As the Spring Climbing Season heats up and we get closer to the inevitable summit attempts on Everest, the community will begin to debate the ethics of climbing on the World's highest peak and who is ultimately responsible for those climbing the mountain.

It is with that question in mind that The Adventurist presents this editorial entitled Responsiblity and Death on Everest. The article, in no uncerain terms, places the responsiblity clearly on the shoulders of the Expedition Leader for insuring the safety of their clients. The argument is that they know the climbers better than anyone, and it is their job to monitor their progress and the conditions on the mountain, and make the judgement call on who is fit to go up or down.

While I won't disagree with this assessment, it's not always that easy. For instance, the article mentions the David Sharp incident from last year, but in Sharp's case, he was climbing independently. He had no guide or Expedition Leader to tell him to turn around and go down. He also was quite an experienced climber with experience on Everest before.

Obviously the guides do have a responsibility to their clients to see themoff the mountain safely, but the climate on Everest is one that has become about money, and it means more casth for their company if they have successful summits. The clients paying those large sums of money are also hell bent on getting to the top. They spent their cash and they expect to get their chance at the summit, with nothing getting in their way. You can point to the Sharp incident once again, when nearly 40 people stepped over and around him on the way to the summit that morning. Sharp was still alive when this happened.

In my mind, the best thing to do is to start limiting the number of permits to climb Everest. However, considering how much money is involved for both Nepal and China, I wouldn't expect that to happen any time soon. The overcrowding is going to get worse, and in the process the risks are only going to increase as well. If something isn't done about the situation, it's likely that we'll soon see a season that will make 1996 look tame.

So here was the vindaloo that I wanted to try from Casuarina. Unfortunately, it wasn't anywhere as spicy as the way that they do it in the UK (or even over at Boat Quay). But I still gobbled it up. If I get roti prata here again, I'd much rather dip it into this than their standard curry.

It was another eventful weekend in the Antarctic where teams continue to struggle with their individual goals. For some of the South Pole skiers it marked a shift in goals and expectations, for others it was a reaffirmation to stay focused on the tasks ahead. For everyone it was reminder that Antarctica is a beautiful, yet harsh and demanding place that will test you at every turn.

The biggest news to come out of the weekend is the end of the "race" that was an important aspect of the 2013 South Pole Allied Challenge. As you may recall, three teams of skiers – Team UK, Team USA, and Team Commonwealth – were all racing one another over the last three degrees to the South Pole. Each of the teams had experienced polar guides leading the way, but for the most part they were made up of men and women who were injured in the line of duty and were now attempting to raise funds and awareness for the Walking With The Wounded program. On Saturday, the teams reached their first checkpiont and had a mandatory 24 hour rest period. At that time the decision was made to put an end to the race in order to ensure the safety of those participating. For those uninitiated to the Antarctic, the pace of the race was grueling and was making things more difficult than anyone had anticipated. So, the leaders agreed to end the competition. That doesn't mean the adventure is over however, as they will all continue to ski on to the South Pole. They'll just do so at a more measured pace that will hopefully ensure that they all reach 90ºS in a timely and safe manner.

Richard Parks remains in his race against the clock however as he struggles to attempt to set a new speed record to the South Pole. He's now five days into his restart, and while he's  making good time, it hasn't been easy. Soft snow is causing him to make slower than expected progress and as of Saturday he was still 1051.9 km (655 miles) from his goal. Obviously since then he has managed to knock off more distance, but just how much remains to be seen. Parks hasn't updated us on his progress since then, but he has been covering about 33 km (20 miles) per day, which quite frankly isn't fast enough to break the record. Things should get better once he tops the Antarctic Plateau however, and if he can put the soft snow behind him it'll help too.
Parker Liautaud and Doug Stoup have  launched the skiing portion of their Willis Resilience South Pole expedition. After spending the first week and a half of the journey driving around the Antarctic in a specially modified vehicle, collecting environmental data and core samples of the ice, they will now begin their attempt to ski to the South Pole with an eye on doing so in record time as well. They're hoping to complete the journey from the Ross Ice Shelf in just 22 days, although their distance will be much shorter than Richard Parks, who is making a full ski journey from Hercules Inlet. His expedition will cover more than 1150 km (715 miles), while Parker and Doug list their route as 640 km (397 miles).

