Talking with Strangers

Earthquake recovery: Pisco, Peru

2007-11-25T19:04:00.000-06:00

On Thanksgiving morning I arrived in Pisco, Peru, the epicenter of an earthquake in August that registered at 8.1 on the Richter scale. To even give you an idea of what this city looked like before August would be impossible, so little remains of it. The streets are filled with rubble piles, doorframes are left standing with no buildings behind them, and cement foundations are filled with Coleman tents where many of the dislodged residents have been living since August. Some parts of the city have returned to a semi-normal way of life, but others have fallen into a sort of stasis, as there is little money to rebuild and most are out of work.

I spent several days in Pisco talking to residents, walking through half-destroyed houses, sitting in dusty tents and listening to people's accounts of the earthquake. It was sobering just to hear about the terror of what they had lived through… The quake itself was a full three and a half minutes long, an earth-shaking so violent many could only huddle and listen to the deafening sound of buildings crashing down around them, like "ice falling off a glacier". They emerged into the dark night full of dust and debris, many badly wounded and others trying to free bodies from under cement ruins, but all terrified that a tsunami would follow to wipe out everything that was left. Guided by the faint light of cell phones and candles, they fled the city on foot, walking for hours through the night to find refuge in the desert surrounds. When they eventually returned to Pisco it was only to find their lives buried under rubble heaps or their damaged homes and businesses ransacked. Later they would wander through the bodies laid out in plastic in the central square to try and identify missing family and friends… To hear these things first hand was something that a lifetime of CNN could never have prepared me for. And to understand that their lives had been changed irrevocably was heartbreaking.

Pisco has been cleaned up since August, but as foreign relief workers have left the city, the money and food that were supposed to continue arriving have disappeared. Shipments have been disbanded in Lima and the goods taken off to the black market to be sold. The prices of food and milk in stores have doubled and tripled, and the government promises help that never comes. Many of the children are badly malnourished, and almost all have respiratory problems. One man told me, "The earthquake was what we felt, what made our houses fall, but the real disaster is just beginning now that people are starting to understand that we have been forgotten."

A group of families are living in tents on the cement foundations of their former homes, right next to the cemetary. They've put up a make-shift plastic wall to keep the graves out of mind, but the kids told me that when the earthquake first happened they "didn't want to eat because the dead people smelled too bad." The skin under their shirts is red with bites from the tents that have become infested with fleas and bedbugs. Their eyes are fatigued, as the scorching coastal desert summer is arriving and their tents are too hot to sleep in as soon as the sun rises. When I pulled up here on my motorcycle they crowded around it like a mob, all making pleas for me to tell my country how bad things were and to ask them for help.

I walked through a family's house that hadn't been completely destroyed, but was a maze where one who didn't step carefully was bound to fall through the wooden planked floor. Holes in the roof were covered shabbily with scrap plywood and two youngest boys were scolded for playing in the trash-strewn rubble heap that used to be the kitchen. The father told me that when they fled the city after the earthquake they returned to their partial home to find all their belongings stolen. Now the government tells them the house must be demolished -- and that they must pay for it. There were dark circles under the man's and he said to me, "We will have nowhere to live if our house is destroyed. What will we do?"

A radiant black-haired girl named Marilu found me taking pictures on her dusty street and wanted to show me the statue of the Virgin Mary they'd put on the corner. I learned from neighbors later that this 8 year old had been pulled unconscious out of her collapsed house and recessitated, only to awake screaming that her brother was still in his room. They didn't get to him in time. Marilu now lives in a band-aid shack of plastic and wooden boards with another family (her mother lost her legs and is in Lima recovering) and clings to you like she'll never let go.

I am going back to Pisco soon, and what those worst off are most hoping for are the temporary wooden pre-fab houses with glass windows and screens, and doors that lock. I have visited the site where they are sold, and for between $400 and $700 each (depending on the size of the family), the company will transport and install the houses in Pisco. I have also talked with some local business owners to establish a voucher program for basic food needs like fruit, vegetables and milk, so that those without proper means of refrigeration can be assured fresh food.

I am trying to raise $4,500 to put five families into the wooden houses, and to provide the rest of the neighborhood with some quantity of food vouchers that might last them through the New Year. I will be handling everything there myself, so as to assure that every last cent will be converted into a home or a food voucher. If you would like to donate, you can go to http://www.paypal.com/ and use a debit or credit card to send a donation to tracymotz@hotmail.com.

Thanks... Will update with progress.

What not to do in a Chinese restaurant in Peru.

2007-11-21T11:07:00.000-06:00

My leather motorcycle jacket is gone, stolen. It was taken off the back of my seat at a "family" Chinese restaurant in Huaraz, Peru when I got up to go to the bathroom.

This jacket was almost the only original item with me since the beginning of the trip. There were scrapes on the elbow from a bad fall in Tahoe, some on the side from Oregon, and a whole pocket full of magic rocks that a wonderfully crazy man on Jade Beach in California gave me. I will never have those same scrapes or magic rocks again.

The road will be colder now. Falls will be more brutal. I will look way less cool. I hope that those boys selling Chicklets who probably stole and then sold my jacket for twenty soles at least sent it off to a good home.

(What I really hope is that they are somehow terribly allergic to leather and got what was coming to them. I sort of doubt either happened though.)

Sniff. Goodbye motorcycle jacket. It was fun while it lasted.

No one is dancing, eating or playing table hockey.

2007-11-08T17:16:00.000-06:00

This is where I am right now.

Tonight I drove into a town in northern Peru where on the main strip all the stores and houses are clay boxes with impossibly tall, thin, wobbly telvision antennae sticking up from tin roofs and there are many people sitting against the walls, waiting maybe, or maybe just sitting there. It is not uncommon for some people in every town to be doing this in South America, but here it is everybody. Nothing else happening aside from the sitting.

I stopped because I was very exhausted and also because it looked like a strange place.

The police didn't seem to have a lot to do. I asked two officers advice on where to stay for the night and after they could not convince me to drive to another town, they came back with the disclaimer "our hotel isn't like a hotel for tourists... it's just for the people from here." I was confused as to whether this meant I wasn't allowed to stay there since I'm not Peruvian, or that I might not find it luxurious enough since the dirt smeared on my face and the mud caked on my shoes hinted to them what a classy lady I am. I assured them that wherever "people from here" slept I would also sleep.

I got a police escort to a hotel where I paid three dollars for a barebones, concrete room with a thin matress sagging into a metal bedframe. Then I drove my motorcycle into a cavernous bar/billiards hall next door where it would be kept for the night, so that none of the sitters would steal it. A round table in the dark corner was host to six men playing a game with dice, all of whom lifted their heads and turned to stare as I unloaded my luggage. The owner pulled a metal curtain with a tiny door cut into it over the entryway, so that going back out was like following the White Rabbit through Wonderland.

Up the block and around the corner I found the main plaza, empty. A megawatt PA system was blaring regaetton that no one was dancing to, and under a tent sat twelve unused table hockey tables. I looked around to see if I was the only one there who found this a little odd. I was. In fact, I was the only one there, period. Everyone else was out along the main road, too busy just sitting against the walls, waiting maybe, or maybe just sitting there, to dance or play table hockey.

Looking for dinner, I wandered in to a well lit yet deserted room that had tables and chairs and napkins like one would see at a restaurant. I stood near the entryway and shouted "Hola? Hola, buenas noches?" until a bald old man shuffled out to attend to me. I asked him if it was indeed a restaurant, and he confirmed that it was. I asked what there was to eat, and he said there was no food. "It's all gone by noon. People don't eat in the evening." This left me to ponder why a restaurant that has no food would be open, but it explained why there wasn't anyone eating there.

Down the street I passed a funeral home/food mart, where two coffins wrapped in plastic were displayed in front of shelves loaded with bottles of Pepsi, cans of condensed milk, strawberry wafers and toilet paper. There was also an arcade/food mart, and a hardware store/food mart where I bought a roll of electrical tape and a candybar. I am undecided as to whether a food mart is so lucritive a venture that you should couple it with any other use of retail space, or whether it is so unprofitable that if you are to have a food mart you must subsidize it with a secondary business. Perhaps selling food only worthwhile until noon, since apparently that's when people stop eating, so the rest of the day you have to sell coffins and hammers.

I stopped in a few other places decorated to look like restaurants, some even doing business under the label "restaurant", yet none had any food. I finally got directions to a place on the outskirts of town where I was sure to find a meal. In the end it was so far away, I realized it was the reason no one had bothered to eat all their food earlier in the day when they were eating the bald man's food, and the food of everyone else on his street. Maybe they're like bears and they eat once a day to store up fat for the rest of the day when they hibernate on the sidewalks, and this is why they cannot dance to reggaeton or play table hockey. They must eat and sit, eat and sit, nothing else.

Walking back to my concrete room I passed through a street with walls on both sides, where all that could be seen over the tops were the towering television antennae. In the dark, they appeared to be crosses. Hundreds of them. A cemetary for people whose legs are stilts and everything in their world is lanky and loft, even their grave monuments.

I don't know the name of this town and I never want to find it out. I prefer to let it melt into one of those memories that later you think maybe was a dream, or into a dream that later you think was a memory. A very strange place indeed.

Introducing, the third highest waterfall in the world!

2007-11-08T17:15:00.000-06:00

The fog, the volcano, the fog.

2007-10-28T19:09:00.000-06:00

Some tips to Ecuadorians on dealing with foreign motorcyclists.

2007-10-25T20:44:00.001-05:00

Dear Ecuador,

In the time spent in your country, I have noticed that there are certain areas in which you and I lack a common understanding. So to help us on the path to improved relations, a few bits of advice.

1) A foreign motorcycle is not a rocket ship.
Regardless of its sleek design, my motorcycle is completely incapable of jet-powered flight... so please stop using equations with high value divisors to give me an estimate of how long it will take me to arrive at a given destination. When two days later I still have not arrived at the town that you said with my motorcycle would take three hours to reach, I just feel confused and betrayed.

2) A foreign motorcycle is not a compost bin.
Whatever you are putting in my gas tank when you fill it up -- vinegar? potato peels? melon rinds? -- is costing me a lot of time every morning when I try to start the bike up and it just sputters out black smoke and smells like a garbage disposal. Please put your compost in your backyard and gasoline in my tank. I would like to be able to get somewhere without having to use jet fuel to burn out the impurities from your leftover meals.

3) The driver of a foreign motorcycle cannot devine what the map in your head looks like.
When you say, "Go up the hill and take a left," and what you mean is "Go up the hill, drive for three hours and then take a left," try not to forget that middle part. Otherwise, I go up the hill, take my first left, and end up on a downward slanting slab of pavement that wants to drop me onto an old river bed, and it is very hard to turn my motorcycle around in this position without something very bad happening.

I appreciate your consideration of the above. Now if you would just give me back the $400 you owe me, maybe we could be friends.

Best,
Tracy Motz

Can't take a Colombian Favor to Ecuador.

2007-10-25T20:42:00.000-05:00

The Colombian Favor -- it is ubiquitous. In Colombia, all you have to do is express a need, desire or even whim for something, and suddenly appears a Colombian to guide you on the path to attainment. "Hágame un favor," they say on your behalf... then phone calls are made, you speak to a succession of people in various places of various trades, and in the end you have whatever it is you seek. Just don't go expecting that this favor chain will last you all through South America, because once you hit Ecuador, Colombia's stern neighbor to the south, the Colombian favor goes weak and then dies. Something like Superman and kryptonite.

I learned this lesson on my recent return to South America. I arrived in Bogota and got on a southward-bound, kumbia-blasting bus for 19 hours to Pasto, the little city in the big mountains where my motorcycle spent its summer. When I arrived, I was enshrouded in my own personal haze of worries and concerns: I remembered the oil and coolant leaks that plagued my bike; my camera was broken; a hard-to-find battery charger had been left in the US... but most of all, my Colombian customs papers for the bike were expired, and if stopped at one of the routine military checkpoints between Pasto and the Ecuadorian border two hours to the south, I was toast. They could fine me, demand a bribe, or worse, they could impound my bike. Things were on my mind.

Having been away for so long, I'd forgotten how things work. Pasto is the perfect setting for the Colombian Favor. At 350,000, it's big enough to have what you need, small enough that whatever it is is within just a few degrees of separation... And Alex, my friend there, is like the fairy godfather of the Colombian Favor. His cell phone contact book is like a magic wand that he uses to wave away peoples' troubles. He brought my motorcycle to meet me at Hotel Koala, and I nearly passed out when I saw it... not only had the oil and coolant leaks been fixed, but the pipes were re-chromed and undented, there were new turn signals, a tear in the back seat had been fixed, missing screws were replaced, the rear fender had been welded back together, the license plate holder was reattached, and the whole bike had been repainted. It looked better than it had when I bought it. "People owed me favors," he said with a grin. My pragmatic American mind cannot comprehend what it is one must do to be owed such favors, or what I did to have the favors "spent" on my bike...

Next we were off to resolve the rest of my woes. Alex flipped open his phone to his list of contacts, spoke to the voice on the other end, and we were soon greeted at a friend's cell phone store, lead into a back room of wires and chips and plastic phone covers where his minons were at work with tiny screwdrivers and magnifying lenses, and given a cup of boiling coffee out of a saucerpan on a single burner. I handed over my camera and was told they'd have it working that evening... Then we were moving again, on our way to see someone whose connection to Alex I vaguely understood as work-related, walking past tiny storefronts in a centro commercial until we arrived in front of a glass window crammed with GPS systems, ceramic figurines, logo-ed watches, toy guitars, video cameras, compasses -- and a sign promising "rare things". A grey-haired man sitting behind the glass counter inside pulled out cardboard boxes full of cords and assorted electronics, promising that if he didn't have the charger I needed he could just make me one, but at last pulled out a plastic package that I was looking for. So that was taken care of.

Next, several calls were made and numbers were jotted down, and in the end I had instructions for everyone I needed to know at the border in case of a problem with my expired papers. I'd be looking for a man named Don Jorge, "El Gato", to whom I was supposed to say, "A friend of yours from high school sent me..." (When I naively asked where Alex went to school with this guy, there was a pause, he looked at me, and then: "We never went to school together." Oooh. Got it.) There was also a military colonel in Bogota who could be called in the case that El Gato could not be found.

Thus, a few days later, with all my rewards of the Colombian Favor -- a working camera, a charged battery, and a beautiful, purring motorcycle -- I drove down to the border. It was a Sunday. I was waved through the sole military checkpoint on the highway, and then slid past customs without a sound. I got my Colombian exit stamp in immigrations with a huge sigh of relief, and even though it didn't look like I was going to have any problems, out of curiosity I still asked around for Don Jorge. A fat money changer, with that same pause and stare that Alex had given me, reported, "He went into the fruit business." I didn't know whatever secret signals or phrases were necessary to continue talking in code, so I said, "Well, wish him luck..."smiled, and left.

