Bama or Bust

Guatemala, North then East then West

2008-05-08T10:44:00.000-07:00

Pictures to follow in the next few days, currently at a very bad internet connection. Again no spell check on this piece of @!#$ (junk)

I had heard that Guatemala was a very popular spot for young hopeful American families to come adopt little Guatemalan babies, but the reality didnt set in until I woke up and walked down to breakfast in my hotel in Guatemala city. As I entered the small covered courtyard of 15 or so tables, there sitting down were about 7 different white bread American couples mainly in their 30's each with their own little dark skinned Guatemalan baby. Every single couple, can you imagine? Amdist the baby crying I managed to get some decent yogurt and fruit, and while I ate, I read that over 4,500 babies get adopted every year from Guatemala (a country of only 13 million) with 95% going to the US. I still couldn't figure out why there were so many in my hotel until I went for a run after breakfast and ran smack dab into the middle of the US Embassy next door to our hotel, Duh... They were all there trying to get their papers cleared next door. The disproportionatly high Guatamalan adoptions were do to the fact that until last year they had virtually no adoption laws. See a kid and like it? Buy it from its mother and take it home! Now that’s one hell of a souvenir if you ask me! The laws have changed now somewhat and it takes up to 3 months to get a little baby of your own.

Time spent in Guatamala city was brief, arriving at 9 the night before, and leaving at 2:30 the next day, but I did get a chance to go out for a drink in the trendy Zona Rosa, and take a walking tour of the more dilapidated and dangerous downtown area.

The more I travel, the harder I find it is to pick out generalized cultural differences between countries and their people. The more you travel the more you have seen, and thus when you see something in a subsequent country you are more likely to have seen it before. It is also too easy to slip into the modus operandi of projecting your own presumptive opinions onto the chosen culture. However, in an attempt to describe Guatemala, I would say that that Guatemala city's downtown has yet to experience a downtown revival the way that much of other central American capital cities have undergone. The narrow allyways that seperate the 4 story tall dilapidated buildings are cluttered with powerlines, trash, street vendors, and people. This spreads out in all direction from the central plaza, with some directions being even more dangerous than others.

I was staying south of the city in a nicer neighborhood where all the embassies, nightlife, and international businesses tended to congregate. As I left my hotel to go downtown, the desk attendant warned me not to go more than one or two blocks away from the central square, take only what I was willing to loose, and wear my backpack in front of me! Granted I have always taken similar precautions and didn’t need her to tell me this, but it was the first time I have actually been told that by a local! So I set off around downtown and wrapped my camera securely around my wrist to prevent having it snatched out of my hands.

That afternoon I caught a shuttle to the city of Antigua, about 1 hour southwest of Guatemala City. The city means "Ancient" and was actually the Spanish capital of Guatemala from the late 1500's until the entire city was destroyed in a series of earthquakes, culminating with the grand Kahuna that leveled the city in 1776 (I think). The Spanish subsequently decided not to risk it all again and moved the capital about 60 km northeast. A few remained in Antigua, renovating and restoring the old colonial buildings, and creating a cultural tourism destination for weekending Guatamalan city buisnessmen and women. To accuratly quote a guidebook in an attempt to paraphrase the city, "In the discussion about what is real Guatemala, Antigua was never brought up; this is a city where powerlines run underground, trash doesnt stay on the street for more than an hour, stray dogs mysteriously dissapear in the middle of the night, and it's safe to walk around by yourself." The city center remains much as it was when originally built, with strict covenants about what can or cannot be done with the buildings. Small single story adjoining bulidings line huge blocks, each with their own courtyard and characteristic red clay tile roofs. The streets are all narrow and one way, and the cobblestone stretches for miles across the valley underneath the backdrop of volcanos. The city really does have a feel like no other in all of central America, with a historical character combined with an impressive size and economy. It is easy to tell that Antigua is not only the home to traditional tourists and weathly Guatemalans, but Europeans who can afford to spend several months a year in another town. This being said, there is actually an impressive glut of small cheap hostels and budget hotels. Finding a cheap bite to eat was another issue. The only place where I could find a lunch under 10 dollars was the open air local market, where a lady served small heaping tacos for a dollar a piece, while you sat on plastic stools on the sidewalk next to the bus station and breathed in piles of black smoke put out by 20 year old diesel school buses. I got my daily dose of carbon for sure!

The volcano backdrop to Antigua was hard to see due to the burning going on all around Guatemala associated the slash and burn agriculture. I spent the three days I was there mostly touring an impressive series of museums showing everything from contemporary modern art to ancient ruins.

Highlights:

-I paid a tour guide 3 dollars to show me around the ruins of the ancient cathedral, only to find out 1 minute into the tour that he was staggeringly drunk.

-I checked out the the ruins of the orginal fountain in the center of the town square; they depicted 4 mermaids, each postured up with one exposed breast and out of that bossum came a stream of water for people to drink...

-I watched a violent street fight and subsequent arrest.

-I saw latin americas largest (not working of course) water fountain.

-I got lost while running, and spent 2 hours finding my way back into the city from one of the suburbs.

-I ran into travelers I had met in Panama and Costa Rica, and ended up having a great time with them.

Overall Antigua was an incredible city if a little different from the rest of Guatemala.

After 3 days I caught a night bus headed north out of Guatemala City to the low lying jungle region of El Peten. It is the least densely populated region in all of Guatemala, and is also home to the world famous ruins of Tikal buried deep in the jungle. The bus that left Guatemala city at 9:00pm arrived into Flores, Guatemala 8 sleepless hours later at 5 in the morning. The bus put me out on the side of the road by myself in the early morning darkness in a city I knew nothing about in rural Guatemala... Fortunatly this was an often traveled tourist route, and a minibus driver was waiting there to take me to a hotel in Flores, or continue north for another hour in time to be at the ruins of Tikal when they opened! It was 40 dollars, and I was hesitant about paying all that money, but he explained that their was going to be a riot/strike in Flores in about 3 hours, and if I waited for the bus I would never get out of Flores. I didnt believe him, but I was half asleep and just wanted to get there, so I gave him the dough and we were off again. Sure enough the guy was right! I met two tourists later in the day, and the entire city had layed down in the street in front of the airport, preventing Tikal tourists and their busses from getting out. They were protesting the fact that none of the tourism dollars were coming back to the local economy and all sidelined for Guatemala City. Eventually the military came in that day with tanks and evicted the protestors.

The protest gave me a morning free to roam the grounds of the massive city of Tikal without a bevy of other tourists. First "discovered" in the middle of 19th century by British Anthropologists; they have been actively uncovering the Tikal ruins for over 100 years, and they still have a large portion of buildings that have yet to be uncovered. This includes a 66 meter high temple that you can only see the top of. The size and scale of city were unfathomable, it takes over an hour just to walk from one side of the ruins to the other, and there are countless small structures strecthing out for 10 miles all around the main city that are not part of the excavation. Tikal was part of the same civilization as the Copan ruins, but reached their prime a few hundred years later than the Copan city. Both Mayan cities collapsed with the region wide collapse of the Mayans in the late 10th century. The descendants moved north into Chiapas Mexico and closer to the coast, leaving the ruins subject to the forest that eventually grew out of a grassland to once again cover the city. Tikal boasts a rich and active history, occupied for over 1500 years, with large temples stecthing from to the 3rd century to the 10th century, and populations possibly reaching 100,000. They gained their military predominance using a technique where they flanked the enemy's troops and attacked them at a distance with large spears. There is evidence that they fought and occupied Caracol in Belize, and Palenque in Mexico. Tikal was no doubt the center of Mayan universe in this part of central America, and its size is just astounding.

Walking around the ruins, you climb the great temples, and then descend back into a dense jungle with a 30-40 meter tall canopy. It is a neat dichotomy pairing thousand year old stone with a living breathing forest, but believe it or not during the Classical Mayan period the entire region for miles and miles had been cleared for homes and agriculture. I couldn't help but think how fast our cities would return to jungle if we simply abandonded them and left them for the forest. Maybe we should think about doing this to some states, ahemm Texas, Ahemm.

The large pieces of stone that were used to build the great temples of Tikal stand as just the foundation of the superficial structure that has long rotted away. At one time these massive temples were covered with a dark red paint, and had elaborate murals and designs around their top, with wooden structures hanging off the sides. Remanants of this rich red paint still cling to portions of the temples and buildings.

The main temple at the center of the grand plaza of Tikal used to be climbable with a steel chain until many injuries and several deaths (tourists falling down the stairs) forced the park to close it. You can still climb several other of the large temples to get a view above the forest canopy.

The reality of how impressive and awe inspiring these structures are does not sink in at first; I was too busy running around looking for a new cool temple or uncovered buildings. But after a while when I slowed down and sat atop Temple IV, staring at the sunset behind these giants I felt the closeness to history. It is a harmoninzing experience, to be so close to such tangible pieces of history, to realize how time can become so compressed.

That night I stayed in the park gates at the "Jungle Lodge," suitibly overpriced since it was only one of 3 hotels in the park gates. The place was neat because it had some history, as it was originally built to house archeologists excavating the park. A simple small room with a fan, a bookshelf, glass blinded windows, shared bathrooms, and a shared roof were all I got, but it was neat to be staying in the same place as the famous archeologists who had once opend up Tikal to the world.

The next morning I left Tikal and got back out on the road, headed east this time to the ex-british colony of Belize, headed for a brief respite from Hispanic culture and a change of pace. I felt the difference the moment I crossed the Belize border, and the guy that stamped my passport starting talking the King's English! He also spoke a more common mix of criole, but must have figured I didn’t look too criolla... The customs building itself was a dramatic example of modern architecture and money, neither of which any central American country had much of. Belize was going to be the most expensive country that I had visited to date, the coastal regions being more expensive that US.

The last time I was in Belize was as a 11th grader at Indian Springs School with my biology teacher, Bob Pollard. He had shown me a wonderful country while we spent a week on Ranguana Caye and the town of Placencia. It was a place of cool reggae vibes, beautiful coasts, and even more impressive sea life. I was more than eager to get back to the country.

Having already been south to Placencia, and eager to get out to the beach, I got into Belize City and bee-lined it out to Caye Caulker, an island about 30 miles north-east of Belize City. The most famous caye out of all in Belize is perhaps Ambergris Caye and the town of San Pedro located on the very northern end of Belize next to Mexico. San Pedro town is a situated on a picturesque Carribean beach with access to all the same diving and snorkeling spots as Caye Caulker, but with fame comes money, and Ambergris Caye is also the most expensive city in all of Belize. I have heard Horror stories of not being able to find a room for under 70 dollars! Caye Caulker is Ambergris Caye's poor cousin, about 20 miles south and a good deal smaller, and so I chose this as my first and final spot to spend the weekend in Belize.

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Coming into Belize City after a 6 hour bus ride from Tikal, I was reminded of how Belize city stands out as an urban jungle in contrast to the rest of Belize. The city is full of trash, run down housing, rastas rolling around the streets on small bikes, giant dredlocks, dirty canals, and general poverty. It is the biggest city in Belize, but since the capital was moved to Belmopan in the jungle, this city fails to get a lot of the government funds it needs. One of the most dramatic things about coming to Belize from being in latin America so long, apart from the english language, was huge african demographic making up more than half of the population of the country. It of course stems back to the fact that Belize was an English Colony until 1981 (they still have the queen on their money) and the slaves that land barons brought in to grow sugar cane. Alongside the african comes a good mix of obvious hispanics, and even a bit of chinese.

We got through Belize city directly to the water taxi that would take me and 50 of my soon to be closest friends out to the islands. As we roared out of the harbor onto the crystal clear blue and green waters I was instantly relaxed, a mere 7 hours out of the dark jungles of Guatemala.

Caye Caulker is an island about 3 miles long and anywhere from 1/4 to 1 mile wide. It was split by a hurricane in the mid 1990's into a north and south island. The north island remains almost entirely undeveloped, while the southern mile long portion is home to the 3,000 year round residents. The island has three roads called (not surprisingly) front, middle, and back road each running up and down the island to an airstrip at its base. There are no cars on the entire island, but a slurry of golf-cart taxis waiting to take you the 1/2 mile to your farthest destination. Bikes are also popular. All the streets are hard packed sand, and most people go barefoot, or if they have to sandals. It is totally legitimate to walk into the nicest restaurant in town for dinner wearing nothing more than a pair of ratty shorts (for guys); I myself didn't wear a shirt for three days straight.

I got together with two guys I had met on the water-taxi and a golf-cart taxi cab driver who found us the cheapest digs on the island at about 20 dollars a night. I had my own cabin with my own bed and a spot right on the ocean, but apart from that it was pretty basic. The desalinated water that was used for the sink and toilet emitted this foul odor which would have been unbearable were it not for the 24/7 constant 30 mph breeze coming off the ocean. I had a key to lock my room, but it was by and large pointless since the "windows" were fixed metal blinds that you could open from either side to reach in. The place was also a good mile from downtown Caye Caulker, throwing in an extra 4-5 miles of walking a day to the 4 that I ran every morning. And to run 4 miles every morning required running around the whole island, twice.

Through the 4 days I would spend at Caye Caulker, I ran down a trail that wrapped around the southern end of the island and then came back up to "civilization" on the three main roads. The trail posed many difficulties that I have yet to run across while living down here, the first of which was the tide. I found out the second morning that the most southern portion of the trail deep within the bushes is actually a tidal pool, so when the tide was in, I ended up running through 2 foot deep saltwater turning my running shoes into 5 pound bricks for the rest of the run. The second problem was that the trail uses the 4,000 foot asphalt runway as part of the only way to get back to the main portion of Caye Cauler. I figured: hey its an island, how much traffic could they possibly get? Turns out a lot... They have a Cessna Caravan fly in and out on the hour. I also said: I will just look in the left hand traffic pattern (because of the wind they only used one runway) for approaching planes and on the rare occasion that one does come I can dive out of the way. They used a right hand traffic pattern... The wind also made it so loud that it was impossible to hear the engines until they are right behind you. So the second day there I was, running down the runway in my 5 pound saltwater brick shoes, dutifully looking for traffic when I barely hear an engine and turn around to see a (relatively) giant Cessna Caravan on short final at the numbers! I dove into the muddy saltwater pond next to me just in time to get out of the way. By the time I finished running down to the FBO now covered in mud and saltwater, I found out that they are used to people running on the runway, and often have to buzz the iPOD wearing ones to get them off. I'd count myself as pretty lucky.

On the third day I went Scuba Diving for the first time in the two years since I got certified, and fortunately for me it was like driving a car. I really didn't know what I was going to do if I had forgotten everything... Belize is home to the second largest Coral reef in the world, second only to Australia, and getting down to see it at 70 feet was amazing. The visibility was pretty bad so we didn't see any big fish, but I didn't let that phase me. Every color you could imagine was covering the sponges, brain coral, fire coral, things that look like giant leaves (Amanda help me here), and the fish. Half the fun for me was still getting all the gear on and going diving regardless of where we were. I was still a relative rookie, and my inexperience showed after I had used up all my air in 30 minutes and had to go back up. It got a little better on the second and third dives; I even got to brush up against some Barracudas.

After some blog work and reading the next day I figured I needed to get off the island before I wasn't able to leave at all. With a little less than a week left before I had to be in Mexico City, I left Caye Caulker this past Tuesday. An hour long water-taxi ride at 8:30 am was followed by learning my bus north to Chetumal, Mexico at 10:30 am had been cancelled. Sweet. So I hitched it over to the local bus station and rode a local bus (read old school bus) north for 6 hours stopping every 30 feet in what should have taken 2 without stopping. Arriving into Chetumal, Mexico about 5:00 that evening, I bought a ticket on a 14 hour bus direct to San Cristobal de las Casas, leaving at 8:00 pm and getting in at 10:00 am the next morning (Yesterday, Wendsday) without incident, 23 1/2 hours after leaving Belize.

After a little rest and recuperation I have spent yesterday and today exploring San Cristobal de las Casas, a gorgeous colonial mounatin town set up at 7,000 feet, and capital of the Chiapas region. Chiapas was made famous in 1994 by the Zapatistas, who came in and seized the regional governement, the town of San Cristobal de las Casas, as well as several other cities in the Chiapas region. They were driven out by the Mexican army in the weeks that followed, but they drew international attention to the plight of this poor region and its indigenous farmers. EZLN is the name of the group, and they are still around and have a voice in local govnernment throughout the Chiapas region.

If you went to Sewanee, Chiapas has also been made famous by the stories of one Fort Bridgforth, as this is where he spent many of his formative years.

Despite it being May now, the town still gets down to 50-55 degrees every night due to the altitude, the thin air also makes it quite an endeavor to run my usual distances. The cold air, imcomplete combustion, and smoke from the farms all brought back vivid memories from living Quito, Ecuador for 4 months, and at times I have felt like I was there.

I head out this evening at 8:00 pm on another 14 hour bus ride for Mexico City to the north. After that I am heading west to Zamora-Jacona tomorrow evening, just in case you dont hear from me until the middle of next week.

Signing Off,
Merrill Stewart

Wow, where do I begin

2008-05-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

I first just want to apologize for taking over a week to let you know what has been going on, but after I left the Island of Ometepe I began this marathon week and half long blazing trail through the rest of Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. I will now try to retrace my steps over the last week and half and clue you in as to what has been going on in my life.

After the relaxing night's stay in the Finca Santo Domingo, I woke up early to catch the 7:00 am bus across the island to Moyogalpa, the big city on the island (pop. 3000) where I was going to catch a Lancha across the Lago de Nicaragua and then continue north from the mainland. The road to Moyogalpa wasn't more than 20 miles, and yet the trip took 1 1/2 hours, and yet again we have another anecdote about traveling by bus in Central America. From the signage on the side of the bus I was riding, I could tell that at one time (probably early 1970s) the bus had belonged to the Rochester District School System. This beast of a bus probably spent many years ferrying little American kids to and from school across icy salted roads in upstate New York. Then many years later, probably in the late 1980s, the school board decided that this bus was unfit for further service and unsafe to transport kids anymore. So what do they do? Sell the bus of course to the government of Nicaragua where they don't value their lives as much as we do and don't have "inconvenient" safety standards for public transportation. And here the bus has worked for the past 20 years, overtime gathering colorful ornamentation endemic to central America such as 6 foot tall 8" diameter chrome tail pipes, pink carpeted ceilings, lawn chair driver seating, bright purple tassells, and custom graffiti grills.

During the hard service in Nicaragua over the last 20 years, the bus had somehow lost all of its gears except 1st, and so I sat on the bus breathing in healthy exhaust in the hot Nicaraguan sun as we roared along at 7 mph. For 2 hours.

There were two options to get across the lake from Moyogalpa, a large comfortable ferry that crossed 3 times a day taking cars, people, and a full service bar for 5 dollars, or... The hourly infamous Lancha. I had heard stories, detailing the necessity to wrap you entire bag in plastic because it would surely get wet, and then a burlap bag around that to make it less enticing to steal by the hoards of people who crowded aboard this 50 year old 40 foot relic of a boat. I took my chances and did none of this as I got on, but I was able to put my bag on the deck and got a small seat up top where I could watch the bag the entire time. The trip began fine, but as we got away from the island the waves got choppier, and captain was choosing to take these 8 foot swells from his broad side. The boat rolled, ohh did it roll. I firmly clenched my seat not out of fear, but to avoid falling across the deck of the boat and into the water as we heaved back and forth 30 degrees at time. Smoothly but precipitously this boat rocked from side to side, each time bringing the top just a little closer to the water that was surely going to be our doom. My bag was fortunately strapped down or it would have met the same watery fate I foresaw the boat doing if we didn't turn into the waves. Not a moment too late, our captain turned into the waves to catch a 12 foot rogue and we made it safely to San Jorge, where I shared an hour long taxi to Granada with a 7th grade science teacher from New Hampshire taking her spring break.

Granada is the jem of Nicaragua, like a island of colonial peacefulness amidst a very poor and undeveloped country. Set on the northern shore of Lago de Nicaragua, Granada has been a cultural capital of Nicaragua since the first Hispanic invaders came in the 1500s. It is uniquely located in the western half of Nicaragua, and yet via the Lago de Nicaragua, and the river forming the border with Costa Rica, you can actually reach the Caribbean by boat. This strategic location made it a prime location for lucrative trading and a prime target for English pirates; the city was sacked several times during the 17th and 18 century. When central america won their Independence from Spain in the middle of the 19th century, there were two cultural centers in Nicaragua: one at Granada, and 2 hours to the north in Leon. These two cities both wanted a piece of the pie, and the situation ended up the way so many do in Central America, in a civil war. After much fighting and bloodletting, they gave up and picked a random small city about half way between the two to be the capital. That capital city today is the largest city in Nicaragua; Managua is an hour north of Granada, but not high up on the list of any body's travels, because a massive earthquake in 1976 leveled the city entirely.

Granada (pop. 80,000) retains a bunch of its colonial charm, along with a good schmattering of tourism and wealthy Nicaraguans. Poverty still abounds no less than 7 or 8 blocks away from the center of the city, but the 10 by 10 block section of the center is a beautiful pedestrian friendly gem of a town. Most of the small 200-300 year old buildings are one-two stories tall, and are all edged with vibrant red clay tile roofs. Each one of the original colonial structures has a beautiful courtyard of some sort, creating little havens of residence among dirtier and noisy streets. The town square is about 100 yards in each direction, and covered by tall leafy trees.

The instrument of war that killed tens of thousands in the civil war 20 years ago is now cutting prices!

For 8 bucks I found the nicest hostel I had ever stayed in, with giant Sandinista murals, decor resembling that in the movie Casablanca, a giant leafy courtyard, hand carved wooden columns, red clay tile roofs, and a custom tiled pool built into a rock wall. There I ran into two guys , Nathan and Dwight, whom I knew from the Finca Magdalena on the Isla de Ometepe. These two 30 year olds had both said to hell with life in LA, and were traveling around trying to find the right place to open a bar. They were both also over 6', which was great walking around so I didn't feel like so much of an awkward giant down here.

Here's one way to chill out...

I have really enjoyed running every morning for several reasons. One it keeps me in shape and provides some regularity to days spent in different cities. 2nd: I run with nothing on my but my shoes, shorts, and a shirt, i.e. nothing to steal. So through this I am able to run in some of the shady poorest neighborhoods and not worry about loosing anything of value besides the clothes on my back. These are places that everyone tells you not to go, but these are the places where the people of Nicaragua live and as such I think is a necessity of responsible traveling to see them. I don't have my camera so I cant capture the experience through this medium, but I can relay to you though writing the utterly basic the living conditions of many. Most of the"houses" in these shanty towns have a roof pieced together from various scraps of tin, and in the "richer" neighborhoods you find block concrete walls with metal bars for windows. In the poorer neighborhoods, you have nothing much more than a dirt floor and walls made from wooden scraps. In these shelters people live, hard working equally intelligent (usually less educated) individuals. Babies sit outside the houses in the dirt and stare at me as I run by, dogs bark from behind the barbwire that delineate the 20 foot square piece of dirt that is a yard. Each of the streets are lined with trash two or three pieces deep, blown off the road and there to remain for many years as the government doesn't care to take care of trash in the poor neighborhoods. If the families are lucky they will have a tree hanging over their piece of dirt that gives them some shade during the day, and an area to cook under. If not, then it is the hot sun and brown dust blown off the dirt road that coats everything they own.

Granada has its fair share of these shanty towns, and I keep my wits about me when I'm running through them. The other morning I was walking after a run and noticed a ratty looking guy about 25 who I had seen behind me three times during the walk at different locations, obviously following me maybe just out of curiosity. He had something in his had, but I couldn't figure out what it was. He would take the jar up to his nose and then bring it back down. Then I realized that it was jar of some kind of green glue or petroleum product, and he was sniffing it to get high. I went back to running.

Drunk old men... at 8:00 a.m.

I ran down to the beach on the giant lake of Nicaragua, and realized that I had never really seen a polluted beach up until that point. There was a giant park the city had built all along the water front, and families would come out there on the weekends to set up a picnic underneath the giant trees lining the sand. And here's the kicker: then they would all go swimming in the lake, but they took their sandals with them. Why? Because there was so much trash: metal, plastic, glass covering the beach and underneath the water that they would surely cut themselves if they didn't.

Where does it all come from? A day does not go by down here that I don't see someone their car (maybe even stopped at a light in the city), open their window and just drop whatever trash they have on the ground. Not small plastic wrappers, giant Styrofoam to-go boxes, bottles that break, plastic cups, everything. It approaches the point of ridiculousness, all out the window and onto the street where the government cant afford to pick it up.

I caught an early bus out of Granada to Managua about 1 1/2 hours away, and after a sinfully delicious and expensive ($8) breakfast at the Cowne Plaza of Managua, I was on a 8 hour bus to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. While on the bus, we made a brief 1 hour excursion into part of El Salvador, so I can check that off the list of countries I have been to, right? The bus arrived at Tegucigalpa at 10 at night into a neighborhood that the US Embassy describes as only slightly safer than a dark alley in Baghdad. So I got a taxi driver to take me as far away as he could from there, and got a hotel room in a real hotel for one night because I was going to be out the next morning bright and early headed west across Honduras. I ended up getting a room in a hotel called Gateway to the Angels (translated from Spanish), haven forgotten how nice it was to have amenities like an ice machine, television, curtains, a desk, private bathroom, and a mirror!

Navigating my way through the narrow allies the next morning and trying not to look to conspicuous (get mugged) with a 30 pound backpack, I found my way to the bus company's terminal. If I have not said it before, most of these cities do not have a actual "bus terminal" like we would think of with a train station or airport in the states. Instead you have anywhere from 10-30 different companies each going to different routes, each with unpublished departure times, and each with their own terminal located in different parts of the city. Needless to say, acquiring a bus can be quite an ordeal. As luck would have it, I missed the direct bus by 30 minutes that was going to take me all the way to the other side of Honduras to the town of Copan Ruinas. This was the only company that went there, and they only had one bus a day! Not wanting to waste an entire day back in Tegucigalpa, I pulled out a map and picked the next biggest city, asked if they had a bus, and bought a ticket getting in at 10 that evening after a 9 hour bus ride.

I had chosen to skip much of Honduras due to the fact that I had overstayed my welcome in Panama, and get a head start on Guatemala then Belize. Traveling northwest through Honduras that afternoon, I got to catch a good glimpse of the countryside from the seat of my bus, in the place of actually visiting the different towns. We were just east of the major mountain range that runs through Honduras, in an area not unlike northern New Mexico with dry stubby shrubs, sporadic rain, and a overall dry cowboy climate. Small sheds that dotted the roadside served as ever present reminders to the oppressive poverty plaguing this country. Peace core volunteers served as sources of information instead of other travelers, as there is precious little tourism to support this country's struggling econonmy that was devastated by a hurricane several years ago.

I also saw something that I hadn't seen to date since I left Peru... Pine trees! I really was coming home! I did a little wikipedia research having never taken a forestry class at Sewanee, and this was no figment of my imagination; it turns out the furthest south pine trees grow natively is 12 degrees north in latitude, or just at the Nicaraguan Honduras border.

