Shwayze Jumps!

I just flew in from Denver to Bozeman MT. As we were boarding the flight some guy in a Fedora hat and sunglasses with nasty brown scraggly hair a few inches past his shoulders, gets on slinging his guitar (which says PINK ROCK on its soft case) behind him and is annoyed by the person on his phone. "That is THE WORST IDEA I've ever heard," he ignores my hello and asks if there's a closet for his guitar. Great, I thought to my self, I have another one of those American Idol "finalists" who thinks they're so important just because they've been criticised by Simon Cowell, but obviously no too important, they're flying a regional airline to get to their show, in coach. "No" I answer shortly. Its been a long day and this rock star wannabe is already annoying me. He proceeds down the aisle, "The WORST" he repeats into his cell. Everyone else boards and the gate agent pulls the jet bridge away so I can close the main cabin door and we may be on our way. As I'm starting my announcement the scraggly haired white boy and his darker complected side kick start rushing to the front of the aircraft with a look of fury on their faces. I panicked! Are they going to attack me? Are they storming the flight deck? What's happening!?!? So I stop my announcement mid sentence and clutch the reciever, backing to the corner of the galley to avoid these crazy hooligans. To my surprise they turned and the black guy jumps the 2 foot gap from the plane to jet bridge, and as I see this I stop the other guy from making the same mistake. Who are these weirdos acting like terrorists who just pulled the pin on a bomb and are running for their lives as the plane is about to explode. "Stop! You cant do that!" I yelled. I'm personally responsible for every passenger on this plane and if home boy here would've missed the jet bridge and fallen 10 feet below to the concrete, I'd at the very least be fired. They stop and look at me, and the black guy tells me they forgot their phone, they left it charging up in the seating area. I've had hundreds of people leave things in the boarding area and I've never in 3 years had someone leap through the air off the air craft. So wrong in so many ways. "I don't care!" I respond, "You can not jump off the airplane, you need to tell me and I'll have someone go get your phone." The gate agent comes up after witnessing this chaos. "You can not do that!" She starts in on the guy in the jet bridge and the white guy next to me is saying, "I didn't jump!" Yeah well you were about to, I thought to my self. So she goes and gets their phone and tells them if they ever do that again she'll kick them off the flight. As they make their way down the aisle back to their luggage and seats, Manuel, the other flight attendant reprimands them as well. "You can NOT do that," He's says with his sassy attitude. "I know, I just had three people yell at me," the white guy points back at me, "Now you want to tell me too?"
"Yeah I'll tell you," Manuel is not happy, "And I'll kick you off my flight." They take their seats and the rest of the flight is pretty uneventful. As we're deplaning these guys are the last to get off and the black guy apologizes for the earlier incident as he passes me, and the white guy says, "So, do you wanna come to our show tonight?" I look at him, not recognizing his face, "Who are you?" He tells me he's Shwayze and they have a show tonight and he asked if he could put me on the guest list. "Sure, Kiffen." I gave him my name and he said I'm down plus a few.
My pilots overheard this and asked me what guest list I was on. "Have you heard of Shwayze?" They hadn't, I asked them if they'd heard the song "Corona and Lime," they hadn't. We get to the curb to catch our hotel shuttle and see Shwayze and friends getting into their Hummer Limo. "Do you know Shwayze?" My pilot asks our van driver, who looks about 22. "Yeah, not personally but I know who he is," the kid says. "That was him back their getting into the stretch hummer," my idiot pilot is trying to sound cool, when he doesn't even know who it is he's talking about.
"Oh cool!" the van driver says and I rolled my eyes. Gotta love rock n roll plane hoppers and name dropping pilots!

South Africa- Wild animals at their best and racism at its worst- sunscreen required

January 28, 2008- 20 hours from take off in Atlanta to touch down in Johannesburg is definitely the longest non-transferring commercial flight there is out there. My trip to South Africa was planned a week before I departed (not unusual for me) with a friend of a friend I happened to meet who had lived in Cape Town for 2 years after high school as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We swapped numbers and spent the next week randomly texting out the details of our trip. I was very happy to have this nice young man escort me to a country ranked by the U.N. as second highest in murders and first for rapes. Besides being a body guard, my new friend (Seth) could also speak a little Xhosa (pronounced: ~tongue click~-0sa) , which I usually just call, "the clicky language". Such a bonus because even though we are white, Xhosa is only spoken by the black South Africans. The white South Africans speak Afrikaans, and luckily both groups speak English. While I witnessed hardly any physical crime in my week over there, the racism is, in my eyes, just as terrible and much worse than anything I've seen in the States. I saw NO inter-racial casual association between the locals, and I mean absolutely none at all. No inter-racial couples, groups of friends, families, even in the work place, an establishment seemed to only higher one color or the other. Obviously I didn't meet all 47 million people there and hopefully some of them are a little more open minded than that, but as you'll see it is disfavored by most.

