Love, fear and other cases of mistaken identity

If this bridge is rockin’…

Another Valentine's Day bites the dust. In its wake there will no doubt be countless readers out there in blogspace looking at their love life, wondering how they might go about adding a second person into it – Romeos looking for their Juliet, Barbies looking for their Ken, Parises looking for a Paris (or Nick, or Rick, or Stavros, or…). For those people I have but one piece of advice: fear is your friend.

It seems a little counter-intuitive, but next time you’re out to impress that special someone, the best approach mightn’t be roses and candle-lit dinners but instead some sparsely bolted overhanging rock, maybe a spot of downhill biking or even a double-black-diamond ski run if the snow’s in good shape (but remember, the goal here is to gently frighten – not kill or maim). It sounds insane, but it’s based on solid evidence.

Back in 1974, psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron from the University of British Columbia, put together a series of experiments involving rickety bridges and sexy researchers. Their hypothesis said that people should find an attractive person really attractive in the presence of a strong emotional stimulus – like fear.

The two canny Canadians set up a series of experiments, the most famous of which involved a good-looking female researcher who would interview randomly selected male subjects half way along two bridges – one safe; one high, windy, unstable and scary.

The at the interview she’d go through a series of decoy questions, then show the subject a picture of a young woman covering her face with one hand and reaching out with the other and ask “tell me what you see here”. At the conclusion of each interview she would hand out her phone number, “just in case you have any questions about the study.” The researchers then rated the sexual content of the picture responses and counted the number of calls, comparing between the two bridges.

The results showed the sexual content of the picture responses on the scary bridge to be double that of the sedate bridge and nearly five times as many subjects phoned the researcher after being on the scary bridge, compared to the sedate one. The conclusion; the unsuspecting guys were ‘mistaking’ their fear-induced heightened state of arousal for being head-over-heels love-struck for the researcher!

Other experiments in the study, as well as subsequent trials have, on the whole, confirmed their findings. These days the body of knowledge they developed is known as the “misattribution of arousal paradigm”. If you’re feeling geeky, you can check out the original study here.

Who would have thought, the secret that’s kept ski instructors’ and rafting guides’ beds warm for decades is actually an established scientific principle. Why isn’t it surprising that that the Canadians discovered it.

Culinary fundamentalism

What's with the backcountry food feud?

OK, you’ve checked the weather, booked the huts, fished out the map and left a note for the flatmates. All that’s left to do now is call the team and see what people want to do about food. That should be pretty straightforward, right? Wrong.

On most backcountry trips trying to get agreement on camping food is like herding cats with a stick. In any group of three or more people you’re certain to have at least one mountaineer who insists on going as light as possible, and one gastro-trekker who refuses to forgo even the smallest culinary detail.

Before you know it, normally chilled-out friends will be arguing with quasi-religious fervour over what to eat and how. The mountaineers will be proposing olive oil as an entire meal. The gastro-trekkers will say “not unless it’s served with flatbread and dukka... and followed by another three courses!”

If you’re lucky a grudging cessation of hostilities will hold long enough for the trip to take place. But many backcountry teams have split acrimoniously over culinary differences before ever heading into the hills.

So what’s the deal? Why can’t we all just get along?

Well, just like any good debate, both sides make a compelling argument. Proponents of the light and fast approach say travelling with less makes for a purer wilderness experience - and that means making some necessary compromises on the food front. Plus depriving yourself a little while on the trail makes that first meal at home taste all the better.

Whereas the gastronomers argue that good food will make a great wilderness experience even more enjoyable – why let a grumbling tummy take the shine off the moment. And besides with a little intelligence you can bring the finer things along without breaking your back.

The only thing both sides seem to agree on is that the worst thing of all is a compromise. The middle ground of leaving the wine and cheese at home but not going light enough for serious adventures is considered an abomination by all concerned.

It looks like the knives... forks and camping spoons will stay drawn for some time yet.

Aristotle and the modern dirt jumper.

Applying ancient greek ethics to today's biking scene.

