fried chicken theory of presidential elections

This will be a rare, ass-free blog entry. Which might make it boring, unless you like politics more than you like hearing about my bum.

I haven't said this too many times in my life, but I'm really happy to be in the United States right now. Not because I love my country, and not because I really missed good burgers or ESPN or my native language while I was overseas. I didn't really even miss the American health care system, even though I spent a minute or two thinking that the Brazilian health care system was about to kill me by accident.

Nope, I'm in the United States right now for the politics. (I'm also here because my girlfriend happens to be in North Carolina, recovering from a stubborn tropical disease... but you know that story already.) The Iowa caucuses are in five days, and seven different candidates have a reasonable chance at becoming our next president. We can even fantasize about brokered conventions. If you're a news junkie who stares at candidate interviews on YouTube instead of videos of chicks with big boobies, this is the best political porn ever.

I'm not going to lecture about who I think the best candidate is, but I'll tell you who will win. If I'm wrong, you can throw tomatoes at me in November.

The winner of the general election will be... the candidate with whom Americans would prefer to sit around and eat a bucket of fried chicken.

The (relative) King of Fried Chicken has won every single election since I've been alive. Bush beat Kerry and Gore because both Democrats seemed like really boring guys who were on low-fat diets. You know that I've never been a fan of Bush, but he has that "real guy" sort of appeal. I'm sure that George and I could have a great conversation about--I don't know, sports or women or whatever--over a pitcher of beer and a bucket of fried chicken in some shitty bar and grill in some small town in some flyover state.

And guess what? He won almost all of the "flyover" states.

You can keep going back, and the theory holds. Clinton could do some serious damage to a bucket of fried chicken, and he could talk to anybody about anything. Unsurprisingly, he beat two stiff Republicans. Michael Dukakis was a really good dude, but he was boring as hell, even compared to Bush Sr., and he looked like he ate ethnic food instead of fried chicken. Reagan was charming as all hell--who wouldn't prefer to hang with him than, say, Walter Mondale? Jimmy Carter and his little drawl did okay on the Fried Chicken O'Meter--far better than Gerald Ford--but he had no chance against Reagan. Hell, even chimps and Democrats were drawn to Reagan.

Even if you think I'm right about this, you might be wondering why the hell this matters right now. It's primary season. Too early to worry about fried chicken.

There are seven candidates who have a reasonable shot to win a major-party nomination--Clinton, Edwards, Obama, Giuliani, Romney, McCain, and Huckabee. Sorry, I think Thompson and Paul and Richardson (thankfully--I met him five times in New Mexico, and can assure you that he's a clueless asshole) have no chance.

Looking at these seven, we can put them in some sort of order on the fried chicken scale, and then use that to predict the winner of potential general election matchups. And the runaway winner is Mike Huckabee. Even if you're liberal, take some time to watch Mike Huckabee talk. Trust me--you want to hang out and eat greasy food with this guy, even if you think that his economic and foreign policy ideas are complete idiocy (and yes, they are).

After Huckabee... nobody comes close, really. You could argue for Obama (seems down-to-earth enough, but he's awfully skinny and has a funny name), Edwards (the combination of a $400 haircut and an over-the-top Southern drawl makes most of us uneasy), or maybe McCain (kind of prickly and getting a bit senile, but kind of in that likeable, "grandpa will tell you some hard facts about life while we eat fried chicken" kind of way). Let's say that Obama, Edwards, and McCain are tied for #2.

The three remaining candidates are pretty much tied for last. Romney is a slick-looking guy from Boston, and everybody hates Massholes and know that they're too full of themselves to eat fried chicken--plus he has the Mormon thing, which still creeps people out. Giuliani is even pricklier than McCain, and he's from New York, and he seems to be legitimately corrupt, and he knows that he's just too damn New York-y for fried chicken flyover country--which is why he's barely set foot in Iowa. Then there's Hillary, who might be okay over tea if she thinks she can get something from you, but it's downright impossible to imagine a warm, casual conversation with her over burgers or beer. I know quite a few people who have had conversations with Clinton, and not one has used the word "warm" to describe her.

I don't care what the polls say. Huckabee would beat any Democrat in the current field, and that scares the hell out of me. If you're a Republican, you should vote for him in the primaries.

At the same time, I think Hillary would get clobbered by almost anybody, besides maybe Giuliani or Romney--and Romney barely has a chance at getting the nomination, anyway. If you're a Democrat, you should vote for anybody but her.

Don't get me wrong--I actually think that Hillary would be a competent president. But if she gets the nomination, she'll lose if she's up against Huckabee or McCain.

And since I'm in North Carolina, I feel obligated to make one more comment about John Edwards. He supposedly has a genuine North Carolina accent. Nobody here talks like him. Not even close, really. Maybe I've just seen the wrong parts of the state, but my friend Ehren has lived in North Carolina since he was a teenager, and he says the same thing: the drawl sounds like a fake.

Okay, no more politics next time. I promise.

dumb American, smart toilet

I'm about to get on a plane for Chicago via Shanghai (normally the layover isn't worth mention, but China hasn't figured out through-ticketing yet... I have to get off the plane, go through immigration, enter China, check in again, go back through immigration and customs and get on another plane), so this will be a quick entry.

And sorry to make butts the new theme of the blog.

East Asia is famous for its embrace of technology--you already knew that. But the toilets are really something special. Toilet paper is obsolete in the finer bathrooms of Korea and Japan, because the toilet is "smart" enough to do the work of the paper and your hands. You do your thing, then press a button. First, there is a "clean" cycle. Then, we have the "bidet" (rinse) cycle. Finally, the dryer goes on.

But that's not all--the seat has an automatic butt-warmer. As soon as you sit on the seat, it starts to warm up. Amazing.

I never got around to pressing the "nozzle" or "massage" buttons--kind of scary.

The toilet and I got to know each other rather well. No, I didn't get sick or anything, but I ate what had to be the highest-fiber meal I've ever eaten. (Besides maybe that time in Mexico, when I ate nothing but papaya and mandarins for breakfast and lunch on a 10-hour bus ride.)

Last time I checked, I was in Brazil, learning Portuguese. So I don't speak a lick of Korean--it's been a challenge just to tolerably pronounce "good morning" and "thank you." All of this makes ordering food a little bit limiting. Street food is always safe, because I can just point and smile.

For restaurants, I do my best to pick the places that have pictures with a few English words on the windows. That way, I can just point, and there is at least some chance that somebody inside will speak some English. Yesterday, I pointed at a blurry picture of a dish called "barley rice," simply because I had no idea what it was, and it didn't look like it had any scary animal/fish parts in it.

Yes, I've gotten into all sorts of trouble with this strategy over the years--I always try to order something I don't recognize. Many intestines and stomachs and other pig or cow bits have ended up in front of me as a result.

Anyhoo, this meal was amazing. Eight small bowls of different wonders--a light rice soup, a spicy tofu stew, a bowl of barley and rice mixed together, some sort of seaweed thing, some pickled radish-like things, kimchi (of course), another bowl of some sort of spicy pickled root thing, and a big bowl of mixed sprouts and cabbage and lettuce and mystery veggies and hot pepper flakes. Really tasty. And nothing but spice and fiber, aside from the bit of rice mixed with the barley.

Probably not a smart thing to eat the day before a 20-hour plane trip. I'm convinced that the toilet in my hotel room is smarter than me.

I didn't really get out much on this trip, just because of the demands of work. But Seoul seems like an incredible place, from the little bit that I saw outside of the hotel and offices.

The United States lacks "real cities" like Seoul--our list begins with New York and ends with Chicago, in my opinion. These are places where you can get coffee, beer, burgers, or shawarma any time of the day or night in any possible state of dress or partial undress, and nobody ever gives you a second look, even if you're wearing shorts at the pizza joint at 3am in the winter. And you know that you can piss off entire neighborhoods, and there will always be more neighborhoods to explore.

Seoul seems like an endless place, just like New York--it's dense and energetic, and has more coffeehouses than anywhere I've ever seen, including Seattle and Paris and Berkeley. I like.

And oddly enough, it's a comfortable place to be foreign. It's one of the world's safest large cities, most people speak a word or two of English, and nobody finds it the least bit strange that my Korean sucks. I felt more foreign in English-speaking Trinidad & Tobago than I do here.

Good thing I like it here. I'll probably be back in a month or two, whether I like it or not.

Korea: #1 in pig intestine flavor, #134 in TOEFL scores

If you're still bothering to check this recently-neglected blog, I owe you an explanation.

Last time you tuned in, we were in Brazil, with plans to stay until March or April. Amber had a lingering case of dengue fever, which confined her to the hotel rooms for the most part. We were both starting to get cranky about it all.

To make a long story short, Amber decided to go back to the US to recover properly. In a way, that was kind of sad--we were finally in Fortaleza, and we immediately took a shining to the city. The whole plan was to stay in an appealing city in northeastern Brazil. By the time we found one, it was too late. Mosquitoes 1, Gringos 0.

At some point, it was just becoming plain stupid for us to be in Brazil. As you know, Amber was getting better only in fits and starts, and I was pretty damned sure that she'd be happier and healthier back home. Eventually, she agreed, and she's now resting in North Carolina with her best friend, Sprocket. (See picture.) Along with his humans, Heather and Ehren, Sprocket owns a lovely home in Wilmington, NC.

Once Amber decided that she wanted to go back, I started trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do if I left Brazil. One hour on Google chat with the owner of DemiDec, and I suddenly had an offer for a full-time editing/coordinating job. With a salary and stuff.

And the job offer had a big question attached: how quickly could I get to Korea? Would Saturday be okay?

Yikes. Turns out there's no direct flights from Fortaleza to Seoul. Actually, there's no direct flights from Fortaleza to anywhere useful, besides the Cabo Verde Islands. But I'll get to that part of the story.

Within 24 hours, Amber and I had agreed to the plan: we'd fly to the US and Korea, respectively, as soon as possible.

Then I got sick. Not foot worms, thankfully, but a fairly high fever. That would never really bother me in the US, but with dengue and malaria around, we were pretty spooked when the fever didn't go away for a few days. I suspected strep throat, but we wanted to be sure. Off to the hospital.

