Change of plans, the Amazon will have to wait.

In Nicaragua I ate pork tacos and drank mysterious beverages out of plastic bags sold by vendors on the buses.

In Costa Rica I ate wild mangoes basically scooped up off the sidewalk.

In Panama I drank the glass of tap water that everyone else shunned, then refilled my bottle in the sink.

In Colombia I scarfed a giant plate of inexplicable meat products served in a second-rate diner.

In Ecuador I ate a skewer of chicken fat halfheartedly grilled by a woman in the park, scooping on top each of the various sauces that had been sitting out in the sun for god knows how long.

All of these, and a general habit of gastronomic optimism, and I was never sick.

Then yesterday. Remember the tourist extravaganza restaurant in “Gringolandia?” Where the menu was entirely in English, the waiters’ uniforms had quotes from English children’s books, and British princesses demanded service in 3 minutes or less? Yeah, that place gave me food poisoning. Apparently the (vegetarian) caprese sandwich was less-than-fresh.

So last night, instead of busing overnight into the Amazon, I threw up in the bathroom of a grungy fast-food Chinese restaurant, whose wallpaper was various shades of mold and whose toilet was an epic piece of antique water wasting technology with a perverse reverse sunset of mildew rings. And since it’s Latin America, I was hovering face-down above the little garbage can full of used toilet paper. Lidless of course.

I guess traveling is more than just canine hiking buddies, Colombian television interviews, and swimming with dolphins. It’s also slinking back to your hostel fast enough before the next eruption of lunch comes back with a vengeance that buckles your knees. Gotta love it. All of it. I'm trying.

Anybody seen a trumpet-playing Mexican around here?

No relevant pictures for this blog,
so just a few I liked from Quito

We’re sitting at breakfast yesterday talking to a couple from Ireland, and once I manage to drag myself above an animal level of delight at their accents, I realized that their words are describing a jungle trip where they saw a jaguar. I think of seeing an animal like that in the wild along the same lines as the Pope thinks about the Holy Grail. They didn’t see one once. They saw one…four times. FOUR!

So the next day we went looking for tours into the jungle. The local place made a good offer, and the bazillion websites generated another, but most of the tour companies are in the “New Town” part of Quito, along with the other tourism services like restaurants and hotels. We hadn’t been yet, and when we walked in there last night…culture shock. Now we understood why the area is also known as "Gringolandia."

There were white people everywhere! So THIS is where the tourists have been hiding! There were miniskirts on women, polo shirts on bro‘s, and bleached blond hair on both, They were sitting at fancy tables in glass-sided restaurants eating dishes other than pollo a la plancha! There were no giant piles of plain white rice with heaps of greasy fries on their plates! And English, English everywhere!

We were amazed, and fairly quickly kinda grossed out, but we drowned our unease in Indian food, which is always a good treatment. Afterwards we ran into a supremely amiable Danish couple we met in the hostel last week, who told us about the agency they were going to the Amazon through, which was cheaper than the others and included the prefix “eco” in their name. Cheap and eco? Sounds good. Where is it?

Like a backpacker treasure map, their answer was to look for the Mexican guy playing the trumpet, it was near there. And behold, the Danes were heard to say “Seek ye the Mexican who playeth the trumpet, in pursuit of thine dining business, there shall ye find thine goal.” Indiana Jones 5: Curse of the Cryptic Hostel Advice.

Do you believe I have a fixation with clothespins lately?

So this morning we walked back over to New Town with the mission of finding one tour agency among the hundreds, in a large bustling part of a Latin American capital city, and our only guideline was to search for a trumpet-playing Mexican.

And maybe the prefix “eco,” and we knew their price for a 4 day tour.

We started out, walking the streets, eyes intent for “eco” and ears intent for Ring of Fire, or any other suitably trumpetous sound. Nada. Then: Ecosomething Tours! Nope, they wanted $60 more than what we heard. Mexican restaurant, albeit sans trumpet…nope. We stopped for a cup of tea and asked the guy where the nearest trumpet-playing Mexican was. He was unhelpful. And possibly offended.

However, we were learning that all of the myriad tour companies offer pretty much identical tours, and the mythic offer was only $20 cheaper, so we kinda gave up, and just went to look for a good company. We found one, full of professional-looking young women, one of which was laughing quite merrily at our difficulties with their bizarre magnetic door. I liked them immediately.

We heard their spiel, and were considering, when I mentioned the M{th of the Musical Mexican offhand. They laughed en masse, and started reciting his sales pitch. They said “He’s down the street.” They said “Hola amigo, Mexican food, Italian food, upstairs, second floor, good for lunch or dinner!”

Sure enough, a block down we found him. “Good for lunch or dinner!” And we found the place. Ecosomething-or-other. We edged past the dude glaring at us in the doorway, smoking a cigarette, and heard the details. Yup, another carbon copy, but for $20-50 cheaper. Credit cards carry a 6% surcharge so we went looking for an ATM, eventually coming back to ask where a functioning one was. (I guess we could have asked El Trumpetero, but he was busy.)

