Back in North America

Mexico City gets a pretty bad rap from most travellers. Most people associate it with rampant over-population, shockingly polluted air and being quite literally one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Given all of this I wasn´t too excited about the prospects of coming here.

When Katie asked me if I was sure I needed to go to Mexico I replied with a less than confident "I think so..." And as I rode in the cab toward the airport in Cartegena I seriously pondered what would happen if I just turned back around and went to the hotel.

Katie and had met only 4 days earlier, but we hit it off right away. Maybe it was because our paths crossed on a boat heading to paradise. Well it was actually Cabo San Juan de Guia in Parque Nacional Tayarona, but within about 30 seconds of getting there we both agreed it was paradise.

Maybe I was just hoping that as a practicing psychologist she could provide some free psychotherapy. But if she managed to figure out any of my many pathologies she didn´t clue me in, which is probably for the best. She didn´t even bat an eye when I destroyed her camera, for which she has my eternal gratitude and admiration. In any case we spent the next 2 days with our hammocks strung up next to each other, enjoying the sun, water and fresh fish that came with paradise.

After a hop, skip and a jump we were in Cartegena and it was time for me to leave. Throughout my travels I´ve noticed that some goodbyes have taken far too long while others have come with such haste one cannot even process the surrealness of that one instant.

With all of this on my mind as my flight began it´s descent into Mexico City I cringed at the fact that I was now here. It all seemed like such a good idea when it came to me about a week ago. Mexico is close to the US. I need to go back to the US at some point, so why not just go to Mexico instead and somehow make my way north???

I knew nothing about Mexico City of course, except all of the things that were now turning me of to it. And I had no idea where I was going to spend the night as usual. But I found a pretty nice hostel fairly quickly without incident and spent the next day exploring the town.

And much to my suprise I´m finding I kinda like it. It´s full of beautiful colonial architecture, wide tree-lined streets and monuments to seemingly everything and anything even remotely related to the nation´s history. And after a few months of complaining about the difficulty of finding a good cheap meal in South America I´m absolutely in love with the culture of street food, although needless to say there are some drawbacks.

And there is something comforting about looking at a map of Mexico. It´s like Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead laid out a song book right there in our neighbor to the south. Cities with names like Durango and Acapulco, Oaxaca and Ixtapa, Tabasco and Tequila just excite the imagination. I don´t know exactly what route I´ll take, but I already know the destination.

No later than Oct 22nd I will be in San Diego. The thoughts of how exactly to put the pieces of my life back together and what exactly this wonderful insightful "plan" that everyone assumes I have already figured out are bouncing around my skull. But for the time being I´m going to try to enjoy this, the last leg of what has been a wonderful journey, a long strange trip indeed.

PADI Certified

I´d finally figured out the secret to Scuba diving, which it turns out is the same as the secret to life. Just keep breathing. But things were getting a little more nuanced under the water and I was feeling like maybe these guys should be teaching me a thing or two about Scuba diving since I was taking a scuba diving course through them.

Taganga is a little fishing village about 1/2 bus ride from Santa Marta, set inside a beautiful bay. It has about 1000 people, 1 paved street and 5 of the cheapest Scuba Diving schools in the world. I picked Oceano because they had the most expensive boat and the cheapest tractor. The first two course days had gone great. Moments after showing up the first day I was falling off of a boat backwards and marvelling at the wonderful world of Jacque Cousteau that lay before me.

The 6th dive was a little different. We descended to 70 feet inside the boundries of Parque Nacional Tayarona, the premier diving spot in mainland Colombia. It started out fine as we cruised along admiring the colorful reefs and fish all around us. Then the Spanish guy and I bumped into each other. I think it was his fault, but since he´s a certified dive master and I don´t know what the heck I´m doing, I´m probably wrong.

He was fine but I started to ascend. I never had managed to figure out how to stay nuetrally buoyant. As I fumbled with my gear I tried to release some of the air out of my BCD but mistakenly pumped it up instead, which speeded my ascent. I watched helplessly as the coral reef we had just been enjoying disappeared below me. I felt the current almost immediately. It was strong, too strong to swim against.