Back in the fourth century BC, Aristotle, one of the first great minds of humanity, came up with a system of ethics that said virtue is the middle ground between excess and deficiency (or something like that in Latin). His theory says the virtue of courage is the middle point between rashness and cowardice, wisdom lies between ignorance and cunning, forgiveness lies between vengeance and injustice and so on.

Flashforward a few thousand years to the opening of Queenstown Mountain Bike Club’s dirt jump park yesterday and you have an interesting demonstration of the old guy’s idea in action.

Under a flawless blue sky with the sound system cranking and the barbeque serving up the best two-buck sausages you’ll ever have in your life, Queenstown’s bikers were out having a blast. Thowing themselves at some pretty intimidating leaps - giving it their all without a prize cheque anywhere in sight.

If you looked closely at the eclectic crowd in attendance, you could see them falling pretty neatly into Aristotle's three camps; the deficient, the virtuous and the excessive.

For every biker there were three pudgy, sunburned rubberneckers, deficiently scoffing sausages by the sidelines, clicking off the occasional photo but never actually entertaining the thought of giving it a go. “Are you kidding! I might get hurt.”

Then there were the virtuous participants giving it their all, throwing a few tricks, having a few crashes, but mostly just having great fun.

If you take a look at the face of a guy who’s just landed a thirty-foot jump on a five hundred dollar bike, you’ll see an ear-to-ear endorphin grin combined with a look of pure calm of which a Zen master would be proud. It’s not surprising really; after watching the ground racing towards at you from a couple of storeys up it must be hard not to feel a deep sense of calm when it’s all over.

Then there’s the most interesting bunch, the professionally excessive. This event attracted a few. Riding their own brand of bike, travelling with a dedicated video cameraman, photographer and manager. It seemed as though they’d sacrificed so much and made so many compromises to get to the top of their game that the fun had left the building a long time a go.

It’s pretty easy to spot these guys in amongst the rest of the crowd. Rather than that look of calm, they’ll be supporting a competitive scowl, cursing at jumps that didn’t go so well and screaming, “Who da fuckin man!” into the camera lens when things went right. It could all be genuine, or a bit of an act to help drum up sponsorships, it's hard to tell. But either way it’s pretty ugly to watch.

Pigeon holing asside, seeing that display of passion on wheels certainly gets you fired up to get out on the bike. As soon as I’m finished writing this, I’ll be off for a spin with a few mates. We won’t be doing any big jumps and we won’t be setting a world record pace but it’ll get the endorphins flowing and burn enough calories to justify a beer or two afterwards… and that’s just fine with me.

Vive la médiocrité!

What’s biting you?

Understanding - and escaping - the dreaded New Zealand Sandfly.

The New Zealand bush comes with good news and bad news on the bugs front: The good news is that, unlike in Australia, none of our insects will kill you. The bad news is the sheer quantity of one bug – the sand fly – may, with their tenacious and persistent biting, drive you to kill yourself.

Maori legend has it that Hinenui-te-po, goddess of the underworld released the sand fly near Milford Sound to prevent humans becoming idle and freezing to death in the face of Fiordland’s natural beauty. These days the little bloodsuckers are found wherever there’s flowing water and bush – most of the country really.

The female sand fly, which are the ones that bite (read into that what you will) live for about six weeks, in which time they have to hatch, develop as larva while feeding on aquatic algae and bacteria then metamorphose into flying insects, mate and feast on blood to get the sustenance required to lay eggs in a fast flowing stream to perpetuate the cycle. It’s a pretty short life, and getting a meal of your blood is one of the highlights – so it’s really no surprise that they’re so enthusiastic about it.

If you don’t want to be bitten, and don’t mind resorting to nasty chemicals, insect repellents with a high concentration of DEET are best. But remember it’s a strong solvent so will do horrible things to plastics (like your expensive outdoor gear) and has known side effects including; seizures, confusion, acute psychosis, nausea and vomiting and skin irritation. It’s also suspected of being a contributing element in Gulf War Syndrome.

