A Break from the Search

We returned to the Netherlands in early December to spend Christmas with the family.  This is the reason after all why we are looking for our perfect place in western Europe - to be within a few hours travel of Michiel´s family.  We had a great Indonesian feast (isn´t that what EVERYONE does for Christmas??!!) and enjoyed the snow and sun of a good old-fashioned Dutch winter.

After the holiday, we spent several weeks in the States with family in Huntsville, Alabama and then in Terlingua, Texas near Big Bend National Park.  In both places, they were experiencing record cold temperatures and even snow (in Alabama) but that didn´t dampen our enthusiasm.

It was wonderful to be able to spend lots of quality time with Jon (my brother), Aor and Jake and my mom, who made the trip from Florida to be with us.  Not returning to Antarctica this season meant that I haven´t played drums in a while so I especially enjoyed playing Rock Band with them - plus my 6 year old nephew is a killer singer, drummer, and guitarist, my brother rocks the guitar and vocals and Michiel made his first semi-public appearance as lead singer.   Going to the Space and Rocket Center (Huntsville is home to NASA´s Marshall Space Flight Center), showing Jake his first stalagtites at the impressive Cathedral Caverns and getting to be a part of their lives for a couple of weeks were really wonderful.

 

   

In Texas, we did lots of hiking with our friends from Alaska, Todd, Barb and Liam and got to experience desert life in low-key, hippy style in Terlingua.  The highlights (aside from the company, of course) were the wild animals, which included roadrunners (they don´t really say "meep meep"), coyotes, mule deer, wild boar (javalinas) and a MOUNTAIN LION from far too close by. Having a mountain lion run between us while we were watching deer at the Chisos Basin campground was one of our top ten moments in nature ever!

   

Can I get a witness?

Timing is everything.

The day we went to the storage facility in Christchurch to pick up our left luggage, we bumped into DJ and Karen, friends from the ice. "Are you busy this afternoon?", DJ asked. Since we were only slowly heading out to the Banks Peninsula to start our WWOOFing assignment, we certainly could spare 15 minutes to witness their marriage ceremony. Which was a lucky thing, because DJ had a TO DO list that included stuff like: find witnesses, whack hair off, get married, email a friend and other items.

CONGRATULATIONS!

Our love affair with the Bay continues

Tossin' bales with Mike and Ali gave us a great opportunity to get to know these wonderful people better, so when our workshop ended and we felt kinda lost, we all decided that it would be a great idea to go on a backpacking trip. First, though, we did some serious relaxation. The construction work was physically demanding and being wall captains on the final weekend was mentally challenging, as well. We celebrated our success with a cookout on the beach featuring freshly harvested cockles (small clams) and New Zealand's famous green-lipped mussels. The following week, Michiel and I did our own mussel harvesting in terrifically rich hunting grounds!

The Anatoki River Hike - a long but not difficult hike through a river valley and then up onto a ridge, to descend, finally, into farmland.

Our hut - night 2


From the ridge


Looking down into the valley from Kill Devil Hill


After the 3 day backpacking trip, Michiel and I went out to Abel Tasman National Park for camping and a day hike. The beach sand was the most amazing color orange and the sunsets were stupendous...but, alas, the sandflies are so horrific that it's nearly impossible to stay still for too long. In fact, I will sheepishly admit that we spent both evenings reading in the car...I know, I know.....how lame! But have YOU ever experienced sandfly bites??! They itch for weeks...really.

The beach at Totaranui


Wainui Bay - Abel Tasman


We had a good hike, all the same but were quite keen to retreat back to our little bungalow in Collingwood and a day hike out at Cape Farewell.

Panorama at Cape Farewell


The motherlode!


Michiel works our bounty into a green curry mussel stew. Not all of the mussels were as big as his hand, but this one was!


The view from Collingwood


Sigh...the area is so beautiful, the beaches are gorgeous, the people are so laid back, friendly and liberal and the mussels are just there for the taking...If Golden Bay weren't so far away, we'd move there in a second.

Tonga without Tracy...sniff

Tracy left us despondent and lonely on Tapana Island but we consoled ourselves with more snorkeling and swimming. That night, though, we had a visitor. A large rat had been hanging out in the bungalow. He'd been gnawing on the soap bar and leaving his droppings behind, but on this night, he wasn't satisfied with soap. He went for anything plastic or rubber her could sink his teeth into, like the snorkel mask, the nose pieces on Michiel's glasses AND sunglasses, and various other items that we are still discovering to this day.