I went through immigrations on the Ecuadorian side, thinking I was home free... but then my good luck came to a screeching halt. The customs office was closed on Sundays. I could not get my entrance papers for the bike into Ecuador. I took my problem back into the immigrations office, where my explanation of the situation caused some stifled laughter in the line behind me: "I can't take my bike into the country without papers, but I've checked out of Colombia, so I can't go back there either, so really the only place I can legally be until tomorrow morning is in this parking lot..." Finally I was waved into a back hall, and after some deliberating and real consideration of whether or not I could camp in the parking lot, two immigrations officials told me just to go back to Colombia, that they'd be nicer to me there if I was caught. So back I went, an illegal immigrant. When fairy godfather Alex heard about the situation, and that Don Jorge was now in "fruits", he said he'd come down to the border town to be on standby the next morning.

So it was that the next morning I met Alex at the border. My luck with Colombian formalities held, and we drove through to Ecuador without having to present passports or papers or any kind. I parked in front of the customs office there and was met at the window by a sour faced woman who I thought must have a hard time keeping her lips pursed like she did when her hair was pulled back so tightly. I handed her my documents, not anticipating any problems... after all, it was the Colombian papers I'd had to worry about, not the Ecuadorian ones. I chatted breezily with Alex as I waited for her to hand back my entrance paper.

Then Sour Face left her seat and went to talk to someone in the back.

Then it was taking too long.

Then she came back with a crippling verdict: I had not obtained my exit stamp for the bike the last time I left Ecuador, which meant I had to pay a $400 fine, and the bike would be impounded inside the customs office until I did so.

Then I wanted to cry.

Alex's reaction to the news was instantaneous -- he went straight for the cell phone in his pocket, a direct line to the Colombian Favor. So while I negotiated with Sour Face -- explained my situation, claimed ignorance of the system, pleaded -- Alex was making one call after another, following one lead to the next, lighting one cigarette off another, and pacing.

I was sent to the main customs office, which I thought was going to be my big break, but instead my case was heard by the male equivalent of Sour Face -- a man immune to big, sad eyes and long, emotional appeals -- and I was made to walk a mile in a thunderstorm (which I was sure I'd conjured up myself) to take out $400 USD and make my payment at an appointed bank. When I still failed to recieve my entry papers into Ecuador and a guard said they had to keep my bike overnight (because Sour Face had gone home early), I lost my mind and charged back into the main office after-hours to deliver an empassioned diatribe to the head of customs and some other important looking suits on how systems and governments function. Then I got my papers, and I got my bike back.

When back at the border Alex finally put the phone back in his pocket, I knew by the look on his face that he'd gotten nowhere. It was a combination of distress, confusion, and defeat -- something I'd never seen on him before. He was a mere couple hundred feet south of the border, and yet being on the wrong side of it had rendered him powerless.

That's because you can't take a Colombian Favor to Ecuador... so better bring your wallet.

The tallest mountain in Honduras.

2006-10-15T21:29:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I get it into my head to do something, and no matter happens to suggest that perhaps I have a serious chemical deficiency which prevents sound judgment making, I can’t get it out of my head. I must do it. (No, mother, I am not referring to this trip).

For instance, two days ago I decided to climb the Celaque, the highest mountain in Honduras. I was captivated by its description as a pristine reserve of cloud forest and a habitat for pumas and the ever-illusive quetzal, and only mildly aware of warnings about steep gradients and so on. It appeared that other people had climbed it. So I’ll climb it too, I said.

I packed up the bike and headed out of Gracias for the dirt road that winds five miles to the trailhead. Later, as I was being hauled back in a pick-up-turned-motorcycle-tow-truck, I would be horrified that I had ever attempted to cross such a disaster zone. There wasn’t a single straightaway of flat land; it was all potholes, dirt bulges, boulders, muddy snares, deep water channels, and other things that scream “bad idea!” to low-riding bikes. Right in front of the actual park entrance, there was a steep uphill jog where the dirt looked like it had been freshly tilled; it appeared that someone had decided this “natural reserve” concept was bunk and had decided to do something useful with the road, like plant corn on it. If so, I destroyed their crop when I burned uphill – emphasis on the “burn”. The bike overheated and quit halfway up.

Whenever things like this happen in Central America, I’m always amazed at how people fall out of the woodwork – even when I’m sure that I’ve drug my bike to a solitary death. A man and his four kids appeared on the scene to push me through the soft dirt, despite my voiced concerns about the smoke coming out of the engine. “That always happens with my bike,” the man said, and threw some water on it. He assured me it was fine to continue – and that the road ahead was “really good”.

The real problem was that a few days earlier, coming back through the Belize-Guatemala border after my failed ferry quest, I’d dropped the bike in some of that clay-mud that Guatemala imports straight from Hell. Ever since then, the gears had been acting a little, mmm, funny – as in, every time I shifted the engine would ROAR and not accelerate right away. It definitely didn’t want to go over 50 mph either. (Yes, I drove through two countries in this condition). Now, on the till hill, it seemed that I had mostly lost first gear.

But mostly is not entirely. And since the road was “really good”, I figured I could make it a few more miles.

Not so. A mile later, I’d lost all ability to accelerate. And when I put the kickstand down to inspect the problem (i.e., push and pull on random parts to hope I might accidentally fix whatever was wrong), I put it down right in a huge colony of fire ants. If you’ve ever done this, you know what a fool it makes of you. I tore my shoes off and pounded them against a tree, then pranced around in the dirt road (that was not “really good”) pawing off a million ants that had somehow summited my legs in .78 seconds.

I was thinking, after the ant disaster, that maybe I just had to wait and someone would “fall out of the woodwork”. But instead the sun just started to set. Sometimes the system is inconsistent.

My tent went up by the side of the road, and since my water bottle had jiggled out of my usually trusty bungees (I repeat, sometimes the system is inconsistent), I took a plastic bag through spider web covered thickets (for lack of a better word to describe a lot of dense buses and vines and trees distinctly lacking a trail) and went to the river to get water. The bag, of course, had a million tiny holes from which the water spouted, so instead of re-stocking camp like planned, I stood by the river and sucked out enough until I decided I was properly hydrated. This was, of course, after about 25 seconds.

I usually don’t mind putting my tent down in the middle of nowhere, but something about the woodwork being empty and the guidebook’s insistence on the impressive numbers of pumas on the mountain left me slightly uneasy. Once it was dark – and I mean, completely dark, can’t-see-the-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark – I holed up inside my tent and took out my harmonica (a guy gave me one in Mexico because he told me I was really “musically inclined”) I figured it would drive any curious pumas away – that, or it would drive them mad and they’d eat me to stop the noise. But the odds of the latter happening seemed pretty low. So I played the only three riffs I know, over and over and over, until the Tylenol PM I’d popped (dry) knocked me out cold.

The next day, much to my surprise, the bike still didn’t work. I’d sort of thought a good night’s rest would fix things. (Such are the theories of motorcycle maintenance, as written by Tracy Motz). Even after a group of construction workers tried to push me to get it going, it just kept groaning and smoking; finally, one of them agreed with me that yes, the smoke was bad. This is the part when you might think I’d put off the mountain climbing – instead, with the concurrence of the workers, I decided to leave the bike there. It would be so much of an effort for someone to get it back down the hill that I was satisfied it would not be stolen.

I packed a bag for the mountain summit and grabbed camera equipment and other things of value. The rest – saddlebags, books, clothes, hammocks, etc. – I wrapped in plastic and chucked over the side of the road (into the “thicket”). I’d attached a waterproof note saying “Please do not touch these bags – I am coming back for them.” Some people build lock boxes, I write sticky notes. Whatever, it works.

By the time I’d gotten to the lodge/trailhead (which the workers had assured me was just up the road, but was in reality far away) I was dripping sweat and desperate for water. The guidebook mentioned the crooked wooden shack of Dona Alejandra as a last place to get food. There it was, right up a little path. And out of the house shuffled a very old, toothless Dona Alejandra, who didn’t have water for sale, but did have a whole lot to say on the State of the Mountain.

“The bridge is broken! You can’t cross the river– you’ll kill yourself if you try! You’ll fall into the water!”

I just stood there, wide-eyed. I’d never encountered such a feisty old lady. She let me stand in the yard to consider this new information; in the meantime, she lobbed a stone at the stray dog that was bothering her. He yelped when it his him. Her shoulders shook with glee – and she turned back towards me with a huge toothless grin.

She was raving mad. I was simultaneously terrified and in love.

As I bid her farewell, promising not to cross the bridge if it was broken, she shoved some spiny, aloe-looking leaves off the footpath. “Thorns!” she cried.

“What are the leaves used for?” I asked, feeling like I was supposed to saying something, but hopelessly dumbstruck.

“Used for!? Nothing! They’re useless – they’re just full of thorns!” She shuffled back into her den. I’d run into Dona Alejandra again on the way out of the park, when she was roaming around with a big hooked stick, knocking dead branches out of the trees for the huge satchel of firewood she was carrying on her back. She would give me small orange fruits and bellow out, "You have to peel them first!" when I went to bite in. This is who I want to be when I grow up.

Across the dirt path at the lodge they told me the bridge was not out, and that I could pass without problem. A very fast-paced, hard-to-follow Spanish conversation between the three workers followed – I later realized it was a debate on whether to let me go up the mountain alone. “She’s big and strong! She’ll be fine,” I heard one of them say. Central America always succeeds in painting me as a person of super-natural human proportions. Here, I am enormous.

So off I went. I huffed up through the pines, passing the first rest stop (i.e., slight break in the trees with a handwritten sign indicating “Rest Stop”) and scoffing at it. For weaklings, I thought. By the second one, I dropped my luggage and collapsed, my legs wondering exactly what was going on. I must be about halfway, I thought. I looked at the hand-drawn, taped-together map they’d given me at the lodge. It appeared this spot was only about 1/10 of the way. The scale is probably off. I’m definitely halfway.

But along came a spirited Israeli – the first and the last person I would see on the climb – who told me it was still a long, long to the waterfall he’d gone to, and that was subsequently a long, long way from the top, which he’d not gone to. We probably have different ideas of distance, I thought. He sat down and offered me some of his orange juice. We talked. He was thoroughly amused with the fact that I’d come by motorcycle.

“I’m sorry to laugh, you just don’t look like someone who is traveling alone on a motorcycle and climbing mountains… I mean, Your fingernails are painted.”

Yes, and aren’t they lovely I thought, admiring my new hot pink polish.

“I hear that a lot,” I said. And they’re right -- I don’t look like a traveler. I don’t own anything in khaki, cargo or hemp. I prefer American Apparel to North Face. It’s rare to catch me without eyeliner. Why? Because “travel wear” does not agree with my fashion sensibilities. And who came up with the rule that you have to look granola to travel? I put on a pair of Tivas one time and couldn’t walk – not because I stumbled or they fit improperly, but because my feet actually seceded from the rest of my body and went to Barney’s. So really I don’t have a choice. I mean, I’m not the epitome of high style out here, but I do manage to look awfully cute.

Meir insisted that I take the rest of his food – a bag of toast, some biscuits and a bite-size Snickers bar. I protested – but would later ravage the plastic sack in a ferocious, climb-induced hunger. I had some ham and jalapeno sandwiches, but I’d discover they were not enough to get me to the top. (Once again, I dive in unprepared – once again, a friendly stranger comes along to dig me out of a ditch I don’t even know I’m in. Some people might scoff at this – I called it “leading a charmed life”.)

Before he left he said, “You’re the first American I’ve met who’s really traveling.” The term really traveling jumped out at me. I laughed, probably longer than I should have when trying to maintain the appearance of sanity. Dragging a street bike up a treacherous mountain road to its death, hiking with a “pack” that’s really an Army Surplus duffel bag with shoulder straps, replacing the strongly recommended “sturdy hiking boots” with a pair of green Converse sneakers, plucking a discarded Pepsi plastic bottle off a tree branch and filling it with sort of cloudy stream water. This is really traveling? Because sometimes it just feels like general blind chaos, or bad decision-making.

I gave Meir my email address and loaded back up. From here, the trail roller-coastered along the side of the mountain, dipping down seven or eight times to cross small streams where I would invariably let slip one of my shoes into the mud or water. Every time I’d look back sort of confusedly like, How did that happen again? I squishy-footed my way along the deserted trail, constantly swatting from my face the spider webs that tend to accumulate when passing through places that reasonable people do not pass.

I found the first camping spot – what the map showed as the actual halfway, and what I chose to believe as “really almost the top”. The words “Very Steep – Be careful!” were underlined. I started up the sharper gradient and thought, Wow, they weren’t kidding. It was steeper, it was harder. I was sweating out stream water at an incredible rate.

But when I thought the steep part was almost over, the trail dead-ended in front of some rocks. I looked at the map. I looked at the trail. I looked around for one of the illusive trail markers (i.e., plastic sack or scrap of cloth tied to a tree branch). I was again confused. This didn’t appear to be the top (although it must be very, very close, I reassured myself).

Then, much to my horror, I spotted a marker sticking out from the rocks shooting up above me. I squinted to make sure it wasn’t a dead bird or a bright blue leaf or other eye trickery. They want me to climb up there? Is that even possible? I studied the squiggle lines on my map, which helped nothing. I stood and blinked and stood some more. I was waiting for the path to spontaneously re-arrange itself to take me around instead of up this rocky precipice. I heard myself say out loud, “You’ve got to be kidding me…” as I reached to pull myself up the first ledge.

I can’t tell you what happened here, because I blacked out some otherworldly force intervened to carry me up the mountain. All I know is that when I came out of the rocks, I had a lot of blood on my hands. I’d like to think was from the mosquito orgy I’d wiped out (only after they devoured half the flesh on my face). But it’s possible it was from a small woodland animal or perhaps even a small human whom I’d killed in a deranged delusion. If so, I’m very sorry. But you shouldn’t expect people to perform physical feats of this magnitude without totally losing their minds.

The sun was just starting to set when I made it to the second campground, in the cloud forest proper. I cannot remember another moment of parallel ecstasy in my entire life. The trees sprung up to impressive heights and were more sparsely situated, allowing the fading light to fall through, with mosses of all shades of green melting off the lofty branches; there were swaths that hung down twenty feet or more. Most amazing of all was the silence: gone were the birds, the mosquitoes, the skittering ground critters, the only sound was the steady dripping from the trees overhead, and the rush of the small waterfall nearby. Mostly though, I was happy to not have to climb another step.

