First off, apologies to everyone who wasn't on this part of the trip for a somewhat ridiculous number of inside jokes and pictures of people you don't know. I really didn't take that many photos this week, and the ones I did take were mostly of the people I was with. I'm putting a bunch of those up, so that the rest of the group can see them, and hopefully all my friends everywhere else can see what a great crowd I was hanging out with the entire week.


15 September

Bovec, Slovenia



I’m picking this up immediately after finishing the post about Chernobyl. I’ve moved inside now, and there are six of us sitting around a table in the bar, sipping coffee, reading books, writing postcards, looking out the window at the rain, and occasionally giving each other a bit of hell for no reason at all.

I’m with a fantastic group of people here, and we’ve been kept busy all week doing a variety of outdoor activities. We’re all getting along well, and the consensus is that we’re a pretty fine crowd, and good looking too. If that resolution were to come up to a vote, I feel certain of its near unanimous approval.


(Navida and Neil in the rainy Bovec streets. Actually, The Bovec Street.)

Before I get to the group though, I’ll tell about the place. Bovec (pronounced Bovets, which caused me some confusion at first) is exactly like the little rafting towns near where I grew up, in West Virginia, except that the mountains (the southern end of the Alps) are steeper, the food better and everyone here speaks three or four languages instead of one (usually poorly - I’m allowed to rag on West Virginia because I lived there for 18 years, if anyone else does, I’ll laugh, and then tell you all the good things about it. Sadly multi-lingual intelligence is not one of them.) In some ways, the valley is in an ideal location for weather… It’s in southern Europe, with Italy only 20 miles away or so, and a small coast on the Mediterranean about 60 miles away.



The valley is only about 1500 feet above sea level, which means it’s not going to get the extreme weather you get higher up, but the mountains rise more than 2400 meters (well over a mile) above it, giving some rather dramatic views, and judging without snow at least, some dramatic skiing in the winter as well. This terrain also produces a plethora of waterfalls and the short time that water takes to get down to the Soca (Socha) river leaves it gorgeously clear and pretty cold. All of this adds up to a valley where you can raft, kayak, mountain bike, mountaineer, canyon, paraglide, climb, ski, fish and pretty much anything else you want to do within 20 minutes of your hotel. And not in a lame way either… the world slalom kayaking championships and paragliding championships have both been held here in the last two or three years, not to mention the world draughts (checkers) championships which were finishing up just as I arrived. (in our very hotel, no less!) and were likely responsible for me not being able to find a room the first night I arrived.

So, I was here a day early, mostly due to my own inability to move smoothly back and forth between the American way of writing dates (09/10/06) and the European way of writing dates (10/09/06). Somehow the two became confused and I ended up thinking I should check in on 09/09/06 – don’t ask me why. Somewhere a couple weeks before I had established in my head that I needed to be in Bovec on Saturday night, so that is when I arrived. It was probably also the American in me, starting the weeklong vacation on Sunday, rather than Monday (Yes, calendars here can be maddening).

It’s worth noting how I got here. Did I mention this before? Four countries in 24 hours, by cab, plane, train and bus? I was picked up by the cab at the hotel in Kiev at 5am, flew out of the airport to Prague (country #2), stayed there for three hours, flew to Zagreb (country #3) dealt with the post restant system and found I wouldn’t be able to pick up my sandals and kayaking gear until Monday, then caught a train to Ljubljana (pronounced lubliana, roughly) (country #4) and arrived at 8pm. I stayed there one night and afternoon, then arrived in Bovec, amidst the furor that is the world Draughts Championships, by bus, at 9:30 on Saturday night - A day early, and with no room, thanks to the checkers players. Fortunately the staff at the Alp Hotel were very kind and called around to find me a room at another hotel for the night, so I didn’t have to sleep on the empty stage where the checkers matches had been held.

I spent that next afternoon cruising around town, checking things out, then went on a hike. Because of the steepness of the mountains, a casual hike up to the top, or high altitude isn’t really possible, so instead I took a hike down towards the river, to see what I’d be dealing with all week.



