Hospitals are not for me

I ripped off the acromio-clavicular ligament on a snowboard fall in the winter of 97 – never fixed it!
On my twenties I was made of rubber, just like any other kid that age. No damage was too serious let alone perpetual.

10 years have passed and my shoulder is still out of place. Today I pay the heavy bill of my laissez passer, especially when the weather changes.

By then, hospitals were just like playing golf - the end of the line for me – you wouldn’t find me there before my 50th birthday!

Chatting with Ze Diogo, he mentioned some short of sports support clinics, which he thought could mean good business! A kind of preventive or even pedagogic health care, for the healthy people! Health services for active life and for heath and not only for the lack of it.

For that reason I was so surprise when, at our first meeting, HPP SAUDE mentioned their concept of ‘health of the new generation’ – it was a completely innovative perspective! Health care as a way to prevent problems instead of trying to fix them.

From that point on, we have established one of the most important partnerships of the Ice Care project. HPP SAUDE has become the OFFICIAL HEALTH CARE SERVICE of our expeditions, providing checkups for all the team and specialized doctors (my shoulder badly needs one!). We’re being looked after as top performing football stars! How great is that!
We’ve also talked about sending one of their doctors with us on the expeditions!

Thanks HPP SAUDE for your support and for the way you address the health care services!

Very interesting worldwide initiative

As I put it on one of my articles in this blog: Climate change is, as far as I know, the first chance mankind gets to work together for the common good.
http://icecare.blogspot.com/2008/07/equilbrio-de-nash.html

Boys and their toys

Yesterday, I surprised my 4 years old son, with a tent on the living room!

The excitement was proper of a 4 years old…

And on his side also! Ah ah

We spent the night inside a TRANGO WORLD tent, with inflatable mattresses and sleeping bags.

I went fetching all the TRANGO WORLD equipment and set up a ‘trial’!
Gore-tex jackets, 1st and 2nd layers, trousers, gloves, boots, back-packs, tents, etc. in quantity for the all team! This was the fantastic contribution of TRANGO WORLD for the Ice Care project!

Can’t wait to try the equipment in extreme conditions! I’ll have the opportunity to do that in some of the mountain training we’ll do before the expedition – stay tuned for the pictures!

Thanks Julio!

Joao Garcia testimony

Yesterday, I had the privilege of watching the documentary “Joao Garcia sur la route des 14”, at Bivaque store. It’s a little movie about Joao’s project to climb the 14 peaks above 8.000m.
Staring: Joao Garcia
Presented by: Joao Garcia
Produced by: Johan Perrier

In a nutshell: INSPIRING!

I strongly recommend you to watch the trailer!



Afterwards we chatted for a while. I asked him if, coming back to mountains he visited before, he could find traces of climate change.
Absolutely! – he replied.
When he started, 15 years ago, there was little awareness of climate change, but now, as he himself gets more attuned to the problem, the impact is very visible reaching more than 300 meters retreat in some cases, he says.

Visit Joao’s website at: www.joaogarcia.com

Great downhill video!

SILVA, one of the brands sponsoring the ICE CARE project, has just launched its new on-line campaign in: http://www.silvaintelligentlight.com/

The website is great and the video promo is really cool!



I’ve got SILVA headlamp already - lucky me!
Can’t wait to try it out on some insane downhills in Sintra or night running.

ICE CARE official website

A long time ago, a friend (AACP) said (and I quote) – “a company is a gathering of wills”

Ice Care is also a gathering of different wills.

It’s very rewarding to see that a simple idea, that started out as a few neurons chatting in my head, is now moving wills of different people on the other side of the town, on the other side of the Atlantic, on the other side of the world.

I just received, from the other side of town, the first templates of Ice Care’s official website.

Thank you Isa!

For the skeptical in you…

For those of you who are still not completely convinced.

Would you trust Sir David Attenborough?

UNESCO’s 5

The choice of ICE CARE’s 5 glaciers, was based on a document by UNESCO, entitled: “Case Studies on Climate Change and World Heritage”
The report highlights 5 glaciers that are dramatically affected by climate change. These are the glaciers we will climb from 2009 until 2012.
UNESCO’s report was coordinated by Augustin Colette, at the time UNESCO’s consultant for climate change. In a recent conversation (by e-mail), he sent me an enthusiastic: “…congratulations for this exciting project!”

Because it’s absolutely pro bono, ICE CARE puts me at a state that borders the statute of divinity and of furious madman! That’s probably why people indulge to pay some attention to my requests.

