the nostalgia project - Bears on Toast, Croatia (1988)

The Route

Bears on Toast is a four pitch sport route taking a central line up the Stup pillar on the Aniča kuk face of Paklenica canyon in Croatia. Paklenica is a classic limestone karst area close to the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic, the sea between Croatia and Italy. The route seems to be regarded as a local classic and is on the front cover of the current guidebook. It features outsize examples of the classic karst erosion feature that the French call "cannelures" - self-explanatory in these photos. The first two pitches are 6c+ (about 5.11c), the rest much easier.

French crusher Charlotte Durif on the second pitch of Bears on Toast © unknown
In her blog she describes the route as "magnifique" 

Bears on Toast second pitch, front cover of the current guidebook
© unknown but looks like a shot from the same photoshoot as the image above

Aniča kuk face at Paklenica with the Stup pillar obvious on the right

The context

In August 1988 I spent three weeks in what was then Yugoslavia: an awkward federation of Balkan communist states which blew apart violently in the 1990s. It was an obscure destination for a European climbing trip, but I suppose was motivated by a couple of reasons. One being to experience another communist country, following on from the Czech trip in 1987. And also to climb in a Mediterranean limestone area, as the magazines at the time were full of glamorous photos of those sorts of venues, especially the Verdon gorge. I had read an article that described Paklenica as very similar to Verdon.

When we were very young - Catherine and I, late 1980s. Scan from a damaged print. I still have that shirt!

My then-girlfriend Catherine agreed to come too, despite having just started a job at a posh City of London investment bank. Generally those are not the sort of firms that grant three week holidays straight after joining but she was (and still is, when I last checked) a very persuasive woman. Reaching Paklenica required a couple of days travel. We flew from London to Split then took a sweaty crowded bus to a coastal town, Zadar. There we spent a large slice of our funds to stay a night in a small sea-front hotel. Our room had a big window which opened to let in a refreshing breeze and exotic street noise. This would prove to be the only conventionally-enjoyable part of our Croatian "holiday". The next day we made a shorter bus ride to Paklenica and checked into the only accommodation option, a stoney shade-free campground. 

There we discovered a few major errors in our planning. We had no stove, assuming there would be cafes nearby that would feed us. In fact there was just one store, selling not-very-nice bread and little else. Some distance further was a dismal pizza restaurant. Both seemed to open at very erratic hours. Ironically the campground was the other side of a fence from a large nudist beach complex, full of sunburned rotund Germans swinging their bits and enjoying too much all-inclusive buffet.

As to climbing, we discovered the gorge was several kilometres inland from the coast. We had no car and there was no public transport so each day began with a stiff hike. Modern day climbers might also question what possessed us to be there mid-summer. The answer is that we knew no better. Generally, the whole notion of optimal "conditions" for climbing had not yet been invented.

On the positive side, the gorge itself met expectations. Close to its seaward end were short cliffs which had recently been developed with modern-style sport routes. There was no topo so we just tried them all, chasing the shade. As far as I remember, none were harder than 6c (mid-5.11).

In theory, we also wanted to do one of the very long routes on the Aniča kuk face, but the prospect of a whole day exposed to the sun was too much. We compromised by climbing a moderate four pitch route on the Stup pillar, possibly "Utopija 85". While we were doing this I noticed that the very front of the buttress was unclimbed, perhaps because of a large body-length roof about 30 metres off the ground. Above the roof the rock looked very featured and climbable.

The next day I persuaded Catherine that we should take a closer look. We climbed back up the same route until above the steep part of the pillar, tied our two half-ropes together and rappeled to the ground. I was very excited to see that the roof had large sharp flake holds running right across it.

The ascent

I had bought a "bolt kit" just before our trip and brought it with us, along with a hammer. The kit was designed for cavers, with short self-driving one-inch bolts; an important detail wasted on me. I don't remember whether I had really thought we might encounter a new route opportunity, but suddenly it did seem we had one. I had hand-drilled holes for a few bolts in Australia two years before so very approximately knew what I was doing.

