Group of Seven Psychopaths Trivia Quiz

Answer: Eiger

Along with the spectacular Jungfrau and the Monch, the Eiger, which means ogre in German, forms a ridge that is a virtual symbol for the Swiss mountain ranges. The Eiger rises some 3,970 metres (13,020 feet) at which height it ranks only 27th in height in Switzerland. Even in these Bernese Alps it is not tall enough to be in the top ten. What it lacks for in height it makes up for in legend.

With its loose rocks, steep slopes and weather patterns that could be best described as unpredictable this is a mountain that exudes danger. However, for Serge and I it is that iconic North Face that overlooks Kleine Scheidegg and Grindelwald that we're interested in. Make no mistake, this is a formidable climb and not for the faint hearted.

Since it was first climbed in 1938 over 60 climbers have perished on its slopes. Just below the first ice field you'll find the Eigerwand Railway Station and on the upper face is an area called The White Spider, which is a series of snow filled cracks that spread out and resemble a set of spider legs. After managing to climb our way through 5,905 feet of irresistible danger Serge and I... step out into thin air in our wingsuits and get as close as humanly possible to achieving sheer unadulterated flight.

Answer: Tasmania

Whilst WA, SA and Victoria all have southern coastal aspects they are also part of the mainland of the continent. Tasmania remains the country's only island state. Ship Stern Bluff is beautiful, totally unpredictable and dangerous. Oh and don't forget to take your wetsuit because it is breathtakingly cold, too close to Antarctica for my liking.

Situated on the Tasman Peninsula between Cape Raoul and Tunnel Bay, it is also isolated and very remote. You have an option of taking a 30 kilometre boat ride to get there or spending some hours trekking through some pretty thick wilderness. If I were you I'd take the boat ride. Big black cliffs edge the coast line. The breaks, which start at around 8 feet and can rise to 20 feet, run dangerously close to rock fields and, to add to the danger, the area has the propensity to attract great white sharks (you didn't mention them, Jacko).

As I'm struggling to find the words to describe the rush of latching onto one of these giant waves I will use the words of one of the local surfers, Charlie Ward. "The scariest part is seeing the wave and committing to catching it but once committed, it all tends to feel surreal and I forget about everything except what's right in front of me". Little wonder that this place has been listed as one of the "places to surf before you die" list.

Answer: Appalachian

At first Sam wanted me to hoof the Triple Crown, which would have taken in the Appalachian, the Continental Divide and the Pacific Crest, but I wasn't ready to go trekking over 7,700 miles with her at the time. As it turned out, the Appalachians were a sight to behold in their own right. To take on board the others would have invited comparisons between the three and, in some respects, diminished the magic of what I had experienced.

We ended up travelling through low lands, evergreen forests and sub alpine regions. We had our breath snatched by the rugged beauty of the Rangeley Lakes region in Maine, enjoyed the sublime beauty of the Saddleback and Sugarloaf mountains, savoured the high elevation cliffs of the Taconic Highlands and the gracious beauty of the Delaware. Sam reckoned that we'd completed the easy run, in other words we'd followed the trail from the south (Georgia) in late March and then headed north, following the season, reaching Maine around about late fall. Sheesh, she called that "easy".

Answer: Yosemite

"El Cap" sits in the western end of Yosemite Valley and it lies opposite the Bridalveil Falls. But what a monster it is, towering some 3,000 feet above the valley floor. I'm standing at its base getting a crick in my neck looking up and thinking "crikey, it's twice the height of the Empire State Building". I was sort of hoping that Sam was planning on taking the hiking trail to the top that I'd spotted next to the Yosemite Falls but "Nooooo" Sam said "we're free climbing".

Now I'm a half decent climber but I found the going here tough and I had to concentrate like crazy. Sam, however, was in her element and was babbling off all sorts of facts as we climbed. I could barely spare the concentration to take it all in but the bits and pieces I did lock in included something about it being the largest "granite" monolith in the world, a section around pitches 8 and 9 was called the "Stovelegs" because two of the original climbers made pitons here using the legs of a wood stove, the rock was formed as a result of glacial action more than a million years ago, the dark veined intrusions were diorite, blah blah blah.

