No Light, No Water, No Power + Guitars = Tijuana

By now most of you know that I am back in the belly of the beast...that beast would be the USA...yes, I have been re-eaten by it. I am in San Francisco for the moment...hanging out and resting up...having a vacation from my vacation as they say. It is strange to be back, a lot of culture shock on this re-entry...but more on that later. I wanted to fill in the blank spot between the gnarliness of my sick days in Guatemala and here, the healthy (more or less) days of San Francisco.

I left for the Aurora Airport in Guatemala City at 4 in the morning. Left Pedro Hermano Hostel happy to never see it again. My fever had backed off a bit but not completely. My gastro-intestinal gnarliness was just kicking into high gear it seemed. I flew up to Mexico City and spent my layover shuffling between men's rooms which are kept surprisingly spotless and nicely fragrant by small old men who I now have a much greater appreciation for. Shitter stalls in third world airports can be shady at best, but I will give Mexico City a 9.5 out of 10 in this department, and that really is a good grade. Anyway, my stomach was clearly in control of things at that point. It was not pretty. I got on the plane to Tijuana ready for a miserable few hours, but for whatever reason, my stomach relented, allowing for a decent flight.

I sat next to a guy called Rolando on that flight. I tell you what, I met at least one interesting person on each leg of this long journey and I must say that Rolando was one of the raddest. Full on stories of robbery and violence on the streets of Mexico City; sex, drugs and rock and roll. He was on the way to Tijuana to "pick something up" to "take back to the family" in El Distrito Federal. He wanted to be friends for life, this he told me, but I couldn't help but get the feeling that this guy was already operating on the dark side of the force. When we arrived in Tijuana he suggested that we share a cab and that I stay at the same hotel as him. I declined and dodged my way out of what I perceived to be a shortcut into the Mexican Border Holding Cells...only later to wonder if it wouldn't have been better to go with him.

I ended up cabbing to the center of Tijuana and found a hotel. My first thought in Tijuana was this, "Why the hell do the gringos call the place Tee-ah-wanna?" More specifically, where is the 'ah' consonant coming from. Everything in spanish is pronounced exactly as it reads...so if there were an 'ah' in there, the city would be spelled, Tiajuana. But it's Tijuana. So WTF? I was fevered...not a big deal, but wtf.

My second thought there in Tijuana was, "Man this place really is a craphole!" Ha ha! No joke there! From all you hear about the place, it sounds like quite a destination, but it isn't...not for much more than cheap tourist panchos and sombreros and hookers and donkey shows. I was there for none of these reasons, so I didn't need to kill much time there to be done with it. I did manage to get dueced there, which is something I think you need to experience if you want to really be able to say that you have experienced Mexico...it is a funny story, that goes something like this:

I get from the airport to my hotel by taxi. It was driven by a young Mexican guy who had lived in San Diego and worked at a Radio Shack. He had been deported, so he was none too enthusiastic about the aforementioned beast of America. That may have factored in to the recommendation he gave me for a place to stay. There is no such thing as cheap accomadation there...unless you want to listen to dudes pounding hookers all through the night. Those 'Love Hotels' are not unique to Mexico, but the security in them is remarkably low, not to mention the company and ambiance issues. So this guy recommended a hotel that cost 30 dollars a night, which to my South American sense of lodging seemed like a lot. But he said it was a safe place and as comfortable as anything. When I got there there was a group of grim looking riff-raff in the driveway of the hotel. Grimacing and giving the newly arriving gringo the furry eyeball. When we got into the hotel I was given the option to see the room, which I waived like an idiot. I was just tired and my stomach was ready to empty again so I just wanted a place to land. The guy working there asked if I was gonna be there for one night or two, 'cause there was gonna be a discount for two nights. I said two, like an idiot, and he said if there was a problem he would refund my money the next day. Ok, cool. So he takes me up to show me the room after I payed and there's another group of riff-raff chillin' out in the hallway. They give me a smile that makes me think an attack is imminent. Ok...cool. We go in and the guy opens the curtains to let the light of early evening in. I ok the room and note that there is no TV like he told me. So he runs out to get the TV and comes jogging back a minute later with it. He plugs it in and then turns to me with a sheepish look on his face and says, "Ahh, so, right before you arrived, there was an accident and a car ran into a power pole and we have no light. But only for fifteen minutes!!" I grimace to myself and immediately do the latin american math. Fifteen minutes doesn't ever really mean fifteen minutes. Each country has its own conversion factor, and Mexico is one of the worst...so I'm figuring about an hour and a half.

I am starving at this point so I go to test the lock on the door and then I do my best to stash my pack and belongings because an infant could sneeze and the lock would give. Again I curse to myself. I leave and hit the street and find a restaurant to get something to eat to go. I get chili rellenos with rice and beans and some sort of beef soup and I cruise back to the hotel room. The power is still not on so I eat in the last of the light that is faintly streaming in through the curtains. My hands and face ended up with beans and cheese all over them so I go to wash them in the sink and oh! whaddaya know, there's no water!! Ha ha! Great. No light, no power, no water. And I am standing there in the dark with beans on my face and my gastro-intestinal beast is starting to revolt. Not a good thing. Funny, but not so funny.

I ended up laying down and falling asleep with my pocket knife open by my pillow. Riff-raff caroused in the hallway for most of the night and a couple times it seemed like they were burrowing through the wall. In the morning I awoke in the pitch black and tested the light switch...nothing. Of course. I had greatly underestimated the Mexican Conversion Factor!!! No light, no power, and still no way to wash the chili rellenos off my hands!! That was when I decided that I would only be staying there for one night. In the gray early light filtering, once again, through the curtains, I did the old 'final pack in Latin America before the crossing the American Border' operation. Then I went to try to get my money back...

This, too, was comedy, and I was silently resigned to fail at it. The Mexicans have a quiet way of enduring the blah blah blah of the gringos, and as I pried at this guy to get my down payment back for the night I wasn't going to stay, I watched from behind my own eyes as he just smiled and nodded. He said that the money from the day before was already gone and that there were no other employees to go get it. The owner wasn't around and he couldn't call anyone. Because he, himself, was poor, he couldn't give me the money out of his pocket and there was no one to borrow it from. He was happy to give me credit to stay there again later, but I had, and still have, no intention of going there again. He said I could wait until more customers came and payed and then he would give me my money. I came and went a few times throughout the morning and no one showed up. I know he never had any intention of giving me that money. I knew the whole time that I was screwed but I had to try. I told him that I thought it was bullshit and that I had payed for the night before only to sleep in a cave with no light or water...he just nodded and agreed that it was messed up. It was pretty funny. Like we were playing this game that we both already knew the outcome of. So I left without my money and in place of it I took a handwritten business card with two nights of credit on it. Super.

The best part of Tijuana, aside from leaving it, was guitar shopping. I went to a few different shops and ended up in one with a hilarious group of guys who were sitting around singing and playing charangos and guitars. I wanted to buy a handmade mini nylon string acoustic guitar. They had four in the store, and true to their nature, each one played completely differently from the others. I played all four for over an hour and chose the one that I liked. The one I got was from Michoaca, a beautiful golden brown nugget of musical love. After leaving I slung it over my shoulder with my beautifully packed backpack and headed for the border.

I arrived on foot expecting the worst...based on what I had heard traveling around and reading about it. I figured that since we have this huge border issue and immigration debate that it would be a tough place to get through. I was ready to take my pack apart and explain every little trinket that I had. I was ready to undergo interrogation about where I had traveled and who I had been with. And it was all for not. I didn't even stand in line!! It was the fastest customs crossing I have ever had! I walked right up to the guy and he looked at my passport and asked me if I had bought anything. I hoisted the guitar and he grunted at it and let me pass. I walked to the x-ray machine and put my bag on it and it passed through and no one said anything so I picked it up and suddenly realized that I was once again in America! Wow. That was it. There I was, with nothing left to do.

I wasn't ready to stop speaking spanish yet so I changed money and talked to that lady in spanish. I got on the trolley that goes into downtown San Diego and talked to people on there in spanish. After an extensive search for lodging I resigned myself to paying $85 for a room in a Motel 6, and talked to the people there in spanish. I ate at a diner with a Mexican waitress and we spoke spanish. That was nice. The next day I slept in and then took a shuttle to the airport with a Guatemalan driver. I took a flight up to San Francisco and here I am. That was over a week ago now...and here I am...adjusting. More on that later...I just wanted to get the Tijuana chapter written.

