I don't feel so good...

Today, my friends. I am a doughnut. No. Wait. That idea is making things worse. An onion ring? Dear god, somebody stop me. Perhaps a bagel then?

A plain, undecorated, bagel. And you might want to skip this post.

Not only the toilet, but the sink and
shower are also somewhat broken.
I like it, gives the place character.

I am hollow straight through. But no worries, it’s a temporary condition, and unrelated to teen angst; no wailing of long-lost love here, today. Nope, I’ve just got the flu. Not The Flu, as in the virus that killed 20 million people in 1918, but a flu. A garden variety, spending-all-day-getting-to-know-the-cold-tiles-of-your-bathroom-floor stomach flu.

In hindsight, that odd feeling late last night was prescience. But too ambiguous. Not nearly as direct as the nausea that woke me at dawn this morning. For the first few hours, it didn’t seem so bad. Everybody seemed complacent enough to file in a more or less orderly fashion to the exit. But right around noon: chaos erupted. Literally. They stormed out the entrance, a crowd of lettuce chunks and chicken slivers that I had last seen the night before.

And good thing I remembered that beet salad, or I would have been much more worried.

I dug out the old gray hoodie with the torn front pocket. Sick days require baggy old clothing. And it’s amazing how cold I am, all my system’s energy directed elsewhere. I slouch around. I make ginger tea. I imagine the muscles in my thighs being cannibalized to feed my inner army, all those miles bicycled, burning away...

But all in all? It’s really not that bad.

I have a clean bed to lie in, walls to contain my moaning, and no one is asking anything of me.

Not like that time in Bosnia, where I was on the train from Mostar to Sarajevo, missing epic mountain vistas to bend over dirty train toilets in hellish mobile bathrooms, trying to match my quaking to their shaking. No resting in that restroom.

Or the childhood trip to Paris, where I sprayed Minute Maid orange juice all over Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and my brother’s yellow walkman. Seriously disrupted his appreciation of Duran Duran.

Or the packed commuter train to Brussels where I nearly tested Belgian stoicism right there in the vestibule. “Get out of the badkamer, meneer businessman! Nu!!!”

I don’t get motion sick, I swear, I just have damned bad luck with trains. And I haven’t even told you about the worst one.

The border between Zambia and Tanzania...now that was an experience. But I think you’ve had enough. I know I have. Ask me about it some other time, when my belly resembles a placid crater lake more than an active volcano.

The point is that I can consciously realign my focus, adjust my perceptions, and be glad that I’m heaving in the comforts of Home. Not so “comfortable”, perhaps an airplane seat versus a bed of nails (or the other way around?) but could be a whole lot worse.

Seriously, I’ll have to tell you about that Zambian train sometime… I apologize to the people of that town.

But now it’s time for another cup of ginger tea and more of the novel I’m reading...that takes place in a certain country I can’t wait to visit...in less than two weeks…

May all your tea be properly steeped, your perceptions optimal, and your stomach congenial.

And your flus short-lived!

The angel's a jerk, the dog is proud, and the plane landed backwards. Time to fly.

I'm no stranger to the jet-lagged delirium of a trans-oceanic red-eye flight.

I dropped a class in college because the professor's preposterously long, slow, erudite sentences were verbal valium.

And I've seen The Talented Mr. Ripley.

But I have never been quite so asleep on my feet as I was in Apaneca. Three consecutive nights of inadequate sleep, bracketing a day of endlessly pacing the pavement of voting centers, had left me rather tired. Add to that the sultry Salvadoran heat. And to that an almuerzo lunch special of chicken, rice, and thick french fries, carbohydrates with a side of starch, and my eyelids weighed 17 kilograms each.

(For my American brethren, 17 kg = entertaining hyperbole for an eyelid.)

But I had an appointment at 3:00 PM (I'll skip the 24-hour clock, in case y'all Americans are still touchy after the kilogram incident) with the zip-line people. My bleary eyes took a minute to focus on my cheap watch. 1:43.

These murals are getting weirder. They know...