I dropped my pack, ripped off my clothes and jumped into the (really, really freezing) stream. That night, I slept.

The next morning I rolled out of the tent back into the misty cloud forest. I was sore, grubby, bug-bitten, funny smelling… And I generally hate mornings. But being so close to the top put me in a weirdly chirpy mood. I laced up my muddy sneakers and got back on the trail, this time to find a slightly less demanding incline. I stumbled over things while straining to see to the tops of the trees. I contemplated the future of mankind, forwards and backwards. I found a slug that was almost a foot long.

And finally, there was the last stretch to the top. I came over the final few steps to see what the ancients had called the window to God. The view at the top… was of clouds. Of course. I was hiking in a cloud forest.

They were the most beautiful clouds I’d ever seen.

I laughed, turned around and walked back down the mountain.

It's raining in Belize.

2006-10-06T16:23:00.000-05:00

It’s raining in Belize. It is always raining in Belize. I have been here three separate times, in three separate months, and whenever I ask what month gets the heaviest rainfall, they always say, “This one.” I’m beginning to think there is a direct relationship between my presence here and watershed.

Now I am on the wrong side of a very long, muddy dirt road. When you say “Four-wheel drive” to this road, it chortles. I came down looking for a ferry to Honduras – a car ferry, to be precise, or at least one big enough for my obese motorcycle – with the hopes of bypassing a long detour through Guatemala. Sometimes our dreams are so lofty.

As soon as I crossed the Belizean border, I started asking about the reality of my fantasy ferry. To arrive at an answer that runs any chance of being the truth in Central America, a survey of the largest population cross-section possible is necessary. Thus I questioned customs and immigrations agents while they defiled the pages of my passport; gas station attendants whose eyes were crossed and hands were cupped in a C; society women; a somnambulist who trotted through my dream; trail blazers looking for reward and recognition; bikini models and their estheticians in between a pluck and a wax and a paint; quasi-evolved atheists from whom was borne the idea of IT training; druids looking a little astray; bass fishermen in pixilated form; and people who enjoy strobe lights but will settle for the effect of a ceiling fan. Mascots and children I got together during a group shot outside the stadium. Oh, and there was a lemming (in the human sense, of course, which was a bad idea).

This group (don’t bother yourselves trying to figure it out) spoke with one, unified voice: They all said, “Maybe.”

But one among them, one very self-assured suit man among them, told me that the highway all the way to the possible ferry departure area was paved. My guidebook told me it was dirt. No, he said, it’s all been paved in the last few years – all but a very small section that you won’t have trouble with.

Well that’s something.

So I headed down that way. I stopped off on another dirt road to stay the night at the Jaguar Reserve. Partly because it was a cheap sleep, mostly because jaguars. Put that on a flash card and pull it out of your pocket tomorrow and see what it does. Jaguar. Asa! It’s the only jaguar reserve in the whole wide world.

I checked in and paid my $2.50 camping fee. The ranger took me outside to a crudely painted trail map and suggested a few nice hikes. “What are these?” I asked instead, pointing to the crab-like figures painted into the river. “That’s where you can take a tube down the river,” he told me.

I’d spent the last two days driving through hours of pouring rain. My voice was down to a scratchy whisper and my mental state was sufficiently waterlogged. I wanted to do something that required little thought or physical effort. Sitting and floating on an inflated piece of rubber sounded like a really good idea (albeit one that involved more water, I at least wouldn’t be fighting it). Normally, I would hate this idea. Not every day is normal though.

So he picked out a tube that looked like the right size. “Remember,” he said, “you MUST exit by the second exit. Do not miss it.”

“What happens if you miss it?”

“Then you go into heavy rapids that will take you all the way back to the highway, if you’re lucky.”

The highway was six miles away.

“What if you’re not lucky?”

“Then you’re dead,” he chuckled.

“Oh.”

He added as a side thought, “Do you swim well?”

I love that in Belize, they send you unguided, unvested, on a river tubing trip where you not only need to know how to swim, but it’s pretty important you’re a strong swimmer. And they only ask you about that last part if they happen to think of it.

I got out onto the Lazy River, except that it was a real river surrounded by a real jungle, and felt like I should feel alarmed by the swifter-than-expected rapids and maybe the whole situation in general, but I didn’t have the energy required for alarm. (Anyway, my mom says I’m missing that chemical that alerts people when danger is near. Could be that most things aren’t as dangerous as people give them credit for.) The tube was dropped into the water and I squirmed into the donut-hole middle.

If you’ve ever craved surrealism, float down a jungle river in a rubber inner tube, alone. They’ll write a song about it one day.

It’s pretty predictable what’s coming here… I got ten minutes down the river, and that pretty blue sky that always shows a little leg then runs away giggling did just that. And along came the greyer older brother with a big one-two pop for the whole lot. Raindrops started to fall. Then it poured. I couldn’t really do anything. Probably wouldn’t have in any case. I just sat in my tube in the river and watched the mist rise off the water.

If you don’t know, the one thing that will make a fast river even faster is more water. Which was actually a good time, except when it came to the whole exit business. I thought about skipping it to see whether I’d make it to the highway or die, but I decided if I did make it to the highway I didn’t want to walk six miles back with an inner tube. So, with no small effort, I got to the riverbank and got out of the river, then walked back through the muddy jungle in flip flops.

That was just a short but kind of long interlude to underscore the fact that no matter what I do here, it rains on me.

But back to this ferry business, which is the real reason why I’m sitting at a bar with a mysterious wireless connection, on the wrong side of a very long, muddy dirt road.

I was shooting for Placencia, the docking point of the fantasy ferry, only because the roads were paved and I could turn right back around if the boat couldn’t take me or didn’t exist. I got onto the Southern Highway and found it smooth and covered, as promised. And when the signs pointed to Placencia and the road turned to good ol’ Belizean red dirt, I thought that this too was as promised. It’s the short patch that I “won’t have trouble with”. Onward.

Turns out, the “short patch” extends for 25 miles. I kept going because I thought the pavement would reappear at any moment. By the time I realized otherwise, it was too late to turn around. It was a fight through thick, muddy construction truck treads and poorly graded dips where water swelled at amazing depths. Had the sun not been shining, I wouldn’t have made it through.

I got to Placencia and went straight to the dock. There I found, in plastic lawn chairs, and old man and an old woman and a big rubber tub filled with enchiladas. This, apparently, was the official ferry information center. I got off the bike.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for a ferry to Honduras.”

“Ferry’s broke,” the old man replied. “It’s not running tomorrow.”

Slap.

“Do you know when it will be running?”

“They’re waiting for a part.”

“So after the weekend?”

“Nah. Probably a good two weeks or so.”

Sock, elbow to the rib.

“Oh.” I let it simmer for a minute. Maybe the boat would be fixed sooner. “Do you think it would take my bike?”

“Dunnow.”

“Does it usually take vehicles.”

“Nah, might take a motorcycle – might – but that one’s pretty big.”

“Is the boat pretty big?”

“Average.”

“Do you know I’d talk to about getting it on?”

“Yeah, the capn’d be able to tell you.”

“Yeah? Where can I find the captain?”

“Can’t. He’s in Guatemala right now. Took a little trip with his family while the boat’s being repaired”

Please, someone just hog tie me and throw me into the ocean.

“You want an enchilada?” the woman asked. “They’re real cheap.”

Just then, it started to rain. In the time it would take me to get back out to the road, it would be impassable. I didn’t want an enchilada.

So here I sit, a day later, and it’s still raining. I’ll eventually have to bribe a large truck to take me back out, or wait for the sun to re-appear.

And after all this, the answer to the question of whether you can get a motorcycle on a ferry from Belize to Honduras is still Maybe.

The Great Guatemalan Wallet Caper

2006-10-05T16:45:00.000-05:00

After abandoning the bike in Coban, I moved through the Guatemalan tourist ring with the rest of the backpacker's crowd and dipped my toes into the open waters of Chicken Bussing. It was a change, and I'd sometimes find myself mentally planning out the heist of a dirt bike, but little by little I was adapting to the crowded, clamorous glory of the system. Nonetheless, when I moved eastward to the less-visited Pacific Slope and found a bus that in a former life was a charter, as opposed the usual re-imagined school buses, I was thrilled. I’d finally found a break.

Onboard, I marveled at the cushioned bucket seats and spacious aisle; this was my first time on a Guatemalan bus not packed ten to a row. The cushions were stained and torn, the windows held shut with twine, and the blinking Christmas lights around the portrait of Virgin Mary bright enough to make a blind man wince – but it didn't matter. It was un-crowded and there was generous leg room. I settled in and assumed the breezy demeanor of someone flying first class. Off to Santa Lucia…

The two-hour trek southward was dyed in Guatemalan green. The bus whirred past a continuous panorama of cane fields and velvety, emerald mountainsides, interspersed occasionally with tiny, wooden-shack villages peeking out from behind palms and banana trees. The roadside was peppered with wandering horses and cattle; an occasional donkey loaded with corn leaves (for tamales) ambled alongside a sun-beaten paysano. It was mesmerizing. Hypnotizing, even.

Earlier, the ticket-taker said he’d let me know when we were nearing my stop, but we’d apparently mis-communicated on the “near” part: When the bus was at a complete stop, I was jolted out of my reverie by urgent shouts of “Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia! Gringa! Santa Lucia!” The driver was not waiting; I hugged my luggage to my body, bolted out of my seat, and charged down the aisle… Sailing down the steps, I had a mental image of the bus inhaling deeply and then SPITTING me out as hard onto the asphalt in Santa Lucia. “Glad I didn’t end up further down the road,” I thought.

Rain was starting to fall so I ducked under the awning of the nearby gas station and dropped my bags onto the ground, unloading the burden of awkwardly positioned weight. I stared out at the watery road and remembered I was thirsty. My hand reached down to grab my pink wallet from the top of my made-for-a-motorcycle-and-not-a-Guatemalan-bus bag … but it wasn’t there. I looked again. Not there. The bag’s contents were hurriedly dumped out, a growing panic peeking its ugly head over the horizon. Oh dear. The wallet was lost. It was on the bus. Full-blown panic vaulted itself over the horizon and landed feet-first on my doorstep (with a mocking “Ta-da!”). Trouble.

Almost without thinking, I scooped up my luggage and ran it inside to the station attendant (who must have had a very trustworthy face). “I’ll be back in a few hours!” I shouted, sure that if I went after the bus I’d be able to reclaim my wallet. I sprinted out to the road (empty-handed) to intercept the wildly painted chicken bus that had just squealed to a halt in the wet gravel. I jumped onto the stairs and rattled off some garbled, high-speed explanation of the lost wallet and the bus I needed to chase down – adding a pity piece about not having any money for a ticket. “Get in, step up, STEP UP!!” the ticket man shot back – indifferent to my plight or financial situation, concerned only with maintaining a tornado-like pace (even in the pelting rain.) And so began the Great Guatemalan Wallet Caper.

The chase continued along the bumpy highway until a loud CLANK, grrrrr, POP brought us to a complete stop, and the driver and his minions piled out to inspect some mechanical malfunction. My fingers dug their way into the pleathery seat cover; this was not the high-speed pursuit I’d hoped for. But my brooding impatience was interrupted only minutes later when a piece of paper with the name of the bus line I was supposedly looking for was shoved into my hand. “Get off here and take the next bus all the way to Guatemala City! You’ll find your bus there,” they assured me. I jumped down the stairs into the streets of an unknown locale and watched them sputter off, “Guatemala City” ringing in my ears...

These were the two words I did not want to hear. Guatemala City. The guidebooks warn you. Other travelers warn you. Guatemalans warn you. The capital is a den of corruption, wickedness, depravity, lechery, sordidness, filth, muck, smut, crime, sleaze, sin… But, then again, people are always over-exaggerating. I’d been once before and didn’t think it was nearly the inferno it was likened to. And this time my pockets were empty – I literally had nothing anyone could steal.*

So two hours later, courtesy of another charitable chicken bus, I pulled into Just-Like-They-Say Guatemala City (slightly different from the I’m-Here-With-My-Savvy-Friend Guatemala City I’d visited before). Streets were clogged with agitated pedestrians and angry honking cars, the air visibly gray with exhaust fumes and the haze of general dissatisfaction. Food carts and vendors’ aluminum stalls leaned into each other on the sidewalk, stray dogs picking their way through the confusion. People were moving with purpose but couldn’t get far without stumbling into the chaos – It reminded me of what would happen if you mashed a bunch of ant colonies together and let them untangle themselves.

As soon as my sneakers hit the sidewalk, a taxi mob piled on top of one another to offer me their services in broken English. With a little insistence and a lot of attitude, I broke free of the hagglers’ snare and found directions to the office, then shuffled a few blocks down the street to match the company name on the paper with the corresponding painted sign. A door-less entryway led into a stark white room with a single reception desk. It was empty.

I stood inside for a minute inspecting the deserted workspace, then turned around to see if someone outside might help me. That’s when I first saw him: Bad Man. He’d come in behind me and stood there blinking – his dark, beady eyes were set into a wide, round face, this a rugged terrain full of warty moles extending down his neck and disappearing under a sweat-stained shirt. A bulbous gut stuck so far over his waistline that it looked like he might topple over from being too off-balance. Luckily the office space was open-faced; I might have otherwise bolted away to escape a boiled death in a giant iron cauldron, Bad Man sucking the last scraps of meat off my broken bones and smacking his greasy lips.

He took his place behind the desk and I started to recite my reason for standing in his bare bus office. But he stopped me short to offer me a chair on his side of the desk. I sat down. Then he asked for the whole story. I told him.

“Well,” he said leaning back in his swivel chair, “there’s nothing we can do tonight. Any bus that arrived here today has turned back around and won’t be back to its home station until late.”

Dread. The buses were supposed to be there, in Guatemala City, not on the way back to wherever they started from. I knew the question forming on my lips about a CV system was irrelevant. My mind flipped through a million different scenarios, but intuition told me that Bad Man was not likely to go along with any zany schemes of getting in touch with someone before the day was over. “So is there a way to call around in the morning to see if anyone found anything?” I asked, with the tiniest tinge of desperation.

“Of course. I can call to all the offices first thing in the morning.”

My chances of success were crashing like the stock market in a Bush administration (yes, a cheap hit). The longer the wallet was gone, the less likely I seemed to get it back.

“Okay,” I said with a sigh of resignation. “Can I get a phone number here, and I’ll call you from Santa Lucia?”

“Santa Lucia? You’re not thinking of going back there tonight, are you?”