If you're keeping score, that would be hospital visit #8 of our Brazilian trip.

I could launch into another long description of Brazilian public hospitals (blood on the concrete floors...then there was the time I literally stepped over a body), but I won't. It started off as a pretty uneventful visit. A disinterested doctor diagnosed me with a bacterial thing--probably strep--within two minutes. In the usual style of these hospitals, he prescribed antibiotic and fever-reducing pills, but then also sent me to the medicine room for some fat shots of both. This much was no surprise--Amber had also gotten a few shots for her fevers during the past few months.

The surprise was, they were butt shots--my first since I was a kid. In my feverish haze, I didn't notice that the first needle was huge and filled with a whole lot of some creamy-looking fluid. It hurt, which was fine. The second needle wasn't so bad. I entertained the nurses by making a show of being shocked by the butt thing, and gave a theatrically feminine scream when they injected. Then I left for the waiting room.

In all seriousness, the next 90 seconds might have been the scariest of my life in some ways. Even scarier than when I was chased around by some white supremacists in Canada who decided that I was a Pakistani. I don't really understand what happened, but I had a bad reaction to the shots. Maybe it was just the sheer quantity of medication, I don't know. But as soon as I stepped out of the injection room, everything went gray and I crumpled. A male nurse happened to be right next to me--not that I remember this part--and carried me back into the injection room. They hooked me up to oxygen. I couldn't see anything, I lost feeling in my arms and legs, and I don't think I could speak--I'll have to ask Amber about that part. I remember having thoughts, but I don't think I got them out.

On one hand, this wasn't too big of a deal. A fainting spell, maybe? Just a little bit too much medicine injected too quickly? That's not so bad. Within a couple of minutes, my vision came back, and after 20 minutes, I felt fairly normal. The nurses seemed to think it was a mild allergic reaction to something--in any case, nothing too serious.

Here's what made it so damned terrifying: when Amber and I were planning this trip last summer, my mother, sister, and I all had nightmares on the same night about bad things happening in my travels. My sister's nightmare was the scary one--she dreamed that I died from getting a tainted injection in a hospital. So there I was in a third-world hospital (some Brazilian hospitals are great; this one was definitely rough), on the verge of passing out, thinking about Sonya's dream, with poor Portuguese-less Amber standing there, feeling helpless. She was probably more frightened than I was.

By the way, that series of dreams last summer played some role in our decision to go to Brazil instead of Mozambique. But that's another story.

So that was a humbling experience. Not a genuine near-death experience, but it was enough to mess with my head for a bit--especially against the backdrop of all of the health problems Amber has had on this trip.

After we returned to our hostel, Amber went to buy some groceries, and I rested for a bit. (Laying on my stomach--my ass was sore as hell from the shots for a few days.) A few minutes after she left, I heard some growly-dog noises, and two women screaming for the dogs to let go. I went outside, just in time to watch two dogs tearing a cat in half right in front of me. The cat was still protesting, barely. Really disturbing.

But hey, at least I didn't get any worms in my feet on this trip.

So the next day, I accepted the job offer and bought a crapload of plane tickets. Fortaleza to Seoul via Belem, Manaus, Miami, Chicago, and Shanghai. Six flights in all, for a total of about 12,000 air miles with four different airlines. The Chicago stopover was long enough to catch my breath--36 hours with Amber's wonderful family. Then off again.

I've been in Seoul for about five days now, in the middle of a crash-course in TOEFL, DemiDec, and Korean publishing. I have tons of stories. You don't get to read them right now.

All I'll say is that Korea is obsessed with TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language)--check out this article if you want details: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/world/asia/17korea.html?emc=eta1. But in spite of the obsession, Korea ranks #134 out of #147 countries in terms of their scores on the speaking section of the test. And you would be amazed by how much money goes into the test in Korea--the largest section of most bookstores is probably the TOEFL study guides.

But although Koreans don't do so well with TOEFL, they are great at cooking pig intestines. Innards are one of the great inevitabilities of international travel. Some local friend gets that slightly-evil glint in their eye at the dinner table, and decides that you need to try this really great local specialty. I've seen that look in at least five or six countries. It's the "hey gringo, have some tripe" look.

So we were at a street stall, eating some really tasty rice dumplings in spicy red sauce, when one of our Korean companions got that look. Next thing I knew, there was a piece of noodle-stuffed pig intestine in front of me. In a black sauce. And there was an audience. The owner of the stall had generously given it to me as a gift. He had the "tripe for foreigners" glint in his eye, too. I was stuck.

But it was actually good. I announced that Korea is #1 in pig intestines. I think the Koreans were proud.

I'll be back in the US on Monday, where I'll enjoy some relatively boring food. One more night in Chicago, then off to North Carolina--Wilmington for a few days, then probably Charlotte for a week or two. If any of you have any idea of how to write a TOEFL guide, send me an email.

damned Brazilian bologna

I sort of danced around the topic of Amber's health in the last posting, mostly because I wasn't sure if her mother knew the story yet, and partly because it probably isn't the least bit interesting anymore.

The real story is that she had a mild relapse after our trip to the dunes. Her fever shot back up to around 102 the day after the tour, and she spend the next five days in our hotel room. The nausea was back, too--so lots of soup and liquid tylenol for a day or two. She got better quickly, but her body is clearly a long ways from being okay. Every time she spends even half an hour outside--even in the shade--she comes back inside with a mild fever. Not fun.

In case I forgot... if you see a mosquito today, smash it for me.

Twice. One smashing for each time Amber has had a high fever.

So we stayed in Barreirinhas for a full week, just for health reasons. Nice town, but nothing to do there. No bookstores, movie theaters, or newspapers. And only one TV channel, with nothing in English for poor Amber. The boredom sometimes seems to be a worse villian than the dengue.

We're back in São Luiz just to build her strength back up for the next bit of traveling, a flight to Fortaleza, probably on Thursday. And she'll be back in bed there while I have a good look around the city, scouting for places to rent an apartment.

In the meantime, I think we're settling into some routines. It's all about wasting time as pleasantly as possible, in spite of the fact that we're in places that aren't necessarily inspiring to us.

For example, Amber is in the hotel room. Nice room. Not inspiring.

Breakfast is always included in Brazilian hotels and pousadas. We've experienced the full gamut of Brazilian lodging options, from hammock space on a boat to dingy crap motel to mid-range restored colonial mansion to five-star hotel, and the breakfast is always the same. Bread, juice, coffee, fruit (always papaya; pineapple or watermelon if you're lucky), and then something to put on the bread. Like "ham."

By and large, I really like Brazil. A lot. And if you're still reading this blog in a few weeks, you'll probably hear a lot more about why.

But then there's the ham. Why do they have to process the living hell out of it, and turn it into bologna? It's honestly a challenge to find any lunch meat--turkey- or pig-based--that doesn't taste like bologna. And why do they have to do the same thing with juices? If you go to a grocery store in Brazil, you can't buy a bottle or box or jug of just juice. It's always some sugary juice beverage. If you're particularly unlucky, you'll get a soy-based sugary juice beverage. This in the land of the most amazing fruit on earth. Very strange.

Okay, that's my bit of gringo whining for the day. If you're keeping track at home, today was morning #38 of bologna and papaya for breakfast. Since we're just killing time these days, it's all about trying to make breakfast as long of an affair as it humanly possible. So that means lingering over a third (small) helping of bologna and papaya. Every day. It's the routine, now.

Coming soon: pictures of my new potbelly.

mechanical bull, eat your heart out

When I last wrote, we were planning to take a long, slow road from São Luiz to Fortaleza, through Lençois Maranhense and a buttload of sand dunes.

Well, that didn't really work out so well, but we got to play rodeo for a day.

We went to Barreirinhas, a town of about 13,000 people (according to the guidebook) on the edge of Lençois. After an obligatory day of rest (required--every time Amber has a day of activity, she has to spend a day in bed... we agreed to that rule as part of the dengue recovery), we took a half-day tour into the dunes.

The dunes and lagoons were pretty stunning--exactly what you might expect. Hills of sand as far as the eye can see, punctuated by the occasional pool of shallow, warm water. Which had zillions of tiny fish. Surprisingly, they bite. Seemed to have a special penchant for my nipples. Hm.

But the hour-long trip to the dunes might be the part that I'll remember the most. We rode on some benches in the back of a large 4WD pickup. There was no road, just a couple of divots in the sand. I've ridden on some rough trucks/cars/bikes/buses over the years, but this was a winner. Brought back fond memories of the weekend I worked at the rodeo in Tucson, right next to the mechanical bull tent.

And that bull had nothing on us. Hilariously bumpy ride, everybody holding on for dear life, dodging the branches of cashew trees that tried to whack us from the side and top.

And best of all, there was no annoying country music or American flags.

So after a week of twiddling our thumbs in Barreirinhas, we're back in São Luiz. We chickened out of the slow road to Fortaleza, and will hop a bus or plane later this week. I'm off to explore some beaches outside of town, while Amber enjoys another obligitory rest day.

Happy belated turkey day, everybody.

did anybody see a tree somewhere around here?

Well, we finally escaped from Manaus after 18 days, which made us both really happy. We took the 13-hour speedboat downriver to Santarem, a journey which usually takes 36-48 hours on the standard boat...well worth the extra US$45 per passenger, especially if you're recovering from dengue and don't particularly relish two nights sleeping in hammocks slung alongside (literally) hundreds of other travelers.

So, yeah...that was our first real look at the Amazon rainforest during the boat ride, since we'd only seen hostels and hospitals during the previous weeks. And guess what? We really didn't see a whole lot of trees, at least not the big kind (with pumas and anacondas and stuff) that you would expect in the Amazon.

It was honestly a depressing experience, in spite of the otherwise-comfortable ride (six movies in a row...sweet). The shore between the two cities was almost continuously occupied--not at all what I expected from 500 miles of river in one of the most infamously remote regions of the world. Lots of grass, scrub brush, cows, factories, and an occasional soy field. When there were trees, they were small and spindly--certainly not primary forest.

