The Politeness Awards: And we thought the Canadians had that one down pat

“A smile denotes warmth, openness and friendliness. Smile gently and with sincerity. But be careful not to overdo it. False smiles can look artificial and never-ending smiles can invite suspicion.”

Instructions from Reverend Sun Myung Moon to his Moonie recruiters? No, this is a passage from Vancouver’s Olympic Protocol Guide, as distributed to 600 city staff members who have been reassigned to Olympic duties during the 2010 Winter Games.

The 120-page handbook offers tips on a wide range of protocol issues, including seating arrangements, proper conversation topics and personal grooming. It is supposed to ensure that our civic workers behave properly while dealing with the bevy of visiting politicians, royalty and business tycoons.

The grooming details are quite specific. For example. “Hair should be kept tidy yet stylish. A neat appearance isn’t enough. You must be exemplary all the time. Others will infer qualities of your [city] from your appearance and behaviour.”

“Never dress in clothes that are too tight,” it reads. “They make a slim person look gaunt and a large person look heavier.” Short socks are another fashion faux pas. As the guide astutely notes: “If they are too short, they may show bare leg when you sit down.”

Bare leg! My god, how offensive.

Under a section titled “Humility” the guide instructs: “You never say, ‘That’s not my job.’ There is nothing too demeaning, too demanding or just plain beneath you. If you are not comfortable opening car doors, holding umbrellas or pitching baggage, then you need to find another job.”

Evidently, complete submission is demanded.

The handbook also instructs civic employees to “remember that Protocol Smile.’ It ought to get larger the worse things get from your perspective. Let them think you are in complete control.”

Those assigned to dignitaries are warned: “You may get close to certain dignitaries and spend a great deal of time with them. But remember: you are not their friend and you are always on duty.”

Good advice if you ask me. Don’t be taken in by those chummy handshakes and phony regal smiles.

The manual goes on to say: “Look your best – smile, be confident, cheery, upbeat, positive. Even if you are nervous and unsure if what you are doing is correct, do not let the dignitary see that side of you.”

The guide also advises that people stay hydrated, take bathroom breaks whenever there is time, avoid jangling the change in their pockets, and avoid talking about politics, religion or marital problems.

Avoid jangling change in your pocket?

This may sound like a joke, but it isn’t. Taxpayer dollars were spent producing this advice, though exactly how much it cost to prodcue the manual has yet to be revealed. Presumably this unsightly detail would be filed under (section 5.8) “Embarrassing Situations,” where the guide advises: “Try to move the individual out of hearing range of others, and quietly tell them, ‘Your trousers’ zipper is open.’”

If you feel an urgent need to brush up your etiquette, you can view the contents of the Olympic Protocol Guide on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/citycaucus/sets/72157623282871864/show/

Remember: the whole world is watching.

Brian Harris is a B.C.-based photographer focused on building a better world – through FarmFolk/CityFolk

by Kerry Banks

Brian Harris’s most famous photograph was taken outside the doors of a nunnery in Dharamsala, India, the adopted home of the Dalai Lama. The shot depicts two shaven-headed Buddhist nuns laughing. “They had just come outside to bang a gong to signal lunch, and I asked them if I could take their picture. Evidently, they thought this was pretty hilarious,” recalls Harris, whose iconic photo captured the nuns’ joyful amusement. The image subsequently appeared on the cover of his 1996 book Tibetan Voices: A Traditional Memoir, and later on posters and greeting cards. However, it was just one of thousands of shots Harris took during a 20-year span working as a photographer and fundraiser for Seva Canada, an organization with a mandate to eliminate treatable blindness in India, Tibet, Nepal and Tanzania.

“You look around and see all this wealth, and you think, ‘Man, most of the world doesn’t live like this.”

The 57-year-old Vancouverite began taking photos at 16, but didn’t take up the camera professionally until he was in his mid-thirties, after working as a baker, then as a counsellor for the mentally challenged. But from the beginning of his photography career the focus was the people of the Himalayas – whom Harris, a Buddhist since age 25, calls “a source of spiritual inspiration.” He found that he felt more alive in the region, particularly in India, with its noisy, chaotic energy. “In Canada, it’s like Sunday morning every day. There are hardly any cars on the streets. There’s no activity. You look around and see all this wealth and very few people, relatively speaking, and you think, ‘Man, most of the world doesn’t live like this.’”

Recently, however, Harris has focused his lens on subjects closer to home, photographing small, sustainable community and cooperative farms in the Lower Mainland as well as urban agricultural projects for Vancouver’s FarmFolk/CityFolk Society. Founded in 1993, the non-profit works to cultivate a local, sustainable food system by developing and operating projects that provide access to and protection of agricultural lands. It also supports local, small-scale growers and producers and educates, communicates and celebrates with local food communities.

 It has been said that ‘beauty is the splendour of the true.’ And for Vancouver-based photographer Brian Harris, a successful photograph approaches this goal. ‘Beauty’ meaning not just attractiveness ‘but the awareness of the profound nature of reality.’

Still, Harris’s work for FarmFolk/CityFolk remains consistent with his overriding mantra: “Beauty in Service.” Simply taking pretty pictures isn’t enough; the photos have to serve a larger goal. “I wouldn’t work simply as a commercial photographer,” he says. And though the subject matter of his work may be different from that at the roof of the world, there are similarities. “I’m drawn to the same things I was in the Himalayas: beauty, a way of life that is substantively real, and using my photography to motivate people toward beneficial actions in their lives.”

Other FarmFolk/CityFolk projects aimed at increasing consumption of local foods include “Meet Your Maker,” which brings together farmers, buyers and distributors so they can create networks. In summer, the organization also conducts farm tours – day trips to local farms.

Twelve of Harris’s photos of small, local sustainable farms, for example, were used to illustrate the FarmFolk/CityFolk 2009 calendar, alongside recipes provided by restaurants and food organizations promoting a grow-and-eat-local perspective. It’s an approach that FarmFolk/CityFolk is also exploring through the Community Farms Program, a collaboration with B.C.’s Land Conservancy. The goal is to expand local food production: by helping new farmers access affordable land, by researching the best practices of existing collectively owned farms and by creating a network of potential farms, landowners and community organizations.

Harris says a new model of farming is needed because so few young people are entering the field. “Most farmers today are over 60, and when they die, the farms are usually passed on to their children. But it’s so difficult to make a living farming that the land is often then sold. It remains in the Land Reserve, but it isn’t used for farming.”

Other FarmFolk/CityFolk projects aimed at increasing consumption of local foods include “Meet Your Maker,” which brings together farmers, buyers and distributors so they can create networks. In summer, the organization also conducts farm tours – day trips to local farms (see below). Meanwhile, Harris has finalized a 2010 Vancouver Museum exhibit focused on food and sustainability that features his photography, installations and a film and speaker series, all part of his continuing quest to help make the world a better place. As he says, “Seeing with the eyes of the heart is a way into the deep and meaningful understanding of existence.”

Get Mobilized Now entering their fifth year, FarmFolk/CityFolk’s Incredible Edible tours are an opportunity for culinary education on everything from heirloom poultry to environmental sustainability. The Metro Vancouver/Fraser Valley tours include transportation, a locally sourced menu of regional specialties, a knowledgeable tour guide and at least three in-depth farm tours with the folks that put food on the tables of many British Columbians — plus the chance to purchase farm-fresh fare. $80. For more info: contact Tallulah at 604-730-0450; admin@ffcf.bc.ca

>>Click here for Brian Harris’s six-minute show FarmFolk/CityFolk Heroes

>>See also: MyWestworld.com’s Spring 2010 Edible British Columbia Giveaway

Photos courtesy Brian Harris

by Kerry Banks

Each February, a band of hardy (some would say foolhardy) mushers compete in the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race, following historic gold rush and mail delivery sled dog routes from the turn of the 20th Century. Contested during the depths of the Arctic winter over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) of wild and hazardous terrain between Whitehorse in the Yukon and Fairbanks, Alaska, the race is a true torture test. Teams are limited to 14 dogs and one musher. Once they leave the starting chute, both the mushers and their dogs are on their own for the entire race, relying on a combination of toughness and skill, the commitment and endurance of the animals and, sometimes, luck.

This past year, B.C. writer Masa Takei braved the frigid Arctic conditions to cover the race for Westworld magazine. After his retreat to the relatively tropical climes of Lotus Land,  he then sat down with me to answer a few questions about the experience.

MyWW: What makes the Yukon Quest a more challenging dog sled race than any other, including  the Iditarod?

MT: The Yukon Quest is said to be more challenging because the mushers travel for longer distances between checkpoints, often over rough terrain and in colder temperatures. Also, they receive no outside help from handlers except during the race’s mandatory 36-hour layover at Dawson City, nor can they substitute any dogs. The way I’ve heard it described, the Iditarod is about pure speed whereas the Quest is about self-reliance. Just think about Lance Mackey, who won both races in 2007, an unprecedented feat. At least it was until he did it again the next year.

MyWW: How did you end up covering the event – and racing yourself?

MT: I’d read Adam Killick’s book Racing the White Silence and became interested in the race. Even before then though, all the Jack London and Farley Mowat stories I’d read growing up put the bug in me to find an excuse to go up north. Then I got an assignment with the newspaper 24Hours to cover the race, and ended up covering the Inuit Games, as well. But spending some time out on the trails with Frank Turner’s kennel was a real highlight. Watching from the sidelines had its moments, but it’s hard to beat getting out onto the trail, even if it gives only a faint taste of what the racers experience.

MyWW: How much time do the competitors spend preparing for the race? How do they train?

MT: Each racer has his or her own approach to training, but I’m sure that getting in the mileage is critical for both mushers and dogs. When there’s no snow, mushers use a cart or an ATV in place of a sled for dry-land training. Some mushers also cross-train with cycling, running and cross-country skiing.

MyWW: Were you impressed by the dogs in the race? If so, why? And, do they all wear booties?

MT: To understand what supreme athletes these dogs are requires thinking about what they do, day in and day out, during the race. To the layperson’s eye, however, there’s often nothing particularly impressive about them. They actually look smaller than I’d expected. It’s probably equivalent to seeing some professional endurance athletes, such as marathoners, in person. They often don’t look physically impressive. And nothing about sled dogs standing still suggests any of their phenomenal abilities. As for booties, those are mandatory equipment and Quest racers are required to have at least eight booties for each dog at every checkpoint, though when to use them is a matter of judgment. I’ve also been told that there’s a protective sheath for the more sensitive body parts on male dogs, the tip of which doesn’t have any fur,  though these are needed only when it’s extremely cold. I didn’t see any during the race I was covering. Guess it didn’t get cold enough!

MyWW: Are mushers emotionally attached to their dogs?

MT: Although I certainly saw a lot of affection being passed between mushers and dogs, I think that it really depends on the individual racer. It’s hard to imagine that a strong bond wouldn’t develop between mushers and dogs after sharing so much trail time together, though each dog also has its own personality, some I’m sure more loving and loveable than others. On the other hand, the dogs aren’t like regular pets; there’s a professional dynamic to the relationship as well, not unlike the one that existed with the working dogs who made inhabiting the North possible a century ago. It’s expensive to keep dogs, for example, and if a race dog isn’t performing well, mushers face the decision of whether they can keep the animal or not. One mushing couple, Zoya DeNure and John Schandelmeier, at Crazy Dog Kennel, run a good number of rescue dogs – unwanted race dogs that are at risk of being culled. In fact, I believe that Schandelmeier now races exclusively with rescue dogs, even if that reduces his chances of placing with the top competitors. And I know that Frank Turner, who I interviewed, makes sure that all his dogs enjoy a blissful retirement, long after they are past the point of being able to pull a sled.

MyWW: Do the competitors race at night?

MT: The clock never stops, which means the mushers run any time of the day or night. In fact, mushers talk about falling asleep on their sleds for miles at a stretch.

MyWW: Which section of the Yukon Quest is toughest on the racers?

MT: Eagle Summit, a 1,100-metre peak infamous for its wind-scoured conditions, gets a lot of attention since that’s where racers and dogs have one of the greatest chances of getting hurt. During a mushers’ meeting in Dawson City, veteran racer William Kleedehn came out and called for rerouting that section of the race. He thought that the course was tough enough without introducing that wild card, where injuries could lead to a forfeited race or worse, and that more racers would enter without that notorious stretch.

MyWW: Had you ever been in such freezing temperatures before? Were you able to adjust?

MT: That was my first time camping out in -40 temperatures,  and my first visit to the Yukon. But with the right gear, it was surprisingly comfortable. I’ve felt colder getting soaked tree-planting in B.C.

MyWW: You tried your hand at running a team for a short distance. Was it difficult?

MT: We had the benefit of running empty sleds with about half the dogs that a Quest racer needs to manage. Turner had also tailored the temperament of each musher’s team so that no one got more dog than they could handle. The most difficult part of the mushing for me was holding up my end of the deal and not letting down the team. And there was a lot more “body English” necessary than I’d expected in order to negotiate some of those turns. The dogs can sense when they’re dealing with a “gumby,” too, though the ones I was running were pretty forgiving. When I got the hang of it, I could relax enough to enjoy the exhilarating sensation, something like swooping a mountain bike over fast flowing single-track, coupled with that particular thrill of having animals pull you. The experience sure kicks the pants off riding a snowmobile.

>>View the latest footage from this year’s Yukon Quest Test Run here.

>>Read Masa Takei’s personal account of trailing the Yukon Quest racers

Lead photo courtesy Pete Ryan.

It’s always wise to contemplate the big picture – i.e., the history books – when bemoaning the latest Olympic “crisis”

by Kerry Banks

Can you have a Winter Olympics without snow? A lot of people in the Lower Mainland are starting to wonder. After all, this has been one of the mildest winters in recent memory and the snow that fell on the local mountains in November appears to have been completely washed away by persistent rains. Recent news reports have suggested that Olympic organizers were considering moving the freestyle skiing and snowboarding events from Cypress Mountain to another location. However, Olympic officials deny that is not the case, and insist that everything is under control. “We have no intention of moving from the site,” declared Tim Gayda, VANOC’s vice-president of sport.

Gayda also surprised reporters by advising, ‘There really is no snow shortage. Cypress has an exorbitant amount of natural snow at higher elevations. It’s free, it’s available and it’s getting used.’

Gayda also surprised reporters by advising, “There really is no snow shortage. Cypress has an exorbitant amount of natural snow at higher elevations. It’s free, it’s available and it’s getting used.” By “getting used,” he means that snow is being transported in from higher elevations and from Manning Park to ensure there’s enough snow cover so that the six skiing and snowboarding events scheduled for the mountain will proceed as planned. If necessary, straw bales and wood forms will be used as foundations for the snowboarding halfpipe and other jumps and obstacles in some of the skier and boardercross courses.

Meanwhile, 35 snow guns continue to blast artificial snow over the mountainsides, producing a frozen, winter-white effect for spectators and what high-performance athletes will recognize as a good base for sliding. Man-made snow is evidently “more resilient” than real snow because it lasts longer. Since November, Cypress has converted almost 100 million litres of water into fake snow.

It may not be an ideal situation, but then climatic conditions are often problematic during the Winter Olympics. At the 1928 Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland, the opening ccremonies were held in a howling blizzard, but shortly afterwards the weather turned so mild that organizers considered cancelling the games outright. In fact, the final of the 10,000-metre speedskating race was terminated, because the outdoor rink turned to slush, though the 50-kilometre cross-country ski race went ahead even though the temperature was a balmy 25 degrees Celsius.

Warm winds, rain and a lack of snow caused a similar crisis at the 1964 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria. Things were so bad that the government called in the Austrian army to save the day. Soliders carved out 20,000 ice bricks from a mountaintop and transported them to the bobsled and luge runs. They also carried 40,000 cubic metres of snow to the alpine venues and then packed the white stuff onto the slopes by hand and foot.

In 1988, Calgary’s Olympic organizers ignored their own consultants’ advice not to build facilities in exposed areas, and paid for it when snow-eating Chinook winds blew in.

In 1988, Calgary’s Olympic organizers ignored their own consultants’ advice not to build facilities in exposed areas, and paid for it when snow-eating Chinook winds blew in. The windy weather cost the 1988 Winter Games more than $1 million in ticket refunds. Because there was so little snow, tons of white silica sand was trucked in from B.C. to make the surface of McMahon Stadium look snow-covered for the opening ceremonies. The Chinooks destroyed the inflatable Rocky Mountains used during those same ceremonies, raised temperatures and made scheduling a monumental headache. The 90-metre ski jump alone was cancelled seven times. The initials of Canada Olympic Park (COP), the wind-lashed site of the ski jump, bobsled and luge, came to stand for “Cancelled or Postponed.” All of the alpine events took place on artificial snow, and the gusting winds sent a ski jumper flying into a camera tower.

In 1998, at Nagano, Japan, a combination of fog, driving rain and snowstorms wreaked havoc with its alpine skiing programme, with the showpiece men’s downhill event on the opening Sunday having to be postponed three times. The storms also caused scheduling nightmares, epic traffic jams and, no doubt, innumerable sleepless nights for Olympic organizers.

But all of those Olympics continued to the finish, which is exactly what will happen here, even if it requires a lot of improvising, extra work and only a bronze medal for VANOC from the David Suzuki Foundation for its sustainability efforts (raking in snow by helicopter not being the most sophisticated environmental option). After all, this week, ever-optimistic Olympic officials vowed that all of the Games’ snow venues will be “pristine,” “white” and “magical” – despite meteorologists insisting there is little hope for much new snow.

Historians remind us of the unsavoury origins of the Olympic Torch

by Kerry Banks

The Olympic torch relay is rapidly nearing the end of its 100-day journey across Canada. One of the most popular Olympic rituals, it is an ideal vehicle for media consumption and corporate sponsorship and, judging by the crowds of cheering and smiling celebrants now greeting its appearance prior to the 2010 Olympics and Paralympic Games, the torch also has an inspirational power. Ironically, according to historians this symbol of hope and friendship arose from very dark origins – origins that are, for obvious reasons, not well-publicized by VANOC, which states on its website that the birth of the torch relay can be traced to ancient Greece and that the first Olympic torch relay took place in Oslo, Norway, in 1952.

According to historical reports both statements are  a tad misleading. Experts note that the Olympic torch relay was actually invented by the Nazis in 1936 as a propaganda device to popularize fascism throughout Europe and within Germany. As author Tony Perrottet notes in his book The Naked Olympics: “The torch relay is so ingrained in the modern choreography that most people today assume it was a revival of a pagan tradition – unaware that it was actually concocted for Hitler’s Games in Berlin.”

A sacred flame did burn 24 hours a day at Olympia, and Greek runners did pass pass a torch to light a sacrificial cauldron at some ancient festivals. But the Greeks opened their Olympics by word of mouth, sending heralds – not torchbearers – racing through the streets. The tradition of carrying the Olympic torch to the main stadium at Olympic Games did not become a fixture of the Games until 1936, when a 12-day run opened the Summer Games in Berlin.

The idea for the torch relay came from German sports minister Carl Diem, who intended to link Nazism to the civilized glories of classical Greece (which the Reich’s academics were arguing had been an Aryan wonderland). But Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels envisioned it as something more: an opportunity to make a bold political statement. The 1936 relay, which took German runners through Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia (welcomed enroute by pro-Nazi demonstrations), was nothing less than a rehearsal of the Nazification of Europe. In fact, in an editorial at the time, the New York Times wrote that the relay was “a strategic highway that traced the line of the German Drang Nach Osten – the drive to the East that the Kaiser sought in the First World War,” and which Adolph Hitler was soon to put into practice.

_______________________________________________________________

Hitler’s propaganda machine covered the torch relay in great detail,

broadcasting radio reports from every step of the route and filling the Games

with the iconographyof ancient Greek athletics.

_________________________________________________________________

In fact, Hitler took personal interest in the ritual and pumped funds into its promotion. His propaganda machine covered the torch relay in great detail, broadcasting radio reports from every step of the route and filling the Games with the iconography of ancient Greek athletics. In Berlin, the flame was carried the last kilometre along the city’s main boulevard by a runner named Siegfried Eifrig, who was watched by hundreds of thousands as he transferred the flame to a cauldron on an altar surrounded by huge flags adorned with swastikas. And despite its political overtones, the event was an unqualified success for the organizers and was immortalized by director Leni Riefenstahl in her 1938 film Olympia.

Diem and Riefenstahl were also responsible for popularizing the five interlocking rings as the symbol of the Games. The ring symbol had been designed in 1913 to symbolize the first five Olympics, but nobody made any use of it until the Nazis in 1936. And for the opening segment of Riefenstahl’s film, Diem had the Olympic rings carved into the sides of a stone altar at the ancient Greek city of Delphi, thus spawning the myth that the symbol dated back more than two millennia. When visiting Delphi in the late 1950s, two British authors Lynn and Gray Poole then saw the stone and reported in their History of the Ancient Games that the Olympic rings-design came from ancient Greece. And so, with Hitler’s influence, the rings became part of the Nazi pageantry at Berlin, and have come to symbolize the Olympics ever since.

______________________________________________________________________

Though America’s Avery Brundage was expelled from the America First

Committee for his Nazi sympathies, he was elected a vice-president of the International Olympic

Committee in 1945, and in 1952 became president, a position he would hold until 1972.

_______________________________________________________________________

Interestingly, Germany hosted both the Winter and Summer Olympics in 1936. It had been awarded the honour in 1931 as a means of welcoming the country back into the European fold, a gesture that backfired when Hitler came to power in 1933. As the racist and brutal policies of the Nazi regime became known, Jewish groups and others in the United States called for a boycott. But America’s own Avery Brundage, president of the U.S. Olympic Committee at the time, actively undermined the boycott campaign, dismissing the protest as a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy,” and succeeded in having the USOC reject it in a committee vote. (In 1941, Brundage was expelled from the America First Committee for his Nazi sympathies, though he remained a staunch defender of Germany during and after World War II. Even so, Brundage was elected a vice-president of the International Olympic Committee in 1945, and in 1952 became president, a position he would hold until 1972.) Meanwhile, in order to make the Games a success and legitimize Hitler’s regime in the eyes of the world, Germany in 1936 took great efforts to camouflage the evil nature of the Nazi regime. Anti-Jewish slogans were removed from walls and roadsides and every sign of racial, religious or political persecution was temporarily hidden. Though incredibly, the German Ministry of the Interior built a concentration camp scarcely a half-hour’s journey from the new Olympic Stadium, where it jailed 80,000 Jews, gypsies and socialists.

Germany would dominate the competition at the 1936 Summer Games, winning 89 medals (33 more than the second-place USA), though the greatest individual performance was turned in by Afro-American sprinter Jesse Owens. Debunking Hitler’s belief in Aryan supremacy, the 22-year-old claimed gold in the 100- and 200-metre dashes, the long jump and the 400-metre relay, with each victory greeted by loud applause from the crowd. Yet despite this setback, Hitler was pleased with the results. He ordered architect Albert Speer to draw up plans for a colossal, 400,000-seat stadium in Nuremburg, saying, “In 1940, the Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo. But thereafter they will take place in Germany for all time to come.”

Fortunately, this was one Nazi prediction that did not come true.

>>Interested in learning more?

Check out the current exhibit at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre entitled “More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics.” Its display of photographs, documents and artifacts demonstrates how Hitler’s Third Reich turned the Games into a showcase for Nazi propaganda, and how Canadians became part of the spectacle.


Address: Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre: #50 – 950 West 41st Avenue, Vancouver, B.C.

Contact info: 604-264-0499; info@VHEC.org

>>Related reading:

The Economic Benefits: Facts versus hype

by Kerry Banks

In the euphoria that followed the announcement that Vancouver had won the bid to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, there was a lot of talk about how the Games would be a gold mine for the local economy: creating jobs, boosting tourism and providing a bonanza for local suppliers. But while it is undoubtedly true that same local businesses will make a killing – porta-potty companies, for example, and parking lot owners, limousine rental firms and flower shops – a number of studies by top economists reveal little evidence that hosting the Games produces significant economic benefits for any host city or region. In fact, according to a 2008 study by three economists who specialize in the economics of sport, in the short-term, taking on the Games can actually be damaging. In their analysis “Slippery Slope? Assessing the Economic Impact of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah,” for example, the authors found that “general merchandise stores suffered a net loss of $167.4 million during  the Games time,  as did ski resorts and other recreation firms.” As Victor Matheson, one of the paper’s authors, noted, “It’s a fun time to be in the spotlight, but most cities lose money.”

Although the accounting methods of Olympic organizing committees are often murky, the evidence further suggests that all of the last six Winter Olympics ended up losing money. The organizers of the Turin Games in 2006 admitted to a $32 million deficit. And while organizers of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics boasted an operating profit of $110 million, the U.S. General Accounting Office determined that the federal government contributed $1.3 billion toward the event. Plagued by cost overruns, the 1998 Nagano Olympics also lost huge piles of dough, though no one knows exactly how much because the organizers burned the accounting books, leaving the financial impact a mystery.

Likewise, the 1994 Lillehammer and 1992 Albertville Olympics ran multimillion-dollar deficits. Even Calgary, where the 1988 Winter Games were claimed to have turned a $90-million profit, lost money. In 1999, Tom Walkom, a Toronto Star reporter, discovered that Calgary’s organizing committee had omitted the cost of building sports facilities from its figures, and the federal, provincial and municipal governments contributed $461 million toward the games – nullifying any profits.

In light of the past record of host cities, then, Vancouver’s chances of avoiding a similar financial disaster are slim. As a recent editorial in Forbes magazine ominously states: “Over the past five years the operational costs of the 2010 Winter Games has mushroomed from $1.3 billion to almost $2 billion. In other words, Vancouver is going to take it on the chin as declining sponsorship and tourism revenue combined with higher security costs push the Vancouver Olympic Committee deep into the red.”

Although it is clearly not too difficult to design an Olympic clothing line that will make scads of money, impressing the critics is a different matter entirely, as Hudson’s Bay is finding out

by Kerry Banks

Back in 2005, HBC defeated Roots and Lululemon to win the bidding war for the athletic wear sponsorship for the next four Olympic games (2006 Torino Winter Games, 2008 Beijing Olympics, 2010 Vancouver Winter Games, and 2012 London Olympics). For this privilege, HBC forked over a hefty $100 million.

Macleans magazine dubbed the HBC's winter Olympic line as "banal, but wearable."

However, the Canadian Olympic clothing that HBC produced for Beijing in 2008 met with scathing reviews:  “garish,” “loud,” “psychedelia run amok,” were just some of the reactions. In its company blog, Lululemon dubbed HBC’s sartorial stylings the “vomit pajama line.”

Chastened by that reception, HBC opted for a more conservative approach with its 2010 Winter Olympic consumer line, which is based on four distinctly Canadian items: the parka, toque, knitted sweater and buffalo plaid. Even so, the company still managed to spark controversy. After surveying surveyed the line of red, white, black and grey clothing, Vancouver Liberal MP Hedy Fry thought she spotted a partisan conspiracy, comparing the HBC’s official Olympic log, (a black ‘C’ with a red maple leaf in the centre) to the logo for the Conservative Party (a slanted blue ‘C’ with a red maple leaf in the middle). Others felt it was a direct rip-off of the Royal Canadian Air Force’s logo—a red maple leaf inside a black ‘C.’

It turns out, the HBC was sensitive enough to the similarity between its new logo and the military logo that it called in its lawyers for a meeting to determine that they were, in fact, different enough. As Hudson Bay’s fashion director Suzanne Timmins told Canadian Press, “When you’re dealing with the maple leaf, red, white, black, you’re going to come across a lot of different logos that are very close to other people’s logos.”

"Cowichan First Nation officials accused HBC of stealing their iconic sweater design after rejecting their proposal to produce Cowichan sweaters for HBC's line of 2010 Olympic clothing."

But there was more flak to come. Cowichan First Nation officials accused the retail giant of stealing their iconic sweater design after rejecting their proposal to produce Cowichan sweaters for HBC’s line of 2010 Olympic clothing. (HBC’s $350 Olympic sweater – featuring a maple leaf and elk — has become one of the clothing line’s most popular items since it was unveiled in October.) Hudson’s Bay initially dismissed the comparison, insisting its hand-knit sweater was not a Cowichan, and that the Vancouver Island band couldn’t meet the company’s production requirements to be an official supplier in any event. But after being threatened with legal action and public protests, HBC changed its tune. The company is now close to finalizing a deal with the band that will likely see Cowichan sweaters sold in Hudson’s Bay Company’s Olympic superstore in downtown Vancouver and in an aboriginal pavilion during the Games.

Meanwhile, the media’s reaction to the HBC’s Winter Olympic line appears to be lukewarm. Macleans magazine dubbed it “banal, but wearable.” The Globe and Mail declared: “These are items that have been designed to sell. Even if some Canadians are left cold by the nostalgic knitwear, foreigners will likely regard the pieces as quaint and worth buying as stylish souvenirs. Where the apparel comes up short is originality.” Chris Rudge, boss of the Canadian Olympic Committee, was more enthusiastic. He said the clothing “screams Canada” and is “bold, inspiring, modern, contemporary and cool.” Even so, “bold and “contemporary” do not seem to be the appropriate adjectives for designs that HBC fashion director Suzanne Timmins admits were inspired by the 1970s Crazy Canucks alpine ski team and the classic Canadian comedy show SCTV, featuring Bob and Doug McKenzie. She also noted that designers decided not to go with seal-skin trim, as requested by Canadian MPs to support Canada’s seal hunting industry.

The total value of licensed Olympic merchandise sales worldwide is expected to top the $500-million mark by the time the Games end, resulting in about $54 million in revenues for VANOC.

Of course, despite what the fashion mavens think, the total value of licensed Olympic merchandise sales worldwide is expected to top the $500-million mark by the time the Games end, resulting in about $54 million in revenues for VANOC. And no one need shed any tears for American-owned HBC, with its 21,000 square-foot Olympic superstore on the main floor of its downtown location jam-packed with more than 1,000 pieces of officially licensed Games merchandise. The store also features a Coke cafe decked out in Coca-Cola colours, a pin wall that can hold 21,000 pins; a display of special-edition watches from the 2010 Winter Games and past Games presented by Swatch; a concierge service offered by Purolator to ship purchases to a customer’s hotel or anywhere in the world; and replica Olympic Torches presented by Bombardier. With the Winter Games still several months away, Hudson’s Bay has already struck gold.

To view all of HBC’s Winter Olympic designs: http://store.hbc.com

So, how do you feel about the HBC’s new line of Olympic clothing? Are these items that you would buy?

Photos: Kerry Banks

Whistler hopes record-breaking snows are enough

by Kerry Banks

Record-breaking snows in Whistler this month have been attracting droves of skiers. In fact, the resort has already surpassed its record for November snowfall, with several days still remaining for the month. Even so, tourism officials are worried about the effect of “Olympic Aversion,” a threat that has nothing to do with the weather.

“Olympic Aversion” is a documented phenomenon that kept people away from previous Olympic venues such as Turin, Salt Lake City and Beijing because of fears that the sites would be too crowded, too expensive, and with too much construction around and no accommodation available. Ominously, early reports indicate that accommodation bookings for this winter at Whistler are already behind.

Officials with Tourism Vancouver and Tourism Whistler are working hard to assure people that these sorts of concerns are not warranted. They want to make it clear to skiers, for example, that there are plenty of deals on lift tickets to be had, that 90 per cent of the skiable terrain will be open during the Olympics and also that the major construction was completed years ago. And though anyone who want to go to Whistler during the Olympics for the day to ski or snowboard will have to take a bus (no driving will be allowed), that scenario won’t come into play for a few months yet. In the meantime, Tourism Whistler claims there has never been a better time to visit the resort because visitors can gain a sneak preview of the Olympic site; transportation has been made easier; and people can try out the Olympic runs ahead of schedule.

