If you love me...

If you love me, you will watch these three short videos with an open mind.

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PcVHDZZquI
Slight variation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP2VzDlL8Mg

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWLW3yUV6wA&feature=related

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdso1S76zn8&feature=related

I have everything I could possibly want, i.e. a backlog of 6 months of Tegan and Sara interviews and videos to slowly digest whenever I want. A pig in shit has nothing on me. They have an interview with Motherjones.com that I am saving for a special occasion.

Size Matters

I've noticed that my backpack is smaller than those of almost every other backpacker I've seen. Everyone else has these giant backpacks that probably have twice the capacity of mine and they're often stuffed to the brim. I am quite proud that I can live out of my small backpack. And my pack would have been a lot smaller and lighter if it weren't for first-timer inefficiences.

Inefficiencies such as carrying a large beach towel as my travel towel. From previous experience, and on the wise advice of Douglas Adams, I knew a good towel is absolutely necessary for travel. But the towel I had was too big and didn't really serve any other purpose than as a bath towel. So, I am quite happy to have picked up a traveler's towel (really thin and absorbent material) that somebody had left behind. I mentioned before how it's really cool to see what kind of loot people drop at hostels and this is the best example of it. I've been wishing I had one of these towels for a long time, and now I have one, so I can get rid of the beach towel. This hostel is great for getting free stuff and food. A lot of people fly out of San Jose at the end of their trip, so a lot of people leave behind toiletries, equipment, food, etc.... here.

Another inefficiency is all the books I'm lugging around. I still have the guidebooks of countries I've already been to. My plan was to sell them (or exchange them for other guidebooks), but I haven't found a good bookstore that would buy them or exchange them at a good rate. It's always two-for-one exchange or a really bad price offer. So, they may end up being really bulky and heavy souvenirs. Plus, I have my spanish textbook that I haven't had the heart to get rid of because I keep telling myself I'll study it and teach myself spanish though I haven't opened it since Hawaii. And I have a fairly large spanish dictionary that I keep thinking I will need, but again, I haven't used it since Guatemala. Plus, I have the bulky sweater/poncho I bought in Guatemala. On the one hand, it is a cool souvenir poncho. On the other hand, if I had known, I would have brought a thin, warm rain jacket instead of that heavy cotton poncho to save a lot of space in my backpack.

So, If it weren't for the excess guidebooks, the too-large towel, the bulky poncho and the unnecessary spanish reference materials, I think I would actually have a lot of extra space and a much lighter pack. But even though my pack is kind of bulky and heavy right now, it's only a problem for those short times when I am going from hostel to bus station and bus station to hostel.

Update 3: old news

The modern US military and the wars it is fighting is logistically maintained and physically fought by private contractors. Mercenaries and private contractors get paid by the US government to do what US soldiers and the military used to do in-house (but with mark up paid for by US taxpayers) . In 2007 there were more contractors than combat troops in Iraq. Transportation and trucking is contracted out, meal preparation is contracted out,

maintenance and repair of equipment is contracted out,

laundry is contracted out, everything is contracted and then subcontracted to for-profit corporations, which is why we spend over half a trillion dollars a year on the defense budget (all deficit spending). In ten years, we will have spent well over five trillion dollars on war. With half that amount, we could have universal healthcare for all of America with money left over to build a few wind turbines; this, while Iraq's constitution (that the Bush Administration wrote in 2005) guarantees universal healthcare for all Iraqi citizens.

"The frontline FOB where I landed and its soldiers, by contrast, are spic-and-span. Credit for this goes largely to the remarkably inexpensive labor of crews of Filipinos, Indians, Croatians, and others lured from distant lands by American for-profit private contractors responsible for making our troops feel at home away from home. The base's streets are laid out on a grid. Tents in tidy rows are banked with standard sand bags and their super-sized cousins, towering Hescos filled with rocks and rubble.

