The Blog of John Patrick Larson

Last week we had a Balinese cooking class and, as is par for that sort of thing, it included a tour around the local market.  This is such a good thing to get in early during a stint spent in a foreign culture, as it trains your eyes (at least partly) to recognize food as actually delicious and edible.

This seems like an odd thing that shouldn’t really be necessary, but hear me out.  Yep, food is food, and if someone’s selling it in a food market, logically one should be able to perceive it as such and take on faith that “yeah, I could buy this, take it home, make something with it and put the result in my tummy”.  But at least in our experience, that leap of rational understanding seldom happens on its own.

What happens instead is that our eyes lock immediately onto (or desperately seek) food that we already know and can recognize.  And that’s what we buy.  Everything else is reduced (by our all-too-quickly discerning brains) to visual clutter which must be sifted through, obstacles as it were to get to the [apparently little] actual food is present.  It’s a trick of perception, and an insidious one at that.  In a sufficiently foreign place one might think “Ugh, there’s nothing to eat in this country!”¹

Luckily we’ve never yet been that disoriented, but we do have countless instances of having delightful treats right under our noses for weeks, before some gentle soul turns us onto the fact and thereby takes one or more items out of the “visual clutter” realm and into the happier land of “hey cool, they’ve got these here and I’m gonna buy some!”

This month our gentle soul was the most jovial Chef Ketut Budi of Payuk Bali, and our easy-to-miss delightful treats included jack fruit², durian fruit, three types of ginger (two more than I knew to appreciate before), turmeric root, snake beans³, and snake fruit⁴.

This cooking class felt completely in line with the rest of Bali (as we understand it), which is to say it had an air of charm, beauty and general awesome which permeated every aspect.  The visit to the market was nice, yes, but so was the stop by the gorgeous rice fields, the time spent making the little offerings, the break time for enjoying tea and fried jack fruit dipped in honey, and of course the very hands-on main cooking event.

What was most striking for me about the cooking we did was the never-clearer experience of transforming raw ingredients into elaborate and lavish foods.  Ketut began by showing off a platter containing no fewer than 16 distinct ingredients, each of which, aside from some which had been dried, could’ve been pulled or picked from around the island and gotten to their ready state with nothing more than a knife.  Nothing imported, nothing requiring elaborate mechanical processing.  To loosely quote Chris Tucker from Friday, “This shit’s from the earth, yo.”

Our main task in the first segment was to chop these ingredients all down to small bits.  We did so using these cool circular cutting boards that were essentially 4-inch thick cuts of tree trunk (to accommodate my height I was given 3 stacked atop one another, leaving me thankfully much less hunched over for the task than I would have otherwise been).

Once our constituent raw ingredients were chopped, we were shown these big ol’ mortar and pestle sets, perhaps 16 inches across and carved from indigenous volcanic rock.  Our chef went down the line and dropped the right combination of ingredients into each of three mortars to make our three sauces, and invited us each to take up a pestle and start grinding things together.

Like magic, grinding up our respective sets of freshly chopped ingredients started to turn things into our respective sauces.  Our essentially dry set of finely chopped veggies turned a thick but unmistakably saucy consistency.  The result was bursting with fresh flavors of the constituent elements, and more than fit for bottling up, slapping on a label, and selling at about a buck an ounce to internationally-curious yuppy types in a fancy suburban grocery store.  (“Oooh, honey, do you think we should try this new Balinese peanut sauce?  It say here it’s made by real tourists, in the outskirts of rural Ubud!”)  Seriously though, if you do see this in your local Whole Foods or wherever, you should totally pick some up.

I wish I could tell you that all 3 of us valiantly managed to grind all our well-chopped bounty of the earth into salable sauce, but the truth is the resident chef’s aides were on hand to relieve our quickly fatiguing selves, politely offering to take over with a clear sub-text that “Look, you’re new here and kinda suck at using a mortar and pestle.  I could leave you to finish the job but you’d take 2 hours, about 60 minutes of which would be you nursing and resting your cramping wrist.”

I gratefully deferred to their technique and musculature, both of which were much better honed than mine for the task.

These three magic sauces served, as is ubiquitously the case in Balinese cuisine, as the basis of flavor for staples like steamed rice, tofu, tempeh, and boiled vegetables, transforming the boring and bland into exquisite and varied.  Our resulting smorgasbord of all vegetarian dishes was tremendously satisfying.

As a consumer of heavily processed and/or imported foods to at least some degree for virtually all of my life, it is remarkable to understand and participate in the process of going from what grows in the ground to a delectable meal in mere hours, with no help from the good people, impressive machinery, or lengthy supply chain of the industrialized food complex.  Heck, drop me on an island of similar climate and natural abundance as Bali with a knife and a few matches in my pocket and I might not starve to death.  If I can find an suitably shaped volcanic rock I might even be eating pretty well after a few days, and have well-toned hands and forearms by the end of the week.

For full on visual coverage of each segment of our well-above par cooking class, Tracy’s got you covered.

Another lovely takeaway from our cooking class was the friendship of Cassie, the other participant joining us for the day.  Cassie is from the US but was vacationing from South Korea, where she’s been teaching English for now three years.  Hanging out with her for drinks one night afforded us the opportunity to learn about life in South Korea, for it has been in our “maybe” pile for the World Tour path for a while now.

“Yeah, all those beautiful, culturally rich things that you see in the tourism promotional material, I’m not sure they exist because I still haven’t found anything like it.  They do a really good job of putting forth a good front.”  Umm… you guys have google and Trip Adviser there to find stuff like that, right?  Yes, given her presence in Bali and upcoming itinerary she’s clearly no slouch about finding things worth seeing in the world, they just have to exist.

Wow, good to know.  Our hypothetical itinerary just got simpler.

Even more interesting is what Cassie could tell us about North Korea.  She’d never been, of course, but living living in such (relatively) close proximity to the troubled nation reveals a steady stream of anecdotes pertaining to the bizzaro situation in which its [essentially] imprisoned people live under.  We learned that a pair of socks is a coveted commodity, a single pair trading for some twenty pounds corn.  A local hero in South Korea came up with a way to float a box full of socks over the boarder using a large balloon, a clever way to send aide when doing so is otherwise basically impossible, thanks to the military standoff.  We learned of the business of mules who will try to smuggle you out of North Korea and on into South Korea, taking the roundabout way of going through China and into Thailand.  If you manage to make it, you walk into the Korean embassy there and they deport you on back–mercifully to South Korea, because you are automatically classified as a refugee.  This service costs something like $10,000 US and comes with no guarantee.

There is no internet, no outside literature or culture⁵.  For most people the only evidence or reminder that there’s an outside world that’s not as shit-tastic comes from things like flyers raining down alongside air-dropped socks.

The sum of these sketches of life made me wonder how the heck can such a place and situation possibly exist in this day & age.

On a lighter note (and zooming back out to broader first-hand accounts of Korea), it bears mention that Cassie is utterly tired of “Gangnam Style”, which, in South Korea, is endlessly touted as it’s proudest and greatest cultural export since spicy pickled sour kraut.   For the record I’m still enamored with the video, but can appreciate how endlessly in-your-face it must be when you’re living within a 100 mile radius of PSY’s hometown⁶.

Last night, to further celebrate the independence afforded to us by our motorbike transportation, we made a date night out to the Jazz Cafe, Bali’s first ever live Jazz venue (opened back in 1996, don’cha know).  After having lived 8 years in St. Louis I have a deep and abiding fondness for sitting back and nodding along to the rhythms of top-shelf jazz performances.  This being a small town inland of a small island in the South Pacific Ocean we didn’t go in with any unfairly high hopes, so my goodness we were delighted by what we found.

It was Sunday night, acoustic jazz night.  On stage was just a guy strumming an acoustic guitar and a native looking woman holding a mic, the resident vocalist Nancy Ponto.  They were incredible.  Granted, my reaction may have been because I haven’t been to a good live Jazz show since leaving St. Louis back in 2009.  Nonetheless I immediately thought this woman could stand in for Norah Jones at anytime with minimal ticket holders demanding their money back, and Tracy agreed.  It was one of those “What are you doing here?” moments, as in “Why aren’t you in some fancy recording studio cutting an album?”

The night was pure bliss to my ears, to my soul.  I was designated driver for the night, so while having a glass of Malbec wine like Tracy had would’ve been lovely⁷ I was more than contented to sip my froufrou tropical fruit cooler out of a tall glass, eyes closes while my ears devoured the brilliantly rendered jazz standards and my body reclined on the swanky and always comfortable lesehan style seating⁸.  We topped it all off by sharing a chocolate mousse, and agreed that our roughly $20 night out was a most worthy way to pass an evening.

As we continue to rack up experiences outside of our paradisaical situation at home, Bali’s stock just keeps rising.

Notes:

Sure enough, as soon as I felt well again it was a very happy living situation.

The nearby Bintang grocery store has a number of items that we’ve taken to be the emblematic staples of Balinese cuisine.  We bought a 5-kilo bag of rice and make daily progress on it (amazingly, it cost less than $4), and Tracy has quickly become masterful at fixing up many variations on the theme of rice (or noodles) plus vegetables plus tofu (or tempeh) plus a base of flavorful elements like garlic, ginger, soy sauce & apple vinegar, and finally topped with freshly chopped cilantro and/or spring onions.

I add my carnitarian twist to this mix by way of the fish fillets that Bintang offers, the tuna and red snapper being my favorite.  Available for under $2 US and perfectly cut like a single serving steak, these easily sear to perfection with a little butter, squeezed-on lime juice, and a few shakes of salt and pepper, completing the meals which feel light, filling, healthy, and very nutritious.

I could get used to this, which is good.  During one of our state-of-the-union pool meetings I began to lobby for two months in Bali, which met with little resistance.  “The way I see it, this place is good enough to merit two months, plus staying a while will give me time to work and replenish the well of travel funds.”

Once back again on my feet the first order of business in adjusting to life in the outskirts of Ubud was to learn to ride the motorbike.  Our landlord Nyoman had me all set up with a motorbike parked right outside our door, and left us helmets and a pancho on the table in our living room.  When I stepped out one day to give riding a try he was right there to give me a little lesson.

Nyoman doesn’t speak much English (Indonesian is much more his forté, really), but he’s got enough to give me a lesson on operation of the motorbike.  I believe the sequence of words uttered were, interlaced between demonstrations, “blinker”, “horn”, “break”, “gas”.  The information-rich (and words-lean) demonstration was capped off with “Don’t panic”, accompanied by a bright smile and thumbs up.