We landed in Jo-burg around 5:30 pm and set out in our white boxy two door rental to Krueger wildlife park! It took a bit to get use to driving on the left side of the road and right side of the car, so I'll blame the following incident on that, plus the fact it was 3 am local time when the death occurred...
After having endured 25 hrs of flight/airport time followed by 7 hours of European style driving, Seth and I were on an unfamiliar road in the middle of the "bush" (African wilderness), when out of NO WHERE a small creature runs full speed, like a ball of fury out of the sage and right into the car! I started screaming, "I killed it! I killed it!" but it was pitch black outside and I was going 120 km/hr so I had no clue what "it" was. After about 45 seconds we turned around, so curious to examine our poor little victim, and I hate to say this, really- I am an animal lover through and through, but it was... oh gosh... a... baby leopard. So sad! I love big cats the most, and when we pulled up next to its motionless spotted carcass I wanted to get out and attempt to revive the small furry suicidal kitty, but Seth reminded me that it's mom was probably watching us right now and she would not hesitate to settle the score an eye for an eye style. So I drove away feeling terrible inside, like a murderer.

Here's the really great directions Seth got us from the Internet that we were still trying to following at 4:30 am-
"Turn at the Excel gas station (didn't say which way)
follow the road through the mine. The road turns to dirt and we're located on the banks of the Olifant River. No physical address"

Since we never found the Excel station its needless to say we never found our hotel, but that's the greatest feature of a rental car, it doubles as a sleeping quarters- even though I really just laid in the drivers seat until I saw the sun rise on the horizon and the sky turn fire red. Seeing my first African sunrise sent excitement through my soul, I couldn't believe I was a few miles away from starting an African Safari, another one of my life long dreams about to come true! So I woke Seth up offering to drive if we could get our excursion started right away, which he happily agreed. We drove around with out a guide and made our own way through the bush. Signs everywhere forbade us from getting out of our vehicle for any reason what so ever due to the fact that there were lions, cheetahs, leopards, rhinos, alligators, hipos, snakes and more surrounding us. The spiders were so big you could see their body and each of their 8 legs from the car 15 ft away from them.


After a couple days in the park we headed to the coast. We stayed in an incredibly nice lodge (considering the location) for $390 RAN a night, which is about $55 US. It was surely the nicest hostel I've stayed in to this day. The room was huge with 2 full size beds, a vanity, a bureau, 2 night stands, a coffee table, chairs and a T.V. The receptionist was a cute African woman probably in her late 20's. Seth said something to her in the African clicky language and she LOVED it! She gave him a high-five and said that she thought it was so great he put effort into learning their native tongue. The British came down here and wanted to convert this precious country into a little Great Britain; naturally the Africans didn't like that at all. The receptionist said the whites not only refuse to speak to the blacks, but wont even touch them. We asked her directions to the closest super market to buy some groceries and I brought her back a coke.


Jan 31- On our long but beautiful drive through the lush green mountains headed toward the coastal town St. Luica, close to Durbin and quietly nestled on the Indian Ocean, we heard on the radio that the "Natural Healers", or witch doctors, have now been recognized by the government as official health care professionals soon to be covered by health insurance. The citizens tax dollars will be wasted on these psychotic spell casters who tell people to cut off a lizards head and drink it's blood in order to win the lottery.





