The town I wound up in that night was called Santa Rosa de Copan, and it was 2 hours away from my final destination of Copan Ruinas. Santa Rosa de Copan was a town of 30,000 people, at the western foothills of the Honduras mountain range, and with an altitude of 4-5 thousand feet, I was afforded another night of cool weather before I sank into the jungle the following day. It was a small colonial town, and it reminded me of how nice it was to visit cities off of the tourist radar, or for that matter off anyone's radar. Santa Rosa de Copan was a traditionally built colonial town with foot tall sidewalks, narrow single lane cobblestone streets, blind corners, and a large leafy central plaza. That night I discovered their main industry was cigar making, and here is where many refugee cigar rollers escaped when the communist took control of Cuba. The town exports nearly all of their product, but that night I got to grab one while sitting at a bar just outside the colorfully lit colonial square and white plaster church.

It was here in Western Honduras that I first began to notice a perpetual smoke that limited visibility and filled the air with the slight scent of a campfire. I would see it in several cities that followed, but it seemed to be constant across the entire country and into others as well. I have since come to find out that I was traveling just during the beginning of the burn portion of slash and burn agriculture. I had heard the term countless times during my environmental studies classes, known it to be a pervasive form of forest degradation, but now the reality of the problem no longer seemed so far away as it once had. This was not in a jungle in some far off South American country; the problem was right here, and I was literally breathing it in everyday.

I left Santa Rosa de Copan early the next morning after a jog and a little street breakfast (hot dogs with mayonnaise). Two changes and three rickety bus ridden hours later I was in the town of Copan Ruinas, in time to throw my stuff down at a hotel and walk the 1 km outside of town to the massive complex of Mayan ruins that dot the valley all around Copan. Begrudgingly paying the 20 dollar entrance fee, I was off into the middle of the jungle to explore the first Mayan ruins I had ever seen.

The Mayan empire was in fact not one empire in the traditional sense such as the Roman Empire, or Austro-Hungarian empire. It was actually a collection of different kingdoms each ruled by a different king, and they were often at war with one another towards the later half of the Classical Mayan period (200AD -900AD). They did share a common culture, scientific advancements, and similiar geographic location. They spead from what is now southern Mexico and the Yucatan Penninsiula, to Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. The civilization first began to spring up and form rudmentary cities aroun 800 BC, slowly growing until around 200AD when there was an exponential growth in the sizes of the cities and their dominion. Then around 900AD there was a sharp decline in the sizes of all cities, and the people just dissapated with the great cities and temples becoming building material for new houses. Most archeologists point to several years of intense drought, and a unsustainable growth in population.

Copan was not the largest of any of the Mayan kingdoms, despite a huge fertile valley, relative isolation from other kingdoms, and few natural disasters. It also does not have the huge temples constructed at places like Tikal, Guatemala. What Copan does have is the most amazing collection of sculpture and intricate carvings out of any in the Mayan world.

I walked into the main plaza and you could tell that much of the 20 dollar entrance fee had gone into the upkeep of the grounds, because spread out before me was a giant green blanketed lawn of finely cut grass unlike any I had seen in all of central America. United Statesians tend to care more about their lawns and grass than just about any other country in the world. Set on this plaza of grass were 12-10 foot tall square statues called stellae, and each one depicted a story or a great king of the Copan Empire. It was late afternoon by this point, and most of the other tourists had left for the day, leaving me standing here alone staring at the shadows from these giant creatures cast across the ground. They were 1400 years old, mementos of a culture long ago destroyed and left abandoned, all writing burned by the spanish inquisition. The plaza speaded out south, featuring a 6 story stairway with each step comprised of 40 hyroglyphic pictures showing the story of the great kings that ruled Copan. Large portions of the entire structure were covered with trees, dirt, and vegitation. It was still a work in progress, and there were parts that were actively being excavated from the massive forest around the ruins. Despite the thick jungle that surrounds and encumbers the ruins and the entire valley, at the time of the Mayan empire there was not a single tree standing in many square miles. The size of the city demanded an intense amount of food production, and they had to farm many miles around the city to supply the needs of the population. Without cheap and reliable energy like we have today, there remained a limit as to how far out the city farm and still collect the crops. This is one of the suspected reasons for the dramtic decline in the 10th century; they had simply gotten too large.

Being so close to such tangible pieces of ancient history was a dramatic experience. With enough imagination you could close you eyes and picture what the city would have been like in its day. I knew I was standing exactly where the people of that generation stood, touching the exact same pieces of stone that they had painstakingly carved out thousands of years ago.

I spent one more day in the city of Copan Ruinas, a village of about 3,000 people, and a good mix of travelers and ex-pats that chose this little highland nook as their home. It was a comforting welcoming place, yet with a distinct foreign/tourist vibe much different than similar sized cities off the gringo trail. These things might have changed it from its traditional base, but it still very much retained significant character, along with good restaurants and museums.

Barbwire Laundry

After a day of rest, it was back on the road headed west this time towards Guatemala, Guatemala City, Antigua, and the Tikal ruins. Im hoping to get that entry up soon, so stay tuned!

San Carlos and Isla Ometepe Nicragua

2008-04-24T12:54:00.000-07:00

Muddy and Foggy, here I am at the top of the 4,000 foot Volcano Maderas in the middle of Lago de Nicaragua.

Moving north out of Costa Rica, I found myself on a small boat going up the Rio Frio, headed towards the boggy town of San Carlos on the southern edge of Lake Nicaragua. We debarked the boat, taking about as long to unload the cargo as it did to get there. Right away I knew I was in a different country; the customs office was a four room wooden shack on a dilapidated pier on the edge of town. The wooden slats that constituted the walls of this customs house were so shabbily put together that you could see through each one, not even tight enough to keep the bugs out I'm sure. Ducking down into the 2 foot by 4 foot hole that had been cut into the side of the building, I handed my passport to the customs official, and after 15 minutes of filling out paperwork he handed it back.

This brings up another point about life down here that will be particularly relative to people of my generation. Our generation has never really known life without computers infused into every wedge and corner of businesses, heck now the DMV even has the newest flat screen monitors. But life and economics march to the tune of a different drummer in Central America, and technology is not as pervasive and ubiquitous as we behold it in the United States. While they do have good computers and internet access in the cafes of many small towns across all of Central America, the connections are usually comparable to dial up and early ISDN. And the costs of such computers still remain too high for any government office and some businesses. As a result, all of my information was dutifully scribed in triplicate by the customs official whose whole job was to do this all day, every day. This process produces mounds of paperwork, and takes what seems like ages for the line of 40 people who would be there for the next 3 hours. Through situations like this, you begin to understand how Latin American culture in general moves slower and is never in a hurry to get things done ; it is a development of necessity because otherwise they would die of hypertension before they turned 30 waiting for stuff to get done.

I had heard that San Carlos was often a hot bed of mosquito activity, and not wanting to risk picking up a nice case of Dengue or Malaria (I hadn't taken my Malaria meds in a while) I opted for a little upscale place with air-conditioning. The AC was great, less because it was really hot, and more because it was going to keep the mosquitoes out.

San Carlos is town of about 10,000 people, and not really high on anyones list of places to visit, making it a refreshing change after Costa Rica. The town is on a hill overlooking Lake Nicaragua, which because of its size looks more like an ocean than a lake, and at the very top of the steep hill there is a domed central park of sorts with a typical church, police station, and surrounding shops. All of the streets here were on a steep 15-20% grade, except the ones running along the lake, which made walking around town quite of a task. There was no doubt about it, San Carlos was poor, and there was not a lot of change in site as the main income came from boats passing to other locations and sporadic small fishing. But the poverty also gave the town something more, it gave it an authenticity and purity. In towns where tourism has been allowed to run rampant you have kids, old men, and cripples asking for money on every street corner. With the easy money that tourism can give to some you get large drug problems, and with drug problems comes significant crime. Here in this poor town, there was a strong sense of community that provided social support and structure in ways that money cant. It was perfectly safe to walk around at night, simply no crime to speak of, and if someone did try to rob me all I would have to do is yell and people would come out of their houses able to identify the face of the robber. At night families sat around in their living rooms, which were usually the first room in the first floor facing the street. There they watched TV, ate dinner, and conversed for all to see. The doors were usually open to let the cool air in, and the windows gave you a perfect picture of what was going on. It was an openness in a comfortable community unlike any I had found before.

In the suburbs we build massive brick fortress right next to one another, and never come out but to mow the law or walk the dog. Then we retreat to our little castle on the hill, aghast if anyone calls after 9. What would we think if an unexpected guest rung the door bell at night? Probably grab a gun. The huge grass yards that we spend thousands mowing and maintaining create such distances between houses, that if you want to see someone who doesn't live in the immediate 10 houses, you have to get in your car and drive there. They are isolating places. In contrast could you imagine a suburban scene, or even a semi urban scene where people left their doors open at night, or the curtains off the windows?

Walking around the village that evening as the sun set, I ran into a 6'3" German and his girlfriend whom I saw on the boat from Los Chiles. They were doing a little traveling themselves, and an instant bond was created by our mutual physical freakishness compared to the average Nicaraguan. It was a celebration of fair complexion, blond hair, and ungainly height. After spending two hours in San Carlos, I confidently deduced that they were the only other foreigners in the town, and so I grabbed a bite to eat with Jentz and Mierka that evening. I turns out that they were in San Carlos as well to catch the ferry the next day to the Island of Ometepe. We both agreed that the small towns, while they lacked the restaurants, nightlife, or flair of the larger towns, were refreshing in their authenticity and simplicity.

The next day after a run, workout, and some picture uploading to the Ipod, it was time to catch the 2pm ferry. That may not seem like a lot to do in one morning, but prepare yourselves as I launch into another parable about doing business in Central America. You see... I have an Ipod that is programmed for a Mac computer, and while I could install the appropriate PC software for the Ipod, this would erase all of the music that is sustaining my sanity amidst a sea of reggaeton. I had planned on using my Ipod as an external hard drive to store all of my photos, and did not find out until I got down here that my Ipod will not work straight up with PC. AND there are no Macs in all of Central America because you cant install illegally copied software on these computers (there is not a single legal piece of music, film, or software in this whole subcontinent.) So I found a program that interfaces on PCs for Mac Ipods! I was saved right? Wrong? Once you find a connection that is fast enough to download said program in less than three hours, you have to find a computer that allows you to install software. 4 internet cafes later, I find one that allows me to install a program, so I'm saved again right? Wrong. For said program to work I have to restart the computer... I also did not know until I got down here that when most of these computers are restarted they erase the entire hard drive and start from a template. So now I have been through 4 different internet cafes, three hours of downloading a program, and it just erased itself! At this point I have to bargain with the Internet cafe owner to try to get them to change the setting. Half of the people running these shops have no idea how to change it, and the ones that do basically tell you to go screw yourself.

I have done this 4 times for uploading pictures to my Ipod, but there are week long gaps in my picture taking where I have spent several days trying to find a place to upload pictures... Welcome to life in Central America!

With all that behind me, I boarded a two story, 90 foot diesel steamer bound for the Volcano Island of Ometepe and debarked San Carlos at 2 in the afternoon. It was going to be another 10 hours until our midnight arrival on the docks of Ometepe. I paid the extra dollar ($5.30 total) and got a first class ticket, that had an air conditioned cabin, badly dubbed loud American movies, and a nice topside deck. Totally worth it. I took the opportunity to read up on a little Nicaraguan History, and listen to the entire discography of Bob Marley that I downloaded before I left. I also got to watch a beautiful sunset while sitting in a hammock overlooking the water. Later in the evening I caught up on a little Family Guy and Lost TV shows. I downloaded all the seasons to my Ipod before I left, and I have been rationing them as I go along so I will always have something to watch when I get really, really board. (like on a 10 hour boat ride across a lake in the dark)

Hauling fish onto the Ferry for the trip to Granada after Ometepe

Jentz and Mierka, the Germans, hooked me up with a really cheap hostel so we wouldn't have to look for one when we got in at midnight. The first night was spent in Altagracia, and the hostel will be one to remember! It was only 3 dollars a night, and so I should have been a little suspect. All 20 "rooms" of the hostel had a door that opened to the outside, and a nice wooden double bed. The problem was that the walls between the rooms of the hostel were actually just one, thats right, one, piece of sheet rock and exposed wooden framing. No paint, no mud, nothing, so I had one sheet rock wall on one side of the bed, and exposed wooden framing on the other. This too would have been livable until you get to the best part - there were no ceilings. All 20 rooms shared a common exposed roof, that was patched with trash bags. This was actually worse than dorm rooms, because the walls gave couples the illusion of privacy while at the same time I could hear every single whisper. Whispers aside, much worse was heard during the night I spent here, and so I thanked god again for my trusty Ipod!

There are actually two volcanoes that make up the island of Ometepe, which means "land between two volcanoes" One volcano, Concepcion, is active and the other, Maderas, is inactive with a lake inside the crater. The first night was spent in the city of Altagracia, pop.2000, underneath the fuming Concepcion, and the next morning I got up and went to the other town, Moyogalpa pop. 3000, to do some blogging. From Moyogalpa I caught the last bus at 430 across the land bridge to the inactive volcano of Maderas and the small coffee plantation of Finca Magdalena. It was from here that I was going to begin my muddy assault on the volcano of Maderas the next day at 7.

Finca Magdalena was equally rustic to the other hostel, but had enough character to more than make up for its faults. It is a working organic coffee plantation that is actually a cooperative between 20 or so families that have lived on the same part of the island for 4 generations. In addition to the coffee plantation, they grow Cacao, Bananas, and Mangos, and have taken their two story 10,000 square foot barn and converted it into a hostel. They rented out Hammocks ($1.50), dorms and single rooms ($4). My small 5' x8' single room had two sides that were part of the original 100 year old barn, and two added sides. They had placed a twin mattress on a 2 foot wide frame, and so I had to try not to get to close to the edges at night lest the mattress collapse in on me. Besides character, the Finca had some of the best views of the valley and the other volcano in all of Ometepe. They also had a restaurant right in the barn, with delicious meals prepared straight from ingredients grown on the farm, and 5 dollar bottles of Flor de Cana rum. That night I sat and played Gin Rummy with two steller guys, Dwight and Nathan, from California, and polished off a bottle of Flor de Cana. Turns out I would run into them again in Granada as the story goes, but I will get to that later.

Late to fall, early to rise, I shared a guide up the Maderas with an Austrian girl named Andrea at 6 the next morning. We were both in pretty good shape, but I can tell you now we weren't mentally prepared for the hike we were fixin' to get ourselves into. Guides had been required ever since a German guy died here 8 years ago after he slipped and broke his ankle. Our guide, Mario, said it was going to be a 8 hour hike round trip, which at the time it seemed like nothing. He neglected to mention that we were going to go from 50 Meters to 1,500 Meters, or almost 4,000 feet in elevation, and then we would have to go all the way back down. He also neglected to mention that halfway up it becomes a true could forest, and everything we touched would be covered in mud. So for 5 muddy hours we scrambled up the muddiest, wettest, rockiest, and steepest trail that I have had the pleasure of climbing while in Central America. Apparently in the evolution of Nicaraguan intelligence, they never discovered the great architectural feat of switchbacks. And so for 5 hours it was 2 feet forward, one of which would slip and one foot back... There are no pictures from this portion of the ascent because I was covered in mud and did not want to risk a muddy camera to add to my worries.

Mario had warned us that there would be no views from the top because it remains perpetually shrouded in clouds, which was fine, and as it turns out the last 1,000 feet or so reminded me of the lush cloud forests of Monteverde, Costa Rica, with green life everywhere on everything.

The lake at the top turned out to be more of a mud pit with water out in the middle, and to get to the water would require getting waist deep in mud. I was fully prepared to dive in until Mario said that underlying layers of water tended to suck you down like quicksand and I could die. I reconsidered. 3 more muddy and rocky hours later, we were back at the bottom, and got to see some monkeys back at the Finca, after we had just spent 8 hours looking for them on the mountain.

That night, exhausted and dirty, I decided I wanted a little more creature comforts than the barn at Finca Magdalena had offered, and so Andrea and I both decided to head down the road to the piece of land that bridged the two islands together. There was a small pretty beach called Playa Santa Domingo, and a cheap hotel of the same name where we both got rooms with private shower, hot water, and our own fans: it was heaven. The beach also had a perpetual 20 mph wind that blew constantly throughout the night, making it difficult to read on the beach, play volley ball, but perfect for cooling off from a hot day of hiking.

The next morning I was up with the sun to catch the first bus down the road, back to Moyogalpa where I had been two day prior, to catch a notoriously dangerous lanca across the lake to Rivas Nicaragua, where I was going to catch a bus up to Granada, one of Nicaragua most beautiful colonial towns.

For all the Sewanee folk out there who got to go Spring Party Weekend this past week, this is why I couldn't come, so I hope you understand.

M3

Sad News San Jose and back on the road

2008-04-20T09:51:00.000-07:00

Trying to do a little catch up job, I also put a large blog up yesterday about Stewart's backpack getting stolen and then fishing in Jacó Costa Rica, so if you get a chance to read down you should check it out as well. If you have any advice for ways to better this blog, please just drop a comment down at the bottom. I have been getting a few spam comments with links saying "see here," advertising some computer programs, so please ignore this and don’t click the link because that will just make them keep spamming me. I don't know whether I should be flattered that I’ve gotten enough hits to warrant spamming, or pissed off?

While traveling it seems as though just when you think that you have seen it all, something comes along that blows your mind and changes your opinion of what different countries are like. This is particularly true in Latin America where randomness seems to be the norm, and it happened to me again that night in Jacó.

After a day of fishing, we decided that we would take a stroll around the city to admire some of the night life and see what this supposed party town was all about. I didn't fully understand the way that tourism, money, and irresponsible travelers had perverted the small economy of this town until walking down the street on the way to the bar. In the 200 yard stretch from our hotel to the bar at 9:00 pm in the evening, I was literally offered "weed, cocaine" or "ganja and white" no less than 10 times. Kids on bicycles no older than 13, old men sitting in the alleys, 30 year old street thugs, and plastic prostitutes all wanted to sell you drugs. This continued throughout the night and even in the morning as I went out to buy a cup of coffee; the drug dealers were on every corner in this supposedly safe city. You felt like you were being watched everywhere you went by the sunken eyes of addicts amidst an underworld of depravity. Everyone around just wanted to use you, and they saw you as only one thing: a meal ticket or another potential way to get their fix. The real true disturbing thing about the whole sub-culture is that its entire existence is due to white travelers like myself. And the more tourists that come in search of a good time continue to propagate and support it even today; simple irresponsibility does not do justice to how their actions destroy the people of this town.

The night only got better, for the next bar we went to was called "The Beetle Bar." It was a bar about 50 feet wide and 200 feet deep blaring loud reggaeton over the speakers while colored lights flashed off of mirrors and faux black leather seats with chrome edges in a dimly lit scene. There were maybe 20 other white men like ourselves, 20 local looking Costa Ricans, and no less than 150 girls in short colored plastic mini skirts with small skimpy tops. Every SINGLE one was a prostitute, and each one of them walked past you like a starving animal digging for trash, trying to get their own fix or next piece of food. We decided we had seen enough and high-tailed it back to the hotel for bed.

After a day of surfing and play on the Jacó beach, we got on the 3:00 pm bus headed back to San José. Craig had a flight to catch taking him back to his job in Birmingham, thereby ending our week of Costa Rican adventure. Craig made his 7:00 am flight and it was back to just Stewart and I for the remainder of the trip. While we regrouped for a few days, we had a chance to stay in possibly the nicest hostel in San Jose, located in a quiet neighborhood east of the city with embassies and universities. Called Bekuo, this place had their own wine list, a Japanese styled meditation garden complete with stone sculptures, all the cable TV, billiards, a huge California style kitchen, and furniture straight out of Ikea.

I did some blogging and Stewart went to the Embassy that day to get a new passport, but came back with some bad news. He could have gotten an emergency passport that day, but it only works to leave the country, and would not have been nearly sufficient for the trip to come. The real passport was going to take 10 business days (over 2 weeks at the time) and cost 100 dollars. He opted for the real passport, which meant we were both going to be stuck in Costa Rica for two weeks, with precious little time left after we had waited longer in Panama for Craig to get into Costa Rica. That night he also did some budget crunching and realized that he didn’t have the money to finish the trip all the way back to the US like he had originally planned. On top of this, taking buses all the way back the US from here would have cost more than a plane flight out of San José, and possibly taken 8 days. So... Stewart bought a plane ticket directly out of San José bound for the US in two weeks after he got his passport.

I was left with two options: stay in Costa Rica with Stewart for two weeks while he waited for his passport and then book it north, or split then and head north on my own, making my way through Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico solo. I wanted to finish the trip that I had started, and see all of the countries standing between me and the motherland. So Stewart and I said our goodbyes, I gave him 20 pounds of stuff from my backpack I didn’t need, promised to write, and I boarded a bus headed north out of San José towards Los Chiles, a small town on the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

I was about 2 parts excited, 2 parts apprehensive and 1 part sad to leave Stewart for the open road of Central America.

Traveling solo is an entirely different animal than traveling with another person, family, partner, or tour group; not wholly better or worse, just very, very, different. The traveler is forced to interact and engage the local population and other travelers; when they go to eat, sit on a bus, hang out at a Hostel, walk on the street, or take a boat, their solitude makes them a natural target for the conversational hooks of others. The isolation also works to make most travelers more outgoing simply to have basic conversations, to tell someone about the places they have been and things they have seen. The judgment of foreign culture becomes an entirely different process, because all of a sudden you don't have someone to bounce your ideas off, or another presence to enforce the social norms of home. It is the traveler and the traveler alone who will decide how to perceive the new and strange. It is a more impulsive friendly type of traveling, because of a total lack of discussion about where the next stop will be. I have spent hundreds of hours discussing new potential places with Stewart and other people I have traveled with, weighing pros and cons, but now I can simply pick up and go when the wind blows too strong on my back. Then there is the obvious potential for loneliness and fondness for home, without that other traveler to hold up the reminder of familiar and comforting culture. In that sense it is a purer and more enriching type of traveling, no easy retreat to the known and familiar.

Staying in hostels makes the trip easier, despite the sometimes horrid conditions, because of the other young travelers from mostly western nations who you meet. With them you can have a good civilized English conversation, or go out to eat at a restaurant without having to bring a book. All of the travelers have different stories, but most are decently educated, interested in broadening their horizons, seeing the world, and having a good time. There are also more of these than you think in every corner of the Latin American world.

I headed out on a 5:30 am "express" bus to the hot humid border town of Los Chiles Costa Rica. I say "express" because that is what was advertised, but I have found that no bus is express unless all of the seats, and aisles, are jam packed full of people so that the driver can make as much money as possible. For 6 hours while headed north, the bus would stop every 2-5 minutes to pick someone up or drop them off. The trip could easily be made in 4 hours in a car, but would have cost a good deal more than the 3 dollars I paid for the bus. We got into Los Chiles just before noon and I found a nice comfortable place with air conditioning where I could veg out for the day and wait to catch a small boat up the Rio Frio to Nicaragua the next day.

Los Chiles was a remarkable little town out on the vast tropical plains that are northern Costa Rica, a border town with character which was a first for me. The giant nicely paved and marked road that had taken us all the way from San José to here ended about 6 miles north of the town at the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Despite the beautiful condition of the massive highway built all the way to the border, the Tico government refused to let anyone cross to Nicaragua by land here. Go figure? I mean this road is like only 10 years old, equipped with mile markers, roadside telephones, giant concrete gutters, and reflective lane markers. It is the Rolex of roads for Costa Rica. The last 6 miles sit completely unused, servicing the border guards and 20 so family farms, out in the middle of the hot sun like the vestige of a once great power (I ran to the border for some exercise is how I know that no one uses it).

Los Chiles is home to another testament from the past as well, for just east of the town is a 5,000 foot concrete runway (Google Earth it, it’s longer than the whole town itself!). Some might ask, now why would a town of 3,000 need a 5,000 foot concrete runway? The answer is that they don’t! This is a secrete runway built by the CIA in the 1970's to provide air support for the Contras fighting a civil war in Nicaragua that they ultimately lost. For the art majors out there, google "Iran-Contra affair."

This was my first night out of San José and alone in a dusty, hot border town with not another gringo in site. It was good. It was real good. Los Chiles reminded me of how I love small towns when I'm traveling down here. There are usually only 2 or 3 basic cheap options to choose from for a hotel, maybe 7 different places to eat, and 1 or 2 bars that are open at night. It really takes a lot of the guess work out of trying to decide where to stay or eat, and you can be content that everything is pretty much the same. It is also hard to get lost, because there might be 8 blocks combined in the whole town. The people stare at you because they haven't seen a gringo in a while, which is fine and helps to remind you that you are somewhere authentic by Costa Rican standards.

Los Chiles is a town of wide dusty dirt roads, and a town square that is actually a giant dry crunchy soccer field. Different groups of men and children were sitting underneath the various trees that lined the sides of the soccer field, not in a hurry to do much besides sit there and try to avoid the heat in the middle of the day while catching up on idle conversation. The kids would scream "HELLO" while riding by on their bikes and then quickly hurry away giggling to their friends. You could tell that everyone in town knew everybody else, and it had been that way for a hundred years. The town had one church, which doubled as the town's only school and faced the giant soccer field in the center. One to two story buildings in various states of repair/construction surround the soccer field, selling clothes, pots, pans, and just about anything they could get their hands on. There was a sign advertising Internet, but upon inquiring I found out that it wasn’t working: They said: “Come to think of it, we haven’t had internet for over 2 months now.” I said “Oh that’s swell, how’s business?” They said, “Well, now that you mention it, it has been a little slow.” Go figure? Nothing moved fast in Los Chiles...

The next day I woke up, went for a run, and hit up the customs office literally right across from the hotel where I was staying. If you think that a 6’ gringo is a site to be seen in a remote border town in the northern portion of Costa Rica, you are right, and I got many merit worthy stares to compliment this fact. Now imagine a 6’ 3” gringo wearing only his bathing suit and a pair of tennis shoes, blinding passersbys with his paleness, covered in sweat, and running down the street in the middle of town. Now THAT is a site to see, and every single other townsperson agreed. I no longer have any shame in Central America. I have decided that I am going to run every day until I get back to the US to give my constantly changing environment some regularity.

After getting my passport stamped in Costa Rica, I asked the border official what time the boat left for San Carlos, Nicaragua, my first stop in the next country. He replied, “When it’s full.” Great. After much prying, I finally convinced the boat company to give me a time, and they said not before Noon. Now I at least had 4 hours where I knew that the only boat for the day wouldn’t leave me!

I headed down to the boat docks about noon and boarded a 5 foot wide, 40 foot long fiberglass excuse for a boat that was going to take me 1 ½ hours up the Río Frio to Nicaragua and the small mosquito infested port town of San Carlos where I would sit for another day and wait for the bi-weekly ferry to the volcano island of Ometepe in the giant fresh water lake Nicaragua.

It turns out that boat drivers are a lot like bus drivers, and the more people they can fit on their boat, the better. This is disconcerting for obvious reasons, but I still got on the boat amidst the sacks of fruit, TVs, chickens, clothes, and dogs that people were taking to San Carlos to hock. The boat drafted maybe a foot before we loaded on, and after the 60 or so people, countless giant bags of god knows what, and livestock were on, we were drafting at least 4 feet, or 6 inches from top of the sides where I was sitting. I looked up, I had a life vest, I hoped to god I wouldn’t have to use it and loose all my electronics. The river and Lake Nicaragua were also home to the worlds only fresh water shark, a type of bull shark that migrates seasonally from the Caribbean up the same tiny river we were on and into Lake Nicaragua. This was also another good reason not to fall in the water!

