Travels With Naked Girls - CHAPTER 3 - 4

Chapter 3.

Goddess of the Earth and Summer's Garden.

At ConFest the next year there was a mud-bathing area by the river, with a sign "Body Love Mud Art." I met a girl there named Tony. She was slender, delicate, and beautiful, and she looked great shaded all over with mud.

I asked her if she could shower off and cover herself with mud again for my camera, and she happily assented. She smoothed a thin coating all over her body with her hands, and then walked through the market area while the mud dried from a deep brown to a delicate pale.

She was short of money, so I paid her forty dollars for her time and efforts. She was the first girl I paid for filming. This seemed appropriate to me. After all, I was making money with my videos. Why not share the wealth?

A girl named Kate at the same ConFest agreed to float naked down the river on an air mattress for my camera. There was a beautiful sense of peace and serenity as she drifted along. Kate had a great figure, and like most girls at gatherings, she was happy to perform for free.

Then at Starwood I met Kendall, a really lovely girl with beautiful pale skin and natural blond hair. We found a field full of flowers, and she ran around and danced for my camera. I gave her some brightly coloured cloths which she swirled around in the breeze.

I realized that these three could symbolize Earth, Water, and Air, three of the four elements. The fourth element is Fire. A friend of mine, Mitch Poulouin, is an expert body painter, so I asked him to do a body painting of flames on Janna, a girl we met at another gathering called the Free Spirit Gathering, in the Baltimore area. Janna danced in a swirling ecstasy, and we got some great footage of her.

That completed the symbol set for Goddess of the Earth. I filled out the video with further footage of gatherings, including the marketplace shot I mentioned in the last chapter.

My third video was Summer's Garden. This started with Amber Moon, one of my loveliest and sexiest models ever, walking and enjoying the woods at Starwood. She carried a blanket which she swirled around over her body and then spread out on the grass to sit on. She meditated, breathing deeply and letting her head drop back and her eyes close in passion.

Summer's Garden was a pivotal video for me. It began in gatherings, but gatherings were limiting because they only took place on a few weeks of the year. I needed to find a place to film at other times.

Then I had a lucky break. A friend of mine named Lochlan suggested I visit Byron Bay, a coastal town in Australia just south of Brisbane. It's a lovely small town, with long curving beaches sweeping out along a peninsula of high hills leading up to a lighthouse. Best of all, it was a centre of the counter-culture.

My mother was getting along fine with her carers, who visited her at home for several hours every day, so I was able to return to Australia for four weeks to visit Byron Bay.

Once again I was able to follow my alternative life. Locky ran an ad for me in the free-spirited local weekly paper called The Echo. About a dozen girls answered the ad, and we filmed six of these in the two weeks of my first visit to Byron.  

The best of these models was Roshelle. She took us to a place in the hills which she called Cascade Falls, a beautiful series of small falls in the rainforest. She played the spirit of the place, emerging from naked sleep on a bare rock, doing some yoga asanas, meditating, floating on an air mattress, posing in front of the waterfalls, and striding through the rainforest.

I used this shoot as the last sequence of Summer's Garden. When Synetech eventually got a website,

www.synetechvideo.com

the home page photo was Roshelle lying in front of Cascade Falls.

Roshelle was easily the most beautiful girl I ever filmed up to then. Often when I pick up women's magazines and see ads with a sexy brunette with sleepy sexy eyes, I think of Roshelle. She looks like every man's dream, and every woman's too.

Roshelle used to cause erotic chaos wherever she went. It must have been hard for her sometimes. Perhaps that's why she had a rather sad, gaunt expression in her eyes. It made her look even more sexy.

But she was happy modeling naked, and she was very good. She was perfectly relaxed in front of the camera, and she had a natural grace which was astonishing. She climbed over the rocks at Cascade Falls, and climbed down onto the floating air mattress, without a falter or stumble.

Cascade Falls was only about 20 miles into the hills from Byron Bay, but in a sense this was the first of my travels with naked girls. And Roshelle was the first to travel with me, in my real long-range travels with girls.

Chapter 4.

France.

In 1994 I read an article about French naturist resorts in Australian Sun & Health. It was written by Doug Ball, a keen naturist from New Zealand.

I got an idea that would change my life. I wrote to him and asked if he could help me find resorts that would be available as the subjects of videos. The idea appeal to him a lot, and quickly he found four resorts who were willing to have videos made.

So in 1995 we made a trip together with his wife Peggy to the beautiful nation of France, and to beautiful French naturist resorts.

The result was the Naturist France Deluxe series of videos. La Sabliere was the resort I liked best, in a deep valley of the River Ceze. I made a video about it, and in 1996 I made two more. I also made videos in 1995 about a deluxe resort called Laborde and a rather boring resort called Belezy. In 1996 I also did one about a splendid little resort in the Pyranees called Domaine Le Clols.

When I made the first video about La Sabliere, I got the idea of trying it out by sending brochures offering it to our mailing list of previous Synetech customers. I sent out 99 brochures for luck, and sold 49 videos, which I think is a pretty good result for a mailout. Then I sent out 99 brochures for Laborde, the second video, when it was ready, and this time I sold 51.

It began to look like I was on to a good thing.

By now I had abandoned the Bolex film camera and changed over to a video camera. I was very lucky, because the time was just right for a changeover to video.

In the 1980's amateur videomakers were hampered by which system to use. There were only two choices: ordinary cameras which shot on VHS, and professional cameras which cost around $50,000. The first wasn't sharp enough, and the second was too expensive.

