Walking Speed

Simien, Ethiopia. October 2012

Simien mountains is a large mountain ridge, sitting on the northern part of Ethiopia. For generations, this mountain ridge was protecting  the only non colonized country in Africa. It is a beautiful place for tracking, with wonderful  scenery and very wild nature. Simien has been a great attraction for walking safaris for years now, but even when you come to northern Ethiopia to visit the historical sites, without any wishes for too much walking, it is a well worth place to visit.

When we bring groups to Simien we take them for short walks, escorted by an armed ranger and a local guide.
I find that when guiding people on walks, I sometimes need to save them from themselves. Many times it's luck of experience, others will be too competitive, but the majority of people that I have guided walk "ahead of themselves", walking much too fast for their abilities. It becomes everyone's problem on high altitude.

During the last trip in Simian, we had a young energetic local guide named Yonas. We were already 2 guides in this trip, myself and Binyam, a great Ethiopian guide, but entering Simien you must have another guide.
Yonas was great, he was very informative and very helpful, but he was also very young, fit and energetic. Few of the people in the group could very well be his grandparents, but as much as I tried to slow him down, he was walking too fast and I saw that too many people are trying to kip up and will finish their strength too fast for the length of walk we were planning.
Binyam was trying to slow him down by telling him, then by walking near him, but nothing helped. Yonas was just too fast.
I then asked Binyam to help the people on the back and walked behind Yonas to be the one that set the pace. After several minutes of quiet walking Yonas turned to ask if I was trying to slow him down.

"Not you, but the clients, you are much too fit for them", I answered.

"By the way", said Yonas, the way he liked to begin ever sentence.
"This is my top maximum slow speed"…..  

Talking About Weather in Israel

Sdot Yam, Israel. October 2012Israel is quite a dry country. If you hear people talking about weather issues, it's normally about the luck of rain, the heat during July- August and humidity.
At Optimist Kayaking club, weather conversations are quite common as wind and high waves might be a problem. But once a year the weather is the thing we fear the most.

Every year at about November there is an annual Kayaking Symposium. Guides arrive from various places in the world to teach and kayakers gather to learn as much as they can. Long days in the water, a good chance to improve skills and great energy all around. Bad weather might become a major hassle in a week like that. 
One  would like to have wind on the wind classes, but not too much wind.
One would like no wind for the Greenland rolls classes.
For rescue classes, energetic sea is great.
But no one would like to have rain.

This year the Symposium had perfect weather. The water are about 26 degrees, the sun was there, but not too strong, the wind was there for a short visit, we felt ourselves lucky.
Not a day after the Symposium has ended an impressive thunder storm came for a visit and liked it enough to stick around. It was advertising strong rain for days and finally all hell broke loose on Thursday evening.

Friday morning paddling looked like a group of kids were sent to play in the rain. We were waiting to see what happens with the wind and stood by the sea. It was raining so badly that we run to the warm water to wait and finally boarded our kayaks and went out. The colors were changing by the minute. It was like paddling in a painting.

We felt ourselves lucky once again, to be out in weather like this. And for not having this a week ago…