Kalaupapa Mule tour in Hawaii

I considering heading to Hawaii and try to weasel my way into this job as a "Muleskinner". It would make a great cap to my "career" as a wilderness guide.

From their website - https://muleride.com/

"In the cool Molokai uplands, a pack of mules prepare for the day’s ride down to the world’s most unique and formerly forbidden village of Kalaupapa. The journey begins from the Mule Barn with a mule guide briefing. You’ll learn your mule’s name and the Mule Skinners (guides) will teach you how to ride and control the mules. No worries, these mules are personally trained by company owner Buzzy is also considered one of Hawaii’s foremost experts on Mules.

You will be riding down 1,700 feet of the most spectacular as well as the highest sea cliffs in the world (recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records). Located on the central northern coast of the island of Molokai, some of the more remote  areas of this park include rare native habitat for several endangered endemic Hawaiian plants and animals. 

The boundless beauty you will experience as you traverse down the 2.9 mile trail, with 26 switchbacks, leaves most folks absolutely speechless.

Upon arriving in Kalaupapa, you’ll be met by your Kekaula Tours guide and for the next few hours you’ll experience one of Hawaii’s most remarkable tours, in a community hidden from the world for so many years. You will learn about the leper colony, its people, incredible tales of struggle and human suffering, along with stories of courage and love. You’ll see the grave site of Father Damien, the heroic Belgium Priest who loved and served this colony of outcasts. Visit St. Philomena Church, where Damien preached to his banished parishioners. Enjoy your lunch, (included with the tour) at Judd Park on the scenic Kalawao side, overlooking sea cliffs and waterfalls, dramatic ocean rock formations and crashing surf."

See you on the trail!

Col. Tomahawk

Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton

by Sara Wheeler

     

Denys Finch Hatton was adored by women and idolized by men. A champion of Africa, legendary for his good looks, his charm, and his prowess as a soldier, lover, and hunter, Finch Hatton inspired Karen Blixen to write the unforgettable stories in Out of Africa. Now esteemed British biographer Sara Wheeler tells the truth about this extraordinarily charismatic adventurer.

Born to an old aristocratic family that had gambled away most of its fortune, Finch Hatton grew up in a world of effortless elegance and boundless power. Tall and graceful, with the soul of a poet and an athlete’s relaxed masculinity, he became a hero without trying at Eton and Oxford. In 1910, searching for novelty and danger, Finch Hatton arrived in British East Africa and fell in love–with a continent, with a landscape, with a way of life that was about to change forever.

Wheeler brilliantly conjures the mystical beauty of Kenya at a time when teeming herds of wild animals roamed unmolested across pristine savannah. No one was more deeply attuned to this beauty than Finch Hatton–and no one more bitterly mourned its passing when the outbreak of World War I engulfed the region in a protracted, bloody guerrilla conflict. Finch Hatton was serving as a captain in the Allied forces when he met Karen Blixen in Nairobi and embarked on one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century.

With delicacy and grace, Wheeler teases out truth from fiction in the liaison that Blixen herself immortalized in Out of Africa. Intellectual equals, bound by their love for the continent and their inimitable sense of style, Finch Hatton and Blixen were genuine pioneers in a land that was quickly being transformed by violence, greed, and bigotry.
Ever restless, Finch Hatton wandered into a career as a big-game hunter and became an expert bush pilot; his passion that led to his affair with the notoriously unconventional aviatrix Beryl Markham. But Markham was no more able to hold him than Blixen had been. Mesmerized all his life by the allure of freedom and danger, Finch Hatton was, writes Wheeler, “the open road made flesh.”

In painting a portrait of an irresistible man, Sara Wheeler has beautifully captured the heady glamour of the vanished paradise of colonial East Africa. In Too Close to the Sun she has crafted a book that is as ravishing as its subject.

A recent ride in the Grand Canyon

Due to some last minute cancellations and knowing the right people,I was able to wrangle a "Free" working mule ride trip the Phantom ranch and back. I love the Grand Canyon and have hiked it many time and crossed it on mules a time or two also. I look forward to getting back to the GC soon for more exciting mule ride adventures.

See you on the trail!

Col. Tomahawk

Edible plants and lore

About a mizagillion years ago, (1983?) I was working as a bike messenger in Chicago while studying Herbology at a local college. Once while making a delivery on south Michigan avenue I stumbled onto an Herb shop. Up to that time I had never seen one and had no Idea they existed.

I walked in and met a few old folks that were hanging out talking about plants  - both medicinal and edible - It was very educational and I learned a lot in a very short time. The shop had a good relaxing feel and I was invited back for a pot luck dinner the following Sunday.