It is with no sarcasm that I say it was a rather confidence inducing lesson.  Seriously: just the basics, none of the over thinking.  Pure presence.

I was ready.

I slowly made my way down the alley walkway and onto our quaint, outskirts street.  I went to the right, so as to enjoy a larger radius for my first motorbike turn.  We’re in a country that drives on the left side of the road here, don’cha know.

To recap: in this moment I’ve never driven a motorbike, I’ve never driven on the left side of the road, and I haven’t driven any sort of vehicle in about 6 months.

Everything seemed to go by so fast, for in this situation my brain was going quite slow.  Everything needed to be run through conscious awareness, so much of what I was experiencing and doing was not yet automated.  So I went super slow, taking it all at my own pace, but then of course having to contend with getting passed a lot more.  I went north a ways, did an about face and then went south a ways.

All I really wanted was to get a little experience without incident.  Have an accident on the first day and I was apt to deem it a bad idea overall, if not for my own lack of faith then perhaps for a most reasonable concern from my beloved over my well being.  Thankfully my 15 or so minutes of riding passed without incident, and I pulled back into our place with an air of triumph.  Not because my riding was particularly studly, but because I’d survived the first experience unscathed.  It was all downhill from here.

A motorbike is a perfect example of the brain’s ability to rapidly learn and condition itself to something very new as an adult.  One round of geriatric-style driving was all it needed to go to work during sleep, and be ready to go the next day.  My second ride was a different experience: it was like time had slowed down considerably from the day before.  By the fruits of offline learning work done in the night, my brain this time had plenty more bandwidth to deal with the (now) somewhat familiar happenings.  Throw in that increased comfort meant going faster meant less getting passed, and you’ve got a nice upward spiral of confidence and ability.

It was like magic.  Brains are awesome.

In the days that followed I took on progressively more difficult situations as I grew into comfort with our new means of transportation.  Open ended cruising around.  Taking the narrow path into town.  Navigating traffic on the main drag.  Going up and down steep, winding hills.  Schlepping groceries over my shoulder.

On about day six I was ready to take the most precious wife cargo.

One of our first field trips together on the bike (aside from groceries, of course) was to the Sacred Monkey Forest.  I think we can all agree that monkeys are, ostensibly, cool and a worthwhile attraction¹.  Every country I’ve been in that has indigenous monkeys has some sort of attraction or tour promising to show monkeys.  The thing is, though, most of the time your guide will point to some indiscriminate figure up high in a distant tree and say “Look at the monkey!  Do you see it?”  Umm…. yeah, I guess that’s a monkey.  Alright, cool.

In my experience, best case scenario you’ve got like 3 monkeys whose figures can be made out clearly, at least two of which are taking a nap.

So against this backdrop of mild monkey frustration², it is hard to overstate my jubilant delight over the literally hundreds of Macaque monkeys milling about and playing throughout the tidy and beautiful Sacred Monkey Forest.  Spanning little more than an acre or two, the forest has enormous ancient trees, beautiful stonework temples and bridges, and a river running through a deep ravine with vine works and stone steps that collectively constitute a platinum-class monkey playground.

And play they do.  All around the forest are piles of yams, yucca root, coconuts and corn to serve as veritable buffets for the inhabitants, and just watching a pudgy Macaque gnaw on a coconut is enough to keep me entertained for 10 minutes, minimum.  They climb, they swing, little ones cling to the underside of mothers, and they all think of you as a more or less interesting distraction from whatever little tedium they experience in their monkey days.

The advice ’round these parts is to not carry any food on your person, for they will take to it in a very forward manner, as if to say “Aw, you brought me a treat!  Here, let me get that for you, no need to make you carry food all the way into my den AND have to get it out from within that zipped compartment, that would be asking too much!  I’ll just be a minute.”  Even without the lure of food, stay stationary enough and they’ll take to your sitting presence as an invitation to use your body as a newly installed climbing fixture.

You bet that I sat idly long enough to take in the experience.

After our jaunt through the Monkey Forest we took lunch at the Pu Nani Warung³ and then tried our hand at negotiating for some Balinese fashion to wear about our swanky villa.  We stopped in one of the many many clothes shops lined upon along the major streets in town, preferring it for the prominence of dresses that were apt to fit both Tracy’s style and (apparently) enormous ribcage (when compared to the cuts of cloth more suited for the locals’ frames).

By now I was fixing to have some traditional garb of my own, and a silk sarong looked mighty comfy.

So Tracy and I went about our parallel tasks of shopping, her picking a dress and me a sarong.  I quickly converged on a royal blue silk one with golden patterns.  Before long Tracy found a nice flowing dress of auburn red patterns on a very light creme color.  When it came to talk price we realized our mistake: because we were shopping in tandem and had both found items we liked, it was harder to negotiate.  There’s a dampened ability to make like you’re going to walk out on the sale when you have concerns of depriving your spouse of the purchase they want to make, so without better-than-average married people ESP that day our tandem negotiation only got us a few bucks off: my $25 sarong came down to $23, and Tracy’s $30 dress came down to $25.

Pricey prices by Bali standards, but still not bad for what we’re used to in the US.

Back at home, the sarong with nothing else has quickly become a preferred outfit.  Cool breezes wafting off the rice terraces, and me rockin’ a 3×6 foot piece of silk wrapped around my waist.  Delightful!

It’s funny how things come full circle.  Back in Madison during college, one of the regulars of the ballroom dance club scene used to wear a sarong all the time.  Between long hair, big nerdy glasses⁴, and what my 20-year-old self took for a woman’s skirt I thought him rather eccentric.  I was “polite” enough to not say anything, but the thoughts “you’re dressed like a girl”, “you’re a weirdo”, and “don’t stand so close to me” all totally crossed my mind.  (I was a charming example of a human being back then, I know.)

But now?  Holy smokes, sarong guy, you were on to something.  Here in Bali that sort of traditional garb is worn all over the place by the men folk, and there’s nothing effeminate about it.  It’s cool and light, positively agrees with a tropical climate, and these fabric rectangles have no shortage of style in the myriad colors and patterns.  You’d be an oddball to condemn anyone for wearing one in these parts, and I bet on a crowded ballroom dance floor the sarong scores serious points for both thermal comfort and movement freedom.

I find it instructive indeed to see how relative tastes truly are, particularly as they pertain to fashion, and even deeper issues like masculinity and femininity.  It’s freeing to realize the degree to which it’s all made up.

Bali bliss continues to run high.  We should probably begin tending to the visa renewal process soon to up our welcome for another 30 days.

Notes:

To my mom and anyone else who might not be familiar with colloquial ‘hood: ballin’ is urban speak for “doing really well, specifically pertaining to a certain lavish affluence”.  It derives from the notion of being a baller, which refers to one who transcends urban poverty by making it as a well-payed athlete, say, playing basketball.

The night we got into Bali there was what we perceived to be magic in the air.  In fairness to observable reality, that was probably just the cool breezes wafting over the nearby greenery and the soothing symphony of the insects within, easily audible above the very sparse hum of traffic.

When we awoke to a thermos of rice tea set out on the table of our second floor porch, we saw the beauty of our rural settings more clearly: rice paddies extending in all directions, set against a backdrop of wafting palm trees and buildings adorned by surprisingly ornate carvings and statuary.  As tropical architecture goes it was a beautiful upgrade from the cinder block and corrugated metal rooftop construction seen so prominently around Central America.

This felt like a whole new world, one of mindful attention to detail and beauty woven into all aspects of life, an attention that showed from the temples & compounds spanning decades (centuries?) to the ubiquitous offerings of flowers &  incense laid out several times a day as a devotional practice.  And there are more statues of Buddha, Ganesh, and other spiritual figures and figurines than you can shake a banana leaf at.

Our potentially premature bleary-eyed fascination with Bali turned out to be well justified indeed.  This was a rare instance of neither of us doing really any prep research about a country, and for it I think we were rewarded by the heightened attention to and appreciation of what actually is, rather than a cursory comparison to pre-cultivated expectations of what should be¹.  That first morning we decided we should be delighted to spend a month in Bali.

With the aid of the internet and a friendly cab driver named Kadek we set about our quest to find a suitable home for the month.  When you’re white and stepping out of a guest house, drivers know there’s like a 20% chance that yes, you actually do need a taxi, thank you, so the offers in that setup come quickly and regularly.  Grateful am I that Kadek called out to me that second morning when we were about 4 steps out of the guest house, for, left to our own devices, Tracy and I will stubbornly walk everywhere (this is in defiance of the fare dance which usually leaves us feeling screwed).  From the prior day’s research we had a few places in town to go look at, and Kadek explained he was available for hire for 50,000 Indonesian Rupiah per hour, minimum two hours, to take us around town and help us in our quest.

For those not savvy to the conversion rates in Southeast Asia, that’s about $5 an hour for a knowledgeable ally and ride around town.  Sold.  Hey, can you take us some place to get a cell phone?  You can?  And the phone plus SIM card will only cost us $20?  Let’s go!

Three hours later we were spent but had 2 viable places in the winner’s circle.  Our barrage of inquiries about other promising properties found online was much less fruitful, but we did get one thoughtful note back to the tune of “Sorry, my place isn’t available but you might contact my friend Jared, a broker in town who might have something for you.”  We decided to give him a call.

“Ah, I’m just on my way to Denpasar.  But, okay, you’re looking to make a decision today… if you can meet me in 10 minutes there’s a place I can show you before I head out.”  Whether or not Jared was really on his way out of town or if that was just consummate showmanship to create a sense of urgency and excitement, we may never know.  Either way, we went for it.  We left our guest house once more and I handed the phone to the first cab driver who detected our Caucasian, ride-needing presence.  We rendezvoused with Jared at the location hashed out with the driver, and he on his scooter led us out of the city and towards the property.

In Bali there’s a culture of getting around on motorbikes and scooters.  What you mostly see on the road are motorbikes and minivans (all suitable for toting around 4-6 tourists), and the ratio is easily ten to one.  Yes, cars are permitted, but motorbikes rule the road and the automobile drivers are well trained to be aware of their presence.  Tracy and I observed this on day one and, being safety conscious and head-splitting accident averse, resolved that we’d need to get a place close enough to things so that we would be generally set as pedestrians.

