Entering Georgia

From Dilijan we caught a taxi to Vanadzor. It was a bit chilly that morning, and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt as always. Locals here have no tolerance for cold apparently, because it was only sixty-ish degrees and to see them dress you’d think it was winter already! Well, I’ve mentioned their hospitality. The taxi driver kept looking at my bare legs and arms and finally had to say something; “aren’t you cold??” he asked. I said, using two of my dozen Russian words, “Nyet, karasho!” meaning, “no, I’m good”. Well, he understood but couldn’t accept it. He kept looking at me in wonder, then when we stopped for gas he took off his jacket and insisted I wear it. And really, I wasn’t that cold! But there was no refusing, so I took it gracefully.

Speaking of Gas, most of the cars here run on propane; gasoline is the exception, not the rule. When filling with propane, we all have to exit the car in case it explodes .It takes about 10-15 minutes to fill up the tank. Anyway, we spent the morning in Vanadzor, walked through the gigantic market, got some raw milk, dried fruits, spicy homemade beef sausage, local cheese, and so on. The milk had a very pleasant taste, and cost about 50c a quart.

We caught a taxi for the border of Georgia, crossing into which was uneventful, then a marshrutka (shared minivan-taxi with 15 people in it) for Tbilisi. We noticed immediately that these people were lighter in skin tone - some lighter than I - and less happy, friendly, and apparently less healthy than the Armenians we had just left.

At the Tbilisi bus station we were immediately accosted by taxi drivers, as usual, to whom I replied with a firm no. Never, ever, take the taxi that runs to meet the bus. It speaks of either desperation or greed, neither of which spells good things.

So we got away from the concentration of sharks and were walking through the bus station, when a man - I later learned he was Nigerian, the only black man I saw the whole trip - walked up to us and asked where we were from, and where we were going. I told him and asked him how to get there, and he insisted on walking us all the way across the lot to the bus we needed to get on. Which was very nice.

After finding a hostel we went to the famed old town to look for some food. I found it quite disappointing - reminded me too much of New Orleans’ French Quarter. Overpriced food, cheesy pseudo-European sidewalk cafes, and so on. We ate, but left hungry and disillusioned. We wound up eating at a New York Burger. Rather depressing. Although I must say the ketchup was the most unusual I’ve ever had. It was thin, and had some sort of strange spice in it, like cinnamon or nutmeg. Still not sure whether I like it or not.

Next morning we set out for the Turkish Baths at Abanotubani. They are a sulphur bath where both Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas once bathed. 20$ got us a private room for 2 with a 5′ cube full of 104 degree water that smelled of rotten eggs, a shower, and tile everywhere. Swimsuit time!

Just when the water was really getting me mellow and relaxed, there was a knock at the door. At first I thought our time was up, but apparently it was our masseur. Crystal was too chicken to go first so I said sure, why not. He proceeded to lather me up, rub me down, use a scrub brush all over, use pressure points on the feet, pound on my back, and so on. Then he seemed to delight in surprising me with a bucket of hot water over my head. It took him 20 minutes to do it all. Then, since I apparently survived the experience, Crystal deigned to take a turn. Wound up costing us another 20$ for the both of us for the scrub and massage.

Found a restaurant nearby, obviously invented for tourists, but which was still fairly cheap; we had a chicken liver/heart dish, a bowl of strangely seasoned beans, and a kebab - which here means something like meatloaf rolled into football-shaped but golf-ball sized lumps. Good though.

Then we walked through the botanical gardens, and up to the top of for Narikala - where I juggled as part of my juggle-around-the-world hobby.

Finally we made our way to the train station, where we were planning to catch a train to Zugdidi, thence to Svaneti, our destination in the mountains. I should note that all Tbilisans we met were rude, pushy, aggressive and angry. I haven’t been cut off in line so many times since I was in the Andes mountains where the Indians were REALLY pushy at times.

We were standing in line in the ticket counter, very clearly, and people would just shove past us, stand on the side in the ticket counter and demand their attention next. As if we were invisible. Finally I got pushy too and no one seemed to mind. A far cry from the hospitality of Armenia, and which were to experience in rural Georgia.

Anyway, in spite of all that we found that all trains were full, we were informed rather rudely and impatiently. Until two days later. So we decided to change our plans and go to Tusheti first, then to Svaneti later. Tusheti was also mountainous, and closer. However it was too late to start for Tusheti that night, so we went to another hostel - we hadn’t liked the first one. Here we met several interesting travelers from China, Italy and Israel and stayed up chatting until fairly late.

Tried to catch a minibus to the bus station the next morning, but the first two were full, and the third one had space, but a woman saw me, pushed in front of us, onto the bus, then slammed the door behind her - and I was IN the doorway at the time! I managed to duck out and the bus pulled away. So we gave up on the minibus idea, took the underground metro and started planning our later return to Armenia via some route that did not include Tbilisi!

Next we went to Telavi, our jumping-off point for the mountains. It was too late in the day to go onward to Omalo, our destination in the mountains, so we stayed in a homestay in Telavi. This was our first real homestay, in a beautiful 19^th century European-style home with 10′ ceilings and beautiful antiques. They made us dinner, and breakfast, and doted on us terribly. Their hospitality was incredible, and they only charged us 10$ each for the room and two meals. And another 5$ to drive us to the next town to pick up the taxi for the mountains. I left another 10$ on the bed to thank them for going above and beyond, since I was pretty sure they wouldn’t take it if I offered it.

As I write this, I am waiting in a shared jeep for a trip up into the mountains. It’s a 3.5 hour trip, but we’ve just been informed that the roads are closed until this afternoon due to a lot of rain last night, and maybe closed even then, so we’re not sure what happens next. But hey, that’s part of travel when you’re not with the tour group!

Posted on August 30th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Georgia/Armenia | No Comments »

Jermuk (They spell it with a “D”).

We walked the distance to the Shuka, the local name for the market where they sell produce of all sorts. Arriving there, things were just starting to get moving and most of the vendors were still closed. I was struck by the fact that all the products were just setting there, under a sheet - not all wrapped up and taken home every night like I’m used to seeing in Latin America. They must be more trusting/trustworthy here.

We wandered through the market and noticed how prettily the food was stacked. We were soon waylaid by a vendor trying to get us to taste her wares - she gave us an apricot and, you’ll think I’m lying, I kid you not when I bit into that apricot I heard singing saying “aaaaaaaah”! It was hands down the best apricot I had ever tasted. It was fresh, but it had all the concentrated flavors of dried apricots, plus some others thrown in. It was amazing.

Then we tried a fig; now mind you, I’ve eaten many fresh figs in my life, I grow my own at home. And I thought I’d had good figs before. I hadn’t. These were spectacular. Using the refractometer, they brixed at 30, while the best figs at home usually brix at 20 - making them 50% sweeter, and more healthy, than the best fig I’d ever eaten.

We tried their blackberries - again, unbelievably good blackberries. Small, and tender, and juicy. The peaches were good, but not outstanding, and so were the tomatoes. The grapes however were excellent, with a brix of 20 which is really good for grapes. I also bought some dried figs which were so tender they were just a little harder than fresh figs, with a dried center that tasted like it had jam inserted into it. Many people have noted the correlation between high-brix foods and healthy people, and here I am eating it and seeing it for myself.

Finally, stuffed and with a backpack loaded with food, we caught a taxi to find the shared minivan going to Jermuk. 2.5 hours later we arrived in Jermuk, the home of some incredible mineral water hot-springs and sanatoriums set up by the Soviets to send workers to for rejuvenation. We wound up staying at a place which was very expensive for me (75$/per person), but it included three buffet meals a day, internet, and treatment at the sanatorium. So at that, it wasn’t too bad.