What’s your take? How do you feel about not being able to drive to Whistler during the Olympics? Are you avoiding Whistler this winter because of preparations for the Games?

***

How will I access Whistler during the 2010 Winter Games?

There will be no public parking in Whistler during the Games, so the best way to get to Whistler will be by bus services offered by private carriers. Travel by vehicle will be possible for visitors with accommodations if they have a permit (see below). Additional travel time will be required at Games time, no matter what mode of transportation you choose.

The best way to get where you need to go and avoid delays is by planning ahead, avoiding peak travel times and knowing your transportation options now before you step out the door in February 2010.

Ticket holders travelling from Vancouver to events at Whistler venues must do so using the Olympic Bus Network. You can book your Olympic Bus Network tickets in advance starting November 24, 2009.

Once in Whistler, public transportation will be the most convenient and preferred mode of transportation. There will be expanded bus routes in Whistler around the clock, seven days a week for the month of February 2010. Ticket holders travelling from within Whistler to events at Whistler venues can do so by using this service.

More details can be found at www.travelsmart2010.ca.

I heard that there will be a checkpoint along the highway to Whistler. Will that affect me?

Given the need to manage traffic flow to Whistler during the Games, a checkpoint will be in effect on the Sea to Sky Highway near the Alice Lake turn-off, north of Squamish. The checkpoint will be open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. from February 11 to 28, 2010.

To pass through this checkpoint within the 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. window, visitors to Whistler must have an official permit. Visitors who choose to drive to Whistler by private vehicle should get this permit mailed to them from their hotel before leaving home. If you don’t get this from your hotel in advance, you must get one from one of the Sea to Skypermit offices (located in either Whistler, Squamish, Pemberton or Vancouver) before you begin your trip up the highway. You will not be allowed to pass through the checkpoint without a visible permit; simply having a hotel reservation confirming parking is not sufficient. If you arrive at the checkpoint without a permit (but you have a hotel reservation confirming parking), you will be required to go the Sea to Sky permit office in Squamish to get one before continuing your trip up the highway to Whistler. If you travel outside the 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. window, you do not require a permit.

Day skiers and other visitors to Whistler are encouraged to take commercial motor coaches or travel during off peak hours. You do not require a permit if travelling by bus.

Lead photo courtesy iStock.

The raven ranks among the world’s most intelligent creatures, displaying high learning ability and use of logic for solving problems, in some tests even surpassing chimpanzees. (courtesy Kerry Banks)

Ravens may be common in the Rockies, but they remain a novelty to me. I find them to be impressive birds: large, intelligent, playful and talented mimics. I remember sitting beside a beach in Tofino one afternoon listening to a raven imitate a dripping faucet. The same bird then made me jump when he did an uncanny and eerie impression of a human voice, calling “Tommy. Tommy.” Actually, it sounded just like the vocal in The Who’s song, so maybe the raven had been listening to the tune on someone’s stereo.

I stroll down the main drag, Banff Avenue, which may be the only street in town not named after an animal. The critter roll call includes Squirrel Street, Caribou Street, Lynx Street, Wolverine Street, Whiskey Jack Crescent and Porcupine Place. The town itself is named after Banffshire, Scotland, the birthplace of  Lord Strathcona and George Stephen, two major financiers of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Able to accomodate 1,700 guests in 700 rooms, the baronial Banff Springs Hotel has been described as having “corridors for the invalid, turrets for the astronomer and balconies for lovers.”

My destination is the Banff Springs Hotel, a gothic castle at the south end of town. And the man behind the creation of this five-star luxury hotel: William Van Horne, General Manager of Canadian Pacific Railways, who viewed the hot springs near the railway station of Banff as a potential tourist attraction. His vision was fuelled by the philosophy “If we can’t export the scenery, we will import the tourists.” Hence, in 1886, Van Horne commissioned Bruce Price of New York, one of the foremost architects of the day, to draw up plans for a hotel to be built above the confluence of the Bow and Spray Rivers overlooking the Bow Valley. Construction began in the spring of 1887, and the palatial resort opened on June 1, 1888. At the time it was reportedly the largest hotel in the world.

Like any grand old hotel, the Banff Springs is said to have its share of ghosts. For example, there are frequent sightings of Sam Macauley, a bellman who died here in 1976. It is believed that he still haunts the upper floors of the hotel. Several people have identified him as a real person and have spoken to him. But then, suddenly, he disappears right in front of their eyes.

And too there is the story of infamous Room 873, which no longer exists, though the hotel does have rooms 872 and 874. According to the legend, a family was murdered in Room 873, and strange things kept taking place after the room was cleaned up and re-opened, including a mirror hung in the room that displayed the fingerprints of the little girl who died there. No matter how many times the staff cleaned the mirror, the fingerprints constantly reappeared. Coupled with the reports of guests who claimed to see the family on occasion, the management decided to close off and wall up the room. Today, staff and guests still reported seeing the spirits of the family near where the room has been closed off.

I spend a couple of hours looking around the hotel and taking photos from various vantage points. I don’t encounter any ghosts, but in the hotel’s flower garden I do find a ghostly coloured moth that looks like it fluttered right out of the pages of a children’s book of fables.

Not all moths are nocturnal, as is clear from this photo. But the identity of this silvery species found in the flower garden outside the Banff Springs Hotel is a mystery to me. Does anyone know the answer?

By the time I meet up with Masters in a coffee shop back on Banff Avenue, I have a headache, the result of tramping around like a maniac in the high altitude air. (At 1,463 metres, Banff is the town with the highest elevation in Canada.) Mysterious as always, Masters refuses to tell me what he did all afternoon. We drive over to the Pox, er the Fox Hotel, where, thankfully we find that the desk clerk’s face is not melting. She has an Australian accent, like about 70 per cent of the people we have met so far who work in the Rockies’ service industry.

Dinner is at the upscale Maple Leaf Grille and Lounge. The Maple Leaf was recently awarded “Best Resort Restaurant, North America” at the United Kingdom’s 2009 Hardy’s Skiing and Snowboarding Awards. I’m not exactly sure what this means, but it is proudly noted on the restaurant’s website. I order the barbecued rib-eye; Masters opts for the Wild B.C. Salmon. “We are in Alberta—the land of beef. Why are you ordering B.C. seafood?” I ask.

“I felt like salmon,” he replies.

The front balcony of the Banff Springs Hotel looks out over the Bow River and the gap between Mt. Rundle and Tunnel Mountain.

“OK, salmon boy. Let’s head back to the Pox. According to our official itinerary we have to be in Lake Louise by  8 a.m. for our hike.”

(To be continued …)

Part I, II, III

Photos: Kerry Banks

by Kerry Banks

In 1965, TV viewers were introduced to My Mother the Car, a situation comedy about attorney David Crabtree, who purchases a dilapidated 1928 “Porter” touring car after hearing the car call his name in a woman’s voice, which turns out to be that of his deceased mother. Much to Crabtree’s frustration, however, his mother refuses to reveal her presence to anyone but him, saying, “Son, the world just isn’t ready for a talking car.” Four decades later, things have changed.

SYNC: What is it?

Ford and Mircosoft have developed a factory-installed, in-car communications and entertainment system called SYNC that enables drivers to make and receive phone calls hands-free and control a range of digital audio via voice commands and buttons mounted on the steering wheel. The system is currently offered on 12 different Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicles in North America.
To place a call, simply press a button on the steering wheel, then say the name of the person you wish to call. SYNC will automatically connect with the names in the mobile phone’s contact list.

SYNC can even receive text messages and read them aloud using a robotized female voice known as “Samantha.” To reply, the driver selects from one of 15 pre-selected text messages, such as “Where are you?” “I need more directions” and “Be there in 10 minutes.” SYNC can also interpret a hundred or so shorthand messages, such as LOL – for “laughing out loud,” and will read swear words; it won’t however, decipher obscene acronyms.

The most advanced technological feature of the SYNC system is the ability to play songs from a connected media player via voice command. When a new player is plugged in for the first time, SYNC takes a few minutes to index all the audio files, after which drivers can use voice commands to select music by genre, album, artist or even track title. Commands such as, “Play artist The Clash,” or, “Play track ‘London Calling,’” will give drivers direct control over their music library. According to Microsoft, the same voice-selection interface also works for digital audio tracks stored on USB thumb drives.

See the System in Action

Lead image courtesy iStock

The Spray Lakes Reservoir began as a series of small lakes. In 1951, a hydroelectric dam was then built, raising the water levels to create one beautiful lake. Today, this 88-kilometre stretch of water is used both for recreation and to generate power for Canmore and the rest of the Bow River Valley.

From Three Nuns to the 1988 Winter Olympics: Canmore to Banff

The metal jangle of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar serenades us as we motor through a corridor of giant stone crags. It’s a beautiful morning, clear and crisp, and there are dozens of photo opportunities. But once again it’s a tight schedule. Though bound for Banff, on way we’re stopping in Canmore, where the road into town descends sharply for a spectacular vista of the valley and Canmore’s signature landmark: The Three Sisters. Originally called the Three Nuns, these three peaks are now known by the locals as Faith, Hope and Charity.

Formerly a coal-mining town, Canmore has experienced a boom since the 1988 Winter Olympics – when it served as the site of the cross-country and biathlon events. Although Masters is generally vague about his past, he now admits to spending time here some 20 years ago. Evidently it was a tough place back then, he recalls, and the town’s main social hub, the Canmore Hotel, “was a good place to have a beer or get into a fight.” Most of its young people were here because rent was cheap and the town was close to the ski hills around Banff and Lake Louise. But now Masters wants to see how the town has changed. He expects he won’t recognize it.

Besides coffee mugs, Seattle-based Authentic Hendrix also markets a Jimi Hendrix lava lamp, a Jimi Hendrix afghan patterned after the musician's second album, Axis: Bold As Love, and Jimi Hendrix infant wear, including an “Are You Experienced?” diaper cover that comes in three sizes.

A stroll down the main drag confirms his worst suspicions. There are a lot of gift shops. In fact, just about every second store qualifies. “Very boutiquey,” he sniffs. He walks more quickly, his disgust growing. Then something catches my eye in one of the windows. I tell him to wait, and a few minutes later emerge with my first souvenir from the trip – a psychedelic Jimi Hendrix coffee mug that proclaims “Do Your Thing” on the inside rim. I’m pretty sure Henrix didn’t coin the phrase. Still, this is the first Jimi Hendrix mug I’ve ever seen. It’s made in China and sells for a ridiculous $13.95.

We resume walking and Masters spots the Canmore Hotel. “It’s still here,” he says, surprised, “and it looks pretty much the same.” Inside is the dark atmosphere and yeasty smell of your classic Canadian tavern. There are pool tables, a horseshoe-shaped bar, and even though it’s not yet noon, several patrons who look like they’ve been here awhile. “It doesn’t look like they’ve changed the upholstery in the last 20 years,” concludes Masters.

“Well, I’ve never been here before, but I’m sure  at least one thing is different from 20 years ago.”

“What?”

“I bet that they didn’t have that back then,” I note, pointing to the “No Smoking” sign affixed to the front door. 

As much as it has evolved into a tourist haven since 1988, the recent economic recession has hit Canmore hard; we pass several massive resort developments standing unfinished as we roll out of town. It’s not exactly a boulevard of broken dreams, but it is a sobering dose of reality.

Back on the highway, I pull out the itinerary. I don’t have my reading glasses on and I mistakenly tell Masters we’ll be staying tonight at “the Pox Hotel.” He quickly corrects me, “That’s the Fox Hotel.” (He probably stayed up all night memorizing the itinerary.) “It would be interesting though,” he adds, “if it was actually the Pox Hotel and when we arrive the desk clerk’s face is rotting off.”

Aspen, the leaves of which turn bright yellow in the fall, are the staple food of beaver. The tree's buds and shoots are also favourites of moose, while its bark and underlying layer of cambium are eaten by elk and deer in winter.

I scan for more names in the blurry pages and announce my distorted findings. “I see that tomorrow night we’ll be staying at the relaxing Migraine Lake Lodge. The day after that is a pleasant hike to the Lake Agony Teahouse.”

Masters laughs. “It all sounds delightful.”

We make it to Banff in time for lunch at the Coyote Deli and Grill, where our greeter informs us we’re 40 minutes late. It’s a rather pointless observation since the place is half empty. Fortunately, the chow is better than the service.

Banff is a town I’m more familiar with. I first came here in the late 1970s during a cross-Canada roadtrip with my pal High McEachern. We were camping, and while we paid our night’s fee, the ranger told us that bears had been spotted in the vicinity. He wasn’t kidding. The next morning, as we cooked breakfast over our fire, a big black bear wandered into the campsite area, looking for a snack. He disdainfully knocked coolers over with his massive paws as made his way between sites. We tossed our frying pan in the trunk and jumped in the car. It seemed a reasonable response, but the other campers chose a different tactic: they hurled rocks at the bear and yelled. Luckily for them, it worked. The bear left, but it could have been a bloody scene.

There are no bears on the menu today, but we are scheduled to join another trail ride. “I’ve decided that I am too sore to do two more hours in the saddle,” I tell Masters. “Besides there are some things I want to see in Banff. He agrees and we cancel the cowboy outing, arranging to split up and meet again at 5 p.m.. I set off down the street headed for the Banff Springs Hotel, but as is so often the case, I get distracted.

(To be continued …)

Part I, II

Photos: Kerry Banks

A popular haunt for X-country skiers, hikers and mountain bikers, the Smith-Dorrien Trail is a gravel road that winds through the heart of one of the wildest and most scenic landscapes in Alberta's Kananaskis Country.

Back in the car, plotting our course to Mt. Engadine Lodge, I say: “Everyone on a roadtrip has to have a role. Why don’t you be the  take-charge guy.”

“Who are you going to be?” asks Masters.

“I’ll be the distracted, laid-back guy. I’ll be Good Time Charlie.”

Luckily, Masters consulted the road map while I was shooting photos of the lake, and confidently predicts we’ll be at our destination soon. He’s right. From out of nowhere, the road to Mt. Engadine Lodge suddenly appears on our right.

The lodge is a major surprise. I was expecting antlers, cowboy paraphernalia and massive wooden beams and split-pine finishes everywhere. And there is a lot of wood, but nothing else is predictable. For starters, the place is not a working-ranch-cum-guest house but a sophisticated boutique backcountry operation operated by Chris and Shari-Lynn Williams, a pair of professional innkeepers. (Chris, a former air-traffic controller, and Shari-Lynn, an accountant, left their day jobs to run resorts a decade ago.)

The lodge's dining room windows afford a spectacular view of the Rockies rising sharply across Moose Meadows – a natural habitat for coyotes, moose, elk, deer and beavers.

Before coming to Mt. Engadine(www.mountengadine.com) in 2007, the couple worked for five years at the Wickaninnish Inn in Tofino, B.C, where Chris was the chief concierge and Shari-Lynn the front-office manager. The well-travelled couple have also worked as innkeepers in Vermont, New Mexico, Cape Cod, on Prince Edward Island and on St. Lucia in the Caribbean. Here at Mt. Engadine they also supervised a major renovation, with the lodge’s nine rooms transformed from dorm-style bunk beds to luxurious suites complete with king-size beds, living areas and private baths. And the rooms are now named (and decorated) after indigenous animals, which are easier to remember than numbers. I’ve been assigned the Moose room, which is appropriate since the lodge is reputedly the best place in the Kananaskis to spot moose. The ungainly beasts like to congregate in a mud wallow adjacent to the property, supposedly attracted by the minerals in the soil.

I have a half-hour before dinner so I wander off down the road to a nearby bridge to take photos. The lodge has an incredible setting, on a hill overlooking a broad meadow and surrounded on all sides by soaring mountains. I’m enjoying the peace and solitude when two tour buses suddenly pull up and disgorge a pack of noisy German tourists. Their timing could not be better: minutes after they unload, a mother moose and her calf begin approaching across the meadow. The sight silences the crowd.

Spray Valley Provincial Park (along with neighbouring Peter Lougheed Provincial Park): more than 100 km of hiking and mountain biking trails, plus canoeing and kayaking on easily accessible lakes and rivers.

It’s occasions like this that make me wonder what European tourists think of Canada. This is the first moose I’ve ever seen in the wild and I’ve lived here all my life. This bunch of Bavarians may well be under the mistaken impression that you can order up exotic wildlife here at will.

_______________________________________________

“A visit to this mud wallow, where the moose

come every day about now, is like a once-a-day vitamin,”

says Engadine manager Chris Williams.

________________________________________________

I make it back just in time for dinner. The roast chicken is delicious, the wine terrific. Masters and I share a communal table with a group of Americans touring Alberta with an outfit called Country Walkers. The company (www.countrywalkers.com) offers 75 worldwide walking itineraries, and on this one, local guide Dave Holder spearheads daily, rigorous hikes into the wilds. Judging by the speed with which the day’s survivors are wolfing down their food, all that walking must work up a serious appetite.

After dinner, we talk with Chris about Mt. Engadine’s niche in the backcountry market, and how the level of personal service and attention to detail is what he thinks sets it apart. For example, he hand picks the wines, seeking out moderately priced, tasty stuff that most guests will not be familiar with. Likewise, the beer is from small, local Alberta breweries. And during the summer months, he brings in musicians – overlooked Canadian talents such as Suzie Vinnick, recipient of the 2008 Canadian Maple Blues Award as Female Vocalist of the Year. “The musicians stay here over the weekend and interact with the guests,” he says. “It’s all very casual.”

Local moose gather daily at the mud wallow alongside Alberta's Mt. Engadine Lodge. The site is rich in selenium, a nutrient the animals need for bone development.

The overall goal is to provide visitors with a unique experience. Of course, the wildlife also contributes. Later that night, as I’m savouring a glass of wine on the outdoor deck, a large owl makes a screeching descent into a nearby pine tree. This intrusion instantly attracts the attention of the country walkers, who are diligently keeping track of Canadian fauna spotted on their trip. They’re still debating whether the bird is a great horned owl or not when I finally stumble off to my Moose room and climb into my Moose bed.

Part I, III

Photographs: Kerry Banks

by Kerry Banks

From 1921 to 1945, Jericho Beach was home to the Pacific Coast Station of the RCAF, and a concrete wharf was built as part of its seaplane base. The structure’s perimeter was later enhanced during the 1976 Habitat Forum, using the original 1938 railings from the Lions Gate Bridge.

___________________________________

“But many complained that the wharf

had become an eyesore, and in July 2008,

 the Parks Board voted to demolish all

but the most eastern section of the structure

____________________________________

But many complained that the wharf had become an eyesore, and in July 2008, after a public consultation process, the Parks Board voted to demolish all but the most eastern section of the 0.6-hectare structure, which would be repaired to create a viewpoint overlooking the harbour. Interpretive signs would outline the wartime history of the dock and its postwar evolution, while the remaining area would be restored to a natural beach. However, since 2008, a new Parks Board has been elected, and a group of citizens – who want the wharf repaired and made available for public events – have mounted a fresh campaign to save the relic. As a result, a second consultation is being held this fall to decide the Jericho landmark’s fate.

What’s your view? Should this B.C. landmark be saved?

savejerichobeach.ca; kendalkendrick.com

Painting by Kendal Kendrick

“Just give her a kick in the belly,” says Dayleen. Our trail guide is growing impatient with my mare’s plodding pace. But I feel sympathy for Hazel, who is 16 and has been humping tourists through these Alberta hills for a decade. If the mare wants to take her time, it’s all right with me. I’m in no great hurry, and staying a few paces back keeps me clear of the goofy antics of Champ, who is second in our three-horse procession.

____________________________________________

“We are a few hours into a five-day roadtrip

through the Alberta Rockies and, just to make it

perfectly clear that we are in cowboy country,

our hosts have made sure our adventure kicks off

with a two-hour trail ride.”

__________________________________________

It appears that Champ wants to run, or else bite Dayleen’s horse in the ass, neither of which is making it easy on John Masters, a my travelling companion. A freelance writer, Masters isn’t fond of horses and is an inexperienced rider – a bad combination when climbing ridges with steep fallaways while trying to control a skittish gelding.

We are a few hours into a five-day roadtrip through the Alberta Rockies and, just to make it perfectly clear that we are in cowboy country, our hosts – the folk at Travel Alberta – have made sure our adventure kicks off with a two-hour trail ride. In fact, tomorrow’s schedule features yet another two-hour ride at a locale outside Banff, which would be fine if we were ranch hands or had titanium buttocks, neither of which happens to be the case.

In addition to the Boundary Ranch, Alberta's 4,211-square-km Kananaskis Country features campgrounds, golf and two alpine and X-country ski areas developed for previous winter Olympics.

There was supposed to be other journalists on this trek, but for some unknown reason a tour of Alberta’s Rockies inspired little enthusiasm. In fact, of the 120 international and Canadian travel writers who signed up for this fall’s Go Media Canadian Tourist Commission-sponsored tours, I was the only one who selected “Working the Rockies.” Masters is here by default – he was booted off his first choice, a VIA Rail trip across Canada – because he had done it before. And since there are only two of us, Travel Aberta has opted to dispense with the customary escort, supplying us instead with a road map, directions, booked accomodations, a rental car, unlimited gas and – just so we don’t get too footloose – a 13-page itinerary.

Our car, a Mitsubishi (and I thought the company only made TVs and computers) has a couple of attractive features: good acceleration and a sweet sound system, which means we can better appreciate the CDs I burned for the trip. Of course, Masters, who is no audiophile, would prefer to listen to CBC news. It’s one of his daily rituals, along with reading the Globe and Mail and drinking a double espresso in the late afternoon. Incredibly, he requires no caffeine in the morning.

The toughest part of our trip so far has been getting out of Calgary, a city that doesn’t see any need for coherent signage, and which apparently believes that endless urban sprawl is what God intended. However, once we escaped from Cowtown’s cement runways and headed west into Kananaskis Country, the drive suddenly changed for the better. Set in the foothills and of the Rockies, the province’s 4,211-square-kilometre recreational district boasts numerous provincial parks and some spectacular natural beauty. And though the area is open to tourists year round, fall may be the best time to visit because the highways aren’t clogged with camper trailers.

Before we reached our first stop – Boundary Ranch – I had already made Masters stop a couple of times so I could snap photos of the stunning landscape. Interestingly, we both have the same model of camera, a Panasonic digital, and even odder we both have the same model of backpack, a piece of swag we both scored on a previous media trip. Fortunately, no one is going to take us for twins. We look nothing alike.

Masters (in green shirt) and Dayleen. An hour later, waiting for the circulation in his legs to return: "Ice picks in the knees," Masters groans while hobbling about in the dirt.

I’m not the only person who finds this rugged terrain visually inspiring. Kananaskis Country has served as the setting for many movies, including Russell Crowe’s Mystery, Alaska; Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven; Brad Pitt’s The Assassination Of Jesse James and Heath Ledger’s Brokeback Mountain.

Boundary Ranch www.boundaryranch.com/ has a connection with the movies as well: the owner, Rick Guinn, a former rodeo star, also had a brief acting and modelling career. He starred in Buffalo Rider, a 1978 film that dramatizes the true life of Western legend C.J. “Buffalo” Jones, who worked to prevent the extinction of the American buffalo during the 19th-century. ”Guinn landed the role largely because he was the only actor the producers could find who could actually ride a buffalo.”

_____________________________________

“Guinn landed the role largely because he

was the only actor the producers could find who

could actually ride a buffalo.”

_____________________________________

After finishing our trail ride and waiting for the circulation in Masters’  legs to return – “Ice picks in the knees,” he groans while hobbling about in the dirt – we tour the grounds. Boundary Ranch is a major operation with about 90 horses, so it can accomodate large tour groups. In addition to trail rides, which last anywhere from one hour to six days, the ranch also offers hikes, canoe trips, rodeos, gunfight re-enactments, chuckwagon races and chili cook-offs. The outfit has even partnered with another company to provide a “Surf & Saddle” package to those who want to combine trail rides with whitewater rafting.

Under the savvy tutelage of its buffalo-riding owner, film and rodeo star Rick Guinn, the Boundary Ranch has expanded its amenities since the 1930s to include gunfights, Wild West rodeos, photo safaris, sleigh rides, calf and horse roping, mountain biking and more.

We don’t have time for the Surf & Saddle combo, unfortunately. We have to get to Mt. Engadine Lodge before dark. It’s located about an hour’s drive away along a gravel road called the Smith-Dorrien Trail. And as we accelerate into the afternoon sun I plug in a CD. Elvis Presly’s voice fills the car – “A hunk a hunk of burning love …”

“A little rock n’ roll for the Rockies,” I say, and put on my shades.

Continued…Part II, III

Photos by Kerry Banks

For the top-ranked O'Neill Coldwater Classic tour, surfers must perform radical, controlled manoeuvres in the critical section of each wave – with speed, power and flow – to maximize their scores.

All this past week, Tofino’s rugged shores have been invaded by more than 120 international surfers on this fourth stop of the 2009 O’Neill Coldwater Classic tour. It’s the first time a professional surfing competition has been staged on Canadian soil, and the locals are stoked, not only because Tofino surfer Peter Devries has unexpectedly made it through to the event’s quarterfinals, but because it proclaims to the world that the tiny outpost is the surfing capital of Canada.

If you haven’t visited Tofino in a while, you may be surprised to see what a hold surfing has on this West Coast town, and how the sport has become an important plank in the local economy. In fact, the place resembles Waimea in Hawaii, with surf shops and burrito joints scattered everywhere. Of course, Tofino doesn’t have the breed of monster waves that regularly hammer the north coast of Oahu, but they are definitely big and narly enough to have earned the town a berth on this year’s tour, with $140,000 in prize money up for grabs.

For each wave ridden, surfers are scored on a scale from 0.1 to 10.0, broken into one-tenth increments.

“The Cold Water Classic event in Tofino is the one all the surfers on the tour have been talking about,” says O’Neill global event manager Bernhard Ritzer. “It represents all that we have set out to achieve with the O’Neill Coldwater Classic Series, which is about providing a unique and challenging experience for the world’s best surfers by pushing the boundaries and exploring new remote and spectacular locations.”

The prestigious cold-water surfing series, which concludes early this November in Santa Cruz, California, made stops earlier this fall in the inhospitable waters of northern Tasmania, northern Scotland and the western cape of South Africa, but the conditions in Tofino might be the most formidable of all. Unpredictable waves, bone-chilling winds and pelting rain make its surf a strenuous physical test. Simply paddling out to the waves while encased in thick neoprene requires strength and stamina. And then too there are the bears, whose presence inspires a mixture of fear and fascination amongst the series’ organizers and surfers, who have trekking to a nearby salmon hatchery to watch the beasts feed.

It’s certainly not the sort of conditions most of these world-class athletes are accustomed to. In fact, it’s only within the last few years that the technology of wet suits has improved to the point where boarders can survive the elements and still surf competitively in them. Even so, the surfers’ feet were bare for Tuesday’s competition, and with the sun shining, most were not wearing anything on their heads while doing battle with the raging froth at Chesterman Beach.

In the Coldwater Classic format, athletes compete against one another in 25-minute heats. In the early going there are four boarders in each heat, but as the field is whittled down it becomes three, then finally gets down to head-to-head match-ups. Surfers can ride as many waves as they want in their allotted 25 minutes, but only their top two scores count. The judges, who sit in a covered wooden booth on the beach, rate the boarders on their creativity, technique and daring, on how many manoeuvres they complete and the speed, control and power they exhibit in the most critical section of the wave.

When he's not competing, Australian surfer Shannon Brown lives in Tofino, where he teaches at the Westside Surf School.

One of the keys to achieving a high score is picking a solid wave, so there is often a fair bit of time in a heat when nothing much is happening. That’s where announcer Dom Domic comes in, filling the dead air with updates on the surfers’ times and standings (which the surfers need to know as well), counting down the remaining minutes and offering commentary on the competitors and the surroundings. When the surfers get up on a wave, Domic, also president of the B.C. Surfing Association, describes the action using a vocabulary that is awash with surf  jargon – backside air, lip bashes, hacks, acid drops, fakeys and fat closeouts. And when a rider takes a tumble, he doesn’t fall but “comes unstuck.” The other unusual thing about Domic’s delivery is that he does it with a hand-held mike the front seat of a truck parked surf-side.

In fact, as I stare out my bedroom window right now, I can hear Domic’s throaty voice rising in excitement. Something big must be happening outside. I guess it’s time to suit up and jog down to the beach to see what’s causing the commotion. Let’s hope a bear hasn’t eaten one of the surfers.

Postscript: The waves broke perfectly for Tofino and local Peter Devries, who defeated Australian Jay Thompson on Saturday (October 31) to become the first Canadian to win a professional surfing event. Half of the town showed up to watch the final. Die-hards were also talking about the ‘out-of-bound’ surfing just north of Tofino. Local surfing enthusiast Brady Clarke puts that scene in perspective with Vancouver Island: Surfing the Wild Side

Got your own surf story? Or your own sweet spot – on the coast or elsewhere? Drop me a line.

Announcers describe the action using a vocabulary that is awash with surf jargon – backside air, lip bashes, hacks, acid drops, fakeys and fat closeouts. And when riders take a tumble, they don’t fall but “come unstuck.”

Critical Reading: The Driftwood Coast: Surfing Vancouver Island by Brady Clarke.

Surf Schools:

• Tofino’s Pacific Surf School Lessons, rentals, camps for all ages and skill livels, 250-725-215

• Tofino Surf School Comprehensive tutorials, from fundamentals to wave-pattern interpretation, reading tides and “surf etiquette.” 250-725-2711

• Surf Sister Founded by Canadian women’s surfing champ Jenny Stewart. 250-725-4456
• West Side Surf School Personalized coaching by superstar Sepp Bruhwiler. 250-725-2404

Photographs: Kerry Banks

Matterhorn; courtesy Ron Layters, flickr.com

Will wonders never cease? Not apparently if Bernard Weber has anything to say about it. Following up on the runaway success of his global contest to select the New Seven Wonders of the World in 2007, the Swiss-born Canadian entrepreneur and founder of the New Open World Corporation, is now running a campaign to choose The New Seven Wonders of Nature. If you want to cast your vote, simply log on to http://www.vote7.com/n7w&nbsp  where you will find photos and descriptions of all the finalists.

Niagara Falls; courtesy Insight, flickr.com

The contest, which was lauched in 2008, has since whittled a list of 261 nominees down to 28. On July 21, 2009, a panel of experts chaired by Federico Mayor, former chief of UNESCO, picked the 28 finalists based on geographical balance, diversity and the importance to human life, from a list of 77 nominees that had collected the most votes in an early round of polling. The world’s top seven natural wonders will be selected by a global poll conducted using the Internet, phone and text message, with the official final announcement slated for 2011.

The list of finalists includes a wide range of natural wonders including rivers, islands, waterfalls, forests and rock formations, and hail from all corners of the Earth. Among the more familiar wonders are Australia’s Uluru (Ayers Rock), the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon Rainforest, Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro, Switzerland’s Matterhorn, Germany’s Black Forest and Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. Canada is represented by two wonders: Niagara Falls and the Bay of Fundy. The only site included from the U.S. is the Grand Canyon.

In addition to the usual supsects, a number of obscure locales made the list, such as Lebanon’s Jeita Grotto, Azerbaijan’s Mud Volcanoes, Poland’s Lake Musurian District, Korea’s Jeju Island, the United Arab Emirates’ Bu Tinah Shoals, Puerto Rico’s El Yunque Rainforest, and Nigeria’s Zuma Rock.

Uluru; courtesy Becky E.; flickr.com

Judging by past evidence, the voting will be intense. About 100 million people cast ballots in the selection of the seven man-made wonders in 2007. The winners were Rome’s Colosseum, the Great Wall of China; India’s Taj Mahal, Jordan’s Petra; Rio’s Christ the Redeemer Statue; Peru’s Machu Picchu; and the Pyramid at Chichen Itza, Mexico.

