Antarctica Blog

I passed the motorcycle safety course, got my permit and got the motorcycle endorsement on my international drivers license. Now I’m more legal than usual to drive my ageing 1991 Honda Transalp xl600vm. I have been spending quite a bit of time at my friends shop working on it. In addition to replacing parts that have reached the end of their operational lifetimes, I have been doing a bit of customizing all in preparation for our trip to Sardinia.

I have been having problems with bearings. The steering stem bearings were completely shot; rusted and pitted to the point that I’m amazed I could still steer. The rear wheel bearings were also starting to go so I changed them preemptively while changing the rear brake pads and tires (it was all apart anyway). The brakes turned out to be the most difficult project. The pads are held in place by a pin that goes through a loop in the pad. The pin is stainless and the housing is aluminum and the corrosion that forms between the two has incredibly adhesive properties. We spent the better part of a day trying everything to free the pin with no luck. Ultimately we had to drill it out and tap a new hole for a custom-made pin. I also changed the spark plugs and made some long-overdue and very successful carburetor adjustments as well as an oil change in the forks and the crankcase to top it off.

When we were in Christchurch, NZ after our season at Siple was over, we ordered a new seat for the Transalp from the American saddle manufacturer Corbin. We had it shipped to my parent’s in Lebanon, Maine where we hand carried it to Italy. It took a bit of tweaking of the top-box to make it comfortable for Luci. Now it is really starting to take on a look of its own. Not many Transalps with Corbin seats around. It was a bit hard a first but, with a passenger, the difference is incredible.

At this point we were more-or-less ready to embark for Sardinia. We had a bit of a problem with the new front tire and the front wheel bearings still hadn’t arrived from the dealer. After messing around with the front tire a bit, we determined that it must be a flaw. The hard part was convincing the tire people (gummists as I call them). Italian companies have not all discovered the benefit of customer service and would rather have you pay for a new tire. If I hadn’t had my mechanic friend Cristiano with me that is probably what I would have wound up with. But he put up a good argument and got me a warranty replacement. The same goes for tools here. Tool makers would rather make cheap tools that break so people buy more. Even top-end tools like Beta are crap with poor warranty service. We broke more than one Beta tool just working on my bike. My friends tell me that they do have a warranty but it takes months to get a replacement. They still don’t believe me that you can just pop by Sears with your broken Craftsman tool and they give you a new one or that Snap-on will deliver to your shop.

The Honda dealer kept telling us, “the bearings will be in tomorrow”. This went on for two weeks so we just decided to go a head and leave for our trip. We left on Friday, May 11th for the Cinque Terre. When I talk to Americans who have been to Italy they always talk about how great the Cinque Terre are but in the 10 years I’ve been coming to Italy I have never been. It is not a big destination for Italian tourists. A friend of mine from Antarctica’s parents have a gestalt meditation center nearby and he recommended that we stay in the town of Levanto. Since we were going to be exploring the Cinque Terre on a weekend we convinced Luci’s parents to drive down and meet us there on Saturday.

What an amazing place to go on a motorcycle. The roads are beautifully curvy and variable enough that I can really put to good use my multi-terrain motorcycle. On Saturday morning, my birthday, we rode and walked to the town of Vernazza, before meeting Luci’s parents. We didn’t have too much time to mess around because we had to meet them in Porto Venere at the bottom end of the Cinque Terre for lunch. After lunch, Luci’s parents took the coastal route to Lucca while we took the inland Via Francigena along a medieval pilgrimage route between Rome and Paris. In Lucca we fell victim to poor dining. Because Tuscany is so full of foreign tourists who don’t know how truly good real Italian dining can be, there are tons of restaurants that serve a sub-par dining experience. Not the first time we have eaten poorly there. In the morning, Luci and I had to be up a the crack of dawn to drive to Livorno to catch our ferry to Olbia in Sardinia.

We have been planning this trip since January at Siple when I discovered that the Italian GP of the World Rally Competition was happening there in a favorable time slot for us. A great excuse to take a road trip to an area known for its off-road. Being much farther south than Lombardy it was also much warmer and perfect weather for camping. It is also off-season there so it was pretty tranquil even in big tourist areas. But someone who goes to Sardinia for the tourist areas is an idiot. It is one of the wildest areas of Italy. Very old-west in most areas more than 10 miles from the beach; no fences and bullet holes in all the road signs. About 80% of this, the second largest island in the Mediterranean, is mountainous with great roads for an enduro bike.

We spend the first week on Sardinia around the Gennargentu National Park. We did many kilometers of off-road riding and stayed in an argitourismo (essentially a homestead who have an extra room for guests). The Rally was scheduled to start that weekend and we had scoped out a campsite that sat right on part of the track. We spent some time running the special stages sections on the Transalp with no bags. Great fun! The way a rally works is the teams base out of a town (in this case Olbia) where they set up their mechanics and media circius. Then, during the race days they do two rounds of a circuit cobbled together out of private and public roads; a different loop each day of the weekend. On certain sections of the loop the road is closed and on others it is not. On the closed section the cars are timed for a standing in the overall. The cars MUST make it back to the service park in the host city even if they make it through the timed special stages. Otherwise they are disqualified. This means they have to do their own repairs on the road with tools they bring along with them or face disqualification. Yesterday, in the Acropolis Rally in Athens, Greece one of the leaders, Sebastian Loeb lost his whole rear end and dragged his Citroen into the Olympic Stadium using only the front wheels.

What Luci and I tried to do on our motorcycle was catch each of the two laps from a different perspective; one on a closed, timed special stage and the other on a public road from a street-side café. A good combination for our multi-terrain bike. The best combinations were the ones where we were riding against the race flow on a public road to get from one viewing point to the other. This way we could pass all the cars head-on and watch them from the bike.

