Outpost51 contents MAY/JUNE 2006
Tripping 9 Dr. Wilderness 10 Local Knowledge Build it yourself in Casablanca
14 Canada Made Me ST. JOHN’S CROWS NEST CLUB; PROTECTING A MARITIME MARSH; VANCOUVER’S “DMZ”
18 Going Hard TOKYO DISASTER CENTRES
20 Field Notes SHRUNKEN HEADS AND SHAMAN’S COATS: One collector’s vision quest
24 Welcome to My Country Mr. Solo in Ukraine
26 Liberia’s Refugee Radio Lo-tech, high impact in West Africa
28 Gourmet du Monde Real Thai cooking
30 Healthpost Avoiding altitude sickness
32 MEC’s The Traveller’s Edge 62 Open Box Lomo Cameras: More Lo-tech for your buck
66 Backpackers Buzz News from Hostelling International
72 Big Fat Word Reviews: The Caliph’s House, wild meals, Nortech CDs
Features 34 Coloured Rivers & Monster Dogs Story and photos: Jeff Fuchs Living with Khampa nomads in the Himalayas, the solo explorer finds the pure life at 5,000 metres.
43 Québec, North Shore Story: Chris Frey A summer road trip to the end of Route 138 delivers whales, vistas, Habitant food, and laughter.
50 When the Stone Rooster Crows Story: Larry Frolick / Photos: Don Weber Isan, Thailand’s remote northeast province, is the perfect tropical hideaway to disappear from “Civilization”–before it also disappears.
79 Wright of Way
COVER PHOTO: JEFF FUCHS PHOTO, TOP: JEFF FUCHS; BOTTOM: DON WEBER
Outpos
Photo: enrique preza
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Outpost travel for real
no.51
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Matt Robinson matt@outpostmagazine.com Editor
LARRY FROLICK larry@outpostmagazine.com Editors-at-Large
christopher frey chris@outpostmagazine.com kevin vallely kevin@outpostmagazine.com Senior Editor, Travel Health DEBORAH SANBORN deborah@outpostmagazine.com Senior Editor kevin black black@outpostmagazine.com Photographers-at-Large
Lorne bridgman, donald weber Art Director
christine ager-smyth production@outpostmagazine.com Map Design
Steve wilson Comix
Jason Loo
I got my Outpost t-shirt last year...and wear it everywhere I travel to…I brought it to Chile with the intention of taking a picture of me wearing it in the Atacama Desert. Unfortunately, I didn’t reach the desert...(but) the Chilean Andes was the perfect spot. I’ll keep wearing it when I travel and send you updates. Enrique Preza Toronto, Ontario
Designers
alexandra ishigaki, Jeff Guscott Photographer
Andrea Sogge Food Editor
Don Douloff Contributing Editors
Magazine Left at the Border
michael buckley, Paul Carlucci, chris chopik, David field, adnan khan, Patti Gower, Tyler Stiem, Chad Ulansky
Earlier this year my husband and I did a two month overland trip along eastern Africa. Just south of Kande Beach in Malawi, we were stopped at a checkpoint. The officer wanted to board our tourist truck. All he wanted were magazines. There was only one on the truck. My Outpost, in full view and I didn’t want to give it up. It was the November issue, with articles on the Bushmen art of South Africa. I had not read them yet. The officer walked down, then up, then down the truck again. “No magazines?” he asked. The moment was tense. My husband looked at my magazine, I glared at him. Then he grabbed it, held it up, and said,” You can have this one?” “Thank you,” said the officer. And off he went. And everyone exhaled. Outpost saved our Canadian bacon that day. Thanks. Kelly James Toronto Your article on IAMAT was a must-read for all. I have used them for years. One example only. I was in a remote village in Peru when overnight my mosquito protection broke down and in the morning I was covered with hundreds of bites. I was not a happy fellow. However, I called the IAMAT number in Lima, the doctor there straight away found me an English-speaking doctor in a town close by who immediately came in despite it having been his day off. He examined me and dispensed the necessary medication, which fixed me up in a day. Total cost: $20.00. Everyone should subscribe and always carry the IAMAT Medical Resources Guide wherever they travel. Walter Seaton, Toronto
was recently in New Zealand covering an action-packed month of hiking, heli-biking, and scuba diving, when he and fellow photojournalist Ryan Carter dropped by the Cow Restaurant in Queenstown for a local Pinot Noir and pizza. An elderly customer collapsed: Rob raced to his aid and performed CPR. The gentleman was resuscitated and taken to the hospital, where he was reportedly fine. Congratulations, Mr. Brodey! Check out his website at www.cloudgazer.com.
