Wild Blue Yonder

The Hat Factor

2011-10-19T08:50:00.001-05:00

Rescue rangers climb and roam Grand Teton National Park on a daily basis, poised to pick up the pieces of accidents, many preventable, some not. The day I joined a ranger on patrol he was called back to base fifteen minutes after we headed out. A skier on Ellingwood Couloir had lost control and fallen 800 feet. It was serious. I went on walking alone.

Another day I joined my friend Drew. We went off-trail toward an area favored by late-season skiers. We bumped into some local backcountry skiers, early risers finishing their day long before noon. In other words, capable. But another guy was making his way solo, with precious little gear or experience. Still, he had managed to climb a remote ridge and have a great time of it. Drew chatted with both parties about the weather, their gear, what they thought of the conditions.

I thought it must be stressful to see people unprepared in the wilderness, but Drew quipped maybe that's what it's for. I took that to mean that there is a lot that can be said for living by your wits. Risks let us find our potential. And we hope it ends well.

Also an avalanche forecaster, Drew commented how his job was not to police the backcountry but to encourage good decisions. Avalanche reports can predict conditions, but they can't anticipate prudence. On one day, he said, avalanche conditions were tricky, which didn't make a trip into the backcountry impossible, just worthy of extra consideration. His report went something like this.

With a cowboy hat a meticulous fit is crucial. It should stay on in a gallop: snug enough to stay put and loose enough to not pinch your brains. This is your perfect hat. But even then, one day a big gust comes along to blow it right off.

Therein lies the point. Lose your hat and it's time to take stock. A cowboy who straps it to his chin with stampede strings never takes that risk, but neither does he find the moment to get off his horse and reevaluate.

I live in a time when warnings come in pithy slogans or written in block letters on danger signs. So it took a while to chew on this old notion--guidance by parable. But (as any English major would) I liked it.

Soon after we hit patches of snow and the going got harder in my trail runners. Though I wanted to keep on going, I knew I might feel differently later. So I reluctantly called it a day.

Sky of Blue, Sea of Green

2011-10-08T15:23:00.003-05:00

It was a huge grizzly that we never saw. But we were always certain of its presence (the air got electric and putrid). Claire and I were finishing a loop trail at the north end of Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park. And I had dragged her there.

We had already celebrated the beauty of lake, craggy Teton views and a pornographic explosion of wildflowers. We spotted crusty discs of bear poop and sweated from our ascent to a panoramic viewpoint. Coming down, tall shrubbery walled the trail which we found blocked by a steaming pile.

We had arrived even before the flies, which told trouble. Then we saw the big clawed paw print. Steps beyond the odor sharpened. Now I know. Grizzles smell like a landfill in a heatwave.

Besides the bear spray, my only recourse was to launch into a pathetic chorus of Yellow Submarine (so strong is the survival instinct). Reader, you have never heard such an unsteady, wobbling and adrenaline-laced version of that tune, clapping, we beat it to tatters until we found the car. Later, my ranger friend surmised that the pile-maker had likely been a grizzly--the black bears in this sector had long fled from their invasion.

In telling the news, Claire would call it our bear encounter. I insisted that it wasn't an encounter without a sighting. And statistically, these encounters were not always grim. What we had was probably worse--those wretched smells and rustlings put to our own imaginations.

The Way We Ran

2011-03-02T17:50:00.002-05:00

Two sore days into the 100k Cruce de los Andes, my partner and I hit the tent. By headlamp, Anne trimmed the parts of her feet that would soon fall off anyway. With dirt-streaked, inflamed ankles and knees, I was more discarded Cabbage Patch doll than adventure athlete, despite a recent wet wipe sponge bath. Was my head actually resting over a dried cowpie? After 8 hours on the course, all prime camping spots had been taken.

A bullhorn shook the campgrounds, "Mandatory racers briefing on the beach! Tomorrow's route has changed..." Were they kidding? It was 11pm.

Welcome to Argentina, where even in an athletic event, the day doesn't end until it's the next. Another sure sign we were there--the race director would soon urge us to pocket meat from the grill to fuel the following day's grueling summit run. In his pep talk (which was sounding more and more like a concession speech) he said that the final day would rival the one we had just faced. The crowd groaned. The day we had just finished included five river crossings, some skittish scree descents and an elevation gain of 2000meters.

But he had good news! Those teams who just weren't up for it could take an 'alternative route'--which turned out to be the main road for cars over Icalma pass into Chile.

Did we come this far to run a road? Broken as we were, we thought not.

That second day, we had soldiered on but run less and less. A pain in my right knee made running downhill excruciating--so we hiked. And I can say that the most difficult aspect of this long-distance race was watching myself perform at a rate I knew I could exceed. But part of the challenge lies in reconciling high adrenaline with an injury. I had to go for it without going for it. A muscle relaxant passed on by an anonymous racer and the searing views of the high Andes helped.

One aspect of the race we hadn't expected--bottlenecks. These happened when the trail narrowed and a tall rock outcrop or ultra-steep descent made for lines a hundred runners strong. On the final day, we had reached the ridgetop with fanfare-- we were technically in Chile!

The path was narrow, the views were big. Pain? Face to face with giant, snow-covered volcanoes, we started running out of sheer joy.

That wasn't destined to last. Ten minutes on we hit a bank line. Hundreds of runners were stopped before a steep section with a rope and race monitors. In an hour, the line had barely budged. Runners were weary, antsy, spent. But in this situation, there was little to do.

A pair of condors swept toward us, gliding, spiraling over the human spectacle (and smells). Everyone looked up. In a moment to remember, we weren't busy trying to beat ourselves. We were just alive in the Andes.

Much later, we would cross the finish line just in time for Chilean customs to stamp our passport before they closed. Almost everything was broken, but you had to be pretty happy about the almost part.

Training in the Wrong Hemisphere

2011-01-28T17:49:00.000-05:00

With less than one week until Cruce de los Andes I'm sharing this blog post from Anne Upczak, my race partner. I think she's going to need a lot of sunblock.

In June, Carolyn invited me to an ultra race consisting of three days of 18 miles per day up and over the Andes from Argentina to Chile. My fantasy life was aroused.

I sat on my deck in the Colorado mountains, red wine in hand, and indulged in the idea of embarking on an adventure put in front of me. It is hard to find an excuse to stay inside during a Rocky Mountain Summer so I diligently began to train.

I registered for the Imogene Pass run, which takes runners from Ouray, Colorado (7792 ft) up and over the Imogene Pass (13114 ft) and back down into Telluride (8750ft) all in only 17 miles. It was a race I never imagined myself doing, but the crisp September air and the spectacular views helped me up and over the grueling pass.

As the fall progressed and the days became shorter and colder my internal motivation to be outside began to dwindle. As many of us who live in regions with four seasons know, fall is a time to wind down and begin thinking about fattening up for the winter.

This is a difficult inclination to fight.

So as winter approached and the darkness encroached on my training I struggled to motivate myself and I began to wonder why I agreed to a race in the southern hemisphere in the middle of the northern winter.

As December winds howled outside I organized myself to re-motivate and make it through the winter training. I strapped on my cross-country skis. The wax squeaked as my skis glided across the snow and I climbed higher and higher.

I realized that the whole reason I wanted to travel thousands of miles and participate in a three-day adventure race was not to prove anything to anyone; rather I was to be outside and experience the glorious blessing that the mountains share with me.

A mountain girl, I thrive on the open ended feeling being outdoors gives me. My heart and spirit are in the mountains, so even if my nose is frozen and my toes are numb, I know I still want to feel the wind on my face, see the sun hanging low in the winter sky and continue to try to train for whatever it is Argentina and Chile have in store for me.

I know that within a matter of weeks the hot southern summer will be forcing beads of sweat to run down my neck and my body will ache from the long days on the trail. I keep this vision in my mind this evening, on a dark, cold night in front of the fire.

Just keep moving forward one friend advised. Isn’t that all we can ever do in our unpredictable lives? Put one foot in front of the other and believe in ourselves.

Running across the Andes

2010-12-21T12:10:00.002-05:00

“How bad could it be?”

With this, Anne convinced me to enter Cruce de los Andes, a 100-kilometer footrace from Argentina to Chile. Does it matter that I’d never run half that far? Anne is the same friend who pushed me to travel solo throughout South America in 1998. Of course, I had wanted it badly, but the idea just seemed too big then. When I dithered, she pushed. “So what? If you don’t like it, just come back.”

I did return, but it took two years. Anne had been onto something.

So, we are the ideal team for a partner-run race. One plods and plans while the other rips the cord. With Anne, I know that there is no whimping out. It doesn’t matter that we live a continent away and reunite only every few years. Together we have backcountry skied, run and raced. We have braved roadside saloons in New Mexico.

This is the thing about pushing your limits. It’s all the better to grab a big idea. A beautiful metaphor, fodder to chew on when hailstones start flying in the second hour of your training run (as did yesterday).

For centuries, the Andes equalled an impasse, a fat, forested wall running the whole length of a continent. Over the centuries, missions and armies struck failure trying to find a route across them. Of course, everything is different now. I’ve hiked them and flown over them. But it seems altogether different to meet the Andes on their own terms, start to finish, like the first explorers did. On foot.

This is the 10th running of the Cruce, a lakes district race with a route that changes every year. In 2011, it starts on February 4th near San Martin de los Andes, Argentina, climbs above tree line, hugs some 2000-meter ridge tops, and finally drops into Chile via Icalma Pass two days later.

A big, beautiful what if. But how do two everyday runners get there?

229 Countries

2010-12-16T09:02:00.000-05:00

If you're like me you might not have time to tour 229 countries in 2011. Luckily, the Travel Book--among the best gifts of the year according to World Hum-- is a good solution. Though a heavyweight, it's the best way debate, say, the virtues of Tonga vs those of Svalbard when planning your next big trip. And in these days of scant world news, it's the great equalizer. Each country gets two pages. That's right, Djibouti gets the same word count as the USA. It's written by my esteemed colleagues all over the planet with my own contributions on Latin America, but I'm betting that the luscious photos will draw you in first.

A stop in Panama

2010-10-31T16:40:00.006-05:00

A lot of people ask me about Costa Rica, which these days speaks pretty well for itself. But what about the last stitch in Central America? To research the just-released Panama guide I spent three months in country going from coast to coast and north to south. It was tropical, it was cultural and mostly hassle-free. And I found dozens of places to love.

Take Portobelo. A Caribbean sliver christened by Colombus in 1502, it is known as the seat of Congos, blacks who stuffed it to their colonial masters by a temporary retreat to the hills to survive. Their traditions of speaking in code, pulling trickster acts and dress of clashing rags live on, alongside cool festivals like Diablos & Congos, featuring mad reels of dancing and drumming.

Another cultural icon in Portobelo is Sandra Eleta, an internationally-acclaimed Panamanian photographer who ditched the society life decades ago to document the traditions of this old community. Visitors can tour the studio she set up for local artists or rent her cool waterfront bungalow (pictured below), La Casa de la Bruja. It's the perfect base for snorkling around the Spanish canons in the bay or kayaking the Río Claro (see first photo).

It's also a short boat ride to dream worlds like the untrimmed jungle beach adorned with a ribboned swing. That's not to say that Portobelo is a resort--far from it. Though it has dive shops and drumming studios, 'eating out' refers to that one place that's open. But it is a living community among the ruins of Spanish forts and shipwrecks, one whose destiny may be shaped as it finds power in the arts.

Panama has one Portobelo, but dozens of rich spots to stumble upon, to lose and find yourself at once.

More about Portobelo and Panama are, you guessed it, in the new guide book.

Feliz viaje.

Blood, Sweat and Beers

2010-10-15T13:22:00.000-05:00

Today marks the release of Central America on a Shoestring, the 7th edition. For eight writers, it's more than just a guidebook, it was the sunbaked, schoolbus-rattled life we lived traveling the isthmus for months, scoping out ceviche stands and putting it all together. That's right: blood, sweat and beers. One colleague accepted the job days before the coup in Honduras (on the bright side, he rarely had to make reservations). With another, we debated merits of cheap vs. boutique (Him: you know, it's a bit pricey, a lot of phallic sculptures and young masseuses. Me: porno? Him: Nah, just artsy). Author Tom Spurling documented his trip with a kick-ass photo journal of El Salvador. In Panama, the sights were too many: whales breaching, a dash of scarlet macaws, chelas rimmed with frozen ice, kids commandeering dugout canoes, the remnants of the world's worst prison and a coat rack from Noriega's former compound.

Now, parts of Central America are offering a lot for your dollar, not to mention great potential for human encounters, fodder for the best kind of travel experience. Yes, here is a place where, boutique or cheap, people will stop and talk with you. But don't listen to me. Grab a book and get on the road.

Dear Delta pt II: the response

2010-09-29T11:34:00.004-05:00

Dear Ms. Mccarthy,
RE: Case Number 1547155

Thank you for sharing your recent traveling experience and requesting
compensation. On behalf of Delta Air Lines, I sincerely apologize for
the inconvenience you and your wife were caused due to flight
interruption and baggage mishandling.

I am truly sorry for the inconvenience caused when our flight was
delayed on the tarmac waiting for an available gate. We want to make
every effort

to deplane all passengers in a timely manner, especially
those passengers with a connecting flight. It was unfortunate to know
that your plane was waiting for 40 minutes on the tarmac for gate.

Additionally, I express regret for the inconvenience caused when your
connecting flight was not held. Please know that any decision to hold a flight for connecting passengers is made on a case-by-case basis. Respectfully, our team members at the gate are responsible for an on-time departure. I also recognize the plane was still at the gate andthe jetway was in place. At that point, the flight had been secured for departure and, again, I apologize the door was not reopened for you.

Moreover, as our customer, you are in the best position to point out
areas that need attention. Our goal is to provide proper assistance to
our passengers at all times. I am keenly aware of the need to listen to our customers and follow up on problems they bring to our attention. I have always felt that our passengers are the best judge of our service. I act contrite in this instance you did not receive the service you expected and should have received.

Additionally, I am truly remorseful for the inconvenience you were
caused with your baggage. Like you, we certainly wish that instances of mishandled bags never occurred. I can imagine how annoying your
situation must have been when you have to be same clothes for 48 hours.
I realize that sincere apology may not erase the negative impact of your experience, but I hope that an immediate recognition of them will
symbolize our commitment to a future partnership. Please know I will be sharing your comments with our responsible leadership teams for internal follow up. Your feedback is valued and we thank you for taking the time to bring this disappointing experience to our attention.

In conclusion, the gesture of $100.00 we extended was not meant to place a value on your experience; rather it was an attempt to make amends for your disappointment with our service. Respectfully, additional considerations would not be due.

Ms. Mccarthy, thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. By
bringing forth your concerns, you give us an opportunity to review our
operations and improve our services. As a valued SkyMiles member, your
business is important to us and given the opportunity of serving you in
the future, I am confident Delta will not only meet but exceed your
expectations

Sincerely,

Vincent P. Harley
Coordinator, Customer Care

My response:
September 29, 2010

Dear Vincent,
Let me first express my pleasure at having contacted an actual human being at Delta. I appreciate your prompt response and must say it took some time to read through your loquacious email to get to the bottom line: “additional considerations will not be due.”

While I appreciate the apology, it seems somewhat lacking in the sincerity it purports to possess (thank you, I was not traveling with my wife). Careless passages like this one arouse my suspicion that your letter was only lifted from an apology issued to another poor sot to whom additional considerations will not be made.

In order to effectively make amends for my disappointment in Delta’s service, I still would like to be reimbursed for the aforementioned costs I incurred. Therefore, I would be most pleased if the responsibility leadership teams you speak of can re-evaluate my case.

Respectfully,
Carolyn McCarthy
Case Number 1547155

Dear Delta (I'm hungry)

2010-09-28T15:52:00.004-05:00

September 28, 2010

Dear Delta Airlines,
Recently I was stranded in Atlanta for 24 hours due to my flight from Boston waiting on the tarmac 40 minutes for a gate. I understand delays can happen. But I still had about 12 minutes to make my connecting flight. My first complaint is that connecting gates were not announced on board the Boston flight. Upon disembarking, the Delta agent at the gate refused to contact my connecting flight to let them know I would arrive shortly. She helpfully said, "You're not going to make it. Don't even bother." Yet, as I had to be in Chile the following day, I ran for the gate and actually made it before the plane's departure. Unfortunately, agents at the gate would not let me board since the door had already closed.

Even this could be understandable, but with lodgings I was given three meal tickets for $6 each (Delta may not be aware that in an airport, $6 is the cost of a bottle of water and bag of chips). There was no compensation for not having my luggage (would Delta agents work in the same clothes and underwear for 48 hours?) When I asked how I could get a change of clothes or call Chile to announce my delay, the last agent of the evening shrugged.

To me, this does not represent good customer service. The following day, as I spent 10 hours in the airport (since my meal tickets prevented eating elsewhere), I begged 2 more meal tickets and a voucher for $100 of future travel. With my airport food stamps, I spent $12 on breakfast and skipped lunch to afford an $18 dinner.

What a great strategy for dieting, but I do wonder if Delta takes customer service seriously. A voucher implies I will fly Delta again, and I am not sure that I will. It certainly does not cover all the costs of a 24-hour delay. I am seeking compensation for:
$7- cost of Boingo Wireless connection to Skype with contacts about my delay
$192 US dollars- cost of my replacement ticket for the regional flight I missed due to the delay.

As a compromise, I will pay the $1 in-airport DVD rental fee, since I assume that entertainment falls under my own responsibility.

I thank you for your concern and prompt reply in this matter.

Regards,
frequent flyer # 2617158999
Carolyn McCarthy

The response:

Dear Carolyn Mccarthy,
RE: Case 1547155

This is an automatically generated message to acknowledge the receipt of your email. Please do not reply to this message.

We appreciate your continued patience while we review your concerns. Our goal is to respond to you within 14 business days. However, due to the complexity of certain situations, additional time may be required to respond.

If you need assistance with a current reservation, please contact Reservations directly at 1-800-221-1212. For international reservation locations, please visit https://www.delta.com/help/contact_us/reservations/index.jsp. They will be happy to assist you.

Customer Care
Delta Air Lines

Canyonlands Run

2010-08-08T09:37:00.004-05:00

Faced with few days and many trails to cover for an upcoming guidebook, I laced my sneaks to run some trails. One of the best places for trail running (provided you've got a Camelback) is Canyonland's Needles. A park ranger recommended the 7-mile loop from Big Springs Canyon to Squaw Canyon. She said the route is mostly flat, save for the middle.