Liautaud was also hoping to become the youngest man to ski to the South Pole but it looks like he may get trumped in that regard as well. Lewis Clarke, the 16-year old from the UK, continues to make good progress on his own expedition to the bottom of the world. While he still has more than 655 miles (1054 km) to go, and a lot can happen over that distance, he is doing well so far. Yesterday, Lewis and his guide Carl Alvey knocked off a respectable 15.1 miles (24.2 km), which is a solid pace for six days into the journey. It's not going to get easier this week however, as the forecast calls for gale force winds to arrive in the next day or two. That will certainly change the dynamic of the expedition.

South Pole cyclists Daniel Burton is finding it hard going, although he did manage to cover 15.5 miles (24.9 km) on Saturday, which is his best day yet. He indicated that the pace is slower than he had expected and that he'll need to pick things up soon if he wants to make a serious run at reaching the Pole on his fat tire bike. He says that his sleds are simply too heavy, but he has a plan to redistribute the weight some that he hopes will start paying dividends as early as today. There is a bit of hope that things are improving however, as Burton noted that it is getting easier to ride than to hike-a-bike, which he has done a lot so far as he works his way up to the Plateau.

Finally, Ben Saunders and Tarka L'Herpiniere, collective the Scott Expedition team, are continuing to struggle with progress on the Beardmore Glacier. They have left the snow behind for now while they deal with hard, smooth and dangerous blue ice instead. In order to deal with those conditions, they've swapped their skis for crampons, although progress remains slow. It may be hard to believe, but the boys have now been out on the ice for more than 45 days, and yet they still have a long way to go on their attempt to complete Robert Falcon Scott's route to the South Pole and back to the coast again. As of yesterday, they still had 1257 miles (2022 km) to go before they are done. Hang in their lads!

That's all for today. More from the Antarctic soon I'm sure.

Photo Courtesy WIRED-All Rights Reserved
I'm far from being a geek or remotely resembling one, but I still like gadgets provided they're useful and have a purpose...which brings me to the iPad.

Unless you're traveling in North Korea, you must've heard that Apple is launching its iPad in its stores this coming Saturday. I live not too far from its 14th Street store and I intend to walk by just to see the gawking crowds.

The New York Times' David Pogue has an interesting article (and well-balanced) titled Looking At The iPad From Two Angles which I found to be the most intelligent of whatever has been recently written about the device. He concludes the article with this:

"The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine. The only question is: Do you like the concept? "

And that's the question. The iPad is really a "looker" not a "doer"...in other words, like its midget cousin the iTouch, it'll be mainly used as a reader, as a viewer of text, of website (minus Flash), of emails, of pictures, and so forth. Its success or failure is also dependent on the available applications, current and future, which I understand are close to 1500 in number already.

So far, I haven't seen any merits for photographers to get one. I read somewhere that an enterprising photographer will buy a few and, when asked for his portfolios, will send them out to his best clients instead of the old-style books. I'm quite certain that the iPad will be great in impressively displaying our images, but that's all.

Will it be fun to have an iPad? Of course, but will it be useful? I don't know. I'll wait and decide in another 6 months. Let others be the testers.

WIRED has a roundup on the first reviews of the iPad.

Flying out of Delhi's international terminal is, to put it mildly, stressful-- even more stressful than air travel has become in general-- and chaotic. Not only is it the most aggressively anarchistic place I've ever been in, at least 75% of the passengers look like they could be featured in a Watch For Terrorists ad-- if not an al-Qaeda recruitment poster. An American profiler would short circuit.

There may be, on an office flow chart in someone's desk somewhere, a schematic for how it's all supposed to work... but I doubt it. At every step along the way, among the pushing, shoving crowds-- many of whom seem to have never been confronted with the concept of "a line" before-- there is something designed specifically to hold up the process and make you return to Go. If you ever thought getting to the airport two hours before your departure was too big a waste of time, let me assure that they must have had Delhi in mind when they made that rule of thumb... and they were being optimistic.

