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
Monday, May 31, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
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
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
Monday, May 10, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
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
-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
-Trapped in a desperate performance of people not from there
Penis
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
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.
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.
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
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