Silly, silly Bad Man. Of course I’m going back.

“All my luggage is there…” I started in, but was cut off by Bad Man’s urgent cry: “It’ll be dark there by the time you get back!”

Oh, right. Better to be penniless and alone in Guatemala City when night falls.

Again, I tried with “It will be fine – my things are there…” Again, cut off: “That’s too dangerous!”

This is going to get annoying really fast, I thought. And why couldn’t you have showed this degree of concern over, perhaps, getting my wallet back?

He shifted in his seat a bit and continued. “Here’s what I’ll do – I’ll pay for food and a hotel room for you tonight, then we’ll call around in the morning. If someone has it, you can wait here for it, and if not, you can go back to Santa Lucia in the afternoon.”

Ha! Please, I thought, I know the adage about free lunches. And sleazy men.

“Thank you,” I said with poorly faked gratitude, “but I prefer to go back tonight.”

He put his hand on my knee. “I don’t live in the city either, so I’m staying at the hotel too. We can share a room,” his hand suddenly starting its way up my thigh.

I slapped his wrist away and shot up out of my seat, knocking the chair hard into the desk behind it. I was furious (and revolted). I shot him an icy “No thank you,” eyes narrowed. I paused for a minute, gears churning to come up with a verbal stone-in-the-slingshot to take this Goliath down, to teach Bad Man not to make advances on women in search of their leather-bound identities. But anger was fogging things up. (Having to think in Spanish – also not helping). I turned and walked out, ready to rack the wallet up as a loss and get out of Guatemala City. No looking back (for fear I might turn into a pillar of salt).

I hurried back down the street, past spray-painted cinderblock walls and vacant storefronts, the insides choked with rubble and garbage. For a third time that afternoon, I climbed a set of chicken bus stairs and was shuffled through as a pro-bono case. I settled in for the long bus ride back to Santa Lucia, still angry that I’d come so far and gotten so little cooperation, but ready to turn attention to my current plight.

A wedding in Michigan was taking me back to the States in two days, so I knew my stint as a vagabond would be relegated to 48 hours. With a well thought-out plan of action, I said to myself, this will be a breeze. My priority was getting to the airport on Thursday, and maybe as a secondary goal, not sleeping in the rain. Though I’d just puppy dog-eyed my way to and from Guatemala City, my floating logic dictated that it would be much harder to actually get to the airport in Guatemala City. This would require money, I decided. (Certainly it couldn’t be as easy as just asking for a ride on the buses again). And how do you get money without a tin cup, a musical instrument or chips for the slot machine? A job, I said. Yes, I’ll get a job.

Next question: Who will give a bumbling Spanish-speaker with an American passport a job for one day? Again, I flipped through the possibilities, but I envisioned my rejection rate something akin to that of a door-to-door vacuum salesman. Then it dawned on me: The church! The church will give me a job and a place to sleep. Why? Because they help people who need help. That’s their job. It was settled. I’d go to the church, ring the bell and wait for one of the nuns to come to the door (because of course all Catholic churches have nuns inside, all day every day), ask for a pew to sleep on, and maybe some work cleaning the floors (or something equally Cinderalla-ish) the next day. That would get me some food and bus money for the airport. I breathed a sigh of relief, happy with my ingenious, “well thought-out” plan.

Halfway through the trip, the youngish man squished in next to me struck up a conversation. “Where are you headed?” he asked. Before I could answer he continued, “I’m sorry to be nosey, it’s just that I’ve never seen someone like you on this bus before.” I mulled over what like you must mean – tall and white, or bedraggled and desperately confused-looking. I feared it was the latter.

I told him I was headed back to Santa Lucia, and he’d soon garnered the details of my unfortunate day. As the bus started to slow for his stop, he turned to me with a going-out-on-a-limb sort of expression. “I’m going to do something to help you,” he said. “There is someone I know in Santa Lucia…” My hopes jumped: I’m saved! He’s going to point me to someone who will give me a place to sleep (and a job?). I mean, the church was a nice plan, but really…

He took out a business card and scrawled some contact information on the back. “Here,” he said, and I held my hand out for the card like it was the Golden Ticket. “I used to sing in a choir with a youth pastor, and he used to work at the church in Santa Lucia. Take this to the priest and tell that a friend of Fernando Leon sent you – make sure you mention the name of the singing group too.”

Now, I’m not usually one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but last I knew, references weren’t necessary to throw yourself at the mercy of the church. And even in the non-charitable real world where name-dropping is more readily practiced, I’m not sure how far the recommendation of a sort-of acquaintance of an ex-employee will get you. (I envisioned a spoof wherein I stood before the stern entrance of a church, pounding on the thick wooden doors and pleading to be let in, a cloaked, solemn-faced abbot looking down at me through a small hinged eyehole, shaking his head no until I wail, “But I know Rigoberto Vasquez Arana from the singing group “Dia D!” And him then growing chipper and saying, “Well why didn’t you say so earlier?”, throwing open the doors to welcome me in [then offering porridge in a wooden bowl]). (Hollywood really does rot our brains). Nonetheless I took the card, thanked him, and assured him I would email to let him know I’d made it safely.

I got off at the same gas station in Santa Elena, picked up my bags in the office, and headed for the long boulevard towards town and the church, ready to put my plan into action. But I must have been inadvertently flashing the SOS signal (or perhaps it was the I’ve-never-seen-someone-like-you-on-this-bus-before effect) because it took all of three minutes before a twenty-something Guatemalan girl in heels stopped me on the street. “Are you looking for something?” she asked.

I paused. This is going to sound ridiculous, I thought. “Yes. I’m looking for the church”

She raised an eyebrow. “The church? Right now?” It was around 10. “Why?”

“Mmm…” I stalled, trying to come up with a better explanation than “to sleep there.”

“To sleep there.”

She looked at me as if to say, I am not standing in the rain in heels to hear such absurdity. She waited for more; I gave as brief a recap of the day as possible and asked if she could just point me in the right direction… I added some weak supplement about having a card to show to the priest.

The girl gave a sort of half-amused sigh and said, “I’ll walk you there. You shouldn’t be walking around here by yourself.”

But you are by yourself, I thought. (My, people are a little backwards in this country).

As it happened, her father soon pulled up in his taxicab and once the girl told him my tragic tale, the father insisted that I stay at their house overnight. So in went the wet luggage, out went the church, on went the story.

Next thing I knew I was sitting in a spacious Guatemalan casa, alone at the dining room table, a heaping plate of eggs, beans and tortillas in front of me. “Eat!” The girl’s determined mother called out. “You must be hungry!” She and four of the daughters crowded together in the kitchen, where they had a good vantage point of the starving, destitute American orphan they’d found on the street. I suddenly felt like I fallen on the wrong side of the bars at the zoo. I picked up a tortilla and started nibbling, under their watchful eye.

“Pauvrecita!” I heard them say to each other (as if I couldn’t perfectly hear and understand them). You’d have thought I lost both my legs instead of just a wallet.

But even with the volcano of pity that was spewing down on me, the family was a model of hospitality: They gave me a cup of tea and sat me on a cushy couch in the living room. They pointed out different extended family members hanging in gold-colored frames on the wall (alongside an out-of-place collection of faded portraits of Japanese geishas). They showed me an illegal collection of Olmec artifacts. And then they asked about my plans for the next day. Gulp. Here we go, I thought…

“I’m going to get a job,” I said definitively.

“For one day?” they countered. “Who will give you a job for only one day?”

This sounds more and more preposterous every time I say it. “The church, maybe.”

Again, the eyebrow went up, this time en masse. A rapid-fire Spanish pow-wow delivered a quick family verdict to my predicament: Instead of going to the church, I should go with Oneyda (my heeled rescuer) to Guatemala City (where she worked). I could stay with her there. Oneyda added, “There might be a place where I can get you a job for a day…” as if to appease my hunger to make this a self-sufficient mission. I was in that awkward position where you don’t want to inconvenience anyone by making them go out of their way, but at the same time you think it might inconvenience them even more if you don’t accept their help, so in the end you just smile like a weakling and say yes to whatever they ask. I was on a bus to Guatemala City early the next morning.

We arrived in the same spot I’d arrive the day before, and transferred to another local bus bound for my friend’s apartment. This was when she turned to me and said, “Listen, I think it’s best if I drop you off at my apartment and you can just hang out there for the day. I’ll give you money to get to the airport tomorrow.” I’d sort of assumed this was coming; my puppety head bobbled a compliant “Okay”. Lost were my dreams of earning gainful employment.

As I settled into my new (or continued, rather) leechiness, I noticed out the bus windows that the landscape was changing drastically from the rat hole I’d visited the day before; the roads widened into boulevards, the median greenery was manicured, the skyline shot drastically upwards and sleek, modern high-rises towered over the streets. Glass-encased luxury car dealerships gave light to the slew of Lexus and Audi-branded vehicles (that had replaced the Toyota pick-up trucks) in traffic around us, and the flawlessly groomed women on the sidewalk were toting Louis Vuitton and other logo-ed handbags. Bright, shiny new cafes, movie theaters and shopping malls filled the spaces in-between buildings. It was like I’d entered make-believe world. I turned to Oneyda. “Are we still in Guatemala City?”

“Yes,” she laughed. “C’mon, we’re getting off.”

We got off the bus and walked across the street to a gated fortress where a guard stepped out of a booth to let us pass through into Condolandia. My jaw dropped as we stepped in; I was unaware that anything of this magnificence existed in Guatemala City. My grungy luggage was put on a wheeled cart and taken up four floors to Oneyda’s shared three-bedroom condo, where, instead of manual labor, I spent the day enjoying hot water, flipping through cable channels, chatting with the security guards downstairs and surfing the Internet. I was a Kept Woman.

So in keeping with that spirit, when Oneyda got home from work she invited me out for dinner. “My friend works at the restaurant,” she explained. “It’s where I was thinking of getting you a job.” We took a cab back through the polished neighborhood. And we stepped out in front of (you guessed it)… Hooters, Guatemala City.

By this point, there was nothing that could seem unbelievable. We went inside and ate chicken wings and looked at autographed pictures of American celebrities, like David Spade. And Oneyda’s waitress friend assured me that if ever I wanted to return, she could get me a job. I told her I’d keep it in mind the next time I lost my wallet.

So that’s the story of how I went from sleeping on a pew and mopping floors in a church, to an all-inclusive stay in a GC condo with a meal served by chesty ladies in roller-skates. (It’s not all bad being an orphan). Surprisingly, the family has even invited me back for Christmas – though it’s possible it’s because they think I’ll otherwise be lined up on the “hungry” side of a soup kitchen.

* Minus my physical self. To that point, I recalled research (or perhaps some vague statistics I made up on the spot) showing that kidnapping/abduction victims are usually a) children of vulgarly wealthy people, or b) very small. The obvious conclusion: I’ll most likely not be kidnapped, neither in Guatemala City or anywhere else.

Back in the Saddle: A recap of the last four months

2006-10-05T16:42:00.000-05:00

A long list of bullet points with highlights from the past few months. (For greater accuracy, feel free to insert “it rained” at the end of each paragraph).

➢ After a wild stint in the jungle at Palenque, Anna and I spent our last days wandering around the Gulf Coast, through deceptively named towns like Paraiso (“Paradise”) and Villahermosa (“Pretty town”), searching for an idyllic beach setting that in fact does not exist on the Gulf Coast. Finally, we conceded that the grey cities and more-ferocious-than-usual speed bumps were dampening our spirits, and there was little choice but to go our separate ways – she back to Mexico City to catch her plane, and I to the Yucatan to ride some more.

➢ I arrived on the peninsula. A likeable German girl in Campeche wondered if she could catch a ride to Merida, an assumedly easy ride three hours to the northeast. En route, we detoured away from the main road to investigate a crazy underground cave (with a tropical oasis growing in its center), and emerged just in time for a monsoon. When we sloshed into the streets of Merida, it was to find the city transformed into a veritable Venice. The pipes were completely submerged, our luggage was dragging through the water, and the "waves" lapped over my seat in some streets (not an exaggeration – it is/was somewhat unclear how/why my motorcycle still runs.) We spent the night blow-drying passports, socks and most everything else in our luggage, and I vowed to warn future passengers about the wiles of the Rainy Season.

➢ High-end hammocks became a new obsession. I bought two out of the garage of a Mayan family who insisted that I stay the night at their house (in a hammock) to watch DVDs of local bullfighters. Another was purchased at a maximum-security prison, with a bewildered hitchhiker in tow. This is a funny story if you hear the whole thing.

➢ Marisa visited. We went to a free, all-day reggae concert on the beach where, with only a handful of Spanish at her disposal, Marisa took on the swarm of Rasta-fied Mexican men who lingered at our tent to woo her in their foreign tongue. She was a champ. We moved down the beach to Playa del Carmen and perfected the art of Caribbean hammocking.

➢ Jason visited – and perched his entire six feet, five inches on the miniature seat behind me. We camped on the beach in laid-back Tulum, a lazy walk to the turquoise ocean, and swam in crystal-clear cenotes down the road. A sand crab took over our tent, and giant palm branches fell on us in our hammocked exile. We drove through alternating bouts of hammering rain and blazing sun, with short pause for a Vogue photo shoot, to reach the ferry bound for paradisiacal Isla Holbox. We walked for miles on a sand bar chasing down a flock of flamingoes, skirting minefields of horseshoe crabs and a tragically dead sea turtle. We were invited to a quinceanera in the town square, and while I got free dance lessons from the locals, Jason journeyed to buy after-hours beer from a man in a black silk kimono with odd animal skins on his wall. The Reality Bites soundtrack played on repeat.

➢ I got to the end of Mexico and found Belize. The immigrations agent on the Belize side of the border looked at me for a long time and finally said, “Do you know where you are?” “Yes,” I said (and in my mind added, “Belize? Right? Is this a trick question?”). He handed my passport back with a slight grin. “Okay then, just checking. Enjoy your stay.”

➢ I took a “shortcut” from the road outside of Belize City that led me over several hours of partly submerged red dirt road, past grasslands speckled with solitary palms, and through rainforest-covered mountains where giant cohune palms towered forebodingly over the diminished track. When I eventually arrived in seaside Dangriga, the grey-haired owner of the guesthouse scooped a handful of red clay from under the fender and exclaimed (in his buoyant Belizean accent), “This must be from the Coastal Highway!” I paused from scraping the red mud off my jeans with a broken board. “That… is a highway?” He belly-laughed. “We may not have a lot in this country, but we’ve certainly got an imagination – and a sense of humor.” Well put.

