Life's Adventures

Lord Hill 50k in the bag

2010-03-07T17:07:00.000-08:00

When I first moved to WA my second ever 50k run was Lord Hill in Snohomish. I did it the year after again, amazed by the park's beauty, and the fact that there are so many familiar faces out there. When we moved back I heard from Tim that the run was cancelled in 09 and 10 as well since he was very busy with work and family, so I took over as RD, using most of his general course design, shortening it a bit to 10 Miles exact per loop. Permit processes always take much longer the first year around but it got done finally and we were all set for the first 4thDimensionRacing trail run since the three Ron Herzog 50k's we put on a couple of years ago.
After running on saturday all around the city on pavement for about 10 miles and having a bit too many beers i was not particularly looking forward to markin the course at 2AM, but after packing and finally leaving thats where it came out to be. However the run was great, it was nice being out there at night, sometimes a bit spooky with the deer showing up from nowhere, but I got used to that.
The day turned out to be great, the race was sold out, people enjoyed the course (sorry for those that had some troubles with the course markings, my promise for any races forward is that we will have trail arrows, probably better and easier for everyone) and the aid stations, and everyone enjoyed the 10 extra large pizzas Alfy's pizzeria sponsored, and the all organic fruit and the vegetable soup sponsored by Nature's Last Stand. Plus a volunteer made lots of brownies and we had Toblerone Chocolates out there, so people did not get hungry.
We had a ton of fun putting this on and learned a few things in the process we will have to change for next year, but overall this was a great day.

Photos can be found at: www.4thDimensionRacing.com/forum
And results are posted at: www.4thDimensionRacing.com/results

Keith Wood, 81 Years old, ran 20Miles, what a stud!

Colinoba 2010, or when pirates roamed the city

2010-03-06T16:48:00.000-08:00

The reason this year's Lord Hill 50k was on Sunday and not Saturday was mainly due to the fact that my Saturday had been reserved for a while now. My friend Colin has been putting on a birthday bash/pub crawl/adventure race/scavenger hunt for his birthday for 6 years now, and it gets better every year. All dressed up (mimes, cowboys, thing1/2, pirates, superman, and so forth) teams of 2-5 run/navigate across the city and have to solve puzzles, find sights, take lots of pictures, drink lots of beer (not mandatory obviously, the RD would not condone such a terrible thing:) and generally do lots of things you only get to do when you are a kid or at mardi-gras.. and boy it's been fun! Over the last few years we had to ride rollercoasters, wear utility kilts, sell dried apples at the market, and so forth, its been a blast.

This year since Yumay sprained her knee and was out for the race i teamed up with Frenchy, Amanda and Susan to form Team Arrrrrr, Susan had all the pirate props, and we ran about 8-10 miles through the city, had an occasional beer or irish car bomb (yummy), and did lots of special tasks.

Thanks Colin and Connie for yet another fun race!

Lord Hill Sanity Check #2

2010-03-01T06:11:00.000-08:00

I just had to run it one more time, one more time with three independent GPS's to make sure the course is accurate, and fortuntely it is...

Yesterday I went out to Lord Hill Regional Park again to make sure racers will have accurate 10Mile, 20Mile and 50km courses, and French came out to run it with me, which is always more fun than running it alone. Out there we met a 81!! year old guy who is planning on doing the 50km race as well, that is plain crazy! Tough guy, he told us he did several 50ks last year, and knew all about the wall of death (its an about 300 feet long hill with 150 foot climb, now thats a killer doing it once, but three times in the 50k is tough, and if i can do that when i am 81 years old i am going to be pretty darn happy!

Race #1 of the season in the books

2010-02-01T05:54:00.000-08:00

This first race ended up being a bit more work than anticipated, but since they all are maybe i just need to adjust my expectations a bit... not that different from a 100 mile run or 24h adventure race, you tend to expect it to be easier, then after the race tend to forget how hard it was. So note to self, probably forgotten in a couple of days.

I went out there very early saturday, set the major part of the course, took an italian shower (sorry, a term i grew up with in Switzerland, basically drying yourself off with a towel after sweating profusely and applying copious amounts of perfume and deodorant, all set!), then looked over the maps with a headlamp haning out in the car all evening, and sleeping in the back of the car before getting up at 4.30AM to get HQ set up.

Sure enough then there was also taking down CPs after the race, though that was a great team effort from many of our volunteers as well!

The race went well, teams had a lot of fun, all CPs were set accurately and the weather was phantastic. One down, many, many more to go!

Oh by golly scouting can be a lot of fun

2010-01-08T05:31:00.000-08:00

So going scouting for new race courses can be either a ton of fun or hell on wheels... sometimes you are out there for 24h straight, running or biking endless miles on fireroads, bushwhacking senselessly up a ridge, only to find out that it is all in vain because the course is dull, dangerous or whatever else monkey wrench to choose from......

And sometimes you get what we got today: Nice weather, a perfect course, and the green light from the rangers to go ahead. Yeehaaw!

Race location will be Salmon La Sac, racecourse is interesting to say the least, the snow is perfect right now, and the area is just gorgeous. No more words, just pictures.

Mt. Hamilton, my sanctuary

2009-09-15T07:23:00.000-07:00

So as I have mentioned living/working in the bay area has taken its toll on my outdoorsy adventures, to put it lightly... all work and no fun makes Roger a big boy (plus 35lbs that is).

To get ready for the Trioba 24h Race I have finally started training again, not really enough motivation to go on long runs, i have done two 100 mile loops over Mt. Hamilton up to the wine country the last two weekends. Mt Hamilton is every Tour de France addicted's dream. 18 Miles, 4500ft of gain, a road in perfect condition (they need to move the satellite dishes up to the top, so trucks need to get up there). And the road, as winding and beautful sights like southern france... ok, NOW i am exaggerating... but its pretty dang nice out there!

The wildlife count was also not too shabby for one of the most populated region in the US. A bobcat, a 5 foot rattler, a bald eagle and a tarantula, wow!

Silicon Valley and the pact with the Devil

2009-04-20T18:04:00.000-07:00

They say that Wendell and Sarah from PCT Running have made a pact with the devil.... years in a row now a randomly selected weekend in April chosen by them have made temperatures spike into the stratosphere.... take three to five weekends in the mid seventies, then one in the 100s, and you got the weekend of the Mt Diablo 50 Miler... not any different this year....
It was a slow train wreck, and i was there beginning to start... having moved to the Bay Area for a fancy new job, working 50-60h/week and not training enough i did not want to cut my racing too, so i signed up for the 50M Mt Diablo and the 100M Headlands Hundred... bring it on!
The weeks leading up to the run i actually trained a lot, maybe a little too much, and got into decent race shape, and even though i have had issues with very high temps before (mainly the Mountians to Sound solo race in 06) i should have known to go out slow.
Temps were supposed to be in the high 80s, but ended up in the mid 90s, not counting the sky-high ones in the slot canyons we crossed. I started off with a good group and got my rythm very fast, and found myself at the top of Mt Diablo the first time around in no problem and way ahead of schedule. By 10AM the temps rose sharply, and by Mile 20 i was feeling it. I had to start walking some of the unbearable sunny sections, and spent almost 10 minutes at the 23 mile aid station, and even longer the ones following.
So I called it a day expectation wise and just slugged it out... walking, sitting, cursing, grasping for air. Finally I met this nice Canadian Ultrarunner Leslie, she made fun of my taped nipples (by then i had to take off my shirt, ridiculed or not), and we spent the next 10 miles frog leaping (in a very slow-frog kinda way) onwards....
The last 10 miles were pure hell, felt like hours... oh, wait, it was! I was cooked and done for, but happy i finished in almost 13h.
Gorgeous course, great race organisation, would do it again in a heartbeat, though wouldnt mind doing it in Washington-like temperatures.

Wonderland Trail Run, close but no banana!

2008-07-20T15:55:00.000-07:00

This past weekend Miles called me up and said he wanted to run around Mt. Rainer. Sure Miles, why not, or we could go down to the Snoqualmie falls and jump in at the top, would probably hurt a little less long and have a higher chance of survival... I havent run longer than 20 miles in a long time. Well we can just take it easy. Ok, sounds like a plan, a not so well thought out one at that, but a plan nontheless. Given that i had friends in town Sunday afternoon and needed to be back at lunch Sunday, and that Kimberly, Matt and Ruri decided to join as well chances dwindled to actually circumnavigate the dang thing, but we had a bail option since Matt's girlfriend came out later, and the weather was gorgeous.

We started at Mowich Lake at 8AM, clocking about 4-5Miles per hour including the climbs for the first few hours.

The scenery was out of this world, i could not remember ever having done a better trail run in my life, sure the current one alwasy sticks out, but i think this will go down as one of the top 10 in my final tally. The company was great, and we moved at similar speed until we night broke.

Then the speed dropped immensely, and we just could not get a rythm going, too many breaks, and general tiredness made it pretty clear I wont be able to make the 93 miles and make it back in time. As an endurance athlete with a wife that has a decent but limited range of acceptance of "lateness due to trainings taking longer than planned" i decided to go for the safe option, rather than the "ask forgiveness later" option. This option actually reduced pain both short and long term! Miles, Ruri and Kimberly joined me in cutting the course short at mile 68, while Matt and Erin who joined him at 68 finished up the 93. Nicely done Matt, I ll just have to do it again, GLADLY!

Booo we´re in Colombia

2008-02-07T07:17:00.000-08:00

And we are finally on the road again!
Yumay and I flew to Bogota beginning of January, and sure enough, Yumay´s bag flew to Lima, a little ahead of schedule for us..... After dealing with all that missing bag stuff and having to change pesos we did not get to the hostel until way after midnight, and sure enough it was full, but finally we crashed dead tired in a dumpy place not too far, waiting for our travel luck to improve a bit.

"The before picture"

Next morning we checked in to our backpacker hostel, found mail from Andres, a guy we met at a Christmas party in Seattle, who actually was from Bogota and had lots of friends there. Armed with tons of local what-to-do info (thanks Andres!) we explored the city, climbed to the local mountain to overview the gigantic city... totally out of breath (Bogota lies at 8800 feet and the top of the ¨little hill¨is at over 10´000 feet!).

Sundays the city of Bogota has what is called a ciclovia, they shut down half of the city´s major streets and tens of thousands of people from the age of 2-100 walk, run, inlineskate and cycle about the city.... incredible! Yumay and I ran for over 3.5h and close to 20miles that day, it was certainly the best way to see the outskirts of Bogota. Hopefully the US cities will pick that up sometime soon... traffic is decreased significantly as its tough to drive on half the streets, and people there seem much fitter too!

Through Andres we met Santiago, Carolina, Tono and Mimi, and they showed us around the city, and since Monday was a holiday, we got to drive out of the city north and enjoy the beautiful countryside, and had a phantastic barbecue, something of a barbecue i have not had since argentina, boy do they like their meat here, and do they know how to prepare it well!

Santi, Carolina, Tono, Mimi and Yumay enjoying the grilled meat and the view

Anyhow, after a few enjoyable days in Bogota we were ready to explore more of the county, so we headed north to Cartagena, a nice colonial town, hot and humid right by the ocean, and a good stopover to the even nicer northern towns.

Funky christmas displays and Cartagena old town

We pretty soon headed up to Taganga Beach, a stone´s throw from our main goal, parque tayrona, one of the most beautiful, unspoiled parks i have ever seen. Its a Jungle park by the ocean, filled with hiking paths and pristine beaches. There we spent 3 days hiking and camping within the park.

Yumay relaxing....

Wannabe Tarzan....

Playa brava.. we had the whole beach to ourselves

One of our main hikes, 6h to one of the beaches, we did not see a single soul, but lots of great bugs, huge spiders, snakes and butterflies... it was simply incredible and left us breathless and alone on a white sand beach. Certainly the best place to visit in Colombia. After the few days of trekking we spend a few days in a really nice hostal in Taganga, and then headed out to Ecuador.
We were beind schedule so we decided to fly, as we had a boat to catch on Galapagos islands, and almost did not make it. After we flew fine and safely to Bogota, our next flight to Quito looked fine. They announced about 5 times that they were cleaning the plane, thats why we could not board yet... nice... a very clean plane.. so clean that it apparently could not fly no more.. eventually they took the plain away with no announcement, and hours later brought a new one... now apparently Quito had too much fog and no planes could land anymore, so aound midnight they shoved us off to a 5 star hotel somewhere in Bogota, nice, but not really, as we only got like 3h of sleep and then needed to get back to the airport... unfortunately the game of fly cant fly continued on way into the day and with 13 delay we finally took off.. phew! So we immediately flew off to Galapagos and made it finally on time!
On the Galapagos islands we met Mike and Anna, they have been on a 6 months honeymoon and we were super excited to see that our paths will cross and booked the Galapagos trip together.
Thing was Galapagos is expensive, so we decided to go for the cheapest Boat (out of like 50 boats available), the Yolita. Originally designed for 12 passengers (and even then too small), they upped it to 16 a few years ago... its tiny, super old (actyally its 28 years old and in 2 months will be taken out of service), and full of termites (no joke), but hey, you get the see the same animals, eat the same great food and have the same guides, for less than half the price of a medium class boat, so we endured the painful heat and sound from the engines at night, and had quite the amazing 8 day trip. 8 day trips are designed such that you see a major part (about 50%) of the islands and the wildlife...

The trip was totally worth it, and I want to go back one day, from a friend we heard it may be able to be done in a kayak (sure, quided, but think of doing a multiday kayaking trip, WOW!)...

Huge tourtouse and relaxing sealion....

Birds in action...

Almost comic-like....

Curious Iguana

Us in Galapagos...

Blue footed boobie mating dance...

Snorkeling was great!

White tip reef shark...

Swam with turtles quite a bit...

And played with sealions...

Rogaine for Men with Hair

2007-05-14T17:39:00.000-07:00

So Yumay and I are organizing a Rogaine on June 9th, and last weekend, after having been out there once before and numerous hours studying maps and creating the course on paper, it was time to set up the monster portion of the race. Rogaine stands for Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance... so much for the longest acronym known to men...

This one is different from the conventional 6/12/24h rogaine races... they are usually only on foot. Creating a bike and foot course took a lot of studying the possibilities of how to deal with people doing the 4h bike 4h foot vs the 6h foot race.... phew....

Havin Fun

Spring is here...

Someone tipped off the chipmunk (on top) and it knows all the CP locations now!!

Tamarack Springs Campsite

Anyhow, Yumay and I packed the car Friday night and started nice and early at 5am to get out there and get going.... and the going was tough. Every checkpoint has to be checked, double checked, measured with GPS, and then vetted (by Glen next weekend). So needless to say my plan of getting it all done (30cps) went out the door in a jiffy.... after roughly 10h of riding and running, and lots of breaks readjusting CP locations it was time to go to sleep at the beautiful Tamarack Sprints Campground. Its free camping at a gorgeous campsite, what wonderful place we live in! Saw probably about 30-40 deer and elk while up there too...

Killer Views

The next day we did a combination of ride/run/drive to get more done, and now the course is almost done! Still lots of work to do figuring out CP values and all that fun suff... but that s why I decided to do the race to begin with... lots of learing, lots of fun!

Sun, Fun on the Peninsula...

2007-04-28T21:29:00.000-07:00

Wednesday night sometime past midnight, buried in emails from work and sponsorship, permit and course planning projects for 4th Dimension, Yumay and I decided we needed a break, and looking at our schedules we figured that would be sometime in mid-august, unless we left this weekend... so two very last minute but very determined emails to our bosses and the next morning we were getting ready for our three day weekend on the olympic peninsula. Woohoo! Havent been there but once, and just a drive by anyways, this time we wanted to do some good runs and rides... so off we were to Sequim after our regular MerGeo.com team ride on Thursdays at Tiger... we caught a late ferry and found a nice little motel.. and were not more than 20 minute drive away from one of the best mountain bike rides washington has to offer... Dungeness/Gold Creek... about 20 miles with 4500 feet of climb, this ride offeres some of the best singletrack there is.. and all that surprisingly dry... it was a great day of riding, about 5h of constant technical but not too technical riding, and top views of the olympic mountains.

First mountain flowers after a long winter...

Having fun!

River crossing balance...

The next day we were off to run the Lake Ozette triangle... after a beautiful drive along the north coast of the peninsula we got there, beautiful sunshine, just a little wet from the days before.. unfortunately 6 out of the 9 miles are running on wood planks, and about 1.5 miles into the run i slipped on a slighly slanted piece of wood that was as slippery as a banana peel, and fell, and hurt my ankle, AGAIN for the 2nd time this year. Not as bad as last time, but no running for a few days.. we still made it to the wild coast but with my swollen and tender ankle I decided to just stay out there and enjoy the weather and then hike back the way we came... so we skipped day three and went home... a bike ride on sunday will be better and still doable with a tender ankle.... two out of three aint that bad!

Saw Bambi along the way...

WoW!

Assessing ankle situation...

On the north coast...

The gloves are off...

2007-04-15T07:05:00.000-07:00

Getting ready for a grueling 1000 mile race with 100'000 feet of elevation gain I am convinced I need to simulate the race a bit more to not get annihilated during the race.... so I need to do climb, lots of it.... and there is not really too much nearby... at least not uninterrupted 3000-5000 feet... hurricane ridge is the best on the bike at the moment, but one has to drive 2h and take a ferry.... mad lake and devils gulch are still snowed in... so I did L'alp d'Issaquah.... named after L'alp d'Huez its barely a homeopathic version of that in terms of total climb, but its 2.7 miles and 1400 feet of climb, not that bad for out here ey?

So I drove there and climbed it.. once, twice, (as riders looked at me, wait, did he not just... why?) four times plus once from the back side... got in just under 6'000 feet of climb by 10am, when I had another job to do... Eric was organizing one of his Northwest Trail Runs and I agreed to go pick up all the flags and markers from the half marathon course.... so it was another 13ish mile run with 4000 feet of elevation gain... great training doing 10'000 feet of gain that morning, something I need to do lots from now on... and we certainly have the hills to train on....

Photo by Murray Maitland, who did aid station...

The best commute in the world.....

2007-04-12T17:42:00.000-07:00

I have the best commute in the world and I challenge anyone that reads this... its 22.2 miles of uninterrupted bicycling path going from Redmond over the noth end of the lake down to Seattle. Very few roads to cross (5-6) and only one major one with a red light... the trail is in excellent (Redmond) to good (Bothell, Seattle) condition, and I there is enough dirt/gravel shoulder for running as well. Over the years I have usually biked to/from work anywhere from 1-4 times a week, and recently to get ready for my Gigathlon I have started also inline skating and running... Roadbike takes me 1h-1h20, MTB 1h10-1h30, Inline 1h45-2h, and running about 3h30... a little on the long side for a morning commute but when I make it out of bed at 4.30 (like today) I can make it... and running almost a marathon before work gives you a good sense of achievement (as well as seriously tired/achy legs throughout the day).... a picture of the Burke Gilman Trail below:

While the trail is completely flat there is also plenty of opportunities to veer off and add some distance and serious hills (Puget Power, Tolt Pipeline, Swedish Hill, etc)..... a blessing of a commute I am very very greatful for!

BEAST #1 in the Bag

2007-04-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

Another Season of BEAST has started... what a relief that it all went well. When Eric called me up over three years ago and told me he wanted to start a midweek adventure race series I thought he d gone a little mad... and sometimes I love to be wrong....

BEAST started three years ago with 42 racers (only 20 preregistered...), many good weather races and phantastic race courses (Eric makes a map for every race, does not just use USGS maps, and updates every orienteering map to perfection), the race numbers shot up to about 80-100 racers, where its been pretty steady... the UW race (#3 of the year traditionally) gets more racers due to the easy central location, the paddling (canoeing in rented standardized boats at the UW activity center) and the fact that it requires roadbikes, not mountain bikes... a little easier for beginners.

This first race was in Redmond and it all started when I did a BBTC ride with Ruri and AV a long time ago and found that there were dozens of really cool singletrack trails right behind my house... over a year I explored more and then the idea was born using these for a BEAST...

Great times, lots of racers, meeting everyone again after the offseason, and an epic battle of many lead teams finiding Manny's pulling ahead by less than a minute ahead of my buddies Jeff Woerner and Ryan Fleming and winning it! Great Job Marty, Kara, Chip and Mark (even after dry heaving several times!). My wife Yumay who religiously does the BEAST races brought out two microsoft newbies and together with Clint Arney they got 5th overall, of 38 teams, and she had a blast and thought the race course was epic....

Not many pictures as my camera died about 5 seconds before race start....

Aaron and Carol busy checking everyone in....

Prerace meeting... prerace anticipation

Checking maps and listening to eric.... just a few seconds to go...!

A very MerGeo Weekend....

2007-04-07T20:36:00.000-07:00

This past weekend it was time to get together with the Team (MerGeo.com). Unfortunately people were injured (Eric, Aaron), on vacation (Julie, Ruri) and busy.. so only five showed up to our first team ride at Black Diamond. The new map and the extra trails were totally worth the trip down there, and Matt, Peteris, Kim, Yumay and I rode and ran the trails for about 4h until we met up with Aaron Vanderwaal (who's leg is almost healed and did his first road ride since his horrible crash in november!) to talk about the Team's schedule. While sitting there and talking, we had the TV running and all of a sudden saw a familiar face.... it was Marty Couret from Team Manny's who got into a national TV commercial talking about the new Aleve Gelcaps, a stint he got during participating at our 4th Dimension Winter AR!! How cool is that!

Getting Ready to head out...

