Richard Bangs

Bring Adventure Back to Europe

2013-05-14T19:21:07-04:00

A Keynote to The European Travel Commission, May 2013

I once ran with the bulls of Pamplona... by mistake, involuntarily. I was at Microsoft, where we were developing a new travel product that would become Expedia, and we had the idea to use a new web technology called Live Chat to convey from the field the adventure of travel. I had the idea that I would cover the running of the bulls by standing in a doorway on the route of the stampede, and report live what was happening. But when the canon went off, a river of people charged down the street, and scooped me out of the doorway and into the fray. The 90 thousand people from around the world who tuned in to hear my reportage heard only screams as I ran with the bulls to the stadium.

Afterwards I checked out the bulletin boards that had the hundreds of photos taken by photographers on the balconies, and there were several sequences of a bull with his horn just inches from my back.

The experience was how some describe adventure today... a well-planned trip gone wrong... but it wasn't always this way.

Europe is where Adventure Travel was born. Today it is a 150-billion-dollar industry, and accounts for 26 percent of all tourism departures worldwide.

So, why do we take Adventure Travel Trips?

In 1735, the British poet Sir Hildebrand Jacob wrote, "A mind truly disposed for the perceptions of that which is great and marvelous is a product of Nature and cannot be attained through study." In other words, it's good to get outdoors.

In 1757, the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke tried to account for the passions evoked in the human mind by what he called "terrible objects." He was interested in our psychic response to things -- a rushing cataract, a soaring cliff face, an avalanche -- that seized, terrified, and yet also somehow pleased the mind by dint of being too big, too high, too fast, too powerful, too uncontrollable to be properly comprehended. These sights inspired a heady blend of pleasure and terror; these were the sights of Adventure. In Burke's theory, beauty, which was about balance and grace, has a relaxing effect on the "fibers of the body," whereas adventure tightens these same fibers. He wrote: "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." He went on to posit that terror was a passion which "always produces delight when it does not press too close." So, as in riding on a mountain train, or skiing a steep slope, kayaking a fast river or hiking through the wilderness it is the suggestion of harm, melded with the knowledge that no harm will likely come, which induces the sensation of delightful terror. It's why we ride roller coasters, and why we take adventure-travel trips.

But it's not just an elective. Adventure, which stimulates the evolution of consciousness, is necessary. As the English mathematician Alfred North Whitehead said, "Without adventure, civilization is in full decay."

So, who were these first adventurers, and why?

Adventure was not a motivation for the first travelers through Europe. They were pilgrims, hunters, Crusaders heading for the Holy Land; mercenaries, messengers, tradesmen, smugglers and other criminals. Most of these voyagers avoided the "hills whose heads touch heaven," afraid of the uncanny powers that lurked within. They did not want to be in the mountains of Europe; they did not want unnecessary adventure.

A half century before Christ the Romans considered the Alps inhospitable, desolate, hostile -- ocris, arduus, horridus. The Roman poet, Titus Lucretius Carus, called the Alps the waste places of the world, where Nature had swept its rubbish.

For generations after the Romans, mountains signified only the deformed and execrable, thinly soiled, steeply sloped, bad for farming, ordeals to cross, the lairs of demons and trolls.

The Welsh priest Adam of Usk was so petrified when he crossed the Gotthard Pass in 1402 he had to be blindfolded, and travelers after him would often close the carriage curtains to avoid the dreadful scenes of the Alps. Anything could happen in this icy semi-circle of teeth that bit off Italy from the rest of Europe.

Not only were the Alps scary; but they also were ugly, warts on the skin of the Earth; boils on its face. The classical notions of beauty called for purity, order, restraint, regularity, proportion -- perfection; while The Alps were disordered, irregular, chaotic, and bad-mannered.

The monk John de Bremble was so horrified by his experience crossing the Great St. Bernard Pass that he prayed, "Lord restore me to my brethren, that I may tell them not to come to this place of torment." Bishop Berkeley, crossing the Alps in 1714, carped that, "Every object that here presents itself is excessively miserable."

Fantastic beliefs are not just a trait of modern politicians. In 1723, a Swiss Fellow of the Royal Society, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, penned a famous "dracopedia" with detailed description of alpine dragons he had seen. And he believed that certain chamois possessed a stone in their bellies that rendered them immune to bullets.

And it wasn't just the mountains that evoked these feelings. In 1791 the English cleric William Gilpin noted that "the generality of people found wilderness dislikable." "There are few," he wrote," "who do not prefer the busy scenes of cultivation to the greatest of nature's rough productions." It's interesting that if you look back before the 18th century there is virtually no literature that praises Grand Nature or the adventures found within... nothing in Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare or Milton... it's all about the human form, about delicate beauty, about ordered gardens and symmetrical patterns. Unless a soldier, pilgrim or pirate, adventure was anathema.

So, how did this mindset change? When did they pull back the curtains?

In 1739, Cambridge professor Thomas Gray took the Grand Tour, crossed the Alps, and wrote letters in which he used the adjectives "romantic" and "poetic," and the phrases, "a sacred terror" and "a severe delight." With these words he put himself in a dramatic story, and turned the pages that grew a movement.

In 1775 Jean-Jacques Rousseau found his narrative voice and turned it on: "I must have torrents, rocks, pines, dead forest, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices beside to frighten me."

Then the Industrial Revolution, which motivated record numbers to leave farms and crowd to the cities. Suddenly places like London were dirty, smoggy, disease and crime-ridden -- this was the setting that gave Charles Dickens his work. People lost faith in God and humanity.

But when the rock star Romantic poets... Lord Byron, Percy Shelly, Mary Shelly... who wrote Frankenstein... William Wordsworth, John Ruskin and others set out to adventure in the Alps, they found landscapes clean and green, dangerous and overwhelming, and it made them feel more alive, it made them believe in something powerful -- and they called the feelings they evoked as

"An Agreeable Kind of Horror"
"A Magnificent Rudeness"
"A Rapturous Terror"
"A Turbulent Pleasure"

These were feelings on the other side of thought and language... this was adventure.

And it was one of the most profound revolutions in thought that ever occurred -- the transition from a loathing of Grand Nature to its celebration.

And adventure travel was hatched.

The Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix was founded in 1821, and quickly became the biggest guide company in the world, attending to the thousands who followed in the footsteps of the Romantics.

Trains then democratized adventure. This despite early sentiments that the rapid movement of trains would cause brain damage and other ill-effects.

Thomas Cook -- the Richard Branson of his day -- helped prove those sentiments wrong. In 1855 he brought a tour group of 62 from England to the Continent for the first time, paving the way for cross sections of society to experience what had long been the province of the privileged. At last everyone could be a character is his own moving adventure play.

Cook wrote what is perhaps the best brochure copy ever. He said adventure travel "provides food for the mind; it contributes to the strength and enjoyment of the intellect; it helps pull men out of the mire and pollution of old corrupt customs; it promotes a feeling of universal brotherhood; it accelerates the march of peace and virtue, and love; it also contributes to the health of the body, by a relaxation from the toil and the invigoration of the physical powers."

In 1888 French author Alphonse Daudet wrote that "The ubiquitous impulse to leave the beaten track had been tapped and its fulfillment made available." Europe was now ground zero for the exploding pike of adventure travel. And it remained so for over a century.

So, what then happened?

The rest of the world caught up, and in many ways took over what Europe started. The Himalaya took the climbers and trekkers; Africa poached the wildlife seekers; Latin America stole the romantics. Parts of Europe today are more American than America, yet with more rules.

But things are changing again, and herein lies the opportunity; to get back to where we once belonged.

In this age of GPS tracking, big data and disintermediation, adventure travel has become more and more analytical. More statistically driven; more about cost benefits analyses, about benchmarking; about safety, about quantifying guilt with tree plantings and pollution credits.

But the underlying enthusiasm for adventure remains the script with the participant as hero, the three act structure of challenge, struggle and resolution; the quest for the agreeable kind of horror Joseph Addison described in 1701. There is a fundamental delight in being close to danger. As someone who has spent some time exploring wild rivers in remote corners, and who holds the distinction of having capsized on six continents, I know this notion -- that life is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction. We never feel so alive as when we purl by the eddy of death.

Our impulses today remain as energetic as ever, eager for the romance, mystery and the vulnerability tapped in wild places... and these attributes argue for preservation, and visitation. Most people won't be compelled to take an adventure because the lodge uses certain light bulbs or soap or low volume toilets; or hires locals; or carbon offsets, though these are necessary and good practices.

What most folks seek, I believe, are the unfathomable shadows where the wild things are. Our human DNA compels us to crave exploration, transformation, resonance, and a story that stars us.

Yet too many adventure experiences around the world have become internment centers mapped and planned with no blank spots. The trails are overly-marked and monitored; the buses are video-enabled, so you can watch the movie Brave rather than the castle outside the window. Around the world at pool sides and lobbies, visitors watch from a safe distance ethnic spectacles and performances, loaded with Post-it Note mysticism. The deep, rich cultures and traditions are too often reduced to dinner shows for the mobile rich. In these brief, one-sided encounters, there is little chance to understand the people behind the dances, no real celebration of a vibrant, living culture. Visitors are offered the bread crumbs on the floor beneath the big table of cultural understanding.

In these dynamics, there is little room for true discovery; little prospect for a story that makes sense of who we are; little chance for profound adventure.

And there is little opportunity for magic and luck. The Danish Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr, who nailed a horseshoe above his office door for good luck, was asked by a colleague, "You don't really believe in this stuff, do you?" To which Bohr replied, "No, but I've heard it works even for people who don't believe."

****

Yes, the wilderness is vanishing, and cultures are fading, but what saves them are not dry statistics and doomsday scenarios, but rather the emotional sumptuousness and connection that comes from visitation. We have to lead from the heart, not the head. Our job is to figure out how to inspire someone on a couch in America or Asia watching his television or computer screen to get up and make that step and come see and feel the witchcraft of European wilderness. Once so touched, travelers become the most passionate advocates for place and preservation, as the trees and brooks and wild things are as family.

If pieces of Europe can be unmediatedly wild -- like, for instance, Sutjeska National Park in Bosnia, where I recently got lost, afraid to go off path for fear of landmines... If pieces of Europe can be unmediatedly wild, without the requisite security and compliant spaces, without adult supervision, it is then faithful to our childlike imaginations of wilderness. The natural sublime is as much about awe as real danger -- the peril of avalanches in the Alps; the risks of wild rivers in the Balkans; or the hazards of fjords in Norway. Real adventure attracts like moths to a flame, where we feel most alive when we can imagine our own demise.

Adventure ought to be the great, original quest, an individual tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance and danger. Done right, it is a journey undertaken with only a fragmentary map constructed out of a patchwork of accumulated local lore and the occasional milepost marked "here be dragons."

If we decode adventure travel it fulfills the desire to find a new way of being, an experience unpredictable, immediate, and true. One of my favorite films is Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, in which Jack Nicholson plays a disillusioned journalist who decides to abandon his past and assume the role of a dead stranger. The tale is a journey though landscapes of identity and mystery, shimmering with danger and uncertainty. And it occurs to me that any adventure travel trip is a similar chance for reinvention, for becoming someone different, perhaps someone better; a chance to explore the inaccessible landscapes and unmapped countries within each of us.

Yet the adventures of today, all over the world, have become too circumscribed. There is a powerful quality in being open-ended, vague at the borders; of being sufficiently unpolished that a visitor can expand upon it in his own mind, projecting himself into its narratives. Too many adventure providers today are like unctuous butlers of the imagination, ready to serve every need or desire as it arises; they don't leave anything implied, unstated or incomplete. They don't allow us to get lost.

The key here, of course, is akin to trundling on a train through the Alps... Europe today, unlike much of the world, can offer up the delight of the illusion of menace, the idea of danger, all with a comfortable seat and a nicely structured glass of wine. And it offers, as well, the adventures outside the train. Not many places can offer both.

This is the opportune moment for Europe. While economies stagger, tourism has never been more alluring, more important, for both the traveler and the destination. We can re-imagine, re-brand, and retrofit to bring back the thrills that once defined the continent. This is the time to let the chaos of adventure shimmer through the veil of order; to be open to tearing down the grid that has lidded the wild places, to peel back some rules, to strip the veneer of worldliness and return to some more primitive, if more demanding, state of grace, remembering, and perhaps retweeting, that Europe is where it all began.

When Travel Goes Bad: Death in Africa

2013-05-08T17:09:22-04:00

While scouting for the first descent of the Baro River in Ethiopia, a tributary of the White Nile, I heard about a Peace Corps volunteer, Bill Olsen, 25, a recent graduate of Cornell, who decided to take a dip in the river at Gambella, a village near the South Sudan border. The locals warned to stay away from the river, which they claimed was busy with monsters. Bill swam to a sandbar on the far side of the muddy river, and sat there, his feet on a submerged rock. He was leaning into the current to keep his balance, a rippled vee of water trailing behind him, his arms folded across his chest as he was staring ahead lost in thought.

A few minutes later friends on shore saw that Bill had vanished without trace or sound. A few more minutes later a big croc surfaced with a large, white, partially submerged object in its jaws. The next morning a hunter on safari, a Colonel Dow, sneaked up on the croc, shot it, and then dragged the carcass to the beach. He cut it open, and inside found Bill Olsen's legs, intact from the knees down, still joined together at the pelvis. His head, crushed into small chunks, was a barely recognizable mass of hair and flesh. A black and white photo of Bill's twisted, bloody legs dumped in a torn cardboard box drilled into my paraconsciousness, and for days I would shut my eyes and shiver at the image.

Nonetheless, I went forward with my plans to make the first descent of the Baro River.

Above, the jungle was a brawl of flora and vines and roots. Colobus monkeys sailed between treetops, issuing washboard cries.

Below, three specially designed inflatable white-water rafts bobbed in a back eddy, looking, from the ridge, like restless water bugs. There were 11 of us, all white-water veterans, save Angus. He was in the raft with me, Karen Greenwald, and John Yost, my high-school friend and partner. As the leader and the most experienced river-runner, I was at the oars.

Our raft would go first. At the correct moment we cast off -- Angus coiled the painter and gripped for the ride. I adjusted the oars and pulled a deep stroke. For a prolonged instant the boat hung in a current between the eddy and the fast water. Then it snapped into motion with a list that knocked me off my seat.

"This water's faster than I thought," I yelled. Regaining the seat, I straightened the raft, its bow downstream. The banks were a blur of green; water shot into the boat from all sides.

Just minutes after the start of the ride, we approached the rapid. Though we'd been unable to scout it earlier...its convex edge was clad in thick vegetation preventing a full view of the river...I had a hunch it would be best to enter the rapid on its right side. But the river had different notions. Despite frantic pulls on the oars, we were falling over the lip on the far left.