Somehow the 300 pound man that was steering us down the river with a 60 horsepower motor skillfully glided the boat away from the dock and out onto the dark muddy river without getting any water in the boat. I could tell that he had done this before. Slowly we puttered down the narrow 50 yard wide river while exotic birds and monkeys played in the giant trees leaning over the banks. I was very much in the heart of the Nicaraguan jungle, and loving every minute despite the threat of capsizing. About halfway up river, the driver instructed us to all put on our life vests, which initially got me worried, until I realized that we were simply passing the guard shack at the Nicaraguan border, and there was a law in Nicaragua that you had to have life vests.

I knew that we had changed countries immediately upon staring at the guards standing on the 30 foot tall banks over the side of the river. Their guard shack was on stilts, and completely covered in camouflaged paint with camouflage plastic cloth pulled out from all sides, like they were hiding from planes. What? Were they at war? All 20 guards were decked out in complete camouflaged fatigues and each had a sub machine gun slung around their shoulder with their hand on the trigger, and the barrel pointed a little close for comfort towards the boat. The boat captain handed him our passenger manifest and sure as rain we were back on the river, able to take off our life vests (I didn’t).

One hour later the river slowly widened until the banks retreated behind us, and we entered Lake Nicaragua! Spread out like an ocean in all directions, the sun was just beginning to set and I could have sworn we were anywhere but on a giant lake in the middle of Central America. The waves picked up, and the last few treacherous kilometers to San Carlos were not easy ones.

They are fixing to turn the internet off where I am working (Nicaragua suffers from frequent and long power outages and right now I am on a generator), so I’ve got to go, but if I get some time this evening I will tell you about San Carlos, a small town on the southeastern tip of Lake Nicaragua.

Travel Safe!

Merrill

Jaco Costa Rica and fishing!

2008-04-19T11:44:00.000-07:00

I got a chance to work on my surfing skills while in Jacó

With Craig in tow, Stewart and I were in "intense travel mode" since he only had a week to spend in Costa Rica, and this required maximizing every moment of each day to its fullest. This was done so that as Craig went back he would have volumes of memories, and it reminded Stewart and I of the importance of time while traveling. Long term travelers such as us often forget the blessing of time in these foreign places, something fairly easy to do. Sentiments such as "oh another giant active volcano," or "oh another extremely rare endangered bird, another idyllic Caribbean beach, another quaint group of indigenous locals, another amazing cloud forest, another 200 year old colonial church..." may not be said overtly, but are thought. The majority of travelers that I have met will most likely return to some western nation in months' or a year's time, and the traveling experience needs to be one that stays with you for the rest of your life; hopefully enriching everything that follows. However, maintaining this sort of appreciation for everything that you see is not easy, it requires a diligence and almost work like ethic. The veil of apathy is something that I see in myself at times, but as long as I remain aware of it I can take measures to remind myself of the opportunity in front of me. Stewart and I often did things called "reality checks" i.e. "Reality Check: we are sitting on lava rocks in the middle of the Costa Rican Rockies in pitch black darkness watching an active volcano hurl lava hundreds of feet in the air only to have it explode in giant balls of fire flowing down the mountain" or "Reality Check: we are sipping beers over a gorgeous sunset while watching a German ship pass through the Panama canal on its way to Japan." I think you get the Idea.

Some travelers unfortunately just travel so that they can avoid responsibility or whatever the next stop is on the road of life . This is particularly present in beach towns where you see people in their 20s and 30s who have been at the same hostel for months at a time. They have saved enough money to live in the Hostel, go out every night and get hammered, wake up at noon to grab a bit to eat, start drinking at 5 and get hammered again. They will do this for weeks on end. At least I know I don’t have it that bad.

Keeping these thoughts in mind, we left Monteverde on the 6:00 am bus to Puntarenas, from where we would change and catch a bus to Jaco. This bus, like many before it, had maximized their profit by fitting as many seats as possible in the 30 feet from the front of the bus to the back. This is fine if you are a 5 foot tall Tico, but when you are 6 foot 3 inch Nordic Viking it poses serious problems. To fit in a seat such as this, I have to sit up as straight as possible and literally wedge my femur bone in between the seats. Then the person in front of me tries to recline and can't because my leg is butting straight up to the metal in both seats, so they tell me to quit it... Quit what: being me? having a femur that is twice as long as theirs? Quit sitting in the seat? Eventually they stop because I am twice as big as they are and would win a fight. HAH! The sitting predicament leads to other problems such as bruised bottoms, prolonged numbness in my legs, tremendous lower back pain, and an inability to sleep. But good things come out of hardship: 2 dollars as opposed to 200 hundred for flying, great views of the countryside, and a memory that will last when other fade into the years.

5 hours later we were in Puntarenas, soon to be called Puta (son-of-a-bitch) renas. As we got off the bus, Stewart dove into the baggage compartment to grab our big bags, and as he did he put his small bag on the ground so he could fit in the compartment. I was watching it and had a good view of the general area when a large man (taller than me which is unusual!) came up and started telling me/yelling something about how we were not at the bus terminal. I was trying to figure out what he wanted and just as soon as that he was gone around the corner. Stewart came out from underneath the bus to see what was going on and we both realized that his small green bag was gone... We frantically looked around, on the bus, around the ground, around the corner to find the guy, but it was to late. The bag was gone. It must have been a two person deal, so while one distracted my attention from the scene, the other grabbed the bag. In the bag was Stewart's credit card, his camera with pictures from the entire trip, money, ipod, passport, and journal: basically his life for the past 2 months.

We ran through the market to see if the thieves were already trying to sell their new found goods, but it was a fruitless gesture. After dashing to the police station we realized that this too was going to come of nothing. The bag was gone and Stewart came to this realization fairly quickly. All that was left to do was cancel the credit card and file a police report to get a new passport. Life can change so fast, something that is easy to forget in the safe complacency of home. This is a generalization, but I feel that the people of many countries I have been to have a closer connection with the tenuous nature of normality, not surrounded by as many of the safety blankets that tend to come with life where I grew up.

Stewart was more up-beat about it that Craig or I, taking a "these things happen" approach, something that is always easier said that done. And he was right that these things do happen, there is a saying that there are two types of people in Latin America: those that have been robbed and those that will be robbed. It is a fact of life when there such disparity of wealth, and poverty is the norm not the exception. Craig and I were quick to not be downers and so we tried to cheer up as quickly as Stewart had. I can also count my blessings from this experience and hope that I will never be in a position where poverty or addiction drive me steal from another.

Not Stewart's actual face after it happend, but general representation on his outlook on life.

Even after filling a police report, we still made the bus to Jacó that we had planned on, and back on the road of traveling.

In the 1960's Jacó was a small fishing village on a western coast of Costa Rica with a relatively large pretty beach and not much going on besides great fishing. It saw the occasional traveler, and both walked away with a content feeling of beneficial cultural exchange. Then like a great tidal wave of wealth and local cultural white-out, the American came, and they came, and they came. Jacó became the pacific coast destination for vacationing Americans and other wealthy foreigners. They came to beach, they came to fish, they came to spend money, and just like that Jacó was no longer the domain of the Costa Ricans but now a colony within a county. High abundances of prostitutes and drugs would soon follow this gringo inundation, further solidifying its colonial status.

This is what we had heard, and after passing a mile of billboards and signs without a SINGLE Spanish word, I decided that it might be true. Best Westerns and Subways lined the main road that comprises the town center and runs along the beach. A giant resort called "Los Suenos" anchored the town to the north, and was home to the richest gringos who had help to move Jacó towards its present condition. I was okay spending my Latin America time in such an un-Latin place for several reasons: 1.) We knew what the town was going to be like before setting out on the road towards here, with no false beliefs that it was real Costa Rica. 2.) I had spent the last few months traveling through many other "traditional" towns and could competently recognize the difference. 3.) They had some of the of the best/cheaper sport-fishing on the pacific coast, and that was our real purpose for being here.

Yes, Craig, Stewart, and I were going to go 30 miles of the coast of Costa Rica in search of Blue Marlin, Sail Fish, and Dorados, and then use our innate manly power to fight them in for the catch. And then release them. Many people our age don't get the opportunity to fish like this, and so the experience was going to be all that more special.

Craig, Stewart, and I splurged and got a cheap hotel room with air-conditioning now that we could split the cost 3 ways in an effort to forget about the events earlier in the day. After a stroll around the local fish guides and little bit of bargaining we got the best deal we could on 30 foot center console, scheduled for 7 am the following morning.

The following morning we shared the van ride with another man from US going out to fish for the day. He has a really interesting story that I am not going to include on the blog because he is hiding in Jacó from the US government, but ask me and I will send the links to a few Vanity Fair, New Yorker, and recent Washington Post articles written about him. (On a side note: Stewart and I had read in the liberal lonely planet that all of the sports fishermen were down here for the legal prostitution in addition to the fish, and that their hotels were "high class brothels." We both reacted with skepticism, and both knew enough guys who fished to know that this was some kind of backpacker editorial contempt for rich fishermen. ) Then the guy from the US looks out the window and points at some 20 year old girl walking down the road and goes: "that is what I'm really here for, the young girls." We were both wrong, turns out that the Lonely Planet is always right!

Our captain and 1st mate were both native Jacóians, and were relatively younger, but we were assured that they were good at what they did and would catch us some fish. Out of the Los Suenos harbor 10 minutes later, we were boring away at the morning sky towards our objective: a sunken volcano crater 30 miles off the shore where all the Blues and Sails were known to hang out. We used the trip out there to catch up on a little bit of sun bathing in the morning rays before we all started to sweat like it was going out of style.

It seemed like not a few minutes later, our first mate was throwing out the lines. We had two sitting on the surface and 5 more at varying depths tied to the outriggers, a total of 7 lines for this 30 foot boat, a pretty impressive feat. The "fishing" that Stewart, Craig, and I had been doing up to this point consisted of pretty much sitting on the front of the boat in the sun. I don’t get the opportunity to go deep sea fishing that much (this might be the 5th time in my entire life) so I really enjoyed having a first mate there to tie up the lines and rig the entire set up, while the captain was in charge of finding our fish. I am sure I could learn how, but just haven't had the chance, although this will be the goal of the next trip I go on.

We watched as he rigged the boat and waited...

The sun got hotter and we waited...

and then and hour later it was like AHHH scream AHHH a bunch of stuff in really fast Spanish that boiled down to: get back here and reel in this fish. The drag of the reel was whirring like a siren Bweeeeeeeeee, a sound of excitement and call to action for all sport fishermen. Craig, Stewart, and I looked at each other to decide who was going to reel this one in, and somehow it was ME! 9:30 in the morning and we already had a sail on the hook. Dash like a flash I flew to the fighting chair, rod in hand, prepared to do battle with the beast.

The fish jumped and flew across the water, fighting the line, and sailed to its namesake. It was a back and forth for about 15 minutes, and then the fish started to loose will power, and I spent the next 15 slowing pulling it in bit by bit. The fight was complicated by the fact that my reel wasn’t secured to my rod, and so it swiveled around the rod as I reeled, hence the shot of 1st mate having to hold the reel in place for me. We got the leader and bill, but the fish had lost a lot of blood, and so we decided not bring it into the boat for the photo-op, hence the above shot Stewart took with my camera. One great fisherman (dad) once told me that after every catch, an obligatory round of celebratory beers were in order. And so at 10:00 am, we all cracked open our first Imperial of the day, and toasted to the captain and his 1st mate.

First catch day out of the way, the hesitation was off of our chests and we no longer had to worry about going home empty handed. Like clockwork we had the lines back out ready to catch another big one. Less than 30 minutes later another WEEEEEEEEEEEE on the drag, mad screaming in Spanish, and we knew we had another on the line. All of the dreams we had about pacific coast bill fishing were coming true. Again Stewart and Craig stared at each other, and Stewart said that he wanted Craig to have it since Craig was a fairly big fisherman. So Craig jumped to the hot seat with rod and reeled like there was no tomorrow. A good 30 minute fight with some aerial action on behalf of the fish, and we had one in the boat. A round of celebratory beers later, and it was 11:00, with 5 more hours of fishing ahead of us. It was shaping up to be a great day.

Captain Craig, and Stewart reverting to the basic medical school instinct of studying when bored.

Unfortunately these would be the only two sails we would see, but we counted our stars when our captain radioed the other two boats in the fleet to learn that those two boats had caught nothing so far! We took advantage of the breeze provided by the trolling to simply enjoy being in the pacific ocean out on the water. The 1st mate turned out to be a great fresh pineapple and watermelon cutter, washed down with some more Imperial. We did get to see some dolphins, a sea turtle, and lots of Sails who for some reason were not biting our bait.

Savoring a bit of Pinnapple

The end of the day came, and we headed back to shore with two sails under our belt, taking the evening cruise as an opportunity to enjoy some more delicious Imperial.

That evening we decided to continue living the sport-fisherman lifestyle, and headed over to the ritzy bar at Los Sueños resort to chum it up while watching the sunset over the yachts in the harbor.

While sipping scotch at the bar, we met a Canadian Real-estate agent who lived in Los Suenos and sold a lot of the houses there. This big cheery guy named Marcel Gauthier was as nice as he could be, and owned a company called "Costa Rica Dream Makers" http://costaricadreammakers.com He invited us back to his house where we spent the rest of the evening finishing a bottle Crown Royal with his sister, Dina Gauthier, who runs the business with him.

Productive day out of the way, we had one more day in Jacó to enjoy the beach before it was time to catch Craig’s flight out of San Jose, and try to get a new passport for Stewart!

Take care,
M3

Costa Rica part deux

2008-04-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

While Monteverde is not Costa Rica's biggest, most diverse, or oldest protected forest, it more than makes up for this fact by being it's coolest (awsome, not temp.). Situated on the western edge of the mountain range that runs through the country, Monteverde is a could forest in the truest sense of the word. Warm pacific fronts bath the country with moiture, and slowly rise to dump tremendous quantities of water all over this part of Costa Rica. Cool temperatures and high altitudes converge on this place to create a humid haven for all kinds of plant and animal life.

As we rolled in on our Jeep-Boat-Jeep excursion from La Fortuna, the sky was clear and the clouds had dissipated as they do every day about noon. We were warned however that the coulds would be back the following morning, because you can't call it a cloud forest if there ain't any coulds. The jeep/van we took from the Lago de Arenal was perhaps the nicest van that I have had the pleasure of riding on while in Costa Rica, a testament to the many foreign tourists that pass this way each year. As it bounced along the horrible rutted dirt road, I admired the faux leather interior, windows that worked, and best of all, the miniture DVD screen (1.5" x 1.5") wedged in the dash. What else could be playing but a ripped off DVD of MTV2 videos from the early nineties featuring Meatloaf, Poison, and other power ballad favorites. We sang along best we could, taking care not to miss the rolling alpine hills that passed by our window while we wailed.

Monteverde was a weird mix of small town, rural setting, and sporadic tourist. I take that back. There were a lot of tourists. Which was all in good reason as this was one of the most incredible displays of nature in all of Costa Rica. There was even a sushi restaurant in this town of 2000, but we didn't trust it, just like I never trusted the sushi served on another mountain at McClurg dining hall.

The NCAA Final four was on during dinner that night at a local soda, but halfway through it got changed to a latin music sing-a-long by the waitress. We tried with all our might but couldn't get her to change it back, and so that was the end of our escapade to american culture for the night. It turns out that the regional rodeo was also being held the same night, and so we walked a kilometer down the road and got to see local culture in action. The bar served up shots of sugar cane liquor, but we refrained and instead got a round of Imperial beers. Familiar fair favorites were there such as cotton candy, fried dooughnut balls, and taffy. A few new ones were there as well such as a Churro, or long fried heavy sweet dough filled with peanut butter and coated with sugar crystals. It was heaven in your mouth, and I could make a fortune importing these things to the US. Small dark dingy rides were all the rage with local 4 to 12 year olds, but they looked a little unsafe for gringo size men, so we just watched. The fair was also popular with the 13-17 year old age group, and it remined me of when I was that age. In Birmingham you couldnt go to a bar, only half your friends drove, you couldnt talk at movies, there was no football team, and bowling got old, so where do you go? We went to things like fairs and concerts the same as the kids down here. Stewart, Craig, and I skipped out on the actual rodeo, saying that we would do it the next night and got ready for a long day of zip-lining, cloud-forest hiking, and soaking up the humidity.

Early to rise about 5:30, we were the first people on the public Monteverde school bus headed towards the protected forest just 5 minutes outside of town. They acutally had a daily quota, and so our goal was to get in as early as possible to have the place to ourselves for a few hours. Early we were, arriving about 6:30, 30 minutes before they actually opened. While waiting, we sat and talked about how this was the most expensive park entrance fee we had ever paid: 9 dollars, in a country where the average daily wage was below 15. Just over our shoulder, a uber-blindly liberal lady from New York in her 40s couldnt help but listen in, and went off on an unprovoked tirade about how Costa Rica was only country down here who protected their forests and that costs money which we needed to pay. We responded by saying that the 9 dollar entrance was the one reason that there was not a single Costa Rican in line, and that the country essentially made its natural treasure too expensive for its own people who live here. And as such making it a veritable playground for rich foreigners. She didnt understand: she had to fly back to New York the next day.

After that we were off! I will say that Monteverde's popularity is well deserved, for this was perhaps one of the most beautiful and richest rain forest that I have ever been in. I felt like I had boarded a time capsule, transported millions of years back before the scourge of man. The trees hung a hundred feet over your head, sheltering you as if you were in some grand english cathedral supported by columns 6 feet around. Meanwhile early morning clouds still wrapped around the base of these massive giants, meandering along the forest floor as if there was no forest at all. The cool temperatures stirred a soup of fog that at times obscurred the path right underneath your feet. And if this was one of Mozart's great symphonies, the key would be in green; for this color overwhelmed the senses in every form. There was so much life in every inch of this place that you could have sworn it had a heartbeat. On the branch of a tree grew a moss, on top of that moss there was an orchid, through that orchid weaved a vine, and crawling along that vine were tons of large ants carrrying pieces of leaves, carrying these leaves to another patch of moss, where a tree was growing on top of the first one. Whole patches of earth were somehow suspended in tree trunks, harboring a second forest floor with orchids, bushes, and animals. From the trees hung 80 foot tall vines, some large enough to swing on, and others just barely thicker than a pencil.

As the day drew out, the clouds cleared, and a gorgeous blue sky was occasionally visible through the trees. We continued the hike, stopping at a bridge built through the canopy to check out what life was like a little higher in the forest. We also passed one or two groups of birdwatchers, which reminded us that we had pretty much had the entire reserve to ourselves all morning, seeing one or two hikers at most. It pays to get up early.

Craig and Stewart on our Canopy Bridge

That afternoon we didnt let the exictement stop, and went on a "Canopy Tour" through another part of Monteverde. Canopy Tour is actually just an environmentally friendly marketing term for "bad ass cable zip line." Ignoring the approaching storm and sporadic lighting customary here in the afternoon, we doned harness, had a brief 5 minute safety talk, and hooked up with pulleys to our first cable. The zip lines here are of epic porportions: Our second zip line was almost a half mile long, spanned an entire valley, brought us 600 feet off the ground, and reached speeds of 30 to 40 miles an hour hour, all on a cable no wider than your thumb. There were 22 of these. It was intense.

Next stop: the beach town of Jaco, Costa Rica to catch some bill fish!

Costa Rica Week of Adventure

2008-04-12T11:17:00.000-07:00

Getting mocked by Stewart

After a water taxi and short bus trip, Stewart and I had officially left Panama and were on our way towards Costa Rica. We were going to meet Stewart's friend Craig in San Jose. He was going to take a week off from work and travel with us while we hit up some of Costa Rica's hot spots.

Costa Rica is perhaps one of central america's richest countries, while still poorer than the US, they do have a life expectancy, a literacy rate, and an infant mortaility rate that is comperable to the States. There are several things that seperate Costa Rica from other Central American countries and make it decidedly unique: After a massive civil war in 1948 between a leftist leader, and conservative right wing aristocracy, the next president Feraria(sp?) aboilished the entire military calling it "a threat to democracy." This would set the tone for a peace loving nation for the next 50 years. Costa Rica's president Arias actually was instrumental in coordinating the peace treaty ending the nicaraguan civil war in 1980 and as a result won a Nobel peace prize. He was reelected last year after 20 years out of office. The US on the other hand entirely funded the loosing side, thereby prolonging the war for years and killing hundreds of thousands in the process.

Costa Rica realized somewhere in the 1970s and 1980s after several decimating Banana blights that they should start diversifying their economy. With the help of many, many extrañeros, they started setting aside land for conservation and preservation, eventually totaling over 30 percent of the country. Within 20 years, Costa Rica had revolutionized their economy and now their number one export was tourism far surpassing all other products. The numbers are evident, with something like 50,000 Americans living in Costa Rica, and over one million tourists in 1999 alone. In contrast Panama only got 80,000 tourists that year. And while this tourism makes the country less of what it used to be 100 years ago, there is not a culture in the world that does not change. Culture is inherently fluid . In the same way that there is a little bit of truth in every stereotype, the tourism is here for a reason. The country's forests, volcanos, and beaches are some of the best that I have seen to date.

Another side effect of such massive influx of foreignors wass their foreign money. While great for the country as a whole, it makes the life of a budget backpacker a difficult one. In other countries we are used to being able to get by on the same sort of pay scale that the locals do, but here since tourism is such a ubiqitous buisness, every price in a restaurant or hotel is quoted for a gringo. The locals simply eat and live at home. The tourists that spend these kinds of prices are here for a week maybe two, and so to them it is really nothing.

Stewart and I met Craig at the airport in San Jose last week, and although his plane arrived at 8:30, he didn't get out of customs until 10:20. Lesson to be learned: when the plane deboards at a foreign airport, do not stop to go use the restroom and let the entire plane get in front of you in line, instead hold it until you get to the other side if you can.

That night we went out and partied with the locals, trying to pick out the "real girls" from the prostitutes or men dressed as women, throwing Craig a welcome to Costa Rica party. It was kind of fun to introduce him to the things so foreign to American culture and now mundane and ordinary to Stewart and I. I lived vicariously through him, watching his reaction and remembering what it was like the first time I came to latin america. We called it a night at 3:30 a.m. after some Hamburgeusas con Jamon y Huevos (hamburgers with ham and eggs, actually really incredibly good) from a street vendor. The next morning at 7:30 am, or 4 hours later, we were up and adam for an 8 oclock bus that would last the next 5 hours and take us up to La Fortuna where we were going to see the Volcano Arenal.

The rickety old 1970s charter bus rambled through the hills north of San Jose along a bumpy dirt road headed for La Fortuna. As the exhaust wafted in through our window and the bumps without shocks threw us off our seats, we all couldn't help but feel a little bit quezy and think that maybe a night of fun wasn't the best precursor to an 8 o'clock 5 hour bus ride through rural Costa Rica.

Finally arriving in La Fortuna, that afternoon, we checked into our hostel "Gringo Petes" and grabed some grub, a set meal down here is called a cansado and we ate the most expensive cansado that we have ever eaten at 6 dollars (in Ecuador they are 1.50). A little nap, some blogging, and we were scheduled to take a night tour up the side of the active volcano looming over La Fortuna.

Volcano Arenal first erupted from its dormant state in 1960, and has been spitting out lava and hot rocks ever sense. The last person it killed was in 2000, a man who was trying to get too close to the volcano and got killed by the heat. Total the volcano has killed under 50 in the last fifty years, with the majority of those being during the initial explosion in the 1960's.

Our guide, Juan Carlos, has been giving tours up the side of the volcano for over 15 years, and as the day slowly faded into purple, we bounced down the road in a van with several other tourists headed for the volcano. The van came to a stop a hour later at the very base of the volcano. From there it was an hour hike in the dark through the jungle, while battling mosquitos, up to a viewing point. The viewing point was actually a clearing of lava rocks from the last major eruption, and for the next hour we sat there in the silence and darkness and watched and listened as this force of nature spit glowing lava rocks hundreds of feet into the air and then let them slide down the mountain, bursting into thousands of tiny pieces in spectacular displays of fire. I felt one with the powers of the earth, and got a sense for how truly massive our planet is. We were watching lava that had just recently flowed up from the center of the earth and now spewing out into the air.

After the Volcano we went back down the mountain in our van and got to swim in thermal springs feeding off of the heat from the volcano, ambiance provided by flashlights mounted in the trees by our guide, Juan Carlos.

Nixing plans to go out that evening, Stewart, Craig, and I caught a jeep out of La Fortuna to lake Arenal 2 hours away, where we boarded boats to take us down the lake. From the end of the lake we caught another jeep to the cloud forest town of Monteverde.

Stewart's Friend Craig

I cant talk more know, have to catch a 3:30 bus, but look for more in the next few days.

Hacking away North/Bocas del Toro

2008-04-10T10:20:00.000-07:00

After Portobelo, I returned to Panama City by bus to avoid paying the 22 dollars it would have cost to take the train back down, and from there I caught another bus headed north to Bocas del Toro. Regrettably I don’t have any pictures from this segment of the trip because the memory card in my camera was full, and I had been unable to locate an internet cafe that would allow me to download the program necessary to transfer the images to my ipod.

In Bocas del Toro I was scheduled to meet Stewart, who had skipped Portobelo to save some dough, and we would spend the next 5 or 6 days on this gorgeous Caribbean beach town.

Bocas del Toro is located on the Caribbean coast of Panama, in the far North West corner of this wide and flat country, and is one of the most popular destinations for Panama City folk. Literally it stands for "mouth of the bull" and the best I can figure is that this is reference to the way the Bay looks which opens to the sea. We decided to spend more than a few days here in an effort to get to know a city a little better than the 2-3 day a city schedule we had been on previously. The capital of the Bocas del Toro region is an Island called Isla de Colon, a direct reference to when Christopher Columbus landed here in the 15th century. The region remained largely undisturbed, too far north of Spanish influence and too far south to have any remnant Mayan civilizations for the next 300 years. In the mid 19th century, three American brothers and businessmen chose this area to start a massive series of Banana plantations which would later be bought out by the United Fruit Company, and later Chiquita. The Banana reality of the region becomes obvious as the water taxi from Changuinola takes you through a 15 mile canal built in the 19th century to haul bananas up and down the giant coastal banana plantations. The bananas are hauled along in giant 30 foot long, 4 foot wide dugout canoes, whose drivers seem to be perpetually bailing with buckets.

My childhood beach vacations were always taken to familiar places such as Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, and maybe occasionally Destin, Seaside, or Rosemary Beach. At these meccas of tourism, giant 200 feet deep beaches had the prettiest whitest sand you could have imagined. It is from this small segment of experience that I based my belief that all Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean coastlines must have beautiful white sand with more room than you knew what to do with. This turns out not to be true... Both Portobelo and Bocas del Toro are located in the midst of Mangrove infested rocky shore lines. While there are pretty beaches, they can take up to 45 minutes to get to, involve hikes through jungles, and only be 30 feet deep.

