Driving from Austria to Slovenia takes one through a corner of Italy before descending into a spectacular network of valleys. I came here to be with two friends, Matjaz and Nena. Their home has a terrace overlooking the blue waters of the Soča river. Their town, Most na Soči, means "Bridge on the River Soča."
I finally got the chance to fly for the first time here. Matjaz and I launched seconds apart late in the day and drifted over the spectacular valley in the diminishing light. The camera I'd set up on the back of my glider (visible in the photo below) took only a few pictures while I was still on the ground before it shut down, but Nena captured the moment for me.
Last spring here, while snow still covered the tops of the 2000 meter peaks nearby, Matjaz captured a flight on video that he made from this hill we flew off. Edited it down to six minutes, it's set to the evocative music of the movie "Avatar." I don't know how many times I've watched it but it must be at least 50 times. To me it captures the stunning beauty of this sport of hang gliding. It is so simple, the way we fly, and yet so profound in its expression of the often forgotten unlimited nature of our existence. We can fly. We truly can. Matjaz takes off a small hill as casually as if descending a few stairs, and finds the right air currents to climb, climb, and climb until he is soaring across the pyramid-shaped face of the snow-covered Krn Mountain.
This last week in, around, and above Zell am See, Austria has had me thinking over and over again of a line from the movie Forrest Gump;
"And so I met the president...again."
When the hugely significant becomes commonplace, it's hard not to trivialize it.
Looking around me each day, I find myself thinking, "Here I am amidst some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet...again."
There's a small hang gliding competition going on.
I'm here not to fly, nor even crew for someone, but merely to be with friends who are (such Belgian Jochen and Russian Yulia pictured here).
A bit of reflection revealed that all of the hang gliding competitions I was involved with last summer and will be or already have been this summer are centered around Austria in a manner of sorts. There's Áger, Spain (near Barcelona) to the west, as is Laragne, France (near Nice) and several places in Switzerland. To the south in Italy there is Bassano Del Grappa (near Milan) and Monte Cucco (closer to Rome). To the east, there is Tolmin, Slovenia (near Ljubljana). To the north in Germany, there is Tegelberg (near Munich).
I've spent last summer, then, and will spend this summer crisscrossing Austria on my way to or from some hang gliding site. This means a lot of time of driving through breathtaking mountains and unbelievably quaint and inviting villages...again.
Something about this has inspired me, apparently. Finally I've actually been able to motivate myself to start running again in the mornings...down manicured trails through majestic and whispering forests, in view of a horizon of white-capped peaks. I'd imagine it's hard not to feel inspired here.
My Swiss friends invited me to join them in their country for a mixture of hang gliding competitions and just simple hospitality. Freddy and Ashanta live in Oberdorf, near Stans, the kind of place probably most of us imagine when we think of Switzerland (just above the top of the tree in the lower center of this photo taken from the summit of Bürgenstock).
Jürg and Dolores live in Basel; one of Switzerland's major cities and yet it remains as inviting as a village.
I'll be back here several times over the summer. It often feels like a dream to be there strolling those streets and paths, though I can't say if it's natural beauty or the dear friends that make it such a magnificent place for me. Probably both.
The 2010 World Championships never happened. Out of 14 days scheduled for competition, not a single one provided weather good enough for a flyable task. For 80 of the world's best pilots pilots who traveled from around the globe, it was a bitter disappointment.
Each day either the cloudbase was too low (often lower than the launch ramp on Tegelberg), or the wind was too strong, or it was raining, or it was snowing, or storms threatened from one side or another...always something. On only a few days was the weather good enough for the pilots to even merely launch for a short, local flight. Down below in the valley, it was green and spring time. Up on the launch ramp, however, it was more winter than anything else.
For me, however, it was still a great time. With so many of my best friends in the world all in one place, what's to complain about?
I'd fall asleep each night contentedly exhausted, and wake still too tired to go for the morning run I'd been claiming for weeks that I'd finally start doing again.
On our last day there, Daphne attached a GoPro camera to her foot and held her regular camera in her hand to combine the footage for the video below of our ride down the summer time toboggan run. Such was how we occupied ourselves on the on the ground.
One of the benefits of being involved in hang gliding competitions around the world is that, since most hang gliding involves leaping off a mountain, I get to experience some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet. Right now I'm in Schwangau, Germany, better known as the location of the Neuschwanstein Castle, the inspiration for Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle.
