Remember this?

It concerned this.

(Feel free to wander over there and tell me I’m mad/wrong/other).

Image: arcticpuppy.

What happens when we overheat?

Being alive is a remarkable balancing act between two cliff edges. When the temperature drops, we’ve only got a 10 degree margin of safety, a few paces backwards, before we’re feeling the icy touch of death. But this leeway is luxurious compared with what happens when we start overheating. Here at our normal body temperatures, at 37 degrees Celsius / 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (or thereabouts), our toes are already poking over the edge of our very own heat-deaths.

Because right now, all that separates you and runaway thermal meltdown is…

3 degrees.

Let’s apply a little heat and see what happens.

37.8°C / 100°F

Maybe you’re in a nice warm room, and you’ve just had a big meal. You’ve got a bit of a glow on. This is because our bodies are amazingly efficient at converting food into heat – so much so that if left unchecked, your metabolism would push your core body temperature around 1.5° C higher every hour. Two hours and you’re approaching done.

But yet again, your hypothalamus is here to haul you out your own fire. As soon as you started straying above optimum temperature, it triggers two notoriously unloved bodily processes for venting heat. Your skin’s blood vessels dilate and blood rushes up and into them – and that blood is being pumped straight from the hot zone, so when it meets the coolness of the outside air, the unwanted heat is safely pushed out your body. That’s why a flushed face feels sizzling hot.

But far more embarrassing – and more marvellous – is when tiny glands all over your body start squirting out droplets of water mixed with sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium and a host of trace minerals. You’re doused by your own sprinkler system, a warm liquid that immediately cools on contact with air (for “cools” read “transfers heat off the body and into the air”) and then evaporates, shifting remarkable amounts of heat in the process.

An amazing biological achievement…which we hate. Nothing like a big sweat patch to flag up to the world that you’re a repulsive nerd – even though it’s actually a small sign that Darwin’s dice are rolling in your favor. You pull your clammy shirt away from your body and fan it surreptitiously. Ugh – human beings are so gross.

38°C / 100.4°F

Maybe you’re newly arrived in an equatorial country you’ve never visited before. And maybe you’ve just tried to carry two suitcases up five flights of stairs. You’re in great shape, and under normal circumstances this physical feat would literally be no sweat. But these aren’t normal circumstances.

As wonderful as the hypothalamus is, it’s not fitted with a GPS. It doesn’t know you’ve just arrived somewhere that’s on average 25 degrees warmer at this time of year. In fact, if your thermoregulatory system could be confused, it’d be thoroughly nonplussed by now. Why isn’t a mild sweat doing the job? Why isn’t turning you lobster-red achieving the required cooling results? You’re suffering from a kind of thermal jetlag, and your body needs time to acclimatise. Until then, sorry: you’re going to sweat buckets. The floodgates are open.

This is a sensible cooling mechanism in the short term – but you’ve got to do your bit to help it. You’re like a breached dam, losing massive amounts of fluids and salts, and if you don’t keep both of them topped up you’re going to lose the fuel you need to keep you alive. So, lots and lots of water. Go nuts. No, really.

But you’re also going to need to replenish some of those body salts, mostly that sodium that’s crusting nicely in the wrinkles of your skin. You know what you need? Salty snacks. Yes, it’s medically important that you eat dry, prepackaged junk food (which will even make you thirstier, making you drink even more water). Oh, life is a struggle.

38.5°C / 101.3°F

Whoops. For your own good suicidally stupid reasons, you’ve decided to sip a strong coffee instead. It’s probably a myth that caffeine itself dehydrates you (it can increase your rate of urination, but usually not enough to derail your fluid levels). However, a strong coffee will psychologically slake your thirst for a short while. This is Bad. You’re sipping fluids when you should be gulping them.

Now it’s time to start your meltdown.

Your skin is painfully hot to the touch…but it’s drying up. This is because you simple can’t perspire enough, and your body heat is scorching away what little sweat you’re managing to squeeze out. Your lips feel swollen, and your face is a truly livid lick of scarlet. With your blood so close to the surface of your skin, it’s losing its water due to evaporation – which means it’s thickening. Thickened blood? Clotting. Your chances of suffering a stroke or a heart attack just spiked.

Don’t go standing up suddenly. Your brain needs a regular blood supply – around 15% of your cardiac output. With so much blood currently diverted elsewhere, your blood pressure is dropping and not enough is being pumped up to your head, making you woozy, nauseous and unable to stand without waves of dizziness. You’re becoming severely hyperthermic – the warm-blooded twin of hypothermia.

