René Seindal

The WWF has just released a report – the Living Planet Report 2008 – about the ecological footprint for various countries around the world. The population of Denmark has the fourth largest ecological footprint per capita, mostly due to our very high CO2 emissions and an excessive consumption of meat, which requires much land to produce.

The only counties with a higher pro capita ecological footprint are the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America and Kuwait.

Each Dane requires 8 hectares of farmland to sustain our life style, while an Italian only requires 5 hectares, which is still well over twice the world average.

Jacob Sterling, a spokesperson for the Danish section of the WWF, says:

- We’re a nation of meat eaters, and it makes us the country in Europe with the highest consumption of beef and next highest of pork, measured pro capita. The production of food for cattle and swine takes up large areas of arable land all over the world. It is completely unacceptable that our consumption puts such a level of stress on the planet.

Here’s the description of “ecological footprint” from the report:

The Ecological Footprint measures humanity’s
demand on the biosphere in terms of the
area of biologically productive land and sea
required to provide the resources we use and
to absorb our waste.

…

A country’s footprint is the sum of all the
cropland, grazing land, forest and fishing
grounds required to produce the food, fibre
and timber it consumes, to absorb the wastes
emitted when it uses energy, and to provide
space for its infrastructure. Since people
consume resources and ecological services
from all over the world, their footprint sums
these areas, regardless of where they are
located on the planet.

Sterling Airlines, the company I have normally used for low fare flights to and from Venice, has just filed for bankruptcy today. It’ll be a few months before I’m heading back to Venice, but I wonder what this will do to prices.

It never was a great company to fly with, but they were cheap and had three weekly flights between Copenhagen and Venice.

Silly update: I don’t know why, but I just checked on Facebook to see if there was something about the Sterling Airlines bankruptcy there, and I got this result:

My ipod has just died – or almost died. Its a 160Gb ipod Classic I’ve been using all summer in Italy for listening to audiobooks. I had tried to add a few books from a Linux computer, and afterwards the ipod just said “No music” when I turned it on.

Apparently, Apple had been doing nasty stuff behind the scenes to keep people from using other programs than iTunes to update their ipods, only iTunes isn’t available for Linux and that was what I had available to me at the time.

My mac back home couldn’t restore the ipod (“Unknown error” – very helpful) and it couldn’t even reformat the drive, with some variation of “internal error” message. In the end I formatted it on the Linux computer, and put it back on the mac to reload my music and books. It went fine most of the way, but after a while the ipod emitted a loud ‘clonk’ and everything blocked on the mac. Back on Linux I scanned the ipod for errors and got a gazillion or two, so the disk in the ipod is dead. It can – for now – play what is on it, but it won’t last long.

I almost had a nasty accident on my travel by motorcycle from Venice back to Copenhagen, and somebody definitely had one.

I left Venice just after noon on Thursday, and decided to drive through the night to get as far as possible before stopping to sleep.

Everything went smoothly for about a 1000km, until approx. 50km south of Leipzig. It was about 23:30 in the evening, pitch dark, and with some, but not much traffic. I was probably going at about 130-140 km/h – I did so most of the time – when I spotted something large, mangled and black rolling over the road in a cloud of sparks. I must have done something instinctive to avoid hitting it – I don’t know what – but somehow registered that an accident had happened, and I pulled into the side and stopped in the emergency lane as quickly as possible.

I had no idea what had happened, and absolutely no idea what to do about it, but I did mentally prepare myself for finding bloody mangled persons somewhere, and cursed for having left without even a basic first aid kit in my bags. I have several but left everything in Venice as I’ll need them there next year.

Two or three other cars had stopped before me, and stood in the emergency lane with their lights blinking. Two young German men were there, and I spoke shortly with them. My German is very poor, and I doubt I would have been able to place an 112 call if the other end didn’t speak decent English, so I started bullying the two Germans, “Have you called? Have you called?”, until I had them both working on their phones.  Initially they had some problems getting through, but then announced that the police was on its way.

While they called 112 we inspected the scene.  The first car we saw was a white van, turned on its side in the first lane of the three lane motorway. The window was shattered and milky white, and we couldn’t get to any doors – one was downwards and one upwards, higher than I could reach – and we couldn’t determine if there were anybody inside. Lorries and cars were hurling by, and we were scared of getting hit ourselves.

The white van had a trailer, a low one used for transporting cars, lying at the side in the emergency lane.

A bit down the road, still in the emergency lane, were a very badly mangled car which had clear rolled over and then crashed violently into the guard rail. Fearing the worst we looked inside, but there were nobody. Incredibly the door opened easily, and the emergency lights were blinking still. Both air bags had inflated and there was blood on the one in the driver’s side, but there were nobody.

Looking around we found the driver sitting on the other side of the guard rail, with blood on his face, apparently coming from around his eyes. I tried to speak to him, but he was very badly shocked and hardly comprehensible, but he moved, spoke something, and moved his eyes too, so even if I couldn’t talk to him, I was fairly confident he was not in a life threatening situation. He remained where he was, so we let him be.

