… in 2009 too.

PS: I really love Harold’s Planet, and the way Lisa and Ralph depict our everyday life. I hope that we all have many, and I mean MANY adventures in 2009. If Matt Harding could be traveler of the year 2008 according to World Hum’s readers, Gorida agree to be traveler of the year 2009. ABBA folks, I mean Happy New Year.

Wanda Rutkiewicz was Polish and one of the greatest woman mountaineers ever. She was the first woman to successfully reach summit of K2 in 1986, and the third woman to climb Mt. Everest. In her mountaineering career she climbed with twenty expeditions spread over 22 years. She was last seen on 12 May 1992 at 8300 metres while climbing Kanchenjunga and adding it to the eight 8000 metre peaks she already climbed. “She was already a legend in her lifetime”, as Piotr Pustelnik has commented in a documentary titled ‘Caravan of Dreams’ that we saw last year at VIMFF. In this documentary Wanda is sometimes depicted as arrogant and selfish, while I would say that she was just a strong person: ”My life doesn’t have any meaning until it’s the way I want it to be. I’d rather don’t waste my life. I prefer to risk it.” She was a charismatic person, and some himalayanist colleagues was jealous and loved to hate her. Many climbers would say that Wanda created a separate branch called woman’s mountain climbing. There have been rumors that her polish colleagues taught children in Pakistan to ask for candy and money by saying ’Wanda pussy’. After that, the children would yell ’Wanda pussy’ at the sight of any white woman. It’s hard to believe that this is the correct information. RIP, Wanda.  

   ps: I loved this photo, but unfortunately I couldn’t find any better resolution.

ps 1: I gave myself a New Year’s present yesterday: Karawana Marzen. 

Many climbers have tried to crack the code of K2, the second- highest mountain (8611 m) and the deadliest peak on the Earth. Reinhold Messner who is considered the greatest mountaineer of the 20th century, christened K2 to “the mountain of mountains” in 1979. He said that K2 is the most beautiful and dangerous of all the high peaks, and that an artist has made this mountain.

The Italian climber Fosco Maraini said that K2 is great, but challenging: “Just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human”.  All agree that K2 is not an amateur’s mountain. Even among experienced mountaineers, K2 is more than twice as deadly as Everest. Jim Curran tried to  compare his climbing on K2 with famous Munch painting ‘The Scream’ saying this: “K2 stands absolutely on its own. The approach is hard. The base camp feels like the moon. The mountain itself looks utterly impregnable, and there’s no easy way up the thing. And all this hits you between the eyes when you see it for the first time. It’s like that famous Munch painting. You know the one— The Scream? Except, of course, you’re the one doing the screaming.” The reason why I started to write this post is because I came over great lecture by Jennifer Jordan who wrote a book ‘Savage Summit’ and made a movie ‘Women of K2′, in which she is trying to tell a story about the first five women who climbed K2 and died either while descending or later in another expedition. This led to the legend that K2 carried a “curse on women” until 2004 when curse was broken by Edurne Pasaban. K2 has an uncrackable code.

Pakour is ‘the art of movement’. It means to move efficiently and quickly as possible using the abilities of the human body. Many people see this sport as ‘jumping from building to building’. They don’t see any art of movement and freedom in it. According to many parkour involves finding new and often dangerous ways of crossing a landscape, very often urban landscapes. David Belle is the founder of parkour as an extreme sport. When they asked David Belle to explain what parkour was he said : “As martial arts are a form of training for the fight, parkour is a form of training for the flight.”

I am attaching this video clip from 30 - ties which shows that they had similar activities which can remind of parkour. When I saw this video clip for the first time, I was thinking Gorida’s video and Alen’s first rock climb ever. Maybe Alen is after all born to be a traceur and not a rock climber?