A decade at a time…

B6678B07-7417-4540-AB54-B89B977AA683I don’t mention my children a lot in this blog, partly because this is written for them, and partly because I don’t want to put them in the limelight, but today is my youngest child’s tenth birthday, and I’ll make an exception. Not because I want to write about the immense joy and love he and his older sister have filled my life with every day of their existence, but because the anniversary made me realise that the time I’ve had with them thus far has passed all too quickly. That made me pause and think.

If a decade can go by so fast, shouldn’t I be planning ahead for the next one? I’ve been setting out goals for the coming year for some years now, but surely the same principle should be applicable to longer term goals as well? I’ve just never really done it, because the notion seems like hubris – how can you expect to know what you want from a point in time so distant as a decade away? But to use the words of Mark Twain: “You should plan your future. You’ll be spending the rest of your life there.” And besides, as today shows only too clearly, a decade passes in the blink of an eye.

So where do I want to be in 2028? Well, still around, and of sound body and mind, first of all. Keeping fit and reading and staying active should help with that. Eating well, too.

Being financially secure would be nice. In ten years’ time I will have paid off my mortgage and will hopefully still be gainfully employed, so that should be ok. The worry is that technological or political developments render interpreters superfluous, but I’m not too concerned about that.

So assuming I’m alive and well and financially doing quite alright, what do I want out of life?

I want to see my children well on their way to being well educated with good job prospects, whatever that means in the Blade Runner era. The rest of my family are hopefully also well (with the exception of my father, who could pass away long before that), but there is little I can do to affect the latter.

I will be 57 in 2028, so resolutely middle-aged but not yet old. As I see it, I will still be living in Belgium, in the same house, as the kids will (hopefully) be coming to see me regularly if they have moved out, and might have boyfriends and girlfriends with them. Besides, there is precious little chance of retiring at that tender age, so I will have to stick around for work.

Having been single for four years I find it difficult to imagine I will be cohabiting with anyone (I may be wrong – nothing is more difficult to predict than the future, after all!). Misty will be nearing the end of her life, if she isn’t gone already, so I guess one thing I will be able to do is let my house for longer periods and live elsewhere. It would be fantastic to spend a month at a time in places like Central America, South Africa, Canada, south-east Asia, Japan…

Speaking of work, I guess I will never quit being an interpreter, but it would be nice to try something else. As I’m already spending almost as much time working for the Communications unit as I’m in the booth (and writing this blog in my spare time) clearly this is the way to go. Speech writer for politicians, maybe? I would like to take a stab at writing a novel one day, too.

I also want to live greener. Installing solar panels and becoming self-sufficient in terms of energy is part of this. Having chickens and bees, as well. If I could I would buy the empty plot across from my house and keep goats, but that takes the kind of money I don’t have. At least not now. Installing a swimming pond in the garden would help local wildlife and give me somewhere to swim.

What else? I hope I can cultivate friendships – old and new – so that people come and visit me and enjoy the garden, as having it on my own seems more of a chore than anything.

So that’s me in 2028. What about you? Will you join me? Have I forgotten something vital? What about 2038? A condo on Mars? Or fighting over scraps with a few other straggling survivors, fearing rabid dogs and killer rabbits? Time will tell.

 

 

 

Ramadan, done.

So I decided to try intermittent fasting. Not for religious reasons, but to see if all the beneficial things I had read about limiting your food intake to a restricted number of hours per day were true. Depending on who you ask, this alternative eating pattern will decrease your blood pressure and cholesterol, increase the efficiency of your metabolism, and even invigorate you on a cellular level. Now I have no way of knowing if all this is true, but I do know Hugh Jackman claimed intermittent fasting was an integral part in his transformation to play Wolverine, and the evidence there is pretty good…!

Me after a month of intermittent fasting. Not.

I’ve done it for a month now. Eating between noon and eight in the evening, and nothing but water the rest of the time. So how did it feel? I was afraid it was going to be incapacitating and overall horrible, but it wasn’t. Turns out you can function quite well on an empty stomach. You can even go running for two hours on a hot day with high humidity and feel none the worse for wear (well, in terms of hunger and stamina – don’t ask me about my Achilles’ tendon!). If anything I felt a lot better for skipping breakfast. You feel sharper, less prone to carb-induced lows (since you haven’t had any!).  There was suddenly a lot of free time in the morning, but that never seemed to be a problem, and quite apart from that, the fact that I was genuinely hungry by the time noon came around meant that I really appreciated what I ate – hunger really is the best condiment.

What about all the health benefits? I don’t know. I didn’t lose any weight (and that wasn’t the purpose of the experiment anyway) but I feel slimmer. Researchers have shown that what will happen when you fast is that you’re depleting the liver of glucose, which means your organism will have to start burning fat instead. This is known as ketosis, and since this happens within 16-24 hours of your last meal pretty much regardless of what or how much you eat, maybe I achieved ketosis in spite of eating lots of carbs. That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it. 

More to the point tho, will I be sticking with this new eating regime? In as far as it is practical, I think I will. Like other changes to my diet – notably giving up coffee and alcohol – people around me seem to think it a little weird, but just because we have been brought up to take three meals a day as a given doesn’t mean it should be. Our ancestors certainly couldn’t count on that kind of regular food intake, and – as is the case with the paleo diet – I think there are strong arguments for trying to emulate the way nature intended for us to live. That’s not to say I won’t have the occasional all-out breakfasts occasionally – after all, what’s the point of evolution if you cannot have American pancakes with butter and maple syrup every now and then?

Fast and faster

7CCE9C35-1584-4ADF-A86A-C7CE9F57CE2E.jpegIt might sound like a Dwayne Johnson movie, but “Fast and faster” is the working title of a project of a different kind. Not a Hollywood blockbuster, but my latest challenge. Fasting.

No, I haven’t become Muslim and joined in Ramadan – Ramadan Mubarak to those who are and do! – but there are similarities. Ramadan means you don’t eat from dawn until dusk, so it’s a kind of cyclical fasting, which is exactly what I’m doing, but to a different beat.

Cyclical or intermittent fasting (IF) is supposedly very good for your organism, amongst other things because it induces ketosis – a state in which your body starts to burn reserves of body fat rather than constantly working through the latest batch of fast carbs you’ve been feeding it. I’ve tried this last year, when I lived on a paleo diet for the better part of a month, and the results were good, but it seems fasting might be an even better way to do it.

The rationale is much the same: caveman eating patterns were dictated by availability, and so we have evolved to go without food for periods of time. Modern food is anything but scarce so we tend not to, but proponents argue that our bodies actually do better with less, so I figured it was worth a try. And if I lose a couple of pounds and/or become a faster runner in the process, so much the better…

There are different ways of doing IF: some suggest going without food entirely for two days out of seven, others follow the Warrior Diet (which – cool name aside – means you eat during a window of four hours every day). I have chosen to fast 16 hours every day, giving me an eight hour window (between noon and eight in the evening) during which I eat what I want.

Why this particular pattern? Frankly, I wasn’t sure I would be able to stop myself from eating even for that long, so it seemed sensible to start easy.

I was nervous about the effects on my training regime, but I needn’t have been. The first day I biked to work and back on an empty stomach (38k) without feeling the worse for wear. True, I did ensure that the trip back was timed so I could eat right after I got home, but working half a day on an empty stomach after an hour of biking wasn’t a problem.

I was also concerned about my general well-being. Fasting is about depriving yourself of essential fuel, after all. Again, I bredbent have been. If anything I feel better for it. I’m on day five of this challenge, and I feel less bloated, fitter and more focused. I haven’t checked my weight (this not being the prime reason for my trying this), but I look leaner already, my energy levels are great and I haven’t experienced any “hanger” – irritability as a result of low blood sugar – so things are looking good.

As per usual I’ll try it for a month and report what happens. Next weekend I have a 20k race planned in the morning – that’s a two hour workout without anything to eat – it will be interesting to see how that works.

Sea shells from the Seychelles

09A62833-1861-45B1-9EE6-3C6AD9C88F1BI’m deep in the densest of jungles, following a barely visible track over huge granite boulders and around insidious vines. Ten meters below me the surf is crashing on the shore with ferocious force, and the skies have just opened up in a monsoon rain that renders everything startlingly slippery. I’m stuck. I also have a sense of deja vu. But the worst is yet to come.

How did I end up here? To find that out we have to go back a couple of days.

We have come to the Seychelles to dive, Miss Adventure and I. We’ve signed up with Trek Divers, one of two outfits operating out of the one harbour on La Digue, a rural island in the middle of the archipelago, incredibly scenic and unexploited.

If you think of the prettiest picture you’ve ever seen of a beach – secluded, jungle right down to the white sand, followed by turquoise waters – chances are you’re picturing Anse Source d’Argent or one of the other beaches here, as they are often featured in travel magazines.

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So mornings are spent on the boat, going out to local dive sites. The diving is good enough – better than the Andaman Sea, but nowhere near as good as Pemba – and we see plenty of things: morays of all sizes from endearingly cute to scary big, snappers hiding in large schools under the many granite rocks that have been tossed up by nature to form tunnels and caves, through which we swim with our hearts in our throats.

Then there are massive humphead wrasse, octopi – always hiding in crevices, often pulling bits of dead coral on top of their already camouflaged selves, the better to become invisible – and incredibly graceful turtles, the octopus’s polar opposite, as they sometimes swim unconcernedly in our midst, checking us out with stern countenances as much as we do them, one of them even allowing me to stroke its shell-clad belly.

Further out in the big blue are reef sharks – shy, sleepy critters – and barracudas who look grumpy and a lot more menacing than the sharks. Speaking of sharks: on one dive a remora (one of those little fish that attach themselves to shark bellies) decided to try its luck with me instead, and spent the rest of the dive darting in and out between my legs, trying to find a comfortable spot. I was a bit concerned that it might succeed (especially when it tried to get into my bathing shorts!), but took great joy in the fact that I apparently move enough like a shark to fool its closest companions…! 😋

We saw dolphins a couple of times, but only from afar and whilst on the catamaran or on land – still, not too shoddy as breakfast entertainment – but the greatest sighting was a magnificent marbled ray, two meters in diametre, lying on the ocean floor covered in four of five other sting rays, taking it in turns to seek protection from their giant cousin, forming a subaquatic stack of enormous pancakes.

So we were doing well, diving wise. Back on the island it’s hotter and more humid than Satan’s anus, but as long as you’re on a bike and/or in the shade it’s ok. Afternoons are spent exploring, first the west side of the island as far as you can go – the jungle is so dense that hiking through the surf and tide is the only option after a while, but that just makes it feel more adventurous – and we trek far beyond the beaten path, discovering ever more secluded beaches as we go.

The next day we set out for the top of the island. We try biking as far as we can up the incredibly steep road, and then push our bikes, sweating more in the process than I ever have before or since, until finally abandoning the bikes and trudging the rest of the way on foot. The last fifteen minutes is nothing but jungle trail – fruit bats are our only company now, flying around in the canopy, occasionally fighting it out over a particularly choice morsel of fruit (all whilst hanging upside down) – but in the end we make it to the top and are rewarded with breathtaking views.

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So it’s against this background that we go east the next afternoon. The road stops halfway around the island, so to get to the southwest you have to hike through the jungle – in fact that’s the only way to get to the fabled Anse Cocos, the one beach on the island with a lagoon – but since our other exploratory expeditions have gone well, we think ourselves easily capable of this feat. That is until the monsoon begins.

And so it is we find ourselves stuck in the jungle. We’ve had our share of misadventures (the latest one was coming close to being robbed in Marrakesh), and know that it often ends well, so we consider pushing on, but it’s too dangerous. One false move and you’ve slipped on the unforgiving rocks or stumbled on a treacherous vine – at best you get badly hurt, at worst you plummet to the boulders and the surf below. So like the main character in The Beach we give up, thwarted by the elements. We make it back ok to the road – going ever so slowly through the jungle – then set out on bikes again through the skyfall to make it home.

We’re soaked through but in good spirits, so when we encounter one of the giant tortoises that roam the island in a semi-wild state, we even stop and feed it an orange in the downpour – something which the Jurassic giant clearly appreciates! He comes at me at surprising speed and isn’t the least bit shy about taking slices out of my hand – although his aim isn’t the greatest, so I fear a little for my fingers until I change my grip to that favoured by horse owners everywhere, something which also brings the benefit of getting to experience what it’s like to have my palm licked by a bone fide dinosaur.

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Our next stop is the fateful one, however, even though it doesn’t seem like it at the time. We stop by a beach-side restaurant and reserve a table for the evening. Big mistake. Although the food is good, it is also very, very bad, as we both come down with a case of severe food poisoning hours later.

Miss A gets off slightly easier, but I spend the hours of the night running shuttle from bed to bathroom with the worst case of tummy bug I’ve ever had. If it weren’t so gross and painful it would almost be comical, as my body is in such a hurry to expel the germs that I am literally performing acrobatic feats trying to make sure that both ends face the right way as they compete with each other to wring the most out of my suffering body.

All told, the bacteria eat up 36 hours of the holiday, but after that I’m back on my feet – if a little unsteady – just in time to get the ferry back to Mahe, the main island, and the journey home. It’s a(nother) shock to the system to re-enter civilisation, so we avoid it as best we can by hiking through the jungle to the top of the second highest summit in the island – no mean feat with a wrecked tummy – but I can’t help but feel that we have arrived here a hundred years too late. If only this guy could talk…!

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Titanic and the Iceberg

E50B9748-1B41-4415-BC37-94A8378B90AD.jpegI’ve always had a heading called Poems here, but never really dared put anything on it. I figured that needed to change, so without further ado, here’s

Titanic and the Iceberg (possibly a virus allegory)

“An iceberg here? It’s unthinkable
And anyway we’re unsinkable
so there is no real need for panic”
said the captain of the Titanic

You know the story, the ship that sunk
(and the captain’s last words: “By Jove, that stunk!”)
but what of the iceberg? Did it feel remorse?
It sailed on regardless, stone cold, off course

In warmer waters it met its match
in the shape of an isle, elementary, natch
Did it cry at last? Did it finally melt?
We’ll never know what that iceberg felt

But under the oceans Titanic lies,
a victim to malnavigation and lies
and dreams of that one chance meeting,
that one kiss, no matter how fleeting.

(For NM)

 

 

The long road back…

Last year in Spain I got injured, tearing a muscle in a paragliding incident. It’s taken me the better part of half a year – from hobbling along on my first pathetic jog after the accident, to getting pummeled, needled, and electrocuted by multiple physiotherapists, to discovering the concept of runstreaking – to get back into something resembling the shape I was in before.

The Paris marathon shone like a beacon for me this whole time. I signed up to it after Amsterdam, and it became a symbol for me: if I could make it through that I would take it as a recipe that I was good as new again.

It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t fun, but I knew the long road would lead me back to where I want to be – fit and active. Small, incremental steps would do the trick.

In February I decided to up the ante in my training regime, adding an iron streak (lifting weights every day) to the run ditto, but half a month into that I injured the deltoid muscle in my shoulder, thus adding to the burden instead of alleviating it. Cue more pummeling, massage, and limited mobility for weeks – not an ideal way of preparing for a marathon.

But at least I kept up the running; I ran for over 100 consecutive days (earning myself a Forrest Gump diploma in the process), only ending my streak the day before yesterday, so as to give my body a little break before yesterday’s event. Because yesterday was the big day: the Paris marathon.

Did I make it?

The training I had done wasn’t really enough to run the whole thing anything near as fast as my PB. The smart thing to do then would have been to keep a steady slow pace throughout, but instead I made the stupid mistake of trying to tag along with someone out to set a personal best significantly faster than my own. Clever? No. But you never know – maybe I would surprise myself?

It couldn’t last. I kept up with him for 10k or so, and ran a decent half marathon, but that’s all I had in me. So when my body started telling me that enough was enough I decided to listen and slowed down to a speed that I knew would allow me to finish the whole thing without breaking down in the process. I could have pushed myself and suffered through the second half and done a slightly better time, I suppose, but that wasn’t the point.

Besides, people were dropping like flies in the unexpected heat (up to 26 degrees centigrade in the shade, and very little shade), with runners falling by the wayside with cramps or worse. I must have seen at least half a dozen ambulances carting victims of heat stroke off, and I personally helped as many cramped-up runners by giving them salt from my little baggie. Compared to them I finished strong, in spite of (or thanks to) having walked long stretches. And I enjoyed it. The crowds were great, a lot better than I would have thought in Paris, and the city itself is of course gorgeous, so I was happy, even though my finish time was the third slowest I’ve ever done. I can live with that.

Would I like to come back and do better one day? Sure, but for now I know that I am back, and that is more important.

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Mandatory before and after pic. Not too shoddy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Runstreak, runstroke, runstricken

For my first challenge this year I signed up for a runstreak in January. The concept is straightforward: you run every day for as long a streak of days as you can muster. The notion had intrigued me for a while, but two factors made me decide to give it a go; first my need to do rehab to recover from my paragliding injury, and second the fact that Paceonearth initiated a Facebook group for people who wanted to give it a try for a month.

The rules are simple: you have to get changed into running gear (so having to run to catch the bus doesn’t count), and you have to run for at least twenty consecutive minutes per day (so ten minutes in the morning and ten in the afternoon won’t do, and neither will running forty minutes one day and nothing the next). And so run I did.

You would think that it would be easy to find twenty minutes per day, especially if you are used to making space for workouts, but an increased workload and a couple of unexpected trips to Sweden presented certain logistical challenges – often runs were squeezed in between shopping groceries and picking up kids from their activities, and on travel days I sometimes had to run at ungodly hours to fit them in at all (squatting at night in a forest because I’d been doubled up in an airplane all day and the run had initiated hitherto suppressed and therefore quite urgent bowel movements? Memorable, as was the realisation that I had no toilet paper…). Running in a crowded Marrakesh (with a woman!) presented its own challenges.

I’m not entirely convinced that it is good for you to run every single day. I certainly felt stiffer and slower than when I was mixing running with biking and swimming and lifting weights. In fact my one gripe is that it steals too much time away from those activities. Of course, my decreased capacity could also be the result of my injury. 

But still I ran. As did the other participants. The one aspect of this challenge that I hadn’t anticipated was how much I would come to appreciate the fellowship I felt with the other runners, none of which I ever met in real life (with the exception of my sister). There were 700 initially, and although many fell by the wayside (some unfortunate souls quite literally!), we shared laughs (an informal competition for worst-looking running gear was an assault on the senses), gripes, hardships, cheered each other on, and ran in all kinds of conditions – neither rain nor storm nor gloom of night may stop these couriers, as the postal services once put it. In a sense it is not unlike an ultra – you do run for a month, after all, you just take reaaalllly long potty breaks 😋 – in that the main obstacle is in your brain, telling you it can’t be done, and in that respect (much like in an ultra) your fellow co-runners can provide invaluable help with just a word of encouragement at the right time. 

So the question is, will I continue? I’ve done 40 days now (OK, so I jump started a little…), and I am tempted to go on, but I honestly think it is better to mix things up a little, so I will change my runstreak to a cardio streak instead – I will continue to run OR bike twenty minutes or more every day. On top of that I will add an iron streak – lifting weights (including body weight) for the same amount of time per day. Bring on February!

Moroccan maze runner

Marrakesh. I’ve been once before, years ago, on one of my very first adventures. I had recently decided to try to pull myself together after my wife left me, and travelling on my own and online dating were two equally unexplored areas in my life, so I combined the two, sitting on a rooftop café in the medina, overlooking Djmaa el Fna, the market square, and browsed OKCupid for the highest percentage matches I could find. There was a Bostonian woman that sounded more interesting than most, so I sent off my scribblings on Marrakesh by way of introduction, not thinking there was much chance of getting a reply. Fast forward three years and I am making my way across el Fna to another riad, where the same woman now awaits my arrival.

We’ve shared many adventures and misadventures over these years, and to celebrate that it seems logical to return to where it all began. L is just back from a tour of the desert, but she has already had a run-in with the denizens of the labyrinth, a young man who showed her to the door of the hotel (all of fifty metres away) and demanded five dollars for his “service”. It is a suitable intro to this weekend, for we will get lost many a time over the course of the next two days, as the meandering alleyways and many dead ends of the medieval medina make it a virtual maze to navigate. Add to that the constant bustle and the cornucopia of trinkets and strange food and woven carpets and intricate woodwork and Berber knitware and a hundred other wares on offer, plus the insistent hawkers and street urchins – all out to get your attention and consequently your money – and you have a streetscape that is equal parts Escher and Bruegel does Baghdad.

The one thing I didn’t do last time I was here was buy lamps. Among the many, many things on offer, the Morroccans make wonderful chiselled lamps and lamp screens out of beaten copper, silver and other metals. Hidden away in a back street we find a 500-year-old funduq, or caravanserail, which is like entering Ali Baba’s cave of treasures. I know what I want, and after a long but pleasant haggling match we come away with a drop-shaped lamp each, plus two shield-shaped screens for me.

Another place we venture into is a natural apothecary, where we stock up on argan oil (made in situ by a woman seated on the floor) and other ointments and unguents. L finds a shawl purveyor in the dyers’ district where she buys cashmere pashminas at ridiculous prices, and I shop sturdy leatherbelts from an equally sturdy and leathery artisan and a knitted hat from a Berber woman in the slave market that she sells so cheaply that it’s as if slavery was still a thing.

The constant negotiations are fun if you are in the mood, irksome if you’re not, and exhausting regardless, so we divide our day up in excursions into the fray and downtime either back at base in the riad or on a rooftop café somewhere. Interestingly, since all houses have these outdoor living rooms on top of them, it’s a whole different world up here: the chaotic, labyrinthine existence of the old streets below fall away, and lush, open, contemplative one takes its place. The streets are narrow partly to keep the sun’s rays out, which of course is needed when it gets really hot, but which also makes it quite oppressive when you’re down there, especially since the blocked-out sun would have otherwise provided at least some help in navigating the winding passages. How lovely then to suddenly rise above the din and take in the Atlas Mountains and the many terraces adorned with shrubs, ornamental flowers and even whole fruit trees.

In the evenings we go to el Fna to eat at the many portable kitchens that set up shop there every night. It is a scene that has to be seen to be believed. In between snake charmers and henna artists and acrobats are dozens of mini-restaurants, all vying for your custom. You move between the stands, taking a starter of snail soup here, a main course of lamb’s head there, and maybe some halva (sesame seed paste) dessert, washed down with wonderfully spicy tea.

The second day we venture away from the main shopping districts and end up being taken on a tour of the Berber tanneries. The Berbers come down from the mountains twice per week to sell their skins (goat and camel, mainly), and then they are prepared in open air tanneries where they are scraped, soften (by being trampled in large pits filled with guano) and dyed, using various plants. It is a sight to behold, and the smell is quite powerful – although nothing like what it would be on a hot day. Besides, we have a Berber gas mask (a sprig of wild mint) each to hold under our noses, so that’s bearable. Less so is the fact that our impromptu guide again tries to impose a rather hefty fee on us for his troubles, ex post. This is after we have already been ushered into a shop where L has bought a pair of fine leather slippers, but that doesn’t let us off the hook, apparently. In the end we gave him something for his troubles (which we had planned on doing anyway), but the experience was made less pleasant as a result.

As it would turn out, that was only the beginning of our troubles. On the way back from the tanneries we got hopelessly lost. This happens all the time and didn’t really worry me. The only thing I wanted to avoid was having a kid walking us all the way, so instead I asked a shop keeper woman if she could point us the right direction. She declined to do so, but called to a young man in a shop across the road and asked him to help us. I repeated my wish to only have the direction given to me, and he gave us some, but then soon caught up with us in the next alley and started walking ahead of us whilst pointing out nonsensical facts. I didn’t like the look of that, especially since we seemed to be moving away from the more populated streets, and lo and behold, before long we were in a culdesac, and three or four of his friends materialise as if from nowhere, demanding we pay him for his ” tour guide service”. One of them quickly gets physical and tries to grab me, asking why I won’t talk to him – I merely snarl at him, demanding he get his hands off me. I’m furious, mostly with myself for not seeing this coming, and am fully prepared to fight my way out. L says afterwards that I looked ready to go berserk. Maybe that’s what saves us, or maybe it would have got us both into more trouble still, had I acted upon it. We will never know, because next my assailant tries to provoke me by calling me a woman. What is probably a mortal insult to him is nothing of the sort to me, coming from a different cultural background, and that realisation is all I need to get out of the red haze. I look around to ensure L is ok, and then stalk out of there, not even looking to see what the miscreants will do, and within a minute we are back in a bustling food market, and the only blood on the ground is that of a fishmonger’s wares.

It’s the sort of experience that can make you go off a place, but for the most part people here really are lovely. Like the women who applaud L as we go running together (something which I admit I wasn’t at all certain how people would react to), or the family of three that we end up seated next to that same evening at the Fna food stands. They let me taste their food to help me decide which local delicacy I like best (the answer is tangia, lamb and dried plums cooked in sealed crockery that is submerged into a bed of embers). Unfortunately the grand Fna-le ends on a low note, as one of the young men employed by the food vendors to get you to sit at their table suddenly confronts us and accuses us of lying for not coming to eat at his establishment. I cannot even say that I remember having spoken to him before – there are so many of them, and for the most part I try to ignore them – but he gets more and more upset, finally telling us to “go home, we don’t need people like you in Morrocco!”

And so we do. It’s a sad ending to the adventure, which has had more than its share of ups and downs. The maze has one more trick up its sleeve, however. The next morning sees the Marrakesh marathon coincide with my departure. I have asked several times in the riad if this will impact on my travel arrangements, and been assured repeatedly that it won’t. But as I try to leave for the airport, we don’t get five minutes before traffic is first diverted by, and then comes to a complete stop as a result of thousands of runners blocking our way. 45 minutes of nervous waiting later I decide that I can’t risk it, and get my bags out of the back of the taxi, get directions from the driver (who isn’t charging anything for that or any other service) and set off on foot towards the airport, running against the steady stream of marathoners. In the end I make it with time to spare, and the driver even catches up with me right outside the gates, and takes me the last three hundred meters to the departure hall, so my very last impression of the country is a positive one, after all.

2018 and the art of being S.M.A.R.T.

I was thinking about what I want to try to achieve in 2018 when I came across some good advice that really resonated with me. If I have failed to reach my goals in the past, it’s nearly always been because I haven’t made sure they were S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. So that shall be my credo for 2018: be smart about what tasks I set myself.

The fundamentals haven’t changed: I want to develop as a person, intellectually and physically, by testing my limits, working diligently and hard towards certain goals, and I want to travel to see the world and broaden my horizons, ensuring that by the end of the year I can look back and see progress and time well spent.

So: smart intellectual challenges – the ones I’ve worked on for a couple of years now still remain the same: I want to read more non-fiction, get better at piano, French, and chess. That’s not very specific, tho, so measuring progress will be key; I need targets I can quantify. One book per month. One new piece of music learnt every two months. One hundred French words per month. And as for chess… well, getting a rating of 1400 before the end of the year would be an easily measurable goal, if not necessarily that easily attainable. (I’m hovering around the 1300-mark as I’m writing this…). Plus I will note down every half hour spent on each activity, thus keeping a tally for accountability purposes.

So I’ve got all of those down to an A.R.T. Physical challenges are a little different, mainly because of the uncertainty I’m living with at the moment, so for 2018, I have decided to change tack a little. For my first challenge in January I will do a runstreak. Running every day will hopefully allow me to rebuild what was damaged in the accident in November. If that goes to plan, Paris marathon in April will be another milestone on the road to recovery, and if that goes well I’ll sign up for either another ultra marathon, or a full length Ironman. Or both.

Alas, there are too many unknowns at this stage for me to know if I will be able to run such distances again, but if I can, then a total of 1500k each of running and biking seem attainable goals overall. At least I know I can bike, so if running is out then I’m doubling that number for biking (and only watching Netflix while on the stationary bike will kill two birds with one stone – limiting my Netflix binging AND encouraging more time in the saddle!).

Weights have never been anything but a complement to my other workouts – now more so than ever as I try to strengthen my weak leg – but again, if I find I don’t recover my running capacity, I will focus more on getting strong/building muscle. Having always been skinny it would be interesting to see if I could actually muscle up.

As for swimming, I want to learn how to crawl properly! At present I can hardly do one length in the pool, and even though I managed the Ironman 70.3 anyway it would be nice to shave off five or ten minutes from that time, so learning how to crawl at least a kilometre is another challenge.

I will be working more in 2018 than I have for a decade, which will hopefully have the dual effect of giving me the opportunity to take on more interesting work on the job, and allowing me a bigger travel budget, as, happily, my children have said they want to travel more with me, so that will affect what trips I take this year.

2018 promises an Arab spring once more, as I’m going back to Morocco in January and have another trip to Egypt in February (with the kids). I have a week of holidays in March that I don’t know what to do with yet – downhill skiing would be nice, but again it’s dependent on me making a complete recovery. I want to go back to Spain and get a fully-fledged paragliding pilot’s licence. Hiking in Iceland would be lovely, the last part of Bergslagsleden still beckons, and I want to do at least one journey further afield – maybe watching the great sardine run in South Africa? Or taking the kids to the US? There’s no shortage of possibilities.

Other challenges: I wouldn’t mind doing more for the environment. This could involve installing geothermal heating in the house, keeping hens for eggs, joining a wind power collective or other changes. One thing I do know I want to try is becoming a vegetarian. At least for a month.

Not eating any sugar in any shape or form may be another challenge, and limiting my social media intake to half an hour per day wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

And of course I want to continue building my blog, writing about my experiences for the joy of writing, but also as a living testament to what I do with my life when I don’t have my kids. Hopefully my readership will continue to grow, but that is less important. If I can inspire only two people, that is more than enough for me.

Here’s to a S.M.A.R.T.er future!

P.S. All this goes out the window if I were to get my dream job, of course… 😄

Swedish Yuletide

I’m headed back to Ultima Thule to celebrate the holidays. Of course, Christmas in Sweden has very little to do with celebrating mass, or Christ. Sweden is to all intents and purposes as heathen as it was before it was christened, and Yule (the Swedish word for the holiday is Jul) was always about appeasing the gods and assorted spirits and sprites that influence life in the cold darkness of winter – something which still goes on, regardless of what the church dictates.

The examples are legion: So for instance the tomte, a gnome that embodied the spirit of the homestead, had to be fed and given gifts, to ensure that the animals lived and stores weren’t depleted. Later on, of course, the tomte was mixed up with St Nicklaus, and Coca-cola added its own taint to the figure, thus ensuring Santa was born, but Swedish kids still leave out porridge or cakes and milk for the tomte the night before Christmas, in what is essentially a last ditch attempt at bribery.

He knows if you've been bad...

We have also, famously, incorporated St Lucia in our traditional celebrations. Why an Italian saint who was burned alive would become part of heathen feasts might seem less than obvious, but when you consider that we have been sacrificing people and animals around the time of the winter solstice to bring back the light since before the Viking era, and lighting fires and singing to scare away the darkness, it’s perhaps easier to see the allure of this sacrificial lamb and her demise. Traditions tend to get lost in the mist of time, however, so the gruesome fact that children dress up in white shrouds and have lit candles in their hands and hair as a token funeral pyre is utterly lost on most modern Swedes in any event.

Speaking of lambs: the aforementioned tomte wasn’t traditionally the one who brought gifts (beyond the gift of not getting pissed off and ruining the farmstead) – that was the role of the Yule billy goat. To what extent this benevolent critter has common ancestry with Krampus, the black horned satyr/devil spawn that probably begat the Belgian Black Pete, who is the antithesis of St Nicklaus, I wouldn’t like to say, but in Sweden at least the goat was always warmly welcomed – probably because trolls were the ones in charge of abducting little children.

One Krampus, two Krampiss...

The word Yule itself is of unknown origins, but if I were to engage in guesswork, it’s probably no coincidence that the old Norse “jul” is very similar to the Swedish word “hjul”, wheel. The wheel of time always turns, and at no time is that more keenly felt, than in the midst of Nordic winter, when the longing for a new cycle of life is most desperate.

So as you can see, celebrating Yule may have a thin veneer of Christianity to it, but when we heap portion after portion of the sacrificed pig unto our plates – always mindful of it being lagom (literally “enough for everyone”) – and drink each others’ health by crying “Skål!” – a word that derives from “skull”, as the craniums of slain enemies were used as drinking vessels – we honour a heritage that goes back much, much further than any Christmas.

Good Yule, everyone!

On balance

It’s fair to say the year ended on a bum note. Things don’t always go as planned. But what of the rest of the year? Time to look back and reflect on what went according to plan, and what didn’t.

But for the butt injury, I might have had a sporting chance at reaching my distance goals for running and biking (averaging a marathon distance per week for each), but realistically that was too much. I did do that much on average when at home, but traveling got in the way, and that lowered total mileage significantly. Need to set more realistic goals, especially with next year’s runstreak requiring time every day.

I did set a new personal best on every one of the distances 1k, 5k, 10k, 21k and 42k, which was gratifying. It’s a clear sign the training pays off, after all. Two marathons – one as early as January – and even if my one attempt at an ultra didn’t end well it was still a good experience. Lesson learnt? Don’t try mountain trail running 70+ kilometres the first time you do it.

I did my first ever triathlon – an Ironman 70.3, and the result was better than I had hoped. Still not sure whether a full-length one is worth the trouble, but maybe… saying I did half-something jars my soul!

I didn’t lift weights, swim or do yoga anywhere near as much as I had planned. I did some, but found it difficult to fit it all into my routine. Will have to find another balance to make it all work. And actually learn how to swim.

So much for fitness. I didn’t read as much non-fiction as I would have liked, but what I read was good. I’ve played a lot of chess and piano, and studied French, too, but I’m still not sure how to measure progress here. I know I am progressing, but how to tell? The system of dividing up the day into half hours to ensure that things get done works, at least, so I will continue doing that. And only watching Netflix when I’m on the stationary bike will kill two birds with one stone…!

Travels and challenges, then? I certainly travelled a lot, and two themes emerged: island hopping around Africa, covering Pemba, Mallorca, and Madeira (following on from Malta), and hiking in the alps in France, Bavaria and Sweden (ok, so we don’t have alps, but parts of Bergslagsleden were really hilly!). Add to that the two(!) trips to Andalusia – once to see Alhambra, and once to learn how to paraglide – and a nice long weekend in Paris, and you have what I would deem a pretty good year of wanders. More of that, please.

Challenges? I went on a paleo diet with good results, I learnt how to fly – or at least fall really slowly – and camped in a tent for the first time in 35 years. And at work I got to try new things, like writing a movie script and leading a think tank, so that was very pleasant, too (and never mind that I applied for my dream job – it’s good to dream, as well!). Less pleasant was the aforementioned injury which left me incapable of running and in a lot of pain, but that only meant that I had one last challenge to overcome this year: rehabilitating myself and getting back on my feet.

Lest I forget, the year has brought some wonderful new people into my life, as eclectic a bunch of characters as one can hope for: an Argentinian telenovela starlet in Tanzania, a Scottish philosopher in Spain, my own personal stalker, a Phillipina philanthropist, a Swedish ultrarunner in Amsterdam… in fact, if I were to write a book about them all it would probably seem outlandish, which brings me to my last point: this blog.

I’ve continued to write throughout the year, about everything and anything, from great tits to particle accelerators, and my readership is steadily increasing (visitors up 25% (to 2800+) and views up 50% (to 5500+) at the time of writing), something for which I’m immensely grateful! It’s humbling to foist your words on people and have them not only actually read them but also come back for more. So thank you, dear reader. I hope you have enjoyed the ride this far.

It’s been a good year, on balance.

#runstreak

I still haven’t run since the accident in Spain three weeks ago, but rehab is progressing and I remain optimistic. I really, really want to get back out there and start running again!

And then today a couple of ultra runners I follow on Facebook (Paceonearth) posted about a challenge that would suit me really well: doing a runstreak through the entire month of January. I signed up immediately!

If you’re not familiar with the concept, it means running for at least a mile and twenty minutes per day. Incredibly, there are people who have done this for decades, never missing a day. One half of the couple behind the initiative (Ellen) has done it for over four years, and shows no signs of stopping – even going out for a shuffling run the day after completing the UTMB!

Anyway, the idea is for people to sign up for this and find motivation in others doing the same, so if you want to join up, you can do so here. Let’s beat the elements, fatigue, laziness, and accomplish something together!

2018 – a year of running?

Moving pictures

I write this blog because I enjoy it, and hopefully it can be entertaining for others to read as well, but it’s meant more than that. Last year I got a job in communications principally because people at work had read it and liked what they saw. Gratifying, to say the least!

So I’ve been conducting interviews and writing about what goes on in my work place, but this autumn I got to do something really special: I was put in charge of writing a movie script for an infomercial – a task both daunting and exciting, as I’ve never done anything like that before.

The brief was to sell my organisation as the go-to-place for big conferences and similar events. And while it might be a little too American-action-movie-trailer-y for some*, I really like how it turned out. Hope you do, too:

As you may have noticed, I ended up doing the voice-over narration as well, which was fun. That inspired me to do a commercial of a rather dissimilar nature – for my application to go on the Fjällräven Polar expedition**. It’s a different beast altogether, but I think it is rather sweet. Here it is:

So in one month I’ve done two whole movies (and never mind that they’re two minutes each)! Writer/director/narrator/animator would look good on a business card, wouldn’t it?

Joking aside, I don’t know that movie making will be a regular feature in the future, but voice acting I could see myself doing more of. The reviews are in, and they range from “sexier than Morgan Freeman” to “laglag malawal”, which is foreign speak for “underwear-droppingly good” (or so I’m told), so maybe there’s a sideline to be had in that department? 😄 A dear friend has already said she would scout the market for me.

Maybe I should add that to my list of challenges for next year…?

* On the other hand, my kids lobbied hard for Deadpool to have a cameo – just goes to show you can’t please everyone.

** If you’re reading this before 14 December there’s still time to vote – what are you waiting for??

Shedding a tear

Well, it’s hard to believe it, but 2017 is almost over. I said I’d take on a challenge or go on a trip per month this year, and I had some ideas about what I’d do for December, but alas, events have overtaken me.

As some of you may know, I have an old injury in my left leg, which leaves me with a structural imbalance. It’s always been a fear that this would someday get even worse, and, well, one forceful step was all it took: As I was running down a hill in Spain last month I heard something tear in my groin, while a flash of intense pain shot up through my buttock.

I was hardly able to stand afterwards, let alone walk or run. I managed to do the rest of the paragliding course, literally limping across the finishing line, but the damage was done, so now I have to undo it as best I can. This will have to be my challenge for December then: Operation Shed A Tear.

I signed up with a physiotherapist, which is a misnomer. She gets very physical, that much is true. Therapeutic? If you’re a masochist, perhaps.

Now, it would be wrong to say she gets Medieval on my ass. More Chilean – under Pinochet. There’s horse liniment, a plunger(!), electrodes hooked up to a car battery, duct tape, needles. All these things go onto or into my ass. And groin. Then there’s exercises. Core exercises, balance, stretching – all those things you should do all the time, but never do (at least I don’t). Plus biking, as much as I can take. And drinking lots of water to keep the cells nice and supple.

I haven’t run for two weeks (the scales know this already!) but I seem to be working out as hard as ever. Hopefully I’ll be back on track (again quite literally) before the end of the month. That’s the goal. It’s already taken blood and sweat. If it can alleviate the tears? We’ll see. Paris marathon in April is still on, as far as I’m concerned.

Fjällräven Polar

Recently I wrote about my dream job. Well, today I signed up for a dream trip. Or applied, at least. You see, the clever marketing folk over at Fjällräven have an annual event they organise, where anyone thus inclined can try to get picked to go on a polar expedition. It’s a cunning way to get people to do your advertising for you, of course – much like I’m doing right now – but it is an extraordinary adventure, too.

The lucky ones get to travel through 300 kilometres of arctic wilderness using dog sleds – not only riding along, you understand, but learning how to handle the dogs and the sled, sleeping out under the stars, equipped with the very best Fjällräven has to offer.

Some might view this as sheer hell, of course. I see it as a fantastic way to fulfil my ambitions of challenging myself, experiencing extraordinary nature and meeting people and learning about things I would otherwise never encounter.

There is a snag, tho. They pick the participants based on their popularity, so if you want me to go to Hell/have the time of my life, you can help. Vote for me here. Then copy the link and send it to all the people you know and blackmail them into voting, too, and you might just get to see me do my finest eskimo impression. So you see, there is something Inuit for you, too…!

Spanish Fly

I’m about to throw myself off a mountain. 

It’s at times like this you question your life choices. It’s a beautiful day, and I’ve got everything to live for. Why would I do this?

Leonardo da Vinci knew. “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” Astonishingly ahead of his time as always, he wrote that 300 years before man actually “tasted flight”. As for me personally, it was as recently as three months ago in a tandem flight in the alps of Bavaria, and so for my November challenge I have signed up for an Elementary Pilot paragliding course. 