We ate dinner there that night, tried some of everything, and it was almost all good. Green beans were incredibly sweet. And the potatoes! They were whole, peeled, boiled white potatoes. And yet, if I were blindfolded, I would have sworn I was eating mashed potatoes - these things tasted like they had tons of butter and salt in them, and I was eating them whole and plain! Not only that, but the texture was so smooth, none of the lumps and chunks we have in our potatoes. Since they were cooked, I wasn’t able to get a brix on them (it only works on raw juices), but I’m sure they were the best potatoes I ever had. Crystal said they were better than eating ice cream, and I think she was right!

Time doesn’t permit me to tell of all the dishes we sampled, so I won’t torture you with them, but I must give honorable mention to another stellar food we ate; grits! Crystal grew up in Georgia and hates grits. And so when they brought two bowls of grits to the table to go with our dinner (which admittedly, is a little odd), I figured I’d be eating both of them. But one spoonful changed all that.

The grits were served plain - no sugar, just a little butter melted on top. What’s more, I couldn’t taste the tell-tale sugar/honey tastes in the grits. But they tasted like… well, I don’t know what. They were sweeter than ice cream, but didn’t taste sweetened. They were just plain GOOD. We wound up eating them at almost every meal after that. They also served whole wheat bread, and some fermented milk with cucumber and drill substance.

I got a chance to use my universal picture dictionary, by taking the page with the pictures of animals on it to the buffet and asking the waitress by pointing at a dish, then at the page, and then she’d indicate which animal it was.

So the next day we set out for a hike around the small artificial lake; halfway around I discovered a path leading uphill which I couldn’t resist, and we followed it and saw thousands of wildflowers, and all sorts of bees and butterflies humming everywhere. It was quite beautiful. Here are a few of the pictures:

Alongside the lake is a building made to look like a Greek temple, and inside it are about 8 pipes flowing into these Grecian urns, each with a different type of hot mineral water coming out of the ground between 90 and 130 degrees. Supposedly different ones are good for different things, and there are claims they cure everything from headache to stomach ulcers to cancer. I drank some of each, and they all had a unique taste.

The next day we went down into a steep gorge to see the town’s waterfall. It was a large waterfall, but I felt rather let down by it. I suppose the water did too! (pardon the pun). The gorge was nice, but not gorge-ous. (I’m on a roll!). However, we walked along the bank of the river at the bottom as far as we could, looking for another way out; the road comes in by a rather circuitous route and we didn’t want to have to go up that way. Sure enough, I found a thread of a path heading straight up the side of the hill, and I had a feeling it would take me out of the gorge and into town.

So up we went. As we got half-way up, the path disappeared at a sheer cliff face, so we had to climb up. Crystal had never done any rockclimbing, but it wasn’t a difficult climb and it was quite a bit of fun. We came out at the top in someone’s backyard, followed a path around the side of someone’s house, and came out behind a building in downtown Jermuk, about a block away from where my dead-reckoning said I should be.

Next day we did a hot mineral bath in the hotel, and then I did a gum hydromassage. I think that may be really good for teeth because it stimulates bloodflow in the gums, so I’m going to try and build one when I get home.

Finally we left Jermuk back to Yerevan, then caught a shared minivan - called a Marshrutka here - to Dilijan, called the Switzerland of the Caucasus. Well, as the guidebook says, that’s stretching it a bit. But it is nice. Built on the side of a very steep hill, full of hairpin switchback streets. We were looking for a place to stay, tried one place and weren’t too happy with it, so we looked for somewhere else. We were looking for a place recommended in the guidebook called “Tateh’s” guesthouse.

We made the mistake of asking two guys about 20ish for help. Naturally, we speak almost no Russian much less any Armenian, and they spoke no English. But we managed to convey what we wanted. Next thing we knew, they’d flagged down two people passing on the street and asked them for directions; they concluded that it was down the hill and to the right - when I say down the hill, I mean DOWN the hill. We thanked them and set off, then they decided to walk us there personally. So they led us down the hill, and to the right, asking everyone they saw as we went where Tateh’s guesthouse was. We walked about a mile until they started wondering if it was there, so they stopped at someone’s house, went in and used their phone to call the number in the guidebook. Somehow or other that didn’t work, I wasn’t sure why.

Then as they were doing that, they asked another woman walking by and she said “Oh, Tateh’s!” and indicated that it was way back the other direction the way we came. So we gathered our packs, tiring now, and we all trundled back up the hill. It turns out we went right at bottom of the hill when we should have turned left. Then we skirted a fence, went up a flight of stairs, up a street, and finally I saw the fence that the guidebook said marked the guesthouse. Needless to say, the guidebook was NOT correct about the location. There is no way to find this guesthouse from the guidebook - the directions are simply wrong.

We thanked our guides profusely. I would have given up long before that, and just looked for a different place, but they wouldn’t leave us till we had a place to sleep. They have a very strongly ingrained sense of hospitality here. It’s nice… but sometimes a bit too helpful J

Anyway, it turns out we were almost back up to town, so I went in looking for some dinner. I wanted some milk. So I went into a little grocery store (TINY grocery store) and asked for “Moloku” which was as close as I remembered, the Russian word for milk. That didn’t elicit a response, so I went to a can that had a picture of a cow, pointed at the picture, then made milking gestures with my hands, then mimed drinking out of a glass. That got a response, and she said “Ah! MILK!” and I said… why yes… milk indeed… why didn’t I think of that J

Anyway, I grabbed a couple of other things and that was that. Tomorrow we head for Vanadzor and then to Tbilisi, Georgia. Catch us there!

Posted on August 24th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Georgia/Armenia | No Comments »

Flight To Armenia

The flight to Armenia was rather brutal; all told we spent 33 hours in airports and planes. We set next to some interesting people, which helped to pass the time. I got to practice a bit of my German on one leg, which was fun. But the interesting experiences didn’t show up until we landed in Moscow. We arrived with a 12 hour layover ahead of us, speaking little Russian and not quite knowing what to expect. We had to stay in the terminal since we didn’t have visas. The terminal was surprisingly deserted and ragged for Moscow, considering it’s such a hub.

We hadn’t eaten in a long time nor slept in two days, so eating was getting important. We found a restaurant in the terminal, looked at a menu which had an English translation, and decided to get some juice. I pointed at a bottle of juice I saw in the window and asked how much it was, and she dug out the menu and said 90 rubles (3 dollars). Well, that was a bit high but we were hungry and needed to relax and unwind. However, they wouldn’t take dollars. They said there was a place to change them down the terminal a ways, so I went to see if I could figure it out, leaving Crystal with the bags.

Well, I found a machine that looked like it should change dollars; I tried to figure it out, but it didn’t seem to work (I later found it was out of order, but no one bothered to hang a sign). So I wandered around, asked someone else, “Dollars… Rubles?” with a hopeful look seemed to convey the idea. They said I needed to go this way and turn there, and so on. So I went there, and found this machine.

Now I’m pretty sure that this is a machine invented by Stalin to torture capitalists. Granted I was famished and lightheaded, but it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. I looked around all over for a place to insert bills, and nothing seemed to work. I stuck bills in all the orifices around the machine, hoping it would grab them and do something, and nothing happened. Finally I decided to try to decipher the machine using my almost nonexistent Russian, and then discovered that it offered an English translation. I selected that immediately, which took me to a Russian translation anyway!

Well, I navigated more or less by guess through several pages and finally the machine creaked and whined, and this slot (lower picture, center, right side, silver spot) opened up to reveal a box; the idea, judging by the pictures inside the box, was to lay the bills inside, on the bottom, and the machine would take them, count them, and give you rubles instead. That was the idea, anyway.

