Vagabond Tales: Is sandboarding better than snowboarding?

by Kyle Ellison on

Contrary to what you may believe, the ocean in Peru is not very warm. In fact, it’s not warm at all. It’s freezing.

Other than desert outposts in the northern reaches of the country where it’s still possible to surf in boardshorts (Mancora, Vichayito, etc.), the Humboldt current–which swings northward from Antarctica–renders the water in Peru so cold that much of the coast is a seascape of lonely gray populated by neoprene-clad surfers suffering from ice cream headaches (surf slang for intense pain in the temples felt when diving beneath a frigid wave).

For this precise reason there was little part of me which wanted to surf in Peru.

But wait, Peru has some of the best waves in the world. Chicama, Pacasmayo, Cabo Blanco? These places are legendary. What’s wrong with you?

Standing on the rocky shores of Huanchaco, a beachfront suburb of the colonial city of Trujillo, the thought of removing my warm flannel and thrusting my ceviche-laden body into 51° water held remarkably little appeal. That, and the waves simply just weren’t that good. Admittedly, a fair weather surfer I will be.

Having already toured the ruins of Huaca de Sol and Chan Chan, ancient cities of the Moche and Chimu people who began inhabiting this coastline around 400 AD, my wife and I were simply going to have to find adventure elsewhere.

How about sand boarding?

For years I had seen photos of warm-weather renegades riding down sand dunes from Morocco to New Zealand to here on the coast of Peru. Still, I was skeptical. It’s sand. Not snow. Or water. How fun can it possibly be?Hiring out the services of a local guide named Jaime we hopped into a 1980’s era red van that appeared to contain half of the dune already embedded into the interior. For over an hour and a half the three of us bounced our way over dirt roads and past rural farming hamlets in search of a shimmering white dune which, ideally, would be protected from the stiff coastal breeze.

“This”, I initially reckoned, “is absurd.”

I could be lounging oceanfront back in Huanchaco sucking down a bucket of cold cervezas and watching tourists head into the surf on caballito de totoras, traditional boats made of thin reeds which many historians believe were potentially the world’s first surf craft.

Instead, I find myself 50km inland driving through scrub brush with a man named Jaime who’s keen on throwing me off of a sand dune on a board akin to a skateboard without wheels.

Absurd.

As I would find out after my first successful run down the dune, however, this is a sport that could grow on me, and it was growing on me fast.

The first notable difference between sandboarding and snowboarding is the exhausting lack of a ski lift. The absence of a lift of course leads to a lot more trekking uphill, which when performed in sand up to your ankles is harder than you might imagine.

This, it would seem, is a massive downside to sandboarding.

On the contrary, it only leads me to offer the first point for why sandboarding may be better than snowboarding:

With sandboarding you get an incredible workout.

Furthermore, when a titanic amount of effort is required to reach the top of a dune it only adds a sense of accomplishment to the ensuing ride down.

Unless, of course, you happen to fall on the ride down. Then the 20 minute walk to the top feels like a waste. While perhaps true, the idea of falling introduces the second reason why sandboarding may be better than snowboarding:

When you fall, it doesn’t hurt.

No ice patches, no bruised butt muscles, no broken vertebrae, just forgiving folds of sand waiting to absorb you and your miserable descent.

True, you may end up getting sand in your shorts, but this raises the third and final reason why sandboarding may be better than snowboarding:

Sandboarding is warmer than snowboarding.

Given the nature of the climates where massive sand dunes thrive, rarely will you need more clothing for sandboarding than your favorite bathing suit. There are no expensive gloves, pants, jackets, goggles, earmuffs, or shivering on top of a mountain. Swap them all out for a pair of boardshorts and call it a day.

Do I feel this reasoning will create any converts? Absolutely not. But I at least feel compelled to make the argument, invite you to try it, and let you make the decision for yourself.

Interested? Check out Sandboard magazine to find a dune location near you.

Read more of the Vagabond Tales here…

Kaikoura, New Zealand: Surfing, seals, and seafood

by Kyle Ellison on

“The chowder isn’t the type you have back in the States” I am warned.

The brunette woman working the oceanfront seafood cart has detected my accent and is concerned I won’t like her steaming bowl of mollusks.

“There isn’t much cream, just freshly made broth mixed with massive chunks of crayfish and mussels.”

Facing the kelp strewn waters of the Kaikoura Peninsula, a popular hamlet on the eastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island, this is exactly what I was hoping for: Massive chunks of crayfish and mussels. After all, it’s only appropriate for a place whose name literally translates to “meal of crayfish”.

Regardless, eating anything else in Kaikoura would just feel wrong, because Kaikoura is not a processed, pre-packaged type of town. It’s a place where the smell of sea salt wafts on the breeze and surfers recount that morning’s early dawn session. Storefronts advertise seal swimming, whale watching, and guided eco-walks, while local scuba shops display the current water temperature and visibility on outdoor chalkboards adorned in smiling blue dolphins.

