My Seven Super Shots

A few months ago, friend and fellow intrepid traveller Zak (his amazing website is at Sparkpunk.com) nudged me to share some favorite photos given a few prompts.  Or he "tagged" me, I should say, the modern version of chain-mail.  What he really did was get me to start organizing the thousands of photos I'd dumped off my cameras over the years.  So, thanks for the peer-pressure Zak, and for making me see that good photography is just as much about organization as it is art...

Choosing seven photos was like trying to appeal to seven very picky little dwarves, each eager to snicker at your poor taste.  But here they are (the prompts I was given are in bold):

A Photo That Takes My Breath Away:

Camino Choquequirao, Peru

She passed us like we weren't even moving.  


A Photo that Makes Me Smile:

Finn with Rainbow, Anchorage, Alaska

Knowing that I have an audience who appreciates my balloon art makes me smile.


A Photo That Makes Me Dream

Cotton Grass, Umnak Island, Alaska

In my world, plants can be clouds and clouds can be plants.


A Photo That Makes Me Think

Basement in City Lights Books, San Francisco, California

There's been some seriously hip dudes and heavy thinkers come through this door, man.  City Lights Books was stomping grounds for many writers of the Beat movement.


A Photo That Makes My My Mouth Water

Backyard Apples, Wasilla, Alaska

You're pretty much a big deal if you can grow domesticated fruit in Alaska, it's not the easiest task.  Each fall my neighbors have an apple-pressing party, where apples are squeezed in to the freshest and tastiest juice anywhere.


A Photo That Tells A Story:

Wildfire, Deering, Alaska

Every time we heard the buzz of the engine, we cleared the line to make way for a water dump.  A moment of rest just long enough for a photo.


The Photo That I'm Most Proud Of:

Paragliding, Crucita, Ecuador

"Isn't that like talking on a cell phone while driving?" remarked one friend about mid-air photography.  This is the classic, cliché paraglider's photo.  I've taken many photos from this perspective, but for some reason this one really seems to resonate with people and inspire excitement (or fear) about flying in far away lands.

Since being prodded, I've started putting together a portfolio of my favorite shots which you can find here.  In the spirit of the game I shall choose a few other photographers and adventurers whose Seven Super Shots I would love to see.  So, "tag, you're it!"- my picks for the 7SS Challenge are Shawn Biessel, Will Elliott, Ben Berger, Adam MacMahan, Boris Tyzsko, Rick Battle, and cuz Brian Pomeroy.

Choose your favorite seven photos to the seven prompts, and then pass the challenge on to someone new.  If you're not in to the idea of using a blog, a (free) Picasa or Flickr account is worth considering, or perhaps a Facebook album.  The point is, You're It!  I'd love to see your shots, and I know you have other friends whose work who is simmering on a dark hard drive somewhere.

Photos are only worth their pixels when shared.  After this exercise I realized that the answer to the following question is "no": "If a photo is stored on a computer and nobody sees it, was it ever really shot?"

Latinoamérica

I've never shared a music video here before, but "Latinoamérica" by the Puerto Rican Calle 13, I share you with you for some truly gripping cinematography.  Apart from just being an incredible song, the video will take you on a journey to many of the places and people I've seen in my travels.   Calle 13 is one of the biggest acts around in this part of the world, though I´d never heard of them before traveling.

English Subtitles included in this version.

Confusion and Cañazo

A short piece I wrote for a friend´s travel website, SparkPunk, from a trek I did in Peru a few months back-

Language confusion and cañazo on the Camino Choquequierao

http://www.sparkpunk.com/blog/language-confusion-caazo-on-the-camino-choquequirao.html

How to Learn a Language

Las Grutas, Argentina

If it didn’t sink in baby teeth
to learn a language you must again don a bonnet.

Fear not to drool your imperfect syntax
or rug burn from the crawl through blank stares.

Soil your diaper with a misplaced clause!

Find someone to look into your eyes
and tell you everything, knowing you understand only sleep and suckle-

nothing else makes sense, until one day
it does.

Fly Site- Llacolen, Antofagasta, Chile

ParaglidingEarth Site Link (None)

Launch: (S 23°43’20”, W 70°25’48”)                             185  m

Landing Zone: The beach                                   0   m

Antofagasta is a large port city several hundred kilometers South of Iquique.  While Antofagasta might not have the same level of tourist infrastructure or white crescent beaches like Iquique, it’s flying sites are many and varied and well worth a visit for paraglider pilots.

