The Great Pan-American Synchronistic Cycle Extravaganza Unlimited - chaddeal
Backpacking, surfing, TEFLing, WWOOFing, boozing, and cycling Costa Rica and beyond.

Decompression
Alajuela, Costa Rica
My first week in Costa Rica was a crude, improvised sort of acclimation process. I bumbled about Alajuela with a perpetual tell-tale mask of gringo-no-entiendo, failing constantly and simoultaneously at operating pay phones, using currency correctly, and putting recyclables in the appropriate bin. I said stupid things in Spainsh like "I have only pain" when trying to communicate that I only carried American dollars. I unwittingly commited the worst of faux-paus and continued on on my way, grinning.
I spent a few days at the Alajuela campground, trying to get my bearings. The campground, more of a house converted into a hostel on the outskirts of town, is owned by a cool dude from Dusseldorf. I made several gringo friends at the campground, who were understanding and helpful in the difficult transition process. We drank copiously and pretended to speak intelligently about politics around a bon fire. I slept in my hammock on the porch.
Stefan, the owner, has five dogs in the yard. They effin rule.
written by  chaddeal on November 19, 2008 from Alajuela, Costa Rica
from the travel blog: The Great Pan-American Synchronistic Cycle Extravaganza Unlimited

Hence the BBQ
Samara, Costa Rica
I am living in la casa de Doña Cristina Castillo Carrillo. Everyone is fed here.
It was sometime after midnight when a speeding car full of nuns collided with the cow. The sisters contacted the appropriate channels and within the hour the cow was being axed into workable chunks on our patio. By noon the next day, parts of the cow had made their way to every corner of town: a liver here, some cabeza there, a hoof. A large section of rib dangled in the afternoon sun from a rope on the porch.
We are having a BBQ. Bold bovine for all.
written by  chaddeal on December 10, 2008 from Samara, Costa Rica
from the travel blog: The Great Pan-American Synchronistic Cycle Extravaganza Unlimited

Mango Bridge
Samara, Costa Rica
Chicken dangles
from bits of string
a crocodile
looks on, grinning
juvenile cackles of glee
resound
as the lizard troll
splashes madly after
phantom feasts
just downstream,
a fat mother
bathes her babies
in the creek
without interest.
written by  chaddeal on December 17, 2008 from Samara, Costa Rica
from the travel blog: The Great Pan-American Synchronistic Cycle Extravaganza Unlimited

Mango Transmissions from Starfruit Satellites
Samara, Costa Rica
It was love right from the gecco
electric mango sunset framed
with guanabana palm tree sway
shoreglow strawhut cabiñas flicker to life
wise-eyed old man chases sea foam
creates galaxies
with the gushing cosmic OH
of a didgeridoo
quetzal end all
iguana monkey round
shinewaves hum good vibes all day
got my papaya on you
starlite poi girls breathe
Scottish gasoline diction
lady luna still grinning like a croc
ocelot longer till a cuppa coati
all according to plantain.
chorotegan ghost warriors
cast jaguar shadows
dance on old curtains
with banana bones.
Pura Vida
en la Vida Sueña
coconut kisses
from the moon.
written by  chaddeal on December 18, 2008 from Samara, Costa Rica

Holiday Rush
The blight of tourism arrived yesterday. A week ago Samara was quiet, tranquilo - static pulse of seashore, the occasional motorbike, unseen birds singing Guanacaste sabanero war cries from palm trees, a tinny radio playing Marley from the bar. Now the town is roaring, barely enough room to bicycle on the beach. Americans stomping around looking pale and insatiable, making crude, condescending demands to the breezy locals who seem to just sort of hang on and bare the rush like a bad joke while it lasts. Gringo business-types from places like Palo Alto and Phoenix talking too loud, oozing anxiety and a misplaced sense of entitlement: but of course this is my picture postcard week on the beach whole town propped up on toothpicks just days ago in anticipation of my mighty influx of Dolores (meaning either dollars or pain when you shift the accent) and what the fuck kinda of hamburger is this anyways want my money back.
Savages.
Up the coast a few kilometers, near Cristina´s house, is Playa Buena Vista, aka "Mel Gibson Beach." It is quieter here, out of the way. All the charm of Samara is obscured by tourism. Tourism insists on homogenized mediocrity, cheap comforts, familiar logos, and above all, absolute predictability.
The tourist sees the surface, complains that the tacos look more like wontons and the burritos are in fact tostadas. The American tourist reflects US foreign policy on the microcosmic level; it finds value in the natives only when they make themselves of service, produce something which it can exploit. The American tourist does not see culture or beauty, only a frantic hodge-podge of places to stick more money in the vain search for paradise. It is content to be just another tourist turd pushed through the established tract, apathetically bloating the town to its economic capacity before suddenly drifting away like so much bad gas.
In high season, a person can easily overlook the subtle nuances of the place. Like how the locals honk their horns at everything. Not the blatant amplified "Fuck You!" of the American SUV; the Tico beeper is a more articulate instrument. It says: "Hey mae, right behind you", "¿que pasa, Esteban?", "Sweet ride!", "¿Donde esta tu novio?", "Hey, I´m driving a truck, too!", or simply "Hey", because we´re two people driving down the road in paradise so why not?
Or how they Ticos never really took to the idea of refrigerating eggs or milk but they taste just as good all the same. The Tico way is relaxed to the point of being lazy, except for the fact that most of the people work well over 40 hours a week. But you wouldn't know it from the looks of them. The concept of "stress" is non-existent here. The most common response to anything is "tranquilo" (relax), "tuanis" (cool), or the national byline "pura vida" (pure life). Free time is spent playing futbol with friends, drinking Imperial at the beach bar, hollering "priopos" (witty and not-so-witty pick-up lines) at girls, and making empty accusations at passersby of being mariposas, pajaros, or about thrity other words meaning "gay."
All of this is lost upon the feverish tourist, who would never notice the smiling street dog who arises from a shaded spot to escort a stranger across town.
The right set of eyes, however, perceives the essence of the place intuitively. Something more, greater, very subtle, stirs behind the homemade tiki facades. A sense of stillness permeates the lackadaisical palm treed shoreline at sunset. One becomes absorbed in the realization that there is absolutely nothing to do except sit and watch, in awe, as the sun disappears down the neck of your beer and a lone coconut thumps the warm sand, somewhere down the Costa Rican beach.

Whole Lotta Up and Down
Jabilla, Costa Rica
Samara to Playa San Miguel - 33 Km
I considered a horse at first. Fancy visions of trotting into Antigua at dusk, spitting tobacco beneath a sun-bleached Panama hat. A bike seemed more feasable. You have to peddle the thing, sure - but its efficient and it doesn´t poop. All I knew was that I had to go.
I was sad to leave them, my TEFL classmate come roommates at Cristina's ranch by Pablitos. We had become like family over the weeks and I became suddenly nostalgic for our breif household as began peddling my black two-wheeled stallion south. The familiar stretch to Playa Carillo and onwards to Estrada demanded a new effort with the mid-sized Australian millitary pack on my shoulders and a searing Guanacaste sun above. The first few kilometers are always the most difficult. After that, sweet endorphines shower over crucial connections in the brain, lending a strange sort of elation at that place where exhaustion and ecstacy meet.
The coastal mountain range proved to be a difficult route. A seemingly endless uphill trudge finally gave way to a few kilometers of blissful, breezy down, delivering my steed and I to the quirky upper-crust resort town of Punta Islita. Sweating and thirsty, I promptly found a large, green pipa on the beach sand. I hacked the unripe coconut open with my red-handled swashbuckler Machete and slurped down its cool, nutrient-filled milk. Then I scooped out the tender coconut meat and ate watching, entertained, as a coati meandered down the road. A unique enterprise of nature, the coati most resembles an anteater, enxcept that it is about the size of a racoon, tailed, and pigeon-toed.
Another exhaustive uphill climb opened up to an awesome ocean view from the single-lane dirt road far above on the cliffs. This led to an especially redeeming downhill ride into a vast expanse of quiet, sparsely populated cow country. The silence was broken by the occasional motorbike wizzing by, the forlorn BUUUH of a cow, and the ever-unseen howler monkeys. The terrain continued in this manner - up,down, pasture - all the way to Playa San Miguel, where I strung-up my hammock between two palms and drank a few slow cervesas in an empty beachfront cantina at sunset.
written by  chaddeal on January 2, 2009 from Jabilla, Costa Rica

Lost in the Valley of the Dinosaurs
Puerto Coyote, Costa Rica
Playa San Miguel to Playa Coyote - about 30 Km
I woke around 8am and splashed around in the waves for a while. The beach was empty and I felt like Gilligan. I sliced open a pipa and filled my water bottle. The road was much flatter heading south through San Francisco de Coyote. Open cow country flew by on either side as I whistled and spoke non-sense Spanish to myself, canoodling along in the morning sun. The road veered inland and the temperature rose considerably away from the ocean wind.
I stopped for refreshment in San Francisco de Coyote. A Dutch woman was liberating a wayward scorpion with a can of Raid as I took a seat in the open-air cafe. I had some blended fruit and one of those sandwhiches generally associated with bistros and fusion restaurants - small, expensive, bland. The Dutchess told me about the road to Santa Teresa. She cited every landmark, river, and good restaurant along the way, intermittenly reminding me - "always you are following this road." I liked her and tipped for the first time in Costa Rica - not a custom here.
I set off, then, pleased with the simplicity of it all. At the first crossroad , several kilometers out of town, I intuitively flowed left and silently congratulated myself on my keen sense of direction. The countryside opened up into wide grassland valley dotted with palmtrees. Not a single soul crossed my path. This was Michael Crichton's turf. I could picture the Bronchiosauri gently filandering about the scenery, occasionally rising on hind-quartes to snatch a coconut from an ancient palm. I smiled and yelled strange things in faux-Espanol and hummed the theme song to Jurrasic Park.
An hour or so passed before I came to the river, the one the Dutchess spoke about, no doubt. I hacked open a riverside pipa and filled up my empty water bottle. The milk came thick and white and stinking of fermentation - an ominous sign, to be sure. I dumped it out and carried on. I was at the edge of a small villiage and decided to to speak with an old caballero selling pineapples by the road to confirm my position on the map. The wizened cowboy promptly pointed to an inconsequential dot, somewhere up in the mountains. I laughed inwardly and corrected the poor man - "no, we are here...which road goes to Santa Teresa?" He pointed in the direction from which I had just come. A young Tico came over to help and told me the same. The man at the pulperia confirmed it once more.
I had gone in exactly the wrong direction.
I zoomed back to San Francisco de Coyote, not sure if I should be irked or totally indifferent. Neither seemed healthy, in the long run. When I finally returned to the fateful intersection, I sat and contemplated life in the shade for some time. The sun was harsh and stifling, and I was exhausted from a poor nights sleep. Lesson learned, I'd decided. I'd never be going back down that road again. I got up to move on and noticed that my bike lock, crucial in this haven of petty thievery, had jostled itself loose from its clamp and was no longer connected to the bike. So, indeed, back I went - several kilometers until I found the damn thing lying leisurely among some rocks. I glared at it accusingly for a moment before snatching it up. By and by, I rolled onto the ultra-low-key beach at Playa Coyote, having made very little southwards progress since morning.
I was spent. I ate shrimp and rice and contemplated my intentions. I found them to be simple and pure, subject to the flippant impulses of the universe as was everything. Shortly after sunset I strung up my hammock on the beach and slept for a very long time.
written by  chaddeal on January 4, 2009 from Puerto Coyote, Costa Rica

Toys in Babeland
Mal Pais, Costa Rica
Playa Coyote to Santa Teresa - 30 Km or so
The ride out of Playa Coyote was flat, scenic, mellow, and pleasantly uneventful. I crossed a few knee-high rivers and waved at the Ticos who sat on their porches in the middle of nowhere. They waved back and some smiled and hollered "hola!" as I disappeared into the dust. About halfway to Santa Teresa the road jutted directly west, right onto the beach. There was no actual road aside from the soggy beach sand, an impassable route at high tide. The tide was out, so I zig-zagged down the open beach and considered living there in my hammock, eating coconuts and maybe foraging for insects and fish for the rest of my long, joyous life. But no, onwards. Keep peddling. Paradise will always be there. Waiting. There is too much to see. Too much to do. Too much sweet nectar 'o life. Ah yes.
I rolled into Santa Teresa early in the afternoon. The sun beamed down its scathing agenda, burning my tender gringo flesh. Cars and motorbikes threw a lingering cloud of dust from the bumpy dirt road through town and I thought of Burning Man. Santa Teresa is a lot like Arcata except with great weather, amazing surf, beautiful tanned chicas everywhere, and a happening night life. Ok, so it's nothing like Arcata. Everyone has dreadlocks and the place has a definite hippy vibe. A hint of magic on the wind. You get the feeling that the secret got out not long ago. The place is a veritable gringoville, teeming with a certain breed of tourism. But its a relaxed, free flowing kind of place and I can see why it is such a sought after destination.
I strung up my hammock at Zaneidas campground and hopped in the ocean for a while. The waves here are huge, consistant, and barreling. I got out and went to a pay phone to call my folks. The phone were in use and I waited. A dreadlocked Jamaican walked by, did a double take, turned around and said, "hey mae, what is that on your shoulder?" I told him the tattoo was Saggitarius. His face lit up. "I am the fifteen of December, mae." Its my birthday too, I told him. The Jamaican laughed loudly and cried out, "how did I know? how could I know? Come man, lets share the beer."
I went to his place next to the campground and we drank a Pilsen. His name was Pineapple Head. He showed me around his place, which he built himself. He was a sculptor and had several cement figurines around the yard. Pineapple Head read my palm and told me I am blessed, protected by a dead relative, bound to live a long life, and also told me the last name of my future wife. We talked for several hours and noted the similarities of our pasts based on astrological predisposition. Then I went back to Zaneidas and fell asleep to the sound of crashing waves.
Hammock Space Pod at Zaneidas
written by  chaddeal on January 5, 2009 from Mal Pais, Costa Rica

From Badland to Mainland
Jaco, Costa Rica
Santa Teresa to Montezuma - about 15 Km
Montezuma to Jaco - one hour by boat
Santa Teresa is a hard place to leave. One succumbs to quixotic visions of endless surf, early retirement at Zeneidas campground, and the ultimate french fry. The allure is Blue Crush meets Mad Max goes to Disneyland mostly naked. Everyone zooms around in beachwear on bicycles, quads, and motorbikes looking like 1930s bank robbers behind big shades and handkerchief masks. More than a hint of mischief lurks on the breeze.
The road to Montezuma was about 15 kilometers of rugged jungle trekking. The first stretch, all the way to Cabuya, consisted of several small stream crossings and a demanding climb over the coastal range. A thick, warm sheet of moisture hung visibly in the air. The final torturous uphill trek eventually gave way to a mountain-top vista of the wide gulf between the Nicoya Peninsula and the mainland.
Montezuma is even more like Arcata than Santa Teresa in its penchant for street-side pipe vendors, organic eateries, spontaneous drum circles, and fire dancing. It is a popular eco-tourism destination. Visitors from all over the world come for diving, jungle hiking, zip-lining, fishing, and beyond. Others come for the reggae and ganja, which looms thick and sweet over a brief main street.
I set up the hammock at a campground, talked with the animated host for an hour or so, and wandered around town. In the evening I had a few cervesas at Chico's and talked with a Tico from Jaco. He told me at length in Spanish about how great the place was. When he left, a dude sitting near by turned to me and said, "that guy is feeding you so much shit." So we talked The Economy, San Diego politics, and catching the waves of life and he turned out to be a good friend of a family friend who has a place in Montezuma. He spoke gravely of the crackheads and condo bullshittery which is blossoming in Jaco. The conversation was critical yet congenial, and we enjoyed sharing many similar views on the general condition of things. After an hour or so my friend left and I jammed on hand-drums with some chill kids on the street corner. Everybody was happy and there was a potent feeling of festivity in the air. Like in Santa Teresa, one feels in Montezuma undertones of celebration, in the pagan sense of the word, at all hours.
What more do you want?
Reluctantly I purchased a ticket for the shuttle boat to Jaco. At first they flat-out refused to take the bicycle. Scratches up the boat, they said. But after some argument and diplomatic half-truths, they agreed to take the bike provided I put it in a cardboard box and paid an extra ten dollars. By the time I finished boxing the bike, it looked like the a seven-year-old's improvised space scooter. The wheels were removed, the frame partially contained in an old fruit box, and the front fork inside a discarded soda carton. My hog was fully equipped for make-believe interstellar travel. Instead, I got on the boat and enjoyed an hour long high speed ride across rolling swells and bluebird skies.
About halfway over, the Tico from Jaco who had been feeding me so much shit the night before suddenly handed me his watch. In Spanish, he told me to keep it. I was confused and hesitant about accepting the awkward gift. Gringo paranoia kicked in. What does he want from me? Is it radioactive, a bomb? Then I remembered him telling me that he is a vendor of watches, among other things, and realized it was simply a kind gesture to a stranger - one of many along the way. I thanked him and we knocked knuckles in traditional Tico fashion as the condos of Jaco towered half-veiled in rain clouds on the horizon.
Jaco is always spoken of in cautionary terms. It stands as a monument and a warning as to what may happen to your humble fishing village, should you choose to sell your soul to the cancerous devil of foreign land developers. By the way people speak of it, you'd think the place was a festering hive of peg-legged drug fiends, cut-throat gangsters, and salivating hookers - and you´d be correct. Jaco is the bastard lovechild of Garnet Avenue, Miami beach, and Reno. An unholy union, to be certain.
I rolled into town just after sunset as main street lit up, revealing poor choices, done deals, with countless devils past. Illuminated signs of Pizza Hut, KFC, and Quiznos, veritable seals of civilization, pocked the trendy downtown strip. I found a hostel and now sit here typing, thinking about turning around and whooping it up in Santa Teresa or Montezuma for bit longer. Of course I can't, not yet. My inertia is too great. The fates, too anxious.
But maybe someday I will return to Santa Teresa and work for Pineapple Head at the hotel/sushi bar/internet cafe he is building - ET's Magic Beach Place. Or maybe I'll proclaim myself the resident poet Laurette of Montezuma and never wear a shirt again. I will be heralded like Krishna returned and shall sip fine batidos de papaya con leche in a hammock, deep into the burning hand-drum night.
written by  chaddeal on January 8, 2009 from Jaco, Costa Rica

