Some people plant, some people gather.

As spring approaches I turn my attention to what this year’s adventure will be. This has been the winter of the blog and Netflix DVD’s. I’m thinking about this summer being yet another PCT thru-hike. When I start thinking about being back on that trail my body starts humming and vibrating. A part of me thinks that that would be the best thing to do this summer. Another part of me remembers how hard it is: the heat, the pain, the stinking horses and their obnoxious riders, the cold and the rain, bear worries, etc. How can something so hard be so alluring? I think it must be something in a person’s intrinsic programing that makes some people want to start roaming as spring nears where as others start thinking about planting a garden.

Xena and me.

Once I took a “Dealing with Difficult People” workshop. The instructor told the following story, I don’t remember why he told it, but it made me so mad that he probably thought I was a plant. The story the instructor told was: “Two men and one woman were marooned on an island surrounded by shark-infested waters. There is a rowboat. The woman asks the men to row her away. One says, ‘no’ and the other one says, ‘Yes if you have sex with me.”

I loudly asked, “Why didn’t she just row herself off?” And he said, “Because, it was surrounded by shark infested waters.”  I kept saying, “I don’t understand why she didn’t just take the boat.” And he kept saying, “Because she was afraid of the shark infested waters.”  This went on for most of the class.

After that class, my next job was running a skiff back and forth to a barge that was anchored in the Columbia. It was the middle of winter and the water and wind could be fierce some days. When I felt the need for some courage, I would think to my self, “Shark infested waters, yeeee ha!”  and plow ahead. Just like Xena and Tarzan have their cries, “Shark infested waters!”  has been my courage conjuring phrase ever since because it reminds me of the cost of fear.

Silver tea

cabin-945-1.jpgFor a delicious, healthy, hot beverage try a cup of silver tea. It’s cheap too, unless you are in Sweden, were it reportedly fetches at least the same price as a cup of Earl Grey.

My other cabin is water access only and I don’t own a boat, so if I would run out of coffee and tea I couldn’t go to the store and get more. I found that I was just as happy with some spruce needles in my hot water or even just a cup of silver tea(hot water).

Your money or your life.

“Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence”money.jpg is a great book on freeing yourself up financially and getting your priorities clear.

I read it about 15 years ago and it changed my life. It helped me defined what was important to me and think up ways to get the life I wanted. Instead of focusing on getting more money, like most financial books, this one is about getting a more fulfilling life.

At the time there was a simple living series at the community college built loosely around the book. The teachers were all people trying for a simpler, more self defined life and they would offer good advice like: “Personal grooming—do as little as possible but not so little that people take notice.”

Note: This is a really popular book. You should be able to find it at most public libraries. If not, used copies are plentiful.

My time at Sesa-Asoke village and how I ended up not going back to work.

When I came back home after hiking the PCT, I went to Thailand for the winter, (as my job was seasonal and I didn’t have to work winters), to take a cob cottage building class. After the class was over, I decided to head to Laos.

When I got to the Laos border, I found they were no longer issuing visas at the border so I had to stay in Thailand. On the bus back, I met two teenage boys that had been over in Laos visiting one of their fathers. I was the only Westerner on the bus so they decided to practice their English on me. They said, “In my village all the people get up at 4 am., where I live no one wears shoes. Where I live, no one eats meat. Where I live we all keep the 5 precepts: No lying, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no intoxicants, and no killing.” I asked where they lived and decided to check it out.

asoke personWhen I got there the next day, I found not really a village but an intentional community that was a little perplexed as to why I was there. They however gave me a place to sleep, introduced to me the English-speaking nun, fed me, and asked me where I wanted to work. I could chose from the herbal medicine shop, the mushroom farm, the fruit and vegetable gardens, the sewing shop, the dump, or compost making. I choose the herbal medicine shop. 2 months later, I was still there and loving it. I taught English and worked in the herbal medicine factory. The people were all so nice to me. I thought it was a wonderful place to live. The village stressed simplicity. There were two meals a day but you were supposed to try to only eat once a day. If you were only eating once a day the people would say, “Oh, very good.” You were supposed to be up a 4 am and you weren’t supposed to take a nap during the day. You were also supposed to go barefoot.

When the nun would go out almsing in the mornings, sometimes I would go with her in a practice known as bin da bawt or something like that. It means walking in the path of a nun. I would follow behind her. One day they put new gravel down, she had thirty years of walking barefoot, but I thought my tender feet would start bleeding.

I wasn’t spending hardly any money at all, maybe a dollar a week, when I would go into town to use the internet and maybe get a treat. Since I wasn’t spending any money I figured I didn’t need to make any money. So I started thinking about instead of returning home and going back to work, of going home and selling my house and all my stuff and moving back to the Asoke village in Thailand.

On my way back, I got the idea to sell my house and buy a piece of vacation property with the money, that could be rented out by the day or week. Then, if I wanted to come home I could tell the management folks to stop renting it so I could move into it. While looking for some practical piece of vacation property I found my dream property, a beautiful cabin on the water and bought it. Since I had my dream cabin I went there instead and have never made it back to Thailand or work.

So far things have worked out okay. It’s pretty cheap to live in a primitive cabin. For five years I didn’t have a laptop, solar panel, or telephone. Now that I do, I can tell you that those things don’t make things better, they just make things different.

