~~





Day 0, 0 kilometers walked of 700:Pilgrim Hostel, Zamora, Spain. Camino de Santiago Pilgrimage, Via de la Plata route.

~~~

Day 1, 16k (16/700k): OMG This is Amaaaaazing! I want to walk around the WORLD!


Day 2, 25k (41/700k): Holy crap.




~~

9/11/2001: New York City, 3rd street and 2nd avenue. I watched the first tower burn, the fireball go up the second. I wandered the city in a daze, walked with the hoards of people covered in grey ash like snow, no one speaking, stunned into silence. I panicked in the streets when someone shouted: "They're going after the small buildings next!" and ran till my heart pounded louder than the words in my head. I dialed my mother, I dialed my mother, oh god don't let me die without speaking to my mother! but the phones weren't working. "Due to the tornado in your area, your call cannot be completed." The Internet: our savior. All of us desperately trying to connect. Reunited randomly online with an old lover: "Where are you?" "Here." "Meet me on 14th Street." Watching ambulances race down deserted streets. Holding hands, clinging to familiarity, waiting for the world to end. The next days were only eerie, the city empty, except for the vigils: I held a stranger in Washington Square Park, touched the faces of missing people plastered on streetlights, burst into tears at PETA's simple white signs, "Do you know of an animal who is missing its person?" Life is so mundane, so normal, until one day, it isn't.

Lago Atitlan is a beautiful lake, up in the highlands, hemmed in by volcanoes and famous for being the second biggest tourist destination in Guatemala.

Meaning: loaded with students and aging hippie ex-pats.

There are several villages of varying sizes dotting the lake, and small boats ferry peopole from one to the other around the lake and back to the largest town, Panajachel, where the busses and shuttles land.

I wasn´t quite sure what I´d do once I got there, but I figured I´d let the adventure find me.

I did know, however, that I would avoid San Pedro -- exactly where EVERYBODY I met told me to go -- which is described in the book as a haven for pot-smoking and all-night reggae parties with travelers, distinctly not my scene.

So, once in Panajachel, I clambored off the bus, and waited, as is customary, quite some time for the ferry to fill up enough for the driver to decide it was worth his while.

As a mix of toursts and locals slowly amassed, I noticed a skinny white guy, dressed in loose-fitting, colored linen/cotton clothes, with an unkempt blonde ponytail and a scraggly goatee, playing some sort of rather annoying Indian flute. I involuntarily thought something along the lines of ¨Ucccchhh,¨ but when he sat down next to me and started talking with a robust Santa-Claus wannabe ex-pat, I discovered his mitigating secret: he was British.

He was also very soft spoken, and overtly spiritual in that peaceful, new-age sort of way that is oddly catching. I found what he had to say fascinating.

On the slow-moving, open air ferry, I mentioned that I was thinking of staying in the town of Santa Cruz, a quieter, more laid-back town on the edge of the lake. As we continued talking, he shyly said that he wasn´t used to company, but that he was staying in a cabin not far from Santa Cruz-- did I want to have some tea? And, maybe the people he was staying with would let me stay in their other cabin. If not, it was a short walk back to Santa Cruz.

Why not?

