Where in the world is John Henzell?

It’s midwinter in Abu Dhabi. Thanks to the peripatetic nature of my life in recent years, the last time I experienced midwinter’s day was three and a half years ago in Christchurch in June 2005.

I had midsummer in New Zealand that December but when June 21 rolled around in 2006, I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in the United States.

In US hiking circles, the summer solstice is also known as Hike N@ked Day and although I was in the middle of a 300km-long roadless segment through the Sierra near Yosemite, it seemed appropriate to take part in HND despite the risk of simultaneous sunburn and frostbite to areas which had not seen the sun in a veeeeery long time.

And it’s fair to say, my enthusiasm for HND was not a view shared by my hiking companions, TG and Inaki. As I had my photo taken on Silver Pass above, it was to a chorus from TG of: “No. NOOO!!! It’s just wrong!” The nekkidness itself was very short lived, not least because there was a long bumslide down frozen snow on the other side of the pass.

By December I was back in New Zealand, where I had my third midsummer in a row.

In 2006, there had been on forest fire in central Oregon and we’d had to bypass just over 100km of the PCT. Partly for the sake of hiking the missing part of the trail but mostly because I wanted to catch up with four of my 2006 hiking companions and help out the 2007 hikers, I flew back to the US for two weeks.

Besides hiking the missing miles mission in Oregon, I particularly wanted to be able to help my friends Scout and Frodo, who had in turn repeatedly helped me out both practically and pastorally the previous year. With the help of my 2006 hiking buddy GoBig, we hiked over Kearsage Pass in the Sierra with 12 days of their food so Scout and Frodo could hike through the 300km section of the Sierra without having to go out of the mountains to resupply.

As it happened, we arranged to hike in to meet them on June 20 and we would still be with them the following day. There was a degree of symmetry to this because it had been Scout who had introduced me to the theory of HND in 2006, so it seemed only appropriate that I was with them on HND 2007.

Frodo, who in her other life is a high school teacher in San Diego, had about as much enthusiasm for HND as TG had the year before.

Let me quote from my trailjournal for June 21, 2007:

Frodo, it ought to be said, was not a fan of the summer solstice ritual of Hike N*ked Day.

“My students might be reading,” she’d said. But, being Frodo, she had a plan.

GoBig, she knew, was about as enamoured of HND as Frodo was and, she knew, would not take part. “I’ll take part,” she said, “if everyone else does.”

But she was not taking into account the changes in GoBig’s life during and since the hike. GoBig had indeed decided it was time to try new things and to challenge boundaries.

“Damn!” I could imagine Frodo saying. But then just as it seemed she’d been snookered into baring all to an audience of mosquitoes, I’d like to advise the TrailJournal world and particularly certain student populations in the San Diego area, that another hiker came along who looked pretty much identical to Frodo and was willing to take her place. She could even conjure up that “I can’t believe I’m doing this” facial expression. Frodo was saved. I cannot tell you her relief.

When I did a HND photo last year on the trail, the biggest hazard was sunburn in places where the Sun Don’t Shine. But in this record low-snow year, the hazards were far more intrusive and their whining opportunism had coloured what was pegged as a restful day at Rae Lakes before we parted ways.

We’d waited until the other hikers headed on before finding an appropriately photogenic place and then with, er, Frodo’s stunt double taking part, we hastily disrobed (like in a bad 1970s p*rn film) and then assumed our pre-arranged positions (definitely NOT like in a bad 1970s p*rn film). The cameras beeped and the mosquitoes whined and we whined in turn about being bitten in places that just shouldn’t be bitten.

At the end of June, I flew back to wintery New Zealand, where I was still based when the austral midsummer rolled around in December. But by then, I’d given notice at The Press and was about to embark on my flight of the godwits tour, heading for Alaska via Japan.

This was summer, at least technically. But when I climbed a snowclad Fuji at the end of April, it required the use of ice axe and crampons and I struck windchill temperatures of about -20degC/-4degF.

And then when I climbed Denali/McKinley in Alaska a month later, the summit was at -25degC/-17degF three weeks shy of midsummer’s day. There was going to be no HND on this mountain! As it happened, I reached the 6200m summit and got back unscathed but while packing up my tent at the 5200m high camp on the mountain, I frostnipped two of my fingers and I was still feeling the effects when the summer solstice rolled around.

In 2003, I’d had the summer solstice at Scott Base in Antarctica, which was so far south that the nearest the sun ever came to setting was a desultory dip to within about 20 degrees above the horizon. In Alaska, I was then only a little way south of the Arctic Circle so there was an appealing symmetry to spending the northern summer solstice of 2008 in the land of 24-hour daylight at Deadhorse, on the Arctic ocean and the furthest north it’s possible to drive in North America.

The left hand pic is just south of Deadhorse (a town that is even less appealing than the name would suggest) in bright sunlight at 1.12am. Some ill-timed cloud spoiled a midnight sun shot the following night, when I camped on an ancient moraine shelf in the Brooks Range and captured this willow ptarmigan.

For a while, I pondered taking time off to fly somewhere in the southern hemisphere like Zanzibar but decided against it. I’m sure there’s some dodgy metaphor for life that involves endlessly putting off midwinter on a par with Dylan Thomas’ “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

But midwinter in Abu Dhabi is actually pretty nice.

On December 21, I went on a sunset dhow cruise with some of the hash house harriers crowd and spent an amiable hour or two as the traditional Emirati boat did laps of the channel between two of the islands that make up Abu Dhabi. Some people wore jackets and even beanies.