I read about Bocas del Toro as being one of the principal Caribbean tourism destinations for both Nationals and Extrañeros alike, so I imagined something at least akin to the beach destinations I was familiar with from my childhood, minus airbrushed tank top wearing red necks in big crappy trucks waving confederate flags, a sticker of some kid pissing on something, reeking of Hawaiian Tropic, and parked in front of the sharks mouth at Souvenir City. While I could not find any of these color figures here, Bocas wasn’t exactly the Mecca I thought it would be.

Bocas del Toro is about 3 blocks wide, 8 blocks long, and mixes together 1 part gringo to 2 parts Panamanian, with a dash of poverty and a dab of foreign wealth. There was not a single building over 3 stories, while most averaged 2, and the wide dirt road that serves as Main Street was full of people just walking around with not much to. Small booths and blankets were laid out with dirty hippies selling island wear jewelry, just trying to soak up the Caribbean vibes for a few more days until money ran out. You were just as likely to find a dog, moped, four-wheeler, bike, or person in the middle of the road as you were a car. The foreign investment provided amenities like a gourmet grocery store akin to V Richards in Birmingham selling the latest California wines, while the rest of us ate at 2 dollar hole in the walls called sodas. Realty offices dotted the street trying to cash in on a potential boom, with signs completely in English aimed towards an obvious target audience of vacationing Americans.

At night we partied at the Mondo Taitu, one of two hostels here started by the same guys that owned Luna's Castle in Panama City, 3 guys who graduated in 2004 from San Francisco. They had weekly 80's parties where they had compiled about 60 different 1980's music videos, and you had to take a shot of beer every time the music video changed, which was about every minute for an hour. It turns out that the Beefeater's society at Sewanee actually came in hand to teach me something! Other hit theme parties that week were Friday Pink Pajama Punk Party, or Martini Monday.

Bocas del Toro may be a beach destination for many, but it sure felt like a small town compared to beach destinations I’ve been to in the states, more analogous to Apalachicola, Florida. Also as a beach destination it lacked a key component: beaches.

The first beach we ventured to while we were there was a beach called wilderness beach, a name that should have proved ominous for us both. A 2 dollar water taxi took us to the nearby island of Bastimentos, where we were supposed to take a 30 minute hike across the island to these secluded Caribbean beaches. We were given vague directions but assured that it was close and we would have no trouble finding it. After a short hike through a hillside graveyard on the way to the beach, we took the wrong trail... 3 hours later Stewart and I had hiked through just about every small trail we could find, gotten stuck in 2 foot deep mud, almost run into spiders 8 inches across, climbed more barbwire than I care to count, and certifiably gotten lost trying to find the ocean. Finally we ran into a house and paid the 7 year old son one dollar to show us the way to the beaches, he took us back to where we started and showed us how the very first turn we had taken was wrong... Lesson learned: when in doubt, always trust the 7 year olds.

Wilderness beach proved to live up to every inch of its name. 200 foot hills surround this protected cove of palm trees and coconuts and a 60 foot deep white sand beach. 12 foot swells violently pounded the sandy shore on a gorgeous blue-bird day. A light breeze coming off the ocean helped to cool you down from the beaming sun, and I found a stream where I could sit, flowing with cool fresh water right into the ocean. The 12 foot swells were great for surfing, but gave this region some really nasty rip-tide. One girl had drowned several months prior, and I saw a girl from California get sucked out while were sitting on the beach.

We found beaches of varying quality scattered in neighboring Isla Careña (named as such because this is where Christopher Columbus Careened his ships to clean them on the beaches 500 years ago) and on the main island of Isla Colon. However none would be as memorable as Wilderness beach.

The next day I paid 15 dollars and took a Sea Kayak out into the Mangrove forests surrounding Bocas del Toro and got some good exercise for about 6 hours. I really wanted to show off my kayaking skills in an authentic Sea Kayak with skirt, but unfortunately this was a sit on top tourist version that was painted bright pink. Not exactly the sexy kayaker image I was looking for. I did get to check out some stunning sailboats docked at the nearby harbor, which made me want to take up sailing when I can afford to, and buy a sailboat to tour the Caribbean.

One of the other incredible things we did while we were in Bocas Del Toro was a 20 minute taxi ride into the middle of the island to a place called El Gruto. El Gruto, which I am guessing means grotto, is a 2 mile long open ended cave that is half full of water, catfish, mud, and lots and lots of Bats! Stewart and I led a crew of 10 American travelers through this attraction buried deep within the jungle of Isla Colon. I had lost my flashlight the week before, and so I went next door to our hostel and bought a 3 dollar LED flashlight and 1 dollar worth of batteries. I should have known that the quality of my 1 dollar batteries would leave something to be desired, because when I pushed them into my flashlight the batteries actually bent in half in my fingers! I was still able to make it work despite the battery acid now exposed, but I had lost my faith in Costa Rican manufacturing.

About half of our crew that ventured into El Gruto had flashlights, no water, some had shoes, and others were decked out in swimsuits ready for the beach. This was by no means a Boy Scout approved trek, and yet we all still made it out alive, something I love about traveling in Latin America. I have seen women scale hard mountains in high heels, 8 hour jungle bushwhacking in flip flops, and now caves without flashlights; we really tend to overprepare / overgear ourselves in the United States.

By the way, I just discovered a hilarious new site this past week that talks about similar funny misguided elements of US culture: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

I have seen bats before fly out of caves, but the caves were generally large with huge openings and at a distance above or far away from me. This was not the case as we ventured into El Gruto right at dusk when the bats are leaving to feed. For a little over 2 hours we waded through waist deep water, only a foot or two to either side of the walls and a ceiling 3 to 4 feet above your head. We prayed it wouldn’t rain and send a flash flood hurtling through the remaining air we had. As you shined your light up to the ceiling you could see a sea of little black creatures clinging to the roof interspersed between the stalactites. As they slept they rocked back and forth with quick motions, giving these groups of hundreds of bats a kind of shimmering appearance, and only a few feet away from your head. Then they slowly loosened their grasp and started to fly out of the cave. We quickly learned that our flashlights, while providing crucial illumination, were also attracting little insects, which in turn attracted bats. Unable to turn the lights off, we had to slowly move forward step by step as bats were swarming all around your body. You could feel them grace your head with their bodies, and the wind from their wing beats made the hair on the back of your neck stand on end and crawl. At times you would have to just close your eyes and try not to think about the possibility of these creatures flying through the darkness around your face. Finally we emerged in one piece and triumphant 2 hours later just as the last bit of day slipped between the leaves in the jungle.

I am now beginning to loose the initial steam that I started this trip with as we travel from country to country. The idea of such a long journey is exciting from the get go, but as the reality sets in, you begin to miss home a little. A sense of place and normalcy is underrated. However I think about the time I am going to spend working this upcoming fall, and that provides me with the motivation to keep going and exploring these new places. To travel this long successfully requires a reorientation of purpose, you have to stop traveling like all previous trips you have taken throughout your life as a vacation, and travel as work, travel to live. This goes beyond the simple and obvious monetary aspect, and requires an acceptance that the road is now your home.

I am looking forward to putting some more stories from San Jose, La Fortuna, and Jaco, Costa Rica, and the past few days I have spent with Stewart's friend Craig Hey. I also have cleaned out my memory card and uploaded all pictures to Ipod, so there are some good photos to come.

Later
M3

Pictures from Portobelo Panama

2008-04-07T17:59:00.000-07:00

I dont have much time to post, so I am just going to put up some of the images from Portobelo Panama. The next post will be from Bocas del Toro Panama, but I ran out of space on my camera so there will be precious few images from there until I can find a location from whence to transfer files to my Ipod.

Deserted Carribean Island

Panama Railway 7:15am

The way the rest of Panama gets around

16th Century Spanish fort

You can see the royal kings gold counting office in the background

I will be fishing tomorrow for Blue Marlin and Sail Fish in the pacific from 7-5, but hopefully I will have some time to bring this whole show up to date on Wednesday. And I apologize for typos in the previous blog; it was written in haste.

Take care

Merrill

Portobelo Panama

2008-04-04T14:28:00.000-07:00

The Panama railroad was completed in 1855, and served as the first transcontinental railroad until the US transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. It was at one time the most expensive stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and cost more per mile to build than any other railroad in the world. Passengers would take boats down to the east side of the canal and then catch a quick 2 hour train ride to the other side where boats would wisk them away to the pacific. This was the case until the US trancontinental railroad was completed, taking all the passengers and bankrupting the company. Although in disrepair for many years, when the panamanians took control of the canal in 1999 and started charging outrageous prices, a US company invested in and rebuilt the railroad to it former glory.

I left Panama early in the morning at 7:15am bound for Colon, in a refurbished passenger train on the old Panama railway. Colon served as the northern port for both the Canal and the train and would be my next stop after leaving Panama.

Colon would only be a short stop however as you will see why. Colon was the boom town during the construction of the Panama Canal, but when the canal was finished there was no longer any work or money for the tens of thousands of imported workers. With a larg population and no industry or outlet of employment, the town sank into a deep deep depression of poverty and violence. Colon would remain this way for the next 100 years, a seth pool of crime and poor people. I was skeptical of this view until I spent 30 minutes in the train station after a short taxi while waiting for a bus. Believe me 30 minutes was enough as I stood there like an island of vulternability amidst a dirty sea of potential theives, and I knew that a majority of what was written about Colon is true. For these reasons I decided that Colon would not be my final stop after debarking the train, and instead I hopped a school bus (not kidding) up the road to the old colonial town of Portobelo.

Portobelo was actually the first spanish fort in Panama and constructed on the Carribean side. It, like Panama Viejo mentioned earlier, was designed to facilite the massive gold robbery from the Incas in peru. Massive quatities of gold would make their way by boat from Lima, up the coast to Panama city and then be transported by land and canoe to Portobelo, where they would lie and wait for ships to come and take them back to Spain. Portobelo, like Panama Viejo, served as a glorious target for english pirates lurking around the Carribean, and as such it was sacked on numerious occasions.

A large portion of these ruins still stand today and so I ventured east along the coast to Portobelo from Colon. (By the way, the Panama Canal and Railroad run from south to north in case you didnt know) This was my first taste of the Carribean and the first real taste of the sea since leaving Lima a month ago. And Maaaan was it nice to breath in the salty air, smell the laidback vibes floating along the gentle breezes, as they wound their way through the mangroves that hugged the shore. Our multicolored school bus made its way down the road along the beach, picking up and dropping off random things like refrigerators, until we arrived a short 2 hours later. Portobelo is a small but unique town that makes you feel like you have lived here for years. While it was once a massive 10,000 person city, it now consists of 5 or 6 roads squished between the hills and carribean bay below. The population is significantly darker, and talk with an island twang that lilts like the brightly painted houses dotting dirt streets. Although it is a small town in Panama, and has all the things that implies such as poverty and lack of development, it retains a unique and persevering tone. I had a set lunch of pulpo, which I later found out was octopus as I exmanined the tiny round suckered flesh sitting ontop of my rice.

You cant help but avoid the massive colonial building sitting right in the middle of town where a square, church, or courthouse should be. The former purpose of this two story, 100m long 50m wide, tile roofed mansion, highlights the real significance to the spanish empire of Portobelo. The building is where all of the "king's" stolen gold was counted before it was returned to spain to prevent any theft during the long journey.

Across from the "kings gold counting building" and stretching out into the bay is one of three forts guarding the town from pirates invading through the narrow inlet that forms the back of Portobelo bay. Here in this bastion of stone sit 25 10-inch cannons, in the exact same position that the spanish left them when they pulled out of Portobelo in the 1700's. I peered down them, and agree that they would have had an excellent shot on any incoming vessel from the bay. The problem is that when Portobelo has been sacked (like 4 times) it has always been from the land where they sit undefended, by pirates who beached a few miles outside the bay. You'd think they would learn...

Panama City

2008-03-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

I guess you need to watch out for runners and body builders?

Panama City from the view of Panama Viejo, or old Panamanian Ruins

Friday of last week Stewart and I took a taxi to the Bogota airport, and boarded another jet aeroplane bound for Panama City, Panama. You dont truly appreciate the beauty and speed of modern air traffic until you have traversed these massive distances by land, a point especially true down here where they dont have interstates! A mere hour after taking off out of Bogota, we were descending into the Panama airport, a jouney that would surely have taken 2-3 days by land.

Panama city, home of the panama canal, is perhaps one of the most cosmopolitian cities in all of central america. On every street corner you are just as likely to find a Thai, Chinese, Greek, Indian, Turkish, or American restaurant as you are an "authentic" Panamanian. High rise towers straddle the pacific coastline, Donald Trump has his own resort, and AARP rated it the #4 place to retire. A lionshare of the international influence comes from none other than the US. I feel that few people realize what a profound impact we have had on this country and its culture.

After backing the Panamanian independance from Colombia in 1903, the panamanian ambassador to the US unilaterally represented Panama in a closed door treaty that gave the US sovreignty to all of the canal zone. The rest of Panama did not learn that we owned a portion of their country (splitting it in two) until we actually had soliders on the ground. This was the case until massive nationwide protests in 1979 forced Jimmy Carter to renegotiate the treaty, allowing them to have the Canal back in 1999. Then in 1989 with Norriega in power we went to war for one day to oust him, killing 2,000 civilians and wounding 20,000 others. This was actually the 4th time we had intervened militarily in Panama since 1903. US military presence contributed 300 million dollars annually to Panama, almost 1% of their GDP, and now the vast military bases sit empty and out of place throughout their country, like vestiges of a colonial past.

As the door to the plane opened it filled the cabin with a warm salty air, a veritable salvation from the past 3 weeks of cold mountain air. I inhaled slowely and deeply, infusing my lungs with the heat and excitement brought about a change in climate. Panama was also the flattest piece of land we had seen in a long time, meaning less walking up and down in thin air exhaustion.

A mile long causeway constructed by the US military to transport two giant 14" guns to the islands protecting the Panama Canal in 1914.

Our first night was spent in the Voyager International Hostel, which came highly recommend by the lonely planet. However, our taxi driver informed us that the Hostel had moved, and as we crawled up the small stairwell to the 3rd story apartment complex, we knew that this was not the same one seen by LP authors. The "hostel" was literally a converted large 4 bedroom apartment, except that in rooms meant for 2 people, they had somehow sqeezed in 10 bunkbeds. I was also firmly convinced that my "mattress" was actually a large covered piece of packing foam. I set about the next morning procuring another dig, and stumbled upon the cheapest, nicest hostel in all of central america. "Luna's Castle" is located in historic Casco Viejo in a turn of the century victorian mansion. This 10 dollar a night hostel was started by 3 guys from San Francisco who graduated together in 2004. With a million dollar view overlooking the Panama City Harbor, and right across from the presdents residence, this is truly a gold mine.

View from our Hostel

The historic center of Panama City stands in harsh contrasts to the Burger Kings and high rises just across the bay. Almost every single building is over a hundred years old, most pushing 200, but somehow it all fell into disrepair for the last 80. UNESCO declared it a world heritage site and so a renovation effort has begun over the last 10 years, followed by the security brought by the new presidencial residence. The narrow allyways are now home to boutique ice cream shops and 5 star restaurants where 10 years ago they were whore houses and drug dens. All of this renovation and construction also meant that Panama city was one of the most expensive places we have been to date, and so we needed to move on to save a little of money!

The next day we went out to check out Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal. As I rode the bus out past the maze of ex-US military barracks, I got to sit next to one of the tram operators that helps pull the boats through the locks on trains. He said that when the US left, life working at canal changed dramatically. Predictably the panamanians had a hard time keeping up with the quotas formerly set by the US, and despite now charging 200 to 300 thousand dollars per boat, all of the workers salaries were cut in half. Stewart and I watched a movie in the Miraflores Locks visitor center while waiting for the boat to come, and we both noticed that this was the first building in Panama we had been in with building code items like emergency exits, fire exstinguishers, exit signs, and emergency lighting. And then we realized it was built by the US...

Even though it was built a hundred years ago, it is still an amazing feat of engineering watching a giant cargo ship get lowerd 60 feet in a matter of minutes. I think that when the locks were first built they were large enough for any ship to date, but now it looks as if the boats themselves are built to fit inside the locks, as there is only 1-2 feet of clearance on each side and not more than 10-20 in the front and back for these half mile long ships.

Also of interest in Panama City were the ruins from the original city built by the Spanish in the middle of the 16th century. Panama City was the first city built by the Spanish on the Pacifc coast, and was preceded by Portobelo on the east coast. The object of these two cities was to facilitate the gold trade/theft out of Lima, Peru. Naturally since boats between Spain and this part of the world only came once or twice a year, these two cities ended up sitting on a LOT of gold waiting to take it back to Spain. This was too much of a temptation for English Pirates, and so both cities were sacked on multiple occasions.

Bogota

2008-03-28T15:16:00.000-07:00

View overlooking the City of Bogota

Bogota's iglesia de San Franciso

Sunset Bogota Colombia

With Stewart on his way south to indulge in Colombia's number 2 agricultural export (coffee), I headed back east towards Bogota to get a head start on checking out Colombia's capital city. I came into Bogota on a Tuesday night, giving me 2 full days to explore before our flight left for Panama city. We chose to fly as opposed to drive to Panama because it is not actually possible to drive from Colombia to Panama without a really intense 4 wheel drive vehicle, a week a free time, and a machine gun toting guide. So we chose to fly.

Between Colombia and Panama is an area known as the Darian gap that isnt actually patrolled or controlled by either country. It is an area of lawlessness and drug smuggling, where the government is more inclined to bomb any potential trouble than send in police. It is also home to some of the most undisturbed rainforest in either country. While sad we could not partake in this adventure, it was for the best.

Bogota would be our third week straight of transcending the South American Andes. From Cajamarca to Quito, Medellin to Bogota, we had been at high altitudes and low temperatures forever, and Bogota was no exception. I don't know what possessed ancient tribal leaders when they decided to place their capitals in environs where it routinely got into the 50s at night, when they had ample gorgeous beaches. I suppose it might have been the disease, but nonetheless it had been a chilly three weeks. I say this mostly to prove the point that the image of south America as being a hot humid place is not entirely true.

Bogota is situated on the edge of a mountain that runs the entire length of the city and directs the sprawl out to the west. Much like Medellin, it is a cleaner more well designed city, although it lacks the sexy metro. It too was dangerous several years ago, but it is quickly coming around to realizing that things must be done. Our Hostel for instance had two doors, one to let people in and a second one behind bars so that the hostel staff could get a good look at you before they let you in. The second door would not open until the first was closed, kind of like an airlock to the outside world. I was told that this was less and less of a necessity, but still used occasionally.

As I left my hostel to grab a quick bit to eat, I ran into none other than Ross from Finn McCool's in Quito. The coolest place to hang out in all of Quito by far is the Irish Pub in the Mariscal called Finn McCool's. Run by an incredible Irish couple, Lee and Ursula, this place truly is special to me, and all the people there are some of the nicest I know. Ross was a bartender there when I was working in Quito last semester, but his visa from Ireland had run out three days before and so he moved to Bogota to start anew. Ross and I met up with some people he had been hanging out with from Bogota, and as it turned out one of them had a way to sneak into a show that night in Bogota. Taking him up on the offer, we slid by security and got to party with Chic Bogotaians while I noodeled out to band called Bomba Estéreo. The second band that came on and led us late into the night (5am ish) was a Colombian version of the Talking Heads, all decked out in white suits. Suffice to say that it was INCREDIBLE! And to top it off everyone had cast aside their salsa upbringing and were dancing similar to a good phish show! I was in heaven.

I wonder what a full service bathroom is like!

The next morning I took a walking tour of Bogota, starting out at the Plaza Bolivar or central square. (side note: if you ever find yourself in a south American city and are lost, just ask for the directions to the plaza Bolivar and nine times out of ten this will be the central square) After an unintelligible 2 minute oral history from a drunk street bum wanting money, I decided to hack it out on my own.

Iglesia de San Francsico, Bogota Colombia

Iglesia de San Francisco, Bogota Colombia

When Stewart arrived the next day, we hit up the museum scene around Bogota. In addition to great infrastructure, cleaner living, and gorgeous people, Bogota also has one of the most amazing collections of free public museums I have found to date. Highlights were more Botero paintings, a photographic exhibition by photographer Carlos Domenech, and last but not least: an exhibition in national police headquarters on the 499 day hunt for Pablo Escobar including the jacket he was shot in.

Machine used by P. Escobar to pack brick of Cocaine. The white horse was his symbol for quality.

Pablo Escobar's Mobile Phone or "Celly"

P. Escobar's silver plated 9mm's

The jacket P. Escobar was wearing the day he was shot by police

Although sad to leave Bogota and Colombia so soon, it was time to move on, and so we headed to the airport on Friday to catch our flight to Panama and warmer weather.

Where do I begin! Medellin, Bogota, and Panama

2008-03-27T15:18:00.000-07:00

First off I just would like to express my sincerest apoligies for not updating the blog in over a week and half. I kind of feel like I let everyone down on the job, but I do have some honest excuses. I was a little burnt out from blogging every other day for the first half of March, I mean, these things can take 3-4 hours to put up and most of the time I am doing it on a circa 1995 computer with half the keys that stick or are in the wrong location. Sometimes the connection is so bad that I will type for 2 minutes and then have to wait for a minute for the words to materilize on the screen (mistakes and all). Second and more importantly: the past week has been what they call "semana sante" or holy week on account of Easter. They really, really, really take their easter seriously in all of South America and Central America; everything was simply closed from this past Wednesday until Monday of this week. Internet cafes, restaurants, stores, everything was closed for almost the entire week; it was absolutely unbelievable. Then on Monday when they were finally open again, I took the Panama Railroad north to Colon and Portobelo where there was no internet to speak of. I am now in Bocas del Toro Panama and I am back up to bloggin. I am going to spend the next day or two filling you in on what I have done over the course of the past week and half...

Medellin, Colombia, Mid March 2008:

After a grueling 33 hour bus ride from Bogota, Stewart and I arrived into Medellin, Colombia. There are monumental differences between Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia. Get this: they have... ... TRASH CANS! This simple act of defiance against the gods of dirt is the first step towards general public cleanliness, better infrastructure, and a better living conditions for the people of Colombia. You dont belive it until you see it, but it is totally the norm in other countries to take whatever trash you have and leave it where you stand. In Quito Ecuador's beautiful manicured public parks, infinite piles of trash dot the lush green grass from where people have picknicked every Sunday. I suppose that the trash, like the dirt, is such a part of their daily lives that they see no difference in it or a verdent lawn. However in Medellin the winds of change are blowing, and fortunately not pushing along much trash as they do!

Medellin is also home to Colombia's only, and as far as I know South America's only Metro! Begun in 1984 and finished in 1995, it is an elevated, beautiful, state of the art, light rail. Ripping through the city on the way to our hostel in a hugely spacious modern metro, while admiring the green grass of highway medians, (this was the first median, or highway for that matter, I had seen in South America) we might have just as well hopped a concord to France for all I knew.

It is hard to believe that a mere 15 years ago this city was the de facto kingdom of Pablo Escobar and the largest cocaine cartel ever.

Stewart getting his new balances shined

As Stewart and I went out that night, we also experienced several other firsts for South America. I will preface this by saying that usually when definitive gringos such as myself and Stewart go out in Ecuador or Peru, my pasty white skin, random pimple, blond hair, and unnaturally tall physique is a definite chick magnet. It is the one chance that I get to stick it to all the unbuttoned shirt, tan, cut, and sexy latinos prowling my own country stealing my women. I will not go into the specifics of why they view white men more affectionately down here (meal ticket ahem...) but sufice to say that it exists. This was NOT the case as Stewart and I went out and partied with the whos whos of Medellin in Zona Rosa. The only gringos who partied here were broke backpackers which had left an indelible impression upon the members of the opposite sex. To top this off we were competing with bankers, stock brokers, and buisnessmen much more relatively affluent here than I could ever hope to be.

So we had to be content to drink our beers and look (stare), which was more than fulfilling for the short duration we hung around. After a good dorm room bed sleep accented by our neighborrs partying till 5 in the morning on account of St. Patricks day, we woke up fresh and tired to hit the streets of Medellin for a little cultural infusion.

I have one name for the art of Medellin: Botero, Fernando Botero. This Medellin native has made a name for himself over the last half century, prolifically painting and sculpting his way into veritable stardom. His 80 or so 4x life size bronze statues litter the city like they had been thrown from a seed spreader. His paintings practically fill up 2 or 3 large musuems here. So see Botero we did, and we saw, and we saw, and we saw. Using a palatte of simple colors with straigtforward delinitated accuracy, he paints figurative portraits of people. Their faces all potray the same umimpassioned ambivilant gaze that peers at you through small beady wide eyes. And their bodies... well every one of his characters is bulbously fat. I mean, every one of his subjects look like they could spend a couple years on the Subway diet and still stand to loose a few L B s.

The first few Boteros were dramatically intriguing, and I spent a good deal of time looking and analyzing his work. However after literally 300 plus works I saw of his, I became a little disengaged.

The next morning I took advantage of the public transportation, and for a 1 dollar ticket I was able to take the metro all the way to the top of one of the hills overlooking Medellin via a brand spakin new cable car that they had put in. As our ski-lift style cable car crested the first hill, I looked down and saw one of the shanty town suburbs that surrounds Medellin. It was here that I realized that even the best city in South America is not immune to the scourge of poverty where the less forturnate are pushed to the fringes. They are forced to live in mud walled homes with patched together tin roofs; this was the South America I knew. While Colombia might have smaller shanty towns than their neighbors to the south or the east, the towns still exist, and the people that live in them have the same impovrished life.

I found more homeless people sleeping in the streets, taking advantage of the peace and quiet of Samana Sante.

Also got to checkout an open air market they have in the Plaza Bolivar, items of interest were pigeon houses up in the trees and a man selling snails.

While Stewart chose to go check out the coffee region south of Medellin for a few days, I elected to get a head start on Bogota and came back from Medellin mid way through last week. We were scheduled to fly into Panama last Friday, and this gave me a few days to check out this incredible city as well.

I will put up more about Bogota and Panama tomorrow!

Till then take care

Merrill

Quito to Bogota to Medellin

2008-03-15T11:50:00.000-07:00

The city of Medellin

*I want to preface this blog by saying that my spell checker is working and I was an art major, not an english major, ahemm*

Unfortunately, Stewart and I had to break our pact of using only bus, car, train, and foot to make it back to the U.S. of A.

Three weeks ago while planning the immediate stages of this trip, we flipped on the news one day to see that Colombia had bombed a FARC military headquaters located inside Ecuadorian territory. In a typical melodramtic childish Chavez/Correa overeaction, Ecuadorian and Venezualan governments (Chavez tends to stick his nose into everything down here) responded by saying it was an incursion into Ecuadorian Sovreignty, warranting complete and total retaliation if nothing was done by Colombia. Ecuador and Venezuela both claimed to have sent troops to the border, but Colombia's President, Alvaro Uribe, kept his wits about him and didn't respond in kind.

Admist all of this turmoil, Stewart and I decided that crossing the border between two possibly warring countries by land would not be the best course of action. This combined a history of kidnapping gringos in the south of Colombia was enough to convince my mother to buy a plane ticket to get us into and out of Colombia. And so we were off into cold pre-dawn air of Quito at 5:00 am Thursday morning to catch a 7:00 flight to Bogota Colombia. Out flight on Copa airlines would take us swiftly out of Quito and rush us northwards at astonishing speeds compared to the busses we have been on for the past two weeks. The flight called for us to land in Panama City (not the one in Florida, but the one in Panama), and then back down to Bogota in time for lunch. However, like too much of the culture here in South America... It was delayed. It was delayed on the prettiest, warmest, most cloudless day I have seen in Quito. Eventually we were off, headed towards the capital on the western mouth of the Panama Canal.