Llacolen is a ridge-soaring site on the Southern edge of Antofagasta.  Awesome views of the coast, smooth laminar air, no obstructions other than a few antennae near launch.  About three kilometers of the ridge in a Southerly direction are easily soar-able.  Further distances should require experienced pilots with a briefing from local pilots.

Wind is principally from the Southwest and West.  Wind from a direction too Southerly will not serve to produce ridge lift.

I sunk out here once and easily kited my way part way back up the ridge, and jumped back into the lift band.  Where else could you get away with that but in a climate as awesome for flying as the Atacama desert?!

Notes on Launch: Launch is a smooth dirt/gravel clearing adjacent to some antennae.  Drop-off is fairly steep, so as always good launch technique is essential.  Flying to the North is inadvisable as the antennae obstruct the route.  Top-landings are possible.

Notes on Landing Zone: Landing anywhere on the beach is fine.  If you sink out right away, avoid rotor by not flying too close behind the tall buildings just below launch.  Expect curious kids on the beach.

Flyable days per year: Almost all of them.

Best times of the day: When I was there in April 2012, conditions became ideal at around 12:00 p.m.

Cost: No launch fees.

How to get there:

To Launch:
Head South along the coast until you see a large cluster of antennae close up on the ridge to the left, almost at the edge of the city.  City bus No. 102 or 103 both pass by this spot.  Launch is directly adjacent on the South side of these antennae.  To get to launch, you can either hoof it straight up the hill once you have your destination in sight (appx. 45 min hike), or even launch from half-way up if the lift is good.

If you have a car, there is a route through some neighborhoods and dirt tracks leading directly to launch.  I went out with a member of a local club who navigated the route for me, so I do not have the details of every turn.

Your best bet for having a good flying experience in Antofagasta is to get in touch with member of the local club, Club Termicas, and catch a ride to launch with them.  If you don’t have a cell phone, have them give you a place and time to meet.  Local instructor David Castro was also very helpful with putting me in touch with local pilots.

To Antofagasta: Recommended bus companies include Pullman and Tur-Bus, regularly scheduled trips are available from any major city in Chile, as well as from Jujuy and Salta across the border in Argentina.

Antofagasta also has an international airport with flights scheduled daily from Santiago.

Websites:

Site description (Spanish): http://www.viento-norte.cl/llacolen.htm

Local pilots, Club Termicas: http://www.clubparapentetermicas.superwebchile.com/

Great information also available in Dylan Neyme’s guide book Condor Trail.

My awesome hosts in Antofagasta, Karla and Viktor, who I met through www.couchsurfing.com !

Para o Brasil...

Greetings from Buenos Aires,

Tomorrow I am headed North towards Brazil.  Both the language and the country are uncharted territory for me, but like always I hope to find friends and great places to fly.

I humbly ask that if anyone out there in the world, paragliding-related or otherwise, has any contacts in Brazil who would be helpful to know for a dirtbag traveler/paraglider like myself, write me know at fsbem4 (at) gmail dot com.  And I shall be eternally grateful.

Muito obrigado! -ben

Viedma, Argentina

The Old Bridge. Viedma, Rio Negro, Argentina.  Photo by Olga Ricci.

Greetings from Patagonia.  The last time I was here in Viedma was ten years ago as an AFS exchange student in 2002-2003.  Visiting here again is the closest to using a time machine I've ever come- around every corner a memory jumps out to surprise me. 

I recently came across an email I sent to family and friends after my first month here ten years ago, which I will share here below.  It's difficult to resist the temptation to edit it.  There are moments when I want to reach back through time and slap myself for being such a sullen whiner.  I remember a friend wrote me back: "I love it!  You sound like a nostalgic old man already." I share it with you here as a snapshot in time.

September 15, 2002

Hola a todos-

Every time I tilt my head up towards the sky there is a neatly shaped V of birds tugging in the summer, they’re going South to Patagonia.  I am jealous of these birds as they migrate down to the end of the world, to where I very much wanted to stay for my time here as a an exchange student. Perhaps they are Arctic Terns, which migrate 11,000 miles each year from Patagonia to Alaska. Perhaps these same birds have flown over my home back in Wasilla. I wish I knew more about ornithology.