The Long Ride
Quepos, Costa Rica
Jaco to Quepos - 75 Km
I was glad to leave Jaco. The place lacks any visibly redeeming qualities. An imminent hostility permeates the darkened night streets, and besides, there is something deviant and perverted about the blatant Americanization of the place. Jaco personified is an obese transgendered prostitute chain-smoking in an expensive red ball gown on a tricycle, incessantly ringing the tinny little bell. It is a sad reminder of the lifeless manufactured surrogate reality which the media and mainstream sheep-think perpetuates and replicates, like so many cancerous cells, at home and abroad.
The scenery out of Jaco quickly reverts to open cow country. Broad billboards punctuate the bovine ambiance with crude promises of ¨paradise¨ in the form of beach-side golf courses and over-priced stucco facades. The road is paved, well-traveled, and relatively flat. I made good time riding the third sprocket gear beneath a searing mid-day sun.
Exhaustion hits - all dimensions collapse to a singular, pointed ¨onwards!¨ - peddles & pavement become all.
About halfway to Quepos I stopped in the small town of Parrita to hide from the sun. I drank a cold batido and pooled sweat on the beige tile floor. I thought I was going to die. The remaining stretch of road was a flat ride through an African oil-palm plantation. Tall palms rose on either side, sprouting small epiphytic ferns from their trunks. The plantation workers drove trucks, operated various machinery, some smiled and waved. I peddled on and pulled into Quepos early in the evening, completely exhausted.
I met up with sweet Susy Pinkfish at a cafe in Quepos. She had gone ahead and found us a place to stay for the evening - a house full of rowdy, delightful Irish girls and one from Seattle, former TEFL students in Manuel Antonio. We went out to Bambujam and danced to the salsa band, sweating profusely in the open-air bamboo bar.
I stepped out back to pee in the brush and came upon a wooden cable car on tracks which went about a hundred meters up a steep hillside. In Spanish, English, and German, a sign warned that the car is to be used at one´s own risk. I brought Susy over and we sat in the rickety car. The thing looked stable enough. We both stared at the green button labeled ¨up.¨ How bad could it be? We briefly discussed an escape route, which consisted of diving from either side of the car into the bushes the moment we felt the rusted chain-link cable slacken. A wave of deja vu hit and I felt like I´d dreamed all this before, some forgotten night years ago. Suddenly Susy jabbed at the button and we braced ourselves for whatever comes next.
Nothing happened. We had bought the ticket to take the ride, threw caution to the wind, declared ourselves masters of reality, and the damned thing was unplugged. Anyways, so what? She had pressed the green button. We´d shown our intentions to the hodge-podge contraption. We were ready for the ride, no matter the perils.
Always press the green button.
The next day we swam at the crowded beach. Manuel Antonio is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Costa Rica, and a look in any direction shows why. The terrain is lush jungle meets island-dotted ocean. You can spot all sorts of exotic wildlife lurking in the trees, the water, and between your bedsheets.
In the evening, Susy and I went to a farm in the hills outside of Quepos for a full moon celebration. The woman who owned the place reminded me of the classic Humboldt ganja farm wife. She busied herself in a kitchen full of reused glass jars and compost bins, absent-mindedly grabbing some fresh oregano hanging from one wall, a clove of garlic draped over the window sill. Her voice was high-pitched and enthusiastic, and when she laughed it resonated in a very mysterious place in my chest. She was like the good witch from some Disney movie - charming and somewhat eccentric. She would say outloud, to nobody in particular, the name of whatever ingredient she was adding to her dish, and seemed to be recalling her first taste of basil, tumeric, and lemon grass as the dish grew. The atmosphere was light and I found myself becoming breezy and bubbly in disposition amongst the lively company.
Susy and I cooked a brochette/pizza hybrid dish and shared a huge meal with about ten others. Someone commented on how rewarding it is to eat something you´ve grown yourself. Our hostess agreed, saying ¨do you remember the watermelon? OOOh, the perfect watermelon. It split before the knife and lingered in your mouth all afternoon!¨ Her pure joy at the recollection was incendiary and contagious and we all smiled, tasting the phantom melon for ourselves.
After dark, we lit a bonfire (with considerable effort) and a shaman from Florida led us in a group energy sharing meditation. A few words of hopes and prayer were murmered and then we jammed out on drums, bamboo sticks, and stones. Later, Susy and I went for a swim in the creek which ran through the property, the full moon occasionally peeking through cloud coverage to beam on down through leaves of bamboo and mango.
A vague paranoia of the infamous fer-de-lance serpent clung with me the entire time.
Today we came back to Manuel Antonio and swam in a small, hidden cove beneath Ronny´s Place. Susy is scouting a new location for the couchsurfing.com collective, so we toured a beachfront mansion and swam in the infinity-edge pool overlooking the sea.
I felt like a zillionaire.
Dropping Keys
the small man
builds cages for everyone
he
knows.
While the sage,
who has to duck his head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the
beautiful
rowdy
prisoners.
-Hafiz
written by  chaddeal on January 11, 2009 from Quepos, Costa Rica

Of Dust, Flats, and Hemroids
Dominical, Costa Rica
Manuel Antonio to Dominical - 47 Km
As far as portals to national parks go, Manuel Antonio is an exceptionally authentic and tranquil place. The tourism aspect is executed tactfully enough that one does not sense the pimped-out ¨NatureLand - brought to you by Pepsi¨ vibe common to Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. While refreshing, this can also be problematic. Without an outright agenda to rebel against, one is capable of spending remarkable sums of money whilst occupied with the other-worldly sunset or the way the waves compliment an Argentinian womans twirling silouette. A dangerous locale for the impassioned budget traveller, no doubt.
I fled this morning, stopping in at the bank on the way out of town. The bank predictably turned into a half-day affair and it was two in the afternoon when I finally hit the road.
Travelling the coastal stretch of hiway 34 between Quepos and Dominical makes one intimately familiar with the Tico creedo of ¨if it sort of, barely, not really works - don´t fix it.¨ The road is unbelieveably rocky yet traveled regularly enough to leave a dense cloud of dust constantly hanging in the air. At regular intervals I was forced to dismount my steed and perform an akward roadside dance in order to cope with the simoultaneously painful and exhillirating sensation of the perenium reacquainting itself with the circulatory system.
At one point in the absolute middle of nowhere, as if part of some mad ongoing experiment in redundancy, a roadside sign read simply: ¨CARRETERA EN MALO ESTATO.¨ I laughed outloud and got a flat tire. After patching the small tear in the innertube I carried on. The scenery was once again ubiquitous palm, and I observed a revealing feature of the rural Costa Rican township. In the US, a town is not a town until it has a post office. In Costa Rica, a futbol pitch is the deciding factor - and any congregation of dwellings worth a shit has got one. Often times the field spans over more land than the rest of the villiage combined.
In the midst of this profound socio-anthropological revelation, my rear tire once again went flat. I examined the innertube for holes and eventually found a slow leak from the valve. I replaced the valve with a piece from the spare and continued bobbling down the road. A flock of white birds alit from a field and traversed the scenery like animated dinner napkins from a forgotten Dali dreamscape. For a brief moment I felt intuitively the eternal perfection and goodness of everything. I smiled and decided to stay there, in that serenity, forever.
My tire went flat. I shouted an uninspired string of explicatives to the open country-side. A few cows turned a wary eye. I felt suddenly graceless, foolish. This was going on my permanent record, I knew. So I analyzed my intentions, found them pure, and replaced the innertube altogether.
I rambled into Dominical with the last light of the evening. The quiet mainstreet felt sleepy, reserved, and brimming with possibilities. I stepped into a Mexican restaurant and, ye gods, it´s Taco Tuesday!
To top it off, the tacos are in fact tacos.
www.bikeblogcollection.com
written by  chaddeal on January 13, 2009 from Dominical, Costa Rica

Re-tire Young - Both Wheels
Dominical, Costa Rica
Once I make my millions, my fat ass is retiring in Dominical. This is ChillVille 9000 - a small town with huge surf. The frenzy is absent, yet somehow the nightlife is roaring.
Just as I'd rolled into town a few days ago, I ran into a few Argentinian dudes who recognized me from Santa Teresa. One of them gave me a beer and smiled strangely from behind sunglasses. "We are having the acid," He announced. The others gave a knowing grin, anticipating my response. I laughed and said ok, tuning in with the ambient psychedelia eminating from the evening trippers. We went to a bar for a live reggae show. The act turned out to be a sub-mediochre singer with an Ipod for a band who I'd seen about a month before in Samara. He started every song with "This one's for the ladies" and would restart every tune about halfway through for no apparent reason.
I camped at a place called Antorches on the beach. The surf was not hitting anywhere as well as it's reputation suggests, but an occasional good set rolled in around sunset when the tide was high. I was riding a chubby four-fin 6'3" and managed to catch a few good waves before dark. Back at the campground, I met a cool dude from Willits who was cooking some fish he'd caught in the river earlier. We talked of Mendocino and Humboldt and the surf.
Surf is virus - an infectious obsession that eclipses all.
The next day the waves were looking better, but instead I decided to sever the webbing between my thumb and index finger with a machete while opening a coconut. The wound was wide and gaping, but mysteriously absent of blood. The camp host doused me in hydrogen peroxide, a woman filled the cut with fresh aloe goop, and another woman brought forth a giant ant to be used as a stitch. I declined the ant. One didn't seem to be enough, and besides, my mood at the time was much too cosmopolitan to be waltzing about with severed insect heads dangling from my unbecoming wound.
I admited defeat and read for most of the evening. After dark, I went to the beach with two Canadian girls with a guitarlele (guitar/ukelele combo). They are heading up to Montezuma to sing songs on the street for money and extend their vacation. They sang David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and the Beatles with angelic harmonies. One of the girls played a song from her old band, The Phycks, who sing exclusively about algae. She serenaded us with a piece about the majestic red rhodophyta.
Now I'm waiting for the town doctor to get back from lunch so I can get a few stitches before heading south. Like a true Boy Scout dropout, I had been hacking at the coconut carelessly, like a fool. I therefore forfeit my Whittler's Chip and will be dropping it in the mail to be delivered post-haste to Headquarters by a fire-breathing bionic buffalo from Antelope at high noon on Chinese New Years.
written by  chaddeal on January 17, 2009 from Dominical, Costa Rica

Pura Vida - Don´t Have a Cow
Palmar Norte, Costa Rica
Dominical to Palmar Norte - 56 Km
The doctor said the two stitches which I might need would cost $75.
I Inquired into her ant supply. In the end she showed me how to cut medical tape in the shape of an hour glass to hold the wound shut. She also taped my thumb to my index finger. I hit the road.
Onwards! The impulse to move is almost neurotic, except there are no apparent negative side-effects and Freud was a judgemental cynic anyways. The road was paved and wide and I made fantastic time sailing along the bejungled coastline just after midday heat. After some time, a strange imminence overtook me and I felt like both the first degree initiate and the thirty-third degree adept of a one-man cult whose holy house is the highway - bandana, backpack, and sandals for sacred garment. The esoteric texts are a tattered road map and a second-hand collection of Sufi love poems. The only exhalted names are Movement, Inertia, Change, and the only ritual is the constant unuttered mantra - Onwards!
Something else, maybe paradise, maybe pandemonium, lies just over the next hill.
Always just over the next hill.
I found a cheap room in Palmar Norte and shambled into a soda (cheap Costa Rican eatery) across the street. I could have salted three pounds of pork with the dried and crystalized sweat on my cheeks and forehead. I ordered a typical dish, casado con bistek - rice, beans, some greens, and meat. As often happens, the only other patron of the soda struck up conversation.
One must undertake special efforts to become lonely in Costa Rica.
¨Pura vida!¨ It was both a statement and a question.
¨Si, si. Pura vida.¨ I was exhausted and it was obvious.
¨Don´t worry,¨ he said with a toothless grin. ¨Be happy.¨
His name was Jose and he is 54 years old. Jose speaks Spanish, English, German, and Chineese, and he demonstrated his fluency in each language as I ate.
¨I am an old man. People think I am crazy because I am still happy.¨
Jose said this many times over the course of our conversation. He repairs rocking chairs and makes leather hats for a living.
¨All of life is a story,¨ he said. ¨I have my sob story and my success story.¨
And he told me both of them - lost love, last left of his family, no children, poor health, yet still living happily, taking everyday anew. We got a beer next door and shared more stories.
The next morning, I ran into Jose once again in the soda. The waitress brought me a breakfast of rice, beans, and eggs. She exchanged a few words in Spanish with Jose and walked away.
¨She thinks you are muy guapo,¨ he said.
¨Oh,¨ says I.
¨Don´t worry. Be happy.¨
¨Right.¨
We went - Jose, the waitress Jeimy, her younger cousin, and I - over the bridge to El Parque de Los Espheros in Palmar Sur. The large stone spheres around the park had been brought in from the jungle, where thousands had been found between Palmar Norte and northern Panama. Some were even found on an island far off the coast. They range from about tennis ball size to two meters in diameter and are often perfectly round. Nobody knows how or why they were made, or why they were often found arranged perfectly mimicking certain constellations. An awesome mystery, to be sure.
Jose acted as our translator as we poked around the spheres and exchanged bits of language for each others edification. Naturally, we began with profanities and digressed from there. I learned perfectly vulgar ways of expressing in Spanish just about every concieveable human emotion. We also traded some bombas - rhyming four-liners originating in the Guanacaste region, announced by yelling ¨BOMBA!¨
I asked Jose to take a picture of us on one of the larger spheres, but because he is mostly blind the lens swung wildly in every direction except at us as he tried in vain to distinguish our figures on the viewscreen. Finally, he took out a single lens from his broken pair of glasses and used it to focus in first on the camera, then focus the camera in on us.
We sat by the river and watched some locals leaping into the water from the high bridge. It became apparent that I was something of a novelty to the girls. There was much giggling and taking of pictures from afar. Noon passed and I decided to stay another night to get an early start on the long ride to Golfito. We walked back to town and I slowly began to realize that Jose was trying to arrange something between Jeimy and I. I was introduced to her mother and father as we passed them on the street. Her brother appeared and we all piled into his SUV and went to the beach. There, Jose folded up bits of the foil-lining from a cigarette box and made an origami flower. He gave it to me and pointed to Jeimy, winking and smiling his gummy smile.
Ticos have a huge knack for origami. Everywhere you go, a hopeful young Tico is producing an intricately folded US dollar or Costa Rican Rojo and urging you to open it. There is a way to do it, but it isn´t obvious. Others, like Jose, make flowers, boxes, balloons, from the foil of their cigarette packs. The mischevious glee they get from such tricks says a lot about the national character. Pura vida. Pure life. Don´t worry - Be happy.
That evening, after everyone had gone home, Jose and I went to a bar called Casa Blanca. Jose ordered us Imperial and turtle´s eggs. The eggs, which appeared in a small window behind the bar, were served raw suspended in ¨blood¨, a spicy tomato juice. The experience was pretty much like taking an oyster shooter - tasty and exotic, but mildly repulsive if you happen to think about it too much halfway through. Judge me not, twas a cultural endeavor!
After the eggs, Jose turned to me and said morosly, ¨she will cry when you leave tomorrow.¨ I was getting sick of hearing it. He had taken every opportunity to remind me of how much my departure would shatter her heart throughout the day. Whatever happened to ¨dont worry - be happy¨? I wanted to cry out and silence this strange charade. After all, the extent of our romantic involvement had been a few half-comprehended exchanges in my broken and her machine gun Spanish, and maybe a total of fifteen minutes splashing around together at the beach.
But what could I say? Jose had behaved like a true gentleman all along - first offering his friendship to a stranger in a new town, then conducting a tour of the locales of undeniable archaeological import, and finally topping it off with a beaming young bride-to-be who cooks a mean casado. Some pay great sums for a Costa Rican package of such a nature, and my new friend had taken it upon himself to drop it right into my lap, expecting nothing in personal gain.
I tried to explain my position, but the semantics didn´t carry.
¨It´s just, you see, it´s about inertia, man. Momentum. I can´t just up and get married now. Not now! I´ve only come so far, see, and, like, there´s a whole world out there, a whole world! It´s like an avalanche, ya know? If you just decide to stop halfway down the mountain, you get pummeled! It´s a precarious slope I´m travelling, my friend! I don´t even love her. Ya know? Not like that. How would it look, marrying a girl you don´t even love? It´s criminal! Besides, we can´t communicate, and what about the kids? I wouldn´t be able to communicate with my own children! Can you imagine how awful that would be for our relationship? It would tear us apart!¨
My dear friend didn´t seem to understand. He ordered more eggs.
The following morning I packed my bag and met Jose for one last hoorah at the soda. Jeimy brought us hot rice, beans, and sausage. About halfway through our breakfast my friend began, ¨what will you do for your poor girl?¨ But I cut him off with what must have been a sufficiently menacing look. He didn´t mention her again. I said adios, then, and shook Old Jose´s hand. He is a good man and his brief friendship was a blessing. I gave Jeimy a hug and a customary kiss on the cheek.
¨No te preocupes,¨ I whispered softly into her ear. ¨Se a feliz.¨
written by  chaddeal on January 18, 2009 from Palmar Norte, Costa Rica

