NvEoUlMkAeNrN

ykk

I really like the YKK. It’s never failed me.

Smack Smack

So here I am. Back in Virginia. Headed to Blacksburg tonight to hang out at the Summer Leage Ultimate Tournament that they were having. Borrowed my mom’s old minivan ‘cause I’m not wanting to pay to register my truck quite yet and it’s not starting anyway. Ugh, car hassles.

My mom’s minivan has a factory tape deck in it - I grabbed my fancy new mp3 cd-player and the tape adapter and I was grooving down the road to my new Regget�n de la Muerte 2004 CD that I bought in Bolivia somewhere. All good.

After pulling out of the parking lot at ultimate the damn tape deck wouldn’t play anymore. I played with all the buttons. Eject. Put the tape back in. Bastard. I wanna listen to Horace Andy!!!! I got to the Ultimate pool party and let the issue rest.

When I was finally facing my half hour drive back home I decided to give the tape deck a nice smack on the face, and hey, waddayaknow, the bitch straightened right up and put out some groovy tunes!

The Lesson? If it don’t be workin’, hit it harder.

Last.fm and Audioscrobbler.com

Time for a geek post, a music post. I’ve been away for a little while, my last big rave was about Musicbrainz, the great CDDB/Gracenote replacement. Opensource, open database, user editing, very cool.

Now I’ve found Last.fm. It’s like the Friendster or Orkut of the web for musically minded people. You can set what kind of music you like, pick artists, songs, how much you like them and it makes reccomendations for you depending on what other people with similar taste like.

After you rate 100 songs it’ll place you in a neighborhood with people like you. After 300 songs in your profile it’ll start making reccomendations on a song level. I haven’t gotten there yet.

You can either listen to the streaming radio of another user or community’s songs and build a profile that way, ot you can download Audioscrobbler, a plugin for most music players, and have it report what you’re listening to the server. Kinda kool, you can check up on what your friends are currently listening to :) It’s all open source so you can be sure it’s not spyware that’s doing lots of other ugly stuff on your computer.

I haven’t played with it all that much and the interface is a bit too much at times, but I see some potential to get turned onto neat new music through this. It takes a few minutes to get Audioscrobbler working but it would be cool to just check back after a month to see what kinda reccomendations the system kicks your way.

The music that they stream is all licensed by the labels so it’s all legal. I hope this things survives. For now it seems like a pretty cool experiment.

Thanks, Metafilter for the tip on this one.

Buenos Aires Stencils

I was so impressed by the stencil graffiti in Buenos Aires that I made a point of photographing some of it to share with y’all. Click here or on the image to see the gallery.

Update: I was doing some more research on the matter and found this site that has some of the same pictures I do, along with some background stories.

Laguna Verde Panorama

So it took me a while to get all these panorama stitching tools figured out but finally I’ve got results and I’m pretty happy. Click on the picture to go to the panorama viewer…

For those interested, I used PTAssembler to make the image. It’s a nice little front-end to Panorama Tools. Takes a while to figure it all out though.

Pretty Flag

Have I mentioned yet that I think the Argentina flag is beautiful…

Borderline Retarded

There’s more where that came from. It’s Me, Ida, and Marthe in the hostel room in La Paz. And this time it’s not even my camera at fault. ;)

BsAsGraffiti

This design was on a wall somewhere in Buenos Aires

Last S. America Pictures

Well Kids, that’s it. My last installment of the South America Travel Pictures. A bit of Buenos Aires, a bit of Iguazu Falls, a bit of Barra da Lagoa, Brasil and Sao Paulo to finish it off. Start here.

To look forward to:
- When I get off my ass and get all the panoramas assembled
- When I get the digicam movies on my computer and upload them for all o’ y’all to see.

Back Relaxin'

planes and buses don’t lend themselves to sleeping so i strung up the new hammock by the pond at home.

Barra da Lagoa --> Sao Paulo --> Floyd, VA

So I passed the travelling rock on. It was given to me by Shannon, May-Li’s friend when she was finishing her Europe trip and it was time for me to pass it on to someone else. Shannon also got it from a traveller. It’s the travelling rock.

I think Arnica ended up with it - besides, Elisa mentioned something about already having a protection necklace. It was getting late, the girls were heading to bed. Time for me to go back home. I had to go to sleep to the noise of a drinking game in high gear.

Tuesday, I got up to see the girls off on their 11am bus. We kicked some more footbag waiting for the bus. One of them was feeling a bit sick. Cold weather in the winter. Ugh. I got their stale rum and coke, a book to put in the hostel exchange, and a bottle of coke to take back to the hostel. They left. I was still drizzly so I found me a nice hammock, listened to some Stella Chiweshe and passed out for 3 hours. I finally got up the initiative to go for a walk, the sun was out. There was a nice beach right behind the hostel and I kept along the coast until the path ceased and I turned my sights on the hill. A bit of hiking up through mud yielded a great view of Barra da Lagoa and how it was sandwiched right between the lake and the ocean, something I would have never guessed from down lower. I stalked a vulture for a little while but then it got cold and I went home to a delicious dinner and some drinking games. Didn’t feel like drinking games, instead I watched TV, and nothing better than The Cable Guy was on so I watched that, yearning for someone to play with :( Ugh, Bedtime. It was a very short feeling day.

Wednesday I ran around and did a lot, relatively speaking. I got up around noon and headed to Lagoa to change some US$ to Reais and look for some hammocks. No hammocks to be found in that town so I walked to check out a beach on the way home. The surfers seemed to be having a good time.

I had to be on the local bus at 19:30 to get to Floripa in time so I kicked it around the hostel for a while, paid for my bed and beers and went to get a last dinner Barra. I got a huuuuge amount of food for 17 Reais. US$6 for salmon, fries, beans, salad, rice, maybe doesn’s sound so impressive, but damn, the quality of everything was really nice.