This, I realize, is what separates Kaikoura from all of the other adventure destinations and photo opportunities which lay scattered around the South Island of New Zealand. Kaikoura is different from the gorges of Franz Josef glacier or walks such as the Routeburn Track in that it has been a long time since I have traveled through a place that refreshingly feels so alive.

Sure, there are pubs with drink specials and tacky New Zealand souvenir stores like any other tourist haunt in the world, but in Kaikoura there seems to be an intrinsic harmony the town has with nature that gives it an energy not felt in other parts of the country.

Nowhere is this more apparent than ambling over limpet covered rocks beneath the peninsula walkway on Kean Point. Aside from the sandy strands of kelp which give the walk a malodorous yet authentic aroma, the shoreline teems with nesting red billed seagulls and dozens of southern fur seals lounging contentedly on the warm rocks.

%Gallery-145599%These same seals were once hunted voraciously by the native Maori people, and given the abundance of sea life in the region Kaikoura was once home to one of the largest Maori populations on the South Island. According to Maori legend, the Kaikoura peninsula was the spot where the Polynesian demigod Maui placed his foot while fishing up the North Island of New Zealand with his great fish hook, and the peninsula extends so far off of the main coastline that Captain Cook on his original voyage in 1770 actually mistook it for a separate island.

With the full-time arrival of the pakeha–Europeans–Kaikoura was transformed into a hub of whaling and trade led by Captain Robert Fyfe in 1843. To this day it’s still possible to visit the Fyffe House, one of the lone remnants of the first European settlement and a structure which still rests on whale bones used to create the original foundation.

Though the whaling trade has long ceased in Kaikoura, throngs of ocean goers have traded their harpoons for camera lenses and have turned Kaikoura into one of the South Pacific’s premier whale watching destination for the sperm, blue, and southern right whales.

It’s not just the abundance of marine life which breathes life into Kaikoura, however, as it’s also found in the people themselves. A rural community of only 2,100 permanent residents, the active, outdoorsy community which populates the Kaikoura peninsula is fortunate enough to be sandwiched between the biking and hiking tracks of the seaside Kaikoura range, and the diving surfing opportunities found where the Southern Ocean meets the rugged coast.

Nowhere is this froth for life felt more potently than down at “Meatworks” a local surf spot set just north of town. Though the clock has yet to strike 7am, a cadre of die-hard surfers has already colonized the heaving beach break and opted to start their day with an active session on the water.

“It’s stunning isn’t it mate?” offers a thinly bearded surfer sitting next to me in the Meatworks lineup.

The summer sun has just risen in the east, and the crisp dawn colors of morning are reflected off the empty Kaikoura mountains.

“Best way to start your day right here I reckon.”

Then, with a quick smile and nod to say goodbye, the affable local strokes into a meaty, overhead set wave and disappears towards the kelp laden shoreline.

So begins another day in Kaikoura, the living, pulsing, breathing speck of New Zealand shoreline that can be found when given the freedom to roam…

For 2 months Gadling blogger Kyle Ellison will be embedded in a campervan touring the country of New Zealand. Follow the rest of the adventure by reading his series, Freedom to Roam: Touring New Zealand by Campervan.

Myanmar Misfortune: a visit to the fortuneteller in Yangon

by David Farley on

The man who told me my unfortunate future, did so with glee. I quickly learned he had a proclivity for sustaining the last syllable of every sentence, like a Spanish-speaking soccer play-by-play announcer after a goal, or a game show host announcing I’d just won a BRAND NEW CAR……!

“In future, you will be very unluckyyyyyyyyy,” he said after recording my birthdate and looking it up in a tattered book filled with numerical codes.

I was doing a self-guided tour of Yangon, the erstwhile capital of Myanmar, as outlined in my guidebook, Lonely Planet Myanmar. The walking tour took me down a street lined with fortunetellers and palm readers. I hadn’t planned on sitting down but I thought that if one of them was particularly insistent, I’d do it.

That’s when Min Kyot Kyow announced himself to me. I took a seat on the bench and within seconds he was rambling on about my unfortunate fate. Astrology is taken very seriously in Myanmar. The location of the new capital, Naypyidaw, was reportedly determined by astrology.

I’ve never really gravitated to fortunetellers, palm readers and psychics, but I’d randomly had a couple experiences with this ilk that left me both intrigued and perplexed. In Rajasthan, a fortuneteller’s main message to me was that the best years of my life were 1996 and 2005. Up until 2011, those were, by far, the worst years of my life. Or did he mean that suffering equals growth which eventually equals positivity? It’s possible, I suppose; after a terrible last year, I’m currently quite happy about the way things have worked out. In Rajasthan, though, I didn’t stick around for clarification. Instead, I walked away distraught and confused. The second brush came when I was reporting a story on people who privately collect holy relics. One of the collectors, it turned out, was also a psychic. In the middle of his answers about how he attained the complete skull of St. Anne, he’d get a glazed look in his eye, stare over my shoulder and make random (and, at times, frightenly accurate) statements about my past.