➢ A handwritten “Rustic Camping” sign at mile 29 ½ of the Hummingbird Highway (on the way back from Dangriga) lured me down a dirt path ornamented with blossoming Birds-of-Paradise into an abandoned eco-community, manned by a lone 17-year-old named Patrick. “This is sort of like The Shining” I mused, as the dark rain clouds swelled overhead and silence was drowned out by the drone of insects, birds, frogs and an occasional unknown from the dense jungle wrapped around the lodge. We talked at length about Easy Rider, poisonous snakes, and the acid he once made from a flower named Angel Trumpet. By the end of the three rainy days, we were joined by the official caretakers – an American-Belizean couple – and four lost-ish American backpackers. Patrick turned 18. We feasted on homemade tortillas, beans, rice and sugar out of plastic fruit.

➢ Made it to the end of Belize (or to the side of, anyway) and found Guatemala. I crossed the border several dollars poorer after an “unofficial” Guatemalan border fee, and another for an obligatory fumigation of my bike. But my shame at being swindled dissipated as the dirt road into the country edged past glistening green fields catching the last light of a melting sun, teams of barefoot kids kicking around soccer balls, some running towards the road with hands waving excitedly at the foreign oddity passing by… Sigh.

➢ I went pre-dawn to the jungle-enshrouded, mist-covered ruins at Tikal. A wrong turn on an unmarked path put me in the middle of a huge camp of howler monkeys, bellowing out deafening guttural cries from the towering branches above. Once back on track, I joined the tourist pack in the climb to the top of Temple IV, from which point the entire jungle appeared like a luxurious, green carpet – from which two other lofty temples peaked out of the treetops. Amazing, really.

➢ I met up with Andy, formerly of Rustic Camping, to explore Guatemala. Over the course of some days, we rambled through dusty, pot-holed roads and across rickety bridges to waterfall-ish natural wonders. We rode down mountains at night with the engine off and felt like we were flying. We bought black market gasoline, and chatted with the friendly purveyors while they fixed the bike chain at no extra charge. Andy jumped on and off the back seat to recite our favorite, “Excuse me, we’re looking for…” plea at least a hundred times – only to receive the standard Guatemalan, “Straight ahead, then turn” response almost without fail. Throwing rocks in mud puddles became a really fun game.

➢ On an expedition alongside a mountainous cloud forest, hopeful to see what Lonely Planet called “one of Guatemala’s most scenic roads”, Andy and I ran into a muddy construction site closed off temporarily to everyone but those on two wheels. “What luck…” we triumphed between ourselves, and chugged on ahead through bulldozers and other machinery of the big yellow sort. After some time though, we met up with a new mud – a stickier, more slippery kind that seemed to disagree with my tires, the soles of my boots, and most anything designed with traction in mind. This new man-eating mud took the bike down… again, and again, and again… until finally the rear brake pedal punctured a hole through the oil tank. We silently watched oil bleed all over the gooey road, and knew that our driving was done... To make quite a long story short, we packed the bike in the back of an S10-size pickup (not at all easy to track down), the tailgate just barely clasping shut, and with three other passengers thrown in beside me, the bike and all of our luggage, we rode the wounded passenger back to Coban. “You won’t find parts for this anywhere in Guatemala,” mechanic Pablo told me. So I walked away from a very good friend, promising to return with parts from the States. Thus began the bike-less chapter of the trip…

➢ Enter Guatemalan chicken buses, named for – you guessed it – the baskets full of live, feathery birds people stuff into the overhead luggage racks of the converted BlueBird school buses. We crammed in with the chickens, the kids and the vendors selling popcorn, chewing gum, toothbrushes and special pens, and our Guatemala journey continued. We trekked up a volcano and stood right next to the oozing, red-hot lava for as long as we could before it seemed like our shoes would start to melt or our clothes catch on fire. We found a packed bar in Antigua and rooted for Italy during the World Cup final. We drank sick amounts of juice. And at some point, we completely understood George Thorogood.

➢ Andy returned to Xela to master Spanish and I went to Lago Atitlan (via three buses and a transfer to the back of a pick-up truck shared by – I counted -- 21 other people). The first night, I was befriended by a crazy, curly-haired Mexican who proposed we find a empty fishing boat to go out on the lake… Instead we found an occupied fishing boat, navigated by a kindly Mayan man wrapped in a plastic tarp. He invited me into the hull of a tiny canoe-sized vessel, tossing a few stray dead fish to the back to clear a space, and rowed out into the lake – a brilliant, rippling pool of mercury under the near-full moon. Lighting somewhere off in the distance flashed on and off to silhouette the volcanoes towering over the water. It was something incredible…

➢ On the other side of the lake, several days later, a motley-crew of travelers from England, Italy and Israel organized a group to rent dirt bikes for a tour of neighboring villages. Little did I know, cruisers and dirt bikes are very different creatures. A combination of rough road, a sharp turn and an overconfident driver left me with an impressive gash in my right knee, a banged up rental bike and a seriously damaged ego. I putted back to our budget hospedaje, where all-knowing Rudy (the owner’s brother) cleaned my wounds with vodka, covered them with the seeping gel from an aloe leaf, and assured me that we all have rough days. Miraculously, the monetary damages to cover a bent rim and broken brake handle amounted to a whopping US $3.

➢ I left Atitlan to explore the little-visited ruins on the western edge of the country. During this time, my status as a wallet-holder changed from “with” to “without”. See “The Great Guatemalan Wallet Caper” for entire story.

➢ I flew from Guatemala City back to the Midwest for the Elyssa’s wedding, with an unplanned 36-hour trip to New York added on to replace my driver’s license (Can’t cross international borders on a motorcycle without it). Thus it went: Guatemala City – Chicago – Michigan – Chicago – New York – Chicago – Guatemala City. Yeah… Lesson learned: Don’t lose things.

➢ With some help, I jumped a bus from Guatemala City to Coban to deliver my backpack full of bike parts. In an astonishing, this-would-never-happen-in-the-US act of heroism, Pablo and his team of giggly mechanics replaced the oil tank and seal, the chain, the chain cover, the air filter, the rear-view mirror, the license plate holder, the front headlight, the rear brake pads and the oil – all in less than a day. I was out of Coban by the evening, and made it to southern Guatemala that night, where I slept in my broken tent behind a gas station, with the permission of the owner's wife who was making kick balls out of cow stomachs.

➢ I crossed into El Salvador for a whirlwind tour of the small country. A helpful lawyer on the street in San Salvador arranged an unnecessary police escort to help me find the road out of the city, complete with flashing lights and no-stops at red traffic signals. I drove along the Pan-American Highway. I took a boat to relax on what I assumed was a populated beach for a day, and was dropped off on a peninsula where I had to cross through cow fields for 30 minutes until they met a row of palms and a totally deserted strip of sand on the open ocean. (Every local on the way there and back kept asking if I was looking for Kristy, their Peace Corps volunteer. They could not fathom of me being in their dusty, unpaved "village" – i.e., collection of several houses – just to go to the beach.) I stayed at the hostel of a giant she-man who terrified me and we made plans to go to Argentina together.

➢ From Cancun I flew to Seattle for Jo’s wedding. Originally, the plan was to return to Cancun to a job as a motorcycle tour guide, but with that opportunity coming loose at the seams, and my general disposition not being that of a chatty, amiable tourist wrangler, I decided to stay in Seattle to tackle the unruly bamboo choking Alison’s back yard. This led to some light work with the contractor who was building a new deck… First staining, then drilling, then sawing, and in the end I was working for days at a time on my own, building the deck. Sometime mid-September, I flew back to Cancun.

➢ The thing about motorcycling in Latin America on a large-ish cruiser is that sometimes (all the time) parts are hard to find. Tires are really hard to find, which is why I had to fly back from Seattle with one in hand… And as it turns out, checking in a tire at the airport has the potential to invite a good number of comic remarks… sometimes from a fun pair of brothers headed to The-Island-Whose-Name-We-Cannot-Mention. So perhaps it happened that when I arrived in Cancun, instead of starting the (still undesirable) job as a motorcycle tour guide, I went to a forbidden island. Perhaps. Perhaps you should also look at the pictures before I take them off the Internet…

➢ Once returned from TIWNWCM, I booked it out of Cancun, headed for Honduras. I'm currently still in Belize and can now start blogging in Real Time.

And then there were two.

2006-05-26T16:38:00.000-05:00

Call it what you will – be it fate or just plain chance – it's amazing how "right place at the right time" sometimes works out. Take, for instance, my recent traveling situation. Just as soon as I had ditched a good load of unwanted luggage in the great beach purge, I stumbled upon a lively Italian who happened to have the same vague idea of where she might be headed as I did – and who also happened to fit as snug as a puzzle piece into the empty space on the back of the bike. And just like that, one became two.

A few words about Anna. She sings, she dances, she laughs, she entertains. She’s taken a regular black motorcycle and given it the feel of a circus on wheels. She never complains or lectures about my sometimes-erratic in-city driving and cheers out loud from her perch on the back of the bike when we skim the sides of the vehicles we’re passing in between. Twice she has seared her leg on the exhaust pipe and both times has been a champ through the blistering, scabbing and subsequent scarring. She doesn’t speak any English and I don’t speak Italian, which means we communicate exclusively in Spanish; when there is a word neither of us knows, we mix our two native tongues and move on. And yet she always understands what I’m trying to say, even when no one else does. It’s incredible.

Between Anna and the motorcycle, there is never, ever a dull moment. To get an idea of what we've been living through this past month, a written portrait of the first two days together…

Right out of the starting blocks, heading out of Oaxaca City, we got lost. In Mexico, just as you’re really starting to enjoy the aide of the large green road signs that indicate in which direction is such-and-such city, inevitably the path they lead you down will fork and at this point the signs disappear (and are replaced instead by four men mulling around by the side of the road, two standing, one sitting, one leaning against a shovel, all staring like you’re an elephant on roller-skates). So as the odds would have it, half the time you get lost. Which is what happened. We took the wrong road and we got lost. And just our luck, it was a road through the town with Mexico’s most unfriendly speed bumps.

Here I stop for a short interlude on Mexican speed bumps. (I could write a whole chapter on this subject alone, but I’ll leave it at a paragraph). Every village, town and city in Mexico believes in speed control via speed bumps, which given their shape and frequency can turn a pleasant drive into a gladiator-style obstacle course worthy of a time slot on late-night cable TV. Some are sloped and gentle, others are a more rounded and severe, and some look like a tree trunk was felled in the middle of the road and covered with cement. It’s always unclear whether they’ve been put there by whoever is officially in charge of putting things in the road, or whether they’ve been put there by the locals who will sometimes stop you with a string stretched across the road to vend dried shrimp, sweet bread, peanuts, pork rinds with hot sauce, fresh coconut, popcorn or any other 5 peso foodstuff. At military checkpoints they use old rolled-out tires as stand-in speed bumps, and at construction sites they’re made of dirt. In theory, all should be marked with yellow paint and a sign a few hundred meters out; in reality, these warning signals are as rare as is winning something out of the claw machine. Thus you usually don’t see the speed bumps until you’re ten feet in front, at which point there isn’t much you can do but hop up on your foot pegs, hold on tight, and hope that today is another lucky day.

(Curiously, I noticed the other day that EVERY single bridge in Mexico – right down the twenty-foot, we’ll-put-something-here-to-cover-this-slight-dip-in-the-road bridge – is marked with a sign that denotes the bridge name. Clearly it is more important that I know when I’m crossing piddly Puente Mesa Verde than it is for me to know I’m about to take off into orbit over a speed bump).

It was the tree-trunk type that we encountered in our unintentional detour and no matter how slow or gently we went, there was no way past without scraping and thudding over top of each one. Just imagine: buh-BOOM… (times 16), followed by the pained groans of the two girls bouncing atop them. No sound could be more grating to the ears of a motorcycle owner (who might have to flip tortillas for 10 pesos an hour if something drastic should happen to her sole mode of transportation). It’s certain that another layer was scraped off the already-battered underside of the bike (yet still it runs like a pro… this is love).

Once back on track, we sped through the world capital of mezcal and the surrounding valleys where huge fields were dug into the mountainside and lined with vertical rows of blue agave plants – a stunning color contrast against adjacent fields of deep red dirt and minty green rock formations. The further we went the closer they neared the road until we were flanked on both sides by giant agaves, sun shining overhead and airy clouds floating through a brilliant blue sky. (These are the times you could just die).

Then rather abruptly and unexpectedly the agave disappeared and the steep walls around us morphed into a fantastic cactus forest, where an infinity of spiny cacti arms reached straight up towards the sky (photo at left). And just as suddenly, after a few short curves, they were no more. Let’s turn around and look we said, fascinated by this aberration. So we headed back, and for lack of anything resembling a shoulder on the road (not only here, but in all of Mexico), I headed for a small patch of dirt just off a bend… But the gravel was looser and deeper then expected and before I could devise an exit strategy it bit into my front tire, twisting it unsympathetically towards the ground. And WOOSH, down we went – the bike, the two of us and a whole bunch of bungee-tied luggage, skidding straight into the dirt.

For me, this sort of low-speed “drop” (as is termed in the motorcycle world – it’s a much friendlier word than “crash”) is a common enough occurrence. Hardly a month goes by when I am not stuck in some off-road terrain cursing my lack of judgment and wiping off my skinned elbows, with a growling 500+ pound machine at my feet. For a first-timer, though, I imagined it could be a distressing situation. But when I hastily twisted the half of my body not wedged under the bike back towards Anna, she was face-up in the dirt with a little blood on her arm and was shaking not with tears or panic, but with laughter (I love this girl). She asked if I’d ever seen Motorcycle Diaries. And there we were. Luggage sprawled everywhere, somewhere in the middle of a cactus forest, somewhere in the middle of the mountains, somewhere in the middle of Mexico. (Photo at right: after the fall)

This is how we went along, in happy disarray. When we felt the first drops of rain, we charged ahead like the fearless road divas we were, throwing fists up into the air and crying out “Vaminos! Vaminos!” And then when a gentle sprinkle turned without warning into a tumultuous downpour and our clothes were pasted to our bodies and the road in front of us was a dark grey blur and my boots were filling up with water and behind me Anna was crouched down screaming, “It hurts!” (And it does – it’s like the bug thing where it feels like someone is chucking tiny pebbles at you, except it’s a whole lot worse), well then we chugged slowly and half-blindly back to the nearest village like the waterlogged buffoons we were. We unloaded our soggy luggage and passed the time with tostadas and a change of clothes under a roofed patio restaurant. A frosty worker eyed us suspiciously as she swept water off the cement floor with a broom. But it didn’t matter. We were out of the rain.