After three intense days of off-roading and race chasing we were read for a couple of days of relaxation. We got a bungalow at a campground right on the water in the town of Palau on the channel between Sardinia and Corsica so we could clean off all the dust we had accumulated over the weekend. At lunch we made friends with the owners of the restaurant. They recommended that we get a zodiac and cruise around the Maddalena Islands National Park for a day. In the morning we went down to the port with our picnic and picked up a gommone with a 30 HP motor. We spent the day swimming and island hopping. We spent most of the rest of our time in Sardinia around Palau until it was time to take the ferry back to the mainland.

On the first day of our trip the speedometer gear broke so we had no speedometer or odometer the whole trip. I called my friend Cristiano to have him order me the part so it would be there when we got back. Knowing the history of our neighborhood Honda dealer (Tresoldi Honda Pessano) I knew I would have to order it far in advance because they keep nothing in house and it take forever for them to get anything out-of-house. When we got back two weeks later, not only had the speedo gear not arrived but the front wheel bearings still hadn’t arrived. I could have got the stuff quicker from Japan. To make matters worse, Cristiano said the guy told him he forgot to place the order in the first place. I sat down and called every Honda dealer in Milan looking for these parts and found one with a speedo gear. I went and picked it up and I asked Cristiano to cancel the order from Tresoldi but he said it was “too late”. They really don’t make it easy. And Italian companies can’t figure out why other European countries don’t want to do business with them.
This morning Luci and her parents went to Egypt for the week. Resort life is not for me so I stayed behind. This weekend I am meeting up with a bunch of friends from the States. We are all going up to open Boccalatte together and dig it out of the snow.

The end of the season has come and gone. The last two weeks at the hut were incredibly slow. The weather was touch and go and the nice periods never lasted long enough to solidify the conditions on the climb. Massimo stuck around for a few days. We hired him to help us bring supplies up and down. He was going to the valley anyway to get some stuff for himself so we offered him a discount on his stay if he brought up some stuff on our wish list. We also had him bring down some of our things as a precursor to closing.

At the beginning of the season we thought we would take advantage of the helicopter scheduled to fly out at the end of the season. But there was a significant rise in the price of helo minutes this year so we decided to close by making various trips to the valley on foot loaded rather than using the helicopter to fly stuff out. In the last week of August I hiked out the last load of our stuff and drove it all to Milan where I picked up our motorcycle. I rode it back up to the valley and hiked back up to the hut for our last week.

The weather stayed crappy and we had almost no overnight guests. This made closing pretty easy and we started knocking things off our list. Since we were making progress and had no reservations it was looking like we might be able to hike out early; Monday instead of Wednesday. So, on Sunday afternoon we started the push to close up the systems. For water we have a concrete reservoir that collects snow melt-water. Often times by August there is no more seasonal snow-melt to capture so I run 100m or so of hose up to a cascade that flows off the glacier itself. This year I rigged up a harness so I could hang a funnel right over the falling water to captured it and fill the reservoir. It was one of the first systems that needed to come out as part of the closing process.

The cascade is down in a narrow chute that is prone to falling rocks. I try to get in and out as quickly as possible. I managed to undo the harness and free the funnel with no problems. But I still needed to bring in the hose and detach the funnel from the end of it which involved climbing down into the chute. While down in the chute I needed to pull on the upper end of the tube with the funnel on it in order to take it down. In the process I freed a head-sized rock which was lightly perched at the top of the cascade which came whipping down towards me. Having worked down in this trench before I had developed an escape route precisely for incidents like this but I had to act very quickly. On the side of the chute there is a small place with a few footholds that is clear of falling rock. The problem is that it is relatively smooth and far from flat. In my haste to avoid the falling projectile I was not able to get a good footing and went sliding down about ten feet back into the chute farther down. In the meantime the rock went hurling by leaving me unscathed. But, in the process of coming to a stop from my slide, I twisted my ankle. Nothing major, in fact my bleeding hand caused me more immediate pain than my foot. I quickly finished up in the chute and got out ASAP. After pulling in the water line, I went back down to the hut to help Luci take down the railing and the gutters. Since we were planning on hiking out the next day I didn’t want to take any chances so I wrapped my ankle in an ACE bandage and tightened my boot then went back to closing tasks until we only had the point-of-no-return tasks left.

At about 3 in the morning I woke in pain. I thought I was going to get away lightly but I was wrong. I grabbed a steak from the freezer and rubber-banded it to my foot and put it up on a coiled climbing rope and tried to get some more sleep. At first light it became obvious that I was not going to be hiking out. The pain was pretty intense and I had quite a limp. Since we were in no real rush to get out we decided that it would be better to just take care of over the next couple of days and take advantage of the helo flight on Wednesday to fly out. I probably could of taken a bunch of Ibu and toughed out the hike but with our busy September schedule we didn’t want to do more damage to it.

So we flew out of Boccalatte down into Val Ferret on Wednesday morning like rock-stars arriving at the Grammys. We spent the next couple of days visiting friends in the valley and riding the motorcycle. Easier than walking on the ankle, actually. Knowing that I would not be trying to convince them to go for a hike, Luci’s parents decide to take up our offer and come up to the valley for the weekend. We relaxed around our friend’s hotel where we booked them a room and went for rides in the small valleys of the region. We ate well, as usual, and then all went back to Milan together.

Now, back in Milan, we are tying up loose ends and getting ready for our trip to Asia and our season in Antarctica. On the 19th we leave for Thailand. It is going to be a challenge packing for both Antarctica and Thailand.

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