There’s eight of us on the course: four firemen from Wales, two ex-army Englishmen, a somewhat elderly Scottish academic and myself under the tutelage of two laid-back but incredibly professional para-bums: Ross and Jack from FlySpain

We’re ferried from Malaga to a quaint mountain-side village in Andalusia. This is archetypical Spanish countryside: weatherworn men and women in black knitwear in front of whitewashed houses, rolling fields, olive groves and oak trees under which Ferdinand the bull and his friends still graze. Algodonales looks much the same as it probably has since the time of the Moors (the neighbouring village of Zahara still lies beneath the ruins of a Moorish castle), but the main draw here is the hilly landscape, clear blue skies and warm sun, which provides paragliders with ideal flying conditions.

Ross and Jack have us starting off learning to handle our equipment on a dried-out lake, as flat as can be, and then we move on to a little hill (60 metres or so) in the middle of plowed fields, where we progress to mini-flights, practicing take-off and landing under relatively safe conditions. 


​​I say relatively, because before you get the hang of it, the wing is an unruly thing, and almost every one of us fails to take off at some point, with either canopies collapsing on top of their pilots, or people being dragged off across the field by the force of the breeze, or tumbling over when landing. (I’m lucky in that all my take-offs and landings are successful, but on the other hand I tear a muscle in my butt during one launch, which just about incapacitated me…!) We make really good progress though, working as a team, so the basic course is finished after a mere two and a half days*.

Which brings us to this moment. 

We’ve driven up the mountain for the better part of an hour, and now I’m stood here, at the edge of a launch site a good 700 metres above Algodonales, looking down at a ravine full of craggy rocks and thorny shrubs. Time to nut up or shut up. Get the take-off wrong here and you’re in a world of pain, or worse. 

Ross lays the canopy out behind me, and I try to focus on the various stances: Gay Crucified Jesus (hands out to your sides in a relaxed manner, allowing you to hold the brakes and the A-lines, letting the latter slide out as you move on to) Funky Chicken (long strides forward doubled over with your arms straight back to allow the canopy to rise above you in order to achieve lift-off, when you can happily move to) French Shrug (hands up by your ears, holding the reigns lightly, ready to steer your wing.).

Radio check. “You’ll only hear me say ‘runrunrun’ or ‘stopstopstop'”, Ross says. Hardly reassuring. Legs shaking with adrenaline. Stomach a tight knot of fear and excitement. Last equipment check, glance at the wind sock, and I’m off! I go from starting position to striding forward as best I can with my tenderised rump, only to find my left hand entangled in the lines. Fuck! I pull it out and continue – too far gone now to stop. 

I’m up in the air before I know it, sitting back in the harness as the ground falls away underneath me. The village is far, far below, the air and the sun in my face, the landscape never ending.  I round the mountain, check my bearings and fly, fly, fly. 

It feels like an eternity, but it only lasts ten minutes before the radio crackles and Jack, who has already landed, comes over the airwaves to guide me. I descend, landing neatly next to a dilapidated farm house, but in my mind I’m still up there. The adrenaline wears off, but the endorphins remain. I have tasted flight. 


We do a couple of more flights like that, gaining confidence with each one (in spite of zero wind on the very last flight, which sees me botching my perfect track record with a treetop-mowing start and ignominiously toppled landing) and then the week is over. As we return to Algodonales for the last time, a solo paraglider is riding a thermal high in the sky above the village, circling it together with a lone vulture, both of them rising effortlessly through the air. The next level beckons. 

——

* It’s hard work. We’re on a conveyor belt system, so once you’ve landed and bunched up your shute, you have to trundle back up the hill on foot, slipping in the furrows, making it back on top in time only for a quick drink before it’s time to suit up again. The heat, physical excercise and adrenaline all take their toll, so I’m stumbling to bed before ten most nights, after a quick trip to the local tapas bar. 

 Södermanland revisited

I came to Sweden this week hoping to continue braving Bergslagsleden, a trail I began hiking earlier this year with my brother. Alas, it wasn’t to be. His back was giving him trouble, and sleeping out in tents when temperatures drop to -4C at night was unlikely to make him better. So we decided to postpone that adventure and go hiking in Sodermanland instead. 

We poured over detailed maps, setting a route. There were a couple of restraints. We’d only do day trips, and we wouldn’t go too far from mom’s place, as we were dependent on her to get us to our starting points. 

The first day we decide to hike around Långhalsen, a lake in the vicinity that is famous for having manors and stately homes all along its shores. The reason for this is simple: the lake forms part of a chain of interconnected waterways that can take you all the way to Stockholm, and in medieval times that route was much easier to traverse than any roads on land, so naturally noble families – landed gentry – established themselves along such waters. Today, their descendants still live there, like Count Falkenberg of Lagmansö, whose ancestors have held this seat for hundreds of years. 

We set out in gloriously crisp autumnal weather – the air so clear it feels as if you could reach out across the lake and pick an apple from the count’s orchards, and the low November sun lending an aura of cold warmth to every leaf it touches. Not a single indigenous tree here has any red foliage (so I can’t fuel my autumnal addiction) but the copper and silver and gold on oak and ash and birch more than make up for it. 

The landscape is varied agricultural land, rolling hills and the lake ever on our left, as we walk into the rising sun. It’s eerily still, the water a perfect mirror image of the opposite shore. It’s also utterly devoid of people. If it weren’t for the occasional krrp of a raven or the fleeting movement of a disappearing roe deer it would be like walking inside a water colour. 

We pass several great houses, one of them an exact copy of a manor as it would have been constructed in the early 18th century, another one – Ekenäs – the former home of one of our own ancestors, before he went and willed it to the state, the silly bugger. 

There is a Viking grave field right at the opposite end of the lake that would have been nice to stay and inspect a little closer, but by this time we have realised that we have misread the map – instead of a 16 kilometre round-trip it will likely be something like double that – so we press on, well aware that sunlight is a rare commodity here. 


We make it back 45 minutes after sundown. I had forgotten just how pitch-black it gets in Sweden at this time of the year! The pale moonlight is enough to show us the outline of the road when we’re in the open, but once in the enclosing folds of spruce and fir there is nothing you can do but trust your instincts. It’s a special experience, and the fact that we are 30+ kilometres into this first day does nothing to take away from it all – quite the contrary, especially when met by hot food and a warm shower. Or at least that’s how I feel. 

Unfortunately, my brother’s back and feet aren’t improved by this shock treatment. The next day he has to stop after an hour, as he’s limping badly. I continue on my own, but it seems everything that was good yesterday has turned bad today: the weather is a drizzly gray, and the landscape seems drained of colour. 

Worse, the area I’m hiking used to be an old mining community, and even though almost every trace of it is gone, the crofts and tenant farms I pass all look like they are inhabited by the kind of white trash you’d imagine would linger on in a ghost town – every farmyard is strewn with rusting pieces of machinery, every torp has a half-finished porch, whirlpool or similarly incongruous feature bolted on to it, old cars and broken toys litter their yards – it’s a sad sight. 

Closer to home is prettier, so next day I set out on foot from my parents’ place. As I’m on my own, I ditch the backpack and run instead. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but never really did: just run down whichever path I happen to chose, discovering the land as I go. It’s lovely. I end up following a horse trail – Ridled Sormland – that we’ve touched upon on our walks, and it takes me on beautiful back roads, through forests, past lakes and a reconstructed Stone Age village (and even a small nature reserve that I never knew was right at my parents’ front door!). I go for nearly 20k before finding myself back for a late lunch. Not a bad way to go exploring!

After lunch my brother – despondent over his ordeal – decides to head back home, so all hope of continued hiking together is lost. I go with him to Stockholm and spend a couple of jolly nice days meeting friends, and go on another long run – this time around a very pretty Djurgården, which used to be royal hunting grounds, marvelling at the romantic 19th century wooden houses that dot the island, so rural in the middle of the capital – but it’s not quite the same. 

Maybe spring will be the season when we finally do the rest of the hike. Time will tell. Now all I want to do is go home be with the kids, and prepare for my last adventure this year, which won’t entail much hiking at all: learning to paraglide in Andalusia

52 places to go

So there’s this job… travel writer for the New York Times. I don’t think I can imagine a cooler assignment than travelling the globe for a year and writing about the places and people I encounter. 

But first you have to get selected, right? And with 2,500 or so applications in the first 24 hours, it won’t be easy. The brief is to write 500 words each on “What themes would you like to explore during your travels?” and “What’s the most interesting place you’ve been and why?”. I figured it was an interesting challenge in itself to answer those questions comprehensively and clearly, and since they are both themes in keeping with this blog anyway, here are my attempts – do let me know what you think!

What themes would you like to explore during your travels?

I started writing about my journeys as a way of leaving a legacy for my children – this is my small contribution to making the world a better place. And so the themes I would like to explore during my year of travels are the ones I habitually look for on my own journeys: pristine nature, exotic culture, physical challenges and unlikely encounters. 

I am a nature lover by nature. In fact I believe we all are. Nothing mankind has created can compete with the breath-taking grandiosity of the Himalayas, the intricate beauty of a coral reef, or the sheer complexity of an ordinary autumn leaf. I’m not a religious person, but natural wonders bring a sense of awe to me that naught else can. 

That’s not to say that humanity’s endeavours do not mesmerise me; expressions of human ingenuity regularly have me humbled and baffled, particularly examples dating back thousands of years. The Stone Age temples on Gozo, the Incan grass bridges, and the hand-hewn Guoliang tunnel are all astonishing feats of fearless engineering carried out in an age we tend to think of as unsophisticated – to encounter such proof of our species coming together for the greater good never fails to inspire me. 

Pushing my body to its limits is for me a way of feeling even more alive. I train to be fit, in order to live long and healthily, but in doing so I have found a new way of exploring my world: whether it be by running the length of Hadrian’s Wall in a day or travelling by dog sled across the frozen wastes of Lapland, whether kayaking in the mangrove swamps of the Dominican Republic, climbing the Alps or hiking the Appalachian Trail, I have found that overcoming your own perceived limitations not only brings a sense of achievement and a heightened awareness of our surroundings, it is also a fantastic way of meeting people. 

That last piece in the puzzle is the most elusive one: you obviously cannot plan chance encounters, but you can put yourself in situations where they are more likely to occur. And so I favour travelling alone and to places outside of the more well-trodden paths, as I find people to be more willing to interact with strangers that way. Outside of our comfort zones we are sometimes, paradoxically, more open to others than we would otherwise be. Would I have met a telenovela actress in her native Argentina, or a Latvian porn star in Tallinn? Unlikely. But on a tropical island off the coast of Africa, and in a beer hall in Bavaria those meetings happened effortlessly. I learnt that the former wanted to be a psychiatrist and the latter an author of children’s books. That, too, is the wonder of discovery.

They say travelling broadens the mind. Not all people can have that experience first hand, unfortunately, but I want to take my readers on a trip every time I put pen to paper. 
What’s the most interesting place you’ve been and why?

My latest trip was to Amsterdam last weekend to run the marathon. It didn’t require a passport. Pemba did. To me it was the perfect trip, embodying everything I want when travelling: pristine nature, exotic culture, physical challenges and unlikely encounters.

Unlike its famous neighbour Zanzibar, Pemba is devoid of tourism; its obscurity one of the reasons why it’s home to the best diving in the world. 

As you descend into the blue, you arrive in a different universe. There are fire corals, like glowing lava, cream-coloured porcelain corals, orange staghorn corals, corals shaped like trees and pink fans and black chimneys and yellow bubble baths and sponges and a hundred other different shapes and sizes and hues, nearly every one of them favoured by different species of fish. Never have I dived in such perfect waters, in such a rich flora and fauna. I surface with an enormous grin on my face. 

In the mornings we go diving, after lunch we go exploring. We traverse the jungle and see silk monkeys and crested hornbills (think Rowan Atkinson in The Lion King) and flying foxes, we paddle along the coast and in mangrove forests – the trees look like giant spiders, and the volcanic rock walls are alive with hundreds of crabs, clambering along the razor-edged volcanic overhangs.

When I go running I have a continuous chorus of children calling me. They shout “bye bye” by way of greeting, and laugh and stare, obviously thinking me a very strange sight. Once we pass a group of serious-looking young girls in beautiful scarves and dresses, and I blew them a kiss. The fact that child marriage and polygamy are allowed is difficult to comprehend for a westerner, and for a moment I was worried that I might have committed a serious faux-pas, but it resulted in an explosion of giggles. Even the adults seemed pleased, much like I expect they would have if a monkey had performed a particularly good trick. It’s a strange feeling to find yourself part of a tiny minority, and quite the eye-opener.

We spend one last day on Zanzibar, in Stonetown, a place that will forever live in infamy as the biggest slave market in the world.

Having been taken across the sound to Zanzibar the traders would cull their stock, throwing the weak ones off the ships to drown rather than having to pay duties for them. The cargo would then be incarcerated in tiny, overcrowded cellars underground for a couple of days to weed out all but the strongest, who would finally be taken to the market to be inspected, bought and sold like so much cattle that their new masters could then take to all the corners of the world, for – lest we forget – this was a global commercial endeavour. It beggars belief. 

And with that sobering reentry into civilisation, plus a parting gift of torrential rain and ditto diarrhoea, Zanzibar speeds us on our long way home. 

I have a dream…

I never thought I would find my dream job, and then this morning it found me. In a newsletter from the New York Times. 

They are looking for a “Writer At Large”, and boy, would this job live up to the title! The newspaper has a feature called “52 places to go“, and the job would mean exactly that: for an entire year, the person picked would pack up and go to a new place every week, and report back on the experience in writing and on social media. Sound like someone you know?

The ideal candidate should have a well-worn passport (✔️), having traveled to several destinations (✔️), have documented travels in writing, social media or elsewhere (✔️), have prior experience at a media organisation (✔️), and be able to commit to a whole year (…might be a stumbling block, but what the hell!).

So now the task is this: write 500 words on the most interesting place I’ve been and why that is, and 500 words on the themes I’d like to explore during my travels. Send it off together with samples of my social media writing (that would be this blog) and other credentials, adding crossed digits and allow to simmer at low heat. Easy as pie, right?!

Eh… maybe not, but it would be a genuine once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I’m gonna do it anyway. I’ll keep you posted. 

Amsterdamned marathon!

So far this year, I’ve been smashing personal bests (PBs) running. I am training hard, and it shows. One kilometre, five, ten, half marathon, all those distances have been crushed. But the Big One remained. The marathon. And so I signed up for Amsterdam marathon, knowing that it was flat and that I’d have a good chance of improving my PB of 3:46 from Barcelona

42k is a long distance tho. Anything can happen that will throw a spanner in the works. And it seemed everything that could, would. 

The railway decided this weekend would be a good time to do maintenance, meaning I wasn’t even sure I’d get to Amsterdam. In the end I managed to puzzle together a route that is best called scenic, as it took in most of the Low Lands, criss-crossing this corner of Europe the way Moses “led” his people through the desert – it shouldn’t be possible to take so long to cover such a short distance, but six hours later I finally stepped off a train in A’dam. 

As for lodgings, the Airbnb host I had picked out cancelled with less than a week to go, leaving me homeless. I had a couple of panicky days – even considering online dating to find a place to stay – but in the end a colleague came through for me; he had a friend who lives in A’dam who was likely going to run the marathon as well, and if I were willing to sleep on a mattress I’d probably be more than welcome. Yay!

I wrote the guy, Tobias, and he offered to take me on. It turns out we have another friend in common, namely my sister’s running coach, the reigning 100k world champion runner. This made me pause, and after a little digging it turns out my host-to-be was fresh back from having run his third spartathlon (that’s 268k under the Greek sun), so he “wasn’t expecting to win the Amsterdam marathon this year either”. Yeah, you and me both, brother…!

So when we finally met up for dinner the night before, it was a great dollop of humble pie for me with a side dish of sushi, but he was just as pleasant as can be, and we got on fine, with me trying to (politely) pick his brain on how on earth he manages to do those races. Another mate of Tobias was visiting from Spain, and it turned out Johan and I had a more similar level of ambition; I figured anything between 3:30 and 3:45 is possible, and he wanted to beat his wife, who had done 3:37, so we decided to go together. 

The race day starts out well enough: we bike through the deserted streets to the Olympic stadium, where the start and finish will be. A nice surprise is that Tobias works for TCS, the company sponsoring the marathon, so we get into the VIP tent in the middle of the stadium rather than having to stand in line for toilets and clothes storage with the hoi polloi. The weather is beautiful, too. Crisp autumnal air, not a cloud in sight, perfect temperature. 3:30 here I come! Or so I thought. 

And so at 0930 we set off, with me leading through the outskirts of the city centre, sticking to between 04:50 and 05:05 per k – easy as anything. Right? Wrong. It worked well enough for the first 26 kilometres, running along the canals and then out along the Amstel river and back for a tour of the affluent countryside, with barges being used as floating DJ booths, and hoverboarders cheering us on from on high above the water. I even knocked a minute off my PB on the half marathon distance. But by then it’s getting warm, and the decision not to bring any water doesn’t seem so great any more. 

Best made plans of mice, men and marathoners… Before long, calves and quads are protesting, and threatening to cramp up. By thirty k I can no longer keep my 5min/k speed up. Johan has long since disappeared. Around me, more and more people stop and grimace as muscles seize up. The only thing preventing me from suffering the same fate is the little baggie of salt my ultra marathon-running sister has taught me to bring along on longer runs. Dipping a finger tip in the bag and licking it off is all that’s required, and it works fine, but it’s not a miracle cure – it can’t do anything to prevent armpits and nipples and even more private parts from being rubbed raw against sodden, sweat-drenched clothes.

And so I trudge on. I try to do maths in my head, to see what it will take to get me to the finish in this or that time, but it’s no good. The kilometres take longer and longer, and it’s only bloody mindedness and sullen determination that enable me to continue. The crowds are good, quite supportive and enthusiastic, or at least I think they are; I hardly notice them beyond one point where the smell of ganja is particularly heavy in the air. 

It’s funny, though. When the stadium finally comes into view. I straighten up and find untapped resources, enough to overtake quite a few runners and finish strong. That’s how long it lasts though. I hobble into the VIP tent and get a massage – the only thing standing between me and a full body cramp – or so it feels. 

Tobias ran the marathon in 2:58 – two weeks after Spartathlon! – Johan fell prey to the heat (in spite of living in southern Spain!) and couldn’t beat his wife, and I, well, I didn’t get anywhere near 3:30, but I still improved upon my old PB with five minutes. It certainly felt good after the DNF at the X-trail! And of course, once reunited, we immediately said we’d do it all again next year. I’ll be Amsterdamned!

Autumn in Paris

I seem to have reached an age where my friends are turning fifty. This is why I found myself in Paris this weekend, to celebrate this momentous occasion in the life of my very good friend L

There’s no denying it is a milepost. A person is no longer young at fifty, the potential of the younger self has been squandered or put to good use, and the resulting life has evolved accordingly. One must face mortality, and consider how best to spend the remainder of this all-too-brief existence before all is irrevocably lost to death and decay. 

Perhaps fittingly then, we spend the first day in Paris visiting the dead. First the untold millions of mortal remains of millennia of Parisians bundled together in the catacombs: 

The medevial municipal graveyards were literally overflowing at the end of the 18th century. At the same time the limestone quarries that had once been well outside of city boundaries were being subjected to urbanisation, which resulted in several spectacular collapses; houses and entire streets were swallowed up by sinkholes as the poorly shored-up, long-forgotten mine shafts caved in under the weight of the expanding city. Such an exciting time to be a Parisian – your house might spontaneously drop thirty metres into the ground, or your basement might get flooded with partly decomposed bodies! 

Ingeniously, the authorities decided to solve both problems in one go: the mines were mapped and their walls reinforced, part of the many miles of underground corridors were consecrated, the churchyards dug up and their dead deposited in the mine shafts-turned-catacombs, instead. Anything between two and six million skeletons were transferred to the catacombs, and today they make for a gruesome reminder of our brief toil on this mortal coil: the narrow corridors are filled floor to ceiling with row upon row of skulls – nothing for the faint of heart. 

The Pantheon is a different proposition altogether: a Greek-Roman temple constructed “to house the great men of the Fatherland” (feminists might have a thing or two to say about that), it is the final resting place for the bodies of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Marie Curie – maybe she was granted a dispensation? – and others worthy of veneration. 

The building is famous for housing Foucault’s pendulum, which proves that the Earth moves – and I think we can agree THAT’s a relief to know! – but more importantly it moves the human spirit, because it is one of the most impressive buildings you will ever see, and the views from the roof of its dome is nothing short of spectacular.

Sticking with the theme of mortality, there is an adage that says that a person should plant a tree, sire an heir and write a book. All that speaks of a desire to leave behind something more lasting, and so the second day was devoted to visiting monuments:

The Louvre, the world’s greatest museum, filled to the brim with painting and sculptures, all wishing to immortalise their subjects and/or the artists behind them. It’s interesting to see, but also sobering to realise how little we know of even the most famous ones: Mona Lisa’s identity is uncertain, there is no proof Venus from Milo depicts Venus (or more accurately Aphrodite), and no one knows what Victory from Samotrace looked like. 

Another good example of the phallacy of immortality is the Arc du Triomph: ordered by Napoleon as a lasting monument over his soldiers’ bravery (and, one suspects, his own greatness), it wasn’t completed until long after the Emperor had been forced to abdicate and end his days on a forsaken island far, far away. It still makes for a good outlook point, however.

A better, living monument, still thriving in the age of e-publishing, situated right across from Notre Dame, is the wonderful bookshop Shakespeare & C:o. Today’s proprietor is the daughter of the founder, who ran it for fifty years, and it’s a wonderful shop, just the way bookstores should be but rarely are: books spill out of every nook and cranny (of which there are legion), and cover every available surface from floor to ceiling, so that you think you have alighted upon an Escher painting made up of books. If books have the ability to transport you through time and space, this bookstore is a wormhole of black star proportions, and I hope it will outlast all other monuments in Paris. 

So, death being inevitable and immortality (even by monumental works) being near impossible, what remains? Eating, drinking and making merry. And so we stroll the streets of Paris, taking in its many wonders – the galettes and cider from Normandy, the macaroons at Ladurée on Champs Elysée (where a Saudi prince and his wife are subjected to the worst service of their lives), the opulent pleasures of brasserie Chez Julien (where Edit Piaf would still feel at home), cheese platters straight from the fromagerie, gateaux from thriving patisseries and incredible breakfasts courtesy of Jozseph and Frédéric, who run the best bed and breakfast in the world. The champagne and absinthe flow, there is laughter and silliness, but a moment of poignant silence marks the end of the weekend, as we happen upon a mass in the monastery church of St Pierre, literally in the shadow of Sacrecoeur on Montmartre.

 There, before a congregation of believers, and in a moment of divine light, the Lord’s Prayer is read, and for the first time it strikes me: underneath the religion and ceremony lies a very simple message. Accept that you can’t control anything much, accept the finite nature of things, be accepting of others’ struggles and treat them kindly regardless, and be grateful for the little things. It’s not a bad credo. 

  

Bogged down by Belgium 

Home from the hills. Après les alps, le deluge. Or so it feels. Coming-home blues is a real thing, as hard a come-down as anything ever sung of in the Mississippi river delta. 

To alleviate my ills, I turn to friend Florian, a man so well-travelled he makes Magellan look like a kid playing with his toy boat in a tub. His journeys are so many and far-reaching it’s as if Marco Polo popped out for a quart of milk at the corner shop by comparison. He suggests the Haute Fagne, or High Moor, as a best place in Belgium for a day trip, and who am to disagree?

Located in the easternmost part of Belgium, straddling the border to Germany, it’s a peculiar highland, more akin to the Scottish peat bogs than anything else. A big bog to take my mind off things? Well, I’ll give it a try. Maybe seeking out the antithesis to what you miss is the way to go? And so off I, well, go. I don’t pack hiking gear, figuring I can run the 30k trail F suggests. Famous last words…

When I get there, looking out across the moor, the landscape looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic dystopia: nothing but a few stunted shrubs and dead trees. The nuclear heat of the day does nothing to detract from this illusion. Once out there, running along the duckboards, it’s a different matter. The marshland is home to hundreds of plants, mainly grasses and flowers, and it’s quite pretty in a low key way. 

There isn’t much time to look out across the landscape, however. The duckboards prove to be quite difficult to run on, in spite of being perfectly dry. The bog swallows everything eventually, but since it isn’t happening equally fast everywhere, this means one part may be perfectly stable, and the next one might tip to the side as you step on it, bounce, or simply break. It makes for a rollercoaster run. 

 This feature of the bog landscape is of course the main reason it has been a borderland for as long as can be remembered. The oldest border markers found here date back to the 7th century, and several imposing stone markers still show where the borderline between Prussia and Belgium once ran. Much like marshlands elsewhere, they were simply too difficult to traverse, and of too little economic interest for countries to fight for. 

Unfortunately, Belgian budgetary authorities share this view. Many paths through the moors are being abandoned, and only a few kept open – the others are allowed to sink into the boggy ground and disappear. I run along the main route towards Germany, and after only four kilometres I am suddenly off the beaten path. No longer able to run, I walk along a brook. It’s hard going, but very pretty, reminiscent of Swedish forests, with ferns and firs growing high, and not a living soul around. Pieces of abandoned duckboards appear intermittently, but it’s clear that not many people come here any more. 

Like a Zorn painting. Only one thing missing…


I have long since left Florian’s suggested route behind, and decide to turn around before I walk back into Germany, and there, suddenly, I’m no longer alone. A photographer and his two nude models are hard at work under a tree! 

It’s difficult to know what to do in certain situations. Do you say “hi”? Stop and admire an artist’s work? I briefly consider asking if they need another model, but I figure this blog has seen enough of me in a state of undress recently, and besides, the couple are twenty years and twenty kilos each past attractive. I get back to running instead.

I run back through ferns and grasses and dead trees, the ground muddy and slippery and mostly hidden by the undergrowth. It’s a hard slog, the ground either sucking at my shoes or sliding away and a couple of times I come close to wiping out. After a painful misstep and a near face plant, I slow down to a walk again, but once back on the duckboards I force myself to run once more – mainly to get out of the sun. 

After two hours I’m back where I started, at the one inn on the one road leading across the moors. The Baraque Michel (or the Obama Inn, as I like to think of it) has been a beacon to weary wanderers for well over two hundred years, and it’s easy to see why the family-run establishment is doing brisk business: my feet are wet and hurt, my shins and calves will require at least two showers to just be dirty again, my clothes are soaked through with sweat – I can’t bring myself to leave. 

I’ve done about half the suggested route, but I’m quite done. Properly bogged down by Belgium. 

Alpine Adrenaline II

The Bavarian Alps. The most German setting imaginable. Marvellous mountains, nestling green valleys with villages taken straight out of Grimm fairy tales. Birthplace of the grimmest of ideologies. 

I’ve come here for a week of peaceful hiking with my friends Florian and Iris. It doesn’t quite turn out that way. 

We come by train from Munich (where a local beer hall made our layover as enjoyable as can be), through pleasant rolling hills, and arrive in Oberstdorf (lit. “The highest village”) in sunny, warm weather. That’s a nice surprise in itself, since the forecast is promising thunderstorms and rain for most of the week. 

Florian suggests a “light” hike for the first day, climbing the nearest alp, Rubihorn. Coming in at 1,950m high, it’s no more than a 500-metre climb from the first lift station, but the sun is out in force, and by the time I reach the summit I’m wobbly-legged and woozy from the effort. That’s nothing compared to F and I, however. They arrive wheezing and gasping for air. But once heart rates have come down to something resembling normal we have a splendid 360 degree view for our efforts. We are at the edge of the alps, so to one side are the lowlands, and on the other there are hundreds of peaks as far as the eye can see.

What draws the eye more than anything, however, is the incredibly blue waters of the lake hidden right underneath us, shimmering in the heat like a Fata Morgana. Declining the kind offer of summit schnapps from a friendly local, we begin to make our way down a slippery slope towards it. When we finally reach its shores I’m so hot that the lure of the cristalline water takes over, and I join the friendly local and his buddies going in for the coldest dip of my life. 

Afterwards I will read up on it and learn that the lake is source-fed from below and therefore maintains a steady – low – temperature all year around (never glazing over in winter), but getting out of the water Iris sums up the experience rather succinctly: “I see it was this cold”, she says, grinning, showing a most unflattering distance between thumb and index finger. Suffice to say when the offer was made anew, I gratefully accepted the (plummet) schnapps this time around. 

Playa del Rubihorn

The next day we make for Fellhorngrad and a ridge walk that would have been ideal as a first day introduction to the area. Straddling the border between Germany and Austria, it’s a pleasant enough hike, but too crowded and pedestrianised for my taste. The best that can be said for it is that it offers splendid views into the Austrian valley where we will be exploring next day. 

The vale is effectively an Austrian enclave in Germany, because there is only one real road into the valley and it arrives there from Bavaria, which must have made everyday life for the inhabitants rather cumbersome back in the day of border controls. More importantly (to us) it’s also home to one of the more impressive gorges in Europe, the Breitachklamm. And so our third day sees us going to Austria.

Getting off the bus well above the Klamm (“pinch”) itself, we follow the Breitach downriver in glorious sunshine along a very pretty road that would have been a joy to run. I say as much to my hiking friends, forgetting the adage that you should be careful what you wish for. You see, after an hour or so of hiking Florian discovers that he has left his outrageously expensive camera hanging on a bench where we took a break. It’s a good kilometre back up the road, so I offer to run and get it before someone else does. 

Unfortunately someone else already has, and so I continue running back to the last lodge we passed, yet another kilometre upriver. When I finally arrive I’m drenched in sweat, but the camera is there, handed in by the finder (hikers are nice people!), and so all that remains is for me to race back to my friends. By the time I get back after this unexpected detour I’m once more so over-heated that I just tear my clothes off and let the river cool me down, with unexpectedly homoerotic / rubberducky results, as captured by my gleeful friends. 

When I post a pic of me on FB/when I’m tagged in one.


The Klamm itself is gorge-eous. The valley narrows, steep walls looming above us, waterfalls forcing their way ever deeper into the rock beneath us, as we clamber along walkways hewn into the cliff-face or precariously hanging on to the outside of the bare rock. Like a cut into the flesh of Mother Earth, the gorge is so deep that some of it hasn’t seen the sun for two million years. The debris left behind by winter floods bear witness to the brute force of the water: entire trees are lodged between the walls in places, and markers show the water levels sometimes reached, metres above our heads. It’s awe-inspiring.

Since Florian is leaving in the afternoon to visit a friend, Iris and I decide to try something both of us have been itching to do for a long time: tandem paragliding. We’ve signed up to do their longest flight, using the thermals to stay up in the air for up to forty minutes. Unfortunately, the flight school is incredibly badly organised, with numerous reschedulings and one pilot not showing up until an hour and a half too late, by which time it’s so late in the afternoon that the thermals are gone. This in turn means our flight is less than half the length promised, but for all that it’s an incredible experience!

We run off the top of the Nebelhorn and take flight as easy as anything, then go down the valley close to the forest-clad sides, gliding effortlessly and smoothly through the air. It’s such a high I’m just grinning and laughing the whole time. Iris, meanwhile, is screaming at the top of her lungs – something she has forewarned both me and her pilot is a sign of joy. She soon has cause to scream for other reasons, though, because then they start showing off their skills, making us swing around our axes, spinning around in half loops in the best roller-coaster tradition. It’s fantastically good fun, if quite disorienting. 

Iris earning her new nickname, with me in the background.


Before we land I’m given the reigns and told to steer towards the village church, which I do as best I can, before finally we come down soft as can be on a field, grinning from ear to ear from the adrenaline high, and me at least more convinced than ever that this is something so want to learn for myself! The rest of the evening is spent in a Biergarten, mulling over the minutest of details, riding the air waves over and over again.

Next day Florian is back, but the worse for wear from last night’s birthday do, so Iris and I ride the Bergbahn to the top of the Nebelhorn on our own. We set out along the ridge together before parting ways, with me attempting the Entchenkopf alone. 

It’s sits across from the Rubihorn, but is 300 metres higher, and significantly more difficult going, with several passages being senkrecht climbing. I had been wanting to try the via ferrata, the climbing paths that you traverse with guides and equipment, but nae more. This is worse by far. With no back-up or climbing gear, the ground slippery from last night’s rain, and drops of anything between ten and fifty metres onto sheer rock, any mistake would be my last. It’s no coincidence Todesangst is a German word, I think. 

What do we say to Death? Not today.

When I finally reach the summit, my legs are shaking from fear-induced adrenaline, and I don’t dare stand up for quite some time. But fear is good. Fear – if harnessed – makes you more alive, more focused. As I sit there, taking in the never-ending views, the air as clean as can be, I feel like a million bucks. 

And then the moment is over, and I slide down the other side of the mountain towards the Hütte where Iris awaits my return, and the best Kaiserschmarren pancakes known to man.

That was Iris’s last day, so next day Florian and I set out on our own to do the Sonnenköpfe, three lower peaks that form the continuation of the Entchenkopf. They looked more like rolling hills from the summit the day before, but as we hike them they turn out to be quite formidable, too, and it’s only the knowledge that there will be even more of the same Kaiserschmarren that spurs us on til the end. 

Next we want to try the stony Gottesacker plateau (lit. “God’s plowing field”), but when we get there the lift is under repair, and faced with the prospect of an additional 1,000 vertical metres in full sun – the weather forecast having turned out to be quite wrong yet again – we opt for an alternative route through a Naturschutzgebiet up to another lodge, seated on the Austrian-German border, and down the other side. It turns out to be Florian’s favourite walk of the entire week, but I can’t help feeling a bit wistful about having missed the plateau, especially since it looks just like a sleeping dragon from below…

Climb every mountain!

The very last day the weather forecast is finally correct, and the rain is pouring down. F can’t be bothered to leave the Gasthaus, but I go for a quick run and then a solo hike in the southernmost valley in all of Germany. It’s wet and misty and moist and slippery, but I don’t mind. The low-hanging mist lends the nature here a mystical aura of veiled beauty, and besides it’s reminiscent of the hikes of my youth, when – as I remember it – the alps were always clad in clouds. 

And so my travels with Sonnenkopf and Nebelhorn (lit. “Sunny head” and “Fog horn”) are at an end. The lovely Martin and Andrea, who run the Gasthaus Birkenhof where we have been staying, hug and kiss us goodbye and drive us to the railway station, and then all that remains is one more visit to a beer hall in Munich (with succulent Schweinshaxe and Augustiner beer), before finally flying home. 

The alps, however, are already calling me back. 

 

Geneva, Switzerland

I came to Geneva early one morning with the sole intention of leaving it as soon as possible, but a fatal error when booking my rental car (not changing 7 PM to 7 AM) combined with a healthy dose of inflexibility on the side of the car rental company left me unexpectedly with an entire day here.

Truth be told, I didn’t mind (much). I had only ever been once before when I was here to work for the UN (as you do), and hadn’t had the time to see any other part of this most quintessentially Swiss town. 

The first thing that struck me is how hushed it all was. Granted, as I had flown in on a red eye, the city was probably even quieter than normal as I made my way on foot towards the old town, but still… the famous water sprout on the lake seemed to be the only thing moving, sending cascades of water 140 metres in the air. It was already hot however, and being dressed top to toe in black didn’t help – it might make you look cool, but I was anything but.

And so I slunk through the alleys of the old town, lurching from shade to shade like Frankenstein’s monster, who was “born” here when Mary Shelley outdid her friends in a literary contest, Decameron-style.

Geneva is famously the birthplace of another monstrosity, too (in the eyes of the Catholic church, at least!). 2017 marks the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and having been at the centre of that revolution the city celebrates with numerous plaques and statues, none more impressive than the stalinesque monument at the foot of the old town, where the four founders stand in vigil, looking like a cross between dour dwarves from Tolkien and Usama Bin Ladin. Given that their ideas directly contributed to wars, civil wars, famine and the deaths of millions one has to wonder what great thinkers will be venerated five hundred years from now…

John Locke, Gimli, Grumpy, Usama

Back in the here and now, modern Geneva proves to be exactly as stereotypically Swiss as can be hoped for: banks line the streets (presumably with impressive vaults hidden underneath them), and luxury items are on sale everywhere – foremost amongst them watches, ranging in price from small car to McMansion – and the army’s favourite deterrent makes regular apparances. 

So far, so Swiss. Less famous is perhaps the fact that Swiss society is incredibly liberal – it’s here people can go to take their own lives in special death clinics, after all – and so it shouldn’t perhaps come as a surprise that there are stores selling cannabis and prostitutes plying their services quite openly, as if it were nothing more special than, say, cheese fondue (I’m not saying cheese fondue can’t play a part, too, but you would probably have to pay extra…).

I have my sights on a different Swiss speciality, however, of a most particular kind: CERN.

The European Centre for Nuclear Research is arguably the most successful example of humankind coming together for the greater good and advancement of the race. It’s here, or rather one hundred metres below the ground, that the Large Hadron Collider is – well, at this point I admit defeat; there is no way I can explain how the particle accelerator is used. They crash particles into each other at near the speed of light and sift through the debris to infer the existence of various infinitesimally small building blocks of the universe. That’s the best I can do. 

But it’s here, all 27 kilometres of it, running circles around everything else in terms of coolness (quite literally, as the magnets used to speed the particles on their way are cooled to just a couple of degrees above absolute zero in order to create superconductivity), and I spend a couple of very happy hours taking in the exhibitions and enhancing my ignorance.  

And so it was that I left Switzerland with an even better impression than I had before. It’s easy to see how the combination of the lake and the surrounding mountains lures people here – unfortunately that is also why the market has seen fit to ensure that it that it’s out of reach of most mortals. As I left I tested this using the Big Mac index: roughly twice the price of all other European nations. Wanna live in Geneva? Win the lottery, or – at least – bring a packed lunch. 

Man vs. Mountain

So today I participated in Courchevel X-trail, a particularly cunning name for an extreme trail run in the Courchevel region (of the French alps). An orgie of gruelling ascents and descents – 54km, to be exact, and nary a flat surface in sight. 

It started at four in the morning, so in fairness there was no way to see the wall-like mountain towering immediately in front us either, but as soon as we were off you could tell just how murderously steep and long it was from the headlamps of runners ahead and behind you, like a string of pearls in the night. 

It took me two hours to reach the first aid station, 10k into the race. Normally I would have covered more than twice that distance in that time, so it wasn’t running so much as climbing. By this time the sun had climbed into the sky as well, and revealed that this first mountain wasn’t anywhere near done with us yet: we were only halfway up it, in fact.


And so on we climbed. The sun stayed resolutely hidden behind clouds and mist, but even so I was pouring with sweat, in spite of it being only six or so in the morning. When I finally crested the first mountain, realisation dawned: descending is almost as bad as ascending! The first descent of the day was relatively doable, but as the day wore on, gravel and treacherous stones in combination with deadened legs meant it was just a different kind if torture.

If I had seen a contour map of the route I dont think I would’ve ever signed up: the second mountain was even higher than the first, 600 metres straight up in the air (over something like four kilometres) to the second aid station, along its ridge for another handful of kilometres (where the fog thankfully hid the abysses we were tightroping along!) and then down impossibly steep roads into a rather wonderful valley. Here a number of fast flowing rivers with water the colour of blue clay, conspired with stone chalets and grazing cows straight out of a Milka commercial to make a rather enchanted place, the enclosing mountain ridges adding to the feeling of a lost paradise.


Unfortunately that paradise was quickly lost again, as a third ascent began at the valley’s end, this one leading up across alp meadows with incredible numbers of flowers and then into a seemingly never-ending field of boulders, where one false move would have meant instant reenactment of the pivotal scene from “128 hours”.

By this time I had given up running apart from a slow jog on the downhill sections, but the boulders provided the straw that broke the camel’s back. There was no way I could walk fast enough to make the next rope time, and running across them (either up- or downhill) wasn’t an option, so after seven hours and 30k I had to resign myself to the fact that today would earn me my first ever DNF (Did Not Finish). 

It’s obviously not an accolade I was hoping for, but at the same time I can’t be unhappy. A number of factors combined to make today a bad day: I slept atrociously bad the night before the race – two days of stressful travelling to get here plus sleeping in a tent after a day of 34 degrees heat and no shower saw to that – and I’m obviously not good enough at running in this kind of terrain (hardly surprising as I’ve never done it!). 

So my spirit wasn’t in it, and I stepped off while still feeling ok physically, rather than push myself to the absolute limit, knowing that this way I’d  be able to come back to enjoy the alps in a week’s time – this time for less strenuous hiking, hopefully – and that’s a choice I’m happy with. 

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A final note on race organisation: while overall it was a very smooth operation, there are some points that might be of interest to potential runners. First of all, Courchevel isn’t one place. There are at least three villages called Courchevel, and having had more information about the actual location of the point of departure would have saved me an hour or so of admittedly scenic but very stressful driving as the closing time for registration drew ever neigher. 

The goodie bag deserves a special mention: apart from the usual array of vouchers and marketing material for other races it contained a plastic gobelet (useful?), a local beer (very drinkable, I’m happy to report), and a condom! That’s a first. Whether it was there to serve as a sort of talisman, to keep and preserve you in the mountains (condom in French is “preservatif”, after all), or whether its presence had anything to do with the imminent proximity of Pussy (a French hamlet nearby) I don’t know. 