It was a wonderful decision. We spent a lovely evening discussing philosophy and world interpretations of spirituality, karma and destiny. The cabin wasn´t available, but the meditation tent was-- a tiny, round slightly raised pavillion with mesh walls and the distinct smell of burned incense, with a diameter of just about exactly 5 feet 2 inches: perfect for me.

I fell asleep to crickets, and woke to sunlight, a perfect, peaceful evening.

The quiet adventure had indeed found me.

(Welcome to Guatemala: Life through a bus window.)

There are 2 ways to get around in Guatemala: the hard way, and the tourist way. Guatemalans take so-called ¨chickenbuses¨(even the Guatemalans call them that, although it´s more like ¨cheekenbooses¨), ancient, deisel-belching school buses worthy of their own entry (stay tuned). Tourists pay five times more to get there in a direct van full of other gringos, backpacks strapped precariously to the roof. Since the tourist shuttle from Antigua to Lago de Atlitlan was a whopping $10 and probably worth way more than that in saved time, comfort, and sweat, I took it.

The shuttle was uneventful, including in that it was late (typical) and a bit, for our $10 of ¨comfort¨, crowded (also typical.) Somewhat amusing, however, were the expressions on the faces of the two young Aussie guys when they realized the trip was almost 3 hours long.

¨We thought it was a 1\2 hour...¨ said Oz #1.

¨We have round-trip tickets...¨ said Oz #2.

¨For today...¨ (Oz #1)

The shuttles estimated time to return? Approximately half an hour after arrival.

¨Ah, well,¨ said Oz #1. ¨We like to ride buses.¨

¨Yah,¨ responded Oz #2, nodding. ¨Nice ride.¨

I knew the rest of the world is laid-back compared to Americans, and Aussies even more so, but seriously: can I have some of whatever they´re smoking down under? Bonus points to the Aussies: they redifine what it means to be chill.

****SCROLL DOWN TO READ PARTS 1-3****

Seeing the glowing, red-hot (more like orange) rocks breaking off the main flow and tumbling softly in a river down the hill emboldened us all.

All of us, that is, except for Sonia. Remember her? The impatient yoga teacher who wanted to head up in her own. leaving the guide and the group behind? Well, Sonia took one look at those rocks and had a full-on panic attack.

¨I´m a social work student!¨ I shouted into the wind. ¨Grab my hand!¨ (OK, maybe not that first part.) Although it was clear the lava was quite happy on its current path and wasn´t particularly interested in spewing any flames or hurling an errant rock in our direction, it wasn´t a difficult thing to imagine.

And Sonia was imagining it.

---

Luckily, my amazing social work skillz paid off. We breathed. We were mindful. We called on rational mind. And, knowing that she´d been ¨holding it in¨ since the bottom of the mountain, I also told her that I thought she´d feel a lot better if she would just pee. She said she´d think about it.

Slowly, she let go of my hand, found a stable place to stand, and let me wander off on my own to, well, poke lava with a stick. (I POKED LAVA WITH A STICK!!!)

Suddenly, I smelled something truly awful, yet vaguely familiar. I turned around, and first saw my group, all with their backs to me. I turned a little more to my right, and saw Sonia´s bare ass, with pillars of smoke coming up around her.

Well, I thought, covering my nose, finally, ·someone· took my advice. And after finishing her pee-on-red-hot-rocks, she came up and thanked me.

¨You´re right,¨ she said, ¨I do feel better!¨

And with panic attack no more, we all enjoyed the volcano, then headed back down in the sunset with our headlamps, watching the glow grow brighter and brighter with each dip of the sun...

Note: Scroll down for parts 1 & 2.
~~~