The diary has no detail on the preparation work. Catherine sensibly stayed in camp. I have a vague memory of hiking in to the gorge alone and feeling small and nervous (at no time during our trip did we see more than a handful of other climbers). I think that the job took two full days, swinging around on the bouncy half-ropes and pounding on the drive-in's. I have no idea how I retrieved the ropes without her help. Perhaps there was a nearby established route that I was able to rappel?

Looking up at the stacked roof section of pitch 1 © unknown

Then we both headed up to climb the thing. The roof went fine. I had installed a belay straight above, which was exciting - in retrospect even more exciting considering that we were both weighting twin 1" bolts. The second pitch started off with something close to chimneying, wedged between the giant cannelures. Higher up these features dwindled to nothing. The crux was a slab move, stemmed between the last remnants of two cannelures, stretching for a good hold. I fell once but managed it on my second try. We joined an established route for two more pitches.

Final moves on pitch 2 © unknown

As it seemed unlikely that we would do anything more substantial than this route and the heat and starvation diet were wearing us down, we then took a "holiday from our holiday": returning to Zadar, catching a boat over to Italy and taking a train to Rome. We spent three or four days there in the cheapest hotel we could find central to the city, doing standard tourist stuff and eating a lot.

After we got back to the UK, I sent a letter to a mountaineering club in Zagreb, listed in the guidebook, giving details of our route. The weird name, I think, had a two-stage origin. Earlier in the year I had been climbing on the UK gritstone and had managed a competent lead of The Rasp, a somewhat notorious and very classic overhanging crack. There were some old local guys at the base. One exclaimed - this needs to read in a northern English accent - "what do they feed these lads on these days - beans on toast and no sex?". Catherine found this very funny and repeated it often. Around the same time and in the same area, we often had breakfast in a cafe, Longlands, in Hathersage in the Peak District, after driving up from London. One day they had a typo on their chalkboard, rendering the British staple as "bears on toast".

As mentioned before, Yugoslavia spent much of the 1990s as a war zone. It seemed exceptionally unlikely that any record of our route could have survived. But, sometime around 2000, I stumbled over a Paklenica guidebook in a bookshop and there we were: correct ascent date, names spelled accurately and route name exactly as conceived! Hopefully someone has also replaced the caving bolts.

Subsequent ascents

I have not been back to Croatia.

the nostalgia project - Starosta, Czech Republic (1987)

The route

The Mayor and Mayoress, Adrspach © unknown

Starosta and Starastova are a pair of prominent sandstone rock towers in the extraordinary Adršpach-Teplice region of the Czech Republic, about 150km north-east of Prague. In English, the names are "The Mayor" and "The Mayoress". The classic route up Starosta is the four pitch Stará Cesta, graded Czech VII (perhaps YDS 5.10a) and first climbed in 1928.

The sandstone of Czech and eastern Germany has a strong claim to be the birthplace of modern rock climbing. Free climbing up to 5.10 was accomplished as early as 1906. The area is notorious for a very strict climbing ethic: no chalk, no camming devices, protection only from from rope knots placed in cracks or very spaced bolts.

The context

Some time in mid-1987 I stumbled over a small item in a climbing magazine mentioning that the BMC were looking for people to join a British delegation to Czechoslovakia (as it was then). Specifically the focal point was a climbing film festival taking place in Adrspach in September. I had seen images of the sandstone climbing in eastern Europe a few years before and had already logged it mentally as somewhere I would like to visit one day. The climbing style and rock architecture seemed unique.

I was also interested in seeing life on the other side of the 'Iron Curtain". The Cold War had been a major backdrop to my childhood. For my parents, who had both served during World War II and kept Winston Churchill's speeches in prized place in their record collection, the Soviet Union was unambiguously the enemy and an existential threat to liberty. I was raised to think the same. The unexpected rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s had caused great excitement in our household. Somewhat for the same reasons I was a fan of the émigré Czech author Milan Kundera's books, all of which I had read at university. Ditto Kafka.

I sent a short letter to the BMC applying to join the one week trip, then thought little more about it. Invitations would only be extended to "known" climbers, I reasoned. Wrong. Or, more accurately: wrong in my case. There would be four of us, the others being Dennis Gray, the middle-aged boss of the BMC, and two guys whose names I knew from magazines, Craig Smith and Tony Ryan.