"Oh my God!" someone screamed. The boat was almost vertical, falling free. This wasn't a rapid -- this was a waterfall. I dropped the oars and braced against the frame. The raft crashed into a spout, folded in half, and spun. Then, as though reprieved, we straightened and flumped onward. I almost gasped with relief when a lateral wave pealed into an explosion on my left, picking up the raft, slamming it against the nearby cliff wall like a toy, then dumping it and us upside down into the millrace. Everything turned to bubbles.

I tumbled, like falling down an underwater staircase. Seconds later, I surfaced in the quick water below the rapid, a few feet from the overturned raft. My glasses were gone, but through the billows I could make out another rapid 200 yards downstream, closing in fast. I clutched at a rope and tried to tow the raft toward shore. Behind I heard Karen: "Angus. Go help Angus. He's caught in a rope!"

He was trailing ten feet behind the raft, a snarl of bowline tight across his shoulder, tangled and being pulled through the turbulence. Like the rest of us, he was wearing a sheathed knife on his belt for this very moment -- to cut loose from entangling ropes. His arms looked free, yet he didn't reach for his knife. He was paralyzed with fear.

I swam back to Angus, and with my left hand seized the rope at his sternum; with my right I groped for my own Buck knife. In the roiling water it was a task to slip the blade between Angus's chest and the taut rope. Then, with a jerk, he was free.

"Swim to shore," I yelled.

"Swim to shore, Angus," Karen cried from the edge of the river.

He seemed to respond. He turned and took a stroke toward Karen. I swam back to the runaway raft with the hope of once again trying to pull it in. It was futile: The instant I hooked my hand to the raft it fell into the pit of the next rapid, with me in tow. My heart, already shaking at the cage of my chest, seemed to explode.

I was buffeted and beaten by the underwater currents, then spat to the surface. For the first time, I was really scared. Even though I was swashed in water, my mouth was dry as a thorn tree. I stretched my arms to swim to shore, but my strength was sapped. This time I was shot into an abyss. I was in a whirlpool, and looking up I could see the surface light fade as I was sucked deeper. At first I struggled wildly, but it had no effect, except to further drain my small reserves. My throat began to burn. I became disassociated from the river and all physical environments. Then I became aware of a strange thing. The part of me that wanted to panic began to draw apart, and then flew away. There no longer seemed any but the flimsiest connection between life and death. I went limp and resigned myself to fate. I seemed to witness it all as an onlooker.

In the last hazy seconds I felt a blow from beneath, and my body was propelled upward. I was swept into a spouting current, and at the last possible instant I broke the surface and gasped. I tried to lift my arms; they felt like barbells. My vision was fuzzy, but I could make out another rapid approaching, and I knew I could never survive it. But neither could I swim a stroke. The fear of death was no longer an issue, for that seemed already decided. But I kept moving my arms automatically, for no better reason than that there was nothing else to do. It felt like an age passed like this, my mind stuck in the realization of my fate.

Then, somehow, a current pitched me by the right bank. Suddenly branches and leaves were swatting my face as I was borne around a bend. I reached up, caught a thin branch, and held tight. I crawled to a rock slab and sprawled out. My gut seized, and I retched. A wave of darkness washed through my head, and I passed out.

When my eyes finally focused, I saw figures foraging through the gluey vegetation on the opposite bank. John Yost was one; Lew Greenwald, another. He had been in the third boat, and seeing him reminded me that there were two boats and seven people behind me. How had they fared?

John paced the bank until he found the calmest stretch of river, then dived in; the water was so swift that he reached my shore 50 yards below his mark. He brought the news: The second raft, piloted by Robbie Paul, had somehow made it through the falls upright. In fact, Robbie was thrown from his seat into the bilge during the first seconds of the plunge, and the raft had continued through captainless. The third boat, handled by Bart Henderson, had flipped. Bart was almost swept under a fallen log, but was snatched from the water by the crew of Robbie's boat.

All were accounted for -- except Angus Macleod.

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I felt I understood the reasons for everyone's involvement in the expedition, except Angus's. He was the odd man out. I met him in Clifton, New Jersey, a few weeks before our departure. We were introduced by a neighbor of his, Joel Fogel. Joel liked to tell people that he was a "professional adventurer." He'd had a brochure printed up describing himself as "Writer, Scientist, Adventurer, Ecologist." Something about him seemed less than genuine, a legend in his own lunchtime, but he had hinted that he might invest in our Baro expedition, and we desperately needed money. I agreed to hear him out. In August Joel flew me from Arizona to New Jersey. I decided Joel was suffering from affluenza... coming from a wealthy family, he apparently never really worked in his life, and spent his time trying to make himself famous. In exchange for what seemed like a sizable contribution to our cause, Joel had two requests: that he be allowed to join the expedition, and that I consider letting his friend, Angus Macleod, come along as well.

I was leery of bringing along anyone outside my tight-knit, experienced coterie on an exploratory, but the lure of capital was too strong. Joel, however, would never make it out onto the Baro. He traveled with us to the put-in, took one look at the angry, heaving river, and caught the next bus back to Addis Ababa. He may have been the smartest of the lot.

Angus was altogether different. While Joel smacked of presentation and flamboyance, Angus was taciturn and modest. He confessed immediately to having never run a rapid, yet he exuded an almost irresistible eagerness and carried himself with the fluid bounce of a natural athlete.

He was ruggedly handsome and had played professional soccer, and though he had never been on a river, he had spent time sea kayaking the Jersey shore. After spending a short time with him I could see his quiet intensity, and I believed that -- despite his lack of experience -- he could handle the trip, even though there would be no chance for training or special conditioning before the actual expedition.

Once in Ethiopia, Angus worked in the preparations for the expedition with a lightheartedness that masked his determination. On the eve of our trip to Illubabor Province -- a 17-hour bus ride on slippery, corrugated mountain roads -- I told Angus to make sure he was at the bus station at 7 a.m. for the 11 a.m. departure. That way we would all be sure of getting seats in the front of the bus, where the ride wasn't as bumpy or unbearable stuffy. But, come the next morning, Angus didn't show until 10:45. He got the last seat on the bus and endured.

Later, after the accident, standing on the bank of the river with John Yost, I wondered if I'd made the right decision about Angus. We searched the side of the river where I'd washed ashore; across the rumble of the rapids we could hear the others searching. "Angus! Are you all right? Where are you?" There was no answer. Just downriver from where I'd last seen him, John found an eight-foot length of rope -- the piece I'd cut away from Angus's shoulders.

After an hour John and I gave up and swam back across the river. We gathered the group at the one remaining raft, just below the falls.

"He could be downstream, lying with a broken leg," someone said.

"He could be hanging onto a log in the river."

"He could be wondering in a daze through the jungle."

Nobody suggested he could be dead, though we all knew it a possibility. All of us had a very basic, and very difficult, decision to make, the kind of decision you never want to have to make on an expedition: Should we stay and look for Angus, or should we get out while there was still light? Robbie, Bart, and George and Diane Fuller didn't hesitate -- they wanted out. Karen Greenwald wanted to continue searching, but she seemed hysterical. Against her protests, we sent her out with the others.

That left five of us -- Lew Greenwald, Gary Mercado, Jim Slade, John Yost and me. We decided to continue rafting downstream in search of Angus on the one remaining raft. I had mixed feelings -- suddenly I was scared to death of the river; it had almost killed me. The ambient sentiment was that we could very well die. Yet I felt obligated to look for a man missing from a boat I had capsized, on an expedition I had organized. And there was more: I felt I had to prove to myself that I had the right stuff, that I could honor the code, and do the right thing.

But the river wasn't through with us. When we were ready to go, I climbed into the seat of the raft and yelled for Jim to push off. Immediately we were cascading down the course I'd swum earlier. In the rapid that had nearly drowned me, the raft jolted and reeled, kicking Gary and me into the brawling water.

"Shit -- not again," was my only thought as I spilled out of the raft into another whirlpool. But this time I had the bowline in hand, and I managed to pull myself quickly to the surface. I emerged beside the raft, and Lew grabbed the back of my life jacket and pulled me in. My right forearm was lacerated and bleeding. Jim jumped to the oars and rowed us to shore.

My injury wasn't bad -- a shallow cut. But Gary had dislocated his shoulder; he'd flipped backward over the gunwale while still holding onto the raft. He was in a load of pain, and it was clear he couldn't go on. Lew -- thankful for the opportunity -- volunteered to hike him out.

John, Jim and I re-launched and cautiously rowed down a calmer stretch of the river, periodically calling out for Angus. It was almost 6:00 PM, and we were just three degrees north of the equator, so the sun was about to set. We had to stop and make camp. It was a bad, uncomfortable night. Between us, we had a two-man A-frame tent, one sleeping bag, and a lunch bag of food. Everything else had been washed into the Baro.

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The rude bark of a baboon shook us awake the next morning. The inside of the tent was dripping from condensation, and we lay in a kind of human puddle. I crawled outside and looked to the eastern sky, which was beginning to blush. My body ached from the previous day's ordeal. I wanted to be back in the U.S., warm, dry and eating a fine breakfast. Instead, we huddled around a wisp of fire, sipping weak tea and chewing wet bread.

That morning we eased downriver, stopping every few minutes to scout, hugging the banks, avoiding rapids we wouldn't have hesitated to run were they back in the States. At intervals we called into the rain forest for Angus, but now we didn't expect an answer.

Late in the afternoon we came to another intimidating rapid, one that galloped around a bend and sunk from sight. We took out the one duffel bag containing the tent and sleeping bag and began lining, using ropes to lower the boat along the edge of the rapid. Fifty yards into the rapid, the raft broached perpendicular to the current, and water swarmed in. Slade and I, on the stern line, pulled hard, the rope searing our palms, but the boat ignored us. With the snap of its D-ring (the bowline attachment), it dismissed us to a crumple on the bank and sailed around the corner and out of sight.

There was no way to continue the search. The terrain made impossible demands, and we were out of food, the last scraps having been lost with the raft. We struck up into the jungle, thrashing through wet, waist-high foliage at a slug's pace. My wound was becoming infected. Finally, at sunset the light folded up on itself and we had to stop. We cleared a near-level spot, set up the tent, squeezed in, and collapsed. Twice I awoke to the sounds of trucks grumbling past, but dismissed it as jungle fever, or Jim's snoring.

In the morning, however, we soon stumbled onto a road. There we sat, as mist coiled up the tree trunks, waiting. In the distance we could hear the thunder roll of a rapid, but inexplicably the sound became louder and louder. Then we saw what it was: 200 machete-wielding natives marched into sight over the hill. General Goitom, the police commissioner of nearby Motu, hearing of the accident, had organized a search for Angus. Their effort consisted of tramping up and down the highway -- the locals, it turned out, were more fearful of the jungle canyon than we were.

I remember very little of the next week. We discovered that Angus held a United Kingdom passport, and I spent a fair amount of time at the British embassy in Addis Ababa filling out reports, accounting for personal effects, and communicating with his relatives. John and Jim stayed in Motu with General Goitom and led a series of searches back into the jungle along the river. We posted a cash reward -- more than double what the villagers earned in a year -- for information on Angus's whereabouts. With financial assistance from Angus's parents, I secured a Canadian helicopter a few days after the accident and took several passes over the river. Even with the pilot skimming the treetops, it was difficult to see into the river corridor. The canopy seemed like a moldy, moth-eaten army tarpaulin. On one flight, however, I glimpsed a smudge of orange just beneath the surface of the river. We made several passes, but it was impossible to make out what it was. Perhaps, I thought, it was Angus, snagged underwater. We picked as many landmarks as possible, flew in a direct line to the road, landed, cut a marker on a tatty dohm palm, and headed to Motu.

A day later John, Jim and I cut a path back into the tangle and found the smudge -- a collection of leaves trapped by a submerged branch. We abandoned the search.

In November I got a call from a friend, a tour operator. A trek he'd organized to the Sahara had been canceled by the Algerian government, and his clients wanted an alternative. Would I be interested in taking them to Ethiopia for a trek? Two weeks later I arrived in Addis Ababa, where I met up with John Yost, Jim Slade, and a trainee-guide, Gary Bolton, fresh from a SOBEK raft tour of the Omo River. They were surprised to see me, here where nobody expected I would return.

By late December, after escorting a commercial trek through the Bale Mountains of southern Ethiopia, John, Jim, and I were wondering what to do next, and the subject of the unfinished Baro came up. The mystery of Angus still gnawed at all of us. I confessed that over the months, sometimes in the middle of a mundane chore -- taking out the trash, doing the laundry -- I'd stop and see Angus's frozen features as I cut him loose. In weak moments I would wonder if there just might be a chance that he was still alive. And I'd be pressed with a feeling of guilt, that I hadn't done enough, that I had waded in waist deep, then turned back. And I wondered how Angus had felt in those last few minutes -- about himself, about me. Jim and John admitted to similar feelings, and we collectively decided to try the Baro once again. We needed a fourth, and Gary Bolton agreed to join as well.

This time we put-in where I had taken out almost two years before, at the terminus of a long jungle path. Again, we had a single raft, with the minimum of gear to make portaging easier. The river pummeled us, as it had before, randomly tossing portages and major rapids in our path. But during the next few days, the trip gradually, almost imperceptibly, became easier. On Christmas morning I decorated a bush with my socks and passed out presents of party favors and sweets. Under an ebony sapling I placed a package of confections for Angus. It was a curiously satisfying holiday, being surrounded by primeval beauty and accompanied by three other men with a common quest. No one expected to find Angus alive, but I thought that the journey -- at least for me -- might expunge some doubt, exorcise guilt. I wanted to think that I had done all humanly possible to explore a death I was partly responsible for. And somehow I wanted him to know this.

As we tumbled off the Abyssinian massif into the Great Rift Valley of Africa, taking on tributaries every few miles, the river and its rapids grew. At times we even allowed ourselves to enjoy the experience, to shriek with delight, to throw heads back in laughter as we bounced through Colorado-style white water and soaked in the scenery. Again, we found remnants of the first trip - a broken oar here, a smashed pan there. Never, though, a hint of Angus.

After one long day of portaging, I went to gather my wetbag, holding my clothes, sleeping bag and toilet kit, and it was nowhere to be found. Apparently, it had been tossed out during one of the grueling portages. I trekked back upstream for a couple miles, but could find nothing, and it was getting dark, so I picked my way back to the raft and the plain pasta dinner John was cooking. At that moment, I had no worldly possessions, save the torn shorts I was wearing, my socks and tennis shoes, and the Buck Knife that hung from my pants. I slept in a small cave that night, rolled up like a hedgehog, with no sleeping bag, no pad, but I slept well. With the morning, I awoke fresh and energized, ready for the day, and though I had practically nothing to call my own, I felt a richness for the moment...I was with friends, on a mission, and was touching something primal. In an odd way, this all seemed liberating...no accoutrements to weigh down the soul...just a clear, present reason for going forward, for being. And I allowed something that would be called joy to wash over me.

