purplecat

Day 2 on the Inca Trail was the least fun of the trip. We had to climb 1,200m to get up and over "Dead Woman's Pass". Wilbert, our guide's plan was to get going as soon as it was light (around 5:30am) and aim to reach our campsite at lunch time. His reasoning was to get most of the actual climbing done while we were in the shadow of the tall mountains around us. It also made life simpler for the support team who wouldn't have to pick somewhere en route, unpack to make lunch, and then pack up again to get to the campsite. He also, I think, quite liked the idea of catching up with the group that were ahead of us who were starting around 700m up the climb and who would be having lunch at our evening campsite. In the event we arrived at our campsite about 2 hours after they had left, having another pass to go over before they got to their campsite for the night.

We were on modern trails, according to Wilbert, and although I think we passed some Inca ruins at a campsite en route, we didn't look at them. Wilbert's explanation for the route wasn't entirely clear. As I understood it the original Inca road went over a different pass, though I never figured out if it was higher or lower. I got the impression a large section of the road from Cusco to Machu Picchu was destroyed by the Inca themselves, triggering landslides, in order to prevent the Spanish finding their way along it, so maybe that explains why we were following a modern alternative.

We started at about 3000m. At around 3,700m I began to feel quite tired and a little concerned about the 500m still go. At 3,900m as we came out of the shade and into the sun, my legs felt like lead and I made it up to the pass only by doggedly walking 300 steps and then stopping (300 steps, if you are interested, gets you up about 50m). At the time we put this down to the fact Manchester is super-flat and so our uphill muscles don't get a lot of exercise. However, I wasn't remotely stiff the next day, at which point it occured to us to measure my blood oxygen using my watch. It was down at 81%, rising to 88% if I took several deep breaths (B., in contrast was generally in the high 80s/low 90s). So it's possible the issue was lack of blood oxygen - even though I wasn't showing any other symptoms of altitude sickness.

Once over the pass we descended around 600m to our campsite. I badly wanted to go to sleep, but B. and Wilbert forced me to have some lunch first. Then I slept for an hour, after which I felt much more like myself.

We walked a total distance of just under 12km.

( Pictures under the Cut )

We did our Inca Trail holiday with Explore! who (out of necessity as I understand it) subcontracted to a local tour company. At some point something went wrong with getting permits for the trail. The story we were told was that the local agent forgot to apply for our permits, but several other people in the group had had permits delayed, so we concluded that there had been a more general permit mix-up which was simplified for our consumption as "forgot to apply for your permits". The up-shot of all this was that instead of travelling as part of a group of ten walkers with a guide, cook and porters it was just the two of us with a guide, cook and porters, setting out a day after everyone else with the aim of catching up with them at Machu Picchu. This was a mixed blessing, we got a lot more time with our guide and didn't have to worry that we were slowing anyone down, on the other hand it felt like an awful lot of staff for just us and even though our guide as very good at leaving us alone for various stretches, or sending us off on our own to explore things, it was quite intense.

( Photos and more under the cut! )

Two Doctor Who companion outfits for your delectation and delight! Outfits selected by a mixture of ones I, personally, like; lists on the internet; and a certain random element.


( Outfits below the Cut )

Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!

Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!

Costume Bracket Masterlist

Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.

I'm behind, so sue me.

( All the things under the Cut )

Outfit with the most votes
Romana in Destiny of the Daleks and Yaz in Survivors of the Flux, both with 15 votes.

Outfit with the least votes
Jo in Curse of Peladon and Mel in Terror of the Vervoids, both with 2 votes.

Highest Average Votes per outfit (excluding characters with only one outfit in the round)
Winner: Yaz (11.75 votes per outfit)
Second Place: Bill (11.5 votes per outfit)
Third Place: Romana 2 (11 votes per outfit)

Most Winning Outfits
Yaz (3 outfits)

Highest Average number of winning outfits
Winners: Bill and Nyssa (2 outfits, 100% success rate)
Ryan (1 outfit, 100% success rate)
Second Place: Yaz (75% success rate)

NB. No more costume brackets until June. I'm going to be away on and off and don't want to worry about posting schedules.

I never posted the photos I took when we were in Portmeirion for Christmas.

( So please find them below the cut. )

Somewhat on a whim, I booked myself to go to Eastercon last weekend. We would have both gone but B. had accidentally booked a trip to Texas to study turtles flipping themselves from their backs to their fronts, so I went alone.

It is almost a decade since we went to Eastercon and I'm not sure why. The last one we attended was in Manchester and I think we were slightly put off by the actual difficulty of getting to help out in anyway - B. never got involved at all. After some effort I ran a Lego Rover session in a tiny cramped room but my experience was that every time I contacted the con comm I was dealing with a different person and ultimately I felt somewhat unwanted. However all the excitement over Worldcon in Glasgow got me thinking that we should give it another try.

The quality of the panels was generally high, a lot better than the first Eastercon I attended where panels were full of people who seemed rather unsure why they were there. I missed both the AI panel and an AI talk - probably just as well as these were the programme items most likely to annoy, but enjoyed panels on writing landscape and world-building. There was a fun Doctor Who panel trying to tease apart the strengths and weaknesses of the current iteration, a fascinating Arthurian panel (albeit one where the Emeritus Professor of Medieval History appeared to have little to say for himself - fortunately the rest of the panel had plenty of interesting thoughts), and the obligatory fanfic panel which talked around the idea of fanfic as a community exercise. Gender representation was good, but the con itself remains predominantly middle-aged (going on elderly), middle-class and white. I also attended the Hay Lecture on genomics and the BSFA Lecture on Diversity in Lord of the Rings (which made some good points, but also a few which were a bit "OK, yes, if you squint really hard"). I had fun at the Ceilidh which was full of confused Scots being confronted with dances they had never encountered before.

The Dealers' Room was oddly disappointing. I was hoping to buy exciting tat and in the end only came away with a dinosaur dice holder - which is very nice, but I'd been expecting more in the way of T-Shirts and jewellery than I found. While waiting for the bus from the ferry to the hotel, I had met a young man from Liverpool University Library who was running a display on the digitisation of their SF collection. I dropped by the stall. It was a bit difficult to appreciate the digitisation - he had iPads on which you could browse the collection, but it wasn't really a circumstance conducive to such browsing. He said most people wanted to talk to him about the collection itself, or their collection, and weren't so interested in the digital bit - but he acknowledged that it was all useful. The archive is here, if you are interested.

There was also a programme of walks which I gathered was fairly new. On the Friday morning before the con had started proper there was a very well-attended walk to Belfast's public library and the Linen Hall (also a Library). The Saturday morning walk started at 7am and was to take two hours ending with breakfast. Rain was forecast so I don't think the organisers were terribly surprised when only two of us showed up. One organiser then cried off since she had a cold. The rain wasn't actually that bad and we had a pleasant walk up the Lagan, via an unplanned detour since we were ahead of time, and culminating in bacon and waffles (in my case) at a Lock keeper's cottage turned cafe. On Sunday morning a small entirely female group (apart from the guide), walked the other way along the Lagan, towards the docks viewing various sculptures and Game of Thrones themed stained glass windows until we reached HMS Caroline. I could only get the hotel for four nights, so had a ferry to catch on Monday morning as a result of which I missed the final walk.

( Photos, mostly of the walks, under the cut )