I walked another block. Saw the same mural I'd seen the last time. The dog that barked at me before had given up on life and gone to sleep. My feet felt soaked in cement. Was I accidentally wearing two pairs of shoes? Looking down would be too much work. So sleeeepy .

Shuffled past the bus stop, where a past mayor claimed credit by plastering his name on the shelter. A few years of rough weather later, and it's not really something one would want to be associated with. This rusty piece of junk was brought to you by the administration of...

Silly politicians, no vision in those people. I looked at the watch again. 1:44.

The church! Churches are interesting. The entrance was locked, but I'd seen the other door open. Back around the block. Past the same mural, still weird, same dog, still sleeping. Inside the church:

nothing.

Renovation. 

One statue. An angel stomping on a grumpy devil's head. Made the angel look like kind of a dick.

Maybe...just...lie down...here.

No! I walked some more, searching for something to find. Said “buenas” at varying volumes when I passed people. I wonder if they think I'm drunk? Looked at the watch. 1:44. Is that possible?

To the market across the street, where three old women with bulging bellies and sagging cheeks didn't bother to chase the flies off the sticky table any more, but greeted me with smiles as I sat at a trestle table littered with mostly eaten pupusas.

Un cafecito, por favor. Coffee would keep me awake.

She placed the styrofoam cup in front of me. Who the hell invented that stuff? Their descendants should be punished. One of my earliest memories is of the horrible texture of those white bricks, rasping out of a cardboard box on the playground at my pre-school. Baby's first goosebumps.

The table where I drank my cafecito

I've been at this table forever. A scrappy little dog gets up and barks at three schoolboys walking past. I can barely lift my head to watch. It comes over afterwards and stares at me, tail wagging with pride. Too fast for my eyes to follow. Go fetch me a nap, Fido. Pick a fight with me and I'll kick your butt. Maybe. 

I try to write something down and eventually realize that I've made a scribble, and the last thing I remember was riding backwards in a plane that was landing on a highway somewhere in China, and wondering if that was normal behavior. 

Coffee: ineffective.

I pay my quarter for the coffee and concentrate on lifting my feet high enough for locomotion. Head towards the zip-line office.

Two experiental hours later, two clock minutes, and I verify that they are still closed. Wander to the intersection, out of sheer inertia. Oh. 

To my right I see something interesting. The entire town. All the people. Walking towards me in a wide front. Zombie movie? Como se dice Soylent Green?

 A hearse. It's a funeral. With the entire town in attendance. I stand to the side, trying to look respectful. No sleeping at the funeral. Three men see me, detach from the procession, and approach. Uh oh.

“Are you ready?” They ask me. I don't know. Have I made peace with myself? With my gods? Can I send a couple goodbye emails before you cook me?

Then I notice their shirts. Apaneca Canopy Tour. These are my zip-liners. 

“Si” I answer, looking forward to cable-assisted flight. My eyelids weigh only 14 kg now. With luck, I won't fall asleep while zipping...

(Read more about zip-lining with Apaneca Canopy Tour on my last El Salvador dispatch on the Ethical Traveler website here. And "like" it on facebook, just because you're nice.)

I had to come home to remember how to feel out of place.

The Portuguese Cistern in El Jadida, Morocco

I'm at home in the souk of Al Jadida, talking to bouncers in Riga, and arriving in Yangon without a clue. I was comfortable on the streets of a city 99% said is too dangerous to visit, and felt harmony in the sandpaper air of a frozen Neptune landscape. But in my home town, among the crowd I hope to join (travel writers), I sweat and stammer, useless and misaligned. I am more wallflower, wallpaper, than I ever was in adolescence, and I cling to ego masturbation, remembering South African townships, gazing over the Syrian Plain, and Guatemalan border towns where drugs outweighed human meat and that's all you are.

Pretty faces I cannot talk to drift around. What would I say? Did I ever tell you about wandering Hong Kong until I was sure I'd escaped the English language, then going for food, my consternation at the waiter's rudimentary vocabulary soothed since it allowed him to tell me I could have pig heart instead of chicken?