A Cornucopia Of Sicknesses, Bus Adventures And Guatemalan Fever

Lately God and The Baby Jesus have been upset with Mateo Del Norte. He doesn't know why that is, but it certainly seems to be so. He must have done something bad in the last little while and is reaping the whirlwind. Or maybe it's just bad luck. He had really good luck for a while there, so why not a downturn? Or, to use the words of our wonderful and oh-so capable president, "It isn't a recession...it's a slowdown." (What is the dollar at now? $1.60 with the Euro? Good goin' douchebag...) So maybe that's it, maybe Mateo is in a good luck 'slowdown'. Or maybe it's just the way things go. Whatever it is, the last few weeks have been filled with a lot of gnarliness of various kinds. I'm not going to go into that much of it, because it sucks to listen to people whine, but intertwined with the rest of the story, I think it makes for some good humor. (Better in retrospect, like so many things...)

So a couple days before leaving on my secret mission (it will be understood why this is, for the moment, secret.), which you will read about soon, once I get the blog written, (it will appear before this entry chronologically) I started feeling funny and realized I was coming down with something funky. I ran around looking for preventative stuff in San Jose, but despite the American Occupation, there is not yet any sign of Echinacea, an Airborne-type thing, or any good asian tea. So I took some vitamin C but that didn't help fend off the bug for long. On the morning that I left for the secret mission my nostrils felt like someone had lit sparklers inside of them, and my throat was raw. Dammit. Not fun to travel like that. Never-the-less, I sucked it up and enjoyed the secret mission. By the time I was back in Costa Rica, my cold was in full effect and I was a walking ball of mucus. Sounds gross right? It was. But, the thing that made me feel better about it, or less guilty about spreading my germs, was the fact that all of Central America is sick right now...then and now! Everyone is sniffling and coughing.

I got back to San Jose to a rainstorm at about one in the afternoon. The airport bus I was on took the longest route possible back to the city. I made it to the hostel to get my bag and then killed some time until my bus left at 3:00 AM in the morning! Not a good time of day. In the evening, I snuck back into the hostel and I tried to crash in the basement but the Sri Lanki guy who works there caught me and gave me hell. No sleep at all. Getting ready to leave the hostel I met this French girl who would become my travel homie. Veronique was her name and she was taking the same busride. So at 2:00 AM we cabbed to the station and waited to get on the bus. This busride was to be a doozy. A twenty two hour ride up to San Salvador. I slept for a little while in the night, and I must admit that the ride was pretty smooth. We watched another load of sorta bad movies, and they served us some not too terrible food. In Honduras the police stopped us and more or less took apart the bus. They boarded with screwdrivers and other tools and took the bathroom apart. Literally, piece by piece. Looking for drugs. It took almost two hours, which put us back two hours on the schedule, which put us two hours longer on the bus. That sucked, even though it was interesting to see the dismantling of a bus. Luckily we had no drugs...Honduras didn't seem like a great place to go to prison.

The plan was to arrive in San Salvador, sleep for a few hours, and then continue on another 7 hours to Guatemala City. They assured us rooms to sleep in in a hotel, but, of course, when we arrived at said hotel, there was one room left for me and Veronique and this Argentinian dude we had buddied up with. We had to share beds there beneath the roar of the box fan rocking to keep us from sweltering. It all didn't matter much because we had less than four hours to sleep. Back on the bus before the sun came up and then onwards to Guatemala.

We got there and my cold was raging from lack of sleep. My first plan there was to get some sleep. I made it to the hostel and did just that. My idea for the following few days was to go to Antigua, the cultural and historical center of Guatemalan Colonialism. Well, I woke up that morning, with the first of the next two parts of the trifecta of misery alive in my body...fever. Man, did that hurt. I am actually pretty sure that I had dengue fever which they call 'break bone fever'. My whole body ached. You know the kind of fever where your armhair hurts? I was sweating and yet completely cold. I got on the bus and rode up to Antigua and after not too long looking around, I crashed into my concave hostel bed and slept 16 hours! That was good, but when I woke up that day, I had the third part of the trilogy; the stomach gnar. Gastrointestinal disaster. So now the cold was still in effect, affecting my nose and I had this raging cough which made the headache from the fever feel worse than I could imagine...my bones and muscles still ached and I was still sweating cold, but know I had sharp pains in my stomach and intestines and I couldn't eat much without a lot of penitence.

That day I took some pills which helped a bit and I looked around some more. I like Antigua, it is a bit like Cusco or Bogota or Quito, with old walls and stone streets and mountains all around. That said, I think it was my least favorite of the four. It is very touristy and gringofied. That was good in my case, because there were things there I could use against my sicknesses that would not have been present otherwise, but on a cultural level, it is compromised. It is still a nice place, don't get me wrong, but it has been seriously 'discovered' if that makes sense. After a couple days there, I headed back to Guatemala City, which is truly a juggernaut of Central American Metropolises. Set down in a valley, the sprawl of the city is massive, and the pollution is almost unfathomable. The air-quality here on a bad day makes Los Angeles look like the pure heights of the Rocky Mountains.

Guatemala has a history and reputation of violence that is varied and disturbing. All travelers know to take care when walking wilderness trails in Guatemala, and when crossing borders with the neighboring countries. But most Guatemalans will tell you that the most dangerous places are in the capital itself. There are streets in the best areas there where a gringo could be robbed just for walking by. You don't wear jewelry of any sort, you don't carry your passport or your credit cards, and you certainly don't carry much cash around. There is a line from a song about Guatemala, written by a band I used to like called LSD. "They shoot the children...down in Guatemala City." That line was in my head as we neared the place and I was interested to see what I felt about it when I got there. After a number of days there, I can say that it would be no surprise at all to hear of that happening. Children being dispatched for a variety of reasons by a variety of people. And certainly during the dark days of the supposed 'integration' of the Mayan indigenous people, this would have happened regularly. It is a violent place among violent places.

That said, the Guatemalans that I met were all very nice and liked to chat about things, of all sorts. My hosts at the hostel I stayed at in the capital where really good people. It's that way pretty much all the time. Everywhere has nice people and some assholes. Violent countries, peaceful countries, big countries, little countries, all are comprised of people; and people, the world around, are pretty much the same despite their differences. Good, bad and everything in between. Lots of shades of gray...

Cloud Forests, Lazy Beaches, Beans, Rice And Lots Of White People= Costa Rica

It is a time of buses. A lot of bus time. Mateo Del Bus has recommenced as commander of this voyage.

I left Panamá city days ago now, on a Tica Bus bound for San Jose, Costa Rica. The first thing that happened on that bus was an experience that not many can say they have had...I am truly a lucky man. We crossed the Canal of Panamá...watching the teeny-bopper movie Bring It On: In It To Win It. And what a cinematic gem that is!! Not only am I lucky to have seen that masterpeice, but I got to watch it while the Panamá Canal rolled gently beneath us on the bus! It's a wonder that cheerleading and major, world changing nautical shipping channels have never been brought together in harmony before! Lucky, lucky me.

We watched a number of terrible movies on that bus ride. It lasted for 17 hours so you can probably imagine. We stopped for awhile at the customs point and milled about waiting for the usual mysterious and nonsensical Mundo Latino process to work its magic. Once cleared to enter Costa Rica, we re-boarded the bus and were promptly given plastic bowls of red beans and rice. Sounds crappy, but I can't tell you how happy I am to be in the land of the bean once again!! I love Mexican and El Salvadorean food and I have really missed it down south of the equator. For me, even a bowl of just beans and rice is a pleasure. 'How can that be chefboy?' You might ask. Well, they're just good. That is the answer. Defying the corriente principal is what Mateo seems to be about. Michael Shanti said, "Red beans and rice, red beans and rice, red beans and rice I could eat a bowl twice..." and I agree with him.

I got to the capital of San Jose at about two in the morning...dozing and in need of a leg stretching session. I got a cab to the hostel with an older pair of germans. They were nice; they wore matching clothes. I think that is cute amongst older couples even though it is annoying and makes you want to punch them in the windpipe. My first sign of what Costa Rica is like was in the form of the reception guy at the hostel. He was a middle eastern fellow, quite nice, who speaks almost no spanish at all. And he doesn't really need to because everyone around here speaks some english. It is a trip. After getting around a little bit here in Costa Rica, I have decided that we should just go ahead, attack the place militarily, and take it over as a new state. We haven't taken any new states in a while, and this one would be real easy seeing as most of the cultural work seems to already be done. I haven't been everywhere, but the places I have been in have been filled with gringos and their music, style, language, coffee, food and chain stores. The invasion is halfway completed anyway!!! For only a couple billion dollars of military budget money we could get this job done! Then the gringos could take out more of their spanish language frustrations on the locals of their own country, in the fifty first state!!! "Because in America we speak english dammit! Yeah, you maybe used to be a spanish speaking country, but now you belong to us so let's just get over it shall we? Maybe sometimes we whitey's will amuse ourselves by flailing through a half assed attempt at spanish, but if we do try it, it's a gift to you people!! And you should be thankful!! We took your asses over!!! Ha ha!"