In hindsight, it's a little like saying Colorado is mostly flat, except for the middle. The first three miles are perfect, easy-does-it sandy singletrack with open views. Then the climb starts and soon running is not an option, as you zigzag up steep slickrock hunting for cairns to guide the way (they are there). Each cairn perched higher. No. Really?

Yes. And the views up top are sick. Plan a long pause there, just be careful with the scramble down to the next canyon. You might lose running momentum for a bit, but it's unlikely that your pulse will flag.

No caution here. The ranger proved to have an excellent sense of humor, or sense of adventure (often one and the same). Her pick has become one of my favorites--and you won't see in the guidebooks.

To make it hiking, just plan for 3-4 hours, bring a picnic and hat, because you'll probably want to strech it out.

In the Words of Edward Abbey

2010-08-02T11:04:00.001-05:00

"Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the Canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the...cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe."

It's been 42 years since Abbey published the book and today it's more apropos than ever. If you go, take Desert Solitaire, it's indispensable as water in canyon country.

On the Road: Utah

2010-07-15T10:42:00.000-05:00

The gas stations on I-70 get more magnificent the further you get from civilization. Far from Colorado’s ski condos, these barren flats slipped between the big ranges are trucker territory. I stop for gas.

I spend so much time on the road abroad that America still feels fresh. It's easy to get taken with strangeness and specificity of her subcultures. Here there's more than candy, maps and sodas (the road is for sugar highs and getting lost). There's both chip dip and lip dip—chewing tobacco. But also thirty kinds of jerky and new short-sleeve white collar shirts, the kind that one can embroider Ray across the breast pocket. Even more than the salted, processed meat, these shirts inspire a kind of sadness in me. Ray can’t go home to get a clean shirt.

He’s bound to the highway, not the back roads, on the run or making time coast to coast. He’s just spilled an 18-ounce coffee all over his lapel, or urged by optimism, buys fresh togs for the promise of a shower or female company. Like me, he’s passing through. In three minutes he’s gone. Ten minutes later I’ll pass him, oblivious to the fresh shirt.

The Most Beautiful Places on Earth

2010-05-12T10:11:00.004-05:00

This month, Lonely Planet magazine takes a shot at this big list. I was thrilled they included my feature on Argentina and Chile in the mix (preview here).

My thanks go out to great subjects and helpers. Buenos Aires was researched under flash flood conditions, but we still managed to hike the high tide of Palermo and have fun doing it. Matt Munro did some incredible photography of Iguazu Falls, tango in BA, glaciers, pampas and parks. The magazine is at Barnes & Noble bookstores in the US and at newsstands throughout Europe.

Which places make your list?

Cochamo Valley

2010-04-19T09:47:00.008-05:00

A few weeks ago I headed out for a solo trek through Cochamo Valley. Only a few hours from Puerto Varas, it has been hailed as the new Yosemite, a climber's mecca perched above a damp, dark rainforest alongside the Cochamo River, whose hues range from clear to teal. To get there, you have to wade through mud, cross a river on a slippery trunk and brush the brambles from your shins. With a pack, it takes around five hours to reach a new refugio with a panorama of granite peaks. From there, trails sprout to waterfalls, granite walls and peaks. Goodbye world.

It's honestly excellent. The raw materials were always here, but the boon is about the setup, dreamed up by Daniel and Silvina. Climbers, they have been coming to the valley and camping for ten years. The refugio they've built caters to every need: fresh pizzas, spacious bunks and porches. A handmade map points out the trails and travel times. A website gives detailed directions on how to arrive. In this part of the world, this degree of service is true luxury. Prices are fair (8.000 pesos/US$16 for a dorm bed, 6.000/US$12 for a pizza).

The only part of the experience they can't soften is the transit, which requires some fortitude, good balance and the instincts of a golden retriever (without rubber boots, gaiters are a must here). Near the end, it's probably best to reach the Cochamo River crossing (created with skinny planks and a pulley) before dark. But by all means, don't miss it. Plan on at least three days to enjoy the upper valley. Don't forget your headlamp, a sleeping bag is useful for the refugio (theirs are thin) and cash for the baked goods better than anything available in town.

Refugio Cochamo is now closed for the season, but December comes sooner than you think.

Diary of an 8.8

2010-03-01T11:24:00.004-05:00

Chile just had one of the biggest recorded earthquakes in history. Puerto Varas, where I live, is far from the epicenter yet I woke up with my house rocking. Then there was the suspense--without power or internet I had no idea what had happened. The phone lines were jammed.

The 8.8 registered locally as a 5.0 and we didn't sustain big damage. But the disaster is present. Chile is, after all, a small country. Everyone has friends or relatives in the capital. I have friends whose house has disappeared. Another did not appear for days.

I thought Puerto Varas was left unscathed. I was slow to realize that the effects will come slowly here--with shortages, roads out, power blinking on and off. There is one highway through the country and when its bridges are out, our connection breaks. Things--like toilet paper, gas, food--are slow to arrive. The only local service station that isn't already out is limiting $10USD worth of gas to each car. Cops direct the line, which twists around the block. I skip it and wonder if I will ever have to attempt the 20km walk from home to town.

Not knowing about what is going on elsewhere becomes an obsession. How can I work when the ground still trembles? Disaster pushes the everyday off our radar and steeps us in the big questions.

A Chilean friend told me the quake brought him to apologize to an ex for bad behavior ten years past. Friends reconnect in crisis, but strangely, so do the ghosts of our past. It's a time of wondering. In the grocery store I feel like I'm buying way too much. Six heads of garlic? But they are bound to save bad meals to come. I reexamine each aisle, trying to perceive what I'm missing, what I'm undervaluing. And that's only in the grocery store.

What remains fascinates me. My town is a rarity in Chile--upper middle class. All diet food is gone. Really, disaster hits and you think about losing those last five pounds? No one has touched the imported goods I covet. Will the day soon arrive when Chileans will have to learn to cook bean thread noodles and quinoa? Somehow, it makes me feel more competent, more safe, knowing I can cook ethnic. But it's total bull. I remind myself: you are just as fragile as everyone else out there.

Predictably, there has already been a run on good value reds in the wine aisle. It is about survival, I think.

The Darien Gap

2009-10-20T15:04:00.013-05:00

Travelers who fancy sweeping the Americas head to foot will find one critical impasse: the Darien Gap.

A steamy jungle swath shared by Colombia and Panama, it is the one and only interruption in 30,000 miles of Pan American pavement gunning from Alaska to Puerto Montt, Chile. The road stops here.

Long the haunt of kidnappers, drug traffickers, rebels and rogues, the Darien's reputation simmers in world-class badness and macho mystique. Personally, I suspected that part of that was because dude journalists have always looked here for street cred.

But what really happens in this 54-mile gap?

People are living their lives. There's a sizeable population of Embera-Wounaan, as well as Kuna and the colonists who arrived with the 'highway' that reaches Yaviza. Along the highway you'll find cantinas, a few concrete hotels and caged toucans for sale. But if you want to really see the Darien, travel its waterways. The rivers will take you into Parque Nacional Darien (a World Heritage Site) and villages like the one I visited, with thatched huts flanking a singular glass phone booth. In these places, a visitor can still be regarded with curiosity.

The reputation? While not undeserved, it's time that it's amended. Rebel troops are probably not waiting with snares in the jungle. These days, it's complex logistics, weary police, constant checkpoints, natural threats (think poisonous pitvipers) and sweaty isolation keeping would-be adventurers at bay.

Before you go looking for shangri-la, keep in mind that there is no easy way into the heart of the Darien. You'll need a. trust, b. expert local help for logistics. c. a lot of money for charter boats and local guide services and/or d. a lot of money for professional guide services and e. inner calm. This isn't a place for everyone. Yet, it can be very gratifying for some.

We affiliate adventure with the extreme and, yes, the Darien has plenty of that. But once you get there (and you'll know what there means), the surprise might be glimpsing a completeness known only to bygone centuries.

Hot off the Press: Trekking in the Patagonian Andes

2009-10-15T14:30:00.008-05:00

With the southern summer nearly here, there's a new version of a classic South American hiking guide. Trekking in the Patagonian Andes was a beast and a ball to research. Yet it would have been impossible without ample help from local guides, mountaineers and good friends who came down to sweat and trudge the trails.

Many thanks and gratitude to those who made it happen!

Wild Life

2009-09-29T18:20:00.000-05:00

Panama´s Coiba National Park is known as the Galapagos of Central America, aka the Disney version of the natural world: a cheery, tropical creature-filled place.

Motoring up to Isla Coiba, a humpback whale breaches and crashes back into the depths. Bigger than the boat, it leaves a still, turquoise slick upon the surface. Soon there are others to watch, mothers teaching their calves the first thing or two. It gets me wondering about these places-where nature displays a loopy abundance- and how few and far between they have become.

What does it take to keep something wild?

Coiba has remained intact for bizaare reasons. Though it was first popular with pirates, later colonists stayed away. Probably because of the murderers. Starting in 1919, the main island held 22 remote prison camps. Surrounded by shark-infested waters, Coiba was the perfect cell. Paradise it wasn`t. Brutal conditions propagated disease and illnesses, torture was practiced and those who attempted escape simply disappeared.

Over 400 inmates are still missing, their fates absorbed into the mute surroundings of open sea and lush tropical forest beyond the deforested areas farmed in labor camps. Bahia Damas, the largest colony, makes a grim visit, overgrown with sharp grasses, its airless rooms slick with grime, indelibly dark in the hard sunshine. Here the few remaining guards (there are a few prisoners left) seem as eager to see a visitor as an inmate would be.

A paradoxical paradise.

The prison visit makes it hard to get in the water to go snorkeling, though the color shimmers turqoise and the beach is powder-white. The home of whale sharks, green moray eels and hammerheads, nature here comes equipped with its own security. But I go anyway, mostly because the other snorkelers brought their five-year-old. If she can, I can.

A puffer fish weaves through sand outside the reef. There are moorish idols the size of dinner plates, irridescent Pacific jack and the hundreds of inch-long rainbow wrasse which cloak my passage.

Whitetipped sharks are shadows on the sea floor. When one flits by my heart gulps. Do you know how hard it is to let that happen? As travelers we become connosieurs of sensation, but we rarely fear and admire in the same breath.

I see other things both beautiful and strange. A leatherback turtle flaps away. Rounding the islet, the current tugs, making my progress feel like the minnow´s escape.

And it is.

A Day in the Life

2009-09-26T10:05:00.003-05:00

· Start in the highlands. Bus 1.5 hrs to the regional capital, grab a taxi and research furiously to make the last southbound bus.
· Wait while a hotel receptionist prolongs a personal conversation. Minutes tick.
· Just make the bus without time to hit a bathroom first.
· Notice how the bus stops every 10 feet.
· Listen to some very loud reggaeton.
· Endure.
· At transit point, take another bus.
· Arrive to your destination, a place without phone reception, internet or taxis.
· Start the mile walk to lodgings.
· Lodgings dirty.
· Walk an extra mile to beach cabins.
· Find a rogue wave has taken out your beachfront lodgings. Locals say this hasn´t happened ever in their memory.
· Return to town, 2 miles, in noonday sun with backpack.
· Passing car does not stop.
· Visit another lodging. Sweat beads your face. Listen as a surfer´s girlfriend lying in hammock violently disses XX publication. You work for XX publication. Smile and leave.
· Find a place with one room left.
· The manager is out surfing.
· Watch a six-year-old wax his surfboard.
· Wait.

(to be continued...)

the other Bocas del Toro

2009-09-06T17:29:00.010-05:00

On Sunday I visited a Ngöbe Bugle community. Cristobal Island is a ten minute boat ride from Bocas town, where there's surf shops and $1 shot specials. But San Cristobal is a very different place.

Here the Ngöbe Bugle subsistence farm but sanitation problems and scant resources make it a difficult place to live. There are no cars, so a walk through the village weaves through stilt houses and crossing flags of laundry with chickens underfoot.On Sunday morning some kids were away for a baseball match, those remaining danced for a visiting group of long-distance runners.

I am weary of performances set up for visiting dignitaries and the like--often they feel like a brochure-in-motion, a rote recitation of culture. But it was clear moments in that this was more. Those who didn't dance stood rapt. It was not only real, but also a reminder that in many places whole societies must live on just too little. Yet their essence is vital and essential to our world.

Panama!

2009-08-31T16:56:00.004-05:00

Will you look at this place? If the toothy glass skyline doesn't faze you, then the diablos rojos (painted public buses) might. By sight they're groovy--hand painted with pop icons, devilish cartoons and portraits of the driver's progeny. But in practice they're scary--barely regulated, they've been known to make pedestrians bowling pins when breaks fail. One word: Cuidado!

Your other option are taxis. These too are barely regulated. Yours might be missing a bumper, seatbelt or door handles. The best practice is pricing before playing, as gringo features usually double the fare, which also flexes with the weather and your eminent need.

Few taxis actually want to go where you do--many will refuse the fare. Those who will take you won't know the address and don't read maps. Then there was the driver with the Bin Laden sticker that I hadn't noticed until we were half-way gone...For the traveler, it's a seminar in Advanced Negotiation, Cartography and Blind Faith. For the driver, it's Sucker 101, every day...

My advice? Suck it up and learn the ropes because Panama City is not to be missed. The people are shouters, the traffic ugly, but Panama City pulses. A walk across the city revealed suited businessmen eating snow cones, dudes casually toting twisted rebar and a jelly shoe diving off a balcony (take particular care under these!) Hard to believe that just beyond this cement jungle, and really, I mean just past the mega mall, lies a tremendous tropical forest where your thoughts are drowned out by the chatter of birds and the buzz of giant crickets.

You just have to get there.

My Favorite Desert

2009-08-18T13:00:00.009-05:00

Maybe it's the redness. Or its bigness. Or its shapes which ripple, arch and collapse into sage and sand, snaking rivers, deep slotted canyons, orange mesas and fissured towers. The Utah desert is a wild place. After traveling nearly half the world, I still find it secretive, strange and otherworldly.

That’s the thing about the desert: it absorbs and engulfs you. Tells you who you are.

There's power here. It gave John Wesley Powell courage, Joseph Smith divine inspiration and Edward Abbey words. You imagine that--if here long enough--you too could write whole books, invent a religion or fling yourself one-armed into the unknown.

The desert tells me that I'm a firefly on the face of things, a speck in geological time flitting briefly through this world.

We set out on the Narrows in Zion National Park early. The Narrows isn't a hard hike, but it does require you to tread a river all day, always "seeking refuge on higher ground" in case of a flash flood (which they say most likely off you anyway). After a night of heavy thunderstorms the water flowed clear and cold. We waded to our waists and forged up canyon over slippery boulders, through sculpted walls pocked with tiny scorpions. We admired the columns of light and peered at the blue slice of sky a thousand feet above. Mere specks.

America's national parks are not only amazing. They are popular. I did not realize how much so until we started to make our exit. It was a mass of humanity. Throngs of hikers forged up canyon. They were midwesterners, Italians, retirees and Koreans. Only a few had walking sticks to steady them in the current. Some wore bathing suits. Others carried designer leather purses or small, soaked children. There were flip flops and aqua shoes. Three divas wore nothing on their feet except perfect pedicures.

Bravo to those brave people. By not reading the free NP leaflet, they had found adventure on the scale of Powell or Lewis & Clark.

Abbey would have scowled. He had the right, the home court advantage. I do not put myself above them--the outdoors may be the only place I can properly organize myself. Otherwise I too am woefully unprepared.

Yet the moment helped me imagine the desert both with us and without us. The solitude of the morning contrasted sharply with the chaos of that afternoon. The desert tells us who we are. Collectively, we were not fireflies but circus fleas careening through some greater majesty, sometimes in RVs, sometimes in plastic sandals. At the end of my visit, I decided that the desert remained otherworldly and even more impenetrable than before.

But I was glad that I'd gotten up early.

Rapa Nui Redux

2009-06-30T11:01:00.006-05:00

I go to Easter Island without my pith helmet. Without illusions that I will crack its wacky mysteries. I do want to see the sights (those really big heads!) But what I am really craving is to be far from everything, which should be easy with two–thousand uninterrupted miles of ocean in all directions.

I am obliged to do it on the cheap. I pounced on a half-price winter fare (US$566) and booked camping in at the island’s only campground with provisions in tow. Tropical winter should be the rough equivalent of Patagonian summer. Right?

The first day, wind and sideways rain trashes five tents, sending campers to bunk on the shelter’s floor tiles. I dream in tune with buffeting gusts and waves crashing—we are right on the coast. My Black Diamond bivvy (more on this peculiar creature later) stands firm. I take it as a sign.

On the second day, the sun comes out.

A group from the campground wave me into their already-full jeep rental. The crew hails from China, the US, Germany and Italy. We take the coastal route, stopping at moais, the giant heads carved from volcanic stone, with the sea sloshing behind them. We end at Anakena, a beach so Pacific perfect that we successfully goad a new friend to swim with us in her underwear. The tour groups gape. The locals glance, but only for a second. What else can you do when life is this good?

Because Rapa Nui is so remote, it’s an expensive place. Dinner or lunch out averages $20 US dollars. So instead we eat in, sharing bottles of gas station wine and pasta. Or eat seafood empanadas ($3) at food shacks. Instead of taking tours, I take long walks, hiking to the island summit, volcanoes and caves.

A museum exhibit explains how the moai made their destinations. Some theories have them carted with pulleys and ropes over logs. But their backs are not damaged, only their bottoms. This matches popular folk tales that claim, “they walked to their destinations.” And so do I.

The encounters are the kind that make travel. Total strangers confess their life stories: a Chilean woman who came here without a penny in the throes of a mid-life crisis, foreigners who stayed for (what else) love, a native who returned after decades on Long Island, who could strip the island of its modern landmarks (school, light post, post office), giving me the invisible tour of what used to be.

My theory (because everyone must have theories on Easter Island) is that, far enough from everything, people drop their outer shell.

Yet RapaNui are not convinced by tourism. Or archaeology. Why would they be? Their treasures are carted abroad. Few personally benefit having their homeland usurped as a national park (and before that Chile leased their native lands as a sheep ranch and confined the RapaNui to Hanga Roa by force). Without their ancestral land, many rely on expensive imports that even tourists can barely afford.

