Expedition Kackar 2009
1. The Introductory European Part of the Expedition
Previous Chapter : Prologue
It is possible to reach the Kackar mountain on foot only from the middle of July to the middle of August. The next limitating factor for us besides the weather was Tom’s boss who decides about his holiday, so the time and date was quite certain, namely from Thursday 30th July until Sunday 9th August.
On Thursday we had a meeting at 5 o’clock p.m. at Ruzyne airport, so I had to pack all my things by quarter to five. My co-travellers had recommended the maximum baggage weight of 18 kilos to me; otherwise there would have been something strange, so I had better reweigh my backpack by the simple method of calculating the difference between traveller weight with his backpack and traveller weight without his backpack. The first three digit value scared me a little bit, the second one too. At least I would be more stable in mountain wind gusts. The backpack was something more than 23 kilos, so I decided to put the rest of the food in the hand luggage.
I easily found Tom and Jack (the second Jack didn’t go) in the departure lounge by the luggage wrapper. After check-in we drank a toast to the success of our expedition, we had a pils naturally (Turkey is a Muslim country, so we couldn´t count on too much beer drinking, and we were right). It´s interesting, the price of beer was identical in both airports, Prague and Istanbul – something more than 140 crowns (5,50 €). It crossed my mind that there is an advantage after all to getting older and earning money rather than being a younger but poor little student.
After the next toast to success in the transit lounge and the final security control we finally boarded the plane. I started to enjoy it like a little boy, because I hadn´t sat on a plane for five years for sure. We flew with Turkish Airlines via Istanbul to Trabzon on the Black Sea coast. The medium sized Boeing 737 on the flight Prague – Istanbul was new and half-empty; we could choose a window-seat without problems. After 8 p.m., with twenty minutes delay, we took off. The service was great. After dinner we tried a Turkish pils, Efes, with pleasure. Who knows when the next occasion would be...
On the way to Istanbul we caught up on our delay and got there at 22:00 local time (an hour shift). We moved to the domestic flights terminal and after a requisite Efes got onto the next plane. That time the again medium sized plane (but Airbus 320) was totally crowded. The plane took off at midnight, in that case with thirty minutes delay.