What I found was a very small, very blue, very clear, and fairly cold river that would be called a stream where I grew up.



 It was beautiful, there was no doubt, but I was skeptical of what it could provide in the way of whitewater excitement. That night I had dinner at a place across the street from the hotel where the pizza was really great but way, way too big for one person. I noted this fact to inform the group later, but when it came time, my warnings fell on deaf ears. I went to one of the bars and had a beer or two, then went to bed around one am, knowing that the main group was due to arrive at the airport in Ljubljana around midnight and would take a long bus ride (2 – 3 hours) to get to Bovec. Sure enough, at around 3am there was a scratching on the door… thinking that my roommate would be given a key of his own, I didn’t get up, but the door didn’t open. After a bit more scratching, I got up and opened it, but there was no one in the hall. Weird. I went back to bed, and a few minutes later more scratching, but still no knock or attempt at the handle. Very weird. Sleepily, I got up and opened the door to find a haggard looking guy who said in a thick Irish accent, “Whathefoockwitthedoor!?”

Thus was my introduction to Liam.


(whathefoockwitthevines????)



(It's the photo that is blurry, not Corinne. )

The next morning I met Corinne, from Switzerland, as she sat down beside me to listen to the official introductory meeting, and watched with amusement as she and a dark complected woman (Indian?) looked back and forth at one another with horror as Dejan (pronounced Dayan) proceeded to give a fairly innocuous (I thought… but maybe I’ve just done too many rafting and kayaking trips. I don’t recall anything about being torn limb from limb, which everyone else seems to remember) speech about the activities we’d be doing and how we had to listen to the guides, etc.


(Big Dejan giving orders while sporty Adrian tries to figure out how the paddle is supposed to work. )

This is standard fair, and usually the dangers get played up in a humorous way to make everyone laugh and loosen up a bit, while making them realize that the stuff they are going to be doing actually can be dangerous if they don’t listen. Talking to Corinne and Navida (from Brighton, with Pakistani parents, I would discover) later in the week, I learned they were both quite nervous after Dejan’s little speech, wondering what they’d gotten themselves into, and they weren’t the only ones.


(Navida: "Is that the waiter coming with our wine???")

After going through the basics, Dejan sized everyone up for wetsuits, shoes, jackets and life vests. There was a nervous moment where it appeared that everyone was going to have to call out their complete measurements to the entire room, which caused some nervous giggling, but then one by one people went up to his table and he looked them over and wrote down the information. There was a little drama as I tried to convert my American shoe size to European but one of the Brits (turns out they were all from England aside from Corinne, myself, Liam, from Ireland, and Catherine who was French, living in England) played translator and we figured it out well enough.

Lord… there is so much to tell about this week! I’ve spent three pages on the first day, and that’s before I really knew anyone! I’m guessing most of you had no idea what you were getting into when you started reading this. I’ll trudge on, in any case, and give you a rundown of the weeks activities.

The later part of the first day, and the first activity, was rafting Most of those on the trip hadn’t really been on whitewater before, so it was very fun watching their reactions. The river was small – much smaller than any of the rivers in the US that I’ve been on, even at a low water level, but it is somewhat technical, with some rapids where you have to wind in and out of the rocks to find the right line. As I mentioned, it’s pretty cold, probably in the neighborhood of 60 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to the Gauley river coming out of the bottom of Summersville Lake in the Fall, for those of you who have been to West Virginia, and a bit colder than Barton Springs, for those of you in Austin. Wet suits were not optional, but did a good job of keeping us warm. The couple times I jumped in and swam rapids it was only my hands and arms which weren’t covered that got cold. There isn’t much to tell about that day…the most notable thing for me as far as the rafting went was the huge number of things they didn’t mention as they were instructing people about what to do in the raft. No mention of what to do if you got thrown out (look for the raft… you’ll probably have a few seconds to grab it before you get carried away by the current), no mention of how to grab a throw line (grab the line, not the bag!), nothing about how to pull a person back into a raft, or how not to bash fellow rafters with your paddle (especially weird since the rafts were much more narrow than others I’ve been in) or a dozen other things. I found myself figuring that either the river really was as small as I’d seen the day before or this group was going to be really screwed. Happily it was the former, not the latter.

