Traveling Dave in The Americas

2011-06-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

Dispatch Number 92 -Errant Thoughts: Peru

This Dispatch is a break from the Two Years summary and pauses from that series after Panama, Dispatch Number 90. It will restart shortly with Colombia. In the meantime, here are some shorter pieces.

Don't Walk

The pedestrian has no rights in Latin America. Crossing streets safely involves running.

Ambulance

I wasn't there, but Scott was when she burned her face in a minor gas explosion. Calling an ambulance is a normal reaction. Not in Lima, Peru, a megalopolis of seven million people, to get an ambulance you must have connections or credit established with the service before they will even pick you up. The majority, hop in taxis to get the injured to a hospital. They are cash & carry societies, and most have very little of it.

Later, I had selfish visions of getting crashed-out on some road desperately needing an ambulance, when none would come.

Call a taxi!, I yelled. Unless I was knocked out, in that case, black-headed vultures would be circling soon.

Cities Begin to Repeat Themselves

After you have traveled a long time, places repeat themselves, they begin to look the same. Definition of a long time is never thinking you could quit the job and really leave it all behind. The beaches, plazas and stores are the same in every city. Pots and pans on offer are the same in each shop, and the once curious open-air markets become as predictable as the white-tiled meat counters that have more flies than customers. Restaurants become a dull drumbeat of repetition. It's when you notice your curiosity wane, the signs are there, its time to go home.

Local sights follow patterns, too. Such as a spot, near town that suffered flood or landslide, an act of nature portrayed as a religious event, another proof of Christs miracles, especially if there was a miraculous survivor. Most townships have these quasi-religious sites used to prove their relevance. Waterfalls dot much of the landscape in Latin America and most serve beer at the bottom. Or the miradors, lookouts that hold the viewer in repeated awe; without guard-railings or signs telling you what to do. Freedom. Eventually, these places begin to feel the same, no matter the country.

When you have a domestic life of routine, these places and activities are fresh and appealing. And now, after three years on the road, find myself on the other side: domestic life looks very appealing, the very domestic life that had me fleeing it's confinement a few years earlier. The wanderlust candle dims and loses some of its intensity. I need shelter to stoke its flame again. A routine of stable home and community looks good. I want things that I have gone without, normal things like the same bed, same people, same woman, same foods, same bicycle, same newsstand and a neighborhood I'm recognized in.

It matters little which side you stand on, the life of a domestic or the life of a nomad, everything we do and everywhere we go, repeats itself.

Are the Drivers Really That Bad?

Drivers in Peru are woefully in over their heads when they get on a autopista, freeway where speeds of 100km/h (60+ mph) are possible for long stretches. Speed kills Peruvians. In a single days drive covering 225kilometers (140 miles) I saw two roll-over accidents on an empty highway. Latin Americans, including Peruvians travel in groups, so most wrecks include family and friends.

This section of the Pan American Highway, south of Lima is first rate, free of interferences and built to European standards, well engineered with excellent visibility and wide shoulders. Yet, somehow, they manage to crash out all by themselves on this empty highway.

How to Break Inertia

It started two and half years ago with, Just see if you can get to Patagonia, the bottom of the world, in a 25 year old truck.

Last Word

It hit me today, after a conversation with a local man. I don't like hearing my own voice, I like hearing my own opinions!

Always

the important
thing
is
the obvious
thing
that
nobody
is
saying

-Charles Bukowski

Whistle While You Work

Small town Peru. These towns have men, junior police, who walk the streets at night to ward off intruders and would-be thieves by blowing athletic whistles throughout the night walking from neighborhood to neighborhood from sundown to dawn, peeping their whistles, every half-minute or so. No gun, no radio, no car, just a plastic whistle.

Fair to assume any half-brained thief would never get caught by a patrolman, cause they'd always hear them coming. When living in Huaraz, Peru I spent months trying to figure out why someone would blow a whistle all-night each time they passed my intersection.

Old Man

Central plaza. Tarma sits low in the saddle of a jagged valley high up in the Andes. It's a sunny Sunday morning and all the benches are occupied, an old man shuffles by, frail and stiff, he passes the plaza with steady steps scratching the concrete as he moves across the plaza. Slowly and patiently he passes. Back in his day, this walk was known as his constitutional.

He passes, and I ask myself, Where will I be doing that? Will I sit on the wall with the other old men watching the world go by, where dreams are already memories?

David

Avila Beach, California

Dispatch Number 91 - Drug Travelers

2011-06-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

Drug Travelers

Peru, one of the poorer countries, has some of the highest purity cocaine in the world. It is also one of the cheapest at $6-7 per gram and would rate as economical to a coke addict. In Peru, drug taking has become integrated with tourism. The North Americans who drop, come for spiritual enlightenment, dosing on natural psychotropic jungle drugs, like ayahuasca used to cope with a variety of neurosis' or the popular desire to find it again.

The Australians come for coke, typically a small group will park it in a beach town somewhere and consume industrial amounts of it, like Tony Montana in Scarface. Achieving dental-grade numbness in their nasal cavity for days on end. Once they are established the coke is delivered like pizza.

As for the Europeans, they tend to dabble in cocaine more than the psychotropics. The ayahuasca centers are filled with North Americans, who don't bat an eye at these over-priced retreats run by people masquerading as 'real' Shaman. These pretenders mix, or rather highjack 'ancient-medicine man-ways' with the latest New Age fads. These Plastic Shaman, as they are called by the real Shamans, add the necessary drama to make a person feel exotic and spiritual and is brought about by the Plastic Shaman impersonating traditions and combining them with New Age-speak, telling the seeker how beautiful and real they are, while emphasizing the importance of 'processing' the experience.

Maybe I caught too many in the 'processing' stage after leaving a retreat, when more than one told me they dosed on ayahuasca for two months straight, three to four times a week (local custom, if an individual practices, is 3-6 times a year); they seemed lost in general, telling me in some fashion or another that they weren't all there because they were in a cloud trying to understand it all. The fragmented mind was out in the open for all to see.

After seeing several in this state, one would conclude that, in all likelihood, little would change for them, even after they 'processed'. The way they use the word 'processing' comes off more as place to hide, than to sort anything out. It appeared to take them in the opposite direction than the reason they came in the first place. Lots of talk and a tendency to intellectualize the experience, rather than live it.

Like the time a European said to me, You Americans are so funny. You're always trying to improve yourselves.

She had a point.

David

Cypress, California

Dispatch Number 90 - Two Years: Panama

2011-05-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

This is a continuation of a series recapping the past two years of travels through Latin America by car, each Dispatch is a single country summary from Mexico, through Central America's Guatemala-Honduras-Nicaragua-Costa Rica-Panama and through South America's Columbia-Ecuador and Peru. The loose plan is to continue driving to the bottom of the world, Ushuaia, Argentina. These are stories of characters, experiences and hardships.

Panama

November 2009

Marjolein handed me the map.

Was this the right road to the border crossing? I asked.

She navigates fine, it's just that holding the map calms me down.

It felt like a border crossing, but the usual visual ques were missing and before I knew it, drove into Panama bypassing all controls. You had to pay attention at smaller crossings like this, they have no gates or neutral zone and no armed guards.
The crossing ran through Costa Rica's mountainous coffee region, steep, green and misty. It was the seasonal harvest, Panamanian Indians, the regions migrant workers, were flooding into Costa Rica.

I sat in a featureless concrete office on a black plastic and chrome chair. The Panama border agent is a racist and die-hard Yankees baseball fan who likes his snappy uniform. He's a young mestizo (a mix of Spanish and indigenous blood, the same blood he prejudices), speaks impeccable English, and tells us with glee how he despises these migrant workers. He's not subtle and doesn't try to conceal it with coded language, in fact, the more he rails against them the more excited he gets. (I know I mix past and present tense, and don't care) He goes on about how stupid they are and don't speak Spanish well. Marjolein and I are trapped. We have to endure this imbecile and nod, like obedient children, since we don't have our passports stamped, yet.

The Stop

On the coastal resort island Bocas del Toro, we made friends with a Colombian couple, Sandra and Fernando, an attractive light-hearted pair. We frolicked on remote gold sand beaches, sipped Cuban rum and skinny dipped in the middle of the day. They joined us when we left Bocas, traveling south through central Panama.

On our second day, driving down the Pan American Highway, we were stopped at a roadside check point. When they reviewed our passports and noted our friends were Colombian, told me they wanted to search the truck. It was going to be a real search inside an inspection center, not the usual kind of cursory search with easy questions and me waxing and waning about how much I like the country.

OK, search the truck. I said, feeling confident.

No. Not here. Over there in the inspection building, said the all-business officer.

I pulled in and set the emergency brake. I was displeased to see a drug dog and another unsmiling officer. The search bay was sterile, not a workshop full of tools, the emptiness was disconcerting and gave me flashes from the film, The French Connection, when they tear a car apart looking for heroin.

Half the gear is emptied on the floor, including each person's backpack. The dog checks everything. You watch this as if waiting for a bomb to go off, expecting the dog to stop and tail go rigid. After the bags, the trainer sets the dog loose inside the truck, it sniffs everything. Anxiety was building, even though I had no drugs and felt comfortable my friends were clean.

Would they plant something? Push for a bribe? I knew I was vulnerable to a bribe situation or worse a plant job, followed by a fake bust.

To my shock, Fernando directly confronts the lead officer, Are you are searching my friend's truck because we are Colombians?

The cop looked stunned at the directness of the question, paused a few seconds and said, No, that's not why, go stand over there.

I couldn't believe Fernando's brazenness. Watching this, I learned you can get away with a lot, while providing distraction and making the experience personal, instead of freezing up. Police in Latin America are not as strict as those in Europe or North America, where you'd be sitting in a secure room while they searched.

Fernando wasn't done.

When he found out the dog was trained in the Netherlands, where Marjolein is from, he brings her into it, She's from Holland, loves dogs and is a photographer. Can she take a picture of the dog and it's handler? He was brilliant.

Yeah, sure, as the officer posed with the stupid-looking blonde dog.

Then we were off. Silence in the car. Relieved.

Marjolein Groot Nibbelink

Santa Fe

Gamaliel is a campesino, a subsistence farmer. We met him while looking out over the valley and the coffee town below, Santa Fe. Our conversation covered a broad range of subjects: national politics, healthcare, Hugo Chavez, local farming and recent property development in Santa Fe. It was becoming a destination for Europeans and North Americans buying land and homes.

He explained how the community changed with the influx of money. Locals bartered less and helped each other less when money became the dominant social currency.

Gamaliel was kind and considerate and after a couple of hours, asked, Do you want to talk with your girlfriend? I can go.

It was delicate and indirect. We parted ways, touched by the interaction. He returned with his four year old son and said how much he enjoyed meeting us and presented a handful of local Mandarin oranges; then vanished into the forest with his boy. This kind of human connection is more satisfying than anything you can buy, and reminded me of why I travel.

A Bridge Too Far

Dateline: November 23, 2009, 12:50pm on Monday.

Crossed the Panama Canal today, driving across Puente las Americas, Bridge of the Americas.

A landmark on the journey to the bottom of the world. The Pacific entrance was full of ships at anchor, waiting to transit the Canal.

People in the Hood

I poured a drink and watched the sticky-hot street from the balcony. A neighborhood drunk stoops at the corner, his corner, next to a trash box and fire hydrant. He's there every day and is barely holding it together. He had a brutal and ravaged face, that said, This is what life does to us.

Homeless-dark skin, body thin and depleted. Hands soiled at the edges.

After earning small change dumping hotel trash, he skips off around the corner to buy morning drink, returning to his corner with a pint of aguardiente, rot-gut. He argues with the local police that stand on his corner and fill the neighborhood. He pats his back pocket and tells me the bottle suits him fine, since he no longer has a wife or anything else worthwhile. He has nothing left to give and life, nothing left to take.

Casco Viejo was the original City, now it's a district within greater Panama City, surrounded by skyscrapers. Casco Viejo has old colonial charm that is slowly being gentrified into a high-end residential district of rescued colonial buildings. The influx of new well-to-do residents mix with poor residents that have lived there for decades in decayed bombed out buildings.

It's a poverty stricken neighborhood where many hustle a few coins at a time. They help park cars and guard them, sell cigarettes by the each, and wash cars with threadbare rags, using water from public fountains.

One of the homeless is a former Panama Canal worker, who lost his job after repeatedly failing drug tests. He lives on the street in rags and sleeps in a decrepit building where the doors and windows are bricked up. I gave him some of my t-shirts and a new toothbrush. I want nothing from him, not even a thank you. The next day, he gives me everything I need. From my balcony perch, I watch him come out of the crumbling building wearing a t-shirt I gave him.

The Swiss kid is an over-enthusiastic backpacker who talks too much. I try to hasten the conversation to an end. I've stayed in the neighborhood a while and developed a morning routine, a walk along the waterfront, before the sun turns vicious. I tell him about it.

The next day I ask, How was it? I detect some pride.

He pauses, smirks and looks pleased with himself, Yeah, I got robbed by a 15 year old, I chased him into the neighborhood after he swiped my knapsack.

I felt guilty for having made the recommendation. He chased the kid down in flip-flops and got his bag back. Now he has a travel story: adventure without humiliation.

It was late afternoon on shoeshine row. Men sit on low stools in front of shine chairs. I chose an old man over the younger ones. This one polishes for his next bottle of beer and can barely do the job. His hands shake badly and has trouble making the swirl-patterns to apply the cream. The old man works steadily for his next beer while his body struggles to keep up.

Container Ships and Sailboats

For big decisions, serious ones, I am fond of saying, “it's time for a come-to-jesus meeting”, a deep, non-religious consultation of sorts, like the one I had in Panama to decide whether to turn back or continue driving south. It was a question of money and curiosity, I still had some of both and put the truck on a ship bound for South America.

The Central America leg came to a close when I said goodbye to Marjolein, she was returning to the land of windmills and wood shoes. James and I shipped our cars independently, without freight forward services, exposing us to the process of shipping international cargo. It was arduous, took a lot of time, and taught me about Latin American bureaucracies and culture. James and I left Panama on an 11 meter (36') sailboat captained by David, an experienced Frenchman. A four-day sail over one of the roughest parts of the Caribbean Sea.

After sailing out of San Blas' calm coastal waters, the swell turned big in the open sea and I became seasick. I never returned to my bunk and stayed above deck; I hardly resembled a sailor, and spent the rest of the journey coiled up in the fetal position. The crew nicknamed me the sloth, since I rarely moved.

Although seasick, I was not excused from night-watch, when we'd scan the horizon for ships that could sink us; sadly, I fell asleep draped over the safety cables that keep you from falling off the boat, leaving James, my watch-mate alone. When the boat surged hard to port, I awoke from a deep sleep in total panic, grasping the cables fearing for my life, I thought I was being pitched overboard into the black midnight sea.

For Select Past Dispatches on Panama hit these select links and look for the Colombia summary in next Dispatch Number 91-

Francis the Psychiatrist, who told Fortunes and Believed in UFOs-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2010/03/dispatch-number-58-psychiatrist.html

The Panama Canal is So Quiet-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2010/10/dispatch-number-76-panama-canal.html

Chapter One: Central America Comes to a Close-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2010/01/dispatch-number-53-chapter-one.html

Errant Thoughts Panama and Region-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/09/dispatch-number-38-errant-thoughts-iv.html

David
Huaraz, Peru

Dispatch Number 89 -Two Years: Costa Rica

2011-05-06T16:34:00.000-07:00

Costa Rica

October

2009

My girlfriend suggested we travel through the country quickly, a nice country, well trodden with lots of Americans living in big hillside homes. A place where retirees retreat to their tropical dream houses and spend the balance of their time shopping, while ignoring both local customs and the native language. She was right, too westernized, too many gringos, too much of what we didn't want.

Costa Rica, sweet and cheery, is one country Americans can name in Latin America and feel safe traveling to. Ironically, Costa Rica has no army or military. I imagined it a place where people sun-bathed in beach-chairs and shielded their cocktails from UV light with miniature umbrellas, while feeling wonderfully rich because everyone around them is colorfully poor.

Volcanoes

Marjolein and I slept under Vulcan Arenal, a live volcano that spewed orange boulders day and night, a couple kilometers away. Lava rocks, not liquid, that made deep percussive sounds as they rolled down concrete-colored chutes. A powerful hiss of gas preceded the rocks before they popped out of the top, like a jet engine, the sound strong and precise. The hiss was tremendous, as if, three 747 Jumbo jets were taking-off at the same time, with their engines funneled into a single exhaust.

Dirty and rough. We stayed in a leaky tent and ate canned food. It suited Marjolein well, she possessed some of the 'boy gene', adventurous and rugged, machete swinging and constantly snapping photos with the biggest camera you can buy, she could also name most the animals and insects in the region.

She stands by the truck. Waiting in a safari outfit: khaki shorts, boots, high-tech synthetic clothes with raincoat and rucksack. To complete the stereotype, wears a machete sheathed in a leather scabbard cracking coconuts open with it. The expensive high-tech clothes didn't work, mosquitoes bit through them and when body odor set in, they smelled awful. An irreversible mix of smells: old sweat-drenched socks, a sour sink drain and wet dog fur. These smells wouldn't come out, no matter how much she washed them.

Source: Wikipedia

We slept beneath Arenal for many nights. Night viewing was dramatic, the chutes of the volcano would light up with orange tracers. I'd be awakened in the middle of the night by a loud hiss of gas, then peer out of the tent to watch brilliant orange fireballs race down the mountain face; a newly minted rock began its life the size of a man, and when it got to the bottom, no bigger than a basketball.

Spacemen

We came to Arenal to watch it blow and instead, met Freddy, a Costa Rican wood craft artist and UFO fanatic. He sold his colorful hand-crafted figurines along a roadside that led to a mirador, lookout. We met him at an abandoned house we paid to sleep in. Freddy, tall and skinny had alive wild eyes. Those eyes, already big, became the size of small plates when we switched to his favorite subject, when he asked, if I believed in flying saucers.

Before I could realize what my answer would trigger, he had me watching a DVD filled with amateur clips of local UFO sightings, See it? See it? he kept asking, pointing to the portable player.

Latin Americans are big on repetition. Every time I answered, No., it was replayed.

I was worried, it came down to the 'correct' answer or the battery. I caught myself thinking about the battery. Marjolein deftly escaped Freddy's spaceman sermon.

Do you believe in UFOs?, he asked.

No, not really, I replied, not in the mood to lie about it.

As a traveler you are inclined to tell white lies to be more agreeable with locals, a sort of traveler diplomacy. In my travels, the most common questions after marital status are, Do you believe in UFOs? and, Are you a Catholic?, but the one that really gets them to pause is, Alone? You're traveling alone?

Latin Americans don't do anything alone, they are accompanied in pairs or groups in everything they do, except take a pee. Doing something alone in these countries borders on criminal, strange and far outside the norm. To the locals, a traveler wondering remote parts is an interesting event, something unique, when they meet a solo traveler it's an aberration. Their reactions often made me feel like I was being diagnosed with a mental disorder.

Do you want to watch? he asked.
Sure, I said, sensing a trap, Freddy, only a few minutes, I have to leave soon.
We view the clips...more than once.
Now, are you convinced? he wanted to know.

His eyes almost sold you on the UFO thing.

In my reckless thinking, I thought I could convince him with my basic and approximate Spanish that they do not exist, explaining that the samples on his DVD were anything but UFOs, proudly pointing out technical problems with the video. Either my Spanish was too vague or he chose not to take my points into consideration, I suspected the latter, as we established our opposition and stopped listening to each other, like two ignorant Missionaries who believe in different books.

Marjolein Groot Nibbelink

Car Parts

While Azulita, my 1986 Land Cruiser was in the shop for maintenance, I met Enrique, a Costa Rican who recently resettled in his home country after twenty years in New Jersey raising a family and running a gardening business.

Why did you return? I asked.
Enrique tells the story, To be closer to my family. We paid the way for relatives to visit us in America and see our home in New Jersey, we can't invite all of them to visit that way. Now, we all live in the same city.
What do you miss most about life in the United States?
In the States it is easy to get stuff. Like at Napa Auto Parts, you can get this distributor rotor in every shop, right now, I can't locate one in Costa Rica, he explains, holding the broken part.
So, you miss the shopping convenience?
Yeah, here in Costa Rica, you go to one shop and a tire costs $49, then down the street the same tire is $32. In the States, the prices are pretty much the same everywhere. It's a lot of work to buy stuff here.

The mechanic who services the truck looks like a fat beer-swollen version of Tuco, the bad-guy, played by Eli Walach in the spaghetti western, The Good the Bad and the Ugly. If you like bad-guys, his character is at the top of the list. Tuco greased the chassis and adjusted the clutch.

Odds and Ends

San Isidro. The market city, where I met Enrique is noisy and colorful. A 'hotel' off the main plaza has bored looking prostitutes that linger on wood benches in the lobby. Worn-down women who've seen too much and cared too little for themselves. Haggard faces and pear-shaped bodies, heavy in the wrong places. The women, with no claim to beauty, look garish in their ill-fitting clothes and thick pasted make-up. Everything a size too small. Faces hard as steel.

Years back in Bangkok, I met a Buddhist monk in-training who said, David, it is the last profession, in the world, a woman chooses.

Down the coast at Trey's place, a comfortable hostel in a sleepy village, I watched a young Swiss woman, who traveled alone, shy and odd, she mixed little and was usually penning in her tiny diary. I looked at her and saw myself.

Osa Peninsula

The German is good company, his Greek wife is a terror. A woman of anger, agitation and pettiness. A female powder keg in a petite body. She trembles with frustration when she talks about the weather while lifting another cigarette out of the pack. When she calls him 'Darling' in German it sounds like she's cursing him. He's a chess player and works for the United Nations in Afghanistan as a police trainer. We debated that war and he told us it was about Democracy and Afghan women winning the right to vote.

I thought, If those are the reasons, then we should occupy ½ the world's countries.

It was, as if, geopolitics and oil (pipelines, there's no oil in Afghanistan) were never a part of the occupation's principal aim.

The irony! Germans working in an American quagmire.

We met them on the magical Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, a stunning coastal rain forest full of rare birds and mammals, set on the Pacific coast with big surf and abundant animal life. The country was well named, the Rich Coast.

Marjolein Groot Nibbelink

On morning walks I was overwhelmed by exotic bird sightings, unable to keep track of them all, let alone know what I was looking at. Many sat on low tree limbs fearlessly staring with the same patience I would study them. It was one of the most pristine natural reserves I have set foot in, second only to the Upper Amazon in Peru, where I spent twelve-days living on the waterways in a dugout canoe.

I was the accidental wildlife tourist. Marjolein was a mammal and bird enthusiast and only through her was I able to appreciate the rareness of the birds I would spot. She took me on night walks to see a whole other world of strange nocturnal insects and mammals.

The Rains

It was rain season in Osa and the rivers swelled. John the owner of Kapu, where we stayed, gave tips on how to traverse the many rivers on our cross-peninsula drive. The rain stopped, but water still poured from the mountains, turning streams into rivers. On the return we used an ad hoc crossing that forced us to drive 'up-river', heading straight into the oncoming waters. I almost lost it here, the river was high enough to flood the engine, the truck struggled against the current and depth as cafe au-lait water rushed over the hood.

Marjolein Groot Nibbelink

Here at Kapu, animals would come close to our room. Scarlet Macaws, Capuchin and Squirrel monkeys, Great Curassows (ground bird), humming birds, a common black hawk (who stared and stared at us), a pair of Toucans eating berries with their enormous beaks and Blue Morph butterflies. An Agouti (a short stumpy hopping mammal), the long-nosed bat that stayed in our room during the day, black turtles crawled about, and leaf-cutter ants defoliated whole trees, carrying their green booty down 'highways' they constructed on the jungle floor.

Something Between the Third World and a Little Better

While Costa Rica was a pleasant country to visit and easy to navigate it lacked something, it ran smoother and was more orderly than neighboring countries. They cut their grass with weed-whackers instead of machetes, building projects were completed and curiously absent were the rebar spires that adorn the rooftops of every Central American city. There were no flies and the majority of roads were paved. Clean water flowed and the electricity always worked.

Gone were the colorful characters, like the shoeshine boys and other hustlers I'd meet in main plazas of most every town visited before it. I could not find street food and when you took a beer, they gave you the option to have it poured over ice. The remarkable part was that you could even get ice. Costa Rica was advanced compared to its neighbors, but I wasn't looking for that kind of order, I was still excited by the rough-shod, happy-go-lucky ways of its neighbors.

For Select Past Dispatches on Costa Rica hit these select links and look for the Panama summary in next Dispatch Number 90.

Errant Thoughts on Central America-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/12/dispatch-number-48-errant-thoughts-vi.html

Errant Thoughts-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/11/dispatch-number-45-errant-thoughts-v.html

After a Year: Short Reflections-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2010/02/dispatch-number-55-beer-thoughts.html

David

Paracas, Peru

Dispatch Number 88 -Two Years: Nicaragua

2011-04-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

Nicaragua
August 2009
Traveling alone. Stocked up with Pop-Tarts. I stood in the breezeway waiting for the border officer to process car papers and stamp my passport, when I began chatting it up with the shoeshine boys and 'expediters', the young men who hustle a buck helping people move paperwork through border control.

It was the same remote crossing that exiled Honduran President Zelaya, just two weeks earlier, had tried to re-enter Honduras from Nicaragua to reclaim his presidency, he and a throng of supporters were turned back amid a media storm. Third World politics as practiced in Latin American are a form unto their own, colorful and dramatic with ample chest thumping.

Zelaya later, did successfully sneak back into Honduras in the trunk of a car, his hope was for a popular movement to sweep him back into power, but ended on a less exciting note, holed up in the Brazilian embassy for a month. Imagine that, a head of state sneaking around in the trunk of a car! An earlier attempt, before the trunk stunt, his private jet flew to the capital and circled around for an hour trying to land, Honduran authorities refused him by placing army trucks on the runway. In other parts of the country armed men parked old buses on unimportant runways defending against persistent Zelaya.

