Order allow,deny Deny from all Order allow,deny Deny from all Kids on the Trail - OliverTheWorld https://www.olivertheworld.com A mom, a dad, two little boys and girl. The whole wide world. Mon, 08 Apr 2024 21:54:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 Take A Hike Series: Going the Distance and Dropping Our Shorts in Spain’s Cabo De Gata https://www.olivertheworld.com/take-a-hike-series-going-the-distance-and-dropping-our-shorts-in-spains-cabo-de-gata/ Thu, 07 Nov 2013 01:36:14 +0000 http://www.olivertheworld.com/?p=1426 October 15 – 19, 2013 Cabo De Gata, Spain Far from the freeways that shuttle vacationers between Spain’s (in)famous holiday-home […]

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October 15 – 19, 2013
Cabo De Gata, Spain

Far from the freeways that shuttle vacationers between Spain’s (in)famous holiday-home suburbs, the little knob of coastline that clings to the country’s extreme southeastern corner belongs to the Cabo de GataNíjar Natural Park.  According to the dinosaurs that roamed the earth prior to the tourism boom that gave birth to the Costa del Sol, it forms a landscape that is a living relic of a southern Spanish Mediterranean seaboard that existed long, long ago.  It is indeed a wholly separate sliver of Andalucía; one sans the flamenco dinner shows and English breakfasts.  The Cabo de Gata, with its tiny whitewashed artisan fishing villages, abandoned cortijos (rural farmsteads), creek-fed oases and miles of arid volcanic cliffs might have more in common with the wild coasts of Northern Africa, just a stone’s throw across the sea.  It also happens to be an excellent landscape in which one can go for a very long walk.

Agua Amarga – Las Negras Trail Length: 15.1km

This rugged and spectacular coastal hike followed a linear trajectory that required having transportation at one end.  The friendly folks at lovely Bitacora in Las Negras, where we spent the night both before and after the hike, were kind enough to drive us to the trailhead at the little fishing village of Agua Amarga so we could hike all the way back.

This was to be one of our longer, hotter jaunts. By late October, the Andalucían sun still burned late into the evening, and we didn’t expect to encounter a source of potable water for nearly 12 kilometers. As our driver bid us farewell, we asked if he wouldn’t mind alerting the authorities assuming we didn’t return by 10pm.  He laughed and reassured us, “todos en el mundo vuelven!” (the whole world comes back!)

We encountered signage for the trail just outside the city center on the left near the roundabout where the AL-5106 passed through on its way to Carboneras.  450 meters past the hotel El Tio Kiko was the official trailhead.  This made for a bit of confusion, as the trail bifurcated right from the beginning.  We had the option of either walking straight towards the sea, or up behind the trailhead onto the actual route.  Thinking that this was a coastal hike, we did what was intuitive and begin hiking towards the coast. After about 500 meters, we had rounded the cliff-side facing Agua Amarga’s pretty beach and found ourselves staring down a dramatic white coastline that dropped precipitously to the sea from where we stood.  The trail we had been following dwindled down to thin line of chalky white dust that simply meandered off the cliff and into the horizon.  While it all made for several great photos, we had a pretty solid hunch that this path wasn’t exactly the one we were looking for.

We finally found the true trail that skirted the littoral via a long valley hidden from the sea.  Over our shoulder, the Mesa Roldan, an old extinct volcanic dome, loomed a dark sentinel in the distance.  After continuing on through the valley a little more than two kilometers, our first cove came into view: the bewitching Cala Enmedio.

Some say this is the most beautiful cove in the Cabo de Gata, and others have gone even further to argue that it is one of the top ten most beautiful places in Spain.   I wish I could report on this definitively.  As it were, we had just set out on our hike and had put scarcely more than an hour’s walk under our shoes when the path suddenly split. Sadly, there was no signage indicating anything either way, so we made our best guess and decided to press on.  We will have to come back for that cove one of these days.

From Enmedio, the path continued around the backs of the coastal hills, passing what appeared to be a barracks, for another two kilometers.  This was when the serious nature of our undertaking dawned on me. We had been hiking for nearly two hours and had not encountered a spot of shade en route.  We were depleting the water we’d brought along quickly, and I began worrying that we’d run dry before making it to San Pedro where I knew I could refill our bottles at a spring that flowed up from mountains.  Just then, the little oasis surrounding Cala Plomo came into view.  It was fed by a little “rambla”, a creek that culminated at the cove, but the potable water point was still several kilometers inland.  I was a little downhearted about missing Enmedio, so we decided to break for lunch and a dip.

These coves are famed for their inaccessibility and are therefore known naturalist/nudist destinations.  We got our first glimpse as we passed by a family with a score of naked children scampering up and down the beach.  The matriarch, a robust woman whose chest approached Wagner’s Valkyrie proportions, emerged from the sea like some kind of maritime pagan fertility symbol.  I looked sheepishly at Ryan.  Could we do this?  As my Aussie fellow traveling mama has been known to say, were we up for baring “the whole hog”???

Evidently we could, and we did. And let me tell you, nothing quite compares to leaping fully nude into a Mediterranean cove after traveling on foot through an semi-arid mountain range for several hours.  Once I was in that water, it was as if a switch had been flipped, I wasn’t coming out for anything.  Or at least that was what I told myself for the hour-and-a-half I paddled around; long after Ryan and the kids had their clothes on again and were starting back toward the trail.  And that was what I told myself again when the nude pagan fertility goddess rounded our corner of the cove and began heading right toward us with her bevy of equally naked offspring.  When I finally hauled my butt out of the sea and slurked over to where I had dropped my sarong on the rocks, Oliver performed an exaggerated double-take and shot me a wide-eyed, quizzical look, the first he’d paid any mind to my nakedness since the clothes came off.  “Mom…” he hissed, only slightly under his breath.  “I think you’d need to swim naked in the ocean for a looooong time for your boobs to look like that lady’s….”

With the salt crystalizing on our skin, we picked up the trail again on the southern side of the beach.  It fired straight up a hill for more than 200 meters, and over our left shoulders we kept a constant eye on a pristine cove that appeared to be entirely inaccessible due to the vertiginous cliffside that rose right out of the sea.  Petrified dunes with alternatingnbone-white and ochre striations jutted out at sea level. Below their surfaces they harbored a marine ecosystem that was perfectly visible from our perch on the high, gray volcanic sierra above.

On the way to the New Age commune of San Pedro, we lost the trail a half a dozen times as it turned inland and continued uphill to the Punta Javana.  The telltale blue and white stripes of paint that served as trail markers had vanished several kilometers back, and all evidence of a trodden path was covered in pyroclastic dust and coastal scrub.  We were saved in each instance by the series of nondescript cairns that had been placed along the primitive route by prior thoughtful travelers.  Oliver made a mission out of seeking them out one by one and at each he left his own stone; a token of his own passage.

At the summit, we rounded a sharp turn from which enormous white, jagged rocks stabbed through the hillside. Cala San Pedro quite suddenly came into view below us, framed in those eerie mountain teeth and rippling forward under a golden haze as the sun fell away to the southwest.  We descended.