In practice, I gave it a 5$ bill (I wasn’t about to risk more than that!) and it spit it back out. I tried again. This time it took it, I had to work my way through several menus, starting over once or twice, but I finally got 150 Rubles for my trouble. I went back to the restaurant, relaxed over a bit of juice, and then we decided to move on. I went to settle up the tab and gave the 90 rubles, and they informed me that it was 90 rubles *per glass*, or 450 rubles (14$) a liter!

Mind you, this is a liter (about a quart) of orange juice! I naturally raised a stink, but they pointed to the menu where it was marked that 200ml of juice is 90 rubles. There wasn’t much I could do, but I let them know it was criminal. I also let them know I didn’t have enough rubles, so I had to take another trip back to the Stalin torture machine.

If I thought it was hard to get along with before, it was downright cruel now. It didn’t like any of the bills I submitted. I even tried a twenty. It rejected it time and again, then started saying “The phone number you have entered is invalid”. This was to change money, cash, it had not asked for and I had not entered a phone number!

I tried this for probably 15 minutes, then sat down in despair to think out my options. At this point a dutch traveler, guessing the source of my frustration, approached me and confided that he’d had the same problem with the same machine, and that I needed to tell the restaurant that if they wanted paid, they’d help me change the money. This seemed like good advice, so I did it. They came down to operate the machine, I gave them a twenty to change (sure that it would work for them and make me look foolish) but to my relief, it gave them the same obnoxious message as it gave me!

So he tried a few times, then reluctantly conceded to accept 15$ American and leave it at that. I again let him know I considered him one step removed from a highway robber and we parted.

With that initial hurdle passed, we started wandering around looking for a quiet place to nap. Finally we found a way out of this terminal into another terminal, which was much nicer, much more modern and clean. It had a huge stretch of carpet, which we used to our advantage.

We weren’t the first to have this idea either.

After that we were hungry again. We went through all the restaurants, where hamburgers cost 30$ and bottled water was 5$ a liter. I decided I would drink water from the toilet like a dog before I paid 20$ a gallon for water. I also decided to skip a few meals rather than give the Russian airport Mafia another dime. Well, eventually we got on the plane for Armenia, which arrived in Armenia at 4am local time; by which point we would have been up, not counting about an hour of catnaps, for about 40 hours.

The annoying thing about this flight is that we arrived in Armenia at 4am local time; too late to really use a hotel room, but to early to just start wandering around. I had stewed over this problem for weeks, not wanting to waste 40$ on a few hours in a hotel, but not wanting to just wander a strange city before dawn.

Well, I set next to an Armenian who was returning from a business trip to China; we started talking about his country, where to go, things to see, and so on. One thing led to another and he offered to let us ride in the taxi with him and he’d see to it we got dropped off in a 24 hour restaurant where it was safe and quiet. He also gave me his phone number in case we had any trouble or needed anything translated.

When we arrived, we had to get a Visa, change some money, and then stand in a LONG line to get our passports checked and into the country. When I saw how long it was going to take us, I told our friend, Narek, to go on ahead and not to worry about us, we’d be fine. It took us almost an hour and a half to get all our visas, through the immigration line, and to get our checked bag - we came out the other end of customs and discovered he’d decided to wait for us anyway, just in case we needed help. Him having had no sleep and us complete strangers. I guess this is that Armenian hospitality we’d heard about.

I’m glad he was there, because navigating through the taxi sharks would have been a bit creepy on our own, we had to follow him and the taxi driver through some dank alleys to get to the taxi, then he dropped us off at the restaurant and refused to allow us to pay for the taxi! It seems someone to help is always there when we need them as we travel. Like Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire “I’ve grown accustomed to the kindness of strangers” 

At the restaurant we had spas, which was a thin yogurt soup with cucumber and dill, and a hamburger which wasn’t too good and a khachapuri, which was mostly a big tortilla with cheese in the middle. We left the restaurant while it was still dark and wandered the city streets. I felt safe there and as the dawn came up we watched the city come alive too. Finally we worked our way to the local market, here called a Shuka, and that’s where our next entry will pick up…

Posted on August 23rd, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Georgia/Armenia | No Comments »

Off To Georgia (Not That One, The Other One!)

We are headed off on a new adventure, this time to Georgia (the former USSR republic, not the place they grow peanuts) and Armenia. Yes, Armenia - not Algeria, nor yet Albania, but Armenia. Why? Well, first it’s no secret to readers of this blog that I hardly need an excuse to travel. But why here, now?

Well, several reasons. Primarily, there are persistent stories of the Caucasus having some of the oldest people on earth. Well documented reports run up to 170 years of age. A friend of mine who emigrated from the Ukraine told me that at any given time, the oldest person in the USSR was always in the Caucasus.

There are three places in the world claiming exceptional longevity, Vilcabamba, where I have been (See my article about it, “Shangri-lost”), Hunza in Pakistan where I have not been (yet), and Georgia where I am going now. In Vilcabamba I found that while old people once did exist there, due to the importation of French fries and the western diet in the 1970’s by the Peace Corps, now they are just as unhealthy as anyone else in Ecuador - which is to say, vastly healthier than your average American, but still nothing fantastic.

The USSR frequently closed down entire factories to send workers to weeklong retreats in Georgia and Armenia to increase health and efficiency. The USSR wasn’t known for wasting money and time to make it’s workers happy, so it’s a good bet they believed it really made a difference.

Second, and what prompted the visit now, is that I have researched the connection between better-tasting food and healthier food and have found a distinct correlation; after all, all things being equal if you have two strawberries, one of which tastes sweet and one tastes like the package it came in, the one that tastes sweet tests to have higher mineral content and being more healthy. That’s why we were made to like the sweeter fruits, a sort of built-in quality checker. We override it with massive amounts of sugar, but the sense is still there for a reason.

In my trip to El Salvador I discovered that their food tasted much better than anywhere else in Central America; and I noticed that El Salvadorans in general were happier, had better teeth and wider dental arches (something Weston Price associated with good food and health beyond any question in his research), and in general were stronger than Americans. I saw a woman much smaller than me haul 100 pound sacks of corn a good hundred yards through thick, soft sand - something I’m not sure I could have done. And she hauled about 8 bags in a row - something practically no American woman could do. And this was quite common there. I saw men racing uphill with a dozen 1″ thick clay tiles on their back - which must have weighed 150 pounds. And they did this all day, and seemed to enjoy it.

So the point is, El Salvador had the strongest, happiest, healthiest people in Central America. And they had the best tasting food. If you’ve never tasted food from outside the US - not imported food, but food actually bought and eaten there - you’ve probably never tasted real food. The difference is incredible. And so when I read on Wikitravel that both Georgia and Armenia had food that “made their counterparts everywhere else on Earth pale by comparison”, and whose taste “would make you unable to go back to eating Apricots at home, after eating the delicious apricots from Armenia”, it told me that Armenia might have a higher quality produce, and that might explain the higher quality health and longevity.

I found this sort of off-hand comments in the Lonely Planet guidebook, and in the separate wikitravel pages on Georgia and Armenia, and in several independent sources around the net. I’ve never seen that sort of comments about anywhere else. So that is why I’m going there.

The reason I’m going now, is the harvest season is in September, and I didn’t want to wait another year to find out just how good this food is. Good food can be tested for sugar content with a refractometer, commonly used for checking grapes for harvest, and good food is called “high brix food”, brix being the measure of sugar in the food. So I’ll be checking that against the standard American fruits and seeing if there really is a difference.

Also, on an unrelated note, the Caucasus mountains is why European and Americans are called “Caucasian”, because historians trace back our white-skinned ancestors to the Scyths in the area of the Caucaus circa the 6^th century BC - a tribe very numerous and fully developed, with no apparent history. I hope to go through the museums and discover links to connect them to other peoples who migrated into that area from the south.