After boarding the Boeing 737-800 and falling asleep before take off, I woke up sometime mid cruise and had a weird realization. I no longer felt like I was in South America, but could have just as easily have been on a flight from Atlanta to Dallas. The nuances of air travel: the smell, the beeps and noises, the view 30,000 feet off the ground, lack of leg room, and bad on-board meals; are in fact fairly universal, but are something I had come to associate with American culture and American flights. For the 90 minutes I was flying from Quito to Panama, I felt absolutely at home in this tin can of culture flying across the sky.

I had read that Panama City is a rich cosmopolitan meca, second only to Hong Kong, which was dearly confimred as we deboarded the plane. Crossing the terminal to our subsequent gate, we passed three, thats right THREE Lacoste stores in the span of 500 meters. A prada store, thousand dollar watches, diamond jewlers by the dozen, etc. Void of fulfillment from my 8 dollar excuse of a sandwich, out of Panama city we ran back down south to Bogota, where we were safely on the ground by 1:30 or 2. Stewart and I had heard that Medellin was the capital of night life in Colombia, and as this was our only weekend we would spend in Colombia, we beelined to the bus terminal from the airport to catch one to Medellin and hopefully be there by the evening...

A side note about Colombia: After reading the state deparments warnings about travlling in Colombia, and knowing that much of the US's supply of cocaine was still produced here, and that as little as 15 years ago the government was in a veritable war with jungle seperatist guerillas, I was understandably apprehensious about what I would find. I stand corrected, for Colombia (from the two days I have spent here) is one of the prettiest, most well developed, least impoverished, and nicest places I have been so far. Their country believes (for the most part as you will read later) in infastructure as the route to buisiness confidence and sucess. They believe in simple things (for the most part) like cleanliness. Obvious international influences are evident throughout city planning, types of food, punctuality. All of this is said in the most part purely relative to other latin american countries I have seen. And the people (specifically the girls/women) are absolutely, hands down, by far, the most gorgeous women I had ever seen. Taller, fairer complextion, curvaceous, and confident sums it all up nicely.

At approximately 3:15 in the afternoon, we left the Colombia bus station headed west bound towards Medellin, with an expected arrival time of 1:00 in the morning. Things were rolling along smoothly, cruising on a beautifully paved two lane highway between Bogota and Medellin while watching the sun set over the mountains surrounding Bogota. One item of notice along the trip was the huge abundance of honest to goodness 18 wheelers traveling the same winding road we were on. In the states we learn from an early age to loathe and fear 18 wheelers, destroyers of pavement, harborers of dirty truck drivers, and general nuisance to a kinder gentler population. However here, they represented the movement of goods for trade and buisness, they represented progress, they represented money for masses. I saw very few in Ecuador, and even fewer in Peru. A second item of notice was that it was still clean! Although the affluence dimished as we pushed our way into the countryside and out of the city, there was still a higher standard of upkeep maintaind by the country people.

Stopping for dinner about 10:00 that evening, we were exicted to almost be in Medellin maybe in time to catch some late night clubbing. For the record I am not what you would call a "clubber;" I was merely trying to immerse myself in the culture. However, as we climbed back onto the bus and out on the road, the trouble soon began. At 10:30 PM, in the dense jungle and rolling hills three hours outside of Medellin, in the pouring rain and pitch dark of night, our bus came to a sudden and complete stop behind a train of cars and trucks. It was here that we would remain, in the exact same spot, for the next 18 and half hours. We came to find out that as the rain fell throughout the day, it had turned a hole hillside into soft red mud that eventually caved under its own weight and covered our road with 8 feet of mud for 200 meters. The road was a great road with concrete gutters and asphalt, but is was only two lanes wide, and it was the only road connecting cities the size of Dallas and Denver. Apparently the Colombian road crews do not work at night, so we were stuck at 10:30 p.m. in the middle of nowhere until daylight broke. Curling up as much as I could in my green bus seat with plastic head covers, I threw on the Ipod and called it a night.

As dawn broke over the steaming fertile green hills of nowhere Colombia, I looked out my tinted window to recognize the same rotten barbwire fence, the same rock, and the same little stick on the road I had been staring at for 7 hours. It was now 6:00, 7 hours and 30 minutes since the bus stopped, on a trip that was supposed to take a total of 9. Around 7:00, two eighteen wheelers rolled through the opposite lane with a bulldozer and a backhoe, and a couple of dump trucks. I thought, I sure am glad that they didnt risk driving on the road at night, who knows what could happen! It is totally fine that the entire economic machine between Colombia's 1st and 3rd largest city has been shut down for 10 hours.

Whats even better is that Stewart asks them how often this happens, figuring that this is just a hazard of traveling during the rainy season. They said they cant remember the last time there was landslide like this. Ouch. Maybe every 5 or 6 years they get one that closes the road for more than an hour or two. What good luck on our part, and this is our 2nd land slide in as many weeks to boot.

What followed has proved to be very typical of the fatalistic optimism/unpreparedness endemic to culture down here. At 9:00 am we were assured by the police that the road would be open and traffic would be moving by 11:00 am, so Stewart and I waited in the bus as opposed to walk the 4 miles up to the landslide and try to hitch a ride from the other side. At 11:00am we were assured again by the police with the confidence indicative of a german engineer that the road would be open by 1pm, they had just had a few small set backs. At 1 pm they didnt both to answer us. At 3pm they said it might take a little longer than expected... Really? I am so glad they came to that conclusion. Finally at 5pm our bus driver brokered a deal with a driver from "the other side" to trade pasengers, and we would get on their bus which would go back to Medellin, and his passengers would come get on our bus and go back to Bogota. He takes us as far as he can to the landslide, but we still have about a mile left which we have to do on foot.

So here we are: a random assorment of 35 men, women, children, old ladies with flowering suitcases, old men in shirts with pearl buttons, and babies hugging the hips of their mothers, all walking down the road by ourselves in the middle of the jungle of Colombia next to a 10 mile long string of 18 wheelers. We had all become better friends in the last 26 hours we had all spent on a bus together with nothing else to do. We are carrying cardboard boxes containing who knows what, bags of fruit, rolling luggage, random electronic appliances, and in our case, huges backpacks. The sun was setting and the road was increasingly covered in mud. Soon after we left we passed the group from the other bus, which put a pep in all of our steps as we rushed to catch our last hope out.

After this motley crew crossed the monstrosity of dirt and rock that had postponed our trip, we arrived at the other bus only to find it full of people who were trying to get to Medellin as well from various cars and trucks. They had beat us there, and paid the driver who seemed to have convienantly forgotten about the deal he made with our driver a mere 30 minutes prior. Meanwhile our bus was steaming towards Bogota with his passengers he had managed to unloaded. Chaos insued.

The daylight waned until it was now dark, and the construction crew pulled out a bunch of portable lighting. I stepped back for a second and surveyed the scene: 30 angry passengers standing in front of the only bus left in this makeshift town, screaming in the air and yelling at the bus driver. To complement our mob, there were another 50 of 60 rugged looking travelers/thugs loitering dangerously close to our bus, who also needed a ride out of town. The light from the construction crew casted dark shadows across peoples faces, provided just enough distant illumination to make sure you still had your bag in your hand. Bordering the whole scene were Colombian Army Soliders decked out in fatigues and holstering M-16s to prevent people from trying to cross over the lanslide, and the noise from the backhoe drowned the air in thunder.

I felt like I was standing on the roof of the American Embassy in 1975, north vietnamese bombing the city, and hords of south vietnamese (colombians in this case) all clambering to climb abord the last helicopter (bus) out of Saigon (jungle).

After an hour of haggling we finally convinced the driver to let us board and stand in the aisles while he made the 3 hour voyage back to Medellin. However apparently it is against the law to have passengers standing in the aisle in these types of buses, which would not have been an issue were it not for the 3 police checkpoints that stood between us and freedom. Our solution: he would turn off all the lights in the cabin at each checkpoint and we would duck between the seats while the police shined lights in to check that there were no aisle passengers.

Medellin at last!

Blog point:

1.) Today I saw a portable public phone station... The station was in fact a 50 year old man, and out of his pockets drouped 4-5 long thin metal chains. Each of these chains was attached to a cell phone, one of which was being used by a younger man.

2.) People here loooove grease in their hair, just like many places throughout south america, and as a result the back of every seat on bus here has some kind of plastic cover to protect the seat from getting filled with head grease. The problem is that they missed a key step in this process of cleaning off the plastic periodicially, so when you go to lay your head down on the bus you are greeted by a nice semi-opaque layer of brownish hair grease. Initially this was discomforting... Never to fear, I have found that if I simply do not bath but every now and then, you stop worrying about the hairgrease because you have your own little layer of filth to protect you from the outside world of other peoples filth. It really is a much easier and more cost effective alternative to cleaning that we should look at in the US.

3.) I wont go into details, but I can check off "getting intestinal parisites" from my list of things to do in life.

Till next time

Bogota and Medellin

2008-03-15T08:54:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to throw this post up real quick in case anyone is getting a late start checking the site on a Saturday morning. After leaving Quito and flying through Panama to Bogota, we arrived Thursday into Bogota about noon. After that we took a 3 oclock bus from Bogota to Medellin (the capital of Pablo Escobars coca empire up until 1994) that was supposed to get there 1 AM Friday morning, but due to landslide we didnt get in until 12 oclock last night (hence no posting). Will reveal all the details and more later today so stay tuned!

M3

Chachapoyas... Chachapoyas... QUITO! 44 1/2 hours

2008-03-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday March 7th-9th 2008 Chachapoyas to Quito

Monday- Wednesday March 10th-12 Quito

Did you know your weight is less on the Equator? So a ticket to Ecuador might be a cheaper alternative to Jenny Craig!

This is a dead mature adult specimen of the Candiru fish, native to the Ecuadorian Amazon. When younger it is known to swim into the urethra of humans while in the water, then extending sharp spines into urethral walls, whereby surgical removal is the only possible remedy.

We spent the night in Chachapoyas in a hotel named Las Orquidias, or the Orchids, suitably named after seeing one of the most varied and colorful display of Orchids in Kuelap that morning. Tired, sore, and road ragged, we decided to stop in Chachapoyas for the night (Thursday). We would thus begin our journey the next morning, possibly finding a bus to Jaen, the first stop we would need to make to get back to home sweet Ecuador. Rising to the familiar small town sound of roosters Friday morning, we dropped by the hostel office and talked to the friendly, yet freakishly tall 6 foot Peruvian owner about the best way to go about making our way north to Ecuador from Chachapoyas that day. To our surprise and luck, this burly bald yet amiable local had done the exact same trek into Ecuador through the least used border crossing of Peru. He proceeded to pull out a dry erase board a draw out a map with destinations, times, and prices to reach Ecuador, this was in fact the first dry erase board I had seen in south america, ever. See picture below.

"How to get to Ecuador from Peru" by: friendly hostel owner

Unfortunately, the first thing he explained to us was that it was going to be impossible to leave that day, Impossible? Nothing is ever impossible in South America? But he was right because as he explained, the only road out of town to the north was closed each and every day from 6 in the morning until 10 at night for road construction! It had been like this for a year, and was scheduled to be like this for a year more... So our only option was to leave either late in the evening arriving into noteworthy dangerous Jaen in the middle of the night, or to get up before the sun rose. We elected for the safer morning route, and thus spent a whole day blogging, studying, eating, and generally resting for the first time since we left Lima a week prior. Chachapoyas, named for the same civilization that had lived in the Kuelap fortress, is a delightful city of probably 20,000 people with a temperate climate and seas of steep green hills that hem in a weathered mix of colonial and utilitarian architecture. One of the tourists who had picked us up from hitch hiking (after our car broke down) the day prior was a construction worker from Spain. If you think it is cheaper traveling on the dollar down here, imagine the Euro! We had a beer with him that evening, and realized it was the first time we had meet another gringo really since leaving Lima, and I would be lying if I didn't say it was tad bit refreshing.

After a full day of recuperating in Chachapoyas, and a pisco sour at a local establishment playing five bad 1980's music videos on repeat, we decided to call it a night. Waking up the next morning at 3:30 AM in complete darkness due to a city wide power outage, we loaded our packs and headed downstairs to catch a previously arranged 4:00 car ride to the town of Bagua Grande 3 hours away. Now the way that most of the long car rides work around here is that there is a fixed price (in this case 25 soles 8 USD per person) and the more people a driver can pack into a car, the more money he makes. Stewart and I, and another person from our hotel made 3, but that wasn't enough for this enterprising driver. So after we were loaded the car, he goes down the local taxi cab hang out, and picks up the drunkest (it is now 3:45 AM), dirtiest, foulest smelling excuse for a man that he can find, and throws him in the back next to me. For two hours we rode through bumpy dirt roads in the dark early morning hours along a road that was under construction. The construction, as I now came to understand, was because they had carved the road into the side of a mountain, but they had not removed all the rock and dirt that still hung over our heads as we barreled down the hill. All the while the people in the cab remained in a semi comatose sleep deprived state, apart from the odorous man next to me slurring out drunken obscenities at Stewart and I because we were not up to date with all of Peruvian current events. What does this man do for a living you might wonder? He was a surgeon... At least now I know where rock bottom lies if I ever get there in my future career endeavors.

6:00 AM we arrive in Pedro Ruiz still in darkness and change cabs for the remaining hour to Bagua Grande, happily loosing our overserved comrade. From here I will list out the times and places visited on our trek north with interesting tidbits:

7:00 AM Arrive in Bagua Grande, catch cab to transfer station for busses to Jaen.
8:00 AM Depart in packed car for Jaen, rolling through rice paddies, hotter temperatures, and rice paddies.
9:00 AM Arrive in Jaen, city of 100,000 and considered dangerous at night. Catch motorcycle taxi to place where cars leave for San Ignacio. Eat cup of red Jello from child street vendor for breakfast.
9:30 AM Depart Jaen for San Ignacio in car packed with people, still not having seen pavement since we left Trujillo the previous Sunday.
12:30PM Arrive in San Ignacio, getting hotter and thicker on our way down from altitude. Take another motor taxi to where cars leave for Las Balsas (different from Las Balsas crossed between Celendin and Leymebamba).
12:45PM Leave San Ignacio in shoddy car for Las Balsas down muddy horrible excuse for a road.
1:00PM Blow out tire on horrible muddy excuse for a road, Stewart and I get out and change tire with driver
3:00PM Arrive Las Balsas, now almost 12 hours after leaving Chachapoyas. This is the littlest used border crossing between all of Peru and Ecuador.

We arrived into Las Balsas, named so because of the balsa wood boats that were used to cross the river before they built a bridge. Rolling into this "international crossing" At once I knew we were in the hinterland, or boonies, yet again, for I could count the buildings on each side of the river with two hands. The most remarkable, and typical South American randomness about the border crossing itself, was that the horrible, single lane dirt road that lead up to the crossing was followed by a state of the art enormous bridge capable of supporting many many tons more that either dirt road was capable of doing. Painted no cross yellow lines, with white side markers and reflective flashers on perfect asphalt for 50 meters only highlighted the irony. There were no guards on either side, people walked freely back and forth, and long bamboo poles served as the only gate.

The town of Las Balsas, wooden slatted truck in background

We walked into the Peruvian customs office/shack to get our passports stamped, and the customs officer dressed in a soccer jersey and umbros said they get about 30 to 40 people to cross the border each day, very few of whom are backpacking gringos.

Closed Ecuadorian customs office

Now finally reaching Ecuador, we crossed the bridge and walked up to the customs office only to be greeted by a closed sign and giant steel drop down doors. WHAT? The border closed? How could an international border crossing be closed at 3:30 in the afternoon? It didn't take long to figure out what was going on, because as we rounded the corner to the only store/restaurant in this one road town, there were all 6 employees of the customs office drinking beer. They told us that the customs office was closed on account of their need to drink beer at 3:30 in the afternoon while on the job, and to go back to Peru and come back in an hour. So Stewart and I went back to Peru, ate some lunch at the only place on this side of town, watched some direct TV in a restaurant with only 2 walls and dirt floor (S.A. randomness), and went back to Ecuador, where we ourselves stopped by at the cafe where the customs officers had been and got a beer. Stewart and I, beer in hand, walked over the customs office and got our passports stamped by another soccer jersey, umbro sporting customs official.

Chillaxin in Las Balsas, drinking a beer and waiting for the customs officials to open the office.

At 5:30 PM we caught the only means of transportation out of town: an open air, wooden slatted seated, 30 year old bus with what had to of been solid metal pipes for a suspension system. For 2 and half hours we climbed back out of the canyon along yet another horrible road. This time due a rigid suspension and rutted excuse for a road; Stewart, I, and our bags spent half the time in our seats and half the time shooting up or falling down in the immediate foot above said seats.

8:00PM Arrive in Zumbes, Ecuador. We ate dinner, watched part of Waterworld (best movie ever) in Spanish, flirted with local 5th year medical student at internet cafe.
10:45PM Leave from Zumbes, Ecuador for Loja, Ecuador along yet another really junky dirt road (no sleeping).
5:45AM Arrive in Loja, eat breakfast at all night diner, and buy ticket for Quito at 8:00AM. Now having passed the 24 hour traveling mark
8:00AM Leave from Loja and begin what was supposed to be a 14 hour bus ride to Quito.
10:45 AM Get the bus stuck, more like buried, in a pile of soft mud left over from a recent landside. Have to call bulldozer to come pull bus out of mud.

Here our bus lies, I venture to say that even the infamous Sewanee Fire Department in all of their machismo power could not pull this one out.

11:30AM After blocking up the only road north from Loja; we are back on the road.
2:00PM Pass Cuenca, Ecuador, 3rd largest city in Ecuador; see asphalt for the first time in over one week. Glorious, Glorious asphalt, oh how I love you.
3:30PM Blow out tire, stop thirty minutes to replace.
5:00PM We are the first vehicle to arrive on the scene of a small rockslide. Between us and the other side are several giant 6' wide 3' tall boulders. It is now getting dark, and raining (this is why I don't have any pictures) and the unfallen rock still hangs unnaturally on the ledge over our heads. The 20 or so Ecuadorian men on our bus, Stewart, and I spend one hour pushing this boulder 2 feet so that the bus can fit through between another boulder. By now there is a line of cars a mile long behind us, and the unfallen rocks stay unfallen.
6:30PM Back on the road
12:30AM Arrive in Quito!!! 44 1/2 hours after we began traveling. Eat Shwarma at Indian food place. Go to bed!

The "real equator"

This is where I have spent the past three days: catching up with friends, doing the things I forgot to do while I was here, taking a break from the road, and planning our next leg, Colombia! One of the things I never did was go to the Equator, or Mitad del Mundo, which you can see the pictures of down below. The giant monument was built by the Ecuadorian government to mark the spot where a French cartographer calculated the Equator to be in the late 18th century based upon star measurements and the like. When the GPS network was defogged in the mid 1990s, they proved the actual Equator to be 30 feet or so north of the French measurement, still pretty damn impressive if you ask me.

Giant Monument built by the Ecuadorian government, but 30' off of the actual equator.

We leave for Colombia tomorrow by plane at 7:00 AM, which is the only flight we are going to take in our journey. The plane ticket was bought two weeks ago when it looked like Colombia and Ecuador were going to go to war, and we had fears of kidnapping/hijacking and the like on the road. They are no longer going to be going to war. From Bogota we are catching a bus tomorrow to Medellin, once the capital of Pablo Escobar's cocaine empire, now one of the safest cities in Colombia.

Twelve easy steps to removing the head of your enemies and shrinking it to a size no bigger than a tennis ball to wear around your neck.

Chao,

Kuelap!

2008-03-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

Thursday March 6th, 2008

Waking up at 5:45 AM in our hostel high above the valley floor, we strapped on our packs and headed out into the darkness on the only road out of Maria, which would take us up to the Kuelap ruins. All the people in town assured us it was only an hour hike up the road to the Kuelap.

So we assumed 2.

It took 2 and half.

I yearn for the day I can expect an honest answer out of someone. I understand optimism, but this optimism borders on the destructive... Despite this, the hike was one of the highlights of the trip so far. As we set out from Maria I initially groaned under the weight of my 45 pound pack, but after 15 minutes of adjustment I fell into a rhythm becoming one with pack like I had countless times in boy scouts as kid. In the early morning light we trodded up the road, passing small homes with clay tiled roofs, the smoke from breakfast billowing through the cracks. From these houses no larger than my kitchen, families of 5 or 6 lived. The father, most likely a farmer, had already loaded up his donkey and headed to the fields to farm and plow a 20% grade by hand. The sun rose over the farms and casted a clear line of orange along the higher mountains to our back, while we still hiked in silence and in shadow. Clouds hung a thousand feet below flowing through the assorted valleys like a river in pause, and the air was moist with evaporating dew. For anyone who is an early riser, you know this morning smell, when the water that has sat along the edges of leaves or on blades of grass, and absorbed all the oils and smells throughout the night, now rises into the air with the heat of the sun and brings with it a deluge of aroma, a unparalleled freshness.

2 and half hours later we arrived at the entrance to Kuelap, greeted by a pack of Llamas, the first I had actually seen in Ecuador or Peru, it might have actually been the first time I had seen a Llama up close in my life. Llamas are funny looking creatures of long shaggy fur, and a thick neck, twice as high and long as the stout legs they stand on. They greeted us where the road to Kuelap stopped and the dirt path began. By this time Stewart and I had hiked 4-5 miles, and climbed several hundred feet, topping out at about 10,000 feet of altitude. Although it was still cool in the morning air, we had broken a nice sweat and were more than eager to reach the top.

Notice road behind Stewart that was taken out by landslide. This is the same road that led to bottom of where we would hike.

The Kuelap ruins were pre-Incan ruins, meaning that they were built by people before the height of Incan Empire of the 1400s, who are most famous for the ruins of Machu Pichu further to the south. The people who built Kuelap were known as Chachapoyas, a name derived from Sacha Poya, which means Cloud people in Quechua, the language of the Incans. The Chachapoyas civilization lasted from 800 AD until the 1470s when they were sacked by the Incans, and then killed off by Spanish disease in the 1500s. The massive city fortress of Kuelap was constructed on top of a mountain, and would have been the capital of the empire, supposedly with more stone than it took to build the pyramids of Egypt. It was "discovered" by Peruvians in the middle 1800s but remained largely untouched or excavated for over a hundred years. Its significance, size, and integrity have really only become known to the international community in the last 20 years, and still it is relatively unvisited.

The base of the fortress is wrapped by stone walls 30-60 feet high, 1300 feet long and about 300-400 feet wide. It has been able to withstand the numerous earthquakes over the last millennia because the design of the outer walls and most of the inner structure is all in waves. Thereby the earthquakes simply pass along the fortress in sine waves approximately that of the structure. All of the shrubs have been removed from the outer walls so you get a clear idea of how large it is.

Stewart and I roll up on the scene and walk right up to these ancient walls, still not having seen a single person having to do with this place. We walk around just trying to take in the sheer size of the place for about 10 minutes, still the only people here. Then we spot a man carrying water down the hill, and it turns out that this is the guy in charge of the place. He leads us into a tiny wooden hut which is the "ticket office" and we each pay a student fare of about 1.50 USD to see the place. As we sign in to the logbook, we look down and see that we were the first people there for the day, and yesterday... they had two visitors. The day before that when the road was open? 8 visitors. They said that they usually don’t have any more than 15 visitors a day! Here we have ruins just as impressive as Machu Picchu and they only have 15 people as day! We inquired about a guide, and he said he could call one. Sounds great as we walk outside back out to the hillside beneath the behemoth of Kuelap and all of a sudden the man starts yelling "Riccaaaaaaaardo, Riccaaaaaaaardo, Riccaaaaaaardo" across the valley. This is what he meant by "calling" a guide. Sure enough in a tiny hut a mile across the valley, a small Peruvian man came out and waved his arms. The ticket office man informed us that we would have a guide in 15 minutes and went back to carrying water.

Our Guide Ricardo

For three hours Stewart and I strolled around the ruins with our guide Riccaaaaardo, who as it turns out, had lived beneath the Kuelap ruins his whole life in that small house. For three hours we toured this massive city on a mountain, a thousand years old with a guide who had lived there his whole life, completely by ourselves. I mean there was not a single other visitor, tourist, or worker, just us and this hands on tour. By far, the most impressive feature of this place was that it was really only explored 20 years ago, and so unlike Macchu Pichu where turn of the century archeologists cleared and excavated every square inch, this place remains largely untouched. As we climbed beyond the outer walls through one of three entrances, we arrived to first of 4 levels and I could have sworn I was on the film set of an Indiana Jones movie. Hundred year old trees grew up from the ruins between the circular houses and created a canopy of shade where llamas, parrots, and other creatures thrived. Every tree branch, trunk, or twig was covered with some unique colorful type of orchid, and small plants and moss grew out of the stone work. This place was truly as the first people found it.

Passageways to all stairways between levels were only wide enough for one person, so that in the event of attack, the attackers would be forced into single file line, easier to decimate.

Designs on the rockfaces were often symbols of a family and you would find this on all the products they used

After Kuelap, we foolishly decided to hike down the 10km 4,300 foot trail to save 15 soles (5 dollars) Hey its downhill, it’s going to be easy right? Wrong. With a 40 pound pack on back, Stewart and I hiked down what has got to be the steepest, rockiest, and muddiest trail I have been on in recent memory. Three hours, two hurting feet, two trembling quads, and two cramped calfs later, we were on the bottom at Tingo, where we started the same time the day before. After an hour waiting in Tingo, we hitched a ride in the back of a throwback station wagon. So what could happen now? Stewart, I, and packs sqeezed into the trunk of the 1997 Toyota Corolla with no room to move, and then… my quads start cramping like a fat kid running the mile in high school. Then a bump sends my head flying into a screw in the ceiling. It continued like this: head between knees to keep from hitting ceiling, bottom numb from potholes in road, and massaging quads constantly to keep from cramping. Stewart commented on how it must have felt to be a slave crossing the Atlantic from Africa, I concurred.

It continued like this for an hour and half, until... the radiator decided to quit and the car overheated. So we paid the driver his 2 bucks, grabbed our bags, and stuck out our thumbs, actually somewhat relieved to be out of the car. 30 minutes later a mini bus came by with 5 or 6 tourists on their way to Chachapoyas. Where had the tourists come from? Kuelap. They had arrived just as we left and we made our way down the hill. At this moment I was a little envious of tour groups with their personal bus. They got up two hours after we did, saw all of Kuelap in relative seclusion, and had their bus take them back to their cozy hotel all without pain or discomfort. However it is the pain that makes the summit that much sweeter, and the journey that much more memorable, so I am glad we did what we did even if we didn’t save the time.

Arriving into Chachapoyas at 5 or 6, a few pisco sours, and time for bed.

