Pictures! Finally!

I've sorted through the mess of pictures and cropped down the ones I like to web-size.

They're available in the following galleries:
Colombia

Panama

Costa Rica

Nicaragua

Guatemala

Spanish Practice

My spanish tutor asked me to write up a short little blurb about my trip using some past and present tense junk. I want to type it below, a first draft unmodified, uncorrected, so that I can come back and read it and laugh some day.

In the middle of writing it, there was an earthquake. My first! USGS shows it as a 5.6 at 14.191°N, 91.407°W -- pretty damn close to Antigua. Neat. I tried for five damn years in San Francisco to feel an earthquake and it turns out that all I had to do was come to Guatemala.

Without further ado, and with accent marks implied:

Hace un mes, estuve en Venezuela. Venezuela es un pais con gasoline barata y un presidente loco. De Venezuela, fui a Colombia. Colombia tiene una costa rica y gente simpatico, pero tuvo demasiados mosquitos.

Despues de Colombia, fui a Panama y Costa Rica. Son paises ricos y muchos personas pudieron habler en ingles. Panama tiene un canal grande y Costa Rica tiene algo grande tambien -- un problemo grande con los turistas que quieren tener sexo con ninos y ninas.

De Costa Rica, fui a Nicaragua, un pais que tuvo un presidente del partido "Sandinistas" hace 16 an(tilde explicit here, not just implied)os y hoy tiene el hombre mismo para presidente. El es calvo y los Estados Unidos dio muchos millones a las "Contras" a matar el y sus amigos.

El Salvador tiene la poblacion el mayor in Centroamerica, per es el pais el menor. Honduras y Belize son aburrido. Guatemala es mejor. Hice "pull-ups" en la parte mas alta de una piramide Maya en Tikal. Tikal es famoso para la selva en "Star Wars" (Yavin IV, no Endor).

En domingo, voy a ir a Nuevo Mexico.

Antigua, Guatemala / Pistolry

I am in Antigua, Guatemala now. I was in Tikal a few days ago but I have been here for two days and will be here two more before heading to the airport early Sunday morning to fly home.

Antigua is very touristy, chock full of Spanish schools, international cuisine (or attempts at it), and more "tourist agencies" than I've ever seen in one city. There must be two to three in every block, often sharing space with a bakery, salon, or clothing shop.

I've been doing Spanish lessons in the mornings for four hours every day. It's been going well but I feel like I'm just priming the pump for future learning. In the afternoons, I've mostly just wandered around checking out the markets, sitting in cafes and reading, etc.

Yesterday, I went to a shooting range off the road between here and Guatemala City. Hopped a public bus, walked about 1.5 klicks off the main road. There was a shooting range, sure enough, but they didn't rent guns as I'd been told. They only rented eye/ear protection (USD$3) and range time (USD$4), as well as selling ammo (USD$14 for a box of 50 9mm cartridges made by Wolf). All told, the afternoon cost the same price as it would have in the US. Shooting is a "rich kid" hobby here too.

I got lucky and ended up borrowing two pistols from some guys who were shooting on one of the ranges. I shot an Israeli military pistol, the Jericho 941, and a Chinese-made knock-off of a Sig Sauer P226. Both were chambered in 9mm. The Jericho was by far the nicer pistol, but I found the Sig Sauer clone easier to shoot despite an awkwardly thick grip and a sloppy trigger.

The "range" as it were, was an open 20 foot by 40 foot grassy area with wood fencing on both sides and a rope strung across the dirt embankment in the back. Between the tables and the dirt were a few sand bags, a few wooden pallets, four "yellow pages" phone books taped together, a bit of large pipe to shoot through, etc.

Nobody on any of the ranges was using hearing protection for any calibre less than .45. When shooting .45, the shooter still wouldn't wear ear protection, but his partner on the range would cover both ears with his hands. Ridiculous. 9mm is plenty loud enough to cause hearing damage.

The afternoon was extremely challenging in terms of language. I didn't have any relevant vocabulary. I had to learn how to say "weapon," "firearm," "pistol" and "rifle" are both cognates, "shooting range," "targets," "bullets," "gunpowder," etc. None of those things were in my phrase book. At the end of my time there, they gave me a form noting my full name, when I was there, etc, and told me that if I was stopped by the police and they smelled gunpowder on my body/clothes, I would have to show the slip of paper to avoid "problems." Hah.

Perception v. Reality / Why Travel

A week and a half back, in Managua, I read an online article from a US source about an American fellow in Nicaragua who was finally set free after much bungling and shady behavior by the justice system there. His poor wife (or girlfriend, depending on the article) had been raped and murdered. One fellow was accused of the murder but struck a plea bargain so that he'd be off the hook if he testified that the American, Eric Volz, was there that night. (?!) Ten other witnesses all testified that Volz was in another town that night, some hours away. Clearly a gross abortion of justice?

A day or two after reading that, I translated part of an article on Volz that ran in the local paper, front page, above the fold. The article was about an inquiry into how he'd been set free, thinking that there was some misdeed there and that he ought to still be in jail. The article said that he was an American man accused of the rape and murder of a "young Nicaraguan woman" (not noted to be related to Volz in any way, never mind his wife) and without mention of the (supposed?) witness debacle mentioned in the US article. Popular sentiment seems to be that Volz is guilty with a capital G. As his conviction was overturned, a mob gathered outside the courtroom chanting that he was guilty.

Perspectives. There's often a noticeable gap between even just BBC and CNN or New York Times/IHT coverage of something. Never mind the mainstream newspapers of other countries. Never mind the newspapers printed by a given group about an issue/event directly related to that group. (I'm reminded of the Somali coverage -- from Somalia, Puntland, and Somaliland -- of the killing of cameraman Martin Adler at a rally in Mogadishu around the time I visited Somaliland.) It's such a damned hassle to get even just one clearly stated, "bias lite" facet of an event. It's impossible, it seems, to get all the facets, or to get even one that's truly bias free.

I think that might be part of the "why travel" question. Obviously an "old Africa hand," or whatever, can explain a political happening in DRC better than I can by being there, watching it unfold in person but only as an outsider, uninformed, sifting a flocculant mess and missing all the subtleties. That said, there's something about being there, about talking to the gate guard, the bread seller, the bicycle repairman, about hearing what they think.

Reality isn't reality at all, as most people mean the word. Reality is a constantly shifting maelstrom composed of the perceptions of those who any smidgen of power at any level. Changing in every moment, impossible to measure. It's the river Heraclitus saw and a delight for Heisenberg. Reality isn't what happened in Pakistan last week, it's what the people perceive to have happened, what the international community perceives to have happened, what the ISI, the US State Department, the Iranians, the NGOs working there or considering it, Karzai, the Great Game players, the fundamentalists, the elders in that corner of Waziristan, the Indian subcontinent, the PPP members, etc, perceive to have happened.

That's it. The currency of realpolitik isn't reality but perceptions of reality. It's that maelstrom, facet free and impossible to pin down even by an "old hand," that matters. Outside the ivory tower, it's a land of perceptions, a wilderness of mirrors.