There were no medals and t-shirts on offer for finishers. Instead you got a mug and a pin – full marks for novelty here as well, but I’m not sure I would have been very happy with that offering upon completion. 

Finally a word on safety. The race organisers had done what they could: the trail was well blazoned throughout, and there were even a handful of volounteers scattered about the mountains in the iffier spots, but there’s no denying that rescue operations would have been very difficult. In the darkness and the fog there was no way a helicopter could have got to the site of an accident, even if there was someone to report where it happened (and the potential for accidents was unlimited). In the same vein, I was incredulous to discover that the only way of getting down from the aid station where my race came to an end was to hike twelve kilometres unsupported “mostly downhill”. It was only luck that saw me being able to hitch a ride with a ranger, otherwise I’d still be out there now…

Half a lap around the sun…

…and it’s time to summarise what’s happened this far 2017. As has been the case these last couple of years, I set myself certain tasks in January, to be completed over the next twelve months, and at the halfway mark it makes sense to take stock, to see what has gone according to plan, and what hasn’t. 

Have I managed to go on an adventure/set myself a new challenge/have a new experience every month? Happily, yes. January I ran a marathon with a difference, February I went to see Alhambra, Grenada (the text about which seems to have been deleted, sadly!), March I dived the incredible reefs of Pemba, April saw me join a monastery of sorts in Mallorca, then came hiking in Madeira and in the troll-infested forests of Sweden (whilst also trying out the benefits of a paleo diet), before finally taking on my first triathlon last month. 

Looking back, it’s quite a lot crammed into six months, so I’m pleased with that. 

I’ve managed to work out quite a lot (unsurprisingly, what with the races) but not as much as I had set out to do in total – weeks of hiking and skiing and diving have prevented me from reaching the goal of a marathon run and biked every week, and I haven’t done much yoga either. But then there’s still six months left to remedy that. 

Have I developed my French, my piano and chess playing, and done more non-fiction reading? I certainly got off to a good start, doing thirty minutes per day of each, but a good friend giving me a Netflix password threw a big spanner in that particular structure. I haven’t completely derailed, but there have been leafs on the tracks, shall we say.

As for taking on new tasks at work, I have, happily. And not least because of this very blog, in fact. Turns out people at work read it and thought I might do good in Internal Communications, so from now on I will spend one day per week as a roving reporter, highlighting goings-on in my work place. Very happy about that. 

So what’s next? I will try to make up for lost time in those areas where I haven’t quite managed to reach my targets, obviously. 

I’ve still got the mountain ultra X-trail coming up in the beginning of August, and ten days of hiking the Bavarian alps hot on the heels of that. After those ten days I don’t really have any plans for the rest of the year. An acquaintance has invited me to Bilbao, and another to Nepal, so those things might happen. Or not. Readers should feel free to make suggestions. 

I still want to try and beat my marathon record before the end of the year – I’ve improved significantly on my personal best for shorter distances, but whether that will translate into a new marathon PB remains to be seen. Time to start looking for a fast race, in any event. 

At work I have made a promise to attempt to add Danish to my official language combination, so that should keep me busy for quite some time (maybe there are Danish movies on Netflix?!), and the new job will hopefully continue to present new challenges, as well. 

All in all I feel quietly confident that the second half of this journey will be as filled to the brim as the first half was. Come fly with me!

Becoming Ironman

My credo for the last couple of years has been to either go on an adventure or set myself a challenge every month. Now, in terms of physical challenges I had already run marathons and even a couple of ultras, so the question was what to do to take it to the next level in 2017?

A triathlon seemed the logical step – and a half length Ironman seemed about right. Combining swimming and biking and running in a course covering 113 kilometres, an Ironman 70.3 is something that could challenge anyone, but to me it was a daunting proposition for a couple of specific reasons: I’ve never learnt how to crawl properly, and I didn’t have any experience with road bikes – both fairly essential skill sets to triathletes…! 

But then it wouldn’t be a challenge if it weren’t slightly intimidating, would it? And so I signed up for the Luxembourg Ironman 70.3 Remich-Moselle triathlon, happy in the knowledge that I had five months in which to prepare. Well, fast forward five months and I still haven’t learnt how to crawl, and I’ve used my new bike a grand total of three times… and yesterday was the day. 

Here’s what happened:

First impression when I arrive at Remich? These are some seriously athletic people. They look like they eat marathoners for breakfast. It’s hard not to descend into homoerotica when describing these men (and even the women look like men!) – suffice to say even oldtimers look like gray-haired terminators. Or possibly these grizzled fellows are still young, and this is what too much triathloning does to you?

Second impression? These are people who take their kit seriously. Most bikes look like something Batman would be happy to cycle around Gotham on, if Bats was into eco-friendly neighbourhood policing. They might have heat-seeking missiles on them, for all I know, and a bat fax hidden underneath the saddle. 

Overall, the level of logistics involved is slightly bewildering to a simple runner like myself. There are bikes to be checked in, red bags for running kit, blue ones for biking (I’m not sure if it’s purposely done to be (R)ed for running and (B)lue for biking, but it would explain the (W)hite bag for afterwards, when all that’s left to do is whimpering…). 

Queuing up for the start, I look out across the Mosel river and a sea of neoprene-clad racers, nearly all of them in black, and already sweltering, because it’s proving to be a very warm day. Thankfully, in spite of the heatwave that makes this quiet village in Luxembourg feel like an outpost of the Serengeti, the organisers have dispensed with the traditional wildebeest-start for this event (where everyone stampedes into the water at the same time, turning it into a churning cauldron of thrashing limbs). This means I’m able to get in line at the very end – in the 50-60 minute bracket – where my breaststroke won’t upset anyone. 

Even so, once we get in the water there are other athletes who are clearly not too good at crawling, but who don’t let that fact stop them from zig-zagging back and forth along the river. I’m quite happy to actually see where I’m going, as in the end that proves rather useful, allowing me to take the shortest route from buoy to buoy, and avoiding detours into Germany. 

I think I did quite well considering this was my first attempt at competitive open water swimming, but I have no way of knowing, because when I stumble out of the water and jog into the transition area I realise my Garmin hasn’t recorded anything. Drat. 

Pulling off my wetsuit and grabbing all my biking kit I laugh a little at a piece of advice I got off the Internet. I piously took a picture of my bike when I had parked it and memorised the surroundings to be able to find it today, but since I’m one of the last to enter the T zone I can easily spot it from a hundred metres away. 

And so I hop on my bike and set off. The biking part is the great unknown for me. I haven’t done more than 18k in one go on this bike; I’ve only owned it for two weeks – and ten days out of those it was in repair back at the factory, since it fell apart on my third outing and nearly killed me, due to an assembly mistake – so there is no way of knowing how this will go. 

As it turns out, I’m in for a pleasant surprise. The first 35-40k are along the Mosel river, first upriver all the way to the French border, then down again – and I average 30kph, which is considerably faster than I had thought possible. Then it’s inland and hilly, ridiculously pretty countryside, but even the longest, steepest uphill stretches feel eminently doable, and I pass quite a few athletes, in spite of my being unable to get at the energy bars and gels I have brought along. (Note to self: flip belts do not work well when biking!) 

Before long, I’ve done more than half, and then suddenly it’s the last 20k, which are either downhill or flat, and I’m flying back into Remich for the last transit. 

As I get off the bike, my legs object loudly to doing anything but pedal, but that was expected, and once I get out of the T zone, they know what’s expected of them. Running, at least, I know how to do. Ironically, that almost proves my downfall. 

Muscle memory dictates what speed I’m going, and that means I am going fast. Way too fast. The first kilometre flies by at 5:05, the second at 5:15. I have to make a conscious decision to reign myself in before I bonk. Quite beside the fact that I’ve been exercising for four hours plus already, its gruellingly hot, 28C in the shade, and precious little shade on offer. 

But once I’ve made my peace with this, and don’t treat the running as if it were a normal half marathon, it becomes surprisingly easy. The run is made up of four laps, each one taking you tantalisingly close to the finish before throwing you out of Remich and down along the river once more to collect another bracelet (one per lap), downhill on the way out, uphill on the way back. 

Around me, people are suffering, throwing up, groaning as they attain to keep running. I take a different approach: I walk when it feels hard, stop to help a couple of people with cramps (salted raisins – work like a charm), and run with an easy gait for as long as it feels good. It won’t be my fastest half marathon, and I won’t meet my goal of making the run in under two hours, but I feel great. I even have enough energy left to show off a little on the finish line (which sadly, since it was only a live feed, you will never see!) before collecting my first triathlon medal. 

My main ambition was to finish the race at all, and my hope of coming in under seven hours I managed with quite some margin, at 6:22:59. Can I improve upon that? Sure. Give me a year of actually training with a bike and some lessons in crawling and I will knock another 23 minutes off that time. More importantly, am I happy about having become (half an) Ironman? Affirmative, Jarvis. 

Tri as I might…

Three shades of tri…

…there’s no denying that – with less than three weeks to go before Luxembourg, my first Ironman 70.3 – this whole triathlon idea is starting to feel quite intimidating!

I mean, I can swim my “granny crawl” (you know that stately progression through the water ladies of a certain age who’ve just come from the hairdresser specialise in) well enough, and I can run – if not fast, then at least for a long time – but I have yet to go more than 30k on the bike in one session (In my defense, I only got my race bike less than a week ago, but still…) And then of course there’s the small matter of putting it all together, all three disciplines one after the other. Who in their right mind does that??

Like all participants I got the email containing race rules and regulations this week. You get penalties for everything, it seems. Some of them things I didn’t even know existed! Like drafting. Apparently you can’t stay close behind someone when biking, because that way you benefit from them pushing the air out of your way. I would have thought that was a bit superfluous as a rule. No one objects to that when swimming or running (in the first case because you’d get your teeth kicked out if you tried, and stumble in the latter), so is it really necessary to have a rule like that? 

There’s also the “no indecent exposure” rule… in my experience, people participating in a race don’t give a damn (mass peeing before a marathon, anyone?), and if someone were to actually expose themselves “with intent” I reckon he would have to answer to every other participant present, rule or no rule, but better safe than sorry, I suppose. 

You even get a penalty if you hang a balloon or similar from your bike so as to find it easily after the swim. That’s a bit stingy, isn’t it? It was one of the best tips I picked up reading about triathlons, and I was looking forward to seeing a sea of bright balloons, scarves, and what have you in the transit area, but that’s not to be, it seems. 

Anyway, those are just minor details. For now, the main challenge – beyond the ever-present question of whether you’ve trained enough – lies in the logistics of the thing; How do you transport your bike safely? How do I organise all the kit so as not to forget something vital? What do I bring to eat/drink? Will I be able to drive back after the race or will I be stranded from sheer exhaustion? 

I guess freaking out a little is normal at this stage. I try to tell myself, One step at a time. Before long, that principle will apply to the race day itself. 

Diary of a cave man (2/2)

Howling at the moon…

The second half of my month of eating paleo looked like it might be considerably harder than the first. Eating nothing but what our most distant ancestors might have eaten works fine when not exerting oneself utterly, but as my triathlon draws closer that’s not an option. Plus I would be going hiking for five days with my brother, and goodness knows how my body would react to that, paleo or no. This is what happened:

Day 16: 10k bike / 2k swim brick-session (i.e. one follows immediately upon the other). No problem.

Day 17: 18k bike, 8k run, 6k run, all with hour-long pauses in between, and 28C temperatures. By the end of the day I’m exhausted, but somehow I don’t think the diet is to blame. I cheat a little afterwards, drinking half a litre of pure apple juice – it tastes like the nectar of gods!

Day 19: I discover that smoked trout and boiled eggs make a good breakfast, but leaves your mouth smelling like fart. Learn something new every day. 

Day 20: New PB on 5k. Wonky reading on the Garmin tho, so won’t count it, but still: clearly paleo isn’t hurting more explosive efforts either. 

Day 21: Prepared massive batch of protein cakes to bring on next week’s hike. Tweaked the recipe to include maple syrup and chocolate. All caveman kosher. Biggest problem will be not eating them before actually on the trail…!

Day 23: Hiking all day. 18k in hard terrain in Tiveden. Protein cakes yummy. Freeze-dried food better than expected. Energy levels stable and high.

Day 24: Hiked 20k. Ate big plate of macaroni and cheese in the evening and literally passed out for half an hour afterwards. Just laid down on the ground and fell asleep. Felt hung over on carbs the rest of the evening. Disgusted.

Day 25: Hiked 23k. In the evening an old friend met up with us, and served us cold beers and Brie sandwiches. Couldn’t say no out of politeness. Didn’t want to, either. Paleo regime officially toppled, then. Will mount a counterattack. Tomorrow.

Day 26: Got up at 0400. Hiked 32k over ten hours. Gratefully accepted a beer in the evening from kind strangers, but otherwise toed the line.

Day 27: Last day of hiking. Family reunion. Lots and lots of food. Decided to forgo paleo for the evening.

Day 28: Back in Belgium. Rest day.

Day 29: Rest day.

Day 30: Went running for the first time in over a week; shaved another sec off my PB on 5k. Celebrated daughter’s birthday with huge, distinctly non-paleo cake. 

Day 31: 10k bike (PB), 8k run, 7k run. Weighed in: 77.2kg. 

So, strictly speaking I stuck with the diet 100% for three weeks. After that circumstances conspired to make things more difficult, as I had predicted. That’s never an excuse tho; I chose to give it up for the sake of convenience. 

But that doesn’t change the fact that I was able to work out as hard as I ever have in my life during those three weeks, and it felt great. I lost five kilos during May, without losing any muscle, so it seems the theory holds water – your body will switch to burning body fat if carb intake is significantly reduced, and do so without lowering your performance levels, over either short or long distances. 

It will be interesting to see what happens at the Ironman triathlon in three weeks – that will be the real litmus test. I will be writing about that experience too, of course. One thing’s for sure: I’ll be continuing on this prehistoric path. 

Braving Bergslagsleden

Death and beauty in Tiveden.


For the last two years I have gone on an annual hiking holiday with my brother, but this year we hadn’t really made any plans, so when an old friend suggested Bergslagsleden I was all ears. 

Bergslagsleden is a trail that goes straight through the heart of Sweden. It also happens to pass through one of the last areas of true wilderness in the southern half of the country, Tiveden forest, making it a worthy candidate to follow in the footsteps of the wonders of Slovenia and Mallorca.

On those occasions we rented places to stay and made day tours, but this would be something else: we would start at the southern-most end of the trail and hike northward, bringing all the kit and food we needed along on our backs. Quite another challenge, and one – it would soon become apparent – we had very different ideas about what it would take to tackle. 

I arrived in Sweden on Monday, and met up with my brother at my parents’ place. I felt well prepared, having collected gear for this kind of expedition for almost a year, finding the right equipment one item at a time. My brother on the other hand had seen a cobbler that morning, seeking advice on how best to glue the soles back on his walking boots(!).

In the car to the trailhead he was in the back, performing the equivalent of an appendicitis operation on his shoes. To say that I was stressed out about this would be an understatement; if he couldn’t get them in working order, the trip would be over before it had begun. 

He also hadn’t brought a tent, so the first night we shared Big Agnes between us. It was cold, considerably more so than the forecast had said, and I was lying there fully clothed in my sleeping bag, unable to sleep – you see, my brother snores. A lot. If snoring had been an appreciated art form, like, say, opera, my brother would have drawn crowds like Pavarotti. As it was, I was the only one to hear what sounded like a buffalo mating with a seal.

At one in the morning it started to rain. The weather forecast had specifically said there would be no rain! My brother roused himself long enough to ask me to bring his freshly glued shoes inside the tent. And so, with the rain competing with the snoring over who can assault my ears the most, the fumes from the glue finally had me drifting off to sleep. 

The next morning brought glorious sun and clear blue skies, however, and Anders’s shoes looked well enough, so we broke camp and set off, eager to start our journey into Tiveden.

Tiveden, literally the Wood of Tyr*, god of war, or the wood of “Tiva”, the gods, in Old Norse, is a forbidding place. The inland ice that covered Scandinavia 10,000 years ago deposited so many erratic boulders here as to create a landscape that was difficult to traverse and impossible to tame, and thus it has remained a wilderness, a forest untouched by modern forestry, and a refuge for wildlife. 

Now it’s a national park and a national treasure, but it used to be place people feared to go; wild animals were a real threat, and stigmän (literally “path men”) robbers would ambush any merchants and pilgrims foolhardy enough to travel without sufficient guard, only to melt back into the dark woods again on hidden trails. On top of that, local lore has always populated the area with a plethora of trolls, giants and other scary critters, so it’s small wonder the area was shunned as far as possible. 

We made it through the park unscathed, however, touched only by its natural beauty. We stopped to have lunch on top of Trollkyrka, a fortress-like accumulation of boulders deep in the heart of Tiveden, where Norse gods were allegedly worshipped for centuries after Sweden was officially christened. It’s easy to imagine blood sacrifices taking place here at night, the ancient trees standing sentinel in the dark around the bare rocks under a starry sky, flickering torches lighting the scene as the old gods are given their due. There were a few American tourists around, and it’s tempting, but we restrained ourselves…

At the end of the day we make our camp at a tärn, a forest lake, that is as picture perfect as is imaginable. The camp sites along the trail are all equally well placed, and kept in beautiful repair: timber bivouacs with ample firewood for the campfire, a clean outdoor loo and almost always overlooking a lake. 

Feeling hot and sweaty we brave the cold, black water, and here things could have taken a turn for the worse. The plankway leading across the moss that encroaches the waters is slippery, and Anders loses his balance and sinks waist deep into the bog quagmire. Luckily he can pull himself up, but he’s hurt his knee, which means our expedition is threatened yet again. 

The author doing his best John Bauer-troll impression.

He spends the night groaning and swearing (and snoring), but once we get going the next day the stiffness subsides and he can continue walking. 

North of Tiveden national park Tiveden forest still continues unabated, if slightly less wild. We pass Tivedstorp and Ykullen, picturesque old villages deep in the forests, still intact, still remote. Legend has it that the area was first populated when famine threatened the local kingdom and the king ordered every tenth family to be executed to save the others. His queen – who was apparently a little less brutal, or just more cunning – convinced him to send the unfortunate families to settle on the outskirts of Tiveden instead. Apparently doing so was seen as tantamount to a commuted death sentence; gives you an idea how hard life must have been here back in the day…

The third day we enter the borderlands between the ancient kingdoms of the Svea and Göta tribes. Here, the inland ice sheet has left a shingle ridge that rises sharply above marshlands, forming at once a natural bulwark and a road across the boggy surroundings. This natural feature meant that any attempt to invade your neighbours this way was almost certainly doomed, but that didn’t stop either tribe from trying, again and again. In more peaceful times the ridge was part of a well established path for monks and pilgrims and other travellers, particularly appreciated since it offered a natural vantage point from which to spy dangers from afar. I read this on an information signpost before climbing the ridge, and I hadn’t gone ten metres on it before I almost stepped on a snake. So much for that theory!

After the bog lands we enter an area of commercial forestry, which is considerably less pretty, but we have a lot of fun anyway, sharing woodsman tips. I’ve been reading the excellent Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs, so we test various tricks to tell directions using trees (it seems the trees haven’t read the book though, because they are rubbish at it!), and my brother – who knows a lot about plants – points out various edible things along the way; so many that I begin to feel there is nothing in the forest that can’t be brewed as a tea. 

Thankfully we don’t have to put that theory to the test, because when we reach the end of the day, my old classmate Jessica – whom I haven’t seen in 25 years but who tipped me off about the trail (hooray for social media!) is there with her husband Per, waiting to take us in their car past this uninteresting stretch and into more pristine forests 20 kilometres to the north. 

We stop at another campsite that looks as if it belongs in a fairytale, and – glory be! – they bring out a cooler full of marvellous brioche, Brie and beer! It was a feast and an evening not soon to be forgotten; the years fall away, and it’s as if a month has past since last we saw each other, not a quarter of a century.

If it’s all the food we ate or the fact that the bivouac faces due east I don’t know, but the next morning I wake at four and watch the sun rise. It’s a lovely experience, but my timing is crap, because this is the day when we need to hike the longest by far – 32 kilometres. 

We set out by eight and it takes us ten hours, but then we do stop to explore the caves in Fasaskogen (literally the forest of horror) where local lore has it the giant Diger lives, and have lunch in an abandoned mine, where centuries old graffiti tell of miners – real-life troglodytes – long gone. 

By the end of the day I’m very, very tired and the soles of my feet are hurting to the point where all I want is to cool them down in a lake. Two kilometres before we reach our campsite we pass a moss, and the plank-ways we balance on sink into the ice cold waters, utterly submerging my feet. I try to tell myself that if I want to see the glass (and my shoes!) as half full rather than half empty I had been wishing for a way to cool my feet – I just didn’t imagine them to be in my shoes as I did so! Another woodsman’s trick – this one from Ronja the Robber’s daughter – sees me picking dry white moss that I stuff into my shoes. They dry up very quickly. 

And so we near the end of our hike. One last glorious sunset, one last meal cooked on the Primus – Anders goes all out with linseed patties, minced meat and grilled vegetables, and a family of four earns its place in the hikers’ pantheon of unsung heroes by offering us a beer each – and one last night spent playing hide and seek with the midges, before we make our way to the end of the trail. For now. You see, we did 105km but Bergslagsleden in its entirety is 280km, and finishes near the part of Sweden where we grew up. We’ll be back, braving Bergslagsleden again.
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*Of Tyr’s Day fame – or Tuesday, as it is more commonly known.

Gear of Wanders 

I said at the beginning of the year that I hoped 2017 would be a year of wanders. Well, I’ve already done one walking holiday, in Madeira, but next week my brother and I are thru-hiking part of Bergslagsleden in Sweden, and fending for yourself 24/7 is a different proposition altogether. To put it differently: for extended hiking you really only need one thing. Gear. Lots of it. 

So I figured I would put together a list of all the gear that I’m bringing with me on Bergslagsleden next week. It’s my first attempt at this, meaning chances are there will be things that are superfluous, or that I should have thought to bring but didn’t. We’ll see. 

(Oh, and all the links are to Amazon.com in case you want to find out more about a given product. If you were to buy anything using those links I get a percentage (without it costing you more) but I’d recommend snooping around for better prices. ?) Here goes:

Backpack. Osprey Atmos 65. A wonder of comfortableness, even when filled to the brim. And it will be.

Tent. Big Agnes. Interesting name. She is surprisingly light considering her volume, and easy to get up, down, into and out of. ‘Nuf said. 

Sleeping bag. Marmot Trestles 30. A bit of a conundrum, this. I can’t sleep in tight sleeping bags, but this one is huge. Will bring it if I can figure out how to get it to fit into the backpack, otherwise I will have to make do with one of the kidlets’.  

Sleeping mat. Therm-A-Rest. Comfortable and light, but squeaky and takes a bit of time to inflate orally. Had I known I might have sprung for another model. 

Clothes. Arcteryx shell jacket. Two pairs of running socks, two t-shirts (one with long sleeves), one pair of shorts, one pair of Arcteryx trousers – yes, I love Arcteryx, and no, I’m not bringing any underwear. I’m going commando. Seems fitting, no?

Shoes. My trusty Saucony Xodus. If they could carry me 90 kilometres in a day for Ultravasan, they will do here, too. 

Water kit. Camelbak 1.5l bladder (for filtered water) and LifeStraw, which proved its salt in Sardinia (to filter water). 

Kitchen. PrimusLite+. Gas canister. Spork.

Food. Mountain House ready-made freeze-dried bags of assorted meals, 12 portions. Brother is bringing home-made versions of the same. Figured we’d get by on this if we bring a sausage or two, plus stop at a couple of hostels on the way to have real food. Home-made energy bars. Oh, and instant coffee – gotta have a start engine!

Electronics. IPhone 6 with downloaded maps and information about the trail. Garmin Fenix 2.0 for recording our passage. Doubles as compass. Spare battery. Cables. 

Small essentials. Matches, two boxes. Toilet paper, one roll. Ecological soap, 100ml. Sunglasses (cheap ones bought in Mallorca – if they sufficed there, they will do in Sweden). Contact lenses, five pairs. Ibuprofen. Anti-chafing bandaids. Small super-absorbant towel. Anti-bear pellets. 

And that’s about it. I worry that I might have forgotten something trivial yet fantastically necessary. We will soon see, I guess. Until then, happy trails!

Diary of a cave man (1/2)

The usual suspects. I'm somewhere in the middle, I guess.So for the month of May I challenged myself to go on a paleo diet, in order to see how this might affect my well-being and physical performance. Here are some of the highlights of what happened:

Day -1: Panic. I’m supposed to not have any sugar for a month!?  

The healthy thing to do would have been to research recipes and prepare. What do I do? I run out to the local night shop and get an overpriced bucket of Haagen-Daez ice cream and down it all in one sitting, then – predictably – feel horrible about it. At least I didn’t have a beer as well.

Day 1: Breakfast is made up of bullet-proof coffee (black coffee with a dollop of coconut oil in it) and left-over oven-baked chicken with mozzarella; how’s that for high fat, low carb? It feels a little weird, eating chicken first thing in the morning, but hey, embrace change, right? Only I have the same thing for lunch AND dinner, and now I do feel a real need for change.

In terms of training I don’t do anything more strenuous than a short run, which a post-workout banana covers just fine. It remains to be seen how longer bouts of exercise affect me…

Day 2: Reading up more on paleo, I discover  all legumes are banned. No beans. I literally had cans and cans lined up on the kitchen counter to make a big batch of chili con carne! No sweat, old bean.

Also, no dairy is allowed, so my buffala mozzarella yesterday wasn’t caveman kosher either, in spite of the fact that trying to milk a buffalo is a pretty Neanderthal thing to do. Crud. Two days in and I’m failing. There’s a learning curve to this, clearly. 

I buy a spiralizer to make zucchini “pasta” for dinner and find it surprisingly edible. The kids threaten to go on hunger strike, then devour almost an entire cheesecake with raspberry coulis for dessert while I watch. 

Day 3: Weight-lifting after an English breakfast goes well. A banana, a date and some walnuts plus lemon water with a shot of flax seed oil replaces my usual (milk-based) protein shake. So far so good. 

In the afternoon the kids have an hour each of breakdance (L) and hiphop (R) with an hour in between, so the plan is to run while they dance. First hour is no problem, the second one I struggle, but more because I’m tired from this morning than anything else. And three workouts in a day is a fair amount, caveman or no. 

Day 4: Brought carrots, strawberries, dates and walnuts to work to tidy me over until lunch. Worked well. 

Dinner I’m invited to an Italian friend whom I’ve completely forgotten to inform about my new habits. Shit! In my mind’s eye I see a mountain of Parmesan-powdered pasta looming, followed by troughs of tiramisu, but my gracious host is very understanding, and beyond the guilty pleasure of a smallish plate of spaghetti vongole I don’t stray from the path. 

Day 7: I want to test myself (and the diet), to see if no carbs for a week will mean bonking when keeping up a sustained effort. So I do an hour of swimming (2k) followed by a three hour walk (13k), stop for lunch, then go biking one hour and a bit (25k). Admittedly this isn’t anywhere near as much as a marathon or triathlon, but I do it all without getting particularly tired or feeling any need for carbs. Yay!

Day 9: 16k run. No problem. 

Day 10: Becoming accustomed to eating “nuts and roots”, as my sister put it. Breakfast is dates and cashew nuts, carrots and hummus, plus a couple of eggs. Apart from the coffee, it feels like something the first guy to climb down from the trees might have eaten. He probably didn’t read his New York Times daily briefing while doing so, but so what?

Day 12 I run equal parts nuts (pecan, walnuts and cashew) and medjoul dates in a blender to create the simplest and best “cake” ever (1 cup of each; calories: approximately 1 gazillion). Who said troglodytes didn’t know how to party?

Ate it all in one sitting, and a good thing too, because Day 13 I swim 3,000m for the first time since I was 18. And then do an hour of weights.   

Day 14: Brunch with a friend. Half of what they serve is bread, or sugar, or both. I try a teaspoon of tiramisu (which I normally adore) and it’s so sweet I can hardly bring myself to swollow. Luckily the other half is made up of yummy veggie dishes, so emerge quite sated.

In the afternoon I run a half marathon on nothing but water. 1:52:50. Good time, given previous day’s workouts. Still don’t feel the need to refuel during the run. Scales show I’ve lost three kilos in two weeks.  Not a bad first half! 

—–

(A friend objected that people get paleo wrong, in that they eat meat a lot more often than our palaeolithic forefathers and -mothers did; this is an objection I would say is probably correct. Even so, I’m buying a lot more veg than usual, and I feel good: slimmer, lighter, never quite as ravenous nor as zonked out before or after meals as I normally get.)

Great, gravity-defying tits 

I’m so sorry. You came here hoping for mammaries, didn’t you? 

No can do, I’m afraid. But despair not. Today was a day of wonders greater than surgically enhanced bosoms. Today was the day when the hatchlings from the nest of great tits in my hedge took the great leap into the void, and I was there to watch it. 

Think about it for a second. Your whole life you’ve been confined to a cosy bed, your parents bringing you yummy, wormy treats all day long, and then suddenly this urge strikes you: I must throw myself into the air and soar. It’s a crazy notion, but it might just work, right?

Wrong. There’s a steep learning curve to flying even if you’re born to do it, it seems. The three chicks are emphatically not good at it. They crash into things, miscalculate distances and generally make, well, tits of themselves in the process. It’s painful to watch, really. 

They call to one another and their parents, but there’s nothing the elder generation can do but watch as their offspring fail Aviation 101. One particularly unlucky fellow smacks into the trunk of the crab apple tree where the rest have managed to congregate, and gets irrevocably trapped in the undergrowth. 

I watch it struggle for a long time, reluctant to intervene, but in the end there’s nothing I can do but pick it up. It’s the tiniest little thing, short wings and scruffy head, but it’s plucky and perky, and stays on my hand without a worry in the world, seemingly sunning itself and calling to the rest of the family as if to say “Check ME out!” (Tits do that).

I have to nudge it to finally convince it to hop onto a branch of the tree, but once reunited – and having received a restorative maggot from mom or dad – it seems content to continue its aviary adventures. 

Me, I spend the rest of the morning at a respectful distance, listening to their calls from afar, a big, big smile on my face, thankful that my garden gives me such moments of unadulterated pleasure. If you can’t fly yourself, then surely the next best thing is to watch the next generation do it?

Three great tits. Not a caption you’d normally want to see.

May, me eat meat.

Urgh. Gruff. What is this M&M’s of which you speak?


Remember the bit in Pulp Fiction where Marcellus Wallace promised to get medieval on someone’s ass? Always sounded like a good threat to me. (I imagine it would involve building cathedrals and trading in relics…) 

However, the whole world seems to be hellbent on going much further back in time, with Trump wanting to bomb everyone into primordial soup (presumably to level with his intellectual discours). So in keeping with that spirit, I figured the month of May might be a good time to challenge myself in a new way: by getting Stone Age on my own ass. 

It’s not as mad as it seems. I’m not proposing to go live naked in a cave and hunt mastodons for breakfast (although that would be fun, too), no, what I will do is go on a Paleo diet for a month, to see what happens. Paleo is essentially about eating the way our earliest ancestors did, in an attempt to get away from starch, sugar and carbs – something which those early hunter-gatherers didn’t find much of on their menu.*

It will require quite the change to my eating habits: no more oatmeal and milk for breakfast, no pasta, beer or pizza post long runs, no sushi on Fridays, and certainly no sneaky Haegen-Daaz ice cream orgies late at night. 

I’m getting hungry just writing about these guilty pleasures, and chances are you are, too, which is due to the fact that our bodies are hard-wired to like this kind of food. The problem is it used to be a very rare treat back in the palaeolithic, whereas now there’s sugar everywhere, and our bodies cannot deal with such quantities of the stuff – hence diabetes, obesity, cardio-vascular diseases; the list goes on and on.

The physical effects of switching to paleo are interesting for another reason too, because after a while – anything from a few days to a few weeks – the body goes into a state where it stops craving carbs and starts using fat as its  prime source of fuel. This will supposedly make you much more efficient in long distance races, as the body’s supply of fat is vastly bigger than its stores of sugar (the difference between your muffin top and the muffin you just ate, if you will). 

Now, I experimented with this prior to running Ultravasan, but chickened out during the race. But my triathlon is coming up, and if I can do that without craving sugar then this diet must be the real McCoy. 

As always, there will be an update afterwards to account for how I did during the challenge – the practical aspects of it as well as any changes to my physique/performance. Now, what’s the best way to cook mastodon for breakfast?
————-

*This sounds like an excellent idea to me, particularly since some studies show dementia to be caused by an accumulated inability to break down sugar, similar to diabetes, and I really don’t want to go down that path. 

Majestic Madeira

After Pemba and Mallorca, my island-hopping circumnavigation of Africa has taken me to Madeira, off the northwestern coast of the continent. Unlike no man, Madeira is an island, but also the name of the entire archipelago, somewhat confusingly. 

Known as the Isles of the Blessed to the Ancient Romans (although no one knows who the blessed in question were), Madeira has been part of Portugal for most of the last 500 years, but geographically speaking it is a part of Africa – and geographically this is probably the most dramatic landscape I’ve ever seen; the volcanic mountains rise up steeply everywhere, and verdantly lush jungle covers every square metre not claimed by man. This is Sardinia on steroids, a place where Kong might feel at home. 

Funchal, the main city, is my base. It rises up the mountainsides in a natural amphitheatre facing out towards the sea. This means the whole town is terraced, with houses literally being built on top of one another – a car parked on the roof of a house, or a house where the entrance is on the topmost floor because it’s perched on an outcrop far below; these are common sights – and traversing it is calf-killing business. 

On my first day I want to see the Monte palace gardens, which lie at the top of the town. There’s a funicular that takes people up there, but the asking price is staggeringly high (much like the gardens) so I make my way on foot from downtown. Three kilometres of hiking and over half a vertical kilometre later, I arrive at the gates, legs shaking and dripping with perspiration, questioning my sanity.

The gardens – first created by a British consul – were beautiful and well worth it, however, with bulbous clouds of bougainvilleas spilling out over the paths, palm trees and jacarandas and tulip trees and African lilies and Austin roses and bottlebrush flowers and endless arrays of other plants. Azaleas the size of trees, ferns taller than I am, and water features everywhere. It was a sight to behold, once my breathing and heartbeat were back to normal. 

There is a lovely little church next to the gardens, where the last Austro-Hungarian emperor rests (having lived the last few months of his life in exile here after he lost his empire), and his grave was filled with ribbons bearing greetings like “our last emperor” in German and Czech. Some people never learn.

The only other claim to fame for the church (beyond having the best views and the sweatiest congregation of all time) ought to be its altarpiece, which consisted of a printed picture of a painting of Jesus with the words “Jesus, eu confio em Vós” printed in Times New Roman (italics) on it. Why anyone thought this a good idea, I don’t know. It looked like the religious equivalent of the first Christmas card you ever DIY’d online. A far cry from the faux perspective cupola in Gozo, it was. 

Pro-empire statements to the left, pro-EU statements to the right…

Below the church are the famous wicker toboggans that tourists are ferried down the mountain in by surprisingly beer-bellied Portugeezers wearing white outfits and jaunty straw hats, nattering away while the tourists shriek with delight. The asphalt is worn silky smooth by their passage. It looks fun, but the prices are as steep as the roads, so having recovered somewhat, I walked back down again. 

This was a fitting overture to the main reason for my coming to Madeira. I want to hike the levadas. Levadas are ingenious works of engineering that the Portuguese set about creating immediately upon discovering the island (It was known to the Romans but subsequently lost to history, before Portuguese seafarers “rediscovered” it in 1419, and never mind that it was inhabited by runaway slaves and others when they did.). For five hundred years they have expanded this network of aqueducts hewn out of the cliff-face to channel fresh water from natural sources in the centre of the island out towards more habitable areas. 

Today, they make for perfect hiking trails, taking wanderers straight into the laurissilva forests that cover much of the centre of the island – it is literally a walk in prehistoric environs, as this type of laurel trees (many of them a thousand years old) covered large swathes of Europe tens of thousands of years ago, but only continue to exist here nowadays due to the island’s unique climate.

And so I find a company that takes small groups of people into the mountains to hike the most scenic routes. I had initially planned on bringing my tent and thru-hiking the island from one end to the other, but that didn’t seem possible, so here I am, doing the light version, coming home to a bed and breakfast every night instead of camping out.

First off is Levada do Rei, the king’s levada, or the king of levadas, I’m not sure which – my Portuguese being somewhat nonexistent. The hiking is easy as can be, but it’s not for the faint of heart. More often than not there is a ledge no more than fifty centimetres wide between the levadas and a drop-off of dizzying height. Fifty or even a hundred metres below, the roar of the river can be heard, and one false move will send you tumbling. It’s a puckering thought, and the last to go through the mind of many a slave (before the rest of them did) – as they were often forced to work on these projects (a fact that guidebooks find convenient to gloss over).

Trail with built-in shower.

 The levada goes six kilometres inland, through the most dramatically inhospitable terrain imaginable – once even inside a waterfall – to finally end in a gully where every leaf and frond is dripping water into the stream. Having left the group far, far behind, I explore the area, have my lunch in a spot that looks like it’s straight out of the Jurassic, and a bit of a rest before setting out again. I finally reencounter them ten minutes away from the gully. Possibly this group hiking thing isn’t for me…

On the way back, the guide drops me five hundred metres from my hotel. Whether it’s punishment for having strayed from the group, or just bad service, I don’t know. 

The next day, the pickup is fifty minutes late due to no-shows, and the guide (another one) is in an understandably foul mood. I try to not let it affect me, but he is frankly rude, repeating “I’m sorry but it’s not my fault”, when no one has claimed as much. The drive across the island is breathtaking, climbing up these alp-like jungle-clad mountains that dwarf everything humans can ever hope to create. 

We reach today’s levada, and I go on ahead again, leaving the group behind, enjoying the solitude and the different fauna of these higher altitudes. Here, it’s tree heathers and laurels forming a roof over the path, ferns are back to normal size, but blueberry bushes tower above me, and the odd wild geranium brightens the shade, while little trout swim in the levada by my side. It’s lovely.

I reach the halfway point of the “four hour” trail in under an hour, and spend a pleasant while by a beautiful waterfall and rock pool reminiscent of the ones I plunged into in Switzerland when canyoning, sharing my lunch with a chaffinch that happily takes pieces of cheese from my fingers. 

Who do you finch took the picture…?

By the time I’m done, the others have arrived, but trundling back the same way doesn’t appeal to me, and after some talking to the guide he grudgingly gives me leave to take a circular path. This is proper hiking – all roots and rocks, not strolling along a concrete sidewalk – and I nearly slip a couple of times, but in the end I’m back by the minibus well before the rest of the group. 

By this time the guide’s temperament and the false marketing combined have most of the hikers grumbling, so he takes us on an extra loop of a kilometre through an area destroyed by forest fire last year. It’s difficult to know how to react: on the one hand he is trying to make good on the company’s overblown promise, on the other hand it’s not like we’re just looking to walk any old where just for the sake of it. And he’s clearly pissed off, so that even if he is genuinely looking to do something for us, no one feels inclined to take him up on his offer. 

In the end we call it a day, and I say nothing, but a couple of exchanged e-mails later I’m looking at a third day at a third of the original asking price. Seems fair. 

Next day couldn’t have been more different: the pickup is on the dot, the guide Duarte is a real Mensch who has me pegged in seconds. “You go on your own, you fast”. And so I do. We go into the mountains proper, to hike between the two highest peaks on the island, Pico do Areeiro and Pico Ruivo, both over 1,800 metres. The path used to take in a third peak, but it’s been closed to hikers since a rockslide obliterated a stretch of it – a stark reminder that geological time is now. 

It’s an old path that locals on the north side of the island used to ferry their wares to the south side market place, however unlikely that sounds. Nowadays at least it’s paved, and a good thing too, as the ever-present tufa pebbles make for easy slipping. 

It’s hard going but incredibly beautiful: the path snakes its way up and down the sides of mountains, balancing on razor edge crests and burrowing through sheer rock. The fauna here consists of heather trees and broom, and the ground is covered by alpines such as indigenous orchids, buttercups, saxifrage and sedums, with oversized bumblebees brumming about. It’s overwhelming in its splendour. 

What’s more, it is all to be a part of the Madeira Island Ultra Trail tomorrow, so every so often there are waymarkers attached to the scant protective wires. I doff my sweaty cap in the direction of the runners: the race is 115 kilometres across the island, and I would not want to try to run many of the metres I cover here today…! (I did 15k today, with 1k elevation loss and 1k ditto gain. The X-trail is four times as much. Lord knows what the MIUT equivalent is!)

