Undiscovered New York: Getting sporty

by Jeremy Kressmann on

You probably already know New Yorkers are a competitive bunch. Whether it’s fighting it out for designer duds at the latest sample sale, running down a taxi or climbing the corporate ladder, it’s a city that thrives on getting ahead. What you may not realize, however, is that these very same facets of New York City also make it the ideal place for athletic pursuits.

Despite all the glass and concrete, New York is an increasingly athletic and outdoor-friendly city, with residents (and visitors alike) reaping the many benefits. Recent years have seen new city regulations to make the streets of the Five Boroughs increasingly bike and pedestrian-friendly. Just a few months ago, a project was announced to convert a stretch of Broadway between 42nd and 47th streets to a pedestrian-only mall. What’s more, large-scale projects like Hudson River Park have redeveloped once-gritty industrial waterfront areas, adding new trails, running paths and parkland.

Perhaps the most surprising fact of New York’s athletic culture is the variety of great outdoor-centric activities you can do just by jumping on the subway. Ever wanted to paddle a sea kayak next to a canyon of skyscrapers? How about a rock climb on one of the highest man-made climbing walls on the East Coast? Or maybe you’d like to “clown” around on a trapeze for the day? Lace up those cross-trainers and click below – this week, Undiscovered New York is “Getting Sporty.”
Climbing and Bouldering
You probably already associate New York with towering skyscrapers and climbing the corporate ladder, but it’s also a great place for some climbing of the more natural sort. Not only can visitors learn climbing skills like bouldering within Manhattan’s Central Park, there’s also a wealth of large climbing walls located all over the city.

Organizations like Climb NYC over a wealth of climbing info to help you find a wall that’s right for your skills and interests. Over at Chelsea Piers, visitors can tackle a 46′ high x 100′ wide climbing wall – one of the largest (and most expensive) man-made climbing walls on the East Coast. Others prefer the City Climbers Club, which offers a more modest but also more reasonable climbing area. Whether you’re just a beginner or a climbing expert, you’re sure to get a challenging experience.

Hudson River Kayaks
The image many visitors have of New York City waterways is grim. Visions of the East River are likely to conjure garbage and decomposing mob victims. Thankfully a concerted cleanup effort has left New York’s waterways in 2009 surprisingly clean – clean enough that you can now ride a kayak on them.

Visitors interested in taking a FREE kayak ride should head to Piers 40 and 96 as well as 72nd Street along the Hudson River. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation rents out free boats for 20 minute rides every weekend during the warmer Spring/Summer months. No prior experience is necessary other than knowing how to swim. It’s a great way to spend the day, paddling your way along the surprisingly serene river between the protected nooks of the river piers. You’re certain to get a view of the city you wouldn’t otherwise get back on dry land.

Trapeze School
Ever harbored a secret fantasy to run off and join the circus? You might finally get your chance when you come to New York. Just a short walk from Hudson River kayaking at Pier 40 is the Trapeze School of New York. Complete with all the necessary swings and safety nets and harnesses to get you up and swinging, the school has been attracting urban daredevils and just the plain curious for almost 10 years.

There’s quite possibly no better setting to learn – as participants flip, swing and glide their way through the lesson they are greeted with panoramic views of the city waterfront and skyline. Visitors can purchase a two-hour lesson starting at around $50-60 plus a one-time $22 registration fee. The school has a second indoor location at 30th Street.

Bowermaster’s Antarctica — Grytviken, South Georgia

by Jon Bowermaster on


In the whaling museum here the most fascinating thing to me – after the touch-me-feel-me penguin skin – are the trophies and sports uniforms worn by the different South Georgia whaling station teams which competed against each other in rugby, track and field, ski jumping and more during the heyday of whale killing here.

Grytviken was South Georgia’s first whaling station/factory, set up by Norwegian explorer C.A. Larsen in 1904. Initially only blubber was taken and the carcass discarded resulting in beaches of bones along the coastline which I can still see lying in the shallows off what remains of its main dock. By 1912, seven whaling stations had been established and South Georgia became known as the southern capital of whaling.

That heyday was during the early 1900s, when a variety of whales (blue, fin, sei, humpback and southern right whales) were abundant in South Georgia’s waters during the austral summers, feeding on the massive quantities of krill found on the edge of the island’s continental shelf.

