Looking for my Hot Rock adventures? Start at the beginning in South Africa , start at the end in Turkey, or browse the archive links on the right for the country of your choice. Enjoy and remember to climb hard!

January 30, 2009: Kodiak, Alaska

This was the first winter I had spent in Kodiak in nearly 18 years. The slushy winters filled with window-rattling storms I recalled as a frustrated youth wanting to play outside had been replaced by crisp days and snow that stayed on the ground for more than 30 minutes before washing away in the rain. It was quite enjoyable, actually, to tromp around in the snow,

My footprints on Kashevaroff Mountain:

especially not having to worry about the bears now deep in hibernation. Frequent sunny days made the island into an airport giftshop postcard -- too good to be true.

Bluebird sky day view of Women's Bay:Salonie Creek at sunrise:
It's not that it wasn't beautiful, because it truly was, but anything too good to be true comes with a catch.

Reflection of mountains in Felton Creek in Middle Bay:Lake Rose Tead in Pasagshak:

The hitch with this Winter Camelot was spending three-quarters of the day in the dark. I had conveniently forgotten what it was like to spend the majority of the day in darkness, wondering what was going on outside. More importantly, I had forgotten that there is something about the lack of sunlight that makes me hungry. Ravenous, even. I have no idea why. Maybe I have a hibernating instinct or deep down I worry that I might be stranded in the backcountry and need to live off my own fat for several months. When I see sea lions or seals out in the bay with their thick layer of blubber I feel admiration with a side twinge of jealousy. And a little peckish. Beware the fat-laden baked good that comes into my view.

Kodiak, with about six hours of daylight around the solstice, isn't even that bad compared to places like Fairbanks which is located at a latitude that teases one with glimpses of the sun (I watched the sun rise and set over the course of two hours while sitting in a hotel room in Fairbanks in December. That was depressing.). One day in Fairbanks I went to an antique store with my mom. The store had a plate of cheese, salami, and veggies set out which I hovered over while trying to feign interest in a blackened pitcher that appeared to have lived over a campfire for the last century. Eventually, I finished most of the plate, proud that I had exercised enough restraint to leave a couple cherry tomatoes and carrots for another customer. I was still hungry, however, and decided to venture further afield in hopes that I might stumble upon another plate of goodies lying about.

My search was fruitless. There was nothing else ready to eat in the store and someone had taken the cherry tomatoes and carrots by the time I circled back to the known food source. I caught myself considering the merits of gnawing the leather on a pair of old snowshoes hung on the wall. I forced myself to look away and my gaze fell on a cookbook: Cooking Alaskan. Since I was already hungry, I decided perusing a cookbook wasn't going to make me any more famished.

I opened to a page at random and was instantly delighted with what I saw. The cookbook was pure gold. Aside from the mundane recipes for Roast Moose Heart with Cranberry Stuffing, Fried Beaver Tail, or Caribou Agutuk (caribou tallow, seal or whale oil, ground caribou meat and broth all whipped into a fluff with a few berries for good measure. Allegedly sweet.), there is both big game like Polar Bear Braised Steaks with Onions and the dubious, smaller game Chicken-Fried Muskrat. Perhaps some Lynx Stew is in order? Let's not forget the ocean. Four-Day Spiced Walrus sounds rather spicy, but definitely preferable to Boiled Walrus Skin or Whale Oil Sugar Cookies. Perhaps you like living on the edge and feel like illegally consuming something endangered. How about the delightful Sea Lion Meatballs and Spaghetti? If you prefer to stay out of jail, it might be possible to console yourself with Seal Liver and Wheat Germ Saute or perhaps Seal Brains au Gratin. Don't tell me you aren't tempted.