Driven by Colette’s reassuring statement, about ICE CARE’s public interest, I’ll probably get in touch with UNESCO to set up some kind of collaboration protocol.

UNESCO’s stamp provides enough confidence, that we’ve chosen the right glaciers…unfortunately, these glaciers were selected primarily because of the amount of data available to document the impacts of climate change….there are of course other glaciers currently at risk…

Q&A

Ice Care started as a ‘civil movement’ (as someone put it in a meeting), by a couple of friends who like to climb, but know little about climate change.

Soon enough this naïf attitude was cornered and proved unsustainable in the long term.

Tiago Bettencourt suggested I would prepare a tutorial about global warming – with all due right.

Recently I came across Zé Diogo Quintela (rather famous Portuguese humorist) on the street. We’ve known each other for ages, so I invited him to become the first official Ice Care ambassador. He throws a couple of intelligent questions at me – which is quite normal for someone publicly endorsing a cause.

- ‘Is it really happening? Isn’t our climate naturally variable? Why is it different now? Is it really serious?’

- ‘can we really do something? Switching off mobile chargers has any effect whatsoever?’

Natural and healthy skepticism, I would say – very common to the majority of people, like me and him, who need a veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery good reason to decline the comforts of ignorance.

By then I’d realize the urge to explain the dimensions of the problem to everyone (like me and him….).

In London I found an excellent book by Bill McGuire - '7 years to change the planet’. Based on that book, I’m preparing a sequence of ppts with Q&A according to the following issues:

1. What is happening already?
2. Is it already too late?
3. What is Ice Care doing?
4. What can I do?

In the meanwhile, here are some ideas that can be applied immediately:

. Eat less meat! – we’ve exhorted the guilt upon cars and planes, but ‘…the meat industry conspires to generate an astonishing 12% of global emissions […]almost as much as all cars, trains, boats and planes put together.’

. Switch off unused equipments! – if everyone in the UK ‘…made sure that the appliances were properly switched off when not in use, we could do away with 2, or maybe 3, of the 10 new nuclear power plants currently in the planning stages.’

First Book

Congratulations Ice Care! Congratulations Zé Diogo to be more precise!

He’s first book “Aventura ao Máximo – os novos exploradores lusos” will be launched in the end of December!
I expect this to be the first of a long series of traveling and adventure books.

Treino fim de semana 15 e 16

Para além da preparação física semanal, alguns membros da expedição já começaram a fazer treino específico para o Kilimanjaro.
Já fizemos alguns treinos de pernas, bicicleta e resistência.

A partir de agora, vamos passar a divulgar no blog os treinos em equipa, que organizarmos ao fim de semana. A ideia é – quem quiser participar é bem vindo!

No próximo Sábado, estamos a combinar encontrarmo-nos às 9h na Guia (bomba da Repsol) e/ou às 9:20h na Panisol da Malveira – podem aparecer num ou noutro.
A ideia é fazer umas subidas à Peninha (cerca de 3horas), que podem incluir, no fim, um treino de escalada em rocha – mas ainda não decidimos, porque isso seriam outras tantas 3 horas pelo menos e eu preciso de dar assistência à família.
Não é preciso levarem equipamento técnico de escalada – nós levamos, até porque queremos levar algum lastro.
É preciso levar bom calçado, água e comida (barras energéticas ou sanduíches).

Quem quiser vir numa de passeio, também pode. Desde que depois se sinta à vontade para fazer o percurso ao seu ritmo, independente do resto do grupo.

See you there

Trash attitude

The ultimate goal of the Ice Care project is to induce a few changes in daily behaviors. That’s all!

I recommend this enlightening 21 minute movie.



Back when I was living in the Netherlands, through several different conversations, I came to realize, different countries have different ways to apply their norms.
In Nordic countries everything is regulated by law – it’s either mandatory or forbidden.
In the US everyone can be sued – the courts settle everything.
In Portugal everything is socially regulated – either it’s socially accepted and everyone does it, or it’s rude.
As awkward as it may seam, we have observed this in very many different cases.

That configures my ambition. To create the social attitude in Portugal, that socially condemns non eco-friendly behaviors.

On the phone with my friend yesterday, I told him I was at the train station, on my way to Lisbon. (I live in Estoril - 20 min away)
His first reaction was: “What’s wrong with your car?!?!”
I’m hoping, in the future, this story will become like an anecdote of the way things used to be.
This represents the typical (very typical) Portuguese attitude, which is neither driven by intelligence nor logic.

In a nutshell, I’m aiming to change this kind of attitude of waste of precious resources, in our everyday life.