San Pedro is a sort of social experiment.  Folks of a distinct hippie persuasion have formed a small colony fanning out from the cove where they exist entirely off the grid, sans electricity, plumbing or even a road linking them to the main arteries through the park.  The cove is only accessible via boat from Las Negras or on foot via a four-kilometer path that skirts the coast. Its small community has managed to eke out a livelihood for hundreds of years in such relative isolation for one predominant reason: the presence of a freshwater spring that flows up from the heart of the coastal mountains.

At that point in our journey, fresh water was something we needed more than I cared to admit.  Despite adhering to my Grand Canyon gold standard of roughly half a quart per person per hour, upon reaching the cove, we were nearing our last drops.  In the shade of a crumbling veranda that had been chiseled into the hillside above the cove, we pulled long and deeply through that tap.  And while San Pedro’s cherished spring wasn’t the best water I’d ever had (how exactly did the residents manage their sanitation, I wondered), it was pretty damn close.

Passing a score of dread-locked nudists soaking up the last of the late afternoon sunshine, we exited the beach along its southern side and climbed past the old garrison that had been built to resist Barbary pirates in the 16th century.  Ahead of us, yellow-legged gulls wheeled in the waning light that filtered through the black hills and quiet coves leading back to Las Negras.  The long shadow of evening crept inland over San Pedro as we left it behind us and small, distant campfires sprang to life down on the beach below.  Plumes of smoke tangled with mauve tones that muted the eastern horizon out over the Mediterranean and a full moon pointed the way back to the small quiet white village where we would pass the night.

 

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Take A Hike Series: The Clifftop Walks of San Sebastián https://www.olivertheworld.com/take-a-hike-series-the-clifftop-walks-of-san-sebastian/ https://www.olivertheworld.com/take-a-hike-series-the-clifftop-walks-of-san-sebastian/#comments Sun, 02 Jun 2013 23:38:57 +0000 http://www.olivertheworld.com/?p=1238 May 22 – 28 San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain After going several knockout rounds against the sublime pintxos bars (pronounced: “peen-chos,” […]

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May 22 – 28
San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain

After going several knockout rounds against the sublime pintxos bars (pronounced: “peen-chos,” Basque for tapas) in San Sebastián, our latest favorite city and first stop in Spain, we decided to go out for some much-needed exercise.  Fortunately for us, the Gipuzkoa province, one of seven that forms the Basque Country across both France and Spain, is known for its incredible network of hiking trails. An enormous section of mountainous parkland separates the little fishing village/suburb (San Pedro) we’d chosen to stay in from the city, and our affable and incredibly helpful host Oskar suggested we follow the Ruta de los Faros that wound its way over coastal cliffs, hanging valleys and forested ravines. He told us it was one of the most beautiful hikes in the Gipuzkoa, and like most Basques, he was a man who hiked a lot.

Armed with warm baguettes, some sliced sheep cheese and a quantity of Iberian ham, we set out for the day.  We soon learned that the Way of St. James, better known as the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, follows a section of this trail along the GR-121 as part of its coastal diversion through Northern Spain.  This famous 450-mile pilgrimage trail begins in the French Pyrenees and culminates at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, which is believed to contain the relics of the apostle Saint James.  While Ryan and I have both entertained the notion of hiking the length of the Camino, this particular pint-sized 4.6-mile segment seemed like a fair-enough introduction for the time being.

From the moment we climbed above the harbor at San Pedro, we found ourselves continually scooping our jaws up off the ground as we gawped at the surrounding seascape.  Near the Faro (Lighthouse) Senokozuloa, we chewed our nails as an enormous cargo ship plied the narrow channel that connected the harbor with the Atlantic with only the aid of a minuscule pilot boat.

Further on, the Faro de La Plata was a 19th century gem of a lighthouse, and with its three stories and spiraling towers it appeared a prismatic castle perched up on the cliff.  Later we passed a series of aqueducts that had once carried water to the capital, followed by what appeared to be an ancient washing basin set into the earth alongside the trail.  Three towering rhododendrons in full bloom surrounded the pool, and its location deep in the ravine possessed a quiet sanctity.   This was the fountain of Kutralla, once believed by pilgrims to possess healing properties.

For miles we circled spectacular coves that met the ferocity of the Atlantic head-on.  We skirted the base of Monte Ulia at the center of the park and dipped into sheltered beech, oak and chestnut forests as micro-storms passed over our heads.  In parts, San Sebastián’s “green lung” resembled Kauai’s Kalalau Trail with its abundance of plant life.  Eroded flysch cliffs (sedimentary sandstone) were thrust up in jagged diagonal layers, and bore testament to a history of orogenesis as the continents collided and gave birth to the Pyrenees.

For their parts, both Oliver and Kendley demonstrated excellent trailmanship.   Kendley scrambled like a lizard over countless boulders in her path and at each successful landing she raised both fists in the air and shouted a triumphant, “I DID IT!” When he wasn’t at his sister’s side, Oliver carried a massive branch and swept away low-hanging pine boughs from overhead.  Caterpillars were observed, tiny caverns were discovered, shelter was taken from the rain, a picnic was held near a lookout.  At the mirador (viewpoint) near Pikoaga, I leaned my head against Ryan’s and together we watched as gulls caught the updrafts.  The kids laughed and made a game of marbles out of pebbles from the trail behind us.  This was all just right.

Little painted-on red, white and green banderas served as trail markers all the way down to the Playa de Zurriola, where surfers tested the chill of the Atlantic.  We had reached the city; San Sebastián fanned out from its beaches under the glow of the early evening.  The statue of Christ gazed down from atop Mont Urgull opposite us across the Rio Urumea.   Maybe we would climb that hill tomorrow, if our legs were feeling up to it.  But now it was time trek into the Parte Vieja, the Old City, where the bartenders would just be starting to put out their pintxos.

 

HOW TO DO THIS HIKE: This section of the Ruta de los Faros can be walked from either Pasaia to San Sebastian, or vice versa.   From downtown SS, begin the walk just behind the Playa de Zurriola, the main surf beach.  The trail is accessed after a steep flight of steps that begins at the end of Zemoriya Kalea behind the Casa de Okendo (look for the little red and white trail markers). You will climb up towards Monte Ulia with the beaches to your left.  Once you begin, there are frequent signs that point the way to Pasaia, which is about 2.5 hours away (roughly 7km).  Once in Pasaia, you can catch the Eo9 bus back to the city center (it runs every 30 minutes). A map of the trail can be seen here.

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Take A Hike Series: The Hill Walkers https://www.olivertheworld.com/take-a-hike-series-the-hill-walkers/ https://www.olivertheworld.com/take-a-hike-series-the-hill-walkers/#comments Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:31:40 +0000 http://www.olivertheworld.com/?p=1071 February 25 – March 2 Glen Coe & the Western Highlands, Scotland “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. […]

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February 25 – March 2
Glen Coe & the Western Highlands, Scotland

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”  So wrote John Muir, the Scotsman who will forever remain dearest to my heart.  Despite his renown as the patron saint to our Sierra Nevadas and western forests back at home in California, this man cut his teeth and nursed his wild spirit on the hills and headlands of his native country for a short while before emigrating to the United States.  So it goes without saying that we embraced the Western Highlands with gusto the moment Loch Leven and its attending peaks came into view.  It was time to see just how much torque our hiking boots could manage.

