Puerto Iguazu, Argentina
My eyes open… mmmm, it's still dark. I look at my watch. Cool, it's only 3:45am, I've got another hour to sleep. As I roll over my alarm goes off. Shit, I think, I must have set wrong. I look at the clock: 4:45am. Desperately, I look at my watch: 4:45am. I groan and stand up. I put on my stiff frosty pants, lift the flap of my wagon and stumble out. Yes, that's right, wagon. Most nights I camp with the 22 passengers I have, but the night before I forgot to put my tent up. Luckily, I was able to convince the manager to let me sleep in one of their old-western covered wagons that they try to pass off as cabanas.
I walk over to the cook tent, start the gas oven and put some water on. Most of my people are either English or Aussie (pronounced Ozzy) and they like their tea in the morning. After the water gets going, I walk from tent to tent try to sound as cheerful as possible. "Wake up, wake up." I say, "It might be dark out, but at least its freezing." They stir surprisingly quickly. I appears that my screechy rendition of the star spangled banner the morning before had the intended effect.
My pax groggily eat their cereal and drink their tea, as the Southern Cross dangles above them. Eventually, they finish, start to take down their tents and load them on to Jack. We’re up so early because we have a long way to go. We’re in Bariloche, Argentina and we have two days of driving in front of us to make it down to Glaciers national park deep in heart of Patagonia about 1500 kilometers away. Argentina is the land of fat steaks, beautiful women and where a mullet hairstyle is not only socially acceptable, but encouraged.
Finally, we’re ready to go and everybody loads up on to our big yellow truck. I go through the motions of directing my Kiwi driver, Dave, as he backs Jack out of the campsite. It mainly consists of me giving hand signs like I know what I’m doing and Dave backing out on his own. He makes it out without scratching up the truck too badly, I hop up into the passenger seat next to him and we’re on the road. As we wind our way through the trees and around the lakes, dawns early light starts to illuminate the beautiful landscape around us. Arrogant glacier draped peaks stare vainly down at their reflection in the hundreds of crystal mirrors lakes below. As the sun gets stronger, I put on some music and some sunglasses and start to drift back to sleep.
“Oi! Look at that.” Exclaims Dave, just as the dreams start to take over. “Hmm?” I mumble. “Crikey, that’s a big cow.” He says, pointing at an impossibly green pasture. I look over, see a cow looking back at me and curse. He hates it when I sleep while he’s driving and will point out the most inane objects possible just to wake me up. Son of a bitch.
After an hour or so we come into a small town and pull into a gas station. As Dave gasses up, everybody else staggers out of the truck and uses the bathroom or grabs a coffee. One of the girls come out with her hair-a-tangle, bags under her eyes and starts to paw her pockets for a cigarette. I smile and say “I tell you what Julia, you look like a million pesos.” She smiles and grumbles something unintelligible.
We get under way and soon the countryside becomes drier and the lines of the land start to become smoother and rounder. Though the granite peaks still glare at us from afar, it seems that somebody has pulled the sheet of the land slightly back. After another half an hour, they’ve finished the job, the land is completely flat and I’m pretty sure that I could bounce a dime off of it. I start to go back to sleep, but just as I do, I hear a knock on the small door between the cab and the pax area. One of the girls sticks her head through the opening and says “Mike, can we stop for a pee break?” I nod and she closes the door. “Fuckinhell, we just left the servo an hour ago.” Dave also calls a convenience store a dairy (pronounced deery) and calls every local either Trevor or Doris. It’s amusing. I look out and see nothing that might serve as protection for them, but Dave downshifts and the truck slowly growls to a stop. I hop out, open up the passenger door and carefully latch it as the wind has kicked up and I don’t want the door to slam. Most of the girls and a couple of the guys pile out of the truck. Girls go to the back guys to the front. There’s generally not much traffic in this area, but when a car passes the faces of the driver is pure entertainment. As they drive up upon what seems to be a fairly good sized army transport vehicle, if you were fighting a war in a field of marigolds, their face shifts from bewilderment to shock as they see the white ass of one of our more brazen girls hanging out behind it, and then back to bewilderment as they try to process what they’ve just seen. Yes, pure entertainment.
We take off again down Route 40, the same road on which Che Guevara rode his motorcycle when his heart was still full of hope and innocence. The horizon lies flat underneath clouds that form an unfinished puzzle piece of a sky. However, no matter how far we go, like tomorrow, the horizon never comes… it only changes.