This day at the border, with it's shoeshine boys and 'expediters', was devoid of activity, empty and lonely.

While my papers were being triple-checked by a third policeman, a prostitute winked and gestured, I smiled and drove on, thinking, A rough and tumble border crossing, like this one, is no place for a moral lapse.

The Price of Rum
Esteli, Nicaragua. The first night. The price of rum, Flor de Cana, was more in Nicaragua, the country it's made in, than it was in neighboring Honduras. This started an argument with the liquor store owner and two locals who made doughnuts on the side. Over beers, the question of price was left unresolved, while I made friends with the doughnut guys, Merdardo and Pablo.

Although he was pleasant to be with, Merardo wore a natural expression of fury on his face that showed in his eyes and cheeks. He grew agitated debating the coup in Honduras and tossed back the last half of his beer with a fury that matched his natural expression. His friend Pablo, watched with curiosity.

Nicaraguans, like Hondurans are passionately expressive and would talk about anything and debate freely, unlike Americans who tend to be fearful of sharing opinions with each other. Merdardo surprised me with a business card, he was a multi-level marketing man; he had his fingers in a hotel, doughnuts and Herbalife. I still get email blasts telling me how I can lose weight and live longer with Herbalife.

In the morning Pablo and Merdardo were making doughnuts by hand for their upstart, Super Donuts, in the kitchen of the hotel. Made by hand without tools to cut or shape the doughnuts, cooked in a large pot of oil that held less than a dozen at a time. Nearly rolling with happiness in the sugar and cinnamon the doughnuts were covered in, I ate them still hot, right out of the cooker.

Coffee Plantations and an Island

Preferring back-country travel with its smaller towns, I avoided the big cities and spent most time in the coffee region with its cool climate, staying at plantations from another era. In contrast to this natural setting of low green hills and the beloved coffee plant, it was here, after nine months on the road, I had my first case of traveler's burnout. I weathered it out by hiding in a cheap hotel, avoiding decisions while watching movies and nursing a bottle of Flor de Cana in a pink room. I half-recovered.

The second half of recovery came on isolated Isla de Ometepe, in the middle of gigantic Lake Nicaragua, riding horses and taking walks. I gained weight eating Marie's home-cooked food, the only restaurant on my side of the island and spent afternoons playing with her pet monkey. It was a tiny Capuchin monkey with a trumpet-shaped penis, cream colored and always sticking out.

Coping with burnout and conversations that repeated themselves, I needed the small world of island life that let me return to my cat-like solitary ways, a world of walks, books, and journals. I was looking forward to meeting Marjolein in a couple weeks time. Like one savors a fine piece of chocolate, I begin re-reading Dostoevsky's, Crime and Punishment.

The first night on the island, I slept in my truck after drinking aguardiente, moonshine with a group of local men. I met them at a bull-riding contest, it was a comical event, as we sat passing the bottle on the rickety stands; it is an easy to drink, hard hitting sugar-cane liquor. It was rumored that the old men who went crazy, did so from drinking too much aguardiente over the years (I met three or four while on the island, I'd give dialog of the conversations, but could not understand one mad-slurred word).

It was Saturday night and the place was packed with people, beer, loud music, lazy bulls and cheap food. The rides were pitiful: a man would mount a bull tied to a post, then released for a 'ride' on a sad-looking barn-sour bull. It was more akin to a walk, than a ride. So we drank. And I slept in the truck. During the night a drunk tried to break in twice. Once he realized I was inside, he asked to come in to sleep. Island life.

Tarantula

The El Porvenir was set on the slope of a stale volcano, surrounded by raw jungle. In the middle of a lake the island was far from city lights, at night it would turn the darkest pitches of black, like a horrible dream of being stuffed into a sealed closet without a trace of light.

It was two or three in the morning when I got up to pee, remembering to grab the flashlight before I set foot outside the bed. No sooner than I switched it on, a juvenile tarantula was walking the floor. I relieved myself. Went back to bed. And let Junior be. In the morning, I bought stolen fruit from an old man without shoes or money. He was begging for spare change and I wanted something in return and that's when the fruit appeared.

The same routine the next night, a midnight pee, and there was Junior defying gravity, walking up the lime-green wall.

Enough, I thought, If he can do that, then very little stands between me, him and the bed I sleep on.
I was much calmer than I thought I'd be when I released him outside after capturing him with a shaving mug (surely this dates me) and a piece of cardboard.

Friends of the Tarantula

A mouse visited nightly and left droppings throughout the brown-tiled room. A cycle began: black blunty shits left in the night, swept up in the morning by cleaning lady, and repeated on the mouse's night-shift. A giant cricket-like insect, the size of my hand, came out at night and would sit perfectly still on the mint colored wall for hours. The last night I saw her, she laid eggs, or rather inserted, fat wood-like splinters into the sheets and mattress. Life at El Porvenir. I wondered how Marjolein would like it.

It was at El Porvenir and Marie's three-table restaurant that Marjolein joined me for three months of travel in Central America. She met the hard-on prone monkey, who promptly peed on her after gaining a perch on her shoulder.

The American Cafe. I parked in front and walked off to do errands in Moyogalpa, a two-road village on Isla de Ometepe, it's where you went for internet and food stuffs. It had several two-shelf food shops and idle taxi drivers drinking beer waiting for fares. I contributed to the evils of drink & drive by buying a group of them a beer while I drank mine. After errands I stood in front of American Cafe, and decided it didn't look inviting, until I saw the Used Books sign. Like a chronic drug addict, lacking any resistance walked in.

Before I could set foot inside the cafe, I was pressed by an aggressive, prickly old white woman with an English accent, Is that your car? You're parked in my spot, that spot is for customers. Are you staying here? Came the blast in a village with fifteen cars.

Her pettiness was out of place, No, just the books.

If you want some good American food, come here, she continued on.

Yeah, but you have an English accent, and you guys aren't known for decent food, I thought to myself.

It was an unpalatable combination: a British cook with American territoriality.

While real estate man and I tried to start conversation, she began interrupting, The books are over there, they are .35 each.

OK, thanks, As real estate man and I tried again over his plate of pasta. We hadn't exchanged a full sentence yet, because of our pesky host.

She hovered over us, We have super chocolate cake, she blared, cutting in, if you want a slice.

No, thanks, I ate, hoping real estate man could finish with how the market fell out and how small plots on the island were hard sells.

How about you, an investment?

No, not looking to buy land, besides I'm a nomad, it just wouldn't work.

Our travels, the first Marjolein and I were to make together, on the Rio San Juan were amongst the most memorable on the Central America isthmus; setting off in boats across the lake and down river to the Caribbean coast staying in settlements along the way. The San Juan is an old pirates highway that runs along the northern border of Costa Rica. The road-less jungle remains undeveloped since the 1850s, when the U.S. government wanted to develop a rival shipping canal to the one the French started in Panama.

It was the best coffee to-go I ever had. Black water from a Styrofoam cup in a cramped seat of a small fast river boat. The seduction of morning mist over glassy water, the sun weak, and a densely dark jungle with birds in dawn symphony. Coffee, me and no conversation -just the sound of water rushing by and the drone of the outboard motor. It was our last boat on the San Juan.

Before leaving Nicaragua I paid my first bribe to a traffic cop, who graciously opened the conversation with a compliment on wearing my seat belt, then promptly found fault with my car papers. I haggled from $20 to $5 and Marjolein and I were on our way for Costa Rica.

After the exchange with the traffic cop, I thought, They are so flexible, the Latin American legal system rocks!

I learned bribes did not come at gunpoint or under threat of jail, but in Dollars, in a friendly flexible way. The horror stories people back home told with such glee were not coming true.

For Select Past Dispatches on Nicaragua hit these select links and look for the Costa Rica summary in next Dispatch Number 89-

The Cost of Rum with Merdardo and Pablo-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/09/dispatch-number-35-cost-of-rum.html

My First Bribe, Glad to see You are Wearing Your Seat-belt-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/12/dispatch-number-52-system.html

Reflections on Material Wealth: North vs South-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-29-material-world_17.html

Brief Observations in a Short Format, Errant Thoughts-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/12/dispatch-number-48-errant-thoughts-vi.html

More Errant Thoughts-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/11/dispatch-number-45-errant-thoughts-v.html

David,
Paracas, Peru

Dispatch Number 87 -Two Years: Honduras

2011-04-11T15:52:00.000-07:00

Honduras
July 2009

With My Own Eyes
The coup began at 5am on Sunday morning. I planned on entering Honduras around the same time Zelaya, the Honduran President, was forcefully removed from office in a coup d' etat that left him standing on a runway in Costa Rica, still wearing his pajamas. It was Latin America of old, a coup hadn't happened in almost twenty years and I was itching to be closer to it.

I waited another week to assess the volatility, which at the time, was full civil disobedience and international political pressure. Everything was in play, the whole gamut: demonstrations, border closings, a media-storm, clashes between protesters and police with a smattering of political killings.

I was apprehensive to go alone and wanted to have someone who would watch my back with a sense of adventure. I found two men ready to leave Guatemala for turbulent Honduras. Jeff, a talkative Australian who was fluster-proof and Alex, a tightly wound journalism student from Mexico City with something to prove.

We wanted to see it first hand, to talk to the people and confirm or dispel what the press was saying. Jeff and I tended to be the more practical, while Alex's temperament was to run the streets of San Pedro Sula after curfew, when the streets would flood with trucks of National Police that played for keeps.

I attended rallies protesting Zelaya's removal from office and interviewed many about the coup d' etat. At the time, the running argument made by the government, was that Zelaya's removal was constitutionally mandated and this was used to great effect blunting domestic anger. After a few days in-country, Alex managed to find himself a journalism job in the turbulent capital, Tegucigalpa, as an assistant reporter. Jeff and I were relieved to have him go, for Alex had too much unbound energy and was a bullhorn of constant criticism for the two of us. Jeff and I headed for the mellower environs of the Caribbean coast. Along the way, we saw a couple of dead men (due to road accidents, not political violence).

Despite conservative cries from the extreme-right, there was no important liberal movement in Honduras. The oligarchy cried Communism and blamed subversive activities on an unnamed movement (there was none), and the people bought it like docile servants shaking their fists at the Communist threat branded with the flags of Cuba and Venezuela. Watching tv and reading newspapers at the time, felt like it was the 1950s in the United States, when Americans were mobilized against the Red Threat.

Ricardo, a heavy equipment salesman and I argued over dinner, the merits of the coup, (he was in favor of it), while he got a lady friend or his sister (my Spanish was so bad at that time) on the phone and attempted to match-make. My position was that if Zelaya's removal from office was constitutionally mandated, then he should have stood trial, instead he was led out of the country under gunpoint, hardly evidence of a legal mandate.

At the end of my stay, what impressed most was the effectiveness of the state propaganda machine and how it influenced public opinion and people like Ricardo. The lesson: regardless of the facts, tv matters more than any other single media when shaping public opinion. Reflecting on the effectiveness of media in Honduras, I could see how the propaganda model was deployed on Americans during the run up to the invasion of Iraq, how quickly and easily the majority of Americans bought into military adventurism.

Political Epilogue
Since Zelaya was unceremoniously stranded in his pajamas that morning in June 2009, the new government of Honduras has increased the use of political violence to suppress popular movements. The violence escalated dramatically since Pepe Lobo was elected President; union leaders, resistance organizers and journalists have been systematically murdered.

In 2010, Honduras was named the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, ten were assassinated in 2010. The United States and Canada are the only countries to recognize Lobo's government; in a rare show of unity, Latin American countries have denounced his government because of the illegality of the coup d' etat and sham election that followed.

People
Hondurans were friendly people with hard faces, until conversation started, then the faces softened. Compared to the overly-polite passive Guatemalans, they were direct and gruff. Greetings in restaurants were rare and when entering a shop or hotel, it was, Diga me, tell me, skipping the usual courtesies.

More people rode bicycles and the women kept their youthful figures later in life, whereas, in Guatemala and Mexico the women turn plump in their early twenties. An enjoyable part of the Honduran character is how open and expressive they are, opinions freely shared on politics and social issues. They were refreshingly direct.

Far away from the protest burdened cities and blocked highways, I met a Dutch woman on the Caribbean coast in Trujillo, not knowing at the time I would fall deeply in love with her. Marjolein and I made plans to travel together in Nicaragua.

On a rain soaked mountain road along the Caribbean Coast was my worst get-the-truck-stuck pickle to date. A land bridge, barely as wide as Azulita, my truck, gave way and crumbled from under us as we tried to cross it. The truck settled on its axle, at the edge of a hole large enough to swallow it.

Before this episode, I had some experience getting stuck, in Mexico trapped on a beach, buried in sand, another time, semi-submerged in a small river with water running inside the cab; all of them workable situations, but this one was bad. There was nothing we could do on our own, to move it forward or backward would send the truck into the hole.

The Russian couple, Dmitriy and Olga went down the hill for help, we needed a pull-out. He came back with a old Toyota FJ40, and after we built a rock ramp with a tree and an old door to help it pass out of the hole the yank out went well. The big Sunday drive I promised everyone was spent getting unstuck. We made it two kilometers up the road.
Dmitriy an adventurer in his own right and a survivalist trainer put it this way, The only difference between a regular car and those with four-wheel drive, is in a 4x4 you get further down the road before getting stuck.

After I left the Russians and New Zealander, Michaela at the edge of the Mosquito Coast, where the road stops, I drove into the Wild West interior of Honduras, Olancho Department, known for rough-hewn ways, it is the same region where exiled President Zelaya came from. A region modeled on the old west of farmers and cattle ranchers linked by dirt roads and dry dusty towns.
Men worked on horseback, Real cowboys, I thought.

I met Oscar in these remote reaches, a traveling salesman who sold guns, but I could only see him hustling leather-holsters. We both stayed in a hospedaje that had cell block rooms with shared bathrooms for a few bucks a night.

After gun talk with Oscar, I got bored and thirsty, and was tired of yellow dust in my mouth, and went for a beer on the plaza. Without local guidance I was at the mercy of the place, I had set foot in cross-dressers bar. Even the owner was a feminino. It was the last thing I expected to find in Marlboro country. They stared at me like fresh meat, I steeled myself for my mistake and ordered a beer.

They had hunting lurid eyes. I squirmed and was conscious of every move, making nervous tick after nervous tick unable to mask my discomfort. A group of cross dressers sat at a table looking my way whispering, smiling and winking.
Is this how women feel? I'm sorry, I'll never do it again, passed my thoughts.
My bravado had to be propped up with a second beer, leaving after the owner told me to come back at seven when he'd have a nice girl or guy for me.

Strawberry Pop-Tarts
After months of craving Strawberry Pop-Tarts, I finally found them, in Danli, a small city known for cigar making, near the border with Nicaragua. I ate them for dinner and for breakfast the next morning in bed, crumbs all over my chest. I stocked up and refused to let other travelers see them. The secret supply ran out soon enough, left deprived, the cravings started over again and lasted for months, until Marjolein found them in Panama City. I had all but given up on seeing or tasting them again. In every city I stayed in, during my walks, I would search every grocery store for Pop-Tarts. Once, I found fig newtons. I dreamt of care packages with Pop-Tarts in them.

Did you know:
In 2001, the United States' military airdropped 2.4 million Pop-Tarts in Afghanistan during the US invasion. Cultural and political imperialism comes in many forms.

Today he said, more than ever before men had to learn to live without things. Things filled men with fear: the more things they had, the more had to fear. Things had a way of riveting themselves on to the soul and then telling the soul what to do..
-Bruce Chatwin, Songlines

For Past Dispatches on Honduras hit these select links and look for a Nicaragua summary in next Dispatch Number 88-

A Colorful First Night in Honduras-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-28-my-corner.html
Presidential Coup with Alex-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/09/dispatch-number-36-alejandro.html
Presidential Coup with Jeff-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/12/dispatch-number-51-jeff.html
With Love from Russia-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/12/dispatch-number-50-drinking-with.html
When I Almost Lost the Truck-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-30-russian-saying.html
Oscar the Gun Salesman-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-27-oscar.html
The Cross Dressers-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-33-bar.html

David
Ayacucho, Peru

Dispatch Number 86 -Two Years: Guatemala

2011-03-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

Guatemala
April 2009

Lowlands
I usually began looking for travel partners a couple days before I left a place. During my stay in Mexico I was surrounded by friends, in Guatemala I decided to go alone, seeking a different experience aimed at being closer to local culture and people. My Mexican friends were terrified of Guatemala and openly feared for my life, to them, Guatemala was the Wild West, never-mind they themselves were in the midst of a large scale drug war along the border with the United States with bodies piling up daily.

Rather than soft-peddling the point, I did discover, or rather observed, Guatemala was a dangerous country. Countless examples showed me the Letter of the Law meant little, while criminal and political killings were the norm.

I was nervous crossing the border alone, for first time all decisions were mine, No backup, as an American would put it. At the crossing I discovered, it was nothing as the border guard came out of his shack, stamped my passport and raised the red and white striped bamboo pole.

What about car papers? I asked.
Don't worry about it. replied the gun-less guard.
From the frontier it was all quiet back-roads to Tikal, the heart of Maya country. Oddly, during the drive, Strawberry Pop Tarts came to mind and would haunt me for months to come.

Guatemala was armed to the teeth, banks had firearm lockers with guards that made those with weapons surrender them. I never saw so much civilian armaments in the open before. It was like the Wild West. The smallest shops in Santa Elena were guarded by shotgun armed men at the ready; the brake parts shop I was in, had a private guard with shotgun and sidearm. We talked. As an American I am expected to like, even love guns. He had pride in his weapons, declaring the shotgun belonged to the shop, but the big pistol was his, as he closely watched a car turn the corner behind the shop.

It was the same thing at pharmacies, agricultural supply stores, banks and the Toyota dealership. Only barber shops weren't guarded, at 50-cents a cut there was little to take from the barber. With all the guns and guards tittering on a shootout, I began to wonder if I would witness one in the dusty crumbly streets of Santa Elena. Each time I used the ATM, I thought I was going to get robbed of my fistful of Quetzals, I'd scurry to the truck, lock the doors and get moving. Foreigners were told to stay out of that side of town and stick to the tame side, Isla Flores, the safe sanctuary of the tourist zone. Travel is about launching oneself into the unknown, I went to Santa Elena regularly.

I was never at ease after the brush-off over car papers. At a regional airport I asked a Guatemalan immigration official the low-down. The airport looked so much more formal than the tin shack with the striped red and white pole.

Don't worry! This is Guatemala, you don't have to worry about this stuff. Relax, said the voice in the snappy blue uniform with bars on the shoulders.
I made him tell me five or six times, until satisfied.

Three months later, at the Guatemala-Honduras border, while requesting exit stamps, the Guatemalan border official demanded car papers I didn't have. With the help of two friends from Australia and Mexico we sneaked the car through to Honduras and promptly applied for car documents. Already, Jeff and Alejandro, 'Alex' were proving their worth as travel partners, the hard part was ahead.

In the steamy lowlands, I spent considerable time exploring and camping at Maya ruins in the region. At El Zoltz, using nannying gestures the archaeological workers directed me to set foot inside a newly excavated tomb, in the El Diablo complex that had been sealed for 1,500 years -I breathed its rarefied air and stared at pristine red and white plaster walls before crawling back out through the tunnel.

Not until later, did I learn it was a royal tomb believed to contain the remains of King Chak who ruled in the late 4^th century AD. He was interred with the remains of six sacrificed children, aged between 1 and 5 years old. Who is afforded that status these days? They dragged President Reagan, the Republicans lock-stock idol, all over Southern California, but at the end of that laborious procession he was buried alone.

The workers probably told me about King Chak and I probably nodded in affirmation with my elementary Spanish. It is clear, as I look back at this and other events: I am the accidental tourist who comes across remarkable things, but does not comprehend the significance of them until later. That's right, no pictures. I often walk without my camera.

In a nearby village I looked for a cheap place to sleep. If I would take my meals at the restaurant I could sleep in my tent for free behind the house with the chickens. A lot of chickens. The old man raised cocks and sold them to surrounding settlements. I didn't know if he raised them for fucking or fighting, cock fighting is normal in these parts. They would wail at all hours, the most shocking session was when they began crowing after I had been asleep for those precious first two hours. I jumped awake. I thought they were in the tent with me. Minutes later, I lay smiling as other chickens in the village exchanged crows in a long relay one after the other across the settlement. It was 2am.

A week earlier we pitched the tent at a Maya site not open to the public, set far from the villages where they harvest chicle, natural gum. The site was in its original state with stones turned up by deeply rooted trees. Gardeners kept the jungle cut back, it was modern man's only touch. My guide, Ephraim smoked pot, he claimed it dulled his pain over a dead girlfriend, he was twenty. It took us hours to find the site and almost gave up the search in the heat of the lowlands.

I took a hit too, then lost touch with the rationalism needed to drive that led to a flat tire, I carelessly sheared off the air-stem after clipping a fallen tree. The tire emptied in seconds. Stoned and sweating, while Ephraim watched me change the tire, eventually he hopped back into the truck to avoid the bacon cooking sun.

In Latin America it seems, most everyone believes in god, jesus-christ and other trees of mystery, and so the question came, Do you believe in god?, as we stood atop the main temple. The disappointment in Ephraim's face registered clear. Before dark we made camp in the main plaza amidst sacrifice stones that rested in their original positions at the foot of each pyramid-shaped temple, these giant moss covered aspirin were used to chop and stab other humans to fulfill perceived obligations to the gods.

I learned from my stay in the region that the Maya built most of the great sites in Mexico and Guatemala, the Incas came later. Their great achievements: built massive scale architecture, were one of four civilizations to invent writing, and were masters of astrology.

Even though I held only thirty-percent of the conversation with my basic and approximate Spanish, the twelve year old kid made conversation with ease while he peddled jewelry.
The hostel owner, who preferred to spend his time watching soccer matches, said of the kid who made his own jewelry, He's a petty thief, stay alert. Emphasizing it with a local saying that implied the boy was clever too, Only the eyes of God can see what he does.

I still gave the kid a ride to Tikal where he spent the day selling a bucket of Mangoes for his mother. Remembering the warning, I kept my eyes on him. Real close 'cause I wasn't convinced god was nearby.

Tourists don't know where they've been. Travelers don't know where they're going.

-Paul Theroux

On the subject of the Maya, I met many travelers with their noses in Armageddon-themed books based on the Western idea that the Maya calendar will end on December 21, 2012, and in turn, bring about total global collapse by way of super-volcanoes and asteroid strikes. It is a crude high-jacking of a highly regarded culture.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was beginning to stumble on the spiritual tourist who would trapeze Latin America in search of something he hoped to find in books and Shamans. An easily stereotyped traveler, one could quickly see they seldom looked at themselves for answers. I could not find one Mayan who believed in a 2012 doomsday, those I met were more concerned with the next rain.

While crossing the country on remote back-roads I met and made fast friends with an American Peace Corps worker and ended up living with him for a couple weeks. Tall lanky Ted lived in a rustic isolated settlement with 300 people, he worked on an Eco-tourism project and spoke K'iche', the local language. I learned a great deal about the customs and governing practices of small communities through Ted. He taught the local kids a new game, baseball, and they'd knock on his door daily, begging to play a game. We played. With bare hands, a tennis ball and wood clubs.

While living with Ted, I met and promptly fell in love with a Guatemalan biologist who did not fall in love with me. Unconsummated love. I was hopelessly enamored with Andrea, she looked more like a sexy librarian than a biologist. Nothing seemed to happen in the small settlement, especially when Andrea wouldn't agree to see me. Ted and I would drink beer and eat eggs for dinner.

The glossy veneer of the over-enthusiastic traveler who says, Everything is great! was stripped away when an American priest was killed in a roadside robbery just 2 km down the road from Ted's place. We watched them drive by moments before the attack and was the same road we ourselves had driven hours before. We all die, it's more a question of how we live.

Highlands
We stayed at a Refugio. In an isolated settlement without roads, set atop a cold mountain with flocks of sheep and goat. We hiked for two days across this barren environment of high plains and small settlements. I was with Ted, of Peace Corps and one of his buddies, Gunther cut in the figure of a lumberjack. Gunther was infected by Ted's experience and was soon off to Africa for his own Peace Corps engagement as a water engineer.
It was in this rocky landscape, I thought, Only in these extreme environments, those most stingy with life that the goat can thrive. From the hottest desert to coldest mountain range the goat can make it. No other animal can do it.

At the Refugio, we made friends with a group of Guatemalan kids and played futbol, soccer on a lopsided field with representative goal posts and an undersized, under-inflated unresponsive ball. My American technique of play contrasted with the finesse of the Guatemala-style, one based on soft touch and good passing, of which I possess none.

I passed and shot hard trying to catch the goalie off guard with booming shots and that's when my boot flew off with the ball towards goal. I was hopping around on one foot trying to keep out of the black mud. Playing at 10,000 feet was exhausting, as we chased the ball around in our mountaineering jackets and heavy boots with kids that wore sweatshirts and flimsy sneakers.

It made me think of the Westerners spirit of necessity, I can't climb that mountain without a Northface jacket. Ha!

Near the end of my stay in Guatemala I began to develop a better understanding of NGOs and GOs (non-government and government organizations) that operate in third-world countries like Guatemala, in the name of helping the helpless. In the case of Peace Corps, a US government organization, they use a field model where a worker is placed in the community alone.

To realize the project he must rely on others within the community. The Peace Corps model encourages him, by way of necessity, to get local buy-in for project development, and whose role is intended to be that of an adviser, rather than a know-it-all. Communities tend to become invested, and this provides the crucial chance for a project to be successful after Peace Corps pulls out. A worker invests dearly, spending two years on-site, often in primitive conditions. For those back home ready for a change or stuck in a crappy job, Peace Corps has no age limit.

On the other side are the many NGOs and GOs operating on a we-know-what's-best-for-you philosophy, using a push down model telling the locals what to do and how to do it, often without their input. It is humiliating to the community and fosters a hand-out mentality of, Just give it to us. These projects are the ones frequently abandoned by the locals after an NGO leaves.