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There it is. I travel to get closer to the maelstrom, to peek into it, to glimpse a sliver here, a shadow there.

Another part of "why" is captured in an old e-mail draft from when I was traveling in Somalia. I don't recall if I ever expounded on it in that blog, but I'll paste it here too since I think it still rings true for me:

I think a big part why I enjoy travel so much, and particularly to the places that I do, is because of the ambiguity of the situations. I like not knowing how to get things accomplished, not knowing outcomes, not being able to see every step and the eventual conclusion.

 

In the states, the lack of language barrier, the formalized rules and processes for most things, and the sort of cultural currency I have as a native means that nothing is ever very difficult. Even if I don't know how to accomplish something, it's a very small matter to uncover how to do it and to set it into motion. Here... it's different. I know what some of my available resources are (money, etc), and I know the end goal that I want (to arrive in Hargeisa), at least in a rough sense, but I don't know what the process will be. Sometimes I don't even know the rough size and shape of it. It's absolutely delightful to engage myself with something and sort out the process, work my way through steps that aren't apparent until I hit them, and then find a solution.

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Peeking into the maelstrom, enjoying the ambiguity, the challenge. I'm definitely not here for a "vacation" in the traditional sense. Central America has beaches and jungle zip-lines and Mayan ruins, but that wasn't the impetus to come. Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti. That had nothing to do with a beautiful beach, cocktails, dishy European girls. Hostels full of Westerners, days, even weeks for some, spent in the hostel, talking about pop music and Harry Potter, playing cards, watching TV and movies, enjoying cheap beer.

I think that it boils down to this:

My head enjoys the glimpses and perceptions and history and politics. What Massoud's former guards think of Karzai, what an FMLN bomb-maker thinks about the role of women in the military, how Haitians interpret their country's tumultuous history. That's endlessly engaging.

My heart finds catharsis in falling down Maslow's pyramid to a point where my only immediate goals are to find food that won't deplete my electrolytes and Cipro supply, lodging sans bed bugs or shoot outs, a roadside where I can pee that isn't a leftover minefield from the last war. And in the midst of taking care of all those needs, time to be alone, reflect, do well by Socrates by examining my life and choices.

 

That's vacation for me. I love it. I'm feeling very happy to be here right now. Walking, thinking, reading, talking with locals. Smelling, touching, tasting the maelstrom of an entire region that's been a political disaster at least since the Spaniards and the bananas that came later.

Being Outside the News Loop

In Puerto Barrios, northern Guatemala, I wandered into a cyber cafe after many days incommunicado.

As is my routine, I pulled up my e-mail and CNN's "World News" section simultaneously. CNN's top headline and blurb said that Bhutto's son was taking the reins of the Pakistan People's Party following her death. My first reaction was shock. Clearly, Bhutto had been assassinated. I didn't have to read further to know that. For reasons I still don't understand, I felt as though I'd been kicked in the stomach, my body slightly flush, the preamble to dizziness.

I've hardly spent any time in Pakistan, but I've been following developments there for the last few months on CNN and IHT. When I read the headline, it was my emotional reaction which was "shock." It certainly wasn't the fact that she'd been assassinated. That should've surprised no one. In fact, you could make a compelling case for why it was unlikely that she even lasted this long. (She almost got 86'd just hours after she landed in Pakistan the day she returned from exile, for starters.)

In the minutes that followed, as I read the articles about what, exactly, had happened, I started to wonder if it wasn't a positive development. She's now a political martyr in a region particularly interested in martyrs. Green flags flapping in the wind, pilgrimages to her grave site. Bhutto remained popular but was caught up in scandal, partially her own fault, partially because of her husband. She had served the maximum of two terms as prime minister. Now her son, Bilawal, is going to take over the Pakistan People's Party. He's 19 and handsome in trendy frames from Prada or Dolce & Gabbana. He's studying at Oxford, though I'm not sure what that means in practical terms. (Certainly the hallowed halls of such schools have produced their fair share of "Western-educated, moderate, progressive" men who've gone home to become the nastiest of third world despots.) He's got the million dollar sound bite in the articles: "My mother always said democracy was the best revenge."

And of course, "what, exactly, had happened" isn't clear at all. The police prevented the autopsy, the husband prevented the autopsy and said so, the autopsy couldn't have been prevented through normal channels except by a judge's order. Bhutto died because she was shot. Bhutto died of shrapnel from a bomb, even though everyone else in her bombproof car lived. Bhutto died because she ducked back down, through the sunroof, into her car and hit her head on the sunroof latch. The video shows her scarf and hair moving, clearly because of bullets. She had a wound on her head, with bone fragments, indicating X. (Plug in your favorite theory! It's forensics mad libs in the heart of Pakistan!) She was killed in an area of heavy ISI control. She was killed because she had uncovered a plan by the ISI to commit election fraud and was about to turn the information over to US diplomats. Her top security advisor has links to UBL. Oh my.

Reading this in an internet cafe, days after it happened, while the guy at the computer next to me watches porn and shifts uncomfortably in his seat... it makes me feel like I'm missing out on something. What does it matter when I know, how easily I can check multiple news sources? Nothing larger than personal interest, I suppose. At home, my desktop RSS feed would've blared the news within a minute of the CNN or BBC running it. Here, I'm in the dark, knees up to my chin in a bus with 50 other people, blissfully ignorant of the fact that Bhutto is dead, that the FARC hand-off has been delayed, that Kenya is bubbling with violence, that Britney's uterus has prolapsed. (Maybe not the last one, though I'd have to check TMZ to be sure.)

Honduras, El Salvador, Belize

I'm in southern Belize right now. English is the official language, but it's this sort of odd pidgin/creole/Caribbean mess. I love it.

In the past few days, I've moved from Managua to Granada, Nicaragua, where I climbed around a volcano in an absolutely grueling 2.5 hour hike and did some language tutoring for a few hours. Then, from Granada up into southern Honduras, crossing the deserted border at night, getting stuck in a nearby town for the night. The next morning, I left for Perquin, El Salvador, where there's a museum of the FMLN struggle against the government there. One of the museum guides was an FMLN soldier and bomb-maker. Despite him not speaking a word of English, we made some obscure jokes about various weapons captured from the government forces, which ones came from the US, how the communication system was setup, the helicopters they shot down with a SAMs and .50 caliber machine guns, etc. From Perquin, I moved up through Honduras, taking five different buses in one day, ending up at a tiny port town in Guatamela called Puerto Barrios. An hour on a boat this morning put me here, in Punta Gorda, Belize.

The buses leave early here and I've had some pitifully non-vactiony mornings. 5:15a one morning, 4:45a the next. I'm eager to sleep in.

Managua, Nicaragua

Alden caught a taxi to the airport Sunday at 5:30a and I promptly fell back asleep. By the time I woke up, it was 10a and I had missed all direct buses to Managua, Nicaragua. I didn`t want to go to Managua, exactly, but rather the nearby Granada which has a very active volcano.

