On the edge of the middle of nowhere and into the back of beyond
“Everyone complains about the weather,” wrote Mark Twain, “but no one does anything about it.” I know exactly how he feels. When discussing travel, everyone talks about the “middle of nowhere” but no one says where it is. So many people have complained about being stuck in the middle of nowhere you’d think there would be a list by now, or at least a GPS position so you could avoid accidentally going there. Boy, if I had a taco for every time I heard somebody say “this really is the middle of nowhere” I’d sure be one stuffed burro by now.
On the other hand, I bet there are a lot of people who’d like to know where the middle of nowhere is located, just so they could go to the edge and have a quick peek so they could scratch it off their bullet list and brag about it. That’s like taking a Polaroid photo of the Grand Canyon so you could come back home and show all your friends what it looked like, but you can only do that so many times before you don’t have any friends left or they all have dental appointments booked when you call.
Personally I know exactly where the Middle of Nowhere is located because I have been there several times and have the photos to prove it. I know you’d call me a fat faced liar if I didn’t have evidence so I have kindly included them here for your inspection. The truth of the matter is that there is more than one Nowhere, which will come as a shock to those people who haven’t given the topic the urgent consideration it properly deserves. What you need is a good map, one with mustard stains on the margins to show its age and mileage, and a pocket calculator to show how far it is away from everything else. After all, you are looking for Nowhere, and first you must find out where the dang thing is located, whether it’s the middle or even just at the edge of it.
We will begin our perambulations long ago and far away. As a teenager I had developed a habit of hitchhiking across Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver, just to see what was on the other side, so to speak. I forget how many times I did this, but I know it’s a long way from here to there and back. I have a lot of memories, including hopping freight trains, but few photos so we’ll keep it brief. I came to the end of my hitching career in the middle of Saskatchewan when I started hitching both ways, which is to say both east and west, one ride after another because I had no idea where I was going. People would say: “Where you going?” Then I would reply: “I thought you knew.” I can tell you from experience that if you stood on a phone book in Saskatoon you could see both Alberta and Manitoba at the same time. If the middle of Saskatchewan doesn’t qualify for Nowhere, I don’t know what does. But the prairies are not only flat, they’re visually boring, so let’s move on.
I’ve been living in British Columbia for a very long time because it’s a very beautiful place. It’s also very large. When I tell Americans that BC is five times larger than Texas they look at me like I am a fat faced liar, but lying through your teeth has long since become an American habit, starting from the top down, so what do Texans know about anything? There is a rain forest in BC as big as the Amazon, but few people even know its name. That’s because until recently it didn’t have a name, but the Great Bear Rainforest is an immense solitude of …. nothing. Nobody lives there. OK, there’s 30,000 people spread out over 4 million acres of forest, half of them living in one town. It makes Siberia seem bustling. Whereas the Amazon is hot and humid, at least you can survive there. In the Great Bear Rainforest, the black flies will gnaw on you right down to the bone. I went there multiple times to search for the spirit bear, an all-white apparition that the native people regard as the guardian spirit that protects the wilderness. I refuse to tell you where you might find the spirit bear, but I can assure you it’s somewhere near the Middle of Nowhere, or in close proximity.
Long ago I developed an affinity for visiting remote wilderness regions. You are never going to find the middle of nowhere in a big city, unless you count Washington, DC, which has a nothingness all its own, but we digress. Nowhere is always far away, usually as far as you can go and then a bit further. Looking for it keeps you on your toes. There is never any public transportation. Until I jotted down these notes for you, there were no guidebooks or maps. You can’t find these places online. Even Google Maps draws a blank. You have to go there yourself, but where to start?
Having commenced with the Great Bear Rainforest, which is in the middle of British Columbia along the coast, let’s wander a tad further north. The Queen Charlotte Islands are located west of the town of Prince Rupert, but you will never find the Charlottes because the islands are now known as Haida Gwaii, the home of the Haida people who have been living there about 12,000 years making some very nifty northwest coast art. Nearly everyone lives on the northern section, known as Graham Island on maps if you look closely. They even have a few villages. The southern section is known as Gwaii Hanaas, a large collection of miscellaneous islands where virtually no one lives. This has something to do with the weather, which can be nasty, especially in the winter. At one time there was a whaling station known as Rose Harbour, where currently (as I write this) a crazy German hippie named Goetz lives in a cabin, as he has since the 1970’s. From his second floor window I think he can see Japan. Rose Harbor truly is on the edge of nowhere. If you go, say hi to Goetz for me.