My favorite so far involves our feathered friends: Duck in the Mud. The recipe assumes that one has shot a duck in the morning before having breakfast. I, personally, would have to eat breakfast first, but whatever. Here are the directions: "While you are having breakfast, build up a good campfire in a hollow. Your duck or goose is eviscerated, so wipe it inside and out with a cloth. Rub the inside thoroughly with salt and a little pepper. Stuff cavity with an apple, an onion or both. Fold the feathers to cover all openings and plaster the whole thing with a coat of clay mud (sand or loam will not do) about an inch thick. Place the bird in the bottom of your fire among the ashes and cover it well with wood. Go hunting all day, and when you return for dinner, be prepared for the best duck or goose you ever tasted. Dig it out of the ashes (it should still be hot) and break off the clay. The feathers come with it." Genius. Pure genius. And there are no dishes to clean!

There was no question. It was clear I couldn't live without the cookbook so I bought it as a Christmas gift to myself.

I pored over the enticing pages all the way back to Kodiak. With no muskox or black bear in the freezer, I would be unable to whip up anything in the 300 pages set aside for animals roaming in one's backyard or found mangled on the road. The section devoted to baked goods with sourdough as a main ingredient soon had my full attention, however. Cooking with a batter descended directly from a partially fermented substance that may or may not have included potatoes, flour, and assorted malt beverages thrown together over a century ago is not for everyone. Personally, I love sourdough pancakes and waffles, but had never considered including sourdough starter in baked goods. In my mind that would be an unholy sweet and savory mix like chocolate covered bacon. Excellent separate, yes, but together, well, that's not exactly a taste sensation a person wants lingering on their tongue. I was intrigued. Especially because these would be fat-laden baked goods made with lard. My palms got sweaty just thinking about the possibilities.

I started off with something simple: Sourdough Squash Bars. With no canned squash on hand due to a terrible summer for the greenhouse, I used the allowed alternate ingredient of canned pumpkin. So basically the Sourdough Squash Bars became Sourdough Pumpkin Bars. But what bars they were! Not too sweet and satisfyingly moist, they tasted faintly of sourdough in a pleasant way. Not at all like chocolate covered bacon. I made three batches.

As winter progressed, sourdough bars led to sourdough cookies and sourdough cookies led to sourdough cakes. By now I was confident enough to improvise and in a flash of inspiration I added a bit of peppermint to a sourdough chocolate cake recipe. It was superb (and 2 1/2 inches high in the cake pan!). I'm fully convinced sourdough is the way forward for baked goods.

Cooking Alaskan has become my favorite cookbook ever -- the ultimate antithesis of all the low-fat and vegetarian cookbooks clogging bookstore shelves. Although the baked goods section is well thumbed, the game section sits patiently while I look outside at the snow,

Cope and Erskine mountains just before sunrise:View from Salonie Creek flats at sunrise:waiting for hunting season or for someone to bring me some seal brains, whichever comes first.

November 19, 2008: Kalymnos, Greece

I am a fan of extended stay travel. Years ago I realized that when traveling I tended to wander around a neighborhood on foot and eat from street vendors rather than shuttle from place to place on the tight schedule of an organized tour seeing the sights. I just like getting a flavor for a place, and that flavor becomes more intense the longer one is able to stay in one area. The four days I had in Kalymnos the previous May were not enough and I was excited that I had managed to plan an entire month on the island. Not only would I be able to take advantage of the fantastic rock climbing at my leisure,

Me hanging out at sunset:but I would also have time to go local. First I just had to find a place to stay.

Diana and I had decided to wing it instead of trying to locate a place to stay before arriving on the island. In practical terms, it can be an adventure to arrange lodging in Kalymnos by Internet or phone. The locals are not especially prompt with email replies and have an inexplicable habit of hanging up in mid conversation over the phone. More often than not they hang up before the conversation even starts. It is not meant as a personal affront, they likely decided to chat with a passerby, yell at a relative, eat lunch, or simply didn't feel like cradling a phone to their ear. Phones are a bit of an afterthought in Kalymnian life, really, and it may be several days before you get a response to a text message. It is advisable to go climbing while waiting for a response.