Finally, we stop for lunch behind a gas station. We work like a well oiled machine. Everybody has their job and they do it. Some people unload the truck and put up the table and then others start to make what they confusingly call dinner. Once everything is done we munch on our sandwiches and a couple of us toss a rugby ball around for a bit. Eventually we pack everything up and are on the road again.
Here the land is fairly brown and dry with enough shrubbery to appease the even the most insatiable of the Monty Python villains. Bright pink flamingos stare intently into small ponds while standing on one stilt and contrast nicely with the flat brown land, white peaks and blue sky. Here and there it seems that some hippy has dropped bombs of dandelions which also help stir up the lands palette.
The sky starts to turn the color of flamingo wings and we pull into the next town looking for a place to camp. It surprising the amount of control we have over where we stop. This is not the standardized tourism that I’m used to. I dig it. It usually works out in the end, but sometimes not. Later on, in Tierra del Fuego, I’ll be woken up at 3 am to peel our cook tent out of a tree where the wind had hurled it. We find a spot and set up for the night. We’re tired, but excited that half of our journey to the land of glaciers and granite is almost over.
Okey dokey. That’s enough for now. Again, I’m sorry that I haven’t been writing at my usual fervent pace, but I will try to do better. Right now, I’m in Puerto Iguaçu, Argentina. Manana we’ll be heading into Brazil and soon we’ll be on to Rio. I’ll write again soon, Moe
Thursday, December 8, 2005
Monday, October 10, 2005
Goin' Pro
Seattle, WA
What’s up Everybody?
For years now, I have been an amateur goof-off traveler. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked hard on my reputation as being that annoying guy who sends you tropical emails of rum-soaked sunsets and drowsy hammock-filled afternoons that you receive while sitting at your desk in February wondering if you’ll ever get to see the sun again. And true, I’ve worked for Club Med and various cruise lines that have paid me to facilitate a certain brand of fun, but I’ve never had the chance to really run the show, as it were. After all, everybody has a gift and mine seems to be (as many of you can attest) dragging people off their couches and making them think that they wanted to go out and have fun in the first place, when five minutes ago they were looking forward to curling up with a nice book and an early bed time (or whatever it is you people do). Of course, I do realize that many of you consider this not a talent, but a irritating trait, but it is what is and it’s about damn time that I get paid for it.
You would think that since I finally just graduated from college and will be one year away from 30 in two weeks that I would be thinking about a career… and I was, in my own way. My hair-brained scheme (which I still have but will have to wait) was to go back and work on the steamboat, make some money, start my own parasailing business in Central or South America and live happily ever after. Alas, the boat thing wasn’t working out the way I wanted to, so I was looking online and found this site that was hiring. It asked:
Are you an experienced traveler? I thought to myself: why, yes I am.
Have you worked in tourism and do you speak Spanish? Yes and well enough.
Are you hard-working, adventurous and organized? Hmmm, well hey, two out of three ain’t bad.
The job was to be a South American adventure tour guide for an Austalian company named Tucan Travel. To lead 6 to 171 day tours from country to country and adventure to adventure with groups of 12 to 34 people. They seemed to focus on young, budget-minded, active people, so I thought hey why not fill out an application. Then I pretty much forgot about it and went on to other sites and filled out other applications, the whole time thinking that I would still probably end up working on the steamboat, as I had in the past. But the next morning at the butt-crack of dawn (well, it was probably 9am, I was having a lazy summer up to that point) I got a call from a woman from the Tucan Travel office in England. She said that they were interested in hiring me and set up an interview for me in Seattle the very next day. So, I went, had a good interview and after hemming and hawing for a week or so and having a couple of good friends kick me in the ass and tell me that I would be an idiot not to take this job, I said yes.
