People like reading lists, they say. The problem is they (the lists) tend to get a bit same-y after a while (people do, too, arguably), so the trick as a writer is to come up with something new and exciting. Here is one you likely never saw before: 5 top ways to get hurt traveling!
Traveling gives me a great deal of joy, it is true, but it’s fair to say that ain’t always the case. So in ascending order of pain and hurt and general discomfort, here are the five worst experiences connected with my travels over the years:
5. Went kayaking off the wild east coast of Sardinia, wearing lots of sunblock but no good sunglasses. Fierce sun, wind and reflections on the water combined with intense heat to create a witches’ brew of salt and chemicals that got into my eyes, rendering me effectively blind, as I was utterly unable to keep my baby blues open – something of a problem when one has to navigate dangerously bad mountain roads to get back to base. In the end I drove at a snail’s pace, stopping over and over to pry my peepers open enough to rinse them with water. It took a night in absolute darkness before I could see normally again.
4. Went diving in the Andaman Sea on a live-aboard boat. That’s a small ship that is out in tropical heat for a week, with everyone living in close quarters. Long story short, I caught something that developed into high fever right as we were disembarking; flying home from Thailand via London with 39+ degrees’ temperature in cattle class was literally a nightmare – I was hallucinating, and so weak they had to get me a wheelchair to go from one plane to the next. Once home I slept more or less straight for 48 hours before finally recovering.
3. First time paragliding in Spain. One of the first attempts to get airborne properly, running down a gentle hill, I managed to rip a muscle in my groin just as I was lifted into the air. The pain was excruciating, but the forward movement and physics kicked in and I continued upwards, which meant I had to fly and land for the very first time while trying not to black out from the agony. To this day I don’t know how I managed. It took months of grueling exercise to regain something like normal function in my leg.
2. Another diving excursion, this time to the Seychelles. Made the rookie mistake of having local food that was probably washed in local water. Within a few hours our stomachs were rumbling, and before long we were two people writhing in gut-wrenching pain, before embarking on a night of horrors, as our bodies went into overdrive trying to purge themselves of the foreign germs; trust me, there is no feeling quite like switching back and forth between projectile vomiting and having your intestines go full fecal Jackson Pollock on the one shared toilet, whilst your friend is knocking on the door to be let in to have their turn, NOW.
1. A romantic trip to Granada and Alhambra might not seem like an obvious winner of this list, but my companion on this sojourn was someone I was very much in love with, and she had agreed to go only as a way to end our relationship on a high note, as she felt we weren’t right for each other. So while it was a lovely experience, and the sights of Alhambra a wonder to behold, it was still with very mixed feelings I went on it. And at the end she did what she had said she would, and ended things between us. She broke my heart, and it took years to mend.
So there you are. A Top 5 List like no other. Honorable mentions go to Barcelona and Amsterdam, where I broke my PBs for marathons – painful experiences in and of themselves, but disqualified because they also gave me a lot of masochistic joy. Hope you enjoyed. If you think you have my travel horror stories beaten, let me know in the comments!
Just off the coast of East Africa, a thirty minute flight north of Zanzibar, lies the tropical volcano island of Pemba. And if that sounds like the first sentence of an adventure story, it is precisely because it is.
It takes an effort to get here; from Brussels to Istanbul, from Istanbul to Zanzibar (via Kilimanjaro), and then one last tiny plane to Pemba domestic airport, an airstrip with a shed made of corrugated metal for a terminal. And even then the journey isn’t over. We’re picked up by a driver and taken on a bumpy ride to the northernmost tip of the island, where we finally arrive at one of the two resorts in existence here, the Gecko Nature Lodge.
You see, unlike its more famous neighbour to the south, Pemba is largely devoid of tourism, and all the better for it. This is also the reason why we have come here; its relative obscurity is one of the factors explaining why the surrounding waters are home to some of the best dive sites in the world. Corals are dying everywhere because of global warming and over-exposure, but here they are still perfectly healthy, and there is an abundance of them, too.