That night, further down the road, we were taken in by a hospitable restaurant-owner who let us sleep in the giant nylon hammocks hanging from a breezy palapa. Sealy-Posturepedic, please exit the dance floor. Sleep has never been so sweet.

When we woke up the next morning it was already hot, and by the time we set off it was steaming. The drive this day was nowhere near as scenic and our enthusiasm levels were slightly diminished after a few hours of forging ahead through flat plains. Looking back the day seems nothing more than a big tired jumble of dust and heat and wind and semis.

Sometime that afternoon we pulled into a Pemex station (all gas stations are government owned, and thus are called “Pemex” – short for Petroleum Mexico, I’d guess) and for the first time in all of Mexico encountered a band of foreign motorcyclists… By this hour were something of a sight. Practically tumbling off the bike, we poked fingers on our arms to see how badly we were burnt. We poured water out of an old Coke bottle onto a dirty rag and used the rearview mirrors to wipe the grime off our faces. Our luggage was wrapped with a spider web of bungee cords, with flip-flops and towels stuck under the tightened straps and crushed plastic bottles shoved into crevices between bags. Our eyes were bloodshot under our plastic Chinatown sunglasses and our hair was greasy under our helmets. Had this been a cartoon, we would have been enshrouded in our own cloud of dust (a.k.a., the Pigpen effect). We may as well have tied a string of tin cans to the rear fender.

Now pan out on us, pan in on them. First, they were clean. Really clean. Fresh out of the shower clean... I don’t know everything about motorcycles, but I can tell you that their most basic feature is that they’re all open air. Which would seem to mean that no matter how fancy or well designed, all are going to be equally vulnerable to dirty roads, black exhaust smoke and mixed debris thrown off the back of semis. But these five somehow defied the basic laws of Mexican motorcycling. Even their bikes and gear looked clean. Their luggage – none the least bit overstuffed – was situated primly on luggage racks and in saddlebags. When they talked to us, they sucked water out of tubes attached to their Camelback packs as if to say, yes, we’re well hydrated too. They asked proper questions about mileage and destination and engine size and such. One inquired about “the wind” on the other side of the mountains. Yeah, sure, it had been windy, but I didn’t realize this was an official weather condition… how do you learn about things like this? Had they been part of our cartoon, they would have all had huge, brilliantly white smiles with a dimple in each chin, and sparkles radiating from their squeaky-clean bikes.

The difference between them and us: they were well informed, well equipped and well prepared. We weren’t sure of where we were, were only vaguely sure of where we were going, and it’s questionable whether we ever know what we’re doing. And yet, we’re having the times of our lives. In one of his books, Paul Theroux briefly mentions how the tools of the information age have robbed the traveler of the joy of discovery. Even with guidebooks in hand, I’m certain that the two of us have been robbed of nothing in this grand heist.

(A few days after this gas station encounter, running on the last fumes of the reserve tank, we would be forced to stop in a mountain village clogged with pick up trucks and buses and buy 10 liters of gas from a woman selling it on the sidewalk under an umbrella in front of an open-faced shop with deep red beef flanks hanging from a wooden support beam. She would pour it into the motorcycle for us using a funnel made out of the top of a Coke bottle. I would remember at this moment our fellow motorcyclists and wonder if they too were prone to such episodes.)

So this is life with Anna and the motorcycle. We listen to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins and Italian rock ballads. I hear her Spanish as correct and frequently ask Mexican citizens if they’re speaking with an accent. She learned how to drive the motorcycle, and when she once fell over with it in a tricky mud puddle in a campground entryway, she got right back on and kept driving. We play with poi and devil-sticks whenever there is an open plaza and look like a band of orphaned gypsies. When we’re on the bike together, people lean out of the window and take pictures of us with their camera phones. This is fun. I am happy beyond words that we found each other.

We are Italian-American, with a Spanish accent.

**In re-reading this, I realized there might be some concern over the well-being of both Anna and the bike. Rest assured, both are in good condition.**

Back to the beach, back to the basics.

2006-04-20T09:38:00.000-05:00

I love the mountains. I do. I love mountains and colonial cities and volcanoes (theoretically), but having been raised in, on and around water, I go a little crazy if I’m landlocked for too long. After a lengthy trek through the hinterlands, I was starting to feel like the goldfish who quit the bowl (and found himself belly-up on the kitchen floor. Even the motorcycle looked like it could use a good drink from the stream). So a few weeks ago I said goodbye to inland Mexico and followed the free highway back to the coast.

There’s something that changes inside you when you go to the ocean… Similarly, there’s something that changes inside you when you realize you’ve been traveling for ten months. I don’t know which it was exactly, but as soon as I was in Playa Azul breathing salt air and dumping sand out of my boots again I had an overwhelming Buddhist zen-like urge for everything around me to be very simple. With the bike, I’m often so entranced by the sun and the sky and the wind and the ground passing under me, that when I snap out of this spell, it’s hard to remember why it is I need… well… anything, other than maybe a few clothes and some gas money.

So in one of these instants I decided to dump half my luggage – out went chain lube, bike cleaner, rain gear, most of the medicine kit, books, vitamins, plastic silverware, clothes, an unused repair manual, a hat, some wrenches too small to be practical and a random pair of cooking tongs. (Some might call such a massive discharge foolish – “You’ll be sorry,” they say, “when you find yourself in a rut without any gear.” Might I remind these skeptics that Mexico is not Botswana. Anything I need I can buy in a store.) If you’ve never thrown out a whole bunch of stuff in a half-delusional whim, you’ve missed out on one of the finer pleasures in life.

I replaced 30 pounds of luggage with a new bikini and a pair of flip-flops and found myself a space under an oceanfront palapa where I parked my tent for a few days (cost: $2.00 per night). I meandered in this fashion along the coast, passing through Playa Azul, Zihuatanejo, Pie de la Cuesta and Pinotepa National. A newfound proficiency in Spanish opened the door to a whole new world of colorful conversation, and at night I would often find myself sitting across from a new Mexican friend animatedly recounting the story of his life. I heard it all, from the tragic (alcoholism, jail, murders, lost children, drug overdoses) to the… actually, for a while there it was mostly tragic – but it kept me hanging off the edge of my seat. (Some interesting stuff concerning local culture and history always made it into the mix too).

One day on the coastal route, I noticed my hands were suddenly covered with strange, solar-induced bumps… to remedy this lizard-skin malady (no amount of SPF seemed to work, and my riding gloves were long ago lost), I started wrapping them in shards of an old t-shirt that had been torn and torn again and used as a towel, a head wrap, a motorcycle chain cleaning cloth, and most recently emergency clean-up relief when I dumped a bottle of fuchsia nail polish. (It’s that old anomaly – no matter with what packaged products and supplies I prepare myself, a shredded t-shirt is my most revered possession… which is why I no longer have packaged products, only scraps). I was able to creatively wrap to conceal the nail polish on one rag, but the other was hopelessly covered. So with my grease-stained, faux blood-tainted rags, I looked like some sort of rough rider who just stepped out of a bar fight (with a George Thorogood song playing in the background). The boldest of military checkpoint inspectors and gas station attendants would sometimes ask what happened to my hands. “Nothing,” I’d reply. Then I’d smile sweetly, bat my eyelashes, and drive away. (My hands have since recovered).

It would be silly to try and describe entire trek along the coast. Suffice it to say that one fine day I arrived in Puerto Escondido. There are places where nature enchants you and there are places where the people enchant you, and then there are places where some otherworldly force is at work and it grabs hold of you and won’t let go … Puerto Escondido is all of this. Any real surfer from any country will tell you he/she has heard of Puerto, but it seems the town itself has no idea it’s been discovered by the entire world – as if its only ambition is to be like your friend’s basement in high school. Except that this time instead of ungainly teenagers, Boone’s Farm and bowling trophies, you’ve got charismatic travelers, eye-catching surfers, Mexican beer and miles of big, beautiful beach.

On the first day, I happened upon a place called Surf Hostel Zicatela. A dark cement stairwell next to a cinema-slash-café-slash-surfboard rental shop led to an uninviting black door where a black iron bell (an actual bell, like one you clang) was the only means of entry. From this shady entryway, I stepped across some sort of magic threshold (like when Dorothy lands and discovers Technicolor) into an open-air balcony where a thatched roof was draped over a beehive of board shorts, bikini tops and flip-flops. Sun-streaked dreadlocks and ponytails fell loosely down browned backs; old surfboards were crammed into corners and hammocks of various colors and sizes were weighted down with relaxed, outstretched bodies. Some people stood cooking cheap noodles on the rusted camping stove; others dabbled nonchalantly with the music on the portable stereo. The single dorm room was crammed with maybe 25 sets of bunked beds with flimsy foam cushions in the place of mattresses, and backpacks, sleeping bags and drying towels were thrown everywhere. In short, this was a traveler’s paradise.

This was also a place that would later be described by one of its longer-term residents as a “crazy house”. And that it was. You could not dream up a nuttier cast of characters. There was “El Flaco”, a well-meaning, rail-thin Mexican I only once saw wearing shoes and who one night performed some sort of tribal hand-reading on me (then recoiled in horror, and went to smoke a cigarette without much explanation). There was the animated Sebastian from Argentina who was always belting out some Spanish tune and making jewelry from seeds he trekked five days through the rainforest to collect (he also told a sidesplitting story of his wine-drinking pet birds named Doobie and Pepe, but it’s probably only funny if you were there). There was a band of four – an Austrian, a Canadian, a Mexican and an enormously tall Swede – who would play poker at the old wooden table in the middle of the room until all hours of the morning and the Austrian would claim he sold his girlfriend for a 20 peso buy-in. And there was Lou, a good-hearted yet totally bizarre character who spoke a strange hybrid of Spanish and British English – neither of which were totally intelligible. One morning when I was heading out to surf he jostled awake and tiredly asked me, “Where do you live?” He had already asked me where I was from the night before.

“New York”.
“Yes, yes, I know, but where do you live now?”
“Now? I’m just traveling, so I stay in different places…”
“Yes, right, but at this very moment, where do you live?”
“Umm… at this hostel?”
“Yes yes, but I mean, where is this hostel?”
“…Puerto Escondido?”
“Ah, yes, right, right, splendid.”

Then fell back to sleep, spread eagle on his foam mattress. I could go on for pages with stories like these. But I’ll move on…

Within my first few hours in Puerto Escondido, I’d found one of the red-shorted lifeguards to teach me how to surf. The next morning as the sky was just starting to color, I piled onto a four-wheeler with three lifeguards and a surfboard and we sped a few kilometers down the beach to where the morning haze met a rocky outcropping. Surfers and fishermen exchanged muted greetings, some sorted out their nets and others waxed boards, and some stood in silent veneration of the rolling waves and foaming waters at their feet. It felt like I’d just been let in on a big secret (and as payment surrendered another piece of sanity to the madness of the sea... sanity is in ever-diminishing supply on this trip).

Learning how to surf is like learning how to ski or to ride a motorcycle – the second you stand up and are carried over top of the water, you start mentally re-working your life plans. With my surf instructor (Jorge), we paddled out and practiced sitting on the board, laying on the board, rolling over the waves, and waiting waiting waiting for the just the right moment… Jorge’s favorite English phrase was “Take it easy, take it easy,” which he would use so often you would have thought I was fighting my way out of a straight jacket. Sometimes when we were in the wrong spot at the wrong time, he would swipe me off the board and under the rolling wave, and then I’d feel myself dragged beach-ward by the strap attached to my ankle. (It gives you a whole new respect for the ocean). Then I’d reconnect with the board and paddle back out, and once I was back on the board I’d hear, “Take it easy, take it easy”. It was funny, amazing, exhilarating. And I did it, I surfed. I found my waves and I surfed.

So the ecstasy of Puerto Escondido behind, I've now headed back inland and am traveling with only two very modest saddle-bags (my compacted leather jacket fills ¼ of the space), a tent, a sleeping bag, and my camera equipment (and an Italian girl named Anna, with whom my only shared language is Spanish… but more on that later). The lone remainders of my once smartly-assembled riding wardrobe are a pair of dirty jeans, a trusted collection of thinning t-shirts, and my cowboy boots. I’ve become an expert at washing clothes in public restrooms and my hair looks like I was raised by a pack of sun-loving wolves.

And with this simplicity, I’ve found some sort of basic, perfect happiness. Things are as they should be.

A horse I didn't take and a volcano I didn't find

2006-04-13T12:19:00.000-05:00

Lately, I've come upon this a lot. People who take one look at me and think, “We want your money and will use your vulnerability as a foreigner to subtly lie and manipulate you into giving it to us.” While I’m not opposed to using this genre of methodology on hapless victims like my brothers (for character definition, see “I’m killing things with my face”, footnote section), I do not care to be the target of it. In fact, I hate being the target of it. It’s like after you get your hair cut, and you’re sitting in the chair astounded at the transformation between the haggled head of hair from an hour ago and the sleek figure in the mirror now, and in this moment of weakness the stylist brings out his/her most sophisticated hair jargon and mixes it with subtle guilt-driving mechanisms – dry hair and broken ends don’t just happen on their own, after all – to make you feel as if the trio of brilliantly expensive conditioning and styling products he/she is suggesting are not just an option but the only option if you ever hope to reveal your hair publicly again. No, I do not care at all for the manipulation over-sell.

So a week ago when I exited the highway and turned into dusty Anguahan, the village nearest to the Volcán Paricutín I’d set out early to climb, I was mildly put off by the cluster of men who, some standing and a few slumped against the wooden posts of a droopy horse-corral, took one look at the girl with a blonde ponytail riding through and swarmed, trying aggressively to coerce me into abandoning my motorcycle right there and renting a horse for the trek to the volcano. Little did they know this easy target was well-equipped; I had a page – the page – torn from my guidebook directing a route through Anguahan, past a giant satellite dish and down to a dirt parking lot where a volcano foot trail began. So not only was I instinctively inclined to ignore these offers, but I had a double-sided piece of fact-checked wisdom telling me that the horses were not necessary (and that the trail they led you on was “longer…and less interesting” than if you went by foot). I signaled a polite ‘no thank you’ and continued.

But ‘mildly put-off’ quickly escalated into ‘highly annoyed’ when one of these very determined horsemen galloped alongside my motorcycle through very narrow dirt streets to the town center, shouting out an unconvincing sales pitch in fragmented English, telling me I wouldn’t even be able to get to the trailhead on the bike. (This, I knew, was untrue). He was riding just enough ahead of me to kick up a cloud of dust so finally I stopped and explained in my best Spanish that as a matter of fact I did not require a horse, I would be driving to the trailhead and then walking to the volcano, and that I didn’t even like horses (true – I was an anomaly as a child growing up in a 4-H town), so thank you and goodbye. He looked back at me as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said, and in English replied, “You can’t get there with a moto,” and trotted off.