The flight to Prague from London was short, which makes sense if you look at a map, but somehow seemed disrespectful of the great fault-line of late 20th century geopolitics that we were crossing. At our destination my luggage was missing, including all my climbing gear. Not a great start but our minders from the Czech national climbing association assured me they would find it. As far as I remember, we spent a night in Prague then were driven to Adrspach. We spent most of the rest of the week based there aside from one short road trip to the Elbe region. In Adrspach we mostly drunk excellent Czech beer in bucolic country pubs and climbed, often in that order. I don't recall that we actually spent much time at the film festival itself, though I think I sat through one animation in which not much happened, then a character died violently and the audience laughed; Czech humour is notoriously dark.

Craig and Tony were really friendly, which was a relief, as I didn't feel remotely worthy to be travelling with them. Both of them were amongst the strongest climbers in the UK at the time. It was especially interesting to meet Craig as he was also a genuine climbing celebrity, in a period when that was still a rare phenomenon. Craig (and his lycra tights) had been on the cover of all the climbing magazines over the previous couple of years, notably in photos taken by the US photographer Beth Wald at Smith Rock, itself probably the most fashionable cliff in the world in the mid-80s. It would be too generous to say that he wasn't aware of his status but he was constantly entertaining and never arrogant. There was only one moment during the trip when he crossed the line into rockstar petulance: our hosts had taken us to a cliff quite early in the morning, where Craig insisted that he was insufficiently caffeinated to climb so we all got back in the cars and drove for about twenty minutes back to the nearest town so he could have more coffee.

Craig posing for Beth Wald's camera on Darkness at Noon, Smith Rock, mid-1980s
© Climbing magazine (from this article)

I wanted to like Dennis, as I respected his work with the BMC, but he was not the greatest company, prone to long monologues about his glory days in the 1950's Brown-and-Whillans era of British climbing or any other story in which he could name-drop famous climbers. Over time, we became curious about his frequent absences in the late evenings. Years later Dennis came out, authoring a book "Todhra", billed as the "first gay climbing novel" and apparently densely populated with casual homosexual encounters. It is a reasonable inference that the book is based on personal experience. Reflecting on that, it is quite impressive that Dennis had the balls (so to speak) to set out on cottaging missions on "enemy" turf.

The ascent

Dennis and I climbed The Mayor with several Czech guys sometime in the middle of the week. The diary records that I led most of it. In practise this meant soloing short cracks between large ledges with giant ring bolts to belay from. My luggage still hadn't arrived and I was climbing in carpet slippers (an actual substitute for climbing shoes in eastern Europe at that time). They were less useless than I expected. Perhaps someone in the slipper factory was a climber and was secretly optimising the fit and sole rubber?

It being festival week, a tyrolean had been rigged from the Mayor summit to the Mayoress, so we crossed that too, swinging around about a hundred meters above the trees. Then we rappelled the Mayoress. A nice feature of the Adrspach towers is that all of them have summit logbooks; we duly wrote in our names. I suppose it is very slightly possible that we were the first Brits on the summits of these two towers, but I doubt it.

Subsequent ascents

I made a second visit to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1989. The only real link with the 1987 trip was that Craig had kept in touch with a young'ish Czech climber, Jiri, who was offering us accommodation back in Adrspach. After meeting briefly in London, we set off in two cars, Craig with Al Manson, and I with Dan Donovan. As far as I recall, we didn't re-unite until Adrspach. Crossing the border into Czechoslovakia from Germany was quite daunting. I remember an interminable wait and long queues of stationary trucks. Unlike our flight two years before, the transition from capitalist west to communist east felt much more tangible.

In Adrspach, Jiri was amazingly welcoming and kept us fed and out of trouble for a couple of weeks. I was climbing much more confidently than in 1987. I even took a fall on a knot. According to the diary, Dan and I repeated The Mayor, but I have no memory at all of it. No tyrolean, for sure. The best thing we did during our stay was the Letecka Cesta route on the Milenci (the 'lovers') towers at about E3 (5.10+ R). Several high quality chimney and crack pitches lead to a final crux face up to the extraordinary twin summits. We also jumped the gap between the summits. Czech tower jumping is a sub-genre of the sport with its own grading system. We were told the Milenci jump was a grade three, which seemed a solid achievement given that the top grade is five. I wondered then (and now) whether we had subtly done it wrong - perhaps jumping in the wrong direction?