The group in our raft was fun, though I didn’t really know anyone yet. Corinne and Navida were in my raft, but it’s hard to chat too much. Our guide was named Peter, and was a nice guy, and very funny, though not an experienced guide. Like most of them there, he had only guided on the Soca river, and while he obviously knew it well, he wasn’t particularly skilled at using the currents or the river, as the really good ones are. Thinking back now, it’s hard recall who was there that first day. I think Adrian was in my raft, in the back, and perhaps Mark and Kathy? That’s my best guess. I was in the front and would probably know better if I’d been in the back somewhere.


(Did you know Blackpool has an airport? Neil did.)

That night we all headed to the bar across the street, and I spent the first real time getting acquainted with everyone. Neil has a great line about how he is a biscuit designer, except that it works better if you’re British and know that biscuits means “cookies” and not “biscuits”. I considered stealing it, but “cookie designer” just doesn’t work as well. In fact, he is a civil engineer and used to design roundabouts, which was a subject of great amusement for us all. Navida works in IT, Corinne is a Doctor, in the middle of her internship, working in internal medicine. Those were the ones I learned first, and through the rest of the week, along with my roommate Liam, the three people I spent most of my time with.

The second day out we started with an easy  section of the river, navigating for ourselves with three person inflatable canoes (basically just narrow rafts that are paddled while kneeling, instead of sitting on the edge)  The A-Team: Neil, Navida and I (we didn’t determine who was Hannibal, Face, the crazy chopper pilot I can’t remember, or most importantly, B.A, aka. Mr. T.) were in one, and switched off steering down the river. We did a serviceable job, especially considering that we tackled the biggest rapids with Navida who had never done any paddling before, and was terrified of going underwater, as the driver. Neil and I pointed out lines down the river for her, and did a fair amount of steering from the middle and front positions, and there were no casualties.

The second half of the day was spent doing what is called hydrospeed. Essentially this is going down the whitewater with a glorified kickboard and flippers, using your legs to try to get to the current and avoid the rocks, and the board to keep your body a bit out of the water and bounce off the rocks you can’t avoid. Given that even the strongest kicker is pretty weak compared to whitewater currents, this pretty much means that your success is going to depend on your skill at reading the water currents, and moving where you want to go well before the rock is in front of you. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t had to spend the entire time trying to dodge fellow swimmers who were caught on rocks or getting run over by them from behind me, but I can say it was definitely my least favorite activity of the week. On top of that, Neil and I had talked Navida into trying it, though she was pretty nervous, and both got bitched at by Dejan as we tried to hang back and help her, as did someone else (Tom, I think). Pretty much everyone got bitched at by Dejan over the next few days, and it became one of the things we all had in common.

To Navida’s credit, she was a trooper, and with a little bit of help from Tina, one of the guides, (in kayaks) managed to get most of the way down the river to the first takeout. I felt incredibly bad watching her drag her hydrospeed up the steep hill, wondering how far she had to walk to the top and wondering if she was ever going to speak to me again. As the rest of the group continued on though, I was glad she’d stopped there, since the water got bigger as we went down, and I ended up tearing a hole in the 5mm neoprene when my knee bashed a rock. I have good skills when it comes to reading water, and felt like I pretty much was getting myself where I wanted to be (aside from the times I was on top of someone else or had someone on top of me), and I still ended up eating rocks a couple times and taking home some good bruises. Everyone else did as well, of course and we were all suitably exhausted at the end, I think.

(Doesn't Tom look a bit angry here?)