This time the glaring cigarette guy on the stoop annoyed me. And the building was fairly scabrous, lurking in the shade of the smog plumes of a major thoroughfare. Inside were two bored scruffy salesmen, a saggy and stained couch, and two dirty bicycles waiting for their next renters. (Wouldn’t you at least wipe them off?)

We got the heebie-jeebies. Does that dude stand on the porch all day glaring and smoking? Maybe we shouldn’t just take the cheapest option in town…

How about now?

We pondered our options over lunch at a touristastically awful place whose staff came pre-annoyed with us, in the capitalism-tourismàbad-attitude tradition. Halfway through the meal two blond princesses shouted in full British prima donna impatient style “Hello?!?” They had been waiting about 3 minutes. This ain’t England, honeys. Suddenly we didn’t mind our waiter’s surliness.

And just to make the day really bodacious-bizarre, at one point I recognized across the street the shaggy visage of a British bloke I met and very much liked in the Sahara three years ago. We remembered each others’ names, although facebook may get some credit for that. Small world.

Then back to our Neck of the Woods, to the original company, whose salesperson was cheerful, informed, and clean. Pictures of other customers blanket the walls, smiling in satisfaction. And it turns out their 5 day tour is cheaper than the Angry Smoker’s anyway. So tonight at 10:00 PM the guy from Carpe Diem Tours will pick us up to take us to our overnight bus to the Amazon, and I’ll tell you about it in 6 days. (If I don’t get eaten by an anaconda or caiman whose lagoon we go swimming in.)

Finding waterfalls in Mindo to not jump off.

Yikes, stop blogging for a day and four sneak past. We’re back in Quito now, where I admired the sunlight slanting through the thick banks of exhaust barfed out by the bizarrely numerous city buses (there are at least 3 distinct networks of bus here, like three different ant colonies all living in the same tree). But somehow I seem to love this city…

And now there’s a show on about aliens and the Mayans, apocalypse, Wright Brothers, and the 2004 tsunami, but I will mute it and try to make sense here… But what if, like, the angels are aliens, y’know? And they, like, come back for the Second Coming, with, like, death rays and Star Trek shiznit? Wouldn’t that be, like, totally unexpected?

Sorry. I had dessert tonight.

Our last couple days in Mindo were as awesome as the first couple, with another 5-6 hour waterfall walk, including crossing the gorge on the “tarabita” cable car which was high enough to cause K to make this face. We thought we had repeated our canine luck when this lady, Bonita, came across the tarabita with us, but she was apparently only there to console K during the crossing, and declined to walk the rest of the way with us.

(By the way, we saw Oscar the next day, chilling by the river with some tailgaters, smiling as big as ever. I love that dog.)

Then a couple hour walk on one side to see 5 waterfalls, the first of which was the bottom of the one I jumped off, maybe this view gives a better idea of scale? And of course the ladder, that darling piece of Ecaudorian engineering.

The other waterfalls were beautiful, and included the occasional rickety plank bridge held together by wire as thick as a paperclip, this millipede, and a group of Ecuadorians we would pass on the trail after each waterfall. The day was warm and the water was delicious on bare feet, so I took off my shirt, then shoes, causing one of the guys to comment to me “you’re wearing less and less every time we see you.” I looked down at my swim trunks, my sole remaining clothing, and answered  “my apologies for next time.”

Next time we saw him he was wearing as little as I was, and we smiled conspiratorially. “Es mucho mas comodo!”

The second half of the walk was to the solo Cascada la Reina (“the Queen of Waterfalls“) whose trail was beautifully unkempt and had few other walkers. The actual falls was up in a slot canyon reached by a staircase built on top of a fallen/placed tree. No one around, roaring waterfall and its resulting wind, wet stone, dripping lichen, and absolutely perfectly cold water left it as one of my favorite places on Earth. The thought of what it must have been like for the first person to find it left my mind jiggling. Pictures do not do it a smidgeon of justice.

By the time we made it back, the leg muscles were griping in that beautiful chorus of use, fighting with the stomach for attention, and we ended up in a wood-fired pizza place that produced an absolutely fantastic cotto e funghi pizza which combined absurdly well with the ridiculously large Ecuadorian beers to produce a thoroughly satisfied vagabond.

My Ecuadorian Grandpa is Trying to Kill Me

I woke up this morning a little tired, kinda half-assed my way through our second attempt at yoga, then fueled up on the largest of the three breakfast options available, with a decent cup of local (that’s what I tell myself at least) coffee to fuel me on a good long walk up to the waterfalls today.

Leaving perfectly-tiny Mindo we picked up a companion. He was a welcome addition to a pair of animal-deprived travelers, even before he impressed the hell out of me by waltzing into the midst of a substantial-sized pack of black labs who live on the edge of town and peeing right on their porch. Ballsy pup.