On New Year's Eve we camped at the confluence of the Baro and the Bir-Bir rivers, pulling in as dusk was thickening to darkness. A lorry track crossed the Baro opposite our camp. It was there that Conrad Hirsh, the professor from the second Baro attempt, had said he would try to meet us with supplies. We couldn't see him, but Jim thought there might be a message waiting for us across the river. "I think I'll go check it out," he said.

"Don't be a fool," John warned. "We're in croc country now. You don't want to swim across this river." We weren't far from where Bill Olsen, the Peace Corps volunteer, was chomped in half while swimming.

An hour later, just after dark, Jim had not returned. We shouted his name, first individually, then as a chorus. No answer. Jim had become a close friend in the two years since we shared a tent on the upper Baro; he had been a partner in ordeal and elation, in failure and success. Now John and I swept our weak flashlight beams along the dark river. We gave up. We were tired, and we sat around the low licks of our campfire, ready to accept another loss, mapping out the ramifications in our minds. Suddenly Jim walked in from the shadows and thrust a note at us.

"Conrad arrived three day ago, waited two, and left this morning," he said, his body still dripping from the swim.

"You fool! I knew you couldn't disappear now -- you owe me $3.30 in backgammon debts." I clucked with all the punitive tone I could muster.

The following day we spun from the vortex of the last rapid into the wide, Mississippi-like reaches of the lower Baro. Where rocks and whirlpools were once the enemy, now there were crocodiles and hippos. We hurled rocks, made threatening gestures, and yelled banshee shrieks to keep them away. Late in the day on January 3, 1976, we glided into the outpost town of Gambella. The villagers there had neither seen nor heard of Angus Macleod.

Postcard from Ethiopia by Rugscape, on Flickr

I never told Angus's relatives of our last search; we didn't find what might have given them solace. What I found I kept to myself, buried treasure in my soul. It was the knowledge of the precious and innate value of endeavor.

I wanted to believe that when Angus boarded my tiny boat and committed himself, he was sparked with life and light, that his blood raced with the passion of existence --perhaps more than ever before. As we first launched our rafts on the Baro ten of us thought we knew what we were doing: another expedition, another raft trip, another river. Only Angus was exploring beyond his being. Maybe his was a senseless death, moments after launching, in the very first rapid. I would never forget the look of horror in his eyes as he struggled there in the water. But there were other ways to think about it. He took the dare and contacted the outermost boundaries. He lost, but so do we all, eventually. The difference -- and it is an enormous one -- is that he reached for it, wholly.

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The New, And Frankly Much Better, Braniff: LAN Airlines To The Galápagos

2013-04-09T13:55:51-04:00

Photo by Didrik Johnck

I went to the Galápagos for dinner.

As a consenting adult, I agreed to be part of a grand prize for a sweepstakes offered by LAN Airlines. The winners could choose a free trip, for two, to one of four destinations in South America (Iguaçu, Easter Island, Machu Picchu or Galápagos), and have dinner with me at the chosen spot. Of course, I encouraged my friends to enter, but they have dinner with me regularly, and so the prize went to David and Susan Carr of Virginia.

I spent more time in the air, jetting from Los Angeles to Lima to Quito to Guayaquil to Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos, than I did on the ground. So, I had a lot of time to think about South American carriers, and my destination, the Galápagos.

The company I co-founded, Mountain Travel Sobek, started offering trips to the Galápagos in the 70s. Back then we used Braniff International Airways, with the Alexander Calder painted planes, the "flying colors" that served all the major posterns of South America. Most countries had "siloed" national carriers, airlines that served direct routes to their capitals and major cities, but not other countries without first going through their own gateway. So, Braniff was brilliant, in that you could wing directly to the country of your choice, in leather seats and with fashionable service. For US travelers, it became the Pan-South American carrier.

But with deregulation in 1978 coinciding with a huge expansion in planes and routes, Braniff faltered. And on May 11, 1982, it declared bankruptcy; the next day its jelly bean splashed planes were grounded.

LAN Airlines is an outgrowth of LAN-Chile (Línea Aérea Nacional de Chile), with whom I started working in 1978, when I set out to make the first descent of the Bio-Bio River. I was in my 20s, shepherding my young company, Sobek Expeditions, and had my heart set on an exploratory raft trip down the most spectacular run in the Andes. But I didn't have the monies to fly a crew and gear to Santiago. I approached Braniff and Pan Am for assistance, but they turned me down. My last chance was LAN. So, I flew to L.A. and met with the District Sales Manager, Diana Samper, and made my case over a long lunch. It was my last shot. Somehow, and against the odds, Diana sensed in me a passion and a vision, and she agreed to provide air tickets for my crew for this wacky idea. It was a gamble, but it worked. The expedition was a fine success, and the Bio-Bio program went on to become the most popular river run in South America, and reimagined Chile as a major adventure travel destination. And LAN benefited mightily with this new and robust vertical market.

In 2002 LAN set out to become the continental carrier for Latin America. It started LAN Perú, Lan Ecuador, and a little later, LAN Argentina and LAN Columbia. It unified under a single LAN brand, and opened up direct service from key US gateways, including LAX, Miami, NY and SFO. And last year it merged with Brazil's TAM, so it's well positioned to be the carrier of choice for the upcoming World Cup and summer Olympics.

Now, with more subdued colors, it has taken the Braniff mantel, and bettered it. The beds in business are completely flat, and the wine is fine Argentinian Malbec and Chilean Sauvignon Blanc. It is leading the way in the continent in sustainability practices, and runs among the greenest airports in the world, in Easter Island (where it is the only carrier with commercial service).

Its main hub is Lima, which makes sense, as its central location makes an ideal concourse for much of the continent, and allows a seamless transition from its international flights to its local connections to Cuzco, the gateway to Machu Picchu, the most famous attraction in all South America.

The great measure of airline is when you want the flight to end. I didn't.

The path I take routes from Lima to Quito, which boasts a new airport about 90 minutes outside the capital. LAN's partner, Gray Line Latin America, makes the smooth transfer, where I spend the night and explore the city spread across an attractive Andean valley flanked by volcanic peaks, and its 'old town,' a maze of colonial splendor that's been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1978.

Then, in the eager pool of morning light, I connect to Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos, where I will share my prized dinner. I transfer to the Red Mangrove Aventura Lodge, lipped on the sea-lion-filled waters of Puerto Ayora's bay, and meet up with the winners, David and Susan Carr.

As we settle in for the buffet dinner on the deck, David shares that he spent a career as an attorney defending drug dealers, con artists, and hit men, so he was naturally suspicious when he received the email announcing he had won the LAN Sweepstakes. He thought it was a scam, so he reached to delete, when a second away he paused, and reconsidered. He had, he remembered, entered a sweepstakes for South America, and maybe this was legit. So, he held his breath, and opened the email. And now he is here supping with me, sun setting over the equatorial Pacific, a drove of marine iguanas crawling around the legs of his chair.

Photo by Richard Bangs

I share a Galápagos story from my history. I once sold a book idea to Macmillan called "Paths Less Travelled" in which I would send well-known authors on various Sobek trips around the world, and each would contribute an essay. I dispatched writers such as Edward Hoagland, Jay McInerny, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tom Robbins, Barry Lopez and others to the far ends of the earth, with no restrictions on what they penned. I also recruited one of my favorite writers, Daniel Boorstin, head of the Library of Congress, and author of The Discoverers. But he said he would join the project only if he could visit the Galápagos over the Christmas holiday, and only if his wife accompanied. Christmas is high-season, but I moved mountains and clients around until I finally got the two spaces. And I booked them on Braniff.

A few weeks after the trip, as the book deadline drew near, I called Daniel, but got his wife. She said Daniel would not be contributing to the book as the flight to Galápagos was shoddy with bad service, and on the boat they were paired with a loud couple with whom they didn't get along. And, the cabin roof leaked. I pleaded, cajoled, and pointed out there were no editorial restrictions on the tone or content of the essay. But for naught. The book was published without Daniel's participation, and went on to be a minor hit. Yet now I wish LAN had been around then, as history might have been written differently.

Our dinner seeps deep into the night, with lively stories of travel, careers, wrong turns, and the twists that brought us together at this wonderful inflection point of time and place.

The next day I join the Carrs for tours of the Charles Darwin Research Station (a short walk from the Red Mangrove), to a lava tunnel the size of a subway, to a giant tortoise preserve, and the beach at El Garrapatero Parque Nacional for sunset. Then it's time for the Carrs to move to the next island in the chain, Floreana (in addition to dinner with me, they won a week tour), and for me to start the journey home, once again via LAN Airways.

Winners David & Susan Carr in the Galapagos. Photo by Richard Bangs

It is just a happy coincidence, but a few weeks before the Carrs chose their South American dinner destination, I produced a little video citing what I thought would be the top ten adventures for 2013. Guess which place won the top slot:

Vermont Deficit Disorder: Finding Peace In The Green Mountains (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

2013-03-14T07:00:00-04:00

This is part two of a two-part series on the restorative splendors of Vermont. Read part one here.

Not much past The Long Trail Brewery, named after the 273-mile footpath that runs along the main ridge of the Green Mountains, paralleled for most of its length by Route 100, I trundle into the Vermonster, the "Beast of the East," Killington, and check into the Killington Grand Resort Hotel, walking distance to the lifts and a rad tubing park across the street. I make a few runs, and then head down the hill to Killington Snowmobiling and Tours.

After a hokey two-minute video on how to use the throttle, kill switch and brakes, I mount my Polaris snowmobile at the trailhead. "Grip it, and rip it," says Klaus Weirether, the owner. I clutch the throttle and thrust the machine forward, my head lurching back like an astronaut at take-off. For the first minutes riding in the cold open air, every muscle is taut. But as the trail curves, I loosen, tilting into turns and allowing myself to spring off the seat with the bumps. A snowmobile is fierce possibility uncaged.

We tool through the Calvin Coolidge State Forest and Park System, braking to drink in some of the most stupefying Green Mountain views in Vermont. As the sun drops below the tree line, we head back.

It's been a gripping experience, and I could use some bodywork in the wake, so I check into the spa, an ecstatic place if ever one, at the Killington Grand Resort Hotel. I sprawl for the maple sugar scrub, the first farm-to-table massage I've encountered, and one that not only exfoliates my skin from the particulates of Los Angeles, but leaves me smelling like Vermont.

In the suffused aurorean light of the next day, before making the push north, I make a slight detour down Route 4 to Mendon and the fabled Sugar and Spice restaurant. Folks drive hundreds of miles to devour the powder sugar-sprinkled pancakes drenched with real Vermont maple syrup. There's been a conspiracy of syrup in America. When I was a boy I relished every Sunday breakfast when I could smother my waffles or pancake stacks in 100% maple syrup, the original slow food. But somewhere along the way big manufacturers found that substituting high fructose corn syrup was a cheaper alternative, and today most syrup in restaurant chains and in homes across America is the fake stuff.

So, it is such a delight to once again taste the genuine article, the liquid gold of 100 % maple syrup, and I stuff myself with too many cakes, but feel sumptuous in the afterglow. Then I head outside for some roofless wandering, in a light snowfall, among the Hard Rock Maple trees, watching the leaves fall and examining the tap holes that will be employed in a few months to collect the syrup. Each tree tap should produce about 40 quarts of pure maple sap, which when boiled down, will make just one quart of pure maple syrup. At one point I reach into my pocket for my notebook, and as I pull it out, a napkin falls to the ground. A man rushes over to me, and picks up the napkin, and with a smile admonishes: "Don't Jersey Vermont."

Back inside I ask Lynn Manney if much has changed in the making of maple syrup since it was discovered by the early American Indians. "No," she responds.

Is that an old sugar house behind the restaurant? "Yes."

Lynn seems not unlike the famously taciturn Calvin Coolidge, another Vermont native, who when a socialite said to him "Someone bet me I couldn't get you to say three words in a row," he replied, "You lose."

Once on the curved black back of the road again, I steer up past Granville, where the familiar Moss Glen Falls spills like a horsetail over an angled rock face. It's familiar because it's featured in nearly every photographic portrait of Vermont ever published.

Then I pinch another short detour to Montpelier, the capital, to catch up with Craig Whipple, the Director of Vermont State Parks. We meet up in the Vermont History Museum on State Street, in a wigwam in front of a mural of the Abenaki Indians, "The People of the Dawn," circa 1650, living a seemingly simple, serene and satisfied life in the Vermont wilderness. Dave is a fierce believer that a denatured life is a dehumanized life, and sees merit in the pre-industrial existence.

"Humans are biological organisms... We're animals, but with better brains. We've been able to use intelligence to modify our environment so that we're comfortable and secure. But we're still a part of nature. When we allow kids to go outdoors we see how the social relationships are different... They work together, they solve problems, they explore. They behave differently than when indoors."

"We have recognized the finite capacity of the planet," Whipple continues. "And the value of more primitive cultures and their connections with the land, living in balance with the land, and we know that's a much more sustainable attitude. The temptation to keep ourselves secure and warm, and to manipulate our environment, builds walls between us and nature. You can't do that at the expense of a total disconnect with nature."

Salamandering up the road, I stop in Waterbury, at the Alchemist Brewery, which serves up the Indian Pale Ale they call Heady Topper. BeerAdvocate Magazine named it the best beer in the world. Henry David Thoreau said we need the tonic of wilderness; I say we need the tonic of beer, and Vermont has the highest number of breweries per capita in the U.S., so I've come to the right place.

John Kimmich, the hoydenish co-owner, along with wife Jennifer, gives me a little tour of the place, enlightening that Heady Topper only comes in cans. "Three reasons," he offers. "First, sunlight, any UV light, can harm an IPA. Secondly, one of my all-time other big passions is swimming in the rivers in Vermont in the summer with my family, and the idea of coming across one of my bottles shattered in a river? I just can't have that. And lastly, you can crush a can on your forehead when you're done drinking."

Yes, you can. As long as you recycle. On the top of every Heady Topper can is the directive: "Don't be a D-bag. Recycle these cans."

Could Heady Topper be a national brand?

"Absolutely," says John. "I could be brewing a quarter million barrels a year and selling it all over the world. But why? It just makes life more complicated, and this way my employees have an amazing lifestyle, which is a big goal, to be happy on the job. If you want to get Heady Topper right now, your best bet is come right here to the brewery."

