Already the world of my Indian friends seemed aeons away

Carlo spelt out the mission’s rules regarding the Indians. “Never give them anything,” he said, “except in exchange for work or for something they have made.” This was to keep them from turning into beggars and losing their culture. Carlo gave them cards with different-coloured dots that were exchangeable for knives, mirrors and aluminium pots. The only thing that was free was medical attention, which he and Claudia spent most of the day ad­ministering. He was bitterly oppos­ed to the influence of people like Peruano, who persuaded the Indians to leave the basic chores of their cul­ture—like tending their gardens—and start advertising the holidays to Split Croatia, in exchange for a pair of shorts.

The reward system at the mission, Carlo realized, would collapse once the Perimetral Norte highway was open. Backwoods people would start to build homesteads along it, and the introduction of rum, cloth­ing, shot-guns and disease would begin. By then he hoped the In­dians, through exposure to the dotted-card system, would know “the value of money,” a concept that was missing from their cul­ture. Even so, he was not optimis­tic. The introduction of something like a shot-gun, which would make superfluous the skills developed over thousands of years, could be devas­tating to the Yanomamo. When the road was opened to colonization, Carlo would move elsewhere.

Carlo told me that the Yanomamo (http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/yanomami) believe the universe has three levels: earth, earth above and earth below. Everything had started on the upper level; a part had fallen to the earth, leaving a big hole in the sky; an­other part had fallen through the earth to the world of the uncon­scious. At death some of the spirits returned to the upper level by means of a vine ladder; it was a happy place, with plenty of food and beau­tiful women, a place of reunion for parted families. Other spirits were transformed into animals for their misdeeds.

The first man was Omama. He copulated with another man who got pregnant in the leg. The first woman was either fished from a river or came out of a rock; there are two versions. In Yanomamo cul­ture, women seem to be an after­thought. Their function is to carry bananas and firewood and to be stolen. Wives are regularly beaten, or even burned with glowing coals. They expect maltreatment, and measure their husbands’ concern for them by the number of beatings they receive.

Most of the Yanomamo wars are over women. By stealing the women from another village you not only eliminate future generations of en­emies, but increase your own num­bers and, by inducing new genes into the group, unconsciously pre­vent inbreeding.

There are about 100 city breaks to Prague available to his people, Carlo told me, only half of which have been used by out­siders. The new highway will change that for ever.

THE next morning, a plane landed with a group of Italian missionaries who were making a tour of their installations in South America. flew out with them. That afternoon I was nursing a cold beer en­emies,sta, the capital of Roraima. Two men were sitting at the bar, and I overheard one complaining about how the Indians were sitting 100mineral wealth that could make Brazil a rich country. “If I was in charge,” he remarked, “I’d blow them all to kingdom come.”

THE END

 

Going Solo The All American Adventurous Way

There was a time when solo travel was the domain of gap year students, hippies discovering themselves and widows and widowers taking coach trips. These days thankfully much has changed and the world of solo travel has come of age. If you are a solo holiday virgin, the US has much to offer.

solo travel

What Is The Deal With Solo Travel?
Travelling alone can be daunting and in fact many of us would rather stay at home than be seen to be going it solo. Whilst a lack of company is a big concern, safety and confidence is probably the primary factor in keeping singles on their home territory. The dreaded single supplement has always been a big bone of contention and even more so now that modern lifestyles have really changed the marketplace out there. Divorce rates are at an all-time high and marriages are lower than before and these are just two factors leading to more and more of us finding a lack of travelling companions.The good news is that these days the options for travelling alone have really changed and there are more reasons than ever to be adventurous. With the help of travel companies offering specialist services you can experience adventure breaks with groups of other likeminded singles. You will not only see another part of the world, you will meet new friends. Travelling in a group like this means you don’t have to compromise on your experience for the sake of safety or confidence.