On Saturday night, tourists and locals alike pile into the Topa Tangi pub, to sweat and dance like the savages we wish we were. After the cultural ballet ($20 for tourists), grass-skirted dancers join grandmothers and German tourists grinding to Polynesian pop and rap. At 3am the party moves to a shabbier dance hall whose name in Rapa Nui means ‘tall grass’ (the local equivalent of the back seat). Polynesian reputations need no introduction.

Cut to my bivvy, aka, Tombtent, in turns cozy and in turns maddingly claustrophobic.

In a week I am absorbed into the fabric of island life, as much as I can be. Locals tell me how much they dislike the tourists, while offering me avocados and passion fruit from their gardens. I can kind of agree: of course I am here to gawk, while to explore the island is the equivalent of raiding their attics to paw their family heirlooms. I can't see that going over big at home.

On my last night, a family makes me roasted fish and sweet potatoes, grilled and eaten with our hands over the coals. My host tutors me to lick my fingers loudly, as they do. "She doesn't have to," his cousin says. "She's not from here."

So I do it anyways.

How travel prepares us for The Crisis

2009-06-07T09:50:00.010-05:00

Honestly, not many people seem to care about the plight of vacationers in these times. Why should they? Even the word smacks of arrogance. Who are these people whose single purpose is leisure?

Though I became a travel writer, I did not grow up vacationing. My family spent vacations visiting my mother’s family in rural Quebec. We never stayed in hotels but occasionally ate out at the kinds of places that also served pancakes for dinner.

Yet I became a traveler and a travel proponent. And I’d like to say that travel prepared me for today’s crisis.

Travel can go beyond vacationing. Yes, it can teach you to live skinnier. Becoming a traveler meant the usual—dining on crusty bread and cheese, rickety buses, moments of extreme penury and mild discomfort exchanged for raw experience. And then, a moment of insight, chatting with child buskers who cleverly tackled the impossible task of hustling religious trinkets to atheists and convincing tourists to shine their (unfortunately nylon) shoes.

But beyond what happened to me, your average American used to a full cupboard at home, there was what was happening to them.

I returned to Buenos Aires, a city I’d taught in, in the middle of their Crisis. The discord and desperation were palpable. My memories were of cinemas that served champagne.

But people kept going about their lives. The cafes were full. True—beverages were deftly nursed—but there were the Argentines, rain or shine, communing with one another. As if it were indispensable. I found El Salvador similarly pluckish. For every headline of gang wars, I witnessed numbers of grandmothers who donned a pressed floral dress every Sunday in the pursuit of anonymous goodness.

When The Crisis spread like a virus a few months ago, an Argentine friend commented, “You Americans talk like the world is over. But we have been through this many times. So maybe it’s easier.”

Seeing how people around the world function through dysfunction can teach and sustain us. Don’t get me wrong—I can’t tell you that goodness lies in poverty. The fact that money can provide solutions, well, that’s obvious. But in the absence of it, how do we go about our lives? That’s something worth figuring out.

Roadtripping Atacama

2009-04-19T12:21:00.009-05:00

Your lips fissure first.

Over 600 miles long, the Atacama is the driest desert in the world. It disorients and dizzies poor gringos, rising from sea level to 22,000 ft peaks (somewhere in between was me, wondering if the nausea came from altitude, Peruvian "bottled" water or the seafood special).

I got my friend Bjorn to travel part of it with me. Bjorn is an engineer/scientist, but that didn't help when roadsigns declared "Geology" (minus specifics) next to skyscraping mountains of sand and rock. Or when we had a 6.0 earthquake in Tarapaca (although we both chose top bunks).

Scientists compared soil samples from the Atacama and found them similar to those on Mars. Lifeless. To back up the connection, a sign on Ruta 11 indicates "UFO landing site." Lots was funny here. On km 43 the "magnetic zone" pulls your car backward if you stop. It's on an apparent downhill.

This is a land of conspiracies.

That makes for giddy good road tripping. The Atacama's treasures are not fast apparent, like in deserts everywhere, they take scouting. We found oases. Cactus blooms and borganvilla. In Puconchile, a lush putting nine walled by giant sandtraps, we found Ecotruly, a domed Hare Krishna compound that welcomes visitors for vegetarian feasts (a bargain at $6 US). If you're not up for religious conversion, enjoy the theme park, which includes a giant wooden anaconda which will swallow you whole (but also do you the favor of spitting you out, whole).

That's not to say this is a theme-park destination. On the contrary. I'd say 95% of the Atacama is the land before time.

Only ten families still live in the altiplano village of Parinacota, at 15,700 feet. Silver used to travel this route in burro loads from the mines in Potosi to the Pacific. Commerce now centers around opening the church (one guy has the key) and serving tourists coca tea to mitigate the effects of altitude.

White adobe with a thatched roof, the church at Parinacota is worth beholding. There's a story of a table that roamed on its own (now secured by a rope to the wall). But better are the wall paintings that show the stations of the cross as interpreted by Aymara villagers long ago: they depict the crucifixion as done by the only villains they could possibly imagine--the Spaniards.

Hostel Takeover

2009-04-04T16:04:00.004-05:00

When Santiago's main newspaper, El Mercurio, called me, I assumed they were selling subscriptions. But no, they wanted to know about hostels.

No Chilean I can remember has ever expressed interest in hostels. Then came that word "crisis" whispered round the globe.

Luckily, backpackers know the concept of creative underspending. First point-today's hostels are not yesterday's sticky chicken coops sprinkled with dirty laundry. In fact, they've gone slick, with high design, sociability and sustainability. Is there a major chain hotel in Chile that recycles? Serves real coffee and second cups? Separates organic waste? Draws hand lettered maps to the bars with live music? Maybe it's logical that, as the baby-face of the industry, hostels should be trend setters. Let's just hope the rest follow.

If you're looking for your next digs in Chile, the article may be a good start.

Body by Torres

2009-03-17T14:22:00.008-05:00

6 days, 101 kilometers
You have to believe in your own willpower. And cute nicknames. At least that's how Christian did it.

A self-described "office boy," my friend actually works within Torres del Paine National Park, chained to a desk and a radio. So he sprang straight out of his swivel chair to join us on the circuit. The object? Weight loss. He said he was tired of being the solo guanaco macho .

(guanacos, a camelid common to this latitude, travel in female packs, choosing one male to safeguard them. The unluckies get cast out together, like B-league fraternities)...

At the trailhead he pulled out his backpack--a 35 liter pack. I shook my head and looked to the 90 liter bag in the back of his Toyota truck, recently dented by the butt of a mare (he wouldn't say what he had done).

I handed him 7 days worth of rations, half my tent and a fuel canister. We heaved our packs on. Though it was nearly 4pm, we had about six more hours of daylight. The trail was nearly flat but the wind bullied us back. We ate caramels for morale and kept on. At Camp Seron we popped a bottle of bubbly I had lugged up to toast the inauguration (or the end of the worst administration in US history). Half the pleasure was lightening my load.

I won't kid you. The trekking is not that difficult but wearing a 40 pound pack IS. We weren't a couple, but I tried some psychology, applying a cute nickname to keep tempers cool. "Almost there, honeybunch!" And so forth.

I don't think it is just the exercise. Life on the trail has the power to transform us.

We trod on, snacking on what I remembered to set aside (sometimes just peanuts, from the economy pack) and wondering where the good stuff was. We emptied streams of freshwater and hoped rain would refill them.

Our biggest day took us from Camp Perros over the Gardner Pass and to Camp Grey--a total of 22 kilometers, with wind, ladders and an elevation change that would read like a heart attack on an EKG. At camp, Honeybunch bought us all cans of beer, which served as an appetizer. Next I did the near forbidden. After all those kilometers, I prepared two packets of ramen noodles. I gave one to Honeybunch.

It was the look on his face.

"Hey," I said. "Didn't we have real sausage with the couscous? And bacon in the fettucini that time?"

I think he moaned. I discussed how ramen was a rite of passage to young Americans that we occasionally returned to with fondness. At least I do. But the look held.

At the end of the trek, he unpacked to return my gear, handing me a ten pound grocery bag of food. So here were those cookies, caramels, the chocolate covered....Not only had I forgotten about this stuff, I had started rationing.

"What are you doing with all this?"

"I thought you wanted me to carry it."

So as my pack got lighter every day, Christian's had not. This was the work of the culture gap: Chilenos are foremost gentlemen. Christian lost seven pounds on The Circuit. And kept on hiking, losing 31lbs total. Trekking can be arduous, trekking partners the cruelest of all. It worked for Honeybunch.

It made me wonder about the mare, though.

A Week on the Paine Grande Circuit

2009-03-06T09:46:00.004-05:00

Trekking the Paine Grande circuit in Parque Nacional Torres del Paine with Cristian Morales, Meg Simone and Dave Eiermann. Thanks to Trauko for the potent homebaked bread--fuel for the march. And we marched. We crossed miles of daisies, rivers and ladders, almost never seeing the stars since the sun set so late. In the middle, a champagne toast. Mother nature, save for some really big mosquitos in Dickson, you spoiled us again.

The Southernmost Hike in the World

2009-01-17T10:04:00.019-05:00

(Antarcticans will take issue)

At this latitude the landscape whinges gray for days, a whitish welcome of sharp winds, hail and disappearing trail lines. It's just to tease. If you love mountains, Dientes de Navarino, the world's southernmost hike, is a must-know. The 53-km circuit winds through Austral beech forest, peat bogs and teacup lagoons, but mostly takes place in a theater of rock above tree line.

Beginner Eyes

2009-01-11T14:25:00.003-05:00

Argentines tend to forget that another country hovers west beyond the Andes. But some generously recognize Chile as the wavebreaker behind Bariloche, a geographic feature that prevents those whopping Pacific storms from washing out good Argentine cattle country.

So I was pleased to have Graciela finally come see me in Chile. Ten years ago I had gone to Buenos Aires a country mouse. Graciela adopted me without blinking. She taught me to jiggle a skeleton key, buzz in apartment guests and hail the screeching 110 bus without losing any toes.

Over Christmas we went hiking in the ultra-remote Puelo Valley, a place, in her words, “without kioskos” (mini-marts).

Move over, Alice in Wonderland.

It started with a trip to a swishy outdoor store, where for the first time in her life, Graciela bought clothes specifically not made for the indoors. In the dressing room I heard myself say, “I know that’s how you like them but trekking pants shouldn’t be skin tight.”

Could I be making a big mistake?

It was embarrassing when she mistook the bramble-covered sheep for a goat, hilarious when a collared piglet (dressed to keep it out of gardens) was taken for a unicorn. And then there was the time when she fell behind hiking alongside the horse riders. Hearing her shouts for help, I nearly turned my ankle racing back, only to find her calmly poised at a faint trail juncture.

She didn’t know the rules of the countryside. I forgot there were rules (like don’t follow Frost. When in doubt, best take the road more travelled).

Much of the work of travel is to understand the charms and advantages of another world and to reassess our own reality. I had known that Graciela would be impacted by her visit, but I was surprised when I was too. It’s not only travel, but also travelers who teach us all what a piece of heaven looks like. And sometimes it’s our own backyard.

Midway through the arduous hike, Graciela charmed (or conned) an unseasoned rider for her spot in the saddle. I again wondered if it was a good idea. I tried to give some conservative advice. But then I saw her mount her ride swifter than she’d ever hailed the 110. And her wild laughter is still ringing in my head.

Where've you been all these millennia?

2008-12-19T07:43:00.004-05:00

We found this huge alerce (fitzroya cupressoides) on the trail to Volcan Calbuco. The route is actually an old logging trail once used to extract this super-resistant wood for bombproof shingles and building materials. Now only a handful remain in the 10th Region and they're illegal to log, though it still happens.

Alerce grow about a millimeter a year, so we guessed this one had about 2000 years on us.

Wilderness with Teeth

2008-12-08T15:13:00.010-05:00

This past week I joined the Cerro Castillo Citizen´s Expedition for a 5-day traverse set to integrate into Sendero de Chile, a national project linking trails its 8,500km stretch.

day I
We set off on a new path only known to Escuela de Guias. A steep, sandy traverse threatens to pitch me into the void. Somehow I dig in my toenails, like a cat on a tightrope, and make it across. Footprints of huemul, Chile´s endagered Andean deer, are everywhere.

The toll: two hikers with debilitating food poisoning from the previous night (the lox?), one guide slips pack first into the river, a few guides and guests wrangle with a full tripod setup (the topographer didn´t interpret work in terrain literally).

day II
¨Aqui me quedo,¨ says the Topographer, and we´ve only hiked for 2 hours. It´s impossible to get him to resist the tendency to flop on his back, and harder to get him back on his feet, as he scrambles like an overturned beetle.

We reach an alpine meadow bordering a snowy pass. Wildflowers peep through the tundra, water trickles underfoot. No one heeds the Topographer. We arrive at camp 7 hours later.

day III
A day for foot repair. A stray dog at the camp receives ham bones, lentils and oatmeal, he must have been starving. We day hike to Glaciar el Peñon but it´s receded so far it´s no longer a day trip.

day IV
The dog turns back at the pass. Every man, woman and mongrel for his/herself. When someone breaks out the horse jerky, I even try it. Stringy. Hard to forget.

We nose up toward the creased blue glacier sitting under Cerro Castillo´s cathedral spires. It releases a curtain of meltwater over cliffs, bubbling into the stream at our feet.

¨The Castle,¨ as it´s named, must be Chilean Patagonia´s most iconic peak, though it is seldom approached and only climbed by experts. We debate Sendero de Chile´s vision for lodgings, including one right in this priviledged spot.

day V
Over the course of the hike we´ve only run into three other hikers, all carrying the guide I´m updating. They have alternately told me that it´s exactly on the money and that the directions are completely unclear.

There´s work to do, if not in writing than in perceiving, including on my own behalf. Outside Torres del Paine, Patagonian trails are another beast: scarcely marked, pocked with rivers without bridges and passes without footprints. For now, Reserva Nacional Cerro Castillo has only three park rangers to cover its 200,000 hectares.

In this torrential wilderness, any reception of infrastructure, with all of its blessings and curses, will be bittersweet. Yet memories of a wilder Cerro Castillo (like horse jerky) will be hard to forget.

Where you can hike out any time you like, but you can never leave

2008-12-08T14:33:00.009-05:00

Chile´s famous southern road is a dusty, mostly gravel arrow headed south 1,240 kilometers through Patagonia. At some points, passengers are picked up even if the bus is full, since transport is few and far between. It would just be too cruel to leave them. But not in Villa Cerro Castillo.

Welcome to the Carretera Austral. Such a lovely place.

Never attempt to head south on a holiday weekend. After a broiling two-hour wait, both Cochrane-bound buses stiffed the rural stop, blowing dust on my thumb. A roomy pickup stopped and a lawyer from Coyhaique got out to photograph Cerro Castillo, test me on Obama vs McCain and provoke me on Guantanamo.

After thinking I aced cross-examination, the lawyer ¨didn´t have room¨ in the truck. Some curious Argentine retirees stopped and a group of motorcycles. They both wanted directions. Finally a tech from the rural electrification project stopped. He was headed north, but wouldn´t a night at Coyhaique´s only disco do me good?

When between a rock and a hard rock club, there isn´t much you can do.

Technically, a traveller has better chances of getting a bus south from Coyhaique, since it´s the regional hub. That´s what I thought before I found out about the holiday weekend. Hiking´s funny that way. It becomes nearly impossible to keep track of bank holidays.

(The bus in the photo, sans engine, found its niche serving avocado and beef sandwiches to hungry hitchhikers in waiting, Cerro Castillo in background)

How the Other Half Hikes

2008-11-29T08:29:00.019-05:00

(a literal mountain playground)

In the Lakes Region, hop the border to Argentine and you'll find a vastly different reality. Let's just say their Swiss ancestors taught them a thing or two. It's not just the chocolate shops in Bariloche. Mountain huts (refugios) with hot showers serve homemade beer. Trails are marked.

This should not appeal at all to your sense of adventure. But if you're curious, check out BolsonWeb.

Photos
Brand new Refugio Natacion; a crossroads; the glacier-centric Refugio Cerro Hielo Azul; Non-native fauna

The Things We Carried

2008-11-15T07:43:00.015-05:00

Hike 1
near Paso Puyehue, Lakes Region, Chile
44kms, 2 days

Km 0
I was still in the truck, two hours in, when I realized my fatal error. A first for me; I hoped we could still go on. After packing the filter. After pontificating on the horrors of Nescafe. After bragging to Ben, my hiking partner, about those beans I'd gotten fresh from the roaster.

I'd forgotten the coffee.

I didn't tell Ben then. It would be bad for the collective animo (mood).

A storm had taken down tree limbs and branches, turning the easy first hours of the hike arduous with the clearing and dodging of debris. After two hours in a tunnel of thistle and bamboo-like quila, we arrived to the great meadow with views. But the day was socked in. After a long, gentle climb, dodging more debris, we came into a dark forest of tall southern beech. It loomed over us, waving surrender flags of gray-green lichen (barba de viejo). Like a dream.

I got my camera. Wait. Where was that battery I'd charged?

Km 20
Clouds broke open as we climbed the pass. Ben woozy with hunger. We'd eaten the turkey sandwiches, a Luna bar each, some nuts. What else did he expect? I had 8 squares of chocolate. I gave him a quarter of his share, lest mutiny set in.

I'd brought food for two. I hadn't realized I'd just brought food for two small women.

Ben, I confessed, I forgot the coffee.

Whatever, he responded. Already without animo. The trail sign was blown over, frozen and half buried in the snow. I kneeled to read the distance but could not.

Ours were the only footprints on the snowy pass, gateposted by volcanoes, with Argentina over our shoulder and at our feet, sinuous streams that fed the azure lakes below. We retreated to camp low in the forest.

Km 25
Dinner:
instant tomato soup
4 cups couscous* with sage and
one tomato
one onion half
a can of salmon
aged goat cheese

(*the bomb for trekking: light and fast, couscous just needs to boil and sit for 5 minutes, pack in ziplock with spices/salt)

Unlike the coffee, all the dinner ingredients came from one of Chile's supermarket chains.