Therefore, tomorrow morning at 6am (the real butt-crack of dawn) I take off and fly to Cuzco, Peru and then will travel by bus to La Paz, Bolivia (it’s like 300 dollars cheaper to fly to Cuzco, rather than La Paz) to meet the tour on which I will be training for three weeks. This tour ends up in Santiago, Chile, where I will meet my first tour the next day. My first tour on my own as a tour guide is 49 day trip from Santiago down through Patagonia to Tierra del Fuego, back up to Buenos Aires and through the Pantanal and over to Brazil where it will end up in Rio. Hopefully, I’ll like these people, as seven weeks can be a long time with people you don't like. To go from place to place, I will have a cool bus and a bus driver (who they are assuring me is very experienced and will help me out, since I haven’t actually been to any of these places) and the cool thing about this tour is that it’s for young people ages 18-35. Though I was hired through Tucan travel and will be working for them, they also supply the guides for a company named Budget Expeditions, who I will be running this tour for. They are the ones who have an age limit. This is the first tour that I’m running, but not the only one. I’ll be doing different tours all over South America for at least a year. However, if you want to check out this tour go to www.budgetexpeditions.com and you can see the itinerary of it and other fun tours around the world. The address to Tucan Travel is www.tucantravel.com and they have a plethora of tours for just about anybody.
As many of you know, I was scheduled to start this job in late August. Sadly, that’s when tragedy hit my family. My little brother Wil was hanging out with his friends under an overpass in the U-district of Seattle, when he slipped and fell 50 feet to the pavement below. He’s spent almost two months in the Intensive Care Unit with collapsed lungs, a broken pelvis, a broken back and an arm that had to be amputated. It happened about a week before I was scheduled to leave, so obviously I was in no state to facilitate fun for anybody. Fortunately, Tucan Travel was very understanding and let me put off this job for a month and a half to be with my family. Even so, until about a week ago, I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with going. Because of the delicacy of his lung situation, they had kept him unconscious and I wasn’t able to talk to him until last week. It’s been an up and down battle these past months, but thanks to the love and positive energy all of our friends and family, it seems that he is on a solid healing track. He is breathing on his own, is conscious, can talk and just day before yesterday was moved out of the ICU. Now that I’ve been able to talk to him I feel much better about going knowing that he, as well as the rest of my family, fully support and are excited for me to fulfill my schoolboy dreams of being a professional international goof-off. (Note to my employers: I am fully aware that this job carries heavy responsibility and requires hard work).
If you would like to check on Wil’s progress, feel free to visit the website that my father has so diligently kept up at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/Wil
Much Love, Moe. 10/10/05
What’s up Everybody?
For years now, I have been an amateur goof-off traveler. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked hard on my reputation as being that annoying guy who sends you tropical emails of rum-soaked sunsets and drowsy hammock-filled afternoons that you receive while sitting at your desk in February wondering if you’ll ever get to see the sun again. And true, I’ve worked for Club Med and various cruise lines that have paid me to facilitate a certain brand of fun, but I’ve never had the chance to really run the show, as it were. After all, everybody has a gift and mine seems to be (as many of you can attest) dragging people off their couches and making them think that they wanted to go out and have fun in the first place, when five minutes ago they were looking forward to curling up with a nice book and an early bed time (or whatever it is you people do). Of course, I do realize that many of you consider this not a talent, but a irritating trait, but it is what is and it’s about damn time that I get paid for it.
You would think that since I finally just graduated from college and will be one year away from 30 in two weeks that I would be thinking about a career… and I was, in my own way. My hair-brained scheme (which I still have but will have to wait) was to go back and work on the steamboat, make some money, start my own parasailing business in Central or South America and live happily ever after. Alas, the boat thing wasn’t working out the way I wanted to, so I was looking online and found this site that was hiring. It asked:
Are you an experienced traveler? I thought to myself: why, yes I am.
Have you worked in tourism and do you speak Spanish? Yes and well enough.
Are you hard-working, adventurous and organized? Hmmm, well hey, two out of three ain’t bad.
The job was to be a South American adventure tour guide for an Austalian company named Tucan Travel. To lead 6 to 171 day tours from country to country and adventure to adventure with groups of 12 to 34 people. They seemed to focus on young, budget-minded, active people, so I thought hey why not fill out an application. Then I pretty much forgot about it and went on to other sites and filled out other applications, the whole time thinking that I would still probably end up working on the steamboat, as I had in the past. But the next morning at the butt-crack of dawn (well, it was probably 9am, I was having a lazy summer up to that point) I got a call from a woman from the Tucan Travel office in England. She said that they were interested in hiring me and set up an interview for me in Seattle the very next day. So, I went, had a good interview and after hemming and hawing for a week or so and having a couple of good friends kick me in the ass and tell me that I would be an idiot not to take this job, I said yes.