solo travel moto

Going Solo In The US:
If you haven’t tackled an adventure holiday before then the mighty USA is a great starting place. A familiar culture and language can do wonders for your confidence. There are a huge number of adventure holidays for singles in America and the country is packed with sights and sounds to explore from cities to mountains, savannahs and lakes to name but a few of the attractions on offer. Along the East coast, take in the incredible Niagara Falls, historic Boston and the bustle of New York. If you fancy experiencing West Coast living then you can join a tour visiting the glamour of Hollywood, the culture of San Francisco and into the heat of the desert and the glitz of Las Vegas. Given the size of the country there is a huge amount to discover in between from the natural beauty of an Alaskan adventure to the retro theme of the famous Route 66.

solo travel

Travelling Solo Tips:
Although you might book on a group holiday, meeting new people for the first time can still be daunting. To help increase the chance that you will have plenty in common with your new travelling companions, opt for a break that involves one of your key interests, whether it is wildlife or history for example. The chances are then that your new friends will be in to that too. Activities are great ice-breakers too so choosing adventure holidays for singles in America is a wise choice. Above all you should keep an open mind because your group may come from all different walks of life.

Being single is no longer a barrier to seeing what the world has to offer. American solo adventure holidays provide a way to experience everything this mighty country has to offer with all the comfort and confidence of being in a group. You will certainly have memories and new friends that can last a lifetime.

AUTHOR BIO:
Josie Wright is travel writer. Having spent several years as a travel guide specialising in water-based holidays she has been based in a number of yacht charter destinations including the Maldives. Previously married, she is now single and is taking full advantage of the solo adventure travel holidays on offer these days.

After helping at the scene

Paster­kamp stayed at the bottom of Gon­dola II, hoping the girls would come down after they were evacuated from their car. “Finally a guy asked if I had anybody missing,” he re­called, “and I described the three girls, but said I was positive they weren’t hurt. He asked me to go over to the clinic.” There Paster­kamp received the tragic news.

ON THE mountain, the ski patrol had been labouring to bring down the people trapped in the 31 cars that hung high above the ground. At roughly10.3oam, patrolman Rich­ard Nelson looped a rope and a length of chain round his shoulder and strapped an evacuation bike to his back. The bike is a small steel contraption with wheels that lock on to the haul cable. The rider sits on a seat with his feet resting on foot pegs, hangs below the cable and glides along it to a disabled car.

Nelson began his climb up Tower 5. Inside Car 67, which had rolled back against the next car in line, the six passengers kept think­ing about the slender strip of steel that prevented them from plummet­ing to the snow. “We hung there cock-eyed,” Steve Beckerman re­membered. “If the wind had blown or we had moved one foot either way, we would have fallen.”

The stranded skiers could hear rescuers below them working on the injured and telling one another that they would have to move the victims aside in case any of the cars above fell. “We were even afraid to talk, as though our voices might shake the car,” said Nancy Beckerman. On the tower, Richard Nelson at­tached his bicycle to the cable and rolled 4o feet towards the gondola, 125 feet above the ground. He did not dare climb on to the roof to tell the people what to do, for fear his weight would send the car down, so he hung from the bike.

“The people inside were really nervous,” said Nelson. “I spoke to them matter-of-factly and said, `OK, I’m going to do some things and I need your help.’ ”

 

The rope was wound through the car windows, tied round the centre pole in the car and secured to the cable. As a special precaution, the chain was also passed through the car, and hooked to the cable. Then Nelson climbed on to the roof, opened the door, and the six passengers were lowered to the ground, one at a time, in a small nappy-like evacuation harness.

It took little more than 15 min­utes to evacuate Car 67. When the last pale and shaken occupant was assisted out of the evacuation seat, a smattering of weak but happy applause was heard from the pas­sengers in the cars hanging near by.

Now teams of patrolmen went to work along the line of Gondola II. It was an exhausting process to bring down 17o more prisoners from their gondolas. Some skiers were trapped for more than six hours. Yet there were no cases of hysteria, no stories of people refus­ing to go, nor were there any in­juries. One skier calmly told Nel­son: “I can’t make myself drop over the edge of the car. Please, when you think I’m ready, just give me a slight shove.”