Upon scraping his plate, Ben retreated to warm his wet feet in the sad, square sleeping bag he'd taken on loan from his girlfriend, another urbanite. It was the kind that usually has a plaid felt lining, very Boy Scout, not very Expeditionary.

I felt for him. Though a great hiker, he had no gear, and Chile was hardly the place to accumulate it. His girlfriend had also loaned him a pack holding 5000 cubic meters, packable as a noodle, with no frame and hardly any cushioning. Instead he had borrowed a small pack of mine, hardly ideal, and some technical but not very roomy clothing.

Next to me in the tent, he looked like one very tired tranny. Was he snoozing or seizing? He ferociously grasped his bag, my pink/black down vest zipped snug. Santiago's city life far behind.

We had just the start I'd expected. Flawed. A bit discombobulated. Still fun. With plenty of lessons for next time.

The next morning we packed up swiftly. Coffeeless. Ben had fought off the cold without having to huddle on me. I think that was a primary concern. His spirits lifted, he cataloged exactly what he'd take on the next expedition. But the trailhead was still far.

Ben ordered an advance on his chocolate squares. The end in sight, I complied.

(photo courtesy of Ben)

Chronicle of a Trek Foretold

2008-11-12T13:08:00.009-05:00

In 1998 I arrived to Chile with the same goal as every other turista: trekking Torres del Paine.

In addition to a bunch of stuff I did not need, my beastly Lowe pack held Clem Lindenmeyer’s Trekking in the Patagonian Andes. It did not fail me. On trial runs at Parque Nacional Chiloe and Parque Nacional Alerce Andino I faced swarms of horseflies and hip-deep mud. Try that in jeans. Eventually I navigated my way to Torres: thoroughly schooled, loving even the headwind (no tábanos there!) and the sculpted designs of mountain, river, steppe.

Well, it’s time to crack this book once more, but this time I’m doing the writing. That’s right: dream job.

From November through February I’ll be hoofing my way across Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Figuring out how to get there, what to pack, what to leave behind. Stuff will go right. Stuff will go wrong. Miles will be trod, blisters patched and friendships forged. Or maybe I'll go howling mad from the weeks on end alone. It's hard to tell.

I'll be logging the trip right here. Your comments and thoughts are welcome!

Paris on the Brain (and tongue)

2008-09-21T22:15:00.014-05:00

When I was eight a crew of firemen came to take apart my kitchen—my mother had smelled something strange. They found withered remnants of meat in the baseboard heaters. I had left it there for our shit-tsu, who could hardly keep up with my under-the-table offerings.

It was a new one for the firemen. My mother eventually forgave me and I eventually came to accept red meat. But if you told that I would one day dine on offal, willingly, and pay handsomely for it, I would have thought you don’t know me. You don’t know about the baseboards.

But the aperture of my mind’s eye could have opened to imagine a scenario: a ramshackle village in a country with a negative GDP, warm hosts and a proud matriarch who would be blasphemy to offend, and I would have thought, okay. You never know.

Fast forward to Paris, 2008. Two good friends are visiting from the US. It’s dinnertime. When we find all the trick places you’d show an out-of-towner booked, we resort to improvisation. There’s a new place with a renowned chef around the corner.

On rue Saint Julien, Ribouldingue, with its crisp linens and perfumed bouquets, is a rare affair even by Paris standards. It’s one of the only all-offal restaurants around. Offal, yes, that’s tripe, innards, you know. According to our host, a true gourmand, if we ever were to try such delicacies, this was surely the place to do it.

It probably helped that we were already a bottle into our evening. “We’re here,” announced Judi, “I say we go big. Did you say they serve testicles?”

A matronly waitress, little amused at finding her menu reduced to giggles, explained away all those strange words. Prepared correctly, she claimed, these dishes could transport one back to childhood memories of grandmother’s kitchen.

The problem was no one served calf’s head in the suburbs of Boston. Nevertheless, Judi and Ralph, fresh off cubicle duty, were as primed as a couple competing for major prizes on a reality show, hoping to use their adrenaline to edge through the hard part.

The amuse bouche were creamy, gelatinous slices of pig’s skin, aged to an “ultimate softness,” according to our host. Ralph called it “kind of disgusting,” but added, “I mean, the texture.”

I had an ally.

Meanwhile, the plates had arrived. We sampled marrow—a great femur sawed in half to expose a dark, also gelatinous core. Its taste was so powerful and earthy, one bite on toast resonated for minutes in the mouth.

Admiring the sheep’s brain (see photo), paired with pickled garlic and roasted golden potatoes, the gourmand sniffed and beamed, “That’s happy!”

Judi thought that her testicles were, in fact, a bit bitter. We passed plates around, contemplating the new repertoire of textures and smells. I couldn’t help but imagine what hardships one would usually meet these strange dishes under, spoiled, narrow-minded American that I am.

“I didn’t realize it would be harder to eat brains than testicles,” Judi observed, looking suddenly very full.

The hit of the night turned out to be my own conservative selection, a bed of flavorful, fine green lentils topped with sausage slices. Even having never known either of my grandmothers, the dish was worthy of wishing it part of my own heritage.

When the waitress cleared our plates she nodded approvingly. We had tried. Save the pig’s snout and udder for next time, I guess.

It was only later that I found out sabodet, the sausage, was pig’s head. But it doesn’t bother me. Our fears, once survived, hardly matter.

You find new ones.

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be....

2008-05-22T15:03:00.007-05:00

New Zealand writer Liz Lewis regularly interviews travel writers on her Write to Travel blog. This week you can check out my thoughts on making a career out of strange encounters and interminable bus trips.

The Four-legged Refugee

2008-05-17T20:05:00.005-05:00

Meet Moncho. This alias, named for the driver Ramon who saved him, is the best anyone can do. He was found in Chaiten, Chile after a week of volcanic eruptions and floods made the survival of local animals less and less likely.

Until two weeks ago, Chaiten didn't even know it had a volcano. Now it looks like this seaside Patagonian village may not be habitable again. No lives were lost--the government hi-tailed residents out on ferries and closed shop via presidential decree. Left behind, in addition to farm animals, are some 500 pets and strays.

Citizen activists and veterinarians rescued some 75 pets last weekend, vaccinated, spayed and neutered the lot and are looking for caregivers or pet parents.

If you happen to be traveling in Chile and still haven't gotten anything for Grandma...well, who needs a Puerto Montt ashtray?

Pet carriers, food and medecine are also needed. If you're interested in helping in some way, contact non-profit animal rescue center Albergando un Amigo at www.albergandounamigo.cl.

How To: Robinson Crusoe Island

2008-05-08T09:17:00.007-05:00

Moated by choppy seas, 667km east of continental Chile sits Robinson Crusoe Island. You may have heard of it. Once it was a mid-Pacific mini mart for pirates seeking food, fuel and shelter.

They stocked the rocky land with goats and berry bushes, wholloped the fur seals and dug their stolen booty into its earth. The island was also the home to Alexander Selkirk, Defoe’s inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, a cantankerous Scot who went native—spending over four years stranded here—rather than board his worm-eaten ship. (Perhaps he fared better, since the ship did fall apart). Depository for shipwrecks (such as WWI’s Dresden) and keeper of treasure (or so they say), fables it boasts in spades.

Potential visitors should know a few things about the island:

Getting here ain’t cheap. In fact, it’s cheaper to fly the much larger distance between Santiago to Easter Island. Miniature airline Lassa charges $800 US dollars for a round-trip. Dress warm, since cabin temperatures are fixed for the live lobsters.
That reminds me. You don't get seasick, right? Because the airport sits on the other side of the island from San Juan Baptista, the only town. Post-flight taxi means a one-hour ferry, or if that isn't available, an open fishing boat transfer. Unless you bathe regularly in sea spray, you might want to bring waterproofs.
Commitments are casual. The airline may or may not give you a return date. Flights in low season should go weekly, but if winds are high (or seas), you might find yourself island bound a few more days. I hope you like lobster.

The Power of Patagonia's Rivers

2008-04-08T09:53:00.006-05:00

Raging pure rivers and untapped wilderness put Patagonia among the planet's great wild places. But Chile's thirst for energy means that ten of Patagonia's great rivers are currently under threat by dams.

This austral summer I journeyed to the ultra-remote Pascua River. My trip had a motive akin to a new form of tourism: seeing the sights while they still exist. To hear about my trip, check out this feature in the Boston Globe Sunday Travel section.

A NY Times editorial on the same subject came out on April 1, 2008.

To learn more about dams and their effects, check out the World Commission on Dams report.

Guidebooks as Gurus (or not)

2008-04-02T11:17:00.004-05:00

A teething baby, a musing mind and ample time on the road has me guest blogging at Perceptive Travel this week, relieving regular blogger and new mom Nia Malchik.

The topic: When should you toss your guidebook? (Funny question for a guidebook author). Check it out and leave a comment...

Paradise has many forms

2008-03-31T13:30:00.005-05:00

In Puerto Williams you can eat king crab every day. It’s as plentiful as canned tuna elsewhere. Colts roam the streets, along with free-range chickens, free-range cows and children. Strangers greet passers-by and the principle bar is a tilted German armor ship docked out in the harbor. Even in its desolation, it is impossibly romantic.

As we toured town, my host started most sentences “The problem is...”

Other residents, who were quick with an invitation to tea or a fireside chat, concurred. The population was cut off. Transit (via plane and weekly ferry) was irregular, which made tourism almost non-existent. Fishermen had employment only half the year. Islanders were just now acquiring a subsidy to cut heavy transport costs to bring food staples from the mainland.

Don’t even ask about the dismal male-female ratio (unless you like guys).

Inconvenient, insular and isolated, Navarin Island has suffered dearly. But it is one of the few places I know that willingly takes strangers into the fold. For me, that factor alone makes a world worth preserving, encapsulating, like a near-extinct species in a botanical garden. But this is arrogant outsider talk. Island residents are restless.

I bid Navarinos patience. Though it may happen in slow-motion, the world is coming to their island. For example, just this year, Puerto Williams got its first pizzeria. The crust is doughy and the cheese wilts in goopy slices, but it’s wildly popular. And as you’d expect, king crab comes on top.

not Alice's Wonderland, but worthy

2008-03-30T13:22:00.004-05:00

Most people know Navarin Island for the four-day Dientes de Navarino hiking cirucit. But as its trail markings beg repair, a new option is gaining favor.

The trail to Lago Windhond is low and long, passing through crimson and ochre peat bogs and gorgeous stands of dwarfed beech (lenga) strung with fallen trunks. It is mostly an obstacle course, which made me happy to be with Brian, a US backcountry ranger guiding a season in Puerto Williams. He kept his eyes peeled for the few trail markings—posts striped with orange paint or small pink ribbons fastened to evergreen branches.

Redheaded woodpeckers flitted about. Underfoot there were purple mushrooms and wild strawberries, tiny and sweet, peeking out from damp sod. We ate them with the dirt still on. The whole interior and southern edge of the island is uninhabited. Canadian beavers are wreaking havoc, but its wild as it ever was. For five hours we walked without seeing a soul, just the muddy tracks of wild dogs.

Last Stop Puerto Williams

2008-03-28T13:15:00.001-05:00

The pilot swiveled around to say buckle up. The Twin Otter was traveling to Navarin Island and Puerto Williams, this hemisphere’s southernmost town, pop. 1,200. The scratchy upholstery was mustard yellow and undoubtedly older than me. An antiquated bell trilled from the cockpit.

“Cake’s ready!” announced a female passenger behind me. Good grief. Were we flying a plane or an Easy Bake oven?

The ride was rough, punctuated by loud pings—ice popping from the aircraft (or so the pilot said). Among the passengers, there was a woman cradling an orchid in her lap, and another recovering from a gallbladder operation she had a couple days before. The other gringo on board was a screenwriter from Scranton.

I couldn’t wait to get there. With its serrated peaks (known as Dientes de Navarino) this rugged island is a hiker’s dream: deep forest, craggy peak and peat bog. But if you grew up here (say, on the Chilean Navy post, which accounts for half the population), in a windy town pocked with cow patties, you might just think it dull.

Its history is anything but. Just north of Cape Horn, Navarin Island was named by sailors. It was the territory of Yaghans, seafarers whose women skin dived for mussels in near-freezing water. Their most famous member was Jimmy Button.

In the late 1820’s Jimmy was a teenager, one of four Yaghans who Captain Fitzroy plucked aboard the H.M.S. Beagle to “educate” in England. Upon their arrival, one died from smallpox. Jimmy would later return to Navarin Island with a missionary in tow but their stores were ransacked by other Yaghans and a few years later—to the dismay of Fitzroy—Jimmy had up and gone native with them.

It was the practical thing to do.

These days the full-blood Yaghan population has been whittled to one, one whose existence invites a sad circus of anthropologists and documentarians to this otherwise forgotten fishing port.

Where I get philosophical

2008-02-26T11:55:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I was writing a travel piece and found myself employing the word destination. It just slipped in but was passable. The trouble was I immediately felt vexed. Dissatisfied. What is it about that word?

In the good old days of Siddhartha or, say, Victorian caravans slaking across vast deserts in stockings and big hats, the word destination meant something.

Hunger, curiosity, lovesickness or fever pushed you forward to meet destiny. You didn’t necessarily have a goal (the source of the Nile or top of Denali). The idea lay at the end of the Road of Unknown. After getting to your destination, you would either meditate into eternal bliss or write beautiful, grieving letters to your beloved sister about the follies of your foresight, the fragrant local spices and viral scourges.

These days the word has been co-opted by the mega resort. First you seek Sizzling Spring Break Destination, eventually followed by the Most Romantic Honeymoon Destination, Fun Family Destination, or (post-separation) Top Ten Spa Destinations.

The purpose of your destination? To pamper yourself. To negate the meaninglessness of daily existence by discovering exotic fruits that go well with vodka (don’t they all?) and a temperature-controlled pool. Basically, you have taken a direct flight here from real life to forget.

But there is a fine line between relaxation and flat-out boredom.

Few have the luxury of traveling like a travel writer, but I’d recommend one thing. Omit the destination from whatever trip you’re going on. Give yourself X number of days to travel a route. Don’t fixate on the finish line. Meet people. Wander. Dawdle. Maybe you’ll make it halfway. This way, there will be no disconnect between you and your destination. You’ll know it when you’ve found it.

Capacity for Solitude

2008-01-28T12:11:00.000-05:00

Ah, research is the best excuse ever to go out and lift rocks and find the world. Because of it, I had stumbled onto a Patagonian estancia. Doors shut to tourism in off-season. It should have been clear. We were five hours from anywhere in any direction.

I stood at a cabin door. Two wire-haired hounds wagged and howled at my presence, not convinced I was the bad guy. The Andes were great sugarcoated humps. The white stuff came down quick now, filling the mud puddles and frosting the air.

At the other estancias I had been sent away.

A man in a black Basque beret and knotted kerchief eased open the door. He took a hard look at the truck (mud-splattered, two-wheel drive, not four), swallowed a smile and asked if I wanted to come in for maté. I did.

It was hard not to fall in love. It helped that my partner was already next to me.

Don Manuel is your quintessential gaucho. Next to him, the Marlboro man looks like the costumed underwear model he actually is. Don Manuel’s face is lined as an oak trunk, but the deep creases and scars don’t add up. He smokes. He rides all day in the sun. He probably has never used face cream. He does the work of a thirty-year old. I did the math upon learning when he did his obligatory military service and came up with the age of 57.

He had been running ranches for almost forty years, a span of time in which the world changed completely. Oil had happened, for one. Roads. Electricity. People didn’t stay on the ranch anymore. According to Don Manuel, they went to work for the municipality. Ranchers’ kids wanted mobile phone service and satellite TV. Save for tourism, ranches were ghost yards.

I asked, “Is it hard to find young gauchos?”

He took a long pull on the metal straw. “There already are none.”

“The countryside is solitary. But I have no problem being here alone for three months,” he said. At sun up, he rides out to the herd. Boring? Maybe it’s cowboy paradise: 10,000 hectares without a fence. “At 4pm I come in to cook, feed the dogs and chickens, but that’s it. All my days go by the same.”

Some summers a French photographer would visit who also spent time in Mongolia. His deference hinted at a great love, either for her or the way she framed his world. We poured over the beautiful albums she left. He knew the photographs by heart.

When we finished we got ready to leave. But the truck lights had been left on. And the battery was dead.

So we spent the night in a bunkhouse, bare and cold as a meat locker. I slept soundly. The next morning we drove away in blinding sun, clumps of snow sinking into the mud, bristly, stubborn grasses stood up.

I scanned the horizon. Somewhere, Don Manuel was already out there.

Postcard from 2008

2008-01-14T14:28:00.000-05:00

From Puerto Montt

(with views of Argentina's Glacier Perito Moreno)

As usual, I've been conspicuously absent under deadline, but it feels unceremonious, even crotchety, to sneak into the new year without popping my head out from behind the keyboard. The mantra LET IT BE runs through my head, washing away the aftertaste of 2007, not a prize vintage. 2008 is about connection, hearth, finding lost objects, building our anthills, kicking up dust, electing a worthy president, lying back in the grass and eating cheese.

Happy New Year to all.

One man's Thanksgiving

2007-11-24T11:19:00.000-05:00

The sign says "Life, this thing full of problems, but how lovely it is to live it!"

In Gaiman, Argentina Parque El Desafio is Don Joaquin Alonso's lifetime masterpiece forged entirely of garbage, illuminated by phrases from Seneca or Plato or Don Joaquin himself. About 50,000 wine and beer bottles, soda containers and cans cut and painted as tropical flowers, repurposed clothes hangers and trash trellises comprise his vision--pro-whimsy and anti-bullshit (defined by war, surveillance, usury or laziness). It surrounds his modest cement house, covering every inch of the family property where a more sensible spirit would have placed a lawn and some rose bushes. He spent thirty thousand hours building it (if you want to do something, advises one sign, start it).

When I visited El Desafio (which translates as "the achievement") Don Joaquin had been hospitalized and a neighbor let me in. It was clear that this beloved labywrinth of trash, with a Guiness record as the biggest recycled park, was entering uncertain times. It made it even stranger, to read the theme in his messages, to savor friends, stupid jokes, and even yourself, because none of it would last.

At least he has shown foresight. With Don Joaquin's "Monument to Myself," a heap of rocks, crushed soda cans and a set of handprints, declaring, "What did you think? I'd wait for the rest to do it?" he pokes ultimate fun of (while reveling in) the ego involved in creating.

