Drought at Algonquin Provincial Park

We ran over a squirrel on our drive to Algonquin Park. It could have made it if it had only paused instead of darting across the road - we would have driven right over it with the squirrel safely between the two tires, but it made a run for it. I felt bad and wondered if it was bad luck or maybe even good luck to start the weekend off with death.


squashed into the little car
As it stood, parts of Algonquin Park were on fire, due to the drought that was still haunting most of the province. It's gotten to the point where the government is not telling us to try to conserve water at home, but rather they are encouraging us to water our lawn to prevent more fires.

When we drove into the park, a big sign displayed the fire rating. It was so hot and dry that they had tacked on an extra rating unit, to show that campfires were especially illegal with the fire ban now. A park warden came around to explain to us that illegal campfires would get you the hefty fine of $615. I did not have that money. I wanted to ask the park warden if his life was just like the TV show Parks and Recreation, but he didn't seem too chatty, probably because his park was on fire.

Facing this sober situation on my first trip to Algonquin Provincial Park reminded me somewhat of the trip I took to Etosha National Park in Namibia, only to find out that a massive brushfire had swept through the park, destroying a lot of the beautiful landscape and killing some of the wildlife. Luckily we were in another part of Algonquin Park, far away from the chaos.

The truth is, I had missed camping ever since moving back to Canada from Namibia. I missed sleeping outside, not caring about being dirty, watching the constellation Orion in the sky, taking long walks deep in the wilderness. After all my time camping in the desert, I was eager to go back to Canadian camping, in the thick of the woods surrounded by trees taller than my house, with no baboons to rob you at night but only bears, who lack opposable thumbs. Surrounded by grass and cool bodies of water.


bears, bears, everywhere
It was unexpected then, when we arrived at our campsite which presented us with the limited choice of settling down on the dead dry yellow grass or the dustbowl reddish dirt that the forest floor had become, resembling something out of a civil war movie based in the southern states, missing only tumbleweed rolling through. Everything we did and had soon became caked in the dusty dirt: all of our food, our feet, our clothes. It was fine with me; it was like being back in the desert.


camp
Even going for a dip in the lake was a futile effort in washing up. You'd get out, clean and refreshed, and as you walked you immediately became dirty again, as the dust would cling to you like staticky pants dried without fabric softener. But at least we had the lake, which was cool and refreshing.






We decided to go on a little hike to the Spruce Bog, which has been described as a kind of a desert itself. It had started off as a beaver pond, but because beavers are so hard-working and industrious, the beavers' continuous dragging of stuff into the pond (as well as other conditions) eventually converted the shallow pond into a bog. According to my guidebook, the chemical conditions of a bog impose severe restrictions on the plants growing there, and the lack of nutrients in the bog make it almost like a desert.


a lovely little boardwalk through the bog...a bogwalk, I'd even call it.


Dannik on the rocks, Curley in the corner. My two favourite drinks!


there's something about acidic swamps that really bring out the romance in a couple.



gloria the explorer of the world
This is what our guidebook also had to say:

"At the present time the mat is a relatively thin layer with many weak spots. We strongly advise against walking on it because of the danger both to the fragile mat and to yourself. If by chance you did go through, your only consolation would be that your body would be preserved for thousands of years in the acidic, oxygen-poor peat nine metres below."

death, death, everywhere, in such a beautiful place. The words of the guidebook made us particularly reluctant to cross this tired-looking bridge with a dilapidated foundation.



It was a hot walk and I was thirsty.

For dinner, we had the meal of kings: Rob's own hearty beef stew, a bottle of champagne, and cookies. With the campfire ban still on, we had luckily brought along a burner, the kind you`d cook Korean barbecue meat on. Otherwise we would have only had the bottle of champagne and cookies to eat.




i suppose we could have also taken a chance on these bright, beautiful and possibly poisonous berries
That evening, with no campfire to stare into, we walked over to the beach with blankets and watched the night sky. In this darkness, you could see so many stars than you can in the city, one of my favourite features about camping. I was trying to find the constellation Orion, to bookend my experience in the southern part of the world where I had first seen the hunter Orion in the desert, complete with his bow and his sword and his belt. But I felt myself going cross-eyed; big clouds kept moving through the night sky and obscuring our vision of the constellations. I wondered if any of the clouds would finally bring rain.