Golfito - Limpio y Bonito
Golfito, Costa Rica
Palmar Norte to Golfito - 81 Km
I had known from glimpses at my map that the pacific highway 34 intersects the Pan-American at Palmar Norte. I had anticipated a mighty thing, pulsing with banana-laden semis, flatbeds transporting chunks of space shuttle, huge tankers distributing imported spice of life. The Great Pan-American would span six lanes at least, and I would glide down a broad shoulder, unnoticed amongst the general hub-bub of the road.
Har har!
While mostly flat and well-paved, the highway lacked any shoulder aside from a white stripe dotted with reflectors, designating the absolute edge of the pavement. Fortunately, the trucks and busses roaring by on the narrow two-lane road were courteous and mindful of my peddled sojourn, and the only true obstacle was the sheer distance to Golfito. The cycling elite would certainly sneer - 50 miles? Child´s play! - but to them I say happily: sit on it and rotate!
You won´t catch me in spandex and clip-on´s anyday.
I stopped in Chacarita, where the road deviates west to the Osa Peninsula, and talked for a while with two dudes hitchhiking on the roadside. They were from Vermont and were just returning from Panama City. One of them, with a bushy beard and stretched earlobes, pluckled out a bluegrass tune on a gas-can banjo and the traffic wizzed by. They were heading north to join a travelling circus from Guadelajara.
Godspeed!
About two hours later I reached the Briceño, where a shoddy dirt road made a shortcut of 12 kilometers to Golfito. By highway, 26 kilometers remained. Jose had warned me about the shortcut, repesented by a brown dotted line on my map. It was dangerous, plagued by ill-intentioned peon peasants, and very hilly. But standing there on the roadside, burning beneath a cruel midday sun, Jose´s advice seemed far-away and diluted. I turned down the dirt path.
About a hundred meters down the road I passed an old Tico walking his bicycle out of a church. His right arm was amputated just above the wrist. I asked him in wack-Spanish about what lie ahead. His bright eyes lit up and he gestured wildly with his severed appendage as he spoke: ¨Es mas cerca...(Spanish blah blah blah)...muchas cuestas...(blah blah)...muy malo.¨
He punctuated the notion by drawing his blunt nubbin slowly and deliberately across his throat, grinning savagely from ear to ear.
I took the long way.
The ride was beautiful. Densely jungled mountains, home to the indigenous Borucas, towered to the east, draped in heavy grey clouds. Trees of mango, papaya, palm, and a cannabis look-alike lined the long, tiring road. A light drizzle graced me for the better part of an hour as I topped the winding coastal range, dropping down for several gravity-driven kilometers into the bayside fishing town of Golfito.
In 1938, the multinational United Brands fruit company established a factory in Golfito, exporting bananas and bringing prosperity and education to the small village. UB relocated its factory near Palmar after a three month long strike in 1985, leaving Golfito in shambles. The town declined into alcoholism, mass unemployment, crime, and prostitution. In the early 1990s, the Costa Rican government established the Deposito Libre, a tax-free shopping compound in northern Golfito which resembles both a carnival and a concentration camp.
With the improving ecomony from the influx of tourists and Tico shoppers, Golfito now enjoys a cleaner but not yet pristine image. Half the town feels like the Central American version of a squatted art colony in Kreuzberg. On the forested hillside, the former estates of UB executives stand vibrantly in myriad shades of pastel. Rusting fishing boats creak against a weathered dock. Remenants of old Golfito crumble like pre-colonial ruins on the roadside, consumed by vines and vegetation.
A banner hangs over mainstreet, ironically reading: ¨Golfito - Limpio y Bonito¨
I got a budget room and wandered around town. After dark, I found a small cantina and ordered an Imperial. It was a gringo bar, as it turned out, and the middle-aged woman sitting next to me struck up conversation. She was the new owner, as of a few days ago, and they were throwing a birthday party for one of the bartenders. She offered me some spagetti and garlic bread. Giant squid-like fishing lures hung from the ceiling by the hundreds. I mentioned my next destination, Pavones, and she referred me to Capitan Dan, who could be found around noon drinking at a fisherman´s bar down the road.
¨Macrocosm is in the Microcosm and thus you get to God.¨ -Sufi proverb
written by  chaddeal on January 19, 2009 from Golfito, Costa Rica

Questing for Jon
Zancudo, Costa Rica
Shortly after noon the next day I was gliding over the blue-green waters of Golfo Dulce, down the coast to Zancudo. A hazy Osa Peninsula rose across the gulf, tinted gloomy grey by the downpour of a solitary, towering thunderhead.
I patched a leak in my rear tire on the desolate beach of Zancudo and drank a cool pipa found lying in the shade of a palm. Then I was off, cycling down the beach for several kilometers towards the distant green hobbit hill of Puerto Pilon. Pilon is remote, undeveloped, and absolutely beautiful. If you even think about constructing some stinkhole suburban retirement block here I will personally shoot you in both knee caps.
I pulled into the one real establishment in town, a cantina, to enquire about ¨Jon de los Estados Unidos.¨ Jon lives on a piece of land next to a plot owned by a couple whom I´d worked with this past summer in Idaho. They haven´t visited the place yet, so when I mentioned that I´d be going to Costa Rica they suggested I check the area out for them, meet the natives.
The bartender was a young woman with a fantastic talent for profanity. She addressed me as ¨mi amor¨ and then continued her tirade to the large woman sitting next to me. I gathered she was speaking of some ¨mujer¨, and every other word was ¨puta¨ this and ¨car´e pica¨ that. She was quite the entertainment. She hadn´t, however, heard of any Jon - not a good sign in a town of less than 100.
The interaction felt like a real life version of the electronic Role Playing Games I´d played as a kid. I was a Level Six Supersonic Bicycle Ninja engaged in an epic quest, bumping into avatars assuming various roles and pressing ¨B¨ for ¨Ask about Jon.¨
I set out, following a rather vague series of directions to the land in question. By default, all directions in Costa Rica lean towards complications. For example: ¨Go 100m past where the church used to be. Turn right at the big barking dog. Go 25m past the old man smoking a pipe and stop at the yellow house with palm trees.¨
This is common.
Eventually, I found what may have been the correct road, but was immediately forced to flee by a giant, frothing dog. I went back to the cantina. After some time, an old gringo showed up. I eagerly sprung the inquiry on him. ¨
¨Well,¨ he said. ¨There are about twenty Jon´s from the US around here. You got a last name?¨
I did not. We talked.
Ferrel is the self-proclaimed gringo elder of the greater Pavones region. He was in aa abrasive mood due to trouble with Costa Rican immigration, and the conversation ended up being about as enjoyable as a handful of sand in the crack.
It got dark and I biked the 7 kilometers south to Pavones in search of brighter company. Pavones is home to what many consider to be the greatest surf break in the world. The point break requires a good south or southwest swell to truly blossom, and as such, the surf was only a reflection of what it could be. Regardless, the head-high perfect left barrel was a better wave than I´ve seen anywhere else along the way.
This morning I awoke refreshed and ready to tackle my quest. I ate some gallo pinto and drank a cup of coffee in a restaurant/cantina which used to be a running-house for the legendary Brotherhood drug cartel. Rain came and didn´t stop for hours. I ate french fries and read. Two Americans sat near me. By the way they spoke I could tell they were locals. The ex-pats carry a certain loopy indolence, each believing themselves to be the last to legitimately move in before ¨everything changed.¨ I asked about Jon.
They didn´t recall him at first, but after some conversing the woman deduced that she had met him once at a Thanksgiving dinner. Aha! The location complimented my confounding set of directions. I sensed victory. Level Seven status was imminent.
¨Wait, wait,¨ said the man. ¨Isn´t he the Jon who got in the fight? The Big Fight?¨
¨Oh, right. Yes, he got into some ugliness. He´s back in the States.¨
The news had an odd effect. Not only was it anticlimactic, but it cultivated strange emotions within me. I felt for the first time alone, somehow, bereft of purpose. Which was stupid. In reality, the quest was peripheral, a casual favor. But all along Pilon was my only true destination; everything else was just fun along the way. Now I felt like the Cowardly Lion - I had outwitted the poppy narcotic slums of Jaco, weathered through personal injury, and narrowly avoided spontaneous wedlock. I had made it to the wizards threshold - The Great and Power OZ! - and found nothing but an empty set, a few bored stagehands dismantling the cheap pyrotechnics display.
Well, what the hell? The rain broke and I biked to Pilon anyways, just to see. This time I slipped past the canine sentinel undetected. I encountered a Tica sweeping her porch and pressed ¨B.¨ Yes, he lived just ahead and to the left. No, he was not home. He´d gone back to the US. My sense of valor was revived and I pressed on. I went to Jon´s house, the only other on the small street, and a strange thing happened. A man came out and introduced himself as Philip. He claimed no knowledge of Jon. He was, he said, the only person living here. The house matched the ex-pat woman´s description exactly.
I apologized and went off, skidding down the steep, rutty red clay hill. If the situation was what it appeared to be, which is not uncommon, I probably would have ended up in some sort of altercation if I´d pressed the issue. I biked back to Pavones and drank a slow beer, considering my efforts. I decided I had done my best and I washed my hands of the wayward quest.
For now, I happily remain a Level Six Supersonic Bicycle Ninja with Intergalactic Tendencies.
written by  chaddeal on January 21, 2009 from Zancudo, Costa Rica

Paso Canoas is Ugly
Canoas, Costa Rica
Pavones to Paso Canoas - 60 Km
I left Pavones around noon, huffing and puffing on the steep, winding dirt road over the coastal range to Conte. The air was very hot and I felt a bit delusional. My surroundings took on a surreal quality, and topping a particularly demanding hill in the middle of nowhere, I beheld an awesome sight. A solitary house, no larger than a garden shack, stood next to the road, hanging precariously over a great cliff. From somewhere within the house played ¨The Wizard¨ by Black Sabbath at top volume. The only person in sight was an old woman sitting on the porch.
Knitting.
A sign on the gate read ¨Cuidado: Perro Bravo!¨ and at the base of the sign, as if orchestrated for a picture postcard, sat a pocket-sized lap dog, smiling preciously at me as I rolled by.
I stopped and rubbed my eyes. I stared. I laughed! I laughed until I cried, so absurd was the desolate scene. It tickled me to the core to see such a thing.
The gods might be crazy, but they definately have a sense of humor.
The road dropped down into Conte, and then a small town called Bella Luz de La Vaca (literally, ¨Beautiful Light of the Cow¨). The air reeked of dung, the sharp odor of water apples fermenting on the roadside, and a sticky sweet smoke wafting from the oil-palm factory. The ride was pleasant and totally uneventful, aside from the occasional midday shower driving me to seek shelter in the nearest cantina or soda.
I considered my agenda.
What was I doing here, wheeling around like a jerk in the middle of nowhere?
My trip, I concluded, is Sal Paradise meets George Washington Hayduke the Third, Easy Rider meets Siddhartha, Forest Gump meets Moses, Baba Ram Dass meets Harold and the Purple Crayon. And while it may be difficult to iterate my motives outright - indeed, I may not even know exactly what they are, yet - I sense that something good must come of all this. It will amount to something, form a cohesive whole.
This must be the basic assumption behind any meaningful life, I knew, for without even the vaguest, most unspecified optimism, we truly have nothing.
With this thought I rolled into Paso Canoas, the ugliest place in Costa Rica (besides San Jose). Located on the border of Panama, Paso Canoas resembles Tijuana concentrate. You get the feeling that youll end up with hepatitis if you stand in one place for too long. Everywhere vendors shout crass advertisements for their wares: sunglasses, pirated mp3 discs, washing machines. The border is loose to the point of non-existance - basically a hodge-podge duty-free stripmall where one can pass freely from country to country through the incadescent shopping frenzy. I wandered unknowingly from Panama to Costa Rica and back several times in search of a decent room.
The next morning I went to the immigrations window. I was told to put on a shirt and was then bounced between windows and lines in no clear order until finally, hours later, I was allowed to proceed to Panama.
The Beloved wants no lord, no master -
She wants anstonishment and devastation!
Im like a monk, safe in my cloister -
She wants me to give up everything
and roam the world like a dervish!
-Attar
written by  chaddeal on January 22, 2009 from Canoas, Costa Rica

Panama - Shirts Required
David, Panama
Paso Canoas to David, Panama - 60 Km
When the guy at the immigrations window told me to put on a shirt, I considered it a matter of personal preference, an individual aversion to sunburnt gringo flesh.
When the Panamanian cop at the open-air border crossing told me to put on a shirt, I deduced it was localized mandate, an attempt at creating an official atmosphere.
When the machine-gun wielding soldier a few kilometers down the road flagged me over and told me to put on a shirt, I realized the bare-chested ban was a national phenomenon.
I gathered the words "camisa," "boleta," and "cárcel." He clasped each wrist with the opposite hand, illustrating the concept.
Which struck me as odd.
Who decides to enforce a no shirt, no service law in a sweltering hot Central American country? It seemed presumptuous and uncouth. Even worse, it was cramping my style.
The Pan-American stretch to David was long, dull, hot, and bumpy. About halfway to my destination, I wiped-out in some gravel and lost most of the skin on my left shoulder. The stinging pain kept me more or less present for the remaining hour to David.
I stayed at a hostel on the outskirts of town. I went out to a disco with some fellow travelers and the hostel owner- a lively, good-hearted dude from New York. We drank Abuelo rum and talked over the booming Reggaeton beats. The hostel owner looked like a young William S. Burroughs. He told me his story, part of it - former producer of the Cannabis Cup, old friend of the producer of the Broadway presentation of "Hair", member of a yage church, and past owner of a travel agency which was, in fact, used by William S. Burroughs. A tranquil dude with a keen sense of humanity. We stayed out most of the night talking, sipping rum, and occasionally dancing with insane Panamanian girls.
The currency here is the US dollar, called "balboas." Everything is unbelievably cheap.
Beer, the Ultimate Denominator, is 35 cents a bottle.
God
and I have become
like two giant fat people living
in a tiny
boat.
We
keep bumping into
each other
and laughing
- Hafiz
written by  chaddeal on January 24, 2009 from David, Panama

Bipedal Once More
Panama, Panama
After some deliberation, I decided to ditch the bike at the hostel in David. Panama City was about double the distance I´d already cycled and the Pan-American stretch would be a brutal, burning inland trek. Furthermore, my chode hurt. I would have to get my pack into panniers or on a trailer when I decided move on.
Instead, I caught a ride with Miguel, who had sought me out on couchsurfing.com weeks earlier to invite me for a stay at his place in the city. In the car also was Kaj the Dutch James Bond (who Miguel had also found on CS), Froste the Swede (pronounced like the snowman), and Ricky from San Francisco. The drive was long and hot and I was thankful that I was not cycling the dull, hilly distance.
We arrived in the city well after dark and picked up yet another couchsurfer from a pub. His name was Daniel, a cheery dude from England. We all dropped our things at Miguel´s downtown flat and went out for a night on the town.
A causeway extends several kilometers over the water of the southward-facing bay of Panama, connecting three islands with a built-up road and offering a fantastic view of the towering downtown. The location was US millitary access only until control of the canal was given over to Panama on December 31, 1999 in accordance with the Torrijos-Carter Treaty. Several students had been gunned down in protests against the American control of Panamanian territory, leading to negotiations which resulted in the signing of the treaty on September 7, 1977. Now the causeway houses bars, restaurants, and marinas, with the occasional converted bunker as the only reminder of the unique location´s history.
Miguel took us out to a waterfront bar owned by a friend of his. Huge tankers loomed between us and the city, which shimmered like a futuristic vision manifest across the dark water, waiting for passage through the Panama canal. Nella - Miguels friend, a beautiful woman, all smiles - served us buckets of Atlas and Panama cervesa. Kaj, fluent and suave in most languages in existence, was already chatting in both English and Spanish with two women at the bar. We stayed late into the night talking, drinking, and laughing together like old friends.
The Gang at Nella´s place
Nella and I, feeling breezy
The next day Miguel took us on a tour of the city. The place was exactly as I´d pictured it - all white, dense, oozing history. I took it as a good omen, like forgotten faces from a dream, as we wandered the crumbling edifices of Casco Viejo. The city was destroyed in 1671 by Welsh pirate Henry Morgan and a band of 1,400 men. Old Panama was looted and burned, though to this day nobody knows whether the flames were set by the pirates or by the residents of Panama in a last ditch effort to stave off the raiders. The city was reconstructed in 1673 about five miles southwest of Old Panama with a great wall on the ocean-side. The remains of this ancient settlement are still inhabited - the poor in apartments hundred of years old and the wealthy in renovated complexes with Brazilian restaurants downstairs. The President himself lives in the gentrified outskirts of Casco Viejo, with a great balcony looking over the bay towards the skyscrapers of modern day downtown Panama City.
Casco Viejo
Downtown from Casco Viejo
That night we went out to a casino in Miguel´s neighborhood of El Cangrejo. I won $1.84 on Texas Tea and cashed in. In an insightful reversal of roles, we laughed and became oddly giddy at the realization that we were being carefully watched like small prey by the various gaggles of Colomian hookers, who sulked about the place in bright clothing and fake breasts, ever searching for a glimmer of ¨yes¨ in our naive gringo eyes. Miguel took us to a bar down the street and a Colombian girl squeezed my butt on the way in. Another suddenly began rubbing my belly as I waited absent-mindedly for a beer.
We thought it was hilarious, somehow - stupidly enjoying all the attention over a game of pool. I realized that Miguel had taken us here intentionally. He was getting a kick out of the way we percieved the decadence with novelty. We joked about our newfound popularity for a while, but then, as if someone had pressed a button, the realities of the situation sunk in and at once we were somber. Fat gringo wastoids walked away with beautiful young women who would never find love notes scrawled on napkins hidden in their pockets. The thin film of humor had popped. We left.
The bus for San Blas left at 5am sharp. We did the sensible thing and stayed up playing pool until the 4WD SUV pulled up at the first light of dawn. At the end of the three hour ride to the Caribbean coast we were awoken by the driver, who yelled ¨EVERYBODY OUT!¨ as if we were soldiers landing for the first time in Vietnam. We were all foggy and disoriented except for Froste, the prudent Swede, who had gone to bed shortly after midnight. We were loaded into a large canoe-type boat with a 15hp motor and skimmed across the morning waters, registering nothing.
Kaj, Ricky, and I - drugged and being transported to Guantanamo Bay
Zonked in the car to San Blas
San Blas is an archipelago of 378 smallish islands, home of the indigenous Kuna people, who were driven from the mainland during the Spanish invasion hundreds of years ago. In 1925 the Kuna fought Panama and won their autonomy; the entire province is now exempt from national taxes. Due to the limited gene-pool on the islands, the Kuna are among the highest in the world in rates of albinism. But rather than being seen as outcasts, albino children are considered "moon children", touched by divinity, and often end up becoming chiefs or other upper-rung officials.
We docked on a larger island covered in palm thatched huts and ate a breakfast of bread and instant coffee. Hammock were strewn everywhere. I later learned that, while most of us enjoy the leisurely function of a good hammock, the Kuna take it to the next level - they are born, sleep, and are buried in hammocks. Their cultural arte-de-force is the mola, a bright and colorful style of patterning worn as clothing or on small rectangles of fabric depicting items of food and nature. The women wore brightly colored head-scarfs, intense blouses, and vibrant beads which snaked about their dark calfs. The overall effect was clown/ninja/lollipop, island style - short, broad-shouldered, and easy, easy going.
A Kuna woman in the city
After an hour ride, we were deposited on a deserted island about half the size of a football field (American) and left for the day. I laid in the sand and tried to sleep. Ricky napped in his hammock. Froste read a book. Kaj met everybody on the island, alternately joking loudly in French, Spanish, German, and a few languages I couldn´t recognize. Later, when the spice of life returned, Ricky and Kaj initiated a coconut tossing contest while I constructed a make-shift Tiki god from debris. Just before sunset, a couple canoe-things buzzed over the horizon and took us back to the main island.
San Blas - living in a postcard
The next day we were taken with about ten others to a more distant plot of sand, called by the locals ¨dog island¨ for an unapparent reason. We snorkled around an old shipwreck and drank coconut juice. I found some shells and made a hemp necklace for a friend. Others joined me. We all sat around in the shade of a palm, weaving away. It was pleasant - there was absolutely nothing to do. Eventually the boats buzzed back and we we loaded up.
Tropical craft time in San Blas
Back on the big island we met a few Kunas about our age and had some drinks with them on an overturned canoe. The island had electricity from 6pm to 11pm, so when it finally sputtered out, Ricky produced two small Mag-Lites and spun them around in an wild raving dance. The natives thought he was god. They fed us shots of a local moonshine and chided us to teach them how to do the light thing.
Around three in the morning, one of them insisted that I meet his family. So off we went, around the corner, into an open thatched doorway. Several people slept around the small room in hammocks and he woke them all, introducing his mother, his sister, his aunt. Aunt had a small child suckling from her breast. We exchanged an awkward ¨hola¨ and I left, wondering why the young Kuna had taken me there in the first place.
At dawn we left the island and headed for the city. We met up with Miguel. Daniel rejoined us from his own stint in San Blas and we all climbed a small mountain which overlooks beautiful Panama City. In the evening we went back to the casino, where Ricky made twenty bucks at blackjack in five minutes and I broke even. Then out to a hip little bar in Casco Viejo, located in the remains of the old city bank. You could still see the vault locks in the doorway. It was Froste´s birthday, the big 21, so we bought him an excess of tequila and he danced like a man possessed. Lord of the dance!
One interesting side-effect of travel is the opportunity to observe this flimsy collection of identities called ¨I¨ in new and unusual contexts. Our group, it seemed, unhinged the bubbly, bold, and free-flowing aspects in each other, psyche-clockwork-champagne. We had excellent synergy, a classic click, and we laughed and danced like idiots, like old friends. After a while we merged with a group of American and Canadian ex-pat girls who were living in the city - talked, danced.
Then off to club, where Hooker Affective Disorder hit quick. I chatted with one, ¨Jessica,¨ for a while, telling her we were astronauts scheduled for the moon from Cape Canaveral in a week. We were on our last bit of study down here in Panama City, practicing communication skills with foreign entities. It felt like it should have been funny, but it wasn´t. She smiled and faked laughter - always waiting for that deal-sealing ¨yes.¨
Kaj flew off to Ecuador this morning. Ricky, Froste, and I went to the Miraflores lock on the canal and watched unfathomably huge ships being lowered 16.5 meters on the last leg of their 8-10 hour crossing to the Pacific. Over 27,000 workers died in the construction of the canal, most under the original French overseer who intended to build a direct, lock-less channel straight across. The US took over construction and the mammoth project was opened for business in 1914. Now, over 14,000 ships pass through annually, saving time and operation costs necessary to round Cape Horn. The amount of land removed in its construction, if strung together in flat-bed rail cars, would circle the planet four times.
Wow.
Biking by the Panama canal
written by  chaddeal on January 29, 2009 from Panama, Panama