I piled on the bus with my packs and two $20 hammocks in my yellow-green rice sack and rode to Flori, eventlessly got on the bus to Sao Paulo and slept maybe 3 hours that night.

Sao Paulo is huge. My guide book says 18 million inhabitants. We started getting to big buildings and dense population an hour before the bus pulled into the final terminal, the biggest bus terminal I saw on the trip. I think there might have been more than 100 gates. Unreal. So many logistics, where can I stash my pack, how do I get to the airport, where can I change some more money, confirm my flight… I finally got it all taken care of and cruised the subway to walk around and get myself lost for a while. Kinda downtownish there are lots of pedestrian zones, I got some coffee, went to the bathroom at McDonalds (2nd fast-food bathroom bailout on the trip.) I found a store selling records, 4 for 10 Reais so I stocked up on some carnival music, some American classics that are hard to find in the US, and maybe a random pick or two. I was free to buy some bulky crap as I’d just be able to take it on the plane that night. I finally figured out where I was and worked my way towards Japan-town. The largest Japanese community outside of Japan. I had a great meal for 29 Reais and headed to the internet to email and blog.

I was done walking around. Tired. Running out of steam. I didn’t stay at the internet place too long and headed to the airport way ahead of time. On the subway a wheelchair guy got on. He looked so happy. Go get ‘em attitude. He got off a few stops later and did a wheelie to cross the large gap between the train and the platform. He was awesome. He made me happy. I wanted to get rid of all the logistics of checking in and paying my date-change fee before my lack of sleep caught up with me. By the end of paying the $150 fee I had about $7 and 5 Reais left on me, I bought a can of beer for 3.90R and waited.

The plane was a new Boeing 676-200 with LCD screens in the back of every seat and little controllers that you could pull out of the arm rest. They had crappy video games. You could switch between movies to watch but given a choice made it even more acutely obvious how crappy all the movies were. The controls were horrible, forcing you into 2 handed operation, changing the orientation of the controller all the time, and constantly changing the funcitonality of every button. I got frustrated quickly and wrote it off as 1st generation software. At least it’s a software and not a hardware problem.

Newark layover resulted in a Dunkin Donuts Bagel and a bit of a nap. There were a lot of fat people and women with too much makeup and bleached or straightened hair.

My mom picked me up in Greensboro with some water from home and some local nectarines. We rolled into Floyd and had a lunch at Oddfella’s - the first nice nachos I’ve eaten in a long time.

At home I basically went to see the site wher my mom’s building the new house and hung my hammock by the pond and napped for 3 hours.

When I got up at 8pm it was still light out. I’ve gone from winter to the long days of summer. Of course Michael flew back from Santiago on Solstice making this effect even more extreme.

Adjusting

So the first thing I’m noticing that’ll take me a while used to is:

poop, wipe, look for garbage bin, looking, looking,… oh right, I can flush it here.

After 2 months or more of getting myself used to NOT flushing toilet paper now I’m so accustomed to putting it in a separate bin that I can’t help but pause and look for said bin for a few seconds.

It’s kinda like when you have long hair and cut it, put on a shirt, and make the motion to pull your hair out of the shirt, not necessary anymore.

I unpacked the boxes that I sent home from Quito, Lima, and La Paz today. It’s overwhelming how much stuff there is. It’s overwhelming after having lived out of a backpack for 6 months.

Reading My Own Blog

So I was looking why images where not showing up on my old blog pages and ran across this goodie
that I would have never remembered if I hadn’t blogged it…

Just think of all the great ideas that were lost in pre-history.

I like my blog.

I promise the donkey on the left will disappear when I sit back in front of Photoshop on my own laptop. I’ve actually grown quite fond of him. Thanks again for the help with that cut-out job, May-Li.

Barra da Lagoa

Sitting in Sao Paulo, slept very little on the night bus, full from eating Sushi, not much money left, an hour or so to kill before heading back to the train station, picking up my pack, taking metro to airport bus, taking airport bus, paying $150 for date change, checking in, boarding, passing out hard.

anyway, back to business… now, let’s read my own blog to see where I left off the narrative…

So another night bus it was. From Foz do Igua�u to Florianopolis (Floripa). I had two reasons for visiting the lovely island of Santa Catarina. Firstly my friend and former Ultimate team captain Mark from Boston has some property out there and a friend that still lives there. Secondly, Jarrad and Anthony were there many weeks ago before moving on to eastern-more pastures. In their update email they said they planned on spending 3 days and ended up there for 2 weeks. I asked them for more info and I received.

In Barra da Lagoa, a bus ride and another bus ride away from Floripa, there lies a hostel called Backpackers. The name made me feel right at home, english spoken. I arrived to find a staff of a bunch of cute guys and gals and guests consisting mainly of surf bums. A laid back attitude. No check out times. Just grab a beer from the fridge and keep your own tab on the blackboard. It has a great view, perched across a hanging footbridge from a 20 km beach of fine sand of which I’m bringing a sample back for Duncan. The water teems with surfers on a nice day, of which I had a grand total of about 1.5 in the 5 that I was there.

The standard routine for the denizens of the Backpacker is to get up at noon, surf or walk around a bit, watch TV, eat dinner that’s cooked by the staff, play drinking games, and go out if it’s a going-out weeknight. If not, the drinking games continue into stupor.

The TV part sucks. It’s so centrally located. It sucks. When it’s right in the middle of things I get sucked in too. Rant Rant. Movies and selective watching good. Channel surfing out of boredom, bad. Turn on some music and have conversations. Interact with your fellow man.