You’re terrified.

But don’t worry – you won’t be conscious for much longer.

39.5°C / 103.1°F

You’re scared and in pain. Your breathing and your pulse are both racing. You’re also yawning convulsively. Your brain is in trouble, and it’s forcing you to suck in cool air and the oxygen you need to keep conscious in your elevated metabolic state.

Are your surroundings helping or hindering your last-ditch attempts to save yourself? If the air around you is almost as warm as you are, your sweat can’t evaporate…which is why heat exhaustion is such a danger in high-humidity (75%+) environments, especially to unacclimatised new arrivals.

At this stage, you might be panicking. Hopefully you’re knocking back as much water as you can – and that would be a great idea if you kept snacking too. Dilute your body’s saltwater mixture too much and you’ll be hit with a bout of hyponatremia. Symptoms? Same as those from heat exhaustion – except with the thrill of possible brain swelling. It could well be that the only thing between you and a coma right now is a tube of Pringles.

40°C / 104°F

Welcome to the death zone.

If you’re still conscious at this temperature, your awareness is severely impaired. You’re almost certainly not going to do the right thing – and the right thing is to get your temperature down as quick as possible, because you’re starting to die. Beyond 40 degrees Celsius, you’re into heat stroke.

This is ugly. Your hypothalamus can’t do anything. Your core body temperature is rising, your natural thermoregulatory functions can’t do a damn thing to stop it, and your body tissues are suffering permanent damage as a result.

Your one and only hope right now is for medical services to arrive and cool you with specialist equipment. If well-meaning samaritans lay wet towels on your skin, it’s probably only going to be a few seconds before the damp material warms and becomes an insulator.  Fans blowing cooler air, periodically-applied cold compresses, water and a little salt…this is how passers-by can keep you alive until professional help arrives. But you can’t tell them that because you’re now unconcious, just minutes from a coma.

Heat stroke isn’t necessarily fatal – if treated swiftly and skillfully. But even if help arrives in time and your temperature is brought down to safe levels, it could be months before it’s known how much damage has been dealt to your organs.

42°C / 107.6°F

Your last shot at salvation is gone. You’re boiling in your own skin.

And here’s how. Your body temperature is so elevated that the proteins in your cells are cooking – as Alok Jha puts it, “like egg white as it boils”. Muscles are starting to lock up – including the ones that allow you to keep breathing. Your thickened, low-pressure blood supply can’t reach your brain…

Your brain, the nerve centre of your body, shuts down.

Game over.

Further reading:

• “Boiled Alive” – Alok Jha, The Guardian, 26th July 2006.
• “Avoiding Heat Illness” – Dr. Gary F. Arnet, Backwoods Home Magazine.
• “After Heatstroke, When Is It Safe To Exercise?” – Gina Kolata, New York Times, 14th June 2010.
• “Heatstroke” – Robert S. Helman M.D., eMedicine.

Images: Grevel, Jayel Aheram, 96dpi, Patrick J. Lynch and Kansas Poetry (Patrick).

Whitby, February 2008. (Not warm).

All photos: Mike Sowden.

The wind gusts suddenly, sending snow whirling past me and down the gaping, eye-sucking maw of the ski-slope at my back.

Everyone else laughs. I think I screamed.

Latvians like to have fun. And by fun, I mean a mixture of puckish wit, welcoming bonhomie and a streak of reckless, eye-bulging wibble-madness, all usually lubricated with alcohol.  Befriend a Latvian and at some point you will find yourself walking into doorways and then laying on the ground, laughing so hard you can barely control your bladder.

It’s the spring of 2000, and I’ve been sipping cranberry vodka all afternoon. So has the driver of the landrover I’m in, and the vehicle’s two other occupants. Everyone has decided that to see the real Latvia, I need a roadtrip into the country. There’s a lot of it. In Riga, the capital city and my home for the week, the streets are thronged, but this is because almost all of Latvia’s 2.2 million people are in Riga.  Take the sturdy motorways west any time between October and April, and you’ll soon hit snow-muffled pine forests as stark as the roof of Cyprus, empty of people.

I’ve just come from the most crowded country in Europe. I’m used to seeing people. Here, there aren’t any to see. Population density is something of a sore point in Latvia, a country whose occupants have endured a century of upheaval, deprivation and near-unimaginable suffering. Part of my jaunt around Riga had taken in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, an unflinching portrayal of the effects of first Nazi and then Soviet rule. In the decade surrounding World War 2, Latvia lost up to half a million of its civilians, some killed or imprisoned, others fleeing abroad for safety. Latvia knows oppression. Hell, I’d want to take my fun seriously as well.