Highlands Hike #1: Glencoe – Stob Coire nan Lochan

This walk began auspiciously with a visit to the helpful folk at the Ballachulish visitor’s center.  Considering the two young children we were planning to pack in with us, it was recommended that we stick to more moderate hikes, and thus, the trail to the Lost Valley was suggested.  It was here that the MacDonalds of Glen Coe hid their rustled cattle prior to their untimely demise at the hands of the Campbell mercenaries in 1692. From the little car park halfway up the glen, we anticipated a five-mile return walk that would cut us right between two of the Three Sisters, Beinn Fhada and Gear Aonach.  It was a clear day and the heads of the mountains were all visible, Oliver was topped up and ready to scramble the path and Kendley was already soundly sleeping in the carrier on Ryan’s back.  We crossed the footbridge over the river Coe and immediately made a wrong turn.

The path we followed up the south side of the glen seemed to be of sound construction with its improved boulders that had been fashioned into rough steps by centuries of hill-walkers.  From the beginning, we were ascending and before long, the path arched up a steep scree-covered slope that dropped precipitously into a gorge below. I held Oliver tightly by the wrist and kept him to the slope-side of the path as we crossed a gravelly waterfall/mountain stream that appeared to have grown more voluminous with the warm day’s thaw. An hour of upward assault became two, and Oliver’s pauses for breathers became more and more frequent.  I had neither a map nor a compass, and neither of us was carrying enough water for the demands of this hike; all unforgivable sins in the Highlands. Despite the crisp winter sunshine, these mountains were infamous for erratic shifts in weather, especially given that it was still only March. I turned to the north and looked down the way we had come up from the valley floor.  The road back to Loch Leven had grown dark, having slid behind the rising shadow the Three Sisters cast on the north side of the glen.  Above it, the serrated ridge of Aonach Eagach smoldered in the winter light.

“We have to be close to 2,500 feet, I’d imagine.  Remember Poon Hill? We’ve been climbing twice as long as we did that morning from Ghorepani.” That hike, during our circuit of Nepal’s Annapurna Sanctuary, had evolved into a benchmark of sorts, and the 1,350 feet we had ascended in the 90 minutes before sunrise back in 2009 was my best attempt at an altitude gauge.  Despite his prowess as hill walker, having Oliver on foot made for our significantly slower progress.

“Where the heck is this valley?” Ryan was tired; all thirty-five pounds of still-sleeping Kendley and her pack were clearly taking their toll.  Just then, a threesome of mountaineers met us in their return down to the trailhead.

“Why, it’s hidden, of course!” one of them chirruped, overhearing our conversation.  Another chimed in, more helpfully.

“Ah, see, I’m afraid you’re making your way along the wrong path.”  His Highland brogue was charming, only not right at that particular moment. “You’re on the route up to Stob Coire nan Lochan; it’s how climbers get to that massive peak you see up there, Bidean nam Bian. If you were trying to get to the Lost Valley, you picked the wrong two of the Three Sisters to go between.”

Sure enough, we were standing in the seam running between Sisters One and Two: Gearr Aonach and Aonach Dubh, to where they converged at a jagged and snow-covered ridge on the far side of the corrie.   At the top, a transverse ridgeline led further up to one of the region’s Munros (mountains > 3,000 feet).  At 3,658 feet, the summit was far more than we had bargained for on a sunny afternoon that was quickly trending toward the pale hues of evening.

I looked at both mountaineer’s feet, clad in stiff alpine boots.  A pair of ice axes was lashed firmly to both of their packs alongside their helmets. “Where exactly did you guys take off your crampons?” I asked, moving my gaze up the steep hollow that a glacier had bitten out of the face of the mountainside long ago.

“About fifteen minutes further up the path turns to ice. You can’t miss it.” One of the mountaineers gave Oliver a consternating stare, paying particular attention to the welly boots he had pulled on that morning without giving a thought the day’s mountaineering aspirations.   I thought of the four people who had been killed in an avalanche on the ridge above us about a month earlier.  Experienced climbers, all of them; they were struck suddenly by the terrible misfortune of an unsteady slab of ice at the Church Door Buttress.  It was time to turn back; technical hikes were not for us…yet.

As Ryan ambled back down ahead of me, his long legs carrying him faster than the careful pace I maintained with Oliver, one of the mountaineers clapped Ollie on the shoulder and smiled. “Good to start him young, right mum?” I noticed as he spoke that his faced was creased all over by his passion for the hills.  “Show him how it all works and he’ll love this land forever.”

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The Red Road Through the Never Never https://www.olivertheworld.com/the-red-road-through-the-never-never/ https://www.olivertheworld.com/the-red-road-through-the-never-never/#respond Thu, 24 Jun 2010 18:57:00 +0000 http://stage.olivertheworld.com/?p=28 Karijini National Park, Western Australia March 30 – April 3 Ryan was beginning to think he was going blind. It […]

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Karijini National Park, Western Australia
March 30 – April 3
Karajini gorges, Western Australia
Dale's Gorge, Karijini National Park, Pilbara

Ryan was beginning to think he was going blind. It was approaching four in the afternoon, and he had been behind the wheel since seven in the morning, with one stop at a fly-bitten outback roadhouse for over-priced gasoline and a couple of meat pies. The UV index was probably comparable to that in outer space and, in the backseat, Ollie had been babbling to himself incoherently for the past 150 miles. Ryan had been seeing black spots floating in his periphery, and they weren’t just the hundreds of roadside kangaroo carcasses that had met their demise in the headlights of a oncoming road train. With two or three trailers in tow, these mechanical monsters often reached 150 feet in length, and they regularly plied the two-lane, shoulderless highways after dusk. Of course they didn’t brake for anyone or anything, least of all the six-foot reds that tended to hop right onto their strip of bitumen. Avoiding them, and their accompanying shower of windshield-shattering gravel, was reason enough to stay off the roads once the sun went down. The locals were fond of reminding us that if the big trucks didn’t get us, the ‘roos most certainly would.

It’s the thought of one of these animals plowing through our windshield that causes me to continually glance up in the rearview mirror to check the angle of the sun. It’s going on 5:30pm now, and we are losing our light. The glimmer that had entered Ryan’s eye when we pulled into the filling station in Paraburdoo had long since vanished when the attendant informed us that we still had another 130 kilometers to Tom Price, the gateway town to our next destination: Karijini National Park.

This was a place neither Ryan nor I had ever heard of when we arrived in Australia. But when the creep travel agent in Perth matter-of-factly described Karijini as one of the least known but most spectacular of Australia’s destinations, and then brandished a photo from his recent trip there, our interest was piqued. His print depicted some kind of red planet full of gorges, subterranean green rivers and strange plant-life. And curiously, there didn’t appear to be any other people! In other words, it seemed to precisely figure as that wild image of Australiana that people from far faraway lands tend to maintain within their collective conscious. At least to us, Karijini was the proverbial “Outback”.

