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ir a principal | Ir a lateral Posts (RSS) Comments (RSS) Photos (RSS) worldwalk-peacetour Blog Google Maps Flickr panoramio Myspace Facebook CouchSurfing youtube Twitter Contact Thursday, February 19, 2009
Camping in the Wild: Africa
Posted by WorldWalk-Peacetour at 7:00 PM Labels: africa, camping, mauritania, morocco, senegal, western-sahara
In Africa and particularly in the Sahara Desert one of the most important prerequisits of camping in the wild is always met: there’s room. The trouble comes when you have to put up or protect the tents.

by FERENC IVANICS
In Morocco it was always easy to find a nice camp site, we usually camped in forests—which became more and more fragmented as we walked south. We had problems near populated areas, but not with humans. Near Casablanca while putting up our tents we noticed lots of small, black balls. Next morning we weren’t awoke by a rooster crowing but sheep baaing near our tents. Sheep eat anything they find, especially in Africa where dried out, yellowish-green grass is their main course. When we noticed them, we had to get out of our tents quickly and drive away the animals, which were already tasting the skins of our home.


Apart of the domesticated animals there was another “enemy”, smaller but deadlier: scorpions. You can see scorpions of various sizes and colors. The more you travel south, the bigger they are. We had to close every small cracks and gaps and slots: with zippers, velcros, anything. You have to inspect very carefully the bottom of your tents every morning, and get rid of the arthropods that had spent the night there. That was quite a scary process at first but later became a dull routine.


The desert—doesn’t really matter if it’s in Morocco, Western-Sahara or Mauritania—is an enormous but poorly equipped camping. There’s space, but virtually there’s nothing else. Without soil we had to invent methods to fix the tents many times, and it was a tiresome job. It’s easy to drive stakes into the sand but they slip out just as easily. And in rocky deserts there’s no way you can drive the stakes into the ground. We used stones—their size depended on the strength of the ever-blowing wind—to hold the cords. I suppose there’s specialized tents for sand or snow, but we had what we had.


To use this method we needed stones. And sometimes it turned out to be hard to find them. Near the Moroccan-Mauritanian border we virtually camped on a landmine-field for ten days. Collecting stones on a mine-field is like playing Russian roulette, so no, thank you.


Near Essaouira there were no stones around. It was almost dark when we found some dry branches that the locals use to stabilize sand dunes. We borrowed some to stabilize our tents.


When we reached the savannah after crossing the Sahara desert it was like reaching the mountain meadows in Austria. All-in-all, we didn’t run into puzzling camp site related situations in Senegal. We camped in the wild without experiences worth mentioning.
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Camping in the Wild: Europe
Posted by WorldWalk-Peacetour at 9:00 PM Labels: austria, camping, europe, france, germany, hungary, spain
One of the recurring problems for the WorldWalkers in Europe was how to find a good camping spot every night. At the end of the day’s walk there was not much time to look for a perfect place before dark in those heavily populated areas.

by FERENC IVANICS
To be able to walk many dozens of miles you need a a good night’s sleep. To have a good night’s sleep you need to find a good camp site. When the weather’s not on our side we sleep in our tents, so we have to put them up. To put up the tents, to drive the stakes (pegs) into the ground we need to find proper soil, a more or less flat area with enough space for our tents. We cannot neglect the opinions of the local authorities either, walking for a good cause doesn’t mean that they always overlook the illegal nature of camping in the wild.

We’d recommend places near less traveled roads, grassy stripes at the edge of fields or forests, these were our favorite places.


In Hungary we camped many times on cultivated fields. It’s OK if it’s not recently seeded, you cannot really do any harm to the crops. Once, after a longer stage we had to find a camp site when it was well into the night. While assembling our tents we discovered that it wasn’t such a good idea camping on the field right next to the road... It had been recently fertilized with completely organic fertilizers. Next day we spent hours wiping the horsecrap off of the bottom of our tents.

We celebrated our last night before crossing the Hungaro-Austrian border in the field you see on the picture above. It was a fine place to stay, plain, comfortble. We slept like babies, not disturbed by the fact that it was raining during the whole night. To our surprise, thanks to the clayey soil we spent a few hours taking down the tents with pounds of slippery mud on our feet.


Our experiences in Austria were fairly similar until we reached the Alps. The mountain meadows were like luxury hotels compared to the fields, and they were quite common. Quiet, calm, silky smooth grass, putting up the tent was a child’s play. No one felt offended by our stay, we had a good time there.