After we lingered there for a while, a man brought a big device down to the lake shore and shone a huge green beacon into the sky. The light was so strong it could point at the stars. I thought that the man was signaling Batman. My friends told me that he was probably just demonstrating star constellations, but after we headed back to camp, I definitely saw a bat fly over our tent.

When we woke up the next morning, there was a crow-like bird that was screaming like it was being murdered. The air was filled with the loud clicking sounds that squirrels make, possibly because they are angry and plotting your demise in revenge for running over their brethren on the road. A mouse had died beside our tent and was being consumed by flies. death, death, everywhere. I reflected on the fact that I can see dead mice or porcupine or deer or zebra and calmly acknowledge that it`s just a part of life - but if I pass a swamp, I'll freak out about how gross it is.

Most of the ice in our cooler had melted in the heat and was only serving to make all of our meat soggy. I drained the melted ice from the cooler and watched the water trickle down the slope of the ground, creating art with its finger-like streams. The ground was so dry that the water couldn't even penetrate through the dirt.

I decided that I wanted to hit up one more hiking trail before we left, so Rob and I headed for the Big Pines Trail, which featured dozens of giant white pines. Rob's old house was in a neighbourhood called White Pines - presumably the area used to have a whole forest of white pine trees. But, as we know, the suburbs are where we cut down the trees and name the streets after them, so it was nice to finally be lost in a huge forest of white pines. After all the hiking through desert mountains, I was getting used to being in forests again, which was just different. In the desert, there's nothing to shield you from the sun, and when you reach the top of the mountain, you can see everything in the desert for miles and miles around because there are no big trees. In the forest, you can feel lost in a different way, not in the sense of overwhelmingly open infinity that a desert does, but in the way that being surrounded by these giant living beings that we call trees makes you feel safe and hidden and anonymous.


tree roots all along the forest floor


this was the largest white pine tree on the hiking trail


a very flattering shot of me and the tree
I was also struck by the dead trees, which, though dead for many years, were still huge, which gave them a sort of frightening quality like an eerie Tim Burton film scene






death, death, everywhere
I was also interested in (and less creepedout by) the trees that were not dead, but had survived previous forest fires like the ones attacking the park now.


the split at the bottom of this tree is a mark of a previous fire that killed the living tissue in this part of the tree. These things are called church doors, although personally I'd probably give them a more vivid name.


a tall tree with a long lightning scar. Like the Harry Potter of trees.
We soon came across the ruins of an old abandoned logging camp that had been operating in the 1880s. The forest was in the process of swallowing the whole site up back into nature.






the logging camp's stove




this used to be a lake

You wouldn't expect a hike through dead/damaged trees, ghost mining camps, and swamps to be a particularly appropriate Lovers' Lane, but it was a lovely hike for Rob and me, especially since exactly two months from that day we would be getting married.



So, to review my first camping trip back in Canada: there was a forest fire, but we did not see any of it. No bears, although a lot of chipmunks and one terrifying bird that will confuse a cop one day. A lake. A huge night sky and a bat signal. Bats. Bogs, romantic ones. A lot of thirst, but I have learned to accept thirst as a part of living. Dead things: a squirrel, a mouse, trees whose skeletons remain a century later. Cookies. It did, by the way, eventually rain: big drops of water hitting the tent and tables hard.


stopping off at Charlie D's in Barrie's Bay for poutine and ice cream, an essential part of Canadian camping.

stargazing by the Gamsberg

When I woke up on Saturday morning, there was a Woerman Brock shopping cart on my lawn. My phone was lying in a pool of something mysteriously wet and sticky. There were bite marks in my cheese. My glasses were nowhere in sight. I found myself blindly trying to put together pieces from the previous night, much like the movie The Hangover. This was the morning after my "kitchen party", my Namibian bachelorette.

But if you think that this blog entry is about that, you must remember: what happens in Klein Windhoek stays in Klein Windhoek (not that anything as crazy as The Hangover happened...I think). Instead, let's talk about my camping trip over the weekend.