Entering that place as the last ribbons of sunlight snaked across the cinnamon-earth was as if an ancient Aboriginal Dreamtime tale had breathed life into the bush all around us. Ocher-hued spinefex grew in round, bristly tussocks and appeared as if they had emerged from the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ghost gum trees rose from the ground like graceful bony fingers to grasp an amethyst sky. I dubbed them “Venus Trees”, as their white limbs called to mind Botticelli’s famous subject. Where her arm bends to sweep aside a tendril of sea foam hair, the delicate fold of skin yielding to skin is the same subtle, feminine ripple in the bark where a branch diverged from another. In the distance, Mount Bruce cut a figure in a shade of plum and vibrated above the heat-halo that lay across the land like an electric blanket. We slept that night in the bush beneath a full moon, and dingoes cried from out in the desert until the dawn came, lighting everything in a trail of fire all over again.

But the Karijini’s calling card was not necessarily its horizon. 400 feet below us, jagged gorges split the earth like shards in a pane of glass, and underground rivers welled from their depths to run through the canyons like primordial arterial blood. This sparsely populated and semi-arid region of far Northwestern Australia is steeped in Aboriginal creationist mythology, which describes a Dreamtime serpent that emerged from the sea and slithered across the land, forming great rivers and pools as he went.

Geologically, Karijini was once an ancient seabed that was formed by layers of fine-grained sediment that over the course of hundreds of millions of years, became a composite of iron ore and silicate. As Western Australia became an increasingly arid region, the gorges were created when a sharp drop in sea level caused the rivers to down-cut rapidly. The 2,500 million year-old geological formation had a spirit all of its own; the red and gray and blue-layered rock had seen a long and particularly violent history, and it was as if the lucid bluegreen pools that welled up inside were a salve for wounds that ran as deep and brutal as the fiery core.

Karijini gorges, Kalamina
Kalamina Gorge: so pretty we almost named our daughter after it

Kalamina was our first gorge, and it was in its center that we stood, on top of an impossibly smooth plane of ferrous rock and gazed up along the ancient cliffs. Their bandy sides were rubbed as soft as soap by rivers that had flowed past for millions of years. With Ollie strapped tightly to Ryan’s shoulders, we scrambled down Knox gorge’s scree-covered slope which might as well have been covered in metallic shrapnel. Once at the bottom, we set Ollie down in a dew-drop of a canyon pool, where he paddled in its translucence as Ryan and I took turns leaping from the ledges above.

Eight long hours after gorge-trekking, we returned to our campsite only to discover that a particularly strong desert wind had, at some point earlier in the day, sheared two of our tent poles neatly in half. Our campsite lay in tatters and appeared as if a rogue elephant had run through it, with our camp chairs, table and little gas cooker strewn every which way into the surrounding spinefex. That night the three of us bedded down in the back of our minivan, where a free-for-all competition for the most elbow room kept each of us grumbling into the very early hours.

The following morning, we woke with sour dispositions and a flat car battery. All were cured after several mugs of instant coffee, and before long, we were back on the plain and into Dales Gorge, a tremendous hike that led us from the spectacular Fern Pool, past the Fortescue Falls, and finally to the Circular Pool, where Banyjima, Yinhawangka and Kurrama Aborigines once frequented, seeking everlasting life. Here we discovered tiny waterfalls that, heated on land by the sun, ran in warm rivulets down the canyon walls.

Karijini gorges, Weano
Ryan and Ollie climb out of Handrail Pool in Weano Gorge

In Weano Gorge, we traipsed after a rough-and-tumble family from Karratha as they led us down a narrow track to Handrail Pool. This waterhole’s namesake was owed to the treacherous manner in which a visitor makes their approach to the pool, via a bolted-in handrail one is instructed to grasp as they step backward off a ledge that drops thirty feet into the pool below. At the end of the rail, one belays themselves down the remaining 12 feet with the aid of old, knotted rope that was tied to the end the handrail. Understandably, at this juncture, the track transitions from a level 4 grade (“only attempt if you’ve packed a well-stocked first aid kit“) to level 5 (“you will most certainly die attempting this, the DOC entreats you to reconsider your route“). As luck would have it, one of the Karrathans was carrying his own 27 month-old son down to the pool, and he made the descent look like a walk in the park. “You put one foot ‘ere, and then the otha’ ’ere, hands down the rope, and she’ll be right! No worries, mate! Give er‘ a go!” This was Western Australia after all, and the people were cut from the same hard earth that they stood on. But we reckoned, if they could do it, so could we.

We left Karijini breathless and besmirched in red dust. It had found its way everywhere and onto and into everything; from the console of our car, to the creases of our oily, rusty grins, into the corners of our eyes and the backs of our knees. From here the Pilbara was wide open and without a spot of civilization for more than 80 miles. We sped off with the specter of Mount Bruce and the Hammersley Range in our rearview, the light falling delicate and mauve across the dusty quilt an eternity of time had stitched into this remote corner of the earth.

Karijini gorge hiking
Ollie, Mom & 2,500 million year-old banded iron formation

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Unleashed On Laos https://www.olivertheworld.com/unleashed-on-laos/ https://www.olivertheworld.com/unleashed-on-laos/#comments Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:16:00 +0000 http://stage.olivertheworld.com/?p=24 Luang Namtha Province, Northern Laos Jan 27th – 31st Half a dozen kilometers outside of the town of Luang Nam […]

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Luang Namtha Province, Northern Laos
Jan 27th – 31st
We traded toddlers for the day

Half a dozen kilometers outside of the town of Luang Nam Tha in northern Laos, Oliver stood in the patchy light that pricked through the rattan thatch roof of a Lenten communal hut and was surrounded by more than twenty of the village children. Some of them gawked in disbelief at the straw-haired ragamuffin in their midst, perhaps incredulous that such an impossibly tall baby appeared to have so much trouble standing still. Others giggled each time he tripped over his own two feet, literally falling victim to his long, wobbly legs and oversized, knobby knees. A cluster of mothers, barely more than girls themselves, slapped their thighs and howled with laughter, and occasionally one stepped forward to affectionately brush Ollie’s cheek. They spoke an ancient Tibeto-Burman dialect that was entirely different from the bits of Lao I’d managed to decipher in the market.

Ryan finally interrupted our son’s slapstick routine to pass an apple that had been stashed away in our daypack. I followed his lead and seized the opportunity to make this a teachable moment.

“Hey, Ol, that little guy over there looks like he would really like a bite of your apple. Why don’t you go over and share with him?”

And so Oliver proceeded around the room with an outstretched arm and a partially munched piece of fruit. When approached, some of the kids retreated to the indigo-dyed folds of their mother’s tunics, but a handful of the older children stepped forward to look Ollie squarely in the eye. To the smallest child, a little girl of barely more than a year, Ollie squatted on his haunches and cocked his head quizzically.

