Driving Miss Crazy [Close Calls]
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
A few years ago I was on a bus from Madrid, Spain, to the Southern port city of Cadiz. There had been a series of small romantic misunderstandings in Madrid, and I felt like I needed to get the hell out of Dodge for a while. Escaping South, where I knew zero people, seemed like the best option. It’s an easy five hours through the campos of Castilla. The scrub land is rugged and lonely, but pretty in its loneliness. The bus was mostly full of people going to see their families for the weekend. They spoke quietly, munched on their Serrano ham sandwiches, or crunched sunflower seeds and spit the shells into little bags. I sat two seats behind the driver dozing with my head against he window. Every so often I woke up to stare out the window as the sun dipped below the sandy horizon, then I’d drift back off.
About halfway through the journey, the flat, straight roads are interrupted by a narrow belt of scrubby hills and steep, rocky ravines that the road winds its way through before coming out into more arid chaparral. Around sundown, just as we entered a precariously narrow and winding section, a silver Mercedes cut us off. The conductor slammed on his brakes—narrowly avoiding a wreck—and released a string of expletives that involved a lot of the Merc driver’s female relatives. There was a moment of panic that quickly passed as the Mercedes sped up and our conductor eased off the brakes.
Then, something insane happened. (more…)
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Beware the Mud Falcon [When Animals Attack]
Stop, Stare, and Behold Nature's Glory!
Now, technically speaking, a Mud Falcon is a beast known to climbers who scale “big walls”, the sheer granite slabs like El Capitán. See, up there, there’s nowhere to, you know, go, and in order to spare the pristine rock faces and climbers below, the ‘Mud Falcon’ takes glorious wing. Woe to he or she who dangles below when the Mud Falcon does not achieve proper escape velocity. What happened to me in Iceland recently wasn’t exactly the result of a Mud Falcon, but it might as well have been.
Until we arrived at Skógafloss (above), Iceland’s most iconic waterfall, the sky was a feisty, flinty cur, all drizzly rain and gravel blowing sideways, into the eye-socket. Then the clouds departed. Tourbuses disappeared. And there we stood, in awe of this thing.
It is damn impressive. At 180′ high or so, it really roars. Local lore has it that a Viking named Þrasi Þórólfsson buried a treasure behind the waterfall. Just try to get close to the thing, and you’ll see why it was a good hiding place. Without full foul-weather gear, you’re a soggy fool in seconds. But it’s better observed from a distance. When the sun comes out, as it did for us, a fat rainbow beams over the thing, absurdly bright and symmetrical and sometimes doubled. Seabirds wheel overhead, piercing the white noise. All is well.
Until you look up, that is. Maybe it’s the falls, the spectral eye candy, the sheer cliffs side by watery side. Or maybe it’s a bird that catches your eye, arcing across the white wall of water. One way or another, you’re rubbernecking—you can’t help it—burning memory card space on your digital camera with abandon.
Then the postcard peace was shattered. As I looked down to admire my latest Ansel Adams, one of those birds—maybe even the one seen here—thought to bestow a gift, a real shot to remember. As I goofily admired shots we’d just taken jumping in the air like idiots, it struck, an enormous glop of yellow-brown bird crap splashed squarely onto the camera’s viewscreen. And it wasn’t just a spot either. It was a good bit heftier, like this thing had been saving up for days. What the—? He nailed it. Screw the rainbow. Time to run. —Christian DeBenedetti
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You Will Like! Is Famous Waterslide! [Wardrobe Malfunctions]
Slip Slidin' Away!
To explain why the lifeguard at the Aquapark Tatralandia in Liptovský Mikulas—a small town near Slovakia’s High Tatra mountains—was screaming at me to get out of the pool, I have to explain why I was wearing Pete’s long underwear. And to explain that, I have to explain why Xenia was making out with her Czech boyfriend in the hot tub instead of driving me and Pete straight to said High Tatra mountains—where we were supposed ski around and find a legendary and elusive hutkeeper named Viktor Beranek. The skiing part was my idea: I’d pitched this random story to a magazine, something about Viktor being an environmentalist and a womanizer and a brute and something about the High Tatras being a rugged, legit, and bad-ass place to ski. (All true.) What wasn’t my idea was this: getting coughed out of a waterslide into vaguely green chlorinated water, dragged to slowness by neck-to-ankle polypro, blushing at the sharp words of the pool police: “You can’t swim in that! Tebe dělostřelectvo plavat ježto!” (Or something like that.) (more…)
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Brogue Wave [Amateur Hour]
Come on in, the water's fine!
A surf trip to the Scottish Highlands is not something to be undertaken lightly. At its North end, Scotland just gives up and falls into the Atlantic. Beyond that there are the Orkney and Farrow Islands, then the North Pole. The landscape is rugged, the ocean angry. Surfers trek northward from all over Britain to tap into the power of Arctic storms that detonate up and down the windswept coast.