But no one had dared tell me my future yet. Min Kyot Kyow picked up a piece of paper and began reading badly worded statements in English about what lie ahead for me. It was as if this crumpled notebook leaf of paper had been divinely inscribed just for me. But because the ballpoint pen ink looked long faded and the piece of paper itself appeared to have been through the wash several times, it was like someone saw me coming about five years ago. Or did the fortuneteller just say these things to all the foreigners who happen to walk by?


Telling me things like I would live with my father until I was in my 70s or that I have a kind relationship to “beasts,” as he put it, was fine, I guess. I didn’t really need to know this information. I won’t be living with my father and I already know I’m a friend of the beast, after all.

But then he started to get specific. “You will marry foreign womaaaaaaaaaaaaan!” he screamed. And just in case I didn’t understand, he began naming nationalities, counting off on his fingers with each one. “China woman, Thai lady, Brazil woman, Indonesian woman.” Then he paused before adding: “Burma woman,” and raised his eyebrows up and down at me a few times.

I wish he would have stopped right there. I could have walked away and begun my search for my new foreign-born wife.

“But in eight years,” he added after studying my palm, “you will become widowwwwwwwwwwww.” A widower? Really? He was prophesying the death of a woman I’m going to fall in love with but haven’t met yet? (Note to any foreign-born women who may take a romantic interest in me: unless you like the idea of knowing you’re going to die in 2020, stay far away from me.)

The fortuneteller gave me a candle and pointed me toward the Sule Pagoda, the large Buddhist temple in the center of town that was looming in the distance. He said I’d know what to do with it when I got there (um, light it, maybe?). Which is what I did. I put it on an altar, set the wick ablaze, and sat there, meditating with a handful of Burmese Buddhists, hoping this fortuneteller was terrible at his profession.

Franz Josef glacier: Big icy tongue of the rainforest

by Kyle Ellison on

“The Franz Josef Glacier is so singularly beautiful, so beautiful indeed, and centered amongst such vivid, exceptional, and picturesque surroundings that if it were situated in any other country than New Zealand it would have long ago been acclaimed ‘The Most Beautiful Thing in the World'”

–E.E. Muir (1929)

Don’t look now, but in New Zealand there are currently two icy tongues lapping their way through the jungle.

While we have previously reported on the unique experience of taking crampons and ice axe to New Zealand’s Fox Glacier, I’m here to illuminate the other shifting sea of ice that’s currently licking the forests of Aotearoa’s soggy West Coast.

At 7.5 miles long, Franz Josef Glacier–named in 1865 after the emperor of Austria-Hungary during a time when naming glaciers after nobility was apparently the thing to do–is perhaps one of the world’s most scenic crumbling blue spectacles.

While I’ve witnessed glaciers calving into the sea in Alaska and watched the sun rise over them in Nepal, what makes Franz Josef so unique is the ability to stand in front of a massive sea of ice whilst entrenched in a setting that is literally temperate rainforest.

At Fox and Franz the flora doesn’t consist of sub-alpine scrub brush or tundra, but rather, it consists of dense green ferns. The waterfalls that streak down the walls of the vertical canyons are raging in strength due to the 7000mm (273 inches) of rainfall the west coast of New Zealand annually receives, a sum that bests many parts of the Amazon rainforest. On various summer days it’s possible to be standing in front of Franz Josef glacier in nothing but shorts and t-shirt, a wardrobe better suited to watching the sunset on the beach that lies just 10 miles to the west.

So why are there glaciers tumbling their way through the jungle in the first place?Both glaciers have their névé, or snowfield, tucked nearly 8,300 ft up into the alpine terrain of the Southern Alps, an elevation high enough to receive copious amounts of snowfall. Seeing as the mountains explode out of the Tasman Sea at such a steep grade, however, the glacial tongue is allowed to plunge down to only 950 feet above sea level towards the coastal region below, hence, there now being glaciers in the rainforest.

In fact, it’s believed that at one point Franz Josef glacier extended all the way to the sea.

Though both Fox Glacier as well as Franz Josef are popular for glacial trekking and scenic flights, for the casual day tripper just wanting to get close to the ice Franz Josef is the undisputed winner. While those trekking the valley floor at Fox Glacier are currently required to maintain a distance of 600 meters from the melting blue ice, at Franz Josef it’s still possible to walk nearly up to the cusp of the beast–close enough to hear it crack and moan and melt into history.