Roger and Matt on the Trail

Sunday I did my new favorite Sunday workout, get up at 5, start riding at 5.30, bike to and up and over Cougar Mountain twice, and then out to Red Town Trailhead for a Seattle Running Company Sunday Trailrun at 7.30am, and after a 10Mile run head back home.... at the trailhead I met Vin and my teammate Matt Hayes and we booked it, 10Miles/2000ft el.gain in 1h43, not bad for already having done 35k/3000ft gain on the bike.... just for the heck of it we rode across Cougar Mt. Top one last time and then around the lake.... I was holding on for dear life (hence no pictures) tugged close behind matt who was riding an average of 23MPH around the lake... did not even look like he was breaking a sweat!
After I got home and inline skated for 30 minutes I knew I was done for the day and ready to input some serious loads of sushi!! After the shower walking down the stairs my legs hurt like after a 6-12h adventure race... that s the kind of training that is key, but usually when I am training by myself I just wont push that hard.... thank god for teammates!

Sleepless in Seattle

2007-03-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

The title reflects more the memory of how it constantly rained during the "Sleepless in Seattle" movie, not that I have been particularly strong (3-5h/night) in the sleep division either...
I love the northwest... I want grow old here, and I am happy that whimpy Californians and Floridarians move back to where they came from when they cannot deal with the cold and wet... but every once in a while I break down too and feel a little whiny myself, and wish back the time when I lived in Berkeley... in 6 months it rained 3 times there... for a combined 5h....

March has been bad, bad, bad... and somehow the only good days we had were midweek days, so every saturday, like clockwork its the same weather....

Yup, that one...

Training has been going really well considering that I am about three months away from the big race... still a lot of work especially on the bike and the swim, but I am getting there...
Today after a desperate overhaul on my bike by Performance, I rode 62 miles in the rain, this ride called "The son of the last dirt trail", its from Kissing the Trail, a great mountain bike guide from John Zilly. Boy it was cold and the trails were wet! I forgot my goretex booties at work and therefore could not feel much of my feet (except for a dull, cold pain) for the most part of the 5h ride.. except for in the shower when the skin and flesh started to warm up... that is one painful feeling like thousands of ants crawling around...

The ride encompasses Tolt Pipeline Trail, Puget Power Trail, Farrell McWither, Redmond Watershed, Told McDonald, Snoqualmie Valley Trail and East Lake Sammamish Trail and can be modified at will, but my version is about 100k with 3000ft of climb and its 60% fireroad, 30% singletrack and 10% road... not bad, when its DRY!! Spring is around the corner and I have got to say that its the most desperate I have ever been for warm/dry weather.. maybe due to not having taken time off through the winter since I ran HURT100...

Dirt deposits in the patented "Love Channel" on my MTB saddle... seriously, that is the official patented name...!! Behind the bike is my super fuel... powered by Clif!

Connecting the dots...

2007-03-28T23:58:00.000-07:00

Things are slowly coming together on the Gigathlon race I am doing this summer... for those who dont know what the heck I am rambling about, its a 900 mile/105'00 feet elevation gain multisport event (swim, cycle, run, MTB, inline skate, each discipline every day)...
http://www.gigathlon.ch/
Too bad that they only have it in German or French but here is the course..

And the distances/el.gains..

Trainig has been going great, and I am swimming a ton theses days, so really the preparations are going as planned... to make it easier, I have been very lucky to get some major sponsors for my race, among them Clif Bar , who apart from making sure I will never go hungry also is providing major sets of race jerseys.....

K2 skates also just came through big and provided me with superb race and training skates, and Yumay some as well to be able to train together... Yumay has exceptional skate and swim skills... the two things I need badly, what a lucky coincidence...

The radical 100... after my first training the only thing left to worry about is how much it was going to hurt when I wipe out at 17-18 miles per hour....!

Fresh off the press I also am getting great support in the swimming category, where Blue Seventy is providing me with the Triathlon Wetsuit of the Year! The Blue Seventy Helix was used by Tyler Patterson in his amazing 55 mile swim (37h) last year, and Tyler is teaching me the ropes of how to swim fast and long...., its amazing the amount of support I am getting from everyone here in the northwest....

The helix... aint it pretty?... and fast!

Paddle Schmaddle

2007-03-18T23:24:00.000-07:00

Aaron is doing a weird american move Roger does not get but smiles anyways...

After I made my mad decision to take part in a 900 mile, 105'000 foot elevation gain triathlon this summer, I stopped paddling, one of my favorite pasttimes last year... and been swimming like mad (well not really, like 3 times a week but that s a pretty mad thing for me, not particularly excited about the slowest sport in the world!). Anyhow, after the Cap Forest Ride yesterday I decided to meet up with AaronVdV who has made some nice recovery advances lately and is limping faster than ever.. and paddling faster than ever too.. ! So we went out to the Northwest Outdoor Center and paddled out to 520 and along the floating bridge to the other side and back... good being out there again, and planning the season with our new MerGeo.com captain!

MTB @ Cap Forest

2007-03-17T22:21:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I rode at Capitol Forest with Glen, RVG, JVG, Aaron Rinn and his buddy Chad. Met up at Krispy Kreme in Tacoma the usual DART fashion, about 15-30 minutes late but in good spirits! Then headed down to Cap Forest. Originally planned on doing the Capitol Peak 50 mile running race course on the bike but our tight schedule, lateness, and some minor bike defects, plus the fact that there was massive snow on Capitol Peak, all slowed us down, but we still ended up getting in a good chunk of biking, about 26 miles and plenty of vertical, which is not hard to find out there!

Glen's car is in desperate need of hydration! Will nuun help? :)

Gotta first get to the trail!

Started off in dreary rainy weather and got to experience what Cap Forest is like in the winter.... WET! Had to cross a big stream and bike up 1500 feet to start with, so after a quick cold footbath the bodies got warm immediately... the ride was a sufferfest in the best of good-pain way... wet, difficult, lotsa climbing and difficult singletrack descending, and at the end a steep climb up to Capitol Peak, which we got about 2/3 up until we hit heavy snow....

Biking in the snow is fun... and difficult.

Boy was it wet!

DIRT, DART!

Yeah well the hardware suffered too...

No words necessary...

it was fun but difficult to ride in a foot of snow, and Glen needed to be back in the city so we called it a day... an awesome day with great bikers... what else would I want on a rainy day!

Raise the roof for Colinoooooooooba III

2007-03-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

Colin celebrated his 46th birthday in style this past weekend.... with the 3rd annual Colinoba! This mix of streetscramble, adventure race and drink fest is a classic already now, and hordes of AR buddies participated, namely DART, missing link, Manny's, Trioba, Double Trouble, Dr. Strangelove, Robin, etc....

Colin with his very stylish flamingo theme glasses....

Superheroes on speed... missing DART

Prerace meeting....

The jist of it is find CP locations all over the city as you are running around with a digital camera and an empty big beer bottle, take lots of funky pictures according to rules and instructions, and drink at least three pints in three pubs/bars across the city (also specified)...... I could explain more but let me just make it easy and wrap it up for you... fun, awesome training, great friends.

RVG, JVG and Jerry won the thing, I raced with John, a coworker of Colin's from Boeing and we got 2nd, just seconds behind Jen and Rick Jerabek, but noone cared too much about the results, everyone was out there to have oodles of fun.... pictures courtesy of RVG....!

Adventure pure at Orcas Island 50k

2007-02-25T15:35:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday I ran the Orcas Island 50k Fat @$$ run which as you can imagine from the name is on Orcas Island! Originally I wanted to run, then not because Franklin and Ats were coming to town, then yes again since Franklin absolutely wanted to do the run and heck that was even better. Not having been able to run much since the H.U.R.T 100, I expected little of the race and started off easy, which is how I usually do best. There were superb runners there, Bryan Morrison, Kyle Skaggs, Ralph Pooler, Brock Gavery, Glen Rogers, Van Phan, Scott McCoubrey, to just name a few, so I knew I needed to run my own race or else I would just blow myself out. The race was tailored to my strenghts, with 8000 feet of elevation gain there were not a lot of flat parts in the race. Four big hills were going to be climbed, including the top of Mt. Constitution. After 9 miles, where we returned once to the start/finish, I was in roughly 25th position, just warming up for hill #2. After that I powered up the powerline trail which was not so much a trail but a general rut in the ground that could be followed, and some sections were a plain scramble. There I passed Van, Scott, Brandon, and Murray among 4 more racers in just 10 minutes, feeling good about having taken it easy in the beginning, knowing there was still plenty of race left for me to finish well. Both highest peaks of the race were snow covered, and both times were the actually only time it rained, or with my luck snowed up above the snowline, so I experienced virtually try weather all day. Hill #3 was Mt. Constitution, and then after the 2nd aid station there was a whole lot of descending to do. I felt great at all times, powered only by clif shots, shot blocks, and hammer perpetuem, plus a few ecaps and nuun. I finished in 6h05 in 10th place, and felt really good about my race. Just 5 minutes behind Glen, bugger! Especially since Murray and I got lost for about 3-4 minues at mile 9 where we took a wrong turn and ended up down at the water.

Happy, tired, a wee bit wet....

4th Dimension Winter AR

2007-01-27T15:49:00.000-08:00

Let me start off by saying that the first ever adventure race that Yumay and I organised together was awesome, as that is all that really matters! We had an interesting time leading up to the event, its not easy, that s for sure. The permits, course design on everchanging snow conditions, racers that change their mind if and with whom they ll race, and volunteer coordinations sure take it out of you even just getting there. Saturday morning (the race was Sunday) Ruri and I met at Hyak Lodge, where the race would eventually start less than 24h hours later, and had a mission to complete. To put out all the 21 checkpoint flags.. preferentially in the right location, as one does not want to mess with tired, angry adventure racers!
The whole thing started off pretty disasterous.... the batteries of the GPS died, due to extreme cold, and having to constantly carry them in my pockets to warm up was cumbersome.... then I found that one CP was slightly misplaced on the map... what to do? Replace in the field or on the map? After an hour of no major disasters my snowshoes broke apart?? WHAT!?! Seriously, just broke in two different places, and I did not even run very hard...
So after a quick stop at the lodge we went onwards, me with new snowshoes, to finish setting the course. It got better and better, and at the end I was almost having fun! The stress levels were certainly there... would the course be long enough, accurate enough, well percieved?

Pre-race rambling...

Got back to the lodge, a quick hot shower and from then on it was just a blur of events after events... racers started arriving, checking in, and before I knew it it was 12pm and I had to be up at 4am to get the volunteers started. The pre-race night was a success though, Bruce cooked some great meals as usual and raers mostly chatted and/or watched the adventure race DVDs I had borrowed.

Volunteers Kean Williams and Jessica Lundin in action

Morning of was hectic but went very well, Volunteers were in place thanks to Aaron and Matt who have a knack for being on the ball, and people like Vivian and many others that are so good at this volunteering thing... its amazing how much easier it is with good volunteers.

Race started just a minute late, and people were on their way! 29 teams (76 people) registered and 28 showed up since Tyler Patterson broke his hand two nights before, and the mad stampede of overly eager adventure racers barreling down the icy road from the Hyak Lodge was almost comic to watch. Once gone, I had a few minutes to relax before the madness of who which what continued.

Don Brooks slams back another one in the hopes of not having to do penalty laps

Overall it went really well though and DART won in a superior fashion before MOMAR. Not all teams made it, in fact several never even got to CP5 (out of 20) due to the sometimes a bit difficult navigation, but everyone was in very good spirits about it, after all finishing a hard course gives one a greater sense of satisfaction. The final part, a special event "biathlon" where people had to throw snowballs at coke cans and if they missed run/skate extra laps was very well received (except for the few poor ones that had to run all six laps... !).

Winning Team: DART-nuun

Team Snowblind, happy to be done...

Overall a total success, got us thirsty to do another one or two....

H.U.R.T Hurt!

2007-01-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

Any race that is called HURT probably is trying to do a pun to pain.. HURT is no different...
H.U.R.T stands for Hawaiian Ultra Running Team 100 Miler.... auguably the toughest 100 miler in the US (not counting Barkley since you need to get "chosen" to race)... its a 100 miler with 99% singletrack, 24'000 feet of elevation gain and loss (the latter hurts more than the former) and very, very gnarly trails... washed out riverbeds, roots as far as your eyes can see..
So I decided to do it! CCC100 went well, and its up or out, always!

I cant necessarily say I had a lot of fun training for it this winter... doing double Mt. Si's in snow storms only mimic the drastic elevation changes not the weather there, and the rain, rain, constant rain throughout the winter got to me over time.. but I prepared for it well, and felt I was ready to roll.... in any event if it did not go well Yumay came along and we were going to go out to Kauaii to hang out for a week so the trip was already a success to start with. My buddy Matt Hart was there along with Krissy Moehl, having some other Washingtonians there was great, and my plan was to not run as fast as them as that would mean I am going too fast!

Steadily uphill.....

I started off rather fast-paced on the first of the five 20 mile loops, finding myself to be running with Krissy Moehl (who would eventually finish 2nd place overall!) and then even passed her and was about 20 minutes ahead of her after lap 1.... not the smartest thing to do knowing that she is a much stronger runner than me... oh well, I listened to my body who told me I was feeling phantastic....

Popping blisters, FUN!!

Second loop I started to slow down, naturally, and being passed by some people, not freaking out about it, I was running my own race, and actually was running by myself for about 80% of the fist 60 miles, when Yumay would jump in and pace me to the finish... Matt was done by then, runing the 100k version.

Mile 50... hot, hot, hot...

After mile 60 I found out I was in 5th place overall out of the about 100 people, NICE! I was feeling the constant heat over the day that started taking its toll, only feeling-wise though, speed wise I was still going really strong up the hills.... Yumay was with me and I felt like this was going to be one of my best races ever.... slip, slam, pop!
Slipped in the middle of the night, very sleepy, on a root, fell into the bamboo forest and sprained my ankle!!! Darn, so close... spend 2h trying to continue but I was down to a crawl and at mile 72 I had to pull out... fortunately I was past the 62mile mark so when that happens and one does not finish the 100 miler they automatically qualify for the 100k time... which I ended up 5th in and got a buckle as well.... no harm done, I ll do this race again in a few years... !!

Season's culminations, 8th place at USARA championships!!!

2006-11-05T08:55:00.000-08:00

It has been a good, hard, long season, and last weekend Eric Bone, Julie Schnepf and I headed down to Santa Barbara in California to take part in the U.S Adventure Race Championship, a spot we earned by beating Team DART-nuun at the Trioba 12h race at Snoqualmie Pass.
I had not raced with Julie before but Eric did and they were supremely successful, so I was not the least bit worried, and found out soon I did not need to be anyways.

We arrived at San Jose Airport and were picked up by Eric who drove down with all our bikes and gear, and off we were to Santa Barbara. We were planning on arriving early to have plenty of time to prepare, but the day ended up a blur of constant running around checking in, picking up race maps and infos, going to meetings, getting the gear ready, working on maps very late and dropping in bed to catch 1h of sleep from 3-4am... knowing we will not get any sleep the night after anyways unless we drop out....

Race start had an interesting twist... a warmup... one had to ride to the start... it was about a 6 mile ride on undulating roads to the start, where we then coasteered along the beautiful coast (we ran across Kevin Costners lawn.... sorry!!), all the way back the the hotel where the kayaks were waiting... (not really worthy of the name, pretty sad that they used Sevylor Tahiti inflatables for such a big race!).

There were 50 teams present, two boats per team, makes 100 boats... and one was deflated... ours DANG!! Could not believe it... had to run around and find the guy responsible who then pumped up and fixed the boat... then Eric in a Boneheaded usual approach to try to stay as dry as possible was trying to enter the surf way too early and capsized.. not once, not twice, three times... we were on the water in probably 48th or 49th place..... wow, what a start....

Our paddling skills did not help, I was sitting way too low in the boat and did not get enough power so we only passed about 5-6 teams on the water and came out in the early 40 range, ready to rumble! The first bike leg went well and we moved past team by team... the only good thing when you are way in the back....

Eric powering up the first hill of the day...

Then we got to the trek and had a superior run, partly because we ran well and Eric's navigation was solid, party due to a misplaced checkpoint that two teams nicely enough mentioned and we found it in the wrong place immediately... after 7 hours or racing we suddenly found ourselves in 6th place!!! The race was on!
After we got on the bike we were once again plagued by bad luck, Eric's light gave out and mine had connection issues so apart from having to deal with the issues we had inferior lighting once darkness set compared to the other teams out there. It was necessary, the downhill sections were brutal and Dan Barger, in his usual, slightly arrogant fashion, proclaimed that the night before with "I dont like easy races...!", yup.

We fell back to about 10th place throughout the night's uphill fireroad battles and downhill singletrack maddness, and as the sun came up I caught second wind. This is something peculiar with me, I get a huge surge of energy the morning after a long hard night, and used it to tow Julie at first, then Eric, and then both, and we managed to pass a team up to the last hilly checkpoint... from there it was downhill to the beach, finish a reasonably short Orienteering section, and along the coast to the finish. With strong headwind, cramping muscles and big smiles we rode the last few miles along the beach and finished the US Championships in 8th place... superbly happy with this race... could we have done better? Always, there s not a team that does not drop minutes, maybe hours in a race that lasts 27h30minutes.. but overall this race went about as well as we could have hoped for.. after all we were ahead of many very strong and well funded adventure race teams such as Golite Timberland Sprint, Wingnut and Mighty Dog... this is it for me for a while... I am taking a mini-sabbatical from MerGeo, stepping down from my captain role and will only race the fun races next year... its time for others to step up and for me to take it a bit easier.....

Done! A well deserved 8th place...

My first 100 mile run, Cascade Crest 100

2006-08-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

When I told my mom I was going to run 100 miles (omitting the fact that there is also 22'000 feet of elevation gain in it) she righfully asked "now why would you do something so stupid?"... for which I had no real good answer.... because I can? Hmm... I can also run into a burning building but I am not going to do it anytime soon....

So I stopped trying to explain why I love the things that most people find a wee bit cooky... watching Amerian Idol or reading about who Paris Hilton did last night is a cooky pasttime for me and noone will ever really be able to sell that to me....

Anyhow, I love doing what I do and so getting ready for this race was exciting.. after a couple of AR's and rogaines I was ready to train for the Cascade Crest 100 mile trail run, but my excitement got a pretty good damper when I fell and hurt my knee on the Skuookum Flats down in White River while mountain biking. One rock in the wrong place (or Roger's bike in the wrong place I guess) and I heard the pop... some ligament had been pulled... and while I could ride ok running was totally out of questoin for almost two months... it was exctuciating not being able to run... and after 5-6 weeks when I was able to get back into it we were in Amsterdam, about one of the flattest cities in one of the flattest countries in the world.... so much for good training....

Cross training came to help and before I knew it it was two weeks before the race and the knee felt fine.. two double Mt. Si trainings and I was about as ready as I would ever be biven the circumstances.
I had great support, Yumay was going to wait for me at Mile 32, then Jerry Gamez took over first pacer duty from mile 45-67, and Yumay from 67-100....
Early on in the race I started running with Diane VanDeren, one of the most amazing women I have ever met... once a star Basketball and Tennis athlete (she was good enough to play at Wimbledon) she began having seizures after a bad fall from horsebackriding when she was younger... after three kids and a successful tennis career the scar on the brain broke, and the seizures came back with full vengeance.. ten years of crippling seizures every day left her no choice but to go for it, a large part of her brain was amputated in an amazing surgery, and she was left with very little short term memory and bad vision at night, but otherwise healthy... she took on ultrarunning and is now on the NorthFace Ultrarunning Team and one amazing athlete!
It was a pleasure running with her and listening to her talk, and the time passed very quickly.

Off they go... start of the CCC100, 70 or so racers....

Diane Vanderen, my running buddy for the first 45 miles....

Water, nuun, lots of Clif, Ipod.... good to go!!

At mile 45 Jerry took over and I started to fade... I wasnt running fast to begin with, Diane slowed me down and rightfully and smartly so.. but somehow I got worse anyways... just as we were entering the (in)famous Snoqualmie Tunnell.... I was passed by Van Phan who was pacing another 100 miler virgin and they were moving fast... was I done?
My stomach was feeling bad, after a full day of strong heat many people had troubles, but somehow miraculously it went away and never came back immediately after we exited the tunnell... 50 mile mark was reached.. barn door was open (still very far away but open!), and Jerry turned up the cranks!! He gave me some kickass tortillas with cream cheese and ham, and after eating Clif Bars, Shot Blocks and Shots all day my body loved the change and responded very well.... I hauled up the hill passing three people and figured I was proably in about 25th place..... not bad...
After Mile 67 Yumay took over, Jerry said bye (thanks again!) and we started getting on the trail from hell...its called that for a good reason... nevertheless I did really well in this section with Yumay's help and we passed another few people...

As night comes, Roger is visibly tired, roughly around mile 65...

Then came the needles... short very steep pinprick needle climbs, over and over and over.. and I continued passing people until we met up with Jeff Arnd whoe Yumay and I (he had no pacer) ran with until the end... 14th place overall... extremely happy given the midigating circumstances.... and made me want to come back for more!

Done! Mile 99.9, a few steps to go!

And the infamous Borat picture Eric A took and modified... yeehaw

RAMSHOD!

2006-08-26T07:07:00.000-07:00

In honor of RAMROD, we did RAMSHOD this past weekend, Run Around Mt St Helens in One Day....

DART organized the training/outing and invited us and Yumay and I were in without a doubt, what a cool way to spend the weekend, drive down friday night late, sleep in the car, on the ground or in a tent at the trailhead (all versions were used, we went for tent for the 4h of sleep we got), then head out supremely early (3am up, 3.30 start).

Erik Nachtrieb getting ready for the day ahead....

Aaron Rinn and Yumay powering up the gravel...

4.45am, getting light out...

Group picture in the early AM

The run can be done clockwise or counter clockwise (D'UH!) and that depends on when one wants runnability and water (east) or slow going and dry, super volcanic rocky ground (west)... we wanted to cover as much ground as possible first so we ran at night in the open flat east fields and were making great progress... the run is about 34 miles and 8000 feet of elevation gain/loss in this lollipop loop. Amazing views down and up the mountain (one can see smoke/fumes coming out of the crator!) were plenty, as was wildlife and different vegetation zones. We ate blueberries galore and treated our water from streams that came off the mountain... an incredible outing.