Listen to my uncharacteristically understated amazement at the end of this impressive video clip.

(By the way, it was really, really windy at the top of that mountain!!!)






CLICK ME FOR PART 4!

~~~
See Part 1 HERE.
~~~

As soon as I got to Antigua, the main tourist hub in Guatemala, I signed up for one of the many bargain-basement ($10!) trips up to the top of Volcán Pacaya, where, rumor had it, we could actually roast marshmallows over the red-hot lava.

After an hour or so ride to a small, dilapidated park at the base of the volcano, our tourist minivan spilled us out into crowd of waiting children, who swarmed around us, saying, “Stick? Stick?” Each dirty child carried a tall walking stick, stripped of its bark and worn smooth. I was too overwhelmed by the onslaught to buy one, but Stephen, a tall, blonde Aussie dude of about 24, bought one.

(Or, at least, he thought he did—on the way back down, the stick was demanded back. Turned out, the boys said, he’d actually rented it. Being a cheeky git, Stephen demanded the boy buy it back from him for 5 Quetzales. As the boy dug quickly into his pocket, I kicked Stephen, who said, “Naw, just joking, you can have it.” Like I said: cheeky git.)

Anyway, sticks bought and facilities visited, we started up up and away, under the guiding hand of a slight, young Guatemalan guide who spoke no English. We quickly self-divided into three main factions: The Youth (ages 24 to, uh, me, from America, Sonia from Canada, Stephan from Australia, Cho from Korea, and Palin from Taiwan); The Insular (a young 30-something couple from some random snotty European country); and The Feeble, about 3 American couples who may not have actually been old enough for AARP but who were so slow and out of shape that The Youth were about to drop-kick them off the mountain.


One of The Feeble, McJerkerson, was so unfit that he wound up holding up the whole group as he wheezed and panted up the mountain. Sonia, a remarkably fit yoga instructor who set the pace for the rest of us, was particularly incensed & started encouraging the group toward mutiny. “Let’s just go without them!” she rallied. “This is ridiculous!”

And she was right: it was. But after seeing the look of the panicked guide, I asked him if we could go up ahead. “No,” he begged. “There are too many different paths…” So with my amazing diplomacy skills (I know, you didn’t know I had them, right?) I managed to keep us together, in fits and starts, for most of the way.

Until McJerkerson started complaining in earnest. “They didn’t tell us there’d be horses,” he started, bitching about the few horses on the trail who were around to rescue out-of-shape sorts like himself. “I’m allergic to horses. They said it was easy. They said it was only an hour.” (Note that it would’ve been only an hour to that point, had only The Youth and The Insular been walking.) “This is 10,000 meters high! This is crazy!”

Oh, for the love of Pete, I though. Was he serious? It wasn’t Mt. Everest (10,000 meters), but it was a volcano, about 2000 meters above sea level. You know, a mountain. There are no moving sidewalks. There are no “easy” mountains to climb.

Thankfully, soon thereafter we emerged from the forested path onto the final, barren slope of silty black sand and crumbly, just-birthed rock, where he looked up at the final steep climb, saw the thin red ribbon of our destination far up in the distance, and said, “Oh, no way. I’ve seen enough. I’m going back down.”

Um, what? Now the guide really started to freak out. McJerkerson was raving like a lunatic. The Youth were about to stampede up the mountain. The Insular were pouting and looking bored and muttering to themselves in European. Something needed to be done.

“Sir,” I said, acting as authoritative as my 5’ could muster, “I was a Park Ranger.” (Ohhhh, yeah! The Ranger card. Don’t be fooled: this actually works in some circles.) “It’s really not safe for you to go down without a guide. We took too many turns to get up here, it’s getting dark, and you don’t know who’s on the trail.” I looked over at the guide’s pleading eyes.

“Oh, he’ll stay,” said one the female members of McJerkerson’s troupe. Finally, someone rational. She, along with another of the Feeble couples, agreed to babysit his seething flabby ass, and the rest of us were off to bound up the mountain, headed for the river of glowing rock so far away.

Or rather, most of us. It was a steep, slippery, 3 steps forward, 2 steps back torture march up scrabbly scree, and I was winded within 10 seconds. “I’m going to have to back and join the AARP guys,” I gasped. I lagged behind, slowly deserted by my new comrades, until I heard in the distance, “HOLY SHIT!”

I took a raspy breath, leaned on the stick I’d pilfered from one of The Feeble, and looked up to the right. Less than 50 feet away was the slow-moving stream of red, black chunks being pushed along, tumbling slowly on a course straight like a road down the mountain.

Suddenly, all fatigue left my body, and I bounded up and away with fountains of renewed energy after them to the magic waiting there for us.


Click Here to See Part 3.

Who isn’t fascinated by volcanoes? OK, maybe you aren’t, but I’ve been captivated by volcanoes since I was a kid. Now that I’m a traveling grown-up, a deciding factor on where to go next has been, “Where can I see lava?”

And so, as a newly-minted West Coaster, I naturally headed off to Hawaii, with images of Kilauea blasting fiery plumes of molten rock high into the sky.

Kilauea, however, must’ve just gotten laid, because there was no smoky belching, no angry rumblings or explosive displays of rocky temper. Just a slow, sticky flow coursing languidly down its flank to crumble steamily into the ocean.

A good 10 miles away from the nearest viewpoint.