Ambling amongst the valley floor, it’s difficult to convey the sheer magnitude of the valleys that have been bulldozed when the ice is advancing. To describe the trickle of human beings plodding their way up the canyon floor as a trail of ants would be horribly clichéd, yet it’s such an accurate representation of the size-scale that I’m going to say it anyway.

As one of those ants slowly plodding onward, the vertical stone walls on the right side of the canyon call to mind the limestone slabs of Thailand‘s Railay Beach, while the misty ridge lines on the left side of the canyon cast the same dramatic shadows of Oahu‘s Ko’olau mountains. More than humbling, it’s the type of place you come to feel small.

Of course, all of that rainfall means that catching Franz Josef on a clear, dry day can always be somewhat of a challenge, and many times, such as the afternoon in which I visited, the heavens unleash a torrent of rain incubated in storm cells rolling off the tempestuous Tasman Sea, a weather phenomenon which does little good for someone sleeping in their van.

Wet, muddy shoes and rain crashing on a metal roof are a poor epilogue to a story as grand as glacial viewing, which is why it’s time to turn the old Toyota Lucida northwards and eastwards to drier, more agreeable climes….

For 2 months Gadling blogger Kyle Ellison will be embedded in a campervan touring the country of New Zealand. Follow the rest of the adventure by reading his series, Freedom to Roam: Touring New Zealand by Campervan.

Vagabond Tales: “The Governator is better, yes?”

by Kyle Ellison on

Crossing borders can always be a bit of a hectic experience. There are long lines, scam artists, customs officials, new currencies, people offering to expedite your visa process for a fee, screaming children, rogue livestock, and occasionally people with guns. Dirty and dingy, border crossings are never the favorite part of my trip.

Luckily, however, I was once aided through a particularly tense border moment by of all things, an American politician. As any American traveler who spends copious amounts of time out of the country will tell you, divulging the fact that you are an American frequently involves being buffeted by a hailstorm of opinions/questions/debate over American foreign policy, war, clothing, oil, health care, politics, and lately, Justin Bieber.

This is because–and excuse me as I fabricate completely random statistics to argue a point–it’s becoming apparent to me that about 70% of the globe knows more about American politics than 70% of Americans do.

Evidence? I offer three examples:

-A particularly smelly hitch hiker I once picked up in New Zealand was able to tell me how many seats the state of Hawaii has in the House of Representatives (2).

-The Kathmandu shopkeeper from whom I was purchasing a $1.50 plate of dhal bhat discussed with me the geopolitical ramifications of Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to Burma.

-A mate from Sydney writing me to express his concerns about the upcoming vote in Congress to once again raise the debt ceiling.

The list goes on.

Although flashing the blue cover of an American passport will frequently lead to this uninvited political joust, I would like to thank one American politician for effectively waving me across international lines.Prior to Slovakia being an EU member and part of the Eurail network, the border crossing by train from Slovakia to Austria was not exactly warm and rosy. Perhaps it’s because it was the depths of winter and the whole of central Europe seemed to collectively huddle beneath a fog of frozen breath and post-Communist-era gray, but the passport control was cold in every way.

Instead of having all of the passengers depart the frigid rail car, two chiseled specimens of angry looking police officers toting unnecessarily large automatic weapons boarded the train and checked the passports of each passenger row by row. From the truncated grunts in German and the international sound of pleading it was apparent that for some passengers the proceedings were going less than swimmingly.

Finally, with a stone cold glare and a heavy thudding of boots the two officers made their stop in front of my assigned seat. Brandishing our shiny, navy blue passports my college girlfriend and I handed over our international identity and awaited what the vibe of the car was telling us might be a hard-fought entry stamp.

Scrutinizing the details of my girlfriend’s passport, a thick, monotone voice came from within the border patrolling giant.

“You are from California, yes?” he stiffly questioned.

“Ummm…yes, California” was the meek reply she could muster.

Moment of truth. Friend or foe.

Then, with a smile that could bridge the Iron Curtain, the gun-toting guard slapped his companion on the chest and jubilantly exclaimed, “the Governator is better yes!”

What followed can only be described as the laugh performed by the alien characters in “The Simpson’s” who carry on with a guttural belly laugh for so unbelievably long that after the first 40 seconds have passed it becomes hilarious in its discomfort.

At no point while boarding the train to Austria did I expect the fact that the Austrian-born actor turned California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, would ultimately expedite my passage through the border.

The guffawing agent–obviously pleased with his joke–nonchalantly stamped the passports and flipped them back into our stunned laps. only to unleash a throaty gumbo of syllables on a dreadlocked hippie behind me who, apparently, was not a California resident.

So thank you Arnold for getting me into Austria, and for allowing me to use my passport for more than political banter. Schnitzels on me.

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Want more travel stories? Read the rest of the Vagabond Tales here…

[Photo: Flickr: Toprankonlinemarketing]