Pan American Road Trip

New Blog

2007-08-22T23:55:00.001-07:00

OK, folks, this is it. We sold the van. We are renting property in North America. I think it's time to move on to a new blog.

If you want to keep up with our adventures in LotusLand (Vancouver), please follow these links for Kim and Douglas, respectively.

http://kwool.blogspot.com/

and

http://theworldlikeadog.blogspot.com/

I hope to see you there! I like keeping in touch this way. Please leave comments if you're still reading, so I know you're out there.

sweet home Carolina

2007-06-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

We're back in NC, after a few more delicious days in Buenos Aires. After we left Brazil, we planned to spend our last few days in Uruguay before heading back to BsAs to fly out. We took exceedingly comfy night buses to Colonia, which was founded by the Portuguese to smuggle goods into Spanish-colonized Buenos Aires. It still has its cobbled streets and loads of lovely old colonial buildings, and we had a good time wandering around. The siren song of Buenos Aires' coffee and delicious food called us back early, though. We could smell the goodness as soon as we stepped off the ferry. Luckily, we arrived back on the right day for the famous antique market in Plaza Dorrego, in the San Telmo neighbourhood, just a few steps away from our favorite hostel, Residencial Carly (highly recommended).

The square was packed with antique vendors selling everything from 150-year old lace, pocketwatches, glass seltzer bottles (we got a green one), working Victrolas, amazing huge old padlocks that you would expect to see on the back of a 1800's paddywagon, piles and piles of family silver, art nouveau tiles, and everything in between. There was also lots of art - our favorite was the figures made out of silver forks - you could get guitar players (playing a spoon), court stenographers, marathon runners, bike riders, you name it. The square was packed with vendors and people, and the stalls spilled out onto the pedestrian streets north of the square. The crowds extended for 20 blocks - there were people filling the street for as far as we could see. It was like a Grateful Dead concert meets the Antique Roadshow - there were marionettes, art, street performers, kaleidoscopes, 10-piece orchestras (including a piano!!), hippy jewelery, and handmade shoes. We wandered up and down the streets for hours, had delicious ravioli and pizza in a streetside cafe, and ended the night watching tango shows in the square. First there were the professionals, all in black and tophats. When dusk fell, they were done, but they left the dancefloor and music equipment set up, and the square filled with local tango enthusiasts. Their outfits were great - from stripey track pants, to swishy tango dresses. One tall woman with short platinum blonde hair was wearing glittery green shoes with brown legwarmers. Picture the Breakfast Club all grown up and dancing tango. It was fantastic.

The trip back was long but totally uneventful. We were a little worried that the US immigration folks wouldn't let me back in the country as a visitor, but the official only asked us one question and waved us on through. We didn't even have trouble bringing back our yummy Argentine salami. The customs guy asked us whether or not we had any meat, and we said we did. He asked us whether we'd bought it at a deli, or killed and skinned it ourselves. We said 'er, deli' and he waved us on through.

Now we just have to reorganize our stuff (it was all packed and organized for Ireland...), visit all of our friends and family, get the car, and head to Vancouver!

Two for One

2007-06-07T16:54:00.000-07:00

For the lazy readers out there, this entry will be a winner, two countries for the cost (in eye wear) in one blog.

We finally managed to find an agency to ship the car back to the USA, a company called Transpack in BsAs. It would seem we are the first people in history to do such a thing and it took two full days, mostly waiting and having transpack do yet another inventory of the car. This was very frustrating and Kim spent most of the time calming me down. But enough of inificiency, the cars having fun on the high seas and with luck will arrive in Norfolk, Virginia in a month.

We left Buenos Aires on a boat for a town called Colonia in Uruguay and then hopped on a bus for Montevideo. In BsAs we had tried to get Kim's visa for Brasil but were told it would take the rest of the week at a minimum, so we figured it couldn't take any longer in Montevideo. And, as we had already seen so much in BsAs, figured Montevideo would be a better place to spend the days waiting. I won't get started on the idiotic political visa thing, but be assured that its very stupid.

Montevideo is a pretty grey town, and after being spoiled by the amazing Argentine coffee and pastry botiques we almost starved to death. It did however offer lots of walking around and even a dead guy in a box gaurded by 2 very serious soldiers. Artigas was the 'founder' of Uruguay and not only was his wee box of ashes in a tomb in the middle of town, there's a statue of him at about every corner.

We found a great little hotel to stay in, most notable for its wonderful marble staircase and bed sheets with more holes than cotton. The proprietor was completely zany and proper mad, amusing us at every turn.

There's also lots of antique shopping in Montevideo. We did a fair bit of browsing but having sent the van on its merry way didn't have any way of carting back all the beautiful stuff. We've managed to pack super light for this short leg up to Brasil and are trying to keep it that way.

From Montevideo we caught a bus to Porto Alegre in Brasil. A really different bus trip, we left our passports with the driver and woke up, unmolested, in a different country. Wow. And talk about comfy, the seat reclined to almost horizontal and there was dinner and drinks and breakfast served. Wow. As my Dad was off vacationing himself, we found our way to his new house in Santa Cruz do Sul. Gabriel met us and showed us around town and took us to Kim's first Churrascaria, a distinctly Brasilian way of cooking. She hasn't stopped talking about it since. The meat just keeps on coming.

Once my dad got back we immediately started making plans for a trip around the south. We decided to head to Cambara do Sul. This is where the highland fall, quite precipitously down into the Atlantic. Cambara is a sleepy cowboy town on the virge of a tourist explosion for its rustic charm. We stayed with a family sitting around the wood stove eating pinhão and drinking Chimarrão (mate). You should certainly follow the previous links to learn more about this. The pinhão is a seed from the huge pine trees and are either boiled or roasted on a fire. Both are delicious. Erva mate is a green tea that one make in a gord and drink through a metal straw. Most every Brasilian, Argentinian, and Urugayan has one of these gords in their hand and a thermos of hot water in the other.

We saw Fortaleza, a beautiful canyon where the river has cut into the flat prairie all the way down to the Atlantic and then on to Itaimbezinho water falls. This is where David almost died as he was washed over the edge before I gallantly saved his life. Well, OK, I was nearby. Its too hard to describe what a beautiful place this was so you're going to have to wait till we can upload the photos.

From there we decended to the coastal town of Capao de Canoa for the night. A wonderful Brazilian beach town with multicolored tile covered condos and fisherman with bamboo poles and fish dangling from their bicyles handlebars.

Finishing out our tour we passed through Porto Alegre for lunch, another churrascaria. We all got just the buffet bar, a common precursor to the onslaught of butchered animals. This works great for me as a vegetarian. Poor Nevia called over a waiter with a huge skewer of meat and said to him "look, I'm stuck with all these vegetarians, won't you do me a favor and slice off a chunk of meat for me". Poor woman, she almost went one whole meal without meat.

It's hard to believe that tomorrow we will begin heading back to BsAs and from there fly north to North Carolina on Monday. We are amazed that what took us 5 months to drive will be over in 12 short hours. We are sad too. We are happy too. We are excited to get home and see Saira and everyone else. We are more in love now than before we started. This was predicted by many, well, in the context of "you'll either be more in love, or divorced" at least.

Buenos Aires!

2007-05-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

Here we are, in Buenos Aires, the destination of the trip. We made it! We arrived the day before Douglas´ birthday (he´s now officially old and decrepit) and have been enjoying this wonderful city ever since. We had a bit of a hard time finding parking at first, and driving here is scary (8 to 10 lanes of tiny zooming cars, lots of complicated traffic patterns), but once we parked the car, on Carlos´ recommendation, we were very relaxed.

We have also booked a spot on a northbound boat for LaTortuga. I think she´s looking forward to the hard-earned rest! A vacation at sea for the van. We found a company on the web called Transpack. They are based in BsAs and ship cars and the contents of homes wherever you want to go. We met with them, they gave us a quote for putting us on a boat next week, and that was that. They were very professional and the process looks like it will be simple. They do the customs paperwork in Argentina, and we will pick up the car in Norfolk, VA in 3 weeks!

We can´t quite believe that´s the end of our Latin American travels with the van. We still have two weeks, in which we´ll pass through Uruguay and head northeast to Douglas´ dad´s place in southern Brazil for a few days of visiting. Then we have to come back to BsAs to fly home on June 11 - plane tickets from here to Miami were less than half the price of tickets from anywhere in Brazil!

Right now we are at the home of an Argentinian VW enthusiast, Carlos, who contacted us by e-mail and offered us to stay at his home. Tomorrow he´s having a get-together of the BsAs VW club!! We´re very excited to meet everyone, including Cris and Barbara, who wrote Guapo´s blog and helped to inspire our trip.

We´ll be posting more entries on our travels in Argentina just as soon as we get a chance.

Argentina!

2007-05-22T18:31:00.000-07:00

We are in heaven. Cancel your next faraway vacation plans and come to Argentina. It could not be better than this.
As soon as we crossed the border from Bolivia, things were different. The roads were paved. The officials were friendly, and didn’t ask you to stop your car and come into their dark little office by the side of the road. Amazingly, a customs officer looked inside our car when we were crossing the border (not necessarily a good thing…but the first time on the entire trip, and we’ve crossed 10 international borders) but he was very friendly also. He opened two cupboards full of food, some of which was contraband, shut them, and asked us if we had anything we shouldn’t. We both answered a rather weak ‘uh, no…’, he asked us how fast the van goes (we were worried this was a trick question and lowballed it), and sent us on our (paved!!!) way.

We drove for a few hours through some spectacular desert scenery, and arrived in Tres Cruces, a small town on the side of Ruta 9 south. The gendarme at the customs waypoint asked us where we were going, and we replied “uh, we’re not sure, maybe here?” He told us we could certainly sleep in the middle of the town, no problem, so we parked next to the church and then went looking for food in the little kioskos surrounding the central square.

This was our first clue that we were not in Bolivia anymore. The stores actually had something other than rotten fruit! We were overjoyed. We found tomatoes and garlic, some KitKatlike chocolate bars called Rhodesia (what Zimbabwe was called before independence, and we couldn’t resist – they were pretty good), and even some delicious sausage. Cecile and Alexandra would have been impressed – small salamis, juicy inside, covered in a very fine coating of white mold. Absolutely delicious, and we’re hooked. Douglas may have even tried a bite or two when I wasn’t looking. We’re debating how many we can store in the black ammunition box bolted to the bottom of the van. Should we write “400 Argentinian salamis” on the customs declaration? Maybe not….

The next morning we drove through the Quebrada de Humahuaca, a collection of absolutely gorgeous red and green (the ROCKS are green, not the vegetation) hills. We especially enjoyed the road signs and the fact that there were LINES on the road, something we haven’t seen since leaving North America. The windy track dropped us down several thousand feet in altitude, and we arrived in the charming town of Salta.

How to describe Salta…they really love their cake. We saw 8 shoes stores in a single block (Nathalie, these are your people). I even found some cute little shoes that fit my strange feet, brown with flowers embroidered on the sides. The central park is surrounded by cafés with outdoor seating, and lined with orange trees. People strolling in the park pick the oranges, for eating. There’s a very social vibe, and we enjoyed sitting in a café with WiFi, eating things with dulce de leche (caramel) on them and watching the people go by. Saltenos are into their beer, too – we often saw pairs of middle-aged women eating sausage and drinking beer at 11am. What a life. While eating French fries on the pedestrian mall, we decided we could live here, and that we were going to come back and work here for a spell. It is just too fabulous.

Unfortunately, we were having another car problem – the clutch slave cylinder was leaking, and the leak was getting worse. It all started in Quinta Lala, and we’d just been adding extra fluid until now, but in Salta the leak got worse, and we decided we needed to do something about it. So, the goose hunt was on. That’s what we call it when we go out to look for something we need but are pretty sure we won’t be able to find, like a clutch slave cylinder for a 1982 Vanagon. Inevitably, each store tells us they don’t have it, but the store 3 blocks away will have it for sure. This patterns proceeds for several iterations until we end up back at the first store.

We got a cabbie to take us to a VW repuestos place, and sure enough, he told us we’d have to go to Chile to find the part. But, of course, he gave us a closer option, too – the store down the road would certainly be able to rebuild the part for us. We set off in search of shop number two. The hunt was on. 3 stores later, Douglas boldly called an end to the hunt, removed the part on the side of the road, and took it inside. And lo and behold, they had just the right gasket to repair the leak!! He put the part back in, we bled the clutch, and were back in business.

We set off down the road (devoid of mummified dogs, washboard, and van-permeating dust) in search of the next place to stay. After a few more hours of brake-squealing scenery (lots of picture-taking) and some nice pottery craft homes on the side of the road, we arrived in Cafayate, a small wine-producing town in a landscape that looks surprisingly like California wine country. I guess wine country is wine country. We circled the central plaza along with lots of old Ford Falcons, Renault 3CVs, some unidentifiable but really old (and possibly homemade) small cars, and hordes of classy bicycles. We think there are perhaps more French cars here than in France. They’re well-maintained, though, and for probably the first time on this long trip, I don’t taste diesel in the back of my mouth from all the truck and bus exhaust.

At the south end of town, we found a campground (!!it’s hard to say how nice it is to be camped at an actual campground, instead of on the side of the road, or a chicken-filled parqueo, or a noisy central square) and then biked into town, to find a café that served wine on the sidewalk. We found one, and settled into several small bottles of delicious local wine, along with a spread of bread, cheese, olives, salami, ham, and chips. We watched the bicycles and old cars go by, and savored the social evening life – folks heading home with an armful of bread, or meeting friends in the square.

The next morning was lazy. We slept late, ate breakfast at our picnic table, and then biked into town to check e-mail, go to the bank, and look for more wine. We took tours at two bodegas, and one cheese making place, and came home laden with cheap, delicious wine and cheese, then settled into a nice dinner at our campspot.

There is something magical about the light here – or maybe it’s the friendly people, or the very relaxed ambiance. Maybe it’s the lack of body armor and razor wire…I’m not sure, but we feel very peaceful and at home. I’m feeling so relaxed at being in a place that has the trappings of civilization that I’m practically floating above the landscape. It’s still different and interesting – you can still buy coca at the corner store – but things work, there is the infrastructure people need to go about their daily lives, the food is good, and the wine is better. I don’t feel like people are scrabbling every day just to keep it together. Every country we’ve been to has been a great adventure, and glorious in its own way, but getting to a place with familiar infrastructure feels like a reward for completing an obstacle course - it’s very relaxing.

Tupiza

2007-05-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

After a few more hundred km of washboard, we arrived in Tupiza, a southern miracle of a town nestled in a red rock river valley where Billy the Kid met his demise after robbing a bankroll train. We stayed parked in the yard of a cute little hotel in the middle of town (after I did some pretty fast talking – they didn’t want to let us stay), and had a nice time wandering around eating Saltenas (dough pockets filled with various yummy stuff, like chicken or olives or eggs), circling the central square, and generally soaking up the nice small-town ambiance. I’m really going to miss the Latin American central squares. They’re always full of people in the evening, taking a stroll after dinner, making out on park benches, eating ice cream, watching people go by. We would have liked to spend more time here, but were anxious to cross the border to Argentina and make our plans for the remainder of our trip. I did take time to visit Hotel Mitru’s fabulous book exchange, though - one of the best we’ve seen.

Dust

2007-05-22T18:18:00.000-07:00

Once we left the salar, we grew back to our normal size, and lost our powers of super-high jumping. It was fun while it lasted.

We set off south, and passed through the town of Uyuni, that subsists solely on tourism. We have seldom seen a bleaker place. Everything was made of mud, brown and dusty. We bought what few things were available in the market, had the car washed to get the salt off, and then turned our tires southward, for Tupiza, and the border with Argentina.

We had heard that parts of the “road” from Uyuni to Tupiza were tricky, and we were a bit worried about the van making it. We had read about the infamous km 33 in Guapo’s blog, but forgot that it was just south of Uyuni, or we wouldn’t have attempted it so late in the day. In the distance, we saw dunes, and 4 big trucks, all stuck. As we got closer, we saw that the dunes lapped over the road, and the guys driving the trucks were trying to dig them out. We stopped and watched 2 trucks, a big orange Volvo and a beige petrol tanker, dig their wheels out and then power through the sand, driving as fast as they could, fishtailing the whole way. The sandy patch was about a foot deep, and probably 30 meters long.
There were 2 more trucks stuck at the other side, and we were still waiting and watching and trying to decide what to do. One of the newly-liberated truck drivers urged us to “go, go, go, now, now, now, while it’s light and there are people” who would have to help us, he said.
So, we did. Douglas gunned the engine and Tortuga powered through the foot-deep sand for about 5m. Then our low-hanging engine caught on the high-piled sand in the middle and acted like a brake. We were stuck, but good.
While we were thinking about how to extricate ourselves, we had to wonder why doesn’t someone do something about the road??? EVERYone got stuck, from big trucks to families in 4x4s. Everyone would get out to push, including grandmas in traditional dress (she did take her hat off), leaving the 12-year old to drive. He did great through the sand, even though he couldn’t really see over the steering wheel, but once he got to the road he stalled it, and someone bigger had to take over. Even the big commercial trucks were stuck, or at least waiting behind someone else who was stuck. This was everybody’s problem, clearly.
We know from Guapo’s blog that it’s been like this for at least 5 years – probably forever. Why don’t they build a wall to keep the dunes off the road? Or move the road? Or save up and buy a town grader and clear it now and then? But no. And that’s just one of many instances where we’ve seen the people here living with a stupid situation that could be fixed with a little ingenuity. Part of the third world, I guess, part of the adventure we came looking for.
In the end, the oncoming truck drivers didn’t offer to help us – they asked us to back up and get out of their way so they could get through. They did help us back up, and then they powered through and drove off into the sunset, leaving us on the side of the road. One small blue 4x4 opted to head off the road into the desert, going around the dunes, and he got through fine.
So now what are we to do?? We’re stuck on the side of the “road”, the sun is about to set, and we have 30m of dunes in front of us. We were planning to wild camp on the side of the road anyhow, so we considered staying where we were. But we didn’t like the thought of being right on the side of the road, or of waking up with the dune crossing staring us in the face. We thought about going around through the desert like the 4x4, but we weren’t sure we wouldn’t get stuck out there far from the road – worse than being stuck in the middle of the road, because no one has a reason to help you because you’re not in their way. Douglas wanted to go for it, and spend the evening digging our way out. We had 2 10’ long planks, and could have laid them out for traction. I, of course, was thinking about dinner, and didn’t want to spend an unknown number of hours digging in the sand in the dark. Not a fun day at the beach. We eventually agreed to go back up the road and look for a campspot, and tackle the sand in the morning, when there might be people to help.
As we were going back up the road, we saw the small 4x4’s tracks, emerging from the desert. We thought – what the hell, if we get stuck, we’ll camp there. We scouted it out on foot, and it seemed firm enough. We cautiously nosed the van down the 45 degree sand bank at the road’s edge, and into the desert. And the sand held us up!!!! We stomped and whistled and did little victory dances in our seats, then drove another few km and pulled off the road on someone else’s tracks to camp…
It got COLD that night, and we woke up to ice crystals on the insides of the windows, and a 2inch long icicle hanging from the tap. No water. Douglas started the car to heat it up a little, and it died after a few minutes. (Just a note – I would NOT want to attempt this trip without a mechanic!!!) After a couple of minutes he figured out that the fuel filter was probably clogged, took it out, and saw actual CHUNKS of gunk inside it. Luckily, he had presciently bought one just 2 days ago, so he popped it in and we were off.
We had 200km to go to get to Tupiza, and we were guessing it would take us 2 days. *2 days* to go 200km. That’s 120 miles. We weren’t choosing the crappiest road just for the fun of it – we were taking the “main” road from Uyuni to the Argentine border. The main track inevitably gets washed out, or too washboardy, so there are many alternate tracks. Several times we were driving along on one of the tracks, and then saw that we were being passed by another vehicle on a different track, just a few meters to one side, on a different and totally unreachable track. The thorns and soft sand in between usually prevented us from switching tracks.
On the way, we got lost – we had been following a riverbed south from the town of Atocha, and when the track split, part of it continuing with the riverbed, and part of it crossing over into the mountains on the other side, we kept following the riverbed. The “road” deteriorated, and I discovered that I kind of like off-road driving (driving on the road in Bolivia is pretty much like driving off-road anywhere else) and am kind of good at it. We also saw a lake full of pink flamingoes, which made the unscheduled detour worth it. Eventually we arrived in a small mining town named Atasi, and were told we had missed the ‘detour’ many miles back and should turn around. The old road, marked on our map, has been phased out and they’ve made a new one. This is easier than it sounds, to be sure, involving little more than driving a 4x4 back and forth a few times and naming the resulting signless track the “road”.
So, turn around we did, retracing our steps with comments like, “o, there’s the mummified dog we saw earlier” and “it looks like the flamingoes have left their lake” and “aha, the llama herd, we must be on the right track.”
I keep calling Bolivia a wasteland, but Douglas clucks his tongue at me and says we’ve only seen a tiny corner of it. He’s a perpetual optimist. And he’s right. But this tiny corner is a wasteland. Every breath tastes of dust. Every possible nook and cranny of the van is covered in a thick coating of fine brown dust. I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of it all. The roads are washboardy dirt tracks through the empty desert, if you’re lucky – otherwise you just follow everyone else’s tracks through the riverbed. Towns of 200,000 don’t have supermarkets, their tourist offices are closed and full of broken furniture, and you can’t buy bottled water in jugs larger than 2L. Every time you ask for something, the answer is “no hay” (there’s none), usually accompanied by a scandalized look, as if to say “why would you think that was available??”
The one thing Bolivia has in abundance is silence. Every night we have found a little spot off the road to park the van, angling it so its new shiny reflective tape (Peruvian law) won’t catch passing headlights and attract unwanted and possibly unfriendly attention. We’ve seen pink flamingos and emus. Our ears are ringing from the silence. And that’s nice. We think maybe Bolivia is the kind of place that takes time and patience to appreciate. Maybe next time.

Bolivia Blur

2007-05-12T13:39:00.001-07:00

Alas, we can see the bottom of our pot of gold. Every country we’ve visited has kept us longer than we had planned and now we need to book it to Buenos Aires to get the van and us back to North America (to start saving up for the return to the countries we’ve missed). Our plan from here is to stuff the car into a box in BA, travel by bus through Uruguay and on to my Dad’s house in Southern Brazil. Then we’ll fly to NC to meet the car, pack our stuff into the trailer and visit folks on our way to Vancouver. Of course Moab is on the way – anyone interested in meeting us out there?

Upon crossing the border into Bolivia it was immediately apparent that the pace of things here are just a bit more relaxed. I had to wake up the border guard to get the car paper work done. Probably a boring job considering everyone just went around the other side of the building with all their goods piled high on the trici-taxis. The large sign proclaiming the need to declare your goods was an amusing detail. Then a local policeman tried to charge us for crossing the bridge, which we had already paid someone on the other side. On the advice of the immigration guys we just drove by him, he gave chase for about 20 meters on foot until we disappeared around a corner. Had he run a bit further he would have caught us stuck behind a parade that covered the entire street with people in amazingly colourful indigenous regalia, gold and red and yellow, playing pan pipes and dancing.

We soon get to our first police check point. This is a gate across the road and a small building. We sit in the van for a spell waiting – nothing. Finally I get out and walk over to the building, this is apparently how its done! He says I need to pay a voluntary amount of 10 Bolivianos. I say that’s too much, half distracted by the porn calendar posters hanging up behind him, and end up giving him the 1USD. On the smaller roads the local traffic would just drive under the raised gates, and upon seeing us the cop would walk out, lower the gate, and walk back into his shack, evaluating how much of a donation we are worth. By the time we got to Tupizza, in the south, Kim gets into a very un-Canadian argument with the cop about the terrible condition of the roads and the lack of signage and that she’s just not going to pay. Actually, I guess that’s very Canadian, expecting every thing to be in order and just so.

The paved roads in Bolivia are excellent, much like Peru’s. Unfortunately the main attraction that I wanted to see is the largest salt flat in the world, the Salar de Uyuni, and it is not on a paved road. A quick squiz at the map and the Salar looks bigger than lake Titicaca and the 500km of secondary road was no deterrent. The pavement ends just south of Huari. The beginning seemed much like any other dirt road and we decided that the reports of needing a 4x4 were exaggerated.