Milenci towers, Adrspach © unknown
(We jumped from left to righthand summits)

On the way home, Dan and I stayed in Prague for a few days with Matej Holub, a young Czech student who we had recently befriended when he was on some kind of exchange study program in London. We had a couple of memorable evenings exploring the city's nightlife; knocking on giant medieval doors in dark corners of the city in order to be admitted to secret beer halls. There seemed to be no other tourists. I remember crossing Prague's famous Charles Bridge while drunk one night, noting our absolute solitude and being shocked that we could be experiencing so much extraordinary historical architecture in such a private and exclusive way.

Charles Bridge, Prague © unknown

One day we also drove out to a limestone area south of Prague with Matej (possibly Srbsko). On the way back it was raining hard. The winding road had several corners with negative camber and on one of them I briefly lost control and slid across the centre marking, clipping the side of an oncoming vehicle. Remarkably no-one was hurt and both cars still driveable but Matej warned us that the bureaucratic consequences could be significant.

Back in Prague and after several phone calls to my insurers, I learned that I would not be able to "re-export" my damaged vehicle from Czechoslovakia without police sign-off, which could only be obtained from one senior officer somewhere in Prague's central police station. Matej offered to take me, but was clearly terrified by the prospect. It seemed our destination was very much the epicentre of the country's dictatorship and not somewhere Czechs visited lightly - the kind of place you might enter but never leave. Inside it did indeed fit the stereotype: many floors, harsh lighting and long echoing corridors with numbered doors. The office of the man controlling the destiny of my vehicle was distinctive. His large desk was entirely covered in explicit pornography, apparently glued to the surface and protected by a glass sheet. The message seemed to be "in this office I can do whatever I want." I awkwardly passed over various documents, evidence of the accident and some cash, Matej and the man spoke at length in Czech, a piece of paper was stamped and out we went. No big deal really, but disconcerting.

And another thing ...

Just after Dan and I left Prague, reforms set in motion by the last Soviet president, Gorbachev, led to eastern Europe countries like Hungary begin to open their borders with the west. Czechoslovakia had its own Velvet Revolution, and, by the end of 1989, a new government was in place, headed by the much-imprisoned dissident, Vaclav Havel. The Soviet Union imploded a couple of years later. Czechoslovakia fragmented peacefully into two countries in 1993.

The end of the Cold War, and Deng Xiaoping's de-Mao-ification of China around the same time, made the 1990s an optimistic time, at least as I remember it. American academic Francis Fukuyama rashly declared "the end of history", believing that western ideals of economic and social freedom were permanently entrenched. Seems quaint now. It is easy to make a case that freedom is in retreat globally. Xi Jinping abolished term limits for the Chinese presidency earlier this year, Putin long since corrupted Russian democracy and there's an authoritarian idiot in the White House.

A few months ago I had a fascinating conversation with a guy, now in his sixties, who grew up in Prague. He described his childhood experience of watching Russian tanks enter the city in 1968, crushing demonstrators who blocked their path. His father had been associated with the pro-democracy movement that preceded that event. By association, that led to him being denied university admission and other basic opportunities under state control. For a while he worked in the paper sector, trying to make sense of the constant shortages and surpluses in supply that were an inevitable consequence of the Soviet's inefficient planned economy. He described how he and his colleagues would buy time when surplus shipments threatened to overwhelm their warehouses by re-routing trainloads of paper bound for Prague back east to Siberia. He eventually concluded that he had to leave the country; an exercise that required he and his friends to roam unauthorised through several eastern bloc countries, be frequently thwarted by armed border guards and eventually succeed through an asylum application to Canada. It is shame oral records like this are not more frequently shared, especially as ever-fewer people remain alive with first-hand experience of communist dictatorships, and there are worrying signs that the ideology is becoming fashionable again.