Sadly, there are far more push-down NGOs than those that integrate into communities. After talking with many NGO workers and volunteer tourists I began to sense that their work was a form of psychotherapy. Many had difficulty answering the most basic questions about how their NGO integrated and delivered projects in the communities they served. But, they were proud to lead with, I'm volunteering... or …I'm doing NGO work...

During my stay in Coban, Guatemala, I met a Belgium woman who was a member a six person team (all Belgium) that worked in an insulated office in Guatemala City, providing social services to gay men, teaching them life/work-skills, so they could take 'regular' jobs and get out of the violent world of the sex-trade. In their office, they decided what to do, then took the program to the people. Sure, in one sense it was a worthwhile project and fair to assume it did have a positive social impact.

After seeing with my own eyes and interviews with organization workers, while traveling through some of the poorest parts of the country, it became abundantly clear Guatemala's priorities: clean water, waste water systems, nutrition and housing. Distantly followed by: health services and electricity. Extreme poverty. Most live on dirt floors in adobe-brick houses. It is about priorities. And when I made this point, she grew agitated and defensive.

It seemed to me that many visitors, not the simple tourist, deceived themselves as to their own motives and emotions. They use Third-world counties like Guatemala as a kind of psychotherapy, not to achieve self-knowledge, but rather these counties are for them a Disneyland of horrors, where the attraction is not delight, but moral outrage. I suspect they are dissatisfied with their lives at home. With marriage, crime, or the meaninglessness that material comfort brings, all unsolvable. But in the Third-world it is possible to be on the side of the angels.

On a Sunday morning, I was eating apple pie made by Don, a chain-smoking Pepsi drinking American who ran a hostel in Nebaj, when a CNN news flash hit the screen: Honduran President Zelaya, the legal standing President, was flown out under gunpoint and dumped on a runway in Costa Rica. This would effect my plans, while I waited to assess the mood in Honduras there was apple pie and other savory American foods to eat. It was Latin America's first political intrigue in almost twenty years and I was itching to see it. The Australian and Mexican, who helped me sneak the car through at the border were the ones I was entering coup-rife Honduras with.

For Past Dispatches on Guatemala hit these select links and look for a Honduras summary in next Dispatch Number 87-

2012ers: Armageddon is on the Way!-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2011/03/dispatch-number-84-2012-survivalists.html
Matt the Super Swimmer-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/04/swim.html
Hippies the Great Traveling Artists-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispatch-number-23-hippies.html
Cemetery or Playground?-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2010/02/dispatch-number-57-cemetery.html
The American Priest, shot dead-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2011/02/dispatch-number-83-dead-things.html

David
Tarma, Peru

Dispatch Number 85 -Two Years: Mexico

2011-03-16T19:42:00.000-07:00

This is a series covering the past two years of car travels through Latin America that began in the fall of 2008. Beginning with Mexico and on through Central America's Guatemala-Honduras-Nicaragua-Costa Rica-Panama and South America's Columbia-Ecuador and Peru. The loose plan is to continue driving to the bottom of the world, Ushuaia, Argentina. These are stories of characters, experiences and hardships.

San Diego, California. I slept in the parking lot of Bob's Big Boy. That night sleep came with dread and reluctance as plans to drive into Mexico with a friend fell apart, I was about to go alone. Today, I write this Dispatch from South America in Peru, two and a half years and 20,000 miles later. I began travels as a tourist, then became a traveler and eventually found myself on an odyssey.

My intention to travel by land and sea have gone well, using only paper maps and asking locals for directions at nearly every intersection, since road signs are unusual. Dusty bumpy back-road travel done in an old, 1986 Toyota Land Cruiser, without a GPS gizmo, cellular phone or a computer. Locals often ride with me to the next town, sharing area attractions and what local crops are grown. The regions I stay in tend to be agrarian communities made up of subsistence agriculture, where majority of the day is spent securing life's essentials. A world without vacations and manual labor to the end.

I take occasional Spanish classes while living with host families absorbing local customs and culture. If categories matter, I am a rural tourist or in more extreme cases the anti-tourist. The intent when I left the US, was to see how another part of the world lived, and to see it off the Pan American Highway system, beginning in Mexico and running to the bottom of the world in Ushuaia, Argentina.

Here is the briefest recap of the journey to date, country by country, starting in October 2008 when I entered Mexico with a sinking feeling in my belly.

Mexico
October 2008

My cellphone rang, it was Stephanie. I wasn't at Bob's Big Boy anymore.
Can you wait another day for me to get there? I want to go with you into Mexico.

I was so relieved. Not alone. My dream of driving the Western Hemisphere was launched when we crossed the border into Mexico through Tijuana. I had trouble remembering how to drive through Tijuana like I once knew as a youth, when friends and I would go there for day-long beer drunks on the beach. I'd awake after passing out over the backgammon board sun-burned and head blazing in pain.

A green traveler excited by it all, I exclaimed just about everything and everyone I came in contact with as, Great!

I suspected my enthusiasm irritated people. When I entered Mexico I spoke no Spanish, learning essentials along the way from gas station attendants and restaurant owners.
You don't say 'Gasolina Maximo', it's 'Lleno por favor' for fill 'er up, said one Pemex attendant.
It was seat-of-the-pants learning that suited me well. Stephanie traveled with me for two months, taking back roads everywhere we went, making remote desert camps across Baja California.

We met Richard, an outlaw living in Bahia de Los Angeles, who escaped from the US before the feds caught him for large-scale pot growing in California, some mysterious friend in the US smuggled money to him periodically. A born storyteller, he dazzled us daily with tales of his past. His eccentric side was kept hidden until we went to town: he wore down-feather house boots and Bermudas to the bar in 90+ degree heat. Taking a Coke, he looked far-out with his unkempt silver hair and those booties. He taught me how to make lemonade and ceviche from the fish we caught together.

While in the desert I found a recent plane crash, one that overshot the runway a few days earlier during an emergency landing. I opened the aircraft door and went inside the twin engine air ambulance. In the medical kit I took blue surgical gloves as a memento. I felt criminal, however being at the site of a crash and able enter the plane unimpeded was too tempting. Where were the investigators and yellow tape, like on the news?

Months later in Taxco near Mexico City, I attended my first of many Spanish schools in Latin America. At the midpoint of the language program, I invited a class-mate to go with me to a village to visit an old man I gave a ride to weeks earlier. Looking for Mr. Rodriquez. A seventy-something compact man with a wrinkled face, who grew medicinal plants and had extended an invite when I dropped him off.

My classmate and I rolled into the small village and asked a group of Sunday beer drinkers, one that included a boisterous bull rider, If they knew where we could find Mr. Rodriquez?
No, we don't know who that is, came the group reply after a minute or so of discussion between eight of them.
I brought out two bottles of beer and joined with my friend Katka, who looked displeased to see me drink at this hour. Thirty minutes and six one-liter bottles of beers later. Suddenly, the oldest and fattest in the group blurts out, That's my uncle! Rodriquez, is my uncle! He hasn't lived here in two years.

Southern Mexico

Don't go there. Zapatista country is dangerous with kidnappings, robberies and murders, they said. They are usually the ones who never go, but rely on repeated stories of mayhem that may have been accurate ten years back. When it comes to human adaptation people hopelessly cling to the past. I think animals in Darwin's world adapt faster than humans do. The warnings filled me with resolve.

Zapatista (EZLN: Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, Zapatista Army of National Liberation) is a political-social movement for the under-represented indigenous class in Mexico and is based in San Cristobal de la Casis, a place that draws intellectual revolutionaries the world over. While hardly revolutionary, the colonial city with its low skyline felt entertaining and heavily touristed. As a commercial revolutionary from the north, I bought an EZLN coffee mug.

Only while traveling with Matt, an excellent surfer from Australia, in the heart of Chiapas along the border with Guatemala, did things begin to feel revolutionary. A region where communities rejected national government, preferring self-rule based on Zapatismo Ideology. These communities posted black and red hand painted signs outlining the manifesto. Anti-Federal graffiti was everywhere, often in the form of murals on school walls. This region felt tough, but not unsafe to the outsider.

It was in this region, we found small Maya communities set in the jungle, some said they had undiluted Maya blood -they did look different, a lot different. Matt and I camped at one spot on a swim hole playing backgammon and swimming with locals. For a couple days we puzzled over the relationship between the caretaker/owner and his young helper. Matt, finally broke the silence that summed up our confusion, She's the plumpy wife-daughter.

Mexican culture is vibrant, lively and proud like few others countries in Latin America. They had blood in their veins. Mexico possesses an incredible treasure of Spanish-era Catholic churches, unrivaled by any other I have visited in the Americas. Its food among the best in the hemisphere, Peruvian fare comes a distant second. I had set the tone in Mexico, living a third-class life, staying in dumpy hotels and eating comida tipica, local dishes to make the money last, and it has been that way ever since. I don't want to come home!

Alienation was my natural condition, I was a stranger everywhere I went. With everything familiar stripped away, I felt childlike, defenseless and dim, and having to acquire a language. Mexico helped me understand what I wanted: to immerse in local culture and not patronize the locals.

David
Chiquian, Peru

Dispatch Number 84 -2012 Survivalists: An Attack Piece

2011-03-09T15:48:00.000-08:00

Alex

This past August having spent the hottest part of the year in the Amazon basin I felt the urge to get out of that sticky oppressive part of Peru and clear my head in the Andes. Set against the mountainous backdrop were indigenous Peruvian herders grazing flocks of sheep and cattle on communal grasslands. To manage the animals they would hiss and make guttural sounds while tossing rocks and slapping them with branches. It was in this setting, far from the city, I met Alex and his 2012 futurist friends at The Way Inn.

Interesting ones in this group, these New Age spiritualists that use psychotropic drugs with surprising regularity to find higher levels of consciousness and use it to get closer to their New Age ideas, one of them is the presently popular prediction of a 2012 doomsday, based on the ancient Maya calendar and scripts. It is a Western idea that modern Maya do not subscribe to.

Alex is the absentee owner of the Inn who occasionally visits to check up on things. He has a room on the remote property, but is hardly in it. Nomadic spirit is in his blood. A tall strapping Englishman with long brown hair pulled in a neat ponytail and a rich voice I imagine women are attracted to. This time he visits with his New Age friends whose focus these days is the copious consumption of psychotropic drugs like ayahuasca and San Pedro cactus; several in his group claim to be self-taught shamans providing guided drug journeys to spiritual tourists (there's an abundance of them here in Peru trying to find it again). Alex and his self-proclaimed shamans are the latest incarnation of evangelists, New Age spiritualists. People who describe most everything they do as a calling.

Alex ate fast and ate multiple plates of food while standing without seeming to pay attention to what he was doing while we talked. He had made a life in Peru and was an unabashed New Age believer in a 2012 doomsday.
Between plates of food I asked the only question that mattered, What sets your beliefs apart from other superstitions that have predicted the end of the world?
Good question, followed by a deep breath as he went on in unconvincing fashion to tell me it can all be explained away by vast amounts of information available interpreted with modern theory and joined with select remnants of Maya texts and antiquated calendar.

How information has grown exponentially since the 1960's, and thus, with this bounty of data and modern ability to interpret it, one cannot refute the signs of collapse that the Maya were telling us. Glossing over an inconvenient truth, the data he refers to came from the very Western civilization he attacks as being corrupt and unsustainable.

He went on, those who remain 'unconscious' in the trappings of Western ways are doomed and will suffer for their dependence on the system. The implication is the 'unconscious' ones will be left out of the new era expected to emerge after cataclysmic events begin on December 21, 2012. He expressed suspicion towards mainstream Western culture, believes in the idea of spiritual evolution, and the possibility of leading the world into the New Era by individual example and group consciousness. The New Agers set themselves apart (in their minds) by practicing meditation, taking repetitive psychedelic drug journeys, while claiming to live at higher levels of consciousness. The implication is clear: They are better fit for survival.

When Alex heard my story of driving through Latin America for an extended period of time, he linked it to an increase in man's awakening and an increase in global consciousness, hinting that I may survive the coming apocalypse by being in the right place at the right time. For him, I was additional proof that something was afoot, my actions were a contribution to the collective consciousness. In books, people take what we need and not necessarily what the books principle point is, and in Alex's case it is an example of seeing everything around him as a 'sign', an environment where most everything has some sort of meaning or significance. For the 2012ers it is superstition dressed up as fact.

He flushed, I love seeing signs like this, man, it's real good, I get excited meeting people like you.
Flattered as I was, I remained unconvinced. Putting the excitement of doom aside one of the aims of the 2012 movement is to foster counter-cultural sympathies and activate spiritual activism. I'd be down with some of their ideas if they would leave the doomsday part out of the picture; in any case, their end-of-time prophecy cheapens this positive aspect and offends those with active minds. No one likes to be manipulated by threats.

What The End Looks Like

The belief, in general, is that there will be cataclysmic or trans-formative events on December 21, 2012 that will come as earthquakes, extreme climate change and super-volcanoes that will kill off more than half the population and in turn lead to the collapse of the capitalist system. Judgment day for capitalism; Western civilization punished for materialism, corrupt mores and extravagant ways. The primitive Christians more or less said the same of the Romans until they acceded the high court of Roman emperors and Rome became a holy Catholic State. Before long those same pious Christians adopted the extravagant ways of the Romans.

Catastrophe and collapse will come in a host of colorful ways, here are some (always told with a straight face): solar maximum or sunspots, (think of a barbecued earth), the earth's magnetism reversing; rogue planets striking earth, super-volcanoes and earthquakes. As if the above were not dramatic enough some of the more extreme predictions include the return of alien caretakers to enlighten or enslave us, to a sudden devolution of humans into non-bodily beings.

A researcher who has studied New Age communities and themes, describes 2012 narratives as the product of a 'disconnected' society: unable to find spiritual answers to life's big questions within ourselves, we turn outward to imagined entities that lie far off in space or time -entities that just might be in possession of superior knowledge. And this is what people around town more or less had to say about Alex, commenting that he was going through some big life changes and seemed adrift in search of answers to the unanswerable.

They excite over the Western idea of complicated data-intensive calculations, astronomical alignments and numerological formulae used to predict the end of the world based on Maya writings and the Maya Long Count calendar. After all, information is power, right? In short, because the calendar ends the world ends -lovely kindergarten logic even a child can appreciate. They believe that after the capitalist system is destroyed a new system will emerge; the new era will be based on a humanistic ethos of simple living based on the concept of 'collective-consciousness'. This basis of group thought is rooted in primitive attitudes of mechanical solidarity or herd behavior, much like the ones I subscribed to when I was a corporate guy -in that environment even though we were all fucking each other over on business deals, we chanted "Win-Win" all the way.

Others interpret it as positive physical or spiritual transformation that may spark the beginning of a new era, however, still as the result of catastrophe and massive population loss. Talking with Alex and his futurist friends about 2012 made me think back to the Y2K bug scare of the late 1990s that suggested our computers would stop working and lead to economic collapse. I knew people who withdrew vast amounts of cash from the bank and stockpiled food anticipating anarchy; at the time I worked in the computer industry and we loved it because we knew nothing was going to happen.
Skeptically I thought, Wow, those PR guys are good.
Survivalists appear in every age on the flimsiest of pretexts; like lonely singles looking for companionship and grab at anything that comes their way; the survivalist waits for a cause.

It's a Western Idea

None of the proposed alignments or formulae has been accepted by mainstream scholarship. Impending doom is not found in any of the existing classic Maya accounts, and the idea that the Long Count calendar "ends" in 2012 misrepresents Maya history. Classical sources on the subject are scarce and contradictory, suggesting there is little, if any universal agreement to what the date might mean. The Maya I met in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala were concerned with the next rain. I could not find a local Mayan that subscribed to the Western idea of a 2012 collapse.

The destruction they crave will pave the way for realignment of world order, a simpler way of life, much like the back-to-the-land movements of the 1960's and 1970's that promoted self sufficiency and humanistic ways, which one could argue contributed to the greed of the 1980s and irrational exuberance of the 1990s. Enthusiasts of 2012 apply a moral standard of simplicity against the perceived extravagance of capitalism. With capitalism the focus of their dark predictions, I wonder if the Chinese and Russians will get a pass on the horrors that await because they made a strident go of communism.

Armageddon, my word, is not used by the New Agers who subscribe to this end of time prophecy and instead use phrases like: "When the shit hits" or "The big change coming", or "A massive realignment". New language and words to describe an old outcome -the Earth's end; an unoriginal story repeated for millenniums.

One is left to guess that when the earth's crust opens Alex's New Age friends will be spared death by the approach of an angel that will catch them just as the earth opens. Further one is left to suppose that when super-volcanoes erupt and fill the air with unbreathable ash they will find themselves atop a remote mountain in a pocket of pure air. Never mind the last time the air turned this toxic from an asteroid strike, it knocked off all the dinosaurs. Yet, listening to the superstitions they promote of 'collective consciousness', it will have them in the right place at the right time to survive. It smacks of mystical superiority and the non-believers, the unconscious who live in the capitalist system, are doomed to the hell that awaits them.

It is an age old tale that falls into a long line of similar predictions made by major religions and cults that have cropped up with each passing moral fad. Religions have always taken contemporary thought, tied it to secret knowledge and applied it to the passive masses claiming sage-like knowledge with command of the facts & data of the day. These New Agers are the new messiahs using an antiquated Maya calendar and ancient writings nobody really understands claiming to know how to interpret what the Maya were telling us.

After conversations with believers in a 2012 collapse, I came away with a wholly different opinion and point of view about them. Their actions, spirit and zealotry made them less 'spiritual' than I had originally thought. They are not New Age spiritualists. They are a new form of an old idea and in-group: they are a cult of Survivalists that fluff up their cause with dreamy spiritualism.

The survivalist movement is based on many events imagined and real, including government policies, threats of nuclear warfare, religious beliefs, and writers warning of social or economic collapse, both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic books. The Maya 2012 doomsday prediction has mystical and religious underpinnings that activate the Survivalists.

It is superstition presented in its latest form and there are no shortage of writers claiming interpretive knowledge (just buy my book). They use the most effective parts of the propaganda model: fear and hidden knowledge. Alex and his friends are persuaded by these superiors to direct their vows to the reining Western resurrection of Maya deities and to propagate the latest doctrine of collapse. They are the spiritually starved who have sadly been reduced to mythic-magical thinking.

Even though they cite 'facts and data', the 2012 gang are as superstitious as the great religions of the world -Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian and Buddhist. Most all have made end of time predictions, while accusing their contemporaries of being morally corrupt and that if they do not reform they will suffer. Man's propensity is to exalt the past and depreciate the present. As a historical point of fact these predictions have always failed to come.

I marveled at the intelligent ignorance of this new class of spiritualist citing 'data' as the proof, yet unable to explain the smallest part of it. Data is the new power word, people get hit over the head with 'information-age' messages in mass media and the corporate environment; here the word has been co-opted to project something untrue and bolster superstition. The Christians did this all the time taking contemporary issues and fads and incorporated them into current superstitions, which in turn, were used to manipulate and control a docile populace. The New Agers are remarkably similar to those primitive Christians who renounced the extravagant ways of Rome and its privileged class, while they practiced non-participation in civic affairs claiming moral and secret knowledge as authority for their choices and proclamations.

Bruce Chatwin captures the dynamics at work of persons controlling information:

"So important were the dates of the seasonal cycle- for planting, inundating and harvesting- that you found an outburst of astronomical calculation and astrological prediction. So important was it to keep the work force in passive dependence, that this knowledge became the exclusive property of a caste of managerial bureaucrats, the futurologist of the ancient world. These were men morbidly wrapped-up in themselves and responsible to nothing but the system; they dwarfed the people with monumental architecture and threatened the people with implacable sky gods."

Alex's answer was deeply inadequate to the gravity that he subscribed to; it also told me he was the latest incarnation of what organized religion has done to people before him: a docile slave to historic interpretations he does not understand, but easily surrenders to without critical thought. 2012 theorists use the passions of the human heart and contemporary circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose.

High in the Andes, The Way Inn seemed like a good place to escape impending doom. It's a rare moment to observe an end of time prophecy playing out before my eyes, usually I only get to read about what never happens. I am sure that in the end, Alex's apprehensions will far exceed his sufferings.

David

Huaraz, Peru

Dispatch Number 83 -Dead Things

2011-02-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

Eight months into my journey, back in 2009, I still wore the gleam of the rose-tinted traveler excited by most everything I saw, summoning it up with 'Great!' My romantic perspective was jolted when the well respected, Reverend Lawrence Rosebaugh, an American was shot dead. He had spent over thirty years running missions in war-torn countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. Now, he was slumped over the wheel caught in a road-side ambush two kilometers outside the 200-person village I was staying in.

Peace Corp friend, Ted and I watched them drive past his house at 5:30 in the afternoon. Minutes later the Reverend was shot in the head and the others in his group, all priests had their valuables taken at gunpoint. The bandits escaped on foot over a jungle trail with a couple cameras, bibles and a fistful of dollars, leaving a dead man behind. The news sent a chill down our spines because we had driven the same road just a couple hours earlier.

Traveling remote areas, which is usually where I am, carried a new edge after that. In this remote part of northern Guatemala the apathy and disinterest of the police contrasted with the anger of the indigenous communities they were expected to serve. The cops would not enter into a pursuit and the next morning a posse of local farmers took matters into their own hands and gave chase finding evidence, but no robbers.

While in Honduras with Jeff the gregarious Australian we saw these two:

After lunch under piercing Honduran sun we drove on a new highway that cut through the banana plantations along the Caribbean coast. An old man lie dead in the opposite lane. Fresh runny blood poured down the sloping roadway towards our lane as we crawled by in first gear staring out the driver's window, the blood would be in our lane soon. A very old woman of similar age stood pensively over him as if afraid to know who he was, a bicycle lay on the ground near him. The scene looked like it happened minutes earlier. The dead one appeared still warm, blood shiny and fresh pooling by his head and running over the little stones that make up asphalt. We drove seven miles before talking again.

Days later in the same region we saw a group of a 100 people or more surround and stare at a man who lay dead next to his spilled motorcycle. No one touched him and we didn't stop.
Was he dead?, I asked.
Yes, definitely dead. Jeff proclaimed in a doctor's tone.
It was a tone surprisingly similar to one I heard from the doctor caring for my mother, Hope when I asked the same question years back. She was too still to be anything else.

David
Huaraz, Peru

Dispatch Number 82 -Shot Dead

2011-02-17T11:13:00.001-08:00

The violence broke out at 9 on a Sunday evening. Mothers and small children crying, some wail as they walk away from the scene in the cold night air. The shock felt in the aftermath of violence. People stood quiet without emotion. Quiet like a funeral service. The tidy curbs and paving stones betrayed the violence that brought people out of their houses in the small Colombian mountain town of three thousand people. The night was quiet except for aimlessly barking dogs. Quiet the way small agricultural towns are after sunset when they shutter up and the streets become still.

A man was shot dead one block from my hotel. The sounds: killing and shock could be heard in clear detail, the crack of the pistol and the horrible guttural wail women make when someone dies. Six rapid pistol shots, like Chinese firecrackers rang out shattering the peace of early evening. I thought someone had lost their temper and shot one of the barking dogs, when in fact, they lost it and shot another man.

I stood with the gathering crowd. We stared in silence at the dead man laying in the gutter. He looked so peaceful he could have been mistaken for a passed out drunk of 40 or 50 years, a man with a swollen face of too much salt, oil and beer. No sheet or jacket tossed over him, just his still body facing the cold night sky with closed eyes. He lay dead in front of a tienda, a small convenience store, the kind I buy toilet paper, beer and food at.

A crowd formed and stood quietly with a stillness only felt when you walk the streets late at night. Still, very still, like sex after an orgasm, expired and calm. No police car sirens or bright flashing lights, just one cop who arrived on foot in a two cop town. The townsfolk slowly grew into a crescent shape around the dead-man. Not a whisper.

I stood close, close as an outsider dare, looking for Hollywood bullet holes and blood. Unlike the movies there were none. I stood with the rest of them staring. Contemplating. The freshly dead are ghoulish. So strange this man in morbid state with not a whisper in the crowd.
I think to myself, What he did he do for work and wondered what the argument could have been over? How many dead bodies have I seen in my life?

I had to remind myself I was looking at a dead man, one shot dead like the days of the Wild West, there it was again: Hollywood. Listening to my thoughts I can see how much of life is played out on film and not in real life. I left the community to itself, its shock, its whispers. My return walk to the hotel was solemn as I passed whispering women standing in front of a house. I bowed my head and walked on.

Death makes you value life, albeit usually temporarily. You make half-hearted promises to yourself to do something different, much like the cheap new year resolutions we make and don't keep, or like this night, the next death.

Ernesto J. was shot dead over something. Nothing. It could have been anything, a woman, religion or saltine crackers. I sensed the killer was the man sitting next to Ernesto's still body, with his head hung low looking unhappy with his rashness. The policeman's radio crackled.

David
Lima, Peru

Dispatch Number 81 -Cow Man

2011-02-13T09:34:00.001-08:00

A leather-faced cow herder waved us to stop at a broad curve in the road where he was shoveling dirt into potholes that burst out everywhere like pimples in the asphalt. He was working this remote section alone while his few cows munching on high plains grass that looked better suited to weave with. This scene is normal on back-country roads in Latin America, the poor get a shovel to patch holes in hope drivers will proffer tips for their labor. They do make a difference, but there are always more potholes than repairmen. Every age participates, from 7 year old boys to old peasant women.

On the drive to Chavin we crossed the famed Cordillera Blanca in search of a sulfur hot spring in the heart of the Andes, it was here we met the smiling Peruvian herder on the road. The peasants, or campesinos who live in this remote cold dry environment have red-brown weathered complexions. Age guessing is hopeless, they all look older than they are, the impassive faces of children have bright red-rosy cheeks that look painted on.

