Motivation
I am not going to delve into
details here about just why exactly I hate Christmas and I don’t
like spending it with my family, let’s just say I have some bad
memories which make me wanna avoid it. For this reason in years
2014-2016 I’ve traveled away from Poland at that time. In 2014 I
went to the ESO Astronomy Camp and I set off to Warsaw a day before
the flight on purpose, so I only had to be at home for Christmas Eve,
but around 5 am on the 25th I was already on board of the
train. In 2015 I intended to just stay in Warsaw and not visit my
hometown at the time, but a roommate from dormitory convinced me that
if I’m not going home I should at least travel somewhere, so I
found super cheap flights to Oslo and went there for 3 days (it was a
nice although in some aspects extreme adventure, I don’t know if
I’ll ever describe it on the blog, but I’ll be happy to tell
about it in person, if You meet me and ask me). In 2016 I ended up
flying to Barcelona and setting off for my first ever hitchhiking
trip together with a Spanish friend I met at an International
Astronomical Youth Camp two years before. The goal was to hitchhike
all the way back to Poland, but the trip was cut with a somewhat
bitter ending in Belgium, and a significant financial loss for me for
some very stupid reasons. Still, it was a unique adventure and I feel
like I should describe it on the blog, hopefully I’ll get the
motivation to do so at some point.
During the Christmas hitchhiking trip in 2016 - Perpignan, France
Now,
in 2017 I didn’t intend to go anywhere, I figured things should
have cleared out in the family so that Christmas will be ok, besides
I felt somewhat discouraged by how my 2016 Christmas trip ended.
Maybe also because I had traveled quite a lot in 2017 already, no
earlier than November I had been in the United States which was a
great adventure, so my urge to travel and explore was partially
sated. I say partially, because I’m that kind of a person who takes
one day of rest after an exhausting travel and is already itching to
plan the next one. Ok, back to the point: I didn’t intend to, but
less than two weeks before Christmas a
series of home quarrels made me worry that nothing has cleared out
and things might go as badly as they did back when I was at home for
Christmas in my teenage days. Besides, winter depression started to
kick in, and for several reasons my mood started deteriorating
quickly. Hell, it was plummeting.
United States in November 2017
But
I’m not going to bother You anymore with my pains in the neck, this
blog is meant to tell the story of my positive addictions and how I’m
enjoying my life, not about my personal problems and how they often
spoil my mood! So instead of describing that shit, I’m going to
tell You about how I dealt with this problem and experienced an
amazing adventure with amazing people. It was fairly obvious that the
only reasonable way I could try
to handle it, was to resort to the well verified method for avoiding
Christmas – travel somewhere. And I really wanted the trip to have
a highline accent, since this sport has become my main thing in 2017
and now it’s really the thing that keeps me going, I cannot imagine
life without highlining anymore. Besides, there is no community in
which I feel more “in the right place” than the slackfamily,
there is so much positive energy in pretty much every highliner, that
I knew spending time with such people was exactly what
I needed. That it was
my only hope to get out of, or at least alleviate, my winter
depression.
The
problem with spontaneous decisions is that I had less than two weeks
to come up with a way to run away far, cheaply (I had spent too much
money on traveling in 2017 anyway), and to find some slackliners I
could meet up with. I checked where do long distance buses go from
Poland, and I saw it’s possible to get pretty far east in Ukraine.
I’ve never been there, it’s famous to be a cheap country, and
thanks to a calendar shift that occurred a few centuries ago they
don’t celebrate Christmas at the same time as most of the world, so
slackliners would be more likely to be up for highline action rather
than spending time with their families. It seemed a perfect option,
and I contacted Valentyna, slacklining friend from Ukraine, if she
would be interested to meet up and maybe do some
slackline/midline/highline action as well. It seemed that meeting up
would be possible, but highline action would
be unlikely since she had work in Kiev etc. Following her
recommendation I contacted Stanislav, a slackliner from Dnipro, who
said that while he also had work, he’d be happy to rig something in
the weekend. So I was pretty much decided on going to Ukraine, but I
had underestimated the difficulty to get there around this time. It
turned out that all the cheap buses were sold out, there were no
seats left in an international train (seriously none, not even in
first class), and there was no sensible connection with blablacar for
the date which suited me either.