You all know that the Amazon is going buh-bye at a really fast rate. But it's another thing to be in the middle of it, and see how far gone it already is. Sad.

After a night in Santarem (sleepy, nondescript city of about 200,000 people), we headed to the nearby beach resort of Alter do Chão, which is deservedly the subject of a bazillion postcards. Bill Gates already vacationed once in the town, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was scheduled for a visit to Alter do Chão while we were there; he never arrived, due to some goofy Brazilian politics (something about Lula and the local governance being from different political parties).

So yes, it was a beautiful place and all that. Big white-sand beaches on the river, stretching on endlessly.

We only had three days there, and it was our last chance to try to, like, see some trees or animals or something. We almost signed up for a two-day tour, and the guide didn't even seem to know whether the forest we were visiting was primary or secondary. But he promised lots of nice meals on the beaches. We passed.

In the end, we took an expensive (roughly US$180 per person) two-day tour with another agency, simply because it was the only trip we could find which involved a hike through some virgin forest. It was a great trip, in the end--we took a boat down an unbelievably fat Amazon tributary (Tapajós, which made the Mississippi look narrow), canoed into a little creek, went snorkeling there, visited an indigenous community where we explored some of the traditional food-processing methods (really interesting...honestly), took another tranquil bird-watching ride in the canoe, rowed back to our boat, spent the night in a hammock...

All good stuff. The next day, we made our six-hour hike through virgin forest, mostly just so that we could say that we saw some. We got a few glipses of monkeys and saw a few monstrously-large trees, but it was by no means the most impressive nature hike we've ever taken. Still absolutely worthwhile, thanks mostly to our unbelievably brilliant 20-year-old native guide. He's one of those rare geniuses who can identify every bug and plant on the trail, but who also understands every bit of the big picture of politics, economics, culture, and history. Had some great conversations with that guy.

And that's really about it. We spent the next day taking it easy in Alter do Chão, sleeping in and eating lots of obscenely tasty fish in a cococut milk stew...mmmm. Next day, we flew to São Luiz, Brazil's most famous colonial city. It's a likeable place with some interesting old archecture, but neither of us have fallen in love with the place.

For those of you who don't already know, we're now starting to look for a city that we really like. As soon as we find one, we'll stay there until our visas expire in March or April. São Luiz didn't make the cut, so we'll take off tomorrow in the general direction of Fortaleza, the next 'candidate' city.

But we'll do it the hard way. Instead of the 18-hour bus on paved roads, we'll head along the coast, through a dune-filled park called Lençois Maranhenses (http://viajarbrasil.com.br/lencois_maranhenses_maranhao.html if you want to see a few photos and read some Portuguese), which sounds far more amazing than most of what we've seen on this trip. After that, it'll be a bumpy series of trips on 4WD vehicles to get to the next bus connection on a paved road, close to Fortaleza.

This might take awhile. I don't expect to see any internet cafes until we get to Jericoacoara in a week or more, so (*attention motherly types*) you might not want to get your hopes up for any emails or calls anytime too soon.

my posts are starting to bore me, too

Funny, this has turned into a forum for not-terribly-interesting medical updates.

It's our last day in Manaus, finally. Amber made her sixth and final hospital visit yesterday--virtually all of her blood counts are back to normal, except that she isn't allowed to drink alcohol for another couple of weeks. Apparently dengue inflicts some weirdness on the liver.

But that's fine. There's no fernet in this damned place, anyway. Believe me, I've asked almost every bartender and liquor store owner in the city. We even spent a night at Manaus' only 5-star hotel (rumored to be a haven for imported liquors) to celebrate Amber's birthday and dengue recovery. It was luxurious by our recent standards (great view, rooftop pool, and our first warm shower since September 25) but strongly resembled a HoJos off the Jersey turnpike. And of course, no fernet. Bastards.

You might be interested to know that I have a friend who reads this blog exclusively for medical updates. She skips the part about dengue fever, though; turns out she's just waiting to hear that I have worms in my feet.

Not yet--those are in the Northeast.

But we might have an encounter with piranas or candiru fish in our next stop. We hope to spend at least a day or two in the jungle, but much of our time will be on the beach in Alter do Chão, rumored to be the "Caribbean of the Amazon."

I hear good things about the place, but after spending a few weeks in the Caribbean...well, I'm highly skeptical.

But about the scary fish...Piranas aren't actually all that dangerous, unless they're unusually hungry and you happen to be bleeding profusely. Candiru fish are the little spikey fish that supposedly really like urine. Rumor has it that they will swim up a stream of urine if you try to pee in the Amazon--I think I might have mentioned them in an earlier post.

Part of this is utter bullshit. No, they can't really swim up a stream of urine. But an exposed pee-hole might be appealing to them.

Anybody wanna come for a visit?

Amber the Unlucky

In spite of the fact that absolutely nothing has happened lately, I feel a little bit obligated to scribble a few lines. Last time you checked, Amber had just gotten out of the hospital. And if she weren't lucky enough to be female, her tropical disease would have made blood spurt out of her ears.

But at least that would have saved her a few boxes of tampons.

And diapers. Did I mention that there were no tampons or pads to be found anywhere when she started hemorrhaging? So she wore a diaper, complete with little happy bears on it. I am not making this up.

And really, she's fine now. Still weak, still spacey...but fine. No fever for four days now, and she's eating fairly well. We still have to make a couple of trips to the hospital for testing and the full green light from the doctors, but I have every reason to believe that this mess is almost over. We should be on a fast boat down the Amazon by Saturday.

At least for me--and I think this also applies somewhat to Amber--the toughest thing lately has been boredom. I've basically chased my tail in circles around downtown Manaus for the last couple of weeks, trying to turn grocery shopping into an interesting adventure. Amber has mostly sat in front of the TV.

From a cultural perspective, I despise globalization. Those of you who have known me for awhile have heard this before, but I find it maddening that most cities in the world have so much in common with each other. There are shopping malls, fast food, and American shoot-'em-up films everywhere; sometimes you actually have to go looking around a foreign city to find something uncomfortable or unusual. If you conked me on the head and dropped me in my old neighborhood in Santiago, Chile, it would take me a few hours to figure out that I wasn't in Los Angeles.

But for an American dengue fever patient, globalization is cool. TNT and HBO and ESPN--programming in English, commercials in Portuguese--have made her life a little bit easier. I can't say that Amber gives a damn about ESPN, but I got to watch the Red Sox close out the World Series. That provided a little bit of joy for me in the middle of the most worrying phase of her illness.

Still, we're in one of the most fabled, exotic-sounding places in the world, and I can't say that it feels unrelentingly foreign. Maybe that's just because this isn't my first trip to South America, but I honestly believe that relatively little is different. Sure, there are plenty of little things that you can't help but notice on a daily basis--the insanely sugary coffee, Brazilians' incredible patience and lack of pushiness (even in the most crowded markets), the ubiquity of prostitution (see the classified ads in any Brazilian newspaper for starters), the incredible Brazilian appetite for a good party.

But it's still amazing how you can have a fairly "normal, American" life in a place like this. It might be a little bit tricky to find a jar of peanut butter, but you can always find ways to close your eyes and pretend that you're still in the United States.

At least until one of those two-inch wasps, poisonous caterpillars, or fist-sized spiders decides to nibble your bum.

always talk to Brazilian strangers; never talk to the mosquitos

About a week ago, I wrote some horseshit about how Amber just has a little flu. Ooops, I'm dumb.

The mistake was an easy one to make at that moment. I had just gotten over a flu (really), and Amber had the same symptoms. She spent one day with a high fever, and then was better the next morning. I wrote the blog entry that afternoon--I thought she was on the upswing, and I was just kind of bored, trying to nurse her back to health using my mediocre hostel-cooking skills.

Shortly after I wrote the blog, she got messy. The fever shot back up and she got really nauseous. She barfed up both the advil and the soup.

I got indignant. What, you don't like my cooking???

The next day, her fever was still flying. She kept the advil down this time, but still was feeling pretty foul. Off to the emergency room, where she took a malaria test (negative), and got a prescription for...drum roll please...tylenol and vitamin C. Brilliant! We hadn't thought of either of those.

The next day--Day 4 of the illness--she was blazingly hot, vomiting, and incredibly weak. Couldn't even make it to the bathroom without help. I'd already taken her to the nearest ER, and there wasn't a whole lot they could/would do for her. Kind of a scary situation--I had no idea where else to take her.

Enter our angel, a young Brazilian architect named Paula. She just moved to Manaus two months ago, and she lives in the hostel while she (slowly) looks for a suitable apartment. I'd barely spoken to her, but we had exchanged pleasantries over breakfast every morning, and she knew that Amber was sick.

Without even knowing our names, Paula made a few phone calls for us. Her aunt is a dentist in Manaus, and has some useful connections. By 1:00 that afternoon, we were in the best private hospital in Manaus.

The next 24 hours were pretty damned ugly. Amber had a fever of 104 degrees (40.0 celsius) when we got to the hospital, and I don't think that was her highest. Her blood pressure was dangerously low (I didn't quite catch the number, but the nurse was vaguely horrified), and she was taken to her room in a wheelchair.

They hooked her up to oxygen, and stuck an IV in her. She went through six IV bags in the next 24 hours. She had diarrhea on top of it all, and I had the pleasure of going in with her so that I could hold the IV bag up while she did her business. I think that probably bothered her much more than it bothered me. Amber isn't exactly the kind of person who enjoys needing my help to take a dump--especially when she was making bathroom trips every hour or so.

IV in, watery poo out. Loverly.

With lots of (injected) drugs, the nausea and fever subsided overnight. I slept in a small chair by her bed, just in case she needed something, or if translation services were required. Somewhat surprisingly, none of the doctors we spoke to throughout this whole thing spoke English or Spanish--or at least none of them tried to speak either language with us, in spite of the fact that they invariably heard me speaking both. My Portuguese isn't great, but it's better than Amber's, and I had no interest in leaving her alone for more than a minute or two.

By morning, Amber was stable from a fever/dehydration point of view, but started to "menstruate." She had just finished her period ten days earlier; it wasn't menstruation, really. Just a convenient exit for dead platelets.