I predictably arrive long before the rest of our party, so when they do show, Duarte simply tells me to go on for another hour and then meet them back at the Pico. I happily do, taking in the utter isolation that is the Village of the Nuns way below in the next valley. It’s hard to imagine a more secluded place, and it looks quite magical, nested in between the mountains, but alas, the clouds come in and cover the nuns (and everything else) from my prying eyes, which I take as a signal to turn around and go find my posse, incredibly pleased with my day. 

I spoke more to Duarte on the way back, as he was understandably interested in the previous day’s debacle, but he also tipped me off about a longer trek that he recommended I do, even going so far as to find me the right bus to take, so my last day will be spent hiking properly on my own, just as I had originally envisaged. 

And so my last morning sees me boarding a local bus that will take me up the Ribeira Brava valley (the same one that blew me away two days ago). It takes its time getting there, but I enjoy every minute of the two hour drive, moving at a stately place down the coast, the driver navigating hairpin bends while I gaze in amazement at the landscape and all the gardens. 

The bus stops twice for ten-minute breaks – once to give passengers a chance to take a look at Cabo Girão, a glass-bottomed walkway over a cliff that drops 580m straight down into the ocean, and once, at eleven o’clock sharp, for coffee. My father would have approved – of the latter. 

When the driver drops me off, it’s in a place that almost defies description. At 1,500m, its high above the valley floor, offering breathtaking views, but unlike previous hikes, I move along this path in glorious solitude. For the first hour I encounter no one at all. Lizards rustling in the undergrowth, birdsong and the burbling brooks are the only sounds I hear as I walk through the dappled shade of a eucalyptus forest, the warm aroma of the trees’ esoteric oils filling my every breath. Truly, this is forest bathing at its finest. 

Jump in at the deep end!

By noon, just as the trail starts ascending, I come upon my first runner. He seems in good shape, considering he’s been running for twelve hours by now, but he’s only done some 50 kilometres, and yesterday’s trail is still ahead of him. We talk a little, and I encourage him in his efforts, offering a few choice tips – I am the author of Seven Tips for a Painful Marathon and a successful ultra marathon runner myself, after all! ?

After that, I overtake more and more runners as I make my way up to Pico Grande, and then steeply down the next valley to the village of Curral das Freiras. 

See the people on the trail?

I make it to the village and down two cold beers in quick succession at the local bar (at the very fair price of 1€ per bottle), thankful that I haven’t traversed 65km, nor have 45 left to go. There’s only one problem: the only bus back to Funchal isn’t  leaving for another two hours. 

I arrived just before the halfway break-off point of the race – any runner who hasn’t made it there by 15:30 isn’t allowed to continue – and this proves to be a stroke of luck for me, as the volunteers begin to pack up and get ready to leave. I start talking to a group of five women all in MIUT sweaters, and they offer me a lift back to Funchal. 

 I would have been super happy with any ride, but the women turn out to be sweet, chatty and very interesting (children of emigrants to South Africa and Venezuela who have returned to their “homeland”). I simply couldn’t have asked for a better end to my holiday here. 

Now if only I could go to S:ta Helena next week…

Monastic Mallorca

I’m in a cloister on the east coast of Mallorca, having taken vows and joined an order. At least that’s what it feels like. 

Joining the Celestial Order of the Brethren and Sistren of the All Inclusive Resort is a strange experience. Much like its religious counterparts, life for the inhabitants of this enclave is strictly regulated, and therein lies its attractiveness to the many seekers of enlightenment who come knocking on its doors. Pilgrims looking to lay down their worldly worries and lead a life of contemplation find their way here, much like real monks and nuns joining monasteries and nunneries, albeit for rather different reasons. 

The grounds of this cloister are littered with cold water pools, where the penitent are encouraged to immerse themselves as much as possible, to purge their carnal sins from their earthly vessels. To ease our way, there is a plethora of contraptions aimed at luring us to stay in longer than is strictly good for you – the favourites being a bouncy hill and a slide of quite breathtaking steepness and height. The kids love it, and only give up their watery self-flagellation when their lips are blue and their bodies shaking. Then we retreat to loungers and allow the sun’s rays to beat us into submission until the cycle is repeated anew.

Penetenziagite…!

Of course there are certain differences from a normal cloister. Our cells are more adorned than I’m led to understand is usually the case, and the refectory where we take our two daily meals isn’t exactly an oasis of silence, nor does it feature divine choirs whose hymns allow the spirit to soar – it’s more like a high school cafeteria into which has been let loose a battery of beastly bairns of all sizes. It’s the main attraction for families with bawling baboo– small children, after all, the fact that in this microcosm no normal chores have to be carried out. No cooking, no cleaning, no leaving the premises for any reason at all unless you really want to. Add to that the anestesia provided in liquid form at all meals, and you begin to understand the appeal.

Watching this antropological experiment unfold is certainly an eye opener. The tired look on the faces of so many parents, the way they barely grunt at each other beyond what is necessary to ensure their offspring is fed and dressed and slathered in sun lotion, makes me feel alot better about my own parenting (and previous marital) efforts. The singles I encounter here are universally in agreement that ours is the happier solution.

Overall it makes for a radically different holiday from my last experience of Mallorca, when it was just my brother and I, and we stayed in a hermit’s quarters, walked in the mountains all day, often not encountering another soul for hours – but to my surprise I find this existence does offer me a kind of solace. In spite of the abundance of obese, tattooed and over-cooked humanity surrounding us, and the constant sound of squealing kids, it’s summertime (at a time when my family in Sweden is dealing with seven inches of snow) and the living here is easy. It’s not the kind of holiday I would choose, but it is the holiday the children wanted – bathing, sun and ice cream being their top criteria for what constitutes a good trip – and so I’m happy to enjoy this for what it is, a brief break from my mortal toil, knowing as I do – much like a real monk – that the end is neigh.

Who knows, I might even resort to resorts again in the future.

Having the time of my life


“People’s life do flash before their eyes right before they die. The process is know as ‘living’.”  – Terry Pratchett

I don’t want to come to the end of my life feeling I haven’t accomplished and experienced as much as I might have. In a way, that realisation is the main reason for this blog; by charting my adventures and self-imposed challenges I can look back and see how well I’m doing in this regard. 

This year, I set out to achieve measurable progress in a number of specific areas, and I determined I would go about it differently from what I have done previously.

Whereas in the past I set lofty goals for how many books I should read, how many irregular verbs or piano pieces I should learn – and then not doing it – I now avoid such targets and focus instead on ensuring there are slots in my day for the activities in question. 

This means I plan as much of my time as I can in advance to ensure I get everything I want done, writing a schedule for the day; one half hour is devoted to reading non-fiction, the next to studying French, the one after that to playing the piano, et cetera. 

In fact, it’s the same principle I’ve been applying to travelling; by planning trips in advance – giving them an allotted time – I ensure they get done. I just never thought of using the same principle in my day-to-day life before. 

Now, three months isn’t a long time, but I’m really pleased to report the method of structuring my time is bearing fruit already. I’m not a machine, so the actual time I spend on these activities often doesn’t correspond exactly to the schedule, but even so the results are better than I dared hope for: in the last three months I have logged over 50 hours each of reading, piano playing and French studies, plus 150 hours of workouts. This works. 

In fact it works so well that I have decided to add another activity to the list: chess. I hadn’t played for a long time when a colleague challenged me to a match in February. This rekindled my love of the game, and I haven’t looked back since. In Pemba, I even played a Danish national champion and won 2-0 (he was a national kite-surfing champion, but never mind…).

If you want to play me, I’m on chess.com – improving my game for half an hour every day, as per schedule.

Perfect Pemba

Spot the danger?

 

Just off the coast of East Africa, a thirty minute flight north of Zanzibar, lies the tropical volcano island of Pemba. And if that sounds like the first sentence of an adventure story, it is precisely because it is. 

It takes an effort to get here; from Brussels to Istanbul, from Istanbul to Zanzibar (via Kilimanjaro), and then one last tiny plane to Pemba domestic airport, an airstrip with a shed made of corrugated metal for a terminal. And even then the journey isn’t over. We’re picked up by a driver and taken on a bumpy ride to the northernmost tip of the island, where we finally arrive at one of the two resorts in existence here, the Gecko Nature Lodge.

You see, unlike its more famous neighbour to the south, Pemba is largely devoid of tourism, and all the better for it. This is also the reason why we have come here; its relative obscurity is one of the factors explaining why the surrounding waters are home to some of the best dive sites in the world. Corals are dying everywhere because of global warming and over-exposure, but here they are still perfectly healthy, and there is an abundance of them, too.

After last year’s less than impressive diving adventures in the Andaman Sea and on Gozo, my friend Lesli (of Sardinian and Appalachian fame) and I have high hopes for this place, and it doesn’t disappoint. The place is right on the coast, next to a local village, and surrounded on all sides by encroaching jungle of the kind you’d expect Tarzan to feel at ease in. 

Our hosts, Russian Ekaterina and French Lucas, have only been here for two months, but make us feel at home right away. The fact that there is only one more diver here at first makes it feel almost as if we are their personal guests rather than paying customers, which is lovely. 

We’re exhausted from our travels, and hide out from the midday heat in the guest huts that lie hidden in amongst the mango trees and banana palms and other vegetation. It’s a shock to the system, suddenly being subjected to heat and humidity on a tropical scale, but as the afternoon wears on, we acclimatise ourselves, and when the sun sets over the African continent we are seated on the water’s edge, sundowners at hand, ready for the spectacle to begin in every sense of the word. 

Light, camera, action!

 

The next day we start with an early breakfast of eggs and freshly baked bread out in the open (but under a roof made of bamboo and fronds to hide us from the elements), then we gather our gear and head out in the rim boat to the dive sites. 

I feel the usual excitement rise within as we follow the coast and take in the sapphire waters and emerald forests. Dara, our fellow diver from Ireland, has been here several days already, and Lesli is three times more experienced than I, but I’m always a little apprehensive when diving; it can be dangerous. 

We kit up, buddy up, and prepare to go in. Lucas warns us that the visibility is so good that it can actually be a problem; divers used to less impressive conditions might mistakenly think they are in shallower waters than is actually the case, simply because they’re not used to seeing so well. That doesn’t sound so terrible, but can be a real issue, as going too deep causes the body to accumulate more nitrogen than it can take, effectively poisoning your blood in a way that can kill you.

One last security check, and we roll backwards into the water. On the divemaster’s command, we decend into the blue, and like that, we arrive in a different world.

There’s a lagoon formed by the main island and two smaller ones, Njau and Fundu, and the best diving is found right on the edge of the islands and in the two gaps that lead into the lagoon, where the tide has furrowed underwater channels that are lined with an astonishing plethora of corals.

There are fire corals, so red they look like glowing lava, cream-coloured porcelain corals, orange staghorn corals, sky-blue corals shaped like trees and pink fans and black chimneys and yellow bubble baths and sponges and a hundred other different shapes and sizes and hues, and nearly every one of them is favoured by one or more different species of fish: Tiny multicoloured nudiebranks and fiercely territorial clown fish hide in amongst anemones, parrot fish munch on their favourite calcified snacks, shoals of golden glass fish crowd swim-throughs, giant moray eels and lobsters and mantis shrimp are backed into crevices, poised to attack if you get too close, camouflaged scorpion fish lie motionless amongst the corals, deadly to touch and all but invisible. The list goes on and on. Add to this that you are floating as if suspended in the air, and it’s an experience so different as to be almost impossible to explain to someone who has not had it. 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so…

 

Dara (who dives every week) and Lesli (with her daily yoga exercises) stay down like a couple of mermaids. Me, I’m using up air like I’m trying to corner the market. The excitement and adrenaline doesn’t help, but it’s all good. Never have I dived in such pristine waters, in such a rich flora and fauna. I surface with an enormous grin on my face. 

The build-up of nitrogen from our first dive necessitates a surface interval of an hour or so, so the captain – a local fisherman who finds all the dive spots with eerie accuracy – lands us on a secluded beach where we bask in the sun, have water melon and pancakes and tea before heading out for a second dive. After that, it gets too hot, so we make for home and a well deserved lunch. 

In the meantime a family trio from Argentina (a father and his adult son – Juan Carlos II and III – and daughter Jennie) have arrived, and over the next four days we will be the only guests at the lodge. Father and son joins us diving, and Jennie, who turns out to be a TV star back home in Argentina, takes lessons in the afternoons to get her certificate. 

It’s a simple routine, but a very pleasant one. In the mornings we go diving, after lunch (and a siesta to hide from the worst heat) we go exploring. We rent bikes and kayaks to see more of the island. We traverse the jungle with a guide and see silk monkeys and crested hornbills (think Rowan Atkinson in The Lion King) and flying foxes (a type of giant fruit bat), we paddle along the coast and into the lagoon and its mangrove forests – the trees look like giant spiders with their hundreds of air roots holding them in place on the edge of the tides, and the volcanic rock walls are alive with hundreds of crabs, clambering along the razor-edged overhangs as if it were the easiest thing in the world. 

Almost as exotic is the experience of interacting with the locals here. When I went running through the village I had a chorus of children calling me. For some strange reason they shout “bye bye” by way of greeting, and they laugh and smile and stare at me, obviously thinking it a very strange sight. If I stopped and tried to talk to them they grew very shy, and were likely to run away, but sometimes they ran after me instead. Once, when biking, we passed a group of serious-looking young girls in beautiful scarves and dresses all lined up and waving at us, and I blew them a kiss. The fact that children often marry very young and that polygamy is allowed is difficult to comprehend for a westerner, so for a moment I was wary of having committed a serious faux-pas, but much to my relief it resulted in an explosion of giggles. Even the adults seemed genuinely pleased, much like I expect they would have if a monkey had performed a particularly good trick. It’s a strange feeling to be find yourself part of a tiny minority, and quite the eye-opener.

Me and my seven new wives. Not.

 

And so the days go by. The place lives up to its name, as I discover when I find a gecko inside the toilet bowl one morning. At least it wasn’t a poisonous centipede, or a cloud of winged termites, or a bushbaby – all of which have found their way inside huts in the past. 

A couple of the dives are scary, because the currents are unpredictable, and toss and turn us every which way, making you feel as if inside a washing machine during the spin cycle. When that happens there is little to be done apart from hiding from it as best you can, but sometimes even that isn’t possible, and you get taken for a ride. 

The very last day on Pemba is a case in point. By now the Argentinians and Dara are gone, replaced by a Danish father and son. One of them has difficulty decending, and before he manages the current has taken us to another spot than the one we meant to dive. Before we realise this we are down to 28 metres instead of the fifteen we thought we would bottom out at. And the second dive that day, the very last dive of the week, is a wall dive that sees us drift so fast that the group becomes separated. It’s not unlike a rollercoaster, in fact, with the current pushing us up and down as we rush by the corals.

Eventually I get low on air and find a rock to hold on to for dear life while I do my safety stop, and when I finally come up I find that the two Danes are already back in the boat, having abandoned the dive earlier, while L&L are a hundred metres away, dragged there by the current. It’s a humbling experience, and one I will always remember as The Floomride. Even so, it was The. Best. Diving. Ever.

A Great White Swede.

 

We spend one last day on Zanzibar, in Stonetown, a place that will forever live in infamy as the biggest slave market in the world. 

The slavery museum is a moving memorial to the untold millions of victims of this heinous crime against humanity.  Raiding parties would find their way far inland, so that by the time they came here, slaves would have been marched for many months already, shackled together like animals day and night, and subjected to all manner of atrocities along the way. 

Having been taken across the sound to Zanzibar the traders would cull their stock, throwing the ones that didn’t seem worth it off the ships to drown rather than having to pay duties for them. The cargo would then be incarcerated in tiny, overcrowded cellars underground for a couple of days to weed out all but the strongest, who would finally be taken to the market to be inspected, bought and sold like so much cattle (or worse, since I gather cattle rarely get used for sexual purposes by their owners), before being taken by their new masters to all the corners of the world, for – lest we forget – this was a global commercial endeavour. It beggars belief. Hitler, Stalin and King Leopold are all amateurs by comparison. 

And with that sobering reentry into civilisation, plus a parting gift of torrential rain and ditto diarrhoea, Zanzibar speeds us on our long, separate ways home. 
??????

All photos curtesy of Lesli Woodruff

300: a race report

King Leonidas, of chocolate fame.


One of my goals for this year is to run the equivalent of a marathon per week, so why not get an actual marathon in early on, I thought, as I sat on my cozy couch, slightly woozy from the heat of the fireplace and the inner fire lit by a fine single malt. Why not indeed?

One month later and I’m in a pine forest on the outskirts of Genk, in the Belgian rump region of Limburg. It’s cold and has just stopped raining. Looks like it could start again any moment, too. 

There are three hundred of us (the maximum number of participants allowed in the Louis Persoon Memorial Marathon), lined up like lambs for the slaughter, or a band of brothers (and a few sisters), and maybe that’s why, or maybe it’s just the mood I’m in these days, the first of the dystopian nightmare that is the Trump regime, but my thoughts go to Thermopylae. 

The tradition of running marathons comes from the first Persian invasion of Greece, when Pheidippides was sent to tell the citizens of Athens about the victory at Marathon. This wasn’t the Persians’ only attempt, however. They came back for more, and when they did, they came via the Hot Gates (i.e. Thermopylae), a narrow pass through the mountains. 

There, three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas made a stand, and held off an infinitely superior Persian force long enough that democracy could live and flourish. They knew they would perish in the process, but they did it anyway. 

It’s a little like that today. The three hundred of us fight through a seemingly endless onslaught of kilometres, battling it out up and down long inclines, pushing against the waves of oncoming Persian pines, lap after lap. 

The seven laps of the race are essentially made up of three kilometres uphill, then another three back down, both taking their toll. A month isn’t enough to prepare for a new record, and after the (still fairly good) first half, I realise that it won’t happen. I can’t help but feel a little defeated. What’s the point? 

My feet hurt so much from the repeated impact of poor soles against the asphalt that I’m forced to walk even if I could have run otherwise. Dehydration proves another obstacle. I simply hadn’t taken into account how much more you sweat wearing multiple layers, so my muscles start cramping, and when I pee it’s the colour of Earl Grey. Nutrition becomes a problem, too, as I get heartburn, which turns every breath into Greek fire, but thankfully a Pepsid allows me to keep that more or less under control. 

The rain holds off, but the overcast skies stay with us all day. When told the Persian archers were so numerous that their volleys of arrows would darken the sky and block out the sun, the Spartans’ only comment was “then at least we will be fighting in the shade”. I try to channel that super-cool attitude in the face of hardship, but my heart isn’t in it.

But then THAT’s not the way to take on a challenge like this. As the Spartan queen told Leonidas, “Come home with your shield, or on it”; quitting simply is not an option. With that in mind I make it a point to go into these races with three goals, where the first one is – always – to finish, the second one is a reasonably good time, and the third a personal best. 

I’m nowhere near a PB, but that’s ok. I came fairly close to the second, which was sub-four hours, and I reached the most important one. I persevered. Maybe sometimes that’s all one can hope for. We need to fight seemingly insurmountable odds, knowing that something is impossible and doing it anyway, sacrificing for the greater good. 

And whatever doesn’t kill you…

Before and after. No way of telling how bad it was in between…

 
P.S. At Thermopylae there is an inscription in a rock that’s been there ever since the battle. It says, simply, “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”

Words to live and die by. I recovered from the race by eating a whole box of chocolates. Leonidas, of course.

A Year of Wanders, a Year of Wonders

Travel one lap around the sun. It doesn’t matter what you do, it will take you a year. But what you do with that time matters. Some people will be content with just completing the trip, but I want to make it a real trip – making sure that I have the time of my life during my life time, if you will. 

And so I will set out goals, much like last year, to ensure that my time is well spent. My credo hasn’t changed: I want to  travel, have new experiences, go on adventures, challenge myself and develop as a person.

One new experience/trip/adventure per month worked well 2016, so I will endeavour to do the same this year. 

In terms of travels I’ve already got trips to Malaga and Zanzibar and the French alps planned, and I’ve got my eyes on Prague, Basel and possibly Belize or Honduras as well. More will no doubt materialise. 

As for new experiences, I really want to go hiking/kayaking and combine it with camping out in a tent – something which I haven’t done since I was a kid, and certainly never on my own. Kayaking on interconnected lakes in Sweden. Or hiking the Pyrenees, the Czech Republic, Romania… if this turns into a year of wanders I wouldn’t be sorry. 

Diving with whale sharks and other megafauna is another experience high on my list: we’ll see what Zanzibar can deliver. Cave diving the cenotes in Mexico is another ambition.

And then there’s delta wings. I really want to learn how to fly one of those. And kite surfing – on water or snow, it really looks stupefyingly awesome. Parachuting is in there, too. So I’ve got quite a few potential new experiences lined up. 

What about challenges? First of all, I want to run a marathon every week. That’s not as mad as it sounds, as it means an average of six kilometres per day, and I did manage to average four daily in 2016. Still, sounds impressive when you put it like that, eh?

I improved my marathon record by 40 minutes last year. I don’t see myself repeating that particular feat, but maybe I can chip away another 5-10 minutes off my PB; we’ll make that a goal as well. First attempt: Genk marathon in January. Then Stockholm in June, perhaps. And I’ve signed up for the Courchevel X-trail ultra marathon in August, too. Maybe I can combine that with hiking in the alps?

In order to have a fitness goal that encourages more than just running, however, I have signed up for an Ironman 70.3 in July – I figure this will encourage me to bike and swim more than would otherwise happen. A bike marathon per week sounds about right. How much swimming? I don’t know. An hour per week might be a minimum. Scary? You bet. 

I still want to do more yoga – finding the right teacher is the main challenge here, but yoga at least I know enough to do a bit on my own. A daily routine would be ideal.

So much for developing and challenging myself physically. Intellectually, I hope to continue to take on new tasks at work, but that’s not something I am in control of. Apart from that, my goals have essentially remained unchanged from last year: I want to read more non fiction, become a better piano player and improve my French. 

Since I didn’t achieve as much as I would have wanted in any of those fields last year, I figure a different approach is called for. Excellence is a habit. Ergo, I need habits that will allow me to reach my goals. Saying I want to learn a piece of music or read so many books or incorporate so many words in my vocabulary isn’t enough – I must set out how much time will be devoted to these activities daily, and what time, and then log it so as to ensure it gets done.

For instance, travelling to and from work by train could be time that is always devoted to reading non fiction – that would be three hours every work week. Days when I’m not working could be scheduled like classes: 30 minutes of reading, studying French and piano playing each day, for example. 

So a typical day off work with the kids at school would have me doing three classes of 30 minutes each, plus on average 1.5 hours working out, and say another 30 minutes of stretching/yoga. That’s 3.5 hours every day taken up by challenges/daily improvement, which is a lot. 

Work days would commence with a daily yoga routine and then I would read when travelling to town and back every day of the week but one, when I would bike. I still have to run 6k per day on average, so would have to squeeze in runs before or after work, plus use the odd lunch hour. I doubt I will be able to muster the energy to do “classes” after work, not all three of them in any event, but maybe one daily at least?

When travelling, some flexibility would be necessary, but I figure I should be able to do at least as much as on work days. 

If it does work, it would mean 52 marathons on foot, as many again on bike, 50 hours of swimming, 150 hours of stretching/yoga, 180 hours or so of reading, say half as many hours practicing piano and French. I’m getting tired just listing it…!

I will try out this approach, and report back. It will be a wonder if I succeed at it all, but then again: Wonders don’t just happen; they generelly take a LOT of hard work. 

We will see how it goes. Here’s to making 2017 a Year of Wonders!

 

20-20 hindsight 


2016 is coming to an end. It seems not long ago that I sat down to set out the goals I had for the year, and now the time has come to summarise what I have accomplished, and what targets I failed to reach. 

I wanted to challenge myself, have new experiences, travel, go on adventures and develop as a person. Overall, I think it’s fair to say I have. 

I overcame my fear of diving, and went not only to Nemo33, but also on two marvellous diving trips, to Thailand and Malta. On top of that I travelled to Mallorca, Luxembourg, Barcelona, London, Leeds, Edinburgh, Sweden, Rome, Switzerland, and Sardinia, so I certainly fulfilled my ambition to go on adventures. 

I challenged myself in other ways than diving: bungee jumping and canyoning demanded overcoming myself mentally; and taking on not one, but two new roles at work has certainly brought new intellectual challenges and opportunities into my life, for which I’m very grateful. 

I tried abstaining from caffeine and alcohol for a month, and lived to tell the tale; I tasked myself with reading more non fiction as a way of contributing to the fight against the dumbing-down of our society; I try to be more mindful of what I eat.

The main challenge of 2016 however was gearing up for the immense task of running an ultra marathon. It took two marathons to prepare for that adventure, along with untold hours of physical exercise, but I did it, and couldn’t be happier with the result. 

Not everything went according to plan, however: my grand design to develop as a piano player looked set to succeed until too much travel meant having to give up on regular lessons, which in turn left me disinclined to practice. 

The same is true for my ambitions to improve my French – I started out well, but a lack of structure meant I let it slip by the wayside, almost without noticing, and I didn’t read as many books as I planned, either.

I didn’t bike as much as I had planned – the lofty goal of 2000 kilometres turned out to be more than twice the distance I actually covered, and I didn’t participate in any kind of Ironman. I did run the 1500 kilometres I had set out to do, however. 

Oh, and I did write about it all here – no mean feat in itself, either.

So, what to learn from all this? First of all the importance of setting goals. I set out to do something every month, and on average I did, even though some months by necessity were more intensive than others. 

Secondly, the need to have clear-cut, measurable targets if you want to achieve something; having UltraVasan as a goal allowed me to plan what I needed to do to reach that level of fitness, week for week. 

Third, to push beyond your comfort zone. If I don’t, I tend to not get anything useful done, but by forcing myself to face up to my fears I have had a much more rewarding year than would otherwise been the case. 

What I take with me most of all going into 2017, then, is that excellence is a habit. No goal is achieved in one great leap, or overnight, but by chipping away at it, you can do wonders. 

Here’s to making next year a Year of Wonders!

Eating order

It’s December already. Who’d have thought way back in January? I’m still working on my to do list, though, which I guess is a result in itself.

I did say I would try something new and challenge myself every month, and since I cannot go travelling (no more holidays, plus December is a busy month as it is), I have decided to challenge myself at home: I will try to improve my eating habits. 


Now, I already eat fairly ok. No eating disorders or anything like that, but altogether too many carbs, too much sugar – and the holiday season hasn’t even begun yet. So… I have begun writing down every last thing that I eat and drink. Nothing fancy, just a list that I keep in my phone. 

To my delight I find that the act of writing it down is in itself really useful, because I can no longer hide from myself what I’m eating. It’s culinary mindfulness, if you will. Knowing I will have to write down whatever I eat, I hesitate to allow myself treats that I would normally turn a blind eye to, or justify as “deserved”.

That last statement is particularly absurd, if you think about it. You don’t “deserve” something unhealthy for having done good. First of all, you’re not a dog, you shouldn’t reward yourself with treats, and secondly, surely a good deed should be rewarded with something good, not something you know is bad for you?

This one simple act has other knock-on effects as well. Suddenly I’m more keen on vegetables and clean protein (vegan ultra runner Scott Jurek’s book Eat and Run helped with the former, if not the latter!) and preparing meals in large batches makes more sense, since having ready-made food at hand reduces the likelihood of my straying from the path, be it at home or at work. 

So Sunday saw me making oven-roasted sweet potatoes and other veggies and frying up lots of lean chicken, and yesterday I made a double batch of lasagna (admittedly a carb fest, but working out hard you need some carbs, too), and I’m looking forward to trying other stuff as well.


I figure the worst is yet to come – Christmas and new year’s aren’t exactly known for being bastions of healthiness, after all – but I reckon this way I will at least think twice before going Cookie Monster on any of the upcoming feasts.

I’m not going to publish the list itself, but I will let you know if it has any effect. I started this month of traditional gluttony at 83,6kg, which is well above what I feel comfortable with. Changing nothing else in terms of training, it will be interesting to see if this one act of documenting my food intake will have any discernible effect on the scales. Can I get down to my match weight of 80kg whilst eating well and orderly? Well, we’ll see. 

One Challenge without fries, coming up!

 

Food for thought

It was 9/11 yesterday. The real 9/11. Trump was elected president. Yet another example of a populist playing on people’s fears and base instincts, but this one now with the power to change the course of history at a pivotal time, crucial for our species’ survival. A denier of climate change. An ingoramous, flaunting human rights and lacking in fundamental decency. The prospect is a grim one. 

The only thing I can see that would have made a difference is education. Learning more about the world around you gives you new perspectives, new insights. It’s the responsibility of each and every human to learn as much as they possibly can, and in doing so, exercise critical thinking, the better to withstand the base appeal of trumped-up alpha baboons offering simplistic solutions (or even just sound bites) to complex problems. 

I can’t shape education policies anywhere much – beyond the local school – but I can at least try to lead by example. As a birthday present to myself I bought ten books that were recommended by TED lecturers; I figured it was as good a way as any to discover titles that I would otherwise never read. Add to that five books that were gifted to me, and you have fifteen (mostly) non-fictional works that I will attempt to read before the end of the year. 50 days, 15 books, equals one book every 3,33 days. 

Tall order? Yes, but I’m going to try even so. Imagine a world in which every single adult read a new work of non-fiction every three days – how much of a chance do you think the Donalds, Le Pens and Borises of the world would have then? Imagine the quantum leap in human understanding, the as-yet untapped potential that might be unleashed for the greater good of humanity. 

Food for thought, that.

—–

The books on my reading list are:

Map Stories (Matteoli)

The old ways (Macfairlaine)

The Art of Being Human (Woodruff)

Eat and Run (Jurek)

A Time of Gifts (Leigh)

Exodus (Collier)

The Singing Neanderthals (Mithen)

Just Mercy (Stevenson)

My bondage and freedom (Douglass)

Lives in Ruins (Johnson)

Easy Company Soldier (Malarkey)

Jimmy Bluefeather (Heacox)

Ankara Witch (Okorafor)

Silence (Endo)

Bit Rot (Coupland)

Which ones are on yours?

Gozo, the Isle of Calypso

I arrive at Malta airport late at night. I’m here to dive off the northern island of Gozo. Having learnt my lesson from Sardinia, I agreed with the dive centre to have someone pick me up and deliver me to my B&B. This turns out to have been a good idea, as I would have had to navigate badly signposted back roads* across both Malta and Gozo to get there. Also, people’s driving here is atrocious**. My taxi driver – a professional chauffeur – is a case in point; he has grasped all the fundamentals of driving apart from steering. He oscillates hither and thither, with no apparent notion of where he belongs on the road. Not even oncoming traffic alters his erratic approach, and I thank the stars it’s close to midnight and not many people about. 

I make it to the B&B at one in the morning, only to be greeted as enthusiastically as I’ve ever been – by a white cat, who purrs her heart out as I pet her – and rather less enthusiastically by the owner, who doesn’t purr (and whom I don’t attempt to pet). 

The next day the dive instructor picks me up and drives me to the north coast. The landscape of Gozo is like the Holy land, arid, stony, terraced, poor. People look remarkably similar, whether beggars or burghers. Someone told me there are twelve family names that are predominant on the islands since the time of the Knights of the Order of St John, and it’s easy to believe when you see how alike people look. It’s also quite eerie, being watched by an unsmiling man on one street corner only to have him (or a close copy) appear at the table next to you, then in a field as you drive past, then in a shop…

And so we go diving. The dives here are all walk-ins, meaning you start from the coast rather than from a boat. The coast is steep rock, however, often dropping five to ten metres straight down into the water, so after traversing salt pans and razor-sharp rock formations you have to clamber down metal ladders to get into the Mediterranean. The first dive goes well, but at the second site local fishermen – who don’t like divers – have sawn off the ladder, making decent difficult and ascent absolutely impossible. 

So we change plans and drive on to another place where we dive into an underwater cave. A million years of stormy weather has carved out a dome inside the rock above the waterline, so you can ascend inside it and breathe the salt-laden air of this secret chamber. It’s even light inside, because the entrance is situated near the surface, which means light is reflected on the sand of the ocean floor of the cave and up into the dome. It’s rather good – just a shame no pirate has had the good sense to hide their treasure in there for us to discover. 

Le grand bleu.

The third and last dive of the day is a wreck dive on the south coast. Poor visibility after the storm last weekend means we swim out and descend into a featureless blue space, only to have the wreck materialise underneath us, like a ghost, which I guess it is. 

It’s all nice, and the people at the dive centre perfectly lovely, but it is rather underwhelming after the Andaman sea. I might have to change my plans for tomorrow, but that’s for later, now all I want is a scoldingly hot shower and All. The. Food. 

Old villages are situated on hilltops here, the better to defend against invaders. Xaghra, where I’m staying, is no exception. Houses are huddled together, limestone and sandstone, all of them coloured in nuances ranging from dirty cream to creamy dirt, nearly all of them with sturdy stone balconies, often enclosed so as to create little extensions to the room, enabling its inhabitants to sit and watch village life from the comfort of their living rooms. 

Having had my shower and a change of clothes, night has fallen, and I imagine unseen eyes (belonging to yet more Maltese clones) following my progress through winding alleys as I make my way to the city square for dinner. It’s easily visible from afar, because that is where the church is, literally mitten im Dorf, as the Germans would have it. 

Mitten im Dorf.

The church is enormous, towering over the village. The vaulted dome is lit, and it reflects off the roofs of the surrounding houses, mere shades in its divine light, further enhancing the impression of dominance. The boom of the bells rings out over the landscape, as insistent, sharp and domineering as the call of mujaheddin in Marrakesh

Once inside, the church’s interiors could match the finest in Rome in its gilded gaudiness, its opulence in stark contrast to the surroundings. And it’s well attended this Tuesday evening, too. None of this should come as a surprise in a country where 80% of inhabitants are practicing Catholics, but I am a little taken aback, even so. Small wonder divorce and abortion are (mostly unwelcome) novelties in this insular world. 

My hunger is more of the body than of the spirit, however, so I set off in search of a pastizi shop. Pastizi are local savoury delicacies, and it’s been impressed upon me by several Maltese colleagues that I must try them. Seeing them is a bit of a shock. Oval pastries tapering to a point at each end, filled with cheese or peas to overflowing, they look like to me like mummified mounds, withered vaginas, brown and brittle to the touch, but the cheesy inside is surprisingly warm, moist and creamy, and I devour them with gusto. 

Erm…….

I break my self-imposed drought of alcohol on the town square, enjoying a draft pint of local lager together with a sampling of other dishes of Maltese cuisine, topped off with home made fig ice cream. It’s sweet, but not too sweet, crumbly but richer than you might have thought, with a note of something that I can’t quite identify juxtaposed against the sugar and cream. Rather like Gozo, I think, the beer having clearly gone to my head. Then I have another one. 

I stagger home, full and content, give the pussy cat a good cuddle, and pass out on my bed well before ten.

I wake at 0430, and can’t get back to sleep, so instead I go running. One of the two reasons I wanted to stay in Xaghra is that Calypso, the nymph that seduced Ulysses, is said to have lived in a cave right next to Ramla l-Hamra, the red beach below the village***. This is where I’m headed. Before six in the morning there is only me, birdsong and the report of rifles, as the happy hunters of Gozo do their damnedest to reduce the birdsong to zero. 

Alas, once I reach the site of the cave, there is a sign informing me that it’s “temporarily closed due to geological movement”. In my experience, when a sign is rusted and the inevitable cafés have turned to ruins, there is nothing temporary about things, and this proves to be the case. Try as I might, I cannot reach the cave. Possibly disheartened by previous experiences, Calypso is not seeing visitors.

There’s nothing for it. I turn and trot back up the hill, just in time for breakfast before the second day of diving begins. I do two dives, and they couldn’t have been more different. The first one marred by incidents, and abandoned before it really begins due to one of the participants having a blackout at fifteen metres, it’s as bad as the second one is good. The sun shines high in the sky, and visibility and colours are therefore very good, and since it’s just me and another diver we explore a long stretch of the coastline, teeming with fishy things. 

I decide to end my diving on a high note, so head back to the village for a quick change of clothes, lunch in the town square and the other reason I picked Xaghra: the Ggantija temples, or Temples of the Giants. There are two of them, and they are right here in this village. Older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, some of the megaliths erected here exceed five metres in length and weigh over fifty tons. 

How people did this 5,500 years ago no one knows, but it is somehow reassuring that people were as ingenious then as they are now. People being people even back then, one can safely assume that Neolithic Monolith Works Ltd. came in over budget and a couple of months late, but that’s another story.  

Neolithic Lego!

The temples are a sight to behold. As so often is the case, all that is known about them is guesswork, but even five and a half millennia after the fact, it’s clear they were built to impress. Standing pairs of stone slabs mark the doorways between chambers, and the way they use perspective and height differences between apses serve to increase the monumentality of the innermost sanctums in quite a sophisticated manner. 

My last excursion for the day takes me to Rabat, the island’s capital that the British impetuously renamed Victoria in honour of the queen during her jubilee, something which the inhabitants never bothered to pay any attention to. Perched high above it is the Citadella, a seemingly impenetrable fortress. And yet it was taken by Turkish corsairs in 1551, and the entire population of the island – all the 5,000 who had fled inside its walls – were hauled off to slavery.  

Here I also find an example of ingenious indigenous architecture. The centrepiece of the citadel is a church, and the centrepiece of the church is a vaulted dome. Or would have been, had the construction not cost so much money that they couldn’t afford it. What to do? Every self-respecting church here has one, after all. The church fathers came upon a brilliant solution: they had a painter do a canvas depicting a faux perspective of the interior of an opulent dome, and placed it in the ceiling! If you didn’t know, you would never guess it wasn’t real. A bit like religion, then.

Fake it ’til you make it.

I decide to walk home, having just missed the bus. Hiking along the road at dusk I couldn’t help but feel like an even bigger target than I had that morning. But I made it home alright, and since that evening was customer night at Bubbles, the dive centre, and I was placed next to Danish Eva, instructor-to-be, incandescently beautiful and a latter-day Calypso, I feel it’s safe to say the day ended very well. 

—-

And so my brief sojourn here is at an end. I’m sorry to report that it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. Two chilli pizzas and far too much red wine meant little sleep, in spite of the lack of company, and so it’s with weak legs, rumbling tummy and bleary eyes that this Ulysses waves goodbye to the Isle of Calypso from the ferry deck. 

As it recedes behind me, it’s easy to see why people have sought to possess this speck in the middle of the sea for millennia – unprepossessing, low key and rural, it is nonetheless a little emerald and gold gem set in azure waters, a treasure. 

*****

*Or poorly signposted in Maltese, which amounts to much the same thing. The language is a bastard mixture of Arabic, Italian and English, with letters and letter combinations unheard of in any other part of Europe. Here they don’t dot the i’s and bar the t’s but rather dot the g’s and bar the h’s.

**I have this confirmed the day after by one of the instructors: “Driving is mayhem. All rules are regarded as the slightest of suggestions, right of way an unknown entity, giving way is a sign of weakness, and might makes right.” So that’s nice.

*** I have a special place in my heart for this story, as I once fell in love with a Maltese girl, but elected not to pursue it any further since I was married with children. More the fool me.

Waving Calypso goodbye.

Sober October

So I decided to quit coffee and alcohol for October. From a habit of five to ten espressos per day and the equivalent of a bottle of wine per week, I would go cold turkey on both. The results? Well…

First of all, actually doing it was surprisingly easy. I taped my Nespresso maker shut just in case I would need an extra second to reconsider in moments of weakness, but those moments never really materialised. People around me were generally supportive, even though they often couldn’t – wouldn’t? – understand why I was doing it. I was worried about becoming a social pariah, but I spent pleasant evenings out in wine bars and cocktail bars without feeling awqward or any need to sample their wares (the Latvian creationist/lesbian porn star/children’s book author I encountered may have been a figment of delirium-induced imagination, I guess, but I doubt it.). I will admit visiting Rome and not having neither cappuccino nor limoncello was difficult, but apart from that I was fine. 

And how did it feel? I had light headaches for a week, and wasn’t able to concentrate too well during those first days – something which my chess partner took good advantage of. But apart from that I was unaffected, really. And I experienced less heart burn, muscle soreness and pain in the liver (although I might have imagined that last one in the first place), plus felt better rested and energetic overall, so that was a big bonus. 

Add to that the pecuniary aspect of easily saving 10€ per week on coffee and twice that on alcohol, and you’re looking at savings to the tune of 1500€ per year, or three roundtrips to the US annually. Not bad as exchange rates go. 

So what now? Should I continue my abstemious lifestyle? I honestly don’t know. I still yearn for that first shot of espresso in the morning, and a glass of Rioja with my entrecôte, and a cold lager after a good, long run in the sun… My problem is I don’t do things half-heartedly, so there’s a risk that one coffee doesn’t remain one coffee very long, and the same goes for drink. So for now, like a good goalie, I think I will just keep the zero for as long as possible. 

Tempus fuggit*

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” G. Marx

This is probably my favourite quote of all time. It contains three undeniable truths, all of them vitally important, yet oft overlooked: 1) your time on this Earth is brief, 2) some things just are, and you can’t do anything about them, and 3) while 1) and 2) irrefutably suck, you might as well try to have a laugh.