The tents are cooled by roaring tornados of air conditioning, thanks to equipment fueled by gasoline that costs the Army about $400 per gallon to import. It takes fuelers three to four hours every day to refill all the giant generators that keep the cold air coming, so I felt guilty when, to prevent shivering in my sleep, I stuffed my towel into the ducts suspended from the ceiling of my tent."

"Many young soldiers told me that they actually live better in the Army, even when deployed, than they did in civilian life, where they couldn't make ends meet, especially when they were trying to pay for college or raise a family by working one or two low-wage jobs. They won't mutiny. They're doing better than many of their friends back home. (And they're dutiful, which makes for acts of personal heroism, even in a foolhardy cause.) They are likely to reenlist, though many told me they'd prefer to quit the Army and go to work for much higher pay with the for-profit private contractors that now "service" American war.""All this helps explain the annual cost of maintaining a single American soldier in Afghanistan, currently estimated at one million dollars."

Update 1: New News: Former Senator Ted Stevens in a plane crash. Traveling with an executive from European Aerospace firm EADS (revenue of $26 billion in first half of 2010). The plane and summer lodge it was flying to are both owned by GCI, the Alaskan telecommunications company (second quarter 2010 revenue of $162 million).

Update 2:

"Defense Secretary robert gates said the Pentagon needs to save money by further reducing a “cumbersome” U.S. military hierarchy, setting up potential battles with members of Congress who support targeted programs.

Gates announced plans yesterday to lop spending on support contractors by more than one-quarter over three years and close a military command in Norfolk,"

Update 3: "Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls."

"In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as "poor man's pavement." Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel."


Well, it was good while it lasted.

First, for context: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVWFgh8iocI&feature=related
then, (listen don't watch): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztvJdAIGk54

finally, for awesome twisted 90's awesomeness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oirtBNejdr0&feature=channel

I went to the mall yesterday and bought a pair of bright pink headphones (for 2,100 colones) so I could listen to music on youtube. I have too much free time here. The mall, Multiplaza Escazu, was huge. There was no brand or store you couldn't find in any American Mall that wasn't represented here. Everything from Calvin Klein to RadioShack (where I got my 'phones).

"...take time to do the little things
which leave the satisfactory thought,
when other joys have taken wings,
that we have labored as we ought;
that in a world where all contend,
we often stopped to be a friend."

Update 2: Should I join facebook

actually, it was a fleeting desire because I randomly looked up this girl I fancied years ago and she was on it and I wanted to "facebook stalk" her, like all the kids are doing nowadays. Fortunately, that momentary insanity passed.

Fuck Facebook, I burn bridges, I don't build them.

The Italian Girl In Algiers

Scene: Two americans, on a bus in Costa Rica, talking in Chinese, on the way to see an Italian opera.

Last night, I went to see an opera called The Italian girl in Algiers at the National Theatre. It was fun, the old historic theatre was beautiful (the president of Costa Rica was in attendance and his car worked perfectly fine afterwards).

The experience of going to an opera was really funny. There were lots of well-to-do looking ladies and gentlemen with jackets and suits. At intermission Cecilia and I were walking around the beautiful foyer and there would be these groups of well dressed intellectual types with glasses of wine in their hands and it looked...cliche, and you know how much I love cliches.

There was a guy sitting next to me during the opera that was incredible. He was caucasian, skinny, intellectual type, fairly young, in a dressed down jacket and shirt. He had intellectual wire framed glasses and would occasionally fan himself with the program pamphlet. He had very proper posture and would sit with his hands clasped on his lap. He frequently laughed a kind of "breathy chuckle" at humorous parts of the play, but he'd laugh at parts no one else did. I guess pretentious is the word I am looking for. I'm sure he's a very nice and interesting guy once you get to know him, but man, he was being such a pretentious asshole at the opera. And for that, I love him.



Me with a cigar in the stairwell during Intermission. I knew I was carrying that long sleeve dress shirt around Central America for a reason. It was a good thing I decided to dress up for the occasion (as dressed up as possible for a backpacker anyway). You can´t see it, but I am wearing running shoes.