Narrow volcanic paths....

Happy to be out there...

Cmon how hard can it be to navigate around a volcano!

Aaron running down the volcano...

On the rockier, gnarlier southwest side of the volcano

Double fun! Devils Gulch, Mission Ridge

2006-08-13T06:37:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I rode with RVG, AV, Ryan Fleming and Glen Rogers in Wenatchee.... it had been almost two years since the 24h Trioba (man those were the times when Trioba still organised hard and unique adventure races!), and I had not been back since.

Now thats what I call carpooling!!

Little cool-off for Glen...

We got a pathetically late start (as always when too many people are involved) and drove out there, not making it to the start until about 11pm... but we were all excited and ready to rumble! I had trouble initially keeping up.. the DART boys and AV were hauling up there! They waited and soon we got into a good rythm and made it up there to the top together, riding with a guy on a single speed that we met on the trail. Amazing that he kept up, after all we re not so slow out there... but we soon found out he is a 24h mountain bike racer and had won a few very prestigious races on single speed...

Ridin up the gulch...

After the Devils Gulch up it was Mission Ridge down and being tired from the upupup (5000 feet roughly) the down down down was just as hard, if not harder... I combined for about 5 falls, some pretty dumb and spectacular looking (e.g. dead bug pose fall, falling on your mountain bike, rolling over, not being able to unclip so that i landed on my back and my bike, still attached to myself was sticking straight up in the air... oh yeah and i ran into a tree too.. that hurt!)

Back at the trailhead.... nice ride!

We made it, the weather was gorgeous, and I ll be back less than another 2 years again, that ride needs to be a yearly occurrence!

X-adventure, Idaho

2006-06-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

A year ago we competed in the X-adventure and got a whiff of the glorious racing scene that lies beyond Washington State... and this year we came back for more. Aaron VanderWaal reinforced our team in the late fall and we were able to train and build a larger, hopefully even stronger MerGeo.com team for this season!

The race was near perfect, with grueling bike and trekking legs, a 400 foot rappell!, class IV whitewater paddling, and snow up the whazoo.... X-adventure pure! We did not fare as well as to be expected... but again learned a lot in terms of minimizing lost time and racing together well. Its a hectic race and takes a couple of times to fully get used to..... we ll probably be back again.

MerGeo.com with the padding gear...

24 h in circles? That exists??

2006-03-17T09:42:00.000-08:00

Those were the words of a friend... what? Why would you do that? That exists? Thats stupid!
All valuable questions and statements but not to me... why do I choose to run around in circles for 24h... because I can and want to see how long/far I can do it for... this time I only ran the 100k, basically around the same lake in a 1 mile loop for 62.5 times.. which equaled 100km... my knee was bothering me and I did not fuel very smartly (used too much bad food at aid station instead of my race food such as Clif), so I called it a day after 12h53, making it the farthest plain run I had done to date... it was good training for my 24h rogaine race and 100 mile runs to come, and I enjoyed the scenery even though it repeated itself a few dozen times....

Roger coming out of aid station early in the race...

My own little aid station, to be accessed every mile....

Done! 100k in 12h53...

Colinoba II, Guinness Rules!

2006-03-10T09:35:00.000-08:00

Yumay, Roger, Bill (aka Ducky Boy) and a bottle of Prangster Beer!

My AR buddy Colin Ness had his 45th birthday this past weekend and what better way to celebrate it than with friends, and what better way than outdoors and what better way than with a mini AR course with lots of special tests and events....

The idea is simple... its an urban adventure, places on maps that one has to find and then take pictures of the whole team plus their mandatory team beer bottle.. (not that s a mandatory team item you dont usually have in AR!)... and lots more....

Yumay and I raced with Bill, a coworker of Colin's and we had a blast and ended up 2nd behind DART/MissingLink/Guniess (there lies the reason, its the strenght of the beer!! :)...

Reed and Andrea studying the maps and instructions...

Team Prangster Beer in front of the Cinerama...

Colin and Connie, what a great Bday!

Desafio de los Volcanes

2006-02-07T07:12:00.000-08:00

January 1st.... I had just gotten up and no, I was not hung over but sore.. not from drinking but from doing 3 orienteering races in 24h... long story, not important to this one...
Aaron Rinn calls..... hey do you want to do a race...? Sure, what? Then I hear words such as expedition and patagonia and epic and team and hold on what? when?? reallly???
Anyhow the jist of it was that Team Big Bear's Heather Salzer and Ted Devito were looking for teammates to race the Desafio de los Volcanes (literally conquer the volcanoes.. though the volcanoes kind of conquer the racers...), and Aaron Rinn decided to race with them. In need of a 4th, they asked me, VERY LATE... just four weeks to race start.... at least I did not have to specifically train for it for months.. I had started my winter/spring training early and felt in good shape... well I guess we d find out... I had never done a race longer than 36h before... it was going to be epic... and in patagonia!!

So I said yes...
A couple of weeks of hectic borrowing and buying gear, learning how to ascent hundreds of feet with ascenders, and upping my kayaking, and there I was at the start line all nervous, what is it going to be like? How will I do without sleep for days? Will my body hold up?

Team Big Bear, Heather, Ted, Aaron and I

Cant wait, my first expedition AR, ready to go!

Ready, set go!!! There were 50 teams, two boats per team, 100 boats... and two capsized going into the sea.... and Aaron and I were one of the two... yikes!! Pumping out the boat and then still sitting in a gigantic pool of water in the first 70km kayak leg was not that comfortable, but we set into a good pace and worked ourselves from 49th place (there was one team that took even longer in the beginning) to about 15th place at the end of the paddle.

Heather and Ted, perfectly syncronized...

No words necessary...

Photos Courtesy of Aaron Rinn

After a quick 12h bike leg we were on the water again for another night of padding... it was scary as hell since the mountain lake was very choppy and we had fast, but tippy kayaks... pitch dark we tried to not fall in the water... and somehow made it...

After a mandatory rest stop where my teammates slept like logs I spent most of the time laying around wondering why I could not sleep.. hmm, adrenaline, fear? Anyhow I knew I was in it for a long one since our next mandatory rest would not be for 2 days....

We biked to a tyrolean traverse and traversed over this very cool waterfall to the other side.. only hooked on two single ropes that were attached to the same tree... adrenaline kept us from worrying about it.. the faster you go across the sooner it is over (or as they say the sooner you die the longer you're dead :)....

Heather, Ted and I on our way across....

Roger demonstrating a good style for tyrolean... head down, body up, bike between the legs.. and then pull as hard as you can!

After kayak/bike/kayak/bike we knew we were going to have an epic trekking leg... and we did... 37 h or uninterrupted trekking across two mountain ranges and an impressive volcano! Taking food and gear for 37 h is quite tricky.. how much do you need, what do you need.. we did not get any support for so long... our packs were very very heavy....

Made it!

Does not play well with others.. this is right after I fell head first into a bush of nettles.. .that hurt!

The trek turned out to be a disaster at first.. we lost nearly 7 hours trying to find a trail that was not on the map.. but we had to get across some raging river wiht apparently one place to cross.. the maps were from the 1940s.. you think I am kidding, I wish I was kidding... so it was more like using your spanish (hard to do at 2am when noone is awake) and your wits (hard to do when you got little to start with and not sleeping for 50+ hours)..... or then there is insanity... its when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome... so we combed the trails over and over... and eventually stumbled across a map someone lost (right when Aaron said "I know now we are on the right trail!") and realized it was our own we had lost about 30 minutes ago.... we had run aorund in a circle and come across our own map... thats when we decided it was not only time but essential that we took a power nap...
Power naps suck but even more so at freezing temperatures and being spooned by Aaron and Ted, oh gee! So we got up 30 minutes later and I made myself believe I was totally awake since I had slept an amazing 30 minutes in 50hours... hehehe...
We still did not find the trail but apparently made so much noise around one of the houses that one of the farmers came out and asked us what the heck was going on.. I was the only one on the team speaking spanish and was trying to explain to him. He was cool about it and very nicely pointed us to the right path, but I begged him to actually physically show it to us and so we trotted onwards and found it... by now it was 5am and we were going to have to cross a cold river up to our chest, so we added another hour of nap time such that we crossed when the sun came up so that our bodies would warm up and dry immeditaely....
This was our lowest point in the race and our lowest ranking (35ish) and then we finally got it right.

Aaron visibly tired powering up the n-th hill of the day...

Bridge crossings were not for the faint of heart...

We started passing people getting up to Puyehue, the volcano we had to climb, and then chose a particularly good route down it (with us I mean Aaron who was navigating very well by then, being backed up by Ted), and we passed several teams that got stuck in the many ravines down the mountain and had to backtrack up to 2 hours!

After an amazing night spent on the low plateau on various fire roads I had the most amazing hallucinations.... I was now approaching 70h with 1.5h of sleep, and it took its toll..... it all started when we were looking for a checkpoint in the dimming light of the night breaking in.. and I saw them.... two checkpoint personel sitting there.. I went over and told them how happy I was to see them, in Spanish obiously... only to be pulled away by Heather who pointed out to Ted and Aaron that I was speaking Spanish to cows now .... WHOA!! There they were, two life sized cows where I just saw people...

Border!! 1 mile to go to Argentina...

Amazing, ridiculously dangerous ropes section...

Made it though the night, found a town where we again had to find a little road but this time it was day and I asked every man woman and child for directions and we got through this section much quicker... arriving at our next CP after 37 hours...
2 times 1h of sleep and off we were again, a few hours of kayaking and then a 27h mountain bike ride... which went well and by the time we crossed the argentinian border we knew we only had one trek left....

My feet, the perils for the feet are many in such a long race... sorry

We managed to get that last section started ok but in the TA I was just too tired to care much about reading the spanish instructions about the leg, and the english ones were unusable as always, (since they just use babbelfish!) and so I dropped that paper and told the guy Si, Si when asked if I understood everything, and we got on course... it was supposed to be a short section, just a few hours....
After a few hours (we were making great progress) we got to this singletrack that led us straight to the finish (if it would have been a straight line) but then turned into this bushwhack and ultimately dropped us onto a beach with nowhere to go..... we saw some teams that rambled on about instructions and swim and all that jazz, that s when it hit me.... costeando is coasteering.... coly cr$p..., we need to get into that mountain lake....
So I told my teammates about that I forgot to translate that section... it was only a 1km section of alternatively swimming, coasteering along ropes and on beaches, but it was a mountain lake and 4am, it was soooooo cold! Aaaron Ted and I did not bring extra clothes but fortunately dry bags so at least we were able to drop the clothes in there.. but it meant in order to have dry clothes at the end of it we needed to go commando! So naked coasteering it was! The coldest 15 minutes of my life...

We made it through that and through the very scary ropes section and eventually dropped down into another gully that lead us to have to swim to the beach to run to the finish, but the coastguard (with instructions from race management) picked up every team to forego this (permit issues) and before we knew it we were done! Over 120 hours of racing, a team worthy of the 11th place we got, and very happy to be done! My first expedition race was with great people, great racers, and a phantastic support crew (thanks Rikky, Tom and Adi!)....

Bring out the champain we did it!!!

Moab

2005-12-29T09:06:00.000-08:00

View from porcupine rim trail....

Christmas vacation in Moab, the best I have ever had!! (please dont tell my mom! :)
It was dreary as hell in Seattle and the forecast was that there would be a new record of 23 days of rain in a row... and we were going to stay home... fortunately Yumay could not take it and wanted to go away for Christmas so I just looked on the map and decided on Moab... man what a lucky punch.

After a loooong drive (20h in 2 days) we got there fresh and ready to rumble! Slickrock was on the menu and we were hungry and devoured the trails up there.. it was sunny and we were on vacation and got a sweet deal on a hotel and things were looking up... three days of riding and two days of running/hiking really made a difference on our tortured phyche... almost made us forget that when we return to Seattle we would once again have to deal with the rain... but Moab was one for the books.... check out the pics, they should say it all... Porcupine Rim was the best ride when we were down there, just blew us away, just a bit of snow at the top and the rest was in great condition... and since it was Christmas there were virtually no other bikers and hikers...

Along the white stripes (see in back) on the slickrock trail....

A few more hundred yards to go to the porcupine rim high point....

Slickrock

Yumay in perfect pose

Happy campers...

Arches...

Roger running down an arch...

BEAST

2005-12-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

Team North's Ruri Stenson, Trea Schocken and Aaron Vanderwaal knocking down their second win in 4 weeks after winning the MAC...

After having organized four successful super sprint adventure races Eric and I decided it was time to go for a bigger one, so last week we held the very first Fall BEAST Race.....
It was a blast, we had a bit more time not having to frantically check people in within 35 minutes but a comfortable 2h.. :)
70 racers took the plunge in the very cold but clear conditions and battled it out on a approximately 4h winning time course.. the lead teams all had problems so winning time was actually a bit slower.. most teams finished, and regardless if or not enjoyed the usual great post race grub from Bruce! The course took racers along the Puget Power and Tolt Pipeline trails to the Redmond Watershed...

Happy Racers at the start...

Roger with some last minute instructions.. everyone s staring at all the maps in his hands...
Registration is running hot...

Ready?

Go, race is underway...

Checkpoint found, now where are we going again?

Ron Herzog 50k Ultramarathon, my first as a Race Director

2005-11-05T09:26:00.000-08:00

This weekend I had the honor to take over one of the oldest 50k races in the Northwest. The Ron Herzog / Tanks alot 50k.... Ron Herzog was an ultrarunner that enjoyed tough and gnarly trails and organized some runs up in the Granite Falls area, this run was dedicated to him after he died of ALS, Chris Ralph, his friend, organized the run for over ten years... last year, 2004, I
participated in that run and had a blast (especially in the bushwhack-ish tank trap sections!) and finished 3rd overall... woohoo!
Right after that run she announced it was going to be the last... and so Franklin and I decided to take it over...
So we went out there a few weeks before to test run the course, and a day before to mark the course, Franklin, Liz and I marked it in the most horrendeous conditions of high winds, driving rain, sleet, hail and snow, and then had to sleep in the car to accomodate the racers at 5am to check them in and get them ready... the race went well, all but one person finished, and everyone had a blast especially since there was plenty of snow on top, a thing that had only happened once in the 18 years its been running.... Jim Kerby and Van Phan won their categories and I am sure we ll be back organizing it again next year!

Tony, Van and some other racers enjoy a quick break before heading out for the next 25k of the course... its all downhill from now!

Race Finish Line, Franklin Wood, Bill Ball and Roger Michel

MAC vs MerGeo

2005-10-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday MerGeo.com wrapped up their2005 season with a "fun" adventure race under the radar, called the Mountain Ascent Challenge. No registration, waivers, rules (well some but since its not a race there are officially no official rules:)... just drive up to alpental the night before, first stash some bikes in the middle of nowhere, then run and bike your heart out!

At the top of Mt. Defiance...

Me, Eric Bone, Liz Stahl and Franklin Wood did just that... we were one of seven teams that drove out there friday night and started in 2 minute intervals at 4am from the parking lot, heading out to lost lake and ultimately Mt. Defiance (location of where picture was taken.). We battled it out with team North's Aaron VanderWaal and Ruraidh Stenson, two guys we've been talking about joining our team, and they wanted to make sure we would not change our minds and kicked our butts.... we felt fairly strong but Franklin had some issues and after hurling a couple of times had to drop out at the run/bike transition and so we continued onofficial in an unofficial race.. no harm done....funny anectote is that Eric, who was supposed to fix the big hole that got punched through his rear tire three weeks ago at the Trioba 24, and that he only "fixed" with duct tape, got blown out again, and I forgot my pump, so eric had to run his last six miles of the course in bike shoes while I pushed his limp bike.... sometimes life throws ya a curve ball when you deserve it! :)

MerGeo.com defeats DART, takes 24h title!

2005-09-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

Man did we work hard for this all year...
Man did it all come together..
Man did we deserve this...

A year ago I took a gamble by not joining DART but staring my own team with Eric Bone, MerGeo.com, sponsored and owned by him, run by me, surrounding ourselves with strong athletes... Aaron Rinn, Liz Stahl were among them, and these two joined us (just like in the 12h Trioba) to give it one more stab this season. We had raced well before but its hard getting a team to race consistently well, and even with a lot of help and advice from Cyril from DART (he was extremely helpful in helping me out with so much information) we came up short a couple of times.
This race was no different at first... problems in the boat (too tired and mad about it to ramble on) an then a blown out bike tire by Eric (same deal... i ll just suck it up!) made us drop into the middle of the pack, but we recovered after a few hours and got to the bike/run transition in 6th place, about 40 minutes behind DART. Luck changes and this time in our favor.. some of the top teams misnavigated and lost a lot of time on one of the early CPs and all of a sudden we found ourselves in 1st place, hauling butt to get done with the trek and continue towards the finish.
Eric overexerted himself in the effort to stay ahead and started hurling late in the race, and we could slowly see our gains fade.

A last push on the bike saw DART almost catch up with us on the long straight road to Ellensburg, but we dug deep with the motivational shouts of Aaron, towing each other as hard as we could to finish the race just a mere two minutes ahead of DART! We had done it, finally, beat DART, and I could now put that behind me and focus on my next, 2nd season with MerGeo.com!

Liz powers ahead of the boys to get to the last trek/bike TA

Challenge the Lake Wenatchee....

2005-09-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

Last weekend MerGeo.com did a fun race up in Wenatche Lake area near Leavenworth. Liz, Yumay and Franklin joined me and we raced the Challenge the Lake race. It was a very well organized race and quite a few teams showed up to give us a run for the money... early navigational problems (I navigated, gee!) threw us back a little, and then not finding a mandatory route threw us back even more... but we hung on, got stronger and passed a lot of teams on the gnarly uphill bike ride and following trek... we finished 2nd in the 4coed division and had a lot of fun!

Raid the North: of grizzly bears and endless bushwhacks....

2005-08-27T13:03:00.000-07:00

I have not been in a life threatening situation for quite a while due to the fact that I havent been traveling for a long time, but this weekend it hit me again how one could potentially have the shades go down pretty quickly, but such is life and I would never have this keep me a minute from the outdoors... more to the race later but at about 3am on Saturday morning we were trotting along, bushwhacking with Team Helly Hansen, right behind team DART, when DART got charged by a Grizzly bear.... we heard a ton of screams, for a long time and determined that could be the only thing.. noone falls off a mountain for about 3 minutes screaming like that...
It all ended ok, one of the guys ran into a tree and needed stiches, but the bear just charged twice but did not attack... fortunately. Crazy day.

Rinn looks relaxed on the TT...

To the beginning, Aaron Liz and I got company by Glen Rogers to do the Raid the North 36h and we got right into it... after a lot of gear checks and a day of preparation we got zero minutes of sleep and started at midnight for our big race... a flamethrower and big street party where we started made the race a bit more exciting.. not knowing we d get plenty of excitement on the course.

We battled it out with DART and Helly Hansen for 30+ hours, being slightly ahead and behind until about hour 18 or so...
The race included my longest bushwhack ever (about 6h with no roads) and a grueling 4500 foot climb on the bikes in the midday sun... it was a great race, with long, very beautifully chosen legs... and after a 5h canoe paddle we arrived at a big tyrolean traverse and start of the "Advanced Section". It was us, DART and HH, all within 20 minutes, and then noone for hours, so we knew noone else would make it to the Advanced Course Cutoff and we had 3rd place for sure.... we lost time in the TA and on the last long downhill bushwhack being indecisive, so we ended up 3rd overall, but it was my longest race to date and I was very pleased with it.... more to come I am sure!!

After no sleeping for 30+h Roger looks a bit out of it...

MerGeo.com 2C wins 6 degree of navigation!

2005-08-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

Yumay and I had big shoes to fill this weekend when we raced as MerGeo.com at the 6degree of navigation at Lord Hill park in Monroe. Debbie Newell and Dave Tallent put on a great course on a gigantic O-map and Yumay and I had to give it all we had, did real deep sometimes and come back from bad letdowns to win this one! Eric Bone had won it for MerGeo.com with William Emerson and Liz Stahl the two years before, but he was at the World Orienteering Championships in Japan so it was up to my navigation to see how well we will do.
The race started well for us and we built a good lead on the first Orienteering Section, only to realize that I had forgotten to go pick up the kayaks, so we had to run up the big hill again to do so, and were passed by 5 teams...
Kayaking went well and we were once again trekking, this time across the whole park and fought it out with several teams, the nav was hard so teams stuck together at times to find the CP's faster, and it was clear that the Biking leg in the midday heat will decide...
Yumay and I were able to pull away good at the pipeline trail, the steepest section in the park, where we had to carry our bikes up all the way. I carried both bikes and told yumay I will race her up the hill... she won, but the incentive made us gain a few minutes and we were able to break free from the pack.. after that I made some pretty good nav choices and we gained about 15 minutes, only to loose it on a combination of yumay going over the handlebar and messing up her knee and me misnavigating... we were four teams all together going up the last hill of the day when Yumay and I were able to break free and put important minutes between us and the rest of the teams to make it to the rappel first, and that was key for the win. A few minutes between us and Alex, Brandon, Tamara and Michelle, who took second... sweet!!

Bloody happy to be done... we spare you the view of yumay's knee, but she ended up needing an MRI after the race... fortunately it healed well...