Por Una Cabeza

2007-11-16T08:28:00.000-05:00

BUENOS AIRES-People all over this city are sick over tango. Some take sabbaticals from real lives in Amsterdam or LA to realize this lifelong dream. They carry stilletos in their handbags, memorize the underground milonga spots and recognize the stars. I am not among them.

Tango is sexy and, yes, even enthralling, but not for me. When I lived in BA some years ago a Sunday tutorial confirmed it. The stern octagenarian I had been paired with practiced me with Teutonic ease. He released me, but only to return from the loo with greater fury and--fly undone--clasped me tight.

Did I mention I have trouble letting the guy lead?

So when Joe, my boyfriend, came to South America, tango was all he wanted to do. Maybe the idea even helped get him here--since the allure wasn't the 5000 kilometers of gravel roads we had just done in Patagonia, not for him anyway.

So this was a payback. We take our positions with other beginners, all foreigners, in a dark tango hall facing Parque Lezama. Infamously complicated, tango is stripped to basics befitting young hopefuls at a regional dog show. After walking in circles (practicing smooth steps) we graduate to pacing our steps in half-time, adding tango rhythms (slow, slow, fast-fast-fast!) and finally, facing our partners.

Here it gets scary. The woman moves backward, guided by her partner, whose steps move forward. My partner, who by the way is the most adept driver I know, handles me like he has forgotten the clutch while shifting gears. We jerk along the dance floor, screeching to a halt before near-collisions. Unable to see what is behind me, I imagine rutted roads, semis and hairpin turns. Gone is the fluid ease of his natural gait. His face is concentrated, stern.

I have to smile. I even relax. From the outside we look tragic.

Enzo, the handsome ponytailed instructor, steps in. "Con confianza," he assures, then takes over and glides me over the floor as if suspended. I know what is happening.

Joe took a tango class yesterday on his own, and went to a milonga with my friend Silvia the other night. In the midst of writing a story on it, he has been taking notes and practicing the sequences in his head all week. Crammed in there are all the steps, the beat, subtle instructions from a dozen experts, not including his epiphany from the other night, when he watched pros take the floor ("I get it now. It's about connection!") Suddenly, the person in front of me has been made utterly transparent. I see him thinking, composing and the more he does, the more we stumble.

More steps are introduced but we stick to our ABCs. "You've got my hand in a vice grip," I tell him. He apologizes--he hadn't noticed. We continue slow, slow, fast-fast-fast. Every couple minutes we lose it completely and and start again. In the pause I search his face for humor. He confesses, "I don't feel the connection."

We forget what it's like to be a beginner.

If tango can reduce a confident, assured man to a lumbering Frankenstein, there is something in our most earnest desire to succeed that achieves precisely the opposite.

I have my own confession. Joe's dancing had reminded me of my own demon--stick-shift driving. Now, it is as if I'm watching myself cursing while I make a 10-point turn on steep gravel (something which, by the way, he's endured with patience). Suddenly tango is about transparency.

"It's ok," I tell him, "But can we stop arm wrestling?"

Finally, we are laughing (though I am told that this is not appropriate tango behavior). Maybe I can't ever replicate Joe's earnesty for tango. But I can admit. It's started to be almost fun.

(photo provided by Joe "Frankenstein" Ray)

New in Nat Geo

2007-10-25T08:59:00.000-05:00

Good news--November's issue of National Geographic Magazine is featuring my article "Puelo River Dammed," about a proposed dam that would flood a pristine, remote valley in northern Patagonia, displacing its inhabitants.

The bad news--it is not in all US editions. It seems that subscribers in the west have had the best luck seeing it. As I'm out of the country I haven't been able to look into it.

Those interested in finding out more about the preservation of the Puelo River can contact GEOAUSTRAL - CENTRO DE CONSERVACION AMBIENTAL AUSTRAL (geoaustral@telsur.cl)

Yellowstone from the Air

2007-08-04T14:49:00.000-05:00

My friend Dave is a private pilot and geologist. Heading up to Yellowstone for work last week, he let me know I could hitch a ride. I had recently spent a month exploring Yellowstone doing guidebook research, and now I was tied to my chair doing the more tedious part of the project--writing.

Never underestimate the power of a free ride.

The Longmont, Colorado airport occupies one free sliver seemingly under ambush by the surrounding tract housing in oppressive pastels. Tall grass fringing the runway reminds you that this was the frontier--once. We stuff our duffels in the rear of a battered Cessna. Dave brought gps receivers, an iphone, Luna bars...

"Aren't those for women?" I ask him.

"Hey man, they're good." That's Dave.

As soon as you cross over Wyoming's 1-80, the nothingness swallows you. This could be Nambia or Mars for all you know. The earth stretches flat in sheets, brown and fissured, forms broad mountains and cakey bluffs streaked with red and alabaster. There is the occasional river, looking like an emaciated garter snake. Or cows, looking like....aliens. Without assistance, what could live down there?

"That's strange," Dave said, "It says the battery's dying in the GPS."

I groaned. We were just heading into weather, with thunderheads dotting the route ahead. Earlier, Dave had boasted that we had better instrumentation than a 737. But apparently, hooking up live to satellite weather drains the juice pretty quickly.

"I bet those storms up there are shallow," he said. I didn't reply, since the declaration was probably just a stab of psychology.

The storms are shallow. We weave a path through them and then I climb in back to rummage for the other GPS in Dave's bag. Without my lined headphones, the roar is deafening. It takes a few minutes for Dave to set it up, during which time I have to hold the wheel. "Don't take take your time there..." I warn. He looks over and smiles. Damn it, he has his ipod on under his earphones. Did he hear a word?

Flying is always an exercise in surrender and this flight is no exception.

After the second gps battery got low we decided to shut it off and save it for landing. Now I am pouring through maps for our location. Mountains hem the wings. We are approaching Togwotee Pass. I remember driving it. "Just follow the road Dave," I say.

But limiting a pilot to a roadway is like asking a fish to take a lap lane. It doesn't last long.

The first landmark in the park is Heart Lake, which better resembles a set of lungs under the parched peak of Mount Sheridan. We fly over Shoshone Lake, the country's biggest backcountry lake, rimmed by pine forest deep in the woods. Then we head up to the geysers.

Yellowstone sits in an enormous crater. It is the most geothermally active spot on earth. We see fumaroles pouring white steam from the earth, grouped like campfires in a village. Geyser pools are turqouise, shimmering. Prismatic Spring is a puckered eye in a chalky basin rimmed by green, yellow and burned orange.

I am pressed against the glass, breathless.

From here the roads appear to be quaint tracks--even the RVs look like playthings, lost in the vastness. Dave's mission is to convince the park to bore holes hundreds of feet in the earth to put in expanders to study shifting pressures. (The research already under way studies mere movement.) There have been shifts: the lake is tipping, the trees at the southern end dying, creek drainages changing directions. Surface changes of as much as a few centimeters a year.

But this is geek stuff. No one would see it without instruments.

There's risk--boring a hole into the same plumbing that makes Old Faithful spurt every 70 minutes. And then there's the sense that instrumentation can provide reams of data, but understanding what is precious or even precarious begins with the view of the whole picture. And today, it's a great one.

El Salvador podcast-live

2007-06-12T11:09:00.000-05:00

Amendment: my podcast with an ex-guerrilla turned tour guide will now be released at www.lonelyplanet.com the week of July 3rd. For me it was a technical feat. For you it's a chance to practice your Spanish (his answers are followed by translations) and get the real backstory of a former "bad guy."

disfrutalo!

Stranger in my own Land

2007-06-10T10:23:00.000-05:00

For an expat, coming back to the States you realize you've lost some sense of cultural ease. Whatever's in, you didn't know it yet. Like in L.A., where there's botox ads on the radio and the guy behind me at the checkout counter observes, "that's a lot of carbs."

But then I went back to Boulder to buy a car to travel west this summer for work.

I know Boulder. I lived here for seven years. So it doesn't take me by surprise when I call a number for a 1988 Subaru wagon and I get a guy--typical flake--saying, "Does it drive well? I imagine it would. I haven't driven it in a couple years. The women have taken over you see..."

It didn't sound promising. But I didn't have other prospects.

He told me I should just come over so I drove out to Louisville to meet him. "Oh, hello," he says.

"The car?" I ask.

"Oh. There's a car?" His creased blue eyes peer out the screen door. "Well, there is! A red car!"

I still think I am being toyed with. I enter his house, with a soothing mix of Asian art, Buddhist prayer flags and family photos. No one else is home. Can I drive the car?

"Ah. Drive the car. Of course!" Does he have the keys?

"The keys...." and he starts to putter about the kitchen, moving things. He grabs a stack of cds. Mahler, Debussy, Mozart...not here!" I start to notice things. There is a large note written in marker with a name and number that says YOUR ROOMMATE. At eye level there is a note SUBARU LEGACY IS FOR SALE, with details of the car. I start to put it together. He doesn't remember anything.

"Can we call your wife? Does she have a cell phone?"

"Oh yes! My wife. She has a cell phone. Very good."

The doorbell rings and he's off. I overhear, "here for the Subaru." Despite its age, the Subaru actually looks pretty good. I hear the man do his thing. "A car?" He might as well be helping me, stalling for time. After a look around I see a copper pot with 2 keys. LYNDA'S SUBARU they say. Bingo.

He's back. The woman went away. I will not be so easily deterred. "Shall we go for a ride?" I ask. I feel like I am kidnapping him.

"I don't see why not!" He's beaming.

I find out a few things about Jim. He used to be a physicist. He does puzzles now. He loves the flowers that fill the front yard ("You call them irises? he asks me with all seriousness). He has great affection for the car but is a calm co-passenger, even when the Subaru stalls out (my stick shift driving is kind of rusty). Unfortunately, the right joint that's faulty according to Lynda's note makes a clenching noise in any right turn that makes you think the axle will snap. Not good. Not good enough for a road trip to Wyoming.

When we get back Jim shows me his wedding picture ("at least I think that's me"). We chat a bit. I leave a note for Lynda, so at least she knows what happened today. Jim will return to his 1000 piece puzzle. "You should come back," he says.

Just when I am sure the encounter was more for me than for him, he's standing on the porch as I leave. I roll down the window to hear him. He's waving his two fists in the air, scrawny arms up at right angles."

"I SAID, ENJOY IT. LIFE!"

That night his grown daughter calls me. She's seen my note. "My father has Alzheimers. I hope he didn't bother you. He didn't make you any promises, did he?"

Not at all. In fact, I'd been thinking about the encounter all day. And I figured out what was so strange and wonderful about it. These are the kinds of encounters we make in foreign lands. Where strangers might not treat each other as such. I never have these kinds of experiences when I am back home. And maybe this time I've only had this one because the other party has lost his mind.

At least that's what they think.

Buenos Aires by bus

2007-05-14T08:58:00.001-05:00

If you decide to cross the Argentine pampas by night, it’s probably not the best idea to choose the first second-story seat on the double-decker bus. I learned this recently. The seventeen-hour ride from Bariloche to Buenos Aires started at noon.

“But the views will be incredible,” my friend insisted, when I bought the ticket via internet.

Sure enough. The road curved with the river under rock outcrops. Tawny mountains sighed into foothills, into plains where the fallen leaves of poplars sprayed the dead ground with yellow. Our miniature TVs showed high school girls calculating cruel punishments for one another. But with headsets they were easy enough to ignore.

The road is skinny. We wobbled and sped but when changing into the incoming lane to pass semis laden with double loads, we seemed to merely creep.

Still, there is something about the surprise of changing landscapes that lends to reflection. We remember what we have inadvertently forgotten. We plot, relax, observe, worry about old decisions, and think up solutions. It’s one of the few moments when life seems clear and purposeful, like the neat line of road ahead. It is an ideal state, worth repeating frequently, if only the bathrooms weren’t so bad.

There would be no sleeping. Cell phones rang. A soundless movie played. People chatted. The assistant shuttered our windows with curtains, so we couldn’t see the terrors of the road (it was easy enough to feel us swerve). I regretted declining the post-dinner whiskey or champagne (surely to buffer our nerves from the crosswinds).

Whenever we tittered, fear took over. I remembered a café conversation I had overheard in Chile. Bus drivers said the safest place to sit on the bus was behind the driver, since his instincts—to avoid a head-on, for instance—were to save his own skin. Obviously, you didn’t want to be in front (for the head-ons) or the back (for the rear-ending). Left middle.

Were there more bus accidents than, say, mountain climbing accidents? I wondered where I stood statistically. A few years back, Argentina suffered numerous fatalities when a bus crossing the pampas took what was almost the only curve too fast. It was all over the press. Regardless, a few weeks later, the same situation repeated in the same place. It was almost as if Argentina was competing with Italy to be the worst drivers in the world.

The only thing left to do was to shut my eyes and accept my fate.

Buenos Aires’ Retiro Station is dark at 6:30 am. Commuters are few. The city sleeps much later than its northern counterparts. I tumbled off the bus and hopped into a remise (a private taxi). The radio blared with today’s news: somewhere narco-traffickers had highjacked a plane, the capital’s air traffic control was using manual guidance for all take-offs. There were calls for investigation into a supposed near-air collision the previous week. My driver gunned down Avenida Libertador, downshifting at the red lights, but not stopping. There was no traffic anyways. “Look,” he said, on Marcelo T. Alvear. Two cars had collided and sat crumpled at the side of the road. Game over, I thought.

When I arrived to my friend’s apartment, he greeted me in his bathrobe. I asked if he wanted today’s paper. I could run down and get it.

“For what? In this country, whatever it is, it’s better not to know.”

The Mother of All Mothers

2007-04-09T07:13:00.000-05:00

part III

We leave the valley passing by Lolo's cabin. It's most outstanding feature is his eighty-three year old mother, Audelia. More than the rest of the family, she loves a visitor. On a brisk day she layers her best summer dresses over each other, puts on bangles and earrings and hopefully remembers to put in her hearing aid.

She holds visitors hands, pats them, smiles. This can last hours. For those unaccustomed to touch, it can be disconcerting.

"When are you coming back?" she asks. Even if you've just arrived.

The question flummoxed Tara, who was probably thinking to herself the chances were indeed slim. But how do say this when your host emptied her jewlery box to greet you?

Given, Doña Audelia is hard to understand. She speaks in a murmur. Her words step over her daughter's. They come confident and swift. Snatches of stories grab me--that her father was a huesero (a bone healer) or that she used to grind the grain racing horses in circles to crank the mill. She was once the fastest rider of all her siblings. Now she's the only one. Only one other family lives further up valley. Visits are scarce.

And though I can barely understand her (sometimes her daughter will shout translations) I'm fascinated. What other stories remain?

She putters around on a cane decorated with crochet. She eats well. She drinks three cups of powdered juice with lunch. "You'll get drunk!" teases her husband. She ignores him. I find myself wondering, who was this plucky woman as a girl? How did she survive with her tenderness intact?

The family is united around the fire. "Mom, we're selling you to the foreigner," Lolo shouts, hugging her.

"Bueno," she concedes.

Who knows how long this will go on? I tell her I'm coming back soon.

Lolo's Backyard

2007-04-05T09:15:00.000-05:00

part II

On the second day it's snowing above treeline. Pituto the dog steps tentatively into this new frontier of sharp scree and thick mists. His caution is hardly surprising. Few landholders get above the treeline, never mind a ragged mutt saved from starving on a city corner on the Escobars' last outing to civilization.

We traverse a cirque counter-clockwise to the glacier, picking through the boulders. Clouds slip around us, giving flirty glimpses of high snowfields, a silver lagoon and the ribbon of a river below us. The valley (not to be named here) of dense forest bears not one human mark, no trail or clearing. It is as virgin as when it was born (though you could argue that, while glaciers recede, the world continues to be born).

Pituto shivers. Tara slips my fleece socks over her hands--she's forgotten her gloves and the air is ice. I ask Lolo the names of things. Disappointment Peak. Laguna de los Visiones. They seem apt.

I pause. "Who named these, Lolo?"

He smiles. Of course. Who else?

By the campfire the night before, he had described his childhood in poverty, the years they lost all their livestock in freak blizzards, when he had scabies and no medicine, when they survived on little more than bread and maté. There were times, he said, when he hated this place, when all he wanted was to escape it.

But somehow he survived those times and changed gears. His steep-sloped ranch was ill-suited to pasturing. Now with the handful of guests that come yearly, Lolo has managed a modest income from guiding others around his mountain refuge.

It occurs to me what a rarity we've found, here above Chile's southern forests. A whole world unto itself, one man's for now, named and gently nurtured. One man's wilderness.

We carefully negotiate the steep tumbled scree. The tongue of the glacier comes into view, slipping through rock face into a frosty turquoise pool. Beautiful.

But it's also grey as an old hound, worn and damp. We approach the glowing blue underbelly to see water shoot out, gushing like an open hydrant. While it is the end of summer and melting is expected, the dripping wetness and the fast flow seem alarming.

Lolo's glacier has receded seven meters since he first saw it. It worries him. Each time he tells someone this, he studies their face. As if he could find some answer there.

It snows harder and we lunch under the eave of a rock on hard bread, salami and a thermos of coffee. Pituto stays warm hunting peanuts in the rubble. When the mist folds in close around us I ask if he's had these conditions before (the question really: can you find your way out?)

Not to worry, he says. And I believe him.

Patagonia via the back door

2007-04-02T12:17:00.000-05:00

part one: going local

We were trekking to the glacier in Lolo Escobar's backyard on a trail he created with a hand-axe. That in itself seemed incredible. Patagonia’s backyards feature few swingsets but some include a thorny wilderness inviting adventurers to get hopelessly lost. That’s why you go with a local.

Among even them, Lolo is considered an anachronism. Compact and quirky, we can say he’s serious and sincere but not above a prank. He helps run the family ranch, carves ingenious animal shapes from discarded roots and studies the Guide to Native Plants and the Bible. Given his scant contact with the outside world, it doesn’t seem incongruous to call himself both ecologist and evangelist.

My friend Tara is an experienced hiker, so I found her aghast watching as the pack horse was saddled with 60 kilos to head up the mountain for a few days. She had already cocked a brow when Lolo’s sister packed us glass jars of honey, four kilos of breadrolls, homemade fruit preserves and marmalade. But we did stop her short of including a whole raw leg of lamb.