The mid-winter doldrums

Too late to be hibernating too early to be hiking. Seems like winter should be over. I’ve watched something like 150 DVD’s from Netflick this winter, all the deleted scenes and director commentaries too. Most of them have been documentaries but some independent and foreign. I think I’m pretty much caught up on what’s happening in the video media. I’ve watched most of the  DVD’s that interest me and have had to look harder for stuff to add to my queue.   I started looking through the TV shows for some possible picks.  My two favorite have been, and this is just weird, “The Dog Whisperer” and “Project Runway”. I don’t have a dog and I own two outfits, three if you count rain gear as an outfit, but for some reason I’m just entranced by both shows.

On “The Dog Whisperer” this guy comes to a house with an unruly dog, puts a leash on it, takes it for a walk and, poof, the dog is well behaved. On Project Runway, all these flamboyant designers design outfits but there is always some sort of challenge. Like they will take them to a grocery store and give them 30 minutes to pick out the material for an outfit. Then they get something like 6 hours to design and sew an outfit out of what ever they bought. Next, they get a model who models it on a runway in front of these judges that say stuff like, “ho hum, another garbage bag dress? It’s been done.” And, “In fashion you are either in or you are out and you are out. Auf Wiedersehen.”

Reentry.

Tom Robbins wrote a story about a creature that worked hard to appear to be a human and to be pleasing to other humans, but he overlooked some things, like he had big patches of hair behind his knees and he smelled really funky. The creature thought those things were insignificant and that no one cabin-937-1.jpgwould notice.

My neighbor invited me to go to lunch with her and two other people. As I was getting ready, I felt like that creature only my thoughts were more, “I’ll never pass�. To my surprise, I wasn’t that far off the mark from the other women. In a town of rugged individualists, everyone looks a little off or even if they don‘t, they don‘t mind if you do. In a store, a woman came up to me, touched my Sunday Afternoon Adventure hat, and said, “ My, that is some hat. You look good.�

Note: The skirt is a Macabi Travel/hiking Skirt ,for both men and women.  It has a clip so that you can make it into trousers or shorts too.

Snow Levels on the CDT and the PCT for 2007

Before hiking the PCT, I watched the snow levels, as too much snow in the Sierras would make for a more difficult hike. So far, things look good for both a northbound PCT(Pacific Crest Trail) hike or a CDT (Continental Divide Trail) hike. (Although NM looks really dry) Snow levels for the PCT and CDT 2007. To see the snowpack for other months and years go to: http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/cgibin/westsnow.pl

I also found this site that has a a really good graph of the snow levels for PCT or the CDT

I sort of had other plans for this summer like building a cob cottage or selling my BC property but as the winter wears on and I tire of domestic life, I’m more attracted to a hike. The cabin I’m living in is fine for now and I don’t need to sell my BC property and it’s not every year the snow levels are this low…….

Bukit Lawang

Bukit Lawang is a magical little village built next to the orangutan preserve in Sumatra. The cars remain on the outside. A river runs through it with a swinging bridge over it and has little children diving off of it. There is a night club in a cave. There are some native rock climbers that live in a tree house and climb all day on the cliffs by their place. People come down to the river to wash their clothes and beat them on the rocks. I stayed for three weeks and would have stayed longer if I could have changed my ticket.

A lot of the orangutans were pets and were being rehabilitated. Western women flocked there, and lined up for a chance to work with them. Twice daily ungainly orangutans who were in the middle stage of their rehabilitation would come to the feeding center to be fed bananas.

I had the honeymoon suite at a place on the river. I got it because it was the only place in Bukit Lawang that had a hammock. There was lots of artful tile work. Water worn branches were bent into a canopy bed. The bathroom only had a roof over part of it, as is common in Indonesia. A tree grew up in the middle of the bathroom and from a tilted terra-cotta pot in its branches cold water flowed for a shower. There were tropical flowers growing in the bathroom. But the biggest attraction for me was the covered tile porch with a hammock.

I was lying on the hammock sleeping when I heard screaming. I opened my eyes to see across the river an orangutan with a t-shirt on and a bunch of natives from the city yelling and running away. Then this orangutan took off the shirt and started washing it in the river and banging it on the rocks like the people do. Then it tried to put the wet t-shirt on again, but because it was wet it couldn’t get it back on right and had it all stretched out.

Costs: When I was there in 1999, the first place I stayed at was .62 cents USD(United States Dollar) a night and had a private bath. When I moved up to the beautiful place on the river it ran me 7.50 USD a night. A plate of fried rice and a plate of passion fruit was less than one USD total. Whitewater rafting, overnight treks, rock climbing, orangutan watching and inter-tubing down the river were all affordable once the bargaining was done.

Note: According to this article, Bukit Lawang was washed away in 2003 and a lot of people were killed. According to the Wikipedia article they are rebuilding higher up and are back in business.

Pictures.

Ten years ago my camera was stolen and until this winter, I didn’t replace it. A camera is nice to have for blogging but for traveling and on the trail I find it too heavy and I think it encourages a person to objectify their experiences. Without a camera, when great sunsets are happening, you don’t think, “this will make a good picture,” you just sit back and enjoy it thoroughly.

On a trek in a jungle in Sumatra, a mother orangutan came down a tree with her baby wrapped around her, the guide gave me a banana as I was the only one without a camera in my hands, I handed the orangutan the banana, looked into her eyes and touched her hand. Over and over, I see people missing experiences by trying to capture them.

Five years ago, when I sold my house, I needed to get rid of all of my stuff. I looked through all the pictures I had, took out the ones of my son, sent them to him, and threw away the rest. Life is about now and you can never be in the now if you have to cart the past around with you.

My travels and hikes are not diminished by not having pictures; I think they are enhanced because not having a camera frees me up for experiencing the moment instead of trying to preserve it. In addition, my life is enhanced by not having to store bunches of pictures of the past.