X-adventure Bend, OR

2005-06-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

Last weekend MerGeo.com competed with the big ones.... !! X-adventure is a series promoted by a bunch of french professionals that have been putting on adventure races for years if not decades.. some of the earliest Raid Guloises were put on by the same team of guys. The organisation is perfect, almost swiss-like clockwork, and a huuuuuuge posse of volunteers, staff, vehicles, helicopters, and film crews from all over the world. It is a world championship qualifier, four races on three continents... and all the best teams in the world present.
I raced with Eric Bone, Brook Nunn, and William Emerson and we finished 26th out of 52 teams... not bad considering the strength of the teams, and a humbling experience...
We did well except for a few major screwups, but its part of racing, broken compass, flats, cramps while paddling, and suboptimal team composition (only three race per section, one sits out, and the team needs to be evenly distributed for maximal performance), but we certainly had a good time and the weather was gorgeous too!

Team MerGeo ready to head out into the night...

Eric in Action....

Eric Bone finishing the X-adventure raid

Pod of whales, penalty boxes and another DART win on the fly...

2005-06-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

Two BEAST races ago we had 42 racers for out first midweek AR and thought that was great... now we just got 89 racers to do our third one yesterday! It was an amazing race in so many ways... the massive amount of racers, their smiles and race efforts.. three girls (12, 13, 15 years old) racing with their parents... a friend of mine who lost his leg only 15 months ago racing with his wife as team tripod (what an inspiration bouncing back from such a horrible kayak accident)... and to top it all off Eric Bone had made up one of the best special tests thus far... involving the Orca Fin Project in Magnusson Park, where if people got the answers wrong (based on navigating through the fins) they had to get to the penalty box... here is the hillarious race report from Missing Link's Shannon Cortez.

It was held at the UW Waterfront Activity Center and racers paddled for LeMans Start times later that evening... DART paddled the fastest (Glen and Aaron) and kept the lead until the end, but Ben Hall gave em the best run for the money as usual!

Clif has now started supporting our series and sponsors are lining up for this great opportunity to help develop the sport at the grassroots level, this is going to be a lasting adventure race series!

Jerry and RVG at prerace meeting smalltalk

Boats coming in at full speed....

Racers getting ready for the LeMans start...

Orienteering Section and Special Task (navigatoin involving the Orcas Fin project at Magnuson park)

Finish, Food, Festivities!!

Bike China!!

2005-06-02T22:51:00.000-07:00

Yumay and I got married about a month ago and decided to do a very memorable honeymoon... and that's when she came up with mountain biking in China... now that s my side of the story, on a steep climb up to a 14'ooo foot pass in the blistering heat she told me it was my idea and I dragged her out there, but I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle :)

Anyhow, it was a great honeymoon, we had a ton of fun and yes, it was hard, but not that we expected this to be a walk in the park.... I think it was on that same hill that I had her on tow and she looked up, smiled and said "I married into the harsh life now, didn't I?" hehe, yes you did dear :)

We found Peter online at www.bikechina.com and he was extremely helpful and very flexible on what we needed from him, he usually organizes all-inclusive bike trips but all we needed were two bikes, all the peripherals and a couple of maps and we were good to go... he got us all that for a very fair prize, and was very helpful onsite when he picked us up with his recumbent bicycle! Probably the only one in china, but certainly the only one in Chengdu, he gets a lot of stares and laughters about it....

So after a day of exploring Chengdu we were off... we had planned a very nice route through the mountains to cut from Chengdu to Lanzhou, and I knew that even at best case scenario we would probably not make it without taking some buses, especially since we intended to hike and horseback ride along the way as well....

Yumay is all packed and ready to embark on the bike trip of her life!

First day took us through the outskirts of Chengdu (a 10+ million city it takes a few hours to bike out of it!) to some ancient irrigation systems north, about a 50 mile ride away... we left very early (4am) and made it there, hiked around and had enough time to get into the mountains before dark, since we wanted to get away from the massive traffic early on....

We made it up into the mountains quite a bit, though in the later afternoon the skies opened up and we were soaked through and through, it is the rainy season after all.. fortunately we were still at low elevations and in the south so it was quite ok temperature wise.. we cycled with these three teenagers that did a 2 day bike trip, with their beater bikes and in jeans and cotton tshirts... man o man!

Roadblock!! Glad we werent biking right when that happened (15 minutes prior!)

Little rest and warm cup of noodle soup with our new friends..

Rainy season... very very rainy!

Yumay s about to get VERY wet and dirty :)

Enjoying the terrific food of the Sichuan Province

A little rest on the bus...

The next day with combination of rising early, biking and taking the bus we made it up to our first destination, Songpan, where we did a two day horseback riding tour to hot springs in the mountains... well they were not really hot springs but the smelled sulfury and came out of the ground so two out of three counts I guess :)
We had a great time up there, riding horses all day and then camping in old fashioned yurt style while our guides cooked us some yummy dinner....

Horseback riding in the mountains...

Enjoying a cup of tea...

Gorgeous scenery...

Dinner, not the most "presentable" but very good!

Tired legs...

After that trip it was time to head out and get three solid days of Biking in, each day with thousands of feet of elevation gain.... we were the only Bikers, in fact according to the locals the only bikers ever they had seen there... I really wonder if that is true because this seems such an obvious trip to make, local or foreginer.. sure its hard when not speaking the language but one can get through (fortunately Yumay is fluent and I am quite ok at speaking it so it was easier for us)... and the sceneries were just a million bucks!!

The climbs were long and hard, but the payoff was plenty with mountain tops in the 6000m range, and being totally immersed in the non-touristy china... well when not being in the actual tourist spots.. HuianLongSi and JiuZaiGou are laden with chinese tourists, proably because they are so beautiful, but once one goes beyond the main spots the views are just as spectacular but one finds themselves alone instead of immersed in a sea of "follow the flag" and "wear the same hat"...

This was a terrific trip, and we will be back in probably two years either finishing up the trip to Lanzou (which we only got about half way) or going down south more.....

On our way to HuanLongSi...

Incredible waters...

HuanLongSi

JiuZaiGou, where "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" was filmed....

Wicked Urban!... wicked, wicked...

2005-05-29T12:56:00.000-07:00

MerGeo competed in the wicked urban race in Portland this weekend, or second race of the season and our second second place... DART got us again but not by too much, we still need to work on our biking skills... and Eric needs to deal with having many maps, he is accurate but not the most skillful multitasker. Shane Gibson and Kathleen O'Neal put on the Wicked races and they do a very good job, meticulously organized, plenty of swag and a great course and post race party. To save ourselves an entry fee for one future event we (Liz, William, Eric and I) actually stayed at the race site all night supervising that no equipment will be stolen or damaged.. the race is part of the Rose Festival so there is plenty of drunks running around mad...
It went well (the night) but our lack of sleep made us do some pretty dumb things on course (e.g reading the wrong question from another CP and not being able to figure it out for like 10 minutes...). All in all a good race for us....

MerGeo.com in action

Rapelling off a parking garage...

What a BEAST!!??!!

2005-04-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

So about three months ago I started an Adventure Race Team with Eric Bone. MerGeo.com is sponsored by his and Terry Farrah's company, Meridian Geographis, and to make some moola for races to come Eric suggested organizing some midweek evening adventure races.. I thought the idea was quite cooky but then again I had no better one and so I agreed to help him with it... doing course checking, registration and marketing.... really did not think it was going to go anywhere... boy was I wrong... its called Barebones Evening Adventure Sprint Tournament (BEAST).

The first BEAST race was held out at High Point Way by Tiger and took racers up grand ridge on single track with their bikes, over the hill back down to Lake Sammamish State Park, where they would Orienteer at the park and eventually via trails and roads bike back to the finish.
Bruce McAlister was responsible for food and cooked up a storm, and 42 racers showed up to race in a fun, furious, fast (Eric's BEAST Slogan) Adventure Race.

Glen Rogers from DART won, a few minutes before Ben Hall and several other close competitors, and everyone seemed to have had a blast... Team Missing Link came in pretty fast too and they all stayed around until the very end (11pm) when Sabina, Heather and Shannon crossed the finish line and we called it a night, a very successful one.. everyone voved to come back...

Tataaa! Glen is da man!

Lotsa people coming in...

Leader board

Sabina, Heather and Shannon

Joker Aaron cleaning up...

Winteroba

2005-02-03T09:51:00.000-08:00

Yumay and I competed in our second adenture race and had a good time at Winteroba... strangely enough only about 35 people showed up at the Hyak Lodge to race, maybe due to the missing snow and the rainy forecast... and it poured!
The race course was fun, taking us up towards Lake Kacheess, back over towards the gold creek valley, by Don Brooks house and the across Gold Creek via a tyrolean traverse.. we connected with Barry from ARGG (Dr. Strangelove) and together (him and I navigated) we got ourselves lost real good on the wrong mountain.... Yumay was already hypothermic and I thought she would have to pull out but she stuck it out and we finished in just under 8h.... learned from some mistakes (clothing, navigation, race prep) and I would do that race again, especially with Yumay.

This is what a checkpoint above Joel's head looks like....

Breakfast for champions....

Off we go...

ACTION!

Yumay on a tyrolean traverse..

Alaska!

2004-09-04T23:32:00.000-07:00

The relationship with Yumay has been gradually growing over the year and since we are both "up or out" kind of people we figured a two week hiking trip through alaska would be pretty beneficial to our relationship... along the fact that we both like to travel!

I just forfeitted going to race in Primal Quest with team DART (Matt Hart blew out his knee and they needed a replacement fast) and kept my promise to Yumay, though she was cool enough to give me the choice, since she knows that that would be a big dream of mine! Hindsight can sometimes be a beautiful thing too and I am glad I went to Alaska!

So we set off to the Kenai Peninsula, saying in Seward and Cooper Canyon for almost a week. There we mostly hiked, and took a cruise to see sealife. It was just incredible how pristine the landscape is, even with the masses of tourists the land still very much seems untouched in most places.

Out in seward on our first day...

And on our boat cruise...

Humpback about to impress the tourists...!

The not so lucky ones....

Talk about the catch of the day!!

A nice hike at copper canyon

Marmot

The glaciers sure were impressive too..

Now Yumay is a lot of things but not the greatest most careful planner, and I lack as well in the category, so we totally underestimated the temperatures..... (yes, alaska, but its august for gods sake!)... fortunately she is a trooper and we were able to camp most of the days... as it was more fun (we usually had the whole campground to ourselves...) . We hiked several days, among them some monster hikes in cooper canyon, where we came across a gigantic cadaver (nicely cut up in 4 big pieces and wrapped with cloth) of a moose, which freaked us out a good bit, but then fortunately soon after saw the hunters, a couple from Alaska that hunts a moose per year to have meat through the winter. They had to cut it up in 6 pieces alltogether and carry it out over two days..., incredible!!

Denali National Park

One of our many campsites...

Enjoying making dinner...

I see dead moose!!

Anyhow we went up to Denali National Park as well and encountered some gigantic grizzlybears, but we were in the bus driving through the park, and were about as safe as taking a ferry ride in switzerland, however the adrenaline still pumped pretty good sitting in the bus just a few yards away from a 1000lbs grizzly!

Last but not least.. the grizzly...

Swiss Miss!

2004-08-10T22:50:00.000-07:00

So Yumay has gotten more and more into the adventure racing vortex too.... after doing minor support at some of my race (she claims she is not a very supportive person, that more because she d rather race :). So we needed to find an appropriate race, and found it in the 6 degree of navigation organized by the Cascade Orienteering Club at St. Edwards State park. Good venue, good trail system, and I got to practice my pathetic nav skills ahead of time since I was able to get my hands on a map before. That was the easy part.
When I met Yumay she was a gym junkie, and she has slowly transitioned into an outdoorsy person, well not slowly, rapidly. But what is more amazing is that she has the aptitude for everything she does. She is a good runner, kayaker and seems to learn mountain biking at relative ease. That is except for the hard stuff. See I am a smart person when it comes to obstacles. When in doubt, get off, walk around it, and go on. Not Yumay. Which is not to say that she is not smart, as she knows the consequences when it does not pan out. She just chooses to try. Then crash. Then scream in pain. Then try. Then crash.. yes, you get it, it goes on. Scarily that will make her a better mountain biker sooner than I like it, as we guys really like to be the tough and better ones.... oh well, I m gonna have to let this one go cuz no way in hell will I transition into that trying/crashing/retrying (in pain) person... cant have it all!
So funny enough since we were doing this race together we needed to get Yumay a whole bunch of stuff.. sure we could have rented/borrowed, but I knew already we were both hooked so we needed to go do one big roundabout shopping trip. Used bike (she got a GREAT deal), paddle, PFD, the whole schabang... she noted that she is putting in a lot of investment into our relationship (thinking $$ not emotional effort, sometimes I feel like the chick in this relationship!!) and this better work out! :) Well we will find out at the race wont we?

Pre-race....

It worked just great. Not that we miraculously finished 1st. Nah, Eric Bone and Liz Stahl (he is the current U.S champion in orienteering, she runs faster than I can dream of) won by a landslide, but we did quite well. In a reprisal of the 24h Wenatchee race our rubber ducky boat spun like a 80's discoball, but we made it to shore eventually and probably 3rd last started passing teams again. My nav was OK given the circumstances (e.g. I suck), our trekking was good and we had a great time with no unhappy words exchanged, and finished 16th (out of 25 teams). Yumay was hooked, I had already been, but now was hooked on the idea to race more with her. It was more fun that with Jeff (sorry, no offense!), just way cooler doing this with my girlfriend, and I already knew I had a keeper but this one helped cementing it a bit. We raced as team Swiss Miss (since I am the swiss and she is the miss), and certainly going to keep that name for races to come!

24h Trioba, Cle Elum, or Burn Baby Burn!!

2004-07-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

104 farenheit is hot.... very hot... even for Arizona or friggin Texas where a village is missing an idiot.. anyhow, but in the northwest 104 farenheit is just pure torture. And then make someone run, bike, and swim (paddle, blaeh, more later) for 24h... a recipe for disaster, ....? I would say so!

The usual pre-race motel chaos.. how do you fit 4 people, 6 tubs, 4 bikes and a whole bunch of unnecessary items into a hotel room?

Our course... yellow trek, blue swim/paddle, black bike...

Anyhow...it all started off so well. After training so much in the spring the races Jeff and I did were good, but I really wanted to race 4coed, and once we got Brook Nunn onboard we just needed a 4th, which we found in Dave Russell, an experienced racer and navigator. Once checked in, we found out that the water leg involved swimming, at least for 3 of the 4... one got to paddle the rubber ducky across the water with the packs. We shuffled, delibered, called around, and then found a way to get our hands on snorkeling gear, so we stuffed the fins deep into our packs to pull a sneaky on the other teams once we got there... but we first needed to get there and that was easier said than done.

The day started off early, as usual, 3.30 am up, 5 am bus, 6 am start. We had to first go across a big ridge and chose the shortest route across it, which was ok and 90% of the people did something similar, but hindsight being 20/20 there would have been a better way. We did not anticipate the bushwhack to be so darn gnarly but it was and took quite a toll already when three hours later we got to the water....

Bushwhack this!

Almost vertical trek up to the ridge... not for the faint of heart...

View on top was worth it though!

I was supposed to be in the boat since Jeff, Brook and Dave were all good swimmers and I sucked..... as soon as we got into the water however Jeff already cramped up and that was not a good sign. So we switched out, me in the water, doing my dog-paddle holding onto the rope while Jeff Kayaked, and Brook and Dave just outright swam across... interestingly we did get 2nd fastest time on that leg.... probably much likely due to the fins... smarts are important in AR, always.

Stunning views!

Exhillarating downhills!

Icecold footbaths!

150 foot rappell...

Getting out of the freezing water we all felt pretty terrible, but warmed up pretty quickly and once the climb started realized that that warming up process would go on and on until it passed comfortable.... at 10 it was already 90F, at 12 probably around 100F. A poor route choice, lack of water, and insufficient teamwork made it all a bit worse and all of a sudden we were trying to hold on... such it goes in AR sometimes....

Feeling strong, towing Dave who had enough time apparently to take pictures!

We lost a few hours on the long bike leg due to our problems, but did not realize that Jeff was very dehydrated and needed rest and fluids... so I pressed hard to get the big trek started.. which was a mistake. About 2h into it, after a long beautiful rappell Jeff opted to quit the race, and I hiked out with him, while Brook and Dave continued unranked.
It opened my eyes, and showed me pretty clearly where I wanted to be heading. DART was one of only four teams that finished, and they were almost three hours ahead of 2nd place. I wanted to be there. I felt great throughout the race and could have pushed much harder, it was time to look for likeminded people to give DART good competition.... but for now it was many lessons learned, and a very good, very tough course DNFed... my first, probably not last, but hopefully one of very very few....

Found a checkpoint at night....

Cycle, Run, Glissade..... Mt. Rainer!

2004-07-04T06:30:00.000-07:00

Roger, Mt. Rainer, Plastic Bag

Last weekend I did a little epic training with Jeff.. camped at Paradise Campground Friday late night and then got up at 4am to cycle from Paradise down to the flats and up to Cayusse pass, very nice felt exactly like Switzerland! Once up there we turned around and cycled back down and up to Paradise again.. it was now 9.30am and we had already done 8000 feet of elevation gain and 70+ miles on the bike and then ran/hiked up to Mt. Rainer Basecamp, Camp Muir, located at 10'000 feet... I felt like a million bucks and soon ran by myself, passing Michelle and her friend who had started earlier in the day to make it up there... the basecamp was not too crowded and I found a spot to lay out in the sun and get warm and toasty... that was already worth it but what came next was an adventure I did not expect...

Jeff's buddies brought heavy duty plastic bags and the conditions were so perfect that we glissaded down from the basecamp almost all the way down to paradise.. amazing how fast and controlled we were able to go with these.. previous tracks from other glissaders had mad bobsled-type halfpipes into the snow and it was super easy getting down... an amazing day with over 10'000 feet of climb!

Warming up on the rocks at the basecamp...

Done! Roger and Jeff after a great day of training...

24 h Adventure Race Wenatchee, 2nd Pl Male Div.

2004-06-21T21:59:00.000-07:00

So now I have the first 24h Adventure Race under my belt too, and what a race it was! Jeff and I raced as a 2M team (Team Manny's), since the woman we almost talked into doing that race with us backed out last minute, but promised to be racing the next one (her name is Brook, she looks strong!). But we had a great support team, Michelle, Jeff's wife came out there with another friend, and Yumay came out too, so at every TA we had not only extra help but also emotional support, yeehaaw!

Roger a little stressed pre-race....

Kayak dry practice pre-race....

Left!Left!Left!NO Right!Right!Right!

To the race: Started at Cashmere near Wenatchee, where we had to paddle down some pretty scary Type I/II rapids in the Sevylor Tahiti (a.k.a rubber duckies, a.k.a. the yellow death) inflatable kayaks. Question: what happens when you do a race in a sport you never practice? Answer: unless you are the biggest natural talent (not me, nor jeff), you suck!
And we did, suck and spin... we looked like we were doing a ride at disneyland, not take part in an adventure race. We spun and yelled, tried and tried, but our boat would just not go straight. That had the advantage that we were in like 10th last place after the TA to the bike, which meant we got to pass like 20 teams on the first hill.. and it was a huge hill.... like 2500 feet of climbing, and then another.

Emotional support.. the best kind!

Trek #2

We made it to the first foot TA where we saw our lovely support crew, but not for long since we were now hot in pursuit of the top teams... until we got lost. Almost forgot for a while that we were still not stellar navigators.. that did not help. After some quarrel and discontent we cound the CP and soon were trucking again. Back to the bike and off we were. From then on it was survival mode... extra shoes, 1 gallon of water, clothes, food, my pack felt like it was a million pounds. Jeff had a stomach bug and was using the trowel like it was never used before (what the f@## do we need a trowel for I asked before the race??!!, yup, for that), so that slowed us down a bit but not much. On the last trek we had no nav problems (other than that I wanted to go in the wrong direction but jeff yelled at me long enough until I got it.. sometimes I can be a bit stubborn you know :). and then it was done! 21h of racing, 5th place, 2nd in the male category, DART won in an impressive 15h... wow, we still need to learn a lot but heck did we have fun racing!

21h07min - 5th place... nice!

The end...

24h Rogaining World Championships!

2004-05-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

This is going to be an all time classic that I will remember for the rest of my life... in fact I think even alzheimers wont be able to take that away from me!
Met Michi (my buddy Michael Eglin from Switzerland, he s the one that got me into the crazy races about three years ago!) in Phoenix where we rented a car and drove up into the mountain boonies. We had two days go get acclimatized to the 10.000 feet of elevation (which is too little for most, unfortunately) so we drove right up to 8.000 feet and stayed at a nice motel, getting a beer at some shabby bar where come cougars (e.g. old mountain p.... yeah, that) tried to chat us up.... grosssss... one was so drunk she fell of her bar stool and could not get up anymore.....
Anyhow, the mandatory beer before the race was crossed off the list and the night after we made it up to the campground, where hundreds of campers were already getting ready for what was going to be an excellent 24h rogaining event on a new map in a very nice area. It was pretty flat up there at elevation, but nontheless there were plenty of hills to be climbed during the event. What the heck is rogaining? Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance (ROGAINE) Seriously? Seriously!
24h of running around and finding as many checkpoints (which have different valued points depending where they are and how hard they are to find). That is the layman explanation I guess......

Map distribution and getting ready...

Got one! 50 points added...

Middle of the night, tired, sweaty, feeling a bit crazy...

They came from everywhere, 30 countries, Central/Eastern Europe, Australia, NZ, etc... some super fast, many just there recreationally, or fast for their age (e.g there were over 10 superveteran teams of each member at least 55 years or older!)

Michi and I wanted to go as hard as we could, and we did. To take it upfront we finished 16th out of rougly 200 teams, not bad ey? We stared off what I thought was slow but in hindsight was way too fast... I am slowly getting the hang of not being so ancy..... oh well. Moving along through the first day, we made great leeway on our planne route and had over a quater of the maximum points in a quater of the time. Thing is noone was supposed to get them all! And noone would. In a 24h race you make or loose ground on your competition after 12h.. some will come to a crawl (like us, Michi had altitude problems and I helped him for a while but soon became too tired myself to push the team along really), some move almost as fast at night as during the day.