Marooned in David
David, Panama
There we were - staring from a dock at the edge of Lake Gatun. A towering cargo ship floated by - a sidelong skyscraper, chided on its way by a doting tugboat. Half-through that Panama canal. All 77 kilometers.
An old man gutted a live fish, still wriggling, on a weathered wooden table and tossed the guts to a long-billed bird spinning circles in the water.
Miguel pointed to a large lime-green building across the lake. The former School of the Americas, he said.
We had to check it out.
The School of the Americas operated in Panama from 1946 to 1984, training over 61,000 American and Latin American military personnel in the delicate arts of torture and interrogation. Among the more notorious artisans schooled here are former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, Bolivia's talented Hugo Banzer, and terrorist Luis Posada Corriles. The School has received much criticism over the years for training CIA and special operations forces abroad in methods which blatantly violate human rights. After closing down in '84 in concurrence with the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty, the School relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia under the name "The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation" (how ominous is that?) where it operates to this day.
School of the Americas
Gamboa Resort (Former School of the Americas)
The building was reminiscent of the hotel in "The Shining". It had a definite presence. Once the most infamous university of torture, it is now a high-end jungle lodge resort, complete with swimming pools, restaurant, and shimmering chandeliers. We walked around the place, absorbing the latent karma lurking beneath the surface. Large gringos milled about, oblivious to the sinister undertones. I took a pee in the marble-lined bathroom and the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
Unsavory things had conspired here. You could sense it. Yet the only indicator of the buildings dark past was an unexplained photograph, faded and half-hidden by some potted palms, of a few old white men in safari hats standing in the jungle with about some shirtless indigenous women, wrinkled breasts sagging in the sunlight.
"National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jungle Survival Training - 1954," the inscription read.
The connection is shady, but nonetheless suspicious. After all, everyone knows that NASA is a front organization for diverting astronomical amounts of tax revenue to clandestine government programs. Like that whole business with the Mars lander not really working out because half the team was using the English measurement system while the other half was going metric. Whoops! A zillion dollars, disintegrated - just like that. Really???
Anyways, we took off the next day. Miguel had been the best host on the planet and he'd shared the generous spirit of couch surfing with all of us. Thanks a lot man!
Ricky, Froste, and I bussed for most of the day up to Santa Catalina, a small beach town on the Pacific. The town was totally dead. Come 9pm, we were the last people awake in the whole village, sharing a flask of seco by the beach. Hermit crabs clambered around, going nowhere, doing nothing. Midnight rolled around and we found a bonfire mysteriously burning unattended on the sand. We fed the thing, made it huge. Two Panamanians walked by with large pails of fish caught fresh from the ocean. We gave them two dollars and they gave us two big, silver fish which we cooked over the fire. Forste's viking instincts took over - he took command of the operation, grunting like Leif Ericson when the fish fat crackled in the flames.
The next day we checked the surf. It blew. We swam.
Now we are back in David, come full circle. Bambu is an awesome little hostel with a warm, relaxed vibe. Everywhere else is pouring rain and flooding, including my planned destination of Boquete.
Marooned in approximate paradise - stay tuned.
Home Medicine
Last night
we attempted
a lint
transplant
but
her navel
rejected
it.
-Tom Robbins
http://www.bikeblogcollection.com/
written by  chaddeal on February 6, 2009 from David, Panama

Bikeless and Beyond
Panama, Panama
You know you´re a jerk when you wake up one fuzzy Sunday morning and realize that you are on vacation from your vacation.
Hoo hah!
The meat of last week was spent idling away by the picturesque poolside of Bambu hostel in David. My intentions were to get to Boquete to rock climb, but the Fates had other plans. A storm from the Caribbean was fouling up half the country with endless rain. It is said that the best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans. And how! This whole thing started as a bike trip to Nicaragua, yet somehow I no longer have a bike and am flying to Cartagena, Colombia first thing tomorrow.
Selah, kimosabe.
Bambu hostel
All doom and gloom elsewhere, but the sun was shining strong at Bambu. Some people splashed around in the pool. Others lounged around in hammocks drinking Balboa or strumming a guitar. Clarisa the resident housecleaner, an absolute dynamo of a girl overflowing with a post-adolescent peppery sucrose energy, taught Ricky and I some games with dominoes. Later we exchanged language, each sharing valuable profanities in our native tounge. At sporadic intervals she would suddenly hop atop the closest object and dance with herself, eyes closed, the whole world dissolving around her liquid sway. She showed me how to merengue but I couldn´t keep up - rusty gringo hips not built for latin groove.
It must have been around three in the morning. I was fast asleep in a hammock in the backyard when I awoke to the sensation of a weight upon my chest. Oh shit. I saw this on the Discovery Channel. The Demon Dream. Old Aborigines folk tale. You think you´ve woken up, but its just an illusion. The demon sits there, leering, slowly squelching the very essence of life from your body as you lie there paralyzed, helpless. The lucky ones wake up at the last possible second, gasping and coughing in the dark. The others, well, no ones ever lived to tell the tale.
I squinted my eyes, peering through the darkness. It was a girl. A latina. Where did she come from?
I stared. She smiled. I waved. She kissed me - a patient, passionate kiss tasting of rum and bubble gum. Then she stood up, rocked my hammock softly, and disappered into the dark with a whispered ¨ciao.¨
I rolled over and slept like a baby.
Onwards! It creeps up like an itch and quickly eclipses all. I had come a long way and my inertia was potent. My Australian millitary rucksack, once a rich green, had faded to a sickly yellow-beige. But I had become lazy in David - sitting around like an ape all day, getting soft around the edges. Everyday I sit here I get weaker, and every day Charlies out there in the bush he gets stronger. It was time to go. I exchanged my bicycle for the lodging and a formidable beer tab and took off. I considered hitchhiking at first, to jumpstart the grand combustion of Adventure, but ended up at the bus stop anyways.
Fat women sat around tending tables of sweets. A legless old man stared off, eyes full of sorrow, from a hand-powered bicycle. Solemn Chiriquis in vibrant garments held the hands of skinny children. Someone rifled through a garbage can.
I wanted to give them all of my money, each of them, and dissapear starving and mad like Knut Hamsun. But not one of them asked for anything, not a penny.
Eventually the bus arrived and everybody loaded up. The scenery for most of the Pan-american is a hybrid of mid-western grasslands, distant cloud-topped mountains, and the impervious streetside palms. The Chiriqui province has a reputation as the Texas of Panama. The general assumption is that we are the shit and should probably suceed from the nation on principle alone, but what the hell? We´ll grace the country with our presence anyways.
The people around me slept. Movies played on a small television hanging from the ceiling starring people like Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damm. The driver joked over the radio with another driver the entire time, making funny voices and saying things I could not comprehend. He made sure to honk at every single woman we passed.
We rolled into Panama City late in the night. It´s like Miami, they say, except more English is spoken here. The full moon is tonight, and in some circles thats a big deal. As for me, I´ve got a mission to accomplish. A mission from Bog!
¨The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.¨ -H.S.T.
written by  chaddeal on February 9, 2009 from Panama, Panama

Colombia - The Only Danger is You´ll Never Want to Sleep
Cartagena, Colombia
Well, shoot me now. The Great Work is done.
My first mission was a failure - finding gringo John in Pavones. That one couldn´t be helped. My second mission, rock climbing in Boquete, was prevented by foul weather. My third mission, however, semi-secret and occult in nature, was a smashing success.
It´s midnight in Panama. A full moon shimmers amongst a city of tankers, all lit up like industrial urban birthday cakes on the quivering waters. Channel lights pulse red and blue in that dark place where the canal meets the Pacific. The mighty Bridge of the Americas looms in the distance.
Suddenly, the sound of water, a stream of it, tinkling into the canal. And there´s somebody whistling. It sounds like ¨Ave Maria,¨ but after about five notes everything goes wrong and it transforms into an improvised acid jazz lick. A sigh of releif. A zipper. And then, silence. A door slams and a truck disappears down the causeway.
It was another late night at Nella´s place. Micah, my old roomate from Samara, was in the city for Spanish lessons and joined us for a night on the town. He once taught me the Cesar Malone trick - snapping and pssshing, calm and assertive - which halted many a persuing canine in its tracks as I bicycled across Costa Rica. Also along was Rookie, a part-time thespian from New Jersey, and Miguel, number one VIP at Nella´s bar.
The stereo played Abba while some fat millionaire bored us with talk about his boats and former Nascar career. He kept staring at Nella, claiming to be in love with her. Which is common. Everyone who meets Nella is in love with her. She glows. Her presence is like a warm blanket. Or, to be more regionally relevant, a silk sheet. You want to curl up with her and fall asleep. Instead we danced, all of us. Curtis Mayfield, Diana Ross, Billy Joel.
Before I knew it I was nodding off in a tiny two prop plane to Cartagena, flying over the Caribbean Sea northeast of the Darien province. The Pan-american highway stops on either side of the Darien gap. The gap, 160 kilometers long and about 50 wide, is largely impassable due to a geography of sheer mountains, dense rainforest, and savage swamplands. The first sucessful crossing of the Darien was completed in 1960 by a team of four adventurers in a 4WD Land Rover and Jeep. The expedition averaged 201 meters per day and lasted over 136 days. Subsequent crossings have ranged in length from 49 to 741 days. The area is inhabited by the indigenous Kuna and Embera-Wounaan people, as well as three Colombian guerrila rebel groups. As such, the most common route around the gap is either by air or by sea.
Cartagena
From the air, Cartagena looked a lot like Panama city. Towering waterfront condominiums for the rich and tin-roofs for the rest. The history is similar as well. The city was founded in 1533 by some Spanish dude. The place was then sieged by English pirate ¨Sir¨ Francis Drake, who went on to destroy 1/4 the city while waiting for the ransom (equivalent today to 200 million USD) to appear. In lieu of all this, the Spanish built a wall around the entire city and an armed fortress to stave off any future take over. The walls and fortress stand to this day, a stone testament to the tenacity of the Spanish architects.
Cartagena Fortress
And thank god for that. It is a sheer stroke of Providence that the place wasn´t settled by the English. Could you imagine the ramifications? The Colombian women, second most beautiful in the world (next to Argentinians), would be storming around with bad teeth and ill-fitting jeans, making crude demands for fried food and tea at odd hours.
Ye gods!
Incidentally, shortly after I checked into a hostel I ran into Daniel, the cheery Brit with whom I´d shared a belly rub for the combined price of one dollar from a lady of the night near Calle Uraguay back in Panama. She had bared her teeth and dug in her nails, growling slightly beneath her breath. It was creepy, yet intriguing.
Daniel had warned me about Colombia weeks ago. Most people have heard the story about the wayward backpacker in Brazil who had his drink spiked by a woman at the bar. She took him home, put him in a tub full of ice, and extracted all of his major organs to sell on the black market. The Colombian version is even worse. Similar story, except you don´t even have to be intoxcated to fall for this one.
You meet a knock-out girl with butt implants at the park or in old town. You talk. She smiles. She laughs. She likes you. So you walk together, arm in arm down the street. Who knows where you´ll end up? Who cares? She stops you at a street side fruit vendor. Insists you try the apples. Like an idiot, you agree. But this is no ordinary apple. You begin to feel strange. She whisks you away into a dim alleyway, saying nothing, suddenly serious. A strange feeling wells up in your throat. Your skin breaks out. A rusty cast-iron door swings open and rough hands pull you into the dark. The poison does its work, and within minutes the transformation is complete.
You´ve turned into a frog.
A leaflette dances on a breeze in the alleyway.
¨Grand Opening!¨ it reads. ¨La Femme Charmante - Fine French Cuisine.¨
We went out with a handful of people from the hostel and some folks Daniel had met through couchsurfing.com. We had some drinks in the Walled City district and shared stories from the road. One dude had toured a cocaine factory in the jungle. Another had found a full head of hair washed up on the beach in Aruba. I had just peed in the Panama canal beneath a full moon at midnight while whistling an improvised ¨Ave Maria.¨
A constant stream of vendors hassled us throughout the evening. They are more aggressive here, like horseflys. After a while you want to take off a sandal and smack them. They will say anything to get you to buy. One recalled the quixotic evening when he´d smoked pot with Bill Clinton right here in Cartagena, just to up the ante. Most have a few packets of cigarettes or Cohiba knock-offs as a pretense, but their true wares are quickly revealed. The pitch follows an organic heirarchy: Cocaine, marijuana, sunglasses, and as a last ditch effort, marracas. Now, I know plenty of people who could make a fine evening of some cocaine, marijuana, a new pair of shades, and a set of Colombian marracas - but my trip is of a different ilk.
I am questing for the very soul of the Earth, the subtle motions behind it all, the common thread, the unspoken thing, the nougat filling, the essence. And it won´t be found in some one place, for the very fact that it is everywhere, all at once, connecting and nullifying everything.
Like the Force.
I´m just getting the taste of it.
The universe,
all of it,
is the prolonged pronunciation
of some unutterable word,
ever-changing.
To tap-in and hear,
there you find divinity.
written by  chaddeal on February 10, 2009 from Cartagena, Colombia

