September 2008
Monthly Archive
Guest post: Sleeping around
Posted by Caitlin on 30 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Europe, Guest post, North America, Transport
A guest post on sleep deprivation on the long journey from San Francisco to Rome.
This is a guest post from freelance writer and tour escort Angela K. Nickerson. Her first book, A Journey into Michelangelo’s Rome (Roaring Forties Press, 2008) combines her great passions - travel, art, history, and Italy – in one volume. She can be reached through her website Michelangelo’s Italy or blog Just Go!.
At one point or another every traveller ends up sleeping in a train station. Not long ago it was my turn. I am not even sure when we actually left Sacramento. But sometime on a recent Thursday I zipped my suitcase shut, and we loaded ourselves in the car for the drive to San Francisco. By this point I was completely exhausted. I hadn’t slept much the night before in the last-minute dash to put work to bed, to tidy up the house, and to do laundry so I didn’t have to run around without clothes again.
Having not slept I thought perhaps I would be able to sleep on the plane. Not so much. We flew Virgin Atlantic, and they offer far too much to keep you awake. I am used to having a TV screen in front of me, but the selections… I had my choice of more than a dozen sitcoms, about 35 movies, multiplayer video games, music galore, and text messaging. Who can sleep? First I had to challenge the rest of the plane to a game of Trivial Pursuit. Do you know Lord Byron’s first names? I do. And I won 300 points for that piece of trivia, too. No one else on the plane got it right.
After proving my trivial dominance, I text messaged R in the seat next to me. This is particularly handy for covert operations and spy games. You can text anyone on the plane – including the very hot Brit in 62A. There were a few things I would have liked to text him. Unfortunately, R was sitting right next to me, so I was reduced to texting him. And he wouldn’t reply – spoil sport!
With no one to text back, I set up my personal playlist – all the movies and TV shows I wanted to watch. I decided to go with a British theme, so I chose two episodes of “Super Nanny” – both featuring children with decidedly filthy mouths. I watched a British show called “Peep Show” which wasn’t nearly as interesting as it sounded. I picked several movies carefully avoiding anything too action-packed or which required reading subtitles.
We had dinner – a beef stew that was surprisingly good. Then I settled back to sleep. But I couldn’t. I ended up watching my entire play list instead as my eyes simply refused to close. I was exhausted, but nothing helped.
Finally, just as they were getting ready to serve breakfast and land, I fell asleep.
But that just got us to London. Our connecting flight was delayed because of weather, so R and I had time to buy and write a few postcards. Finally, looking and feeling like death-warmed-over, we crawled onto our next flight to Milan. Both of us were asleep before we even left the ground. Of course, the flight was very short – only two hours. And when we landed in Milan that cat nap didn’t exactly leave us refreshed.
Our plan was to take a train from Milan to Rome, and there were many from which to choose. But… by the time we got to the train station, we had missed them all. Our only choice: an overnight train that left at 11.20pm – giving us another 4.5 hour wait. I stood at the ticket counter and cried. In my exhaustion I’d been looking forward to that train trip as a chance to sleep. And now we had to wait. All I wanted was to sleep. I was exhausted. My head hurt. I couldn’t stay awake any longer.
So, we found a bench. It was stone. It was filthy. But it was flat. We perched our luggage as foot rests, and I lay down with my head in R’s lap. For nearly five hours we took turns sleeping. Given my experience with luggage and train stations, we didn’t dare sleep at the same time. But there, in the train shed in Milan, I had what may have been the best nap of my entire life. The droning hum of the trains drowned out the conversations nearby. R’s lap made for a fantastic pillow, and I simply slept.
By the time our train arrived and we boarded for the night, I felt more human. I smelled, however, like a zoo. Our little berth had two bunk beds and a tiny sink. No room to truly get clean, but we both sponged down. At this point we had been traveling for 27 hours, and we had eight more to go. But we had a place to lay down at long last.
As we pulled out of Milan for Rome, I fell asleep, rocked by the train as it slowly crept through the dark Italian night.