By the late 1920s such shore-based whaling factories on the island declined due the scarcity of whales around the island, followed by a boom in whaling on the high seas. The stations on South Georgia then became home base for repair, maintenance and storage. It was the uncontrolled whaling on the high seas followed – up to two hundred miles off shore – and led to significant reductions in populations of exploited whale species.
Whales were harpooned with an explosive grenade, inflated with air and marked with a flag, radar reflectors, and latterly radios. A catcher would then tow them to a factory ship or shore station. The whale was hauled to the flensing plan. The blubber was removed and boiled under pressure to extract the oil. Meat and bone were separated and boiled. The results were dried and ground down for stock food and fertilizer. Baleen whale oil was the basis of edible, pharmaceutical, cosmetic and chemical products. It was also an important source of glycerol to manufacture explosives.

Between 1904 and 1965 some 175,250 whales were processed at South Georgia shore stations. In the whole of the Antarctica region a low estimate suggests one and a half million animals were taken between 1904 and 1978. Probably the largest whale ever recorded was processed here at Grytviken in 1912, more than one hundred feet long, weighing in at nearly two hundred tons. This intensive hunting reduced the Southern Ocean stock, once the largest in the world, to less than ten percent of their original numbers and some species to less than one percent.

It wasn’t until 1974 that the International Whaling Convention agreed to protect the few remaining species in the Southern Ocean, and whaling here was mostly stopped in 1978. Paul Watson and his Sea Shepard – now Animal Planet heroes apparently, though that has happened this season while I’ve been in Antarctica – are still attempting to dissuade the Japanese from their annual hunt. Today. On occasion, you can spy whales close to shore at South Georgia, as they make a slow recovery, in particular southern right whales and humpbacks.

THE BOSS IS BURIED HERE

On top of the sense of history left at this beach by its whaling history, Grytviken is famous in Southern Ocean lore too for being the burial site of Ernest Henry Shackleton.

In 1921 – six years after successfully rescuing his men off Elephant Island, thanks to the help of the Chilean naval vessel “Yelcho” – he sailed south for what was to be his third Antarctic expedition. Its vague intention was to survey the coastline and carry out somewhat ill-defined science. You get the sense he was just itching to get back down south.

This time out his sailing ship, “The Quest” barely made it to Grytviken and in the early hours of January 5, 1922, he suffered a fatal heart attack here. His body was on its way back to England when the ship carrying him home stopped off in Uruguay and learned that his widow wished her husband be buried on South Georgia. His grave is still the focus of the Whaler’s Cemetery at the end of the beach.

It is tradition to toast “the Boss” – no, not the bard of New Jersey! – with a shot of rum poured onto his grave, which I happily did. Unlike the rest of those buried in the small, white picket-lined cemetery, Shackelton is interned with his head pointing south, towards Antarctica.

Beware ayahuasca: How drinking a psychedelic South American tea led to the worst night of my life

by Aaron Hotfelder on

It all started with a paper I wrote in college. The class was Criminal Law, and our final assignment was to write an opinion on a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal, which posed the question of whether a small Brazilian religious group living in New Mexico should be allowed to use a psychedelic tea called ayahuasca as part of its religious celebration.

“Hell, yes, they should!” I wrote (more or less) in my paper, and the Supreme Court, citing the importance of religious freedom, agreed.

Fast-forward two years: I’m sitting in a large dug-out canoe in the Ecuadorian jungle with three German guys and our guide, Marcelo. We’re in the middle of a week-long trip to the Cuyabeno Nature Reserve, an Amazonian rainforest located in the northeastern part of Ecuador.

We’re on our way to visit a shaman (medicine man) and his family, when I turn to Marcelo and, remembering my paper from college, ask whether the religious groups around here ever use a tea called ayahuasca in their services. Marcelo pauses, looks at me with a half-smile, and says, “You want to try ayahuasca?”

“Sure,” I say, with absolutely no knowledge of what’s in store for me. I had taken mushrooms containing the psychedelic drug psilocybin before, and had enjoyed the experience enough to rate it as easily one of the top five experiences of my life. So this ayahuasca stuff would be a piece of cake, right? Well, no.

That night at the house of the shaman and his family, Marcelo calls several other backpackers and I into a small room where we would finally drink a short glass of the extremely bitter tea. What we find in the room is like nothing we expect: A medicine man at least 70 years old is sitting on a chair before us smoking a cigarette. A feather is stuck through his nose and he’s wearing a loin-cloth. Only a loin-cloth.

As we sit in a half-circle on the floor before him, he asks us questions to try to ensure that we’re ready– spiritually and physically– to drink the tea. “You have fasted for twenty-four hours?” he asks in Spanish. “Wait, wha?!” I think. No, I hadn’t done that. In fact, my stomach was about as full as I could ever remember it. (Let’s just say the bathroom facilities in the Ecuadorian jungle are not up to my usual standards.)

But I’d come this far. “Sí,” I tell him. “No comida para mi.”