But who am I kidding? I’m going because I want to see what’s over that next hill. The rest… just excuses

Posted on August 19th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Georgia/Armenia | No Comments »

Too Bad To Be True - Florida Misadventures

“Come to Florida and build a greenhouse? You’ll pay extra for delivery and cover my expenses? Sure, sounds like fun!”.

And it did. Then. He bought a greenhouse, hydroponic lettuce garden, and barrel gardens from me and paid me to deliver them a thousand miles away in Florida. But fun? Well, I suppose that depends on your definition - and the amount of sarcasm you inflect when you say “fun”.

Assembling the parts was simple enough; a week’s work but nothing worth mentioning. Assembly too was a wrap - piling all the parts on the trailer was a relatively academic, if ungainly, problem. Then we decided to take it for a quick spin before embarking. We made it about ten feet before I noticed this rubbing sound coming from the trailer. Turns out the tires were rubbing on the fenders.

Well, I hadn’t expected it to be quite so heavy - or the trailer to be quite so weak - but we had to do something, and fast, if were going to keep my schedule. So we decided the best way to fix it was to raise the shackles on the back of the springs - replace the 3″ pieces with 8″ ones. This was a rushed, makeshift job assembling it out of the parts we had on hand in the time available but we have a well-equipped shop and had no other choice so we got it done.

Then we went for another loaded test drive. The tires no longer rubbed, but because we’d lifted the shackles, the trailer bed rode higher above the axles - which was the idea, but now it had the shocks stretched out so much that they were not “shocking” and the trailer was wobbling back and forth like it’d just had a pint of tequila.

Newer, longer shocks were the obvious solution, but by now this was Sunday morning - the morning I’d planned to “leave early”. Right. Well, it was a good plan. So as some of us went to town to look for shocks, the others stayed home doing the last-minute packing so we could leave the instant they got home. To make a long story short, half a day was wasted in town partstore-hopping and looking for longer shocks. Of course, you can’t by them by length - you can only buy them by the part number, and since this was for a trailer, and a now-customized trailer at that, no one really could help. So we got spring supports instead.

These little gizmos clamp under leafsprings and help support them, in theory. In practice, they were apparently designed for lighter, thinner springs than we had, because there was no way to clamp them on to ours with the bolts they provided. So we moved on and did what we should have done from the start and just lengthen the shocks. This was pretty simple, removing the shocks, adding a piece of stainless pipe and a new bolt to make the shock longer. Once done, we were finally on the road! It was 3:00pm, but we were on the road!

Thirty miles down the road we were calling home asking “how serious is it when the temperature gauge on the dashboard starts dinging at us??” - apparently it thought we should know that the temperature gauge was maxed out. Mind you, this car had never given us any trouble with overheating, or really that much trouble at all, before this trip.

So my dad, who knows more about cars than I do about computers (and even more than someone who knows something about computers!) drove out to meet us and see just what the problem was. We concluded that it had to be a sensor since it was fluctuating too quickly, and decided to do nothing and hope we were right. But on the test drive my dad took it on, it started vibrating on the front end; it hadn’t done that before, so we figured it must be the road, right?

Just to be safe I felt around and noticed that one of the balancing weights was so loose that it came off in my hand. So we clamped it down tighter and reattached it, and it seemed to fix it. They followed us in their car a few miles down the interstate to make sure things seemed to be ok, and they were.

Well, somewhere in here the air conditioner started dumping about a cup of water on the driver’s feet - it came out and poured right on the accelerator. It did this periodically throughout the trip, but being the passenger I rather enjoyed that part so I didn’t consider it a “problem”, per se.

Anyway, just past Shreveport, less than two hours from home, the vibration my dad had noticed came back with a vengeance. So we stopped and checked the tires for pressure, bumps, missing weights, etc - you know, the things you usually check for when you have vibrating in the front end. We spent all told over an hour checking these things over a fifty mile stretch of road.

Then we discovered that if we pushed past the vibration and got to a higher speed - around sixty - it got a lot better. So, since by now any self-respecting tire shop was closed, it being after dark, we decided to push on and make it to Monroe for the night.

Next morning we went to the nearest tire shop, which happened to be Wal-Mart. After an interminable wait watching the goobers there dawdle, we gave up and asked where another tire shop might be. And I mean goober in the nicest possible sense… I mean, seriously, Gomer Pyle could have changed tires faster.

So we went to another tire shop. On the way, the gauges all went dead. Speedometer, fuel, everything. We decided to focus on one thing at a time and asked the guy at the shop to balance the tire. He did so, but said the rim was bent but he balanced it anyway. While he was balancing, I happened to notice that the brake pads were almost completely gone. So I asked him to fix that, and he said to do that he’d have to grind down the rotor, too. I said fine, so we got ready to wait for a fixed car. A few minutes later he came in and asked me to come look at something only to tell me that the rotor was so badly scratched that we needed new ones. He wouldn’t fix the pads without it. So I told him just to put it back together and I’d deal with it later.

The balancing seemed to have helped the problem, but it definitely didn’t fix it. So after nursing it for an hour we pulled off in Vicksburg. I asked a tire shop to mount my spare, thinking it would cost me five, maybe ten dollars. He quoted me 70$ to swap it out for my spare. Yes, seventy. I repeated it back to him several times. He must have misunderstood me somehow, because I can’t believe anyone would charge that much to swap out tires. Anyway, I never did figure out what he thought I said because I just kept moving.

I nursed it for awhile longer, hoping it would get better, then finally pulled off and asked another tire shop. He quoted me 15$, which I thought was too high but would have paid, then told me there would be a half-hour wait. I was behind on time enough as it was without MORE waiting! So I pulled off and changed it myself. In the process discovering that jacks kept under hoods get REALLY hot while driving and that the tire pump we kept in the car may well be the cheapest piece of equipment ever manufactured by humans anywhere. I also discovered it was very hot in the sun and that gravel doesn’t feel good on your knees. (I already knew those things, but I had to work it into the narrative somehow!)

But the tire was changed and we were moving again. Then the windshield wipers turned themselves on. Yes, without any help on their own they came on. Just once. Then about 5 minutes later, they came on again. Throughout the rest of the day they continued to come on at random intervals. If this were not strange enough, the wipers seemed to wipe faster when the turn signal was on while they randomly chose to run. This seemed strange. After watching cars chasing people all over the world in Transformers just last night, this was disturbing to say the least.

Naturally, it wasn’t raining (why would it rain when your wipers are working??). Considering the skies were clear, we were likely the only people in Mississippi right then with our wipers on. On another day I might have dealt with the autonymous wiper blades promptly, but today we were taking one problem at a time.

Since central Mississippi roads aren’t the best in the world, I couldn’t tell if the tire wobble was still there or if we were just on a really bad stretch of road. After another half hour I was convinced that the problem was worse than ever when, while going over an overpass, the vibration became worse than it ever had and only got better when we coasted. I thought the engine was going to fall out.

When we accelerated, it got horrible - like giant was grabbing the front of the car and shaking it. When we coasted, it was almost normal. So we pulled off to a “complete car care center”. I explained to him my problem and he explained to me that they only did oil changes. I thought about asking why, if it was a “complete car car center” they only did one tiny thing to cars, but I wasn’t in the mood by then. He referred me to another place and we went there, explained the problem, and he promptly said “Oh, you need a new axle”.

This was not good news. I was starting to wonder if this trip was going to cost me more in car repairs than I was going to make! I was thinking “Axle… $1200? $1500?”, so I timidly asked the first question I always ask “how much?”. He said $175 and an hour and a half. That was a relief so I told him to do it and went to wait. Fortunately we brought a laptop and DVDs, so the wait wasn’t too onerous. Although of the three sets of (brand new) DVD seasons we brought with us, only one set seems to actually work properly on this computer.