After Amber's fifth blood test in three days, the doctor pulled Paula and I into another room for a chat. Told us that she had hemorrhagic dengue, which is the scary flavor of the disease. Basically, platelets die like crazy, and the body tries to expel them. Luckily, Amber has a vagina as a convenient escape hatch. When men get hemorrhagic dengue, the blood gets to choose another exit orifice--eyes and gums are surprisingly common.

The slightly-panicky doctor insisted that Amber couldn't set foot outside of a hospital for three or four days, and sent us to the (public) Tropical Disease Hospital for further testing, and probably for a long stay.

I should mention that angel Paula was around for most of this. She stayed with us from 1:00 in the afternoon until 9:00 the first day, then came back at 9:30 the next morning. She accompanied us to the other hospital, and stayed with us until the end.

Luckily, this story is mostly over. The doctors at the third hospital did some more tests, fed her some tasty soup, made us wait awhile, and then sent us home. Said that she had a bad strain of dengue, but not the worst--hemorrhagic, but not the scary brain-bleeding sort. She could go home ("home"...a youth hostel), but had to return in two days for a fresh consultation. Lots of hydration fluids, fever meds, nausea meds, etc.

We escaped from Hospital #3 on Tuesday, and returned for a quick chat on Thursday. Today is Friday, and she's doing pretty well. Still weak as a kitten, but fever-free for over 48 hours. She has an incredibly itchy dengue fever rash (broken blood vessels in her skin, on her entire body) that has interrupted her sleep. It apparently can't be medicated (we've tried, hard), but at least the worst of it seems to be over. We're heading back on Tuesday for more tests, and I don't expect to travel again for another week--it takes a long time to rebuild her platelets and white blood cells, both of which are still desperately low. Not dangerous or anything, but travel is a really dumb idea until she feels much better.

The moral of the story is, mosquitos really suck. If you see one today, smash it for me.

The other moral of the story is, wonderful strangers really don't suck. Amber spent 24 hours at the private hospital, and then they refused even to charge us for it. Paula's family had made sure that Amber would be taken care of, and completely for free. And Paula spent most of two days with us in the hospitals, translating from the doctors' Portuguese to my "Portunyol", and making sure that we effectively navigated the bureaucracy.

I have absolutely no idea what would have happened without her. My Portuguese is conversational at best--fine for ordering food or talking about the price of plane tickets, but not so good when I need to completely understand every word of a doctor's diagnosis. They usually understand when I speak (fluent) Spanish or (Spanish-accented, Tarzan-ish) Portuguese at them, but it's tough for me to catch the nuances of medical Portuguese. Paula saved us from a lot of unpleasantness.

I promise that my next blog will be much more fun. In the meantime, let me know if you have any brilliant ideas for a good thank-you gift for Paula and her aunt. It's tough to appropriately thank somebody who does something like that for you.

And if any of you are worried or curious about Amber's illness and want some more details, feel free to send me an email (cbibilos@gmail.com)--I have a little bit more energy for answering questions right now than she does.

gazpacho brasileiro

We're in Manaus, which is just about as far into the Amazon as you can get. I have all sorts of great stories about our latest adventures with anacondas, alligators, incredible tropical fruits, howler monkeys, and mighty tropical rivers.

Unfortunately, none of those stories are true.

We've been in Manaus for five days now, and I have to admit that the city doesn't suck anywhere near as badly as I expected. I thought it would just be a stinking industrial pisspot surrounded by maddeningly deflowered forest. But it's actually a nice place--surprisingly safe and relatively clean, with some interesting markets near the ports. Still surrounded by maddeningly deflowered forest, though--not that I've seen any of it lately.

Poor Amber came down with a nasty little flu, so I've been on nurse duty. I'm even wearing one of those cute little white nurse outfits with the skirt and everything.

Okay, I'm lying about that, too. The outfit, I mean. Amber really does have a bad flu, and is in no shape to travel yet. She's getting better--and no, Mom(s), she clearly DOES NOT have the symptoms of any creepy tropical diseases--but our stay in Hostel Manaus is dragging on.

So I am left to amuse myself by trying to find new ways to get Amber to choke down a crapload of vitamin C, in spite of her lack of interest in food. I made gazpacho. Something got lost in the kilogram-to-pound translation, and I accidentally bought enough tomatoes and cucumbers to make five full blenderloads of the stuff. Then Amber didn't like it.

My Dad did a wonderful job of laying the whole "starving kids in Japan" guilt trip on me when I was a kid. I hate to throw food away and gazpacho is really perishable, so it had to go down my hatch. I'm sloshing with gazpacho now. Say a prayer for the plumbing in this poor hostel.

And that's about it from here. The hostel is tolerable enough, and I've had some nice meals in some really sketchy stalls near the ports...tasty stuff for US$2, served with a dirty tin cup of water and a dash of classic third-world grime. I pass on the water, and stick to canned beer.

There's really no cheap way out of Manaus without taking a really long boat ride--almost two full days to our next stop, Santarem. For US$40, you get to string up a hammock on the deck...meals are included. Not a good situation for feverish Amber.

So here we are, until further notice. Send cold soup recipes--my gazpacho failed.

six ounces of espresso went into this blog entry

Consider yourself warned: I just drank a crapload of espresso.

We had a brilliant time on our little touristy death march through the jungle in Venezuela, and we´re now in Boa Vista, Brazil. So this entry has two separate streams of thought. I´ll rip through the details of our Venezuelan tour as quickly as possible, then I want to make one final series of wisecracks about Venezuela in general. This might be a long entry, and it also might get a little bit more acrid as it goes along.

As I mentioned in the last blog entry from a week or so ago, Amber and I firmly believe that organized tours are for lameass American numbnuts who completely lack creativity and independence. But since tours are the only way to see Angel Falls (world´s highest falls, if not the largest by water volume), we bought one.

Reluctantly, at first. It was hard even to get Amber to walk into the tour office.

Most of the normal tours take one of two forms. Either you fly over the falls and go home to Ciudad Bolivar in the same day, or you fly first to Canaima (tiny indigenous village-cum-tourist trap) and then take a one-night/two-day boat trip to the falls before flying back.

We were sold on a more adventurous route--five nights and six days, going from the city to the falls completely by ground and water. Good stuff. And it was only about 30% more expensive than the usual packages--well worth it for the extra nature time and the `badass points´ earned by trekking through the jungle.

We´re hoping that the badass points make up for the fact that we´re now certifiably dorky American package tour takers.

Here´s a quick blow-by-blow, one day at a time.

Day 1: In stereotypical Latin fashion, we were asked to show up at 7am for a 9am departure. We left at noon...sweet. Then we spent three hours riding in a sweaty old Chevy Astra van, until the road dead-ended in downtown Paraguas, Venezuela. It dead-ended straight into a river, with no fanfare whatsoever. The town´s only real restaurant was on stilts in the river.

After waiting an hour, we boarded a canoe with a portable motor. It looked like the canoe could fit eight people. All fifteen of us (eight foreign tourists and seven assorted guides/helpers/friends/drivers) and our gear crammed in. The boat sagged so far into the water that the edge of the boat was just a few inches above the water. We got wet quickly. Good stuff.

Somehow, a phenomenal meal of roasted chicken, polenta, tomato salad, bananas and rum appeared from the back of the boat. Good shit. After being mildly terrified by the damp and shaky start to the boat ride, we all calmed down. And every time the guide passed the rum bottle and yelled `Happy Hour!!!´ in adorable Colombian-accented English, we got a little bit less terrified.

By the time the sun started to go down, we were happily buzzed. I was crammed between Amber and a young Swiss woman who could easily pass for a late-1980´s version of Meg Ryan. (Poor me.) Amber was slurring slightly. Very cute.

We enjoyed one of those absolutely ridiculously gorgeous sunsets that I thought only existed in Photoshop-altered pictures. The water was completely still, glassy, and black; you could see a perfect mirror image of the forest, ghostly-dead trees sticking out of the water, and the ever-changing reds and violets of the sunset.

Then I barfed. But that came after the undercooked chicken at midnight, and after we put up our hammocks for the night under a buggy riverside thached-roof palapa. And of course, after another few bottles of rum vanished.

Day 2: Hardly any of the eight foreigners (four Swiss, three Americans, one Englishman) had ever slept in a hammock before, so nobody slept well. Which was perfect. Back on the boat for a two-hour cruise, followed by a six-hour march through the jungle. Absolutely great on zero sleep and rum-and-salmonella-induced nausea.

Actually, it really was an enjoyable hike. There were a couple of nasty uphill bits, and all of it was muddy as all hell, but really a pleasure for most of us. Our native Pemon guide stopped to show us bits of jungle wisdom along the way--spiders the size of your fist, edible plants, a poisonous snake (stupid Americans stared right at a small coiled one, not realizing it was deadly), giant poisonous ants, bright red tropical birds (guacamayas)...I am not making any of this up. Good thing our guide knew native cures for things like snake bites (suck out the venom, then put semen on the bite...I am not making this up, either, though I luckily did not see this in practice).

We probably made about 20 river/creek crossings over the course of the hike, and only one person fell in. We drank water straight from the rivers. Tasty. Lots of iron.

We slung our hammocks that night in an unused one-room hospital in an indigenous village. The landscape surrounding the village was gorgeous--something like a tropical version of Northern New Mexico, with table mountains (tepuis in the local lingo) dominating the skyline. Pictures might be coming soon. Bug Amber for those.

Day 3: After sleeping like dead people, we started hiking again. Two easy hours of hiking, another short boat ride, another short hike through the savannah, another indiginous village where few people even spoke Spanish...a bit more hiking, then we hitched a ride on a passing tractor to a highly-developed `camp´ in Canaima, the great tourist trap of the jungle, accessible only by plane, unless you´re up for several days of boats and hiking.

We had lunch, then hopped yet another boat for the first great waterfall experience of the trip. Wearing only bathing suits, we walked behind a waterfall, Salto Sapo (literally, Frog Waterfall). It was absolutely amazing--it´s hard to describe what it feels like to have a fat waterfall beating onto your head, or what it´s like to just stand next to the spray of something like that. Exhilarating as all hell--definitely a highlight of the trip.

