Last day

Hey all,
I haven´t updated this in forever but figured I´d do one last post before returning to the states tomorrow. Seems somewhat crazy that this is almost over, it hasn´t quite sunk in yet. I imagine maybe I will start to believe I´m going back when I´m on my way to the airport. I´ve been in Argentina for the last three weeks, and I have to say it hasn´t been my favorite country: everything here is very polished and comfortable and at times I feel like I´ve somehow stumbled into Europe. There was one ski town (there wasn´t any snow when I was there, it was kind of funny to see empty ski lifts going up totally barren, dusty hills with jagged Patagonian mountains in the background) that even had a whole bunch of St. Bernards with those little whiskey barrels around their necks so you could take a picture with them in front of ski lodge. Don´t get me wrong, it´s a lovely country, just not so much my cup of tea. That and the food choices heremore or less consist of hamburgers, pasta, and pizza-- I am yearning for aguacates and ceviche!
In some respects I wish that I had done this trip in the reverse direction. The majority of the people I´ve met in Argentina speak a fair amount of English, and it would have been easier to start out in the expensive country with less of language barrier, so that I could live it up in the cheap countries a few months later with my now fairly competent spanish. I´m still having sticker shock about the prices in Argentina even after having been here for 3 weeks. I find myself saying, ¨If this were in Peru...¨ a lot. I can´t even imagine how hard it is going to be to readjust to US prices!
I started my jaunt through Argentina in the city of Mendoza, which is the wine capital of Argentina. The city is technically in the middle of a desert, but through the magic of irrigation channels it doesn´t feel that way at all: the streets are lined with huge, beautiful trees and the city is awash in nice parks to waste the day in. I couchsurfed with two very lovely French girls and drank a lot of wine and saw a lot of art. The tallest mountain outside the Himalayas is somewhere in the general vicinity of Mendoza, so I took a few days to go hiking around the base.
After that it was off to Bariloche, which is more or less the border of Patagonia, and was undoubtedly the most beautiful place I have ever been. I met some other pacific northwesterners and went on a crazy backpacking trip through some Patagonian mountains that were the inspiration for the drawings in The Little Prince (which, by the way, I did manage to find a copy of in spanish). After that it was off to the coast to see some penguins, which was actually really underwhelming. I´ve come to the conclusion that all the various penguin movies and merchandise are a lot cuter than penguins themselves. And since then, I´ve been in a big cities, which have never really been my thing. I guess it´s good that I haven´t been too fond of the last few places I´ve been, as it´s making me more amenable to the idea of coming back.
I´ve been in Buenos Aires for about a week. Some of my rugby friends from Portland spent time in Buenos Aires last year, so I got the contact info for their club and have been playing with a local women´s team. Rugby feminino is more or less unheard of in Argentina, most people I talked to about it thought I was joking. There are maybe 8 teams in the whole country, and I had the good fortune to come over a weekend with a six team tournament. So I´ve spent the last two days beating up/getting beat up by a bunch of Argentine women and it has been an absolute blast. I miss rugby! I want to start playing again when I get back to Portland, but I am a bit wary of playing such a contact sport when I need my right hand to make a living.
I can´t load any pictures right now because my camera cord decided to stop working, and I don´t have all that much more to say... So. Yes. I´m heading back to the states tomorrow. Those of you who live in Portland, I´m looking forward to seeing you! I´m coming back with no job, no house, no money, and no real plans, so I´ll have an overabundance of time to see you, give me a call any time after Tuesday and we can frolic merrily about the city.
Much love,
tessa

Street art street art and more street art

Hey folks,
I love street art. I miss my acrylics, I haven´t painted in three and a half months, which is effectively forever! Here´s a bunch of pictures of walls from Santiago, Chile.
-tessa

I´m in Arequipa taking a glorious week to just hang out and not really do anything. It´s a welcome change of pace, I´ve been going for long walks around the city and doing my best to get as lost as possible in interesting neighborhoods. I´m staying with an architect named Paolo who is hands down one of the most awesome people I´ve ever met. She plays the bass in a band called Die, Tulip! and her house is full of fascinating architecture books and music. She has a crazy dog named Pelusa, which translates into fluff or lint.
I don´t really feel like writing and pictures are of course so much more interesting, so I´m just gonna post some pictures.