I just smiled. On midsummer’s day in Alaska, I’d had to wear my down jacket as temperatures struggled to hit double figures (in celsius) and remained well below that when the windchill was taken into account. While emailing friends in New Zealand this week, I was informed that my midwinter maximum of 24degC/75degF was considerably warmer than the austral midsummer was offering.

Then I walked through pleasant evening temperatures back to the Capital, the hotel which I’ve called home for coming on for four months.

Something tells me I’m not going to enjoy midsummer here as much…

(Merry Christmas everyone)

When I heard about the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge soon after arriving in the UAE, I pitched to the news desk the idea of getting a team together so we could report the six-day running, kayaking and mountain biking race from the inside.

I heard nothing, either about that idea or indeed any of the other dozen or so that I’d pitched to them in my first couple of weeks at The National. Instead I continued through what I later dubbed my invisibility phase at the newspaper, in which I toiled for 40 days (and nights) before my first story was published.

But when the event actually rolled around this week, I was sent to cover the first couple of days as it went from the Corniche in downtown Abu Dhabi then transferred across to Sir Bani Yas Island, the former hideaway of Sheikh Zayed but now a game reserve and home to an exclusive hotel.

The race began on the newly developed beach, which is formed of imported sand dumped over the landfill used to reclaim an extra few hundred metres of foreshore. From what I’ve been told, it covered what had been a pretty but less user-friendly series of coral reefs just off shore from the original waterline.

Not that you’d know that now because there’s just a pleasant, if not especially natural looking, beach amid the combination of high rises and building sites that make up the edge of downtown. After a quick circuit of the Corniche by mountain bike, they dragged their double sea kayaks into the water and – silently cursing the sails that were there more for brand awareness than function – paddled out to another semi-manufactured island offshore, did a 10k run then headed back.

This was the second year of the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge, which was set up by the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority as a way to highlight the physical attractions of the UAE, about which most outsiders know of only the bling of Dubai or think is relegated to oil rigs and camels. When you see pix like the one below from last year, you can see that it was set up as a picturesque course.

Kiwis have dominated adventure racing, as the genre is known, for years. Unfortunately they’re not nearly as good at getting sponsorship, being from a nation of modest means and possessing an inherent disinclination to highlight their skills and abilities. (No surprise that the US is the polar opposite in both)

But there was an appealing Cinderella story last year when New Zealand ultra athlete Richard Ussher’s team was unable to get any meaningful sponsorship for the inaugural Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge and ended up paying their own way over. And they won, having led from start to finish, which was a relief because the substantial prizemoney averted what would have been an ugly fiscal deficit if they’d merely placed. Now all four of the winning team were back, albeit split between three teams, with Ussher and his wife Elina now sponsored by the local company which runs the hotel on Sir Bani Yas Island.

(Full disclosure: Richard Ussher might have won the Speights Coast to Coast this year but I beat him to the finish line at Sumner by more than 45 minutes. This might possibly have been because I was doing the two-day race and thus had a trifling 23-hour head start on him.)

With that back story (the cinderalla bit, not me beating him in the Coast to Coast) and the profusion of top-level teams attracted by what is now one of the biggest prize pools in adventure racing, it was gratifying to see Ussher’s team come in first at the end of the first day.

Everyone then drove a few hours through sand and salt marshes to Sir Bani Yas Island. This used to be the private island of the UAE’s founding father, Sheikh Zayed, who established a wildlife preserve on it and installed a truly mind-boggling quantity of irrigation. One of his constant refrains was: “How green is my desert?” You wouldn’t strictly call it green now but it’s certainly much more vegetated, albeit everything growing in incongruous straight lines mirroring the location of the irrigation pipes.

After his death in 2004, the 87sq km island was opened up to other uses, including an eco tourism operation based on the inevitable charismatic megafauna.

Because the days events were running late, what should have been a two and a half hour wildlife tour for the media contingent was condensed to 40 minutes. The benefit was that as we reached the group of 38 giraffes, the full moon was rising while the sun was setting on the other side of the island.

The racers had to sleep in tents on the beach, while the soft media brigade stayed at the Sheikh’s old guest house, which has been turned into a $1000/night hotel.

The photo above isn’t the guest house. It’s just the pool bar. The photo below is the guest house. It has a mere 64 bedrooms.

I must be becoming desensitised to the excesses of the UAE. This stuff just seems normal to me now…

Then everyone went to the beach site where the competitors were camped for a barbecue, organised by the hotel. As you’d expect from anything associated with the hotel (or, you could argue, the whole of the UAE) it wasn’t a barbecue which an antipodean would recognise.

The next day began (for the competitors) with a 45km circuit around the island on mountain bikes. For the soft media brigade, we were ferried around in the game-watching vehicles. As ever with anything involving journalists, it was like trying to herd cats and nobody could agree on the best photo site, even though there were only six journos to each vehicle.

The biggest problem for the competitors were the estimated 5000 sand gazelles that call Sir Bani Yas Island home. Normally, the animals on the island enjoy absolute right of way but they learned that the competitors were not as keen to stop as the wildlife-watching tourists are.

Almost everyone later compared notes on near misses, due in part because the hovering helicopter made the herds of gazelle skittish.

I later spoke to a rider from the British team Sleepmonster, who said in Scotland once a few years ago, he’d run into a deer at 30mph.

“I didn’t fancy running into a gazelle,” he told me. “These ones have horns.”

Ussher’s team came in first once again, then the hacks headed back to Abu Dhabi shortly before the competitors headed off on a 33km paddle across to another island in the Arabian Gulf for an overnight bivouac.

And next year? I’ve already found another couple of people willing to field a team from The National.