At these times, I remind myself that we live under local norms here, not modern ones, and are mostly content for it. It helps too to remember that people of this valley died of hunger in not-so-distant past. Thus these hulking grain sacks amounting to a portable Frigidaire were something of a comfort to Lolo (but not to his horse).

We started in the meadows and climbed to a forest of moss-covered boulders dubbed the houses of stone, up a river valley to huge southern beech and thick stands of lenga and ñirre. Lolo walked attentive to surprises in our path: a blue mushroom, a giant spotted moth, a rock in the shape of Easter Island moai.

Given the storybook setting, I would not have been surprised should we happen upon wood nymphs or trolls. Light streamed through the forest in glittering pillars. Big trees grew straight out of granite hunks. The river was transparent and ice cold. I’m telling you, it was that good.

And if there were no gingerbread house at the end of the trail? At least we packed the cherry preserves.

On Writing: The Boulder in the Kitchen

2007-02-13T09:14:00.000-05:00

I've been on hiatus from the blog while I write up some 100,000 words for a new edition. Call it superstitious. As if we were comprised of a finite number of words and those spent here cannot be redeemed elsewhere. I know this must not be true, but when the muse is stingy there's no taking chances.

Every guide I write, the process is the same. Pets (this one, a cat named Tiger Lilly, is not even mine but an appendage of the apartment I rented) need attention. The house is dirty. I remember that I've been on the road for three months and--is that a fully equipped kitchen?--decide I need red curry made from scratch. It will help me "work better."

I don't think we resist writing because we hate it. Writing, like life, has its chores (strange how I can only clean the house while on deadline). Call it fear of mediocrity. In guidebook writing it's too easy to be dull. I need fifty ways to describe a plain, clean linoleum room, twenty to describe a plate of rice and beans. A dashing insight.

I thank god for the quirks (bare bulbs, boulders in the kitchen, grasshoppers in the stew) that we writers cling to like meat hooks. Of course, some of these turn out to be utterly useless. I search my notes for help describing a tranquil colonial city. Beyond the bus timetables, hotel and restaurant descriptions, I have scrawled one comment:

What's up with men--everywhere--using street as urinal?

And then comes the dilemma, the reason it takes an hour sometimes to wrestle 100 words of text. The fact that Ciudad X is home to indiscreet pissers may be a pointed insight, leading a random anthropologist to follow my lead on fellowship. Or, I could be scarring a noble (read "marketable") image because I just happened to visit during football finals.

I don't know how you'd solve it. I don't know how I will. But for now I'm going to make some popcorn and...hey, where's the cat?

El Mozote 25 years on

2006-12-30T21:12:00.000-05:00

Some stories get stuck in your throat. There´s no good way to start them because they don´t make sense.

El Mozote is a small hill village in remote Morazan famous because the military massacred the whole town (primarily women and children) on Dec. 11, 1981. I go to see it with a couple of friends on Christmas day. Our guide is Maria de la Paz Chicas. Now 36, she was eleven at the time of the massacre. She had been away visiting the countryside that day. She lost six brothers and sisters and her parents.

Her story is told all matter-of-fact with one hand cradling her one-year old and the other on her pregnant belly. This is where the bombs fell, this is the well where nobody hid for fear of snakes, these are bullet holes made from aerial pot-shots. The church where children were shot (burned and replaced) , the hills where women were violated... The laundry list of atrocities rubs raw under a bright sky sky dotted with cloud puffs. Next to the crayola-colored murals there´s a rose garden where the children are buried. There´s chalky rubble where some ruins lay unexcavated--the relatives had no interest in digging up the past.

There´s something sinister about a beautiful day, when horrors have been about. We walk to Rio Sapo, where the sun is hot and families swim in t-shirts and shorts. We join them, relieved to be somewhere where life is thick.

The orginal story about El Mozote, written by Mark Danner for The New Yorker is at http://www.markdanner.com/newyorker/120693_The_Massacre.htm.

In Suchitoto there´s a restaurant called La Balanza. The owner is an ex-guerrilla, who put a sculpture of a scale above the entrance. One half holds the tip of a 500 lb. missle-head, the other a stack of tortillas. The misslehead weighs heavier, to say, the damage of the war cost us more than the hunger that started it.

Tremors in El Salvador

2006-12-22T21:23:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday I bolted for the hostel garden at 2am, certain the sky was caving, or the beams shifting.

There have been over 800 seismic tremors since last Sunday in Northern El Salvador, one that was 4.8, the rest negligible, if sober bedspins and squaking barn animals don´t phase you. Most of these have been between 11pm and 5am, leaving me a zombie wreck, sending me to sleep with my room door wide open (they jam in quakes) that night. In San Lorenzo people just said the hell with it, threw their mattresses in the street and slept in jeans and sneakers. Over a thousand homes are damaged, mostly improvisory or old quarters inhabited by the poor.

Add this to the soup of everything else that disconcerts about El Salvador: Raw war images in the museum, precise folk art scenes tucked into a miniature carving like a strawberry or egg (sorpresas), retired school buses from Cranston and Cooperstown turned public transport--recast in psychadelic tones, gleaming clean, tossing passengers to the pavement without hitting one full stop. Men hissing and clicking appreciation, topped by an old woman who stopped me on the street to say, ¨Me alegro por tus ojos.¨ (it helps when they´re blue). It took me a week to meet other tourists. I was beginning to believe I was the only one. A suspicious feeling that is.

But---it´s mostly been lovely. I have had El Salvador to myself, which first meant holding hands with paranoia, then precaution. It has ebbed into drifting conversations with the streetside sandwich girl (wondering about dad--seven years gone in the US) when the bus never comes to the elderly neighbor who uses the skinny apartment entrance as his patio (¨Marco Polo, now that´s a story¨) and the deadicated surfers, radical sons of old money, and people--hands split, heaving hundred pound sacks--who bring us Starbucks.

There is no reconciling--the homicide statistics and the not-distant war with such, well, friendliness. As a traveller it is too tempting to make an explanation. Folks are willing to talk (best when they´re not the ones clicking or hissing), to walk you five blocks instead of giving the directions, to respond in a way that´s frank. It makes for something of a trip.

A Country Without Turistas

2006-12-13T20:53:00.000-05:00

The plane to San Salvador is decorated with holly and the duty free shops are giving out shots of rum. It´s thirteen days til Christmas. Almost no one deboards in El Salvador, I spot no guidebooks and only one passenger with skin freckled enough to double-check. Am I the only one? I admit I am here because I have to be but there is that underlying curiosity: what´s this place about?

The immigration official is frowning. ¨Tourism,¨ I say. After delving into my date of birth and profession he asks again, ¨What´s your reason for being here?¨

¨Tourism,¨I repeat. Is it that hard to believe?

He gives me 60 days grudgingly (the limit is 90). I mention, ¨Is the limit 90 days? Because you gave me 60.¨

¨Yes,¨he says, ¨it depends on the case.¨ I´ve barely landed and become a case. Interesting.

The customs guy was another story. After briefly glancing at my passport he slips in my name, ¨Tienes unos ojos muy lindos, Carolina.¨ Then he translates it for me. That´s what I like, as a former English teacher, a bilingual come-on.

¨Thankyou,¨ I say politely, still afraid someone will revoke my tourist card.

How long am I here for? ¿Tan poco? I have to press the button on the baggage traffic light, the traveller´s Wheel of Fortune.

Green.

¨Ah, te vas Carolina!¨ This is my welcome. He lets me go, out of the airport (clammy and swarmed at dusk by parrots) and into San Salvador.

The Gaps in the Guidebook

2006-12-11T09:11:00.000-05:00

(If guidebooks are making travel too routine, the tourist trail too rutted, adventures still stand in the ambiguities on the page).

Chasing Waterfalls

Sunday and the sun is glorious. So far my friend Rachel has been graciously tagging along on my rainy discount lodging tour of Costa Rica. We have crammed in a handful of cities behind us, but haven’t once stepped onto Mother Nature’s patio.

Goal (destination)
An afternoon off. Descriptions of Rio Celeste’s waterfall gush, "electric," "impossibly blue," and "like a frothy blueberry milkshake." As writers, we are suckers for a good description. The park—Volcan Tenorio—is one of Costa Rica’s newest, hardly visited and hard to get to.

Caveat (transportation)
The book mentioned you might convince a local to taxi you for $12 USD.

Worried? Ha. Fluent in Spanish, conversant in charm. That’s the power of a sunny day for you.

We bus to a regional hub then hop another headed toward Nicaragua, getting off at Bijagua. It looks closed for business. Mutts nap in the road, the shop is shuttered and men drink beers in the shade. After a good haggling session, I get a guy to take us to Bijagua, 13km away. Gas up (siphoning from a jug) and we’re off!

An hour later we are at the park. It’s 3:30pm, but the rangers won’t let us hike without a guide since the forest darkens early (though the trail is less than two miles long). Our friendly driver takes us to a soda (outdoor café) with the only budget lodging around. I pay up $15 dollars but the driver insists we agreed on fifteen thousand colones ($30 dollars). What????? A ruckus ensues. While haggling, we had tossed around numbers in the teens, never thousands. But this is Costa Rica, he tells me. Exactly. The only Latin American country where you hear English and use dollars half the time. Half the time. My bad to assume.

He wins. It smarts. Forget security, we tell him not to bother returning for us the next day. We’ll find our own way. Never mind my tight schedule and the fact that that there are no real options around, save a dirt bike and a few spirited horses.

The Unexpected
Our karma changes the second we meet the Ordonez family. Witnesses of the public spat, they handle us (ugly Americans) with kid gloves. The Senora offers us coffee, brings us packaged cookies. At $5 a piece we take their bare-bones cabin. Feliz.

Boys chase each other on the cement floor of the soda while old men play cards with our hostess, all with money down. Alex, a local guide and the son of the hostess, puts in a video of tapirs. Now that they are protected they are no longer hunted, but Alex’s father Evelio used to hunt them and monkeys as well, as a pioneer here forty years ago. That’s how he discovered the waterfall with a group of friends.

I wondered, was it special? Did they take their families on Sunday outings to see it?

"No," Don Evelio says, "Nunca pense 'eso me va a dar una vida'." (I never thought 'this will give me a living.')

The waterfall was beautiful but far. There was plenty of work to do on the farm. They certainly didn’t think folks would pay to see it someday. Nor the hot springs or the bubbling thermal vents, the stuff in their backyards in the middle of nowhere.

Now we are here. Will we see it? How can we not? It is practically a dare.

We will have to start hiking at 6am to make our ride out. After our reticence to jump on the back of Alex’s dirt bike, one by one, for the return to town, Alex negotiates our ride out with the 7am milk truck that delivered from area farms to Bijagua.

The sugary smell of orchids fills the night, but then comes rain, downpours, drumming the tin roof. We will twitch in our saggy beds wondering if this was Another Stupid Idea.

It turns out that the waterfall was only the premise to the adventure. Then came the Ordonezes, with their stories of settling the jungle, the droves of bats at twilight and the milk truck hauling half dairy, half locals grabbing the rails. We did easily make the waterfall in the yellow first light, swearing that the startled rustling in the woods are tapir.

The rain had finally ceased, but left its mark on the famed waterfall—now a memorable, muddy brown.

Dust rising on Tamarindo

2006-11-22T11:11:00.000-05:00

Thirty years ago the resort town of Tamarindo was home to 21 families. It has grown exponentially into something akin to southern California (picture surf boutiques and tiki torch ambiance). Perhaps its the biggest hyperbole of how popularity distorts an attraction. First Playa Tamarindo was about surfing, now it´s about recreating the ¨comforts¨ back home for package tours and spring breakers.

Those who came here for pura vida style refuge (and built the industry) now look at their Frankenstein a bit bewildered. Gil, a muscled retiree from Queens who looks like he could bench press a surfer, runs a small cafe where people stop by all day to chat or have a soda out of the sun. Once he counted--a truck passes down the narrow dirt strip every 60 seconds. They rip up the road, covering the cafes, the souvenir stand mobiles, even the sarong-clad girls from Denver and London, in a thick coat of golden dust.

Villa Macondo is a petite refuge from the fray, a tiled pool surrounded by sun-colored cabins and palm fronds. It´s offshoot location, blocks off the main strip, is filling fast with high-rise condos, created by construction crews who start their excavating and pounding at 6:30 am, in earshot both of four-star honeymooners and budget lodgers alike. I was shown around by the hotel´s Tica owner while frontloaders beeped and blared in the background.

So, what did they make of all this? I asked.

They were trying. Some guests on chaise lounges had ipods stuffed in their ears. What could she say? She peered high above our heads, blinking out the blinding blue. ¨We think, honestly, that one day one of these men will fall into our pool.¨

By and Buy

2006-11-17T19:17:00.000-05:00

Drusilla Lapp is a Mennonite woman living in the rural province of Limon. Her name implies the modest frocks and piercing blue eyes, but she is also a decisive woman who scoots around in chauffeured pickup trucks, an entrepeneur selling homemade honey and ice cream on a major scale, emitting sound laughter at the frustrations of Carribbean life.

The Lapps came to Costa Rica six years ago as a family of ten originally Amish of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The US had gotten too restrictive, in Drusilla´s thinking. Mennonites are workers and pacifists. Maybe they didn´t want to feel on the edge of a community but part of one. They also wanted to be freer and without the baggage of a government at war (Costa Rica has no army, which suited them).

Her adopted daughter Marilene took me through their farm, where they have Norweigian Fjords horses (a docile and ancient race), full dairy operations, organically raised cattle and vegetables. Snakes hide in the tall grasses so workers with machetes accompany us. Imagine your typical farm plus bamboo and chonta palm, wedged in by two mighty rivers, clear and paradisical.

She told me what an exciting prospect it had been. First, they failed. Their macademia crops fell flat, their matriarch passed away and a few members admitted homesickness and went back home.

To see the the farm now is to think nothing of it. Mighty Rivers (the property moniker: www.mightyrivers.net) has earned an air of humble prosperity. But success means the family getting up at 3:30 to milk, Drusilla fiddling with tractor mechanics (yes, they do use electricity) in her full length skirt, dreaming up ecotourism projects and researching how to start from scratch on the web and with Earth University (www.earth-usa.org) down the street. This is the stuff of dreamers, but also doers. Did I mention that she is getting into real estate?

I never expected a traditionalist to be so, well, modern. But Drusilla worries that surrounding land could be bought by the ubiquitous banana plantations whose practices pollute the rivers and destroy the Carribbean coral reefs. She also sees a potential for community. Not necessarily other Mennonites, but conservation-minded folk who also lay off the mary jane. She may be radical, but there are limits.

What struck me was the gumption. To move the Promised Land to a tiny country in Central America, because yours didn´t live up to the guarantee. Once upon a time--think grade school here--I thought my homeland was a haven. Hadn´t we created something indestructible, fully ours? Could there be something better out there?

The Lapps don´t seem so radical in many ways. I think they´ve found something sensible. But will it lure other tropical pioneers?

Stir it Up

2006-11-11T12:42:00.000-05:00

Costa Rica´s Carribbean coast is more Afro than Latino, more Bob (Marley) than Che (Guevera). There´s something to its candor. It´s addictive.

It goes something like this:
¨That not shit in the toilet Miss, it´s a stain.¨

(Jose when showing his hostel).

I believed Jose, moreover, I had to hand it to him. He took the most ramshackle establishment in the village (dark and dank, concrete stairs leading to nowhere, a rusted nail thrust out of a board) and had the chutzpah to call it BACKPACKER´S DREAM.

Jose cobbled together a calpso while he fumbled with the keys. ¨The key don't open the lock, oh-no, but it not the lock fault, no no, not the lock fault.¨ Composing, Jose says, is not so hard as people think. You don't sit down and think (oh-no). Sing what you're doing and match the last word with the last word of the last line. Zing. Jose had whimsy and energy.

All eyes and flashy smile on a rickety violin bow frame. If every stain was an accusation, at least every woe a ditty. He recalled a girlfriend named Carolina, singing, ¨She went back to Europa...¨ So this was the Backpacker's dream.

Exhibit B

According to my guide, Cahuita is where we white chicks snag a Rasta love toy. This is the closest I get:

I am checking out digs—this one a not-so-shabby ($15, seafront) hotel. The proprietor, plodding stride and graying hair, has a smile like a whiff of breeze.

“Sure Miss, come have a look at my room.”

“A room,” I yip. “A room.”

“Ahhh.”

The sigh says tryin’s part of greeting. We return to the tour of miniature glass chandeliers and orthopedic mattresses. His patience is more plentiful than seawater anyway, he opens every room, shows every sliver of a view even without my asking.

Exhibit C
Travel the Caribbean coast and local expats will issue you more warnings than the U.S. State Department Travel Advisory website. The hotel next to mine was robbed in the early-morning hours, while snarling echoes of howler monkeys woke me briefly. People get pick pocketed, robbed, tied up, and they wear masks now, as if that’s the worst of it.

I get the bejesus scared out of me. I am walking down a long dirt road, following signs to see a new hostel when a German Shepherd comes charging. I yell and the owner appears but the dog is fast on me now. Not braking, certainly not wagging. He ignores her call.

Sharp gnashing teeth. I break his approach with the only thing I have—a fistful of notes, my photocopied map. He gnashes them in his teeth. The taste of pulp and cardboard disappoint, he backs off. I salvage what I can.

Like hell I’m seeing this place.

I keep on down the road, the ocean to my right, lapping black sand divided by tall palms, so the water breaks like a film sequence. A man on a bicycle approaches me. I am soured. The dog (and I love dogs) made suspects out of all locals. I want nothing to do with him. Does it matter? We chat for a quarter mile anyway, him kicking his bike along to my steps. He’s got a funny face. He says he’s an electrician making house calls. Very good business here, where the salt air rots everything to dust.

A few hours later, he rolls up. I am walking back.

“I declare, it must be the will of Providence!” he says. “Do you believe?”

Who is this supposed handyman? It isn’t like I returned. I haven’t left. He is not impressed with my logic.

“Sometimes you are here for a reason,” he says, “and it is NOT the one you think it is.”

Part of me likes these breaking-and-enterings of casual philosophy. How often are you terribly bored when you could be having a perfectly deep conversation with the stranger next to you? On the other hand, he has to be a huckster. Whoever heard of going door to door fixing boom boxes? The more I talk to him, the more I’ll get tangled in the lines.