I chose Argentina for my host country because it was a Spanish speaking country with a wide swath of mountains running up and down it’s Western longitude that I had always dreamed of seeing one day, but apparently AFS (American Field Service, the exchange oraganization I’m with) has done their best to send me as far away as possible from those dramatic horizons here in Viedma, across the continent from the nearest hill.

I confess for my first week after arrival I could not have invented too many positive comments about here.  My plan had been envisioned somewhat like a six month expedition somewhere further South, someplace where everything would be unrecognizably distinct from back home and ideally I wouldn’t have to go school because it would be my job to stay home and tend the family llama herd.

However, do not let me give you the impression that I am totally distraught. Although I am not exactly in the exotic picture of South America I imagined, I am learning how to make the best of it, “aprovecho” (I make best use of it). There is beauty in anything and everywhere. There is art waiting to be realized in the piles of trash and heaps of pruned branches that people dump at the edge of town. There is a romance to the wheat fields freshly ploughed for spring and the ranches that fold forever in to the flat and featureless horizon. There is an aura of timelessness that hangs above the river winding lazily through town like fog on a cool morning.  There are many convenient aspects of living closer to a city that I am learning to make use of.  I enjoy riding a bike to school, a badass “Beach Commander 2000” that looks like a 1970’s concept of a mountain bike. And if I had hoped for a more spectacular landscape here, perhaps my host family had hoped for a more exciting person than myself.  I swear I’m doing my best to be a lot more social than I am normally. It sounds like my friends from school here are even going to make me go to “El Boliche”, the dance club. Though you know I would rather spend the evening sealed inside a cardboard box with glass shards and fish entrails than in a dance club, I am going to try it. Another thing I am looking forward to is to try out a kayak. Kayaking is a popular sport here since you are never more than a five or ten minute walk away from the riverside. Apparently Viedma has the most people per capita in all of Argentina who own kayaks.

Aerial view of Viedma, Argentina.

Allow me to share my first impression of where I shall live for the next half-year. I arrived in a zombie trance after a twelve hour bus ride in the dark from Buenos Aires to Viedma. I awoke just as the bus was pulling into the station and through blurry eyes, waiting at the platform outside my window I spotted two very hopeful looking people whom I had seen before in a picture that my host family had sent to me- they were my new parents. The striking, trim woman with thigh- height leather high heels and a smart dress was Bella, my host mother, and the tall man with dark hair in khaki slacks and a t-shirt and thick glasses was Tony, my host father. They took me to my new home where I immediately fell asleep.

When I awoke, I didn’t know whether I had slept for an hour or three days, no idea where I was, why, how, etc.  After lying in bed and racking my brain for the next minute or so I remembered all the traveling I had done during the last few days, and with a sickening wrench of my stomach, for the first time I truly wondered what the hell I got myself into and how I had ended up here.

Downstairs my six new family members were all having lunch. My new family includes my parents Bella and Tony, my two younger sisters Pilar and Belen, and two younger brothers Jose and Roberto. Two days later though we took the eldest son, Jose, to the airport to leave for the U.S. to be an exchange student as well.  I guess I’m his replacement.

After a lot of confused albeit amicable conversation with my new family over lunch, what appeared to be an unhappy marriage between an ancient Volkswagen bug and a small truck full of excited looking people pulled up to the house honking the horn emphatically gunning an ill-sounding engine. I followed Jose as he shuffled out of the house and we piled into this little creature with five other friends of his to go cruise town. We went to go "dar vueltas", literally, to go in circles. Everyone except myself had dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes, and were dressed head to toe in denim clothes designed to appear as if they were well-worn. They wore jeans with pre- faded material and pre-ripped holes from the use years of use they never had, cigarettes hung casually out of their mouths and they spoke rapidly in a tongue incomprehensible to my muddled ears.  The main road here goes adjacent to the Rio Negro (the river) through the middle of town, a half-mile strip of pavement which we drove up and down no less than twenty times accelerating over speed bumps as if they were jumps and slowing down occasionally to whistle and yell at girls.  Everyone kept chanting something about "Chupe". (The verb "chupar" means "to suck".  Later I learned that “Chupe” was Jose’s nickname which had evolved from Jose to Giseuppe to Chupe, which changed my idea a lot about what I had imagined they had been talking about in the car.)  The little city sped by over and over as they all asked me if I like to drink, do I have a girlfriend, do I like to party, and if not they told me we’ll get busy with all that right this weekend.