But I’m Travelingdina! An experienced urban and backcountry hiker! What is distance, to deter me from my dream? So I strapped on my boots, filled up my Camelback, slathered on the SPF 55 and headed off on the stark, battered plain of shiny and crumbling black rock toward the horizon. I was determined to reach my glowing goal. Nothing could stop me now!

Except for… a pesky government employee known as Ranger Smith.

“See the signs?” he asked.

I put on my cutest, most innocent face and looked around. “Um… what signs?”

(Only Bald Hikers Prohibited)

He sighed, and translated the “DANGER – DO NOT ENTER– AREA CLOSED– HIKER WITH A SLASH THROUGH IT” signs that were all around us: “Don’t walk any farther, the crust is thin and there could be lava right below you.”

As in, you may crash through the surface into the bubbling stuff below.

Yeah… I wasn’t getting anywhere near Hawaiian lava.

It was time to activate Plan B: find lava where the government doesn’t care if we fall in!

That’s right: I was headed to Guatemala!



~~~

Your Tax Dollars At Work

~~~

Click here to read Part II!

Baby Turtles!

So the best part of traveling is the wonderful people we meet.

I'll write more about the amazing week I spent with Corina, a beautiful girl from Ciudad Mexico, but for the time being, here's a placeholder self-portrait of us!

~~~

La mejor cosa de viajar es la gente que nos encontramos.

Voy a escribir mas sobre la semana muy fantastico que yo pase con Corina, una chica muy linda de Ciudad Mexico, pero por el momento, aqui esta una fotografia self-portrait de nosostros!

It's time for me to come clean: I'm hopelessly entrenched in a co-dependent relationship.

He speaks to me with a voice unlike any other, his English accent all languid, round vowels and crisp consonants, his demeanor wrapped in the assuredness of a Brit and the charm of a foreigner.

He's Daniel. My GPS.

Only hours after deciding to break out on my own, evaluate our relationship, take some space, and getting into the trusty civic for a week of Driving without Daniel, I sat in an oyster bar in Sonoma County, eavesdropping.

"What did we do before the Internet, cell-phones, GPS?" a young woman with close-cropped, jet-black hair asked a small group of her friends as she walked in the door, late.

"I guess we used maps!" replied her pretty blond friend.

As a certified map geek and technology-phobe, I have a special place in my heart for maps. My last home had a map of San Francisco center stage, each street I've walked on highlighted carefully in pink marker. I had every wall of a shared office covered with maps of the subway systems of foreign lands. And pulling out a map at the Flushing Avenue subway station may get you at least stared at and at worst mugged, but you also may make a friend.

But you know what we did before the Internet, cell-phones, GPS?

We got lost.