The stairwell. The pictures are blurry because of inappropriate camera settings, apologies.


The historic sitting room where officials and elites would hold events.

The Teatro Nacional during the day.


End of the show when we were allowed to take pictures.

Fail

Yesterday, I was trying to figure out how the bus system works in San Jose. I took four different buses and out of those four, only one went anywhere near where I thought it was going to go. That is a 25% score, fail. The system here is really confusing. I see a lot of locals always asking the bus driver where the bus goes and asking other locals for bus directions. The buses have signs for the general area they go to, but the route they take to get there can be very circuitous. that plus the fact that most of the streets are one way mazes, means I did a lot of backtracking and walking yesterday.

Now I get it

What little spanish I have learned has helped me understand things in my life I never really understood before. For example, in a Sublime song, Bradley sings, "much gusto, hey I'm a Bradley". Now I know that mucho gusto means "Nice to meet you".

And the band name Yo La Tengo. I couldn't figure out what it meant at first because the grammar structure of Yo La Tengo doesn't match what I learned. Someone told me while we were having a discussion about music that it translates to "I have her".

I also learned that Tesoro (the gas station) means "treasure", which is an appropriate name for a gas station considering the fact that oil is buried underground and countries go to war over it.

Too much free time

I made an epic pot of chicken soup the other day. Chicken drumsticks, cabbage, carrots, potatotes, tomatoes, corn and powdered chicken soup stock. As I was adding all the ingredients into the pot, it couldn't hold it all, I had to upgrade to the largest pot they had in the hostel.

So that soup has fed me for the past 3 days, and I still have one more meal's worth of soup for tomorrow. It reminds me of batch cooking with my crockpot back home. I get tired of eating the same meal six times in a row for three days.

I have too much free time here. I am reading these terrifyingly satisfying novels. They always seem to be about middle aged adults having love, marital, career and family problems and mid-life life crisises. It is so bizarre and disheartening to realize I can enjoy these novels and sort of relate to them. It is so bizarre to think that these problems in our lives are real problems and that the lifestyle depicted in these novels have any relation to reality when I watched a homeless man pee into a plastic bag and carefully set the bag aside for later. Or when I watched a well dressed young man hustling toothbrushes in downtown San Jose. Stupid novels.

Should I join Facebook?

Should I?

Krav Maga

I took my first Krav Maga class last night and it was really fun. I was worried about my conditioning because I've been smoking too much lately, but the class is all technique and practice, no conditioning required at all. As advertised, Krav maga is about practical, effective self defensive training, none of that kata and forms bullshit, it's all about knees to groin and elbows to throat and running the fuck away. Just the way I like it.

After that first class, I was cursing the fact I couldn't find a club in Hawaii. The instructor suggested I get certified and start teaching in Hawaii, which isn't a terrible idea and I am adding that to my list of potential post-backpacking-trip career/jobs.

Update I: Big News Day

If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday,
assassinated on Saturday,
buried on Sunday,
then go back to work on Monday.

I always liked this song. Don't know how well Wyclef would do as president, but I can't imagine Haiti getting any worse than it already is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pq_3OheqzU


LOL: D for forward, R for reverse. Oh, Obama, you.


Prop 8: If Tegan and Sara are happy, I'm happy.


Gulf Oil Spill: Officials: static kill worked and most of the oil "appears to be gone". Oh Really? Where the fuck to, I might ask?


Lady Gaga: Record 13 MTV award nominations. 10 different nominations including Best Video for "Bad Romance". I told you so. Didn't I tell you so?


The Other Boleyn Girl: Book way better than movie.

Rum and Coke in a can?!

Rum and coke in a can?! What will they think of next? Mint Mojitos in a box?

How do I know I am acculturizing to central american life? I get annoyed when I see toilet paper in the toilet instead of the wastebasket where it belongs. I remember those young naive days when I didn't understand and hated the waste basket...