In Germany we got used to camping in vast forests instead of meadows. These camp spots were just as luxurious as their Austrian comrades. Cheery clearings, milennium oaks, calm, just like in Goethe’s poem, the Wanderer’s Nightsong.
Wanderer’s Nightsong II

Up there all summits
are still.
In all the tree-tops
you will
feel but the dew.
The birds in the forest stopped talking.
Soon, done with walking,
you shall rest, too.

One night, our sleep was calm until we started to hear some kind of snorting and the noise of breaking branches in the middle of the night. The noises were getting louder and their source was getting closer to us, it was getting quite scary in the woods. And we became even more scared when we figured out that a hog herd was passing around our tents. They were feeding on the acorn of the millenary oaks. We got awake and alert in a moment. Those minutes in the dark felt like a lifetime, but finally our noisy and hungry guests left our home.

In France we got used to another unexpected difficulty. According to our plans we should have had arrived to Spain by then to spend the colder winter months there. But we started the tour with a month’s delay and winter cold had arrived early that year. We lived our coldest night in November of 2007. The skin of the tent was frozen stiff even before putting it up. We were unable to get a sleep in 25°F cold. We had all our clothes on, yet spent the whole night awake, shiwering. By morning there was ice even on the inside of the skin of the tent.


Our cheap tents and sleeping bags weren’t able to protect us from the cold, we managed to get along with proper food: fatty, high calorie meals, good French red wine.

Spain welcomed us with mountains and rocky soil, absolutely inapt for camping. But when we reached the orange and tangerine plantations of Valencia we arrived to heaven, almost. Fortunately orange thiefs rarely carry tents with them and almost never spend the night on the crime scene, so we weren’t mistaken for them, had no trouble with angry orange farmers.


Though our main interest was to find a place to sleep, we ate tons of oranges as well. And it radically changed our metabolism. :) Once a local farmer surprised us during a breakfast, we were a tiny little bit scared, but he was telling us: ‘tranquilo, tranquilo’. Even though we didn’t know what the words meant, we got the message. Orange prices were so low, it wasn’t even worth to harvest. Anyways, Valencia provided us with bed and breakfast. And oranges from Valencia are the best oranges in the world. We mean it!
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Rainy Weather in Málaga
Posted by WorldWalk-Peacetour at 3:00 PM Labels: europe, photos, spain, weather
Last week the weather was horrible in Málaga. The WorldWalkers took shelter in the mountains in their tents. Their new camp site offered them a chance to take some amazing photos of the weather and they made the best of it. No tornado shots, just some really heavy rain storm clouds and sunshine. They promised to provide us some rainbow images next time. :)



For more photos visit our Flickr account.
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Thursday, February 12, 2009
Exclusive Beggars
Posted by WorldWalk-Peacetour at 6:00 PM Labels: budget, europe, spain
Due to the global financial and economic crisis the brothers haven’t managed to find a temporary job in Málaga so far. They are not alone, hundreds try to find a job there with even less hope. So their only chance is begging.

And Ferenc and István do it in an enthusiastic and professional way, they really are exclusive beggars.

by FERENC IVANICS
We just received the 1000 euro donation of the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians. We are really grateful, thank you. It’s a big step, but according to our calculations this won’t be enough for the USA. Apart from the flight tickets we have to pay for the visas, we have to eat, sleep somewhere, buy new shoes, etc. Currently there is absolutely no chance for us to find a temporary job, so we have decided to beg, or—if you fancy these kinds of euphemisms—to ask for small donations. For the last weeks we have studied this profession in theory, our tutor was János Molnár, a Hungarian guy from Transylvania, who was telling us most of his knowledge and best practices. And there were, of course, many other teachers, friends who gave us advices. We chose one of the most traditional methods: a board with a description of our difficulties and a request for some help.


We worked for two long nights in our tents, we tried to be as prepared as possible. We didn’t want to be one of the many beggars in the city, but the WorldWalkers in trouble—who we are, indeed. So our objective was to create a very show-and-tellesque propaganda, and we didn’t waste our time to achieve our goal. The result was amazing. Other beggars stared unbelievingly at our donation equipment. We became exclusive beggars.


Our very special tool is the dynamic counter, which shows our financial necessities and the amount already collected.

First we tried our luck in front of the El Corte Inglés shopping mall. To our surprise, nobody was interested in our action, it was very disappointing. After a small analysis and discussion we thought that the customers of this shopping mall were always in a hurry, they had no time for beggars, not even for exclusive ones. We tried to find a quieter place that was busy enough at the same time. So we went into the city center of Málaga. The start was very slow but promising.