We named him Oscar. His interests include peeing on things, smiling, and jumping into the jungle to flush out birds K and I otherwise never would have seen. No thank you, we don’t need a bird watching guide, we have an insane dog.

The tourist office tells you that you have to pay for the “tarabita” cable car which runs for 530 meters high above the jungle…and costs $5 a pop. I am perfectly fine with chipping my 5 bucks into the local economy, but we were enjoying our walk so much we continued on past the cable car to the upper falls, where another local family is trying to make a living off tourist visits too.

Their property includes a cute grandma, a waterfall, and zip lines, though the lattermost were closed today, either because it’s midweek in the tail end of Low Season, or because a rival company was shut down a couple weeks ago after a tourist died falling off a line. Oops. Not the first such accident in Mindo either. (We walked past the property, the big red government sign declaring their closure pasted in the window of an empty ticket office.)

The Tarzan Swing doesn’t need staff or supervision though, so we took a couple turns on our way down. Oscar waited patiently, just far enough away to ensure he doesn’t get kicked. I got the feeling he’s seen it all before.

Down at the river we met Cute Granma’s cute husband. Raul has had his nose broken at least once in the past, and there was something shaman-like about his steady brown eyes. He showed us the concrete slide, cautioning us “don’t lie down, stay upright”, and then pointed out the path to the waterfall.

Looking at waterfalls is all well and good, but I felt a bit peckish for adrenalin. Normally I wouldn’t think of a slide as much of an adventure, but this f’er launches you out a good 10 feet above a rather excited and chilly river, plus did I mention it’s concrete?

I convinced myself, dunked in the little pool at the top, then pushed off. Holy crap that thing was faster than I expected! I had a moment to worry that my momentum would push me up onto the waterless and abrasive side before the turn spun me around, spit me out, and I found myself flying for a perfect instant through the air, backwards, before hitting the cold river.

The current was stronger than I expected, and I was reminded how much less buoyant fresh water is, but pretty quickly I was bumping my knees on the bottom and dragging myself out with a little help from the soggy ropes strung across the flow. That was fun!

Cute Grandpa gestured again towards the path to the waterfall. “The fall of the waterfall”? I doubted my Spanish for a second. The jump of the waterfall? He gestured again and we headed over to have a look.

The waterfall was impressive, an angry plunge of white water and swirling currents. He pointed to a little ledge and repeated his “jump of the waterfall.“ Yup, he said “jump.” Then he said 12 meters. That’s 40 feet, or a four-storey building. Then he threw a stone down to show me where a suitably insane person would throw their hapless physical form if so inclined. The rock fell a long way before disappearing in the belligerent looking foam below. Raul’s calm brown eyes settled on mine.

I looked at the falls for a couple minutes, not deciding anything, just letting my brain soak it in. Then I decided to do it. Why not jump off a friggin cliff into a raging river? I went over and stood above the drop, getting ready. Then I looked down. Then I had to think about it a bit more. A four storey building?

I decided I didn’t have anything to prove to anyone, dammit. I’m old enough to only do something if I want to…dammit. Not gonna do it.

Then I thought about what my brother would say if he were here and hey, they wouldn’t let you do it if it weren’t safe, right? Let’s go!

Then I considered the relative importance of cash flow versus safety in developing countries. Looked down again. No way.

Ecuadorian Grandpa just kept looking at me.

How would I feel if I didn’t do it, walking away from a challenge, taking the easy way out? Let‘s go!

I got ready. Then thought about that moment where I stepped off into space. How hitting the water would be. The current. Nah, let’s go home.

You get the idea.

Then just for extra credit the ladder back up was a rusting, curved thing of metal wire totally unattached to the stone. Not a good day for fear of heights.






I think Oscar had a good day too. He walked all the way back with us (I'm estimating it was around 15 kilometers total), look back at us one last time as we entered town, then disappeared. Just another great traveler friend.

Finding out I'm aviophilic

“I’m going traveling to find myself” is one of the great statements of our age, perhaps even part of our zeitgeist script. Sometimes it seems better to me to say “I’m going traveling to MAKE myself” instead, but today is not one of those days. During today’s traveling I found out another wee factoid about myself. Turns out I like bird watching. Who knew?

They're too fast for me and my auto-focus, but you can see
a yellow feller and the blue on in the top left.

Perhaps I should hedge that a tad; it turns out I like bird watching…in Mindo, Ecuador. If you’ve ever been here I bet you’re nodding your head in comprehension right now.

The guide book sayeth “Mindo is home to over 400 species of birds, and 250 of butterflies.” I read this and shrugged approval, along the lines of “cool…sounds nice…at least that means there’ll be trees…too bad they killed all the charismatic macro-fauna (like the monkeys, sloth, and capybara I saw in Costa Rica).”