He pulls a three-liter plastic bottle out from under his chair, sets it on the ground in front of him, and begins reciting sing-songy incantations while blessing the bottle’s contents with the smoke from his cigarette. (Of course, it’s anyone’s guess exactly how much of this ceremony is really traditional and how much is performed only to look authentic for tourists.)

Soon he’s pouring glasses of the ayahuasca tea for each of us, and he delivers them to us one at a time. I’m the last one to drink, so I already know by everyone else’s reactions that the tea is not going to be very good. But the tea’s disgustingly bitter taste can’t even live up to my already lowered expectations. It’s virtually unpalatable, which, considering the mind-altering effects it’s about to bring on, is probably for the best.

We sit and wait for twenty minutes after drinking the tea before anything happens. Then the backpacker to the far left of me stands up, leans his head out the window, and vomits. It’s okay, the shaman assures us, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Then, like that contagious-throwing-up scene from Stand by Me, the guy next to him vomits. Then the person next to me does. Unfortunately, because of my stuffed-to-the-gills stomach, I never do.

What happens then? Well, let me offer an extended excerpt from what I wrote in my journal the next day. The opening sentence, I assure you, is no exaggeration:

“That was the worst night of my life. I will, as always, blame someone else. Our guide Marcelo apparently thought we’d be okay without fasting before the ayahuasca. Turns out, all the food in my stomach absorbed the nasty tea, and instead of puking twenty minutes in– like we were supposed to– and returning to Earth three hours later, I writhed in agony for nine hours….

“It shouldn’t go unmentioned, however, that I did manage to enjoy some of the positive effects of the ayahuasca: colorful open-eyed hallucinations, extreme visual mind-f***s, and an all-together giddy demeanor. But then, somehow, things began to turn south, or perhaps a better way to put it is that things turned into hell on Earth. It’s difficult to describe with any precision, but I’ll give it a go anyway. I began losing track of who I was; I couldn’t form abstract thoughts; I turned into an animal looking only for survival…

“I couldn’t wake up from the nightmare, couldn’t return to anything resembling a functional human being. I had roughly a hundred false awakenings. They lasted forever… Never in my life have I felt so utterly alone, so helpless, so out of control, so insane. I remember asking a biologist from West Texas, as I was finally coming out of the daze, to tell me his life story so that I could latch on to someone else’s coherent thoughts. So I could remember where I was, what I was doing.

“The most frightening part was not knowing if I’d ever return to normal. I imagined myself– or rather, I would have imagined myself if I remembered how to imagine– like Jack Nicholson at the end of Cuckoo’s Nest when they wheel him in: the lights are on but nobody’s home. It entered my mind that maybe I was dead, and that if I wasn’t, maybe I wanted to be.”

So, if you couldn’t pick up on my subtlety, this was not a very positive experience. Don’t mistake this post for an anti-drug cautionary tale, however, since my fellow backpackers mostly had very good times.

I realize now that I was stupid in not fasting for 24 hours before taking this very powerful substance. I’ve learned– and earned– my lesson.

Life Nomadic: How Airport Metal Detectors Work

by Tynan on


I’m a bit fanatical about shaving. Most of my possessions are pared down to the bare minimum, but my shaving stuff is the one big exception. I use a Merkur travel safety razor with Merkur platinum coated blades, a Dovo silver tip shaving brush, and Truefitt and Hill shaving cream.

Excessive, I know.

The blades that the razor uses are standard “safety razor” blades. They’re thin pieces of metal with a blade on each side. That sounds like something that the TSA would possibly prohibit, but in fact they don’t. They mention them specifically in their rules.

They prohibit “Razor-Type Blades – such as box cutters, utility knives, razor blades not in a cartridge, but excluding safety razors.”

Clearly, safety razors are permitted. This is consistent with my experience, too. I’m almost invariably selected for further screening. TSA agents see my razor blades and move on.

And somehow I’ve managed to resist any temptation to hijack a plane with them so far.

In New York a few weeks ago, things were different. The TSA agent didn’t like my razor blades. I insisted that the TSA rules permitted the blades. Things got escalated to the supervisor, an icy woman named Gohel.

“I specifically checked the TSA site and saw that these are allowed. Can we please look over the rules together?”

Gohel told me in clear language that the blades would not be allowed on the plane, and that, no, I could not look at the TSA rules with her. No amount of friendly yet firm pleading would change her mind.

The blades were taken.

I anticipated that this might happen, so I came up with a way to pass small metal objects through the metal detector. I doubt any serious weapon could possibly make it through, but it’s great insurance for those worried that poorly trained TSA agents will confiscate items you’re legally permitted to carry on.
Metal detectors work on a simple principle. One of the walls of the arch you walk through sends pulses of radio waves to the other wall which bounces them back. Their return is timed, and if they come back too soon then they’ve hit metal.