Maverick on Totenhansel at the Ghost Kitchen wall:The little red shirt is Mike in the stunning Grande Grotto:
We didn't exactly show up, however. Diana secured us a couple of days on a couch with a fellow in Pothia, the capital of Kalymnos, through couchsurfing.com to at least give us some place to hang our hats while we looked for an apartment. Aris, our extraordinary host, seemed to know everybody. Though not a native Kalymnian, he had contacts with government officials and farmers through his job as a promoter/coordinator of the island famed thyme honey industry (who knew?), and everyone else through his theater group and traditional dancing club.

It was Aris who was able to explain more about the explosions that had nearly shattered our windows in May. For whatever reason, there was quite a bit of dynamite in the waters surrounding the island after WW II. Diving for sponges was the primary industry on Kalymnos and divers would collect sponges as well as dynamite. One explosion led to another, and pretty soon every holiday had food, a parade, and dynamite in downtown Pothia. Nothing says "celebration" like exploding massive quantities of dynamite. People survived more or less intact until one year when a dynamite stick didn't light and one of the guys in charge of the explosives tossed it over his shoulder into a pile of unexploded dynamite. Big mistake, big explosion. Details are still murky because the fellow managed to blow himself up as well as several other innocent bystanders. Determined to learn from their mistakes, the townspeople kept the now traditional big dynamite explosions but moved them to a hill overlooking the town in order to make them bigger and better than ever. There are rather frightening pictures in some Pothia restaurants of fireballs generated by those hillside explosions, the shockwaves of which must register at least 4.2 on earthquake sensors. It is not suprising that Kalymnos has a reputation with neighboring islands. When Diana was on the nearby island of Rhodes and locals there found out she was staying on Kalymnos they would say "Oooh, those Kalymnians are crazy! They blow up things!" It seemed the best way to avoid random sticks of dynamite was to go climbing.

Mav looks like he's getting swallowed by a rock wave:Rock climbing is easiest when one has all limbs intact so Diana and I had even more incentive to find lodging outside Pothia. Our goal was to find a place in Masouri -- the town most centrally located to developed climbing on the island -- so we took the bus there (we used the bus so much that the drivers started to let us off at unscheduled stops) and started to poke around. We decided to drop in on Fani, a women who runs a mini market that we had frequented when we were in Kalymnos in May. Turned out she and her mother managed the flats around her market, as well. When she found out that we were staying in the area for a month, she decided to put us in a room reserved for clients arriving in a few days, booting them to some other building. Diana and I felt guilty about dislodging the folks until we saw the view. Done deal. We had an apartment and deck.

Albin, George, Mike, and Diana playing cards on the deck on a cool November evening with the island of Telendos in the back: It was time to get climbing!

An ominous goat skull at the base of some seaside cliffs:Me gearing up:Diana rests before making her next move:
Although I loved the view and loved our location, I was less than keen on the mosquito population that magically appeared every evening precisely as I was drifting off to sleep. I smacked myself more than a few times in the face in a vain effort to smash the high-pitched whine buzzing around my head. Bug spray did nothing. The sacrificial arm outside the covers didn't work. Unable to sleep with my head under the sheets (I feel like I'm suffocating), there was only one thing to do: go hunting. Every night I would spotlight with my headlamp, searching for my prey, then leap into a whirl of action, wielding my climbing magazine "sword" like a samurai as I swatted the little bloodsuckers out of the air and on the walls, leaving trails of smeared blood from floor to ceiling. Neither our cultivated spiders in the ceiling corners (a great sacrifice for me) nor the squished carcasses of my successful hunts prevented the nightly attacks. Then we realized that the mosquitoes were coming in through the open bathroom window and getting into our room under the closed bathroom door. Right. Should have checked that possibility earlier. Best just to climb to the point of exhaustion and sleep through the feeding frenzy.