Taganga - Welcome to the Mothership
Taganga, Colombia
Colombia is in a state of anxious frenzy in these final moment before Carnaval. Gaggles of shirtless youths swarm the streets on bicycles by the hundreds, whooping and whistling, slapping taxi windows. A full samba band plays at top volume in the middle of a supermarket, heralding the advent of a cutting-edge condiment that will revolutionize the way you experience a sandwich. Women dance in the street with baskets of fruit on their heads. The bus driver lets you ride for free, provided you dance in the aisles with everyone else.
Approximate Heaven on Earth
Taganga is a bitchin little fishing village gone hippy Mecca on the Caribean. The village creeps up the sides of a costal valley covered in dried-up trees and cacti. The weather is arid and windy, resonating an acute nostalgia within me for home in eastern San Diego. I´ve been hanging out with some fellow travelers whom I´d met at Holiday hostel in Cartagena - Brad from Canada, Sophie from the bloody UK, and Ruby from Australia.
We went out last night to a hilltop hangout, something of a strawhut perched on the side of a mountain. You have to climb up a good stretch of crumbling Stone steps and you feel like you are approaching the site of an ancient Olmec ruins. When you get there, you find about twelve people hanging out, sitting on the floor with a beer, David Bowie pulsing from the stereo. A sign hangs on the balcony, where the village glows far below, reading: ¨No more than 6 people on the balcony at a time, please.¨ And something about the authentic construction of the place compels you to obey.
After some time we descended from the funky hut and danced to hits from the ´80s at a disco in town. I spun around with a few bright-eyed Colombian girls and, in a moment of precedence of epic proportions, even managed to effectivly salsa dance with a girl from Holland.
All fun and games, sure sure, but the real adventure kicks off on Monday.
Stay tuned.
PS - Blog name update. Sure I sold the bike, but really, it´s all a cycle. Dilate the sphincter of your mind, Jim.
PSS - Happy Valentines Day - go squeeze someone for me.
written by  chaddeal on February 14, 2009 from Taganga, Colombia

Ciudad Perdida
Ciudad Perdida, Colombia
The bus rolled up at 9am sharp, multi-colored and blasting insane Colombian carnaval tunes. The contraption was half psychedelic hippy bus, half wild animal park tour vehicle. I expected to find Neal Cassady at the wheel, raving mad in a off-beige safari hat. We loaded up - Ruby, Daniel, Sophie, Brad, and I - and rode into Santa Marta to pick up seven others for a five day trek into the heart of the savage jungles of Colombia.
The Magic Bus
The terrain shifted over the next hour from coastal desert valley to humid mountain jungle. Just past a small banana farming village, the bus veered off the road. Some soldiers instructed us to unload our bags and proceeded to perform a search which seemed to serve a purpose more ritual than functional. We were loosely patted down by the young soldiers, most looking about seventeen years old, all toting automatic rifles and smiling shyly whenever someone spoke to them.
Then off we went on a rutty, sideways road which cut up the side of a mountain, into the wild core of the jungle. The magic bus kicked into 4WD, groaning and growling over the impossible road. We rocked wildly from side to side as the bus negotiated the terrain, leaning far over harrowing cliffs and then nearly plowing into the mountainside on the next turn. Several times everyone was made to exit the bus so that the psychedelic beast could roar through a thick stretch of clay mud and puddles. Vast valleys of dense jungle gave way to towering cloud-topped mountains, frothing rivers rushing far below.
The magic bus, enduring the hard times
Eventually we pulled into a tiny community of houses in the middle of nowhere and began to walk. Leaf cutter ants streamed across the trail toting upright bits of green leafage many times the mass of their own bodies. A bacteria on their bodies cultivates a fungus on the leaves, which grows into a food source in large underground nests.
We hiked for several hours, stopping occasionally to swim in a river or enjoy one of the many amazing hilltop views. We arrived at camp around sunset, a riverside Eden sparkling with lightning bugs and surrounded by lovely smelling datura plants. Datura, also known as Hells Bells or Angels Trumpets, contains the psychoactive compound scopaline, an abrasive psychedelic known for inducing demonic visions and general belligerence for days at a time. "Don't sleep under the datura," as the folk adage says.
A Colombian man trekking with us warned about the malicious use of scopaline at carnaval. Someone blows a handful of the powder in your face. You think is just more celebratory talcum and continue to party. Before you know it, everything goes weird, and you come-to days later, conveniently liberated of all financial assets.
Colombia is known to the majority of the world for one thing and one thing only - cocaine. Cocaine is produced in the jungle, and for a small fee, we were given the opportunity to tour a production center. Which, of course, we did. The side tour reminded me of a time in the first grade when my class toured an ice cream shop. Buckets of this and that were strewn about, prepared to demonstrate each step. A cheerful, soft-spoken Colombian man guided us through the process.
Five workers picking for ten days can harvest 1000 kilograms of raw coca from the jungle grow-plots. The small green leaves are ground to a pulp in a machine, then churned with salt and powdered calcium, which is abundant in the surrounding terrain. The mash is then placed in a large vat and mixed with 120 liters of gasoline, which helps separate the cocaine from the plant matter. The liquid is siphoned off and mixed with a combination of water and sulfuric acid. A charcoal-like form of potassium is used to extract the gasoline, and caustic soda (Draino) is added to neutralize the acid. The end result is a white paste of water and pure cocaine, resembling toothpaste. And just like in the ice cream tour so long ago, our humble guide offered everyone a sample at the end.
The kilogram of paste is distributed from the jungle production center, later to be mixed with acetone (nail polish remover) to extract the remaining water. As a result of the loss of weight from water removal, all cocaine is cut with flour or baking soda by up to 20% before it even hits the market. Ten days of work, and the jungle renegades are several hundreds of thousands of dollars richer.
But of course, it's a frustrating lot being a zillionare in the middle of nowhere. Many of them buy expensive cell phones, despite the fact that there is no service. Others invest in flashy road bikes, but there are no roads. You can bet they aren't spending money on drugs. A strict policy of three times and you're dead prevents most workers from ever even trying cocaine in the first place. Besides, Colombian love to get drunk, and cocaine only deters this.
The legality of the whole endeavor is similar to the marijuana scene in Humboldt. In general it is permitted, if only because by and by, it makes everybody a little richer. But the authorities are obliged to make a facade of enforcement in order to justify their own existence, so every so often the paramilitaries will send out a chopper to arrest a few helpless coca harvesters picking leaves in the rain. Years ago, when Colombia was an unruly no man's land which made America's so called "Wild West" look like an eight year old's birthday party, FARC and other rouge guerrilla groups would raid the coca operations and demand a cut of the profits for "protection."
FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, was established in the '60s as the military component of the Colombian Communist Party. They were community organizers, protecting their farming villages from an oppressive government. The winds of politics eventually shifted and their communities no longer needed a militant force to ensure livelihood. The faction remained, however, enchanted with the spoils of the blossoming cocaine trade of the '80s. Today, an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 members remain, down from 16,000 in 2001, mostly in the jungles of the Darien region, keeping to themselves making their riches in drug trafficking.
There are, however, incidents.
Our guide, a quiet old Colombian who spoke, when he did, in a sweeping, melodic tone, told us of an incident in 2003. He was guiding a tour like ours, to the lost city ruins three days into the jungle. A gaggle of FARC soldiers intercepted the group at the lost city, posing as paramilitaries there to evacuate the group. Our guide was then tied up and the group was split up according to how fast the soldiers perceived the people could trek. They were taken deep into the bush to clandestine hideouts, where they were held for ransom for 113 days.
The Americans in the group freaked out and wished they'd stayed at home watching TV like everyone told the to do in the first place. The French sunk into an existential oblivion and chastised the brutish soldiers for their outright ignorance of aesthetics in the jungle hideaway. The Israelis, however, had a blast. They joked with the soldiers, demonstrated superior techniques in operating their assault rifles, played cards, and formed friendships that would last a lifetime. They considered the affair three and a half months of free vacation time in the wilderness with kindred spirits.
Emotions were strong on day 113, when the negotiations for release were finally complete.
But Colombia has changed in the years since, as paramilitaries slowly chip away at the remaining guerrilla forces. At least that's what our guide told us as we trekked ever closer to the lost city. We came to a congregation of about thirty huts made of sticks, mud, and straw. Dark haired indigenous Cogi children peeked at us from the insides of the dim huts. Our guide produced some lollipops and the children came running out, smiling beautifully as they snatched the sweets away and thrust them into their woven shoulder bags. The older Cogi's kept their distance, regarding us suspiciously and maintaining stern faces when a few of us waved. We were not permitted to enter the village, this time, because they were preparing for an evening ritual involving entheogenic shaman's brews made from local mushrooms, flowers, and herbs. We kept walking.
Cogi kids eager for candy
The third day was several hours of intense uphill walking in wet, heavy heat and we pressed ever closer to the lost city. The trekking was demanding and tiring, especially for those of us who had awoken ill in the stomach, plagued with vomiting and diarrhea. After some time we came to some stone stairs which came down a mountainside to meet the river. We climbed. And climbed. I had never seen so many stairs in my life. It took just under an hour to get to the top of the makeshift stone stairway. When we finally finally got there we were speechless. Circular stone terraces dotted the grassy mountaintops, an enchanting vision as the rain began. We went to the accommodations shack and slept for a very long time.
Extra haggard with Brad at Lost City
The next morning most of us had recovered from our illness. We went out into the sun and explored the vast ruins. Daniel asked one of the child-soldiers milling about the place if he could pose with his assault rifle. The soldier was obliging, and was just going down on the grass with his hands behind his head for a point blank capture photo when our guide ran over yelling "no!" The other children may get the wrong idea, he said, and open fire on my bold British friend. Instead, we all took turns posing on the mountaintop with the fashionable loaded weapon.
What the FARC?
Soldiers at Lost City
Our guide lead us around the city, giving some history along the way. The place was built sometime between 500 and 700 AD. It was a shamanic spiritual center, a university of sorts, holy grounds. When the Spanish arrived they plundered the city for gold and enslaved the wise, peaceful shamans. They established churches in place of the ancient holy sites, making vague justifications involving some God character who supposedly wanted it this way all along. Sound familiar? (Iraq..."Democracy"...)
The parallels between the old Spanish and the current American agenda put me on a long string of contemplation. Conquest and complete disregard for humanity is the story of almost every nation on earth. One could resign the notion to "human nature", some innate tendency which we are helpless to control. But that's stupid. America should be held accountable for whats its doing - Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, supporting Israel. I don't dislike my country for one second, but lets face it - American foreign policy personified is a belligerent frat boy who spends all evening rambling about what a great bro you are, and then buggers your sleeping girlfriend in the next room the moment you go for another beer. The creeps in charge are making fools of us, enslaving the minds of the masses with manufactured consent - everyone hysterically chanting the mantra of "Freedom" and "Democracy", the false idols of our time, as they are herded like so much cattle to the killing fields.
Anyways, back we went. Down the stairs. Across the rivers. Over the hills. We all went for a dip in the river when we got back to camp. The dudes jumped off of rocks and the girls circled together in a cove, washing their hair and talking. A pagan mood took over me as the women splashed around like nymphets on the riverside. I felt elfin and green. I wanted to join to Cogis, live simply and free.
But of course, that would ruin everything for the Cogis.
The next day we trekked for eight hours. About halfway through we encountered a Cogi vending Coca Cola by a river. A zillion miles from anything and you can still buy a Coca Cola. The Real Thing.
The Real Thing, like hell! The real thing was being grown on the hillside, manufactured in makeshift tarpaulin shelters in the jungle. In fact, the Cogi had a large wad of cocoa leaves in his cheek and licked, every so often, a stick which he produced from a container which looked like a maraca. The white stuff on the end, he explained in Spanish, was made from powdered sea mollusks and aided in the absorption of the cocoa.
Hours later, with bloody feet, we emerged in the village of Adan, where the magic bus awaited. We bumbled over the hills. At the first possible location, our guide leaped out of the bus and bought a huge bag full of beer. He passed them out and turned the music up loud. We all drank and sang and felt really good as we breezed down the highway, stopping at every single bar along the way and taking turn buying sacks of beer for the road. Our guide must have spent half his paycheck before the time we got back to Taganga, but that's how Colombians are. They will spend all their money taking out girls and partying and then starve for a week before doing it all over again.
Which sure beats a whole lot of other approaches, ya know?
Plenty of laughter in the jungle
written by  chaddeal on February 24, 2009 from Ciudad Perdida, Colombia

Mama Ron en Carnavales
Barranquilla, Colombia
It is difficult to relate the absolute hysteria of Carnaval in Barranquilla. Most nations couldn't handle an equal event without soon collapsing into a frenzied state of all out warfare. But Barranquilla does it, and does it well - pushing all possible boundaries of all out celebration.
Daniel and I joined the festivities late Saturday afternoon, quickly discovering what it means to be a gringo at Carnaval. We were heralded like politicians everywhere we went. Women handed us thier babies and daughters and gleefully snapped off photographs. We were covered in foam, doused in talcum powder, soaked with water, and then fed rum from small wooden and ceramic cups worn from thin string necklaces. Kids painted black with engine grease surrounded us weilding sticks like guns saying "we are FARC!" and demanded ransoms. Others covered our faces completely with foam and tried to pick our empty pockets while the crowd looked on, amused. The welcome was intense everywhere we went.
Carnaval
Everything about Carnaval is sexual. Women parade by in scant clothing and wild, colorful peacock feathers. Men dance around in the bizzare elephant mask of Marimonda, a classic archetype of Barranquilla Carnaval. Marimonda represents the core of the average Colombian man - a raving horney drunk bent on dancing, sexual persuits, and having the most fun possible at all times. "Monda" is a vulgar term referring to the exaggerated phallic nose which swings from the freakish mask. Others wear the costume of the dark mulato woman with afro wigs and red polkadotted head scarves.
Marimonda
As it turns out, a curiously large number of Colombian men look exactly like Barack Obama when placed in a suit and tie. As such, Obamas abound, smiling and shaking hands deliberately everywhere they go. And what parade is complete without transvestites? Broad-shouldered men saunter around in high heels and nurse outfits, blowing kisses from behind black masks with red, exaggerated lips.
Little black cermaic handguns were being sold everywhere, with pinkish flesh-colored penises on the end. I tickled us to think that somewhere there exists a factory dedicated to the production of these rediculous penis guns. Someones job depends on drawing the veins and details just so. Later we met two Englishmen who had been robbed with the old concealed weapon beneath the T-shirt trick. They handed over everything, never considering the overwhelming odds that they were being accosted with a cheap ceramic replica, nothing but a life-like penis tip at the end of the barrell.
The official slogan of the event is "Mama ron en Carnavales!" The verb "mamar" means to suck as if from the nipple. Suck rum in Carnaval! And suck we did, dancing insanely with beaming Colombian girls who blew our minds with the unfathomable alchemy of salsa. A parade of women in bright, 1980s rendition of the future of fashion spun by in wild neon dresses with stacked wire skirts.
Something in my mind clicked. Everything became lucid - my consciousness felt of the brink of something huge, something infinite. I licked eternity with the tip of my brain, a massive deja vu condensation of approximate Everything.
And then, just like that, it was gone.
We kept dancing and the world seemed very small, a crude farce of some watered down reality. I felt imprisioned in my body, and danced ever more wildly in a desperate attempt to wiggle out of the damn thing, back into the world of souls.
Ah, but one must wait.
We couchsurfed with Mickey and his girlfriend Jennifer, who were prepared to host thirty people for Carnaval. As it turned out, Daniel, Ruby, and I were the only ones to show up. But he still made sure we had a good time, taking us out to clubs at night and being merry. Jennifer took us to a block party in the barrio of one of her friends. The streets were blocked off and a giant sound system blasted a canon of about twelve Carnaval songs repeatedly until late in the night. There is a specific dance for each of the songs, and the girls taught us all of them. Colombian women are absolutely tireless dancers. Daniel and I clumsily struggled to keep up.
Mickey and Jennifer
I was totally sapped by the debautchery at the end of it all. I sat in the Barranquilla bus station waiting for a ride to Medellin, feeling a poignant loneliness and yearning for the comfort of home. Traveling alone is an amazing blessing, but soon leaves one feeling ungrounded and empty, with friends lasting only a few days at a time. I felt delirious, missing my family and friends, my bike, mexican food.
What was I doing a zillion miles away from everything that mattered to me, roving senselessly around with no true destination? Was I really here to teach English, or was it all an unconscious facade, some weird joke, a flimsy excuse?
I felt useless, indulgent, depraved - like the prodigal son, who blew all of his money on nonsense and then returned home with his tail tucked.
The bus was cold, very cold. All through the night the air conditioning chilled us deeper and deeper. It felt like a meat locker. I hid beneath my towel, shivering half-asleep for fifteen hours.
I know how ya feel dude!
written by  chaddeal on February 25, 2009 from Barranquilla, Colombia