A small bird managed to get caught behind the waterfall, and couldn´t get back out...Amber scooped it up, carried it out from under the water, and let it fly off. Amber was stoked. She saved a bird...straight to heaven for Amber.

Another boat ride, another short and buggy hike, then a wet, rapids-filled boat ride...then we slung our hammocks in yet another camp for the night.

Day 4: I´m getting tired of writing this. Another boat ride in the morning, then we set up camp at yet another site, then hiked for an hour. Finally made it to Angel Falls, the world´s highest, the thing that brings more visitors to Venezuela than any other attraction. It graces the front of virtually every tourist brochure and guide to Venezuela. It´s, like, beautiful and stuff. Not the least bit disappointing.

We hung out for a couple of hours, went back to camp for lunch, then went to a nice swimming hole on the river for a cold bath. Some goofballs (including a certain cute American chick I know) jumped off a big cliff into the river. One of those goofballs even hurt her ass by doing a `butt-flop´ into the river. There were photos of the red, raw butt...but they got deleted, somehow.

Day 5: Retraced our steps back to Canaima, ate food, drank more rum, got happily sloppy, went to bed.

Somewhere in there, we swam in Canaima Lagoon--an ugly name for a gorgeous place with seven small waterfalls. Cold, red water, but amazing. It´s rare to get the chance to swim within a few hundred feet of falls like that.

And the best part was....drum roll please...the little hut next to the beach sold Fernet. Fernet in the jungle in Venezuela. Who knew that was possible?

Special message for Joe de Leon: I got four fernet virgins in the jungle. Ha.

Day 6: Flight back to Ciudad Bolivar, itself a highlight of the trip. Imagine a 1982 Volkswagen Rabbit. Now pretend that it has three rows of two seats each. Then give it wings, and send it flying over the savannah and jungle and tepuis at an altitude of about 10,000 feet, just barely under the clouds. Amazing.

Just don´t look at those three randomly-spinning gauges on the dashboard, or the fuel gauge that reads empty.

Only one person barfed after the flight, and it wasn´t either of us.


Sorry, that was really long. In case anybody reading this is interested, here´s the sales pitch: Total Aventura was the tour provider. Javier rules. www.totalaventura.com, I think. And we were also helped enormously by Javier´s friend in Santa Elena, another tour operator by the name of Francisco Alvarez, who accompanied us to Boa Vista. If you want a great nature trip in Venezuela, find these guys--wonderful people.


Part II of the entry starts now...this is where I rip on Venezuela a little bit.

I´ll start with the good stuff. I met some phenomenal Venezuelans on this trip, some of them at random. The country certainly has more than its share of friendly, open people who are quick to enjoy the opportunity to chat with some random foreigners. It´s also a country with more than it´s share of natural beauty, and we know that we barely scratched the surface.

Then there´s the fucked-up economy. I think that I already got into that enough earlier--most normal Venezuelans seem to barely squeak by. And what little disposable income exists in the country seems to get spent on booze--Venezuelans consume more whisky per capita than anywhere in the world...I find that amazing.

As soon as we stepped into Brazil a couple of days ago, we realized--in a completely self-serving touristy way--that Brazil is a hell of a lot more fun than Venezuela. The grocery stores in Venezuela are comparably barren, there are precious few good restaurants in Venezuela, and the street food is mostly greasy crap.

That´s all okay. But then there was a side of Venezuelans that we really didn´t like; if I´d been traveling alone, I never would have noticed.

On my previous trips in Latin America, nobody has even given me a second glance, since I don´t look the slightest bit foreign--at least, I don´t look foreign until I try to speak Spanish or Portuguese. Amber, on the other hand, is a lovely lily-white woman. She attracts a shitload of attention.

Of course, she´ll get stares and catcalls when she´s walking around alone. That´s just part of the deal in much of Latin America, and isn´t too big of an issue. As `wealthy´tourists, we´ll also get more than our share of people trying to sell us something or another. And that´s fine, too. No matter how annoying a salesman may be, I respect his right to be irritating in his quest to make a living.

But a disturbingly large minority of Venezuelans we encountered on the street seemed anxious to make complete asses of themselves. People would semi-mockingly call out to us in English, women would very openly stare at Amber´s clothes, and men would make kissing sounds at her from passing cars, even with me glaring right at them.

Men always make asses of themselves when women pass by alone, and I can pretty much accept that as a harmless part of Venezuelan culture. But much of the rest of the behavior is just hideously bad manners, regardless of one´s culture. I certainly expected better from the women, and I took to staring them down whenever they went too far in giving rude looks toward Amber´s hiking boots.

Again, this sort of stuff wasn´t exactly constant, but a sizeable minority of people we passed in some towns and cities behaved like fools. And after three and a half weeks of it, I think it tainted our image of the country, in spite of the dozens of wonderful Venezuelans we met along the way.

And for what it´s worth, we´ve felt 100% comfortable in Boa Vista, Brazil, in spite of the fact that we haven´t seen a single foreigner here. A welcome change.

Off to Manaus on the overnight bus tonight, then we´ll hunt for an Amazon jungle tour. Yep, we plan to continue being THAT kind of tourists.

Look ma, we´re tourists!

Amber and I both like to think that we stay away from international travel cliches. We do our best to speak the local language, and neither of us have ever taken an organized tour in our lives (unless forced to by a parent). English and package holidays are for unoriginal American lame-asses.

Having said that, we´re taking a six-day tour to Angel Falls with a bunch of Americans and Europeans who don´t speak Spanish.

First day involves a drive through the savannah into the jungle, six hours or so up one river into a lake, then up another river. We´ll camp with an indiginous family the first night, then hike to another jungle community to spend the second night. A few more boat rides, four more days of camping, lots of walks and rides around waterfalls in the table mountains.

We´ll be back in a week. Then off to Brazil almost immediately, where we´ll find a friendly ATM so that we can actually pay for this little excursion.

Yay, we´re tourists.

prying ourselves away from the beach

I´ll try to keep this entry short-ish, for once.

Amber and I finally pried ourselves away from our lovely room overlooking the Caribbean, and we´ve begun the race south into Brazil. Our supposed five hour trip to Ciudad Bolivar ended up taking about eight hours, but that´s not too bad, all things considered. I have memories of a 52-hour bus trip from Santiago to Sao Paulo that ended up lasting 72 hours. By the end of it, all nine gay men on the bus had come out of the closet to the entire bus, and were doing a drag show in the aisle, lip-synching to the Eurythmics using the driver´s intercom as a microphone.

We had chosen a posada in the historic center of Ciudad Bolivar, which is something of a Venezuelan equivalent to the older parts of Philadelphia. It´s pretty much the cradle of Venezuela´s national creation myth, where Simon Bolivar made some of his most glorious accomplishments.

I won´t bore you with the history--you can read about it elsewhere if that´s your thing--but the neighborhood is stunning, with centuries-old colonial architecture, including a restored cathedral.

Even our posada was built in the remains of an old colonial mansion. When we arrived last night, we lay on our bed with the sliding door wide open, staring out over the cathedral in Plaza Bolivar, watching a beautifully violent thunderstorm. Great stuff.

Then we passed out. It was about 8:30, maybe. We were up well before 6:00 in the morning today. Check it out...we´re turning into morning people. Who woulda thunk?

On our way to our posada last night, we stumbled on a wonderful little restaurant run by a Syrian family. We had obscenely tasty shawarma and a great conversation with the family (Amber thinks the 20-year-old daughter ¨really likes me¨). Best meal we´ve had in Venezuela so far...and we were back today for lunch, an epic plate of falafel and hummus and kibbeh, followed by Arabic coffee.

So yes, we´ve gotten a bit tired of Venezuelan food. Most of it is greasy as all hell--hot dogs, deep fried plantains and empanadas, greasy ¨roasted¨ chicken. Even the ¨grilled¨ arepas--white corn patties stuffed with your choice of meaty stuff--are usually really oily. Much of it is tasty enough, but two weeks of it is plenty. We´re ready for Brazilian food.

Ciudad Bolivar is lovely, but there isn´t much to see. We hit most of the sites in less than a day--highlighted by the Jesus Soto Contemporary Art Museum--and we´re off tomorrow. Ciudad Guayana for a couple of nights, mostly so that we can take a day trip to a huge hydroelectric project in the jungle. By Monday, we should be in Santa Elena, on the Brazilian border. We´ll try to hook up some sort of day trip to see some of the topography from there, but most of the tours that we´ve found so far have been unreasonably expensive. By the end of next week, we´ll be samba-ing our little butts through the Amazon.

Coming soon: bold predictions of Venezuela´s impending inflationary spiral (*snore*) and some potentially-offensive but sometimes complementary blanket statements about Venezuelans.

mad props to our friends with cool children

We´re nearing the end of our week in Santa Fe. We´ve done almost nothing, which is great. The water is literally ten feet from the door to the posada, so we pop out for a swim whenever we get warm. Otherwise, we´re just eating, sleeping, reading, and hanging out. I spend a fair amount of time listening to baseball on the radio, which sort of qualifies as my Venezuelan Spanish lessons. Amber spends hours at a time hunched over a short Chilean novel, madly looking words up in her dictionary.

I suspect that she´s learning more Spanish than I am, but at least I get baseball instead of, like, culture or something.

The only little wrinkle in our paradise is the 21-month-old daughter of the posada owners. She wails like a banshee almost non-stop. She´ll calm down for a few minutes, then go right back to screaming. And screaming. And screaming. It really bothered me for a couple of days. Now I´m getting used to it--it´s turning into white noise.

Quite a few of you have children who are fairly close to that age. And none of them do that. Sure, kids get moody--I definitely met my buddy Jon´s 2-year-old on a bad day in July--but I can´t say that I´ve seen anything quite like this.

I´m not a parent, obviously, but I get the feeling that parents´ general vibe rubs off pretty thoroughly on their kids, even when the kids are only a year or two old. Seeing this little hellion at the posada--and her disinterested/dysfunctional family--makes me really appreciate some of you who have kids.

I might embarass myself by leaving somebody out, but I keep thinking of the kids I truly enjoy being around...Volmer, Burns, Dullaghan, and Frigyes jump to mind. You guys rock.