After watching TV, eating dinner, and playing some drinking games with the pornographic deck of cards we went out to a place in Lagoa where some love music was going on. None of us knew how to dance to it so a few of us cruised on down to another joint where there was an American Rock cover band. Ok, not exactly my bag either but it was god to get a change of pace - and there I met my salvation for my Barra da Lagoa experience. Elisa and Arnica, from the Seattle area knew some of the Australian boys I was out with from before and I got to talking to Arnica for a good while. Not really sure about what. Just BS.

At the way end of the night when we were piling out of the bar and I was standing around with these two girls, waiting for the rest of the gang to empty out of the place, one of them mentioned something about ‘how great it would be to have that hacky sack.’ That’s what I like to hear. It’s been a while since I’ve kicked hack, might have been in Cusco with Jason. Hmmm, cool.

Six of us piled into a little taxi and went back home. A. and E. were staying across the footbridge, close to the hostel, but apart from it.

The next morning as I was heading out on a beach-walk I got a little call as I walked past their balcony and was invited up to the room. We plotted to do a beach walk together,… all the way to the end!!! which never happened because it was a hell of a lot longer than we thought. We did discover some cool coastal pine forests just behind the dunes, some wicked-pissah campsites, and the the tide makes walking up the beach a lot harder when it’s high.

We went back and threw some frisbee and kicked some hacky-sack and kicked and hit their volley-ball. We couldn’t persuade a single TV watcher / drinking-gamer to join the fun. I eventually ran up to the hostel to fetch my speakers and we made a mellow evening of it… turning them onto The Waifs.

I called Marks friend Jonathan that night and we set up a noon lunch date. The next morning (Monday) I got up at 10am so I could get into Floripa and buy my Sao Paulo bus ticket and get back to Lagoa in time to meet Jonathan at the gym that he’s part owner or manager or investor or whatever in. We went out to a nice ‘pay by the kilo’ buffet, typical for at least this part of Brasil. He was super welcoming and we talked about anything from travelling to beekeeping (his hobby) to linguistics. We may or may not have gossiped about Mark.

After lunch it was off to J’s house to meet his family and go for a walk around his property, see the 16 beehives, look at the treehouse, and talk about the economic sustainability of the island. Later on I installed Mozilla Firefox on his computer. He asking me what I thought of macs, he liked them because they didn’t have popup-ads on websites all the time. I explained to him about the browser wars and that Microsoft and the pop-up companies were in bed together. We had some tea in classic British fashion and after a while he gave me a ride home. Nice fellow.

I stopped by the hostel for a minute to rearrange gear and went to see what the two ladies were doing across the way. They were leaving the next morning :( and were getting rid of all the food in their kitchen :) so I got to supply music, run back to my hostel for some salt and pepper and oregano and partake in their lovely dinner of yummy yummy squash and pasta. The Aussie boys that they knew had taken off earlier that night and left us with the dregs of a bottle of wine which I finished through the rest of the evening.

With my spices I figured I’d also bring my cookpot with all its contents. Elisa was feeling sick and cold so I demo’d the alcohol-burning-in-metal-lid room heating trick that Paul and I had pioneered in Uyuni. This led to me showing off the alcohol stove made out of Red-Bull cans that Al and John gave to me in Quito. I passed it on to them to use on their continuing journeys. I didn’t have time to burn a copy of The Waifs ‘Up All Night’ so I decided to just pass on my ‘folk’ mp3 cd, and a reggae one, and a learn spanish one. I’ll be back with my computer real soon. It’ll take me 2 minutes to burn another copy. They didn’t have an mp3 cd player but I think these discs are providing incentive.

I also passed on the travelling rock.

15 Years, More Or Less

Wow, it was January 25 of this year that I last drove a car. Tomorrow I ought to be back in the States to reclaim my purple pick-up.

This is the longest stretch of time I’ve gone without driving since cruising down driveways when I was about 12 years old.

That would make the longest non-driving time in 15 years.

Well then, time to go see Sao Paulo for the day :)

Around Iguazu

I got off the bus at Puerto Iguazu ready to head to one hostel that I found in my guidebook but the cabbie stalled and decided to ignore me for about 5 minutes. In that time a lady working for comission from another hostel came along and share the splendoes of the Hostel-Inn and grabbed the cabbie’s attention again. I was off.

I walk into the place and there are a good 20 pre-pubescent kids running around playing hide-and-seek, billiards, foosball, ping-pong. Yes my friends, it was Argentine holidays. Iguazu is a popular spot and it was raining. I had a choice between a dorm room with 8 or 6 people. 8 was cheaper, so what the hell. I’ve never seen bunk beds piled into a room like that. That many people in a room smell. There was barely space to put my pack. I had to repack in order to go to Iguazu for the afternoon and had to move operations to the hallway. Partly to blame was lack of space, I also didn’t wanna wake up the hard partying Irish who were still sleeping in the room at 13:30.

I almost didn’t make it to Iguazu because of not wanting to deal with the rain but I was definitely feeling a bit of hurry having only about a week left in South America. So I flagged down the bi-hourly yellow bus off the highway and rode to the falls. Getting there I was faced by a brochure that touted trails to view the falls. 2 hours to look in the Devil’s Throat. 1.5 hours for the lower circuit. 1.5 for the upper circuit. It was 14:30. Eeeek. I was quicly calmed when I jumped on the ‘15 minute’ Green Trail.

The sign said the trail was about 670 meters long. So in shitty conditions when Jason, Ina, and I were walking up to Aguas Calientes we covered 1km in 15 minutes. 670 meters, 15 minutes. I realized that the estimates applied to people pushing wheelcairs while holding onto a few kids’ hands.

The 2 hours trail took me about 50 minutes. It provided access to the edge of some huge falls via a top-quality stainless steel catwalk. Realy impressive. Really Expensive. I think I stayed at the lip to the falls longer than average. Holy Ridiculously large amount of water falling down I don’t even know how many meters. Below was just an inferno of white with a tourist-soaking mist rocketing back out of the abyss. Camera manufacturers love this shit. I don’t know how many hours Iguazu decreases the life span of a visitor’s camera but quite a few got dre-henched.