This is a hut on one of the floating islands on Lake Titicaca. The floating islands are made by tying together blocks of reed roots and then laying down lots of layers of reeds. The islands are small-only about 30 meters across- and most of them have between 5-8 families that live on them. During the wet season the islanders have to make new ¨ground¨one a week, once a month during the dry season. The thing on the roof of the hut is a solar panel. It powers the TV´s inside the huts. It´s a pretty crazy juxtaposition.

This is Lake Titicaca from the highest vantage point in the city of Puno. There were 816 stairs involved in getting up here (I didn´t count, there was a sign).
Procession for Santa Semana (the week before easter) in Arequipa.
Girl on Taquille Island. Fascinating place... I´ll write about it eventually, maybe.
Cusco.
Street art. I love street art.
It´s hard to update this thing because I always feel like I have so much that has been running through my head, but it´s all already in my sketchbook and I don´t really want to rehash it. I guess that makes me a bad blogger because I don´t make much of an effort to write with an audience in mind. I think I´m a little old-fashioned and too accustomed to having a honest to goodness paper journal. Maybe at some point I´ll feel motivated to actually write something substantial in this thing, but I kind of like it just as a glorified slide show.
-tessa

My socks are made of llama

Ok i´ll start with the obligatory apology for not having posted in so long. Since the last time I posted, I´ve had two more charming bouts of whatever is wrong with my stomach, seen more ruins than I can shake a stick at, and wandered through the most beautiful mountains I´ve ever seen. They were cold. There was snow. I´m currently in Cusco feeling a bit overwhelmed by how touristy the city is, I keep doing double takes when I´m walking down the street and hear people talking in English. Everything here is crazy expensive (relatively speaking) and bilingual and I don´t really like it, but thankfully with the crazy pace I´m moving at, my surroundings are never a problem for more than a day or two at a time.

I have been feeling like I want lots more time to travel, ideally months and months, and had come up with a really brilliant plan that involved selling a car I partially own (long story, don´t ask) and changing my ticket, and the only thing that stopped me was some assinine airline rule about not being able to change tickets if it means you´re staying for more than 120 days. So it´s only by the grace of airline beauracracy that you´re getting me back on time.

My four day hike around Chachopoyas was amazingly beautiful and amazingly wet. We started out walking along an old inca road and descended through miles of cloud forest. Because it´s the wet season, the views were mostly obscured by clouds, but occasionally things would clear up and you could see endless fields of trees draped in orchids. Which I neglected to take pictures of. I´m bad at taking pictures. But here are some:

when the guidebooks say that the wet season gets muddy, they´re not kidding....we hiked to a little village whose name I have forgotten and stayed in a hostel called Jesus is the Light of My Salvation and I met the pet monkey that lived there. At first I though ¨How cute, they´re friends!¨ But then it became clear that there was a definite one sided affection thing going on, and the monkey was not riding the dog in the most chaste fashion.

The ruins of Kuelap. I don´t know why, but Keulap might have been the single most tranquil place I have ever been. Maybe I´m just weird, but I find ruins strangely calming. This one was way up on top of a big hill, and it was covered in big trees and wildflowers. And grazing llamas. I tried to make friends with them, I made a daisy chain for a little one.

After Chachopoyas I headed for Trujillo/Huanchaco. Nothing too interesting to report there... I got really sunburned and felt overwhelmed about being in a big city again so I got a little drunk by myself and went wandering through the shopping district. I went and saw more ruins, this time the ruins of Chan Chan. The city is made of mud and everything is the same color. It´s a rather surreal experience to be surrounded by mud walls that are thousands of years old, makes you really think about what on earth people are going to make of the remains of our civilization when they find it (tangent-- read the book The Motel of the Mysteries, it´s about just that). Hardly anyone was there when I went so all you could hear was the background noise of the ocean.After Trujillo I headed for Huaraz and took off for another four day trek, this time through the Cordillera Blanca mountain range. It´s the most beautiful place I´ve ever been, so I forgive it for being horribly, horribly cold. I half killed myself halfway through the hike with a combination of food poisoning, altitude sickness, and a rather wicked hangover. I spent the next two days of hiking running off into the bushes every 15 minutes. It was lovely. Cold. So cold. All of us in this picture should have thought bubbles that say, ¨just pretend you´re enjoying this right now.¨Aíght enough of this... I´m going to head out in search of food. Until next time,

-tessa

awesome street art

I wanted to share this lovely testament to interspecies superhero love. I found it on a long wall in Cuenca. It makes me very happy.