I'm here to drive for (l. to r.) Daphne, from the Netherlands, Claudia, from Columbia, and fellow American Jamie. The three of them are competing in one of the three classes of World Hang Gliding Championship running concurrently off of Tegelberg, a mountain just out of view of the Neuschwanstein castle. They also have been my companions (both individually and as a group) of many adventures over these last years.
Those are just three, however, of perhaps 30 people I know taking part in this competition, of which close to 15 could even be termed some of my closest friends. The other night while sitting at a table, literally squeezed left and right between the affectionate shoulders of Swiss mother and daughter Dolores and Ashanta (pictured here later in the evening with Zhenya as well), I could not help but gratefully contemplate my blessings of human compassion in my life.
Last Sunday, May 9th, was the last practice day before the competition began. I attached a camera to Yulia's hang glider and set it to take a picture every two seconds for what she knew would be just a short flight. It began to rain just before she landed so that by the time she came down over the Neuschwanstein castle, rain drops had spotted the lens cover.
Rain has been a problem. Of the four days that have passed since the competition began on Monday, the 10th, none have been flyable. Yesterday, however, a German pilot found a small window of opportunity for a personal flight and strapped a camera onto his glider. Daphne took the trouble to edit his 27 minutes of footage down to a three minute glimpse of the beauty of flight, this region, and Neuschwanstein.
I was only in the States for five weeks, three of them spent delightedly hosting Yulia for the period surrounding Florida’s two spring hang gliding competitions. As recorded a year ago, I spent the previous spring doing much of the same with Zhenya. Over the last two years I've had many adventures with both Yulia and Zhenya overseas (such as my trip to Velikiy Dvor in northern Russia with Yulia recorded here). It's always good to have the chance to return the hospitality I've been shown in so many different countries by so many different people.
The trip to the States was short, however. We both departed May 5th for Germany; her to compete in the World Hang Gliding Championships, me to join her and other friends at that competition as a way to begin a full summer of plans overseas.
I'm home, arriving this morning in Orlando at 5:30 a.m., where Jamie picked me up. You've just got to love a friend who will rise at 4:30 a.m. to pick you up at a place an hour from their home and then drive you to a place yet another hour beyond.
Jamie hung out as long as I could stay awake (until 2:00 p.m.) then made the two hour drive back to her home on the coast just below Cape Canaveral.
This evening (awake again) I've just read her blog entry posted yesterday in which she comments,
Science Daily reported recently that buying life experiences is much more likely to produce long-term happiness than buying material possessions.
No wonder I always feel so overwhelmingly blessed.
I live in a trailer (when I'm not living in a tent or a car or on somebody's couch). I've just spent five months in Australia and only brought back a couple of hand-made mugs from Beechmountain Pottery and a really cool 12 volt portable shower pump (thanks, Scott!).
Okay...so maybe I'm not finished with my Australian adventures just yet. Scott and I scoured the local sites this afternoon and found that only at Strzelecki Lookout were the winds were right.
I launched first and Scott soon followed. In the air I found that Scott, one of world's top pilots, was doing everything but flying backwards to get some in-flight pictures for me.
A few more days of errands, goodbyes and such, and I'm off to the USA...for only about five weeks.
For my last adventure in Australia before returning home, Scott took me for a weekend of camping and mountain biking just west of Newcastle. Here I had the chance to view a side of aboriginal culture that few non-Aussies get to witness; the stone carvings and cave paintings of Yengo National Park.
These aren't historical sites you'd find in a guide book. In fact, Scott pointed out that there usually weren't any signs indicating where a road lead until you'd driven a small distance down it. You had to know what you wanted to see and where it was beforehand. To view the cave depicted in this photo, Scott parked at a campground and, after we set up our tents, suggested we go for a walk before it got dark. We moved to one end of the parking lot and, after Scott indicated to me that a path started where we stood (I never would have seen it), he said, "You go first." After I'd walked a very short distance, he said, "You missed it." I turned around to see him indicating a cave only a few meters off the path I'd just walked.
If you don't know someone who knows, you'd never find any of these fascinating sites. Scott believes this is intentional, designed to protect these culturally significant sites from the fools such as the ones who'd carved their initials next to aboriginal art thousands of years old.
Yengo Mountain, Biamie's stepping stone to heaven.
I picked up Chris at the Sydney airport at the crack of dawn Saturday, returning from her assignment with the U.N. in Chad, Africa. After three months of austerity on a level most of us cannot conceive, her first thought was fresh seafood fresh seafood fresh seafood.