Then Sony brought out a new video system called Hi-8 which produced professional results at a reasonable price. The Hi-8 tapes were about the size of audio tapes, and you could record 90 minutes on one for a cost of about $20. Much better than 16 mm film, which cost about $45 for 3 minutes.

I found to my delight that the French resorts were full of interesting activities in summer. At La Sabliere, for example, there were workshops in pottery, ceramics, silk painting, and even bookbinding. There were lots of sports, such as tennis, archery, volleyball, and badminton. There were two huge swimming pools, and there were exercise classes in the pools, as well as swimming and diving of course.

In the River Ceze at La Sabliere there was canoeing, kayaking, dam building, and even gold panning. You could climb on the rocks by the river and jump or dive back in. There were caves high up on one side of the valley, and a medieval castle on the other.

Best of all, there were animateurs who supervised the activities. These were generally students who worked for room and board and a free holiday, with a small salary, and a chance to improve their French if they were from other countries, as many were.

This meant there were lots of attractive young people to be in the videos. I even got some of them to do extra shots, like two girls who performed underwater acrobatics in the pool, and others who strolled around the grounds while I did scenic video.

I did lots of shots of the guests too, especially in the workshops and activities. Everyone was very cooperative and helpful. It was a halcyon time for me, and all the videos were very popular.

Doug Ball was a great help in our trip in 1995. He was very fit and loved exercise, so on our first day at La Sabliere, he went on a hiking trip to the Three Arches, a rock feature up the far side of the valley. He carried the camera and did lots of video of the hikers, including a woman named Leen and her two kids, a beautiful girl of about 13 named Melody, and her younger brother Jeremy.

Like most kids, these two were keen on being in video, so I did interviews with them and shots of them playing in the pool, which had windows at the side so I could get underwater shots.

Those days were relatively free of the present mania about child pornography, so I did lots of footage of kids, who are the best subjects at resorts generally. The parents just want to lie in the sun for their holidays, but the kids bounce around all over the place.

We were at Laborde for the 14th of July, Bastille Day, the French national holiday, and they had a carnival with lots of games, mostly for the kids, which made great video. They had plenty of activities as well. The French resorts in general were the best places for holidays I've ever seen.

I travelled to the resorts in July and August, which is their busiest time, and lived in Byron Bay the rest of the year. Sadly, my mother had passed away in 1994.

I kept on making videos in Byron Bay about people whose free and easy lifestyle allowed them to do many activities in the nude.

One girl named Azura, for example, used to shower and then rub her body every morning with a selection of aromatherapy oils. That made a great video, as did another family who used to enjoy massage and then a hot tub together.

I also visited a couple of naturist resorts in Australia. Shoots like these made up Naked Lifestyles 1 and Naked LIfestyles 2.

Roshelle featured in several shoots of these Byron Bay videos. She played a girl who arrived home tired to find solace in a shower (with lots of sexy lather) and a pill which gave her visions. This can be seen in Naked Celebrations. In Magical Nudes, she performed a ritual with a crystal, and in Naked Paradise, she wandered with a handsome young man on a Byron Bay beach.

We even did a series of shots of her tied up. Once I had her stand in front of a tree with her legs astride and her arms stretched up. I did a shot tilting up her body from her feet to her hands, then tied her wrists to the tree with thick red yarn and did a second shot. In the third shot she was tied to the tree with strong brown rope, both her ankles and her wrists.

The three shots made a lovely series. Roshelle looked lovely and helpless and sad, with the ropes making strange harsh contrast with her pale naked skin.

I used this footage much later, in one of the Free & Wild videos. More about these later.

Roshelle was reserved and inclined to be somber, but when you won her trust, she was actually warm and friendly. We got into the habit of meeting every couple of weeks for lunch and to talk about life.

As I planned my third trip to France for 1997, I thought about one problem with shooting at resorts, which was constantly having to find someone to video every time I got an idea.

In a flash of inspiration, I got the idea of asking Roshelle to go with me.

Roshelle was my ideal choice, but would she go? She was such a magical beauty that she made me nervous and shy, like a schoolboy.

It's a big step up from having lunch occasionally to a trip to Europe together.

I loved her company, and the trust she showed in me, and that helped me ask her. That, and my friend Peter who pointed out prosaically,

"She likes you, Charles. She goes to lunch with you, right? Why not ask her?"

But Roshelle was the most beautiful girl I'd ever videoed. When I was taking nude Poloroid photos of Kate in Malaysia, Roshelle was just being born.

I was kind of a nerd in high school, often left out of dates. I was always did well on tests in school, but I wasn't so good at other sorts of exams. Would I pass with Roshelle?

Yet Synetech had done a lot for my confidence. Running my own business was a thrill. Videoing naked girls, and telling them what to do, had done a lot for my confidence too. The business was also providing plenty of money.

I gathered my courage, and asked Roshell to travel to France with me, and model naked in far-foreign scenes.

And she said yes. To my pleased surprise, yes. To my new-found confidence, yes. To my delight, yes.

I remember a blur of preparations. I was to go to the US first, to my small cottage in Connecticut, which I had inherited from my mother and father. She would stay with me there awhile. Then we would go to France. Ticket, passport, travel insurance, plans. A blur of consciousness, wondering if it would all really happen.

Finally the time came. Late on the appointed evening, I emerged from my cottage and drove to Hartford airport, wondering if she would really arrive. Waiting at the arrival area, waiting for her to appear. Wait. Wonder. Worry. Then the real wonder.

Suddenly, there she was.