In the cool cocoon of the blue evening light I follow the spirit line of Route 100 all the way to the Stowe Mountain Lodge, which boasts a 21,000 square-foot Wellness and Fitness Center, with an outdoor swimming pool and 18 private treatment rooms. But after the bath of morning, rather than an indoor workout, I don snowshoes and tramp about the pleasing snowscapes of Stowe. Emerging science suggests there are considerable benefits to outdoor exercising in Vermont, rather than on a Stairmaster or in a spinning class or on a climbing wall. Studies show that on subsequent psychological tests the outsiders scored significantly higher in vitality, enthusiasm, pleasure and self-esteem, and lower on tension, depression and fatigue. As a focus group of one, I agree.

When at one point I take a tumble into the snow, I stand and see that the impression I left looks like a spiral, just like the spiral of the Milky Way galaxy. I have a Saul of Tarsus moment; a "2001: A Space Odyssey" time-space linkage. John Muir put it this way: When you tug on a string in (Vermont), you find it is connected to everything else."

Everything to this point has been a palette cleanser for the final feast. One of the most successful movie musicals of all time was "The Sound of Music," and like millions I rubbed tears away as the von Trapps, in the final scene, escaped the Nazis by crossing the Alps out of Austria in 1938. But what happened next?

Well, who wouldn't be stressed after leaving a beloved homeland as fugitives on the run? But the sequel has a happy ending. The family landed in Vermont, and started the 96-room Austrian-style Trapp Family Lodge on a 2,500-acre wooded spread. Today Sam von Trapp runs the lodge with his father Johannas, youngest child born to Maria and Captain Gehrig von Trapp.

I catch up with Sam, who suggests we go out for a cross country ski run just outside the lodge. "My father started the first commercial cross-country ski resort in the United States back in 1968. Now we have some 100 miles of Nordic trails, and snow making for longer seasons."

Sam apparently inherited some good instincts from his grandmother, Maria, a former postulant at a Benedictine monastery in Salzburg, but by diligent hard work he overcame them, at least for a spell. He lit out after college and found himself ski instructing in Aspen, modeling for Ralph Lauren, surfing in Chile and even making People magazine's America's Top 50 Bachelors list in 2001. But, with prodigal pursuits sated, he came home and now lives on the compound, along with his sister Kristina and his dad. And they all seem preternaturally fit, happy and relaxed.

Scientists have determined that shushing about the backcountry of Vermont offers a state that transcends relaxation. New research supports the contention that spending time in The Green Mountain state helps control negative stress, obesity, perhaps even heart disease and dementia.

But most vitally, it evokes a feeling -- one I'm enjoying now -- a feeling larger than science can measure. Vis medicatrix Vermontae, it would be rendered in Latin.

Aging, I think, is bad policy. But the alternative is worse. And so while moving down the trail, all I have to do is make the unlimited refills that can be found in Vermont. The prescription never expires. And it is the sacrament and the miracle cure for that pernicious malady, Vermont Deficit Disorder.

For details about how to follow in my footsteps, go to www.orbtiz.com/vermont.

Vermont Deficit Disorder: The Cure For The Common Trip (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

2013-03-13T07:00:00-04:00

At first coffee on the morning of September 11, 2001 I was in the New York offices of Outward Bound, serving as president of the non-profit that promotes the merits of character development and self-discovery through outdoor challenges and adventure. By mid-morning I had asked the staff to go home to be with families and to find some time to be outdoors. I stayed and worked for the next several days and weeks, to sort out the confusion that enveloped every organization and household during that spell.

Come November it was time to steal out, to seek some personal clarity and reflection, and so I turned north, to Vermont, the most rural state in the nation. I spent a week between the clean lines of Killington and Stowe, and came back renewed and recharged, and with new resolve. Boy, did I feel good. I quit Outward Bound a few weeks later, and moved back west to be close to the earth of family and friends. The Vermont afterglow lasted for some time and fueled a raft of agreeable life choices.

Not long ago, in the wake of Sandy and Newtown; of Lance and Pink Slime; of the agitations in Egypt, Mali and Algeria, I confessed to a friend, a brain scientist, that I was feeling a bit unnerved. Living in Los Angeles I felt a poverty of the senses; the stifling of authentic exposure. I shared my experiences of a dozen years ago in Vermont, and how I wished I could recapture that sense of calm and brightness.

"You're suffering from Vermont Deficit Disorder," he explained. "But there is a cure."

A few days later I land in Burlington, ready for another week-long dose of Vitamin V.

At the baggage carousel I sense some stress swelling as I jab around futilely for change to rent a luggage cart, until a stranger offers one up... "They're free," she smiles. As are the rocking chairs overlooking the runway and the Wi-Fi. There's even a yoga room in the terminal. I could be happy just vacationing in the airport.

There's always some anxiety in choosing a place to stay when traveling, but a friend recommended a new B&B called Made INN Vermont, a quirkily restored 1881 Victorian mansion, just up the hill from downtown. Linda, the owner, bounds down the stairs, and offers up a spiked hot chocolate and decanters of personal warmth. She's eclectic as the appointments, shelves of out-of-print art books, vintage games and puzzles, kitschy toys and bibelots, two plump and fuzzy resident cats (Cutie Kitty and Casey Boy), cascades of Vermont-made maple candies, cookies, syrups, ciders, popcorn, cheesecake, even cotton candy and an endless mix of re-purposed, antique and modern tchotchkes, though mercifully no potpourri or lace doilies in sight. The swarming walls remind me of the scene in "The Usual Suspects" when Dave Kujan, the U.S. Customs agent, scans the walls and sees that Verbal Kint concocted his elaborate story from the adorning items. One could concoct a film festival here.

Linda tours me about, including the widow's walk, a room with a view of Lake Champlain, where she cryptidly claims you can occasionally spot Champ, the giant serpentine monster, cousin to Loch Ness, reported since the Iroquois and the Abenaki relaxed along these waters.

My room, 905, sprawls like an overstuffed armchair, offering up a working record player with a selection of vinyl LPs from my high-school years (Stan Getz; Soundtrack to Easy Rider, Little Feat), nightstands fashioned from djembe drums and colored disco lights under the bed. Yes, I am seeking restoration, dialing back to perhaps a simpler era, and this may be my hot tub time machine.

After settling in I decide to walk to town for some nourishment, and Linda recommends the locally-made flatbread. The Vermont night air is brisk, crisp and bracing. On the tree-lined stroll I feel the tension scurrying up and out of me. Shoulders unclench. The restorative power of Vermont is kicking in. I'd worked not long ago for Microsoft and Yahoo, and felt the noose of technology tighten; but here, now, it is looping away. The best antidote to too much electronic immersion is an increase in Vermont body contact, unplugged from devices, but plugged into the deep time of the Green Mountain State. It is for some a scandalous idea: the more high-tech we become, the more we need Vermont.

The morning next, after a breakfast of Vermont eggs, local cheese, maple bacon and cinnamon raisin French toast, I pack the car and ready for the trip.

One of my goals is to drive the mythic Route 100, from the foot of Vermont to the top, so from Burlington, in the northwest, I make a leisurely jaunt south towards the starting block. I don't get far, though, before pulling into one of Vermont's tourist lodestones, Ben & Jerry's, outside of Waterbury. For ice cream lovers, this is a pilgrimage and an inspiration. Who could not be encouraged by the story of two hippies who paid $5 for an extension course on how to make ice cream, then set up shop in an abandoned gas station and soon after were making dollops of money -- and headlines as a socially conscious corporation that supported everything from small dairy farms in Vermont to Brazil nut crops in the Amazon rain forest.

Unilever now owns the company, purchased from the founders in 2000, but it still donates seven-and-a-half cents of every dollar earned to charity. And the ice cream is still mischievously good... Even though it's snowing hard outside, practically a DQ Blizzard, I order a scoop of Stephen Colbert's AmeriCone Dream, which lives up to its promo, "the sweet taste of liberty in your mouth." For all its elegant contours, this piece of Vermont is marbled with camp.

Then I wend south, first along Interstate 89, and then southeast over State Route 4. In the liquid late afternoon light I can't shake a feeling that there is something about the highway that seems wrong. For miles, as I scan the unfettered view on all sides, I feel like something is missing. And then at last I see, or rather don't, as I live along the xeric flats of LA, where streets are lined in forests of billboards, and the condition driving these roads has been called "continuous partial attention."

Here there are no billboards; it turns out they are illegal in the state. The roadway views are non-synthetic, of trees, wild rivers, green mountains and cows. There have been studies of late that indicate that uncluttered window views of natural landscapes can hasten patient recovery in hospitals, learning in classrooms and productivity in the workplace. So, I figure, the same must hold true for windshield views. I feel better already.

At last I repair into the Mount Snow Valley, reaching Wilmington towards the seam of the day, and through a fog that seeps like Sleepy Hollow, check into the haunted mansion on the hill called The White House Inn. Built in 1915 by lumber baron Martin Brown who wanted a grand place to entertain guests in style, it looks as though he hasn't left. It rambles about with balconies, columns, wainscoting, layers of crown molding, bluestone terraces, antique furniture, silk mural wallpapers and grand fireplaces burning with logs of birch.

There is a growing recognition that exposure to Vermont enhances health, improves cognitive functioning and nurtures the spirit, or spirits in the case of The White House. Kat, the inn-keeper, greets me with a maple martini in the sunken bar, so wickedly sweet it should be illegal, and then offers a tour of some of the ghostly features, such as a secret staircase behind a mantle, replete with cobwebs and an iron bank vault door in the dungeon-like downstairs that creaks like a sound effect. Kat says that both staff and guests have reported unaccountable cold spots, disembodied footsteps, doors that open by themselves and apparitions, like the ghosts in our own genetic attics who whisper that the nature of the past is prologue to our future.

To postpone ghost protocols, I step outside into the night air and make a circumambulation around the manor. It's quiet and dark outside; the decibels and light turned down and the senses turned on. I know that research suggests that exposure to the Vermont air stimulates our ability to pay attention, think clearly and be more creative and so I return eager to sit down and compose a cantata to The White House and its milieu, even though I don't play an instrument.

The sky lightens slowly the next morning, and time seems to pour like syrup as I linger over the blueberry coffee. Afterwards, Kat walks me over to a steep snowy slope, equips me with specially-designed inner tube and points to the bottom. "It's the most extreme tubing in Vermont," she gushes. Down I plunge, flying over bumps, freedom in my face, before I finally crash into a field of low brush at the bottom. After trudging back up the hill, resistance is futile, so down again I zoom, self-medicating by sucking in the lozenge of the cold, sharp Vermont air all the way.

After a few unregulated plummets I pack the car and head down the mound to the center of Wilmington, which is so idyllic-looking it seems a Norman Rockwell canvas come to life (which makes sense, as he lived and painted in Southern Vermont). From here I begin the drive up Route 100, called the most scenic in New England, and the " Skiers' Highway," since it links Vermont's sheeny legends -- Snow, Killington, Sugarbush, Stowe -- like pearls in a necklace.

This is the anti-interstate, a coiling, slender, obscenely picturesque path that cuts up the backbone of the state, meandering along racing rivers and through time-smoothed mountain bowls. It's a fidgety, dithering motorway, ever on the verge of the linear, only to turn its mind in a mile.

The road is a visible manifestation of inward grace, seemingly blue-screened with covered bridges, snow-covered apple orchids and contented cows. It sheeplegs into a landscape pointy with churches and 18th-century brick houses behind fences that seem born to the earth. There are Norwegian pine forests and hemlock stands, paper birches, beeches and sugar maples, and high passes strewn with massive, mossy boulders. On either side rises Vermont's Green Mountains, the misty peaks that set its citizens apart from "flatlanders," as Vermonters call anyone -- tourist or resident -- who hails from across state lines.

Every few miles there is a bright yellow sign with a hulking, horned silhouette that signals a moose crossing. The danger has increased as the state's moose population has risen, from a mere 200 in 1980 to more than 4,000 today. Their prime predator is the four-wheeled variety. When an animal is struck by a car, the impact often sends the creature -- an 800-pound cow or a 1,000-pound bull -- through the windshield. At least one driver is killed and many more injured every year.

I pass through Londonderry, where the legendary Jake Burton invented modern snowboarding, shredding the long traditions of binding about on split-rail fences. And then, about midday, I pull into Weston, a chocolate-box town centered on a village green justly famous for the Vermont Country Store, "purveyors of the practical and hard-to-find since 1946." Like an old-time general store, it's crammed to the rafters with the trappings of an era before the anonymity and blandness of Wal-Mart, everything from apothecary to woodstoves, homespun clothing, boutique sodas, hand-tooled toys, nightgowns, bedspreads, music boxes, perfumes, handicrafts and free samples of cookies, jams, crackers, cheese and popcorn. Abbie Hoffman, who wrote "Steal this Book," about how to live and eat free, might call this Mecca.

A little further up the road I roll into Bridgewater Corners, and park alongside the Ottauquechee River. It's a hop to The Long Trail Brewery, named after the 273-mile footpath that runs along the main ridge of the Green Mountains, paralleled for most of its length by Route 100. Built between 1910 and 1930, the Long Trail anteceded -- and inspired -- the Appalachian Trail, with which it merges for about 100 miles in southern Vermont. Both can work up a mighty thirst.

So, I belly in for a draft of the eponymous beer and a self-guided tour on a catwalk above the pub. I instantly love the place, as it offers up free popcorn, a broken canoe, like many I have wasted, hanging from the ceiling, and a big wall map of the world pinned with the hometowns of hundreds of patrons. I order up a flight of beers, their sampler, lined up in a muffin tin, and, once sated, head outside for a nippy walk along the river. In a recent study researchers reported the health outcomes from outdoor exercise in Vermont: boosting of mood, memory and empathy and reduction of anger, confusion, depression and blood pressure. I'm not sure if it's the beer, or the hike or perhaps the combination, but I feel pretty damn fine.

This is the first in a two-part series about the restorative powers of Vermont. Continue to part two.

13 Greatest Adventures For 2013 (And A Free Trip To One Of Them)

2013-01-10T08:55:00-05:00

Though the odds have been bucked (there are bold travelers; and old travelers; but no old bold travelers), I've been reconnoitering the backs of beyond since the exordium of modern adventure travel, and have written about quite a few. I would imagine I could swing my Bic with the best of them. Nonetheless, I am daunted by AdventureLink, which boasts the world's largest database of adventure travel trips and outfitters.

So, I combed through this dangerous catalogue, and picked out what I think will be the best adventures for 2013 -- and I have personally tested them all, and reported about each on Huffington Post!

But here's the lagniappe. You can win a free trip, for two, with air, with me to any of the four great South American wonders by entering this sweepstakes from LAN Airlines before January 18.

Buena suerte! And I hope to see you in South America!

The Spirit Of New York's Catskills (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

2013-01-08T08:00:00-05:00

Part two of a two-part series about New York's North Country. Start with part one.

Before arriving at a new place we all carry the luggage of pre-conceptions. There are usually holes in this kit; we're almost always wrong, at least to some extent, about our notions. My idea of the Catskills came from two very different periods, the live television run of the 1950s; and the Summer of Love in 1969, the year of Woodstock.