Why does this place, this event, disassemble me so efficiently? Is it just that the room is too small and too hot, no seats and no oxygen, leaving me standing/sweating by the door? Or that a single half-glass of wine costs ten frickin dollars? More likely, it's because these gods of an intimidating industry, conquerors of a world that hasn't even stamped my passport yet, are just so damn....NICE! I want them to be pricks, so much easier to scorn, but they seem so damn welcoming. President, Prime Minister, and King, and I'd gleefully go to lunch with any of them. I should be able to talk to them. I would tell them they should move to a larger space. With windows.

Last time, leaving this interpersonal constipation made me dance, but tonight I'm astounded that the glass walls aren't shattering behind me as I walk through Versailles, where bvlgari, Jimmy Choo, and other names I know from stories not written for my demographic, sell shit made in the same damn sweatshops for $(I have no idea) instead of the relatively honest $10 at Ross. Models three times a human's height and half the width speak with anorexic irony as they say “let them eat cake” down to the mentally disturbed man with a semi-circle spine pushing a shopping cart full of garbage.

But they don't eat cake, it's a chicken bone I step over in the BART hallway where the homeless sleep on their faces while we walk past in clean laundry.

I transfer trains in West Oakland, where freeway overpasses allow the affluent to pass right over the graffiti'd streets paved with broken glass and angry fear, where the only constellations are on their way to San Francisco International Airport.

I make the mistake of trying to talk to strangers as I get on my next train. I can't help it. “Welcome to West Oakland” slips out of my mouth as I wait for disembarking passengers to alight; I'm such a nice young man. I'm met only by stony unresponsiveness, most people pretending I never spoke, while those too close for that act look prepared to fight.

I'm 20% inclined to cooperate with that, right now. I've become curious what it would feel like with flesh instead of the heavy bag.

“Oh, right, Americans don't talk to each other” I mumble as I board. Great, now I AM the crazy guy. I manage not to add “I forgot, I have to leave the damn country if I want to meet anyone.”

What's the best medicine for a grumpus? That's right: a burrito. I had carnitas yesterday (just kidding, it was today at lunch, I'm being coy) so I opt for pollo asado, black beans (as if there's any other valid option) and take it home to the house I am happy to live in, with the roommate I like, the dogs I adore, and a computer to hammer out a cathartic blog. I try not to swear, since my mother and her priest read this. Hi Mom. Hi Father Jeff.

Consoled by rice and beans, soothed by sour cream and avocado, I can take stock. Tonight wasn't so bad. I went for a walk, nodded to some people I know, and the forecast looks promising for a lunch I'd enjoy, with one of the monarchs of the enticing realm of writers.

I still might feel more at home on the alleys, calles, mitaani, sadaka, (and other words for “street” that I'd have to google first) of foreign countries, but I'm pretty happy on my little Avenue tonight, overly grandiose as that title is.

PS. I know, Neptune's surface is gas, but Mars is almost a cliché now, and Iceland ain't red.

PPS. The pig heart was good. The oysters were the gross part of that bowl of slimy congee.

PPPS. “Bvlgari”? Whoever decided to spell it that way gets a prominent place in line for the guillotine.

PPPPS. No offense to those of you who prefer pinto beans. Luckily, there's room enough in the world for all of us, even those of you with poor taste in beans.

I've got more pretty pictures of Iceland for next time.

Iceland has ponies. Laughing ponies.

Iceland is aptly named, sure, but I'd hate to give the impression that it only has frozen water. It's also got ponies.

Ponies who like frozen water.

Ponies who pose, oh so pretty.

Ponies who endure high winds and frozen manes.

Ponies who smile.

Ponies who laugh.

Ponies who guffaw.

Ponies who photobomb each other.

Ponies who would mock me for being inside on a day as lovely as this one.

Now that's just far too pretty. This is Jökulsarlon.

“Did you make it to Jökulsarlon?” asked a friend, when she heard I was in Iceland. The name didn't ring any bells. “Don't get on the plane without seeing it – really!” This from a woman who has traveled across 97% of the Earth's surface, as far as I can tell.