Ha! I DO take pictures!

Hi everyone,

Sorry I haven´t updated in forever. I was up on a mountain for two weeks and then I decided to cross into Peru via a rather remote border (Zumba) that turned into two days of travel with like a gazillion and a half different inefficient legs involving buses, minivans, mototricycles and taxis. I´ve ended up in Chachopoyas, Peru, traveling with two very nice german girls with very large backpacks. We´re about to head out on a four day trek through the jungle (the third day involves horseback riding. Ponies in the jungle! Yay!) and some nice canyons.

I´m going to just post some random pictures in no particular order.

Here´s a picture of one of the various things I ended up traveling in to cross into Peru:

Taxi drivers really like to pimp their rides. Lots of the little mototricycles have LED´s and EL wire on them, so at night they drive around covered in flashing lights while blasting loud music. It actually really reminded me of being on the playa at night at Burning Man.

And here is a picture of Canoa at sunset:
The weight bench is made of bamboo, and the weight bar is a metal rod with chunks o´concrete on the ends. Such things are standard fare along the Ecuadorian coast.

The farm in Vilcabamba ended up being one of the oddest (and loveliest) places I´ve ever been. It was less of a farm and more an experimental permaculture community run by a former Canadian anarchist named Yves. The farm is wayyyy up on a mountain above the cloud line, which is both awesome because it means you get to live in the clouds (and chase them if you feel like it), but also pretty cold. At least relatively speaking. Here´s a view from the main building on the farm:

All the buildings are made of cob and adobe, mostly through the efforts of Yves alone, plus any unsuspecting volunteers who happened to show up at the wrong time. Here´s a picture of the cob kitchen during meal time:

And since that picture doesn´t really show its cuteness, here´s the kitchen from another angle:

Having a kitchen for two weeks was so wonderful! It had all the spices one could ever want, and there was always an entire hammock full of tropical fruits at my disposal. I learned how to make some pretty awesome chocolate mango banana empanadas. And I also learned how to make granola and chai, and how to make cob, and how to milk goats, and a multitude of other fun things. Oh and SHATTERED my previous record for longest period of time without a shower. I think it had previously been 5 days while at burning man, but... heh... 14 days. The hippies are right: you do reach a point where the texture of your hair and skin changes and you don´t get any more dirty, but it is a lie that you stop smelling. Such a lie. I smelled horrible until yesterday when I finally showered.

Volunteers on the farm pick projects that fit their time frame, so I made a cob planter box with sculptures of all the farm animals on it (which I neglected to take a picture of because it was still drying and really didn´t look very pretty yet), and then laid flagstones for a week. I got super sick while up there and ended up unable to eat for about three days, and boy let me tell you-- if you ever want to lose weight in a hurry, get yourself some sort of week long food poisoning that renders you incapable of eating, and then run up and down a mountain hunting for large rocks to lug back to your flagstone project.

On a related note, I had far and away the best valentine´s day of my life: I hadn´t been able to eat for the three days leading up to it, and then, on valentine´s day, I ate a mango. I almost cried it was so good. I think I might still have some sort of stomach parasites because it seems like any time I revert to a normalish diet, my body will have none of it. So I´ve sort of been eating actual meals every other day, with rice in between. It´s really annoying, especially because I can´t drink, and drinking is useful both as a means to meet more people to travel with, and to practice my spanish with reckless abandon. Language pratice, like haircutting and large scale painting, is an endeavor greatly aided by a few beers.
Here´s a picture of me soaking wet and covered in foam during carnaval:

I went on a nice hike to some ruins today. Here are some kids with their doggie and a see saw.