Okay, enough of that.

I´ve had a few questions about our travel plans, so here´s the quick rundown. We´re heading south to Ciudad Bolivar, where we´ll look into tours of the Gran Sabana, a region filled with waterfalls and table mountains. After that, we´ll take a long bus ride south to the Brazilian border--there´s a small chance that we´ll take a weeklong trek up Mount Roraima while we´re down there. Then, into the Amazon in Brazil--I expect to be there by October 20, roughly. We´ll try to arrange a jungle trip outside of Manaus, then start heading downriver after that. Odds are good that we´ll ¨settle¨in NE Brazil (Sao Luis, Fortaleza, Natal, Recife, Olinda, Maceio are candidates) by mid-November.

Before I finish, I want to make a couple of more comments about Venezuelan economics. I found out that there is indeed a serious milk shortage in the country, which is a direct result of the price controls--an enormous number of producers have simply given up trying to make a living at the unrealistically low government price.

I also read in the newspaper that the government sends agents out to check prices in stores and markets. Businesses can be fined or shut down for selling goods at prices above the regulation level. Crazy.

And to give you an idea of wages, I met a college-educated woman who works in Caracas as the director of a major youth sports program. She earns about $400 a month, in spite of her education. The minimum wage is around US$286. With food prices as high as they are (did I mention the sliced ham for $9/lb?) it´s a pretty rough place to make a comfortable living.

In spite of all of that, Venezuela consumes more whiskey (mostly Scotch) per capita than any other country on earth. Go figure.

But still, no fernet anywhere.

Hugo McChavez

As the title might suggest, I´m about to get into a big, fat diatribe about politics and economics in Venezuela. You´ve been warned.

But first, let me tell you about my diarrhea.

Just kidding, sort of. We spent our first four days in Venezuela in Rio Caribe, a comfortable but unspectacular little coastal town. Then we took a Sunday morning bus to Cumana, a city of 350,000 people. Amber and I both got a nasty case of motion sickness on the ride. Fun.

To make a lame story short, my motion sickness kept going for about 72 hours after we got off the bus. Fun! My first nausea of the travel season. Amber was fine, thankfully, and brought me crackers and sprite and stuff. The owners of the posada found out that I was sick, and sent soup and fruit up to our room--unbelievably nice of them.

So if you´re ever in Cumana, stay at Posada La Cazuela, on Calle Sucre. There´s my shameless ad for the day.

We did almost nothing of great tourist interest in Cumana, though we did find our Swedish friends. They had a ton of fun with the military. More on that later.

After three uneventful days in Cumana, we headed to Santa Fe, a small fishing town just an hour away. We almost immediately found the posada of our dreams. Our room is on the third floor, overlooking the sea. The room actually is completely open to the ocean--no windows or anything, just a half-wall, so we constantly have a breeze from the water and the moon shines through the palm trees onto our bed at night. Amazing place--the town is nothing special, but we´re just two flights of stairs away from the beach, and we get most of the joys of being outside while we´re in our cozy room. All for just US$20 per night. We´ll be here for awhile. There´s even an outdoor kitchen that we can use. Good stuff.

Okay, that´s it for the personal garbage. Now, about Venezuela and the great Presidente Chavez...and baseball....

More than a few friends/family expressed concern about our travels to Venezuela. I think I mentioned earlier that everything has been fine--we were treated well at the border, and people have been extremely kind everywhere we´ve been so far.

(Our Swedish friend Paul was strip-searched at the border, and then was searched two more times at checkpoints during his first two hours in Venezuela. Amber and I apparently look less suspicious--or less wealthy, or something. For more, feel free to read Paul´s blog: http://frigyes.blogspot.com/.)

I think that a lot of us in the United States have a bit too extreme of an image of ¨dictatorships.¨ Chavez, according to the American press, is a dictator who restricts the free press and manipulates far too many aspects of daily life. To an American, this sounds a bit like Soviet Russia or North Korea. We then assume that people are on lockdown, with no freedom of speech whatsoever and military pricks running around everywhere.

There´s a grain of truth to this image, but only a grain. Yup, there are lots of guys running around in fatigues--a couple of dozen were dispatched to keep order at the little festival we saw in Rio Caribe. Completely unnecessary--I don´t think that little town needed even two cops for its festival. And there are a fair number of checkpoints on the roads, but nothing more intense than in the American Southwest.

But freedom of speech? No problem. Nobody seems shy about speaking their minds. We had a chat over breakfast one morning with a pair of businessmen from western Venezuela. When they left, one of them said, ¨Have a wonderful time with your travels in Venezuela. The entire country is beautiful, except for that cunt we have as a president.¨ At the posada in Rio Caribe, the owner told us to ¨be careful at the beach--the military cameras watch everything.¨ Honestly, I don´t think there were any cameras at all, but her comment was interesting.

In Cumana, the posada owner went on a diatribe about what a useless populist schmuck Chavez is. We were the first American guests at his (six-room) posada in the three years that he´s had the business, and he was thrilled. ¨The people of Venezuela love America. We love New York, and hot dogs, and baseball... it´s just that our president is a dipshit.¨ He and I talked about baseball for a good while, boring Amber almost to tears.

By the way, this country is baseball-crazy. When Magglio Ordoñez won the batting title, it was front page news. Not on the sports page...on the front page of the whole damned paper. I like this country. Except that most people seem to be Yankee fans--I see Yankees gear everywhere, and sports radio shows disproportionately focus on the bastards. That´s unfortunate.

So for those of you who might be wondering how I´m managing to keep up with the playoffs, it´s fairly easy. Some of the games are broadcast on the radio, which is great...although the schedule seems a bit capricious, in a stereotypically Latin way. And the Venezuelan announcers tend to drift off and talk about things which have nothing to do with the game being played. Suddenly, a couple of batters have come and gone while they were talking about some guy who isn´t even in the playoffs.

Yesterday, the games were pre-empted by a really long speech by Chavez, who seems to be everywhere. He has an extremely long-winded TV program on Sundays, consisting of Chavez blabbing on without a script for three hours. I watched some of it. Excruciating. Then he´s back on TV and radio a few days later, with another really long speech.

People are obviously free to criticize him here, but I think most people do actually like the guy. After listening to a few of his speeches, I agree somewhat with my baseball-loving friend in Cumana: Chavez is kind of a blowhard. He´s either not that bright, or he thinks that his listeners are idiots--or both.

Why is he so popular? Well, part of it is simply that he does seem to give a shit about normal people. His biggest focus is on reducing unemployment. He has some pretty silly ideas about how to do it (increasing the military, shorting the legal workweek...for starters), but at least he seems to genuinely want the country to enjoy full employment. He has brought health and education services to a whole lot of rural places for the first time. In a few ways, I think he´s done well, based on what I can pick up from newspapers, radio, and conversations.

So you might be able to convince me that Chavez is a prick, but I still love the way he stands up to George Bush, who is a far more murderous prick. And I think that a sizeable minority of Venezuelans love Chavez for his anti-imperialist rhetoric alone, and pay little attention to the rest of his activities. He´s done an amazing job of creating a ¨brand¨for himself. Hugo Chavez, building a NEW socialism. No freedom fries, but maybe a McMarx Burger with cheese.

Having said all that, I think the economy here is pretty screwed. Food prices are way out of whack with everything else. An hour at an internet cafe costs US$.50, but a can of corn costs about $1.75 on average. Gasoline is massively subsidized, but there´s a disturbing dearth of food stores, restaurants, etc. My impression is that most people get by on a pretty simple diet of rice, beans, and plantains--even a meal in a cheap restaurant (usually close to $8 for an entree) has to be well out of reach for most people. Which is why we´ve seen virtually no restaurants, and precious few stores stocked with any real variety of food products.

I can´t claim to be an expert on Venezuelan economic policy, but I have the impression that Chavez has done some serious distorting. He tries to keep prices down by imposing price controls on food, but that´s just forced some producers out of business. Since less food is being produced, the prices ulitmately rise--I think some basic foods are sold cheaply at government-subsidized stores, but other products end up being really expensive...especially when you start to think about how low wages are here.

The other big oddity is the capital controls. You can walk into a bank in Venezuela, and they´ll give you bolivares if you bring them some good old American dollars. But they won´t make the exchange in the other direction, not at any price. A Venezuelan simply can´t buy dollars or any other foreign currency with bolivares. As far as I can tell, Chavez is just trying to stockpile foreign currency for some reason, and does not allow the free conversion of the bolivar.

The official exchange rate is 2,150 bolivares per dollar. But people have little faith in the currency--I was offered 3,500 bolivares per dollar by a private (highly illegal) moneychanger. In other words, normal people expect the bolivar to someday be worth a whole lot less than it is now, and they´ll pay a 65% premium just to get their hands on a nice, stable currency like the US dollar. Crazy stuff.

Have your eyes glazed over yet?

The internet connection in Santa Fe is miserably slow, so these entries might be a little bit rare for the next week or so. After three days here, I´m in absolutely no hurry to leave. Maybe another week? Then, we´re off to Ciudad Bolivar and the Gran Sabana, a region of jungly table mountains on our way to Brazil.

I´m a millionaire!!!!!!

Last time I wrote, we were eating pizza and sleeping in an epic shithole in Chaguaramas, Trinidad, hoping that we could somehow gank a ticket to Venezuela on the next morning´s ferry.

So we woke up at 5:30 am on Wednesday, ate cold pizza that just barely escaped the clutches of the termites and zombie spiders, checked out of the palacial hotel, and grabbed a taxi for the pier. The ticket booth wasn´t open when we arrived at 6:45, but there were signs everywhere saying that tickets would not be sold on the morning of the sailing, and that four days advance reservation was required. Clearly, we were screwed. But we sat down with a nice Swedish/Kenyan couple that was waiting to board the ferry, and had a good chat. We figured that it was worth trying to beg our way onto the ferry.

