Cellular carriers lie

Telus is my cellular service provider and I recently called them before I went to Europe to ask about the cost of using my BlackBerry while I was traveling. I was told that I would pay $10 per MB for data and based upon my daily usage in Canada, I was able to predict my cost because I wouldn't be using the browser like I might here in Canada. Perhaps I would get about 20 emails per day, and each email might be at most 5K so I might expect to consume 100K per day, or about a dollar per day.

What they don't explain is that every hour I would be billed 20K to maintain the convenience of a real-time data connection. Back in Canada, that connection is maintained for just 1K per hour. So I was billed an extra 450K (24 hours x 19K), or $4.50, per day in unexpected data!! Telus claim that they are billed the 20K from the foreign carrier, but those networks are running modern 3G networks and they would have as advanced billing capabilities as any carrier here and the data usage would be the same. Therefore, the carriers are charging a HUGE premium, perhaps in Europe, but perhaps by agreement between carriers on both sides.

If you want the convenience of having email arrive immediately while you are in Europe, then you are forced to pay $0.20 per hour and it would be advisable to turn off the device when you sleep which I never do here in Canada. Telus may not have told a direct lie, but they do misrepresent the cost of operating their devices outside their network.

FRANCE !!

A quick trip to France !

The Rock Rocks

On my second day in Newfoundland I drove from St. John's up to Twillingate to see what was reported to be the biggest iceberg in twenty years (white blob in the photo behind me just before it start to rain, sideways). Along the way I picked up a hitchhiker and eventually we discover that he worked with my father 30-some years ago at Come By Chance and Bay "Despair." What's the Chance of that? You gotta love some of the names of places there too: Cupids, Blow Me Down, Dildo.

There is something noticeably and wonderfully pleasant about folks in Newfoundland. It isn't just people in the tourist industry, but people in general. I imagine there are some cranky folks too, but not the ones I met. It is not unlike many of the people we met last summer in small communities across the Prairies during the David Thompson Brigade. I would be tempted to say it is a rural thing, but I continue to meet grumpy, miserable and rude rural folks in Ontario.

Burano Italy

Near Venice is the famous Murano glass factory. In fact you can buy the glass all over the place around here. But you would be hard pressed to find anything equal to the colourful village of Burano where every little house is painted some wild or vibrant colour. And they have canals too. And a leaning tower.
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My Best Brigade Shot - Ready, Switch !

Like everyone involved with the David Thompson Brigade, I am struggling to decide what is my single best photo. At this point, this blurred-in-camera shot of the Canadian Voyageur crew doing a switch is my favourite. For me, this captures the essence of the experience - a blur of people working together in complete synchronization. Often it wasn't obvious who was doing the work. Often you only saw it briefly while you were focused on something else. Often it seemed like others were able to effortlessly do something you could not.

In the beginning it was frustrating to see a crew like the Voyageurs slip past at what seemed an impossible rate while we struggled to make our boat respond to clumsy efforts. The first revelation was a clean switch which in time became simple even in high winds, big waves and rapids. One day on the Rainy River we snuck up on the Canadian Voyageurs and beat them to shore at a crew change - it wasn't really a race, but to everyone on the crew it was a small victory which we will probably remember (and boasted of) for a long time.

Snakes

Here I am at the Narcisse snake dens in Manitoba. - the home of tens of thousands of red-sided garter snakes, the largest concentration of snakes in the world. Dozens of male snakes wind themselves around a physically larger remale creating a rolling and twisting mass. There were easily a few hundred in total, but a picture of a hundred snakes isn't as cool as a video clip - maybe I will post that when I get home.

Earlier in the day I had a great time at the Ducks Unlimited HQ at Oak Hammock Marsh. There were hundreds of ducks around - many of them species I had never seen before.
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Russia trip video

This is a ten minute video of our trip. The DVD version has some of the parts that were cut and I am working on finishing the 20-minute extended version which will also end up on the trip DVD. There is a two minute slideshow in an earlier posting.

Slideshow of trip to Russia

I am working on a video of our trip to Russia last June. So I decided to see how Blogger does with the conversion. The audio comes through well, but the frame size is reduced. But not bad really.

Hawai'i

We had a great time in Hawaii - a week on Maui and a week on the Big Island of Hawaii. On Maui we spent a few days in Hana, including some great snorkeling. The islands had been blasted with a major storm so the waterfalls were all flowing. The sunrise from the top of Haleakala was not spectacular on the day we were there, but other sunrises more than compensated. The hiking on Haleakala however was beautiful in a volcanic sort of way.

On Hawaii we went on a tour of the original 88 inch observatory on top of Mauna Kea; unfortunately we didn't get into the Keck observatories which are the twin ball shaped ones in this photo and are the world's largest optical observatories. We also had an amazing time swimming with dolphins along the coast north of Kona. If you go to Hawaii, it is an amazing experience.

Necessary Journeys - Finding Farley

I know people who have gone for multi-month road trips or walked the Appalachian Trail and even some very long canoe trips. Cool. Exciting. And clearly well beyond my travel vitae. But I am in awe of that elite group who qualify to be what I would call Great Modern-day Explorers - GMEs.

At the very top of the GME pile is the Gluttons For Punishment category presently dominated by Colin Angus and Julie Wafaei. Colin did the first human-powered circumnavigation of the world. We heard some of their stories last year when they spoke at the University of Waterloo. Somehow they were able to spend five months together rowing across the Atlantic and still get married. Their videos and books will amaze you.

My other favourite adventurers are Karsten Heuer & Leanne Allison. They are just finishing a cross-Canada adventure journey - Finding Farley . Leanne won several awards for the brilliant video Being Caribou - imagine walking across the tundra in Yukon and Alaska following a caribou herd, without having a dozen porters or helicopters dashing ahead to tell you where the herd went while you were asleep. Karsten wrote a book of the same name as well as Walking the Big Wild which describes his Yellowstone to Yukon walk (virtually no trail by the way). Y2Y is an important conservation project worth supporting.