Therefore, tomorrow morning at 6am (the real butt-crack of dawn) I take off and fly to Cuzco, Peru and then will travel by bus to La Paz, Bolivia (it’s like 300 dollars cheaper to fly to Cuzco, rather than La Paz) to meet the tour on which I will be training for three weeks. This tour ends up in Santiago, Chile, where I will meet my first tour the next day. My first tour on my own as a tour guide is 49 day trip from Santiago down through Patagonia to Tierra del Fuego, back up to Buenos Aires and through the Pantanal and over to Brazil where it will end up in Rio. Hopefully, I’ll like these people, as seven weeks can be a long time with people you don't like. To go from place to place, I will have a cool bus and a bus driver (who they are assuring me is very experienced and will help me out, since I haven’t actually been to any of these places) and the cool thing about this tour is that it’s for young people ages 18-35. Though I was hired through Tucan travel and will be working for them, they also supply the guides for a company named Budget Expeditions, who I will be running this tour for. They are the ones who have an age limit. This is the first tour that I’m running, but not the only one. I’ll be doing different tours all over South America for at least a year. However, if you want to check out this tour go to www.budgetexpeditions.com and you can see the itinerary of it and other fun tours around the world. The address to Tucan Travel is www.tucantravel.com and they have a plethora of tours for just about anybody.
As many of you know, I was scheduled to start this job in late August. Sadly, that’s when tragedy hit my family. My little brother Wil was hanging out with his friends under an overpass in the U-district of Seattle, when he slipped and fell 50 feet to the pavement below. He’s spent almost two months in the Intensive Care Unit with collapsed lungs, a broken pelvis, a broken back and an arm that had to be amputated. It happened about a week before I was scheduled to leave, so obviously I was in no state to facilitate fun for anybody. Fortunately, Tucan Travel was very understanding and let me put off this job for a month and a half to be with my family. Even so, until about a week ago, I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with going. Because of the delicacy of his lung situation, they had kept him unconscious and I wasn’t able to talk to him until last week. It’s been an up and down battle these past months, but thanks to the love and positive energy all of our friends and family, it seems that he is on a solid healing track. He is breathing on his own, is conscious, can talk and just day before yesterday was moved out of the ICU. Now that I’ve been able to talk to him I feel much better about going knowing that he, as well as the rest of my family, fully support and are excited for me to fulfill my schoolboy dreams of being a professional international goof-off. (Note to my employers: I am fully aware that this job carries heavy responsibility and requires hard work).
If you would like to check on Wil’s progress, feel free to visit the website that my father has so diligently kept up at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/Wil
Much Love, Moe. 10/10/05
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
The Happy Hippie Hut
Olympia, WA
What’s up all? Well, yes it’s true. I’ve been home for almost a week now, but I feel that you all deserve closure on my Costa Rica vacation. Hmmm. Does that cross the pretentious line? Nah. So in the last email, I illustrated my time in Puerto Viejo and how I met Laura and Jolen, a nice couple from San Diego. Well they convinced me to head south with them to the Happy hippie commune (my name, not theirs) in Punto Mono or point monkey in English (that one’s real), down near the Panama border. The commune is four miles from the nearest town, so we had to take a boat to get there (or make a long muddy hike through bug and snake infested jungle which I would have been all for if not for my laziness), but it was scenic and we enjoyed the ride over the rolling waves.
The commune itself is beautiful. It’s fairly self-sustaining with subsistence farming, solar power and is tended to with peace, love, harmony and other bullshit. I kid. Actually, the people there were very nice and very welcoming. Only a couple of them had that disconcerting, vacant, everything’s just so fucking beautiful I just can’t handle it and might have to machete crazy, look in their eye.
The fact is I’m totally used to the vegan, soy-based, non-animal tested, organic, communal lifestyle. At Evergreen I’m surrounded by it, after all, and I can definitely appreciate certain aspects of it. Nonetheless, it was certainly entertaining to watch Laura’s reaction when she was informed by a long curly haired Israeli dude, that basil is an herb, not a spice, as we all held hands in a large circle around our recently prepared and blessed dinner and one-by-one told the group our name, where we were from and our favorite spice.
That night, after numerous games of shithead (the card game I mentioned last email) there was a truly kick-ass drum circle (one thing hippies can do better than almost anybody). Everybody had an instrument and/or was dancing. There were guitars, flutes, obviously drums and other knick-knacks to beat, shake or rattle. I had a maraca. Not a pair of maracas. Just one. Which, honestly, fits right in there with my musical abilities.