And here´s the view of the canyon. I don´t know if you can see all the waterfalls and what not in the background, there were about 8 of them.

Ok, I´m getting super tired of writing and waiting for these pictures to load. I´ll post more stuff eventually. Love,

-tessa

no pictures cuz I can´t figure out this computer

I know that pictures are way more interesting than my rambling, but my camera does not seem to want to play nice with this computer-- I hope this means there is something up with this computer, not that my camera has decided to not be friends with computers in general.
I´ve been hopping about like crazy for the past week or so. After Canoa, I ended up in Puerto Lopez and went to a place called Isla de la Plata that is supposed to be the poor man´s Galopagos. It was alright, but kinda a waste of money for what it was. I did see a lot of blue footed boobies, and learned an important lesson about myself: I do not like guided nature hikes. People walk so slowly! And yes, the first blue footed boobie is perhaps novel enough to warrant a photograph, and maybe even the second, but 20 blue footed boobies later do you REALLY have to pull out your cameras again, people?! I found that about a mile into the trail I was starting to have the really evil urge to run full speed towards whatever was being photographed so as to scare it off. Although a few days after that tour, I met a girl who had a pretty nasty cut on her foot because one of the blue footed boobies bit her, so it´s probably for the best that I didn´t try to chase them.
I got stuck traveling with a crazy man with a stick for a few days. I don´t really want to get into the whole story right now, but should you ever meet a chain smoking 50 year old named Charles who likes to tell you about how he is young and free at heart, just run. Quickly. Due to a tempermental ATM and a small coastal town that wouldn´t change traveler´s checks, I had to go with crazy stick man to the town of Montanita, which REALLY reminded me of any old northern california surf town, only international. Lots of hippies drinking in hammocks, lots of people selling badly rendered drawings of bob marley and pendants in the shape of pot leaves. Think Stinson Beach, but international and packed to the gills because it´s Carnaval.
Oh right, it´s the last day of Carnaval right now. The last three days have been absolutely nuts. Everyone celebrates by (of course) drinking heavily and getting everyone ridiculously drenched. Everyone roams the streets with buckets and super soakers and water balloons and cans of something that is a cross between shaving cream and silly string, and no one escapes unscathed. I saw a nun walking around with a super soaker! Gringos are particularly attractive targets, so I´ve been more or less dripping wet since Friday. Unfortunately this holiday is not conducive to things that shouldn´t get wet (sketchbooks and cameras), so I don´t have much evidence that it happened.
After Montanita I went to Guayacil for a day, and then onwards to Cuenca. Cuenca is a beautiful city and is far and away the cleanest place I have been in Ecuador. Unfortunately no one was around because everyone had left town for Carnaval, so mostly I just walked around a very pretty ghost town. I accidentally watched the last five minutes of the super bowl from a bar in Cuenca.
And now I´m currently in Vilcabamba trying to head to this farm I´m gonna be working on for the next two weeks. It´s silly, but I´m mainly procrastinating on getting a move on because I am deathly afraid of having to try to speak spanish on the phone. But sooner or later it will have to be done.
I´ve been traveling with all sorts of interesting folks from a panoply of countries including Holland, Switzerland, Israel, Germany, Ireland, England, Norway and Australia. It´s been fascinating to hear about the politics and social structures of so many different places, and also to hear the international opinions on what´s going on in America right now. It seems the general international consensus is that our country has managed to fuck up a really staggering amount in the past 8 years, and that no American travelers like George Bush. Yup, seems pretty accurate to me. Oh, and most people cannot seem to wrap their heads around America´s educational system and its health care system.
I´ve learned that people from Holland have very large watches. Like twice the size of any other country. And apparently Bolivia has an amazing selection of watches from the 80´s-- big assymetrical day glow sort of things (I met a girl from Ireland with an 80´s watch fetish).
And if I had to give one piece of advice to anyone wanting to travel to Ecuador, it would be: make sure you have lots of small bills. When going to either the strip club orto Ecaudor, it is crucial to have a bit stack of ones. For the most part ATM´s only give twenties, and then it´s almost impossible to find somewhere to get change without being glared at for being such a terrible inconvenience.
Okee, I need to dash. Love to all.