Thanks, Angela. I’m a veteran of long-haul flights - London to Sydney being a popular route for me. Please see this post for practical strategies on long-haul flights. - Caitlin.
Best of the web: Green travel links
Posted by Caitlin on 30 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Blogging, Ethics, Events, Trends
There’s a green theme to this week’s round-up of travel links.
- Liz at Perceptive Travel writes about TripAdvisor’s $1m charity give-away. Charities in the running include environmental organisations such as Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy, and the National Geographic Society, as well as development and aid organisations such as Medicins Sans Frontiers and Save the Children.
- Over at Intelligent Travel, Suzanne Roberts writes about the greening of the Burning Man festival, while Meg Weaver writes about a museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park that claims to be the greenest in the world, and also in San Fran, Pat Tanumihardja turns her attention to sustainable sushi.
- A piece by Elizabeth Becker in The Washington Post examines the impact of mass tourism on the planet titled Don’t Go There. It makes sobering reading. (Link via Intelligent Travel).
- Pam at Nerd’s Eye View recently hobnobbed with royalty at the Conde Nast World Savers Congress, covering the event on Twitter [search using the #WSC code], and writing two thoughtful pieces on her own blog. Beata Loyfman and Julia Bainbridge have also blogged about this on the Conde Nast site, and Conde Nast Traveler has published notes from the event online.
- Harry Pearson on the Guardian’s Travel Blog bids farewell to the passenger ferry from Newcastle to Norway - killed off by cheap flights apparently.
- Over on the Emerald Isle (yes, I’m stretching the green theme a bit here), food blog A Forkful of Spaghetti reviews breakfast at Denis Cotter’s Cafe Paradiso.
- Finally, don’t be too alarmed at these green polar bears featured by Jeremy Elton Jacquot at Tree Hugger.
Photo Friday: Village children in Uganda
Posted by Caitlin on 26 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Africa, Photo post
Uganda; April 2006
I had the privilege to go to Uganda to write about a sustainable coffee project in April 2006. It was my first time in Africa, though not my last; I’ve since been to Tanzania, Senegal and Tunisia.
Uganda is a country that has suffered enormously in modern times, particularly in the 1970s under the ruthless Idi Amin. In some places, entire villages were wiped out. Certainly the natural landscape bears the scars of this era, with many of the forests felled and wildlife hunted out for food.
Yet everywhere we went, we were welcomed by happy, smiling people who seemed genuinely excited and pleased to see us. The reception of some of the children, crowding in and waving, made me feel like a queen!
Unlike in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania, where exposure to tourists has taught people to expect payment for having their photo taken, everyone was delighted to pose for photographs and when I showed them the image in my digital view finder it was, for some, the first image of themselves they’d ever seen. On my return to London, I printed copies and sent them back care of the coffee company to give back to the villages.
This post is part of Photo Friday, hosted by Debbie at DeliciousBaby. For all of this week’s submissions, see here.
Carnival of Cities
Posted by Caitlin on 24 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Blogging
This week’s Carnival of Cities is up at Sheila’s Family Travel Logue, with a great range of posts from New Delhi to Paris. Check it out!
Best of the web: Emergency landings, book deals, travelling solo, photography, surfers’ baggage headaches, Western Australia, Latvia, budget beach travel
Posted by Caitlin on 24 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Blogging, Transport, Trends
- * Pam from Nerd’s Eye View on some unscheduled excitement (not the good kind) on her flight to New York to cover the Conde Nast World Savers conference (see her Twitter feed for the conference coverage).
- * The Lost Girls - three New Yorkers who blogged their way around the world - have signed a book deal. (Link via the Perceptive Travel blog).
- * Kim Wildman on Wild About Travel + Writing extols the perks of travelling solo and shares tips on travel photography.
- * Speaking of beautiful photography - these pics of Italy on Travel Planners are just stunning! (Link via Darren of Travel Rants fame on Twitter).
- * Intelligent Travel on the cost of baggage fees for surfers. (I imagine skiiers would have the same problem).
- * Lara from Cool Travel Guide points us to her article on Western Australia for Wanderlust magazine.