Oh now I'm just being silly. Right? I am not sure. Seems like that mentality is already here. I surely have overheard at least as much english as spanish, and yes, that is because of where I am staying and traveling to an extent, but there is something more, I tell you. And it has been confirmed by the Costa Ricans I have spoken at length with. (In Spanish) They have Wendy's here. They have GAP. They have almost all the companies that we have, and then their own too. You can buy any American name brand products in the stores and ATMs give out American dollars in addition to Colones. It isn't a very big country, but the whities are everywhere in it. I am sure that America would be ok with another small-ish state. I guess the problem would be that it is full of people who many would mistake for immigrants. Maybe we would even kick them out of Costa Rica. Make them move to Nicaragua or Honduras or Mexico. After all, for most of our countrymen, all and any latinos could be Mexicans right? They all wanna speak spanish and they all want our jobs!!! They must right? Why else would they be trying to get into America. And if we annexed Costa Rica as a state, they would all of the sudden be in America, and just imagine the immigration logistics problems with that!! Oh man, those poor, white, rascist, southern republicans would be writhing with fear and fury! Imagine how those Costa Ricans might vote!! More goddamn liberals!! It would cause quite a stir. And so for their sakes, maybe we outta just leave it, and exploit it, as is. There's enough hippy/gringo infrastructure here to supply all the American-ness these tourists want and need anyway. And one can only imagine there will be more to come.

And the interest in Costa Rica is with good reason. For those who haven't thought about the meaning of the name of the country, it means, 'Rich Coast'. And that it has. It has the most species of plant life of any country in the world. For it's size it has the most animal variety as well. The variety of landscapes here is incredible. From beautiful beaches with some of the world's best scuba diving, to the highland cloud forests and rain forests that team with life of all kinds, this place is chock full of abundance.

I spent the last few days up in a couple places called Monteverde and Santa Elena. It is close to some very unique forests that are called 'bosques nubosos' or 'cloud forests'. These differ in many ways from the rain forests that are found here in lower altitudes. A combination of currents and mountain configurations cause the condensating air to rise and hold the forests at the top of the mountain range in a world of clouds. As a result, a whole microclimate is formed with amazing things to see inside of it. There are many adventure sports in the area, from bungee jumping to zip-lining to the partially famous Tarzan Swing. I toured the 'canopy' of the forest the first day I was there and saw a lot of birds and plants that were really intersting. There are so many kinds of trees there. My favorite was a type that strangles the huge trees that grow in the forest. After many years, the stranglers live off the moist lifeblood of the host tree and the host tree dies and decomposes, leaving the exoskeleton of the strangler. We climbed probably fifteen meters up inside of one of these stranglers, as if it were a ladder. It was completely cylindrical and a lot like a vertical tunnel. Cool. We walked all through the branches of the forest on bridges that had been built to facilitate the viewing of the ecosystem. It was impressive.

The next morning I was up at five and headed to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve to scout around for the day. I ended up in a group with a great guide named Andreas. He was a young guy, but a bird fanatic and a huge geek for leaves and plants. If you've never been around birding people, it's something you have to see to believe. It is pretty dorky, but in a good way. They have a complete lingo for the viewing of birds and birds themselves and all their habits, and the bird people's excitement is such that at times you'd think that God himself had flown down and perched him/herself on the branch of a nearby tree. They gasp and groan as though in some sort of orgasmic nirvana...and yet, they are simply watching birds flying around through binoculars. It is a thing to behold. I say this with love. I am not making fun, because it is rare in life to see people this excited about anything!!! Andreas was a complete nature badass. He used to shoot documentaries with National Geographic and he was a naturalist on numerous cruise ships. It cannot be overstated how much this guy knows. He is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge on everything in these forests. EVERYTHING!! I was amazed. He had a sense of humor to go along with his knowledge and his interest was infectious. I found myself grinning and giggling as I scampered this way and that to get a better look at a bunch of birds.

The variety here in Costa Rica can also not be overstated. We saw all sorts of things. But the biggy was the Quetzal. Now I don't know shit about 'birding', but it is said that the Quetzal is a very rare bird and that to see it is also quite rare. Bird connosieurs consider it a 'top three' bird and don't want to die without seeing it once in their lives. Usually, seeing one is a treat, but as luck would have it...we saw at least a dozen!!! Colorful and graceful, they were frolicking around the trees about 10 meters up for hours the morning we were there. We got to observe them through a powerful scope, and it got to the point where we were almost bored of them! (Exageration) I am sure the experience was wasted on me, even though I really enjoyed it. It would be like a person with no sense of smell drinking an '82 Lafitte Rothschild...what a waste.

I had spent close to seven hours on the bus getting up there, and luckily I had partied the night before going so I was tired and slept and drooled almost the whole way. On the way back I wasn't so lucky. It seemed as though the return bus trip took forever and a day. I was tired but couldn't sleep, and so I grooved to some tunes and watched the rain fall on the Costa Rican countryside. It smelled great. Inside the bus, not so much though. On the ride down I met a Texan girl who lives in New York and we had a fun time talking and drinking that night back in San Jose. She doesn't want to have her info be known on the internet so we'll call her Jessica and pretend that she is from Louisiana and lives in Connecticut. She lives and works in the corporate world and it was interesting for Mateo to exchange life ideas with her. More about that later. We explored the San Jose world of cow art, and walked the deserted nighttime streets, fending off the beggars and burglars into the wee hours. I will surely miss this traveling life. Always meeting cool people and exploring new environments. There is something to be said for security and familiarity, but for me the instability and chaos of the moving world is equally important. It is an ebb and flow I suppose...a pendulum of experience that swings back and forth. At this time the wave is carrying old Mateo Del Norte back into shore. I will be home in the USA in about two weeks, and for all that I will be giving up, I am happy at what I will gain as well. Good old San Francisco and a big little world of friends and music and food and life. But again, more on that later...

Footnote: There is a lot of sarcasm in this blog entry. Please don't confuse me for a close minded conservative. Thanks.

Smells Like New Orleans, More Hilarious Characters, And The Story Of How Mateo Took Someone's Mom To The Movies...

One night I am burrowing down into my bed under kilograms of weight in blankets, just trying to stay warm, and then the next night I am tossing and turning on a bed that has no blankets at all, trying to cool off beneath the roaring cieling fans of my hospedaje in Panama City. Once again it is hot as a bastard and the chill of the Andes doesn't seem so bad at all. (Or the fact that this hostel has showers with only cold water nobs!!)

I left Bogotá at 6 in the morning and enjoyed a very early morning cabride with the talker of all talkers. This cabbie was not just a talker either...he sang for me and played his dashboard as though it was a set of congos!! Talk about a bon vivant, this guy takes the cake. He talked with a raspy smoker's voice and had obviously weathered many years of fiestas and being completelemente borracho...sin duda! But it was the perfect way to exit Colombia. He drove very slowly down the highway that leads to the airport so that he could show me all the things that I 'probably missed' in my time in the central part of the city. (We got passed by everybody!!) These were things like newspaper offices, malls, movie cinemas and used car stores. I acted fascinated though, as he seemed to be showing them to me. He was so nationalistic how could I not want to go back! Colombia has the best weather, the best countryside and por supuesto; the best women!!! He assured me of that. He said that I needed a wife from either Bogotá or Cartagena because they are very hogarista...that's to say that the do a good job taking care of the home. Oh, and they make good mothers. Can you tell that the Women's Liberation Movement has yet to take ground in Colombia? Well, why was I leaving without my Colombian wife? I didn't have an answer for him on that one.

I flew across the border into Panamá and landed in late morning. A wave of hot, wet air hit me as I walked off the plane and into the tunnel. They use the dollar here so I stepped right into a cab and was in Casco Viejo with no delay. That is the old neighborhood of the city and it is a charming, if very run down, affair on the water just outside of the city center. It is again, a dangerous sort of place with all sorts of riff raff roaming here and there. But as usual, all good. To me it feels and smells a lot like the Quarter in New Orleans.

I rolled in on a sunday afternoon and I was starving. I negotiated my way through a number of shady characters to a 'restaurant' on a little side street. It was more or less a buffet. You tell the lady what you want and they plate it up for you. No one needs to eat in this place. I had some sort of pasta dish with vegetables and sliced ham. The flavah was just not there, and it tasted pretty weathered. Worse was the coke I ordered, I poured it into the stainless steel cup I was presented with and after the bubbles settled a clearish-white skim of grease formed across my black milk of capitalism. Ucky!! I don't want white skim!! I tried to dab it off with the one paper napkin they had given me and it proved not to be up to the task of removing the gnar. Luckily the cup was so small, I still had half the coke left in the bottle. Interesting meal, but it only cost 75 cents, so Mateo can't really complain. If Jake was here he would say that we got what we payed for!!

I caught a cab a little while later to go to buy my onward ticket to Costa Rica at the bus terminal. I had a really cool cab driver there too. Here they often drive two fares at once, which outside of being pretty sketchy, is pretty cool. You get to see other parts of the city and meet new and local people. I ended up really liking that driver and when he dropped me off we were friends and I was bummed that I would never see him again...but...as fate would have it, again I had a wierd coincidence moment when he swung through that same parking lot hours later and picked me up again!!! Can you believe that? Paranoid people would think that was a 'coincidence? I think not...' moment. That was pretty interesting, but nothing compared to this...