As a young boy I would run home from school every day to turn on the TV and drink in whatever show or movie was playing. It turned out all my favorite performers were veterans of the Catskills, Borscht Belt comedians, mostly Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, who cut their teeth in the Catskills at resorts like Grossinger's, Brickman's and The Overlook. The catalogue is thick of the funnymen with Catskills cred who flickered in my living room: Woody Allen, Morey Amsterdam, Bea Arthur, Milton Berle, Shelley Berman, Joey Bishop, Mel Blanc, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Red Buttons. Sid Caesar, Billy Crystal, Rodney Dangerfield, Phyllis Diller, Totie Fields, Shecky Greene, Buddy Hackett, Danny Kaye, Alan King, Robert Klein. Harvey Korman. Jerry Lewis. Richard Lewis, Chico and Harpo Marx, Jackie Mason, Zero Mostel, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Rowan & Martin, Mort Sahl, Soupy Sales, Dick Shawn, Allan Sherman, Phil Silvers, Arnold Stang, David Steinberg, Jerry Stiller, The Three Stooges, Jonathan Winters, Ed Wynn, Henny Youngman and on, as some above would say, ad libitum.

In August 1969 I was a river guide on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. My college sweetheart decided to go to Woodstock, but I couldn't get away for the little music fest in the Catskills. So I was insanely jealous as the media rolled out declarations that it was a seismic cultural event, one of those generational revolutions that changes everything. But I was even more green-eyed when my girlfriend announced she met someone at Woodstock while they were both naked and tripping, and she was leaving with him to an Ashram in the Himalayans.
So, when I finally arrived in the Catskills I expected Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, and an overkill of free love and recreational psychotropics.

Instead I found an unexampled rebellious spirit that stretches back to the 18th century, and is a connective tissue between Woodstock and the Borscht Belt, and a life-force that upholds today.

I first head straight back in history to Kingston, a little town on the Hudson that displayed early-on an independent spirit when it set up shop as New York's first capital. It was the fall of 1777, a year after Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. A government on the run was being chased north from New York City by the British Army, who scorched everything in its path. In the algid air of February the government took up residence in the Ulster County Courthouse to create a formal state constitution. While the Assembly met in a local tavern, the Senate convened its first session in the old stone home of a sympathetic Dutch merchant. On October 16, British forces swarmed through and set fire to every house in town as punishment for Kingston's role in supporting the Revolution. The razing didn't snuff the spirit, though, or keep a colony intact, and today there are proud reenactments and displayed documents of the episodes that set a defining disposition in motion. Jacob Coiro, a local guide, resplendent in tricorn hat, shows me around the original stone house, now a museum, and says "The people here knew what they had. They looked around the Catskills and saw how beautiful it was, and it made them feel as if it belonged to them."

All this energetic independence works up an appetite, so I stop at Dallas Hot Wieners on North Front Street, and order up a spicy dog drenched in the family secret sauce, an inverse correlation between flavor (long) and life expectancy.

From Kingston I find my way down NY Route 28 to The Emerson Resort in Mt. Tremper, home to the World's Largest Kaleidoscope, a former 64-foot high barn silo turned tourist attraction. It takes chutzpah to name an inn after one of the most famous American literary figures, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in 1836 wrote "Nature," an essay inspired by the severe beauty of the area. The publication prompted the American Conservation Movement, which led to the establishment of the 600 square-mile Catskill Forest Preserve that surrounds the Emerson today.

It also takes chutzpah and spirit to rebuild after burning, as did the early citizens of Kingston. In 2005 the Emerson burned down (like so many of the Catskills resorts), but rather than pack up and withdraw, the owners rebuilt with a vengeance, inserting a giant Rajasthani door as an entrance to the spa, outfitting the suites with stone fireplaces and Zen touches and effecting a mash-up of Asian and Appalachian sensibilities that seems to work, though Emerson would likely head down the seam of light that is Esopus Creek rather than check-in.

I take dinner then at the fittingly-named Phoenix Restaurant, and meet Michael Brothers, the head chef, who is so passionate about creating meals from local ingredients he practically leaps over to my table to tell me so. He says passion is the spirit he shares with his patrons, as most are pursuing such when they come here, be it art, agriculture, Buddhism (the Zen Mountain Monastery is down the road), comedy, nature... "whatever it is, they go for it full force."

I head out the next morning to the town of Woodstock, which didn't host the eponymous 1969 music Festival, as it turned down the initial permit application. The rock event was actually held 60 miles away at Max Yasgur's Farm in the town of Bethel. Nonetheless, Woodstock has become the meme for generational liberation through music and art, though it is today a rather chic high-end gallery and café mecca. Nonetheless a pungent whiff of those high times remains, along with some stringy ponytails and shops hawking tie-dies and old LPs.

I chance up with local historian Richard Heppner, who wrote the book Remembering Woodstock, which recounts the town's early history of wintry hardships, courageous settlers and rebellious farmers who set the stage for a saga of spirited and creative personalities. He tells me how, too, the spirit of the land began to take on meaning after the Civil War. "It was then Woodstockers began to realize they could earn money from what people saw in the land and felt in the land rather than exploiting it through quarrying, tanning or timbering." It was a time when folks sought sanctuary from the heat, dust and asperities of the city and looked to the vital portal and pure waters and air of the Catskills. This was also about the time Woodstock played host to the brotherhood of Hudson River School painters, such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and Jasper Cropsey, the sublime watercolorists who turned brooding landscapes into rock stars. "Today you can almost feel that same sense the artists felt when they first came here. It was like seeing the South Pacific for the first time."

Richard directs me to up the road to the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony. In 1902 a wealthy Englishman, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, poked around these parts looking for the ideal spot to create a utopian community where all the arts would come together, painting, sculpture, music, metalwork even furniture making. The result: a 300-acre sylvan spread that has drawn thousands of independent-spirited artists and craftspeople. Isadora Duncan danced here; Bob Dylan lived here in the '60s and early '70s; Joanne Woodward performed at the theater. Byrdcliffe is the oldest continuing arts colony in America.

I find Matthew Leaycraft, executive director of Bydcliffe, who tells me "the spirit of artistic expression began here, and it continues. It's extremely vibrant and alive today." He talks a bit about how the Catskills became a place to retreat for inspiration. "There's a certain kind of purity that comes from contact with the natural world. It lifts you up into your highest plane, and becomes a refuge where people can find the beauty within. It's profoundly restorative."

Matthew takes me over to a studio where Richard Conti, the Ceramics Program Director, is hunched over a pottery wheel. He's masterful, of course, but watching his hands mold the spinning mud into something with contour, character and beauty reminds me, and I know this is gauche, of Patrick Swayze guiding the hands of Demi Moore in the movie "Ghost." And of course it was Patrick Swayze who did more to sex up the Catskills than perhaps anyone ever with his turn in the movie Dirty Dancing.

With a light snow falling I head over for a bite at the Phoenicia Diner -- not to be confused with the Phoenix Restaurant at the Emerson; rebirth seems to be a popular theme throughout the Catskills -- and order up the Arnold Bennett Skillet, smoked trout, parmesan cheese, crème fraiche and scrambled eggs, with, of course, de rigueur for a true diner, a cup of joe. The owner, Michael Cioffi, plops down on the bench next to me and tells me he is from Brooklyn, where he had a hard time finding authentically locally grown produce and meats. (They were mostly trucked in, sometimes from the Catskills.) He went on a quest to find a place where he could serve food in a diner that he would want to eat and landed here.

His menu offers up Wild Hive Farm polenta, a grass-fed burger, a prosciutto sandwich with brie, apples and arugula, and, my favorite for health nuts, house-made beer battered onion rings. His is the first menu I've encountered that offers up the practical regional advice: "If you are camping, you can protect your food from local black bears by suspending it on a rope between two trees." As Michael gets up to greet another patron he tells me he aspires to a diner that is a destination, an eatery that transcends his current motto, "Come for the mountains, stay for the food!"

To round out my little winter visit to the Catskills I head over to Hunter Mountain, highest peak in the county, and host to the fastest, longest and highest Zipline Canopy Tour in North America -- and the second-largest zipline in the world. It is more than four miles long and reaches speeds of up to 50 miles per hour. Movement is life; velocity is spirit, and here, all troubles are left off the ground. This is the spirit of fierce exhilaration. Brad Morse, the owner of NY Zipline Adventure Tours, tells me "The spirit of the Catskills has to do with adventure, the outdoors, the beauty of the mountains. When you zipline 600 feet off the ground, you get a perspective of what spirit is really about."

And so, though it seems the spirit here is articulated in so many sundry ways, there is a tie that binds. It is a powerful nexus of faith, creativity, independence and courage, and over the bench of time it has not been subdued or softened. It is a spark where creative beginnings are always possible. It is the spirit of the Catskills.

For more information on adventures of all kinds in the Catskills, and to follow my footsteps, go to: www.orbitz.com/nystate

If You're Traveling In New York's North Country Fair (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

2013-01-07T07:00:00-05:00

Part one of a two-part series about New York's North Country. Continue to part two.

Even though few therapists would agree, sometimes neglect paths to the best possible outcome. Such is the case with the Adirondacks, whose fierce geography, unproductive soil and hard weather diverted early American settlers to more benign plots. As a result, a state of raw wilderness maintained into the 19th century.

Some credit the turning point to William H. H. Murray's book, Adventures in the Wilderness, extolling the freshness and purity of the Adirondacks. Before then, most regarded the Adirondacks with disdain. In 1791 William Gilpin noted that "the generality of people" found wilderness dislikable. "There are few," he wrote," "who do not prefer the busy scenes of cultivation to the greatest of nature's rough productions." Mountains and deep woods were things to avoid, or, if one were a merchant, soldier or pilgrim, to go around. Mountains, as a whole, were anathema.

So, how did this mindset change? Some of the shift, perhaps, had to do with the palpable deterioration of the cities of the day, especially smoggy, coal-blackened New York City, with its rising fatigue and social atomization. The success of the agricultural revolution, with its techniques of crop rotation and protective enclosures, created a steep upwards curve in food production, and in turn population. As more people flocked from the fields to the economic opportunities that cities promised, sewage got worse, crime increased, urban blight spread and faith in a higher power that looked after those in need faded. By the middle of the 19th century, more people lived in cities than in the countryside, and more were employed in industry than in agriculture. From this dynamic, tuberculosis spread in the perfect storm of population density, the damp winter climate and the concentration of smoke from factories and homes.

In the wake of this corrosive wave there evolved the romantic notion of the virtues of the simple, clean and healthy life in Nature. It was, however, the industrial revolution that led to vastly improved means of transport, and to a class with disposable income. Those developments allowed and inspired travel to the Adirondacks, where the high mountains and its clean water and air set the minds wandering -- and perhaps got rid of that nasty cough.

It was about this time Ralph Waldo Emerson and Teddy Roosevelt discovered the wild resources and reserves of the Adirondacks. Emerson wrote poetic tributes that influenced a generation to see Nature as something to explore and embrace. Roosevelt, as governor of New York, baked into the Constitution protection with a big concept he called "Forever Wild."

The result of that gazetting is the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, the largest park in the continental United States, larger than the state of Vermont, bigger than Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Glacier and the Great Smoky Mountains parks combined.

And within the blue line that defines this considerable area is an elaborate medley of men, their works and nature. It strives for an exceptional balance, as it contains nearly every kind of land classification: wilderness, wild forest, primitive area, land owned by investment groups and private clubs, industrial land, land held in trust by environmental organizations, private land under state easement and private land without easement, not to mention 103 municipalities within the park, including the enfolding mountain town of Lake Placid, the only place in the U.S. to have hosted the winter Olympic Games twice.

I trundle into town beneath a white flurry, watching the falling flakes reflected in the lake. Despite the tag, the placid body of water next to town is not Lake Placid -- it's Mirror Lake. The namesake is down the road, a bit off the beaten track.

I check into the Mirror Lake Inn, a vertex of rustic luxury, which Condé Nast Traveler readers just ranked as #1 in the Northeast. It's owned by Ed and Lisa Weibrecht, whose son Andrew is Olympic medalist with the U.S. Ski Team.

The Inn is designed in the Arts & Crafts style of the mountain lodges in the Adirondacks (rough-cut wood and unpolished stone), with wood-burning fireplaces in every room and spectacular lake views from almost every vantage. But what makes it extraordinary is the bottomless plate of freshly home-baked chocolate-chip cookies that sit on the Reception table.

Lake Placid is a small town in a big place, to which every point of interest is walkable. I first make my way to the Winter Olympic Museum, the only one of its kind in the U.S., tucked next to the rink where Eric Heiden won five individual gold medals, and set four Olympic records and one world record at the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. The museum is bursting with commemorative posters, torches that look like medieval bludgeons, medals and memorabilia from both the 1932 and 1980 Games. There are video monitors replaying the "Miracle on Ice," the moment when the U.S. hockey team, made up of amateur and collegiate players, defeated the Soviets, who had won nearly every world championship and Olympic tournament since 1954. This, of course, was during the height of the Cold War, just weeks after the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and so the victory was symbolic, at least to those in the West, of some kind of triumph of the greater good.

Jim Rogers, a member of the 1980 Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee and continuing champion for the region, tells me he thinks the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union traces to the Miracle on Ice. His theory: The Soviet athletes were fed unremitting propaganda about their infallibility, and when the West bested them, a belief in regards the whole system cracked a bit, and like a fissure in warming ice, widened and spread until the Fall of the Wall.

Moving further down the lake, along the two-lane Main Street, past a profusion of intersecting circle logos, I turn up come to the Lake Placid Pub & Brewery, and stop in for a lusty ale.
Christopher Ericson, the owner, sidles over and recommends his signature microbrew, Ubu, and tells me a bit of his story.

Chris found his passion early on with a homebrew kit, and almost at once knew he wanted to ferment. In 1996 he and a buddy bought a small pub in Lake Placid. They installed some barrels and started brewing, a first in the area. One of their concoctions was Ubu, named for a patron's chocolate lab, and it became a local legend. He sips, and shares his favorite story about the success his local brew.

"In 2000, the Pub was a stop for some White House interns accompanying Hillary Clinton on a trip through the area. They loved my Ubu Ale, and decided to bring some to President Clinton as a gift. After he tried the brew, the President called in and ordered three cases of Ubu growlers for a party at the White House."

"Ale to the chief," I raise a glass in toast.

I stroll back to the hotel the long way, completing the 2.7-mile loop around the white-rimmed lake, working up an appetite. I take dinner at The View, the only Four Diamond restaurant in Lake Placid, and a leader in the farm-to-table movement, working closely with local and regional meat producers and processors, along with local cheese and vegetable producers, to offer up organic ingredients as fresh as a stone's throw. It also hosts an 8,000-bottle wine cellar, with many of the selections produced nearby. George Bernard Shaw said, "There is no sincerer love than the love of food," and this is a place to fall in love.

