Roadmonkey women (from left) Christina, Deborah, Carolee & Zaby, with Roadmonkey co-leader Juan Flores (left) and surf instructor Jonny Hillyard (blond dude).

Deborah R. catching a beginner wave, aided by Roadmonkey expedition co-leader Juan Flores.

Deborah J. riding high, with instructor Alfredo in the background

Roadmonkeys, from left, Emily, Zaby & Carolee, evalulating the waves.

Okay, we’re off for lesson no. 3 now….more soon.

Stay tuned,

Paul

On Friday, Roadmonkey launches it’s fourth adventure philanthropy expedition, to Nicaragua. Follow our progress here.

The first four days, we’ll learn to surf the mellow waves around San Juan del Sur, on the southern Pacific coast.

Then, on Wednesday, Mar. 9, we caravan six hours north, into the northern highlands, near the Honduran border, to a mountain-top town called San Jose de Cusmapa, to spend three days building a playground for some 400 school children. For most of them, this will be their first-ever playground. We’re building it entirely from local materials, input from the kids in the community. No prefabricated swingsets or slights or monkey bars on this project. To the contrary, this will be a unique, sturdy structure that incorporates Nicaraguan culture, art and homegrown natural woods to create a world-class playground you won’t find anywhere else….because it was custom designed by two professional engineers: Judy Lee and Adam Vollmer (read more on this below).

Our non-profit partner on this adventure philanthropy expedition is the Fabretto Children’s Foundation, which runs the school and which has been a steady, positive presence for poor children in Nicaragua for decades.

Pristine & empty: Playa Yanqui, south of San Juan del Sur.

Our playground building partner is WGBH Boston, the PBS station that has chosen to film this Roadmonkey volunteer project as an episode of a new program showing kids how to use engineering to improve the lives of people in need in creative, sustainable ways.

I will be posting photos and daily updates to our 9-day  surfing and playground-building expedition. So please stay tuned to this blog. I’ll also be posting pix & updates – as long as internet connections & bandwidth allow – to Roadmonkey’s Facebook and Twitter pages.

Join us on this unique combination of physical challenge and volunteer work collaboration in Nicaragua. See you in Nica starting Friday!

Sincerely,

Paul

PS, If you’re reading this in the stone-cold, slab-gray deadzone known as the Northeastern United States, here’s the forecast for Nica this weekend. And I doubt next week will be any different.

Thursday Mar. 04 93°F / 73°F

Friday Mar. 05 93°F / 72°F

Saturday Mar. 06 93°F / 71°F

In June 2009, a 10-member Roadmonkey expedition team summited Mt. Kilimanjaro, at 19,345 feet the highest point in Africa, to complete the adventure portion of the Tanzania adventure philanthropy expedition.

Below are two 3-minute videos, professionally shot & edited by two expedition team members: Steve and Joanie Wynn of Bayside Entertainment, based in Marin County, Calif.

The first video shows the Roadmonkey crew during our 6-day ascent of mighty Kilimanjaro:

The second 3-minute video portrays our post-climb volunteer project: refurbishing an impoverished school outside of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital, and installing a sustainable filtration system to allow the children, many of who have been orphaned by East Africa’s AIDS epidemic, to drink the groundwater at the school. We also installed affordable, clean-burning gas stoves to replace more expensive & environmentally unfriendly wood charcoal cook barrels.

When we arrived at the school, some of the students, dressed in their uniforms, performed a lovely, cheorgraphed dance in one of the classrooms:

In June 2010, Roadmonkey will return to Tanzania, to climb glacier-capped Kilimanjaro once again and then, in the village of Babati, southwest of the mountain, build a fish pond for a new school.

Join us on this challenging, gratifying and memory-making adventure philanthropy expedition.

The article’s author, Mike Kessler, an award-winning Outside writer and self-described skeptic of the trend toward “voluntourism,” came to see Roadmonkey as such a good thing that he joined the company this year.

More on that later…

I and my co-leader, Michael Stephen Kessler, will be taking this small group via mountain bikes into some of the most heavily contested areas of the country during the war with the United States. We’ll make a day ride to the site of the almost unbearably gruesome My Lai killings, by an isolated and frustrated squad of American soldiers in March 1968. As I discovered during my scouting trip to this region in March, My Lai sits incongruously 1 km from a serene white-sanded oceanfront beach area.

The Roadmonkey expedition will pass through the town of Quang Ngai, on the central coast, then turn west on Highway 24 to take on the rolling hills and valleys that will swallow us into the jungly digestive tract known as the northern Central Highlands.