We spent the night near the road just south of Rio Mulatos after a long day of washboard and river crossings.

The sunset was great and then there was the silence. All you could hear was the blood running through your ears. I just sat for an hour listening to the silence. While eating breakfast after a great night in the altiplano I said ‘hey look, emus!’ Kim, the biologist, looks up sleepily from her oats and says, no, those are just llamas. Then she looks again, drops her oats and lunges for the binoculars. Emus!

Then came THE detour. A sign said ‘this way for the direct route to Uyuni’ Here the road started following river beds, this would be the case for a quarter of the trip to Uyuni, and deteriorated into tracks across the desert and river crossing that created bow waves that washed up onto the windscreen. This is when the joke ‘this looks like the main road’ started, Kim would say this anytime we were on a track that looked like it had been used in the last year. At a high point we actually pulled out the binoculars trying to see anything at all. We spotted a village in the distance and headed for it. Upon arriving a guy comes running out to greet us. It turns out he’s been waiting for days for a ride to Uyuni, and he knows the way. He says its just three of them and I see two kids next to their packed bag. Sure I say, that shouldn’t be too much extra weight for Tortuga. He’s practically kicking up his heels as he runs back to collect his wife, mother in law, everything they own, and the two kids (I guess kids don’t count). They fill the entire back of the van. Thank god for the new air-springs! This is when Tortuga really came through, climbing slick rock, ploughing through hundreds of meters of soft sand, climbing impossible ravines. It really reminded me of a 4x4 trip to Moab with David – except we didn’t have any beer with us here. I know if David were here that would never have happened!

The Salar didn’t so much appear, as the ground in front of the distant mountains disappear. Then the horizon started turning white. I knew the last two days of goat tracks across the dessert would be worth it. We deposited the family on the main road in Colchani, the entrance to the Salar. The Salar isn’t like the salt flats in the US, its actually the remnants of an ocean and is still 100 meters deep with a ½ meter crust of salt on top. There’s the danger of going through but we decided if we followed other tracks we should be OK on our way out to Isla Pescado an island made of petrified corral and covered in huge cacti, pretty surreal, 70km across the salt. Getting onto the salt is reportedly the tricky part although everything was nice and dry for us and it was pretty easy.

Right at the edge there are guys piling salt into neat little piles to dry, by hand of course. Driving on the perfectly flat salt with its hexagon pattern is amazing. We kept wanting to call it ice. Arriving at Isla Pescado, thank golly for GPS, we parked on the shore on the opposite side of the tourist area thinking this would be free. It’s not, 10 Bolivianos each that goes into a fund for the local community, this year its for electrification of the village

We spent the evening riding bikes, cooking, listening to the silence, enjoying one of the best sunsets of the trips and watching the Salar change colours with the changing light. And we ended this wonderful day in a very decadent way – watching Battlestar Galactica. Thank you Darcey for giving us the idea to download them through ITunes.

Turbo Liberation

2007-05-12T13:15:00.000-07:00

Arriving at the Lima airport (very nice flight on an Airbus 319) I haggled a cab down from 40 Soles to 25 Soles (10USD) to take me to DHL. On the way there he tells me that today is a national holiday and they will be closed. This, in addition to the fact that DHL was across the road from the airport did not put me in the best spirit. After calling him a thief he offered to take me anywhere I wanted to go for another 15 Soles. I asked him if he understood what I had just said, about him being a crook and all. Being in the middle of an industrial zone I decided to have him take me to Miraflores. This is a suburb of Cusco reputed to ‘not be in Peru’.

Once I got settled in at a nice hostel in Miraflores I set off exploring. Everyone was right, the convertible Lexus’s, Land Rover Disco’s and Limo’s made me feel like I was in Cary. And then there was Vivandas. It’s a Whole Foods, only with nicer produce (in addition to the SA fruits) and it’s 24hrs. Not Peru.

The electric fences around every house and private guards with Uzzi’s on every corner affirmed that these people were uncomfortable with their wealth in a country dominated by poverty.

The beaches are stunning. Comprised of stones about fist size, the receding waves make a magnificent sound. I spent several hours just sitting and listening.

Then I stumbled across LarcoMar. A very upscale mall, complete with a Starsucks. I took in a movie.

The next morning, I arrived at DHL at 8:30 and waited for over an hour for Milton Velasquez. I don’t think his employee manual translated the “express” in DHL Express. I was then told I needed to go and plead my case with Customs (window 14 he tells me). At the customs house I started the standard goose hunt. Window 14 only does packages over 50 kilos, you need window 7 I was told. No, you need window 4, actually, you need Jorge Torres in window 2. Jorge didn’t let me finish telling him about how I’m on honeymoon and my wife is in Cusco before he sprang to action. He called over an assistant to pull my paper. Run run he said. He called DHL and told them to release the package to me within the hour. He begged my pardon and yelled to a DHL employee in the customs area to have him take me in the DHL van back to the DHL building. By this time he was speaking such fast Spanish I didn’t catch most of it but before I knew it I was back at DHL. Milton dragged himself down to meet me, obviously post verbal lashing by the guy in a suit behind him. This guy apologized profusely for the hold up and sent me out the door with the brand new turbo. There was supposed to be 150USD import duty but no one said anything about it. I sprinted around the first corner.

I walk across the street to the airport and had missed the last plane to Cusco by 10 minutes. Drats, another night in Lima with no Kim. The next flight was at 4am. OUCH. I booked a seat on it and headed back to Miraflores. My plan was to watch a late movie and head back to the airport and practice my juggling until 4.

As luck would have it, Spiderman 3 opened at midnight. I could occupy my entire evening strolling the wonderful parks of Miraflores and watching movies! Not to spoil it for my readers, but the guy next to me in Spiderman slept with his head on my shoulder through most of it.

A cab got me back to the airport just in time to check in and get on the flight. I had been very careful with seat selection so that I could see the wonderful Andes from the other side of the plane. Walking onto the runway in the dark made me realize this was all for naught.

Flying back over the countryside we had driven a month ago was like Cliff Notes. The desert leading into green valleys leading into snow covered peaks. Wonderful!

I’m writing this parked on the main square of Chuquito next to the police station. There are 2 marching bands consisting of two drummers and 10-15 guys playing pan pipes dueling it out! Pan pipes!! These aren’t the guys you see in tourist restaurants, playing ABBA for Europeans and North Americans. These are guys in jeans, with backpacks on, and maybe a beer in their hand, stomping around in the square with their neighbours and friends, rocking out on their pan pipes. This is fantastic.

Or, it would be, if after two hours they’d played more than one song, over and over and over…!

SNAFU

2007-05-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

We have been really enjoying a lot of the things that make the third world the third world - the markets, the riotous colors, the anything-goes attitude. Of course, there is a flip side to that coin, and right now it is staring us in the face - the corruption, the brainless bureaucrats, the ENDLESS hassle.

We decided to have the turbo shipped to us from the US, at great expense, because the van won't go without it. Well, actually it will, but it will only have about 25-30 hp, and we would be driving to Argentina at 20 mph. That wouldn't be any fun, and we still have thousands of miles to go before the end of our trip.

So, we found a turbo, and had it shipped to us by DHL.

On Monday, yesterday, it arrived in Lima. This is where things got $%^&#$ed up. We got an e-mail saying that they couldn't import our package into the country because importation of used car parts isn't allowed.

First, the turbo is brand new. Our shipper didn't mark the box labelled 'used' on the DHL label. So we don't know why they think it's used. Doubtless some nasty bureaucrat is trying to line his pockets and make our lives difficult.

Second, we're not trying to import the part - we're in transit, and will be leaving this backwater as soon as we can put it in our car and drive away.

Sigh. There was no convincing anyone of this over the phone, so this morning, Tuesday, May 1, Douglas got on a plane to Lima, on a mission to liberate the turbo from the dastardly customs agents. He has a real flair for convincing government officials that they would rather help than hinder us. I think it's his cute smile.

Unfortunately, we didn't realise (and the folks we talked to yesterday at DHL didn't tell us, even though we said he was coming to Lima today), that today is a national holiday and EVERYTHING is closed. So poor Douglas is stuck in Lima by himself, waiting for customs to open so he can argue with corrupt bureaucrats. Lima's not exactly a nice city (to put it mildly) - it's huge, dirty, and has more than its share of crime and corruption.

That's all for today - I'm off to make voodoo dolls of witless customs agents.

o, and keep an eye out for new posts from a while ago - I'm working on catching up on our blogging from while Beulah was visiting us. I'll post them in the order they occurred, so the new ones won't always be at the top.

Ay, Caramba

2007-04-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

The roads have been hard on poor la Tortuga, and the turbo is broken.

The little thing inside that spins is supposed to have .5mm of wiggle, and it has 4mm!! So we’re stuck in Cuzco for a few days at least (we hope not more) waiting for a part. It’s Sunday the 29 of April, and we’ve been here for…2 weeks already.

Luckily, we couldn’t be stuck in a nicer place. Quinta Lala is a haven. It has everything we need, is right in a wonderful city, and is chock full of friendly and interesting travelers. We’ve probably met more people here than we have on our entire trip. We’ve been having a great time exchanging stories, places to camp, road recipes, and drinking boxed red wine. Apparently in Chile, all the wines come in boxes as well as bottles, and the quality is the same. It probably has something to do with the roads, and the impossibility of transporting glass bottles intact on terrible dirt or gravel roads. We certainly appreciate it!!

Douglas has been making friends by fixing everyone’s trucks – so far he has fixed Colin and Liz’s Ford (twice – that’s Ford for you) and two Land Rovers. We’ll see who’s next.

In the meantime, we’re taking advantage of the time to organize our lives. We have 6 weeks of travel left, at which point we’ll ship the van from Buenos Aires (assuming we make it there!) to the east coast of the US, where we’ll pick up our dog, Saira (she decided she didn’t want to come on this trip – too much time in the car). The van will be 3 weeks in transit, and we plan to spend that time visiting friends in NC and Boston, then we’ll pack everything in the van and drive over to Vancouver, where we’ll settle.

In the meantime, here’s an update of where we’ve been this year, and how long it’s taken us:

USA, NC to Texas: 2000 miles in 4 days
Central America, Mexico to Panama: 4000 miles in 2 months
South America, Ecuador to Peru: 3000 miles in 1 month

So far we’ve traveled 9000 miles, and we think we have between 2500 and 3500 miles to go, depending on which way we go, and what the roads are like. We hear they're pretty bad in Bolivia, but quite good in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.

And, yes, people actually say ‘Ay, caramba’ here. It’s my new favorite curse. I don’t know exactly what it means, but the taxi drivers say it whenever something goes wrong.

Altiplano and Sillustani Ruins

2007-04-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

On our way back to Cuzco, we decided to stop at the Sillustani ruins near Puno. We turned off the main ‘highway’ onto a small road that wound its way through a bewitching altiplano landscape.

At one particularly beautiful adobe compound, we stopped to take pictures, and the friendly family living there waved us in to see more. The kids were all wearing multicolored hats, and one of the women was wearing my new favorite type of hat, a tiny brown bowler perched at an angle, with a little tassle.

They showed us around their home, composed of several small round adobe buildings surrounding a courtyard.

In the back was a small pen for guinea pigs, a local delicacy. In this picture you can just see that there is a small hutch at the back for them to hide in, with a hole as a doorway. One of the guinea pigs was too fat to fit through the doorway anymore – we figured he was going to be lunch!!

When they were done showing us around the rest of the house, they took us into the weaving room and showed us their wares. Of course. Everyone’s gotta make a living. We bought one weaving made of llama, rather than the usual alpaca. Llama fiber is usually used for ropes, and has a coarser texture. It was actually quite soft, though, and reminds me of raw silk in its combination of strength and suppleness. The undyed llama wool had a really lovely shading of colors from palest cream to warm brown. One of my favorite textiles. I wish I had a picture of it to include, but I forgot to take one before I sent it back to NC with Beulah – she generously offered to take some of our extraneous junk home so we could have room to move in the van again!

Finally, since we will be passing through this way again (if we ever get our car part and get to leave Cuzco), we took some family portraits, promising to print them and give them to the family on our way back through. They were quite amazed that they could see the picture immediately on the screen of our digital camera.

Next we headed over the Sillustani ruins, which are pre-incan funerary towers.

I also got this nice picture of a woman spinning by the side of the path:

And just before we got back to Cuzco we passed through a small town fill to the brim with Sunday marketgoers in all their finery. The hats are just splendid.

Lake Titicaca

2007-04-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

After seeing Machu Picchu, we took a rest day and then headed south to the other main attraction in southern Peru, Lake Titicaca, home of the famous floating islands. The drive through the altiplano was stunning, with big snow-capped mountains on either side. We only made it as far as Pucara, unfortunately, and ended up staying in one of the eccentric “Turistic Hotels” that are so plentiful in Peru. We took off early the next morning for Puno, and arrived early in the day. We got Beulah settled into a hostel, and we found a parqueo run by a friendly family, then grabbed a taxi to see some of the small towns scattered along the southern shore of Lake Titicaca.

We went first to Chucuito, which is famous for its Temple of Fertility. As soon as the taxi pulled into the central square of the sleepy little town, two small kids approached and offered to be our guides. They of course had finger puppets on, hoping to make a sale. They were quite the young entrepreneurs, and even had a sales pitch worked up where they spoke in unison in sing-song voices. We were a little weirded out at the thought of having the Temple of Fertility explained to us by 5-year olds, but decided that they were old pros, and so we hired them.

The Temple is an old Inca site where women would come to make offerings of coca, hoping the gods would favor them with children. The central part of the temple, which no longer has a roof, is filled with carved stone phalluses, some as big as 4 feet! The older guide told us most of the story, then poked his business partner in the side to get her attention, and they ended by saying “and that concludes the story of the Temple of Fertility” in unison. They were pretty cute. When we paid them, we asked them who got to keep the money, and they said it all went straight to their mother, so we paid them with some chocolate, as well.

On our way back to Puno, we stopped at the tiny lakeside village of Chimu, where they are famous for making the reed boats. It must have been the wrong season or day, because we didn’t see any boat building, only reed-drying. Luckily, there was one small house that doubled as a museum and boat souvenir store, so we stopped. We first looked around the museum, where they had a spectacular collection of replicas of local birds and animals, and a large reed boat carrying the Inca King and his wife. It was pretty impressive, so we resolved to buy a small boat or two.

When we went downstairs, some of the boatmakers came out of their boatmaking room/living room to answer our questions, and to ask questions of their own about where we are from, what it’s like, etc. It turned out that one of the boatmakers was also a boat racer, who regularly takes part in (and wins!) the annual reed boat race on October 22.

The next day we took a guided tour out to the floating islands. The boat was typical for here, and only had one speed. When they wanted to start or stop it, the captain would leave the wheel and head to the back of the boat, lift a wooden cover on a hatch, and fiddle with the engine. Typical, yes. Safe, maybe not.

We arrived on the floating islands to see a veritable army of locals ready to greet us and sell us things. Our tour group sat in a semicircle to listen to the story of the floating islands, and to taste totora, the reed used to build both the boats and the islands. How multipurpose can you get?

Totora is extremely rich in fluoride; here is a picture of Douglas and Beulah getting a full day's worth of fluoride in one bite:

The folks who built the Uros Islands speak Aymara, a different language from most of the indigenous people in Peru, who speak Quechua. They are originally from the Amazon Basin, if I’m remembering correctly. They were persecuted by other nations in the area, and began living on floating islands to evade conflict with their neighbours.
The islands are built by first cutting free a big mat of entwined totora roots from the edge of the lake. This mat floats to the top, and successive layers of totora reeds are laid on top. Every so often (depending on the season, as often as once a week) new reeds are laid down. After 20 years or so, the islands are so thick that they touch the bottom and have to be abandoned because of danger of flooding in the rainy season.

The boats are built out of totora reeds, as well. Originally they were made of pure totora reeds, and would only last for 3 months. Nowadays, though, the builders incorporate layers of plastic bottles, and the boats last for 2.5 years.

Overall, the visit to the islands was a bit of a mixed bag, and we have debated a fair amount about what to make of it. On the one hand, it was incredibly touristy, almost Disneyfied. Each island was essentially a floating souvenir shop, and we felt not just that these folks’ lives were impacted by the tourist trade, but that their lives were shaped by and for the tourist trade and almost nothing else. They were like a living museum exhibit.

On the other hand, they have found a way to preserve their unique way of life. Their community seemed fairly intact, and we didn’t get the impression that many families were split up because the husband (and maybe the kids, too) had left to work in a big city. They also seemed to be doing fairly well. The proceeds from the tourist visits are shared among the community, and have been used to build a big school, and to provide amenities like solar panels and international telephones on the island. In that respect, at least, the development was positive – the money is really going back to the community, and is being used productively.

Still, I don’t know if I would want to live in Disneyland, even if there were solar panels and good schools.

Enough seriousness - here is a video of a trici-taxi ride we took on our way to eat delicious cake in Puno. And a photo of the trici-taxis, which are quite common, and very fast!!

Machu Picchu

2007-04-26T11:49:00.000-07:00

This amazing archeological site is often the highlight of many folks' trip to South America, and we are no different. Yes they bludgeon you as a tourist with a ‘special’ $73 US train ride and $12 bus ride and $40 entrance fee, BUT, the moment the sun rises above the site, producing a magical double rainbow behind the caretakers hut that all becomes irrelevant.

We started the journey on the 7am train from Cuzco and four hours later arrived in Aguas Calientes. Many paint a dismal picture of this town but I went in thinking of it like a ski resort and found it charming. The food and lodging was actually reasonably priced. We even had a magnificent 3 course meal at Indio Feliz, carefully prepared by a French chef and served by his attentive wife. All for $12. And of course we had to go back again for another round of the amazing desert.

In order to see sun rise, and avoid the crowds, we caught the 5:30am bus. We hired a guide, Ernesto, whom I wouldn’t recommend, and began the tour by climbing to the caretakers hut. This is where the Inca trail enters the site and from where the classic MP photos are taken. From there we descended to the main entrance, more wonderful rock work. I could go on and on for hours, but the pictures in the MP album may be more useful.

After the tour, my Mum headed back to Aguas Calientes and Kim and I climbed the narrow stairs to Wayna Pichu, the astronomers hang out high above the city. This was very well worth the hour hike and the clouds cleared just long enough for us to snap a couple photos of MP below.

Some of the coolest things about MP: Built around 1400 it was basically a university. The terraces were used to experiment with crops facing different directions and encompass multiple microclimates as they climb the slopes.

The water works are amazing! Channels carved into the rock with 16 water falls. The first water fall is ceremonial and the next 15 are for getting clean drinking water.

The round carved stones used to tie the roofs on and hold the doors closed.

The incorporation of the natural stone outcroppings into the buildings.

When we arrived in the morning it was drizzling rain and we feared the weather may not cooperate for us. But just as the sun rose the clouds parted a bit presenting us with a rainbow and a mystical Machu Picchu. The weather held all day with some light drizzle from time to time. We couldn’t have asked for better weather or a more wonderful day.

The train ride home was pleasant. I especially enjoyed the zigzag rail as you enter Cuzco. To overcome the steep climb out of the city, the train tracks zigzag, with an operator jumping out and switching the track at every zag, very similar to the Nariz del Diablo in Ecuador.

Pisac Market and Ruins

2007-04-26T10:55:00.000-07:00

Once we had looked around Cuzco a little bit, we decided to head to Pisac for its famous Sunday market. There are also some Inca ruins nearby (there are ruins everywhere in this area – a 5 minute walk from our campground there are some small, unmarked ruins). The market was the usual mixture of touristy crafts and everyday things for the locals, and we very much enjoyed looking around at everything. Beulah and Douglas tried out some choclo, which is local corn with HUGE kernels, very tasty:

We decided to pass on the local remedy for joint and muscle pain, though:

After we had had a good look around the market, and sat in the shade to drink some coffee, we decided to take a short taxi ride to the Pisac ruins. The site was divided into two major parts, the agricultural part, and the ceremonial part. There were numerous curved terraces for growing crops in the agricultural section.

And there were ceremonial baths where pilgrims could purify themselves before entering the ceremonial section.

The site was sprawling, and involved a lot of climbing along narrow winding paths that hugged the steep cliffsides.

Cuzco and Sacsayhuayman

2007-04-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

So we arrived in Cuzco the day before Beulah was due to arrive and settled into the wonderful campground of Quinta Lala. It’s run by a Dutch couple, Gonna and Helmie, and is just perfect. It has everything an overlander needs, including lots of other overlanders to talk to!! And, my favorite, just about every morning a herd of alpacas comes in to graze the lawn.

Beulah arrived the next day, quite early in the morning. We picked her up at the airport, then got her settled into the one small room at Quinta Lala (usually reserved for campers rained out of their tents).

We went first to Sacsayhuayman (it sounds a little like sexy woman), the Inca ruins that are right next door to our camp spot. They are built on a ridge that overlooks the city of Cuzco, and the stones used in the construction are absolutely gargantuan. It was our first sight of the famous Inca stonework, and it was truly impressive. The largest stone weighs more than 350 tons, and some of the join work defies the imagination – one stone can have as many as 30 angles! These gargantuan stones fit together perfectly, with not even enough room to slide a piece of paper between them.

The Incas were engineers, all right. Their constructions were remarkably earthquake-proof, as well, and have survived a number of large earthquakes that leveled most other nearby buildings. All of the walls have a slight angle, between 8 and 14 degrees, that makes them more stable. They are also built on a foundation of small, round stones, so that when the earthquake hits, the walls can shift on their rolling foundations without collapsing. Amazing.

We had a guide to explain the site to us, and we really enjoyed hearing the extra information. Otherwise it would have just been another beautiful pile of rocks. We wouldn’t have known that Cuzco is built in the shape of a puma, and that Sacsayhuayman is the puma’s head, since it was the ceremonial site. Nor would we have known that the Incas carved their stones with meteorites, and slid them into place on huge leaves of aloe, which then served to help glue the stones together.

The name Saxsayhuaman means satisfied falcon. The site was renamed when the Spaniards slaughtered hundreds of Incas here, and their bodies were left out for the falcons to eat.

After dragging poor Beulah around this pile of rocks (she had come up to 3300m from sea level, and was feeling the altitude) we decided to take a turn around Cuzco and see what we could see. The city is absolutely gorgeous. Tiny river stone streets wind their way in between lovely colonial buildings, some of them with remnants of Inca stonework at the base. The buildings off the central square have elaborately carved wooden balconies. And mountains ring the city, giving you a sense of distance and space whenever you look up from the lovely architecture. Here is a picture of the narrow streets:

It is, of course, VERY touristy, and every time you step into the square you are swarmed by folks trying to sell you finger puppets, postcards, or dinner in their restaurant. Beside the expensive restaurants are stores that sell jewelry and fine alpaca sweaters for hundreds and thousands of U$. But somehow it’s still a nice city.

Another tactic often used to part tourists from their dollars is to dress up in traditional garb, pose with a well-brushed llama or alpaca, and ask for money for taking photos. We took some funny pictures of these two boys with their llamas.

And as we were walking down a central street, looking for coffee and cake, an indigenous woman in full regalia stuffed a baby goat into my arms, and then demanded money for a photo. The goat of course started to poop, and I nearly dropped it. But we got a photo anyhow, and Douglas helped me pick the little balls of goat poop off my clothes afterwards.

After some cake, to revive us, we headed over to a local craft cooperative called the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cuzco. Here they try to preserve the weavers’ art by selling really fine woven goods for fair trade prices, and encouraging children in villages to learn spinning, dyeing, and weaving from their grandparents. In the center of the store, surrounded by the beautiful and varied types of weaving produced by different village traditions, were four weavers using backstrap looms. All the thread is hand-dyed with natural materials, hand-spun with drop spindles, and then woven into intricate patterns. It was incredible to watch – the amount of time needed to produce a single row of weaving was impressive. Here is a video of a weaver at work:

And I can't close this blog entry without mentioning that sweet sweet Beulah brought us the porta potti we've been looking for in every city since Antigua. We are both pleased as punch. Here is a picture of Douglas testing it out:

Lake Titicaca

2007-04-20T18:20:00.000-07:00

A quick note. We´ve been having a great time with Douglas´ mom. We spent some time in Cuzco, ate some delicious food, shopped for crafts, visited Machu Picchu, and are now in Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Tomorrow morning we´re planning to take a boat out to see the famous floating islands.