So, on this day, the 45th anniversary of my having been born into this world, I would wish for all my loved ones, friends and family alike, to take a moment to consider this.

Done? No. Take another. It’s quite heavy to digest. 

Now. Embrace it. Within the framework just given to you, time’s a-wastin’. So. You are going to die, you can’t change some stuff but you can use as much of your time as possible to do things that make you happy. Do something today that makes you happy. Then do it again tomorrow. And again after that.

 Take a long, hard look at your life and decide what’s worth doing, cause you ain’t immortal, and you’re a long time dead. 

Dare to say fuggit*. Nothing would make you (or me) happier.

Giving Death the Kiss of Life. (photo L. Woodruff)


*Tempus fugit means time flies. Fuggit is a feeble pun. Works best if pronounced like an Italian-American gangster would do it. Fahgeddabahtit. Fuggit.

Power to the people

I might have mentioned that I run a bit from time to time. And like most, when I go out for longer runs or bike rides, I need a dependable source of energy. I’ve got a Camelbak that is just the right size to see me through just about any outing, and there are various energy drink powders you can mix in your water, so fluids isn’t a problem, but I have never really found a solid source of energy that I like. 

There are gels and tablets and goo and bars available to buy, but they all have their drawbacks – they’re too sticky/icky/wasteful or difficult to digest, so I’ve decided to forgo them. Enter Miss Adventure, who apart from being a keen diver/yogini/hiker/biker also is a dab hand in the kitchen. She has been making her own power bars for ages, and kindly let me have her recipe, which I promptly adapted for my own purposes. 

So, without further ado, let me present what I humbly claim is the world’s greatest power bars, easily reproduced in the comfort of your kitchen:

350 ml almond butter

350ml rice syrup

Heat in a large pot on the stow, bringing it to a low boil. To this, add a mixture of:

300g oats

100g each of crystallised ginger, cashew nuts, walnuts, pecan nuts, chia seeds, goji berries, cranberries, coconut flakes, chopped dates, and 1-2 tsk of raw cocoa powder. (For protein powder bars, add vanilla protein powder to the mixture)

Stir it all together until a good consistency, then press into a pan greased with coconut fat, and leave it in the fridge to cool for a few hours, before cutting it into 5×5 cm squares, each containing a whopping 330 kcal, 15g fat, 10g protein each (more of the latter if powder was added, obvs.). Wrap individual squares in clingfilm or wax paper, stuff them in your flipbelt (don’t repeat my ultra marathon mistake!) and you’re good to go for as many miles as you like. 

Oh, and you never tasted anything near as good. It’s got to the point where I now have to work out to compensate for all the power bars I’m eating…! ?

A Farewell to Balms

Way back in January I set out my goals for this year, one of which was leading a healthier lifestyle.

Now, I eat reasonably well, and I think it’s fair to say I work out more than most. One weak area that has remained unchecked, however, is my intake of stimulants, specifically coffee and booze. Both are of course intrinsically linked to socialising and special occasions, and so I have found that increased networking, the occasional date and incessant travels have meant that my consumption is now well above what I consider healthy. So…

The challenge for October will be to go cold turkey on caffeine and alcohol. No point in doing things half-heartedly, eh? Not one drop of either beverage shall cross these lips as of tomorrow, in spite of heavy workload, some planned encounters with friends and an upcoming birthday. My Nespresso will grow covered in cobwebs, the restaurants’ wine lists will be off limits, the occasional après workout beer consigned to the past. It will be fun, I’m sure! ?

As always, I shall log my results here. Just don’t expect me to writ prticclarrly wrll onfe the jittters kikk in…

Sardinia – misadventures with Miss Adventure

We’re on a mountain top made out of lava rock so perforated and serrated its like a giant cheese grater, and we the cheese.

The path is nowhere to be seen. Everywhere I look there are steep ravines blocking our way down, and there are storm clouds drawing ever closer. If this isn’t being between a rock and a hard place I don’t know what is.

I blame the effing elephant.

—–

To explain how this happened, we must go back a couple of days, to when we first arrived to Sardinia. The third largest island in the Mediterranean, yet so often overlooked, Sardinia, unlike Corsica to the north, has neither famous sons nor Astérix albums to its name. Like Corsica, it has been invaded over and over again over the millennia, and now it’s our turn.

My good friend Lesli is celebrating her birthday this week, which is as good an excuse as any to go on an adventure, and we decided Sardinia had what it took. We meet up in Cagliari, the regional capital in the south, and drive up the east coast, which is largely still wild and unexploited.

Our destiny is the village of Lotzarai, and the Lemon House, a bed and breakfast that has made its name among hikers, bikers and climbers as an excellent base camp for all kind of excursions. It doesn’t disappoint. We arrive late at night, but Riky, the gentle giant that runs the place, has been waiting up, and has us installed in no time, and even insists on having a midnight drink with us to celebrate our arrival.

Next morning he’s up cooking breakfast for a long table full of adventurers; there’s the British triathletes, the Swiss thruhikers, the Italian climbers, and us. Someone remarks upon the respective amulets we carry around our necks – me a Thorshammer, Lesli a Ganesha, the Indian elephant god – and I make fun of hers, saying how a pachyderm that’s in charge of removing obstacles but sometimes also places them in your path isn’t really worth its mettle. Little did I know…

Soon we’re setting out northwards along the coast on our first hike. The morning hours are exquisite, as the path hugs the coastline on its way to Pedra Longa, a natural rock outcrop, shaped like a pyramid one hundred and fifty metres high. It looms in the distance, marking the mouth of the ravine we’re planning to hike up. The sun shines down upon macchia made up of cistus shrubs and myrtle trees, tufts of thyme and euphorbia, with occasional eucalyptus and olive trees – all making for an impossibly green landscape that offsets the turquoise and sapphire waters of the Mediterranean. Lizards dart across the ocre ground like metallic blue arrows, and here and there are goats and even wild pigs*. It’s a stroll in Arcadia.

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Et In Arcadia Ego.

Once past Pedra Longa we continue upwards towards the mouth of the gorge. It’s awe inspiring, like something out of Yellowstone plonked down next to the ocean, and suddenly the path is much more difficult to discern. We clamber up and down the ravine mouth, following every likely-looking goat trail and rockfall in an attempt to find the path again, knowing that it must be there yet infuriatingly failing to recover it. Brambles and spinablanca shred our legs and arms, tear at our clothes, and sliding gravel threatens to turn the slightest misstep into a lethal slide to the bottom of the gully.

In the end, after nearly two hours of searching, Lesli – who knows her Hindu gods – suggest that we give up and go back to Pedra Longa to cool off in the Mediterranean. So Ganesha has his way, and we give up on the hiking for the day to go skinny-dipping instead.

Submerging our scraped and shredded bodies into the sea stings a little, but it sure beats spending the night in a goat-infested grotto lost in the macchia. Maybe the elephant god knows something we don’t?

The second day we take the rental car over winding mountain roads up the coast to Cala Gonone. It’s over an hour’s drive, but well worth it, as from here we rent kayaks and go down the coast along a particularly scenic stretch of the natural reserve, past caves that conjure up the adventures of Tom Sawyer or the Count de Montechristo.

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No elephant here. Or is there?

It’s exciting and peaceful in equal measure, if very hot as the sun shines bright. Fortunately the breeze is constantly in our faces – but after four hours that’s too much of a good thing, as well; my eyes are screwed shut from too much light, salt and wind, and smarting as if they too had been lashed by thorns yesterday.
Alas, Lesli doesn’t drive stick shift, so I have to get us home more or less blindly, traversing the winding roads at a snail’s pace, stopping every kilometre or so to bathe my eyes in what little water we have left to cajole them into staying open just a little bit longer.

It’s a desperately dangerous thing to do, but we have no choice. We stop in one lay-by to see if Lesli might manage to drive – she really, really can’t – and in another to see if we might convince the people in the car parked there to help us out. Turns out they weren’t admiring the view, as we thought, and it’s a testament to my desperation that I briefly consider asking the female passenger to give us a hand once she’s done giving the driver head. I don’t. Instead I dab my eyes with a soaked rag for what feels like the hundredth time, and drive on, cross eyed and crying copiously. Goodness knows what the couple must have thought we were up to.

We make it back in just under three hours.

Day three dawns, and after twelve hours in total darkness and plenty of saline solution my eyes have recovered enough that we can venture out again. Riky tells us that the path we searched for in vain on day one is in fact located on a ledge that looks impossibly thin from down at Piedra Longa. We decide to try to hike up the gorge again, and drive there to shorten the hike. Good thing, too, because the trail is so steep in places that we’re climbing rather than hiking it. The term “drop dead gorge-ous” applies here, as it is quite possibly the most beautiful nature I’ve ever seen, but also very unforgiving. The ledge is no more than a metre or two wide in places, and there’s nothing twixt us and a terminal drop.

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The ledge. Note Pedra Longa (centre or the picture) for perspective.

We do get all the way to the top of the ravine without misadventures, and it seems as if Ganesha is finally cutting us some slack, but then we set out to the summit of Punta Giradili, the higher one of the two promontories enclosing the gorge, and that’s where it almost goes badly wrong. It’s a difficult hike, as the rock is pure lava, all sharp edges and treacherous holes, and the only way to navigate is by following cairns marking the path in amongst the undergrowth. That’s all well and fine as long as we’re headed upwards, as the little piles of rocks can be seen against the evergreens behind and above them, but coming back down is a different matter. Suddenly the cairns look no different from the million other stones, and before long we are lost.

By now we’ve been out for five hours and fatigue is setting in. One false move and one or both of us could be badly hurt and/or stuck in the cheese grater stones. What’s worse, everywhere looks the same, and we have no way of navigating. Going in a straight line is out of the question, as the dense macchia turns the whole flat summit into a giant labyrinth, and everywhere we look there are steep ravines barring our way, even if we did know where we were going. On top of that, dark, pregnant clouds begin to fill the sky, and there will be no cover to be had if the autumn rains decide to start.

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The summit of all fears.

It’s a desperate moment, and I genuinely don’t know what to do. Lesli suggests going further inland in the hopes of circumventing the ravines, and I’m just about to give in to this when I recall that my trusty GPS-watch has a mapping function, which when switched on allows you to retrace your steps. In a manner of minutes we are back on the trail, happy to turn our backs on the wretched mountain. Garmin 1 – Ganesha 0.

The next day we decide we won’t hike at all. Instead we rent mountain bikes and load into the rental car. We drive up even smaller roads than before, deep into the mountains, and I’m having a blast, as these roads remind me of the forest roads my father taught me to drive on. It’s all gravel and hairpin bends of a kind I’ve only ever driven on in computer games, and I only wish I had a car better suited to the terrain. 

Then we hop on the bikes and start the decent down towards the sea. Alas, Ganesha doesn’t give up. Three, four kilometres into the ride, my chain snaps clean off, and there’s no tool in the tool kit to repair it. Nothing to do but hike the whole damned uphill slog, pushing the bike, then get in the car and drive all the way back down again to have it fixed. 

Once that’s done we decide not to push our luck, but to go for another Cala (sandy cove). Alas, poor map reading leads us astray, and we get on our bikes only to alight upon a gorge that is off limits to bikers. Instead we walk the rest of the way – Lesli wearing slippery bike cleats on a path made up mainly by shale – and finally arrive at the sea after another gruelling hike. The Truncated One might have had a point in getting us here, because it’s another spot of natural perfection, but on a no hiking, biking day, we managed to do a grand total of twenty minutes of biking and several hours’ worth of hiking, so we weren’t exactly over the moon.

There seemed to be nothing for it. We kept the bikes for another day, and set off yet again into the wilderness, and this time – on our last day – we seemed to be getting it right, or maybe I had just atoned for my hubris vis-a-vis Ganesha?

We rode our bikes down a remote gulch of stunning natural beauty down to Cala Sisine, a gorgeous pebble beach in the middle of nowhere. We had it all to ourselves, and I would wish everyone could experience that feeling at least once in their lives – surrounded by sparkling clear turquoise water, deep blue skies, steep cliffs clad in green, and nothing but the wind and the sun on your skin. Heaven.

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Eden, a.k.a. Cala Sisine

It lasted all of an hour. Then a taxi boat came and dislodged a horde of tourists, bringing dogs and cigarettes and loudspeakers. It was time to go home.

In the end we didn’t get to go rock climbing, as Sardinia doesn’t have any licensed guides (they have to have ice climbing experience – not something easily gained in Sardinia), and we didn’t have time to go diving, but all in all it was a fantastic holiday, all the better for the mishaps and hiccups that occurred along the way (especially true once we decided (mis)adventure points could be converted into gelato points!). Ganesha came through in spades – even Thor came out and sent us off with the mightiest thunderstorm I have ever experienced on the night before we left – so gods willing I will be back to Sardinia for more of the same before long.

______

* I’d tell you about the wild pigs, but I don’t want to boar you. Things take on such a littoral meaning along the coast.

Alpine Adrenaline

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I figured if I managed to pull off running Ultravasan I would be deserving of some creative rest and recreation. And where could be more restful and restorative than Switzerland? A stay in a Kurhaus hotel in a country that has known peace for 700 years must be the most calm and peaceful experience imaginable, right?

Wrong.

For sure, if you wanted to, hanging out in the World’s Most Scenic Bank Vault ™ could be as coma-inducingly quiet and laid-back a time as you ever had, but since I’m here with my good friend Lauren, chances of that happening are slim to nonexistent.

Canyoning

We start off with canyoning early Saturday morning. For me, this comes as close to outdoor perfection as anything I’ve ever done. The concept is deceptively simple: using whatever means necessary, you make your way down a canyon. Seems straight-forward, but tells you nothing of the exhilarating rappels, jumps, slides and climbs you experience en route. Nor does it give any inkling of the gorgeous gorges, placid pools and wonderful waterfalls we see on our way down.

It’s like entering a lost world, a jungle ravine where plesiosaurs could still lurk in the grottoes and deep pools, and in a sense it is, since you would never be able to do this and live to tell the tale if you didn’t have experienced guides along to tell you where to step, how to jump, when to release the rope and slide down natural water slides that put to shame any amusement park ride you care to mention.

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They tell us it’s a canyon for newbies, but that’s only because it progresses perfectly to more and more technical stuff, so – after having started off with easy passages (that seem quite intimidating to a beginner) – by the end of our four hours we are happily jumping off cliff edges as much as eight meters above the water, and rappelling down waterfalls so high you have to let go as you reach the end of the rope and slide the rest of the way, landing in a cascade of water. By the end of the canyon we feel like fully-fledged canyoneers, ready to take on any challenge.

Bungee jumping

It’s a perfect way to spend the morning, and it also builds up quite nicely to the activity of the afternoon, where that theory will be put to a severe test, because we are to bungee jump off the Verzasca Dam in Lucarno. Famous as the dam James Bond jumps off at the beginning of GoldenEye, it’s a tremendously intimidating prospect, and I mean that quite literally; The moment I see the dam my hands tremble, even walking onto it seems a foolhardy notion, let alone jumping off it voluntarily!

I’ve never done anything like this before, and this is the highest bungee jump in Europe – two hundred and twenty meters worth of falling. Suddenly James Bond’s propensity for Dirty Martinis seems quite understandable. We exchange weak smiles and even weaker puns as we wait, try to listen to the instructions as best we can. Contraptions are attached to our ankles – all that we will hang our hopes on- and then it’s time to step up on the launch platform.

I get called first, and walk up, over the edge of the dam, and try desperately not to look down. Bungee cord gets attached without me even noticing, the guys in charge joking, efficient, and good. Doesn’t help. I step onto the edge, manage to get my feet right (toes outside but not too far) without looking down, anything but looking down, spread my arms out in the manner of someone about to be crucified, and they ask me if I’m ready. Could you ever be? “Let’s do it,” I whisper, and then it’s three, two, one, and I dive into the chasm.

Nothing, but nothing prepares you for what comes next. I had vaguely planned to shout “Geronimo” as I jumped, but every cell in my body is crying out in primal fear, and I with them. Tumbling through the air, falling, falling, impossibly still falling, it doesn’t matter the least bit that intellectually your brain knows you’re going to survive this; the rest of the organism is in “FuckFUCKwe’reabouttodie” mode, and the sheer adrenaline rush is so overwhelming screaming at the top of my lungs is all I can do.*

Well, I don’t suppose I’m spoiling the story by telling you I survived. I managed to follow the instructions I had received in a fog, got back up again, shaking and grinning like a fool, wanting to kiss the ground and everyone around me. Then I watched Lauren go trough the same ordeal, and then we went home and went to bed, and – alas, so un-Bond-like – slept like babies even though it was only seven o’clock, our bodies and minds exhausted from sensory overload.

Ridge running

It’s hard to top what we both agreed was one of the best days of our lives, but we both tried hard, each in our own way. So while Lauren spent the Sunday enjoying every conceivable spa treatment the Kurhaus staff has been able to dream up, I set out for the funicolario in the next valley.

The Alps are more imposing here than in Slovenia, where I last encountered them, but I have my eyes on a ridge path that looks like it could be a good run. Monte Lema (1624m) to Monte Magno (1636m) is seven kilometres, making the total a good round trip, I reckon. What I haven’t reckoned with is the first kilometre (all downhill, highly technical), nor the second (all uphill, highly technical). That, plus the fact that I’m three toenails short of a full set, put paid to my ambition.

I still manage to walk just about the full distance, and it’s very pleasant. There are hardly any people about – I spy two runners, but take solace in the thought that they probably weren’t in Sälen last week – but I do encounter a flock of goats, thankfully less evil-looking than their demonic brethren in Mallorca.

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It’s a tough slog though, reminiscent of the hikes I did last year in New Hampshire. And because I’m wobbly-kneed as it is after Saturday, and as when ridging the divide (to coin a phrase) between two valleys you really cannot afford to be less than sure-footed, hiking it instead of running feels like a wise decision. And this way I can really take in the views and marvel at the grandeur of the landscape.

Joyriding

When Europe rear-bumpered Africa, it did some severe damage to itself; to whit, the Alps**. The Alps are the most grandiose mountains I know, and walking along the ridge I can really appreciate our insignificance, seeing little villages spilled out among the mountains, tiny playthings left behind by a capricious deity. It’s a wonder anyone made the effort to settle high up on the mountainsides, but I’m thankful that they did, because the impossibly serpentine roads they needed to reach these settlements mean the whole landscape is one big rollercoaster.

I’ve been holding back before out of respect for my co-pilot, but now – on the way to and from the hike – I really let rip, and it’s the most exhilarating drive I’ve had since my dad taught me to drive on the logging roads in the forests of Dalarna. 180-degree turns, hairpin bends, twists and turns, up and down it goes, and the goofy grin never leaves my face. I’m beginning to see why every other car here is a Porsche, Maserati or similar. This is pure petrolhead paradise. Zipping around roads such as these is what driving should be all about.

And so the weekend is over, only too soon. Lauren is going back to D.C. where she will continue to live smack-bang in the world of politics (arguably an adrenaline sport as well), but I’m already eying the map for more. Those downhill mountain bike paths look cool, the guys who had pitched tents along the ridge were probably thru-hiking the Alps, that would be awesome, and there’s base jumping, and those canyons you have to be heli-dropped into, and, and, and… You can keep your Bolivian cocaine – I’m hooked on Swiss adrenaline.

 

—–

*I believe my exact choice of words was “WAaaAArrggHHooouuuaaAArrraaarggHH.”

**Geologically speaking, Africa has just begun driving off after the collision, and an onlooker (it would admittedly have to be someone watching in Deep Time) could be viewing in horror the way the continental body had crumbled up in the crash, with Italy and Greece barely hanging on, like a mangled hood ornament and a smashed headlight, respectively. It’s a wonder no one has tried suing for damages. But I digress.

Ultravasan

Going forth

It’s four o’clock in the morning, and I’m in a tent in a dark forest, hiding from the rain together with close to eight hundred other people, all of us preparing to go out and run Ultravasan, Sweden’s most prestigious ultra marathon and – more to the point – a trail ninety kilometres long. It’s more than double what I’ve ever done before.

The atmosphere is akin to what I expect it must be in an army right before battle commences – there are a lot of grim faces and thousand-mile stares, as people make last minute adjustments to their kit. Some try to sleep, others make surreptitious dashes into the wet darkness to empty their bowels, like birds of pray before taking flight.

There’s four in our group; myself, my sister Sofia, my brother-in-law Anders, plus Magnus, a friend whom I talked into signing up in early January, and who I suspect has regretted the decision several times over since. As we get closer to the starting time there are embraces and selfies and jokes, as the gravity of the situation is sinking in – we’re going into the unknown, and anything can happen. We line up in the start pen with ten minutes to go, the announcer’s incongruous natter finally replaced by stirring music, and the feeling of going forth is further reinforced when the soundtrack from the Hunger Games comes on, drones hanging in the air above us, filming for television. “We who are about to die”, I mutter, giving a half-hearted wave to one of them. Then suddenly it’s a matter of seconds, the Vasaloppet theme song comes on, and we’re off.

Up, up and away!

The first thing that happens as the crowd starts moving is you pass a signpost saying Mora 90, Smågan 9,2. The former is too huge a number to compute, so I focus on the latter, marking the length of the first section. Vasaloppet famously starts with almost eight kilometres of uphill logging roads, but people are too fired up to care, and shoot off like Superman. I force myself not to get drawn in, and have scores of people overtake me. Sofia and Anders quickly leave me behind, and Magnus disappears behind me. The rain hangs in the air like a particularly invasive mist, but it feels good.

There are plenty of places along the way offering drinks and refreshments, so I’ve elected to leave my Camelbak at home, which means all I’m carrying is a flip belt (essentially a double cummerbund with openings into which you can jam things) with some toilet paper (in case I have to Pope), paracetamol pills and three energy gels, plus my iPhone – not essential, but since I want to document the adventure I take it along both as a camera and a safety precaution. My secret weapon is inside the little bag that my sis bought at the expo yesterday, which is hanging on the outside of the flip belt in the small of my back – it’s supposed to be used for carrying litter, but I’ve stuffed it with chocolate protein balls.

Eight in all, these magical pills full of goodness will have me flying along – or that’s the idea, until five k into the race I realise that disaster has struck! Like the U.S. paratroopers invading Europe on D-day, I’ve been betrayed by untested equipment; they were issued canvas bags to store their weapons in only the day before their deployment, and the overstuffed bags mostly ripped clean off the soldiers and disappeared into the void, taking the weapons with them. In my case the bag was still there, but without me noticing, the balls had been bouncing out of the bag, leaving only one at the very bottom. Like Hansel and Gretel, I had been leaving a trail of sweets behind. Unlike them, however, I had no intention of turning around, so gritted my teeth and pressed on into the forest proper. I would have to make my own magic.

Run, Forest, run!

After Smågan we’ve reached the end of the road. The trail becomes exactly that, a single track trail leading deeper and deeper into the forest. Pine tree roots have you Fred Astairing your way forward, as they try to trip you up, and rocks are everywhere, meaning a fall would be most unforgiving. It’s beautiful though, the mist hanging low, and the rain lending every surface a fresh polish, making for a landscape where trolls seem less part of mythology, and more like a distinct possibility.

Then it’s on to the bogs, wetlands where only stunted trees grow in the acid waters, and you have to balance on boardwalks, slippery with rain and algae, laid out on top of the grassy knolls, as stepping off them would mean sinking to untold depths immediately – there’s no telling how solid the water-sick ground is; you might only sink foot-deep, but if you’re unlucky you’re instantly submerged – this is the kind of landscape our forefathers used to depose dead bodies and ritual sacrifices in, after all.

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Another sign of clear and present danger is literally carved into the boardwalks themselves. They are made of sturdy two-by-fours, but every so often I come across places where furrows have been raked into the wood as if it’s nothing but warm butter. They’re territorial markings by the brown bears that roam these lands, and they leave precious little to the imagination. It’s a disquieting sight – the fact that bears apparently make use of the boardwalks to cross the bogs as well doesn’t inspire confidence in the construction so much as conjure up visions of what the consequences of a close encounter with a 700 lb version of Mr Cuddles would be.

Feed me, Seymour!

Thankfully no incidents occur, and the inhospitable terrain requires full focus, so the kilometres slip by almost unnoticed. I pass Mångsbodarna, the first of the depots serving food, and realise I’m ravenous. Breakfast was at 0200, and now, five hours and 23k later, my body is craving nourishment. Pancakes with jam, blueberry soup and chicken broth, anyone? I eat it all with gusto, and wash it down with coffee and water. In the cold and rain, the warmth of hot beverages is a godsend to be savoured.

I had worried that eating too much would affect my ability to run, but since my strategy is to keep a pace where I don’t get out of breath or my heart rate too high, it seems not to be a problem. The theory is that by keeping that kind of slow pace, your body never switches into aerobic mode, which means you can go on more or less indefinitely, as your organism doesn’t burn fuel the same way. I don’t know. I read it in a book. I thought seven minutes per kilometre would do it, but my feet seem to be saying 6,40/k, and who am I to argue? I’m only along for the ride, after all.

Fairy trails

And so on it goes. The trail stays lethal, an obstacle course made up of jagged rocks, but I am too distracted by the man in front of me wearing a sports bra to pay much attention. Turns out it’s a good way to prevent bleeding nipples, apparently. That still doesn’t explain the bright pink colour, of course…

The final destination is still much too far away to contemplate, but getting to the next station in Risberg is intimidating in itself, as the section prior to it is infamous. By this stage I’ve done 28k, and know the next five will be nothing but uphill. I walk parts of it, and try not to think about the fact that I still have two thirds of the way to go.

Risberg to Evertsberg, the approximate halfway mark, feels long, but thankfully the surroundings are mesmerisingly beautiful, even though the rain keeps falling. I pass little lakes in the woods, where moose would be grazing on less crowded days, old mills and cottages that look like they belong in Middle Earth, streams and burbling brooks. By the time there’s a signpost saying we’ve now gone past the finish line of a regular marathon I still don’t feel the least bit tired, and note with satisfaction that I’ve done it in about the same time it took me to do my first ever marathon, Berlin, which is famously flat and easy running – not something that can be levelled at this race.

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The Halfway Inn

The kilometres keep rolling by, and before I know it I roll up at Evertsberg, which has loomed ahead as a Fata Morgana for quite some time. More pancakes, gherkins and blueberry soup, but more importantly, this is where the drop bags await, with whatever provisions you have seen fit to send in advance. Bench upon bench full of people taking stock of their situation. I strip off my wet t-shirt and socks and apply liberal amounts of Vaseline all over, in places I wouldn’t even point at in public under normal circumstances. No one gives a damn – they’re all busy doing much the same. New, dry clothes on. Two of my toes have gigantic blisters, but since they don’t hurt I decide against changing shoes. This is probably a wise decision, as doing so will prove Magnus’s downfall. He will go on to develop so many blisters that he essentially has to hobble the last twenty k’s.

After Evertsberg it’s gently downhill for six kilometres, and that, combined with dry(er) clothes, a stomach full of food, and asphalt, glorious asphalt to run on make these some of the easiest kilometres of all, whizzing by at breakneck speed – sub-six minutes, even. Joking aside, my strategy to not go out too hard is starting to pay off, as I now start overtaking other runners instead of vice versa. It’s not my prime objective – that was always just to finish the race – but it feels good, even so.

Wood sprites

Another thing that helps is the support you get from onlookers. By now I’ve been out for close to seven hours, the rain has finally stopped, the sun is out, and normal people are starting to wake up. Given that the race is run in the wilderness there aren’t many supporters, but what they lack in quantity, they more than make up for in quality.

Some groups and individuals clearly follow a particular runner’s progress and if you keep up with that person they show up several times along the way. A trio of bikers – a giant of a man who looks like a cross between a bear and a troll, plus his wife and mother, of similar stock – start recognising me after I urge them to do the wave as I pass, and soon they are looking out for me and doing their wave as soon as I show up. Others join in, making me feel like a superhero.

There’s a mother-and-son duo from Norway that show up more often than anyone else, always enthusiastic and shouting encouragement (at least I think they do – it’s in Norwegian), but my personal favourites are the two beautiful young women who suddenly appear around the 70k mark, offering candy to all runners.

At this point I’ve had my only low of the entire journey – I had been running together with a woman from the UK for awhile, and although Lucia was as pleasant as can be, her tales of having run a 30-hour race in the Lake District just two weeks previously, her plans to do another ultra in Switzerland in two weeks’ time, plus the fact that I couldn’t keep up with her, conspired to bring me down a little, and when I twisted my foot on top of that, I started to wonder if I was going to have to walk the rest of the way.

So I dropped behind, and walked for a bit, but when my foot didn’t get any worse I started running again, and then there was the silly Volvo video thing you can see at the end, which raised my spirits quite a bit, and then there they were, like two dryads with a huge bag of candy, and in spite of my parents having told me never to accept sweets from strangers, I happily deviated from that rule, and made sure to tell them just how glad they had made me with this selfless gesture. They, too, would pop out of the woodwork (as it were) several times more, to my unbridled delight.

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The long game

The last twenty kilometres? Well, it’s weird. Twenty k is a long run by any standard, and yet it seemed easy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was still able to run, even trundling up inclines that I would previously have used as a welcome excuse to walk a few steps.

Sure it helped that it was mostly slightly downhill on relatively easy logging roads, and sure I wasn’t running fast by this stage, but I was running when most runners weren’t running at all. I passed most everyone I saw, with one notable exception – occasionally along the trail there would be the odd runner I would overtake, only to find them ahead of me again, over and over, and at the end there was Zebra Girl (you name people when you see them again and again, and she had striped tights. I’m not at my wittiest after ten hours’ running, what can I say?), whom I overtook around the 80k mark but who then kept pace with me, occasionally ahead, but mainly right behind.

Coming in to Mora, I passed a man on the outskirts of town who said we would probably make it in under eleven hours. He seemed a little doubtful though, and since my GPS-watch had long since given up the ghost, I had no choice: I found resources left in me to sprint the last six hundred metres, running hard, rejoicing in the feeling of seemingly endless strength.

The audience cheered and clapped, but I was particularly pleased to find my two Candy Angels waiting just across the finish line. If you look at the video you can actually see how I swerve as soon as I crossed it to give them both a huge hug and to tell them again how much they had meant to me. It was a delight to be able to share that moment with them, as they symbolised all the good people who had helped me along the way; volunteers, onlookers and well-wishers, all giving freely of their time to spur me on.

Karma goes both ways tho, because a minute later Zebra Girl taps on my shoulder to thank me for having been there for her – for the longest time, she said, she had only managed to keep running by literally following in my footsteps. We hugged as well, united by our struggle and our accomplishment, sharing goofy grins and the joyful realisation that we had done it!

This more than anything symbolises ultra running to me: regardless of how and when you finish, you are a victor. Sofia and Anders beat me by more than three quarters of an hour, but I ran what felt like a perfect race – I was never overexerted, never had a negative thought, and finished strong. I might have been able to do it half an hour faster, but at the prize of my enjoyment of the experience. As it was I loved every step of the way, I took in the beauty of the nature, the goodness of my fellow runners and all the other people involved, and even managed to spread a bit of happiness in the process. You can’t ask for a better result.

Halfway, 2016

imageRemember New Year’s Eve? And the resolutions you made way back then? It’s hard to believe, but the year is more than halfway over already, so it’s high time to have a look at how you’re fairing in regard to these promises – most likely they have fallen by the wayside already, long forgotten – but since I made a commitment to myself (and you) to report back occasionally on how I’m fairing, I will do so, even though – or perhaps precisely because – the results are less than fantastic.

I set out to improve intellectually and physically, and to go on adventures and challenge myself. To ensure that I did so I set myself clear, measurable targets, so how am I doing in relation to those?

In a word: poorly. At least on the intellectual side of things. I haven’t read more than very few books, my attempts at taking piano lessons were foiled by too much travelling, my efforts learning French came to a halt after two months (during which I did learn rather more words and phrases than I had thought possible, but still).

Improving my general fitness level is an area where I have been a lot more successful. Even though I have cycled nothing like as much as I thought I would do, and swum less, I have managed to work out a lot (as evidenced by a nice lady doctor asking spontaneously if I was an athlete of some sort only yesterday(!)). I’ve logged 160 workouts in the first six months of the year, or slightly below one workout per day nine days out of ten. I’ve run two marathons, both well below four hours, and I’m hopeful I will manage Ultravasan and its 90 kilometres come August. Who knows? I might even be reduced to swimming and biking afterwards instead of running, as a result…

On the other hand, my diet hasn’t been anywhere near as strict as I had planned – perhaps precisely because I had no concrete target in mind there. If anything I have been too indulgent, especially in allowing myself too much alcohol, so that’s something to improve upon in the second half of the year, as well.

So far, so-so impressive. Travels, adventures and challenges, then? Well, I did go for a refresher dive at Nemo33 in January, then went skiing in Sweden in February, and to Thailand to dive in March. April I got a new job part time, which wasn’t planned but must count as a new adventure, and May saw me hike Mallorca with my brother, which was quite the challenge – not because of him, I hasten to add! Then in June I explored Luxembourg, and this month I’ve taken the kids kayaking in the Ardennes, and gone to Edinburgh for a quick visit, so overall my track record isn’t too bad, even though I feel it lacks in challenges.

So what to make of all this? Reinforced efforts in terms of reading, playing the piano and learning French; more diverse workout schedule; better food and drink habits; more adventurous adventures and challenging challenges (and trippy trips? No.).

Lined up next: London with the kids, then two weeks without them (good time to improve diet and spend time playing piano/reading/studying, putting good habits in place) before going to Sweden and making final preparations for Ultravasan. After that I’ve got nothing planned apart from a few days in Lugano, as a post-race (re)treat, and then school starts and the rat race recommences. If experience shows anything, it’s that it’s time to start planning autumn now. Maybe that Ironman? Or a climbing course? Or something else entirely…?

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Luxembourg deluxe

imageSo there is this country that I’ve been to dozens of times for work, and never really saw, even though it’s tiny, and right next door. Or rather, I never bothered, because it was tiny and right next door. And I associate it with work. How interesting could it be?

Luxembourg was one of the founding countries of the E.C., and as a thank you for that – and for being small and inoffensive and neither Germany nor France – it was rewarded the seat of several institutions, amongst them the Council of Ministers, so I’ve been here more times than I care to remember, but this weekend I finally decided to make a visit memorable, so after two days of the usual minstrel show, I drove away from the wind-swept Kirschberg plateau, to Esch-sur-Sûre.

It’s a tiny town in the Luxembourgian part of the Ardennes, situated on a bend of the river Sûre, snugly nestled against a mighty outcrop of sheer rock on which the oldest castle in the country still stands, eleven hundred years after it was built. The town is surrounded by lush forests on all sides, and it’s easy to see why people would have chosen to settle here – the river teeming with fish, the forest full of game, plus it’s a natural fortress to begin with, and with the streets spiralling upwards and houses built with massive walls of local rock, the whole village becomes part of the ramparts, easily defensible from Viking marauders and rival knights and robber barons down the ages. The inhabitants must have felt very Sûre of themselves. In this regard as in many others, Eche is a microcosm of the microcosm that is Luxembourg (a nanocosm then, perhaps?).

The landscape around the town, up and down the meandering river, is exceedingly pretty, wealthy and clean. This is what southern Belgium would look like if it were run by the Swiss. My one gripe is with the (more modern) houses, which look like a Belgian imitation of Swiss architecture. But there’s not too many of them – mostly it’s small-scale farms and forests, and perfect, undulating roads that attract swarms of bikers.

Unlike Mallorca, however, it’s motorbikes only, which means that when I rent a mountain bike I have the wooden paths and back roads entirely to myself. I spend several happy hours pedalling upriver, through a nature reserve that also holds the main water reservoir of the country, and then run downriver for another hour, past fly fishers and through a valley so steep and narrow that there is only room for one row of cottages in the village therein. It’s like stepping onto the stage of a Grimm fairytale.

After that, it’s back to the hotel for the long awaited spa visit, and – after goodness knows how many visits to different saunas, plus a hearty dinner (Luxembourgers pride themselves on having a French kitchen with German-sized portions) – to bed, jolly well pleased with my discovery.

Sunday is spent driving around the countryside. It’s not unlike Mosel, in that there are fertile plateaus above the river valleys, and just like Mosel there are castles by every strategic bend in the rivers. I visit two. The first one is something of a disappointment, as it has been turned into a renaissance chateau, and is closed to visitors – the only redeeming factor being the Sorceresses’ Tower, a remnant of the older burg, and last residence of medieval women suspected of whichcraft. 

Apparently they were allowed only one window, which showed them the place of their execution-to-be. Today, modern wrought-iron art depicting dancing flames marks the spot where the women met their fate. It’s creepy.

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Oppressive? Me? Never…

The second castle is the real deal. Vianden, located just on the border with Germany, has been a stronghold since the days of the Romans, and the counts of Vianden didn’t mince about – the castle is an impenetrable fortress that was never taken, but fell into disrepair after the last Count moved elsewhere – the family sprouted several branches, two of which form today’s Grand Dutchy and the also grand Dutch royal family, so it’s not as if they didn’t have other places to hang out. It’s been lovingly restored, but I can’t help but think it would have been even more grandiose as a ruin.

I spend a couple of hours pottering about the castle and the walled town, and then finish off the weekend by having an enormous Angus entrecôte in nearby Diekirsch – cooked on a sizzling stone at the table – before finally turning the car back to Belgium once more. This is the way to experience Luxembourg properly, I think.

 

Norrköping, Sweden

imageI’ve long thought I should try to write a travel entry on the topic of Sweden; I’ve lived abroad long enough that it’s a different country from the one I grew up in, after all, and for most readers it will be just as exotic as any other place I experience on my journeys.

This week offered the perfect opportunity: I went to a town I’ve never visited before, in a part of the country that is oft overlooked – Norrköping, Östergötland. The name means Northern chipping (or market town) in the Eastern part of the Land of the Gotae – one of the three original tribes that populated what is now Sweden- and in some respects I suspect it has remained essentially the same since this was Viking heartland.

This feeling is enhanced upon arrival. Even flying into Stockholm, the capital, the impression is one of forests and smallholdings right up to the edge of the city, and going by train to Norrköping showcases more of the same – an infinite number of lakes (the result of the perma ice having retreated from these lands relatively recently, thus not allowing the land to rise up just yet), all of them dotted with little red wooden cottages along the shores, and often with woods growing right up to the water’s edge.

Norrköping itself has been a city proper almost since the time of the Vikings, but the town has been razed and burnt several times over, so today the oldest buildings are no more than two hundred years old. This, together with the grid layout of the city blocks, it’s eclectic mixture of new and old, scruffy and chi, and the well-to-do hipster look sported by just about everyone makes it reminiscent of Brooklyn.

I am instantly smitten. Of course it helps that the Swedish summer is in full swing, meaning blue skies and glorious sun during the day, and white nights on top of that. I wake at four thirty every morning, simply because it’s light outside already. There’s also the fact that nearly everyone looks good and healthy – the Lamp hotel breakfast is a wonder to behold, easily beating the finest hotels I’ve ever been to, and no one smokes, or is obese – and when I go to the gym in the evening this is borne out by the fact that people from all walks of life have found their way there – old and young, men and women, immigrants and Viking descendants, they are all here.

I’m dead serious about the latter, by the way. At the board of Transportation, the authority hosting us for the week, there is a immensely large man called Thorbjörn Kämpe (Thor bear fighter) – it doesn’t get more authentically Norse than that. In fact, replace the cardigans and stupid trousers, give them an ax and shield and most every one of these muscular, bearded, tattoo-sporting hip folk look much like their infamous forefathers.

You can accuse me of sugar coating it of course, my head soggy with nostalgia, but for the life of me, this kind of town – a Nordic Brooklyn in the wilderness, with bars and coffee shops littered generously throughout, with a sex shop facing the town church, with the minister of the latter going to work on his mountain bike, with Valkyrie-look-alikes and spry octogenarians out and about with equal grace, and immigrants being seen as normal rather than a matter of controversy – is my idea of the ideal place to live.

Bokashi – the Way of the Eco Warrior

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You don’t even have to chop stuff into pieces. Unless you want to.

You may have heard of Bushidō – the Way of the Warrior in feudal Japan. It was literally the code of moral principles that the Samurai should live their lives by.

I have a great fascination for that epoch, but today I won’t talk about the Samurai – instead I want to introduce you to an equally venerable tradition from Nippon, namely Bokashi. It, too, encompasses a moral code, namely the most basic principle of ethics we have to live by: give back as much as you can of what you take from the Earth. In a word – recycle. The Way of the Eco Warrior, if you will. Or the Eco Worrier, perhaps.

Bokashi is a composting system that enables users to completely avoid wasting food. I had been looking to find an indoor-compatible compost for several years when I came across it. Having discarded the idea of having a worm compost as being too fiddly (and also likely to leave me abandoned by my family), this seemed to good to be true when I read about it – no smell, no creepy crawlies, and an end product that could go directly into the flower beds without attracting rodents and the like, even if I put fish or meat in it? Where do I sign up?