Students at the Kon Ray boarding school, Central Highlands, playing a local version of jump rope.

Five days of cycling through mountain passes, alpine forests and hot summer valleys (the seasons are different here than in North America) will put us in the frontier-like city of Kon Tum, the capital of a province that is home to dozens of ethnic minority tribes. The town names sound different here from other parts of Vietnam; tribal languages continue, and a visitor can see the differences from the majority Kinh (Vietnam’s dominant ethnic group) in the faces of local people here; it’s quite fascinating. There is also a poverty rate in this area that one doesn’t see, or see so viscerally, in other parts of Vietnam. I’ve thought of the tribal peoples as similar to North American native tribes in the economic and community challenges they face: education, health, environment, viability of traditional mores and sustainable development.

Roadmonkey’s volunteer project in Vietnam will be building an organic farm, 400 square meters in size, at a school for ethnic H’re, H’mong and other minority students in the Kon Tum region. Our non-profit partner for this project is the East Meets West Foundation, a large, organized and extremely effective American organization that has been building and creating health and education opportunities for Vietnamese people for two decades. My great thanks go to John Anner, EMW’s executive director, for inviting Roadmonkey to partner with his excellent group of managers.

Those managers include Ms. Nguyen Thi Minh Thu, EMW’s program director who began the Roadmonkey partnership with great effort and elan, and Ms. Vo Thi Hien, in Da Nang, who is as pleasant and easy to work with as she is organized and effective. These ladies are wonderful people to plan a complicated and challenging 4-day volunteer project with!

Teachers at the Kon Ray school where Roadmonkey's volunteer project begins, Nov. 6.

The current group of Roadmonkeys — six women and 1 man — raised more than $8,000 for our volunteer project at the Kon Ray school. That is truly amazing, and part of a growing tradition at Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy: our clients have raised more than $30,000 in tax-deductible contributions from their own social networks since last year, for the three volunteer projects they have completed in northwest Vietnam (Nov. 2008), Tanzania (July 2009) and now Central Highlands, Vietnam (Nov. 6-9, 2009).

That is, after all, what adventure philanthropy, and Roadmonkey, are all about.

Our November project is particularly urgent now, only a few weeks after Typhoon Ketsana roared through Central Vietnam, killing dozens of people and causing enormous damage. The Kon Ray school, in fact, saw its water-supply system washed away in the typhoon. Roadmonkey’s projects focus on sustainable programs. But in this case, given the urgent need for humanitarian and other relief, we and East Meets West have agreed to donate a percentage of the $8,000 we’ve raised to emergency projects to get the school and its people and students back on track.

Tomorrow I fly from New York to Los Angeles, to convene with my expedition co-leader and gear up for the 12-hour flight to Asia.

More soon from the road to Vietnam…

Paul von Zielbauer

After meeting with the impressive crew at Amazonas Explorer to discuss a rafting adventure next spring, I rented a mountain bike from Cusco’s most famous Scotsman, Dougie Stewart. Dougie has a huge inventory of killer Kona bikes, most all downhill fat-tire demons. I rented a Kona downhiller to ride uphill, steeply, for two hours, along a winding road arcing up into the hills overlooking the city.

Guinea pigs, caught wild, eaten con gusto.

Two hours of near non-stop pedaling, up grades that only a bike with an almost 1/1 gear ratio could make possible. I could have walked the bike faster than I was riding it at certain points, but there’s something to be said for consistency. So I stayed in the saddle….a cursed, evil saddle. My behind was numb after an hour.

I rode — pedaling maniacally in absurdly low gear, yet moving at a pace that can be described only as glacial — past the white monolithic statue of Jesus Cristo, overlooking Cusco below, and several Inca ruins, to and from which a trickle of other foreigners were walking. I envied them. All they had to do was put one foot in front of the other. Walking. What a concept.

On I peddled. Until I reached, finally, a windy, almost cold plateau that led to the turnoff for the village that Scotsman Dougie Stewart told me was the point at which all offroad trails lead back to Cusco.

“You can’t get lost. Evre’thing leeds bahk ta toun,” Dougie told me, blissfully. He offered to draw me a “wee map” showing that it was physically impossible to get lost.

Downhilling toward Cusco: Halfway to lost, two hours from the middle of nowhere.

Exiting town, of course, I promptly got lost.

