But what if the ice breaks and you fall in the zero degrees cold water?

There is a simple answer: try this before it hits. Your chances to get out alive become higher. Read on for the boring theory and a short report of how I did this recently in a mild -17°C afterwork evening.

The first thing to really understand is that this can happen. If you ever move on the ice, this can happen to you. I learned it from my own experience.

So, the second thing is to be prepared. In this case, being prepared is relatively easy.

There is a general “smart” advice: do not panic, know the theory, act calm and fast. Anyone who had ever been in a stress situation knows that the latter can’t be just easily followed. When the life is at stake, all your skills can degrade in one moment down to what is learned in practice. So – just do it.

• Find an ice opening, where you can safely get out. In Finland, we have maintained winter swimming spots which are perfect for this task
• Call a friend or two who will pull out your body on a rope in case something gets really wrong.
• Make sure they actually can do it – test this on the ground first; one should be reasonably fit in order to be able to lift a person of similar weight.
• Prepare full change of the clothes, including shoes. (Never attempt such fun disrobed. You can cut yourself with ice edges.)
• Read more theory below.

It’s nice to practice next to a warm place – a house or a car, which you can jump into after the exercise. But in fact I recommend doing it without such possibility. Getting out of the water is just first stage of your game; second, maybe equally dangerous and sometimes underestimated stage is recovering your warmth afterward. Climbed out, one may fall in an euphoric feeling “I did it” and end up with frostbitten extremities. (For ones looking for real horror pictures of frostbitten hands, see bottom of this page. And the story started innocently: small dipping in water in the cold.) You’ll know fascinating details: wet shoelaces freeze and you can’t take the shoes off; zippers freeze and do not open; and so on. Reading about such issues from a computer screen does not always deliver the idea that this is serious.

One more “do-and-do-not” list:

• always carry awls with which to climb out of the opening back to the ice (pictured above; jäänaskalit in Finnish; I wonder how is it called in English or Russian). In some cases, it may be impossible to climb out, as the ice may be slippery and your hands just slide helplessly. They must be hanging on the neck, not in a backpack or a pocket.
• always carry some spare clothes. Full set is the best; at least something is a must. It must be packed so that it stays dry after your potential bathing
• climb out to the direction you came from
• when got out, immediately do whatever you can to the wet clothes (in 15 minutes, it may be already too late) – change it if you have change, wriggle it as good as you can otherwise
• never take alcohol or anything like that.

So, how was it in practice? Pretty cool. Real winter fun (with necessary precautions). Unfortunately, the water level in our test lake was lower than I expected – just up to shoulders, so I could actually stay and push myself up. This made climbing out easier than it might have been. I climbed first time without pulling the awls out; but I guess the possibility to jump on the bottom makes a huge difference. After that, I decided to still test the awls and crashed ice edge the second time. Naturally, it was even easier.

Now I would like to repeat the exercise in a place where I do not reach the bottom with feet. And of course getting a bit nicer pictures does not harm. It may be not immediately clear without explanation, that the picture to the left shows a floating object in the ice opening, and that this object is in fact me giving a short lecture on how it feels.

Cycling in Himachal Pradesh: practical issues

My next plan is to publish the daybook with facts and impressions. Stay tuned.

Even if so, the good news is that there is always an escape from such dead end! That is, unicycling!

I got a 20″ unicycle for Christmas. This was not actually a surprise, as I was thinking about this toy for sometime already. Oh I do not remember last time being so much involved with something simple! Maybe it was a snowboard. Same feeling here: while learning to ride, I was telling myself: now the last time. And this promise was forgotten already during this “last time”, or I just did not even think about it, because I put too much pressure to the right foot, so now I just fix that and try this once again, and… And that continues until I’m so exhausted that my knees are bending down without asking

Watching circus performers, I did not think that unicycling is this hard. It looked like “they are simply pedaling and keeping the balance”. Well yes, just that! Fortunately I have read on the Internet that it may take 10-20 times longer than what it took for you to learn riding a bicycle. Sounds plausible. I have now practiced for maybe 10 hours, and can ride almost stable, but not yet always mount reliably. How much easier it is now when it takes just some clicks on the keyboard to find (say, on YouTube) visual instructions how to start riding.

The first times were the most fun. No better way than to try it; being so helpless in anything – the damn thing just does not ride a single meter!!! – then gradually making one pedal revolution… then sometimes more than one… words do not make for that.

Have a happy unicycling!

Impressions clearly overloaded my brain. This was first time I’ve been to Real Mountains – the highest pass, Kunzum, was at 4500m. And this was my first time I’ve been to a non-Western country (not counting my home Russia, which I’d put “on the border”).

The route was easy: start at Shimla, and follow the National Highway 22 (with some variations in the beginning) until Manali. Oh the highway… Never have seen anything like this before.

Numbers, mostly of interest to cyclists only:

• 9 ride days
• 750km covered
• Total altitude gain is still not counted, although three biggest gains were 1600, 1300 and 1000 meters

What else:

• Was caught in a snowfall in Lossar, 4000m:
  
• In the plains (Chandigarh), the temperature was in +30 range
• On the National Highway 22, passed landslides three times. Two of them, the bike could just ride through, like this one:

  

  once had to wait until it’s cleaned (I waited just half an hour, but others were there from the morning to the evening):

  

• Stayed in the tent two times, in hotels and various “rooms” 11 times.

In fact the impressions of India as a country overweigh the “mountain-cycling” impressions. It deserves much more than one blog post – even much more than one book. All my perception of the surrounding world is now a little bit different than it was before. Probably such thing is called “cultural shock”. I’m so happy that this happened; now I see how terribly narrow view I previously had.

Of the real India, I have seen only Chandigarh, which is described in all guides as most comfortable city in the country. Still it is, of course, Indian city (just like my home Saint Petersburg is the most European of the Russian cities, but still fully Russian).

I’m feeling own deficiency of not being a good writer to describe my thoughts about these two weeks. I will certainly do what I know I can – produce a technical report, with details for cyclists such as what tires to put on your bike and how much food to carry.

All pictures (unprocessed) piled here.

One forest road was not cleaned of the snow, and we had to drag bikes for several kilometers. What a joy! That was the first – and I’m afraid the only – day in this winter when I enjoyed the snow.

All other roads were either clean asphalt, or covered with smooth ice. Good for the one who had both studded tires! I’m so much missing the real winter; well now I’ll have at least one memory of it.

I have been there in 2001, six years ago, and longing to get there again.

This region is a known touring place. Nowadays there are not so many places on the Earth where you can wonder for several weeks and meet not a single human being. Backpacking there is nothing like “hiking trip from a hotel to a restaurant” along marked route. There is no services – you just go wherever you can. No cellular network (and we don’t take a satellite phone, as it weighs over kilo). All food has to be carried – we plan to fit in 700g/day, which makes 15kg of “consumable” start weight.

More facts:

• The region is extremely wet. Expect your feet to be wet all the time. There is positively no reason to dry down the boots, as they fill up with the water during first 15 minutes of walk-time.
• The temperature can be anything between 0°C and 25°C. At 0, the rain with heavy wind makes for a rich experience. Snow is possible starting from beginning of August.
• If the weather is warm, there can be really much mosquitos and gnats. Normal situation is when you must wear mosquito mesh and gloves to protect. It is impossible to eat with the mesh; so eating becomes challenging and people eat either inside the tent or walking/running around.

We’ll have 3 weeks of full autonomy. My heart is already in the mountains.