Mission Incomprehensible

OK, so I just managed to slip into Marie's house, get a shower, eat a small quantity of cereal and get out again without her even realising I'm in her postcode. I had all three of my housemates helping me out with this process, so don't go thinking I'm a ninja or anything. Besides, a true ninja would have finished the bowl of cereal.

Today, I'm going to find a white suit (which will involve driving to Vancouver if necessary), get a haircut to look like this guy (I'm already halfway there - it just needs a professional tidy-up), book a restaurant for my hot date tonight and get ready for some sweet awkward romance.

To do this I have: A van full of smelly smelly clothes that doesn't start reliably in the rain (it is helpfully raining like a mofo), a mobile phone that has a broken button that turns the volume down constantly (which not only makes it difficult to hear people, it also drains the battery and occasionally freaks out the whole phone and renders all the other buttons inoperable), a laptop whose screen needs to be set to careful angles or the screen flickers like those Sonic the Hedgehog games before Sega found out they were triggering epilepsy in kids and mellowed them out, and three housemates who are ruthlessly effective and terrifyingly committed to this plan.

I'll tweet some live updates (well, probably not, but I'll try), so check out twitter for more details (you're all asleep, why am I bothering?).

Doing it for the LOLz

I must confess to a serious blogging omission over the last few months. I realise that you guys don't expect any kind of detailed exposition of my life, but I figure that you probably do want to know about anything funny or foolish or awkward that I have been engaged in during my travels. On that front, there is a pretty significant story that I probably should have told you earlier, but for a variety of reasons it never happened.

Don't get me wrong - I didn't mean to conceal this story from you all, but it's a difficult situation to explain, and will be especially hard to capture in writing. I will do my best, but please be understanding. This story builds on a number of themes that have developed during my time in Canada, so I'll link those in for people who haven't read the back catalogue. So here goes:

I have, for some months now, been involved in a kind of awkward false romance with Maud's Hot Sister.

It all started in early February, when I found myself suddenly single in the sausage convention that is Rossland during winter. My housemates instantly recognised the opportunity this presented for hilarious housemate gossip and meddling, and set about trying to find me a lady to woo. I have never been one for wooing the ladies, and my misgivings about potential Rossland romance were amplified by the fact that there are no single women in Rossland, and even if they were, I would have been a long way down the system of single-Rossland-man seniority.

So I hit upon a diabolical plan to stave off any uninvited dating "assistance" from my housemates, while turning the awkwardness of the whole situation away from me and onto someone else. Fortunately, the perfect candidate had recently been presented to me in the form of my french housemate Maud's sister Marie. A few days after Marie ended her visit to Rossland to return to her home in Squamish, near Vancouver, I declared my undying love for her, dubbing her "Maud's Hot Sister". In one fell swoop I had neutralised any housemate meddling and made a hilarious joke that would make Maud uncomfortable.

And that blissful situation lasted for all of a few days. I had made a number of errors of judgement in formulating my plan. First, I had overlooked the unstoppable strength of the impulse to meddle in the romantic lives of one's housemates. Second, I had misjudged just how canny Maud would be at turning my joke against me. Before I knew it, my professed desire for Maud's Hot Sister had been communicated to said sister, by Maud, via text message.

This seemed wierd, but reasonably innocuous at the time. How wrong I was. This was, in fact, the first shaking of the tracks that implies the imminent arrival of the freight train of doom. To my relief, Maud's Hot Sister's reply was baffled and not particularly interested. But Maud wasn't about to let this golden opportunity in housemate meddling go begging.

Before I knew it, Maud commenced a concerted campaign of remote text message wooing on my behalf with her Hot Sister. Maud's Hot Sister's replies changed tone. She made objections like "I only like Latino men" or "He has to be able to dance". Realising that my defense from uninvited dating assistance was under threat, I made up increasingly ludicrous answers to her questions. I was half Costa-Rican, I spoke Spanish, I was an excellent dancer, My name was actually Juan, etc. I even sent her a picture of a long haired, well muscled, shirtless Latino man emerging from the sea with a signed invitation to dance written in Spanish that I found in an online phrasebook (this was, incidentally, the first and hopefully only time that I have google image searched "Hot Latino Men" at work). At some point in this process, my other housemates realised that rather than being an obstacle to Rossland based meddling, this was in fact a shining opportunity to engage in relationship meddling via text message. I continued to up the ante, assuming that at any moment Maud would reach a limit on how involved she was willing to get in her sister's love life. Eventually, I reasoned, she would no longer want to be a text message intermediary between her sister and her supposedly besotted housemate.

