Track Pete

The image of the giant stone heads of Easter Island has been engraved on my mind for as long as I can remember – even as a child, there was something mysterious and amazing about the idea. Seeing them for myself has always been on my list and yet, if I’m honest, I never quite expected to actually travel there. I simply haven’t looked into it until recent times, and was shocked to find that this island, considered one of the more remote locations in the world, happens to be the proud owner of one of the largest runways in the Pacific. This runway, the most remote in the world, was completed in 1987 and crosses the entire width of the island, quite literally from coast to coast. It was provided by NASA as an optional failsafe landing zone for the space shuttle, but had the side effect of massively boosting tourism on the island thanks to the ability to land planes as large as 767’s with plenty of room to spare. I would not at all be surprised to find that the paved surface area of the ru...

We have some weird taboos about discussing money in the US, but I personally think we’d all be a lot better of if we shared more. Like the politics or not, you can’t argue with the effectiveness of collective bargaining – from unions to Groupon, there’s a reason sharing knowledge of money is all over the news during a critical time in our economy. Going forward, I will try to summarize my expenses on a weekly basis where possible to give you guys an idea of how much a trip like this costs. One critical thing to note: I am not “traveling on a budget” like most people, but rather the inverse – I have a certain amount of money and plan to spend it. Instead of trying to make it stretch to a certain amount of time, I’m trying to get as much enjoyment out of it and will simply end the trip when it runs out (and slink back home to get a job). Novel, eh? As of April 2, here is my current general expense data (all amounts are USD, I arrived in Peru on March 14): One way ticket to Lima: $520 Mot...

I’ve been in Lima since March 14 working towards ownership of a Honda CG125NL mototaxi with my decidedly non-fluent Spanish. After going through the initial hassle of establishing communication with a dealer, choosing a model, finding out how many were in country, and doing a wire transfer for the funds I thought I would be ready to go in 15 days – not too bad, all things considered. Well, there’s some good news and some bad news. The good news: I am now officially the proud owner of a red and yellow Honda mototaxi! All of the paperwork is mine and as far as everyone is concerned, this mototaxi is now proudly owned by me. It is still on a truck for delivery however it should be ready for me to get eyes on it and take some photos of the actual moto within a couple of days.

In spite of seeing it hundreds of times in surfing movies and documentaries, nothing quite prepared me for the intensity of being smashed beneath a wave at high speed and tumbling deep down into the ocean. Blurry disoriented vision combines with overwhelmed physical senses struggling against the pressure and noise to create a sharp stab of fear and pain, suddenly smothered as all sensation focuses precisely on the massive rolling wave moving over me. For a moment, that wave is my entire existence. Upside down, legs and arms akimbo, the light filtering through it defines depth and motion, a single moment in which everything stops to allow my mind to process this intensity. As the calm acceptance of the power around me settles into my mind a single thought escapes, unexpectedly shaking me from my reverence. ”How can I possibly capture this experience?”

Every time I travel, my world seems to shrink, my sense of time completely changes, and I often lose track of what’s happening “today.” I become completely disconnected from myself and almost feel like a passenger in my own body as I interact with the world outside. It’s especially strong when I travel outside North America, because I am instantly alienated by the world around me. There is a strangely surreal effect on one’s psyche to be completely surrounded by people speaking a different language, following different rules, and interacting in different ways. No matter how you try to submerge yourself in another culture, you are always an oddity, an outsider, and the ever present knowledge of this is what creates this strange mental disconnection.

Tomorrow I am off to Park City, Utah for a few days of snowboarding before I head off to South America in three weeks. I thought it might be a cool opportunity to highlight the humorous fact that the gear load for a five day trip to a cushy place with a bunch of buddies is almost exactly the same as the load for a few months around South America on a motorcycle. Aside from my sleeping bag, liner, basic tools, and a couple pieces of camera gear not going with me to Utah, this will be the sum total of my worldly possessions for the next few months: For the picky or curious, there’s a detailed breakdown below.