I offered a lollipop instead of a coin. He had one of those broad natural smiles that gave the appearance he smiled all the time. His teeth were badly decayed though lined in silver, like picture frames highlighting what was left.
He was pleased with the candy and surprised me by asking, Do you have an old newspaper?
We were near a low mountain pass in the middle of nowhere, not a single house in sight. I love to read and was charmed he asked for a daily and dearly wished I had one to give.

We exchanged pleasantries then drove on while the next driver ignored his plea for a tip leaving Cow Man in a whirl of road dust.

David
Lima, Peru

Dispatch Number 80 -The Guest

2011-02-07T09:19:00.001-08:00

This August having spent the hottest part of the year in the Amazon basin I felt the urge to get out of that sticky oppressive part of Peru and clear my head in the Andes. In the foothills where grass meets granite the focus becomes the mountainous backdrop with Peruvian herders managing small flocks of sheep and cattle. The herders hiss and make guttural noises to manage the animals while tossing rocks and slapping them with thin branches. After long walks in the mountains I would take communal meals at the Inn where fellow travelers shared stories.

There was a colorful variety of guests staying at the Inn, Amy an American lawyer visiting Peru for two weeks who brought it all with her, not the work, but the weird energy of wound up America. She worked for the U.S. Department of Justice in the Environmental Division in Washington, D.C. who was a tense tightly wrapped person. When people said something she made a point to hear exactly the opposite. She had the knack of asking questions and ignoring the reply.

A person who had trouble accepting kindness like the time I gave her a tangerine as a simple food gift; eying my actions with suspicion, she struggled with a snotty "thanks" sounding like a college sorority girl who was worried her friends were watching. A person could not hold a conversation with her because she would parse one's words mercilessly derailing the "intent" of the conversation. She would search for fault and blemish in most everything, including herself.

The most colorful guests were friends of the owner, Alex a group of 2012 futurists that predicted impending doom in December 2012 that took a lot of natural jungle drugs to see through it all. It was such a colorful bunch I wrote a separate piece to be shared soon.

Two German women were among the guests at the Inn, who I suspected of being lovers (men always have to comment on this superficial bullshit) that complained of the local peasants doing their annual grass burn before seasonal rains. The confident one, Teresa worked for Airbus and described her world in extremes of 'the best and worst' despite common opinion. Germans tend to be some of the most inflexible and intolerant people I have met on my travels. The most offensive I met were two young German men teaching English in rural Ecuador who turned the motor off in my Land Cruiser as it warmed telling me as I watched from the balcony above they did not want to listen to it and authoritatively told me engines don't need to be warmed anymore. I was never asked to turn it off.

The women at the Inn were much more friendly, Teresa's unemployed girlfriend had a voracious appetite consuming anything left on the communal dining table, smothering it with hot sauce until she emptied the bottle.
The confident one went on, thick with pity about the burning hillside near the Inn, I wish someone would tell them to stop doing that.

The West always knows best. I tire of this type of traveler who accepts little of the places they visit, preferring high moral ground like fires, trash and toilet systems to bitch about. One needs to be cautious when moralizing against the countries they visit, because if everything was run to high standards like they are in the West, then these travelers would have no place to go. A principal reason to travel is to see different things and things done differently. I have found the Germans to be the most reluctant to accept this idea, they prefer the comfortable couch of criticism, railing against anything they set their attentions to. On a closing point, the practice of burning grass to set nutrients for the next crop has been an agricultural practice for over 11,000 years.

David
Lima, Peru

Dispatch Number 79 -No Hands

2011-02-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

After I saw him I thought shamefully to myself, David, the next time you get bitchy or full of self-pity try it one more time without a pair of hands.
Through a birth defect the backpacker next to me had no hands.
He has gone through his whole life this way and it stimulated a string of questions:
What are his hardships?
How does he count money?
How does he endure being teased and stared at?
How does he eat?
And how does he do it all and not have it be at the center of attention?

He moved effortlessly about and I hardly noticed him in my morning haze. The man with no hands refreshed my perspective on how petty we can make things. In this brief passing it was to never know a man yet be affected by him.

David
Lima, Peru

Dispatch Number 78 -Notes From a Notebook IV

2011-02-03T13:51:00.000-08:00

The Move

The petite French woman who went volcano watching with us the night before rode with us from a cool air mountain town in Ecuador down to the steamy tropics of the Amazon basin to the east. Sort of cute, she had a compressed face that squished up her features and had a munchkin-like body. We stopped for a dip in a river to escape jungle heat by lying about in the shallow riverbed.

Jason, a travel friend, did a bizarre thing -he made a move on the pug-like Nittie, an action that stood in contrast to his low self-esteem that propelled him to do little. He was throwing rocks with his cousin when he suddenly stopped, walked over to where Nittie was sitting, over fifty feet away, then faced her while he placed his hands on a large rock, then with model-like sexuality tore off his t-shirt and dunked his 80s rocker-style hair into the waters. He stood up dripping, pulled his hair back and bared his chest to unimpressed Nittie who struggled to contain a giggle.

Marjolein, my Dutch travel companion remarked, Did you see Jason's Herbal Essence Shampoo move?
Before it was over Jason, without saying a word, gave a clumsy smile, stood cautiously proud and hesitated awkwardly for a moment then walked back to his rock pile. Nittie finally gave a laugh, the condescending way French people do when confronted with American guilelessness.

When we arrived at our destination in steamy Tena she was gone in under five minutes for the bus station declaring she was bound for one of those spots promoted in the travel guides as an "off-the-beaten-path" experience. These guides are bibles for the uncreative non-adventurous types and they adhere to them with remarkable predictability. The implication made in these travel books is that you will be the only non-native person there. And like most things that share characteristics of the bible it leads to group-think and group-actions that end in dull predictability: the "intrepid" backpacker finds his congregation has already arrived at the same hotel and taking meals in the same restaurants.

Doritos
A traveler's comfort comes in many forms, tonight it is being alone in a cheap street-front room, a candle in the window with a large bag of Doritos, a chunk of cheese and two bottles of beer. Made complete with a good book, this one a biography about the Argentine revolutionary Che.
Little else is needed in this mountain town.

Unhatched Ideas

A Doritos Index. It would keep a running record of Doritos prices in each country as a measure of inflation and relative prices which can fluctuate widely country to country. Two things I can find in every country: Doritos and Coca Cola, good Coke in glass bottles.

The Recently Read List
Compañero, a biography on revolutionary Che Guevara, now I know the story and it is a great deal more than the pop-art posters that are plastered everywhere. A complicated and extraordinarily interesting man, he was a Gemini after all. After his capture the Bolivians decided to execute Che to avoid further problems they anticipated would come with having just captured the World's Revolutionary leader whose stated goal was to export revolution. The Americans wanted to interrogate him in Panama and there was a possibility the Cubans would send an armed rescue to break him out. Aside from being a rural tourist I am also a morbid historical seeker, my plans are to visit the ravine where he was captured and school house where he was summarily shot. Years ago I stood at the motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The combined pleasure of seeing the actual location of one's death and history is difficult to explain.

Blinding Light, Paul Theroux's (One of America's great travel writers) worst novel ever and something rare for me, left unfinished and abandoned on a bookshelf for another traveler to suffer.

A contemporary history of The Arab-Israeli Conflict, an eye opening read from a world historical perspective. The rule of history prevails, those in power rarely negotiate. Israel is in the driver's seat on this one.

Endurance, the Shackleton story of an exploration ship getting trapped in antarctic ice floes and of his miraculous, truly miraculous story of survival and leadership. An unbelievable ordeal that lasted nearly two years, in 1914-17.

Howard Hughes, The Secret Life, a biography of the billionaire sex crazed bi-sexual control-freak who was also a titan of American industry, a friend of the CIA and to wrap up his further eccentric side was a germaphobe and notorious tightwad (an odd trait shared by many of the super wealthy). Contrary to popular belief, the evidence demonstrates he was not crazy nor controlled by others, but was, in this account very alert and active in his latter years. With his Hollywood productions he influenced how films were made, especially the loosening of sexual censorship. Others include contributions to the aeronautics industry; spy satellites for the U.S. government; various CIA escapades involving Cuba; a secret technology provider to the intelligence boys at the CIA; transformed the Las Vegas you know today when he bought several casinos from mob families in the 1960s. Howard initiated corporate-run Vegas of today made fit for a child and a man of vice.

A Short History of Nearly Everything, a layman's book of modern science by Bill Bryson, very good, especially the biographies of the fame-crazed scientists that either made novel discoveries or stole them from each other -these guys are catty self-promoters! Did you know that if your text book diagram of the solar system was to scale that Pluto would be two kilometers away from where you sat?

What am I Doing Here, a Bruce Chatwin posthumously published book of travel and interview notes. It helped me better understand my current nomadic traits. He has a thing for very good first sentences too.

David
Lima, Peru

Dispatch Number 77 -Notes From a Notebook III

2010-10-31T16:58:00.001-07:00

Things You Don't Learn Reading Books
Latin American girlfriends are like wars. They are easy to start and terribly difficult to end.

On Getting There
"I'm not going back, but I don't know where I'm going."
-Scott, The BiPolar Traveler

Cat
Sun burns through the dust of windy arid Huanuco, a city that sits at the edge of the highlands between the Andes and the Amazon basin. Two hotel workers, men in their 20s throw a kitten the distance of a horseshoe pit into a garden fountain deep enough to drown it. The kitten learns it can swim. The men leave it in for some time wallowing in adolescent laughter, eventually they pull it out. The weeks old black kitten sits in shock in the grass next to the fountain.
Minutes earlier Scott, my suicidal American friend and I were discussing human evolution, Was man still evolving or locked into his present form?

Our discussion took place on a balcony above the fountain where we witnessed the cat being tossed. It was cruel.
Scott remarked in his deadpan fashion, I'm not sure humans have evolved.

Scott
Scott talks of suicide in a deep southern Tennessee drawl, morbid contemplations of the noose to put a stop to it all. He explained the importance of using a thick rope to perform the task comfortably and how to set the rope on the neck, not Hollywood style with broken vertebrae, but by gently starving the brain of blood and oxygen. I refer to him as my Suicidal American Friend in letters to friends. In fact, he owns a beautiful piece of white rope tied into a noose that always sits out in the open. He has carried ropes like this one for years, it gives him solace. He jokes to put me at ease, yet I know his musings have a tinge of realism.

He is safe; I am not the type to freak out and try to prevent him from his wishes. I am of the opinion that life is yours to do what you want with it and if he is going to do it, he will. I can only be a normal guy with him and let each of us take away what we need from our time together. The noose helps him keep perspective when his mood turns against the instinct of the heartbeat to live.

He does not seem over the edge, but families say that all the time of murderous or suicidal relations, you never know what lie inside. What I do enjoy about Scott is he possesses both LIFE and DEATH and that is more than I can say of most people I meet.

Chavin
Guided by my sometimes misguided idea of being an antitourist I told Scott I wanted to go to Chavin up in the mountains because the map showed a hot spring there. The idea was to go find a place to sleep and soak in the sulfur baths. Aside from the symbol stamped on our dog eared map of Peru we knew nothing of the place.

After six or seven stops to ask directions we found the nameless hot spring as the sun was setting only to be told by the old woman caretaker that, We open in the morning.

My antitourist wishes were met: we had no idea where to stay the night. The road was cut into a steep mountain side, everything perched on a ledge. Accommodations did not look encouraging, clusters of roadside adobe houses splattered with road mud and locals that stared at us as they prepared to shutter in for the night.

In the fading light of dusk the settlements looked disappointing and depressing. People stood in doorways of dirt-floor houses in wash-worn clothes, dreary muted colors as dusty as the dashboard of the truck. The same old lady pointed down the road with Latin American approximation for a place to sleep. Scott and I harbored silent thoughts of a rough night trying to sleep in a dumpy hospedaje with mice, unrelenting cold air and lumpy beds.

To our surprise Chavin was tidy and stood in stark contrast to all the towns we had passed, it had a colonial atmosphere of thick walled adobe buildings and a new plaza. We settled in for the night at the very comfortable La Casona. To my dismay in the morning I discovered the guidebook called attention to it all: Chavin, its hot spring and even our hotel. After traveling for two years I have learned that most everything has been discovered and Chavin was no exception. Tourism has become industrialized in its reach and scale taking the thrill away from the intrepid off the beaten path traveler. Part of my Latin American odyssey aside from cultural and language studies is searching for these out of the way places that have not been trampled by the tourist hoards.

Rumblings
The intentions of life, where do they go?

Italo Calvo
“In the square there is a wall where the old men sit and watch the world go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.”
-Italo Calvo

David
Huaraz, Peru

Dispatch Number 76 -Panama Canal

2010-10-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

This is a slightly dated piece written while in Panama in 2009.

As an American you hear all sorts of stuff about this waterway growing up, the biggest this or that, the greatest engineering task ever undertaken by man and so on... usually with a great deal of American grandstanding. So there I was standing at the Gatun Locks on the Panama Canal, a giant set of locks on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama. Locks are the equivalent of gigantic rectangular swimming pools and the Gates are like a pair of swing doors to an old style saloon that open and close holding water in or keeping it out.

The waterway is an 80 kilometer (49 mile) passage over a combination of man made lakes, waterways and canal locks to cross the Isthmus. Since it opened, more than 950,000 vessels have transited the waterway. Enough earth was removed that if it was all put on railroad flat cars, it would circle the globe four times at the equator. The briefest of history- As early as the mid 1500´s the Spanish wanted a water way in Central America to move their gold about, from then on it was studied with various plans made over the centuries. Once the location was set by the French in the 1880´s work began on a sea-level canal that lasted almost ten years. Due to the immensity of the project and high number of worker deaths (over 20,000) caused mostly by yellow fever and malaria, both untreatable diseases at the time, that the French abandoned the ambitious project. The Americans took over the canal rights from the French at the open of the new century choosing a Lock-type canal to speed construction after concluding the French plan would take twenty more years to complete.

There were two canal routes under consideration at the time, one in Panama the other in Nicaragua. The Nicaragua canal, favored by the United States, was known as the American Route. While traveling in Nicaragua I took the American Route on the Rio San Juan, on a colorful combination of river boats, dug out canoes and lake ferries. It was one of the highlights of my travels so far. The landscape along the San Juan feels unchanged from the late-1800s and remains road-less to this day. I traveled for nearly two weeks on the 120 mile long river and discovered it was populated with just three towns; everything between them was virgin jungle, cow pastures and the occasional one house settlement. Thousands of would be gold miners made their way to join the California Gold Rush during the 1850's over both routes using a combination of ships, wagons and trains to make the passage over the isthmus.

To expedite U.S. interest's to build and control the canal Roosevelt´s Administration recognized Panama when it proclaimed independence from Columbia in 1903. It did this because Columbia was slowing the concession discussions and asking for more money. Teddy and his investors would have none of it. The discussions and planning for Panama's secession from Columbia took place in Washington, D.C. The process was a shameful one. When Panama claimed independence America promptly recognized it as a sovereign nation at a ceremony in the White House. It did not include a single Panamanian nor was Spanish spoken. Additional insult was added when the canal treaty was negotiated without Panamanian government officials; it was conducted by a Frenchman. The history of the canal reads better than fiction. Better.

The US went on to build, manage and fully control the land five miles on each side of the waterway from 1903 to 1999. It was run like a military base (and looks exactly like one) that included very large defense installations at the Pacific and Atlantic entrances with 15 inch naval guns. All rights were returned to the Government of Panama in 1999 honoring a handover agreement made in 1977.
Enough history.

At the Gatun Locks observation platform I watched the container ship Maersk Dunbury make the transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean dropping ninety feet in three monumental steps, then set free to sail the Atlantic. From the viewing platform I could throw rocks at the ships as they moved slowly by like sleeping skyscrapers. The Dunbury is a class of container ship designed to just squeeze through the canal with 2 1/2 feet on each side to spare. Cables are tied to the ship then moved by locomotive tugs that keep it centered in the canal way. Transit from ocean to ocean takes eight to twelve hours.

The Dunbury was over 900 feet long and 105 feet wide and paid $268,000 cash for the passage, every ship pays cash two days in advance including the U.S. Navy. The Dunbury is in the Panamax-class of ships designed to maximize the canal dimensions of 110 feet wide and 1,000 feet long. In 2014, a new set of giant locks will open as a third lane to allow transit of post-Panamax ships, the canal dimensions grow to 180 feet wide and 1,500 feet long. Trivia- The smallest toll ever paid was by American adventurer Richard Halliburton who swam the canal in 1928, it took ten days and he paid a 36 cent toll. Tolls are based on weight of a vessel.

Amidst all the heavy industrial equipment and vast volumes of water movement it is of interest to note that the first time a ship is connected to the canal is by row boat that two canal workers row out to catch the lead line. A ship is moved without computers or electronic sensors, instead it is done the old fashioned way: by eye, bells, steam whistles and radios.

The Gates, aptly described as giant steel swing doors weight 700 tons each and are the originals installed in 1914. They open or close in under two minutes and the locks empty and fill in under ten minutes moving a ship up or down 28 vertical feet. The water movement is staggering as a massive pipe system moves, via gravity, 26,000,000 gallons of water in less than ten minutes. The process is repeated three times until vertical movement of 90 feet is reached. Despite these massive movements of machinery, ships and water the whole process is oddly silent, even the movement of water is done so smoothly that it looks as calm as a duck pond.

Fresh out of questions for David the guide, I asked what the worst accident was to happened at the canal, thinking I would hear of a runaway ship crashing the giant steel gates followed by an explosion of water. Careful what you ask, the answer was sobering and both accidents involved the steel cables that run from the locomotive tugs and the ship. The lucky guy, if you consider it so, had both his legs cut off when a cable snapped, today he holds an office job and gets around by wheelchair. The other handler, less fortunate, was sliced in two mid-torso by a broken cable.

Last year the Panama Canal Authority had revenues of $2.2 billion, after operating expenses, $800 million was left to the government. As a rural traveller I can attest to the vast scope of infrastructure projects canal revenues have funded in the country side: schools, medical clinics, potable water and sewer systems, erosion control and road improvements. The level of infrastructure in Panama stands apart from other countries in Central America. The Panama Canal is, as I am told, the eighth wonder of the world. While impressive I am unsure deserves to be on the list a world wonders.

Postscript: When I shipped my truck from Panama to Colombia it was loaded on the Carribean side of the canal, thus it never transited the canal. I shared a 40' container with one other vehicle, it cost us each $800 USD to ship our cars. I skipped services offered by freight forwarders who would have handled everything, instead I dealt with every detail of an international shipment directly, it was quite a learning experience in both the process and cultures of the Latin American countries involved.

David
Huaraz, Peru

Dispatch Number 75 -Amazon Run

2010-10-07T14:53:00.000-07:00

The air was cooling in the early evening air as our boat motored up the Amazon river where the jungle always looked the same- high mud banks and settlements of wood plank houses, the land flat and dense with unvarying trees and plants. There was an occasional settlement in this road less country connected to the world only by the cargo boat for necessities of salt, oil and gasoline. Sweat beaded off my brow as I talked with Cindy an American on the upper deck of the Edwardo VIII. The deck was full of American evangelicals on their way to a revival deep in the Amazon jungle. The deck was all hammocks and over packed bags.

Cindy and her husband John came to Iquitos, Peru the largest city in the world without a road leading to it 28 years earlier directed by the voice of god on one of the most bizarre and incredible boat journeys I had ever heard. Originally from Wisconsin they bought a house boat in Michigan and began a journey south on rivers until reaching the Gulf of Mexico, then crossing the hurricane prone Caribbean in an ill-suited 58 foot houseboat with a mere 13 foot beam designed for lake travel, not the pounding swells of the open sea. As the seas grew more treacherous god's voice became stronger when one day off the coast of Venezuela John opened a mariners reference book in a sort of calling to discover a river route that led to Iquitos via Venezuela. This would make the journey much safer by avoiding the big waters of the Atlantic where the Amazon pours out in northern Brazil. They arrived in Iquitos five years after leaving the U.S..

The choice of boat, one expressly designed for smooth lake travel bordered on a loss of sanity when taken over the open sea.

John was the child of missionary parents and as a youth he yearned to break the yoke of the missionary orbit. He never broke it; first performing missionary work in Mexico and eventually in Peru. To John and Cindy taking the ill suited houseboat over oceans was in itself an act of god and explained they felt blessed all the way with the help they received. To Cindy everything was a god granted miracle, her enthusiasm bubbled through her short stocky rugby body.

Before meeting Cindy, as the Edwardo VIII prepared to leave the muddy banks of Iquitos I began to feel something godly, something great aboard this cargo ship when a lily white nubile teen with generic spectacles exclaimed from the stern, The water is so dirty with a matter of fact tone seeping with coldness and superiority. She had an authoritative way of speaking beyond her young mousy appearance. She went on with American impatience, I can't wait until we are moving. It was her last remark to a young companion that got me wondering about the specialness of my ship, See that cross? He strained looking for her abstract sighting. He acknowledged nothing and she went on to explain the shadow of the ship made a cross on the surface of the Amazon's cafe au lait waters.
I silently thought, We all see what we want to see.

True we were in the Upper Amazon, but it was the tame part, we were just passengers with bags and hammocks so when one revivalist strode the deck in disco era sunglasses and camo pants with a machete tied to his waist it was adventure on the Edwardo.

When I first met John and Cindy on the deck and learned they were from Iquitos, which produces and manufactures nothing, I asked with genuine curiosity what they did for a living. They were remarkably evasive to this question.
Together they stammered, Well, we are a part of the Fellowship of Mission Agencies or something similar and equally unrevealing.
I did not understand their answer since they replied by naming an organization rather than answering the question, what do you do?
They would not say they were Evangelicals or Baptists as I suspected, but chose evasive ambiguous language. I pressed. The what?
It is a charitable organization
So, you are part of a church group? I remembered the white girl with glasses proclaim she saw a cross. What did you call it? What do they do?
We are helpers, providing assistance to Peruvians.
Yes, I thought, it is the Peruvians that need help. So it is a religious organization?
Yes, oh yes.
They were not forthcoming. What religion or denomination?
We are helpers in a Christian church in Iquitos., came their begrudging answer.
Ah, I thought to myself, I have flushed out some Evangelicals and they are trapped on the boat with me.

Soon after John was saying they had to go, things to do, people to help; they were helping the group of revivalists that walked the decks with machetes and bibles. Later I learned they planned to build nothing, plant nothing, just have a revival in a remote part of the Amazon jungle. A holiday for seventy Americans in god's name. Never in our introduction did they use the words Christian or Evangelical. John cut the conversation short.

I felt like Peter Sellars in the film Lolita aboard this ship with my evasive Christians. Sellars was the police detective that suspected James Mason as the pedophile he was. I'd wait patient like Sellars did to talk with them again. When I bumped into them a short while later while standing idly John again hastened to prevent a conversation from starting. I'd have to change my tactics.

I watched my Peruvian hammock mates ignore informational signs that were pasted all over the ship reminding them not to litter with colorful phrases and characterizations, by chucking their plastic bottles overboard under the watchful presence of trash cans big enough to shoot baskets into. Yes, the river, to the shock of the Westerners on board, is in fact, a trash can. Ecology is a Western concept.

Later I met John alone on the lower bridge and made myself a companion in guy talk while we stared at the immense river and greenery before us. He had a well developed mid-western potbelly that contrasted with his semi-lean frame and slightly ruddy complexion of a vodka drinker. When he spoke one had the sense of under achievement, of hopes abandoned and lost ambitions. He held no job other than his generic description of a church helper who owned a lot of material possessions in a country where people own nearly nothing except their clothes and the pans in the kitchen. He owned an air boat and a hovercraft, a cargo truck and a room full of remote control airplanes he flew at his model airplane club. Life is simple in these parts and water transport is still done in dugout canoes and other vessels you are surprised can float, so the presence of John's watercraft in Amazon Indian communities would be the equivalent of having a UFO land in San Francisco's bay. The indigenous people have lived this way for thousands of years, why a hovercraft was needed was beyond my grasp.

On the other deck I found a hippie backpacker pair, they are not hard to spot with their long hair, ratty beards and vegetarian skinny limbs; this type earn their bread as they travel playing music for tips and making unoriginal woven bracelets. It is a hard living, they earn money one meal or bus ride at a time; to their credit they do work hard at it. This time it was a European couple doing the hippie hand-in-mouth thing playing guitar, reading and weaving bracelets in their hammocks while we idled along the Amazon river. On one of my many walks around the ship I caught him reading "Guide to Investors". To a hippie this is like a committed capitalist reading Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto looking for another way. These hippies are notorious anti-corporate types finding fault in everything about the system they were nursed on. It was a shock seeing him reading Guide to Investors.

I thought, Man, if the other groupie-hippies saw this they would tear into him like the Christians did to the Pagans in the Roman days.
His whole credibility as a drop out would come into question. They might even begin to suspect his unkempt Che Guevara look and ask unpleasant questions like -is it real or cultivated?

Yes, I thought, less beer would be shared with him, fewer joints passed his way and they would have trouble finding cheap flop houses hippies have in every city.
He was counter-cultural to the hippie fashion itself. I have seen hundreds of them throughout Latin America and ask, why do so many hippie men try to look like the dead revolutionary, Che Guevara?

Below deck a dog wailed. Later I visited the engine room and the dog; I could see the dog but could not hear myself think against the pounding of the diesel engine. A serene duck watched us from his wood cage with all the calmness of Buddha. Before returning to my third class deck crammed with Peruvians I went above deck, lay on my back and stared at the creamy Milky Way, assigning no god or designer to its presence.

Cindy, on the other hand, was eager for conversation sharing her life story and faith in christianity. (faith is believing in something that is not real.). Her bright passionate eyes distracted from her thick barrel chest that hid her feminine features. She reminded me of an overgrown Oompa-Loompa out of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. She went on with a well rehearsed story about their sailing journey in the houseboat from Michigan to Iquitos and how god's hand made it a safe journey; to Cindy every aspect of that journey was a miracle. It was in this conversation she relaxed and began to use the term christian freely making distinctions between real christians and the ones who say they are. Religious extremism was rearing its head. When she said this her eyes fired with intensity that bordered on hostility.
I thought to myself, Were the children of god ever at peace with each other, let alone the rest of the world?