The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald

Back in the day (the early 1970s) my mother got me involved in reading. "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald was my 1st "adult" book. It was a tough read for a 13 year old but I worked my way through it and it helped me to gain confidence as a reader and tackle other books like "The learning tree", and "To kill a mocking bird" and numerous others by a wide variety of authors.

See you on the trail!

Colonel Tomahawk

Fishing in Thailand

Ernest Hemingway once said “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Well, I have been to Paris and have to disagree with him on that but , substitute Bangkok for Paris and Im in…I lived in Bangkok and other parts of Thailand for several years and will always remember that time with great fondness. Basically Thailand spoiled me for life elsewhere.

Throughout those years I engaged in many different adventures and outdoor pursuits with locals and visiting friends. Things like hunting at night for squirrels, rats and bats, foraging for wild edibles in the forest, learning blacksmithing, and perhaps my favorite – fishing.

Once in March a few years ago I contacted my good friend Captain Eddie Mounce of Fish Thailand(http://fishthailand.co.uk/).

My interest was in doing a jungle fishing safari on Kanchanaburi Lake at Khao Laem Dam in western Thailand. I had heard about the massive snake head species in the lake.

Eddie informed me that the snake heads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channidae) were not biting at the time so I opted to do some fishing for Mekong Catfish and other catfish species at Bungsamran Lake near Bangkok.

It turned out to be a good day, Eddie provided me with an excellent fishing guide named Ali and under his guidance I managed to Hook and land 38 catfish all over 20 kilos in weight over an 8 hour period.

The Mekong Catfish(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangasius_gigas) is the largest fresh water species in the world and is protected under thai law. So it is catch and release only, and a real honor to see and handle such awesome fish.

A few days later I took the bus south from Bangkok to Ko for some Tuna fishing. I was able to hire a boat for the entire day for just over 30 bucks American.

I didn’t catch any tuna but toured the fish farm, drank some Chang beer, dined on excellent sea foods and got wayyyyy too much sun.

While at the fish farm I had some fun feeding the captive tuna, I would throw a small bait fish over their pens and watch them shoot through the water, I believe they are the fastest fish in the ocean.

I ended up spending the night because I missed the last ferry back to the mainland.

The next morning I caught the ferry, then took the bus back to Bangkok, and had a long nap before heading out in quest of my next adventure.

Colonel Tomahawk

A moveable feast - Hemingway in Paris

 I love this book.

Col Tomahawk


"In 1956, Ernest and I were having lunch at the Ritz in Paris with Charles Ritz, the hotel’s chairman, when Charley asked if Ernest was aware that a trunk of his was in the basement storage room, left there in 1930. Ernest did not remember storing the trunk but he did recall that in the 1920s Louis Vuitton had made a special trunk for him. Ernest had wondered what had become of it. Charley had the trunk brought up to his office, and after lunch Ernest opened it. It was filled with a ragtag collection of clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, correspondence and, on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest: 'The notebooks! So that’s where they were! Enfin!' There were two stacks of lined notebooks like the ones used by schoolchildren in Paris when he lived there in the ’20s. Ernest had filled them with his careful handwriting while sitting in his favorite café, nursing a café crème. The notebooks described the places, the people, the events of his penurious life."

-- Hotchner, A. E.  A Moveable Feast is a memoir by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling young expatriate journalist and writer in Paris in the 1920s. The book describes the author's apprenticeship as a young writer while he was married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson.
The memoir consists of various personal accounts, observations, and stories by Hemingway. He provides specific addresses of apartments, bars, cafes, and hotels --- many of which can still be found in Paris today. Among other notable persons, people featured in the book include: Sylvia Beach, Hilaire Belloc, Aleister Crowley, John Dos Passos, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Pascin, Ezra Pound, Evan Shipman, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Hermann von Wedderkop.
The memoir was published posthumously based on Hemingway's manuscripts and notes by his fourth wife and widow, Mary Hemingway, in 1964, three years after Hemingway's death. An edition altered and revised by his grandson, Seán Hemingway, was published in 2009.

"The airmen and the head hunters" by Heimann

I just recently finished this book by Judith Heimann. It is a good account of a survival trek made by a B-24 crew on the island of borneo in WW2. The Dyak people were of course instrumental in the ensuring the survival of this crew. I like the fact the author goes over the survival gear carried by the crew and their trek through the jungle. Pretty cool.

It took me back many years to Kuching in Borneo when I was there sitting in the old time coffee house reading "Farewell to the king" by Pierre Schoendoerffer, it is another great read if you find the time.

See you on the trail!

Tomahawk