We live in a big brick house in the city. Here the houses are constructed so that usually two houses share the same wall. If I walk outside and look down the street I can see about fifteen neighboring homes. Quite a change from the seven acres of woods surrounding my home back in Alaska. The Rio Negro is maybe four hundred meters from our house. It is an enormous body of water, maybe four hundred meters from shore to shore.  I greatly enjoy its presence. Just to have a large body of water near the house is a thrill if you’re not accustomed to it. They tell me in the summer everyone goes to the shoreline to spend the day, to swim, nap in the shade, have a picnic.

If I were to sum up my first three weeks here so far in a word it would be: confusion. It feels as if I’m never quite completely sure what’s going on or what I’m supposed to do.  From what I have seen so far it is pretty much the exact opposite of Alaska, but all the people here have been incredibly kind to me.  My family here are all wonderful people, I have a lot less responsibilities, and school only goes until noon. As far as the language, it still feels like everyone here has collaborated to play a clever trick on me. It is as if every time someone speaks, their words pass through some devious, invisible filter that scrambles them into a string of incomprehensible gibberish. I had imagined that the three years of Spanish I studied in High School would help out a lot with my efforts in mastering the language, but I have found that I still have miles to go before I sleep and I can actually understand what in the world all these people here are talking about all the time. I have found that the easiest people to talk with are my youngest siblings, who have smaller vocabularies and usually speak more slowly. It is already hard for me to write this in English so I suppose I am going to learn the language whether I want to or not.

I have been spending a great deal of time running, though it is tough to be so self- motivated- I miss the cross-country team. Some days it feels like everything sneaks up on me all at once and alI want to do is go home. There are days when I would give anything just to see one pathetic little mountain, to have some thick woods where I could go for a quiet walk, to have all my hammers and saws back in my callused hands and to have some dirt back under my my fingernails, so these are the times when I go for a run. I search for someplace I have not been yet, usually as far away from the city as I can go.  Running clears my head, it makes everything seem more tolerable. I’m ready to give anything another chance after I have run far enough. I run down lonesome dirt roads out in the country and the cows look at me funny across the barbed wire as I run by, their gazes follow me as I pass as if I were holding a string attached to each of their snouts. I stir up flocks of prismatic parrots nesting in the scrub brush and they swarm above me in hundreds screeching angrily at my presence.  The animals are all surprised to see something that passes on feet rather than wheels.  Some days when the clouds look just right I can pretend they are mountains, the tall white pillars in the distance are something solid and tangible rather than just suspended ice particles.  The sky grows pink then red and finally purple like a swelling bruise, like a fistfull of melted crayola, then ultimately healing in to blackness. The stars appear and fill the sky in a completely different pattern than back in Alaska. Everything is better.

I don’t want to hog the computer anymore. I think Pilar (fourteen year old sister) has friends to chat with. Hope to hear from you.  

Love, Ben

Fly Site- Palo Buque, Iquique, Chile

ParaglidingEarth Site Link

Launch (S 20°23’0”, W 70°09’0”)                       297  m

Landing Zone Same

Palo Buque is the easiest place in the world to achieve the most ancient of human dreams- to spread our arms and fly into the sky on a whim.  On a good day, all that’s necessary to get airborne from flat ground is to set up the equipment, kite the wing a little ways up a small hill- and you’re up in the air.  This is truly a magical place for paraglider pilots

The site  lies about fifteen minutes driving South of Iquique.  From the road it doesn’t look like anything special and there are no facilities of any kind nearby the site, but once in the air it is an other-wordly place.  It is possible to gain 800-900 meters of elevation within several minutes of launch on a good day, and you may find it at times a challenge to descend as quickly as you’d like.  Cross country-flights following the coastal range may also begin from here.  Winds are generally from the Southwest.

For more information on the necessary permissions needed for cross-country flights in the area, contact Altazor.

I highly recommend having your risers already clipped in to your harness before arriving at this site.  There is no sheltered, protected area of any kind to lay out equipment.  In my first visit here I struggled like a newbie for nearly an hour with my equipment tangling and dragging across the sand and the rocks.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Notes on Launch:

Set up your equipment either at the bottom of or part way up the small (appx. 50 m) South-facing hill at the site.  (How high you’ll need to set up your equipment depends on wind speed, start lower down in higher winds).  Kite your wing up to the point where you are feeling lift, and launch.  Begin by making ridge-soaring passes until you are above the small hill, then use the much larger, smooth slope to the East connected to the hill to continue climbing.  Watch out for the Venturi effect in the corner where the small hill connects to the mountain slope.

