2114

Thats the number of kilometres driven by me in the last two days. Certainly not a world record, its still a fairly long way. Most of it was through pretty unpopulated areas too. I will admit, I love to drive, but that love comes with a qualification. I love to drive without traffic. Driving in traffic, especially in a city, is simply a maddening adventure.

Here, in the middle north reachs of Canada, there is little traffic, and little of any thing else. Well, there are a whole lot of trees, but not people. Animals abound, although in low population densities. Over the past couple of days I have seen a handful of moose, loads of white tailed deer, a brace of caribou, a couple bison, some coyotes and even a red fox. My hope of seeing a bear before the winter sets in seems a wishful one, and yet again they evaded me.

I was driving largely on the Alaskan Highway, which is a strange name for a road that is mostly not in Alaska. But it is one of the worlds great roads I guess, misleading name or otherwise. It starts in the Town of Dawson Creek (no relation to the TV series) and heads north to Fort St John's, Fort Nelson and on to the Yukon. I have followed it as far as Watson Lake, a town just across the Yukon BC border. This time though I headed to Toad River, a tiny dot on the map in Stone Mountain park, and in argueably the most attractive section of the highway in BC.

While driving, radio listening aside, there is very little to do but think. I got thinking about great roads of the world. Although I have travelled none end to end, I have been on a few. To list some I think are deserving of great roads I have been on

• The great north road, Cape to Cario
• The carreterra austral
• Route 40, Argentina
• The trans-island road, Taiwan
• The Srinagar road

Certainly there are many more, but those ones at least are more known. And it got me to thinking too, what is the classic road of your country, the drive that every citizen who gets the chance should make. Certainly, things like the Carreterra Austral in Chile or Route 40 across the border are of that ilke. I guess the most famous one in South Africa might be the garden route. And Canada must have others than merely the Alaskan highway. But its pretty impressive. You head through wilderness almost untouched for many hours. In most cases, if you left the road and headed north, you are as likely to reach the arctic ocean as you are to find another road. And that is more than 1000km away. Thats a whole lot of bush out there.

I know that many people lament the destruction of the forest and the opening up of the north, but compared to almost everywhere else I have been, there is still true wilderness here, and will be for more than a couple of generations, even with the rapid development. In fact I would say that this wilderness, although altered indirectly by our destruction of this planets climate, will outlive us, virtually untouched. Why, you may ask. Well, simple, aside from sporadic mineral deposits, there is nothing there to make money off. We will scratch a little here and there, but to mother earth, it will be mere scratches, not flesh wounds. The bush will reclaim the efforts in time, and having given up here buried assests, be left alone. It is too cold and too big to be touched for others reasons, and so will be left, like the Vastness of Siberia.

I feel honoured to be able to travel this wilderness at all, and enjoy my brief encounters with the wildlife and the Rockies.

With the wind comes winter

For almost a week now the wind has been ripping across the plains and buffetting this little town. We have been cleaning out the shop, so have not been on the road in all that time. Everyday the wind seems a little colder, as if it is continually drawing air from futher north.

Finally, today, the wind lay down and the rain came in. And I got to go out. I needed to do a pick-up in Tumbler Ridge, 200km away in BC. There is a long way there and a short way. The long way is tarmac all the way, while the shorter route heads through forest on dirt road. Needless to say I opted for the short way. However, with the rain the road had taken a beating since I last travelled it, and at times 40km/h was too bone jarring to sustain. So I took it slow and gentle. Gone are the days when I used to ride on Company vehicles. I know nuture them and treat them like my own.

The short cut involves driving a radio controlled road. This bizarre sounding name is a sensible system they have here for narrower dirt roads. Although by most dirt road standards, the roads here are massive, it can still be a little trying to squeeze past a logging truck at 80km/h.
So to stop the surprise of rounding a corner to see a MAC truck bearing down on you, everyone tunes into the same frequency and calls out their mileage.
So, for example, while i was driving along, I would see say the 16km sign, and radio in "West bound 16 on the "Hiding"" (Hiding creek been the name of the road) Hence when someone is getting close in the other direction, you know and slow down.

After that little road adventure I joined the main "heritage highway" which is certainly not much of a heritage to anyone and even less of a highway. It was even more rutted and puddled than before, and to add to the fun, the rain slowly turned to snow. On the higher points the ground was almost blanketed already, yet the tempature was a mild 3 degrees.

