Adventures in Paradise

Long Weekend

Last weekend I did something I haven't done since maybe high school - went to the family ranch in Oregon for Labor Day weekend, which coincides with the Lake County Round-Up - rodeo and county fair. After a two hour flight to Reno and a four hour drive to the ranch, the next three days were packed full.

My cousin's daughter showed her pig for the 4H Showman competition...

The four year old discovered the joy of hay bales in the barn (note the handful of hay there destined to feed the horses.)

The two year old with incredible balance found the best perch for animal watching.

The city boys tried out the Western Wear look.

Four generations gathered to watch the parade and the collect candy thrown from the floats.

At the rodeo I helped my aunt run the kid's watermelon race.

We spent as much time watching tomorrow's cowboys perfect their skills...

...as we did watching today's cowboys perform feats of bravery and daring.

And most importantly, got to spend a lot of family time with everyone, including my Papa.

North to Alaska

I've been singing that one line to that old song for something like three weeks. Also, I've been singing it wrong my entire life. I always thought the line was "Go north to Alaska, go north, the west is won" because the Gold Rush in Alaska followed the ones out west and because so many westerners continued north, like Wyatt Earp. Anyway, the lyric is actually "...the rush is on."  No reference at all to the winning of the American West.  Not that there is any point to this other than that my ear worms tend to be very specific to the circumstances, I don't know any other songs about Alaska and I can't get the darn thing out of my head.

This, on the other hand, is the pointy end of my ship headed into Kachemak Bay. This is June, but my guys were dressed for December.

It was pretty apparent walking and driving around town which were my Sailors and which people were locals - my guys were not the ones in shorts and flip flops! It wasn't so bad when the sun was out, or at least when the sun wasn't obscured by the clouds.

I have lots to say about Alaska...the views, the people I met and played with, the food I ate, the animals I saw (Clint's comment in the last blog post will give you an idea, but one incident involves a charging bear) and lots of other stuff.  So, as usual, I will cut it up into small bits and then add a BIG folder of photos to the sidebar.  And yes, I am indeed a poster child for the old "Join the Navy, See the World" slogan - and I love every second!

Urban Tropics

As much as I love finding the adventure in my travels, there’s
also something comforting about revisiting old haunts. The Raffles Hotel,
for instance, costs nearly half a month’s pay to stay there for two
nights, but I do it for the history (Kipling! Tigers in the Billiard Room!) and
for the sheer luxury after months of sleeping in a tiny shipboard rack. 
The rooms are all large suites, with neato lighting systems that are
simultaneously old fashioned and completely automated. And each room
comes with a butler. I’ve stayed at Raffles three times now and
never used the butler because really, what does one do with a butler? It’s
not like I have shoes that need to be shined.
 
There’s also wonderful eating everywhere in Singapore. 
I indulge myself with everything from high end dining to street food. My favorite
meal of the visit was at a hot pot style place with a group of my Senior
Enlisted guys. There were nine of us crowded around a couple of long card
tables with big soup tureens in the middle bubbling away. Everyone grabs
piles of meat and veggies and throws them into the communal pot to cook. 
Great food! Dinner was followed by an evening at a Karaoke bar, but the
less said about that, the better! (I should know better than to hang with
the Chiefs…) I also hit up a couple of different stands for chicken
rice, which is pretty much Singapore’s
signature dish. I closed out the evening hanging out with the CO, who is
less willing to eat street food, at a nice Spanish restaurant overlooking the
water on Clarke Quay. I love the contrast between the blue of the evening
and the red of the restaurant.
 
Finally, for me at least, no Singapore trip would be complete
without an evening in Little India. Our visit this time around coincided
with Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, which means I got some religion and celebration
along with my vegetarian dinner (I always eat at the Jain places there because
they’re amazing.) I did some shopping in a tented market place and
thoroughly enjoyed the differences between modern Singapore and the crush of humanity
in Little India.

Singapore, The Wild Side

I had three full days to enjoy Singapore,
and enjoy it I did, despite the horrible air quality (thank to Indonesia’s
habit of burning large sections of rain forest) and one particularly rainy
day. As I mentioned before, one of the first things I did was run a ropes
course along a reservoir on the east coast of Singapore. It’s amazing
how such a tiny city/country can harbor large tracts of green space and what is
essentially rain forest. The course had moments from pretty easy,
climbing ladders and crossing fairly firm bridges to holy cow hard, moving
sideways along logs hung in a zig zag pattern with gaps of a full foot between
the zig and the zag. You can see the course on the map in the picture,
along with some of the interesting obstacles. I was the photographer, so
no pictures of me. Which is really too bad because one of the more
interesting parts of the course entailed a Tarzan-like swing from the tree tops
into a cargo net that is supposed to stop your swing. Which it did for
most people. I, on the other hand, having spent a fair amount of the last
year flying on a trapeze, came off the platform with my toes pointed and my
legs stuck together like they were velcroed that way. And flew right
through the cargo net! The only thing that stopped me was the connection
point of the safety harness, which was attached to a wire rope. Had I not
been connected, I think my shoulders might have stopped my momentum, but I was
in well past my hips when I came to a halt. The safety observers thought
it was pretty funny. Then again, they also loved that I did all four zip
lines upside down :-)
 
