South Dakota - Day 3 - Crazy Horse

Saturday 25^th September 2010

This morning we decided to start the day with a swim and a dip in the hotel hot tub, before breakfast.

Today was our second day at Crazy Horse and we had an interview with a Native American who worked at the visitors centre to get her view on the project. After this we knew we had a quick turnaround as we had been offered a prime position for the mountain blast. Every so often they blast parts of the mountain to shape the sculpture and combined with a visit from the state governor they were doing this today. About 10mins into our interview we were told we needed to finish as we needed to go to watch the blast.

When we had packed up the kit we heard the call on the radio, “Three Minutes to blast”, it turned out our guide Pat had a broken radio and had missed the earlier notices, so we sprinted to the nearest area we could and managed to get the kit up and recording just as we heard “10 seconds to blast” over the radio.

The most striking thing was the delay between seeing the explosion and hearing it.

We then made our way down the road to get an ariel view of the statue from a helicopter ride over the top of the statue. This for me was a special moment as I have never ridden in a helicopter before and had always wanted to.

I rode in the front passenger seat and took off the door so I could film out of it. They didn't ask me to, but I clipped the camera to me just in case, especially as he said if I dropped it, it would go though the tail and that would be the end.

It was an incredible experience and so much smoother than I ever thought it was going to be. We managed to get some lovely footage in the 15 minutes we had in the air.

That concluded the Crazy Horse filming, so we said goodbye to Pat and took a piece of rock from the mountain blast as a nice souvenir.

Tonight we stayed down the road in a lodge so we were close to our next story, the buffalo roundup. We arrived at the lake lodge just as the sun was setting so I thought it would be nice to have a swim in the freshwater lake next to where we were staying. The water was FREEZING but oh so refreshing. I did get out pretty quickly though.

That evening we pondered firing up the BBQ but soon discovered that although the lodge had a hob and microwave, there was no cutlery, crockery or cooking equipment at all.

We settled for the restaurant at the late which had a somewhat restrictive menu. We all went for a salad to avoid any fried food, but my chicken salad came with a deep fried chicken breast, Mmmmmm.

Once again we were last to leave the restaurant and the hoovering and cleaning was well underway as we tucked into our meal (around 8pm). We ordered a dessert and took it back to the lodge. We have decided to slip forward all our meals from this point to fit into American time.

South Dakota - Day 2 - Crazy Horse

Friday 24^th September 2010

OK, If we're going to save the world environmentally we're gonna need some help. The Holiday Inn Express (Custer) have developed the ultimate in throw away breakfast. Plastic knives, forks, spoons, plates and polystyrene cups for the coffee...Mmmmmmmmm. Kind of makes you think it's not worth bothering when the other side of the world have no idea about wasting plastic. Oh, they do leave your towels if you hang them up so they are not “all” bad. *sarcasm off*

Breakfast itself was a little basic with muffins, bagels, scrambled egg and porrage. Although the did have the most amazing Cinnabon, really naughty but amazing.

First story of the trip is Crazy Horse Monument. As we drove to the site a few miles down the road we suddenly spied the memorial from a distance, and it looked quite spectacular from there, even before we got close.

On arrival we met press man Pat Dobbs who was really helpful and gave us a quick tour. Now Pat is a talker, in a kind of, why say 3 words when 30 will do, way. Although he did give us some great info and looked after us for the next three days.

One of the first things we got to do was talk to Ruth Ziolkowski. Ruth is the wife of Korczak Ziolkowski who was first approached to carve the memorial in 1939. Since his death, Ruth and their family of 10 children have continued the project and it looks like the grandchildren will keep it going.

The carving takes no federal money and has been offered it twice. Korczak always wanted to keep it publicly funded as he believed people would engage with it more and they would see it through to the end.

Ruth, now getting on herself still has a very active role in crazy horse, she still gives lots of interviews and the one with us was fantastic, she is certainly well media trained. She also runs the post office at Crazy horse for which she is paid $1 a year which of course she doesn’t cash as it's federal money.

After that we were given a rare treat in being taken to the top of the carving right in front of the head. Not many people get to do this, most tourists are driven around the bottom.

Pat took us up and recommended we walked right to the end without looking back so we could turn round and experience the full majesty and size of the finished head.

When we turned it was incredible, it looked a lot smoother than I thought it would and was full of some amazing geology that you cant really make out from the visitor center a mile away.

Whilst we were up the top, we met with Kaz Ziolkowski, son of Korczak and Ruth who still works on the monument. He was a little shy at first but soon told us all about what it was like to work on this humongous project.

That evening we thought we'd manage another Custer restaurant for dinner but we didn't get back until late, but on the walk to the same restaurant as the night before, we found another one open.

This was a proper steak house, and one that sold vegetables. AMAZING! The meal was good and only really runied by the bill coming mid way through dinner and the hoovering up. It was cracking on for 8.30pm........