Later on, back in Cusco, Dougie would tell me, “Ah, you taerned rrright, when you should’ve gone strrreight thrreuw toun.”

I really enjoy Scots accents.

Anyway, instead of the sloping, enjoyable offroad trails that Dougie told me I’d easily find back to Cusco, I found narrow, steep, and ankle-breaking rocky cowpaths that required me to carry the Kona bike on my back. I’d had enough downhill hiking in Peru, mind you. This was neither rugged nor fun. The sun was setting, I was in the middle of literally nowhere. No people, no animals, no man-made structures. Just big hills that looked…really cold to sleep on all night.

Do I turn back and take the highway back home, and know I wimped out? Or do I trust in the Scotsman’s proclamation: “You can’t get lost”? I had one hour of daylight. If I kept riding/carrying the bike further into the hills, presumably toward Cusco, I ran the risk of having to backtrack in total darkness on ankle-breaking terrain….carrying the bloody bike.

Sometimes you just give yourself up to the universe, and this was one of those times. I figured the worst that could happen was that night would fall, I’d be lost in the hills and have to slaughter a cow and slice open it’s belly and crawl inside to survive, like that scene in “Star Wars.”

But eventually, the deeper into the hills I rode (and carried the bike), I found signs of civilization. By “civilization,” I mostly refer to a litany of angry dogs that, no matter how small, seemed to think they needed to angrily nash at my ankles as I rode by their masters’ homes.

But dogs begat homes, which begat homeowners who pointed me in the direction of “toun.” By sunset, I was riding through the smoggy streets of Cusco….on a now-flat tire. I walked the bike back to the drop-off point and was happily exhausted.

In Cusco, Das Auto takes a back seat to Das Llama.

After a sound, desperately needed sleep, I spent one more day in town, absorbing its essential flavor and relishing the relative dearth of foreign tourists. Cusco is a pretty city for the uninitiated. The climate is cool, dry and crisp by day, chilly by night. It’s small enough at its heart for one to still glimpse any number of hearty old women walking their llamas through the narrow cobblestone streets.

Roadmonkey will be back here, in spring 2010, to raft the untamed Apurimac River, and hike the lesser-known segments of the Inca Trail around Machu Picchu.

Now, it’s off to Vietnam, to scout out Roadmonkey’s November expedition.

See you there!

- Paul

On Sunday, Anotonio (my driver) and I left the tourist-choked lil’ town of Chivay, Peru, at the eastern end of el Cañón de Colca, the Colca Canyon, at 6:45am. I arrived in Peru four days ago to scout Roadmonkey’s March 2010 adventure philanthropy expedtion.

We drove west to Cruz del Condor, where multitudes of candy-colored coach buses disgorge camera-carrying tourists at canyon’s edge to watch South American condors, the world’s largest flying carnivores, ride thermals looking for breakfast.

Condors are a huge tourist draw on this route, so there was a lot of French and Dutch and Germans snapping digital pix at a speck with wings in the canyon far below, presumably a condor. We (the tourists) saw a couple condors wing by, maybe 100 feet below the cliff. It was nice. I couldn’t help note, though, how many completely worthless photos the crowd was snapping.

Antonio & I hopped back in his Hyundai van and drove to Cabanaconde, a sleepy town on the western edge of Colca Canyon. I dropped my bags off at my hotel, sunscreened up, filled my liter water bottle and hit the trail down into canyon. I was in for a rough surprise.

Two solid, near-nonstop hours of very steep, rock-strewn downhill trail hiking. About 3,000 to 3,500 feet in total. Killer on the quads, and on any knees that have more than, say, 23 years of wear on them. This is one tough canyon climb, my friends.

My legs, fairly well-conditioned from Brooklyn-to-Central Park-and-back bike rides through the New York summer, were shaking 40 minutes into the 2-hour hike to the “oasis” at the Colca River’s edge. I made it down, after several pauses in which I mentally parried invidious “holy crap” thoughts, to the grassy, palmy oasis by 12:45pm.

The oasis was really pretty cool: a couple of cold but clear, blue swimming pools, framed by green, short thick grass that ran right up to the pool edge, and a basic bamboo-style cantina with drinks, surly young waiter/minder, and a single “menu” aka food offering: a plate of rice, a puddle de papas puras (ie, crappy box-made mashed potatoes) and, to top off the carbohydrate rush, one boiled potato. That was lunch. But it did me fine.

