South American Blunders

On Tuesday the 17th I left Puerto Maldonado and started the epic journey to Quito. It consisted of 4 busses and over 80 hrs. on them...

Puerto Maldonado to Cusco: Our bus broke down...4 times. The 3rd time, at about 2 in the morning in the middle of nowhere we screeched to a halt on the side of the road and someone sheepishly asked, ¨should we push?¨ At that moment i really loved Peru. At night the temperature dropped dramatically as we climbed into the Andes and I would surely be suffering from pneumonia now if the man next to me didn´t take pity on my quivering and shared his blanket. The bus rumbled like it was about to fall apart, but after 18 hours the earthquake on wheels rumbled into Cusco.

Cusco to Lima: 2 hours later I was on a bus to Lima, which was relatively very luxurious. This time a Peruvian law student gave me a blanket.

Lima to Tumbes: I then traveled Nort all along the Peruvian coast for many, many hours. I sat next to a nun that was doing missionary work in Africa, I was happy to offer her my sweatshirt.

Tumbes: In Tumbes things got a little crazy. A small mob of people were waiting for me at the station and all clambered for me to follow them (apparently the bus line had let someone in Tumbes know that there was a Gringo wanting to go over the border and would probably need some help). Somehow 18year old Javier got a hold of me and took me to a bank, back for my bag, to the immigration office in a collectivo (like a taxi but full of people and for a long distance), to the border which we walked over, to the immigration office in Ecuador, and finally to the bus line. All the while he kept telling me how quickly I´d be robbed at knife point if he wasn´t looking after me. On the Ecuadorian side of the border, before my bus to Quito, I got him sufficiently drunk and sent him on his way.

Tumbes to Quito: I sat next to a really friendly, really curious, young Columbian guy that asked a million questions about the states and its politics. We got controlled (stopped by the military and all the males have to get off the bus and have their id checked, sometimes patted down for weapons), 4 times. At 3:30am, the last time we got controlled, they pulled only 2 people off the bus, one of them was the columbian guy on my right. When the bus started to pull away I ran to the front and told the driver we had left 2 people but he explained that they had ¨been detained.¨ Creepy.

I got to Quito over 4 days later at 6am on Sat. and, thanks to mummy dearest, went straight to a hotel. When I was let into my oh-so luxurious room I immediately jumped back and forth from bed to bed like a child. I then went and took my first shower in 5 days, brushed my teeth for the first time in 3 days (my fault, lack of water), and enjoyed what shall hence for be known as ¨the bowel movement of glory.¨
Quito was beautiful and very fun though I spent a lot of time by the hotel pool.
Yesteray, Monday morning, I took a 9 hour bus ride here to Bahia de Caraquez. At 9pm I finally found Planet Drum, my new home until mid-december. Initially I was really pleased (after having no idea what to expect). The set up is like a college dorm room with Bob Marley perpetually playing and pot growing in the bathroom and a hammock in the living room. Communal dinners are cooked everynight by 1 of us and then the 6 of us work during the day until around 2pm. There´s 5 girls around my age, mostly Americans but they´re all (but 1) leaving by the end of the week to be replaced by new volunteers. Clay is the ´program director´ but has the persona of a stoned, california surfer-dude. All this would normally be a fun setting to live in for a couple months but the jury´s still out...I miss the forest and the people in it. Most of the volunteers here are kids traveling around for a bit, not crazy environmentalists with a million things to say. Oh, and no one speaks Spanish, which is really no good. We´ll see.
The city itself is pretty cool with a river to the east that collides with the ocean from the West (it´s a big triangle). The surrounding area is forest but relatively very dry.
Tomorrow is my night to cook, any suggestions?