~~~

We tell ourselves that all the added technology in our cars poses a safety hazard, causes distractions. But raise your hand if you've never pulled out a map while careening down a highway, steering with your knee, glancing up and down, up and down, trying to find your location amidst the black and red squiggles on the seemingly 12 feet of ruthlessly folding and unfolding paper while trying not to plow into the back of the semi you're following at 65 mph. Yeah, I thought so.

~~~

Driving without Daniel was an emotional experience.

As I wondered how much further to my exit (or, more often, "Oh no! Did I pass it?"), I found my eyes wandering over to Daniel's vacant cradle, lonely and waiting like the empty space on the opposite side of the bed when your lover has left. Where was he in my time of need? How could I have not realized how much he meant to me?

Driving along, I felt, well, lost. (Probably because I was.)

Although Daniel certainly can get testy if I don't follow his every word ("Recalculating!" he'll grumble with clear annoyance, "Recalculating! Recalculating!") and has more than once steered me wrong ("Now arriving at Frostee Freeze, on left," he declared as we pulled into the abandoned cul-de-sac of a cookie-cutter suburban development), Daniel is, for a man, extremely reliable.

Not only does Daniel tell you where to turn, he knows how to fulfill your fantasies. Thirsty? Daniel knows where the Starbucks is. Need gas? Ask Daniel, he can tell you how far till the next fill-up. Hungry? Well, do you want Asian food, Italian, British? (Yes, British.)

Yet despite countless pull-overs to the side of the road, looking at various maps (paper, laminated, state, county) to figure out where the hell I was going, how to get from A to Z, and where, in fact, Z actually was, it was only when I was overcome with the mad, inexplicable desire to go to The Container Store that I realized I was truly lost without him.

I'm sorry, Daniel.

I needed space, but I've realized, it's true:
I love you, Daniel. I need you.

I'll never leave you home again.

"I'm not freaking out because you're all by yourself in the middle of the jungle with no money, but..."


I nearly spit out my chelada: this was the best line I'd heard all vacation. 

Sophie, a cute, 20-year-old Londoner, was telling me her woes and quoting her mother. Her first time really traveling abroad -- doing the backpacker-hostel route -- Sophie, though much calmer in the face of adversity, reminded me of myself in more than a few ways.                                                                                                                      (Chelada --->)

"Dip dip do, cat's got flu," Sopie said, jabbing her finger a few places along the menu. "Dog's got chicken pox, so out goes you!"

"What in the world," I asked, "Are you doing?"   

"I can't decide what to eat. I do this all the time. Takes the pressure off." 

I looked at my watch. We'd been sitting there about 20 minutes, each trying to figure out what to order, neither with much luck. "I've gotta try that one," I said, committing it to memory and laughing as she chose something completely different from her original few selections.

In addition to suffering, as I do, from terminal indecision, Sophie had managed to misplace her ATM card deep in the far-reaches of her backpack, where it was found only moments after she'd called the bank to cancel it. (This, sadly, also sounded vaguely familiar.)

Sophie's traveling companion, an acquaintance from Uni who was quite a bit less intrepid than she, was temporarily taking over Sophie's finances until her new card arrived. UniGirl had managed to make them late for the Palenque bus (for the third time) and so Sophie decided to go on, anyway, leaving UniGirl -- and all the money -- in Cancun to catch the next day's bus.

Which... UniGirl didn't do. In fact, UniGirl was so put out by being left on her own that she decided to skip seeing any of Mexico at all (for all intents and purposes, Cancun is just another extension of the USA) and changed her flight to go home early.

So Sophie did what travelers of all ages do in times like this: She called her mum.

"I'm not freaking out because you're all by yourself with no money in the middle of the jungle," her mom said, "just don't smoke anything they give you out there, ok?"

I love the English.



Click here to read part 2

"Send lawyers guns & money
Dad, get me out of this!"
~Warren Zevon~

(!! CLICK HERE TO SEE PART 1 !!)

Sophie, like her mum, was also clearly taking her plight in classic English style.

While most New Yorkers I know whould be wailing and carrying on, convinced they would die or implode or simply starve to death while trying to hitchhike back to Mexico City (where they'd inevitably be taken into a back room and beaten by corrupt security guards after a misunderstanding at the consulate anyway), when we met Sophie was causually doing her laundry in a tiny bathroom sink. She showed about the same concern for finding a tweezer and some eyeliner as to what she was going to do when her $150 ran out.

Rather than fly out on the first flight from Heathrow (Hi, Mom!), Sophie's mum was going to try to Western Union her some cash to the closest city, just in case Sophie couldn't somehow track down UniGirl and convince her she was being a wuss.

Plus, this being the Internet Age, I told Sophie that if her mom set up a paypal account in the next two days, she could send me the money, and I'd go into town and give Sophie the money from my account. (God bless the Web.)

And this is what traveling is like: there are crises, and it's stressful, and you (or your mom) may freak out, but more often than not, a stranger steps up to the plate to help you out.

More often than not, you've just got a mild case of the Dengue, or you're down on cash, or you need a place to stay -- you're not being held in jail in Ghana, fleeing Uruguayan thugs or floating somewhere in the Philippine sea sans backpack or passport on a half-sunken makeshift ferry.

Unless you're my friend Chris.

But even then you'll probably wind up OK.

I think we all could learn something from the English.

More adventures from the turtle farm.
(Again: I swear those 's'es don't sound so strange in real life.)

By popular demand, TravelingDina TV is pleased to bring you... MORE SILLY VIDEOS!

Jess & I visited the Turtle Farm on Isla Mujeres, were we saw many, many, many, many turtles.

Enjoy!