Scrabble and tea at Leon

After a good London adventure, we ended up at Leon for biscuits and tea. I won the game of Scrabble - yyyyyyessss!

We headed into the city to attend Adventure Travel Live, which was most interesting for the talks we attended. We first listened to Doug Scott talk about his climb of Everest and his views on what is currently happening in Tibet. He's head of a charity that sets up schools in the Everest area and helps train nurses and doctors. This charity has only one paid member of staff (not him) and they rely on people buying products and attending guided tours (not to the top of Everest). He was against the commercialisation of the mountain, saying that untrained people die each year, sometimes every week, on the mountain, and 1,000 people at base camp wasn't his idea of fun. In his day, the mountain had to be booked, and only by one climbing party. Doug spoke of a presence that seems to come to those who are at the maximum of their strength and endurance. He knows of one man at the top of Everest who broke his Kendal mint cake in two to share with the person climbing with him, but this climber had got to the summit alone. Doug himself had an out-of-body experience at the top of Everest which sharpened his actions - one step out and he would have been in great danger.

Buoyed by the talk, I went down to his stall and bought a jacket that's as warm as a duvet. It's very colourful, knitted by Nepalese folk, and gives me the appearance of some hippie that's twice the size as I am.

The next talk we attended was by a couple of people from Brandt's travel guides who were highlighting aspects of Madagascan wildlife. I now really, really want to go, not because of the lemurs, but because of a group of marsupials called tenrecs.

After browsing the stalls, which were all selling guided tours of some sort (and we're not that into being guided), we walked down the South Bank, pausing to let a critical mass of inline skaters and cyclists, one with a stereo booming out beats, pass (Whoooh! Yeah!) before settling on our tea zone.