February 2- There's two guys about our age next to us here at the beach. One's in a rastafari beanie, yellow Volcom T shirt and Billabong board shorts; the other in a Metallica T and Rusty Board shorts. They're speaking Afrikaans and digging a hole for their beer cooler. Seth befriended them out in the shore break body surfing, while I opted to watch from the sand. Its incredible how this serene beach blows any continental US beach out of the water with its gentle hills and white sand and yet no one was here except the 4 of us. Later the skinny boy in the Billabong shorts was venting to us about how corrupt his country was. He was shocked, almost appalled that Seth could speak Xhosa. "Us white people don't bother to learn the black, I mean Native language," he said. Then he tells us the guy next in line to be President of their country can not read or write at all, and has a criminal record of rape, abuse and fraud. The chubbier guy tells us, "Don't mind him, he hates this country and I love it. At least its not as bad as Zimbabwe." The skinny one gets even more worked up as he tells us about his last trip to Zimbabwe. He said there was absolutely no fuel anywhere available to anyone, and no food. "A huge super mart would be desolate except for a single shelf of food, and it was JAM!" The inflation rate rose 26,000% in January. Which is near impossible for us to even relate to that. The other one adds, "Its mainly the crime that is bad."
"You have to have a big gate and a big dog," Seth joked. The angry one was quick to correct Seth, "They'll cut your gate and poison your dog."

Seth forgot to re-apply his sunscreen after playing in the waves and the next day a yellow blister the size of half a ping pong ball rose from his right arm, full of fluid. He slept for almost the rest of the trip which we decided to cut short due to his severe sun burn and sun poisoning. I told him he should start getting chemo therapy immediately to counter act the massive burns all over his body.





















South Africa was beautiful. The majestic landscape, the people dressed in bright colors and happy smiles, the wild animals and the peaceful beach all contributed to me ranking this amazing land as second on my list of favorite places I've ever traveled to. I can't wait to go back and see Cape Town!

The Great Barrier Reef (03/07)

My trip to Australia was spent entirely in Cairns on the North-East coast where I could spend my time in the rainforest or observing The Great Barrier Reef, a dream come true!

