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On Top of the World…. And Out of a Plane

There are plenty of spectacular (some might say crazy) activities for thrill seekers in this wonderful planet of ours. Swimming with great white sharks in South Africa, for instance. Or cycling down the Camino del Muerte, or ‘Death Road’, in Bolivia. Others love the buzz of snowboarding off piste high up on a vertiginous peak, or climbing solo on equally dizzying overhangs. But I’ve just found out about a new challenge, which might just pip the lot…

Everest Skydive it’s called. Yes, you did read that correctly. A skydive over Everest. Incredible, huh.

 

‘The ultimate skydive experience’ – and you can’t really disagree – is being offered by Captive Adventure, a new company looking to create once-in-a-lifetime adventures for the adventurous spirited. The company were set up after the great success of ‘The Everest Test’ in 2009, the world’s highest game of cricket… proving just how extraordinarily dedicated and barmy cricket fans and players can be.

For this expedition they’ve teamed up with World Record breaking adventurer, Nigel Gifford OBE (who scaled Everest as a climber in 1976 and organised the first ever Everest skydive in 2008), for what they hope will be the first of a series of adventure experiences… I wonder what they’ll do to top this!

The trip (www.skydive-everest.com) runs from 30 September to 12 October 2010. After a five-day acclimatisation trek through the Khumbu Valley the daredevil expedition members will take their leap of faith from a Pilatus Porter P6 Turbine aircraft at 29,500 feet – the cruising height of most passenger aircraft – from within 6 miles of the top of Mount Everest. They’ll drop at speeds of up to 140mph before landing on the highest drop zone in the world, Syangboche, at 12,000 feet above sea level… higher than the total jumping height of most ‘normal’ skydives.

Superlatives abound with this sensory overload of a lifetime.

The 8,848-metre-high mountain – Sagarmartha as its known by Nepalis – will be in full view for expedition members as they enjoy 60 seconds of free-fall (compare this to the usual 10-20 seconds for most jumps). Then, parachutes safely open, the skydivers will be able to savour a gentle descent amidst some of the highest mountains on the planet.

It’s not just for experts. Beginners are welcome to take part and will skydive in tandem with a leading skydiver from the Swiss Boogie Skydiving Team.

It doesn’t come cheap. A solo jump costs £15,250 (roughly $23,290 US) and the tandem skydive is £20,000 (around $30,500 US), with a portion of the fee donated to local charities in Nepal.

But a fair price, you might say, for a snapshot of the fear, challenge and sense of achievement that Everest has provided for so many climbers over the years.

The ultimate high in every sense.

Mavida Balance Hotel, Salzburg, Austria

It’s Saturday morning and Chapter Square – the Kapitelplatz – is alive with the sound of music. Not the music of the von Trapp family, nor the music of Salzburg’s most famous son, Mozart – in Mozartplatz, a statue of him stands tall, overlooking a winter ice rink and a huddle of wooden market stalls selling Christmas decorations, glasses of gluwein, spicy bockwursts and mustard-topped frankfurters….

But for once this is not a Mozart moment. A rat-a-tat of marching drums and pipes drifts across the square, followed by the clip-clop of shod hooves and the shuffle of polished boots. All becomes clear when 100 men enter from a side street, wearing immaculate uniforms, tricornes on their heads, frilly shirts and socks pulled up to their knees. Cavalry and infantry come to a halt, some lining up in front of the grand baroque cathedral, the Dom, others on the opposite side of the square with the 900-year-old Hohensalzburg Fortress as an imposing backdrop. And then the small contingent from the village of Zell am See raise their rifles and let off a volley into the crisp sky.

 

Later, as I head out of the city towards Zell, I ask my taxi driver about the troops. “I’m not sure,” he says. “There are so many occasions like this in Salzburg – any excuse for the men to get out their lederhosen and play oompah music!”

Zell is an hour-and-a-half’s journey from Salzburg. It’s a pleasant transfer through pretty passes. Looming above are high peaks, ice and snow etched on the upper slopes, the result of the first dusting of the winter season.

At the Zeller See, a beautiful alpine lake, my driver pulls away from the shore road into surroundings that are unexpectedly suburban, to drop me off at the Mavida Balance Hotel.

‘Ma vida’ (in Spanish it means to adopt a certain attitude to life – to enjoy it and to celebrate food and drink) is the region’s first design hotel. It seeks to be an alpine sanctuary, a place to restore personal harmony. And, it has to be said, despite its rather utilitarian appearance and the car park on the doorstep, it does this well.

Unlike many hotels in the region, there’s no cutesy rustic Alpine theme, but the sharp angles and warm tones that characterise the interiors of many of the Design Hotels group, of which Mavida is a part. The design is minimal, the bedrooms small and compact, but with pillows the size of hay bales and cosy beds positioned so that you look out of the floor-to-ceiling window towards the snow-capped Schmittenhöhe mountain, framed by curtains like a theatre stage.