There’s our communal bottle of cranberry vodka sloshing pinkly on the dash. I worry about the lid, what would happen if raw vodka poured out and down into the engine and the car caught fire, and whether we’d stop to put it out or just wind the windows down and keep going until something worse happened. I worry about what would befall us if we’re stopped by a police car.

A little later, we’re stopped by a police car. Our driver asks a few directions as a policeman glances over our flushed faces, our gimlet eyes, over the bottle on the dash. He looks uninterested, and waves us on. (Later, I’ll remember this. He could have stopped us. He could have done something).

Our driver is a professional hunter. Presumably if asked, he’d say he knows these woods well. I guess this is why he suddenly shouts something happily, punches the air with one hand and yanks the wheel over with the other. We career off the road and into the trees, bumping between frozen pines and hopping rotting logs. It’s about this point that I realise my definition of fun doesn’t include flying through a windscreen into the depths of a Baltic wonderland, so I make the internationally recognised gestures of distress including clawing at my window and emitting a noise like a mongoose being castrated.

Luckily – I use this word loosely, of course – we slam into a tree trunk with a teeth-rattling crash. There is a pause for contemplation, and we listen to the forest crackling with the cold, the engine pinking furiously. More vodka, then. Vodka will help us think. Slosh. I’m pretty sure trees aren’t supposed to grow this close together. It’s unnatural. It’s also damn cold (nothing to do with the alcohol, of course. Alcohol is warming. Any fool knows that). We back up carefully. It’s April, yet the country is still winter-locked. Nevertheless, part of me wants them to stop the car. To hell with it guys. I’ll walk back. It’s only 50 km.

Most of Latvia is forest. Like forests? You’ll like Latvia. It’s a dazzling display of nature’s leafy/needly wealth, which in winter is rendered a lovable mixture of scenic and terrifyingly hostile. The countryside isn’t well signposted because there just aren’t enough signs in the world to do it.

We get back on the road, and gradually my convulsive grip on the door handle loosens. It was…just a fit of over-enthusiasm, wasn’t it? He wasn’t trying to kill us. He was trying to…get closer to nature. Yes.

After a couple of kilometres, I’m firmly convinced the worst is over.

to be cont.

Images: Dainis Matisons and  Uqbar is back.

If you want to understand just why I was so chuffed to be included in the TBEX Community Keynote last weekend, go to Nerd’s Eye View and have a read of the other pieces. They’re all ridiculously good.

I still see and hear people get sniffy against travel blogging. I still see and hear a few people mutter “oh, it’s from a personal blog, is it? Oh well then.” I still watch nostrils flare and noses turn up at the suggestion that self-published, non-commissioned, initially-for-the-hell-of-it travelwriting can sing anywhere near like the average paper-clad travelogue. Patronising rather than malicious – smirky rather than lip-curling. But it’s there.

And those people really need to wake up.

Image: anniemole

Here are some interesting things about the word “denial”, regarding travel.

1. Denial is not a river in Egypt. (Ask this chap, if you don’t believe me). It’s spelled differently. This is why puns are all contemptible: they’re all about perverting our language to fit humour. Well, not in this blog.

2. Denial is restraint. When you’re travelling, everything is limited. Your time is ticking away, your budget is trickling through your fingers, your brain can handle a limited amount of novelty before you suffer cognitive burnout and sit slack-jawed until your mind has tidied itself again. The sights and sounds bombarding you may appear to be limitless – but you’re not. You have to be choosy.

3. Denial is constraint. The way to heighten one of your five senses is to deny one or more of the others. Want to taste things more intensely? Try closing your eyes. What you see colours your judgement of it. (Look at that – “colours”. Which is related to sight. There’s a clue, right there in our own language).

When you limit the flow of information going into your brain, when you bury some of those multitasked thoughts cluttering your imagination and your here-and-now consciousness…you can focus on the important things.

Yeah yeah yeah. We all know this. It’s akin to Gary Arndt’s comment “Content is king? That’s like saying the way to win a 100m dash is to run very fast” yesterday at TBEX ’10. But how many of us actively deny ourselves our “travel senses”?

And here’s what I’m getting at.

(And here’s what I’m writing about, for publication elsewhere).

You know how you forget your phone, and you feel strangely naked?

You know how when the Internet goes down, and you rediscover books and tea and conversation and staring out the window?

You know how when the electricity supply goes down, you rediscover candles and darkness and a curious sense of peace with the world?