The volumes of food and leftovers that are thrown away annually in the western world are stunning, and I’m no better at this than anyone else – quite the contrary! – but this type of compost – an improvement upon a centuries old technique consisting of burying scraps deep underground makes me feel almost virtuous about chucking out stuff that’s past its sell-by date, and has made me less prone to harass the kids in an effort to get them to eat up their Brussels sprouts – both decidedly good things.

So how does it work? When you buy a bokashi kit you get two plastic containers (thoughtfully designed to fit under your average kitchen sink) and a bag of Bokashi brans – essentially saw dust enriched with particularly beneficial microorganisms that kickstart the composting – that you scatter a handful of on top your scraps every time you add something to the container. Why two containers? Because once one is full it should ideally be placed somewhere cool and dark to ferment before the process has run its course and the end product can be placed in your garden compost/borders/potted plant. There’s even a handy tap that grants you easy access to the juices that collect at the bottom of the vessel, which can be used to revive any dying plants. Sure, it seems expensive, but given what potting soil costs per sack, you will soon break even.

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Ya should’ve seen the other guy!

Now I have never in my life gone on record endorsing a product. Normally I don’t even endorse product endorsement, but this thing is too good not to tell people about. So what are you waiting for? Buy yourself a kit, buy one for your dear old mum, or give your loved one a present they will never expect – and if they complain, tell them it will all come up roses in the end.

The Adventures of Spike

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It all began with a dying duck. A mallard, to be precise, that the children had discovered in their mother’s hedge. It had clearly been hurt, and they were very upset about it all, especially Childe One, who has a soft spot for all animals, down to and including insects. This happened on a Sunday, and as their mom was going to be away all week, it was up to me to don the shining armour and rescue the poor critter first thing after school Monday. Shining armour – or rather a big blanket and the cat’s travel cage – stowed in the car we set off, and found the sad-looking thing hiding not a metre away from where the kids had found it in the first place.

It was almost too easy to grab the mallard, its one leg and one wing hanging at odd angles from its body. I realised with a sinking heart that we were going to have to deal with a death in the family, but off we went to an animal sanctuary, where the bird was duly handed over to the volunteers amid furrowed brows and shaken heads. To distract the kids I asked if there other animals in residence, and was told that there were, in fact, four hedgehog babies that the kids were welcome to have a look at if they cared to. You can see where this is going, right?

Three weeks later I’m back at the sanctuary. The news of the duck’s demise has been drowned out by tidings of joy (suitably, as we’re entering the month of December soon): one of the hedgehogs is to be given a new lease of life chez nous. I install a special hedgehog house in the kitchen, and bar the entrance with a couple of planks. The transition is easy, as the prickly little thing is hidden in a bunched-up ball of straw, so I simply lift the whole thing from the cat cage onto the floor and put the house on top.

And there it stays. Not a sound, not a movement for the first couple of hours. Misty the cat comes and inspects the house – essentially a man-made cave, complete with tunnel entrance, and nothing. I wait up until midnight, and nothing. The second evening is different. Spike (as it has been named) emerges, and explores its new environment, stopping along the way to nibble at the pellets I’ve placed around the room. In spite of my presence Spike is totally unfazed, even hiding behind my seated frame – a hedgehog can famously never be buggered at all, after all. That’s only as long as I remain still, however. If I move the spiky one growls at me and rolls into a ball in time-honoured fashion.

We keep Spike in the kitchen for a couple of days, and apart from becoming less and less careful about where to go potty, our less-than-sonic friend seems to settle in well. But of course it was never the idea that we would keep it as a pet, so one day I again lift the entire house and its contents unto the terrace. I figure it will be warmer there, and so hopefully a nice place for Spikey to spend the winter.

Alas, only a few days later when I carefully sneak a glance inside, my fears are confirmed. Spike is gone. Famously prickly(!) about where they hibernate, hedgehogs will not easily accept homes that are thrust upon them – and in fairness, a home that occasionally levitates would not feel safe to most of us. There is still hope, however. The garden does have a shed in the furthest corner, which could easily accommodate a hedgehog underneath it, and since the garden is surrounded by fences and hedges, the risks are limited, as long as it doesn’t venture onto the road.

And so there is little to do but hope for the best. A hedgehog’s greatest enemy is the car, against which it has no defence – indeed, the hedgehog has become endangered in many areas precisely because it’s meandering nocturnal searches for food leaves it particularly vulnerable to traffic. Many people have never seen a hedgehog in any other state than flattened, sad to say. But we have fond memories of Spike, at least, and imagine that one day it might reappear. Until this week, when I’m lunching on the terrace for the first time. Suddenly there’s a stirring in amongst the tulips and aquilegias, and I grind my teeth, thinking that our kitchen compost has attracted rats, in spite of us using a bokashi. But my fears prove groundless, because there, not a metre away from where I last saw it, is Spike, or if not Spike, then at least a very healthy-looking hedgehog, rooting about and occasionally peeping out to check on me.

It’s about twice the size Spike was when we released it, so clearly adult, and doesn’t seem to mind my intrusion, particularly not as I present it with a bowl of lovely mealworms. If it is Spike, it must have hibernated nearby, at least. The kids are super excited, and me, too. I’ve always wanted a garden that is wildlife friendly, and this is certainly an example of success in that regard. Who knows, we might even have a whole new set of hedgehog babies before long…

 

If you want to adopt a hedgehog there are plenty of sanctuaries out there that will happily provide you with one, as long as you have a suitable habitat for them – that means a fairly large garden, preferably quite overgrown and protected, and with no dogs. If at all possible, there should be no way for the animals to reach roads, but that’s almost impossible to ensure. Do get in touch with your local sanctuary. We used Birdsbay, and they are typical in that they rely on volunteers to care for rescued animals. 

Marvellous Mallorca

imageI’ve come to Mallorca on holiday with my brother. It’s with some reluctance I admit this: The place has always been a byword for package holidays of the kind up with which I will not put. Back in the days of socialist Sweden this was where people escaped the state monopoly on booze and sunshine to pig out on an abundance of both – but there is more to the island than its bad reputation would have you believe.

For me, this marks my second visit to Spain in as many months. It’s a country I hadn’t hitherto considered as very interesting, but I’m very pleased to admit I was wrong.

I know of course that I should tread carefully here, in every sense of the word; only non-Spanish people talk of Spain as a unified country – to a Catalan their homeland is Catalonia, and a Basque or a Mallorquin are equally fiercely proud of their respective regions. Without commenting on the respective merits of various other separatist movements, I think it’s fair to say that the Mallorquins’ case has more merit than most; like all islanders, their history is the result of all manner of foreign influences. Long before the British invasion of binge-drinkers or the colonies of German nudists, indeed long before Spain was an entity, the Balears were part of the Califate. The name of the isle itself is a bastardisation of Al Malorq, which in turn is an approximation of the Latin Isola Major (the big island), and before the Romans there were the Phoenicians, and so on. But I digress.

We’ve come to hike the Tremontana region that spans the entire northwest coast of the island. We did a hiking holiday together a year and a half ago in Slovenia, and we’ve been looking to find something that could match that experience. This certainly fits the bill: the Tremontana is home to the GR221, Ruta de Pedra en sec, or drystone route, all 161km of it, and it traverses some of the most impressive landscapes I’ve seen in Europe.

It’s still a work in progress tho, with some landowners contesting the right of the hoi polloi to cross their lands, so I’ve reluctantly decided against using the refugios, for fear of having the itinerary thrown into disarray by some trigger-happy estancia-owner with a hatred of hikers*. Instead we found an agretourisme, Finca d’Olivar, near Estellencs, which became our base. Formerly the home of a hermit, it’s a cluster of little stone houses built into the cliff side, nestled above orange groves, hidden away from sight but still offering wide-reaching views; small wonder stray cats like it!

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Our finca is nothing out of the ordinary, however. The whole coast is littered with beautiful honey-coloured villages, houses huddled together on cliffs and outcrops like swallows’ nests, built one on top of another in a jumble with not a right angle in sight**. The dramatic road serpentines its way between them like a never ending snake, never straight, never horizontal, imbued with a steady stream of bikers swooping down the slopes or sweating their way up the mountain side.

The GR221 is a different proposition altogether: just as vertiginous, but almost completely devoid of people, we stroll for hours without meeting a single hiker. The first day sees us scale the heights of the nearest mountain, which we have all to ourselves with the exception of some wild goats, and from whence we can see the entire island. The second day we set out along the coast, and hike for seven hours straight through fishing villages and almond groves, past vineyards and poppy fields and watchtower ruins, before taking the bus back from Bayalbufar, a very bijoux bayou. The third day, we drive high into the mountains north of Sóller for a final excursion in the remotest part of the Tremontana. Everywhere we go the landscape is stunning, the sky and sea deepest azure blue, the air so crisp that individual leaves on trees hundreds of metres away are clearly visible, and the stillness such that the slightest sound carries for kilometres. Flowers are in bloom everywhere, birdsong and fluttering butterflies fill the air. It really is paradisiacal.

In fact, the term paradise is particularly apt here, since pairi daiza in Persian originally meant “walled garden”, and the most distinguishing feature of the island is the abundance of terraced walls. They are literally everywhere, even in the remotest areas, and I am reminded of a comment by a forester friend (who said apropos the Blue forest): “If you think the woods are beautiful, thank the foresters.” This is brought home to us again and again: all this is cultivated land, used for millennia. Olives were a source of wealth to the islanders even before Carthage lost it to the Romans, and the trees are still there today, their centuries-old trunks contorted like souls tormented in a Dante-esque inferno, impossibly alive in spite of looking like they should have died a dozen deaths. Intricate systems for water collection – aljab cisterns – help funnel the winter rains down to the fertile soil down in the valleys, often using canals built into roads and walls to get to the staircase gardens below. Even higher up, where nothing but pine and holly grow, there’s still evidence of charcoal burning sites, and as you reach the crest of a mountain, more often than not you will find a drystone wall, erected to avoid flocks of goats escaping.

It really is a walk through a pastoral idyll, and it’s easy to imagine fauns and nymphs cavorting in the valleys, where rosemary and sage grow wild in the dappled shade. In reality, any attempt at cavorting would result in sprained ankles or worse, as the ground is extremely unforgiving – think rock, rock, rock around the clock – but we manage to make it unscathed, which is more than can probably be said for the passengers of the helicopter wreck we come upon the last hour of our last day. There’s no telling how long it’s been there, but discovering it changes our mood. Even the skies begin to darken, and it seems right to end our adventures here.

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I spend one more day in Mallorca, getting lost in the labyrinth of Palma’s old town, dodging raindrops and dodgy tourist traps, meeting interesting people and finding hidden gems. The island still has more to offer though. There’s canyoning, rock climbing, diving, even biking – if I can overcome my dislike for spandex. I leave thinking I should come back for more – and what better way is there?
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*At one refugio we find ourselves seated next to a Swedish woman and her ten-year-old daughter, who have elected to do a through-hike of the kind I originally envisaged, – as a birthday gift for the girl. Food for thought, that.

**The result of hundreds of generations of husbands succumbing to their wives’ pleas for “just one more room”, perhaps?

Fun, forest, fun!

After a hectic week at work, is there anything better than getting out in nature?

It was a typical April weekend, with clouds, rain, sun, blue skies, hail and snow, all mixed up good, but I managed to spend hours and hours in the garden, weeding my way through the borders until my fingertips ached at the merest touch. It’s a tough job, but satisfying, especially since the difference is immediately noticeable, and besides, this is my favourite time of the year to be in the garden: everything is in bloom, and birds are chirping everywhere.

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From a distance the weeds are invisible. Up close, invincible.

Speaking of blooms, this is also the season for bluebells, and nowhere are they more impressive than in the Blue Forest Hallerbos, near Waterloo, where Mother Nature has seen fit to put on a real extravaganza for about two weeks every spring, when gazillions of the dainty hyacinths turn the forest floor into a carpet of the deepest purple blue imaginable.

We braved the dark skies and went late in the afternoon on Saturday, eyeing the clouds as we drove, but by the time we got there the clouds (and the crowds) had dispersed, and we had the whole glorious display almost to ourselves (Relatively speaking. It’s so popular, and the time of flowering so brief, that there are always people around, but at least we didn’t outnumber the bluebells, which apparently sometimes happens…).

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Why it’s called the Blue Forest is anyone’s guess.

Sunday brought more of the same weather – a perfect setting for my first duathlon, a local race in the English park of Chateau La Hulpe in the neighbouring village, and the stately forest behind it that is my playground par preference. A duathlon combines running and biking, and in this case the set-up was two loops of 2k running, followed by two loops of 11k biking and ending with one final 2k loop on foot.

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Vertigo is normal at dizzying heights, right?

It was a fun way to switch up my long workout of the week, and my experience left me with a newfound respect for mountain bikers – I don’t recall ever having scared when running, but whilst rocketing down steep, narrow slopes on my bike, with other bikers trying to overtake me, I did consider my mortality, and how the impact of an unseen root or a false move could affect me in that regard. Thankfully neither occurred, and I made it through without incident, although getting off the bike to run the last lap was hard, stiff legs and numb bum and all.
This was my first official foray into combined sports, and although it was hard it certainly wasn’t impossible, so it did whet my appetite for more. A quarter ironman triathlon is 1k swimming, 40k biking (not mountain biking tho!) and 10k running – something to ponder, that.
All in all, not a bad weekend of outdoor adventures – both peaceful and less so – right on my doorstep!

Paradise lost?

imageLast week I went to Thailand to go diving, somthing I have long wanted to do. So I signed up to go on a live aboard boat – an old Chinese junk, and a movie star, no less!* – and off we went into the choppy, tepid waters of the Andaman Sea. We were a motley crew of sixteen divers from all over the world – the U.S., the UK, the Philippines, Argentina, India, Finland, France and Sweden – but we got on splendidly, and this would have been just another travelogue – you know, blah blah Richelieu Rock blah blah leopard shark – had it not been for one last news feed via radio before we entered waters where no communications were possible.

There was talk of explosions in Brussels. No details, just a headline. It was agonising, not knowing, not having any way of finding out what had happened. As it turned out, of course, the explosions were the worst terrorist attacks Belgium have ever experienced. Over thirty dead and three hundred injured, and – even more devastating – the perpetrators men born and bred in Belgium who hate their fellow humans so much, have so little regard for the sanctity of life – their own as well as that of others – as to feel that this atrocity was the right thing to do with their existence.

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Fishy pearl of wisdom #1: Know thine anemones, as well as thine enemies. Don’t destroy the former to conquer the latter.

Society must have failed these men on numerous occasions for that kind of rage and hatred to grow in their minds. Where do these values come from, and who instilled them in the suicide bombers? Where have we gone wrong as a collective when members of our society lash out to destroy it? When people born and raised in western civilisations pledge their lives to a death cult with medical ideas of justice? These are questions I hope are being asked in ernest, but I doubt it.

In fact, I think mankind is doomed. We lack the collective will to protect what is dear to us and do the right thing. Global warming and pollution is killing off species at a rate last seen when the dinosaurs went extinct. We know this, yet doing anything much to stop it seems beyond us. We continue to use more resources than the world produces, year after year, as if we had an Earth 2.0 in reserve somewhere, which – I’m sorry to tell you – we don’t.

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Fishy pearl of wisdom #2: Judge actions, not looks. Most – however scary-looking – just want to be left alone to lead their lives as best they can.

Diving in Thailand is a case in point: the corals are dying due to bleaching, something which occurs when the water gets too warm (as global warming continues, this becomes inevitable), but also due to overexposure to humans. However, instead of protecting the reefs, Thai authorities let anyone who pays in, leaving the sites lousy with divers – and lousy divers! – bumping into corals that have formed for decades and breaking them, and what’s worse: the national marine parks aren’t even protected from commercial fishermen, as guards are bribed to look the other way. Short-sighted greed scores another victory.

Another example: if the entire world became vegetarian, it would help reduce greenhouse emissions by 60-70%, and would save millions of lives annually, not to mention giving fish stocks a chance to recover from constant over-fishing. But will that happen? No. We can’t even instill in our own citizens a sense of it being wrong to kill your fellow men and women – what hope can there be for a species that cannot even master that?

We evolved to be scavengers, hunter-gatherers with a built-in evolutionary advantage for natural horders, since resources were – by definition – scant. But then humans stopped being hunter-gatherers and started dividing up the land into yours and mine, and that same advantage became greed – the urge to own more, ever more – and since agriculture meant resources were plentiful in this new word order we grew to dominate the entire planet.

Well, we’ve come full circle, with resources being scant again due to overpopulation, and we have to go against our instincts to resolve that problem. To add insult to injury, with modern society now having removed us completely from our link to nature, there’s not even a sense of it being wrong to deplete resources. But: appreciating nature’s beauty, however fleeting, can instill in us a sense of urgency, a sense of what we’ve lost and stand yet to lose, on this paradisiacal planet we call home. It’s as close to a religious experience as I have ever had, and with good reason.

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Fishy pearl of wisdom #3: Be cool, little dude. And if faced with suicide bombers, BYOB – bring your own blast protection

We felt it, all of us aboard that ship, irregardless of nationality, religion, gender, age. And that gives me a little hope. That reverence for nature is perhaps the only thing standing between us as a race and extinction. So I leave the Andaman Sea behind, hoping that humans will do the right thing – it’s no longer a case of preserving nature for future generations, but preserving it so there will be future generations. I know I will try my best, whenever I can. I may have been cast out of Eden, but I won’t be hiding behind a fig leaf.

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*James Bond’s nemesis operated off of this ship in The Man With The Golden Gun.

 

Photo credits (apart from Little Dude): L. Woodruff

Reality check

Most people’s resolutions for the New Year flounder by February. Actually, most resolutions probably find themselves stillborn on January 1st, but even for those people who do honestly try to effectuate change in their lives, habits die hard, and so I figure it is high time I conducted a health check on my ambitions for 2016 and see what happened to them.

If you recall (and even if you don’t, never fear – all is revealed just one click from here), I set out to improve myself in terms of physique and skills and experiences and whatnot. My idea was to have specific targets for each of these areas, the better to be able to track my progress. So how have I fared thus far?

In terms of improving mentally and intellectually, I have been playing more piano than before, and I have been taking lessons, even though these were temporarily disrupted by my teacher moving to Vienna. I’m not sure I can claim to have played 30 minutes per day, though. I listened to the theme from The Piano and didn’t take to it, so am looking for alternative pieces to learn – Claire de Lune is the current front runner, but suggestions are welcome.

On the other hand I have been diligently studying French, and have accumulated a total of 506 words and phrases thus far, which is a lot more than I would have thought. Have I learnt them all? Not yet, but using CardsOnGo on my iPhone has proven to be a really good method, as I can pick it up whenever I have a moment of downtime and go through my lists. To be recommended.

I’ve only read two non-fiction books thus far this year. I experimented with audiobooks, but found the medium not much to my liking – possibly due to having to wear headsets all day at work – so have gone back to analogue books now, and am ploughing through Bill Bryson’s latest even now (I’m writing this in between chapters).

Staying healthy and getting fitter made up the second chapter in my to do-list. I can’t say I have been wholly successful in staying away from alcohol, as it seems intrinsically linked with going out – something I’ve been doing more of this year, too – but I have stayed away from carbs and sugar for the most part, at least.

Working out is an area that’s been, well, working out well for me so far this year. Even with a week of no physical activity whatsoever due to a persistent cold, I have managed to notch up 69 workouts over 70 days, which is a LOT. It’s been mainly running and strength training, as I had the marathon in Barcelona looming last weekend, but I’m hopeful that biking and swimming will enter more prominently into the equation as the weather improves.

Finally, my ambition was to go on adventures and/or experience something new every month. January saw me go diving down to 30 metres in Nemo33, but in February I didn’t find anything new to do. I did take the children skiing in Sweden, which turned out to be more adventurous than we would have wanted, as one of their cousins fell and broke her leg, but it wasn’t a new experience as such*. All the more reason to look forward to Thailand next weekend!

In conclusion then, I don’t think I’ve been doing too bad so far. Some things haven’t materialised quite as I imagined them, but I’m on track, at least. After all, a map can never fully predict a path, merely point out its direction and features more or less accurately. I will be back with more updates later on.

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*Having said that, I doubt even Scott (of ill-fated polar expedition fame) had to coax and cajole his companions into pushing on as much as I and my brother-in-law did when stuck on a wind-whipped slope far from the cottage as the sun started to set on day one. Then again, if his fellow explorers had been ages seven to ten and he had promised them unlimited access to iThings once home, I dare say they would have overcome any obstacle.

Seven Tips For A Painful Marathon

imageYesterday I ran the Barcelona Marathon. The goal was to improve my personal best by over half an hour, from 4h33 to anything sub-four hours. A tall order at best, as preparations didn’t exactly go according to plan.

It occurred to me that with three marathons and one ultra marathon under my belt – all of them marred by difficulties, injuries and insufficient planning and experience – I could probably write something on the topic of how NOT to go about training for them and running them in the best manner possible. After all, every runners’ magazine, web page and blog is already filled with that stuff. Instead, I figured I could provide you with

Seven Tips For A Painful Marathon

1. Overtrain
The importance of this cannot be overstated. There’s nothing quite like showing up at the starting line with a wonky knee, a smarting hip or a stiff back to ensure a painful experience. Acquired through Zealous Adherence to a Plan no matter what (you can follow in my footsteps and go running in primordial goop for two hours on a given day because the Plan decreed it should be so – causing an inflammation to the hip three weeks before D-day) or simply by training too much – nothing like preparing for a marathon by running one, right? – they all but guarantee a torturous outing.

2. Don’t sleep/eat enough before the race
During my last marathon I burnt 3,600 calories, or the equivalent of almost one and a half days worth of calories, so carb loading is essential. Overdoing this might have adverse effects on your sleep, however: having duly inhaled a couple of pounds of pasta and some jolly good Spanish cervezas the night before, I found myself tossing and turning between two and five in the morning, as the sheer quantities of food left me feeling like a beached whale; again something that begets a less than enjoyable run.

Another essential part of preparations if you want things to run smoothly – quite literally in this case – is the application of

3. Vaseline and/or Glide
Imagine you were to suggest to someone that they take a piece of cloth, soak it in briny water and rub it back and forth over their nipple, oh, say, 50,000 times without stopping. All but the most ardent masochists would surely balk at the suggestion, as no other method is more fool-proof in terms of dropping you into the seventh circle of runners’ Hell. To avoid this, apply Vaseline or Glide to all your intimate areas – nipples, crothes and ass (every crack, fold and crevasse), you name it, a liberal dollop of the gooey stuff is the only thing – again, quite literally – between you and utter, agonising, blistery chafing pain.

I’ve been told that those of a female persuasion would do well to look after the seems of their sports bras the same way, but regardless of gender, a top tip is coating your eyebrows with it (preferably before you go to work on other, more delicate areas), as this prevents sweat from reaching your eyes and stinging them like acid rain. Or not, you know, depending on your preferences.

4. Footwear and headgear
In a good story, the beginning and the end are the most important bits. Get these right and the stuff in between will fall into place. And so it is with the body during a race; make sure your feet and head are doing ok, and the rest will follow (it has no choice, really, does it?).

Feet need proper, well-fitting shoes, but since feet swell during a race, and shoes generally do not, you must either run with shoes that are initially too big or wear compression socks that help fight the swelling. Having ignored this in the past (with consequences that are outlawed in the Geneva convention if inflicted upon others), I opted for the latter solution yesterday, and it seemed to work. Having said that, as I’m writing this one of my toes has a pustule that is to normal blisters what Krakatoa is to a pimple, so it’s clearly not a perfect method.

As for the head, wear a baseball cap. It’s going to protect you come rain or sun. Pour water on it if you get too hot, but keep it on. If you do not, you will get sunburn/rivulets of sweat/rain in your eyes/headaches from squinting in the sun, all of which is dispiriting and painful.

5. Don’t study the map beforehand
Almost all serious organisers provide runners with a good map of the race course, and – even more importantly – a topographic outline of it. Ignore this at your peril. In Berlin and Barcelona you can get away with it as the courses are quite flat, but nothing brings your spirits down quite like suddenly facing a seemingly never-ending ascent that you didn’t even know was coming. Also, studying the map will help you avoid social embarrassment, like when I managed to run right past La Sagrada Familia yesterday without noticing, an involuntary faut-pas my proud and architecturally-minded hosts were understandably quite upset about.

6. Run with your heart, not your head
And so you’re finally ready to step up to the starting line. You’ve done your homework and are well prepared, physically and mentally, and know what pace you want to be going at, but once the speakers start blasting music (“Barcelona” with Freddy Mercury and Montserrat Caballé yesterday) and the crowd cries out, you charge ahead, blood boiling, adrenaline flowing, and you find yourself running fast, too fast. Much too fast.

I did exactly that yesterday. I had set my Garmin to alert me if I ran too fast or too slow, the better to ensure that I kept the speed I had decided on beforehand, which would take me to the goal in just under four hours. Due to my inadequate programming skills, however, it only beeped when I ran too slowly. Before I had noticed this I was five kilometres into the race and going almost a minute faster per k than foreseen – a recipe for disaster. I tried to slow down but couldn’t. By ten kilometres I was panicking, by the halfway mark I was becoming fatalistic – it was do or die.

Another thing to avoid is straying from the path; the bigger marathons nearly always draw a line on the ground that demarcates the official length of the race, so professional athletes actually run the distance. Stay on this, and you will, too. The problem is that you are crowded by people, some of whom you will overtake, so walking the line (or more accurately running it) becomes impossible, and inevitably you run longer as you zig-zag through the throng. By the end of the race I had done a kilometre and a half more than 42,195 metres, which is quite frustrating but seemingly inevitable. You can counter this at least in part by running in as straight a line as possible and under no circumstances interact with the audience, but where would be the fun in that?

In fact, I counsel you to do the latter as much as possible, and if you pay for it in sweat and additional steps then what you get in return is certainly worth the price; having whole swathes of the crowd clasp your hand and shout your name as you go past merely because you were the only one of all the runners who gave back something by smiling and thanking them for their support is priceless, and I promise that the pain you felt a moment ago will melt away under the adulation of las zorras.

7. Don’t take pride in your results
What’s a marathon, after all? Anyone could do it, right? Well, maybe they could, but they sure as heck don’t. Less than 1% of all people do. It’s going to hurt, it’s never going to be not painful, and you will walk like a stop-motion John Wayne puppet afterwards, whatever all those articles tell you, but if you embrace it (and maybe heed a piece of advice or two along the way) and enjoy it, there is every reason in the world to be proud and rejoice; after all, you just ran an effing marathon!

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P.S. Did I make it in the end? Did I beat my personal best? Did I do a sub-four hour marathon? You betcha. I improved my PB by over three quarters of an hour and it wasn’t even (that) painful. Which only goes to show, I guess, but what, I’m not sure about.

Finding Nemo

January 15

I dived a lot as a young man. Went to the Red Sea and had some fantastic experiences, and then… Nothing.

For years I didn’t dare go diving for the sake of my ears. I have tinnitus, and it’s difficult to cope with as it is from time to time, I don’t need more of it, and so that fear – and the fact that my wife wasn’t overly keen – made me try to forget diving, but I couldn’t. And so last year in the Dominican Republic I decided to give it a try, and almost ended up swimming with a humpback whale.

With this in mind, I knew diving would be one of the things I did this year. But it’s not advisable to just suit up and jump in the ocean like I did in the DR, so I figured I needed to try my gills in a more controlled environment. Luckily, Brussels is host to Nemo33, the deepest indoor pool in the world.

 

And so I found myself entering a crowded foyer this Saturday morn, jostling fifty or so Belgians who had had the same idea as me. It was a quarter to twelve and I was on a tight schedule, as my son needed a ride to a friend in two hours. Since they only let people in on the hour, and the one woman manning the reception desk moved with continental speed, I figured it wasn’t going to work, but two decades in this country has taught me a thing or two.

I left the queue and went to the bar, where a man who was obviously a diving instructor was seated (Just the thing! Drunk diving!). I asked him if he knew how I should go about things if I wanted to dive, and he immediately got the woman out from the reception desk (while the fifty other divers-in-spe stood and looked on, grim-faced), got her to sign me in (“No PADI card? I don’t have time to look you up. What level are you? Advanced? Ok, in you go.”) and five minutes later I was kitting up on the edge of the pool with Yves, my new dive buddy.

Turns out diving is a lot like riding a bicycle (apart from the fact that you don’t have to assemble your bike every time you want to go biking), so once I was in the water it was as if it were only yesterday. The free divers have the deep part of the pool to themselves for the first ten minutes of every hour, but Yves had us on the edge of the abyss before anyone else, and so we were the first to slowly descend into the part of the pool that gives Nemo33 its name – a man-made blue hole, the depth of a ten-story building. It’s an awesome feeling, looking up at the surface from such a distance, and it wasn’t made any less impressive by the sight of groups of divers slowly drifting down towards us in clouds of bubbles.

Once they were down, though, it was a different story. Think blubbery seals boldly bouncing into each other whilst taking selfies and you have a fairly accurate picture. So we made our way up again and spent the rest of the dive exploring the tunnels and caves (“zey zerve ze champagne here”, Yves informed me, as we briefly stopped in the largest one), made faces at the people in the restaurant on the other side of the windows, and generally amused ourselves as best we could – Yves had me take off my fins and “run” on the pool floor and then onto the wall and perform a backflip, Kung fu-movie style.

It was a good experience, though, and it served its purpose, showing me that I can dive. As I got out of the pool and gravity reasserted its grip on me, I felt elated, and more than ready to take this old/new adventure to the next level: a live-aboard diving safari in the Andaman Sea off of Thailand! Watch this space…

To do list, 2016

‘Tis the season… for people to start thinking about what they want out of next year.

Unfortunately this is often done in a rather tipsy state on New Year’s Eve, which doesn’t help making the resolutions any more achievable, but more importantly, the intentions – however good – aren’t accompanied by a plan for how to accomplish whatever healthy habit-pickuppery/unhealthy habit-kickery the resolution takes aim at, and so by the end of January things have largely returned to normal.

I’m no different. In fact, the few times I recall having carried out my resolutions to the letter have all been when I was able to have a plan for how to do it, and measure the rate of implementation.

When I was twelve my father and I agreed we would do 10,000 push-ups each in a year. I got a little notebook and wrote down however many I did each day, and by the end of the year I reached the goal. (Dad dropped out long before that, making me suspect that his motifs were somewhat different than mine…).

This year I’ve done something similar, in that I set out to run 1,000 kilometres, and used my Garmin account to track my progress. The counter currently stands at 995, so unless something really untoward happens tomorrow it should be in the bag.

These goals are a tad simplistic, admittedly. It is after all merely a matter of dividing a random (but hopefully impressive) number by 365 and then averaging that much every day, but the principle is sound; if you want to achieve something, have a clear goal in mind, do it incrementally and make sure progress is easily measured.

So can I apply this to my ambitions? Well, first I have to figure out what I want. Luckily, what I noted when I wrote the initial text about me still holds true. I want to improve intellectually and physically, and I want to go on adventures and have new experiences.

So how to make this quantifiable?

Improve intellectually

Overarching goals: Get better at piano playing and French, read more non-fiction.

Specific goals: learn a challenging piece by heart, e.g. the theme from The Piano; incorporate 1,000 new words and 300 new expressions in active vocabulary, read 25 books.

Incremental steps: play piano 30 minutes per day when at home, take lessons; read French texts, look up and memorise terms and phrases, and incorporate in conversations; make a list of non-fiction, read 30 minutes per day, utilising modern technology to bring books when travelling, write reviews on GoodReads.

Improve physically

Overarching goals: Get in better shape.

Specific goals: Run a marathon in under 4 hours; run the 90k ultra marathon UltraVasan; (possibly) do a half Iron Man.

Incremental steps: work out continuously six days per week (depending on if I have the kidlets or not), three days running, one day biking, one day swimming and/or two days weight lifting; eat healthily (no refined sugar, alcohol, and little carbs) with the exception of a Cheat Day every two weeks, and sleep enough (ideally eight hours per night); measure improvements.

Adventures and new experiences

Overarching goals: travel to new countries, try new things, test my limits

Specific goals: do at least one thing every month that falls into this category:

  • January:   Go diving at Nemo 33
  • February: Go to Malta to dive?
  • March:      Run Barcelona marathon
  • April:         Take kids to Disneyland
  • May:           Go to London with ten-year old
  • June:           Go hiking in the Alps
  • July:             Try western riding
  • August        UltraVasan
  • September Learn how to fly a delta wing?
  • October       Go to Mozambique to dive?
  • November  ?
  • December   ?

Most of these are not yet set in stone as I need to check when I can go travelling and when the various destinations are at their best, but it’s a starting point.

Finally, in order to stay on the straight and narrow, I will report on my progress here throughout the year. It will be an experiment, and I’m not sure how it will turn out – if nothing else it will certainly make for a Happy New Year!

 

 

Antibes, France

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One year ago today I found myself in Antibes, on the French Riviera. I was there to run the Nice-Cannes marathon. Instead of the sunny, lovely experience I was expecting, however, the race turned into a harrowing trial when a freak rain storm hit the coast, turning the marathon into a 26.2 mile gruelling gauntlet. In short, the race turned into an allegory of my life.

Crucified in Cannes.

Crucified in Cannes.

You see, six months earlier the woman I thought I had partnered with for life came home one day and announced she wanted to separate. The mother of my children had fallen in love with another man and that, apparently, was that. We had been together for eighteen years, and not all of them were good, but to my mind we had made the ultimate commitment to each other – having brought new lives into the world that we were now responsible for together – and I thought it would be us ’til the end.

I was wrong.

And so it was that my life was instantaneously changed from the long slog I was counting on – not always great, perhaps, sometimes a downright struggle, but always enjoyable – to a hellish fight for survival, the downpour threatening to drown me at any moment. This wasn’t the cold, quiet rain lamenting a summer coming to its end, it was torrential torture, a vivid, livid, thrashing cat o’ nine tails trying to wear me down to the bone by sheer force, and I raged against it, hating it for doing this to me, for ruining everything I had envisioned. It was by far the most horrific thing ever to happen to me, a sense of falling only to realise that the floor underneath my feet was gone, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

And yet here I am today, back in Antibes. I’ve gone down here on a whim. I briefly considered enrolling in this year’s edition of the marathon (under way even as I write these words), but I’ve realised you cannot rerun a race. What’s past is past. Instead I enjoy a weekend sampling of what the Riviera has to offer: hiking the sentier littoral, eating astonishingly good sea food at the fishmonger’s, getting lost in Old Antibes’s labyrinthine alleys, going to piano bars, drinking absinthe in vaulted cellars and flirting with yachties – the always young and beautiful crews of the billionaires’ boats that are moored in the harbour.

"So this is absinthe? I don't feel a frglgnphprrrt..."

“So this is absinthe? I don’t feel a frglgnphprrrt…”

It’s sunny and warm, the Alps clearly visible in the background, the sky and sea competing for bluest hue, and I thoroughly enjoy my time here. Is it still an allegory of my life? I’d like to think so.

It’s been an interesting year. I’ve launched this web site, gone on well over a dozen trips abroad, and I’ve met and befriended some wonderful people.

I’ve tried surfing and kiteboarding for the first time, I’ve gone rock climbing and diving again for the first time in ages, I’ve run an ultra; at 44 I am probably in better shape than ever before.

So far, so good – at hiding the fact that half the time I cannot be with my children, the two people that mean more to me than life itself. I sit in my house, staring at nothing, doing nothing, waiting for Sunday evening to finally arrive so that I can welcome them through the door and have a sense of purpose once more.

There is nothing I can do to change that. All I can do is run the race as best I can, accept the freak storms of life and hope for sun again further down the path. So as the runners go by the marina, sweating in the heat, I applaud them without envy. All races are different, but all must come to an end.

There’ll be other races.

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Autumnal addiction

I have a confession to make. I am a anthocyanin addict.

Like any addict I can go to great lengths to get my kick. Why, only recently it took me all the way to the northeast of the U.S., but I have spent quite a lot of money on it here at home as well.

It’s a seasonal thing, and this time of year is when my addiction really surfaces. You see, anthocyanin is the agent in some deciduous trees and bushes that turn their foliage a bright red once the temperature drops below a certain level, and I’m a complete sucker for it.

New England

A fix for the aficionado…

Whereas yellow fall colours are simply the result of chlorophyll draining away from the leaf, anthocyanin has to be produced by the tree, and the reason I have to travel to other continents and/or import exotic plants to get my fix is that anthocyanin doesn’t occur naturally in plants in Europe.

The explanation for this is that it’s quite taxing for plants to produce anthocyanin, and that at a time when they would be well adviced to store their energy for the long cold period ahead. So why do these American and Asian trees do it? The answer is to be found 35 million years ago.

After the Appalachian mountains (along with the rest of the North American continent) were torn away from Scandinavia*, the Ice ages affected the evolution of deciduous trees differently. Europe’s mountain chains being mainly west-easterly oriented, they stopped insects from migrating away from the warm south (where they are more abundant), unlike in North America, where mountain chains tend to follow a south-north axis, creating corridors where insects could travel freely.

Trees in North America therefore evolved throughout the years to protect themselves from many of the species that never spread in Europe. Their answer to this challenge? Anthocyanin, a substance that helps ward off insects and protects them against sudden cold spells (which is also happily why red leafs last longer on trees before they fall in the fall).

Japanese acer, chez moi

But can you smoke it…?

So next time you take in the stunning colours of an autumnal garden (be it mine or the entire New England wilderness), you can enjoy your fix – like I do – knowing that it’s an addiction that does both you and the trees a world of good.

 

—–

*It’s all part of the Greater Swedish Empire, really.

The Mosel Valley, Germany

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October 21st, 2015. To some people this was the day Marty McFly arrived in the future, but I find myself celebrating an event fifty years in the past, namely one of my dearest friend’s birthday. Instead of opting for a more traditional party, he has gathered a group of friends in the Mosel valley to walk the Moselsteig with him. This party of friends fluctuates in size and composition, but the core group is made up of myself, the birthday boy, and four German female friends of his.

Thus I’m immersed in German from sunrise until sundown, and I become painfully aware how poor my active German is. Looking at it from the bright side, I provide my new acquaintances with some good laughs, as when I refer to Thor as the Donnerwettergott instead of Donnergott (the “Goddammit” rather than the God of Thunder), or accidentally reduce a complete stranger to giggles when he overhears me referring to the breakfast müsli as Vögelfutter rather than Vogelfutter (that one umlaut being the difference between bird feed and f**k feed).

On the other hand the five Germans aren’t spared either. Every five minutes or so they find a word that has at least as many regional variations as there are native speakers present. It is a very telling indication of just how recently Germany was created from a mishmash of little fiefdoms, and how rich and diverse their language remains as a result of all those centuries of relative regional independence.

In fact, hiking along the Mosel you’d be excused for thinking you were transported back in time to The Middle Ages. The river itself is used for transportation the way it has been since times immemorial, Fachwerk houses still huddle together in labyrinthine villages close to the riverside, always with a church in the middle and a castle or ruin typically perched on a rocky outcrop above. Legions of vineyards, brought here by the Romans, march up the mountainsides in straight lines only to meet fierce resistance from the unruly, wild Teutonic forests that still hold sway on higher ground.

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Our merry band, too, march up and down the steep slopes. The paths wind their way along the sides of the valley, and it’s hard going, something which the less experienced hikers among us discover to their chagrin. For thirty million years the Mosel has been carving its way into the slate (which itself consists of sediment deposited here at a time before the dinosaurs, when all this was the bottom of a primordial ocean), and the valley runs deep, which means the slopes are very unforgiving indeed, and a fall would oftentimes be fatal.

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The fall flora on the other hand is beautiful; beyond the vines are wild cherries, mountain ashes, red oaks, French maples and other trees and shrubs that compete with the river itself for attention. According to our host there’s even something called “Kruppel-leichen” out there (It seems even native speakers can’t always cope with the German language’s propensity for combining words into new words, as one “L” too many here changes the word “dwarf oaks” into “crippled corpses” – not an easy mistake to make in most languages!).

Luckily we don’t see any of those, and avoid adding to their numbers, too, in spite of the treacherous terrain*. Possibly this is due to the fortifying sustenance we are able to avail ourselves of. This being Germany there is plenty of hearty food to be had: schmaltz (rendered fat), blutwurst (blood sausage) and bratkartoffeln (fried potatoes) being a favourite for lunch, especially when washed down with plenty of Federweizen (still fermenting grape juice) – a delicacy often only found in the vineyards, as it doesn’t travel well. But then to be fair, nor does the drinker after a few glasses.

Speaking of that particular lunch menu, one German word that I had never encountered before this trip is Bratkartoffelnverhältnis (fried potatoes relationship). After the Second World War as men were returning home from the front there were a great many widows around that might need the help of a man with this or that, and who in return for this and other services rendered might offer the hungry ex soldier a warm meal. Well, it seems that often enough the men and women found this arrangement to their liking, and prolonged it indefinitely (if unofficially), and this type of relationship became known under that particular moniker.