That night the group of us went down the street and found a great bar with a big patio that had room for everyone to surround three tables. Liam began to cement his reputation as the insane Irishman by spilling huge amounts of wine not once, but twice, though he was aided by shaky plastic tables. Navida and Neil played group leaders by making us play drinking games including Mr. Thumb, Mr. Freeze and Celebrity names, at which Corinne and I were at a massive disadvantage since we didn’t know most of the British names they were using, and they didn’t know most of the really good names we came up with (No one knew who Dick Dale was, or Freddy Fender! – two prime Double letter names! Only Neil had even heard of Stevie Ray Vaughn!). On top of everything, they laughed at me when I mispronounced Kyle Minogue’s name, trying to come up with some damn person they’ve heard of. For those of you who don’t remember (most I hope) she had one hit in the US… a cover of Locomotion, about 200 years ago. I’m pretty sure Jefferson mentions it in one of his letters to Adams. Did someone say the Brits were supposed to be hip? By the way… did anyone else over there know that David Hasslehof was a singer? All this time I thought he was famous in Europe for Knight Rider and Baywatch. I had no idea he was releasing albums. The reason I mention this is that Corinne is a huge fan. She was singing us one of his songs. I have now scratched Switzerland off all my lists of places to visit, simply for fear of their musical tastes (If you think this is extreme, go back and re-read the post about St Petersburg!).

Wednesday, the third day, things started to get interesting. Well, I take that back. They started off horribly boring, with a kayak for beginners class. Let me start off by saying that I totally respect Dejan and X-Point (his company, who took care of all our sporting activities) for making people do kayak classes instead of just throwing them in boats and taking them down the rivers. That said, there is nothing more annoying than having someone make you overdo things just for the sake of learning something you already know. Peter, our guide (we were divided into three groups, each guide supervising around 5 people., roughly divided by ability. Essentially they told us to paddle up a narrow ravine, against the current, and the first five to manage to get their kayaks where they were supposed to go were taken by Peter as the first group. The second group of six were taken by Tina, and the ones who couldn’t manage very well were taken by little Dejan. More about him later.) took us through various lessons about what an eddy is, why you should always lean away from the moving current, and other basics to kayaking. It’s always good to have a refresher, but I forget that I’m not a very good student sometimes (know it all tendencies, damn it.) and so Peter was constantly telling me to lean more, when I knew perfectly well that we were in very small currents that needed no such thing. The only thing I blame him for is taking so long to realize that I knew a bit about what I was doing, once he sorted that out, everything was fine.

Anyway, once we got through the first half of the day of lessons, THEN things started to get a bit interesting. We made our way down the river stopping in a couple places to play a bit and practice going in and out of the different currents. I spent the afternoon getting used to being in a closed kayak for the first time in about eight years, and getting used to the way a playboat handles. (I’ve spent the last few years paddling in an open, sit-on-top style kayak which is great for riding waves in the ocean and light whitewater, but is almost completely different than a “real” kayak.).  Too soon though the day was over, and we were pulling our boats out of the river. I didn’t even realize that the last place where we took out was pretty deep and calm – a perfect place to try to do an Eskimo roll. Not that I thought I’d still be able to manage one, but I was wanting to try. I was reminded as I stood on the bank with Corinne’s camera, taking photos and watched her roll herself upside down and then, amazingly (she had never done one before) roll herself back up. The next moment of watching her was one of those rare moments when you see someone truly joyous. For one moment they forget everything bad and wrong and they are filled with pure delight. I swear I think its almost more fun to see than to experience, as it always tends to happen very quickly and then you almost forget what it’s like, but watching someone else, you get this great image of pure happiness that can stick with you. Well, that is what I have from that afternoon, watching Corinne roll back on top of the water with a shocked look on her face, then raise both her arms up in the air and let out a loud whoop as she realized what she’d done. The thing I love best about Corinne is that I saw her do it again the very next day, after jumping off a high rock while canyoning. I know tons of people who have never shown that expression, as long as I’ve known them, and she did it twice in one week. That almost makes up for singing David Hasslehof songs. Almost. Corinne, I’m very sorry that I didn’t get the picture of you rolling back up. The truth is, I watched you roll yourself over, and the lifeguard/Dad instincts took over. I didn’t expect you to come back up, and was watching to make sure you made it out of your boat okay… I think the two of us were both taken by surprise by your absolutely perfect Eskimo roll.