With the window open a crack, the morning air infuses vigor and elasticity into every nerve and muscle. My skin is cool, and my frame tingles with anticipation of the adventures ahead. I head over to Whiteface Mountain, which boasts the highest vertical drop in the East, a cool 3,166 feet. In the pure morning light of the mid-morning I sluice down long faces that hosted crushes of Olympic athletes, and can't help but hear the roar of the crowds as I carve a turn in front of the imagined 1980 booth of Jim McKay's.

Then, for the afternoon I head over to The Mt. Van Hoevenberg Olympic Bobsled Run. The track is a twisting chute of steel, concrete and ice, down which you can luge and bobsled at rocket speeds. This is the place, as the philosopher William James wrote more than a century ago, to "aspire downwards."

I go for the luge first, lying on my back, gloves clenched on the sides, feet tight against the front tillers. And as I charge down the run, feeling at the edge of capsizing on the sharp curves, feeling the torque and rattle in my bones, my heart feathering through my breast, it occurs to me that this is a modern example of Forever Wild. There is a fierce feeling of freedom hurtling through the icy air, a savage thrill plummeting down a groove on the brink of catastrophe. The run mimics a descent into the abyss, devouring me by wildness. Tearing down this mountain course, banking through the shrill turns, and shooting through tunnels like a bullet, I feel energized, vibrantly alive and, once at the bottom, I can't stop myself from heading back up the mountain to try the run again, but this time in the bobsled.

It seems Forever Wild is not just a designation, but a state of mind, a measureless but authentic feeling. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who found his own private paradise in the Adirondacks, expressed the eternity of Nature here when he wrote:

"We struck our camp and left the happy hills
The fortunate start that rose on us sank not;
The prodigal sun rested on the land
The rivers gamboled to the sea
And Nature, the inscrutable and mute,
Permitted on her infinite repose
Almost a smile to steal to cheer her sons
As if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed."

Jon Lundin, a long-time resident, takes me for a short hike above the bobsled run, to a point where the light opens up overhead, and where an endless trust of white ridges marches to a tantalizing promise. "Forever Wild allows us to come here and see exactly the same landscape as those who stood here 40 years ago; and if we come back 40 years from now, we'll see the same exact view."

Continue to part two of this story.

For more information on adventures of all kinds in the Adirondacks, and to follow my footsteps, go to: www.orbitz.com/nystate

Hell Is Grand Cayman (VIDEO)

2012-12-05T07:00:00-05:00

Part four of a four-part series on the Cayman Islands

It's the final afternoon in paradise, and I head for Hell.

Hell, it turns out, is a flash in the road near West Bay, named for a swatch of spiky, tortured, black, ironshore that looks like midday in the garden of evil. There are just a few structures in Hell: a bar named Club Infernal; the Devil's Den novelty shop, a post office where one can send a postcard from Hell; and the fire-red barn called The Devil's Hangout, sporting Beelzebub on the side, and the devil on a sheet of plywood in front with a circular hole where the face should be.

After I park on the brimstone pavement, a man wearing a red cape, pointed horns, a sharply trimmed goatee, and carrying a three-pronged pitchfork, bounds over with an arsenal of greetings:

"How the hell are you?" "Hell of a nice day." and "Where the hell you from?"

"From Los Angeles, City of Angels. How do you like living here?" I ask.

"It's a hell of a place."

"How's the weather?"

"Hot as Hell. But living Hell is the best revenge"

"Who the hell are you?"

Turns out Satan is septuagenarian Ivan Farrington, who makes a living dishing out every hellish pun on earth. He bought the shop in 1987 when it was called, like so many other affairs in these islands, "Paradise." But, he says, "My business went straight to Hell, so I renamed it the Devil's Hangout." Now he does brisk commerce selling satanic souvenirs-- t-shirts with slogans such as "I took your advice and came here in a hand basket," as well as coffee mugs, spoons, bumper stickers, whelk shells, and postcards with every mal mot conceivable.

As I pay for a bottle of Scotch bonnet-based Hell sauce Ivan pulls out his calculator and says, "I was born on July 17, 1934." He taps the numbers '17, 7, and 34' into the calculator, turns it upside-down. It reads: "HELL!"

When he hands me change he snorts, "Thank you. Now get the hell out of here."

As I depart, I realize I'm made a wrong turn, ending up on Church road. So, I make the U-Turn, and once again pass through Ivan's infernal town, so at least I can say, with all honesty, I've been to Hell and back.

So, what makes the Cayman Islands different? My undergraduate degree is in Sociology from Northwestern University, and I still pal around with sociologists, and some fret about constant e-mailers and texters losing the everyday connections to casual acquaintances or inconnus who may be sitting a touch away in the café or on the bus. That is the current dynamic in the continental U.S., in Europe, Asia and beyond; but not yet here. It could be said that we in the US are now, more than ever before, building barricades with our devices, employing screens that screen out strangers. Yes, they reinforce family and friends--we can chat and text and twitter with them more than ever--yet we are blocking the chance encounters, the random meetings, and with them the brushes against novel and unfamiliar perspectives, and the shivery flashes of insights. Cayman is different, and it disarms all who visit.

The Caymans Islands achieves a kind of correspondence between belief and place, between inner and outer landscapes, between travelers and locals, as all trace to somewhere else.

Caymanians talk to everyone. They look up at the clear sky. There is a dance to their tread. Adults become children as they swim with stingrays. Businesspeople walk to their appointments, greeting the people they see. Caymanians are connected to the sky and water and land, and, most of all, connected to one another, and to those who visit.

Wandering through the blades of sunlight along the paths of Cayman, witnessing the mastery of environmentalists and entrepreneurs, delving into the music, food, nature and culture, and basking in the welcomes of new acquaintances, I am knocked over with a feeling of being part of something deeply human and universal.

The paradox of the Cayman Islands is that it was a bleak, unwelcoming place that kept people away for much of its history; yet it became a place of gathering for modern questers, and as such, a locus for the exchange of fresh ideas, of fusions of food, song and the arts. It was once considered a Hell on earth, but it became Paradise. And it is today a milieu that transports identity and tolerance, romance and preservation; it unnerves habits and perceptions, unwinds the mind, sheds shells, and along the way leads to the loss of items not usually missed....pins and needles, taxing thoughts, and disquietude.

This is the treasure of the Cayman Islands.

Getting Down On Grand Cayman (VIDEO)

2012-12-03T14:56:51-05:00

Part three of a four-part series on the Cayman Islands.

The hours melt away as I snorkel the brilliant reefs, hike the filigreed interior, draw figures in the sand, collect lovely shells, even paddle around the island in a leaky plastic kayak. I finish reading my one book, Explorers of the Nile, and then stare at a palm tree. I come to admit I'm bored. All these studies about how continued connectedness leads to attention deficit disorder may be true. I'm restless, and anxious. I need a fix. It's time to get back to civilization. So, I pull out my cell, and push the on-button. But nada. It's out of juice. I panic. But then reach deeper into my pack, pull out an Energizer portable charger, plug it into the phone, and make the call. But it goes to a robot voice saying the mailbox is full; call again later. I'm castaway on a desert island.

So, I decide to swim for it. I stash my pack and sandals, towel, hat and sunglasses, and head into shark and jellyfish waters towards the shore of Little Cayman.

I make it, and after arranging for a pick-up of my left-behind gear and electronics, head to the Edward Bodden Airfield, and catch the first flight back to Grand Cayman, and then straight to Camana Bay, the new cosmopolitan development packed with so many high-end restaurants, glam shops and luxury labels some call it Brand Cayman.

I first stop at Books & Books, carrying the kind of collections the best Borders used to offer, and pick up several new titles, in case I'm stranded on a desert island again, or a hurricane hits. I step by the sports stadium, where the Rugby team "No Woman No Try" is practicing. I stop for a delightful meal at Ortanique, a Nuevo Latina Carib-Asian eatery. And I run into Kenneth Hydes, the VP of Product and Experiences, who tells me the billion dollar development is the brain child of Kenneth Dart, heir to the Dart Container Corporation of Michigan, world's largest manufacturer of foam cups. Kenneth gave up US Citizenship in 1994, moved to Cayman, becoming an investor, and a champion of recycling initiatives. His refined taste is represented in Camana Bay, which is more Rodeo Boulevard than Caribbean sugar shack, more Waterford and Cartier than watermelon and giclée, and it gives Cayman, already the most sophisticated stop in the region, an extra lift.

The perfumed tropic air is Sunday's, and at the crack of noon I head out for the contrast to Camana Bay, the Grape Tree Café on the beach in Bodden Town with its locally-famous Sunday Fish Fry. This is where the islanders come, and bask in deep-fried bliss.

"It humbles the stomach," says Alex Bodden, related to the first settler on Cayman back in 1700, and who owns, with his family, the adjacent Texaco gas station and liquor store. The perfect combination platter.

The café itself is the size of breadfruit basket and sizzling away inside are chunks of snapper, mahi, wahoo, swai, chicharrón as well as conch fritters, plantains, cassava and sweet potatoes, all for a fraction the price of the fusion appetizers at the resort hotels and trendier west end eateries. And outside, around thatch-roofed tables, an array of well-nourished Caymanians sit and nosh, swap stories and jokes, and generally enjoy the island life and food.

After lunch I'm hungering for some island music, so head over to Hopscotch Studios, where the Swanky Kitchen Band is in full practice mode for an upcoming wedding performance.

It's an incredibly energized jam -- it's music that softens rock, and could bend the ironwood tree. Between takes I chat with the electric violinist Samuel Rose, the leader. He explains that "swanky" is a Cayman word for lemonade (made with brown cane sugar), and that Cayman kitchen music represents the melting pot that is Cayman, tracing influences back to Irish fiddling and Scottish jig traditions, mixed with African slave rhythms. Then it blends in ostinatos of calypso, reggae and jazz.

"In the old days the kitchen, or caboose as we call it, was the center of Caymanian homes, a detached room in the back where everyone gathered, and so it became a natural place to socialize, celebrate, dance and create music, using cassava graters and other kitchen utensils. We've picked up on that tradition, and are carrying it forward with our own signature." But Samuel doesn't want to jab too long; he wants to skank, and I'm not suffering from an overabundance of good sensations, so I step to the back of the room, pick up my feet in terpsichorean splendor, and surrender to the swank.

A photobomb went viral recently, three women in midst of a vacation photo pose being hugged from behind by a pin-eyed stingray:

This final soft-blue morning, I catch a fishing boat named Heavenly Hooker and head out to find the scene of the slime. We cruise out to a shallow bank in the North Sound, drop anchor, and beneath crystalline waters see a dozen gray-hued underwater bats, the size of pterodactyls, gracefully circulating at our stern. Captain Stacy leaps into the waist-deep brine with a bucket of smelly squid. Immediately the rays lap him, coddle him; cats to catnip. The captain motions me to join, but I'm a bit hesitant, remembering too well Steve Irwin's untimely death by stingray barb in the Great Barrier Reef.

But what good is travel without a little fear? So, I take the leap, and though my mind is trembling on the edge of danger, the soft Portobello mushroom skin of the rays against my own is rather silky and sensuous. It is an agreeable kind of horror.

This interspecies dynamic came about some years ago when fishermen, to avoid the once mosquito infested coastlines (so bad it was, they say, the mosquitos could suck a cow to bloodless death), started cleaning their catch in this calm off-shore channel, and the Atlantic Southern stingrays gathered to nibble at the gut scraps. Soon the stingrays began to associate the sound of a boat motor with food. Now, it's a daily ritual, and the wild rays have gone gentle, gliding about torsos, through splayed legs, planting hickies on exposed human skin while suckling for food, and wrapping wings around their guests in puppy-like hugs, all in symbiotic exchange for morsels of sea meat. "Oh, it feels good to be touched by a stingray," beams Captain Stacey. It is undeniably, ahem, a raydiant experience.

Continue to the next installment of this series.

Avoiding Stress And Taxes In The Cayman Islands (VIDEO)

2012-11-30T13:12:44-05:00

Part two of a four-part series on the Cayman Islands.

I wind back to the western side of the island, to Lighthouse Point, to meet Nancy Easterbrook, the fire behind a critical ecological initiative in the Caribbean: Eat a fish; save the fish.

Nancy, who is managing partner of Divetech, says in recent years the beautiful Indo-Pacific lionfish, studded with toxin-tipped spines, has found its way to the Caribbean, and is not only rapidly pro-creating (one female can produce 2 million eggs a year), but vigorously reducing the populations of native fish, insatiably gobbling up juveniles and hurting the reef habitat. It is an abundance that produces scarcity. Besides the threat of species elimination, there is a looming fiscal threat as well. Since diving the clear waters of the Cayman Islands, so vivid with their extraordinary array of marine life, is a key tourism draw, the loss of native tropical fish could send divers elsewhere, an economically devastating scenario.

How did this scourge get here? Some guess from ballast water released by freighters after passing through the Panama Canal; others believe from home aquariums in Florida, perhaps emptied during a hurricane. However they got here, they're multiplying and devouring like zombies.

Throughout the world overfishing is a critical issue. But not here, at least when it comes to lionfish. In response to the invasion the Department of Environment offers culling courses and licenses special slings to capture and kill lionfish. Several dive companies set aside a day a week for hunting lionfish. And restaurants are buying the fish.

Nassau groupers have the big mouths needed to devour lionfish. They routinely follow divers and consume lionfish speared by divers. If the grouper can learn to attack and consume lionfish without the aid of divers, then natural controls will take effect. After all, in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean lionfish populations are maintained at equilibrium by local predators, such as large groupers and reef sharks.

Nancy hands me a flier called "Cayman Sea Sense," which outlines restaurants that are certified ocean friendly, and says I should boycott eateries that serve grouper, and instead look for places offering up lionfish, such as The Greenhouse, a new café in the neighborhood. The cook and co-owner, Jennifer Skrinska, fries up, in coconut oil, some lightly-floured lionfish, a flash in the pan we hope not...and concocts a lionfish ceviche served with homemade flatbread, which, though small in portions, is terribly tasty....and, if enough folks eat lionfish, encouraging more fishermen to clip the weed fish of the Caribbean, then the other, native fish will remain in healthy numbers. So, eat a fish, save the fish.

After lunch I catch a Cayman Airways Express Twin Otter to Cayman Brac, 90 miles to the northeast. At 12-miles long and a mile wide, it is the second largest of the trine that make up the the Cayman Islands. I check into the Alexander Hotel, have a cold Caybrew at the bar, and head out to explore with local guide Keino Daley.