You know how you forget your map, and suddenly have to rely on your wits and whatever visual pointers you can clap your eyes on?

You know how when you forget your camera, after you’ve finished hating yourself, you try to write everything down, making notes like you’ve never made before?

You know how you forget your phone, your map, your camera and your notebook, and you suddenly realise that your memory sucks, and suddenly think how wonderful, how right it would be if we were all furnished from childhood with a smattering of the skills of the great poets of the oral tradition, able to use nothing but our minds and our minds’ eyes to collect and craft our stories and convey what we see to other human beings using nothing but the bare essense of ourselves, working to the best of its ability, fulfilling its potential?

I can’t deny this thought intrigues me.

Images: topher76,  arcticpuppy and Mike Sowden.

A typically fickle-looking Orkney sky – 2009.

My thanks to Mike, Pam, Kim and everyone else working so hard this weekend at the 2nd Annual Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX) event in New York this weekend, for making a livestream session so fascinating  that I was glued to my screen all afternoon despite glorious sunshine and England’s final, desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to stay in the World Cup…

…and for allowing me to be part of it (TBEX, I mean, not Germany stuffing England) – because as part of the Community Keynote this afternoon, this piece was read out to a packed auditorium. (And it was still packed afterwards! Well, maybe the doors were locked. I don’t want to get bigheaded by making wild assumptions – my ego deserves the facts).

The TBEX meet is an event where hundreds of clever, industrious, outgoing people converge on one spot from all over the world, chat about various things, learn some useful stuff, and then go out drinking heavily, spending the next day in a pain-laced fog of self-recrimination. At least, this is what I’ve been told by people who attended this year. I’m only going on word-of-mouth, mind.

TBEX ’11?

It’s in Vancouver.

And I’ll be turning up for that one.

How about you?

…………….

You may see a few changes in here. I’m tweaking, based on some sage advice from TBEX and also because it’s long overdue some tidying up.

If anything looks unbearably screwy, just holler.

That doesn’t apply to the writing, of course.

Outside Cambridge University’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, you’ll find a curious sight. For some reason, someone has embedded a couple of metal-filled footprints between two paving slabs.

Feeling the urge to prise them up? You’d be in for a surprise.

You’re not looking at filled-in footprints. You’re looking at the soles of the feet of a life-size statue of artist Antony Gormley, buried head-down. (Name sound familiar? He also did this).

It’s like the aftermath of Iron Man suffering power failure at high altitude.

Stand on those soles, and you become one half of an approximately 12-foot-long sculpture of the human body, mirrored at your feet and rooted beneath you in cast-iron symmetry….

“EarthBound Plant” – Antony Gormley, 2002.

Images: Mike Sowden.

On page 19 of Stephanie Lee’s ebook The Art Of Solo Travel, I’m suddenly faced with my age.

The days of traveller’s cheques are over.

It’s all changing, out there on the road. European currencies are being gobbled up by the Euro, making it easier and, well, duller for us all. International ATM services spit money at you directly from your bank account, no matter how geographically exotic the wall they’re set into. Increasingly powerful brands of travel insurance are there to catch you when you fall (ill/under the wheels of local transport/prey to the unscrupulous). And traveller’s cheques are on the way out. I’ve only ever filled out one wad of traveller’s cheques, in Austria in 1993. And I probably never will again. (Cheques, period? One more decade and you’re toast).

Young folk! Eeee. I remember when the Internet was all fields. Travel? Don’t make me laugh. I remember when it took 3 months just to get to the bottom of the garden, changing horses twice a fortnight and living for the last 2 weeks on fried grass and boiled shoe-leather! Those were the days. Young people, they’ve got it easy with all this “Skyping” and “Couch Surfing”. (Have you ever tried to surf on a couch? I tried it: sunk within minutes, took three hours to drag it to shore. Utter waste of time). Phones? I remember when we used flags! Oh, don’t talk to me about trains…

So that’s how I felt after reading The Art of Solo Travel.

Well okay, just a little. What I actually felt most was the urge to grab an atlas, sling it into a backpack and head out the door. It’s that kind of book – even if I’m technically the wrong sex, because  the subtitle is “A Girls’ Guide”. Regular readers may be aware that I’m not a girl. (I’m aware that some people will contest this on grounds of humour. I know who you are, guys).

New to the idea of packing a suitcase and seeing the world? Here’s what you should do with this book:

1) Read through it quickly.

2) Read bits of it slowly, Googling and reading around to get the details.

3) Read bits of it painstakingly, making lots of notes from your own research before, during and after your trip.