South Dakota - Day 1

Thursday 23^rd September 2010

Travel Day....

So United Airlines, isn't their check-in fun. What we thought was an empty check-in was in fact first class. When we found the cattle class (after I’d been to customs...more below) the queue was massive, then came the mid-queue passport checks where they disappeared with our passports and asked Maria detailed questions (because she's Irish and they clearly cant be trusted).

This is the first time I’ve ever had to manage a carnet (It's like a passport for kit to check you're not buying kit abroad and saving money on avoiding VAT).

It involves writing down all the kit you want to take, serial and model numbers. This all has to be stamped on the way out and on arrival in the states. So having filled this all in the week before I was prepared if a little unsure as what I had to get stamped, but the Heathrow guys were quite helpful.

The United Airlines queue left us no time for any “shop” time at Heathrow, but I did manage to convince the others to register for the iris scan when we had gone through security. If you haven’t done this, it is free and means when you re-enter the UK, you can go through the iris scan booths instead of queueing, (and then you go and wait for your luggage with everyone else, but hey).

I do advise anyone flying United to take plenty of entertainment, the system had 5 really shit flims and 5 TV programmes. That was about it. Luckily I had an episode of Sherlock tucked away for such a crisis, although much to the annoyance of the other passengers, we did all talk a huge amount though the flight discussing a range of subjects including the all important critique of the office staff..(most of you fared well, but some....well....).

Funniest part of the flight was, after a bumpy approach and a pretty silent cabin, the plane touched down to a “Whoooooooohhhhhh” from a kid which made the whole plane laugh.

On the way out of the plane, first class passengers were reminded over the tannoy (to the whole plane) to pack away “ALL of your pillows blankets and complementary shoes” just to remind us of the luxury they had been experiencing.

Most flights to the middle of the states go to Chicago or Denver, we flew into Denver which is pretty sparse based on the approach to the airport and what we saw on our next flight on a tiny (Smallest plane I have ever been on) trip to Rapid City, South Dakota.

Our (only) flight attendant, Dana, looked like she had flown that route for the last 30 years and knew those safety procedures like the back of her hand.

We touched down in Rapid City to a tiny airport and went in search of Europcar....Oh they don't exist, but hold on Hertz have our reservation...Oh hang on so do National, Oh, but both details are incorrect and state we will be returning the car to the same location and don’t have any extra drivers. On setting every thing straight we are told it will quadruple the price. No problem, a quick call to the worldwide 24h helpline will sort this out.

Oh, they have no record of the booking as this is a UK centre. We took the car anyway.

We chose to stay near our first job at Crazy Horse monument, so a nice night drive through South Dakota to Custer was great fun to our “everything is amazing, cute, strange minds”.

On arrival at the Holiday Inn Express, we quickly were reminded that we were no longer in a 24h city as all the restaurants had closed bar one. With no further option we had our first (and certainly not last) fried food dinner. The bonus of this place is that they advertised over 100 beers. So we dutifully tried one each to close what was now hour 24 of our first day.

Friday 23rd October 2009

This morning was very different. Our big day was yesterday, and there are quite a few big stories around today, so we have only done the three TV lives, and we didn't actually do the last one as the kit wouldn't connect. So we now have time to relax a bit. I need to strategically pack all the gear and sort out the payment of the hotel (cash only in Africa). We have been invited to dinner tonight with ?? from the Mums for mums charity, just hope I can stay awake.

Whilst I'm here writing, a few things I've noticed on my travels not time specific.

Traffic Lights / Signs.

It wasn't until I saw a set in Mekelle that I realised I hadn't seen a traffic light all trip. Even in Addis the traffic is free to roam, cars fly around all over the place but everyone just uses common sense and it all works rather well. Although I'm informed there are quite a few bumps as the general driving style is quite free-for-all. It's also very refreshing to not see hundreds of sign posts on the streets.

Scaffolding,

The development everywhere in Ethiopia is massive in every town we went to, large or small there was a huge amount of building work and construction. The most fascinating part of this is that huge concrete buildings are being supported by wooden scaffolding.

It just doesn't look like it could support it, but as Mike pointed out to me, that's how they must have built structures like Salisbury Cathedral many years ago. I did ask Tsigue's husband about this a few nights ago, he said it is a becoming a problem as there is so much building work going on, the amount of logging being done to maintain enough scaffold poles is very high.

Thursday 22nd October 2009

This is where the blog gets dull, no travel information. We edited and sent the big breakfast piece last night, that was finished around 3am, we then edited the Today Programme package and sent that back.

These are sent using a small satellite dish called a BGAN (Broadband Global Area Network) said in my best nerdy voice. It basically gives me a steady broadband internet connection, which is critical here as broadband in Ethiopia is as fast as dial-up. In true broadcasting tradition, that meant me going onto the roof of the hotel (Safely) and dropping a cable into my room.

The TV, Radio, Stills pictures and text bits all get sent back this way. And it means I can keep in touch with base through email. This is also what we use to do the TV Lives.

It takes about 40 - 60mins to send the TV packages and the Radio and pics go quite quickly. By the time everything was filed, checked and everyone was happy it was 5.15am.

BBC One Breakfast wanted us to be on live to introduce our film, so I was back up at 6.30am to set all the kit up....

This morning everybody wanted a go...but at first nothing worked. The rather heavy satellite dish (The M4) is not stable and unusable, and when I try to switch to the backup that fails as well. Luckily these were the only faults all day.

So we really have spent from 8am – 6pm doing TV lives, radio lives, and sending back internet bits literally non-stop, the list is quite impressive.

But we still have some more to produce. We have one more film to make for Breakfast television tomorrow, so another late night beckons...

We had dinner in the restaurant tonight for sanity as we had it in the room yesterday. If we'd had it in the room tonight we'd have got cabin fever.

Everything was finished at send back by 3am which gave me nice long 3 hour sleep.

Wednesday 21st October 2009

Today we had to do some interviews in the morning, but we wanted to do these as soon as possible as we knew we had a lot to get through today.

We went to an organisation called EYES (Ethiopian Youth Educational Support), where I met Birhan Woldu. She was two years old in the 1984 famine and had her life saved by an Irish aid worker who gave her an injection. She is now Director for EYES. She now has a degree in nursing and a diploma agriculture, a very inspirational person.

We interviewed her for the film and as her interview was so good we are going to make another film for the website which is just her story. After the interview I went back to her house to get some footage with her father, whilst I was there he organised us to have a traditional coffee ceremony.

I thought I had arrived in heaven, those that know me well, know my love for coffee. A coffee ceremony is basically a social gathering, I suppose it's where the traditional “Coffee Morning” comes from.

Friends and family come together, sit around a table and have a good gossip whilst drinking three rounds of coffee. That is one ceremony, you'd usually do three ceremony's in a day.

In the house on the floor is a small pot with burning charcoal, on top of this in a small fry pan the raw coffee bean is roasted at a hight heat, (I'm sounding like a cookery programme here). I realised I've never seen a raw coffee bean.

This produces quite a lot of smoke (This is all indoors) and smells beautiful. When roasted the coffee is put in a pestle and ground down with long mortar.

When that is fine, the coffee is put into a jug and is topped up with water, that is then placed on the charcoal pot to boil.

Ethiopians like their coffee, but they like it with lots of sugar. It's fair to say how much coffee would you like with your sugar sometimes. Sugar is put into the bottom of the cup and the coffee poured into the demi-tasse cups.

As part of the ceremony we also had a huge plate of popcorn. I was reluctant to leave this house. . . .

I was so interested in the ceremony that I filmed most of it as I thought it would made a nice website film.

This was the last thing that we had to film, so I knew whilst going back to the hotel that the hard work started here.... Over the next two days we need to produce...2 x TV Films, 2 x Website films, 1 x radio package and be available to do live inserts. Should be an interesting 48 hours.

Tuesday 20th Oct 2009

7am start today so we can film in Korem and get back to Mekelle to make a start on compiling everything. Last nights hotel was interesting. Although very hospitable as usual, it did somewhat resemble a prison. Rooms around the perimeter with a balcony in the middle. The slamming doors echoed with a firm clink. When I paid for the rooms, they guy proudly showed me a dollar he had. Not to be outdone by the Americans I dug out my English coins and gave him a selection, of course pointing out the Queen.

We headed straight for the fields where thousands of people flocked to in 1984.

It was quite strange to be stood in the fields where thousands had died in terrible conditions only 25 years ago. There is nothing here to mark this. Ethiopians don't hang onto death, a funeral will take place on the day of death and then they are buried with no markings.

We did some filming that will link our sequences together and headed back to Mekelle. On the way we stopped to film some farming on the mountain. The farming methods haven't changed for many years, ploughing is done by cattle.

The crops are picked by hand and placed in a circle on the ground. They then tie three cows together and walk them over the crops in a circle to break them down. It's also worth pointing out that every single inch of usable land is seeded.

Current winding back down the mountain, think of the opening sequence in “The Italian Job”.

Back at the hotel, an afternoon of admin starts, we need to interview some people tomorrow morning and find a place to do our live broadcasts from.

I opted to stay back at the hotel for a few hours, as I was well aware of the workload ahead so I wanted to get started on the website films.

I did catch up with Mike a few hours later to meet a few people. Tebereh Woldegabriel from Mums for Mums, a charity based in Mekelle. Mike then went to meet some more people in town to chat to them about our story and get their views for the website pages.

Back at the hotel, after some dinner Mike and I split. He set about writing the website pieces and scripting the TV package whilst I edited the two website films.