There are no inclusive resorts in Cayman Brac; no casinos; golf courses; little in the way of shopping, and just a few restaurants. But it has birds, trails, cliffs, reefs, and caves. Brac and its sister island, Little Cayman, move to the rhythms of the natural world, relics of what the Caribbean used to be.

As we slope uphill Keino says the island is named for the limestone bluff, or Brac in Scottish Gaelic, that looms at its peak at 141 feet above the sea, where sits a solar-powered lighthouse, highest structure throughout the islands.

Then we climb down a cliff overlooking Spot Bay, Keino's hometown, and crawl into Peter's Cave, one of 170 littoral caves on the island. Rumors persist this, and other grottoes, were used as lairs by pirates, even perhaps Captain Morgan and Blackbeard, using the dark recesses to hide their booty.

I was an active spelunker in college, and back then used a carbide lamp attached to a helmet to negotiate the stygian passages. Other times throughout the years I've used flashlights, headlamps, even candles and torches. But none of these illuminating accessories are with me now, so instead I tap the flashlight app on my iPhone (which is in turn attached to an Energizer charger so as not to lose juice while deep in some defile), and the dark world is alight.

Though not a deep cave, Peter's has its share of fairy tale beauty and spelean riches. The flowstones look like melting cake icing; the cave coral like popcorn; the draperies like strips of bacon; and the Aragonite crystals like frostwork, or frozen flowers. Though no treasure be found, the long-winged bat of imagination soars here.

Back at the Alexander Hotel the manager Karen Gascoigne wants to show off her latest toy, a two-seater Wheego LiFe, the first electric car on the island, and the first offered to hotel guests in the Caribbean, she says. As we tool to a vanilla-hued beach for sundown she says the car can travel about 100 miles on a single charge (more distance than all Brac roads combined), and can reach 80 miles per hour, though she has yet to test that claim.

Karen says it is the right kind of vehicle for an eco-destination such as Brac. And it is quiet, to match the mood of the place.

Not so that night. It's Friday, but crawling around caves is exhausting, and so after a rum cocktail and some jerk chicken at the Captain's Table, and I take to bed early. But down by the bar it's Cowboy karaoke open mic, and even with earplugs, the party seems to be at the end of my bed. When I was president of Outward Bound I realized, after reading countless accounts of sunsets and rainbows in the journals submitted by participants, that the organization might just be responsible for more bad poetry than any other on earth. And about 2:00 this morning I realize that the Alexander Hotel could be responsible for more bad singing than any other, at least in the Caribbean.

A blue dawn at last swallows the ink of night. I take the twin otter on a 10-minute hop to Little Cayman, the smallest of the archipelago, shaped like a 10-mile-long coral cigar. Only about 160 folks live here year round, so it's more like a family picnic than a municipality. Nobody locks their homes, and they keep the keys in their cars.

The first sign upon walking into the closet-sized airport: "Terminal A, Gate 1," painted by the chortling baggage boy. The next sign is on the road, "Iguanas have the right of way." There are more iguanas than people here. More hermit crabs on the roads than people. More of almost any living native creature than people. This elongated spit hosts the largest bird sanctuary in the Caribbean, full of red-footed boobies, whistling ducks and frigates. Electricity didn't make it here until 1990, and phone service until 1991. This is my kind of place.

I've decided to come here for a digital detox; to surrender to a sanctuary unplugged. But even Little Cayman seems too crowded and connected. There is even Wi-Fi.

So, I hire a little outboard boat to take me to Owen Island, a true desert island off the southern coast of Little Cayman. The isle has no lights; no electricity; no man-made structures; no men or women. Just talcum-soft white sand, driftwood, scrub and a lagoon.

But as the little boat is pulling away after dropping me off I yell to Jeremy, the driver, "When will you come back to pick me up?"

"Call me when you're ready," he shouts over the din.

"But I'm on a digital detox." I protest as he disappears over the blue waves.

I dig into my pack, exhume my buried cell phone, and turn it on, against the self-imposed rules. There is, to my amazement, a signal. But the battery is low, so I turn the phone off and entomb it again.

Continue to the next installment of this series.

The Magic Of The Cayman Islands (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

2012-11-29T07:00:00-05:00

Part one of a four-part series on the Cayman Islands.

An accident of geography and geology, the three coral islands that make up the Cayman archipelago are cursed with terrible soil, minimal terrestrial relief and a lack of rivers or lakes. This land was not settled by the Caribs, Arawaks, Tainos or any other autochthons, when Christopher Columbus sailed by in 1503.

The sharp, black dolomite outcroppings in some places evoked Hades rather than any sort of haven. The first recorded English visitor was Sir Francis Drake in 1586, who reported that the crocs, or caymanas, were edible, as well as the many turtles -- but that note didn't persuade immigration until around 1700, when the first recorded permanent inhabitant of the Cayman Islands, Isaac Bodden, of Welsh descent, was born on Grand Cayman. After him came pirates, refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, shipwrecked sailors and slaves -- but not many as the barren land couldn't really support plantations or communities of consequence, as nearby Jamaica and Cuba could.

So, it grew up a place with few people. Instead the world came to Cayman, into its coves, sounds, channels, runs and bays. And that diversity of settlers may have saved it from the worn-out, overtaxed fate other islands have suffered. It became a place where everyone was from somewhere else -- over 100 different nationalities are represented today -- and that ripened into an ethos that invites strangers into the conversation.

The Caymans Islands float at a magical inflection point influenced by three continents and a radiance of nearby islands. Buccaneers prowled about in search of provisions, safe harbors and remote spots to bury doubloons. The anchored ships were in a way like bees pollinating flowers in gardens far from where they started, spreading ideas, arts and cultures over this trinity of islands. They brought different music, dance, foods, customs, crafts, beliefs and new human constructs. The travelers and adventures found shelter and social interaction, and the seeds of multiculturalism were sown.

I take the Bird of Paradise, Cayman Airways, from Miami, a Boeing 737-300, and am delighted to find the carrier allows two free checked bags, the exception these days. It is also the only carrier I've ever flown that offers rum punch on the service tray. Turns out the punch is supplied by the Tortuga Rum Cake factory, started by a former pilot, Robert Hamaty, whose son, Basil, is our captain.

As we pull to the gate at Owen Roberts Airport there is a giant green iguana on the tarmac. No ordinary airport, this. No ordinary airline. There have been dozens of airlines in the Caribbean that launched and then fell into the ocean of bankruptcies. But Cayman Airways has been around since 1968, and now serves half a dozen cities in the U.S., as well as Cuba, Jamaica, Panama and Honduras.

On the taxi ride to the Westin Casuarina, the driver, almost to the point of overprize, crows about how safe Cayman is. "You can walk anywhere, anytime, mon. The beaches have no litter, no vendors, no hassles, no homeless, just pure sugar sand." I live in Venice Beach, near the Google offices, and despite the home prices and wealth, there is a large indigent population and a crime rate not to be envied. How do they do it here?

In 1966, legislation passed enabling the banking industry in the Cayman Islands, and that changed everything. The British Overseas Territory went from a sleepy backwater with scarce resources to the fifth-largest banking center in the world with trillions on deposit. Today it has branches of 40 of the world's 50 largest banks. One five-story building in the capital George Town, The Ugland House, no bigger than a boutique hotel, houses over 18,000 corporations.

Business and financial services contribute 30% of the GDP, and employ more than 20% of the labor force. The Cayman Islands has the highest per capital income in the Caribbean, no taxes and almost no unemployment. And it has evolved into a matchlessly clean, pristine and pleasing destination for travelers.

At the northern end of Seven-Mile Beach (it clocks in at five miles and a few minutes long, but that's the nature of Cayman; everything is a little bigger than reality), I check into the hotel and take a room where I can see the powdery sweep of sand, the tufted tops of palms soughing in the breeze and the tourmaline waters that will somewhere to the west brush the shores of Central America.

The tumbling sun bathes the remnants of the day in gold, the norm here I'm told, and radiates romance. Barefoot couples stroll the seam between sand and water, hand-in-hand, while others sip champagne on lounge chairs as the tropic air seduces. By the reckonings of a number of sand experts, this is the most romantic beach in the Caribbean. It's as close to living brochureware, or a set for a diamond commercial, as I've seen in real life. Later I chat with Joanne Brown, CEO & Creative Director of a company called Celebrations, a wedding planning company, and she says business is booming. Many folks come here, she says, and are bewitched by the beaches, the diving, the sunsets, the food and wine and decide to return to tie the knot.

Shuttles of birdsong nudge me awake the morning next. After a tropical fruit breakfast I drive east to Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park to see first-hand one of the most remarkable species comeback stories in modern history: the back-from-the-brink saga of the blue iguana.
Just a decade ago, the Grand Cayman blue iguana teetered on the cliff of oblivion, with only 10 to 25 left in the wild, all on this one island. Unaccustomed to predation, it fell victim to an invasion of stray dogs, feral cats and rats. Many ended up as road kill as they sunbathed on increasingly busy streets.

But as of my visit the turquoise-colored reptile has returned to promising numbers and is no longer listed as a critically endangered species. It dodged the bullet of extinction.

With a switchblade strut that telegraphs sense of purpose, John Marotta, head warden of the Blue Iguana Recovery Program, shows me around the captive breeding facility. He says the blue iguana now has a population of about 750 and is on the path to achieving the goal of restoring 1,000 blue iguanas to Grand Cayman's shrub lands. "If I'm successful, I'll work myself out of a job," John volunteers. "And I'm happy with that."

The blue iguana is the largest native species on Grand Cayman, up to five feet in length and weighing in at more than 25 pounds (the native crocodiles were bigger, but they are all gone.) The Blue Iguana once ranged over most of the island's coastal areas and interior dry lands, but without anyone paying attention, they almost vanished.

Blue iguanas are beautiful, with a pimpy fashion sense, but they also have that red-eyed Godzilla look that evokes menace, and they are in fact dangerous. John has 37 stitches from various bites over the seven years he's worked to help the coldblooded critters, as well as a dislocated thumb. But one friendly fella, Methuselah, 27 years young, lets John hold and pet him -- and even allows me to rub his spikes and scratch the back of his head. John says the charismatic nature of the blue iguanas has helped raise the monies needed to bring them back, but also has helped habitat protection, as the unglamorous scrubland that few value, but which is important from an ecological standpoint, is now being set aside and protected.

John explains the program helps give juvenile iguanas a head start by protecting them for their first two vulnerable years of life, when they are still small enough to be easy snack food. Then, with radio monitors attached, they are released into the wild.

After an hour of barely containing his feral enthusiasm for saving the blue iguanas, John excuses himself, as a school group is approaching, and he wants to direct energies to them. A dozen years ago I did a stint as president of Outward Bound, and one initiative under my watch was "expeditionary learning," in which students participate in outdoor, hands-on education, rather than from books or lectures. "This is the way to get them involved in life-long conservation," John echoes, and bolts off to his outdoor classroom, where the future is being written with lightning.

Continue to the next installment of this series.

Quest For Wonder: Galapagos Islands (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

2012-10-31T07:00:00-04:00

To find the mystic islands of diversity we travel back along the spine of the Andes, back out into the Pacific and off the coast of Ecuador until we bump into the fragile island chain known as the Galapagos.

At first glance, the Galapagos don't evoke wonder, but something akin to dread. The landscape of this island chain straddling the equator is barren, severe, ragged and raw. Volcanoes still steam and fire, and in some places the ground is barely cool enough to step. It's like the birthplace of the planet.

Somehow the Galapagos, vulcanized by lava and sun, evolved to host among the most biologically intact places on the planet. Here, in full showcase, is the wonder of diversity.

When the first European explorers landed here, in 1535, they found no ancient gravesites or ceremonial buildings -- no trace that a permanent settlement had ever been established. Over the next 300 years, only sailors, whalers and pirates came here, but nobody stayed for long. But tens of thousands of years before that, the islands had been colonized -- not by humans, but by a bunch of mismatched creatures.

When Charles Darwin collected specimens here in 1835 he noticed subtle but dynamic differences between the flora and fauna of the various islands. What he found would change the way we see the tapestry of the world.

Darwin was only 26 when he approached the islands as shipboard naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle. He wrote in his journal:

In a few days' time the Beagle will sail for the Galapagos Islands. I look forward with joy and interest to this, both as being somewhat nearer to England and for the sake of having a good look at an active volcano.

Darwin's interest in volcanoes was inspired by geologist Charles Lyell, who posited that changes in the earth's surfaces occurred over time by natural forces, rather than in one fell swoop by divine creation.

And the Galapagos looked like prime proof of Lyell's theories, islands formed by active volcanoes.

Like Hawaii, the Galapagos grew from a "hot spot," a volcanic vent in the submarine surface that built first one, then another cone-shaped island rising from the sea.

As the earth's surface moved -- a theory later developed as plate tectonics -islands formed in different places, with the older islands in the east, and the younger more rugged islands of Isabella and Fernandina to the west.

The Beagle spent just three weeks in the Galapagos, but it was time enough for Darwin's earth-shattering discoveries.

As Darwin explored the Galapagos he let curiosity be his guide, and in time, unpuzzled what he saw. In doing so, he recast the study of life.

Darwin collected small finch-like birds from three islands. After returning to England he discovered there were 13 different species of Galapagos finch among those he had collected, a number that made no sense in the science of the day. Why were there so many closely related species in such a small area?

A seismic notion began to form in Darwin's mind, with aftershocks that reverberate today. Darwin theorized that species evolve by means of natural selection.

In its simplest terms, natural selection is the process by which only the organisms that best adapt to their environment will survive and pass on their genetic characteristics to succeeding generations.

Darwin wrote in his notorious book, The Origin of Species, "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Sailors always knew these islands were different -- they were called Las Encantadas, the Enchanted Islands, the name by which Herman Melville knew them.

Without predators for tens of thousands of years, the creatures here grew up without fear. It's an Ark of distinctive wildlife, from blue-footed boobies to red-billed tropic birds, iguanas that swim and cormorants that don't fly.

The Galapagos got its popular name from the Spanish word for saddleback, the name given to the shells of the giant tortoises found here -- big enough, and docile enough, to ride--but strictly forbidden.

Giant tortoises are the first wonder of the Galapagos - the world's largest tortoise, Lonesome George, weighed in at nearly 900 pounds, was almost 6 feet long, and lived over 100 years in the wild. He died earlier this year, as possibly the last member of the Pinta Island tortoise, a species once found only on an islet near the chain's biggest island, Isabela. Although tortoises may live to as old as 250, the oldest known Galapagos tortoise was Harriet, who died in an Australian Zoo in 2006 at the age of about 172.

Harriet was captured in the Galapagos in 1835 by the young naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin.

Before human contact its estimated there were over a quarter million tortoises on the Galapagos, in 15 known subspecies. Each subspecies was found on a separate island, with differences from the height of the domed shell to the length of the neck to the pattern of plates on the carapace. By the 1970s, because of poachers and collectors, those numbers were down to a fraction. But they're coming back due to the efforts of scientists, conservationists and mindful travelers.

