Late Christmas Presents

So Christmas has come and gone, and New Year's is tonight.

Christmas eve was spent at a party at Judy and Al's. We were still trying to get our Visas, so Dave spent a good part of the evening on the phone trying to get a live body at the King Faisal Visa office in Saudi. Ironically once he did get through he had to shout over the sound of Chrismas carols, and the "Babe" video that the kids were watching. Just what the Saudis want to hear...pagan worshipping rites, and a singing pig.

Christmas morning was great and we got some great travel loot. Dave left Vancouver on the 26th and went to Calgary where he got to visit some friends and relatives before meeting up with Jen again on the 28th in Ontario. Amazingly the flights came in within 40 minutes of each other, but we were still Visaless.

Mollie (Jen's mom) picked us up and took us out to Collingwood to party with some old ski friends. On the way to Collingwood, we decided that the only way to get Visas in our hot little hands would be to drive up to Ottawa and actually visit the embassey in person. Unfortunately it's a 5-6 hour drive from Collingwood to Ottawa, and the embassey is only open from 10am to 12pm (not bad hours eh?).

Painfully, we got up at 5:00 am (2:00 am our time) and started driving.

We arrived at the embassey at 11:00 and after doing some consulting with the person who was attempting to get our Visas for us , who recommended not going to the consulate, and Dave's parents in Saudi, who recommended we go in and have a hungerstrike if need be, we headed up to demand our Visas.

We were greeted by a locked door and quickly found out we were on Candid Camera when the door was opened for us automatically. We were ushered into a tiny little room with a security guard sitting behind a small particle board desk (with a nice dark oak finish) that was held together by strips of tape.

Upon his desk was a beautiful little TV monitor that let him watch up and down the hallway outside the embassey, a big black button for opening the door, and a collection of very important looking papers. Behind him there was a large package X-Ray machine, and a poster proclaiming the 100th anniversary of the Kingdom of Saudi (which I personally find hard to believe).

We had decided on the way in that Dave would do all the talking being the token male. The security guard asked Dave for his ID and took his Driver's License and started writing down every last detail on it onto a little pad of stick it notes he had in front of him. He then took both out passport numbers, out Visa number, my parents telephone number in Saudi, and we're quite convinced would have happily written down Dave's Air Canada card number, his blood type, and his MEC membership number had Dave offered them to him.

Just after he'd finished writing this all down, and looking at it and then looking at us, and then looking at it again in a kind of stuck up disbelief a lady came to a little plexiglass window beside us and asked us what we wanted.

The security guard waved us towards her, so we went over and stated our case. She immediately recognized the MacLachlan name and made a face at us and then said that our case had already been looked at for the day and that the papers hadn't arrived, thank you very much. She started to walk away, so Dave grabbed a pile of emails out of his pocket and waved them at her stating that a "VERY" important Saudi wanted us in the country. She stopped, turned back and read the name, made an indecisive clucking sound and told us to wait for a moment. Less than 30 seconds later she was back asking to see the name again. Dave slid the emails through the small hole in the plexiglass and she grabbed them and walked out of sight. A few seconds later she returned and told us that we should come back at 13:30 because a "Special" mailbag was coming in that might have our papers in it at about 13:00. Not quite sure what else to do we told her we'd be back and left the consulate. As we were walking down the hall we realized that she'd only returned 2 out of 3 of the emails to us. There was a moment of panic as we tried to remember what had been written on that piece of paper. Dave's Dad had sent us an email stating that if we didn't get our Visas that we should go and shoot all the Arabs. We remembered though that it was actually a scrap piece of paper that we'd grabbed at Judy and Al's, so with a great sigh of relief we turned back to the consulate to see if we could get our phone numbers back.

We went back to the locked door, waved at the little camera on the wall and were let in. As we stepped in to the room the security guard stood up and told us rather firmly that we were expected back at 13:30 and not a second before thank you very much. We quickly decided a retreat was in order, and went down to the local Mickey-D's to recover with some caffeine and grease.