But now Jared was taking us far out of the city center, more like the middle of no where, it felt, as the 7 minutes of following him down the rural road ticked on.  “I’m not sure this place is going to work” I said to Tracy, concerned that perhaps we’d wasted the man’s time.

When he finally stopped we got out of our cab, followed him on foot down the narrow alleyway between two family compounds, and through the gates into the house he had to show us.

We’d seen some nice places in our two day quest.  This villa blew them all away.

Bedroom & bath on the first and second floor, very new and modern fixtures, wide open space with vaulted ceiling on the second floor, upstairs terrace overlooking rice paddies, well appointed kitchen, and a pool right in the living room, all enclosed into a private little paradise with lush tropical vegetation serving as a garden for ambiance.  Only photos do it justice.

Perhaps we might reconsider our self-imposed motorbike ban, after all.  To business then, I said to Jared  “Like we mentioned on the phone, $1100 a month is pretty much our splurge price point… what does this go for?”

“$1500 a month, but in Bali everything’s negotiable.  I’ll let the owner know you’re interested, and I won’t show it off for the next 24 hours to give you guys a little time to think about it.  I’ve got one more property to show you, but she’s not picking up right now.  How about we meet tomorrow morning and you can have a look at that one as well?”

On the cab ride back Tracy and I considered Jared’s words about motorbikes: they’re easy to learn, the conditions are safe because people ride slow and cars know to look out, you can rent one for $50 for a month, that we’ll be much happier and more autonomous with our own transportation.

The next day we met at the other property, this one a sprawling estate that had four bedrooms and three (three!) pools, located on different levels fitting the slope of the land down to the river upon which the property was perched.  Jared explained “Here if you guys wanted it I’d only rent you whichever one room you liked, and just not rent the other 3, so you’d have it to yourself.”

Wow.  This castle would’ve felt much too sparse and deserted for just Tracy and I, but darned if I didn’t have a few lovely visions about taking it over for a week or two with some family and/or friends.

“We like the other one, and if $1100 can be done we’ll take it.”  Jared phoned Nyoman, the local who lived right next door and owned the house.  $1200 plus electricity is the offer that came back.  Electricity was apt to be between $50 and $150, depending on how much we ran the AC.  Not too bad, because we’re pretty good about keeping our usage low.  We told Jared we’d think about it, and he zoomed off on his motorbike to go to his next meeting.

We walked along the street from the castle towards our guest house, and perhaps 2 minutes later Jared zoomed back in our direction to say “Just talked to Nyoman again, $1150 plus electric and it’s yours.”  Tracy and I exchanged glances briefly, and then to Jared I nodded “done deal.”

And that was that.  In real estate there’s this concept of moving in (to a place you’ve been shown and like) in your head.  It’s when you start to let excitement grow and attachment build before you’ve actually made a deal.  From a negotiation standpoint, this is a dangerous thing to do, for it makes you less free to walk away and woe is your position if the party you’re negotiating with knows you’re already attached.  We were careful not to mentally move into the villa with a pool in the living room before we we had actually secured it at a workable price², and so in that moment it was very sweet indeed to finally let ourselves get excited for where we would spend the next month³.

Two hours later we called Kadek to take us to our shiny new digs, dropped off our bags, got the keys, and let ourselves be chaperoned for a proper grocery run by which to stock our fridge and pantry.  After the 2 and a half days of house hunting, we were elated to kick back with confidence that we’d made a perfect landing.

After all that running around on top of our 22 hour day of travel from Australia, things caught up with me and I pretty much immediately came down with a nasty cold which lasted a week.  If I had to be sick, this was a space in which to do it and keep in good spirits.  I was so happy to be where I was I just patiently waited it out.  Every day at some point I would just look around, be struck by the fact that in this moment this is my home, and giggled to myself that we should find (and be allowed to live in) such a place.

I felt like a baller.

Notes:

Evey year on New Year’s Eve, the city of Sydney in its harbor puts on arguably one of the most spectacular fireworks shows that the world has to offer.  Being in Sydney for the occasion presented us with an opportunity.  How could we miss it?

Tash recounted her time of attending the fireworks 2 years ago.  Something like 1.6 million people congregate along the harbor for the show each year.  To get a good view of the show, she and her friends set up on a sidewalk in a neighborhood at 10am, spent the day in the sun drinking from flasks, knocked on a neighborhood house door or two to use the bathroom, and after the show hung out at a bar until about 3am, waiting for the crowds to disperse so they could catch a bus home.

That sounded like a LOT of work just to see a 20 minute fireworks show, even if it was liable to be the greatest display of fireworks we’d ever seen and were ever likely to see.  But then again, we were here, and when would this opportunity ever going to come up again?  And what else were we going to do to make our time in Sydney quite as memorable?  Were we just going to sit sadly at home that night in the suburbs, watching the show on TV even though it was happening just one bus ride away?  How could we call ourselves world travelers if we squander such peak experiences?

So we were on the fence a lot about this one.  What largely settled it for me was when my friend Anne gently paraphrased my own lowbrow profanity right back to me, saying plainly “Well yeah, so stop being such a great big pussy and go see the amazing fireworks show, already.”

Touché.  At about the same time Tracy had similarly come around to the idea, that we should pack a lovely cooler of food to last, get to one of the harbor-side parks at around 11am, while away our time with e-readers, conversation and cards, avoid the sun under cover of umbrellas, and just have a nice picnic day with the bonus of a fireworks show at the end.

So we did just that.  Out the door at 10:10am, we took the 309 downtown, walked 5 minutes, and queued up to enter the park.  It was a winding queue that took about 2 hours to get through, putting us in the park around 1pm.  All the spots with good views of the harbor were taken, but it didn’t really matter: everyone would be standing and crowded into the good vantage points for the actual show anyway¹.  We whiled away the day just as planned, and by our training of enjoying idle times with things like layovers and other transit events, it was a well-shaded cinch: hardly the suffering we’d imagined from Tash’s account.

The nine o’clock fireworks were very nice, and indeed the location of our blankets had no bearing upon where we would actually watch the show from.  Afterwards we realized we had two and a half hours to pass before the midnight show, and we were feeling already a bit sleepy.  So we simply napped, spooning all cute-like on our blanket.  Now, I’m not saying that this is a lifestyle habit that I’m looking to cultivate, but man, sleeping in a city park was quite comfortable.

Firework warning shots served as our wake up call.  Refreshed from the nap, we again huddled close into a group of revelers with a passable view through the trees and enjoyed the show.  It was satisfying to think that we had indeed bucked up and gotten ourselves out for the event.  The day was pleasant, it was not hard to pass all that time, and it was neat to think at that moment that I may indeed be watching the greatest fireworks show in all the world this year.

The night finished well.  After the show we packed up and walked on back the way we came, right to the park-side street at which we were dropped off, and what did we find?  A barely loaded 309 bus, just waiting to fill up and take us right back home.  Five minutes later we pulled out, and we were back home by 1am.  The process of getting home after our long day was smooth as silk: no camping out at a bar until 3am required.

My computer surgery ended up a long winded affair.  For one reason or another, I couldn’t overcome the technical hurdles of cloning over the old drive to the new, and so eventually bit the bullet and resigned myself to reinstalling/rebuilding everything on my new hard drive, and copying over the important data piecemeal from the old.  Though it broke my heart to lose those few good productive days, there was simply to manage the situation as it presented itself.

In the interest of good karma and fulfilling on our promise to be Grade-A house sitters, we made certain to leave Tash and Simon with their house in as good a condition as possible.  We stripped & laundered our sheets, tidied the spaces, stocked the fridge with a case of Victoria Bitters, and greeted our hosts’ noontime arrival with a prepared lunch of quiche, salad, and fresh fruit².  When it was time for us to leave we exchanged fond goodbyes, I let Mustard jump on me and lay doggie slobber on my hands and arms one last time for good measure, and we were off.

Tash had welcomed us to stay with her & Simon for those last two days in Australia, but in the interest of experiencing a speck more than just Sydney during our visit to the continent we declined and opted instead to head for Katoomba, a small town nestled in the Blue Mountains just a pleasant train ride away.  Our time there was pleasant but largely unremarkable, another chance to hike about some great outdoors and spend more than we ever thought possible on mere hostel accommodations.  Given our sparse gear it was better than sleeping out in the bush.

One night for dinner we went to an Indian restaurant.  I ordered a $16 lamb korma and Tracy a $12 daal dish, and I requested rice for our meals, thinking nothing of it.  After a delicious meal we both had a bit left over, and asked for a little rice to go so as to make a great snack for later.  When we were awaiting the bill I said to Tracy “I wonder if the rice is gonna be extra?  What do you think, one or two bucks?  That’d be fine, I guess.  Four bucks and I’m making a scene.”

The universe sometimes, it seems, has a delightful way of calling me out to see me follow through on things I’ve brazenly declared³.  Our bill cost $12 more than I calculated it should.  The reason?  $4 for my rice, $4 for Tracy’s rice, and $4 for our takeout rice.

“Excuse me, but, $4 seems a bit excessive for rice, and why is it not included with our meals?  I don’t recall seeing it as a surcharge listed anywhere on the menu.”  I was told it was on the menu, that people usually don’t ask for rice, or if they do they just ask for a little bit and he charges one or two dollars.  “So wait, you’re telling me that you expect people to order a $16 dish of lamb in a bowl with lots of very flavorful and spicy sauce (it was delicious, by the way), but not order rice?”

“Well, they just order a little, or have naan with it.”

Our waiter, who might have been the owner as well, went off to tend to something else for a minute, mentioning that they had just opened last night and were still ironing out some of the kinks.

“Excuse me,” I called to some guys who had been recently seated at a nearby table, “do you might if I have a look at one of your menus?  Thanks, mate.”  A quick scan revealed no line item for rice, let alone $4 rice.

When our waiter returned I continued about the objectionable state of our check.  “So there is no mention of rice in the menu, and I swear you said it was no problem to get a side of rice with our meals.”

By this point, I’m told, I had the full attention of the dozen or so other patrons in the small dining area.

I continued, “I’m a bit taken aback that our $40 meal has jumped to a $52 meal with something that I can’t imagine you not including with the meals you serve.  Does everyone else here know that their meal will probably run them $4 more than the menu price, or do a lot of people in Australia just eat Indian mains not on a bed or rice?  This feels like a nasty tack on, and had I known you charged $4 for a scoop of rice it would have been a different story, we simply would have not eaten here⁴.”

