Written by: Noah Hellen

Trip attendees:

• Qian Hui Sim
• Felicia Lim
• Eleanor Schyma
• Natasha Diederen
• Milena Micic
• Sean Chiu
• Erin Clark
• Zheran Zhang
• Lola Hartman
• Toren Dofher
• Eugene Bevilacqua
• Elaine (Yi) Gao
• Jasmin Hills
• Noah Hellen
• Jeremy Ghinn
• Theo Furtsev
• Ben Varmin
• Tom Cumming
• Zak Leek
• Ella Litjens

Day 1

(Skip to $$$ if you don’t want to hear about minibus issues 😠)

While the first day of the trip formally started on Saturday, 28th Feb, it had actually started two months previously for myself (Noah), Tom, and Zak.

All was going to plan.

Like a lion (or lions?) stalking its prey, we understood the movements of the beast that goes by the name ‘Imperial College Union’ from previous grievances and annoyances when dealing with them. We were cocky that all would go to plan: book the accommodation, send in a budget, book the minibus, bing, bang, boom, all done. Oh, how naive we were.

In the early days of January, everything for the trip was going to plan – pretty much everything had been booked. One day, Zak or I noticed that the timing for the minibus said 5 PM Sat instead of 5 AM. No biggie, the trip was two months away; we could just email the Activities team and they would sort it out!

Fast forward two months. It had not been sorted out.

After a solid month of no replies from the Activities team, we chased them up again and asked what was going on. They told us to cancel the booking and rebook. Okay, easy. A few weeks went by, and nothing. One day, I decided to check the minibus page to see if there was a booking with DXB (the minibus we booked) – there was! Oh great, we had it booked. I clicked on the booking expecting to see ‘Mountaineering’, but what I saw wasn’t that at all; it was Toren’s love affair society, ‘ICE HOCKEY’!!! WTF!! How had this happened?! It was now about a week to go until the trip, and we didn’t have a minibus. We were so prepared!!!!

Okay, I’m bored of writing about this.

Anyway, they f*cked up the booking and only approved our trip proposal with one day to spare. I hate the Activities team, smh.

($$$)

Okay, back to the trip. We all agreed to meet at Hammersmith station, except for the kind souls who agreed to go to Woking to meet our other driver. All good, everyone was on time. Except one man: the gear sec (BENJAMIN Varmin). He arrived, and we went.

Not much occurred on the minibus down there. Most people were sleeping. It was just a pretty wholesome drive. The same cannot be said for the car driven by Ella Litjens. Apparently, they got stuck on a hill, and the passengers (Milena, Jasmin, Sean, Erin) had to get out and push. Okay, maybe they didn’t push, but that would have been funny.

We then visited the Beehive Cafe. Very scrumptious stuff. Everyone (bar one person, I’ll go into that later) loved it. Jeremy, Fedir, and Ben, I think, went to Lidl to pick up our lunch for the day (thank you, guys). Tom and I were getting the crack-fiend shakes and wanted to head off ASAP. Everyone got in the minibus, and we started driving towards Lidl to pick up Jeremy and co. on the way. We looked around for a few minutes on the road, seeing nothing. We drove back to the main road, only to see them waiting in the Beehive (us having passed them on our way out) looking quite bewildered. Whoopsie.

We got a move on and arrived at the Battleship area car park at like 11/12. The weather was perfect – a bit windy, but that’s what you expect at the crag – and everyone got to climbing.

A few other unis were there: Oxford, Bath, Surrey, Sussex. They were all very nice. I like the climbing community. I was told that Ben went ‘slightly off route’ – perhaps he has been training too much on the traverse wall at Westway?

Fig above is Ben’s training wall (this was funnier in my head)…

Erin and Lola (and some others) were climbing a route with the first draw like 5m off the ground, so they had to climb another route adjacent to it to clip it in.

Anyway, here are some wholesome pictures.

Abby was feeling too-cool-for-school and didn’t want to be in the picture.

The sun started to set, so we set off. As I was walking back up the approach, I noticed a figure sitting facing the sunset. I squinted my eyes to see that this person was Jasmin (who, after saying my name 20 times, still doesn’t know it), looking very pensive and introspective. What was she thinking about? Why was she staring out at the horizon? Some questions are better left unanswered.

Just as we were walking along the ridge, I thought it would be funny to do the little trip-up thing on Abby. You know, where you nudge someone’s foot and they hit their heel. I did it; it was funny (for me). But the second time I did it, within an instant, I felt an acute pain shoot through my leg from an attack so vicious I can only describe what I saw before my attack by picture:

Anyway, we hopped in the vehicles and went to Tesco to pick up food. We then went to the bunkhouse, where we were greeted by the very friendly Surrey uni people. The head chef Theo (Fedir) and his sous-chefs got to work and cooked us up an amazing meal (thank you). We chatted for a while, and it was good.

People started heading off to bed, but a few of us decided to socialise with the Surrey uni people (and others like Zheran, Sean, etc., completed a jigsaw). We played a game called Mao, which they raved about. It was pretty good. We were pretty sleep-deprived at this point (having woken up at like 5/6 AM), and the sight of the Canadian (Toren) sitting across from me, again, can’t be described in words, only picture:

We went to bed.

Day 2

We woke up at like 8 AM because it was meant to rain. A few people slept in, so I had to play some wake-up call music – ‘Wake Up’ by Rage Against the Machine. A few people were not very happy.

It rained a little bit, but it was chill. Jeremy had made overnight oats the evening before (thank you), so we all dug in. We headed to the Beehive again, and all (bar one… foreshadowing) enjoyed their selection again.

We saw some familiar postgrad faces (including the man, the myth, the other postgrad sec, Matthew Shields) in the Beehive, and saw them later at a petrol station at 11 PM? It’s a small world – is that the saying?

We headed off to The Cuttings to climb. It was some people’s first time cleaning and doing top rope anchors – round of applause. Here are some highlights (or lowlights):

Toren hit a ledge with Eugene belaying (tut tut tut). It may have been a ledge midway up the route and Toren had only been one clip up from it, but it still should have been better.

Tom and Natasha climbed 2.5 boulders that day!

Theo flashed Amy’s (previous postgrad sec) 7a project.

Abby and I raced side-by-side on different routes, and I beat her (she was top-roping as well).

Toren and I learnt some multi-pitch stuff from Zak (thank you!).

Here are some pictures.

We headed back from the crag, with Tom (exhausted from his whole 2.5 boulders) having to clean a 6b route.

We were going to go to Codfathers, but we had faffed a lot and couldn’t be f*cked to wait for the food to be cooked, so we went to the services instead. The other car got it, though (was it good?). Within twenty minutes of driving, a man who goes by the name Benjamin (who had been complaining about being ill all day) took a turn for the worse, and I heard a panicked Jeremy asking for me to pull over. We did, and Ben vomited like nobody’s business. But he’s a trooper, and within 10 minutes (and some mint gum for him), we were on the road again. We met up at the services and did two stars and a wish.

Happy days.