A silver lining to this entire trip was that Dave got to visit the parliament buildings for his first time, so we wandered around in the -35 weather checking out our nation's capitol.

At 1:30 we returned to the consulate, and amazingly the mail had come through and our Visas were waiting for us. We are now the proud owners of 2 Saudi visas, which have been kept on our persons ever since.

We stayed in Ottawa overnight with some friends, and then drove down to Tottenham to stay with Jen's sister Katherine and her family.

Heros of the past few days are (in no particular order):

• Katherine and Dave Waldock (for letting us stay with them)


• Joanna McNutt, Morgan Quarry, Wembley and Baggy (for letting us invade their humble homes)


• Mada and Mal Gibson (for letting Dave stay with them and getting him to the airport at an ungodly hour)


• Judy and Al Lee (for letting us stay with them, and getting Jen to the airport at an even more ungodly hour)


• Mollie and David Palmateer (sorry about the Calling Card Mollie)


• Mary and Don MacLachlan (thanks for pulling those strings)

Thank you all very much!

Getting a little nervous

...still awaiting the Saudi visa's. Guess we really should have been prepared for this though. Sure won't be the first time there was a hitch in getting someones visa issued! Everything else is pretty much set to go...

Merry Christmas I think

Found out today that Dave had registered us for an Adventure Holiday in Africa. This was suppose to be a Christmas gift, but suppose I would have seen the $ missing from the joint account on this one :-) This program includes the price of writing your Environmental Ranger certification at the end. During the course we will learn about flora and fauna, animals and how to track them, how to drive a 4 wheel drive, and how to handle poisonous snakes... I'm hoping I can opt out of the last part!

Cleaning our lives

We decided to create this web site so that people (mainly our parents) will be able to find out where we are suppose to be and see where we are heading next. Of course, things could change at any time... So, as far as what is going on right now, we have sold almost everything we own short of our underwear. We realized yesterday that we have reduced our belongings down to our packs, which is kind of scary and yet cleansing at the same time. You know all that stuff you have been carting around with you for a few years that you just don't feel that you should part with, well, this is your excuse... I mean opportunity!

Stein Valley Take 1

This is an email I sent out a long time ago. Well before this blog existed, but I thought folks may be interested. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

I took off Thursday evening and went up to Lillooet to go camping with a friend of mine (S) who works for the Ministry of Forests, and 4 of her friends (L, M, A and N) who are also Min For. We were going to start off in the upper Stein (up near Lillooet) and hike down to the bottom of the Stein Valley right above the Lytton Ferry. We started off up near Devil's Lake, and were going to follow Cattle Creek down to Cottonwood Creek, down to the Stein River, and out the bottom of the Valley. We spent Friday organizing vehicles, and didn't take off until Friday evening.
 
Friday evening we made it up near Devil's Lake (7700') and camped out...things were fine at this point ;-) Up at the lake we met an outdoor adventure group who showed us a "better" route on the map from the one we were going to take. So Saturday we started out and headed down Cattle Creek, and then changed to the "better" route which involved us dropping to about 6000' and then climbing right back up to 7700'. I hope my pictures come out. Anyways after hiking along this ridge we abruptly came to basically a drop off and managed to wind our way down a goat trail to the Cottonwood. At this point (7 hours of serious hiking) we'd only covered about a third of the distance we wanted to cover for the day. Our main trouble was that S and L had been hiking the week before and had arrived home 1.5 hours late and had been severely reprimanded by their supervisor because he'd already gotten search planes ready, so we really wanted to be home on time. 
 
We bush whacked our way down Cottonwood Creek to get to the junction of Cottonwood and Cattle (where we'd intended to go in the first place) and couldn't find the trail we had been told existed there. At this point we had two choices. One was to continue down Cottonwood and the other was to go up on the ridge. By checking our aerial photos and our topos and our water supply we decided to stick with the creek. (First major bad decision). It should be emphasized that this creek is anywhere from 15-40' across and is all white water. M had done some whitewater kayaking (more than myself) and we both considered the Creek to be completely unnavigable by kayak or river raft.
 