For the lower circuit walk I decided to pick up a can of over-priced beer at the ever-present kiosk. I was enjoying my Gore-Tex in another drenching misty spray, trying to forget the maniac ladies running past me, snapping photos, stressing out, running on, making sure they got photos of everything. photos. photos. I don’t think they took time to even look at the photos without the assistance of their camera lens. Standing in the mist, but I was dry.

A guy in a yellow jacket above the falls was waving really big. I saw him out of the corner of my eye. How cute. That’s something I would do, wave to the crowd of strangers below. I move to start waving back and do a double-take as I see Yoav and Gretchen, from the Titicaca boat and from the Jungle trip in Rurrenabaque up there smiling at me. This was the third place I have spontaneously bumped into this couple. I think that’s a personal record for this trip. I pointed to communicate that I’d head up that way, we completed the upper circuit together, saw some toucans from right below the tree and headed back to Puerto Iguazu for some dinner.

Those crazy Argentines are crazy meat eaters. I don’t usally eat too much steak but I figure in my last night there I’d follow suit and order some crazy bacon-wrapped cow meat. It arrived raw in the middle. Had to send that sucker back. The fries were quite nice thought. It was good steak but I don’t really think steak is my thing. I prefer a Super Sandwich Daivhey from Cusco.

We went shopping for a bit and went back to our houses. I was gonna go to bed earlier on but the Irish kids kept me up for a while and it was interesting clearing my mind about the animosity I had developed towards Isrealis to a cool Isreali girl that straightened out a few of the prejudices I’d developed. I guess Mediterranean culture can be pretty loud and if there were as many Italians or Greek in South America they’d probably get on my nerves just as much.

I was gonna get up early the next morning but ended up sleeping until 10am. Another ugly rainy day. I headed into town to catch a bus to Foz do Iguacu in Brasil, ended up on a bus to Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, had to get off and walk back to the bus station and take the right bus. An hour or so later I was in Brasil.

I didn’t speak the language. It was hard to ask where the bus terminal was. It was hard to ask where the money exchange was. It was hard how to get to the bus to Iguazu on Brasil side. It was hard to buy the ticket to Florianopolis. But I managed most of these. Ticket for 9pm in my hands I stashed my bag in the storage and headed into town to try to get to Iguazu.

The bus driver missed telling me what stop to get off on and it was getting late so I went to walk around town for a bit. I was hungry anyway and had to catch up on some blogging. It was a rather uneventful time until I got on the bus. Damit, I don’t speak Portugese.

Santiago --> Mendoza --> BsAs

Bueno.

So on Monday morning (July 5) Paul ducked out of the room early to catch a bus to Buenos Aires. I slept in and headed out a bit later. Little bus going over a big pass. It was a really pretty route, I wanted to get out and camp every 10 minutes.

In Mendoza is where all the Yerba Mate began. But I already wrote about that so I’ll move on. It’s a pretty town with some really big and beautiful parks. When I come back in the summer I’ll have to do some chilling out here. On Tuesday morning I bought a bus ticket to Buenos Aires for that night and rented a bicycle for the day. I rode around a big park that they have on the west side, hit the zoo for a little while… Off season, Monday zoo was really nice. There was a nice view-point up on a hill that I biked up. It was a nice chill day eating lots of cheap tangerines that I had bought.

I dropped off the bike, got my backpack from the hostel, and went out to look for a taxi to the bus station. The guy at the hostel had explained to me that there was a new law passed that all taxis had to be less than 5 years, or was it 3, old and therefore there aren’t too many taxi drivers who can afford taxis anymore. I walked about halfway to the bus station before I finally for a cab. Argh. No worries, I had plenty of time though this was a huge departure from the taxis honking at me at all hours of the day for the previous 5 months.

On the bus I had the front seat on the top floor. Great views of the transvestite hookers standing by their campfires alongside the road. Next to me was a dready-guy, Gabriel, who was getting taking his band’s CD to BsAs to get mastered. It was good chatting to him. We talked music and computer junx, he’s a graphic design guy - he gave me his friend’s number in BsAs but I never got around to calling.

Buenos Aires is big. Concrete Jungle. A lot going on. Another town with a subway too, Subte, as they call it there. I checked into Hostal Milhouse, the first Hostelling International place I’ve stayed at since Tizzie Taus, Matt, and I took a trip to Montreal and Quebec. Milhouse had a large common space which could seat about 60, beers and snacks, boom-box, all a hostel needs to get people congregated, meeting each other, and ready for a night out on the town.

In BsAs I basically slept from 4am or 7am until 11am or 1pm every night. Clubs usually don’t start until about 2am on Thursday thru Saturday. I’d use my afternoons to walk around a bit. Winter, chilly, unless the sun was on me it was all about having a fleece and the scarf that I bought in Uyuni.

Cars in Buenos Aires seem deadly to me. In La Paz and Lima they honk like mad if you’re in the road. I think I’ve gotten used to it. In BsAs they all turn their headlights to a special dim mode that we don’t have in the US and barrel down the road until you hear their near-silent engine bearing down on you. They had a green light so why should they stop for silly me crossing the street. I knew what was up in Boston, I got to know the streets, but going from a honky place to a sleek-car-in-stealth-mode place is a dangerous proposition.

Turns out Paul who I had just split up with in Santiago was also staying at the Milhouse. Small gringo trail. I tried getting in touch with Lucila, a friend of my friend Claire in San Francisco,… I tried to meet up with Lucila on two ccasions before we finally found each other. One time she left a message at the hostel and rather than calling me they just put a paper on the bulletin board. I had told them to get me, I was waiting in the other room. Grr. The other night I was out having some all-you-can-eat sushi and Lucila swung by but well after an our after she said she would so we missed each other again — so without guidance from a local I walked around some neat neighborhoods and some not so neat neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. La Boca was the photogenic multi-colored madhouse that the photos make it out to be. There are some nice yerba mate drinking parks near the zoo, the nature reserve along the river makes for a nice walk, I always slept too long to go on serious excursions.