We stayed for two days, basking the quiet glory of a peaceful place. Finally, however, we had to make the long trek back to San Jose. My new friends headed on to Monteverde, where I started my trip and I came home.
So here I am. A week into the new quarter, sitting in my school’s library writing this email, about to walk through the cold drizzle to my house. I can feel the heartfelt pity your sympathetic souls are sending me right now. Thank you. I appreciate it. Be good. Moe.
What’s up all? Well, yes it’s true. I’ve been home for almost a week now, but I feel that you all deserve closure on my Costa Rica vacation. Hmmm. Does that cross the pretentious line? Nah. So in the last email, I illustrated my time in Puerto Viejo and how I met Laura and Jolen, a nice couple from San Diego. Well they convinced me to head south with them to the Happy hippie commune (my name, not theirs) in Punto Mono or point monkey in English (that one’s real), down near the Panama border. The commune is four miles from the nearest town, so we had to take a boat to get there (or make a long muddy hike through bug and snake infested jungle which I would have been all for if not for my laziness), but it was scenic and we enjoyed the ride over the rolling waves.
The commune itself is beautiful. It’s fairly self-sustaining with subsistence farming, solar power and is tended to with peace, love, harmony and other bullshit. I kid. Actually, the people there were very nice and very welcoming. Only a couple of them had that disconcerting, vacant, everything’s just so fucking beautiful I just can’t handle it and might have to machete crazy, look in their eye.
The fact is I’m totally used to the vegan, soy-based, non-animal tested, organic, communal lifestyle. At Evergreen I’m surrounded by it, after all, and I can definitely appreciate certain aspects of it. Nonetheless, it was certainly entertaining to watch Laura’s reaction when she was informed by a long curly haired Israeli dude, that basil is an herb, not a spice, as we all held hands in a large circle around our recently prepared and blessed dinner and one-by-one told the group our name, where we were from and our favorite spice.
That night, after numerous games of shithead (the card game I mentioned last email) there was a truly kick-ass drum circle (one thing hippies can do better than almost anybody). Everybody had an instrument and/or was dancing. There were guitars, flutes, obviously drums and other knick-knacks to beat, shake or rattle. I had a maraca. Not a pair of maracas. Just one. Which, honestly, fits right in there with my musical abilities.
We stayed for two days, basking the quiet glory of a peaceful place. Finally, however, we had to make the long trek back to San Jose. My new friends headed on to Monteverde, where I started my trip and I came home.
So here I am. A week into the new quarter, sitting in my school’s library writing this email, about to walk through the cold drizzle to my house. I can feel the heartfelt pity your sympathetic souls are sending me right now. Thank you. I appreciate it. Be good. Moe.
Friday, April 1, 2005
A Day in the Life: Puerto Viejo
Olympia, WA
I open my eyes and pull myself to my feet. I'm bleary eyed but not to worse from the wear of last night. I wade through the sea of hammocks trying to get to the front desk to see what time it is. I neglected to bring anything that gives time and had accidentally woken up before 9:00 am the last two days. Hmmmm. The clock says 10 till 10, well ... all right. That's more like it.
Walking down the main drag of Puerto Viejo I'm frustrated with how crowded it is. It's Semana Santa and it appears that most of the country has shut down and come to the beach. I run into a couple from San Diego that I met on the bus a couple of days before. We sit and eat breakfast: Pineapple, banana and mango drowned in yogurt and granola. We sip on watermelon juice and gripe about the fact that the stupid reception clock was wrong and it's actually still only 8:30 in the morning. Oh well, nothing to be done about it now. We hurry back to our hostel to get ready to go to the beach as a procrastinating sloth peers down at us and seems to say "Whoa, now...slow down and take it easy."
We take the sloth’s advice, ease our way down the jungle trail to the beach and prepare for a day of sloth… the sin, not the animal. We laze on the beach, once in awhile getting up to use the boogie board I rented or to play Frisbee with Chancho the German Sheppard who seems to be waiting for us (or perhaps the Frisbee) at the beach everyday.
After a hard day at the beach we retire back to our hostel for a little nappy-poo. This truly is one of the nicest hostels I’ve ever been in. Tile work and mosaics decorate practically every square inch of walk way and walls and when there’s no tile work, there some other work of art. The place is jam-packed for Semana Santa with the afore-mentioned hammocks and tents that cover every available blade of grass. Beautiful girls wearing little more than a skimpy sarong and a bikini, lazily drape themselves over any available piece of furniture.