While I was oblivious to the attention of the fellow patrons, I reckon our host was not.  Before long I recall the words “I just want to you to happy” being said as precursor to an offer to remove the offending rice charges from our bill, presumably an urgent gesture to rush me out and end the mealtime show.

It felt good to take a stand.  Charging for rice is a pardonable sin, but doing so without getting informed consent is not.  Because I’m either kind or stupid, I effectively nulled out a large chunk of the protest savings by tipping generously.  After dinner we went to the store to get some picnic fodder, and with the adrenaline fading the humor of our dinner bill situation started to creep in.  “Hey, this loaf of bread is kinda pricey, but at least it’s cheaper than rice!”  Everything in the store was either cheaper than rice, more expensive as rice, or about the same price as rice.

So Australia was expensive, and the next phase of World Tour beckoned.  With our strategic reserves of English-speaking white people more than replenished, we were ready to move on to less familiar cultural surroundings.

Our second morning in Katoomba we awoke to a 4am alarm, did our solitary walk in the brisk moonlight back to the train station, and watched the sun rise as we headed back to Sydney.  Our travel day was long: 2 hours to the city, a 4 hour flight to Perth, a 5 hour layover, and then a 3.5 hour flight to Bali.  Bleary eyed, we arrived at around 9:30pm in the Bali airport, did the dance through customs and getting a visa-on-arrival, and grabbed a cab.

We were so very tired when we arrived in Ubud at about 11:20pm (or about 2:20am as far as our bodies were concerned, thanks to timezone traversal).  And yet, Bali had something magical about it that was immediately palpable.  We got settled into a room in a guest house, and I forget who said it to whom but the conversation was something like “Hey I know we just got here and it’s dark and there’s nothing happening, but, I think I love this place.” to which the other quickly agreed, with just as sparse an understanding of why.

Notes:

From my vantage point, and save for a few exceptions including the ubiquitously cool & novel accent, Australia’s southeast province often felt like we may as well have been anywhere in the US.

Our last few days in New Zealand were uneventful.  Wanaka was everything it promised to be: a pristine and picturesque city perched on a beautiful lake.  And like the rest of New Zealand, it was pricy.  The first morning I managed to find a breakfast of pancakes for $16¹.  At this point we were just tired of traveling about, and so during our 48 hours we didn’t venture far from the rather nice YHA hostel beyond grocery store runs and a few meals out.

We’d been in travel/tourist mode for just over three weeks, and were looking forward to having a more regular home.

Our laying low at the YHA made a good proxy for this.  The kitchen was well-above-average impressive.  With its island containing no fewer than 5 burner stations and a comparably well-equipped perimeter it could’ve passed for the kitchen of a happenin’ restaurant.  From around 6 to 8pm it positively hummed with groups of travelers of many cultures all working to prepare meals that were way more involved than what you’d expect in a hostel kitchen².

The common space was pleasant and spacious, like that of an alpine lodge and complete with a Christmas tree, that handy reminder of the so easy to forget fact that Christmas was, yes, next week.  In the evenings they put on a movie in the separate TV room.  One night we caught “Mao’s Last Dancer”, a biographical film about a Chinese ballet performer who visits and subsequently defects to the US.  In this film the US is portrayed as a bit excessively decadent as well as a super awesome alternative to going back to communist China.  As with the Hopkins film the week before, it’s fun to see how different cultures view the US and which points of contrast stand out.

It’s probably worth noting and remembering how well it worked to have a TV not in the main room of socialization and gathering.  At the Wanaka YHA the television is situated in its own [sound] space, a dedicated & closed-off room with comfy couches arranged to mimic theater-style seating, and dark-lit ambiance to match.  We’ve been in countless places where the TV is an unavoidable presence in the common space, and whether it means to or not it kinda dominates the space.  When turned on, it has to be loud enough so as to be heard, so it necessarily drowns out normal speaking voices which relegates (again, whether it means to or not) actual communication and conversation among fellow travelers to second class status.  This effect is largely invisible until you experience a common space without it–without a TV contending for attention, I couldn’t help but notice a lot more meeting and mingling among travelers was happening.

That and you can really just enjoy the movie when it’s movie night.  Brilliant use of a second room.

When it was time we caught our bus back to Queenstown.  One more night before our flight on to Australia and our house sitting gig.

On the whole I am just so struck with how good natured the whole of the New Zealand population again and again showed itself to be.  I adore their mannerisms, which may be the only thing that explains and/or excuses why I’ve been incessantly quoting lines from Flight of the Concords.

One instance stands out in memory.  During the bus to the glacier towns we had a stop in a park and I hit the restroom.  As I came out an older fellow, a member of the parks department with this huge grey beard called out to me.  “On holiday, are ya’ now?  Gonna see the glacier?”  “On holiday?  Yeah, I guess so: my wife and I are traveling for a year and have some time here in New Zealand, it’s beautiful here.”  He beamed back “Right-o, then, good on ya!³“.  And they he merrily went about his task of polishing the metal on an outdoor garbage receptacle.

I don’t know for sure, but I feel like I come from a culture where cleaning a trash can would overwhelmingly be viewed as draining or menial work.  Yet here was this fellow, cheerfully chatting with tourists while contributing to the very pristine quality that makes the area/country so endearing⁴.  I’m not saying you can’t find similarly cheery retirees doing basic manual labor in the US, but I’d wager you won’t on the first try.

Though I certainly wasn’t among 100+ other passengers, I felt like a VIP as we walked some 50 meters on the airport tarmac towards our plane, all nestled in mountainous beauty.  I’m walking along the cordoned off path, summery blue skies above, the outdoor terrain looks like this, and I’m about to fly to Sydney on a Wednesday afternoon.  I feel blessed.

A few hours later we landed in Australia’s world class capital.  Through no fault of its own, our first glance impression was strikingly lackluster.  New Zealand is a tough act to follow: suddenly in the streets of the city we saw regular bits of graffiti, a few pieces of litter, and less than perfectly lush and splendorous nature.  It looked like hell.

It wasn’t, of course: that impression is just a function of what our eyes were accustomed (and not accustomed) to seeing the last 11 days.  It’s totally unfair to be the destination city of a flight that originated in New Zealand.

Onward we navigated the bus system to the Sydney suburb where our charge lay, Mustard the dog and our hosts Tatiana and Simon.  Tatiana (or Tash for short) had provided immaculately detailed instructions and we made it straightaway.  We were invited to stay a with them a few days before they headed off for holiday in Thailand, so that we could get settled and to give Mustard time to get used to his new caretakers.

Tash’s hospitality was stellar.  On arrival we were greeted with homemade laksa, a spicy noodle soup from Malaysia with a coconut milk base.  Tash isn’t Malaysian, but Japanese in ethnicity and born and raised in Brazil.  That plus her cooking prowess makes her all kinds of worldly.  Being done with school and off from work, she pulled out all the stops to show us around her proud city during the next two days.

Our first stop was down to her place of work: Captain Cook Cruises.  She scored us some free tickets for a boat tour of the harbor.  Aside from featuring the legendary (and deservedly so) Sydney Opera House, Sydney’s harbor boasts the rightly famed Sydney Harbor Bridge, a kickin’ city skyline, sandstone cliffs, beautiful beaches, and collections of $10+ million dollar houses.  See the photos here.  If there was ever a good way to be impressed upon the world classiness of a city, this was it.

When we got off the boat, Tash led us on a surprise run along the harbor to the Opera House.  Turns out she bought us tickets for the tour, and we had to hurry to catch the 12:30pm.  At $28 a piece, Tracy and I left to our own devices might well have skipped it, contenting ourselves with a walk around the outside and popping our heads into the foyer.  It’s ridiculously beautiful up close and personal, well worth the price of admission.  Many thanks to Tash for treating us to an experience we might otherwise have let slide.

We rounded out our adventurous day with walk along a harbor inlet through the Royal Botanical Garden, lunch at a mall food court at which I cemented my new love for laksa soup, a guided tour of the Susannah House (an historic neighborhood building of 5 apartments built in 1844 and stylistically still quite in tact), and a delicious pint of beer at Fortune of War, Sydney’s oldest pub which dates back to 1828.

It was quite the day arranged graciously by our hostess, a perfect sampling of Sydney at its best.

Ah, if that weren’t enough, the next day she took us to the Bondi beach, one of Sydney’s finest.

By day three of our stay we were well acclimated and feeling right at home.  In the afternoon Tash and Simon were off for their flight, so for the next two weeks the house and all its dog-tending duties were ours to manage.

Mustard is about 75 pounds of muscle, built no doubt in part from devouring 2 chicken wings whole in the morning every day, and then 2 again at night.  Shaped like a bouncer with a barrel chest and slender waist, about 90% of the time that he’s looking at you he’s got this big, loving smile on his face.  It’s super cute, he’s a good looking and friendly dog and that grin just gives you the warm fuzzies inside.  During walks and between breaks to smell things, he’ll get you up to a sprint if he can by toting you along on the leash.  And if he spots another dog within 100 feet, there’ll be a lot of barking and a mini tug-of-war as you pull to prevent a doggie altercation.

From Mustard I learned a very important and subtle distinction about me: I am a dog liker, but it turns out not a dog lover.  As a dog liker I love to pet and generally love on any dog whose path I cross, be it my Mom’s dog when I go home to visit or stray dogs running around the square of a city in Central America.  But I am not a dog lover in the sense of wanting to sign up for the ownership gig with its years-long haul.  For me the novelty wears off, leaving me with substantial daily responsibility and an upper limit on cleanliness that all that slobber and hair puts on your home⁵.

So we are lovingly tending to our Mustard duties and even get a lot of enjoyment out of the excuse for early morning fresh air and the games of catch in the backyard, and at the same time we take comfort in the fact that we won’t have to do so forever⁶.  What is so great about learning this here and now over a mere two weeks in Australia, is that we’re getting effectively inoculated against the premise of owning a dog now, well before our hypothetical children fall in love with a dog and bring impassioned pleas for us to get one.  Now that Tracy and I have a clear picture of the experience, we’ll be better equipped to quell such requests, and less apt to fall for innocent lies like “I’ll take care of it, it’ll be my dog!”.

Christmas was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  By that I mean it was the first, and most likely the last, time the Christmas was a strictly just-Tracy-and-I affair: no family, no friends, just the two of us with literally zero fuss on our part about gifts, decorations or other such preparations.  It was chill and low key, yet had a certain decadence about it.