But then I found myself…sitting in the breakfast area of our hostel next to the river, where they put out bananas for the birds and hung a hummingbird feeder. I found myself…watching xxx’s with their bright yellow bellies, xxx’s with their pale blue tails, xxx’s with their positively florescent yellow little bodies, and at least half a dozen species of hummingbirds, including the one I know, the rufous breasted hummingbirds chasing each other around the feeder, dusky red tails cavorting.

Xxx. I was going to look up the names of the few most remarkable birds we’ve seen, but a quick search for “birds of Ecuador” informed me that this tiny country has 1663 species. Oh for crying out loud. Or perhaps better yet: oh for cheering out loud.

Then this afternoon we went for a walk in the unofficial nature preserve of “Mindo Lindo” as equatorial raindrops fell on our shoulders, palm fronds brushed our hips, and spider webs flirted with my cheeks (since K was graciously letting ME walk in front…) We could hear the birds, but in the shaking leaves of an equatorial rainstorm, couldn’t see them.

Female

Then we were drinking a cup of fresh lemongrass tea with the owner in his beautiful natural-wood house with tons of books and no television, looking out the plentiful windows at all the now-familiar amazing ones, plus these little winged bursts of chromatic incredulity (although to be perfectly honest, the ones we saw were bigger and brighter, less rumpled looking).

Male Red-Headed Barbet

So now, here, this week, I am a bird watcher. I don’t know shit about what I’m looking at, but I sure am happy doing it.



PS. I did know the general name for one thing we saw on the forest walk, although I’ve never seen a purple one before…

Finding a moment like church in Mindo.

We woke up at 5:30 and got ready, eating the pineapple we bought in Otavalo for breakfast. It was early, it was tasty.

We checked out, walked to the bus stop, and got on the bus during the morning commute. It was packed.

We found the next bus with a local’s friendly help, and rode a few easy hours, buying little yucca bread things stuffed with cheese. They were tasty.

We arrived in Mindo, 400 species of birds and 250 of butterflies, walked around checking out hostels then picking Casa de Cecilia, $7 each for a private room, vociferous river outside the window, and park-like grounds full of colorful birds. It was gorgeous.

Went to for a walk beside a river in the cloud forest, then to El Quetzal coffeeshop/restaurant for cups of local coffee and lemongrass tea, sitting semi-outside at a table surrounded by hanging flowers, cloud forest on the hills all around. It was delicious and beautiful.

A rufous tailed hummingbird with scintillating green body, dusky red tail, and brilliant red beak flew up, drank nectar from a blossom next to our table. It was colorful. (Pic from this site, see there for a few smaller ones too.)

The place, the nature, the moment…it was nearly sacred.

Saw K’s wide-eyed and utterly guileless wonder and joy at seeing such a beautiful creature, an animal not found in Belgium that she saw as semi-mythical until seeing her first one fairly recently.

A building, bleeding statues, and guilty sermons don't do it for me. A piece of beautiful nature? Simple and honest wonder and joy? Now it was a brush with something sacred. Now it was church.

Quito: dancing angels, hiking in the clouds, no pigs, and the comatose.

Sorry for the delay in posting, but today is the first time the guards have let me use the computer. Ecuadorian prison is worse than I expected, and I can’t help but wonder how the hell I got here. I should have known it was a setup from the moment I saw her. No one wears a dress like that in Ecuador. Not red like that…


Just kidding. We found a hostel full of good people, and when there’s good conversation it’s hard to go fibble on your computer. But they’ve all moved on while K and I took a daytrip to the indigenous market in Otavalo, so we came back to a quiet hostel, with just a few Israeli’s who are not interested in talking to anyone else. And K and I have had plenty of each others company today, so here you go!

Yesterday we saw two of the primary Quito destinations: El Panecillo, and the teleferico.

El Panecillo (the little loaf of bread) is a hill just southwest of the old town, crowned by a 40 meter high statue of The Virgin of Quito, who has a more mythological flair than usual, given her wings, and the fact that she seems to be dancing on the dragon chained at her feet. (They say she’s actually getting ready to fly away, but her nickname is “La Bailarina” so I’m not the only one who sees divine boogying.)

The statue is pretty cool, and the view is excellent. That lasts a few minutes, then you’re looking for a taxi down. You see, the hill is rather tall, but that doesn’t matter because you reportedly have a 100% chance of getting mugged if you try to walk up or down it.

The Plaza Grande. Don't let this post
fool you, I really do like Quito very much

We looked around for a taxi and found none, until a little gentleman approached us to offer “transporte” down the hill in his little black car, that looked sorta official, but was definitely not a normal taxi. I balked for a minute, then we climbed in.

His name was Pedro, and he convinced us to try Quito’s main attraction (if you ask me): the teleferico cable car. We climbed in, he locked the doors, drove us across town, through a tunnel visibly full of smog, then into a sketchy-looking neighborhood…at which point he slowed down, unlocked the doors, and pulled over right by three shady looking guys who watched us approach, smiling.