In retrospect, I'm not sure why I thought it was a good idea to go on a long road trip the morning after my big party. The car ride was not pleasant, not for me anyway. The road to Gamsberg Mountain was all unpaved dirt road with many potholes, so the car would often lurch and swerve and slow down and speed up at precisely the right rhythm that my stomach did not want it to go. Sometimes cattle would randomly stand in the road and we'd have to crawl to a stop, engaging in an intense staring contest with the cow until it decided to move. Not to mention that Julia had forgotten to fill up on gas before we left, and the thing with Namibia is that there are many long long stretches of road without gas stations.

Eventually we arrived at our destination, and I was glad to get out of the car, my head and stomach still spinning. We weren't going to climb Gamsberg Mountain that weekend, which has been described as Namibia's Table Mountain and has been described by Wikipedia as a mountain that a bunch of people unsuccessfully tried to climb a bunch of times until the 1970s when some hardcore folks finally did it. That seemed a little ambitious the morning after a bachelorette party. Instead, we set up our tents in Hakos, a privately owned farm several kilometres away. Mark was very very excited about this place because it was advertised as an astrofarm. "It is an ASTROfarm, folks. They farm STARS."


tent city


we did not get to swim in this pool

After setting up our tents, some of us decided to go for a short hike while the others stayed behind to "keep an eye on our campsite" (read: start drinking). Feeling like I was never going to drink alcohol again, I went with the hikers. It was a lovely hike. The scenery was gorgeous: we were surrounded by the rolling mountains that Namibia is famous for, those short trees that are pretty to look at and thorny to touch, sand paths that remind you that you are so close to the Namib desert, and a general sense of beautiful emptyness, like you just might be the only living soul for miles around, which leaves you with a strange sense of infinity, an appreciation for just how small you are in the context of the universe. Which is what Namibia is great for.





By the time we headed back to camp, the others were still drinking, despite their promises that they would have dinner ready. So we set up a fire and began cooking up some boerewors sausages. The Americans began a debate with Namibians about whether braais were better than barbecues. If you ask me, of course, Korean bbq surpasses all forms of meat grilling.


i set up my tent to have a perfect view of the sunset

We watched the sun go down as we ate dinner, and then the group split into two again, with the drinkers staying behind to mind the fire while the hikers heading to the farm house to go stargazing.

Hakos is located so far in the middle of nowhere that it offers one of the best locations around to observe the night sky. It's got two observatories, but even just standing in the field with our naked eye, we could see so much more of the night sky than one could back in Windhoek. I was particularly eager to go stargazing here because the southern sky is different from what you can see in the northern hemisphere. I've spent a lot of time looking at stars in the country back in Canada, falling in love with the Big Dipper and Alpha Ursae Minoris (the North Star). Now that I was in the southern hemisphere for the first time in my life, I wanted to see all those stars that you couldn't see at home.

It was a perfect cloudless night, it being several days after the last full moon, which is apparently when the ideal stargazing period starts. The Milky Way was a bright streak across the whole sky, something which we don't get to see very often.

The most important constellation to see for me, of course, was the Southern Cross, which points to the spot of the sky that is directly over the south pole. Our guide had a nifty green laser pointer that was strong enough to point towards stars (he admitted that the laser may or may not be illegal in certain parts of the world). Using his pointer, he also showed us Sirius, one of the brightest stars in the sky (and also a Harry Potter character), Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to ours, and a number of other stars, some of which we could only spot through his telescope. We saw Jupiter, which was reflected much brigther than I'd ever expect a planet to be reflected. I saw the Pleiades, one of the few constellations that I can recognize on my own, which was a bit of a comfort since I've spent a lot of time looking at it back home too.

Also impressively, I saw the full Orion constellation, which lies close to the equator and so can also be seen from both the North and South hemispheres. Usually I can only recognize his belt, but the sky was so cloudless and free of urban light pollution that I could see his full body, and for the first time, understand how the constellation was supposed to be a man posing with his weapons. Usually someone will point to a bunch of stars and tell me "that's a bull/fish/woman", and I just think, "Right, sure it is...if you're on drugs." But Orion, for once, made sense. He was standing on his head though.