It’s not easy, but I do manage to get a few winks in amongst the reggae music and the general revelry. There’s a Norwegian a couple of hammocks down who I haven’t seen out of his hammock all week and I get the general impression that if I were to return to Puerto Viejo in a couple years, he’d still be there with his little iPod and speakers and joint hanging out of his mouth. Well… I don’t want to end up like that guy, so yet again I pull myself up to my feet.
I find my new friends and we play a few rounds of an entertaining card game with the unfortunate name of “shithead”. As we play we sip a fruity beverage that the owner of the hostel has whipped up. Its sweet taste belies its strength, but we take no heed.
Later we leave the hostel and walk into town. This place reeks of reggae. It looks like it, feels like it and definitely smells like it. Heavy-lidded Rastafari saunter up and down the streets, a joint dangling precariously from their lips as their heads bob up and down to the Marley beats.
We grab something to eat, perhaps a casado (the national dish that consists of meat, rice and beans and a some veggies) or maybe a pizza and down some Imperial beers. Afterward, we head down to Bambu, the reggae disco, but it’s too crowded. The place is overflowing with the melange of high dread-locked locals and drunken sunburnt tourists.
So we head back to the hostel. There’s a huge bonfire on the beach, around which people are belting out truly horrendous versions of bad songs. Perfect. We sit down and join in the off-key crooning of such classics as Hotel California and La Bamba. Finally, however, my eyelids tell me that they’ve had enough for one day and I pick my way through the slumbering masses to my hammock and fall asleep content and ready to do it again the next day.
A quick note, before I get any more hate mail. This is a retroactive email. I’m actually home now in cold and rainy Oly. So please, no more death threats. Peace (and I mean that), Moe.
I open my eyes and pull myself to my feet. I'm bleary eyed but not to worse from the wear of last night. I wade through the sea of hammocks trying to get to the front desk to see what time it is. I neglected to bring anything that gives time and had accidentally woken up before 9:00 am the last two days. Hmmmm. The clock says 10 till 10, well ... all right. That's more like it.
Walking down the main drag of Puerto Viejo I'm frustrated with how crowded it is. It's Semana Santa and it appears that most of the country has shut down and come to the beach. I run into a couple from San Diego that I met on the bus a couple of days before. We sit and eat breakfast: Pineapple, banana and mango drowned in yogurt and granola. We sip on watermelon juice and gripe about the fact that the stupid reception clock was wrong and it's actually still only 8:30 in the morning. Oh well, nothing to be done about it now. We hurry back to our hostel to get ready to go to the beach as a procrastinating sloth peers down at us and seems to say "Whoa, now...slow down and take it easy."
We take the sloth’s advice, ease our way down the jungle trail to the beach and prepare for a day of sloth… the sin, not the animal. We laze on the beach, once in awhile getting up to use the boogie board I rented or to play Frisbee with Chancho the German Sheppard who seems to be waiting for us (or perhaps the Frisbee) at the beach everyday.
After a hard day at the beach we retire back to our hostel for a little nappy-poo. This truly is one of the nicest hostels I’ve ever been in. Tile work and mosaics decorate practically every square inch of walk way and walls and when there’s no tile work, there some other work of art. The place is jam-packed for Semana Santa with the afore-mentioned hammocks and tents that cover every available blade of grass. Beautiful girls wearing little more than a skimpy sarong and a bikini, lazily drape themselves over any available piece of furniture.
It’s not easy, but I do manage to get a few winks in amongst the reggae music and the general revelry. There’s a Norwegian a couple of hammocks down who I haven’t seen out of his hammock all week and I get the general impression that if I were to return to Puerto Viejo in a couple years, he’d still be there with his little iPod and speakers and joint hanging out of his mouth. Well… I don’t want to end up like that guy, so yet again I pull myself up to my feet.
I find my new friends and we play a few rounds of an entertaining card game with the unfortunate name of “shithead”. As we play we sip a fruity beverage that the owner of the hostel has whipped up. Its sweet taste belies its strength, but we take no heed.
Later we leave the hostel and walk into town. This place reeks of reggae. It looks like it, feels like it and definitely smells like it. Heavy-lidded Rastafari saunter up and down the streets, a joint dangling precariously from their lips as their heads bob up and down to the Marley beats.