After last year’s less than impressive diving adventures in the Andaman Sea and on Gozo, my friend Lesli (of Sardinian and Appalachian fame) and I have high hopes for this place, and it doesn’t disappoint. The place is right on the coast, next to a local village, and surrounded on all sides by encroaching jungle of the kind you’d expect Tarzan to feel at ease in.
Our hosts, Russian Ekaterina and French Lucas, have only been here for two months, but make us feel at home right away. The fact that there is only one more diver here at first makes it feel almost as if we are their personal guests rather than paying customers, which is lovely.
We’re exhausted from our travels, and hide out from the midday heat in the guest huts that lie hidden in amongst the mango trees and banana palms and other vegetation. It’s a shock to the system, suddenly being subjected to heat and humidity on a tropical scale, but as the afternoon wears on, we acclimatise ourselves, and when the sun sets over the African continent we are seated on the water’s edge, sundowners at hand, ready for the spectacle to begin in every sense of the word.
Light, camera, action!
The next day we start with an early breakfast of eggs and freshly baked bread out in the open (but under a roof made of bamboo and fronds to hide us from the elements), then we gather our gear and head out in the rim boat to the dive sites.
I feel the usual excitement rise within as we follow the coast and take in the sapphire waters and emerald forests. Dara, our fellow diver from Ireland, has been here several days already, and Lesli is three times more experienced than I, but I’m always a little apprehensive when diving; it can be dangerous.
We kit up, buddy up, and prepare to go in. Lucas warns us that the visibility is so good that it can actually be a problem; divers used to less impressive conditions might mistakenly think they are in shallower waters than is actually the case, simply because they’re not used to seeing so well. That doesn’t sound so terrible, but can be a real issue, as going too deep causes the body to accumulate more nitrogen than it can take, effectively poisoning your blood in a way that can kill you.
One last security check, and we roll backwards into the water. On the divemaster’s command, we decend into the blue, and like that, we arrive in a different world.
There’s a lagoon formed by the main island and two smaller ones, Njau and Fundu, and the best diving is found right on the edge of the islands and in the two gaps that lead into the lagoon, where the tide has furrowed underwater channels that are lined with an astonishing plethora of corals.
There are fire corals, so red they look like glowing lava, cream-coloured porcelain corals, orange staghorn corals, sky-blue corals shaped like trees and pink fans and black chimneys and yellow bubble baths and sponges and a hundred other different shapes and sizes and hues, and nearly every one of them is favoured by one or more different species of fish: Tiny multicoloured nudiebranks and fiercely territorial clown fish hide in amongst anemones, parrot fish munch on their favourite calcified snacks, shoals of golden glass fish crowd swim-throughs, giant moray eels and lobsters and mantis shrimp are backed into crevices, poised to attack if you get too close, camouflaged scorpion fish lie motionless amongst the corals, deadly to touch and all but invisible. The list goes on and on. Add to this that you are floating as if suspended in the air, and it’s an experience so different as to be almost impossible to explain to someone who has not had it.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so…
Dara (who dives every week) and Lesli (with her daily yoga exercises) stay down like a couple of mermaids. Me, I’m using up air like I’m trying to corner the market. The excitement and adrenaline doesn’t help, but it’s all good. Never have I dived in such pristine waters, in such a rich flora and fauna. I surface with an enormous grin on my face.
The build-up of nitrogen from our first dive necessitates a surface interval of an hour or so, so the captain – a local fisherman who finds all the dive spots with eerie accuracy – lands us on a secluded beach where we bask in the sun, have water melon and pancakes and tea before heading out for a second dive. After that, it gets too hot, so we make for home and a well deserved lunch.
In the meantime a family trio from Argentina (a father and his adult son – Juan Carlos II and III – and daughter Jennie) have arrived, and over the next four days we will be the only guests at the lodge. Father and son joins us diving, and Jennie, who turns out to be a TV star back home in Argentina, takes lessons in the afternoons to get her certificate.