We had a great time though, since I dont nav there was no disagreement there, plus Michi did a phantastic job, and we just got along great the whole time. I managed to jump into a lake shortly before night broke (dumbass me thought it was a reflection... of what??), so my feet never dried and were totally blistered up after the run was over. At night I got super tired for an hour or so but then got over it once the sun came up, was happy to see that I should be able to manage that well once I did more 24h adventure races .

Done!

Not much else here, a great event, Jeff was there too with his buddy Mark and had a great time as well. Michi and I limped to the finish with 2700 points, the winners (Team Nike/Balance Bar, Mike Kloser and Michael Tobin) had 3490... not THAT much more :)

Totally fascinated by the sport, will need to learn how to navigate!

Trioba Sprint #1, or Roger's first Adventure Race!

2004-05-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

So I am now officially an adventure racer, with a 1 of 1 record, having completed the first adventure race with Jeff Woerner and Kimberly Shavender in Ellensburg. I met Jeff at a Seattle Running Company run in early February and while running together at Cougar Mountain told him that I was thinking of doing an Adventure Race, namely the Trioba Series. Found out that he not only had done four twenty four hour adventure races last year but was also still looking for teammates. Since then we have been regularly training together pretty much every weekend, and joined many DART trainings (Dirtworld Adventure Race Team, the best and most competitive AR team in the northwest). We usually run at cougar mtn. and bike at black diamond. My technical skills still are lacking a bit on the bike but I can hang on the climbs and am faster than most on the runs. The SRC sunday runs have really helped propel my running shape into being fairly competitive. I met other great runners, Carol O'hear for excample, who finished top10 at Western States 100 miler last year, who I ran with (35miles, 6h) at tiger mtn last weekend. Anyhow, so much to tell, I ll keep it short. We got to the race start all hyper, I was a bit worried though since my really big race is next weekend, the 24h World Rogaining Championships in Arizona, so I wanted to not completely blow out my legs. Not a problem the way we navigated. After some chatting with Cyril Jay-Rayon, the captain of DART, we started off like a rocket following DART instead of actually navigating, and already we made our first mistake and completely overshot the CP. In this way it continued, we were reasonably fast but Jeff sucked at the nav and I was no better at helping him out, so all day long we kind of flailed around and eventually got done with the trekking section. Some teams we must have passed five times, while we were faster they always took the direct route until we passed them again from another direction. I am sure it was fun for them!

Pre-race... wheel's on, check!

Pre race chat with Cyril from DART

Truckin towards the finish...

On the bike Jeff blew up a bit since he tried a new drink, yup, never try anything race day of if you have not used it many times in training, lesson learned! That mattered very little compared to the two extra misses we had on the nav., so we finished somewhere in the bottom 2/3 at the end. All in all not the greatest race but one under the belt and a lot learned. Woohoo this is my sport!

Good/Bad Luck on Mt. Adams

2004-05-01T23:20:00.000-07:00

Holy of all swiss cows! This past weekend my german buddy Rainer convinced me to climb Mt. Adams. Good idea, we re both in shape, he's climbed it before, the weather was ok, we had a 3 day weekend (of which we only needed to spend 2 days, up and down quick)... so nothing really spoke agains it.

Drove down there in one go and were able to still climb up to about 300 meters from the termed "Lunch Counter", a flat-ish area at around 9'000 feet where people camp when the weather allows. Well we never even got there. Up around 8'000 feet it started storming (it already looked worse than predicted all day) and by the time we got close the wind was blowing icicles sideways onto our face such that we decided to camp for the night. We chose what we thought was a good protective area, a flat patch just besides a protective ridge.

Digging our campsite...

In the tent at night.. rainer likes his sleeping bag...

Took this at 3.am while shoveling snow off the tent..

On the way down....

Mistake. The wind picked up even more, right over the ridge, and carried more and more snow over it which started to cover up our tent. More and more. By now it was night and we could not sleep in a full blown strom on the mountain. We had to get out of the tent alternatively every 30 minutes and shovel the tent free.... that we did until late in the morning. No way getting off the mountain until it calmed down. Eventually the tent sort of collapsed and started ripping apart, and it was time to try to crawl down the mountain. Huge wind gusts, hail, not a fun outing. We made it down even though it was complete whiteout... a bit lucky since I met up with a rather big snow track that was half overblown. ..... at the end we were wet, cold, tired and had just had to leave the tent (rainer's 500$ expedition tent) behind. Tough luck, but we were happy to be back safe and a bit freaked out..

Volcano 1, Underprepared Foreginers 0

On the way going there....

Same place, on the way back....

Lake Serene, or how to toughen up your Girlfriend

2004-03-28T23:24:00.000-08:00

So I have been living in Seattle for a few months now and I am really happy with the choice of moving here. Three months in a nutshell. Work is ok, getting used to a 8-5 day again and doing reserach, good people to work with, not so interesting work at the moment. Started running more since Michi and I signed up to be doing the World Rogaining Championships in May, woohoo! Should be fun. Anyhow, joined Attackpoint www.attackpoint.org which is a great program to track my training and progress. So about 4h after i arrived at the airport I met Yumay at my friend Rainer's appartment (I stayed with him in the beginning) and we hit it off right away, and been together since. She is fit but only because she works out in the Gym, and has no real experience (at all) in anything outdoorsy except skiing. So we decided anyways to go do a hike, and man can that turn out ugly when expectations are unmet, on either side (do I speak of experience ya think!!??).

Anyhow me being an airhead I figured hey lets go to Lake Serene, a great mountain lake I had been to twice... kind of forgetting that it was March and there was still a TON of snow. Forgetting about this we drove out there and started hiking, she in sneakers! She is a chronic underpreparer I found out over time. It looked like a fine day, a little cloudy but good otherwise, and I was impressed by Yumay's speed up the hill. Shortly before we reached the last hill I knew we were in trouble. Snow was on the ground and became more and more by every foot we climbed, and soon we were potholing through a foot of snow. It was trecherous to walk on the planks that were set up, and Yumay wiped out twice and got some really nasty bruises. Without a whine or whimper she took it (heck I d have whined to kingdom come), and on we went. At the top we were wet and cold, so we took a few quick pics and off we went. Down was worse, tired legs and slippery snow, yeehaw, the wiping out continued. Back at the car Yumay was excited about the trip and told me she wanted to do another one next weekend... whoa, Girlfriend 101 passed, Grade A+, next week will be 102 and I am sure I can find a tougher hike :)

Seattle and what's beyond....

2004-01-10T12:21:00.000-08:00

Life like I knew it over the last 18 months may be over, but what I have seen, experienced and learned will sure stay with me forever. It was a great trip covering most of what I had planned to see, and what I had to leave out makes me want to go back, one day...

I just arrived in Seattle and the memory of the last few weeks is still fresh so I ll go right ahead and cover that, more of the Wild West later.

I left for Belmopan in the Belizean Mountains to check out some caves that I heard were worth the trip, well I had to transfer over to get to Belize City and the Cayes anyhow, so I was game to check it out. While waiting for the tour to start (well it ended up being just me, and my tour guide had drinken too much and overslept by 1.5 hours!) I met Shaina, an American that was going to the Cayes as well, so I already had company for the trip through Belize, which was great.
My tour guide, hungover, driving a 35 year old volkswagen with gigantic rust holes in the bottom (when you lifted up the floor mats you saw the ground) was a spitting image of Bob Marley... spitting image! Same face, dreads, and talking in the usual creole accent I though I just travelled back in time. Spending a day with him and his buddy was already worth the trip, but the caves, the canoeing trip there, and the bundles of information I got doubled it all, what a lucky punch!

Canoeing into the caves...

I met Shaina the next morning to transfer over to Belize and realized quickly we will get along great, most of the time you can tell within a few minutes. I met my share of complete nutcases, freaks and weirdos, but hey, in 18 months you see it all, and most people I met were truly great, out there to enjoy the travels, to take it all in, to have the places you see change you, and vice versa, in a positive way. We took a bus to Belize City, then transferred over to the "ferry". Traveling through southeast Asia ferries used to be a ginormous time suck... wait for hours until the boat finally arrives, late, if at all and there is no storm, and then go at 4 miles per hour to your destination. Belize is a pretty modern country and what also helps is the flat water around most of the Cayes. So our "ferry" was a speedboat, an a real one that carried 40 people but still flipped up when the two gigantic turbines started... we were hauling 40 miles perh hour across the water, incredible.

Pure serenity

Once we arrived at our island we went off to find a hostel, and book our snorkeling trip. Shaina did not dive so I decided to go snorkel for once, I had one my fair share of diving in the previous weeks. The trip was great, and we saw lots of mantanees, stingrays, nurse sharks and gazillion of colorful fish. Another few days of relaxation, running on the beach, great food and company, she had to leave (on my birthday of all days) to travel back home. I had a month left almost so I decided to stay, and spend my Birthday on the island. Coincidence has it I ran into a guy I met in Tikal, and spent my Bday with im and two english girls in a karaoke bar. Turning 31 one I had a good reason to get hammered, and I sure did, I remember singing some Bob Seger song with this guy called Chuck, sure hope it was not recorded anywhere, it could and would be used against me some day.

A lazy day of backgammon

A good place to play hoops

Drenched and hammered...

It was time to leave, I had planned for months to get to Playa del Carmen on the Yucatan Penninsula on the 22nd of December to meet Marina again. Marina is a space cadette just like me so information was not very accurate and much, and after an hour of deciphering the directions and address a bus driver dropped me off at the side of the road to walk to the hotel. It was nestled away north of the city, no public access. For some reason they did not require one to wear bands to show that you are part of the hotel, probably due to its remoteness... and so it was no problem staying there for a few days.

I had never been to an all-inclusive hotel, sure is nice not having to carry around a wallet but it does sort of cause one to lay on the beach and drink coctails all day. We made sure to run and explore the surroundings to offset that, but both became a bit restless, so the deal was to escape the false paradise and go to Isla Cozumel for a few days. First though the whole family wanted to go see all the ruins, so the dad wanted me to drive his rented car (none of them spoke any spanish) and drive em around. Sure thing!! So we saw all the famous sights such as the beach ruins of tulum and especially chichen itza. At the hotel, Marina, her family and friends there soon realized that whenever they sent me to get the drinks (which was often since not many spoke spanish) I would bring stronger drinks back. Apparently since I talked to all the waiters up there they would give me the "special treatment", alcohol from the lower cabinet (better quality) and higher amounts.... so I became very familiar with the 6-8 waiters that regularly would be at the bar, good noone ever found out that I did not even belong there!

Tulum ruin...

Chichen Itza

Lack of gas, no gas station, no problem, there s always a solution

After that I took the overnight bus to a big transit center (San Christobal de las casas) and found out that Annie, who I travelled with through the south, decided to come north to finish up her travels in MC as well, so we struck a deal and met halfway... lago aticlan in Guatemala. Another night bus (2nd in a row..grrr) got me there. We spent a few days there, including new years, which turned out to be quite the desaster (too much smoking and drinking) and got me thinking the next morning that now is the time to clean up... really clean up.. no more drinking, smoking, etc.... its perfect timing, my travels are over in one week, and its a good new years resolution, though probably a bit drastic, I think I can hold on to it.

Funky taxicabs in Mexico City

At the museum...

Xavier and his family!

Flying home... wow, this is really it...

So anyhow, we spent a few more days traveling up north before we had to split up, was great seeing her again but now it was time to see one more friend, Xavier! We met in Patagonia and he invited me to his house in Mexico City, and I got to stay with his family while there. I had a great time, being shown around the city, and taken out to fancy dinners. He is the VP of HR of Bimbo Bread, a gigantic mexican owned company, so quite a different style to my raggy usual travel style. I still managed to get sick, (yummy tortillas at the subway stand) and spent a day out cold at their house, but overall it was a great end to the travel and I was ready to start my new job, postdoc-ing in Bioengineering at the University of Washington.

18 months, 35 countries, close to fifty flights, tens of thousands of miles on the bus and train, and stories I will be able to tell for the rest of my life.

No man is an island...

2003-12-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

There we go... the finish line is in sight and I am starting to get a little nostalgia...After the adventurous travels through northern China and some parts in South America, i have been pretty much on the "gringo-trail"... throughout africa for better or worse, you cannot wisely travel off the beaten path all the time. After Africa I took a month break in Switzerland, preparing for landing in Seattle in about a month (January 2004!), getting the visas, work permit/schedule figured out, and sending off a container (well more like a small palett) to San Francisco, will figure out later how to pick it up and schlepp it to Seattle. I am excited going back "pseudo home", after I lived there for a period of time with my ex wife in a part of my life that seems so long ago now. Interesting when you travel and see so many places in such a short time, the life before becomes sort of slow motion affected as well, all boxed into the "pre-travel" stone age. Reentering society will be interesting and tough too I am sure. Anyhow, I will spare you the roger rambles and tell you what I have been up to. Arrived in Costa Rica, decided to pass on Panama but hit all the other countries in central america, travelling north criss crossing the subcontinent.

Hot springs bar directly beneath the volcano!

After a few days of visiting some volcanos, hot springs, and relaxing on the beach, the sun and fun was over and my travel buddy Daniel was scheduled to arrive. Dont get me wrong, it actually wasnt that the fun was over, it was starting, just not every tourists dream climbing every Volcano you can in ten days. We started off easy, travelling to Nicaragua, where we stayed on a rather nice island on the biggest lake of the country, and that island, coincidentally hosted one big, bad, VOLCANO! Now we could have elected to go there to relax, do some hikes in the area, and explore the gigantic markets the island had to offer.. but volcanoes are like magnets to us..... they are there, dangerous. Slippery, volcanic rocks, bad to virtually no paths, snakes and other poisonous animals, and the odd farmer with a machete walking by at dusk or dawn, there are a lot of perils out there..., but the worst was 100% the fact that some of these volcanos we scaled were still active enough that when you did not pay attention to your footing, you easily could scorch off the soles of your shoes... yup, no sandals recommended.

Gekko

Bagged our first "peak", recommended to not walk further... right at the crator edge

Our first volcano, wrapped in an evening cloud veil
We then proceeded to try to take a shortcut. I love shortcuts.... especially since they usually are long-cuts once you have reconsidered everything, because if they were shortcuts would not everyone take them? So there was two ways to go from A (island) to B (Granada), the regular but, regular boat, regular bus... appx 6h.... OR try to convince the local farmers to let you on their once-a-week banana boat heading directly to Grenada.. no buses, just a whole lot of convincing and a much longer (also 6h) boat ride.. until about 30 seconds before the boat left we were not sure we were allowed to go with, and would have lost a day since the regular boat already left... but somehow the guys had pity on us and we got to hop onboard a squeaky, crappy, broken old barge that carried probably 5 times more bananas than allowed, and the odd foreginers....

The Banana Boat, there s room at the top..

Dani on the boat

Church in Granada

The ride was great though, hanging out with Banana farmers for 6 hours was worthe the trip alone... Grenada was a good stopping point to see some of the famous central american churches, eat a LOT of rice and beans, and bag the 2nd volcano. But then it was time to go for the kill. The biggest, baddest volcano we planned to climb was described as an adventure extraordinare, and it sure was. We needed to find a taxi, bus and taxi in the middle of the night to get to the town at the base of the volcano. There, we eventually tracked down the major who supposedly knew the one guide that was (stupid?) able enough to guide us up there. So after a not very easy haggle on the guiding price we trotted on, with a 4-6h climbing time in sight. It sure started easy enough, only thing we were told to pay attention to was the snakes, and since our guide with his machete was plowing us through the densest vegetation, it was not always clear if we could if we wante to. Once we finished our bushwhacking part it was supposed to get easier. That was certainly not the case, and now we were walking up at a 40 degree angle on sliding sharp volcanic rocks... the traversing was particularly difficult and Dani eventually sprained his ACL again, not realising it at the very moment, but that was the end of our volcanic explorations for the remainder of the trip. After a hard hike up we finally made it to the top, it was amazing standing in the crator of a pretty active volcano. Sulfur smell, and the fact that one step away from our guides path would have made us pothole through the hot earth into a steaming pool of mud, made me make the decision right there. More risk, more fun, until you reach your comfort level. That was it. On the way down the guide started chatting.... he practically said no word on the way up. So apparently a few weeks back he guided this american up the volcano and on the way down he stumbled and fell, and broke a few bones and ended up in the hospital for several weeks.. great, good to know, AFTER THE FACT! :) Hey, wanna make business, gotta be smart...

Volcano Cotapeque, looking pretty tame there from the bottom...

Uppedyupupup, and it was hot!

At the top, open steam holes all around...

Nice shot Dani!

So that was that for hiking, and since we are not the most dedicated ruins and churches watchers, we decided to do something else fun that did not bother Dani's knee much.. diving! We both did not have the PADI certificate yet, but been diving before, so it was time to get it. Utila in Honduras was the place to get it, and so we did. A week of diving during the day (while it was raining) and drinking at night pretty much sums it up.. a good end to a good travel section with Dani. After dani left and the rains continued (4 days of heavy rains uninterrupted) I left in a hurry the first day the ferry actually left.. two days before it was canceled.

Roger, about to go underwater....

On the boat I met Annie, and decided to get out of the hurricane region towards san pedro. After all the downpour we decided to treat ourselves to some relaxing beach time on the other side of the country, where it was dry season. Traveling with someone that speaks spanish is great, it allows both people to engross themselves into conversations and one does not have to translate all the time, and during the three days that it took to get to the island we did not see another tourist. One night we went to play pool, and annie being the only girl (among about 100 guys) in the pool hall, got a little too much attention... i am already used to playing "boyfriend" for female travelers, ... once the young guys hear that the girl is already taken they leave, while the older men of about 60-70 years stuck around and taught her how to improve her pool-game, quite a funny sight!

We arrived on isla el tigre, a wonderful island that only received a very small subsection in the lonely planet travel book, fortunately... and hence was completely abandoned from tourists. In fact we saw none during the four day stay there. We took a nice apartment in a hostel and spent the days exploring the island and swimming in the ocean, watching the kids play soccer on the beach, or have a fantastic fish dish with lots of salad for roughly 2 dollars... can't beat that. What made it really that special was the lack of tourists... (I know, its hypocritical since I am one too). There are many advantages... no one spoke english, no tourist touts, just chicken buses to get there, an hitchhiking on the island to get around... obviously much cheaper to travel as well.

Dinner at the marina..

Watching the boys play "futbol!"

Nice view from the ferry dock....

After the four relaxing days it was goodbye for us, she had to travel south, me, I needed to get to Mexico City in less than a month to finish off my travels... my cousin Christoph, who has travelled extensively across central and South America told me a while ago to go to El Salvador, and somehow i had forgotten and only because I traveled that far south with Annie did i consider going there. A lucky punch. When i left the island I already met a guy from el salvador in the bus and he helped me across the border, which was a bit of a chaotic situation, but the guy helped me quite a lot and somehow i got across. I already though I d have to bribe the border patrols, but I don't like doing that since one false move and you are in jail... bribing to get into parks is much easier...

I though it was a good start to meet such a nice guy from a country I did know nothing about... on the next chicken bus to san salvador i got to talking to an engineer from san salvador, we chatted the whole way to the city and he invited me to dinner, gave me his number and told me we should go out, so the next night I met him and two of his friends and talked all night about world politics, the country's sights and random stuff... a great experience. In the hostel I met two dutch girls, and we decided to go to cerro verde, where we found a great hostel amongst the lakeshore and the mountain range.

The family there that ran the place only had us as guests at the time and seemed more like a family then a guesthouse to us. From the first night we drank cuba libres with them (not with the two kids, they were only 3 and 6 :), then went out for dinner in town, sitting in the back of a pickup truck on sawed-off plastic lawnchairs... going 90 km per hour in the dark on a road with potholes... so much for save travels... we somehow made it there and had some really nice pupusas, the el salvadorian specialty, filled flour tortillas, a great dinner cost a little over a dollar including a drink, I still dont cease to be amazed by the fact that a meal there in a restaurant with an eglish menu will be 3-5 times more expensive and half as good...

Lucia's (3) birthday at the guesthous

Out in town with the family

Another church... hey we re in central america!!

Our daily dose of relaxation at the hostel...

After a visit of the volcanic park in cerro verde and a day doing pretty much nothing but reading for 5 hours in a hammock, i decided it is time to hit the road again, and be off to tikal... tessa and iris gave me some great tips of where to go. I crossed the border to Guatemala and after an almost 6 hour busride and a walk though guatemala city i got to the bus station and within just 30 seconds made it to the very last bus towards tikal, great because that meant i could sleep in a bed that night... bad because that meant another 10 hours on a tiny bus, combining for 16h, sleeping is not that easy because people get on and off all the time, plus the occasional police checkpoint with heavily armored police searching the bus does not help either. At midnight that day I made it to Flores, found a place and crashed for the night... the next day I relaxed a bit and organized my day trip to tikal, which i did with two americans, a girl from ancorage and a guy from new york city, and we spent the day together walking the amazing maya ruins in the jungle of the tikal region.

Yes I like you too...

Roger, Tikal Ruins in background...

Busy ants..

The jungle setting of the ruins is just spectacular, and the beautiful hiking paths that connect all the temples something I had not seen yet even though I had been on the road for 17 months. A few beers and a great meal later i said goodbye to my temporary travel mates and set off for Belize.