I went back to the white van because we still haven’t found anybody there, and I feared somebody might still be inside, but we couldn’t figure out anything. We couldn’t get around it properly due to the traffic passing by. It seemed abandoned, no traces of any persons and no blood.

Another person showed up from one of the stopped cars – which had a similar trailer with a car on top – and he was going on very rapidly in Russian, gesticulating wildly, and even though we didn’t understand anything he said, and he didn’t understand any German or English, we understood somehow that he had been driving the van and had crawled out himself. He had been driving with the other Russian car, and had been there all the time.

The German guys found an emergency triangle in the crashed car and put it up a bit down the road. Just as they were doing that, a lorry almost crashed into the van on the inner lane, avoiding it by inches after a frantic manoeuvre. One of the German guys starting signalling the oncoming traffic using the display of his mobile phone, and I did the same, and seeing  that most lorries moved to the middle lane and avoided the van.

The police passed on the other side of the motorway, and it took another couple of minutes before they had turned around and came back to us.

At this point there was little left for me to do. The policemen did the same things we had done, looking at the crashed cars, locating the involved persons and finding out if anybody needed immediate emergency treatment, and concluded that wasn’t the case started taking photos. Shortly after a Red Cross ambulance showed up to care for the hurt driver, and we saw nothing more of him. A while later a doctor turned up in another car and entered the Red Cross van.

I asked one of the policemen if I was still needed and was asked to stay for a little while.

The police started interrogating the Russian driver and the three of us who had stopped, collecting stories and documents. Fortunately, the two Germans had some English and could translate for me, because the policemen only spoke German, and my German is too poor for anything that serious.

It took a while, and after I had written down my name, address and licence number of my motorcycle, I got my passport back, and I was allowed to continue. I didn’t linger, there was nothing for me to do, and I wouldn’t get any wiser for it.

I departed and decided to stop at the first stop possible for think and relax a bit, but it was well over 80km before until the next stop.

Naturally, witnessing a serious accident up close makes you think, it could so easily have been fatal what I saw, but on the other side, I still had about 600km to go, at least five hours driving, and I wouldn’t be any safer having images of mangled cars and bloody drivers  in my head, so I tried to push it away, think of something else and just get home.

In the end I didn’t really feel like stopping much or sleeping anywhere, so I just continued driving through the night, stopping for about half an hour every once in a while for something to drink and sometimes a little nap in the empty restaurants along the motorway. It was rather cold in the night, so I only did short stretches of 50-80km between breaks, stopping when my hands got too cold. I was a the Rostock ferry harbour at 7.30 in the morning, and got on a ferry at nine for Gedser, and I was back home just after noon, very tired.

These photos were taken with my phone after the police had arrived:

What appears to have happened is this. The van was driving in the inner lane with the empty, but very low trailer. The car, probably trying to overtake him, hit the trailer at high speed having only seen the van. At impact, the car must have done a somersault and rolled over, ending crashed into the guard rail turned 180° relative to the driving direction. This was what I saw and fortunately didn’t hit. The van must have received a violent forward push, directly into the chassis through the trailer hook, which turned it over. The trailer was detached as the van fell, and ended besides it.

From what I could see, the driver of the car had injuries around his eyes, but not to his eyes, probably caused by the expanding air bag, which had blood stains on it. His seat belt and the air bag probably saved his life. The driver of the van was completely unscathed, but shocked. Getting the impact from behind he had no forewarning, but the seat belt and having the larger vehicle protected him.

So the kayaking season is over here in Venice, and I’m heading back home now.  I have most things packed, and just need to check oil on the motorbike before I’m off, heading north towards Denmark, Copenhagen and Valentina and Jamil.

Yesterday I had a very interesting meeting with Maria and Andrea from Venice Canoe and Dragonboat, which is quite another way of experiencing Venice in a non-traditional way. I have rarely met nicer people, and I’m really looking forward to working with them in the future.

Now its my way and the highway

(photo from May on my way down here)

Il tempo è migliorato dopo una notte con raffiche a 60 nodi, grandine e pioggia ora c’è il sole ma il bollettino parla di vento sui 35 nodi nel canale e mare agitato, a malincuore ma Michele e Massimigliano, anche su consiglio/richiesta della capitaneria di porto di Genova, rinunciano alla traversata. In ogni caso saranno domani pomeriggio a Genova per la conferenza stampa di domani pomeriggio.

Nel frattempo si mangia e discute…

The weather has bettered after a night with gusts of 60 knots, hail and rain. Now the sun is shining, but the forecast is talking about 35 knots in the channel, and rough seas. With a heavy heart Michele and Massimigliano, also at the request of the Port Authorities of Genoa, renounces on the journey. In any case they will be at Genoa tomorrow afternoon for a press conference.

In the mean time we eat and talk …

The Canottieri Diadora is the Venetian rowing club where I have been taking voga alla veneta lessons recently. It is a very old rowing club, with a very particular history.

The club was founded in 1898 in Zara in Dalmatia, modern day Zadar in Croatia, by a small group of rowers of mostly Venetian descent. Zara had been under Venetian rule from 1409 until the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, and a good part of the population were descendents of settlers from the Veneto region in Italy. They called the club S. C. Diadora, which is the Venetian name for the city of Zara.

Zara was, however, under Austro-Hungarian rule at the time, and the Venetian club was not welcome in the Austrian rowing federation, so the club had great difficulty participating in races. It took a long strenous battle, but in the end the club managed to become associated with the “Reale Rowing Club Italiano”, after which the S. C. Diadora could participate in national Italian races, and later in international events under the Italian flag.

In 1907 the club won their first medals at the internation regattas of Trieste, which was followed by many others in national and international events, including national Italian championships and an bronze medal in Mens Eights at the 8th Olympic games in Paris in 1924.

The Second World War put an end to all this. Many club members died in the war, and many others fled Zara for Italy, as the city was all but destroyed. It was the end of the S. C. Diadora.

However, in 1961 a group of old members got together in Ancona in Italy, and participated in an event there under the blue/white colours of the S. C. Diadora.

The following year a group of Venetian rowers, together with some of the old members of the club in Zara, now living in Venice, met on the Lido di Venezia and reformed the club as the Circolo Canottieri Diadora, with seat on the Lido di Venezia, and the Diadora has been there ever since. Other Venetian rowing clubs gave a hand in establishing a new fleet for the reformed Diadora.

As basically a new club, competitive results didn’t come immediately. In the 1960s results were few, but things got better in 1970s and 1980s, with many regional and some national wins. The activities were extended to racing kayaks in the early 1970s, and more slowly, to voga alla veneta.

The first Venetian style boat in the club was a veneta a quattro, which was given to the club by the rowing club of the railway workers. Not a competitive boat, it became nevertheless a means of training, and in 1973 the Diadora won the Historical Regatta in a veneta on load from the Querini rowing club in Venice. The Diadora team consistently won the Historical Regatta for several years in a row. One of the members of the team was Lino Farnea, who still coaches rowers at the Diadora at the age of 70.

The mid-70s was a time of revival of voga alla veneta in both Venice and on the mainland. The Vogalonga, started in 1975, was a part of this revival. Many of the city’s rowing clubs gradually switched their focus from English style rowing to Venetian style rowing, and so did the Diadora. Consequently, at the Diadora it is now possible to row English style, kayak and row Venetian style, both competitively and recreationaly.

The Diadora now has a fleet of several mascarete, a gondolone and a caorlina, and has access to the municipal fleet of racing boats for use in the municipal regattas which are held at various places in the lagoon each summer.

Lino Farnea is coaching still at the Diadora, and also at the Scuola Navale F. Morosini at Sant’Elena, and he is often a referee at the municipal regattas.

Update from Marco in Corsica:

Oggi ancora tempo pessimo, vento oltre 20 nodi, qui il mare è protetto, ma appena oltre capo corso c’è mare forza 4, 5. Per il momento attendiamo. Probabilmente spostiamo la partenza a Domenica.

Also today the weather is very poor, winds over 20 knots. The sea is sheltered here, but just around the Capo Corso there’s a moderate to rough sea. For the moment we’re waiting. We will probably postpone departure to sunday.

[The forecast for sunday is force 4 winds, SW, moderate sea -- rené]

Arrivati a Macinaggio il tempo che ci accoglie non è dei migliori e il bollettino non ci consola, vento da sud-ovest 20 25 nodi e per domani 30 35 nodi, al largo mare agitato… Probabilmente la partenza verrà rinviata a domenica…

Arrived in Macinaggio the weather that greets us is the best, and the forecast doesn’t console us. Wind from SW 20-25 knots, and for tomorrow 30-35 knots, outside the sea is rough. Most likely, the departure will be postponed until sunday.

I’m posting this on behalf of some friends of mine.

Michele Ghezzo and Massimiliano Valerosi, both from Venice, are going to paddle from Macinaggio on the island of Corsica to Genova in northern Italy in a double surf ski. The journey is about a 100 nautical miles across the open sea, which they hope to achieve in 22 hours of non-stop paddling.

The purpose of the journey is to get attention to a very widespread problem here in Italy, that of architectural barriers for handicapped persons. Many cities are notoriously difficult to navigate for people in wheel chairs.

The plan is to depart from Macinaggio in time to arrive in Genoa between the 5th and 7th of October, when the Salone Internazione della Nautica is open in Genoa.

The two paddlers will be followed on the journey by two 44 feet sailing boats, the Ribot and the Tornese.

I will post updates here during their journey, as I receive them via mobile phone.

Here are some of the informational material about the journey, in Italian:

• Un mondo senza barriere
• Un mondo senza barriere – Manifesto
• Michele Ghezzo