It’s a simple routine, but a very pleasant one. In the mornings we go diving, after lunch (and a siesta to hide from the worst heat) we go exploring. We rent bikes and kayaks to see more of the island. We traverse the jungle with a guide and see silk monkeys and crested hornbills (think Rowan Atkinson in The Lion King) and flying foxes (a type of giant fruit bat), we paddle along the coast and into the lagoon and its mangrove forests – the trees look like giant spiders with their hundreds of air roots holding them in place on the edge of the tides, and the volcanic rock walls are alive with hundreds of crabs, clambering along the razor-edged overhangs as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
Almost as exotic is the experience of interacting with the locals here. When I went running through the village I had a chorus of children calling me. For some strange reason they shout “bye bye” by way of greeting, and they laugh and smile and stare at me, obviously thinking it a very strange sight. If I stopped and tried to talk to them they grew very shy, and were likely to run away, but sometimes they ran after me instead. Once, when biking, we passed a group of serious-looking young girls in beautiful scarves and dresses all lined up and waving at us, and I blew them a kiss. The fact that children often marry very young and that polygamy is allowed is difficult to comprehend for a westerner, so for a moment I was wary of having committed a serious faux-pas, but much to my relief it resulted in an explosion of giggles. Even the adults seemed genuinely pleased, much like I expect they would have if a monkey had performed a particularly good trick. It’s a strange feeling to be find yourself part of a tiny minority, and quite the eye-opener.
Me and my seven new wives. Not.
And so the days go by. The place lives up to its name, as I discover when I find a gecko inside the toilet bowl one morning. At least it wasn’t a poisonous centipede, or a cloud of winged termites, or a bushbaby – all of which have found their way inside huts in the past.
A couple of the dives are scary, because the currents are unpredictable, and toss and turn us every which way, making you feel as if inside a washing machine during the spin cycle. When that happens there is little to be done apart from hiding from it as best you can, but sometimes even that isn’t possible, and you get taken for a ride.
The very last day on Pemba is a case in point. By now the Argentinians and Dara are gone, replaced by a Danish father and son. One of them has difficulty decending, and before he manages the current has taken us to another spot than the one we meant to dive. Before we realise this we are down to 28 metres instead of the fifteen we thought we would bottom out at. And the second dive that day, the very last dive of the week, is a wall dive that sees us drift so fast that the group becomes separated. It’s not unlike a rollercoaster, in fact, with the current pushing us up and down as we rush by the corals.
Eventually I get low on air and find a rock to hold on to for dear life while I do my safety stop, and when I finally come up I find that the two Danes are already back in the boat, having abandoned the dive earlier, while L&L are a hundred metres away, dragged there by the current. It’s a humbling experience, and one I will always remember as The Floomride. Even so, it was The. Best. Diving. Ever.
A Great White Swede.
We spend one last day on Zanzibar, in Stonetown, a place that will forever live in infamy as the biggest slave market in the world.
The slavery museum is a moving memorial to the untold millions of victims of this heinous crime against humanity. Raiding parties would find their way far inland, so that by the time they came here, slaves would have been marched for many months already, shackled together like animals day and night, and subjected to all manner of atrocities along the way.
Having been taken across the sound to Zanzibar the traders would cull their stock, throwing the ones that didn’t seem worth it off the ships to drown rather than having to pay duties for them. The cargo would then be incarcerated in tiny, overcrowded cellars underground for a couple of days to weed out all but the strongest, who would finally be taken to the market to be inspected, bought and sold like so much cattle (or worse, since I gather cattle rarely get used for sexual purposes by their owners), before being taken by their new masters to all the corners of the world, for – lest we forget – this was a global commercial endeavour. It beggars belief. Hitler, Stalin and King Leopold are all amateurs by comparison.
And with that sobering reentry into civilisation, plus a parting gift of torrential rain and ditto diarrhoea, Zanzibar speeds us on our long, separate ways home.
??????
We’re on a mountain top made out of lava rock so perforated and serrated its like a giant cheese grater, and we the cheese.
The path is nowhere to be seen. Everywhere I look there are steep ravines blocking our way down, and there are storm clouds drawing ever closer. If this isn’t being between a rock and a hard place I don’t know what is.