We grab something to eat, perhaps a casado (the national dish that consists of meat, rice and beans and a some veggies) or maybe a pizza and down some Imperial beers. Afterward, we head down to Bambu, the reggae disco, but it’s too crowded. The place is overflowing with the melange of high dread-locked locals and drunken sunburnt tourists.
So we head back to the hostel. There’s a huge bonfire on the beach, around which people are belting out truly horrendous versions of bad songs. Perfect. We sit down and join in the off-key crooning of such classics as Hotel California and La Bamba. Finally, however, my eyelids tell me that they’ve had enough for one day and I pick my way through the slumbering masses to my hammock and fall asleep content and ready to do it again the next day.
A quick note, before I get any more hate mail. This is a retroactive email. I’m actually home now in cold and rainy Oly. So please, no more death threats. Peace (and I mean that), Moe.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Mint Jelly
Mal Pais, Costa Rica
Happy Monday everybody! I trust this message finds everyone well. So, once again, I have been delinquent in my travel emails. I know that y'all have been on the edge of your seat for the last week, but without further ado let me fill you in on my adventures so far. I arrived in San Jose last Tuesday and left the next morning as soon as possible. Like most Central American capitals, San Jose is crowded, dirty and is without much to do. I had been stuck there on the once before on my last trip to Central America with my friend Kevin for three days looking for a yellow fever shot and did not wish to repeat the experience.
I first made my way to the cloud forest of Monteverde, where I had been before but had neglected to do the canopy ziplines, because it would've blown my daily budget and have regretted it ever since. The canopy ziplines, as the name suggests, are 11 separate ziplines that span the drastic canyons and gullies of Monteverde. You are fitted with a dubious harness and a comical helmet and then attached to a metal handlebar that has a wheel in it. They then fit the wheel over the zipline, give you a little push and you're sent zipping out into space. Some take you through conveniently placed holes in the canopy, others over the forest entirely. If you're interested in looking at fauna or spotting the rare blue spangled quetzal, this is not the experience for you.
From Monteverde I made an extremely hot, bumpy and generally uncomfortable trip to Montezuma, which is a beach town on the pacific coast. Montezuma was chalk-full of spring-breakers (of which I now am one, but am having a hard time admitting. I'm a traveller, damn it!) and generally unremarkable, though I did meet some cool people.
Yesterday I moved up the coast a bit to my present location of Mal Pais. Despite it's name, which means literally "bad country", Mal Pais is my sort of town. Here, it is all about the surfing. Long blonde-haired, bronzed-skinned surfers of every sex and nationality strut up and down the long main drag (if you can call it that, its really a dirt road) which is lined with beautiful flowers, mango trees and thatch roofed surf shops. Howlers monkeys bicker overhead (which sounds like a 800 pound gorilla mating with a haemorrhoidal jaguar) as purple-bodied, red legged crabs scuttle underneath your feet and in fact the street is littered with the remains of crabs who perhaps scuttled when they should have skiddaddled.
Today I decided to take up the local hobby and it turns out the last nine months of working, going to school and doing other decidedly non-surf like activities have not made me any better at surfing. I still suck. I did manage to get a hellacious burn, though. It seems that my skin as accustomed to the sun as I thought it was. I'm on fire. All I want to do right now is crawl naked into a vat of mint jelly. And that's the mental image that I'll leave you with. Me...Naked...Mint jelly. I'll let you're imaginations do the rest. Moe.
Happy Monday everybody! I trust this message finds everyone well. So, once again, I have been delinquent in my travel emails. I know that y'all have been on the edge of your seat for the last week, but without further ado let me fill you in on my adventures so far. I arrived in San Jose last Tuesday and left the next morning as soon as possible. Like most Central American capitals, San Jose is crowded, dirty and is without much to do. I had been stuck there on the once before on my last trip to Central America with my friend Kevin for three days looking for a yellow fever shot and did not wish to repeat the experience.
I first made my way to the cloud forest of Monteverde, where I had been before but had neglected to do the canopy ziplines, because it would've blown my daily budget and have regretted it ever since. The canopy ziplines, as the name suggests, are 11 separate ziplines that span the drastic canyons and gullies of Monteverde. You are fitted with a dubious harness and a comical helmet and then attached to a metal handlebar that has a wheel in it. They then fit the wheel over the zipline, give you a little push and you're sent zipping out into space. Some take you through conveniently placed holes in the canopy, others over the forest entirely. If you're interested in looking at fauna or spotting the rare blue spangled quetzal, this is not the experience for you.