It
was less than a week before Christmas Eve when I finally realized
that making it to
Ukraine the way I wanted was impossible, and I started desperately
seeking an alternative. While scanning the map of Europe I realized
that I have a friend in Cluj, Romania, fairly close to Poland, and
he’s a motivated highliner (I met him at Drill and Chill in
Bosnia), so I contacted him if he’d like to meet up and rig
something or just do stuff. He said he was out of country, but his
friends were planning to rig something near Brașov. Now, Brașov
appeared to be significantly farther, but I checked connections, and
it was doable! Bus to Budapest and a direct train from there,
tallying the overall travel costs (there and back) at about 60 EUR!
And that’s how it ended up happening, a little highline action
carried
out by a group of motivated Romanian slackers, mostly beginners (none
of them I really knew before),
and me, a perfectly random addition from Poland :D But before we
started rigging stuff together, I had to somehow get there, so let’s
stop in Budapest for a moment.
Andrei, my Romanian friend from Drill & Chill. Here on a waterline we rigged in Bosnia.
Christmas
Eve in Budapest
I
got off the bus in Budapest around 6 am, walked to the train station
to leave my luggage there (a walk far longer than I had anticipated),
shopped on the way in a grocery store which turned out significantly
more expensive than I wanted it to be, exchanged money into some more
forints since I spent all I had in that shop, left my luggage in a
locker, told off a few annoying people who tried to get some money
from me in a very intrusive way, and set off to explore. The weather
was fabulous! I was delighted to feel the sunshine on my face again,
after so many cloudy days in Poland! I took 3 juggling clubs with me,
because there wasn’t enough space in the luggage locker. Only the
day before I had bought myself
a new camera (as I explained in the description of the US video, my
old camera is really asking to go on retirement), with full HD
recording option and twice the optical zoom of my previous one, and I
figured it would be cool to test out video quality by recording some
juggling action. And it all went pretty well, until I hiked up to the
top of that famous hill in Budapest, and I wanted to record some
juggling with that famous statue in the background. I put the camera
on a little fence, started recording…
A
stronger gust of wind suddenly came, knocking juggling clubs out of
my control, and knocking the camera off the fence. The fall it
experienced was less than a meter, and I’m pretty sure that I
dropped my old camera from such height at least once, and it still
served me for many months after. So what happened to the new baby?
Lid doesn’t shut, and makes a loud cracking noise when turning off
the camera, sometimes it switches off all by itself saying an
error was detected, the
images get blurred and it only starts to sharpen once zoomed in (the
other troubles
I could get by with, but come on)!
Well,
just brilliant! I had only just begun the trip, only just started
enjoying myself, forgetting about my winter depression as the
sunshine kissed my face and the familiar thrill of traveling into the
unknown started to turn in… And here I go, right on the first day
of the trip, destroying a camera worth 800 PLN. Before You ask, yes I
recently tried to repair it, but when they estimated the repair cost
at over half the original price I said no thanks, please just utilize
the damn thing and don’t remind me about it again.
Trying to be creative, one of very few sharp pictures this camera snapped in it's lifetime
Very cute statue on the shore of Danube, camera still working
Very last sharp picture taken by the camera, less than 24 hours after it was bought
So
it was a really hard moment for me, all the happiness sucked out like the flame of a rapidly extinguished candle, just a
second ago a vigorous traveler heading to adventure, now an enraged
individual that’s kinda lost in space. Yeah, I know, I only said a
while ago that I don’t want to cry about my problems here, but only
describe how I dealt with them. But
I had to describe this unlucky situation throughly, otherwise I
wouldn’t give You a complete picture on my trip. Coming to terms
with this situation was not easy nor immediate. But what I realized
fairly quickly was that I had a very simple choice to make. Either I
could accept that what had just happened cannot be undone, but try
not to think about it and enjoy the rest of the trip, or I could keep
dwelling on the misfortune that occurred to me, spoiling my mood for
the whole time in Romania and beyond. So I started putting my efforts
to meander into the first option. I managed to find a tiny bit of joy
in standing on top of some weird umbrella-like metal structure I found and
balancing a club on my head. I also wanted to do something really
risky and illegal, like climbing a bridge, which I knew would put me
in a better mood, but the train to Brașov was setting off around 8 pm
and doing such a thing at any other time than in
the middle of the night would be sure way to get into trouble and
double my financial loss thanks to a police ticket. So the only
consolation that was available was a delicious veggie burger downed
with two beers served by a very cute waitress. I also managed to find
some comfort in a thought that technically I hadn’t lost 800 PLN.