It was only when the questions from Marie (the Hot Sister) became disturbingly lewd that I realised that this was another substantial error of judgement. Maud faithfully relayed these questions and, I have a horrible suspicion, even fabricated answers when I strenuously refused to respond.

At this point, it became obvious to all parties involved that I had completely lost control of this joke.

But I am not the kind of man who turns around in the face of adversity. I had created an awkward joke, and it was now my responsibility to see it to its natural conclusion. The fact that my creation had turned against me was no reason to let down the people who now looked to me for LOLz.

The reason I'm writing all this now, is because I'm in a MacDonalds in Chilliwack, just outside Vancouver, on my way to Squamish, to see my housemates Robi, Fleur and Maud one last time before they back to Europe. And they are staying with Maud's Hot Sister, who I have been assured via text message, is ready and waiting.

Some new friends I made climbing at Skaha have given me a pineapple for good luck, and I've spent part of my day scouring thrift stores for a white suit to wear when I take Maud's Hot Sister out for dinner. Somehow I have settled on taking Marie out to dinner in a white suit as a kind of talisman that will see me safely through to the other side of this joke, although I'm somewhat terrified of what will happen even if I do find a white suit and manage to go ahead with the plan.

Wish me luck, friends. I am your ever faithful servant of the LOLz.

Oh - and sorry, but there's no time for proofreading or putting those links in right now, I just found a paralysis tick on my back, and I should probably leave the MacDonalds before I take my shirt off and try to get it off.

A Token Desert

Dearest reader, last time we met I was in a trailer park in Golden about to go ski touring in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Now I am writing to you from the back of my van in a campground near Penticton. I don’t have internet here, so by the time I actually post this I’ll be writing to you from the car park of a nearby fast food restaurant with free wifi (my spellcheck doesn’t think that’s a word, in fact, it also doesn’t think spellcheck is a word, which seems somewhat defeatist). Thanks capitalism!

Anyway, I didn’t write this post to praise capitalism (although I do intent at some stage to write something about how grateful I am for the existence of rich people). Instead, I intend to fill you with wonder at my recent exploits, and explain how I came to be sitting in the back of my van in a desert next to an enormous lake in the rain. Be warned that this post is about my actual life, so all those people who just read this to laugh at my misfortunes can just skip to the next post.

So, let’s start with the trailer park. Last post I told you I’d explain how I ended up staying in one. It turns out that one of the ski touring crew from Rossland, the inimitable Brace, knew some folks living in Golden, and we stayed with them on the way to the Rockies. This worked out to be a fine arrangement, because we ended up barbequing snags over a fire in their front yard and Justin, one of our hosts, even came with us on our trip. Anyway, these folks lived in a trailer park, which I have unilaterally decided makes them the best kind of people. I’m glad that Brace was with me in the car as we drove to their house, because to get there you basically drive through Golden, out the other side, then up a narrow winding road until you come to a trailer park near a motocross riding area. It’s the kind of place that, if you were following written directions, would cause you to wonder if you hadn’t made a navigational error at some stage. However, despite the stigma of trailer parks, it was a super cool place. Everyone we met was friendly, there’s no traffic, people have big yards for dogs and barbeques and everyone leaves their cars and houses unlocked. Plus the view across the valley to the Purcell Mountains on the far side is pretty amazing.