After the last skier had been res­cued, a lone patrolman started down from Eagle’s Nest. The sun was be­ginning to set, and the mountain was empty of skiers. He skied to a point beneath the first dangling car and shouted up through a loud­hailer, asking if anyone was left in­side. This eerie act was repeated all the way down the mountain. There was no answer from any car. By the time the patrolman reached the bottom, it was almost dark. The day was over.

Stephen Meoli underwent surgery for a pierced blood vessel the day after his transfer to St Anthony’s Hospital; he died the following morning. Carol Pasterkamp, whose right arm was nearly severed, has regained the use of her right hand. Other victims have had recurrences of pain. But none was paralysed, which is amazing considering the number of spinal injuries.

The next gondola ran into the tangled carriage and stopped

Again, the haul cable began its saw­ing action, until the car was dang­ling by a steel thread an eighth of an inch thick. Then the sawing stopped —no one knows why. But Car 6o fell off the line and landed upside­down in the snow.

 

At this point, the entire system was shut off, leaving Car 67 and 3o other gondolas, loaded with 176 ski­ers, dangling like beads from their cables. SKI patrolman Dave Stanish got to the scene within minutes. He looked into one gondola. “It was a gory mess inside,” he recalled. He ra­dioed patrol headquarters : “Major medical emergency ! Major medical emergency!”

 

Dispatcher Roger Hesseltine im­mediately transmitted a bulletin to all drivers of the mountain-groom­ing snow-cats and tractors, the ski school, the Vail police and fire de­partments, and the Vail Valley Medical Centre. Pete Burnett, then head of the Vail public works de­partment, immediately put snow­plough crews on the mile-long back­street route where ambulances would be shuttling victims to the clinic. “I want those streets shaved so clear you can see asphalt!” yelled Burnett. Soon there was activity all over the village and mountain.

 

From the clinic, Dr Thomas Stein­berg and Dr William Holm raced by ambulance to the foot of the ski slopes, arriving there in only three minutes. Steinberg climbed on board a snowmobile driven by a ski patrolman, and the pair went buck­ing and snarling up the mountain. Holm waited below with the bulky medical equipment until a tractor arrived to pick him up.

 

Jim Fish, a snow-cat driver who had just finished hauling supplies to the restaurant at Eagle’s Nest near holiday apartments in Brussels, gunned his tractor down the hill to Tower 5, where Stanish had forced his way into the up-ended Car 6o. “The people were heaped inside like spaghetti,” he remembers. “The other car was buried and the door wouldn’t open, so I grabbed a shovel from the cat and dug like crazy.”

Meanwhile, ski patrolman Den­nis Mikottis had arrived to help Stanish at Car 6o. “We could see right away two people were dead,” Mikottis said. “A young girl was bleeding heavily from the mouth and breathing in shallow gasps.” There was no hope; Janice Paster­kamp died at the scene of the accident.

 

Other ski patrolmen and rescuers raced to the site of the tragedy, but once they stepped out of their skis, they sank to their waists in the deep, soft snow. It had acted as a cushion for the falling cars and possibly saved lives, but for the floundering rescuers the snow was nightmarish.

Some of the rescuers had brought toboggans to carry the injured down. Some carried first-aid packs, splints, backboards. Snow-cat driv­ers and ski instructors who had heard the call began cordoning off the accident area with the help of volunteers.

 

Patrolmen Stanish and Mikottis quickly decided that only the most essential first aid would be given at the scene, just enough to stabilize the injured for a quick trip by snow-cat or toboggan down the mountain to the medical centre. The clinic there can attend to routine fractures and injuries, but it has no facilities for major surgery. So, clinic admin­istrator Chuck Tubbs telephoned St Anthony’s Hospital in Denver. He asked it to dispatch helicopters to Vail and its fixed-wing aircraft to near-by Eagle airport for evacua­tion of the injured to Denver. The first of eight helicopter flights to Denver took Arnold Cordts, with a liver injury and a fractured spine, and Carol Pasterkamp, in a deep coma and with a nearly severed right arm. Stephen Meoli, who had suffered an obvious dislocated shoul­der and broken leg, was flown out soon after.