In the morning we made egg sandwiches with fresh fruit atop yogurt and meusli.  Then we drank beers and played cards in the backyard.  Then we had a 30 Rockin’ around the Christmas tree marathon of watching 30 Rock, drinking wine, nibbling on cookies, all while our feast cooked: twice baked potatoes and a beef roast on a bed of veggies.  You get the idea.

My laptop’s hard drive has been in slow decline since Nicaragua and the situation has now come to a head.  Australia (like I imagine most countries that are not the US) totally closes down for holidays, which is most inconvenient when you need specialty parts to do surgery on your computer.  Today around noon I realized to my utter chagrin that my next-day shipping for an order I placed online wouldn’t ship until the first or second week of January.  With that plan out, I managed to find a store that was open until 2pm, and then not again for 5 days.  A $94 one way cab ride across town ensured I got there on time to make my purchase, saving me from another week of idling, work-wise.  No regrets, but youch, I wish I’d known an hour earlier that I might spend more like $7 on public transportation to get me there.

Right then, on to computer surgery.

Notes:

Maybe it was because we were fresh off of months in the no-stranger-to-squalor nations of Central America.  But then again we just had spent 24 hours in San Francisco, a good looking town by any account.  Even against that worthy point of comparison, Auckland was uncommonly beautiful.

We started our tour of New Zealand that early morning by walking a mile on foot, backtracking to make up for our hesitation to press the stop button press on our shuttle bus into town (we should have known that the Circus Circus we passed, the breakfast destination at which we were to meet our hosts, was in fact our cue to get off and no, it wasn’t one of a chain).  Even in the relatively pedestrian suburb in which we found ourselves, super reminiscent of the neighborhoods of my home town of Brookfield, Wisconsin, New Zealand’s polished nature and beauty impressed.  The air was clear &  invigorating, and the vegetation still wet with morning dew smelled simply delicious.

After holing up in a cafe to catch a proper breakfast, our host swooped in to pick us up right on time.  Back at their house we chatted a while over tea.  Charles and Amy are themselves about a month from commencing their own world tour, which gave us much to talk about.  It was somewhat humbling to be reminded what a big world it is when they described their own year-long path, one containing very little overlap with our own.

After an hour or so of visiting, my jet lag was getting the best of me and we settled in for a nap.  Here in the southern hemisphere the December days are long, so when I woke I guessed it was 4pm, maybe 5.  Nope, it was 8pm and still quite light.  To my surprise and utter non-disappointment, I had slept 8 hours, and felt thoroughly refreshed.

May we all be so blessed to have so comfy a bed to crash in after a 13 hour flight.

That night we made dinner (from the groceries we picked up earlier Tracy cooked lomo saltado, our favorite dish from Peru) and had a lovely little dinner party, topped with a drive down Auklund’s premier avenue for elaborate holiday decorations (a useful reminder that yes, we are in the Christmas season).

The next day, unfamiliar with couch-surfer protocol and wishing to err on the side of not being a needy or burdensome presence, we took to our own adventure of exploring downtown Auklund and its harbor area.  Charles set us up with directions and bus routes, and we were on our way.

This trip, during our day-long wanderings downtown and along the shores of the harbor, is when we realized that Auklund is ridiculously beautiful.  It’s a good looking town in general, but beyond that it’s pristine in an unreal kind of way, like visiting some sort of alternate universe utopia in the not-too-distant future.  During our whole day we saw not one bit of graffiti, not one homeless person, and I counted exactly 3 pieces of litter (they were floating near to one another in a little alcove of the shore).

Perhaps these typical marks of urban imperfection exist somewhere else in the city that we just happened to miss, but even if so it’s remarkable and deliciously disorienting to have them absent for even a whole city block, much less for hours of wandering about¹.  Even the water of the harbor, this bustling harbor with shipyards and cargo ships all present and accounted for, lacks the usual grimy tinge to it in favor of gorgeous blue and turquoise that could be mistaken for the Caribbean.  Tracy’s got the pictures to back it up.

For lunch we hit a supermarket to assemble an impromptu picnic of wine, bread, cheese, deli meat, cucumber, and a pint of super tasty in-season strawberries, and took our bounty to a lookout point on a high hill overlooking the harbor, land and island formations dotted on the blue canvas below, and the city skyline across the way.

It was one of those “And this is what our life looks like right now.” moments.

Back at the fort Charles and Amy whipped up a smorgasbord of food and us two couples enjoyed our second little dinner party together, complete with wine and jazz music streaming from the collection on my laptop².  Charles, a native Kiwi, and Amy, born and raised in China until 20, proved again to be delightful company, and yet another pair of data points to suggest that people from all backgrounds and walks of life are, well, pretty much the same when it comes to hopes, fears, ambitions, joys and all that other stuff that makes us human.

The next morning, rather than have us try to navigate early morning bus schedules to catch our return shuttle to the airport, Charles generously insisted on giving us a ride.  Since our earlier attempt at a greeting present of fresh roasted coffee smuggled all the way from Guatemala failed (turns out whole bean coffee is a bit of a niche gift around here, requiring the recipient to be a more than casual fan of coffee to own the requisite specialty equipment), I scribbled a note to accompany a box of Vizios that we would leave behind as gratitude Plan B.

This had the unfortunate side effect that my ballpoint pen through a single sheet of paper left a perfect imprint of my nice note upon the guestroom desk.  It’s one of those “Aw, crap.” kind of moments, because  “Hey, I just did something nice for you but defaced your furniture in the process, so, uh, I hope you still appreciate the gesture.” is not an ideal parting sentiment.  In the hustle of the morning I genuinely forgot to mention it to Charles until after he dropped us off, which made me feel like a bit of a spineless shit³, as though I were hoping they wouldn’t notice.  Two days later I did come clean with an email announcement of (and apology for) the defacement, which was met with a gracious assurance that they didn’t notice, that the desk was second hand & of no sentimental value, and would soon be in storage for a year.

Ah good.  I was hoping we’d be remembered as a net positive and welcome presence, and I rest reasonably comfortable that we will be.

So onward we flew to Queenstown, a town proclaimed 150 years ago to be fit for a queen.  Let me say right now that I doubt the city has lost any luster since that austere declaration, for it too was, ridiculously beautiful.  Nestled in the mountains and abutting several lakes, Queenstown, has all of grade-A natural surroundings, tidy small town architecture, and charming public spaces going for it.  Tracy and I felt immediately at home here, for Queenstown feels nearly identical to Colorado’s boutique mountain towns, fitting right in with the likes of Aspen, Vail, or Breckenridge.

“You get what you pay for” is a well known saying.  There are exceptions to this all over the place, of course (otherwise the Thunder Quotient™ would be a moot concept), but boy does it hold in the comparison of New Zealand to Central America.  After months spent acclimating to $3 breakfasts and decent lodging for $20US, New Zealand’s prices came with a dose of sticker shock.  Everything is beautiful, everything is immaculate, everyone is super nice, and prices for comparable goods are all somewhere between 2 and 5x.

It’s simply the tradeoff you make when going from the third world to the first.

So overall here in New Zealand we tread lightly, indulging in only a few of the pricy adventure offerings.  Our first was an excursion to Milford Sound, a 3-hour bus ride through spectacular terrain and a boat cruise through the sound out to ocean.  While winding our way through the Kiwi countryside I saw ample evidence that, yeah, there probably were more sheep than people in this two-island nation.  Our bus winded through lush valleys, over uncommonly blue rivers, and past more waterfalls than I usually see in a year.  Tracy’s photography brings this crude account to life.

The cruise through the sound was similarly beautiful, just on water.  Actually no: we also had a dozen or so dolphins keeping pace with our vessel on both sides, doing their fanciful dance of side flips and jumps as though deliberately entertaining for tips.  The masterstroke of this experience was when our boat pulled up close to a waterfall, forming a scene of dolphins literally jumping through a double rainbow formed by the falling mist.  It was the sort of scene that, to make more magical, would require something like Jesus riding in on a little cloud, flashing a peace sign and giving a wink before zooming off into the distance.

Again, score one for New Zealand.

By the time of the bus ride back my eyes were quite thoroughly saturated on natural beauty, so its splendor on the second pass was largely lost on me.  Fortunately, the time was made fantastic by a few simple joys: munching on a tasty takeout order of fish & chips, and watching a film of New Zealand propaganda, “The World’s Fastest Indian”.  Based on a true story in the late 60′s, Anthony Hopkins plays a delightful old New Zealander who goes to the US with dreams of setting a new land speed record with a motorcycle he built.  Basically his character is all chill and makes instant friends and allies with the motley assortment of (sometimes weird) Americans he meets along the way, a resounding endorsement of simple, down-to-earth friendliness if I ever saw one.  If every New Zealander we met wasn’t similarly charming and friendly I’d swear it was a contrived plot to make New Zealanders look good.  Nope, turns out his character is, uh, pretty representative.

Our second adventure was to hike a glacier.  We hopped a 5 hour bus to Franz Joseph with hopes of hiking the glacier there, but this turned out to be a small failure of internet research intel: it turns out with the recent trend of melting it is no longer safe to hike this glacier.  The other option was a helicopter tour at $330 per person, which, uh, wasn’t in the budget.  Confronted with the possibility that we’d come all this way without actually doing what we’d set out for, we opted for Plan B: to backtrack to the Fox Glacier the next town over, still walkable, and do the guided tour plus gear for a much more palatable $115 per person.  We booked it for the next day.

With our afternoon and night to kill in Franz Joseph, we went for the 5km walk to the glacier.  By this time my lungs were still keen to enjoying the clean as can be air, and it was a splendid walk through more nature that was just plain good looking and ecologically distinct enough to feel just borderline otherworldly.  The choice to use New Zealand as the setting for the fictional land of Middle Earth suddenly made so much sense.  The only letdown of our “glacial preview walk” was that the glacier, from a distance, looked like one big pile of dirty snow.

Fortunately the Fox Glacier was much prettier when we got up close and personal the next day.  Equipped with every layer that the tour company had on offer (socks, snow pants, and rain jacket–we are largely packed for summer conditions, after all), we strapped on our crampons⁴ as we descended on the entry point to the glacier.  Our British mountaineer guide brandished a pickaxe, and as we went along our path he now and again swung it windmill style like a pro to tidy up the small stairs carved into the ice (all the guides and tour outfits lend a hand in keeping the stairs in tact).