We'd been warned about the Tongans' flexible definition of borrowing from tourists (you know, like stealing, only not as frowned upon). In fact, we had no problems with any human behavior at all. We found the Tongans to be friendly and exceptionally laid back. So laid back, that they really didn't enjoy working much and if they ended up working in the tourism industry, they liked to tell everyone how hard they worked and how tired they were. Those few Tongans involved with tourists did work hard compared to their countrymen and women. Since Tongans have a communal spirit, all possessions within a family can be claimed by any family member. It's a system that doesn't lend itself much to working hard, innovation, entrepreneurship or capitalism for that matter. Most of the people working in the tourism industry are foreigners.

In the case of Taina, a Tongan lady who is running her own accommodation establishment on the island of Eua, she was married to a German and lived in Germany for many years, where she must have learned something about capitalism. Unfortunately for Taina, her kids and nieces don't necessarily have the same drive so not only does she run the homestay and cook for the tourists (not to mention the awesome service she provided us by tracking us down at the bank to tell us that we could catch an earlier flight) but she cooks and cleans for the family, too. Her place is lovely, though, and we enjoyed our day hike through the National Park with her son, Michael. He's the gangsta looking one in the photo with the machete and the fan (tee hee).



Taina's Place





Hiking on Eua


Eua Landscape






Our plane to Eua was broken and none of the employees of the airline company had thought to check to see if our flight was actually going to depart. It wasn't that they were lazy per se, more that they just didn't think of taking that extra step. We ferried by boat to the island instead and flew back the 8 minutes by special medevac flight which was necessitated by a domestic stabbing. Pretty gruesome sitting in the airplane with the sobbing woman, her bleeding wounds and her IV...no attendant, no nothing. They even dropped her while transferring her from the ambulance into the 8 seater prop plane.

Eua Airstrip



It all sounds pretty grim, but we had a surprisingly good time. Almost everywhere we went, we bumped into happy ice people who were fun to be with and the slow pace suited our temperament. Other than post-ice trauma, I'm sure it was the heat that slowed us down to a crawl. When I now think back on those 2 weeks, I don't think about the humidity, the mosquitos, the dengue-fever lite that Michiel got (it's carried by mosquitos; there's no vaccine; there's no real cure; it's like a bad flu), the lack of motivation of Tongans or the cockroaches. I think about the Lysol blue water that is so warm that we could snorkel for hours, the markets with their woven baskets of taro, the tropical fruit, the enormous umu feasts and traditional dancing performance, the boisterous preaching and loud singing in Sunday churches, the steady pounding of mallets against wood as women prepare leaves for tapa cloth, the South Pacific version of Mormon missionaries in their woven skirts (the men!), white button-down shirts and flip flops, the pigs roaming freely and even swimming at the beaches, the Tongans with gold teeth (most of them have at least one), and most of all, the good times we had with Tracy, Barb, Steve, and lots of other ice people (and even some fun people who weren't from the ice!)

The market in Nuku'alofa


The root vegetable in the woven baskets is taro and/or sweet potato. Taro is the plant in front of the baskets, above



Steve (in yellow) and Barb at a Tongan feast and dace performance at Hina Cave


Tongan dancers


Stuffing my face with guava

To Kish

Hey, Kish....we know you're reading and we'd like to email you but don't have your off-ice email address. Could you please send it to us at our usap.gov address?

Update from AK

First an update on Blogarithm...if you would like to receive an email when we update the blog, you now need to sign up with www.rssfwd.com. They purchased Blogarithm and it seems that the migration of old Blogarithm accounts didn't go so smoothly.

We've been back in Alaska now for a month and we're exceedingly busy. I'm leading tours again for Adventure Alaska Tours and Michiel is busy with a host of big projects, including putting in a large garden and greenhouse at the home we are staying in, staining cabins, cleaning, chopping and bundling wood and many other things. He's also done a lot of fishing already this summer, including 2 (failed) attempts at king salmon (in his defence, he was the only person in the boat to get anything (a sockeye salmon) on the first trip and he was the only person to hook a king on yesterday's trip.) He was successful at landing a couple of halibut so we've got some nice fillets in the freezer.

Our friend, Sandra, from the Netherlands will be here tomorrow for 3 weeks and she will be joining us on an Adventure Alaska hiking tour. We'll get some photos up when we can.

Donut of Misery

Things are rolling along here at McMurdo. The warmer temperatures are starting to turn the roads into muddy streams and the temperatures are approaching the 30s F (just below 0 degrees C). It feels warm and pleasant when the wind isn't blowing and we're trying to spend more time outside.

