International Jet Trash

New Year’s Celebration 2012: No Electricity

Clubbing on New Year’s Eve is played out. Now it’s all about a 22-km snowshoe hike to a secluded hut in British Columbia.

A few of us ducked out of the traditional New Year’s Eve partying to leave for Squamish, BC for coffee. After that, we had to hike nearly 2km to the Diamond Head parking lot (we didn’t have snow chains), from which point we began the 22km hike to Elfin Lake.

Elfin Hut can host 30-odd snowshoe hikers and ski-tourers, though overflow arrivals can crash on the floor or in tents outside. The hut and its toilet facility are supposed to be lit with solar-powered lights, but some dumbass (or dumbasses) broke the timing systems, so it was all about propane lights, candles, and headlamps.

The hut is equipped with four propane burners, and guests take turns melting and boiling fresh snow for cooking/cleaning/drinking water.

Before adding some of our communal food to my pack, I noticed that the bottle of sparkling wine I had packed weighed more than the rest of my gear combined. At least I’d only be carrying the empty bottle back down.

Speaking of which…

Goon Bag!

One of our crew had the foresight to pack a box of wine: she then made use of the goon bag pillow when faced with a bare wooden bunk. I had only seen the goon bag as a pillow once before, when noticing a hipster asleep near Melbourne’s Smith Street the other month. I had no idea it was a national (and international) phenomenon.

(Downside: the toilets were a study in stench. A mingin’ masterclass, in fact. The dianoga that lived in the middle pit toilet was dead, floating face-down in the fecal froth. Be advised: your gag reflex will be challenged.)

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The view from Elfin Hut

Whiskey Jacks Feasting on Seeds

Howe Sound from the Trail

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(I have my own snowshoes, complete with climbing platforms. The others hired theirs from Sigge’s, that cross-country skiing scene on 4th Ave in Vancouver.)

A Day in the Life of a Suitcase

If you’re wondering what happens to your precious suitcase once you check it in, have a look at the Journey of Checked Baggage.

You’ll notice quite a few cuts in the video, and not only in the TSA screening area. Real-life suitcases get tossed around quite a bit more than this.

The takeaway from the video below, which Delta Airlines posted to its YouTube channel, is to show you that, when you check in your luggage, it becomes an item that gets shipped. There is not a crew of smiling, gentle staffers standing by to make sure that your irreplaceable snowglobe gets back home intact.

Best case scenario: baggage handlers are indifferent to your suitcase; after all, it’s one of thousands that they’ll handle in a day. Worst case scenario: it gets tossed around, and, yes, this happens.

As always, my suggestion is to do your trip with carry-on only. It’s surprisingly easy to do, and oyr handy Packing Light section will get you started.

Also, the last level in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow had a luggage-conveyor section in the LAX level, but that’s a bit different.

Is That a Funnel Web Spider? Oh, Fuck, It Is

This is a funnel web spider. Normally, such a spider is more three-dimensional and alive, but this is all you get.

The funnel-web spider is one of the deadliest in the world, a fact that I contemplated as one was crawling up my leg as I enjoyed a beer or two with Myles Nelson and Darren Sutton. I quickly brushed it off, and we had to kill it. Trying to move the spider could have resulted in a bite, and we were in a somewhat remote area. Not the middle of the bush or anything, but not super-close to any known hospital.

• Australian Spiders: a Rogue’s Gallery of Nasty Critters

This was a male, which tends to explore more than the female. That’s problematic because, while the male is smaller than the female, it’s also way more venomous.

What would have happened if the funnel web had bitten me? Let’s find out…

The bite is usually immediately painful, and if substantial envenomation occurs, symptoms commence usually within a few minutes. They include, progressively:

• Piloerection, sweating, muscle twitching (facial and intercostal, initially), salivation, lacrimation, tachycardia, and then (fairly rapidly) severe hypertension.
• Vomiting, airway obstruction, muscle spasms, writhing, grimacing, pulmonary oedema (of neurogenic or hypertensive origin), extreme hypertension.
• Unconsciousness, raised intracranial pressure, widely dilated pupils (often fixed), uncontrolled twitching, and death unless artificial ventilation is provided.

After about 2 hours the muscle fasiculations and most symptoms start to subside, and are replaced with insidious but profound hypotension, primarily due to severe cardiac failure.

Well, shit. I’m sure glad it didn’t bite me. We did the right thing, but, to be honest, I still feel bad about killing it.

We encountered the spider in a caravan park near Ninety Mile Beach, which is in turn near Lakes Entrance, Victoria. Good thing we didn’t see any tiger snakes.

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In a Paris Review article titled The Unlikely Event, Avi Steinberg dissects the humble airline emergency card.

These pamphlets have been degraded over time, contain almost no text. The art is muted and spare; this is by design. Older versions used the emergency card to highlight the glamor of air travel, even in disaster; the new cards smooth the passing of information into a sort of gel-coated capsule, to be swallowed with as much ease as possible.

Leaving aside the vanishingly unlikely chances of survival if your plane actually plunges from the sky, there’s no way that anyone on board will be as relaxed (or even happy) as the characters depicted in the pamphlet stored in the seat-back in front of you.

Chuch Palahniuk covered similar ground in Fight Club.