Leymebamba to Tingo to Maria

2008-03-10T08:52:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, March 4th 2008

Still reeling from the 6 hour trip up and down the mountain in the dark, in the rain, on a junky road, in a junky car, with a 16 year old behind the wheel; we awoke to the small peaceful town of Leymebamaba. This town, like others we had come through in the last two days, rarely sees visitors over 6 feet with sunburned faces, white socks, and blond hair, and so I was the subject of many, many stares and glances. Apparently it is rude to point here so as not to single anyone out, but it is not rude to stare at gringos. Several times Stewart and I have walked into a restaurant to sit down and have every single person at every single table staring straight at us. No hiding glances, or discrete one at a time looks, NO, every person stops whatever they were doing, stops talking at their table of 8, stops eating and drinking, and just stares at you. You think you are ready for it, but wait until the day you are singled out like that, however I have good news: eventually this too can be grown accustomed to. I returned the favor and walked around town that morning getting some images of the people who live here, what they do, and who they are.

Leymebamba is a town of about 2-3,000 people with a usual gorgeous town square, lively friendly townsfolk, small one lane streets spreading out for 4 blocks from the Plaza, and crumbling yet loved 2 to 3 storied buildings of semi-colonial facade. Outside of town for 2-3 miles are small farms dotted with the occasional shack that passes for a house. Making up for the meager living arrangements of the majority of the inhabitants are gorgeous views of rolling fertile green hills as far as you can see. Flora was lush, wet, and green again after we crossed the 10,000 foot pass between Las Balsas and here. It was increasingly feeling like a jungle as we moved east away from the Andes and towards the massive rainforests hundreds of miles away surrounding the Amazon. Leymebamaba became semi-famous in 1997 when they discovered 3 perfectly preserved mummified pre-Incan bodies on the cliff above a lake about a 12 hour hike outside of town. Even with all this notoriety, we were the only tourists there on this particular day.

As much as we were encouraged to hike up to the ruins, mummies, and museum, we had tunnel vision towards the ruins of Kuelap, the town of Chachapoyas, the Ecuadorian border, and Quito. The last two days had taught us that the longer you wait to get where you are going, the higher the likely hood was that you would never get there. This is not true if you travel between the larger cities with planned bus fare and decent road, but we were in the sticks, the boonies, nowhere Peru, where the roads were a step below fire roads, and our transportation consisted of farm trucks and people with empty seats in their car.

So after haggling with a local driver, we procured a ride from Leymebamba down the valley to the town of Tingo, about 1 and 1/2 hours away (he said), for 7 dollars a piece. 2 and 1/2 hours, 3,000 potholes, 1 inch of mud and dirt, and 2 worn bottoms later, we arrived in Tingo. Fortunately this road followed a river down a valley and was surrounded by blanketing jungle; there were no 2,000 foot drops on either side of us, and so I really didn’t care about the other problems. Rounding the bend into Tingo, I noticed a village up on top of a hill about 100 meters above the river and another village. This, the driver kindly explained to me, was Nuevo Tingo, and Viejo Tingo, or New and Old Tingo. Here again we have an example of what the cataclysmical rain of El Nino in 1990´s did to Peru. The entire old town was completely flooded for weeks at a time, forcing the people who lived there and subsisted off the land to build a "new town"

When we asked were Kuelap was when we arrived into Tingo, everyone pointed to a trail that said 10 Km and a mountain that was 1,300 meters (4, 300 feet) higher from where we stood. Originally we were going to stay in Tingo and hike (with packs) up to Kuelap, but now staring at what would have been a long, long hike up for me with 45 pounds on my back, we decided on alternate means of ascension. Sure enough not less than 5 minutes after we arrived, we were able to flag down a water truck going up to Maria. Maria was about a 2 hour hike away from Kuelap, but only 900 feet or so below the summit. So this is how we got halfway up the mountain until... A landslide. As I have said earlier it was the rainy season here in Peru, and despite it being like this for a third of the year, EVERY year, the Peruvians haven’t figured anything better than just waiting for one to happen and then trying to fix it. The driver let us off, where we were able to scramble over rocks and dirt taking care not to slip and slide the rest of the 1,000 feet down to the bottom. On the other side, we snagged a car up to Maria, again just by nightfall.

Maria, a town of 500, is perched at the top of the valley and with only one road in and out, we were the only visitors in town that night (the others not willing/able to scramble over the landslide). Again more stares from the townsfolk, but I was getting used to it by this point. As sun set everyone in town loitered along the main road to catch up with a farmers as they came in from the fields to close the day’s work. The closeness of a small town is the same in Peru as it is the States and elsewhere, something that bridges cultures. When the town was built, they must have seen what happens when you try to build a flat road in landslide territory, so the entire town is sloped about 10-20 degrees, even the town plaza.

Our Hospedaje

After dinner, Stewart and I went and played with the kids in the town square, who were gathering giant beetles off of all the bushes and putting them together in a giant pile where they would fight each other. It took a while to absorb the cultural differences and similarities between kids here playing with beetles and kids in the US playing... video games? maybe. The interbeetle skirmish was all fun and games until one of the kids got the great idea to start throwing the beetles at us. Yes, you can hurl a 4 inch wide beetle through the air and it will stick and grab to your shirt. My initial reaction of surprise and fear of a giant beetle only inches from my face encouraged more kids to throw beetles at us. IT WAS WAR. A beetle hurling fight ensued for about 5 minutes until the beetles were gone.

Celendin to Las Balsas to Leymebamba...

2008-03-07T12:51:00.000-08:00

Tuesday March 4th, 2008

Awaking in Celendin at the Hostel Reymi Wasi, we peered out of our window knowing that the next leg of journey would be a true venture into the sticks of Peru, as the few who had travelled this way had written. There were busses that ventured towards Leymebamba and Kuelap on Thursday and Sunday, and we had arrived into Celendin on a Monday with no intention of waiting here in this two horse town. So before breakfast or even brushing teeth, we loaded up our packs and headed to the one roundabout in town where anything and everything that came into or out of Celendin stopped. It was here that we learned that a few trucks sometimes stopped here in the morning on their way towards Leymebamba (a stop along the way to Chachapoyas and our objective of the Kuelap ruins that is about as far as you can get in a day).

Stewart and I spent about two hours asking every single truck that rolled into town where it was headed. With no luck, the sun rising higher in the sky, and an increasing sense of disillusionment, it looked like we might be there another day. And then... a 12 foot tall, wooden slatted, 20 year old farm truck rolled into town on its way to Las Balsas. Our map showed that Las Balsas was a city on the way to Leymebamba, and we said: We’ll take it. For 5 soles (1.50 USD) a 5 hour ride, we climbed up the metal ladder on the side of this giant onto a perch on the front of the bed. There with about 5 other Peruvians we held on for dear life as the truck rambled on down the road. I was holding onto the 3 inch wide bamboo pole running the length of the bed supporting a thick tarp, and Stewart was sitting on top of it. Looking down into the dark recesses of the truck bed, we realized that we were not the primary passengers on this journey, but more important was a 3000 pound pregnant cow... with Horns!

Celendin as we climbed out of the canyon

Guy from Celendin who rode on top of farm truck with us to Balsas, he was 21 and studying to be a police officer. Here he was telling a story.

The sharp lines carved out of the mountain and through the road are ruts scarred into mountain by weekly torrential downpours that often put this road out of service.

Climbing out of Celendin it quickly got cold, as we crossed the first of two mountain passes within the hour, and we were sitting on top in the wind and rain. The pass brought us to 3,200 meters, high in the clouds without much to see, but as we cleared it and started our way down the clouds dissipated revealing a truly massive expanse of space. The cow got off about an hour after we cleared the pass, so we could stop worrying about out bags down below getting stepped on!

Foaming at the mouth with the distended abdomen of a pregnant cow, it was just us and her for 3 hours on the back of this truck, mono a mommy.

Notice nice fall off to left...

For the next 3 hours we descended from our briefly held perch down into the valley, and it passed like 30 minutes, because this was some of the most amazing scenery I had ever seen. Sitting on top of the truck, we truly had a 360 degree view of everything that we passed around us. We were looking at giant valleys that might be 10 miles wide and slowly rising up and up to the mountains forming them. It was like someone had a giant ice cream scoop and carved giant swaths between the mountain ranges. Shorter spires of rock rose all around us, some 1,000 to 1,500 feet high, and all along their side you could make out the now vertical twisting layers of time. The road was rough, but just as rough as the one we took from Cajamarca to Celendin, however this road often had 2,000 foot drops next to it as it was notched into the side of the stone, which made it interesting from top of the truck. Stewart and I figured that if the truck started to roll off the side of the mountain, we would have time to jump from the top to avoiding rolling with the truck down the hill.

Notice nice fall to the left, no trees to catch you like they did for the girls driving up 41 last year...

The valley finally widened out some, this gives you an idea of how they just built a road where there should be no road.

The further we came down, the hotter and drier the air became that rushed against our faces, and the land around us began to change in time. We had descended from a semi lush alpine valley into a dry, red, and sparse desert. Cactuses spired next to the green remnants of vegetation from above, and the hills around us were now brown and dusty. At the bottom of this savage scene we saw the river Maranon and the small town of new Las Balsas and old Las Balsas.

Theme from the bottom: down at the bottom of this canyon we had descened again from lush cloud forests to desert heat and rivers. The town of Las Balsas is actually a reference to the boats they used to use to cross the river, made out of? Balsa wood.

Interesting Side Note: Many of the river towns in the Andes along Ecuador, Peru, and Chile have a “new town” and an “Old” town. The new town is almost always perched on a hill several hundred feet higher than the old town, which is usually right on the river. When El Nino was at its peek in the early to mid nineties, it caused massive flooding of most of the major rivers in the Andes on a scale never ever recorded. So all of the towns were forced to relocate to higher ground, but they still use their old town now, so they all have two ¨towns¨

If Celendin was a two horse town, Las Balsas is a no horse town. Total population under 200, it was here where the bus let us off. We were assured by the driver that cars came all the time, and it would be no time before one came along to pick us up to go to Leymebamba. This was at 12 o’clock. So there at the bottom of a desert canyon in a dry and dusty town, where the only visible means of employment was to sell fruit to passing tour busses, we waited. We walked to the corner store (or just the store because there was only one store) and bought a cola, and we waited. We talked to two basuco or pasta (cocaine sulphate) addicts who were waiting too, and we waited. We chewed some coca leaves, and we waited. With an hour of sunlight and faced with the reality of spending a night in this outpost of humanity, Stewart and I ponyed up the 200 Soles (65 USD) and found the one man in town with a car for hire to take us up over the mountain and down into the more populated Leymebamba.

View from the road climbing out of Las Blasas, the mountain we were climing was not that different from the ones you see.

Let me just say first that we had no idea what we were getting into, for the dangerous part that often shuts this road down in the rainy season was the part we were fixing to climb. Leaving Las Balsas in another one of these 1990´s throwback sedans with not more than a foot of ground clearance, and more give in the power steering than a friend of mines Jeep Grand Cherokee I wrecked graduation morning (another story...). Coming out of Las Balsas for extra cash we picked up a man who needed to go to the doctor (broken jaw), and a father and his daughter, both needing a ride. The first hour of the journey was absolutely spectacular with views trumping those over the entire trip, and the warm orange glow of the setting sun drawing retreating lines of light on the mountains.

And then... the sun set... It is one thing to be on a junky ill kept road in the middle of nowhere Peru, when the edge of literally thousands of feet is 2 feet away, in the daylight. But at night, suddenly the vast emptiness of black that occupies the entirety of your window becomes something more. The black represents you careening around a curve and over the edge, it represents the car blowing a tire and the driver loosing control to go off the edge, it represents an unseen rock hitting the tire and sending the car flying to edge. One thing I forgot to mention: our driver was the 16 year old son of the owner asleep in the back. As if the darkness was not enough, as we approached the top it began to get wetter and wetter (the town at the pass is actually called the ¨city of black mud¨). As if the darkness, rain, and mud were not enough: then a thick soupy fog enveloped the car, as thick as the thickest one I have ever seen at Sewanee. Oh yeah, and mudslides every half mile would force the car to drive over giant piles of dirt at a severe angle towards the abyss on our right.

So let me retrace: Stewart and I with 4 strangers in a junky old car headed up the side of a mountain, at night, in the fog, in the rain, with mudslides every half mile, several thousands of feet to fall on our right, along a narrow road, with a 16 year old driver. (I found out later that 16 year olds are actually not allowed to drive here).

In honest sincerity Stewart and I had our doors unlocked, seatbelts off, and hand on the door handles the entire time. For 3 hours we sat like this, on the edge of our seats, completely ready for our world to end. Our fears were confirmed when we crested the mountain and headed down the other side out of the fog, and our driver gives out a big sigh and says: Its a good thing we have passed the most dangerous part, right! This, this from a person that lives on this road, in a culture where they tend not to value their own lives as much. You rarely here a Peruvian call something dangerous, so we were both relieved we were not the only ones scared, and at the same time terrified that he had been scared as well!

Sleep came easy in Leymebama that night after a 4 hour adrenaline binge.

Blog Point:
1.) If a South American tells you to wait 10 minutes, assume he means one hour. If he tells you that the hike will take 1 hour, assume he means 2. If he tells you the bus ride will take 4, it will most likely take 5. If he tells you that it will be un ratito (a little bit) it could take all day.

Cajamarca to Celendin

2008-03-07T09:01:00.000-08:00

Monday March 2nd 2008

Cajamarca is a town of about 100,000 people set on the western edge of the Andes. After a little difficulty finding our way around town, we wound up at the Hostel Prado. Upon arrival we wound our way from the bottom to our fourth floor room, through stairs that were located at a different spot on each floor, with only small signs directing you through twisting hallways. It was here that I finally understood how conscious people died in building fires, and I thanked god for American building codes. The shared bathroom had a door more akin to a horse stall, and the sink was a glorified eating trough, but it was totally worth the 4 bucks a piece we spent here.

Children Playing in Cajamarca

The next morning we woke up and checked out a local treat, Los Banos del Inca, roughly translated the baths of the Inca people. The Andes, with their wealth of active volcanoes and plethora of rain, probably boast some of the best hot springs in the world. About 5 km outside of Cajamarca, we hopped a combis or shared minivan to the springs, where for 7 dollars we got hot showers, hot tub time, a walk on hot rocks designed to massage your feet, a weird multi headed shower, and a back massage.

View from hotsprings, the steam you see is coming off of pools of 70-76 celsius water straight out of the mountain

With that over by lunch, we turned back to our original mission: Crossing the Andes to make it to the pre-Incan ruins at Kuelap. The first trip we had to make was to Celendin, about 5 hours away and further up in the mountains. This was supposed to be the easy part of the journey along this route, but easy is a relative term. Instead of taking one of the tour buses that leave for Celendin 4 times a day, we opted to try and save 3 to 4 dollars and catch a ride in a shared car. We went to the ¨bus stop¨ for Celendin, which was really nothing more than a curb on the side of the road and a bunch of people sitting there. The only way we knew we were in the right spot was by asking people if this is where cars for Celendin left. So we waited, and waited, and waited some more. There were 15-20 or so people sitting around waiting for something going to Celendin to stop, and then suddenly a car stopped up ahead, and the driver leaned out and yelled ¨CELENDIN¨ This a perfect example of how in South America they don’t believe in lines or colas . Because as the driver spat the words out, it was a mad dash of old men, children, women, burlap sacks, fruit, and the occasional chicken or other small animal towards this car. Stewart and I made it to the car in time to claim a seat in this early 1990s throwback of a small station wagon. The more people the driver could fit in the car, the more money he made, and so the middle of this tiny car is often 4 or 5 deep. I snagged the front seat, but Stewart was not quite as lucky, and had to sit in the trunk with the entire luggage. I couldn’t count them all, but I think that there were 5 Peruvians in the middle seat, one of which was a small girl about 6 who would give me a dirty look every time I turned around.

Climbing out of Cajamarca at 2 or 3 that afternoon, it was smooth sailing. The paved road gently climbed out of the valley and into the range beyond. Happy and content, Ipod playing to drown out the horrible music the driver was blasting (see comment below), we were clams in a clamshell. It continued like this for the first hour, and then... the pavement stopped... and the dirt began. The driver looked over at me and smiled just before we nailed a huge pot hole that sent me and my sunburned head flying into the ceiling. This would be the last stretch of pavement that we would see for the next 3 days and 15-17 hours on the road. The dirt road continued like this for the next 4 hours until we reached Celendin. If the pot holes weren’t enough, the driver was swerving from one side of this two lane wide dirt road to the other, nearly constantly, to try and avoid the pot holes. The problem was he was really bad at it.

The one solace of this trip was that we were rolling through some of the most gorgeous countryside I had seen to date. High up in the Sierran landscape, we wound through rolling hills (we would call them mountains in Alabama, but here they are just hills) covered in green and farmed from top to bottom. One advantage to still using Ox and people to plough your fields is that you can farm just about anything; we saw rows of corn on 20 to 35 degree slopes!

The final fall down into Celendin was literally along the side of a mountain on this skinny one lane path and through two adjoining cities; the road that hugged the side of the cliff was so skinny that when we ran into oncoming cars, we would have to back up 300 to 400 meters to find a spot wide enough without sliding off the edge of the cliff and down 2000 feet. This was all because the main road into Celendin had been taken out by a landslide the day before, as would become a reoccurring theme on our journey.

Getting into Celendin at nightfall in the pouring rain was also an interesting experience. After checking in with the local police and getting one of their officers to show us around town (it was a small town less than 10,ooo so it didn’t take that long), we found a hostel three blocks up from the Plaza de Armas.

Entering the Hostel Reymi Wasi, we were escorted back to our room, and along the way we passed what looked like a miniature bull fighting stadium buried and set 10 feet down from floor level, about 30 feet wide. What was it? It was a cock fighting ring! Apparently every Sunday this entire hotel is packed out as the townsfolk all bet on their weekly cock fights. We were both kind of sad we missed what would have been a true cultural immersion.

Cock fighting ring in our Hostal

Blog Point:

1.) After months spent in South America, I still find myself unable to appreciate the music. It is a mix of nasal singing, pop progressions boiled down to about 4 different variations, lack of imagination in instrumentation, and lyrics that rarely veer away from 20 or so different common rhymes. Thank god for Steve Jobs and the Ipod.

Trujillo to Cajamarca

2008-03-06T18:17:00.000-08:00

Thursday March 6th 2007, Chachapoyas, Peru

We made it! Stewart and I successfully made it over the course of the past three days from Trujillo to Cajamarca, Celendin, Leymebama, Maria, Kuelap, and now we have bedded down for the night in Chachapoyas Peru. It has been a long, fun, hot, sunburn, tired, and scenic four days and I dont even know where to begin, as this is the first time I have found internet since I left Cajamarca on Monday.

I think I am going to go back and post my journal entry for the bus ride from Trujillo to Cajamarca on Sunday:

11:30 a.m. March 2nd 2008

Despite having a wealth of Pre-Inca culture in Trujillo, and a few sights nearby, Stewart and I knew we had to move on if we hoped to make it over the Andes in time and into Peru for our flight on the 13th out of Quito (will explain later). So, we bought tickets Sunday morning for a bus to Cajamarca leaving at 11:30am that morning, the same morning we arrived at 6:00 am from Lima.

Nonetheless, Trujillo was an incredibly neat town for about 5 hours, and the colourful colonial coastal architecture we found here was like no other. (see earlier blog, pictures to come as soon as I find a fast internet connection next Tuesday in Quito)

When you think of Peru, you think of the Inca race, jungles, Alpacas, and maybe the rainforests, but to generalize it in this way is to call California just a land of sunny beaches, suburban sprawl, and L.A. smog. We found this out for ourselves as we left Trujillo. We had come into the city at night, so we didn’t realize that in addition to being a coastal town, Trujillo was firmly planted in the middle of the driest desert this side of the Sahara. If it were not for the poverty and the Hispanic culture of the people we passed, we could have just as easily been in southern New Mexico. The mountains in the distance of this vast sea of sand actually reminded me of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico.

Stretching out for an eternity, after two hours of driving from Trujillo we finally began to climb into the sandy hills we had seen in the distance. The brown bushes that dotted the landscape and rushed past my window gradually began to gain color. The valley narrowed and from the bottom a flood plain of green grew around the river we were following up into the hills. It now blanketed the valley floor and inched up the sides of the hills.

About halfway along the trip, the river we had been following inland from the desert emerged from the bottom of a giant hydraulic dam. The dam formed the base of a semi-alpine desert lake that expanded across the hills bridging the gap of miles of land. This lake set against the backdrop of still rocky and barren hills was about as out of place as the two gringos travelling inland into northern Peru.

The lake gave way to the river feeding it and the green grew back around the floor of the valley, and now the hills too were covered with a thin green flora. From a distance the green was the same green of any plant life you could find at home, but up close the bushes and trees were not exactly the same ones you knew and had grown up with; they are slightly foreign and out of place.

Just as soon as this forest emerged from the desert, it was obscured by the afternoon rain clouds descending from above. The road continued to climb into the mountains, hugging the sides while we stared off into the foggy abyss.

The clouds cleared by the time we reached Cajamarca, just in time for us to watch a purple sunset behind the hills of this alpine outpost of a town. As the sun set, the lights were turned on throughout the city, bathing it in the orange sulphur glow characteristic of most Peruvian cities at night. Above the city, a giant statue of Jesus with open hands was lit and looked down on the people below.

Already we could feel the altitude, and at 8,000 feet, this city defined the beginning of the true Sierrian Andes. After a pizza and sangria, and a visit to the local club, we called it a night and prepared to head for Celendin on Monday.

Blog point:
1.) Only here in Peru does a pizza with pepperoni cost much more than any other pizza on the menu. Apparently it is hard to get pepperoni here!

Trujillo, Cajamarca, and Celendin!

2008-03-03T08:44:00.000-08:00

Cajamarca, Peru March 3rd 2008

Well the bus ride to Trujillo was a sucess, we left Lima about 9:00 on Saturday night aboard a bus-cama (bus-bed). I just want to go ahead and say that the South Americans know how to bus it, as this was the nicest bus I have ever been on in my entire life. The bus has two levels, and most of the passengers are on top, with our seats being in the very front of the bus, giving us a full panoramic view of the nightlife as we drove through Lima. The seats themselves are reminiscent of ¨1st Class¨ on international flights back when they had three classes, a first class, a buisness class, and a coach. Our wide leather seats reclined until you were almost horizontal (hence the name of the bus). We did however have to lower a protective screen in front of our window because the poorer neighborhoods of Lima have been known to throw rocks at the buses.

Our 20 dollar ticket got us into Trujillo, a small colonial town about 30 minutes off the coast, at 5:30 Sunday morning. We had to wait in the bus station for the sun to rise at 6:00 before it was safe to walk around Trujillo. Once we did, we meandered into town about 6 blocks from the bus station to the Plaza de Armas (a common name here for what would be the town square with courthouse in Alabama). As our ultimate goal is Chachapoyas, and Kuelep ruins buried deep in the northern Andes, we were itching to get inland to our first stop, Cajamarca. Eventually (after driving around town to 4 different bus companies) we found an 11:30 5 hour bus up into the western Andean city of Cajamarca, where we arrived last night.

Trujillo has the origins of a classical spanish town, with 2-3 story colonial archtitecture. The streets were dusted with a layer of sand and dirt, and 20 foot high trees lined some of the major walkways. You could feel the desert heat, mixed with salt from the pacific ocean as it rose with the sun. What is neat about Trujillo is that many of the older colonial buildings are painted with bright blues, oranges, and yellows that make them stand out from the other tarnished finishes. I suppose this is a tribute to the coastal origins of this 500 year old town.

Our 5 hours in Trujillo were great, beginning with the walk to the Plaza de Armas at 6 in the morning on a Sunday, with a big backpack on. I was acosted by no less than 15 taxi drivers offering rides, some twice. We actually explained to one we were just walking 5 blocks, and sure enough, 4 blocks later there he was again asking to give us a ride. I suppose there really is just not a lot going on in Trujillo at 6 in the morning on a Sunday.

We got to witness the raising of the flag at 730 in the Plaza de Armas. This was a huge spectacle, where all of the soliders posted in Cajamarca (about 500) march into the square in full regalia, and go through this long (about an hour) ceremony of pomp and grandure to the background of a drum and brass band. We were one of maybe 100 or so spectators to watch this elaborate ordeal, and we asked another guy how often they did this. Every Sunday. Can you imagine? Stewart was talking to the guy next to us who had been in Cajamarca his whole life and this was his first time to see it, and why now? He lost his cell phone the night before at a party and he was there to pick a new one up, but the store hadn´t opened yet so he figured he would hang around and watch the parade.

In the middle of the ceremony as they were walking out to bring the flag to the flagpole there was this awkward pause for about 15 minutes. 15 minutes and 500 soliders at attention with all the city officials there too! There was a podium set up for some speach the mayor was going to give. The reason for the pause? They forgot one of the flags! They have been doing this for years every Sunday and they forgot one of the flags! I will never ceased to be amazed by the nonchalance down here.

The 5 hour bus ride to Cajamarca was incredible, but I dont have time to talk about it now since we are trying to get into Celendin (5 hours away) by nightfall. This is a small town probably without internet so I wont be able to update from their either. From Celendin we are hoping to hitch a ride along the notoriously rough 14 hour 90 mile ride to Chachapoyas. The buses arent running because the rainfall at 8,000 feet up in the Andes has put this road in bad shape, and it hugs 2,000 foot cliffs at times. We are hoping to get a ride with a local truck or car that still travel on this road... It could take several days to make this journey, so if you dont hear from me this is why. Wish us luck

Merrill

Lima Pictures

2008-03-01T16:02:00.000-08:00

City of Lima, Miraflores, Pacific Ocean

Paragliders over Limas Coast

Out of Lima to Trujillo and beyond

2008-03-01T14:31:00.000-08:00

Saturday, March 1st Lima, Peru

The past two days have been spent wandering around Lima and seeing a few of the popular sites for visitors.

Yesterday morning I woke up to the sounds of birds chirping in the courtyard of our hostel, and thought, now this is a real special place that they have a garden in the courtyard that attracts song birds every morning. Then I realized that I am in the middle of downtown Lima, a city of 8 million people, not exactly the jungle or rural by any means so where did these song birds fly in from. I walked outside to realize that they had caged several song birds and an owl to sing to the guests every morning as the woke up. Definitely different than the USA...

After seeing a famous monastery yesterday morning in Downtown Lima and a few other of their famous sights, I made my way over to DHL to mail some items back to the US.

Seeing as Stewart was coming today, and had a bag no bigger than a school back pack, I have spent the last three days trying to figure out what I could loose. I mean seriously Stewart is carrying like 10 pounds of stuff for 3 months! So I’ve got my backpack of 38 pounds measured at the airport, and I’m feeling a little like my mom who always overpacks, just kidding!. But I mean come on, three months, there is no telling what we are going to encounter? Nonetheless I went down to the South American Explorers club here and dropped off a pair of pants, 4 pairs of socks, 2 pairs of underwear, electric razor, extra deodorant, and two t-shirts, which will all be given to foreign prisoners currently in Peruvian prisons (mostly on drug charges). I mailed home(DHL), a jacket, Camera flash, and extra ipod cord (don’t know how that got in there?). And STILL my bag trumps his by 2-3 times the size.