Again, Tracy’s pictures do justice to the experience which words alone simply cannot.

Fox Glacier has been receding for literally centuries.  As you drive on in to the valley carved out by ice many years ago, you see signs that “Fox Glacier was here ____ years ago”.  So the overall pattern of melt is nothing new, it’s just that it’s happening a lot faster than it used to.  During our hike, our guide showed up a white narrow tube jutting up from the glacier.

“We do this and take measurements in collaboration with a few scientific survey endeavors happening around the world.  We put the pole in all the way, so that they’re flush with the ice.  As the glacier melts the pole rises relative to the surface on which we are standing.  You can see how it comes up to my waist now, which means there’s been about a meter of melting in the last 2 weeks.  That’s a lot more than in usually does.”

If climate change is a hoax, be warned that these friendly Kiwi’s with their fancy melt measuring devices are in on it.

After the glacier we returned to our hostel, and warmed up (kinda) in a small wooden box with infrared lamps posing as a sauna.  Tomorrow it’s off to Wanaka, another beautiful town on a lake in which to enjoy our last few days in this beautiful country.

Notes:

We’ve now set foot in 5 countries in just as many days¹.

After catching our boat from the Pasajcap dock to Pana, we proceeded on to Guatemala City by shuttle to catch an overnight bus to Tikal.  At sunrise our bus pulled into our destination in Flores, and in our bleary-eyed state we fell prey to the sneaky doings of an overzealous tourism and transportation operator.  A fellow got on to the second level of our double decker bus and announced to the passengers that this was the place to get off for Tikal: just hop off the bus and on to the shuttle, and we’ll be taken to wherever we’re going in town.

It was so seamless, we assumed it was a benevolent add-on service provided by the overnight bus company.

We were heading for El Remate, a less touristy town about 30 minutes closer to Tikal than Flores.  Eagerly communicated Spanish assured me “Yep, we’ll take you there, give me your bag and hop on!”  After about an hour of cruising circles about town as the shuttle shuttled about its cadre of similarly bleary-eyed marks, we finally went onward to El Remate, roped in to pay 50Q a person when it should have been more like 20.  Not fatal, but annoying enough that I was delighted to decline Enrique the fare collector’s borderline pushy offer to set us up with a pre-dawn shuttle to Tikal, guide for Tikal, and subsequent transport continuing into San Ignacio, Belize.

“It should be 550Q but I give it to you for 450Q because I know her.  Good price for you my friend.”  (Indeed he knew Rutt, an Estonian gal I’d first met at the Mayan sun ceremony weeks earlier.  We’d coincidentally ran into her again on the overnight bus, and in the early morning shuffle Rutt was sold on our plan to stay in El Remate, making us travel companions for the day.)  It has consistently been my experience that the words “good price”, especially when uttered in English in a non-English speaking country, indicate a good price for the one doing the selling, as in “If you go for this I will have roped you in at a good price.”

Enrique first skirted around the fact that his good price didn’t include actual entrance to the park (150Q), and he completely neglected to mention that, when you go before 6am to catch the magic that is the sun rising over the Mayan temples while howler monkeys howl (which was part of his proud pitch), the price is 250Q.  Nuts to that, Enrique: if our transit to El Ramate is any indication, we’ll do way better to piece our trip around these parts together on our own, thank you very much.  (What can I say, I was still a little sore from the “aboard the sanctity of our bus announcement” hustle earlier.)

In El Remate, we hiked a quarter of a mile to accommodations, nicely nestled on the lake and tucked away from the main road.  The next day we did Tikal.

Tikal is a beautiful walk through jungle that has everything that is ominous and mysterious to love about it.  Well trodden paths through lush vegetation suddenly open up to massive clearings featuring one or more majestic structures of often staggering size.  In the morning a deep fog envelops both the paths and the clearings, giving the temples and eerie ancient vibe, which I suppose they well deserve.  Have a look at Tracy’s pictures of Tikal.

Unfortunately, due to a few deaths owing to presumably tragic missteps and/or jackass antics, most of the temples with their steep and endless staircases are off limits to climbing.  This is a shame because the view from that high, well above the lush treeline, is something worth witnessing.  The view from up on Temple IV suffices to satisfy pretty well in this regard, made available safely to all by the modern day winding wooden staircase built on top of still-buried portions of the temple.

(There were still a few jackasses who we saw early in the morning ignoring the signs and climbing other major temples.  My informal poll of Tracy and myself indicates an average 15% desire in people to see one of said jackasses fall as a gesture of instant karma asserting itself in real time.)

After Tikal we made our way on out of Guatemala and into Belize.  20Q got us out of El Remate to the next shuttle, and 50Q got us out of the country.  Our shuttle ride to the border felt like a Sunday drive with the family: we piled in to a minivan with 17 other people, 5 of which were in the front seat (3 small children).  Cramped but cozy, as we went and dropped people off we upgraded from our initial awkward position of facing backwards on a bench.

At the border we walked across the bridge, paid our 20Q a person to leave the country (sometimes I swear the guy stamping your paperwork at the border is making up the exit fee), walked forward 50 meters further and got stamped on in to Belize.  A quick cab and bus ride got us into our destination for the night, San Ignacio².

The change was immediate.  After months in Central American where countries that mostly blend together, Belize was immediately distinct in terms of architecture (cinder block and corrugated tin roof construction is replaced with aluminum siding with wood trim), music (salsa is replaced with reggae), language (Spanish is replaced with English), and food (beans and tortillas are replaced by more Caribbean and other culinary influences).

The variation in food was quite delicious as we dined on Moroccan curry dishes, and the beer, Belikin, was quite tasty and more substantial than a lot of the pilsners we’d been having.  My mom and I took a trip here in late 2005³.  Those memories plus the spoken English made Belize feel sort of like a homecoming, like we were reemerging from the deep jungle and back into civilization (which, of course, has a certain literal truth to it).

I needed a hair cut and wanted to fit one in before hitting the much pricier countries we were bound for.  I found a place in town called “Da Royal Cut”, and upon entering a laid back dude of like 26 greeted me and bid me sit down.  It was a little barber chair in the open air front room of what looked like someone’s 1st story flat.  He hit a button on the stereo and laid back reggae beats filled the room, it felt like the musical track of an MTV reality show makeover scene.  Then he grabbed the electric shears with a serious attachment and gave me the shortest haircut I’ve gotten in memory.  His technique seemed mindful but super chill bordering on lazy, I think he broke out an actual scissors for about 4 tidying cuts, possibly just for show.

I dug it.  It was like a barber shop trust fall.  The end result was tidy, and looked just a touch military.  $3.50 well spent.

We headed on to Belize City for a night in anticipation of our next day flight.  There’s not much to say about Belize City, but I must admit among blase scenery of urban decay there’s a certain scrappy pride about it.  In the morning there are folks out sweeping the sidewalks, going about their business, cheerfully bidding you good morning, and not trying to sell you anything with their politeness.

Among our limited 8am breakfast options we found only a place tucked away into the corner of the ground floor of the commercial center on the riverfront.  It had its name, “Butler’s Delite” spray painted on the wall above the entryway.  It was owned and run by a man and his daughter, happy to make us whatever we wanted from their motley assortment of options.  We settled on eggs, beans, coffee, fresh squeezed orange juice, a little loaf of creole bread, and some stewed chicken that tasted out of this world.  “Holy crap that’s good chicken!” I thought as I sopped up the last of the sauce with the ample slices of creole bread.  The proprietors just opened two weeks ago, and I wished their venture well.  The tiny 2-table establishment describable as something between a food stand and a restaurant deserves to have a tidy clan of regulars.

We flew out at noon, onto our 2 hour layover back in El Salvador.  Our quest there while awaiting our plane was to catch a lunch of the delicious pupusas we’d fallen in love with 6 weeks before.  Unfortunately, airports tend to be really short of street food vendors cooking up legit deliciousness on tidy little portable griddles, especially behind the lines of airport security.  We settled for the only option we found, an airport bar advertising pupusas.  As you might have guessed, yep, they were rubbish.  But at least they cost us a lot more.

Onward then to San Francisco back in the US of A.  There once again the awesomeness of friends shined to make another 23 hour layover pass like a deliberate, joy-filled visit to town.  Ran, my insta-kindred-spirit and top-notch programmer friend that I met at Morgan & Jon’s wedding picked us up from the airport.  After catching sushi, Ran and I stayed up chatting and geeking out about JavaScript until 1am.  This says a lot to the quality of our quality time spent, for it was 3am according to my body with the time zone switches of the day, and after the lake I was accustomed to having a 9pm-ish bedtime.

Then next day Anna, a friend I picked up in Buenos Aires in ’09, played hostess to us in her fair town while we awaited our 7pm flight.  I must admit, during our stroll through the City Target I was a bit bemused by the prettiness of US-style retail as we wandered the immaculate and well-lit aisles.  A few months away can have that sort of thing instill a sense of wow once again.

After stocking up on essentials we made our way to her famous neighborhood of Haight/Ashberry for top-notch brunch.  After strolling the funky streets and the Golden Gate Park we parted company once more and made our way to the airport.  There during our wait I made sure to get a burger.  I found a good burger to be neigh on impossible to find in South and Central America, and didn’t want to miss out on my chance for one before venturing off to other countries of unknown burger quality.

And then it was time for our 13 hour flight.  With its more than ample collection of on demand movies, our passage to New Zealand passed by swiftly⁴.

Now we are in New Zealand which, unlike the Americas, is for both Tracy and I a whole new world⁵.  In an hour we rendezvous with Charles and Amy, our Couch Surfing hosts here in Auklund for the next two days.

Notes:

And so the time came to leave the much vaunted Lake Atitlan, but not without a few more memorable experiences.

Just before Chaz’s departure we were reminded that Thanksgiving, which doesn’t get a lot of airtime in these here parts, was just two days away.  With our weak showing of spirit for Halloween (although I did carve a papaya back in Nicaragua), we started to come to terms with the stark reality that we stood to miss an entire year’s worth of holidays.  And unlike when you miss, like, one holiday, and hear sweetly reassuring sentiments from family to the tune of “Oh, we’re really going to miss you for this one!”, we’re starting to hear more like “Well, here’s what we’re doing”, which carries the subtext “…and you’ll not be here, and we’re used to it and we’re over it.”

It’s not an unkind sentiment at all, but rather quite understandably practical: who wants to spend a year getting even just a little bummed out every holiday over a pair of persistent & predictable no-shows?