It’s hard to believe but there are places further north than Haida Gwaii where, thanks to modern technology, people actually live and work in between rainstorms and blizzards. There are even a couple of cities in Alaska, Juneau and Anchorage among them. A unique situation exists in Alaska in that in the middle of summer it never gets dark. This allows you time and space to explore Nowhere, which is spelled on the map as Denali National Park. You can’t go there in the winter because its pitch black and about a hundred degrees below zero, but there a few weeks in July where the beauty of Nowhere can be observed and enjoyed.
A train runs north from Anchorage to the park, where you get off and explore by bus what you are allowed to explore. The beauty of the landscape is overwhelming. Denali has been called the “Serengeti of the North,” referring to the great plains in Africa where herds of animals can still be seen. In Denali the “Big Five” are grizzly bears, moose, wolves, Dall Sheep and caribou. The wolves are too clever to be seen, but from a tourist bus you can spot caribou everywhere and the sheep high atop the hills if you have a telescopic lens.
Nobody will tell you this except for me, but it possible to drive all the way through the park to the other side, if you have permission and have registered to stay at a hidden lodge that no one knows about. This is not the Middle of Nowhere. The park is in the middle; the lodge is in the Back of Beyond, which is even more remote. No one is allowed to get out of any bus at any time, largely because grizzly bears can kill you and the moose are even more dangerous, but at the private lodge you are allowed to wander around and feed yourself to the wildlife, even at midnight when it is as bright as high noon.
Exploring further afoot in the Far North, I urge you to explore the Big Land, which is what they call Labrador, a colony of Newfoundland, which is also worth a look. It’s as far north as Alaska but enjoys the advantage of having very few people wandering around and ruining the view. There are several Nowheres to be enjoyed, but it requires some work. Best to fly to Deer Harbour, an airport in the west of Newfoundland, because driving there from the capital at St. John’s will eat up all of your holiday. From the airport, you rent a car and drive west to the Viking Highway on the coast, and then all the way north to L’Anse aux Meadows, where the Vikings landed in 999, beating Christopher Columbus to the Promised Land by almost 500 years. Having arrived there, a small fishing boat will take you to a lighthouse on Querpon Island at the very northern tip of Newfoundland. Here you can stay for a few days and eat lobster on Wonder bread and watch the icebergs and humpback whales drift by the lighthouse and if you squint you can see Greenland in the distance.
Querpon (pronounced like harpoon) certainly qualifies as the Back of Beyond, because you had to drive through the Middle of Nowhere to get there, but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. To get to the real Back of Beyond you need to retrace your steps back down the coast to the ferry dock at St. Barbe, where the ferry cruises through the Strait of Belle Isle to Labrador on the other side. Should you go during the middle of summer as I did, you may enjoy a blizzard and whiteout while pausing to think about icebergs and radar.
Blanc Sablon is not in Labrador. The little village is located in the far eastern fringes of Quebec, so the proprietors of the only bed and breakfast don’t speak English but may leave a cold boiled egg on the breakfast table while they are out shoving icebergs off the beach. If you are still feeling peckish, there is a tiny grocery store selling last month’s fruit imported from faraway Newfoundland so best to stock up on snacks for the drive ahead. It’s a very, very long drive in your rented Silverado (they don’t rent cars in Labrador, only trucks with 10-ply tires) on a rough road through L’anse-au-Clair, L’Anse Amour, L’Anse au Loup and L’Anse-au-Diable to Mary’s Harbour where it seems like you have arrived at the North Pole. (I forgot to ask while I was there; if you go, kindly inquire what L’Anse means in English.)
Should you feel smug finally arriving at Mary’s Harbour after surviving your drive through the Middle of Nowhere, the last section on a gravel road that will wreck your Silverado, your journey is just beginning. Next you climb aboard a tiny ferry that tiptoes through an iceberg field with more bergs than new potatoes in an old potato patch and bravely putters out into the North Atlantic Ocean where winds can hit 200 miles per hour in the winter (don’t go in the winter) and waves can top 200 feet in height. With luck you may arrive alive at the island of Battle Harbour, formerly a fishing “outport” where people crazy enough to live way out there caught codfish for a living until all the cod were gone and then they moved to the “mainland” as Labrador is called.
Battle Harbour is famous for being the place where Marconi sent the first telegram from North America to Europe. There is a little plaque you can read on top of the hill next to the wreckage of an airplane, which crashed in deep fog. Did we talk about the fog yet? On the rare clear day in summer you can stare into the void and almost see Iceland. Aside from all the icebergs, you can wander around the re-created little village and say to yourself, and anyone you meet: “Wow, this is really the Middle of Nowhere!” Actually, it’s just on the edge. If you are truly crazy, you can talk one of the locals to taking you out to a berg and see one of these shiny diamonds up close and personal. At night the Aurora Borealis will convince you that you have truly arrived at the Back of Beyond.