- * Europe A La Carte on Ventspils in Latvia - it’s a new destination for me.
- * Beach destinations for the thrifty traveller on the Guardian’s travel site.
Photo Friday: Farm girl in the NSW Southern Highlands
Posted by Caitlin on 19 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Australia, Photo post
Southern Highlands, NSW, Australia; January 2006
This is my sister Emma, age three, at the family farm in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, Australia. It’s a beautiful part of the world with rolling hills and is quite evocative of parts of England and Ireland - although in this photo the drought is much in evidence. Emma is sitting on the hay bales, about 100 metres from the house, dressed her favourite pink dress and boots. You can also see my father striding down the field on the left hand side. This was a weekend property when this photo was taken but my dad and his wife and my small sister and brother have now moved down from Sydney full time.
Photo Friday: Chinese New Year in London
Posted by Caitlin on 12 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Europe, Photo post
London, UK; February 2005
London has a large Chinese community and every year for Chinese New Year there’s a huge parade from Trafalgar Square, up Charing Cross Road and into Chinatown. Lion dancers prance the streets of Chinatown, devouring lettuces that hang out of shop windows. (The lettuces are not the point; they contain money and this is one of the main community fundraising events of the year). All around, street vendors sell tasty snacks and pinches of gunpowder wrapped in newspaper that let off a loud bang when you throw it to the ground. In my first year in London, I went to watch the parade with my boyfriend and half a dozen friends, and took this snap of a man in an opera costume.
This is part of the Photo Friday event hosted at DeliciousBaby. Check out all this week’s photos.
Driving to the end of the earth: Alaska Part 4
Posted by Caitlin on 12 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Guest post, North America, Transport
This is the final day of guest blogger Roger Norum’s four-part series on driving Alaska’s Haul Road with his father.
To my surprise, GPS is a real advantage on a trip that follows a single, solitary road. For one, knowing the distance to the nearest petrol station is essential – especially if it’s hundreds of miles away and you’re only getting 12 miles to the gallon. But you also get unexpected navigational gems, too, such as when the little gizmo announces “Turn left. Continue straight on unpaved road for two hundred and thirty two miles. Then turn right.”
This is the longest stretch of road without service stations in North America – though quite frankly these days I’m happy not to be reminded of the painfully high cost of North American gas (as much as $7.40 in one remote village). An irony of globalisation: Alaska holds and produces 20% of America’s crude oil, yet petrol prices here are consistently among the highest in the country.
During the 1980s, in the early years of the pipeline, the oil companies were consistently pumping 2 million barrels of oil a day out of Prudhoe Bay. Today, this number has shrunk to 400,000. Some argue that this is due to the pipeline rusting away at various points (the pipe was designed with a 30 year planned obsolescence – 31 years ago). Depletion theorists, meanwhile, assert that the reduced flow is due to the fact that the fields are rapidly drying up, and they regularly make calls for the US government to prioritise locating alternative means of energy production.
“Here, let’s give you a chance to stretch your legs,” Norm beams, before pulling over to the bank of the Sagavanirktok River – “The Sag” to locals. At the edge of the river, Norm runs his fingers over a beige rock and fondles it gently. “This is so neat!” he whispers excitedly. He strokes the figure of a plant etched in the stone, explaining that it is fossilised coral – sedentary rock that existed as marine life eons ago and, after being tectonically uplifted into to the mountains, is now slowly eroding its way back into the ocean. Again, a cycle of regeneration – though one which takes millions of years to complete. Norm confides in me that we haven’t stopped so that we can stretch our legs, but so that he can forage for a few pet rocks to add to his collection.