Confronted with the reality that it’s up to us to make our own holiday fun if we were keen to having it (we were), I set about the apartment complex to arrange a proper Thanksgiving party in t-minus 48 hours.  My first stop was downstairs, for Garth had casually insinuated several times already that he makes a mean roast chicken whenever the topic of US Thanksgiving came up¹.  Our Canadian friends had already celebrated their holiday of thanks in early October, but Garth was sporting enough to offer up his culinary participation for ours.  We hatched a plan that I would pick up a full chicken fit for roasting when I was dropping off Chaz in Pana the next day, and pick up some spices while I was at it.  Garth gave me directions to Sandra’s Grocery, a specialty shop catering to gringo tastes at which I could procure such items.

My second stop was up one flight and over to Barb and Fernando’s apartment.  Barb is from Canada and Fernando from Colombia.  We’d met around the property a few times earlier but only just that day had we had our first time real time spent together: during day 1 of the hypnotherapy course we were all taking.  I could barely speak out my invitation to US Thanksgiving before being ushered in, sat down, poured some rum, and served up a plate of super tasty cilantro-baked vegetables on a bed of fish with lobster tails on top (Fernando’s culinary prowess and sense for hospitality was keenly demonstrated in the space of about 45 seconds).  As you might imagine, they were immediately up on the idea of our forthcoming gathering, and eagerly volunteered to be a most worthy part of the potluck equation.

At 6 attendees I decided we had a good party for the upcoming holiday.

The next day in Pana, just after seeing Chaz off I found myself at the cozy and well appointed Sandra’s.  There I happened upon the opportunity to buy a 6 pound butter ball turkey, a rare find indeed.  I immediately phoned in to update mission control of the situation: “Hey Chef, how do you feel about me bringing back a turkey instead?”  “Bring it on,” my Canadian cook declared without hesitation, “and in that case then see if you can find a little jar of rosemary, eh?”

Roger that.  I picked up all the called for items plus as many boxes of bonus Vizios that my pocket full of 300Q would afford me without requiring an ATM visit, and was off².

Thanksgiving was perfect.  Fernando made up a dish of top notch shrimp on a similar bed of tasty vegetables, plus a separate helping without shrimp for Tracy.  Garth did a bang up job of roasting the turkey, complete with a stuffing adapted for Guatemalan produce that included jalapeno peppers.  Tracy remarked of our (comparatively basic) contributions of mashed potatoes, baked yams and brownies for dessert that it was kinda nice for a change to be bringing the most boring entries to a potluck.

It was the best meal I’d had all month.  As we ate and drank wine we took turns declaring what it was we were thankful for.  Amid so many blessings on this night I found it fit to be thankful for our friends at the table, and how on such short notice we could all come together in the interest of allowing us United Statesians to get in a proper Thanksgiving while so far from our homeland.  You can see a shot of our troupe here.

After about 4 bottles of wine, a trio of great he said/she said stories of how the couples at the table met, and even a few inspiring tales of divorces gone past³, our 4 hour party laden with laughs gave way to triptophan-inspired sleepy time.  If we can do Christmas and New Year’s anywhere near this well we’ll be set.

During our last few days we got a bit of hiking under our belts: one day with a hike up to a waterfall in the neighboring town of Tzutzuna, and the next day up the same cliffs as the Mayan sun ceremony earlier but this time for an evening lunar ceremony, to mark the full moon and lunar eclipse.

Lest you suspect our time on the lake was all fun and games, let me assure you I made a rather lovely office space out of our 3-volcanoes-facing dining table, whereat I finished, among other things, a cheeky 29-page guide to using my brand of coaching software.  In a fine demonstration of collaborative working together during our travels, Tracy did a fantastic job of typesetting and laying out the whole thing.  I daresay it’s the most beautiful thing that we’re apt to make together until we start with the whole “making little people” thing in the next year or two.

Earlier today as we stood on the Pasajcap dock one last time awaiting our boat I stared good and long in all directions, savoring one last time the beauty of lake Atitlan and our now bygone residence.  And as always, what smoothed over the bitter pill of leaving behind a great living experience is the promise of the next one.

Notes:

One of the best things about hosting someone in a beautiful place is that you get to see that beautiful place newly once more, through the eyes of your guest.

By the time of Chaz’s arrival, Tracy and I had clocked right around a full month’s worth of time on Lake Atitlan, spread over our our past and present trips.  So to a certain extent we’d come to take some of the area’s charm as given, registering much less in our awareness under the category of “Holy crap this place is magical”.  In addition to his own many merits of personality, we loved Chaz’s visit for the reactions he had to our surroundings, which refreshed our own perceptions.

At around 8am from our dock I flagged down the passing boat bound for Panajachal (or Pana for short), a 40 minute ride which I shared in the company of a lovely woman named Dita.  Dita left her job as a partner of one of the largest executive search firms in all of Germany some 10 years ago, and with her husband came to live on the lake in a sprawling and beautiful looking house located two docks down from our place.  We’d just gotten to the topic of what it was like raising and home schooling their 7-year-old (who speaks 4 languages) here on the lake when our boat ride ended in Pana.  Though I invited her and her husband over for drinks at some point, I fear that perhaps the casual bond we’d forged in those 20 minutes of chatting might not be sufficient to entice an actual visit¹.

From Pana I took a shuttle into Antigua, the appointed place for me to meet up with the incoming Chaz and escort him back to our place on the lake.  The fruits of Chaz’s high school Spanish study have largely withered on the vine, and so while the airport-to-Antigua shuttle is easy enough to sort out with English alone, the full trip to San Marcos take a bit more travel gumption the first time.  Thus as part of paying forward the fab hospitality from our friends back in Miami, I was happy to ensure his 8-day stay got off to a proper start with smooth transit to our accommodations.

We arranged to meet at Parque Centrale, as likely a drop off point as any for Chaz’s shuttle in from the airport.  When he arrived I was sitting on a bench, plying a native fellow to teach me how to eat a local fruit called hocote, and, in the process, sharing a bag thereof that I’d bought 10 minutes earlier.

Our first order of business was to get Chaz some proper lunch.  Appealing to his adventurous side we walked on into the Antigua market and sat down at one of those micro restaurants like those I described from Peru: a few stools and a counter at which you can get a big heaping plate of whatever someone’s mama is cooking up that day.  Today it was chicken, rice, mashed potatoes, and suitcase black beans², all topped with this tomato puree red sauce that brings it all together and tastes so good.  All this for 20Q (about $1.30 US), so you may as well splurge 7Q more for a fresh blended, frothy pinapple/milk beverage called a licuado.

Chaz was already finding himself pretty sold on Guatemala, and generously vocalized as much.

After lunch we strolled on further through the market, picked up a few coconuts to snack on, marveled at how thoroughly boot-leggy some of the bootlegged merchandise was, and grabbed some produce to take on back to the house.  En route back to Parque Centrale for our 4pm shuttle I had one more order of business to tend to in town: buy a new pair of jeans.

If you see me walking among the native population anywhere in Guatemala, you’ll notice immediately that I, at 6’5″, stand out even more than I usually would in most any other country.  So by all counts the notion that the nation of Guatemala has any pair of jeans suitable for my stature within its borders ranks a little, well, perhaps naively optimistic.  But it turns out there’s a shop right off Antigua’s main square that carries my size, 34×34.  I know this because I bought a pair there back in ’09 to replace mine which had a bad rip up the left leg³.  On this occasion I had an ever growing worn patch around the crotch of my jeans and strict orders from the Mrs. to take care of the situation already.  With 5 minutes in my favorite jean shop in Guatemala (perhaps the world, I mean, I did wait several countries to finally do my jean shopping there) I was sorted, and we were on our way.

A few stops for beer marked our 2 and a half hour shuttle ride to the lake, and it was well past sunset when we got to the Pana dock.  We stepped aboard the half full boat (which comfortably seats about 20) at 7:07pm, and waited for it to fill until about 7:30 when we, aboard the last boat of the night, scuttled off into the darkness and across the water.  The boat dropped us off at the Pasajcap dock at around 8:10, and my what a welcome site was Tracy, waving down to us on the dock from our warmly lit apartment some 80 feet up.

“Honey, look what I picked up in Antigua!”  Tracy had done a lovely job of prepping for our arrival: after our long day of travel we settled in with beers, tostada chips with fresh made pico de gallo, and tasty tacos.  Chaz, pal that he was, brought us key items from the homeland, including zip-lock bags, some new credit cards that had arrived by mail and were lovingly forwarded along by my fab mother in law, and a dish wand, the hard-to-find luxury which so brilliantly prevents the unpleasant scent of sponge hand.

We had no firm plans for our visitor’s stay but had plenty of ideas to serve as building blocks for an itinerary.  Here are the broad strokes and highlights which aptly describe his visit:

• Free* boat rides.  Free with an asterisk to denote that they weren’t strictly free, but close enough.  Jumping to San Marcos or San Pedro by water taxi was a 5 or 10Q affair, which Chaz deemed essentially a rounding error.  Compared to our $80 ferry ride to Cape Cod from Boston, I’d have to agree.  So we took the boat option for transport as often as possible.
• Lakefront sauna.  Pierre’s property has a wood fire sauna in a stone edifice right at lake side, and for now it remains un-flooded by the rising lake.  So we partook one morning of the sit in the sauna/jump in the lake/repeat as necessary sauna ritual.  I was feeling the hint of a cold that morning, this cleared me right up.
• Liters and liters of Gallo and Extra.  Gallo is Guatemala’s answer to like a Miller or Budweiser, and Extra is a common darker beer.  Chaz tells of having 3 or 4 beers while lunching in San Pedro, and an onlooking 8-year-old was stunned that he was still standing.  Apparently locals can’t hold their liquor quite at all like folks from the states; as a cultural norm they are just not as practiced.
• Smokin’ Joes barbeque.  We were glad this fell on day 6 of Chaz’s visit, to give the man a chance to experience local cuisine long enough to have a gringo throw back be a welcome change of pace.
• Breakfast party with neighbors.  Robin and Garth joined us as we pulled out all the stops to make pancakes and bacon, granting our party of 5 about 3 hours of top-notch entertainment.  It is all too easy to underestimate the simple joys of cooking for people.
• Night out with live music.  I’d met a fellow on a boat ride who told me he and his buddy would be playing at Restaurant Fe on Saturday night.  In the sleepy town of San Marcos just coming off of low season, such a happening was remarkable indeed.  So we came out for beers, tunes, and a curry buffet.
• Driving a tuk tuk⁴.  This one was all Chaz.  After our first ride in one he boldly declared “I wanna drive one of these things.”  To his immense credit, he managed to do just that during his solo field trip to San Pedro.  He missed the last boat back to San Marcos, so to get back he had to take a 100Q tuk tuk ride.  As coincidence would have it, he ended up sharing the ride with Pablo, the same Pablo who leads Mayan ceremonies high above cliffs (see what I mean about small town magic?).  They had already met, giving Chaz an in.  Pablo doesn’t speak too much English, but enough to broker Chaz’s request of the driver to drive a part of the way around the lake.  Sure enough, Chaz was allowed to drive through San Juan (another town along the lake), and his experience came complete with a mini lesson on, well, how to drive one.
• General cultural immersion.  Walking the streets of town, visiting the markets, interacting with people.  Chaz put to words something I never thought to articulate but immediately recognized as true: the natives here consistently exude a way of being that is notably polite and respectful.  Well summarized.