After DHL was finished I looked at the map and saw that I was relatively close to where I was staying and figured I might walk back. After about an hour of walking through a nice up-scale neighborhood called SanIsidrio, I looked again at my map and realized that I had mistook one plaza called Ovalo for another called Ovalo Gutierrez, and then realized I had another hour of two of walking. Well, by this time I had already committed an hour to walking, and was bound and determined to make it home by foot. Two hours and 6 miles later I finally reached my hostel after 4 hours of walking and many miles, so it is fair to say that I have seen a good portion of Lima.

The hike traversed about all that can be considered Rich Lima. Along the way I got to walk past all the major embassies in Lima. For anyone who has spent much time in foreign countries you can probably agree that it is amusing to walk past a bunch of embassies at once. It is kind of like being at Epcot in Disney world, because every stereotype that you can think of is packed into one long stretch of space, one after the other. Por ejemplo: British (and ex British countries) all have a Victorian Facade with a quaint garden in the front, security guards are all dressed in red or something. All Russian, and ex-soviet bloc countries have a crumbling 1960s modern facade, and haven’t been washed in several years. All Chinese embassies have a similar 1960s facade, just as ugly, but with a little more upkeep since they have more money. American embassies tend to be over the top, 4 times as big as any other embassy, and have a wall twice as high surrounding the place (in Quito, they are building a brand new embassy ¨complex¨ outside of the city, because the 6 city blocks that currently held the embassy were too small) I mean Come ON! Does the US really have that much to do in Ecuador? Egypt has an all white plain facade with deep set windows just like you imagine building to look in Egypt. The other South American and Latin American embassies tend to have uncharacteristically nice embassies, I think due in large part to the close relationships they have. The Canadian Embassy is modern yet stylish with neo-European flair, and very, very, cold looking

Yesterday while walking past all these embassies, all of which have impressive looking security guards standing out front, the one with the biggest guns was... Colombia, by far. I was walking with my head down and almost bumped into this 6 foot tall Colombian carrying an Israeli made Uzi, hand on the trigger, and get this: a foot long silencer! WHAT the heck?

So with Stewart here today we have been planning out our attack for the next week and half. Here is the plan : We leave this evening at 9:00pm for Trujillo, a desert city a couple hundred klics up on coast. Arriving into the city at 5:00am tomorrow morning, we are possibly going to check out the ruins of Chan Chan (once the largest city in the Americas between 100 and 1000 AD) before we catch a five hour bus inland to Cajamarca. This smaller colonial town is up in the Andes at about 8,000 feet. Highlights include neighboring famous thermal Inca baths, Gold mines, a room that once held the famous Incan king Atahualpa prisoner, and where he offered Fracisco Piazarro to fill the room up in gold and silver twice in return for his release (Atahualpa was subsequently killed). But Cajamarca is just a stop on the way to even smaller Celedin. This town in the middle of nowhere Andes has a population of 10,000, at about the same elevation 5 hours more into the Andes. This is where we hope to catch a bus to Chachapoyas, but the road is often taken out by mudslides, so we will see. This route to from Celedin to Chachapoyas is truly the road less traveled, reports tell of locals staring at white skinned foreigners, for they don’t see them often. It is supposed to be one of the most spectacular and white knuckle rides of your life as the old rickety bus hugs the side of the Andean mountains through 11,000 foot passes. It takes 14 hours to go 90 miles, which says a little of the type of topography we will be dealing with. Once we hopefully make it to Chachapoyas, outside of the city are ruins that reportedly rival Machu Picchu in terms of size, with more stone than was used to build the pyramids. They are not as famous due to the current inaccessibility described

From Chachapoyas we are going to make our way north from Jaen, Peru into Ecuador through a border entrance that just opened a few years ago after the Peruvian/Ecuadorian war was over. This path is also not traveled much at all, and will take a whole day and several different bus changes to get to Ecuador, but supposedly if you leave Jaen at daybreak you can make it to Ecuador by nighttime. So we will see!

M3

Back in the Saddle Again

2008-02-28T11:15:00.000-08:00

Lima Peru Feb. 28th 2007

Well here I am again in South America! For those of you who are just reading this, I spent October through December in Quito, Ecuador learning Spanish and working at El Centro de Muchacho Trabajador. After coming back to the states over Christmas, I got a job working as a Carpenter for Stewart Perry Construction (I’ve got a connection in management that helped me land the job). And after two months of 730 30 degree mornings, and as many bruised thumbs, I decided it was time for a change. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the work there, but the winds of travel were blowing at my back and I was itching to move. I got accepted to UAB School of Medicine in January, and had about 6 months before the real work began again in my life.

So where did I decide to go?

Lima, Peru

But Lima is only the beginning. Using the money that I saved working this winter, combined with a little help from my dad, granddad, and mom, Stewart and I are going to begin a three month long trek northward towards the United States via bus, boat, and foot. (We are taking a small flight over a part of Colombia due to kidnapping woes, but this is the only airfare we are using). I have a budget of 25-30 dollars a day (room and travel included), and no agenda but the road in front of me. Along the way I will be studying Spanish, and writing in this blog ever other day. Should internet availability be an issue here where infrastructure is not always the first thing on the government’s mind, I will back fill when I get the chance.

All that being said, what am I up to? I got into Lima late Tuesday night around 1 o’clock in the morning. The trip began with a great start as our non-stop Atlanta to Lima flight was on a Delta 767 ER planes! For those of you who are not seasoned travellers, the ER does not mean that there is an emergency room in the back of the plane. No, ER stands for extended range. Each of these beauties is brand new, and all coach seats are made entirely out of leather. The reading lights have lenses to put the light exactly where you want it, and there is HUGE leg room. My knees never once touched the seat in front of me NOT once during the entire 6 hour flight, for those of you over 6 feet you can understand what a miracle this is. To top it off each of the seats has a touch screen video player that allows you to select from 20-30 new releases, TV Shows, Games, or weather. So this was great. On the flight to Atlanta I sat next to a pediatrician from Colombia, and on the flight to Lima I sat next to a neurologist from Chicago. I guess they were they to remind me that I have to come back.

When I got into Lima and exited the airport, sure as rain there were 30 different people offering hotels, taxis, trips, etc. I read the entire section on Lima in my guide book on the way down here, and so I knew how much the taxi ride was supposed to cost (which is an absolute necessity when travelling in a city you don’t know in SA). So as this taxi driver speeds through the red lights at one in the morning along the deserted streets of Lima, I started to have a strange feeling come over me. I felt like I was back home, or back where I was supposed to be. I don’t know whether it was the bumpiness of the road, dirt in the streets, having to haggle down from 30 to 10 dollars for my taxi, getting solicited by every vendor in the airport, or the faded buildings, but it all felt natural. Back in South America, where nothing is sure until its done, where you can talk your way out of (or into) anything, where if you want something you go out and get it without fear of repercussion, where life is laidback, where formality is a thing for the aristocrats, where I want to be.

We made our way to my Hostal in a part of Lima called Miraflores. From what my guide books told me, this is the nice trendy happening part of Lima, and for the most part they are correct. This also means that it is going to be the rich and expensive part of Lima. When deciding to stay in these portions of a city in South America, it is my opinion that you need to be conscious of where you are in relation to the rest of the city. The street that I am on has old leafy trees along the sidewalk; leading three blocks away from a gorgeous park with new playgrounds, surrounded by umbrella covered outdoor cafes serving Pisco sours and cappuccinos. The shops and bars the branch off from this park all have menus in Spanish with English subtitles, serving international favourites like hamburgers, French fries, and your favourite German beer on tap. The prices reflect this importation of culture, meals costing from 10 to 20 dollars. There is even a Starbucks, McDonalds, and KFC surrounding this beautiful quaint park. You still very much feel like you are in a South American city, but it has money. This is not representative of how the greater 8 million inhabitants of Lima, or Peru in general live, which is something you need to keep in mind when making value judgements about the nature of a city and its problems. Regardless, it is fun to hang out in these portions of the city, and hopefully they will be the seed from which a larger more affluent population can grow. When you make a decision to stay in this portion of a city, it is because 1.) Easier access to mobility and travel, 2.) It is safer, and 3.) This is where a majority of the Hotels and Hostals are located, so you really have little other options.

One of the major differences between Quito and Lima is the weather. Quito was 10,000 feet high, bathed in a cold rain and temperatures that never got above 70. This kind of left a sour taste in my mouth for South American weather in general. In Lima, on the contrary, we are just at the ending of summer, where average daily highs are around 80. As I rode in the Taxi from the Airport, we took the highway that runs right along the Pacific Ocean. Rolling down my window, I felt the characteristically universal smell of salt water, and a warm humid air blew through the musty taxi. It was refreshing after flying out of Birmingham at about 40 degrees, to have the heat and humidity. I think the humidity actually reminded me of the south in the summer as I began to sweat just sitting there without working for the first time in months.

Apart from the newer section of Miraflores in Lima, there is also a downtown historical section with buildings dating back to the 1800s and some the 1700s. Predominant Victorian architecture is in this section of 4 to 5 story buildings, and here is where you find the main churches, parliament buildings, large Plazas, and presidential residences. The split between downtown Lima and Miraflores is not unlike that of La Mariscal and El Centro Historico in Quito (for those that read earlier blogs).

Yesterday, I picked up a taxi in Miraflores to take into downtown Lima to see some of the churches and older buildings. The taxi driver this time was actually a woman, which I am not saying out of sexism, but this honestly is the first female taxi driver that I have ever seen in South America after possibly hundreds of taxi rides. We get to chatting and she is pushing some ruins south of the city that she wants me to go see (with her driving of course), and she gives me her card (lots of taxi drivers here have cards that they give to tourists so that they can give rides outside of the cities and charge larger than normal fees/rip off). She drops me off at the main plaza, or Plaza de Armas. I go in to check out the main church of Lima where and as I’m walking around inside, I reach down to feel my pants pockets I realize that my cell phone is gone. After frantically searching my backpack and around the church I can’t find it anywhere. As a side note I don’t use the phone down here, it is more just for emergencies, but all the numbers, and the loss of a phone is huge. I called the phone several times from a phone booth to no avail. As I am sitting there in the phone booth I go through my pockets one last time, and all I find is that card the taxi driver gave me. I decide to call for the heck of it, and low and behold she has my phone! She agrees to come back and pick me up and give my phone back, at 330 in front of the main church of the Plaza de Armas. Of course she is late (because she is South American of course, not because she is a woman, of course) and I sit out in the sun waiting for her to come. I am trapped, because if I go inside to use the phone I might miss her on this very busy street, and if I go into the shade she might not see me. So I wait until she finally shows at 430 phone in hand. By the way, as a result of being forced to sit out in the sun I now have a huge sunburn on my face, so now I really look like a gringo. Along the way back we stopped at a police station and I gave a testimony (in Spanish) about how she gave my phone back to me, so that she gets brownie points with her company.

Till later
M3

Blog Point.

1.) I’ve decided that despite my very close trimmed scruff, I need to break down and shave, to look cleaner cut. Case and Point- Yesterday while on the steps waiting for my taxi to come, I had two different kids come up to me and offer to sell me drugs. Taken aback by the first, I was just amused by the second. I don’t know what it was, but I must have looked like I needed some, because why else would I be sitting out in the sun burning my face off? Nonetheless I politely declined. Experience like that - Only in South America baby.

2.)I LOVE that roller blading is still very very popular here.

El Centro de Muchacho Trabajador

2007-12-05T12:19:00.000-08:00

So I suppose its worth writing a blog about the work that I have been doing down here for the past three and half weeks. After about a month of Spanish classes I was able to get a job volunteering at El Centro de Muchcho Trabajador with my cousin Stewarts help. El Centro, http://www.centromuchachotrabajador.org/ , was established in Quito over 40 years ago and their goal was to provide food and an education to the countless number of kids in Quito that have to work for a living. Spend 2 days here and you will know what I am talking about. There is a veritable army of kids who spend their days polishing shoes, or selling packs of gum. Some kids have stands with chairs, although the majority just walk around with small wooden tool boxes full of the different kinds of polish and a dirty cloth or rag. Most of these kids actually have families, but the families are so so poor that they cant even afford to house and feed the kid without the extra income earned from the child.

The kids usually spend about half of their day working in the streets, and then come in for the morning or afternoon to get two meals and classes. The genius of this program is that they incorporate the whole family, because the parents can be the biggest hindrance to the childs education. Before the center, most of the families viewed school as nothing more than wasted potentially productive hours for the kid. Well, maybe not quite that harsh, but at the very least they didn’t think they could afford to loose the money while the kid was in school. So the center brings the families in too and shows them the value of an education (the free meals help as well in this regard).

Within the center I specifically work with a group of boys that, for whatever reason, are behind the rest of the class. Many have easily recognizable learning disorders that will probably remain untreated. Everyday I work with a small group of 4 to 5 boys in a classroom and we go over basic mathematics, reading, and writing. The kids I work with are between 10 and 14 years old, and we will spend several hours every afternoon going over fundamental addition and subtraction between 0 and 20. I never truly appreciated the value of the education I received at a young age until I was working with 14 year olds who were having trouble adding 6 and 9 (that’s 15 for all you liberal arts majors). Through different exercises involving flashcards, holey cards, and math games, we also tackle a fair amount of reading. While my Spanish skills leave much to be desired, Spanish is such a phonetic language that I can read a word and pronounce it almost perfectly. Most letters only have one sound, unlike English where they can have 2 or even 3. So I read with them, and help them with parts they don’t understand. While I might not understand every word, I can pronounce it well so they can understand the meaning and incorporate the look of the word with their already existing vocabulary base.

One of the hardest parts of the job is the stories these kids come from. On the outside they can seem like happy, care-free children, but when you dig a little beneath the surface and stress them out, you see a darker history. I was sitting in class the other day and had a kid go completely comatose on me for the better part of an hour. I was asking him the answer to a question which he must not have known, and got this glazed over look on his face and wouldn’t respond to questions for about an hour. Obviously this was some kind of defense mechanism that he had learned as a child when confronted with a situation or problem he didn’t know the solution to.

Many of the kids have obvious cigarette burns on their arms, and seem to come back every week with some new scar.

The other day one of the my kids (11 or so years old) came in with gritty black mouth, and I asked him what he ate. He didn’t say anything, but halfway through the lesson I realized that he was chewing on a pencil lead. I asked him why? He liked the taste.

It took me about a week to figure out what was going on, but all of the Ecuadorian kids in my class kept talking about this ¨Agua Sucia¨ (dirty water) kid, but there was no one in my class named that of course. Then after about a week I realized that they were talking about the only black kid in my class.

I watch one of my kids (of 11 years) with a usually a nice normal demeanor, drop kick and start throwing punches at the other kids 10 year old face. I mean this kid was punching harder that I have ever seen any 20 year old ¨gentlemen¨ punch at Sewanee. When I pulled him off and took him into the office and asked him why he did it? He said the other kid wouldn’t give him a paper airplane.

I will reiterate what my cousin said in an earlier blog several weeks ago, that I have earned a true appreciation and respect for all people who work with special needs children. It takes a constant ingenuity and an ability to see the world from their eyes. You have to try understand what they are thinking, when they are going to loose interest, and find a way to keep them motivated to learn the task at hand. You have to stay one step ahead of them at all times because the moment you loose one they are gone for the rest of the day. Some days I have a hard enough time motivating myself to learn, much less 5 other kids from Quito who have never excelled in school.

It is a challenge everyday, but one that is teaching me worlds about the pains and joys of working with people much different that myself.

Here Again

2007-11-23T12:32:00.000-08:00

Im sorry it has taken me a week to put anything up, but a lot of things have happened to me in the past week. I have been doing some incredible work tutoring math and spanish at el centro de muchacho for street kids and will blog about this as soon as I feel up to it.

Just Thoughts

2007-11-17T13:18:00.000-08:00

No picutres this afternoon, just thoughts about this place.

1.) To cross the street here, just like in the states they have lights that show a green person moving, or a red person standing up. Now they might have this in the states, but here the green person is actually an animated LED display that shows a green figure walking. And what does this figure do when the light is about to turn? It actually starts beeping faster and running! The animated display speeds up!

2.) I went to eat KFC (Its HUGE down here) the other day because I was simply had the urge for Fried Chicken (don´t tell me you´ve never had it). And next to this KFC joint is a joint that says ¨Menestras de Negros¨ which literally means: ¨Vegtable stew of the Black People¨ and what do they have next to the sign? A picture of a little black baby with a piece of fried chicken in its mouth! And guess what else? Its a chain! Now I´m not one for strict political correctness, but I think this crossed the line.

3.) I don´t know why the record industry is going after the single mom in Minnosota to something to the tune of like 80,000 dollars when pirating DVDS and CD is like the third biggest industry in South America (alright I might have made that last part up). There is an actual store (and this I am not kidding about) on every block selling pirated DVDs. So I go to get one and buy the Bourne Supremacy for a dollar. I throw it in and I am sort of getting into it despite the really really bad quality, and then I notice something´s wrong. This is not a sitcom, but I still hear laughing at the punch lines. Then people start getting up to go the restroom towards the end of the movie.... I was had again.

4.) For any of the curious out there, there is a hotel Alcatraz in San Vicente, Ecuador on the coast. It was hard, but I decided not to stay there when I went to beach last weekend.

5.) (this is for dad) Second story concrete forms here are held up by several hundred bamboo trunks.

6.) Passed by a dirt bike today, with one seat, and how many people were on it? 4: Dad, Mom, 15 year old kid, and 4 year old. Hey, at least if they had a wreck there wouldn´t be anyone left behind.

Hope everyone is well and has a good thanksgiving. I will be teaching a class; turns out they don´t celebrate thanksgiving down here even though they have a street named after ¨Jorge Washington¨

MHS III

More pictures from Mindo one week ago

2007-11-14T10:22:00.001-08:00

Here are some pictures from over a week ago in Mindo, but be sure to check out the blog below I put up yesterday, because I´m probably not going to post for another week. (this stuff takes time!)

The restaurant we discovered at the very bottom of a 45 minute hike down the only foot path in 50 miles. 800 meters below the main road and in the middle of nowhere.

The waterfall that Stewart and I jumped off of. If you look closely you can see the rope you have to hold onto as you slide down to the edge trying not to slip.

The idiot in me forgot to bring chacos to Ecuador, and if you have ever worn leather sandals in the water, you know they don´t exactly hold your feet. So I jery-rigged straps to the back of these so I could take them rafting. Actually turned out alright.

Moss growing next to our table at the restaurant at the bottom of the gorge.

Mindo and the local guy who walks around town with his big green wagon.

How goods are transported in Mindo

Main street Mindo in the middle of rush hour

The hostel we stayed in in Mindo

Here is a boy that hitched a ride on the back of our pickup truck as we climbed up the side of mountain in search of Al Roker.

The filming of the the Today Show. Notice the guy on the right is the chef from Alabama that works here and started the first catering buisness in Ecuador. He gave us a ride back to Quito.

Continued filming of the Today show. Here they have a traditional Ecuadorian band on the left, and they are doing a segment on how the first Panama hat was actually from Ecuador. But now the original company is so highly saught after, that the hats are too exspensive for most Ecuadorians to own at around 1000 USD. So they are exported...

Canoa, and other issues

2007-11-14T06:13:00.000-08:00

I would first like to address an adequate complaint of this blog: that it appears like I have been on a four week vacation and I am not really getting around to doing any real service. Well, from the looks of the pictures in the blog, that is a just take. But what have I have not been bloging about is the 8 hours a day, everyday, of studying and working on my spanish. I figured you would never come back and read the blog, because the studying is the antithesis of exciting. Instead I chose to focus on exciting weekend trips. And while the Spanish has not progressed quite as fast as I would I have liked, learning a new language is hard. The spanish training was a necessary precursor to trying to get any work here, volunteer or not, and now I have reached a level where I feel comfortable enough to try and get some work. I start work this upcoming Monday at El centro de Muchacho Trabajador , or The Center for the Working Boy. There I will be helping kids who have to work polishing shoes or selling gum just to make money to eat and live. I will be helping them to read spanish, do math and other basic skills.

*Most of the blog material comes from trips I have taken over the weekend and not from working life during the week*

Now that that has been said, I´ll give you my usual two cents about interesting goings on in Ecuador. For the past few days I took a break with Stewart to check out the coast of Ecuador before he had to go home. Yes, the studying down here was not quite as intense as in Quito, so shoot me, but it is the last weekend I am going to leave Quito for the next five weeks. We stayed in a small hostel in Canoa, Ecuador right on the beach for 5 bucks a night and soaked up beach culture for a few days.

The town of Canoa from the air (see below)

The beach of Canoa at sunset

The town was really small, but had a relatively large population of gringos who had all said to hell with life in the states and lived in Canoa year round. The first guy we met while were down there was a guy named Greg from London, Kentucky. He was in the furniture manufacturing business up until 4 or 5 years ago, when he saw it was headed for China. He tenured his resignation, and moved his small paragliding school he had started (in Huntsville, AL) down to Canoa, Ecudaor. After marrying a Columbian, and buying a hotel he was set.

The local occupation: fishing boats are just left on the shore because the property isn´t quite as valuable as that in the states

So the other evening I am sitting around the hostel, when a group of students studying down here from Washington state pull out a couple of guitars and mandolins. Fortunately for me they were all in bluegrass band back home, and had an extra guitar. For 3 to 4 hours we sat around and entertained Greg and others with traditional bluegrass songs by Old Crow Medicine show and others. Greg was so thrilled, having not heard live bluegrass, and being from Kentucky, that he took us all up paragliding for free the next day.

Paragliding over the pacific ocean

Its a lot cheaper that flying small planes and a lot less noisy!

The next gringo we met down there was on Saturday as Stewart and I were again struck trying to find the Auburn game. This time it was actually on CBS, which we could have gotten on cable in Quito, but of course they don´t have cable in Canoa, just direct TV. Greg tells us that if there is one guy here who would have it, it would be a guy named Tripp who runs the ¨yacht club¨ in neighboring Bahia de Caraquez. At first we were surprised that there was a yacht club in Ecuador, but after a 20 minute bus ride, 10 minute ferry, and short walk, we found the Puerto Amistad Yacht Club http://www.puertoamistadecuador.com/.

Boat Ride to Bahia de Caraquez, there is a reason that everyone has to wear lifejackets...

The reason Greg recommended this place to us was that Tripp was actually from Dothan, ALABAMA. He went to Auburn and was in the telecommunications industry until 5 years ago when he too handed in his two week notice, bought a boat and headed south. He met and married a Columbian, and started this yacht club here in Bahia about 3 years ago.

You too could leave Alabama and start a yacht club!

Or just quit your job and buy a boat!

A few points on Ecuadorian culture I want to get off my chest:

-With gas prices at an all time high in the US I can´t help but bring up the huge discrepancy with Ecuador where a gallon of gas might cost 1.20 and diesel around a buck a gallon. The government clearly subsidizes the gas here either directly, or simply not getting the going rate and selling it to their own country at pennies on dollar. This is something that each and every Ecuadorian can see, and has a daily impact on the cost of their lives. This in turn keeps the costs of buses and taxis down, cars are relatively cheap to operate, and affects the bottom line of every business. No one sees where the government money COULD be going if they simply charged the going rate, and allowed the market to sort it out, and then spent their money on areas where the market will never help:

-Infrastructure down here pales in comparison to everything that you know in the states. I took a 10 hour bus ride from the coast to Quito the other day and we used dirt roads practically the entire route. When you were actually on asphalt, you got sick as the driver swerved from one side of the road to the other to avoid potholes the size of small cars.

-While at the beach, you can´t drink the water just like everywhere here, but on top of harboring disease, the water was actually SALTY. Apparently they have a hard time finding fresh water so they will just give you diluted saltwater...

-Tripp (alabama yacht club owner) says that he pays 250 dollars a month for an internet connection based off of speeds he was getting 12 years ago in the states.

-Electricity is expensive everywhere, particularly because the electricity companies don´t do anything (don´t care) about the fact 70% of the people in Canoa get their electricity by just trying off to a power line next to their house (no meter). As a result of the overtaxed system, the power will go off for18 hours stretches. The meter men say it is not their job to get those people in trouble because they simply check the meters that do exist.

-Education, while in upper level universities is somewhat cheaper here, has problems elsewhere. It takes the children going to school in Canoa 6 or 7 years to finish 3 to 4 years of school, because the school board will simply run out of money and teachers quit.

-The dutch guy, Frans, who ran our hostel (http://www.hostalcocoloco.com/) says he was on the street last week talking to a fisherman about why he wasn´t fishing on what was a great fishing day. This fisherman who is just living from catch to catch in a wooden shack with his family said, ¨I went out yesterday and have enough money to eat today, so there is no need to go out today.¨ Now I am supportive of the live for today lifestyle, but when you have a family to feed as well, and you might get sick next week, I think that he is missing the bigger picture. This is problem indicative of many attitudes here: a lack of planning.

-There is not a city in Ecuador that doesn´t have a building on every block consisting of a concrete form finished to about the second story and then rebar continuing on up to a possibly unfinished roof. The building might be anywhere from a year to ten years old. Ask anyone what happened and they will tell you that so and so got a lot of money one day, had a big idea, and started building this building without the funds to finish it. Now they are losing capital, stuck with an unfinished building, and have no way to finish the project. It almost a culturally accepeted practice to not have a long range plan or any planning in general for that matter.

On a nicer note, you can get shrimp as big as lobsters there for 5 dollars a pound. Stewart fixed this fisherman´s ear the other day and the guy gave him 2 actual lobsters for breakfast!

I´m also planning on putting up some more pictures from Mindo later this week so check those out. Hope all is well stateside.

-MHS

Pictures from Mindo

2007-11-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

Here are a few more images I was able to get through, be sure to notice the blog below these explaining some of the images.

Elementary School Playground in Mindo

Unloading the rafts from the truckwith people underneath

An afternoon with Al Roker

Bridge at the bottom of the waterfalls leading to the jump off of the rock ledge

Mindo

2007-11-05T15:22:00.000-08:00

*This blog does not have many pictures because I am having a hard time finding a place with the bandwidth to upload them. I hope to have the NBC pictures up on a few days time*

I just got back from another weekend excursion away from Quito. I took classes and worked until about 2 o´clock on Friday afternoon, and then we caught the 3:30 bus (turned out to be the 5:00 bus because our bus broke its axel on the last trip) to a town about two hours north of Quito called Mindo. As we would later find out, Mindo was created by a rich businessman from Quito that had made all of his money writing a ¨history of alcohol¨ and used the proceeds to buy this large piece of old growth cloud forest to harvest the timber. Well, while this guy is out surveying his newly purchased timber has an epiphany, he sees god, and god tells him to protect the forest and not destroy it. From hence was born the Mindo cloud forest and tourist destination.

The journey begins actually before we arrived in Mindo, because as the giant coach bus wound its way around the curvy roads that descend from 9,500 feet to 5,500 feet, the driver must have been in a fight with his wife ON THE CELL PHONE. He barrelled down the road, passing cars at 80. In Latin America it is considered customary to pass when ever given the option, and so our driver was often three wide across blind turns while on his cell phone. Needless to say I never want to sit up front of a coach bus here again.