The first nightmare involves getting the bags you intend to check into a great big cavernous black box and collecting it on the other side. Somewhere along the arduous quest for departure someone is bound to tell you about this-- usually the man at the end of the 30 minute line in front of the check-in counter. Black box first, check in after. But once you get through the crowds to the black box and figure out vaguely what's supposed to happen and how, you need to confront several hundred Osama bin-Laden look-alikes jostling in front of and all around it. I thought I was at the Kaaba. Nothing really seems to happen-- just a tremendous amount of seemingly unfocused kinetic energy but no discernable movement towards any goal. I knew I'd be OK eventually but I couldn't help wondering if the fragile looking elderly ladies lurking apprehensively on the outskirts of the melee would wind up stuck at the airport forever.

Eventually you find someone with an airport smock, slip him 10 rupees (like a quarter) and he shoves your bag into the box, gets a security string tied around it and you're good to go-- back to the boarding pass counter line. It was worth the 10 rupees because he alerted me about the need for a security stamp or some kind before you can get your boarding pass that allows you to proceed to the security check. I'm sure regular Delhi Airport commuters are well aware of this quirk.

Once you pass through security, it's less chaotic-- but just a little less. There are families (or tribal groups) camped out on the floors, apparently not having chairs as part of their culture. (Later, on the Air India jet, I realized some of my fellow passengers were among the 700,000,000 Indians I wrote about at DownWithTyranny a few days ago who have no access to sanitary facilities. Besides explaining seat belts and oxygen masks, the flight video does a tutorial about how to use a toilet.) But first I had to find a gate for my flight. There were just 3 question marks where a gate number should have been on my boarding pass and the loudspeaker announcements were so garbled and so unintelligible that it was impossible to tell if they were in Hindi, English or something else. Eventually some airport employee started walking around the terminal shouting "Bangkok flight, Gate 11." That worked. I won't have to brave this nightmare again for another month. And in a couple of years this will place will be left to domestic passengers since India is building a new international airport on the other side of Delhi. I only hope it is as well-planned as the brand new Bangkok international airport.

When I was 15 I hitchhiked across the country-- from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. I was on my way to Tonga but I never made it past San Pedro Harbor. I got all the way to L.A. in less than a week and most of the trip was in a nice new Cadillac driven by a sailor named Howard (like me) for a rich man moving from Philly to L.A. (also named Howard; but I never met him; he flew). Howard, the sailor, was a bullshitter but I didn't know what that meant at the time. As we were driving across Texas he told me he had eaten Chinese food in Peking and Canton and Shanghai but that the best Chinese restaurant in the world was in Amarillo and we would be there in an hour and have lunch there. Coming from a Brooklyn I was, of course, a connoisseur of Chinese cuisine. That's when I discovered Howard was full of it. I didn't have to taste it-- it was like canned Chungking or something-- before I realized I'd been had. As soon as I saw the baskets of rye bread (with butter) on the tables I knew what was in store for me. I suppose if I hadn't grown up in a Jewish neighborhood, where Chinese food was more common than gefilte fish or latkes, I might have fallen for Howard's nonsense.

Now, unless you live in one of the 4 or 5 biggest American cities you might be clueless about Thai food. But I'm not going to steer you wrong. In fact starting this blog began as an idea for doing a restaurant guide to one of my favorite cities in the world: Bangkok. I lost track of how many times I've been there sometime after the tenth time. And one of Bangkok's big draws for me is the incredible cuisine. Bangkok has wonderful restaurants serving food from all over the world, everything from nutritionally worthless, cardboard-tasting American fast food to exquisite sampling of haute cuisine from Switzerland, Italy, China, India, Vietnam. They even have Mexican food now. I'm just going to write about Thai food today.

Cumulatively, I've spent months and months in Thailand. I'm an adventurous eater and I love to eat. So, of course, I've searched out the best Bangkok has to offer in the way of restaurants. And they do have a lot to offer! If you like fresh, flavorful, spicy food, chances are you'll like Thai food. If you like bland and unstimulating food, this isn't the cuisine for you though. Early on I learned about something called "Royal Court Cuisine." The recipes have traditionally been closely guarded secrets and the only genuine royal court cuisine chefs all learn how to cook in the royal palace kitchens. I'm not sure how much of that is myth and how much is fact, but I can tell you that there are only a small handful of restaurants serving the exquisite and unique delicacies that make up this kind of cooking. In the last couple of decades more and more of the recipes have crept out onto menus of some of the tourist restaurants, especially in the luxury hotels and these days you can experience a royal court cuisine dish without too much trouble.