I followed her link to a website and saw a spray of beautiful images, boats apparently tooling around among gorgeous iceberg hunks of calved glacier. How could we have missed something that beautiful?

I clicked the “translate to English” button, which pondered a moment and informed me that the page had been translated, though there was no visible change in the text. I love the Icelandic language. Anything that confounds google, for that matter, but this language of umlauts, accents and whatever the hell this thing is: Þ

But upon closer inspection...oh, Jökulsarlon is that place! Hell yes we went there. I was just thinking of it as The Glacial Lagoon.

A few centuries back, in the Little Ice Age, the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier dug its way down to the coast, where it met the Jökulsá river. (It's okay that you enjoy the words more than the info.) Normally a glacier digs out a big ravine, sure, but when it's equipped with a river to wash away the sediment it's grinding? It overachieves.

Thus, the Jökulsarlon glacial lagoon, 300 meters deep, and growing in size as the glacier retreats. Fifteen square kilometers in 1998, it looked much bigger to my eye last week. Of course, to my eye it was an entire planet of seductively clear water, murky with cobalt mystery under striated chunks of ice that looked like the furniture of a liquid nitrogen god.

1. Arrive at Jökulsarlon, put on all available clothing layers and get out of the car.

   

   Oh, the thing is full of seals, too.

2. Realize you've just spent an indeterminate amount of time gaping at the blue expanse, frozen yet liquid, immovable but constantly in motion, eternal and ephemeral.
3. Walk down the rock and gravel embankment, aware that sliding into the water would be lethal.
4. Try to take pictures that don't profane the place.
5. Once fingers feel like recent transplants from a corpse, limit yourself to 20 more photos. Okay 50.
6. Get back in car, thaw fingers, and soak in gratitude to this beautiful planet.

We returned to Jökulsarlon a couple times, because there was a whole other side to the place...

(Again, all images copyright, let me know if you'd like to use them. That'd be swell.)

Hornafjordur. It won't notice when it kills you.

Someone lived here.

That's the thing that boggled my mind, as I leaned into the wind, peering at the fuzzy shapes of dunes through the mesh of my cheap hooded shirt pulled across my face, hoping the sweatshop fibers would keep the black volcanic sand from scraping out my retinas.

And I'm not talking about living here nowadays, though that too is impressive, but back in the Xth century. Some Danish king told Bjorkylvörlakvirðerheim Þorlakhöslmangleson (or some such appropriately Vikingish name, I didn't write it down):

“Hey, why don't you move out to the eastern edge of that frozen and geologically genocidal island we found in the icy and ill-tempered seas? You'll love it there. They have sand. And ice. Take your crusty wife and your crusty children too, they'll thank you for it.”

I'm guessing the king didn't like Bjorkylvörlakvirðerheim very much.

You can see the replica settlement in the distance

But he came here. In a frickin boat. Built a homestead, and didn't die. Incredible. Named Hornafjörður, this area eventually grew into one of the larger settlements of Iceland, though it remained remote, isolated, and caustically severe for centuries. The isolation didn't start to thaw until the late 1970's, when the technology necessary to build bridges that could withstand the epic jökulhlaups, or glacial floods, was developed and implemented, completing the ring road around the island.

I shook my head, hearing the percussive scratch of sand whipped against the cloth covering my face, and walked deeper into the black sand dunes, veined with dry grasses as tenacious as any living thing on Earth. I stepped over a jaw bone, bleached white and completely stripped of flesh, the calcium already wearing away at the edges.

This is the sort of place that doesn't even notice when it kills you.

To my right, white-capped waves off the Norwegian Sea hacked the backs of the waves before them into froth in their haste to assault the shore, outraged at sand's impertinence in impeding their icily majestic sweep across the sea. Behind me an American-built weather station, nearly abandoned after the nation politely told us to remove out military presence in 2006, hunkered down in olive green desolation, waiting to die.

But in front of me...