Thanks to my late date with Queen Mab, I instead had to catch a bus to the border at Peñas Blancas, cross the very strange, large border at night, and then catch a chicken bus onward to Managua. In the end, it was less than half the price that the direct bus would have been. Of course, I arrived here in Managua at 10p, with most shops closed, the streets mostly deserted, and a friendly reminder from one of the bus passengers to be very careful with taxis in Managua as the drivers are thieves who will rob me. Lovely.

I slept at a dive hotel near the bus station the first night. The next day, I called my friend Cecilia. She and I were housemates in San Francisco for a short while and when I sent out the email about this trip, she replied that she'd be in Managua the same time I would. I've spent the last two nights at her sister's house, in their guest room. Her sister, Norma, is a nacatamale maker of some local renown. Nacatamales are tamales 3-5x larger than in the US, stuffed not with a bit of shredded beef or pork or chicken, but with herbs and pork still on the bone and vegetables, with the whole thing wrapped in a banana leaf. In the afternoons, Cecilia has been going over Spanish grammar with me. She speaks English, French, and German, with Spanish as her first language, and has been a Spanish teacher in the US for years.

It's a lucky situation for me.

Managua itself is uninteresting to me. "It lacks personality," Cecilia said, and I agree. It's a sprawling, dusty, dirty, hot Latin American city. There's interesting stuff here, if you dig, like a cinema that plays independent/art-house movies once or twice a week and the university area, but overall it bores me: "If you've seen one, you've seen them all."

Down in the center of town, which was wrecked by an earthquake in 1972 and hasn't been fully restored, there's an area full of statues, monuments, important cultural centers, etc. It has an old cathedral which is crumbling, structurally unstable, and off-limits to the public. Near there, there are two things that were pretty interesting to me.

The first is a huge bronze statue of a man holding a pick-axe and hoisting an AK-47 in the other hand. There's a Sandinista flag flying from the assault rifle and the placard below says, "Workers and peasant farmers onward 'til the end." The other, about 500m away, is in Parque de la Paz, where weapons were collected when the Sandinista/Contra conflict ended. The park has a burnt-out tank "melted" into the concrete below it and hundreds of rifle barrels stick out from the walls.

It's Wednesday the 26th as I write this. This afternoon, I'm going to leave Managua for my original destination: Granada. I want to have a look-see at the volcano near there before heading further north, through the corner of Honduras, to Perquin in El Salvador. From there, I want to move north again to a small town in southern Belize for a few days before my flight back from Guatemala City. ("Guate," as the locals call it.)

It`s hot in Central America, but it`s not 451 degrees.

A few days before I left on this trip, my friend Tracee loaned me a copy of Ben Fountain`s short story compilation entitled "Brief Encounters with Che Guevara." It seemed apropos to the trip so I decided to bring it as my reading material.

Fortunately, it was a lovely read. Unfortunately, I was done with it in a few days. The stories involve overseas locales of particular interest to me, including Colombia, Haiti, Sierra Leone, and Myanmar. (I haven`t visited the last two, though I`d very much like to.) I was reading the book`s story about an American ornithologist kidnapped by FARC in Colombia as I was on a bus slouching toward that very country. (Of course, that added to the gravitas of where we were going.)

Fountain has visited Haiti some 30 odd times and many of the short stories take place there. The stories were a real deight as they mentioned many little tidbits that I brushed against while I was there a few months ago: RAM playing Thursday nights at the Oloffson, the Macoutes and their wall of murder victim photos, the ghosts of the Special Forces ODAs that were spread throughout the countryside, voodoo shrines, Preval, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Naïve movement paintings, etc.

Done with the Fountain book, I started looking for book exchanges or bookstores with English language books. On the shelf at a German-run bistro in Cartagena, I found one that looked interesting. It`s titled "SOURCES: An anthology of contemporary materials useful for preserving personal sanity while braving the great technological wilderness." It was published in 1972 and its editor, the cover proclaims, is one Theodore Roszak, "the author of `The Making of a Counter Culture.`" I was at first reminded of something one of my philosophy professors in San Francisco, Jacob Needleman, said about that era: "In the 60s in San Francisco, you couldn`t throw a brick out a window without hitting a guru." (Is that line cribbed from "The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test"?)

Still, the author list looked interesting. There was a lot of stuff I`ve already read or been exposed to (Mencius, Thomas Merton, Pablo Neruda, Martin Buber), some stuff I`ve heard about but hadn`t read (Carlos Casteneda, Alan Watts) and then a ton of random other stuff including things about Drop City, Colorado (hippie commune obsessed with geodesic domes, just like every other commune of the era that bumped into Buckminster Fuller), essays from MANAS, Norman O. Brown, R. D. Laing, etc.

I didn´t want to give up Tracee`s book in trade, since it would be expensive to replace in the US, so I went to a store and picked up a copy of "Grapes of Wrath" for USD$4 or so and swapped that.

After about a week, and maybe 10-15 of the essays, I was sick of it. So many words, so little content. A stark reminder of all the loony characters of my youth in the "New Age" movement who, looking back, were fascinated by anything which confused them, taking it as axiomatic that anything non sense, without sense, was really a profound wisdom just beyond their grasp.

Forward, onward. I found the trip`s third book at a shop in San Jose, Costa Rica. Mora Books is the name. It`s tucked away on the second floor of a modern style shopping center near the town`s central market area. It`s run by a bunch of bilingually chatty, long-haired counter culture types who read sci-fi and DJ jazz records on weeknights. Like all the best used book stores, the aisles are avalance hazards. You have to turn sideways to make your way from "Classics" to "Harlequin Romances." The bathroom is so full of boxes of still more books that you have to sit on the toilet seat sideways and then worry that the precariously balanced top boxes might end your life right there, leaving you like Elvis or George II.

It took an hour to sort through all the "airport best-seller" thrillers and random junk from the last four decades. I finally settled on Erica Jong`s "Fear of Flying" for USD$2. I knew little about her or the book, save some tidbits from a Salon interview I read years ago which mentioned her famous (at least in some circles) "zipless fuck."

The book has been absolutely delightful, although now I have to find a fourth book to read. It reminds me a lot of Henry Miller`s "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn," but with more shit (literally, and that`s a strong statement as Miller doesn`t shy from the subject), slightly less sex (ibid), and more pedantic snobbery (reminding me of Umberto Eco) in place of Miller`s more refined critiques of the human condition. Still -- absolutely excellent.

I need to find another book exchange that has something more than Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Stephen King, and Robert Ludlum. The bar has been raised.

La Costa Rica

The story is the same. All day on a bus, arrive late, some hassle finding a place to stay, ending up in a slightly peculiar hotel or hostel. This time, it was a hostel called Galileo in the La Sabana area of San Jose, Costa Rica´s capital. The rooms are about six feet wide, four feet of which is a bunk bed. Bathrooms are shared and are about twice the size of each bedroom. There`re "Smoking of Marijuana is Prohibited" signs on every flat surface but the place reeks of pot almost constantly. Reception has a wall of 50+ travel books in Hebrew, the billboard is covered in Hebrew notes, there`re Hebrew placards on walls. I asked if the owners were Israeli and was told that the owners and all workers are Colombian, but that 85% of their guests are Israeli. I guess Galileo is more highly recommended in the Hebrew guide books than the English ones.