Thursday night I went to a reggae show that I saw posters for. 14th anniversary of Chala Rasta, they started playing at 2am and stopped at 5:30. Not a bad set. The crowd was singing along to most songs wird by word and looked like a bunch of hooligans moshing in the pit whenever an upbeat ska rhythm surfaced.

For Saturday I found some posters that spoke of an African music show. This time I decided to gather a crowd from the hostel and by the time the show rolled around we had about ten of us going. Ooooh, I also got to control the music in the common room for about 2 hours before going to this show playing a buncha reggae and funk and good hanging out music. The african show was great, mad-good drummers, great beats. They had me dancing like I hadn’t danced in quite some time. Definitely the most on this trip. It was fun having brought the group along to share. Yay black music.

On Monday night I finally caught up with Lucila - she stopped by the hostel with her car and picked me up. With me I bought Noah and Jasper, the New Mexico boys I’d been kicking it for a while. I got to talking to them after DJing all that music in the hostel. Jasper plugged in his I-Pod after my players batteries died. We all went out to a Parilla, argentinian bbq joint and ate lots of red meat. More than I’d eaten in a sitting in years. It was weird. It was good. But it was so much meat. We went to another place for desert - warm chocolate cake with a chocolate creme filling. It was scrumptious. It’s definitely redeeming to have a local to show you around.

She dropped us off at the hostel and decided to make a little detour on the way to take us past the transvestites that walk the street in Buenos Aires. There’s a certain street that we eneded up going down by taxi a few other times so I’m glad Lucilla brought us there first and explained what was going on. Seeing the butt-less pants and the estrogen-shot induced cleavage was strange, mesmerizing, it was a strange enough scene ignoring the fact that all these ladies had been men before. As it was, all we could do was smile and nod.

We went back to the hostel that night to gather up some more people for going out. Hmm, Monday night. Not a huge number of options. We tried to go into a tango place but got denied because our shoes weren’t fancy enough. So we went to see a swilly cover band with a late-teen audience. Word Em Up. When the glam-cover band finished they played all this brasilian music that all the brasilian kids at the hostel later denounced. There are all these cordinated dances that everyone knows and the ones who know them well, are over-confident, or really drunk, get up on the stage and do them in front of the crowd. It was to die for when the club-emploued dancers got up on stage to start doing these dances and then began removing their x-small shirts to reveal their rippling piles of muscle underneath. It was about time to go home.

Tuesday I was gonna head out of town a little bit but realized that I had to get money before doing that. My ATM card is expired and somehow my backup credit card got deactiveated,… I think for some reason the bak decided they wanted to send me a new prettier looking card and decided to cancel my old car din the process. I still need to call them and figure out what went down there. Anyway, I ended up having to phone my mommy and have her Western Union me some cash so that I could continue on the trip without having to start selling drugs for a living or something. Western Union is a beautiful thing if you’re stuck in some random country without cash.

The Easy Star All Star’s Dub_Side_Of_The_Moon album was quite well received at the hostel so I made some copies for some kids at the hostel. I’m a bad boy. I shoulda told them to go out and buy copies. They were actually prominently available in Buenos Aires. Is the same craze going down in the US nowadays?

Walking around I saw posters for a ballet-theatre interpretation of Alice in Wonderland and I pulled a group together to go see that on Tuesday night. I should have read the book beforehand because the little bit that I remember for the story line wasn’t really brought back to me by this abstract dance performance. Still neat with some funny costumes, original choreography, and skilled dancers. After, Lucila took us to a yummy Mexican restaurant. Drum and Bass night right next to the hostel and then sitting around as kids were sniffing lines of coke off the hoste table rounded off a nice night and they all went to bed. I laid down for about an hour, didn’t want to sleep to much. I was saving sleeping for my night bus ride to Puerto Iguazu.

Wednesday I wandered around the Plaza San Martin checking out the awesome photo exhibit by Yann Arthus-Bertrand . The photos consisted of aerial photographs of various scenes from around the world. Super impressive. After that I got a little bit of book shopping in, bought Yo_Robot by Isaac Asimov and headed for the bus station.

I got on the bus and not having slept for a night I passed out within the hour. The next morning I was in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina (Thursday, 15 July) and it was raining hard.

feeling really scattered but had to get something down before i forget it all. all the entertaining tidbits i seem to already have addressed in previous spontaneous posts, i’m starting to burn out on this travel blogging i think. hard to keep the initiative going all the time. i could just go into less detail but that would be booooooring.

New Pics

La Paz to Buenos Aires…
1st one here, you know the drill.

Homeless Rags

I was sitting here in a cafe on the corner of Chile and Defensa here in Buenos Aires when a crew of 4 teens arrived outside.

The were selling the “Hecho” homeless paper, same idea as Spare Change
where the street vendor makes a profit selling the paper. This alows a homeless person to preserve some dignity and not have to beg without returning anything.

So these 4 kids were selling this paper.

They were walking around giggling, fooling around, when a potential customer appeared suddenly, …

somber, poor, barely able to walk, hungry, down on their luck.

If the passerby didn’t buy the paper they’d curse her behind her back.

Then they’d keep goofing off and smoking their cigarettes.

Two-faced liars.

Yuk. Cigarette.

Foxes, Wolves,???

Zoos to yourself are cool.

Monkeys play peek-a-boo.

When I approached the cage with the little red canines, the cage without a name tag (how rude) they stared at me.

When I got to their level they ran away into their burrow, hiding behind their bars.

Being watched by 6 pairs of eyes.