My last afternoon I actually found a trapeze rig that had
single swings for $10 and three swings for $20, so I brought one of my guys
(all the rest of the big talkers backed out) and we swung around for a
bit. He did great – got his legs up and into a knee hang on the
first try. He was pretty pleased when I told him that not everyone did so
well, though he kept his feet flexed the whole time so I’m not sure how
exactly he didn’t slide right off.
 
The endlessly changing nature of Singapore is one of the things I
love about it – no matter how often I visit, there’s always something
new to see and do. Happily, this new stuff fit right in with my sense of
adventure!
 
 

River Walk

The cold is mostly gone, in that it has moved from my head to my chest,
which means I can at least think clearly. So, since I'll have more to
share in the next few days, I'll write up this experience first.

The Fonte River Valley was no cake walk, seriously. It was a daunting
hike, one that was sold to me as "real Bear Grylls" stuff and didn't
disappoint. In fact, I was told later that we (1) took a more difficult
route than my guide had previously and (2) even the parts of the route
that we repeated were more difficult given that the last time he'd been
there was in the dry season. So we had a tough hike punctuated with
lots of mud and rotting breadfruit. I never want to see another
breadfruit again.

To start the hike, we drove up to the top of a mountain, geared up and
then headed down along a wide path under some power lines - which is why
the path was there in the first place. After a little hunting, we found
the correct turnoff into sword grass that was at least six feet tall and
plunged into a short uphill hike to a ridge along the valley. (The
thing about a nice easy jaunt downhill to find the trailhead is that you
have to come back up it at the end of the hike when you're tired.
That's when my calves made their presence known.) You can see the
valley we descended into from the picture on the ridge. It was slippery
and fun, but the only things that made it even possible were the hiking
stick and gloves we wore. That sword grass bites!

The trail started in the grasslands, with red clay and grass everywhere,
but turned into mud and rock once we got to the actual river. The clay
part was easy. Now as I look at the pictures though, I'm not entirely
sure how I got down much less back up at the end of the trail. At one
point early in the river part of the hike, you have to jump from a set
of rocks into the base of a waterfall, the bottom part of which is about
6 feet deep but is surrounded by shallower rocks. That took a couple of
seconds for me to gather my courage, but I did it. There was some rock
climbing involved in nearly every stretch of the trail after that. The
very end of the trail had the highest concentration of rotted
breadfruit, which made it really stinky, but once we hit the waterfall
at the end of the trail, it was like a little piece of paradise.

Serendipity

When we left San Diego, we knew our transit plan and we were
a little bummed because we weren’t going to get a stop in Hawaii –
we were headed north of the islands and getting gas from a couple of ships on
our way because of timing. Then two things happened. First, the oiler broke
and nobody was sure they’d be able to fix them in time to hit us as
scheduled. Maybe isn’t really a comfortable position when you’re
looking at running out of gas somewhere between Hawaii
and Guam. The second thing was a big old
storm up in the Alaska area that had an impact
on sea state all the way to the northern side of the Hawaiian
Islands. Not as significant as the winter storm systems up there
that cause massive waves on the northern shores, but enough to make the trip uncomfortable. 
In the end, all signs sent us into Pearl Harbor
for gas and our timing gave us an evening of liberty. 
 
I was particularly happy, because through Facebook I’ve
gotten back in touch with old college buddies who had drifted away over the
years. One of my best school friends is in the Army and happens to have just
transferred to Hawaii,
so I got to give her a tour of the ship and she took me out to her place in the
city and we wandered in search of dinner. After looking at and dismissing a couple
of restaurants, we wandered into an encampment of food trucks – steak,
Mexican and seafood. They were parked around a bunch of picnic tables under an
awning and had a couple of Coke machines placed around the slab floor since
none of the trucks sold drinks. It smelled great, so we bought a couple of “plate
lunches” of garlic shrimp (my favorite Hawaiian meal ever) and sodas and
sat down to catch up on 17 years. Do I need to say it was a wonderful
evening? Or that in Hawaii,
you should eat out of the trucks instead of the fancy places?
 
On our walk back to her place, we stopped at a store where I
could buy some postcards for the older niece and nephew and ran into a sight
that might well be unique to Hawaii:
SPAM flavored macadamia nuts. No, I didn’t buy them. I did take a
picture to prove I did indeed see what I thought I saw. Also here is a picture
of Diamond Head from sea – isn’t
it lovely? I really could move back to Hawaii.