‘Relaxation by design’ is Mavida’s mantra, and there’s a ‘sleeping menu’ in the room, should you prefer a sturdier mattress or a different softness of pillow. The options already provided seem comfortable enough: I slip into a deep sleep for 12 hours straight. After this hibernation, I’m fortunate that the Mavida has such generous breakfast hours, allowing guests to wander in until 11:30 am. I take full advantage of this leisurely start to the day, happy to adopt my own interpretation of the hotel’s underlying premise of ‘balance’.

But there are plenty of things to do should you feel more energetic. The hotel runs a daily programme of indoor and outdoor activities: from Nordic walking beside the lake and snowshoe hiking in the foothills, to Pilates, yoga and circuit training classes. Personal horoscope sessions are another option, but I decide to follow my own path, ambling along the 3-kilometre-or-so trail through farmland to the hotel’s private beach area.

The path is a cross-country ski trail in winter and makes for a pleasant Sunday stroll, passing other walkers who smile and say ‘Grüß Gott’ in greeting.

Back at the hotel and it’s time to check out the spa. I’ve had a crick in my neck since the flight from London and a 50-minute full-body massage soon fixes that, leaving me feeling revitalised and relaxed. Massage is, however, but one of the many treatments that earned the hotel the Gala Spa Award 2009 for its ‘innovative spa concept’, the first time this prestigious international prize has made its way to Austria. There are light, sound and even weightlessness treatments, plus two saunas, an outdoor and an indoor pool with waterbeds for relaxation, and a private spa suite for two.

In the street outside, the bells of a small church sound faintly every 15 minutes, a gentle reminder that time is passing, even if it seems so much longer here than normally. This tranquillity continues with afternoon ‘calm time’ in the lobby and stylish lounge bar. Although it’s not busy during my stay I imagine the latter – laid out around an enticing 360-degree open fire – being a super place for the après-ski crowd to thaw off, sip cocktails and share stories of their day on the slopes, before moving up a floor to the gourmet restaurant to carry on their merriment.

Of Moose and Men

Phuh! It was a strange sound, a sudden burst, like a whale emptying its blowhole, following an equally unusual, almost bovine noise: long, deep and guttural, haunting too, like the distant rumble of thunder.

“A male moose,” explained Ronnie Ward, who’d produced this unexpected and remarkable impression. Ronnie is one of the Mi’kmaq, the First Nations people of Maritime Canada, and the moose – a noble if ungainly creature – has for centuries been a crucial part of his ancestors’ lives. Moose skins were used for clothing; bones and antlers for medicine and tools; its dark meat for sustenance. And the sound of the moose was evidently Ronnie’s party piece for visitors to the Metepenagiag Heritage Park where he works – a place that brings to life the culture and history of his forefathers.

These ancient Indian lands were named Nova Scotia and New Brunswick by the European settlers: provinces that are small by Canadian standards, but appear boundless and unpopulated to my British eyes. Long straight highways are fringed with forests thick with pine and beech, while others pass through pretty villages like Wolfville in the Annapolis valley, an area reclaimed from the sea by the descendents of French settlers, the Acadians, for farmland.

In the eighteenth century, the British enacted a ruthless policy towards the Acadians across the provinces, forcefully deporting those who refused to pledge allegiance to the British Crown. Some were sent to other British North American colonies, others to France or Louisiana – where the word Acadian gradually became ‘cajun’.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s nineteenth-century poem Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie, about a woman and her lover who are separated by the Great Expulsion, is a set text in many North American schools, and it is possible today to follow the Evangeline Trail created by the local tourist authorities through the eponymous heroine’s Acadia.

Driving along the trail, I try to imagine the swathe of destruction as villages were torn down and communities driven out of their homes, but it’s hard to visualise such turmoil as the morning rainclouds begin to clear and sunlight brightens up the furrowed fields of this gently rolling and verdant valley. The only disputes nowadays are over a dollar or two at the yard sales on the road out of Wolfville, where neighbours wander over one another’s otherwise pristine lawns picking through cast-offs for bargains.

Beyond the town, the land reverts once more to fields of asparagus and orchards of apple trees, their branches speckled with pink blossom. Farms with bright red barns stand out against the open farmland, while the sky above is streaked with ripples of cloud like a crumpled duvet. Patches of violet lupins sway in the breeze as the silhouette of a bird swoops into the scene, an eagle hovering on the gentle thermals overhead, its eyes searching for carrion.

Lunch is at a local vineyard, where buttercups grow amid rows of vines that slope away towards a smudge of water on the horizon – the Bay of Fundy, a vast stretch of water between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, which splits at its end like a whale’s tale. An astonishing 100 billion tonnes of seawater flow in and out of here from the Atlantic each day. Its famous 50-foot tidal range has inspired the annual ‘Not Since Moses’ fun-run, at Five Islands in the Minas Basin of the bay, in which competitors run along the sea floor when the tide is out, scurrying to the finish before it comes back in.