Kayaking is a great way to explore. Natalie De Roy, the niece of an old friend of mine, is young, passionate and informed about her home, and she offers to take me for a paddle. We see all manner of colorful fish, Sally Lightfoot crabs, rays, eels, and penguins.
There are over 20 penguin species, many in Antarctica, a couple in the southernmost regions of South America, Australia and Africa. But penguins on the equator? How did these flightless birds migrate thousands of miles over open ocean to find themselves here, chasing schools of sardines in the tropical waters of Bartolome Island?

The closest relative to the Galapagos penguin is the Humboldt Penguin, who follows the cold-water currents along the shores of Chile as far north as southern Peru.

So even though the Galapagos are on the equator, it's the cold water that wells up from the depths of the Pacific that keeps these birds alive -- or have so far.
For like many of the species found on the Galapagos, the penguin is endangered, with only about 1500 thought to be alive today. On Isabela Island, introduced predator species like cats, dogs and rats, brought by the island's human inhabitants, have decimated their numbers.

Oil pollution and commercial fishing too have make life a struggle for these small birds, usually less than 10 inches and only 5 pounds in weight.

Even global warming might have a hand in their decline. The oscillation of El Nino seems to bring ever-warmer waters to the Galapagos, making long-term survival for the penguins, and other species, an open question. But with the questions, with visitation and curiosity, come the keys to dreams not remembered.

Some of the other islands' inhabitants, like iguanas, drifted in on rafts of debris from South America. Still others, like finches, were blown off course on passages across the Pacific. Isolated and untouched by humans and predators, the diverse and valiant tenants of the Galapagos are descendants of these castaways.

The Galapagos have been called a natural laboratory of evolution. But it took a curious traveler, Darwin, to come here, wander, observe and finally rock the world with his incendiary set of ideas.

These 19 volcanic islands, like fragments of a fallen moon, gave rise to the theory that challenged the established notion of how nature works.

It is through diversity that we catch a glimpse of unity, the continuous and the discrete, the forest and the trees--pieces of the mosaic that give us the sum of life.

I witnessed so many wonders on this journey. The landscapes of South America serve up such a surplus of wonder, wonder that quickens the blood, enlivens thoughts, and leads, by degrees, to joy. Why is this important? Because these feelings embolden us, and at the same time bring us humility, but perhaps most magnificently, they dial us back to an earlier time.
How, then, do we find the coordinates of Wonder?

Well, look as a child does and travel with eyes wide to discovery, because travel allows us to begin anew.

The APT/KQED television special "Richard Bangs' South America: Quest for Wonder" is airing nationally now on PBS. Click here for air dates and more info.

A Quest For Wonder: Machu Picchu

2012-10-29T07:00:00-04:00

In order to experience the many wonders in South America today, we need to fly. And Lima, a short direct flight from major US gateways, is the concourse for much of the continent. From here it's a quick hop along the rugged southern spine of the Andes to Cusco, gateway to a lost empire.

These are the Andes, the world's longest mountain chain, crowned by the highest peaks in the New World.

The ancient capital of the Incas, Cusco, nests at more than 11,000 feet above the sea. It's here I pick up the trail of wonder, and one of its key signposts, beauty.

Once the site of two colliding cultures, Cusco today is a striking blend of Inca and European sensibilities. Like most travelers who hail from sea level, I like to take it easy the first day in Cusco so my body can acclimatize to the altitude. Hotels, like La Casona Inkaterra, run by my old friend Jose Koechlin, greet guests with tea made from coca leaves, and it eases the entry into the high Andes.

Despite the rugged terrain and thin air, people have been living in the high Andes for over 5,000 years. Building complex societies based on kings, gods, gold and things of great beauty. The greatest of these people, the Incas, ascended to power in the 1400s, in part because of their brilliant engineering skills. The ability to build roads--25,000 miles worth--along with the fact that their domain was almost as vast as the Roman Empire, earned them the name "Romans of the New World."

Wonder is an offensive against the repetition of what we know. And the highlands of Peru brim with mysteries, beautiful things we don't understand, such as the Festival of Qoyllur Rit'I which brings local peoples in their Sunday finery down from the high Andes to honor the Lord of the Star Snow.

And everyday life seems to go on almost oblivious to the beauty that infuses it at places like the Sunday market at Pisac. Vendors, buyers, tourists... foods, fabrics and faces -- all elements of a living canvas still thriving in the Andes.

The Inca possessed a cultivated sense of aesthetics, interweaving the vivid and the graceful in their daily lives. And these aspects of Incan beauty are alive and flourishing today.

That's not what the Conquistadors had in mind when they set out to loot the treasure of the Inca. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: where the Inca saw the tears of the sun in the gold they crafted, the Spanish saw only riches to be melted down for the cathedrals of Europe. Although the conquerors took nearly everything they coveted, beauty persisted. The Inca maintained their arts and crafts, traditions, music and ceremonies, and perhaps most significant, they managed to keep hidden a sacred citadel of thrilling beauty.

The whereabouts of the Sacred City of the Inca was lost to lore, despite efforts of latter-day treasure hunters, historians and archaeologists. But in 1911 an Ivy League trained American named Hiram Bingham showed up in Peru possessed with the idea of finding the lost city of the Incas. Some say he was the inspiration for Indiana Jones.

Jose and I set out as well, though in a fashion more comfortable than Bingham. We take the Inca Rail, which spirals into the valley like the shell of a nautilus.

It's like both being in, and watching a gallery of fine art -- moving through halls of stunning landscapes and portraits, past period pieces and natural sculptures, back, back through time.
On the July morning when Bingham crested this rise, to his amazement, he saw the ruins of an overgrown stone city perched on a narrow saddle. "The sight," he said, "held me spellbound. Literally, paralyzed as by enchantment, the spell of wonder."

Bingham called the place by its local name: Machu Picchu, which means "ancient summit."
Machu Picchu is a destination every traveler aspires to experience. Why? It may be because it is just so transcendentally beautiful. This is the wonder of beauty.

Standing here, the world spreads out before me-the deep valley of the Urubamba River and the distant ridge of the Andes that encircle Machu Picchu. It's as if we're flying, with a condor's view of this riddle of a ruin. Temples, terraces, shrines and sundials, all pieces of an exquisite puzzle.

Was this the royal retreat of the Inca, where the beautiful artifacts and icons, where the wealth and wonder of the ancients were once hidden?

Or a religious site? The complex is dominated by sacred temples and shrines...
Or perhaps there's an archaeo-astronomical explanation. Was Machu Picchu a giant observatory? Tracking the sun's passage across the sky?

The Temple of the Sun was crafted in the traditional method -- carved granite, no mortar --but with one striking difference: each block was angled back so that it would form a perfect crescent shape to surround the sacred stone within. Its two windows point to auspicious constellations, and align with the summer solstice, so the sun's first rays strike the interior stone.

Maybe we'll always have more questions than answers about Machu Picchu. But in the mystery there is a beauty that transcends the rabble of the senses.

When I ask Jose how this place affects those who come, he says, "People come here and they are awed by beauty, they are awed by what we're experiencing right now. We feel that there's something that moves us into just coming into yourself, some sort of introspection, those rare moments in modern life where you can actually get to be with yourself. How could you not be moved? There's something that people express when they go home, there's something that moves them."

Beauty is sometimes best when partially veiled, when it is an ambiguous, unfinished narrative. It fires us with wonder.

The Inca knew something we seek. When order combines with complexity, when elegance appears effortless, and there is a coherent but unspoken relationship among the parts, then there is enduring beauty.

Our imaginations are stirred by the beauty of the Andes, by its wildness, by the precision in the palace that brushes the stars. But there is a world of beauty in the little things, too, nature's own exquisite handiwork.

Some of nature's most superb creations are on a small scale, like the garden of native orchids at the Inkaterra Machu Picchu hotel and sanctuary. The Inkaterra is a leader in sustainable practices, including the preservation of the cloud forest. Through that good work 372 types of wild orchids spill open in its garden, one of the largest collections of orchids in the world.
Where does such diversity come from? The answer isn't readily evident here in the lush cloud forest, but rather in a cluster of inimitable islands that lay over a thousand miles to the west.

A Quest For Wonder: Easter Island (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

2012-10-24T07:00:00-04:00

From Iguaçu I travel west over the Andes and beyond, over one of the emptiest stretches of water on the planet, en route to Easter Island, a fine dot on the map of the Pacific. If Iguaçu is full presence, Eastern Island is absence. Fretted by incessant winds, it is surrounded by a million square miles of open sea. And the nearest solid land you can see from here... is the moon.

This tiny rock in the middle of nowhere, on the way to nowhere, has bewildered and beguiled explorers, scientists, artists and visitors for centuries. But only its solitary stone sentries, some standing, some fallen, know the island's real story.

Wonder is what provokes through opposition of what makes sense, and so little makes sense here. It's a twisted plot that turns on creation and destruction; a whodunit; a cautionary tale... and one of the greatest unsolved riddles of all time.

Why did an ancient people erect the massive stone figures that haunt this remote island? How did they do it? And why did such an accomplished people nearly vanish into thin air?
Answers are as insubstantial as sand. The footprints of those who once knew have long washed away. Yet we are inexorably drawn to things we don't understand...compelled, by nature, to wonder.

Easter Island is a place to meditate upon mysteries. Nowhere can such colossal statues be found in such a small place in such great numbers created by so few people. It is the richest, most bewitching open-air museum in existence.

Many are familiar with the outlines of the story: Once blessed with bounty -- flocks of native birds, a forest of palm trees and a sea abundant with life -- Easter Island was, for a time, Eden-like.

Sometime in a period still uncertain, seafaring Polynesians, masters of wind, stars and current, set sail in outrigger canoes. Defying all odds, they crossed a vast void of ocean, until they bumped into this igneous spit, and then settled here, perhaps because of the fresh water source in its crater lakes. Over time, they carved and erected these great moai, the island's iconic, brooding statues.

Then suddenly, over the course of a few short hundred years, the society buckled, then collapsed. The population shrank to a shadow, leaving only the mute moai as witness to what had happened.

Anthropologists tell us the people who settled this island were Polynesian. Archaeologists tell us the moai were carved from volcanic stone. But no one can explain why the inhabitants spent so much time fashioning the statues, and moving them around like giant chess pieces... and why they toppled them when they were done.

The island received its cartographic celebrity from the Dutch sea captain Jacob Roggeveen, the first European to visit the island on Easter Sunday, 1722.

One sailor wrote of the huge stone heads they found: "all made with skill, whereat we wondered not a little."

Up to 13,000 people once inhabited the island, but by the time Captain Cook arrived in 1774, most of the land had been deforested, and only a thousand called it home. Like so many, Cook was amazed by what he found. "It was incomprehensible to me," he wrote, "how such great masses could be formed by a set of people among whom we saw no tools."
The extinct volcano Rano Rarku provided the volcanic tuff from which the island's almost 900 moai were chiseled and carved. Archeologists think it took 5 or 6 men, using hand tools, a full year to complete each statue.

But how did they move these monoliths, some standing thirty feet high and weighing up to twenty tons? Some suggest felled palm trunks acted as rollers as teams of hundreds pushed and pulled the statues into place. Others say they were walked, as movers might walk a large piece of furniture across the room. And there are those who believe there was no human assist at all, that the statues marched themselves across the raw-boned isle.

At Tongariki stands a line of giant Moai, one crowned with a massive stone headdress. The achievement of donning this fellow's hat might be compared with putting a man on Mars today. How did they do this? The only thing to do in the face of the incomprehensible is to wonder.

Most of the moai were felled for reasons obscured by the long shadows of time. Only recently have several been re-erected to their previous viewpoints, and the restoration work continues
Contact with the outside world was not kind to Rapa Nui, and in time the island seemed to shrink into itself. European ships brought slave traders and disease. Then there was the islanders' own undoing, still a mystery. But by 1860, just 111 people survived and today's inhabitants are the descendants.

After missionaries arrived on the island, much of the native culture was suppressed and, in some cases, erased, but since the 1960's Rapa Nuian culture has undergone a renaissance. The people of Easter Island today are breathing mana, or life spirit, into their native arts, language and culture.

Controversies still rage as hard as the sea into the cliffs on this three-million-year-old volcanic spit. Theories slip past like fish in flight.

Many guesses for Rapa Nui's early undoing have been hazarded: climate change, overpopulation, volcanic eruption, rat infestations, cannibalism, war. Though we continue to search for answers, it's the non-answers that needle and keep us wondering. Why is this important? Because knowing begins with not-knowing.

But while we fail to grasp the narratives long vanished, there is a yearning wonder in the attempt. Was what happened here a moment of dizzyingly singularity? Or is it a crystal ball to our own future? What are the costs of our own choices? What can we learn to avoid this fate?
In recent years, tourism has boosted the economy of Easter Island. But the people of Rapa Nui well know that if the number of tourists increases past a certain threshold, the island will once again have insufficient resources to handle the growth. The people of this island are no strangers to overpopulation, and its consequences, so great efforts are being made to keep this address sustainable, in balance, for locals and visitors.

From the moment visitors' touchdown, these efforts are noticeable. Even the offices of the island's leading airline are designed to be green and sustainable.

The newly built Hangaroa Eco Village is based on the Polynesian kainga, or village, integrating respect for the fragile lands of Rapa Nui with a laudable cultural sensitivity.

"On the entire surface of the island, there is not a tree that merits being called that," wrote naturalist George Forster, who accompanied Captain Cook.

No matter how the island's trees were lost--cutting them down to move the Moai, or for building, firewood and weapons, or from a plague of Polynesian rats arriving with the island's first settlers -- thanks to work from CONAF, The National Forest Corporation of Chile, trees native to Oceania are now being introduced in an effort to re-forest land denuded for centuries.

And so, the guardianship of this once-broken island seems in good hands now, its tonic of wonders intact, and sustaining.

The wind whispers here, like the voices of carvers past. All we are left with is the magnet of mystery, which pulls travelers to this powerful place.

The mysteries lay folded in wonder. The great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda wrote of this place: "And in this capital without walls made of light, salt, stone and thought, like the rest I looked at and left frightened by the cleanly clarity of mythology, the statues surrounded by blue silence.... Easter Island, where everything is an altar, where everything is an altar of the unknown."

The blind eyes of Easter Island watch our comings and goings, impassively, as they always have. Most gaze inward, toward the center of this island universe; but a few look out to sea, wondering, perhaps, what lies beyond. Can they as well see across time as space, and know what is coming in the Moai's future -- in our today?

The APT/KQED television special "Richard Bangs' South America: Quest for Wonder" is airing nationally now on PBS. See this link for air dates and info.