Still, we managed and after an hour I went out to check on the car and found a coterie of attendants scratching their heads in consternation. It seems the axle they had which was supposed to fit this car just wouldn’t…. quite… fit. They tried for over an hour to make it fit. So they finally admitted defeat and went to the parts store and bought a different one. After they’d been working on it for awhile, I dropped back by to check on how it was going. “Much better,” he said, “it seems to work better when you use the right part”. “Amazing the difference that makes”, I commented.

Somewhere in all this I dropped a hint that the air conditioning water was flooding the front seats and that, while I personally enjoyed it, the driver would love to have that fixed, and since that just involved blowing air back through the drain hole, he volunteered to do that for me. So after about three hours waiting for a ninety minute repair, we were ready to go.

In my paranoia I insisted in taking the car for a good test drive before we left town or hooked back up to our trailer, but since all seemed well we hooked up and drove away. By now we’ve driven about two, maybe three hours out of an eight hour day.

We commented on what was going to break next as we pulled away. The attendant assured us we’d have clear sailing from now on out. A lot he knew! We got two miles. Yes, two miles. Well, I think it was two miles - our gauges still weren’t working. Anyway, twoish miles out of town and suddenly the engine started to miss.

At this point, a less philosophical person might have been frustrated, or even began postulating such ordinarily implausible causes such as aliens, gremlins, or a vengeful deity. But not us, we’re troopers! Although, we had seen over a half-dozen cars abandoned alongside the road at various points along the freeway, (five of them in Louisiana) and were considering adding our own vehicle to the list and flying home.

But we nursed the missing vehicle with an unresponsive accelerator onto the frontage road which happened to be conveniently located, and even managed to make it into the shade in front of someone’s house. Before I left, my dad had cautioned me that he had “rigged” a quick fix on the accelerator cable that might give away at any minute. By “rigged” he meant that the cable had come apart and he had held it together with a chip-clamp and duct tape. Naturally my first thought of a culprit led to this semi-repair. Surely we couldn’t be out of gas, having only filled up 150 miles ago.

So I looked at the cable, which certainly lived up to expectations. I figured it must have been coming apart and caused the car to die. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized that despite its obvious shortcomings as a repair, it wasn’t actually the problem. So then I decided to check the gas. Normally, I’d have looked at the gauge but of course, it still wasn’t working.

So I tried to get the gauges going - checked all the fuses - nothing. Then I realized that the obvious way to check and see if there was anything in the gas tank was simply to rap on it. I crawled under the car without delay and a reverberating sound revealed that the tank was indeed hollow. I later deduced that the bad axle was causing so much vibration it must have been murder on my gas mileage, but hindsight is… well, you know.

So now we’re out of gas. A call to AAA told me it would take an hour to get someone here to fix it, no one was at home in the house in front of us, but we had passed a gas station about a mile back that I could just barely see. At least, I thought it was a mile. And I thought it was a gas station. It looked like one, but you couldn’t quite tell from here. I decided a walk back there would be less time than AAA would take, so I grabbed an empty water jug and started hoofing it.

On the way I passed a home that looked occupied so I thought I’d give it a shot. An old lady came to the door and coldly answered my inquiry if she had gas with the answer “station’s that way”. At least, I think that’s what she said. Her dog was yipping so loudly, and she paused every word to yell it’s name at the top of her lungs, it was rather hard to understand anything except that she figured it was my problem, not hers.

So I kept on cruising. As I got within a hundred yards of the station, after 10 minutes of hot hiking, my phone rang; Crystal, the driver, informing me that the people whose driveway we had chosen to grace with our steaming hulk had returned home and offered to come pick me up. I told them it wouldn’t help me much on the way there, but I sure would appreciate a ride back!

I managed to fill the jug with no one accosting me, and managed to even get most of the gas poured into the car. After the appropriate thanks we filled the tank, and I decided to take one more stab at working on the gauges so this didn’t happen again.

Again I swapped out fuses and fiddled with things, rattling it hoping something would fall out - the only repair techniques I know (works on computers, too), and nothing under the dash made any difference. So I went under the hood. None of those fuses admitted to having anything to do with gauges, but I messed with them anyway. Wiggling and taking out this fuse and that, and finally the long awaited exclamation from the person watching the gauges - “Wait a second! That worked!”

I had removed - not replaced, but removed altogether - a fuse. I replaced it, and it killed the dash again. I removed it, and again it worked. Nothing else seemed to be broken when I left it out. It was labeled “Ign. Off Down” which I assumed meant it was the fuse that controlled the solenoid that turned off of the car, it being fuel-injected. Still, after our recent gas episode I figured having gauges was more important than being able to turn the car off. I could always kill it by replacing the fuse in a pinch!

After that, everything worked fine. I can’t figure out exactly why removing, not replacing, a perfectly functional fuse worked, but the wipers no longer move without being told to, the car does in fact shut off without problems, and all the gauges work. Who knows what will happen next. We knew we’d never believe this happened unless we wrote it down the same day, and you may not believe it - but this stuff is so crazy, do you really think I could make it up?

But the sad part is, this trip hasn’t been all that unusual.

Posted on July 4th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under United States | 1 Comment »

How Close Is That?

I took a trip this winter to Arizona and Mazatlan, and saw quite a bit of neat stuff but wasn’t really in the mood for blogging so I didn’t get anything written down. But there was one event in particular I just had to blog about. Crystal and I were in Mazatlan, in her truck which we’d driven down there, and we were coming home to Texas across Mexico.

Well, Crystal wanted to get new tires since they’re cheaper in Mexico and so we needed to pull out money from the ATM, and she wanted to know how much we’d need. I didn’t want to leave Mexico with many pesos because you always take a hit when you exchange them back into dollars.

I didn’t have much time to give the question thought, so I just said “7,000 pesos”, which works out to being about 650$, which when you figure 400$ of that was going for tires, would leave us 250$ for the 3-4 day trip out of Mexico. I figured we could pull out more money if we had to, anyway.

So regardless she pulled that out, we got our tires and left Mazatlan and drove towards Durango. The road is brutal, seven hours of hard curves and uphill climbs - where the oncoming trucks have the delightful habit of being in YOUR lane when they go around curves. Curves that have no gaurdrails and 3,000 foot dropoffs.

Anyway, we stayed a bit short of Durango, ate breakfast in Durango the next morning and got online at the “Cafe Interbus”. Quite literally a white schoolbus in the middle of an otherwise very trendy city park… with an internet cafe inside.

Words fail me. Anyway, we went from Durango, through Torreon, and up to Cuatro Cienegas to look at the beautiful pools. Well, we tried to guide ourselves and got lost in the desert a couple of times, and we were on a deadline, so we gave up and decided to try again later. Well, we eventually go to the Mexican side of Eagle Pass, Texas, three days after leaving Mazatlan, with about 40$ left.

I had wanted to buy papayas and pineapples and take some home, since they taste infinitely better in Mexico than they do in the US. So we drove around, found a wholesale fruit market, bought some papayas. The pineapples didn’t look so good, so we kept driving. Found another market, went in, at this point I had about 20$ left, and they didn’t have a scale so I had to guess at how many pineapples I was buying. Well, I got to the checkout and I had bought JUST the right amount of Pineapples - one more would have left me broke.

I got 25.40 pesos in change - about 2.20$. I was at this point glorying in how close we’d come - 25 pesos out of 7,000 isn’t bad for dead reckoning - and we headed towards the US. Getting into the lane to cross the bridge into the US, we discovered that the bridge was a TOLL bridge!

Can anyone guess how much the toll cost? That’s right, 25 pesos! We drove across the US border with 40 CENTAVOS - about 4 cents - in Mexican money in our pockets! How cool is THAT?