We went straight from the airport to the fish market in Sydney and filled a eski ('cooler' in the States) full of seafood to consume over the next few days. The first order of business upon reaching her home here in Bathurst was a feast of prawns, oysters, crabs, and something I'd never seen before called Balmain bugs (next to the crab in the photo). They were kind of like small legless, armless, clawless lobsters with less taste.
These last few days have been unusually rainy, leaving Chris content to rest, recover, and slowly reabsorb the joy of her own home. I'm content to read, study, and write and enjoy her company for a bit before my last few adventures in Australia finish up and I head home.
I'm a bit sad to have missed all the snow in the northern hemisphere this winter that I've been reading about (be it in the States or Europe). Even so, these days of endless gentle rain here in the comfort (both spiritual and physical) of Chris' home have left me in much the same peaceful mood so exquisitely depicted in this beautiful movie of snow in Moscow.
Friday night, after flying back from the Gold Coast, I resumed my living-in-a-car existence and drove to Brighton-Le-Sands, a small town on the other side of Botany Bay from Sydney's airport. There I could spend the night on the street in my car and be well placed to pick up Chris the next morning upon her return from Africa.
Strolling the beach along Botany Bay in the evening's light rain before I turned in for the night, I found a place that seemed most fitting to enjoy a glass or two of wine.
I most often prefer to spend as much of my time as possible in a setting like Jonny's home town of Beechmont: in simple buildings surrounded by forests and hills with perhaps a significant city no closer than an hour away. There are times, however, when being amidst a conflagration of civilization actually does appeal to me. There are some places/settings/feelings than cannot exist without a massed population to justify them. So often, lately, I've thought about how much I miss something like a good dinner with a good friend on a sidewalk cafe on a summer night on Washington, D.C.'s Connecticut Avenue, just north of Rock Creek. Ah...city life.
Sitting alone tonight in Australia's late summer amongst the subdued ambiance of an exquisite restaurant, I got a hint of that feeling. Additionally, I felt a great sense of my good fortune in life to experience such moments in such diverse places around the world. Opposite me out an open window the sand was only a few meters away with a tranquil bay of seawater at its edge. The quiet and almost non-existent lapping of the bay's water on the narrow beach running along to my left was equally as evocative a kind of music as was the murmur of peaceful conversation all around me to my right.
I was alone but I didn't mind. Perhaps it would have been impossible to coordinate my emotions of the moment with another. Solitude, while not particularly sought, does occasionally have it's advantages.
I don't know Sydney well but I do now know a place I'd return to on some summer night just to be there...just to sit...just to absorb a kind of energy that makes me feel blessed and content.
Until 2006, I'd never been to Australia. Until last November, my complete Australian experience was three visits to Fremantle.
As much as I enjoy Freo ("Fremantle" in local speak), so many other friends who've traveled in Australia or actually live here kept telling me that I haven't really seen Australia until I'd been to the east side.
One of the reasons for this extended stay here these last few months was to explore all the places I've been hearing about. Prime among these was Jonny's region; the Gold Coast.
The view above is from Jonny's back porch, looking down from Beechmont to the coastal city of Surfers Paradise. Below his parents, Jon Sr. and Judy stroll on Palm Beach, with Surfers Paradise in the background.
In addition to the natural beauty of the coast, hills, and water falls (photo at right: Purlingbrook), I was also fascinated by the ubiquity of grey headed flying foxes; huge fruit eating bats with wingspans over a meter wide. Months earlier one evening in Newcastle, I'd seen the sky full of them moving from their roosts to nearby fruit orchards. It looked like the flying monkey scene from the Wizard of Oz.
Jonny knew the location of a colony near Cannungra and took me there to see them.
There were hundreds in every tree I could see on both sides of the road for a few hundred meters. While Jonny and his sister Gemma remained in the car, anticipating a barrage of guano if they all took flight in the same instant, I walked down the road awestruck.
My stay was brief and, though I brought my hang gliding harness, the weather brought either pouring rain or adverse winds, so no flying was done. I did, however, get to at least see where I might have flown, had the conditions been right. Beechmont launch
Scott and Monica hosted me once more for a long weekend of fun in Newcastle. One of the coolest things we had the chance to experience together snorkeling in a large tidal pool full of temporarily captive fish. It was like having one's own private aquarium as big as an Olympic pool.