Medellin is Rainy and Cool
Medellin, Colombia
The cold eclipse of my sour mood quickly passed as I strolled the wet streets of Medellin. The city is large and sprawling, prone towards light midday showers and brick architecture, which creeps up vegetated mountainsides in beautiful, chaotic avenues. Medellin resembles Portland, Oregon in the building style, the weather, the surrounding terrain, and the Metrocable.
Medellin
Metrocable
I met Steve at an empanada stand after taking a series of incorrect busses to visit the Metrocable. He overheard me fumbling with Spanish, trying to comprehend the appropriate route, and offered to show me the way. This is one of the most annoying and frequent hit-ups for money that a gringo encounters in Colombia, besides a simple "hey you, give me money." But Steve had a different aura. He didn't want anything. He had pure eyes, and I sensed good intent. So off we went, stopping at the botanical gardens along the way.
Medellin Jardin Botanical
Medellin is clean, calm, cultured, and cool. Artsy, contemporary fountains and sculptures decorate the metropolitan plazas and parks. The local water company funds many of the urban parks, Steve told me, in an initiative to constantly better the city and purify its residual karma from the '90s. Steve's girlfriend met up with us and we all rode the rail to the Metrocable. Most cities shun their slums, neurotically trying to forget about them like a be-fungused hang nail. Instead, Medellin gifted the Santa Domingo barrio with a multi-million dollar sky tram and uber-modern library, which looks like a medieval castle.
Bibliotheca Espana
We checked the place out. A group of young school kids waited in line for the internet lab.
"Hey you," one kid said. "Hey you."
"HEY YOU!" I said, giving him a look so freakish he'll probably pee a little every time he thinks of hey-youing anybody ever again.
I went back to the Black Sheep hostel and did the most American thing I could muster. I drank a Coca-Cola. The new Batman movie played, followed by Hotel Rwanda - both heady contemplations on the nature of evil and humanity. I nodded off to sleep for a long time, lamenting the absolute absence of justice in this mad world.
The next morning I went to a store for a needle and thread to patch a hole in the crotch of my pants which I'd neglected to attend to for a week. Back at the hostel, the maid saw me struggling to do anything functional with my new stitch set, and without a word took over the job, sealing the hole up, smiling, with a few deft strokes and a knot. I wanted to kiss her.
Then I met up with Steve and his girlfriend, and off we went to Pueblito Paisa, the quintessential old town of Medellin. Pueblito Paisa sits atop a hill in the middle of the city, with an enchanting panoramic view of red brick townships creeping up the valley walls onto the mountainsides. Steve pointed out various regions of the city, telling me of how Pablo Escobar had blown the place to ruins with random bombings in the 1980's in order to dissuade the Colombian government from extraditing him to the U.S.
Pueblito Paisa
Escobar, that notorious kingpin of the Colombian drug trade, was the seventh richest man in the world until one fateful day in 1993, when police forces finally shot him down. And you can bet they were happy to do it - Escobar paid handsomely to anyone who brought him the body of a police man, a move which brought the homicide rate in 1991 to eleven times that of Chicago.
We climbed down the hill and continued on to Parque de los Pies Descalzos, an urban plot with a flowing foot pool of water and a therapeutic sandbox, meant to relax he barefooted sojourner. Medellin is hip and progressive. You don't see the rouge eddies of garbage swirling on the wind, common to Barranquilla. And you are hard up to find trees decorated with discarded plastic bags like the lifeless remains of landlocked flying jellyfish, such as you'd see in Taganga. Medellin has a green thumb, and a knack for art. The best example of this is the Plazo Botero.
Fernando Botero was an artist who flourished in fifties, creating sculptures and paintings of weird fat things which have come to typify Colombia art. He explained his fat-knack thusly: "An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it."
Botero Scultpure
People on the plaza were constantly asking for money - some of them performing, some demanding, others grossly disfigured in one way or another and simply holding out a hand. The poverty in Colombia is heartbreaking and ubiquitous. An estimated 60% of the urban population and an unbelievable 80% of the rural population are believed to live beneath the poverty line. The paisas (people from Medellin), Steve told me, are known across Colombia for being clever, persistent merchants and money-makers, always finding a way to subsist during hard times.
That much was very apparent as we shelled out small change and loose bills for the forlorn eyes of Plazo Botero.
Plazo Botero - fat is back
That night I went out to a couchsurfing party and met the local group, who were very helpful in offering advice about how to teach English in Medellin. We sipped rum and celebrated the birthday of an Argentinian named Nacho on the top floor of a restaurant.
written by  chaddeal on February 26, 2009 from Medellin, Colombia

Shacking up in Medellin
Medellin, Colombia
The botanical garden in Medellin is a meeting grounds for ambassadors representing all walks of life. I met up with a gang of about fifteen people from couchsurfing.com. One of them, Justin had prepared several vegan pizzas, a pasta, and cookies to share with all. Others passed beers and sodas. Steve, his girlfriend Angela, and a friend met me there, and we all hung out, played ultimate frisbee, strummed the guitar, ate, and talked.
A few Colombians dressed in white aerobic pants practiced the Brazilian fight/dance of capoeria, spinning cartwheels and throwing slow kicks on the grass. The Harry Potter club convened across the park, sporting round-rimmed glasses and casting spells with their wands as they traipsed through the trees. The local Boy Scout troop assembled, shouting militantly and stomping around in tight formation, myriads of merit badges proudly displayed.
I recalled my experience in the Boy Scouts as a youth.
Troop 155 of Jamul was the antithesis of everything that the Boy Scouts of America stands for. In light of the Scout mantra, "Be Prepared," we neglected sleeping bags and snake bite kits to make room in our packs for vials of gasoline, explosive Binaca spray bottles, and firecrackers which somebodies older brother had brought back from Tijuana. While the other troops were busy practicing knots and reciting Scout passages in class A uniforms, we were swinging from the trees in roped-up cots and plotting water balloon attack missions on the other camps. At the end of a long day, someone would saw open a piece of dry bamboo, and we would recline around the fire, passing the smoldering stick like a sacred peace pipe, babbling about girls and blowing shit up.
Anyhow, Medellin has been a series of good omens saying "stay for a while." Steve had given me his old cell phone, a necessity, he said, to find work. By my second day in town I'd found several prospective students for private English lessons without really trying at all. I also found an apartment for the equivalent of $90 USD for the month in the center of town by the University.
So everything is sort of conspiring, and I'm just going with the flow.
My good friend Daniel arrived in Medellin last night, ready as ever for a night on the town. So off we went, sipping a small bottle of rum as we strutted down the street. The end of the night found us in Zona Rosa, the "place to be" in Medellin, according to the Lonely Planet.
We should have known better.
Every city has its weird coven of overpriced discos that nobody actually enjoys. But somehow people feel obligated to stay all night, buying watered down drinks which cost too much and trying their hardest to look blase, blend in.
The music was bumping, but no one was dancing. The night was cool and smelled of afternoon rain, yet no one was smiling. Everything felt plastic. A subdued frustration lurked on the breeze.
Is this it?
It was the stuff of midlife crisis, where, on one especially hallow Saturday late night, dull men in expensive clothing can no longer strain out that famous desperate smile and finally crack, crying out to the cosmos and later giving away all their earthy goods to join the Hare Krishnas, dancing with reckless abandon in the street.
Thunder barrels through red brick alleys.
The next morning Daniel and I went to the local supermarket for supplies. I bought deodorant for the first time in about seven years - a requirement, I've been told, if I expect to find a Colombian honeypie. The checkout line was long and it took some time before we reached the front.
I looked around, feeling bored and annoyed by the florescent lighting. I saw a woman, she was beautiful, tall, jeans, high boots, but when she turned around and faced me it became apparent that she had no eyes. Two black holes gaped at me where her eyes should have been, imagined singularities which threw me straight into the void.
I observed my consciousness shifting.
I felt again exactly like I had in the Barranquilla bus station, suddenly estranged from consensual reality. My insides became airy and crispy. I consisted of nothing but pork rinds and styrofoam!
What was happening?
I felt on the brink of it, hanging by a thread. The world was a cheap hoax, a bizzare charade, and for better or worse, I had snapped out of it. It was at once fascinating and terrifying.
Try to stay calm. Look natural. Just make it to the door and sit down outside. Fresh air. Sunshine.
My skin felt like television static and my left ear hummed from the inside. I felt sick. Why were everybodies eyes floating in front of their faces like magazine cut outs? Deja vu rushed in from every direction. Forgotten dreams surfacing in the mind, syncopating precisely with this very moment. Rerun, seen this one before...
I was Howard Hughes slugging milk in the screening room, Friedrich Nietzsche crosseyed in his bed. This is it, I´ve met the Edge.
Woah, stop. Thoughts like that´ll only make matters work. Relax.
Just breathe.
A skinny cat ran down from a tree and started at me convictingly.
¨Remeber,¨ his eyes seemed to say. ¨Be here meow.¨
The oddness stuck for about an hour as Daniel and I walked the vacant Sunday streets of Carrera Carabobo eating fruits which looked like bunches of spiders eggs. When the feeling finally left me I became serene, nearly blissful. The air was damp and cool and evoked a nostalgia for a life I've not yet lived.
It was the adamic Sunday, the archetypal day of hush and nothing, cozy down with your loved one if you got one and watch the rain through steamy windows.
written by  chaddeal on March 1, 2009 from Medellin, Colombia

Cyberpunk in El Jardin Botanico
Medellin, Colombia
I moved into my apartment on a rainy Thursday afternoon, a pretty fundamental affair cosidering that the entirety of my material belongs could easily be transported on the back of a large house cat. The complex looks like a prison from the outside and is inhabited mostly by students from the Univesidad de Antioquia across the street.
Three roommates share the modest abode. Next to my room is flamboyant, Prada-wearing Sergio, who studies telecommunications at the U of A. Next to him is young Laydies and her aunt, hushed and observant like siamese, always cooking something delicious. The dinning room is small and without furniture apart from some sitting pillows and a clothesline. My walls are Xanax blue and my thirteenth floor window yeilds a Fritz Lang metropolis view of the railcar cutting across downtown city lights at midnight.
In the morning I went to a bazzar in a warehouse where stolen and reconstructed goods of every variety could be bought cheap. I found a pair of computer speakers for the equivalent of $3 USD. Old men played Atari games on dingy TV prototypes from the sixties. Frankenstein television sets spilled their wirey guts behind wooden partitioned booths. Bastard radios grimaced from dusty shelves. Smells of solder and small electrical fires. The scene was straight out of a William Gibson novel.
Incidentally, Fractal '09 kicked off the next day in the botanical garden. The science fiction conference would last four days with speakers on topics such as ¨The Infuence of the Beat Generation on Science Fiction,¨ ¨Fractals, Chaos, and Determinism,¨ and ¨Who´s Reading and Who´s Writing Sci-fi in Latin America?¨
The event took place beneath the spiraling octagonal wooden slats of the Orchid garden, where two white sofas sat on an elevated stage in front of a sea of chairs which remained mysteriously empty throughout the conference aside from uniformed groups of high school students, whos homogenous attire mimicked the ¨Clockwork Orange¨ images flashing to the beat of electronic music across a giant screen on the back of a flatbed truck. The best topic by far was ¨Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk¨ presented by writers John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly.
Cyberpunk is a genre from the ´80s typified by fast-paced escapades of high technology in the hands of low lifes. Virtual reality, shady antihero protagonists, gleeful subversion (a la Hakim Bey), dirty deals done in the dark. Kessel summed it up the best: ¨It´s about smoking cigarretes at midnight staring across the bar through slitted eyes at the girl with the prosthetic arm.¨ The real appeal of Cyberpunk, Kelly stated, is that it´s a feasible reality. ¨None of us are going to go to outer space,¨ he said, ¨but any of us can go to cyberspace.¨
Steve, Angela, and I spent the rest of the day lounging around the park. Steve corrected my Spanish and I corrected his English. Later, when the sun had set, we shared cheap wine and watched ¨Fahrenheit 451¨ in Spanish projected on the wall of the EMP building at Parque de los Deseos (The park of wishes).
The next night it was ¨Blade Runner¨, in English this time, as Colombia couples kissed and ate cookies on the park´s marbled incline. The moon, almost full, peeked through passing clouds and hairs were tossled by a cool evening breeze. I felt perfect and sublime.
Later I met up with Eliana, Amu, and Yeisey at a bar on the corner by the university blasting an inspiring volley of salsa punk songs. Dreadlocked beauties, mohawked wanna-bes, checkered pantsed loners - the entire hep crowd of Medellin was right there on the corner of Calle 67 and Carrera 52. The music drew out the adolescent mirth in all of us and we danced recklessly in a jumping, sweating heap. Fists were thrust to the sky. Chins jutted out in obstinant punk rock whateverism. Everyone sang along to the chorus ¨Sexo, sexo, sexo!¨
The bar closed at 2am and we went back to Amu´s apartment a few floors beneath mine. A riot broke out in the courtyard - twenty, thirty, drunk students punching, jump kicking, swinging metal rods and broken bottles. The police, always present on most every street corner, were nowhere to be found. The brawl dragged on. Girls screamed. Dudes yelled incomprehensible nonsense in Spanish.
We watched from above, considering the meaninglessness of it all.
written by  chaddeal on March 7, 2009 from Medellin, Colombia

Colombia Loves Coldplay
It´s true. Everywhere you go you catch the tail end of ¨Yellow¨ or some melanchollie piano intro. Stepping off the Metro, enduring existential breakdowns in Exito. Even at the orchid garden when you arrive after sunset for the free ¨Happening¨ listed in the Fractal ´09 program, there´s Coldplay again, introspective and bittersweet, flowing like liquid nitrogen lemonade from the speakers.
The ¨Happening¨ was advertised as a ¨cyberpunk concert¨ but turned out to be a tango show, complete with onstage vocalists and a cast of about twelve. Steve, Angela, and I shared a juice box of wine as lithe girls in airy dresses kicked and twirled around dudes in outfits from the 1800´s. An enchanted mood quickly possesed me and I decided at once to stay in Medellin forever - the most cultured city on the planet, to be certain. We were hard-up to find any connection between the performance and the stated Sci-fi theme of the conference, but so what? I was totally seduced by the passion and precision of the dance, and was reminded once again that the vast majority of Latin culture is pure celebration of human sexuality.
The conference closed the next day with the Medellin Philharmonic playing Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky to a looping background of what appeared to be a ten second clip from the trailer to Mary Shelley´s ¨Frankenstein,¨ loosely intertwining the event with the theme. Cyberpunk dynamo Bruce Sterling never showed up for his spiel, and for that I now boycott his writings for exactly 1.618 sidereal years.
We went to the monthly jewelry fair in Parque Bolivar - Steve, Angela, Eliana, Maritza, and I - where beaded and leather good of every variety were bargained for over the sound of handdrums and guitars. Street performers did their schtick everywhere - stand up comedy, music, clowning, blowing bubbles. Others simply advertised their enfirmities, infected sores and disfigured limbs. I observed my gut reaction to avoid the ugly ones, the injured, the sick - the ones who probably need help the most. Much easier to toss a few pesos to the grinning mime with smiley face stickers than to look in the eyes of suffering. Those eyes reflect guilt, resonate questions too vast.
Why did I just spend 7.000 pesos on some stupid piece of jewelry for myself and yet instinctually try to justify giving nothing to a starving man?
That night we went to lovely dready Eliana´s hometown of Bello, once a pueblo outside of Medellin but now amoeba-ed into part of the city. We danced late into the night, Eliana attempting to remedy my genetic dancing disorder by taking me on the floor and whirling me around to salsa, merengue, cumbia, bachata, reggaeton. By the end of the night I was speaking the language of dance pretty well, I thought, and even came to an apogee of sorts with my Spanish when I managed to accurately articulate to the girls on the bus the old Buddhist adage of ¨what is the sound of one hand claping?¨ and then made a daring metaphor involving an avocado.
Which reminds me - I´ve engineered a diet plan designed to boost energy and general enthusiasm, reduced incidents of stomach bugs, increase virility and stamina, and induce incidents of metaphysical bliss. Simply eat papaya in the morning, a fried egg in the afternoon, and arepas with tomato, avocado, and garlic for dinner. Put lots of hot sauce on everything. To approximate an arepa, loosely stick three or four corn tortillas together with butter and heat.
Presto, all your problems are solved.
written by  chaddeal on March 9, 2009 from Medellin, Colombia

Underbelly
Though not a noctournal city by any means, there is no such thing as a dull evening in Medellin. One needs not look far for free movie screenings, theatre productions, live music, art shows, dance shows, or just about any other form of cultural entertainment that can be placed on a showbill.
Henry, who has been helping me with Spanish and I with his English, invited me to an environmental short film festival in Envigado. I enjoyed the films, some interpretive, some literal, all in Spanish which evaded me completely.
I attempted to absorb the meanings subliminally. All that language is out there somewhere, out in the noosphere, stirring in the collective subconscious, and it´s as much a part of me as anybody else. Why not tap in an suck straight from the source?
I left oblivious.
Also along was wild, chatty Olga, who buzzes around town on a motorized scooter in a helmet which she describes as ¨muy bacano¨ - really cool. She couldn´t take me for a ride, however. A recent rise in ¨drug and vengence¨ related murders prompted the local officials to instate a month-long ban on male passengers on motorbikes, the prime getaway vehicle. The measure is working, Henry said. Murder rates are down, so far.
But so what?
Not everyone requires the comfort of a motorized escape vehicle when enraptured with those thorny, deliberate emotions which demand death to assuage. Amu the Jolly German witnessed a shooting on a sports field not two weeks ago, the culprit disappearing on foot once the deed was done. And just yesterday, a student was shot four times at the university across the street from my apartment under accusation of affiliation with the leftist guerilla revolutionary militants, FARC.
The shooting of drug addicts, prostitutes, theives, and FARC members occurs regularly as part of a mysterious program known as ¨Limpieza Social¨ - cleaning society. Some people blame the Augilas Negras (Black Eagles), a rouge faction of retired cops who have taken the law into their own hands. Others blame right-wing fundamentalist radicals known as ¨paramilitaries¨. Some even suggest that the goverment itself is employing clandestine groups to remove the undesirables from society. A hit-list was recently distributed indicating thirty students at the universities who had been identified as FARC infiltrators. You can bet that at least twenty-nine check marks indicating ¨absent¨ will be made over the course of the day.
The pressure for neutraility from both sides creates a situation where people are kept in a constant state of fear of expressing political opinions which deviate from dead-center. It´s kind of like wearing a blue bandana in the wrong L.A. barrio, except the tension centers around something a bit more personal than crack dealing territiory. Every so often the conflict reaches boiling point, with masked guerillas and paramilitaries alike opening fire and throwing home-made ¨potato bombs¨ until the riot police arrive and tear gas everyone out of the university.
So maybe its no wonder that Medellin has something of a reputation, hell, all of Colombia has something of a reputation for being somewhat...unsafe.
The average tourist has nothing to fear, however, except the run-of-the-mill street slime you´d find lurking in any urban environment. For example, a few days ago I was approached by a dude in broad daylight who rattled something off in rapid-fire Spanish. I offered him some bread rolls, which I´ve begun to carry around habitually as a result of sheer boredom with making excuses when approached for loose change.
I finally gathered that he wanted to see my cell phone. He was concerned that it might be stolen. Which meant he wanted to steal it. Just around the corner was ¨Los Puentes¨, the local liberated goods emporium.
I told him no. His left eye twitched. I could see from his tight fitting clothes that he wasn´t carrying a gun. He may have had a knife, but he also had a limp. A power-walking granny could have lost the poor bastard. So I walked away.
Now I reflect on beautiful Colombia, a country too lazy and disorganized to ever become a threat to anyone but itself, and am reminded of the words of the late Donovan -
¨Que sera, sera.¨