The Mi’kmaq believed that these islands were created by Glooscap, the Native Indian god-like man who lived on the high bluffs of Cape Blomidon. A disrespectful beaver, the story goes, had built a large dam and flooded Glooscap’s garden. He threw giant handfuls of mud at the beaver and smashed the beaver’s dam, which allowed the water to pour in, thus creating the Bay of Fundy tides. Glooscap also taught the people about the constellations and stars, and how to hunt, fish and cultivate.

Driving into New Brunswick, I wonder what Glooscap would make of modern methods – husbands returned from their day’s labours in the offices of Fredericton to sit atop tractor mowers in baseball caps and plaid shirts, keeping their lawns immaculate with apparent ease. Others relax on swinging chairs in the shade of their porches, watching the world go by, or resting a moment before taking their children off to ice hockey or swimming practice.

Wooden bungalows, many freshly painted and so keeping up with the expectations and standards set by neighbours, line both sides of the highway. Once in a while there’s a whitewashed Evangelical church, a cemetery or a gas station. But beyond the road there’s little but trees. I begin to wonder where they go for a newspaper or a pint of milk. It’s so unpopulated, so wild. My overwhelming sense is of the size of this place.

I stay overnight on the wooded banks of the Miramichi river, from where the forest sprawls on to unfathomable realms. This land of green and blue continues virtually uninterrupted all the way to Canada’s frozen north. Ferns grow here too, their coiled ‘fiddle-heads’ gathered in springtime and cooked in butter and salt – a great accompaniment to the wonderful local salmon and washed down with Moosehead beer.

The Miramichi is famous for its superb salmon fishing, and I have a good long spell trying to land a suitably impressive specimen: but a few trout later, I decide to take the chance to find a bigger beast, and set out to find a moose.

As raindrops cast ripples in the river and mosquitoes buzz in the evening air, I head out in a four-wheel truck into the forest with Dion Carson, a guide at a nearby river lodge. He drives us carefully along the muddy tracks that run through densely packed fir trees, looking out from under his baseball cap for anything that might appear, suddenly, from among the trunks.

“If you hit a moose in your car, its legs would come up to the dashboard: its body would come through here,” he says, waving his hand from the windscreen to the back seat.

“I’m a woods person,” he tells me in his gentle drawl. “I love it here. It’s my life.”

We pass a few clearings and rivers dammed by beavers, one swimming on the surface in the pond. It circles the pond, head above the water, before returning to its lodge. And we move on, too, to a large clearing where a tranquil lake has formed. This is a good place to spot moose, as they often come here at dusk during the summer months to feed on waterweed and to drink the salty water, which their bodies need after the long winter.

The still waters reflect a blur of browns and greens from the encroaching forest at the lake’s edge as the evening light fades. Moss hangs like a wizard’s beard from the trunk of a pine, which I lean against while preparing to wait. Bullfrogs croak in the long grasses underfoot. And then I see them.

A few hundred metres out into still waters are eight or nine moose. Silent, stocky shapes, unaware of our presence. They wade into the water and feed, lifting their outsized noses every so often, their eyes watchful and their ears alert to sudden noise. But there is none, and they carry on as before.

It’s like stepping back in time and watching prehistoric beasts grazing, I think, as the trees swallow up the last traces of light and we return to camp.

“Pretty neat, eh?” says Dion. And he is absolutely right.

Travelers’ Tales Festival

Hugely looking forward to the Travellers’ Tales Festival, taking place at the historic headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society in London later this month. I think it’s the only festival in the world dedicated to travel writing and photography, so it’s probably a must for anyone interested in either or both – and probably for anyone passionate about travelling.

Intrepid explorer Benedict Allen is due to open the festival with what promises to be a riveting account of his extraordinary journeys around the world, which should provide a suitably inspiring start to a weekend’s worth of talks by equally well travelled photographers and writers.

And closing the festival is Don McCullin, arguably the greatest war photojournalist who I understand is making a very rare appearance.

The weekend stars numerous travel photographers including greats such as Frans Lanting who is one of National Geographic’s in-house-contributors and Carol Beckwith & Angela Fisher, well known for their striking African portraits.

Writing-wise, there are two rare appearances: the grand dame of travel writing Jan Morris and Irish writer Dervla Murphy who wrote From Ireland to India with a Bicycle will both be there. Other speakers are the inspiring and wildly witty Chris Stewart and the acclaimed BBC special correspondent Fergal Keane, who is as poetic as he is hard-hitting.

In addition, the festival will run workshops and solo spots by emerging new talents dotted about the building’s many rooms and halls so punters can pick up a few hints and tips from the experts.

I’m sure it’ll be an interesting and pretty inspiring weekend. It runs from the
19-21 February in London and should provide a refreshing pause from the rather rotten winter.

Visit the website for tickets… www.travellerstalesfestival.com

Pictures by Paul Harris from Travellers’ Tales Festival 2009