GPS, synthetic fiber clothing and airplanes have fundamentally changed the challenges of undertaking adventurous journeys. These folks have redefined adventure and exploration. Someday I hope to accomplish a fraction of one of their journeys.

Georgian Bay kayaking

Allan and I recently spent a week kayaking from Killarney. We paddled south to the French River and then back, going around Phillip Edward Island in the process. Paddling in this area is FANTASTIC. If you want someone to paddle the area with you, gimmie a call !

Russia trip

Mom and I just came back from a trip to Russia. The trip is called Waterways of the Czars. It was interesting to learn that 90 years ago many Russian didn't have a last name. They were serfs, with no property rights. The trip went from St. Petersburg to Moscow. We visited some beautiful churchs, some hundreds of years old.

Killarney

Justin and I went into Grace Lake in Killarney Provincial Park before Thanksgiving weekend. We were very lucky with the weather, but we missed the peak of the colours. We were paddling two nights in the moonlight after a long day of shooting pictures.

Rwanda

Rwanda is a hard country to describe in a few words. We went there because I wanted to see mountain gorillas while they still exist in the wild. There are less than 500. The more numerous lowland gorilla populations have dropped 70% in the last decade. The mountain gorillas, made famous by Diane Fossey, live in mountain parks that are largely surrounded by terraced farm land.

The genocide was only twleve years ago. We went directly from the airport to the Genocide Memorial. But interestingly we could not go in because it was the fourth Saturday morning of the month. And on the fourth Saturday morning of each month all citizens are to do their civic duty and head out their front door and clean up the country. I don't know who came up with that idea, but it shows there are some thoughtful people in government in Rwanda.

When we did visit the Memorial it was sobering. It is hard to imagine how 800,000 people were killed in four months. It is harder to underestand how the international community failed to intercede. Many people have heard about Hutu vs Tutsi, but few would know that the distinction was largely fabricated by European (mostly Belgian) colonial powers as a divide-and-conquer tactic. There is no religious, language or cultural difference between the two groups. It is hard to believe, but true, that "H" and "T" stamps were placed in identity cards based upon ... you won't believe this ... how many COWS you owned.

Kilimanjaro

Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro had been one of my goals for almost twenty years. I was fortunate to be able to join a group from CARE Canada raising awareness and dollars for CARE Enterprise Partners, an important development program.

I suspect our DNA has a substantial influence on how well we adapt to high altitude. I was fortunate to adapt reasonable quickly and enjoyed the climb a lot. It is a long walk up and a very quick walk down. In terms of a wilderness experience however, it is not like going backpacking in the Rockies. Our group had 22 people and we had 115 porters plus several guides. It is good for the local economy, but it was a LONG way from a self-supported alpine experience.

The Serengeti

We left Waterloo at the end of January when there was hardly any snow. We got back in early March and probably have missed all the major snow storms. Some people go somewhere warm for the winter. We went somewhere amazing.

I had wanted to go to Africa for as long as I understood the idea of the place. We saw as many different mammal species in two weeks in Tanzania than I have seen in two years in Canada. Possibly as many as in my whole life. Watching a lioness hunt and kill a zebra was the most unforgettable moment. You see it on television and imagine it is impossible to actually see happen - and then you watch it happen maybe 80 metres away.

Our guide was Bjorn Figenschou who has operated Tanzania Guides for over twenty years. He has lived in Tanzania most of his life and was outstanding.

The BC Coast

After the Nahanni we went to Whitehorse and then down to Skagway Alaska to take the Alaska Marine Highway ferry to Bellingham Washington. The trip is a about three days and we were fortunate to have beautiful weather. We met up with some friends on Salt Spring Island and relatives at Comox and more friends on Quadra Island before heading home. The flowers at Bouchart Gardens in Victoria were beautiful.

The Nahanni

We joined some folks who support the work of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society The Nahanni is probably the most visual stunning place I have ever been. The canyons are spectacular. The wilderness is breathtaking. The paddling is fun, and challenging at times. Mostly we zoomed along with a 10km/hour current doing all the work.

Victoria Falls is twice the height of Niagara Falls, unfortunately the Painted Canyon immediately below the falls went by too fast as I was just getting into paddling through three or four foot haystack waves. It would probably have been better to be in the raft so I could soak up the incredible views.

Our guide Neil Hartling runs Nahanni River Adventures and they were amazing. We had primerib for dinner after a week on the river -- I know it sounds unbelievable, but the folks at NRA are amazing.

First time on the tundra

We flew out of Ft. Smith in the Northwest Territory on July 9th - heading about 300 miles from the nearest road. If you haven't been above the treeline, then it is something to see. We were up near the Thelon area which is a long way from anything. Fellow-paddler Tom had a great description - "I wouldn't call it beautiful ... It's a place where we don't belong." I would add that it is not without beauty; but it is a stark land.

We saw caribou, wolves and muskox; there are wolverines and grizzly bears in this area. Our guide Alex Hall (website) has been running rivers in the north for 30 years and has seen herds of caribou numbering several tens of thousands at one time.

There are a few billion mosquitos too.

Mountaineering school

This course is a LOT of fun. The instructor, Conrad Janzen, was excellent and I would highly recommend both Yamnuska and Conrad. We started learning glacier travel and safety. After a couple days we moved from the Bow hut to the Peyto hut where we practised crevasse rescue. We also watched a grizzly bear cross the glacier. Returning from the Peyto hut we went up Mt. Rhonda were we looked down to the Icefield Parkway which connects Jasper and Banff.