My feet started sweating a bit, I reached up and relocked the door and wondered what was about to happen. Pedro turned around…and gave me his telephone number in case we wanted a ride to another local tourist attraction. The guys on the corner peered at us. Pedro finished writing and we pulled away from the curb, reaching the base of the telemetric a minute later.

Shit, Pedro! Don’t do that to me!

The teleferico is a rather epic piece of French engineering, covers 2500 meters (wow) in about 15 minutes (wow), starting at an altitude of 2950 meters and ending at 4100 (WOW!!)

Remember the cable car in Manakamana, Nepal? This one is much larger, longer and higher. At least, that’s what I would have said if you’d asked me yesterday. Looking it up now, turns out they’re remarkably similar in size, but I was flamstaggerblasted by the epic view of Quito as we ascended. (To be fair, it was foggy in Manakamana, so I’ll have to go back and redo it when it’s sunny…)

At the top you can look down at the wee planes flying beneath you, drink coca tea while admiring the signage and facilities for anyone suffering from altitude sickness, then walk, at a snailish altitude-pace, up to the peak of Mount Pinchincha. The wind is blowing, it’s cold, you’re out of breath and have a slight headache. The sun will burn the skin off your face since you can’t feel any heat, and the views are phenomenal, with Quito’s bumpy urban legs stretching way off out of sight up and down the valley. I frickin loved it up there.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to walk the whole way, only making it one rise past where a couple rugged Andean fellows will rent you a horse to carry your anaerobic arse up the mountain. And of course it’s Latin America, so you can stand, leaning into the wind, on the edge of a mind-slappingly high cliff with nothing to hold you back beyond some ankle-high grass.

To complete my catch-up blog, as I mentioned today we went to Otavalo. I heard from a friend that this was a good place to try the famous Ecuadorian “cuy” (guinea pig) but we didn’t see any. What we did see was a decent Latin American market (the main day is Saturday, so today’s was a more modest quotidian version) with a lot of women with faces and clothes that were just so fantastically…indigenous!

However, we also found that irritated familiarity with tourists who wander around taking pictures and not buying anything. So we took a few pictures, bought plantains, uchuva, and carrots, wandered around for awhile, and came home, watching another kung-fu movie along the way.

We got back to our neighborhood of Quito during rush hour, and walked down the street among crowds of people, all of us stepping around the man lying face down on the pavement. I barely noticed him until K, face troubled, said quietly “it’s not right. That we all just walk past.” And she’s right. But this is the world.

We felt our helplessness, coughed up a lungful of Quito’s heavy smog, and decided we’re ready to leave Quito. So tomorrow morning we’ll be up at 5:30 AM in order to catch the 8:00 bus to the cloud forest of Mindo. 250 species of hummingbird, man.

See you in the forest.

Quito has stolen my hobby.

Buenos dias from the equator. Well, close enough.

We got to Quito yesterday, and I am pretty sure this city is a giant pinata of amazingness and fantabulosity. The only problem is the city’s somewhat suffocating reputation for thievery. We spent last night in a popular hostel, and the common room was a barrage of stories of robbery, pick pocketing, and occasional extortion thrown in for seasoning on the streets of this Andean town. So if the city is a pinata, the only problem is the kid with the stick is beating you instead.

Remember Arturo and Juli, the French couple from Nicaragua? They are some seriously savvy travelers, hitch-hiking and camping their adventure up the continent’s backbone, and the only place they got robbed was here. Pinche ladrones.

So here we are again (still?) negotiating the line between sensible-caution and voluntary-limitations-of-over caution/paranoia. For now, we’re going with high caution, red alert: the cameras left in the room. So I have no pictures from Quito, and a new awareness of how important a camera is to my enjoyment of a place.

We walked around the city today, which was pretty…but after awhile it all sort of faded into a blur, versus when I have that glorious machine close at hand and details approach shyly and beg to have their picture taken. So I can tell you about sitting in the Plaza Grande, but I can’t show you a picture of the slope-shouldered bald man in the off-white blazer who looked more like an egg than anyone I’ve ever seen.

Nor can I show you the restaurant we ate lunch in, where the waiter asked me to translate so he could explain to an Eastern European (I’m guessing Hungarian) mother and daughter that they couldn’t pay for their $9 lunch with a $100 dollar bill. Nor the park fifteen minutes later where we saw them again, waved hello, and the daughter responded only by lifting her expensive Nikon to her eye, zooming in on us, and taking at least three pictures, actually chasing us a few steps like a bucktoothed paparazzo.

I can’t show you the pitted stone bench where we sat to laugh about how bizarre that last item had been, where a shadow fell over me and I looked up to see a heavily drunken man in a shabby tweed suit leaning over me trying to sell me a bag of lima beans in slurred Spanish.