Touring in the Rockies reminded me very much of New Zealand. Firstly, it’s alpine. You bumble through some trees on the way up to the real skiing near the peaks, but once you’re up there it’s rock, snow and ice all round. After the veritable forests of the Rossland area it was actually a bit unnerving to get up into the big mountains. Another way in which the Rockies are similar to New Zealand is the conditions. They are often bad. Visibility is frequently poor, the snowpack is variable, it’s very windy, and every gift that the mountain gives you (fresh snow, or a sunny day) is balanced by something the mountain takes away (windslab, or afternoon avalanches). The fact that you have to hike up everything complicates matters, because conditions are probably only going to be good on whatever you want to ski for a few hours, and you might spend all of those hours just walking towards your objective. Despite this, it’s clear that getting lucky in the Rockies would make for some amazing skiing. And by that I mean getting lucky in the good-weather-and-snow way, not the Justin-woos-all-the-ladies way.

So, with five days of glaciers and hiking and big mountains successfully completed, the time came to change from skiing mode to climbing mode, and commence The Great Climbing Improvement of 2012. The Great Climbing Improvement of 2012 is different from The Great Climbing Improvements of 2010 and 2007, because unlike the last two times I tried to get into shape to climb with Rohan, it will actually happen, and it won’t end in an ACL reconstruction before I even get to go climbing.

The GCI 2012 has kicked off in Penticton, in the Okanagan valley west of Rossland. Do you like the way I always explain the locations of things relative to landmarks you’re unfamiliar with? It’s always a feature of travel writing that I particularly enjoy. For example, I am currently south of Kelowna, and east of Vancouver, which outlines an area that’s probably the size of Victoria. Just look it up on Google Maps.

Anyway, I came to Penticton to climb in the Skaha bluffs, which are a couple of kilometres from town on the eastern side of the Skaha Lake. Skaha is known for having lots of sport climbing and is popular at this time of year because it’s warmer and drier than anything else nearby. In fact, the Okanagan is considered something of an arid zone by BC residents. In fact, I’ve even heard this region referred to as a desert. I suspect this is a relative concept. Maybe the Okanagan is dry compared to the rest of BC, where it rains (or snows) with the persistence and diligence of a model Newstart recipient (that’s an Australian dole/EI joke for those of you not familiar with the terrible burden of a jobseeker diary). But compared to somewhere actually dry, it still rains here a lot. Perhaps, to extend the simile, with the persistence of an actual Newstart recipient – it’s common to get a tiny bit of rain (just enough to say that it did, without actually achieving anything), and then it seems to hammer down every now and then to make up for all the time it spent slacking off.

Skaha is lucky that I got some climbing in yesterday, otherwise my assessment would be pretty harsh. To be honest, the crag doesn’t look very inspiring – it’s a few small chunks of rock set into some rolling hills next to a lake. But it turns out that the rock quality is really good and the climbing is actually pretty nice. This is good, because if I’d just rocked up, looked around and then gotten rained on I’d be questioning the judgement of the local climbing scene.

Of course, a bit of rain is not a big deal. There are plenty of things I need to do and a day without climbing is a great chance to sort them out. The big deal is that my van won’t start in the rain. So I’m stuck in a campsite outside town with no internet, no way to do laundry and most importantly, no way to renew my vehicle registration. Obviously, that registration expires today. As the kiwis would say, crepe.

In Hot Water

Spring hit Rossland and the Kootenays pretty hard, so on Sunday I joined a convoy of vehicles heading north in search of big mountains and good snow. The first stop on our journey was a set of natural hot springs a few ks off the highway. Some keen folks have hauled in a bunch of cement powder and made some convenient pools to sit in, as well as setting up a pretty impressive system of pipes to collect the water from the various cracks and rocks from which it emerges.

In fact, the last week or so has involved quite a bit of time lounging around in hot water. During the extended closing day shenanigans at Red Mountain, we jumped into a few of the hot tubs attached to unnocupied apartments and condos on the ski hill. So you can rest assured that I speak with some authority when I say that hot tubs and hot springs are completely overrated. Yes, I know this is a fairly contentious position to take, especially in British Columbia, where skiing and hot tubs seem to be the recreational equivalent of siamese twins (as an aside - am I supposed to say conjoined twins? Is siamese twins not PC? Would anyone know what I meant if I said conjoined twins?). Bear with me, though, because my argument is both simple and convincing.

