On The Road

Another epic adventure

After much prodding, finally a post from me (j):

We just bought two new ropes in Athens. We're at the port town of Piraeus, an extension of Athens, waiting for our ferry to Kalymnos, where we're going to spend a few days climbing.

We had planned to spend longer in Kalambaka, but ran into some problems with our ropes. Our first few days of climbing there were slightly frustrating. Our 20-year-old, 30-Euro guide book led us to climbs that either no longer existed or were closed to non-Monks. A lot of the climbs were originally set by old school Germans who thought that anything "easy" didn't need to be protected--no matter if you were hundreds of meters off the ground. Needless to say, Brad didn't feel too comfortable with that kind of climbing.

We finally met a fabulously helpful local climber - "Larry" - who suggested some climbs. We set out early the next day for a five pitch climb that would lead us four pitches up one rock face, where we'd then step over an abyss (ie. do the splits in the air if you are short like me) to another face, then climb another 15 meters to the summit.

The climb was one of the best we'd ever done. We were ecstatic at the top as we signed the summit book (there's a notebook, protected in a metal case at the top of some of the climbs). We noticed some writing in German at the beginning of the book that seemed to explain the rappel. All I understood with my two years of junior high German was "danger" and "abseil". Brad didn't understand much more. But we found the ring from which we were meant to descend. We tied our ropes together and headed down. Brad went first. Because our ropes were long enough, he decided to skip the first rappel station, which was only 20 meters down and would involve tying into a half-dead tree. When I reached the rappel station, we pulled on the rope so that we could begin the next rappel. We pulled very hard. We pulled and we pulled... for two-and-a-half hours we pulled. We climbed part way up, we climbed part way down trying to free the rope, but it wouldn't budge. Finally, after shedding many tears (I shed the tears, not Brad), we decided to cut the ropes. Because Brad had found a bolted climb below us, we knew we had enough rope to get down... and we did in two rappels.

Since we no longer had any usable ropes, we decided to go to Corfu so that Brad could do some diving with the Drinkies folk. Unfortunately, when we got to Corfu, we found out that there was no diving, but that's a whole different story...

-j (& b)

P.S. If you're wondering why we haven't posted any new pictures...we decided to just wait until we got back to the US in July, since the connections here are generally pretty slow. Sorry!

Posted by jacqueline at May 21, 2003 05:00 AM