Further on it got a little colder and I saw a pick-up and a truck both wrecked on the side of the road on a hairpin bend. There was no sign of a collision, so i suspect that a little ice on the road might have been in play.

I safely made it to Tumbler Ridge, a quaint little holiday mountainfoothill town, where I got to dismantle a dish and pack up the truck to return. Before I did, the boys in Calgary gave me another call and sent me on a little side trip to collect a second installtion on the way home. This involved a bit more driving, but i kept safely to the paved road this time and had a dinner on the way, getting there on time at 7pm and finally rolling in home at around 9pm.

The wind that has been ripping in, might not have brought actual winter, but is has stripped most trees of their leaves, making for a very wintery feel to the drive. Add the odd flake to that and it looked far colder than it felt.

On the way home, an hour out, Wen-shu gave me a call. What a pleasure to sit in my warm truck, soaking up the mileage on crusie control, while chatting to my wife half a world away. She is in Taiwan, where I will be soon for a week. I remeber the days when calling international cost half the planet and involved delays, crappy lines and endless frustration. We have come far when you can pick up a phone and call anyone, almost anywhere, anytime.

How much of this world...............

The changing of the seasons has always been a good time of year. I like the early morning nip of the air in autumn, or the lingering warmth of spring. Only thing is I am used to a little more moderation in these things. The mercury went below 0 for the first time this season this week, and I found myself outside moving stuff around at work in a rather stinging wind. I am eager to test myself against the coming winter. I guess I have never been colder than around -15. Admittedly I was sleeping outside in a tent at the time, so that should count for something. But now, here, it will be cold in a truely brutal way.

That got me thinking about the limits of your world. How much of what this little planet has to offer have I had the chance to experience. I have been to both the driest and the wettest places on the earth. While I have not been to the hottest or coldest, I have experienced mid 40's on the plus range. I've been 122 degrees east, 128.7 degrees west, 60 degrees north and over 55 degrees south. I've climbed 6400m above sea level and dropped over 2000m below it (or 40something m in it) Of course I have flown all the way around this blue jewel, but that to my mind does not count. It's like counting the countries you have visited by the number of international airports and Hyatts you've been too. To have been somewhere, in my mind, you need to have placed your feet firmly on the soil and breathed deep of the air. You need to have gazed around and listened to the insects and the birds. Or the silence. You need to have met some who lives there and had a small glimpse into their world and their culture. Otherwise you are merely passing through.

With my present job, I will be doing a hell of a lot of passing through. Not that I really want to, but the distances will be great and there is not enough time in this short life to linger everywhere. I hope to grab a snap shot here, or a photo there, and comment much on the land. But when it comes to experiencing things, a lot will be through the hardened glass of my bush truck. Still, the winding roads are alluring and I do enjoy the landscape as I pass through them, even if I don't quite meet them on the terms I set myself.

Why oh why a Blog?

I feel like I'm a bit late for a party I started. Well, not started, but was ahead of the game on. Way back in the mid ninties I did a bit of blogging. Long before blogging was blogging, and it was something else entirely. During my years of wandering the globe, I decided that it would be far easier to simply update a central webpage during my travels and have my collection of friendscolleaguesfamilymetionableothers login in and catch up on my news. So before heading off on my South America jaunt, I wrote out a few templates and saved a file stucture on the geocities servers to update on my travels. And over the next couple of years I updated them from many a random internet cafe. It was, in all intents and purposes, a blog.

Of course I have since given up the world travel (sadly and not out of my own choice, but the years move on...) and with it, my blog. Not to say I haven't done a selection of interesting stuff since, but it has not been weblished since. I still have the old blog, floating around somewhere on a couple of servers. In fact I know it sits on my old webserver, since out of commision and not running. There is a copy here if anyone wants to ramble through it.

So now I find myself stagnated in a real job, with some interesting things that should come up now and again. My wife has started her own blog too, so I feel a little left out. Her blog rocks too, so I guess there is a little of that oneupmanship going on. Hence, finally it is blog time I guess. Something to pass the time doing. Of course I would ideally like to host the thing myself and the like, and with time I guess I will. But for now, it starts here