Let's say you walk up to a hot tub. You've been skiing or something equally tiring and fun all day, and now you want to relax. So you get into the hot tub. It's hot (or you're doing it wrong), it's relaxing, you float a bit, maybe there are some jets that gently jiggle you around. Life is grand. And so far, you and me are on the same page - this bit is pretty good. But then comes the bad part: You sit around in the hot tub for ages and ages and ages.

At the hot springs on Sunday we spent several hours lounging around. Hours. Basically doing nothing. If I said to you, "Come over to my place and we'll sit around for a few hours doing nothing," you would say "That sounds pretty boring, how about we do something interesting instead." But for some reason, when you say "Let's go somewhere and sit around for a few hours doing nothing while immersed up to our necks in warm water." this is suddenly the most exciting thing anyone can think of. I'm going to go on the record here and say that I have absolutely no idea why the warm water thing makes such a big difference. Think of other boring things, and then add warm water. Doing your taxes in warm water - still boring. Writing selection criteria for public service job applications in warm water - still boring. Watching those olympic events that they only televise because there's a chance of an Australian medal in warm water - still boring.

Don't get me wrong. The first bit, where you get into the water and it's warm and relaxing, is just dandy. And natural hot springs, where there's a real sense of wilderness and isolation, are even better. But after a few minutes of that it's time for something new.

Warm water isn't even a reliable way of improving things that are already fun. Riding a bicycle in warm water - tiring and sweaty, also not a practical mode of transportation. Eating deep fried foods in warm water - would make everything soggy. Climbing a rock in warm water - it's not even clear what this would involve, but it doesn't sound good.

Hot water should be like going to the supermarket: Get in, enjoy the brief period when things are novel and exciting, and get out before things get boring and you feel oppressed because the cheese is so expensive (I'm in Golden now, and it's daylight robbery).

Right. Hot tubs = not that great. So, here's the awkward bit. I'm increasingly self conscious about the endings of my blog posts. I don't really know how to give a sense of considered closure to whatever I've written about each time. Ideally, I'd like you to get the sense that I'm sitting in an armchair, wearing a dressing gown over a shirt and pants and, having contently finished my story and instillled you all with new wisdom, am now continuing to smoke my pipe.

Of course, that's not really the case. I'm actually stealing wireless while sitting at someone's kitchen table in a trailer park. How did I end up in a trailer park? I'm ski touring for the next five days, so I'll tell you when I get back.

Faith and Resurrection

I am by no means a Christian scholar, but it seems like the central claim underlying many varieties of Christian faith is as follows: There was once a dude named Jesus. He died and rose from the dead, so we should get pretty excited about him and his homies.

Given that the resurrection is one of the most significant moments in Christian theology, not to mention world history, I hope everyone will get appropriately excited about...

My van.

That's right folks, the stone has been lifted from the tomb! A few days ago, the time came to roll my van down the hill from Rossland to Trail (that's literal, not figurative - our towns are about 10km apart, and it's 600m downhill the whole way from Rossland to Trail), and I figured it wouldn't hurt to see if the old beast would fire up one last time. Which, to my surprise, it did.

In fact, it happily roared to life as if it had never broken down in Fernie, made it home and then pooped itself in an apparently permanent way in the carpark of the pub across the street from my house. To be sure it wasn't a fluke, I turned it off and on a bunch of times throughout the day. Lo and behold, it ran just fine. I decided to postpone the trip to the scrapyard, on the grounds that a functioning GMC Safari van is a wonderful thing to own, and that if it at least made it to one of the bigger towns nearby I'd have a better chance of finding a suitable replacement.

The next day, it looked like my hope had been premature. It didn't want to start, but after much poking and prodding it eventually came to life and has been running fine ever since. Of course, when I say running fine I mean it is unbelievably hard to steer, requires a one-legged leg press of substantial force to brake, shakes when it does brake, has a crack in the radiator, and doesn't necessarily have functioning windscreen wipers. But I was used to all of those things, and preference adaptation is a powerful force in my life.

I feel, however, that if the van has gone to the trouble of dying and then rising from the dead, the least I can do is place my faith in it. Untold jillions of folks have placed their faith in Jesus after his brief excursion into the afterlife, and it seems to have worked out reasonably well for them. Of course, my van was dead for more than three days, has not (yet) ascended body and soul into heaven, and it's also not a member of a divine trinity, so perhaps it's more akin to Lazarus than Jesus. But that's good enough for me. I have a vehicle, where before I had none.