Diana is determined to get one more climb in before the sun sets:

If nothing else, our mosquito skeleton "scarecrows" may have given us that hint of eccentricity to fit in with the local characters of Masouri. There was the pierced car and scooter

Hell's Angel Lite. My favorite scooter on the island -- pink with flames on the seat and a goat skull strapped to the front:rental guy who organizes jungle raves in Thailand in the off season, and maintains the only mullet with dreadlocks (mullocks?) I've ever seen. Or the pub proprietor with the magnificent skullet who is the only registered fan of Deadliest Catch on Kalymnos and dreams of visiting Alaska one day (I'm sending him an Alaskan flag to hang in the bar). Tradition mixes with the modern in Masouri creating a cultural mashup where one can use wi-fi while watching herds of goats pass by, or see women sunbathe topless who are watching other women swim in the ocean in dresses. (I observed that particular scene only for it's anthropological novelty, of course.)

There were plenty of other things for me to scratch my head about, as well. As the traditional climbing season ends in October, things start to shut down or change with no warning. I went to get money from the lone ATM in Masouri ("open 24/7" according to the sign) only to find it had been removed without warning for the season until April. Diana and I couldn't figure out why we kept missing the bus and then discovered that while the bus schedule had officially changed, the posted times were not updated for two weeks. I tried to make reservations online to fly from Kalymnos but the websites only showed options for the airport at the neighboring island of Kos. (Luckily, cheap ferries run several times a day between Kalymnos and Kos so it was not a problem to catch a flight.) Allegedly, it is possible to make reservations to/from Kalymnos only through a travel agent for a few of the winter months, although some locals maintained that the planes stop flying during that period. I gave up trying to figure out the transportation puzzle and went climbing.

Me and Mav finishing yet another climb in the last bit of available light:George, Diana, and me waiting for the first ferry to Telendos (background) for a day of climbing:Mav loves the nightlife:
In perhaps the oddest experience in my life, the water in our flat became electrified. Diana was washing dishes one morning and suddenly shrieked, dropping the bowl she had been holding with a clatter. "I think the water just shocked me!" she exclaimed. I didn't quite know what to make of the situation. Huh? Electric water? What, did we have an electric eel in the water tank or something? I of course had to give it a try and sure enough, it was like a liquid electric fence. The fact that the sink and part of the counter were metal didn't help matters. Showers were a hair-raising experience, and merely washing hands became hazardous to one's health. To make matters worse, this happened on a holiday weekend -- it's hard enough to get anybody to do anything, let alone on a holiday weekend. Luckily, the entire building had the same problem and since Fani and her family lived in the building it only took a couple of days to get things straightened out. The only thing to do was go climbing while we waited to once again sit on the toilet in peace.

George puts his footwork to use on a slab:Albin pulls rope:
One would think that with all the odd things happening in town that left the local populace unfazed, our behavior wouldn't seem like a big deal. It may have been, however, that our group seemed to be increasing in size with no end in sight. First our friend Maverick from Hot Rock joined us, which we had planned. Fani and her mother marvelled at his 6'7" frame that he somehow managed to fold up on the cot in our room.

Mav puts his long reach to good use: George showed up a few days later with about 12 hours of warning, although we weren't really sure from his Facebook posting if he was truly coming.

Yes ladies, this man is single!:Fani was as surprised as we were when he showed up. "Your friend?" she asked quizically, perhaps recalling the ruckus we made the night Mav showed up. Things got really good when Mike showed up a few days later and we had no idea at all he was joining us.

Mike all smiles after a successful climb: He had been cycling in Turkey, heard we were climbing in Kalymnos, and decided to pop over. I happened to be hanging laundry out on our deck when I heard a voice say "Mzungu!" (Swahili for white man/foreigner), looked down and saw Mike grinning at me from street level. Although he knew we were on Kalymnos, he had no idea where we were staying yet still found us almost immediately. The man has serious tracker instincts. I think Fani tossed her hands in the air when a couple of fun French guys started hanging out with us.