Hello friends, here's an update that, given my lack of traveling, will be brief.
The past 2 weeks I've been living with the old Spanish couple, Pepe and Therese, and their 14 year old son Sergi. Life there is somewhat hard but wholesome, sweat filled but happy. In my time there, with many bug bites and much sweat, I have built 2 composts (1 for organic things like vegetables and the other for the toilets) a gate of bamboo, a wall of bamboo for climbing ivy, and a 'green house' of sorts that was instantly torn to shreds by the god damned puppy Garelle. It was pretty glamorous at first, chopping down bamboo in the forest to use in construction but this glamour soon wore off. The benefits to living there, however, are enormous and I think have had a profound effect on how I want to live my life in the future.
1. The river (to say nothing of the private beach I cross to get to it) is paradise. The temperature, the soft sand, the strong current, and the beauty all make it something I could sit in for hours. It's especially wonderful once gallons of sweat and dirt have been accumulated. But it's ESPECIALLY wonderful at 5:30 when the sun begins to set and the forest erupts in a symphony of birds and bugs that lasts only 30 minutes.
2. Most every night is punctuated with an animated conversation over a delicious, fresh meal. Pepe loves to rant about the 'sweetness of life' and other such cheesy, feel good topics that seem so appropriate in that setting.
3. Smoothies. There is no electricity or running water, which means very few luxury and no refrigeration. However, I can go to the market in the morning and buy fresh yogurt and fruit. Back at the house there is a crank blender with which I can make delicious, relatively cold fruit smoothies. Each one is the greatest drink I've ever had.
Included (I hope) is a picture of the couple I've been living with as well as one of me with Ashley at that same house. Ashley was one of the 2 researchers that convinced me to go visit Pepe and Therese in the first place. There's a picture of me on top of the observation tower at CICRA and another of me bailing out one of the aged, pseudo-buoyant canoes that 6 of us took down the river at night (amazing experience).
MG has given me her small digital camera and thereby I will be able to take pictures and upload them here, a happy day.
Monday night I took the advice of Therese and Pepe and went to Shaman Eduard to drink Iowaska under his watchful eye. Iowaska is a psycho-delic (tropic?) drink of three herbs that has been used for centuries in a certain ceremony by a certain tribe. I went to him at 8:30 and, when no one else showed up, took a tall shot of black sludge with him. I spent the remainder of the night in a pitch black room, curled into a ball and trying to prevent venomous creatures from stealing my reason and unsuccessfully trying to convince myself that everything was okay and death was not upon me. Worst night of my life, enough said.
I am now back at CICRA for the weekend and seeing MG again was nicer than I could have expected. Monday I'll go back to Pepe's house for long enough to skip rocks with Sergi and have one last dinner with the happy couple. Tuesday will be day one of a three day bus ride to the border of Ecuador and Peru. On the 25th I start my internship with Planetdrumfoundation in Bahia Carazquez.
Monday sort of shook me to the core but I'm once again beginning to feel reckless and excited, as it should be. Here at CICRA I plan to sit in a hammock and read (I'm learning to lucid dream, kind of exciting) and try and relax to a point that seems inappropriate. I still don't have addresses for the vast majority of you. Send me them and your love.

Xnay on the pictures for now, I"ll be able to upload them when I have a better connection in the future.

I have to try and keep this brief as I need to get to the market and find a taxi before it gets dark.

I took a painfully long bus ride from Cusco to Puerto Maldonado on the 25th and stayed the night in a run down little hostal in this extremely ugly city. It rivals phoenix in it´s appalling heat and appearance, only it has more dust than tar. The difference being that tar doesn´t stick to your sweaty skin and make you feel like you´re suffocating. Almost all the taxis are motorcycles (there´s hundreds of them) and I got to ride my first one, pretty exciting.
The next morning I crammed myself into a little car with 9 other people (3 in the trunk, 4 across the seat, 1 between the driver and passenger seats) and arrived in Laberinto from where I caught a boat up river. This boat moved at about .5 miles an hour and was so loaded with people, baggage, and animals that the sides of it barely stayed above the surface of the water (and several times didn´t). I rode 11 hours in this damn boat and got urinated on by both a puppy and a sheep. Towards the end the children had taken a liking to the gringo and I was teaching them math and giving them multiplication quizzes towards the end of it (I know, the worst gringo to be teaching math on the planet). They listened to my ipod and were fascinated by anything I pulled out of my bag (so I generally opted not to open my bag). Overall it was a pretty good if a little harrowing Birthday.
I was dropped off in the pitch black on the bank where, lucky for me, MG had come down to meet me. This was a good thing seeing as how I had no idea where to go, there are apparently Caymans (like crocodiles) all over those banks, and there was a Bushmaster on the stairs I had to take (super deadly). I spent the next 3 days with MG in the middle of the beautiful rainforest, taking walks with her to catalogue plants and getting to know a slew of amazing, intelligent, interesting people. I climbed a huge observation tower that went above the canopy, saw a ton of monkeys and tropical birds everywhere I went, and ascended a 90ft. tree with ascenders (and had an awesome repel down). Sorry mom, that´s just the way it is. The whole stay was truly life changing and I didn´t want to leave.
Yesterday I caught the boat back in the morning (a faster, better, more comfortable boat) and was invited by two of the researchers there to stay the night with them at a friends house in Puerto. I decided I could put off my trip to Bolivia and the monkey reserve for a day and opted to join them. This "house" is 25min. outside of horrible Puerto Maldonado and is paradise. It´s completely secluded within the rainforeset and right on the river (which is the perfect temperature, I´m about to go buy an innertube). It´s actually an ecological education center/lodge that has ambitions of an organic garden, green house, and many other big picture projects. There are hammocks everywhere and 5 different cabanas. No electricity, no running water-just compost toilets and a small solar panel that offers enough power for a stove and some light in 1 room at night. It is lived in by this sweet old, Spanish couple that built the place. They are some of the most animated, energetic and happy people I have ever met. They get impassioned and should about globalizaton and socialism and various life philosophies and don´t speak any English. So, when they said they were looking for volunteers to stay there and help undertake some of these projects I of course put down my heavy backpack and declared myself their volunteer. I´ll be here 3 weeks until my internship in Ecuador begins on Oct. 25th. There´s a ton of work to do but also a lot of time to sit in a hammock and try to spot monkeys, I´ll also be able to go back to the research station and visit MG.
Thus far everything has been really amazing. I´m covered in bug bites and itch everywhere but am as happy as can be but for my lack of a camera (stolen from a train on the way back from Macchu Picchu).