Posted on April 9th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Mexico | No Comments »

Security - Take Three

We mostly just played in the water and tried to relax so that we’d be rested when we got home. Natnee and I did a short mangrove tour on our last day there. It was disappointing, but we did get to see some animals. We did it mainly to have something different to do. While we were wandering around waiting for our ride, we found some buildings sinking into the sand. Someone built too close to the beach and on too unstable a foundation.

The only time we were stopped during our entire trip was just a few km outside the airport, and that was hassle-free. We returned the car. They tried to get us to pay fees for damages because a little plastic cover thingy was missing from off the rear windshield wiper. But we didn’t have to pay fees for damages thanks to a picture I had taken when we received the car (go me!). At the airport security check, we were stopped. Actually, they had questions about almost every carry-on bag we had. They said one had water in it, which it didn’t. They wanted to inspect my fingernail clippers before finally allowing me to keep them. (If they’d taken them, it would have been like the infamous Fingernail File Confiscation Incident of 2009!)

All other bags were okay except Natnee’s - probably because he looks like a gringo drug lord. Hehehehe. They wanted to inspect his bag by hand, so he and a security agent went to a nearby table. He looked at his flashlight, slowly pulling out the batteries like it was going to explode in his face. Then he wanted to make sure his camera was really a camera. He told Natnee that duct tape was prohibited, but let him keep it anyway. We’re talking like less than 5 inches of duct tape. That’s not enough to go around one wrist, let alone tie up a stewardess! No problem with the juggling balls this time (until the US border, at least), but he questioned the knife sharpener, which, of itself, is entirely harmless. After Natnee demonstrated that the sharpener couldn’t cut anybody, he spotted Natnee’s Bible. No questions about that, but he wanted to see his toiletry bag. Seeing nothing unusual there, he finally let Natnee go.

Once we got to our gate, they wouldn’t let us through without unzipping all our bags and feeling around one more time (for what? They’d already been x-rayed.). That makes THREE times we were searched. I mean, REALLY? Was all this bag inspection really necessary? But this is just a case in point of how little the Latinos trust other people. They are always locking and barring up their doors and peering down the streets. This fear of what MIGHT be leads them to be untrusting of others, themselves, and period.

Once we found a place to sit down, Daddy wanted some water. There was a small place nearby - a table, really - selling bottled water, but they wouldn’t let Daddy back to the gate with it. So he stood there and drank it. Grumbling. The flight back was without incident. US Border Patrol stopped us and questioned Natnee’s juggling balls (as expected) and x-rayed all our bags for illegal stuff, aliens, etc. There were some El Salvadorans in front of us who’d brought suitcases full of raw chicken and other raw meat parts. SERIOUSLY?!? Yes, and they were fined $300 on the spot for it. Ouch! Expensive mistake.

~Crystal

Posted on December 25th, 2009 by Natnee and filed under Mexico | No Comments »

Petting Zoos, Steam Vents, and the Wheel

The Jardín de Celeste really was the best hotel in the area. We looked. It had cozy cabins nestled in the hillside surrounded with beautiful plants and flowers. They owned a 270 acre coffee plantation and had a small petting zoo consisting of a few ducks, some sheep, and a pair of geese. There was a wonderful restaurant there at the hotel with good food and decent prices. The only thing this place didn’t have, well two things, were a view of the valley, and a market within walking distance. Nonetheless, we did enjoy ourselves there.

The town of Ataco was about 5km away, and we went there frequently for foodstuffs. We found some exotic fruits there: binches (mamones chinos - I should note that Natnee ate roughly 1000 of these during the trip), a strawberry flavored cherimoya (anoni), and an orange cherimoya-like fruit that we don’t know the name of. We also found a place in Ataco that made whole wheat bread, so we had them make us 12 “loaves”. These turned out to be thick tortillas and not the loaves you see on grocery store shelves in America. But they were good. Left are binches, and right is an anoni.

On a couple occasions Natnee and I just wandered the streets of Ataco, seeing whatever we could see. Interestingly, when you leave the actual city, there are houses and farms right there in the “burbs”. This is not so in Mexico. There, when you leave the city, there is nothing until you get to the next city. Natnee and I received strange looks all through this town because it was not frequented by white people, and they are more suspicious of others in this town than in others we’d visited. On one promenade through town, a little girl of not more than 5 called out after us, “Gringa! Gringa!” When we turned, she smiled broadly and said, “Hello!” to our “Hola”.

Another day we checked out the market at Juayúa since we had not as yet made it there. It was highly recommended by the guidebook as being one of the largest in the area, with huge numbers of vendors on Saturdays and Sundays. So we went on a Sunday to check it out. We were disappointed. It was too Americanized and too clean to be a market suitable for our delicate tastes. Really, though, there wasn’t much there to see, so we went to the nearby town of Apaneca to check out their market. It was even more depressing, with about 5 vendors total. After this, we were depressed enough to just go back to the room for the rest of the day.

One day we decided to do a coffee tour in a nearby factory. It was all in Spanish, so Natnee had to translate all of it for us. All their machinery was American-made and old (these days, it has to be old to be American-made). The guide took us through the process from start to finish - from the washing of the beans to the packaging. It was all very interesting (even for someone who doesn’t drink coffee), and at the end there was a video in English summarizing the process.

Later on during our stay at Jardín de Celeste, we decided to go to Ahuachapán to the ausoles, or heat vents. Daddy suggested that Ahuachapán was something Mother needed to do more often. There are volcanoes there that let off steam, and 10% of the nation’s energy needs are met through using the ausoles. We took a few pictures of bubbling water and steam (of course!) and we were going to go to the top where the baths were. But, the fumes and gases made Daddy sick, and the road was one of their customary back roads - long and very bumpy. So we turned back.

By the time we got back in Ahuachapán, we were hungry, so what better place to find food in than the market? We found several food vendors in a large open area with tables and chairs so we all sat down and Natnee ordered things from different vendors. But you couldn’t take dishes from one section to another. Why? Because the dishes might get stolen. Really?!? These people are so superstitious and so distrusting, it is hard to put it into words. All their houses and stores have bars and locks on them, and there is always a security guard with a sawed-off shotgun closeby. So, we ate in one section and then moved over to the next to try a different dish. While we were eating in this second section, a beggar approached us. We gave him our leftover tortillas and soup, and since he wasn’t too proud to take that, we gave him a dollar also. Not sure if that was the right way to handle that situation, but we figured it was worthy of some reward since most people wouldn’t take your leftover food; they just want your money.

On our last day at the Jardín de Celeste, we did some exploring by car (as we are wont to do) and ended up in Tacuba. It was a fairly good sized town, the only one we’d run into the whole trip that had one-way streets (how frustrating!). The town was clean, and the people were fairly friendly, since they want revenue from tourism. It was nice, but not spectacular. If you enjoy one-way streets, you might like it.

In all our driving around and exploring, we found some interesting things to note: Cows graze along the sides of the roads, and there are cows literally EVERYWHERE. As are the people. We tried finding a few bushes to, um, “inspect”, and everytime we found a good one, there’d be some man coming up the hill with a bag of corn on his shoulders. I’m not kidding. It got to be kind of funny. Also along the sides of the roads are fields of corn, beans, sugar cane, and coffee. Right up to the road in some places. And in every spot of arable land. Some places you’d have to rappel to in order to pick the crop because the hillsides were so steep.

Here’s an enigma smothered in secret sauce. Everybody carries things on their heads or their shoulders. Women carry things on their heads, and men carry things on their shoulders. Never the other way around. That just wouldn’t be right! I find this carrying distinction cute. Irrational but cute. They carry bottles of water, bundles of sticks, and many other things that way. These are sticks they walked kilometers to gather into a bundle less than 1m across and tied with string. This is water they walked kilometers to collect from the community well. The terrain in this region isn’t exactly level. It’s very hilly. So these people walked up and down steep hills on roads not fit to drive on with these things. Now, a few of them actually began thinking about what they were doing and created the wheel. Ta dah!