Jillian vs. Colombian Cusine
Jillian flew out from California to experience the spice of Colombia for a week. We did it all. The Metrocable, Botero Plaza, the Gobierno Square, Parque de los Pies Descalzos, The so-called EMP ¨Intelligent Building¨, El Jardin Botanico, and beyond.
Chillfest at Jardin Botanico
One day we met up with Steve and Angela and went to the Musuem of Modern art, where we observed feminist paintings contrasted with whorish lifesize wooden mermaids with too much lipstick.
Womens Rights
Gettin some
Steve and Angela
Afterwards, we all lounged around my apartment with a few beers soaking up the sweet sounds of American music from Jillian´s iPod. I made some arepas with avocado and quesito, a marvelous culinary epiphany which resembles queso fresco in its crumbly texture and salty aftertaste. We ate and Jillian said I had fed her too much, a proclaimation which would become the central theme of her stay in Medellin.
As it turns out, just about everything is cheesy and fried, if not also meaty and saucy in Colombia. Which is just tits for me. But the descriminating palette protests. In an attempt to distract from this fact, we went to Exito for some hot sauce.
Hot Sauce is Sexy
We also encountered Salsa Negro, a fantastic feat of political incorrectness in a bottle.
PinC condiments
We roamed the streets of Carrera Carabobo (literally, ¨face of the fool¨), a pedestrian marketplace where the intuitive shopper can find avocados at five for seventy-five cents. Old women ratteld plastic jars full of chicle, a impromptu ritual meant to generate prosperity, and we were approached by whirly-gig salesmen, who accosted us as if they knew in the core of their being that we had been searching our entire lives for their worthless goods. We stopped by Govinda´s, the Hare Krishna´s vegetarian restaurant, where I filled Jill up with a cheesy dish and we experimented with the new hot sauce, which was very hot.
We left plump and sedate, resembling Botero´s exaggerated sculptures with faces which may well have been described as foolish.
Jilltero Cat
Chadtero Dog
Jill bought me a pair of shades, which made me look like the Terminator, hippy pimp edition.
Effin Cool
The rain started up and we went to see ¨Twilight¨ in the cinema, which was in Spanish so it was called ¨Crepusculo.¨ It felt cosmic, somehow, both of us sitting around in Colombia watching a movie which was filmed in Forks and Port Angeles, Washington, a place that both of us had happened to live at different times of our lives for no good reason. Fate had triangulated on us right then and there, and a mysterious, ineffable mood possesed me, impressing me with the inescapable connection of everything. Like when you are thinking of something, for example, ¨that fellow sure has got a strange shape hasn´t he? Sort of spherical, sort of rotund, yes rotund is...¨ and right then someone walking by on the street says ¨rotund¨ for whatever reason to whoever it is they might be talking to on their mobile phone and you think, ¨now wait a minute. Who´s in charge of this whole charade anyways?¨
Chillian
Jillian flew away Saturday afternoon, full of hot sauce and cheese and avocados and lousy Colombian pizza. I went with Deisy and some of her friends to Guarne, a small red brick pueblo about an hour outside of Medellin. The rain came heavy and we were fully soaked when we arrived at the half-finished house which belonged to the sister of one of Deisy´s friends. The place was empty and dusty with the feel of a well-kept squat, bunk beds everywhere, cute posters on the wall reminding you to ¨Smile!¨ in Spanish rhyme.
We sipped some aguardiente, a traditional anise-flavored liquor, to warm up and suddenly I had a breakthrough of sorts in Español. I observed how people would change their address from the formal ¨usted¨ to the informal ¨tu¨ and the informal informal ¨vos¨ depending on their mood, the context, and who else was listening. After several hours of conversation, I realized I was fluently discussing the pros and cons of Freudian psychology with a local and wondered, ¨now how the hell did that happen?¨ It was as if the language had slipped in unnoticed while I was busy contemplating the best way to eliminate reggaeton from the face of the earth.
I passed the next day in the botanical garden, reading the Spanish version of ¨The Tao of Physics¨ by Fritjof Capra and watching the people go by. The rain came around five, as usual, and in no time I was huddled under the over-hang by the cafe with everybody else as a booming storm lit up the evening sky. I sipped coffee and watched the lightning, feeling part of something huge and dynamic, something magical and alive, an inspired extra in the pandimensional tango of life.
The rain let up and I returned to my apartment. I looked out my window for a long time. Far below, street lights flickered sulpher-orange and reflected from wet asphalt in hazy blobs of infinite mystery and sadness. The city lit-up bit by bit - faux-luna blue metal halides illuminating vacant warehouse bays, the distant San Javier barrio on the hillside, the metro sliding over its rails like a well-disciplined glow worm, Cisneros apartment blocks and the towers of Carabobo, the intelligent building shining like a glorified tin can, the TV towers by Pueblito Paisa phasing in and out of each other in urgent, emergency red - every nook of the city acknowledging the nocturne in its own way.
The rain stopped and I smoked a cigarette from my unscreened window.
The world felt timeless and immortal.
Window vista

City of Brick
Medellin, enchanted city, home of the silicon buttcheek, where no one remembers the natural light of stars and the sun has barely been named, where the paisas wear their souls on their skin and old men sing sad songs in the streets selling guanabana juice by the cup, where notices in the park bathroom urge you to give transcendental meditation a chance and park attendants in decorative safari hats remind you ¨no shoes!¨ while rouge bastard geese ambush afternoon picnics and iguanas look on grinning, where laughter thunders and thunder laughs and eveybody remembers your name, where no ever has change for 50 mil, no more than $23 dollars, so you buy juice on the corner, an arepa down the street, quesito in the market, all part of a strange ritual shuffle necessary to divide the great bill, where buses leave a lump of black exhaust wherever they go and stoplights are more of a suggestion, where the metro cuts across the city like something from the future and heartbroken youths wander the nights street singing Spanish songs of love, where raisin-faced women push carts of coffee and gum and the history of the world transpires every hour to a backdrop of horns honking, globular synthetic breasts, and the smell of cornmeal frying.
The contract expired on the 13th floor, so we all packed up and found new rooms. I was the last to go. I sat at my window, looking out, sensing the emptiness of the apartment. Across the street, high up in a building, a woman swept a vacant living room. Windows glowed orange, blushed pink, emitted deep-sea greens with the varied hues of curtains. Others were dark. I took in the view for the last time, at once detatched and nostalgic. Jefferson Airplane played from second-hand computer speakers, adding to the mood, making life feel transient and too short, conjuring memories of people and places which felt and which were very far away.
I would miss that window. The way the apartment blocks across the street looked like something out of a Stanely Kubrick film, uniform and sterile, radiating pure functionality. I would miss the small stretch of hiway visible between buildings, revealing the pulse of the city which peaks at five in the morning and again at the same time at night. I would miss waking up late and watching students bustling over the yellow bridge spanning Carrera Barranquilla and stopping to mingle around streetside empanada stands or sitting in the grass with friends to talk noilsy over cold bottles of Casteña. Or the way fruit vendors would roam the streets with broad carts declaring their wares in rhythmic auctioneer mantras through amplifiers rigged to car batteries as an afternoon rain blew in. I would miss spitting from above and watching the blobs explode halfway down, sending fine mist to the trees.
These things I considered as I took one last look from the window.
The surrogate stars of San Javier shimmered angelically in the distance.
Lightning blinked soundlessly.
A dog barked from vacant streets below.
A motorbike appeared on the brief glimpse of hiway.
And then, just like that, it was gone.
Police pour from the paddy-wagon
like
cartoon firefighting clowns,
bramble ´cross the street
to the meat shop.
Out they come,
then,
the body limp,
the spectator´s eyes -
¨Que puta, not again.¨
Jello red on white tile.
¨Silencer,¨ says the somber
server nextdoor,
hands me black coffee -
¨No one heard a thing.¨
The van takes off.
The crowd floats away.
Gelatianous blood blobs
disappear down the drain.
written by  chaddeal on April 1, 2009 from Medellin, Colombia

Popayan: Carrying the Faith
Popayan, Colombia
Had I been feeling superstitious, I never would have gone in the first place.
There was the dead guy, for starters. Dying, anyways, slumped against the meat display at the carneceria across the street from my apartment, hands clutching the hole in his gut which appeared minutes earlier from a gun which nobody had heard. That could have been a bad sign. But then, at the metro stop in Poblado where I would meet Steve, a bus overturned on the rainy night highway below and one-by-one passangers escaped kicking out emergency windows. Not the best omen for someone about to hop on a bus for eight hours.
Fortunately, I was feeling bold and non-chalant. Life is transient. I had no time to contemplate the broader significance of daily mundane misfortunes.
We materialized in Cali sometime the next morning, groggy from the anti-nausea pills and poor sleep. We drank some coffee. Another hour south by bus brought us to Jamundi, where Steve´s mother welcomed us joyfully. She was the embodiment of all admirable maternal qualities, always making sure we had enough to eat and that Steve´s sweater was pulled down tight and kissing us both on the cheek everytime we left the house.
Jamundi was hot and dry, so we biked to the river and jumped off some rocks, drank a slow beer and chatted with the locals. Then back to town, where Steve introduced me to the heart and soul of Jamundi. One thing that I liked about Steve´s style of cultural introduction from Day One is that, rather than beating around the bush of tourist bullshittery, he takes you straight to the source of what matters most - the food. In accordance with this philosophy, we proceeded to slurp down a couple world famous Jamundi cholados - cups of shaved ice decorated with cuts of fresh fruit and sauced in sweet condensed milk - smiling beneath a harsh midday sun.
Around town, then, to meet the locals. Steve has friends in all circles, representing all aspects of Jamundi personhood, but I quickly saw that each of them have one thing in common: they all like to jam. So we turned up the volume in various jam rooms across town and rocked, funked, and bluesed the day away.
The night we met up with a friend of Steve´s, Catarina, a beautiful young girl who´s recent pregnancy was visible through a tight red dress. We hopped in a taxi and disappeared through the cow fields. Some time later, a vast glowing palace churned over the horizon and came to a halt aside the cab window. We got out. The palace turned out the be the local shopping mall, conveniently located at least twenty minutes from anything.
We sat down at an outdoor bar kiosk called ¨Rock and Pop¨, which would make a great title for a future cult classic about an Elmore Leonard style dope smoking strangler from the midwest with a knack for cherry Tab. The radio played Air Supply and Extreme, not the best dancing music, but it didn´t matter. Catarina, the one girl present, was prohibited to dance lest the baby slip out in the midst of a heated salsa and get lost half-developed amongst high heels and the urgent shuffling of feet.
A couple beers later, the mall began to take effect. Commercial centers have a way of bringing out the shadow side in me, the inner Sundance Kid. A rare hostility beheld me. I felt like Han Solo, an outlaw, liable to cut to the core of you with one well placed remark and slap a hooker with a satin glove on the way out.
I got the creeping urge to destroy everything in sight - demolish the department stores, dismantle the disco, peel the paint from the panaderia, blow up the butchery, disect the drogeria, implode the info booth, trash the television, obliterate the offices, heap the habedaschery - if only to see what remains when the surface is gone, making the whole hoax tick.
The notion was soon forgotten as we breezed back through the bovine barrios to a late night Jamundi. Inside a friend´s house, people sang reggae and country karaoke through a keyboard, liters of volatile aguardiente circulating constantly. The music hit a high note and so did I, so I grabbed the mother of the house and we spun around the living room breaking loose with dance moves that would have launched Catarina´s wee embryo halfway to Aruba.
Then she read my aura. It was straight out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez tale. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she told me of spells and manipulations, confirmed secret suspicions of malevolence, then gave me a purple crystal for protection and told me to be wary of women, keep an eye on that money!
The next day, at the suggestion of Steve´s father, we hit the highway. He said my be-gringo-ed disposition would put us at an advantage amongst the bustling holiday traffic. He was a man of serious appearance, but, as I would find out over the next week, full of a certain brand of humor. But it must have been no joke, this time, as the third car to pass swooped us up and off we went to Popayan. A half hour later we were milling around the side of the highway, as oblivious as our benefactors as to the mechanical problems which prevented the vehicle from going an inch further. But in no time off we went again, this time in the back of a Jeep which deposited us in Santander, where a bus would take us the hour or so more to Popayan.
The core of Popayan is a colonial downtown dating back over 500 years, everything painted white and not a single traffic signal. A church is visible from any given point and the streets are bustling with indigenous Guambiano vendors, who still wear traditional low-cut witches boots, black and purple shawls, and comical little Charlie Chaplin bowler caps. The town reaches capacity during Semana Santa, aka Holy Week, the latino version of Easter which draws crowds for the Catholic processions, said to be second best in the world after Spain.
Guambiana
Christian, Angela, and me in Popayan
We stayed at Steve´s grandparents house, where over the course of the week more family members showed up to take part in the festivities. A maid prepared a lunch each afternoon based on Steve´s grandmother´s recipies - soups of tripe, seasoned meats, patacones with heavenly sauces, and of course, rice and beans.
We also sampled the local specialties around town, the best of which were empanaditas pipian - minitaure empanadas filled with potatoes and mashed peanuts, dipped in a sauce of peanut and aji peppers. These are accompanied by a champu, which looks like a glass full of vomit but takes like sweet, succulent American pie gone liquid and chunky. Finally, there is the chontaduro, an orangish fruit thing with a large black pit which comes from a type of palm. The chontaduro is coverd in honey and salt and tastes somewhat like a fibrous yam. Yum.
Champus look like vomit
Steve looks like latino David Byrne
Back at the house, Steve´s cousin Paulo filled me in on the history of Semana Santa in Popayan. The tradition dates back 450 years and involves a two or three hour procession of large, heavy ¨pasos¨ carrying lifesize figurines depicting biblical scenes. The pasos are carried by eight ¨cargueros¨, four in the front and four in the back. Paulo´s grandfather had started the tradition in his family line 70 years ago and had carried for 55 years. This would be Paulo´s eighteenth year as a carguero, a role which he took proudly, humbly, and reverently.
¨In reality the pasos are very heavy,¨ Paulo told me, ¨but when you are carrying you don´t feel any pain. You carry with the strength of your heart. You carry with your soul.¨
A few days later I had a chance to carry one of the heavier pasos depicting two women at the feet of Jesus as he carried the cross. I carried for about half a block (next to a man who must have been over fifty and carried for about eight blocks) and felt it in my shoulder for three days. The cargueros, who carry over thirty blocks and several hours, are left with welts which resemble a softball surgically implanted on the collarbone.
Catholic for about three minutes
The processions began on Tuesday, with the crowd growing larger every night until Friday, which is considered the most important procession. Back at Steve´s grandparents house, everyone was chatting anxiously as Paulo, Steve´s younger brother Christian, and several other family members were dressed in the living room in blue robes and caps. Girlfriends, sisters, and aunts pinned minture wreaths to the white sashes which draped over the robes.
Later, on the streetside, the military band blocks away echoed down the whitewashed corridors. Young boy/girl scouts in blue class A uniforms and arms linked cleared the road followed by street sweepers in dust masks and yellow jumpsuits. Then came the junior police, eight-year olds looking stern in stiff uniforms. Behind them more children in red frilly robes ringing bells, looking like high priests from the inquisition. The band arrived - glockenspielers, booming bass drums, women in heels with hand cymbals, the percussion artillery, then the brass. The music was mournful, militant, and Christmasy - the type of songs you might hear at the funeral of a high-ranking elf who fell valiantly in a hopeless and bloody quagmire with the nefarious grinchlings of the south pole.
Paulo and Kike luggin the big one
The first paso arrived, adorned with candles which Steve´s grandfather makes by hand and depicting one of the Catholic saints surrounded by fresh flowers. The cargueros paused with a faraway look in their eyes and propped the paso up on four poles made from the same palm which produces the starchy chontaduro fruit. More pasos, then, followed by bands playing music which makes you think of the moment Bambi died, politicials, a beaming Miss Colombia (straight from Popayan) waving to the flashing cameras, more pasos depicting Jesus, Mary, the whole cast, a mobile symphony playing a song which evokes images of the last dinosaur collapsing in the middle of a vast desert and, oddly, a Simon and Garfunkle song which Steve later told me has been converted into a tradtional hymnal. The tail of the carnival was brought up by soldiers carrying candles and rifles, and finally, a single street vendor shouting ¨Mani! Mani! Mani!¨
Which means peanuts.
The next day we woke up early-ish and piled into a bus advertising Medellin Rum. Instead of seats there were bar stools lining the open-air sides making plenty of room to dance behind the caged-in divers pit. Somone yanked the generator and the music spewed forth as we wheeled around town, collecting various people who all turned out to be more or less related before zooming off at top volume into the countryside. Like something out of a commercial, someone produced a bottle of rum and we all smiled approvingly as the accordians blared from the speakers. The gang was fairly grinning by the time we pulled up at the hilltop country house.
Steve´s folks are awesome
The women began cooking rice and boiling up a traditional concotion of ¨sancocho¨, a large stew of meats, vegetables, herbs, and really anything you want. The men kept drinking. I fell asleep in a hammock. When I awoke, the grandfathers and uncles were drunk and intrigued by the pale visitor. What was I doing here? How did I like the women? Did I need another rum? Nada mucho, me encantan, y claro que si, Señor!
We passed the day like this - talking, eating, sipping rum - until finally we all heaped back into the party bus and rambled off down the rutty mountain dirt road. We were feeling inspired, it seemed, especially the grandfathers and uncles, who all took to the dance floor, flailing around in an inebriated, stumbling salsa. One of the girls grabbed my hand and someone slapped a straw hat on my head and off we went, twirling recklessly to the beat. At Steve´s urging, I cut loose with The Dance of The Gringo, one of the only true remaining esoteric arts, and wowed the locals with my deft, straight-from-two-decades-ago gyrations.
The disco bus, gringo style
The next night we took the 11pm bus from Cali. We arrived at the terminal in Medellin early in the morning. The sun had not yet topped the eastern mountains. Coffee vendors roamed the streets. The air was warm and welcoming.
At once I longed for and felt at home.
written by  chaddeal on April 14, 2009 from Popayan, Colombia