“You wanna bite ah dis apple?”

In a few moments, he was off again, dashing past the old pot-bellied sow and her trio of piglets rooting around in the dirt outside, and right through a mother hen’s brood of molting adolescent chicks. When I finally emerged from the hut, I found him clear across the village at the foot of a small hill, again surrounded by more than half the inhabitants. This time, he was stark naked and swirling around like a dervish in an enormous mud puddle that most likely belonged to the aforementioned family of pigs.

The ensuing scene was pure ‘golden-era’ stock comedy, as I chased him through and around the mud, all the while slipping on clusters of wet hay and trampled grass, barely able to keep my own balance. Lubricated by the grime, Oliver inevitably wriggled free each time I grasped an arm or a leg, and soon the entire village had gathered to watch and cheer on my effort to subdue our son’s naughtiness. I finally caught him in the end, and one of the old patriarchs nearly busted a seam as he helped pour river water from a gourd over Ollie’s head as I gave him a thorough scrubbing.

This was our third day in this famously quiet country where the pace of life proceeds as slowly and deliberately as the course of the Mekong during the dry season. Entering Laos through the northern Thai border of Huay Xia, we shied away from falling lock-step into the path of other travelers winding their way two days down the river to beckoning Luang Prabang, and instead forged north, deep into the forest.

At its heart, Laos stands starkly apart from its sophisticated neighbor to the west, Thailand. Families still squat in the dirt around a fire for their dinners as they have for centuries, and nimble-footed men from bamboo and rattan villages still ply the forest with their machetes in search of wild edibles that have no translated English names. We followed two of these men, both naturally soft-spoken H’mong, for two days through the Nam Ha wilderness. Wild-eyed and breathless, we walked for hours through a mosaic of habitats; mature evergreen forest, deciduous broadleaf woodlands, and sky-high clusters of giant bamboo that bent like the great, green arches of a mountain cathedral over our solemn heads.

The recent Chinese incursion into the north of Laos has brought new roads and construction crews to the mountain towns, and from a clearing along a ridge on our first day, we saw tremendous swathes of land where the forest had been razed and replaced by fledgling rubber tree groves, a principal raw material export. Sing, our sole English-speaking guide, explained how nearly everything pulled from the forest; be it timber, wild cardamom, or even the endangered muntjac deer, was consumed by China.

The path for the most part could scarcely be called one at all. Sing and Chi crisscrossed us through the Nam La River several times and led us steeply up the banks to an indistinguishable trail that villagers used to bisect the forest on either mountain. Very often we found ourselves negotiating mind-numbingly steep grades as our guides took us sharply up and down between the peaks. Suddenly, we were able to consider the switchback trail design of the Annapurna Circuit quite objectively, as merciful turning areas on the trail were nowhere to be found in this part of Laos. In the severest segments, carved out toe-holds beneath clumps of damp, fallen leaves and dangling vines were all that prevented us from tumbling off the side of the trail. In the face of all our efforts, our tiny Lao guides floated along the path like the vaporous mountain spirits that they worshipped, and aside from their birdcalls, they seldom made a sound.

What was billed as the "Special Hotel"

Camp for the night was a small, open-air bamboo and banana-thatch affair at the foot of the mountain close to where the Nam La spilled off a cliff. The forest faced us from across the river and hemmed us in on our left, right and back sides. Any approach to or away from our camp required a steep climb from our little grotto up one of the surrounding mountains. As the light crept away, Sing and Chi scuttled around, procuring vegetables from the forest and mincing buffalo meat purchased from the market the prior day. Ryan and I worked to fetch shards of bamboo in an effort to build up the fire in preparation for the long, cold night that lay in front of us.

After a remarkably good dinner of laap (spicy Lao meat salad), kaeng pak (Chinese kale soup), and sticky rice, our guides stripped to their skivvies and wandered off to spear tiny river fish by flashlight. Chi spitted a frog he had caught near the waterfall, and before we tucked Ollie away in the hut for the night, all three of us tasted frog legs for the first time, roasted over an open fire.

As our guides turned in, Ryan and I walked down towards the Nam La and watched the full moon rise directly above us in a clear sky between the mountains. The small clearing where we camped was flooded in shades of blue and white and the river glittered from its clear depths where the moon caught the smooth river stones and caused them to glow. Before us, on the opposite bank, the jungle stood by darkly and heaved animal sighs as its denizens came to life.

Under layers of blankets we shivered as the temperature plummeted close to freezing. We slept in intervals, both of us regularly waking to see that Ollie was properly covered, or starting at the sound of a mouse burrowing in the banana leaves over our heads. Our sleep was buffeted by the sound of the Nam La rushing onward to where it met the Nam Tha, a tributary off the mighty Mekong.

The following morning we were fed and up the mountain before nine. The early light filtered through the jungle canopy and illuminated the dried, yellow undersides of fallen leaves strewn across our path. Tall purple flowers resembling lavender lined the trail and perfumed the air. Our guide doubled a saw palm leaf in his hand, blew across it sharply and mimicked the call of a young Sambar Deer to its mother.

Ryan took the opportunity to offload the nearly 24 kilos of Oliver and child carrier on his back at points where the path was more negotiable, and Ollie, clutching his ‘rod and staff’ (a tiny walking stick and an enormous banana leaf), didn’t hesitate to blaze a trail. It is something to see your 30 month old son run care-free through the forests of Northern Laos.

Family resemblance?

Our adventure concluded with Ollie’s antics in the Lenten village. At the end of our trek, Sing welcomed us into his home in Had Yao village to meet his wife and two little girls. Ollie was fitted in snappy H’mong attire for a photo op with the family, and again, nearly the entire village turned out to look on. Over dinner, Sing bashfully told us that we were the first foreigners he had ever welcomed into his home, and as we cooed over daughters, it was clear that he could barely conceal his pride. As the shadows grew long into the evening and the laughter of the village children floated back to us, Sing informed us that most of the surrounding villages had never seen a Western child before. I glanced up at Ollie and Ryan; Ryan tickled Ollie’s bare feet as the little guy blew raspberries in his ear. I laughed and agreed with Sing. I could be wrong, but it would be a long time before Northern Laos saw anything quite like the three of us again.

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The Obstacle Is The Path https://www.olivertheworld.com/the-obstacle-is-the-path/ https://www.olivertheworld.com/the-obstacle-is-the-path/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:50:00 +0000 http://stage.olivertheworld.com/?p=21 Annapurna, Nepal November 24 – December 1 With our suntans only just beginning to peel from our week in Thailand’s […]

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Annapurna, Nepal
November 24 – December 1
Himalayan A Team

With our suntans only just beginning to peel from our week in Thailand’s south, we arrived in Nepal, the highest country in the world, if you don’t include Tibet. Katmandu’s (or “Captain Do” as Ollie would say) dusty warrens spiraled outward from Durbar Square, and amid teak pagodas and smoking saddhus, we glimpsed the sacred Kumari, a three-year old “living goddess” who lives cloistered away in a dark courtyard. Like all other Nepalis, we quickly became accustomed to sipping tea by candlelight when at 6:30pm sharp, all the lights across the country went out in a government-backed effort to conserve the country’s feeble power grid. We stumbled around this city for a few days, slipping in and out of the small tourist enclave that is Thamel, where we dodged touts offering deals on rip-off North Face gear, until I came down with a particularly nasty bout of hemorrhagic conjunctivitis from the dust billowing up in the streets. For a little more than a pocket of loose change, I saw one of the country’s top opthamological surgeons at an NGO and was prescribed a regimen of drops and ointments. Red-eyed and resolute, we set out west for Pokhara and the gateway to the Annapurna range.