At this point, it probably sounds like travel in T&T is incredibly irritating. Objectively speaking, it is irritating. If I were trying to travel on a schedule for, say, business meetings or something, then the wobbly travel infrastructure in T&T would probably make my anus bleed. But we´re leisure travelers, with no time schedule whatsoever. Why get upset? Most of the time, none of this stuff really bothers us, unless we´re hungry. It can also get bad if the heat is bothering us--this happens much more often to poor Amber (sunburns, heat rashes, dizzyness) than it does to me.

Anyhoo, people are pretty friendly in Tobago--I can´t really speak for Trinidad, since we spent hardly any time there. The travel delays can actually be kind of fun at times, and sometimes we ended up having nice conversations when we would ask somebody for directions.

Okay, so back to the ferry. We waited for awhile while the other fifteen passengers checked in. Then they decided to sell us a ticket, with almost no fanfare whatsoever. Very nice...the travel gods seemed to be with us that day.

We met up again with the couple that we had met earlier--he was Swedish, she was a Kenyan living in Sweden, and they had two adorable little girls, ages 14 months and 3 years. They were an amazing pair--she speaks four languages, he speaks seven. They were on ¨parental leave¨ for six months, earning 80% of their normal salaries. Hooray for the Swedish welfare state!

This was definitely the best experience I´ve ever had crossing an international border. There were only about 20 passengers on the ferry, and there was a makeshift T&T immigration post set up in a tent on the small pier. Definitely the most beautiful place I´d ever had to go through customs--literally standing over the Caribbean on a beautiful morning. Good stuff--way better than an airport.

It was really hard to find any information online about the ferry, and it seemed that some of the locals in Chaguaramas had no idea that it even existed. Which explains why there were only 20 people on the ferry...but it was a wonderful ride. Nice, comfortable little boat with an open-air deck and fresh coffee. What more could you want? We spent the whole ride chatting with our Swedish friends and a really cool Venezuelan guy named Edward. Not Eduardo, but Edward.

After four and a half hours, we arrived in Guiria, Venezuela, a crappy port town of about 30,000 people. Four serious-looking guys in military garb boarded the ferry as soon as we docked. They had swords. I think they were fake--they didn´t look even the least bit sharp.

Then three Venezuelan immigration people set up a makeshift office on the boat, and began to process the passengers. Edward sailed through in a minute or two, with almost no conversation. The Swedes took a good 20 minutes. We were last.

Supposedly, Venezuela and the United States aren´t too friendly with each other these days. A few of you (you know who you are) actively discouraged us from traveling to Venezuela, out of fear of the anti-American dictatorship in Venezuela.

We had a really fun, pleasant chat with the immigration people--they really got a kick out of the fact that Amber studied International Relations. Once I told them that, we were just joking around while they stamped our paperwork.

Then, we were off the boat to another small tent on the pier, where the four serious military guys were looking through baggage. They barely glanced at our backpacks, and welcomed us to the country. I don´t think that I´ve ever seen such friendly bag-searching soldiers.

They didn´t seem to like the Swedes so much. They ended up in the back of a truck, and were taken somewhere else for further searching. We know where they planned to stay in the city of Cumaná, and we plan to go looking for them in a couple of days...we didn´t even have a chance to exchange email addresses or anything.

The good thing about the ferry was that we managed to avoid the insanity of Caracas. The bad thing is, we were at a grungy port which looked almost abandoned--a fair number of really old sunken ships could be seen in the harbor, not far from where we docked. There was no obvious taxi stand or bus stop or anything, and most of the other passengers had left already.

The next fifteen minutes were a crazy blur. I heard some guy say ¨taxi,¨ and I told him that we wanted to go to Rio Caribe, even though I had no idea where that town was in relation to where we were. Next thing I knew, some gangly pockmarked teenager had grabbed both of our packbacks, and was taking them to a beat-up old 1979 Chevy Malibu. I barely had time to negotiate a price--I thought that we´d settled on 25,000 bolivars, but I couldn´t understand the cabbie´s accent at all. And they were just racing down the road, with our backpacks. We had to follow. Amber and I gave each other the ¨I think we might get killed in the next hour or so, but we have no choice but to follow these guys¨ look.

Luckily, there were already three other passengers in the taxi, and one of them was our friend Edward. To make a long story short, all was well, although Amber didn´t figure that out for another three hours or so--I had argued with the bag-carrying guy about his tip (he asked me for about ten times more than what was fair, and I politely told him to take the TT$2 that I offered and fuck off), but everything was fine. The cabbie was a great guy, actually, and I figured that out pretty quickly. But poor Amber had no idea where we were going, and couldn´t understand a word spoken by any of the Venezuelans in the car.

It was three hours to Rio Caribe, as it turns out. Lots of time for Amber to get a little bit freaked out. But all was well--we checked into a little posada on the main plaza, just a few meters from the sea. It´s a crazy charismatic place, with that classic shoddy half-built improvised Latin American look. No hot water, but clean and friendly. The door is somewhat broken (if the door is locked, it takes a key AND a knife to get in), but it´s definitely a safe home in a charming small town.

I played Powerball once when we were in North Carolina last month, and I won. Now I´m a millionaire.

I went to an ATM in Venezuela, and took out some cash. The ATM receipt said ¨available balance: B$15036305.00.¨ I´m a millionaire!!!! Fifteen million B$!!! Sweet.

Okay, so I only won $4 in Powerball. And fifteen million bolivares doesn´t really buy much of anything, even in Venezuela. Apparently, it won´t even buy a bottle of fernet--because as far as I can tell, there isn´t any. Waaaaaaah.

Tobago, land where nobody´s home

We´re in Venezuela now, but here´s one last round of stories from Trinidad and Tobago.

When I last wrote, we were waiting for a bus to the capital of Tobago on Republic Day. After three or four hours, we gave up and took a taxi for about US$35. It was a pretty damned unoffical-looking taxi, with beers on offer and party fliers pinned to the ceiling of the car. But it got us to Scarborough in record time--less than an hour. The bus takes almost two hours. We were happy.

After that, the rest of our plans kind of went to shit. Our plan was to catch the 10am ferry the next day for Trinidad--we had to be there on Tuesday to buy our ferry tickets to Venezuela. So we thought that we´d check into a posada, then buy the ferry ticket to Trinidad. It was only 3pm...no problem, right?

Ha.

We went to posada #1. The owner wasn´t around, but a guest called her, and told us that no rooms were available. Off to posada #2. The owner wasn´t around, but a guest said that she´d be back within an hour. We decided to wait in the living/dining area. After half an hour, I wandered off in search of food and ferry tickets.

First, there was a small mob at the ferry station. I arrived just in time to hear a message delivered by the Port Police--there was a waiting list for all ferries remaining on Monday. For anything pertaining to Tuesday´s ferry, I would have to come back at 4am. Whee.

Nothing I could do about that one besides plan on waking up really early the next morning. So I went looking for food. There are easily 25 restaurants and two minimarts in downtown Scarborough, but only two of those businesses were open: KFC and Church´s Chicken. I am not making this up. Luckily, Church´s serves tolerable hoagies and pizza in T&T. Yay for American fast food while traveling overseas.

After a full two hours at posada #2, we gave up. I stopped at #3. All of the doors were wide open, but nobody was home. After a long walk, we found posada #4. No answer. We started asking random people for directions to any damn room anywhere in the damn town, and got some vague stuff about a cottage on a hill with two large trees--you can´t miss it. By then it was kind of dark. We met a wonderful woman who worked in posada #5...but the owner wasn´t home, so we couldn´t stay there.

To make a long story short, I left Amber with the woman from posada #5, and hiked up a nasty hill in search of posada #6. And found it, but only after passing a minimart with its doors wide open...but not a soul in sight.

That was definitely an odd experience. Five of Scarborough´s six guesthouses were left completely unattended. If you ever want to start a crime wave in Scarborough, I can assure you that it would be really, really easy.

Let me put it differently for the sake of any parents who are prone to worrying: if that many people leave there businesses unattended, it must be an incredibly safe place.

This has already been a long posting, so I´ll gloss over the rest fairly quickly. Up at 3:30 am, down to the ferry station...no space on the 10am ferry, so I ended up waking up way before dawn just to buy a ticket for the 1:30 pm boat. Poopy.

The boat to Trinidad was amazing. I expected a grungy old boat with tin benches, certainly nothing better than the Staten Island ferry. But we ended up on a super-fast catamaran with really comfortable reclining seats, great views, and a bar. Good stuff.

Trouble was, we had to make it to a completely different pier in a different city in Trinidad by 5:00 on Tuesday--supposedly, we couldn´t even buy a ticket on Wednesday morning to catch the weekly ferry to Venezuela. After taking a taxi from one pier to another, we arrived at 5:20. No tickets, no information, nothing. All we could do was try to find someplace to stay for the night, and come back before 7am the next morning.

I´ll try to make this short...we walked about five miles through a seemingly neverending series of boatyards, and finally found a hotel called The Cove Beach Resort, at the very end of the highway. It was an epic shithole. But it was an air conditioned shithole, although the air conditioner was stuck on one setting--we couldn´t turn it off or down or up. There was no hot water, the toilet only flushed after ten pumps of the handle, there was no key, the furniture had piles of termite-induced sawdust around it--but no visible termites, thankfully, although there were plenty of bug corpses and spiderwebs around. Even a vacated wasps´ nest in the bathroom. Which was carpeted, by the way...scary, considering that the carpet looked like it was 25 years old. Mmmmm.

This luxury in Chaguaramas, Trinidad can be yours for just $50 a night.

And guess what two restaurants were open in Chaguaramas that night? Yup, KFC and another pizza joint.

I´ll continue tomorrow, and tell you all about how our new Swedish friends were abducted by the Venezuelan police...

sucked inside the discovery channel

We're presumably in our last few minutes or hours in Charlotteville. I'm in an internet cafe (duh), Amber is sitting a few yards away in a shady bus shelter, hoping that a bus will show up eventually. There's no bus schedule, it's a major national holiday (Republic Day), and the petrol station that sells bus tickets is closed. We're betting that a bus will show up eventually, but who knows?

Normally, I wouldn't try to travel on a day like this, but we don't have much of a choice. If we want to catch Wednesday's ferry to Venezuela, we need to get to Scarborough (Tobago's capital) tonight, catch a ferry to Trinidad tomorrow (Tuesday), then be at the ferry terminal at the buttcrack of dawn on Wednesday. So we're waiting.