For as long as I can remember my favorite overall Thai restaurant has been Bussaracum, always perfect even as it moved its location time and again over the years, from a classic old Thai mansion to a hotel to another old house to an office building. It's always my first culinary stop when I get to Thailand. It was my introduction to Royal Thai Cuisine. It is academically authentic and very serious about what it presents-- oh, and mouth-wateringly delicious. The prices are extremely inexpensive for a tourist eating in a first class restaurant. And even a budget-restricted tourist can easily afford to try this place-- especially the incredible all-you-can-eat buffet lunches. It's a nice healthy walk from all the big river side hotels-- about a third of the way to Patpong, the Disneyland-like, family-oriented red light district that so many western tourists delight in-- and is just down Pan Rd from the big Hindu temple on Silom. The food you'll find here is not food you'll find on the menus of western Thai restaurants (or in the non-Royal Court Cuisine restaurants that are on every street in Bangkok). It looks stunning and tastes even better than it looks.

One of the old locations for Bussaracum is the Dusit Thani Hotel at the foot of Silom at the end of Patpong (Rama IV). It's the most Thai of all the big luxury hotels and although they have a variety of restaurants to fit the taste of any visitor, the Benjarong is a Royal Thai Cuisine restaurant that is nearly as good as Bussaracum. It's quite a bit fancier (great for a date or an anniversary or something like that), maybe a bit less a stickler for the culinary traditions, but still completely delicious and well worth a visit. The Benjarong is an exception to my rule about avoiding hotel restaurants. That's because it's a great restaurant that happens to be inside a hotel rather than a restaurant a hotel happens to have so it can feed its hungry, undiscerning guests.

Newer and a bit more geared to tourists, but still wonderful and worthwhile, is the Blue Elephant. It's in an old Thai house a few blocks from the Chao Phraya hotels. When I was in Bangkok I sometimes worked out of the Warner Bros office there and it is just next door to the Blue Elephant. The restaurant is more concerned with being a first class international restaurant than with the specific and traditional intricacies of any schools of cooking. That said, it definitely gets it right anyway. It's perfect for someone a little nervous about going "too native" too fast but who still wants a taste of what's best in nouvelle Thai cuisine. They definitely take liberties with the traditions but everything they come up with is fantastic and unique in a fusiony kind of way.

I always stay in one of the hotels on the Chao Phraya River but the Sukhumvit area is another part of Bangkok very popular with tourists and it's the part of town most Western expats live in. The best restaurant I found in the sprawling area-- and a contender for best haute cuisine in Thailand-- is Baan Khanitha, a restaurant as sumptuous and traditional in its decor as in its delicious dishes. The food is very traditional and tends to highlight some of the best regional Thai traditions as well as the Royal Thai Cuisine. Some say the chef has made too many concessions to the palates of tourists but I'm usually sensitive to that and I found the food excellent.

One place I just discovered for the first time on my last visit is a simple-looking contemporary restaurant called Patara, not far from the Blue Elephant. (I stumbled on it when the Blue Elephant was too busy and I had neglected to make a reservation.) I think its an offshoot of the great Thai restaurant of the same name in London-- except this one is a lot less expensive. In fact, of all the fine-dining experiences in Bangkok, I think this one is the least costly. The service was particularly friendly and less reserved than in most of the always great service you receive in good Thai restaurants. They tend to serve food that is inventive and unique-- but always delicious. Its obvious that there is a mind behind everything that is sent out from the kitchen, a mind that is eager to please and even astound. I found myself going back again and again.

Another restaurant I discovered by accident-- a block from Bussacarcum-- is a very traditional Thanying, also worth a visit, even if the cuisine is less exciting and less innovative than some of the others I mentioned above.

Good Thai food is always fresh and healthy. The cuisine is very vegetarian-friendly and if your eating preferences run towards seafood and vegetables, you'll be very happy anywhere in Bangkok. There are a number of really good specifically healthy-food restaurants these days, restaurants that use organic food and that cater to health-conscious clients. My fave is Amaranth, in the Sukhumvit area. You can take people there and not mention it's health-oriented and they'll just think they're having a delicious meal. I haven't tried it but I hear the same is true of Anotai. Here's a list of a few dozen veggie and health-type places in Bangkok. But if you want to keep it to "fine dining," you'll never go wrong at Amaranth.


