One of the guys staying on the floor above us leans over their balcony:

Excuse me, do you guys have a 7mm screwdriver?

Funnily enough, we don’t, but it’s not long before Brett’s upstairs taking on the role of works mechanic and bleeding brakes for them. It turns out they were legendary downhill world cup racers Tommi and Pau Misser (now co-owners of the mighty Guak empire), who’d come to the mega with their mum. She was busy cooking them dinner and shouting at them every time there was any danger of grease going anywhere near the carpet. Brilliant.

Tommi went on to win his qualifier the following day, with Pau finishing fourth in his. Whether it was because they couldn’t stop, we may never know…

For us though, “Guak” took on a whole new meaning. It became the call of some sort of rare animal, and could be heard ringing out across alpine valleys for the next week and a bit. GUUAAAARRRK! GUUUAAAAARRRRRK!

You probably had to be there.

La Clusaz, France, July 2008.

Despite all that, I had a bucketload of fun. I rode trails I’d not ridden in ages. I discovered an enchanted cottage hidden in the woods. I had a bleating match with a freshly shorn sheep. I blasted down the sides of fields, along fire-roads and though twisting technical singletrack. I sprinted up climbs with Rage Against The Machine shouting through my earphones.

I got home feeling better than I did when I left, and that’s what it’s all about.

We started with Temtiwr, which is the shortest of the trails. A mere 9km or so and sadly too much of that is fire-road (this is a running theme). The Dream Time section is fantastic though — so much so that we went back to ride it twice.

After a hearty lunch we took on MBR. Again, too many fire-roads, but the singletrack was a great pay-off. Brutus is one of those incredibly technical climbs that you’re happy to get to the top of without putting a foot down, while Cain, Abel and the legendary Pink Heifer are all fantastic descents.

On sunday, Brett and myself had a go at the Tarw trail. The fire-road theme is all to evident here too; The bit after Heart of Darkness was particularly disappointing because it’s all downhill! Luckily, the singletrack on offer is nothing short of brilliant. Hitting Snap, Crackle and Pop at high speed is like tackling the dragon downhill track at Gethin; rocks everywhere and no easy way through it. Keeping momentum through there is a challenge in the best sense, while the slightly smoother Rocky Horror Show is absolutely flat-out fun.

There’s a few more photos on flickr. Thanks to Andy for organising it, and to Brett, Neil, Ash and Darren for making it such a good weekend. Fire-road be damned — I want to go back for another go at all that singletrack!

Man, I’ve missed this. Today was my first ride since the broken hand incident. I saw a dead snake and what I think are some Crias (baby Llamas). I’d not seen a snake in the wild since the adder we found in the woods at school. Exciting huh?

Obviously most of my strength, fitness, confidence and stamina had evaporated (although bizarrely my legs seem as strong as ever). They’ll come back though, given time and effort. My hand was absolutely fine throughout. Winner!

Great fun. Glad to be back.

It was Owen’s 30th birthday the other day, so to celebrate it a bunch of us descended on Go Ape! in the Forest of Dean.

Put simply, it’s a great big ewok-village style obstacle course set up to 35ft in the air. When you’re that high up, all of the front goes out the window and you can really see who’s scared — It’s usually not the people you’d expect.

The highlights of the whole thing had to be the zip-wires. They pale into insignificance compared to the Fantasticable, but they’re great fun nonetheless. Clip on, jump forwards and WHEEEEEEE! You’d inevitably crash land at the other end (unless you were Ben), filling your shoes and pants with wood-chippings. Sweet.

The pictures are up on Flickr should you be interested.

Well, perhaps it wasn’t entirely accidental, but I appear to have bought myself a new Apple MacBook.

So far it appears to be pretty lovely. Being used to a Windows machine, I’m still getting used to the slight keyboard odditites and lack of a right mouse button, but it’s proved to be a fairly easy transition so far.

I switched it on, filled in my details, chose a wireless network… and we’re done. Start up iTunes and within seconds I’m streaming music from the rest of the house. It’s a bucket full of aceness!

Right, what’s the text editor of choice out there? I’m used to TopStyle on the PC if that’s any help. Any other must-have software I need to download?

