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awesome thread adsman
- wondering if you have any pics (current or old) so i can associate a face with the story i check 10x a day
I'm a bit reluctant to do this. I'll have a think about it. It means a bit of effort too, as I don't have any photo's of myself on the computer.
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- also i see that you associate the x-girlfreind in the beggining as the chism that started your journey and that triggered your story, but after you broke up what made you stay in sydney? opposed to going back home and living with your folks?
When I left I quite my job, sold everything and took off. What would I have gone back to? I was determined not to fail.
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- do you have any instances or in depth stories throughout your journey where one of your buddies got greedy/backstabbed you (or other freinds) over money/women other issues. i know you argued with GM but he wasnt a freind. (and you gotbecame freinds with mark after your radio music fight)
Mark and I were always friends, that was just a little blip. In fact, he's flying in from Australia to stay with me for a few weeks today. Uncle Mick got in yesterday. I showed him this thread and he's threatening to register and write up his version of the facts.
The GM was the worst backstabbing situation. Perhaps I didn't make it clear that he was somebody that we hung out with before he became GM. Before that situation happened I just assumed that if you did the right thing, others would do the same back to you. It was a good life lesson that you always have to watch your back.
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I was standing at the baggage carousel in Milan when I noticed a young guy who had to be a riverguide. Apart from the fact that he was deeply tanned, he had a whitewater helmet clipped to the back of his backpack. I walked over, introduced myself. His name was Zane, he was a Kiwi, and could you believe it, he was walking for the same company that I was. He had also brought a guitar with him. We shouldered up our kit and were heading out through the airport when we heard some music being played. There were people singing as well.
“That’s Kiwi music, bro,” Zane said. “Lets check it out.”
Sure enough there was a group of about 15 New Zealand Maoris jamming together amidst a big pile of bags. Turns out that they were a famous traditional music group over in Italy for a tour. We sat down, and Zane pulled out his guitar and he began jamming with them. They were very welcoming. One of the girls asked me where we were going and I explained what we were in Italy for. After a while I asked if I could have a guitar and somebody passed me one. Then we really got jamming. A big crowd began to form and we played for about half an hour until finally I said that we had to be goiong if we wanted to get up to our base that night. We fare welled the group and headed out to the bus area. Both Zane and I agreed that it was a very cool way to start our Italian sojourn.
We got the bus into the main train station in Milan. It was quite imposing, in its neo-gothic-fascist style architecture. I found a phone and called the rafting base. It was five in the afternoon. The phone was answered by a nice lady called Carla who spoke English. After some hasty conferral we worked out that there was no way we would be able to reach the valley that evening by train. She told me to call back in five minutes. I called back and she told us to get the next train to Verona. One of the Italian guides who worked for them lived there and he would pick us up and look after us for the night.
We hopped the train to Verona and got there around 8pm. We were standing outside waiting when a young guy in a little Fiat 500 came to a screaming halt. He jumped out and introduced himself as Tobia. We piled into his tiny car and he rocketed off through the narrow cobble-stoned streets, weaving violently in and out amongst a horde of scooters and luxury cars. He pulled up outside a picturesque apartment building and we dragged our gear upstairs. He had dinner waiting for us on the table, and a big carafe of red wine. We dug in with gratitude. He rolled some joints. He was 21 and looked younger. He’d been rafting since he was 15 in the same valley where we’d be working. We asked him about the river, and the company we’d be working for.
He laughed. “Charlia is the big boss,” he told us. “Very strange man, crazy sometimes, he can be good, he can be bad. But lots of work, money is very good.”
Zane and I were both keen to learn Italian. We got Tobia to teach us some words. He got us both to memorize a phrase which he told us meant something fairly innocuous. Turned out that he was teaching us how to say, “I don’t speak Italian very well but I love blow jobs.”