Maybe the aggression of the waves had provoked volcanic obstinacy, a geologic temper tantrum, but whatever natural forces pushed up those mountains did so with a ferocious hand. Edges to break axes, ice-lined heights to turn blood to stone and shatter it with a feral grin, and loose rocky screes that could avalanche over a home in seconds to annihilate all trace of the temerity of mortals.

It was pretty.

I wanted to stare at it forever. Or at least until the brutal beauty either opened my mind or eroded it. But after a few minutes, fingers growing stiff as the ligaments steadily froze, I got back in the car, which rocked in the blasts of wind.

In the shower later that night, my downwind ear was empty but the side that had faced into the fury was lined with a layer of black volcanic grit that had pierced right through the cloth of my shirt. Cotton? That would last an hour out there. But that place, it will outlast us all.

(This place was so brutally beautiful that I'd like to remind you these images are copyright. If you fancy them, let me know, and I'll share them.)

Words didn't happen in Iceland, but pictures did.

Iceland, for me, was a vacation from traveling. I had few cultural experiences there (one that threatened projectile vomit), met few Icelanders (guys in a bar explained how to avoid dating one's cousin in such a finite population), and didn't even try much in the way of new food (except the reindeer burger, which was de-frickin-licious).

This is just alongside the highway.

My normal travel routines and habits didn't fit in the bag among all those sweaters, and words fell by the wayside. I don't know where they went, but it's freaking me out. No, seriously. But if images are really worth a thousand of them, then I've got a few million to share.

Stop off at a lake, and the wind has pushed the ice sheets onshore. Cuz it's Iceland.

If only I knew where to start. I decided to grab a couple to throw on here...and that was three days ago. How about this one?

Why would there not be an abandoned quarry beneath a fortress mountain alongside that same highway?

Note the people on the point, for scale

No? Then do you prefer a tourist destination like Gullfoss, an epic (yet strangely difficult to photograph) waterfall on the famous Golden Circle?

How can going through these take so damn long?

Can I hire an assistant to help? I can pay in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Or carrots. Anybody want to help me for carrots? These guys would. Iceland is full of ponies. Would you be shocked to hear that they eat them?

Then I won't tell you. Maybe I shouldn't tell you what else there is to eat, either...

But I will.

I don't believe you, but I love you anyway

They tell me this is one planet. All the same one. But I'm not sure I believe them.

Because I remember walking down a backstreet in San Salvador, where children stopped their futbol game (played with a clump of garbage) to watch me pass, grandmothers winked at me, everyone said hello, and laundry hung to dry on rusting barbed wire.

There was exhaust, and constant noise, and a large plate of food cost about $3. It was warm to hot, and I needed no vocabulary beyond T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. Violence was a very real possibility and twenty-dollar bills were too large to use most places, tens were pushing it.

But today I rode around in a car, since you can't really walk around Iceland at present, and the sky opened up with an array of things that were all irrefutably snow. People are all friendly, but there is a distance between strangers that even I can feel, I who seemed aloof to the Salvadoran sensibility of space. The cold has perhaps hardened cheeks into a habitual emotional reserve? Or something about long months of darkness, of light, or of the relentless need to work together?

The barbed wire here is clean, and serves only to remind the shaggy ponies that they shouldn't wander into the street. A small plate of food, elegantly arranged, three slices of lamb and some decorations around the perimeter was about $40.

$40? According to this site's data on minimum wages in El Salvador, that would be about a third of a month's salary for an agricultural worker. For a small meal. Ten long days' work, one tasty but unsatisfying plate.

They tell me this is one planet, but I'm not sure I believe them.

But I can tell Them, one planet of more, I love it all. I love the noise of San Salvador, and the silence of an Icelandic field at night. I love wandering a hill town past indigena women in colorful skirts, and bundling up with the armored layers against the cold. I love cheese and ham on toast, and pupusas.

I love the hearty belly laughs of latinos, and the hard-won smiles of pleased Nords. And I love, beyond love, the chance to come and see as much of it as I can.

And the craziest part? I'm saving the best Iceland photos
for later posts. This country is just...preposterous.

I love travel. I love this planet. Hell, I love you too.