A dive in fear! lessons learned from the field!

Olongway, Malawi

"Discovery is the privilege of a child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else" - Alexabder Grothendieck

Growing up we only learn to fear things, it will take you one time of touching the fire to recognize its pain, our memory of pain will never allow us to do it again! that;s not a choice, it is there in our subconscious mind!!! this is how we grow all of our fears in the life!

The Jordan Trail Ownership ملكية درب الاردن

In Jordan as communities recognize the social, economic, environmental, and health benefits of hiking, trails development is becoming more prevalent.

ان زيادة الوعي لدى المجتمع بالاهمية الاجتماعية و الاقتصادية والبيئية و الفوائد على الصحة العامة للمسيرة في المسارات و الدروب البرية أدى الى زيادة العمل على تطوير المسارات و دروب المسير و المغامرة في الاردن.

The involvement of the local communities must be considered in the early stages of the trail development. Instead of adopting a top down approach where agencies plan and implement the development of trails with limited input from the public (which is the traditional way of trail development), an early involvement of the local communities should be considered to best serves the community and trail planners, as the combination of local knowledge and planning expertise creates a dynamic and interactive planning process.

Hike like a Martian

The Martian Film, Jordan, Wadi Rum.

In the outdoors I have been falling between two schools. Adventure and challenge school, where we hike, walk, run, or ride from A to B with the fastest time possible, a physical challenge for ourselves, body and mind, a way to cross the barriers in our minds that keep telling us we can’t, because this is how it has been programmed to protect us, and this is what it does all the time.

We tend to challenge our physical abilities. Go out to do a sport and have a healthier life style. The natural terrain makes it even more challenging. There in the nature we feel how we are small part of a bigger planet, an infinite universe. We keep searching for new heights, pushing toward new limits to prove the capability of the amazing human machine! (Just to mention Ueli Steck’s with his fascinating 82, 4000m Summit in 80 days project). We Human are setting new limits of speed and challenge for the outdoors. (READ MORE

The First Specialized Training in Nature Guiding

A photo of the participants in the Nature Guides Training course

The RSCN held the first specialized training for their Nature Guides last Sunday (5-1-2014) as part of the building capacity for their employees in order to provide the guests with the best experience possible.

The training was delivered by Four FGASA (Filed Guide Association of South Africa) Guides (Osama Cori, Osama Al-Smadi, Abdulla Abo-Rumman, and Nadia Al-Aloul) who have spent a year studying Nature Guiding In Eco-Training Academy, South Africa.

This Course was a first of its kind in the region, covering an introduction to the intended skills needed for a guide to build the best experience for his guests, and covering the basic knowledge that the guide need to possess to be able to interpret the environment to his guests. The training where build through over 6 months during which the four guides were working on developing a training curricula similar to the South African one but well fitted to the needs of the region.

Why You Should Hire an Adventure Athlete?

I was reading some reviews for the book “Business Lessons from the Edge”, which talks about how extreme athletes use intelligent risk-taking to succeed in business, when the idea of this article came to me.

Why would anyone hire a crazy risk-taker who risk even his own life?

In a previous post I discussed the reasons that make us take a high risk action –as a sport-.

Well what does it take to succeed in business? Risk taking. Preparation. Self-confidence. The same principles that drive extreme athletes to the highest peaks of performance.
.......More..

Grounding, a better way to discover the nature

After we finished our afternoon walk in Selati Reserve trying to identify as much animals Tracks and signs, as part of the Tracking Course I was doing in south Africa, we started a discussion with our instructor Colin Patrick, who was one of the best field guides in South Africa, a person with a very high senses for nature.

Colin Patrick, Selaty Reserve, South Africa

Colin started “it is very essential for the tracker to think in a different way, to feel all the components of the nature around him and be open in his explanation of the animal behaviors that left behind the tracks and the signs he is trying to interpret”.

“One important aspect a tracker should not forget, and it can make all the difference between finding the animal you are tracking or not, is the unnatural noise that we make.” Colin added.

He then looked at one of my colleagues, garbed his back bag explaining, “ the bags we carry for example, many pieces  going out of its body, some metal pieces hanging from it, and too much friction, the noise of friction is not natural to animals, though it will scare them away. Even our clothes do make a lot of noise, certain fabrics can make too much noise, though we should be careful choosing our bags and our hiking clothes.” He then asked us to take off our back bags and put them a side.

“One big barrier between us and the wild life surrounding us are these shoes we are wearing. Look how antelopes moves in the wild, he takes the front limp off the ground to put it forward and then moves the hind limp to fall right exactly on the same place the front was before, they recognize that walking can make a lot of noise that will get their camouflage reviled, they avoid breaking more twigs or crashing more dry leaves on the ground, since shoes protects our feet, now we stop paying attention for what we step on, we become less carful in or way, not only that, but it will give you the feeling of the ground,  t same feeling that the animal get when it is walking, giving you a better imagination and understanding for where the animal next step will be.” He added again. We all then took off our shoes.

We went in a small walk around to see how this can affect the acceptance of our existence by the surrounding animals. The results was surprising how close we could get to different birds, and other ground animals without them to flee away, they were no more scared by our close presence, Like if we were accepted as part of the environment and not as a strange body from outside.

This experience left many questions in my mind of our connection to our surrounding environment.

One of these points was the effect of barefoot in hiking or outdoor walking in general, on the park, the beach or even deep in the forest. A small act that removes many barriers to the natural wildlife, I won’t say it in a loony hippie way spouting sounds about being one with mother earth (It is fine if you are one), but it is the innately human feeling of nature that have been forgotten with the rush of the modern life.

Interesting enough there have been many studies conducted on this subject, explaining many benefits giving us all the reason to forget our shoes home next time we go hiking!

Knowing that around 40% of the world population are not wearing shoes makes you feel you’re not odd by doing so, even that the reasons are different in both cases.