Her passive obedience was a curiosity to me and I encouraged her to go on and tell me of miracles. Oh, the time I was in charge of the kitchen services here in Peru and the cook found kerosene in the igloo drinking water tanks. Cindy, as kitchen boss, glossed over the problem and explained that kerosene was natural and to serve the water anyway.
Christian compassion., I thought.
Later when they re-examined the tainted water the kerosene was gone and explained away as a supernatural occurrence. Another was a boy born with a rare condition without bones in his legs; at a revival his bones were restored and he walked thereafter.

The Bible, what a great book., she started in without encouragement from me, It has everything. I started reading it when I was seventeen.
She waxed and wained this way for a while suggesting I should consider reading it. Curious as to what her other spiritual influences might be I asked what second book she would recommend after the Bible. She launched into a long explanation of how busy she has been as a mother of forty-five raising three children, the demands of missionary work, And, well, my second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth choice is the Bible.
Yes, I thought, The Bible, the world's all-time best seller is all we need.

Her unwavering belief in the only book she had ever read and faith in the marvelous and supernatural held me in wonder that a person could be satisfied going through life this way. Cindy was a goldmine. I had only seen her kind on tv, and now, before me I was talking with one. She was a prodigy that confirmed the lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church.

Those who live the god-fearing life are educated to believe natural disasters are connected with human affairs, paybacks for human misdemeanors rather than the Law of Nature that gives us plate tectonics and volcanoes. I chuckle when they attach our "sins" to the level of cosmic significance. Is there any other way to describe it, other than extreme egocentricity when connecting humans to natural events.

In fresh morning air while the boat stopped to unload goods at a river settlement I watched black and tan waters mix where two rivers met, pink dolphins swam in and out of the contrasting waters.

Later, the seventy or so evangelical revivalists held a service on their deck with a portable MC system, I heard plenty of Hallelujahs through the port hole while a loner from the group strode the open deck full of piety with bible in hand that gave her an uncomfortable constipated look. Had I seen the machete wielding man I would have asked about his visionary hope of a miraculous deliverance. What I had long suspected and often treated as a joke, was very real to this group, that acts of nature are acts of god, such as floods, fire, saltine crackers, our boat sinking and rainfall.

In the middle of the night I watched a remote fishing village receive its twice weekly ice to preserve their catch that is stored in old refrigerators set like coffins packed with ice and covered with banana leaves that took six men to maneuver onto the ship. A Peruvian small business woman, America was the owner of those crates of fresh fish who went on to explain that if she took them to the next big town she could sell them for twice the price. Her route was: our ship every other week to buy fish, then cargo trucks to the interior to sell them wholesale, then back on the ship to repeat the process dragging empty refrigerators around.

Morning fog shrouded the banks of the Marañon, the Sun looked like a ball on the horizon as we approached port after nearly three days on the water. The journey on the Amazon was over as we approached Yurimaguas the last city with a road going to it; anything beyond it was limited to boat travel, which was how I traveled for six weeks covering nearly 1,700 km (1,000 miles) of water ways in a variety of ships, speed boats and dugout canoes. At one point I spent two weeks with guide, Rudber paddling the waterways of a nature reserve in a leaky dugout canoe camping in deep jungle spotting all sorts of animals; we covered 250 km (155 miles) this way.

The evangelical christians disembarked in the middle of the night in a remote area for their jungle revival. Unlike the christians aboard the Peruvians were applied to their form of living disembarking their produce: of lumber, fish, green bananas, cattle, scrap metal and sacks of rice and sugar.

All materials are loaded on and off ships, trucks and docks by hand. The cargo loaders, lean compact men with Indian features work in tattered filthy clothes carrying unbearable loads that buckle their legs, up to 200 pounds, over wood planking and muddy banks. To watch them is to watch ants work. And this is how Iquitos' half-million people are supplied, every case of beer, box or bag of food is trans loaded by hand.
My journey down the Amazon River was coming to an end.

David
Huaraz, Peru

Dispatch Number 74 -Superlatives

2010-09-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

Peru is a country of superlatives in geography and mineral wealth. Until you study a map and some export statistics you would never know this side of Peru except for the famed Machu Picchu. A land of extremes that range from dense jungles and rivers of the Upper Amazon to the Andes mountain range.

The Amazon River, the world's largest, begins in Peru. A 6,800 kilometer (4,800 mile) twist to the Atlantic ocean. It possess the heart of the Andes with the second highest mountain range in the world, second only to the Himalayas. A cathedral of ice capped peaks with nearly two dozen over 6,000 meters (19,800'+). Then Pacific north coast with its tropical hot lowlands. And the southern coast is desert, some of the driest in the world. A 100 mile drive from the Amazon basin into the heart of the Andes can leave your mouth agape, changes are extreme, each turn reveals a staggering display of nature.

In Peru you will find the highest coal mine in the world at 4,000 meters (13,200'). Highest train station in the world, 4,760m (15,700'). Highest drivable pass in the world 5,060m (16,700') and yes, I plan to drive it. Highest sand dune in the world, 2,080m (6,860'). Deepest canyon in the world, 3,350m (11,000'). Even lake water is at the top of category, Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world at 3,810m (12,575').

The mineral wealth, albeit not shared with the people is impressive. They are the number one producers of silver in the world; number two in zinc; third in both copper and tin; fourth in lead and sixth in gold.

Another category approved by me is the food of Peru, it is the best I have eaten since leaving Mexico. Central America, Colombia and Ecuador left much to be desired by way of flavors and creativity. Gas approaches $4.50 per gallon making Peru one of the more expensive places to drive a private car.
A six month tourist visa hardly seems adequate.

David
Huaraz, Peru

Dispatch Number 73 -Some of My Favorite Things

2010-09-19T11:51:00.000-07:00

As the two year anniversary approaches I reflect of some of the things I have done and experienced. It will be two years this October since I crossed the border into Mexico to begin a driving journey to the bottom of the world.
-David

Directions
Waving goodbye to a backpacker in northern Guatemala after convincing him to take a road that was not in the Lonely Planet guidebook. He looked so happy standing with his travelers bag in an empty flat bed truck with two workers. I drove the same road weeks later. A special route not frequented by travelers through mountainous communities of indigenous Maya. He waved back to me as the heavy truck built up speed leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. He was going the other way just 15 minutes earlier.

Eating
Buying stolen fruit from a beggar.

Flat Tire
The Man who fixed my flat out in the middle of the jungle, where services such as tire repair services don't exist. No one in the village owned a car and the town itself lined both sides of a long unused dirt runway now grassed over with a soccer pitch shared with untethered pigs and horses. I sheared off a valve stem on some jungle brush while deep in the dry jungle of northern Guatemala searching for a Maya ruin that had not been exposed to the tourist hoards or polished up. It was near the famed ruins of Tikal.

The old leathery Guatemalan making the repair had no valve stem to replace the one I'd broken, but explained he'd look for one and to come back later. When I came back I was disappointed to see him stuffing an inner tube into a modern tube-less tire. It was done. I let go of my finely honed "make it perfect American way" by joining the men who were inflating my newly repaired tire with a bicycle pump in repressive Guatemalan heat. The bead eventually set after 45 minutes of pumping settling at 18psi. I had a spare tire and could barrel off into the bush again. I was beginning to learn something about Latin American resourcefulness.

Stuck
The Honduran who pulled my truck off a precarious rain soaked mountain road; it was a land bridge that gave way with four friends out for a Sunday drive to the top of a mountain that overlooked Trujillo on the Caribbean coast. A hole as big as the truck lie waiting. My old Land Cruiser's rear axle rested on crumbly soil. Any attempt to get it out without help condemned it to the hole beneath it. Even if the tow out went bad the hole lay waiting. It was my worst pickle to date. We dug, placed timber while another Toyota pulled it out safely. We drove off the mountain and went back to town returning to our rum.

Fantasy
Driving portions of the 2008 Baja 1000 off road race circuit through the Baja California desert in my antiquated Toyota Land Cruiser.

Readers
It was the strangest book trade I ever made and the most unequal while standing on a remote people-less beach. We drove 100 miles over dirt roads to reach this pristine crescent white sand beach on the Sea of Cortez in Baja California. I was fiddling with the tent when they appeared on the beach in a pair of kayaks and pitched camp. A fit and attractive Swiss couple.
He asked, Do you have a book to trade?
Yes, I do. I said with pleasure, I have a travel book by Paul Theroux, a collection of his works. What do you have?

It was a juvenile action book for 8th graders about a man hunted naked in the desert by a nut who hired him as a guide. It was a stupid read of survival and homoerotic fantasy. Usually for an unequal or poor trade like this one I refuse the trade. It didn't matter, the setting was too unusual not to, plus the fact that these two were rowing a significant portion of the Sea of Cortez in kayaks, carrying all their own supplies, including 15 days of water. I was impressed by their mode of travel and traded the book willingly. I read the naked man in the desert book and it was awful. It contained Jeeps, guns, survival, strange behavior and nudity. What did the Swiss man think of America after this read?

Pie I
Eating genuine apple pie in the indigenous highlands of Guatemala. You find Americans in the oddest places provided the oddest services.

Two Wheels
The French couple that Stephanie and I met who were bicycling from Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina (near 16,000 miles) that we met in the earliest days of my journey in the Baja California desert. This was November 2008 and one way or another we were all headed to the bottom of the world, Patagonia in buses, cars, motorcycles or bicycles. In January 2010 I received a letter indicating they arrived -the bottom of the South American Continent by bicycle. Almost two years later I am less than halfway in a car.

Pie II
Eating genuine apple pie again a year later in another indigenous highland town in Ecuador. This time it was an Ecuadorian baker providing the oddest service.

David
Huaraz, Peru

Dispatch Number 72 -Notes From A Notebook II

2010-09-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

On the Value of Men
The men keep the machines running -it is a brotherhood. In some ways the male half of the species may seem lazy and unsupporting in Latin America when compared with the female half, but the men keep the machines running.

In Quest of What is Not There
There exists no idealized society, only ones different than your own. One's both equally great and equally screwed up. I slowly, almost reluctantly confront my romanticist views of the countries I travel through. Dismantling notions of countries somehow better than my own, when in fact they share the common threads of human nature, both good and bad.

Secrets
Oh, how uncomfortable it can be when people, especially strangers ask about your eating habits. In my case, my Ecuadorian host family noticed I was not eating my fruit or drinking the fruit juices they placed with my main meal. I could feel it coming, Don't you like fruit? Put into the unwelcome position to defend or explain my eating habits I went on in rough Spanish to explain the concept of Food Combining and how fruit inhibits digestion of non-fruit foods. So, you don't eat fruit?

My quiet world revealed to strangers. It felt like a drinking problem had been exposed.

A Question
Has anyone been shocked or knows someone who has been shocked by one of those electric fences used to keep cows inside the pasture fields? When I look at them in their old decrepit state I find it hard to believe they work. But I never touch one.

On Swimming in the Amazon Basin
It is a fine line between stupidity and bravery, I think to myself as I reflect that in the past three weeks of traveling the Amazon waterways including the Amazon River I have not seen a single local person swim. It feels more ominous considering I have traveled nearly 1,500 Km (930 miles) in a variety of boats and dugout canoes. When we fished for Piranha and I saw how fast they attacked (one to three seconds after casting with a chunk of fish meat wrapped on a simple hook) I decided to swim no more. When I asked, Why don't people swim?, of the locals they all responded the same, It's too dangerous.

Dreams
Billboards Promise Paradise
You'll never arrive.

Paul Theroux
Travel at it's most enlightening is not about having a good time.
-Paul Theroux

On Choosing Friends and Company
There are some people who pay their way. They bring their own energy their own light, but most of the others are useless both to you and to themselves. It is not being humane to tolerate the dead, it only increases their deadness and they always leave plenty of it with you after they are gone.
-Charles Bukowski

Words
It has been a while since I have written. I just don't seem to write much when traveling with someone. Perhaps the thoughts that usually go to paper are dissolved when spoken with another. In the company of others the juice of the word is lost.
When traveling alone you are the perpetual stranger, all is fresh and new. In Latin America the conversations tend to repeat themselves, however, your secrets remain yours. No one sees you pick your nose more than once.

Ecuador
Ecuador does not make for interesting writing, it is so tame and safe under the spell of good government and a shy reserved indigenous people. As a group and community it is a very peaceful place with mellow people and this makes Ecuador such a "sweet" place, safe and unassuming, they are poor but not angry. Peaceful to the core.
If I wrote about Ecuador it would be so sweet and honey like, pretty and comfortable; the good food, nice people, albeit shy, stunning roads crossing from the dramatic mountains of the Andes into the dense jungles of the Upper Amazon, handcrafts, merchantiles of sweaters and soft shawls.

Listen To Me
Deaf Ears.
-That's what most of us walk around with.

Iquitos
When do you turn on a place?
A city tires me. Too many days in a two-day city. Noisy dirty, over touristed this place Iquitos.
-Iquitos, Peru deep in the Amazon, a city of 500,000 people that has no road leading to it, planes and boats are the only way you can see it and how they get their food.

On Waiting
Everything worthwhile is NOT in the future.

David
Huaraz, Peru

Dispatch Number 71- Nomads: The Virus of Wanderlust

2010-08-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

In rural areas of South America conveniences are less and I learn to go without many things because they simply aren't offered. The reductionism of the countryside is satisfying. Dusty farming communities where men come to town on horseback with bundles of vegetables or bags of coffee to sell at the open air market and unload at the cooperative. They head back into the hills with money in their pockets and empty sacks tied to their horses, leaving a wake of sounds. The clack of horse hooves over paving stones mixed with the sound of men greeting each other with warm smiles and handshakes.

The rural communities with their unfashionable clothes, earthy smells, seasonings from kitchens and clods of green horse shit that dot the street. Rustic farm houses with children and cows and bird song from every tree. Laughter that comes from them and the silence that falls after they see me, the foreigner pass, they quickly recover and their silence turns to giggles. Children play without a yard full of toys. A milk crate and string make a sled ensuring hours of fun and entertainment.

I see the Latin American children play this way with crude toys and appear content. I can't spot a toy, except the ones they made.
Seeing this draws out a thought, Why do Westerners believe toys make children happy? Are toys a myth?
Perhaps the toys that fill most North American houses have little to do with distraction and happiness, and more likely to do with fostering consumerism at the earliest of ages.

These journeys into the countryside are humanizing experiences. Back to the land. Where people work it to feed their community and country. The city person is humbled here and struck by the seeming contentment and satisfaction with which these small farming communities lead their lives with. Eye contact is followed by warm greetings. They are places that manage perfectly well without the conveniences of the city.

Conversation comes easy in the countryside while walking back roads or sitting in a park. The gristled farmer with his lean body, hands and face like leather. Disarming smiles and eyes. I can feel the human condition in these areas, life has not been blocked out by the kaos of the city.

Cities are congested with cars, motorcycles, heavy trucks, blaring horns, hair trigger car alarms and noxious exhaust clouds belched from buses. Stinging fumes hang in the air of narrow streets. People crowd the sidewalks squeezing past shops that offer every product or service possible, shops with smart window displays. Smart. Advertising is sexy. People of the city are plumper from inactivity and rich diet. And true to most cities the habitants make brief eye contact, if any.

"...the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping." -Italo Calvo, Invisible Cities

The city is too much internet, too much food, too much tv, too many sweets. It is here, in these dense dirty cities that I find them -the long term traveller. In cheap hotels with sagging doors, lumpy beds and musty showers. Those that roam the earth without itineraries or destinations. Just a nap sack with a dogeared book and dogeared clothes that look like they need a wash or have been washed too many times. Perpetual wanderers that have been on the road a long time.

They ply the globe with their knapsacks picking buses or jet planes, places, hoped destinations, better towns, better times, better love, better luck, better something. They'd never find it, they'd never stop looking. The ones who took on steady jobs, steady towns, steady lives, steady routines, steady house and car payments, steady relationships and steady gardens wouldn't fare any better.

I screw on the gas cap and keep driving south.

David
Yurimaguas, Peru

Dispatch Number 70 -Bomb the Police Kiosk

2010-05-31T07:56:00.000-07:00

Anarchy Lives! Revolutionary Movements Live! People not afraid to risk it Live! Or maybe it was a bombing ordered by one of the cocaine cartels. Nothing is clear in Colombia. On April 21, 2010 at 9:30 pm from a hard bed in a cheap hotel nursing a cathode ray nipple I heard my first bomb go off. Three blocks away. It detonated in Pasto's central commercial district, my home for three days before I entered Ecuador. It was very loud and sounded like a crane dropped a 40' container ten stories onto the sidewalk in front of my hotel. A deep percussive sound that made my body clinch.

After three months of travel throughout highly militarized Colombia and more than 50 roadside check points under my belt I was accustomed to feeling safe with the professional nature of the national police and various branches of the Army. I present car papers, the occasional passport and answer questions, especially when I drive alone. No one travels alone in Latin America and my arrival at a check point this way always aroused curiosity. Sometimes they would search the truck, but not very hard. The worst I ever experienced was in Panama when traveling with two Colombian friends and a Dutch woman when we were stopped at a permanent check point and given a drug dog sniff, even then they did not open a single bag when the truck was parked in one of those special search bays that feel eerily empty. The sight of the drug dog made my heart skip. Suddenly, I didn't feel in control of very much. Our drugs were well hidden (joke).

The sole exception to this professionalism were the highway cops, they could see you cross a double yellow line behind a mountain or around a curve where they'd be standing patiently next to their patrol bikes waving you over with calm authoritarian arms and big assault rifles draped lazily over their shoulders. The story was always the same after thirty minutes of pleading and haggling, but never begging: you can pay here and be on your way or have a real ticket written and pay the fine at the bank (takes hours). Once I pulled $2.50 out of my pocket to settle a bribe in the name of gas money for their new Kawasaki patrol bikes. We all expected more money from my pocket and the area commander I negotiated with laughed out loud at the sight of my small money. His rifle totting lackeys joined in and my embarrassment grew.

Pride bruised I hollered, Wait, wait! as I ran across the highway to my truck and dug out another $10. Too late, the paltry $2.50 and the laughter had done me in. I had to live with that moment being laughed at clinching that lousy two-fifty. I'd switched the $50 I was carrying to the other pocket while they hassled a local driver who wanted to give them a bag of oranges for his freedom. What I never knew was if I had grabbed the big bills or the small ones when I made the switch. The two-fifty was a surprise to all of us.

Back to the bomb.

It was planted next to a national police sub station or kiosk in city of 100,000 people. An otherwise crowded district during the day, the city is very quiet after 8pm (maybe the Colombians know something. Warfare is remarkably organized and rule bound when you study it.) Had it been anytime between 10am and 7pm there would have been blood, lots of it.

It blew out one of the walls of the sub station and shattered windows of all buildings that shared the corner with it. The catholic church, apartments and offices on the second floor all had shattered windows. It was a loud bomb, but not too powerful unless you were standing next to it. At first I though it may have been a natural gas explosion from the damage, but confirmed with a policeman who stood in the remaining doorway of the attacked kiosk that it was a bomb. One believed to have been planted by guerrilla forces.

If I had been injured by that bomb I wouldn't have felt like I did in the safety of my room where I thought, That was cool. While emergency lights and sirens filled the night.

David
Banos, Ecuador

Dispatch Number 69 -Cocaine

2010-05-11T16:22:00.001-07:00

This is the last of the series of a one month journey in the northeastern region of Colombia on the Atlantic coast near Venezuela. Travel was a mixture of group and solo.

Cocaine is a part of Colombian life, it is legal to carry a personal amount of 3 grams of the white powder. It is illegal to grow and process it. Where coffee grows the cocoa plant can grow. The over rated white powder comes in several quality grades from 90%+ pure that sells for $20/gram, whereas, lesser quality in the 70% range is as low as $8/gram. Now, that I have dispensed with all the usual questions, and now, that some of you are planning your trip to Colombia, I will write about other aspects of cocaine and the government led wars against it.

In 1999, the United States and Colombia drafted Plan Colombia as a way to combat cocaine production and trafficking. The first draft was in English for this Spanish speaking country and the Spanish version came months later, that says something. The Colombian government wanted both military and social/economic aid (to support poor farmers and encourage alternative crops). The US shunned the request and made it a condition that funds be used exclusively for military use. Today and for the last ten years 80% of each budget went towards military hardware. I saw old Vietnam era helicopters with new jet engines and soldiers with "U.S." emblazoned ammunition belts. In 2006, $624 million went to military goods.

The Colombian Army and a special division of the national police force, the Antinarcoticos receive the lions share of funding in the form of hard cash, helicopters, arms, transport, intelligence and supplies for cocoa eradication (read: poison sprayed from crop dusters). All eradication is performed by the American company DynCorp that flies armoured crop dusters piloted by Americans with cover provided by the Antinarcoticos in their helicopters with Gatling guns. Turns out they are shot at a lot by the paramilitary forces (private armies) that protect crops.

I talked with Francisco, a helicopter pilot in the Antinarcoticos, leaning against one of the Kevlar armored doors of his chopper as he explained how it worked. The backdrop at this remote sea side base was the Atlantic sea, the rough and angry part of the Caribbean. The base sits at the northern most point on the South American landmass in a desert. His favorite aspect of flying was not skimming the ground at ten feet, but practicing "auto-rotation", a training method to crash land a helicopter without power. Francisco was an adrenaline junky and a consummate gentleman. Tall, dark, and handsome with exceptional manners.

When he flies cover for the crop dusters, he explained that flights are defensive in nature and not used to launch preemptive attacks from the sky, only to protect the crop duster. His helicopter had two bullet holes and it took he and a ground engineer a few minutes to locate the patched spots. Studies on this method of eradication have shown that more regular crops, such as, bananas, beans and potatoes are destroyed than cocoa plants. In my travels deep in the bush throughout Latin America I have experienced up close and lived with these poor farm families; the poverty in the countryside is extensive. These small crops and plots are how families eat. It is subsistence living. The program to poison from the air continues. It hardly seems worth it. Poison, pilots and planes bought with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Research findings on the merits and success of Plan Colombia have not been kind and surely make the men who want continued funding blanch when they tell lies about how successful their interdiction and eradication efforts are. Without exception, every report and committee convened have arrived at the same conclusion: that armed forces used to interdict drugs coming into the U.S. have minimal or no effect on cocaine traffic. These studies are conducted by the Who's Who of research organizations: RAND, U.S. Defense Department, and National Defense Research Institute.

The best proof of the failure of Plan Colombia is the market price of cocaine in the United States -it has remained constant. When implementing the plan the U.S. government boldly predicted that their efforts would cause the price of coke to go up. When their interdiction and eradication efforts were confronted with an unchanged market price they made the preposterous claim that there were stockpiles of processed cocaine and that these surpluses kept the markets stable. A claim made five years ago, now that is quite a stockpile! Sweet words for another year of funding.

Plan Colombia is a thinly veiled program for militarizing Colombia, a third-world country. In the near term seven new military bases will be opened and staffed with American military personnel and advisers. The university student movements in Colombia are against this militarization of their country. History shows over and over what happens when poor countries are militarized by Western nations, it is seldom good.

While researching Plan Colombia I reflected on the illicit things I have seen and done. We were invited by Francisco and another pilot to camp inside their Antinarcotico base on the Atlantic coast in northeastern Colombia near the border with Venezuela. The base walls were rotting from the corrosive sea air in a beautiful desert-on-the-sea location of yellow earth and a sea with no ships on it. The Antinarcoticos are a special branch of the national police that receive extensive training and have a professional air about them unlike other encounters I have had with military personnel throughout Latin America. We were sitting in the lions den of America's War on Drugs and it was guarded 24 hours day with big guns and a helicopter.

The irony was just a week earlier while in the Santa Marta mountains on a 6-day hike to The Lost City that I saw cocoa plant farms far away from anything except the foot trail I was on. The Lost City is a hard to reach place similar to Machu Picchu in Peru without all the people. A day later I visited a cocaine chemist who performed before my eyes the first phase of extracting the drug from the raw plant leaves. No, there is nothing to sniff at this stage, just toxic pale dough. It is a horrible chemical process. A list of chemicals and two links to a documentary are at the end of this Dispatch.

Inside the base we were treated very well given access to precious freshwater showers, joked with them in the mess hall as they fed us, crashed in their hammocks, and drank desalinized water (the desalination plant was donated by Southern Command of the US military). Another irony was one of the travelers in our group, Andreas was a chronic pot smoker who became agitated when he didn't smoke, he was grumpy living in the Antinarcoticos base. And the only one drinking beer inside the base to temper his edge.

I traveled for two weeks in the Guijira desert and after talking with the farmers, truck drivers and Antinarcoticos it was clear that the region was a major gateway for cocaine being smuggled out of the country and for cheap Venezuelan gas being snuck in. I benefited from the cheap gas that sold for half the price of legal fuel. La Guijira is a smugglers paradise of dirt roads, desolation, and illegal airstrips.

It was odd how little the Antinarcoticos patrolled their zone and how few men were stationed at the base we camped at. In fact, according to the soldiers and pilots stationed there it was a relaxing commission compared with the interior where fighting was frequent and tensions ran high. They liked the posting on the sea. There was no tension on this base where the desalination plant groaned in the background. When I met them we were all drinking beer together out front of a tienda, convenience store near the base.
I left Guijira thinking, If there was a place where they could make an endless stream of busts it would be in this open desert.

The cocaine business is big money, very big and this facilitates government cooperation at the highest levels and when financial coercion is not successful the cartels respond with swift violence. It is compelling to cooperate. Surely, some of the lack of Colombian military and police presence in Guijira is a form of understanding between the cartels and the government. A very good book on the cartels and government corruption is Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden.