African short stories

2003-10-21T16:05:00.000-07:00

After my exciting trip through northeastern Africa it was time to see the south, leaving for Johannesburg, to visit my friend Stephan and his wife Francette... they have a son, Luca, now and I was excited to seeing old friends in new places.. she is from Ghana he is Swiss and they moved to J'burg not too long ago. Mike, my best buddy from Switzerland was joining me for this 6 week part of the trip, South Africa, Swaziland, Leshoto and Namibia. Basically the very bottom part of Africa.
J'burg was not worth the visit other than hanging out with Stephan and Francette, but their house was nice and protected from the raging crime, so we had a nice "warmup" there... there are alarm buttons and at night when I had to go to the bathroom I accidentally pushed one of those instead of the light, within seconds there is a phonecall, if you dont answer within 30 sec and give em your security code they send in troopers and snipers (I wish I were kidding) and if necessary break in with force to try to save you from kidnappings... thats the new vogue things criminals do in South Africa.. seldom the kidnapped survive. Enough for scare, we were warned and informed how to not get kidnapped (in theory, but better than nothing) and rented a car... once outside of the big cities we felt very safe.. but the cities are not.

At Stephan and Francette's house...

Hanging out with Luca and the neighbor's girl

Drove out to visit some canyons and other landmarks and got to Swaziland in a few day's time, spent three very nice days there, including a 2 day trip in a park full of white and black rhinos.

Lovin the hostels... heated pools, beer, what else do you need?

Driving through Leshoto...

After that we hit the coast of South Africa and apart from a one day detour to Leshoto followed that all the way down to Capetown. Leshoto was very nice to look at with the clay huts, but is one of the poorest countries in the world... it has its fame for being the highest country in the world (highest low point that is), and not much grows there. The roads, built by foreginers 10s of years ago were deserted and had accumulated potholes galore, so it was like racecar driving in an arcade mall... just with worse consequences if one messed up. I did, once only... but that was because I realized after about 10 minutes driving that I had accidentally been driving (with full speed, like 100km/h) on the (wrong), right side of the road... this was a former english colony... not a good idea. Fortunately we only saw a car every 30-50 minutes so no accident happened...

Seriously? Seriously! There was no game park nearby...

Lucky punch, a little (2months) old elephant...

Playing with the front bumper.. i hope the bit momma is not coming over!

This is when I stopped feeling comfortable and told the guide to please drive backwards...

The garden route is the road in south africa that follows from Durban to Cape Town and it is one of the most beautiful coastal roads in the world, and we stopped often along the way and stayed in nice hostels. The thing about backpacking in South Africa is the hostels... they are the quintessence of traveling. Many of them are resort-style large complexes, with hundreds of rooms, dozens of dorms, swimming pool(s), bars, gigantic surroundings, private beaches, and/or large peripheral programs such as rock climbing, cycling, game viewing, diving, riding, you name it. Such a place we ended up staying in Cystna, along the coast.

Another gorgeous hostel...

Malin at the beach, riding horses with the swedes we met...

Travelling Buddies

At Mats home... thanks for the invite!

Nestled away from town, close to the beach, the hostel at cystna is all a traveler needs, for days. With its private access to a large beach, miles of sand dunes, and opportunities to ride, bike, hike and explore the Xhosa culture (a common people of South Africa), we spent several days there, and got to know some really nice Swedish Girls that, along with their mentor, taught handball in South Africa and were on a relaxing vacation. We spent several days together, riding horses, and just relaxing, and then were invited over to their house further down south for another few days. It was kind of like a vacation from a vacation, living in a house, we spent the days running in the AM (Malin is a strong runner), then hanging out by the pool and visiting the town. Unfortunately we had a plane to catch, only a little over a week from when we left there, and so we had to go. The rest of the trip down the coast was rather lame and uneventful, maybe party due to the fun times spent with Malin, Jenny and Mats up in East London, maybe because we were just a bit tired from the travelling. Well in any event, Mike and I traveled well enough together to figure out quickly where we liked it and where not, and drove the couple of hundred miles straight through to a small mountain town just northwest of Capetown. There we spent a couple of days doing fun stuff. What fun stuff? We stayed at a hostel where we could do lots of bike trips to nearby wineries, austrich farms, caves and mountian passes. It was a great place to hang out, and we met a lot of good people to do that with. First off we rented a bike and rode out to the austrich farm, where we got a very thorough introduction into the animals. It was educational, but also a lot of fun. Particularly riding one of those things.... WWF is probaly going to kick my @$$ for stating this, but I had to lie about my weight (they allow only 180lbs max rider weight, so i am 185lbs, no big deal, its like the safety thing for bridges.. 5 extra lbs wont matter...). Anyhow, noone else (e.g. as always I was the only idiot not seeing the danger) wanted to ride it, so I did. Austriches are dumb animals.. in fact they have one of the lowest brain/body mass of any animal, and it shows.... when you put a bag over their head, no matter how hard you had to chase it, it immediately stops and stays there, thinking it is night now. So I did and comfortably got to sit down on one of those... now you lift the bag and hell does the guy shoot off... uiiiihaaa here we go... the head can be used as a joystick and when turned in either direction the animal sees the ground at an angle and immediately wants to make up for that by going in the other direction. Hillarious.

Whatcha looking at punk!!??

Note to self... do not feed the animals.

Austrich rodeo!

That night we booked a trip, well mike did, to be dropped off at the top of a mountain to bike back the 50 miles to town, and pass by some impressive caves. I wanted to be the tough guy and bike out and back, a gnarly 100 miles with 3000 feet of gain, hey after all I had been trainning lots-NOT! Anyhow, get up at 5am, get going, I d be at the top before Mike gets dropped off... well plans dont always work out where there are hostels, fun travelers and beer in the equation... but most I blame it on Swiss Soccer... its a bit like US soccer, sucks most of the time but when they actually play well everyone gets into it... well we beat the Irish, another great soccer nation (tsisss) and qualified for the world champs... so I had a beer or two... and the german group I drank with told me about killer pool. Its Billiard with a twist.. not really a twist but more like an excessive drinking game attached. I figured one game cant be that bad... and told everyone including the owner of the hostel that I needed to be in bed by 11pm... yeah, like anyone gave a bleep mate! One game became two, and the second game I won (out of like 30 some people) which spared me having to drink three small glasses of beer (for every shot missed) but the winning price was a tshirt and three shots of hard liqueur to be drinken in one go.... the rest is fast forward... more killer pool, then a pub, then some disco-like thing where all I remember is the tall, qute German girl I danced with, and coming home around 4.30am... well there was no sense in sleeping now, so I drank 1.5 liters of water and started cycling. Hell is a crummy old Mountain Bike, a Hangover and a 3000 foot climb I tell ya. I never made it all the way up there by myself.. Mike and the driver caught me a few miles short and the driver took pity in the hungover dork that was trying to get up there and gave me a free lift.... oh yeah and the caves were nice on the way back :)

Playing killer pool at the hostel... one bad, very bad idea...

Amazing caves along the way...

Stalactites (or Stalacnites?) I never remember..

Fun evening at a Xhosa village

Jump, Jump, Jump! Oh crap...

Next station was Hermanus just off the coast and near Capetown. Mike really wanted to go white shark watching and I did not so we split up (much to the dismay of mike)... for those of you that have read the blogs till now, very hard to believe but for once there was something potentially dangerous and I did not feel like trying it out... was I getting tired of traveling? Well they feed the sharks while they go out there with all the tourists, then throw the tourists in cages to dive down and watch them... now I am not an animal behavioral specialist but when White Sharks associate getting fed every time they see a human, I feel queasy at best, so I skipped. Mike really wanted to go and probably would have changed his mind, but hindsight is 20/20. After getting out there he found out he gets seasick (hehe, like all my travel buddies), and ended up throwing up for almost all of the time on the boat. No cage diving, too choppy out there that day, but they did see a great white, and mike saw it the closest. While he was throwing up on the left side of the boat everyone spotted the shark at the right, everyone but mike ran over, the shark dived under the boat and up on the other side. Mike may have done humankind a huge favor, barfing (throwing up for non-native speakers) all over the shark. Now the poor fella will always associate humans with a very bad smell of half digested mexican food... andele andele!! :)

I stayed at the coast, put in a great 2h run (started running again since my friend Helen Bridle, who is on the national orienteering team, convinced me to do this 2 day run in the mountains in summer... which is in like 2 months!!), and then sat on the coast, chatted with two lovely travellers and saw whales breach very close to us. Plus a penguin, which apparently are never seen in Hermanus, the poor guy must have really gotten lost

Lost solo penguin (top) and breaching whale (bottom)

Well we finally made it to Capetown and had a great time there, we spent five days there, going to the cape of good hope (e.g. the southern tip of africa), and more importantly and impressive, the prison where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for decades! We were guided through the prison by a former inmate and he talked very openly, emotionly about the imprisonment, the horrible torture, abuse. It was very emotional, and many women started crying by hearing this man's story, he was a cripple from the torture, and these scars do not lie. Made me want to punch (or worse) someone for the first time in a long time. It is the 20th century and we are still treating each other worse than animals, hard to believe.

We stayed at a big hostel (more like a hostel complex) where hundreds of backpackers stay, and many use this as the hub for trans africa travel (12 weeks, to cairo) and vice versa. We stayed there haning out with two swiss guys and Marina, a german/russian model that took a sabbatical and worked there with children gunshot/burn victims, to work through their horrifying experiences... so much for all models are superficial.

Nelson Mandela's cell (that is the whole size) where he was imprisoned for 28 years...

Marina, Marcus and I after a game of pool at the hostel

In fact she was about done with her work there and planning to head up to Windhoek/Namibia, to work in developing schools, and we headed out there to do a 10 day exploratoin tour of Namibia, so I was happy to reconnect with her and have her show me around what she was doing out there.

So we flew to windhoek and took that tour. It was certainly a good way to see the interesting sights in Namibia. The dunes were particularly spectacular. We travelled in a group of 10, and there really is not too much to write about, drive, see, explore, hang out. After 8 of the 10 days I decided to drop the tour and head back early to Windhoek and hang out with Marina, and got a good idea of her work with the children there, went to some schools talking about traveling, enterpreneurship, and various topics, and to a prison for young delinquents as well. All in all I had a great time, and it rounded up my trip to Africa as a "must return one day". Traveling with Mike was awesome, a bit bumpy at times, but as best friends we had no problems getting these out of the way ASAP. I am a morning person, he barely waked up before the sun goes down.. but hey, traveling with you best buddy you find ways to meet i the middle.

Funky, its my shadow!!

Nice evening walk on a dune...

A tad bit on the hungover side...

Wavy sand....

SandDune51 (they are indeed numbered)

Chameleon!

Mystic Giraffe

Byebye Africa, see you soon again!

Africa, BABY!, Africa....

2003-08-23T15:51:00.000-07:00

Off i went again about a week ago, where this time i am dragging my bum across Africa! First part was a bit more touristy, but no less fun, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with my dad, and then doing a safari with mom and dad across the serengeti.

At Kilimanjaro airport we had no visa problems, getting our bags right away and our guide was already waiting to take us to the hotel, it was almost scary how everything worked out. Well until I unpacked and found that my hairgel had exploded (what dork travels with hairgel anyways, serves me right I say!!!) I am currently still brushing my teeth with that faint taste of gel, I think it s pineapple flavor!

After a good nights sleep we got up the next morning and found the porters, cook and guide, already preparing everything, our bags were (despite our disagreement) taken by the porters and we were given these tiny backpacks to carry, we had the mandatory guide, assistant guide, cook and four porters that all carried up to 35kg up the mountain. A little on the insane side when you see that they are carrying tables, chairs, and non-dried food up there... but hey, arguing was senseless, that s the way it s been done, no change to come... hmm....

Us and our porters/guide/cook...

Several groups on their way...carrying their load on their head

Camp 1

After starting from Machame gate at 1500 meters we walked slowly (pole pole, in the Swahili language) up to the first camp, enjoyed the easy hike through the jungle, talking to the cook and learning the most important words of Swahili, now, after a week me and my dad can already properly introduce ourselves, talk about the weather and most importantly haggle and bargain, its great fun!! We slept at 3000 meters the first night (about 10000 feet) and over the next three days slowly hiked up to 4600 meters, to properly acclimatize... of the 50 people or so that tried to summit the mountain the same day we did, many were already complaining of AMS (accute mountain sickness), which can occur above 10000 feet and lead to headaches and vomiting in the beginning, but become much more serious later if not properly treated. Having learned a thing or two from Lucas, the swiss doctor i traveled with in Nepal, I tried to help a couple of people that complained about problems, and explain basics how to minimize the altitude problems (e.g. staying above camp for a couple of hours before sleep if there is time, lots and lots and even more fluids, nope guys, beer wont do the trick!).

Last leg we were supposed to get up at 11.20 pm, no sleep for me as my dad was snoring like he s at sea level.. all the power to him if he can sleep at that altitude... we got up to get ready, had a hefty breakfast... strange only 5 hours after dinner.... and set off at midnight to watch my most spectacular hike i have done so far.... star lit sky, the moon lighting some of the way.... it was bitter cold... about -20C/-10F, so the breaks we took were many but short, again hydration was very important... at 5 30 am, about 2 hours ahead of schedule we arrived on top of Kilimanjaro at 5895 meters, 19345feet, VERY exhausted (me that is, my dad is a machine, I dont know how he does it with 57 years old, but i sure hope its heredetory!!)

Creatures at the top... my dad, guide and porter...

Did it!

Amazing bud sadly slowly disappearing glacier...

Picture of a lifetime: Glacier, Mt. Meru (small one) and shadow of Kilimanjaro (big one)

I was hyper taking tons of pictures as the sun came up, it also kept me warm. After an amazing sunrise and about 45minutes rest we descended at six fifteen, passing by all the ones slowly making it to the top. Back on the steep volcano rock face we could easily surf down the gravel, but had to take care, falling would have been quite painful, we descended the 1200 meters elevation in 45minutes, and finally got breakfast, WONDERFUL....

My mom arrived a day later, having made the trip by herself to Tanzania. She was picked up by achmed, our fantastic tour organizer. Like so many others that have booked tours with him, I inquired about 1 year ago about kili and safaris, and though i knew little about this guy called achmed, with flawless english and good german skills (never occurred to me to ask), I was very surprised to see this tall skinny English guy picking us up at the airport. Truth is i would have been less surprised by a 5foot1 Pakistani with a small mustache...

Achmed proofed to be a great choice, no surprise after the meticulous answering of my questions and thorough inquiries.

At the serengeti, we witnessed all the wonderful wildlife (we saw the big five over and over... (big5 being elephant,lion,buffalo,rhino and leopard, the latter two really hard to encounter), plus lots of cheetas, birds, baby lions playing...a male lion 5 feet from our car, etc....), then returned to a wonderful lodge, and reviewed the day by having a cold beer and looking at the pictures on the digital camera, followed by a wonderful dinner....

Impressions from the Serengeti....

I knew already the days of plenty and posh hotels would soon be over. After spending the last night in a gorgeous hotel in arusha and having a grand time with my parents, i left last Saturday to backpack again, .... first i visited Kate and her family in Nairobi, a girl i met while skydiving in New Zealand. She was so nice to offer her "hilton gardens lodge", a shack they have below their huge house in a nice district a bit off Nirobi downtown, like the beverly hills area. I was received very nicely with a great curry her dad made and spent two days there, visiting museums and a snake farm, and decided to go off by myself to the north a bit too.

That was quite the trip I have to say.... I haven't seen another traveler in two days... just taking matatas (like minibuses for locals), spent yesterday at lake naivasha visiting a gorge. I had to stay in the hotel all night since I ran out of money, the banks close at three and the cash machine was broken.... so crackers and water is was.

Hiking the devil's canyon

Now i am in nankuru, it is deserted from travellers (the tourist hotel is absolutely empty, I am the only visitor and have been for days)... after the extremists set fire to three german hotels in kenya people are scared, but I feel very safe here... its totally off the radar out in the boonies. Not what most of you would call "nice traveling", a lot of poverty and no tourist facilities, but people are very friendly and it is certainly interesting and gives you a different perspective. I ended up taking a 5h minibus, cramped in with 10 locals and about 20 boxes of young chickens (2000 chickens, not chicks unfortunately!! :), the noise was UNBEARABLE, i am still coughing up feathers, but its a trip i wont forget.

Roger and the 2000 chicks

p.s. 1
note that the correct translation for roundabout in swahili (as found in the official english-swahili dictionary from daressalam university), is keepylefty keepylefty

p.s. 2
it is said to be a fact that the great massai tribe that live in his area, claim to be the rightful owners of all cows around the world...they just haven't had the time to collect them yet....

p.s.3
katia (a friend i met traveling in bolivia, chile and new zealand, gave me a book called "the essential survival kit for traveling", and I actually already used it: there is a section called "how to pass a bribe", which I had to do yesterday since I was out of money and could not pay the entry fee to a nice park, the guard, after a textbook bribing conversation let me in for free (after i paid him a third of the entry fee i was supposed to pay... good stuff to know!

Far away in a land down under....

2003-06-26T19:56:00.000-07:00

I have been to so many places, seen so many continents, but Australia and NZ have been given a miss until now, and I ll be damned if I wont come back. I took one of the longest flights in exsistence, Santiago de Chile to Auckland... 17 odd hours and with the timechange thing where you fly over the time zone I actually missed an entire day and flew on the 20th, and arrived on the 22nd... groovy.. or not, since I lost a day.

I got picked up by a friend who I stayed with in Auckland, and she showed me the city and I stayed there for a few days, but it was not really why I came down under for... the amazing outdoor activities is what lured me, and soon made me leave the city. I was happy to find that Katia was just a few hundred miles north, she had meanwhile traveled to Fiji to meet her boyfriend for a 2 week vacation (sort of a vacation from travelling :), and was back. So we met up at 90 mile beach and took a day trip to the "end of new zealand" where the two mjor streams of the pacific and atlantic collide... amazing to see the large swirls....

Roger on 90mile beach (actuality its much shorter but kiwi's like to exxagerate :)

A little fun must be included... woohoo!

The end of 90 mile beach and new zealand...

I speed-travelled the north island in a figure 8 path, only had 8 days and then three weeks in Australia, I had spent too much time in South America and was running out of time to get back to CH, work for 2 weeks, get my visa's straightened out for the US (work) and Africa (travel), so oh well speed traveling it was!

Went down to Rotorua and Taupo, where I mountain biked, visited active crators, hiked the tongariro crossing, did some caving and my very first skydive!!

That was a whole lot of fun and action all packed into about 7 days. In Rotorura I met Karen and Mike from England and we became a good travel pack for those days, they were on their honeymoon, sold their house to travel for one year, and were adventure junkies like me. We had a grand time, and mixed our daytime adventures with pub crawls at night so there was no time to rest until I flew out to Australia. All in all a very good time, but way too short, need to come back some day, especially since I have not seen the south island yet.

Caving trip, amazing views but the darkness and water is not conducive to cameras!

Some mountain they used for Lord of the Rings

Tangariro crossing, bitter cold

Karen, Mike and I

Dont I look like one of the Armageddon guys?!? :)

Australia was not much different, you cannot see a continent in three weeks, so I did not attempt to do so and focused on staying with my friend Alexandra and her husband (she is originally swiss) in Sydney, and her mom Maggie in the blue mountains. I had a phantastic time staying with them, after months of no private room it was nice to have a home for a few days, and swiss friends to talk to!

The usual classic picture...

In the blue mountains with Alex, her husband, and Maggie

Three sisters...

Additionally I booked a trip from the northwest down to Sydney, taking a one-way flight up to Cairns. Up there I started off easy with some snorkeling trip, and getting ready to take the bus down to Airlie Beach where I would take a two night three day sailing trip to the whitsunday islands. Arriving in Cairns I realized that the laid back traveling of south america had given way to adventurous excursions in NZ and now wild parties in australia. Not that I am a prude but I saw more live $ex shows from travelers getting it on right there in the bunk bed next to me, and saw more live throwup parties (fortunately except for once they always made it out of the room) than I ever needed to see. See here is the deal, the trip you book is dirt cheap, and the quality you get is dirt cheap... not complaining, you get what you pay for. So 30+ bunk beds it was....

After that somewhat shocking first few days in Cairns I realized if you cant beat them (e.g really I felt like beating some of them... was I getting old and cranky?) you have to join them. After all I had two weeks left and then I was going to travel off the beaten path in Afria again....

So once I arrived in Airlie Beach after a 20h bus ride I was plastered, and checked into my gigantic bunk bed room and chose the bed the farthest away from the bathroom (that s where most of the action occurred at night, either or if you know what i mean). I met a german, english and canadian girl who were all about to head out to the bar, and they convinced me to go with them as sleeping now would not be smart, the only way to get a full nights sleep is to go out and be home last, most drunk.. hey, whaddayaknow? The english gal had gigantic knockers and ended up being harassed every 15 minutes by random guys who begged her to take part in the miss wet tshirt contest.. and finally caved, not because of the guys, but because of the rather impressive 1000 australian dollars first price.. heck I d consider showing mine if I had any :)

So Miriah (the canadian girl) and I, after having drinken several pitchers, proceeded to go to the contest to support the gal by telling every guy in there who to vote for.. once the thing started the commentator came to the front and started getting everybody fired up... people stared jumping around and the girls got on stage and it was too lound to hear what was going on but somehow he started pointing to me, maybe because I jumped the highest... but all of a sudden I realized I was the one that was supposed to pour the ice water (two pitchers each, in both hands) over the girls shirts.... yep, sure not something my mom would have been proud to see but probably one of the "top hunderd things to do before I die" off the list! :)

Believe it or not it was hard work, sure I got front row but had to slowly pour fifteen times two gallons of ice water over these girls, and my arms were hammered by the end. For my hard work I got even more free beer which tipped the scale to favor the idiot in me, there was random beach exploration with Miriah involved, and fence climbing which damn near killed her as she got stuck hanging upside down (only to find out the next morning that literally five meters next to there the fence was open)... needless to say I did have a good nights sleep, latest and drunkest.

The sailing trip to the whitsunday islands was fun, though it ended up not really being a sailing trip since there was no wind.