If far northern climes are too chilly for you to explore, let’s head south for some heat and sunshine. I drove once to Death Valley from my home in northern California, largely because I had heard the valley was the driest and hottest place in the entire country and it had been raining on the coast for months. Sadly, the valley had been hit by the biggest rainstorm in decades the night before we arrived and the valley was a sea of mud. All campgrounds were closed. We drove and drove and drove, and there was no place to stay and nothing to see. Just the sight of a highway sign was a cause to celebrate. We drove so far that we arrived in Nevada. The town of Pahrump was so hopeless we almost turned around to go sleep in the mud. Pahrump was a sad ass dump where people who worked in Las Vegas at minimum wage cleaning toilets on the midnight shift lived because they couldn’t afford to live in Vegas. It was a collection of trailers and modular homes lost in the blowing sea of dust. I’m not sure it was in the exact Middle of Nowhere but it was close enough to quality for second place. However, the all-you-can-eat 99 cent breakfast at the casino, right across the street from the whorehouse, is not to be missed.
Not as warm as Death Valley is the famous Cloud Forest of Ecuador which boasts some excellent jungles in which to not get lost. Clouds drifting east from the Pacific Ocean keep these mountains in perpetual mist, like a car wash that never ends. If a plant can’t be grown here it can’t be grown anywhere. There are more bird species in Ecuador than in the rest of the world combined. There are more poisonous plants than are found in the Amazon. Should you go, do anything and everything your guide tells you to do or not do. Do not wander around with your head up your ass. If you get lost in the jungle there, no one will come looking for you. Also, watch out for the ocelots and jaguars. It’s like the Great Bear Rainforest without the grizzlies and black flies. You have been warned.
While you are in Ecuador, you might as well pop by the Galapagos Islands. This will require some time, effort and expense. Myself, as a guest of the Ecuadorian government, I flew from Vancouver to Toronto to Miami to Panama City to Ecuador and in the morning I was so tired I couldn’t remember where I was. I looked all over my hotel room for matches, stationery, anything with a name of the hotel on it. I had to go down to the reception and ask what city I was in. Turned out to be Guayaquil, wherever that is. Then you fly to the Galapagos. It’s the only way to get to this very remote island group, and then you must board a ship or vessel to explore the islands, which are so far off the map they were only discovered fairly recently and subsequently have been overrun with tourists rich enough to come all the way there and check it off their bucket list. Great place to watch marine iguanas go swimming or to have a chat with a 200-year old tortoise. Tell the iguanas I sent you.
To save time and money, while you are in the South Pacific Ocean you might want to visit the Marquesa Islands. Getting there makes a trip to the Galapagos seem like a walk over to your neighborhood 7/11. The Marquesas are conveniently located in French Polynesia and most tourists are rich French bourgeoisie who fly from Paris to New York to Los Angeles to Tahiti then board a cargo freight that only sails every two weeks to the islands, on a lengthy journey that touches base at seven different islands. Not to worry; the Marquesans no longer practice headhunting or cannibalism.
The Tourist Board in Tahiti a thousand miles to the south likes to claim that the Marquesas are the most remote islands in the world because they are located “farthest away from any body of land” in the world. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it sure is a pain in the neck to get there. On the way back I was sitting on the deck at the back and told a friend I had made onboard that we were exactly half way between Tahiti and the Marqueasas, which made our conversation the most remote chat in the world. He took a long sip on his gin and tonic and considered. “Give my best to everyone when you get home,” he said.
Sognefjord is the longest and deepest fjord in Norway with a length of 204 kilometres and a maximum depth of 4,291 feet (just to mix measurements). For about 100 km of its length, the fjord has a depth of over 3,300 ft. The cliffs rising on both sides of the Sognefjorden are extremely steep and about 3,300 feet high. The spectacular natural landscape of the region attracts visitors to the Sognefjorden from all corners of the globe. Being in the middle of Norway it’s not exactly the Middle of Nowhere but there is an added plus that it has a Back of Beyond that few people ever explore.
The cruise up the fjord is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world. It ends at the lovely little village of Flaam, where tourists get off and wander around and run screaming back to the ship when they pop into the local grocery store and see the prices in Norwegian kroner. It cost more to buy a picnic lunch in Flaam than it does to fly there from North America. Should you wish to buy a password to access the Internet at the hotel, it will cost you $17 US but you can always remind yourself you are on vacation and no need to access your email at all.