Faced with this situation I tried to think back to all the instruction I had recieved. But as I tried to form a mental picture of those 3 seperate 1/2 hour DVD sections which constituted the sum total of my training all I could see in my mind´s eye was Roberto, the proprietor of Oceano, saying ¨it´s all just a lot of blah, blah, blah. Let´s go diving!¨

I knew panicking wouldn´t help. I couldn´t see any evidence of my fellow divers below me. I´d finally managed to duck down below the current sweaping me away but had no clue where I was. The ocean can be a dark and lonely place when you´re alone. I knew I should never have rented that stupid move ¨Open Water.¨

The next section of the DVD was supposed to cover decompression. Up until now I had just followed the instructors and assumed they knew what they were doing. So I waited an agonizingly long time, which I assumed to be 5 minutes about 10 feet under water before surfacing. The current had pulled me out past the cove we were exploring and I was heading to open sea. I could see our boat in the distance skimming around. I knew I should have learned to whistle louder, but instead I just shouted ¨hey!¨ a couple of times. I had plenty of oxygen left so I wasn´t too worried, but I really didn´t want to swim all the way over there.

But soon enough they were over to pick me up. It turned out that when we seperated the other 3 divers had surfaced and started hunting for me. ¨Was it scary¨ asked José? ¨Yeah it actually was¨ I replied honestly. ¨Well at least now you´ll have a story to tell you´re kids¨ said the Yalel. ¨It´s ok¨ I told him ¨I´ve got better.¨

Just about ready

When I was in Quito and e-mailing back and forth with Bill trying to make plans to stay in Medellin he asked me how long I was going to be here for. I told him just two weeks, but if I´m having a good time I might extend it to three. Well one month after I got to town I´m finally ready to leave. The same thing happened to me when I started this trip 8 months ago. Two weeks turned into 35 days. Medellin is a great city, as addicting as it´s most famous export.

Marta and I continued our tradition of saying our goodbyes over a media botella de Ron Medellin. It certainly was a roller-coaster ride with her this time throught, but thankfully we managed to end on a high note. And seeing Bill again went swimmingly. I´ve got a feeling we´ll meet again soon, perhaps in Medellin again if one of these business ideas takes off, if not maybe in South Carolina once his new condo is done and the fish are biting again.

I spent the last two months hanging out with family and friends. And now I´m going to head to another city where I´ve never been before and don´t know anyone. Obstensibly I´m going to Santa Marta to take a scuba diving course. I was planning on doing that 8 months ago but I never left Medellin the first time and I realized I should probably learn how to swim before going scuba diving. So now that that´s taken care of there´s nothing to keep me out of the water. There´s also a rather famous archeological ruin 3 days away, which sounds tempting.

After that plans get thrown up in the air again. I´m actually basically ready to head back to the US and put the pieces of my life back together. I´m tempted to just be done with it and book a flight from Cartegena all the way back home. But actually I think I´ll try to find a boat heading to Colon, Panama and continue the rest of the journey by busses and trains eventually crossing the border from Tijuana to San Diego.

That also lets me hedge my bets just in case I´m wrong and that Cuban salsa band I´ve been dying to see does eventually get their visa situation straightened out and make it off the island for their Mexican tour. Actually most of them are there already, they´re just missing one of the singers. But I´m trying not to get my hopes up.

Either way this has been by far the best thing I´ve ever done in my life. When I reflect back on all the ridiculous experiences I´ve had and the hodgepodge band of hooligans I´ve met I can´t help but think how my life would be the same as it was before had I just stayed in Seattle working for Microsoft. My biggest concern now is that when I get back and try to acclimate myself to a ¨regular¨ lifestyle I´m just going to want to take off on another trip.

I hear Thailand and Vietnam are really fascinating, jungles, beaches and great food. But I never did get to the northern coast of Brazil and Portuguese is similar enough to Spanish I think I could pick it up pretty easily. Of course parts of Eastern Europe are still pretty cheap and it´s very accessible. And maybe I could just go work on my Hindi in India. Addicting indeed.

Just Another Day At the Office

Before I showed up to Medellin Bill had filled me in on the great business idea he had been playing with for the last several weeks. Saddles! “You mean like for horses?” I asked him at first? Yup, turns out Colombia is known for making high quality, hand-made leather saddles. “But I don’t know anything about horses or saddles” I told Bill. “That’s ok” he assured me, “neither do I.”

Bill is one of those guys you want to hang out with just so you can hear his stories. It’s been 5 years since he sold his commercial lighting business and he was ready to do something, anything again. It’s been at least 9 months since I put in an honest day of work, and I guess I was ready for the same. Bill had the entrepreneurial spirit, and I was all for playing apprentice. We’ve always had a great time hanging out together, probably because he reminds me so much of myself only 20 some years older, and I assume the same in the other direction. I was sure this would be no different.