If you plan to have a long and healthy outdoor career the herbal repellents are a better option. There is a range of products out there that work almost as well as the DEET based stuff, without the stress about contracting some awful ailment down the track. Be warned though, some of the best contain lavender oil which can sometimes result in exchanging sand flies for bumble bees!

Covering up as much as possible with light-coloured clothing will minimise the need for repellents. Tuck your trousers into your socks, wear thin polypropylene gloves and a fine head net then put your bug repellent of choice on any exposed bits left - and you’ll be sweet as bro!

If you want to explore some alternative bug solutions, some people think that consuming large doses of Vitamin B gives your sweat a repellent quality. I'm also told the early loggers in Fiordland apparently drank a glass of diesel each day to achieve the same effect. However, I’ve never had much luck with the Vitamin B theory… and I’ve never tried the diesel approach!

Once you’ve been bitten expect some pretty nasty mosquito bite style welts to arrive within a few days. Calamine lotion works well for the itching, but really all you can do is leave them alone, and console yourself with the fact that your body develops an immunity to sand fly bites over time, so each bite makes you a little bit better prepared for the next.

Lost and found

Rediscovering the art of tracking.

After several years’ procrastination I’ve finally taken the plunge and become involved with New Zealand Land Search and Rescue, the first step of which is getting educated in the ways of SAR with introduction to tracking course.

I have to say my understanding of the subject was until recently, limited to B-grade TV shows where the ‘Indian’ tracker would point down at muddy footprints and say, “Two men went this way, Kimosabe”. Needless to say in real life it’s a bit subtler than that.

In fact, tracking in the SAR context is really about tuning in to the environment, getting intimate – down and dirty - with the land, then looking for something out of place; a turned leaf, a broken twig, a straight line that looks man-made.

It sounds like a ‘needle in a haystack’ exercise – and often it is. If it takes twelve hours to find out someone’s missing, and they’re walking at two kilometres per hour, then you have about 5500 square kilometres to search.

But it’s not all bad. The good news is that as you wander through the bush, especially thick bush, you leave about three thousand footprints per kilometre, from which a trained tracker should be able to extract about five or six ‘signs’ each.

Then there’s above the floor evidence like broken branches, and disturbed dewdrops, ‘top sign’ as it’s known, plus information gleaned from huts, toilets, cars, witnesses, and the person’s family and friends.

When you add in the statistical information known about the behaviour of different groups of people when lost (that’s another course in itself) plus some high-tech gadgetry like helicopters with thermal imaging capability - then you really start to stack the odds back in favour of finding them.

There’s no guarantees they’ll be able to thank you when you get to them – but at the very least you’ll be giving the person’s friends and family a bit of closure, rather than leaving them with a question mark.

NZLSAR’s Trail and Clue Awareness course is a two-day crash course in a subject people devote their lives to, so it’s pretty safe to say I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Even so it’s surprising how quickly you get the knack of it. On Friday night I couldn’t track down someone unless they’d walked through wet concrete, by Sunday afternoon I could do it - not well - but I could slowly but surely follow a person through the bush by the signs they inadvertently left behind. And that’s an amazing thing for a slow learner like me!

Which led me to thinking; it’s only in the last thousand years or so that we’ve been ‘civilised’ to the extent that we haven’t had to do this for a living. For a few million years or so prior to that the ability to track is what kept us alive.

Perhaps like just walking, talking and having sex, this is something that, through evolution and natural selection, has been hard-wired into our brains. Perhaps doing a course like this isn’t so much about learning, as remembering what we instinctively know.

I suppose that might also explain my tendency to stray from human tracks onto deer tracks over the weekend - it must have been my inner caveman saying, “never mind the lost bloke, what about lunch!”

The cat among the pigeons.

Exploring the changing face of travel journalism and tourism marketing.

For years the travel industry has had it easy, with an almost endless supply of journalists willing to write "ooh ah, isn't it lovely" stories, in exchange for an all expenses paid holiday.

Perhaps it’s to be expected, after all most people read travel stories in the same light as plastic-wrapped men’s magazine – for a moment of escapist fantasy provided by idealised accounts written through the most deeply tinted of rose coloured glasses. Being told, “actually she’s got pimples on her bottom,” tends to ruin the effect.