After I bought my ticket, I went to do email in this mall nearby. While I was there, the email place closed just as it was starting to deluge down the warm and huge summer rain. I was not tempted to go out into it, so I strolled the mall and found a movie theater. Should I catch a movie or not? This is what I was thinking while I looked at the options. Before I could decide, a small latina woman walked up to me and asked me if I was looking for someone.
"No." I said.
"Oh, well I was waiting for my friends but it seems as though they are not coming..." she said, partly in english.
"Umm..." said Mateo.
"I think they are not coming because of the rain." She said.
"Oh." Said Mateo.
"What are you doing right now?" She asked.
"Ummm..." Said Mateo.
"Do you want to see a movie with me?" She asked.
"Uh, ok..." Mateo replied.

She was a woman of about 43 and she said that she was from Costa Rica. She had lived in the USA for eight years. Married and divorced. We walked to the ticket booth and waited in line while exchanging strange smalltalk. When we got to the teller and went to pay for the movie, I looked at her to get her contribution and she just smiled. I looked at the teller and she gave me the 'well are you gonna pay or not?' eyes. So I handed her a ten and got the change and we went in. Sitting there waiting for the previews to start she told me about her past and where she lived in the US. Then, as the lights went dim she pulled out a photo and told me that it was her daughter and that her daughter was now a model in Los Angeles. I was like, "Umm..."

And that is the moment that I realized that I had taken some random person's mother to the movies!!! Ha ha ha! I was thinking over all the angles she could be taking. See, when I say that I said 'umm' a lot, it isn't that I am scared to talk to latinas...it's that as a gringo traveler you are always on the lookout for being conned. Often the South and Central American scams involve a good looking latina woman seducing an unsuspecting and lucky feeling whiteboy. Well, that wasn't gonna be Mateo. She tried to cuddle up during the movie and I moved everything out of my pants pocket that was on her side. I put the kabosh on her moves early and she seemed to be pouting in the dark. We watched a shite movie called Jumper, (if you have a job that pays money, don't waste it on this movie...) and at every tense point she would shriek and jump and grab my arm. After a while she asked where my wife was. When the movie finally ended she asked if I wanted to take her to dinner. I did not, and I left. She wanted money for herself to have dinner. What did I say to that? "Ummm..." No.

Later that night I rearranged the pack and then drank a bunch of Balboa beers with some homies in the hostel. Outside in the street the sounds of violent riff raff ebbed and flowed. Fireworks erupted at one point and the heat resided to the point of faint relief. I crashed late in my blanketless bed with a smile of amusement on my face...welcome to Panama baby!!

The next day I woke up and took my laundry to get washed. Here, they will wash and dry your clothes for a little more than just one dollar. I like that. I returned to the hostel and took off for the Canal of Panama with a hilarious personality I had met in the hostel the night before; a fiesty ex- New Yorker named DiDi. DiDi lives in Oakland now and is a complete riot. She met the Dali Lama in Tibet many years ago during the protests against the Chinese. She was busted in a hashish deal in North Africa in the late seventies. She is a regular at the New Orleans Jazz Festival. She is a well adjusted hippy with a self admitted lack of brain cells and a sense of self depricating humor that is completely enchanting...you can't help but love the lady. She has recently had surgery on her mouth up in Costa Rica and enjoys her daily ration of pain medication...in other words, she makes a hilarious travel buddy!

We cabbed up to Miraflores to check out the Canal. It really is a cool place. We watched a number of boats pass into the locks, then elevate, and then sail out the other side. We watched the video about the digging of the canal. We toured the museum of the canal. Then we cabbed out to a trail head and spent the next while roaming around the rainforest, chasing animals and butterflies. I climbed a couple trees and roared with laughter at DiDi's stories of travel and debauchery. It was hilarious. After making the circuit of the trails there, we sat on the side of the highway for the better part of an hour while waiting for a bus. A chicken bus as it were. It took many minutes for it to arrive, and when it did, we got shipped all over the damn place before making it back to the city.

Later that night, a guitar appeared and I jammed for a couple hours with a Panamanian named Rafa...that was a lot of fun. Then a group of us went out for the night and then came back and drank 70 cent beers until the wee hours again. I will continue the story soon...I am on the move right now...

Guitar In Colombia, Rallies Not Fazed By Rain, And Une Bonne Nuit Blanche...

It is going to be sad to leave here. I am now fully in the Bogota state of mind. At night we light the fires in the fireplaces in the rooms and the light flickers and jitters across the walls and exposed log beams below the cielings. In the kitchen we place logs on the coals in the big cast iron flattop stove and blow on them until they light and make the room warm. It is such a calm place. People read and cook and talk. There is free flowing tea all day and a vibration of tranquility all the way through. There is an old and well worn mini nylon string acoustic guitar that hangs on the wall and I have been playing it almost nonstop. I stayed up all night playing my old songs to this girl that works the night shift in the hostel. Her name is Fanny and it is obviously an atypical name down here in Colombia. None of these people would understand what that name would mean to us english speakers...especially what it means to the English english speakers...or that the name was popular in the US in the late 1800's!! It sounds different when they say it and everyone seems more or less intrigued by it. She is studying english and I did my best to make sense of prepositions and adverbs for her. They still are a pain in the ass for me so time will tell if I was of any help at all. They place eucalyptus acorns on the flattop while it burns to give off a nice fragrance. I think that will be engraved in my state dependant brain from now on. The combination of all that this hostel is makes me really like it and not want to leave. There are people that have been here for months...the place has a magnet in it. I understand why they stay.

I have been waking up early despite not going to bed early at all. I have to walk across an outdoor courtyard to get to the bathroom so by the time I get there and back, I am cold and awake. I get back under the soft but bulletproof layer of blankets on my bed and think about the state of things. Sometimes I doze off again, but mostly I just enjoy the contrast of warm and cold. This will be a tough trip to give up. South America is a place full of good things for Mateo del Norte, and the thought of returning to the mothership of America is at once both appealing and full of dread. I could easily pass a couple months in this hostel in this town with a constant stream of tea, travellers, guitar, wine, rain, shine, books, elevation and peace. Coming back seems inevitable, but I am half and half about being ready.

Yesterday I wandered the streets for a while before finding a terrific pizza place and I had a couple slices of Mexican Style. For once Mexican Style was attained! People misunderstand mexican food all over this continent, I am not sure how, because it is fairly simple, but they do. This pizza was money...and didn't cost much money at all. Here you eat well for 2 dollars. Oh snap.

I went to the Museum of Colonial Art after that and again I find that I really like that. I have been interested in the period of time when Simon Bolivar was roaming around trying to establish his Gran Colombia. The art of that colonial period is interesting because it is almost entirely done by mestizo and native people. It looks just like the art from the Italian and Spanish schools of religious art...but it was not generally created by Europeans. It was used to communicate the vices and virtues of humanity under God through the eyes of the church and since there was a major language barrier between the conquerors and the conquered, that art was used to teach for the most part. As a result, messages are exaggerated to achieve an understanding, and they are very bloody and grim. Lots of skulls and suffering and darkness and aloof looking angels. Christ seems to be in much worse shape here in South America than he is on other continents...lots more cuts and blood up on the cross. Lots of portrayals of self flagelation and repentance. It's quite something to behold. It is impresionante to see the things that humans have done in the attempt to get closer to the idea of God. Christianity has a strange and violent history, but I must admit that I am intrigued by its roots and machinations throughout the 'development of modern man'.

When I left the museum it was raining hard. Over the roar of water on the rooftops I could hear a man's voice projecting loudly through a loudspeaker some distance away. I pulled up my hood and slid across the wet flagstones in my search for the voice. I found it in La Plaza Bolivar, and was wowed by the difference from the scene I had witnessed there the day before. The plaza had been transformed with banners and protest signs and even though there was rain falling, hundreds of people were gathered and chanting in the center. There were also hundreds of police and army men with guns and shields and batons out and ready. Evidently it was a protest of the FARC group and their kidnapping of numerous nationals and internationals, namely La Femme Betancourt. There were people of all ages out there carrying signs and looking fierce and yelling about Libertad. I checked it out until I was thoroughly damp and then I moved on.

When I moved on, I went to the house of Manuela Saenz, the woman that supported Simon Bolivar throughout the course of his time as Liberator. Her house is a museum now, but it was cool to see it. It is a very nice little place with a courtyard and a fountain. There was a display of local Colombian traditional clothing that was really pretty and fairly interesting. It would have been better if I liked clothing styles. Oh well. To see the hogar of Manuela was great in and of itself...read The General In His Labyrinth and you will know what I mean.