We also posted a LOT of videos these past days. Check out the video link. Some are from as far back as Nicaragua!

more soon...

Cuzco!!

2007-04-13T20:31:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note - we are in Cuzco and it it glorious. And we have uploaded our 'favorites' set of photos, for those who can't stand to look at all the rest. I'm going to try and put a few photos into the blog text in the next few days, too - we have wifi here, which we haven't seen since Quito!

Peruvian Altiplano

2007-04-12T19:04:00.000-07:00

After a relaxing couple of days in Huacachina, that included a wine/pisco tour in Ica that was perfectly spectacular, we piled into the van (with many new repairs - thank god I married MacGyver) and headed for Nasca. We stopped at an observation tower beside the Panamerican and had a look at three of the figures: the tree, the hands, and the frog. This part of the Peruvian desert is made up of very pale sand covered in small dark rocks, and the figures were made (by aliens, of course!) by moving the dark rocks. The most popular theory about the purpose of the figures is that they are a calendar system. The folks who constructed them also built a complicated underground irrigation system, parts of which are still in use today.

A landmark moment of our trip occurred in Nasca - we left the Panamerican highway. We´ve spent much of our trip driving on this road (of highly variable quality), and we were a little sad to leave it. Partly because it was easy to find and follow, for the most part. And partly because it means that the ´go south, south, south´ leg of our trip is over. We only have 4 countries to go! Some day in the not-too-distant future we will have to find jobs and return to something resembling a normal life. How strange.

After we left Nasca, we turned east, and drove straight up, it seemed, into the Peruvian altiplano. Peru has already showed us a spectacular variety of landscapes, and the altiplano was something new again. We ascended from sea level to about 14,000 feet, or 4400m, and then drove straight across flat green plains dotted with shining lakes. Diaphanous white clouds streaked the sky about 3 inches above our heads. And all the alpacas that I´ve been waiting to see, wondering where they were - were in the altiplano!! Huge herds of them. So many. And don´t worry, we took lots of pictures.

Speaking of pictures, we just uploaded about 200 new ones for Peru. We´re doing our best to edit them ruthlessly. For those folks who can´t stomach looking at that many photos, who see the number and just turn away - we´re working on a trip favorites folder that is only about 100 so far. Soon we´ll figure out how to upload those, too, and then you can look without fear.

Two real incidents of note in the altiplano. First, I bought 2 pounds of alpaca wool, straight from the alpaca. Before I say more, I´ve been looking for this stuff since we hit Ecuador, and haven´t been able to find any. I have been asking in every wool shop (and there are many - this is a continent of knitters) where I could buy pure alpaca wool. No one had any, saying it was too expensive. Today, we stopped in a small village, and a woman approached us with a beautiful crocheted hat (we bought this too). I thought she might have an idea where I could get my hands on some wool. Sure enough, she had an entire llama´s worth of wool in her back room (lying next to a skinned animal carcass, apparently waiting to be butchered and eaten). She brought it out, stuffed it into a bag, and charged me $5 for 2 pounds of pure, caramel-colored, soft-as-a-kitten alpaca wool. I can´t believe my luck. Now I just have to get the mud and sticks out of it, and figure out how to card and spin it. Hm. Should be easy.

Second, as we were driving along at 50kph (an amazing thing in and of itself, but the road from Nasca to Cuzco is wonderful, contrary to all reports), we saw a tarantula the size of a dinner plate in the middle of the road. We both said ¨whoa! did you see that??¨ and turned the van around for a better look. But by the time we got back to where we´d seen it, it was gone. Wow. A spider big enough to notice it when you´re driving by at 50kph!!!

And tomorrow we´re off to Cuzco...

Ica and Huacachina

2007-04-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

After waiting for a couple of hours, this is Peru after all, our bus finally took us back to Pisco. We ate a weird fruit called Tuna – looks like a big fig, but BRIGHT red inside with little seeds. Not a new favorite but worth eating the whole thing. Then we drove a couple hours through desert interspersed with vineyards to Ica. We stopped at a spot reputed to have yummy Pisco Sours. We decided one wouldn’t be enough to give it a fair evaluation, so we had several. Wondered around town a bit and then drove to Huacachina. Now this is a real oasis. I mean like in the movies. The pond’s murky water is reputed to be therapeutic, we’re going to take their word on that. And the dunes surrounding it are huge! In between there’s a narrow string of houses, restaurants, and hotels. Upon entering town we asked a guy on the street if there was someplace to camp, he, being Peruvian, jumped in the back of the van and took us to a wonderful spot, Bananas. Armanda and her boyfriend Antonio run a pool/bar/camping spot that also does boogie rides into the dunes. I’d been looking forward to sand boarding – a great opportunity to get sand into every nook and cranny- so we took a couple from Armanda and hiked into the dunes. Wow, the sand is super fine and super hard work but very fun. A few runs and we decided to just drink the beer I’d brought and enjoy the surreal scenery around us.

We got back to the van and collapsed into bed at 7 sans dinner. This prompted some comments about how much we sleep from Armanda. The next day we lounged around. I fixed the radiator fan that had a bad ground and blew a fuse. I also replaced the passenger side headlight only to discover that the dove that flew into the van yesterday morning shattered the drivers side one. We made a plan to go out into the dunes with Antonio in his boogie. Try saying that with a straight face.

Just before sunset we headed out in the sand buggy with beer, sand boards and cameras. Ah, V8 power made the sand boarding a LOT easier. And what a ride, dropping off dune edges and catching lots of air. Antonio was a great driver and we were never out of control – after all he’s been doing this for 10 years. He would lower his Oakleys just as we got to a fun part, and afterwards turn around with a huge grin and ask if we had fun.

Paracas and Pisco

2007-04-10T12:09:00.002-07:00

Pulling off the panamerican highway we headed into Pisco. This is a pretty grungy town and after asking several people it turns out the best Pisco is had in Ica. We did however book our boat trip to Islas Ballestas. These islands are billed as the poor mans Galapagos and, being poor, and therefore not having gone to the Galapagos, we were excited about them. We then continued through town, past the fish meal factories and arrived at Paracas National park. Somehow we were on the wrong road and a bit of fast and exciting driving across the sand got us to the right one. This made Kim smile. We paid our 10 soles and headed towards the Atenas campsite. More driving on the sand – go Tortuga go! - and we found about 30 others camped here as well. This would be the first we see of actual campers in Latin America. The were all Peruvian sail boarders enjoying the fast wind. A very wonderful sunset and sleep ensued.

Waking up at 5am proved difficult. At quarter to six I happened to open my eyes and see the tranquil alarm clock that Kim had turned off 45 minutes ago. A fast race to get ready to make the 7am departure of the bus got us coffee’d and out of camp in 15 minutes. As we got onto the road and up to about 50mph we were alerted that we had been remiss in properly latching the roof as it popped up with quite a sound – much like a sail filling. This is something that we had both pontificated about, what if… well, it was quite dull really, we stopped (spilling coffee) and depopped the top, again, and hurried on.

Now this is Latin America, so the 7am bus didn’t actually get to the travel agency until 7:45. Then we waited for another hour at the dock for the boat. This was a bit of a zoo as many tourists lined up willy nilly for their boat. A quick boat ride got us to the Candelabra, a weird sand thing reminiscent of the Nazca lines. Then we headed towards the main course – las Islas.

These Islands were white in the distance and I reckoned it was all the bird poop. There was actually a war – The Guano War- fought over these islands. Before petrochemicals the guano was used as fertilizer and quite valuable. As we got closer the number of birds was astounding. I didn’t see any blue footed boobies – I’d been excited about seeing boobies all week – but there were countless other varieties.

Then we came around to a cay that was making a very unusual sound. The sea was quite big and obscured our view until we got closer. Hundreds and hundreds of sea lions! Here is a video:

The were all around us, frolicking in the waves, lounging on the rocks, and making weird sea lion sounds. This was fabo! We watched them for a while and then pressed on looking for the very shy Humbolt Penguins. Just before we were to head back we spotted two funny looking birds. Penguins! They posed for a few pictures and then wobbled down into the ocean. This made our day. Penguins. Sea Lions. I was still distraught about the boobies so Kim showed me hers.

Dali

2007-04-10T12:09:00.001-07:00

Overall, Peru has been a real trip. I started out hating it – the crooked money changers, the menacing cops who stopped us 85 times a day to point out that we don’t have a front license plate, the desolate high desert, the overall air of poverty and desperation. Then we drove through some of the most surreally beautiful landscape I’ve ever seen, and met an unbelievably warm welcome from the mountain villagers. I started to like it. The mountain cops, too, were better – they wanted to know where we were from and if everything was going OK on our trip, what we had for lunch. We came back down from the mountains into the bleak desert where people live in plastic bag shacks outside of town in the sprawling dump and hail you, hoping you’ll dump your garbage near them so they can have first pick. The shacks shaded into the shanties of Lima, and while we were distracted by the blare of horns and the so-Catholic-they’re-suicidal taxi drivers, we drove into a zone of pure opulence, of Porsche SUVs and picture-perfect beach houses. When you’re nice to street vendors or waitresses here, they blink and then grin at you like you’re the first.

I cant say enough how nice the people are here. The owners of all the parqueos we’ve stayed in have been the nicest people we’ve met on our trip. After parking for lunch in Ica, we paid our pittance to the parqueo owner, and on the way out he ran out with three mangoes for us. Huh? This is classic Peruvian.

We get tossed from one extreme to the other, both in terms of landscape and people, and I can’t regain my equilibrium. I feel ike we’re traveling through a Salvador Dali painting, and nothing is what I expect it to be. Every time we turn a corner the rules are different. Somewhere back near the border, I think the highway folded and we slid into a different dimension. I’m writing this entry from a tiny desert oasis, which contributes to the surreal atmosphere – I didn’t know landscapes like this existed outside of the movies. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in this country, where the majority of people seem to be struggling for food and shelter, and a few live like the upper crust of North America.

And we’re only halfway through Peru…

Lima

2007-04-10T12:08:00.003-07:00

The next day’s driving was a stretch we’d been dreading, but it was also our last long stretch before we got to stop and relax in Ica/Pisco/Nasca. We hopped onto the big fast toll highway through Lima. North of Lima, everything is bleak desert, houses are tiny shacks in the desert, and the people appear to have *nothing*. Lima itself is a megalopolis of 8 million. It holds almost a third of Peru’s population, and has spawned endless ‘pueblos jovenes’, or young towns on its edges that are mostly collections of shacks. And when I say ‘shack’, I really mean shack. Most of them look barely big enough to lie down in, maybe 6’ by 6’. The nicer ones are made of adobe bricks, and have a flat sheet of something on top, held down by a neat row of small rocks, so the roof won’t fly off. Some of them, however, are made of the reed mats we use for a rug in the van, hung over a frame of bamboo poles – little better than a tent. I’ve even seen a single mat rolled into a tube and pegged down, so the owner can presumably sleep in the middle.

We passed through Lima without too much trouble – the highway was fast and straight, and mostly bypassed town traffic (though not entirely – see the crazy video of Lima traffic, which is pretty standard for Latin American cities – thank god Douglas is a mountain biker and good at avoiding obstacles). Here is a short video of Lima traffic. Note the fluidity of the 'lanes':

Lima spat us out into a landscape entirely different from what we’d seen to the north. Beach resort followed fancy beach resort, interspersed with gated communities of fancy beach houses. Porsche SUVs, 30 sole ($10) lunches on the beach, and a grocery store the likes of which we haven’t seen since America were a shock to our sensibilities, having passed through days’ worth of shack communities. We stopped at the grocery store to see what they had, and stocked up on olive oil, tabasco sauce, and Lindt chocolate, all the while feeling shocked by the luxury and excess.

Back to the Coast

2007-04-10T12:08:00.001-07:00

The drive to Yungay was absolutely gorgeous, again, but in a totally different way. We traveled through high green Andean peaks, and then descended all the way to sea level. The road was really windy and misty, and offered spectacular views at every turn. The driving we’ve done the past few days, from Santa on the coast, to Yuramarca, down past Huaraz, then over to Barranca on the coast, is one of the most beautiful stretches we’ve driven the whole trip. Highly, highly recommended. Once we had descended from the heights, we spent a while driving through a green valley with dry Mars-like mountains on either side. The valley was like the green arm of the mountains reaching down to the coast, and was heavily cultivated. We saw trucks full of apples, roadside stands overflowing with fruit, and chiles laid out to dry, as far as the eye could see.

We stopped at a parqueo in Huacho, north of Lima. The family who run it were incredibly friendly (which is turning out to be the rule in Peru). They wanted to talk all night about our trip, thought the van was the best thing since sliced bread, and actually clapped their hands when they found out this was our honeymoon. In the morning, we decided to give them our blue folding chairs (we’re traveling too fast to use them – we’ve pulled them out all of twice), since we thought they could use them to sit at the beach, or in their parqueo. They *loved* them, and promptly disappeared into their little house to find something to give us in return. They came out with 3 eggs fresh from their hens, tinted green and varying greatly in size, and a loaf of sweet bread special for Semana Santa (it’s delicious). They also gave us their phone number and said we should call them if any little thing came up, they would do what they could to help us out. We are constantly surprised and overwhelmed at how friendly people here are.

Hostal Blanco

2007-04-10T12:07:00.001-07:00

The next day we drove through the Canon del Pato to Huaraz, and the pictures speak for themselves here. It was a gorgeous road that goes through 35 tunnels in just a few kilometers. After the canyon it’s paved, and goes through lots of green small towns that remind us of Ecuador.

We finally arrived in Yungay, the turn off to the Cordillera Blanca and Huascaran National Park, where we intended to spend the night. At the gate however we were told that it would be $25 each to spend the night in the park. This was for the month pass. No amount of explaining that we only wanted one night would suffice. Oh well, we headed up to Laguna Llaganuco for a hike anyway. Driving into the glacial valley was amazing, the walls went straight up until they disappeared into the clouds. Every now and then we caught glimpses of the snow covered peaks that surrounded us. Although the Cordillera Blanca is only 20km wide and 180km long, there are 50 peaks over 5700m. For reference, North America only has three and Europe has none of this height. We were at the base of Peru’s highest mountain, Nevado Huascaran, at 6768m.

We were also amazed at the masses of Peruvians from Lima. Hordes of tourist, with only a sprinkling of gringos.

Descending back to Yungay we saw a green land rover with roof racks coming around the corner. Being an overlander down here is pretty exciting, and we get excited to meet others. “It’s the germans it’s the germans” we said. Stopping next to us I opened my window and asked “Toby?” We had been told about them and their green land rover by Collin and Liz, the brits we met in Huanchaco. We had a quick chat and exchanged contact information as it was sleeting.

I’ve often wondered how it happens that places like Bates Motel stay in business. Well, much as in the movie, it was raining, we couldn’t find a decent place to park the van, and then we saw a tiny, faded sign saying “Hostal Blanco” past the windscreen wipers. Walking up the dark muddy track I found Norman. Well, actually his name was Victor – but he was weird. He ran down to open the creaky iron gate and ran ahead of the van looking much like Gollam in his gate. This is when the back of the van started loosing traction and in an instant the back right wheel dropped two feet into the corn field. Stuck. Getting out and inspecting the situation I realized that we may have been the first guests here in years and the better part of the road track had been taken over by the corn field.

Kim got very excited that we would finally get to use the HighLift. I’d explained to her the intricacies of this marvel of engineering, how it can lift, pull, pry, and knock teeth right out. I was very pleased to have married a woman that gets excited about these sorts of things. After getting rigged up we began slowly extricating the van, my biggest concern being that the front wheel would slide off and that the van would promptly roll over. Pablo manned the HighLift, his wife barked instructions to all four of us, and Victor ran around apologizing and pushing. An hour later the next adventure ensued. The “hot” shower.

In the cold highlands our solar shower never warms up, and after a long day in the rain we thought a hot shower would be nice. As I was cleaning mud off the chains and highlift, Kim came out asking if I could try and make the shower hot. Being covered in mud we decided to ask Norman. He confessed that the breaker sometimes needs to be fiddled with – with very dry hands – he said several times, making me wonder about past guests demise. Some fiddling later and the lights dimmed a LOT as the water started coming out warm. This was one of those South American shower heads that have wires (often bare) running into it and a heating element inside. (I suspect Underwriters Laboratories would treat it like a bomb.) Just as Kim got wet, pop, all the lights went out. I looked outside to see if her shower had darkened the whole town, but it seemed to just be our area. Well, so much for the warm shower!

The beds were in about as good repair as the shower so we retired to the van for an excellent night sleep in the cool mountain air of Yungay.

Peruvian cops

2007-04-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

These guys deserve their own special blog entry. We’ve been stopped more times in Peru than the entire rest of our trip. Outside of every little town, next to every highway toll station, and in a few other random places are a few cops standing outside their SUV, or sometimes motorcycle, watching everyone go by and stopping whoever they feel like. We’ve been warned again and again about corrupt Peruvian cops, especially south of Lima.We’ve been told they love to stop foreigners and make them pay for some imaginary infraction. Sometimes they will ask for your documents and then refuse to give them back until you pay them. We’ve taken precautions against that strategy (thanks for the idea, Colin and Liz) and photocopied every document they could conceivably ask for, stapled the pages together, and put it in the glove compartment. When they stop us and ask for documents, they get the pack of photocopies and not our originals. This seems to work, and when we get asked for the originals, we tell them they’re in the car somewhere, which seems to satisfy them.

So far we haven’t encountered any cops asking for bribes. We’ve mostly met two kinds of cops. One set are *very* friendly and curious about our trip, ask us questions about where we’re from, whether everything has been OK in Peru, tell us to take much care on our onward journey. This set sometimes asks us weird random questions, too, like how many gallons of gas it took us to get here, and what we had for lunch (that’s my favorite so far). The other set are not so friendly, and hint that we have broken some Peruvian laws. They always ask us where our front license plate is, and we explain to them that in NC we only have one on the back, it’s normal. One cop kept insisting that we needed to have another one, so we asked him where we should get it. He said “The US”, and we said, well, we’re not going back to get one, and anyway, they wouldn’t give us another one, because they just don’t issue front license plates. He kept insisting that we should find a way to get one, and we finally gave up the conversation as fruitless. Then he wanted to see our international insurance papers, and complained that they were in English. Well, duh, they were issued by a company in Florida. Anyhow, he eventually let us go without doing anything more than annoying the heck out of us.

We’ve been stopped so many times, that we’ve developed some strategies to avoid it. If we see a police point coming up, we snug right up to whatever car is in front of us, or if it’s a 4-lane, whatever is beside us, hoping they don’t notice us. It works sometimes. Other times when they are flagging us down, we pretend we thought they were just waving ‘hello’ at us, and wave back and keep driving. This also works, surprisingly. They haven’t hopped into their cars and chased us, yet, anyway!!

Landing the Mother Ship

2007-04-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

The past few days we have been driving on extremely good, fast PanAm highway through the flat coastal desert, and we decided we needed a change of pace. We also wanted to see the famous Huasacaran National Park, with lots of high peaks, and drive along the Canon del Pato road (so named because it looks like a duck from the air). So we headed inland from Santa. The road immediately got smaller, but was still paved until we had gone some ways inland. We drove through lots of small villages where every single building was made of adobe. Then, suddenly, the road turned to a dirt track, and that’s when the landscape got really beautiful. We felt like we were driving through a Martian landscape – everything was dry, rocky, and red. The road often dropped off precipitously, and sometimes the road had fallen away completely and been re-routed, probably by a bus driver. There were lots of fresh piles of rubble where there had been a tiny landslide, and lots of the trucks had heavy duty grates on top to protect passengers from landslides. We didn’t dally!
The road was really slow, though, and it took us about 9 hours to get from Huanchaco to Yuramarca – check what a small distance that is on the map and imagine our speed. In one of the villages nearing Yuramarca, we were hailed by two women and asked if we could give one of them a ride onwards. We generally don’t mind picking up women hitchhikers, and they looked like they’ve been waiting for a ride for a while. Veronica turned out to be a health worker, an obstetrician, who works in the district, traveling from village to village. Some of the villages only have foot paths leading to them, so she spends a lot of time walking around getting from place to place. Her job demands that she be multitalented – fit enough to hike all over, multilingual, since many people in the area speak Quechua or Aymara rather than Spanish (though that is changing, sadly kids aren’t learning their native language, only Spanish), and good at diagnosing non-obstetric problems, since the area has no doctor, and she has to decide when a case is serious enough to send the person out of the district for more care. What a job!! She was very interesting to talk to. She said that family size in the area used to be 8 or 9 kids, but that 3 or 4 is more the norm now. Apparently many men are still too macho to permit their wives to use birth control, but many take it on the sly anyway. Veronica had also traveled a lot around Peru, more than most people we’ve talked to on our trip. She studied in Lima, and after finishing at college took some time to tour around and get to know her country.

We dropped her off at the health facility in Yuramarca, and she advised us to camp in the Plaza de Armas, saying it was very friendly and safe. It was already an hour after dark, and we hate traveling after dark, so we decided to take her advice. She even offered to guide us through town to find it, which was much appreciated. Yet another super-friendly Peruvian.

As we drove towards the center of town, we heard shouts of ‘gringo’, the first sign that this would be an interesting night. Once we stopped, the crowd started to gather – boys under 10 crowding close and pushing each other closer, girls and their parents a little further away up on a platform for looking out over the hills (or down into the vans of passing tourists), and teenage boys walking by, pretending not to be interested. When we popped the top, some people stepped back and gasped in surprise, never having seen anything like us before. After about 10 minutes, the bravest of the boys had come close enough to start asking questions, and they continued until our dinner was ready, at which point they magically dispersed without having to be asked. Every Latin American we’ve met recognizes that eating is sacred, and no one will ever bother you if you’re trying to eat. After we’d finished eating, they came back, of course, and they never stopped drawing graffiti in the mud on the sides of the car, or peeking in the windows. We finally had to say ‘We want to sleep, please go away’ and shut the door!! We felt like we’d landed the mother ship on an alien planet, and were being besieged by curious natives!

We had a great night’s sleep, and when we opened up in the morning we heard a young girl running down the street shouting ‘They’ve opened it, they’ve opened it!!” and waving her arms. The questions started again. 8) We met the mayor’s assistant, talked a little about the political and economic situation in the village, and then were handed a piece of leaf from a lime tree that was covered with fungus. Apparently about 5 years ago “the plague”, as they call it, started showing up on all of their lime, orange, and mango trees. The fungus covers the leaves, slows photosynthesis, and prevents production of all but the littlest, stunted fruits. One of the village’s main sources of income is its fruit production, so this is a serious problem. The ag extension folks from the local university have come up to see about the problem, but have done nothing but spray chemicals on the plants. This works for a while, but the fungus comes right back. They also really want a solution that doesn’t involve chemical sprays, if at all possible, since they’re concerned about side effects.

I think the fungus is probably a sooty mold, which doesn’t actually penetrate the plant, but lives on the surface feeding on aphid honeydew. So if you can control the insects, you can get rid of the fungus, too. Does anyone out there know of a good way to get rid of aphids? I have the mayor’s assistant’s e-mail, and have promised to send her any information I can gather on how to get rid of “the plague.”