So what happened next... I found the dirt lot (entirely accessible by motorcycle), I found a trail, but in 8 hours of searching I did not ever find the volcano. Yes, it sounds strange, like what? Someone threw an enormous camouflage tarp over it? How can you not find a volcano? I don’t know. I just know that I didn’t find it.

Ok, kind of I do know. I went the wrong way… more than once. Constantly, actually.

I started on the horse trail instead of the foot trail (I thought there were the same for the first few kilometers – they weren’t). This wound through a pine forest full of dead ends and loops and confusing detours, so after twice backtracking, and scowling over the part of my page that suggested “a compass might be helpful”, I turned to my woodsman intuitions and started seeking out traces of horse droppings like they were clues from Hansel & Gretel’s basket. Not as easy as you might think – these horses were not well fed. But, hunched and slow-moving, I managed to find my way out of the pines…

The problem then was that in the pine forest there were exotic plants and flowers and other aesthetically pleasing vegetation to entertain my senses, but once outside it was just kind of, well, dull. So I put my country girl hat on, jumped an easy fence, and started off on what I was sure was a more exciting shortcut (and what was really just a divergence from that path that wasn’t even the right path to begin with). This is not much worth going into… suffice to say there is a part of me that thinks that having grown up surrounded by trees and lakes and fields and things, that I can wander off “into nature” anywhere in the world and will eventually drift back into something familiar. Not true. Mr. Bowen’s property lines do not extend this far south. There was some slogging through ashy fields and climbing over lava rock and other dirt-filled activity. Again, not worth going into.

Instead, here we pause for the story of the volcano (because it’s really quite amazing). In 1943, a local farmer was out tending his crops when (according to my page) “the ground began to shake and swell and spurt steam, sparks and hot ash”. What’s funny is that instead of, oh, I don’t know, going to tell someone about it, he tried to cover it up… which obviously didn’t work. Over the next year the volcano grew up out of nowhere to 410 meters (2,800 meters by 1952) and completely covered two nearby villages with its slow but persistent trickle of lava. (Imagine being able to set up a lawn chair and actually watch molten lava destroy your home). No one was hurt, but the towns were clearly destroyed – save for a single church tower belonging to the village of St. Juan. It’s still there today, and this is what I emerged from my “shortcut” to find.

The scene here is really something staggering. Pitch-black rock spread in jagged waves for miles, with a single church tower poking up out of it all (photo at top of page). There was a family from Spain (who’d come on horse) trudging up and down the rocks in deck shoes, but once they’d tired, I had the place to myself. What I found most incredible in wandering around it all is that some devout and seriously motivated locals make the journey to the crumbled remains of the church alter to keep it fresh with flowers and other offerings (or are they called sacrifices? This sound gory. I’m not Catholic. I don’t know the lingo). Now these are people who believe.

I knew that from the church you could get to the volcano (albeit in a slightly backwards way), so I asked a very kindly old man (on a horse, leading two women, each one on a horse) which direction to head out. This turned into a complicated conversation that came to include the use of sticks (for lack of the word “crossroads” in Spanish) and a finger-traced map of the area drawn out on the dusty ground. I could hardly understand a word of his thick, unrecognized accent, but the hieroglyphs I got. Many thanks were extended, and I departed.

I walked for hours along the drawn-in-the-dirt path without seeing another walker (or horse), past roadside alters to the Virgin Guadalupe and goats wandering from who knows where (to who knows where). Twice, a truck passed (despite prior claims by numerous sources that the trail was totally “unreachable” by vehicle): the first time it was going in the opposite direction, and the second time I was aimlessly climbing in the rocks (trying to keep myself entertained after hours of solitude) and couldn’t scramble back quickly enough to hail a ride or even to ask if I was on the right trail. So I continued walking past an endless expanse of black and weaving between small mountains to a destination whose existence I could neither see nor verbally confirm. Finally, there was a sign in the distance…

Volcan ⇑ (2 horas)
Geologico ==> (1 km.)

This was unbelievable. (Two more hours??!) I looked at the time on my camera (for lack of a watch). It was 3:30. Already I’d been walking for 6 hours, which was far outside of anything the page predicted. Even if I made it to the volcano by 5:30, it would be, according to the page, another 3 ½ hours to get back. Which meant that even if I beat all time estimates, I would still be in a race to make it back by dark. Geologico, whatever it was, was only a short kilometer away. And its path seemed to be heading towards what my highly keen sense of direction told me was town.

So while disappointed about having to give up on the volcano, I was delighted with having a new important-sounding destination that was unknown even to the infinite wisdom of the page. The new path was lovely, tra-dee-la, wildflowers flanking me on both sides and birds chirping and nice smells and all those other things that make up pleasant postcard moments. And them WHAM! The record screeched to a halt. I turned a curve to find an enormous metal gate with serious barbed wire extending from it on either side (the gate closed, ironically, with a heavy padlock inscribed “American Lock”). Why, WHY put up a sign for an ambiguous geological attraction when it is barred from entry by a gate suggesting deranged captives or a nuclear reactor explosion. NO! I would not be denied two sights in one day (plus, this seemed like it was the only way back before dark). So I mulled a bit, kicked some dirt, fumed over the thought of the horse-guided folks sipping on margaritas by now, and pulled that country girl hat back out of my sack… there was a tree right next to the gate with a branch low enough on my side to where I could climb up onto it. From there I snaked my way onto a slightly higher one on the opposite side, crossing into the “other side of the fence” airspace, then worked my way down until I was hanging by my hands and able to drop the short foot or two back to the ground (it was nowhere near this graceful, and I actually sat on the tree branch for a few minutes wondering how long it might take for someone to happen by with a key to the gate and/or a ladder).

From here it was more postcard-perfect scenery (taken this time with a drop of caution; I was, after all, on the other side), but it kind of just seemed to keep going… and going… Where was this Geologico? (What was this Geologico, for that matter?) I walked double or triple the promised one kilometer and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Finally, I threw my hands up. This place was nothing but empty promises. I was just about to… well, actually, I don’t know what I was about to do, I didn’t have much of a plan or many options, now being trapped inside quite a lot of barbed wire… but at a good moment, I came around a bend to find two men sitting under a tree – a peach tree! – with a transistor radio spitting out some mix of static and salsa music behind them. I could have kissed them, I was so happy to see other humans! “Anguahan?” they repeated after me (I was finished with Geologico), “Oh yeah, it’s only another kilometer down this path.” Ah! Hoooome freeee. (But why are you looking at me like that… Oh, right, I’m an out-of-bounds American who has infiltrated your security gate and is now likely trespassing on your property. Right.)

I stood for a few moments to offer what I could in the way of Spanish conversation, and they finished by very graciously (considering the circumstances, and my Spanish) handing me peaches fresh off the branch. Thus I continued through the rest of the overgrown grove with the bounce back in my step. There was, of course, another huge fence at the end of the path, but a dog or some other claustrophobic animal had come before me and conveniently dug his way under the fence, so I slipped out that way.

So to finish this long story, I made it back to my bike (whose tires had not been slashed by angry, dejected horseman) and eventually back to my dumpy hotel whose grimy surrounds I was perfectly outfitted for in my veil of dirt and ash. When I finally put the bike to rest for the night, my parking-attendant friend looked me up and down and with a peculiar expression on his face and asked “Where did you go today?” (Followed in his eyes with, “To wrestle with pigs? To volunteer at the garbage heap?”)

“To the volcano.”
“Really!? By yourself!?”
“Yes…”
“Did you get a horse?”
“No.”
“You didn’t!? Did you get to the volcano?”
(Short pause to consider a pride-preserving white lie).
“No.”
“Did you walk?!”
(Ah, stop making those exclamatory questions! Can’t you see I don’t want to talk about it…)
“Yes”.
“Oh, you can’t walk, you must rent a horse.”

No. You can walk. You don’t have to rent a horse. That’s just a manipulative sales pitch. (And okay, if you do, why didn’t someone make that clearer on this PAGE IN MY GUIDEBOOOK?) It’s just that I… well… it didn’t work out this time.

A few days later I sitting on the beach and a horseman appeared to ask if I wanted a ride down the beach. No thank you. I’m fine just where I am.

Guanajuato to Uruapan - or - Paradise to Hell

2006-04-05T13:13:00.000-05:00

A not-so-quick recap of the points on the map I've hit in the past five days...

Guanajuato
Guanajuato is Mexico’s most fanciful, imaginative creation – it’s like a real-life trip down the rabbit hole. Tunnels carved out of solid rock lead into a city where colorful houses stacked on one another crawl up the mountains, and the crooked, narrow streets that wind between them are microcosms of lively characters and daily routines: in the paths that surround Plaza Baratillo (where I stayed), old crotchety women vend bright flowers out of plastic buckets just a few steps from the three “gordita sisters” (as named by an American friend) – one to cook, one to stuff and one to collect the money – who dominate the food-cart market and will send you away hungry if you arrive too late. Inside a nearby storefront is Guanajuato’s first and only sex shop, opening their doors after the sun goes down to reveal a confused mix of hemp/Rastafarian wares and adult-only playthings, and across the plaza is Café Zilch where American students pair with Mexican locals for acoustic guitar duets – sometimes singing out-of-place Beatles tunes and other times originals about black cats and love. Wander through the dense trees and sidewalk tables of the central garden and you’re bound to run into a crazy curly-haired teenager who roams town banging on a cowbell and screams “Photo!” whenever he sees you, then jumps onto something or dangles off a ledge for a quick pic. (at night he serves up drinks at the dim, artsy hangout, Barfly). Church bells (along with roosters and dogs) don’t ever rest. Spanish teachers teach by way of immersion, escorting lucky groups to shady, all-night salsa clubs. You meet other Americans who will hitchhike with you in the back of a rickety truck to the seafood tents at a nearby lake, and others who will challenge any slew of locals to a game of pool. Guanajuato is Utopia. The sun always shines.

(So much happened in here that to throw it in with these others and skip the details it deserves is to do it a serious injustice, but for the sake of time, we must go on…)

Next I drove two hours east of Guanajuato to…

San Miguel de Allende
In San Miguel, German DJs manage trendy jewelry boutiques (with streamlined turntables dangling at waist-height from the ceiling) and hip hostelers drag on Mexican-branded cigarettes and talk about the silversmith classes they’re taking. A man from Italy, the self-appointed “city guide” who speaks five languages, roams the town with news of the latest gallery openings and live music and adds (with a business card), “My profession is in real estate”. Sushi and expensive coffee and Middle Eastern fare are readily available in high-design restaurants alongside hoards of “Mexican” eateries with fountains, tropical plants, waiters who speak English and baskets of bread in the place of tortillas. The guidebook claims “Locals are especially fond of fireworks…” and sure enough, I was jolted awake at 5 a.m. on Sunday to the sound of what at first thought was a gang riot but turned out instead to be that of super-powered firecrackers… ending in just enough time for the church bells to start ringing (at least an hour later). Some years ago the city was named one of the top twenty places in the world to retire and it definitely wasn’t kept a secret: San Miguel feels like SoHo taken over by the AARP folks who never cash their social security checks.

(Admittedly, however out-of-place and vulgar the foreign capital here, the rich, artsy feel was like a hot bath after a long day. Indulgence, if only for 24 hours.)

Crossing over to the state of Michoacan, 200 miles southwest of San Miguel, I found…

Pátzcuaro
The rough story of this town, as I understand it, is that a resourceful priest came to Patzcuaro centuries ago when it was inhabited by the Purepecha people and taught them all sorts of “crafts” to reduce eventual dependence on the spreading Spanish empire. Craftwork must have seemed rosier than field labor, because they’re still mad about crafts today. The small red-roofed town has a few interesting plazas where sticky-faced kids holding melting ice cream crowd around Purepecha dancers in ceremonial mask and costume, and women selling enchiladas try to entice you into a spots at their plastic-covered picnic tables with promises of “free drinks!” (pointing to the grape and orange Fanta at the middle of the table). Once the towns sights are exhausted, it’s off to nearby Lake Patzcuaro. This is not a trip made in search of jet skis and parasailing; though the lake is enormous, it’s been a repository for untreated sewage long enough to move the whitefish business out of nature and into hatcheries (and to make squeamish tourists cringe when a local boy jumps in for a swim). The tiny villages surrounding the lake each boast a trademark craft: lacquered goods, corn cane figures, copperware, stone statues, etc. When I went to see the home of “Mexico’s most famous mask makers”, I expected that the masks would be on prominent display, like in the rest of the towns… Not the case. Locations of the mask makers are marked with small signs, and you have to knock on their door, enter through their courtyard and make yourself a guest in their home to have a look at the clay creations depicting kings, snake-faced men, Eskimos, and yes, even Shrek. (The flaw in this knock-and-enter system is that it’s easy to mistake doorways. Luckily, residents are kind, even when you interrupt their cooking.)

There’s an cone-shaped island – Janizito – in the middle of the lake that is the place for Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations, but to visit in the off-season, it appears to be not much more than steep walkways filled with cheap knick-knacks and men making butterfly nets. Crowning the top of the island is an odd mosaic-statue of revolutionary hero Jose Morelos thrusting his fist into the sky – odd yes, but somehow wonderful.

Thirty miles further south…

Uruapan
Uruapan is a dump. The guidebook’s description as it being “… a very traditional ‘Mexican’ city retaining some colonial ambience”, is like calling Gary, Indiana “a waterfront town with real estate potential”. This city is a whole lot of dingy billboards hanging over crammed storefronts selling plastic shoes and hoochie women’s clothing. In my hotel room, the windows are cracked and don’t shut all the way; the toilet is missing its seat and the back lid is broken in half; the one light in the room casts an orange-ish, mind-of-a-serial-killer tint over the dingy floor; and a desk with three legs leans precariously in the corner. Also, just outside my door is a rock on a pedestal. It's not a pretty, sparkly rock or one of those semi-translucent ones that people put lights under. It's just a plain, grey rock. And it's on a pedestal. (I am only paying $10 a night for this place). To make matters worse, the people are about as sunny as the grit on their streets. The night shift manager at the hotel will not feed my knowledge of the area nor further my Spanish with my favorite game, “Ask the front desk”, because he is much too busy IMing someone a lot of hearts and smiley faces.

The odd thing about this charmless place is that is has beautiful “surrounding attractions” – a volcano, waterfalls, national park (see picture) – so I’ve been using it as a homebase for exploring anything NOT in the city. Tomorrow I leave Uruapan for Playa Azul, which, after here will doubtless feel like paradise regained.