Weber says he expects more than a billion people  to participate in the voting this time. ”This campaign should contribute to the appreciation–to the knowledge—of our environment and not just the one in our country but worldwide,” he told the Associated Press. “If we or our children want to save anything, we should first appreciate it.” Weber declined to give any numbers of votes so far. But the organization plans to release detail about voter profiles later, he added. Registration on the Web site aims to prevent people from voting twice.

New Zealand's Milford Sound; courtesy Swisscan, flickr.com

Although the contest is to pick the “New” Seven Wonders of the Natural World, there is actually no consensus as to what constitutes the original seven natural wonders. There are several lists floating around on the Internet. The most popular one includes Mt. Everest, the Great Barrier Reef, the Northern Lights, the Grand Canyon, Mexico’s Paricutin Volcano, Victoria Falls, and the harbour of Rio De Janeiro.

So which natural wonders do you think deserve to make the final seven? Let us know.

Lead image by benisntfunny; flickr.com

courtesy Kerry Banks

The heron was hunting for fish in one of the ponds near Jericho Beach, a wetlands habitat that is home to several species of waterfowl as well as turtles, frogs, muskrats and beavers. My main purpose for visiting Jericho is to take pictures, but since the area is rife with birds, I find that I am slowly and unintentionally joining the ranks of what is North America’s fastest growing hobby: birdwatching.

It’s a development that my family regards with some bemusement. My wife has begun calling me “Nature Boy” and my teenage daughter is less than impressed. At dinner the other night as I was describing some of the birds I’ve seen at Jericho, she said, “You seem to know a lot about them. Have you given them human names yet?” Her final retort, as she left the table, was “Birds are boring.” I can’t agree. They sing, screech, swim, waddle, fly, fight and hunt. And when you actually stop to examine their plumage it is hard to deny their beauty. Most things, with the possible exception of Brittany Spears, become more interesting the more you know about them, and I find this to be true of birds.

I’m not alone in this opinion. About 70 million North Americans currently participate in birdwatching, a hobby that employs more than 60,000 people in the retail and nature tour trades, and generates more than $25 billion dollars annually. Spending on bird watching is on the rise around the globe. For example, the birders who flock to Kuşcenneti National Park at Lake Manyas in Turkey are estimated to spend as much as $103 million annually. Guided birding tours have become a major business with at least 127 companies offering them worldwide. There are now several websites that cater specifically to bird watching enthusiasts who are keen to travel, such as www.travellingbirder.com and Where Do You Want to Go Birding Today? www.camacdonald.com/birding/birding.htm.

courtesy Kerry Banks

Some of these birdwatching trips venture to remote and inhospitable regions. One of the popular destinations for Birdseekers, an English company that offers bird-watching tours at some 30 different global locations, are barren, windswept islands in Alaska’s Bering Sea. The company’s founder and director, Steve Bird (yes, that’s his real name) says that his clients are willing to pay $16,000 or more for a 25-day trip to Alaska for the chance to spot a Bristle-thighed Curlew, McKay’s Bunting, Smith’s Longspur or Red-legged Kittiwake.

The term “twitcher,” is reserved for those who travel long distances to see a rare bird that is then “ticked” off on a “list.” According to Wikipedia, the usage of the term twitcher began in the 1950s, originating from a phrase used to describe the nervous behaviour of Howard Medhurst, a British birdwatcher. Prior to that the term used for those who chased avian rarities was “pot-hunter,” “tally-hunter,” or “tick-hunter.”

My budding interest in birds pales in comparison to the extreme behaviour of hard-core birders. A couple of years ago, the appearance of a rare type of turtle dove drew a flood of twitchers to a remote island in the Orkney Islands. On the first day of the dove’s sighting there were 27 car-loads of birders on the ferry, charter flights from England and dozens on scheduled flights. In the space of 10 days around 1,000 twitchers came and went. Among the onlookers was Lee Evans, who earned himself a Guinness Book record entry for the number of bird species seen in Britain in a year (359 in 1990). When a reporter asked him why he does it, Evans said: “We’re sad gits, really. We’re misfits, anti-social obsessives, and I know I’m one of the worst because even the other birders say I’m mad. I’m quite prepared to admit it, but don’t ask me to stop because I can’t, even though I know I’m too old now to ever be number one.”

courtesy Kerry Banks

There are about 10,000 species of birds and only a small number of people have seen more than 7,000. Many birdwatchers have spent their entire lives trying to spot all the bird species of the world and some have lost their lives in the process. One of the most famous is Phoebe Snetsinger, a globe-trotting American woman who set off on an almost non-stop series of journeys to exotic locales after being diagnosed with malignant cancer. When her cancer went into remission, she continued travelling, surviving an attack and rape in New Guinea, before finally dying in a road accident in Madagascar in 1999. She observed as many as 8,400 species, a feat that no fellow twitcher is near to challenging.

Predictably, Great Britain produces some of the planet’s most fanatical twitchers. In 2008, Alan Davies and Ruth Miller, from North Wales, set a new world record by observing an amazing 4,327 different species during a year-long tour, easily exceeding the previous record of 3,662, set by an American spotter in 1995. In an interview, Davies, 47, said: “Birds are my passion, always have been. From a very early age, birds have been the focus of my life. They have been reason to suffer altitude sickness in the Andes to see an Ecuadorian Hillstar, trek across the Karoo desert in 45 degrees Celsius to glimpse a small grey Eremomela, empty my stomach over the side of a small boat with engine failure just to see an Isabelline Wheatear. To see birds in wonderful places is what I live for.”

courtesy Kerry Banks

The two ecccetrics sold their houses to fund the trip, which began in Arizona on January, and spanned British back gardens, Asian rainforests and Arctic ice floes, among other terrains. The adventure was not free from setbacks. While in Vancouver, in April, they had possessions stolen from their car, including a camera, mobile phone and video camera featuring footage of many of rare birds they had ticked off their list. After a brief return to their rented flat in Wales, the couple spent Christmas in the Ecuadorian jungle, where they proudly spotted such species as the Vermilion Tanager, Green Jay and Saffron-Crowned Tanager. On their blog, they wrote: “Highlights along this track included Bearded Guan, Black-and-Chestnut Eagle. A female Masked Trogon added a splash of colour. Leaving the park behind we headed for our lodgings at Madre Tierra at Vilcabamba (the Valley of Longevity) and had our Christmas supper of roast turkey.”

However (and this must be quite a blow), while the pair carefully documented their expedition through the blog, photographs and film, their achievement will not enter the record books, as they were not accompanied by an independent adjudicator.

Lead image by Kerry Banks

Boa Vista: One of the lesser-developed isles in the volcanic Cape Verde chain, Boa Vista is mainly suited to those whose interests lie in water sports and sun worship. With pristine sand dunes, magnificent, bone-white beaches, emerald-green seas and relaxed atmosphere, you can lounge all day in complete peace, absorbing the sunshine and spectacular panoramas. Or choose from a readily available range of activities, such as snorkelling, scuba diving, windsurfing, kayaking, game fishing, horse-riding, quad bikes and jeep treks. Boa Vista is the third most important loggerhead turtle nesting site in the world. See them nesting from June to September. At night, you can sample the traditional seafood restaurants and lively music bars in the capital of Sal Rei and its unique blend of African, Portuguese and Brazilian cultures.

courtesy flickr.com

Fakarava: Enveloped by a coral reef and blue lagoon waters, this gorgeous Polynesian atoll is so remote it is not found on most  maps. Fakarava’s environment is so pure that the isle has been designated as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve for the preservation of rare species. Rich in natural fauna, it offers pink-sand beaches and is rife with rare aquatic life that includes loach, meru, and barracuda–not to mention hammerheads and tiger sharks. Not surprisingly, scuba diving is the island’s top draw, but other attractions include the ancient village of Tetamanu, where there is a Catholic church made of coral that dates back to 1874, and pearl farms, where rare black pearls are shelled.

Terre-de-Haut: Les Saintes, a spectacular cluster of eight islands situated just off the coast of Guadeloupe and accessible only by ferry or private yacht, is the very essence of French West Indies life-–without the crowds. Terre-de-Haut is the most appealing of all, with its attractive beaches, delicious Creole cuisine and laid-back French-speaking locals. It’s also the only Les Saintes island with overnight accommodations. Beachcombers will love the powdery white sands of the palm-lined Plage de Pompierre, while the spectacular underwater world of colourful reefs and exotic fish makes scuba diving and snorkelling another huge draw. Rent a golf cart to get around and visit a different beach at dawn, midday and dusk. Outside the village centre, a steep trail leads to 18th century Fort Napoleon, a fortress with barracks and prison cells, model ships and a botanical garden. There is also a nearby beach that attracts divers and nude sunbathers.

Lamu: The oldest living town in Kenya, Lamu was one of the original Swahili settlements along coastal East Africa. The port has existed for at least a thousand years. Lamu was on the main Arabian trading routes, and as a result, the population is largely Muslim. Due to the narrowness of the streets, automobiles are not allowed–the city is easily explored by foot, bicycle, or, as many locals favour, donkey. The island boasts golden sands fronting the Indian Ocean, tiny villages and a breezy, slow-moving pace of life. The rich atmosphere and history alone makes Lamu worth the trek, but so do its beaches and waters: Shela Beach offers the best swimming, while excursions to ruins and coral reefs could have you snorkelling alongside frolicking dolphins.

courtesy drewmeyerinsights.com

Cat Ba Island: The largest islet in Vietnam’s Cat Ba Archipelago, a series of 350 craggy limestone outcrops adjacent to scenic Halong Bay, Cat Ba Island is an undiscovered oasis. Starting from the Halong Bay Wharf, it takes four hours to reach the island by boat, with stopovers for swimming and eating fresh seafood. With an area of 356 square kilometres, Cat Ba encompasses forested zones, coastal mangroves, freshwater swamps, beaches, caves and cascading waterfalls. In 1986, the northeast side of the island was designated a National Park and includes a protected marine zone. The best way to see it is by motorbike. Cat Ba Island supports a population of over 20,000 inhabitants most of whom live off fishing or farming in and around Cat Ba Town. The town is small and ancient, with clusters of fishing boats. It’s a short hike from the through a tunnel to Cat Co Beach where mountains form a throne-like frame around a stunning sandy coast.

Vis: Aside from intrepid travellers, wealthy yachties and Croatians in the know, Vis remains relatively undiscovered by tourists. While the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Slavs, Venetians, Austrians, French and British have all taken turns occupying the strategically positioned island, Vis has now reverted back to something of a Mediterranean hidden gem. With its secluded beaches, crystal-blue waters strewn with sunken shipwrecks, vineyard-covered mountains, historic ruins and some of the best fish restaurants in the Adriatic, it’s no wonder Conde Nast Traveller has billed Vis as “Capri before the tourists.” The island also offers some great hiking opportunities and from the top of Mount Hum (587 metres) it is possible to see Italy.

Lead image courtesy fabuloussavers.com

The price of admission includes an optional tour with a guide. It’s highly advisable, as Dali’s work is complicated. Our guide, Tom, is an enthusiastic fellow who produces an alarming amount of saliva when he talks. Originally from Virginia, he has a thick southern accent, and it takes some time to adjust to the sound of his honeysuckle drawl as he discusses Dali’s fascination with Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious. But the effort is worth it. A far more complex impression of Dali emerges during our tour than I remember from the 1960s, when the wild-eyed Spaniard was regarded as another wigged-out pop star, roaming the globe in a purple cape with a black ivory cane and his twitching Count of Monte Cristo moustache.

courtesy gravitando.wordpress.com

Out tour begins with a painting entitled Daddy Longlegs of the Evening–Hope! In addition to the obligatory spider, there is a limp airplane oozing out of a cannon and a desiccated body draped over a tree, its head flattened into a fish-eye silhouette. The figure is holding a violin while ants dine on its skull. According to Tom, this 1940 piece predicts the key role that air power would play in the Second World War. The work is also significant because its history explains the museum’s creation.

The painting was purchased at an auction in 1943 by a Cleveland plastics engineeer named Reynolds Morse, and his wife Eleanor, for $600. The Morses met Dali to complete the transaction over cocktails at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. Dali, demonstrating his business acumen, regretfully informed them he could not sell the painting without its original frame. The cost of the frame was $700.

Rather than being soured by the experience, the Morses continued to buy Dali’s work. The conservative couple’s infatuation with the flamboyant artist puzzled their friends, but they persevered, braving the insults tossed at them by Dali’s domineering wife, Gala, and paying for expensive dinners that Dali presided over in chic Manhattan restaurants. Eventually, the two couples developed a friendship that included taking vacations together and collaborating on lectures and exhibitions.

courtesy worldgallery.co.uk

In 1971, Morse began to exhibit his Dali pieces in a wing of his company’s headquarters in suburban Cleveland. The collection soon outgrew its surroundings and in 1980 he began to search for a permanent home. St. Petersburg won the bid for collection under the condition that it be kept intact and accessible to the public. The Florida legislature raised $2 million to convert a vacant warehouse into a museum and establish foundations to maintain and display the collection, which is now valued at more than $350 million.

Those who only associate Dali with his surrealist canvasses will be surprised by the museum’s examples of the more conventional paintings that he did in his youth. One, in particular, the 1926 still life Basket of Bread, glows with the translucent warmth of the great Dutch masters. Eighty-three years after its creation, the bread still looks like it just emerged fresh from the oven. There are also a number of rarely exhibited items, including a drawing for a movie entitled Giraffes on Horseback Salad that Dali intended to make with the Marx Brothers. Sadly, Dali’s script was rejected by MGM as too weird.

Thankfully, the museum has plenty of examples of Dali’s stunning hallucinatory visions, the ones populated with melting watches, bleeding eggs, lobster telephones, insect-legged elephants and tilting crutches that caused many to conclude that the artist was either insane or on drugs. Dali denied the latter charge, declaring, “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”

courtesy artknowledgenews.com

These powerful and macabre 1930s paintings, pulsing with sex and paranoia, established Dali as the most famous of the surrealists, an art movement from which he was expelled in 1934 because of his right-wing political views. But the Catalonian’s photographic realism clearly stamped him as a modernist. As writer J.G. Ballard observed: “Fitted with a disquieting light that is more electric than solar, his paintings are like stills from some elegant but unsentimental newsreel filmed inside our heads.”
Dali had a mischievous wit, evident in some of his titles: The Pharmacist of Ampurdan Seeking Absolutely Nothing, Eggs on a Plate without the Plate, and Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket. The latter is a sculpture composed of dozens of shot glasses filled with creme de menthe that are attached like monstrous sequins to a jacket from under which a white brassiere peeps out. As the Spaniard noted, “It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”

Out tour culminates in a long, tall gallery devoted to six of what Dali immodestly called his “masterworks”: massive, religiously inspired paintings, crowded with mind-boggling detail and double images, all produced between 1948 and 1970. In order to paint these behemoths, he had part of his studio floor removed so that a canvas could be raised and lowered by ropes, keeping the part he was working on at eye level. The most famous of these epics, The Hallucinogenic Toreador, took almost four years to complete.

courtesy fotos.org

Head buzzing, I exit the gallery wondering what Dali would have thought of all this. He planned to attend the museum’s opening in 1982, but cancelled when Gala fell ill. After her death that year, his own health went into decline and he made no more trans-Atlantic trips before his own death in 1989. One suspects that Dali would have been pleased by the museum, especially its fabulous gift shop, whose assorted temptations artfully empty the pockets of visitors.

The shop’s array of books, T-shirts, posters, calendars and fridge magnets is supplemented by baseball caps, umbrellas, jewellery and silk ties imprinted with Daliesque grasshoppers, ants and rippling birds. There are Dali-designed tarot cards, functional melting clocks, martini glasses, jigsaw puzzles, finger puppets, and bumper stickers and coffee mugs emblazoned wth one of Dali’s most enduring and revealing statements: “The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.”

Lead image courtesy iatwm.com

courtesy Loving Earth; flickr.com

The long-dead gunslinger is also a big tourist draw in New Mexico, the state where he spent most of his life. Each year, New Mexico stages a Billy the Kid Pageant in Lincoln from August 7 to 9. And to meet the needs of Wild West aficionados who can’t make the trip, the New Mexico Tourism Department recently created a new website, (www.newmexico.org/billythekid) featuring biographical information and maps and tours of Billy the Kid territory that allow visitors to retrace his history.

Judging by the only authenticated photo of him, Billy the Kid did not resemble Paul Newman, Val Kilmer, Kris Kristofferson or any of the other actors who have portrayed him in the movies. That photo, a two-by-three-inch ferrotype or tintype, taken outside Beaver Smith’s Saloon in Fort Sumner, in late 1879 or early 1880, depicts the Kid at age 20. An earlier version published in 1907 in the first volume of G. B. Anderson’s History of New Mexico: Its Resources & People, remains unaccounted for; speculation endures that it may have been lost in a fire.

Billy the Kid; courtesy wikimedia.org

The image reveals, as the Las Vegas Gazette reported on December 28, 1880, “… a young man about five feet eight or nine inches tall, slightly built and lithe, weighing about 140; a frank and open countenance, looking like a school boy, with the traditional silky fuzz on his upper lip; clear, blue eyes, with a roguish snap about them; light hair and complexion. He is, in all, quite a handsome looking fellow, the only imperfection being two prominent front teeth slightly protruding like squirrel’s teeth.” 

Tintypes are reverse images. Unfortunately, publisher after publisher of countless books, magazines and newspapers over the decades produced copies of the halftone from the Anderson book without telling readers that they were seeing a reverse image. As publication of the reversed image multiplied, it created the myth of the Kid as a left-handed gun. That fallacy is only one of many about Billy the Kid. 

According to the popular legend, Billy was a homicidal maniac who killed 21 men, one for each of his 21 years. In truth, he shot four by himself and perhaps five others in concert with others, and each of his killings was either committed in self-defence or as an act of war. Rather than a cold-blooded killer, he seems to have been a product of his times. New Mexico was a violent place in 1880: the state’s murder rate was 47 times higher than the national average.

He was also not named Billy, though he did assume the alias of William H. Bonney. His real name was Henry McCarty and he was born in 1859 in New York City, the son of  Irish immigrants. His father vanished from his life at an early age and Henry moved west with his mother, first to Indiana, then to New Mexico, where she remarried and died of tuberculosis in 1874. Abandoned by his stepfather, the teen drifted into petty crime before moving to Arizona and getting involved in cattle rustling. 

The saga of Billy the Kid emerged from the debris of the Lincoln County War, a complex and bloody feud that erupted in New Mexico in 1878, pitting the area’s ranchers against the town merchants. Billy fought on the side of the ranchers, who lost the conflict, and was later charged with murdering Lincoln County sheriff William Brady, even though Brady died in a hail of bullets fired by numerous gunmen. Many found it strange that the Kid was the only one tried for the murder, and most agree it was a crooked trial. In fact, the Kid was the only person successfully charged with a crime as a result of the Lincoln County War. 

Lincoln County jail; courtesy wikimedia.org

Billy was eventually captured by Sheriff Pat Garrett and jailed in the town of Mesilla. His trial was held in a building that still stands at 2385 Calle de Guadalupe, and is now called the Billy the Kid Gift Shop. Here, on April 9, 1881, Billy was found guilty of murder and  sentenced to death by hanging. But on April 28, 1881, after being returned to the Lincoln County jail, he escaped custody by slipping out of his handcuffs and shooting two of Garrett’s deputies. A few months later, Garrett tracked down his nemesis and killed him, ambushing Billy at a ranch near Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881.

Pat Garrett; courtesy wikimedia.org

Ironically, Billy the Kid was not a well-known figure during his life. He was catapulted to legendary status after his death by the publication of a rash of dime-store novels and Pat Garrett’s own sensational book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid: The Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Have Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona, and Northern New Mexico by Pat F. Garrett, Sheriff of Lincoln County, N. Mex. By whom He was Finally Hunted Down and Captured by Killing Him.

His legend got another boost in 1926, when author Walter N. Burns published his bestselling novel The Saga of Billy the Kid, heralding the rebirth of the boy as America’s own Robin Hood. Adding further weight to the renaissance was the emergence of several old men claiming to be the real Kid, having survived Garrett’s bullets. The controversy would ultimately result in a 2004 court battle to exhume the remains of Billy and his mother to extract DNA to compare with that taken from the corpses of two of the men who purported to be Billy. This challenge was successfully opposed by the mayors of Fort Sumner and Silver City, who realized that the result had the potential to dry up a major source of tourism revenue.

Maybe the Kid can now finally rest in peace, wherever he is buried.

(Lead image by Shanissinha; flickr.com)

Janice in the forest; courtesy Tom Ryan

Our final day in the East Kootenays begins with a hike through an old-growth forest. Not a difficult hike, mind you. Our guide, Steve Kuijt, operations manager at Island Lake Lodge, assures us it is “a leisurely jaunt.” Of course, Steve is impossibly fit, just like just about everyone on the staff here, most of whom happen to be female. “Fernie mountain girls,” is the way that Tom describes them. “They are a special breed,” he says.

I am still pondering that remark as we ramble into the woods. At least there is not much chance of getting lost. Steve is a certified mountain guide, which means he is proficient in all things involving the outdoors. Apparently it takes anywhere from five to 10 years to complete the program, and mountain guides have to work in several locations to receive their accreditation.

Steve Kuijt; courtesy Tom Ryan

The trail leads through a shadowy world of towering 800-year-old Western Red Cedars. Light filters down through the canopy in celestial shafts and everything smells like has been bathed in air freshener. This pristine forest, which was never logged, has also miraculously escaped the wrath of forest fires. It’s one of the natural gems of the lodge’s 7,000-acre property.

As we plod along, Steve relates some of the local history. Many people, he says, believe this trail was the same one used by the legendary Sam Steele when he came though the area with Division D of the Northwest Mounted Police in 1887. His mission:  to establish the site of what would be the NWMP’s first permanent post west of the Rocky Mountains, and to diffuse tensions between white settlers and the Ktunaxa tribe. Steele, who was front and centre in a number of pivotal historical events in the opening of Canada’s west, including the battle with Big Bear at Saskatchewan’s Loon Lake, and the Klondike Gold Rush, settled the dispute with typical efficiency.

Sam Steele; courtesy wikimedia.org

And what is the evidence that the famous Mountie rode this path? Trees along the trail have been marked with hatchet slashes, and beside one of theses Steve shows us where the name “Steele,” has been carved into the wood.

An hour later, we are back at the lodge. Janice tells Joe and myself that we have a couple of options for the rest of the day. We can join her and Andre on a six-hour hike up into the Lizard Range, or we can stay behind and hang out and have a massage in the spa. Gee, tough choice.

My massage, administered by one of the lodge’s attractive young mountain girls, is very relaxing – so relaxing, in fact, that midway through it I notice that I am drooling. We discuss travel and she tells me, “Wow, iIt sounds like you have a fascinating life.” Afterwards, feeling pretty good about myself, I enyoy lunch on the outdoor patio. Tom drops by to join me.  Joe, however, is nowhere to be found. “He said he had some work to do,” says Tom. “He has to file a story today about his trip.”

“Ah yes, the spectre of the deadline rears it ugly head. I wonder what he’s going to write about?” 

“Probably about how everything out here is not quite as tall as the CN Tower,” says Tom.

Early in the evening I meet up with Janice and André, who have returned from the heavens with sunburned faces. The pair excitedly recount their ascent. The words “steep,” “slippery” and “snow-covered” are mentioned repeatedly. André proclaims it to be “the best day of hiking I’ve ever had.” 

I figured that was the case,” says Janice, “because when we got near the top, he kept stopping, and looking around and saying, “Merde!”

Just as our pre-dinner cocktails are being served, Joe re-surfaces wearing a brown blazer and a blue-and-yellow striped tie.

________________________________________

“Hey, did you get your massage?” I ask him.

“Yeah,” he says. “But to tell you the truth,

it was one of the most difficult things I’ve done.”

____________________________________

“You’ve got to be joking?”

“No, I’m serious. The whole time I was on the table it was like I was on a roller coaster. It felt like I was going to fly over the edge. The masseuse kept saying, “Your body is really tight.”

Tight is right. It sounds like Joe needs 10 massages.

As the conversation veers into the latest methods of avalanche control, Joe suddenly decides that he has to get a picture of the mama moose that everybody else has seen. He gulps down a tumbler of scotch and charges out the door, heading to the lake with his tiny camera. The sun is starting to slip behind the mountains and so Steve scrambles after him.

They return 40 minutes later. Joe proudly proclaims that he not only got a photo of the moose, but also of her young calf. He then goes on to boast that he was the first to spot the wild beasts and not the accredited mountain guide. “I saw them first, right Steve?” he says.

Steve  just smiles.

Part 6

Part 5

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

(Lead image by qyd; wikimedia.org)

It is late afternoon when we arrive in Fernie, and the town’s brick buildings are bathed in a soft, golden glow. It is the perfect evening to see the Ghostrider. Many of B.C.’s frontier towns have legends attached to them, but none are more colourful than the “Fernie Curse.”

The tale begins with mining magnate William Fernie, the town’s founder. During one of his prospecting trips in the area, Fernie met a tribe of First Nations people, and  noticed that one of the chief’s daughters was wearing a necklace of shiny black stones. Knowing these stones were coal, Fernie asked about their source. The chief agreed to show Fernie where the stones had been found, with the condition that the prospector marry the princess. But, after learning the location of the coal deposits, Fernie reneged on the deal. The angry chief responded by putting a curse on the valley, saying it would suffer from fire, flood and famine. In April 1904, fire reduced Fernie’s wooden commercial district to smouldering rubble. Four years later, a second fire gutted the entire city. In 1916, more damage was done when the Elk River overflowed and flooded large sections of town. The near-famine conditions of the Great Depression made residents believe the curse would never end.

courtesy library; flickr.com

That’s the way the situation remained until August 15, 1964, when members of the Kootenay tribe, led by Chief Ambrose Gravelle (Red Eagle), assembled in Fernie for the ceremonial lifting of the curse. Mayor James White made amends for the wrong done by William Fernie by smoking the “pipe of peace” with Chief Red Eagle.

Though the curse has now been banished, the memory lingers. On sunny summer evenings a spectacular shadow appears on a rock-face high above the city that shows the form of the jilted princess sitting on a horse with her father, the chief, who is walking beside her. They call it the Ghostrider.

Fernie: Coolest Town in North America – According to Rolling Stone magazine

Today, of course, Fernie is more popularly known as a mecca for skiers, snowboarders, hikers and mountain bikers, and tourism is on the rise – thanks in part to some glowing media coverage. Rolling Stone magazine have dubbed Fernie the “Coolest Town in North America” and Outside magazine ranked it among its “Top 20 Dream Towns,” two points noted by British Columbia magazine when it did a 2006 cover story on the town, entitled “Coolest Fernie.” However, my first impression is that this is one of the sleepiest places I have ever been to. The downtown sidewalks are deserted and it’s so quiet you can hear yourself think. All that’s missing is a dog asleep in the middle of the main street. I dunno, maybe you have to see it in winter.

Joe finds a store that is actually open – a head shop – and begins interviewing the owner, an attractive woman who came here from somewhere else, which seems to be the secret to Joe’s heart. I wander off and end up in a saloon where I drink a beer and watch dust motes drifting in the air.

courtesy patrick 444; wikimedia.org

National Geographic Traveler 2009 Pick: Island Lake Lodge

A 10-kilometre drive up into the mountains gets us to Island Lake Lodge. Situated at the 1,400-metre level, the remote setting packs a visual punch: green-roofed wooden chalets dwarfed by the towering, grey mountains of the Lizard Range, and everywhere you look ramrod straight evergreens rising up out of a blanket of emerald green. There is a beautiful lake in front of the lodge, bald eagles circling overhead and jackrabbits in the parking lot. The air feels like it is composed of pure oxygen.

The lodge www.islandlakeresorts.com/ is famed for its powder snow and cat-skiing operations, but its summer pleasures – fine dining, fishing, hiking and a full spa – are also attracting a following. Recently, the travel magazine National Geographic Traveler published its “Stay List 2009 Guide,” an elite list of 129 hotels around the globe with a transcendent vision that goes beyond traditional hotel-keeping. Island Lake Lodge was one of only 13 Canadian hotels included on the list.

We have dinner on the lodge balcony. Head chef Kelly Attwells recommends the steak. He can personally vouch for the beef, because he bought it at auction. He means he bought the entire cow. “Her name is Midnight,” says Atwells. Hearing that, Janice decides to pass on the steak. She doesn’t want to eat anything that she knows the name of.

courtesy Tom Ryan

During dinner we learn that the area boasts one of the largest concentrations of grizzlies in the province. There is plenty of other wildlife as well. At the head of the trail that leads down to the lake a blackboard lists the latest animal sightings. Today the board reads, “Moose, bear, cougar spotted this week. Make noise on the trails! Keep dogs on leash.” The moose, a 1,000-pound female, is a local celebrity. Every year or two, she swims out to the little island on the lake and gives birth. She stays there until the calf is ready to get around on its own. Apparently, the cow has already has already had her baby this year.

Midnight is delicious and the wine is first-rate. It should be, considering that the lodge has 3,000 bottles in its wine library, ranging from $40 to $600 a bottle. Even so, I’m not sure how Joe can enjoy his. Beside the vino, he also has a glass of coca-cola, a beer and a scotch in front of him. And his foul-smelling cigars are back.

I stare out across the valley at the Lizard Range and its three most prominent peaks, popularly known as “the Three Bears.” A thought comes to mind. “Hey Joe,” I say, “standing out there are the three bears: Papa, Mama and Baby Bear. Which one are you?”

“Bears?” he says. “I don’t see any bears.”

(To be continued …)

Part 5

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Lead image by Island Lake Resorts

courtesy chiloa; wikimedia.org

We are motoring south on Highway 95 and Tom is telling us that he once worked for Pierre Trudeau. “I used to have to get him a red rose for his lapel every day,” says Tom. I can’t say that I am buying this story, but I nod like I am. Joe, who is evidently not a Trudeau fan, mentions the one-finger salute that the prime minister gave to protesting strikers from his train car in Salmon Arm. ”Yes, but less widely remembered is that the protestors were shouting anti-French slogans at the train,” I note. “Still, all in all, another heart-warming piece of Canadiana.”

Continuing the Canadiana theme, at Joe’s urging we pull into a Tim Horton’s.  He returns a few minutes later carrying a coffee and a bag of donuts. “They don’t move like they do in Toronto,” he says, between mouthfuls.

Back on the road, Tom tells us about a recurring dream he has been having in which he is dating the Queen of England. “This is the queen as she looked in the 1950s,” he quickly points out. At any rate, Tom is waiting for the queen in his car. She gets in and says, “Tom, I can’t take it anymore. I want to leave the palace and hang out with you.”

But Tom replies stoically: “No Liz, you’re the queen and I’m just a little guy. It would never work out.”

None of us know quite what to make of this. I offer some helpful advice. “You know Tom, they say that all the characters in your dreams are parts of your own personality. Maybe you want to be the Queen, or maybe a queen.”

Any further probing of Tom’s subconscious is abandoned when Joe poses a football trivia question. “Which NFL player was Howard Cosell referring to on Monday Night Football when he said, “Look at that little monkey run.” Joe is disappointed that I know the answer. Cosell was referring to Washington Redskins receiver Alvin Garrett, who was black. That controversial 1983 remark ultimately caused Cosell to leave Monday Night Football a few months later.