After the first night, we got in contact with a family friend named Richard who lives in the hills outside the city. He has a small guest house that he has setup as a studio for his rolfing work and he offered to let us stay there for the few days we`d be in San Jose. A warm shower, a comfortable futon mattress, safety, and best of all, free. We set up camp there and then went back down into the city center to stroll around. For a country with legal 18+ prostitution, an unbelievably huge problem with under age sex tourism, descriptions by locals as "a city of whores," and guide book admonitions like "be careful -- any friendly woman you meet may be a hooker!" -- I was expecting more. San Jose feels like any other large Latin American city. If it`s really "overrun with whores" or whatever, either it`s fairly well confined to the red light districts or I just don`t know what real Costa Rican hookers look like. It`s possible, I think, that with it legalized, there`s less need for all the pageantry of electric blue eye-liner and fishnet thigh-highs. Maybe legalized prostitution means there`s something for everyone and they have a bell curve with standard deviations leaving you with a lot of average, rather mousy hookers that I see but don`t notice and only a few real outliers in micro-minis and 6" fuck-me pumps.

Alden was eager to see some nature the next day and I didn`t mind the idea. We talked about it as we wandered the city, eventually settling on Monteverde.

Monteverde is a very small town up in the hills somewhat close to San Jose, at the edge of a cloud forest area. Originally founded by Quakers (Friends) and still pretty heavy with their influence (schools, libraries, etc). It seemed chock full of interesting "nature stuff." A 5a wake-up got us down to the city and on to a bus leaving at 6:30a and we were in Monteverde by noon.

That afternoon, we hiked up to a tree with a French man named Phillippe and an American woman named Erin. "The tree" was highly recommended by one of the hostel owners. It was a very large tree which was completely wrapped by a strangler vine which eventually killed the tree inside. The vine is thick and strong, a "wood" itself, and the end result is that the lattice work of the vine which surrounded the tree remains while the inside of it, where the tree was, is completely empty. It forms a large tube, of sorts, soaring up into the canopy, which you can climb inside of and then climb up to the top of. I was the first one in, climbing barefoot and hoping spiders and snakes wouldn`t bite my toes. It took about ten minutes to climb the sixty feet or so up to the top, the tube opening up onto large branches where it was possible to stand and look out over the valley and town below. All four of us were eventually at the top, marvelling at how cool this was, birth canal jokes abound, looking down and remembering what the hostel owner said when he told us how to get to the tree: "If you fall, you`re DEFINITELY dead."

I have pictures which I hope will do justice to it.

We ended up spending the rest of our time in Monteverde with Phillippe and Erin. Erin turned out to be a photographer and screen printer on vacation from Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she works in a museum. Cool, casual, a seasoned world traveler. Phillippe lives outside Paris and works as a radio personality on a rock station, reviewing comic books, video games, and extreme sports. He`s a dynamo, bubbling with energy, babbling in English, Spanish, French, telling absurdly funny stories about "cafe con piernas" in Chile and why he has a pirate flag tattooed on his calf. (And his more serious side: we talked about Hakim Bey´s "TAZ," the sociopolitical side of anarchism, and Chomsky.) After the tree, the four of us on an hour-long guided tour at a "frog zoo," seeing 20 or so different species and learning about how some have poisonous glands filled with formic acid from eating ants and termites, and others (males) sing in chorus to attract a mate even though only one of them will get to do the deed.

From the "ranario" it was straight to a guided two-hour night hike through the cloud forest area. (Yes, we were hemorrhaging money to do all this stuff, minus the free strangler vine tree.) With an apathetic guide and the world`s worst flashlight batteries, we saw a few beautiful orange and black tarantulas, a sloth with a baby (so far up in a tree that it looked like little more than a brownish smear), a couple of snakes, and some sleeping birds (unmoving, like indistinct, little puffy sponges on branches). I`m not sure what my expectations were going in, but I felt disappointed. I wasn`t expecting to come face to face with a jaguar, but a monkey or even a brightly colored exotic bird would´ve been nice.

The next morning, it was the four of us again, going up to an area setup as a zip-line tour of the cloud forest and canopy. This was really a lot of fun. They have 15 zip-lines setup in the jungle, through the trees, or over the top of the canopy. You wear rain suits, strap on a harness, and then fly past trees ("like broccoli," the guide book says) as you zip through the air on a half inch metal cable 1500 feet long, one leather-gloved hand on the line to add friction so you can slow down before you hit the tree at the end of the cable. The day also included a "Tarzan swing" (I have video of both my turn and Alden`s) and a walk across some large suspension bridges up over the canopy. I suspect all the photos will look like, "Oh, boy... more forest... green...leaves" and not capture what it`s like to stand in the middle of the rain forest, surrounded by fog, every cubic centimeter around you teeming with life.

We returned to San Jose that evening so we could sleep another night at Richard`s before Alden had to go to the airport at 5am Sunday morning to fly back to the States.

Panama

The flight to Panama was uneventful, save security confiscating my half-inch safety pins and breaking the half-inch mini-file off of my fingernail clippers. I`m not sure what they were thinking. I felt like grabbing the teeny, tiny blunt little nail file and assuming a fencing stance in front of the soldier and asking "Tiene miedo?" but that`s really never a good thing to joke about in airports.

 

I had read a number of immigration horror stories on the internet about entering Panama, especially from Colombia, but it was a breeze for us. Nobody asked about onward tickets to leave the country, a yellow fever vaccine, or for us to show sufficient US dollars to demonstrate "economic solvency." Nothing. I guess when you fly in on an absurdly priced Copa Airline flight, they just assume you`re not a bum planning to stay.

 

We arrived early in the day and headed in to Panama City with lodging as our first priority. We went first to Casco Viejo, the old city, and tried a place highly recommended in the guide book called Loca`s Castle. That none of the locals knew where it was should have been our first hint. When we finally found it, it had a sign hanging off the front that said it was closed for renovation and there were some old people staring out of the second story windows, watching us. We later found out that despite Lonely Planet saying it`s one of the best backpacking hostels in Panama City and has a lively bar, etc, the place has never been open. It is a retirement home, will become a hostel sometime in the future, but isn`t closed for remodeling, isn`t open, has never been open. I`m pretty upset that LP, whose information is always at least a year or two out of date for publishing, time between editions, etc, would think it was acceptable to take on faith that something would be open by the time the book was published and lie about it, making up some bogus review. I`m not the only one who wonders what kind of favors or cash the owners gave the LP writer.

 

With other, actually open, existing, hostels booked full, we ended up at a cheap hotel for USD$25 a night. USD, incidentally, is exactly how we paid. Panama stamps some of their own coins, for quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies, but they use US bills exclusively. They call the currency the "Balboa," but it`s all just older US printed bills. Alden was quite surprised by this, but a whole handful of countries do it, a handful of which are here in Central America.