I blame the effing elephant.
—–
To explain how this happened, we must go back a couple of days, to when we first arrived to Sardinia. The third largest island in the Mediterranean, yet so often overlooked, Sardinia, unlike Corsica to the north, has neither famous sons nor Astérix albums to its name. Like Corsica, it has been invaded over and over again over the millennia, and now it’s our turn.
My good friend Lesli is celebrating her birthday this week, which is as good an excuse as any to go on an adventure, and we decided Sardinia had what it took. We meet up in Cagliari, the regional capital in the south, and drive up the east coast, which is largely still wild and unexploited.
Our destiny is the village of Lotzarai, and the Lemon House, a bed and breakfast that has made its name among hikers, bikers and climbers as an excellent base camp for all kind of excursions. It doesn’t disappoint. We arrive late at night, but Riky, the gentle giant that runs the place, has been waiting up, and has us installed in no time, and even insists on having a midnight drink with us to celebrate our arrival.
Next morning he’s up cooking breakfast for a long table full of adventurers; there’s the British triathletes, the Swiss thruhikers, the Italian climbers, and us. Someone remarks upon the respective amulets we carry around our necks – me a Thorshammer, Lesli a Ganesha, the Indian elephant god – and I make fun of hers, saying how a pachyderm that’s in charge of removing obstacles but sometimes also places them in your path isn’t really worth its mettle. Little did I know…
Soon we’re setting out northwards along the coast on our first hike. The morning hours are exquisite, as the path hugs the coastline on its way to Pedra Longa, a natural rock outcrop, shaped like a pyramid one hundred and fifty metres high. It looms in the distance, marking the mouth of the ravine we’re planning to hike up. The sun shines down upon macchia made up of cistus shrubs and myrtle trees, tufts of thyme and euphorbia, with occasional eucalyptus and olive trees – all making for an impossibly green landscape that offsets the turquoise and sapphire waters of the Mediterranean. Lizards dart across the ocre ground like metallic blue arrows, and here and there are goats and even wild pigs*. It’s a stroll in Arcadia.
Et In Arcadia Ego.
Once past Pedra Longa we continue upwards towards the mouth of the gorge. It’s awe inspiring, like something out of Yellowstone plonked down next to the ocean, and suddenly the path is much more difficult to discern. We clamber up and down the ravine mouth, following every likely-looking goat trail and rockfall in an attempt to find the path again, knowing that it must be there yet infuriatingly failing to recover it. Brambles and spinablanca shred our legs and arms, tear at our clothes, and sliding gravel threatens to turn the slightest misstep into a lethal slide to the bottom of the gully.
In the end, after nearly two hours of searching, Lesli – who knows her Hindu gods – suggest that we give up and go back to Pedra Longa to cool off in the Mediterranean. So Ganesha has his way, and we give up on the hiking for the day to go skinny-dipping instead.
Submerging our scraped and shredded bodies into the sea stings a little, but it sure beats spending the night in a goat-infested grotto lost in the macchia. Maybe the elephant god knows something we don’t?
The second day we take the rental car over winding mountain roads up the coast to Cala Gonone. It’s over an hour’s drive, but well worth it, as from here we rent kayaks and go down the coast along a particularly scenic stretch of the natural reserve, past caves that conjure up the adventures of Tom Sawyer or the Count de Montechristo.
No elephant here. Or is there?
It’s exciting and peaceful in equal measure, if very hot as the sun shines bright. Fortunately the breeze is constantly in our faces – but after four hours that’s too much of a good thing, as well; my eyes are screwed shut from too much light, salt and wind, and smarting as if they too had been lashed by thorns yesterday.
Alas, Lesli doesn’t drive stick shift, so I have to get us home more or less blindly, traversing the winding roads at a snail’s pace, stopping every kilometre or so to bathe my eyes in what little water we have left to cajole them into staying open just a little bit longer.