I am thinking how to extricate myself when a lady shows up, the same expat who whispered about the masked men.

“Eric, is my coffee pot ready? Can you drop it by?”

And sometimes the writing on the wall IS that plain: an old fart’s seduction, the person passing time, the dog who wants to bite your buttock. We don’t expect face value. It’s abrupt, this Caribbean candor composed to stir it up, to make respectable you blush and stammer.

The pot is stirred. But if you can hang in there, maybe you can keep playing.

Pura Vida?

2006-11-08T19:29:00.000-05:00

The immigration line at Juan Santamaria snaked out of the holding tank, reaching the gates. There were some 400 of us extranjeros who´d just arrived on various US flights ill-timed to bottleneck the halls. We were eager, we were tourists. We were retired people, backpackers, couples (many of them honeymooners), tour groups, independent travelers, long-lost Ticos with Californian habits, missionaries and land grabbers. We wore moneybelts and carried guidebooks: we were ready to discover something.

The first half-hour meant good-natured groans. But the rumbings grew. Those behind edged forward on the heels of others, as if making the line more compact might speed it up. The guy behind me belted out, ¨Hell, I GOT my credit card right here. I´ll BUY some land NOW if it´ll get me outta this line.¨ He was going for a chuckle maybe, but the attendant (bilingual, of course) looked like he wanted a hatchet.

I am here in Costa Rica to write a guidebook. And the hardest part might be discovering something.

invisible in Brazil

2006-07-28T00:24:00.000-05:00

Once the plaza where slaves were hung or tortured, the historic area known as the Pelourinho is Salvador's most touristy. The idea is gnawing. Gentrification has spruced up the colonial facades, traveling bands of vendors offer their trinketry, plump women in white turbans and fluffed skirts wait bored to pose for pictures.

It's my first visit to Brazil, and trying to separate the what it is from its packaging takes work.

I was in the city museum looking at the candomblé figures. A Brazillian approached with explanations. His name was Durval. He didn't work there, but spoke English and Spanish and could be hired for tours and guided visits to the ceremonies. I asked him if he would take me to one. A candomblé ceremony is not a tourist event. I couldn't bring a camera, I couldn't wear dark clothing. It was like being a child again: shut up and sit tight! It was someone else's show. Durval thought it was gutsy of me to go. No, I told him. I've almost no choice. It's curiosity.

The ceremony was in Dike Torroró, a marginal neighborhood. It would be too dangerous to return long after dark on foot, but it was still daylight so we walked, coming off the hill, skirting Brazil's second-largest soccer stadium (a rank urinary) and shards of broken glass. The candomblé houses are marked by flagpoles strung with white flags.

Durval gives me Candomblé 101 on the walk out. A form of ancestor worship, the religion recognizes spirits which watch over us. Those with special powers can invoke the spirit to posess them. In these ceremonies it's as if the individual goes to sleep. They will remember nothing. But the spirit who has visited drinks and sings and counsels.

This ceremony was called Caboclos, celebrating an indigenous divinity. The host had prepared all year for the event, a feat which required heaps of offerings (such as goats and Johnny Walker Red--these didn't come cheap).

An iron gate insulated the small cement house from the street. We were admitted and offered cold beers in flimsy plastic cups. Young men were strewed about the front porch conversing, kids ran rampant. It could have been a birthday or a baptism.

The ceremony in fact was in pause (it had started at noon, now it was five pm, but it could last a couple days). I leaned against a wall and took it in. The inner room was empty, save for a set of bongos. Everyone was in the inner courtyard, a crumbly square stuffed to the gills with people: grandmothers seated, Bahianas in lace dresses serving seafood broth, young women with the curves popping out of their tight tops, young men dressed in loose white cottons shaking and singing sambas. Little kids practice capoeira moves and cartwheels on the bare cement floors indoors.

What strikes me is my own invisibility. I am the only foreigner here, an outsider by miles, yet my intrusion invites no curiosity. Candomblé ceremonies are open to the public. I have been attended to, but not incorporated. The intimacy of the ceremony, its singularity of purpose, remains intact. In my travels the experience is unique. What's theirs is theirs, without explanation. I find it fantastic.

An enormous fleshy man in a tunic smokes a porro and wanders the crowd with a regal air. He wears a leather cap, necklaces and armbands, carries a wooden club decorated with weights and tassles, held cocked over one shoulder. In his gaze there is a clarity and precision that's impossible to mistake. He is the orixa, the spirit. He approaches a group. He tells one of the men about his troubles. The man smiles and nods.

Later, in between samba, shuffling dancers and whiskey poured down the orixa's throat, believers will line up to get the orixa's advice. His eyes are glassy and his words mesh into the drumbeats. The whole pulsing scene shatters a westerner's idea of what religion should be. There is rhythm and movement, alcohol, other worlds floating in and out of view. There are offerings--an altar of flowers and candles, fruits and whole roast goats, chicken feathers and dozens of bottles of cachaca and whiskey. Young men are everywhere, like at a keg party, nothing like today's dying Catholicism. Durval says that if you asked anyone about their religion they will say Catholic, but this is just something else they do. It's impossible to know how many practitioners candomblé has, but there's 2000 registered candomblé houses in Salvador. I think back to my own Sunday school lessons that molded me to divide the sacred and profane, to suspect false idols. I can't speak to the truth but there is no doubt this searching is a tangible experience, external and not internal, and wholly felt. Back in the courtyard the orixa wields his baton in swift movements. A woman stands before him awaiting advice. His voice booms over the crowd. "Life without obstacles is not a life," he repeats. All attentions swerve to follow the rest of the discourse.

Snapshot of Valparaiso

2006-06-11T16:23:00.000-05:00

Valparaiso has over 40 hills, thick with homes running from the stately to shanty, squatting over what was once South America's biggest port. There's still enough sass to let you know neckties don't rule here. Spindly streets climb alleys like laundry chutes. High above in second and third floor balconies panties and trousers in yesterday's fashions drip from their racks over the window hangings. I can't imagine their wearers donning these threads dried in tailpipe exhaust. Valparaiso is a curious visual picnic muddied by its own poverty. In a well-trafficked cobbled square a mutt stops to shit in the middle of the whizzing cars, unscathed. It sums it up. Necessity rules all here.

highlights: getting lip from 30-year waitresses, murals painting the passageways, the nightscape of hills twinkling with lights, sealions sleeping nose up in the harbor (you pass them when kayaking).

lowlights: hopscotching dog crap, barethreaded homes, the fog which curdles around you when you suspect you're not alone in the maze.

ends of the earth encounters

2006-04-10T14:16:00.000-05:00

I researched all of Patagonia for the guidebook and had a lovely time doing it. It was nice to relearn what I love about Chile--the incredible hospitality of strangers, folks with simple means, and the crazy unfettered landscapes.

I am now am firmly grounded and sulky to have to write 150 pages in a month. So I apologize if I disappeared! I'll run the highlights, that way I can relive them and bring a speck of joy to this restless desk-bound life. These are the most recent flames of memory from a bumpy, interminable trip:

In Puerto Guadal I met an ancient oak of a man who shared some of his stew with me when I stayed in his tattered hostal and told me of the old days, when he was a young sailor afraid of whores, til when he met his wife to be in a dusty outpost of Patagonia (he remains there today, and all for "a sweet face" as he put it). Kemel was his name, part arab, world-traveler, knotted with adventure and a few chuckles left.

I met a Belgian-Chilean whose parents emigrated after WWII and built up a ranch in the middle of nowhere. He was about six and a half feet tall, icy blue eyes, with a thick cowboy accent. He talked about ranch life coming to an end for many, his doubts about this so-called cash-cow called tourism, and shared the utter solitude that for these folks is so comforting.

I met an ex-barmaid at the last village on the continent--in Puerto Williams, across the beagle channel from Tierra del Fuego. She had a salty view of men and a whipsmart maternal instinct that had her popping in my room at 3 am incensed because I came home late without calling!

jungle notes part II

2005-11-14T14:51:00.000-05:00

Ecuador

Last night was my last with the colonel. I found myself at dinner with 2 army colonels and a hotelier--needless to say all 50 yr old men. I couldn´t scratch my way out of the situation so I ordered a steak and some wine and held tight.

Inevitably, the colonel wanted to talk about women in the military (to show how progressive he was). The only problem was their getting pregnant (not allowed, I guess)--so he cleverly remedied it by interviewing all female cadets every month. ¨Are you pregnant?¨ (No, he didn´t ask me).

They proceeded to talk excitedly about tourism projects--which ranged from fitting a plane salvaged from a crash in the river for acquatic tours to putting a gondola over the country´s highest waterfall because the access isn´t very good. Shortly, I assume Ecuador will have very few visitors, except for those who couldn´t get reservations in Vegas.

The colonel had gotten on my shit list for his canoe arrangements--the public canoe to the border (14 hrs one way) didn´t want to make stops for me to see the jungle lodges, which was absolutely necessary. Not even his fame could change this (and I was somewhat relieved, as 11 adults and 2 babies were traveling with us, it would have been awkward to sequester them to my 10 hr mission). He was known to comment thoughout ¨they don´t recognize me¨ or after meeting someone, ¨did you see? He recognized me...) Apparently he is a war hero from the conflict with Peru five years ago. As a result we boated all the way to the Peruvian border, stayed the night in grim conditions and took the 5 am ferry back upriver, not wanting to wait for the army helicopter lift the following day as it would be cancelled if the weather crapped out and then we really would have been stuck.

Nueva Rocafuerte, the border town, is an Amazonian outpost with roads but no cars. There are 2 foot weeds coming through the cracks in the street. Drinking is the main sport and when the sun set a guy who does jungle tours set up a grill on the sidewalk next to the river and brought the large color tv outside for some fine entertainment. At least he fed us--there´s no restaurant (or, there are but you have to request a meal hours in advance, so they can kill it I suppose). And then he told us about his expeditions, one aspect of which is hallucinating off the juices from the stem of a big tropical flower called floriponeo. I must admit, if I had to live in Nueva Rocafuerte, I´d look into hallucinogenic options.

At least before that I did get to stay at a few amazing lodges. These places are luxury in the jungle. You canoe up in a small twisty blackwater river filled with lillypads and morpho butterflies (blue giants the size of my hand) and there´s monkeys and toucans and caiman, and, of course, buffets.

Now I can see the end of the tunnel--three major jungle cities (towns) left, 20 hrs of road, then I am treating myself to a flight back to the capital!

Many thoughts.

jungle notes

2005-11-05T14:30:00.000-05:00

where do I start? I was traveling with the Colonel (long story but a liason helping me with all the amazonian research and yes, an ex-army big wig) on monday when we found out (his cell phone) that 22 tourists were assaulted on an Amazonian river to the north, where his jungle lodge is located.

The river Cuyabeno is a narrow and winding river in remote parts near the colombian border. Tourists go into their various lodges via a 2 hr. motorized canoe trip. Well, in the middle of it a group of masked men armed with oozies and sawed off shotguns decided to detain them. Then they detained each successive boat. They had time to drink a few beers from one of the canoe´s coolers but they graciously put down plastic so their victims wouldn´t muddy. Everyone came out ok but without cash and cameras and Gore-tex. One guy lost a pair of Hawaiian surf shorts (the authorities will be looking for them!)

I arrived in the area 4 days later with the colonel. Interesting to see firsthand the military mobilization of another country. These guys are assumed not to be Colombian guerrillas (even though the border is an hour away and full of cocaine crops) because it is against guerilla politics to cause trouble in Ecuador and troublemakers get assasinated by the organization (oh didn´t you know? there´s rules). so it´s probably just the locals who couldn´t resist the draw of surf shorts. But not all the locals, since the only income in the area is hiring out your canoe to lodges.

In spite of everything, the Cuyabeno Reserve is a marvellous place of tepid black water lagoons filled with caiman, monkeys, tapirs, 3 meter long fish, etc. I spent a couple days there and now am in Lago Agrio, staying on the military base at the invitation of a major´s family I met on the trip....an all-military vacation, another new one for me!

Before that I did half the Napo River with the colonel, whose connections are indespensable even if his company isn´t always. What can I say? It´s a job. On the bright side, I´ve held monkeys, seen about a dozen wild ones from two species, some very unusual looking birds and remote river villages where the natives wear ball caps.

More later. I am left with another river trip to Peru´s border, many bus rides and concrete jungle villages ahead.

Ecuadorian bus decor

2005-10-15T14:07:00.000-05:00

The coastal bus from Manta

1. 2 photos of driver and bus, right angle, left angle
2. cd player thumping ¨psycho cumbia¨ (accelerated version)
3. floral scarf tied over dash, secured by a pink banana clip
4. 1 rainbow Jesus sticker, 2 regular Jesuses (miniature), 2 virgin marys, 1 saint (unknown)5. magazine cutout of nude female backside wrapped in white bow in privledged location next to rearview mirror
6. approx. 2 dozen Tweety and Pooh stickers on red fur trimmed rear-view mirrors
7. one side window silhouette of male and female nudes, face to face, female in stillettos.
8. 3 old air fresheners
9. the following bumper stickers:
god guides me and my way (yellow)
if your daughter cries and suffers, it´s the job of a woman (red)
if you pass me tell your old lady I´m coming from behind (yellow)
drivers work for women and the wine (red)
(I) sting on eye contact (red)
10. 1 dangling teddy bear, 4 national football stickers, One virgin with crown and scepter holding Jesus in free hand, one extralarge playboy bunny sticker, one eighteen inch blonde in bikini, 10 red and green christmas tree bows swimging from curtain fringe
11. One faded greeting card of doe-eyed girl in original plastic (contents unknown)
12. wooden keychain carved with palm tree and TERESA
13. The short leash from which both hang
14. One worn facecloth, red
15. 2 Bart Simpson Chick Idol stickers
16. One marbelized steering wheel, red
17. Window inscription ¨Me sigieras viendo toda la vida¨ (you´ll keep seeing me all your life).....

Happy Colombus Day and safe trucking...

the emerald coast

2005-10-04T13:35:00.000-05:00

Ecuador

Can´t say that I´ve ever had a birthday quite like this....I arrived yesterday in San Lorenzo, a coastal border town with Colombia. It was populated with slaves that escaped when their ship sank offshore a few hundred years ago. There was a train but no roads into the area until 5 years ago. It isn´t so mucho of a town as a disaster area. It didn´t have a war, or a natural disaster. It is just that poor. The buildings are half-built or crumbling. I have never seen anything so bleak.

I was starving from a long bus ride so went to a recommended ¨restaurant¨, an open cement block structure. The fish was better than I´d expected (the local specialty is coconut and hot chile sauce) and I ended up dancing salsa with the cook--a very friendly very black woman almost my size but twice my girth in curves...The table next to mine adopted me, ¨scandalized¨(their word) by my blue eyes. Among them was a couple cops--who have the weekend off in San Lorenzo (lucky them!)

And yes, the absence of cops does add up and it is considered a very dangerous city. So I danced out of there rather early, not pushing it, and spent a grim evening in the hotel--hot and buggy, enveloped in an old-fashioned mosquito net that so resembled a giant bourkha....I did my town visits in a flash this morning and already I am now a good ways down the coast...

notes from the wild blue yonder

2005-09-20T22:38:00.000-05:00

Ecuador- first guidebook assignment

1. I}ve fallen into the tropical fishbowl. that is to say, what we do in N. America, and even chile, is not often noticed. We are transient and anonymous citicizens. Here, I am a museum exhibit. It takes some adjustment.

2. The keystrokes are not at the same place, making contractions difficult. I{ve not been able to correct this.

3. I can{t recommend climbing to the highest churchtower, a gothic pinnacle, in flipflopsbut it was a tremendous and terrifying experience. I had a view of everything'--the narrow 40 km valley with pastel houses jenga stacked, falling in the crevices. Quito is textured and hilly and sometimes downright filthy. Sunday is a respite from traffic, when all the families go arm in arm for a 25 cent dot of ice cream on a cone. Nuns still dress like penguins.

4. There are no shortcuts. I met with my co-writer tonight and there seems to be very little I can do to ease my burden or anxiety. I{ve decided: I am leaving the day after next. It doesn{t matter where. My cowriter says he can check 30 places a day! The past two days I{ve managed 6. I am destined to run around like a chicken with my head half-lobbed.

5. I also met my supposed nemesis--the Rough Guide writer, who happened to be in the same place at the same time as me. I was very polite (he was brit, so he sounded polite, even if he didn{t mean it). I even asked him to autograph my RG copy, next time we cross paths (which is sure to be constantly=what are the chances??)

greetings Winter

2005-07-15T18:41:00.000-05:00

“This one had his two feet in the grave!” Doña Licha’s great doughy hand flopped at her octogenarian husband. A month ago in this bad Patagonian winter he’d fallen on a rock going out for firewood. Six days later was helicoptered into the city hospital with broken ribs.

Leonidas Pinto, the exhibit under discussion, squinted at me and nodded. It was true. He liked to cross his arms over his chest, but today his hands were folded in his lap. Six days?

“Without a word. And almost a week it took him to admit it.” Doña Licha’s baritone voice resonated in their bare kitchen, decorated with grandkids’ soccer trophies and various rodents and raptors which had undergone amateur taxidermy. Cozy it wasn’t, at the end of the valley, in a worn farmhouse under the glaciers.

To boot the goats were dying—they’d managed to sell off the calves but their remaining animals had neither shelter nor sufficient grazing. Buying supplementary feed was a great cost for these poor subsistence farmers, one that they might not need to incur if the winter came rainy and gentle. This one didn’t.

Chile is having a killer winter. Rain or snow filled the entire month of May. On May 20 over forty soldiers marched to their death on the flanks of Antuco volcano because their commander ordered to change posts despite blizzard warnings. The government (it is an election year) is sending aid to its isolated residents, like the Pintos, which included feed for the animals and some for the people too. A couple of bales of hay dropped by helicopter might not make much of a difference if it keeps snowing. I love the snow; prefer it a hundredfold to the constant southern rains, but ranchers feel differently. Snow is death.

One rancher had lost up nineteen sheep to lingue, a plant poisonous to animals, but attractive when there’s little else to forage. Trips to get medicine were out of the question and things like meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables were scarce. People ate dried meat, fry bread, potatoes. The Pintos had recently sacrificed a horse with a broken leg and the maroon strips were salted and strung up like Christmas decorations throughout the house. The animal had belonged to their oldest grandson, Johnson. He moped and stayed away.