 

We went and saw the Miraflores locks on the Panama Canal. Panama has a nicely executed tourist attraction there, with staggered ticket pricing, a gift shop (including canal earrings), multiple floors with decks to view the locks, a small theatre with a video offering a short history of the canal in multiple languages, a restaurant, snack carts, an announcer on the PA system giving a running commentary on the boats and more tidbits about the history in both English and Spanish, etc. Tour busses are lined up outside and the attraction seems to be as popular with the locals as with foreigners.

 

Unfortunately, it`s not so exciting to see. The lock system is big, sure, but it`s like any other lock system. The sizes of the boats that fit through it are impressive, but everything moves very slowly. We stayed for almost forty-five minutes and in that time, a very large boat moved approximately 200m closer to the entry to the first lock. That`s it. Nothing opened, nothing closed, nothing filled or drained. Amazingly, some people in the crowds clustered on the rooftop deck were holding video cameras in the air, filming what promises to be the most boring vacation footage ever. I pity their friends.

 

In the afternoon, we had lunch at a mediocre vegetarian restaurant and marvelled at the ridiculous sundries and junk at an East Indian import shop. Upstairs, they had a bunch of large animals carved in wood, many of which we couldn`t figure out. They a carved dog / rodent of unusual size which we were told was a rabbit. They had a more identifiable kangaroo that looked like it had a cow`s head and fingers from the Roswell autopsy.

 

After that, we went to the Albrook Mall and died in retail hell. The mall is 380,000 square meters (not feet) and seemed to have no end. We walked for hours, passing Zara and Diesel and Levis and a Abercrombie knock-off called Moose. The mall is so expansive that it has multiple instances of the same store. There were at least three of a local electronics chain, and two of another, spread out here and there. Kiosks sell donuts and ice cream and snow globes and digital photo printing and sunglasses and video games. There`s a multiplex cinema and a full-size supermarket. The primary food court, which ought not be confused with the multiple other ancillary food courts, was an enormous cavern surrounding a huge carousel. It had local fare, pizza, gelato, etc, but also a Burger King, Wendy`s, Dunkin Donuts, Baskin Robbins, Quizno`s, Subway, etc. To make all of this worse, the entire mall was crowded with Christmas shoppers. Huge throngs of people milled about, some stores had lines to get in to them, cell phones companies had sponsored huge Christmas tree displays with "sexy elves" girls in mini-skirts, a Santa display was set up charging USD$4 for pictures with a rotund white guy wearing a fake beard. It had a line. Kids were screaming, running, sleeping in strollers and their parent`s arms. People were toting so many bags they had to hold their arms out to their sides with bags staggered every inch or so up their forearms.

 

Alden bought some clothes. We bought a funny birthday gift for our friend Rachel. I tried to find fancy cell phone that I want to buy: HTC`s TyTN II. It`s USD$800 through an importer in the US and I`ve tried to find it in Sydney (no luck), Beijing (no luck), and now Panama (found it, but for USD$1030). I guess I might try in Costa Rica. Costa Rica is the most affluent country in the region, although Panama City is the richest single city.

 

That night we decided to head up to an archipelago called Bocas del Toro, near the Costa Rican border. Unfortunately, buses weren`t leaving until 8p the next night, so we got stuck in Panama City for another day. Breakfast, wandering the city, checking out of our hotel meant we had our backpacks with us and mobility was limited. The bus station is, of course, part of Albrook Mall! Right outside the mall, across a 25 meters of taxi lanes, there`s a bus terminal that`s probably a quarter mile long with hundreds of buses to every part of the country and transnational into Costa Rica.  It has a large food court full of Western fast food restaurants, rows and rows of shops, etc, and then nice little departure lounges where you wait for your bus to start boarding. It`s all done in the same style as the mall. We were exhausted from the previous day at the mall and didn`t want to walk around with backpacks, so we hit the cinema. I watched Beowulf (terrible, and with much more to the story than I remember reading in high school), and then Alden joined me to see a romantic comedy from the same people who did "There`s Something About Mary." (The small audience roared with laughter and giggles at a queef joke, but the subtitles were too fast and I missed what the word is in Spanish. Shucks. That`d have been a sterling addition to my blossoming Spanish vocabulary.)

 

We slept on the bus that night, a 9 or 10 hour journey that should`ve put us in to Almirante around 6a or 7a. Alden woke me up some time after 5a because the bus had stopped and the driver was announcing something. We were on the side of the road in the middle of the jungle. It was dark out. The bus had blown a fuel line and couldn`t continue. Other buses from the same company would come along eventually and we would transfer to one of those, space available. Over the next 20 minutes, the sun started to rise and a local colectivo bus pulled up behind us. I waded out into the throngs of mosquitoes (literally, I smashed one against the bridge of my nose and smeared blood everywhere) and got us two seats for USD$2 each on the already overly full bus for the last 45 minutes into Almirante.

 

From there it was twenty minutes on a speed boat to Isla Colon, the largest island of the archipelago and the location of the actual town of Bocas del Toro. The island is lovely, hot, sticky, touristy. Tanned white people in board shorts and hand-woven bracelets prowled the main drag, some with surf boards, some looking like they were nursing hang overs. There`s a popular hostel here called Mondo Taitu that has 80s night and cheap drinks and the like. Other bars do similar things, putting up flyers around town for Ladies Night or a Pajama Party. We only stayed for a day, visiting a "butterfly farm" which ended up being closed and a beautiful, deserted beach full of starfish that left both of us with copious bites from flies or sand fleas or something (?). Alden has probably 40+ spread out over her back, arms, legs, butt, etc, even areas that were covered by her tankini swimsuit.

 

The next day, we caught an early boat back across the water and up the river to Changuinola. From there, a mini-bus colectivo to the border, la frontera. Exiting Panama was easy and the actual border crossing is 120m or so walk across a large bridge spanning a river. The bridge used to be for trains, but people have nailed down two by sixes and two by eights onto the railroad ties. On the Costa Rican side, we had some hassle with showing proof of onward travel. (Alden has an e-ticket and we had to go to a nearby pharmacy with internet access and print off the confirmation page. Of course, they knew it was for a ticket for the border and gouged us for USD$3 to spend five minutes and print one page.) On the Tico side, a bus to Puerto Limon (where Columbus docked) and a transfer to San Jose put us here late last night.

 

We`re in San Jose now, about to go out and get breakfast, explore the city, etc.

Cockfighting in Cartagena

Our second to last night in Cartagena, I took Alden with me to a cockfight out in the new town area. On a side street, down a dirt tract lined with motorcycles, through a gate. USD$4 each got us entrance with numbered bracelets. Inside, men bustled about with a cool, casual "afternoon picnic" air that belied the fierce poultry violence to come. Out of a few hundred people, there were only three or four women, looking bored on the arms of boyfriends. We stood out, of course. Alden as a girl, both of us as the only foreigners in the place.