Palo Buque is a world-famous site and sometimes a popular place, but there is plenty of room for all.  If you happen to arrive on a day where thirty Argentinian or French or Russian pilots are all jockeying for a place, just be patient and you’ll have all the space you need momentarily.

Notes on Landing Zone:  

You should be able to land right next to where you parked without issue.  If you land far away, the highway parallels the coast and you should be able to hitch a ride.

Flyable days per year: Nearly all of them, so they tell me.

Best times of the day: When I was there in March the best times were later in the day, after 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. until sundown-

Cost: No launch fees.

How to get there: No public transportation is available to Palo Buque.  Altazor rents vans for the trip to Palo Buque at 15.00 COP (appx. 30$ U.S.).  Split amongst five or six people it is quite reasonable.  Or, you can try your luck at hitch-hiking.  

If you’re going it on your own, head South from Iquique along the coast for about 15-20 minutes driving time.   Appx. 1 km. past the Punta Gruesa turn off, several dirt roads turn off to the left (you will see a small cemetary on the right just before) and all lead to the small lump up against the mountain about 1 km. away that will be your launch site.  If you have a GPS, use the coordinates to have an idea of where to get off.

Website: www.altazor.cl

Things I Have Lost While Traveling

This is a list of items that

The following is a list of items that have by mindlessness or fate disappeared from my posession in the last six months of traveling:

1.) English/Spanish Dictionary- Somewhere in Colombia around January.  No mere paperback, this was my language talisman.  Duct tape cover, dog-eared pages, magazine clippings of Patagonia scenery taped inside.  My desktop companion through several years of high school Spanish, my constant companion  long ago as an exchange student in Argentina.

I couldn’t bear to replace it for several weeks but eventually decided to move on and graduate to a Spanish-only dictionary.  Before this transition if I ever came across mysterious vocabulary like, let’s say, “trincha,” I could look it up and find the English translation (“strap”).  In my new dictionary, I find, “trincha (f.)- adjustador en la parte atrás que sirve para ceñir el chaleco, el pantalón, u otras prendas.”  Well, I have an idea what I think that means... but I’m not sure about ceñir, I better look that one up: “ceñir (tr.)- rodear, adjustar, o apretar la cintura.”  I better double-check rodear that means, “to surround,” I think?  And so on until I forget what the original word as that I wanted to look up.  

It is at times inefficient, but my new dictionary feels less like a crutch than the old one.  It forces me to remain in Spanish when I am trying to think in Spanish rather than crossing back and forth between two languages.  Over the long term I think will help me avoid flubs like that time long ago I told my host family I was going to go look for some conchas at the beach.  (You’ll find “concha” defined as “shell,” but it in fact has a much more grotesque usage and is like a strong curse word...)


2.) Three Baseball Caps- Disappeared in various places.  I can only conclude that the universe is telling me I don’t need a hat.  I keep buying them anyways.

3.) iPod Touch- Left it on the bus between Calí and Popyán in Colombia.  Eulogized in a poem I shared here a few months ago.

4.) 1 x 2 m Tarp w/ One Side Reflective Material- Left it on the bus back in January on a foggy morning on the way out of Puerto Lopez, Ecuador.  It was a ground cloth for my tent, emergency blanket, rain cloak, pack cover, and halloween costume.  I haven’t been able to find another one like it down here.

Moto-taxi in Puero Lopez, Ecuador.

5.) Carbon Fiber Seatboard for Sup’Air Hybrid 2 Paraglider Harness- Left it at Boris’s house in Cuenca, Ecuador in late January when I was folding up my glider in the back yard.  Two months later I would backtrack fifty-five hours by bus to retrieve it.  For the two months I didn’t fly once, and without it I felt like an incomplete human being.  Only other paraglider pilots would understand...

Fellow firefighters at launch near Baños, Ecuador.

My absent-mindedness might have had something to do with having to say goodbye (temporarily) to a Colombiana I had fallen for hard and fast a week earlier.  I was still awaiting an overdue package from home in the mail, while she and her posse were lit with a Kerouac-like (vague yet self-assured) momentum to continue on.  We planned to meet up in Lima a few days later.