We didn’t buy them, and neither did anyone else in the half hour before we saw him again, lima bean bag still in hand, buying ice cream from a street vendor, swaying as he watched her scoop. Except it wasn‘t actually ice cream, but a pile of a sort of frosting, which makes sense on a sunny day, but still makes me gag slightly to see. I purified myself with a cone of coconut gelato.

I think tomorrow I’ll risk the camera.

A mountain and/of my opinions.

I adore the internet's ability to connect people, and deeply appreciate everyone who reads the things I post on here, so if you get offended by (perhaps unorthodox?) religious opinions, maybe skip this one and come back when it's about traveling or food... I don't mean to offend anyone, though I also don't think that's quite the grave affair we seem to think it is nowadays...but anyway, that's yet another topic.

One of our last pending items in Bogota was to take the cable car up the remarkable hill/mountain that looms landmarkishly over the city, Monserrate. Unfortunately the cable car was closed for maintenance, so we took the less nerve-wracking funicular railway, which was still a matter of ascending roughly 1,729 feet (based on the interweb’s figures for Bogota & Monserrate’s relative elevations, the actual distance must be a bit less since the base of the railroad is already uphill a bit) and watching the view go from good to great.

At the top there are some expensive restaurants, tourist kitsch stalls, and a church dedicated to “the Fallen Lord” finished in 1657. He’s quite literally “fallen”, with the statue above the altar showing a collapses Jesus struggling to lift himself off the ground. The church is a place of pilgrimage, so I inherently respect it…but I just can’t quite understand the desire to worship pain and suffering.

I hear the words about sacrifice, but I just can’t internalize the idea of someone else’s suffering making my sins...what…okay? Is the entire Third World a modern day Jesus for us First Worlders who want to drive our SUV to the grocery store to buy meat farmed in inhumane conditions on the other side of the planet?

I see the Divine in redwood trees, the smiles of proud parents, solar eclipses, orgasms, coral reefs, a child’s laughter, giving a good gift, and a great meal with friends around the table. Hell, I even see it in a smoggy vista over a sprawling city. They can keep the agony, pain, and suffering, I’ll take the relaxation of giving or getting a good massage.

But anyway. The view was indeed beautiful, and ghastly, as the mind tries to assimilate the reality of that many people living like that. And Bogota is only the world’s 25th largest city, by population. That means there are 24 other cities larger than the smog-hazed eternity stretching to the horizon below.

I simultaneously felt two emotions rather profoundly. 1: A sense of helplessness for our planet’s environmental future. 2: An iron-clad resolution to enjoy and love the world (and all its saints and jackasses) as much as I can while it all crashes and burns.

From colonial mansions to vomitous toilets.

We ended up spending the better part of two different weeks in Bogota, but kept busy walking, taking pictures, eating, and switching hostels every day or two in a compensatory form of interior vagabondery.

For K’s first day in South America we stayed in the luxurious Casa Platypus, a restored colonial piece of awesomeness with creaky wooden floors (in a good way), impressive water temperature and pressure in the stone-floored showers, and attention to detail unmatched by any  hostel. Rolled and soft towels on the bed. Nice blankets that don’t smell as funky as the last 37 backpackers to use them. Complimentary soap and shampoo and a TV which we even considered watching. Bedside tables on BOTH sides of the bed, which is more important than you think. And a better breakfast of eggs, cereal, fresh fruit, and hot beverage.

We met an Austrian couple on their honeymoon, a French professor with permanent scuba-mask marks on his forehead, and an American expat who wasn’t actually staying there, but haunted the place trying to sell English lessons to the staff of young women…(and yes, that ellipsis means I think he was looking for more than pupils…)

It is prohibited the psychoactive-substance use in the hostel. 

Casa Platypus was impressive in all respects, including the price, so on Day 2 we switched to Hostal Explora. It’s more like a Hosteling International place, with coldly clean rooms that feel a bit like human storage. The common room is a chilly rear patio enclosed by cold brick walls and covered by a tarp…and it’s cold. The hallways are bare of decoration…and cold. The showers have warm water…but the bathrooms are cold.

Can you tell my main problem? But it’s a new hostel, just beginning under the efforts of a consortium of friends, and they have good plans to improve it, so by the time you get here it could very well be warmer. But for now staying there requires a nearly continuous flow of hot tea.

Hostel Sue had some good
courtyard artwork.

We didn’t meet anyone in Explora, so moved to Hostel Sue, despite how weird of a name that is in a Spanish-speaking country. It was a good mid-line of fiesta, not so body-odorous as some (like the famous Cranky Croc) but much more conversation than our day at Explora.

I suspect Sue has a deal with a local Spanish school, as there seemed to be a lot of studying going on during the day, and studying-abroad-type partying at night. The staff barbecued rows of juicy sausages and grilled plantains by the tray, which we peeked at enviously over our bowls of fairly bland spaghetti, not knowing how to get included in the flavor options.