 

The whole event begs boxing analogies. Most people come only to watch and gamble, but those who want to compete bring their roosters with them. The chickens are already plucked/waxed/shaved from legs to butt, have a strip of shortened feathers along the back, and have had their neck feathers trimmed so that when their feathers stand on end, in a fight, the remaining head-feathers will flare out dramatically like a lion`s mane. Inside, each chicken is weighed in a little chicken-sling suspended from the ceiling, complete with chicken-leg-holes so they`re stable. Chickens who`re already checked in are put on display in cages under the roster board and men crowd around using some sort of chicken divination to decide which chicken, as they amble about, pecking at the floor, will be ready for a bit of the old ultra violence come match time.

 

How this chicken divination works is unclear and I found myself wondering, as I watched the crowd shift and shuffle for a better look at the contenders. Some, I imagine, is passed down through the generations, a men-only family secret of chicken pickin`. Others, I like to think, might be more scientific and have a secret, passworded spreadsheet of all chicken types, weights, pre-fight behavior, color, whatever. Maybe they feel the heads for bumps. "That chicken there," one man thinks, "looks kind of wise... like an Oriental master... that will deftly maneuver and use the other chicken`s momentum against it! Yeah, that chicken will be like water, my friend..." Like most gambling, it`s probably simple "feeling." Like most gambling, people`s "systems" are probably a crock of shit, a case of human tendency toward apophenia.

 

After display, and when the chickens are "waiting in the wings" (guffaw), their rear spurs are cut off and the legs wrapped with athletic tape. This is a careful, highly ritualistic process that involves at least a few men in focused concentration, surrounding the taper, watching every solemn wrap. With a good base of tape, a sharp spur is attached by first having its base dipped in hot wax, to make sure the fit and angle are absolutely prefect, and then having more tape wrapped around the top so it is secure. The artificial spurs are about an inch long, sharpened to a fine point, and made of... something. Coconut shell? Some kind of nut? Whatever it is appears organic.

 

In the ring, the two birds, bred from birth for this purpose, have their naked legs and hiney bits rubbed with what I think is wood alcohol, to make them furious. Their spurs are then coated in lime juice and the chickens are held out toward each other by their handlers, excitedly pecking at each other and getting appropriately riled up before being let loose on the arena floor.

 

What follows is a flurry of spikes and feathers, then blood, then bloody feathers and dripping, spraying blood, which culminates, many minutes later, with one bloody, battered chicken giving up and trying to run away from the other. The aggressor gives chase and cinches the win by knocking the now defenseless loser down, biting at its neck, killing it. The winner is held up proudly by its owner, the loser is carefully tossed out of the ring by an aide, blood dripping in a graceful arc, destined to become McNuggets. (Or, here, un plato de pollo con arroz.)

 

I took photos and video footage for anyone interested. Alden and I had ringside seats. Being the only whities, being ringside, the camera`s flash... it was no surprise that the next day, while looking at hats in a shop across town, one of the other customers exclaimed, "Oh! Hey! I saw you at the chicken fight! Last night! Yeah!"

Cartagena

Cartagena is a another Colombian town on the Caribbean coast. It´s far larger than Santa Marta and sprawls urban decay for kilometers in every direction. Traffic is a nightmare. Trash spills out into the streets. With its size, it`s less homogenous. The bus ride from the terminal on the outskirts to the òld city` area, on the coast, showed definite differences in socioeconomic levels. People in "favelas" to people driving BMWs and everything in between.

We`ve spent our time in Cartagena almost entirely in the old city area. Cartagena was part of the gold circuit, for ships from the old world to travel to the new world, load up on gold, murder some dark-skinned people, pull off some toe-nails, yadda yadda, and return triumphant to Europe. As such, it was a plump target for pirates and was under siege numerous times in its infancy. The `old city` is the walled off central area, right on the coast, which was the original city. Outside of those walls is the sprawl. Inside is a plethora of hotels, banks, hostels, street vendors, artisans, emerald shops, hookers, museums, restaurants, statues, and plazas.

There´s Cafe Havana, with rumba and West African Yoruba-inspired music and posters of famous Cubans floor to ceiling, serving delicious ropas viejas (`old clothes`) and Cuban sandwiches. There´s dusky-eyed beauty with dangerous cleavage working the bar at the marina. There´s a haggard old above-knee amputee sitting on the curb outside the popular hostel, asking for help. There´re salty old sea captains, drinking beer at noon, downing three cans in thirty minutes as they pitch boat trips to Panama to doe-eyed backpackers. Street vendors sell soap and straw hats and replacement blender blades and Harry Potter posters. Others hawk ladles made of polished coconut shell, beaded bracelets, fake Ray Ban sunglasses, and Botero knock-offs (both statues and paintings). In the plazas, people enjoy the shade to read, chat, or watch performers dance (before they pass around a hat).

We spent four nights in Cartagena, total. The first night was a bust as we arrived after dark and had little energy after finding a hostel. Since then we´ve spent a lot of time wandering the city, eaten some ice cream and schmootzy bakery gourmet (think the Mac laptop and Starbucks crowd in the States), visited the Inquisition Museum to look at the torture instruments, picked through the book exchange at a German bistro, and chatted with emerald sellers. On our last night, we went to a theatre and watched a subtitled version of ´Love in the Time of Cholera.´ Appropriate, I thought, since it takes place in Cartagena in the late 1800s and since I chatted with a painter in Santa Marta who did a very nice painting of Marquez. As much as I adore ´100 Years of Solitude,` I really disliked `Love in the Time of Cholera` when I read it while traveling in Afghanistan. While I enjoyed the little vignettes about other women, I found Florentino pitiful and Fermina insipid. I didn`t resonate with either. The movie wasn`t much better, except that it was over in two hours instead of being dragged out for days.

 

We blew a day in Cartagena trying to figure out how to get to Panama. Option 1 is to go overland to Turbo, Colombia, then on some boats around the Darien Gap to Puerto Obladia, Panama, a small town and military barracks juuuuust on the Panamanian side. From there, you have to fly to Panama City as there are no roads. The flights were booked for the entire month of December, so that options was out. I pushed for doing that route anyway and then taking Kuna boats up the coast, village to village, until we got to one with a road and a 4x4. Alden wasn´t hot on the idea, so we looked at other options. Option 2 is to take a sail boat from Cartagena to the San Blas Islands off of Panama, near Carti. USD$275 per person, really hit or miss options with boat captains. A charming young German guy, or a nice, rich Argentinian couple, or an old drunkard who was downing beer like nothing before noon (and whose beautiful daughter was tanning on the boat in a bra and denim micro-mini, seemingly sans her "ropa interior").

 

We didn`t meet the German until later, the Argentinian couples boat ended up being full, and we weren`t hot on the salty sea dog borracho and his lolita daughter. We ended up not doing the 3-5 day sailing trip and instead chose option 3: USD$284 for a one hour flight on Copa, straight from Cartagena to Panama.