The station celebrated Thanksgiving this past Saturday with a two-day weekend and a giant, fancy meal in the Dining Hall. We celebrated with some friends, including Antz and Christine. Christine introduced me to the Antarctic Program in 1999 and encouraged me to apply (so I can alternately blame and thank her :) They mostly do winters these days so we don't get to see them very often, but they are here this summer on an Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation.

Antz is known for his incredible time-lapse films of Antarctic landscapes, wildlife and people. You can see several of his videos on Youtube if you search for Antzarctica. His wife, Christine, is also incredibly creative and very amusing in the video about Condition 1. Their goal is to gather enough time-lapse footage during their 6-week stay to put together a full length film. Their website is: www.frozensouth.com

Prior to the eating-fest, we ran in the 5K Turkey Trot race. It was pretty windy so I needed to supplement my gear with handwarmers, but we both finished and Michiel did well enough to win a great t-shirt. The top 50 runners were rewarded with a shirt. You'd think that it would be easy enough to place in the top 50, but the running crowd is exceptionally competitive and the turn-out was excellent (maybe 100 runners???). I just missed being in the top 50, but I scored a shirt from a guy who couldn't wear a Medium. (It's good to be small!)

Now that the Thanksgiving weekend is behind us, the holiday season will fly by, but still...at this time of the season, people start to think about the travels after the ice and the free time and travel opportunities that are the main reasons why people keep coming back to the ice year after year.

In order to keep track of how much time we have left, someone created the Donut of Misery. The donut is a famous (around here, anyway) Excel spreadsheet that calculates the time you have remaining on station based on your contract start and end dates. Here's a screen shot.

The donut is particularly popular with people who are doing a year-long contract. They might lament that they are only at 28% when the rest of the summer population is at 48%.

I recently received a copy of an updated, slicker version of the donut, called the Penguin Timer. Here's a screen shot:

Albuquerque to Sedona

On the way to Sedona, Arizona, we stopped in the Painted Desert/Petrified Forest National Park for a hike. Most people drive through the park and take short, marked trails through designated areas. The park ranger informed us that we were free to hike down into the "painted desert" area and simply wander. Since we had both seen the Desert from the strategically placed look-out points, this was a great way to experience the colors, textures and sounds of the desert and the petrified wood.

We drove south from Flagstaff, Arizona amongst the pine trees and cool air, through Oak Creek Canyon a bit before sunset. The quality of light reflecting off the red cliffs and the rock itself was amazing. Arriving in Sedona at sunset is something that everyone should experience.

We spent the next two days with friends who work for Pink Jeep Tours. They got us a tour to Native American cliff dwelling ruins and took us out in their own jeep for some awesome, near vertical 4-wheelin' on the red rock of the Broken Arrow trail. Very exciting!

We also did a couple of hikes in this gorgeous area to a natural rock bridge and through formations. We never did manage to feel the energy that the New Age (what do you call these people??? practitioners? believers? wackos?) folks talk about in relation to certain rock formations. They believe that at special "vortices", there is either an up- or a down-flow of energy, which they classify as male or female. The whole idea came about as the "brain-child" of a woman who visited the area about 30 years ago. Apparently, she is now finding vortices all over the US. New Age centers are everywhere and there is no shortage of companies making a buck on the spiritual experience in Sedona. Here's just one example: Sedona New Age Center

Northern New Mexico and Albuquerque

We took (yet another)scenic drive through high, snow-covered mountain passes to cross the state border into Chama, New Mexico. Sheri lived in New Mexico for 6 years and had heard much about this area and its historic steam train, so it was lucky that she made a wrong turn and we ended up getting to see it.

Our drive took us past the Rio Grande Gorge and into Taos for a spin around the historic plaza and a visit to the mission church made famous by Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. We tried to do the same in Santa Fe, but Sheri couldn't figure out how to get to the plaza with all the construction....no matter....one New Mexican historic plaza is much the same as the others. We decided to hit Albuquerque's plaza, instead.

We spent the next couple of days in Albuquerque staying with friends, driving around a city that was no longer recognizable to Sheri (so much development and a completely re-done downtown area), and doing a little hike in hip-deep snow (well, hip-deep for Sheri - knee deep for Michiel) on the top of Sandia Crest.

Of course, the trip was made complete by a full New Mexican meal of green chile chicken blue-corn enchilada, posole, sopaipillas and margaritas. Ole!