Life in the hostel here is easy, maybe too easy. It's a little too much like home that it makes me uncomfortable. I watched The Prince of Persia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button the past couple of nights. I also read The Other Boleyn Girl (that was made into a perfectly casted motion picture movie with Scarlet Johannson and Natalie Portman). I haven't seen the movie yet, but luckily, the hostel has a copy of the movie, so I am definitly going to watch it now that I finished the book. It was a good read and would recommend it, I finished it in a couple of days, I couldn't put it down.

Yesterday, I walked around San Jose for many hours. the first time to find an english bookstore with Panama guidebooks, which I found in central san jose. The second time to find the Krav Maga gym. I walked for two hours around the Sabana/Escazu area and couldn't find the place.

I learned that hitting the alt+shift keys at the same time switches your keyboard settings to different languages and/or configurations.

San Jose day two

This STD store was a total rip off. I paid USD$15 for gonorrhea. I later found out I could have gotten it from the woman on the street corner a couple blocks down for $12.

Living costs here can be pretty high but I found some decent places that serve cheap food. These set plates are 1,700 colones which is a little over 3 dollars. clockwise from the salad, it is melon stuff, beans, beef thing and rice in the center, and it comes with a juice drink. Pretty good deal.

This is the park a couple of blocks from my hostel. It's really big and has a pond, there is supposed to be canopy zip lines and Go Carts, but I didn´t find them. There were lots of people there playing soccer and having picnics and just enjoying the good weather. The weather in San Jose is pretty good. It´s been perfect cool weather for jeans and t shirts. The sky is overcast all day so I don´t have to worry about walking around in the hot sun. and it starts to rain after dark.

There are these guys who perform at this intersection during red lights. This guy twirls the hourglass shaped thing on a string between two sticks, another guy juggles balls and bowling pins. The perform during the red light, then ask for money from the cars. I wonder if this is worse than selling little bags of peanuts for 5 quetzalis in Guatemala.

San Jose Costa Rica Day One

I am so tired of eight hour bus rides. I thought the ride from the border of Nicaragua to San Jose would take five hours for some reason. When i looked at a map, I realized 8 hours makes more sense. the bus stopped once for a break about 2 hours in, then non-stop to San Jose. There is nothing I hate more than arriving in a big city in the night with all my belongings and having to catch a cab in the rain in a sketchy part of town. Plus the only thing I ate that entire day was a plate of gallo pinto (traditional rice, beans, cheese and egg breakfast dish)and a large roll on the bus. I believe a war was fought between Nicaragua and another country over bragging rights to who invented gallo pinto and how it is properly perpared.

the 1km long border crossing between Nicaragua and Costa Rica was pretty interesting, as all the guidebooks and people I've met said. The Nica side is full of wooden shacks and people trying to sell you things. You cross through a little door along the concrete wall and then go to the concrete building to your right to get your exit stamp and pay usd$2 exit fee. Then, ideally, you get on one of the first class buses right in front of the Nica immigration office. I paid usd$10 for the ride to San Jose. You get on the bus, it drives down the border for about 500 yards, then you get off and get your Costa Rica entrance stamp. then you wait around for an hour, take your luggage out of the bus, line it up on a wooden table and let the costa rican custom officials "examine" your luggage. Then you get back on the bus and go. On the bus, you watch movies such as The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith (in spanish) as the miles go by outside the window.

The hostel i am staying at is pretty nice. It's a converted house, it has a small pool table that is too close to the wall so you can really only play on two sides of the table. The place itself is really nice and clean, they have a full kitchen which i will probably utilize because san jose is so (relatively) expensive. they have a nice living room with TV and movies and computers with internet. San Jose itself is the nicest, most modern, most western city I've seen so far. it has lots of traffic lights, tons of KFC's, Subways, burger kings, McDonalds, etc... Although it is kind of expensive, you can still find smaller eateries with pretty cheap food which is what I did today.

Protip: Rough Guides is a superior guidebook to Lonely Planet. Lonely Planet sucks.

Did I mention the hot showers at the hostel? Heaven.