Like many travelers who aim to trek in the Himalaya, we outfitted ourselves with a guide and porter. Bhimsen (the guide) and Bharat (the porter) were both men from the hills and therefore lacking all the flash of their Kathmandu brothers. Bhimsen in particular had a gentle way with Oliver. Already a father of two, he forever scanned our perimeter and caught Ollie once when he decided to leap off a flight of granite steps.

Day 1: We departed Pokhara for Nayapul via local bus. When asked, Bhimsen confided that tourists almost never choose to travel this way and always opt instead to pay a private taxi $15 for the 1.5 hour long ride through the mountains. Indeed, nearly an hour into the trip and we were still in the outskirts of Pokhara, picking up locals bearing porter’s baskets and tump lines, barrels of fish and cardboard boxes containing everything but the kitchen sink. The seats were barely bolted to the floor and we rocked back and forth wildly as the bus swerved around hairpin turns in the mountain. Goofy Bollywood tunes trickled out of a tinny speaker bubblegum-glued over the driver’s seat. As is his custom, Oliver pooped his pants roughly four minutes into the ride and Ryan and I were buffeted by the awful-smelling breeze that blew from the bus window to Ollie‘s pants and straight up to our faces. All the while, various mountain people boarded and disembarked; Magyars, Gurungs, Tamangs, and Thakalis. The Hindus of Kathmandu gave way to the Tibetan-looking people of the hills.

Finally we arrived and set out, making our way for the village of Tikkhedhunga where we would spend our first night on trail. The path was loosely paved with large granite slabs and we brushed shoulders with errant water buffalo, goats and caravans of pack ponies. Ollie saluted approaching men and animals alike with a spirited “Namas-te!“ and the late-autumn sun was soft and warm on fields of winter barley. With the snowfields of sacred Macchapuchare before us, the path through the valley and foothills was exhilarating.

Two hours in, we encounterd a British Ghorka returning for the first time in 14 years to his home village. The Ghorkas are a famous and feared sect of highly trained Nepali soldiers who, under King Malla’s reign in the 18th century, united Nepal’s separate warring states and forced the adoption of the Newari official language. During the Indian Uprising in the 19th century, they became mercenaries of the British Army, and with their curved Kukri daggers, they silenced many a Sepoy. In recent times, the Ghorkas form an elite foreign legion of the British military, and many earn their citizenship and their fortunes abroad. In the mountains, many bridges, guesthouses and water conduits are Ghorka-financed, and it was clear that this fellow was a patron to his village. He and his family were met by group of musicians and, as we marched alongside in awe, the panche baja escorted them all the way to his homecoming.

Day 2: Full of muesli and banana pancakes, we set out for eight hours of our first day of strenuous hiking. Before the day’s end, we would climb nearly 4,264 feet for an elevation of 9,020 feet in the mountain village of Ghorepani. We began ascending the moment we stepped outside. Step by careful step, we made our way to Ulleri, where views of Annapurna South and Huinchuli stretched vertically in front of us. The snow mountains appeared so close through the hills; swirls of snow blown off of their summits formed wispy halos around their peaks.

We climbed another few hundred meters and passed through a cloud forest. Ollie maintained a sharp lookout for tigers, and I could barely keep my imagination from ricocheting off the next tree; visions of yeti and snow leopards leaping from behind the moss-dripping, mist shrouded woods occupied my every thought. We continued following the Pancha River as it ran in rivulets down the mountain and spilled over stones into cold, clear pools below. Ollie, whose energy was unflagging, was carefully monitored for signs of AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness), though he never showed signs of exhaustion or breathlessness. Those were left to us!

Nepali-style winter woolies

After nearly four grueling miles and 3,936 feet uphill, we arrived in Ghorepani, a trekkers’ outpost where five or six teahouses advertised hot showers and chicken dinners. As it was already Thanksgiving for us, we of course opted for the latter, which was served with fresh steamed mountain vegetables and mashed potatoes topped with yak cheese. Harkening back to the Thanksgiving dinners I used to share with Italian family friends in Connecticut, we ordered Ollie a plate of lasagna which he polished off like a champ. And though it could never hold a candle to my mother’s special recipe, we put away a enormous slice of apple pie in the grand spirit of the holiday. We ended the evening curled up like bears in a winter’s den, piled high with blankets, jackets, wool caps and socks against the cold. Our sore muscles would be tested again early the following morning when we rise at 4:30 AM to see the sunrise light the Annapurna range from the vantage point on Poon Hill.

Day 3: Up before dawn with Bhimsen’s 4:45am knock at our door. I made the executive decision to leave Ollie sound asleep in our room where I knew he would remain safe and warm until our return. For extra assurance, Bhimsen asked our porter if he wouldn’t mind keeping an eye and an ear open after 6:00am when Ollie is likely to stir.

5:00am, out the door. As families across the United States sat down to their Thanksgiving dinners, Ryan and I began the 1,476 foot climb up Poon Hill in complete darkness and bone-chilling cold. Twenty minutes into the ascent, I felt a blast of frigid air as we rounded the eastern side of the hill and I falsely assumed we must be nearing the summit. In actuality, we were not even at the half-way point. The approaching sunrise formed a scarlet meridian in the eastern sky towards Kathmandu and we continued ever upwards under the faint beam of my pocket flashlight. Japanese, Germans, Finns, Spaniards and all other bleary-eyed travelers from far-away lands formed a silent caravan up the hill, all making the same pilgrimage to witness the day break over the snow mountains. Near the summit, we passed a woman covered in sweat, shivering violently and slurring her speech; all symptoms of AMS. As they rushed her down to a lower elevation, her party shined a flashlight in her eyes and forced her to drink water.

Nearing 6:00am, the Annapurna range comes to life. Plumes of snow silently lift off Annapurna South and the sun’s first rays arc off its eastern face, bathing it in a rose-gold light. Behind, on the far side of the Sanctuary, Annapurna I, the goliath of the range at 26,700 feet, is already illuminated.

Machhapuchare, the "Fish Tail"

My eyes scan to the west. Tilicho, Nilgiri, and finally the great Dhaulagiri rise over the ravine of the dark and wild Kali Gandaki and lord over Nepal’s far western frontier. Broad ridges and glittering snowfields flank either side of Dhaulagiri, and the mountain ensures few travelers venture farther beyond. Returning east again, there is Nepal’s holiest mountain. The razor’s edge of Macchapuchare (the “Fishtail”) is so steep that its peak holds hardly any snow. Even with cold-numbed toes, it is nearly impossible not to be awe-struck while in the company of these giants. Across all the eastern faces, the snow mountains shift their shade of pre-dawn periwinkle blue to lavender, then to rose-pink and finally to gold. The layer of mist floating above the escarpment below appears to be made from sacred elements of ether and water, and they form an atmospheric gossamer fit to dress these high kings.