• Jeff Veen’s presentation: Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps. Caused me to have all manner of light-bulb moments.
• Chris Wilson’s very informative presentation about IE7 — and (perhaps more importantly) future versions beyond that one.
• Mexican food with Adam and Gareth.
• The relief when Peter Crouch finally scored for England, then the elation when Steven Gerrard sealed it.
• Kate “buying” us (Amanda, Rich, Ross, Alan and myself) the most foul champagne of all time, then running away without drinking any enough.
• Ian Lloyd mistaking the moon for Big Ben.
• Robin Christopherson’s presentation was absolutely amazing (despite the technical hiccups). It gave a real insight into how a blind user operates a PC and what problems they can (and do) run into on a daily basis.
• Chatting with Adam, Nate Koechley (it’s pronounced “Keckley”) and [insert name of that canadian dude who took a liking to London Pride here] about some of the innovations going on at Yahoo! including a great sounding inverse-forum on their corporate intranet.
• Andy “Malarkey” Clarke’s presentation: The Fine Art of Web Design. Really inspirational talk on pushing web design out of it’s current “comfort zone”. I intend to try. I wonder how far marketing will let me push it?
• The “hot topics” panel session which closed the conference. Jeremy Keith lorded it over Molly, Jon Hicks, Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelic, which produced a very entertaining debate.
• Inventing a series of new microformats (including hTopTrumps and hLove — for dating websites) in the pub with Rich, Gareth and Andy.

Big thanks to Patrick, Amanda and the rest of the team for organising it and everybody else who made it such a good event. It was great to meet you all again / for the first time. Can we book tickets for the next one yet?

[Technorati tags: atmedia, atmedia2006]

Them: “So what were the highlights then?“
Me: “Um…“

It’s amazing what happens when you’re on holiday for three weeks. You do so much that you start to forget things. I started looking through the photos this evening and it all started to come flooding back.

That awesome fountain in Kings Park. The DNA tower. The bikini photoshoot. The mental waitress and the Arsenal-supporting (HA-HA!) waiter from Islington. Waffles in Fremantle. The scary prison tour. The tandem on Rottnest Island. The supermonsterpatrolmeister 4x4 behemoth truck. The evil seagulls. The penguins. The only miserable aussie. The biggest ants ever. The steaming lake at sunrise. The trees you can walk through. Dôme. The high pitched receptionist. Owen’s crazy ladder tree — and the bonkers granny who went all the way to the top. Hardcore offroad driving (dude). Those amazing caves, and the guide who’d clearly spent too much time down there. Tales of the runaway “controlled” bush-fire (oops). The wine tour. The streak, ah, the steak. The road-trains. Getting up before sunrise to see the pinnacles. The sand-boarding. The snorkelling. The trek through death valley. The world’s biggest spider (except for that even bigger one). The stripey feet. The parrots. The reunion. Dim sung for breakfast. The booze run across the border to Kuala Lurah. Sushi. The crown prince, twice. The water village. The most ostentacious hotel on earth. The lagoon. The most apologetic staff in the world. The safe. Getting the bride. The wedding. The reception. The hangover. All-you-can-eat noodles. The goodbyes. The not wanting to come home, but being glad to be back. The passport with a nice selection of stamps.

…and that’s just scratching the surface. Man, we did everything! I’ll start uploading photos at some point. There’s just sooo many to work through… I’ve started uploading my photos to Flickr — there’s a whole set dedicated to them.

The day of the wedding. It started at Steve’s place in the morning, where he gathered all of his homies together. We all trooped in convoy over to Wei’s house where he (along with the rest of us) had to pass a variety of tests in order to get to the bride.

Once we’d got through that, we proceeded to the church for a traditional catholic wedding. It was a very nice service, in which Wei sang the psalm — very brave, but she carried it off perfectly.

The evening saw probably the biggest wedding reception ever, followed by a party at which certain people got ever so slightly inebriated. Great fun.

See more photos taken on 3rd June 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

[The very next day we headed for home. Alas I’d managed to pack my camera very well, so alas there are no photos of my hangover. Gutted.]

After a couple of days staying at Steve’s place, we transferred to The Empire, which is possibly the most ostentacious hotel I’ll ever stay in. It’s one of those places that you walk into and think “wow”.

The evening saw us head back to Steve’s for an evening send-off, which included us carrying a safe upstairs, drinking the first third of the secret beer-stash and comparing me to Kimi Raikkonen — I can’t remember who came off better…

See more photos taken on 2nd June 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

The last couple of days are just a blur of driving down one side of Australia, eating a massive steak and then flying over to Brunei: consequently I failed to take any photos at all.

Today was good though: After a slow start, we had a Japanese lunch at a well hidden restaurant in the centre of Bandar Seri Begawan, before Steve led us on a tourist tour of the city centre, taking in the military regalia museum and a boat-ride around the water village. Fantastic.

See more photos taken on 1st June 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

After yesterday’s walk through death valley, we decided to do something a bit more relaxed today. We visited the Rainbow Jungle Parrot Centre, just up the road from Kalbarri. The best bit was little tiny bird that saw a wasp fly in, turned around and pecked the little bugger clean in two. Ace!

See more photos taken on 28th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

Turn back now unless you are:

• Cautious
• Fit and Agile
• Prepared to scramble
• Confident with heights
• With a companion
• Carrying water

See more photos taken on 27th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

Irish Tanya and Anne sand-boarding near Kalbarri. It was ace fun — a lot like sledging, but without the getting wet, cold and miserable.

See more photos taken on 26th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.