Because I had already spent these money, and I had no intention to
spend as much again, so it didn’t really affect my financial situation.
The only thing I had lost was a camera. Not a very comforting
thought, but better than nothing, right?
Metal umbrella-shaped structures on top of which I stood and balanced a club on my head for a few minutes. Cut out from a screen shot from Google Maps, since I failed to find a better picture of these online.
So I didn't do it, but clearly I wasn't the first one to come up with a thought to climb up this bridge. Image blurred since it was taken with my camera after it's fall.
My
overall conclusion is that I will probably buy myself a cheap sport
camera, it seems to be more suitable for my usage anyway (I bought a
digital camera cause I wanted to take good pictures as well, but I
guess I mostly need to record juggling and highline action, so) and
less likely to get destroyed in such a stupid way.
Romania
Finally,
on the 25th
morning, I arrived in Brașov. On the train station I met Iulia, who
showed me into a temporarily empty apartment, where I could stay
together with others from our pack who didn’t come from Brașov.
Highline action was meant to begin on the 26th
so I had a day to spend on my own. Despite being tired from two
nights respectively in a bus and train, and from walking around
Budapest a lot, I set off to walk around Brașov, including a mountain
hike
to Tâmpa, a characteristic mountain with the town’s name in big white
letters on it. I referred to it in my thoughts as “Romanian
Hollywood”, until I realized that a neighboring town had the
exactly analogous thing :D I also stumbled upon a slackline-related
graffiti made a few years before by Diana, one of the members of our
Romanian highline team.
On my hike around Brașov, view from the edge of a rock which could also provide a nice highline spot, but it would only make sense for a ~150 m highline, so it was not an option with the gear we had. I guess You could call the partial blur effect kinda artistic, pity it's not that but a camera failure.
Tâmpa
Slackline related graffiti I stumbled upon in Brașov :-)
On
the 26th
morning we set off to scout for highline spots. I was with two
people, Iulia and Ion, and the others joined about an hour later. But
I didn’t get to meet them until the evening, because… Now that’s
the kind of adventure I like to talk about! We were walking along a
trail and we found what appeared to be a
beautiful abyss with an option for natural anchors. So we had to
verify if it’s feasible to climb up to these potential anchors, in
order to establish a highline. I suggested that to speed things up we
can split and I would go on the side which seemed harder to approach,
while Iulia and Ion would take the other side.
What
started as a steep scramble up quickly turned into actual rock
climbing, when a ledge I thought I could traverse across to an easier
ascent turned out to be far slimmer than I expected so I opted to
advance straight above me instead. It wasn’t any hardcore free solo
climbing, just little boulder problems with such big handholds that
it felt almost like climbing a ladder, interrupted with some nice
ledges or trees to hold where I could rest. Except they were often
exposed, so that making a mistake in such a trivial boulder problem
could in fact cause a fall of not just a few meters down, but all the
way to the bottom of the canyon. Slowly the easiest option of ascent
wasn’t that easy anymore, I had to take off my gloves to manage
some moves when handholds weren’t for a whole hand, but for
individual fingers. I was already at least 50 m above the trail down
in the canyon when I realized that some of the moves I did during the
climb I definitely didn’t want to do while going down. So the only
option was to keep going up, knowing that even if we manage to
establish a line I would have to climb up all the way to the summit
of the mountain I was on the side of, so I could transfer
on another, less steep slope which would allow for descent. I won’t
say the climb was super risky, but there were a few sketchy moments,
like the one when I had to get up out of a small cave-in, but
there were no decent handholds above it, yet I somehow managed to
scramble up by holding on to clumps of grass while keeping most of my
bodyweight on solid footsteps I had, so I don’t tear that grass
out. Not exactly a move You wanna do while exposed to a 70+ meter
abyss ;-) Anyways, I reached what I considered a good anchor point,
made contact with others… Basically it turned out that they started
climbing later, and decided it was too dangerous after they reached a
first vertical rock formation. Oh well, we considered still trying to
make the connection, I was about to try throwing the tagline (and I
was so high I’m not even sure if my 100 m tagline would reach the
ground). The rest of the pack had already arrived, we communicated by
phones until it was concluded that it’s pointless to throw the
tagline if they can’t access the other side, and I shall just
resume climbing so I could get myself out of the situation I packed
myself into.