I got down real low so they could barely see me,

Yup, they were curious.

One by one they took turns.

First one just ran out a few steps and then low-tailed it back into the house.

The next one was already waiting for the baton.

Ready, Set, Run out towards me, watching intently. Run back, hand off baton.

Sometimes the baton wasn’t handed — they’d come back for more.

I ducked even lower.

They had to come closer to see me.

My knees got tired after 2 of them were standing close enough to see me for a while.

I wanted to go see the elephants.

Max Mate

Mendoza, Argentina:

Yerba Mate Everywhere…

Got into the bus terminal and was asking about departure times to Buenos Aires and the guy was drinking it.

Went for a bike ride around the park today and some girls were drinking it.

Walked past a gym and the girl on the stationary bike was being passed a cup.

Wow.

They’re serious here.

Cab in Mendoza

The Cabbie was honking and honking and honking,…

Boston Style,…

New York Style (before the new laws)….

Then the city bus came by and took off his driver side mirror.

I almost laughed.

Here he was, yelling at the bus driver….

“Eh, Che!”

Jochen's Music

So I’ve been listening to some of Jochen’s music and quite enjoyed The Moldy Peaches, consisting of Kimya Dawson and Adam Green — I got some of their solo material as well. Her solo stuff reminds me a lot of Richard Brautigan meets Foscoe meets Bob Dylan meets Wesley Willis. I like her style.

San Pedro de Atacama --> Santiago

So we descended down into Chile, San Pedro de Atacama to be exact. In the Atacama desert - one of the driest places on Earth. We decided to get out of town about as quickly as we could. Escape Chilean prices, catch a bus to Salta, Arg. Well it was Wednesday night and the bus didn’t go until Friday. We had a day to chill out. Wednedsday afternoon we watched Portugal beat Holland in Futbol and made a mellow night of it. I introdiuced Paul to Clos de Pirque wine, my staple in Peru, not readily available in Bolivia.

There’s a Valle de la Luna near here, like there seem to be near every town in Bolivia as well. On Thursday we awoke to some slight drizzle in one of the driest places on earth and rented some bikes and headed out towards the valley. Eventually, that is, after getting some breakfast, checking email,… we were finally on the road by about 1pm. I was put in a nice head-state by some goodies that j-I passed my way at my Boston going away party. There was some pretty neat scenery, a big dune, some ground that had eroded until it got to a layer of crystal, quartz or salt or I don’t know was all that’s left. Same drill, neat landscape, cool photos. On the way back my tire was dragging on the rear fork slowing me down and 20 minutes out Paul got a flat. He just rode on it as the rental folks didn’t give us a patch kit. It was ok on that flat paved road anyway. We were in Chile, they pave roads here.

Another evening. I retired to bed kind of early. Paul stayed out on the town. In the morning I saved some money, cooked some of the instant oatmeal that I had been carrying since Cuence, Ecuador — it was accompanied by some good ole instantaneous coffee. The bus to Salta was to leavr at 11am so we got to the station at 10:30 to find out that the pass was closed due to snow. Lots of thinking was done. Renting jeeps back to Uyuni was considered. Waiting it out was considered. We decided to hop on a 23 hour bus ride to Santiago. This gave us a few hours to kill since the bus left at 4:45pm. Internet and sitting in the park were good ways to kill some time. The bus was a cama bus, a bed bus. The most luxurious one I’ve ever been on. We paid a premium for it but it was so absolutely worth it. The seats folded almos flat and foot-rests folded down from the seat in front to make a super amazing comfy ride. Only 3 seats across too so we all had wide seats. Def. 1st class. Headphones dangling from the ceiling so people watching the movies woulnd’t disturb the readers, writers, thinkers, breakers, or poppers.

Some cool scenery passed and we were in Santiago at the bus station. We took a cab to one hostel that was full. Ugh. Took a cab to the Hostal Indiana and liked what we found. Pretty multicolored paintjob. Not the best matresses but there was a kitchen and free internet and a little toy-poodle, a bunny, and baby-bunnies hopping around.

Santiago on a Saturday is like many other places on a Sunday. Most stores are closed. It adds a relaxed feel. Very nice. Santiago downtown feels sometimes like Boston, sometimes New York, sometimes, some other city. It’s pretty big. More like an American or European city though. As everyone had told me. We had slept well on the bus so we walked around for a bit, got some food at a very NYC diner type of joint, checked out a free Beatles cover band that was playing some corporate sponsored concert, went on a bit of a pot-buying adventure and eventually ended up at a club with some electronic music. Paul’s into electronic music so that’s pretty cool. I got a bit drunk and sat in the corner for a while waiting to recover enough toi not feel like shit walking around looking for Paul. Turns out Paul had gone home so I went back and crashed as well. I slept from 5:30 am to 2:30pm. Shit. I was gonna do some more looking around Santiago during the day. Oh well.

So I’m caught up until today in my blog. Unprecedented. It’s been so long.

Woke up got out of bed, dragged a cap across my head. Grabbed my oatmeal and my cup, was in the kitchen seconds flat. I headed to the mall to find internet. I guess that was the next-closest internet place. Cost a lot though, US$1.5 an hour, I’ve found better meanwhile. I didn’t hear back from the Ultimate contact so I guess I wasn’t going to find the Santiago pick-up game. Oh well. It was just too far out of town to try to get to on the tip of a UPA webpage posting. Speaking of UPA, they’re looking for someone like me to work for them in a contract position developing IS stuff for them. Hmmmm… Hmmmm… That’s in Colorado, eh? Hmmm….

I walked around town for a while and saw a juggler’s convention looking thing and a group doing Capoeira in the street. Park bench people watching. I climbed up Cerro San Lucia, a nice urban mountain all built up with stairs and level gardens and fields. Sat down and sewed up my shoes with some floss, one of the eyelets had ripped off the show and had to be sown back on.