[ Product Link ] Nothing gets abused like my shirts on an adventure – sure, my underwear gets worn as often and as hard but it’s (almost) always under something to protect it. Mostly I’ve given up on caring about t-shirts, instead I make it a point to buy cheap shirts locally when I’m on the move, wear them until they fall apart or start to stink (2-3 weeks usually), then give them away and buy new ones. In India I picked up a couple great Nike shirts that held up to the rigors of hand washing and generally didn’t stink too much, but even after a lot of care back home, well… let’s just say I can’t really wear them in polite company because they look pretty nasty. Worse, even in India they were damn expensive, they did well in heat but were useless in the cold, and generally had a constant low-grade funk that wasn’t obnoxious but could get annoying. Similarly I had a couple North Face shirts that I thought might make the grade until they started to come apart at the seams and hand w...

[ link to product page ] Imagine spending nearly 80+ straight days wearing a jacket, only taking it off for brief periods of time while grabbing food or sleeping. Each time it’s worn over dirty, unwashed clothes and at night it’s wadded up for a pillow, drooled on and smashed out of shape. Never washed or maintained in any form, the jacket slowly becomes disheveled and discolored until it has aged many years in a few short months. Then, when the trip is over, without any receipt or proof of purchase or nary even a bit of fuss, the company let’s you trade it for a brand new one. That alone is enough of a mind-blowing reason for me to recommend this down jacket (and by extension any other First Ascent gear), but that reason doesn’t have to stand alone. In spite of some very clear negatives, the 2009 Downlight Sweater I bought last year was a fantastic piece of kit, and if you can find one on clearance and need some down, pull the trigger without hesitation.

On September 24, 2009 I received an order from Amazon with my brand new ContourHD video camera. Five minutes later it was torn out of the box and the Hat Cam was born ; it’s that easy to get started with a Contour cam. In the time since then, I have recorded many hundreds of gigabytes and hours of video with my ContourHD on five different continents, from sea level to over 16,000 feet, in jungles, snowy mountains, deserts and other terrain. It’s been strapped to my head, peeked out from my jacket, smashed onto my backpack, held in my hand and mounted to all kinds of vehicles and devices. I’ve punted it off (small) cliffs, fumbled it onto the side of the road at 35MPH, driven over it, stepped on it, fallen on it and left it out in the rain and cold… all more than once.

It’s very rare for me to suffer buyer’s remorse, as I typically research any product I am going to use quite carefully. When it comes to photography, I have always been a Point & Shoot fan for a number of reasons: smaller and lighter cameras, less complexity, and most importantly, lower cost. In my adventures I could carry two P&S cameras and not worry about one being broken or stolen and I was generally quite happy with the quality of the photos. This changed in a very subtle way sometime in early 2010, as I began to understand that photographs of people and things were just as interesting as photos of places and landscapes… I realized I was leaving out part of the story of my adventures because I often left the people around me out of them. As I changed some of my style, I became absolutely amazed with the quality of photos being taken by a friend I met in Nepal with a Nikon D5000. Her photos of the people around her told a completely different story than those I took due to ...

One thing I learned when planning for last year – don’t get too caught up in any particular idea, keep everything as open as possible. It cost me more money in airfare to not plan months in advance but aside from the mistake of paying rent on a condo I wasn’t living in, the flexibility in that schedule allowed me a much greater set of experiences. After a fair bit of planning on thinking, I’m already seeing my 2011 completely change from how I imagined it two months ago. There’s still a month before anything really exciting starts other than preparation (paperwork, paperwork, paperwork), but as things are starting to come together I wanted to share my rough plans for 2011 as of right now:

On April 9, 2008, my life was irrevocably changed. Every risk I’ve taken in the last two years has been a direct result of almost a single moment in time. I remember looking at one of my best friends, Brad, and saying “I am going to quit my job and travel the world.” To hear Brad describe this moment is somewhat shocking, because he could see in my eyes how real this was, and he knew it would happen. It started out, as it always does, with a small risk. Brad wanted to do European Delivery on a new BMW and spend a couple weeks driving around Europe – for me to join him would require taking the longest amount of consecutive vacation from a job I had ever taken in my life, an entire two weeks . Our trip would end in Amsterdam, where some of the guys on my team worked, so I was able to justify it by finishing up with a week working out of our Amsterdam office. Brad’s brother Adam joined us for what would turn out to be a whirlwind tour across most of Western Europe and a defining experien...