Anyways we proceeded down the glacier creek and found ourselves a camp site for the second night on the edge of the river set back in the forest.
 
This is where things get a little more interesting.
 
The third day (Sunday) we continued down the creek and after some incredible bush whacking that shouldn't even have been attempted (second major bad decision) we ended up at what appeared to be a dead end. I stripped down, grabbed onto a rope and jumped in the water and drifted down creek (third major bad decision). I tied up the rope down at my end, and then we started ferrying people and packs across with the packs carried strapped to our heads. On the way, S managed to slip and fall off the line and got washed into a hole in the river. She banged into a rock and ripped a small gash in her stomach and leg. I bandaged up S while the rest of the crew scouted ahead. We continued on down the river for about another half kilometer and found another place which was difficult to navigate. M and I scouted up ahead and found that we could keep going...at least for a while. While we were navigating our second difficult place (which didn't require getting into the water), L slipped and fell in the creek and got washed down creek. All we saw was him fall in the creek, and get washed over a ridge into a SERIOUS hole. I sprinted down river, and finally found him about 100m downstream on the opposite side of the river in the last eddy before a major set of waterfalls (Cattle falls for those who've been there). He was in complete shock and there was no way he could climb out, or cross the river. He also, as we found out later had a serious ostrich egg size bruise on his right hip. At this point we set up camp at the last flat spot and started waiting for the rescue planes which was Sunday about noon. We put out crosses, and made flags, and got a smudge signal fire ready to go. Sunday night we slept out on the rock and waited. Monday morning we saw one helicopter and one plane fly over us, but nobody noticed us. We found out later that the pilots had decided that there was no way humans could get in that far so had stopped the search about .5k short of where we were. 
 
M and I got restless and decided we should set some markers up stream from us in a clearer area. This required doing some interesting navigating around some rocks which the girls didn't feel comfortable with at all, especially S already having taken an unexpected swim. We put up a large signal flag, and made a bigger smudge fire upstream. We then lit the smudge fire. The fire burned just a little too beautifully and managed to catch some nearby wood which went up which set of some nearby trees which set of the nearby forest. I have never seen anything unfold so fast in my entire life. M and I sprinted down stream to help the girls pack up our gear and hide it behind rocks. I then went back up stream and started fighting forest fires with a Becel margarine container. We were finally noticed at this point ;-) A Rap Attack (an ace forest fire squad who specialize in rappelling into forest fires) chopper came and landed near me and I explained our situation. They then told me to go down to the girls and explain that they were going to lift us out of there ASAP. I ran down stream, and as the chopper took off it managed to light up the entire beach with it's downdraft making it impossible for the helicopter to land there again.
 
We huddled down stream and waited for the RapAttack crew to show up. They went for L first but couldn't drop right on him due to weird winds in the canyon. They dropped a crew of three people downstream from L, but they couldn't make it upstream to him. The three people climbed up to the top of the canyon (100') and rappelled down to L. The RapAttack chopper came back and attempted to get us out, but couldn't drop anybody in on us, again due to weird winds. They instead dropped in a chainsaw and proceeded to drop a log across the river on which they landed the chopper. We climbed in the chopper and flew out of there about 9pm on Monday night. The rapattack crew spent the night on the creek, we spent the night at Forest Fire HQ at Lytton. As of 11am Tuesday morning the fire was out (as far as I know). We burned about 40-60 trees. L turned out just to have a serious bruise, and S cut was minor but infected. The rest of us are just fine. I got back last night and spent the evening "discussing" this with various people...parents etc.
 
So that was my weekend. If anybody wants a lunch and learn on forest survival and psychology (which I completely left out of the story and makes it MUCH longer) let me know eh? ;-) If anybody wants a quick hike in the Stein, I've got the area down pretty well now....