(Just as an added item of interest, I was pulled over here – or waved over rather by two cops standing on the corner – for going the wrong way on a one way street [ironically, because I’ve gone the wrong way on a one-way in Mexico many times on purpose and never had more than a finger shaken at me, but this time it was totally on accident], and when I went along with the ticket they were giving me and asked when I could pay it at the station, the possibility of cash in their pockets disappeared and they let me off. A useful thing to learn about Mexico – don’t feed the crooked.)

Up next: The story of how I lost a volcano.

Some business.

2006-04-04T20:05:00.000-05:00

1) First, I don’t know how to say it without sounding like a sentimental schmuck, but a million thank yous to everyone who has commented, emailed or sent along general encouragement. What a surprise to find that my ramblings have a home on the net (and in your hearts, aww). Your support has kept me firm in the idea of selling this trip as a book. And money = more miles = more blogs. So thank you.

2) Some of you have emailed me to ask if I can tell you when a new posting is up. I can only guess that this is because you tire of looking at the same thing for weeks on end and would rather use your internet navigation time to read non-neglected blogs. So yes, if you want to be notified when a new post goes up, send an email, subject line “Tell Me”, to tracy.motz@gmail.com.

3) I’ve finally uploaded some pictures to Flickr. You can view them at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/talkingwithstrangers/. Be forewarned, they’re of the generic, mom-pleasing sort and will not be interesting to most. They’re not interesting to me, and I took them. (Peter Barnes, do not look, they will waste your life.)

I kill things with my face.

2006-03-24T04:13:00.000-06:00

It's true. Every day, I kill things with my face. And when I say kill, I mean massacre. (My brothers* would here insert a cheap quip about this having gone on for years. Grow up you two). It’s not just a friendly shot in the foot that results in a random, tragic death from loss of blood or a shock-induced heart attack. No, these bodies, once I’m done with them, are mutilated beyond any scope of recognition. It’s gruesome. It’s gory. It happens by the dozens, sometimes the hundreds. But it’s my reality.

I kill bugs. With my face.

If you’ve ever driven or ridden on a motorcycle, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine. Just as we humans take for granted our existence as the only life-force in the universe, so do we take for granted our existence as the only life-force on the open road. I’m here to proclaim, We are not alone. Bugs are everywhere. (Except where I’ve been. There they’re all dead because I kill them with my face).

These bugs… You can’t avoid them. Can’t swerve out of their way. Can’t negotiate with them. There are days when I can actually see them coming at me, and I’m certain that they’re some sort of arthropod freedom fighters who aren’t just randomly colliding with a high-speed vehicle but are putting themselves in the line of fire for the sake of martyrdom. Stop it bugs! You’ll never win. And you’re interfering with my driving.

First, there’s the pain factor. If the killing is of anything over the size of a common housefly and it takes place on the surface of your skin and not your helmet**, it is PAINful. You’d be surprised. It’s like someone’s hurling tiny stones at you at 60+ mph. Most of the time I scream on impact because, well, a) it hurts and b) I can. (No one is going to tell me to be quiet. Other times I just scream without having killed anything. See b.)

If there isn’t a pain indicator, it’s usually worse. Several different times I’ve pulled up to a small-town gas station, peeled off my helmet and strode inside, only to find that no one will make direct eye contact with me except the bewildered child who strains his neck in amazing ways to holds his stare on me regardless of where in the store his mother drags him. This is when I know two things have happened: 1) I have tiny gnats stuck all around my mouth and lips, and occasionally plastered in between my teeth. (They don’t stick to my cheeks or forehead – only my mouth which makes it look like I’ve just been mowing -- pronounced maow-ing, as in “to mow”, to chow down – on a colony of dead bugs). And 2) My helmet has deposited a line of dirt between my eyebrows, which perfectly imitates a uni-brow. By this point, it’s no use trying to wipe any of it off – the dirt on my hands will be just as bad all over my face as the bugs. So, much of my time is spent in costume as some sort of demented, bug-eating Frida Kahlo. (It’s glamorous, the biking life).

If they’re not collecting on your face, they’re collecting on your helmet, which is bad news just the same. Drive along the St. Lawrence Seaway mid-summer and you’ve got yourself a date with about 300 billion sand flies (not fleas, flies). I made this very trek at night, which is like their Mardi Gras, and was wiping them off of my faceshield every other minute. Except I couldn’t wipe them off, they just smeared, and then the lights from oncoming cars would smear over the smear, and I was blinded from the dead bug remains all over my helmet. When, by some act of god I made it to Montreal, I threw my helmet in the shower like a dirty prisoner and watched enough sand flies swirl down the drain to cause concern about a clog in the pipes. Even my jacket had to be scraped of its mashed carcasses.

(The Lanark County Genealogical Society writes on their website, “Where houses are near swamps or rivers, [sand flies] enter by thousands and attack the inmates, driving away sleep, and producing the most uneasy sensations.” “Uneasy sensation” perhaps being… that you’re covered with thousands of flies? Gross).

Sometimes I’ll attempt an autopsy to try and link the remains on my lethal face to the original species. But it’s usually impossible. The most I can ever decipher is that something very green or neon yellow was taken as a last meal. Only if they’re really big can you tell what they might have been, like when I got my first Dragonfly. Happened in the White Mountains and he was fat, the size of a walnut. (Maybe even a kiwi. Probably even a whole grapefruit). He hit me with an audible Smack! (Scream!) and a very unfortunate positioning – he tangled himself in my chin strap. I could feel his wings flitting and flapping against my neck, fighting a champ’s fight to break free as I grit my teeth and downshifted to 4th, 3rd, 2nd, 1st like the fires of hell were burning underneath me (you have to use both hands when shifting – no limbs available for freeing bugs) … Once I reached my sanctuary on the side of the road, I tore the helmet off , flung it into the weeds, then jumped off my bike and started pawing at my neck and doing the dance of a madwoman. Alas, we were by then separated, but his death lingered on my skin for days.

(One time in California I hit something that was definitely not a bug. I think it was a bat. It was big enough to knock my head back. People have told me I’m out of my mind, that you can’t hit bats because of their faultless sonar. But then how do people catch bats? If their sonar is that good, wouldn’t they always avoid capture? I'm sticking to my story. It was a bat. Unless you're from PETA, in which case it was probably a coconut).

I can say I’d like to do something about this face killing business. But I know there’s nothing to be done. Someone more heroic might turn this into a good cause, like “Killing things with my face to fight XXX rare disease”. But I’m no hero, so I’ll just go back out and continue with my causeless killings. Because that’s what I do, and I like what I do.

*Danny Motz: Age 21, a member the U.S. Air Force in Anchorage, Alaska where he snarks free continental breakfast off hotels after having passed out in their lobbies. Served in Kuwait in 2005/early 2006 (Iraq = War; Kuwait = Peace) and when recently questioned as to why he unfairly received a laptop from traditionally non-laptop-giving parents, he credited it to his being a “war hero” and all.

Andy Motz: Age 19, a member of the Albion College football team in Albion, MI. Spends his time carving fraternal logos into chest hair and strategizing how he can abandon his career at a college, where he has to “pretend to be sympathetic to the liberals”, for a life of professional poker playing. To date, Andy has earned an aggregate Absolutely Nothing on the poker tables.

**My helmet is a Nolan flip helmet (probably called something more professional than this, but work with me). The front can be worn either up or down -- i.e. with the face totally exposed or totally covered.

The beginning... in the middle. (A helpful Q&A to get you started)

2006-03-21T16:27:00.000-06:00

This is it. My blog. After all these months, I've only just begun...

This is the story of how in July of 2005 I left New York City and a real life for a ride across the Americas on a motorcycle. How a call to chaos quickly transformed into a story of grease and leather and the smell of gasoline. This is my adventure. Enjoy.

(photo by D.Y. Bechard)

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

Q. What kind of bike do you drive?
A. I drive a Honda Shadow ACE 750. It's a cruiser, all black and chromey and when not caked in mud is a mechanical Playmate of the Month. I adore it. It weights 505 pounds (same as a 12-foot bull shark) without gas or luggage, has a 3.7 gallon fuel tank and chugs out a pretty consistent 55 miles to the gallon.

The "750" refers to the engine size -- or if you're a glutton for technical details, to the capacity of the combustion chamber in the engine cylinder, measured in cubic centimeters (CCs). The larger the chamber, the more fuel and air it will hold, thus the stronger the "combustion" it produces and the more power the bike has. (I know I'm screwing this all up for the sake of simplification and that the actual explanation involves bores and strokes and displacement, but let's just be clear right now that I am not a mechanic... and I've gotten along just fine). There are bikes as small as 50 CCs (not highway-legal) and as large as 2,000 CCs (probably even beyond). Mine is perfectly suited for my purposes (though I do sometimes hear a whisper of "I think I can" when we accelerate or charge up large hills). So far this bike and I have covered almost 20,000 miles in the US, Canada and Mexico.

**Not long after posting, I was informed by a kind expert on the Motorcycle USA boards that my information is far from accurate. He writes: "50cc means that the pistons displace 750cc as the crank rotates one time... The displacement is the radius of the cylinder squared times Pi times the distance the piston moves (the "stroke") times the number of cylinders. I'd imagine your bike has a compression ratio of about 10 to 1, so that means your combustion chambers are only around 43cc each, as 750+43+43 = 836 and 836/86 = 9.72. This is not exact, (because I guessed at the compression ratio, and) as no 750cc motorcycle is exactly 750cc." Ok, I kind of get it. Kind of.**

The "ACE" stands for American Classic Edition; it's a Honda bike but was produced at a plant smack dab in the middle of the American heartland -- Marysville, Ohio. Coincidentally, I bought it in the same state a few hundred miles to the north from a man I found on Ebay whose four kids welcomed me at the airport with a crayon-made sign of my name and a can of 7UP.

Q. Why don't you drive a dual sport BMW with all the convenient metal storage cases and off-road capabilities?
A. Oh, wouldn't that have been tremendously easy. And practical. Certainly I'd never afford myself either of these luxuries.

I did, actually, look into getting the dual-sport BMW F650. But, as indicated by the term "dual-sport", this bike will hop off road just as easily as it will hop onto the freeway... Since this is a solo expedition and I generally tend to test my boundaries with things, I decided that with a bike that goes off road I would no doubt end up off-road. And probably, at some point or another, off road, wrecked, hanging over the edge of a canyon. I know far too little about motorcycles, dirt and the world in general to toy with freedoms of such massive proportions. My reasoning:

If... BMW F650 = Freedom from pavement = Increased opportunity for off-road expedition (IOORE)

And... IOORE + general feeling of invincibility + total disregard for mother's cautions = Perilous off-road situation far from reach of human contact (PORSFFROHC)

And... PORSFFROHC = Possible to near certain death and resulting multiple-day search party at enormous cost to local police force, also disrupting the nearby small-town whose inhabitants close shop to volunteer with search

Then... BMW F650 = Bad for the economy. And my life.

Q. How did you decide to do this? When?
A. There was certainly a lifetime of build-up, but the actual decision? It kind of seems like I just woke up one morning and thought to myself, “Next year I will learn how to ride a motorcycle, buy one and ride it across the continent.” Then I got dressed and left for work. It was really that arbitrary. I hadn’t heard of Ewan McGregor, hadn’t seen Motorcycle Diaries, and hadn’t been dating a Hell’s Angel. It just seemed like fun -- an adventure. I do love adventures.

(Of course, if you examine at the daily routine into which this decision was embedded and the mental constrictions imposed by the physical New York City landscape over an extended period of time, combined with a career field burning with all the excitement of a pre-arranged marriage, there’s a philosophical case to be made that a trip with no schedule and a machine without doors was a choice born of deeper roots… but that’s not fit for the FAQ)

Q. Where do you sleep?
A. Now that I'm in Mexico, I jump around between hostels and budget hotels (which can be had for $10 a night and under and host a surprising number of travelers over 25). I do carry a tent and sleeping bag bungeed to the back of the bike and while I was in the US I did a lot of camping in national parks or on BLM land (because it's free! All 261 million acres).

However... there are times when night jumps up on you like a bum on a freight train and so you knock around in the dark until you find a place to fall. I have slept in an abandoned RV, on deserted beaches, on a bunk in a VW Vanagon, in the Temple of the Red Velvet Jesus, tucked into a canyon with grazing cattle, in the guest house of a local judge, on numerous strangers’ couches, in trucker motels coast to coast, etc. etc. One time I was invited to stay at a firehouse but had to decline, with regret. I am most appreciative to all those who have taken me in for the night and equally appreciative to those who would like to do so in the future.

Q. Aren't you scared/afraid?
A. This is an incomplete question. The correct question is "Aren't you scared/afraid of...?" If you're asking whether I'm scared of being a woman alone on a motorcycle (in Mexico), the answer is no. It's nowhere near as dangerous as your mother or the State Department would have you believe, and clearly, I'm doing it, aren't I? I don't know too many people with a fear of the dark who lock themselves blindfolded into a closet at night.

If, however, you're asking whether I'm scared when there is a wild, frothing boar ripping through my tent or if I'm scared when I wake up in a bloody bathtub full of ice with a suspicious-looking incision across my kidney area (scenarios not based on actual incidents), then the answer is yes, certainly. Do I worry about the possibility of such things happening? Well, luckily, there are plenty of other people who do all that work for me.

Q. Are you taking pictures? Where can we see them?
A. Only a fool wouldn’t eat and sleep with a finger on the shutter on a trip like this. And only a fool wouldn’t back-up 5,000 digital pictures with the singular dedication of a Jamaican bobsledder while traveling through places where an American accent translates into “Steal from Me” in perfect Spanish. (Would take an even bigger ninny to be pursuing professional photographic opportunities and not back-up).

What a fool I am. My computer was stolen, my pictures were not backed up. So find my laptop and you can see ALL my pictures. Otherwise, there is a mutt selection on Flickr that I’ll begin (someday) to add to on a more consistent basis. There’ll be pictures on the blog too.

Q. Do you carry a phone?
A. I had a phone until February 18, 2006. Then there was the incident involving a yacht, a stolen... er, borrowed... kayak, and a certain quantity of whisky. The phone is no longer with me. (I hesitate to use the word lost; I like to think of it as more of a sacrifice to the gods ascertaining my death will never arrive from the sea). As I've continued to live and breathe without Cingular-branded chimes resonating from my back pocket, there are no current plans for a replacement.

Q. How long do you plan to travel?
A. Until my bank account runs dry and I can’t find any more bottles to return for a deposit.