But if you’re actually going to be paying your own hard-earned cash to stay somewhere, you need real information, the ‘pimples and all’ details if you will (I’m talking about travel now, not the girly magazines).

With a few exceptions – Lonely Planet being the most notable – that sort of information has been sorely lacking for far too long. I suppose not many publishers can afford to print travel material, particularly regarding high-end destinations, without the support the industry and tourism ministries to grease the wheels.

The industry holds all the aces, and that’s the way it’s been for as long as anyone can remember. Not for much longer, however. Enter the great shaper of twenty-first century society, the internet.

Over the past few years user generated content sites like Trip Advisor and to a lesser extent Thorn Tree have allowed anyone with an internet connection to act as a reviewer, telling the good, the bad and the ugly details of their travel experiences - and throwing a cat among the travel industry pigeons in the process.

So what's a poor tourism marketer to do? You can't bribe and schmoose every customer like you do travel journalists. How are you supposed to respond?

The new wisdom says three things:

1. Cut the crap - Tell people what to expect, don’t be tempted to ‘spin’ the truth or take artistic licence – if you’re a quirky B&B don’t try to convince people you’re the Ritz – customers will find out they’ll post it, and then you’ll have a crisis on your hands.

2. Get amongst it - When, inevitably you do have a ‘clanger’ of a review, don’t freak out, everyone gets them occasionally. The seven star Burj Al Arab in Dubai has been described as, “The worst hotel I have ever stayed in!!”, and Queenstown’s five-star Blanket Bay has been described as, “One of the World's great rip-offs.”

What you need to do is participate in the discussion – standing by idly while your reputation is trashed online is a great way of saying that you really don’t care what our customers think.If someone has highlighted a genuine flaw in your business acknowledge it and demonstrate that you’ve taken steps to fix the problem. If someone is just having a rant then invite them to contact you offline. Either way you’re showing that you’re paying attention, and that says a lot.

3. Harness the power - People will believe a collection of good reviews by a customer over a great review by a critic every time. So if you can work with your customers to generate positive e-publicity you’ll earn yourself a whole lot more business than by running expensive ad campaigns or trying to seduce visiting journos.

Set people’s expectations accurately, provide a good service consistently, charge a fair price and you’ll reap the benefits of the new technology.

So, for the not-so-humble-anymore customers, next time you’re about to book a hotel room for the night, take a quick look and see what other travellers have to say – you’ll be glad you did. And next time you have a really bad travel experience, don’t go screaming at front line staff or barking at junior management, just politely ask if directions to the nearest internet cafe.

Power to the people!

Who the hell is Henry Mencken?

The ultimate bigot, he was an elitist, sexist, racist and atheist - but damn he had a way with words.

I'm currently studying the history of journalism. It's an undertaking that for has involved spending an inordinate amount of time trolling the net - even more than usual - looking for gems of historical wisdom and eyewitness accounts of events from the Hindenburg to Hiroshima.

Between Google and Wikipedia, it's amazing what you can find. What's perhaps more amazing is the things you bump into by serendipitous accident - like Henry Menken.

Son of a cigar maker, Mencken never attended college, but never the less grew into a talented journalist, essayist and satirist. In the early twentieth century his pen produced cynical, elitist, atheistic, and anarchistic points of view. He was sometimes unpopular, often controversial, and is called a bigot and a racist to this day, but his words still raise a grin (at least for me) and no doubt a few hackles. Here’s my top ten:

10. “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking,”
9. “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable,”
8. “Self-respect: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious,”
7. “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice,”
6. “Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents,”
5. “Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends,”
4. “Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence,”
3. “Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood,”
2. “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public,”
1.…and the classic, “Nature abhors a moron.”

He died in 1956, after falling out of favour with the American public due to his position on the nation's involvement in World War II and a stroke that left him unable to read or write for his last years. On his tombstone was engraved the words:

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner, and wink your eye at some homely girl."

If you’d like to find out more, check out his wikipedia page, or Google Henry L Mencken.