Hostel Sue was pretty mid-level for parties in that most of it moved out to the “party bus” around 11:00 so us old people got to sleep at a good hour, but we did have the familiar pleasure of a morning trip to a bathroom splashed with vomitous liquids, cigarette butts in the sink, and…do you really need a third item?

We were on the third floor in Villa de Leyva.

Then it was a week in Villa de Leyva where Hostal Parque Narino felt more like a family home (in a good way) with a Colombian aunt and gay Colombian uncle, with their inexplicable two year old daughter who was precious to the very edge of overkill. (Little creature knows how to work the impish smiles…be careful of that one.)

We had one night in a budget hotel whose only memorable feature was the open floor space where we finally had our first morning yoga session. That was a day with good chi, lemme tell ya.

Back in Bogota we went to Hostel Platypus, where I meant to go the first time. We were in a quiet second building up the street which had typical hostel bathrooms of wet floors, hairballs in the shower, and a toilet that doesn’t really flush so much as just make lots of noise. The room was large, though retained an odor sharp enough for even me to detect, and I am traveler-blessed with a surprisingly dull sense of smell. (Poor K is cursed with a remarkably sharp olfactory sense. Good for gardens, bad for traveling.)

Platypus had a nice laundry area, but it wouldn't stop raining.

The wireless internet didn’t work though, which was a disappointingly big problem for us, so we went looking for another one, stopping for breakfast on the way. Turns out the breakfast place has a hostel upstairs, which was clearly aiming to be a home-away-from-home type place, and succeeding heavily…but not necessarily in a good way.

The place had an overriding sense of closeness, as in the staff is all up in your biznis the whole time, asking how you are and where you’ve been every time you come in the door, frequently stopping by to see if you need anything and give you recommendations about what to do (which you then feel semi-obligated to actually do), and generally making you feel like you’re back in high school and your parents suspect you are lacking in motivation, and are perhaps even doing the marijuana.

The hostel mom puttered around saying things like “have you seen my glasses? I just can’t see anything without my glasses. Have you seen them?”

Plus the walls were paper thin, such that we could hear the neighbors’ every word, shift, and fart, and the bathrooms were communal by gender, so there were people wandering around on the other side of the half-wall while you’re showering or on the toilet.

The peak for me though was the breakfast. It was a decent Colombian hostel breakfast, with eggs and coffee or chocolate, which was fine the first morning, but for the second we wanted something else so went out. When we got back the little hostel mom gave us a hurt look that we’d gone elsewhere for breakfast. A guilt trip! From the hostel staff for eating breakfast somewhere else! That kind of cracked me up while simultaneously making me want to pull out my hair.

We looked at a couple more, one with two available rooms, the front of which was no good for K since it was right next to a bus-busy street, and the rear of which was no good for me since it had no window. The next was nearly good enough despite the lingering cigarette smell in the kitchen and common room (“we’ll just stay outside or in the room”) and the slightly sex-tourist room décor (think geisha posters and pink lighting) but then the manager hit on K. No thanks.

So we came back to the clean and stable ice hostel at Explora. I drink so much tea here I need to pee every 15 minutes. In fact, my bladder just notified me that this blog is finished. Adios!

Walking, eating, and not getting shot in Bogota.

I said that last blog was making me hungry and I wasn’t kidding. I posted it, joined K who was waiting somewhat patiently in the hallway for me, and we went looking for a vegetarian restaurant, getting lost along the way but not minding on such a beautiful day and in such an interesting neighborhood.

Chorro de Quevedo is an unexpectedly Bohemian enclave on the southeastern edge of the Bogota’s downtown, with quality street art on half the walls, bright Latin American colors on the other half, and a narrow strip of rough cobblestones that always seems to have inexplicable puddles in odd places. There are funky little shops, handmade jewelry by the ton, and a selection of establishments for tattoos or bongs.

There are artists, “artists,” and people who do art wandering around, as well as normal people and lotsa young ‘uns, who may eye your clean hair resentfully/judgmentally. We passed one open door and I glanced in to see a middle-aged man sanding a guitar in the dark.

Walking up there last Friday night a drunk 16 year old excitedly said hello to K and I before asking to be in a picture with us, with all his friends laughing and piling in. I enjoyed the somewhat bizarre moment, albeit with my hand on my pocket (wallets are too obvious).

The veggie place we were looking for may or may not exist, it’s hard to tell in the scrambled egg street plan of that part of Bogota (I tried to explain the mangled beauty of Bogota’s layout, but it quickly became too much of a rant, even for me) so we ended up at a middle-eastern place called Fairuz.

Holy chupacabra, Batman. The food there… Wow. Uh. (shiver) Grunt. Bwah. Shoosh. Guuud. Barumph.

If we hadn’t been sitting in the middle of the narrow restaurant I would have licked my plate spotless. It was the type of place where I don’t use the napkin because I don’t want to lose any of the flavor, and try futilely to eat as slowly as possible to sustain the experience.