As I leave Norm, his shoes now soaked as he putters about the water cuddling a palm full of rocks, a family of mosquitoes is buzzing about impatiently at the van, waiting to call shotgun. Suddenly, a golden plover lands in front of the van and cocks his head to look at me quizzically. The plover has arrived here at Alaska’s North Slope for breeding after enduring an amazing 2-day, 2,200-mile transoceanic migratory flight from western Hawaii. Feigning injury, the bird begins a quick limp towards the highway, hoping to lure me away from its nest, which it presumes I am preying on. It hops briskly towards the road, scampering across the highway before ducking into the thick, dried brush. Norm returns from the river, catching sight of the plover, who is now fluttering eagerly about the tussock waiting for us to depart. Norm lets out a sigh and smiles over at me, very occupied with swatting away the mosquitoes and spraying myself with OFF! [mosquito repellent]. He pauses for a moment, clutching one of his fossils. “Life is pretty good right now,” he asserts, deadpan and candid, before hopping into the van and speeding us off south for the few hundred remaining miles before America begins, leaving a spoor of camel-coloured dust and the tiny, rugged plover in our wake.
This completes the end of Roger Norum’s guest series on Alaska. Read part 1 , part 2 or part 3 of Roger’s journey here.
A very warm thank you to Roger Norum for his contribution. Roger has previously written about Oxford for Roaming Tales and you can read more about him here
Driving to the end of the earth: Alaska Part 3
Posted by Caitlin on 11 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Guest post, North America, Transport
This is the third part of guest blogger Roger Norum’s four-part series on driving Alaska’s Dalton Highway, or Haul Road, with his father.
The Dalton is the gateway to the most remote regions of the interior and northern parts of Alaska and offers a rare glimpse of America’s Arctic – an opportunity to imagine what gold prospectors first saw when they flooded into the Klondike and Brooks Range over a century ago in search of golden riches.
Invariably, a disproportionate amount of the state’s population has arrived from somewhere else. The average Alaskan tends to be very, very outdoorsy. Jillian Simpson, for example, is a tall, striking ex-Bostonian who arrived in Alaska 11 years ago for a vacation and never left. The day I meet Jillian, who is now head of overseas marketing for the Alaska State Tourist Board, she is happening on her way out of the office for a weekend hike with friends to camp on the banks of the Arctic Ocean.
But it’s not that the average Alaskan happens to be interested in the outdoors; it’s that you have to be outdoorsy to get around.
Even for outdoorsy types, though, walking around on Alaskan tundra for any period of time can be extremely exhausting. The land in much of Northern Alaska is riddled with tussocks, fibrous stems and leaves of cotton grass and sedges that wobble and crack as you step on them, making twisted ankles and wet socks commonplace.
Not that driving here is any cakewalk. Vehicles kick up thick clouds of dust and mud, rocks occasionally flash into windshields and potholes that could easily take out an axle mandate a lot of deft manoeuvring at the wheel. Visibility is rarely more than a pipe dream. Many of the more rugged parts of The Dalton are groomed on a daily basis by maintenance crews, who wet the road down into a slurry, mow and shave it with Caterpillars and then add calcium chloride to enable the road to retain moisture and keep it from disintegrating into dust.
Nor is life made any more sustainable by the masses of bugs that can descend on northern Alaska at any time of the day, commando-strength no-see-ums that despite their magnitude deterred few of the thousands of soldiers and common folk who came here to build the state’s major roads in the last century. Before these civilians signed on, their employment contracts required the admonition, “Mosquitoes, flies and gnats will not only be annoying but will cause bodily harm.”
Still, bodily harm notwithstanding, there can be no better time to explore Alaska than summer. Come mid-August, the brown, greys and rich greens of willows, birch and bearberries turn a brilliant crimson and goldenrod, as the coats of ptarmigan and snowshoe hare morph from brown to white; only the evergreen spruce maintains its colour.
In the forested reaches, grizzlies and black bears putter about the rivers and lakes, while on the plains caribou find shade under the pipeline when they’re not fraternising with shag-carpeted musk oxen. An ugly, hefty beast with the face of a cow, the form of a bison and the furry coat of a English sheep dog, the musk ox is taxonomically a goat. It looks horrifically prehistoric – an animatronic fossil of a mammal that should have died out millennia ago along with the woolly mammoth. Though staunchly herbivorous, they can easily take out their predators – grizzlies and wolves – by trampling them to death.