We’d met in Baños, Ecuador, where I was camped out in don Washington’s horse pasture at the edge of town.  One night after a day of flying with Edgar (an exceptionally friendly local tandem pilot who’d been letting me tag along on the ride up to launch) I came home to find that my tent was no longer solo.  A half dozen others had popped up on the opposite side of the field and in the middle was a tiny bonfire with music and merriment being made around.  “Do you know those people?” Washington asked me when I got back.  I had no idea.  “I think they showed up late last night.  Didn’t ever ask about staying here though...”  I went over to go say hola and do the favor of suggesting they ought to ask if they were going to stay another night,  and I stayed until the sun came up.

They were all from different places, but mostly Colombia and Argentina.  They were my age but with more dreadlocks and tattoos and handmade jewelry.  Most of them were fresh from a large gathering that would be a central reference in many of their future rants, La Llamada de la Montaña (The Call of the Mountain), a large “Rainbow Gathering” a few weeks earlier.  Now they were on the road until college started up again a few months.  To grossly summarize, the Rainbow Family is a sort of global-grassroots alternative-living culture.  I remember first hearing about Rainbow Gatherings from my snarky co-workers when I was sent to Idaho for work with my wildland fire crew.  We were assigned to a fire in a remote National Forest area where a large Gathering had happened a decade earlier, and local curmudgeons were rumored to still be peeved about all tham’ hippies that came and made a mess of the place.

We were all travellers, all blessed enough to find a free camping spot in a town oriented more towards milking tourists, but their journeys trod a different path than mine.  Unlike the gore-tex clad laptop-wielding European and American backpackers like me (I’m not travelling with a laptop, by the way), many of the young South American travelers I meet are of humbler means and set out from home with only a small amount of money, planning to work along the way.  Some of them are artists- everything from working in front of stoplights for tips with juggling and acrobatics, to hawking handmade jewelry on the sidewalk.  Some of them are musicians, some of them were waiters and waitresses, some of them were shoplifters.  With some of them I would end up traveling for the next two months.

My new friend Viki from Bogotá said she financed her travels by singing on the buses.  I had seen plenty of musicians come up and try to get their captive audience clapping along with mixed success.  It seemed like a tough crowd, but she said she made good money in tips.  “The people who live here, like the bus attendants, make about fifteen dollars a day for working twelve hours, but I can make around seventy in just five hours on a good day.  My father is professional musician and thinks it’s a shame that I would ever work in this way, but he just doesn’t understand.”

At some point in the night don Bruno, a friend of theirs from the Gathering, showed up.  A man whose likeness to Gandalf in both appearance and presence can not be overstated, he seemed most comfortable standing around the fire stripped of his black wool muumuu in only loincloth.  He said he was from Bolivia but with the strangest of accent that would later reveal he was a Belgian man-of-the-world who’d made Bolivia his home for the last several decades.  He took a special interest at my mention of parapente and told me there was a mountain near where he lived that he’d always thought would make a great launch.  “No one has ever flown there, of course,” he explained though his beard, “and I’ve never been paragliding, but I’ve seen people do it before.  You should come and check it out.”  He wrote down the name of Apolo, Bolivia and an email address.

At some point in the evening I mentioned I was traveling South to Cuenca the next day.  So were they.  That was all it took to dive out of my hermetic world of solo travelling and tag along for the next two months with new friends to places I’d never imagined.  My Spanish started picking up in leaps and bounds.



6.) Two Debit Cards- One of them in Bucaramanga, Colombia, back in December and the other one in Cuzco, Peru in March.  You know those ATMs that suck your card in and keep it there until you’re finished?  Those are financial doom for travelers like me.

7.) Two Nalgene Bottles- Perhaps the gringo-est of items among all my backpacker paraphenalia; small, sturdy, plastic containers designed specifically for the purpose of carrying and refilling water.  Just imagine such a thing, that there is a place in the world where people buy empty plastic water bottles...

8.) Swiss Army Knife- An item I consider indispensable to daily existence.  I have no idea where it disappeared.  In Cuzco, Peru I decided that I needed a new one before setting out on a five-day trek that was in the works.

After a day shopping around I located what looked like a genuine article in a hawk-shop type place.  The price was clearly marked as one-hundred soles, but I knew better.  I find the whole process of bartering awkward, but here you’re a sucker if you don’t offer at least thirty percent off the listed price.  I’d seen my South American friends doing it expertly for the last few weeks.  I’d been keeping my mouth shut and letting them negotiate various fees like hostels and bus fares and suddenly finding everything costs a little less if you don’t have an American accent.