I did notice that she went real quiet around about pitch 27. I found out that this section was called "Changing Corners" and it was an extremely technical section. I don't mind saying that my heart was in my mouth quite a few times through this section and I had to stop and put some serious thought into every single move I made. That's not to say that I was blasé about any step of this journey. It took Sam and I four days to get to the top and I rank that as one of my major achievements though Sam would show me the next day when her partner Tom showed up and the pair of them speed climbed the Nose in a little under ten hours.

Answer: Machu Picchu

It was a three hour drive from Cusco to catch up with Pablo and cast my eye upon the impressive Salcantay, the highest peak in the Willkapampa mountain range. This is truly a majestic peak, it is a part of the Peruvian Andes and, I was surprised to hear from Pablo, it does not manage to appear in the ten tallest peaks in Peru. It comes in as the twelfth highest. I had been warned by Sam to rug up and it was just as well, our starting altitude was at 9,515 feet and we would ascend to 15,200 feet by day two. Pablo mentioned that we could have taken the famous Inca Trail but there were too many tourists on that track and it would only be interesting if we wanted to look at a lot of old ruins.

The Salcantay track on the other hand would showcase the natural beauty of the area, "eet will blow your mind senor Poll" he said. He wasn't wrong, the glaciers at the peak were incredible and I can't blame the thin air when I say that they took my breath away. From there we went downhill (with no disrespect to the scenery or the mountain intended) passing crisp streams, waterfalls and breathtakingly beautiful valleys. By the end of the third day we'd reached Santa Teresa where Pablo pointed out some hot spring pools and these were much welcomed by my aching muscles. By the fifth day, after trekking through jungles that exhibited some amazing biodiversity and had Pablo regaling me with many stories of puma, jaguar and baseball-sized tarantulas in the area (none of which we encountered), we finally reached Machu Picchu. The Salcantay Trail is recommended but it certainly isn't a walk in the park.

Answer: Volcanic cauldron

Calderas are formed by a land collapse that comes after a volcanic eruption and, whilst some may look similar, they should not be confused with a volcanic crater. Deception Island sits in the South Shetland Islands archipelago and it is administered by the Antarctic Treaty System. Now he tells me, I'm about to take a dip into the Antarctic waters. Deception used to be the base for a whaling station but now it is used by Franco, his fellow Argentinian scientists and the Spanish as a research station.

There is also a great deal of tourism interest here, particularly for the large colonies of chinstrap penguins that reside here, or to take the opportunity to enjoy a warm volcanic bath that can be found at Port Foster. Franco is gesticulating that it is time to strip down to our Speedos and take a dive into the icy waters of the Southern Ocean, emulating the feats of Lewis Pugh in 2005.

As we take the plunge I get another late warning from my mate, this time something about keeping an eye out for leopard seals and ... "last one in the volcanic bath is a rotten egg".

Answer: Mali

The Sahara Desert is simply a vast sea of undulating dunes that seem to extend in every direction and, as a consequence, it seems to forever toy with your perception. Its vastness is a barrier, its extreme conditions are dangerous and its constantly shifting sands make navigation (and the aforementioned perception) difficult. Crossing it from west (the Mauritanian coast) to east (Egypt's eastern coastline) has a strong allure and a great deal of romanticism attached to it however, the political climate and the internal strife that exists in most of the nations here is such that this notion is both dangerous and highly unlikely. The most prudent method would involve making several trips over a period of years, taking time to carefully study the route, the mood within that zone and employing the services of a trusted and expert guide. If you're doing this out of some romantic notion then you need to be authentic and make your crossing by camel, but a word of warning, after several days sitting astride one of these desert ships the romance will disappear rather quickly.

