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DECEMBER 23, 2011 - Today I'm learning to dive at Fun and Sun Dive and Travel on Malapascua, Philippines (http://bit.ly/vAoQjP). In three days, we be swimming with thresher sharks. Merry Christmas to me :)
It takes most people between 15 and 20 hours of practice spread over several weeks to learn how to kitesurf. But, occasionally, an exceptionally motivated individual is able to go from ‘zero to hero’. That is: learn to kitesurf in one day.
When I decided to write this article on how to kitesurf I didn’t want to waste any time. Being an experienced wakeboarder and snowboarder, as well as having some experience surfing and windsurfing, I figured I was as good a candidate as anyone to go from zero to hero. Although in my relatively short seven-hour lesson I never quite got up on a board, I did learn what it takes to learn to kitesurf, and it’s really not that difficult.
My instructor, Joe Rueger of the Tainan Kitesurfing Center, walked me through the following steps.
Lesson 1: The Basics
First you have to learn the proper kitesurfing terminology so that your instructor can communicate instructions to you clearly. This includes a few pieces of equipment and kite positions.
Equipment
Kite – Used to harness the power of the wind and pull you across the water. Looks like a smaller, modified paraglider.
Harness – Attaches you to the kite.
Power Bar – Allows you to steer the kite and control the power or ‘pull’ of the kite.
Board – The board that you stand on as you zip across the water. Similar in size and shape to a wakeboard.
Bindings – The foot holders that attach you to the board.
Kite Positions – Horizontal (see fig. 1)
As with flying any kite, when kitesurfing you always stand with your back to the wind. If you are facing the same direction as the wind, the position of the kite from left to right is discussed in terms as if you are standing in the center of a large clock and the kite is near one of the numbers. Straight ahead is 12:00 and 90-degrees to your right is 3:00. To your left 90-degrees is also 12:00. The kite will always remain between 9:00 and 3:00 because if it goes any farther the wind will no longer hold it aloft.
Kite Positions – Vertical (see fig. 2)
The position of the kite on the vertical plane is discussed in terms of degrees; the ground being zero degrees, and directly above your head being 90-degrees.
Lesson 2: Power Positions (see fig. 1 & 2)
Once you know how to discuss the position of the kite, it’s time to learn the significance of the positions. This is important because the position of the kite determines the strength of the pull, or power, of the kite.
The formula for power positions is basically this. The most powerful possible position is when the kite is at 12:00 (directly in front of you), at a 45-degree angle – pretty much the center of the kite’s field of movement. The farther you move away from this position in any direction the less power the kite will have. If you place the kite at any extreme – 3:00, 9:00, 90-degrees, or zero degrees – it will have barely enough power to stay aloft.
Lesson 3: Controlling the Kite
Next, to learn how to control the position and power of the kite, you will start practicing with a trainer kite on the beach. The trainer is a miniature kitesurfing kite that maneuvers just like a real one, but that is too small to pull you anywhere.
You’re first attached to the kite by a harness. Your control over the kite comes in the form of a bar about 80 cm long that you hold onto like a set of handlebars. This bar controls the direction of the kite, as well as the power. The ends of the bar are attached by strings to the corners of the kite and the bar pivots on the main cord that attaches your harness to the kite. When you pull in on one side of the bar, the kite will turn in that direction.
The bar also moves towards and away from you along the cord that attaches your harness to the kite. Holding the bar midway between yourself and the stopper will keep the kite at full power. If you pull the whole bar towards you, or let the bar all the way out, it will de-power the kite. This is a failsafe for people who feel out of control. If you panic and let go of the bar and the kite completely de-powers.
Lesson 4: Sand Skiing
Once you’ve got the hang of the trainer kite, it’s time to strap on the big boy and try dragging yourself across the beach. First, you strap into a real kite. Then, you practice moving the through low-power positions. Then, when you’re ready you move the kite into a power position. It will jerk you forward and then, leaning back against the pull of the kite, you will ski briefly across the sand. Don’t worry, you won’t be pulled far. It’s very hard to keep the kite in a power position in this exercise. You’ll move the kite through the power position, and then out do a de-powered position, so the pull will only last a moment or two. This exercise teaches you where the power really is, and how it feels to be pulled.
Lesson 5: Body Dragging
The next step is just to get comfortable with a kite in the water. This is basically the same as sand skiing, except you’re dragging yourself through the water. You just move the kite in and out of power positions, pulling yourself along through the surf.
Lesson 6: Kite Surfing
This is it. You’ve mastered all the techniques. Now it’s time to strap on the board. To start you sit in the water with the board on, keeping the board near the surface of the water, just like starting on water skis or a wakeboard. Then you put the kite in the air, and move it into a power position. The pull of the kite should pull you up out of the water and, as you lean back, keeping the board’s edge in the water, you’ll start moving. And that’s it – you’re kitesurfing.
For more information in Chinese visit the Taiwan Kitesurfing Center website.
