Some people may have found my long silence a blessed relief. Others have complained about my lamentable failure to update my website and send out newsletters over the summer. My excuse is that my summer travels turned out to be rather hectic - though full of interest. I spent two weeks at the end of July in Alaska, travelling by public ferry from Homer to Dutch Harbor, then spent a couple of nights in two fabulous lodges where I saw grizzlies and black bears from scarily close. Then I flew up to Prudhoe Bay, the oil fields on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and joined a tour group driving along the Dalton Highway, which follows the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to Fairbanks. And then I hopped over the border to the Yukon where I was researching a guidebook for Bradt Guides. Read on...
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| And the winners are... |
Given that it's been the summer and I, for one, have been away, I've packaged all the entries since the last newsletter into one - and I've been agonizing over the result. The problem is, the two best entries both broke the rules by going over 500 words. And then I thought, oh hang the rules, I'll let the best one win anyway. And so I have. This may be entirely immoral - complaints to the usual address, please. Anyway, the rule-breaking winner is Brendan Harding with his piece on the wonders of digital photography in a far-off land. Read Brendan's subversively too-long story here. Brendan wins the Bradt guide of his choice.
The winner of my newsletter draw, less controversially, is Valerie Oakley, so a signed copy of one of my books will be with her just as soon as Royal Mail deems fit.
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| On the Shelves |
The German edition of Fried Eggs with Chopsticks, titled Wer niemals Reis mit Stäbchen aß, is now on the shelves in Germany. What better Christmas present could you think of for your German-speaking friends?
Meanwhile, the audio version of It's Not About the Tapas has just come out, the perfect Christmas present for anyone who spends a lot of time in the car, or whose eyes are too rubbish to read. By a truly weird coincidence, Lucy Scott, who read the audio versions of both It's Not About the Tapas and Fried Eggs with Chopsticks, swims in the same swimming club as I do. It was a strange evening in the changing room when we discovered that I was me, and she was her.
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Bears
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One of the most memorable days of my summer was a trip to Redoubt Bay Lodge in Alaska. The lodge is bang, slap in the middle of the wilderness. To get there you have to fly in a tiny bush plane. And just round the corner from the lodge, on the shores of the lake, grizzly and black bears congregate to fish for the salmon that are trying, under almost impossible circumstances, to make their way up a creek to spawn. (Start praying now that you don't get reincarnated as a salmon. The drama they have to go through before they can reproduce is quite terrible.) I went to the bay in a boat and managed to get closer to the bears than I would have believed possible without becoming lunch. The guide reckoned that I, lying on the front of the boat with my camera, was probably about two metres away from this mother grizzly. To me it felt like she was sitting in my lap. Whatever her distance, I had to put away my telephoto lense. She was too close. Check out my photos here. And also check out the website of Redoubt Bay Lodge and its sister Winterlake Lodge. They're both really unique and wonderful places to stay should you ever happen to be passing through the Alaska bush.
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The Ferry to the Aleutians
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I also spent four days travelling on the State ferry from Homer to Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. Dutch Harbor is the town where the TV show Deadliest Catch is based. I didn't haul in any crabs. I did however see several humpback whales blowing and flipping their tail fins. And I was lucky enough to take this trip in a week when the Aleutian Islands enjoyed quite spectacular weather. (Usually the weather there is dreadful.) The ferry is no cruise liner. There are far more passengers than berths, so I ended up sleeping on the floor of the public lounge along with 60 or 70 others. But it's small enough to weave a much more interesting path than the big ships, and we stopped at many tiny communities to whom the arrival of the ferry (it only runs four or five times a year) is a really big event. In one miniscule village called Chignik, which has only 80 inhabitants and no restaurants or cafes, the ship's chef even cooked up burgers for the locals who streamed onto the boat by the score and left with towers of polystyrene take-out boxes. The photos are here. And you can read all about it in Wanderlust early next year.
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Dalton Highway
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And then I headed north to Prudhoe Bay, the oil fields on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, and drove back down the Dalton Highway, the supply road that follows the Alaska pipeline, with the Northern Alaska Tour Company. We were lucky with our wildlife viewing. We saw a polar bear in Prudhoe Bay itself - it had been injured following a fight with another polar bear and had been lying on the ground for several days. From the road, we saw lots of muskoxen (those are the shaggy creatures in the picture above), a lone caribou and a couple of red foxes. We also took a detour to the wonderful little village of Wiseman, which lies just off the highway. Wiseman has a population of just 13, and its inhabitants live a largely subsistence lifestyle, hunting moose and caribou for food, trapping wolves and marten to sell their pelts, and growing most of their own vegetables. It was fascinating to spend an hour or two with these people who are really in tune with the land from which they live. My full story will be published in the Independent on Sunday in due course.
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| In the Press |
Read my interview with Count Paolo Marzotto this month's issue of Food & Wine. I visited the Count and his family at his home in Vicenza, Italy, towards the end of last year. He's in his late 70s but he's a man of extraordinary energy and intelligence. I found him and the rest of his family hugely impressive - and fantastically hospitable. Not only does the Count run various businesses at an age when most people are establishing a close relationship with their slippers, but he, his wife, and all his children and grandchildren speak several languages fluently. When I asked how they'd learned them all to such a high level, one of the daughters looked astonished and said, "But it's normal!" It turned out that she had been packed off at the age of nine to Scotland to spend the summer. I asked if she'd been homesick and again she looked surprised. I felt feeble.
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| Oops |
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After I'd been in the Yukon for just a week in August, I had a bad five seconds on a remote gravel road. One minute, I was driving along at a conservative 80kph. There were no bumps, no holes, no bends...but the truck suddenly veered off violently to the left. I overcorrected, left the road to the right, and rolled in the ditch.
I walked out of it with a cut lip and a broken tooth. As you can see, the truck wasn't so lucky. The police reckoned I must have caught some soft gravel under my tyre.
This is a land of no mobile phones outside the main towns, so I waited by the roadside for an hour until a family of German tourists came by. They looked horrified at the sight of me: lips bleed. They drove me to the nearest town, Ross River. Ironically enough, this was the one town in the whole of the Yukon I'd been advised not to spend time in, but after the fantastic treatment I had from both police and nursing staff, I can't feel too badly towards the place. And the nurse's stitching was of such a great standard (a cynic might assume she'd had some practice) that after just six weeks, the scar is barely visible.
Other than that little incident, I had a wonderful six weeks in the Yukon. Check out some photos of my later (and considerably less traumatic) drive up the Dempster Highway, and my hike to the Donjek glacier.
Now I just need to knuckle down and write the guidebook. At least nobody can accuse me of not doing my medical and police research.
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