A savory part of traveling off the beaten path are the unpredictable things that happen such as camping inside a remote police base, sitting on a helicopter and talking with the young pilots. Getting lost and not knowing where you will sleep until you get there. Seeing cocoa farms and visiting secret processing plants. The satisfaction of making your own way on roads less travelled.

There I stood at the edge of the windswept Atlantic ocean in the lions den of America's Failed War on Drugs. All major research has made clear it is a failed policy to use armed forces. Other studies have demonstrated the same money, if used for social and recovery programs would be both economically and socially more successful.

As a war on drugs it has been a near total failure and has been going on since President Nixon started it in the early 1970s. In light of the well documented failure of Plan Colombia the chimera continues with American funding approaching $1 billion each year. More truthfully it is militarization of a third-world country in the name of drugs. A review of geopolitics in the region reveals a great deal about America's policies and politics in Colombia. It is hardly about interdicting drugs.

EXTRAS-
List of chemicals used to extract the drug from the plant leaves, resulting in cocoa paste, the first stage of making cocaine:
Salt
Calcium
Gasoline
Sulfuric Acid
Caustic Soda (Drano)
Potassium

Watch this two part documentary on cocaine production and the government efforts to eradicate cocoa plants:
Part I http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4831

Part II http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4832

David
Otavalo, Ecuador

Dispatch Number 68 -The Cheap Hotel

2010-05-10T19:45:00.001-07:00

The great money saver, the third class traveler's retreat with its thin walls and creaky furniture. Everything is flimsy, shaky and half repaired, doors that look and sound like they could be pushed in by a five year old. The smells. Unventilated and dank or my new word to describe this offensive sort of smell, munky. The inescapable smell of mouse shit hidden in the walls and ceiling cracks, then on top of your bag in the morning. One room in Colombia smelled of mouse shit and wet dog fur; I burned incense and accomplished nothing except add to the confusion of smells. I live this way so I can travel one more day.

There is a continuous stream of noise in the cheap hotel. My neighbor's tv blares while his catatonic body lie on the bed with volume turned too high. Nursing his cathode ray nipple. It is shocking how much time we pass with this brain suck device. Short stocky construction guys hammering into concrete walls at seven in the morning. Pounding, drilling and the satisfying smell of fresh made concrete. They are perpetual works in progress; dream chasing owners with plans to become more grand. The truth is hotel DNA rarely changes.

For me it is both budget and desire to be with more authentic people than those found in fancy hotels with their new linens and well dressed people looking for the same things the cheap hotel guests want. In the cheap hotel conversation comes easy.

In the recent past I made an early check in and was pleased with my hotel find: a spacious $9 room with good bed and private bathroom. After a long walk and dinner I returned to my catch of a hotel and found it filled with new sounds: joyous drunk people. As the night progressed the smell of alcohol and semen filled the hallways. With this new perspective I made a closer inspection of my room and found a condom wrapper in the corner, another in the bathroom trash can and a neatly folded bath towel that looked suspiciously unclean.

How could I have known, it all looked so normal in daylight. I laid in bed in want of what they had until I fell asleep. I awoke in the middle of the night to pee and watched a couple fuck in the breezeway with a bed sheet drawn over them. The sheet was the only part that bothered me. Sometimes the poor places read like old Rome. Time is distorted when one is drunk. I watched. The act was efficiently completed in less than two minutes.

When all the honest people were long in their beds. The cheap hotel.

David
Otavalo, Ecuador

Dispatch Number 67 -Notes From A Notebook

2010-05-05T15:36:00.000-07:00

He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins

"They have nothing, but they have more"
-Andreas K. on visiting a poor fishing community

The Budget
Some budget travelers stay out of restaurants to save money choosing to live on a loaf of bread and mangoes for a few days. It is a diet out of balance. Then all the savings goes to buy beer or a box of cheap Chilean wine. At 44, I am too old, I want both: balanced meals and warm wine.

Some Towns

As we drove out of Cabo de la Vela I felt like I had survived two days and nights in a village full of liars and cheats. They either begged or schemed you.
-Thoughts upon leaving a town in the Guijira Desert

The Handout
They don't beg on this side of the peninsula. The people of Nazareth study you with reserve and curious eyes without the shameless begging found inCabo de la Vela where it felt like I was at a friend's house (unnamed) with his poorly trained dogs jumping on me, sniffing my balls too long then trying to hump my leg. It was nice to be relieved of this kind of pestering. I enjoyed the dignity and self-worth they had on the other side of the peninsula.

Open Space
The peace of aloneness.
-Thoughts after a travel family disbands in the middle of the desert

Quote
"He had no illusions, and so he was fully alive every waking moment, looking for food or water, looking for shade, looking for a woman."
-Paul Theroux on a leprosy colony

Hand Rolled
Don't smoke weed with an Israeli, they will smoke you under the table.
-Casco Viejo, Panama on the roof of our hospedaje

Music

Indigenous music played by people not from there can be punishing to listen to.

-Trapped in a desperate performance of people not from there

Penis

In Chile the penis is the unofficial national symbol of freedom and protest. It is an integral part of graffiti everywhere.

-Chilean travelers educate me

Costs

Shipping the truck from Panama to Colombia cost US$885. It spent two days on the high seas. I sailed the same sea for four days and was seasick most the time; the price I paid for my romantic notions of all travel done over land and sea.

Age
I watched a lean bodied older woman with grey hair as she strode down the sidewalk in repressive Panama heat and thought, How attractive she must have been in her younger years and how attractive she looks this day.

Before we know it we are suddenly old. Life postponed, things left undone, travels never taken, and how petty so much of our time is spent. Things saved for an uncertain future. We are old before we know it.

Slow
Old men when rushed deliberately slow down. Routine takes over. -Observation of an old man

The City
too much internet
too much food
too much tv
too many sweets

p.s. I don't think the words tv and internet deserve to be capitalized

Observation

Perhaps it is in peoples predisposition to take fortified positions in the fort of COMPLAINT and CRITICISM. Many travelers mock what they cannot comprehend when in a culture not their own. They are some of the dullest people one can meet on the road.

New Travelers
They take pictures of everything. My plate of food, cup of water, generic palm trees, and me chewing food. They tell me to stop eating so they can get a picture of my plate of food.
My thoughts drift to this invasion of privacy feeling like a lab rat, Maybe the advent of the digital camera was bad, with celluloid at least people were held in check.

How Some Travel
Cigarettes, booze, people and food consumed without being present.

David
Otavalo, Ecuador

Dispatch Number 66 -Pig

2010-04-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

Observation and processing of an experience is something done best alone, there are no voices to shatter it. On a morning desert walk along a sand road that cut through a forest of scaly wrathlike trees I saw a dirty white pig foraging for food, small enough to still be suckling a tit.

On the way back I saw the same piglet crushed dead in the roadway; a pickup must have run it over by accident. I had seen it foraging for food only an hour before. A life ended with intestines squeezed out and mouth still moist filling with flies. Damp sand stuck to its mouth, tongue and saw-like teeth.

I stood over the runt, felt little emotion, no pity or sentimentality. Alone I experienced this. When walking alone one doesn't have to listen or offer hollow sentimentality or drum up pity about a dead pig and how we should do something like bury it or chase the flies away. It was dead. Nature or the community would take care of it; deserts are extremely efficient in these ways. I stood over it. I continued my walk back to the village where people and water were.

The next morning I drove the same road I walked. The pig was gone.
The peacefulness of aloneness and no voices to shatter it.

David
Otavalo, Ecuador

Dispatch Number 65 -Mechanic

2010-04-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

Mechanic
"Mile" the weathered and wrinkled drunk mechanic prattles on something bad with insufferable monologues. Deaf, too, the way drunks are. He was important to befriend for he showed the way to Nazareth over a befuddling maze of dirt track roads. It is so easy to get lost out here. It was how we met Mile in the first place, we got lost and drove into the wrong town.

On the way to Nazareth nearly all the people we passed were members of his family. Men in pickup trucks loaded with cargo and small groups of women walking hunched over with bundles tied to their backs in traditional long dark skirts and white blouses.
With a beer in his hand from the back seat he'd holler in his scratchy voice at them then tell us, that's my cousin, that's my uncle or nephew, and on like that for 10 miles of dirt track.

Once that beer was drained we reached a wood shack, more like a chicken shack that sold snacks and beer. Mile ordered a stop, hopped out and took a drink order at 10am. He frowned, hopped back in the truck, the chicken shack was out of beer. Mile's 10 mile routine was disrupted.

In Nazareth he made introductions, for in these remote and sparsely populated parts of the Guijira desert it means something, it changes they way people interact with you. His introductions and references were extremely helpful.
On second day members of his large family were driving by to say "Hi", people we never met, yet knew who we were. It made the small pueblo more welcoming and less hostile (much of which is in your head). In remote places like this the presence of a stranger is felt like a stone tossed into a calm pond.

David
Otavalo, Ecuador

Dispatch Number 64 -Travelers Epilogue

2010-04-26T12:32:00.001-07:00

This is a series of a one month journey in the northeastern region of Colombia on the Atlantic coast near Venezuela. Travel was a mixture of group and solo.

After returning to the comfortable city environs of Cartagena to study Spanish after a month of travel throughout the remote northeast region of Colombia it was by chance I bumped into Sandra who I traveled part of this region with. Over a cup of strong coffee in the lobby of her hostel she went on to relate a most unsettling story. It happened the day we parted ways in Nazareth near the Venezuelan border.

Andreas had been talking excitedly about Venezuela for weeks and was finally setting on his way, Sandra was joining him as a flexible traveler without an agenda. We had all known each other for over a month having met on the sailboat we took from Panama to Colombia. They were told by locals if they had passports that they could get on the daily truck bound for Maracaibo, a city deep in the interior of Venezuela. They would be travelling into another country bypassing normal immigration controls.

We parted ways in Nazareth, an oasis town in the middle of the Guijira desert after a couple weeks traveling together; they jumped on a flatbed cargo truck bound for Venezuela laden with twenty goats, a dozen pigs and twenty-five people under blazing sun. It was the kind of truck the intrepid backpacker loves to take to reach a destination. Deep bush travel. A colorful passage, one to be remarked upon.

The truck out of Nazareth normally arrives in Maracaibo by mid afternoon; it ran late this time arriving as darkness settled on Venezuela's second largest city. Venezuela has an electricity shortage and uses rolling blackouts; Maracaibo, a city of two million without electricity felt menacing upon arrival.

Exhausted from a thirteen hour journey with goats, pigs and an x-ray sun, they were dreaming of a shower and a soft bed when things turned brutal from the moment the truck arrived. They were yanked off the truck like livestock by two Venezuelan policemen demanding passports.
You have no passport stamp, the officer triumphantly exclaimed after examining them.
Peaceful calm Sandra tried to explain the route they took to the uninterested officer, while Andreas who spoke no Spanish stood mute.
You can be put in prison for entering Venezuela without a stamp. Why are you here? the officer pressed on.
OK open your bag and show us all your money, they demanded

Sandra's bag was thoroughly searched as she placed her last $50 on the table with Andreas' $300. Andreas' bag was not searched and he was taken to an adjacent room. The door was shut.

Are you transporting drugs? they asked Sandra
No. came her reply.
We will search you.

He looked down her top and panties for contraband. Andreas was not as fortunate to receive such light treatment, he was cavity searched up his anus. When he came out Sandra could see something had shocked him as he told her in Swiss-German what had just happened. The fear level increased as threats of imprisonment were repeated. Nauseous from his experience Andreas sat down as Sandra related the seriousness of the situation to him.

The police handed back a small portion of $350, so they could get by for the night. The rest was stolen, along with a camera and guitar tuner. Sandra's collection of photos from the journey into the desert and the Children of Camarones were gone.

There was no buildup. The police did not need time to gather their nerve or feel out their prey where one could sense what was coming, instead they moved with great speed and had all this done inside of thirty minutes. It left Sandra and Andreas in a state of shock while they looked for a place to sleep in the dark city. Currently, Venezuela is undergoing political and social change short of upheaval and it is in times like these that police have extraordinary powers with little oversight.

Two nights in Maracaibo was enough as they searched for a safe way out of Venezuela for the relative safety of Colombia. Still without Venezuelan tourist stamps. The journey back to Colombia was difficult and dodgy using a taxi to go part of the way benefiting from the driver's good relations with police at certain check points. When they got to a bridge known for police abuse they switched to a boat to cross the river, then back to a car for the border.

At the immigration station they explained to the Venezuelan border agent why they had no Venezuelan entry stamps doing their best to project calm in a country they were desperate to leave. He held them up a while, but seemed to sense something bad had happened and let them pass without the necessary stamps.

Sandra and Andreas would have a new perspective on travel, it would all be different now. I have met several travelers that related good experiences about Venezuela and returned for second visits.

As for me I was looking into driving the dirt roads of La Guijira along the border of Venezuela and decided against it. The road crossed back and forth between Venezuela and Colombia without any border controls and would require a guide to spot bad people and show the way. As explained to me by the truck drivers in Nazareth I would have to avoid Venezuelan police on the drive since I would have no papers authorizing me or my truck to be in the country. One even suggested making a night run down the road. That sealed it for me, no one had ever suggested a night run to pass a territory. I would be in over my head taking this route, even with a guide.

The risks were too high. I would back track through the blank desert, not an easy decision for me, since I routinely look for loops or circuits to drive rather than repeat terrain. My friends on the cargo truck would be safe, it was a regular route used to move people and goods who were in possession of permanent travel papers.

David
Otavalo, Ecuador

Dispatch Number 63 -Errant Thoughts XIII

2010-04-25T13:37:00.000-07:00

Song
"You do whatever you please, I'll do what I can."
-Beck

Road Signs
52 TON
-A bridge sign

On Foot
We ran in the open desert like lost neo-hippies
-A travel family gets out of the truck in a windswept landscape

The Way They Dress
The indigenous women wear loose moo-moo dresses that place a pleasant emphasis on their faces, hair and feet. My imagination wonders.

Rod & Reel
"Fishing can best be described as incessant expectation followed by perpetual disappointment."
-source unknown

Murphy
"Nothing is as easy as it looks. Everything takes longer than you think. If anything can go wrong it will."

Me
As a traveler, the perpetual stranger, I am allowed all my secrets.

Paper Towels
People in Latin America buy only what they need at the moment they need it. This stands in contrast to the North American penchant for buying enough paper towels to outlast a nuclear fallout. Paper towels to last years. Armageddon fears wrapped up in the unassailable logic of economics.

New Year
As a long-term traveler I find myself living increasingly in the present (some would say the life of an escapist). So standing on the shores of the Caribbean this past January the year ahead meant little. Once I made a big deal out of it. This year I did not feel like the dreamy man looking out over the bow spirit at the hopeful sea. Now, things feel more practical and short -this day, this week, this love.

David
Otavalo, Ecuador

Dispatch Number 62 -Drunks

2010-03-21T11:55:00.001-07:00

After the Children of Camarones camp we worked our way deeper into the Guijira Desert in northeastern Colombia near the border with Venezuela, an isolated region rife with gasoline and cocaine trafficking, known as a Smugglers Paradise. None of the roads are marked with signs, there are no highways or paved roads, only a collection of dirt tracks leading in every direction. The word "maze" best describes the road system out in these parts.

Travel is slow because of rough roads and stopping to ask directions so many times I lost count. The oddest things would happen when we'd stop to ask directions in this landscape of sand, wind, abandonment and one house settlements -slurring drunk men would come stumbling out of the houses or from nearby bushes offering help.

The drunks would rush headlong into tireless monologues and quickly weren't talking about directions anymore. They always asked for a handout and demand to be let into the truck to show the way. In Latin America the cheap alcohol of choice is aguardiente, a locally made white lightening derived from sugar, corn or rice depending on local crops.
We began to see so many drunks in the seemingly empty desert that I changed the name from Peninsula de la Guijira to Peninsula de la Aguardiente because of the surprising number of booze fueled inhabitants we met out in the bush.

After a sandstorm we could see again once the wind let up and the sheets of sand that filled the sky came back to earth. Two drunks appeared on the horizon of the empty desert like a mirage, smashed out of their heads on aguardiente babbling the way drunks do: breathless monologues delivered in machine gun bursts.
Feeling lost when I saw them I thought, I'll ask for directions. You never know they are drunk until the conversation starts.

They were an odd couple, one young the other old and leathery with a bottle of aguardiente tucked in his waistband. Indian skin turned black from a life working in the desert. Burning merciless sun. Their appearance in this landscape was surreal. The wrathlike trees gave no shade. It was Charles Bukowski who chronicled the American drunk so well meets Albert Camus in the Algerian deserts of North Africa.

They babble and plead for drink money saying, We'll show you the way, while pulling at the door handles of my nervous passengers.
The stream of consciousness may be clearly represented in the mind of the drunkard, but to the unwilling audience it is babble that almost sounds human. I tire of drunks quickly, they are like super glue when it gets on your fingers, they are very hard to get rid of. It has to be done delicately or your skin tears.

This pair slurs so badly Juan-Pablo the Colombian traveling with us can't understand them. Excited about something, they monologue like mad under merciless afternoon sun. Burning. Burning.
Just let us in! they holler.

David
Cartagena, Colombia

Dispatch Number 61 -Desert Rats

2010-03-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

This is a series of a one month journey in the northeastern region of Colombia on the Atlantic coast near Venezuela. Travel was a mixture of group and solo.

After our special stay with the Children of Camarones we regained our emotional balance and as a group of five continued the journey into the desert. We left the sea side town Manaure to head up coast to Cabo de la Vela along sandy hard to follow dirt roads without signs of any kind; it made for continuous confusion and doubt in the truck. I was reduced to following roads that felt right. The Sage's tales of difficult navigation in the region were coming true on the first day.

Like a game show, I ask at every intersection left or right? We fumble most the afternoon this way through desert scrub brush and plant less hard pan; the hard pan is like the sea, flat and never changing. The drive is further spiced up with intermittent sandstorms that reduce visibility to almost nothing. The girls were sitting on the doors hanging out of the truck as wave after wave of sand filled the sky.

It was in one of these sandstorms when I could barely follow the tire tracks that Kathrine asked, Can I get on the roof?

Yes, I replied and slowed the truck.
The question was music to my ears, she was an adventurer, not someone being overly careful. It was certainly one of the reasons why I liked her company so much.

Windows down. Sand swirled everywhere and thick dust covered everything inside the truck. I discovered owning an old truck is complete freedom; windows down in sand storms, rainstorms, nasty mud roads and river crossings where water comes in the doors. Or in this case, people on the roof. Three of them were on top riding the sandstorm; Juan-Pablo and I smiled inside as I drove in lazy circles trying to throw them off. They all screamed and my smile widened.
I didn't stop until I heard Kathrine tell the others, I almost fell off!

Both attractive women, Katherine and Sandra looked sexy and free in the bright sun and blowing sand wearing big black Jackie-O sunglasses, fucking sexy. They looked liberated and free covered in desert dust. I was not traveling with the dry sock crowd. These were the kind of fantasies I had when I dreamed about this driving journey into The Americas.

On this coastal dirt track where land met sea we saw a family of goats among tall cactus. We ran into the desert like lost neo-hippies chasing them to get pictures. Everyone had a digital camera and they put everything they saw into frame.

David

Cartagena, Colombia

Dispatch Number 60 -The Children of Camarones

2010-03-11T19:08:00.000-08:00

With the Sage behind us, it was our first night on the road as a newly formed travel family with backpacks, food and water jammed into the truck. We were on our way for what promised to be an off the beaten path adventure in the dry arid region of Colombia's Atlantic coast, a region given little coverage in the guidebooks. Our group was made up of a diverse cast of characters: a drunk Swiss man prone to nightly rants when he would misplace something; a Canadian woman with a camera that never stopped and neither did her questions of the local people; a Swiss woman who was at her happiest in dry dusty countryside towns; and a Colombian film student from Cali who quietly watched everything, then would drop very funny comments.

Our first stop was in a poor fishing community outside the small pueblo of Camarones where the children outnumbered the goats and adults. Their specialty was shrimp and fish; the backdrop was a flamenco reserve and I watched them fly every morning. When they took flight by the hundreds they looked like ribbons of exploded pink paper from Chinese firecrackers.

Here at the edge of the Guijira Desert the air became hot, the land was barren, dry and hard pan. The father of the family we stayed with fetched water everyday from a local spring carting it back in buckets so his family could bathe and cook. The goats had eaten all vegetation from the ground up to three feet. Children ran about everywhere and the truck, the only vehicle in this poor community was a play set for the barefoot children. We passed much of the time sitting on the tailgate while they clamored on the roof and engine hood.

A little more on the travel family:
Kathrine was a great travel partner, active, quick, unhesitating, and with a sense of purpose. It was very supportive to have this kind of traveler in our group, as a couple of the others seemed incapable of making their own decisions. She spoke excellent Spanish. Katherine made plans within the first hour we arrived in Camarones to spend the following day with a local fisherman.

She was also prone to asking a lot of questions of the country people who are soft spoken; a continuous barrage of probing questions asked with persistence and finality that the Western mind so craves. In the end she had learned the most and had some of the best pictures.

Sandra looks to be in mild bliss sitting on the ground surrounded by soiled barefoot girls with black hair and dark Indian skin. They sit with her as she plays guitar. She is curious, interactive and speaks very good Spanish; the children adore her. Sandra looks at her happiest when far from the comforts of the city. Not shy, although admits to a dislike of making decisions.

Andreas is linguistically removed from much of what is happening as he learns Spanish one word at a time from the children. He laughs a lot while finishing my bottle of rum. Unable to speak Spanish he has let himself become too dependent on us. In the morning the children prod Andreas with a stick as he sleeps in the tent. Giggling children and growling Andreas...they prevail.

Juan-Pablo plays the role of soft overweight city dweller accustomed to working very little for what he wants. At times he looks stunned, but especially so, when we set up camp in the fishing village amongst the goats and children. He is Colombian and these are his people. My intuition tells me he will be the one who is affected most by this journey into the desert.

As a long term traveller I enjoy the newness of ever changing landscapes, while perpetually seeking routine. It is the travelers dichotomy: dynamic change contrasted with static routine. At this stop we are surrounded by curious and beautiful indigenous children ages two to ten. Children are special at this age, they communicate through their eyes and this provides a sense of community that my life lacks. It feels like a dose of routine.

Even though Andreas spent most of his time drunk he managed to put it best while I struggled through pages of my journal to understand what I saw. As we discussed how the West has more than Third World countries do by way of stuff, money, and opportunities we arrived at a point where we thought it may be the other way around. Beauty and friendship meant something here. Life in North America and Europe was easy but empty.
He went on to say, They have nothing, but they have more.

After two nights and days with this family who opened their home and lives up to us it was time to go. The goodbyes were slow and visibly painful for Kathrine as she confronted her attachment to the children of Camarones. We depart this fantastical camp of joyous children and welcoming parents. The children have showered us with pure love. A day earlier the children began to ask when we were leaving and they tried to persuade us to stay longer and when that didn't work they resorted to extracting promises to return another time.

We pile into the truck to go to another place and no one talks. The experience of Camarones is silently felt between us, tears flow in some and invisibly in others. We wonder why we are going, why leave this special place?
Secretly, each of us wonders, Can it be like this every stop?
Never is and never can be, I thought to myself.

Each stop and each day is different and is why it is so important to live in the present and enjoy the moment. For this traveller it is not about chasing past experiences, it is about being open to them as they present themselves. We always move on, so why pretend? How many ways to say goodbye in a nomad's life?

It was rare. It was beautiful. The children and their ever playful expressive brown eyes always spoke to me. When it became clear we were leaving the eyes turned flat and piercing in a way that conveyed betrayal. It was one of the more difficult goodbyes.
We drove on and I thought, They have nothing, but they have more.

David
Cartagena, Colombia

Dispatch Number 59 -Sage

2010-03-08T16:17:00.001-08:00

This is the first in a series of a one month journey in the northeastern region of Colombia on the Atlantic coast near Venezuela that I just competed. I am in Cartagena for a couple weeks to study Spanish and have time to write. Travel was a mixture of group and solo.

No matter how poorly planned the journey into the desert was it began to take on good omens the night before our departure. Over dinner Andreas and I decided to leave in the morning; by midnight the truck was full with a newly formed travel family: two very attractive women, a drunk Swiss man, and a Colombian from Cali who was mute most the time. Warm with friendship and red wine I went to bed happy reflecting on this mix of characters.

The night before our journey into the Guijira Desert we met an old man who spoke with a mystical air of the place and things we would find there. He proclaimed we had the right truck for such a difficult overland journey where there are no paved roads, only a maze of dirt tracks that lead in all directions. A compass would be mandatory; I own one and do not know how to use it. In places like this, I have learned the gas gauge is the one to watch.

When he spoke of my truck is such good light and told my friends who were assembled that I was a good leader, I thought to myself, flattery will get you most everywhere.

Sitting on the seawall in the sleepy fishing village of Taganga we were growing more excited about this adventure into the desert. He was tall and thin, carried a small satchel and wore faded white pants. With gray hair and leathery skin the old man exuded an air of special knowledge or at least possessed talented theatrics with the spoken word. He had little and was hungry, we shared our food. In a gravely voice, verging on dramatic he spoke of the pleasures of the desert, its beauty and simplicity. A Smugglers Paradise where cheap Venezuelan gas and beer enter and cocaine leaves via illegal dirt airstrips, boats, and now submarines.

He went on to explain the intricacies of Colombian culture in this remote desolate region. A place known to be dangerous in parts with friendly people if you minded local customs. Dangerous and friendly, was one of those dichotomies Colombians use to describe their country; this only heightened my interest in the area. Guides are recommended and I hired none, choosing instead
to rely on intuition and people for directions and places to sleep.

The old man had an air about him; the next day we tried to characterize him to each other and all arrived at the same word, Sage.
The Sage made me feel good and gave me confidence to travel this remote and harsh region. As the driver and group lead I felt a sense of responsibility for my friends no matter how poorly I planned for it.