The last time I was in Newcastle it was mid week, which limited Scott and Monica's ability to play. This time around I came on a weekend specifically to play, be it fly, swim, surf, sail, or whatever else came to our minds.
Two other friends of theirs from Germany, Ernst and Sylvia, just happened to be in the area as well so it was a weekend of a fivesome waking up in the mornings as a group and pondering just what kind of fun we would have that day.
Something I got to do that I've always wanted to try but haven't yet (on an imaginary list of probably 100 things) was welding. While Scott and I worked on a modified electric bike that he was constructing from various parts (some of which he was fabricating and welding himself), he gave me the chance to try to join two pieces of metal. I did, yet when I finished, he took one of the pieces in his right hand and pulled it off. "That's not welded." I tried again. Same result. I tried again. Same result. The fourth time I poured so much molten metal on the joint that the two pieces glowed for some time after I'd finished. When it cooled off enough to touch, Scott tried to separate them and couldn't. High fives. I'm a welder now. No matter that the two original pieces were distorted by all the heat they'd been forced to endure. They were welded.
Ah...boys and their simple pleasures.
The winds and weather didn't cooperate during the weekend but on my last day there, the morning I was flying out to Queensland's Goldcoast, everything lined up perfectly. Scott and I jumped in his car, let some air out of the tires, drove out onto the dunes near his house and squeezed in an hour or so of dune gooning on Redhead beach.
I had my own helmet in his car but once we set up his glider (mine is still being repaired), he just handed me his helmet and said, "Go." Scott has created harnesses for both his cairn terrier and beagle that enables him to take one of them along on flights (hence, the helmet's ornamentation). Once airborne and horizontal, his dog will just climb onto his back and enjoy the ride.
We played until I blew a landing and broke a downtube. Scott, ever the gracious host, offered to run back to his garage to get another but my flight up north was only a few hours away. It was time to finish playing with all of our toys.
After so many years of supporting others who competed in hang gliding events, I've finally come to the point of wanting to compete in one. I've been flying sailplanes for 40 years ago (since I was 14), powered aircraft for 38 years, and hang gliders for 18 years. In all that time, however, I've only flown for the singular joy of the amazing experience of being up in the air, carving turns, climbs, and descents through space however I choose.
I'm not generally competitive by nature and perhaps even quite the opposite. Yet I do see the merit of bringing the best out of ourselves by competing against others. And so I set my glider up with 57 others in Manilla, Australia on the first day of the NSW Titles. In this competition, the highest placed finisher who is also a resident of the Australian state of New South Wales is declared the State Champion.
Being a bit too involved in the competition to take photos myself, every picture here and in the slide show below, excepting one (its identity will become obvious) was taken by my driver, Gaynor Schoeman.
Of the seven possible days of competition, the weather cooperated for five. I flew the first four but, having trashed my glider by landing in a tree, was forced to miss the fifth. In 51st of 58th place at that point, missing the last day altogether still only dropped me to 57th. I actually beat somebody.
Tree landings are not so terribly uncommon in hang gliding. I know someone who has had three in the last two years. They usually come about when an intense sense of competition overrules logic and judgment. As I'm not that competitive, there should be no reason I'd ever land in a tree. Or so I thought.
In retrospect, I can find at least six consecutive errors in judgment which compounded each one before it and concluded with me spending two and half hours hanging perilously 20m above the ground. It would take too long to explain all of them but one surprises me the most: excessive competitiveness, i.e., as I was so determined not to land, I stayed too long in a place that, from it's topography in relation to the current winds, should have provided me the lift I needed. It didn't and by the time I finally gave up, I was already trapped.
When I landed on the trees and seemed to be stable, I nevertheless shot my left hand out to the nearest significant branch I could find to hold on. An extension to my radio's PTT (push-to-talk button) is attached to my left index finger and activated by pressing my thumb against it. In grabbing the branch, I had also unknowingly pushed and held down the PTT. The pilots on my frequency (I was told with a laugh that evening) where treated to about twenty seconds of heavy breathing and profanities.
My dilemma was witnessed by many of the pilots waiting to launch on the ramp at the top of the mountain and some of those already in the air. Once I determined I was stable and finally released the grip on the branch to my left, this also released my PTT. Only then was Gaynor able to call me and ask if I was okay. Advised that I was, she and a friend of mine from Norway, Thor Landgraff, drove down to find me.