However, they don’t pick up every bit of metal. If they did, then people with metal fillings, metal rivets on their jeans, and metal rings would be unnecessarily detained. The sensitivity is always turned down a little bit.

Because the radio pulses are coming from side to side, if a metal item is aimed so that its thinnest profile is facing the walls of the arches, it is less likely to be detected. I keep a spare blade in my wallet, and it has never set off a metal detector.

There’s no way to know exactly how much metal can pass through a metal detector undetected. I’m sure that the higher ups at the TSA have metal detectors calibrated to catch anything big enough to pose a serious threat.

I have successfully passed safety razor blades as well as small pairs of scissors with no problem. The TSA rules clearly allow scissors under 4″, but agents sometimes have problems with those as well.

Trying to get anything seriously dangerous past the metal detectors would be a very bad idea. I’ve been randomly patted down before, and I wouldn’t want to be caught with something that isn’t clearly allowed by the TSA.

But if you’re sick of being subject to poorly trained TSA agents’ whims and opinions, consider keeping your razors and scissors away from them and their metal detectors.

Bowermaster’s Antarctica — In the Footsteps of Shackleton

by Jon Bowermaster on

Fortuna Bay, South Georgia

Ernest Shackleton had an intimate relationship with South Georgia. He stopped here for a month in 1914 before sailing the “Endurance” to its crushing fate in Antarctica; a year and a half later with five others he sailed the gerry-rigged lifeboat “James Caird” 800 miles across the Scotia Sea to King Haarkon Bay, arriving on May 9, 1916; and in 1922 he returned, died and is buried here.

On a warm and sun-filled morning we land at Fortuna Bay, to repeat the last chunk of Shackleton’s legendary and unprecedented climb across South Georgia. A steep and muddy tussock hill leads to fields of broken slate, which climb gradually to 3,000 feet. The higher we get, the more stunning the landscape grows: tall, spiky, far off peaks covered in snow, clear mountain ponds, tufts of soft moss scattered among the shattered scree, waterfalls tumbling off nearby walls.

It was the whalers of South Georgia who first warned Shackleton that his route to the northern edge of the Antarctic continent was likely to be barred by unusually heavy concentrations of ice that had arrived the year he sailed for the Weddell Sea in December. He went anyway; we don’t know what he was thinking when he left South Georgia then nor what exactly when he thought when returned via the “James Caird.” In retrospect would he think it had been a mistake to take the “Endurance” down that season?
Exhausted by the 16 days it took from Elephant Island in the tiny boat, they narrowly negotiated a landing and crawled ashore on the southwestern side of the island, at Cape Rosa. But ultimate safety lay on the north side of the island, at the whaling station called Stromness. Leaving three of his crew under the upturned “James Caird,” Shackleton along with Tom Crean and Frank Worsley set off with minimal equipment (stove, binoculars, compass, an ice ax and ninety feet of rope).

Shackleton wrote of the beginning of the climb: “The snow-surface was disappointing. Two days before we had been able to move rapidly on hard packed snow; now we sank over our ankles at each step. High peaks, impassable cliffs, steep snow-slopes and sharply descending glaciers were prominent features in all directions, with stretches of snow-plain overlaying the ice-sheet of the interior …. The moon, which proved a good friend during this journey, threw a long shadow at one point and told us that the surface was broken in our path. Warned in time, we avoided a huge hole capable of swallowing a small army.”

At one point they had detoured badly and had to drop down to Fortuna Bay, which is where we picked up their trail.

Standing at the crest of the hill, the point at which Shackleton would have seen the sea on the eastern side of the island and possibly evidence of the whaling station at Stromness, it is hard to imagine what must have gone through his mind, after a year and a half being lost. One big difference is their journey in May was through deep snow; we see barely a snow patch on this mid-summer day. What told them they were in the right place after thirty-six hours of climbing, across twenty-two miles of previously unexplored and inhospitable terrain, was the very civilized whistle of the whaling factory’s wake-up call.

“Men lived in houses lit by electric light on the east coast. News of the outside world waited us there, and, above all, the east coast meant for us the means of rescuing the twenty-two men we had left on Elephant Island.”

Clambering downhill, past the tall waterfall Shackleton allegedly rappelled down, we cross a wide, wet plain of saw grass and glacial melt. Rusted remnants of the whaling station still stand, though today it’s tumbling down and off-limits due to being filled with asbestos and flying sheet metal. Thousands of fur seals wait on the beach to greet us; they have taken over the place, aggressively chasing us down the beach as soon as we step onto the sand.