Jungle, Mountain, Sea

2003-05-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

About 11 months into my travels, I am far from being done mentally with traveling, in fact I like it so much I will extend it to 18 months. South America has really gotten to me, despite the fact that i have had some really scary moments on this trip, and as you will now find out, the past month as well!

Last I communicated I was spending about 2 weeks relaxing in BA, staying with my friends ... I had a grand time there, people here are super hospitable and I also barely spoke English during my stay, getting to know the locals much better than the gringos, a nice change of pace for this part of the trip.

La Boca... part of Buenos Aires

The last night in BA I actually met up with Jennifer, a girl I hiked with in Patagonia, and it involved way too much alcohol and too little sleep, a tradeof when spending time with travelers that dont have to get up at a specific time the next morning. I left for Foz de Iguazu (largest waterfalls in the world, as big as the niagra falls, with gorgeous tropical backdrop!)....

Part of the falls...

The big momma!!

Everything s big here.. even the ants!!

The park...

I spent again more time there than anticipated...probably simply since the longer you travel, the slower you go, seeing new places becomes less important than just being out there and experiencing different cultures. Argentina is first rate and dirt-cheap, and the travellers and hostel staff just made me stay a few extra days... since it was low season there, there were about 5-7 staff members and not many more guests, Yamila, was so kind to show me the area around town and exercise the large knowledge she had aquired during tourism school... an offer too good to say no to.

I did have a pain to catch for Australia in three weeks time, so I traversed Paraguay pretty quickly and ended up flying to La Paz instead of taking the 50h, horrifying sleeper bus that travelers had warned me about... I m sure it would have been a good experience :)

Arriving in La Paz, there had been this big plan looming in my head ever since Dani and I travelled through Peru and Bolivia, climbing a mountain higher than 6000 meters (20000 feet). I dont mull things over for too long usually, I sign up and suffer the consequences later, so I did.
After a few hours of checking out the possibilities it was all set, get acclimatized very fast (I really only had 48 h at 3500 meters, then was to ascend to 5200 meters for one night, and get the peak at 6088 meters the next day at dawn.....) Acclimatization isnt that hard for me, so I spent the good part of the day drinking tons of water and mate de coca, and getting my stuff ready for the trip. There was a great bit of anticipation in me, I had been above 5000 meters, but only over passes, and as we were climbing Huayana Potosi, and there was a 70 degree glacier right at the end, ice climbing at 6000 meters could not to be taken lightly. I got my gear, and since Marc, the second person coming along, felt stomach sick, I agreed to additionally carry our tent, which gave me a hefty 25-30 kg backpack that I needed to carry from the base at 4600 meters to the basecamp at 5200 meters.

Finally up there, after stunning views of the peak-to-climb, we put up the tent, ate dinner at 4 pm, and went to sleep at 5pm. Well we laid in the sleeping bag until midnight, sleep never came at that altitude and additionally there was a mean wind blowing, sounding like our tent was about to fly away with us in it! At midnight we got up, under a perfectly lit star sky, almost full moon, so we did not need our lights for breakfast and preparations, as the reflecting glacier even enhanced the light. Anyhow, a tough six hours of hiking on the glacier and a last great effort ice-climbing the last 200 meters at a 70 degree inclination, we got up there just as the sun came up. Very happy but also very very tired, it is really true that at these elevations you can only do a few dozen steps before needing a break, unimaginable how it must be over 8000 meters!

Uppedy up....

Roger over 6000m on top of Huaina Potosi...

After another 5 hours of descent we arrived in la paz later this afternoon, i pretty much went to bed right away (again at 5, only this time no 2 minutes needed to fall asleep!) and slept until my alarm clock woke me at 6 am.

I had another mission! Montainbiking down the worlds most dangerous road (150 deaths each year on a 65 km strech from La Paz cumbre (4700m) to Coroico (1500m). Nope, i dont have a death wish, but this is the road to the jungle in bolivia, and as i didnt want to fly both ways i decided biking down is safer than taking a bus with some sleep-deprived, drunken driver.
The day started as well as it ended... I had a great breakfast, got my material (a brand new trek bike with disc brakes), and found out i was the only one doing the trip, along came a bike guide and a driver (to bring my bags and food, etc...). Crazy, all that, 2 guys for a full day, a car, 2 first class mountainbikes and hearty breakfast and lunch (at a hotel-buffet!), cost me 40 US dollars, I do not know how these guys can still make money off of that, really!!

Being an avid mountainbiker i told my guide to give it what he got and not worry about me, i would be able to follow. I was happy to find that I was still in good enough shape and though we were careful at dangerous places (there are dozens of indications of fellow travellers with bikes or buses crased and died along the way) We made the trip in about 2.5 h instead of 6-7 as advertised, good for me, more fun, good for the guide/driver, much shorter work day.

A day later i took the overnight bus to rurrenabaque, down to the jungle in bolivia, this ride was absolutely NOTING for the faint of heart, they call that the easier part of the bus ride down into the jungle, but the Bus was on such a small, rutted road and was going at full speed into curves where I, at the end of the bus, sometimes saw nothing but the Jungle 1000 meters below,.... i arrived at 8.15 in the morning after a pretty unconfortable ride but decided as i was sweaty and dirty i may as well go into the junlge (actually called a pampa tour) for the three days, and as a group was leaving right at 8.30, i was able to save some time that i may need later to get back toSantiago....

For the next three days I was in a group with our guide, Einar the pampas man (great guide that grew up in the pampas and obviously knew every anymal that ever lived there), and an irish and american couple. After a four hour drive to the river, we proceeded to the middle of the pampa by a boat for another four hours, and started seeing the most amazing animals... many birds, some of the most colorful ones I have ever seen, a capibara (the worlds largest rodent, size of a grown pig but looks just like a rat :), crocodiles, aligators, river dolphins, and turtles. We swam with the dolpins, in the river that could not have been more brown, visibility 1 inch, not kidding you. Feels a bit weird swimming in a river with dolphins when alligators are all around, however the guide absolutely swore to us that no alligator comes close to the dolphins.. they swim in large groups and would bite a predator such as the alligator to death. God I believed so much on these travels!

Whats for dinner??

Minus two alligators...

Group foto with the anaconda...

Slimy...

Scary...

And here it goes again, Roger is just a bit too accident prone this trip, but i cant help it!! Roger's close encounter with death #3, last but not least. We discovered a very large turtle nest while cruising down river, and right then the fled out of fear. We knew we had disturbed it and needed to cover its nest so that the vultures would not devour the eggs. Einar asked who wanted to come on shore with him and sure enough I said yes, as always, just a little to eager to try everything. As we were doing this I must have stepped on a beehive. Within seconds there were several dozen bees hoovering all around me and kept attacking and stinging me.... what a nightmare!! Noone else nearby got stung, even though hundreds of bees surrounded us, I had disturbed the peace and I had to pay for it. With my shirt off I kept slapping around as much as I could, but got stung a lot my head, on my face, pretty much wherever i could not reach. Our guide fortunately was quick enough and screamed at everyone to get into the boat, and drove that thing as fast as he could down the river, they threw blankets over me until finally all the bees were gone. According to the guide, who was VERY freaked out, these killer bees can smell you at large distances, he had seen a friend of his get stung literally 150 times, spending 3 weeks in the hospital). I started to take out the stingers, I got stung "only" about 20 times, and as I am not allergic i just took an antihistamine and smeared toothpaste all over the areas, apperently it helps! I was totally dead that night, could barely move, joints were aching, heart war racing, may have been the histamine, the bees or just the adrenaline rush.....

The rest of the trip though I survived quite well, barely got stung by the millions of mosquitos, and had a blast looking for crocs, alligators, and found TWO anacondas!! The second anaconda we tracked down was almost 3 meters in length and it was just great seeing one of those in nature....

After that exciting outing in the jungle I flew to la paz in a military airplane, then made my way to Arica (northern chile), took another 30 h busride, man i am sick of those, and now i am awaiting my flight to new zealand in a few hours. South America has been phantastic, sure will not be the last time I have come here... but now I am looking forward to English speaking, English food (outch!) and 1st world tourism.. bring on New Zealand and Australia!!

South American Heartlands

2003-04-30T20:24:00.000-07:00

Since Dani only had 3 weeks to travel (poor worker bee), we moved much faster than my lazy @$$ is moving at this time, the constant travelling has actually made me mellow, not a concept known to me, for all of those who know me well. We came back from our trek and the next morning went to puno at Lake Titicaca, the highest lake in the world (3800 m, 11000 ft above sea level) and one of the largest ones as well, very impressive sight in the Peruvian/Bolivian mountains.

There, we went on a 2 day tour by boat that brought us by the Uros first, the islands that were built originally hundreds of years ago when the powerful Incas threatened to annihilate the preexisting cultures that lived around the lake titicaca. These very smart people built movable islands of sea-fern and grass (which grows in the lake), and started building up layers and layers until it would support their weight. This way they lived on the islands, mainly from fishing, and attacked the incas by boats at night, returning to their islands when the strong incas would retaliate. The incas could not swim nor did they figure out to build boats.... Pretty cool, huh!!??

Uros islands, day to day activities of locals..... making crafts for tousists (top), grinding wheat (bottom)

"Original" Uros boat, now just used to shuttle touris around...

There on the lake, we also visited the two largest islands of the lake titicaca and soon went on to the bolivian side of the lake, to the "real", original Copacabana. Very nice, but at 3800 meters above sea level not really crowded with women in string bikinis like the Brazilian counterpart... oh well, you cant have it all!

After a short trip to la paz, we took a hard-core overnight bus to Uyuni (e.g. cheap, slow, old), which managed to break down 4 times in only 14 hours (one exploded tire, another one just flat, two mechanical problems...), and all that on a road that felt like a whashed out riverbed, we could tell we were in bolivia, YEEEHAAW!! The rollercoaster of temperatures (the bus heat only worked when it was moving, obviously) was another story, as well as the crazy bolivian behind me, all in all just another day travelling :)

Anyhow, after arriving we met a really nice german couple and a crazy irish guy and decided to do the 3 day/2night trip togehther, travelling by overland fourwheel drive though the salt lakes, geysires, huge cactuses, and tons of flamingos...

Roger and a Llama in the atacama desert... my guess is as good as yours who's who? I am a mean spitter I can tell you!

A hotel completely made out of salt (bricks), you better hope it does not rain very often there...

We had a very good time, went with a great guide and our car actually did not break down for once, though the altiplano (the highlands that connect bolivia with chile) , and ended up in san pedro de attacama.... where we stayed a few days.

Gotta looove the hot springs.... it was sub zero outside though

The group, with some huge volcano behind....

We did some out of this world mountainbiking (out of this world due to the moon-like landscape that we travelled in, the driest desert in the world, grey earth crust topped off with the salt that was left when the sea evaporated millions of years ago).

Ridin Roger...

Never bored...little climbing project....

Chruch in San Pedro...

We really enjoyed the excellent but not too cheap food San Pedro de Attacama had to offer... San Pedro hosts the driest desert in the world, drier than the Sahara, with only approximately one day of rain every TEN YEARS!, so we really stocked up on water when we went biking ...
Eventually we met up with katja, a swiss girl travelling by herself around the world, and not only did we have good female company but another jass-partner (a typical swiss cardgame we can play for hours!), which was great fun! The three of us ened up travelling to La Serena and Vicuna, where we did tastings of the local pisco factory (pisco is the national drink of chile, peru and bolivia, a hard alcohol made out of wine), and went horseback riding in the beautiful valleys vicuna had to offer....

Wine and pisco tasting!

The last weekend with dani was spent in company with good friends from chile
(guillermo and macarena, their daughter and other friends), at the wonderful
beach house they own in zappallar, not much to tell, lots of sleeping, relaxing and a ton of pisco cola and pisco sour :)

Yup, its true, other than fish, chile has nothing to offer in terms of culinary, though I LOVE the completo and the italiano... see that mayo right there!!

Finally dani had to leave for home, not like ABB woulnt be able to run down the company without him :), but oh well... and i continued to patagonia, to finish what i started in february, to finally see perito moreno, the amazing over 1 km wide glacier that ends up in a mountain lake (you HAVE to check out the pictures once they are up), and the beautiful Torres del Paine National Park... once i arrived there actually i met a girl from colorado and we hiked the 4 days together, again assuring me that travelling alone not really exists, because you always find very nice, interesting or crazy people, people that though with very different backgrounds or interst, travel very well together...

After that, I decided to head down to Patagonia once more and finish up what I started but got interrupted so badly by the riverrafting accident. I flew down to Puerto Natales, and stayed with the same family that took me in and took care of me when my leg was a mess.... Paola, the mother, spent hours with me at the hospital, buying food, even driving me to the internet when i could not walk, so i had my mom send them 2 kg of the best swiss chocolate. That did the trick and I was received like a king at their house. The time in Patagonia was very nice, I was lucky even though it was very borderline off-season that we caught one last nice week down there, and hiked the Torres del Paine in four beautifully sunny days. I spent the time trekking with Jen from Colorado, a girl used to trekking and a lot more suitable than the slow english couple that we encountered every evening, hours later. The four of us had a great time, usually being the only ones left in the hostels, a few days after they closed for the winter (or summer really).

Hiking the Torres del Paine Park...

After that I decided to go see the most impressive glacier there is really, the perito moreno in Argentina, it was a good day-trip from Puerto Natales, and heck it gave me four more entry/exit stamps going back and forth... but seriously, the sight was just so impressive I am so happy I went, sometimes its funny how we spend money at home, but when traveling everything is so cheap that when a trip costs 60$ one thinks of it as too expensive... well it was worth every cent. To add to that experience I met Javier, Veronica and their kids. Javier is a VP of human resources for Bimbo Bread (employ tens of thousands of people) and more importantly a very interesting person, and we connected right away through my travels in Nepal (he had trekked the same Annapurna Circuit). I promised to visit him in Mexico City since that will be the last stop, about 10 months from now... which should be fun.

Small part of the end of the glacier... seen by boat.

Impressive gigantic pieces fall off at the end of the glacier....

Repaired Roger Ready to Rumble

2003-03-15T16:03:00.000-08:00

I left santiago 6 weeks ago and flew to lima where i was staying with Ulrike, the german teacher I met on the boat travelling to patagonia in February,... i was warmly welcomed and stayed a week in Lima, relaxing, and waiting for the arrival of Daniel, a friend i studied with He was going to be the sencond human experiment as in how long it takes until you get sick and tired travelling with Roger, Manfred usually lasted about 3-4 weeks until he needed a Roger-break :) The plan was to travel through Peru and Bolivia back to Santiago de Chile.... Once he arrived, I dragged him straigth to a party so he could not even think of getting jet-lagged... after about 3 hrs of sleep we had to get up at 4 in the morning to catch our flight to Cusco and start the travels... yeehaaw!
Once there, we had a few days of relaxing in Cusco (drinking lots and lots of mate de coca, tea made of the coca leave, primarily used for cocaine production, but in countries like Peru and Bolivia the most drinken tea, supposed to help against altitude sickness).

The (in)famous Mate de Coca Tea, most leafs are used for cocaine production worldwide, but still a healthy amount avoids the processing with hydrocloric acid (outch!), kerosene (are you kidding me??) and acetone (I am not making this up!!) and ends up as a great tasting tea that is a great remedy for so many illnesses, inculding altitude sickness.....

After the deserved rest and acclimatization to about 10'000 feet elevatoin (hitting 13'000 a few days later), we left for a four day trek. The famous Inka Trail eventually led us to the ancient site of Machu Picchu, the forgotten city of the Incas, which was abandoned hundreds of years ago (due to probably some desease they could not eradicate, so they abandoned the amazing buildings in the mountains) and fortunately was not discovered by the looting spaniards. In fact it was not discovered until early this century, and is now the greatest site of Inka arcitecture in the world.
The four day trek was very impressive, with cobblestone paths and incredibly sophisticated architecture of ascending paths through the mountains, up passes at 13'000 feet and higher. All that we did together with 12 other travellers and a herd of porters and guides!!

Roger along one of the amazingly (100s of years ago!) crafted inca stonewall

These guys were working day and night for us, carrying up to 35 kg of baggage, tents, food, even chairs and a table! Crazy.... The days flew by and Dani and I were by far the fastest trekkers, so we had plenty of time enjoying the views and waiting for our fellow travellers....

Eery early morning shot of an ancient temple...

Night three one of the israeli girls got really stomach sick, first I though someone was having a bit too much fun in the tent (hey, some have urges even in 0 Farenheit and 12'000 feet elevation) but then thought someone was getting robbed... got up in the pouring rain and pitch dark to find the girl had such stomach cramps she could barely move.... the got a bit better but we spent all day accompanying her up to the top of the pass, crutching her along the way.. Promptly in the early afternoon I all of a sudden felt a sting in my stomach... then some uncofortable feeling, and so forth (yes, I will spare you the details)...... So i spend day 3 and 4 throwing up and with bad stomach cramps, so by the time we finally reached the inka site (Dani was carrying my backpack), I needed to lay down in the office of machu picchu incorporated and sleep, while Dani explored the area with our newly made friend Lucas, a Doctor from Buenos Aires, who first helped the Israeli girl, then me with some antibiotics I gladly took. By the time the weather got better I was up and able to explore the area, and see again how incredibly advanced their knowledge of architecture and astronomy was, really an amazing experiene for me. Its nice to find that even after such a long time of travelling and seeing so many things i still get very enthusiastic about what i see, and hope this will continue to the end of my travels..

Top: Macchu Picchu in the mist and fog.... Bottom: nothing for flatlanders.... dont look (or jump) down... Dani pointing down hundreds of meters to macchu picchu...

Part 2, round the world I go....

2003-02-20T13:13:00.000-08:00

About a month ago I left Switzerland, with a smiling and crying eye, my grandmother was already so sick that she did not reckognize us anymore really, and even though I knew I would never see her again I also knew I spent the last days with her when it mattered.

I i flew to santiago with much anticipation, looking forward what will be the second part of my travels around the world with stops in South America, New Zealand, Australia and back to Asia,....though at the moment i am stuck in this little town in the very south of Chile, after a horriffic riverrafting accident that could have easily killed me (e.g. Roger's close encounter with death #2 and counting). But let me not jump ahead.... one after another...

I was warmly welcomed in Santidago by Sandra, a friend from Switzerland, who organized a room in a nice cozy student house, where mainly Chileans are living during the school year. Within one busy day I had organised everything I needed, and even got a nice city tour from a friend of Sandras before the first marathon-day was over. I decided to study spanish for three weeks, which seemed to cut out a big part of my travel time in South America, but studying diligently at this phantastic language school I chose, along with getting to know some locals, really propelled my spanish which was pretty much inexistent before, to conversational in no time. I not only studied hard but befriended our dorm's cleaning lady, whom I talked to all afternoon usually, she was supposed to clean the dorms but with most students out for vacation she chose to rather sit at the kitchen table and talk Spanish, smoking hundreds of cigarettes in the process.

Camping trip....

Hiking at Siete Tazas

That by itself would have been a good way to learn Spanish, but the fact that I met Marcela whom I spent most of my last four weeks with, really made the difference. Through her I became fluent in no time, and it was sad to leave, but I wanted to go on travelling, she needed to stay and work, oh well....

Santiago, by the way is a phantastic town for tourists, hot and sunny at this time of the year, clean (in the touristy parts of the city at least!), cheap, and wonderful people, but much, much more south-european looking than i thought...

My last weekend it was planned to spend a weekend with Marcela and some friends at Siete Tazas, seven beautiful pools connected by seven waterfalls, i got in the bus at seven in the morning, and santiago bus-drivers, who work on commision, drive like madman across town, this guy does not look on the road while giving out tickets, all the while speeding up like damn Michael Schumacher, had to make a mad stop, people fell over, and me with my backpack ended up falling and tearing my ligaments... and i thought that was enough bad luck for the year...hehehe, so I though.

Well i ended up limping across town for the last few days in santiago and once I started travelling and ended up in Pucon, this wonderful picturesque town with lakes, mountain scenery and a huge volcano covered with snow... i was already able to walk again and hiked some national park there.

I ended up meeting some friends I met way back in 98 travelling through china, Guillermo and Macarena, who have an adorable daughter only 9 months old, and hung out with them not only back inSantiago, but also in pucon, as they were down there on vacation the same time....

Guillermo, Maca and Baby

And just like life's stories are better than any movie ever made, so started the misery in disguise... Maccarena, who was staying down there with her mom and sisters that also have kids,were looking for a babysitter, I offered and had a blast looking after 4 cute chilean kids from 9 months to 7 years old, speaking only spanish, great experience. Everything went well and afterwards Maccarena would not have no for an answer when they offered a riverrafting trip the next day for me as a token of appreciation. The river was type 4-5, very hard, but not stupidly dangerous usually... I was excited to do it, but previous torrent rains had made the river swell too much, much more than normal.

At the worst (Type 5) place, our boat collided with a big rock at full speed and I fell out along with one other person, the rest were able to hold on to the boat going through these tremendous currents and clifs, i did not..

The next 60 seconds were the worst of my life, I got slammed around rocks, sucked underwater, and then my leg somehow got stuck between two big rocks... there was no way to get out, and I was getting worried I will drown. As live will have it, the guides though I was swept downriver so they sent the rescue boats there, while they sent the next boat down the rapid.. how stupid is that?? Well it saved my life... the boat overhead must have created a shock-wave that ripped my leg out of the rocks, and I finally got up to breathe again. I had a torn wetsuit, even the zipper of the one leg got ripped off and i lost both my booties... that s what I was worried about...

Broken Roger

Darth Roger....

Since then its been a mess.. doctors, hospitals and lots of calls to the insurance. My foot was broken (not a big deal really) in two places but worse my muscle tore off my shin at the back, creating a gigantic hematoma, I lost about 2 liters of blood in my leg, which created a gigantic swelling, threatening to cut off nerve and arterial blood supply to the leg, which would have needed amputation. It hurts so much I can only sleep when i take morphine-based pain relievers... bad luck man!!