I finally ducked into an upscale-ish cafe, had me some jazmin tea, and read the Monkeywrench Gang for a while, I have already read this book but after all that four-wheeling in the desert I found it at an exchange in San Pedro and couldn’t resist trading it for Gaia and The Teachings of Don Juan. I found a nice copy of Tom Sawyer in Spanish on the shelf. I compared it with the crappy shitty cheap copy that I bougt in Cusco. Very differently translated. I liked the expensive one a lot more. They tell the same story, one is just more eloquent.

Makes me question my own writing that I’m doing here…

Uyuni

It was Sunday, June 27, I believe. 8 am. We were getting off the bus in Uyuni, when our way was blocked by tour agency representatives trying to get a jump on the gringos who are kinda sleepy from a long bus ride. boy were they eager. If I had had my lasso, Jason would have been proud. Then again, I first have to train myself in lassoing, but I think they’d get the idea pretty quickly anyway.

Uyuni is cold. Mad cold. It was winter. Really winter. Yuk. Paul and I walked off with the tour company lady that offered us to sit down in her heated office. They had one of those jobs where there is a burner on top of a propane tank. Very nice.

In the warmth we got the rap on the 4 day Salar de Uyuni tour. Pile in a jeep with an unknown number of people. Drive around and check stuff out. Yadda. Yadda. Our brains were poop. Couldn’t think. She said we could crash for free at the hostel next-door if we booked with her. We asked if we could pay for the room if we didn’t book with her. Yup. That’s OK. So we went to get some shut-eye until 2pm.

Walking about Uyuni was like walking around an inhabited ghost-town. Maybe it was the way the sounds didn’t echo. How there were no kids laughing in the street. Everyone was huddled up keeping warm. Kids were the shyest I’ve seen in South America. We went to grab some brunch, cold pancakes and salchipapas (frenchdom fries with fried hot dog slices) - a winner of a combination. The restaurant was cold too. Internetting took up some more of the afternoon until our fingers were frozen and didn’t want to type anymore.

The market in town was all raffle-based. Not really a market I guess, more of a Sunday fest. Hand-pushed merry-go-rounds for the kids. Paul played the game where he rolled a set of dice and if the numbers added up to the number posted on a monetary prize you won that monetary prize. There were many other 12 year old boys running little gambling operations. Enterprising. I played ‘pick a number out of the bag’ to win a pink plastic jet fighter and the horned scarier than death itself moveable arms and hip multicolored action figure. Not bad for 2 bolivianos.

Walking around I also tried my luck at the cake raffle. Here some callers in white jackets standing up on platforms sold tickets with numbers on them until they had sold a whole set - then they drew a number out of a box and the two people who had the matching number won a ‘cake.’ I won. It cost me 0.50 Bolivianos. I asked later, the ‘cakes’ cost 6 B’s to buy. I got some nice ‘nasty gringo’ looks as I held up my ticket and redeemed my prize. I put the cake away to be eaten on the jeep tour in the next few days.

We went back to the travel agency and booked out tour. Looked like there would be 2 brits, 1 austrian, and 1 swiss in our group. Good enough. We were to show up at 10:30 to 11:00am the next day. Cool. We put on all our clothes and went out for night on the town. I bought a scarf - one of my best investments here to date. Paul and I wiled away the night at La Loco, a bar that had a nice fireplace and a good dinner,… tourist priced. I think this town would go under if it wasn’t for tourist money. They had a sign that says ‘MP3’ on it so I brought my tunes along - turns out you can’t use their computer to play them, just a dvd player that can’t skip folders so i was basically limited to playing the first album on whatever cd I gave the guy. Yuk. We listened to some J5 while shooting darts.

Heading towards the hostel I decided to buy some alcohol to fill up my bottle for my camp-stove. I had used the last bit of fuel cooking dinner with Ida in Rurrenabaque. Paul and I got back to the room and it was cold cold. After filling the alcohol into my fuel bottle there was a little bit left in the bottle I bought it in. A great idea was borne. I poured the fuel into my pot lid and burned it, causing the room to warm up after a few minutes and us to huddle over it like a camp-fire. We were to do this for the next 2 nights on the trip and I’ve remembered it as a great way to heat an ass-cold room up in bumfuck bolivia.

We slept well.

The next morning Paul had to go to try to get his visa extended as he would be overstaying his welcome by 1 day. Turns out this was no problem since May 30 to June 30 seemed like 30 days to the guy at the desk. We both got our exit stamps. For some reason my back-up credit card is not working and my normal atm card expires at the end of june so I went to the bank to try to take out a chunk of money. No ATM in town but yes, they could give me money from the card. Word. That was one of my larger worries. We ate breakfast and showed up at the office at 10:50am.

There were 2 Israeli girls sitting there that were thinking about joining our tour. They waffled for about 20 minutes trying to decide. We were supposed to leave on the truck at 11:30. It was 11:10 when they decided to go and asked if they took credit cards. HOLY SHIT!!! You’re in Bolivia, Hello? Hello? They walked off to the bank to get some money out. They never came back. Paul and I had a hard time getting the kids in the street to play frisbee. They were really shy. We threw for a while and finally got one of the boys sucked in a little bit. Yay.

At noon the jeep finally showed up, we had gone from complaining about the slow unprepared Israeli girls inconveniencing us to complaining about slow unprepared Bolivians inconveniencing us. But hey, we were in Bolivia. That’s how it goes.

Instead of the 2 Brits, a Swiss, and an Austrian a Japanese couple was grinning at us out of the Landcruiser. Uhhhm, ok. Mari and Gorgo were very nice. Funny. Kooky. In a Japanese way. It was a pleasure to have them on our trip.