 

Santa Marta, Part 2

Santa Marta is a resort town. It`s right on the beach, the Caribbean coast, replete with everything that goes with that: an ocean breeze, the smell of fish, kids splashing in the water while parents look on from the shore, a relaxed vibe, copious nightlife, `districts` that stay open late for strolling, outdoor cafes, mangy dogs sleeping in the afternoon sun.

We stayed for three days, most of the time being spent wandering around town rather aimlessly. We found a favorite pizza shop and figured out where the super market was to buy cheap bottled water, and enjoyed what was probably the cleanest hotel/hostel room yet.

On our last day there, we rented snorkeling gear and did a day-trip out to Parque Tayrona. A short bus ride and a rather steep national park entrance fee put us in the park, but we were still many kilometers from the beach we´d come to see. Ten minutes in a Jeep solved half of our problem, but the rest of the distance had to be covered on foot. It took 30-45 minutes to walk a muddy path through dense jungle foliage. (Alden was delighted to touch a grasshopper that was about four inches long.)

Once at the beach itself, the jungle gives way to a nicely tended grassy area with a grass hut information booth and a restaurant with a patio. The information booth has a grass roof, but it´s poured concrete, has a glass counter-top and flat-panel computer, and is manned by two cheery park officials in goofy `Native Indian` outfits. The restaurant is equally out of place. The staff are wearing all-white `Native` outfits, the food is 3-5x more expensive that stuff in town, and the bathrooms have lovely mid-century Mod fixtures with suspended glass bowls as sinks.

The whole place feels like Colombia poured a ton of money into it, probably so they could put it on brochures and say, `See? Look how nice our parks are! We`re eco-conscious!` I can`t imagine any other parks around the country are equally schmootzy, but I suppose it`s possible. There´s no denying that there`s money here. You don´t see it as much in Santa Marta as in Cartagena, but it´s definitely there.

The beach there looks like something off a postcard. Verdant jungle spilling up to the beach of the sand, palm trees silhouetted against the sky. White sand beaches extending out into the green surf, waves lapping the shore or, further out, crashing against the rocks and spraying high into the air. We walked up the beach for another 45 minutes to get to a safe swimming and snorkeling area, where a row of rocks out in the surf broke the current. In that area, the water ended up being far too sandy and muddy to see anything while snorkeling, but the waves and cool water were a nice change from the streets of Santa Marta.

From Santa Marta, we caught a four-hour bus to Cartagena, passing through Barranquilla for the second time on this trip.

A note on Editing

I`ve rigged this blog so that instead of logging into the blog site and writing posts there, I have a super-secret e-mail address which will automatically post to this blog anything that I send to it. (If the blog shows up with a post about Viagra or a charming Nigerian fellow who just needs a little help with escrow, that´s why.)

I think that`s pretty clever, on whole, but it does keep me from editing previous posts. For example, I`d like to go back and add that at the last `por rato` love hotel we stayed at, in Maracaibo, the front desk had a poster of the Statue of Liberty drowning in a sea of money, and next to the desk, in a large glass case, a mannequin bust with a lacy bra, a pair of six inch stripper pumps, and a thong over its missing head. All the items were for sale, just in case you needed a little something extra to spice up your visit. All were covered in a layer of dust.

And I typed `gonig` on a previous post. And I apparently have no idea how to spell Caribbean. (One R, two Bs...One R, two Bs...)

And I´m some kind of snobby pedant, to write a post about editing on a travel blog that ought to serve as a raw, unrefined, record of my trip as it is. As it was. (I poked around a stack of old books at a street stand here and found a copy of ´The Bhagavad Gita As It Is´ -- there´s no escaping the Hare Krishnas.)

Santa Marta, Colombia, Part 1

Well, we bungled that one. After an easy border crossing into Colombia and a lovely, cushy 'directo' bus to Santa Marta, we made our first big travel mistake. Somehow, either because I was asleep (remember 'cushy'?), or talking to Alden, or just deaf, we missed the Santa Marta stops and overshot the place by two hours (!), ending up in an industrial wasteland called Barranquilla. (It's mid-way between Santa Marta and Cartagena, where we plan to go in a few days.)

 

Oops. The bus ride back to Santa Marta cost us 10,000 pesos each and blew another two hours. We're in Santa Marta now and it's lovely, at least at night. It's a beach town and our hostel (Casa Familiar) is two short blocks from la playa. After all day in a taxi and on a bus, eating little more than crackers, food was the first priority here. Alden had a chicken plate, I had a hamburger and fries, we split a crepe stuffed with cheese and spinach and then an ice-cream popsicle to top it all off. (Our eyes were bigger than our stomachs, as it turned out.)

 

We're going to explore the city tomorrow and perhaps make a day trip to a nearby national park that's supposed to be quite stunning.

 

I think I'm gonig to like Colombia a lot.

Venezuela

The flight from Aruba to the Las Piedras airfield near Punto Fijo was uneventful. It was a 'miniature' plane (about 20 seats) and the lone flight attendant came around with miniature, half-sized bottles of lemonade.

 

At the Las Piedras airport, we really bent over on the exchange rate. Due to some series of unfortunate events involving the value of the US dollars and the Venezuelan Bolivar, the official rate of exchange is USD$1 = 2150 Bolviars or so. The black market rate, on the other hand, is USD$1 = 4400, 4800, even 5000+ Bolivars. Of course, we didn't know this until later.

 

We hopped a bus down to Coro that afternoon. Our first night in Coro was marked by bad Chinese food, a lot of raised eyebrows and blank stares when I tried the words for 'youth hostel,' and then ending up a dumpy hotel near the main road. The only redeeming feature there was that it had a TV and we watched back-to-back episodes of House with Spanish subtitles. (The intro music IS different outside the US, as the Wikipedia page says.)

 

The next day we hit an Internet cafe and bought the Western Venezuela and 'Carribbean Coast' Colombia chapters off the Lonely Planet website. It felt like a cop out, and like it put us in danger of ending up at every popular backpacker dive with a bunch of other white people, but it helps immensely to know where the bus terminal is, how long the rides are between major cities, roughly how much we should pay, where some affordable hotels are, etc. The chapters are available for individual purchase and are downloadable as PDF. It took almost two hours to get the cafe clerks to give us a discount on printing, copy the PDF to the main computer, print from Adobe into their Canon print spooler, etc, but it eventually worked.

 

With Lonely Planet in our back pocket, we quickly located a charming little hostel run by a Belgian couple with a beautiful 3-month old boy. It was called Casa Tun Tun ('Knock Knock') and was chock full of a South American version of the hippie-cum-circus performer. During the day, they wove bracelets and carved necklace pieces to sell in the market. At night, they had a drum circle and practiced juggling bowling pins. There was a unicycle in the corner.

 

We ate at a cafe on the nearby plaza that had jokes written all over the walls. I could only translate the simplest of them. (What did the elephant say to the naked man? 'How do you breath through that thing?!') Others must have been puns as they were simple to translate but made no sense without some larger picture.