Huanchaco

2007-04-10T12:04:00.000-07:00

We made our way down to a little seaside town called Huanchaco, near Trujillo. A small, sleepy little beach town with a pier and a stock of fishing boats made out of reeds. We found a nice hotel to camp in, called The Garden. They let us park on their lawn next to the pool and use the *hot* shower in one of their rooms. We were tired after our long haul through northern coastal Peru, so we decided to take a weekend day and sleep late, cook eggs for breakfast, and generally chill out. We also needed to plan the next phase of our trip really well, because Beulah is coming to meet us in Cuzco! She said over e-mail that she’s feeling restless, so we suggested she come and meet us for a week or so. She wanted to see Machu Picchu, so she’s meeting us in Cuzco for 10 days and we’re going to tour the ruins and then drive down to Lake Titicaca to look at the floating islands.
The hotel turned out to be one of those gathering places for travelers going overland through South America, too. A truck and camper pulled up, with Texas plates but a lot of British flag stickers. Colin and Liz are from just north of London and have been traveling for 2 years already (!!) and will keep traveling for another 9 months, so they can get all the way to Tierra del Fuego. They’ve already driven through Africa, done a bit of volunteer work in Asia, and then bought their truck/camper in Texas and drove it here. They were really nice to chat to, and we went out for sun downer beer and dinner. Too bad they’re traveling so much slower than we are, it would have been fun to travel with them for a bit.
They had just driven through Colombia, and had some very interesting things to say about it – that it was their favorite Latin American country so far! We steered clear of Colombia on the advice of lots of people who know what they’re talking about, but it sounds like there has been some rapid change for the better in Colombia. They spent 6 weeks driving around and said they felt very safe. They said that their impression was that the security situation had changed a lot in a very short space of time, and that the Columbians they met were enjoying their new freedom to drive around all over the place without fear. They said that everyone was amazed to see tourists, and wherever they went they attracted a lot of attention from friendly people who were curious about their trip. They got asked to join family barbecues a few times, and were always greeted really warmly. They also said that they were in a few places that hadn't seen tourists in 18 years!!!!!!! So if anyone out there is thinking of taking a vacation in Colombia, now might be the right time to do it.

Yikes!

2007-04-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

Of course there's the odd mugger, poor driving technique, and dirty money changers; but one danger that has been very obvious to me, and is rarely discussed, is how amazingly geophysically active our route is. I mean you can take a 20 minute hike and be standing in front of lava, every building has earthquake areas, the guide book says of every town "not leveled by earthquake since ..", and then there's the smoldering volcanoes. We spent several days in Banos, Ecuador at the foot of this smoldering giant. A true testament to how sick I was is that some AP reporter in a far off town took the only photo I have of Tungurahua. On one of my recovery walks we watched it shoot off about half this high, asking a local if we should start running, they non-chalantly said, naw, nothing to worry about...
Yikes

Taken a couple days after we left:

And here's an interesting link. Needless to say the 'glacier covered stratovolcano' no longer had a glacier on it. We also had to wait a couple hours for them to clear a mud/lava flow off the road!
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1502-08=

Follow our route:

Lambayeque

2007-04-02T08:32:00.000-07:00

Well, Peru is seeming a little better. We spent the night in Lambayeque, a little town just north of Chiclayo, and near the site of the famous Tomb of the Señor of Sipan. We found a great little parqueo owned by a friendly family who not only let us spend the night in our car, but wanted to hear about our trip, and even gave us a ceramic donkey as a reminder of their parqueo. Their son, Royal, is about 10, and he and his gang of friends, Marco and David, had endless questions for us. Douglas gave them balloons and instructions on how to make annoying noises with them, and we had a rubber-band war. This morning we found the right kind of workshop to press out the old bushings and press in and spot weld the new ones, so we are all set. We might go and see the town´s other museum before we take off.

Swindled

2007-04-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

Rat bastards. We tried to buy gas today with one of the bigger bills we got from our money changer at the border (nothing different from usual - we always change money at the border with seemingly random guys who wave stacks of bills under our noses), and we were told it was counterfeit!! On closer inspection, it was clearly counterfeit - they´d given us some real, small bills, and we could see the difference. The fake stuff is printed on paper, and some of the numbers were of shoddy quality, and it didn´t have the fancy color-shifting metallic ink in some places. It did have a plastic strip in the middle, and a watermark, and generally appeared genuine. But wasn´t. We got scammed for about $60, and we´re a full day´s drive from the border, so there´s no going back and trying to find the scammers. Rat bastards.

I was really mad, and still can´t curse roundly in Spanish. I tried to get the gas station attendant to teach me some cusswords, but he was too nice and polite. He was to embarrassed to swear. He mumbled a word or two when I insisted, but I would guess they´re equivalent to ´darn´ and ´gosh´. O well. Live and learn.

Bleak

2007-04-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

This will just be a hasty bulletin from the road. North coastal Peru is a bleak desert, and the sun is scorching. There are as many goats as people. We are feeling sad not to be in Ecuador any more. Bright spots: the border was very chill, especially in comparison to Central America, and the plantain chips are fried more, and therefore tastier.

Tonight we are in Piura, in one of the few parqueos that does not double as a chicken run.

Three hours later. We were kicked out of our previous parqueo by a smug, rude attendant. He wouldn´t hear of us staying inside the car for the night like we usually do. We drove in circles and circles around the city, looking for another parqueo that would take us. We tried lots of parking lots, and they kept saying they were full, even though they appeared to be almost empty. We thought we´d been blackballed by the Parqueos of Piura because we hadn´t paid the rude guy for the short time we´d stayed. We were imagining armies of small, speedy minions dashing around town telling parqueo owners "not the white van." We eventually found a parqueo that would take us. Guess which one it is?? Lucky us, it´s the one with lots of chickens. Even luckier, we´re right next to them.

The traffic here is nutty, too. In other cities, either the streets or the avenues had the right of way. Not here. If you want to cross a stream of traffic, you just edge out into it and hope that everyone´s going slow enough to stop before they hit you.

Crab Stacking

2007-04-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

We are like mountain gnomes, or hermits - whenever we have to come down from our hills, we don´t like it. it´s HOT at the coast. I feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of bananas. And the oddest thing. People are selling small purple crabs by the dozen, and they are stacked into perfect cubes. I mean perfect. It seems geometrically impossible. The crabs are, well, crab-shaped. How can they be stacked into cubes? It defies the imagination.
We made it to Guayaquil by driving through Parque Nacional de las Cajas. Misty mountains, small terraced lakes, glittering streams running down green valleys. IT looked like we thought the Andes would look (complete with llamas). It was glorious.

About midafternoon, we got to Guayaquil and got our parts. There´s really no story to this, and that in itself is a story. It all went according to plan. Are we still in Latin America?

After that, we drove some more. It was a day of driving. Of picking cacao by the roadside, and later trying jugo de cacao at a yogurt stand. It tasted like a banana raspberry puree, sweet at first, and then it whacks the back of your tongue with tanginess. Mostly, it was a hot, hot day.

At the end of it, we arrived at Tengual, a little town about 2 hours north of the Peruvian border. When we drove in, a guy in the town square on his mobile loudspeaker (these are common - either bike or car-powered, they let someone drive around town and tell everyone AT VOLUME about Jesus, a party, Jesus, ice cream, or Jesus) asked us what we wanted, were we lost, did we need to go to Guayaquil - all over the loudspeaker, from across the square!! I don´t think out-ot-towners come here often. He gave us directions to the hotel over the loudspeaker, too, even though we were now stopped 2 feet in front of him. He likes his microphone, I guess.

We should have known this didn´t bode well for our night´s sleep. Motorbikes. No mufflers. I think the whole town drove circles around us all night.

They have it!

2007-03-29T13:10:00.000-07:00

Douglas just got off the phone with Guayaquil, and they have the part. Iguanas, here we come! This is a big relief - I´d been having bad images of the wheel falling off while we´re travelling across the Salt Flats in Bolivia, and us dying of dehydration in a dreamscape...

Cuenca

2007-03-29T12:56:00.000-07:00

Douglas is feeling much better, hooray. So yesterday we decided to leave Baños, that cute little town of cafes just like the Naam in Vancouver, and head south to Cuenca. We estimated it would take us about 4 or maybe 5 hours to get here, based on Lonely Planet bus times, but we weren´t counting on the tiny little goat track that crossed the foggy Andes. It was a hard day of driving. The road to Cuenca only got paved in the 60´s, and I don´t think it´s been paved since. Add to that the fog, which was sometimes so thick we thought we might be upside down or maybe driving straight up the side of the mountain. It was completely disorienting. The few moments when the fog cleared were like revelations - we sat straight up, with wide eyes and remembered that we were really in the world, and not transported to some weird foggy dimension.

The trip was worth it, though. Cuenca is a truly charming city. It´s the 3rd biggest in Ecuador, but it´s really not very big. It has a lot of intact colonial architecture, and the folks here are very fashion-conscious. There seems to be a big artist community, too. I´ve seen lots of graphic design storefronts. All in all we like it. There´s some really tasty food here, too. We just had lunch at a Colombian place. Arepas (which are like thick corn tortillas, very crisp on the outside) with fried eggs, and a plantain that was totally flattened out, fried, and topped with avocado, fried tomatoes, and a bit of salty cheese. Delicious.

Unfortunately, we´re having some trouble with the van. The bushing on the right front wheel is worn, and so the wheel is a bit wobbly and makes a funny noise. Gr. We´re having a lot of trouble finding the right part, too. It´s been the usual odyssey. We got bounced around from little repair shop to little repair shop, and finally found the VW dealership. Of course they didn´t have anything for such an old car as ours, and seemed to want us to leave as quickly as possible. I think they were worried we would tarnish their image. They directed us to some more small shops, who directed us to a guy who has a VW workshop in his backyard. He told us he could fabricate a part for us, but Douglas is skeptical. Someone else told us there´s a guy who specializes in Westfalias in Guayaquil, so we might be going back to visit the iguanas. Douglas is calling them right now. Guayaquil´s not too far, though, and we liked it, so it wouldn´t be so bad. It´s not even really that much out of the way. If they have the right part, I think we´ll be off.

And, a personal triumph - I´m about a third of the way through Harry Potter number 2 in Spanish!!! It gets a little easier to read every time I pick it up. I still need a dictionary by my side, of course. And I spend most of my time reading English books. But I´m determined to finish it before the end of the trip.

Speaking of books, we found a really excellent book exchange/used book store in dontown Cuenca. It's called ABC Books, and is run by a former English teacher, an expat American. They have an absolutely amazing selection - this might be the best bookstore we've found on the whole trip. They're right near the flower market - check them out.

strange

2007-03-26T16:11:00.000-07:00

Douglas just pointed out a painting hanging in the internet cafe. It´s Renaissance-style religious, but there´s a UFO above Baby Jesus´ head - I think he´s just been beamed down. Weird.

This town is also famous for paintings of people being saved from automobile accidents by the Virgin of the Holy Water. Will have to check those out, too.

the curse of Baños

2007-03-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

We´re in Baños, a little town famous for its ecotourism and its thermal baths. Hence the name, Baños, which means thermal baths. But baño also means bathroom. Which brings me to the curse. Last time we tried to come here, after Salinas, I got so terribly sick (probably a virus, the kind you had when you were a kid that gave you diarrhea and a fever and made you puke). So we didn´t make it to Baños. We stayed in Guaranda, and then headed north. But I visited the baño plenty of times.

Now we´re actually in Baños, and Douglas has exactly what I had last week. Poor thing. He´s over the fever, and is on the mend. And here we are in Baños, always looking for the baños. sigh.

Saquisili,Cotopaxi, Otavalo

2007-03-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

The last few days have been taken up with lots of marketing. And I mean lots. Take a look at our most recent photo upload, and you´ll see where we´ve been. Animal markets, stepping around pigs and pig poo. I almost got run over by a giant pig. And I´m in textile overload. Each market has had a big ´tourist´ section where they sell ponchos, wall hangings, stripey sweaters, carved gourds, etc. It´s all beautiful stuff, but we´ve been feeling too overwhelmed by the vendors and the sheer amount of stuff to really buy anything. Douglas got a dark grey alpaca sweater with little llamas around the cuffs. And I got a big sheepswool poncho that´s pretty much like a blanket with a hood. All the indigenous men wear ponchos here with much panache. I´m not quite sure how they don´t get themselves all tangled up like I do. Well, i´m working on it.

We also spent a night at Cotopaxi, a volcano just south of Quito. It´s the rainy season, so we had the park to ourselves. Alpine meadows full of oddly familiar plants (purple lupine, heather, and indian paintbrush). We never actually saw the top of Cotopaxi, because it was covered in clouds the whole time. Actually, *we* were covered in clouds most of the time. It´s amazing how often we´ve been at cloud level on this trip. Ecuador really is heaven...

Epiphany

2007-03-26T14:53:00.000-07:00

So, at our wedding, Mark and Erika were doing this crazy thing. They were sitting down with maps and planning out their route home. They highlighted things, figured out how far apart things were, and decided what they wanted to see in the time they had.

hm.

Up until now, we´ve been militantly anti-plan. We´re lucky if we skim the guidebook the day after we arrive in a country. And it´s been working out OK. But we´ve felt rushed the whole time, like we were supposed to be somewhere further south already.

So the other day, we did a revolutionary thing. We took out our maps (Harry and Doris sold us some buenissimo German maps, so now we have maps of places we haven´t been yet) and we planned out our trip.

wow.

It´s revolutionized everything. We feel like we know where we´re going. We know when we plan to get there. We´ve figured out what we want to see, and where we want to go. And we should, gods and roads willing, be able to see it all and still get to Brazil before money and time run out. And it´s amazingly relaxing!! We don´t feel like we´re supposed to be somewhere else anymore!!

wow.

Lago Quilotoa and the Posada

2007-03-26T14:44:00.000-07:00

We´ve been having pretty quiet adventures this week. It´s been all about a leisurely drive through Ecuador. Nothing is very far away, the people are chill, and we´ve been here long enough that we feel like we have it figured out (two whole weeks!). After we left Guaranda, we went north a few hours to drive around the famous Quilotoa Loop. This is a loop of road just south of Quito, high in the mountains, and fairly isolated because of the bad condition of the road.

The scenery was spectacular. Every mountainside, no matter how steep, had small farms and sheep and sheepherders just barely clinging to it. I really don´t know how they don´t all slide off. It boggles the mind.

We stayed at a small posada, that we happened upon just as dark was falling. Well, maybe it was a bit after, and we´d already spent a harrowing hour driving in the dark, with headlights that just barely work and smell like burning electricity when they do, not knowing where we would spend the night. But maybe it was just as dark was falling. 8) We were greeted in the driveway by Magdalena, one of the owners, and her son, Pablo. We agreed to camp, and they invited us in to sit by the fire and drink some tea. It was practically like being at home!!

The posada is also a working farm, and they have all kinds of fascinating old machinery still running. Douglas was most taken with the antique shower that runs on alcohol. You pour in 1/3 of a cup of alcohol, start the water, and light it on fire. If you let the water just barely dribble out, it gets pretty hot. Not my favorite shower ever, but I think it just might be Douglas´ all-time-favorite. In the top 5 at least.

We got to check out the cow milking, the llama riding, the water-powered turbine. And we were treated to the fabulous fresh-made-on-the-farm food, from cheese to yogurt flavored with coconut to fresh eggs. It was fantastic. Needless to say, we decided to stay one more night and take a hike down to Lago Quilotoa. We also got to attend our first ever dinner party entirely in spanish - there were a 4 other travellers there, and the best common language was spanish, with occasional bits of english and italian thrown in (the finnish woman didn´t try to say anything to us in finnish).

All in all, one of our favorite places.

Guaranda

2007-03-26T14:33:00.000-07:00

After we came down from Chimborazo, we spent a couple more days in Guaranda, waiting for me to recuperate. That was some virus. Guaranda is a sleepy town in the mountains, not touristy at all, though famous for its cheese. It was really nice to spend a bit of time in a town not geared towards tourists. We got to see Ecuadorians going about their usual business. And the Ecuadorians got to see us going about our not-so-usual business! Lots of people were curious about us, and it was fun to have the tables turned for once.

We were parked on the street, buying cheese, maybe. Douglas was outside the van, lashing something down with our endless supply of rope. I was sitting inside, snacking no doubt. School had just let out, and hordes of schoolkids in their brown uniforms were milling around town. A gaggle of girls walked past our van, in their white kneesocks and pleated skirts. They were pretty curious about what might be inside this strange contraption, and they all stopped to peer inside, pressing their noses right up against the glass. They must not have seen me, or thought I didn´t see them, and they were totally unabashed, looking and pointing and exclaiming. I was watching them in the side mirror, unobserved and really amused. They finally finished looking, and turned to head down the street. One girl turned for a last look, and caught sight of me grinning in the mirror, and then they all fell down laughing in a heap on the sidewalk.

We also stopped outside of town to pick up a few pieces of junk wood for levelling the van (it drives Douglas nuts if we have to park at a bit of an angle, and it makes it hard to cook). The guy at the wood/cabinet place thought we were just fascinating. He couldn´t believe we´d driven that far, and after he sold us the wood bits, he stepped away a bit and started snapping photos of us with his camera phone!! I can´t tell you how delighted I was that someone was taking pictures of us!! We´ve spent so much time on this trip taking sly pictures of other people!!

16,000 feet

2007-03-18T16:05:00.002-07:00

We tried to spend last night at the Chimborazo base camp and failed. We should have known better than to try and sleep where no one lives and even the vicuna population (wild relative of llamas and alpacas) thins out!! At 4:19am we had to bail because of mountain sickness. We fled the mountain with the van top still up and dinner leftovers skittering around on the stove.

It started out as a good day. I was feeling better, though hollow and light as a feather. We were tired of the hotel room (more likely we were scared our brains would rot because of too much TV – we watched heaps of it the day before, half in Spanish and half in English – nature shows on Colombian birds, several episodes of Heroes, not a bad show if not for the brain-eating subplot, and a movie with Tom Cruise as a hitman) and wanted to move on to another town, not too far away, just in the rainshadow so everything wouldn’t be so wet.

We piled into the van and took off for Chimborazo, a nearby volcano that is also the point on the earth closest to the sun (something to do with the earth’s bulge, ask Douglas). There’s a fauna reserve there, and we thought it would be a nice quiet place to spend the night (ha!!). The drive up was spectacular. As the road went up and up through green mountains, the afternoon rain and fog set in, only to vanish abruptly just as Chimborazo came into view. The mountain stops all clouds in their tracks, and just on the other side the landscape is dry and sunny.

As Chimborazo loomed, we also started to see what we thought were particularly cute llamas, but later found out are vicunas (Douglas says he knew this all along), a wild relative of llamas and alpacas with particularly fine hair. The Inca ruler would only wear clothes made out of vicuna hair; everyone else had to settle for alpaca. We stopped and took endless vicuna pictures, then finally made our way up to the base camp, where climbers attempting Chimborazo’s summit stay to acclimatize to the altitude. We should have known that somewhere so high wouldn’t be healthy, but it didn’t occur to us that somewhere we could *drive* to could make us so sick!!

The base camp was nice in a rugged, snowy moonscape sort of way. We whiled away a few hours looking around, making some food, etc. Douglas went for a bikeride, and we cooked dinner when he came back. We were feeling kind of short of breath, but we figured that if we just drank lots of water and didn’t run around too much we’d be OK. Shortly after dinner we both started to feel bad (splitting headaches), and decided to head down the mountain a bit, to where the main road turns off to the base camp. We stopped there and tried to sleep, but our headaches got increasingly worse. Douglas couldn’t sleep at all, and then he started to feel really nauseous. At 4:19am, we couldn’t take it anymore and bailed.

We’ve spent the day recovering, parked on the side of the road just outside of Guaranda, on the way to Salinas (the chocolate/cheese/sweater town). We’ve had a nice rainy sort of day, puttering around in the van and doing all the projects we were putting off at the end of the Central American leg of the trip, worried that we might never see the van again. Tomorrow, probably, we’ll be off to Banos, a small town that’s a hub of mountain biking/trekking activity. Apparently they have some cafes that show movies every night at 8pm, and some good book exchanges, so we’ll both have something to do. Finding good books is turning out to be way harder in South America than it was in Central America – I wish I had bought more when I had the chance.

Side note: on the next trip like this I will pack a hefty supply of rooster poison.

Salinas

2007-03-18T16:05:00.001-07:00

Driving north out of Guayaquil we enjoyed the rice paddies and the Andes looming ever closer in the mist. We filled up with diesel for $1/gal and soon began climbing out of the heat. At the first road side stand with red banana looking things we stopped. We had seen these on the way down from Quito, and were excited to discover what they are. Moranos. Kim said they taste as if someone took the banana out and made it into banana pudding and put it back in. They are seriously yummy. I asked what this other round green thing was and as she was telling me was cutting one open. Zapote. At first I didn’t like it because of the sweet morano taste in my mouth, but it’s a bit like the cross of a mango and a melon. Onto my second piece of zapote I started to enjoy it.

Passing through Guaranda we started asking for the turn off for Salinas, a small mountain village known for their cheese, chocolate and sweaters. A very enthusiastic policeman told us that the turn off was in just a few kilometers. Have I mentioned how nice everyone one is here? At the turn off a pickup truck with 5 policeman hotboxing told us this was the right road.

After about 10 kilometers the road was covered by a landslide. There was a path through, but I wasn’t sure if it was safe. Night had fallen so I hopped out with the MagLite to check out the scene. Sinking to my ankles in mud I thought we might not be making it to Salinas. Kim and I had a good laugh about the 5 policman laughing at us ‘yup, this is the road, ha ha ha ha.’ As we deliberated what to do a pickup came up and they just drove right through, and emboldened, we followed. At the next mud slide that covered the road they got a bit stuck making me nervous. Luckily we have 400 lbs of books over the back wheels and just plowed right through! Go Tortuga.

Salinas was a very cute little town and we slept next to the town square. The bells of the church started going at 5:30 so we got an early start to the day. We decided to do a hike to some neighboring villages in the morning and see the artisans’ houses during the rainy afternoon. Unfortunately on our hike Kim started feeling sick. After a few trips to the public washroom I struck out to find her a hotel room. As luck would have it, a large group was in town for the weekend and all 2 hotels were full. So we started heading back to Guaranda, were we are now. After a nasty afternoon and a good night’s sleep Kim is feeling better, talking about food and markets. We’re still not sure what she ate/had, but we reallyreally hope it doesn’t happen again.

Getting the Van out of its box

2007-03-18T16:04:00.001-07:00

Our Hapag Lloyd representative, Fidel, was very helpful and spent lots of time with us. Although we have discovered that no one person seems to know what the entire process is, maybe that’s what the ‘Agents’ are all about. We decided to try and save the $150+ on agent fees and go it alone. Fidel originally told us Tortuga would be unloaded on Thursday, and after a relaxing morning of humitas and coffee we checked our email. Fidel wrote to say the container would be opened at 12, today, Wednesday. It was now 10 and we were not ready for this, as the previous day was a wash as we didn’t have the proper stamps (again more stamps) on our Bill of Laden when we went to customs. Today, however, we were armed with stamps and photocopies and money. We took a cab to the private port of Inarpi which is about 15 minutes by cab from the main port, and customs. They managed to rustle up some safety vests and hard hats for us and were led back to the bodega, a customs warehouse for loose goods. The hour wait passed quickly watching the dock workers zipping around in forklifts and container lifts. We noticed Tortuga’s container, stacked on 2 others, right outside the bodega. When they finally picked it up and placed it on the ground we were amazed at how gently it was handled. Opening the box was uneventful and it felt wonderful to drive the van again, I’ve had enough of cheap hotel and eating out 3x a day. This was short lived though as I had to drive it into the bodega and begin the customs procedure. Here’s a short synopsis for those interested:

After they unloaded the van a snotty guy, Romi, inspected the van and filled out a Traja. He insisted that I did not need a copy of this for customs but we did, which involved a cab back to Inarpi and waiting an hour for Romi to finally produce it.
With Carnet de Passage (FAI), Passport, Title, Traja, Bill of Laden (with the stamp we got from Transoceania in Guayaquil), list of car contents, and we had a letter from Transoceanica explaining that we are tourists and this is a used car in transit, go to the subgerencia office in the port’s customs office, not the main customs office that’s on the way to the port.

While Romi was inspecting the car a customer service lady at Inarpi said that it would take at least 5 days to get the van out, it was a terribly lengthy process, this is a bureaucratic country and we could not expect to see the van before Monday. This torpedoed our hearts, as we were hoping to have the van out in a day or two. She smiled at us sympathetically and offered us the number of a customs agent who could help us. Funny, he was listed in her phone under ‘Papi’. When we showed up 6 hours later with all of our paperwork completed, she looked pretty sheepish…

We got to the subgerencia as soon as they got back from lunch at 1400. The austere disposition of the guards was countered by jovial atmosphere inside. They said that the Carnet *is* needed when I specifically asked. The ‘tramete’, or paper work needed to get the van out, requires 3 stamps and 3 signatures. The last one being the boss, who, as bosses always are, was in a meeting. We took a stroll around the port enjoying the iguanas and brilliant yellow birds and went back as instructed in 30 minutes. Success. What happened next was a whirlwind tour of the bowels of the customs building. There was photocopying, lawyers’ signatures, we were introduced as our host’s long time friend at one point to get our papers processed ahead of a LARGE stack of others and then, finally, we were spat out again into the bright Ecaudorian sunshine with what we presumed to be everything we needed.