We began the week with the stated intention that we ensure Chaz’s visit be a memorably positive one, bordering on (if not crashing into) “kick ass” territory.  Here at the end we all agreed this intention had been fulfilled.  This morning (the day before his flight) we took a boat back to Pana, and his confidence and comfort with moving about Guatemala was such that I needed only get him on a shuttle to Antigua and he would be good the rest of the way, including getting a place to stay the night and getting off to the airport.  This was quite nice as it saved me about 5 hours of riding in a minivan, but also delights me to know that he’s all set to have his own adventures traveling about this country.  Thanks for visiting, Chaz.  It has been a pleasure to show you around the settings of our current home⁵

Notes:

How quickly one can get into a rhythm of things.

On the way back from our first visit to town, we met another couple who happened also to be staying at Pasajcap as the four of us sat under an awning, trying in vain to wait out the rain.  Andrew and Lanie, about our age, were at the tail end of a most enviable 2-month long honeymoon spent in these parts.  In the limited time we had together they graciously passed on knowledge and expertise of lake living to us over wine, most notably the what, when and where of the once-a-week barbeque in San Pedro.

“Yeah, we’re heading back to Ohio on Monday, but stop by around noon tomorrow and we’ll take you over for it.”  It’s a good thing we made friends with them during our limited window, for the Smokin’ Joe’s Sunday ritual is a rather magical thing.  The native cuisine here is good and all, but the occasional infusion of gringo culinary sensibilities and know-how is a great way to keep things fresh.

There, for example, 60Q (under $8 US) gets you a huge piece of bacon-wrapped fillet mignon, which (as all menu options do) comes as a plate with garlic or corn bread plus 3 top notch sides (show up early before they run out of the mac-n-cheese).  Chicken, pork ribs, to die for cuts of tuna, and more make up their fab menu, all grilled to smoky perfection.  It’s held in the yard of an outdoor bar with a rooftop terrace and full swimming pool; no waiters, just walk up and pay, they’ll call your name.  In total, barring those brief moments of handing over a few Quetzales while ordering or getting drinks, it feels just like being at the house of a friend who REALLY knows how to do a barbeque.  This for us has become a weekly tradition, and mindfully made a habit of paying the knowledge forward.

One afternoon, in order to keep up with my proper regiment of meat consumption¹, I took a boat across the lake to a nearby town so that I could get a few tacos for lunch and pick up some bacon and chicken from the (comparatively) well appointed store there.  On the return as I hopped from the boat onto the private dock of the property I call home this month, I giggled, literally giggled to myself that, on a Thursday afternoon, THIS is what my life looks like.

You can see the whole of what our living environment looks like from Tracy’s pictures of the property.  The little thatch-roofed nooks equipped with benches, chaise lounges, and hammocks are ideal places to make friends.  On about day 4 of our residence I crossed paths with Garth of Robin & Garth, our downstairs neighbors.  In place like this, it’s just natural and fitting to say to a person you just met “Hey, whaddaya say we and our mutual lady friends² hang out in one of these tonight over wine?” and have it be met with a yes.

Garth and Robin are from Canada, and are a fine example of life lived with joy and laughter.  Both divorced, both early into retirement, they found they made fantastic travel companions to one another during a few months last winter and so are at it again this winter.

Robin’s a world class fisher woman, the kind of gal who catches fish bigger than she is³ and has a smoker at home big enough to accommodate her serious catch.  I’m told we should come by in the summer to partake of her smoked salmon.  If we can tie in shooting a pilot for the fishing show that she should totally star in (with me providing zany ad libbing of at least some of her lines), I’ll count that as a more than worthy visit just waiting to happen.

Garth is the very vision of a jovial retiree that I hope to grow into: genuinely funny, amiable and hospitable, and regularly singing the praises of our shared surroundings (e.g. “How’s it going, Garth?”  “Oh, I’m somehow managing to get along okay here in this paradise, eh?⁴“.  Garth’s career was in large scale drilling & mining operations, and he tells intriguing tales of months-long assignments in harsh Canadian environments chasing ore.  His background suggests that the solution to the problem of rising Lake Atitlan could be to drill a hole in the bottom that routes out to lower land, offering added benefits of generating hydroelectric power and irrigation, which to me is a fine way of looking at things from a creative problem solving stance indeed⁵.

One late afternoon I took to the quest of putting up flyers for Tracy’s private yoga instruction.  In the space of 20 minutes as I walked about the village I ran into (and was greeted by) about 9 familiar faces, which was not bad since we’d only been there a week and rather exemplary of why I love small town living.  There’s a feeling of connection and belonging you get that’s unlike anything you can experience while roaming a city as a largely anonymous figure among thousands of others.

Making acquaintances in this sort of environment seems proportionately easier as well, as evidenced by my meeting Pablo.  While winding my way through the pedestrian streets of town as my posting task drew to a close, a voice called to me from within the small, shack-like travel agency.  “Como se llama?”  I popped my head in to introduce myself, and got to chatting with the proprietor.  Before long I was told about a Mayan sun ceremony that was happening the next morning, and was invited to come.  I got the feeling I was being sold on something, so instinctively I asked what it cost.  “Solo donacion, amigo.”  Right on then, I’m here to have experiences, so let me throw caution into the wind and go for it.

The plan was to assemble at 5am the next morning at that very location in town, and then we would all walk halfway to San Pablo, the neighboring village to the west, and go to the ceremony site.  By the early rising of the sun here on the lake and the not-at-all bashful roosters on neighboring properties, waking up early enough for such an event would not be hard.  Rather instead, as I slipped through the big black gate of Pasajcap and onto the moonlit dirt road that leads into town, I found the early morning walk to be its own invigorating reward.

Just outside of town I saw two dudes walking along the same road in the same direction, wearing flowing clothes that looked super comfy.  It was one of those moments where at a glace we all knew “Yep, we’re all heading to the same place.”  With any lingering concerns that I’d been lured out for a pre-dawn mugging well put to rest, we continued on to the assembly point to meet about 7 others.  When Pablo arrived on the scene at about 5:05 our merry caravan of hippy-dippy types who go in for this sort of thing⁶ proceeded back up towards the main road and on out of town.

At a nondescript part of the lake-winding road Pablo stopped the group, and said in his very calm and easy-to-understand Spanish that here now we would begin to climb up the big bluff-like hill.  Now then, you know how sometimes we exaggerate to say things like “we thought they were joking when…”, like, say, when they announced Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate in ’08.  We know in these instances that they’re not really joking, it’s just a derisive way to editorialize the situation.  Well, in this instance I actually spent a good 5 seconds or so in earnest thinking Pablo was joking to say we would somehow climb up here.

Yet sure enough, Pablo and other members of the troupe began to ascend, making light and careful footfall on a trail barely visible and winding through cornstalks as they swiftly left the surety of the road below.  So climb I did, keeping up without too much difficulty on the crude path, and yet still impressed by the progress anytime I looked up or down.  The tops of the towering cliffs above looked insurmountable yet drew nearer and nearer with every minute as we made our way through brush, used the trunks of coffee plants for handles, and stepped up steps loosely etched in dirt.

Sun had broken above the tops of volcanoes across the lake, making every pause for breath a visually rewarding one.  Just the hike plus views of reflected orange in the lake so far below was already making this adventure worth the TBD donation price of admission.  About two thirds the way up we made a stop off into a shallow cave in the cliff which opens out to a view of the lake.  Pablo lit a candle and gave a blessing, and we continued on our way.

At the top I was surprised to see we had in fact scaled the cliffs that looked so imposing from below, putting us somewhere around 150 meters above the lake.  We’d climbed the equivalent of about 45 flights of stairs.  We circled a rock upon which Pablo made a fire from incense-like charcoals and an assortment of colored candles.  Pablo began the ceremony, in a mixture of Spanish and a dialect of the native Mayan tongue, with a note about the whole 2012/Mayan calendar/end of the world thing.  He explained that, no, the world is not ending, and rather instead Mayan tradition calls for a celebration for the completion of one era and the commencement of another.

I don’t know about you, but for me that settles it.  We’ll of course see next month, but hearing that all is well with the epoch-changing 12/21/12 from an actual Mayan dude at a sun ceremony upon high cliffs in this part of the world counts, for me, way more than any brand of sensationalist doomsday punditry arising from outside the Mayan culture.

The ceremony proceeded from there, largely comprised of blessings upon the earth, the sun and the moon, air, water, fire and light, and perhaps a few others.  I found it pleasing and calming to take time to appreciate these more simple things which comprise our elemental existence, it sort of puts the modern complexities of life into soothing perspective.

After the ceremony there was time to just relax and take in the scenery while sitting at the edge of the high cliffs.  Before long a kirtan broke out⁷: one fellow broke out a digery doo, another a flute.  Another girl had a small container filled with a little rice which subbed in for a proper maraca quite nicely.  There were a few other instruments floating about, and before long I was handed a kazoo.  For a half hour or more we were just playing.  The sounds built upon one another, interweaving complex melodies and rhythms.  For the record, I totally rocked the kazoo.  Seriously, I didn’t think there was much one could do with a kazoo, yet I found it easy dive in and add to the richness of the mix.

So I guess I loves me a good kirtan.

Life on the lake roles on in beautiful fashion, but tomorrow we’re in for a most welcome disruption: I pick up our friend Chaz, here to visit us for a week.

Notes: