We were at the beginning of a week-end during which Hunters Gold was introducing a bunch of us to three of the extreme sports it sponsors: sandboarding, abseiling and bungee jumping. This is Axel's kind of weekend – when it came to the bungee at Bloukrans (216m of it, please note) most of us used the buckling-knee technique while Axel leapt off yelling something about Superman.

But then, throwing himself into the unknown is not unfamiliar to Axel. After finishing his psychology and communications degree he set off ... to a ski resort in Colorado. It was there that he discovered snowboarding. Later, he set off down the West Coast to the border with Mexico.

Jamaica is a land of rum and hummingbirds; of sweat-shiny writhing bodies. Here Axel was getting closer to the paradise he w as looking for. But Jamaica has no snow.

There is snow in Austria. And snowboards. And people to teach snowboarding. Axel was in one of his many elements.
And it can also be lucrative. Axel's looks, chutzpah and snowboarding style began to attract offers of commercial and photographic work (it's Axel flying across the cover of the German coffee-table book Fascination Snowboarding by Peter Mathis and Christoph Murr).

But still paradise did the elusive rainbow thing. He nearly found it on the little island of Utila, off Honduras, where he and his brother honed in on the coolest scuba-diving outfit and organised themselves two free dives a day (no prizes for guessing how) while, South Africans to the essence, running fish braais to make ends meet. But the idyll was shattered by violence when a fight broke out between two of the locals – over a girl, predictably - and one gunned the other down.
It was time to move on, and Axel, never one for the easy route, found himself in a Venezuelan village on the Rio Orinoco, hitching rides down the Amazon from the Yanomami Indians in dugouts. "If I had known what I was getting into," he says, "I would never have done it. Thank God I didn't know ... thank God I survived."
But he did make it. Albeit as a completely changed person. Sometime between fighting off hypothermia, mosquito’s, and fear, it had occurred to him that you don't find paradise in the jungle, or the tropics, or on the ski slopes or rivers.
You make your own paradise.

Cape Town – where there are mountains to bike on, sea to surf in and sand dunes to board on – and snow not so very far away: Tiffindel, on the Lesotho/South African border, where Axel implemented the first snowboarding facility. And that's when he started Downhill Adventures. And so the adventurer found paradise where he left it five years before…. at home.

Downhill Adventures, tel: 012 422 0388; fax: 423 0127; e-mail: info@downhilladventures.com