We returned to the Inarpi port and our hero, Javier Delgado, was astonished that we did that so quickly. He wouldn’t believe us that we did it by ourselves. Even Kim was saying that my childhood in the developing world has honed my skills of pushing, with a smile, at just the right time to get that last stamp.

So, why is Javier the hero? Well, he knew exactly what needed to be done, and he was hell-bent on getting the car out that same day. He pushed our papers through the right windows, asked for the right stamps, convinced the bank guy that the bank wasn’t actually closed yet (phew!) and then, remember Romi, well he would not release the car. No reason given. So Javier managed to go over his head and get the final bodega signature.

We really wanted to do something for Javier, we even bought him a bottle of booze, but then felt a bit funny about going back to Inarpi to give a customs officer a gift. Hopefully you’re reading this Javier and know how much we appreciated all your help.

The final moments were the best. I was in the van and drove up to the gate. Kim was on the outside and I was feeling a lot like I was getting out of the joint. Another customs guy walked up to me and asked if I drove the van in, I said no, it came in on a boat and he simply said, ‘well, you can’t leave then’ and walked off. Harrumph. Luckily 4 or 5 semis started piling up behind me so a sense of urgency happened (this is a rare thing and I basked in its presence). I produced a photocopy of some stamps and before I knew it we were driving in Ecuador.

The whole process cost: $100 to Transoceanica for printing the B/L and handling fees (not sure why this was charged and felt like we double paid). $70 bodega and inspection fees. $30 cab fees (misinformation made for a lot of cab rides)

The whole process, once we knew when the container was being opened took about 6 hours. Everyone, except Rommy, was incredibly friendly and helpful. If you don’t speak decent Spanish, I would recommend a customs agent.

Reunited

2007-03-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

We got the van out of its container yesterday, safe and sound!! It´s parked in the hotel´s garage, and after one last visit with the iguanas and a quick look at the local market, we´re heading up into the cool green mountains...

more later on the details of getting the van out of the port - it was an adventure, as usual!

Guayaquil

2007-03-13T19:27:00.000-07:00

The guidebook and other travellers told us that Guayaquil was another dirty, hot, nasty port town not really worth spending time in. We weren´t looking forward to it. But they were completely wrong! Guayaquil is fantastic, especially after the bombed-out port towns of Panama.

But let me back up a little. From Riobamba we took a train ride down the Devil´s Nose to a little town called Alausi. It was incredibly touristy - four boxcars, the roofs packed with gringos, countless vendors walking up and down the train roofs selling Oreos and alpaca mittens. The train didn´t actually *go* anywhere, either - the train line ended at Alausi, and then most people turned around and went back to Riobamba. It was incredibly scenic, though, and everyone we passed seemed to get a real kick out of watching the crazy gringos who prefer to ride on the roof. 8)

From there we took a 6-hour busride to Guayaquil, crossing the Andes for the first time. Most of the trip was on a narrow dirt road, and we passed two other trucks in six hours. Shortly after we left Alausi we entered a surreal misty green world. The fog was so thick we could only see a few feet from the bus, and everything was GREEN. The road was narrow and wet, and the ground dropped away from the bus just inches from the wheels, steeply down and down for hundreds of green feet. The bus stopped heaps of times to let people off in what seemed like the exact same middle-of-nowhere place - it was just a wall of mist and some green slopes. I have no idea how people knew where they were. At one point, a teenage kid who had been sleeping in a careless sprawl at the front of the bus woke up and asked us where we were, and we could only laugh.

Finally we came down into Guayaquil. It was raining, and how. The streets were filling up with water, and the taxi driver charged us extra to go out in the rain. It just started to rain as I´m typing this - this is the third night in a row. It´s like the peak of a Durham thunderstorm, but it continues for hours, never letting up. The streets fill with rain, then the sidewalks - ankle deep puddles everywhere. Everyone just continues with their business. I finally see the utility of the latina shoes - little strappy sandals with 4 inch heels. Only their toes get wet!!

Guayaquil is great. There´s a park full of iguanas. Giant iguanas, some of them 3 feet long. The roam around and stare down little kids for their snacks, climb trees and have naps, fall out of the trees because they´re sleeping, land on their feet, and go in search of something to munch on. They´re fantastic, and the park is a local hangout - everyone goes there with their kids to check out the iguanas. The juice is great here, too - the default flavor for just about everything is blackberry, which is probably my favorite fruit, after guanabana.

We can´t quite get over how nice it is here. The city is big and modern and chill, like Quito. Loads of people are out roaming around the streets at all hours (something we never saw in Central America). There´s a long boardwalk along the Rio Guayas with nice views of the river and the city, ice cream vendors, juice sellers, fountains, and loads of people out enjoying the day. The streets are wide, and the sidewalks are even wider. We keep saying we feel like we´re in a latin version of Vancouver.

We´ve spent a couple of days finding the shipping company, getting the bill of lading from them, going out to the customs office, etc. The boat with La Tortuga on it docked today, and they say they´ll open the containers on Thursday. We´re hoping to finish our customs stuff tomorrow, and set La Tortuga free on Thursday as early as possible. We miss the van!!

We just saw a bad movie at the multiplex and we´re off to have some dinner and beer, at a respectable latin hour (10pm). I think the people here are my people. Things open late (9, 9:30), everyone speaks very softly, eats late, and every second store is a cake shop. Ahhhh. Who could ask for more?

Doo doo de doo doo, Guanabana

2007-03-13T19:22:00.000-07:00

It's the next day and I think I've acclimated to the altitude. Maybe now I can say something a little more coherent about our first few days in Ecuador - I think last night's entry was just gleeful rambling!

We spent the morning walking around the craft market in Quito, checking out the stripey sweaters, the alpaca ponchos, the wonderful wall hangings and rugs. We bought handfuls of fingerpuppets in every possible shape - the wicked witch of the west, marge simpson, a lion, a gnome, a snail, a lizard with another lizard on its back. We're hoping to come back when we have the van and get some small paintings. There were some lovely watercolors, and interesting abstract paintings. It was the calmest market we've been in yet - there was no music, no chickens, just peace and quiet. Most amazingly, when we told the vendors that we were solo mirando, just looking, they said 'o, ok' instead of trying harder to sell us something. I don't think I had realised how much the hot chaos, the body armor and machine guns of Central America were stressing me out. The Andes are chill in every sense - vibrantly green, cool mountain air, and a real sense of calm.

I'm surprised how many kinds of fresh fruit juice are available in such a cool mountainous climate. But then I suppose that Ecuador has everything, from hot coast to cool mountains to Amazonian jungle, so it's probably not hard to get the fruit. I had guanabana-coconut for breakfast, guanabana for lunch, and guava for dinner (I tried to get guanabana again, but they didn't have it). And when I say fresh, I mean that you hear them turn on the blender after you order it. The juice is pure fruit, so thick that a straw will stand up straight in it - as thick as a really good milkshake. Douglas has discovered a new favorite fruit, called tomate de arboles, or tree tomato. It looks like a roma tomato, but pinker, and it tasted like a cross between...passionfruit and papaya, maybe? amazingly good. We bought some whole ones for the train ride tomorrow, so we'll try to take some pictures.

We took a very sedate and scenic bus ride this afternoon from Quito to Riobamba. Isn't that a great name for a town? Riobamba. It's a bit less happening than it sounds, but still has a vibrant evening scene. Everyone in town, I think, is out eating ice cream or window-shopping for cell phones or getting groceries, or making out in the park. Busy, busy, busy.

The bus ride was scenic, as the road went straight south between the two Andean cordilleras. There were mountains and volcanoes on both sides. The mountainsides are farmed incredibly high up the mountains, so they look like they've been spread with very green patchwork quilts. Another very striking visual is the indigenous women in their fedora-like hats. I wish I could look that stylish in a man's hat. Pictures soon.

Tomorrow morning we are waking up early to take the train down the Devil's Nose. The train tracks were apparently very difficult to build, and are billed as the Most Difficult Railroad in the World!! It's a 5-hour ride, and we'll ride on the roof of the train to get a better view. There are handrails, I think, so hopefully we won't fall off.

Last night at dinner, we were at a somewhat fancy restaurant, having palm heart ceviche and sangria and fried mashed potatoes. There was live music, too, two guys playing guitars and pipes, traditional Andean music. We were munching away and half-listening to the music, enjoying it, and then I realised that I recognized the song - they were doing an ABBA cover! Fernando, on Andean pipes.

Tomorrow night we should be in Guayaquil, the port town where La Tortuga should arrive on Monday or Tuesday. Hopefully we will be able to pick her up without hitches... keep your fingers crossed for us!!

Quito, Ecuador

2007-03-09T18:44:00.000-08:00

We are both oscillating with excitement to actually be here, south of the bulge, new continent, more things to see. The most striking things so far are beautiful people, dark skin, great noses framed with strong cheekbones. And the food. We ate the carbohydrate equivalent of a mango today, a humita. And the altitude. The walkway off the plane was like running up an escalator in the wrong direction, except nothing was moving, and I think it was downhill. The guy with the neat hat passed us like we weren´t moving, must be from here.

Kim here now. I think this is my favorite place I´ve ever been. The food is amazing. I didn´t know corn could taste so many different ways. The humita was like a tamale, but sweet, and something else that we can´t identify, and it tasted more like corn than corn ever has. Douglas says I´m being premature saying this is my favorite place ever, and maybe it´s a little hasty after only 8 hours. Maybe that´s true. But I don´t think so. Quito is nestled in the Andes, more green than I expected. It´s also more modern, and less like Central America than I expected. There are Canadian-style buses running around town. I haven´t seen a single farm animal yet. And we went to an art market that was absolutely incredible.

d here| They´ve just fired up a bonfire on the sidewalk across the street (so much for being like Canada) in front of a cafe, so we´re off.

Panama Canal

2007-03-08T15:18:00.000-08:00

To watch 60,000 tons effortlessly move up 55 feet is quite something. We spent a few hours watching ships move through the Pedro Miguel locks and were pleased to be the only gringos.

The next morning we went to Miraflores locks, one of the largest due to the magnitude of the Pacific tides. We paid the $5 to climb 4 (air-conditioned) flights of stairs to the observation platform. This gave us an amazing vantage point to see both flights of the locks, or esclusas in Spanish, as a large container ship moved through, and UP 55 feet.

Read the Wikipedia info for more details, but the jist of it is they close the 7 story, 662 ton gates and then dump 26.7 million U.S. gallons into the thousand foot long lock. They do this twice at Miraflores to raise the ship the 55 feet. The hinges on the doors weigh 17 tons each! And, the only pump used is a 25hp hydraulic motor to move the gates back and forth as the water is gravity fed. The water culverts are large enough to drive a train through and move the 30 million gallons in 8 minutes. Needless to say, we were both very sun burnt by the time I had had enough of watching this amazing marvel of engineering.

The Mitsubishi mules run on a cogged track and have winches for the lines. They only guide the ship through and the clearance between the ship and the lock made me think those guys knew what the were doing. There were 6 mules on the ships we watched, 4 up front and 2 in the back.

It all looked like a choreographed John Travolta movie, and even the guys on the ships looked like they were enjoying it, lots of waving in both directions.

Notes on the tooth

2007-03-08T06:28:00.000-08:00

A quick note, for those of you (my mom) who are maybe concerned about my tooth. We are flying to Quito via San Jose, and will stop over there for a day so I can see Dr. Marco again, so he can fix my tooth. It actually turned out to be cheaper that way, amazingly. Imagine this: flying from Panama City to Quito, direct: $470. Flying from San Jose to Quito, direct: $470. Flying from Panama City to San Jose, stopping there for a day, and then flying on to Quito: $330. Go figure. But it works out perfectly for us!!

Stuffing la Tortuga

2007-03-08T06:25:00.000-08:00

Stuffing! It reminds me of Thanksgiving, and makes me feel all festive!

The van is tied down inside a 40-foot long orange container somewhere in Puerto Manzanillo, and we are sitting in the airport in Panama City, waiting for our flight. It all went well. Boris and the rest of the port guys were friendly and full of questions about our honeymoon, and we didn’t get mugged in Colon like all the guidebooks said we would. All in all, a successful day. Plus, we got to see the inner workings of a huge port city. It was surreal. I’ve never seen such huge machinery. Odd to think that this is how most things get from place to place, and that most of the stuff in your house has probably been inside a container.

And maybe best of all, we took a taxi ride from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, across a continent!!

Here is a summary of what we did to ship the car. The process seems totally impenetrable at first, but is actually pretty simple. The hardest part is finding a shipping company.

Here are the steps:

1. Arrive in Panama City, spend a few hours talking to Evelyn at Barwil Agencies, conveniently located on Balboa Avenue, near Avenida Federico Boyd. If you’re coming into Panama from the west, it’s just past the yacht club.

2. Go to the police stations, where they inspect your car. Then go the Secretary General’s office, to get the PTJ (policia technical judicial). Then go to the customs office where they will stamp your passport so you can leave the country without your car. Get lots of official stamps. This takes about 3 hours, and according to Evelyn, is best accomplished in the morning.

3. Go to the bank and get cash or a cashier’s cheque to pay Barwil because they do not take plastic. We got cash advances on two Visas from HSBC, just around the corner from Barwil, because ATMs would not give us enough $ all in one day.

4. Go back to Barwil with your paperwork and your wads of cash. Spend another hour or two, emerge with your Bill of Lading, maps of the port, instructions, and Evelyn’s cellphone number in case of emergency. They also let us use their computers/internet to book our flights online.

5. Wake up early to drive to the port, get there as close to 8am as possible. For us, this meant something like 9:30, but whatever. The container wasn’t ready until 10:30 or 11:00 anyway.

6. Go to the Barwil office in Manzanillo (finding it is a whole other saga – imagine mazes of containers stacked so high they make Mack trucks look tiny, with honking horns and people milling around everywhere). There was no sign on the highway, we just went towards the first big cranes we saw from the highway. Get your container number and seal (a weirdly delicate doodad made of plastic and metal – it’s the equivalent of a wax seal, and serves only to prove that the container wasn’t opened while it was being shipped. We also put our own padlock on the container to make extra sure it isn’t opened). The seal number is on the bill of lading and it must match.

7. Take your paperwork to the customs window at the port. Collect many more stamps – several for each of the 4 copies of Bill of Lading. This is the window where all the drivers are loitering, left and around the corner from where they issue visitor badges. Take ID other than your passport in exchange for an ID badge.

8. Go to the next window (Almacenaje), pay $9 if you’re lucky, $105 if you’re not. Don’t ask us the difference. We were lucky. Neil, an American moving to Venezuela, wasn’t. More later on Neil’s amazing stories about Venezuela, involving bags of gold nuggets, guns, and drug smuggling.

9. Get car checked by K-9 security guy (he just peeked inside and said ‘nice’).

10. Have a lovely lunch at the port’s restaurant (thanks, Neil) because all the port employees are having lunch, too, so you might as well, because you can’t get anything done for the next hour.

11. Wait around a bit more.

12. Meet Boris, a very friendly port official. Drive out to another port office, lost in a maze of stacked containers and the biggest machinery I’ve ever seen. Accomplish something totally mysterious. Drive onward with Boris.

13. Arrive at your container!! Ours was orange, and 40 feet long (Barwil didn’t have a smaller one available, and this one cost the same). Check the container number, make sure it matches your paperwork. Drive the car in, watch as port employees nail wooden blocks to the floor of the container to hold your car still during shipping. Be amazed that the wooden floor of the container is made of huge planks of wood more beautiful than the floors in your house, probably teak or mahogany. Watch as the port guys tie your car down with string (see photos).

That’s it!! The whole stuffing procedure took most of the day. We left Panama City at 8am, arrived in Manzanillo at 9:30, were finished with stuffing by 2:30, and at the Panama City airport by 4:30.

We highly recommend working with Evelyn Batista at Barwil. She was incredibly efficient and helpful. We originally wanted to ship from Costa Rica via RoRo (supposed to cost $500), but that proved impossible. If you are trying this in the near future, head rrrrrecto to Panama City and contact Evelyn. Our container ended up costing $1550, which is more than we wanted to spend, but it didn’t break the bank, so, o well. All of the other travelers we’ve met along the way have turned up at Barwil, leading us to believe that they are currently the *only* way to ship a car past the Darien Gap.

Overall, the process took us 2 weeks. We e-mailed Evelyn on Friday Feb 23, she replied the following Monday, and had quotes and dates for us by Thursday March 1. We drove to Panama City over the weekend, met with her on Monday midday, did our Panama City paperwork on Tuesday, stuffed the car on Wednesday, and will be in Quito Friday night if all goes well. The van should sail on Friday, too, and should arrive either Monday night or Tuesday morning in Guayaquil, and we should be there to meet her (Guayaquil port has no free days – they charge you for every day your car is waiting for you).

We found a newspaper in the Barwil office that listed a bunch of other shipping agents that we hadn’t been able to find previously. Here are some of them. This list is totally unscreened – we don’t know where they ship to, or if they ship cars, or anything – but they’d be worth checking out if you’re trying to ship a car.

www.anchorpanama.com
www.agenco.com
www.steamshipsagent.com
www.euro-line-logistics.com
www.boydsteamships.com
www.cbfenton.com
www.hamburgsud.com
www.crowley.com
chinasshipping@csaca.com
www.coscopan.com
www.cma-cgm.com
www.maersksealand.com
www.molpower.com
www.norton-lilly.com
www.panalpina.com
www.seaboardmarine.com
www.servinaves.com.pa
www.unigreen.com
www.italialine.com

Panama City - 4 year or 7 year?

2007-03-06T17:57:00.000-08:00

It’s Tuesday March 6, and we’re in the offices of Barwil Agencies, ready to pay them and get the final paperwork for shipping the car. At Barwil we have run into Doris and Harry, the Germans who traveled from Nova Scotia to Alaska, then south to Guatemala (we met them camped by the side of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala and see them every other week it seems). They unfortunately have to ship their car home, because it has too many broken springs to continue their holiday in South America. Yes, the roads are THAT bad here! We all spent the morning going from police office to Secretary General and back and then to the customs office, and now we have all the paperwork that we need. It wasn’t so terrible, less than three hours and I even got to sign for Harry and Dorris’ car as there was some mistake and they had already moved on to the next step. Never mind that my signature doesn’t have ANYTHING to do with them leaving the country, there were LOTS of stamps to make it all OK. We are getting used to navigating Panama City (rather, Douglas is getting used to it – I seem to have a strange unconscious fascination with crossing La Puente de las Americas, the bridge across the canal, even when it’s not really on our way…), and have found two good places to sleep. Finding spots to sleep in the city can be really tricky. Not all the hotels have parking spaces, hotels being our standby up north, and even when they do, they’re inevitably tiny and we are cramped. We spent the first night at the National Park 20 km north of the city, right next to the ranger station, very tranquil, thank you Lucas. We even saw a HUGE toucan in the morning. When I asked the ranger what they eat he said, rice, bread, vegetables, whatever they had left over, not the answer I was expecting. Last night we slept at the Balboa Yacht Club, out on the prosperous western edge of the city, also very tranquil with a great view of the Canal. Kim wondered where all the fancy yachts were, and on my daily bike ride, I found them. Out beyond the Smithsonian Tropical Studies buildings and dock there were many, very bling boats. The ride was great, the wind coming off the Pacific was pushing me at mach speed on the way out and gave me a great workout on the wonderful boardwalk on the way back.

Panama City is a great city, completely out of place down here. The buildings are (mostly) all new and incredibly tall. And everyone is super friendly. Driving here is sorta like pushing your way into a concert, except in cars. Everyone jostles along and it all works out, and of course there's a cacophony of horns.

You are no doubt wondering about the title. At the grocery store tonight, we were wondering down an isle and lo and behold, they're sampling the yummy Nicaraguan Rum, Flor de Cana! I was asked whether I wanted the 4 year or the 7 year, of course I had to try both. Yum:)

Well, we have to stuff the car early tomorrow on the other side of the continent. Wow, what a great sentence. Yes, it does seem like the official term for putting your car into a container is stuffing, and I hope it’s not that tight of a fit! And yes we’re going to drive across the continent for a 9 am meeting! I was planning on riding my bike to the port, a 70km jaunt, but the timing is not going to allow it . But how cool would that be, riding your bike from the Pacific to the Atlantic, all before lunch!

We are going to ‘stuff’ the car, and if we’re lucky, catch a flight to San Jose, see the dentist, and then continue on to Quito, Ecuador. So, in all likelihood, the next post will be from a different continent, YEAH!!! (I wish I could make that blink in neon like the good ol day’s of the web (not as much a technical issue as sympathy for you, my reader:)).

Terrible tooth

2007-03-06T17:33:00.000-08:00

Terrible luck, my filling fell out!! I was flossing my teeth on Saturday night, and it fell out!! My tooth is aching again, and it’s not practical to go back to San Jose to get my filling fixed, so now I’m on a hunt for a new dentist in Panama City. Dr. Marco contacted a Panamanian patient (not just any Panamanian patient, either, she used to be the Panamanian ambassador to Costa Rica), who has said she will refer me to a dentist here. The tooth saga continues…

Panama – Way too hot

2007-03-06T17:32:00.000-08:00

We found a boat!! We gave up on the folks who’d been trying to get us a quote in San Jose, and have decided to ship with Evelyn Batista’s company in Panama. She found us a boat that leaves on March 9 from the port city Colon (for folks trying to find some of our smaller towns on the map, try going to either Google Earth or Google Maps, and typing in the name of the town. The program will find the town for you, even if it wasn’t on the map before. These gizmos know more than they let on). The Lonely Planet guidebook says, basically, don’t go to Colon if you can avoid it, since you will mostly likely get mugged in broad daylight, no matter what precautions you take. It also gives us enough time to get to Panama City, do customs stuff, look for a solar panel and a porta-potty (we might have better luck, since these are items many sailboats use, and there is a really big yacht club in Panama City), see the Panama Canal, then take the car back to Colon by Friday. Whew. We won’t have much time to spare, since it’s a day either way, but we should have just enough time to do everything.

Let me back up a bit, to just before we left San Jose. We spent two more days there, waiting to hear from Evelyn about the boats, and also trying to run errands (like find solar panels, etc). It was incredibly frustrating, because we couldn’t get any of it done, despite being in a gritty city. We went from store to store, asking our questions, then getting directions to the *next* store, who just might have what we were looking for, then wandering the really hot and dusty streets. Ugh. To get a break from it, and because we really miss movies, we spent our evenings out at the cinema in the big mall on the edge of town. A little dose of Hollywood can be just the thing for the 3rd world blues…. 8)

Once we heard from Evelyn that she could ship our car for certain, we packed up our stuff and headed south, and east (Panama mostly runs on an east-west axis – it’s a funny-shaped bit of land). We spent a terrible night in a parqueo in San Isidro de la General, because it was where we were when it got dark, and there wasn’t anywhere good to stay. The idea of camping is non-existent in Central America. We think this is because in most countries it’s too dangerous to spend the night in the wilderness with just the thin walls of a tent to shelter you – where would you attach the razor wire?? Costa Rica is an exception – you can often camp in the national parks. But the van can’t always deal with the long dirt roads that lead to them. So, a parqueo for us. Unluckily, we picked one right next to a disco, and they played LOUD 80’s music until the wee hours. What’s up with Central America and 80’s music, anyhow???

The next morning, we crossed the border into Panama. We chose the smallest of the 3, just for something different. We were also hoping to avoid the big scene with the guides that we’d had to deal with at the last 2 borders. Let me backtrack a little more – I don’t think we said much about our last border crossing. At the Nicaragua/Costa Rica border (we went through Penas Blancas), our guide tried to rip us off. He told us we’d be waiting for at least 4 hours, but that he had connections and could get us through the border really quickly if we would just give him $20 to give to the border guards. He said we couldn’t give it to them ourselves, because that was illegal, but he could give it to them for us, and save us the 4 hour wait. Luckily, Douglas’ scam radar was working, he didn’t pay him the $20, and we were through in 30 minutes. The border guards were perfectly efficient, and seemed very surprised when Douglas suggested that there might be a long wait. Our guide then had the cheek to tell us that we hadn’t tipped him enough! We gave him enough for 2 beers, for 30 minutes of work. He got indignant and asked “What’s this?? I usually get at least $10!! Give me $10!!” We refused (we’re not paying him $20/hour!!!), and he walked off in a big huff. This was our introduction to Costa Rica last week.