After
about two more hours of climbing I managed to transfer to another
slope where a descent was possible, although it was still steep
enough that I was more sliding down then walking. But thanks to that
I got
down in just half an hour, reaching civilization before sunset.
Still, I had to walk along a road for quite a bit until I reached a
parking lot where we were supposed to meet up. And once I did it was
dark, and being down at the bottom of the canyon again, I couldn’t
get signal to contact my team. There were some people on the parking
lot, and I was confused if they were my guys or not, but eventually I
figured out this is not the case. It seemed the only option was to
try to walk out a bit, so I could hopefully get some signal and
contact them. As I walked a car stopped by, there were two girls I
saw earlier on the parking lot and wondered if they’re from our
team. They asked if I needed help,, first in Romanian, then in
English. I briefly explained that I have trouble finding each other
with my friends, and so on. And she offered to give me lift all the
way to Brașov! It’s hilarious how I ended up only meeting up with
my
Romanian pack back in the apartment in town, after we split up early
morning 30 km away :D Laura, to whom I owed that hitchhike, was a
really nice girl, and I feel very stupid about not telling her the
whole story – I mean, I explained that we got separated as I tried
to go off track and realized I couldn’t come back safely, but I
deliberately skipped out the part about me being a slackliner, our
plan to rig a highline, and so on. I did it because our plan wasn’t
perfectly legal, as we intended to rig a line in a national park
without authorization (in fact we had an encounter with park
officials because of it, but they weren’t very angry and allowed us
to keep highlining for a day). But honestly I should have told her,
why would she try to prevent us from rigging a highline, and it felt
awkward to keep disclosing this information, I think she must have a
very puzzled impression of me now, due to some curiosity driven
questions I answered vaguely or avoided answering.
That’s
pretty much it for crazy adventures, the rest was just what You’d
expect from a winter highline action paired with a lot of fun in the
evenings in the apartment. The day after my climbing adventure we set
off to rig a line in a spot the others found while I was up there. It
wasn’t half as epic as what one would wish to establish in a canyon
as beautiful as this one, but being about 30 m high it was high
enough to not be a midline, and ~60 m of Feather PRO allowed for a
lot of fun. Especially surfing the line felt great, it went super
smooth and I was able to play with things like
exposure-surf-bounce-walk, which I’d never done on a line this long
before.
Rigging the line - connection established
My first session on the line, OS despite tight backup
Paul exposed on the line
Diana walking on the line
Getting off after a ramble with Josi
Balancing a club on a highline! So far I can't hold it for long, but long enough to get a nice photo
Probably the most interesting thing about this highline was it's name: "Am Ham". Literally it means "I have a harness" in Romanian, but "ham" is also a Romanian counterpart of "woof", the bark's imitation. It's a reference to a very interesting dog we met during our highline adventure. It seemed to be a stray dog that was like a ghost of the valley, it kept coming to us wanting food, and even walked by us when we were coming back to the car after sunset. Two days in a row. It was a very cool and mysterious creature: how long has it been living in a canyon? Where did it come from? Maybe it really is a ghost? We'll probably never find out, but it will be commemorated in the name of this highline.
The dog, which seemed to live in the valley
Overall I had absolutely great time in Romania, not
just fun climbing and highlining, but my new Romanian friends were
more than hospitable. We had loads of fun in the apartment, doing
juggling, riddle solving, speed cup stacking, You name it. And how
not to love people who while driving You back to the train station
first insist to stop so we can have a group photo, then after
dropping You there and bidding farewell chase You to have that last
group hug <3 I am so grateful for this experience, moments like
this really make me believe that the slackfamily is something
special, not just the people who share a passion for this particular
sport, but people who
share similar values, similar lifestyle, and can sometimes understand
each other without words even if they meet for the first time. I
would be extremely sad because of the need to leave Romania, luckily
just after I came back I was organizing a NYE highline party in
Poland, and it was full of fun and positive energy as well!
Group photo taken just before my departure