David
Cartagena, Colombia

Dispatch Number 58 -The Psychiatrist

2010-03-03T14:33:00.000-08:00

I met Francis a retired psychiatrist from Kansas when I was in Panama City, he told fortunes with a deck of playing cards that he spread out over a big piece of purple felt. It had an astrology wheel and other crudely painted symbology on it. People at our cheap hotel loved to circle around him in the evenings and have their fortunes told. The reception guy and I were compatriots in our non belief and poked fun at it all. We were ignorant for we made fun of what we did not understand. Inventions of the mind , I say.

Francis was harsh and judgemental about most things, including a man neither of us knew performing construction work below the balcony of our dumpy hotel.
"Stupid idiot! He's not wearing ear protection. He'll be deaf in a year.", as the high pitched power tool roared through floor tiles.

Francis loved the words fuck and shit and used them in typically uncreative ways making it difficult to believe he was the science fiction writer he claimed to be. I never saw him read. I was careful not to ask for one of the manuscripts I saw him passing around to unsuspecting backpackers. When I saw one returned it was done without much comment and I didn't want to be in that position, I may not have been as delicate.

He believed in UFOs and life on other planets. They are an odd lot the silver disc believers, like missionaries who want to recruit or confirm you into their subculture. They can be zealots, too. Area 51 people. In Costa Rica, I met a local artisan, Freddy who had me watch a video fraught with technical problems in the camera work. He defiantly claimed this was proof of UFOs. Freddy used a portable DVD player instead of a bible.

Francis asked, just like Freddy did, "Do you believe in UFOs and extraterrestrial life?"
I am not delicate anymore, probably since I'm not trying to sell people things, and replied without hesitance, "No. Not a believer. Shall we talk about God next?"
Francis would not be deterred and pressed on in an accusatory manner that linear thinking was the cause for not believing in UFOs. He used the label and made it sound dirty or contaminated, and it warmed me to debate.

He was not a crafty debater and his attacks were obvious and clumsy. From the start it felt like a set up. His line of reasoning was rehearsed and when I began to out debate him he resorted to talking over me. After some time it was clear he had another agenda and went on with his unpolished monologue. I began to wonder how his science fiction manuscripts read.

Constructions of the mind help us cope with our world, some make them and never break them. Others adopt religions and philosophies. As for this traveller, it may take years before I reluctantly challenge the constructions I create, and revise them or completely break them down. I believed in UFOs until I was eleven.

Over lunch with a group who liked to spend time with him, fortune lackeys I called them, Francis choked on a piece of meat. A Finnish man helped him cough it up using the Heimlich Maneuver; I'm told Francis sat back down as if little had happened, while the others stared at the huge piece of meat that came out of his throat.
"Francis, you have to chew!", exclaimed one of the Spaniards who took lunch with him.

David
Cartagena, Colombia

Dispatch Number 57 -Cemetery

2010-02-24T09:13:00.000-08:00

Guatemalan cemeteries are pell-mell and without much order when compared with the solemn neatness of North American cemeteries. Here they are filled with colorful tombstones and crypts and a surprising amount of trash. Many crypts are painted in ornate patterns of bright greens, whites and blues. Death is colorful. Murals adorn many. Some are political or artful, while others are wholly incomprehensible such as several crypts painted boldly with American flags with "U.S.A" placed where the stars usually go.

Guatemalan cities with populations over 10,000 are noisy, dirty places with an unappealing new generation of concrete buildings. Economical concrete is ugly and ramshackle with high walls laced in razor wire that make walking about town a penitentiary architectural experience. Will the architecture of this uninspired period charm 300 hundred years from now the way old colonial cities charm the intrepid visitor today?

When the excitement of the busy, noisy and exhaust thick city wears off I seek tranquility in cemeteries and churches. A traveller develops weird habits he would never have back home. Rural public parks are hard to find, the kind with trees and grass, so it is at the cemetery one can hear the birds sing, appreciate the trees and the smell of damp grass amidst a sea of colorful tombstones. Cemeteries are parks of historical significance full of dates and names where local history is told. Here in Nebaj it also represents a dark chapter in Guatemalan history where fifteen crypts set in a row all have the same date.

Guatemala´s Civil War raged on in the late 1970s and 1980s with mass killings committed by both the military and pro-government para military forces. In Nebaj I met a team of young Guatemalans taking lunch. Their pickup was jammed full of gear and covered with a tarp. They were excavators preparing to dig up mass graves in the area; they exhume bodies for possible identification and return to the families. Sometimes their work results in fifteen graves in a row like those in the local cemetery. Their commitment and choice of work was touching. They ate lunch with gusto.

In the cemetery two boys do their homework atop one of the single level crypts, acting as the perfect desk with papers spread over its broad top. I will have to admit that as one who appreciates a good writing surface that the boys had made a great choice. Higher up the hilly array of tombstones two women talk in gentle tones while sitting side by side on a pair of low slung concrete cross.

Atop the hill a group of young girls play on the tombs like they were part of a swing set. They holler ¡Hola!, ¡Hola! over and over, I answer every time, for in Guatemala it is in bad manners to not reply. They keep it up for a while until I pretended to be out of earshot. It is their playground. Their lightheartedness stands in contrast to the backdrop of the cemetery. They were curious girls who were happy, playful and shy like children everywhere.

Even though I am not a believer in caskets, worms and rot I do respect these grounds and found myself shaking my head in mild disapproval when a man rode his motorcycle through the cemetery with a woman on back; they laughed with new lover joy as the bike sputtered to and fro and finally exited under a wisp of giggles.

David
Valledupar, Colombia

Dispatch Number 56 -Food for Thought

2010-02-08T08:36:00.001-08:00

a.) The future has imploded into the present. There was no Nuclear Armageddon. There is too much real estate to lose. The new battlefield is people's minds.

b.) The megacorps ARE the new governments.

c.) The U.S. is a big bully with lackluster economic power.

d.) The world is splintering into a trillion subcultures and designer cults with their own languages, codes and lifestyles.

e.) Computer generated info-domains are the next frontiers.

f.) There is better living through chemistry.

-Quote from a source I failed to make note of.

David
Taganga, Columbia

Dispatch Number 55 -Beer Thoughts

2010-02-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

No matter how common I think I am or try to be, when I travel Latin America I am a petite bourgeois.

Travel is either finding yourself or accepting who you are.

Disowning my own culture I seek it in the countries I visit. How can you seek such a thing when you are an outsider? A drifter takes the best of the places he visits. He belongs to the travel culture. He is lost and wants it that way.

Constantly uprooted he finds his companionship in other vagabonds, his books, journals and long walks. Who will he be after it all?

Sitting by a lake shore that feels like a sea shore.

My days revolve around meals not livelihood. I am a member of the leisure class. An undeniable member.

David
Taganga, Columbia

Dispatch Number 54 -Errant Thoughts VII

2010-01-27T17:07:00.001-08:00

Coconuts
In the jungles of Costa Rica coconuts fall at night with heavy thuds, like rocks falling off a cliff landing in damp soil. Getting hit by one could kill you. The snakes and frogs can kill you. The jaguars can kill you. Things in the ocean can kill you.

It is a natural paradise and there are no signs saying "No..." or restrictive handrails prohibiting entry. The absence of controls and laws in Central America is liberating to the American who comes from the most legislated place on earth; America also has more people in prison than all other counties in the world, naturally this includes Central America. I don't think the handrails and abundance of laws are working in America.

Cigars
How come men who smoke cigars act as if they own or command everything around them?
-Note on a man smoking a cigar loading his car on a ferry in Nicaragua

Neal
Neal Diamond is gay, I didn't know that. I thought he was singing about women in all those songs.

Second Times
Most of the time people aren't that happy to see you again, it is like the moment has passed.

Unused
Policeman's pistol looks like an unused museum piece.

Notes from a Notebook
I am a country boy. I am much more at ease in the country. A rural tourist if you demand a label. Cities are a drag and require a lot of energy to be in, they are snake pits. When in them I feel like a bad swimmer in big city waters. It requires energy. The energy of survival.

Solar Flare
Sunsets. You can watch a mind blower with all the orange layers upon more layers until the sky turns cobalt blue and finally sparkling black. We tend to recall them like special events as if they were rare things that hardly happen.

Sunsets happen every single day. We live a mechanical life in cars, houses and places like cities where the horizon is blocked out by something man has made. Mechanical places we choose to be, while missing most every sunset. Sunsets are not only for retired people.

Milk
Throughout Central America milk is raised and collected the old way. Local farmers have a small herd of say ten dairy cows he collects milk from each morning, as the sun is coming up he sets one or two tin canisters out on the edge of the dirt road that a pick-up truck collects. Later that warm milk is transferred to a larger truck with tanks. When I camp with a farmer I am often treated to fresh milk, often still warm -it tastes incredible. There are no industrial cow farms in Central America with millions of cows cramped up, instead they are free to roam the pasture.

Dateline
Crossed the Panama Canal by going over the Bridge of the Americas on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 12:50pm. The canal represents a major wayward point for this traveller on his way to the bottom of the world. Family probably thinks it is a bridge too far. This traveller now breaks a land tether by going to South America by sea, for no road connects Panama to Columbia.

The Dirty Look
In a hostel one has little privacy, so it becomes a chance to learn how others live. Those hippie Rastafarian types spend a remarkable amount of time maintaining and creating the soiled unkempt look. It came as a surprise since they often look so disheveled and barely keeping themselves up.

Is anything real anymore or is it just a bunch of fashion cliques and designer cults?

The Marina
While there are a lot of beautiful boats here in the well-to-do Panama City marina, there are a sizable share of "project" boats and others abandoned to dreams gone by. The common ending for boats is decay. The passion fades fast making a boat like a tattoo, a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling.

Books
Books I have read in last couple months:

The Path Between the Seas (Panama Canal History), Blade Runner, Guns, Germs and Steel (a pull it all together history of the evolution of civilizations), The River of Doubt (an explorer story that almost killed President Theodore Roosevelt on an unexplored river in Brazil in 1913), Saint Jack (a Paul Theroux novel), The Godfather, The Last Don, Songlines (travels in Australia by Bruce Chatwin).

David
Cartagena, Columbia

Dispatch Number 53 -Chapter One

2010-01-17T12:03:00.000-08:00

To continue traveling always came down to two things, the means and desire or more bluntly if I had money and curiosity. By the time you read this the Land Cruiser, Azulita will be loaded on a container ship for Cartagena, Columbia and I will begin exploring South America. The idea is to drive to The Bottom of the World, Ushuaia, Argentina at Cape Horn, from there Antarctica is 750 miles away. The first chapter of road travels through Central America comes to a close.

There is no road between Columbia and Panama so I will sail down the coast of San Blas, a special untouched place along the Caribbean coast where the Kuna live, one of Panama's few remaining indigenous people. Traveling by sea allows me to adhere to one of my few travel rules -No Planes.

I have seen so much in fifteen months of travel in Mexico and Central America.

Central America is backpacker country where most of those I met were hopelessly trapped in their guidebooks, staying on what is known as the Gringo Trail with its creature comforts. Each stop tends to be a series of canned adventures that start by scratching their name on a clip board for volcano sledding, scuba diving or flying over verdant jungle canopy on a wire like Tinkerbell. This type of traveller seeks adventure, not culture, and stay exclusively in "hip" hostels surrounded by other strangers who mock what they can´t comprehend. Their adventure travel is a form of McDonaldization for the independent shoestring traveler who romantically see themselves on non-corporate expeditions, when in fact, it comes with a high degree of predictability and ease.

It is easy to imagine after eavesdropping on this backpacker set of them on cruise ships with pale skin and white socks enjoying the same isolated type of travel later in life. And sadly, the closest many of them get to the local culture is their guide. For me and many others it is out on the street or on dusty roads deep in the country that things come alive.

I like finding my own meals, places to sleep, and fumbling with maps. Latin American hospitality is extraordinary, especially the ease they make conversation. The stranger is welcome. The self-conscious North American who is reluctant or keeps to himself is shown another way.

In Honduras I visited a fortnight after the coup d'état. It was a rare visit to a country that had just ousted its president by military force, dropping him off on a runway in Costa Rica in his pajamas, something Latin America had not experienced in 19 years. In the five weeks I traveled the countryside I quizzed people about these dramatic events, attended several protests and was happily inconvenienced at opposition road blocks. 80% of those I interviewed were in support of the new illegal government. I came away believing propaganda works the same in every country, much the way it worked to great effect in the United States leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 -everybody was behind it. In Honduras they made it about ousting communism, not about chasing terrorists through the Mesopotamian desert.

In Nicaragua I set out with a friend to explore the Rio San Juan, once known as the Nicaragua Route, as it was favored by the Americans over the current Panama Canal. The Nicaragua Route was never developed. We spent almost two weeks on the Rio San Juan in a combination of ferries, fast river boats and dug out canoes. This rustic river covers 120 miles with only three large villages; places that seem hardly changed since gold miners took the route in the 1850's. I never thought I would get so much out of walking in the steps of history. It was one of the highlights of my journey so far.

Costa Rica had stunning natural beauty. The Osa Peninsula on the Pacific Ocean had the highest concentration of rare animals, the same ones I had so much trouble spotting in other parts of Central America. In Osa you would literally trip over the wildlife on a sleepy morning walk. It was almost too easy. As friendly, helpful and polite as the people of Costa Rica were their culture seemed to lack something when compared with others in the region.

In Costa Rica bolts and rivets were used to construct, not nails and wire. Weed whackers to trim grass not long machetes. In the main parks there was a curious absence of small children selling candy by-the-piece; there were no shoe shine boys and no street food vendors. There were no flies to complain of and something very rare -construction projects were completed. Because of these things I am less than enamoured with Costa Rica.

In Central America the countryside can be stunning especially the mountain communities where coffee is grown. These places won my heart over and over. If I was a city-boy, then to live in Panama City, Panama would be at the top of the list, it has a wonderful mix of old and new and a culture that pulls it all together.

One thing I do not miss in North America is rampant materialism. In Latin America I have escaped the viciousness of materialism, shallow culture and ruthless careerism. In North America listen to the people around you: they talk about stuff. The subject of money encapsulates the the American conversation. It does not in Central America -people are first. Travel has renewed my belief in humanity and it has humbled me.

On occasion I reflect that if I ever lost the truck for any host of reasons I would promptly turn to a motorcycle and continue the journey; a consideration that does not feel bad because it would force me to travel even lighter. Charles Bukowski said it best, Everything you own must be able to fit inside one suitcase; then your mind might be free.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama

Dispatch Number 52 -The System

2009-12-18T06:17:00.000-08:00

Before I left on this journey into The Americas people were all to happy to tell me how how corrupt and violent Central America would be when I got there. American tales and American fears projected onto anyone who would listen to help them validate their fears and confirm how smart they were not to travel to these savage uncivilized places.

Even my dentist was concerned that I would not be able to get my teeth cleaned, as if there would be a total absence of the dental profession where I was going. I listened and frowned then had my teeth cleaned in Mexico and Panama. Camus said it best in The Stranger, One always has exaggerated ideas about what ones doesn't know.

Then a year into the journey it happened. A bribing situation arose when a Nicaraguan traffic cop told me to pull over at a check point. It was a good time to speak very little Spanish. He began by expressing pleasure that I was wearing my seat belt then promptly found problems with my out of date car papers and lack of an emergency triangle. I lied and said I had flares, but that didn't help since I did not know the word for flare nor could I produce one. Then came the explanation:

I will hold your licence while you go to the bank to pay the fine, then you can return for your licence. Or you can pay here.
Here?
Yes, here.
How much is the fine?
$20 dollars.
Twenty, that's a lot.
Then how much?
Aha, I thought what a fair system they have here in Nicaragua the amount of the fine is up to me, I counter with, $5 dollars
$10?
No.
$5 dollars.
OK.

That was my first bribe and the experience was well worth the five dollars and time spent haggling. I suppose that will make some people happy back home, a vindication of sorts. I was prepared to go through the legal process of receiving the multa, ticket and visiting the bank to settle it.

While traveling I have observed a dichotomy between the Law Abiding foreign traveler who criticizes the corrupt nature of Latin American institutions (an ingrained part of the culture), then the same person is more than happy to "pay" a bribe when they get themselves into a sticky situation. Can't have it both ways I say.

Contrary to all the fear mongering I heard prior to leaving the U.S. I have found all interactions with federal and municipal authorities in Central America to be professional and prompt. Thus far, my experiences have been the furthest thing from uncivilized. In general, the people of Central America are friendly, open and helpful to the stranger. Had I listened to the exaggerated ideas people had about places they knew nothing about I might not have been able to tell you otherwise.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama

Dispatch Number 51 -Jeff

2009-12-16T08:33:00.001-08:00

Jeff was a gregarious story teller that could get anybody talking even the shy ones. Gabby and free spirited. Jeff was a travel know-it-all dispensing an endless stream of advice to unsuspecting travelers who recently arrived. He'd lure them in with where are you going?, then launch breathlessly into five minutes of advice about how to get somewhere and where to stay. As for our time together in Guatemala and Honduras we laughed a great deal, enjoyed mild adventure (the coup d’état had just happened in Honduras) and witnessed two dead men on the roads we traveled. I silently wondered if it was an omen since the sightings were at point blank range and came in the span of days.

He loved the sound of his own voice and I told him so, he smiled like I was in on some secret of his. Once he pointed out after lunch with new friends that I was obsessed with washing my hands before and after I took meals. True to being an American I took it personally and felt compelled to defend it with some blubbering about keeping sanitary, I think I even evoked the swine flu to shield my sudden feeling of exposure. I learned after a few weeks with Jeff that he saw everything. Everything. To me it became one of his most heartening qualities.

Jeff had a peculiar quirk for a shoestring traveler accustomed to doing things the least expensive way, he would compulsively window shop and catalog the prices in his head. Once the data was collected he would take perverse pleasure in confronting a store owner with the price discrepancy and make an issue of it.

When we went our separate ways I did not want to part from his company. He was adventurous, even minded, open to suggestion, mixed quickly with new people and would act without hesitation. He was an avid student of Spanish and spoke it whenever the chance presented itself.
I miss the Australian. In his company I felt stronger. I have a rule that I do not write about the people I get to know and travel with, however, in this case Jeff suggested I write something and I took up his offer. I hope we meet up again.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama

Dispatch Number 50 -Drinking With Russians

2009-12-14T15:35:00.001-08:00

We took the truck as far as it could go, the end of the road where the Mosquito Coast begins. From here on the remote wilds are only accessible by boat in the deepest reaches of Honduras along the Caribbean coast. We were in a damp, musty, mosquito ridden dump of a hotel drinking on the patio saying our goodbyes. My friends were getting on a boat in the morning and I was turning back. The booze everyone packed for the journey was consumed that night.

I listened as attentively as my numbed head would allow to the Russian's explanation of the proper way to drink. I have always been curious about Russia and her culture and the beautiful couple from St. Petersburg presented a rare chance to learn more. They explained the proper method to drink so one could avoid a hangover. By consuming liquor and beer in a particular order one could dodge the morning bullet; due to my fueled state at the time I will pass over the details since I cannot recall them clearly. To drink any other way was to invite a hangover and the most damning of class remarks, it was, to drink like a whore.

Olga was beautiful and I could not resist what I said next. I noticed that we were drinking in precisely the way they said not to, we were heading for a hangover. Far from caring at that stage about manners I told Olga we were drinking like whores. Lovely Olga replied with a frown.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama

Dispatch Number 49 -Over The Rainbow

2009-12-10T15:05:00.001-08:00

This group has bled my interest dry. They were a lethal mix of personality: all-knowing and incurious. A collection of amateur artists, freaks, dopers, dreamy revolutionaries, drunk spiritualists, malcontents, gypsies, and hangers-on who presented themselves as fashionably reincarnated hippies with blind ties to that fabled past. One thing was obvious -they all needed to feel loved, to feel important and to impress others that they were special and unique when they were full of stale dead and unoriginal opinions.

My friend Stephanie and I tried to make it to the Rainbow Gathering, a month long festival near La Paz in Baja California, Mexico. These Rainbow Gatherings are the current form of the hippie commune lifestyle where most everything is permitted and money is not used in daily affairs, the intent is to get people back to their roots of community and away from capitalism. However, the charms and delights of the Baja peninsula kept us from making it to the gathering in the desert. Reflecting back I am glad we never arrived.

My chance to meet some Rainbow people came a short time later when I invited a group of them to ride with me from Baja to mainland Mexico. I was curious about them and heard positive things they propounded like consciousness towards mother earth and her people. I traveled with them for over a week and said my goodbyes as quickly as possible when we arrived in Sayulita a pacific coast fishing village turned tourist haven. There was an informal Rainbow Gathering at this beach town where I met more of the Tribe. Successfully catering to the tourist the beach front was filled with lounge chairs and umbrellas for rent occupied by people feeling comfortably rich among the colorfully poor. After several months of back-roading it in dusty Baja California accustomed to finding my own way I did not care for the ready made feel of Sayulita.

I shared late night beach fires with the Rainbow people curious to understand their outlook and enjoy their company, however, my curiosity was thwarted because of their copious consumption of alcohol and drugs. I discovered the modern hippie was deaf the way most drunks are and little different than the heavy drinkers at my old neighborhood bar that was full of artificially happy people with unhappy depressed lives that eventually let their anger fly after a few. Like bars, the cultural component that held these Rainbow people together were drugs and alcohol -finding them, talking about them, and taking them. They never complained about the price of beer or a bag of weed, but they would complain about the $4.50 camp fee while they ate your food.

Many had swollen faces and limbs from a steady diet of pills, pot, hash and alcohol; malnutrition and poor self-care were obvious. They looked as unhealthy as the resident drunk on his semi-permanent stool nursing a warm beer clutching a pack of cigarettes. With drugs there is a difference between self-expansion and self-deception.

Their behavioral promiscuity at the fire pit was shocking. With all the unity and consciousness messages the Rainbow Movement promoted I was unable to find it here. The unity was through drugs and getting smashed together. Common ground or intelligent debate was absent, and consciousness was curiously absent at the fire pit. The pit always felt like it was delicately perched between peace and war, a violent undercurrent was always underfoot. Over and over I would be told or hear others say, everything is O.K. and peace. Little of it could be found at night. They were angry. The mother earth chatter I heard during the day held no water at this hour.

Actions and words knew no relationship. They talked about revolution like bystanders hoping someone else would do it. One could see they were scared to death of the world and chose to cloak themselves in the safety of the tribe. I am down with their anti-establishment views and anti-corporate sentiments, but I am not crazy about them. They have a herd instinct and I noticed they talked about what they were told to yap about -repeated ideas. Over the years I have learned to cherish original thinkers.

Their life experiences seemed limited to psychedelic drug journeys mixed with lots of talk and little participation in life. The Rainbow Tribe was jammed with phonies, many of them unfeeling and false people. I think of the suit and tie lifestyle, the corporate lackeys pulling the 8-5 grind and the Rainbow Tribe people are against this and I am down with this too. From where I stand neither the lifestyles of the hippies or the 8-5ers looks appealing. I used to think the hippie was more alive than the stockbroker, now I am not so sure.

Maybe I am getting old. I left them in their tourist town excited about my next stop to meet up with new friend Carlos, a Mexican who owned a coffee plantation with 35,000 of the world's most beautiful plant (yes, I love coffee that much). Carlos invited me to learn how to harvest the red bean on the steep mountain slopes that lie northwest of Guadalajara. I spent several days with Carlos and his mother, Guadalupe who treated me as a son. They helped replenish my heart that had become so depleted while in the company of the Rainbow people.

In life I discovered that one group leaves you depressed and another group of people can bring you back. I love humanity and the magical ways in which it works. I accept the Rainbow people, I just do not want to be one of them.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama

Dispatch Number 48 -Errant Thoughts VI

2009-12-09T07:23:00.000-08:00

Greeks, Germans and Afghanistan
The German is good company, his Greek wife is a terror. A woman of anger, agitation and pettiness. A female powder keg in a petite body. She trembles with frustration when she talks about the weather. We meet them on the magical Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, a stunning coastal rain forest full of rare birds and mammals.

Her husband supports Americas attempted conquest of Afghanistan by working for the German government teaching Afghans how to be police. He thinks it is about human rights and the rights of women. A casual look at military bases in Afghanistan, the big ones, and their proximity to the soon to be built oil pipeline tells you it is about oil company rights. Afghanistan has defied foreign conquest for all 2,500 years of its recorded history. America wants to succeed where Alexander the Great, and numerous others, ultimately and ingloriously failed.

Coffee
I collect coffee from the region like I once collected red wine. I have seven or more different bags of coffee from countries throughout Central America. A traveler acquires interesting habits and comforts along the way.

On War
"...priests provide religious justification for wars of conquest..."
-Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel

Statistics
On walking.
"93% of all trips outside the home for any distance or purpose Americans get in their car. On average the total walking of the average American these days adds up to 1.4 miles per week. Barely 350 yards per day. Walking of all types- car to office, office to car, around the supermarket and malls. If you are hiking for twenty minutes you would cover the same distance an average American does in a week."
-Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods

Under a Shade Tree on a Hot Highway
A review of the mileage log revealed the following:

I have traveled an average of 25 miles per day in the last 14 months since crossing into Mexico in October 2008. That adds up to 10,500 miles driven covering six countries in Central America. Draw your own opinions about me, but I did meet a French couple doing the same journey and it took them twice as long to get this far. Their Spanish is much better than mine.

In 2007, I drove the United States in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX. It took nine months and 20,000 miles to get home.

Bad Honesty
Relatively speaking the brunette backpacker is attractive, but the poor thing has been cursed with awful legs. Awful. A twenty something from the waist up and a sixty-something from the waist down. Observation is brutal for everyone, including me. Those legs are nasty and belong on a retired motor home Mama.