UPDATE: RAW FOOD IN BANGKOK

A friend told me about a new raw-- like in living-- food restaurant in Bangkok: Rasayana Café. I can't wait to try it. But not this year. This year I'm going to Mali and I have a lot of trepidation's about the... cuisine.

Now, if I hadn't known better, this place was a total tourist trap. Never mind the fact that there was a gift shop selling T-shirts in front...this place also claimed to be "America's Oldest Restaurant" (41 Union Street, 227-2750). And yet, it was a Boston local that took me here, saying how he would come to this area near Faneuil Hall for drinks and food quite regularly as well.

Anyway, there was a dining area, but there was a 20 minute wait to get a table, so we pulled some chairs up to the so-called "stone" bar in front where they shucked oysters. And amusingly, the bar counter was so old that it listed heavily toward you, meaning that you really couldn't put anything on the bartop without it sliding off onto the floor. The solution was to put a bunch of coasters underneath each plate so as to act as a little door stop.

Either way, the shellfish worked, especially when washed down by a couple of local brews that were exclusive to this place. I was still kinda curious as to what they were serving on the normal dining room menu, but we bailed on that to head to our next destination.

I had no idea what this place was, but I was in the neighborhood today when it seemed like it might be a reasonable choice for a healthy lunch (3 Pickering Street #01-31, 6438-7961). I ended up liking it, as the orange dressing wasn't as sweet as I thought it would be.

Interestingly, this shop in particular does lobster rolls at night. And it looks like these guys are part of a broader group that does handmade pastas at its other locations...how come I had never heard of these guys before??

Photo © Steven Greaves-All Rights Reserved
American writer Mark Twain wrote:

"Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together."

Varanasi (Benares) or Kashi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and probably the oldest of India, and is one of the most sacred pilgrimage places for Hindus of all denominations. More than 1,000,000 pilgrims visit the city annually. For centuries, Hindus have come to Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges, to attain instant moksha, or "release", at the moment of death.

Steven Greaves's galleries include Kashi, City of the Dead, and Kashi, City of the Living; both which I highly recommend.

Steven is a freelance photographer, who was born in the UK, but considers New York City as his home. With a formal education as a lawyer, Steven interned with VII Photo Agency, and his work was published by a number of international publications and displayed in New York City, Miami, London and New Orleans. His work is currently represented by Lonely Planet Images.

GreatOutdoors.com has posted an update to their Planet Ice Project page, this time with a look at the vanishing ice on Kilimanjaro.

You may recall that the Planet Ice Project is the brain child of writer and photographer James Martin, who is traveling to various places around the globe over the next two years, to check the health of glaciers and polar ice caps. He hopes to write a book and photo essay on the impact of global warming on some of these iconic ice fields.

In the case of Kili, there are some estimates that the famed "Snows of Kilimanjaro" may completely be gone by 2015. While I was there, some of the long time guides talked about how far the glacier use to reach down the mountain, and while it still appears to have a heavy snow cap, it is retreating at an alarming rate. If you want to see snow on the top of Kilimanjaro, you may want to schedule that visit sooner than later.

Rock climbing is a popular outdoor sport in certain parts of the world, but India doesn't happen to be one of them. Recently, the state of Maharashtra announced plans to begin promoting the sport to attract tourism to the area. This has inspired Indian born climber Sujay Kawale, who now lives in the U.S., to travel home and help introduce the sport to his native country. Sujay and his friend Mike Wilkinson are hoping to document those efforts while simultaneously showing off the climbing opportunities there in a new film called Ascending India. To do that, they've launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund their efforts. They're hoping to raise $10,000 for the project and with 14 days to go, they could certainly use some help getting to their goal.

To get an idea of what they have in mind, take a look at the trailer video for the film below. Good luck guys!

Ascending India Teaser Trailer from Mike Wilkinson on Vimeo.

We nearly didn't come to Sasa on this trip. But a client secured us a few seats here tonight, and so we happily came down here to have at it with whatever the man felt like serving us today, including multiple varieties of uni, that monkfish liver from last time, as well as that reed-smoked fish above. He also deep fried the cod sperm this time, but it was still just as creamy and delicious. Good, but pricey.