A huge part of my traveling is sharing my experiences with friends and while I enjoy my writing, nothing beats photos and videos for simple, pure sharing. Over the last two years I have slowly tweaked the hardware, software, and technologies I use for this, always trying to find a balance between cost, usability, and quality. In July I took a couple major steps, adding a DSLR and a high definition audio recorder to address what I felt were major gaps in the video of my ContourHD (audio and low-light performance). As I prepare for my next adventure, I’m taking the knowledge gained over the last year and changing things up again. First of all, the Zoom H2 is out – the audio quality was amazing, but it is simply too big, too bulky and (most importantly) too much of a hassle to use. I am currently looking for a smaller, much simpler device that I can activate with the touch of a button/slider through a jacket pocket. I plan to equip this two small external microphones including a shotgun ...

For just over a year now, I’ve only worn five pairs of underwear – for much of that time, I’ve only had three pairs actually with me. At times, I’ve swapped as often as four times a day while at others I’ve gone as long as three weeks without changing or washing a pair. A few times I’ve even gone over a week straight without removing a pair at all (or taking a shower for that matter). It sounds absolutely disgusting, but I assure you that even in some of the most extreme circumstances I’ve been fresher feeling (and smelling!) than after a day at the office in a pair of Fruit of the Looms.

I’ve been home from my scooter trip for a month now, and by far the most common question I’ve heard anyone ask is “What’s next?”  It’s a question that has consumed me for months, and needless to say, it’s not easy to answer. My plan for the next adventure is a bit more ambitious. If you’ve been following me, you know that I have two driving reasons behind my recent adventures: the first is to help people in need through charitable donations while the second is to inspire “normal” people to look up from their daily routine and see the amazing beauty of the people and world around us, to realize that we’re all the same and enjoying that is as (or more) important than focusing on our own small bubbles of existence.

Apparently I’m not the only person in the world who uses the internet – today I got to enjoy the slightly bizarre experience of reading about myself as written by others who encountered me on my long scooter ride. I thought I’d share these on my blog and relive my own memories a bit.

Sometimes when I’m hundreds of miles away from any cell or internet service and haven’t been able to communicate with the outside world, my mom likes to update friends with stories about my exact location:

In the last two and a half years I’ve only used one tent, a fantastic 3lb compact two-person tent from Big Agnes called the Seedhouse SL2 . It’s a little frightening to realize that during this time I’ve spent over 120 nights sleeping outdoors in it, and I’ve set it up and torn it down over a hundred times. I’m not a professional gear reviewer who spends a couple nights in different tents throughout the year, so I can’t compare it from personal experience to other tents – but I can say, from immense personal experience, that this tent will not let you down. Ever. The Seedhouse SL2 is a very simple design with a single aluminum hub pole held together by some sort of magical kevlar or nylon. Toss it on the ground and maybe kick it once or twice and it self assembles rapidly with strong mechanical clicks, reminiscent of a Transformer – I’m not sure exactly why, but this action is always a pleasure to experience and makes the first few moments of setting up camp enjoyable.

One of the hardest things with any long journey is coping with the end – you feel amazingly free at first, but this quickly turns to boredom. Worse, you may find yourself changed in many ways, perhaps unexpected, and accepting this can be quite difficult. This is the fourth time in the last year I’ve gone through this, each time different. In November, 2009, I returned from one of the most bizarre and thought-provoking vacations anyone can imagine, where I rode a mototaxi thousands of miles across South America (I cannot recommend this type of experience enough). I had already made plans to quit my job, but I think everyone I worked with secretly hoped I would change my mind when I returned – unfortunately for them, this experience solidified my need to experience life at a different level. Immediately after my final day of work on December 31, 2009, I set out on a road trip across the US with the goal of getting the few remaining states in my “all 50 states” merit badge. Sleeping in...

The sun flees behind me, sullen, as I pass it by. Night slowly smothers my world, until all that exists is a shrunken cone of light, a feeble token of my unwillingness to fully surrender to the darkness. The smooth dark curves of the mountain road reveal themselves by this light, tantalizing glimpses of yellow and white paint keeping me within the night road’s embrace. Each curve is a new mystery to explore, the road leaning away from the light and refusing to reveal itself. They must be felt, intimately, each meter of the curves coyly unfolding itself under my touch as I slide along it. The sharpness often stabbing, forcing an unexpected response, rapid deceleration followed by careful, thoughtful exploration. Mysterious shapes slide by, tugging at my mind, familiar yet completely foreign. The road consumes my attention, even to consider what lies beyond, in the darkness, is a risk not worth taking. Somewhere above lights in the sky beg to be revealed, but the curves before me refuse ...