Mountaineering types and adventure travel advocates are always hyping their accomplishments--until too many people follow in their footsteps. We can officially call Mt. Everest done-ski now that the Olympic Torch has made it to the summit.
When a team of torch runners can just say, "Let's take this thing up there," you know it's gotten too easy to just cruise up the mountain. Well, maybe easy is a bit of a stretch:
The summit attempt had been repeatedly delayed because of bad weather, and the team had been forced to sit for days at various high camps.
The group of ethnic Tibetan climbers and Chinese journalists must've been a lonely on the climb: China barred access to the summit earlier this year to keep any pro-Tibetan protests from marring the mountain-top torch run.
After a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful hunt for adventurer Steve Fossett last year, Nevada was left holding a search-and-rescue bill for $687,000. Now the governor wants his family to chip in for some of those costs. Barron Hilton, whose Flying M Ranch was the setting-off point for Fossett's fateful flight, has already sent the state a check for $200,000.
The Governor Jim Gibbons' press secretary says any contribution would be voluntary, but added:
We are going to request that they help offset some of these expenses, considering the scope of the search, the overall cost as well as our ongoing budget difficulties.
The search for Fossett was indeed a massive one, involving multiple agencies and covering 20,000 square miles. Ultimately, though, rescuers found no trace of the world record holder, and he was declared legally dead on February 15, 2008.
After a particular post on Monday, some people accused us of being heartless. As evidence to the contrary, allow us to present Davy and Daryl Vogel, two youngsters planning to bike from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. These kids are cute!
OK, yes, they'll also be biking with their parents, two schoolteachers who will help Davy and Daryl make it to Argentina. Along the way, the twin brothers hope to educate other, less fortunate kids about geography and set a world record as the youngest duo to bike the Pan-American Highway.
Obviously, there's a blog involved. We'll be watching for updates from the road, boys.
It's only been spring for a couple weeks in the Northern Hemisphere, and New Smyrna is already making a play for this summer's "Most Dangerous Beach" award. Four people have already have suffered shark bites in Volusia County this year--including three in the past 10 days--and that has locals thinking this year's title is within easy reach.
The latest shark victim was 18-year-old surfer Joey Giangrasso, bitten on Thursday:
I thought he was just going to hit me and leave, but he like held on for a second when I went to pull out he clamped on a little harder and shook his head. And that's when I like reached down in the water and tried to grab or push or do whatever I could. He finally let go.
Luckily doctors were able to patch Joey up--though it took more stitches than they could count.
Meanwhile a spokesman for the local beach patrol says the last time there were this many bites this early was in 2001, the "Year of the Shark." New Smyrna racked up 22 shark attacks that season.
In Spanish, the word baños actually means "bathroom," so I found it amusing that an entire town christened was such (but I promise to spare you attempts at potty humor in this post). My bf Jeff and I learned that the name actually refers to the thermal hot springs, or baths, that well up from underneath the town or fed by nearby waterfalls.
City planners turned these springs into series of separate soaking pools ranging from cool, to pleasantly warm to insanely, painfully hot (50 degrees C!). We recommend Las Piscinas de la Virgen, the only baths in town open at night. For $2.00, you can relax in the water with a few dozen strangers, sticking around until your fingers and are downright pruney. Technically, you're not supposed to bring any alcoholic beverages, but we can assure that no one's actually checking your water bottle.
One of Quito's greatest selling points? Within less than a day's travel from the city, you can reach the Amazon rainforest, the Andes mountains, the Pacific beaches, active volcanoes and of course, the country's namesake attraction: the equator.
My BF Jeff and I decided to skip out on the big painted stripe at Mitad del Mundo. (It's disappointing, we'd heard, since GPS now indicates that the actual equator is hundreds of feet away from the touristy hooplah.) Instead, we hopped a bus to a town called Mindo.
We'd attended an informal barbecue the day after our arrival and everyone--our hosts Andrew and Lau, their ex-pat friends, backpacker buddies and dozens of local Ecuadorian attendees--had recommended it as one of the best short trips from the city. If you can't make it all the way to the Amazon basin, Mindo will give you all the rainforest you can handle.
An Austrian tourist died on Monday after a shark attack in the waters between Fort Lauderdale and the Bahamas. Markus Groh was out on a shark-spotting trip with Scuba Adventures, which sails seven-day live-aboard cruises out of Riviera Beach, Florida.
Unlike some tour operators, Scuba Adventures doesn't send its divers under in a cage. The outfit's website says:
We regularly encounter tiger sharks from 6-18 feet in length. The giant of the tropical shark world, this awesome predator will sometimes cruise past in bulky silhouette, approaching the baits with fearless purpose, an exhilarating experience!
To insure the best results we will be "chumming" the water with fish and fish parts. Consequently, there will be food in the water at the same time as the divers.
Though the company says it has crew in the water "to insure diver safety," it's apparently going to take a fatality to remind them that there's no stopping a wild shark from doing whatever it wants.
Super-adventurer Steve Fossett was declared dead by a Chicago judge on Friday, more than five months after he vanished into the Nevada wilderness on a daytime flight in a light aircraft.
His widow, Peggy, took the stand during the court proceedings, testifying to Fossett's legendary survival skills:
Everybody thought he'd come walking down the road one day and have another story to tell.
Sadly, that never happened, and there's been no sign of him--or even his plane--despite a massive search operation that went on for weeks. A search-and-rescue expert at the trial testified that Fossett could've crashed in a crevice near Mt. Grant in Nevada. It's also possible, he said, that pine trees were obscuring the wreckage of his plane.
This ruling not withstanding, we're betting people will be pondering the mystery of Fossett's disappearance for decades to come.