The Panamanian border was much different. It was so small and relaxed we accidentally drove through it and were told to turn back!! It was 10 km down a dirt road, just two buildings by the side of the road. Everything was very informal. The Costa Ricans were standing around outside their building, and watched us drive by into Panama, then turn around and come back. I guess they were amused by our shenanigans. They stamped us out of the country, and a woman walking down the dirt road dealt with our car paperwork on her way to lunch. On the Panamanian side, the border guard had brought her teenage son to work with her, and introduced us to him, and we all chatted for a while. When it came time to pay the car fumigation fee ($3), we didn’t have correct change, and the border folk didn’t have any change, either, so we went across the street to have lunch (amazingly good fried chicken) and get some change, then came back to finish crossing the border. It was as chill as could be. El Sereno, it’s called, appropriately enough. We recommend this crossing highly. The dirt road leading to it is very picturesque, too – lovely hilly vistas, and a 3-foot long iguana crossing the road!! It was huge! We could see the muscles rippling in its bright orange arms!!

Now we’re in Panama, and it’s the opposite of Costa Rica (which we didn’t like as much as we expected to). In Costa Rica, the landscape was absolutely gorgeous, and the people were, for the most part, surly (with a few notable exceptions, like Dr. Marco, my dentist, Mireya, the schoolteacher at Finca los Maestros, and Andres, a volkswagen enthusiast who pulled up next to us in San Jose traffic, and started talking about vanagons – we pulled over and chatted for a while and traded contact information). Otherwise, we had more encounters with downright rude people than we have had in any other country. Panama, on the other hand, is kind of a wasteland, with odd oases of hilly beauty, and the people are incredibly warm and friendly. Complete strangers keep striking up conversations with us.

We spent last night in Boquete, a small hilltown about 40 km north of the Panamerican Hwy that reminded us of Banff, AB. It was very small and cute, and we ate some terrible pizza and had another wonderful post office experience with lots of arcane instructions involving glue, tape, paper, and stamps (both rubber and lickable). We also found our first road that la Tortuga couldn’t handle, on the way to Volcan Baru. We wanted to camp there, but had to give up on the dirt ‘road’ and turn back and camp in town, alas.

Tonight we’re in El Valle, Panama, about 2 hours from Panama City. We’re camped outside the police station, and had a delicious dinner of fresh orange juice, stewed chicken, and flattened plantains. We tried to give the police a 6-pack of beer to thank them for letting us camp behind their station, but they refused!! They asked for Coke!! We are not in Nicaragua, anymore, Toto. This makes me feel oddly at home. Once more in a country where you can’t thank the on-duty police with beer. Ah.
We’re going to the local craft market in the morning, then on a short hike to see the famous golden frogs, and then we’re off to (hopefully) camp at the yacht club in Panama City and arrange to ship La Tortuga. We’re both feeling pretty exhausted by this whole shipping rigamarole, and poor Douglas has caught a nasty cold. Hopefully we’ll sleep well tonight and feel better tomorrow. And, fingers crossed, we should be in South America in a week!!! We can’t wait…mountains and llamas.

Go South, young man, and grow up with the country

2007-03-01T07:53:00.000-08:00

Well so thats not exactly how Greeley wrote it, but we are heading south, to Panama.

So we found some helpful people in Panama that actually *want* to do business, so we are leaving today. This is sorta good. The panama canal has GOT to be an amazing thing to see, and there are tours of the locks. There are even electric trains that act as tugs to pull the boats through. It now looks like we will be going with either LOLO or containers. The most important thing for the LOLO is that I can get pictures of la tortuga dangling in a banana net!

We will certainly post a fully detailed entry on the trials and tribulations of shipping.

On the Silk Road Panamerican trip blog we learned of Evelyn Batista with Barwil Unitor Ship Service a Wallenius Wilhelmsen agent. They refered to her as the Hero of the Darien Gap. This could not be more true, she is friendly, timely, and very professional. These do not seem to be common traits in the shipping industry.

her info:
Evelyn N. Batista
Sales Executive, Barwil Agencies, S.A.
Barwil Unitor Ship Service

Panama City Office
Avenida Balboa, Galerias Balboa Building
Second Floor, Suite 35
Phone: +507 263-7755
Cellphone: +507 6673-8150
Fax: +507 223-0698
Email: Evelyn.Batista@wilhelmsen.com

Alejandro Vargas with NYK is completly USELESS. After over a week of seeing him in person and unanswered emails he doesn't seem to want to help at all. He is the replacement for Milton Madriz at Barlovento, who by all accounts was very helpful.

Ive been getting long winded sitting around waiting for the boats, so I'll keep this short.

Lots of love to everyone.

Pura Vida in Costa Rica

2007-02-28T08:05:00.000-08:00

Here we are in San Jose, killing time and waiting for a boat to take us to South America. We’ve sent a bunch of e-mails to shipping companies, and received several negative responses, but are waiting to hear from 3 companies that said they thought they could probably send us and would let us know how much, and when. Fingers crossed!!

In the meantime, we’re getting the van ready to be shipped. Douglas built a wooden partition that separates the front of the van from the back, which will hopefully keep our stuff from getting stolen in transit. We’re hoping to ship it via RoRo, or roll-on, roll-off, which entails giving our keys to the port guy, who then drives the van on and off the boat. This means that the van will probably be unlocked while it voyages across the ocean, and it’s very common for things to mysteriously disappear from the van. Hopefully the wooden partition will prevent that.

Building it was a bit of an adventure. There’s no Home Depot in Costa Rica, but there was a hardware store, with wood, just a few blocks from our hostel. We got directions from the door guard – he told us not to walk directly to the store, but walk down to Avenida Central, over several blocks, and then back up to the same street, because there was a bad section between us and the hardware store. We did as he suggested, buying some avocados and green mangoes from street vendors along the way (side note – the green mangoes are very small and hard – unripe – and they are delicious!! They’re really tangy, and cut into small pieces, with salt and lemon, they make a wonderful salad). The vendors were very nice and insisted on picking out perfectly ripe fruit, asking when we were going to eat them, today or tomorrow. The hardware store was small, with wires strung across the ceiling so they could hang everything that wouldn’t fit on the shelves – extension cords, hammers, whatever. The wood was kept around the corner, in a separate location. We picked out our wood, in 4 meter sections, 5 pieces, and then carried it back to the hostel, getting lots of strange looks along the way.

Our hostel was kind of peculiar, filled with 20-something backpackers who seemed to do nothing but sit by the pool (even though the pool was closely surrounded by high concrete walls topped with razor wire, not so scenic) and drink. No one would talk to us – I’m sure we were ‘the weirdos in the van’! 8)
We’ve made a couple of side trips, to escape from the city. We went up to Volcan Barva, where we camped near the ranger station and hiked in the woods. It was absolutely heaven up there, cool and misty with great views, giant plants, and hummingbirds the size of my thumb. We saw all sorts of excellent plants, and came back to San Jose feeling very refreshed, ready to deal with the shippers again.

We also spent a night in Palo Verde, tons and tons of birds!

The city has been good for getting things done, though. It’s an interesting mix of Central America and America, with lots of American franchises and fancy cars, mixed with Latina fashion and fresh mangoes. Tonight we went to a movie (as a post-dentist pick-me-up, more on that in a second) out at a multiplex, and we could have been in a mall in Anytown, America. Cinnabon, McDonalds, Burger King, Subway, Timberland shoe store, Benetton, you name it, it was in the mall. The only giveaway that we were in Central America was the Carrion. Yes, Carrion. It’s a big chain of department stores, and there are lots of adverts about how they’re first in fashion. That one won’t be coming to any English-speaking country anytime soon…

So, the dentist. Many of you will remember that just before we left, one of my molars was bothering me, and I saw 4 dentists about it, whose reaction ranged from “gee, I dunno” to “all of your teeth are cracked and you need a root canal right now! It’ll cost $1200” to “you don’t need a root canal, your tooth looks just fine to me, why don’t you just wait and see” to “I think you clench your teeth, here’s a bite guard”. Well, many hundreds of dollars later, here I am in Central America and my tooth still hurts. No, it hurts *more*. Luckily, this summer I worked on researching a book on dental tourism (many countries have established an industry catering to patients who can’t afford dental care in their own country (read, ‘merica). In places like Hungary and, ta da, Costa Rica, the standard of care is high, and the prices are low), and I knew that there were some excellent dentists in Costa Rica. So I contacted the editor of the book (thanks, Joe) and asked for a recommendation. I saw Dr. Marco Peralta today, and he took an X-ray like the other dentists had, and it showed nothing, like theirs had. Then he did something novel, and actually looked at my tooth. And lo and behold, there was a very small cavity just at the gumline that the other 4 dentists somehow hadn’t seen. He showed it to me on a nifty little camera-TV setup, then quickly fixed it, and I left the office $40 whole dollars poorer. I won’t even tell you how much the &%$#$% ‘merican dentists cost me. And today’s dental visit was one of the most efficient and painless I’ve ever had – thank-you Dr. Peralta! So far, the tooth feels much better – a little sore from being drilled and prodded, but the dull ache that’s been bothering me for months is *gone*. That’s all I have to say about ‘merica’s much-touted standard of care.

A couple of funny incidents: tonight, taking the cab home from the cinema, the cabbie had no idea where to go. We were maybe a 10-minute cab ride from the center, and our hostel’s near the big road that runs down the middle of town. I gave him the address, and he wandered in circles, eventually stopping to ask some other cabbies. Several of them stood outside the car, waving their arms and giving directions – mostly repeating the same set of directions multiple times, which were, as they always are in Central America “la vuelta, y entonces RRRRRRRRecto” which basically means turn here, and then go straight ahead!!! Somehow, every single time we ask for directions in CA, we are told to go RRRRRRRecto. It’s hilarious. Of course, everything is straight ahead. What makes the cabbie’s lostness even funnier is that San Jose is organized on a grid system, with streets running north-south, and avenues running east-west. What’s more, they are numbered. We wanted 5th Avenue, between 36 and 38th streets. So, how did he get to be a cabbie here…?

Yesterday, when we were driving through a smallish town called Heredia, on our way back from Volcan Barva, we stopped to check our e-mail (hoping for something from the shipping companies). There was lots of parking space near the Central Square, but there were signs saying you needed a ticket to park there, and it wasn’t obvious how you got this ticket – did you buy it monthly? Did you pay at some station we couldn’t see? We ended up in a parqueo, as usual, and ran our errands. On our way back to the car, we asked a vegetable vendor about the signs – what type of ticket did we need, and where could we buy it? He pointed up the street and said ‘In the florist shop, of course!’ Of course!!

So, yes, we are enjoying Costa Rica. It’s one of our favorite countries so far. It’s easy to disfrutarnos here (one of my favorite Spanish words – disfrutar, to enjoy. Doesn’t it just sound like what it is?? It always makes me think of Carmen Miranda taking off her big fruit hat - dis-fruitar). The people are super-friendly, and the parks are stupendous. We’re chomping at the bit to get to South America, though….

Little Corn Island

2007-02-28T08:04:00.001-08:00

Waking up after another night in the Granada parqueo (oddly, sleeping in parking lots is seeming normal) we were giddy with excitement to get out to the Caribbean. A short bus ride and then a long taxi ride got us to the airport in Managua, the capital of Nica. Boarding the plane, Kim asked, the concern evident in her voice, “You reckon this thing will fly?” Other than the fact that all the gauges were in Russian, and neither pilot appeared to speak Russian, it seemed like a serviceable enough plane. I assume the gauges with post-it notes were Spanish translations of the important ones. As we approached Big Corn Island, it was just like in the pictures, mottled water of deep blue and aqua. WOW! We started walking the 2 km to the dock after wading through hordes of cabbies at the airport, knowing that the boat to Little Corn left in an hour. Half way there a taxi stopped and told us that on Wednesdays they leave early and we should hurry, so we hopped in. We waited for two hours for the boat. Arriving on Little Corn we were greeted by many islanders each offering the best place to stay. We had been told that Elsa’s was really nice, so we headed that way with her son. Upon arrival, we discovered they were full and went to the next group of huts on the beach, Grace’s Cool Spot. This was a bit more of a Florida spring break atmosphere, but the food was good.

The next day we intended to find other lodging as the hut motel wasn’t really what we wanted. The day slipped by quickly once we had strung our hammocks up between a couple of palm trees. The only interlude was taking a dug-out with Randal out to the reef, 500m offshore. So National Geographic rates Little Corn Island’s reef as one of the top 10 in the world and boy, did it ever deliver. There was brain coral, elk coral, green coral, red coral, and sea cucumbers and parrot fish and blue fish and and and. And then, as we got into a bit deeper water I saw this large dark shape gliding along. Assuming it was a shark, I didn’t want to get Kim’s attention, but as it got closer I saw that it was an Eagle Ray, the one with spots. Kim was a ways back bobbing in the waves and by the time I got her attention, there were 3 rays!! Needless to say, getting back into a dugout in the ocean takes some doing, but before long we were back in our hammocks, every now and again saying to each other, Wow! RAYS!

After Grace forgot to shut down the generator and the mice kept us awake well into the night, we decided to prioritize other lodging options. We got an early start, 11:30, and soon found Ensuenos (Dreams). The owner has built the cabanas out of materials that were found on the beach. Our cabin was the smallest, and cheapest at $15/night, and had tons of charm. Each building was different and funky but the owners’ house was truly magnificent. A ship’s steering wheel serving as a window, sail cloth awning over the deck, lots of funky.

And then there was the bathroom. Again, all found materials. My drivel can’t truly explain it, so have a look at the movie. I’ll rate this toilet as my second favorite, the best being in the saddle of the Tetons in Wyoming. And the water pump was pretty neat. It was a PVC pipe coming up from the well and a piece of rope running through it. On the rope were tied little ceramic cups, just smaller than the pipe. A crank handle to get it all spinning and the pipe soon filled with water and poured into a water collection tank serving the shower, toilet and sink. Although this would have impressed the Professor, Ginger would have loved the exercise bike that could also spin the pump. The sink in the bathroom was an old dug-out. This also served as a clothes-wash station, with a wash board fitted in the middle.

We spent 2 more days stuck in our hammocks, the loud thud of a coconut falling nearby confirming the need to carefully choose where you hang your hammock. I once calculated how fast a coconut is traveling by the time it hits the ground. It took lots of calculus, but I seem to remember it would hurt. During this time I managed to convince Kim that we should go scuba diving. Who couldn’t for $25?

We got to the dive shop right on time. However, our watches were not on island time and we hung out for a while and chatted with the new managers, both very friendly and professional. Our dive master, Esteban, was an enthusiastic Mexican and he walked Kim through the procedure on how to put her kit together with endless smiles. She was a bit rusty as her last diving was in Malawi, ten years prior. A ten minute boat ride and we were at the dive site. I can’t say how proud I was of Kim as she put her hand over her regulator and fell backwards over the boat looking like a pro. Growing up in northern BC does not seem to foster a love of the water. Once we started to descend we could see reef with sand channels running all over and barracuda fish looking at us down their long noses, bristling with teeth. This was amazing! The coral was much denser than at snorkeling depth and there were way more fishes. We followed Esteban around, me snapping a bunch of photos with the digital camera I rented. Underwater photography is an art that I have yet to grasp. In what felt like 10 minutes Esteban signaled that we were going up for our decompression safety stop. The hour we spent bobbing around with such an extensive array of fish, coral and sea critters was a highlight of the Island trip for both of us. Once back on the boat Kim noticed that she had been stung, most likely by a jellyfish. We quickly washed her arm with vinegar and took pictures of her very angry skin. Nothing that a few more hours in the hammocks won’t fix.

And now for a low point of our Island trip. As we headed across the island into town for dinner, a 20 minute walk, a couple coming from town told us about how they had just been mugged. They looked frazzled (who wouldn’t) and this didn’t help their English, but they said a guy with ‘The biggest machete I’ve ever seen” asked them for all their money. Kim and I didn’t know what to do. Go back with them to Ensuenos? They said he and the machete ran off into the woods, would he be gone? Well let me tell you a well known fact about Kim. When she wakes up, she starts thinking about food. About half way through breakfast she usually strikes up a conversation about lunch, you get the picture. I asked her, should we risk it, or go hungry? I knew the answer and we headed into town. Once in town I headed to the police station and Kim hurried to the dive shop to pick up our photos on CD. As I would never have found it alone, I asked a man where the police station was. He of course asked why, and was visibly upset about what I told him. He led me straight to the station which only had four guys eating dinner outside to differentiate it from any other house. The cops immediately scoffed down the last of their dinner once I had explained to them what happened. I then saw what many of you may never see. Inside the station were a couple of bunk beds. The cops pulled on their uniform shirts and then from under their pillows, yes under their pillows, they produced machine guns. That made me laugh, until four guys with machine guns all looked at me. They started tossing a couple of names around and then settled on who the crook was and decided to go looking for him. I suppose with only 500 people, half being female, half again being black, half again being young, it doesn’t take Colombo to figure it out. I also arranged for them to walk Kim and I home as it would be dark once we ate dinner. While Kim was at the dive shop she established that one beer would be appropriate compensation for walking us home. According to the dive shop, this would be the first time in almost a year that anything like this has happened. Apparently the Island used to have a Wild Wild West feel but the tourist police came in over a year ago and sent the ruffians packing. Tourist police are a subset of regular police, trained in the ways of tourists. They are the government’s (very effective) answer to muggings of tourists at places such as Tikal, Copan and the Corn Islands. The walk home with four cops was wonderful glimpse into another facet of Central American life. They make peanuts - 2000 cordobas or $120 a month. A dinner out on the island costs between $2 and $10, a beer is $1, and canned supplies are pretty expensive, since they have to be brought in from the mainland. They didn’t like the Island and were glad their tour there was almost over. Can you imagine wishing for your tour of duty on a peaceful Caribbean island to be over?? The national police are stationed all over Nica and move around a lot. They were also, like most Nicas, amazingly nice. A highlight was a HUGE crab running up one of their legs. He wasn’t so impressed and I thought he was going to shoot it with his machine gun.

The next morning we got up really early and caught the first boat off the island. At the airport, which was a large thatch roofed hut, they were doing hand searches of carry on since they didn’t have an X-Ray machine. Going through Kim’s bag they found two pairs of nail clippers (actually three but the one didn’t have the file thingy, and no, I don’t know why Kim carries 3 pairs of nail clippers). They told us we couldn’t take them on the plane, and then offered to check them. Separately. They wrapped them in tape, and stuck a ticket on them. Then he started to search my bag. I pushed on it and said it’s just clothes and a hammock which was good enough for him and I was let through. Oh, but don’t worry, if I had had anything in there, they would have found it in Managua. There was an X-ray machine for folks getting off the plane and *leaving* the airport. Seriously. I gave my usual objection about the camera and the guard said “well take it out.” I took out my camera bag, they scanned my backpack, but no-one looked at the camera bag. Weird.

We were both relieved to see La Tortuga snug as a bug in the parqueo. Although as we came in the attendants came running over with Strong Man in their hands! Dean had tied Strong Man onto the grille back in Asheville and he’s become our guardian angel. We had also notice how the kids looked at him and apparently one kid did more that look! The attendant, who spoke Spanish in what I would liken to a southern drawl, and was generally unintelligible, explained with lots of vigor about how the kid had reached through the fence are gjavascript:void(0)
Publishrabbed strong man (and the VW badge) and ran down the street. He of course gave chase (I wish I could have seen this!) and soon caught the miscreant who, we were assured, received a very strong lecture. Strong man has been relocated to higher ground. This will not only give him a better vantage of the world, but should be out of harms way.

Turtle murder

2007-02-28T08:03:00.001-08:00

So we decided to spend the night at the Refugio Silvestre de la Flor, in southern Nica, near the border with Costa Rica. This national park is known to have lots of turtles and this is the right time to see them, and the pictures seem wonderful. We drove the corrugated dirt road, even crossing a stream that was deep enough to almost cover the wheels, and got there just before dark. Turning off the main road our spirits began to soar as the scenery was just gorgeous. We walked up to the ranger station and started the usual conversation, how much, where, and the response was a little befuddling. Mainly because what he was saying just didn’t make any sense. But the gist of it was that it would not be safe to camp here as the usual group of soldiers had left and that there were miscreants and robbers on the beach. But this just didn’t make sense. We were in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a national park that’s a turtle sanctuary to boot. The ranger bid us to follow him to the beach, and we did. What we saw was horrific. Hundreds of people, men women and children, sitting behind the turtles and putting their eggs into sacks. It was so outrageous that they were even carrying the turtles up to holes, so that the bastards wouldn’t have to wait for the turtle to dig a hole or make its way slowly up the beach. The ranger said that if he were to do anything they would barricade him in his office. The only thing that kept the turtles safe was the soldiers based there. We are not sure, nor was he, as to why they were called away.

We decided to drive back to San Juan del Sur, waves of tears and anger washing over us.

Special Edition – Van Life

2007-02-28T07:56:00.000-08:00

Before we ship the van we thought we’d post a little about what it’s like to live in it, just in case it doesn’t make it.

We’ve named the van La Tortuga – turtle in Spanish. For anyone that’s been behind one of these portable houses on the road, this is self explanatory. It’s a 1982 Westfalia that I traded my brother’s Geo Metro for. It came with a bum aircooled motor which I replaced with a 1.9L turbo diesel from a 1998 Jetta TDI (AHU engine code). This could not have been accomplished without the help of the Vanagon TDI Conversion Yahoo group. Many thanks to David of Fast Forward, Karl M, Costica and many others. As part of the conversion I re-geared the transmission. This was really nice in North America, however down here the speed limit is usually 60kph which is just in between 3rd and 4th. Oh well, 3 speed with overdrive. We’re getting 30-33 mpg, fully loaded. And diesel is everywhere in Central America. We even stopped at a gas station that *only* sold diesel. Anyone that wants a wonderful camping vehicle with more pep than a Vanagon, this is the way to go.

We are both amazed at how comfortable the living space is. At night we sit facing each other (the front passenger seat swivels) or snuggling on the couch typing, reading, knitting, much as we did in our mansion in Durham. The cabinets inside easily hold our clothes, books, more books, camping gear, food, pots, and more books. The stove and sink are great for cooking. Once we pull into camp and close the curtains, light the candle lantern (thanks Cecile!), we are in our cozy little home, and it’s amazing how great that is on a trip like this one when every day is full of foreign language and sensory overload.

We’ve made a few modifications which make it a little more comfy. For extra storage, we bought 2 120mm mortar canisters (ebay). One is painted beige (which ended up looking more like desert camo) and is strapped to the roof and chained on. The other one is painted black and 2 metal straps hold it under the van. It would take a keen observer to notice this as anything other than part of the car, as intended. It only takes a couple of minutes to get out, but does require groveling in the dirt. We have spare car parts, fuel filters, snorkeling gear, that kinda stuff in there.

We also installed mosquito netting everywhere – in the tent top, across the van door (two big overlapping pieces that roll up and tie up above the door when not in use) and two envelopes of netting that fit over the front windows and are held in place by magnets. We wish we had enough netting to make two more windows in the sides of the top tent, for more ventilation. A 12-volt fan would have come in handy, too. It’s HOT here, and the mosquitoes are fierce.

We reupholstered the back seat and back seat cushion with some black cordura, because the old van upholstery was, well, kinda grungy, and no amount of cleaning would make it look better. We also put some “Bound” brand seat covers on the front seats. These have endless pockets and an almost magical ability to repel dirt, so they’re very handy.

Refrigerator: After 2 years of fighting with the Dometic fridge, we ripped it out and turned the space into a large 2 shelved closet. The fridge was very temperamental, not surprising since the instruction manual mentions a Ouija board. Good riddance. Our German friends have a solar powered compressor fridge, similar to what our next rig will have, that they love. We do miss cold beer.

One ‘modification’ we made was maybe a bad idea. At the beginning of our trip, the van was pretty loaded down. We spent at least a month throwing stuff out. It was an orgy of purging. Our table, alas, was a victim of the purges. Westys come with 2, and we only brought one, and now we have none. Poor thing, we left it on the side of the road in Mexico because it made access to the pantry a bit of a hassle. We go back and forth on whether that was premature, but mostly, we wish we hadn’t thrown it out.