But with the knife I decided that I was going to do it myself this time.  I offered seventy soles and the woman behind the counter postured a genuinely offended look... “I don’t understand why you’re coming to me with a new price,” she said.  

Indeed, I don’t either, because I’m a sucker that will end up paying the full price anyways, we both knew that.  I decided to keep my mouth shut and let my friends do any negotiating from then on.

Friends and shopping proxies Victoria y David from Bogotà

9.) Waterproof Pack Cover- A gift from my Aunt Mary many years ago which had seen many miles of use.  Destroyed at Sitio Arqueologico Choquequirao (Choquequirao Archeological Site), near Abancay, Peru.

It was about two days walk from the road.  I had expected little more than rubble and was absolutely blown away by the vast and almost fully intact, yet eerily empty system of terraces, temples, and water dikes.  After a full day of tripping over my knees huffing up and down the forty degree-slopes (and seeing only a small fraction of the site), my strongest impression of the place was: why would people build a civilization here of all places, where one false step could often send you hurtling down a canyon?  “It was the Spanish conquistadores,” said Viki when I brought it up.  “The Incas were forced to retreat to difficult, hidden places like this to survive.”  But I’m not convinced- Choquequirao, an outpost approximately the size and significance of the much more famous Macchu Picchu, was a work in progress many hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived.  Perhaps the location had more to do with strategic defense, with conflict amongst other warring pre-Colombian kingdoms?  My history fails me.  

Camino Choquequirao, Peru

It was the rainy season and the nearby campground was empty save the two of us and about a dozen wiry Quechua guys who worked full time with machetes and weed-whackers to maintain the mere 30% of the site that’s been excavated since its discovery a hundred years ago.  We asked them if we could set up my less-than-perfectly-waterproof tent in an empty storage shed I’d found.  Inside, the rain machine-gunned the tin roof but it was blissfully dry.  We leaned our packs against the dark adobe wall and sat down for a moment to enjoy a moment of not being rained on.  Viki lit a few candles and I started fussing with the tent.

Casa del Sacerdote, Choquequirao

I can only describe what happened next as what it must be like to be mugged.  The sudden crack I heard could have been lightening, but was instead a bamboo pole breaking across my skull.  We both screamed- where seconds ago there had been a wall, as inanimate and unremarkable as any wall anywhere, was now a bus-sized hole open to the elements and several tons of wet earth and boulders covering our backpacks and my left hiking boot.  The bamboo-skeleton of the adobe wall’s interior had snapped open like a broken rib cage and struck across my head.  It looked like the rest of it could collapse any second.  I was able to control my bowels.

Hearts racing, we quickly realize that we’re in over our heads and sprint through the apocalyptic torrents to the warm yellow light from the caretakers dining room.  I leave the breathless explanation to Viki and within moments all of them have abandoned their steaming mugs of soup and charged out with shovels and headlamps to save the day.  Twenty minutes of digging later, our packs are unearthed though with my pack-cover shredded by shovel blades.  We are invited by our rescuers to join them for dinner.

Huddled in the small, bright room we are served coca-leaf tea and a thick vegetable soup.  Though thousand visit here each year, I get the impression that we may be the first tourists to ever be invited in for a meal.  We are grateful.  Viki has her flute out within minutes and everyone is clapping along to El Pescador, an upbeat cumbia (folk music of Colombia), surely a change from the usual evening entertainment of listening to the crackle of radio waves from a jumble of boxes and wires in the corner.  

We are shown another dry space for the night in a small storage closet, the rain harder than ever now.  Next door someone is playing an enormous Andean harp that some poor horse carried here.  We light a candle again and lay out the sleeping bags, now several hours after the incident- and are very suddenly struck by the trauma of almost being buried alive, not really having had a chance to process it until now.  It is a sort of hollow feeling in the chest, an emptiness where before everything was reliable and mute.  We are left to ponder and grieve over the intransigence of everything as the rain intensifies.

As far as memorable and meaningful experiences, even a trek to an abandoned civilization in an exotic land is no match for confronting the fleetingness of life.

9.) Feathered Friends 20 F Down Sleeping Bag- Lost near Apolo, Bolivia at Escuela de Permacultura Sachawasi (Sachawasi School of Permaculture).  We arrived from La Paz after a two-day odyssey that involved the drivetrain of our heavily overloaded bus dropping out several times, witnessing a passenger revolt, camping for a night alongside the road, awaiting the promised replacement bus for a day until we demanded a refund and set out in search of our own solution, and finally flagging down a different bus for the remaining fourteen hours of one-lane-blind-corner-jaw-rattling gravel road with a bunch of rowdy soldiers.  All of it was only a teaser for the trip back to La Paz a few weeks later...