 

Among the other six survivors in the two cars, there were two fractur­ed spines, one dislocated spine, a fractured skull, as well as concus­sions, simple fractures, dislocations, bruised organs and wrenched muscles. Three passengers in Car 6o—Darlene Reese, Karen Togt­man and Janice Pasterkamp—were dead from massive head injuries.

 

As the doctors and patrolmen worked with the injured, many ski­ers came to help. Among them was Dick Pasterkamp, completely un­aware that the victims included his two daughters and their friend.

 

“I stayed until almost everyone was out,” he said. “The dead were there, but they were covered. I never thought for a moment the kids were involved. I phoned in our Lisbon apartment to my wife and said, ‘If you hear about this on television don’t worry, it’s not our kids.’”

Nightmare on the Ski-Lift

Packed with skiers,the lift cars glided high above the snow. Then came the first hint of tragedy

THERE had never been a more perfect day for skiing than that Friday, March 26, 1976.

The morning sky was a deep blue, and the mountain looming over Vail, Colorado, was sun-splashed and immaculate, its trails and runs carpeted with new powder snow.

Vail, Colorado

Because this was the spring school break for much of the United. States, the resort was alive with people. While ski patrolmen checked in at their stations, a long queue of skiers formed at the base terminal of Gon­dola II, one of two gondola lift sys­tems at the resort. Almost all the randomly numbered cars were filled to capacity.

Around 9.toarn, Car 25 was boarded by Stephen Meoli, Greg Dietrich and two other young men, all friends. Ira Potashner and Arn­old Cordts occupied the remaining two seats.

Waiting in the queue for the lift were Janice and Carol Pasterkamp, Carol’s university friend, Karen Togtman, Gene and Darlene Reese, and Stephen and Nancy Beckerman.

Vail-Colorado

The Beckermans boarded Car 67 with two other couples. The Reeses and the Pasterkamp party occupied Car 6o, Richard Pasterkamp, the sisters’ father, had accompanied the girls to Vail. While they queued, he went to buy lift tickets. By the time he re­turned, the queue waiting to board the gondola had grown even longer. “The attendants asked me not to break into the queue,” says Paster­kamp. So he gave the girls their tickets and took another lift.

The cars began their ascent to­wards Eagle’s Nest, the top terminal on Gondola II. Then the first signs of trouble appeared. A little after 9.15, a skier, reported rumblings along the gondola cable to a lift at­tendant. About the same time, gon­dola operators at Eagle’s Nest were getting anxious reports from off­loading passengers—violent bounc­ing of the cars, and a strand of wire hanging from one of the cables at Tower 4.

The gondola machinery had been switched off and the ski-patrol notified when, at approxi­mately 9.25, the report came in : “Two cars are on the ground near Tower 4.” Greg Dietrich recalled the ride in Car 25, the first to fall, as getting “really rough. It made us all look up at Eagle’s Nest, hoping that we could make it there. Then we ap­proached the next tower, and the car started banging against it.” Said Ira Potashner, “It was almost as if we were in a container that some­body was shaking. There was a lot of screaming inside . . . and we were dropping!”

Meanwhile, Gene Reese and the others in Car 6o were taking an awful buffeting. “The car was ‘Jumping and making one hellish commotion,” he recalls. “When Car 25 tumbled down, everybody in our car got panicky. I screamed, Put your head between your knees!’ That’s the last thing I remember until I came to, upside-down.”

Vail-Colorado

Ir WAS the worst ski-area accident in American history. A US Forest Ser­vice report states that a z 15-foot length of stationary steel cable, which acts as a track for the four wheels on top of each gondola, had started unravelling at Tower 4.

When Car 25 came along, the partially unravelled track cable dis­lodged the front wheels on the gon­dola’s roof. But the haul cable con­tinued dragging Car 25 another 1,15o feet to Tower 5. Here the de­railed wheels jammed and the car was pulled violently against the tower. It fell back, struck the tower again and lodged there with the machinery grinding. The haul cable now started chewing through the steel support that kept the car hang­ing on the line. Finally, the haul cable severed the support. Car 25 plunged into the snow below.