The Hostel in Mindo was recommended by a friend from the South American Explorers, and at 5 dollars a night, how could we turn it down? The nicest old lady in the world shows us our rooms. As she showed us the first room (Stewarts) and she opened the door, something was immediately different. It was then I realized that Stewart’s room was simply missing a wall! Situated on the second floor, his room consisted of a ledge built underneath an overhanging barn roof, just wide enough to hold the bed, and with safety board built in. My room had walls and windows, but no glass in the windows...

After settled into the Hostel, we heard the crickets for the first time since leaving the states, and faintly, far off, Roadhouse Blues by The Doors being sung in perfect English. Following our ears across town, we found an open air bar with dirt floors, selling nothing but the local beer in bottles, and a bunch of pictures of Bob Marley up on the walls. After asking the barman for his best beer (he only had one kind) we saw a three piece local Ecuadorian band wailing out some Eric Clapton. Keep in mind that this is the FIRST time I had heard American music in about a month... Upon set break I find out that the singer/lead guitar player is a 45 year old English teacher at a high school in Quito, never been to America, and ¨learned all his English from rock n´roll.¨

Awesome

The next day we went down to the center of town and caught a ride up to the waterfalls with a bunch of study abroaders from Oregon (don’t worry; they didn’t know you Bobby I asked). Now a ¨ride¨ in Mindo consists of jumping onto the back of a pick up truck that has been specially outfitted with metal bars to hold you inside as you pay a dollar for the scariest and fastest ride you have ever been on up the side of a mountain. We got to the top only to find that we were going to have to walk down to the waterfalls about 700 meters, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize that’s over 2000 feet, and its not horizontal, that’s 2000 vertical feet. So we hike down the skinny, narrow as all get out trail only to arrive upon a huge house with concrete water slide and 40 foot jump over the waterfalls!

This is a side note about SA (South America) in general, in America if you arrive upon a house or other large edifice in the woods, you are used to having some kind of access road that you used to get here. Here you can walk along the most unrecognizable trail in the world only to arrive upon a mansion because all the materials were brought here by hand down the same scary narrow trail you walked down

On the way back we stopped by at a local coffee plantation and for the first time I saw what a coffee bush looks like. This is a beverage that I have consumed on a weekly basis for the past 8-10 years, and to date I had no idea what a coffee plant looks like.

The plant can produce 30-40 pounds every year for up to 20 years I think it was. The bean (surprise) is actually green with a red outer covering when ripe.

The next morning we got up and went ¨tubing.¨ Again to harp on a familiar refrain, the Ecuadorian idea of tubing is a little bit different. They take about 6 or 7 18-wheeler tubes (with scary metal air input still attached); lash them together, and then put 4 to 5 people on them as they ride down a river that rivals the Ocoee. These too are lashed to the top of a big pickup truck for the ride up there (see soon to come picture).

We came back that afternoon (Sunday) and began our search for the Today Show crew. Stewart and I became friends with a local guy, Milton, who ran the tourist information office, and together we called all of the rich haciendas around Mindo to see if any of the NBC crew was staying there. No luck with the first five, but at last this guy Milton calls his friend that works close to one the places called Bella Vista, and he says that he ¨thinks¨ that the NBC crew is up around this town that calls itself Mindo, but is actually separate.

Off of this tip Stewart and I paid another truck driver 10 bucks to hitch a ride up to this bird preserve/fancy resort called Bella Vista. Sure enough after a another 70mph harrowing ride for thirty minutes in the back of a truck, we rolled up on three very large vans full of technical gear, a bunch of cables, and several mean looking security guards armed with sawed off shotguns. We had arrived, here was NBC! We off-loaded and began to walk through the gates to this Swiss-family Robinson style series of houses perched on the top of a cloud forest mountain, over 7000 feet up and on the equator. You could tell Stewart and I were not their usual fare because we were immediately surrounded by people offering to help, asking if we had reservation. It was a little intimidating at first, but then we saw why we came: there sitting quietly on the porch of one of these houses was the man himself, Al Roker. We talked to Al briefly, asked the usual questions: ¨how’s the weather?¨ ¨so where you from?¨ ¨what do you think of Ecuador¨ etc. Then we got a picture and were invited to come back the next morning for the show.

Sure as rain, we came back the next morning for the show, and got to watch it live in person. Stewart and I were the ONLY two Americans there that had any idea of what the show was or the fact it was being broadcast live to 30 million Americans. While we were there watching the show, we got to talking to chef who was doing all of the food for Al to eat (clearly a native Ecuadorian but with perfect English). He asks us the standard questions, but when we responded that we were from Alabama, he was taken aback a bit. Turns out that this guy’s dad was from Alabama, he lived there for 10 years, and went to UAB! He came back here and started Ecuador’s first catering service (needless to say this guy is really successful) and the short of it was that this guy gave us a ride back to Quito for free while we caught up on the goings on in Alabama.

While we didn’t get interviewed on the Today Show, we still got to hang out with the crew and met a new friend. All in all a good weekend! I start work next week teaching Ecuadorian street children math and how to read!

Please check back in a few days to see if I got the pictures up…

Till next time

Merrill

Four points on Ecuadorian Culture

2007-11-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

I thought I´d leave a short simple post, sans pictures, about a few funny things that I´ve noticed around here in case you don´t want to dig through a long post. However, if you haven´t done so, be sure to check the one post previous to this, and my buddy Bobby´s blog: http://bobbyinrwanda.blogspot.com/ he finally put some pictures up, and his work is in a lot of ways more interesting than mine.

1.) So the first time I saw this I couldn´t believe it, but now I have seen it several times. For those of you who aren´t aware, the light emited from an arc welding torch is one of the brightest sources of light that people come into contact on a daily basis. Ask my friend Micky Momen and he will tell you that just a few seconds of staring at one left him in tears for days, with possible permanant retinal damage. The only way to protect youself fully is to have a full helmet that not only proctect the eyes, but shields the skin from an almost garaunteed UV skin burn. What do they do here? They JUST CLOSE THEIR EYES! I have walked by at least three men with peeling faces and probably just the hint of a retina left as they have succumed to the UV burns induced through the eyelids.

2.) Do you ever ask yourself what happens the maniquins from the early 90´s with the bleach blond steller swept back haircuts? The kind with a permanent plastic coiffe that are deserving of a pair of cut off jeans, a kanarly neon wind breaker, and some really sweet Ray-bans? Well, I really didn´t until I got here and saw them in every store window, towering two or three feet above the average ecuadorian they are catering to... I guess they are cheaper?

3.) So Stewart and I are riding to school this morning in a packed trolly bus, and I look over at the bus next to me. There pressed up against the window of a commuter coach bus was a mom. The mom was supporting her 5 year old boy who was even more pressed against the window. The lower half of the window was open. The boy was slightly bent at the waist as a stream of urine came out from his nether regions, out of the bus, 10 feet of the ground, and onto the taxi waiting below. I´ll just say that no one watching this affair had any questions about whether he was circumcized... When you´ve got to go I guess you´ve got to go.

4.) For those of you somewhere more remote that Quito, Ecuador, I´m happy to let you know that yesterday was Halloween everywhere except Quito, Ecuador. Thats right, in the 12th hour the new president, Rafael Correa, embolded by recent sucesses in .... ? decided to make Halloween illegal. Annoucend in a national press conference yesterday by the man himself and his sidekick the chief of police, anyone caught wearing abnormal costumes of any sort would be arrested. Any bars displaying Halloween decoration (most of which were already displaying at the time of this announcement) would be shut down and the owner would be thrown in jail for seven days. Think about this the next time you think your freedom is speech is being trampeled!
Happy Halloween! This weekend Stewart and I are going to Mindo, Ecuador where Al Roaker (so?) will be broadcasting LIVE the Today show. They are do a special on the climate and have someone on the Equator, and at both poles. So look for us Monday Morning in this secluded cloud forest hiding between the trees with signs that say: HEY MOM IM ON TV!

Ruca Pichincha

2007-10-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

I probably should be studying and not making another blog entry after the most recent one this past Saturday. However I can't help not telling the everyone about an incredible experience I had yesterday. Several students from the spanish school I have been studying at, and I, decided to hike up to one of the peaks of volcanos that surround Quito. The combined peaks are known as the Pichincha range, and the one we chose to hike up is known as Rucu Pichincha. The young English guy in our group assured us it was an easy ascent and I, not having a guide book or any other source of information, agreed to come along. We actually were greatly helped in our ascent by a new cable car that the Ecuadorian government has built called the teleferico. This brand new cable car took us from the floor of the city of Quito which is about 9,500 feet, up to 12,800 feet (according to the altimeter on my watch).

We began our trek along some gently sloping hills, gradually easing along with no idea of the trip we were about to undertake. Slowly but surely the nicely sloping hills turned into a steeper and steeper vertical challenge. This would not be thought of as particularly intense, but due to the altitude, the lack of oxygen made each step just a little more difficult.

Our grouped hiked along the ridge of a vast expanding sierra plain, with little more that the occasional bush to break the sea of tundra grass tufts. As we ascended higher, breaking 13,000 feet, the altitude began to really take its toll. The Ecuadorians don't believe in switchbacks, and so I would have to hike for 10 minutes only to rest for five. Remarkably once you stopped you quickly recovered as the the oxygen content of you blood climbed back up.

Two hours into the hike we reached the base of what could be described as the main peak; this is where it went from very steep to veritably vertical. By this time we were all somewhat fatigued, but persevered on.

The path wrapped around the back side of the mountain and timidly hugged the side of a 50 degree slope that at times dropped at least 1-2000 feet to your right before flattening out.

Now I was limited to 100 meter jaunts before I was completely out of breath. The pounding in the back of my head grew louder, and I could hear every beat of my heart as it resonated across my skull.

After about 45 minutes of this we reached the final pitch. Now about at 14, 600 feet, we were approaching the highest altitude in the whole lower 48, and we still had a little under 1,000 feet left to go. Now almost 3 hours into a very strenuous hike, I was more than a little fatigued. As I stared up at the last pitch I was a little disheartened; squinting against the sun I saw a 600 foot 45 degree slope of pure sand, banked by even steeper semi vertical boulders. After you got past the sand, it was all sharp rocks that led to a final scramble for the summit.

Digging foot steps into the sand, I tried not to think about the fact that if I slipped or fell, it would be a nice 1000 foot slide until it bottomed enough to stop myself (although by that time I would probably be unconscious and close to death). I could only go about 10 meters at a time before I had to stop for air, and by now the altitude made me feel like I had had about 4 or 5 beers, stumbling trying to put my foot in the right place. If you didn't stop to get air and get your oxygen levels back up, your vision would start to faintly dim and stars came out. I am sure there are those out there that have been much higher, but this is also the same altitude at which oxygen is mandatory for the cabin and crew of all unpressurized aircraft.

45 minutes later and 400 hundred feet higher we were at 15,000 feet and I was definitely having coordination issues. This is not a reassuring fact when I still had 400 feet left on the most exposed ridge on the mountain with a 1500 drop on one side and 2000 on the other. Clumsily I passed several people too illequipped to go further and scrambled up a pitch that was not actual rock climbing, but more that made up for this in the danger provided by the loose rocks and debris comprising foot and hand holds. And I was still having trouble coordinating my movements as my head now felt like one giant bubble about to burst.

And then rather suddenly it just flattend out. I was there! I had reached the top and felt dizzy just standing up staring out across the plains I had just conquered. 15,416 feet, the highest I had ever been, and higher that anywhere in the lower 48.

After a moment more I regained my composure and slowly made my way back down the crumbling rocks until I was back on the trail again 30 minutes later. While my coordination improved the lower I got, I now had a really killer headache that throbbed all the down, bad enough to throw up once or twice. I was assured that this was normal, and would go away by tomorrow!

Intrigued by the experience, I am going to look into other opportunities for some real mountaineering here in Ecuador!

Three weeks in, 9 more to go

2007-10-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

Bird Study #1

Bird Study #2

One of the Main Squares on Old Quito

So because we won the pub quiz last week, we got a discounted meal at this local Vietnamese restaurant run by an Ecuadorian who lived in Louisiana for 10 years. Appetizers: 4 dollars, Entree: 8 dollars, 3 Drinks: 4 dollars, Total cost: 16 dollars, Living in a less developed county: a little cheaper

Bird Study #3

One Saturday later I am here with a status update. Still in Quito, and I have done nothing extremely exciting since last week, but who am I kidding; everyday here is exciting in its own way. I finished my third week of Spanish classes this past Thursday, and now I can carry on basic conversations with people to get the things I need. My basic routine was this: get up about 6:00, take a shower, eat breakfast with the rest of the family and Stewart, and then study till about 8:30 where I would walk down and grab the morning bus in from old town to the area where my classes are (about a 15 minute bus ride, 40 minute walk). Spanish classes would last from about 9:00 to 1:00 and then after 1:00 I would walk down to La Mariscal and catch a cheap lunch or almuerzo for about 1.50 somewhere at one of the countless lunchtime ¨restaurants¨ that that offer this service. I say the word restaurant hesitantly because most of these places are more akin to someone’s garage than what we would think of as a restaurant in the states. There will be a table, some plastic chairs around this table, and if you are lucky a plastic table cloth. There is no menu, but often a choice for beef or chicken for the main course(pollo o carne for the less knowledgable). The one dollar meal will consist of a thin soup (often with recognizable chicken body parts see earlier blog), followed by a main dish of meat, rice, and some kind of green. Juice and a desert accompany this setup. I say all of this only to reinforce that this will be pretty much exactly the same everywhere you go in Quito for one of your meals. If you want to eat other fare for lunch or dinner, there are plenty of options, but expect to pay 3 to 4 times more (4-5 dollars) for a nice meal, and 10-11 for a really, really nice (i.e. Bottega) meal.

After lunch I´d find a cafe somewhere and work on the computer for an hour or two, study for 2 or so, and go home for dinner (which I have with my family and Stewart every night).

So Stewart and I got booted from the Marine mansion last week in the middle of the Florida game, because apparently the guy who we were a guest of wasn’t allowed to have guests (got busted with his girlfriend last month). They just got a new sonofabitch CO that lives in the house and likes to enforce rules. But before I go on I have to tell you a little bit about this house. The house was built in the 1970s, BUT somewhere along the lines one of the Marines requisitioned 50 grand a year to pay for ¨house expenses¨ in addition to their own salaries, and a cook, maid, and Ecuadorian security guard (for 6 people). So they have a huge green backyard, the first one I’ve seen since I’ve been here, barbeque pit, and gym. They have a huge movie theater room, with stadium seating and plush red leather sofas as seats, and through the armed services they get new movies on DVD within two weeks of coming out in movie theaters in the states. They have a giant pool room, fully stocked-aged oak bar, dance floor, library/reading room, and industrial kitchen. I guarantee you they will never be stationed somewhere so nice for the rest of their lives.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I want to talk about shopping here. In Alabama I am used to having to go to a store just for what I need; if I need office supplies I go to the office supply store, if I need clothes i go to the one big clothes store, etc... Here there a very few chains and no large stores; there are not even areas just for shopping (bad zoning) just lots, tons, of tiny shops selling everything from motorcycles and washing machines, to just socks and beer. So finding exactly what you need can be kind of a hassle. You have to plan what you need probably a week in advance and keep this in the back of your mind the whole week while you walk past shops on you way to work, and then hope that you find what you need eventually. It is definitely a different way to doing business than I am used to.

After Stewart and I got kicked out of the Marine’s mansion last week we were stuck trying to find a spot to watch the Auburn game that came on later that night. (In hindsight I wish I had not spent so much time trying to watch a game that killed our chances of SEC championship) So we went to the fastest connection in town, this coffee shop in la mariscal, hooked up Stewart’s computer, and watched the game off of a technology known as sling box. One of Stewart’s friend’s has a machine hooked up to his cable television at home, and through a special program over the internet we were able to watch his cable television on a laptop computer in a small coffee shop with wireless internet in the middle of Quito, Ecuador. For three and a half hours we stared at the small screen, trying hard not to cheer too loudly in what I would describe as the worst atmosphere to watch the game. (Small quiet sophisticated chic coffee shop). In a strange series of events, the coffee shop was actually owned by a graduate of Ole Miss.

1.) The 25 cent bus that I take everyday gets absolutely packed, as do all the busses here during rush hour. The north to south layout of the city affords for some fantastic bottlenecking with traffic in a city that doesn’t quite have an integrated traffic net system. So yesterday afternoon I finally find a lamp that I need for my room (see point above on stores). And buy it only to realize as I walked out of the store that it was 4:00 pm on a Friday afternoon, and I had no way to get home sans bus. Nonetheless I persevered and rammed myself into the sea of people already on the bus as the doors opened. The trick is that you have to do this right before the doors close so that as the doors close behind you, they push you into the crowd without effort and there is nothing the people can do to stop you. Sitting there on the bus I am trying to make out the broken Spanish over the intercom as it calls out the stops. I manage to catch that my stop is out of order and the bus is going to go on past it (which would have been a 20 minute walk). I realize all this as the better previous stop is closing. I rush out through the doors as they close, but do not make it in time. As the doors come to a complete close, I have one foot, one arm, and a lamp outside the bus while the rest of my body remains inside the bus. The bus drivers starts out of the station while I try to hold onto my lamp that is hitting the street signs along the way outside of the bus. Eventually with the help of the people around me yelling puerta (door in spanish), I get the guy to stop and hop out unharmed except for a scratched lamp.

Till next week...

Merrill

Cold, High, and not a ski bum in Colorado

2007-10-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, that is a goat tied up in the playground.

La Basilica de Quito

La Basilica otra vez

Mi Ciudad

This blog might or might not have any pictures depending on whether this Internet cafe allows it or not. Things are rolling along as usual here in Quito finishing my second week of Spanish classes. I'm trying to crank up the work load so that I will be conversable within three to four weeks time. We are now firmly entrenched in the rainy season here in Quito, what they call the ¨winter.¨ Every morning it is bright and sunny at about 68 degrees, which gradually increases to about 73 by mid-day. By 2 or 3 o´clock the sky has gone from a bright blue to a dark gray and a semi monsoonal rain drenches the city for about 3 hours, bringing it down to a chilly 50 degrees by night time, perfect for bundling up and crawling into bed.

I am not sure if it´s the pollution here or the home cooking, but the entire city seems to faintly smell like a campfire 24/7, which actually helps to bring back the fond memories of campfires as a kid on boyscout campouts.

The weather took its toll on me this past week and I came down with a massive sore throat followed by a cold which is still clinging through its last throes this weekend. I joined a group of ex-pats here in Quito called the ¨South American Explorers,¨ and they have a ¨club house¨ here, which is actually this very nice 100 year old 5,000 square foot house with a library, porches, free coffee, tea, and Internet, all for 50 bucks for the year. So one afternoon when I was feeling particularly bad from this cold I went over there, sat by a warm fire while the cold rain fell outside, drank tea, and watched a movie.

Despite the infirmity, Stewart and I managed to make it out Pub Quiz twice this week after work. Pub quiz is a two hour long event that several of the English style pubs here hold to cater to gringos (me and probably you reading this). Small groups from 3 to 5 people vie for the prize of a free pitcher of beer through several grueling rounds of trivia. We won the first night when one of the categories was serendipitously ¨anatomy¨ The question of the night was ¨how many bones are in the human hand?¨ Stewart quickly countered with ¨29¨ only to be shot down by the judge saying that there were 27. Stewart pointed out that the judge failed to include two commonly forgotten bones that are not entirely separated from the other bones but technically separate bones, and then offered to name each bone. The judge would have none of this back-talk and failed us on the question...

This afternoon were are going to try and watch the Auburn game in the only place in Quito that gets US television over the countless damn soccer games, the personal residence of the US Marines that man the Embassy here. Yes, somehow many years ago the US government bought a piece of property right in the heart of what is now the business district. Thirty story tall high rise buildings encumber this house that more closely approximates the playboy mansion than a barracks. And we will be there all afternoon watching AMURICUN football!

Blog points:
1.) Many of the busy intersections here with blind entrances here do not have stop signs, so what to drivers do? Stop anyway and look because no one has right of way? NO, they simply continue on at the same speed and honk there horn very loudly in the hopes that the other person will heed. This is all very amusing unless your room is right next to an intersection...

2.)The other night I walked by a chic bar in the tourist district in the pouring rain. There were several covered areas outside these bars, but occasionally there would be a gap between the covers, so what did they do? They went out and bought like 20 umbrellas to hang between the gaps...

3.)My teacher was explaining the seasons to me, and as I tried to figure out what each one was (she speaks no English) it occurred to me that she had written them: Summer, Winter, Fall, Spring¨ I corrected the order and showed them back to her. She just gave me this puzzled look and shrugged. THEN it dawned on me that they don´t have real seasons here, just rainy (winter) and not rainy (summer). She had no idea what the seasons were, just learned them from school...

4.)Everyone, and I mean every single bloody person here in Quito, has a stellar car alarm for their not so stellar car. They are the kind that cycle through like 20 different sounds, and are so sensitive that I myself have personally set off two by just leaning on cars waiting for the road to clear. There is not 15 minutes that goes by without hearing one. This is also amusing unless you are trying to sleep and they go off on the hour....

If you gotten this far, my new phone number is (011(us only)) 593 08-5385667, feel free to call me whenever you want, it about 40 cents a minute for you, just to warn you. You have to dial the American exit code first 011 and then the rest of the number.

Take Care,
Merrill

More fotos

2007-10-15T14:30:00.000-07:00

Banos (cont.)

2007-10-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

After returning from Banos last night on a long and hot 4 hour bus ride, I am now in Quito. The title of this entry is Banos, because as I learned this morning in class, the Spanish don't put "el" in front of their cities. So the last entry more closely meant "the bathroom" than the city of Banos (which is named for its therapeutic baths nonetheless).

So on our last day, Domingo (Sunday), we ponyed up 30 dollars to take a 4 hour horse ride up the side of a Volcano. Banos, as a few of the pictures will illuminate, is under a very active volcano. There was actually a small eruption a little over a year ago that killed 5 people while burning 50 more. Ever the more eager to get closer to it, the three scottish/american girls I have been traveling with and myself jumped onto some very fit horses that took us straight, and I mean straight up the side of this volcano. There were no switchbacks, and you had to learn forward to give your horse better balance so it wouldn't fall backwards. The closer we got to the top, all the trees and grass turned a muddy gray color, obviously from the dust that perpetually emanates from the mouth of this volcano. Closer to the top, the grass and trees disappeared, leaving behind a desolate wasteland more akin to mars than Ecuador. When we finally stopped, we were about 200 meters underneath a cloud of dust, and our guide informed us that it was too dangerous to go any further due to the thick volcanic ash that would compact in your lungs until you simply lacked the ability to breathe.

The other pictures I am going to put up are from a 4 hour hike we took on Friday around Banos and a bike ride on Saturday to see some amazing waterfalls. To whoever is reading this I hope you enjoy, and I am trying to set up a Picasa account so that I can put up more images as they come along. I'm trying to set up ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.photo.gifn international cell phone that is cheaper than my AT&T account right now, and when that comes I'll let you know!

Take Care!
Merrill

The View from my room in EL Banos

2007-10-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

The View From my room in Qutio

2007-10-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

EL BANOS!

2007-10-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

So after a full week of Spanish classes in Quito, and seeing as Friday was a National holiday for I´m not sure quite what, we decided to go on a trip to a Town south of Quito about 2 hours by bus coach. El Banos is a vacation spot for many people in Quito and situated in the heart of the Andes. Its a couple thousand feet below Quito so its a good deal warmer. The town is located underneath a very active volcano that smokes all the time. El banos is known for its phenomenal hot springs and actually feels a lot like a ski town in Colorado, except with a lot, I mean a lot less money. We got in yesterday on a 4 hour coach bus to the tune of 3 dollars and are staying in a nice hostel for about 7 bucks a night. Last night we went to one of the local baths and its wasn´t exactly like a spa in the states (not that I have ever actually spent a good deal of time in spas). The public pools were a dark muddy brown and packed with people. I was assured that the color was from the minerals in the rocks where the water came out of, so we got in. Little did I know, but the water was so hot that after about 10 minutes in the bath I had what I would describe as a mild sunburn all over the lower half of my body. Today we rented bikes for 5 bucks and rode about 10 miles down the valley to check out the local waterfalls and swim in the pools. Tomorrow we are taking horses up the side of the volcano for 4 hours for 20 bucks and then back to get back to work in Quito, but it was a nice first weekend.

Points
1.) Stewart teaches me daily animal anatomy by the different parts of chickens we find in our soup for lunch. Today, and I am not kidding, we found a whole chicken foot, half of a head, and a heart (we actually counted the chambers).
2.) Seeing as it is a vacation weekend, most of the Quitoians that come down here don´t have cars to get around, so what do they do¿ ride bikes¿ no, walk¿ no, take cabs¿ no, they rent big four wheelers to ride down the streets all night, I mean it is literally a sea of these things, old people, young kids, everybody just cruisin.

Quito, Ecuador: The Top of the World

2007-10-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

Well, Here I am In Quito, Ecuador! I finally arrived on Sunday night after a 6 hour flight. Quito, for those of you who don't know, is the capital city of the Ecuador with a population of about 2 million people. Situated high in the Andes at 9,500 feet this is perhaps the highest city I have ever been to. The town of about 2 million people is laid out lengthwise, similar to Manhattan, except that it is flanked by two massive mountains instead of water!

Just to give you an example of how high this place is, before I left my dad let me borrow a fancy watch that he has with an altimeter. As the pilot took off, he set the differential of the cabin pressure at about 6,000 feet while he cruised at 27,000 or so. Then when the plane began its descent into Quito, instead of lowering the pressure, he actually had to raise it further to local elevation!

Stewart Hill, my cousin, met me at the airport and gave me a ride to the apartment we're staying at, I could tell he was thrilled to see someone else from home, as he has been down in SA (South America for those in the know) for about 2 months. I stepped onto my plane in Birmingham, Alabama to a ¨nice¨ ambient temperature of about 80 degrees and 90% humidity. I arrived that night in Quito to a light drizzle and about 55 degrees. Thanks to the altitude, the city get downs to about 50 degrees every night, and then up to 75 degrees during the day. AND, because the city is right smack dab in the middle of the equator, there are absolutely no seasonal fluctuations in temperature. It does have a rainy season though, which began the day I arrived, and every afternoon it pours big heavy ecuadorian raindrops for about 2 hours.

The town is absolutely gorgeous! The population is predominantly descendant from the indigenous people that lived in mountains and down in the rain forest, as well as some Spaniard blood mixed in. Stewart and I live in a nice (or at least original) section of town called "old town," and most of the architecture dates back to colonial periods. This is actually the cheaper side of town with most of the development and business happening in "New Town" with a typical ugly (in my opinion) post-modern architecture.

I began Spanish classes yesterday, and enjoyed the look on my teacher's face when she asked how much Spanish I had, to which i replied "Nada." "NADA?" Ci, Nada. While regretting not taking Spanish in the states, to the tune of 80 dollars an hour in college, I am glad I am taking it here, where I get 4 uninterrupted hours of one on one instruction for about 16 dollars.

The city is a good degree cheaper than say traveling in Europe, although there is an area known as La Miscal, where all the gringos and ex-pats flock to spend outrageous prices of 10 dollars a meal.

Hopefully I´ll be able to get an international cell phone this weekend, which will make communications vastly cheaper back to the states. Cheers to all those back home and I hope to have some pics up as soon as I can find an Internet cafe that lets me plug in my camera!

Cheers,
Merrill