Wookey's holiday page

Last updated: 2012-02-20

Aug 2011: Expo, Austria. Founds loads in 'Country for Old Men' in KH, almost connecting to Steinbrücken. Also made the Steinbrücken-Tunnocks connection.
June 2010: Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway and Argyll. Camper trip with lots of Mountain biking. Great weather, some brilliant mountain-biking, and we even happened upon Beavers in Argyll. D&G is really nice - we shall return.
Nov-Jan 2009/2010: Western Australia. I did 3 weeks, Tess did 2 months. Lots of interesting stuff covering most of Western coast. Way too hot up north by Xmas. And they don't tell you a fly-net is essential.
Aug 2009: Expo, Austria. Return to Kaninchenhöhle after 15 years. Found a load of stuff at the far end of East Anglia inlcuding a fine shaft series we got 55m down, and AndrewA did a fine climb into the roof of Repton. That's 3 major leads still going.
March 2009: Majorca, CUCC trip, mostly walking and canyonning for us. Did Mortitx, which was fairly epic.
Dec 2008: Norway, cross-country skiing.
Oct 2008: Crete. Hiking and Snorkelling in western Crete. Putting off the arrival of winter. Crete has excellent hiking along canyons and up mountains. It was still pretty hot at the end of October - rather too hot for coastal walking.
April 2008: Caving and Biking in the Grande Causses, France with CUCC. Bit bloody cold (it snowed!), but some fine scenery and caves.
Jan 2008: Red Sea, Egypt. Slacking and Snorkelling at Coraya Beach hotel, avoiding UK grey and cold.
July/August 2007: Expo in Austria. New personal record of -600m. Brilliant trip.
May 2007: Brittany by Camper-Van
May 13th to June 4th 2006: Mexico. Wook went out for Debconf for a week then Tess arrived, and we rented a car and visited Oaxaca, and Chiapas. Very intersting, but a bit too exciting even for us, due to car crash at about half time. pics.
March 28th to April 19th 2006: Ardeche and Extremadura: Went to the Ardeche with CUCC to do some biking, canyonning and a bit of caving for Wook. Very nice place. One lovely canyon, one desperate. Already too hot some days. Then on to Spain: Madres mountains for some climbing and walking, then across to Monfraüge national park in Extremadura for a couple of days before spending 4 days in Jarandilla de la Vera at the spanish Govt's expense doing an Embedded Debian work Session. 3,500 miles in total and nothing important fell off the van.
April 19th/May 21st 2005: California. About time we had a proper holiday, so a month touring the good bits of California was in order (Joshua Tree NP, Mohave National Monumnet, Death Valley NP, Sequioa NF/NP, Kings Canyon NP, Yosemite NP, Point reyes NP, Muir Woods). General pics. Flower pics.
March 2005: Went to HinterTux in Austria with Geekski. Marvellous snow conditions, and very nice weather when it finaly stopped snowing. Enough powder to get completely knackered falling over in it on a snowboard. Here's a few pics.

July 2004: Week in pembrokeshire to celebrate Tess's sister's 40th birthday. Good weather, nice walks, and a handy botanist in the form of Richard, her brothe, getting very excited about non-descript plants on the coast path :-).

June 2004: Quick trip to the Isle of man. I was invited to give a talk on softwarePatents, so we strung a short holiday on the end, then came back via the remarkably sunny lake district - sunbathing on top of crinkle crags!. Second proper camper-van trip.

June 2003: MTB tour of Wales, starting in the Forest of Dean. Sampled a lot of south and mid-wales MTB routes, most of which were bloody marvellous. 2 weeks in wales without a drop of rain - that doesn't happen very often.

Jan 2003: Mulu, Borneo. Caving Expedition to the national park, working on Benarat mountain. I was along as 'chief surveying victim', as there was a major need to update and link all the survey data. Much work converting it all from Compass to survex, and getting surface fixes and connections so that all the caves in the mountain could be seen in their relative positions. I'm still drawing the surveys up in mid 2005 (<embarassment>). Found some really impressive cave - Mulu is extraordinary.

August 2002: Austria/France. 2 weeks of CUCC expo (Tess came out for a trip down Eishöhle, then we escaped from the terrible rains for a week in the Stubai Alps Hut-hutting and bagging the Liesener FernKogel with Alex Cheesman. After that Tess and I vistied the Vosges/Alsace - walking, MTBing and touristing. Here are the raw pics from the second half of this trip - rotation and labelling to come later.
Jan-Feb 2002: New Zealand. Took a quick look at most of NZ and tried a few new sports along the way. One of which was rafting. Here's some pics of us coming down the 7m Kaikoura falls, which is a daft thing to do in a raft, especially with a lardy german behind you. And now there's an animated version.
June 2001:China Caves Project expedition to Jiang Kou, Sichuan/Chongqing province. 11th June to 2nd July. Small expedition returning to the wet and scary caves of the area and samle the extreme foreignness of china. Da Xioa Dong was remarkable stuff - scary levels of water and a lot of pitches made for some excellent technical exploration. There are some pics of this courtesy of Chris Densham.
May 2001: Trip to Skye staying in JMCS hut at Coruisk. Very damp so didn't get to do any climbing but did a good scramble, painted the hut and had a couple of nice walks although the second turned into a mild epic due to appalling weather.
September 2000: Malaysia. Snorkelling and festering on genuine tropical islands in the Perhentians off peninsular Malaysi, then 2 weeks in Sarawak at Bako National park (Mangroves and Rainforest) and Mulu National Park (World class caves).
July/August 2000: Austria caving expedition. 3 weeks. Some excellent ice-caving in Eishöhle.
May 2000: 1 week in austria with a group of German cavers.
April 2000: 5 days in the forest of fontainbleau, bouldering.
November/Decmeber 1999: South Africa and Swaziland: Mpumalanga and Kwazulu-Natal - Blyde River canyon, Kruger Nat Park, Mlawula Nature Reserve, Sodwana Bay, Drakenberg Mts (Cathedral peak, Natal NP and Golden Gate NP areas)
July/August 1999: Austria caving expedition and Mountaineering/Klettersteig in Austria and Italy (Dachstein/Dolomites). Then Canyooning in the Maritime Alps, France.
1999 20-26March: Quick trip to Fermanagh, N.Ireland for some caving.
July/August 1998: Austria expedition and Canyonning in the Vercours.
1998: 22nd April to 14th May: Utah's National Parks - marvellous, photos to follow...
August 1997: 7th - 21st August - Union Internationale de Speleology conference in switzerland, including prior electronics meet, and subsequent Surveying meet.
July 1997: 19th July to 3rd august - Canyonning in the Alpes Maritime, France
April 1997: Recce to Katavothra valley, Greece, to search for caves at local sink.