Day 4: 8,528 feet above sea level, and the cloud forest was clear in the morning light. A troop of Himalayan gray langurs stopped to watch us pass and followed us for a bit from the treetops, their silver coats and wide-eyed black and white faces melding in and out of the shadows. We picked our way gingerly down the mountain, testing for loose stones and gravel that would not hold a boot. With our calves throbbing and ACLs near their breaking point, we moved far slower and less gracefully than the 10,000 pounds of water buffalo family that preceded us. Along the path we paused to catch our breath at small Gurung-owned teahouses that perch along the mountainside where they gaze down into the Kimrong Valley. Ollie was fond of pulling the blooms off the clusters of marigolds that adorn the lodges. Following the protocol taught to him by a friendly young lama in Kathmandu’s Swayambunanth Temple, he plucked the petals from the flower and attempted to scatter them in Ryan’s hair. His mountain blessing only slightly missed home; from where he sat in the carrier on Ryan’s back, most of the petals slipped right down the back of Ryan’s shirt.

We made Chomrong by 4:00pm and unanimously decided that baths were in order. Ryan absconded to the little shower stall first, but before Ollie and I can gather up our toiletries, a fleet of grimy trekkers stepped in front of us. I was doubtful the 300liter tank would enough to spare, and therefore relieved when Ollie and I managed to capture ten minutes’ worth of hot water. We emerged into the dusk, bellies rumbling with hunger and still steaming from the heat. Once under blankets and full of a hearty dinner (among other things, we enjoyed a Snickers Roll, a fried dough pocket containing the mashed and melted candy bar; famous on the Annapurna Circuit), we soon drift off. In my dreams I returned again to the snow mountains, the fields, forests, rivers and streams.

Day 5: Up early as we planned to change the itinerary today. Per Ryan, we would roll through our designated camp site this afternoon and continue on towards Pothana, all in about a seven hour hike. But first a requisite stop at the Jinnu Hot Springs, a natural mineral bath at the banks of the Modi Khola. While our guide and porter stripped down to their skivvies, washed clothes and paddled about, Ryan and I rolled up our pant legs and soaked our tired muscles. Ollie took the experience one step further, strips naked and launches himself into the center of the action. The serenity and spiritual element of our Nepali “onsen” is shattered when, 45 minutes later, we pried a screeching Oliver out of the spring and forced him into the chilly morning air.

Back on trail and no stopping until Landruk for lunch. Tempers were a bit short, and our porter’s grumbling over the extra mileage was not lost on us. Towards the village, I stopped to take photos of the rice terraces and as a result become separated from the group. Frustrated at first, I cursed my fellow travelers (one in particular), but soon shook off my grudge and reveled in the silence. The rhythm of the mountain dwellers was hypnotic; the cool, quiet air punctuated only by the sound of elderly villagers threshing millet and the occasional child calling after a water buffalo as it wandered down the hillside.

Shortly before dusk, we reached Deurali and Bhimsen pulled the plug. Here we were only a few kilometers away from Pothana but our porter would walk no further. Just as well by me; I’d kept pace for five days straight and couldn’t force the extra 45 minutes if I tried.

Deurali is a one-goat village perched on a pass between two hills and surrounded by dense alpine forest. There hadn’t been a sign of electricity or running water since Landruk, so we finished our supper of chapati and noodles by candlelight and turned in early. While Ollie slept soundly, Ryan and I were kept awake throughout the night by eerie screams coming from the forest all around us. We were informed the following morning that the calls were made by some indigenous owl, but to this day I am convinced that no mortal creature could have made those sounds that night.

Day 6: The previous evening, Ollie befriended Kancha, the local three-year old, and I couldn’t help but notice the little boy had but three toys to his name; a 99 cent wind-up frog, a rickety three-wheeled wooden car and a baby rattle. Understandably, Kancha became immediately enamored with Ollie’s small collection of trucks, so I decided we would endeavor to leave one behind in the morning. This was no easy task. In parting with “Orange Truck”, Oliver screamed and cried as if he was losing a limb. In our travels, we can only afford to carry along the smallest collection of toys, including a couple of dog-eared soft-cover Read to Me books, some washable markers, a faded plastic zebra and (the crown jewel), a set of rubber Tonka trucks. Every so often, the toy chest shrinks in number as a result of a book left behind on a bus, a truck that fell out of a hand while we weren’t paying attention, and even a Thomas train that disappeared down a sewer drain in Bangkok. Ollie is acutely aware of this, and his anxiety over being left toy-less is high. Despite this, once back on the trail and with his tears dried, he acknowledged his sacrifice for what it was. “Kancha no have any orange trucks in the mountains. Only water buffalo”.

As we drew closer to Pokhara, the charming mountain town that serves as the base for nearly all treks into the Annapurna, we crossed paths with a number day trippers heading out of the valley in the direction we had just come. I asked Bhimsen if he was encouraged by the number of tourists so late in the season, and he reminded me of the number of trekking operators stationed in Katmandu (700!!!). His hopes of leading another group were slim.

Daybreak over the Dhaulghiri masif, looking west from Poon Hill

After skirting several of Pokhara’s surrounding foothills, we arrived in the village of Naudanda where we encountered the first paved road we’d seen in six days. The honking horns of overflowing Tata buses startled us in our tracks, and in a moment’s time we were blanketed in the insidious clouds of dust from the traffic as it passed us by. In Sarangkot where we finished our trek, we overlooked Pokhara and watched quietly as the lights across the city came on, sending their glittering reflections into Phewa Lake. From our place on the hill, the road back to Kathmandu was shimmering and serpentine as wound its way east towards the setting sun. It was beautiful, and like all night-city views, enigmatic. But to the west, the real treasure, the memory indelible in my mind.The Annapurnas (I, II, III, IV and South) all visible, stood in snowy silence as the sun drew away and dusk enveloped them in pale purple robes. I see them resplendent like this only once more as we fly from Kathmandu to Delhi. From the plane, the mountains rise up from the patchwork of the valley floor and meet me at eye level, twenty-five thousand feet in the air. They hold court over the clouds and, from where I sit, they appear inseparable from the sky itself; white and ethereal, floating over the earth.