The next day I spent the morning playing the guitar while the rain fell on the plants in the courtyards of the hostel. Once it stopped, I mobilized and went to the Museum of Francisco Botero. If anyone has heard of him then they know that he is the artist that paints things into 'fat' or 'very plump' caricatures. It is pretty interesting stuff. He has naked people, clothed people, families, still lives, guitars, bathrooms, horses, trees and many other people, places and things; all of which are big. It is interesting. Evidently he is from Colombia. I liked it. Also in that gallery were all sorts of great European works of art by the likes of Monet, Dali, and Degas.

A short distance away was the dual museum dedicated to telling the story of currency in the New World during the time surrounding colonization, and the use of gold over the centuries. Looking at different shapes of gold and the machines that made them is not really my thing, but again I was interested by the relations that the Spanish and natives had with each other.

The last night I was in Colombia, me and some Colombians watched a Colombian movie called Paraiso Travel (Paradise Travel). Most people who remember that they have watched a Colombian movie have seen one called Maria Full Of Grace. That is a powerful tale of the women who swallow coke packets and then travel by air into the USA. The are refered in the industry as mules. It is a dangerous job. That movie is the story of one such woman, and it is pretty intense. In the same spirit, Paraiso Travel really captured me and made me think about the struggle of others. It is the story of a young couple trying to get to the US and the things that happen once they arrive. It is an often brutal tale, but one that is really enlightening. It is not in the least bit Hollywood-ized and so you feel things that seem out of the ordinary to our usual fare of neatly packaged cinema. I really recommend this movie to people...you would recognize John Leguizamo...and that is probably it. He is Colombian and the only one of the cast that has fame in the US.

The final part of this blog will be quick...but again it underscores the international community of chefs and cooks. When I was chillin' with Fanny, this guy arrived from Medellin who used to be a chef. Now he is a food writer. We hit it off right away and talked about all sorts of food and restaurant stuff. It was really fun and funny and I liked that many of the usual conversation barriers were breached by our mutual passion for food and wine. It was like having an instant brother of cuisine...and what a cool thing that is. Everyone should like to talk about food and then maybe the world would be a less freaky place. Just a thought.

I was indeed sad to leave the tranquility, the climate, the conversation, the guitar, the Fanny, the zen ladies who ran the hostel, the pancho I wore, the firelighting, the pile of blankets etc...but I guess those will serve as reminders and reasons to return to the unexpected love I found with the city of Bogotá.

Camouflaged Machine Gun Men, Marquez Style Colonial Beauty And My Latest Lovely First Impression...

Places can be like people in a lot of ways. One of the ways in which I find this true is in the way of first impressions. In all these different destinations, you end up with a sense of vibe in each place. It is like when Dane Cook said that sometimes you meet someone and you just know they are a bag of douche. Right away. Other times, you really like the person and you don't know why, but you leave wishing that you had more time to spend with them.

In a past blog...I don't remember which, I talked about some of my enduring favorite places around the globe. Oh yeah, it was the one where I went back to bury my heart in Cusco...so Cusco and Wellington and Oporto and Prague where a few at the top of the list. Well, as of today, I am going to make a way-to-early-to-tell statement and say that Bogotá may have just joined those juggernauts on the big global list. No kidding. But I'm crazy.

I left Quito this morning in the cold sunshine of the High Sierra...and I wasn't terribly sad about it. I was ready to move on. After about an hour and a half of watching the green and brown mountainous undulations far below, the plane began to descend into a place that looked more like France than South America. Green and brown checkered plots of agricultural land spread out between the mountains and below the layers of puffy white clouds. Could this be the drug-ridden, ultra dangerous, infamous traficante-ruled Colombia I had always imagined? No. It was something else completely. Dirt roads leading to farms and streams meandering down from the heights, and the heights themselves; majestic but comfortable. Strange my brain kept saying. And then abruptly, the green farmland turned to shanty towns...first shanty towns with only dirt roads and broken down busses and other vehicles littering the way. Then the shantytowns started to have pavement around them...then the shanties turned into small houses and then they got bigger and the cars got nicer and then there were trees growing and then brick buildings and parks and soccer plains...and then the plane banked and I could see the center of the city, cradled in the arms of the huge mountain that rules over all this stuff. Wow...what a place. My heart was beating fast, which is not the norm anymore...but something was different here. We landed and I got the fifth degree going through customs. Maybe it's the beard. Could I really just be here for tourist reasons? Sebastian the immigracion officer was skeptical. But he ended up stamping my warped and dangerously close to the no-good-anymore line passport, and waved Amigo Mateo on by. I checked the big bag into the baggage storage in the aeropuerto (no homeland security problem with this in south america yet...thank god 'cause it's a great thing to be able to do...) and I caught a cab into the city. My hostel is in a place called La Candelaria, which is basically the old town, or ciudad vieja. The guy dropped me a few blocks from my place because they were digging up the street I was staying on. Walking that distance had me realizing that Colombia is different from the other places I've been. It is noisy like other places...colorful...aromatic...a bit chaotic...all these things are the same...but somehow it is different. A bit edgy, but an edgy that I like...

So I get to the door of the place and this old lady opens the inner door, which is separated from the outer door by a good twenty feet...and she gives me the fifth degree too!!! What is my name?...no my full name...where did I come from?...no not originally, today!...finally she let me in and it was like entering some South American spiritual/meditation sanctuary...plants and flowers filling three different courtyards...laundry lazily bobbing on the line in the fresh breeze. Two latina beauties dozing in brightly colored hammocks...and a smile on that face of the old lady that could melt the ice on any jaded bastard's heart. The lady showed me around and then gave me the schpeel on Bogotá. I smiled when I walked into my room and saw the fireplace and smelled the soot and fresh coals. On my bed was a stack of folded blankets. I thought it looked like a lot. She told me that if I needed more blankets I could have them. Yikes.

I went for a stroll a few minutes later and got to know the city in my normal way. I call my method, "Getting Lost." It works well to get your bearings, and you meet some interesting people along the way. Every time. Yeah, so here it might not be the best idea. But I had my compass/internal warning system set to the "potential rocket launcher attack" setting (Anyone remember Harrison Ford in the Bogotá scene from Clear And Present Danger?) so I felt alright about it. I found the main plaza, Plaza Bolívar, which is really a nice place. I remember seeing a foto of that plaza years ago and thinking, 'I wonder why more people don't go see this place?' Now that I am here, I think it is even more beautiful than I imagined it would be. Seriously, you should have seen this place tonight...full of birds and people dressed for the chill of early evening. The women in scarves and woolen hats with their long black hair blowing up with the wind...the men with their mountain hats and set faces and cigarettes. The sky was like a renaissance sky...like the God-sky you see in old italian paintings and technicolor promos. The pillars of the court buildings stood stern and white and the giant wooden doors of the massive old churches were being drawn closed for the night. It was something. As I climbed back up the narrow streets towards my hostel, ahead of me were rows and rows of pastel-painted houses and beyond them the giant mountain above, crowned with churning cumulous clouds...behind me across the valley the sunlight had turned the haze to an orange and rose color that lay like lace on the steeples of the many churches.

What is this place? Despite the many camouflaged men carrying big and automatic weapons, despite the robberies taking place in back alleys nearby at this very moment, despite the stigma of the North American 'War On Drugs', I knew that I had stumbled on a good place. Like when you know when you have met a good person, you can also know when you have found a good place. I could get robbed tomorrow and that may change my mind...but I doubt it. Like a man under the charms of a beautiful woman, I think I would just forgive her...forgive my new city love...of Bogotá.

On a different and more humorous note...Jake and I witnessed a number of embarrassing "Americans In Action Abroad" moments while chilling in Quito a few days back. I have bitched about this before...but it is so incredible to watch in action, I just have to talk about it again. The most notable of the cases that we saw was with this American woman who was basically verbally barraging a British woman who had made the mistake of letting the American woman sit down at her table in a small cafe. The American woman's daughter was living in the Galapagos and she was not going back to the US anytime soon so the mom and dad where getting used to the idea of visiting the daughter in Ecuador. They had taken a few language lessons and this lady obviously thought that she could speak spanish really well. She couldn't. It was actually terrible, and the 'at least she is trying' argument was completely being cancelled out by her attitude of superiority and condescencion. But the poor British lady couldn't get a word in at all. The American was telling her every little thing that the British lady 'had to do' in the Galapagos. I hate when people say this, "You're gonna wanna get to the blah-blah-blah..." It's the 'wanna' word that gets me. Telling people what they want to do is not so cool. I realize that at it's core it's just an aspect of speech, but coming from the American mouth it doesn't seem that way and it is just not cool. Often our enthusiasm and tendency to try to dominate conversation just adds to our imperialist reputation...and that is algo feo out in the big world. Anyhow, after a while of listening to this embarrasing exchange, we got the hell out of there, glad to never have to hear that lady's voice again. Well, the next day at the airport while I was waiting for my flight to Bogota, guess who's voice I heard!!! Yep, her. And she ended up sitting near me on the plane and disturbing some French people until they pretended to be asleep. The plane to Bogota was connecting to one that was headed to LA...she would fit in well there.