Dostoevsky
"He sat down at a sticky little table in a dark and dirty corner."
-Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Coffee II
It was the best to go coffee I had ever had. Black water from a Styrofoam cup in a cramped seat of a small and fast river boat. The seduction of morning mist over glassy water, the sun weak, and a densely dark jungle with birds in dawn symphony. Coffee, me and no conversation -just the sound of water rushing by and the drone of the outboard motor.

Happy or Harmony?
It is not about being Happy. It is about being in Harmony with the self and the world that self lives in. This may not in turn bring about happiness or sadness. It is a question of contentment.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama

Dispatch Number 47 -Children

2009-12-06T06:58:00.000-08:00

In Central America children are put to work at the earliest age possible. In the cities kids peddle trays of candy or shine shoes as young as five or six years old. In the countryside they help with carrying wood bundles or babies on their backs. These little children perform these tasks with all the seriousness of adults at an age when the most a child in North America would be made to do is put his toys away. For the children of Central America there is no prolonged period of learning or easing into responsibility like it is in America.

In the mountain regions of Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua the children carry their heavy loads up 60% slopes not for yards, but for miles. Hiking on these same mountains I grow winded carrying nothing except water. In the countryside a remarkable amount of time is spent gathering wood for cooking. This precious fuel is never used to warm a house, even those in the Guatemala highlands at elevations over 3,000 meters (10,000 feet).

Life in these poor indigenous villages and settlements is striped down to bare essentials where gas stoves, concrete floors, electric fans, electricity and running water are considered luxuries, most go without. In Nicaragua 80% of the population lives on less than $2 a day, (the indigenous population lives on less than $1 a day) it is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The poor Nicaraguan wants my relative wealth and I want his slower and simpler life. As always human nature presents itself -we want what we don't have. As a traveller I spend more than $4 per gallon for gasoline, $2-4 per meal and $5-8 for a place to sleep. What travelers like myself spend in a single day the average person in Nicaragua could live on for 12 days or more.

Even though I do not feel like it the Nicaraguans and Guatemalans view me as a very rich man. While traveling these countries I am a petite bourgeois for I have the freedom to travel about in a private car and can take my meals in just about any restaurant and sleep in nice hotels. In my actual case, I travel third-class eating $3 meals instead of $12 ones, sleeping in $6 places instead of $30 ones.

Everything is relative, but can be shocking when you take a closer and more thoughtful look at the income differences between yourself and the countries visited. It influences my behavior as a visitor and keeps me humble and respectful. A travel philosophy I have adopted is to spend my money in small locally owned businesses and eat in family-run restaurants.

When I drive about the countryside I offer rides to locals who pile in with baskets of tomatoes & peppers for market, some with babies, other times at the end of a very hot day it is the campasinos, (country folk and farm hands) who hop in with their three foot machetes and reused radiator jugs for drinking water. Exchanges are fun and I ask about their crops and things like that. I am open to it all and largely avoid the yuppie backpacker tourist path- a class of traveller who is hopelessly caught in the guidebook syndrome. I avoid the cities and take the dirt roads over the back country where the cows are and I need to ask for directions at every road split; real cowboys and the penetrating stares you get when driving through small settlements. Dust swirls around the cabin of the truck because my windows are always open.

A friend of mine who I have not talked to in a long time was fond of saying, The beach is out, the city is in. Today, the city is out and the country is in. As a traveller I have discovered that I am not fond of big cities anymore. I am a rural tourist.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama City, Panama

Dispatch Number 46 -Locals

2009-12-03T12:37:00.000-08:00

Keep on Truckin'
I met Costa Rican truck driver, Mr. Perez, a driver for hire, who hauls cargo in other peoples trucks while at the border crossing between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. We were standing in the hot sun processing our vehicle documents. I learned from my conversation with him that he drives loads all over Central America for $65 per run, driving up to 12 hours per day. Perez's favorite truck: Freightliner.

Spacemen
I came to watch a gaseous volcano kick out newly minted rocks by the hour and instead met Freddy a Costa Rican wood craft artist and UFO fanatic. We were standing at the base of the very active Arenal Volcano. When we first met I thought he had alive eyes, after he grew comfortable he asked if I believed in those silver discs that fill the skies his eyes grew to the size of small plates. Before I realized what my answer would trigger he had me watching a DVD filled with amateur clips on his portable player.

Do you want to watch? he asked.
Sure, I said sensing the trap, I have to leave soon, so only a few minutes (I detest getting trapped in these kind of webs whether it is UFOs, Bibles or the worst of the lot looking at some one's personal picture collection usually delivered by the 100's.)

We view the clips...more than once.
Now, was I convinced? he wanted to know.
No. Not a believer., I replied.

In my reckless thinking I thought I could convince him that they do not exist explaining that they were anything but UFOs, as I proudly pointed out the technical problems with lens reflection in most of the amateur clips. Either my Spanish was too vague or he chose not to take my points into consideration. I suspected the latter as the two of us became Missionaries in our own right. As often as ever people dislike being caught between their self-delusion and hard practicality.

While traveling I learned that language can keep doors shut or open them beyond one's wildest expectations.

Coming Home
While Azulita, my 1986 Toyota Land Cruiser was in the shop for repairs I met Costa Rican, Enrique who recently resettled in his home country after twenty-plus years in New Jersey raising a family and running a small business.

Why did you return? I asked
To be closer to the greater family. We paid for many visits for relatives to see our home in New Jersey, we can't invite them all to visit that way. We are all close together now.
What do you miss most about life in the United States?
In the States it is easy to get stuff. Like at Napa Auto Parts you can get this distributor rotor in every shop, right now, I can't locate one in Costa Rica.
So, you miss the shopping convenience?
Yeah, in Costa Rica, if you go to one place a tire costs $40, then down the street they charge $32 for the same tire. In the States the prices are pretty much the same. It's a lot of work to buy stuff.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama City, Panama

Dispatch Number 45 -Errant Thoughts V

2009-11-29T09:24:00.001-08:00

Travel Burnout
After eight months on the road I am tired of making decisions. Where to eat , what to eat, where to walk, trying it all in Spanish -fatigue sets in. I want someone else to make choices.

Ironically, visiting the Catholic church on the town square becomes my decision free refuge.

Nomad Life
Thoughts on the nomadic lifestyle I lead while traveling the Western Hemisphere. The wanderer. The drifter. The vagabond. The nomad. The adventurer. The romantic. The stranger. The rootless. The uncommitted. The curious.

Dream
The nomad. Leading the nomadic life. The dream. Not a dream of attainment, but the dream of being and doing who you are now. Live this life for there is nothing to suspend and wait for later. It is a dream of living life now and not suppressing the way one really wants to live. A dream in that sense. Not the dream of finding perfect love or visiting some overwrought ideal of a deserted island with palms, birds and blue water. A different meaning to the word dream altogether.

Had
Trying to capture what we once had.

Cities
Cities are so distracting in their pleasures and disorienting in their removal from nature. Distractions aplenty with shopping, restaurants, music and drink. Disorienting because electricity deeply alters the sleep/rest cycles. One looses a sense of time in cities because there is no horizon and the sun is blocked from clear view. It is easier to know the time out in the open country without a clock than in a city.

God's effect through something called Religion
Wailing woman making the rounds to each deity in this church, wailing the whole way. Long drawn out wails that fill the chamber mixed with the taxi horns outside on the busy street. It is real to her.
-Catholic Church, Nebaj, Guatemala

Camus
"One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know."
-Albert Camus, The Stranger

Cell Phone
"To communicate with God, it is not necessary to use a cell phone"
- Notice inside a Catholic church aimed at the chatty ones -Esteli, Nicaragua

Exports
The United States is the number one export partner for each and every Central American country including Mexico, from North to South:

82% of Mexico's exports go to the U.S.
42% for Guatemala
60% for Honduras
32% for Nicaragua
26% for Costa Rica
36% for Panama

The pattern of politics following business emerges.

On the Other Side
The open market lives! An ancient way of life and commerce continues in these modern times. People from the countryside come to buy and sell.

Towns with No Cars
It is not a dirt road town, there are no cars. In the village Rio San Juan de Nicaragua they have narrow raised sidewalks running in neat lines making up quadrants. You can only get here by boat.

Kamp
This camp is on a large farm, Finca administered by Alvaro a warm helpful Costa Rican who tends to the chickens and pigs, milks the cows, rides a horse to herd the cattle. He is followed everywhere by a trio of very attendant dogs. If they are not out on the finca working with him then they are traumatizing the horse in the pasteur. The horse while under pursuit tries to stop, hold ground and eat grass out of sheer will, but the dogs set him to running again. Depending on where you stand on the property it smells of wet dog fur or the munkiness of rat and bat droppings.

Made (by hand)
One of the joys of traveling Latin America is that most things are made by hand, often in small artisan shops such as the shoe and saddle maker, wrought iron workshops, foods like cheese, yogurt and fresh breads made ocally and in small batches. Things crafted in the pre-industrial way. The roads are often built by hand and in houses the craftsmanship shows itself in the tables and chairs, window frames and heavy wood doors.

Quotes
'Faith is believing in something you know isn't true.'
-Unknown

'The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.'
-Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Hotel Estrella
A cute tiny greenish-black turtle crosses the room straight for me. The hotel pet. I think how cute it is coming just like a dog to visit me. It comes straight for my big toe and bites it. Hard. As I jerk back in recoil my friend says they're the territorial type. No wonder the things are almost exstinct.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama City, Panama

Dispatch Number 44 -Human Nature

2009-11-26T09:14:00.000-08:00

Human Nature. We want what we don't have. The poor Nicaraguan wants my wealth (relative to him), he experiences me as a rich tourist. I want his simple life, a slower more human pace (relative to me), one closer to the soil, closer to my food.

I want what I don't have in my own culture. Life in these poor indigenous villages and settlements is striped down to bare essentials where gas stoves, concrete floors, electric fans, electricity and running water are considered luxuries. Most go without these extras. In Nicaragua 80% of the population lives on less than $2 a day, (the indigenous population lives on less than $1 a day); it is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

The poor Nicaraguan wants my relative wealth and I want his slower and simpler life -we want what we don't have. As a traveller I spend more than $4 per gallon for gasoline, $2-4 per meal and $5-8 for a place to sleep. What travelers like myself spend in a single day the average person in Nicaragua could live on the same money for nearly 12 days.

David

Casco Viejo, Panama City, Panama

Dispatch Number 43 -Two Boys

2009-11-24T07:15:00.002-08:00

My cultural experience with two Nicaraguan boys that were seven or eight years old began with a "Hi" in the parking lot where I was staying. When I returned to get something from the truck they gathered up their nerve and asked for money -the handout. Begging.

Give us money., their hands held out
Why?, I asked.

This question stumped them into silence. I seldom give money to beggars, it weakens a person and produces dependent behavior. I look for other ways.

So I took the chance and asked, Do you know how to wash a car?
Yes, came their prompt reply.
How much?
After they whispered in consultation for a moment the older one said, 20 Cordobas, the equivelent of USD$1.00.
OK. I said.

They lacked the basic equipment and borrowed a bucket, soap and a scrub brush from the woman who ran the reception where I was staying. She cautioned me that they would need direction on how to do it. I waited until they got started so I could influence their work without telling them what to do. Empowerment and confidence is EVERYTHING to a child.

After they had been at it a while I joined them and to my pleasure the smallest one was standing on the roof of the truck scrubbing away. I worked with them, guiding the work while they had the satisfaction of doing it themselves. They were hard workers and highly motivated. It felt good to adapt to the begging by not dismissing them outright and looking for a way to show them one perspective of the relationship between money and work. I believe that by offering them work it made them stronger, rather than a handout that takes a piece of their self-respect with it.

It is the role of the community to teach the children basic conduct and skills. My travel philosophy is to interact with the people, learn their culture, eat local food, acquire the language and watch everything my eyes can absorb. So with the two boys it was a moment to participate in community.

Before I paid them I explained that I had shown them how to wash a car and that now they knew all they needed to do it on their own next time and emphasized that they were smart kids. I paid them in front of the reception lady to make the community experience complete.

You can talk about it or do it.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama City, Panama

Dispatch Number 42 -A Lifetime

2009-10-13T08:23:00.000-07:00

It takes a lifetime for
a man to find himself
a lifetime of music, love, food, travel
a lifetime to begin to know himself

It takes a lifetime to drive every car
to listen to all the music
to learn to love, whether with one or many
it takes a lifetime

to meet all the people
to travel and see the people
to read books you think are the ones for you

we spend half our lifetimes trying to learn how to live
and the other half learning what a joke the first half is when lived that way
it takes a lifetime
for a man to find himself

a lifetime of great coffees and wines
if you are in the wrong town it takes a lifetime to find a good meal
it takes a lifetime to make all those plans and goals
and a lifetime to watch most of them float by like leaves on a slow moving river
it takes a lifetime

we may have a lifetime, but this is the only moment we really possess
no future, no past
it takes a lifetime
for a man to find himself

it takes a lifetime to understand surrender
it takes 1/2 a lifetime to understand what truth can do for you
it takes a lifetime for a man to find himself

a lifetime to learn not to hold your mistakes against yourself
and a lifetime not to hold them against others
it takes a lifetime to see a reflection of yourself
and a lifetime to be comfortable with what you see

it takes a lifetime to see how fast we learn and a lifetime
to see how slow we can learn
it takes a lifetime to establish a routine
and a lifetime to realize we are at our most vibrant when that routine is broken

It takes a lifetime for a man to find himself

David

Uvita, Costa Rica

Dispatch Number 41 -6 More Years

2009-10-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

It takes 6 years to

forget about something bad that has happened to you
learn how to fish and still catch nothing
understand you were never guaranteed to live the last 6 years
learn you can't drink like you used to

It takes 6 years

change a habit
think you have turned a corner, only to discover it was a circle
become a doctor
stop attracting the same lovers

It takes 6 years

notice your vision grow weaker
recognize a pattern
understand what really pleases you
let the pain go

It takes 6 years

realize you have ignored the signs over and over
save enough money to buy a house
learn to live without a 'to-do list'
know what you want in another person
order something new at a Chinese restaurant

It takes 6 years

accept that 1-ply toilet tissue has no place in your life
walk on the other side of the street
realize the difference between drinking buddies and friends
find new love
realize family is important to you

It takes 6 years

forget
finally do something you wanted to do
understand you cannot control things outside yourself
forgive

It takes 6 years

realize your favorite bar actually smells of urine and disappointment
learn how to say 'no'
understand money makes people cautious
realize a chiropractor has something to offer
learn one of your parents doesn't really accept you

It takes 6 years

realize the only people who know about mercy are the ones who need it
walk across a bridge
realize you are disappointed
branch out and find a new author

It takes just 6 years

realize most of your friends don't give a shit
understand something is an illusion
recognize you continue to live in an illusion
let go of something

It takes 6 more years

David

Uvita, Costa Rica

Dispatch Number 40 -6 Years

2009-10-08T16:17:00.001-07:00

6 Years

It takes 6 years to
know for certain you have turned a corner
watch leaves turn to flame just 6 times
realize you are with the wrong person
see how little your life has evolved

It takes 6 years

experience so much pain and suffering that you finally change something
get a university degree
watch a girl become a woman
notice a new car turn old
watch a boy become a man
notice you climb mountains slower

It takes 6 years

watch a dog live half its life
acknowledge you are lonely
learn to eat well
realize you are a calmer person
forget the dreams you once had

It takes 6 years

notice your vision grow weaker
know you are not leading the life you want to
find a perfect couch
save money you will never spend
know it is time to move out
realize all this today is your life

It takes 6 years

cross a river
watch a friend go under
realize you won't take it anymore
tell a parent something difficult
realize a routine does not always serve you well

It takes 6 years

realize you will be with her for the rest of your life
know who your friends really are
let your frustrations and anger become sickness
realize you were hurt
understand you cannot be with her for the rest of your life

It takes 6 years

know a charade isn't one anymore
understand santa clause isn't
wake up 2,190 times and have changed nothing

It takes 6 years

David

Uvita, Costa Rica

Dispatch Number 39 -26 Seconds

2009-10-07T15:55:00.000-07:00

It takes 26-seconds
to cross a street
to let a phone ring 4 times
to count to 40
to run from a fight

It takes 26-seconds
to stare at a wall without thinking of someone
to stop listening to someone else
to know you'll marry her
to learn how white your teeth could be

It takes 26-seconds
to stare at someone without words before you get uncomfortable
to speak before being asked
to decide whether you like a new town or not

It takes 26-seconds

David
Uvita, Costa Rica

Dispatch Number 38 -Errant Thoughts IV

2009-09-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

America's Gift
American cultural influence is expressed throughout these parts of Latin America with the word, Hollister painted boldly on t-shirts.

Pleasure
It is hard to put into context, but the Guatemalan is seldom alone, in public they are in groups or shop in pairs. In their homes whole families will cram into one or two beds depending on the size of the family. In my days in Guatemala I could not find what I would call private time. The closest was when someone was watching tv ignoring all else around them -an invisible room. They do not have their own beds let alone individual bedrooms.

So all this brought on a thought: If you are Guatemalan where do you masturbate?

Sitting in Church
The walls of this church are plain and drab, candles burn and bring solemn light to darkened corners. I think of the Spanish Conquistadors with their troops of Catholic priests. The Conquistadors saw the land for material riches, principally gold; the padres saw the lands of Latin America as a place ripe for the harvest of souls.

Time
Where were you ten years ago?
Today: September 2009 in Monteverde, Costa Rica
Back 10: September 1999 -San Francisco, California

Dogs, Cats, Chickens, Ducks and Rabbits
The more a man comes unraveled he brings animals closer to himself. The last refuge of relationship provided to a man with few to no recognizable friends.
-Observation of Don an American hostel owner high in the mountains of Guatemala.

Western Hemisphere
It is easy to say Latin Americans feel inferior materially and technologically to North America, however, it is important to recognize that they may be culturally and spiritually superior to life in North America.

Search
The painful search for self. It is a place you never really arrive at, you only become more familiar with yourself. The great release is to let go of this ridiculous concept of being perfect and solving the riddles of life or searching for meaning around every corner.

People & Books
The travel family disbands. I retreat to my happy world of books and writing. A return to my cat-like solitary ways. A world filled with books, maps, journals, Dispatches and laying on my back to stare at the ceiling. Travel Families are small groups of new friends met while traveling that bond and choose to travel together with me and Azulita for days, weeks or months.

How I Get Around
Gas and go varies from country to country. To fill Azulita's tank, 23 gallons costs:
$52 in Mexico
$80 in Guatemala and Honduras
$102 in Nicaragua
$90 in Costa Rica

Modernization
In the ever-going era of development and modernization in Latin America those of us who appreciate the old ways understand the importance of dirt roads. For we realize those colorful overland routes of dirt roads are fading fast. The dirt roads traveled today will be paved tomorrow.

Fly Food
Rice is not food to a fly.

tv
Stop watching tv and begin to see and feel again. Participate in life, not merely watch it. When was the last conversation you had where a tv program was not used as a way to start a conversation?

David
Monteverde, Costa Rica

Dispatch Number 37 -Mozzies

2009-09-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

Upon encountering the superior mosquito I had not fully taken into account what I was up against. In Western Honduras in the port town of Trujillo a special breed roams, very special. As a seasoned backpacker who spent a lot of time in the wilderness suffering with pesky insects I thought I knew the ways to deal with them.

To my shock the mosquitoes of Trujillo can fly in wind and make a landing to drain your blood. Remarkably they can do it in a rain storm too and they can penetrate a t-shirt. They fly at dusk, in total darkness and, perhaps the most unsettling, fly and attack in direct sunlight. I thought you could always escape a mozzie (Australian for mosquito) in direct sun light, but not these.

I am forced to seek refuge in the sticky hot dorm room where they still harass. They have defied all I have come to learn about biting insects and I find it a shocking misuse of nature. When the Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortez set out to conquer Mexico almost 500 years ago they complained of mosquitoes so bad that they abandoned a camp because of them and I thought while reading that passage, how bad could it be? Now I have an idea.

David
San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua

Dispatch Number 36 -Alejandro

2009-09-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

Alejandro was an interesting dichotomy of bravado and insecurities. Those insecurities and fears were projected onto Jeff and myself. I wrote it off as nervous energy which Alex had a lot of. He was a bounty of dichotomies telling Jeff and I to be more aware and less touristic looking then himself running in the streets in his pajamas to see what the Honduran government meant by curfew while leaving the hotel room door wide open with no one to tend to our things.

In the morning I gathered my things and announced that I was keeping my belongings in my truck since I did not trust the hotel clientele or Alex based on his behavior the night before. The journalism student from Mexico City silently nodded in reply.

In country for less than a day, he was showing signs that concerned me. Concern I did not want in a country that had a curfew with early indications of Marshall law. The police had the right to enforce the curfew and detain people (opposition) for 24 hours. Detentions are nasty affairs in Latin America and many mysteriously die while being held. The tools of suppression. We had to be cool and stay together, yet Alex who demanded this togetherness would routinely break it by walking the streets alone in the night. It was clear Alex wanted to be part of a riot and one to report. He suffered from the need to prove himself.

Alex at a tender 21 years possessed no ears and was full of self-righteousness. I could identify with him for I had similar traits when I was in my early 20s. Alex was prone to harsh criticism of both Jeff and myself for all sorts of stuff.

Alex left us after a couple days in a rush to get to the capital Tegucigalpa to meet with the international reporter from the newspaper he apprenticed at. It was a very nice opportunity for him to be assigned to shadow this reporter and be at the heart of the protests and unrest. This news came as a relief to Jeff and myself since our experience with Alex was tiresome.

At 21 years I could understand his arrogance, condescension and contradictions. However, after several days of Alex ping ponging every which way with spastic energy it drained me. Alex was high maintenance and took substantial energy to be with. It was a constant struggle when I was not in search of one. It would be hard to imagine Alex not "wearing" on anyone he spent time with.

I am glad I met Alex months earlier when I was in Mexico because he is the reason I chose to enter Honduras at this politically delicate and historical time. It was his bravado that helped me find mine. After nearly a month in Honduras observing the coup, talking with people and gathering their opinions and seeing for myself how effective the national media was at managing propaganda, that I was very pleased with my choice to visit Honduras. We still talk and I believe he has a brilliant, but deeply biased mind. It is possible time will temper him the way I believe it tempered me.

David
Altagracia, Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua

Dispatch Number 35 -The Cost of Rum

2009-09-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

I was finishing up my conversation with the liquor store owner about the high cost of rum in Nicaragua and how it was less expensive in neighboring Honduras. He insisted it was impossible and that his prices were right. The rum in question was Flor de Caña, Nicaragua's national pride and perhaps the best rum in Latin America. As the conversation drew down and I set off without my rum two men walked in who were immediately engaged by the prickly liquor store owner in the cost of rum discussion. Upon hearing this I turned around and walked back into the store to join the conversation and made friends with them.

After the subject of rum was exhausted I moved to my current favored topic, the Honduran coup d'état that happened in late June 2009. Merdardo, one of the guys who walked in, a Nicaraguan, had lived in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa for 25 years and strongly supported the new government. A government, by the way, that no country in the entire world has yet to recognize. Neither do I.

Merardo had a natural expression of fury in his face that came out in his eyes and cheeks even though he was pleasant to be with. I asked him several questions that I have discovered all Hondurans who support the new government had trouble defending let alone answering. Merdardo was no exception and it only hardened my opinion of the illegitimate government. My prickly questions helped his frustration set in and drank the rest of his beer with a fury that matched his face. His friend Pablo watched him with curiosity. People dislike being caught between their self-delusion and hard practicality.

Pablo and Merdardo were expressive and passionate. I noticed that my reaction to this kind of culture makes me feel good for they are not fearful like Americans of sharing their opinions with each other. The average person in Honduras and Nicaragua jumps in with heat and passion on all sorts of subjects that you rarely find in American culture where the people tend to be passive, ill-informed (everybody is a victim of this criticism), and a fearful society where the people have a stronger need to to be liked and feel part of the crowd than to risk it by expressing an opinion.

When I asked for their names at the end of our conversation Merdardo promptly handed me his business card. I stuttered, this had not happened to me in all my travels in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras -the business card. Merdardo was a Herbalife man and his card proved what he sold: nutrition and weight loss. On the card were two mug shots, a before and after of Merdardo himself. In one shot his face was fattened like a sumo wrestler's and the other more representative of him today, that is, 42 pounds lighter. Naturally, this was the result of a Herbalife regimen which he now sells and builds his coveted multi-level marketing team with.

In the morning Pablo and Merdardo were making donuts by hand for their small business Super Donuts, which made a go of it by distributing them to shops and theaters around town. They made them completely by hand without tools of any kind to shape or cut the donuts, then placed them in a large pot of oil that held less than 12 at a time. I ate them right after the cooker still hot, smothered in sugar and cinnamon. I was in donut delight.

It was a colorful evening that had me take to Nicaragua and the people, immediately finding their culture open and expressive as well as inviting to the stranger. My first night in Nicaragua was showing promising signs of the visit ahead.

David
Altagracia, Isla de Oemetepe, Nicaragua

Dispatch Number 34 -Smoke and Drink

2009-09-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

Drinking and smoking are what the owners of this hostel on the ocean do around here. The hangout is the bar and is where they spend most their time and burn an endless chain of cigarettes. The hiss of beers being opened starts just before noon. I concluded that a bar in bug infested tropics that confine you to a large screened room is a bad thing. The insects bar you from outside activity so you spend it indoors with drink, smoke and boring traveler tales.

All I saw them do was drink, we'll make an alcoholic out of you, David came the shot across the bow one evening when I surprised them by ordering one. Drinkers hate it when you don't drink with them. Misery loves company is what these experiences have shown me and I have trouble joining them.

When you do not drink, or do not drink very much it reminds them of their consumption. It unnerves them to see a person content without drink, one who is comfortable without needing to be plastered. You are an outsider and the relationship does not last long. They grow uncomfortable of you.

Like most bars this one too smelled of urine and disappointment not to mention mosquitoes that could fly 24/7 in any weather including direct sunlight. I obviously had something to prove, I stayed there nearly a week.

David
Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua