Gringo Tur: Kickin' it Stateside

Great Western Roadtrip 2011

2011-10-03T03:47:00.000-07:00

Driving for days on end is not our strong suit. The drive from Seattle to Colorado to LA to the John Muir Trail and back to Seattle was broken into small, manageable pieces by day bikes, quick rock climbs, short backpacking trips, visits with friends, brewery tours, and a few national park layovers. Some scattered images from our trip...

Berkeley Pit - read more here. A giant, toxic pool that threatens to poison the ground water around Butte, Montana.

I don't know about you, but I might have quietly taken this down on May 22nd.

Thermophile-crazed coloring around thermal pools in Yellowstone.

Taunted by bugs in the Winds of Wyoming.

Views from camp in the Wind River Range.

Wildflowers everywhere.

Cirque of the Towers, Wind River Range, Wyoming as seen from Jackass Pass.

The Jackass (pass) itself.

The Winds sure are pretty. Big sky moves in over the mountains as we drive the 100 miles of dirt road away from the trailhead.

One of many rainbows encountered on the trip. This time, it was a double complete rainbow (although hard to tell from the picture), at a rest stop where we had stopped to cook dinner.

Great mountain biking outside of Laramie in Curt Gowdy State Park.

Beautiful skies in Colorado after finishing our section of the Colorado Trail.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison: deep, dark, and tall. I guess a bit like most canyons, but still pretty impressive.

Culturefying ourselves at Mesa Verde.

Already in the high 90s at 8AM, Joshua Tree National Park.

Kickin' it in Pt Reyes National Seashore with Chris Andree.

Range of Light

2011-09-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

Three statements were made:
1.) It never rains in the Sierra, we shouldn't even bring a tarp.
2.) Bears don't exist in the Sierra.
3.) The Sierra are Awesome. It is so beautiful you will not be able to stop having eyegasms.

I doubted. "We'll see how many of these Andrew is right about," I thought as I packed the tent, rain gear, and bear cans.

Statement #3 was validated within the first 4 hours as we topped out over Bishop pass at sunset. Dusy basin, my first granite spire and alpine lake filled view of the Sierra was beautiful, and I had my first eyegasm. We bivouacked under a starry sky without the need for a tent.

Dusy Basin

Headed up toward Bishop Pass

The blue skies and eyegasms kept coming as we yo-yoed.

We dove down into LeConte canyon and then up over Muir pass...

second night bivouac campsite

just below Muir Pass

...down into Evolution Basin and up over Selden pass...

Creekside bathing session in Evolution Basin

Wildflower time in late September? Maybe I will stop complaining about the late melt out.

Selden pass: Lord of the Rings could have been shot here.

Taking in the view before heading down from Selden pass

... then down again to Bear Creek and up over Silver pass...

Marie Lakes

First night we had to pitch a tent, and only because I don't like bugs.

Andrew reading Rudin.

giving the feets a break over Silver pass.

Big sky over Silver pass.

Andrew's time out chair.

...and then down towards Red's Meadow where we promptly hopped on the bus into Mammoth for resupplying, showers, and pizza consumption.

Not paying attention to time, we missed the last bus back to the trailhead and were unlucky at hitching late in the day. Lacking the desire try too hard, we decided to check in for a night at a hotel. Surprisingly (or not), the Motel 6 parking lot was packed full of Harleys, all with California plates. A predominantly middle-aged motorcycle gang wearing matching Harley-decorated leather jackets idled in the parking lot, drinking Bud heavies that had semi-miraculously materialized from an ice chest in a minivan. We waited in line to pay for our room behind a German-American tour group organizer as he checked in for 16 rooms and asked about authentic steak dinner options. As we left the office I noticed that one of the minivans who had earlier supplied Budweisers was equipped with three copies of a giant handwritten sign that read "CAUTION: GERMAN MOTORCYCLISTS ON TOUR." I had simultaneous feelings of confusion and curiosity. Were they parodying us? What does the American experience feel like? I tried to exhibit my best manners around the poolside, attempting to strike up conversations with hopes of being invited along for a day on the back of a bike. No luck. I must not have looked American enough with my dirty clothes, backpack, and microbrew in hand.

Showered and well fed, we caught the trail where and how we left it. We stopped early, enjoying gummy bears and apples as we watched the sky turn colors over Garnet lake.

Garnet Lake at sunset

Thousand Island Lake, where I am pretty sure fairies and lost boys live.

As we topped out over Donahue pass, the sky began to turn dark. Rain and hail were soon splattering the ground as we headed down into Lyell canyon. Statement #1, sadly, was proven wrong, but the rain would at least hold of during the morning hours for the rest of the trip. Now officially in Yosemite Country, I expected us to see signs of Statement #2 being false, but we never did. The bears stayed out of site (if, in fact, they do exist). From Lyell Canyon we traveled to Tuolumne Meadows, by Cathedral Peak, and Sunrise High Camp.

Playing with fire at camp around Sunrise.

Trying to beat the rain, we rose early on our last day. Eyegasms all around.

Views from Cloud's Rest

Homeless appearing man on top of Cloud's Rest

Half Dome from above.

We picked our way down the gradually increasing stream of people headed up the trail. Yosemite felt more and more like a foreign Disneyland to me as we went deeper into the Valley. I started to have these notsodeepbutfeeldeepatthetime thoughts about what John Muir would have thought about national park use today, about why people could be so disgruntled in such a beautiful place, about...

...and then I saw a pizza stand, and my fickle self was grateful for civilization again.

Olympic Coast

2011-07-07T14:48:00.000-07:00

I celebrated America's birthday on the Olympic Coast, camped at Toleak point with friends. We had sunny weather, campfires, amazing tide pools, sunsets, and coffee five times a day. Life was good.

rock stars

driftwood of the large tree type on Rialto Beach

Rialto Beach Sunset

Feeling glad that I don't live in Forks

headland trails

tide pools

Toleak sunset

kelp!

chillin' on the beach

Ferry ride back to Seattle

Empirical confidence intervals, redux

2011-06-24T14:46:00.000-07:00

There's nothing quite like spending an afternoon trying to get R to Plot What I Mean. In hopes of getting a paper off my desk and out the door, I got to revisit the overplotting conundrum previously presented. I wanted to plot this:

but allow the viewer some concept of the relative density of points near 0% error . There's way too much overplotting here to tell by eye. With only a little reflection, it was obvious solution I offered before was jingus, chiefly because of the sparsity the data (and their non-rectangular hull) prevented the 2D kernel estimate from working very well. You can see this in action if you a command that almost Plots What I Mean--smoothScatter, which uses a 2D kernel estimate to plot most of the data, then overplots outliers:

A kernel density estimator is too fancy for this problem. All that you really need to do is divide the abscissa into a grid that has enough points at each slice that taking the pth percentile of all the points in the slice gives you a decent estimate of the true value of the percentile there. This is easy to do with quantcut (make the slices with equal number of observations) or cut2 (make the slices with at least n observations). Then you can connect the pth percentile at each slice with linear or loess interpolation. I even cooked up a panel function that you can drop straight into your favorite lattice xyplot:

> xyplot(y~x, data=comp3, cex=.5, xlim=c(-5, 1e3), ylab="Percentage error", xlab=expression(lambda), ylim=c(-100, 100), panel=panel.confbars, npt=15, conf=.05)
Make npt larger to get a denser interpolation grid, or smaller to get smoother interpolation. conf gives the 100-2*conf % confidence interval you wish to bound, so the default is a 95% confidence interval.

panel.confbars = function(x, y, npt=25, conf=.025, ...){
require(gtools)
panel.xyplot(x, y, ...)

xcut = quantcut(x, q=seq(0, 1, length.out=npt))
xval = quantile(x, p=seq(0, 1, length.out=npt))
yval = matrix(unlist(tapply(y, xcut, quantile, p=c(conf, 1-conf))), nrow=2)

lconf = approxfun(xval[-1], yval[1,])
uconf = approxfun(xval[-1], yval[2,])

panel.loess(xval, lconf(xval), type="l", col="red", lwd=2)
panel.loess(xval, uconf(xval), type="l", col="red", lwd=2)

}

Amadou and Ami do Senegal

2011-06-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

For this post, we will be known as Amadou and Ami...Andrew and Erin being a bit hard to pronounce if you are Senegalese.

The last few weeks of our trip were spent in Senegal visiting our friend Emily and seeing the country. Emily has been working in Ngaraff as a Peace Corps Volunteer for the past 14 months and graciously hosted our trip. And by graciously, I mean it...walking more slowly so that our sand-challenged legs could keep up, put up with our attempts at French while teaching us some basic Wolof, and didn't even get upset when our camel trip was ruined by a bout of violent gastroenteritis (Ami 2: Amadou 0).

Our first day was spent in Dakar, with a trip to Ile De Goree, important historically in the Atlantic slave trade. Although most references show that a very small percentage of slaves from Africa went through Goree, there are still signs of a disturbing past. The most dramatic being the intact holding chambers: boat houses and the Maison de Esclaves.

Boat Houses - Where captured men were kept in conditions similar to what they would encounter on boats to the new world while working on the island. The colonialists did not want to waste money on shipping the weak, so this was done to weed them out.

Dubbed the "Door to nowhere", boats would park on the outside of the Maison de Esclaves in order to load up slaves to take across the Atlantic.

Captured and recaptured several times by the French, Portuguese, Dutch, and British, signs of religious, cultural and architectural differences are seen on the island. Ile de Goree is now a haven for artists, who come to make and sell their paintings, carvings, and jewelry.

View of Dakar from Ile de Goree

cafe Touba stand

Resident Artist's housing on Goree

Next, we headed out down the coast of Senegal, amoung the delta and salt flats, to Palmarin. Joined by another volunteer who had lived in Palmarin for the last three years, we instantly felt at home in the village where we spent time playing in the ocean, building sand castles, taking a pirogue out camping, kayaking, and eating delicious freshly caught fish.

Taking the village kids swimming.

Crossing the lagoon to the beach.

Pirogues (brightly colored wooden boats) stopped to bring in fish outside of Palmarin.

Couldn't this be a Grant's ad? Convieniently comes in a triangular bottle that won't roll around when boating.

Oops...migratory bird island with a dog...birds are not too happy.

Campsite on a sandbar.

Kayaking in the mangroves.

Side trip to check out some Baobobs (which are, by the way, one of my most favorite trees).

Inside the Baobob.

After a great time on the coast we started the day-long journey inland to the Linguere region, to Emily's village. Emily, by the way, is a Wolof speaking badass, who negotiated her way through garages with style and fierce determination. A few sept place and minicar rides later, we landed in Ngaraff.

The people of Ngaraff greeted us with open arms, and lots of greetings:) Ever the gracious hosts, they tolerated my amateur millet pounding skills with a smile, allowed us to share dinner from their bowls in the evenings (even slaughtered a chicken), and were full of encouragement even if we couldn't communicate more than a hello and names in Wolof.

Ngaraff was also getting ready for a huge baptism party. This was to be the party of the year, with crazy amounts of food, women dressed to the nines, and even a generator to power the tunes. We spent the day making greeting rounds, watching the ladies dance-spar, holding cute children, and helping slice things to be cooked. And, I have to say, we brought the house down with our Toubab dancing skills. The crowd went wild when Amadou started his crazy-eyed booty shaking.

The ladies cooking up a huge Baptism feast. It is amazing how much food is generated in a few hours on wood burning fires.

Dressed to the nines, slicing some onions.

kidnapping...

Goat + Chicken + Cat = World Peace

We took a stroll into the bush after the Baptism party. The desert always strikes me as such harsh, hot, and challenging place to live that I often find myself wondering why people call it home, but sometimes it can catch you off guard with its beauty...especially around sunset.

Sunsets in the Djolof

Acacia thorns.

More pretty clouds at sunset.

Our last day in Linguere, we rose early and headed out into the bush on bikes to meet up with other PCVs. What was to be a hour bike ride turned into a 4 hour debacle as we were tested with flat tire after flat tire. Good thing Amadou and Bigue are pros at changing tires. The other volunteers patiently waited on us, and we had a great day in the village, watching a teaching lesson on making mosquito repellant lotion from local plants, and hanging out with a Senegalese-American-Canadian ex-pat who is setting up a homestead in the village of his birth.

Flat tire episode #1.

Somebody's been eating garbage...

Chariot ride back to the bikable trail

Waylaid by Ami's intestines, we spent a day lounging about before heading to St Louis for some beach time, jazz festival time, and debauchery. Our last few hours back in the capitol were spent shopping for and cooking a decidedly delicious meal of lasagna, broccoli, and ice cream.

Not wanting to leave, we trudged back to the airport. I felt extremely happy that I had been able to share this experience with such great people. We had the trip of a lifetime, and have Emily to thank for showing us the country, helping us communicate, and sharing her beautiful personality. I have already started to plan a trip back.

Self Propelled Motion

2011-05-29T23:30:00.000-07:00

I miss my bike.

A lot.

It hit me last night while taking a night train to Tangier just how much I missed my bike and the act of biking. I miss the freedom of route finding. I miss the exercise. I miss the hypnotizing monotony of stripes on the road. I miss the weird calf sunburns. I miss the moment when biking when you stop thinking about anything at all, when your mind goes blank. I miss not knowing or needing to know where I will end up at the end of the day. I miss the feeling of accomplishment when you arrive at the top after a difficult climb. I miss the banked curves. I actually miss the sore ass.

Of course, I didn't think this a week ago, when I actually had a sore ass, and when I had spent a few days attempting to negotiate public transportation and large cities with my bike. But now, after traveling mainly by bus, car, and train, I feel that I am missing out on the in-between. I am missing the connection to the road, to the land, that I feel when there is some sort of ability to self propel.

Just one touch

2011-05-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

After spending about 20 hours close to facilities (Gastroenteritis: 1, Erin: 0), I needed to get out for some fresh air. We were in Essaouira, a fortressed city on Morocco's Atlantic coast, complete with beach and wind (more of the second).

view from the Essaouira ramparts

Andrew and I headed out along the beach, walking to where the river empties into the waves to the south. After saying no to many men selling type II spice cake, and avoiding being beheaded by beginner kite surfers coming to shore, we hit the area of the beach where Moroccans peddle camel rides and horse rides. Then, I actually had this conversation with a man trying to sell me a camel ride:

Hello, Madame? French? English? German? You want to ride my camel?

No, thank you.

Yes, you want to ride my camel. He is a special camel, nicest to ride.

La, shukran.

Okay, you don't want to ride. I will not push....but, just touch my camel. Touch the head. Just a little touch. It is the nicest camel to touch the head of. Touching my camel will make you have a nice time, and if you touch you will want to ride.

No, thank you (laughing a bit)

I promise, my camel is nice and is the best camel to touch. Just touch the head. Touching is the most fun thing that you can do here in Morocco. Just one touch.

Shaking my head no, still laughing.

Okay. Not today, maybe tomorrow? Later? Never?

Probably never.

Okay, but you would like to touch.

Andrew and I continue our walk, hit the river where we can´t walk any further, then retrace our steps. On the way back...

Touch my camel's head. Like this (demonstrating). Just one touch. I promise you will like...

I have to give it to the guy, he was persistent, and really probably believed that touching his camel would want me to take a ride over the sand dunes. He believed in his product 110%, like you are told to do in salesmanship school. But, by the end, I couldn't help feeling a bit dirty, having just had a 5 minute just-the-tip-esque back-and-forth with a camel man. Twice.

graffiti in Essaouira

More Morocco

2011-05-27T02:54:00.000-07:00

Morocco has left me introspective, frustrated, and enamored all at the same time. I will spare you my introspective musings. Now for a few of my favorite things...

Loudspeakers crackle five times a day, and the voice of the muezzin bursts forth into the sky from the minarets towering over the city. I really have come to look forward to the adhan, or call to prayer, especially in big cities where the clusters of minarets all calling at the same time lead to a beautiful disjointed few minutes. The sunset adhan is my favorite, when the calming effect on the city is most visible.

marakesh mosque

I can't stop taking pictures of the intricately carved tiles covered with Arabic prayers. Just thinking about how long and how much skill it took to make these blows my mind a bit.

courtyard view at Ben Yousef Medersa

crazy beautiful prayers sketched into the tile in Arabic

more Arabic prayers

I am also working to perfect my tea pouring skills. The sticky, sweet tea is always a welcome refreshing offering of hospitality. The host will bring in a silver tray with sugar, teapot, mint leaves, and adorned glasses. He will break up the mint leaves and stuff them in the hot water, then proceed to pour the tea in a very specific way - starting close to the glass, then moving slowly upwards until the pot is pouring at the highest point without spilling out of the glass. I don't know if status or respect is given to the highest pourer, but maybe it should be.

Andrew attempting to master the art of pouring mint tea

I have, after biking earlier this month, a new found respect for the ubiquitous desire to put the largest objects possible on the back of your chosen mode of transportation while driving. Moroccans are pretty good at this. Two cows in the back of a mini pickup truck, no problem. Four kids on your bike rack, easy. A twenty foot pole that tells traffic you are coming before you turn the corner, not even a big deal. A satellite dish while you man your scooter...oh please, come up with a better challenge.

trying to maneuver through Ave Mohammad V traffic

I am also in love with date flavored ice cream, twenty different types of olives, the smell of spice stands, the myriad of different colors and patterns of head scarves...and have I mentioned the cats and the orange juice?

Marrakech

2011-05-22T05:13:00.000-07:00

My apologies up front. This may read like a PBS special on Morocco, but so be it.

There is probably no better way to ensure culture shock (first cliché) than spending a day in the air conditioning, shopping, napping, getting hair cuts, watching Spanish television, taking multiple showers, and staying up all night, then flying at 400 AM to a bustling, crazy, hot, desert Muslim country. But, we made it through customs, sleepily payed too many Dirhams for a taxi to town, and were pawned off without realizing the consequences to a guy who took us through the winding, covered roads of souks to our hostel. We regrouped, napped, then hit the streets.

The medina, or walled old town, of Marrakesh centers around a square, the Djeema el Fna. From there, stalls of covered souks (small markets) extend in all directions. Most of our days in Marakesh were spent repeatedly getting lost in the souks. Somehow we would find ourselves back to the square, then promptly get lost again.

Medina walls

The souks are dream-worthy, constantly dancing with your senses. Usually the smells or the sounds give away what is around the next corner. There are tanneries where you can buy your leather slippers or bags. There herbal markets with piles of brightly colored spices, mystery eye drops for your eye problems, siwak sticks for cleaning your teeth, goopy, brown olive oil based soap.

There are meat markets where they will butcher the animal in front of your eyes. There are dried fruit stands where you can taste several different types of dates and figs before you decide on the right ones. There are mint carts where you buy your mint fresh daily for the ubiquitous Moroccan "whiskey" - sweetened mint tea. You can watch the tile guys carve intricate patterns, watch the woodworkers cut and fit pieces of a door, watch the dyers hang up their yarn to dry in the wind and sun. There are orange juice stands where you can enjoy fresh squeezed OJ any time of the day. There is a market for any desire. To a newbie, the crowded stalls can be a bit overwhelming, but the locals have a daily walk where they gather all of their needs.

stalls of dried fruits and nuts

Then there's the Djeema el Fna. The Djeema is always a happening place, but at night the general population of tourists and Moroccans alike descend upon the square for night time display. In late afternoon carts pulled by mules bring in men dressed in white coats who set up covered tents, makeshift displays, tables, chairs, and fire up the grill. Then begins the strange courting ritual of words, prices, foods.

"Madame, Monsieur. Scottish? English? Francais? Take a look, see if you like. Only freshest. Stall one-seven, send you to heaven."

Kebabs, snails, lamb soup, type-I spice cake (ask sometime about type-II spice cake), cous cous, spice tea can be sampled as you walk from tent to tent. At some point it becomes dark enough to need lights, and the gas lamps flicker on.

after dinner at the Djeema

delicious type-I spice cake and spice tea for dessert

Further out around the periphery people pander the crowds for donations. Cross dressing belly dancers shake their stuff with their palms out. Snake charmers spend time pissing off their cobras, then playing tunes for a few dirham per picture. Nightly concerts start up on the stage, and kids scramble to the top of trees to get the best view. Old men crowd around tents where stories are told in the Berber tongue. Women try their hardest to make sure that no tourist leaves without their hands covered with henna tattoos. Demonstrations occur, music is everywhere, and there is still orange juice.

the Djeema el Fna at night

Needless to say, most of our time was spent exploring these sights, tastes, sounds, and smells. We also spent time trying to sneakily feed the kittens that would gather around our feet. A medina kitten would definitely make a well adjusted cat...if only bringing one home wasn't so hard.

Medina cats

The Snails

2011-05-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

A constellation of shells litter the grass. He sits, insomnia-stricken, on a rock next to the tent while his mom snores softly inside. At bedtime, Mom was still angry. He lost her car keys that afternoon. He had begged her to let him return to the car for his mp3 player while they went grocery shopping. Then he lost her keys someplace between the car and the supermarche. Worst of all, his music player was broken anyway, a victim, he is sure, of the constant traveling they had endured the past month.

The snails cover the ground in the camping, having emerged from their hiding spots in the rocks and hedges as the dew descended after sunset. They slime lazy arcs in the grass. Some of them are tentatively crossing, with antenna outstretched, the gravel driveway that leads to the sanitary station.

The light from the crescent moon suffices as he walks to the sanitary station, pees, and returns to his brood outside the tent. He stifles a yawn and decides that bed, even with a furious mother, will do. He crosses back towards the tent and nearly steps on a snail right in front of the tent door. He is about to open the tent and climb into his sleeping bag, but a strange compulsion seizes him. He turns around, stoops and unsticks the snail from the grass. It immediately retracts into its shell. He walks a few steps towards the hedge and sets it back on the ground. After a moment, its head peeks out and it returns to its nocturnal vigil. It is a traveler too, he thinks, carrying its payload on its back, rather than in a car.

He crawls into the sleeping bag, winces one final time recounting in his head the missing keys and their car still sitting 3km away in the Supermarche parking and how they would pay the bill of the locksmith tomorrow, shuts his eyes and counts sheep for a time before eventually managing to fall asleep.

The sun had not yet warmed their shady square in the camping when his eyes flutter open to see his mom standing over him, jingling a pair of car keys.

"You. found. them," he manages groggily.

"Yes, they were just sitting not even a meter from the tent door in the grass, silly boy!" she smiles. "You must have had them in your pocket all along!"

He reaches up and feels them, still wet with dew, and brings them closer. The keychain glistens iridescent with snail trail.

Selling cherries at the road junction, the day passes slowly. He is bored, missing the music that normally fills his day, in a bad mood and it seems their would-be customers can sense it. It is only 5PM, but the gorge walls have nearly swallowed the late August sun when they decide to call it quits. There would be no new mp3 player tonight.

They return to the camping, and notice a van has pulled in adjacent to their site. An older Swedish couple (judging from the license plates and hair color at least) is drinking tea. He wishes them a bon soir and returns to setting up the stove. They cook the last of their food as night falls and the Norwegians retire to the van, taking with them their chairs and tables, evidently fixing for an early start in the morning. He tries reading, but can't seem to focus without any music, so he gives up, lies down and quickly falls asleep.

Judging by glow to the east and the right-side-up big dipper, it is just a bit before dawn when he awakes to pee. There is already a light on in the Swedes' campervan as he walks slowly to the bathroom, nearly stepping on a half-dozen snails who inexplicably loiter by the wheels of the van, oblivious of their peril if the Swedes get their early start. He picks them up by their shells as he walks and then drops them in a pile outside the toilet. As he is leaning over to pick up one last straggler, his mp3 player slips out of his sweatshirt and falls into a tuft of grass.

He doesn't realize the missing piece until he's back in the tent and reflexively feels for its weight in the front pocket of his sweatshirt. Oh well, he thinks resignedly. He'll look for it in the morning. It was broken anyway.

It is a stifling warmth in the tent that wakes him at last. The sun has been up for hours, but it's Sunday, and that's the day off, even for ersatz cherry-sellers. He climbs out of the boiling tent to sit in the shade in the vacant Swedish camping site. He leans back and rests on the trunk of a tree, running his hands through the grass idly until his fingers stumble across a small, square object. His mp3 player. That was a weird place to lose it, he thinks. Maybe mom is right and he really is as absent-minded as she says. He brushes slime off the screen and gives the power button a tap out of habit and blinks in surprise when the screen flashes to life. Not only does it turn on and play music, but the crack running down the center of the screen has inexplicably healed. He puts on the headphones and closes his eyes in pleasure.

About halfway through the third song a hand on his shoulder startles him from his reverie. His mom pulls off one headphone. "Sweetie, I know it's Sunday but they called. There's work in Cavaillon this afternoon. They are promising at least 200 euros. If we leave now, we'll make it by 1."

He looks over towards the car. The tent already lies deflated like a crushed animal on the pitch, and the trunk is open with their belongings half assembled inside. Perhaps he would start this school year in Cavaillon, if the job is as good as they say. But they had been disappointed before. He gives a resigned shrug, hits pause on the song, and goes to roll up his sleeping pad.

Next to him, a snail slimes a patient, directionless arc in the shade of the hedge, secure in primordial knowledge that its path will surely provide.

Barcelona

2011-05-20T04:51:00.000-07:00

Barcelona has big boulevards. And bike lanes. And lots of Gaudi.

The Sagrada Familia basilica (started 1886, with construction to finish sometime in the next 50 years) is a modern wonder. It is also a wonder that the catholic church let Gaudi build the SFB, because the whole thing seems like a drug-fueled fever dream. Faceted pillars start with 8 faces, then double to 16, 32, 64 in geometric progression as they reach nave-ward, and explode into branches of a tree. The staircases of the belfries dive to the floor of the sanctuary in tortuous, logarithmic spirals. From the outside, rows of slender towers are topped with the "fruits of the spirit." Or are they giant stalks of grass, laden with grains? Gaudi seemed to find God in nature, and used his architecture to convey this. I have rarely seen this so centrally featured in Catholic imagery, but it is a school of thought that I can relate with, and probably why I enjoyed Gaudi so much. Needless to say, admission into the cathedral and a ride up the elevators was worth the 15€ pp.

nautilus mimicking winding staircase

shadows cast on the streets below by the Sagrada Familia towers

intricate stained glass

tree sprouting branches of columns inside the Basilica

We tested the bike lanes riding across town to the bus station later that evening. Those worked pretty well: wide, off-street lanes and bike-shaped stop lights all the way to the station. We arrived with 20 minutes to spare. However, Mordor conspired against us to the very end. We nearly had to wrestled the bus conductor to let us take the bikes on board, despite our duly purchased additional fare for the beasts. We finally placated him by buying 10€ "bike bags" that did nothing but make the bus late. Oh well.

After the usual nightbus antics, we were unceremoniously dumped at dawn at the "Avenida de Americas" in Madrid, wherever that is. Ando had slightly learned his lesson from Barcelona and this time had the name and address of the hotel (correctly?) memorized. Somehow, that was enough to deduce a sensible metro stop, navigate our bikes through a couple of transfers, then find our way under/over two (count 'em) limited access freeways and bike to the hotel, feeling certain that we were the first people in the history of Madrid to have arrived on bicycle at that particular hotel. All this transpired without the benefit of Internet. Yeah, we are two badass hobbits. We gave each other a high-five once the bikes were ensconced in the luggage room of the hotel, then proceeded to shop 'til we dropped at the Plenilunia Centro Comercial, which really did have some excellent ofertas. Ando plans to fill his bags with discount euro-tailored clothing when he returns.

Orcs!

2011-05-19T04:46:00.000-07:00

Although spectacular, the gorges and causses of the Cevannes had left Erwise and Andoo saddlesore, aerobically spent, and carpal-tunnel afflicted. They were then eager to stop for the night in Millau, a city of men, but on an old road leading Mordor. From there, they would cross back into the Dark Land, and cast their Great Burdens into the fires of Mount Doom (also known as the left luggage of the Madrid Aeroporter Hotel). They had been warned about spies from the Dark Land roaming about Millau, but the city seemed benign, even inviting in the afternoon sun. Ando and Erwise ate a meal fit for two hungry hobbits, retired to their biouvac next to the gurgling River Tarn, and quickly fell into a dreamless sleep.

after slaying a 16€ buffet

Some hours later, Ando awoke to a soft blue glow filling the Megamid. At first he thought it was the moon. But no, there was but a sliver of moon, and it was setting when they retired. He looked down and realized Stang, his faithful headlamp, was aglow. That meant only one thing...orcs! He snuck a peak from under Megamid and saw three dark figures stooped over their trusty steeds/great burdens. There was no time to think. He sprang from the tent and charged at the bike thieves without uttering a word. The thieves never had a chance, for a enraged shirtless hobbit is a sight to see, and nothing angers a hobbit more than orcs preying on defenseless bicycles. They gave a surprised yelp and sprinted into the Tarn, splashing into its icy clutches.

Ando and Erwise moved camp away from the river, and took turns in watch for the thieves. The dark figures did not reappear. Nevertheless, a restless few hours passed in jumpy anticipation, then light began to dawn. They mounted their steeds, and glided through the still sleepy town, and got on the 5:45 train to Mordor.

bike ride back over the France - Spain border after an early train

Parc National Cevennes

2011-05-16T12:21:00.000-07:00

We found open road.

We stayed at a winery that overlooked a valley.

There was Titou. He finished the destruction of our pillow.

We found smooth asphalt. I saw 4 cars over the course of an hour.

There were gorges.

And villages carved into the gorges.

There were causses: utterly desolate, depopulated limestone plateaus. We might have seen an orc.

There were flowers.

And then there was Millau.

Escape from Provence

2011-05-15T12:14:00.000-07:00

Without a plan besides seeing more Provençal cities that were supposedly neat, we headed west out of Orange. We quickly felt the pull of the Rhone as the land flattened and the traffic turned more industrial. We crossed a bridge, a long, slender island between channels, and some locks and were suddenly west of the Rhone.

Some wrong turns and some kilometers later, we arrived at the city of Uzes, an obviously European city, since the entire, plus-beaux village is one giant roundabout. We were under-inspired. However, that night an rogue wifi connection in the camping showed that we could bid adieu to Provence and keep heading west into a Parc National. On the far side of Parc National Cevennes was Millau, a town with a train station that looked a couple of days of riding away. On the map were lots of green-underlined small roads, which mean scenic and untrafficked. Which is normally a good bet.

I < 3 poppies

The next morning, despite our best efforts in Orange and Uzes, we were still out of stove fuel, and therefore, coffee. We headed back into town for caffeine so that our brains would function. We held council over a map and cafe. The synchronicity of the prior night continued. As it came to pass, beside us was a Frenchman who lived in Uzes and built bikes and when he saw that we were avec velo and pondering a map, he offered to advise us on a route. We left with several circles scribbled on our map, and feeling a little pleased, since our gibberfrench seemed more intelligible than normal.

Heading into the hills

Roadside attractions

The going was going to be good.

Polar opposites

2011-05-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

Gravity dropped us in Malaucene mid-afternoon on a Saturday, a bizarrely disagreeable town. Its centreville featured a boulevarded parking lot, choked with traffic trying to enter. Calvacades of motorcycles, RVs and the occasional tractor (driven by, no lie, a leering frenchman wearing a beret and flying a tricolor) rumbled through the streets. We fled for the outskirts of town, and found a campground, which at first glance appeared delightful. The camping, Le Bosquette, is on an orchard perched above town. It has a swimming pool. It has spotless bathrooms. Great.

Grapes all over the place

Oh, I forgot to mention that the orchard was subsequently covered in a uniform layer of sharp gravel, with nary a patch of grass for the beleagured tent camper to patch her/his tent; tractors are roaring from dawn-dusk in the field below in some sort of exhibition; the swimming pool is just a dry pit; and the toilets, while clean enough for the Virgin Mary to eat out of, have neither seats nor TP. So yes, bizarrely disagreeable.

Highlight of Malaucene centreville

We got as quick of a start as we could manage the following morning, feeling sapped and slightly demented from the angry rays of the sun that hit our camp as soon as it had risen. The tractors, too, had already began their combative droning, while vaguely militaristic symphony music echoed up to Le Bosquette. We had hatched a plan to shorten our day to Orange by taking a little penalty climb at the start, then cutting through the Dentelles de Montmirail, a range of limestone teeth that formed in the wake of the orogeny that lifted Ventoux.

Dentelles from a Col

We crossed the ridge and our outlooked improved immediately as we caught a minor breeze and left the tractors behind. The penalty climb was quickly dispatched and we began a 10k descent on banked roads with clean, smooth asphalt and kickass views that dropped us on the edge of the Rhone's alluvial plain. Some more quiet, smooth roads led to a narrow, more trafficked road that we conquered with our new technique of the flying wedge. (In which Erin takes shotgun and rides near the fogline. Andrew rides a bikelength in front, and rides far enough into the lane to force a lane change in passing cars. Cars can tell how many bikes they are going to pass, and both Andrew and Erin can see approaching cars in their mirrors. It also works well in roundabouts, which while are great traffic engineering for cars, hover between frightening and unnavigable on bikes, depending on diameter and traffic volume.)

Looking back at Ventoux and the Dentelles

We quickly arrived in Orange, a dusty, medium-sized city with some Roman ruins 'n' stuff and a poorly signed, but very helpful tourist office. We stayed there for a bit and ate pizzas and nutella.

We carried this pizza about 50 km from Malaucene in 80 degree sun. It miraculously didn't make us poop our pants when we ate it.

Le Mt Ventoux

2011-05-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

200m: Leave from Jouncas, head up the valley towards and past Murs Coll, past the wall that gives Mur it's name. The wall extends the length of the Provencal countryside. It was erected from dry stone by citizens after a governmental decree in reaction to the bubonic plague overwhelming the streets of Marsailles. It was coined the mur de la peste and was guarded along its length 24 hours a day by sentinels. To be able to cross, one must have a clean bill of health in hand. A lasting representation of panic surrounding the outbreak.

(Picture egregiously stolen from wikipedia)

900 m: Views of Mt Ventoux begin to show in the distance as we reach the peak of our climb for the day and head down to Sault.

810 m: We stop for eau potable and watch goats cross the road at a busy rural intersection.

740 m: The road switchbacks up 100 meters and dumps us into Sault, perched airily above the valley. Feels like finishing a Tour de France stage. We enjoy beers and look out at the valley as the sun sets.

680 m: We drop to the valley floor before starting our climb to the top of Ventoux. The road is gently graded and in the trees at first. Scattered Tour graffiti spray painted on the road makes for interesting reading as we climb.

1440 m: We triumphantly emerge above tree line. After a picnic break we begin the exposed climb over white, tumbling talus, which gives the mountain its snow-covered appearance from far away. The climb steepens to over 10% grade and the temperature begins to drop slightly as the wind picks up. I am passed seven times on the way to the summit by others in race kit. Andrew passes one man dressed in head to toe spandex and on an ultralight bike...he now owns his soul forever.

1850 m: Only one kilometer to go, the observatory on top of the mountain gets closer in view.

1912 m: Summit time! Excited to be done with the climb, and feeling self-accomplished for completing an HC climb with full touring gear. Battered by the wind, we do not stay long to revel in our accomplishment.

1700 m: Rim-boiling steep, airy descent with amazing views to the north.

440 m: We arrive at Maulacene, among many old men playing bocce ball, a strange beauty pageant, and a noisy tractor demonstration. We work on consuming as many calories as we burnt during the day in pizza and salad.

über lüber

2011-05-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

Crruunnchh, smack, smack, smack. The sound of a small animal chowing down next to my left ear abruptly woke me from sleep at the municipal campground in Apt. I sat upright, shook Andrew awake. "Wake up, there's a huge rat in our tent trying to eat my ears! Where's your headlamp?"

While he searched, the animal seemed to lunge at the border of the Megamid and I tried to stop it's vicious approaches with my water bottle. But, I struck something more substantial than a soft animal, and the figure just rolled on it's side slightly.

"It's a huge porcupine!"

Actually, with a little light, it proved to be a very petite hedgehog in the middle of a midnight snack of snails. Feeling a bit foolish, but still not ready to go back to sleep with a hedgehog for a pillow (the downside of having a bottomless tent-tarp), we left the tent for a few minutes and watched the little guy scurry away. Apparently he wanted nothing to do with an over-dramatic sleep-deprived Americane.

hedgehog, frightened into a ball

The riding from Forcalquier to Apt had been uneventful, filled with fields of grapes, olives, and silage. We had followed the zig-zagging Luberon bike route against a fierce headwind the first day, and soon departed from the bike route after leaving Apt on the second day due to bumpy roads and unnecessary climbs. We opted for smoother sailing and more direct routes to the few villages in the Luberon that we had decided to visit that day.

fun descent into Reillanne

Bonnieux was our first stop, and what you would expect from a quintessential Provençal ville: beautiful, green, filled with tourists, and surrounded by ruins. We spent time wandering the ruined church lookout, taking pictures, and unintentionally feeding the ants a healthy picnic.

crazy cobblestone

stairs up

rooftops over Bonnieux

We sped down, up, down, up to the next venue of the day: Roussillon. France has a ranking system for the most beautiful villages, or "Les Plus Beaux Villages de France". To be added to the list you must pass several tests of quality, beauty and support. We had already passed through a few of these villages without knowing they had undergone this stringent selection process, but Roussillon let you know as soon as you entered. It had plaques and signs lit by Christmas lights galore touting its fame in the list. Built upon ocher cliffs and surrounded by seas of red and green, it probably deserved its self-congratulations.

exploring the ocher cliffs

the extra creepy blue-eyed keeper of o the Ocres

Roussillon in all of its splendor

red dust covered wandering shoes

We wandered away from Roussillon with threatening thunderclouds overhead late in the afternoon. After not much more pedaling, we decided to stay the night in Joucas to cut down on our 900 m climb the next day to Sault, the jumping off point of Mt Ventoux.

The anti-spectacle of the Plateau de Valensole

2011-05-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

The Verdon Gorge had been full of mighty towering limestone cliffs, sinuous downhills, and dramatic views from canyon walls into the depths of the river below. The beauty of the Verdon was definitely in-your-face, middle-of-the-magazine-pin-up type of spectacular. Monday's beauty proved to be a bit less sublime, but equally enjoyable.

At some point during our bike past the Lac St Croix we entered France's Alpes-Haute-a more pastoral, curvy, girl-next-door type of spectacular. For five hours we pedaled our beasts through hilly countryside full of pre-bloomed lavender, feral poppies, and grazing cattle. We stopped for goats crossing the road. We whizzed past rapeseed in blossom. We stopped for lunch and enjoyed the quiet landscape, disturbed only by frogs, ants, and crickets.

From Verdon

hand painted goat crossing sign

From Verdon

rapeseed in bloom

From Verdon

speak your language

From Verdon

empty roads in a bike mirror

We dropped to the river valley, biked our finishing touches on the Verdon circuit, and crossed the river towards Forcalquier where we would pick up the Luberon bike trail.

From Verdon

view of the river valley near Forcalquier

The spectacle of the verdon

2011-05-04T06:43:00.000-07:00

Sunday was gorge day. We managed a somewhat earlier start than usual, and had the wind at our back. Thousands of millipedes crossed the road escaping the rising sun for the first minor climb to the rim. Even though it was 9:30 AM on a Sunday, the roads and viewpoints were deserted. Score. Nice canyon, too (although Utah still has my vote for best canyonlands).

We probably crushed hundreds of these little guys under wheel

Le gorge

We made good time to Le Pont du Artuby, which is the highest span in Europe, and watched a few bungee jumpers go for the plunge. The French, never content to stop at a merely thrilling, but relatively safe sport, offered base jumping (for the untrained) from the bridge as well.

Le Pont du Artuby

We made Taxing Climb #1 of the day, and went through a pair of unlit tunnels, which were mercifully short and traffic mercifully absent. We fueled up for Taxing Climb #2, to an anonymous notch high above the south rim of the gorge, where the road ascends to outflank some cliffbands. The steep 400m climb was dispatched without too much trouble, and we rode our brakes down, down, down to Lac St Croix.

Le col de I'liore

We were a little haggard (okay, half-hallucinating and cussing like sailors) by the time we climbed back up to the town of Moustiers, and certainly had our fill of the packs of smelly, loud, close-passing motorcycles that had been plaguing the roads since Lac St Croix. So there was no discussion about stopping when we saw a sign for camping right below town.

Moustiers was very cool, even in our half-demented state. It is built on the flanks of a gorge, with several natural waterfalls pouring through town, and a pretty medieval church perched high above.

Moustiers

A bottle of wine a jour makes for a fun bicycle tour

As we fell to sleep, our bodies tired and stuffed full on more pasta and wine, we agreed we could do with a little less climbing and spectacle tomorrow.

To the verdon

2011-05-03T06:18:00.000-07:00

I was reluctant to leave camp, but I been living most my life in a squatters' paradise. Besides, we possessed two pricey train tickets to south-eastern France. I felt a pang of regret that we were skipping over this spectacular stretch of road as we biked one last time into Cebere. The Mediterranean stretched out from my handlebars and the predawn painted the hillsides purple. A warm breeze blew off the water, but otherwise it was utterly still.

That proved to be the apogee of the day. A dense, four-hour train ride led to the Marseilles train station, which was lightly mined with dogshit, as I discovered (guess how!). It was also occupied by a contingent of French police whose mission, as near as we could tell, was to hassle anybody brown skinned. However, everybody seemed surprisingly good-natured about the whole race-hassle-thing.

Later that afternoon we found ourselves in Les Arcs Sûr L'Argens, the nearest town with a train station to the Verdon Gorge. It was a gloomy afternoon and we were cranky, tired and feeling overwhelmed with the whole unintelligible language thing. A trip to the Hipermarché, a French hybrid of a Walmart, which turned into a two hour epic didn't help. Nor did the lazy, gluttonous washing machine in the camp ground, which ate six euros without washing our clothes, or indeed, even so much as a "merci."

A feast of beef stew, fromage (gouda with cumin) and wine regionaux lifted our spirits and we went to bed resolute to climb some hills and have some thrills the following day.

Not exactly speeding

Afternoon gloom over the artuby

Vendredi dawned bright and clear. Or so we guessed, when we finally stirred from our sleeping bags at 10AM. It was well towards noon by the time we had set off, and the clouds were already building in the distance. Some pleasant climbing on nearly deserted, forested roads led to a bigger climb on a bigger road and le Col de la Grange. The thunder reporting in the distance on the climb finally materialized into a light rain. We donned our rain gear and carefully made our way down from the Col.

Chateaudoble with rain

Despite our best efforts to wait out the rain in a tiny cafe in Ampus, it continued in fits and starts. By the time we had arrived at the base of Big Climb #2, we had lost all desire to continue further. We found a cute, cheap (by French standards) pension in Montferrat and watched French TV in hopes that osmosis might force a little more of the language into the void between our ears. My favorite program was on trained circus cats. Their tricks sucked eggs compared to the trained dogs on the show, but I enjoyed the arduous, intricate, pointless effort involved in the training. Sisyphus would smile.

Samedi, despite feeling quite spry on the climb to Comps Sur Artuby, we quit while we were ahead and made early camp in the cheap municipal camping (only 7€!). After all, the trip through the gorge was supposed to be the most taxing leg of the randoneé.

Outside comps

The jury unanimously returned the verdict: delicious

Costa Brava

2011-05-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

After some bike fixing, food buying, late sleeping, internet using, and being kicked out of a nicer restaurant for trying to change into biking gear in their bathroom, we headed out of Toroella and promptly got lost. After an hour of repeatedly asking directions from randos on the side of the street, we ultimately ended up on the wrong road in the right direction. It was one of those roads that was too wide and straight for cars to want to slow down in anticipation of obstacles in their path, but not quite wide enough for one bike + two cars. We quickly tired of the rapid traffic buzzing our shoulders, and took a detour on more quiet roads.

Happy to find a less busy road (with goofy glasses)

From bikinggirona

The coastal winds on the Costa Brava kicked up. Pedaling our loaded bikes against walls of headwinds coupled with more than a few detours due to not having sufficient maps landed us near Empuria Brava in late afternoon. We found ourselves blocked by a newly formed river over the road. The wet ford looking unappetizing, we headed to the signed camping to ask directions, and decided to stay the night. I am beginning to think that wrong turns in the Mediterranean only bring unexpected delights.

"Dangerous Currents" blocking our passage

From bikinggirona

The view from our beach side campsite. Note the Rosé in the water cage.

From bikinggirona

Wednesday we began our climb into the Cap de Creus on the easternmost part of Spain's Mediterranean coast. I soon remembered how different meters are from feet, as the 400 m climb to the pass with a loaded 50 lb bike quickly dropped me to my lowest gear. I was passed by several Frenchmen yelling "Bonjour" and "keep up" as they blew past me in race kit. I was barely able to mutter a hurried salutation before they were out of view.

When I caught up to Andrew near the top, he had a huge smile, and said proudly "I passed two racers and was complemented by a French man." Which, yes, is a pretty big deal in this land overrun with bikers training for great races.

View from the Top, road to Cadaques

From bikinggirona

We topped out to amazing views and the scenery kept coming all afternoon as we dropped from the road to Cadaques into a line of tiny towns linked by fun, banked turns. I could have ridden those roads forever.

Self portrait attempts on fast and fun roads through northern spain

From bikinggirona

The riding was so fun, it was tempting to continue on into France, but being advised of the type of roads past Llança into France by several bikers, we decided to take a quick local train across the border.

By early evening we were wandering the deserted streets of Cerbere, searching for a place to spend the night. In the window of the closed tourist office, we saw a flyer for municipal camping. Using our very minimal French with much hand gesturing, we were able to find out that the camping was a few kilometers out of town on the right...so we headed off in the direction we had been pointed.

Arriving to a closed appearing registration station, we were bummed. But hadn't we seen campers in the distance across the water? We continued down in good faith, and sure enough, hidden on the cliffs, we found a city of squatters/campers. Again using our jibberspanishfrench we found out that the camping was free for however long we would like to call it home. We pitched our tent and cooked dinner with a mindblowing view of the sea. Free squatting privileges with such a view...France you've got my heart.

feral flowers at camp

From bikingFrance

not too bad for a free campsite

From bikingFrance

Chapter 4, in which your heroes discover their great power

2011-04-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

Ando and Erwise were bummed. Their burdens had been weighing heavily on them since they entered the land of the Euros. Even the smallest staircase, which the lithe Eurofolk bounded up, required great toil. And while their shoulders were heavy, their purses were becoming distressingly light, for their Shire coins were worth very little.

Dusk was fast approaching as they wandered another unfamiliar town, understanding none of the strange tongue spoken. A sign, mercifully legible, indicated they might make camp for the night someplace outside the town. But their legs were weary, and the sign said nothing about the distance to camp. Erwise sat and contemplated the deepening shadows the headlands cast over the immense, blue Meditteranean, when suddenly she was struck by a vision so vivid it was as if Gandalf himself had returned with his wizardry. They would mount their burdens, and pedal them to camp! In fact, they could really pedal them anywhere in Middle Earth! They were not burdened at all. Instead, they possessed a great power.

"Ando! Alack! Grab the reins of your stead and let us flee this town, for the wind is at our back and the world is ours!"

Ando mounted his stead with a hearty yell, and started up the sinuous highway. As soon as his foot hit the stirrup, the world seemed to shift. The azure Meditteranean appeared an even deeper blue. He charged up the steep hill that lead out of town, not feeling the grade at all, as though he was being pushed by an invisible hand.

Your heroes banked through turns and raced the birds, and soon, too soon, camp appeared on a headland across a cove. Provisions, they had not, but they now understood that it didn't matter. On their faithful steeds, the immense world had become a little smaller.

Vías verdes (and not so verdes)

2011-04-28T13:42:00.000-07:00

Girona is known to be a center of competitive cycling in Spain. The US team trained here, Lance had a house, etcetera. Which is all well and good, however we are operating on an entirely different plane than 17 lb bikes and 80 liters/kilogram VO2 maxes. Fortunately for us, it is also a center of anti-competitive cycling, with lots of rail-trails and rural cycling routes. We took one such rail-trail from Girona to Platja d'Aro, on the coast.

After very pleasant 42 km through small towns and alongside fields of poppies and rapeseed, we arrived in Platja d'Aro. La platja was a raging shitshow of traffic and vacationing Madrileños. Whoops, we forgot it was Semana Santa, which means Spring Break! for all of Spain. And just like Spring Break! in the US, everybody goes to the beach. We found our camping, where they assured us that it wasn't really all that crowded, which although incredible, might have been true. We were camped in site 5207, and an entire half of the campground wasn't open yet. God help us if we had arrived mid-summer.

The roar of traffic on the carretera throughout the night assured us that we should find a route that didn't involve the highway. The next morning, traffic through town had calmed substantially, and we rode next to the water through fancy-smancy beach towns and steady, but not terrifying traffic, before finding another rail trail that led inland. A propicious wrong turn lead us up a couple hundred meters of climbing to a pleasant viewpoint. If only all wrong turns were so scenic.

From bikinggirona

Some fast kilometers downhill and a wrong turn onto the carretera (which was actually not too bad, and far less terrifying than "smaller" roads we rode on) lead us to more routefinding through beautiful, medieval towns, and eventually the town of Torroella de Montgrí. We were bushed from pedaling our distressingly-heavy bikes into the wind all day, and couldn't convince ourselves to look for the camping outside of town. So we settled for an over-priced hotel in the city and a underpriced, and very delicious Catalan supper of sausage, salad and lasagna.

mm-mm-mm-my Girona

2011-04-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

We hurriedly stuffed our bikes into the bus bound for Barcelona where we would connect to Girona. Our bikes were mostly built by this time, boxes discarded. We soon found ourselves back in disassemble mode - racing to take off parts of our bikes to make them fit into the luggage compartment while encouragements (if you want to call them that) were yelled to/at us by the bus conductor. We were soon on the bus with more than one annoyed look from strangers for holding up travel. We were soon settled in to fitful sleep.

The morning in Girona was dark and rainy, the clouds menacing. With café con leche in hand, we settled into a coffee shop to wait out the Seattle-like weather. Soon enough the clouds burnt off, the sun came out and we were able to explore the city of Girona before setting off on two wheels.

To Andrew's eyes, it was like wandering around a section of disneyland, but real. And it made the old parts of Chile and Perú less impressive, with the possible exception of Cusco.

Madrid is a very fine city, but it ain't no Rivendell

2011-04-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

Despite the best efforts of the barrowights, also known as Air France, your two adventurers and their Great Burdens arrived in Madrid.

Ando argued mightily with the Wights that they leave us in Rivendell, aka Paris, but it was for naught. $1800 must be abandoned, p.p., for the privilege of getting off the plane early in Paris. That they left one of our bags to marinate overnight and closed the boarding of our plane 15 minutes before scheduled in Rivendell, I can only theorize, was to punish us for the asking.

But yes, Madrid. Quite nice.

Lots of parks, an absurdly extensive subway, and strangely desolate, due to Semana Santa (note foreshadowing)

We did some more investigating and found that Alsa would help carry our Great Burdens by auto-coach towards France, via way of Girona. They were intact, mostly. So we built them, mostly. Then we pushed them, cajoled them up stairs, held them while speaking in soothing tones on train and subway (they spook easily in crowds), did delicate ballet to corral them onto elevators. Then dumped them in the luggage hold of a bus.

Chapter One: In Which our Heroes Leave the Shire and Discover Their Great Burden

2011-04-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

It was several weeks past the equinox in the shire, in what had been an unusually cool spring. The daffodils and tulips were finally, cautiously poking their heads out of the cold ground.

The Shire in Bloom

From bike1

The mid April sun shone obliquely, but did little to warm Ando McDaggins, who was on his way to his post at the Cancer Prevention Mill. Ando had just crossed the bridge on his way to South Bywater when he came upon his dear friend Erwise.

“Good day, Erwise Gringee. I must admit I am surprised to see you this far from Hobbitown. Are not your services required in the Hobbitown Public Health Clinic?”

“Nay, Ando. I threw up my deuces and walked out this morning.”

“What brought on this change of heart, dearest Erwise?”

“I had a dream last night that a great journey was in my future, and I figured that I needed to be unencumbered by a job to take on this task."

"A dream? You quit your job because of a dream? I have always known you to be a level-headed, scientific type. I am just surprised you did such a thing.” Ando spoke, while scratching his scraggly bearded chin.

“You speak true. I usually do not heed such dreams, but I lately have been fed up with spending my days doing Hobbit footcare.”

“Tell me about this dream of yours. I took a class from Sir Gilbran on dream interpretation several years ago, and maybe I could help with interpretation.”

“Well, there was a large Elvin apparition that appeared to me and showed me two large boxes hidden in the bushes, and called this my 'great burden'. She told me I was to pick a partner for the adventure. And that was all. Except she was dressed strangely for an elf, in head-to-toe spandex and with a long, bright yellow cape. She also kept complaining about how much her taint hurt.”

“Oh, yes, I can definitely help interpret this type of dream,” replied Ando. “Just toss three sticks under one side of the bridge. When they appear on my side, I will use the pattern to decipher the meaning of this dream of yours."

Erwise quickly gathered three sticks and tossed them in the river.

"A-hah!" cried Ando. "Just what I thought. You are to take a bike journey to the hills of France, and your travel partner will be I, Ando."

Erwise looked down at the sticks - one stuck in the curve of the river, the other two seeming not to make a symbol at all. Sir Gilbran was known to teach bogus classes for extra cash to support his herbalism habit. This would not make for as good a story as her friend Frodo was able to brag about around the town bonfires. However, searching for a real answer to this obtuse dream seemed tedious, and the answer might be something that involved Dark Riders, which didn't sound tempting in the least. Giddy with the thought of free time and adventure with a dear friend, she accepted.

Ando tossed his cancer prevention bag into the Water, and they turned 90 degrees. They set out west, towards the Brandywine, the ends of the shire, and the land of the Euros.

Empirical confidence intervals on scatter plots

2011-03-31T18:15:00.001-07:00

Update: see this instead for a better solution.

Here's a little R-trick for you nerds out there in cyberland, but mainly for me, so I won't have to rediscover this little bit of code.

>xyplot(results3gr[,1]~results3gr[,2], xlim=c(0, 5000), cex=.1, ylim=c(-200, 200))

So you've got a dense scatter plot. Damn, there's points EVERYWHERE on this stupid thing, but how many more are being overplotted along the x axis versus some other blue-colored spot?

Well, how about using a 2D-kernel density estimator to get the relative density of points across a regular grid? Then you could find the ordinates correspond to 95% of the mass at a given slice of the grid.

So, the package KernSmooth should do the trick:

> ks = bkde2D(results3gr, bandwidth=c(10, 30), range.x=list(c(-200, 200), c(0, 1e4)))Then we need to find the marginal mass at each abscissa of the grid, and the cumulative mass:

> ksmarg = apply(ks$fhat, 2, sum) > kscum = apply(ks$fhat, 2, cumsum)Then divide the cumulative mass by the marginal mass, and get a list of linear approximations

> kscond = as.data.frame((t(t(kscum)/ksmarg))) > kscdf = list() > for (i in 1:ncol(kscond)){kscdf[[i]] = approxfun(kscond[[i]], ks$x1)}
to get a cumulative distribution function for each abscissa of the grid. Now we get a list of 1% and 99% ordinates for each value in the abscissa:
> confbars = matrix(nrow=2, ncol = ncol(kscond)) > for ( i in 1:ncol(kscond)){confbars[1, i] = kscdf[[i]](.025); confbars[2, i] = kscdf[[i]](.975)}

Now do some lattice witchcraft and plot:
> xyplot(results3gr[,1]~results3gr[,2], panel=function(x, y, ...){panel.xyplot(x, y, cex=.3); panel.xyplot(ks$x2, confbars[1,], type="l", col="black"); panel.xyplot(ks$x2, confbars[2, ], type="l", col="black")}, xlim=c(0, 5e3), ylim=c(-200, 200))

The bars appear to be over-conservative, probably because of sparsity...but oh well. It'll have to do.

Hat tip to Yihui to for the reference to KernSmooth.

North Cascades Highway, November

2010-12-01T00:08:00.000-08:00

From Thanksgiving Sno

Type II Fun

2010-10-06T21:06:00.000-07:00

We drove, then boated. We passed happy fisher people, congregating in the cathedral of Ross Lake.

We hiked trail as far as it would take us. We forded a river.

We fought brush and struggled up steep slopes. The walls of the drainage closed and the sidehill grew treacherous. We had gone up the wrong drainage. We hiked back down to the river in the dark.

We forded the river. We looked for a confluence. We grew frustrated. We forded the river again. We fought brush. We fought brush.

We found a confluence. We struggled up steep slopes. We fought brush.

We found the river's headwaters. We camped. The sun set.

We climbed a gulley of trackless hardpan. Loose rocks teetered. We crested a divide.

We lifted our eyes.

We traversed a basin. We crossed a snowfield. We scrambled solid granite, then piles of shattered gneiss, then cinder and sand. We found the summit.

We lifted our eyes.

We downclimbed. We traversed back across the basin. We skated down scree.

We followed the stream from its headwaters to the river. We followed the river to a lake.

We hiked back to the car. The memory of our trials faded with each step.

All Things Bright and Bruised

2010-10-04T00:35:00.000-07:00

After taking a day to dry our socks and pack our bags, Andrew and I headed down to Bend to do some mountain biking.

Driving around Mt Bachelor, we stopped to mull our options. Into the clouds, or back towards blue skies?

From central oregon biking

Our first Oregon morning was freezing. But who cares, it was finally sunny! We spent the morning biking up the steep dirt road to Paulina Peak, and the rest of the day riding a 24 mile circuit around Paulina lake and East Lake.

Morning sun rising through the clouds at our campsite.

From central oregon biking

Atop Paulina Peak

From central oregon biking

Andrew's makeshift braking mechanism (bungee cord assisted drag brake) for the longer downhill portions of the ride.

From central oregon biking

Stopping for a rest half way through the ride, above Paulina Lake

From central oregon biking

Feeling a bit battered (after my first endo) and tired the next day, we opted for a day hike up to South Sister.

The South Sister and I

From central oregon biking

Moraine Lake

From central oregon biking

Glorious sunset from camp at Elk Lake

From central oregon biking

Our last sun-filled day was spent biking around Swedish Ridge from Swampy Lakes trailhead.

riding zee bikes

From central oregon biking

Sufferfest 2010

2010-09-22T00:16:00.000-07:00

Last summer, after an amazing few days in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, Andrew and I decided to return in 2010 for a week-long end-of-summer hike-a-thon. Our planned route was over Little Giant Pass to the Napeequa Valley, west to the PCT where we would go over Indian pass and take the "closed" portion of the PCT up to Image Lake, and return over Spider Gap. A 100 mile loop around one of our favorite Washington peaks. I put in the request for days off from work the required six months in advance, and we planned, dehydrated food, and studied maps.

Seattle weather before the trip was not promising: the rainiest September of memory. We drew out a pros and cons list for alternate options. After hours of contemplation, debating, and discussion, we decided not to change our plans. Seattle weather be damned, we were headed to the Glacier Peak Wilderness.

We headed out, stopping by the 59'er diner for lunch (stackers!!). This afforded us full bellies, but also a late afternoon start time. Reaching the trailhead about three hours before dark we forded the Chiwawa river and headed up the overgrown and steep trail to Little Giant Pass.

Brendan's not-so-happy faces while fording the icy Chiwawa

From Glacier Peak Sufferfest

Hauling our bloated bodies up Little Giant Pass

From Glacier Peak Sufferfest

From our first night camp on top of Little Giant Pass

From Glacier Peak Sufferfest

Colder, wetter weather moved in during the night bringing a light dusting of snow and ominous clouds. We finished the climb over Little Giant and headed down to the Napeequa valley, throwing worried looks upwards to the little black rain clouds hovering overhead.

Short but sweet view through the clouds of Clark Mountain over the Napeequa Valley.

From Glacier Peak Sufferfest

From the Bottom of the Valley

From Glacier Peak Sufferfest

As we started our climb out of the Valley, the rain began. Tentatively at first, then in lusty drops that pockmarked our foreheads as we looked up in anticipation towards Boulder pass. The overgrown slide alder and huckleberry bushes acted as sponges, ready to loose their wet bounty at the most gentle brush or tap. The water off of the bushes rushed down our legs, and came to an abrupt standstill in our shoes as we squish-squashed up the trail.

Reaching higher elevations, the temperatures began dropping. Trickles, then cascades of water poured off gabled buttresses on Clark Peak and down the trail, which was now more of a streambed. We hurried downhill, hopeful to find a dry spot in the trees to pitch the tarp to wait out the rain, which now had taken on an air of malice.

And so it rained...for 23 hours. Rain on the tent, rain in our sleeping bags, rain on our dry clothes, rain in all body crevices. We attempted to ignore it, vainly picking wet pine needles out of our chili. Then we tried to bargin with it, hovering in the dryest quarter of the tent. We shouted at it, when drips through the leaky megamid kept us from sleep.

Finally, we accepted it and decided to bail. A little bit defeated, we made a dash for the nearest exit point when the rain let up. Luckily, we were able to hitch a ride to Lake Wenatchee where the locals were more than happy to take our money for a long, bumpy ride back to the car.

Headed back to Seattle I decided that I undoubtedly needed a little sunshine in my life...but where would this be found? Perhaps Oregon?

Only 50% drowned

From Glacier Peak Sufferfest

Blame It On The Tetons

2010-07-30T20:39:00.000-07:00

Job perks:
1.) new smells daily
2.) decreased worry about planning what to do with my weekday evenings
3.) old-fashioned dirty medical stories to tell at dinner parties
4.) CME money and time

I decided to take advantage of perk #4 and head to Wyoming for some medical education and hiking. Although I was super excited about learning about "Safeguarding Sphincters" (an actual lecture title...which I can post on later if there are interested parties), I was a bit more excited about hiking the Teton Crest Trail, mountain biking, and sleeping on the ground for a week.

The wildflowers were still blooming, the days were sunny, the hitch-hiking was easy, the crest trail was relatively unpopulated, and the company was great. I'm proud to say that I now officially have hiking-in-Chacos tan lines.

Queen Anne's Lace

View of the Teton range from Death Canyon Shelf.

Wildflowers blooming

Say Hello to my little friend

Views from Alaska Basin

From Hurricane pass

The reason I carried a large, heavy camera for the trip

The Grand, shrouded in clouds, on a day not for climbing. The week before we were there 16 climbers were rescued after being caught in a morning Thunderstorm

Attempt at self portrait

After finishing up the Crest Trail, Andrew and I left Jackson Hole to do some hiking in the Wind River Range. We stopped in Pinedale for coffee, pancakes as big (and delicious) as your right ass cheek, and a large earful of boomtown politics.

Seated near some local ranchers, now making their fortune off of natural gas, breakfast quickly became a quiet affair. We sat and listened to stories of apocalyptic planning, where not to go in California (south or west of Bakersfield), how to spend your fortune on mail order precious metals, what women are good for, and how Mexico is a bastion of free speech and individual freedom (and apparently where to move if Obama is elected for another term). Sometimes you just have to eavesdrop.

The Winds were beautiful, and had an untamed feeling that you don't get in the National Parks. I want to return with a fishing pole and a pack full of rice and butter for a few weeks of backcountry wandering and trout eating. I want to do this wandering when the mosquitoes have less of a voracious appetite...or maybe with a complete body suit of netting.

Green River Lakes

Crazy lichen

The canyon and another phallic object

Not the worst idea

2010-07-20T11:40:00.001-07:00

Apparently there must be some truth to the old saw that "God watches out for drunks and fools" since last weekend we were, at times, both.

The tandem isn't responsible for my current hobbling around, which probably has to do with my foot position when I pedal. And Robert only nearly crashed us twice, so we remain on speaking terms. I actually grew to like stoking the tandem, because it let me eat and drink and take pictures at 20 mph. And it was a train on the flats and a rocket sled on the descents. Thanks to its aerodynamics (and our need to over compensate for the appearance of Pinky) we blew past quite a few pacelines of much fancier bikes.

Final verdict: not the worst idea.

Self portrait at 20 mph.

Looking back at the pack as we cross the Columbia

Entering Oregon, finally.

Possibly a bad idea

2010-07-17T06:43:00.000-07:00

Robert: Hey Andrew, I bought a pink tandem for $500 on Craigslist.
Andrew: oh.my.god. LET'S RIDE IT TO BANFF OR COLORADOGLACIERUTAH!!
Robert: uh, how about the STP?

And thus the gears were set into motion for three months of training, mainly consisting of drinking beer and skiing. Which may or may not translate to riding an unfamiliar tandem 127 miles today. Good thing that we practiced riding it for 5 miles yesterday, right?

Check back and find out!

Spring in Seattle

2010-06-30T23:28:00.000-07:00

Thank the gods it's Summer. It was a bit of a long, hard haul of a Spring. Now, with the Solstice officially here and gone, ~~sunshine~~ hope fills the air. Hope that some day soon I can put away my space heater. Hope that the water of Lake Washington will not make one's nipples fall off when taking a impromptu plunge. Hope that I can soon be backpacking in Chacos instead of snowshoes. So. Much. Hope.

I haven't posted much of late...probably because I am a bit embarrassed with how little I have to show for my Springtime accomplishments. Here are a few things that I have been passing the time doing, for those of you back home who are still interested.

1.) I planted a Garden.

Life is usually better when you can eat what you grow. I even spent all winter working on growing starters from seed. Then, I left for a long weekend, and they died. The nice thing about the northwest is that the climate is forgiving to those of us who have black thumbs.

Pak Choi taking over

Tomato Plants

2.) I built a Chicken Coop.

I also found out that I have no carpenter skillz. I was told a few times during this project that I would have "failed 8th grade shop class". The floor is crooked, the angle on my A-frame is not calculable by any geometric property, but it works quite well.

Bones of wood

Crooked-floor-cutting Badass

3.) I finally got chickens.

Not only do they lay eggs, they provide endless entertainment for guests. No jugglers or dancing is needed for summer parties, just a fire pit and a few chickens. And here are the ladies...

Baba Yaga, a large, mean, peck-holes-in-your-hands machine. Although frightening, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. She is the only one that cannot figure out how to get out of the coop (with the door open).

Olivia Trashnasty (T-nast for short), a Sebright bantum, who can fly to the roof of the house in case of a raccoon attack. She is also, despite size, turning out to be the leader in this complex winged caste system.

The Chicken Formerly Known as Pixel, who also has a symbol for a name. She is the most friendly of the bunch, but the last to get perch rights and tasty snacks. She will also go after your uvula if you talk for too long with your mouth open. Who can blame her? That hangy-down thing in the back of your throat DOES look like a worm.

4.) I went on a few Mountain trips.

Olympics through the fog

Straight of Juan de Fuca

Shoveling Snow

5.) I began to learn to ski

I have no pictures from the attempts of this accomplishment. I was afraid of destroying my camera as I fell 2.4 billion times each run down the mountain. Next year I have decided to start early, and maybe get past thigh-burning snowplow turns. Because having something fun to do in the snow keeps you out of the winter/spring bell jar that much more.

Once By the Ocean

2010-06-27T23:14:00.000-07:00

From Oregon Coast

Once By The Ocean
Robert Frost

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the light was spoken.

From Oregon Coast

The joy of awk: transforming group vCards

2010-05-25T16:58:00.001-07:00

A system's analyst's life involves more data munging than I'd like to admit. Despite all of the advances in computing, sometimes the old tools are the best tools. Such is the case with awk and its even-more abstruse cousin, sed.

Awk really isn't all that bad. The way to envision it is a giant while-loop with branching if-blocks that use regular expressions to match parts of the current lines and then do stuff like print parts of lines or calculate things. Its syntax and grammar is more friendly to casual use than perl or bash or sed.

Anyway, here's an awk program I spent about 60 minutes writing that transforms group vCards into csv files, because Microsoft Outlook only reads the first entry from a group vCard and Address Book on Macintosh doesn't write anything except group vCards. Maybe it will be of use to you.

vcard2csv.awk


BEGIN {newcard = 0
  FS = ":"
  name = ""
  orgname = ""
  email = ""
  OFS = ","
  }
 $1 == "BEGIN" {
  newcard = 1
  next}
 newcard == 1 {
     if ($1 == "FN"){
      name = $2 
      }
     if ($1 == "ORG"){
      split($2, cleanedorg, ";")
      orgname = cleanedorg[1]
      }
     if ($1 == "EMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=WORK;type=pref"){
      email = $2
      }
    }
 $1 == "END" {
  print name, orgname, email
  name = ""
  orgname = ""
  email = ""
  newcard = 0
  }

You can run it by typing awk -f vcard2csv.awk < export.vcf > export.csv in a terminal. You might need to convert the line endings in the vcf to Unix (LF) first.

Sierra Shralpathon: Green Butte, Shasta

2010-04-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

After 10 hours driving south on I-5 though a raging rainstorm, Jim and I capitulated and stopped in the city of Mount Shasta, CA for the night on Monday. The wind and rain howled against the hotel throughout the night, but it felt too warm for there to be good skiing accessible.

In the morning we cast the weather I Ching, and it reported that Shasta had received at least 10 inches of snow above 7800 feet, and the wind--while brisk--was not as narwhal as what the Sierra was about to receive. We drove up towards Bunny Flat, heartened by the deepening snowbanks on the road, and increasing deposits of fresh on the trees.

Shasta Soup

We skinned up through fog, snow and occasionally gusty winds along the Green Butte, a gentle treed ridgeline to the east of the Avalanche Gully route. We made it to 8300 where the poor vis and snorting winds turned us around, and enjoyed smooth windpack and then 3 or 4 inches of fluff on denser snow down to 7400. It was fun enough that we were totally in agreement about the necessity of another lap. This time, the sucker holes opened, and we being undoubtedly a pair of suckers, followed them up to 9100', where the vis promptly shut down and the snow got increasingly slabby. Fortunately, after a few minutes waiting in an emetic whiteout, another hole opened up and we hastily skied down to tree line, where we enjoyed more fluffy turns on a bowl that drained off the east side of the ascent ridge.

Sucker hole (and sucker)

The runout was not as flat as it looked, and the trees were beautifully spaced, so we had no problem gliding through the powder and pines back to the car, freshened for the remainder of our voyage to the Eastern Sierra. This was a bit different than Erin and my adventure two days ago in the Stuart Range. I think I could get used to California.

Four days in the Glacier Peak Wilderness

2010-04-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

Glacier Peak is the wilderness volcano. It lies 10 miles as the crow flies from any road, and ever further as the homo sapien walks. It doesn't dominate the skyline like Rainier does in Auburn, or Baker does from Burlington, but on a clear day on the bridges in Seattle, look east and it'll be there gleaming white. It occupies a lofty piece of sky from Cascade Pass, Buck Creek Pass, the Alpine Lakes: some of my favorite places in the cascades.

A late start from Seattle Friday afternoon dashed our hopes of getting beyond the Mackinaw shelter that night. Views behind us to Sloan distracted us from the hard work of carrying skis and boots and winter gear along the dry trail. Once we got to the shelter, we stayed up late attempting to keep the campfire burning, mistakenly believing the next day would be an easy one.

Reaching continuous snow the following morning was cause for celebration. The late winter sun warmed us as we changed into boots and crampons. The sun was also rapidly warming the south-facing slope we need to climb, we soon realized, as we occasionally sunk through the 190-pound crust and resorted to the time-tested "alpine wallow" to climb out of tree wells.

We finally made it to a bench, changed to skins and nervously eyed the headwall above. After much debate, we skinned east across the bench, including one sizeable pile of fresh-looking avy debris and aimed for a steep, treed rib that offered some protection before it petered to steep, open slopes until the angle mellowed out towards the top.

Meandering along a ridge towards White Mountain, we were not quite sure how we were going to enter the White Chuck drainage, since the north side of the ridge was steep and corniced, until a promisingly-looking gap in the cornice appeared, leading down into the White Chuck basin and a series of bowls and benches. Night quickly fell as we made camp in a stand of trees.

The next morning we left after daybreak, but long before the sun had climbed over the ridge to warm us. We followed drainages up and across a glacial plateau, then crossed a broad col before finally arriving at the foot of Glacier, several hours later. The summit was still a humbling-distance away. We followed a wandering ridge a ways, then dropped onto the Gerdine Glacier and made a rising traverse to the east. We reached the Gerdine-Cool Col as the sun was diving back below the ridge, left with neither time nor energy to go any higher. To the south lay Daniels, Hinman, Overcoat and Chimney and eventually Rainier. To the west, the Olympics poked through. To the southeast, the Dakobed, cloaked in white poked up craggily. We skied variable snow: from soft sastrugified windpack to shallow powder to gently-breakable crust, then reversed the long, rolling traverse back to camp.

Monday morning, we struck camp and skinned back south towards the notch in White Mountain's corniced ridge, arriving before noon to slightly-undercooked corn. We made a few turns here and there and mainly traversed west on the steep (45 degrees in places) slope on the tasty corn snow. Below a couple hundred vertical feet of truly-atrocious breakable crust transitioned to stable, summertime corn, which we skied through increasingly-dense slide alder to 3300 feet, where we encountered the snow-covered trail.

Glacier was now hidden behind the ridge. But I could feel it looming invisible, impassive, above me as I shouldered my skis and hiked out.

Yellowstone

2010-02-28T23:58:00.001-08:00

Some pictures from our winter trip to Yellowstone. Long ride, scarce snow, but a pretty good time.

Clouds rolling in over the back side of Bunsen.

From Yellowstone

The front side...

From Yellowstone

Mammoth Terraces

From Yellowstone

Thermophiles in action

From Yellowstone

Lamar Valley Trees

From Yellowstone

Stormy Weather

From Yellowstone

Wildlife gawkers

From Yellowstone

Geyser Rhime ice

From Yellowstone

Elfin Lakes, British Columbia

2009-11-29T23:29:00.001-08:00

We drove up a little past Squamish to the Diamond Head sector of Garibaldi Provincial Park. Snow conditions were initially crummy.

But there was this bright glowing orb in the sky and the Coast Range was out in all her glory.

We managed to finish the 11 km approach right as darkness swallowed us. The hut was even more deluxe than I had imagined, with gas light and heat, and we only had to share it with three other guys and two mice. The following day, I tagged along with some good ol' boys from Squamish and skied off of Columnar Peak. Over night six or seven inches of light and tasty snow had fallen. In the open, if you kept up your speed it was quite nice, but in the trees or in tighter terrain, the bumpy and runneled crust made skiing unpleasant. And needless to say, the visibility had taken a turn for the worse.

I acted (in my opinion) responsibly and prioritized a daylight return to the car over taking another lap off Columnar. It was still a bit of a slow, wet affair out of the hut. I can't wait to go back.

Better than the Sierra? Lyman Lakes Loop

2009-09-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

After most backpacking trips Andrew and I have taken, I hear these words: "It was good, but not as good as the Sierra. You should go hike in the high Sierra, the best mountains in the world." I understand having favorite mountains, but by now the mountains of northern California have been built up so high that I fear grand-scale disappointment when I take my first trip. Here in Washington, we finally on a trip that rivaled the Sierras enough to stop these declarations. Of course the "I want to ski this" comments abounded, but the "You should go to California" comments were shushed.

We headed out for a long weekend to do some hiking in the Glacier Peak Wilderness area. Lyman Lakes loop was our destination. Most of the first day was spent in a slow, steady ascent in the trees. Although this was not delivering on the views, we did come across something that peaked our interest: pack goats.

I was sitting with our gear, waiting for Andrew to drop off the car at our endpoint and hitch a ride back to the trail head when I saw them first. A friendly guy out for a backpacking trip with his gear-laden group of goats. Ben, a white and black goat with a sweet-ass beard and loud bell, came over and sniffed me for awhile, licked my forehead, blew goat snot in my face, then attempted to eat my map. The owner apologized and tried to round up the other three goats to hit the trail. The rounding up part did not look like fun, as the goats were totally content destroying every huckleberry bush in sight. I can't blame them, huckleberries are delicious.

A wild pack of family goats

I excitedly told Andrew about the goats when he returned, and we took off on the trail, hoping to catch up with them. It ended up that we played leap-frog with the goat pack several times that day (maybe it was intentional), and every time we had a battery of questions for the guy: "How many pounds can they carry?", "How do you train them", "What do they eat on the trail, do you have to bring extra food?", "Can they go over glaciers?", "Can they carry skis?". We sadly said goodbye as the heartwarming group set up camp before the climb to Buck Creek Pass. Andrew was quiet for awhile, then says "I think it could be done, really". And by "it" I knew he meant finding a baby mountain goat, bottle feeding it, training it to carry gear, and using it to carry skis to the top of mountains. The trouble is having the heart to steal a baby mountain goat from its mother...

We continued on in the trees. Dusk was threatening when we emerged above tree line into views of jagged, crowding peaks with meadows of dying bear grass backlit by the setting sun. As we hit Buck Creek Pass, Glacier Peak in all of its splendor, popped out from hiding.

View back over Buck Creek Valley

Dying bear grass

We climbed to the top of Flower Dome where we had great views in every direction for about 10 minutes. Suddenly, and I mean suddenly (less than 4 minutes), the clouds moved in. One moment, a clear beautiful night with peaks as far as you could see, and the next minute fog so thick you couldn't make out the moon.

From our campsite as the fog rolls in

In the fog

We set up camp on a people-free yet foggy summit, and cooked dinner. Lately we have been stepping it up a notch in the back-country cooking department. Instant mashed potatoes can shockingly get old. One of our backpacking partners last week brought a delicious pork vindaloo for dinner the first night, which I tried to recreate on this trip. The gourmet dish was mighty flavorful, but I didn't grind the spices sufficiently. We kept biting into whole sticks of cinnamon or cardamom seeds that made our mouths go numb. Nonetheless, it was delicious, and my pack was much lighter sans Indian food the next day. Full and warm, we fell to sleep in the fog, with the sounds of marmots whistling.

Glacier from the top of Flower Dome

The next morning rang clear, and views of Glacier were f-a-b-u-l-o-u-s. We hit the trail doing the down-up dance over three passes: Middle Ridge, Suiattle Pass, and Cloudy Pass. Cloudy Pass ended up not being cloudy at all, and we found a perfect bivy spot for the night on a ledge overlooking Lyman Lakes. It was early in the afternoon, but we opted to make our hike out a little longer the next day and camp on higher ground in desolation, rather than descend to the lakes into crowds and fewer views. Hitting camp early made for a relaxing afternoon: exploring the surrounding knobs, meadows, and streams, making popcorn, and napping in the afternoon sun.

Views of Lyman Lakes and Spider Gap from our bivy site on Cloudy Pass

Sunset from the pass

Streams, Streams

Once the sun hit the horizon on day three it was a hot one. We left our perch on Cloudy Pass and sauntered down to lower and upper Lyman lakes. Then we began picking our way up the rocky, sometimes snowy, Spider Gap. The sweaty work to the gap payed off with views in both directions.

Views back toward Cloudy Pass from Spider Gap

We had two options from the top: trail over shifty rock or glacier. Picking the snowy route rather than the trail, we descended, greeting several parties on their way up. I have to admit that my prominent thought on the descent down this populated glacier was "Man, I'm glad I don't have to poop right now".

Algae patterns down Spider Glacier

Views up the talus and snow fields to Spider Gap

We came off the glacier trail to blossoming Spider Meadows. We weren't done. Eight of the 15 miles of the day lay between the base of Spider gap and the car. Good news was that the tread was good and mostly flat. Bad news was there were no more views and the sun was out in full force, making for some sweaty, sweaty pits. The walk back to the car was the worst part of the trip. But, it always is.

Part-time model shot after taking a dip in a stream on the long hike back to the car. But he'll probably have to keep his normal job.

Some of the only views from Spider Meadow

To my surprise, this time when we arrived back at the car there were only "That was great" comments. Somehow the Sierra had been forgotten, at least for a few days.

---

26 Hours in the Boston Basin

2009-08-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

We have been ascending for hours. Glances back to the north face of Johannesburg mountain, once towering above us and now at eye level, are a consolation. Now we need to stop and put on our harnesses. We gain a notch beside a decaying tower of rock and sit down. It is mid-morning, warm and windless. The sun makes me sleepy. I drift off for a few minutes before Mike, clinking hardware, draws me unwillingly back into consciousness. I glance at the route description and artfully offer to lead the first pitch to avoid leading the crux.

A few hours and a few pitches later, I am leading again. The ridge narrows to a sharp edge. I gingerly traverse, stick in a cam, and pause with a sinking feeling as I eye the next fin ahead. It is nearly vertical, six or seven feet long, and doesn't have even so much as the edge of a dime to step on. I look down, horrified at the abyss yawning beneath. I glance over to the north side, and see a rubble-strewn ledge system running four or five feet below the crest. Shit, that doesn't look enticing, either. I dither for a few more minutes and fantasize about large birds plucking me from my airy, unwilling perch and gliding with me to flat ground. I order my freaked-out brain to commit. It is much easier than it looked, but I'm gripped by the time I make my way across some sloping ledges a bit below the crest. I think I want my mom.

The next few pitches go slowly and it is now late afternoon. We come to the edge of an abrupt tower and rappel into a notch stacked with blocks of dark, lichen-covered rock. Above us, another stark tower of rock, variegated with water stains, guards passage to the summit. From the looks of it, this is the crux. Mike leads out, takes a few minutes to arrange a couple cams and suss out the moves, and then disappears over the top of the bulge. I feed out rope steadily for a while, then in fits and spurts, then stop.

I look down. Far below me, to my right, the immense Boston Glacier is now in shadow. Its crevasses are now black, the snow, blue. On my left, some final-looking rays of sunlight color the basin. The only human presence I see is a tent, three thousand feet below, in a stunted stand of avalanche-flagged pines. It is hopelessly removed and impossibly small.

I feel impossibly small, a trespasser sitting on this broken ridge. I shiver a bit and turn more of my body into the sun as a chill settles on the evening. At my feet, a clump of cobalt flowers flutters in the breeze, also seeming to shiver. The sun gets me drowsy and through the slits of my eyelids I see a fat bumblebee settle on one of the flowers at my feet. The bee doesn't care that it's on an inhospitable fin of rock thousands of feet above the nearest tree, just as the rock doesn't care that two humans are scrabbling across its spine. It seems inhuman, but beautiful. It makes me want to cry. A tug on the end of the rope startles me out of my existential reverie and I break down the anchor and start climbing.

It's a while still before we are standing on the summit. By now it is obvious that we will be chasing twilight off the mountain. Mike arrives, and we flee for our packs. Rappelling off of the north side of the mountain, further away from any road, only deepens the feeling of isolation. As the dusk deepens, we make our way along grassy ledges and look for passages across rocky ribs. It's dark by the time we find the gully that leads back to the civilized side of the ridge and up to our packs.

Back at our packs we exchange relieved high-fives. We descend by headlamp into the dark. A yellow moon is creeping above the horizon, but it is still hard to make out the buttress that guided us up this morning. We stand above an unfamiliar gully: noisy, with water pouring over drop-offs. I eye it dubiously and follow Mike. This is not the one we want. I dislodge a pile of rocks onto Mike as I claw my way back up to the flat spot above the gully. Hearts racing, we sit in the darkness, which is just as warm and windless as it was 12 hours before.

We try several variations on this theme before we locate the correct gully and slowly follow it back to the lower basin. By now the moon is diving towards the hazy western horizon. Some stumbling around in the dark later, we find the trail and follow it back towards the trees. The forest moths are startled by the strange blue orbs our headlamps cast, and flutter dizzily around our faces. Slippery roots blend into the dusty forest debris that conceals the tread. An hour later, I bid Mike goodnight and crawl off the trail. A man-shaped depression between two trees cradles me. I turn off my headlamp. The darkness is complete. I do not dream.

It's light out when the chill wakes me. I continue down the trail. Back at the car, Johannesburg once again towers above, its hanging glaciers cast blue by the diffuse light of dawn. Another team is preparing to head up.

That Old, Sweet Song

2009-08-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

I land in the South with a sore neck and red eyes. After a few hours of dodging cars that never use blinkers for merging, I finally turn onto the dirt road that takes me home. Out the window, the main garden is in full bloom: heads of corn reaching for the sun, beans sagging off of fixed poles, peppers and tomatoes shining red in the mid-morning sun. I stop the car and pick the makings for my all-time favorite lunch (BLT with garden-fresh tomatoes, corn-on-the-cob, and a cold glass of milk). Past the garden, boards fresh from the lumber mill are stacked high. I can smell the sawdust, potent after a recent thundershower. I walk to my house, which is surprisingly unsheltered after losing the familiar oaks out front last winter. I think about how strange it feels to mourn the loss of a tree, but it had the best foot holds for climbing.

Inside, little has changed. My room still is decorated with failed attempts at art created in high school and a Walt Whitman poem I haphazardly, yet passionately, painted on the wall one late night. A few books I couldn't bear to give away line the bookshelves. My mom has tried to make it seem more inviting by filling the empty picture frames on my desk and putting new sheets on the bed. I go wake up my brother, and get a leave-me-alone grunt. So I do as I'm told and leave him alone with his sleep palsy from a late night at work. Mom is cooking food for the wedding. She apologizes for the smell, remembering that I would leave the house for hours at a time when I was a kid because I hated the smell of chicken boiling. It doesn't bother me now. We talk. She leaves to go help bake cakes, and I decide to take the new puppy for a walk. We go explore the creek, which is barely a quarter of the size I expected. Years of drought have left a listless trickle, the waterfall dried to bare rocks. Obie (the pup) doesn't notice how lackluster the stream is, and we both leave wet, dirty, and smelling like dog. He finds a wild turkey in the bushes, and some of the most horrible noises I have ever heard ensue. I might have let him continue the pursuit if it had been Thanksgiving, but we've already got one bird on the burner.

After spraying my clothes down in a vain attempt at red clay removal, I roam some more. I walk over to my great-grandparents' homestead. In the yard, Grandaddy is installing an aisle and chairs are being sowed in rows in anticipation for the ceremony. The place has been cleaned up, but the dilapidated barns are still pretty magical to explore. They hold old doll heads (I don't know where the bodies went), random garden tools, pieces of furniture and cars, horse tack, the old rusted tractor, and hundreds of mason jars that most certainly contain botulism by now. I sit on the tractor for awhile, and listen to sounds begin. Afternoon brings a cacophony of katydids, crickets, and frogs. Much different, but perhaps louder, than the traffic I hear out of my bedroom window every night in the city.

From Ansley's Wedding

Daddy Jim and Ma Mamie, my great-grandparents, lived here and worked the land, sustaining themselves and making money with what they could sell at the farmer's market. Signs of this past are still around. After the winter loses its bitterness, the ground is blanketed with blooming jonquils. These were planted in order to have something to sell in the early spring, when few vegetables were ready for harvest. Ma Mamie scavenged asparagus, baked cakes and cut jonquils to sell at the market.

All this she would load in the buggy every weekend. The work horse that drew the buggy outlived my great-grandparents long enough for me to vaguely remember it. I don't remember his name, but I remember (fondly) that he had a flatulence problem. When that horse hit a gallop, you could hear it coming. It's too late for the jonquils to be in bloom, but I make a mental note to come home in the spring next time.

From Ansley's Wedding

There is a yellowed newspaper cutting, framed and hung in my grandmother's basement, that tells of how people would travel for miles to buy Ma Mamie's cakes. Coconut, caramel, pistachio. The recipes have been handed down, via first-hand kitchen experience, through the generations. My grandmother is busy baking the same cakes for the wedding tomorrow. All I can say is the newspaper was right, they are fucking delicious.

From my tractor perch, I can see the sky turning gray. It looks as if there will be another afternoon thundershower: the kind of Georgia summer storm that soaks the land and makes a lot of noise, and then leaves as fast as it came. I head back home to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. I pass the second garden which has been taken over by hundreds of sunflowers, Ansley's favorite.

From Ansley's Wedding

Hidden Lake Peak, North Cascades

2009-07-05T22:30:00.000-07:00

Washington and I are a few months shy of the two-year mark. And while I have been enjoying my time in the outdoors of the great Northwest, somehow I have never made it to North Cascades National Park. The shame! The folly! I really am sorry it took so long.

Growing up less than 20 minutes from the start of the AT, the Appalachians were my first love. I have a habit of subconsciously comparing all other mountains to my well-known, pastoral hills of the Appalachians. There is this weird family tree of mountain organization in my mind, and every time I am introduced to a new mountain group, along comes a new label. The Appalachians are the old grandmother who has seen it all, with face full of smooth laugh lines, and plenty of laid-back wisdom: disciplining, but never too harsh. The North Cascades definitely fill the rebel distant cousin role. Rugged, dangerous. The whole family is always talking about his crazy ramblings. Probably a heart breaker with his good looks. You never know, he might try to kill you with a broken beer bottle or befriend you and have the greatest adventures of your life.

We hit the road on Friday afternoon to be stuck in the city-escaping traffic of the holiday weekend. Stop-n-going it until well out of Seattle, we were finally able to escape the highway to the stretch of cities ending in -ington, then to the North Cascades Highway, and finally to the trailhead for Hidden Lake Peak.

The trail was heavily wooded for the first 800 feet, but then broke out into a drainage, where it climbed steadily through areas of wildflowers, tongues of avalanche debris, and snow-melt streams.

From Hidden Lake Lookout

At about 5500 feet the trail turned to snow. Breaking out boots and ice axe, we kicked steps up to the ridge. We found the lookout on hidden lake peak just after the sun set behind Baker. As the sun was down, and I was a bit freaked out about crossing even slightly inclined frozen snow in the dark, I talked Andrew into a bivy on some snow-free ground at the top of the col. The sunset had been beautiful, with alpenglow lighting up peaks in every direction. From our bivy spot it was jagged, snow capped peaks for about 340 degrees around us. A perfect spot to sleep for the night.

From Hidden Lake Lookout

...well, a perfect spot to sleep out except for the mosquitoes. We had been above tree line in solid snow for the last 1000 feet, and you think this would ensure a bug-free zone. But these mosquitoes if anything were worse up here than in the melted-out meadows below. Resigning to having at least two hundred bites by the morning, I fell into a deep sleep with a soundtrack of buzzing to my dreams.

Andrew with his own, personal swarm. Kind of like your own, personal Jesus, but a little less guilt when you kill them.

From Hidden Lake Lookout

My feelings towards the biting bugs

From Hidden Lake Lookout

We woke up to find that, in the light of day, the trail up to the lookout was melted out and an easy climb. So we climbed up to the lookout post, and spent some time taking in the views and reading journal entries from the lookout log. My favorite entry is from a girl who just was dumped for a "skinny girl in California", taking post-breakup haven in the mountains, and wishing her ex-boyfriend ugly children. Second favorite was a long entry about how the outdoor privy outside the lookout was, hands-down, one of the best views for pooping in the history of outdoor thrones.

Andrew reading journal entries in the lookout.

From Hidden Lake Lookout

Views from the breakfast table.

From Hidden Lake Lookout

We decided to start our descent about mid-day, after Andrew got in some turns. (Note to self: skis are a much faster downhill method of transportation than feet.)

From Hidden Lake Lookout

We hit the car in the late afternoon, and headed back to Seattle for some fireworks, crowds, and good, old-fashioned redcoat bashing. Don't get me wrong, fireworks and drunken crowds are great, but there is no greater way to celebrate Independence than in the woods on a mountain top.

Happy Solstice!

2009-06-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

A Haiku:

Light early, dark late
Glorious summertime days
It's downhill from here

-----------------------------------------

We missed the naked bike ride, but got to see most of the Fremont Solstice parade. I love hippies.

From solstice

I don't understand either.

From solstice

Trying to see

From solstice

A bowl...

From solstice

...of spaghetti.

From solstice

Seven Lakes Basin, Olympic National Park

2009-06-19T00:59:00.000-07:00

After landing in Seattle, I had two days of freedom before working a few shifts. We decided to hit up the Olympic Mountains. Olympic National Park is pretty diverse. It is a huge place with rain forests, a wild shoreline, snowy mountain vistas, and areas of thick ferned-n-mossed, rain-fed growth under a canopy of pines. Having seen the coast and rainforest, we wanted to head to the higher hills on this trip. It didn't end up to be all that we had hoped. The weather turned rainy, with clouds blocking any views, and the patchy snow and terrain made for not-so-great skiing conditions. So the days were spent hiking with a heavy pack and skis (for Andrew) and awkwardly slipping and post-holing (for me). Andrew did get in about 6 turns, and we made it back to Sol Duc hot springs about an hour before closing to soak in the sulfurous waters...so not a total loss.

Andrew looking over the Olympics to the North.

From Olympic National Park

Fun with shutter speeds

From Olympic National Park

Light at the end of the day

From Olympic National Park

Wishing the skis were on...

From Olympic National Park

Seven lakes basin

From Olympic National Park

Joining the Glee Club of the Damned

2009-06-08T15:08:00.000-07:00

Excellent rewrite of "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

As they say, the internet is a race. You've won!

"Skiing" the Middle Fork Snoqualmie and Overcoat Peak

2009-06-05T21:12:00.000-07:00

Interstate 90 starts in Seattle and buries itself deep into the Snoqualmie valley, climbing with its south fork before crossing a low divide, hooking to the south and following the Yakima River. So the South Fork of the Snoqualmie, despite being rugged country, is easily-accessed and well-traveled. But the Snoqualmie's other tributary, the Middle Fork, is an enigma. Although is just as close as the crow flies to urban Seattle, and despite having a "road" along its bank for quite a ways of its length, it is as lightly-trodden as it is rugged. The "road" has gone from being unmaintained and halfway-abandoned to the automatic-weapons aficionados to outright closed in recent years. This adds a 13-mile road hike or bike to the itinerary if one wants to access the Middle Fork.

Yet the South Fork is just over the divide from the Middle Fork, which got me to thinking about how I might be able to hop the divide and save myself a bit of hiking. A thorough review of the maps showed that the Cooper Creek Road, off I-90 and outside Cle Elum got you within striking distance to the east side of Overcoat. So Chris A. and I gave that a try.

We set off at 6AM in sneakers from the Cooper Lake TH. We hit patches of snow almost immediately, but nothing long enough to bother putting on the skis and boots. In any case, the trail to Pete Lake is cursed with gaining only 300 feet in 5 miles, so even with continuous snow, snow is a dubious advantage.

We hit Pete Lake at 8:15. This was taking longer than I thought. At least now we were on the map, though. Another 3 hours of following the trail as it joined the PCT, then leaving the trail as it began switchbacking its way east and following the bank of the tributary creek of the Cooper for a half mile through big timber, then open slopes finally got us to where it was clear we had snow for the rest of the way up.

Pete Lake in the morning

Basin below the Summit Chief-Chimney Divide hammered by avalanche

We skinned through piles of avalanche debris full of rocks and trees, all the while looking back to the south at the ominous clouds building. The key to getting to the Chimney-Overcoat Col from the Cooper drainage were two broad couloirs that provide a gentle way through otherwise cliffy terrain. I was worried even these could be melted out to slab by all the heat we were getting. Luckily my worries proved to be unfounded. We made it to the head of the valley, and turned nearly 180 degrees southwest and ascended the first couloir/ramp. 500 feet of skinning took us to the unnamed glacier below the east face of Chimney. We turned 90 degrees north and found the next ramp. It had some waterfalls and cliff bands showing on its east side, and looked steeper. This being Chris's first time on skins, it seemed wise to switch to boots for more security, and to take a more direct line away from Chimney's face, which had dropped some rocks onto the snowfield.

One thousand feet later we had arrived on the Overcoat Glacier. It was already 2 PM, but fortunately the thunderheads to the south had retreated. After taking another break to admire the scenery, we skinned our way across the broad plateau, almost an icecap, and went around the corner to Overcoat's north side. The couloir was fat. We kicked steps up to a wide col at the top of the couloir, which lay between rocky battlements of the summit ridge. My altimeter was claiming we needed another 300 feet for the summit of Overcoat, but I didn't want to to believe it and scrambled a little ways up a promising-looking tower, until I finally caught a view of the true summit of Overcoat. It towered several hundred feet above me and looked decidedly fifth class from that side. So I deemed the skier's summit "good enough." It had a cool window you could scramble through and catch a view to the south, anyway.

Booting up the second ramp

Panorama of Chimney from the Overcoat icecap

View from Overcoat's col. Wish we could have made a camp here.

Chris skiing the apron below Overcoat

The top of the run was the steepest, but the snow was good, albeit a little overcooked. They seemed like some of the steeper turns I've linked in a while. Chris did an excellent job for not having skied for the past two years.

The rest of the run was all downhill from there, however. Even at 6600 feet, over 1000 feet above treeline, the snow was fouled with pollen. We skated our way downhill across the glacier, only to endure a 2000 foot run of sticky, grabby snow. I was able to straightline 20-25 degree slopes and hardly exceed a running pace. This transitioned into rock-strewn avalanche debris lower down, which actually skied faster than the rest of the tar, since the chunks meant less snow contacted the ski.

We changed back to boots at 6PM and prepared for the long hike out. We made it back to Pete Lake around 8, and I was still feeling pretty good. However, by the time sunset rolled around, I was starting to bonk. We arrived at the car at 11, hallucinating a little by headlamp: snakes in the bushes, snakes in the trees.

Pollen sticks

A coin, a coin, my kingdom for a coin

2009-06-02T15:53:00.001-07:00

As travelers, we were reliant on ATMs for currency, and the ATMs gave us big ol' bills. It was a constant struggle to break these bills and keep enough small stuff for day-to-day purchases. This was an artifact of the fact that we "importing" all of our cash, so never had any local currency flowing into our wallets.

Argentina had a strange mutation of this theme. It was not a big deal to break the equivalent of a $20 on a couple dollar purchase, but as soon as you need a coin to make change, it was a disaster. Argentina had bills as small as AR$2 pesos (about 50 cents), as well as AR$5 bills. So the real game stopper was trying to make either one peso or three pesos of change, since every other value is can be made from combination of AR$2 or AR$5 bills.

Every cashier in Argentina is well aware of this fact, even if they might not be able to state it this precisely. Resultantly, until we figured out the allowable change values, we often had cashiers politely ask to see our bills, and count out an additional AR$5 or AR$2 in order to avoid changing us AR$3 or AR$1. And if you want to feel some genuine love, give a cashier a coin to make exact change. They will smile warmly and tell you, "Perfecto!"

Contrast the Argentine daily struggle for coins to Chile. Its integral currency (pesos with no centimos), and the size of its bills (CL$1000 is the smallest bill) insure than you always have a heavy pocket full of coins. In even the smallest market, the cashier has no problem breaking a large bill and giving you as many CL$100 coins as you could ever want.

So the question is: "Why can't the central bank of Argentina print some more coins."
The New Yorker has its theories involving hording. I'm not so sure. I never had any indication of anyone hording coins. It seemed like no one had any.

The article does discuss one phenomena that I always imagined must take place. The buses, which only take coins in Buenos Aires, are a huge sink for metal money. The bus companies than turn around and sell their coins at a mark-up to businesses that need coins to make change. Ingenious and evil.

Consider the tourist

2009-05-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

The trip is over. We are home now, but many thoughts have still been beating against my skull about the nature of travel. I was working on a big post about these thoughts, but it just ended up sounding like a contrived Travel:Good or Evil creative writing assignment.

I found this quote the other day, buried in a footnote of David Wallace's "Consider the Lobster," and it is no surprise that he is able to put into words what I have been thinking better than I ever could:

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it is only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. [...] To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

He hits dead-on what bothered me about the idea of mass tourism, most notably to places like Uyuni or Machu Picchu where there is a dependence on the influx of foreign currency to survive. By the mere act of being in those places, I felt deep-down that I was part destroyer (although just a soldier in a greater army). Every time I bought dinner or payed for a hostel, I felt that I was helping to perpetuate a type of tourist based welfare state, spreading my ¨alien, ignorant, greedy" nature...ending up disappointed in the mess that we had created.

Nevado Pisco, part II: the vengeance

2009-05-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

Walter thought a moment, then shrugged and said that it would mean another night at the camp, but he was amenable. Erin said she was done for the day. We parted ways and Walter charged back up the moraine almost at a jog, while I followed as fast as I could.

It was hardly after 7 by the time that we had roped up again, and the sun was already out in force, giving us animo (as well as later cooking the snow, and our brains on the glacier). However, to my horror, Walter also pointed to low clouds creeping up the valley that looked like they could spoil our weather. Walter finished fixing his crampons and took off with a jolt, practically dragging me after him. We got the wide col that marked the turning point of the route, and despite the snacks I had just eaten, I was starting to drag. After stumbling up another 150 meters with snow botting hatefully on my crampons, I ventured the obvious: the skis needed to go if we wanted to summit before midafternoon. A traverse above to a hungry-looking crevasse seemed like an appropriate place to leave them, since I probably would have to deski to cross the obstacle on the way down anyway. So at 5400 meters I jettisoned the skis.

Walter resting a bit above the col

From Nevado Pisco

I call this one "blue steel"

Final pitch too the summit

Relieved of my burden, we made better time for 70 or 80 more meters, but sure enough, I started slowing again. One breath between steps became two, and finally I was panting like a dog between each step. Worse still, the midmorning tropical sun was frying us alive. Yet somehow I stumbled up with my awkward loaner ski boots and the attendant 3 pounds of snow plastered to each crampon and got within 100 meters of the summit. A final steep section of snow put in the final sting, but a couple rope-lengths later, I was on top.

Made it!

Tall, isn't she?

It must have been the warmest, calmest 18,900 foot peak in the world at the moment. The clouds came and went below us but we stayed in the sun without even a breeze. After snapping as many pictures as I could blindly through an invisible screen on my camera, Walter collected the rope and I collected my wits and we descended.

We made good time back to the cache and it was time to ski. I snapped into the unfamilar bindings and tentatively started down the slope. The first few turns were the crux of the route, it turned out. Although slightly off fall line, a bottomless-seeming icefall loomed to my right. The angle was probably pushing 40 degrees. I jump-turned and slide-slipped over the roll until the top few inches of new snow, that had been overcooked by the sun, started to sluff. I gingerly traversed out of the way and paused for a second before continuing, making sure not to get caught in my sluff until the angle lessened and I had passed the void.

Skiing

My tracks leading down the col, Walter following

The rest of the run went without event, aside from the heavy snow and hairy-skis, which desparately needed a wax. Luckily, a supportive crust lay under the top few inches of mashed potatoes. If we had been three hours earlier, it would have been a few inches of powder on the crust. Oh well.

We made it back to my cached running shoes and unroped. Walter bid his leave and took off back towards camp, while I slowly repacked all the ski gear. I swear the packed weighed three times as much as it did that morning as I tiredly slide down the slabs. Two hours and a minor detour through some shifty talus later, I arrived back at camp just as it started to snow again.

The next morning we got up early and descended back to Cebollapampa to look for an arriero to carry down the remains of our camp. We found the hapless arriero who had fruitlessly waited seven hours for us the day before. We apologetically explained that we were finally ready to descend.

The drive back to Huaraz was a bit of a shock. Four days of climbing in the mountains despite the somewhat exotic feature of being conducted in Spanish had made me forget I was in Perú. Men laden with firewood for kitchen stoves and mudbricks drying beside the road reminded me that what I had done was almost inconceivable to 99% of the population in the country, much less the world. What a strange, wonderful way to be able spend one's time, hypoxically stumbling up dangerous fields of snow in order to slide back down again on planks of wood and plastic.

Planks of wood and plastic.

Nevado Pisco, part I

2009-05-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

Hearing Andy, the German, discuss his ski dreams set loose dreams of my own. Several times we had stopped by a guiding agency in Huaraz called Quechandes. As luck turned out, they had some skis lying around for excursions they made from time to time to a flat snowfield to teach skiing as best they could. Once it was clear that we didn't have more than a few days left in Huaraz, my thoughts instantly turned towards skiing the most popular--and most technically straightforward--peak in the Cordillera, Nevado Pisco, 5760 meters.

After yet another mildly-terrifying drive, we set off from Cebollapampa (3800 meters) under increasingly-cloudy skies with the delicious luxury of donkeys carrying all the heavy stuff. We made quick work of the climb to the basecamp at 4600 meters. After setting up camp, I climbed up to the moraine we would be scaling the next morning and took a look at the route. Recent glacial retreat had devastated the valley we needed to cross. Trundly piles of granite lay scattered at the angle of repose. To the west, the sun was sliding beneath a sea of threatening clouds. I sat in an utter silence, without even a breath of breeze, hoping for the clouds to lift and permit a glimpse of Pisco. After 30 minutes I gave up and shuffled back down to camp.

Nevado Pisco from the climb to basecamp

From Nevado Pisco

The moraine-valley we had to cross to get to pisco, aka, the warzone

A little before midnight Erin and I woke to the sound of snow skittering lightly on the Megamid. Not a propicious sign, I thought, and rolled over. At the appointed alpine hour of 1 AM, it was still snowing. I had no interest in setting off into a storm, so didn't even try to talk to Walter, our guide. At 2, he yelled over at us asking what we wanted to do. Since we had a weather day in reserve, it seemed obvious to wait a day. Another day couldn't hurt with acclimazation, either, I reasoned.

After sleeping long enough that bedsores seemed possible, we got up. Low clouds and occasional hail and snow flurries vindicated the decision to wait. To pass the time, we played cards, fixed ropes to practice our prussiking, and z-dragged ourselves around the pampa. After eating ourselves sick, we waddled our way back to the Megamid. Almost immediately after settling into the bags, it started snowing again. I groaned and said a prayer to the mountain gods and tried to sleep.

1 AM came all too early and it was game-time, snowing or not. We made satisfyingly good time across the no-mans-land of the valley. As we climbed, a ghostly half-moon pierced the clouds to cast a dim glow. It gave enough light that we turned off the headlamps and made our way on talus, then clay, and finally granite slabs up to the base of the glacier. However, our celebration for the seemingly-improving weather was shortlived. As we roped up, the clouds crept up the valley and engulfed us. We dubiously set off in the midst of an especially heavy snow shower and kicked steps up the steep headwall at the toe of the glacier.

After 20 minutes, we leveled out on a bench and paused to parlay. The clouds had made no sign of opening and continuing seemed like a folly. Regretfully, we turned around and plunge-stepped our way down. After taking some defeated photos of me climbing up and skiing approximately three turns, we skittered our way down the slabs just as the sun was beginning to assert itself through the clouds.

A little flavor of the times

Improving weather reflected in an electric-blue lake

Almost immediately, the wall of fog that we had been swimming through began to lift. Visibility opened up. Alpenglow lit Nevado Huandoy. We scratched our heads in amazement and we continued down the trail. I was tormented by visions of fine weather that I would be watching back at camp while I waited for the burros to carry us back to the highway. After another 15 minutes of improving weather and descent, I finally ventured the question that seemed to hang in the air: Can we turn around and give it another go?

¡Panorama-rama!

2009-05-14T13:00:00.000-07:00

We are getting fat on bread from the California Café in Hauraz and figuring out what to do with our week in Perú, so not much to report right now. But in the meantime, please enjoy a sampling of our finest panoramas we stitched together with autostitch.

The Paine massif on a rare clear day, Chile

Glacier Grey, tongue of the southern Patagonian icefield, Chile

Laguna Sucia and Cerro Fitz Roy, Argentina

Altiplano lake in southwest Bolivia

Lake Titicaca from the Isla del Sol, Bolivia

Machu Picchu, Perú

From Valle Sagrada and Machu Picchu

Santa Cruz: Out

2009-05-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

We headed out of the canyon to camp below the highest pass of the trek. It only took a few minutes of climbing on the trail for the views to open up. The snowy peak of Taulliraju dominated the landscape. When the sun shone on Talliraju, it began to creak and groan, heaving serac into the small alpine lake below.

Lift thine eyes

From Santa cruz

Talliraju

From Santa cruz

Not so early the next morning, we started our climb up to Punto Union pass. Breathing and walking got a little more difficult over 4500 meters, but we reached the pass in the late morning just before the clouds, rains, and hail hit.

Punto Union with people

From Santa cruz

Punto Union without people

From Santa cruz

We headed down the far side of the pass, feeling sorry for the groups of trekkers we met trudging upwards in the early afternoon hail. Although they didn't have to carry any packs and had an expert Peruvian guide leading them and cooking their meals, we knew they weren't going to get the kick-ass views that we had gotten just an hour before.

The path became more of a stream bed than a trail, making the 3400 foot descent slow going. Arriving in camp late afternoon, we set about making the worst camp meal we have had in a long time. I don't know how we screwed up pasta so bad, but Andrew couldn't even finish it off...which is saying a lot about quality. We fed the last bit of pasta to the cows, and hit the sack, planning to get back to Huaraz early the next day.

Reflection back over the pass at the end of the third day

From Santa cruz

It dawned a sunny, beautiful morning, and we made good time. We ate breakfast, packed up camp, and hiked the three hours out to a town (Vaqueria) to catch a bus back to civilization. We did this all by 1030 in the morning, and felt pretty good about being on schedule.

Right as we arrived at Vaqueria, a collectivo pulled up and the driver offered us a seat on the van back to Huaraz. We questioned again, and he confirmed that he was headed to Huaraz. We threw our packs on top of the bus and hopped in.

About an hour later, we were in Yanama. We were told that we would be waiting there for another hour before continuing. We got off and ate lunch, returning to the van about 10 minutes before the set departure time. To our surprise, the 12 passenger van was surrounded by about 30 people with varying sorts of items to be loaded on the top rack: bed frames, squash, desks, potatoes. Peering inside the van, almost all of the seats were already taken. The driver assured us that we had seats on the back bench of the van, so we got on and kicked off a few Peruvians that had taken over our seats...one with machete in hand.

After much negotiation and a few U-turns to pick up other passengers, we hit the road. Although most of the people wanting a ride had been turned away, there were 25 grown adults, three babies in arms, and a couple of brave souls riding on the roof as we headed away from Yanama. As we got farther from town, the scenery looked very familiar. It took me a few more confounded minutes before I realized we were headed back to Vaqueria, where we had started. Chalk another one up to transportation errors for the trip.

This time we continued past Vaqueria in the right direction: up. We topped out at a 4700 meter pass and began down the snaking dirt road to Yungay. I began cursing my long gringo legs crammed into the back bench of the van as the bus lurched and bounced around curves. Several times my head hit the top of the bus, and several times the girl sitting in the seat in front of me shot me some dirty looks when my knees dug too far into her back. We made it to Yungay around 4pm...a little later than we had planned. With sore knees and a few bruises, we were able to catch a scary, but (by comparison) luxury collectivo back to Huaraz. Showers, beer, protein, and roughage were in order.

The snaking road down from Vaqueria, dropping about 6000 feet.

From Santa cruz

Santa Cruz: In

2009-05-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

Huaraz has 24,000 ft glaciated peaks, and the finest weather of any high mountains in the world. So we decided to go for a hike.

Our bodies lurched through an unpleasant dance in various colectivos from Huaraz to Cashapama, which took more time than we thought. It was already midafternoon when we hit the trail, so we ended up camped only 20 minutes from the trailhead in Cashapampa on a grassy spot next an ebullient Río Santa Cruz.

Lower Río Santa Cruz and so many bromeliads

This proved fortuitous, since the next morning we made the acquaintance of a resident species of biting black fly that thrived in the canyon between 3300 meters and 3700 meters--where we had contemplating making camp (in our open tarp) the day before. With our early start we were able to camp above its awful kingdom. In camp, we spent a pleasant evening scratching our dozens of itchy, red welts and watching cows defecate in the stream we our drinking water was coming from.

Slight navigation error before our camp in Quishuar the second night

From Santa cruz

Full moon lighting camp

From Santa cruz

Giving the cows a taste of their own medicine

From Santa cruz

It rained overnight, but the next day dawned fair. We detoured from the trail and hiked up a side canyon to the south-side basecamp for Alpamayo. The clouds quickly moved in, so that view were pretty hide-and-seek by the time we made it up the lake where its southern icefall had carved out.

From Santa cruz

Poor Bessie, evidence of the constant ranching activity in the valley

Cairn and a peak in the Nevados de Caraz

From Santa cruz

The lakes in the area have a seemingly-strange series of dikes and channels. But the shifty glacial moraines that dam many of them have burst after earthquakes or seracfall. This caused a number of horrific aluviones (mudflows), the most infamous of which buried all 25,000 inhabitants of the city of Yungay alive. Now the lakes that might threaten the valley has been excavated or reinforced.

After admiring the engineering at Lake Ayhueycocha, we descended back to the valley, collected our craftily disguised cache of gear and hiked to the camp below the main difficulty of the hike, the 15,600 foot Punta de Unión.

Huaraz and Not-Lima

2009-05-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

Operation Lima was a success. After asking around in Nazca to all the bus companies we could find, we figured out how to get to Huaraz without spending more than a couple of hours in Lima. Now, you might think we are being unfair. But even people who like cities have told us to avoid Lima. And after crawling up the walls in La Paz, we were inclined to believe them.

We did, however have a fascinating conversation with a graduate student doing his field work in Perú on peasant militias (originally formed to fight against the sendero luminoso) in the Ayacucho area. According to him and his professor, Lima has a much more favorable opinion of Fujimori, in contrast to Arequipa. However, because of how Fujimori favored certain regions, or even certain populations within certain regions, it's more complicated than just Lima liking Fujimori and Arequipa hating him. In Ayacucho, the city liked Fujimori (because of development aid received) and the campesinos hated him. Or maybe I've got that backwards. But anyway, it's complicated.

Fujimori innocent (often found next to signs to vote for his daughter Keiko in 2011, who has promised to pardon him)

Hauraz seems like a paradise for climbing, trekking and maybe even skiing. On the bus we sat next to a German who had brought AT set up. He had a very sharp Dynafit jacket on, too. I was jealous. Who wants to come to the Cordillera Blanca with me next season? There's big wall and sport climbing as well as fluted, scary-looking summits over 20,000 ft.

View of Huascarán (22206 ft!!) from our hostel.

We are going for a hike in the Quebrada de Santa Cruz tomorrow so will be incommunicado for a few days.

Nazca

2009-05-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

We caught the night bus from Cuzco, and it was duro. After getting the preliminary climb out of Cuzco and a more-or-less flat hour of Altiplano out of the way, the rollercoaster ride began. For the next 7 or 8 hours, if I wasn't getting slammed into Erin, she was getting slammed into me. I looked at the altimeter and it various times it read 3000 meters, 2000 meters, 4300 meters, before, thanks God, we finally descended into Nazca. So for future reference to you out there Cyberland, you might consider flying to Lima or Nazca, since it's only $40 or $50 more.

Nazca wouldn't be anything more than a sun-scorched spot on the Panamerican, were it not for its famous geoglyphs. At least, that was the only reason that we stopped. The next morning we got on a little Cesna and took off over drab desert interspersed with the occasional irrigated rectangle. After a couple of minutes, the pilot banked the plane steeply, and a few hundred meters beneath me I could make out what was clearly the outline of a whale.

Whale

From Nazca

Pointing towards water?

The flight only lasted 30 minutes, but we saw 13 or 14 figures. Pretty much every anthropologist thinks they were made without aerial help, so it would be been fascinating to survey them from the ground, as the Nazqueños did when they were constructed. However, much of the desert is supposedly mined, so that seemed like a bad idea.

No one knows what they are for, but a plausible theory to me would be that they were for ceremonial purposes. Almost all the figures we saw were homeomorphic to the circle, so could be traversed completely without skipping between segments. I imagine a parade of Nazqueños marching around the figures, much like a prayer labyrinth.

Owl-priest/astronaut/alien

Condor

Spider

Escape from Machu Picchu

2009-05-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

PeruRail is barely above the mafia when it comes to extortionist organizations. The 50 kilometer train ride from Ollantaytambo is a whopping 100 Sols, each way. In Peru, that's the equivalent of 30 lunches in the market or a 36-hour bus ride. However, 100 Sols is also US$30, so most people pay up without blinking. Besides, $30 is cheap in comparison to a plane ticket to Peru or hiking the Inca Trail.

Back when I went with Chris, we had contemplated hiking the tracks from the nearest road, 30 km from Machu Picchu in the Sacred Valley. But I hadn't the slightest clue that there was a backdoor from below. A rough road goes within 8 kilometers of Machu Picchu on the jungle side. And from there it's perfectly legit to hike the barely-used train tracks back up to the ruins. The only catch is its convolution: first you drive up to 14,000 feet, then drop to 4,000, before driving back up to 7,000. Oh well. It's still only a third of the price of the train.

We started down from Machu Picchu around 1, opting for a hour of downhill hiking to avoid paying 22 Sols to a different extortionist monopoly, the bus concession in Aguas Calientes. Don't let all this bitching fool you, Machu Picchu is in a spectacular canyon. (If it weren't rainforest, there'd be amazing climbing on compact, grey granite that makes up the Andes here. Instead it's so verdant that anything not overhanging is carpeted in moss and a bizarre array of aerophytes.) The peaks have tremendous vertical relief from the valley. We followed the tracks, and they followed Urubamba as it roared down the canyon, the river like emerald bathwater.

Walking along the breakdown lane

From Valle Sagrada and Machu Picchu

Feral impatiens

Walking on the tracks quickly proved more difficult than I had thought. The tracks are set in irregularly-shaped crushed rock that's awkward to walk on. Walking on the ties is more efficient, albeit a bit of a dance. If you are a jedi master, it's even more efficient to walk on a rail. I could only manage bouts of 15 to 30 seconds at a time. On top of all this, it's hot and muggy enough to remind you that you are near the equator, and rapidly descending towards the Amazon.

Just as we were beginning to wonder how much farther it was, the hydroelectric plant that signifies the roadhead appeared. To our surprise found three cars waiting to pick up hikers like us. Evidently the backdoor to Machu Picchu was more popular than I thought. We were tired and hungry enough that we might have paid any price, but the driver only asked for 10 Soles. Score.

The valley suddenly opened up and the granite walls receded. Banana trees laden with fruit had sprung up, as well as some tree full of giant green fruits nestled around its crown. Guava? It seemed like if I climbed on top of the next ridge, I would be able to see that vast, green, impenetrable plain that is the Amazon. At the same time, I also saw more evidence of the popularity of the “backdoor” to Machu Picchu. Hostels and restaurants catering to tourists had sprung up like mushrooms (watered by the steady stream of tourist Soles). No matter. We paid 16 soles ($5) for a private room in a hostel that night.

Bananas and tracks

After finding the hostel, dinner was in order. We sat down at an empty restaurant and ordered. Our soup had barely arrived when a tour group of 10 filed in and sat at a long table across from us. A moment later, two other groups of six shuffled in as well. All were en route to Machu Picchu through the newest "alternate" Inca trail: the "Inca Jungle Trek." There is evidently a lot of pent up demand to hike to Machu Picchu, even if it's just along some railroad tracks.

The next morning we caught a bus back to Cusco. It rumbled through green jungle for a couple hours before we paused for a pit stop. Back on the bus, a smartly-dressed attendant handed out crackers and filled little cups with Coca-Cola. I smiled ironically, thinking about how I was getting better service on a 15 sol Peruvian jungle-bus than I got on a 100 sol foreign train ride. My smile turned to confusion when she handed us little plastic bags. Erin and I exchanged quizzical glances until we overheard her say that it was for vomitando. Maybe this 15 sol bus ride wasn't such a bargain after all.

The tortuous road up to the pass at Abra de Málaga took nearly an hour to climb, but it was paved and fortunately the vomit bags were not called for. As we crested, we were treated to an amazing view of the highlands above the Valle Sagrada. From there it was only 3 more hours back to Cusco. I guess that's the price for being contrarian.

Looking down towards the Valle Sagrada from below Abra del Málaga

Machu Picchu

2009-05-04T12:08:00.000-07:00

I wasn't expecting much from Machu Picchu. I had listened to a few days of disappointed reports from others that had just made the journey. Even more exhausting were Andrew's unending complaints about the extortion of PeruRail and of crowding of the ruins with gringos. I went anyways. Just like you can't go to Rome without seeing the Colleseum, Machu Picchu is one of those places that you have to check off the life-list.

It was raining and a bit cloudy on top of the mountain, but that added a little bit of intrigue and mysticism. I had slept in a little bit more than I had wanted, but got there a few hours before the hordes hit and was able to explore. As far as ruins go, Machu Picchu probably was not as impressive as Saqsaywaman or some others that we had visited in the Sacred Valley, but the location is pretty incredible. And, yes, it was worth it.

Machu Picchu at sunrise.

From Valle Sagrada and Machu Picchu

Peaking through the clouds.

From valle sagrada erin

Temple of the three windows.

From Valle Sagrada and Machu Picchu

The ruins.

From valle sagrada erin

Andrew on top of Wayna Picchu.

From Valle Sagrada and Machu Picchu

Money shot.

From Valle Sagrada and Machu Picchu

Ceremonial bath. (different from the type of shower below)

From Valle Sagrada and Machu Picchu

My favorite action shot. A llama that came to stand in front of where I was sitting, spread it hind legs, and took a huge rapid-fire dump while it pissed. Pretty impressive.

From valle sagrada erin

Inti huatana, hitching post of the sun. The Inca's sundial.

From Valle Sagrada and Machu Picchu

More Salt

2009-05-03T13:05:00.000-07:00

Although they are not ruins, the Salineras of Maras were one of the most impressive ancient Incan sites. Built and maintained by the in the 1500s, they are still in use today. Citizens of the nearby city of Maras are given a certain number of plots, which they work and are able to keep the profits from: a type of Cooperative. An elaborate aqueduct system fills the pans with water from the nearby river. As evaporation takes place, the salt begins to crystallize. Dry salt is packaged and sold. Makes me wanna shoop.

Salt pans taking up the hillside.

From valle sagrada erin

Salt on the sides of the aqueduct system.

From valle sagrada erin

At sunset

From valle sagrada erin

Sacred Valley Superlatives

2009-05-03T11:13:00.000-07:00

People come to the Sacred Valley of the Incas for one reason...Ruins. They are old. They are stony. They are big. And I admit they are pretty impressive. You would probably be ruined-out and incredibly bored if I wrote a post about every ruína that we visited in the Sacred Valley. So, I'll just hit the highlights: Senior Superlative style.

Most likely to be late to graduation - Ollantaytambo
Sprawling ruins, with lots of projects (temples, terraces, homes, baths, crop silos) left undone. Just a little late on the start, these ruins were abandoned in limbo with the invasion of the Spanish. It is also one of the most interesting places to see the building process...as ramps and stone cuttings were hastily left as they were.

Stone that looks like it was cut...but by what? The Incas had no knowledge of steel, and other metals would have been too soft. Curious, but how else would they obtain such stony perfection.

Impressive stonework at Ollantaytambo.

From valle sagrada erin

Most likely to be a supermodel - Saqsaywaman
Hands down the sexiest stonework, with walls of stone that fit together a little too perfectly. Built as a defense fortress above Cusco, the walls are big and wide, but the stones fit so tightly there is not enough space to fit a knife blade between the rocks. It is hard to imagine that anyone, especially someone 700 years ago, was able to move (stones up to 80 tons) or fit the stones with such precision. And, with a name like "sexy woman", it's fate is already decided.

Andrew posing by one of the largest stones at Saqsaywaman, over 80 tons, and a little taller than an average height human.

From valle sagrada erin

More stonework.

From valle sagrada erin

Most likely to succeed - Machu Picchu
Not only does he wear suits and ties to school, he already has an internship with an investment banking firm set up after graduation. Damn him! The ruins of Machu Picchu aren't quite as beautiful or well-built as some of the others in the Sacred Valley, but they are well publicized with incredible financial backing. The ruins of Machu Picchu are on an unbeatable, mystical mountaintop location, and destined to succeed (at least from a touristy point of view). You can definitely see the price of popularity at these ruins, as thousands of people visit daily and the wear and tear and crowds are inevitable.

Machu Picchu showing through the clouds from the top of Wayna Picchu

Most eccentric - Moray
...or at least concentric. This area of circles was built as a type of crop laboratory. Each circular terrace (supposedly) represents a unique micro-climate. Experiments with different types of potatoes and corn and other crops were performed to see what grows best where. It also catches every aspect of the sun during the day. Hippies from around the world travel here to soak in the magical healing powers Moray is said to have. I can't say I felt anything magical, but maybe that is because I am a square.

Moray...all circular and stuff.

From valle sagrada erin

Descending flagstone steps in the side of the terraces. Real steps were thought to weaken the terraces.

From valle sagrada erin

Most likely to be high at graduation - Pisac
It's high, man. And when you start exploring, there is way more than meets the eye...layers and layers back into the mountains. Fortresses were built facing every direction, a little paranoid of possible attacks. On the hillsides a type of fear-reducing tea was cultivated and used by workers that had to toil on steep, exposed terraces to help them calm the fuck down. Pisac didn't make me want to eat a family size package of Kraft macaroni and cheese and a giant bag of Rolos at 3 o'clock in the morning, but it did blow my mind a little bit.

In front of the temples at Pisac.

From valle sagrada erin

Climbing up to the fortresses.

From valle sagrada erin

View of the Valley from the trail to Pisac.

From valle sagrada erin

Strange Fruits...

2009-05-01T14:27:00.000-07:00

...with apologies to Langston Hughes.

One of the highlights of hiking in the Colca Canyon was trying crazy, wild fruits.

Tuna, aka prickly pear fruit. It was all over the place. The cacti aren't the evilest in the forest, but the fruits have barbs so care (or gloves) are required to pick and peel them. They come in a range of colors and flavors. The red ones seemed sweeter and juicier, the white ones with creamier flesh. All types are full of numerous edible seeds. Excellent chilled on a hot day.

Pitaya agria (Corryocatus brevistylus), or locally called something like mosqui. Some Peruvian websites also call it sanky. Tastes a little like the love child of a kiwi and lemon. Grows on tower-shaped cacti.

We can't figure out what this guy is called, but one of its nicknames is supposedly plátano del la sierra. Grows on squat trees with big, thick trunks and huge leafs. The trees are highly heterozygous, like apple trees apparently. Some of the trees yield sweet fruits, while others yield picante fruits, which are not eaten. You gotta be a local to know which trees yield which fruit, since there is no way to tell by looking at them. See also here.

The fruit has a very gummy flesh and is full of edible seeds. It has a rather disagreeable texture if chewed, but is pretty tasty if you slurp it like a raw oyster. It tastes like a combination of cucumber and banana.

From Strange Fruits

Not a fruit, but delicious-ass crepes in from The Crepería in Arequipa. I could eat these forever.

Colca Canyon: Out

2009-04-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

The next day, we went to the cascada outside of town. More interesting than the cascada was talking to Lucy, who is very bright for a 12-year-old. Here's hoping she'll be able to attend high school in Cabanaconde. On the way back, she offered to show us some "cabezas del los viejos," which literally means heads of the elders. I was confused, and remained so when she lead us to a little grotto that had a pile of human bones mixed together. They are not (known) relations to families in Fure. Lucy said they were of some pre-inca people. Erin and I both found it unsettling. I'm no anthropologist, but it seems very uncommon for a culture to bury its dead in a common unkempt grave. We couldn't help but wonder what abuse might be been responsible.

Andrew, Erin, Cascada #2

Lucy. Note the cool hat. It's extremely regional. If you go even an hour east, the women wear bowlers with sparkly sequins. I think I prefer the Cabana style hat.

Back in Fure we bid our goodbyes and descended back towards the Río Colca. It was late afternoon when we arrived in Llahuar, which seemingly only exists for the tourists that stay there. Nonetheless, it was a great place to hang out for a night. The friendly dueña greeted us and showed us the way to the hot springs. Later we watched dusk fall on the patio perched above the río Colca and drank beer that was probably scandelously hard to pack in.

We foolishly agreed to eat breakfast at the slovenly hour of 6:30. The south canyon wall (with cursed northern exposure) was already baking in the sun by the time we started the 4,000 foot climb out of the ditch. By the time we had neared the top, it was midday and there was no shade to be found. We hadn't quite ran out of water, but the food was gone. Coca leafs sustained me for a while, but soon I was bonking and dutifully hallucinating faces in the rocks. Erin wasn't doing much better. Without a hat, the hateful tropical sun was cooking her brains and sunscreen-laded sweat was pouring into her eyes. We cursed our lazy start and painfully crawled towards town.

Shadowed in the depths but an oven higher up

Hallucinating in the midday sun

We made it with a half-hour to spare before the 2PM bus back to Arequipa. It was full, but we managed to finagle our way on, standing for the ride to the neighboring town of Chivay. En route, we had a fascinating conversion with a grade school teacher in Cabanaconde. He works five days in Cabanaconde before making the six-hour trip back to Arequipa, where his family lives. This is a marked improvement over his old post which was at 4500 meters in the mountains outside Cabanaconde and a four-hour walk from the nearest road. He only went home once a month there.

I asked him what he thought about Fujimori being sentenced to life in prison. He thought the trial was fair and the sentence deserved. That makes two out of two Arequipeños I've asked about it in favor, but Abimael Guzmán is from Arequipa, so who knows how that might bias things...

Once in Chivay, we got the last two seats on the late bus of the least-popular bus company. We quickly caught on as to its lack of popularity when we shuffled past rows of filthy, torn seats barely attached to the sticky floor and took our seat next to the (broken, of course) bathroom. Erin looked like a little Butch Cassidy with her hankerchief over her mouth in a vein attempt to filter out the rich scent of urine radiating from the bathroom. The bus was so bumpy, I swear I pooped a tooth. After an interminable ride, we arrived back in Arequipa.

Colca from the rim

Colca Canyon: In

2009-04-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

All sorts of hyperbole describe the Colca Canyon. By someone's warped metric it's over 10,000 feet deep (but you can hike from what sure looks like a rim to the bottom in less than 3,000 feet), it's swarming with man-eating condors (they are scarce, and they could probably only eat a small child at best), it has towns and hostels in its depths with nicknames like “Paradise” and “Eden.” Canyonwise, it's not too bad. It's no Grand Canyon, but it's a pretty darn good one.

Despite the siren promises of the 1.5 million tourist agencies in Arequipa, we escaped to hike by our own devices. We left Cabanaconde, a few hours later we arrived in San Juan de Chuccho.

Leaving Cabanaconde

From arequipa and colca

Baby-eating condor

Even 60 years ago, the towns on the north side of the canyon probably seemed unremarkable, apart from their spectacular position. But now, to my modern urban eyes, they are in a kind of quaint stasis, many without electricity, all without cars, relying on gravity-fed aqueducts for their water. We followed the aqueduct up to the hostel in San Juan and ate a dinner of textured vegetable protein by candlelight. The next morning, we trailed the hostel owner's son out of town, to San Juan's school. Four students attend.

We passed through the larger and more metropolitan Coshñirua and Malata, then started uphill towards Fure. The sun was unrelenting, so when the path changed aspect and a pool of shade appeared, we quickly sat down and took off our boots. A moment later, a Peruvian appeared and sat beside us. We offered him some banana chips. He munched on the chips, then asked if I spoke Spanish. I foolishly answered yes, and before I knew it I was the recipient of a fire-and-brimstone evangelical screed. Apart from learning that the Pope has the mark of the beast tattooed on his head (presumably that's why he has to wear the hat), I learned that the rapture was imminent. Isn't it always?

My neck was stiffening, but I was helpless with my socks and boots off to make a graceful exit. Fortunately, Erin took the initiative and began packing her bag so I started tying my boots while I dumbly nodded along with the apocalyptic Bad News. We stood up and started backing away slowly and he took the hint that his congregation was going to move. He offered to accompany us to the trail junction, but we demurred. We breathed a sigh of relief as he disappeared around the corner. The book of Revelations has got to be the most abused book in the Bible.

Pooping misadventures of the cactus kind. (Editor's note: this marks the second such misadventure of Gringo Tur.)

Threatening to dash myself on rocks in the Río Huaruro after the apocalypse hour.

Fure has a dramatic entrance. It's tucked into a fold in the canyon of the river Huaruro, invisible until you are right upon it and the guardian waterfall that towers over it. We crossed the waterfall and met Lucy, who took us to her family's hostel. After playing with her younger sisters and brothers for what seemed like an eternity (one we nearly had to throw into the river to be rid of), we had dinner.

Despite what it looks like, I don't like kids. Almost had to toss him into the river.

Fure and its waterfall

We brought a bag of pasta and some sauce to help sooth our consciences. Even though we paid for dinner, it still seemed unfair to eat their food that takes so much effort to supply. It's ten hours round-trip and 5000 feet elevation gain to Cabanaconde to bring food in by mule. Erin remarked to Lucy that she'd enjoy living somewhere without the devil's contrivances of electricity and cars. Lucy smiled politely and said that she wouldn't mind a little electricity. I told them that they should trade places.

Lucy's parents collect cochineal besides housing the occasional tourist. Cochineal are aphid-like bugs that feed on sap from the prickly-pear cactus. When crushed, they turn a deep red. Besides being the traditional dye for cloth in the Andes, they are used in food and cosmetics. It takes over 100,000 beetles to make a kilo, which wholesales for US$80. It sounds like hard work.

Cochineal on a cactus outside of Lucy's house

Campaign promises of electricity, irrigation and roads

Santa Catalina Convent, Arequipa

2009-04-28T12:17:00.000-07:00

Extravagance was the name of the game at Santa Catalina Convent. Wanting to keep the convent high class and pure, the monastery's founding mother only accepted nuns from the richest Spanish families. The chosen girls continued to live it up in solitude. Profligate with their dowrys, ornate furniture, paintings, curtains, and gowns were bought by Jesus's bridezillas.

Nagging rumors of hedonistic parties and pregnant nuns caused the Vatican to send a new madre. Sister Josefa Cadena carried a long stick and set new rules for the convent. Rules including: 1.) Women of the convent were to be called sora, and could no longer demand to be called doña, and 2.) Only one slave per sister.

The rules might have restored some order, but apparently did not help long-term with finances, and the convent eventually opened to the public to remain solvent. That is how we got to explore the vast fortress of a convent that takes up more than a whole city block in Arequipa.

The convent is still running, but only in a locked off corner. Geranium and narajo filled cloisters are divided by walls of red, blue, and orange. A little more cheery than I expected. But there were also things I did expect: lots of gaudy religious paintings, scary dolls dressed in gold-encrusted habits, and room after room of normal, daily things like beds for sleeping, kitchens for cooking, benches for kneeling, baths for bathing.

Poverty, chastity, and obedience were their vows. Obedience must have been their strong point, because there was obviously a little bit of plentitude and licentiousness on the side.

Window lighting up the opposite wall in one of the many kitchens.

From arequipa and colca

Color!!

From arequipa and colca

Arequipa and Santuarios Andinos

2009-04-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

We crossed into Arequipa, Peru, the jumping off point for some trekking into the Colca Canyon. We were planning on spending a night and hitting the trail early the next morning, but found Arequipa sunny with good views and vibes. So we took off our shoes and spent a few days.

Arequipa's Plaza de Armas

From arequipa and colca

Arequipa is surrounded by a few impressive volcanoes, growing conically from the plain, some of them snow-covered. With all of their aesthetic appeal it is easy to forget that they can also be imposing and possibly catastrophic. The Incas understood the devastation that the volcanoes could cause, and took steps to keep the mountains happy. They sacrificed on remote, high Andean peaks to appease the gods that had their fingers on the volcanoes' red button.

On top of El Misti, one of the volcanoes that you can see from anywhere in Arequipa, archeologists found six children sacrifices. About ten years ago on nearby Volcan Ampato, volcanic activity uncovered three still-frozen sacrifices. Juanita, the most well-preserved of the three, lives in Arequipa when she is not being magnetically imaged or genotyped.

We stopped by Museo Santury to take a peak at the Andean princess. From all of the testing, they know that Juanita died at age 13 from a precise blow to the right forehead after being marched to the top of Ampato at 21,000 feet. She was sacrificed with offerings of the Inca's best textiles and metals, probably with a ceremonial sending off to the next world. Because of the cold, Juanita, as well as the offerings made with her, are in perfect condition. You could not buy a newer looking tunic at the baby alpaca emporium a few doors down.

The museum took great pains to keep the viewings respectful, if not apologetic. We were repeatedly reminded that Juanita was a willing soldier for the cause: she rejoiced that she was chosen, and gladly took the step into the next life for her people. Maybe there was uncited evidence that she went without duress, but I found it not so credible. Human sacrifice implies violence.

From the top of the convent, with El Misti in the background.

From arequipa and colca

Sorata

2009-04-25T15:54:00.000-07:00

Semana Santa celebrations in South America are not only a time to respectfully consider Jesus's death and resurrection, they are also a time to GET WASTED!!

We came down off the mountain late in the morning, and we found a wide cross-section of the population of Sorata drunk in the streets: grandmothers, twelve-year-old boys, Cholitas, bus drivers, priests, and lots of old guys. So, we carefully chose seats outside a cafe near the plaza, dropped our packs, ordered a few paceñas of our own, and settled in for some people watching.

In the middle of the plaza there were several music stages set up side by side, each with their own band playing simultaneously. The musical mayhem continued into the streets where marching bands dressed in full costume would strike up a lively tune and parade around the square a few times until drowned out by another marching band. Battle of the bands Bolivian style sounded like preschool music class after a while.

Party on the streets of Sorata

From Laguna Chillata

We watched with amazement as 90 liters of beer vanished within five minutes of being parked on the sidewalk. The dancing, once impressive, began to disintegrate. The men promenaded their Cholitas around in an inebriated stumble-trot, trying not to fall. The streets turned increasingly wet with the foam from hundreds of beers...and from a few people who had to break the seal.

Lady that was partied out at noon, and sat down for a nap at our table, the confetti slowly falling out of her hair.

From Laguna Chillata

The scene kept getting uglier over the next few hours. We decided to head down to our hostel after I was told (for the third time this trip) that I looked like “a virgin” or “The Virgin”...one of the two. Apparently this is a secret-weapon pick-up line of drunken middle-aged men across South America. I have my doubts about how well it works. (It definitely can't get more action than my all-time favorite pick up line: “Hey baby, can I take your derivative? I want to be tangent to all of your curves.”)

We headed away from the chaotic center and took the steep path down to our hostel at the bottom of the valley. By the time we got to the hostel, the clouds had completely lifted, and we were shown the impressive peaks of Illampu and Ancohuma that we had almost missed on the days trekking at their foot.