1) is easy. It’s a quick read. You’ll be done in half an hour, enjoying the colourful layout and the no-nonsense, cutting-to-the-chase style. And 2) and 3) are when the accumulated wisdom therein has been bouncing round your brainpan for a while, fermenting all sorts of crazy schemes.

Admittedly, I’m somewhere between 1) and 2) at the moment, so feel free to write it with cries of “what the hell do you know?” and “Get a life, you jerk!”. (Hi Mum).

So maybe you can’t trust me. Who can you trust? The author, of course – she’s walked the walk she’s now talking the talk about. Between September 2008 and April 2009, Stephanie Lee did a lap of the world (taking in 18 countries on the way) on an impressively thrifty budget of AUD $13,000, at a time when the Australian dollar was getting a right kicking. Think you could go round the globe on $10,000, or less than £7,000? Me neither. Quite the feat. And this book is her explanation of how she did it.

While I’m not giving away any of the details for obvious reasons, I will say this:

It’s unashamedly subjective. You can’t have an “objective” how-to travel book. I mistrust any books that claim to be such. We make every journey our own by tinkering with, bending or breaking the rules when it’s wise to do so. Thankfully, Stephanie makes no bones about her bias. This is what worked for her, and worked in specific places and at specific times. It may work for you, it may not – but it has worked.

It’s about attitude. Travel is tough on the mind. Sometimes you’re going to be pushed into very inhospitable corners of your psyche, and that’s just something that comes with the territory. It’s important to have that spelled out to you before you go, and what you can do about maintaining the right attitude. Kudos to Stephanie for including this, even when it’s verging on dissuading potential readers looking for something rose-tintedly breezy. There’s much honesty in here.

It’s about being single. In my experience, travelling on your own leads to a profoundly different experience than travelling with friends or loved ones. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but very different. I loved that this author is candid about the disadvantages (of which there are many) – and that being alone gave her time to discover she actually didn’t hate the job she’d fled round the world from.

It’s not about gadgets. Stephanie’s first line in the digital gizmo section is “I’m not a gadget geek” – which is fair enough. But there’s a serious omission in here. Although she mentions bewaring of places where mobile phone internet access is expensive, she also sings the praises of smartphones on the next page without mentioning call plans and roaming charges, and then follows it up with an (admittedly very sensible) recommendation for using iGoogle on a daily basis.

Connectivity fees are more important than equipment. This is worth spelling out for anyone planning long-term travel. Mobile phone handsets are not where horrible, holiday-destroying bills come from. Before you leave home you need to know exactly how much you will be paying for every local and international call, and most critically, every single megabyte you download when not using free WiFi. Moreso, make sure you know about everything your phone is downloading. Handy Windows Mobile gadget that tells you what the weather is? It’ll be getting the data from somewhere – and when you’re using GPRS or the like, it’ll be racking up roaming network charges.

Ignore this advice on a short holiday abroad, and you’ll get stung when you’ve back home. Ignore it while long-term travelling, and you’ll get shafted while you’re on the move. It’ll punch a huge hole through your rolling budget. So treat with caution, read your mobile plan carefully, check out online advice like Lifehacker’s “How To Keep Track Of Your Cellphone Data Usage“, and treat every non-Wifi connection like a ticking bomb.

It’s about all the basics. If you’ve spent the last year picking over Matador Network and Almost Fearless articles with a discerning eye and an increasingly tall stack of scribbled notes – this book isn’t for you. It’s designed to whet your appetite for all the details – not slake it.

It may give you the confidence to actually do it. And if that happens…well, this book is beyond price.

Interested? Then grab a copy for $12.95 here.

Images: Indie Travel Podcast, marcokalmann, skelekitten and Mr. T in DC.

For the last couple of months I’ve also been writing in other places, namely….

At EcoSalon, writing an 8-part series on:

• The Mekong drought
• That pesky volcano up north
• The recent attempts to clean up Everest
• The U.S.’s first coastal offshore windfarm
• A billion baby turtles
• Bill Gates wanting the clouds whiter
• The colossal Boreal Forest of Canada
• and how humans turned the Aral Sea into the Aral desert in just 40 years.

And while all sorts of nice folk were guest-posting in here, I was writing for them about…

• Athens
• York
• Naxos
• Abruzzo
• More Abruzzo
• The Paris Metro
• and maniacalism as a way to better yourself.

And you could also find me over at Nerds Eye View, listening to the North York Moors.

See? Not lazy. So, fire away.

Images: Mike Sowden.