From Monteverde I made an extremely hot, bumpy and generally uncomfortable trip to Montezuma, which is a beach town on the pacific coast. Montezuma was chalk-full of spring-breakers (of which I now am one, but am having a hard time admitting. I'm a traveller, damn it!) and generally unremarkable, though I did meet some cool people.
Yesterday I moved up the coast a bit to my present location of Mal Pais. Despite it's name, which means literally "bad country", Mal Pais is my sort of town. Here, it is all about the surfing. Long blonde-haired, bronzed-skinned surfers of every sex and nationality strut up and down the long main drag (if you can call it that, its really a dirt road) which is lined with beautiful flowers, mango trees and thatch roofed surf shops. Howlers monkeys bicker overhead (which sounds like a 800 pound gorilla mating with a haemorrhoidal jaguar) as purple-bodied, red legged crabs scuttle underneath your feet and in fact the street is littered with the remains of crabs who perhaps scuttled when they should have skiddaddled.
Today I decided to take up the local hobby and it turns out the last nine months of working, going to school and doing other decidedly non-surf like activities have not made me any better at surfing. I still suck. I did manage to get a hellacious burn, though. It seems that my skin as accustomed to the sun as I thought it was. I'm on fire. All I want to do right now is crawl naked into a vat of mint jelly. And that's the mental image that I'll leave you with. Me...Naked...Mint jelly. I'll let you're imaginations do the rest. Moe.
Monday, March 14, 2005
The Costa with the Mosta
Seattle, WA
I think I have a problem. Maybe its time for an intervention or perhaps I should join a support group or something. Hi...my name's Mike...and I like to go places.
But this time it's not my fault. I swear. Seriously. All I planned to do this Spring Break was relax in Oly, maybe pop up to Seattle a couple of times, but really just chill, drink a few beers and do other what-nots. But, when a few weeks ago my mom asked me if I wanted to go to Nicaragua to help her look for property, I obviously said yes, because that's the kind of guy I am. I'm a team player... a family man at heart.
She ended up buying tickets to San Jose, Costa Rica rather than Managua, Nicaragua because it was cheaper and since the property that she wanted to look at was in the very south of Nicaragua, it was just as close. So, I didn't even think about this trip at all. I've been busy with school, you know finals and all of that. I've been letting my mom plan and plan to her little heart's content. Until I got a phone call a couple of days ago when she told me that she decided not to go. Huh? It turns out that we were scheduled to go during Semana de Santa (Easter week) and the beaches were going to be packed with partying locals. Then she asked me if I still wanted to go by myself. Partying locals, I thought to myself, hmmm...yep, I think that I can struggle through it.
So, manana morning, I'm off to Costa Rica. I've decided to stay there, since I've seen more of Nicaragua than I have of Costa Rica. I'll be back on the 30th, so you can expect a few emails over the course of the next couple of weeks. I hope the rest of you enjoy your time off or if you have to work, I feel for ya'. Peace, moe
I think I have a problem. Maybe its time for an intervention or perhaps I should join a support group or something. Hi...my name's Mike...and I like to go places.
But this time it's not my fault. I swear. Seriously. All I planned to do this Spring Break was relax in Oly, maybe pop up to Seattle a couple of times, but really just chill, drink a few beers and do other what-nots. But, when a few weeks ago my mom asked me if I wanted to go to Nicaragua to help her look for property, I obviously said yes, because that's the kind of guy I am. I'm a team player... a family man at heart.
She ended up buying tickets to San Jose, Costa Rica rather than Managua, Nicaragua because it was cheaper and since the property that she wanted to look at was in the very south of Nicaragua, it was just as close. So, I didn't even think about this trip at all. I've been busy with school, you know finals and all of that. I've been letting my mom plan and plan to her little heart's content. Until I got a phone call a couple of days ago when she told me that she decided not to go. Huh? It turns out that we were scheduled to go during Semana de Santa (Easter week) and the beaches were going to be packed with partying locals. Then she asked me if I still wanted to go by myself. Partying locals, I thought to myself, hmmm...yep, I think that I can struggle through it.
So, manana morning, I'm off to Costa Rica. I've decided to stay there, since I've seen more of Nicaragua than I have of Costa Rica. I'll be back on the 30th, so you can expect a few emails over the course of the next couple of weeks. I hope the rest of you enjoy your time off or if you have to work, I feel for ya'. Peace, moe
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