Universidad Externado de Colombia

Feeling positively sublime after that gastronogasm, we wandered up through the surprisingly beautiful campus of the Universidad Externado de Colombia, then up a steep street of stairs to a nice-looking church that promised an impressive vista over the city.

As we climbed the last stairwell below the church a stocky man in a private security uniform approached and warned us not to go that way due to the odds of being robbed at gunpoint. Hokey dokey, gracias amigo! I think he felt bad that we didn’t get to approach a beautiful piece of Bogota, so he came up the steps with us and stood by while we snapped a couple quick pictures, but he spent the whole time glancing skittishly at a seedy character on the corner opposite, who was definitely watching us back; the guard clearly was not comfortable being there with us.

We quickly headed back down through Chorro de Quevedo, but not before I heard our Protector radio in our presence and trajectory. The best part of that was that he referred to us as “vacas,” that is: cows. We had been chatting in Spanish and he looked at me a tad apologetically at that point, but man, if you protect me from an armed robbery you can call me any farm animal you like.

This blog is making me hungry.

During the first two months of this trip food was just another element of each day, enjoyable but not exactly essential; I lost 17 pounds between Managua and Panama City, and probably more during the boat week.

Then K joined me, and in Villa de Leyva I started thinking about the next meal as soon as we stood up from the last one. Last night we checked into our hostel in Bogota and went straight to the Mongolian barbecue place I’d noticed a block away. From there we literally went around the corner so I could get a slice of pizza. After that we took a lap and a half around the block before buying a slice of Baileys cheesecake and a towering three-level piece of chocolate cake ecstasy, which we devoured while drinking green tea (with pineapple) out of bowls in the hostel courtyard as the sun set and the sky turned blue overhead.

Did I mention I’m a social eater?

So since I’ve got food on the mind I’ll continue my trend of late and talk about food a couple more times. (We fly to Ecuador in a couple days, so travel stuff should be back then.)

That first morning we couldn’t find changua we ended up at a vegetarian restaurant called Casa Salud Natural which had a super laid back vibe, occasional weird Indian homeotherapeutic stuff on the TV, and a Hari Krishna cook with an excellent feel for spices. K’s favorite breakfast of fruit, yogurt, and granola came with a layer of quinoa on top, and I found myself staring at a Colombian tamale.

The tamale was good, but very different from what I bought outside Mexican/Guatemalan bus stations. Those were firmer, more corn-based, whereas this one was larger and almost gelatinous. I think the Mexican ones were roasted/baked, and the corn sheaf they came in was dry, while this one came in a banana leaf, still dripping from being steamed. It was tasty and filling, perhaps my two primary criteria for breakfast.

Another local specialty dinner was Cocido Boyacense (cocido = soup/stew, Boyacense = from Boyaca, this region of Colombia). It is a base of potatoes, turnips, (maybe yuca), beans (including lima), peas, tomatoes, onions, and a small hunk of corn on the cob marinated red by the sauce. It’s seasoned with garlic, cilantro, and cumin, plus a few other unknown ingredients (I need to take a Kitchen Spanish class…) Also comes with a little plate of rice on the side.

But the point of the dish is the collection of meats, which included just about every beast in the neighborhood (except dog, I‘ll probably make it to China someday…I have until then to decide on that one). I had a chicken drumstick, a lump of pork with a nice layer of jelly fat on it, a couple blades of tough beef, and a couple pieces of longaniza, a chorizo-like pork sausage.

It was very good, and again, hearty, and made a great dinner on a chilly mountain evening. But I suspect it could be better, and (as with the ajiaco) it made me wish I had a Colombian grandma to make me a proper bowl.

I couldn’t handle all of the pork fat, and tucked some into the palm of my hand (mmm, greasy) and snuck out the front door, then down to the sweet-eyed dog that hangs out on that street. He looked at me nervously as I approached and laid down the fat, but when we left the restaurant a few minutes later he was sitting upright, wagging his tail and grinning at me.

I tried to get his picture but the garbage truck pulled up and scared him off. (Note, if garbage truck driving was an Olympic sport, these guys would win, after those incredibly narrow colonial streets.)

The last food note (except arepas, which I haven’t fully deciphered yet) is Pekish restaurant, which is a required element of any trip to Villa de Leyva, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a little family-run place on a side street just as you enter the old part of town, with two small tables and the bite-sized kitchen right there. The food is excellent, and prepared with the type of care that only a family-run place with 4 things on the menu can accomplish.

The first night I had lamb souvlaki and K had the most delicious falafel I have ever tasted. The second time I gave in to a strange impulse and got the nachos, from tortillas they made by hand right then and there then fried up with homemade guacamole made to my spicy specifications, beans, and that good local mozzarella-like cheese. Both times K and I each got delicious juices from fresh fruit, made right then and there.

The nachos were good, but as always with nachos, they make a better appetizer than entrée, so get the falafel. Actually, get two falafel plates, and send me one. I’ll pay the postage.