Dispatch Number 77 -Notes From a Notebook III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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