Why Howard Cosell’s name has popped into Joe’s mind in the midst of the B.C. Kootenays is a mystery, but it provokes a round of sports trivia that causes Janice to groan in frustration. Tom laughs at her discomfort. “This isn’t turning out be much fun for you is it Janice?”

courtesy Hollylewi; wikimedia.org

Flanked by 3,000-metre snow-capped peaks, we roll through the Columbia Wetlands. Considered the last intact portion of the Pacific flyway, the 27,000-hectare expanse was designated a wetland of international importance in 2005. In spring and fall, the area attracts up to 60,000 mallards, 20,000 northern pintails, 10,000 swans, 15,000 sandhill cranes and 50,000 Canada geese.

We pull over to admire the panorama of the glittering green floodplain and get into a conversation with an aboriginal woman. She is wearing pigtails, a straw cowboy hat, a grey T-shirt, baggy, checkered purple shorts and pink Crocs. She is here trying to find some friends who are re-creating explorer David Thompson’s exploration of the region by canoe in the early 1800s. “They have one token white guy to play David Thompson,” she says. “He should be easy to spot.” She shakes her head and chuckles, “That David Thompson, he wouldn’t know where he was going. He would have had to ask his squaw wife.”

A bit of revisionist history? Well, Thompson was married to a Métis woman named Charlotte Small, and she did accompany him on some of his expeditions. Their marriage lasted 58 years, the longest Canadian pre-Confederation marriage known, and they had 13 children together, so this was definitely no summer fling. Still, during his many years of surveying, the man the Natives called “the Stargazer” mapped more than 3.9 million square kilometres of North America, so I’m guessing he must have had some sense of direction. Unfortunately, Canada’s greatest geographer died blind, penniless and in virtual obscurity in 1857 in Montreal.

Our final destination today is Island Lake Lodge near Fernie, but we have time to make a few stops along the way. The first is Radium Hot Springs. I’m not sure that naming your town after a radioactive element was a wise business decision, but the springs are popular. There are two large pools, one with hot water for soaking (usually around 39°C), the other a two-thirds-size Olympic swimming pool that is kept at about 29°C. There is also a hot-tub sized pool that has been dubbed the “Plunge Pool,” because the water can be hot – right from the source at 44°C – or cold, right from a creek running beneath the pools.

After we enter the complex, Joe pulls out his tape recorder, approaches one of the employees and says, “Well, the first question I have to ask is how many people have you saved?”

While he asks his questions, I wander off to check out a tourist shop that looks like it has been preserved in amber since the 1960s. Feeling nostalgic for the family road trips of my youth, I buy myself an Eskimo Pie.

Later, we stop for lunch in Invermere, which is also known as Calgary’s “Whistler.” The permanent population of the town is only 4,000, but on summer weekends it swells to 40,000. This may be why it takes us about an hour to be served lunch. Joe doesn’t appear to mind. Excited by the fact that so many of the people working in these parts are from southern Ontario, he is now interviewng everything that moves.

Hit man? courtesy Riley Banks

After eating, André and I don our sunglasses and walk off to explore, eventually ending up gazing at a statue of David and Charlotte Thompson. When we come back, Tom says, “Geezuz, everyone is staring at you guys. You look like a couple of hit men.” I’m wearing a green sports jacket, a black shirt and black slacks, while André is clad in a black track suit. I guess it doesn’t take much to stand out in Invermere.

(To be continued …)

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Lead image by sallylondon; flickr.com

courtesy Tom Ryan

Twin Falls is a sweet piece of eye candy: water spilling through two grooved chutes at the top of the chasm, falling through air, then merging into the same flow farther down, before crashing over the rocks and becoming a frothing cauldron. There is a bench that offers a head-on view of the show, so I sit down and soak it all in. Tom hauls out his camera and snaps some shots, including one of the three muskeeters.

Within seconds, a golden-mantled ground squirrel appears and stands on his hind legs peering up at me. I suppose he figures this is his turf and he is looking for an admission fee. Feeling rather good about having survived the hellish hike to Twin Falls, I open up my pack. ”Do you like pretzels, little guy?” Turns out he does. He takes one of the salted snacks and begins munching away, holding it aloft in his paws like a steering wheel. To complete the picture, he even has a pair of snazzy racing stripes.

courtesy damclean; flickr.com

Since our rodent pal is eating, we decide to follow his example, devouring the lunches that the lodge packed for us. The spray from the falls is having a soothing effect and I am starting to feel very relaxed. Janice, however, is disappointed that the tea house isn’t open. Yes, out here in the middle of nowhere there is a tea house that serves scones with jam. It’s a national historic site, built in stages by the CPR, beginning around 1908 with a one-storey cabin for patrons taking backcountry tours. In 1923, the company added a two-storey log structure to create a larger and more attractive chalet. A woman named Fran Drummond has owned and operated the place since 1964. Constructed from local spruce, the chalet now houses a main-floor kitchen and eating area with bedrooms on the second floor. The menu includes a selection of soups, sandwiches and desserts, which are served daily during the summer months.

Denied her chance at high tea, Janice decides that that we should start back. Man, the girl just can’t keep still. But the phrase “start back” comes as a jolt. It is an unpleasant reminder that we have only reached the midway point of our circular 17-kilometre hike. Janice also mentions that we will be taking a different return route.

My thinking is that this trail has to be much easier since we will now be descending. Once more I am proven wrong. Ten minutes into the return hike, things are already looking grim. There is no trail. Instead, we must traverse a moonscape of huge, jagged boulders on an upward diagonal. Why “up” I don’t know, but we are climbing again, and once again trying to keep pace with the long, machine-like strides of Janice and André.

This time, however, the pair lose interest in stopping to let us catch up. They vanish over the ridge, leaving Tom to deal with the stragglers. ”Would you take a cripple up these rocks?” asks Joe, a reference to Tom’s earlier anecdote about the Filipina journalist. The moraine is unforgiving stuff and it is not long before Joe, despite his trusty walking stick, begins to complain. He says that he has a bum leg and doesn’t think he is going to be able to make it.

courtesy Tom Ryan

Since we’re not equipped to camp, I wonder how feasible it might be to get a helicopter in here for an evacuation. Would the Toronto Sun foot the bill for that? Tom calmly urges Joe to continue, promising that this nasty section of rubble ends shortly, while steering the conversation away from the current situation. He also begins offering Joe pretzels as a reward for completing each new stretch of terrain. The pretzels work their magic and Joe, his lily-white knees glowing like headlamps in the afternoon sun, makes it through the moraine.

From there we descend through the forest, where I quickly remember that descending is no easier than climbing. I start gobbling ibuprofen tablets, but by the time we finallly make it back to the car my legs still feel like someone has been pounding on them with ball-pen hammers. Janice asks everyone what they thought was the highlight of the hike. I spoil a unanimous vote for Twin Falls by stating that I liked Takakkaw Falls best. “Of course, we saw that in the first five minutes,” I point out.

We dine that evening at Cilantro at Emerald Lake Lodge, overlooking the lake of the same name. The upscale resort attracts a large international clientele and, judging by the fleet of red canoes tied up at the dock, a healthy contingent of Japanese tourists. The restaurant’s location is stunning and everyone’s mood is upbeat. Even silent André has started talking, his tongue loosened by several glasses of fine Okanagan red.

Joe has made a miraculous recovery from his ordeal in the Yoho Valley, either that, or the experience has tipped his mind over the edge. He is still carrying his walking stick and he goes around the tables with it, chatting openly to total strangers. “I almost died today,” I hear him tell one couple in a happy voice. “I hiked for 55 kilometres.”

I must admit, the guy has a writer’s instincts. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

(To be continued …)

Part 5

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Takakkaw Falls, courtesy Xevi V; flickr.com

We are trudging up a forest trail somewhere in the Yoho Valley, just west of the Continental Divide. I am sweating buckets and gasping for air. We are on the hike that Tom and Janice earlier described as “pretty easy.” I now know that these two can’t be trusted. The lone consolation, and it isn’t much, is that Joe is having an even tougher time of it than me.

The hike might not be so bad if we didn’t have to keep up with the maniacal pace that Janice and André are setting. The duo appears to be competing to see who is fitter. As for Tom, a former college track athlete, he comes and goes, merrily firing off wisecracks and taking pictures along the way, and, hopefully, keeping watch for bears.

“Bears?” Joe repeats loudly when informed that some had been spotted recently in these parts. He seems genuinely astonished to learn that bears inhabit the wilds of B.C. I suppose he figured the big fellows only show up to beg for sandwiches along the roadside, like you see in the postcards. At any rate, the struggle to keep within eyeshot of the two marching metronomes has made it too difficult for him to talk, which is a blessing. But then again if he had enough wind to converse, we would have less reason to worry about bears. The booming sound of his voice would have sent them scurrying.

Admittedly, the trail started out promising enough– the first kilometre of it was paved. The route took us past thundering Takakkaw Falls, a long, narrow, horsetail-shaped slice of glacial melt water that makes a spectacular plunge down a narrow channel fed by the Daly Glacier. Takakkaw Falls has a height of 384 metres and a vertical drop of 254 metres, making it Canada’s second-highest waterfall after Della Falls at Della Lake, B.C., which has a vertical drop of 440 metres. In comparison, Niagara’s famed Horseshoe Falls drops a pitiful 57 metres, though it has a much greater volume of water.

The sight of Takakkaw Falls was certainly uplifting, but what I didn’t realize then was that “up” was going to be the operative word for the day. The trail we are on does nothing but climb. This might be fine if you run a few miles every day, not so good if you job keeps you chained to a desk. Thankfully, there is some beautiful scenery enroute to relieve the pain. The water at Laughing Falls, for example, was an amazing milky green colour. Even knowing that the hue is caused by silt deposits carried down from the glaciers didn’t detract from its magic.   

Our destination is yet another waterfall-–117-metre high Twin Falls. The view, according to Tom, is supposed to make the hard slog worth it, but then this is the guy who called this a “pretty easy hike.” Meanwhile, the sight of all this dazzling, glacier-fed water has stirred up a fresh obsession in Joe. He desperately wants to stick his feet in B.C. mountain water. “How cold will it be?” he asks. “Will I be able to stand it?”

“It will be this cold,” says Tom, making a tiny circle with his thumb and forefinger.

Kicking Horse River, courtesy Feffef; flickr.com

Another kilometre on, we cross a babbling creek and Joe indulges his wish, taking off his shoes and socks and jumping in. He then bends down and begins happily slurping handfuls of the stuff into his mouth. When Tom, who has paused to take some shots of a trio of pretty female hikers, catches up with us and spots Joe in the water, he says, “OK. Just tell me that you didn’t?”

“Didn’t what,” asks Joe.

“Didn’t take a drink.”

“Yeah, I did. Why?”

“I’m guessing you haven’t heard of ‘beaver fever,’” replies Tom, who promptly launches into a very detailed, gory and highly exaggerated description of the intestinal infection’s effects.

Joe’s exuberance over his mountain-water baptism is instantly swept away. “How long before I know if I’ve got it?”

“Could be a couple of hours. Could be a couple of days,” says Tom.

We plod on, eventually reaching the base of a series of steep switchbacks that lead up to Twin Falls. The climb is a killer. Halfway up, Joe drags a branch out of the brush and uses it as a walking stick. Dripping with perspiration and caked with dust, we finally make it to the top and stare out across the yawning gorge.

(To be continued …)

Part 1

Part 2

Lead image by Keith Young; wikimedia.org

//

courtesy woodchuckiam; flickr.com

Now that his cellphone is no longer functioning, Joe is forced to converse. He begins tellling us about the celebrities that he has interviewed for his newspaper column, or, in the case of Ben Affleck, tried to interview. Joe collared Affleck at a Toronto Blue Jays’ game, but the actor blew him off, so Joe sat behind his subject and glared at him for nine innings while Affleck kept calling him nasty names.

We are all pumped to be in the B.C. Rockies. This is Joe and André’s first time in these mountains, and I was last here several decades ago, so the drive is stirring up some fond memories. Crossing the border through Yoho National Park  is a spectacular way to make an entry. Named for a Cree word that means “awesome,” Yoho was declared a UNESCO world Heritage Site in 1984. Despite having 28 peaks higher than 3,000 metres, several amazing waterfalls, including Takakkaw Falls, the third tallest in Canada, 400 kilometres of hiking trails and an array of green alpine lakes and roaring rivers, the park has a low profile. Despite its close proximity to Banff National Park, it attracts far less traffic than its famous counterpart, which draws about four million visitors a year, making it Alberta’s number one tourist destination.

courtesy meironke; flickr.com

Just inside Yoho, we pause to admire the Canadian Pacific Railway’s famous Spiral Tunnels, which were built to solve the problem of running trains up Big Hill. To complete the CPR as quickly as possible, a decision was made to delay blasting a 430-metre tunnel through Mount Stephen and instead build a temporary 13-klilometre line over it. That required scaling Big Hill, whose 4.5 percent grade was the steepest in North America.  Trains going up the hill required four extra engines to push, while several runaway spur lines greeted the trains on their way down. As one might guess, disasters were common. After 25 years, the Spiral Tunnels finally replaced the “temporary” route in 1909. This new route added 10 kilometres, but reduced the grade to 2.2 percent. Today, from a highway viewpoint you can watch a train disappear into Mt. Ogden. The train then exits the 890-metre circular tunnel, crosses under the highway and enters a 992-metre circular tunnel in Cathedral Crags.

Our next stop is the town of Field (population 300). No more than a few wooden houses, backed by an amphitheatre of sheer mountains, it looks like an old-world pioneer settlement, little changed from its 1884 origins as a railroad-construction camp. The town was named after Cyrus Field, an American financier who led the company that laid the first transatlantic communication cable in 1858. Field later invested heavily in railroads in New York, and evidently the CPR’s executives felt he might be inclined to the same in B.C. if they named a pioneer town after him. But Field didn’t invest, and so for no particular reason we have this tiny mountain town named after a Massachusetts entrepreneur.

Even though we are going to be dining in style at Cathedral Mountain Lodge, Joe appears to be concerned that he is not going to have enough to eat. At the general store in Field he buys an armload of junk food: twizzlers, ding dongs, Doritos, beef jerky, chocolate bars and a bag of cookies.

“Had your cholesterol count taken lately?” I ask him.

He chuckles. “I’m no health nut.”

Cathedral Mountain Lodge www.cathedralmountain.com/ has a rustic look, but it is high-end rustic. The resort’s 29 log cabins feature wood-burning or gas fireplaces and deep soaker tubs. The timber frame lodge was constructed of re-claimed Douglas fir posts and beams and was designed by Vancouver architect Brad Lamoureux. The dining room has an indoor/outdoor river rock fireplace, 24-foot vaulted ceiling and 18-foot high windows.

courtesy cathedralmountain.com

Our dinner, hosted by lodge owner Nancy Stibbard, is sensational. As we demolish the meal, she tells us about the various hiking options available in the area. We decide to make a trip tomorrow through Yoho Valley to Twin Falls. “After all this food I don’t think I’ll be able to hike very far,” says Joe.

“The hike is nothing too serious,” Janice assures him. 

As Janice polishes off the last of the chocolate-dipped strawberries, Tom tells us about a writer from the Philippines who he squired through the Rockies a couple of years ago.  She was writing  a piece on wheelchair accessibility. At one point in the trip she asked him, “Mr. Tom, what is another word for handicapped?” The story she later published in the Manila Bulletin was entitled “A Cripple Visits the Rockies.”

After dessert, Joe invites me to have a beer with him on the porch of his cabin, where he confesses, “You know I’m really having trouble with this cellphone blackout. I’m addicted to my cellphone.”

“You gotta relax, man,” I reply. “You’re not in Toronto anymore.”

The lodge is scenically situated beside the Kicking Horse River and directly beneath Cathedral Mountain. Joe looks up at the stony peak and asks his favourite question. “Do you think that mountain is taller than the CN Tower?”

“That mountain is 2,766 metres high,” I tell him. “The CN Tower is 553 metres. It’s no contest.”

“Maybe,” he says, “but it doesn’t look higher.”

I have to wonder about his bizarre attachment to the CN Tower. Is it just that he has no sense of scale, or is he having trouble accepting that Toronto doesn’t have all the biggest things in the country? We sit there gabbing for awhile until Joe’s next-door neighbour ambles over. He doesn’t speak a word, but simply stands there with a grimace on his face. Finally, he says, “Are you guys having a good time?” It’s only about 10 p.m., but then again Joe’s voice does pack quite a wallop. We decide to call it a night. I start dreaming as soon as my head hits the pillow.

(To be continued …)

Part 1

courtesy Lone Primate; flickr.com

“Do you think that mountain is taller than the CN Tower?” We all laugh, thinking that Joe is making a joke. But no, he is quite serious. In fact, he will pose this same question several more times as we drive through the Rockies, becoming increasingly convinced in his own mind that none of the soaring peaks around here are actually taller than Toronto’s phallic landmark.<!– fi

There are five of us in the van: Janice from Tourism BC, Tom, our driver and fixer, and three journalists – myself, André, from Montreal’s La Presse, and Joe, from the Toronto Sun. We are on a trip to southeastern B.C., but we have begun our journey in Calgary and are approaching our destination via Trans-Canada #1. The route winds through Banff National Park, where we make a stop so that Joe can take photos of some mountain goats that are grazing by the roadside.

courtesy kris247; flickr.com

Joe is a strange character; red-haired with a crew cut and freckles, he somehow manages the rare feat of  looking young and old at he same time. He stands on the shoulder of the road in a loud Hawaiian shirt, ill-fitting shorts and scabrous runners, trying to bring the goats into focus as 16-wheelers howl past only paces to his left. “Watch out for the trucks!” yells Tom, leaping out of the van and running over to make certain that we don’t have to witness a horrible accident.

Joe is a throwback, a guy who would be at home in one of those 1930s movies, screaming “Stop the presses!” The only thing that is missing is the cigar. At least that’s what I thought at first. But a half hour into the trip, I am stunned to see him smoking a stogie in the back seat. Thoughtfully, he is holding it out the window. Joe is also an urban creature. He used to write a column entitled “The Night Scrawler” for the Sun and admits that this is the farthest west he has ever travelled in Canada. Not only is B.C. virgin territory to him, this is also his first up-close glimpse of the Rockies. You would think then that he might be awe-struck by the scenery, but he doesn’t seem to be paying much attention. Instead, he has spent most of the drive making and taking repeated calls on his cellphone.

As boisterous as Joe is, André, the Quebecer, is virtually silent. A big, broad-shouldered guy who bears a resemblance to Guy Lafleur, he is originally from Belgium. Although André seems to speak English fine, he claims to be uncomfortable with the language, so he usually only speaks if spoken to. Because he never removes his dark shades it is often difficult to tell if he is even awake.

courtesy Mike.in.NY; flickr.com

We make a brief stop at Lake Louise to admire the scenery. Just as Tom predicts there are Japanese tourists paddling around the lake in red canoes. “A red canoe on a blue-green lake – it’s the Japanese ideal of Canada,” he says. Down at the dock in front of the Chateau Lake Louise there are two newlyweds posing for their own personal photographer. The groom is wearing white pants with a pink tie and a pink vest. His bride, a blonde bombshell with a large tattoo on her shoulder, is clad in a tight, low-cut, wedding dress from which her breasts are threatening to burst out of.

Lake Louise may have more people with cameras per square kilometre than any other location in Canada, and within minutes every male with a lens has found his way to the dock to snap the bride with the jiggling bosom. Every male that is, except for Joe. We find him back at the van jabbering into his cellphone. He didn’t even make it down to the lake. I tell him about the scenic vista that he missed at the dock. He seems to think I’m putting him on.

We are headed for Cathedral Mountain Lodge in Yoho National Park. As we drive west through a gauntlet of glacier-topped peaks, Joe keeps asking Tom to stop the van so he can take photos of road signs. While he is outside lining up a shot, I tell Tom, “This cellphone stuff has to stop. The guy is driving me crazy.”

“Don’t worry,” he replies. “We’ll soon be in a cellphone dead zone.”

Tom is right on the money. After we cross Kicking Horse Pass and enter into B.C., Joe can’t get a signal. When he is informed that we are out of cellphone range and will remain that way for a few days, he has a mild panic attack. “What am I going to do?” he says. “My girlfriend is going to kill me.”

(To be continued …)

Courtesy of {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/mekin/} timekin on flickr{/link}

Jakarta, Indonesia: It is midnight and we have just arrived in the Indonesian capital. There is only one taxi in the airport parking lot. It is an aging black wreck, unadorned by any company logo. The doors are fastened shut with rope. The driver is asleep, his bare feet sticking out the window. His radio is playing a Pat Boone song: “Love Letters in the Sand.”

Yogyakarta: Watching a performance of Wayang Kulit, or shadow puppet theatre. Ethereal shapes slide across the cotton screen, flickering in the glow of the oil lamp. Two realms of existence. On the other side, ancestral spirits with nervous insect profiles, elaborate as lace, bow and fight and make love or grow to giant size or vanish.

Yogyakarta at night: Kerosene lanterns, clip clop of horse-drawn carriages, becak drivers pedal past, flags flapping in the wind. Gamelan music, street performers cracking whips, doing gymnastics. Skull mask lying in the street. Each passing westerner is like an alarm clock, waking all the slumbering becak drivers. “Hello. Hello. Where you go?”

Nandi, Fiji: Our taxi driver is giving us a free tour of town. We pass a wrecking yard. “Ladies driving school,” he says. We pass a McDonalds. “American High Commission,” he says. I ask him if there any poisonous creatures here. “No. All friendly and non-poisonous. But if you want to see poisonous snakes and spiders wait until November and I will take you to parliament and show you where they sit.”

There seem to be only two types of weather reports in Fiji. “Fine” or “Mostly fine.”

courtesy Fenst, flickr.com

Moscow: My guide tells me, “We have the unpredictable history. We have the unpredictable past.”

Inside Night Flight, a famous nightclub, I gain a flash of insight into what it is like to be an attractive woman. Night Flight is stocked with young prostitutes. I am sitting at a table surrounded by 12 of them. Twenty-four eyes trying to hook my attention. If you return their stares, then they look deeper.  There is a hunger there.

Quebec City: While eating at a toney restaurant, Diane mentions that she attended high school with Pamela Anderson in Courtney, B.C. “She had brown hair and brown eyes. And she had small breasts. I know because she was on the volleyball team and we shared the same change room.”

New York: Sign in a city taxi: “25 cents extra for an argument.”

Acapulco: The humidity is withering. It takes the starch out of anything you put in your pants pockets—matches, Kleenex, business cards all reduced to rubble in a matter of hours. Clothes stick to your body and turn dark and splotchy from sweat like you are leaking from bullet holes. My yogurt capsules are mutating.

Holland-America Cruise Ship to Vancouver: Riding the elevator: The electronic voice intones, “Going down.” The guy standing beside me says, “I hate to hear that phrase when I’m on a ship.”

The Norwegian captain makes his daily address. “We are now sailing past the beautiful sceneries of Juan de Fuca Strait. We have these beautiful sceneries every day.”

Williams Lake: At the Stampede Parade the floats and entertainers include The Rose Lake Miocene Swine Club and the Vernon Girls Trumpet Band. The Babine Lake Traditional Dancers are wearing Airwalk sneakers, high heels and sandals. Someone shouts, “Look at those chainsaws!” The Squaw Hall float is an old palisade with a country band performing inside. The float is followed by a bunch of Elvis impersonators. Walt Cobb, the local MLA, cruises past.  An onlooker shouts, “Hey Walt, hope it’s your last term. You idiot.” Cobb replies, “Where is my gun when I need it?”

Hong Kong: List of fish dishes in the Jumbo Floating Restaurant: Black Dragon, Spotted Grunt, Green Wrasse, Horse-Head, Pink Garoupa, Whelk, Silver Coat, Oil Crab.

Barcelona: Many of the women here ride motor scooters. Some ride them in slit skirts. Very formal. I saw one today with sheer black stockings that went down only as high as her ankles. A strange and exotic touch. How do I meet them? Something else … Most of them smoke.

Chichen Itza, Mexico: It is about 7 p.m., just after a rainstorm. Eerie yellowish light, wriggling lines of ants, and a metallic taste to the air. Thunder rumbles in the distance as we approach the old church. Three black vultures sitting on the white crosses rise up and flex their wings.

Holland: I am learning Dutch expressions. Take the phrase, “To rush headlong into something, to butt in.” In Dutch, this is expressed as Met de klompen op het ijs komen. “To go on the ice with wooden shoes.”

There are meat hooks affixed to the roof gables of the homes in Amsterdam. They use them to haul furniture to the upper floors because the stairways are too narrow. The house were built narrow because the amount you paid in taxes depended on wide your home was. The wider it was, the more you paid.

The Dutch public transport system sells special tickets for dogs.

Dunedin, Florida: I’m drinking beer at my hotel’s Tiki Bar. It is Happy Hour. The sunset is a simmering palette of magenta and orange, smudged with jet contrails. There is a woman sitting across from me with a “Bad Mama” tattoo. Her boyfriend has the words “Born to Lose” tattooed on his bicep. There other bikers crowded around with bandanas and tattoos. But none of them are riding choppers—they are riding bicycles, and raising money for charity. The tattoos are decals.

Kenya: A young guy leans in the car window and asks to bum a cigarette, “Share the cancer,” he says.

The frogs outside our hotel at night sound like a series of rusty drawbridges slowly being opened.

Rule of the land: Outside the game parks everyone walks. Inside the parks, no one walks.

courtesy digitalART2, flickr.com

Our guide, Mustafa, tells us about cheetahs. The adults have to teach the young to hunt. The mother will sometimes drag a crippled impala in for the young to play with. After the cubs make their first kill, the mother leaves them forever. Mustafa saw this happen once. The mother stared from a distance at the scene. When the deed was done, she tilted her head back, let out a loud wail, then loped off towards the far horizon.

Title image by retro traveler; flickr.com

courtesy of A Boy Named Hugh (flickr.com)

Yes, the Stanley Cup really gets around. In fact, the trophy has logged more than 400,000 miles during the past five years. As well as making the rounds with the members of the championship team, it also travels 250 days per year to charity events and NHL promotional activities. When the chalice is travelling, a replica takes its place in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. How can you tell the difference? The real Cup has about a dozen misspelled names, such as the name of goalie Jacques Plante, and the word Boston in the 1972 engraving. All the errors are corrected on the replica.

The Cup’s wanderings have grown increasingly exotic since European-born players began sipping champagne from it. In 1997, the Detroit Red Wings’ Russian stars Igor Larionov, Slava Fetisov and Slava Kozlov took the trophy to Moscow’s Red Square and tried to take it into Lenin’s Tomb. Josef Vasicek of the 2006 champion Carolina Hurricanes transported the Cup to Havlickuv Brod, a town of 25,000 in the Czech Republic. There, the chalice was driven to the Vasicek family home, then to the outdoor arena where he played as a teenager. In 2007, Anaheim Ducks sharpshooter Teemu Selanne’s trip with the Cup to his native Finland included a stop at a Helsinki sauna and a cooling dip in the Baltic Sea.

courtesy of wstera2 (flickr.com)

The ritual of spending 24 hours with the Cup began in 1995, as did the rule that it always be accompanied by white-gloved custodians. Before that the celebrated silverware was not always treated with such reverence. After the Ottawa Senators won it in 1927, the Cup spent much of the summer in King Clancy’s living room, where it served as a receptacle for everything, including letters, bills, chewing gum and cigar butts. When the New York Rangers won the Cup in 1940, some of the club’s executives reportedly celebrated by urinating in it. Winger Clark Gillies of the 1980 New York Islanders allowed his dog to eat from it. In his defence, Gillies noted, “He’s a nice dog.” Fellow Islander Bryan Trottier took the Cup with him to bed. He said, “I wanted to wake up and find it right beside me. I didn’t want to think I’d just dreamed of this happening.” In 1991, the Cup was found at the bottom of Pittsburgh Penguin Mario Lemieux’s swimming pool. In 1994, New York Rangers captain Mark Messier took the Cup to Scores, a famous strip joint. According to Scores spokesman Lonnie Hanover, “It was the first time I’d seen our customers eager to touch something besides our dancers.” And in 1996, Sylvain Lefebvre of the Colorado Avalanche had his newborn daughter baptized in it.

During its 105-year history, the Stanley Cup has been dented, dismantled, left in a snowbank, kicked into a canal and used as a flowerpot. It has also been stolen a couple of times, and in another memorable incident–nearly stolen. During the 1962 playoffs, a Montreal fan, unhappy that Stanley was in a glass case in the lobby of Chicago Stadium, opened the case, snatched the Cup, and headed for the exit before police apprehended him. The thief claimed he was merely “taking the Cup back to Montreal, where it belonged.”

Yet, despite such abuses, it perseveres; the oldest and most famous trophy competed for by professional athletes. So, after defeating the defending champion Detroit Red Wings, where will this year’s winners, the Pittsburgh Penguins, take old Stanley? Judging by the varied birthplaces–Kiev, Magnitogorsk, Pizen, Chelyabinsk–on the team’s roster, there will be is some international stops on its summer itinerary.

In fact, this year’s tour has already started. On JUne 14, a group of Penguins players took the Cup on an impromptu visit to several Pittsburgh nightclubs, causing a traffic jam as delighted fans called friends and urged them to rush down to see it. During the Cup’s evening on the town, some players ate hot wings from it–wings, get it?–and held it aloft from a second-storey balcony. The next day, they showed it off at PNC Park prior to a Pittsburgh Pirates–Detroit Tigers baseball game. Coincidentally, the Pirates were paying tribute to the 100-year anniversary of their 1909 World Series victory over Detroit, also decided by Game 7 in Detroit.

For Stanley, it seems, the party never ends.

courtesy Laverrue (flickr.com)

They are opening the Lady up – all the way to the top. On July 4 this summer, the Statue of Liberty’s crown – off limits to the public since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks – will again be available for touring. The museum gallery and observation deck at the landmark’s base were reopened in 2004, but the crown remained closed. The official reason given: “fire safety,” but many believe it was due to9 the previous American administration’s campaign to foster an ongoing climate of fear.

In a recent interview, Ken Salazar, the U.S. interior secretary, stated that the re-opening was a symbol of President Barrack Obama’s agenda for “a new beginning, restoring confidence in the American people, in their government, and in our place in the world.” Salazar also noted that a maximum of 10 visitors would be able to occupy the crown at any given time, allowing for 30 an hour, or 50,000 a year, in the initial phase of the crown’s re-opening.

A lottery will determine exactly who will be able to journey to the crown. After two years, the statue will then undergo a more significant “rehabilitation,” in the hope of increasing the number of such treks to about 200,000 a year. Visits to the Statue of Liberty have declined steadily since the crown’s closure – down to to 3.4 million in 2007 from a high of 5.5 million in 2002, according to the National Park Service.

How It All Began

The massive copper sculpture known officially as “Liberty Enlightening the World” was designed by French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi – to mark the 1876 centennial of the Declaration of Independence, with its construction funded completely by donations from the French people. Meanwhile, fundraising in America to build the pedestal for the monument was proceeding very slowly, so Joseph Pulitzer (noted for the Pulitzer Prize) opened up the editorial pages of his newspaper, The World, to support the fundraising efforts. Pulitzer proceeded to use his newspaper to criticize both the rich, who had failed to finance the pedestal construction, and the middle class, who were content to rely upon the wealthy to provide the funds. His campaign was successful in motivating Americans to donate $100,000.

After Bartholdi finalized the design in miniature, the statue itself was created using wooden moulds, a copper shell and an iron structure designed by Gustave Eiffel, who later built the Eiffel Tower. The statue was then shipped to the U.S. in 350 pieces aboard a French vessel, in June 1885, then re-assembled and unveiled on October 28, 1886. The day was declared a public holiday and more than a million people lined New York’s streets (draped with red, white and blue and French tricolour buntin) to watch a parade of more than 20,000 pass by. The New York Times reported that as the parade rolled past, the office boys “from a hundred windows began to unreel the spools of tape that record the fateful messages of the ‘ticker.’ In a moment the air was white with curling streamers.” And so the famous New York ticker-tape parade was born.

Interestingly, tourists were also once able to climb the inside of Lady Liberty’s arm to the top of her torch. But that also changed after another act of sabotage. On July 30, 1916, during World War I, German saboteurs ignited a cache of dynamite at a munitions depot on nearby Black Tom Wharf . Shrapnel from the explosion resulted in extensive structural damage to the buildings on Ellis Island and popped bolts out of the Statue of Liberty’s right arm. Officials shut down the monument for about a week, and, when it reopened, the arm was closed to tourists.

A few Things to Consider Before the Big Climb

A heads up: those eager to experience the majestic ocean view from the crown can’t be claustrophobic or have a weak heart. The only route is up, waaaay up, via an extremely narrow, almost-vertical staircase of 354 steps. Also worth noting: it’s best not to attempt to scale the crown on a windy day. The copper skin is no thicker than two pennies and in gales the statue sways by up to 7.5 centimetres;  her gilded torch can shift by up to  12.5 centimetres. As well, the torch, which stands 92 metres above the small island, or the equivalent of 22 floors, is pummelled and pitted by frequent lightning. And inside the head, temperatures can be sweltering and the 25 windows in the crown are merely tiny portholes.

But then, true democracy never is.

courtesy Kerry Banks

Fortified with sugar and caffeine we climb in the car and start driving toward the Similkameen Valley, which lies to the west of the southern Okanagan Valley. The farther south we go, the more desert-like the landscape becomes. The Similkameen has a rich history dating back to the heady gold rush days of the 1800s, but today the scene is mostly orchards, horse and cattle ranches and, increasingly, vineyards.

For years most of the grapes grown in the Similkameen were sold to wineries in the Okanagan, quietly contributing to their awards lists, but now some determined entrepreneurs are attempting to awaken people’s perceptions to the agri-tourism potential of the valley by producing first-rate wine. Grape-growing country begins on the benchland above Keremeos and extends east and to the south to the heart of the region around the tiny hamlet of Cawston.

courtesy Kerry Banks

The Similkameen’s climate is comparable to the south Okanagan, producing similar annual temperatures to Osoyoos and Oliver. The long hours of sunshine and hot summer temperatures make a large range of grape varieties possible, from heavier reds on the bench land to aromatic whites on the cooler parts of the valley floor. However, the absence of a lake to moderate the temperatures means the area is susceptible to summer heat and also to the risk of cold winter freezes similar to what is experienced in Oliver.

The amount of vineyards in the valley has increased from 207 acres in 2004 to 580 acres in 2008. Considering the lack of space and the exorbitant price of land in the Okanagan proper, the Similkameen is certain to continue growing and add to its current inventory of 11 wineries. Eight of the valley’s wineries have joined together to form the Similkameen Wineries Association, in an attempt to emulate the marketing success of the Naramata Bench Wineries Association. The new association is launching its very first event today as part of the Spring Wine Festival, a meet-and-greet wine-tasting party near Cawston.

When we arrive the session is in full swing, complete with a country band. We park beside a huge carved dragon that looks like it just flew in from a Lord of the Rings movie set and head inside. The first person I meet is Rhys Pender, who is also an aspiring Similkameen vinter. He hands me a glass. It’s time to start drinking again.

The event is hosted by Rustic Roots Winery, which recently began producing four types of fruit wines. But while the wine-making may be new, that adjective doesn’t apply to the farm here. The Harker (nee Manery) family settled in the Similkameen Valley in 1888, just 17 years after British Columbia became Canada’s sixth province. The farm that the winery is situated on has been in the family for five generations, and has hosted a variety of different enterprises over the years, including horse rearing during World War I, a dairy business and organic fruit growing. The Rustic Roots label depicts a rare, 110-year-old heritage Snow Apple tree that is still producing apples on the property. The roots below the tree represent the six generations of Harkers to farm in the Similkameen.

courtesy Kerry Banks

Our hosts from the previous evening, John and Virginia Weber of Orofino Vineyards, are on hand, and I take the opportunity to chat and help myself to another glass or two of their addictive Red Bridge Red, a Merlot that their website describes as a “rich, seductive wine that is full of ripe black cherry flavours, sweet vanilla, hints of coffee and a touch of smoke.”

The couple purchased their vineyard in 2001, and moved here from Saskatchewan, where John was a high school teacher and Virginia was a nurse. They have become very passionate about wine. Virginia has a horticulture diploma and has taken wine courses offered by the Okanagan University College, while John has completed courses in viticulture, winemaking, and wine marketing from OUC. He was the first recipient of the Frank Supernak Bursary, sponsored by the Canadian Vintners Association and OUC. The award is given to the student who shows potential in B.C.’s wine industry.

Besides turning out fine vino, the Webers’ operation has another distinction—it is Canada’s only strawbale winery. That’s right, the entire structure is constructed over hay bales–890 of them to be exact. As John notes, “There isn’t a straight line in the place.” The Webers chose this ecofriendly building method after much research and planning. Earthy, 21-inch thick walls provide superior insulation qualities–ideal for manufacturing constant barrel room temperatures and for keeping cool in the summer heat.

On the drive back to Penticton I review the mini-films I have shot on my new camcorder. To my surprise there are 21 in all. Some, however, are little more than fragmented blips, lasting less than 10 seconds. I discover that I recorded four videos at Rustic Roots, all of them noisy and chaotic. One clip, and I’m guessing it may have been the last one, probably best captures the event. Part of it is filmed upside down, while other sections appear to have been shot from somewhere inside my jacket. About the only clear and constant image is of my arm repeatedly raising a glass of red wine. I suppose I was filming without being aware of it. I’d like to think of it as “stream of consciousness video.” If I can ever figure out how to download this stuff on to my computer, I may post it on my blog.

Lead image by Kerry Banks

We are standing in a vineyard, listening to Rob Van Western discuss the geology of the Okanagan. Van Westen is a third-generation farmer in the region. His parents and grandparents cultivated peaches and cherries, but he has taken up the challenge of growing grapes. The vineyard’s first vintage was released in 2003 and Van Western has enjoyed considerable success, winning numerous awards locally and nationally for his handcrafted, small-batch quality wines.

courtesy Kerry Banks

When people come here as part of the Naramata Unfiltered tour they learn how different soils affect the profile and taste of a wine and are shown how to plant, leaf pluck and prune a vine. Because this is spring, there are no vines to inspect–the first pinkish buds are just making their appearance. It’s hard to believe that such bounty can spring from such simple beginnings.

Talking with Van Western gives you a sense of the delicate balancing act that viticulture can be in these parts. Because the growing season is relatively short in comparison to most wine-growing regions, there are narrow margins for error. “Some times we will only have a day or two to do a harvest,” admits Van Western. When the weather doesn’t co-operate, he will often have to perform a major cull of his vines. This may occur when they are exposed to a stretch of hot, windy conditions. “The grapes shut down to preserve moisture and photosynthesis stops happening,” he explains. The plants that are cut are tossed on the ground to rot, a necessary sacrifice in order to ensure quality. “My father, who was a long-time fruit grower, could never understand how we could do that,” he says. “But he’s come around now.”

Van Western has set up a couple of bottles of his Viognier under an awning. Once virtually unknown in B.C., this white wine, which originally comes from Condrieu in the northern part of German’s Rhone Valley, has been growing in popularity in recent years. However, it still hasn’t made major inroads into the mainstream consciousness, quite possibly because most people don’t know how to pronounce it. The correct pronunciation is VEE-own-YAY, which is not so difficult, and certainly easier than the challenge of growing the grape. Mildew is a persistent problem and yields are modest and seldom predictable. But Van Western’s handcrafted version is a revelation–golden in colour with fresh aromas of apricot, peach, honeysuckle and citrus.

We have a couple of hours of free time before dinner and I use it to stroll around Penticton. My route takes me down Riverside Drive (Penticton’s so-called “Sunset Strip”) past the faded 1960s-style white stucco motels that were once the staple accommodations in the area. The “peaches and beaches” family vacationers still come here, but their numbers are dwindling, replaced by a clientele with bigger bank accounts and more demanding tastes. Not only is Penticton the hub of the booming wine tourism business with 88 wineries located within an hour’s drive, it’s also become a haven of festivals. Besides the Elvis shindig and the four annual wine festivals, there is also the Beach Blanket Film Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival, the Peach Festival, the Meadowlark Festival, the Ironman Canada Triathlon and the Pentastic Hot Jazz Festival.

courtesy Kerry Banks

Before returning to the Ramada Inn, I stop to snap photos of the restored SS Sicamous, the largest remaining steel-hulled sternwheeler in Canada, which Penticton bought from the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1949 for $1.00. She was built in 1914 to accommodate passengers in luxurious style while also moving large cargo and providing daily mail service. Farther down the shoreline I come upon the 203-room Penticton Lakeside Resort, Convention Centre and Casino, which represents the opposite end of the historical spectrum. Outside the complex stands a 60-ton granite sculpture by local artist Pat Field that is cantilevered on a 100-ton concrete horizon pool. The title of the mammoth piece, “Who’s in Charge?” relates to the question is it man or nature?

Our dinner is at Amante Bistro, a hip and stylish restaurant that was opened in 2007 by Mexican-born chef Abul Adame and his wife, Rose Amante. The bistro has teamed up with John and Virginia Weber, the owners of Orofino, a small Similkameen Valley winery, for a five-course Winemaker’s Dinner that is part of the Spring Wine Festival. It’s a dynamic combination: the wine is first-rate and the food is delicious. It’s easy to see why Amante has become the hottest dining spot in town, and why Orofino, although it has only been making wine since 2005, has attracted a devoted following and won several awards. Its Riesling has captured gold medals in each of the last three years at the Canadian Wine Championships.

courtesy Kerry Banks

Tonight’s dining experience includes sampling a “flight of wine.” A “flight” is a term used by wine tasters to describe a selection of wines, usually between three and eight glasses, but sometimes as many as 50, presented for the purpose of sampling and comparison. Our flight consists of three different vintages of Orofino’s Beleza, the winery’s signature Merlot-Cabernet blend. Beleza is a Brazilian Portuguese noun which evokes a feeling of contentment and bliss. This is precisely the state I find myself in as I finally weave my way back to the Ramada.

(To be continued …)

Lead photo courtesy Kerry Banks.

courtesy Kerry Banks

The sun beams down as we proceed to Lake Breeze Vineyards, which I always want to call Lake View because the panorama of Lake Okanagan from the vineyard’s veranda is so spectacular. Still, with 17 acres under vine and nine different varietals, including Pinot Blanc, Semillon, Ehrenfelser, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, this is definitely a working vineyard. (Annual production is a modest 9,000 cases, which is fairly typical of the boutique-style wineries of the Naramata Bench.) Backdropped by the view, we then take seats around a table on the balcony as Rhys Pender launches into a discussion of the art of food and wine pairing.

How to Pair Foods with Wine

The main concept behind pairings, advises Pender, is that certain elements (such as texture and flavour) in both food and wine react differently to each other, and finding the right combination of these elements makes the dining experience more enjoyable. No missteps with this demo, of course. The wines we are drinking are provided by Lake Breeze, while the food is supplied by Joy Road Catering, which has earned an excellent name for itself hosting wine-paired dinners featuring “cuisine de terroir” Wednesday and Sunday evenings throughout the summer at God’s Mountain Estate, on a cliff with another stunning view (of Skaha Lake).

As Pender explains, there are three basic methods used in wine and food pairings. One is the “weight method,” which involves pairing heavy wines with heavy food, and vice versa. For example, a pasta with a heavy red sauce would ideally be paired with a substantial Cabernet Sauvignon, while a light salad would taste best when paired with a more delicate Pinot Grigio.

The second technique is the “complimentary method,” which involves pairing similar flavours – such as duck and pinot noir, so that the gamey quality of the meat matches the earthy flavour of the wine. The third approach is the “contrast method,” in which a wine with a high acidity is used to cut through the fattiness of the meal. For example, a greasy dish such as sweet Italian sausage is paired with a dry, acidulous wine, a zesty Barbera perhaps, which cleanses the palate and lightens  the heaviness of the entrée. Pender also recounts the basic rule for dessert wines: the wine must always be sweeter than the food: a cherry port with chocolate, for example.

What to Avoid When Pairing Food with Wine

While the general approach to pairing foods and wine has relaxed, there are still some definite no-no’s. These include quaffing wines that have high acidity – or high tannins – with spicy foods “These types of wines ignite the spices. It’s like adding kerosene to the fire,” says Pender. “You want a sweeter wine in this case, to contrast with the spices.”  Another absolute no-no is pairing a tannic red, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, with fish – because it creates a metallic taste. “It’s like chewing on tinfoil,” says Pender. And, too, there are a few foods that really do not go well with wine at all. For example, “Asparagus is considered a wine killer.”

It’s All in the Tongue

A taste session follows where we learn about “tongue zones.” Apparently the human tongue has “zones” for each type of flavour it can taste, so you want to swirl the wine in your mouth so that it is flows over each section. The tip of the tongue senses sweet, the front sides sense salt, the back sides acid, and the very back bitter. And even within each of these sections, there are buds of different “intensities.” So to practice, we sample different wines after eating jelly beans, salt, tart pieces of apple and jalapeno-flavoured potato chips –  to demonstrate how wine reacts, for the better or the worse, with different flavours. In between, there are also several courses of Joy Road Catering’s offerings (and proving its reputation is justly deserved), which I later realize I have neglected to describe in any detail. Even more disconcerting is the realization that what I have scribbled in my notebook is close to illegible. Obviously, way too good a time is being had by all.

Adding to my confusion is my abundance of gear. Not only am I writing and photographing, I am also attempting to film the proceedings with a pocket-sized Kodak camcorder that I have never used before. The device is supposed to be dead simple to operate, but then I’ve heard that line before. And perhaps because of its supposed simplicity. the camcorder’s instructional manual contains virtually no instructions, its pages filled instead by useless reams of small-print guarantees, French translations and drawings of the various components.

courtesy allposters.com

Our lunch finished, we pile into the car and head for our next destination: Van Western Vineyards, a Naramata vineyard with a tight focus on brands that begin with the letter V. The roll call here includes Voluptuous (a red Bordeaux blend), Vivacious (a white blend) and Viognier, a Rhone white with a powerful, rich and complex aroma that has been likened to overripe apricots mixed with orange blossoms or acacia. The effect of orange blossoms I can guess at, but the flavour of acacia, the thorny, parasol-shaped tree that dots the African savannah, is a complete mystery.

(To be continued …)

We are guests for breakfast at a Japanese sumo stable, and not just any stable, but Kokonoe-beya, the school run by the greatest sumo star of modern times, Chiyonofuji, a.k.a. “the Wolf.” Being invited to dine with Chiyonofuji is a rare privilege, the Japanese equivalent of brunch with Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan. During his career, he has won 1,045 matches, including a record 807 in the elite Makouchi division and 31 grand championships. The legend himself sits directly to my left, devouring a platter of sushi. Eyeing my scrawny frame, Chiyonofuji gestures at the main course, indicating that I should dig in, and pantomiming with his hands to show how it will make me grow. It seems wise to follow his advice. Although he retired in 1991, there is nothing soft about the man. He looks like a heavy from a gangster movie, the guy the boss sends for when bones need breaking.

There are 54 sumo stables in Japan, all located in or near Tokyo. Rarely visited by westerners, these enclaves offer a portal into Japan’s feudal past. Having sworn loyalty to the stablemaster, novice wrestlers cook, clean and play valet to the senior grapplers in return for shelter and food. Living and training in communal quarters, the recruits develop their strength and technique in the hopes of climbing through the ranks. Once a wrestler or rikishi joins a stable he remains there for the rest of his career.

zimbio.com

A typical sumo day

Life at a sumo stable begins at 5 a.m., when the novices report for several hours of training. At about 7 a.m., the senior rikishi join them. Before our meal, we spent an hour in the adjoining keikoba watching the novices work out. The scene was unlike anything in a Western gym—nary a Nautilus machine, treadmill or juice bar in sight. Instead, in a bare room with a dirt floor, these round-shouldered hulks grunted their way through a series of slow-moving exercises: alternatively raising their legs and stomping; repeatedly slapping their hands and shoulders against a wooden pillar; and sitting on the floor and spreading their legs as wide as possible while bending their heads forward. If a wrestler couldn’t get the proper extension, one of his pals would help out by pressing down on his back. The exercises were followed by practise bouts in the dirt ring. Gradually, the rikishi grew dirtier and dirtier.

After morning training, wrestlers customarily bathe, then gorge themselves on chanko-nabe, a protein-rich one-pot meal comprised of broth, fish, meat and vegetables. The repast includes side dishes, huge bowls of rice and plenty of beer. They then retire for a nap, the best method to convert the calories to fat. Early in the evening they will eat again. Packing on the pounds is a key part of their apprenticeship. Although speed and power are important in sumo, without sufficient bulk, a rikishi can’t become a champion. The reason is simple: all 850 of Japan’s sumo wrestlers compete in the same weight class, struggling upward through a pyramidal hierarchy.

flickr.com

Thinking of a career in sumo?

To enter the sport, candidates must weigh at least 75 kilograms. Top-division wrestlers average 157 kilograms (345 pounds). The heaviest rikishi in history, Konishiki, a.k.a the Dump Truck, tipped the scales at an earth-shaking 253 kilograms (604 pounds). The minimum height required is 173 centimetres. Yet, even when one is too short there are solutions. One wrestler recently overcame the barrier by having four inches of silicone injected into the top of his skull.

After several bowls of chanko-nabe, we bid Chiyonofuji good-bye and leave the stable. Outiside in the street, we meet a trio of rikishi wearing flowery kimonos and clog sandals called geta. Like everything else in sumo, footwear denotes rank. Romantic as it may be, the clip-clop of the wooden geta indicates a junior wrestler. In the light of day, the three seem very young. They carry cloth shopping bags and smell of bentsuke wax, a soybean extract used to hold their burnished topknots in place. These teenagers apparel is a reminder that they live this role 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There is no other life to go home to. We take their pictures and then watch them totter away into the electric hum of Tokyo.

flickr.com

We start drinking wine at 10:30 a.m. and are still drinking wine at 10:30 p.m. Not continuously mind you. There are a few breaks in between the elbow-bending sessions and some time spent travelling from one winery to the next. Because of the continuous flow of glasses, we are cautioned not to try to finish every sample, but rather to taste and then spit into a bucket. However, spitting up fine wine runs contrary to my instincts and I have trouble following this directive, which may explain why much of the weekend passes in an aromatic blur.

Naramata Unfiltered
We have come to the Okanagan to experience a condensed version of “Naramata Unfiltered,” a two-day wine education retreat offered three times annually by the Naramata Bench Winery Association (retreat@naramatabench.com), at which people learn about wine making from the ground up in seminars with owners, winemakers and growers, and sample some of the best wine and food available on the Naramata Bench. The event’s $799 ticket price includes first-class accommodation, two lunches and two gourmet dinners (all of which build on the theme of wine and food parings), plus transportation between seminars, meals and custom gum boots. The weekend concludes with a “Graduation Dinner” where participants have an opportunity to challenge their palates alongside the winemakers during a blind tasting.

courtesy naramatabench.com

Background

Since 1990, when the region’s first two wineries opened, the Naramata Bench has become one of the most desirable stretches of winery real estate in the Okanagan. Many wine tourists now consider it to be the number one destination in the Okanagan. The scenery is stunning and there is no other place in the province where can you cover as many wineries with as little time spent driving. Some enthusiasts even tour the options by bicycle. Currently, there are 22 wineries operating along or just off scenic and winding Naramata Road, all of them characterized by their intimacy and charm.

Laughing Stock Winery: Creating the Perfect Wine

Our tour begins at Laughing Stock Winery, where we meet owners David and Cynthia Enns, and Rhys Pender, a 34-year-old Aussie wine educator, wine writer, wine judge, wine consultant and the host of the Naramata Unfiltered program; all three are keen to introduce us to the art of blending and some of the winery’s award-winning vintages. Laughing Stock specializes in making a few wines well, including Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and Portfolio, its flagship Bordeaux blend. The winery has developed a cult-like following since it first opened in 2003, and its 3,000-case run sells out quickly, with about 60 per cent of it purchased online.

Before getting into the wine business, the Enns were both successful business consultants and so their winery’s name is a play on the risk of launching a winery. As David likes to say, “This winery is our vow of poverty,” Their wine labels resemble a ticker tape, showing the values of widely-held stocks on the days on which the grapes were harvested.

According to the Enns, assembling a blended wine takes finesse and judgement, so that the experience of the whole will be greater than the sum of the individual parts. Take for example, the winery’s Portfolio wine, which captured gold at the 2005 Canadian Wine Awards in the category of Meritage Red. The 2006 vintage is a combination of five Bordeaux varietals: 61% Merlot, 16% Cabernet Sauvignon, 16% Cabernet Franc, 5% Malbec and 2% Petit Verdot.

courtesy Kerry Banks

One of Laughing Stock’s newest offerings, available in both red and white versions, is Blind Trust. As its name suggests its ingredients are a secret. The wine might contain some, but not all of the following: Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Petit Verdot. Says David: “If you are really curious about the blend, just blind taste the Blind Trust and try to guess the varietals before checking out the ingredients which are kept under the seal of the capsule.”

Educating Those Taste Buds

Listening to Rhys Pender and David Enns discuss wine and flavours is an education in itself. As Pender points out, the mouth only recognizes five taste sensations: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umamai, a name applied to a savoury, earthy, mushroomy flavour. All other flavours are received through our retro-nasal passage, which means a sharp sense of smell is a key to appreciating wine. Of course, you also need a wine lexicon to follow the experts when they begin dissecting flavours. Individual wines can have a “great mouth feel,” “big floral notes,” “a polished nose,” “fleshy, full, mid-palate taste” or a “long finish.” A long finish is highly desirable–it refers to the flavour that lingers in the mouth after you swallow the wine. By the time we conclude our visit and get ready to move on, I have a Laughing Stock long finish coating my taste buds.

To be continued …

The Royal Clipper (destination360.com)

A lot of people believe that bigger is better. This view certainly applies to the sailing segment of the cruise business, where two rival companies are constructing the largest and most expensive sailing vessels to ever ply the seas. Star Clippers, which has a fleet of authentic re-creations of classic 19th-century clipper ships, currently operates the world’s largest and only five-masted sailing ship built since the early 1900s. The Royal Clipper, a design inspired by the legendary tall ship Preussen, is 134 metres long, comes equipped with 42 sails and carries 227 guests in romantic and luxurious style. However, by 2010, the majestic Royal Clipper will be relegated to third place in the sailing stakes.

On April 5, 2010, German-based Sea Cloud Cruises will launch the maiden voyage of the Sea Cloud Hussar. Measuring 136 metres long and 17 metres wide, with a total sail area of more than 4,000 square metres, it will be the largest three-masted ship ever built. The vessel will have 69 luxury cabins and boast room for 136 passengers and a crew of 90. After completing its 12-day maiden voyage from Malta to the Greek port of Piraeus, the Hussar will travel along the Cote d’Azur and sail to the German port of Hamburg, which it will enter on June 26, 2010, after completing a musically themed voyage from Portugal, Spain, France and Belgium. The ship will dock in Venice on September 3, 2010, followed by a journey to the Arabian Peninsula in early December. Tickets for the maiden voyage start at $5,976 per person.

Not to be outdone, Star Clippers recently announced it is building an even larger and more expensive vessel. Extending an astounding 157 metres and weighing 7,400 tons, the as-yet-unnamed barque will be 48 per cent larger than the Royal Clipper. The five-masted giant will carry 37 sails for a total of 6,350 square metres of sail surface area; its rigs will soar 65 metres above the waterline and the open sundeck area will be an expansive 2,500 square metres. The ship, which will make its debut in 2010, will have room for 296 passengers and 140 crew, feature three swimming pools on the top deck and house a two-level dining room that can hold all 296 passengers in one seating.

There will also be a private dining room for smaller groups, a piano lounge, a two-level “tropical bar,” a dive/sports bar, a forward observation lounge, library, spa and gym. A retractable marina on the stern will provide access for watersports. One of the swimming pools will have a glass bottom, allowing light to filter down into the piano lounge and dining room. The aft pool, meanwhile, will feature a swim tube that extends down into the dive/sports bar and into the library that will be used for scuba training.

But big doesn’t only apply to sailing ships. Here are the remaining Top 10 travel-related “World’s Largest.”

2. World’s largest museum attraction

The amazing Titanic Museum in Branson, Missouri, was built half-scale to the original. Towering 30 metres above Country Highway 76, it holds 400 priceless artifacts in 20 galleries from the wreck of the RMS Titanic. The structure is anchored in water to create the illusion of the Titanic at sea, and the 90-minute, self-guided tour is designed to give guests the sensation of being one of the passengers on Titanic’s 1912 maiden voyage. As visitors step through an iceberg into the early 1990s world of this historic re-creation they are given a passenger boarding ticket, bearing the name of an actual Titanic passenger and the class they were travelling. Guests learn the individual stories of their adopted namesake and in the Titanic Memorial Room discover whether their ticketed passenger survived or perished. The museum opened in 2006 and has already welcomed more than a million visitors.

3. World’s largest aquarium

onearthtravel.com

Whale sharks, the world’s largest fish, are kings of this 30-million-litre tank. But once visitors to Atlanta’s Georgia Aquarium have seen Ralph and Norton–the only whale sharks on display outside of Asia–they will still have about 100,000 fish to go. Shaped like an abstract cruise ship looming over Olympic park, the aquarium was bankrolled almost exclusively by a $200-million gift from Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus. Size-wise it has no serious rival. By comparison, Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium–the largest indoor aquarium in the U.S. for decades–has just 19 million litres and about 20,000 fish. More than just a monstrous tank, however, the Atlanta site also boasts a “4-D” movie theatre, which shows films with 3-D animation and other special effects, and a banquet hall that can serve a sit-down dinner for 1,100, catered by a company owned by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck.

4. World’s largest shopping mall

When it opened in 2005, the South China Mall in Dongguan, China, crushed all rival mega malls with 6.5 million square feet of retail space and seven different wings – with theme areas based on Amsterdam, California, the Caribbean, Egypt, Paris, Rome and Venice, and, of course, an amusement park. But customers did not throng to the gigantic emporium. Today, it is not only the world’s largest mall but the world’s emptiest, with fewer than a dozen stores scattered through a space designed to house 1,500, making it a dusty, decrepit complex of buildings marked by peeling paint, dead light bulbs and dismembered mannequins.

5. World’s largest dinosaur

Standing adjacent to the Visitors Centre in Drumheller, Alberta, a fiberglass-and- steel Tyrannosaurus Rex rises 26 metres and weighs 66 tons. Travellers from as far away as Africa and Australia have climbed the behemoth’s 106 steps, plodding past the prehistoric mural paintings that decorate its belly, to be spit out inside a toothy mouth. There, they are rewarded with a choice view of the Red Deer River Valley and its eerie badlands landscape, where so many dinosaur bones have been unearthed. Cheesy as it may sound, the T-Rex blends in with the rest of the dinosaur statues stationed throughout the town in parks, on street corners and even busting out of the local IGA’s brick facade.

6. World’s largest casino

roongthongtour.com

Thousands of Chinese poured into the Venetian Macao resort, built by U.S. operator Las Vegas Sands, when it opened in August 2007. Macau is the only place in gambling-mad China where casinos are legal, and business is booming. Last year, gaming revenues surpassed those of the iconic Las Vegas Strip. The Venetian Macao promises to push the numbers even higher. It boasts 3,000 hotel suites, 1,150 gaming tables, 7,000 slot machines, 350 shops, a 1,800-seat conference centre and a 15,000-seat entertainment arena. If the Venetian succeeds, according to analyst estimates, it will help double Macau’s annual gaming income to $13.7 billion by 2010.

7. World’s largest place name

This Maori name for a hill, 305 metres high, located near Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, is so absurdly long that I won’t attempt to reproduce it here. The 85-letter-long place name is a combination of the words taumata (brow of a hill), whakatangihanga (music making), koauau (flute), o (of), tamatea (name of a famous chief), turi pukaka (bony knees), piki maunga (climbing a mountain), horo (slip), nuku (move), pokai whenua (widely travelled), ki (to), tana (his), tahu (beloved). Therefore, it means: the summit of the hill, where Tamatea, the man with the big knees who slid down, climbed up and swallowed mountains, known as land eater, played on his flute to his loved one. Nowadays, the moniker has been abbreviated to Taumata.

8. World’s largest hotel

Until recently, the MGM Grand in Las Vegas held this title, but First World Hotel in Pahang, Malaysia, has now secured the crown. Located in the mountain gambling resort of Genting Highlands, about 40 kilometres north of Kuala Lumpur, this three-star hotel has 6,118 rooms (1,000 more than the MGM) in its dual 23-storey towers. One thing you are not going to hear at the First World: “Sorry, all our rooms are full.” But with its pulsating lime-green, canary-yellow and fire-engine-red colour scheme, the hotel is unlikely to ever win any awards for design. The sizeable premises incorporate a theme park and a half-million square feet of shopping space. There are 32 check-in counters with 64 terminals located in the hotel lobby, and the laundry department manages an incredible production of 40 tons worth of laundry per day.

9. World’s largest swimming pool

latimes.com

Do a few morning laps here and you’ll be in intensive care. The new San Alfonso Del Mar resort, situated about 130 kilometres west of Santiago, Chile, has been recognized as having Earth’s largest crystalline pool by the Guinness Book of World Records. It’s actually a saltwater lagoon that runs for more than a kilometre between the ocean and several apartment buildings. Its surface area is eight hectares, roughly equivalent to 6,000 standard backyard pools. It took five years to build and cost nearly $2 billion and the annual maintenance bill is $4 million. It easily dwarfs the next biggest pool–the Orthlieb in Casablanca, Morocco–which is 150 metres by 100 metres. The pool utilizes a technology developed by the Chilean company Crystal Lagoons, which uses water pumped from the Pacific Ocean that is then filtered and treated for supply to the pool.

10. World’s Largest Miniature Village

Visiting Madurodam is like Gulliver being let loose in Lilliput. Located in The Hague, in the Netherlands, it’s a model of a Dutch town on a 1:25 scale, composed of typical Dutch buildings and landmarks as found in various locations in the country. This major tourist attraction was built in 1952 and has been visited by tens of millions of visitors since. The miniature city was named after George Maduro, a law student from Curaçao who fought the Nazi occupation forces as a member of the Dutch resistance and died at Dachau concentration camp in 1945. In 1946 Maduro was posthumously granted the honour of Knight 4th-class of the Military Order of William, the highest and oldest honour in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, because he had distinguished himself in the Battle of the Netherlands against German
troops. His parents donated the money to start the Madurodam project.

To calculate the distance between hope and despair, one could sit on the edge of a 250-metre oceanside cliff on the South Pacific’s fabled Easter Island and consider the fate of those who once lived in the world’s most remote, inhabited place. At first glance, there’s nothing to indicate how this dot of land, 3,700 kilometres off the coast of Chile (and smaller than B.C.’s Salt Spring Island), could have come to symbolize all that can go wrong with a society. The ocean on this day is cobalt blue and endless. An armada of cumulus is becalmed on the western horizon. The great stone statues that line the island’s promontories to my left are too distant to be seen. But etched into the boulders around me on this precipice are strange, half-man/half-bird bas-relief figures that, it is now known, mark the apocalyptic End Time of the tropical civilization that once thrived here.

Those people – the descendants of wayward fourth-century Polynesian mariners – flourished in splendid isolation on Easter Island amid their farms and forested hillsides for more than 1,000 years. Completely cut off by distance and time from any outside influences, they developed a mysterious religion and a still-undeciphered writing system, established an aristocracy, feasted on their little island’s bounty, erected temples and monumental statues, grew numerous and then – oblivious to the consequences of their own excesses – did nothing in the face of impending environmental calamity. Rather, in a series of events with ominous modern parallels, the islanders’ flagrant consumption and population explosion 700 years ago led to forest clear-cutting, fuel shortages and rising temperatures; and these, in turn, led to soil degradation, drought and famine. Still, the raising of Easter Island’s massive stone figures – called moai – continued unabated. Bigger became better. Prestige, for the statues’ wealthy benefactors, lay in size. So the moai grew to monsters: five metres, then 10, then 20 metres tall. Then came decades of unrest, looting and finally cannibalism as the Easter Islanders’ numbers dwindled and civil war swept the once-bucolic place. By the mid-1700s, most of the moai had been toppled and many among the aristocracy killed. The statues that had once served to protect the people had failed. In the face of island-wide anarchy, the survivors created the Cult of the Birdman, which marked the civilization’s last desperate grasp at salvation. And for 150-plus years – until well into the 19th century when there was almost no one left – the men of Easter Island ritually fought, and sometimes died, over the possession of a single tern’s egg. It is exactly here where I sit, on the sea cliffs at Rano Kau, and on the tiny, wave-washed islet of Moto Nui far below, that the bizarre – and ultimately tragic – annual competition over that egg took place.

A half-century ago, when explorer Thor Heyerdahl wrote his book Aku Aku: The 1958 Expedition to Easter Island, few would have been able to locate the place on a map. Even by the early ’90s, less than 5,000 tourists arrived annually. Today, that number has increased tenfold, with visitors drawn by the astounding and cautionary environmental story surrounding the place, by the collection of 16,000 archaeological sites and by the 1995 designation of Easter Island’s Rapa Nui National park – covering 60 per cent of the island’s total area – as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In a week spent wandering the island, I often walk among the fabulous stone heads that jut from hillsides and oceanside bluffs or lie on their backs amid the grasslands that cover much of Easter Island today. Knowing that the island’s story ends tragically makes the appearance of each new statue all the more profound. A rough trail cuts northeastward from the south coast toward the volcanic cliffs of Rano Raraku, following the ancient route the moai-builders themselves once utilized to haul the 12- to 80-tonne figures from the quarries, where they were hewn and extracted, to the scores of ceremonial sites where they once stood.

Along this trail today lie a dozen abandoned supine heads, half-shrouded in weeds, face up, their ears pendulous, their expressions uniformly melancholy, their eye sockets unfinished, awaiting the time – that never came – when they would be removed from their log rollers and slowly levered to the vertical to receive their fear-evoking coral and obsidian eyes. At that moment, the islanders believed, the all-seeing statues merged with the divine to funnel spiritual power from the cosmos, thus protecting the villages over which they loomed. I circle each one trying to grasp why the islanders once dedicated so much time and effort to such a Herculean enterprise; and how their fateful story resonates for the planet today.

The trail ascends the slopes of Rano Raraku, where I find myself walking into a scene I studied in National Geographic as a child, evoking a lifelong wish to see the figures first-hand. Ahead, with some of the island’s 2,000 horses grazing amidst them, the upright statues begin to appear. First one. Then three in a cluster. Then a dozen more, some leaning at odd angles, some high above, beneath the mountainside’s cliff-face quarries, some fallen, some chin-deep, some belly-deep in grass. They are black, impressively huge, with pursed lips and countenances of sober, almost sombre concentration, staring seaward like vigilant watchmen waiting for intruders. But it’s only when I reach the quarries where the statues were cut from volcanic rock that the sheer enormity of the project and the suddenness of its cessation becomes clear. Here, 397 more moai, most only half-finished, the biggest over 20 metres long, still lie within their stone crypts, their extrication halted centuries ago by the onset of civil war. All are eyeless. The quarries, I realize, are a cemetery for blind gods.

My companion on many of these walks is archaeological historian Ramon Edmunds, 41, a descendant of one of the few people who survived the Easter Island apocalypse that ended just over a century ago. Standing on the shoreline below Rano Raraku with the 15 recently raised moai of nearby Tongariki, Edmunds, a stick in one hand, gestures toward the land that spreads out before us. The upland pastures where cattle and horses graze are burnished to pale celadon beneath a relentless tropical sun. Little volcanic cones punctuate the horizon to the west where eucalyptus now grow. And big, open-ocean waves explode against the sea cliffs at our backs, sending their spindrift airborne. But where before us there was once an ancient ceremonial plaza and village, there is now nothing. The 15 standing moai today guard emptiness. “The destruction, the warfare, the deaths,” says Edmunds with regret, “have left much of what happened here an eternal mystery. The oral history I heard as a child ends . . . and the rest is myth.”

Heu Rapu, a local 53-year-old gaucho who herds his 250 head of cattle and horses on those upland pastures, joins us, and the three of us talk about what once was and what is coming to Easter Island. Of the moai, Rapu agrees, little is known of their purpose or of the religion they once embodied. They are, he’s sure, the living faces of his ancestors; the rest is conjecture. When Norwegian anthropologist and author Thor Heyerdahl came to the island in the 1950s, he recounts, the intricate stonework of the moai platform at Vinapu convinced him that Easter Island’s settlers came originally from Andean South America, just as Heyerdahl’s famous, trans-Pacific Kon-Tiki raft expedition aimed to prove in 1947. Author Erich von Däniken speculated, on the other hand, that it would have been impossible for humans to move the immense figures and attributed their construction to extraterrestrials who, he argued, utilized laser beams to cut the stone from the Rano Raraku quarries, then employed – of all things! – rope to lower the statues into position.

Modern science has a more plausible explanation. All I have to do is look at big, barrel-chested, top-knot-wearing Rapu to know that part of the mystery of the islanders’ origins and their strange statues has been resolved. Rapu is unmistakably Polynesian, and linguistic, mythological and archaeological accounts confirm this connection. The original Easter Islanders, riding outrigger canoes, left Polynesia’s Marquesas archipelago, 7,000 km to the west, around 300 AD. Somehow, after months of sailing eastward across the uncharted ocean, these seafarers managed to hit – in the vastness of the Pacific – the 15-km-wide, uninhabited speck that came to be called Easter Island. With plentiful fish, birds, palm trees and fertile fields, the mariners must have believed they’d found paradise. They established farms, clans and – fatefully – an aristocracy. Within a few centuries, they’d begun turning their traditional, one-metre-high coconut-trunk votive figures – called tiki across much of the South Pacific – into the larger stone figures that populate Easter Island today. But over time, the aristocracy became more demanding, the royal feasting more elaborate, an underclass more necessary, the statues bigger . . . and bigger, and then things began to fall apart.

On my last day on Easter Island, I walk with Edmunds amid a set of miniature volcanic cones to the Puna Pau archaeological site, located just outside the island’s tiny capital of Hanga Roa. From the brick-red, volcanic rock within the crater there, the islanders quarried the huge stone topknots, called pukao, that once sat like turbans atop the heads of many moai. Their purpose is lost to time. In the fields around us lie 18 of these spool-like hats, abandoned along with so much else when environmental collapse brought chaos. From this hilltop vantage point, the farms that today surround the little, tin-roofed village and its tree-lined streets are visible. All is peaceful. An afternoon breeze off the Pacific riffles the yellowing grass and sends the palms swaying. I know that beyond the few thousand people living quietly below, the rest of humanity lies far, far away. To the south, there’s nothing until Antarctica, 5,000 km distant. To the north, the Galápagos Islands, 3,700 km away. The coast of Chile lies the same distance to the east. And to the west 2,000 km are Easter Island’s nearest neighbours, the few dozen inhabitants of Pitcairn Island.

In fact, for more than 1,000 years, legends say, no one came to Easter Island. And once the last tree was chopped down 400 years ago, there was no wood to make a boat to leave. “You sit and look out,” Edmunds says, gesturing toward the ocean, “and see nothing. And you wonder, as people must have wondered then: ‘What’s out there?’ After centuries of isolation, being cut off from the world, people must have come to believe that they were alone on Earth . . . that there was no one else. It’s like that photograph from Apollo 11, of the Earth rising behind the moon. A little island . . . lost in space.”

When it appeared to Easter Islanders 300 years ago that the End Time was approaching, with rebellion raging and the sacred statues being pushed over and survivors believing the gods were dead, the remaining inhabitants, so the myths say, looked out from the cliffs at Rano Kau each spring and saw evidence for hope in the annual reappearance of the migratory sooty terns that nested on the seaside ledges of nearby Moto Nui islet. The birds had to come from somewhere, the people told themselves. Their eggs were proof of the possibility of renewal.

So, rather than killing one another as they had for centuries, they invented an annual athletic event that would decide who would be the island’s leader for the upcoming year. On a day in early spring, the Bird-Listeners would assemble above Moto Nui and await the sound of returning sooty terns wings. Young men – drawn from servants of the island’s leaders – stood ready, their bodies painted white, for the signal that the terns were coming. Then, the men raced down the cliffs, swam the shark-filled channel to the rookery and waited in caves near the nesting birds for the first egg. Men died falling from the Rano Kau precipice, from being taken by sharks, from starvation and thirst when the egg-laying was delayed. But whoever got the first tern egg carried it across the wave-swept channel and up the cliff face, then presented it to his honoured master, unbroken. That man was declared the Birdman and lived in year-long luxury, adjudicating peacefully over all issues concerning the islanders, until the following spring.

For a while, the people must have thought that, unlike the failed moai, their Birdman ritual worked.

Then one day in the late 18th century, a whaling ship appeared, and Easter Island’s long isolation came to an end. But the whalers brought syphilis, and some of the locals died. Several decades later, the first Peruvian slave ships came and, over the following years, took away 2,000 islanders to work collecting guano off South America. Those that didn’t die there were – after the abolition of slavery – returned to their Easter Island homeland. But the 15 returnees carried smallpox. Two thousand more Easter Islanders died. Of the estimated 15,000 people who lived on the island 600 years ago, a census taken at the end of the 19th century showed only 111. And these survivors had, in many cases, been reduced to living in caves, fearful that fate might play one more trick on a society that had suffered enough. By then the Birdman ritual had also ceased, leaving only the half-man/half-bird petroglyphs at Rano Kau as evidence that the people of Easter Island had once believed in the possibility of redemption.

“There are some tricky sections up ahead. If you are anxious here, then you will be 150 times more nervous on Triglav,” says Spelic, without the slightest trace of a smile. A few in the group shuffle their feet and glance up at the 2,864-metre peak, Slovenia’s highest and the centrepiece of Triglav National Park, now ablaze with fiery morning light. The wiry, no-nonsense 32-year-old spent two years in the Slovenian army’s crack mountain unit in his early 20s and now runs ultra-marathons in the mountains here for fun. We take him at his word.

Bounded by Croatia, Hungary, Austria, Italy and 40 kilometres of Mediterranean seashore, Slovenia is a tiny land of mountains, forests and rivers straddling the cusp of Europe and the Balkans. The island-dappled Dalmation coast of the latter, Croatia, bears the marks of the Venetians, Romans, Greeks, Austrians and various other traders and invaders through the ages, and is next up on this journey’s three-week itinerary. Together, the two countries once made up the northern and westernmost portions of the former Republic of Yugoslavia, a complex political artifice that emerged from the rubble of World War I. Josip Broz Tito, known popularly as “Marshal Tito,” fought the Nazis during World War II here and went on to successfully consolidate this republic of Christians and Muslims under communist rule. After Tito’s death in 1980, Russia’s geopolitical experiment slowly unravelled in a pressure box of ethnic tensions that finally erupted in war in 1991.

The Julian Alps

On this six-day traverse of the Julian Alps, however, I’m experiencing only the region’s stunning beauty, which escapes the notice of most North American travellers. I’ve already discovered that Slovenia’s soul is in its mountains, with Slovenians celebrating their outdoor adventure athletes – such as Davo Karnicar, the first human to ski Everest, and famed Himalayan alpinist Tomaz Humar – the way Canadians revere Gretzky and Lemieux. In fact, there is a folkloric belief here that to be truly Slovenian, Triglav must be climbed at least once in one’s lifetime.

And so, suitably prepared for our own Slovenian right of passage, we set off, wrapped in the cold, indifferent shadows of an alpine morning. Soon the trail is less a path than an obscure track following narrow weaknesses in otherwise sheer cliffs. Hands grasp at the jagged, icy wall for balance and find rock prickly and coarse enough to shred skin and the via ferrata’s thick cable bolted waist-high. We cling to this safety line as Spelic and Loboda point to a pair of chamois traversing a cliff across the valley. Spelic watches carefully as we negotiate the trail’s “tricky sections” and plod up a massive cone of talus.

A trio of Englishmen, buoyed by their early morning ascent, tramp cheerfully toward us with tales of another climber, a Scotsman, who greeted them on the summit with bagpipes and a celebratory tune. Finally, the morning sun has erased the shadows, and car-sized boulders, damp from dew, are smouldering with steam. The Julian Alps are dominated by limestone, which, because of its solubility, can be rendered by water into a phantasmagoric subsurface world of sinkholes, caves and disappearing rivers. Yet Spelic treads quickly across the moonscape, springing effortlessly from boulder to boulder, demonstrating the Slovenian stoicism, love of the outdoors and reputation for hard work. Predominantly Catholic, the Slovenian people have always identified more with Europe than with their Balkan neighbours to the south, farming their valleys in tidy plots of vegetables rimmed by mountainside pastures for sheep and cattle; managing small-footprint logging operations that make the industrial-scale destruction of North America’s woods seem criminal.

We climb nose-to-heel – the mountains peaceful, with not even a puff of wind. Of course, this hasn’t always been the case. During World War I the Italian army battled the Germans and Austrians here for supremacy over critical passes and valleys. Artifacts of that brutal conflict are still evident: cement bunkers, rolls of rusted barbwire and mule paths by which provisions were delivered to the harsh alpine front. Cresting the talus slope, we find only picnic tables outside the Dom Planika pod Triglavom hut. But Spelic, our own personal drill sergeant, propels us onward after just a quick bite – the forecast is calling for clouds and possibly rain.

I fall in behind John Robertson, a good-humoured Glasgow Crown attorney whose normally boisterous chatter is replaced by grunts and laboured breathing as the terrain steepens. Then a seemingly featureless, blank wall of limestone reveals an improbable rock crevice that allows us to quickly gain the ridge, and from here we scramble rapidly upward, following the via ferrata to a flat notch and, beyond, across a steep ramp covered in pebbles as treacherous as ball bearings. A carelessly placed foot dislodges a basketball-sized boulder that tumbles over a series of ledges before launching into the void below. We wait for the inevitable crash of broken rock, but there is only silence. A barely perceptible, bemused grin creeps across Spelic’s face as he observes his latest band of foreigners facing down their fears.

The sky remains brilliantly clear, though below, dense clouds shroud the valleys, advancing and retreating, glaciers of air moving in compressed time. In the distance, limestone ridges protrude like shark fins plying an ocean of cloud. We pass memorials to those who have died attempting the climb, including one ornate marble plaque dating back to 1795. “Most of them perished when they were zapped by freak lightning strikes,” says Spelic, while noting such incidents have done little to deter the thousands who tackle the mountain every summer. “Some days you might have 200 people on Triglav. Half the population has climbed it. I don’t know why we have to prove ourselves – maybe because we’re such a small country,” he muses, laughing, as we regroup where the ridge is as wide and flat as a highway. “I’ve even seen people up here in flip-flops.”

The Summit

The summit is guarded by a final tower that from afar looks impassable. But as we clamber up the via ferrata’s crude, carved-rock steps, the faint, incongruous smell of cigarette smoke wafts downward. No bagpiper heralds our arrival at Triglav’s blocky peak, just a climber with the chiselled, suntanned complexion of a European mountain guide, nonchalantly puffing a Marlboro next to the odd, metal obelisk that serves as an emergency shelter. Below, mountains shimmer like waves toward the horizons of Austria and Italy. We linger for a few cliché photos as more scramblers, young and old, arrive to tag the apex of Slovenia.

“I think we go now?” says Spelic. The need for summit celebrations is muted by the need to get everyone down again safely.

Two days after the ascent, we hike down to our trek’s final chalet, Blejska Koca Na Lipani, situated in an idyllic meadow and protected by a semi-circle of limestone bluffs. The late-afternoon sun washes the mountains in warm, diffuse light; below, the forested Pokljuka plateau unfolds like a carpet of green. A savory aroma wafts from the hut where a commissar with tree-limb forearms greets us. “You want soup? Es good,” he says.

Later, over dinner, Spelic introduces Frank Kozelj, a lanky man with thinning silver hair sipping grappa with friends. A former Slovenian Olympic rower, Kozelj recounts how he moved to Vancouver in 1968, and we share a laugh at our coincidental encounter. Soon we are invited next door to the family shepherd’s hut to meet his brother Tomiz.

Inside, the stove crackles and the scent of wood smoke permeates thick wooden walls. Tomiz pours three generous portions of schnapps – “ancient mountain medicine” – and carves spicy sausage onto a platter. “For a long time we were hidden, just this little mountain country that nobody knew about,” Kozelj begins.

Spelic, in training for a marathon, abstains from the spirits but raises a thick slice of sausage as we lift our glasses to the mountains of Slovenia. The strong schnapps, sweetened with honey, floods my insides with warmth and brings tears to my eyes.

If the soul of Slovenia dwells in its mountains, then Croatia’s is surely found on the country’s Dalmatian Coast and the thousand or more islands that lie in the Adriatic like strips of limestone torn from the craggy, arid mountains of the mainland. Here, four days into a week-long sail, water laps the sides of the SS Leonardo as it glides toward a concrete pier on the island of Vrnik. The ship’s owner, Leonardo Naranca, a towering, thick-chested bon vivant, is seated on deck enjoying an early morning cigarette and glass of sharp, Croatian red wine.

“Zivjeli,” he shouts, raising his glass and offering the traditional local toast when I chuckle at his breakfast of champions. The crew ties up the boat. Over the railing, the Adriatic is so clear it looks drinkable; stairs leading down into turquoise waters are festooned with the magenta spikes of sea urchins, a shoal of small fish darts in the depths. Grabbing a towel, I jump ashore and am soon submerged in water as warm as tepid tea, contemplating something Naranca said yesterday over another glass of wine between the islands of Mljet and Vrnik. “I have lived my whole life on the sea. My father and grandfather were both sailors.” On a more philosophical note, he had then added: “The sea gives, and the sea takes.”

Croatians keen to escape life in the capital of Zagreb have always journeyed to the coast for rejuvenation. In times of trouble, they have also fled here for refuge. Barely three days ago, we too steamed northwest from the noise and crowds and stresses of city life, though not from the capital but from the ancient seaport of Dubrovnik. The UNESCO World Heritage Site once played a pivotal role in Mediterranean trade, and its outstanding baroque, Gothic and Renaissance architecture, dating back to the 13th century, makes it an international treasure.

Tragically, during what Croatians call “the homeland war” of the 1990s, when Yugoslavia disintegrated, the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav army laid siege to Dubrovnik for some 10 months from 1991 to ‘92. The fighting devastated the city and laid waste to the tourism industry on the Dalmatian Coast. But wandering Dubrovnik’s narrow, cobbled alleyways, past Benedictine and Dominican monasteries, Onofrio’s Fountain and one of the world’s oldest pharmacies, we had to search hard for signs of the conflict – a stone wall pockmarked with bullet holes or new, red-clay roof tiles bordering ochre-coloured tiles of ancient times. Tourism, long a staple of the region, seems well on the way to recovery. In fact, Dubrovnik is a city besieged with cruise-ship passengers, even in late summer. Boarding the SS Leonardo for a cruise between lesser-known villages and islands has provided welcome relief from its torrent of photo-snapping humanity.

Sailing the Coast

In contrast, the boating season on the coast is winding down – a good time to walk Vrnik’s waterfront. According to Samantha Brocklehurst, the ship’s sanguine British guide (she of the impeccable Oxford accent, with a sailor’s sense of humour), the city is renowned for its limestone, and modern and ancient quarries pock its hillsides. Standing in the hollow, desolate base of one, it is difficult to imagine stonemasons carving out blocks of stone to build the ramparts of Korcula Town, visible across the narrow straits. For there isn’t the slightest suggestion of activity anywhere in the city. Houses seem strangely vacant. Small, ostentatious, turreted summer manors are boarded up, their gates locked, their gardens left to grow wild in a riot of olive trees and bougainvillea – what Naranca calls the “dent of time.”

Korcula, less than 15 minutes’ sail away, is an entirely different scenario. Like many of the local islands, its communities are scattered around the island’s perimeter while its bony interior is an inhospitable mix of shallow soils, limestone bluffs and lanky cypress trees. The Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo, I’m told, was captured here in 1298 during a naval battle between the fleets of Genoa and Venice. As for Korcula Town, it is Dubrovnik in miniature – minus the cruise ships. The streets are noisy with travellers who have docked their private yachts to dine at its outdoor cafés and experience the kitschy, Disneyesque Moreska sword dance. The island is renowned for keeping alive this theatrical mock-fighting performance, a tradition with origins in Spain that has flourished here for more than four centuries.

Damir Taras, the intense but amicable chief steward of the SS Leonardo, invites me for coffee onshore. Here, pedalling the ship’s bikes along the narrow, twisting street that leads from the dock to the old city, tantalizing aromas float from numerous pizzerias, betraying the longstanding cultural and culinary affinity between the Croatian coast and Italy. Entering the old city via the arched “land gate,” we park the bikes to walk on limestone pavements polished as smooth as silk by centuries of footfalls. A leggy, raven-haired beauty passes in high heels, trailing perfume and the detached demeanor of a Croatian supermodel.

At a quiet café over robust espressos, the 36-year-old Taras speaks of the war, when he worked at the Split airport renting cars to foreign correspondents flying in to cover the conflict. It was a surreal and confusing time for a young man who should have been enjoying the prime of his life, he says, and he thought about leaving. But a love of the sea and the hope that life would improve made him stay. And things have improved, he notes. Tourism has rebounded to what it was during communist times, and there is no shortage of work for seafarers like him. Still, the boarded-up houses of Vrnik, an island that in another part of the world would boast a Club Med, suggest that the coast remains relatively undiscovered – indeed, as some travel brochures note, it remains “the way the Mediterranean used to be.” For while Slovenia may have escaped the worst of the Balkan Wars and been quick to join the European community, Croatia is still vying to be fully welcomed in. The country declared independence in 1992, but its road to nationhood has been fraught with conflict and residents like Taras are still recovering psychologically from a war that pitted neighbour against neighbour, turned citizens into refugees and claimed some 15,000 Croatian lives.

The following morning Naranca is already enjoying his morning constitutional as we weigh anchor early for Sipan, and just two hours later we’re docked at Sudurad, a collection of three-storey stone houses with red-tiled roofs wrapped around a sparkling cove. Here in the Middle Ages, wealthy families built residences to escape marauding pirates in their hometown of Dubrovnik.

Joining Brocklehurst for a cross-island cycle, we follow a lane bordered with wildflowers that climbs precipitously from the shoreline before levelling off in a shallow, fertile valley of fig, olive and pomegranate orchards. An austere Catholic church occupies a wooded hillock at the entrance to the valley, and inside, the air is cool and dank. Soaring walls of cracked plaster are hung with faded tapestries and a sombre oil painting of the Crucifixion. Half an hour later we arrive at the other side of the island and another tranquil village, Sipanska Luka, where we share a thin-crust pizza. Open-hulled wooden fishing dories bob at anchor. Nearby, a huge, gleaming white power yacht is tethered; its complement of male passengers – all sporting dark sunglasses – have the appearance of Sicilian gangsters.

After lunch, pedalling slowly back to the boat, I veer off the main road on a whim to follow a dirt track that meanders uphill through olive groves and past an old mansion before fading into an indistinct footpath. A woman dressed in widow’s black walks around the corner, shouldering a bundle of firewood; a half-dozen goats follow nervously. She mutters something in Croatian, shakes her head and laughs, then vanishes down the trail.

Later, strolling back to the boat at dusk after exploring another incredible 15th-century mansion, this one gloriously restored, a soft evening breeze carries the briny scent of the ocean. Gentle waves rustle a beach of polished stones, and I dip my hand into the warm water and cradle one, rolling it around and feeling its smoothness against my palm. The lights of distant Dubrovnik twinkle across the sea.

Bagan, Myanmar

1. Bagan, Myanmar: Once considered among the most precious collections of relics in Southeast Asia, second only to Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, Bagan (formerly Pagan) is in danger of becoming an unmitigated disaster, say archaeologists. An eleventh-century king is credited with building many of the original shrines, ornamenting what was then Myanmar’s royal capital with symbols of his religious fervour. After a 1975 earthquake damaged several of the most important temples, government officials invited a team of UNESCO archaeologists to help restore and reinforce the monuments, and Bagan seemed well on its way to becoming a World Heritage Site. But by the early 1990s, Myanmar’s notoriously ruthless military regime was no longer interested in adhering to the exacting UNESCO standards for historic preservation, choosing instead to fast-track the restorations and erect replicas of monasteries, stupas, and temples—many from scratch and with inferior materials—in an effort to lure more visitors to the country’s most popular tourist attraction. The original stupas took months or years to construct, but the modern facsimiles are completed in a mere two weeks.
2. 

   Galapagos Island

   Galapagos Islands, Ecuador: Too much of a good thing can have negative consequences. More than 120,000 visitors a year come to the Galapagos to gaze at giant tortoises, iguanas, Darwin’s finches and other endemic species. That’s a spike of 80,000 people since the early 1980s. Adding to this is a steep rise in immigration from the mainland, 965 kilometres away, which has contributed to overfishing and pollution. The biggest threat to the islands’ ecosystem, however, is a steady influx of invasive species stowed away on boats and flights. Conservation organizations spent $18 million over the last six years to wipe out 140,000 feral goats. But the islands remain plagued by cats, rats, fire ants, and hundreds of other non-native plants and animals, as well as germ-laden insects to which the native animals are not immune.

3. 

   Banaue Rice Fields

   Banaue Rice Terraces, The Philippines: Built and maintained by the Ifugao people for the last 3,000 years, these amazing rice terraces achieved UNESCO World Heritage Status in 1995, but that has provided few economic benefits from tourism for the farming population. Two clusters of the five terraces are now considered to be threatened because of increasing pressures due to urbanization, land use conversion and shifting cultivation, and other demographic pressures. Other causes of the terraces’ degradation are a lack of interest on the part of younger Ifugaos in learning the relevant techniques and the fact that the terraces’ low yields are in many cases sufficient for only four months per year.

    

4. Everglades National Park, Florida, USA: This 1.5 million-acre area, which is full of rare and endangered species like the Florida panther and the West Indian manatee, is the largest subtropical wilderness in the U.S.. However, today it a mere shadow of its twentieth-century self, shrunk by half under suburbs and sugar farms, its natural course dammed or diverted by roads, canals, locks, and levees—changes that have left no fewer than 14 animal species here threatened with extinction. Urban development, including condominiums and shopping malls, agricultural fertilizer, mercury contamination of fish and wildlife and lower water levels due to flood controls continue to threaten the Everglades. Already, half the ecosystem is gone. On the World Heritage Centre’s Danger List since 1993, the park is also at serious risk from climate change and sea-level rise.
5. Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo: Civil unrest and armed conflict extending back to the mid-1990s has devastated the DRC, claiming an estimated four million human lives since 1998. This war—considered the deadliest since World War II—has also had a drastic implications for wildlife in the DRC. Perhaps the most horrifying example of the impact of conflict is occurring in Virunga National Park, the oldest national park in Africa. Virunga is one of the most biologically diverse regions of Africa, with over 700 species of birds and 200 species of mammals. It was named a World Heritage Site in 1979 for its natural habitats—essential to the preservation of biological diversity and endangered species, including the mountain gorilla. There are only around 700 mountain gorillas left in the world, and more than half of them live in Virunga. Today, ongoing conflict continues to threaten this dwindling population. In 2007 alone, 10 mountain gorillas were slaughtered.
6. Walled City of Baku, Azerbaijan: Since it was built in the 12th century by Iranians, the walled city of Baku has survived invasions and bombardment by Russian warships, civil war and revolution. But now the citadel designated a UNESCO World Heritage site is under threat of extinction from a construction boom fed by Western oil companies pouring billions of dollars into the capital. Flouting a ban on all new development in Baku’s walled city, known to locals as Icheri Sheher, buildings which have stood for centuries are being torn down to make way for new office complexes and plush villas. They are built to meet demand from Western oil companies drilling in the nearby Caspian Sea, foreign embassies and wealthy locals, all ready to pay high rents to base themselves in Baku’s choicest piece of real estate. In 2003, UNESCO placed the Inner City on the List of World Heritage in Danger, citing damage from a November 2000 earthquake, poor conservation as well as “dubious” restoration efforts.
7. Luxor, Egypt: As the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, Luxor has frequently been characterized as the “world’s greatest open air museum.” The city is home to some of the greatest wonders of ancient Egypt, including the Temple Complex of Karnak and the Valley of the Kings, which houses the tombs of the pharaohs. William C.S. Remsen, a preservation architect, says as more people move into the area (which was once farmland) extra water is pumped in, causing water levels to rise. Since the temples are made out of porous stone, the water gets absorbed and leaves behind salt. When this salt crystallizes behind the stone, it causes the decorated surfaces of the temples to evaporate. The ancient monuments are also threatened by tourism, theft and floods that have damaged wall paintings and caused structural damage to many of the tombs.
8. Ice Fields of Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania: These massive pure white fields captured by Ernest Hemingway in his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” are literally disappearing. In 2002, Lonnie Thompson, a professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University, released a study that predicted global warming would wipe these fields out completely between 2015 and 2020. Data from the study show that 82% of the ice fields melted between 1912 and 2000. However, while global warming is cited as one culprit, most scientists claim that it alone cannot have caused such a dramatic change. The other factors behind the transformation remain a mystery.
9. Angkor Wat, Cambodia: According to heritage experts carrying out restoration work at the temple, which ranks as one of the largest religious ruins in the world, a plethora of new hotels, cashing in on the country’s rapid rise in tourist numbers, is sapping gallons of water from beneath nearby urban areas. They say this could upset the delicate foundations on which Angkor Wat sits and could lead to parts of it crumbling into sinkholes. The structures at Angkor Wat are built primarily out of sandstone, which the huge amount of foot traffic around the site is steadily eroding. In 1993, when Angkor was first added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, the savage Khmer Rouge was still active in the area. Only 7,600 brave souls ventured to the temple complex that year. Since then, however, Cambodia has become “safe” in the eyes of the international community, and package tours have landed in fleets. In 2007, some two million tourists visited Cambodia, with half stopping at Angkor Wat. With tourist traffic continuing to increase by about 20 per cent a year, three million people are expected to visit the country in 2010.

Photo Credits:

#1: poisonwen.wordpress.com

#2: goway.com

#3: gorilla-haven.org

#4: swiftravel.com

The bizarre dance craze originated completely by accident. In 2003, Harding had just quit his job as a video game designer and was backpacking around Southeast Asia with some friends. One day in Vietnam they were videotaping each other when one of his companions suggested he do his “geeky dance.” Harding continued to do the jig in various Southeast Asian countries that he visited on the trip. The videos were uploaded to his website for friends and family to enjoy. Later, Harding edited together 15 dance scenes, all with him in centre frame, and added some background music–a world music song entitled Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest. Harding first posted himself online in January 2005. The video was passed around by e-mail and by various bloggers and eventually became viral, with his server getting 20,000 or more hits a day as it was discovered. “It got picked up by somethingawful.com and sites like that,” Harding recalled. “Usually, what they showed was people getting hurt or doing something really stupid, so I was bracing myself for abuse, but everyone seemed to like it.”

Bemused by his antics and impressed by the following he was amassing, the makers of Stride Gum contacted Harding and asked him if he would be interested in making another video for them for the debut of their chewing gum, which was slated for June 2006. With Stride’s sponsorship money, Harding journeyed to 39 countries on seven continents, including Antarctica, Egypt, Italy, Turkey and Easter Island, stopping to film himself busting a move at each destination. From these wanderings, he created a second video called “Dancing 2006.”

In an interview with the Washington Post, Harding admitted that the most difficult dance he did took place on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. “I spent nine hours climbing up to the peak, I vomited eight times on the way up and I just had nothing left by the time I got up there.” The most complicated video was shot underwater in Micronesia in front of the propeller of a Japanese shipwreck that was sunk in World War II. The most terrifying two-step was on the Kjeragbolten rock in Norway. “It’s just a tiny rock wedged between two faces of a chasm 3,000 feet up and only a few feet across. Dancing on that rock, yeah, I came very close to killing myself.”

Although there is no discernable connection between chewing gum and bad dancing, Stride offered to sponsor Harding strutting his stuff around the world again in 2007 and 2008. Amazingly, in this era of shameless commercial tie-ins, he was not obliged to wear a Stride T-shirt or deliver a little pitch for the product. Harding released his third dancing video on June 20, 2008, the product of 14 months of travelling in 42 countries. In his early videos, Harding dances alone, but in his third video he is usually in the company of others: South African street children in Soweto, painted tribesman in New Guinea, Bollywood dancers in India, waitresses clad in French maid costumes in Tokyo, all copying, or trying to, his spastic gyrations. Harding’s girlfriend, Melissa Nixon, helped to produce the video. Nixon organized the 40 or so dancing events, culled from a list of more than 20,000 invitations from fans around the world to come boogie with them in their hometowns. The esoteric background music, a piece called ”Praan,” was composed by Gary Schyman specifically for the video. The vocals were supplied by a 17-year-old Bengali singer named Palbasha Siddique, with lyrics adapted from the poem “Stream of Life,” by Rabindranath Tagore.

Today, Harding estimates that his online dance videos, which appear on YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and on his own website: www.wherethehellismatt.com, have been viewed more than 20 million times. The miracle of Internet fame has transformed his life. Harding was recently recruited by Visa to star in its “Travel Happy” advertising campaign, and has hired a publicist to help him field interview requests. He is also in demand as a public speaker, an amazing development considering he never utters a word in any of his videos. As for the message he hopes to convey through his globe-stomping antics, Harding says: “A wildly exaggerated view of the natural joyfulness and goodwill of our species. I make humanist propaganda. I try to trick people into thinking the world is wonderful so they will act accordingly.”

Photo Credits:

#1: smh.com.au

#2: gamespot.com

#3: brandrepublic.asia

courtesy hubpages.com

Everyone seeks something different in travel. For some it begins and ends with foreign food. Others prefer art and museums. Some take their pleasure in exotic nightlife. For many, the quest involves a beach. I have my own special thing. I always go looking for the local sport. I enjoy sports for their own sake, but I also find that they often offer revealing insights into national culture.

On Malaysia’s east coast that meant standing in a village square watching a top-spinning contest. The Malaysians call this peculiar sport main gasing. The participants use long ropes to violently snap their discus-sized tops onto a mound of packed clay. Then a teammate scoops up the six-kilogram top on a wooden paddle and transfers it to a metal-tipped bamboo stand. Soon there are several gasing “asleep” (as the Malaysians describe a fast-spinning top) on their stands. They sleep for more than an hour. Main gasing may not be Wide World of Sportsmaterial, but it’s definitely different. In North America, you don’t often see the athletes squatting on their haunches smoking cheroots in midgame.

Sumo was high on my itinerary when I flew to Japan. Ancient and mysterious, sumo is half sport and half religion. The ring, the sand that is used, the referee’s robe, his ceremonial dagger, the salt-tossing and the wrestlers’ thunderous foot-stomping are all drenched in Shinto tradition. Unlike most sports, sumo is as much about anticipation as it is action. The rikishi spend up to four minutes simply preparing to do battle. When they finally get to grappling, the bouts rarely last more than 20 seconds. The violence is a release of tension, not just for the wrestlers, but for the crowd as well. When the flesh collides, the usually reserved Japanese cut loose.

When I visited Holland, I went to a bar to watch a World Cup soccer match. The Dutch were playing Brazil and the room was ablaze with Dutch orange. Calling the place noisy would have been an understatement—to order a beer you needed a bullhorn. Once more sport provided a socially acceptable excuse for a normally stoic race to raise hell. The Dutch lost the game, and they rioted that night in Rotterdam.

Thai Kickboxing - thaiphotoblogs.com

In Bangkok, I spent a night with the eight-armed warriors. That’s how the Thais describe kickboxers. Almost anything goes in this savage sport: punches, kicks, elbows, knees, leg trips and wrestling throws. Tough as it is, it was tougher in the old days when boxers would put ground glass into their leather hand wrappings to better maim their opponents. Rituals play a major part in Muay Thai. Before commencing hostilities, the fighters perform a slow-motion dance that is part prayer and part psych. A band composed of pipe, cymbal and drums plays throughout the bout. It’s eerie snake-charmer stuff. Stranger still, the music mirrors the pace of the combat. Adding to the unholy din is the crowd. The spectators bet furiously with one another, shouting wildly and flashing hand signals as the odds shift from round to round. How they sort it out at the end is a complete mystery to me.

Many years ago in Barcelona, I set aside a day for bullfighting, if only to hail a taxi and say, “Plaza de toros, por favor.” People kept telling me that the best stuff was on display in Madrid, but they seemed to take it pretty seriously in Barcelona too. The highlights from the arena played on the TVs in most of the city’s bars. In North America, they show goals and home runs. In Spain, they show deaths. Six bulls died three times a week. Still, squeamishness didn’t keep all the tourists at bay. The day I attended, a young American girl stood up at one point and cheered, “Yay, bull! Go bull!” She was making a statement, but I’m not sure she had thought it through. When the bull wins, the matador gets eviscerated.

Bullfighting may be Spain’s most famous sport, but it isn’t the most authentic item in Catalonia. I found the genuine article one afternoon in an old stone building just off La Rambla, a 1.2-kilometre, tree-lined pedestrian mall. The game was jai alai, or pelota, as it is often referred to in Spain. Jai alai (pronounced “high lie”) is also played in Miami, Tijuana, Macao and a few other places, but it began in the Pyrenees with the Basques. Some claim it’s the oldest ball game in the world. Most everyone agrees it is the fastest. The ball reaches speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour.

Jai Alai - nytimes-institute.com

The ball is slightly smaller than a baseball but harder than a golf ball. The players catch and fling it against a wall with a cesta, a slim, hook-shaped wicker basket that is attached to their wrists. The three-walled court, orfronton, is long, high and narrow. The front wall is 15 metres tall. A screen prevents the spectators from getting creamed by the speeding orb. Even without knowing the rules, I could recognize the high level of skill involved, but that’s not what impressed me the most. It was the atmosphere; the fronton was such a relaxing place. Shafts of sunlight filtered down through the clerestory windows. The walls of the arena were made of nut-brown wood. Some spectators smoked cigars; some wore suits. All of them were men.

Jai alai is a big gambling game. It was once described as “a lottery with seats.” But the betting in Barcelona wasn’t conducted at pari-mutuel windows. Instead an attendant walked back and forth in front of the stands with a couple of split tennis balls in his hands. When someone indicated that he wanted to make a bet, the attendant tossed the ball up to him with a piece of paper tucked inside. The gambler wrote his wager on the paper and tossed the ball back.

Intimate was the word that came to mind. This cathedral of leisure wouldn’t have seated more than 200 people. A small standup bar served beer and spirits. There were no cheerleaders, no video replays and no commercial breaks; just the crack of the ball on the wall, the hiss of the cestas, and the occasional burst of appreciative applause.

Ninety minutes in the fronton put me in an entirely different place. I left convinced that I had touched the rhythm of Spain.

Photo Credits:

#1: telegraph.co.uk

#2: thaiphotoblogs.com

#3: nytimes-institute.com

2. After John Lennon’s death in 1980, the graffiti-covered “John Lennon Peace Wall” became a shrine for the youth of which city?
A. Amsterdam
B. Prague
C. New York
D. Liverpool

3. You are having a meal in Honduras and the waiter brings you a dish of “bamboo chicken.” What are you eating?
A. Skunk
B. Ocelot
C. Parrot
D. Iguana

4. In which Asian country will you find the mysterious “Plain of Jars”?
A. Laos
B. Iran
C. Turkey
D. South Korea

5. Which American city dyes its river a bright shade of green every year for St. Patrick’s Day?
A. Boston
B. Chicago
C. Pittsburgh
D. Charleston

6. The icon of the Black Madonna is the most important shrine in which country?
A. Brazil
B. El Salvador
C. Poland
D. Portugal

7. Maxwell House Coffee was named after a hotel in which American city?
A. Detroit
B. Atlanta
C. St. Louis
D. Nashville

8. Ian Fleming, the British novelist who created James Bond, spent his winters writing the Bond novels at Goldeneye, a home that he designed and built on what island?
A. Jamaica
B. Sicily
C. Majorca
D. Bermuda

9. In which Muslim country can you observe a spectacular festival called Fantasia, where armed men on horseback perform acrobatic tricks and fire their muskets at a full gallop?
A. Egypt
B. Morocco
C. Yemen
D. Afghanistan

10. What famous American bridge has appeared in such movies as X-Men: The Last Stand, Vertigo, A View to a Kill and Interview with a Vampire?
A. The Brooklyn Bridge
B. The Golden Gate Bridge
C. The Verranzo Narrows Bridge
D. The Royal Gorge Bridge

11. Which Caribbean island group is the fifth-largest banking centre in the world and home to more registered businesses than people?
A. British Virgin Islands
B. Barbados
C. Cayman Islands
D. Bahamas

12. The 1982 movie The Year of Living Dangerously, starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, was set in which Asian nation?
A. The Philippines
B. Burma
C. Indonesia
D. Singapore

Answers

1. C. Kenya
Quite possibly the only place in the world where you can feed and photograph the giraffe over your breakfast table, and at the front door, and even from a bedroom window. The Giraffe Manor is an elegant, personally hosted, small and exclusive hotel, famous for its resident herd of giraffe. Built in 1932 by Sir David Duncan, the lodge is situated on 140 acres of land just a few kilometres from Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. In 1974, Jock Leslie-Melville, grandson of a Scottish earl, and his wife Betty, who also founded the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife (AFEW), bought the Manor. They then moved five babies of the highly endangered Rothschild giraffe to their property where they were successfully reared and now have their own babies. When Jock passed away, Betty decided to open her house, now called the Giraffe Manor, to visitors. As well as the giraffe, the property is home to many species of birds, large families of warthogs and the elusive Bush Buck.

2. B. Prague
John Lennon was a pacifist hero to young Czechs. After his death in 1980, the “John Lennon Peace Wall,” at the backside of a fourteenth century churchyard in Prague, became a place for the youth of Czechoslovakia to write their views. In 1988, the wall was a source of irritation for the then communist regime of Gustav Husak. Young Czechs would write grievances on the wall and this led to a clash between hundreds of students and security police on the nearby Charles Bridge. The movement these students followed was described ironically as “Lennonism,” while Czech authorities described these people variously as alcoholics, mentally deranged, sociopathic, and agents of Western capitalism. A running battle developed between the police whitewashers and dissident graffiti writers until November 1989, when Communism collapsed in the former Czechoslovakia’s non-violent “Velvet Revolution.” The Lennon Wall has since become a tourist attraction.

3. D. Iguana
Iguana meat is popular throughout much of Latin America, where consumers willingly pay more for it than for fish, poultry, pork, or beef. To fill the demand, several iguana species are hunted by rifle, slingshot, trap and noose; they are even run down by trained dogs. Villagers catch them for food for the family; professional hunters snare and sell them to vendors. The meat tastes somewhat like chicken, and iguanas are often referred to as gallina de palo, “bamboo chicken” or “chicken of the tree.” The lizard meat is typically cooked in a spicy stew.

4. A. Laos
The hundreds of huge carved rock jars that litter Laos’ mysterious Plain of Jars, date from the Neolithic period. They stand up to 3.25 metres high and weigh up to 13 tonnes. Historians still debate their origins and purpose. When French archaeologist Madelaine Colani excavated the jars in the 1930s, she discovered some contained bronze and iron tools and bracelets, along with glass beads, while the rest appeared to have been looted. These items led Colani to theorize that the jars were funerary urns, holding cremated remains. This theory has been strengthened by the more recent discovery of underground burial chambers.

5. B. Chicago
For over 40 years, the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers turn the Chicago River a bright emerald green for the annual St. Patricks Day Parade celebration. Bill King, the administrator of Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day committee, says that “the idea of dyeing the Chicago River green originally came about by accident when a group of plumbers were using fluorescein dye to trace illegal substances that were polluting the river.” According to the event organizer’s official site, it takes 40 pounds of vegetable dye to create a carpet of green that lasts four to five hours. Of course, they don’t dye the entire river with that–just one section a couple of blocks long. Interestingly, the vegetable-based dye replaced an oil-based dye. Environmentalists lobbied for the change, arguing that oil-based dye was hardly an eco-friendly substance to be shovelling into a river.

6. C. Poland
The Black Madonna in the Paulite Monastery of Jasna Gora (Czestochowa) is visited by millions of pilgrims annually. The painting came to Poland in 1384, probably from the east, perhaps even Jerusalem. Legend traces the icon’s origin back to St. Luke who, it is said, painted it on a cypress table top from the house of the Holy Family. Nobody knows when people began venerating the painting as an icon, but it was already thought miraculous when it was brought to Poland. When the sick or ill prayed to it for health, they often were healed. When Polish kings or monks prayed to it for military victories, they won. In 1655, 3,000 Swedish troops besieged the Jasna Gora monastery. Defending it were just 170 soldiers, 70 monks and 20 noblemen. The monks and their troops won. This inspired the rest of the nation to rebel and the Swedes were routed. This “Miracle at Jasna Gora” was attributed to the intervention of the Mother of God, and her painting. When the Russians were at Warsaw’s gates in 1920, thousands of people walked from Warsaw to Czestochowa to ask the Madonna for help. The Poles defeated the Russians at a battle along the Wisla (or Vistula) River. During World War II under German occupation, the faithful made pilgrimages as a show of defiance. That spirit deepened during the years of Soviet-enforced communism, when all government attempts to stop the pilgrimages failed.

7. D. Nashville
In the early 1900s, Nashville entrepreneur Joel Cheek perfected a special coffee blend, which became the house blend of the Maxwell House, a city hotel. When he began selling it to the general public, he adopted the hotel’s name as the brand. In 1917, Cheek began using a “Good to the Last Drop” slogan to advertise Maxwell House Coffee. In 1920, the Cheek family sold the brand to General Foods, which made wide use of the slogan. For several years, the ads made no mention of Theodore Roosevelt as the phrase’s originator. By the 1930s, however, the company was running ads that claimed that the former president had taken a sip of Maxwell House Coffee on a visit to Andrew Jackson’s estate, The Hermitage, near Nashville on October 21, 1907, and that when served coffee he had proclaimed it to be “Good to the Last Drop.” Today, Maxwell House claims that the slogan was actually written by Clifford Spiller, former president of General Foods Corporation and did not come from a Roosevelt remark. The phrase remains a registered trademark for the product and appears on its logo.

8. A. Jamaica
Ian Fleming, the British intelligence officer turned turned spy novelist, spent winters on Jamaica’s north shore at his Caribbean getaway for almost two decades and wrote 10 of his James Bond novels there. Fleming borrowed the name of his famous spy from James Bond, the author of A Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies. As for the name of his home, Fleming said in an 1964 interview: “I had happened to be reading Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, and I’d been involved in an operation called Goldeneye during the war: the defense of Gibraltar, supposing that the Spaniards had decided to attack it; and I was deeply involved in the planning of countermeasures which would have been taken in that event. Anyway, I called my place Goldeneye.” The estate is now the centrepiece of an exclusive resort by the same name.

9. B. Morocco
Also referred to as the Aiin Aouda (Mock Horseback Battle), Fantasia is an annual equestrian performance and celebration of traditional folklore that takes place in Meknes each July. This horse-riding spectacle includes hundreds of charging horsemen (and women) wearing traditional clothing. The performance consists of a group of horse riders, wearing traditional clothes and charging along a straight path at the same speed so as to form a line, at the end of the ride (about 200 hundred metres) all riders fire in the sky using old gunpowder guns. The difficulty of the performance is synchronization during the acceleration especially during firing so that one single shot is heard. Each region in Morocco has one or several fantasia groups, called serba, totaling thousands of horse riders nationwide. Performances are usually during local seasonal, cultural or religious festivals.

10. B. The Golden Gate Bridge
This fabled, orange-hued San Francisco bridge has appeared in many movies since it opened on May 28, 1937, with the world’s longest suspension span. Why you may ask isn’t this city landmark painted gold? Because the term “Golden Gate” actually refers to the Golden Gate Strait which is the entrance to the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. The orange colour, called International Orange, was chosen in part because of its visibility factor. Advection fog, a low, ground-hugging fog, is prevalent in San Francisco Bay. The bright colour helps drivers as well as ships see their way. The colour was also chosen because of its natural blend to the warm landscape of the area.

11. C. Cayman Islands
Not only do these remote British-run islands comprise the fifth largest banking centre in the world, they also tout the highest standard of living in the Caribbean with the average annual income of approximately $42,000. The Caymans have more registered businesses than its 65,000 inhabitants, and are home to 279 banks with $1.5 trillion in banking liabilities. The Cayman Islands has become a successful offshore financial centre because of the high quality service providers, reputable law firms, as well as the Big Four accounting auditors that operate from the islands. Today, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks have subsidiary or branch operations in the Caymans.

12. C. Indonesia
The Year of Living Dangerously is about a love affair set in Indonesia during the overthrow of President Sukarno. The plot follows a group of foreign correspondents in Jakarta on the eve of an attempted coup by the so-called 30 September Movement on September 30, 1965, and during the beginning of the violent reprisals by military-led vigilante groups that killed hundreds of thousands. The film was banned from being shown in Indonesia until 1999. The title The Year of Living Dangerously refers to a famous Italian phrase used by Sukarno for the title of his National Day speech of August 17, 1964. The movie also starred Linda Hunt as the male dwarf Billy Kwan, Gibson’s local photographer contact, a role for which she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Photo Credits:

#1: travellingboard.net

#2: flickr.com

#3: flickr.com

#4: newsday.com

#5: flickr.com

Icelandic Phallological Museum: Husavik, Iceland
This museum’s bizarre goal is to collect penis specimens from every mammal in Iceland, including several species that are endangered or currently extinct in Icelandic waters. The museum houses 245 specimens displayed like hunting trophies, embalmed in formaldehyde, or dried in display cases. The collection includes specimens of sperm, humpback and even the giant blue whale, polar bears, various kinds of seals and walruses and even tiny mice and other rodents. The strangest item is the penis of the “Icelandic Christmas Lad”, donated by a former mayor of Reykjavik. It is believed that “Icelandic Christmas Lad” refers to one of Santa’s toy-making helpers. Sigurour Hjartarson, a former teacher, is the founder and director of the museum. Hjartarson says he founded the museum so people from all over the world could “undertake serious study into the field of phallology in an organized, scientific fashion.”

Dog-Collar Museum: Kent, England
Although it is hard to believe that there’s a demand for this sort of thing, this museum, located inside of Leeds Castle, attracts more than 500,000 visitors every year. The dog collar collection counts over 100 unique items that present the history of canine-wear starting from early medieval times to the Victorian Age. The dog collars were originally gathered by Irish medieval collector John Hurt and his wife Gertrude, and were donated to Leeds Castle in 1979, as a tribute to the castle’s last private owner, Lady Baillie, a major dog lover. The antique dog collars tell 500 years of canine history, from early, 15th century dog collars, filled with spikes to protect the neck of hunting hounds against wolves, boars and bears, to glamorous leather and velvet baroque collars of the 18th century. Engraved silver collars from the last century, some fashioned by leading silversmiths of the day, form an interesting section. Many come in pairs joined by short chains, such as those presented to Top and Tabinet engraved “The Property of Earl Talbot. The Winner of the Great Champion all aged (Puppy) stakes for all England 32 Dogs at 20 guin’s each at Ashdown Park. Dec 14th 1838.” Other inscriptions are less formal. An 18th century English brass collar simply states; “I am Mr Pratt’s Dog, King St, Nr Wokingham, Berks. Whose Dog are You?”

Mutter Museum: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The Mütter Museum was founded to educate future doctors about anatomy and human medical anomalies. Today, it serves as a valuable resource for educating and enlightening the public about our medical past and telling important stories about what it means to be human. On display are some 20,000 objects showcasing gruesome human health anomalies including a wax model of a woman with a human horn growing out of her forehead, a five-foot-long human colon that contained over 40 pounds of fecal matter, and the petrified body of the mysterious Soap Lady, whose corpse was turned into a soapy substance called adipocere. The museum also houses a collection of 2,000 objects extracted from people’s throats, a malignant tumour removed from President Grover Cleveland’s hard palate, the conjoined liver from Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker and a growth removed from the thorax of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

Museum of Medieval Instruments of Torture: Prague, Czech Republic
This educational exhibit with historical explanations in six languages showcases an extensive collection of torture devices, many of which originated during those wonderful years known as The Inquisition. These replicas of the originals will send a shiver down the spines of all who contemplate the horrors unleashed upon mankind in the name of religion, war or just plain old sadism. Aside from knuckle-crackers and cat-o-nine tails, torture devices utilizing fire and plenty of needles await you, iron maidens, and saws meant to separate bodies in half–lengthwise. And if your head’s not screwed on right, the Spanish garrotta chair will fix that for you, literally driving a screw right through you skull.

The Burlesque Hall of Fame: Las Vegas, Nevada
Formerly known as Exotic World, the museum historically was located on the site of an abandoned goat farm in Helendale, California. It documents the history of burlesque from its 19th century origins through its golden age in the mid 20th century, and displays artifacts commemorating historic burlesque performers such as Blaze Starr, Lili St. Cyr, Chesty Morgan and Tempest Storm. Exotic World originated as the private collection of retired exotic dancer Jennie Lee founder of the League of Exotic Dancers and former “Bazoom Girl” (a moniker she earned for effortlessly twirling tassels on both her bosom and behind). It’s currently curated by retired burlesque performer Dixie Evans, who often personally leads tours through the exhibits. Unique individual items include ivory fans used by Sally Rand, gloves and a black velvet shoulder cape worn by Gypsy Rose Lee, a heart-shaped couch owned by Jayne Mansfield and the cremation ashes of Miss Sherri Champagne.

Sulabh International Museum of Toilets: New Delhi, India
“Unlike body functions like dance, drama and songs, defecation is considered very lowly.” So begins a 1995 paper written by Dr. Bindeswar Pathak, the founder of this New Delhi museum as well as the Sulabh International Social Service Organization. Ostensibly part of a sanitation crusade, the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets follows the toilet’s historical pipeline from 3,000 B.C. to the present. What began as a hole in the ground—and remains a hole in the ground in some parts of the world has come a long way in terms of design, comfort and plumbing. The museum offers fun facts (Louis XIV purportedly used to relieve himself while holding court), examinations of toilet customs from around the world, and arts and literature (from poems to painstakingly crafted chamber pots).

Serial Killer Museum: Florence, Italy
Who needs to visit galleries crammed with the world’s greatest art when you can listen to a man with a creepy robotic voice describe the crimes of John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy in infinitely gory detail? As well as offering the chance to buddy up with waxworks of Charles Manson and notorious cannibals, Florence’s most bloodthirsty attraction also investigates methods used to track down the killers–from blood sample analysis to psychological profiling–and the methods of dispatching them. That means mock-ups of gas chambers and electric chairs. The displays include waxwork models of notorious serial killers, often in an environment associated with their case. Gacy is dressed as a clown in a mock-up of his living room, with the bones of his victims buried beneath. Ed Gein, the inspiration for both Buffalo Bill in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon and Norman Bates in Psycho, is in his shack, creating his perfect woman out of the skin of his victims.

Cockroach Hall of Fame and Museum: Plano, Texas
Back in the 1980’s Michael Bohdan paid $1,000 for the largest cockroach in Texas, which got him an invitation on The Tonight Show. That started the roach craziness and before he knew it, the bug exterminator found himself on a tour judging a cockroach dress-up contest. After the tour ended, all the funny-dressed bugs were to be thrown away, but Bodhan decided to keep them and put them on display in Plano. And that’s how the Cockroach Hall of Fame and Museum was born. Ever since, the bug-control master has been killing roaches and adding them to his collection. Now the collection features more than 25 dressed-up bugs, including Marilyn Monroach, David Letteroach and Ross Peroach and Liberoachi, a dead cockroach dressed up in a suit and wearing a mink cape, playing a tiny piano. There are also some live Madagascar Hissing Roaches. More than a little intimidating, they are four inches long, over one inch thick and make a hissing noise when they’re disturbed. The Cockroach Hall of Fame and Museum also offers its guest some very special snacks–barbecue-flavoured Worm Snacks (dried roach larvae).

Photo Credits:

#1: news.com.au

#2: scienceroll.com

#3: cpa.psu.edu

#4: msnbc.msn.com

I rode a bus to the University of B.C. campus and then descended down Trail 6. There are several routes that will get you to the beach, but Trail 6 is the most spectacular. I remember taking Trail 6 back in the late 1970s when I first came out to Vancouver from Toronto and being blown away by the massive trees and the first breathtaking view of the vast expanse of sand and the crashing waves. It was like stumbling into a secret world. Of course in those days, Wreck Beach was something of a secret world, and one that aroused considerable suspicion, and perhaps a little envy. Some Vancouver politicians wanted to shut Wreck down. The most vocal anti-nude campaigner was a deep-voiced Pentecostal preacher and alderwoman named Bernice Gerard, who claimed that the naked sun-bathers would have a detrimental moral effect on students at the nearby University of B.C. I guess she wasn’t familiar with the school’s Engineering Department.   

In those days there were no apartment complexes encircling the crest of the hill and no picturesque wooden stairway to guide you to the bottom. You had to clamber down an overgrown dirt trail and, if I recall correctly, you also had to swing on a rope to traverse one section. It’s much more civilized today. There is a large coloured map at the top of Trail 6 that tells you “You Are Here,” and other signs telling you what you can’t do, such as walking your dog on the beach between March and September. There’s even a sign posted at the halfway mark that tells the people coming up when they have to put on their clothes.

I was introduced to Wreck Beach by my friend Mike, another transplanted Torontonian, who went there virtually every day during the summer. It was like a religious act with him. He would take a journal and scribble his thoughts. He called the beach “his office.” I didn’t go down to Wreck to write. I just loved the atmosphere. This was the best beach in the city: big waves, big sand, big sky and big blue herons. In fact, when you were down there you never felt like you were close to an urban centre. Wreck Beach was a place that simply couldn’t exist anywhere else in Canada and most definitely not in uptight Presbyterian Toronto. It was part of the frontier feeling that still existed in Vancouver back then. The beach epitomized a sense of freedom that I found completely captivating.

Then again, Wreck Beach boasted other visual delights beyond the local flora and fauna. (Actually, there were probably more visual horrors, but I have erased those from my mind.) One sight that still occupies a prominent place in my memory was the mirage-like appearance of a beautiful tanned and topless brunette strolling up the beach with a tray of aquamarine-coloured drinks in her hand. The blue drinks were catchy, but even more intriguing was the fact that she wore a leopard-skin bikini bottom. Somehow, that lone scrap of clothing made her appear a lot sexier than if she had been totally nude.

The jiggling vision of leopard lady selling alcoholic drinks from atop a tray was certainly a novelty. I’m not sure that would be the case today. In mid-summer, the beach is a buzzing outdoor emporium. There is an entire area known as Vendor’s Row, where people sell postcards, massage oils and suntan lotions, clothing, gourmet snacks and various intoxicants. If you are so inclined there are also tarot card readings, henna tattoos, body painting, wood carving, energy healing, portrait sketches, casino games and umbrella rentals.

Vendors Row was empty when I arrived this time. But to my surprise there were a couple of dozen nude or nearly nude people bivouacked in the sheltered section of the bay. Some of the men were playing Frisbee and an impromptu jam session was underway. A hardy tribe, this lot. No one seemed to mind that I had a camera, but then I didn’t linger in the nude section. Instead, I got blissfully lost in space taking photos of glittering shells, seaweed-draped rocks and the graffiti-covered searchlight towers that were installed during World War II to keep a lookout for invading Japanese. Thankfully, the old hippy haunt had not yet succumbed to gentrification. The afternoon sun was glorious and the salt air was invigorating and the hours just melted away. Seduced by the beach’s wild beauty, I stayed to watch the sun burn into the sea.

When I finally made my way up the 436 wooden steps and back to the real world, I felt just as I had 30 years before–grateful that Wreck Beach exists and glad to be living in Vancouver.

Photo Credits:

 #1, 2, 3, 4: Kerry Banks

Slumdog Millionaire

In the case of Slumdog Millionaire, however, some of the travel spin-offs have sparked controversy. Part of the movie was set in the Dharavi district, Asia’s largest slum, where one million people live in squalor in an area smaller than New York’s Central Park. Mumbai-based Reality Tours and Travel is now offering guided tours of the hellhole. The excursion’s “highlights” include a stop at a stall of six toilets that serves 16,000 people and a stroll alongside a river so black and septic that it oozes rather than flows.

“In India, a lot of people think the movie is poverty porn,” said Reality Tours co-founder Chris Way in a recent interview. But he insists that criticism of his tours, whose sales are up by about 25 percent since Slumdog Millionaire’s release, “comes from misunderstanding what we are trying to do, which is break down the negative image of slums, and highlight the industry and sense of community.” Reality Tours charges $10 or $20 a person, depending on length of the tour, and pledges to donate 80 percent of after-tax profits to local charities.
 
Other tourism operators have begun leading curious, rich Westerners into famous slums, from the townships of Soweto to the favelas of Brazil. “The jury’s still out on whether the tours are perverse invasions of privacy or eye-opening experiences that will prompt action on the poverty agenda,” Christine Bowers, a consultant for the World Bank, said on her blog.

There is no doubt though that popular movies can provide financial bonanzas for savvy marketers. The most striking recent example occurred in New Zealand, the backdrop for The Lord of the Rings, where an intensive tourism campaign spanned the three years of the trilogy’s film releases. The island nation has christened itself “New Zealand: Home of Middle-earth” (the world in which the Rings’ fantasy plays out). Air New Zealand has emblazoned four aircraft with giant images from the films and there is even a government-appointed Minister of the Rings. The payoff? The annual tourist influx to New Zealand has jumped from 1.7 million in 2000 to 2.4 million today–a 40 percent surge–attributed to a large degree to The Lord of the Rings phenomenon, and a big upgrade for New Zealand’s international profile.

Similarily, the Harry Potter movies have inspired tourists with children to visit a variety of locales in Britain where tour companies have organized itineraries that include, if not the actual Diagon Alley or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, then some of the sites that served as those imaginary settings on the big screen. Locations included Gloucester Cathedral (Hogwarts), North Yorkshire Moors Railway (Hogsmeade station) and Alnwick Castle (Hogwarts again). VisitBritain, the tourism body responsible for selling England to the Brits and Britain to the non-Brits, invested heavily in movie tie-ins: 340,000 Harry Potter location maps were printed.

