It is crucial to prepare yourself for a trip to Elbrus. Unfortunately London does not have much to offer for mountaineering training, Altin and Yolanda was limited to the hill in Greenwich Park, stairs around Canary Wharf and in the car park where they live. Here we see Yolanda trying out her new Scarpa Vega boots while training her legs one evening in July.

To obtain a Visa for Russia you can either send your passport by mail, use one of the numerous dodgy Visa service companies that operate in London back streets or brave the Russian bureaucracy and spend a few hours in the queue outside the Russian consulate in London. Altin and Yolanda were going to Sweden the weekend before going to Russia and therefore could not send in their passports. The picture shows the queue outside the consulate on their third attempt (the previous two attempts failed after 4 hours of waiting in the queue) to get in. They arrived at 04.40 am to start queuing for the opening at 09.00…This time they got in and after getting the standard unfriendly reception (have you seen the Seinfeld episode with “The soup Nazi”?) by the consulate staff left one hour later with a successful Visa application. Marco and the others had a much better experience at the Russian consulate in Sweden.