Alexis showing some skill while Albin belays:

Our climbing crew was creating an impression. Whether it was good or not was beside the point. When we weren't turning heads with our sartorial sense on our way to the pub,

George, Mav, Diana, and me ready to celebrate:

George was trying to sunbathe in the weak November sun.

George, the last determined tourist in Kalymnos:When a perplexed Fani came up to Diana and asked, "Your friend, this Mike, why he have his camp on the bed? How can we change the sheets?" there was a moment of confusion. Was there something wrong with the fact that Mike had erected his tent on top of his bed and was sleeping inside of it? Perhaps it was the mosquitoes or perhaps he really liked his tent. Who could say for sure? It didn't seem particularly odd or unusual when compared to, say, an electrified shower, overzealous dynamite explosions, or a disappearing ATM -- events that barely turned the heads of locals. Maybe that was it. Odd and unusual behavior no longer seemed especially odd or unusual to us. We were going local!

Other pics:

Diana on the Kastelli Church steps with Telendos in the background:Sailboat passes by the Kastelli Church:George belays in the evening sun:Telendos Island:Cool flower:

Another cool flower:Clear waters:Mav picks another climb to do just as the sun is setting. Typical:Alexis, Diana, and Albin hamming it up:Church on Telendos:Inside the church:George and Diana on the descent after our day climbing the fun multi-pitch Wings of Life on Telendos:Diana, George and me waiting for the ferry back to Masouri (in the background) from Telendos:My attempt at sewing the rip in my trousers:George exhausted after a climb:Lovely sunset:

October 19, 2009: Athens, Greece

Athens was a stopover for me on the way to my rock climbing destination, Kalymnos, and I figured it was just another chaotically full city with history to spare, heavy with the odors of its people and attendant smog. Not to mention plugged with tourists. It's a rare day that I readily enter a tourist scrum so I wasn't counting on seeing much the day and a half I was in Athens. Especially with jet lag. Ancient Athenians were scrappy in their day, but the outcome to several key battles may have been slightly different if they had been under the influence of jet lag.

All it took for me to change my mind about sightseeing was the view of the Acropolis from the roof deck of my hostel (any lesser sight, however, and I would have ventured out only to get my shwarma or kebab fix).

Those ancient Greeks were onto something with their design aesthetic and it is still impressive to see the grand structures. Even with a crane in the middle. If anything, the crane made me appreciate even more the amount of effort it would have taken to do repairs before the advent of modern machinery. These are the musings that plague my mind.

So I rallied myself for a partial day of taking in the sights. One "borrowed" guidebook from the hostel lounge later and I was ready to hit the tourist laden streets. I was pleasantly suprised to discover that Athens has built a lovely, wide promenade linking together a number of the major sights, negating many of my crowd issues. I could stretch my arms to the side and not touch anybody! It made for a pleasant stroll trying to figure out which nubs of smooth-worn rocks were historic versus the nubs of smooth-worn rocks that could have been oversized skipping stones. Luckily, there was usually some sort of plaque around.

Reflection of the Acropolis on the side of a museum:
The reality is that parts of places like Pnyx Hill could simply be grassy fields with some boulders because most of the structures are so well-worn or missing. It was easier to imagine what things looked like, however, than try to determine the purpose of some modern structures.

As you can see, nobody has been using the door:At least the hill made for nice views of Athens.
One of the things I love about having no agenda is stumbling upon places like Tom's Place. An expat squatter of mysterious origin, Tom creates an ever changing structure on his corner lot from objects he finds. Call it art or call it a shanty, his political views were on full display.
Despite being inspired by the sight of the Acropolis to step out of my hostel, I never actually made it to the Acropolis. There just wasn't time to check it out because an hour wouldn't suffice. I figured I would take a couple more days on my way back from Kalymnos but those couple of extra days disappeared in the excellent rock climbing on the cliffs of that island. That just means I have an excuse to go back to Athens.