Isn’t this great?!? Well, only when you’re going downhill, since they don’t have gas or pedals, only brakes. Some of them had wooden wheels, some were covered with a little rubber. People would zoom down the road in these things alongside regular traffic back to their houses or stores. Incredible. Even fewer people used a vehicle for hauling wood to and fro. I suppose they just can’t afford it, even as a group, or else they simply prefer doing things in the more primitive fashion.

All in all, the people are very friendly and very healthy and very happy. More so than in other Latino countries we’ve traveled to.

After leaving the hotel, we headed toward some Mayan ruins. Mother wanted to see them. Natnee and I had seen the ones at Copán, so it was nothing new to us, and Daddy didn’t really want to see them. After seeing that it would cost us $12 to get in, we decided not to do it, especially since there was no tour guide for that price. After all, this is a pile of rocks we’re talking about! And, we could see them through the chain-linked fence. So we left and went to our next stop - a crater lake. It was pretty, but there was no place to stay, and had we stayed, there would have been nothing to do in the area or in the lake. So off we went.

Unfortunately, we had to go through San Salvador to get to the beach again without retracing our steps. Retracing our steps is against our principles! Driving through (or rather, as much around as possible) San Salvador was hectic. Daddy nearly clipped off a guy’s elbow. He was walking along the freeway carrying a bag of oranges on his shoulders. How stupid! Anyway, the guy barely kept his elbow. We stopped at a Burger King in the heart of San Salvador to rest and recoop for a few minutes, and also to have some “real” French fries, instead of all the wanna-be’s we’d found in the markets. Anyway, we ended up for the day, and the rest of our stay, at Costa del Sol, a small town on the spit of land on the southeastern side (near La Herradura), but more about that next time.

~Crystal

Posted on November 24th, 2009 by Natnee and filed under El Salvador | No Comments »

Back to the Land of Pupusas

We were undecided for a long time of where we wanted to go for our fall trip. We initially thought we’d go out west, but finally decided on El Salvador since it had a nice beach, mountains, and some interesting foods. So, off we went on September 30. We stayed in Houston the night before since our flight left early on the 30th. As we were going through the usual security checks, I was stopped and frisked because I was wearing two shirts on this particularly chilly morning. Last time I checked, it wasn’t a crime, but the metal detectors didn’t like it. The agent said it was a “bulky item”. And even after I showed her my undershirt, she said she would have to pat me down or else I would have to go back, take the shirt off and send it through the x-ray machine, and then come back through. I opted for the frisking, mainly because I was still cold and didn’t want to take my outer shirt off, but also because it would be a new experience. It was painless and fairly non-invasive, and afterwards we went along our merry way.

Once on the plane and in the air, I settled into my seat for a roughly 3-hour flight. I thought I might tilt the seat back a little since they’re so uncomfortable when they’re upright. What kind of people COULD be comfortable in those things? I mean really. Anyway, I pushed the button, gave a gentle push back, and WHAM! Only a whopping 3 degrees of tilt! I was just getting going good! I tried again. I asked Natnee if his chair was the same way. There was extra space on the flight, so if it was just my chair I would have moved, but alas, all the uncomfortable chairs were made all the more uncomfortable by not being able to tilt back more than a few degrees. [sigh]

We landed and got our rental car without incident, and then we headed to the beach! After all, this IS why we came here. We passed through La Libertad, stopping for some pupusas for lunch. A pupusa is a stuffed tortilla with sauerkraut and chile sauce on top. Most pupusas are stuffed with refried beans and cheese. Yum! We walked through the market there to get a few essential food items and then headed west.

We landed for the night at Playa Mizata, staying in a nice little room at the Mizata Resort (www.mizataresort.com). It wasn’t much before dark when we arrived, so Natnee went down to the beach to watch the sunset and wander around a little. Not far off was a giant rock which we, of course, HAD to investigate the next day. There wasn’t much of interest, but we did capture a few good pictures.

We were about to walk back to the room, when we decided we wanted just another picture or two from on this rock. While out on the rock, a wave twice the size of the regular ones came up and knocked both Natnee and me off our feet. Since he was closer to the edge of the rock, he sustained greater injuries. I escaped with a few scratches and bruises, but he lost a big chunk of flesh on the heel of his hand and the side of his foot, right where the sandal rubs. So, we began hobbling back to the room, but by the time we arrived there, the salt water had helped to heal Natnee’s foot wound so that it neither bled nor hurt. However, he spent the rest of the two weeks we were there hobbling around, which greatly hampered our exploring.

The next day we decided to move further up the coast. We liked where we were staying, but there just wasn’t much there to do, so we thought we’d try to find some place better. We ended up at Barra del Santiago. We drove through this little town and toward the beach. And we drove. And we drove. It took nearly an hour down a bumpy road to get to the beach, and once we got there, we had to use 4-wheel drive to get to the hotels. There were two. One was $250 a night, and we would have needed two rooms. The other one we talked into $90 a night for two rooms, since their rooms were ridiculously small. It was a night of living out of our coolers since no local food was available, and the air conditioning didn’t work so well. Also, Daddy kept getting bit by critters all night, so we left there the next day to find someplace better.

We wanted to go towards Guatemala and take a road back across the mountains toward Juayúa instead of going through the big cities. We stopped for breakfast at the market in Cara Sucia. The typical breakfast there is two eggs (fried or scrambled), fried plantains, queso fresco, sour cream, and tortillas. We had such a breakfast in the market for $1.50. We also obtained recipes of their sour cream and queso fresco while we were there. Onward we drove toward Guatemala looking for our turn-off. But we came upon the Guatemalan border before we found the road. It was in the guidebook, but there were no signs along the road anywhere. We tried a few roads that could have worked, but none did. The locals said it was possible to take this road, but it was not a good road, and it was best to go through the big city of Sonsonate. We cut off Sonsonate by a legitimate road and ended up in a guidebook-recommended hotel, Jardín de Celeste, where we stayed for a whole week, and which I will write about in my next post.

~Crystal

Posted on November 1st, 2009 by Natnee and filed under El Salvador | 2 Comments »

Mexico To… Home! Ondale! Ondale! Arriba!

Sorry this post has taken err… six months to get posted. Things like this seem less important when you’re home. Anyway I left off in San Cristobal; from there we booked a tour to go to the Sumidero Canyon for the day before we left. It cost 14$ each (although I later learned that we could have done it for 5$ each had we gone directly to Chiapas De Corzo and gotten on a boat ourselves). Still, it was cool. The canyon was a half-mile high straight up in the deeper spots, and we were on a fast boat that cruised at a good clip. The pictures pretty much say it all:

When we got to the end of the canyon and turned back, I inquired where were the crocodiles I had heard were here. He replied that they were in the water. With a smirk. He then said that to see them we needed a tourist to volunteer to go in the water. No one volunteered

Anyway, on the way back we did see a couple of different crocs, and got close enough to get some nice pictures of them, too:

On the way back we stopped at Corzo to have lunch and I had Pozole, which is what happens when you put a tortilla and water in a blender with some cocoa, basically. That’s not how they make it, but that’s pretty much what it is. It is a corn drink, very slightly sweet, with cacao beans in it. I liked it, but Crystal didn’t. Anyway back in San Cristobal we found some organic chocolate which I thought would make great gifts for the women back home. It said it was made in San Cristobal, but no address. So I walked all over the city, literally, looking for someone who knew where it was made, since I wanted to buy direct and wholesale. I spent about 3 hours that day and next morning looking for it, went down several blind alleys, but finally found it and bought 5 pounds of chocolate.