La Alma de la Ciudad
Only one question matters to anybody who is travelling correctly:
Where do I find the soul of the city - the main nerve?
I´ve spent over two months in Medellin now, hounding this very inquiry.
Its probably not in the top-rated Lonely Planet hostels - surrogate frat-houses dotting the globe. Its probably not in the key tourist destinations linked by a bus which, for some unknown reason, is modeled after a San Franciso trolley car. Its definitely not is the posh disco ghetto of Zona Rosa, where drunk bipolar bachelorettes spill tears and drinks with names like ¨Russian Cocaine¨ on their over-priced breasts, waiting for someone to come along and just love them.
It might be somewhere in the hole-in-the-wall cafe down a dark alley, where a plate of bandeja paisa can be had at any hour while unimpressive hookers and half-wit pimps mill around looking bored casting neon shadows on the asphalt. It might be in the stairwell on the top floor of an apartment building sharing boxed wine with friends and feeling immortal as the city lights sleep far below. Its definitely in the people themselves, the way they reflect their surroundings through humor, song, dance, quirks, cliches, and even violence.
Carrera Barranquilla
I met Felipe about a month ago. I literally ran into him while exiting an internet cafe. He told me about his music studio next door, which explained the mysterious muffled punk drumming I´d been hearing for weeks. Felipe refined my use of explicatives and comical derrogatives in Spanish and I occasionally corrected his English. In no time we were having jam sessions with Steve of pure improv sweetness which lasted for hours and left us all feeling high.
Steve, Felipe, and me jamming
Felipe's studio is a definite social hub. Everyday on the concrete third floor balcony you can meet adolescent punk wanna-bes slugging aguardiente and bearded chain-smoking metal heads who don´t realize that they are too old to be wearing leather pants and Slayer t-shirts, pretending to have some sort of unholy arrangment with Satan. It was in this way that I met another Felipe, who falls into neither category.
Felipe (part deux) is a mathematician who studies algeabraic geometry at the National University. We went to his spot, Niez Bar, and talked of fractals, the golden ration, the idea of a grand unified theory, and the fourth dimension. Felipe knows his shit.
Me, Deisy, Felipe (to the second power), Grisly, and The Paisa at Niez
He also taught me how to stay out all night in a city which, from the outside, appears to be fast asleep by 11pm most everynight. It was a relevant bit of knowledge considering I´d just come down with a mean bout of insomnia which kept me awake until well past dawn following and endless chain of links into esoteric reading material on the internet. The internet gets a weird as you want it to. The night life in Medellin, as it turns out, does too.
Negotiating a nocturnal Medellin involves, first, avoiding very specific streets which become hostile when the sun sets and, second, meeting with the gang at Niez Bar. Niez is the ultimate dive bar. It doesn´t even have a sign. The same crowd of five or ten regulars are there everynight laughing loudly on the porch as 1990´s ¨alternative¨ music videos gush from the TV. The doors close between midnight and two, at which point the festivities continue inside or everyone walks a few blocks to a taxi carwash which sells pastries and beer.
Around two, Livido gets going. Livido is the polar opposite of Zona Rosa. You go with someone who knows what their doing to a non-descript door in a residential block on the farside of Jardin Botanico. You knock. Someone peeps out and you feel like you´re on the threshold of a 1920s speakeasy. The guy decides you´re alright and in you go, into the concrete belly of what looks like a squatted mortuary. The hep latenight crowd of Medellin is there, dancing strangely to music which is gritty, beat-heavy, and seems to have originated somewhere in Eastern Europe. A cloud of ganja smoke looms in the air as couples engage in every phase of copulation in a dark room, away from the flashing lights. You think for a moment...maybe this is it. The Nexus.
A few nights later Deisy, Felipe (squared), and I met up at Niez for a rock show. The band played covers from the ´90s, including both ¨100%¨ and ¨Diamond Sea¨ by Sonic Youth. It was blissful. Grisly, one of the regulars, gave me a bracelet as we talked on the stairs so I would never forget her. Her name, she told me, came from Grisly Adams. Her mother had watched the movie and, thinking Grisly was the name of the female protagonist, named her daughter accordingly. Only years later did she realize that Grisly was the name of the bear, a fact which Grisly laughs about to this day.
Deisy and me
Strangely enough, I´ve also found ample evidence of the soul of the city in the house of a a fellow foreigner - Amu from Germany. Amu lives ten floors above me with two Colombian roommates, Julian and Santiago. Good ole once-cuarenta-y-tres, walls painted the vibrant red-yellow-blue of the Colombian flag and always a crowd of travelers talking, strumming guitars, playing poker in the living room. Every aspect of the house is oriented towards hosting guests from couchsurfing.com - a gaggle of girls from Peru, bearded men from Belgium, bright-eyed Italian women, gringos, euros, whoever. Everynight there is someone visiting and staying for a while. The atmosphere is always festive and a meal is always cooking. Amu enjoys a pure, uncomplicated appreciation for life and other people which is selfless, infectious, and inspiring.
Today I said goodbye to all of them, the people who have in so little time impressed so much upon the way I consider the world. My quixotic love affair with Medellin and all of Colombia is over, as I fly out tomorrow just after noon. Like Vonnegut once wrote: ¨Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.¨
Because the great thing about this life is that our experiences will always be with us.
For just a moment,
I was a part
of the soul
of the city.
Now the soul
of the city,
its a part of me, too.
written by  chaddeal on April 28, 2009 from Medellin, Colombia

Take the Long Way Home
San Jose, Costa Rica
Santa was having trouble with Colombian customs.
"Where's the snow, Saint Nick?" the agents asked as they gutted his big red suitcase like a dead animal. Santa smiled and gave a shrug. They found nothing and eventually stamped his North Pole passport, sending him on his way.
It was my turn next. I approached the window and yeilded my passport. The bored agent behind the counter flipped through the visa pages for a very long time. In Spanish, he told me to wait as he disappeared behind a door. When he came back he informed me that my visa had been overstayed by nearly a month. I would have to miss my flight to Panama City and produce large sums of money. I protested.
He took me to a dim back room which seemed to serve this purpose alone - bantering about overstayed visas and exchanging half-assed threats. The agent got on a computer and clicked on random icons, desiring the appearance of looking busy, somehow trying to help.
"Two hundred and fifty dollars," he said finally, as if he we reading it from the screen. He was halfway through a game of minesweeper.
"Listen, I don't have two hundred and fifty dollars, thats why I'm going home. I'm broke."
"Hmm, well. Two hundred and fifty is the minimum. I'm trying to make this easy on you."
"Right."
"What were you doing for nearly three months in Colombia, anyways?"
I was teaching English without a work visa, dancing salsa with wild girls, and eating lots of fried food - but sometimes the truth only complicates things. I had a better idea.
"Well, if you must know, I'm a writer. A professional. For a very popular travel magazine in the United States. I've been working on an article about how wonderful and welcoming your country is for tourists. After all, the only risk is wanting to stay, am I wrong? Well, I've had nothing but good experiences...so far..."
He caught my gist.
"Just give me whatever you have and get outta here. And hurry, your flight's about to leave."
I sat next to Santa and we struck up conversation. Panama would be his 80th country. He held the unofficial world record for hitchhiking, an estimated million and a half miles. He was as kind-hearted and jolly as you'd expect Santa to be.
Santa
When we arrived in Panama City Santa and Pete from New Jersey came with me to David's house, who I had gotten in touch with a few days earlier on couchsurfing.com. David lived in a elegant highrise on the waterfront. The causeway gleamed across the water and the city made city sounds. We shared stories and beers late into the night.
I woke up to Santa looming over me in his big red shirt and his Peruvian lama fur hat.
"Man," he said, "you one ugly motherfucker in the morning."
"Thanks Santa."
Pete had awoken with his eyes bloodshot and itching. I later learned that he was detained at the Panama City airport under suspicion of having swine flu. You can read the full story here:
David and Santa
Pete and Santa
We headed off across town to Mama Llena hostel, where I was going to meet up with Katie, old Humboldt friend, and Santa was going to find a room. Santa drew a lot of attention from the locals, who HoHoHo-ed from delivery trucks and snuck pictures from across the street. He seemed accustomed to the popularity and returned the salutations joyfully.
We found Katie at a hostel in Casco Viejo and hung out for a while drinking coffee. Then off we went, Katie and I, to retrieve a car which some folks from Alabama had left with her to return to northern Pamana. The car was an old brown diesel Toyota 4-runner. At first we couldn't even get the thing started, so we wandered around barefoot in the rain for a while before finding a taxi who was willing to come over and jump the battery. The car came to life and we took off.
Katie and an anteater who says HONK!
Katie had driven a stick one time before in her life, when someone in Humboldt had taken a vial of LSD to prove a point and quickly lost the ability to operate a motor vehicle. Now she was learning all over again, on the wet roads of rush hour Panama City. The first thing we did was got lost following some bogus directions. We asked the locals and some policemen, but every single answer contradicted the others. We took life into our own hands. We read a map. In no time we were zooming through the insane traffic of the city towards the canal. By the time we breezed over the Bridge of the Americas, Katie was driving the beast like a champ and we both shared a profound sense of relief and accomplishment.
The plan, we decided, was to drive until it got boring and figure out what to do and where to stay as we went. Of course.
When evening hit we were both ready for a beer. We pulled off the road and went into a bar which shared an architectual heritage with the public restrooms you find on So Cal beaches. Shitty porn played from a TV.
Katie spotted him first.
"That one, with the baseball cap. He's the one that's going to give us a place to stay tonight."
"You're right," I said. "Let's go talk to him."
He turned out to be friendly enough. We all talked about mundane things for a while. Katie and I decided somehow to masquerade as German tourists for the hell of it, so we occasionally broke into side conversations of exasperated faux-German before resuming small talk with our unknowing benefactor.
He did indeed have a place for us, as it turned out. Just across the street. He introduced me to his friend, who looked like a toad from an old Chinese story. The toad appeared to be retarded. Or very, very drunk.
"Forty dollars," said the toad.
"Five," I countered.
"Twenty," he challenged.
"Look," I continued, "The lady and I are simple people. In fact, we're German. We don't require much. We're probably better off sleeping on the beach."
"Ten," the Toad belched irritably.
"Agreed."
The place was a three bedroom guesthouse behind a large, semi-luxurious estate which was clearly inhabited by old folks. It was unclear why the Toad had the keys to the house, but it seemed to involve a boss who was on vacation elsewhere. We rigged up the stereo and laid down our things and proceeded to drink late into the night with our two Panamanian entrepeneurs.
The next morning we woke around noon to find the Toad on the porch sucking on a bottle of vodka, still with that challenged look in his eye. We took our time leaving - went swimming, ate some mangoes, showered.
Katie and the Toad
We weren't on the road more than a few hours before pulling over at a roadside beerhut to get leisurely. Some locals waved as we sat down. They appeared to be in the depths of a methamphetamine binge. Their faces were skinny and too wrinkled for their age, their eyes hollow and frantic. They signaled the waitress to give us some beer. So we drank them. But before we were even halfway through, two more showed up. We waved a "gracias" and the dudes smiled proudly. Suckers for gringa girls, all of them.
In no time we were halfway to drunk and again somehow mysteriously German as we talked away with some people sitting next to us. They were from Santiago, nearby. The older man told me that the other was his son in law.
"A ha, and she must be your lovely daugter," I said, indicating the woman sitting near to the other man.
"No," he responded. "My daughter is at home with the kids. This is the mistress of my son in law."
"Oh, hmm. This sort of thing is not so common in Germany. You don't mind it here though?"
"Why should I?" The man asked, smiling. "Everyone has a mistress in Panama."
Katie and I exchanged some German remarks.
More beers appeared.
"Those guys," said the father in law, pointing to the meth fiends. "Gays."
"Gays?"
"Yes," he said gravely. "Gays. And robbers."
"Holy shit. What should I do?"
"Avoid the urinal. They want to steal your penis."
"Good lord!"
We realized that we would have to cut off the drinks pretty soon if we intended to drive any further, so we left the bar and clambered around on a half-built watertower, sang strange songs, and painted each others faces with the ash from a burnt tree.
The sun had long since set when we rolled into Santiago. We found a cheap hotel room and bought a bottle of rum. Election day was the day after tomorrow and all booze sales would be halted the next day at noon so as to prevent drunk voting. We wandered around town, then, seeking a taste of Friday night Santiago. We ended up at a bus station where somehow we had decided to distribute rum to everybody.
"Would you like a shot of rum?" One of us would ask a bored looking stranger.
"A shot of rum?"
"Yes, a shot of rum."
"How much does it cost?"
"Nothing."
The idea alone of free rum was enough to frighten away a few, but the tenacious understood and eagerly accepted. I produced the bottle from beneath my Colombian poncho and filled up a tall shot in my wooden shot glass necklace from carnaval. The takers were pleased and grateful. Its a long ride to David by bus, but this night the ride was certain to be a shade merrier.
What an odd notion, we realized. How simple it is to get the vast majority of an entire bus grinning stupidly for no good reason at all. We felt like sorcorers.
The bus took off but we wanted more, so we waved down a taxi.
"Listen, we're on a promocional campaign for Abuelo rum and we absolutely must distribute this entire bottle to thirsty locals before the night is through. What we need is for you to drive us down every street in town while we hand out shots. We can't pay you, but we can get you drunk. What do you say?"
The first cabbie said he didn't drink and therefore couldn't help us. A Panamanian man who doesn't drink? Lies!
But the next driver was intrigued. At first he laughed, but when I showed him the bottle the tone became conspiritorial. He had to make a run, he said, but he'd be back.
So Katie and I clambered up a watertower to get a more complete yen of late night Santiago. For me, Katie has been one of those friends that just flow into your life naturally and seem to be there for a reason. Our conversations quickly turn esoteric and seem to carry an air of secrecy. Like we're on the same vibe. We both generally suspect that there is a lot of unseen and unknown going on behind this thin film of consensual reality, and that seemingly ordinary people are in fact divine superheroes - the hot dog lady on the street corner, a flight attendant, hazy eyed old men smoking pipes in a cow field, all of us - mysterious and magickal somethings that for some large and blocky purpose have been imprisoned in life as we know - passing time, learning lessons, hammering out the edges just waiting to fly again.
So it was these sorts of things which we discussed loudly like giddy children atop the watertower as we waited for and then forgot about our taxi accomplice, who never did come.
The next day we hit the road late again and plowed through the rain for hours before reaching Bambu hostel in David around sunset. We passed several days there - swimming, hammocking, singing bizzare songs to the dogs on the porch, Katie working on her mural on the wall, me taking my old bicycle out for long rides, sometimes lurking around the city at night.
Finally Katie said she couldn't stand it anymore, David is hell. I didn't know just what she meant until we made it up to Lost and Found eco hostel in the rainforest about an hour inland. She had spent the past two months there doing a work exchange, giving the place some flair with her wild art, and generally causing trouble.
Katie's mural at Bambu
She took me on a hike through the appropriately titled "death trail", where the path crumbles beneath your feet and disappears down a cliffside like something out of Indiana Jones. I was positive I would step on an exotic serpent and die peacefully right there in the jungle like a shaman. Instead we swam in the river and jumped around on some rocks.
A few days later I got on a bus and found myself at the end of a long and hazy day in San Jose, Costa Rica. I met up with my old roommate Michelle from the TEFL school in Samara and we went out on the town. Scenic San Jose. We ended up at a bar that played eighties music all night and danced like fools while everyone else stood around looking cool.
The next day we met up with Layne, another classmate from the TEFL school, who was celebrating her birthday with her cousin in a hotel room by the airport in Alajuela. Both her cousin and I had flights at 6 the next morning, so we stayed up most the night talking and hanging around.
Well, then, before I knew it, here is was. Back in mama America. Everything looking so clean. So orderly.
People stop at red lights and follow the lines on the road.
And maybe you know how it is - for all the homesickness along the way, for all the times I found comfort in the memories of right here, well, suddenly that feeling was very far away, and the bittersweet of people and places never to be seen again surged my heart with the impossibility of it all, the beauty and the strange miracle of existence in the first place,
and I was made full
with gratitude.
written by  chaddeal on May 14, 2009 from San Jose, Costa Rica

Bitchin Sunset

Pipa Gangster

The Gang at Nella´s place

A Kuna woman in the city

San Blas - living in a postcard

Jaco from afar

Jeimy, Jose, and me on a litich sphere

Yes is good!

Casco Viejo

Biking by the Panama canal

Zonked in the car to San Blas

Chipper as heck in the way to San Blas with two Danish friends

Downtown from Casco Viejo

Kaj, Ricky, and I - drugged and being transported to Guantanamo Bay

Nella and I, feeling breezy

Tropical craft time in San Blas

School of the Americas

Gamboa Resort (Former School of the Americas)

Bambu hostel

Cartagena

Cartagena Fortress

Approximate Heaven on Earth

Hammock Space Pod at Zaneidas

What the FARC?

Cogi kids eager for candy

The Magic Bus

Carnaval

Metrocable

Marimonda

Medellin

Medellin Jardin Botanical

Bibliotheca Espana

Extra haggard with Brad at Lost City

Soldiers at Lost City

Plenty of laughter in the jungle

The magic bus, enduring the hard times

I know how ya feel dude!

Plazo Botero - fat is back

Pueblito Paisa

Botero Scultpure

Mickey and Jennifer

Effin Cool

Chadtero Dog

Jilltero Cat

Chillian

Window vista

Hot Sauce is Sexy

Chillfest at Jardin Botanico

PinC condiments

Steve and Angela

Womens Rights

Gettin some

Catholic for about three minutes

Christian, Angela, and me in Popayan

¿Como se lama?

The disco bus, gringo style

Guambiana

Paulo and Kike luggin the big one

Steve looks like latino David Byrne

Champus look like vomit

Steve´s folks are awesome

Steve, Felipe, and me jamming

Carrera Barranquilla

Me, Deisy, Felipe (to the second power), Grisly, and The Paisa at Niez

Deisy and me

Katie and an anteater who says HONK!

David and Santa

Santa

Pete and Santa

Katie and the Toad

Katie's mural at Bambu

Steve tests out his roadside karmic conductivity

Gangsters