Several British locales featured in The Da Vinci Code, such as Temple Church in London, Burghley House in Lincolnshire, and Rosslyn Chapel, a 15th-century Scottish church (pictured here), found themselves invaded by a wave of fanatical amateur sleuths after the film’s release in May 2006. In fact, the hullabaloo surrounding The Da Vinci Code led to an unprecedented partnership among national tourism agencies in Britain, France and Scotland, who teamed together to showcase locations, destinations and attractions linked with the film. The three agencies developed a tour program called “Seek the Truth” with Sony Pictures, and high-speed rail service Eurostar to offer tourists a chance to “follow in the footsteps of the film’s main characters.

Japan’s tourism industry has gotten a lift from several recent films, including Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai and Memoirs of a Geisha, even though much of the latter was actually shot in California. Meanwhile, several Caribbean islands have capitalized on the box-office success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie trilogy. Tourists in the Bahamas can take a 25-minute boat ride to Blackbeard’s Cay, visit the Pirates of Nassau Museum and see Fort Charlotte’s underground passages and dungeons. St. Lucia has the Brig Unicorn, an authentic 140-foot replica of an 18th century ship which was featured in The Curse of the Black Pearl, while Dominica has Shipwreck Cove and a cruise up Pantano River where the Black Pearl anchored.

Visits to scenic Phi Phi Leh island, near Phuket, Thailand, soared after Alex Garland’s novel, The Beach, was turned into a 2000 film there starring Leonardo DiCaprio, but not everyone was pleased that the film makers had chosen to shine Hollywood’s lights on the uninhabited island. Despite strict conservation laws, the Thai government let the film crew dig up more than half the beach at Maya Bay to plant coconut trees–destroying roots holding the dunes together.

An unexpected monetary windfall was created by Sideways, a modest comedy about two middle-aged men embarking on a wine-tasting tour in California. The 2004 film generated more than 600 media stories highlighting Santa Barbara as a travel destination–the equivalent of $4-million worth of advertising, a major cash injection for what had previously been an overlooked and often ignored part of the California wine business. Businesses in the Santa Barbara area have reported an increase in trade of up to 30 per cent since the film’s release, with wineries on the Sideways’ map receiving a rise of up to 42 per cent.

Although the power of celluloid to spur tourism is now widely recognized, the movie credited with opening people’s eyes to the phenomenon is the 1986 comedy Crocodile Dundee, which became Australia’s highest grossing film ever and made an international star out of unknown actor Paul Hogan. One survey credited the movie with doubling visitor numbers to Queensland in three years. Interestingly, many Australians initially objected to the film, claiming that it confirmed the general image of Australian backwardness and “outback”-ness rather than affirming the image of a modern urban society. Hogan’s response to the criticism was nothing if not direct: “People are so dumb sometimes in Australia. What are we going to do, put a nice sensible hard-working accountant in a film and say: ‘Here’s a typical Australian, hard-working, industrious. Everyone would yawn and say, Never go to Australia.’”

In terms of long-term tourist impact, however, the piece of cinema that can stake a strong claim to being the most successful of all is the all-singing, all-dancing, all-yodelling Hollywood classic The Sound of Music, which was set in Salzburg, Austria. One out of three Japanese have seen it, and it’s what draws 75 per cent of all American tourists to Salzburg. More than 40 years after the film’s release, some 300,000 fans por into the city every 12 months on the strength of the musical, with 40,000 taking the official Sound of Music Tour. Evidently, the hills are alive with the sound of cash registers.

Photo Credits:

#1: boston.com

#2: teako170.com

#3: templars.wordpress.com

#4: thgholidays.com

#5: blog.goethe.de

According to marketing experts, boomers are significantly different travel consumers than their parents, and they are expected to maintain those differences as they age. For example, boomers are much keener on travelling overseas and more confident in doing so than the previous generations. Most–but not all–have more money than their parents, and have higher expectations that apply at both the budget and luxury ends of the spectrum. And they are always looking for something different. By the time they reach their senior years, many boomers will have had their fill of packaged vacations and typical destinations. Instead, there’s a big appetite for more specialized educational and experiential travel, including hobby vacations, cargo-ship cruises, “voluntourism” and literary-themed travel.

What other travel characteristics do travel experts apply to boomers? I have compiled a list of what industry insiders claim are their 10 most notable traits. It makes for interesting reading, even if you aren’t employed in the travel business.

1. Boomers demand immediate gratification. Unlike their Depression-era parents, boomers grew up in times of plenty. Easy gratification bred a desire for still more and quicker rewards. As a result, boomers don’t wait to take the trips they want. If they don’t have the money, they simply use plastic. The instant-gratification lifestyle means they don’t book travel as far in advance as their predecessors. But when they are ready to book, they want to do it NOW. Finally, it’s important to remember boomers invented the question, “Are we there yet?” They have little patience for long, uninterrupted stretches of road time. Tourism efficiency, such as at hotel registration desks or airline check-in counters is a key to understanding baby boomers, who quickly become frustrated with inefficiency and are not afraid to complain.

2. Boomers are travel-savvy. The empty-nest syndrome of the baby-boomers’ parents is being replaced by people who seek to get on the road, who are not afraid to travel and who may well be seeking to recapture their pre-family years when they were free to wander the world at will. While their parents first visited Europe when they retired, boomers criss-crossed the Continent as students. Been-there-done-that is one reason adventure travel appeals to them. Because boomers are interested in bettering themselves, intellectually stimulating travel also holds appeal.

3. Boomers like creature comforts. This is the first generation in the western world that has never known real poverty. As such, baby-boomers tend to be willing to pamper themselves. Boomers want prestige items, upscale events, and even seek the chic in the outdoors when they are roughing it. A tent is OK, but it better have a great view and great food. They even have a term for it–”glamping”–which means “glamorous” camping trips where the tour operator does all the hard work, with comfortable tents and catered meals.

4. Boomers think they are special. Boomers like things that reinforce their feelings of specialness, so they are attracted to credit cards that offer preferred theatre seats or tours that give them after-hours access to a museum. They also want products designed to fit their individual needs, so customization, or the illusion of it, is important. One travel firm that has capitalized on this trait is Boston-based Elderhostel which offers 8,000 educational travel programs in 90 countries for 160,000 travellers aged 55 and older each year. One of its most popular programs is Criminal Forensics, which allows CSI-inspired travellers to visit a morgue and learn about blood spatter and determining time of death. The company’s Behind the Velvet Curtain program allows groups in London or New York to see a theatre production, go backstage to meet the cast and crew and even sit in on auditions.

5. Boomers are wary of group travel. What boomers definitely do not want is herding. To many boomers, group travel has the faint aroma of a cattle drive. This has prompted some operators to drop tours from their names. Others have pared down group size, either by forming smaller groups or breaking larger groups into subsets which engage in different activities simultaneously. Organized group travel becomes valuable to boomers when it’s a physically or mentally challenging adventure, and they don’t have the skill level to do it themselves, or when safety and cost make travelling with a group more practical. To attract boomers, tour operators must emphasize their expertise. Guides must become like personal trainers and demonstrate the skill and knowledge that boomers will respect and pay for.

6. Boomers will pay for luxury, expertise and convenience. ATM fees, nannies and bottled water prove boomers are willing to pay for what they want. They are demanding consumers who seek quality service and knows how to complain when the service is denied. While this generation is willing to spend money, it is not willing to settle for second best. Locales and tourism entities that provide second-rate service, poor security and poorly trained personnel will quickly lose clientele.

7. Boomers see themselves as forever young. “Adult teenagers” is the way Phil Goodman, co-author of the Boomer Marketing Revolution, described boomers. As Goodman notes, “Boomers will always try to act much younger than their chronological age.” As a result, boomers still want to fulfill the dreams they had at 25–even if their bodies aren’t always willing or able. This cult of youth also affects boomers’ choice of travel suppliers and companions. They don’t identify with people older than they are, after all, their credo was “Don’t trust anybody over 30.” Now well past 30 themselves, boomers still don’t want to be like their parents. That means mixing the two generations in the same tour group probably won’t work. Early-bird specials and senior discounts hold no appeal for boomers because they won’t think of themselves as seniors until they are in their seventies.

8. Boomers are not passive. They want a measure of control in designing their travel experience, and, once on the road, they want to choose their activities. The challenge for travel marketers is to make it clear that their product offers plenty of options. Boomers also want interactivity in the travel experience. They don’t want to hear about panning for gold, they want to do it themselves.

9. Boomers are time deprived. To get relief from their stressful schedules, boomers vacation at spas where they can do absolutely nothing but be pampered. Or they may go to the opposite extreme, choosing adventures that are physically or mentally challenging–or both. Letting somebody else deal with all the details is very appealing, but the hang-up for boomers is trust. They wonder whether they can rely on somebody else to plan their kind of trip. When booking travel, boomers also need time-saving devices. They like 800 numbers, the Internet, videos and virtual reality because they offer convenience and interactivity.

10. Boomers prefer to associate with people like themselves. As noted earlier, boomers do not identify with people older than themselves. They look for outfitters or operators who share their values and so they are very selective about who they’ll use. The industry can respond to these needs by not mixing age groups in the same tour and using younger images and words in their marketing materials. They should stress the flexibility and participative nature of the experience as well as hype the expertise of their staff and guides. Boomers definitely want to avoid anything that smacks of being stuffy or stodgy. More youthful models should be selected because boomers relate better to younger images.

Photo Credits:

#1: meethere.com

#2: img.timeinc.net 

#3: yumsugar.com

#4: 1stadventure.net

It is the destiny of great cities to possess one landmark structure that personifies the place’s spirit and identity. In London, it is Big Ben; in Paris, it is the Eiffel Tower. Barcleona’s cultural icon is called Templo de la Sagrada Familia (Temple of the Holy Family). This strange and unforgettable landmark was conceived as nothing short of a Bible in stone. Of the millions of tourists who visit the city annually, more than a third come specifically to view this extraordinary basilica, which remains half-finished after more than a century of construction. Whether one prefers to view it as a ruin or a work-in-progress, its visual impact is undimished, inspiring a mixture of awe and astonishment.

The cathedral’s size alone is startling. Eight spires rise like celestial billiard cues to a height of more than 90 metres. The massive stone walls are pimpled, creased and curled like the contours of some great mutant sandcastle. The main façade, dedicated to the theme of the nativity, is riddled with biblical sculptures life-cast from pelicans. tortoises, still-born children, and the rag and bone merchants of Barcelona’s slums. At night, illuminated by banks of pale blue lights, the entire structure appears to be melting.

La Sagrada Familia is the masterpiece of architect Antonio Gaudi, one of the most creative and enigmatic artists the world has ever seen. Revered by the Spanish as a combination of wizard and a saint, Gaudi was a frail, rheumatic man who never married and lived most of his life with his father and orphaned niece. His most striking features were a pair of piercing blue eyes and what one contemporary described as a “luminous half-laugh.” Disdainful of wealth or publicity, Gaudi never gave a single lecture or wrote an article or book. Three beliefs sustained his life–a belief in architecture, in a Christian god and in Catalonia, the region of Spain where he was born in 1852 and from which he scarcely stirred during his 74 years on the planet.

Virtually all of Gaudi’s major works can be found in Barcelona, offering tourists a compact record of a career characterized by boundless creative energy. Much of Gaudi’s early career was spent designing opulent and eclectic homes for wealthy patrons. With its fretted facade of rubble stone and pink brick, floral ceramic tiles and spiky iron-cast railings, Casa Vicens affords visitors a good introduction to the Gaudi’s talent for joining the sensuous and organic to the cool, disciplined logic of geometry.

Casa Battlo and Casda Mila, two residences located with in a few blocks of one another on Paseo de Gracia, showcase Gaudi’s secular styling at its most accomplished. Casa Battlo, built for a wealthy textile manufacturer, is nothing short of jewelry on a grand scale. The iridescent blue tiles of the faced resemble the bubbly surface of a wave breaking over a beach. Casa Mila, is a very peculiar-looking six-storey apartment whose hammered and pitted stone facade lends it the appearance of a liquefied mountain. Know to locals as La Pedreda (the Quarry), its undulating roll of individual floors has been likened to everything from cave dwellings to hornets’ nests.

Unfortunately, both Casa Battlo and Casa Mila are private residences, and many of their most intriguing features—curling staircases, vertical courtyards and Alice in Wonderland rooftops—remain hidden from public view. Lack of accessibility, however, is not a problem with Park Guell, Gaudi’s most ambitious undertaking after La Sagarda Familia. The park, which is located at the north end of town, was originally conceived as a suburban real estate development by its financier, Count Eusebio Guell, who hired Gaudi to design a garden city for 60 families. But only two of the houses sold, one of which Gaudi bought. After Guell’s death, the property passed to the city and has since become a successful public park.

Gaudi’s intention here was to be bizarre and playful on one hand, while producing architecture that could serve as a compliment to nature. The result is a hallucinatory expression of the imagination with giant decorative lizards and a tilting Hall of Columns. One Spanish writer described it as “at once a fun fair, a pertrified forest and the great temple of Amun at Karnak, itself drunk and reeling in an eccentric earthquake.” The park pavilions, which were designed by Gaudí, seem to be taken out of Hansel and Gretel, with curved roofs covered with brightly coloured tiles and ornamented spires. The staircase at the entrance of the park is also designed by Gaudí. The dragon-like lizard at the centre of the ceramic-decorated staircase is the best known symbol of the park, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984. A connecting flight of stairs leads to another famous feature of the park: the Gran Placa Circular. Originally intended as a market place for the residents, this plaza is bordered by what is known as the largest bench in the world. The colourful ceramic serpentine bench twists around the plaza. The view from the plaza is spectacular; one can see as far as the Mediterranean Sea. The whole platform is supported by 86 huge columns, creating a hall beneath the plaza.

As Gaudi aged, he became increasingly eccentric and religious. In 1914, in retreat from the world, he chose to devote himself completely to La Sagrada Familia, living on the site in a simple workman’s hut. His work on the cathedral had actually begun 31 years earlier and had continued sporadically, dependent upon the public donations that financed its construction and on other architectural commitments. Gaudi never intended the project to be finished in his lifetime. Like the medieval cathedrals, it was to be the work of generations. “My client is in no rush,” he once said. After Gaudi’s death in a street car accident in 1926, work proceeded under a group of close collaborators, people who could be trusted to faithfully translate the master’s ideas. However, construction was halted at the onset of the Spanish Civil War in 1935.  During the conflict, fire gutted the building and the models and blueprints in Gaudi’s studio were destroyed. This has made it very difficult for workers to complete the cathedral in the same fashion as Gaudi most likely would have wished.

Today, the construction continues amid much controversy. Some contend that a new generation of craftsmen, unacquainted with Gaudi’s spirit, cannot possibly hope to do justice to his original vision, and that the work should be stopped. Others feel that the rather than being confined to a facsimile of what Gaudi might have done, the design ought to be widened to include modern flourishes. The debate continues to rage, even as city officials have targeted a completion date of 2026 for the cathedral, which will mark the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death.

Photo Credits:

#1: barcelonapictures.blogspot.com

#2: gaudidesigner.com

#3: spanishjourneys.com

#4: baldheretic.com

#5: coined-spain.org 

“It’s Gus and Jippo,” says Roland, identifying the pair of young orangutans, who converge at our feet and begin fingering our trousers and shoes. I start taking pictures and they grow bolder. Gus, who sports a fuzzy Don King hairdo, deftly slides open the zipper on my camera bag and reaches inside. “Hey, get out of there,” I yell, waving my arms. Gus retreats a few paces and flashes me a guilty look. It is quickly replaced by another more devious expression. He springs forward, intent on making off with the entire kit. I grab my bag and instant before he does and a tug of war ensues. Gus suddenly lets go. I tumble backward and Roland bursts into laughter. Thirty seconds into my first encounter with an orangutan and I feel like the straight man in some slapstick comedy routine.

Gus and Jippo are residents of the Sepilok Forest Reserve in Malaysian state of Sabah in northeastern Borneo. Sepilok is a research centre and wildlife sanctuary where orphaned and displaced orangutans are rehabilitated and eventually returned to their natural habitat. Most of the orangutans at Sepilok are abandoned babies whose mothers were either killed or chased off by logging crews. Others have been confiscated from black marketers who sell the animals as pets. The apes arrive in sad shape–many are malnourished, some have been beaten or kept on chains. After receiving medical aid and spending some time in quarantine to ensure that they carry no communicable diseases, they are free to come and go as they please. The oranges usually stay in the vicinity of the two feeding stations near park headquarters, where they are offered fruit and milk twice a day. Only the very young are kept in cages at night, primarily to protect them from hungry pythons.

Since these apes were separated from their mothers at an early age, they have had no opportunity to learn the skills needed to survive in the wild. At Sepilok, they are encouraged to follow the more experienced animals into the forest. Those who are reluctant to leave camp are carried piggyback by game rangers and left to find the way home. Gradually by imitation and discovery, they learn self-sufficiency and can be released in other parts of the country to boost declining wild populations.

The work is vital, as orangutans are an endangered species. Once abundant from China to Java, the red apes are now restricted to diminishing ranges on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. Poaching, logging and land-clearing have reduced their numbers to about 20,000. Unless the wholesale destruction of their rainforest habitat is curtailed, reserves like Sepilok may eventually become the orangutans’ lone hedge against extinction.

This would be a terrible tragedy, especially considering that scientists are only beginning to fully grasp the capabilities of these arboreal apes. According to recent research by the psychologist Robert Deaner, orangutans are the world’s most intelligent animal other than humans, with higher learning and problem solving ability than chimpanzees, which were previously considered to have greater abilities. A study of orangutans by Carel van Schaik, a Dutch primatologist at Duke University, found them capable of tasks well beyond chimpanzees’ abilities—such as using leaves to make rain hats and leak-proof roofs over their sleeping nests. He also found that, in some food-rich areas, the creatures had developed a complex culture in which adults would teach youngsters how to make tools and find food.

Sepilok is more than just a rehabilitation centre for orangutans. The 43-square kilometre forest reserve is also home to proboscis monkeys, gibbons, macaques, langurs, barking deer, bearded pigs, pangolins, Malaysian sun bears and more than 200 species of birds. But the red apes are clearly the major attraction. Each year, 90,000 visitors come to the rehabilitation centre, as I have, to view the orangs in their natural habitat. Eventually, we leave Gus and Jippo and proceed to the nearest feeding station, where we find a half-dozen other young apes scattered about like toddlers at a playground. Roland takes me around, making introductions. He knows them as individuals, each with its own distinct character. Noreen is even-tempered and passive. Bob, on the other hand, is something of a juvenile delinquent. He delights in sneaking up behind female tourists and flipping up their skirts. Psychologically scarred by some early trauma, he can’t bear to be touched.

One-year-old Melissa is Roland’s favourite. He spots her in a tree at the far side of the creek and clucks softly to her in Malay, “Come Melissa. Come.” She clambers down a vine and across a large log that spans the water. At the log’s end, like a countess debarking from a cruise ship, she demurely extends one hand to Roland, who takes it and swings her up into his arms. “Do you want to hold her?” he asks, and I eagerly exchange my camera for 10 kilograms of orangutan. It is her gentleness that I notice first. Despite her considerable strength, Melissa’s touch is velvety soft. She has tiny fingernails and a warm, bristly-haired body. Black eyelashes frame dark, knowing eyes. She begins licking the salty perspiration from my arm and I am instantly charmed.

While leaving the sanctuary, I pass a couple of German women who have fallen under Melissa’s spell. They stand transfixed in the clearing, cooing and cradling the baby ape in their arms. The two tourists are so taken by their tiny new friend that they are oblivious to the skulking presence of Bob, approaching from their rear. Moments later, heading down the trail, I hear a startled shriek. The incorrigible skirt-flipper has struck again.

Photo Credits:

#1: ifonly.net

#2: dailymail.uk.co

#3: solcomhouse.com

#4: sciencedaily.com

Cabbages and Condom caused quite a sensation when it opened in 2002, but is has since been surpassed by other more extreme fetish restaurants, which are now popping up all over the globe. Here are a few of the crazier ones.

Edible Excretions
If you happen to be in Taiwan and want to indulge in a different type of culinary experience, check out the Modern Toilet, which bills itself as the world’s first toilet themed restaurant. I’m not sure the world really needs something like this, but evidently it’s a big hit with the Chinese. The concept is simple and sickening. Diners sit on acrylic toilet seats and eat out of toilet-shaped bowls (both the Asian squat-style and the traditional Western style). Menu items include chicken curry, pasta, fried chicken and Mongolian hot pot, as well as shaved-ice desserts with names like “diarrhea with dried droppings” (chocolate), “bloody poop” (strawberry) and “green dysentery” (kiwi). Modern Toilet owner Wang Zi-wei got his idea from the Japanese robot cartoon character Jichiwawa, who loves to play with poop and swirl it on a stick. Inspired by that image, Wang began selling chocolate ice cream swirls on paper squat toilets. Customers loved them and wanted more edible excretion experiences, so he opened Modern Toilet in Tapei in 2004. The chain now has seven outlets in Taiwan, one in Hong Kong and one in Shenzhen, China.

Bombs Away
At Buns & Guns in Beirut, Lebanon, everything is about war-–from the decor and sound effects to the names of the menu items. Chefs sporting battle helmets while realistic-looking weapons and ammunition decorate the counters, and camouflage netting hangs from the ceiling. As you eat, a continuous loop of rifle fire, mortar fire and explosions plays in the background. Manager Yussef Ibrahim says that the theme reflects the mood of the city during Lebanon’s 2006 war with Israel, and that while some patrons may find it disturbing, most are amused. Diners can order a “rocket-propelled grenade” (chicken on a skewer), “Claymore” pizza, an M16 Carbine meat sandwich, a Mortar burger or a Terrorist meal (which happens to be vegetarian).

Naked Sushi
In Japanese nyotaimori literally means “female body plate.” A nude woman lies atop a platform or table dressed only with leaves in strategic places. Sushi and sashimi is served atop the model, using the leaves as serving plates. The leaves are necessary to insulate the sushi from the model’s body heat, which would warm it up and spoil its quality. The history behind this Japanese custom is muddled. Some sources quote it as a long-standing tradition; others claim it was introduced by the Yakuza gangsters. Whatever its roots, it is not openly advertised today in Japan, but a cheaper and less esoteric version is making the rounds in Tokyo. At these nyotaimori restaurants, an edible body, with dough for “skin” and sauce for “blood,” is wheeled into the room on a hospital gurney and placed upon a table. The hostess begins the meal by cutting into the body with a scalpel and then patrons dig in, operating on the body to reveal edible “organs.”

Black is Black
In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Opaque group offers dining in the dark, literally. The entire restaurant is enveloped in complete blackness. After ordering your meal outside, you are led to your table and helped to navigate through a three-course dinner with the assistance of blind waiters. Supposedly by denying one’s sight, other senses, most notably your sense of taste, is heightened. The first pitch-black restaurant, Blindekuh (the Blind Cow), which opened in Zurich, Switzerland in 1999, had the goal of “creating jobs for the blind and handicapped people.” The concept has since spread to Paris, London and Sydney and Beijing, although at many of these places, the sighted staff wear night-vision goggles. In Beijing, the Whale Inside Dark Restaurant is not only about heightening the sense of taste, but lowering social inhibitions. It’s popular with Internet daters, who meet on matchmaking Web sites that are sprouting throughout China.

Just What the Doctor Ordered
Considering how much people complain about hospital food, it’s a minor miracle that Hospitalis is a success. Founded by three doctors, this strange restaurant in Riga, Latvia, is completely white, looks clinical and has loads of medical equipment for the purpose of decoration. The bar resembles an old pharmacy, while the drinks come in beakers and test tubes and the food in operating-room dishes. Patients are attended to by leggy nurses sporting red wigs, skimpy starched uniforms and stethoscopes. Your table could either be a gynecological consultation bed or a trolley. As an added bonus, customers can be tied up in straight jackets.

Tiny Portions
Dwarves of the East is the name of a popular café in the fashionable area of Nasr City in Cairo’s suburbs. The gimmick here is the staff—all of them are midgets. The café’s owner, Ahmad Al Kilani, no stickler for political correctness, was prompted to open the establishment after a friend of his complained that he had been sacked from his job as a mechanic because he was too short. As Al Kilani said in an interview, “I call the café Dwarves of the East to highlight the fact that these people are part of our world and society.”

Soviet Kitsch
St. Petersburg’s contribution to restaurant madness is Zov Ilicha, loosely translated as Lenin’s Mating Call. Only a few years ago, opening a joint like this would have meant a stint in prison. Now it is considered a must-see. Statues of Joseph Stalin, Felix Dzerzhinsky and Vladimir Lenin can be found on the walls and windowsills, and even hanging upside down from the mirror ceiling. One of the bar’s two rooms, which are both painted in red and black tones, also contain a few unsavoury paintings and various phallic parallels with the Kremlin towers, while TV screens play speeches by Soviet leaders interspersed with soft porn scenes. The dining hall is divided into two sections–Soviet room and the other, anti-Soviet room. The Soviet room has Lenin portraits on the wall and offers a classic Soviet menu with the local Russian favourites. The anti-Soviet room has parody posters and references to liberalization, sex and drugs and offers bourgeois dishes such as fondue and crab. The waitresses are dressed in sexy Communist Party Pioneer uniforms with naughty red high heels, red fishnets and “hammer and sickle” garters.

Haute Cuisine
Anyone with a feat of heights or a weak bladder is advised to avoid Dinner in the Sky, a Belgian-based based novelty restaurant which uses a crane to hoist its diners, table, and waitstaff 50 metres into the air. The structure can accomodate 22 guests, who are strapped into leather seats that are secured to a dining table. The centre of the table has a walking platform that allows room to serve food, take photos, conduct a meeting or do a product presentation. Since its founding in Brussels in 2007, the concept has spread to other parts of the planet, including Las Vegas, where a Dinner in the Sky had its grand opening on New Years Eve 2008. With local officials’ blessings, the platform can be transported to just about anywhere the crane can maneuver. The restaurant belongs firmly in the special-occasion category, however. The cost for eight hours is about $11,500—not including catering.

Six Feet Under
Want to dine inside the world’s largest coffin? Welcome to Eternity, a restaurant in Truskavets, Ukraine, near the Polish border. The restaurant is a windowless, 20-metre-long coffin, six metres wide and six metres high. The decorations correspond to the theme–-funeral wreaths, black shrouded walls and human-sized coffins. Consistent with the chilling atmosphere, a single candle burns on each table. Morbid diners can browse the funeral paraphernalia before ordering from a menu that includes “Nine Day” and “Forty Day” salads–named after local mourning rituals–and an ominous-sounding dish called “Let’s meet in paradise.” The idea of opening the eatery came from the director of a local undertaking firm, who believes this is a great opportunity to attract more customers as well as more tourists.

Photo Credits:

#1: americandigest.org

#2: saynotocrack.com

#3: flickr.com

#4: odditycentral.com

#5: wordpress.com

You may have read recently that Canada and the U.S. have issued travel advisories warning tourists about a rising tide of violence in Mexico. In a press release, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs warned Canadians to “exercise a high degree of caution” when visiting Mexico, ominously declaring: “Armed clashes between security forces and drug groups are commonplace in certain areas and could occur at any time without warning.” The U.S. State Department went even further in its travel alert. It told diplomatic staff to curtail all non-essential travel to Durango and other hot spots. It also warned spring-breakers to keep their wits about them when travelling into volatile Mexican border towns. “Large firefights have taken place in many towns and cities across Mexico. During some of these incidents, U.S. citizens have been trapped, the U.S. report stated.

 It is true that a major drug war is currently underway in Mexico. Since January 1, 2009, drug cartel gunmen armed with huge arsenals of automatic rifles and grenade launchers have slain more than 30 police, soldiers and judges in ambushes and assassinations. The attacks come in the wake of a crackdown by Mexican president Felipe Calderon that has sent 25,000 police and soldiers against the gangs and resulted in a record number of busts and extradited alleged kingpins to the United States. All told, some 6,000 people were killed there in 2008 during this bloody narco-insurgency. But it also true that the violence is largely confined to northern border towns such as Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Tijuana and Nogales, and has not affected the Mayan Riviera, Puerto Vallarta, Hualtuco, Cancun and the other resorts that most Canadian snowbirds flock to.

These government travel advisories, often written in menacing and exaggerated prose, are clearly designed for the small segment of travellers who never read the news. In truth, these pronouncements are not likely to prevent tourists from running into trouble, but they could have an impact on Mexico’s tourism industry. One need only recall the hysteria that followed in the wake of the admittance of a handful of SARS patients at hospitals in Toronto in 2003. The fallout from that health scare cost Toronto an estimated $350 million in tourist revenues. Last year, 1.4 million people Canadians travelled to Mexico, 20 per cent more than the year before. A decline in free-spending American visitors would have a larger impact since the U.S. supplies close to 80 per cent of Mexico’s annual tourists.

My guess is that the actual risks of travelling in Mexico would not be any greater than they were before, and in my experience, as long as you exercise common sense, this is not a dangerous place. However, in light of the recent events any incidence of violence involving a Canadian tourist in Mexico now gets major media coverage. In January, two Canadians were shot in Cabo San Lucas. The news reports offered no details as to the circumstances other than to say that the shooting occurred in a topless bar at 1:30 a.m. I think you need more details to make a judgement on what actually happened.

Another news story now getting a lot of play is a government report that reveals that almost twice as many travelling Canadians were assaulted in Mexico than in any other foreign country from 2002 to 2007– a total of 172 in seven years. That may sound like a lot until you consider that is taken from a total of about seven million tourists, a ratio of about three assaults for every 100,000, which is a tiny percentage. On a per capita basis, China actually ranks higher in assaults on Canadian tourists than Mexico, and yet no one is raising any alarms about travelling there.

Several years ago, my wife and I flew to Fiji at a time when it had been declared off-limits for tourists by Australia and New Zealand, which supply the bulk of Fiji’s tourism trade. The reason for the travel ban was a political coup staged by a businessman named George Speight and seven followers, who had taken 36 government officials hostage. Speight wanted to overthrow the elected government, the People’s Coalition, a multi-racial grouping dominated by the predominantly Indo-Fijian Labour Party, and replace it with one that was entirely native Fijian. At least that was his public stance. It was later revealed that his motive was more personal: the new government had cancelled a couple of contracts with his company, which had pushed him into bankruptcy.

That coup, like virtually all of Fiji’s frequent coups, was resolved without any bloodshed or disruption of public life. But the governing regime did change as a result of the incident, a development frowned upon by Australia and New Zealand, who issued travel advisories in retaliation. These were inspired by political motives rather than out of an actual concern for the safety of tourists. And they did have an effect. Although our vacation was a carefree success, a number of the Fijian resorts were half-deserted, a situation which was felt most by the employees, who saw their hours and salaries slashed.
 
Other government travel advisories are harder to explain. For example, you may not be aware that Australia issued a travel advisory in 2008 for Aussies travelling to Canada. The report warned Australians to be aware of “the threat of terrorism, heavy snow, ice and forest fires that can erupt at any time.” British Columbia, in particular, was singled out as being located in an active earthquake zone and “subject to avalanches,” along with Alberta. And all this comes from the country that is home to salt water crocodiles, funnel-web spiders, the Great White Shark, the 10 most deadly snakes in the world and the most venomous creature on the planet—the box jellyfish.

The official Australian Smart Traveller website listed several countries that it considered safer than Canada, including Chile, South Korea and Latvia. God knows where Australia would rank Canada in 2009, with tourists now facing the added threats of gang murders in Vancouver, tasering at airports by the RCMP and beheadings and cannibalization on Greyhound buses.

Photo Credits:

#1: flickr.com

#2: abc.net.au

#3: zelkas.com