The tour itself consisted of a lot of driving by Esteban, our driver-guide-cook. We headed out on the salt flats after visiting a town that makes sustains itself by shoveling up piles of salt to be loaded away on trucks. The town wasn’t exactly loaded. I bought some jelly-in-a-bag from a street vendor. Yum.

We stopped at an island in the salt flats - Isla de Pescado - there were huge cactii growing on it and many tourists walking around. Some had big cameras, some had little cameras. Some had no cameras at all.

That night we stayed in a Salt Hotel, made of slat blocks. What a beautiful gimmick. I licked all the walls and tasted the floor to insure authenticity. Paul and I decided to do the non-tour thing and set out to climb a local peak for to watch the sunset. It was good to bushwhack a bit after a day of being coralled. Llama steak for dinner, an alcohol campfire in the room, head to pillow, sleep.

The next morning we got up just before 7am to wait around for 30 minutes until breakfast. Then we waited around for another hour. I did some photo project with horned scarier than death itself moveable arms and hip multicolored action figure and the salt-grain floor. When Mari saw the figurine she got all excited and asked to borrow him for a while. She and Gorgo were taking pictures with him for the rest of the day.

At 9am we finally left. So much sitting around. Ugh, why had we gotten up so early. We drove to see some salty-lakes with flamingos and a fox running around. We saw the ‘arbol de piedra’ (stone tree) which was in a great wind-carved rock valley. I think I got a few nice star-wars’esque shots in this area. Then we headed to a big lake where we had to pay a park entrance fee and had some beds to sleep in. We had dinner, someone should tell the locals that spaghetti doesn’t cook well at high altitudes, really! A different guide came up to us saying that Esteban was feeling bad and we might have to split up to ride with different drivers in the morning. That would explain all the morning delays. Ok then. I demonstrated the room-heating to the Japanese couple as we were all sharing a room and went to bed. I put a nice warm nalgene bottle in my sleeping bag.

The next morning we didn’t get up until someone knocked because we were a little jaded by having to wait for 1/2 hour the day before. Better to sleep in a warm bed than to stand in the cold. After breakfast we drove to some geysers. Esteban was well again so we still had our same group. The geysers were very Princess Bride like. Bubbling pits of gray clay, jets of hot sulphur gas shooting from the ground. Arm-length visibility. Mud clinging to the shoes. It was a first-class experience. What a cool place. Next we stopped at a hot spring where I soaked my feet as they were getting a bit cold from walking around in cold mud. We stopped at another lake and then headed for the Chilean border where we hopped on a bus to San Pedro de Atacama, 47km from the border.

Buy Buy Buy

So I was back in La Paz. Ready to move on to Uyuni to go see the Salt Lake and whatever else a 4 day jeep ride may hold in store. First I had to buy some things in Lap Paz though. Cheap to ship things home and the silver and clothes and hammock prices were really good. So I spent a whole day and about $200 buying cool things.

There are a lot of stores selling the same kind of things. Every now and then there’s a little store selling dried dead baby llamas, to put in the foundation of your house for good luck. Now and then a shoeshine guy wth a facemask will try to shine your sandals. Shopping was nice. Interspersed by som street food hamburgers from time to time.

On Friday I got around to mailing all this stuff back. 18 kilos in the standard mail package - cost 481 Bolivianos, about $55. Not bad. Then I dropped another $106 at DHL to send back my boots, the camera lens I bought in Cusco, and the silver that I bought in La Paz. Insured ‘cause it would suck losing the lens that I paid $200 and the Boots that I paid $220 for.

That evening I met up with Jochen and Christian, the Austrians I met in Coroico and got some mp3 cd’s from Jochen. He was oplaying some good music in Coroico and we had been talking about doing a swap for a while. SO I copied him 3 cd’s and myself 4 cd�s worth and met them at the hostel later.

I was a bit late getting to the hostel and J and C were already there, Marthe and IDa had bought some alcohol and they had all started a bit of drinking. People get loud when they drink so we got kicked out and went to a bar to do some cheap tequila shots… Ida didn’t participate. She was feeling sick, so she and Marthe went hoke while the boys and I headed to Bizarro, the club that had just re-opened a few weeks before.

Neat place, 2 dancefloors downstairs - one with strictly techno and the other with reggae/hiphop/soul/… next to the techno room there was a glass-encased chillout room with sets of closed-type studio headphones chained to the wall, playing cooled-out jazz to let you R-E-L-A-X. The river-rock floor was kind of nice too. Upstairs happened to be a nice jazz band playing. Reminded m a bit of Murphys. A bit. I’ve been away for a while. These guys were definitely not as hard working, they’d play a 30 min set and take a 30 minute break. Ugh. Good night though, we stayed until the place closed at about 4:30am.

The next day the girls were awake early and went out to the internet. I slept until 11 and got my things packed as I wanted to go to Uyuni. As it looked like the girls were not coming back (they still hadn’t mailed their La Paz purchases) I went out to burn my photos to a cd, get some food, and find out about getting to Uyuni. While I was eating Paul whom I met in Coroico walked in, he had just gotten back from Rurrenabaque and was headed to Uyuni on a 3:30 bus. It was 2:20. Wow, tranquilo day had just been transformed into hurry hurry hurry. I got it all taken care of though, went back to the hostel, the ladies still hadn’t gotten back - didn’t look like they’d leave that day. So I left a note, paid for the room and took a cab to the bus station where I got the seat next to Paul.

The bus ride was interrupted by a 2 hour break. Just sitting there in the dark. They’re really good at stopping the buses for whatever reason for 2,3,4 hours and not telling you what the hell is going on. You get used to it. Eventually they came around to collect more money from us as they’d have to take a detour to avoid some road blockades. Whatever. Just get me there. In the morning we arrived in Uyuni. After scraping the ice off the inside of the windows of the bus we were able to look upon this freezing town that was a base for exploring the Salar De Uyuni salt lake and the rest of the scenery of SW Bolivia.