With clear views, Sorata struck me as an impressive place. With sun, you can see all the way from the bottom of the lush, jungle-like valley to the top of the snowy Andean peaks that hover over the city. The land around the town is steep, but still terraced and cultivated. Fields and houses cling to the sides of the mountains like lichen covering a rock, with different patterns and textures.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at the quiet oasis at the river's edge, enjoying the sunshine, drying our gear, napping, and taking in the views.

View of Illampu from our hostel at the bottom of the valley

From Laguna Chillata

Pepe, the resident dalmation at the hostel, who was really good at his job: lying in the sun, barking at geese, and begging for food.

From Laguna Chillata

Laguna Chillata

2009-04-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

Sorata was a pleasant change from the austere Bolivian Altiplano. If it were a butter spread it would be called Jungle-Lite. Green, warm and dank like the rain forest, but with half the calories and no malaria!

We went on a hike. For the first time in my life, I paid a guide for a hiking or climbing trip and it proved to be an excellent investment in several ways. Bolivian maps are notably deficient and hard to come by. For example, it was only a decade ago that someone realized that Ancohuma wasn't 7000 meters (it's 6400). A rather notable oversight, since it would have been the only 7000+ meter peak outside of the Himalaya and the tallest in the Americas. Nevermind that. Even if you have a topographic quad, it's not going to have the roads and trails marked on it. And maybe most importantly, if you don't speak Aymara, you are going to have a hard time asking for directions in this part of the countryside.

The Bolivian weather office had lied and it was raining a cántaros when we left the hostel.

We had teamed up with a French and German who proved to be good company as we trudged up the valley to Laguna Chillata, the first night's camp. We rapidly found the next advantage of going guided, which was the horse that our guide Frederico brought with him that carried all our food. Erin had neglected to say her Guata's prayer was making use of many bushes during the 1500 meter climb, but fortunately had a light pack on.

After a few hours, we entered the clouds and the visibility quit for good. Fredi gamely lead us through the soup with calls of "más arriba, más arriba". With an hour of daylight to spare, we settled into camp next to what we had to take on faith was a lake.

2
The fog had been beaten into submission the next morning and we elatedly skipped up towards Laguna Glacial. We crossed a rocky pass and third classed it into the next drainage. After contouring around and climbing a slabby headwall, we confronted the obvious former presence of glaciers that reached at least 500 meters lower than they do now.

Remi basking in the sun

Fredi pointing the way up some wet slabs

The going got tougher above 4600 meters and we all slowed down as the altitude hit us. By the time we had made it to Laguna Glacial at 5000 meters, we were socked in.

Hole in the clouds before they closed for good at Laguna Glacial.

Fredi proved to be invaluable as he lead us down in the whiteout, weaving our way on nondescript talus fields with cliff bands lurking below us in the soup. By myself and without a GPS I would have been boned.

Suckerhole

Fredi was also an excellent cook. The combination of a good camp cook and a horse laden with all type of provisions insured that we ate better than I can ever remember on a backpacking trip. After learning an excellent new card game from Guido and Remi, we turned in and slept like stones.

The next day dawned the fairest of them all. Unfortunately, we were descending back to town, but the views were still exceptional.

Laguna Chillata at sunrise with the fog below

Hardly able to touch each other after two months

Rush hour

As we rapidly lost altitude, the rain, fog, and dampness were forgotten. We walked into Sorata and found ourselves in the midst of a raging party.

Hell is #17 on Repeat

2009-04-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

We headed out of Copacabana in a packed bus, got off at a dusty nondescript crossroad, and waited to flag down anything that would take us to Sorata. We were successful. Finally, a jeep with only one extra passenger pulled up and offered a ride in the right direction for a reasonable price. We hopped in.

My mother, when she rides with me, will hold on to the sides of the car when I take curves a little too fast. And my father will stomp on a ghost brake pedal when I tailgate. I found myself uncannily turning into my parents on April 15, 2009: holding on to the sides of the car, closing my eyes, wanting to cry, and throwing up a little bit in my mouth.

Maniacal. The appropriate adjective was maniacal. The driver was a short guy, who could barely see over the tasseled and Virgin-Mary decorated dashboard. He also could not decide whether or not to wear his red baseball cap. On, off, on, off, on, off. And every time he changed the cap he would add another piece of bubble gum to the growing wad in his right cheek.

But, there were things he was decisive about. Music. In particular, tracks 2, 6, and 17. At first I thought it was an oversight, that he was too intensely focused on his driving to worry about the music that was blaring in the cab. But it was not a mistake. With one hand, he carefully insured that the stereo remained on repeat track with a complicated-looking, plastic-bag-covered remote control, and with the other hand he blew through stop signs and honked at lingering school children, nuns and the army. (Yes, women in habits and men in camouflage.)

I didn't mind the deejaying so much for the first 30 minutes of the ride, as he changed the song number a few times, and I got to know a new song, which I can only postulate is titled "Ay, mí cholita linda flore..." based on the triumphant refrain.

After topping out at a pass in the Andes, we began speeding down a "geologically unstable," curving road down into the fog. He chose number 17 to be the theme song for the rest of the hellish hour-long descent. I caught Andrew burying his head in his hands in disgust every time the synthesized drums vamped a new beginning to the song. And I buried my head in my hands with fear every time we would skid around a hairpin curve in the wrong lane. Apparently, honking insures right-of-way, but the rest of the traffic just didn't know it yet. Opposing cars ended up gesturing angrily and sliding to a stop when they encountered our jeep. Our driver just turned up the music.

The lyrics to the chorus of #17 were Hoy te toca llorar, Hoy te toca sufrir, or, "Today it is your turn to cry, today it is your turn to suffer¨. Truer words have never been sung.

Isla del Sol

2009-04-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

The next morning it was raining as hard as ever. We dawdled over breakfast vainly hoping it would subside, so that it was nearly noon by the time we left Copacabana. Increasingly thick waves of pilgrims had washed in overnight and the lake shore was now littered with tents. However, as we walked towards the outskirts of town, the crowds thinned and a patch of blue sky opened wide enough to permit a few powerful beams of tropical sun to dry us out and make the rain jackets uncomfortably hot.

Crazy sea rocks?

There was a surprisingly steady flow of cars on the muddy, rutted road to Yampupata. Semana Santa is a great opportunity to sell some trout that you caught on your slice of lakefront Titicaca property that morning. We walked past numerous paceños who were playing tourist around the lake as well, before we wandered by a farmer who offered to ferry us across the channel to the Isla. We didn't think we were quite in Yampupata (the closest piece of mainland), but his price was about what we were expecting to pay and it was getting towards dusk so we hopped in the motorboat.

It was nearly dark by the time we crossed the channel and hiked to the biggest settlement on the island, Yumani. We had hoped to camp on a random terrace out of town. But with fading light and a stream of dubious warnings of nighttime thievery from the (obviously neutral and disinterested) hostel touts, we paid a few dollars to sleep in someone's backyard. Fortunately, it was well-drained, because minutes after pitching the 'Mid, the heavens opened again and didn't stop until dawn.

We slept poorly. But the insistence of the mid-morning sun forced us from our bivy and we stumbled out of town, heading north. Very rapidly the views opened up as we hiked along the backbone of the island, passing a steady flow of gringos a flotilla of boats had vomited on the north end. We continued our retrograde march for a few hours until we found the north shore of the island, and the highlight of the various ruins on the island, the coffee table of the Inca. Scholars insist it is a temple of the sun, but we thought otherwise.

Panorama from near Cerro Bárbara

We were nearly out of water, so a descent seemed appropriate. Water, water everywhere, right? We found the east coast of the island and the tiny settlement of Challa'pampa. Yumani with its clouds of piranha-like touts had been fairly mala onda, and fortunately Challa'pampa is its antithesis. We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out on the beach, tying one on with a random contingent of other foreigners (as well as the island's resident shaman, who happens to be Australian and sells cheap jewelry on the side.) Random and buena onda. We stumbled again in the dark looking for camping, before we submitted to the approaching downpour and spent a kingly sum ($2 per person) on a room. The storm beat scandalously against the thin roof all night.

Dusk at Challa'pampa

Rainclouds swallowing the moon

We miscalculated a bit the next morning and got on the 1:30 boat back to the mainland. It was a slow, slow boat that took the rest of the afternoon. Dusk had fallen by the time we made it back to Copacabana. With a numb ass and dead iPod, I looked east and saw the Cordillera Real pierce a clear sky and could tell that the coming night would be fair.

Ancoma and Illampu beating back the clouds

Copa-Copacabana

2009-04-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

Copacabana sits on the shore of Lake Titicaca, which besides its hilarious name is famous for (supposedly) being the highest navigatible lake in the world. We managed to time our arrival for the day before Good Friday. Easter Weekend is a big deal in all of Latin America, but especially in Copacabana. Thousands of "pilgrims" arrive from throughout Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, but especially from La Paz. The classic "pilgrimage" is to walk from La Paz to Copacabana, which is a bit over 100 km. The reason for the scare quotes is because although there is certainly many who arrive to Copacabana for pious reasons, it's also a big ol' party.

We had other ideas, because, well, we hate a) people and b) fun. After spending part of Good Friday in Copacabana, we had a little pilgrimmage of our own to the city of Yampupata. Yampupata is a short boat ride across the lake from Isla Del Sol, the site of the most famous of the Incan creation myths, where we could enjoy a little cosmogony of our own.

The main pious event in Copacabana is hiking to the top of Cerro Calvario and visiting the stations of the cross. At the top, there are a half-dozen stands where beside the usual Coca-Cola and popcorn, there are toy cars, tiny houses, stacks of play money and miniature diplomas. There is a purpose to these objects. If one buys a representation of the prayer, let's call it an idol, perhaps, then you are more likely to receive the real thing. We thought that the beer was also a nice touch, since it might help keep you lubricated for a long prayer sess. We later found out it's to offer to the Pachamama. So less commercial, but more Pagan?

Regardless of theological implications, Calvario has a great view of the lake.

The pagan synchronism was kept a little bit better under wraps at the Cathedral in town. It's the only Moorish-style cathedral I've seen in South America.

We stayed at La Cúpula. A little pricey by Bolivian standards ($22 for a room with heat and a private bath. The horror!), but worth it for the slackline in the garden and free hat for each night you stay there.

The Guata's Prayer

2009-04-15T15:12:00.000-07:00

Our guata, who art inside us,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy digestion come,
Thy excretion be done,
in Bolivia as it was in Chile.
Consume this, our daily bread,
and forgive us our street food,
as we forgive you for making us poop our pants.
Lead us not into nausea,
but deliver us from gastroenteritis.
For thine is the paristalsis, the microvilli and the chyme,
for ever and ever,
Amen.

La Paz

2009-04-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

Paz (peace) is defined in my spanish dictionary as a state of quiet, tranquility, solitude; without disturbances or agitation.

This word does not describe La Paz, the capitol city of Bolivia. La Paz is a city of chaos. The sidewalks are overflowing with vendors selling everything from tissue paper to DVDs to spatulas to bottled animal fetuses. Each stand is a virtual Mary Poppin's bag full of wea packed under under brightly colored tarps. Mobile hawkers pushing their goods (fossils and cocaine the most popular) take over where the fixed stands stop. Pedestrian traffic loses the battle and has to walk in the street. Walking against traffic seems to be the best bet for not getting clipped from behind with a car mirror. Follow a native to cross the roads.

The roads thrombose with traffic that sputters and jumps as it climbs the steep hills of the city, erupting with superfluous honks. Mini-buses full of people speed by with barkers hanging out of side doors shouting routes and prices. Guys dressed in zebra suits parade in the street doing...well, I´m not yet sure what they are doing. Some are directing traffic and some appear to be doing interpretive dance.

Songs blare from shop speakers, attempting to drown out the music of the institute to it´s right or left. Loud pops are heard over all the background noise every 20 minutes. We found out firsthand that these bangs are not cars backfiring or construction site noise, but the police firing tear gas into crowds of people marching or demonstrating in the streets. And demonstrating, as well as parading, seem to be favorite Bolivian past times.

From far off, even the buildings seem to be unorganized, tumbling down the cliffs that hold the city hostage. The city lies in a valley, and looking upwards you can see brown and red houses in all directions until the colors stop and are replaced by sharp gray rock. South of the city lies a large stretch of badlands, and you can see the snow-covered Andean peak of Illimani on a clear day.

La Paz has been the most interesting, yet intimidatingly inhospitable cities I have been in. I kept trying to talk myself into liking the city, because it just seemed like a city that I should like if I was an open-minded, adventurous person. I found it enthralling, but I could not embrace the chaos. I felt tired at the end of the day, jumped a little every time I heard the sound of a horn honking, and felt unsure of myself in my sleep. I don´t think it is La Paz´s fault exactly, just a fault of my own that I like green better than concrete and fresh air better than deisel fumes.

Never missing an opportunity for a march, in protest or otherwise. This one was complete with various military mucky-mucks shouting some orders to the contigent every 30 seconds.

Loving feeding the birds in the Plaza Murillo

Panorama of the infernal city from the one square of open, green space in La Paz.

Literary Fantasies

2009-04-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

I looked around me. Was everyone else here for the same reason? Probably. There was only one guy, and he was in the corner admiring a model ship. All the women were lingering over the study and bedroom, sneaking glances at the poetry books they had brought along with them. Isn't there only one reason to snoop around Pablo Neruda's home? And isn't that reason to have a stage for your literary fantasies? I knew what they were wondering, because I was wondering it too:
Would he go marking with crosses of fire the white atlases of their bodies?
Was his mouth really like a spider, frightened and thirsty?

I know, I know. Neruda was a politician, an activist. There was much more to his life than writing love sonnets that would make even Margaret Thatcher blush. But who falls to sleep with a smile thinking about expulsions from the senate?

Maybe my imagination remains over-stimulated from a childhood full of make-believe friends and pet rocks, but no matter what book/poem/essay I read, I find myself wondering about the author's interior life. Who doesn't daydream about the conversation you would have sitting beside Dostoevsky on a 12-hour plane ride with free booze? Or...

How often Bukowski's house got rolled? An did he bogart that shit or pass it to the left?
If Nabakov would enjoy frotterism on the subway?
If William Carlos Williams washed his dishes right after dinner, or did he leave them in the sink, dirty with a half-way apologetic note?
Would TS Elliot laugh or cry watching CATS! live on Broadway? Was he really a dog guy?
Could Thoreau survive without his mom doing his laundry?
As a child, did JRR Tolkien build the ultimate couch-cushion fort?
Would Salinger dress in tight American Apparel jeans and an ironic T-shirt and talk sourly about Death Cab for Cutie?

And there were those months in Junior High where I would fantasize about going over to Sylvia Plath's house for a slumber party...maybe inviting Emily D. over to bake some cookies in the shape of hearts (being wary to keep certain people away from the oven, of course).

Maybe Keats was right, and an author can be totally divorced from their work altogether. But who fantasizes about Keats anyways?

Potosí and the Devil's Mountain

2009-04-08T13:09:00.000-07:00

Potosí must be the oldest city I've set foot in. It's not only the knowledge that it was founded in 1545. It feels old. Only 100,000 people live there, but they are crammed into streets and buildings that obviously predate any thought of buses and cars attempting to circulate the city.

Terra Cotta view from the top of the Cathedral.

From potosi

Echoes of a richer age fill the town. Many fine colonial buildings and houses still nostalgically look out on the source of its former riches: Cerro Rico. When the mines of Cerro Rico were full of silver, it was the richest, most populous city in the Americas, even more so than Paris or New York.

Cerro Rico looming over town.

It's former wealth is misleading. Upon nearing the tan, slumping mass of Cerro Rico you finally see the thousands of mine shafts that pockmark its surface. Only amidst the terraces and pits deforming the mountain is there indication of the costs of its exploitation. The silver that used to fill Cerro Rico didn't mine itself. Eight million American Indians died slaving in the mines. Since then, Cerro Rico has been as much as a curse as a blessing to Potosí. The refinery supernate poisons the rivers. The silver has been largely exhausted, but zinc, lead and tin still cause the men of Potosí to crawl into its maw.

Ingenio or refinery. The valuable minerals float to the top of the slurry. The waste is dumped into the river.

And the mountain continues to devour them. The average lifespan of a miner is 30-40 years of labor. Working without respiratory protection, silicosis is universal. The degree depends on the duration and type of silica exposure. A drill operator who is constantly exposed to fine dust, often dies after only ten years. Besides the slow death of silicosis, cave-ins, carbon monoxide poisoning and trolly accidents kill 40 miners a year out of the current 5,000 working.

It was with trepidation, then, that we decided to take a “tour” of the mines. After donning coveralls, hard hat, and lantern and buying gifts to share with the miners, we headed to Cerro Rico. We first walked, then crouched, and finally crawled into the Candelaría mine, which has been in operation since Colonial times. Now, rather than Indian slaves, a cooperative of miners exploits what's left of the ore. They split the earnings according to hierarchy. The socio (head) making 5000 Bolivianos (US 700) per month, segunda mano (second hand) miners making about 1000-2000 Bolivianos depending on the month, and the gofers making about 20 Bolivianos (less than 3 US dollars) a day. A bottle of coke is 3 Bolivianos.

In the maw.

Our guides repeatedly told of improving conditions, some of which seemed accurate. A law was passed that banned children-miners, working hours have decreased, and the cooperatives provide health care. While on the one hand, we didn't encounter any children, most miners we met had worked since age 13 or 14. Yes, the miners can choose their hours, but if the ore is impure the groups must choose between rest or remuneration. Salary means survival. And regardless of health care, silicosis is untreatable.

So, it is still a hellish place. The miners know this. So they worship Mary on the surface, but worship Tío (Uncle Satan) underground. He rules their fortunes in the mines. He permits them to extract the ore that they find, supports or undermines the walls of the shafts, circulates fresh air or noxious gas. At the end of the week, the miners offer Tío some of their drink-of-choice. The belief is that the purer the drink, the purer the extracted ore, so they drink 190 proof grain alcohol. And, from first hand experience, it stings the nostrils a bit.

Tío.

After descending three levels into the mine, we were more than ready to return to the world of the living. Back on the surface the guides were kind enough to demonstrate how dynamite is used in the mines.

Unsure of what to do with lit dynamite

Salar de Uyuni: Gringos

2009-04-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

The popularity of our route was undeniable. Despite the fearsome appearance of this section of altiplano, which sitting at 14,000 feet above sea-level scarcely provides enough grass to feed a few scraggly and frozen-looking llamas, squat tourist refuges had sprouted like mushrooms over any halfway-potable source of water that the volcanoes saw fit to release from their slopes. Lines of parallel tire tracks raked the plain like plough furrows in a field. Where the ground turned rockier, a quartet of jeep paths beat in the boulder field intersected and bifracated. We climbed a small hill and passed a broken-down jeep, surrounded by a group of cold and angry-looking tourists.

We turned off a rough track and found the main road. “How many years have you been a guide,” I asked Carlos, our driver.
“16 years. It has changed a lot. It used to be a 5 day trip [now it is 3]. Only 3 or 4 tourists a week would come,” he answered without lifting an eye off the wheel as we speed down the freshly-graded track.
“It seems like there's more gringos than Bolivians here.”
“Yes, there are.”
I paused and thought for a second. “Well, I am here, too.”

The landscapes were mind-bendingly hallucinogenic. But the altiplano was suffocating on its own popularity. At the lake we found another half-dozen Brits from some another company attempting to stalk a couple of wary flamingos. We got out of the jeep to find our own flamingo to hunt and absent-mindingly tightened the altiplano's ligatures a little more.

We left the lake and speed towards our hostel, which had sprouted next to an anemic-looking stream, and added our own furrow to the loose gravel. We complained about the food loudly in English as it was served. After dinner, the Brits bought beer and were getting rowdy, when the fickle power cut out for good. I sat in the dark at the corner of the table for a few moments before I got up and went to the kitchen and, interrupting a conversation in Quechua, asked for a glass of my own.

If you lived in Bolivia and occupied the bottom of the labor pool, you might take home 20 Bolivianos (US$3) a day. And you wouldn't turn down even a single Boliviano, no matter how outnumbered you were in your own country, no matter what language its owner shouted at you.