It's one of my pet peeves when people adopt that dumb and weak little voice to say, "Small world..." or, "It sure is a small world..." They sort of chirp it out and then laugh a weak little laugh as though they've just summed up the majority of things on the planet. But sometimes, I have to admit, it does seem small. I realize that we gringos move in relatively small and closed circuits down here, but damn, why her? Why that lady? I have had that happen numerous times on this trip alone. It was better when it was Maria Los Angeles...I didn't mind running in to her twice.

Back To Cold Elevation, The Ecuadorian Lie, And The Vegetarian's Struggle...

After we got back to Jake and Rebecca's house in Guayaquil, we ate schwerma and drank rum to rest and recover. Here in Ecuador the rum, which they call ron, is super cheap. So we made a lot of Cuba Libres and Rum and Peach Nectars. Good shit. The schwerma wasn't bad either. Both Jake and Rebecca are vegetarians and I can't think of a tougher place in the world to be one. Here, when you say, "We're vegetarians..." they nod as though they understand you, but they don't, and they prove it in short order. They say things like this: "Ok, so then do you eat chicken?" "No, we're vegetarians..." "Oh alright, then you eat fish right?" "No, you see, we're vegetarians. We don't eat meat." "But fish isn't meat." "Ok, well whatever, we don't eat fish either."

There are side dishes that one can order here that have no meat, but they often don't understand that the 'no meat' thing means, absolutely no meat. Not even a little bit. They often serve you potatoes fried in beef fat, or other animal productos.

Today, we had a hilarious thing happen. Jake and I established with our waitress that he was vegetarian. The only options on the menu were with meat, but she said that they had a soup that is traditionally made with no meat. Jake ordered that with a side of rice, I ordered a bowl of tomato soup and a chicken and noodle entree. When Jake's bowl of soup arrived, it had a huge hock of meat in it! The waitress smiled and said 'que aproveche!' with no acknowledgement at all that she had just established that Jake was vegetarian and then served him meat. So I ate that soup, and he had my tomato soup. My entree ended up being a few cold noodles with some shreds of chicken and a mountain of undercooked rice. Luckily it only cost a dollar...or as Jake put it, "about what it was worth." The kid hits the nail on the head every time.

So the food isn't all that great here in Ecuador. It is the third world though so one can't complain. Jake, at this point, has gotten used to the constant struggle to eat. He also looks a lot like Jesus and people comment on it in the street. A guy today actually pointed at him and said, "Jesus Christo!!!" I laughed, Jake grimaced. I sent my friend Marta a foto of us all on the cruise and pointed Jake out in the foto, she replied in Spanish, "Ahh, the guy with face of Jesus Christo!!" Luckily for Jake, his face looks like Jesus, who is very well liked here in Sud America...he could look like George Bush...that would be real bad. In fact I don't think he would be around still!! Ha ha!

So we chilled for a couple days in Guayaquil. I cooked a risotto dinner on saturday night and we had pizza on sunday. Yesterday, on monday, Rebecca headed off to do her job, and Jake and I got on a bus to come up to the highland sierra, to Quito. We drove through hundreds of miles of banana and pineapple plantations. Everything totally green and lush. It seems as if the whole lowland is flooded right now. Houses on stilts and huge brown, rushing rivers full of brush and garbage. It was scheduled to take 8 hours on the bus, but it took almost 12 because of a big rainstorm that caused us to take a major detour. We ate almost nothing all day and our hunger, combined with the elevation, warped our senses of reality when we arrived here in Quito. Man was I hungry. We were staying in the old city and there is nothing open there after seven. So again, poor vegetarian Jake had to eat a plate of french fries for dinner. We found this shitty chain restaurant that served mainly chicken. I ate shit chicken and he ate fried potatoes. Probably fried with beef lard!! Ha ha! Poor bastard.

That is another observation I have made enough times now to say it outloud. In Ecuador, signs don't mean anything. They could say, "HERE WE HAVE FOOD." And you could walk in and be like, "Hi, I'm hungry and I see that you have food, can I eat?" And they'll look at you like you're a dumbass whiteboy and say in a confused voice as though they wonder where you would have gotten that idea, "No, we don't have food here." And you'd say something to the effect of, "But, the sign?" And they'd slowly shake their head and frown and say, "No." Ok. Bummer. Everywhere in the Galapagos were signs that read, "Coca Cola! Pidela!!!" which means, order coke!!! And when you would, they'd smile and say that there was none of that there. That was happening everywhere there! It has happened with many other things. One place had this big ice cream poster advertising all the lip licking varieties they had. I stared at it for almost an hour before caving in to the temptation, then when I asked for a cone, the guy just said, "No hay." "There isn't any." That happened with so many things. So now Mateo Del Norte don't truss nobody in Ecuador!! The sign could say "Now selling, good luck!" or "Free Money!!" and Mateo would just walk on by. I would shake my head and talk to myself as though sharing some sort of inside joke and then I would just walk on by. If you have a sign that says that you have something, then have it!!! If you don't have it anymore, then take the goddamn sign down!!! Sheesh.

They also are much happier lying when giving street directions than admitting that they don't know. According to the people of Quito, The Ecuadorian History Museum is in seven different places!! All far apart. Don't truss 'em!

So Jake and I wandered around this high elevation city for hours today. We are now in a bar/internet cafe so if this blog still makes sense then that is a pretty big success! The rumor is that here in Mariscal, the hood we're in, the restaurants are open past dark...wow, cool. I am still having probs with the photos, so this blog will be missing them for a minute. I am going to try a couple things tomorrow to get them uploaded.

A couple days ago there was a huge sinkhole that caved in right in the middle of the city! No one died, but huge amounts of road and sidewalk and grass just disappeared, falling more than 100 feet to the underground river flowing below. Because of this sinkhole, they have canceled school and the traffic is horrendous. Cabbies are charging more and busses are jampacked. Quite something I must say.

This is a nice city, high elevation and cold. It is crazy how fast the climate changes here. We are above 9,000 feet and it is like late autumn here. I have a wool hat on and my jacket. It smells like woodsmoke and rain and it makes me think of Cusco. And that makes me sad because I love Cusco. Love it. Quito is nice, but it's no Cusco. Soon I will be in Bogota in Colombia, which is said to be a nice high elevation city as well. We shall see. Peace.

Gigantic Tortoises, Volcanic Moonscapes And A World Of Life Below The Ocean's Surface=Las Islas Galapagos...

We just got back from Galapagos and mang, what a place that is. It costs enough to get out there and take any sort of tour that it kind of keeps the riff-raff out. Which is a good thing considering how fragile the ecosystem is there. It was eight days full of activity and adventure, and I am still trying to work out how to document it. I think I will start with an itinerary, and then some specifics.

We landed in Baltra, which is a small island connected to one of the biggest islands, not far from Puerto Ayora, which is where the majority of excursions are based out of. We were soon on our boat, alternatively called Friendship, Amistad, and Gabi. We went immediately out to the big water and made our way south to Bachas Beach, where we saw our first big batch of sea lions. Those things are everywhere. Seriously, you get tired of them, no matter how 'cute' they may seem. From there we traveled overnight down to Santa Fe and watched a lot of lizards of different kinds. Crabs all over the place, birds, iguanas and the occasional snake. From there we sailed for a long overnight to Española to see a huge island haven for sea lions, marine lizards in all sizes and colors, and blue footed boobies. (Insert boobie joke here, you get over it) On the fourth day we sailed to Floreana and did some diving in an area called The Devil's Crown. In the middle of the trip, we returned to Puerto Ayora to drop off the short-timers, and to pick up a few more. While on the big island of Santa Cruz, we went to the Darwin Center to see how they are protecting and breeding endangered iguanas and tortoises and then in the afternoon we went to the highlands to see the huge Galapagos turtles in the wild. That night we were back on the boat and we went to the east to Bartolome and Sombrero Chino. We were in that area the last couple days and then back to Baltra to see the Frigate birds with their huge red balloon bellies before we got on the airplane yesterday afternoon to come back to Guayaquil on the mainland.