What was the coolest, though, were the two Magellanic Clouds. At first I just through they were two clouds in the sky, that is, our sky. Instead, I found out that they were Megallanic clouds, dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way which can only be seen from the southern hemisphere. But seen by the naked eye. I don't know why, but I was really impressed by the fact that I could see these dwarf galaxies without a telescope, just standing in this field looking up. It all went very well with Andrew's nalgene bottle of red wine.


gamsberg mountain

we did not die in the desert

“after two days in the desert sun
my skin began to turn red.
after three days, in the desert fun,
i was looking at a river bed
and the story it told, of a river that flowed,
made me sad to think it was dead…”
-“Horse With No Name” by America



“So do you want to do the four hour hike or the eight hour hike?” Julia asked as we prepared to set off on our girls’ camping trip in the hot Namib Desert. We had planned a fun weekend of girly bonding, climbing the Naukluft Mountains, and burning things.

I was tempted to go for the eight hour hike, because like Julia, I love hiking and could do it all day. The ultimate hike in the Naukluft Mountains, of course, was the 120 km eight-day-long Naukluft Trail, famous for being one of the toughest hiking trails in Africa. Maybe we’d save that for another trip.

We packed the car full of more food and snacks than I eat in a week – this is what happens when you travel with girls – and hit the road. We left the city, passing the enormous Heroes Acres monument outside Windhoek, which one of the girls joked would be the only phallic symbol we’d see all weekend. The rest of the car ride was full of girly conversation about Lisa Loeb, yoga and the like.


when girls pack for a camping trip

The Naukluft Mountains are a mountain range located in the Namib Desert, not too far from Sossusvlei and Sesriem, a couple of hours southwest of Windhoek. We passed the mountains on our way to Sossusvlei last year and I remember being completely awestruck at how beautiful they were, like nothing I had ever seen before. The feeling returned as we pulled into the Namib-Naukluft National Park.







Other than the two friendly park staff at the camp office and one quiet French family at the next campsite, we seemed to be the only people in the entire area. The park gets a lot busier around March and towards Namibia’s wintertime. Apparently not everyone wants to go hiking in the desert at the height of hot summer, like us.

We unpacked some of the massive storage of food we had brought along and made ourselves a nice little picnic lunch in the braai area of our campsite.



By the time we finished eating, the sun had climbed to the highest part of the sky and it was the hottest part of the day. We saw on our rudimentary map that there were some swimming holes along the Waterkloof trail, the eight hour 17 km trail that Julia had referred, so we set off on the trail in search for water.

Along the way we came across a gopher-like animal that looked awfully cute at first, but got angrier and angrier as we kept taking pictures.


angry gopher thing

Eventually we came across a nice little natural pool at the foot of a small waterfall that was perfect for swimming. Feeling unbearably sweaty, we immediately jumped in, trying not to feel too grossed out by the soft mushy moss-like surface beneath our toes. Besides the spongey things, the cool water was wonderfully refreshing.



When we continued along the trail, we found an even nice swimming hole that was deeper and gross-mushy-stuff-free.




imitating a Sports Illustrated cover photoshoot



After our swim, we headed back to camp to build a fire and cook our dinner. Allison and Julia are both vegetarians to some degree, so I cooked my own separate dinner of delicious boerewors sausages.


Yes, my sausages are dripping grease into the girls’ healthy vegetarian meal.

We had a lovely evening of watching the fire, drinking vodka, burning things after dousing them with vodka, and gossiping about celebrities and chick flicks. As the night set in, the stars came out shining more brilliantly than you could ever see in the city. We lay down on the ground by the fire and watched the night sky until clouds came in at midnight and I hit the sack.


Smores!


burning things


things in the night watch our campsite

The next morning, I left my tent to find broken egg shells all around the campsite and the largest baboon I had ever seen strolling right past me. The baboons had eaten our feta cheese and eggs overnight.

After a quick breakfast of peanut butter banana sandwiches and fruit, Julia and I got ready to try the the Olive Trail, while Allison lounged around the campsite - she was not feeling up for the 10 kilometre hike. It was 38 degrees, and our four hour hike through the desert would take us through high noon, the hottest part of the day. Because neither Julia or I are early risers, we keep doing this, hiking through the heat. It’s like we are gluttons for punishment.

“on the first part of the journey
i was looking at all the life
there were plants and birds, and rocks and things
there was sand and hills and rings
the first thing i met was a fly with a buzz
and the sky, with no clouds.
the heat was hot, and the ground was dry,
but the air was full of sound...”