I should point out that no such relationship was formed during our brief sojourn together (none that I know of, at least!), but one of the women did ask if I was perhaps in love with our host. This after I had opted to serenade him rather than give a speech at the official birthday dinner – she couldn’t know it of course, but the song I had elected to sing was Helan Går, a Swedish drinking song that most Swedes know better than their national anthem. This proved more useful than real serenades, as the wine flowed freely during our nights together. Our demi-centarian is a lover of fine wines, so Bacchus was properly worshipped every evening, with the local Rieslings proving to be mostly excellent choices for our libations**, always accompanied by calls of “Prost!”, the most German of toasts***.

So there you have it. A celebration that included wine, (wo)men and song. Oh, and some wandering. I’ll drink to that. Prost! Whenever you want to do it again, Alter Freund, I’ll be back. To your future!

 

—–

* Although one late addition to the troupe barely makes it here before a shot back had him limping to the nearest train station, poor soul.

**Even more fittingly, one of the local villages we hiked through was called Pommern, a bastardised version of the Latin name Pomona, goddess of fruit. Not too difficult to imagine which fruit they had in mind.

***Prost itself is a germanised form of the Latin Prosit (“may it be good”).

 

New England, U.S.

Oktober 2015

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Ever since I read Last of the Mohicans as a boy I have wanted to experience New England’s wilderness. This is where Hawkeye Leatherstockings fought the sly fox Magua to the death, and Uncas and Cora Munro were the first believably star-crossed lovers I ever encountered in literature, so this was clearly a happening place, my ten-year-old self reckoned.

Fast forward 25 years and I’m still inspired by literature, only now it’s Bill Bryson and A Walk In the Woods that have me pining for the Appalachian Trail, that runs along the Eastern seaboard for 3,500km from Georgia to Maine. His story about hiking along the AT – and in particular his description of the White mountains in New Hampshire and the 100-mile-wilderness in Maine – was what got me interested in hiking in the first place, so there are several reasons I’m giddy as a schoolboy as my native guide (gotta have a native guide when exploring the unknown) guns the car down Kankamagus Highway into the Pemegawasset Wilderness, where the White Mountains are.

We’ve come not only for to hike, but to leaf peep as well. This is an actual thing, as the autumnal colours of these forests are so spectacular that tourists come to just marvel at the russet reds and fiery oranges of the sugar maples and moosewoods and beeches and birches and rowans and other deciduous trees. Even though I know what to expect I run out of synonyms for “gorgeous” long before we’ve even reached our base camp, a friend’s skiing lodge. The colours are those of a Japanese garden lit up by fire.
There’s a natural order of things, however. Down on the valley floor the deciduous trees reign supreme, but as you set off up the mountain on ever more bouldery paths, conifers begin to appear and grow in number until the leafy trees give up altogether, and you are left with something best described as an army of undead Christmas trees, the tortured, gnarled branches of which reach for you, wanting to snag your clothes. Then these, too, give up the ghost and you enter truly alpine heights, where nothing but bonsai shrubs cling to what little topsoil remains.

Having read Bryson’s accounts I’m a little apprehensive about the difficulty level of some of these trails – New Hampshire styles itself “the Granite State”, and the paths certainly bear witness to this; they are essentially just boulders that you have to hop, skip and clamber over and around, up and down. My faith in my own Pochahontas is absolute however, or rather it was until about an hour or so into the first day’s hiking when she suddenly stopped and swore. I naturally asked what was the matter, and got the undying answer “my foot is stuck underneath my other foot”.*

The undead Christnas trees are closing in...

The undead Christnas trees are closing in…

Yet in spite of this we manage admirably. The first three days follow the same pattern. We set out at ungodly hours (at least jet lag helps you Get Up Very Early), hike from different trailheads up ravines and past waterfalls unto ledges and crests where we eat our packed lunches and marvel at the panoramas unfolding before us.

Visibility is nothing short of incredible; from atop Franconia ridge (which saw us bag three 4,000-footers in an afternoon) and Frankenstein cliffs (sadly not named after the Doctor and his monster but after a local painter) you can see over one hundred miles, and what you see is nature putting on a spectacle to rival any I have ever seen. And in spite of it being peak season we encounter no more than a handful of other hikers every day, one or two birds of prey high in the sky, and the ever present silver grey and red squirrels, whose territorial challenges follow us along the paths.

Make no mistake, however: the wildlife of these deep woods is impressive. Black bears roam the land, as do coyotes, bobcats and possibly even wolves. Less deadly animals abound as well, such as deer, jackrabbits and wild turkeys, which we would see peacefully pecking their way along the roadside. On one hike we set off on a trail that passed several beaver ponds, where moose sometimes come to eat and drink. The guidebook says to listen out for frogs at these ponds, the sounds of which are “remarkably like someone plunking the strings of a banjo”.

"Dadadumdimdum", Frog.

“Dadadumdimdum”, Frog.

We didn’t hear any frogs, but that passage got me thinking about the movie Deliverance, and the decidedly backward (and banjo-plunking) people the city-dwelling protagonists encounter. This place, too, has its share of colourful locals who go by hillbilly names such as Zeke, Cletus and Bubba, and they certainly do live off of tourists, but only strictly financially speaking – cannibalism no longer being in vogue.

Outdoor tourism is huge here all year around, so it’s not surprising that the locals are keen to reap the rewards. For our day of rock climbing we engage a specialist guide named Zebulon Jakub, who takes people rock climbing in summer, ice climbing in winter and kite boarding and para-gliding all year around. He is clearly a latter-day incarnation of Hawkeye. Add to that the fact that he looked like a young Zeb Macahan, and you see how the border between fiction and reality blurs up here.

The climbing itself is brilliant: just hard enough to be a real challenge without completely crushing you. We hike up to Square Ledge, facing Mount Washington, and as the sun climbs in the sky so we climb up the sheer cliff, thirty vertical, vertigo-ous metres straight up to the summit, from which we then rappel down to do other routes, including a chimney-like crack that sported a long dead bird as a special treat near the top. I surprise myself by how strong I feel – clearly all the workouts are starting to pay off – and lunch has rarely tasted as good; adrenaline and vistas make for excellent condiments, it seems.

"Can I have some more view on my sandwich, please?"

“Can I have some more view on my sandwich, please?”

It’s a perfect holiday, in short, if only too short. Luckily, on our last day the weather changes completely, and as we set off for Maine and its lobster shacks and outlet malls, the rain is pouring down, turning bouldery trails into babbling brooks and crests and ledges into slippery death traps, so it seems ordained that this adventure should be at an end. I have ticked off two or three more items on my bucket list in a matter of days – it simply doesn’t get much better than that.

——–

*Credit where credit is due, however. She personally diverted a hurricane that was threatening to cancel the whole endeavour, sped up the leaf ageing process by sheer willpower, and held torrential downpours at bay that would otherwise have made hiking utterly impossible. On top of that she also introduced me to the marvels of local cuisine, to wit: cider donuts, hoagies, dark chocolate peanut buttercups, pumpkin bread, blueberry syrup and republican pasta(!) – made with no taxes whatsoever.

Paris II

September 2015

I’m back in Paris, and for a very specific reason. It’s their Car Free Day Sunday, and I’ve come to test run the Paris marathon, or at least parts thereof, to see if it might be my cup of tea (or verre de vin, as the case might be).

I get there early to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy that particular joie de vivre that is so uniquely Parisian. A freelance colleague has kindly offered me the use of a pied à terre in her possession; it’s in an old Hausmann building, made up of two chambres de bonne – maid’s rooms – where the wall has been opened up to create a bigger space. Bigger is a relative term, of course, as it is still minute, but it feels very authentic and even has the obligatory view of the Eiffel Tower that all rooms in Paris must have (according to movie laws, at least).

We make the most of the sunny weather on the Saturday and take the train out to Giverney, where Monet lived and painted his famous impressionist works (including the water lilies that adorned every other dorm room I ever set foot in as a student). I’m cautiously pessimistic, thinking that September might be the worst of time to visit, but I am soon proven wrong; the garden is overflowing with flowers, different Dahlias in their hundreds foremost amongst them, and the adjacent pond park (actually not a part of the gardens proper) is magical, all bluish-green hues, dappled sunlight, and of course the Japanese bridges (plural – I always thought it was just the one) serving as focal points. It’s only a shame Monet was too short-sighted to do it all justice in his paintings… 😉

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Sunday is carefree if not exactly car free; Parisians don’t like to be without their cars much, it seems, so the car free zone is limited in space and time to the centre of town and is enacted only as of 11 AM. It’s a glorious day, however, and once we get out (using the claustrophobically closet-sized elevator) we make good use of the Promenade Plantée – a disused elevated railway that predates its New York cousin by a decade – to get downtown, where we continue running up and down Champs Élysées, along the Seine, through the Louvre and the royal gardens all the way to the Eiffel Tower and back. People are out and about everywhere, strolling, long boarding, skating, biking and generally enjoying the novelty of not being subjected to the bull run-like conditions that normally rule the streets of Paris.

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For three hours we run at a leisurely pace, and even though we don’t quite manage to recreate the marathon it’s still a very special feeling to run here. My colleague, who is more Fighter than Lover (of running) does show real fighting spirit, and actually runs her first half marathon that day, before sending me off back home again (presumably with a sigh of relief and a groan of pain).

As for me, chances are I’ll be back for the real thing next spring, car Paris (car free or no) l’oblige.

New York, New York

July 2015

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Just reading that name twice probably made you hum a certain tune. Writing it made me realise how difficult it will be to do a travel piece about the most famous city on earth. How do you avoid cliches when you’re dealing with a place everyone has seen a million times, in movies, television, a place literally famous from songs and sagas?

Maybe by going the road less travelled?

If you decide against one of the horribly boxy hotels around Times’ Square and opt for a rent-controlled apartment in an art deco-building on Westside Avenue?

If instead of the glitz and glitter of Broadway you have a picnic at an impromptu outdoor concert in Riverside Park in the evening, where belly dancers and fireflies provide more restrained but no less attractive variations on that theme as the sun sets the water on fire?

When other tourists stampede into Harlem to have a “genuine gospel experience” (as genuine as a Disneyfication of black culture can be), why not trek still further north on Manhattan, and seek out the thoroughly fake and marvellous Cloisters, a faux monastery built by Rockefeller to house his collection of medieval art and architecture, stunningly situated on an outcrop above the Hudson River?

Shun the shopping in TriBeCa and the bars in SoHo, and take the High Line* through the meat packing district instead, before developers have turned that area, too, into a chic yuppie-version of its former self. In fact, don’t do Chinatown and Little Italy and Wall Street and the rest of those places at all – even if you haven’t been (and chances are that you have), you’ve seen them anyway. You know them intimately. Go rather to the Upper West with its Woody Allen-characters and Ivy League campus (replete with ivy-covered professors), or to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, whose local tribe people sport massive beards and numerous tattoos (regardless of gender). Go to the Metropolitan, not to look at the art but to have cocktails on the rooftop; don’t eat burgers, have Ethiopian or Tibetan cuisine (because when else can you?); head to New Jersey (yes, there, I said it!) and watch as the moon rises over that most familiar of cityscapes (that you never actually see if you stay in Manhattan).** Then you will have bitten to the core of the Big Apple, and not just admired its shiny surface.
*The High Line is a disused elevated railway that has been turned into a park – it’s gimmicky but enjoyable.

**And if you must – although I advise against it – get a severe cold and pop into a pharmacy for remedies, only to realise that you’ve strayed into yet another ethnic enclave, this one Polish, and that all the products on sale are Russian, of all things. I couldn’t understand a word on any of them, but they were clearly industrial strength, and I’m grateful, even though I haven’t slept for three days now…

On refugees

June 2015

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My son woke me up this morning by telling me that he loved me. I was in my own bed, in my own house, and I counted my blessings.

Imagine having all that torn away by powers utterly beyond your control, having to abandon your home for fear of being raped, tortured, killed, having to flee for your life, seeing friends and family die on the way into the unknown and still have to carry on, since it’s the lesser of evils.

Imagine finally making it to a place where prosperity and peace reigns, only to be met by racism and xenophobia, by people wanting to send you back to the utter hell you’ve escaped (a hell created by a lack of action from those same countries that you now have to flee to).

Now imagine that’s you. How would YOU like to be treated?

The Dominican Republic

May 2015

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I’ve come here ill prepared. I realise this very quickly after having sat down behind the steering wheel of my rental car.

There’s just one road leading across the island from the south coast to Las Terrenas in the north, a fine toll road that will take me straight where I need to go. Should be easy, right? Only the motorway from the airport to Santo Domingo doesn’t connect with the toll road. Between the two lies the old road, and between that and the motorway are concrete walls, preventing me from getting where I want to go.

After an exasperating hour of trying in vain to reach it via back roads I return to where I started (guided by a car full of giggly, drunken, grotesquely overweight young women), and resort to reversing off the motorway via an entrance ramp to get onto the old road. I only execute this desperate manoeuvre because I’m now safe in the knowledge that my fellow road users would approve, as they all seem to be treating basic driving rules as laughably restrictive.

The ride across the island is beautiful, over lush green hills and through verdant fields, but the Department of Transport has another surprise for me; there are no less than four tolls to be paid along the way. Now, just as there seemingly was no way to get on it, there is really no way to get off the road either, so why they feel they have to get you to pay in incremental steps I don’t know, but pay I do, thanking the stars that I got enough pesos to get me all the way.

Once off the toll road I again get immediately, frustratingly lost as tropical darkness descends upon me (and what precious few signposts there may have been), and it’s only with the help of a local woman – who actually gets in the car and guides me the last seven kilometres through labyrinthine village roads – that I finally arrive at my destination.

Buenas noches.
Day 1

The first thing that strikes you here is how familiar the scenery is. I’ve seen this beach in a hundred movies and a thousand pictures, the palm trees hanging out over white sand in the water’s edge, the waves rolling in to lap at your feet. I half expect Captain Sparrow to careen around the corner at any moment, cannibals in hot pursuit.

The second thing that hits you is the technicolor quality of the landscape; the turquoise sea and azure sky, the crystalline salty white beaches, the cascades of colour exploding from the rampant vegetation – fleshly purple hibiscuses, translucently pink grasses, ripe red mangoes.

Not to be outdone, the Dominicans adorn their houses with colours seldom found outside of Italian ice cream vendors’ counters: electric blue, acid yellow, poison green and countless other outlandish nuances jostle for position, making me feel as if I’m the last spot of white on a child’s painting, waiting to be coloured in.

It’s an odd sensation, expectant and abandoned in equal measure, and yet it sums up my first day here perfectly.

Day 2

Remember how I said I didn’t feel well prepared coming here? Well, I’ve been swatting – as well as sweating – and now I know that I’ve landed on the great island of Hispaniola, so named by my namesake C Columbus, who did likewise in 1492, bringing the local Tainó people the traditional gifts of trinkets, baubles and measles, and changed the world forever.

Christopher’s brother Bartholemew went on to found Santo Domingo, the oldest colonial settlement still in existence, but after that the Spanish pretty much forgot about Hispaniola as they went on to conquer the Incas and the Aztecs. The French were thus able to promptly snatch it up and turned it into Haiti (after a Tainò word meaning “land of many hills”). Some time later people in the east of the island rebelled against their French masters’ rule and formed the Dominican Republic.

The name means something like the Sunday Republic, and if it conjures up images of amateurism (e.g. Sunday drivers) you aren’t far wrong, since the fledgling republic has had a long and onerous journey to democracy. It holds the distinction of being the only country in the Caribbean that voluntarily returned to its colonial masters once the yoke had been cast off, it was occupied by the US in the 1920’s, then run as a dictatorship for thirty years (the original banana republic) and was torn by civil war as late as in the 60’s(!).

On top of that, the relationship with their co-habitants the Haitians has always been fraught – in the 30’s they even engaged in a spot of genocide of ethnic Haitians, which I feel is a bit short-sighted when you consider that more than half the island’s population is made up of the brethren of their victims. Suffice to say that even today locally produced maps of the DR depict it as being an island unto itself, completely ignoring the existence of their neighbours.

Trouble in Paradise? You betcha.

Day 3 and 4

I’m finally getting acclimatised. The jet lag has eased, the heat is becoming bearable (though still oppressive) and I’m beginning to come to grips with this alien society.

Houses here are small, mostly one or two rooms, rickety things constructed of wood or concrete, shockingly colourful, with a covered veranda in front if the owners can afford it – always protected with wrought iron bars, because shade is a valuable commodity here.

Mostly though, life is lived outdoors, in the cornucopia the jungle provides; mango, avocado, guava, papaya, cocoa, coconuts all grow in abundance. The climate is such that if a Dominican wants to make a fence she simply sticks branches in the ground, which take root, turning it from fence into hedge in a season. It works both ways though: the jungle will reclaim anything, and fast.

The car isn’t the mode of transport of choice – the moped is, and it will have 2,5 people on it on average (sometimes literally, as the aforementioned cavalier approach to road safety takes its toll). In the mountains mopeds face stiff competition from horses – all of them steeped in the same mould as Rosinante (of Quixotic fame) and ridden in vaquero style – and for longer journeys there are hua huas, the 50’s Jetsons buses that my friend Laura claims you can “flag down and ride for a peso, often seated next to a rooster”.

The police aren’t much trusted – a memory of the bad old days – so instead there are people who provide private security for homeowners, banks, gas stations et cetera by means of a sawed off pump-action shotgun. That, combined with the odd guy sauntering through the streets with a machete in his hand, makes it a bit unnerving to move
about, but at the same time I have never encountered a more laid-back society. They even measure time in Dominican minutes, which of course are slightly longer than ours.

It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Days 5 to 7

Tourism is by far the largest sector of the local economy here, and it’s easy to see why: the Dominicans are blessed with a climate that rivals just about anything I’ve experienced, and tourists are coming here in great herds, like wildebeest crossing the savannah (and often with the same delicate approach). How tempting it must be for the locals then to make a quick buck – especially when domestic monthly salaries are a fraction of what an average tourist is happy to dispense with over a week.

Unfortunately, this means that you’re constantly running the risk of getting ripped off, if not worse. 3,000 police and military personnel were recently dismissed as they had all been involved in armed robberies. That’s coppers and grunts threatening to kill you if you don’t hand over your money! To continue the metaphor, it’s as if zebras and giraffes suddenly turned out to be lions and crocodiles in disguise. Not a happy thought, that.

Even legit operations seem to be geared towards extracting the maximum amount of dollars with a minimum of effort, so every excursion I’ve made has turned into a gauntlet, negotiating with or just plain dodging locals who are hawking their trinkets and services, often making completely bogus claims in the process. “Wanna see famous waterfall, señor? You need horse and guide, esta impossibile otherwise. Forty dollars US.” No horse required, nor guide. Entrance fee? One hundred pesos, or about two dollars. And on it goes.

On a larger scale, money speaks even louder. Anything is for sale, without regard for the public good. So for instance the village I’m staying in is effectively divided into two valleys because a local politico owns the land in between and won’t allow a road to cross his dominion. Foreigners are buying more and more properties along the coast, making it impossible to access the sea for locals and tourists alike. And with the new toll road, the time it takes to get here from the capital has been reduced by two thirds, which I fear will only exacerbate the situation.

For now, woodpeckers are the only ones enjoying high rise condos, as they make their nests in the coconut palms, but give it another five years and I am convinced that las Terrenas will be another Punta Cana or Costa del Sol – a concrete tourist ghetto with not a hint of authenticity.

Paradise Found equals Paradise Lost, seems to be the inevitable conclusion.

Outro

They say travel writing is the most self-indulgent form of writing bar autobiography, and so in self-defence I stay away from what I think of as “and then I did this”-writing if I don’t feel it has some general interest.

However, someone pointed out that this has the effect of making it sound as if I don’t do anything much at all on my holidays sometimes, and so to debunk that, here are some of my top experiences in the Dominican Republic, big and small:

– Hiking through the jungle to a 50 metre high waterfall and swimming in the water right underneath it,

– Watching a gazillion stars at night uninhibited by electric lights during one of several black-outs,

– Having a humpback cow and calf surface right next to our speedboat and watching them splash about for half an hour,

– Having another whale appear just as I was about to go scuba diving for the first time in well over a decade (even though it made me hyperventilate),

– Learning how to surf, and feeling on top of the world when I rode my first wave (and my second, and my third…),

– Exploring Tainò cave paintings deep in the mangrove labyrinth of Los Haitises,

– Watching the setting sun set the ocean on fire, calming the waves and turning them into something akin to molten mercury every evening.

Not too shoddy. But now the trip is at an end, and as the flight takes me across the Caribbean (named after an extinguished tribe) and the Atlantic (home of the fabled lost continent) I can’t help but ponder the inevitable demise of everything. In the end all you can do is keep on travelling, keep on moving forward.

After all, what’s past is prologue.

Berlin II

April 2015

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Berlin has lured me back. My last visit left me frustrated, with a sense of having left important tasks undone, and so I’ve returned with a mind to fulfilling an obligation. The practicalities of my stay couldn’t be more different from last time – then I lodged in a swanky expensive hotel, now – thanks to the wonder of airbnb – I am sleeping on someone’s couch for the price of box of Belgian pralines. The posh breakfast room of the Hilton is replaced by a rickety chair in the kitchen of my host, but the fair is just as good, and the conversation much better.

My host* is an avid traveller and has friends in Syria, and as I have just read of Ibn Battutah’s travels there we compare notes – her facts vs my fiction, admittedly – but as she moves on to Korea I am left behind.

I do learn a few surprising things about this people, though; their written language is an amalgamation of pictograms and letters, and the South Koreans are the world’s greatest consumers of plastic surgery, with eyes and noses being primary targets for improvement. Alas, only one type of nose job seems to be available, so all recipients end up looking the same, she says. I suppress the impulse to observe that they already did to my untrained eye, and instead bring up the similarities of Korea and Germany, and so on it goes until my host has to leave for a seminar (the topic of which she mysteriously declines to divulge).

I set out to see the memorial to the holocaust victims, which eluded me last time. It’s located underneath the cenotaphs I visited last time, and as the texts and photographs calmly leads me on a path of slowly evolving, deliberate and cold repression, persecution and extermination, the walls crowd me and claustrophobia sets in, as if I was entombed with all these victims of nazism.

Worst of all is the room with scraps of letters written by parents separated from their children, knowing that they are going to their death, without hope of ever seeing their families again. I read until I can no longer see for tears, stay down there until I can no longer breathe, until the horror is racking my body.

I leave with the words of Primo Levi echoing in my head: “it could happen here, and so it can happen again”. It’s not a happy thought.

I continue my pilgrimage by visiting another memorial to those who have died here, this time under the other totalitarian regime to curse Berlin with its presence. The Wall museum at Checkpoint Charlie tells the story of the Cold War in the same unrelentingly factual manner, the story of a failed state resorting to killing and imprisoning its own citizens rather than accept its shortcomings. Personal tragedies aside, it’s hard to comprehend how this absurd situation could continue for decades, with the world in the balance, and the realisation that we may be returning to that state of play (for what is Syria if not a new Vietnam, with the US and Russia facing off by proxy?) is even harder to fathom.

I leave feeling gloomier than the Berlin sky, and head straight across the road into the former US sector and that most American of bastions, McDonalds. Rarely has a Big Mac tasted better.
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*A lady of a certain age who asked to remain anonymous, as couch-surfing – like most good things – isn’t strictly legal in Germany.

Day 2

Heading into town on a Sunday morning you get the feeling Berlin has been deserted. Walking through the largely empty streets it reminds me of a carcass, the many building sites bringing to mind open wounds, the prolific and brightly coloured pipelines thence emerging viscera slithering out of the gashes in the cityscape.

In fact the latter are a necessity in the building industry in order to pump ground water away from the construction sites*. Berlin takes it’s name from the Slavic word “brl”, meaning marsh or swamp, and – like a very slow but persistently vengeful god of the Old Testament – nature is continuously trying to reclaim its own.

In fact I find myself thinking of the city in terms of deadly sins. The pride and hochmut of the German Reich under the Kaisers, expressed in the many classical temple facades and pantheons still dominating the city centre, the greed and wroth of the Nazis, striking out from here for Lebensraum and murderous hearts with their efficient war machine – the bones of which is still visible in autobahns and the Tempelhof airport – and the sloth (and implicit envy) that was the East German reality after the war, in glaring contrast with the lustful, gluttonously hedonistic lifestyle of the inhabitants in West Berlin.

A city, in short, where fascism and fetishism are facing off, and sado-masochists spar with Stalinist-Marxists. What’s not to like?
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*And not for piping beer to the builders, as the jokers would have it.

Massachusetts, U.S.

Massachusetts, day 1

Moving across time zones is a strange experience. You effectively displace yourself so fast as to end up time travelling. This I did yesterday, setting out at ten am from Brussels and landing in Boston at three pm, eleven hours later.

Of course, the price you pay for this sci-fi experience is jet lag. In an attempt to fight it I stayed up until 0430 in the morning my time, which is a decidedly less impressive 2230 local time – as evidenced by the cocktail waitress’s look of disbelief when I was going cross eyed after half a beer – and then slept like a log jam until dawn.

Now, traditionally, Easter is the time when witches are abroad, so where better to spend my first day in Massachusetts than in Salem, scene of the most famous witch trials in history?

I didn’t see any witches (maybe the competitions were held elsewhere?), but the city certainly capitalises on the old madness. Wiccan shops, haunted houses and the like abound, and tourists come from afar to revel in the gruesome history of the place.

Me? I was blown away. Literally. The gale force winds forced me inside at regular intervals, even though the sun did lure me back out, time after time. And I shouldn’t complain – turns out they had seven feet or snow here until only a couple of weeks ago!

Eventually though, my body had had enough. Several hours’ worth of siesta was required to bring me back on my feet just long enough to enjoy my first Maine lobster, but now midnight (the local one) is approaching, and I’m about to leave the state of Massachusetts for the state of unconsciousness once more…
Massachusetts, day 2

The US is a land of extreme contrasts; the unsightly hangar-like superstores along the roads on the one hand, the beautiful New England clapboard houses on the other, the ever-present Dunkin Donuts drivethrus next door to organic eco-eateries/yoga centres, colonial historic sites encroached upon by modern skyscrapers and so on.

Similarly, people are diametrically different; I visited Trinity church in downtown Boston which was packed to the rafters for the Easter sermon, and went outside only to find several women cosplayers climbing on the church building in an attempt to look more like the Assassin’s Creed characters they were dressed up as*.

And yet this is what makes it such a wonderful place, I think. There’s room here for all kinds. So when a bold eagle appears high in the sky above the highway on the way home, it feels symbolically quite fitting.

Land of the free, home of the brave indeed.

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*One creed is as good as the next, I guess…
Massachusetts, day 3

There are places in the world that seem to act as magnets to forces other than normal natural forces (gravity and whatnot). So for instance Jerusalem is a black hole to religions and New York exudes a force field of capital.

In Boston, there is a higher than usual background radiation of learning, and I spent the day trying to expose myself to as much of it as possible (in the vague hope of turning into the intellectual equivalent of the Incredible Hulk). So the morning saw me visiting Walden, the pond in the forest where Henry Thoreau spent two years in splendid isolation contemplating the beauty of nature and a simpler life (except for when he went over to mum’s for pancakes and a change of clothes on Sundays), and in the afternoon I went to Harvard and MIT – not many people have done both, and certainly not in the course of a day, so maybe I was turning into a green intellectual giant after all?

Regardless of colour, it is certainly easy to grow too large here, but in the evening I threw caution to the wind and fulfilled a life-long dream by eating in a Worcester diner, a wonderfully retro institution with table jukeboxes, busty waitresses calling you “honey”, a menu (made) out of Grease and a clientele that between them must have weighed like a whale. My arteries contracted as soon as I stepped inside, and I didn’t give in until I had gulped down a load of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and a wedge of lemon merengue pie (that could have held the door open), the effects of which had me eying the walls for a defilibrator. Bliss!
Massachusetts, days 4 and 5

I’ve spent much of my time here roaming up and down the coast, exploring capes and coves, taking in the quaint little fishing villages and their typical New England architecture.

I freely admit I am in love with the colonial style, which seems to consist of taking Edwardian houses as your starting point and making sure that the architect has the blueprints confused with a recipe for wedding cakes. All of them have an abundance of turrets, pilasters, ornate gables, Roman pillars, covered porches, outside staircases, nooks and crannies, which gives them a stately but very organic look.

The nicest ones are old sea captains’ houses, built by wealthy skippers and traders gone ashore, but not willing to give up the sea – built along the coastline, often right on the water’s edge, with balconies and lookout points where their original owners could spy their ships come in from the Caribbean, where their cargo of slaves had been offloaded, and molasses taken onboard, to be processed to rum in New England and sold on to slave traders back in Africa. (This last detail is oft overlooked by Ralph Lauren and others selling the New England lifestyle for some reason…).

White dominates, but a whole spectrum of muted greys, blues, and beiges exist, mirroring the colour of the weather-beaten landscape and the ever-changing ocean in a way not dissimilar to the buildings in the Dominican Republic, although diametrically opposite its palette.

As always I leave taking something with me. This time, it’s an irrepressible urge to add a covered colonnade to my house…

On skiing

March 2015

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Skiing is a strange pastime. You drive endless hours to get to a mountain somewhere, dress up in outfits that make you look like the Michelin man in a space cadet’s armour, only to let yourself get literally dragged into an environment that is as harsh as any you’re likely to find; an ascent into hell.

It’s the Greek version, an icy inferno, featureless save for the stunted, gnarled trees that the relentless winds whip into submission, like howling demons tormenting the shadows of dead people. You assume the foetal position, curled up in the lift, questioning your sanity for submitting yourself to this torture, your extremities going blue in the whiteout, and then suddenly you’ve reached the summit, and it all makes sense as you enter a powdery paradise.

It’s Fifty Shades of White*, and you might as well be blindfolded as you hurl yourself down the slope, your body moving instinctively, hard steel against sinuous curves, skis caressing the snow, nothing existing but the sounds and the feeling of your body against the land itself.

It’s elemental, exhilarating and exhausting, and it’s over in a matter of minutes, only for the process to begin again. Insane? Maybe, but they say being in love is temporary insanity, and I’m in love with skiing.
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* Like all good SM-relationships, you get as much out of it as you’re prepared to put into it, but this mistress doesn’t take any crap; one false move and you wipe out. Or so I’m told.

Paris I

February 2015

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I came to Paris to meet a friend I hadn’t seen for twenty years. The owners of the B&B are intrigued by the notion, and essentially allow me my short stay only when I tell them about our reunion. And yet where else could such an impossibly romantic folly come true but in the city of lights?

The B&B is quintessentially Parisian, on the outskirts of the Marais – the old town – under the rooftops of a typical townhouse, previously the maids’ quarters, now an ultra-stylish pied-a-terre for two gentlemen who take me in like a long-lost friend and ply me with wine and nibbles and interrogate me until my own long-lost friend appears on the doorstep, and there’s a moment of readjustment for my hosts when they realise he is in fact a she.
They recover magnificently however, and we are sent off into the cold night with their blessings and directions to an Occitan wine bar, thence to start catching up on whatever goings on we might have accidentally glossed over in the last two decades. It’s only in the wee hours of the morning we part, with me exhausted and her bright-eyed and going strong with jet lag in her corner.

The next two days are spent revelling in the exotic world that is Paris. It’s so familiar-looking, its landmarks and facades so unmistakable, its denizens so Gaulishly stylish, its blend of elegance and bizarrerie uniquely Parisian. We pass a reptile merchant followed by a sex shop (doing brisk trade in 50 Shades of Merchandising) next to a rat catcher (whose window display is full of 100-year old rats in various traps) followed by an elegant tea salon and so on and on.

The crêperies and brasseries provide welcome refuge from the biting cold, but we do manage a few proper tourist attractions, among them Notre Dame and Place de la Republique, where we marvel at the many e-wheelers zipping about on their futuristic contraptions (e-wheels are paired down segways, essentially self-propelled unicycles without a saddle).

All to quickly the weekend comes to an end, and we part with the sad realisation that it may well be years before we meet again, even though we both swear it will not be thus.

Whatever happens, we will always have Paris.

Berlin I

January 2015

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Day 1

I cannot imagine there is any city so emblematic to, and shaped by, the history of last century as Berlin.

As I leave my hotel I have only to turn a corner to happen upon the building where the faithful press conference took place that marked the beginning of the end of the Iron Curtain. It’s 9 November 1989, and after weeks of protests the DDR regime has to ease restrictions on travel permits (mainly to other Soviet Block countries). Now they’re holding a meeting with western media to announce as much when the flustered person responsible gets a question about when the Wall is going to open. Unprepared and overwhelmed, he rereads his instructions before uttering the undying words “As far as I understand, immediately”, and history is made.

I was in high school when this happened, and remember vividly how our German teacher, a stately old matron called Frau Ekebjörns – a woman who could have out-ironed the iron chancellor Angela Merkel – came into the classroom teary-eyed the next day. Watching the documentaries, hearing about the plight of the people, both those who stayed and the hundreds who died trying to escape, it’s easy to understand why she did, and yet a couple of blocks further on, this suffering is dwarfed to insignificance by the memorial to the Jewish holocaust.

It’s deceptively simple, with 2,410 massive slabs of concrete resembling traditional Jewish graves, all uniform in size but varying in height from 0 to 4 metres, laid out in orderly rows (although some are deliberately slightly askew). Surrounded as they are by public buildings and pizza parlours, it’s not very impressive at first sight, but when you pass in between those rows, with the concrete weight of 6,000,000 murdered people crowding you, towering over you, it’s impossible not to feel grief and disgust at humanity’s incapacity to prevent such horrors and her capacity to organise them in cold blood.

Berlin is a marked city, forever associated with these events, and yet, ironically, World War 2 and the Cold War are the main reasons for why Berlin has changed more in the last sixty years than any normal city will ever do. The bombings of the former and the no man’s land of the latter have both meant that – once bombs stopped falling and the Wall was torn down – developers could run amok on an unprecedented scale, and so they did. 30% of all buildings in Berlin have been built after 1989. I would imagine that the percentage was even greater after the war.

Being a Berliner* of a certain age (and who wouldn’t want to be an old jelly donut?) must be akin to being a Londoner after the Great Fire or a Parisian after the not-so-great Hausmann came to town; It’s life, Jochen, but not as we knew it.

And all the better for it.

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*But then the typical Berliner isn’t. 100,000 people leave the city every year and 150,000 move in to take their place, so the population is mostly from somewhere else.

Day 2

I said yesterday that Berlin was emblematic, but just as we use capitals as shorthand for governments or regimes, so iconic buildings act as symbols for nations. Big Ben is the UK, the Eiffel Tower France, et cetera*.

Germany’s symbol has always been the Brandenburger Tor. It was established enough as such that Napoleon knew to enter the city through this gate – he was hailed as victor by the crowds**, and then promptly nicked the quadriga that adorns its apex.

The city gate got its statue back once Napoleon’s star waned, and ever since it has formed the backdrop to all important events in Berlin, from the operatic posturing of the Nazis to the tearing down of the Wall, hidden lights making sure that the peace goddess and her four horses were always in focus, day or night.

Last night it was dark, however. The city decided to shut down the lighting in order to avoid having the Pegida-movement*** use it for their purposes. In the end the counter-demonstration brought together a lot more people than the anti-Islamists, but I was still pleasantly surprised at this simple, yet symbolically potent move; you have the right to express your opinions, however baroque, it seemed to say, but don’t think that you can make it look as if this country stands behind you in your xenophobia.

Seems some people do learn from history, after all.
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*Sweden is symbolised by a rather less permanent erection, namely the garlanded phallus we impregnate Mother Earth with at Midsummer.

**I can imagine what it must have been like, having done the same two years ago in the Berlin marathon. I didn’t win, though.

***Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes. Nincompoops.

Berlin, day 3

Maybe it’s the weather, but I am starting to feel maudlin. It’s cold, damp and grey here, which doesn’t help, but on reflection I think it has less to do with the whims of the weather gods and more to do with the climate of oppression, which seems ever present; set in the pavement in the form of gilded cobble stones marking the names and horrific ends of individual Jews who lived there*, in the air – stories of how Stasi kept scent records of all those interrogated in case they would need to track them down with bloodhounds later – yes, even in the ground itself. Only last night we were told that today’s itinerary would have to be changed due to an unearthed WW2 air bomb that needed detonating.

None of these occurrences are normally associated with the everyday hustle and bustle of a western capital, and yet seem normal here. And when we finally reach the Reichstag, the writing is literally on the wall – in the shape of graffiti left by Russian soldiers on what little remained of the building when they were done with it.

100,000 Russians died conquering Berlin, while the allied forces shamefully hung back to let the Red Army slaughter and be slaughtered. There’s a large memorial down the road from the Reichstag to these fallen comrades, which must feel a bit odd to Germans who know their history, considering that Russian soldiers did a lot more than just write the Cyrillic equivalent of Kilroy Was Here on convenient walls – but then that too is the madness of war, I guess.

All in all, these dreary thoughts turn my mood from maudlin to ennui, and I’m reminded of the rather more contemporary graffiti that adorned the student lodgings I once inhabited in Göttingen: “Es ist Deutsch in Kaltland.”

But then I’m struck by a different thought: here we are, a group of people from all over Europe, invited by citizens of Berlin from all walks of life to learn about their work, hopes (and shortcomings) for a better world – from the chairman of the Special Senate Committee in charge of Berlin’s new airport Schönenfeld** to the German-Turkish woman volunteering to help integrate people like herself in society, working door to door to bring immigrant Muslim women out of isolation – and suddenly there is a metaphorical (if not a real) ray of light in the skies above Berlin. To (mis)quote Goethe’s undying dying words:

“Licht… Mehr Licht!”
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*A laudable initiative by an artist who has done the same in many cities both in Germany and abroad. He was turned down by Munich, however: ostensibly because they felt that it would be to dishonour the dead to tread on their names, but for once the well-to-do burgers were probably more interested in avoiding having their streets being quite literally paved with gold.

**A spectacular failure of almost comical proportions.
Day 5

The last two days here in Berlin have seen us tossed from one extreme to another, from the Stasi-untersuchungsgefängnis (investigation prison), where one of the former inmates* described the various interrogation (read: torture) methods in use and their respective merits, to Die Komische Oper two kilometres down the road, where the same regime offered subsidised culture to the masses; from the Holocaust Museum (an experience so overwhelmingly terrifying that I will not even try to put words to it) to the mixed sauna in the hotel where a stark naked woman offered to teach me Tantric massage within an hour of meeting me (All the elderly gentlemen eves-dropping on our conversation seemed very disappointed in my decision to decline the proposition. I wonder if they thought the class would take place there and then – and for all I know that might have been the case!).

Everywhere you go in Berlin there is this paradoxical juxtaposition of a lovely people and the hideousness of their past. If you ask me, that’s the thing about the Germans: there is an immense capacity for Verlustigung (the word means entertainment, but it’s literally “lusty behaviour”) which – paired with the incredibly efficient manner in which they go about everything – somehow enables them to move effortlessly from a real appreciation of both highbrow culture and hedonistic sex to societal bloodlust. To paraphrase Faust**:

Das ist der Kern des Pudels.

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* He was 84, of which he had spent 10 in prison, first at the hands of the Soviets and then the East Germans. With a twinkle in his eyes he explained that his interrogators still lived in the area, but that none of “die Kollegen” had volunteered to work as guides there.

**An operatic German intellectual who unknowingly strikes a deal with the devil and then finally realises who he’s dealing with.

Södermanland, Sweden

December 2014

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Part 1

I’ve travelled back north, to the land of my ancestors. Here, winter has come with a vengeance*. As you rise in the morning, the darkness is Absolut: 100% proof and able to knock you out. Dawn has evidently chosen to have a sleep-in. The quicksilver in my mother’s thermometer has shrunk back to a decidedly frosty -18 Celsius. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the landscape is transformed, snow crystals rendering every surface diamond, like an enormous treasure trove, every encrusted tree sparkling, every pale golden clump of grass glittering in the hesitant morning sun.

There are no Northern lights in the sky, but Northern light is quite singular in its own right. The sun barely makes it above the horizon before it’s gone again, but it makes up for the brevity of its presence with a light show of spectacular proportions; the palette runs from apricot orange in the morning, through pinkish hues of every nuance, to a purple haze before dusk that would have made Jimi Hendrix give up drugs and take up ice skating instead.

Ah, ice skating. It’s one of those inventions that can barely be improved upon. Vikings skated these forest lakes on ice skates made out of moose antlers 1,000 years ago, and there is every likelihood that the Bronze Age people buried in the pine-clad premonitory on the water’s edge did the same 4,000 years before them. How miraculous it must have been for them to walk on water – as indeed it still is for us today.

The ease with which you can traverse a frozen lake, its surface like a ballroom floor, is unlike any other means of self-propulsion I know of; the speed, the silence – broken only by the deep singing of the ice itself – the sensation of going where no man has gone before, however fictitious – it all comes together to create an experience at once exhilarating and meditative.