It’s a desperately dangerous thing to do, but we have no choice. We stop in one lay-by to see if Lesli might manage to drive – she really, really can’t – and in another to see if we might convince the people in the car parked there to help us out. Turns out they weren’t admiring the view, as we thought, and it’s a testament to my desperation that I briefly consider asking the female passenger to give us a hand once she’s done giving the driver head. I don’t. Instead I dab my eyes with a soaked rag for what feels like the hundredth time, and drive on, cross eyed and crying copiously. Goodness knows what the couple must have thought we were up to.
We make it back in just under three hours.
Day three dawns, and after twelve hours in total darkness and plenty of saline solution my eyes have recovered enough that we can venture out again. Riky tells us that the path we searched for in vain on day one is in fact located on a ledge that looks impossibly thin from down at Piedra Longa. We decide to try to hike up the gorge again, and drive there to shorten the hike. Good thing, too, because the trail is so steep in places that we’re climbing rather than hiking it. The term “drop dead gorge-ous” applies here, as it is quite possibly the most beautiful nature I’ve ever seen, but also very unforgiving. The ledge is no more than a metre or two wide in places, and there’s nothing twixt us and a terminal drop.
The ledge. Note Pedra Longa (centre or the picture) for perspective.
We do get all the way to the top of the ravine without misadventures, and it seems as if Ganesha is finally cutting us some slack, but then we set out to the summit of Punta Giradili, the higher one of the two promontories enclosing the gorge, and that’s where it almost goes badly wrong. It’s a difficult hike, as the rock is pure lava, all sharp edges and treacherous holes, and the only way to navigate is by following cairns marking the path in amongst the undergrowth. That’s all well and fine as long as we’re headed upwards, as the little piles of rocks can be seen against the evergreens behind and above them, but coming back down is a different matter. Suddenly the cairns look no different from the million other stones, and before long we are lost.
By now we’ve been out for five hours and fatigue is setting in. One false move and one or both of us could be badly hurt and/or stuck in the cheese grater stones. What’s worse, everywhere looks the same, and we have no way of navigating. Going in a straight line is out of the question, as the dense macchia turns the whole flat summit into a giant labyrinth, and everywhere we look there are steep ravines barring our way, even if we did know where we were going. On top of that, dark, pregnant clouds begin to fill the sky, and there will be no cover to be had if the autumn rains decide to start.
The summit of all fears.
It’s a desperate moment, and I genuinely don’t know what to do. Lesli suggests going further inland in the hopes of circumventing the ravines, and I’m just about to give in to this when I recall that my trusty GPS-watch has a mapping function, which when switched on allows you to retrace your steps. In a manner of minutes we are back on the trail, happy to turn our backs on the wretched mountain. Garmin 1 – Ganesha 0.
The next day we decide we won’t hike at all. Instead we rent mountain bikes and load into the rental car. We drive up even smaller roads than before, deep into the mountains, and I’m having a blast, as these roads remind me of the forest roads my father taught me to drive on. It’s all gravel and hairpin bends of a kind I’ve only ever driven on in computer games, and I only wish I had a car better suited to the terrain.
Then we hop on the bikes and start the decent down towards the sea. Alas, Ganesha doesn’t give up. Three, four kilometres into the ride, my chain snaps clean off, and there’s no tool in the tool kit to repair it. Nothing to do but hike the whole damned uphill slog, pushing the bike, then get in the car and drive all the way back down again to have it fixed.
Once that’s done we decide not to push our luck, but to go for another Cala (sandy cove). Alas, poor map reading leads us astray, and we get on our bikes only to alight upon a gorge that is off limits to bikers. Instead we walk the rest of the way – Lesli wearing slippery bike cleats on a path made up mainly by shale – and finally arrive at the sea after another gruelling hike. The Truncated One might have had a point in getting us here, because it’s another spot of natural perfection, but on a no hiking, biking day, we managed to do a grand total of twenty minutes of biking and several hours’ worth of hiking, so we weren’t exactly over the moon.
There seemed to be nothing for it. We kept the bikes for another day, and set off yet again into the wilderness, and this time – on our last day – we seemed to be getting it right, or maybe I had just atoned for my hubris vis-a-vis Ganesha?