The Olive Trail

“Where do you think the nearest person is?” Julia asked me after some time hiking. We had not seen a single soul for a while, not even an animal. The silent isolation of the Naukluft Mountains was something that we could never get used to. To step back and look all around you and see that you are surrounded by nothing but wilderness – it was an incredible feeling.



The Olive Trail was a curious route and despite being the shortest trail, was by no means an easy hike. Unlike most mountain hikes, this trail got progressively more and more difficult as we went on. The first hour involves a steep but fairly safe climb to the summit of one of the mountains (another hour on nature’s Stairmaster), and then the next three hours is spent descending carefully into a deep and long canyon with often treacherous footing. I felt like it should have been called the Ankle Breaker trail, because it was so easy to trip on a boulder and sprain your leg – and then what? Inevitably someone would have to go on without you to get help from the park staff, if they were even around, but medical rescue in the canyon seemed difficult, if possible at all. But it added to the excitement of the hike.


standing at the summit


Julia


gloria on the rocks

The trail was marked by the occasional posting of a white footprint. I kind of wish they had chosen a more obvious colour, because a lot of the rocks had white markings on it that was confusing. Furthermore, as the trail become more difficult, the footprint, or Mr. Foot as we called it, became less frequent and much more hidden. It soon became some sort of twisted game like Where’s Waldo, except this one was called Try To Find Mr. Foot Or Else You Will Get Lost and Die In The Desert. I have no idea why anyone would plan a trail this way.


Mr Foot


yeah that's quite the canyon.

At one point, we were climbing down a giant boulder with about a ten foot drop when Julia stopped.

“Gloria, there’s a dead body at the bottom.”

“What?”

She meant a dead animal’s body. It was half-eaten, so we couldn’t quite tell what kind of animal it had been originally, something similar to a small deer. What was much more of a concern was that the thing had the insensitivity to die in the best spot to jump down from the boulder. How were we going to get down?


time to heat up the braai?

“Maybe the carcass will provide some soft cushioning for our fall?” I suggested.

Julia the vegetarian did not agree.

Eventually we found our way down the boulder around the carcass. But then we came across another obstacle.

It was kind of amusing to follow our gradual realization of what we had to do to move on.

“Ew, that is a disgusting pool of water….wait, how are we supposed to get past it?...Oh, there’s a chain.”

Let me explain. At one point of the trail, the canyon narrows to about ten metres wide, with the canyon walls still deep and totally vertical. Ahead of us is a steep drop from the boulder we stood on and at the bottom was, not a dead carcass this time, but a deeper gross-green pool of swampy still water. Of course Mr. Foot had disappeared at this point, leaving us to figure out how to get across. When I spotted the chain fastened to the side of the canyon wall, I realized that what we were meant to do was scale across the canyon wall using nothing but the chain. Essentially we were rock climbing without any safety harness gear.


oh that's right, i'm also afraid of heights.

I went across first, pretending to be totally okay with it. Thank God I’ve been going to the gym lately and have awesome upper body strength. At a few points there simply were no footholds so it was all about using my sweet biceps to carry me across, dragging myself along the chain, trying not to think about the fact that if I fell, I would

1) possibly hit my head on the boulders
2) touch the gross green water

At one point I slipped off the rock and found myself dangling with my hands, my feet kicking in the air. I tried not to picture that scene from Cliffhanger. This is nothing, I told myself, just pretend you’re doing pull-ups on Joseph’s chin up bar. I imagined that I was just doing one of the aerial courses at Camp Fortune, found a foothold, and made it across. As soon as my foot hit solid ground, my lawyer’s mind released its fury. This is such a tort liability. Tort! Tort! Tort!

“Yeah, that was a piece of cake,” I told Julia, who was making her way across now.




Tort!



Luckily that was the toughest part of the trail and there was no more insane bouldering. Mr. Foot reappeared finally and led us to the end of the trail. We picked up Allison from the campsite and headed home, stopping off at the bottle store in the little town Rietoog to buy some ice cold mango pine juice. We played Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill album on the way home, singing along to every line – because that’s what you do when you travel with girls.

“you see i've been through the desert on a horse with no name,
it felt good to be out of the rain.
in the desert you can remember your name,
'cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain”
-“Horse With No Name” by America