Overall, living in the van has been so good that we are actually seriously considering moving into an RV full time for the next while (no bigger, just without an engine in the back). This would let us save up for the house we want to build in BC, and we are excited about the prospect of living ‘mobile’ in Europe. We keep meeting folks traveling around in practically bombproof expedition vehicles, and we’re a little jealous.

There are a couple of things that we’d change, but not many. We’d like a bathroom and shower. Although showering outside has been wonderful, I don’t think I’ll have quite so much enthusiasm in the Andes in the autumn. The blue box is fine for emergencies, but it does NOT need a magazine rack next to it. 4 wheel drive. Not that the van has gotten stuck, we just want more ground clearance and a more comfortable ride on the endless corduroy dirt roads that we hope to explore in the future. Although I drool at the sight of a Unimog, we are thinking about something like a Toyota Landcruiser with a camper shell on the back. More payload capacity. With fuel, water, bikes, books, we’re probably pushing 5000lbs which shows when we bottom out on the paved roads. To be fair to the van, this was never a problem before the Mexican border.

We had to make list of all of our belongings for the customs agents (in Spanish!! I’ll bet they’ll have a good laugh when they read it). It was 314 items long, and it took forever to make. They told us it had to be ridiculously detailed – that if we had 4 pencils in the car, we should write ‘4 pencils’. Sheesh. It was interesting to look at what we still have with us, though. It reminds me that we wanted to make a list of our favorite gear, to help out anyone else planning a trip like this one.

REI quick-dry towels. They’re huge, soft, dry in about 30 minutes, and best of all, they’re orange.

Sani-Fem Freshette FUD – The name is ridiculous, but this handy doodad lets me pee standing up. I can’t tell you how many times a day I’m glad I have this. REI, also.

Pressure cooker, 4 quart. We love this!!! We cook everything in it, in a fraction of the time it would take otherwise. Why didn’t we ever have one at home??

Plastic buckets we bought in Guatemala for $1 each. We put one of them under the car to catch the greywater from the sink. The other is good for doing laundry, or for washing in on those days when using the solar shower is tricky (see below).

Shur-Flo faucet. We replaced the van faucet with this guy, and we love it. It’s really mobile, and regulates the flow of water from trickle to gush, which the old van faucet couldn’t do.

Small LED lights everywhere – lots of these used to live on bikes, and now they live in the van. We’ve glued some of them to magnets, so they can go (and stay) anywhere we need light, and they use almost no energy, and they don’t run off the car battery. Alas, we wish we’d bought a solar panel for the roof, to recharge the battery. Next trip.

Candle lantern. So handy. We accidentally brought about 12 candles with us, and Douglas has been making fun of me for bringing so many, but I think we just might use them all.

Easy button. Thanks, Louis. We use this thing every day, and multiple times a day when we cross borders.

Sewing needle and thread. I’ve sewn meters and meters of seams by hand on this trip. I’m getting a lot faster.

Water: We often buy our water in the 5 gallon ‘water cooler’ jugs. At $1.50 each this is an easy option. We also brought a Katadyn Base Camp filter. This filter rocks. It’s a filter element inside a nylon bag. Fill the bag, hang it on the side of the van and gravity pushes the water through a hose and into the tank. A recommendation from Great Outdoor Provision Company in Durham and we give it a 2 thumbs up. We will often also add a few drops of bleach to the water for viruses (less than 1 micron). All the bleach bottles down here have instructions on how to do this.

The bleach bottles also have instructions on how to mix up a concoction for vegetable cleaning, essential in a land full of amoebas and other nasties. It’s a stronger solution of bleach water and you soak everything in it for 5 minutes. We’ve notice this also makes the vegetables last for a long time with no refrigeration.

Osram Flex light: A wonder map light on a 20cm flexible stalk. Very handy.

Garmin eTrex GPS. Almost the cheapest one available at $100 and we very nearly did not bring it. Now that we are starting to connect with serious overlanders who rely on GPS a lot and all their information is with GPS coordinates, we’re really glad we did. The eTrex also interfaces with our laptop, which is handy.

Laptop. An old HP NC6000, a real workhorse with a nice combination of power and battery life.

El Cheapo 300 amp power converter. Picked this up at a truckstop a while back and it’s now solidly mounted in the van. Great for the various electronics that want 110V for charging.

Cannon EOS Rebel Digital. This camera is light, cheap when you consider developing costs, and has all the features any amateur could want. Brought a Cannon EF 75-300 zoom for the wildlife and an EFS 28-55 for the rest.

HP 670 digital camera. Thanks mum and dad! We love dropping this little gadget in our pocket for snapshots and its best feature, movies. The lens cover doesn’t really close all the time now, surely not from when it leapt out of the van onto the concrete

Eagle Creek Pack it Cubes. These things are great and keep our clothes organized and in neat stackable cubes.

Solar Shower: Thank you Rob and Christine! Fill it with water and put it in the sun and within 30 minutes you have a hot, and I do mean hot, shower. We use this everyday and it lives tied to the roof. We’re currently building a removable shower stall that attaches to the side of the van. We’ll post a picture when it’s done.

iPod: Gotta love Latin American radio, with its crazy announcers, but sometimes some Le Tigre or Neko Case is what you really want. We also have a doodad that will download photos from our camera straight to the iPod. This is nice when we travel without the laptop.

The Blue Box. Sometimes when you gotta go, you gotta go. Its an old army ammo box, water (and smell) tight that’s strapped to the front bumper. We painted it blue after Jon’s story of the East German guards insisting they see inside their ‘blue box’. This is almost as difficult to explain at the border as Kim’s pee doodad.

Jerry Can: I picked up a European style jerry can on ebay. Unlike the screw top American ones, this does not leak. It fits perfectly on the roof with the storage box on its side. Low profile and hopefully remains unused.

Highlift Jack. After seeing pictures of the Austral Highway in South America I started thinking about winches. Winches cost money, and the highlift was rusting in the back yard. It fit neatly in my rear bumper once disassembled and is inconspicuous. This too I hope remains unused as they are more work than pushing the go button on a winch.

deWalt 9.6V cordless drill. Although this seemed bulky and maybe extraneous, it’s been used almost daily on various van projects. It’s no longer cordless as I brought my old one and the batteries will only last long enough to put in 4 screws. Yesterday I wired it to the car battery, held my breath, and pulled the trigger. Eureka! It likes 12 volts even better than it liked 9.6.

Large Mag-Lite. Not only does it work great for spotlighting monkeys in the trees or finding the right turnoff at night – this thing is BRIGHT – but it spends the night next to the bed when we are in a sketchy spot. I think just the sight of this monster will ward off most evil doers.

Petzl headlamps: For all of you who’ve drooled down the flashlight you’ve got in your mouth, these little wonders make for handsfree lighting for your active lifestyle.

And of course the Van: Thanks Brian and I hope the Metro is doing you well!

We would both like to thank everyone that has contributed to this pool of stuff. We don’t have much, so we use it often, and think of you every time.

The size of the world

2007-02-23T15:12:00.000-08:00

It’s littler than we thought. Or maybe Central America is bigger than we thought. But we’ve gone 5021 miles since we left Asheville, and we’re done with the Central American portion of our trip. We’re in San Jose waiting for a boat to take us to Ecuador already. We think it’s about 10,000 miles through South America, from Ecuador to southern Brasil. Which means that South America is only about twice as long as Asheville ->San Jose, which is a lot littler than we thought. But then, the southernmost point of South America is S54*47’, making it about as far from the equator as Vancouver is. And Vancouver doesn’t seem so very far away. Hm. Geographical perspective.

Our route so far...

2007-02-23T14:46:00.000-08:00

Here are some maps of where we've gone so far. The numbers don't mean much, unfortunately; they're just there to help me reconstruct the approximate route.

Here is the first part of our route, from Durham to Xela, Guatemala (on this map called Quetzaltenango). Click to see a bigger version.

And the next part of our route, from Xela, through Guatemala, finishing in San Jose, Costa Rica:

By the way, we've posted lots of new photos and videos. We'll have posts about the Corn Islands trip etc. soon...

Nos Encanta Nicaragua

2007-02-13T18:44:00.001-08:00

Within 1000 meters of entering Nicaragua, we’re pulled over on the side of the road taking pictures of these AMAZING orange trees.

I end up chatting with a coffee farmer and am told that they are shade trees for the coffee. Asking him for permission to take a photo of his quaint operation, it’s obvious they have none of the superstitions held in Guatemala about fotos. He calls over his daughter and makes her pose for me.

Kim is perpetually amazed at how I can start a long conversation with anyone, in any language. This continued for the next several hours, pulling over every few kilometers for yet another photo op, Nicaragua is wonderful. We stopped in Esteli, at a ‘turicentro’ thinking they would have maps (the eternal search for maps) but quickly realized that it’s a tourist destination, not tourist information. There were pools, cabanas and a science museum with some really neat exhibits, like a wood fired pressure cooker (we still think anything with a pressure cooker is neat) inside the belly of a dragon, the steam vented through the nostrils and the smoke out the mouth. There was also a Brontosaurus with a series of pulleys to raise and lower his head, and a T-Rex with hydraulic powered jaws, and a Triceratops with solar panel and solar powered eyes. Lunch in Esteli was accompanied by a delicious cup of fresh tamarind juice, a taste Kim says she’ll never forget.

We, and many, many horse drawn carts and Russian cars navigated the narrow streets into Grenada. The Antigua of Nicaragua they say. WOW has been our mantra. It lacks the touristyness of Antigua and rivals it for charm and beauty (although the streets are not cobblestone, which was quaint for about ten minutes driving around Antigua). And the people! Though unemployment is high, the Sandanistas’socialist experiment seems to have left a good mark here. There are more road signs here than in the rest of Central America combined, we’ve seen actual operational ambulances, the drivers are very friendly and courteous (we even saw a cop with a RADAR), the kids are all in school and there’s a lack of garbage on the roadside. Kim even said it reminds her of Canada.

We had a funny experience trying to find a place to camp. Several travelers recommended eating at a local restaurant and then tipping the guard to sleep there. Sitting down to eat, the smell of fish quickly reminded us of amoebas, and then the completely uncooked chicken they served confirmed our fears. Not wanting to be rude, we didn’t know what to do, so Kim went to the van to get a plastic bag. Amid hysterical laughter we built a wall of napkin holders and beer bottles to conceal us slipping the raw chicken into the bag. Ok, so maybe the ample beer after a hot day on the road made this a lot funnier. We didn’t see any security guards and decided to head back into town a few blocks away, and slept near the central park in a parking lot. Not the lakeside night we had anticipated, but a wonderful night’s sleep.

For Valentines day (happy V-Day moms and nana) we are being very decadent. We have booked a flight to the Corn Islands, on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. We will be staying on Little Corn, surround by sharks, rays, and reefs with all the fish you can imagine (so say the posters). We ran into another tourist and he went on and on and on and on about how amazing his two weeks out there were. We’re excited! There may not be internet so this will be our last post for a week or so.

http://divelittlecorn.com/photos.shtml

By the Grace of God

2007-02-13T09:42:00.000-08:00

Wow, by the grace of God (now that Kim has found Jesus, and is praying A LOT in traffic) we made it out of Honduras alive. The crazy driving got worse and even I started to pray. Unfortunately, we didn't really like Honduras that much. We found the people a little pushy and downtrodden and then, there was the driving. This of course has its caveats, like we only spent three days there, and we only went through the center and missed the Caribbean coast altogether.

We spent one night at the archeological site Las Naranjas in the parking lot on the shores of Lago Yojoa. We showed up, and asked the guard, Mario, about sleeping and he said if we were going to see the ruins, and maybe buy him a coffee, we were welcome to stay. He assured us the security was excellent and introduced us to his squadron of military kids, each with an M-16, so we felt good about it. The next morning we saw him, much like the pied piper, marching in front of the 5 boys with a dead armadillo dangling by its tail in his hand. When I asked him if Hondurans ate armadillo, he first told me it’s illegal to hunt them and that this was ‘road kill’ (yes, each boy still had taken his M-16 to pick up the ‘road kill’, hmmm) and that yes, armadillo is quite tasty. Another man promptly stepped out of the museum office to tell me that ‘not ALL Hondurans eat armadillo’. Mario does have an interesting palate. We bought him a drink at Coti’s restaurant next door to the museum, and she was cooking up an odd looking plant that we had seen in the markets. Finally we discovered how to cook it. You can either just boil it, and eat it with a bit of salt, or after boiling, throw in some eggs and make a hash out of it. We tried the first option, boiled (luckily we were spared the second) and NO amount of salt made the bitterness go away. It was the worst vegetable we have ever tasted. This is Mario’s favorite dish, and several other men that came in to the restaurant were ecstatic to smell it on the stove. Pacaya con juevos they exclaimed. Weird.

The ruins were nothing more than a couple of mounds of earth, a disappointment after the amazing ruins we’ve been to so far. The birds however, made up for that two fold. The word for trail in Spanish is ‘sendero’. We laughed many times about what may have been lost in translation as the wooden sendero in the marsh had as many missing boards as rotten ones. This causes a bit of a perilous situation as ones gazes into the trees at the birds. I think we saw at least 30, of the 365 different species!

From the lake we headed towards the border, stopping in at El Paraiso for the night, a dusty cowboy town where the horses outnumbered the cars. I certainly was thinking of my niece and wondered if she can parallel park a horse.

The border was the first at which we encountered the ‘guias’ or guides. Of the ten kids offering to usher us through I picked one to get rid of the others, and then told him I wasn’t going to pay him. He was unfazed and took us to the first office window. Now imagine 100 feet of tiny windows, none with any indication of what it’s for. I quickly decided a few bucks for a guide would be worth it. When we got to the Nica immigration office, there was no one there. Juan, our guide, thought nothing of it and ran off to find the right guy, coming back in a few minutes with him. After a flurry of stamping and about $20US for us and the car, we were in Nicaragua. Oddly, this is the first country where the guard at the gate actually looked at our passport.

Honduras!!

2007-02-11T18:39:00.001-08:00

We finally made it out of Guatemala! We thought we might not. It was too nice. Here we are, in country number 3.

The border crossing with Honduras was really easy. We crossed at El Florido, and the officials were efficient and friendly. The only hitch was that we had some trouble making the photocopies for importing our car into Honduras. Every border has an independent contractor who photocopies documents for a small fee. But this time, one of the photocopiers wasn't working, and the guy who ran the other one was off somewhere for over an hour. Douglas ended up going back into Guatemala to find a photocopier, and when he did, it took at least 20 minutes to copy 8 pages. His copier was almost out of toner, and he had to turn it off and tap the toner cartridge between pages to make it work. I also got this photo of a truck driver hanging out in his hammock under his 18-wheeler, waiting for his turn to cross the border:

While Douglas was off photocopying car documents, I was keeping an eye on the car. I noticed two border guards at the back, looking at the bikes. Everyone looks at the bikes, so I just ignored them. Then I noticed there were 3 guards back there, then 4. Then 5. So I got out to see what was going on, and I walked over and said "Buenas". One of the guys took out a big roll of bills and asked if we were willing to sell the bikes. The border guards wanted to buy our bikes!

The ruins at Copan were fantastic, and the pictures speak for themselves.

http://picasaweb.google.com/dpwool/RuinasCopan

We're camped at a Texaco station tonight. Not much for atmosphere, but we paid to camp here ($2) and there's a guard outside with a big gun across his lap, so we guess it's OK. We asked several people in town where we could camp, and they all suggested the Texaco. We asked in hotels if we could park in their courtyards, and they told us to go to the Texaco, too. So we did.

So far, Honduras is really different from Guatemala - much more prosperous, and also more expensive. I think we're having some mild culture shock. We had dinner at a really nice restaurant ($10!! - to make up for the Texaco station), and sat on the patio and watched people go by. Aside from the odd tuk-tuk, we could have been in a town in North America. Weird.

We're not going to spend much time in Honduras because we're kind of anxious to get to Costa Rica and find out about shipping the car. The newest possibility is to take a ferry from Panama to Cartagena, Colombia, via a Caribbean island. We can't seem to find any good information about this, though, like where it leaves from, or how much it costs, or whether we can really take the car on it (though our Colombian friend Alexandra has confirmed that it exists - that was in question, too). If anyone out there in blogland knows anything about this, please pass it on. This would be a great option - until now we thought we would have to leave the car at the mercy of port workers and hope it would be intact when it arrived in Guatemala. We've heard lots of stories of cars getting robbed while in transit, and we're not excited about sending La Tortuga off on her own.

O, and every kid under 10 *had* to touch the strong man that Dean tied to the front of the van, as a sort of figurehead. I think we'll be lucky if the strong man makes it out of Honduras.

OK, this is the next day and we drove right by Tegucigalpa and are now at the Nicaraguan border in El Paraiso, a kind of cowboy town. We're going to cross into Nicaragua tomorrow morning. The drivers here are *insane* - we figure that Douglas' long years of mountain biking experience are coming in handy helping him dodge giant car-eating potholes and avoid oncoming buses/trucks/you name it. Everyone seems to like passing on blind corners best, and keep on coming even if you are coming towards them! It's like an adult game of chicken, and several times I was sitting in the passenger seat saying 'o god, o god, o god' and squeezing my eyes shut to block out the sight of an oncoming semi in our lane. BUT, we've made it this far, and Douglas says he always has his eye on the shoulder of the road so he can dodge off. i should stop this train of thought, sorry mom.

Nicaragua looks great! more from there

Spanglish

2007-02-11T18:38:00.000-08:00

So, before leaving for this trip, I didn't really speak any Spanish. I had some language CDs, and I took a short class at a local language center, but that was it, I had about 20 words. Language school in Xela helped a lot, but I'm still not sure what's going on sometimes. We're practicing a lot - language tapes in the car, grammar books under the seat, but I'm still wishing 'good appetite' to the guy in the tienda who just sold me soap, and 'excellent!!' to the guy in the internet cafe when he tells me they close at 10, and at the paper store, looking for card stock to make flash cards, I asked if they sell homework (tarreas, tarjetas...almost the same thing).

Back in the Land of the Chocobanano

2007-02-11T18:37:00.000-08:00

Out of the jungle and amoeba-free!! Heaven!! There was even this gorgeous rainbow right after we passed into the rainshadow of the hills. This was maybe the biggest rainbow I've ever seen! Maybe not. Maybe they were bigger at Victoria falls. But maybe not.

We stopped at Estanzuela to look at a dinosaur museum - this part of Guatemala was once home to heaps of dinosaurs. The museum was tiny and kind of rustic, but had really excellent bones, including a giant sloth about 10 feet tall. They also had a fair amount of early mayan pottery - mugs in the shape of faces, and some containers big enough for me to disappear in. cool stuff.

We spent the night in Chiquimula, preparing to cross the border into Honduras. The contrast between this region and the Peten is *sharp* - the city was so wealthy we felt like we were back in the US. The supermarket was chock full of tasty goodies, including guanabana flavored yogurt (the perfect flavor for yogurt), powdered soymilk (which is actually good, and really handy since we abandoned the fridge), and things for preparing chocobananos. It's nice to have a change from avocados and plantains!! Although, if I had to choose just 2 foods to eat, those might be the two I'd pick. Fried plantains, mmmmm

I have to say something about chocobananos - they're a phenomenon. Even hardware stores and cellphone stores sell them - they just stick a piece of paper on the wall saying "and we have chocobananos!!" It's basically a banana on a stick, covered in chocolate. Aside from tortillas, I'd say it's Guatemala's national food. Amazing. In the grocery store you can even buy special sticks, just for chocobananos. Special chocolate, too. I haven't seen the special chocobanano bananas yet, but I'm still looking.

O, and at the hotel we met a family from Quebec who sailed here from Quebec via Cuba. How cool is that? They took the kids out of school and put them on a boat. Excellent. They think it'd be easy for us to find a sailboat to Ireland, and gave us some websites and contact info. We've met an amazing number of Canadians on this trip - far more than any other nationality. Germans are a close second. Douglas even saw a newspaper headline declaring that there are "hordes" of Canadians in La Ceiba, Honduras.

Se alquila telefonos (telephones for rent)

2007-02-11T18:36:00.000-08:00

After the touristyness of Antigua, we headed north, into the hinterlands of Guatemala. But first we stopped at Coban for a tour of a coffee plantation, and got to see every stage of the process from seedling, to picking (each red fruit has two green beans in it, and they squirt out if you squeeze the fruit - they have a really vegetably smell and are covered in sticky goo), to washing, to drying, to roasting (we went into the tiny roasting room, where they have a wee little roaster and two grinders, the size you'd see in a coffee shop at home, and two folks roasting and packing each little bag of coffee by hand). We also got to taste cardamom fresh off the bush - yum!

The central part of Guatemala was gorgeous to drive through. Rolling hills, the forest getting more and more tropical. We drove a little ways off into the jungle to eat a bite of lunch and start soaking the purple beans I bought in the market in town. Here's a movie:

(coming soon-the internet cafe is closing...)

Some of the roads were out-of-hand bad, too. One day we drove for 8 hours, and only went 100 miles!!! 100 miles!! The roads were dirt, and sometimes sand, and incredibly windy. Here's a picture of a chicken bus coming up a hill towards us on a really sandy bit:

(coming soon-the internet cafe is closing...)

Somewhere in the planning of this trip, we worked out the total mileage, and the number of days we had, and figured that we'd only have to drive 100 miles a day to get to Argentina in 4 months. We thought, great, an hour and a half a day, maybe 3 or 4 if the roads are really really bad. ha!!

Once we got out of the hilly region, the roads got a lot better. Only the major highways are paved in the north, and all other streets in a town are dirt, which makes it kind of easy to find the way out of town - just follow the ashphalt. If you hit dirt, you've made a wrong turn, and you'd better go back to the center of town and find a bus to follow.

Things got increasingly tropical as we headed north, and the folks got poorer and poorer. I wonder why those two things seem to go together. The Peten was also hit pretty hard by the war - many of the Mayans who fled their villages ended up living in hidden jungle villages in the Peten. Maybe the area is still recovering - the peace accords were only signed in 1996.

The north is also the country of motorbikes - everyone has one, even the schoolgirls. You see them motoring around, two to a bike, with their little plaid skirts hitched up and their braids flying. No one wears the Mayan typical dress up here, either. Just in the highlands.

Then we got to Tikal!! We spent a night on Lago Peten Itza, near Tikal, and that was glorious. The water was so clear you could see to the bottom even in moonlight. We also met some interesting Italians who are driving from Buenos Aires to Alaska, and we exchanged tips about the road - how handy that we're going in opposite directions! On their advice, we waited until 3 pm the next day to go into Tikal - that way you get a few hours in the afternoon, and your ticket is still good for the next day. Tikal was absolutely magical. Read on to Douglas' post for stuff about Jungle and Birds, birds, birds!!!

Antigua - picture perfect

2007-02-11T18:32:00.000-08:00

Antigua is the hotspot for tourism in Guatemala. It's a UNESCO world heritage site, and it's packed full of language schools. So we thought it would be easy to find. But it turns out that they've rerouted the (very new, nicely paved) highway *around* Antigua, and not put up any signs!! You actually need to exit at a different city, drive through that city, and arrive at Antigua. And there are no signs!!!! I guess most people don't drive themselves here, but still!!

Once we found it, we liked it - well, sort of. It's amazingly touristy, and pretty expensive. But so lovely!! Every view is just perfect, cobblestone streets lined with brightly painted colonial-style houses. Little shops selling marzipan animals and cappuccinos. It was charming. We unfortunately ended up staying in a parqueo, which is a gravel lot surrounded by big cement walls with razor wire on top, but we spent all of our awake minutes out in the city, so it didn't really matter.

We of course ran into our friends Linda and Maggie, which was nice - it's funny how we keep running into them, even though we're not planning to. I guess we're just walking the same path through Guatemala.

