Over the course of the fortnight, from May 14th to the 26th, the intrepid quartet will be sending reports of their trek through to mission control here in London. Read their dispatches below!
May 24th Well, it would appear that the decision not to take any elephants over themountians with them has paid off, and the four walkers now still have eight legs between them (although I forgot to ask if they still have therequisite number of toes). Indeed, they are now somewhat ahead of schedule, and are staying tonight in Aboyne: click here for the website, and it all looks as lovely as everywhere else they've been.
Braemar struck them as something of a frontier town- they left it and they were into nothing very quickly. The walk through the Cairngorms was not too bad, according to Duncan, although they had to do battle with a fair amount of snow- apparently Duncan resembled an emperor penguin at one point, but I can't quite get to grips with that image.They haven't actually climbed any of the Munroes but they seem to have skirted a few: their highest altitude reached has been 840 metres (Ben Nevis peaks (or rather plateaus at 1344m) and they camped out at 600 metres the other night. OK, it's not exactly Hillery and Norgay on Everest, but would you do it? Ben Macdui, so it seems, the second-highest peak in the UK" looks like a mountain that a child would draw". How reassuring.
Surprising as it may seem, there are people even madder than these four doing The Great Outdoors Challenge- Duncan has met people who are doing this for the 17th time! In my opinion that makes people who went to see
The Sound Of Music 75 times seem sane and reasonable in comparison.
But I digress. They walked 30 km yesterday and have now left approximately 243,000 steps in their wake. Duncan still hasn't found any "down" yet in Scotland, a fact emphasised in this brief interview with him:
Click here for the brief audio interview:
Click on this arrow for previous reports! |
