mountains oceans travel stories
Below is a 10min video we made of our time cycling through France. It’s not good, it’s not interesting, but if you’re our mothers or someone really interested in cycling and/or France it might be worth watching. Also there are all kinds of cool tunnels (click on the vimeo logo on the bottom left for a slightly better quality).
Tidak Apa Apa
From the upstairs porch outside of my simple corner room the smooth lines of Lance’s famous right hand reef break appear, dark blue hills on the march. As they near the white washed reef an invisible zipper rips open the surface of the mounds, and the white foam interior pounces forth. Still air and ample swell have brought out the afternoon surfers. A three-story powerboat anchored in the channel has disgorged a few wealthy Australians, little floating blotches in the water that move slowly toward the lineup.
On every wave is saddled a lithe rider, emerging in an act of optical trickery from behind the wave, appearing in the critical plane of smooth blue just ahead of the pitching waterfall, riding with fast pumping dips along the face, or if the wave allows, dropping low and carving in a quick arc toward the lip, whipping the tail of the sharp surf board in a plume that joins the foam, then stalling at just the right point near the wave’s upper edge, allowing themselves to be caught by the maw of the beast. One will reemerge, unbitten; another will disappear, consumed and digested, popping up after the water settles like a stubborn shit.
I want to paddle out but I’m limping from a wound on my knee, and the gash on my left thigh still burns, even though it was weeks ago that I tore it open on the reef. It doesn’t seem to heal right, staying wet from days of surfing, or spear fishing. This is a life in the water and it’s wearing on me. Three hours of surfing yesterday and another three today. I feel surfed out, as they say. Still I have the urge to paddle, to test my chances at seeing the inside of the thing, to keep practicing the nuances so that I might relax in the moment, place myself into the most critical edge of a breaking wave and escape, flying over the lip, returning stoically (and secretly gleefully) to join the others, as though nothing out of the ordinary happens out there.
We sailed into the largest city in East Indonesia, Kupang, in the beginning of August 2017. My long time girlfriend, Della, and I were completing an extended trans-Pacific crossing that started in Panama in February 2016. Sailing on other people’s boats for various legs that included stays in many of the island nations of the South Pacific including most recently New Zealand and Australia. In total we had sailed over 10,000nm, and gone nearly another 10,000 miles by land on our path to Indonesia. As soon as we landed on a small rubble-littered patch of beach in a busy section of Kupang I was surprised at how stark the difference between the other islands of the South Pacific was to this. Having spent the last 8 months in the westernized countries to the south maybe I was unconsciously expecting what I had last experienced in the more equatorial Pacific, quiet Polynesian island communities. On our first walk around Kupang, from what I immediately observed in the organization of the buildings, the way that people approached and addressed me, the image of the land and the people taken as a whole, this was going to be a completely different experience than anything we had seen thus far. While we were walking through the overrun streets, blindly hot and dusty at the end of the dry season, Della turned to me and said, ‘It feels like we’re in Asia’. It is clear to anyone that attempts to draw cultural lines on a map that such lines are slippery, naturally promiscuous, and hard to tack down, but I knew what she meant, and that in itself has meaning.
Mt Rinjani in a day: 2600m altitude gain, 34km round trip, 16hr hike.
We left the homestay at midnight without a moon to help us. We were at the rim camp by 4am and could see the long chain of headlamps ascending the ridge as tired campers were trying to get to the summit before sunrise. By 9am we were standing on the summit. Most of the 2 day climbers having already descended, we had the top (mostly) to ourselves. The sky was stark blue and the wind began to abate and loose its chill as the sun climbed into the day. We rested, spun a few pirouettes on the pinnacle and made a rapid decent. Beers were cracked and guzzled back on the front porch of our homestay by 4pm. It’s a long day, and only for the confidant and competent. It might be illegal, it might blow out your knees, but if you are looking for information on how to do it, read on.
