For my second and final Spring Break of business school I organized to go to Belize with a bunch of friends from Berkeley – Neal Kohl, Josh Moreen, Ayako Tanaka, Tara Davis and KJ Yoo. Neal and I flew down together as the advance party, and the others joined us over the following few days.
We began our trip in the tiny town of Placencia – reportedly it has the best beach on the mainland, and it’s also THE place to go dive with the whale sharks on the outer reef (unfortunately we missed the full moon by just a couple of days). It was a quiet little place with a decent strip of beach and a couple of chilled-out places to drink and eat. Our pick was the "De Tatch" restaurant on the beach, a great place to relax and waste the hours away.
Flying in to Placencia – not much of a landing strip!
Josh enjoying the "good life". Or is he in a Corona ad…?
Fresh pina coladas – mmmmm.
Our favourite haunt. The beach.
Darren Miao and I decided to go ice climbing with an outfit called Sierra Mountain Guides. I have a fair bit of experience on ice and rock in the mountains, but I’d never tried technical ice climbing – the steepest I’ve climbed before would have been around 50-60 degrees.
Our destination was a one horse town called Lee Vining, which is out the back of Yosemite NP near the border with Nevada. To get there we drove over the mountain passes through one of the worst snow storms of the year and it took us about 8 hours to get there – urgh. Lucky we rented an all wheel drive!
We had two amazing days climbing pitches of around 30m on ice of varying difficulties. The ice and the weather were both perfect for climbing. Our guide, Doug, turned out to be a great instructor and he definitely taught me some new techniques and some good anchoring tips for ice and mixed ice/rock. I’ll definitely go again!
Amazingly, I’d never done the most San Francisco of things and walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. We had some mild Spring weather in February so one weekend Adriana and I decided to finally do it.
We started walking from my apartment in North Beach, and it was a good hike to the bridge via Fisherman’s Wharf, Fort Mason, the Marina, Crissy Field and the Presidio.