In these conditions I went out to make my last visit to the people of Ventisquero Valley, seeing what wasn’t there in summer. Couples who had been holed up alone for a month snapped and crackled when butter was requested. Hairbrushes were forgotten. Knitting needles clicked. Dogs were real thin. Midday folks looked out their small windows guessing which dim mountain their animals had retreated to.

I admit I went because I had heard about Don Leonidas’s accident. I was afraid he might be dying. There were signs—his grown daughter grabbed a photo I’d offered her father of the two of them, “as a remembrance.” Doña Licha said that she wouldn’t step foot in a hospital again, that you went there to die, and even that you couldn’t do so well in those places. Don Leonidas took advantage of his new frailty to tell me he remembered nothing anymore, so went my questions of the old days.

Instead of prying I ate some fry bread with instant coffee and had a real visit. Doña Licha got stirred up and said she’d cook a goose if I came the next day. Would I? Everything depended on the reprieve of bad weather, and I was sure it wouldn’t happen. “Don’t you get it?” Don Leonidas said from his shaded corner, long unnoticed by all. “The girl’s trying to say goodbye.”

“The fox” they called him. I was convinced then that his wits were still sharp, but it was his game now, and he’d play it how he wanted to. But I was gaining on him too. If I asked he would send a grandson to show me the hidden trails to the pass. Maybe he would tell me about the old persecutions of the law, his wanderings to Argentina, his happenstance survival and the revolutions his mind took as he sat here in the half-darkness, with a whole hard life behind him.

I left before the darkness would catch up, promising to be back in spring.

route finding

2005-01-31T13:37:00.000-05:00

Above Lago Azul

My other recent trip was an exploratory excursion into the box canyon of Azul Lake, looking for an ideal place to take hikers that wanted to earn birds’ eye-views through sweat. I was set to take two friends from the states, Stephen and Tara, along with fellow guides Cathy and Fernando. As fate would have it a terrible stomach flu claimed Stephen, and Tara as nurse nightingale, so the group was whittled down to three.

But we still had the gear (read: elaborate gourmet food and camp accessories) for five, or perhaps for eight. We hiked the perimeter of the lake on an old trail almost never used. The spiky brush of rosehips and hazelnut bushes and other plants had reclaimed the trail. We had to breaststroke our way through the underbrush, if one had worn shorts it would have been occasion to cry with all the needles and spines grazing our legs. As it was, the conversation was reduced to “ooh” and “ow.”

The next segment of the hike was up, straight up, at a merciless angle. But here there was an established trail, a good one, since livestock climbed these valleys in winter to forage for food. These were the so-called “wild cows” we stumbled upon, or, “spy cows” who gazed at us through thick forest brush and bolted like frightened sparrows at the sound of a snapping branch. All the while we lamented the absence of Stephen and Tara, who would have provided good humor and extra cliff bars.

The valley we climbed into was not the flat, high altitude basin I had imagined, but instead, a long steep walled forested canyon that ended in a wall of formidable peaks: the Argentine border.

The next day, while it spit snow and hail, and the clouds banked low on the peaks, we had a look around the upper reaches on the only accessible mountain, which had burned in years past and now had short grass instead of forest. From up there we could see Lake Azul and the waves of mountain ridges behind it. The wall of Argentina still stood before us like a fortress, but now it seemed we had earned half its height. The trouble was getting down. We went route-finding, which is to say, wandered toward the back of the mountain, slipping all the while in the coarse, wet grass, before descending into thick brush that threatened to swallow us whole, or, mercifully, claim an ankle. Wading though the plants my boots absorbed water until it felt like I had sponges under my rotting feet.

To sum it up, Fernando, a local 20 yr. old, who ached for a military career and herded sheep and cattle all his life, said, “I never want to walk this way again.”

I wasn’t so sure. We heard of another local who has ranched and shepherded and knows the valley well. He says there is a better trail which leads up to the border, and he’ll take us there. I have gone to the pharmacy, undergoing the initial embarrassment of asking for a cream to cure the mushrooms on my feet (literal translation). They’re starting to heal up nicely. And once again, though half the time these trips result in uncertainty and mild torture, I find that I ‘m tempted.

These places will never lack adventure, they will always have places to explore, secrets to find. The cows know. I have a feeling, the way they eyed me suspiciously. And they want their secret kept.

the hidden valley

2005-01-31T12:34:00.000-05:00

It seems like for the past year I have been treading the rural backwater, so to say that I’ve hit the furthest-flung reaches might sound redundant. But it’s not.

I had heard about Ventisquero (the hanging glacier) Valley for some time. I tried to go twice but was foiled. First in September by a horse accident, and second in December by a travel partner unwilling to trod the eleven hours in on foot. A local claims that the valley is bewitched and “mañoso,” picky: not letting just anyone enter, and sometimes keeping travelers at bay for weeks with storms and swollen rivers. In short, it sounded to me like the kind of place where folktales and fairytales were still being manufactured.

This time I took my time and contracted a local guide, the only who would agree to hoof it (walking is second class, riding is first). Still, we traveled with a packhorse to carry provisions and cross rivers with. We set out on a blazing hot summer day, horseflies swarming us as we made our way up valley.

My final destination, reached a few days later, was the ranch of Don Leonidas, age 79. He was the last of the old school of cowboys, arrived as a child in the valley and was brought up making a home out of the wilderness. When he was 22 he rode to Argentina to get a wife, and while before he was suspected to be a bandit, these days he is a local patriarch, the guy they send to the grade school once a year to tell the kids about the old days.

When I asked if I could tape him he took one sidelong glance at my silver recorder and asked how could he be sure it wasn’t a pistol. Sometimes being five foot tall and minimal works to your advantage. I just shrugged.

All the while an orphan sheep cried in the background (if they are bottle nursed they resist weaning and follow their owner around like a lapdog) and Doña Licha told me about her own milk miracle. When her daughter abandoned her granddaughter at their house she was able to breastfeed her, up until the sturdy age of eight. Doña Licha must be Ventisquero’s patron saint of dairy, she also showed me a separate hut where she makes cheeses and offered me a chunk of the mild stuff (like munster”), wrapped in an old plastic food wrapper, to bring home.

A gracious host, she hasn’t been out of the valley in at least twenty years (unlike her husband, who rides to town once a week). She says she won’t either, because she can’t get on a horse because of a hernia. When asked if she’d have it operated on, she replied in her baritone voice, “For what? Just let it be, I should be dying soon enough anyhow.”

On my second day their great grandchild, known as Juanito Accordeon (little Juan accordion) emerged from the attic, painfully shy but bribed by his great-grandma to play a few songs for a candybar. His instrument is an antique that he’d picked up lying around the house, and the keys stick in the humidity, making his little brow furrow.
Juanito plays accordion and guitar, mostly Mexican rancheras, and is seven years old. Doña Licha danced and slapped her thighs. The accordion appeared to crush Juanito, his two spindly legs sticking out, but he played with gusto, with the rapidity of a field mouse darting hole to hole. Juanito is the kind of kid that doesn’t talk unless it’s through an instrument, and then does so beautifully.

I have plans to go return to the valley in March, to get more stories and more cheese.

another one bites the dust

2004-12-25T22:29:00.000-05:00

northern patagonia

One more year almost down the hatch. How are my friends out there?Somewhere I know there is winter, there are naked trees and frozen lakes, new babies, work, commutes, but so far away I can barely imagine any of it.

It doesn't feel much like Christmas with the hortensias in bloom, no jingles or pine trees in sight, and (in lieu of a turkey dinner) a lamb bbq this afternoon. American consumer madness has begun to make its way down here, but if you stay clear of the mall (one town over) there is not much in the way of frenzy. Me, I spent my extra dollars on phone cards. thank god I am not licking envelopes, but in the spirit of it all I am sending a Christmas missive of my own.

I have had a fortunate year and feel the need to celebrate a little that I remain in one piece. I plan to stay til the american summer. The plan is to travel during this excellent summer weather and write in the chilly months afterward. I have gained momentum with my project, recovered my ribs and lung capacity, become known in the mountains where I work, and rented a sweet little cottage (with spare bedroom for GUESTS) to make it all worthwhile.

I just returned from another trip to Patagonia for research. This time I went with an American photographer. We took a trip up to a glacier with a local guide, Lolo. He built the trail he built with his own hands, it's worthy of any in Rocky Mt. National park, with carpeted forests of moss and giant southern beech, thick sections of bamboo, a rushing clear river and southern beech. To give you an idea, the forests have the look of Japanese triptych, with whimsical fanning branches.

We never made the glacier. Snow fell both days we camped above treeline. My boots fell in the fire and suffered 3rd degree burns, as a result they shrunk, massacred my ankles on the hike out, then needed emergency "surgery" (via penknife) to refit. I am officially Bad Luck for anyone I travel with. We were able to have a good look around though, and ran into a wild huemul (a deer, endangered species) and a condor. We climbed a nearby ridge and saw the ripple of valleys in the distance, their blue-green snaking rivers and vast expanses of nothing.

People are the best part of these trips. Lolo lives with his sister and elderly parents in an elfin cabin visited by almost no one, it is so remote. His mother Odelia, age 85, puts on stacks of jewlery and her best dress for a visit, then sits and holds your hand. Guests are so scarce in these areas that hosts can tell you stories of ten years worth of visits-the time the German came and we traded chocolate bars and hard salamis for hand knit slippers and quartz crystals. My visit will be the story of "the time we installed the first shower." It was in a stall outside, and functioned with a bucket and very little water pressure. To shampoo my hair I had to bend over. I am sure they'll work out the kinks.

On my last visit I ran into a local who almost fell off his horse giving me the customary kiss hello. He was known as rarely sober. During my stay he turned up missing--his horse saddled and trapped on a raft mid-river (with a pulley used to cross the Puelo, a wide river with heavy current). They sent out divers and organized a search but have decided he has drowned. He is the most recent in a series of drownings, almost every family has lost someone, every crossing has a cross and plastic flowers in rememberance.

With the coming of the first road to the region this place is undergoing massive change. Seeing it first hand, I can imagine what the world was like for our parents or grandparents once and why they so mourn the changes. Every time I return, the footpaths I once walked into the mountains have become gaping sores of gravel (see pics combo and combo 2--taken of the same hillside 6 months apart). With the sense of isolation and community changing in great strides I have plenty of work left to do and will do my best to figure out what it means and to put it into words.

witchy woman

2004-08-05T11:25:00.000-05:00

Doña Albana’s shoes are pointy, her nose crooked, her face a contour map forged by decades of isolation and hard labor. On these short winter days she tends her chickens, gathers herbs, spins wool, knits and sews. All the while it pours. I visited her in her shack beside Patagonia’s Route 235, the principal road snaking up the fertile Palena valley to the divide of the Andes and the Argentine border.

She has plunked down roadside because after a lifetime pioneering one of the most isolated sectors of Patagonia, walking five miles to the bus, crossing rivers on footbridges and climbing steep hills, wasn’t longer comfortable. This area has been historically cut off from the rest of Chile, separated by sea and land thick with mountains and rushing rivers. It was most easily accessed via Argentina, and many of its Chilean colonists first came that way.

Doña Albana was five years old when she made the trip in 1933 over the Rio Encuentro pass. In those days kids didn’t have boots, her feet were shod in raw calfskin wrapped over wool stockings. The Reyes were returning from a stint in the more prosperous Argentina, having suffered as emigrees. Through the Aysen Law of Colonization they received a land grant of 500 hectares. The trick was it was land completely isolated, unaccessible by roads, steeped in vegetation and moated by rushing rivers. They arrived with a pair of horses, ten sheep, 25 goats and two oxcarts. They settled in “El Diablo” named for the cloven hoofprints found throughout the area.

They slept on saddles in a lona (animal skin tent). Albana was the oldest of five; then came Estela, Prosperina, Euteria, Facundo.

Two things strike me about Palena. One is that its citizens, the pioneers, have achieved incredible longevity. I met one centenarian while there and heard of two others who died not long before at the ages of 105 and 110.

The other is the relatively unrecognized truth that the foundations of this society was its women. While the men worked in argentina for months on end it was the women who worked the fields, tended the animals and raised the children. The women have big strong hands. Rings didn’t fit well on even the younger women. They kneaded bread, rolling it out with a winebottle, washed clothes, spun wool, built stock fences.

rural boarding school

2004-04-20T13:23:00.000-05:00

Northern Patagonia

The Llanada Grande Escuela Internado is only two years old, and in pretty good shape. The only things its missing is a gym and heat. For physical education all grades, 1-8, run up and down the corridor that connects all the classrooms, or shove their desks in the corner of the classroom for stretching. All the classrooms are equipped with small cylindrical wood stoves, fed sporadically by the teacher while she tends to writing on the board or circling among the kids. One kid wore a pair of gardening gloves to class, not a bad idea. I had long underwear and a jacket on all day and still managed to freeze most of the time. Half the kids wear plaid or tan coats, uniforms, and most wear slippers or woolen slipcovers over their shoes. Thirty pairs of black rubber boots stand outside the front door. I have no idea how each kid finds his own.

Approximately thirty kids live at the school for the duration of the school year, whose boots you won’t find outside, since they live in bunk rooms in the building, their homes a matter of hours away by trail, the furthest valley being Ventisquiero (Glacier), where the kids must travel a full day to get home. It makes it hardly worth it to go home on weekends, and some of the kids are left for the year, while others go home all the weekends that the weather holds up, which become fewer and fewer as winter comes on.

The school is lacking so much of everything. Most of the teachers teach two grades at a time, dividing their class in two rows. Because of the scarcity of books the 5th/6th grade teacher had students read passages silently which they picked from various models and editions of reading books and comment individually about them. Another teacher photocopied small bits of text which the students pasted into their notebooks, which then became a sort-of textbook. One teacher lectured, “the problem here is comprehension. So when you read, pay close attention.” Unfortunately, a third of the class couldn’t read.

The students aren’t typically allowed to bring books home. One teacher said, “I can’t count the times we’ve loaned a book and it disappears, then you visit the house and find it in the bathroom, being used as toilet paper.”

I expected a certain amount of claustrophobia, for the confinement, the rain, the lack of space and privacy. What I found was confirmed later on my bus ride out the valley, when I was one of two passengers, and put between the driver and his other passenger on the front seat, and between their conversation, instead of sitting in one of the various empty benches in the back. Proximity wasn’t shunned, it was savored. The girls of third and fourth grade adopted me immediately. They grabbed my hand when they saw me in the hall and snuck touches of my hair. I felt like The Beatles or Nicole Kidman.

The downside of being so special is my every move was broadcasted. I got lost coming home from school to the farmhouse one day. There are no streets in Llanada Grande, a few mud-bogged oxcart trails that end in houses, sinewy paths that meander and loop around straight-shot destinations. Instead, everyone takes the footpaths, which are a little distracting, crossing log cattle fence ladders, the re-paved municipal airstrip, fallen limbs over streams, flocks of ducks, piglets, horses, thick forest, open, ruddy farmland, thick, low forest, pegged wooden gates and fences.

Of course I wasn’t really lost, because I saw the landmark waterfall nearby, but I had roamed back and forth in the fields and the forest and still hadn’t found the farmhouse. Finally I headed for the house under the waterfall and a woman collecting wood gave me directions.

The next day at school a little girl came up to me. She turned out to be the wood-collector’s daugher. “You got lost yesterday?” The question was more puzzlement than inquiry. It drew the other kids closer like magnets.

An army lieutenant thought he saw my horse being prodded by another rider on the trail a few days back. “Impossible,” I tried to convince him. It was no use. Tourist season had ended, there were no other blondes to take cover in. Llanada knew me now.

Of course, like any other place it holds its secrets. But I was surprised to find the kind of stories that became public fodder. One day at recess a kid named Leandro, age 11, played the guitar and sang for me. The principal’s office was packed. I was dragged to the scene by my girlfriends in 3rd grade, who had set up the concert themselves, saying “there’s a kid who can play guitar and he sings about the guy who drowned in the Rio Ventisquiero.” Like a folktale, I thought. No, it had happened two years ago. They even dragged the little sister of the guy to the concert, saying, “She’s the one who lost her cousins.” The girl nodded sadly. I tried to offer my condolences while the music started—Ranchera—which has a huge following in rural Patagonia.

Little Leandro played a mean guitar, but he didn’t author the lyrics. Those were penned by a guy in the valley. The tragic song about the son and husband that was lost in the flooded river when his horse slipped was followed by one about a drunk man who goes to jail for killing another man (also inspired by true local events) and one about a man attempting to make conjugal visits to a married woman. I didn’t even ask about that one.

The kids of Llanada Grande escuela internado clapped along and cheered to the songs, their stories, of their valleys, which everyone knew by heart and counted among their few possessions.

the middle of everything

2004-04-16T19:00:00.000-05:00

Back from a rainy, muddy, week in Northern Patagonia in the mountains (or “cordillera,” a term I prefer for its precision and the corduroy sound about it). Anyhow, after several trips to the upper Puelo I’ve found something unexpected. The middle of nowhere is becoming the middle of everything.

Llanada Grande is about 140 km south from Puerto Montt, the capital of Chile’s X Region. Until this past year the village only had an airstrip and a network of trails that could take you and your horse to the city in 12 days, descending parallel to the flat, turquoise River Puelo. Last year the road was finally put in, so now, via vehicle and ferry combinations, the village is seeing more and more traffic. While staying in a farmhouse there this past week I ran into a Tango performer based in Toulouse, was interviewed by a Chilean film crew making a show on fly-fishing and traveling with models, and met a collection of local kids in the public boarding school struggling with poverty, low-funding and scandals.

The major achievement of my trip was learning to ride at a gallop, not achieved by my own election, but rather, with help from a friend bored with the pace. My horse was “motivated” by a slap on the hide whenever Oscar would pass, or a smoochy sound that drives horses wild. We made a four-hour trip in three, me laughing most of the way in sheer terror.

That was Easter, a dark and chilly day of mud and rain, rewarded earlier by a lamb barbecue at a local’s farm and chocolate bunnies for the kids, who found prodigious appetites for the new discovery. In a place where the nearest church was hours away and only open for business every few months when the traveling priest was in town, the date was barely observed beyond a mere acknowledgement, “it’s Easter?” “Happy Easter.”