We've spent the entire week on the same beach--lovely Pirate's Bay. Arrg. Pictures coming soon, maybe.

And we're a little bit stupid.

The whole time we've been here, we've seen groups of snorklers in the water. Small groups, sure, but there are always a few of them. It didn't really cross our minds that there might be something neat in the water, at least not until we saw this beautiful iridescent blue fish a couple of days ago. I had a pair of swim goggles in my backpack, and decided that we should bring them to the beach the next day.

And then I forgot the next day, and finally brought them to the beach on our last day there. I floated over to a few rocks, just to see if there was anything cool over there.

Turns out that we've been splashing around next to a coral reef all week. Absolutely stunning--it felt like the TV had sucked me into some aquatic documentary on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic. There were fish everywhere, all of them completely different from each other, most of them were ridiculously colorful. Some of them were large enough to be a little bit scary. Even after spending several hours floating around in the reef, I still saw new types of fish everywhere I looked.

To be honest, I never really had the least bit of interest in diving or snorkeling or anything like that. How cool could it possibly be? You couldn't possibly see too many neat fish, right? Nope. It was absolutely amazing--if you ever get the chance to do something like this, I strongly recommend it. A snorkel and flippers might have been nice, but a $10 pair of swim goggles from Target did the trick just fine.

And it was all under our noses for six days before we figured it out. Lame us.

I'm off to sit by the side of the road for awhile. Yay.

sand-poopy towers

A couple of days ago, Amber and I decided that wet sand is really fun. After splashing around in the obscenely-beautiful clear Caribbean waters for a bit, we plopped ourselves onto a wet bit of sand on the far end of the cove. And we started playing with the wet sand, making little mounds and castles, which would get washed away every few minutes when a larger wave would hit.

Accepting the ephemeral nature of our sand structures, we started to build them sloppily out of incredibly wet sand. If you take a handful of wet sand and squeeze it, it sort of looks like your hand is pooping. So we starting making sand-poopy towers. We started flinging wet sand-poopy at each other, too. Lots of fun, until we started to get sunburnt. Then we went back to our hotel.

The next morning, we decided to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to go for a walk in the jungle (on a lightly-traveled, paved road--nothing too adventurous). It was the only time of day cool enough to take a tolerable walk.

We were joined by a dog, who started following us on the edge of town. Two hours later, he was still trotting alongside us...not begging, not barking, not being annoying--just along for the ride. We called him our tour guide. We met a gigantic hummingbird--easily the size of, say, a robin--and saw lots of sensitive plants lining the roads (you know, the type of fern that closes when something touches the leaves). I thought that those were the coolest thing ever when I was a kid, but I'd only seen them in pots--never guessed that I'd see fields of them in the wild.

After two and a half hours of wandering, we drank the most coffee we'd had in a week, and watched crappy TV all day. Yay for vacation.

Today is Friday, and we're out of here on Monday. Since life will be a lot trickier in Venezuela and Brazil, we're working hard (ha) to be degenerates while we have the chance.

Okay, now pretend that this one is from Wednesday.

This is our second full day in Charlotteville. It's supposed to be a quaint little fishing village on a nice little bay, well off the beaten path. It's cute enough, and there's a bay with a tiny strip of sand--if you're really determined to use it as a beach, you could.

We went looking for a place to eat lunch yesterday, and found exactly one place that was open. It had two items on the menu: kingfish and chips, or shrimp and chips (oddly pricey, too--US$10 and $20, respectively).

When you see only one open restaurant in a town, you start to think that it must be a poor sort of place. Lots of people just seem to hang out on the streets, on the small dock in the center of town, on random benches scattered around. There were little tourist businesses everywhere--craft shops and cafes and the like--but most were closed.

The weird part is, there seems to be plenty of money washing around this place. There's a nice library which looks brand-new, a disturbingly well-manicured soccer field, and some nice-looking homes. A fair number of swanky cars can be seen in the town, blaring soca or hip-hop out of some crazy aftermarket amp. Yes, you see the spinning hubcaps, too.

And everybody seems to have a cell phone, and the internet cafes have DSL. And we're in a dinky town on a dinky bay, surrounded by jungle. Definitely an odd mix of worlds.

For us, the important part of Charlotteville is proving to be Pirate's Bay, which is about a 15-minute hike over a fat hill from the town center. After climbing a dirt road into the jungle, we decended about 180 stone stairs to get the the beach. It's unbelievably beautiful down there--a barely-visited beach in a little cove, surrounded by forest. We'll post pictures.

On our first walk over there, we met an amazing Trinidadian fellow who gave us a quick rundown of some of the tropical plants. He makes some fantastic hand-carved crafts out of coconuts (no room in the backpack for them, unfortunately), built a little shack for himself on the beach, and spends his spare time gardening in the forest--plantains, flowers, corn, among other things. He even had a documentary made about his craft work. And he's just chillin' on this beach, hanging out with tourists. Fascinating guy--grows or catches most of his food, but owns a car and a four-bedroom house in NE Trinidad. Looks like the classic rasta beach man, but has a sharp business mind, as well.

Anyhoo, we're just hanging out on the beach most of the time, sunburns permitting. Not much else to do here...and that's probably a good thing. After spending our first night in a dirty, buggy motel, we switched to a much nicer and slightly cheaper place called Seaville Chateau. Sounds fancy, huh? Not really, but at least there's a kitchen, a/c, and a TV. The TV is probably not a good thing, but at least we can cook for ourselves, so that we're not at the mercy of overpriced fish and chips.

our first third-worldish experience

Pretend that I wrote this on Tuesday...it's Friday now.

So Amber and I decided that we'd had enough of Crown Point, which is the heart of the touristy part of Tobago. After carefully reading our guidebook for a minute or two, we carefully took another minute or two to pick another place to go for a week or so. We settled on Charlotteville, a supposedly-remote fishing village on the exact opposite side of Tobago.

The lovely woman who owned (or managed...we couldn't quite tell whether she actually owned it) the posada we stayed at in Crown Point gave us a ride to the bus station in Scarborough, the capital of Tobago. She's really nice. If you ever go to Tobago, stay at Kia's Across from the Beach...it's a five-minute walk from the airport, and is across from the internet/laundry cafe.

Yes, this ad space is for sale for the right price. A ride to a bus station? Sold.

Some excellent ad space on my butt is also for sale for the right price. I have two cheeks, both only slightly hairy. I'm willing to get them tattooed with your company's logo. Again, for the right price. I'll even moon people more often.

Anyhoo, we got the the bus station in Scarborough at noon. There was a bus for Charlotteville leaving at 12:30. Sweet. And it only cost TT$8 for the 2-hour trip...that's equivalent to about US $1.30. Nice.

Then they told us that the bus was cancelled. No worries, there was another at 2:30. We went to a nearby bar, had a few Caribs (very tasty beer, incidentally--much better than most national flagship piss-waters) and some rum and coke and really good plate of grilled snapper with veggies and rice (you can get fat and happy real fast with Tobagoan food). Then we went back to the station.

Which had no fan or air conditioning, by the way. Amber was sweating like a pig. Not cute.

They cancelled the 2:30 bus. But there was another at 4:30...so we decided to hang out. Amber drank a cup of coffee, and got plenty of weird looks--who the hell drinks coffee in 90-degree heat and tropical humidity? With no fan in sight?? White people are weird.

Then the 4:30 bus was cancelled. At 5:00 we finally asked for other options at the cafe next door. Turns out that most of the busses had been run into the ground when T&T hosted some big sporting event (cricket world cup, I think) a few months ago. Apparently, it was common knowledge that there weren't enough busses to run the normal routes, but nobody had told us...or the other people waiting for the bus...or the ticket window lady.

We hiked to a "maxi-taxi" stop, on a hill overlooking the rest of the town. We waited for another hour, and watched chickens in a small plaza, trying to eat styrofoam. We decided that we'll stick to eating fish around here.

Finally, a maxi-taxi came. After leaving our motel at 11:30 am, we finally arrived in Charlotteville at about 9:00 pm. And the entire island is only about 45 miles long. Sweet.

And the best part was, we didn't even get upset about it. The relaxed Tobagoan spirit is just infectious enough.

Tobagan mauby is almost like a stinky version of fernet

We were stupid enough to start our trip to tropical paradise with a 2:30 a.m. shuttle to LaGuardia Airport. Which sucked...SuperShuttle insisted that we take a 2:30 shuttle to catch a 6:00 a.m. flight, but then we waited twenty minutes for the check-in people to show up, then another hour for the security line to open. Lame. And that's all the bitching you'll hear from me for awhile. Once we got on the plane, everything was lovely. Flew to Miami, then to Port-of-Spain, then to Crown Point in Tobago with no delays at all. By 4:00 in the afternoon, we were sipping coffee in a bamboo-walled cafe, just a few meters from the beach. I think that I told everybody that we were heading to Trinidad, but that wasn't exactly true. We were checked in by a Trini, who told us to skip Trinidad and fly straight to Tobago. Then Amber sat next to another Trinidadian woman, who said exactly the same thing. So as soon as we landed in Trinidad, we bought a ticket to Tobago. Tobago is the quintessence of Caribbean postcards. Completely clear water, palm trees, nice beaches, mellow people...soca and calypso and reggae music playing everywhere. We even met a bull who seemed to have a sense of rhythm--he was just bopping in time with the music. The song changed, and then he swayed to that tune. Really odd.

And the food is amazing. About half of Trinbagoans are of East Indian descent...so there's a definite Indian influence on the cuisine. We ate really tasty roti with flying fish (fish fly?), a great dish called Coo-Coo Callaloo (something resembling polenta with fish and some sort of green chutney), and lots of pigeon peas pelau (a rice and lentil dish...mmm).

Amber and I both love to order odd-sounding things off the menu, just to see what they are. We tried mauby, a drink made from some sort of tree bark. It smelled like fernet. I was excited.

But it had no alcohol, and just tasted like tree bark, not fernet. Waaaaa.

Off to a tiny town for a week...yay.