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mountains oceans travel stories

The Beautiful, Brutal Bartang

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We have been on the road with our bikes for just over two weeks. We have been riding the road on our bikes for about 8 of those 17 days (the other 9 spent getting here from southern China via train, bus, and van), the most recent 8 consecutive days (or 6, if you don’t count rest days). It is July 5th, we are in the town of Karakol, a high elevation winter settlement sitting snug as a tick next to the giant Lake Karakul of Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains. It is currently near-deserted as most of its inhabitants have taken their herds (mostly yak and goat) to the nearby Bartang Valley for summer grazing.

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Surfing and Waxing Philosophical: Notes from Kuta Lombok

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Waxing.

 

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.

 

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Floating in an Endless Sea

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What if you lost someone at sea?  You woke up at midnight, to relieve them of their watch, and you couldn’t find them on the boat.  Anywhere.  It’s not as if they popped off to the corner store to buy milk.  Or you forgot that today was the day they were flying to Spain.  You are in the middle of the Pacific.  It’s a 35 foot boat.  There is a set number of square feet both above and below decks.  You’ve combed every single inch of each one of those square feet.  And the person is simply not on the boat.  Where could they be other than floating somewhere in that endless sea?
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Whack-a-Mole: Sailing the Tasman Sea

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The sailing trip from New Zealand to Australia inevitably takes you across the Tasman Sea, aka, “The Ditch” (though this is a bit like calling your 300lb friend Tiny). There are more formidable seas in the world, truly, but enough boats have disappeared into the Tasman to inculcate most sailors with, if nothing else, a healthy respect for this stretch of salt water. When we sailed out of Whangarei,NZ, Australia bound, my “healthy respect” was something more like a dog worrying a bone.

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Komodo Dragons

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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.

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Spear Fishing in New Zealand: Giant Kings and Hungry Sharks

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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.

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Noserlies: Sailing from Fiji to New Zealand

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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.

 

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Passing Out Under Water

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This is a story about passing out under water, something that I experienced for the first time about 10 months ago in the waters of French Polynesia. Before it happened, I viewed the prospect of black out with awe: even the most experienced and amazingly talented divers (of which I am neither) pass out, a seeming signal of their limit-pushing and dedication. But post-black out, how naïve my previous views seemed, because while free-diving itself is a master’s skill acquired through great practice and patience, it takes absolutely no talent to blackout.

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Atoll Tale: Yarns of the Remote South Pacific

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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.

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About Us

We are two regular superheroes: tight spandex, obvious muscles, 'special' abilities. We like holding our breath, eating the delicious food, up hill walking, touching rock, beer-coffee-spinach smoothies, and words. Together we are dellandtucker, apart we are just lonely.

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