But we were there.  Bruno greeted us in his signature loincloth, a half dozen other volunteers from Chile and Colombia and Spain and Italy  came to see the new arrivals.  Bananas and tangerines and oranges were ripening on the trees.  Ducks were quacking.  The woodpile had fallen over.  There were fields to be weeded (by hand).

It (the sleeping bag) disappeared while I was setting up my tent, which turned out to be unneeded as we all slept in a common area on the second level of a twelve-sided open-air structure at the center of the compound.  All I know is afterwards that it was gone.  This was not an inexpensive item.  I have my own neurotic suspicions of where it went, ranging from divine intervention to conspiracy.  There’s not many places it could be- dozens of times I circled around the mango grove (pregnant with newly ripe offerings every morning) where I had set up the tent, thrashed through the weeds where several dozen muddy ducks made their homes.  I was sure I would find it while machetèing the vines out of the coffee trees.  Maybe someone would fess up.

I never did fly my glider from that launch that Bruno showed me, the wind was always blowing the wrong way.  But even more so I was busy with installing shelves in the new kitchen, weeding the maize fields, picking up the wood pile, washing dishes, stirring boiling pots over a fire.  Such is life at such a place.

Coca Leaf

10.) Olympus Stylus-Tough Camera- I think it was stolen out of my backpack in Lima, Peru.  The camera itself was a loss sheerly peripheral to the three weeks worth of photos from Bolivia that disappeared with it.

Some of my favorite photos that no one will ever see:

-Shepards in the Bolivian Altiplano herding llamas through a snowy mountain pass.

-Blurry shots of a frenzied crowd elaborately decked out for Carnaval in bizarre nightmare-clown type costumes called Polleras, somewhere in a little town outside La Paz.  Even very humble families will spend small fortunes on their Polleras, we were told.  We asked some of them if we could take pictures beforehand and they told us no, but we did anyway behind their backs.

-Tiny, dessicated llama fetuses sold from sidewalk stands in La Paz.  To be used as an offering in the annual challa, in which the home is decorated with a variety of special items used to scare away bad spirits and attract desirable ones.

-Snowball fight with new friends in a high mountain pass just outside of La Paz.  Viki had never seen snow before.

-Silhouette of girl in a field of small yellow blooms facing a sunset on the Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca, remains of a large stone labyrinth-compound in the background.

-Me doing a flip from a tree branch into the river next to Sachawasi were we went swimming every day before lunch.

-Basket full of mangoes, oranges, tangerines, and bananas we harvested one day.

-Viki performing an aerial-yoga spectacle draped from a long strand of green cloth in a tree in Apolo’s central plaza.  Dozens of kids circled around, shy grown-ups murmured in the back.

-Close-up of a guy’s hand cupping a foil gum wrapper filled with tiny gold flakes he had scoured from the countryside.  He was drunk and kept pulling his stash out to show me, just to have a little peek.  Also in Apolo, Bolivia.

-A long line of people hiking across one of forty landslides blocking the road upon our intended return from Apolo to La Paz.  After several hours hike we arrived to where the buses were stopped to discover that locals on their way to the National Coca-Growers convention had booked up all available transportation for the next several days.  

Viki only had a week left to travel all the way back to Colombia before college started up.  She gave the driver a story about our passports being due to expire in two days and if we didn’t get back to La Paz they’d kick us out of the country forever.  The driver took pity on us, and we paid about three dollars extra to ride in first class for the fourteen hour trip.  That meant being crammed into the front cab with the driver and five people instead of in the back with seventy people and fifty seats.

Several days later, when I broke the news that the camera was gone it was a bit of a heartbreak for both of us.  She’d had her camera stolen a few weeks earlier too, and so had been using mine regularly.  “Things come and go, I suppose,” she said.  As would we several days later, she to the North and I to the South.

For now I’m back to traveling solo gain, back to flying every day I can.  They are experiences a world apart, traveling solo and with friends, each with its highs and lows.  I have no idea if I’ll ever see any of them again, but it’s an experience I’ll treasure forever.  It’s something I’ll never accidentally leave behind on a bus.