(Corinne is ready to roll! Sorry... it couldn't be helped... )

That morning, Dejan had asked those of us who were interested in doing outside activities to go ahead and begin making plans, as it looked like the weather was going to turn later in the week. So for that reason, I ended up hanging around the offices of X-Point for an hour or so after the rest of the group left, waiting for my turn to go Paragliding. Actually, I spent that time in a bar next door trying to talk to an absolutely stunningly gorgeous waitress. She was a rock climber and had the shoulders to prove it, and if I wasn't thinking of moving to Bovec already, for that hour I was. And then my attention was turned to the overheating truck that was supposed to be carrying me to the top of the mountain, along with four other people. We never did figure out why it was overheating (yes, I helped try to figure it out) but it got us to the top, running the heater and pushing the limits on the steep uphill when it went into four-wheel drive. Once there, having seen Italy on the drive up (yes, did I mention how high the mountains rive above the valley?), Simon helped me get into my suit (basically the same as a skydiving suit) and then the harness (a cross between a rock climbing full body harness and a chair, if you can imagine that) while my pilot (this was a tandem thing... I'm not rated to fly one on my own) got the parachute/wing ready. I was a little shocked by how little preparation was taken... no close-up surveying of the lines... just unfold, untangle a few lines, and he was ready to go. He did give a hard tug and inflate it, letting it take some wind, which I guess would have shown any rips or tears, but I could have done with a bit more than that. Two other guys went ahead of us, one making his first solo flight off the mountain. Simon told me that he was doing it with only three days of training, which was less than usual, but it was his choice. He took off, followed by another guy (looking out for him, basically) and then a couple minutes later we were ready and we clipped in, took off running down the hill, and felt the ground fall away.

It was a good experience. The view was amazing, of course, and it was interesting seeing how he flew the wing and how different things worked, but I realized that I'm way too fond of being in control of my own destiny to really enjoy being completely in the hands of someone else. I was basically sitting in front of and just below him, and the entire time I was trying to figure out what to do with my hands, trying to look back to see what he was doing, and getting nervous when the wind crossed the wing and gave us some turbulance. Yes, turbulance is a whole differnt thing when you're hanging by a couple dozen thin lines from a cross between a wing and parachute. Fastened into a place it doesn't bother me in the least.. swinging me outwards and letting the wing slip to the side, through the air, it doesn't make me happy at all. So... I'm glad I did it, but I don't think there will be any other tandem flights for me... maybe sometime I'll learn to fly one for myself, though...

After dinner that night we decided not to go out for drinks. There was a pool table in the hotel (apparently an American style pool table, as all the Brits thought both the table and the balls were huge, though I thought it was simply regulation size, It seemed the same as those in the good pool halls back home, though the cues were definitely not regulation) and since we’d been talking about playing pool every night up to that point, we finally did it. I assumed we’d play doubles eight ball or something, but someone knew a game everyone could play, so that’s what we did. Basically the rules were, everyone shoots (alphabetical order is how we got organized) and if you miss two (actually, we started with three, as the Brits got used to the giant size balls and table) you’re out. After a couple games of standard rules, Neil (I think it was Neil – if not, it was a very Neil-like thought) suggested we change it to speed pool, with everyone having 5 seconds after the last ball stops moving to take their shot. I found another good cue, and suggested that we alternate cues, so that the next person always has one in hand, and with that, we were off. If you’re ever in a large group with one table I absolutely recommend this game for sheer energy and fun. It’s pretty straight forward until people start dropping out, and then suddenly you’re not only trying to sort out what you’re going to be left with and what you’re going to shoot, but also trying to figure out when it’s your turn. As the crowd is counting, “One… two… three… four… “ you’re all laughing at the same time, and it turns out it’s a great way to learn the rest of the names you hadn’t quite caught over the last two days. After that night, I knew at least the names and faces of all fifteen in our group.


(Paul, Chris, Kathy and James, ready for another day on the water!)

With that, I’m going to leave off. This is already a pretty long post and I’m only half way through the week. I think I’ll post this half, and then go back and do the other half as a separate link. Especially since I have plenty more pictures for the second part.

More soon..

Stephen

On to Part 2 of Bovec...