Which brings me to how I ended up in the “town” of Thurso, the last hamlet at the end of the world, in the late Autumn of 2004. I had snagged a last-minute ride up the coast with some Aberdeeners; we arrived at 6:00am on a Saturday morning, hung over from revels that ended only a couple hours before. Although the charts had looked promising all week, the weather along the North Coast rarely surprises you in a good way… (more…)
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Off a Pony, Express [Rough Landings]
Just like riding a bike!
The Icelandic Tourist Board was a new client of my public relations agency and I was thrilled to be visiting the legendary Arctic Open Midnight Sun golf tournament in the northern part of the country, up near the Arctic Circle. My local host was a bulldog of a man – thick neck, close-cropped blond hair, blazing blue eyes – named Thor who, like many of my new Icelandic contacts, had the habit of sharply gasping in air when he spoke. Thor was thinking of buying a new Icelandic horse, one of the purest breeds on earth. Although the size of ponies, these were fully-grown powerful animals that horse fanciers around the globe proudly show in festive equestrian events.
Driving his ATV to a field in Akureyri, he points out a brown horse, grabs a saddle and trudges through mud up to his ankles to saddle up. Once astride the animal, it takes off like a shot – tolting down the road, almost out of sight. Within a few seconds, he muscles the animal to return, tolts back to within a few yards of me, and unceremoniously gets thrown to the ground, literally beside my feet.
“Want to try to ride her?” he asks with that lilting Icelandic accent that dates back centuries to the Viking days.
Like the fool that I am, I answer, “Sure why not?” I figure I know how to ride. After all, didn’t I take the kids on a trail ride once on the rim of the Grand Canyon? Didn’t I once participate in an evening ride to a swank dinner party in Keystone? (more…)
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Naked Envy [Wardrobe Malfunctions]
Can't wait to show off my new swimming apparel!
Ipanema Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, was recently named “The World’s Sexiest Beach”. It is topless, or can be, leaving me the mindless task of identifying the real boobs from the fake on a recent visit. Then the broad shoulders on some of the topless ones had me questioning whether it was a guy or a girl sporting those massive headlights. It’s Brazil, afterall.
Nevertheless, it was fun to be there, idling away last night’s indulgences mesmerized by the sea. Everyone was so beautiful! Except me, that is.On the whole beach I was the only aberration. I really stuck out next to a sculpted, nearly-naked black man lying in the sand. There I was in 100 degree heat, fully covered in 60 SPF sun screen, with a big floppy hat, long sleeve shirt, and a towel covering me from my toes to my baggy, surfer-style bathing suit. I realized my presence alone could jeopardize Ipanema’s Sexiest Beach status. So, before an ad hoc and barely clad committee could ask me to leave, I collected my towel and what little dignity I could find and departed. Besides, after 45 minutes in the sun I was cooked! As I walked my lily-white butt back to the hotel I imagined that Brazilians all over the beach thanked me for leaving.—Richard Frisbie recently ran for, and nearly won, the office of Mayor in Saugerties, New York.
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Smell of The Wild [Amateur Hour]
There's nothing like a long flight with a beautiful lady.
I’m from the Northeast, so the term ‘river trip’ doesn’t resonate as much as it does out West. When I agreed to meet a guy friend for one of them on the South Fork of the Salmon River in Central Idaho, I could only imagine what I was in for.
To get there, I flew into Spokane, Washington on a little puddle jumper from Salt Lake City. This was after I didn’t get on my original flight out because I was too heavy and my luggage was too big (I’m 121 pounds and a light packer). We finally landed at 10 at night. I met my friend in the airport, grabbed my luggage, and then it was a five hour drive from Spokane to the sleepy whitewater rafting town of Riggins.
We arrived in Riggins at three-o-clock in the morning and set up our tent for three hours of (ahem) sleep. The next morning I looked far from my best—okay let’s face it—completely beat-up, and we met all his friends at the town’s only diner for a hearty breakfast. I brought my make-up case along so I could sneak into the bathroom and attempt to look halfway decent, but it was so obvious what I was doing and embarrassing to think about now.
We got our gear in order and headed off to the put-in, a three hour drive. We stopped at the local Sate Recreation Center to get a map and directions, but what was supposed to be a quick break turned an hour-long debate among the seasoned kayakers on our trip. Forest fires were burning very close to our put-in. The patroller warned us to turn around, and that because of roadblocks we wouldn’t be able to get to the part of the river we needed to.
We didn’t listen. We found an alternative route to avoid the section of blocked-off road, and started down river. Paddling through freshly burnt forests, we were inhaling acrid smoke. Not good for the eyes, nor the lungs for that matter. But we had plenty of whiskey and beer to keep us hydrated. And I needed the alcohol to calm my anxiety about how dangerous this all was… (more…)
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