So, I will believe in the van, and drive it to Revelstoke on Sunday. That will mark the end of my time in Rossland, and the beginning of the next phase of my Canadian excursion. I'll be poaching internet as I go, so I'm sure I'll get a few posts up here (in fact, I wrote much more during my time in NZ, where the internet is still transmitted along a taut string streched between tin cans). I will however, be living on the road, which tends to make my life (and my posts) strange and incoherent. Wish me luck.

Important Life Acheivements

I was always an imaginative child with a abiding penchant for action movies, so it was natural that as soon as I rode a chairlift I began to daydream about climbing around on one. Specifically, three questions came to mind:

1. What is in the enclosure above the bottom station of a chairlift? Obviously, it's the machine that powers the chairlift, but more specifically, what does it look like? How big is it? Why is it in an enclosure that looks like it comes from a sci-fi movie?
2. What is it like to climb a lift tower? They have ladders on them, but you're never allowed to climb one. Anything that's banned is likely to be fun, so what's going on up there?
3. If the chairlift stopped in some kind of action-movie based emergency, would it be possible to climb up from the chair onto the cable, traverse along the cable and then get down via a lift tower?

Well, yesterday was staff day at the ski hill, and after the lifts had stopped running and everyone was slowly drinking themselves into a stupor in the bar, I answered all three of those questions and acheived a number of life ambitions that I had always assumed I would never do. And the answer to all three questions is:

AWESOME.

Of course, that doesn't make a lot of sense as the answer to question three, so for that question we should add the words "and totally possible".

Now that I look at it, it doesn't really answer question one either. The answer to that question is that the mechanism that powers the chairlift is pretty small. In fact, it's not much bigger than a truck engine. Given that those enclosures are pretty big and pretty sci-fi-ish, there's actually a lot of empty space up there. So that was suprising and slightly unnerving. But also awesome.

Question two is totally about awesome. It's fantastic on the top of a lift tower. You're up high, on a lift tower, there are enough safety railings that it's not scary, there's the thrill of the forbidden. It's great - I recommend it to you all.

As for question three - I should admit that I didn't actually climb onto a lift tower. A bunch of us climbed into a chair near the bottom station that was at a conveniently reachable height, and I just climbed onto the cable from there and traversed down it to the base station. But it was still most excellent. And everyone said the cable would cut up my hands, but it was remarkably smooth and un-burred. I guess it spends its days running over pulleys which must smooth it down. Anyway, it's totally climbable, so if there are explosions going off and you're riding the chair next to Steven Seagal and he tells you to get off the chair so he can kung fu some bad guys, just do it.

Just so everyone's clear on this: the chairlift was not running at the time. Doing life goals one and two with a moving chair would be fine, but number three would be worthy of an action movie - if you stuffed up the timing your hands would go through the pulleys, and I suspect they would pretty neatly cut all kinds of important hand parts off.

I hope this post inspires all of you to live your dreams. I'm available to act as a motivational speaker at high schools right away, and my fees are very reasonable.

All Good Things Must Change Hemispheres

After several months of blissful chairlift riding, Red Mountain has closed for the season. All around Rossland, ski bums are questioning their life choices, buying heavily discounted ski equipment and trying to work out what to do with their meaningless lives.

To be totally honest, the ski hill is actually still running. Today is staff day, and as I write this my housemates are up on the hill making merry. Despite not actually being a staff member, tagging along to staff day is encouraged and I could probably have snuck onto the hill for a few turns, but I figured that it's best to let them celebrate the season for themselves. The snow is also not very exciting and I am very badly sunburnt.

Traditionally, the last day of the season is Retro Day, where everyone pulls out their finest retro ski equipment. It also features a party on the deck of the base lodge and beer-drinking on the top of Granite Mountain - the highest mountain in the ski area. However, this year Retro Day and the deck party were on Sunday, and the hill closed on Monday, which meant that the drinking and shenanigans were extended over two days rather than one. The folks I ski with warmly embrace any kind of retro event, and it was an awesome sight to see them descend the hill as a large pack of tipsy, absurdly dressed miscreants. We extended our personal retro day to Monday as well, so most of us were able to sport different outfits on each day.