Once below me, Thor made the wise suggestion of deploying my parachute over the nearest major branch I could reach to ensure that, if the branch holding me gave way, I would not fall completely to the ground. Before I let the parachute go completely free, I made sure the bridle attaching it to my harness had enough wraps around the branch to ensure it would lock if I fell.
The most notable aspect of the rescue was Thor. I was so high in the tree that there were no substantial branches near me that anyone could climb. Furthermore, the local volunteer unit that responded within 30 minutes had the equipment and ropes needed to bring me down but weren't really up to the task of climbing the tree. The alternative was waiting for a ladder truck from the nearest major town's fire department (an hour away). Pondering this, Thor graciously volunteered to don a harness and climb the tree himself. He got to within five meters of me and, after a lot of effort, finally got a line to me.
It would have been a much bleaker afternoon and perhaps evening as well, had Thor not be there with his wisdom and enthusiasm.
So many lessons learned, some of them for the second time in as many months (e.g., how foolish it is to cling to the hope of lift while your options of escape diminish by the second). Though I still contend that the most dangerous thing I do is ride two-wheeled vehicles (responsible for three episodes of broken bones while all my other activities have left me free of injuries), I know I'm very lucky to have escaped this with nothing but ripped sailcloth and broken aluminum tubes.
The glider will be fixed in a week. I, on the other hand, have no consequence except a profound experience which hopefully taught me a thing or two (or six).
I bought a Ford Falcon station wagon here in Australia just before Christmas. Though Chris has been so gracious as to give me her small Volkswagen to use while she's away in Africa (for almost the entire time I'm here in Australia), I still needed a car to which I could subject the typical abuse a hang gliding vehicle must endure...and one big enough to accommodate five people, five hang gliders, five flying harnesses, and more.
The Russians have been using it these last few weeks but now they all have gone home (excepting Zhenya, who's still working at the Moyes factory). So I've parked Chris' car back in her garage in Bathurst, caught the train to Sydney, took possession of my own car once more, and have begun living a kind of life I've been wanting to live for some time; that of a vagabond with means.
There's no shortage of friends here who would give me a place to sleep and, even if that weren't so, I could still afford to stay where I wanted. But what I wanted to experience was a life of chosen simplicity, something a bit like my year on a boat from '07-'08 as I circumnavigated the earth.
This time the goal is merely to experience various places I enjoy here in Australia with a sense of being as low maintenance as I can. So I park by the sea (different places each night so as not to be too intrusive into what are often residential streets) and sleep in the back on a pad, waking at sunrise without effort as the light begins to pour in.
This morning found me at Bronte Beach, north of the harbor. In the night I'd been woken by the sounds of heavy rain but, rather than being disturbed, it was actually very pleasing. When I woke, it was still raining. I left the car, barefoot and bare-chested, clad only in boardshorts, and walked along the beach in the warmth of the air and the coolness of the rain.
Bronte, like so many other beaches in Australia, has pool built at the edge of the surf that is, in effect, a man-made tidal pool. There is no need for plumbing, chemicals, pumps, or maintenance because the pool is naturally flushed out and cleaned each day at high tide.
It was high tide this morning just after I woke, it turns out, for time to time I watched the people swimming laps be momentarily disoriented by the waves that would breach the walls and pour foam and turbulence into the lanes.
I joined them for a while, swimming a few laps without goggles, opening my eyes in the saltwater to orientate myself as needed, then took a cold shower in the public showers nearby and strolled the beach once more, feeling strangely animal-like and natural, cool rain falling on my bare skin, content with the simplicity of my needs.
I dried my head and chest and put on a t-shirt (leaving my boardshorts to drip dry), then went to a coffee shop on Bronte Road to enjoy the feeling of cleanliness and warmth so simply attained while I sipped a latté, watching the rain continue to fall.
It was, in truth, an illusion I created for myself. Warmth and dryness were, if not just a car's door away, then also an open door away. Bill and Molly live in Bronte beach and it was nearly right in front of their home that I was living my private fantasy. All I needed, were I to feel any true sense of distress, was to simply knock on their door.
Still, I had the freedom to live this way and so I wanted to. Though I'll be at friend's homes from time to time as my final weeks in Australia come to a close, I'll also be living this way whenever I can.
Twelve years ago, before my daughter left to go to college, I had told her that once she moved out, I was going to move out, too, and live in a van down by the river, just like the Chris Farley's "Motivational Speaker" character.