We decided to mail some packages home from here, before we went on our volcano walk. What a saga!!!! First, all the DHL-type shipping places had closed their offices in the past year or so, so we trooped around town looking for all of them, only to be told they were closed. We finally find the regular mail place, but they don't have any boxes we could use to pack our stuff in. Next door, at the Dispensa Familiar (kind of a cheap supermarket), they had a pile of boxes as high as my shoulder - but we were only allowed to take *one*. Go figure. So we took our box back to the post office, and tore it into pieces and wrapped each bundle of stuff in pieces of cardboard and packing tape (and now we're hurrying because the volcano walk leaves soon), and wrote the addresses on them, and took them up to the counter. Where the lady tells us we have to unwrap them so she can see what's in them. She watched us wrap them from a few feet away!! It took at least 30 minutes!!! Anyhow, the packages got totally covered in stamps and sent off, and we hope they arrive!!!

We dashed off to our volcano walk. The woman at the tourist office told us to follow another woman to our bus. We followed her a few blocks, and she stopped at a little tienda and went inside. Another woman came out, and told us to follow her. She dropped us off on a street corner, and told us to follow another guy. We thought we were in a James Bond movie!! But we got to the bus, and drove to the volcano, and the pictures say it all here. It was HOT!!!! I thought I was going to get cooked by the lava.

Finca Ixobel and amoebas

2007-02-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

Ah, little animals that you just didn't see running around on your plate. YUM. Amoebas. We think we came home with more that a suntan from our school trip to the beach. Eating with the Guatemaltecos we were reassured that dive restaurant was better than it looked. And the food was tasty....

Neither of have felt 100% for the last couple of weeks, and in Poptun, decided to get it checked out. This would prove to be my first clinic visit on a dirt road. Here, you first go to the lab and get whatever test you think the doctor might want, and take those results to the doctor. The lab was quite something! There was a box growing something purple, and when she pulled out a spatula had to blow dust off the box. What the lacked in 'lab protocol' however, they gained in speed and efficiency. 20 quetzales and ten minutes later we were certifiably amoeba'ed. Our next stop was the doctor, finding one not in the field took a bit of time, but within an hour we were leaving the pharmacy. Both of us laughing about what Shelly would think as when we told the doc Kim had similar symptoms he just told us to buy 2x the medicines! (and why are drugs so expensive in N.America!??)

We spent a couple of days at a wonderful farm and have recuperated fully. I would highly recommend Finca Ixobel in Poptun if youre heading south of Tikal.

Uaxactun bike ride

2007-02-08T19:35:00.001-08:00

After spending all day enjoying the ruins of Tikal, I (Douglas) got on my bike to try and reach Uaxactun, a village 23 km north of Tikal. The guy at the gate couldn't quite understand why I wanted to *ride* their, especially as the bus was right behind me. Now the fact that there is bus service to this village is truly amazing. I actually stayed ahead of it for most of the way, navigating 1/2 meter ruts in the mud road and would consider it a pretty good *mountain* bike ride. During the hot afternoon on my way out there the jungle was quite and my uneasiness was quickly displaced with a bit of exercise. (I unfortunately came within 1km of the village and the not so touristy ruins, but was running out of time to get back to watch the sun set again from the temple in Tikal with Kim.) The trip home, was a very different story. The sun was now coming in at a more acute angle, and everything was glowing green, a truly spectacular light. The jungle was also waking up from its nap and the birds started to make quite a racket. Then I spotted a group of spider monkeys in the trees next to the road. Now there's two types of spider monkeys, the ones that are used to tourists, and the kind that aren't. These were the later, and upon seeing me began screeching and shaking the branches and piling three high and waving all there appendages around. It was an amazing sight! They even did that monkey thing of scratching under (and up and down) their arms. WOW. Pressing on, I heard something running through trees, even Jim M. woulda been impressed at how fast that made me go!

Tikal!

2007-02-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

wow! it´s been a whirlwind week. we drove all over guatemala - antigua, then all the way north to Tikal and the mayan ruins, and are now headed for poptun, on our way to Honduras. We´ve had adventures mailing packages, climbing volcanoes, taking dirt roads that were so bad we only went 100 miles in 8 hours of driving, seeing parrots and toucans at the mayan ruins, getting screamed at by packs of spider monkeys, having the heat and humidity of the peten melt our brains. whew. more later. here are a few pictures...

here is a map of guatemala...

Guatemalan Mac and Cheese

2007-01-30T07:37:00.000-08:00

We're glad to be back on the road. 2 weeks of Spanish school was great, just the right amount. Our brains are full, and we're ready to see some new places. Tonight we're at Panajachel, at Lake Atitlan. We kept thinking to ourselves, it's just a lake, how pretty can a lake be, maybe we should skip it - but, wow, a lake can be really gorgeous. Check out the pictures on our picasa site, link to the right. It's touristy, and really beach-y, but we have a campsite out of town, right on the lake, and it's super relaxing. Plus we made ourselves feel right at home by working on the van all day, and leaving broken appliances in our front yard! The fridge hasn't been working, and we don't really think we need it, so today Douglas tore it out and we turned the space into a giant closet. The fridge is sitting just outside the van. We don't know what to do with it.

I guess we're not really used to being back on the road and having to cook for ourselves. When we were at our homestay in Xela, Dona Juana made us breakfast at 8, lunch at 1:30, and dinner at 7:30. Usually fresh, handmade tortillas and rice and vegetables we didn't recognize. We were thinking to ourselves that it would be nice to be able to decide what we were going to eat, and to eat when we felt like it, but we haven't quite figured that one out yet. Yesterday when we were at the giant market, it somehow didn't seem like the right time to buy vegetables. And today, when we were working on the van beside Lake Atitlan, it didn't seem like the right time to buy vegetables. Not when we were walking into town to go to the internet cafe, either. Later. In Mexico, the tiendas all had some fresh veggies, some avocados, limes, tomatoes, cans of salsa verde.

Turns out the Guatemalan tiendas have fruit juice, every kind of hard liquor you can name, lots of hot sauce, bottled water, and ketchup. So dinner tonight was beans, cous cous, nutritional yeast, and ketchup. It sorta tasted like mac and cheese, but with beans. It actually wasn't half bad (god, I was hungry).

We've been feasting our eyes on textiles, instead, I guess. Yesterday we went to the big market in Chichicastenango. The best market I've ever seen, bar none. And we ran into our friends Linda and Maggie from Xela, even better! We had friends to drink beer with again.

The stuff for sale was out of this world. Gorgeous, giant Mayan calendars, woven and embroidered clothes of every possible color (usually all at once), bags of every size and material, never mind the frying chicken and toasting tortillas. It was bewildering. We wandered around for a couple of hours on total sensory overload. Here's a picture of Douglas at the stall where we bought a Mayan calendar.

We are *loving* Guatemala. We haven't even left yet, and already I'm thinking that we have to come back.

Streets of Xela

2007-01-29T16:58:00.000-08:00

We've been spending some getting to know our little town. I just spent an hour at the nearby used bookstore, stocking up on books - I just realised, to my horror, that I was down to two novels!! eek! book emergency. Fortunately, english books are pretty easy to find, and I just got 4 for something like $8. whew. crisis averted.

My favorite discovery is the hot chocolate. Last week we saw it being ground, at El Molino, where the corn for tortillas gets ground. Fresh-roasted cocoa beans, smashed together with enormous amounts (laundry tubs full, seriously) of sugar, and sold in bars about the size of my head, 10Q each for the good stuff (about $1.10). Chunks of it melted into hot water (you can have it with or without milk, as you choose) are like a chocolate bar in a mug. O mi god. I am spoiled for life.

And, continuing with the food theme, always my favorite, yesterday at spanish school we got a cooking lesson, how to make fried plantains with sweet mole. Here is the recipe, in spanish first, and then in english:

Mole de Platano

4 platanos maduros
1/2 libra chocolate para tomar
4 onzas pepitoria
4 onzas ajonjoli
1 libra tomate
1 pedazo de canela
1/2 chile pasa (como pimiento)
1 pan dulce

Procidimiento

- frier los platanos
- cocinar en poca agua el tomate, la canela, y el chocolate
- licuar el tomate, canela y chocolate, y pan
- tostar la pepitoria, el ajonjoli y el chile
- licuar la pepitoria, ajonjoli, y chile
- revolver el recado con los platanos
- hervir por 5 minutos
- decorar con ajonjoli

que rico!!!

Ingredients

4 ripe plantains
1/2 pound drinking chocolate (you can get Abuelita brand in NC), and if you can't find it, use regular chocolate and add sugar to taste
4 ounces green pumpkin seeds
4 ounces sesame seeds
1 pound ripe tomatoes
1 stick of cinnamon
1/2 big red, not-so-hot chile, seeds removed
1 sweet bread, or some arrowroot cookies, just to keep it from being too runny

Method

- peel the plantains, and cut them into long thin slices, then fry 'em up
- cook the tomatoes, cinnamon, and the chocolate together, in a tiny bit of water
- in a blender, liquify the tomato mixture
- toast the pumpkin seeds, the sesame seeds, and take the seeds out of the chile
- liquify the sesame mixture (you may need to add water)
- mix everything together and heat it up for about 5 minutes
- decorate with a bit of extra sesame seeds

enjoy!!! It's kind of like fried bananas in chocolate sauce, with a bit of a spicy bite.

Black beaches of Guatemala

2007-01-24T14:34:00.000-08:00

Black beaches? like Hawaii? well sorta, yes, as in the sand is black, afluent like Hawaii, no. The guide books describe them as delapitated and that maybe there time has come and gone. I guess thats why were the only gringos there, which after spending a week in a very gringo'fied Xela was welcome. The menu wasn't in english.

On the way to the beach we stopped in at Tak Alik Ab Aj, the oldest ruins yet found in Central America and one of the few examples of the Olmec and Mayan culture mixing. The flora was just as interesting as the ruins, with orchids growing on most every tree!
Arriving in Champico the people were easily recognized as beach types, sandals, no shirts and lots of beach cruisers. This town was once a bustling port city, 2nd largest in Guatemala, during the height of the coffee fincas or plantations. There is a pier going out to sea and is standing by nothing shy of a miracle, and the railroad tracks end just shy of the pier. I presume this is how they used to load the coffee onto boats 100 years ago. Now, its being used to store fishing boats which get lowered off the end past the breakers. Off course I had to go check out the mechanism with which the fishermen risk there lives, more miracles that it works. Kim noticed that there was not a single unfilled hammock during the height of the day.

We really enjoyed our lunch of shrimp and fish fried in garlic and just before heading home, Maggie bought us each a green coconut to drink. This is a real treat. The milk is not as sweet or thick as a brown coconut, *just* right for a hot day at the beach.

Having photo uploading issues, but over in our pictures there are photos of this trip. The volcano is Sanguanita, and is very active. From Xela we can see the larger dormant volcano but only the PLUMES of smoke from the wee one. Driving down to the beach afforded a great view of the little one. I read in the paper that a group of geologist have just finished building six monitoring stations around this volcanoe in an effort to predict a larger erruption and avert deaths. Remember, Xela is the second largest city in Guatemala and about 10-15 miles from this volcanoe. Not sure if size really means anything in the world of volcanoes as the biggist volcanoe I've ever seen was the lake in Yellowstone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Volcano

Well the bell just rang for classes to start again so. Yo va!

oo, and here's a picture of our host family

Weaving

2007-01-19T08:34:00.000-08:00

Part of the mission of our language school is to teach us about Mayan culture while we learn spanish. Many of the teachers are Mayan, and they organize loads of informative events. Earlier this week, there was a speaker about Mayan cosmovision, a movie about the civil war in Guatemala, and an expedition to a see local weavers in action. The brightly colored woven cloth is famous, and we got to see how they make it.

It's super labor-intensive, like most things here. The weavers set up in a big field, with wheelbarrows full of long skeins of cotton thread. Then they stretch out the skeins, which are about half as long as a playing field, and organize them with what look like big combs. They count all the threads, and divide them evenly between the teeth of the big combs. They they paint the threads with natural dyes. First everything gets striped with black, and then the gaps between the black stripes get filled in with different colors.

Once the threads are dyed, they get taken over to the weavers, who are usually in the same family as the dyers, and they set up their giant looms to weave the cloth. We visited a weaving house, and got to see them in action. Here's a short movie of the weavers in action:

I even got to try my hand at the loom!! Here's a terrible picture of me trying to figure out how to do it - the weavers made it look so easy!! Apparently I was really lucky to get to try it out - our guide said he'd never seen them let anyone else take a go at the loom before.

Our first week in Xela

2007-01-18T21:36:00.001-08:00

It has been nice to be able to stay in one place for a bit. Kim and I are studying Espanol in Guatemala's second largest city, Quetzaltenango, more commonly refered to as Xela. Its a town of about 200,000 people, and as in most of Guatemala, mostly Mayans. The women, and the occasional man, wear the amazingly embroidered and hand dyed and woven 'ropa tipica' making any outing into the narrow cobblestone streets an amazing experience. I wonder how many times they drop their groceries off their heads as they are learning to balance it up there!

Our school, Celas Maya, is a school that teaches Spanish and Quiche, one of the many Mayan languages. The complete immersion into the culture and the language has been great. We are living with a Mayan family, the Jocols. The mother, Juana has been great, welcoming us into her home and feeding us yummy food.

In the photo below we went up the road to grind some corn which we later used to make tortillas 'a mano' or by hand. These are way tastier than the ones Kim and I make in the States with Maseca.

This morning we went to Fuentes Georginas, a local hot spring where they've built a couple of pools and a bar. This rivals the relaxation offered by David's sauna.

The trip there was fun, we took a local bus, more on these later, and then a pickup truck up into the hills. The views from the back of the pickup were great, the fields were more like raised bed gardens, with carrots the size of your forearm coming out of the rich earth. Here's a short video(mute your sound):

Have you ever wondered where the US school busses go? Well, they're here! And bright yellow is just one of the colors. You can't imagine what great paint jobs, right down to each wheel lug nut, they put on them. After they trek up to the US to get their bus, I think the first thing they do is mount a ladder and roof rack. Next comes amazingly shiny chrome everything, and then they smoke a lot of pot and head to the paint store. These busses will certainly be a subject of many of my photos. Here's a primer

And now, turn up the sound for this video, and I doubt your speakers will compare to air horns on narrow streets:

The school has kept us amazingly busy, homework, activities, and then there are the markets and so, so much to see and do. Hope everyone is great!

ps. we've updated our links on the right - new photos and videos.

Guatemala!

2007-01-14T14:18:00.000-08:00

we made it to Xela (Quetzaltenango) on time for our language school!! With 50 minutes to spare, actually, before we're supposed to be picked up by our host family. We're road weary. I wouldn't recommend trying to drive all the way through Mexico in one week. But we're here, and Guatemala is gorgeous. More later. They have WiFi at our school, so you may hear lots from us, if they don't keep us too busy with spanish lessons. We may also have time to upload photos. xo

Where sugar comes from

2007-01-12T17:46:00.000-08:00

We're going fast trying to get to Guatemala for our Spanish lessons. Our map (which we got at the place we bought our Mexico insurance, Sanborn's in McAllen, Texas) is pretty good. It shows most of the roads we need and we don't have to guess too much. My favorite towns are the ones that aren't on it.

We're passing through beautiful little mountain towns like Papantla and Ozuluama - they're tucked in the hills away from the highway. The roads are really narow and the buildings aren't set back at all, so you feel like you're going through little canyons. All the houses are built of cinder blocks mortared together and then painted really bright colors - but they must put another layer of mortar on top because you can't see the brick outlines. All the houses are small and very square, kind of lego-like. The shops are mixed in. They're mostly doorless - well, they don't have front walls either. They're cubes with one side open to the street. I think they have metal grates to pull down at night. The streets open out onto small squares with park benches and lots of people milling around. Panantla had a big basketball court with ahuge stone relief carving as its back wall, in the same style as the pyramid decorations at El Tajin, the ruins we visited. The towns are just so *pretty* - there's a lot of attention paid to aesthetics.

We must be travelling a little off the beaten path, too, because we're getting lots of stares. Today we stopped at a small market to buy a 20L jug of purified water to put in the van's tank (cheap at 20 pesos, or $2 - a coke was 8 pesos). A kid of about 8 was working there and ran off to get change for us. He must have told his friend there were gringos at the counter, because next thing another kid appeared, and he just stared and stared at us. His mouth wasn't hanging open but just about!! I said 'Que tal?' (what's up?) and his eyes just about fell out of his head. When we were pouring the water into the van, Douglas heard him telling his friends 'and then she said ¿Que tal?' and giggling like mad. Douglas thinks they're staring at my hair, but I think they're staring at his crazy sunglasses.

Everything suddenly got very tropical, too. Once we left the hills, we got into orange and sugar country, and it smells like it! Most trucks that go by are either full of oranges or stacked with sugar cane. I have some pictures, but we haven't managed to organize getting them onto the web yet. Soon. We stopped at a stand to buy some oranges, and I think we got charged a gringo tax. We got 4 oranges and a couple of bananas, and asked how much. She said 10, with a little lift of her eyebrow. I already had a 10 peso coin out ($1), so I handed it over, and this sly grin spread across her face like she'd just overcharged us by a lot. I guess I{ll bargain next time.

Here's a picture of a truck loaded with sugarcane:

Rules for animals are different, here, too. Dogs roam wherever they like, even well-kept ones with collars. They always look like they're going somewhere, too, like they have an errand to run. Hroses are thethered on the verge of the road, munching grass. All the farm animals look pretty happy in their sunny little fields.

*next day*

We're in San Cristobal de las Casas, now, and is it ever charming!!

We got stopped by another police officer on the way, in a small town in the Tuxtla mtns just south of Catemaco. A few cops had set up shop in the middle of the highway, and one whistled us over to the roadside. They all had machine guns and WWII era pistols. He wanted to see ID, know where we were going, etc. And then he asked for a soda!! Too bad we didn't know how to say 'we're smelly hippies and we don't drink soda'. We said we only had coffee, and then he wanted to make us one! Our end of the conversation probably sounded something like this 'sorry I do be, spanish no good, coffee?' We hesitated long enough that he let us go, luckily. Though it might have been fun to make coffee for all the cops in the middle of the highway. He wasn't menacing, like the cop in Tampico - he was pretty smily. I think he was just curious.

Later in the day, driving through a big town, all the traffic got diverted slightly from the highway to go through a police checkpoint. There was a big sign saying 'if they ask you for money, call this number'

And to give you a picture of what the driving is like here - imagine you're passing a big slow truck on a narrow highway. Then someone passes you, while you're passing the truck! and there's someone coming the other way in the oncoming lane! hours and hours of this, while mopeds with 5 people on them join the stream of traffic in totally chaotic ways.

Thanks for keeping in touch - we love the comments!!

Our First Bribe!!

2007-01-09T16:11:00.000-08:00

We´re in Mexico, in Ozuluama, just south of Tampico, on the east coast. We crossed the border yesterday. No one really asked us where we were going or inspected our car, or even looked at the car. Instead, we were told to park and walk from office to office, paying small fees to various people. I(Douglas) really liked the small private enterprise that only did photocopies, which are needed for one of the offices (different building of course). One dollar and he of course knew exactly what needed to be copied. The only person who resembled a customs officer was the woman at Migracion, and she was really too motherly to be a customs officer. She was very patient with our broken spanish.

Once we crossed the border, everything was different - there were no lines on the road and drivers drove wherever they felt like it. Horse-drawn carts trundled along the side of the highway. Every building is a different shade of BRIGHT.

We camped in a small coastal town called La Pesca. A recomendation from RV Camping Mexico by Mike and Teri Church. La Gaviota turned out to be a dump, but the town is super cute. White Pelicans and oyster catchers by the hundreds. A bike ride this morning disproved my fears of biking on the roads here. I think the drivers are used to slow moving horses, peds, and bikers. Of course we love the old school bikes that many folks are riding here, although there´s lots of cheaper mountain bikes too.

Driving through Tampico today, a cop steps out into the road to make everyone stop, and we all did. The only difference between us and everyone else is how white we are, and so we were motioned to the side. The cop explained that we were supposed to stop behind the line - the obvious question is what line. Nonetheless, he tells us that its going to be a 3000 peso fine ($300US), but conveniently, we can take care of it on the side of the road rather that go to the police station. Hmmmm, what to do. We balked, and he asked how much we could afford for this traffic violation. Not being the best negotiator, I (D) said 300 pesos ($30). This seemed reasonable to him, but we then had to pay him through the passenger window, out of sight of the road. hmmm. Well, it was a first for me, Kim and La Tortuga, a bribe. We had been gazing happily at the Mexican countryside, the happy cows grazing in their fields and the brightly colored houses, people walking and talking to each other everywhere, and saying that America could use a little more Mexico. This has balanced our view. And whats with rose tinted sunglasses anyway?

We´re really enjoying having the van - we can go wherever we want, whenever we want, and at the end of the day we´re in our own cozy home, instead of an unfamiliar hotel room. Our stuff is shaking down (and out), each thing to its own particular place in the van, and lots of living space left free. With a few small exceptions, our fully-loaded van looks like we´re on a trip to the grocery store. How did we ever live without a VW? The question of the day yesterday was - Is there enough room in the van to play hackey sack? We decided no, but not by much!

We´re planning to speed through Mexico, so we can relax in Xela (Quetzaltenango) in Guatemala. We plan to start language school there on Jan 15, and stay for 2 weeks. Tomorrow we plan to spend the night on the Emerald Coast, or maybe a little south of there. Cross your fingers that the cops we meet are honest!!

Did it all fit?

2007-01-02T21:25:00.000-08:00

Amazingly, all that, plus countless knick-knacks that Douglas had in the shed, actually fit in the van. Of course, I'm taking a couple extra relays, nuts, bolts, and mass airflow sensors, and any other kinda sensor I had back there. It has taken a couple extra days in Asheville figuring out where, and how, everything will live. I just got news that the deodorant has been jettisoned. The extra starter motor got nixed, the unicycle even got the boot, although Dean, who convinced me it was superfluous, seems a little TOO pleased that its staying here...

One last around the block trip on the unicycle, a bit of boring banking business in the am, and we are heading out of the wonderful town of Asheville tomorrow. This place is wonderful, with some of the best people ever to share the days with. Yesterday's new years day hike up Pilot mountain with Dean, David, Annette, Don and Bess will be a day to be remembered.

Packing

2006-12-22T22:11:00.000-08:00

Months of saving and planning are coming to an end. We're packing the van. It's all coming down to the 2 piles on the left. We have clothes enough for 2 people, for 5 months, we hope. It was hard to decide what to bring, to account for just about every possible climate, from Central American muggy jungle to Patagonian bone-chilling mountaintops. O well, they have clothes in South America. If we don't have it, we can always get it there.

We also have camping gear, kitchen stuff, books, chairs, pillows, sleeping bags, etc. - all we think we'll need for life on the road. The van is a lot bigger than the backpacks we've taken on previous long trips, and the amount of stuff we can pack seems really luxurious. I mean, we're bringing olive oil, and cocoa, and 3 pairs of shoes each! We're trying to keep the load light, because we'll no doubt find new and cool things on the road and we want to have room for them. But it's always tempting to throw in that one small extra thing that will make life easier...
The paperwork is lagging behind the packing, of course. We have most of what we need, but are waiting on car insurance. And we still have to close the deal on the house. Oh, and get traveller's cheques. And health insurance. And visas for 3 countries...
We'll post a final packing list, as well as a final paperwork/to-do list before we take off. This trip took a lot of planning, and we learned a lot from other blogs we read, and we'd like to return the favor. We learned a lot about what not to leave to the last minute (what, procrastinate? us? never!!).

Keep your fingers crossed for us that we packed enough pairs of wooly socks (says the Canadian). Likely when we write next, we will be living in the van...

Getting ready

2006-12-04T15:05:00.000-08:00

We've sold the house. We've quit our jobs. Soon we won't both be able to work legally in the same country. So we're heading south, as far south as we can go. We'll be taking the VW camper van variously known as the Breadloaf (because that's what it looks like) or laTortuga (because it'll be our slow-moving portable home for the next few months).

We plan to speed through Mexico, stop in Xela, Guatelama for language school for a week or two, and then drive relatively quickly through the rest of Central America, because it's close to North America and will be easy to visit later. We'll ship laTortuga from Costa Rica to Ecuador, then drive through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, ending up at Douglas' dad's house in southern Brazil. I can't wait to see the wool in Uruguay. Douglas can't wait to climb all the volcanos between here and there. And we're both having dreams about monkeys, parrots, and lots of fresh fruit.

I need to go practice my spanish. More later, from the road...