On Sunday, I wore a one-piece-ski-suit (or "onesie") in dashing purple with asymetrical fluoro yellow and pink trim. It was very hot inside the onesie, so I casually stripped the top half off and skied topless. Although I applied a fair bit of sunscreen at one stage, with the assistance of a middle aged lady who was somewhat too enthusiastic about rubbing my back, I still got very, very burnt. Of course, the novelty of the outfit soon wore off, and my housemate traded her rather svelte black onesie for my brightly coloured one for the deck party. This was at once a raging success and a terrible mistake. A raging success because the combined allure of the ultra tight ski suit and Tom Watson's now infamous "Clic" googles (see fig. 1) was so intense that I was awarded runner up in the male category of the best dressed competition and got some neat stuff (I would have won, too, but another contestant, the dubiously named "Phil Yourpants", pulled out some amazing dance moves which I could not match, partly because I'm not a competent dancer and partly because I couldn't really move in my outfit). A terrible mistake because the outfit was so tight I couldn't comfortably sit down, couldn't pick anything up off the ground and now will never have children. And people kept trying to stroke/pull out my chest hair, which I did not appreciate.

Figure 1 - it is tough to be so beautiful

On Monday I went with something a little more refined to balance the rigours of the previous day, skiing in a collared shirt and sports coat. The real reason for this change was to keep the sun off my neck, which is still a delightful rosy hue today. It did, however, make for a much more comfortable (and dapper) day on the slopes, and it's easy to see why the onesie went out of fashion right after people returned to their senses in the nineties.

Before I sign off, I should mention that my housemate rode a monoski (which I have previously reffered to as a monoboard) on Monday, with considerable success. I know I'm not supposed to think this, but maybe I was wrong when I said I was wrong about ever wanting to monoski. Could there be a second chance for my shattered mono romance?

And Then What Happened?

Life as I know it will end on the 8th of April, which is just days from now. On that day, the ski hill will close, and the fixed point that centres my existence will disappear. In typical fashion, I don't really know what will happen after that.

My rent is paid up to the 15th of April, so I'll be based in Rossland for at least that long. After that I might be able to house sit for a few more days, but it will be time to move on shortly after that. There should still be plenty of good ski touring around until the end of April, but to take advantage of that I need to co-ordinate transport and other people to ski with. After that, I don't so much have plans as a list of things I'd like to achieve, with no real plan as to how to make that occur.

The biggest feature in the barren landscape of my future is climbing. I'm going climbing with Rohan, my brother-in-law, from mid June to early July. This is a daunting prospect because I'm woefully out of shape for climbing. Over the last few months I can studiously neglected any form of exercise that isn't directly related to skiing. It will be a rude shock to the system to encourage my body to do something else.

While I'm looking forward to hitting the road again, I need a way of transporting myself, my stuff and eventually my climbing partner around Canada for three months. Hitchhiking is fine if you're not too picky about where you go, and you don't really care how long it takes to get around. Sadly, I think I'll fail both those criteria, so it's probably time to invest in another fine automobile. Given the fate of my last vehicle, this is a task I'm approaching with some trepidation.

Buying a car also precipitates a decision that I would, in normal circumstances, put off until the last minute: Whether or not to return to Canada. Eventually, the next winter in New Zealand will end and I will have to decide whether to head north for another winter or stay in the southern hemisphere and be hot and uncomfortable. And if I do head north to continue skiing, I will need to decide where to go. If I return to Canada, the best option is for me to buy a decent car now and store it somewhere over the summer. If I don't return to Canada, buying a car that's worth selling will just add more hassle to the end of my trip.

Canada is a good option because I have a work visa for here, I can probably work at Powderhound for another season, and folks speak english. I'm quite tempted to go somewhere outrageous like Kashmir or Europe, but getting work in those places would be pretty much impossible and eventually the money I have saved from my old desk job will run out.