I was stupid enough to have the riverrafting company drive me to the firs two doctors, which both told me I was fine (yeah, right) until I got to Puerto Natales 7 days after the accident... meanwhile I was in bad pain stuck on a 4 day cruise, on a big barge, fortunately surrounded by two med students from Switzerland that helped some.

On the boat.. never too wet to play some chess

Stranded ship

On the upside, there are worse towns to be stuck in than Puerto Natales, with its beautiful mountain scenery, the sea, and good restaurants to go to... additionally i got to know a lot of people on the 4 day boat ride who are really nice and though trekking in the nearby national parks will return in a few days and hopefully help me to get to the nearest pub to forget the pain for a while....

The woman at the Hostel is amazing, brought me to the hospital, keeps a room of 4 free for just me, at no extra price, so i can relax, drives me to the internet cafe 200 meters down the road just so i dont have to limp around, and goes shopping for me as well, man either she s the nicest person i have ever met or i must just look soooo pathetic limping around here that she cannot help but help..... probably both...

A more upbeat report will probably follow soon once I am all healed up!

Time is relative... isn't it?

2002-11-30T10:57:00.000-08:00

Five months is not a very long time when you are grinding away at home, working, and not much exciting is happening... it seems to be hard to remember what you did three days ago sometimes... not when you are travelling, every memory seems so strong, vivid, and lasting.

Five months ago I flew to Singapore with certain expectations, but they were all surpassed by far, and now I am happy to be home for a short spell, to charge up the batteries and spend time with family.
This last part was very excitinglast and painful, as it goes sometimes. The last part didnt quite work out how i had planned and I had to come home 10 days early, what had happened?

We finished off the very nice trip in nepal by travelling from the trekking destination pokhara to the main city kathmandu via a big national park, royal chitwan, where we booked a jungle walk, river cruise and elephant ride to chase various animals (or get chased vice versa, we got told excactly what to do when encountering rhinos/slothbears/tigers, etc) ...once we got there I already had a strong case of flu and diarrhea, and had to stay home for most of the trip, but still got to do the elephant ride (saw several rhinos, a crocodile, etc)...

Streets of Kathmandu had some snake charmers too....

When we returned to Kathmandu, and met up with Joseph, a guy we knew from my hometown, who has been living in nepal for 10 years and is the head of a large aid organisation that builds roads for nepal (he employs 15000 people). We got a very interesting and thorough insight into his work...and since his wife owns a swiss restaurant there i got to have a terrific dinner, the best bratwurst outside of switzerland i have EVER had, seriously.!! He also showed us around the non-touristy parts of town and we got to see large stupas (holy shrines) and got an inshight into the almost medieval handyworks still carried out at the durbar square...

Buddha statue...

This is not for feeble stomachs, skip this section if you dont like gross stories or are about to have lunch. I like eating where locals eat in any part of the world, touristy restaurants just done have the charm I am looking for, 3rd world country or not..

We did this pretty much every time, but also forgot about the golden rule sometimes,....eating at a very sad looking and deserted restaurant (eat where a LOT of locals eat), i had Chow Mein, chinese noodles, when upon my second to last spoonful I noticed a big cockroach I was about to swallow, entangled in my noodles. I am used to lots of specialties but that was probably just some poor creature that had fallen into the pot and was fried to death... decided though to put it aside, eat the rest anyways, (was still hungry and decided if the food s been contaminated it was already too late anyways....) well that did not get me sick, but something did, days later....

Deli downtown... your usual New Deli street scene....

We decided on a whim to continue to India, and travel down from New Deli to Calcutta.
Well India sure was krass i must say... arriving there we soon realized that almost as many people in much less space than china makes very overcrowded and polluted cities... there is a lot of suffering on the streets, its extremely hot, enormous amounts of people hassle Tourists on the streets (the only way to make money for most), trying to lure you into obscure buys, transports even if you dont need any, or just trying to convince you of something you dont need... We were quite toughened up by our travels, and the many quite colorful reports of other travellers, and not so easily intimidated, but it was still difficult traveling at times. Overall, we were really enjoying our trip there though, visited many beautiful sights such as the Red Fort in Dehli, the Amber Fort in Jaipur, and most extraordinary, the marvellous Taj Mahal in Agra.

The beautiful Taj Mahal

However, all good things tend to come to an end and so they did a little too early... while eating, what else: Manfred and I are very different with different opinions and personalities, so when it came to eating, he would never eat something that was not peeled or boiled, while I, on the other hand, over the first four months, enjoyed many great salads, fruits and local specialities, even when those turned out to be unboiled, cooked, or peeled,....

At the Taj....

I was aware that I stood a greater risk of getting sick, and so in India I finally did... I am feeling a bit better now, after having had severe stomach issues and high fevers for the last 12 days. I visited a Doctor in Calcutta, and was told that its best to go home and get treated in Switzlerland since they could not really figure out which bug(s) were in me.....

I was easily convinced... I had spent 3 nights in two different overnight 3rd class train squat tiolets (sometimes up to 45 minutes at a time, barely being able to unlock myself from the squat position)... hey s@#$ happens!

The doctor in calcutta was working with a drug in an FDA approval framework of an american company which produces an antibiotic against travellers diarrhea, so I got paid to use it,.. not a bad deal!

Home now, I feel like i have learned a lot on this first part of the trip, and cannot wait for my 2nd.... my grandmother is dying so I will stay here a few weeks to spend time with her and then head out to South America....

Life's adventures at 10000+ feet

2002-11-05T17:31:00.000-08:00

So i have been in Nepal for a good three weeks now and my feelings are mixed, just like the reports in the newspapers.... the country is very beautiful and though i generally feel pretty safe the reports say otherwise, and many tourists have already left the country. Maoist attacks almost every day, bombs going off in Kathmandu, and police and army presence by the hundreds, fully armed, among the beautiful and calm mountain sceneries make this trip here almost surreal, no tourist has been harmed by maoists in ages and still i believe we will leave Nepal a bit earlier as expected.

Our luxury tourist bus...

But thats not really what i was looking forward to writing you about... after a very quick stop in Kathmandu we headed out to Pokhara to drop off about 25 lbs of our travelling gear and limit backpacks to sub 30lbs, makes trekking a whole lot easier and its amazing how little you need when you need to carry it around for 10-12h a day on your back! We headed out in the morning to catch a bus to Besi Sahar, the starting point of the Annapurna trek.

New and older crop to feed the many hungry mouths of the valley

On the 5 h bus ride to the start, we immediately started talking to Lucas, a swiss mountaineer and recent medical doctor, and Wendy and Natalie, two travelers from New Zealand on a round-the-world trip, not knowing that we would be spending the next two weeks hiking together....the bus hosted some overly loud and obnoxious israeli traveling group with scores of guides and porters. To escape being trampled down or deaf by sundown, we immediately started the trek to start ahead (we had now guides or porters).... As we hiked it became more and more apparent that we had the same interests, hiking speed and got along really well. I had never hiked longer than 3 days in a row so the planned 14-16 days were posing some interesting obstacles (blisters from hell, that could only be treated with second skin and lots of cussing and swearing, tired legs, and hella stinky socks!!)

Our hiking group

Mani stones, beautiful carvings....

Funny substitution for a prayer wheel... whatever works!!

We ended up working so well together as a group that the trek took a lot less time than anticipated.... for the 12 days we were out there, we usually got up around 4-6 am, hiked until lunch-time, then relaxed for 1-2 hours in the sun (as its dry season and always sunny), then hiked for another 1-2 hours to arrive around 3 pm at a lodge, where we would secure a room for 20 rupees (no joke, between 15-25 cents per person!!), and order Dahl Bath (traditional dinner) for the whole group. Dahl bath is the nepalese natioal dish and is eaten EVERY day by locals, usually for an early lunch and for dinner. Its all-you-can-eat rice, curried lentils and vegetables, doesnt taste like much after the second day, but conserves energy (very important to have a low impact while trekking there) and fills the stomach.... We were all very keen on following the excact guidelines from the annapurna conservation project, as in the year 2000 about 80,000 people did the annapurna circuit and left hundreds of tons of garbage up the mountain while using so much firewood that whole wooden areas were cut down (to heat showers, and cook special food ordered by foreginers, as lasagne and cordon-bleu are not really ideal meals to be cooked up there... I was fine accepting these guidelines, but not being able to drink much coca cola was the hardest one!!!

One of my favorites... Annapurna in the back

Lucas being threatened by a goat...

Anyhow, to finish the story of the trek, after an acclimatization day in manang at 3500 meters, (to avoid altitude sickness or even worse a lung or brain oedema), we hiked up to thorong phedi where we trided to sleep at 4500 meters, (no luck there for me, did not close an eye at this altitude), then got up at 4 am and started the most strenuous day from 4500 meters to 5416 meters (thorong la, the worlds biggest pass).... and then descended down the pass to 3800 meters extremely exhausted to find sleep come easy (after a more than 8 hour hiking day.....

Made it to the top of Thorong La! (5400m)

Up the pass manfred and I were in very good shape, probably due to the altitude acclimatization from tibet the weeks before, so we were able to help others over the pass, especially Natalie, who was suffering from frost-shakes and exhaustion, but with her i-wont-give-up personality still made it up the mountain.... Lucas, by the way, who brought lots of medical supplies, was able to use the stuff he brought and help rule out pulmunary oedemia (water in the lungs) and treat a sick swiss couple along the way, so having a doctor along with us was certainly very comforting.... Anyhow,up the valley, the green rice fields and vegetable gardens gave way to higher altitude forests, then bushes and only rock-landscape, and on the way down it happened vice versa, and this over several days. It was so pretty, no wonder each year travelers return to do the same annapurna trek yet again, leaving behind all possibilities of communications (telephone, internet, heck electricity alltogether) and the better part of luxuries, accepting the fact that blisters are a part of hike just as sore muscles, but hiking through mountain sceneries such as the 5 annapurna peaks, or a dalaugliri icefall that compares to the worlds most stunning mountain pictures....

Curious faces...

Lamb too tired to walk...

On the way down we stopped in Tatopani (translated: hot water), hot springs and cold beer, no need to say more! We spent a day relaxing, sunbathing and drinking/eating like we hadn't done in weeks (well we really hadn't actually). After Natalie and Wendy offered a couple of bottles of wine for our help (I hauled up their packs the last few miles when the pass was almost reached and their altitude sickness kicked in), so we drank a bit much and got up with a slight case of headache, hiking our last day down to Beni and catching a bus to Pokhara, where we now have been for a few days, doing nothing but relaxing, eating great pastries and lots of meat, and planning our next few weeks....

The search for the inner I

2002-10-15T17:25:00.000-07:00

This post comes a bit earlier than originally anticipated, partly due to the fact that my impressions of Tibet are still very strong, and partly due to the strike in Kathmandu, opposing the Kings measures in Nepal, which forces us to stay in the city for a few days longer, not good to travel when demonstrations are planned, especially since there have been pretty fierce retaliations by the King's military before.

One for the engineering nerd in me... solar power: tea kettle heater!

The last 15 days i have spent on a semi-guided tour around Tibet and into Nepal, following the friendship highway.... Semi-guided mainly due to the fact that China is milking the Tibet Cow as much as it can, and only guided tours through Tibet are allowed, with many permits which are cheap for our standards, but still too expensive compared to the previous travel budget we had.....
After Wulumuqi we flew to Chengdu and organised a trip which would take us to Lhasa by plane, spending 6 days acclimatizing to the altitude change (3700 meters over sea level, or appx. 12000 feet...) then travelling onwards with guide and driver in a Toyota landcruiser to Nepal.

Roger standing in front of the potala palace....

Once arrived in Lhasa we did acclimatize for 6 days really, we spent the first four days walking around the beautiful old town (the part the Chinese did not spoil with their architecture), hang out in cafes drinking yak butter tea (which 99% of all non-tibetans despise but I somehow really like, call me an oddball), writing postcards and doing a little bit of trekking gear shopping, to be used in Nepal on our 20 day trek.... During this time not much else happened, so after the second day my hyperactive nature kicked in and I had to climb some mountains, as Manfred was not silly enough to join me i walked up two 4000+ meter mountaintops, and spent some time reading books between the prayer flags which span most tibetan mountains... really nice...

No words necessary....

After the 4th day we started by visiting the Worlds most famous monastery, the Potala Palace in Lahsa where 12 of the 14 Dalai Lamas are buried in beautiful stupas which are covered by up to 200 kg of gold per stupa, and decorated with immensley beautiful jewelry. The potala palace is gigantic, once had roomed 7000 monks before the cultural revolution, before the Dalai Lama had to flee to India. After visiting the palace, we visited 3 more great monestaries in Tibet, all with a guide that is active buddhist and that gave us a good insight into the buddhist tradition and way of living...

After the 6th day we rose early and started our 4WD trip to Kathmandu, which would last 7 days... we first passed 3 mountainpasses of which 2 were over 5000 meters (16.500 feet), and rested on a beautiful mountain lake, admiring the tibetan landscape.... After three days visiting further monasteries along the way we went onwards towards Rongbuk monastery (worlds highest monastery at 5000 meters) and the Mount Everest basecamp, just 5 miles up the road....

Scary driving manuevers got us there, not before getting stuck a few times...

Tibetan prayer flags.. always an inspiration
Unfortunately, I did get my deserved ratio of Travellers Diarreha that almost everyone gets here and there when travelling in 3rd world countries... but getting it at 5000m elevation with temperatures ranging from freezing to lets not go there.... this was no walk in the park.

Mount Everest and a Yak in the way...

Let me quickly tell you about bathrooms in

Tibet

(really just citing the average out there)....
-Imagine the worst squat toilet at train stations you have EVER seen in

france

italy

..
-Multiply by 10
-Remove the top of the building, add freezing temperatures and high winds...
-Reduce the wall height to 60 cm (with surrounding buildings much higher so everyone can watch the foreigner suffer)
-Remove all doors
-Add smell to that equation
-Much, MUCH smell
I do have a tendency to exaggerate but not on this one, trust me...

Anyhow, no complaints here, that belongs to it as much as actually being able to SEE mount everest when you have to go Nr.2, YEEEHAAW!!

To round up that trip, we did get to the everest base camp without a cloud in-sight, it was beautiful really, very cold but amazing.... sleeping at 5200 meters above sea level does not allow you to sleep much (I think i slept most of us with no more than 3 hours that night), so we descended the next day to "only" 4200 meters, where sleep came easier....

Now i am in Kathmandu, about to leave for a 20 day trek around the Annapurna mountain range, a trek of pretty epic proportions, 200-220 miles, about 10000 meters of elevation changes, and which will take us up to 5416 meters at highest altitude.... bring it on!

Wulumuqi! (yeah, you d like to know what that means right?)

2002-10-07T16:48:00.000-07:00

I am about to leave for the biggest, most exciting adventure of this trip so far, that will take me to Tibet, starting in Lhasa, travelling with a 4WD throught the Tibetan Highlands via the Friendship Highway
The last three weeks in china took me around regions sparsely populated and visited by very few foreginers. The northwestern regions of Gansu and Xinxiang, which are about evenly populated by Han chinese and Uighur people. Leaving Chengdu, i took a 22 h train to Xian, where the word famous terracota warrier army is situated.
However gave that a miss as i had seen it in 98' when I travelled the north with my ex-wife Theresa, but met up with Manfred and Francesca to continue our travels together.
After a night of good sleep (the 22h in a sleeper train do not qualify as quality rest time, the compartments are nice, but the chinese snore louder than canadian woodworkers), we took another 33 h train to Dunhuang.

Some city wall...

Random friendly locals wanting to take a picture of the weird, bearded foreigner

The train ride was much more beautiful, I like the north better, even though its sparser in terms of vegetations, the changing colors of the deserts and mountain ranges are super impressive! Thirty-three hours of constant train riding (maybe two times 30 minutes to strech the legs at a larger train station) is no picnic for the faint-hearted traveller, but with books, games (even though Manfred and Francesca do not want to play!), and a couple of interesting tourists such as the canadian guy that I chatted to for many hours about philosophy and philantropy.

The camel on the camel's back

Crescent Moon lake nestled between two large sand dunes...

Sand dune sledge race!

In Dunhuang, the lush green regions ofchina give way to sand dunes, mountain-tops covered with snow and deserts of all kinds (sand, rock, dirt)...
After a bit of a fallout wiht Francesca (gosh is she complicated, close minded and terribly boring), Manfred and I went off by ourselves for a day and decided to play real Tourist just that one time.... we rode a camel!! , and also surfed down the sand dunes on a boogie board, causing massive sand deposits all over my body which seemed to last for days to clean out... but boy was that fun! There was like a bit of a fair between dunes with tours, camel riding and boogieboarding down dunes, plus we rented a bike and explored the whole area which was much more fun than taking a taxi.

The real reason to go to dunhuan was naturally not the camels and sandunes, but the word famous 1000 buddha (Ma-Gu) caves, which were built around the time the silk-route was flourishing. Over about 1200 years, new caves were constantly added by rich and poor buddhists, adding up to 750 caves that can be visited today!!! Surprisingly most of them survived the cultural revolution, it is unclear why, the very decentralized location, or maybe they were hidden.... We spent many hours there and looked at a good two dozen caves and were astonished by how wellthese amazing caves were conserved... clearly because after the English, French, Russians and Japanese explorers stole most of the valuable goods, deporting them to their museums, the chinese ended up closing the caves again for a long time, thus no sunlight could destroy the thousands of wall paintings and buddha statues....

After Dunhuang, the real hardcore travelling started, taking bus, overnight train and overnight bus in a row. We wanted to make it to Kashgar in one step, but even with good travel organisation, one can not avoid the MASSES of people travelling in china. Coincidentally, October 1st and a week thereafter, several hundred million people were planning to return home to see their families due to a big national holiday....

We started off by taking a beater bus and then tracking down one last 1st class compartment from Dunhuang to Korla, about halfway to Kashgar, where we intended to go. There we did not know what expected us, no city for tourists.. in fact noone had heard of it, and the fact that its not in the lonely planet speaks books of how unimportant it is to tourism..... Well we got there fortunately in the morning, and after talking to about 75 different random people on the street I did what I always do... statistics.... see most people tell you their best guess, and they never say no, its supposed to be unpolite.. so deducing the correct information can be tricky...

After a bit of searching and constant asking (it helps the conversational chinese so it really is a win-win situation) we found the bus depot and one bus that claimed it would go the 600 miles or so to Kashgar..... "only" 16h.... yeah, right... and i can fly. These are very common things to get used to when travelling, why tell the truth when you can make it sound better... not that we have a problem with that, whether it takes 16 or 30 hours, we need to get there, so lets hop in....

The bus was half empty (or almost empty) when we left the station, yeehaa, would we have a row of seats all to ourselves until we reached Kashgar? Hehehe, here is a funny one... buses have to charge passengers an added tax (like 20 cents) when in a bus station, so its a bit cheaper to track down the bus along the route, even if for a 600mile ride that means after 0.25 miles... so there were hordes of people (mostly sheperds with a LOT of livestock) waiting along the road to track down the bus... cheaper, but with the risk of the bus blowing by.... well this one didnt, and stocked up about 20 of the smelliest men plus chickens, goats, whatever you can herd... in the bus. So we ended up squeezed into the back, for 28h (16h plus the time they did not account that is needed driving through completely rutted river beds, and fix a broken bus by pounding on something at the bottom with a metal object for hours during the middle of the night when we tried to sleep. We got there, not though before we saw the most amazing and scary thing during the first 5 months of travelling...... the driver was heavyset to make him a compliment, more like 5ft tall and 300lbs (1m60 and 150kg), and had a seat with shock absorber.... at one time, when we finally were able to get the bus above 60mph, we hit a huge pothole and the driver's seat ended up as a spring, catapulting the driver out of his seat, straight up... somehow he held on to the steering wheel and ended up landing back on his seat... the bus swerved like crazy and we almost tipped over at full speed.... there it goes... Roger's first encounter with Death during traveling #1, with many more to come!

Anyhow, I am exaggerating a bit as usual.... we got to Kashgar finally, the norhwestern most city of China, where in the vicinity of few hundred miles, countries such as Kyrgistan, Kasachstan, Usbekistan, India, Pakistan, Afganistan and Russia lay, and one finds an immense multi-cultural scene, even exaggerated by the worlds biggest Sunday market, where about an additional 50'000 people from the surrounding cities and countries flock into to sell everything from rug to potato, from watch to camel....

Hordes of well dressed men selling grapes at the market...

Spending 3 days in Kashgar, we did nothing much other than eat tons of mutton skewers and enjoy the different kinds of Uighur breads (much like bagels in the states), sit around and watch the people (and being watched too, obviously)... it was traveling at its best... just being part of the city... watching and interacting...

After Kashgar we decided to make our way to Wulumuqi, all the way north, trough travelling the southern silk-route to hotan, and via several busses, cross from there through the taklamakan desert via a 700 km road straight through the desert. We used a sleeper bus, wich is really only slightly more confortable then the small busses, where even 1.60 meter (5ft) chinese suffer, not to talk about my 1.93cm (6ft4), which really gets in the way sometimes i must say.

Colorful vegetable store....

I really enjoyed that part of the trip and was happy to practice my chinese and guide our travel group savely to Wulumuqi....There, in the largest city in the north (3 Mio), we left quickly for Heavenly Lake, where a lake serves as a backdrop for a scenery much like the Swiss mountains...

Colorful Market

We stayed for 2 days and slept in Yurts with Kasak people, enyoing the warm hospitality and food in the cold surroundings, and absolutely stunning views.... it was a great start for acclimatization and getting ready for the Tibetan and Nepali Mountains, with more, much more to come.....