We rode our bikes down a remote gulch of stunning natural beauty down to Cala Sisine, a gorgeous pebble beach in the middle of nowhere. We had it all to ourselves, and I would wish everyone could experience that feeling at least once in their lives – surrounded by sparkling clear turquoise water, deep blue skies, steep cliffs clad in green, and nothing but the wind and the sun on your skin. Heaven.
Eden, a.k.a. Cala Sisine
It lasted all of an hour. Then a taxi boat came and dislodged a horde of tourists, bringing dogs and cigarettes and loudspeakers. It was time to go home.
In the end we didn’t get to go rock climbing, as Sardinia doesn’t have any licensed guides (they have to have ice climbing experience – not something easily gained in Sardinia), and we didn’t have time to go diving, but all in all it was a fantastic holiday, all the better for the mishaps and hiccups that occurred along the way (especially true once we decided (mis)adventure points could be converted into gelato points!). Ganesha came through in spades – even Thor came out and sent us off with the mightiest thunderstorm I have ever experienced on the night before we left – so gods willing I will be back to Sardinia for more of the same before long.
______
* I’d tell you about the wild pigs, but I don’t want to boar you. Things take on such a littoral meaning along the coast.
Remember New Year’s Eve? And the resolutions you made way back then? It’s hard to believe, but the year is more than halfway over already, so it’s high time to have a look at how you’re fairing in regard to these promises – most likely they have fallen by the wayside already, long forgotten – but since I made a commitment to myself (and you) to report back occasionally on how I’m fairing, I will do so, even though – or perhaps precisely because – the results are less than fantastic.
I set out to improve intellectually and physically, and to go on adventures and challenge myself. To ensure that I did so I set myself clear, measurable targets, so how am I doing in relation to those?
In a word: poorly. At least on the intellectual side of things. I haven’t read more than very few books, my attempts at taking piano lessons were foiled by too much travelling, my efforts learning French came to a halt after two months (during which I did learn rather more words and phrases than I had thought possible, but still).
Improving my general fitness level is an area where I have been a lot more successful. Even though I have cycled nothing like as much as I thought I would do, and swum less, I have managed to work out a lot (as evidenced by a nice lady doctor asking spontaneously if I was an athlete of some sort only yesterday(!)). I’ve logged 160 workouts in the first six months of the year, or slightly below one workout per day nine days out of ten. I’ve run two marathons, both well below four hours, and I’m hopeful I will manage Ultravasan and its 90 kilometres come August. Who knows? I might even be reduced to swimming and biking afterwards instead of running, as a result…
On the other hand, my diet hasn’t been anywhere near as strict as I had planned – perhaps precisely because I had no concrete target in mind there. If anything I have been too indulgent, especially in allowing myself too much alcohol, so that’s something to improve upon in the second half of the year, as well.
So far, so-so impressive. Travels, adventures and challenges, then? Well, I did go for a refresher dive at Nemo33 in January, then went skiing in Sweden in February, and to Thailand to dive in March. April I got a new job part time, which wasn’t planned but must count as a new adventure, and May saw me hike Mallorca with my brother, which was quite the challenge – not because of him, I hasten to add! Then in June I explored Luxembourg, and this month I’ve taken the kids kayaking in the Ardennes, and gone to Edinburgh for a quick visit, so overall my track record isn’t too bad, even though I feel it lacks in challenges.
So what to make of all this? Reinforced efforts in terms of reading, playing the piano and learning French; more diverse workout schedule; better food and drink habits; more adventurous adventures and challenging challenges (and trippy trips? No.).
Lined up next: London with the kids, then two weeks without them (good time to improve diet and spend time playing piano/reading/studying, putting good habits in place) before going to Sweden and making final preparations for Ultravasan. After that I’ve got nothing planned apart from a few days in Lugano, as a post-race (re)treat, and then school starts and the rat race recommences. If experience shows anything, it’s that it’s time to start planning autumn now. Maybe that Ironman? Or a climbing course? Or something else entirely…?
Remember New Year’s Eve? And the 