Varazze

The journey to Varazze turned out to be a little epic... We planned to break the journey with a stop at the more esoteric bouldering venue of Prieure in South East France. However, it had rained prior to our arrival and the sandstone boulders were looking particularly green and damp in the shady, mossy forest. It looked like they'd take some time to dry so we continued East to Varazze.

We were almost at Varazze when the weather turned very ugly - very strong winds, darkness and heavy sleet made the journey very treacherous. The coastal motorway weaved around headlands, through tunnels and over extremely exposed bridges. We saw a few near misses and decided it was wise to stay the night in a motorway services. The following day was calm and we made more relaxed progress to Varazze.

Varazze is most famous for Gioia - one of the hardest boulder problems in the world graded at 8C+ (I'll try to flash it tomorrow...!). So far we have climbed at two areas and generally found the problems to be a great quality on good granite.  The quality is definitely in the 7th grade, with many sixes not seeing as many ascents - however, some gems are still there to be found.

I climbed a great traverse - Anime in Pena 7B VIDEO and Claire sent some great 6's.  We plan to check out some more areas in the next few days.

We spent two nights by a very beautiful mountain stream and were very lucky to see it lit by a full moon.  It looked magical and I took lots of pictures!