So we spent the next two weeks visiting various saddlery shops to check out their stocks, learning about the shipping routes through the Carribean, discussing visa requirements with lawyers over three martini lunches and learning the right way, and the wrong way, to negotiate a contract in Medellin. We learned about the difference between fiber glass hulls versus wood, metal horns versus leather, and the thickness required to etch patterns on leather surfaces.

In our down time, which was fairly common, we argued about the usage of the subjunctive tense in Spanish, experimented with different footwork for performing the “Dile que no”, smoked dried out Cuban cigars, made several promises to quit drinking rum and comiserated in our tortured love lives.

With the recent news out about Fidel we decided we should try any get Bill’s half written travelogue about Cuba tidied up. Then we talked about how cheaply designer jeans could be made in Colombia and that somehow worked its way towards exporting and distributing a well known line of Colombian lingerie to the US.

Bill started to apologize at some point, “I don’t want to make it sound like we’re just throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, but…” Not to worry, I assured him. “Throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks is one of my favorite pastimes.”

We had both agreed early on that the whole point of this exercise wasn't just to make a bunch of money. Although, that would be nice of course. It was about financing a lifestyle. Well actually we went back and forth on it quite a bit. After about 45 minutes and half a cigar we agreed it was more like 50% about the lifestyle and maybe 30% about making money and a remaining 20% about just having something to do.

After three weeks we’ve gotten to the point where we have about 4 or 5 lines in the water. The plan now is to see which one, if any, of them gets a bite. I’m getting ready to continue my journey north, head to Santa Marta and find another beach to bask in. Maybe one of these projects will turn into something, maybe not, either way it certainly felt good to be something close to relatively productive again. I suppose that’s what you call hanging out with a good friend for 3 weeks.

Songs in the Key of Life

The apartment that Bill and I rented had an agonizingly slow cable modem. It was enough to drive a man to drink. But I had my laptop with me and plenty of free space on my iPod so I knew what was to be done. My sister had done a pretty good job filling the thing up with music before she gave it to me, but there were a million songs running through my head that I wanted to hear again.

After a few days, a new found appreciation for BitTorrent and 15 GBs I was feeling like my old self again. And just in time too. Next Monday was some national holiday, Colombians sure do love their national holidays. They have something like 30 days off a year, which makes for a lot of 3 day weekends and great excuses to travel. Marta and I decided to head to Armenia to check out the Parque Nacional de Café. And my goal was to get enough new music on my iPod to keep us occupied for the 7 hour bus ride each way.

Lately I’ve been hearing Crosy Stills Nash and Young in my head a lot. Just the one song, they keep telling me to love the one I’m with. It sounds like such good advice, but like most bits of good advice it’s much harder to put into practice.

The trip to Armenia started off most disastrously. A ½ hour into our journey the skies burst open and let out one of the torrential rains that Medellin is famous for. Traffic came to a standstill and we sat around and inhaled diesel fumes. Turns out some power lines were knocked down, combined with the long holiday weekend and that meant that the single road out of the valley in which Medellin was nestled in was packed from end to end.

Eventually we did make it to Armenia. On the way there Marta found one of the few Spanish songs I had on my iPod, “Algo Mas”. Not the version by La 5ra Estacion, but the one from a relatively unknown Cuban vocalist I’d fallen in love with. In what will no doubt prove to be one of the most ironic twists of fate I’ve ever stumbled across, Marta decided she loved the song and it perfectly summed up our relationship. She must have played that song 100 times over the span of one weekend.

Armenia is gorgeous beyond compare. The rolling green hills you see everywhere in Colombia are full of coffee and banana plants and a nice cool breeze keeps the heat of the sun at bay. Marta and I spent the entire next day exploring Parque Nacional del Café, walking over bamboo bridges, riding pontoon boats out on the little man-made like and pretending to be Juan Valdez.

As I went through all the movements and said all the things that sounded so right and felt so wrong I couldn’t help but hearing Fiona Snapple in my head telling me about feeling like a criminal. I’ve come to the conclusion that doing the right thing is really hard. In fact, that’s how you know it’s the right thing to do, because you just really don’t want to. It’s far more easier to just do what will get you through the next moment without having to feel the pain and anguish that accompany the truth, only the pangs of guilt that eat you up inside.

As we found ourselves traveling back to the north on our ride back home I couldn’t keep my eyes open. As I laid my head down to sleep I put on Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” I glanced out the window and watched as the Colombian country side turned slowly into autumn. Things weren’t going as planned, they seldom ever do, but I though to myself I just can’t help it if I’m lucky.