For information in English call Joe Rueger at 0956 100 97 1
Click a thumbnail to view a larger version of the picture. To navigate the full-size picture gallery click on the arrow icons, the picture itself, or use the arrow keys on your keyboard.
Note: This is a heavily reworked version of an article that originally appeared in Highway 11 Magazine. Don’t miss the photo gallery from the farm at the bottom of this page!
I tipped back my cowboy hat, which I had brought to wave in the air while riding the crocodile, and sized up the dinosaur-like behemoth. His head looked like that of a crocodile, but his body looked more like it belonged to giant mutant toad. His belly spread out on the pavement beneath him like a green leather sack of water.
“Are you ready?” I asked my girlfriend.
“No way. You first.”
“It looks pretty safe. I don’t think he can move.”
I pointed at the crocodile and asked the owner, Chiu ‘the Crocodile King’ Hsi-ho, “Ke yi zuo ma? (Can I sit on it?)?”
He nodded. I took a deep breath and started to walk towards it.
We were in the Crocodile King Animal Farm, a small zoo of exotic and mutant animals in a small town called Madou in rural southern Taiwan.
The crocodile that I was about to mount had been imported from Thailand two-and-a-half years earlier. Since then he had lived on the farm in a children’s wading pool that was only about one meter longer than his body in either direction. His life consisted of eating, sleeping, and being sat on by Taiwanese locals so that they could pose for novelty photographs. He had gained 500 kg since arriving at the zoo and he was now so fat that he looked like he couldn’t even walk.
He was, in fact, so fat that he may have been a record breaker. Later I did some research into famous large crocodiles. The heaviest crocodile I was able to find an official record of was Yai, a 6m, 1114kg, Thai croc. I also learned that some extremely large wild crocodiles could possibly weigh over 1300kg, but that crocodiles of that size would normally be over 6m long. So, if the crocodile in the Crocodile King Animal Farm was, as the sign on the wall claimed, 1250 kg and only 5.2 m long, it’s very likely that he was the fattest crocodile in the world. He sure as hell looked like he was.
As a person who likes animals and…uh, you know, freedom and stuff, I was disturbed by the croc’s cramped living space. But thinking about it later, I realized that I have lots of friends in North America who live in mobile homes with abnormally large televisions that have made it their life’s goal to eat as much and move as little as possible. So, as much as I hated the idea of the croc being forced into this lifestyle, it seemed possible that the he may not have minded the arrangement. If they laid him across a paisley couch in front of a TV and stuck a Marlboro in his mouth, he would have somewhat resembled my friend’s unemployed uncle who bought beer for us in high school.
Christine and I took pictures of each other sitting on the über-obese amphibian and I waved my cowboy hat in the air. Afterwards we felt ashamed. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Our day really took a nosedive a few minutes later when Chiu gave us an extra show. There was a smaller female crocodile living in the adjoining pen. Chiu shook and kicked her until she defecated in fear. Then he scooped up the feces with a large metal pan and fed it to the giant croc. After the croc finished eating, Chiu turned around shot us a game show host smile and an enthusiastic thumbs up.
“Xie xie (thank you).” We stuttered and walked away, dumfounded.
The Crocodile King Farm is a walled compound on about three-quarters of an acre. The middle is occupied by large pond smothered in lily pads and encircled by a trail lined with animal cages and pens.
We followed the trail around the pond. We saw a lama and a miniature pony in a fenced-in area the size of a small studio apartment. In another small pen was a group of Formosan deer. In a separate cage, with barely enough room to turn around, lived an albino deer. One aquarium contained a cute-as-a-button little two-headed turtle. There were several varieties of exotic birds including an ostrich, an emu, a cassowary, and an oddly large number of featherless mutant chickens, all living in areas too small to afford much movement. The most incredible birds, however, were the mutant ducks, which had clumps of feet growing out of their butts like bouquets of webbed yellow flowers. They were super cute.
On the final leg of our tour we encountered the most disturbing of the mutants: the mutant goats. The two of them lived in separate pens. One was a three-legged cripple with horns growing out its front left foot. The other had a bone-like protrusion the size of a wine bottle growing from the center of its chest. While we stood there the three-legged goat jumped up on its hind legs and got its horned foot stuck high between the bars of the cage.
As I watched the goat wrestle with its entangled deformity I wondered about its life prospects beyond the freak farm. The goats had probably come from normal Taiwanese farms. Had they stayed on those farms they’d probably have been killed to prevent them from passing on their abnormalities to their offspring. Perhaps the Crocodile King Farm had saved the goats from prejudicial slaughter. Perhaps it had also saved the featherless chickens and foot-butted ducks. It was a comforting idea.
Opposite the goats was a door to a hall lined with windows looking in on various exotic reptiles and snakes. Each cage occupied about the same area as two single mattresses laid end to end. Some of those cages contained single crocodiles. Some contained several lying a heap. The latter looked kind of like the pictures they showed us in high school of the mass graves at Auschwitz—haphazard mounds of flesh. After seeing that we left.