I drank two bottles of sprite and ate the carb plate from hell and swam and read my book, ¨Zeitoun,¨ which is excellent, and lolled in the sun, listening to the breeze in the trees and the rush of the river water in the distance and thought, If every sunday were like this, free of worry or electronics or the need to do 10 things or compete with peers or see anyone except the couple people one wanted to see…that would be alright with me. It’s the same idea that draws me, still, to the idea of a year cooking, eating, writing and surfing in Hawaii.

A simple but full life. The sun and breeze, and the unique feeling of a nature-nestled well being, away from most other human effects, were worth the hike down. Note to self: find places like this more often.

After two hours of rest and relaxation, I had — after another refreshingly crisp swim — to put on my dusty brown pants and sweat-dried merino wool Ibex long sleeve and strap on the backpack and start the slog back up that 3,000 feet or so. Another round of “holy crap” thoughts soon began filtering into my sun-baked head.

For perspective, Cabanaconde lies at 3,600 meters above sea level — about 10,800 feet. For all y’all Americans, that’s twice as high as Denver.

What a climb. Three hours. Often at a 10% grade, if not greater. It was everything I had to keep shuffling one dusty boot ahead of another, one…more…step….higher. There was a sense of urgency driving me: darkness falls quickly and promptly at 6pm; I had started climbing at 3pm. If I took longer than the prescribed three hours, I’d risk being caught on the side of this cold, rocky cañón in utter darkness.

I passed several people on the trail. By passed, I mean I ever so slowly caught up to them, whispered “hi” or “ciao” or “hola” in a parched, non-accented throaty way and kept moving…glacially slow. The relentless sun, at this altitude, exacted its toll, in sweat and fatigue. Many times, I had to stop, sit on a rock and let my heart rate lower back down below its “gimme a break, pal” threshold.

The challenge was at least half mental. I had just enough water — I thought — to last me back to Cabanaconde. Rationing water on these kinds of climbs is, itself, an exhausting mind game. At one point I came upon a Peruvian guy with two mules on the trail. A female Euro-tourist sat on one of them. Her Euro-dude stood by, prepared to hike on foot. I asked the mule owner how much longer to Cababanconde.

“One hour,” he said. “You want a mule?”

I trundled upward. Finally, the sun dropped far enough onto the horizon to allow boulders on the zig-zag trail to create shadows in which to rest, ready one’s body and mind to continue onward.

When I got to the top of the trail, where it levels off toward town, the sun was 10 minutes from dropping behind the 20,000-foot peaks to the west. I sat down on a dusty rock and allowed myself a congratulatory 4-swallow chug from my near-empty water bottle. Soon the crepuscular sky was all but drained of light. I have no idea what came of the several people behind me, who fell out of my sight and must have been still climbing as the rapid cold of evening took hold of the region.

But as I was about 20 minutes from the top, I’d seen a second Peruvian guy walking two other mules down the trail….into a canyon of approaching darkness. I could only guess that he makes money by rescuing exhausted, grateful foreigners on this trail every day. Clever business model.

I ate dinner at the hotel, voraciously. Vegetable soup, two halves of an avocado stuffed with beets and chicken cubes (I scraped off the mayonnaise), and then a plate of lasagna. One huge Cusqueña beer, and one glass of marginal house wine. And now I’m at the hotel’s only computer terminal with another beer.

Cost be damned, I’m eating & drinking whatever the hell I want tonight.

Goodnight from Cabanaconde,

Paul

I’m waiting for my room to be ready here at Hotel Marani, full of Dutch, Danes and Germs & Aussies….curiously not a Frenchie to be heard or seen in the breakfast area or in the hotel logbook. The hotel is at the top of a narrow, winding cobblestone street just off Plaza San Blas, overlooking the city….a city probably overrun with gringos y otro extranjeros como yo.

But there’s comfy armchairs, semi-cheesy “Andean” flute musicwafting about, weak instant coffee served in pleasant faux-Inca red-clay mugs, and a strong, free wifi signal. What more could a roadmonkey want before 8am?

Breakfast, perhaps. But that can wait. I have dried apricots and plenty of mixed nuts from the supermarket in Arequipa to keep me energized.

- Paul

The goals is to create something new, not copy something else. Check out all the best photos and videos of Roadmonkey expeditions to date, and become a fan of the Facebook page that the above link connects you to (there is no Facebook login required).

Life is a series of chapters. One chapter has now closed — mostly…I may do some freelance for the New York Times from various parts of the world.

Another chapter is now opening, boldly and quickly. Let us see how the story goes.

- Paul