As we trundle along the southern reaches of the highway, Norm calls out through the Ford’s makeshift loudspeaker system, “Does anybody remember what a tree looks like?” He’s right. We are in Alaska, the most forested state in the nation, but I haven’t seen a single conifer since we’ve arrived. South of Coldfoot, if the side of the highway isn’t completely barren, it’s lined with miles of burned stubby, half-naked black spruce trees that look ripe for another lightning fire. One fire four years back decimated 500,000 acres in this area; plains of naked, ashen-coloured stalks of dead spruce that stretch towards the heavens. “Mother Nature puts them out when Mother Nature is ready,” Norm advises. It’s all part of the ecological cycle: fires remove dying spruce, readying the soil for fireweed, then spawn willow, aspen and birch, followed by an undercover of moss and lastly the growth of new, healthy spruce. This whole process, which takes several years, is a natural renewal that is one of nature’s most productive cycle of habitat regeneration and maintenance.
Read part 1 and part 2 of Roger’s journey here, and stay tuned for the next installment tomorrow.
Driving to the end of the earth: Alaska Part 2
Posted by Caitlin on 10 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Guest post, North America, Transport
This is part 2 of Roger Norum’s four-part guest post on his road trip through Alaska with his father.
Driving in Alaska is an experience amplified by the extended summer hours of near-Arctic daylight, an unsettling phenomenon that deceives the senses: driving without headlamps at 10pm; a glowing red sunset at midnight; waking up to a “dawn” chorus of birdsong at 3am.
Behind us sprawls the Brooks Range, an alpine landscape that would look less out of place on the moon: rifted moguls of deep brown crags, pillowy hunks of ice that cling to and blanket the rock and families of Dall sheep and moose that wander glacial hills and trudge along S-shaped rivers. Everywhere are the taciturn landscapes of northern Finland and western Mongolia. In fact when seismic geologists first arrived here in the 1950s, they surveyed the landscape and saw one thing: Iran. They saw strong similarities in the anticline, the syncline and the way the hills delicately roll. Suspicion led to hunch led to a short drilling exploration in 1967 that led to the discovery of bazillions of barrels of petroleum buried beneath the sea: the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay.
The Dalton, you see, was not built for you and me. It was slapped down by private oil companies over five months in 1974 to enable transport vehicles hauling supplies and machinery for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, the US oil industry’s petroleum aqueduct. Costing some $8 billion to build, the pipeline is still the only way to get crude oil from the ocean to the transport tankers waiting in Valdez. Still, Prudhoe Bay oil is very, very crude – saturated with sulphurs – so raw, in fact, that many refineries dread having to process shipments of Alaskan oil, and many won’t even accept it. Yet the oil produced here accounts for a whopping 20% of US oil production.
Aside from the odd caribou, who feed on the lichen that grows here, visitors driving the Dalton are accompanied by a single, lone travelling companion: the pipeline. A massive steel tube that groans its way south along the tundra for over 800 miles and crosses more than as many rivers and streams. About 50 miles south of Deadhorse, the pipeline re-emerges from the permafrost, where it remains mostly above ground for 420 miles until it reaches southern Alaska. The frigid temperatures outside (–90°F [-67°C] in the winter) and scalding temperature of the oil inside (140°F [60°C]) mean that the 48-inch diameter pipe had to be constructed to be able to expand and contract accordion-like without breaking.
There are no towns or villages along the 414-mile stretch of The Dalton and, by God, there’s nothing that ever comes close to a city. The half dozen settlements up here have been established to accommodate the traffic of lorries transporting heavy industrial objects north and a few bewildered tourists – European and American middle-aged couples who want to keep on trucking after driving the much-mythologised Alcan Highway through British Columbia and the Yukon. Service stops up here are little more than oversized gift shops offering excessively large selections of moose-related trinkets, corny bumper stickers and wicked expensive liquor. Along the route, we pass a handful of what I came to call “inconvenience stores” for their criminal prices (A transport koan rhetorically asks: If you, the proprietor of a roadside shop, charge me $23.60 for a six-pack of beer at a roadside shop, and I beat the crap out of you for attempted highway robbery, will anyone hear your pain?).
Read part 1 of Roger’s journey here, and stay tuned for the next installment tomorrow.