I really don't want to spend weeks in San Jose, as nice as it is. What I really want to do is head out to the WWOOF farms as soon as I can. I have to see how the Krav Maga thing works out.

itinerary

Tomorrow morning, I will catch a chicken bus to Rivas, then to the border town of Sapoa, and catch a 1st class bus to San Jose Costa Rica.

I feel kind of sad for some reason. I feel like my trip is almost over, since Costa Rica is my final destination, but I have weeks if not months in Costa Rica, plus I plan on heading towards Panama if I can buy a guidebook in San Jose. Plus I want to visit some friends and family on the west coast on my way back to hawaii, plus I will probably meet my mom in Hong Kong at the end of my trip, so I don't know why I feel San Jose is the end of my trip.

Random Pics

Here I am at a rodeo, again. this one was different in that there were cowboys on horses that would rope the bull and pull it out of the pen and then tie it against this tree so a rider can get on. This running of the bulls wasn’t nearly as fun as the one I went to in Guatemala. The bulls in this one didn’t do anything, they didn’t run around after the crowd. If anything, you had to be more careful of the horses that the cowboys were riding, at any time there were up to 8 of them in the pen. This was at that festival in Ometepe, I didn't get to see a chicken fight, to my disappointment.

sunset at Isle de Ometepe

Che painted on the wall at the Hospedaje Central hostel in Ometepe,

quote painted on the bathroom wall at the Bigfoot hostel in Leon, and yes, that is a basket of used toilet paper.

"Impossible doesn't exist" painted on the bathroom wall at the hostel in Leon. Me making trying to make it true.

also painted on the bathroom wall at the hostel in Leon

funny and true graffiti in Leon. But are they referencing Bush I or II?

cool looking table in the cafe at El Tunco, with my notebook and Fanta.

me feet

the 3 dollar grilled chicken plates I lived off of in El Tunco. The chicken pieces are usually bigger than what you see in this pic.

cool looking wall in El Tunco

The pier at La Libertad. All the fisherman boat are parked on the pier and whenever they want to go in or out of the water, they have to be hoisted by this crane.

Above three pics are cool graffiti art they had at the tourism center at La Libertad

boy with his pet lizard on the bus to El Elsalvador. It even had a tiny little vest and leash.

Maderas Nicaragua

Maderas was cool. It's a beach break with lefts and rights, with better lefts. It is totally tide dependent, a solid swell will disappear during low tide. The best time is to get it on a rising medium tide. Offhore winds all day long. It got super ridiculously crowded on Tuesday, I think everyone was there for the swell that didn't come that day, there was 45-50 people (half of them kooks) spread out along on the beach. the locals here like to drop in a lot. The swell showed up on wednesday, it was solid overhead waves. Pretty fun and it wasn't crowded either. There were tons of tourists who would show up for surf lesson and they'd crowd the inside. The guys outside weren't much better. Just like El Salvador the ratio of experienced guys to kooks was like 1.5:1.

The hostel I stayed at sucked. You can't beat if for location though , cuz it was literally on the beach, ten feet from the high tide line. But it was "rustic" to put it optimistically. Water was scarce for the showers and toilets, the kitchen closed around 4:30pm, there were lots of bugs, and rats ate my bread (I had to hang it like i was in bear country). The food was expensive as well. It was generally a dump.

But again, the location couldn't be beat. There were lightning storms the first two nights i was there, beach bonfires the second night and fireflies all around. The people there were cool, we would chill out on the porch and drink and they'd smoke a lot of pot.

on the third night, i was totally alone on the deserted beach. The owners of the hostel left, the other backpackers left, there are no other hotels or houses nearby. It was just me. It was spooky but also a really cool feeling to be so isolated. I got stoned drinking warm rum with even warmer coke. I sat on my porch in the moon lit dark and stared out at nothing all night long.

at nights, it would storm and the rain falling on my tin roof would wake me up even with earplugs, it was so loud.

I had lots of fun though, I spent 4 nights there.

