The way of Iron

05/21/06
The first week here with campers was good. It gave greenhorns like me a chance to see how
things run around here. I was a floater, teaching canoe sessions and climbing. Our Grande
Descente down the river went very smoothly and was most entertaining. The school we had was ISS, the International School of Stuttgart. The kids were almost all fluent in German, but
most of them spoke ennglish as a first language, and many of them others such as Danish or
east Indian dialects. The kids were entertaining and hailed from all over the world, many
originally from the states. They fit into a category known as Third Culture Kids, as they
have no real home country. Their citizenship belongs to one country, their residence
another, and their orwn culture straddles the two. That is what they have in common, and so
a third culture, the culture of the global nomad, arises from this. It makes for an
interesting and mostly tolerant group of young kids. After the week ended, Neil, our
director, took six of us toa town an hour and a half away. We drove through small vollages
and around roundabouts. Our trip took us up into the hills where the rock changed
drastically from Limestone to granite and other volcanic rock. We stopped in a small town,
rented soem gear, and set off to concor the Via Ferrata, the Way of Iron. Via Ferratas are
common in France, Switzerland and Italy. They are riggings of metal grips, banisters, cables
tension traverses and zip lines that take you around and up cliff faces and over chasms and
gorges. The afternoon was a spectacular one of climbinb and ziplining and enjoying the
scenery. One side of the gorge we were over was made of rock that looked like lava frozen in
it's tracks (which it was) and the other of solid granite. We made our way through the gorge
and up the opposing cliff faces all the while clipping and unclipping our carabiners to keep
us on the face should we fall, and getting in precarious situations for the sake of taking
pictures. On the way home Dan, my tent mate, told us stories of the summer he was running
rickshaws in Ottawa. He told absurd tales of drunkards paying 60 dollars to get a ride
around the block and being so bushed at the end of a 9 hour day that stretching one muscle
made another cramp up. All the while I sat in the back of the car with a length of wild
boar sausage in one hand, knife in the other, hoping neil wouldn't smash into an insolent
french driver on a tight turn. We enjoyed a local blue cheese and the sausage as the castle
ruins, red tile roofs, vineyards, sculptures and hills rolled by outside. The night ended
with us returning to camp and then retiring to the Quetzal for an evening of laughs and
elaborate pizzas. Everyone is tired now, and we are expecting the kids from the International
School of Milan tonight. The kids promise loads of laughs with their accents and
personalities. Next weekedn is our three day stint off. Ann and I are trying to figure out
which city on the coast we want to visit, and we hope it can be coordinated in short time, as
we will have to hop on a bus as soon as we are
off! This last picture is of the Pont D'Diable. The Devil's bridge. I think it's called that because there are only theories on who built it and when it was built. There are a few in this area, very mysterious.