The Back of Beyond is carefully hidden away in the valley behind the village where no tourists fear to tread for fear of getting some exercise. The friendly young man in the village who rented me a bike at a very special discount rate told me that no tourists from the cruise ships ever rode up the valley. I can say without hesitation that the Flaam Valley is the most beautiful place I have ever been in the world, a merry little stream running through the middle of it, a 2,000-foot waterfall tumbling down from the surrounding peaks, cows munching whatever cows munch in the fields, a church dating back to 1604, and lovely little cottages scattered among the trees. I half expected to meet Julie Andrews and crew singing the Sound of Music. It was what Beyond should look like, a tiny piece of heaven that had fallen out of the sky. When you go, ask for the McCarthy rental rate at the bike shop and see what happens.
If you check Google maps you will find a lack of detail of some destinations in Nepal. The Upper Dolpo region of northwest Nepal, cleverly situated just north of Lower Dolpo, is one of the least visited regions on the planet, which is strange because Nepal is a prime tourist destination. There are reasons for this. Number one is there is no good reason for anyone to go there, no famous mountains to climb, no world class restaurants serving gourmet food, no nude beaches and no tourist attractions.
Also, it requires about a month to enter and exit, can only be accessed in the spring after the snow melts and before the summer monsoon rains start and the rivers become impassable (there are no bridges), there are no stores or places to buy food, no electricity or phones, no running water or toilet facilities, no doctors or clinics, no roads, and you must walk about 700 kilometres mostly above 15,000 feet and cross 4 passes over 18,000 feet. Death from Acute Mountain Sickness, whether cerebral or pulmonary edemas, is a risk. Aside from that, there are no McDonalds or even a Burger King in the entire region. After going there myself for reasons that can’t be rationally explained since they are Classified, I would suggest you stick to the Marquesas where they serve up a good pig roast at Lucille’s on Niku Hiva.
Should you have access to a copy of the book Stones of Silence by George Schaller, detailing his trip with Peter Matthiessen (who wrote the masterpiece The Snow Leopard about their expedition to Upper Dolpo) you may note a black and white photo in the middle of the book that looks exactly like the colour photo below, except Schaller’s photo had people sitting in a group with the immensity of the Tibetan plateau in the distance. Why it is called a plateau I don’t know, because you can see hundreds of mountain peaks. Somewhere in this Lost Horizon supposedly resides the land of Shambala, or Shangri-la as the Tibetans call it, heaven on Earth. As far as I am concerned, they could have chosen a more convenient place to put the damned thing, given there cannot have been more than a handful of people in human history to ever see the view.
There are Nowheres everywhere if you just know where to look. Often they are located in the oddest places. Take for example Dubai, and I wish somebody would. That Disneyland on steroids is located on what used to be an empty beach where no one lived due to the fact it was so hot you couldn’t live there and still exist as a human being. I went there in September when it was so hot that if you farted your hotel would catch fire. My Swiss watch, which told the time and elevation and heat and humidity and everything but Donald Trump lies, stated it was 47 degrees (Celsius). That’s about 125 degrees Fahrenheit, which isn’t too uncomfortable as long as you never go outside for more than 30 seconds, in which case you would die. My guide cheerfully told me it reached the 50’s in August, which is an even better reason never to go to Dubai.
I had nothing whatsoever to do with the itinerary. I only went on the press trip because I had never been to the Middle East before (and likely won’t again). Whoever decided that I should experience the thrill of Go Karting wearing heavy protective gear in 47-degree heat ought to be forced to do the same himself. The idiotic “dune bashing thrill ride” (racing large SUVs over sand giant dunes in the so-called Empty Quarter to see if you could roll the car and die) was beyond stupid. But after that woeful adventure, we drove to the Back of Beyond where were treated to a belly dancing show and dinner in the desert when the temperature dropped to a positively frigid 40 degrees, when rivers of water fell from my fingertips like 10 tiny waterfalls and cold soft drinks were regarded the same as red hot and illegal hard liquor.
Can you figure out why the Empty Quarter is so named? Good for you. I remind you of the test yet to come. The Middle of Nowhere can be found in many places, and even the edge of it is exciting to have a peak., but be careful if and when you finally get to the Back of Beyond. If they are barbecuing slices of camel humps over a roaring fire, perhaps you would be better off back home in Peoria ordering the microwaved quesadillas at Carl’s Junior with mild salsa. I will wait here for you.