 

The main strip of Coro, where we spent the first night, seemed like any noisy, rundown town that happens to spring up around a large thoroughfare. A mile or so away, however, at Casa Tun Tun and on the plaza, the city has a pleasant colonial feel. The streets are cobblestone, couples walk hand-in-hand, kids play, locals hawk handicrafts to visitors.

 

Alden wanted to get to a beach, so we left Coro after a second night and headed west to Maracaibo. On the bus ride, we tried to remember lines of poetry. Alden came up with 'Beware the Jabberwock, my son' and something about a man from Nantucket. I remembered a stanza that I used to be very fond of, years ago. 'The splendor falls on castle walls and snowy summits old in story. The long light shakes across the lake and wild cataracts leap in glory.' I don't remember the author. I think it might be Tennyson.

 

I don't have much to say about Maracaibo except that it's rich and has a McDonalds, a Wendy's, and a Hooters. There's a whiskey bar with the 'W' logo lifted straight from the hotel chain. There're gaudy Christmas decorations all over the place, many so large they block the sidewalk, forcing you into the street to skirt around them. It also took us four hours to find a room and we ended up another 'love hotel,' this time for 90,000 Bolivars -- our most expensive hotel yet.

 

We were up and out the door before 6a the next day, off to the bus stop to try to get a direct bus through to Santa Marta, Colombia. There either were no direct busses, or 6a wasn't nearly early enough. We ended up buying seats in a 'colectivo' (shared taxi) and crossed the border that way. There's a 36,000 Bolivar exit tax before the border. While we waited in line for our exit stamps from Venezuela (with tax receipts in hand), our car-mates got in line at the Colombian entry area, speeding up the second half of the border crossing.

 

I was pleased that it was one of the smoothest (albeit not quickest) border crossings I've had.

 

-------:: Tidbits

 

Gasoline is dirt cheap in Venezuela and it shows. The backbone of the non-bus transportation system is old Detroit iron. 60s and 70s American muscle cars are everywhere and I can't imagine any of the old rust buckets getting over 15 MPG, max. Novas, Chevettes, Malibus, Darts. Alden and I rode from Maracaibo to the Colombian border in an Impala. Oncoming traffic here looks like a chase scene from a late-60s police drama.

 

Like most of the poorer countries I've visited, the two lane road effectively becomes three or four lanes as necessary, with a honk, a flash of the headlights, and a momentary holding of the breath being the only things that keep cars from careening head-on into each other.

 

Approximately two weeks ago, the country voted on whether or not to pass a series of sweeping reforms championed by Chavez which would have further consolidated his power base. The vote failed and in the days following there've been student protests in Caracas, Chavez defending the reforms as being constitutional in the local papers, etc. The country also bears the market of the campaigning. City walls remain covered in nicely stencilled slogans. 'Vota 'Si!' con Chavez!' is more popular in the state of Falcon (where Coro is), whereas an outstretched 'stop' hand in the flag colors with 'No!' across the palm is more popular in Zulia (where Maracaibo is). At the time that the most recent Lonely Planet guide was written/published, Zulia was the only state in the country aganist the reforms.

 

There're also menacing graffiti slogans and large (formal) signs that say, 'Patria Socialismo... o muerte!' Yikes. I hope I'm misunderstanding the tone and meaning of that.

 

On December 9th, Venezuela did something akin to Daylight Saving's Time by rolling back all clocks by... HALF an hour.

Aruba

The first leg.

 

We spent a day in Aruba, including a USD$15 taxi ride, a USD$40 night at what would be called here a "por rato" hotel. A "love hotel," with constant comings and goings (haw haw) of our fellow hotel patrons all night long. I suppose those're the dangers of arriving somewhere at night and asking the customs official where you can find a "cheap hotel."

 

If you stay near the cruise ships and fancy hotels, Aruba looks every bit like the "island paradise" it's advertised to be. Fat white people, some pasty and some wrinkled by decades in the sun, tromp around, stepping into Baskin Robbins for a bite of ice cream between shopping at Salvatore Ferragamo, Louis Vuitton, or one of the hundreds of perfume specialty shops. The streets are clean, decorated. Quaint little bridges and fountains abound. The hotels in the area have grand, spiralling staircases. Everyone is dressed in a uniform that looks like something inspired by Dora the Explorer.

 

On the other hand, if you hop a public bus and cut across town away from the ritzy coast, it looks like anything but an "island paradise." 70% of buildings are unoccupied, in disrepair, slowly crumbly. The majority of the shops have bars on all windows. Graffiti covers the walls. People are walking not in Seven jeans, Gucci bags, Omega watches, but in flip-flops wearing through the bottom, ratty jeans or slacks.

 

We caught a short flight from Aruba to Las Piedras/Punto Fijo in Venezuela. USD$100 on Tiara Air, an Aruba airline. We're in Venezuela now and I couldn't be happier about it. Things feel like a known quantity. Things are affordable. I feel like I know "the game" here. It's such an enormous relief to be in Latin America and out of whatever sort of purgatory Aruba represents.

 

We're in Coro now, on our way to Maracaibo this afternoon. More later.

Unum.

I'm flying to Aruba on Wednesday, December 5th, and slipping south into Venezuela.

I'm flying home from Guatamela City on January 6th.

What happens in between is uncertain. I've added a link to a map of the region to the right-hand side of this page. I want to cover the whole distance overland, possibly with segments 'overwater' (but not overboard). I want to spend the entire month thinking about anything but school or medicine. (I'm now 12 months through PA school, with only ten weeks to go, once I return, before clinical rotations start.) I want to read some great books. I want to come back to Albuquerque speaking more Spanish. I want to come back without malaria or dengue.

I cut my hair into a fauxhawk. It's now shorter than my beard. The change has more to do with shampoo and combing than with any sort of allegory for my psyche, but the latter sure sounds sexier and more apropos for a first post on a travel blog.

Alden is joining me for the first half of the excursion. She's flying back to the States from San Jose, Costa Rica, shortly before Christmas. It's her first trip of 'this sort.' She's excited and I don't want to shatter that with the reality of diesel fumes, of diarrhea, of countless hours crammed into a bus, cradled against your anonymous, sweaty neighbor as if they were a lover.

Right now, the night before I leave, my thoughts aren't on the practical reality of military and police checkpoints, travel routes or border crossings. When I think "beautiful white powder," it's beaches, not checking the bottom of my bag for surreptitiously placed parcels of cocaine before I inadvertently become a mule. I'm thinking about how I loaded my MP3 player with Leonard Cohen and Neko Case and I'm imagining dusky-eyed Colombian girls dancing on beaches under the moon light ("...with the wind in their fists and the stars 'round their wrists..."). As absurd as that is, it's even more absurd that I'm imagining speaking Spanish with enough skill to add swagger to my language. (A verbal wink.) I'm smirking, leaning in, an apricot scarf around my neck, dropping a savvy, "Well, you know..." with a twinkle in my eye. Ridiculous. Delightful. I'm excited.

I hope there're challenges along the way, but I hope they don't involve bowels, being kidnapped by FARC/ELN/AUC, or mosquitoes. Other than those things, I'm game.