The first day there we got 32 euros, the next day 43 euros, so it seemed to work. You might think that it’s easy. But I have to tell you: it’s not, it’s a very hard job. We stand, sit or squat the entire day, and it’s very exhaustive mentally as well. Time passes slowly, the weather is cold, but there’s a hope we can collect the missing piece of our budget and finally fly on to North America. We wouldn’t do it if we saw another option. But we don’t.
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Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Gear: What You Need to Walk Around the Earth
Posted by WorldWalk-Peacetour at 4:10 PM Labels: budget, camping, equipment,
Walking and backpacking around the Earth is an extremely strong load test on your gear. But you have a real chance to prove its quality or its flaws: The brothers walked and put up their tents in France in frost, in the Sahara in 100 °F, they were hit by a hard thunderstorm in Austria, and a much harder sand storm in Africa, they spent many days among high mountains in the Alps, wandered on huge plains in France and in wild forests in Germany. I can say that they checked their gear in every imaginable situation. After the European and the African stage of the trip we’ll try to summarize their experiences and opinions about their tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, mats, trousers and shoes. Also, a new continent’s ahead, new soils, new climate. Probably they have to replace some of their equipment before moving on.


Tents: An Indispensable Base


Your tent is your home during backpacking. And if you backpack for 6 years, you try to choose the perfect one. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don’t.

The boys bought their tents an InterSport shop for about 120 euros (US$150). These are McKinley Compact Light 2 tents, a run-out model, but there’s a similar one on the official McKinley page: the Enduro Light. The manufacturer’s description:

Ultra-lightweight tunnel tent for 2 people, ideal for travelling and on trekking and cycle tours. Outer skin made of PU-coated polyester, all seams sealed with seam tape, 3,000 mm water column. 1 entrance, 2 frame arches made of aluminium. Tent pegs made of aluminium.

2 frame arches made of aluminium: It became obvious soon enough that these arches hadn’t been designed for everyday use. When you put up the tent you have to bend these pipes to the arch shape, and when you dismantle your tent in the morning these are straightened again. It was too much for them, in a month they were beginning to break one by one. Of course they were very-very light, but useless.


That time Ferenc and István were working in Spain on a construction of a house in the mountains. The foundations of that house was made of reinforced concrete. They got some rebars, and made their own frame arches. These arches were pre-bent by them and covered by many plastic tapes to keep the skin and the floor of the tent safe. The advantages of these arches were obvious: they’re very stable, no winds or storms beat them. The disadvantages are obvious, too: they’re damn heavy. So our advice to the manufacturer: please, pre-bend the arches, and don’t force the backpackers to bend them.

Tent pegs made of aluminium: This seems to be a joke, here you have the photos of them. Aluminium is too soft, the tip of the pegs became dull soon, they bend easily and can harm your hands.


Zippers: These are far too weak, ideal for a schoolbag, but not for a tent that is to be used in Africa. Somewhere in Mauritania they even had to saw a velcro to keep out the mosquitos (they seemed to be infected by malaraia).

Skin: The strong-point of these tents, there was no trouble with it whatsoever. Now there are some holes, protection from rain isn’t perfect, but the life of these tents haven’t been easy at all. So that’s just fine.


Sleeping Bag: Like Napoleon Bonaparte

“The bed has become a place of luxury to me! I would not exchange it for all the thrones in the world”, Napoleon Bonaparte said once.


The Denali Alpine 19 sleeping bags of the WorldWalkers were purchased in the same InterSport shop, unfortunately they can’t recall its price. The manufarturer’s comments:

Sleeping bag suitable for Alpine conditions, ideal companion while mountain climbing and on trekking and Alpine tours. The comfort range lies between +3°C and -3°C, the extreme range lies at -19°C. The double layer concept offers maximum loft and heat retention qualities. Ergonomic hood with corded seam at forehead, padded heat collar, shoulder extension and thermally enhanced foot part ensure optimum heat retention qualities. Excellent sleeping comfort through the use of robust, lightweight and breathable materials.

Ferenc and István have been very satisfied with the product, so far. As the manufacturer promised it provides comfort down to 25 °F. It needs a small space when packed, and it’s light enough. There was only one disadvantage revealed: the zippers, again. These are a bit stronger then the tents’, but they’ve been giving up. And the winter in Málaga is cold enough.