The wildlife in Galapagos is really interesting and the situation there offers a rare opportunity to get really close to the animals and see them close up. These animals have no history with humans, and so consequently, they have no fear of us. (One day they will figure out that we should be feared.) You can walk right up to almost any of these creatures and look them right in the eye. The sea lions will flop right up to you and touch you if you don't watch out. There are rules against touching any of these animals. The sea lions cluster themselves on the beach and often go on for as far as the eye can see. There is a lot of grunting and groaning, and if you have ever heard the sound that Jeremy and I use to greet each other, than you have a round about idea of how these big critters sound. The iguanas where some of the coolest animals for me. They have all sorts of colors and are really big! Some of them are smaller, but many of them are just gigantic, lying on the hot rocks in the sunlight of the morning. There are land iguanas and marine iguanas. I had the chance, one day while diving, to see a marine iguana feeding in the ocean, down about fifteen feet. It was unlike anything I have seen before, with his feet and tail pushing away the multitude of fish that swirled nearby while he used his teeth to scrap food from the rocks. The turtles are also quite amazing. Or I should say, just as amazing as I hoped they would be, having grown up with the idea of those giants living in my imagination. We chased them around this swampy area in the highlands of Santa Cruz. They move very slowly so it really isn't chasing. But you can walk right up to them and they draw their heads into their huge thick shells and make sounds that sound like Darth Vader. They look like ET, and sound like Darth. They weigh hundreds of pounds and are suspected of being able to live as many as two hundred years!!! Many people come to Galapagos to watch the variety of birds. There are finches and boobies of three kinds, and hawks and albatrosses with a wind span of almost fifteen feet! For me, the most interesting of the birds was one called the Frigate Bird. The male is a good sized bird with a huge red balloon that can be inflated on its chest when attracting a female. The females will fly around, circling above while the males will puff ot their chests and make unique calls to them. (Not unlike our species...ha ha.) We also saw a couple snakes crawling around on rocks and cactuses, which is rare.

For me, the really interesting wildlife was to be found below the surface of the great green ocean waters. Everyday we went snorkeling a couple times and would spend hours floating around underwater, watching hundreds of colored fish, octopus, sharks, starfish, devil rays, and jellyfish. The water was warm and most of the time it was very clear. I got good at diving down really far to check out the things happening on the bottom. We saw numerous sharks of various kinds. Not the kind that attack you, but they are very big and the way that they move is reminiscient of the movie Jaws. When I see them coming from a distance I get the feeling that I can't swim anywhere near as fast as I wish I could. I really liked following the octupus' around. The way they move and swim is quite trippy. When you get close to them, they have these srange deep eyes that look out at you. It's unsettling. The various rays were also a bit worrisome to me. I don't know why, but when those huge pancake looking bastards float towards you, you tend to want to move the other way. A couple times I floated into clouds of small jellyfish and that isn't where you want to be either. Those stings hurt in a unique way. Kind of electrical. When you watch them, they are interesting enough, light green with translucent skin. But when they hit your skin you put your fins to water and get the deuce outta there!!! The fishlife down there is terrific. The colors and varieties of the fish are overwhelming. You can swim right into huge schools of silver and gold and blue and follow them as they make their way along the channels of coral.

I will include more info in the following blog...there is a lot to recount...

Living On The Equator, International Family And Functioning While Rocking...Galapagos Part 2

We had a number of things go wrong on our boat and with the crew. We think that the boat had been having problems over the course of the previous weeks and the crew seemed a little bit shell shocked. I think they had gotten some harsh comments from the group of passengers before us. We were never introduced to any of them and we had very little contact with them the entire time. I think they were good enough guys, but they wouldn't talk to us or even look at us a lot of the time. Our 'captain' was a solid, first rate douchebag...no doubt about that. We had great waiter named Daniel who left halfway through because things weren't going well for him either. He was a really nice kid and worked his ass off and we were sad to see him go. He was replaced by a guy who must not have had any experience because he managed to wait on us in a puzzling and at times frustrating way. Not a big deal. What kinda sucked bigtime though, was our guide. His name was Sergio and he had a major chip on his shoulder. He looks like a cross between Tarzan Of The Jungle and Keanu Reeves in Point Break. He usually works for a much more high-dollar boat, and at one point he remarked that he was happy to get back to more 'well-educated' customers. Yeah, nice. We lost him halfway through and the guide who replaced him was great. Rodrigo was his name. He was excited by the nature there was to see and knew all about it and was very excited to share it with us.

Our boat was pretty much a junker. Because of all the bad comments they had recieved from previous customers, they were spending a lot of time while we were on the boat re-painting things and fixing them. The night we spent in Puerto Ayoro they had an inspection by whoever inspects boats in Ecuador...and, well, our boat failed the test. So they had to bribe the inspector, which took time, and that resulted in us spending a day sitting in port. That sucked. The Douche Captain was not even on the boat that night and we made up all sorts of stories of how his debauchery was keeping us from the open seas. That night the air conditioning in a couple of the rooms didn't work and so myself and three others slept for a while on the roof of the boat until someone fixed it at 2 in the morning. While they were painting the boat, they roped off sections that we couldn't enter and that was rather annoying too, considering the fact that we each payed a grand to be on that boat, and it was tiny to begin with. The food that they cooked went over fairly well with the group, although a few of us had some gastro-intestinal fallout. I was one of those people...again, nice. We often ate and slept while sailing and those times were very unstable on the boat. Glasses would fall off the table and plates would slide. A few of us experienced nausea and we all had a tough time eating a lot with the boat flying back and forth and side to side. Dramamine is a good thing.

This description probably makes it sounds like it was a crappy trip, but it really wasn't. I think the main reason it was great was our group dynamics. We had a varied collection of people from all over the place and people really got on well, which made the whole thing fun and made the shitty parts funny instead of frustrating. Jake and Rebecca roomed together. My roommate, who was really nice if also really stinky, was an Israeli named Omri. There was another Isreali couple in their fifties who have spent most of their lives in Canada and now live in Brasil. They were really nice as well. There was a Japanese guy named Keiji, a Scot named Mandela, three people from Sweden, a lone French girl, a French girl who was living with an Italian guy in Quito, two cute Belgian girls, a British girl, an Irish couple and a lone American girl from New York. We spent a lot of time talking and reading and eating together...and a lot of time walking and watching wildlife and just hanging out. It was really nice. We got to know each other pretty well. I get the feeling that if we didn't have such a good group, things would not have been so fun. The nature alone in Galapagos is worth going to see, but if you go on the 'budget' end of the traveler's spectrum, it helps to have a good group of comrades with whom you can brave the not so desirable parts. Like a boat that was lucky to float and a couple of bags of douche in the forms of capitan and guide.

We would generally take two walks a day; one in the early morning and then one in the late afternoon, each with a snorkeling session attached to it. As I mentioned, our first guide was not a very nice guy, so the walks we had while he was in charge were interesting, but in an odd way, sort of stressful. He would snap at you for asking the wrong question (?) or for not heeding his exact orders. If you weren´t ready to get on the motorboat to head to land five minutes before scheduled...you were chastized. (Which is odd because normally in Ecuador, EVERYTHING happens 20 minutes late!!) At one point Uri, the Isreali Canadian guy was trying to take a photo of our group on this silica and obsidian beach and the guide burst out with, "If you want to take a picture of me, you just tell me and I will stand out in front of the group, but don't try to take a photo of me while I'm trying to do my job because I know you are going to post it on the internet with a sign that says, '>Worst >Guide In The Galapagos'!" We were all like, "Whoa man, chill out." But he didn't chill out, so it was nice when he left. He made a pretty big ass out of himself and so it was funny and fitting that his last tour that he gave us was a disaster. First he dragged us through this ancient lava cave, and then through the mud-marshes nearby in search of the huge and legendary turtles. We did find them, which was great, but our enjoyment was cut short when he suddenly announced, "We're lost, we have to go now!!" and then he proceeded to run (literally) off down the path. I know we weren't very lost, if you've ever been in the woods before, then you know more or less what is going on. But he was afraid of us getting stuck out there when the sun went down so we power-walked after him. We found a road and were power-walking down it for almost an hour before we were picked up by a pickup truck carrying dogs that hunt and kill feral pigs!! Sounds exciting right? It was! So sixteen gringos pile into the back of this jalopy of a truck and we bounce all over the dirty gravel road for a long damn ways before we were let off. Sergio, the guide, was pissed off and not saying anything or looking at us at all. Our bus driver had gotten confused by the fact that we hadn't returned, and so he took off!!! With all our stuff on the bus! We ended up having to call him and he came and picked us up. Thank the lord and baby jesus that even the poorest of people in Ecuador can somehow afford a cell phone! So we made it back to the port and all, but it was a hilarious set of events. It was actually really fun, because of the group's attitude towards it...and I think it actually made that day a lot funner!