Due to an error, Derek Hatfield, Skipper of The Spirit of Canada, was misidentified in a piece that appeared in OUTPOST #50 (“The Spirit of Canada Gets Ready for her Maiden Voyage”). OUTPOST apologizes for the error, and wishes Mr. Hatfield all continued success in 2006. Outpost MAY/JUne 2006 www.outpostmagazine.com
Online Manager LIONEL MANN lionel@outpostmagazine.com Reviewer
Pat Kennedy Outpost [ISSN: 1203-7125] is published six times a year by: Outpost Incorporated, 425 Queen St. W., Suite 201 Toronto, ON M5V 2A5 Editorial and Business Tel: [416] 972-6635 Advertising Tel: [416] 972-6527 Fax: [416] 972-6645 E-mail: info@outpostmagazine.com Web site: www.outpostmagazine.com
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Correction: This Hatfield is the Real McCoy
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Coloured Riv Mon
IN THE REMOTE VALLEYS OF THE KHAMPA NOMADS, YOUR NEAREST NEIGHBOUR IS THE HIMALAYAN SKY STORY AND PHOTOS: JEFF FUCHS
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Rivers onster Dogs
The author’s mountain home for a season, Lashi’s tent sits under an ominous sky. www.outpostmagazine.com MAY/JUNE 2006 Outpost
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PHOTO: © TOURISME QUÉBEC/SYLVAIN MAJEAU
“The grand boreal watersheds, emptying into the St. Lawrence.”
WATER, WHALES AND WONDER:
QUÉBEC, NORTH SHORE STORY BY CHRISTOPHER FREY
THERE’S A DRIVER’S LOOKOUT JUST OUTSIDE OF BAIE comeau, where a massive pinnacle of Canadian Shield makes its last stand before yawning into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Inland, a bowl of boreal forest cradles a sun-dappled lake. Ripples of exposed bedrock undulate, occasionally showing through the forest. A cordon of hydro pylons marches onward, giant exoskeletons playing hopscotch, carrying electricity from the megaproject dams of the area to the rest of the province. The horizon is lost in a blessed blue where the ocean meets the sky. We’re halfway along Route 138, Eastern Canada’s betterpaved answer to the Dempster Highway. The 138 runs 1,100 kilometres beyond Montréal, hugging the north shore of the St. Lawrence where the river broadens into a gulf, connecting the province’s most cosmopolitan city with many of its remote towns and villages. My companion is counting the hydro pylons as she swats a veil of mosquitoes away from her face. I’m examining a map of Québec. Facing the reality of this landscape, a topography only suggested by the map comes to life. I focus on the profusion of blue lines running from north to south, from the grand www.outpostmagazine.com MAY/JUNE 2006 Outpost
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“
here's the existential end of the road... an improvised highway into the boreal frontier
”
watersheds, emptying into the St. Lawrence. The veins of this province are cold and clean. Motorcyclists—solitary outriders, doubling Honda Goldstream couples, small groups—stand out in the light traffic. Unlike the Dempster, the only danger comes from playing cat-and-mouse amidst the walls of hard rock with tail-gating truckers. The road is well-groomed and provisions are sufficient—at least until Sept-Îles. The 138 may be North America’s least-heralded but most rewarding road trip: it deserves a good long run.
dilemmas as the rest of the country, the province’s north shore feels like a less provisional, more wired frontier. A log-constructed, A-frame trading post wouldn’t appear out of place sandwiched between a dépanneur and an electronics store. Jacques Cartier, the St. Lawrence’s original European wayfarer, could not have foreseen this. After spotting land at Ponte des Monts, just north of Baie Comeau, in 1535, Cartier continued south, favouring the rich estuaries, islands and wooded slopes down river. He could do without the North Shore, he sneered, calling it “the land God gave to Cain.”
people are supposed to be leaving these hamlets—Forestville, Godbout and Pointe aux Anglais—for the lights of Québec City, Trois Rivières, Montréal. And if there’s one Québec narrative emblematic of such migrations it’s the story told in the 1968 film Entre la mer et l’eau douce. Protaganist Claude Tremblay hops a cargo ship from his home at Pointe aux Anglais and lights out for Montréal, with dreams of becoming a famed chansonnier. A blue-collar poetry-singer. Sensitive Guy from the North Country. But visiting these towns, with the weather on our side, there’s a surprising liveliness, raw beauty and cultural pride: the graceful sandbanks studded with herons rolling into the Gulf at Ste Anne de Portneuf; the perfectly modernist Musée Louis Langlois devoted to studying the 18th and 19th-century shipwrecks off the coast of Pointe-des-Anglais; the infusion of young people who come here out of interest in its landscape each summer. Lean and muscular, 30-year-old Jean Poirier is a reverse Claude Tremblay. During his many years working in Montréal’s film industry as an assistant director of photography, Poirer spent summers around Charlevoix and the Côte Nord as a rafting and kayaking guide. This year he made the move here full-time, forsaking his film career. “I wanted to be outside, to live at a slower pace. Something more in keeping with my values,” he says. “The contact with people is different, too, the further along the Côte Nord you travel. Near Québec City people can be a bit grumpy. Too close to the city and too far away from being really far. Up here they treat everybody like their neighbour.” Québec is one province where the North might actually figure constructively in its future. If it shares the same demographic
if you can take your eyes off the sea long enough, and study the vast hinterland it embraces, an altogether different sense of this country emerges. The Innu had the right idea. The natives hunted and fished this rocky, unyielding Eden of granite shield and forbidding bogland—long before the first trading posts, whaling stations and fishing outports in the 16th and 17th centuries—and lived by a principle of surrender to the land. Read their mythologies: the Innu developed a finely-tuned sense of irony, ambiguity and the absurd long before they became useful coping mechanisms for our life in the 21st century. Their myths could be humorously crude—consider the tale of a woman who takes a penis for a lover. Or the man who is forced to live out his days in a caribou’s ass. They defy easy moralization. The stories artfully express the absurdities of life set in an impossible landscape, and minimize the value of life kept in balance—although there’s a bit of that, too. Then there’s how Wolverine created the world. It was a time of floods, when the earth was covered in water but for the few stones sitting above the waves. Wolverine leaped from stone to stone, fearing that more floods would soon submerge the stones entirely. He summoned the water animals for help but no one was of much use. Until Muskrat volunteered. “Can you swim to the bottom of the ocean and bring up some ground?” Wolverine asked. Muskrat asked that Wolverine tie a rope to his foot while he dived. But when Muskrat stayed down for some time, Wolverine, fearing the worst, pulled in the rope. Muskrat wasn’t there. But mouth crammed with muddy earth, Muskrat finally did surface. So much earth he couldn’t breathe or speak.
44 Outpost MAY/june 2006 www.outpostmagazine.com
PHOTO: Chris FREY
Perfect water, perfect skies—kayaking the 80km long Mingan Archipelago.
The Isan people of the Mekong area are a mix of cosmopolitan and traditional.
50 Outpost MAY/JUNE 2006
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WHEN THE STONE ROOSTER CROWS Time runs slowly in Thailand’s Isan region, a land of spirit houses, tree-ghosts and Khmer temples. It’s the perfect place to disappear from sight until Time runs out
PHOTOS: XXXXXXXXXXX
STORY BY LARRY FROLICK PHOTOGRAPHS BY DONALD WEBER
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Illustrations: Ian Wright
Haiti, 2005: Schoolgirls in Port-au-Prince
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CELEBRATING 10 YEARS OF PUBLISHING ADVENTURE AND TRAVEL. continued on page 89
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