Backpack: A Snail’s Life


Snails carry their shell (i.e. their “house”) on their backs, in a similar way the brothers carry all their personal stuff on their backs. And to make their life as comfotable as possible, they needed a fine backpack. They have been using Quecha Forclaz backpacks for a while, and they are fully satisfied with them. Zippers are placed in the middle of the backpack, so you can easily reach the inner parts. If you need your foorth bottle of water in the desert, it’s really handy that you don’t have to get out the three empty bottles to find the full one. The raincoat was a bit surprising for then. The backpack itself is not water-resistant, if you want to make it water-resistant, you have to cover it. Close to the fasteners the textile has begun to break, and a couple of the many zippers broke down already, but these backpacks have survived the Sahara, so there’s nothing to complain about.


Accessories

Mats: They provide comfort and protection from cold. The polyethylene foam sleeping mats or mattresses were a present. They’re quite good, nothing extraordinary, though.


Hiking Hats: They’re from Quecha again, a brand that combines affordable prices with acceptable durability. These hats were really important for Ferenc an István in the desert, they were durable and they protected their head, face and neck from sunshine. And it was pretty easy to keep them clean as well, a rinse of clean water did the job. The nape flap could be a bit bigger to fully cover the ears, a light wind can blow it off. After the extremely strong usage it’s a bit ragged—mostly where the visor joins the hat, but it’s OK.


Trousers: Another peace of the equipment from Quechua. They’re worth their price, they survived half a year in the Sahara. They’re light, breathable and comfortable. But after half a year they decay very fast, you can’t repair or patch them. There were some weird color changes, the trousers of Ferenc became white-yellow, István’s: yellow-green. They’re easy to wash, they dry in a reasonable time. A good choice.




Shoes: For the Walking Part

Running Shoes: Their first shoes were Nike Dart V running shoes. They had survived more than 2.000 miles, nothing was wrong, there were only small flaws: the rubber of the tips separated, the softer materials gave up, but all these were repairable.


The death of these shoes arrives when the hard rubber layer on the sole of the shoes wears away. There is only a soft spongy layer under—or above—it. These shoes aren’t designed for long periods of walking, they can heat-up very much. And you know heat means sweat, and blisters will surely appear. Sweat means stinky shoes as well, so you have to wash them regularly, but it’s not easy to dry them. They are comfortable, strong and relatively cheap, the boys repeated and purchased identical pairs to replace their worn-out first ones.

Hiking Shoes: Their third pairs were Salomon Exit Aeros. These are not running but hiking shoes. The sole of them seemes to be too hard, but after a couple of miles it became acceptable, but not that comfortable as the sole of the Nike. Their uppers are surprisingly tough, although the mesh parts are a bit weak.


The shoes let the boys’ feet breathe, but let the sand of the desert in, too. And sand between your toes is not what you call a pleasant experience. Its sole was strong enough, and due to the breathable uppers, their feet were less hot, less stinky. These shoes not a bad choice, but the WorldWalkers are not sure, if they will buy them again.
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archives
February 2009 (7)
January 2009 (8)
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recent posts
Camping in the Wild: Africa - Feb 19, 2009
Camping in the Wild: Europe - Feb 18, 2009
Rainy Weather in Málaga - Feb 17, 2009
Exclusive Beggars - Feb 12, 2009
Gear: What You Need to Walk Around the Earth - Feb 11, 2009
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WorldWalk in Spain: Tempest in Málaga - Feb 17, 2009
WorldWalk in Spain: Tempest in Málaga - Feb 17, 2009
WorldWalk in Spain: Tempest in Málaga - Feb 17, 2009
WorldWalk in Spain: Tempest in Málaga - Feb 17, 2009
WorldWalk in Spain: Exclusive beggars - Feb 13, 2009
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Walking around the world in six years. That means 25.000 miles (40.000 km) on five continents: Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia and Asia. Two brothers—Ferenc and István Ivanics—walk 15-25 miles a day to reach their goal: to arrive home. To arrive home after going around our planet Earth, to arrive home after meeting many different people in many countries. People who live in different cultures, in different environments. People who have one very important common wish: peace. Peace, that is the final goal of the WorldWalk project. And the key is friendship and brotherhood, this is the message they'd like to share, try to tell everybody, every person living on our mother Earth.

View their complete profile on Blogger.
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twitter updates
http://tinyurl.com/b54gam 17 days ago
We survived the tornado in Malaga. But it was the hardest night of the whole tour. 17 days ago
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http://twitpic.com/19la8 - Check out DoveHand: Two Symbols of Peace in One Sculpture on the WorldWalk-Peacetour blog. 20 days ago
We haven't been down to Malaga for a few days. We're a bit fed up with camping in the hills around the city... 22 days ago
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