By now our possessions were starting to snowball and get to be quite a load to haul around, and it was to get worse! We lost track of time that morning (it was the day of our flight) and so we didn’t start looking for a taxi until it was almost too late to make it to the airport.

We almost, and I do mean almost, missed our plane to Mexico City that morning. When we finally noticed what time it was, we had 1.5 hours until the flight LEFT. Not to check in, but to takeoff. And we were about an hour or better away. I was having some stuff printed that morning, and before I left I had to pay him; however he gave me a different price than his boss had quoted me (a higher one, naturally) so after we agreed on a compromise and I went to pay him, I realized I was out of pesos, he wouldn´t take dollars, so I had to change some – running downtown to find a bank, changing money, signing papers, etc – and once that was taken care of, I had to find a taxi, and then negotiate a price with him, then the taxi driver wanted to pick up some extra passengers but they weren´t ready… by now we were getting quite anxious so we told him to forget it and just take us to the airport. And step on it.

Never say that to a Mexican taxi driver. Seriously.

The dude was a good driver, no doubts, but he literally passed a police car doing two-and-a-half times the speed limit. Granted, it was one of those stupid so-low-that-noone-even-tries-to-obey-it limits of 40kph, but still. I have to say though, e got us through a 40 minute ride in about 25 minutes.

Unfortunately, I didn´t have enough pesos to pay him (we agreed on a price of about 30$ for the ride and the speed) and he wouldn´t take dollars either. Apparently, it is a real hassle for Mexicans to change dollars here. It´s easy for me, but locals apparently have to explain where they got it, why they are changing it, who they are, where they are from, and all that bureaucratic hoo-hah. So he wouldn´t take dollars, even when I offered him 40. So when we arrived at the airport with just 10 minutes to spare until takeoff, we went to check-in and the clerk told us the bags had already left. After a momentary pause, we realized we could carry on all of our packages (at this point numbering 2 tubes, 1 box, 3 backpacks, and us).

So while Crystal got us ticketed, I ran off to find someplace to change dollars to pay the taxi driver - who, it cannot be denied, had earned his fare. I found a store who traded pesos in at 10 for the dollar, which was a criminal rate (at the time, 14.5 pesos to the dollar was what banks gave) but I was out of time. So I did that and paid him, plus gave him all my change as a tip.

Then we went through security. Mind you, we had planned to check our red backpack which had our knives in it. Since we didn´t have a chance to do that, we decided to try to run it through security. I´ve done that before, but this time no luck. They spotted them and took them away, both of our nice swiss army knives (although the total investment was only about 12$, still…) and I guess since they already had us stopped, they wanted Crystal´s scissors too. We are talking scissors with a blade a half-inch long. Seriously. While they were in her vanity pack they also took away basically everything else pointy too - her fingernail file, cuticle trimmer, mysterious femininely-used pointy thingy.

On the upside, our pack was lighter with less female stuff. On the downside, I´ve heard about the nail file 25 times since then.

Anyway, we made it on the flight believe it or not. They were still boarding and they let us on. And I looked at Crystal and said ¨See? No sweat!¨ - Then she hit me. I still can’t figure out why.

So after an uneventful flight change in Mexico City, we landed in Monterrey. The airport is quite a ways from the city, and there seems to be a sort of Taxi Mafia and it has all the taxi and bus prices hacked up to crazy prices for the ride from the airport into town. It cost us 5$ each on a bus for a 40 minute ride. A taxi wanted 30 for both of us. Mind you, it cost less than that to get across Honduras. I spent the better part of an hour trying to find or negotiate a better price (you know me) but 5$ each was the best. And then, there were only three of us on the bus! But it´s Mexico, can´t always understand it. Actually, you seldom understand it.

So we arrived in the inner city of Monterrey late at night. It was pretty creepy, reminiscent of Detroit or Chicago. Dark, dismal, knots of gang-like people on the corners. I had found a hotel on the internet and managed to find it after a few adventures. On the internet, they advertised $11 a person. On arrival, I was quoted $7, which I agreed to happily (most hotels in Monterrey seemed to charge almost US prices).

When I got my money out, he charged me $15 a person. Then when I balked it became $5. Then a few minutes later he knocked on my door and said he made a mistake, and tried to charge me $15 again. So we settled on $10 at last call. I told him I wasn´t paying more than I was quoted on the internet. I told him I paid him what he´s going to get and if he changed it again I was leaving. I meant it too, so he finally left us alone.

Anyway, it settled down after that. We were in a not-so-nice part of town. We tried to find a restaurant but all we found was halloween and druggies. Don´t ask. Anyway, we wound up back at the hotel eating granola. I really didn’t like Monterrey very much, although to be fair I didn’t see it under the best light.

Next morning we caught a bus for Reynosa from Monterrey. Again I got entangled in dialectic changes, since there “bus” was NOT an understandable alternative for “autobus”. “Bus” was not understood at all. And “Reynosa” was not an appropriate substitute sound for “RRRReynosa”. You have to trill the first R. I don’t know why, but “bus to Reynosa” got me blank looks, and then a few finally said “oh, an AUTObus to RRRReynosa!”

Spent the night in Reynosa – a seedy border town – found some food to take home (a case of Pineapple and a case of Papaya – about 70 pounds altogether), some Kahlua-like stuff that I am fond of which is only sold in Mexico, and did some general last-minutes-in-Mexico shopping. Crystal wanted some yogurt, and we were in a large chain grocery store, and she couldn’t find it at first.Then she found a little bit on the end of this aisle:

She said “that’s not very much”. I said “look around the corner”; that entire island, from one end to the other on both sides is FULL of nothing but yogurt. They consume a lot more of it down there than we do. So next morning we caught a bus for McAllen. We had to get off the bus and walk through customs into the US – carrying the fruit, which they looked at carefully but allowed to pass (except for the tangerine Crystal forgot to eat, which was confiscated) pay a tax on the alchohol of 2.50$ for 2 liters, and finally got to the bus station, where we awaited a connecting bus to Austin, where we were to meet my parents.

We had a 2 hour layover, and both of us were starving for Taco Bell. After 6 weeks in Latin America, Taco Bell was all we could think about. So the nearest one was 11 blocks each way. So 22 blocks of walking later, I was back with tacos! I was stopped in the yard of the bus station by a self-important guard who refused to let me in to the station. Mind you, I was 10 yards away from the unlocked glass doors which opened up onto the main room of the station. And I had tickets! But no, I had to enter through the other side of the building.

There was NO reason for that at all. It wasn’t like I went through a line, the other side of the glass was a public space in the middle of the station, not a restricted area. It irritated me. But I walked around the whole bus station to get right back where I almost was (although in retrospect I think I should have insisted on going through the short way). Crystal then informed me that the security guard inside had made her not sit with her feet on the benches (the benches were steel, and it wasn’t like they were that clean anyway). So then I juggled for awhile to kill time and of course after a while the guard came over and told me it was prohibited. By this time I was weary of ignorant rules and demanded to know why. He said it was prohibited, I said why again. He didn’t know and didn’t care. I then informed him that this rule was stupid. But since I only had 10 minutes more, I let it slide. It just illustrates one of the major differences between the USA and Latin America.

In Central America, I could have built a fire in the middle of the bus station and no one would have cared. I could have roasted corn on it and opened a concession stand and no one would have cared. Here, in the “Land of the Free”, I juggle quietly, not bothering anyone, or try to walk into the bus station in a slightly unusual way, or sit with my feet on the bench, and a pompous security guard is there to tell me it’s against the rules. I missed Mexico already. Maybe I’ll go to Morocco next… ?

Posted on July 31st, 2009 by Natnee and filed under Mexico | 2 Comments »

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