March 10, 2007

I just finished a two day one night snorkel trip on the Great Barrier Reef and it was absolutely amazing! I came considerably close to 2 sharks, the first sighting was on a guided tour with a dive instructor, though we were just snorkeling. When I saw the Reef Shark, it was about 4 feet long, I told the guide, who wanted to get closer, so i started swimming towards it and turned back to show him where it was but in that split second the shark it was gone. Then I got up close to a huge sea turtle, probabley 2 1/2 feet across it's back. I've always loved swiming with turtles and admiring their ease of gliding through the water. The guide, a 20-something year old tan local with dark shaved hair and friendly smile was happy to share his love of this phenomenal place. I watched him swim down about 8 ft to this giant clam, it's span of it's mouth (?- whatever you call it) was curvy and as long as my arm, and slamed shut with he reached down to touch it, then he picked up this black sea cucumber with soft spikes on it, probably 16 inches long and 4 inches wide, sort of a rectangularish shape, and let me hold it. It was such a weird feeling because holding it in my hands I could sense it was alive, even though it looked like a piece of a black tree branch and didn't move noticably. Next he handed me this vibrant blue starfish, then he swam down and got an Elephant Sea Cucumber which I also held. It was really amazing.
Back on the boat I met some of the other travelers. There were 6 snorkelers and 20 divers, in addition to the crew of about 12. We slept in little cabins that consisted of 2 beds a small desk, a mini closet, a t.v. and a private bathroom. My bunkmate was a petite, lively British woman, maybe 50, named Sarah. She had recently gone through a divorce, and rather than taking her half of the money from their old house to put toward another one in which she'd be stuck paying off for the rest of her life, she decided to go do all the things she'd never been able to before. Her trip began in January in South Africa, then to Singapore for a month, after which she cycled acrossed the enire country of Vietnam, now here in Australia, where's she spent the last few weeks. Next she's off to New Zealand, then Fiji, Tahiti, the Cook Islands and finally the US. She says she plans on writing a book. I think that's great she's being so adventurous, I would do the same thing! Its so important to make this life exactly what you want it to be.
Some of the other people staying on the boat include a guy from AZ, a chic and her mom from SFO (which were the first Americans I met), tons of Europeans, this cute girl from France, whose a Flight Attendant in Austria was there with her dad, these two young guys my age from Sweeden, and one of them was asking me if I've been to Beverly Hills or the OC- That was my first clue about how people all over the world are obsessed with American pop-culture. Then this girl from Denmark was telling me how over there they say all the trendy US things, like Chill, or if they get a new phone cover they say, "Look, I pimped my phone!" I was totally cracking up because sure we have that embarassing TV show, Pimp My Ride, but NO ONE would ever say, I pimped my phone.
I got up early this morning and was in the water at about 8:45, staying in until after 10 am. This time I was mostly by myself, and I saw another shark (we were in a different location, we dived in 3 different places total). This shark was about 5-6 feet long. The first shark was swimming away from me, that's probably why I wanted to follow it, this one was not. I don't like the feeling of watching a shark swim towards you. It was probably about 20 feet away (and getting closer), then I stopped, turned so that we wouldnt be face to face in about 4 seconds, but luckily it stopped too. It felt like the shark and I were actually in the same living room, and my living room is not exactly large, so I was quite happy when it felt unentertained or like it had done it's share of freaking out the humans for the morning and swam away. A shark encounter was nothing I'd ever hoped to add to resume, but it was probably my favorite thing about the Reef (probably just for the shock value). I asked one of the mates on the boat what the biggest shark out there was (because we were a 2 hour boat ride from land, right in the middle of the ocean!) and he said they get hammer heads and tiger sharks, but they never come up becuase they dont like the noise of the boat. Now he seemed like a very intellegent bloake- with a trendy spiral piercing in his ear, but I'm not sure it he's seen a shark lately, because they dont have ears, so his theory one them not liking the sound of the boat, might be a bit off... but who am I, definately not an Ocean Reef Adventures Crew Member-
The Reef had the most beautiful fish, along with TONS of Jelly fish, but not the kind with tentacles, they will murder you, the ones there are la clear color with a pinkish purple hint to them and about as big as a grapefruit- lots of coral, starfish, little nemos, and a huge fish about 3 feet long with these gigantic lips, like freakin JAY Z- seriously just these lips that were as wide as two of my fingers put together, and I didn't like the look of his teeth, he looked fat old and cranky. Some fish I saw were just so bright and beautiful, there were neon purple with gorgeous yellow spots, or turqouise with orange fins and every other color you can imagine.
On my second dive out today I was also by myself, and I really just wanted to make sure I saw everything being my last time before we returned to land. I was having so much fun, saw some more turtles which I followed for a while, then I'd swim down about 3 1/2 feet or so to see the coral up close, and I guess I wasnt really paying attention to where I was going, because I looked up after a while just to see how close I was to the boat, and there was a man in a little motor boat about 80 feet a head of me waving his arms and yelling, COME HERE! I checked behind me, and when I realized he must be calling to me I yelled back, "What's wrong?" but my snorkel was in my mouth so he couldn't exactly hear me. I started swiming towards him- which was against the current, anxious to find out why they sent out the rescue boat- was there a Great White spotted and he was rounding everyone up? Were there killer eels attacking? Or maybe he wanted to take me to a different spot and show me something cool- so I finally made it up to the boat exhausted I ask, "What happened?"
"You're too far out and no one could get to you out there, youre right in the middle of the reef and its too shallow, and you should only go about 100 meters from the boat, youre about 'alf a km out!" He was pissed.
"Oh, sorry- what time is it?" I asked, since I knew we could dive til about noon, and he's says, "Time for you to come back."
So he motored me back to the boat- which was funny, because the boat I had thought was mine, that I'd been heading in the direction of, was definitely not ours, and about a mile away from ours, so I told him, "Oh I thought that was our boat!" pointing across the water. Not amused, he's replies, "Yeah, thats why you ought to pay attention." As we pulled up to our cruise ship everyones looking at me like, was she drowning? Why'd they rescue her? The rest of the day people were asking, "So I heard you tried to escape?"
As I'm sure you can see, I loved the reef, it was so fun, such an amazing experience like nothing I'd ever seen before. Now tonight I'm staying in a hostel, the same one I was in before, and I have to stay in a mixed dorm. I asked the man working the front desk if there were any beds available in the all girls dorm. "Why?" he asked, "You afraid of boys?" The other people around laughed at his HILARIOUS joke, and I said no accepting the key to the mixed dorm. The mixed dorm turned out to be 5 guys and me. I'm definitely not shy, I just was a little nervous so I tried to be hard core as I walked in to my room with 10 eyes staring at me peculiarly. One of the guys asked me with his British Accent, "Where might you be from?" Doing my best impression of a gangster walk, I slung my back pack off my shoulder and on to the only open bunk, "California, you heard of it?" I asked trying to sound hard core... and he saw right through it, and we both started cracking up at my front. Turned out that I had way more fun bunking with the guys than any of the nights I spent in the girl's dorm. The guys wanted to practice their American accents with me, saying stuff like, "Sweet, Dude". Bloody good times indeed :)