The next day he had to work in the city, but he dropped us off in the center after we went to the station to get our tickets and stow our bags. We had about four hours to kill in Verona. We wandered into the historical center and just walked around with our mouths open. Finally we took a seat an outside bar that was one of many that ringed the huge piazza around the Verona Arena. The Arena is a small version of the coliseum, but still incredibly imposing. We sat there and drank our first Italian cappuccinos. It was a beautifully warm Spring day. The girls were incredible. Hottie after hottie walked by, all dressed like they had just stepped off a Milanese catwalk. Zane began to tell me about all the hot girls he had had to leave behind in New Zealand to come here. I was starting to get the impression that Zane was a nice guy but he had a tendency to exaggeration. Whatever, I didn’t care. I was just so happy to be there.
We took the train up to Trento. We left the Lombardian Plains and entered the foothills of The Alps. This was the valley that led to Austria, the route Napoleon had taken when he had invaded Italy centuries before. The mountains got higher and higher as the train sped North. We arrived in Trento an hour later. Our directions were to walk a few hundred meters up from the main train station to a smaller branch line called the Trento-Malè. This train went directly to our valley. Our destination was a little village called Caldes, in the Val di Sole – The Valley of the Sun.
The little electric train finally left and we headed into the mountains. It was a real cattle-train. It stopped every five minutes on the way. It took us almost an hour and a half to get the Caldes. We got off the train and looked around. We were high in the mountains. There was a good deal of snow on the immediate peaks, and it was much colder than Verona had been. We shouldered our gear and walked into the little village. There was nobody to be seen. Dogs barked at our passing. The village looked like it hadn’t changed for a thousand years. We headed down out of the village towards the river. We figured that the rafting base had to be down there somewhere. We came to a bridge and got our first look at The Noce River. It was a narrow, rocky river, only about 100 meters wide. The water thundered under the bridge. It was quite a high level. We stared at the river for a few minutes looking at the obvious lines through the rapids and then we continued over the bridge where we found the rafting base.
There was a little office with a smiling, chubby lady behind the desk. She came running out with a big smile on her face. This was Carla and she apologized profusely that nobody had been at the station to meet us. We told her not to worry about it. Charlia wasn’t there, but she got someone else to mind the office and she took us back into the village to the guides apartment. It faced onto the main piazza. It looked to be about 500 years old. We walked up the lobby stairs and she knocked on the door of the apartment. The door was opened by a young, smiling Aussie guide named Josh. There was also a young couple, Nick and Emma. Nick was the guide, Emma was his girlfriend. They were very young and had bagged the main room. The house was cool, there was a mural on the ceiling of the living room. We dumped our stuff on our beds. I’d sort out the accommodation later. All I knew was that I was buggered if a bunch of young kids on their first trip overseas were going to grab the best rooms.
There was another guide as well, but he was up in the village bar getting wasted. They told me his name and I couldn’t believe it. I wandered up to the bar and sure enough it was Maz. I’d worked with him in Cairns years before.
He saw me and let out a huge sigh of relief. “Thank Christ you’re here. I’m going insane hanging around with fresh-faced youngsters. They’re doing my head in.”
He bought me a beer, and we caught up. He’d spent the last six months rafting in Peru, and had come straight from there. “I’m going into coke withdrawal,” he told me. “I spent six months with a couple of grams up my nose every day. At least they’ve got pot here.”
Maz was in his late thirties. He had dreadlocks and a scraggy face. He had a joint hanging out of his face. He was disreputable. He was not to be trusted. He filled me in oh how the base worked, the different personalities and possible problems. There was a South African guide called Ralph who was here with his wife. They had gone away for a few days. Maz was skeptical of his abilities on the river.
The next day we met the boss, Charlia. We took a raft and went down the entire 25km section of river, taking turns on the stick so as to show him we could actually guide. The river was non-stop rapids for its entire length. It was fun guiding a technically challenging river again, having to actually zip through large rocky sections, as opposed to just punching through enormous waves and holes on the Nile. The boss seemed to be a head case. He was weird, moody, and his English wasn’t any good so we had problems communicating. The South African got back and we did another trip down the river. It was obvious that he was doing what I’d done all those years ago – he was faking it.