As a traveler, I try to think of exhibits like the Crocodile King Farm as cultural artifacts. I mentally filed the Crocodile King Farm with the other unseemly attractions that tourists flock to: Thai ‘ping-pong’ sex shows, Filipino cockfights, the Spanish running of the bulls, and so on. However, since our visit I’ve thought a lot about the ethics of the Crocodile King Farm and I’ve concluded that, despite it’s obvious ethical shortcomings, it’s neither good nor bad, but lies in a moral grey area.
I offer the following explanation.
If we want to live in a world where people understand and respect nature, it’s necessary to have places where people can experience nature’s infinite variety. Pictures and words simply cannot replace the psychological connection that occurs between two conscious beings that occupy the same space at the same time.
The problem is that, as a business, the Crocodile King Farm’s ability to provide quality accommodations to animals is limited. If customers demanded to see larger, cleaner pens, management would have to comply. But they would also have to raise their prices. Would the farm’s patrons, mostly residents of rural Taiwan, be willing to pay, say, double the current price ($6.50USD per adult) to ensure the humane treatment of the animals? Sadly, they probably wouldn’t.
Unfortunately, ideas about the ethical treatment of animals in Asia are very different from those in the West. Taiwan’s government is aware of the Crocodile King Animal Farm and it does nothing. The same can be said of local Animal Rights NGOs. That’s a situation one can do little to change. But, if I had my way, the government would subsidize and farm so that conditions could be improved and fair treatment of the animals could be ensured. That way the farm could continue to educate people about the strange and fascinating creatures that inhabit our world, and, hopefully, offer those animals a place they can live happily.
Although my trip to the Crocodile King Animal Farm wasn’t exactly what you would call fun, it was educational. I learned about nature’s limits, or, more specifically, her lack thereof. That night lying in bed, as I thought of those animals in their tiny cages, I imagined my favorite of them roaming free. He was in a swamp. He plodded awkwardly along the shore and slid into the water. In the water he moved quickly and gracefully. He plunged downwards looking for food and zoomed into the depths. I had first thought him to be a freak, but now I saw him for what he really was: the product of millions of years of natures genetic tinkering—a natural being existing among all of the other haphazardly created genetic lottery winners. Then he returned to the surface, popped out of the water, and sat there majestically, bobbing up and down, the water streaming off his snowy white feathers. He’s a pinnacle of evolution in his own way, that cute little butt-footed duck.
Recently I’ve been working on a series of articles about paragliding in Taiwan. I’ve been learning how to paraglide, and about the evolution of paragliding in Taiwan, from Malcom Vargas who is, as far as I know, the only certified foreign paragliding instructor in the country. These are some photos from one of my first outings with Malcom taken while he taught two other students: Tim Hillebran and Paul Wesson.
If you’re an editor interested in a story about, or photographs of, paragliding in Taiwan contact me at xpatmatt (at) gmail.com.
For the last few days I’ve been working on my application for the Glimpse Correspondent Program. I’ve gone through all of my old photos, picked out my favorites, and touched them up. I now have a total of thirty-three pictures. The problem is, I need to narrow my submission down to twenty. If you have a minute, it would be a great help if you could look through the photos and leave a comment telling me which photos you think I should keep, and which I should trash, and why.
Don’t worry about my feelings. Be ruthless. Telling me which ones you hate will help more than telling me which ones you like. But, of course, I hope you like them all.
It’s nice to be noticed. A couple of weeks ago Matt-Gibson.org was TravelPod’s blog of the day. TravelPod offers free blogs to travelers who want to share their adventures with their friends online.
It’s very easy to use; great for new bloggers. You can upload as many photos and videos as you want, make travel maps, and do all sorts of other dorky travel stuff. Of course, TravelPod has to make money. To do this, it displays travel-related ads alongside your blog. You do have the option to remove the ads; purchase an enhanced membership for about $39.95USD per year. The enhanced membership also gives you control over who is and isn’t allowed to see your blog. Not a bad deal. Actually, had I known about it when I first moved to Taiwan, I totally would have signed up.
A few years ago Vice Magazine, a punk counterculture magazine that started out as a welfare work scam and grew into an international trend setting voice for youth culture, started an online television station called VBS.tv. Like the magazine, The television station produces borderline gonzo new journalism style documentaries about the edgiest and wildest topics that you could imagine. The work that the station has done is of such a high caliber, and so interesting, that CNN has partnered with them.
It’s wild. One episode focuses on a part of northern Columbia where men commonly, and surprisingly openly, have sex with donkeys. They actually show it. In another they visit the last surviving members of an Aryan community started half a century ago in Paraguay.
Last night I watched the Webby nominated documentary, The Vice Guide to Liberia. It’s one of the best, and most horrific, documentaries I’ve ever seen. You must watch it now (but do so at your own discretion–it is incredibly disturbing).
If the you have problems watching it using the embedded player below, you can watch it here.
DECEMBER 23, 2011 - Today I'm learning to dive at Fun and Sun Dive and Travel on Malapascua, Philippines (http://bit.ly/vAoQjP). In three days, we be swimming with thresher sharks. Merry Christmas to me :)
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