I have to mention Bernard a bit too. Every now and again you meet people while traveling that just wow you. A super unique combination of influences who have made them who they are. Well this guy Bernard, from French speaking Quebec, was one of these types of people. He was born on a farm in rural Canada and had ten brothers and sisters. (Who we learned all about.) He was raised working on the farm under the strict hand of a his father and didn't begin to travel until he was 28 years old. But once he started, he didn't ever stop for long. He never married and he struck me as being a little bit Forrest Gump-like. Just walking through mayhem right and left without a scratche left on him. He has travelled seemingly everywhere and his stories, and the way he tells them, are fantastic. He is a very just man, a man who sees things as they are, and describes them with a clarity that I find rare in humans. He has negotiated extremely dangerous situations without breaking much of a sweat and his recountings of these tales are accompanied by his great, life affirming laughter. Ejemplos: He crossed a huge desert in India on a camel, he hitchhiked through The Golden Triangle (major opium growing region in Laos, very dangerous), he lived on a houseboat amongst the violence in Kashmir, and the stories just go on and on. He remembers every date and person exactly and he does 100 pushups every morning at 6 AM. He is 53 years old and he drives a cement truck for a living. He is very difficult to sum up. He had us all laughing almost constantly with his accent and choice of words, and his unique perspective on seemingly everything. He has no email address and carries no camera. The kind of person you wish you could travel with more often.

Each night a group of passengers would play a card game called Yanif that the my Israeli roommate had learned during his mandatory three years in the army. Some would read and some would nap and we all seemed to talk non-stop about the new deck chairs that we had to sit on, the parts of the boat that were being painted, the rumors about the new guide or what would be served for dinner. After a short week we had turned into a little family of internationals. At any time one could hear conversation in english, french and spanish. It was nice.

There are, of course, many other stories to be told, but there is not the time to tell them here and now. I am sure that I will talk with each of you about this trip and I look forward to showing you photos. My camera got wet when a huge wave came over the bow of the rowboat we took to shore and so I am having a tough time getting the photos uploaded because the technology here is really out of date. Eventually I will have many more loaded onto my myspace page to check out. I hope you are all well...chau...

The Border, The Bus, And The Heat

Mateo Del Norte is, at this point, very close to being, technically, back in the north. I am now in the country named after the line that separates the hemispheres and man does the weather reflect it!! It is hot as a bastard up here in Ecuador and each afternoon it rains bucketloads and floods the streets and washes the buildings without cooling things down much at all. I just braved a torrent with an umbrella to get down the hill from my bro Jake's house to the cibercafe. There was a dead and rotting cat in the road and lots of wet Ecuadorians plodding along. It smells good...that is a bonus...it smells like you'd think it would in the tropics, moss, moisture, flowers and fruit. We have a couple days of hanging out before leaving for the Islands of Galapagos on friday.

The day before yesterday I left Lima in the late afternoon after having a really nice lunch with Waldy and Christian. I went back to the house of Silvia to endure the inevitable sadness of leaving her and Marta and the rest of the family. I got a chatty driver and listened to his theories all the way to the airport. Theories about life in Peru and the world, education, politics, the seasons, the regions. It seems as though at times the Big Guy In The Sky gives you what you need when you need it. I have been from bliss to breakdown and back a number of times in the last couple weeks and the whole time it seems as though He/She/It has got my back. The chatty guy helped me to not oversulk. I was in no state to sulk. Long story. I got to the airport in time to get in line behind a family of six, and as we waited to amble up to the AeroCondor counter, they pulled the pants off this little toddler, and while one little daughter smelled at his butt to see if he had shat, another held a blue plastic pitcher in front of the little guy while he pissed into it. It reminded me of a pit crew in Nascar. After he was through, the dad oversaw the operations while two daughters put the kid back together and another son took off with the pitcher to pour it into the toilet in the bathroom that was apparently too far away to take the kid to. In the meantime it was their turn and the mom had been lugging the bags up to be weighed. It was something else. I had never seen that operation performed in an airport waiting line. I was impressed and entertained and what was most funny was that the little kid hardly seemed to notice it all.

On the plane I put my mind to the navigation of the city of Tumbes and the reputedly grim borderland beyond. The travelers circuit is full of horror stories regarding muggings and various ways of getting ripped off there. I was ready for whatever, but again, fate sent me a gift. As we were departing the aircraft I met a guy from Switzerland who spoke spanish at about the same level that I do. And he had the same game plan as me, so just like that, we had backup!! If you have traveled a lot in the third world, then you know how good it feels to know that you have someone that you trust. The Swiss are good people. Their country is organized and well run and the people reflect those imprints. This guy, Eric, was from the french speaking part of Switzerland and we spoke mostly in Spanish, with a little english, and then I dusted of a few old french sentences as well. We got into a place to stay in Tumbes and then got a bus across the border the next morning. It turns out that the guy is a real philosophe and we really enjoyed our conversation. He's a smart guy and we share a common skepticism of the sterility of the modern world. The bus ride up was a lot more tranquil than I had expected. We had a few random detours that could have eroded into trouble, but all in all, it went well. Because I have been without a guidebook since my encounter with the Ladrones in Mendoza, I usually look into travel information online before I go to a place. Some places have more info about them than others. There is not much beyond horror stories in blogs when you google info about the aforementioned border crossing, so at this time, I want to include a little insider info, in case others who will be crossing are interested and happen to find this blog. Please pardon the interruption.

Border Crossing Between Peru And Ecuador At Tumbes:

If you are wanting to go from northern Peru northward to Guayaquil, you obviously have to get across the border. You have no doubt heard that this is a tough border point and you may be a tad bit stressed out about the details of crossing. I made this crossing yesterday and it was fairly easy, and I want to let you know how to do it. I don't know what it is like to get to other destinations besides Guayaquil, so if you are not doing the Tumbes-Guayaquil trip, than this may only partially help you. Ok. If you are not in Tumbes yet, Tumbes is not as bad as it is made out to be. You need to be aware there, but it is not the land of the dead as some people make it out to seem. Find a hostel or hotel that has decent security. There are numerous hotels near the Plaza de Armas so at the very least, if you show up with no plans, get a cab or a tuk-tuk to the Plaza, and work outwards from there. We stayed in a nice place about twenty paces from the plaza. From the airport to the Plaza de Armas, you should only have to pay 15 Soles...don't let them get you for more...agree to this BEFORE you get into the cab. If you speak spanish this is easier, but it is 15 for the ride, not for each person. From the square, you can catch a 1 Sol tuk-tuk to the office of CIFA bus. This is the only company I found that goes more or less direct to Guayaquil. The good part about this is that they are with you throughout the customs process. I have heard of many people trying to cab through the labyrinthine process of the immigration borders and that just seems like work you don't want to be doing. There are so many ways to get had in that area. So a ticket from Tumbes to Guayaquil costs 21 Soles, and lasts about 6.5 hours. You leave from their offices and they take you through the Peruvian side's Aduana station. DO NOT pay anyone here...just wait in line and get your card stamped. There are people there trying to "help you" and change your money, don't give anyone anything and mostly just ignore the bastards. They are preying on the clueless...which most gringos are in these situations. After you get your shit done there, you get back on the bus and cross into Ecuador. There is not a system even resembling order in all of this, so what came next seemed odd, but apparently normal, for these guys and it ended up working. We had to get off the bus we were on which meant we were separated from our packs that were in the baggage hold beneath the bus. That made us uncomfortable, but only the gringos. This Peruvian chick that I was sitting with said that she crossed often and this was how it went. We got on another bus and then went about fifteen minutes to the immigration station of the Ecuadorian side. It took about 30 seconds to get a stamp and then we waited for about ten minutes while eating churros and then our original bus showed up again. I asked to see the bags and the driver showed them to us and then we hit the road. You have to get off the bus a couple more times to show your paseporte to some military types, but all in all, it isn't much more than that. The road in Guayas Province is rumored to be dangerous, but we had no problems. Keep your handbag close to you at all times and I would advise not keeping it beneath your seat. If you do, keep your leg through a loop in your bag so that it cannot be easily dragged off. These guys are good robbers though, often with knives to cut straps quickly, and if you doze off, you can easily be had that way too. I had a friend who crossed over and fell asleep with her bag beneath her seat and woke up without a lot of things she really liked. Just pay attention. Lots of people are getting on and off these buses, selling food and drinks and various other random shit, so just pay attention to your pockets and your bag. If this is helpful to even just one person, than I am happy. It sucks to get robbed, I know this, so whatever measures you can take to prevent it are worth it. Good luck.

Alright. So Jake lives in a huge house in the Miraflores neighborhood of Guayaquil...a house fitting of a...doctor? Yes, a doctor! And that is just what the wife of Jake is!! A doctor, so it's perfect. I have my own big room and bathroom, and the bathroom alone is bigger than most of the rooms I've stayed in in the last while! They have a great view over the city and I realize that Jake's 'view karma' must be good. In San Francisco too they have a terrific view out over the downtown and Bay Bridge. Yesterday we watched the afternoon deluge while drinking beers and in the evening we went to a seafood joint for a bite. The city is hot, but not as hot as it could be. It reminds me of South East Asia and I certainly don't need my Sierra clothes here...

There isn't a whole lotta time this afternoon...we are leaving for Galapagos on friday morning and if I don't get a chance to write again before then, then it will be a week later the next time I do...the 29th or 30th. I hope you are well, hablamos otra vez muy pronto...