Me staring at the waves from my porch. I would sit and stare for hours, waiting for the tide to be right to go out. I think the best thing to do would be to stay at the hostel only if the medium rising tide is in the early morning, that way you'd be the first one in the water every morning, you can avoid the local day trippers and the surf camp groups. I am tired of having to run around trying to find a bodyboard rental place that doesn't carry one piece of water logged shit with one size small fin. I missed half a day because I had to go back into town to get a real bodyboard and fins, luckily I found a place that rented a good board with fins and rashguard for 8 bucks a day. The board I chose was a big one, I figured I needed the speed. It was huge, probably a 43, which is an inch bigger than anything I've ever ridden before*.



view of the bay maderas is in, and my rum and coke.

view of the bay and the taco stand next door

sunset at maderas

that is the hostel I I stayed at. Notice that ther is nothing else nearby. the closest hostel-hotel was probably a 15 minute walk up the hill or down the beach.

set wave at Maderas on Wednesday. kooks in the inside. I was having a good time on Wednesday until my leash broke, I guess I was charging it too hard. Actually, I was super stoned and making lots of stupid wave choices, I purposely air dropped late on a closeout left and I got blown up and my leash just tore. I was kind of pissed at first because I thought I would have to pay the rental place for the leash, but when I got back to San Juan Del Sur, I bought some super glue and glued the ripped out part of the leash back into the swivel mount and they didn't notice. So I got away with that (good thing for my budget). I didn't stay out too much longer after my leash broke cuz I got tired of swimming after it everytime I lost it.




*That's what she said.

maderas nicaragua

gonna be bodyboarding in Maderas nicaragua for a few days. no internet, not much electricity for that matter, so I won't be updating for a while.

Mission Accomplished

I came to Central America to "find myself" and I did it. I found him, he was riding a motorcycle around a volcanic island in Nicaragua. He was having entirely too much fun.

In the Footsteps of Che

I rented a motorcycle in Moyogalpa in Ometepe and I toured around the island all day. It was ridiculously fun. This ranks in the top 3 experiences so far in my trip along with Semuc Champey and El Salvador. I was a little skeptical about my ability to ride the dirt bike at first, it was kind of big and I was half tip-toeing when at a standstill. But I said "fuck it" and told myself that I am technically licensed to ride a motorcycle (and I did take that class with John years ago). It took me all of 5 seconds to learn to ride that thing.

I rode around to several scenic attractions that was recommended to me by the hostel staff. I went to a Punta Jesus Maria, I was not impressed, it's supposed to be a good spot for sunsets. Then I went to Chaco Verde, and I was very impressed with the lagoon and smooth hiking trails there. See pics below:

Then I got "lost". The island is so unexpectedly small and the signs are so random that I missed a turnoff and had to circle back for it. I continued passed a spot called The Eye Of The Water, a spring fed pool formed by two dams, that I was going to see but didn't have time for on my way back. I had decided at this point to check out this hostel, Finca Magdalena, I was going to stay at in a village called Balgue. It is an organic farm at the base of Madera volcano. There is a trailhead right at the hostel and it's a farm so you can hike and see and do cool farm stuff and there are supposed to be lots petroglyphs there as well. I was planning on staying there later in the week so I wanted to check it out on this motorcycle trip. What I didn't expect was the smooth paved road turning into an offroad adventure, luckily I opted for the dirtbike instead of the moped. I was rambling through dirt/gravel/boulder roads. I didn't have any problems, was having ridiculous good time in fact, until I almost reached the Finca Magdalena. There was this short but steep boulder strewn hill, that I stalled on half way up. I couldn't push the bike up and was having a hard time rolling it back down. I dropped the bike probably 3 or 4 times. I was stuck at teh bottom until a kind stranger came along, saw my trouble and rode it up for me. Thank god for kind people. besides that, I had no problems with managing the bike.