Komodo dragons are like saltwater crocodiles with python heads, but by midday they have assumed the posture of overfed house cats, laying flattened in the shade, one arm pointing to the north of their kingdom and the other pointing to the south of it. They notice you gawking at them, taking their picture, they pose, regal in their own minds, with the confidence of naked fat men posing at a figure drawing class. They lift their head for a moment, slightly, to the side, their better side, just a bit, or maybe they blink, one long undersided-eyelid blink that drags on too long, maybe they just fell asleep a little. They dream of standing over your open carcass, digging with wet slurps, jostling for position, grinning, laughing, eating. Or maybe they don’t dream at all.
I’m haunted by the image of a large fish emerging head first through a mist, snaking in that way that a large fish swim, toward me, mouth slightly agape, breathing, lidless and watching. I have tried to tell my free diving friends about this, I dream about it, my mind makes stories of every variation from the same beginning when I close my eyes, they always laugh it off, not wanting to engague in any conversation founded on unsterdy ground. I’m not loosing touch, it’s not that bad, I’m simply in the spotlight of a memory, it will fade, maybe faster if I exorcise it. It’s a short and uneventful tale, but I think I have to tell it, if only that I can stop it from replaying in my dreams.
Part I – Don’t panic, and stay away from the tail.
I woke up feeling dehydrated, with one of those headaches that only goes away if you can get back to sleep. I was in a tent with wool blankets pulled over my head. I could smell the septic pond already. Why had we camped next to the septic? Oh yeah, we were anti-social and it was the only spot with no one else ‘living’ in it. We were like Canadian pioneers, moving to shitty places because it was the only land left for the taking. It was supposed to be a rock climbing day, we were in the north western tip of the south island of New Zealand because there was a fantastic crop of limestone cliffs, but that day my tips were raw, my hands were stuck into half-cocked fists, I guess claws is the word, and they were not responding to commands. All I needed to do was sleep some more, and pee, and drink more water. I was hungover. Troy, the camp master, was outside talking to the girls, who must have been drinking tea judging from the period of their banter.
Are you guys traveling with wet suits? Troy asked.
Yeah, why?
There is a mass whale stranding out at The Spit and they need volunteers with wetsuits.
I’m sitting on the lee side of the boat against the dodger window, reading in the short crescent of shade left by the midday sun. Jade, a worthy 45ft center cockpit Alden-designed ketch is bobbing, not lazily, but also not violently, hove-to against a fresh ‘noserly’ breeze. Coined by the captain, a noserly is a wind that insistently turns onto the nose of the boat, halting the possibility of any forward progress. The direction of this demonic breeze depends solely on which direction one desires to bear. Having sailed south for a week and a day after leaving the fair ports of Fiji on a kind east south-east wind with persistent and improbable high pressure prevailing, blue skies and spectacular sun sets, we have come to a stand still 200 miles north of New Zealand, for 4 days running, stuck in the eye of a noserly.
We entered the only pass into Manihi on a clear day with casual sailing winds coming over the land and across the lagoon. The entrance to the atoll, barely the width of an avenue, welcomed us with an incoming tide. The water that carried us was a moving glass, magnifying and distorting the white coral formations below, a funhouse mirror melted and flowing into the strange ring of land. Wild, carnival colored fish, clearly visible below the warped surface, passed on other-worldly errands, inattentive to our arrival. This was the first land that had been sighted in a few weeks, and all of us were excited to explore. But nearing the much awaited firm earth we were settled upon by an uneasy feeling, an uncanny stillness, maybe just the normal stillness of land, or a faint and unsettling smell, maybe just the ever present but unnoticed effluvium of loam and root and human dwelling not present at sea.
Part I: I explain in a general way what is going on in my life, and why I have a website.
I haven’t been home in more than a year. I don’t own a house, so I ought to say I haven’t had a home in more than a year. I’m 32 years old. Everything I own is stored in the back of an old pickup truck in a warehouse in Maine, or with me now, in my bag, on the other side of the world. I have a girlfriend. She isn’t really my girlfriend but she won’t let me call her my wife unless we are in a dangerous or compromising position that requires tactful escape. We are not married. I love her most truly. We have done too many things together to recount even to myself. We lived in New York City, way up town, in San Francisco on a hill too steep to bike, on a sailboat off an island in Portland Maine, and when we met, we were just two kids sharing a bed between classes in Portland Oregon. Now we are traveling, not living anywhere, sleeping in so many places, always together.