Preparation is essential. You will need entry and exit permits for the borders you cross, expert guides, solar powered GPS systems, 3 to 4 camels (one won't last the journey or it might run away - remember, there are very few places to tether them) and some form of communications device. This is all before thinking about food, water, first aid facilities and camping equipment and, in case it hasn't dawned on you yet, you have to carry all this. There are no convenience stores out there.
I am fortunate that Yasmine and her family are prepared to guide me. This route that I've chosen is both strife torn and plagued with bandits and smugglers but for Yasmine it is her heartland and her family knows the ways through here like I know the back of my hand. There are short and safe tours that operate out of centres such as Morocco and Egypt and these are great ways to get initiated to desert travel but times change and check before venturing.

Answer: Gilgit-Baltistan

Because K2 has the second highest fatality rate among the peaks that exceed 8,000 metres in height it is also known as the Savage Mountain. This moniker is not surprising. It is far more remote than its famous cousin Everest, its weather is far more unpredictable, the winds through its peaks are furious and avalanches are a constant threat. The mountain sits on the borders of the Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County, a part of Xinjiang in China and Balistan, which is a part of the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan. Despite its majesty and its towering peaks, it is its inbuilt hazards, those fierce and brutal hazards, that make K2 one of the most sought after conquests for ski-mountaineers like Faisal. Faisal's dream is to ski down from K2's summit. So far he's managed to do so from about 400 metres below though others have achieved the feat slightly higher.
"Surely we're NOT skiing from that high Faz?"
"Ah come on, show a little backbone my little Aussie bear".

Answer: Vanuatu

Blog entry: July 24
Ambrym is essentially a volcanic island and its volcanoes are amongst the most active in the New Hebrides. Nine of us, including a volcanologist, a photographer, Jacko and I, have made the trek through some dense jungle and about seven miles of ash plain to get to Marum. Man, that ash was a slog. All the while Marum and its sister, Benbow, continued to shake and make this tiny island a living hell. It came as a surprise to see resilient little purple flowers creeping out through the slag to add some incongruous colour to this greyish landscape. I don't think that I slept a wink last night thanks to the continuous rumblings from the nearby crater. With every sound I'd gaze at my tent shelter and think "Man, that cover is flimsy". Yesterday Benbow had belched out an ash cloud and within minutes our faces, our clothes and our equipment were covered in tiny bits of grit. Jacko ribbed me that I looked like some sponge cake dipped in cocoa and that all I needed was to be iced with desiccated coconut and I'd resemble a walking lamington.

Finally, after a couple of days of solid trudge we arrived at Marum's pit. As I peered into the crater my eyes were immediately drawn to the molten lava. It looked like syrup, bubbling away and moving in (apparent) slow motion at 2200 degrees Fahrenheit. It was mesmerizing and, at times, overwhelming. I had the sense that we had somehow sneaked into a carnival to watch some sort of alien fireworks display. We set out the ropes and descended into the crater, all the time buffeted by jets of pressurized air and poisonous gases, and I could not shake this sense that I was staring at the centre of the Earth. Marum rumbles, the earth shakes and I clench the rope tighter, my stomach is tied in knots. Jacko and I figure that we've seen enough.

There are a number of companies that offer tours to the island of Ambryn and the active cones of of Marum and Benbow but be warned, they do have a firm fitness criteria.

Answer: Siberia (Russia)

Siberia represents about 77% of Russia's land area but it only holds 27% of its people. Sparsely populated is almost an understatement, the equation here is approximately three people to every square kilometre. You might think to yourself "great, so much space" but it's not so great when you choose to paddle the Bashkaus - something goes awry and you have very little chance of finding help.

The Bashkaus is a 136 mile tributary of the Chulyshman River that starts near the Mongolian border. It falls at a rate of thirty-two feet per mile. If that doesn't sound like much compare that to the Colorado River as it churns its way through the Grand Canyon, an impressive piece of white water in its own right. The Colorado drops at about eight feet per mile. We will be paddling through some frightening torrents of water, navigating massive boulder strewn rapids and holes, drenches and siphons that cut through steep gorges where there is no escape. This is one long maelstrom. "Serge, you're a psychopath mate".