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Tiger Leaping aka ‘Face Plant’ Gorge https://www.olivertheworld.com/tiger-leaping-aka-face-plant-gorge/ https://www.olivertheworld.com/tiger-leaping-aka-face-plant-gorge/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:23:00 +0000 http://stage.olivertheworld.com/?p=13     Good evening from Yangshuo, Guangxi Province, China. This is actually Ryan as Emily just went across the street […]

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Up In the Sky

 

Good evening from Yangshuo, Guangxi Province, China. This is actually Ryan as Emily just went across the street to get some snacks and to check out the activities at the massage parlors that line our street.  Yes, our hotel is situated within the “red light” district, but we are only paying 60 RMB per night, or roughly $9USD. Can’t complain. Yesterday when I asked the nice, scantly clothed lady on the leather couch how much for a foot massage, she told me to go pound sand.  I guess the fact that I had Ollie on my shoulders did not get her excited about me as a prospect. Speaking of Ollie, he is snoring like his PaPa (love you Dad) on the bed next to me.  His breathing and lullaby music are helping to drown out the cat calls from outside our window, and he is simply beat from riding on a Chinese bike seat for seven hours today.

As I sit here typing, I am filled with a sense of peace and serenity that is truly a gift from God as today, and this trip thus far, have been absolutely amazing.  We biked roughly 25 kilometers throughout the countryside and saw cozy little villages, colors that you can only dream of, water buffalo, farmers working in the fields, and to top it all off, a baby cow chased Ollie and me for a good 25 yards. There are many parts of China that have been overrun by the machine, but there are still a few places where you can actually hear yourself think and the beauty is second to none.

Before I go back in time to our experience in Yunnan Province hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge (the highlight and lowlight of our trip thus far), I have to circle back to my one and only post before we left. As you might remember, before leaving on this trip, I had a lot of fear for numerous reasons. I am extremely happy to say that the trip so far has surpassed my wildest dreams. Emily, besides being a wonderful wife and best friend, is an amazing travel partner; although her tendency to never admit when she is wrong has certainly carried over into our travels. Ollie has been relatively well behaved, but he has definitely had his moments.  He is literally treated like royalty here and it has only accentuated his terrible twos.

While everything has not gone perfectly, the time spent with Emy and Ollie has been second to none. It is not the sights that you see when you travel, but who you see them with that matters. For those of you that work day and night like I used to or who don’t put family first, I highly recommend that you re-connect with the people closest to you as you don’t have to be in a remote corner of China to tell your wife and kids, or anyone else for that matter, that you love them.

Back to Tiger Leaping Gorge, or Hutia Xia, as the locals call it. While the bus ride was not the most enjoyable, Tiger Leaping was well worth the pain. We took a five hour bus ride from Dali, another picturesque city, to Qiaotou, the jumping-off point. On the bus ride, two Chinese men behind us hocked loogies (a national pastime) for the entire trip and the driver chain smoked and passed cars on a two-lane mountain road as if he was Mario Andretti.  To add insult to injury, Oliver pooped his pants early in the ride, as is his tendency whenever we board a bus/plane/etc., and there were only so many times that we could convince him to stay in his seat or else the “monsters” were going to get him.

Upon arriving to Tiger Leaping Gorge (one of the deepest river gorges in the world), we located Jane’s GuestHouse, a place to store bags and get some lunch before we headed out.  Perhaps not too long ago, Jane was better known as Jim, and I have to admit, this was my first encounter with a Chinese transvestite on PRC soil.  Emy and I clearly did not know that we had nearly a 30 kilometer, 9,000 foot ascent ahead of us, so we each ordered greasy omelets for lunch.  While eating, we met two lovely folks, Toby and Collette (Cola as Ollie called her) who were our hiking buddies for the majority of the two days.  If you two happen to be reading our blog, we miss you and are sorry we did not get to say good bye in Shangri-La. While I am not terribly proud, it is worth noting that at Jane’s, Emily and I finally, and out of dire necessity, gave up our squat toilet-virginities,  as we had both religiously avoided doing a #2 in this manner up until that point.

Almost immediately, the scenery was breathtaking. The only thing I have seen that rivaled the beauty of Tiger Leaping was perhaps Lake Victoria/Louise up in Banff during our honeymoon.  For those that aren’t familiar with the Tiger Leaping Gorge, it is where the Yangzi River flows through the Haba Shan and Yulong Xueshan mountain ranges.  To the west is Myanmar and to the north are Tibet and the source of the MeKong.

Needless to say, the hike was extremely difficult as I had Ollie on my back who now weighs over 35 lbs, and Emy had a pretty heavy backpack on as well.  In fact, she became so dehydrated and light-headed in the searing heat of the mid-afternoon sun that we had to stop a number of times.  After the first two brutally hot hours, we stopped at a small Naxi family’s home, Emily re-hydrated and we were ready to go, although I still had no idea that the next four hours would be even more grueling than the first two.  The 28 Bends, as this part of the hike was called, consisted of what felt more like thirty narrow, granite- strewn, tree-root-snarled, near-vertical hairpin turns along a path that could barely accommodate one person at a time.   By the time we made the Tea Horse, another lovely Naxi guest house in the mountains, we were tired and could barely put one foot in front of the other, but we both knew we had just seen natural beauty that is unparalleled.  It saddens me to say the Chinese government is contemplating building a major dam for hydro-power right within the Gorge, so it is unlikely that it will be around in the next couple of years. 

While getting out of bed the second morning was not easy, Emy, Ollie and I said goodbye to our wonderful Naxi-mama host and hit the trail again at roughly ten in the morning. Little did we know that thirty minutes into the second day I would trip and fall flat on my face.  Luckily, Ollie came away with only one minor scratch, but I was not that fortunate. Blood gushed from where my head had connected with the sharp granite and I had tweaked my ankle pretty badly. While I did not necessarily think so at the time, I came away from the fall a very lucky person; if I had tumbled off the cliff, it would have been game over for me and Ollie. Thankfully, we met a handful of other hikers about 45 minutes down the road who gave me a bandage and helped patch me up.

Good to know

 

After the fall, we still had a four hour hike that traversed beautiful waterfalls and made a dramatic descent to the bottom of the Gorge. Emy was quite the sport as she carried Ollie after my fall and navigated the terrain like a regular pro, unlike her sad husband who should clearly wear a helmet at all times. After finishing the hike and being the brain surgeons that we are, Emily and I decided to walk another thirty minutes to the lovely town of Walnut Garden.  As the sun was going down, we made our next critical error.  Rather than retiring to our rooms to clean up and collapse on our beds as most would do after hiking the Gorge, we instead turned off the trail and hiked another two hours through corn, squash, and pumpkin fields in an effort to get down to the water’s edge.  Along the way, we swatted away spiders the size of my hand (the entire hike Ollie kept screaming “huge spiders going to get you!”). Unfortunately, we never made it as it was getting dark and we soon lost the trail.

The next day we had to get back to the beginning of the Gorge in order to catch a bus onward to Shangri-La.  The taxi ride down was even scarier than the hike as there was no guard rail and there were rocks all over the road which clearly indicated recent landslides. On one occasion, a truck coming from the opposite direction passed by us with little more than a foot from the edge of the cliff. While again I am not proud, I was petrified and needed to relieve myself once we made it back to Jane’s.

The hike and fall through Tiger Leaping Gorge was a memorable experience that I will hold onto (like Emy and Ollie) for many years to come.

The post Tiger Leaping aka ‘Face Plant’ Gorge first appeared on OliverTheWorld.

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