This is a list of items that
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.
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| Moto-taxi in Puero Lopez, Ecuador. |
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| Fellow firefighters at launch near Baños, Ecuador. |
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.
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| Friends and shopping proxies Victoria y David from Bogotà |
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Coca Leaf |
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.