I arrived at Finca Magdalena and although it was beautiful, I decided I didn't need to stay there. I will be doing plenty of farm stuff in costa rica anyway and i'm not interested in a 5-10 hour hike up the side of the volcano regardless of how nice the view is at the top. So I had a Fresca and rested (motorcycle riding is exhausting, especially when you keep dropping the bike and are trying to push it up a rocky hill). Then started back to Moyogalpa.

On my way back, I saw some monkeys, I think they were howler monkeys. I was super close to them, probably within 10 feet. So, that was another reason I didn't need to do the volcano hikes (the monkeys were something the guides really try to sell you on for the hiking tours). I also stopped a lot and took lots of pictures of the land on my way back. such as:

Locals playing baseball and soccer in the evening.

the monkeys.

Me taking a rest break on a side road. The only thing I remembered from the motorcycle class I took all those years ago was to wear protective clothing and sunscreen and drink lots of water. That and "monster head turns". The road here is so fun for motorcycle riding. its smooth and paved and mostly straightaways and there is virtually no other traffic on the road. You just cruise.



setting sun on an Ometepe field

I had two spiritual epiphanies during my bike ride:

1. I am buying a motorcycle when I get home.

2. My next backpacking trip is going to be a motorcycle tour, maybe in South America a la Che Guevarra.

Isle de Ometepe

This is a picture of the island, the volcano on the left is Concepcion, the bigger active one. the one on the right is the inactive smaller Maderas volcano.

This picture of the volcano is actually of a plume that erupted during my ferry ride over to the island.



I've seen some weird hostel pets like rabbits and turtles and parrots along with the obvious dogs and cats, but I was surprised by this deer licking me.

Here comes the hot steppers

I'm a lyrical gangster
word'er up, still living like dat
No No we don't die, yes we multiply
Still living like that

Remembert that one? that was a good one. Last song I would have expected to hear in Ometepe.


But for the last few days, I've been feeling this song from one of my all time favorite bands, punk or otherwise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgXJt5gfvgY

Pics of Volcano surfing and update

picture of me getting ready to surf down the volcano yesterday, hawaiian style.



A view of the area from the top of the crater



for scale, try to find the little figures in orange on the volcano

The speed record for the volcano run was 80Kph. that's 50 miles an hour down an approximately 45 degree slope on a little wooden plank. Everyone sat down on their boards but I wanted to do it hawaiian style so I stood up and surfed down it. sitting down you go a little faster but you have to wear goggles for the dust and the goggles are so old and scratched you can't see anything. Standing up you don't need the goggles and can see everything, plus I liked the surf/skate vibe of standing up. O fcourse, you don't go anywhere near 50 mph but it was still really fun.

Right now I am in Isle de Ometepe. It is an island in the Lake of Managua in Nicaragua that is made up of two volcanoes, one active one not. It is suppose to be really beautiful hiking and adventure touring and just generally nice and laidback. Today was a long travel day and I arrived late into town so I didn't get to see anything yet.

Luckily, I arrived during this town's saint festival. There's going to be music, dancing, drinking, bullriding and chicken fighting supposedly. Hopefully i can go to a chicken fight and make up for the one I missed in Leon. Apparently I've been living a day ahead for a long time now. I thought it was Friday, but it is only thursday.

Today I caught a cab in Leon to the bus terminal, a shuttle south to Managua (managua is a real shithole), taxi in managua, 2nd class busliner to Rivas, taxi in Rivas to San Jorge, San Jorge ferry to Isle de Ometepe. all in all about a 6 hour journey.

I was outside having a smoke and enjoying the cool night air when a distraught young man crying and banging his head and shouting "todo basura" (it's all trash) walked by. He was red eyed and leaking snot. I felt bad for him but I also wondered if he was working a con on me. He sat down next to me and starting talking and gesticulating, I told him I didn't speak spanish but he kept talking and I guess he got his phone and other things stolen while drunk. I think girls were involved. There wasn't much i could do for him so I offered him a smoke. He took it. after he finished that he borrowed my lighter to smoke a bowl (of marijuana). then he offered to buy me a beer. So I'm not too sure why he was so upset if he still had pot and money for beer.