In spite of the unforgiving cold we keep at it for hours out of sheer joy, reaching parts of the lake it would take ages to get to in summer. Finally, hoar frost in my beard, be-icicled eye brows, buttocks burning and wobbly-ankle’d I struggle back indoors, thence to thaw in front of a roaring fire**. By four in the afternoon the Stygian darkness outside is total once more, and hibernation seems the only option, at least until tomorrow, when we will begin anew…

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* George RR Martin would feel at home, even if white walkers haven’t been sighted… yet.

**Generations come and go, kingdoms and civilisations pass into oblivion, but this is a scene that has remained virtually unchanged down the millennia. It is a comforting thought, somehow.

Part 2

I wrote previously of the tremendous, primeval joy of ice skating, but these last two days we have indulged in even more ancient pastimes. The children and I have engaged in wintery traditions older still than that most time-honoured ritual of enticing the sun to return (the original rationale behind Yule), namely snowman building and snowball fighting.

Anyone who has studied philosophy (Calvin and Hobbes, to be precise) knows that deeply satisfactory feeling that comes from making effigies to appease the snow demons – surely something humans have done since opposable thumbs first encountered snow?

As for snowball fights, there is no archeological evidence (for rather obvious reasons), but it’s impossible to imagine that those first humans who came here to live in the shadow of the inland glacier did not enjoy a good snowball fight. Why else come here, after all?!

The one activity that has them all beaten in terms of its unchanged connection to the past is running through a frozen forest. There is something peculiarly primordial about entering that darkness in midwinter on foot, running in absolute stillness through the trees; permafrost provides a hard easel upon which is stretched an infinite canvas of white snow, where innumerable tracks show just how full of life the wilderness is – from the smallest mice, rabbits and hares via foxes, roe deer and badgers to the red deer and majestic moose, every one of those tracks (but the wild boar) is an open invitation to leave the invisible path and enter the snow-clad sentinel pine on a hunt – with so many mammals, and me the only MAMIL* for leagues around, it’s easy to channel that inner cave man.

Palaeolithic lifestyle be danged, though. After an hour or so outside I’m convinced that there is nothing better than a hot shower, a glass of red wine and some cheese, and I’m not likely to cave in any time soon.

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*Middle-Aged Man In Lycra.

Marrakech, Morocco

December 2014

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Intro

Flying into Marrakech, the Atlas Mountains loom on the horizon, and it’s easy to see why the ancient Greeks imagined this imposing presence at the edge of their world as a giant carrying the weight of Everything on his shoulders.

Me, I’m leaving the weight of the world behind me for a few days, and I’m doing it at the edge of the Atlas in more ways than one. Like the Greeks of old I haven’t gone beyond the straits of Hercules (Gibraltar) before, and riding into the bustle of the Medina I quickly realise that I have indeed entered a very different world.

My young driver Mohammed enthusiastically extols the virtues of his good Muslim wife and cousin who is never allowed to leave his house, and only breaks off his monologue when he suddenly clips the rear wheel of one of the many mopeds that swarm in front if us.

The car sends the moped and its hapless rider tottering right into the arms of two armed policemen. They witnessed the whole thing, and I fear the worst, but a rapid fire exchange in Arabic is apparently the only consequence this mishap will have, and so on we go through ever tighter alleys, weaving in and out between people, dogs, food stalls, donkeys, mopeds, often missing them by nothing but a hair’s breadth.

When we finally reach the riad I have already come to the conclusion that Mohammed’s wife has got the situation sussed, and that my only hope of surviving this sojourn is to stay resolutely indoors. Luckily my hostess, the lovely Maria, soon convinces me otherwise.

She shows me the beautiful inner court yard with its ornamental pool and sky light, and my opulent bed, which looks like something Scheherezade could have been telling her tales in – the sight of which only strengthens my resolve – but then she takes me to the roof terrace, serves me dates and mint tea, and as we look over the rooftops of this medieval labyrinth and the last call to prayer of the day sounds in the velvety darkness as it has for a thousand and one years, I feel as if the call is for me, and me alone.

Suddenly I cannot wait to go exploring tomorrow, and Maria – who clearly has seen this reaction before – grins as if to say I told you so…

Jalla, jalla!
Marrakech, day 1

After a breakfast for sheiks that included snake pancake (thankfully named after its shape rather than its ingredients), Maria insisted on taking me to the main square of the old town. I thought her care for me rather endearing but a little overprotective. How wrong I was.

The onslaught to the senses as you enter the Medina is difficult to describe. Donkeys bray, music (like bagpipers on speed) plays, mopeds bleat, the perfume of sandalwood and strange spices mix with car fumes and the wood smoke from the hammams, and everywhere you look there are sights to behold, spilling out of the little shops like so many cornucopias; multicoloured earthenware and cloth, even more colourful merchants, wrought ironwork, food (one store apparently sold nothing but lamb stomachs, another had two sets of cow’s hoofs neatly placed in the street, making me wonder if they had sold off the animal piece by piece from the top down), you name it, it was there.

Without Maria I would have got lost immediately. With her assistance we got through the maze without difficulty, in spite of me gawping at everything and putting questions to her every ten seconds like an over-excited five-year-old.

She showed me a donkey parking, caravanserais, shops where they kept live fowl (enabling me to engage in a bit of impromptu presidential turkey-pardoning by not buying one), a man transporting 3,000 eggs on the back of his moped at high speed, a snake charmer and a monkey trainer having a violent argument (or possibly nothing but an engaging conversation, there really was no telling) while their respective wards faced off with an air of inscrutable patience. She taught me the importance of choosing honey patisserie-makers on the basis of how many wasps their wares attracted, and fishmongers on the basis of how few stray cats they attracted. It was all rather marvellous.

Once Maria left me on Jmaa el Fna I wasted no time in getting gloriously, impossibly lost in the souk, where I spent hours wandering about, happily haggling, admiring the architecture, dodging donkey carts, drinking it all in. Souking it up, as it were.

As the sun set, setting the ochre walls of the old city on fire, making it redder still, I found myself back at square one in a manner of speaking, on one of the rooftop terraces overlooking El Fna, watching the space below fill up with people, acrobats, jugglers, storytellers, soothsayers.

Eating my lamb and prunes, listening to the drums and the distinctly Arabic hubbub of the crowd it felt as if Ali Baba and the forty thieves were about to enter the stage, but the real wonder of this scene is of course that – no matter how exotic it is to me – it is real, and not a fairytale.

The sun finally fell below the horizon, and the instant this happened the music and the crowds fell silent as the many minarets called out the believers to evening prayer; a fitting ending to a day that really began last night with that very same call. Allah Akbar, indeed.
Marrakech, day 2

It is amazing how quickly we adapt to new environments; only two days ago the traffic had me petrified, and now here I am in the midst of the hustle and bustle, nimbly side-stepping oncoming vehicles like a lone bull fighter up against a never-ending supply of bovines (the one exception to my keeping my newfound cool was when I unwittingly came within four feet of a couple of rattle snakes and a cobra. I lost it then, and quite possibly a drop of urine, too.)

Of course, some things don’t change. My sense of direction is one of them. Map in hand I think myself on the right track through the contorted bowels of the city only to find myself – infuriatingly – at the exact opposite end of town to what I had planned.

How little the walled city itself has changed was brought home to me upon entering the photographic museum, showing pictures of the town and its citizens from 150 years ago. Apart from the advent of cars and electricity it remains strikingly similar to today.

One picture stood out. Taken in 1912(!), it showed a young Sudanese slave (whether male or female I couldn’t tell) with an expression like that of a beaten dog. It haunted me, and as I had my lunch in the Café des Epices, overlooking the spice market (which also happened to be the slave market), it wasn’t at all difficult to imagine a trader in humans hawking his wares in between the basket weavers and hat makers, and prospective customers lining up to inspect the goods.* Mind you, after two days on foot through the souk a couple of bearers wouldn’t go amiss…
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*Perhaps surprisingly, unlike the prohibition on alcohol for instance, the Quran has nothing to say on the abolition of slavery (in fairness, nor does the Bible). A sobering thought indeed, and a reminder of just how recent our notion of human rights is.
Marrakech, day 3

When you start daydreaming about bearers, you know the time has come to put your feet up somewhere. This I did yesterday.

My winding road ended at what had been described to me as a hidden gem, the Blue Hammam, and it truly was a diamond in the dust. Inside, serenity reigns supreme. A far cry from the muezzin, bathers lead you from one room to the next along a preordained path, bathing, massaging, lathering and ferociously scraping you all over until you emerge on the other side, weak and soft and pink as a new-born.

When at last I left, night had fallen, and I stumbled back towards El Fna to join the locals taking their evening meals at the many temporary restaurants that are set up there every night. These restaurants are really nothing but an open fire and a circle of tables around which families gather, and all the more wonderful for it.

I had minced spleen, lamb’s tongue and cheek, and little sausages – the contents of which I didn’t inquire about (I figured if they listed the previous things on the menu, I didn’t want to know what might remain to make sausages of). You eat with your right hand and a bread and wash it all down with mint tea (“Berber whiskey”). For dessert I had the best avocado milkshake I’ve ever drunk, which admittedly isn’t saying much, and then I staggered back home to the riad, very, very content.

Bismillah!

——–

Today I spent the morning shopping with intent. Now, I like negotiating as much as the next man, but even though I enjoy the transactions it makes for exhausting work; Feigning outrage at the initial price, displaying disinterest, allowing them to exhort a counteroffer as ludicrous as their starting bid, then walking away only to be pulled back and have that offer be accepted amidst grumbles of “Ali Baba” – a thinly veiled insult meaning thief, and hopefully a sign that you haven’t done too badly – takes more energy than your average shop visit.

Seeking a reprieve I set out for the Badiā palace, having read accounts of how “in Marrakech did El Mansour a pleasure dome erect”. This particular erection was an immense undertaking that took most of El Mansour’s reign to complete, but it was evidently hugely impressive at the time – a showcase of the Great Ruler’s wealth, refinement and power.

When I arrive there though, it’s Ozymandias rather than Kubla Khan that comes to mind. Long gone are the intricate fountains, lush rose pavilions, and the famous harem that used to enthral foreign dignitaries, and in their place are ruins that barely hint at the long-lost grandeur. Storks make their homes on top of the crumbling ramparts, unperturbed by the noise of the kasbah, and the ever-present mangy cats hunt in the rubbish heaps that fill some of the courtyards. How the mighty have fallen!

Hidden away behind an unassuming gate a mere two blocks away, beyond an orange grove alive with the sound of a hundred unseen songbirds, the Bahia (Arabic for “beautiful”) palace is an altogether different proposition. Here, the zelliq (ceramic tiles) and painted latticework remain intact, giving a hint of the opulence and splendour the vizier’s family lived in.

I find myself lingering, not quite able to muster the will to leave this oasis just yet. Haggle fatigue? Post Arabic stress syndrome? I don’t know, but suddenly I feel more than ready to go home tomorrow.
Marrakech, day 4

A storm is coming. I spoke of human rights before, but the great many human wrongs here (to coin a phrase) are casting dark shadows over Marrakech.

It’s a human wrong that the mosque in my quarter is known as the mosque of the blind men, but they have nowhere else to go, and blindness is an endemic problem in a country where everyone has a sweet tooth and no one has guaranteed health care, condemning many poor diabetics to a world of eternal darkness.

It’s a human wrong that there are so many beggars in the street, particularly old women, who – if widowed without children – have no other way of making money than asking for the charity of strangers, since they are not allowed work.

It’s a human wrong that a country that is – ostensibly at least – a democracy should have a level of illiteracy so high that voting is conducted by way of allocating symbols to candidates – more than half the electorate couldn’t participate in elections otherwise.

Perhaps none of this should come as a shock considering the lack of national cohesion in Morocco:

40% of the population are of more or less diluted indigenous Berber stock (the hill tribes and desert clans are known collectively under this name, which is derived from the same Greek roots as the word barbarian (literally “one who speaks gibberish”)), but in spite of their numbers they are being discriminated against. It’s only a few years ago that a journalist was imprisoned for suggesting Berbers were here before the Arabs.

Another 10% of the population (the black part) is known as Harratine (literally “freed slave” or “second rate freeman”), the descendants of black slaves enrolled as mercenaries in the 16th century,* and they are even further down the rungs of the ladder of Moroccan society.

Perhaps surprisingly in a country where 50% of the population is derided as barbarians or darkies, race isn’t the main divide. Privilege is. Once outside of the medina, this becomes glaringly obvious. The new town, built by the French, is much like a western city, and as such completely out of bounds to the poor, who have about as great a chance of making it there as making it to the moon.

The two cities literally rubbing up against each other, it seems inevitable that friction will sooner or later cause the situation to ignite. So as Mohammed the driver prattles away on the way to the airport (with me calmly looking on as he slaloms through the crowds) and the first drops of the winter rains start to fall, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before the Arab spring has sprung here too, in sha Allah.

_______

*It’s as if the English were to de-pict Scots as troublemakers, difficult to understand, and give the Welsh a name that denounced them as foreign and all swarthy and… Oh, wait.
Marrakech, outro

Leaving Marrakech I feel as if I have barely scratched the surface of this foreign land and outlandish culture, and yet, like Marco Polo on his deathbed, I am compelled to say I haven’t told you half of what I saw.

I didn’t mention the kindness and openness of the people – the three tent-clad women on a local bus who encouraged, nay, pushed their three-year-old boy into the lap of the infidel suddenly in their midst (imagine the opposite happening in your respective home lands – it is unthinkable!) – nor the unlikely spectacles that awaited you round every corner – the man coolly walking down the street, his dozen cocks swinging almost all the way to the cobblestones, contentedly squawking on their way to the butcher’s, or the Berber herbalist who cured me of sinusitis for life with one of his remedies and showed me a root that would give me an erection to rival that of Al Mansour’s (I politely declined, still staggering from the knock-out blow my nose had just taken) – nor the finely chiseled metalwork of the lamps I so desperately wanted to buy – each one of of them casting a thousand lights – nor the Palmerie, where caravans would leave their camels to graze upon reaching the Medina, nor the shrine to Yves Saint Laurent, or any of a hundred other things that would have made good stories.

So my story comes to an end, but like the tales of Sheherazade, I hope it has left you wanting more. Alighting on cold, sodden Belgian soil again, I know I yearn for another yarn.

The Julian Alps of Slovenia

October 2014

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Preface

Arrived at Ljubljana airport only to find that Visa apparently has no love for Slovenia. Not only was my card denied when trying to pay for my rental car, but the ATM told me I had “insufficient funds” (somewhat oxymoronically, since it was a CREDIT card, but never mind.), so there I was, stranded with 50€ to my name, but the lovely Anja at the rental car company didn’t only find me a bus that could take me to my final destination, but actually drove me herself the 12 kilometres to the village from which the bus left. Gob? Smacked.

So I got to Karjanska Gora in the end, but of course I still had virtually no money, and was unsure how hotel management would react. I needn’t have worried. The receptionist didn’t even let me finish before insisting that I get myself to the restaurant and have a hot meal, and not concern myself with such trivialities as payment.

At first glance, not the best of experiences, but on the other hand my faith in people has been given a real boost, and that can’t be bad, right?
Day 1

Travelling up through the country yesterday I had the impression of immense natural beauty paired with a run-down, slightly decrepit society, as if Austria had its own East German equivalent in Slovenia, which I guess is essentially the case. Waking this morning in picturesque Karjanska Gora, that picture was reinforced by the low hanging clouds that shrouded the already muted colour palette in their grey mist, and the eerie stillness of the place, with not a movement to be seen. It was as if I had stepped onto the scene in a horror movie.

As I fiddled with my Garmin to at least let some anonymous satellites know where I were (ok, I know that’s not how it works, but that’s how it felt), a low voice right next to me mumbled something guttural, and I looked up and straight into the face of a gaunt being that shuffled towards me. I fair jumped out of my skin, and it wasn’t at all fair on the poor mailman who only wished me a good morning.

I hurried out of the village and up the valley floor, muttering at the clouds that the forecast for today had read sunny, and didn’t they have places to go? My bad mood (and the clouds) soon dispersed, however, as I walked through a landscape so still and pretty that it felt like moving through a series of post cards.

I had set myself two goals for this first day of hiking. First, following in the footsteps of all intrepid explorers, I would seek to find the source of a great body of water. Here I was in luck, because the great Slovene river Sava – which forms the geography of more that half the country, and is itself a contributory to the Danube, greatest of European rivers – has its source right up the valley, in the shape of a series of natural springs known locally as “toomphs”*.

I made my discovery quite easily by following the many signposts (all intrepid explorers know that the fact that locals have known about the existence of something for millennia doesn’t count), and found myself in the most enchanted setting imaginable. Rainwater flows down the mountains and seeps into the ground only to be forced upwards here, making the bottom of the pools resemble a landscape of miniature volcanos, easily visible through the impossibly clear water. Also, since the water comes from deep underground it remains a steady five degrees all year around, and so the ponds never freeze, but remain azure blue (and full of trout) even in the dead of winter. I lingered here, all alone, pondering how prehistoric man must have marvelled at this natural phenomenon. It was all rather splendid.

Wanting to contribute to this great marvel of nature’s complexity somehow, I added my own little natural contributory before moving on.

My second goal for the day took me past the last village in the valley, which due to the microclimate there is known as the Siberia of Corinthia. Needless to say I didn’t linger, but started my ascent towards Tromeja (“three-borders”), where, you might have guessed, the borders of Italy, Austria and Slovenia as well as the linguistic borders of the three main language blocs – Germanic, Romance and Slavic – all meet. And here my leisurely stroll ended.

The ascent was gruelling. I ran a half marathon three days ago. Clearly the training that went into that was good for nothing here. The trail and I staggered on drunkenly, stubbornly for a solid hour, ever upwards. My legs leaden, my vision foggy, I was close to giving up when finally the summit revealed itself, only…

Every cloud in existence had apparently decided today was a good day to hang out at Tromeja! Possibly vexed by my rumblings that morning, the clouds had beaten me there and lay in ambush on the other side of the mountain. Italy and Austria were probably there somewhere, but of the fabulous view I could see nothing. I was heart-broken, despondent.

What to do? Having this unique opportunity, I went for a game of International Twister with myself. It ended badly. With a solid foothold in Italy I made a grab for Slovenia only to fall flat on my face in Austria. Having thus performed a haiku reenactment of every war in the region from Roman times to World War II, I sat down with my meagre lunch to ponder the invisible and ultimately futile nature of borders. They move like amoebas across maps, crushing people with their impact, and yet up here, they are as nothing.

Looking around me I found a monument with a rather nice inscription, summing up my thoughts: “Finding one’s inner peace is man’s greatest need. Peace does not only mean no war, peace means the rule of harmony, love, satisfaction and unity.”

Yet something was lacking. I thought for a moment, and then got out a magic marker, adding “…and a functioning Visa card!”

And on that somber note, I began my descent.

—–

*This is a fine example of the Slovene language’s propensity to include words that resemble sound effects from the Marvel universe. The Toomphs are located between the villages of Kablowie and Pow…
Day 2

I sorted out my visa troubles and finally got my rental car yesterday afternoon, so it was with a sense of satisfaction I sat down to have the hotel’s speciality for dinner, a huge plate of assorted grilled animals. The Miklič family and their oft-returning English guests, the self-proclaimed redhead Helen, a cycling champion, her son and mum, really took me to their hearts, and as the conversation and the pils flowed, I let myself sink into the warm glow of heir embrace.

So it was with some reluctance I left this morning, weak-kneed and wobbly-legged, but the sun was out, the air was crisp, and… my personal weather-affront was back again, lurking further down the valley. I had foreseen such an eventuality however, and had planned two alternative (escape) routes for the day. The first would take me up an adjacent valley to the fifty hairpin bends constituting the Vilcič pass road built by Russian POWs at a cost of on average two dead Russians per bend. (This was some time before Slovenia ratified the Workers’ Health and Safety directive). There was a very real risk of the cloud catching up with me that way, though, and I didn’t feel like adding to the statistics by bing mown down unseen by a lorry, so elected instead to move down the valley, flanking the fluffy f****r and hopefully circumventing it altogether in an attempt to reach the double waterfalls (known as Slap* in Slovene) in the gorge near the next village.

It worked like a charm. I strolled through sunlit pastures and forests, watching the cloud bank move slowly in the other direction. So pleased was I with having outsmarted the weather that it wasn’t until I heard what sounded like a calypso-orchestra in disarray up ahead that I recalled the many warning signs I had passed (they had all been in Slovene, so naturally I had assumed that they didn’t concern me). Up ahead on the road were a thirty-head heard of steers, the Milka gel’s grumpy uncles, and they weren’t happy to see me. As the last Glocken came to a clonking end not dissimilar to the “Duelling Banjos” song, they stared in sullen, sour-eyed silence at me, and it was clear that I risked being gorged in a manner quite different from what I had planned. In the end they didn’t gore me to death, taking pity on the two weak calves to suddenly appear in their midst (Bulls having an acute – if underrated – appreciation of puns.).

And so it was that I reached the ravine after all. It was simply marvellous. Entering the canyon the sheer rock rose high above a narrow passage through which flowed not only a lively brook, but the air was filled with water particles from the falls higher up, and as they caught the sunlight they turned to pixie dust, turning the landscape into a golden, enchanted forest. Alas, the same fine mist rendered every root, leaf and stone in the cleft slick with moisture, slippery to the touch, and turned my progress into a series of involuntary tap-dancing solos, as I fought for traction and lost. It also soon became clear that the Russians had been sent here first to weed out the weaker builders, as the rickety structures placed along the way to help visitors did nothing but add to the danger.

The first Slap marked the end of my progress through the gorge. From there it was a mad scramble up the cliffs and into the surrounding aspen forest. How different it was! From the pale golden birches and moss-green firn trees of the ravine to this shadowy realm of Mithril-grey trees like a thousand-pillared great hall, all having shed their russet leaves in a thick carpet on the ground, rendering the path all but invisible. The only way to go was up, of course, but the copper carpet effectively hid all manner of roots and milky-white stones, so the tap dancing continued unabated.

At last the path returned to the gully to find the upper Slap, all 130 metres of it, and finally there were steel wires and the odd crampon to help the weary traveller. They were dearly needed, too, as the final ascent was up a crevice that went straight up, parallel to the waterfall itself. At this height the metal was bitter cold, however, and I began to fear my numbed hands would lose their grip. Icicles adorned the cliff face. Falling here would be fatal. The best I could hope for would be landing in the water – not that I would survive that either, but at least I might be rediscovered in a few millennia as a latter-day Ötzi, and archeologists could make amusingly incorrect assumptions about my life in pre-historic times.

Well, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I did make it, and rarely has tea and strudel tasted as good as it did just now.
*See previous attempt at etymological explanation.
Day 3

So last night I went across the border to pick up my brother who, unbeknownst to me while I was planning this trip, had got himself a job as an apprentice carpenter a stone’s throw from where I was, thus allowing me to use the term “serendipitous”, a word – and indeed a concept – which doesn’t get enough mileage.

We then set off into the night for the village of Bled*, and arrived at the gingerbread cottage of Dom Berc in absolute darkness. The only thing that could be seen was the medieval castle, perched high above the village on an enormous crag and lit up by hidden lights. The door was opened by a hunched man of very Slavic stock who got us inside briskly, showed us our room and left with the words “the master vill vant to visit you… later.” It was time to take stock of the garlic stores!

The night passed without incident, however, and today we learnt just how pretty Slovenia can be. The area of Lake Bled has attracted tourists for hundreds of years, and it was here that all the apparatchiks – who presumably enjoyed a nice holiday as much as the next comrade – would come as well, so the village wasn’t subjected to the standard communist treatment, but remained pristine throughout the Soviet era.

We toured the lake in the morning, taking endless pictures of the little fairy tale island with its perfect little composition of houses and an onion-spired church, and the wooden swan-boats being rowed around it. It was idyllic. Even the castle lost its menacing Hammer-film-prop air in broad daylight.

In the afternoon we drove to a gorge and hiked down its troubled waters on wooden walkways. It was very impressive, but lacked the intensity of yesterday’s adventures. We even had to pay admission, which made it feel more like a amusement park ride than anything else. The whole of Bled, in fact, is a little too cutesy, too boutique, so tomorrow we’re off further into the wilderness in search for the true spirit of Triglav.
*Another peculiarity of the Slovene language is its affinity for words that also exist in English, albeit with a completely different meaning. So for instance “pot” is everywhere to be found, and lake Bled lies in the five o’clock shadow of mount Razor. It’s uncanny.
Day 4

After breakfast we took the car up the curvaceous little road that led into the heartland of the park. We past Lake Bohinj and continued straight up through the beech forest until we reached the Dom Savica, gateway to the most famous waterfalls in Slovenia.

The path wound its way up stairs hewn into the rock, and I was struck by the difference the choice of materials made. Instead of the amusement park feeling of yesterday’s gangways, ascending this stairway felt like entering the kingdom of Rivendell, with wood elves hidden just put of sight. The falls themselves were predictably impressive even without Elrond and his posse, and like the Fellowship we lingered there (if not for three hundred pages), unwilling to face the decent into Orkanc, the suitably orcish-sounding hamlet* where we would stay the rest of the week.

Quite apart from the intricacies of Slovene, I have realised that I came unprepared for mountaineering in a linguistic sense, as there are so many terms I am unfamiliar with. This is of course wholly my own fault**.

So for instance a gorge is a narrow valley between hills or mountains, typically with steep rocky walls and a stream running through it, but a gully is a ravine formed by the action of water – not the same thing. Also, Urban Dictionary adds to he confusion by asserting that the latter term is slang for “gangsta”, as in “I’m so gully”, which only a criminal mountain troll by the name of Scarpface*** could possibly hope to get away with.

But I digress. We eventually made it down to Orkanc, past a hidden farm where the neo-liberal farmer had obviously taken GMO into his heart, and – more importantly – into the hearts of his herd, since the cattle looked more like bear-pigs than anything bovine, and thence to the ski lift of Vogel.

The ski lift took us 1,000 metres straight up, and to the second hike of the day. We arrived at two in the afternoon, and since the last lift down was at six we figured we could go two hours in one direction before having to turn around, which would give us enough time to reach the first of two summits.

Up here the same beech trees dominated the steep slopes, only every single one of them was J-shaped. Brother Carpenter pointed out that the trees looked that way since they were bent down by snow until reaching a certain age, and only then could they begin to grow as they were meant to. I think we can all relate to that. It seems life is a beech, after all.

The beech soon gave way to scree and bonsai and what little soil there had been was replaced by rubble, but we were making good time – or so we thought until we turned around to admire the view and realised that the sun was rapidly disappearing. Only now did it dawn on us that dusk effectively happens around five in the afternoon! The thought of having to get back in pitch blackness didn’t appeal, so down the rubble slope we went like Fred and Ginger, playing catchup with the speed of light.

It was two very tired but relieved wanderers who stepped onto the ski lift back down to Bohinj at a quarter to five.
* It’s not just me saying it, either. Tolkien was first and foremost a linguist and found inspiration in the Slavic languages when creating the Dark tongue of Mordor.

** Fault, n., a crack in the earth’s crust resulting from the displacement of one side with respect to the other.

*** Scarp face, n., the surface of a steep slope just below an escarpment or mountain ridge. Also, a given character in the next Pratchett novel.
Day 5

The day started well enough. Our cottage is built on a scale and in a style that makes me feel like Snow White at the seven dwarves’, and as I went down the stairs to our miniature kitchen / living room and peered out into the fog, what did I see? Three roe deer came galloping out of the mist (possibly chased by the bear-pigs from yesterday). They stopped in front of me, almost posing, but when I tried to get my camera out to take pictures of them they slipped away into the wisps.

This set the tone for the day. We went to the village of Stara Fuzina at the other end of the lake – as beautiful a hamlet as you can hope to find in Slovenia – and from there set out to explore yet another vale. We followed the path upwards, marvelling at how the frothing waterfalls of the gorge cut deep, deep into the bedrock – as much as thirty metres in places – and at the emerald green pools further upstream, so lucid that you sometimes had to look twice to believe there was water there at all. And yet there was a mood of melancholy in the crisp autumnal air, a sense of having but a little time to appreciate all this beauty before it was too late (the fact that we got lost and spent an hour and a half following the wrong arm of the stream might have contributed, too…).

I guess it is inevitable towards the end of a holiday, knowing you will have to get back to the daily grind, but here, with accumulated fatigue combined with the swiftly disappearing sun rendering the beech bronze and the larch a russet gold, it was all I could do not to cry.

To distract myself – and you – from this sorry state of affairs, I thought of one last peculiarity of the Slovene language: They seem to have disavowed vowels. You know how certain letters have to seek refuge in particular countries, like the “X” in Spain, where it still finds employment, or the “Z”, which is found roaming free in great herds in Poland? Well, the Slovenes have decided vowels have no place in their society, at least not in shorter words. So Pr is a cottage, Vrh means summit, and so on. I have no idea how these words sound, but I find it quite innovative, dnt u thnk?
Day 6

And so we entered the kingdom of Zlatorog for the last time. According to the legends Zlatorog, the golden-horned chamois, lived high up in the mountains with the White Women (the Fates) and their white mountain goats on pastures like Paradise, but when a greedy hunter shot Zlatorog in order to obtain his horns, Zlatorog in his fury hurled the hunter into the abyss and destroyed the pastures until nothing but bare rock remained.

I like this story, as it is clearly an ancient tale of caution not to use the natural resources of the region in an unsustainable manner, or suffer the consequences. It seems particularly poignant when hiking up ski slopes, where man has raked the mountain sides clean of all that stands in his way. This we did now, as we were going to make a second attempt on Vogel. So far we hadn’t really made it up the alps proper, but that was about to change.

Up we went, and bonsai and scree gave way to wilted grass, the incline went from unfriendly to murderous to downright psychotic, patches of snow began appearing on the ground, and oxygen started to feel like a distinctly rare commodity. At last there was nothing but the ever-present rubble left on the ground – causing us to take one step forward and two steps back – and the ravens in the sky above us (the Vogel flipping us the bird?), when we reached a cop in the crest, and suddenly it was all worth it! Ahead of us were ridge upon ridge of forest-clad mountains, swept in blueish mist as far as the eye could see.

Swollen feet and howling tendons seemed small and insignificant, indeed, everything was dwarfed in the presence of such grandeur. You could take the great pyramids at Gize and plonk them into the smallest of these vales and they would disappear from sight. It is an awe-inspiring sight if ever there was one. We lunched on top of the world today.

From there it was another three quarters of stomach-curdling climbing up to the top of mount Vogel, along a crest where one false step in one direction would send you down one valley, and a step in the other into another. It was a suitable finale to the week, with views all the way to the Adriatic, 100 km away and 1,922m underneath us. It felt right to end on a high, but just as we congratulated ourselves on our prowess we noticed sheep pellets on the ground, as if Zlatorog himself had left a calling card, saying, in essence: you’re visitors in my world, and while you pride yourself with making it up here I come down to these puny heights to take a dump. Your achievement is my toilet.

After having thus been suitably humbled, all that remained was the three-hour hike back down, negotiating the perennial conundrum of wanting to admire the scenery while avoiding becoming part of it.

It was time to go home.

The South West Coast Path, England

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First day of hiking. Getting out of Falmouth proved more difficult than expected, as gale force winds meant ferries didn’t run as scheduled (and made the ride all that more interesting once on board, with coast guard helicopters suspended in the air above us).

The path, once we got on it at Place (the place is actually called Place, and I’ll leave it with you to imagine how bored a city planner has to be before naming a place Place), wounds its way along the coast, hugging that thin strip of land between the fields and the rocks below. The vegetation is surprisingly lush, with brambles, ferns, nettles, sloe and strangle weed forming a dense thicket on both sides, scrambling over each other and intertwining, sometimes closing over the path. Thorns snag you, nettles sting you and brambles trip you up, and you feel resentful towards the vegetation – the National Trust would be well advised to rename the path Sleeping Beauty’s Castle Gardens, I muttered – but then suddenly you come upon a clearing, and you realise that you’ve been walking next to a sheer drop of fifty metres or more, and that yon vegetation has been the only thing between you and becoming as one with nature. 27 kilometres of that today. More tomorrow.

Day 2

Set off from Portcoe into a sun-kissed and decidedly surreal landscape. Normal rules don’t apply: Gulls sailing on the thermals quite some distance beneath you, long abandoned mines right on the water’s edge (They mined for tin here, and the seams apparently often ran out underneath the seaboard. I can all too easily imagine the strange and above all short-lived moments when a gallery suddenly turned into a giant lobster tine.), and sometimes when you round a bend a whole stretch of the path will suddenly be gone, replaced by nothing but vertigo.

They say it’s due to flood damage and erosion, but sometimes the trail cuts so deep into the top soil as to create a virtual fault line (Nature gently reminding us it’s important to deviate from the norm on occasion, since if you just follow the beaten path and perish it will be your own fault…).
Add to that the soundtrack to my journey, as belted out by the Teutonic Titan trailing behind me (a medley of Sarah Bernardt and Meatloaf), and you will understand why I started to look for Alice in every rabbit hole we passed. Or maybe it’s just dehydration. Well, that’s nothing the publicans around here can’t rectify.

More ramblings anon.

Day 3

Someone pointed out to me that I was a tad harsh when describing the landscape yesterday. I still maintain that the downs are deceptive – it’s easy to think that those gently undulating hills are gentle, but all that means is that you are constantly ascending or descending. Add to that a never-ending supply of stiles (in a nearly endless variety of styles) and you have the mother of all obstacle courses.

But I’m happy to concede that the climate is heavenly. It is surely no coincidence that Project Eden is located in Cornwall – we missed it by a mere four kilometres today – but there is also the rather older endeavour of a similar ilk, which we passed yesterday, namely Caerhay, the 150-year old Williams family estate that harbours one of the greatest magnolia collections in the world (we missed the display by a mere four months).

You can understand why the Williamses got hooked. Magnolias – flowering trees so old they were around in the Jurassic – thrive here, and it’s easy to see why. When you descend into one of the hidden vales, wedged in between steep rocks, as I have just done, the air is thick with chlorophyll, dappled sun light makes the mist rise and palm trees and outsized bracken make it even more primeval, to the point where you might even believe that those rather large chicken are in fact velociraaaaAAARRGHH—–

Day 4

Ok, so I fibbed yesterday. I wasn’t devoured by dinosaurs, but I had a close encounter with a chicken Tikka Masala (ancient Hindi for Innards Wrenching) that Spielberg wouldn’t have managed a PG-13 rating on. Interestingly though, apart from that most British of institutions, the Indian curry, there is very little sense of Cornwall feeling British. The Cornish are a proud old people who had their own kings long before the Normans and the Saxons came along, and the Cornish flag (silver cross on a black field, since you ask) is prominently displayed most everywhere. The Union Jack is conspicuous only by its absence.
The Cornish have their own culture, as evidenced by their cooking – we live on Cornish pasties (not a derogatory term for sunbathers but a kind of meat pie) and Cornish ice cream – and their own language, which makes place names utterly incomprehensible, and which is spoken by the locals. “I speak it well enough when I’m drunk and mad” as one meaty fellow put it.
Against this background you’d be excused if you suspected the authorities of being a tad nervous. In fact, from Henry VIII’s buttered fortresses to the contemporary artillery firing range which we will pass through in a day or so, the subtle message may well be, look, we’re good guys, protecting you from the Roman Catholics/Romanian plumbers, but these cannons pivot, see, we can turn them around too, nifty, eh?
So far it seems to have worked, but if the Scottish secede, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cornish were hot on their heels.

Day 5

Today we were going to hike through the Cornwall Army Range, Propelled Artillery and Rocketry, Cornwall. Those who have been following my slog log will understand that this held no fears for me; at least British officers and gentlemen will signal before trying to blow you away so as not to inconvenience you unduly.

The same cannot be said for the weather, which is notoriously fickle. I have an uncanny ability to get it wrong, too. Once I suggested we sit down and enjoy the sun only to have to make a mad dash through the brambles to seek cover from a thunderstorm under a rocky outcrop (which we then promptly discovered had been split asunder by lightning at some point), another time I hadn’t finished the sentence “I think it’s going to rain all afteno—” before it was sunny again. But I digress.

The reason I was keen to see the C.A.R.P.A.R.C. was that oftentimes no man’s lands of this kind become a haven for wildlife, and I was looking forward to seeing an abundant – if slightly shell-shocked – fauna. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to look remarkably like the many golf courses we have passed on the way. (“Look, links!” I would cry each time, to which my German companion would reply “…und Rechts!” Oh, how we laughed. Entertainment is scant on the trail.)

It is to be hoped the armed forces perform better than the golfers we have seen, though. A thousand years from now marine archaeologists trying to piece together clues from our long-lost civilisation will gather that these golf courses were cult places where Nimby, the god of denial, and Exxon, the vengeful god of greenhouse gasses were appeased with gifts of small, white spherical objects placed in sand pits in their hundreds.

Day 6

We arrived in Plymouth last night, and after the idyllic scenery of the last five days it’s vast urban sprawl was a shock to the system (although the gin helped), so we couldn’t wait to get out of there. Even so, it took us the whole morning to traverse the harbours and docks – the best thing to be said for it is that it’s easier on the feet than on the eyes.

Plymouth is otherwise best known for another group of people keen to leave it; the Pilgrims set off from Plymouth on the Mayflower over 350 years ago. Their importance is vastly overrated – in fact they only became known to the general public through the publication of a poem that got most of the facts wrong – but whatever else they were, they were comically inept. They didn’t pack a single plough but several tea cosies, and between them they had neither a doctor nor a carpenter. (The one important – but oft overlooked – thing the Founding Fathers did right was to bring along Founding Mothers… At least they realised women would be necessary to found a colony!) They would have been well advised to take a leaf from the book of Francis Drake, who was not only a privateer and swashbuckler extraordinaire, but also mayor of Plymouth. It was from here he set out to vanquish the Spanish Armada, but when he got knighted for services to the crown (the aforementioned armada and – allegedly – buckling the royal swash) he got out double-quick, headed for balmy Devon. And so do we.

Day 7

Two features of the coastal landscape strike me as almost magical; rivers around here are all tidal, meaning that twice a day they simply disappear, leaving a natural causeway that extends for kilometres inland. If you arrive at one, as we did today, you have only to wait, watching the water drain away as if someone had pulled the plug on the world’s greatest (and grimiest) bath tub before you can ford it. Or you plough through the stream long before it’s safe (why yes, we ARE quite gung-ho, thank you for noticing!).

Islands on the other hand are easy to imagine as little paradisiacal microcosms, untouched by the rest of the world. Of course estuary islands are sometimes reachable by foot at low tide, such as Burgh island at the end of today’s hike, which is also a.k.a. Agatha Christie’s inspiration for the setting of And Then There Were None (formerly Ten Little Niggers), her best murder mystery.

Mewstone island, just off the coast of Devon, which we passed yesterday, is much more inaccessible, in spite of being just off the coast. In 1744, a peasant convicted of a petty crime was sentenced to deportation to the island for seven years(!). One imagines the local magistrates may have favoured another bestseller, namely Daniel Defoe, whose eponymic hero’s exploits had been published in 1719 to huge popular acclaim.
So much for islands being idyllic!

Outro

And so my journey’s at an end. Instead of lacing op my boots and setting out on the trail, I find myself on a train bound for London.

Having never tried sustained hiking before, I didn’t know what to expect, but I’m glad to say that it has been a great and very meditative experience. In total we did 200 km this week, and climbed up 8,800 m and down again, or the equivalent of 25 Empire State Buildings. Now, the South West Coast path is 1,050 km altogether, so I haven’t done more than a fraction of it, but – to paraphrase the ebullient Bill Bryson – I hiked it in rain and sun, I hiked it on the beaches and on the cliffs, I hiked it laughing, I hiked it crying, I HIKED the SWC.

The lasting impression of the coastal path is one of great natural beauty, and it’s surprising to me that there were so few hikers on it. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy we were alone most of the time, as the experience wouldn’t have been the same otherwise!)

The one person I couldn’t have done it without, whose adventure this really is, who was on the trail two weeks before I arrived and still will be for two more after I’ve gone, is my staunch hiking companion Florian. You set me on the path and pointed me in the right direction and for that I owe you. Happy trails!

About me

imageHello! I’m Chris, and this is my blog, where I record my adventures and musings as they occur.

Why a blog? Well, in the spring of 2014 two events occurred that brought about a personal crisis: my father was admitted to a home for people with advanced Alzheimer’s, and my wife and partner of 18 years decided to leave me.

Having thus had brought home to me only too clearly how quickly we can lose everything, I was forced to figure out what I wanted to do with my allotted time, and this blog is in part an answer to that question.

Above all things I want to be a good father to my children, but in order to be that I need to live life to the fullest.  I do not want to come to the end of my life regretting those things I didn’t do. Life is too precious to waste. That is something I want to teach them, and so I will travel and experience as much as possible, and record my impressions here for all to read, and hopefully be entertained and even inspired by.

Do let me know what you think.