God brought me there.

I am sitting in the huge echoing restaurant of Hotel Sahara in Santa Ana, San Salvador. Directly in front of me there is a long table full of God lovin' people. At the center sits a typical overweight thick wristed man with a neck wider than my thighs and a petite phillipina wife. According to him, God spoke to him last night and told him that he needs to learn spanish. He then went on to say that he had had no interest in visiting his wife's birth country until God told him to go there.

God never speaks to me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really all that dissapointed by that but I can't figure out why (S)He spends his time talking to this Yanqui.

glimpses

Memories of a country are often formed from series of images which build up into a sentiment or a feeling while loosing their fine detail.  I always chastise myself for not walking about with a notebook in which I could record the details of those swift moments, glimpses of what makes a country unique.
I was thinking of that this morning while walking the damp cobbled streets of Antigua in search of breakfast.  Sitting on the stoop of a cafe was an old man who I often see there selling carved wooden angels.  The image of him jogged my memory to another moment in Antigua when I found myself walking behind a man stooped over with a meter tall wooden angel bound to his back by a piece of rope which stretched across his forehead.  For whatever reason the image of that man moved me and I felt compelled to buy the angel just to relieve him of his load.  Then of course reason sank in and I continued past him down the road to forget about that moment until again this morning.

being here now

I often find myself trying to recreate the sensations of being in Asia, just as one might try and remember an old lover, trying to recover the nuances, the fine details. It is funny, I knew that this would happen. It isn't a desire of wanting to return, but just a nostalgia for a time in my life. Sometimes, when it is hot, as it is today, I re-imagine the heat pressing down on my back, the sweat drawing rivers down the small of my back. I'm in Chichen Itza (well just outside), the hammering footwork of the traditional Yucatecan dances thunders from down the hall, and all the tourists look damp and uncomfortable. Ice cream or ice lollies seems the most accepted solution to the pounding sun. I opted for doing my accounts over a tour of the ruins under cloudless skies. One can only admire 'el castillo' so many times before it just becomes another 'pile of rocks.'
Back to my first tangent, Asia. My recovering of memories, or attempts at it, highlights the very core of travel. Newness, stimulates us, it fires all sorts of excitement in our nervous system. Think of your first view of the crested pyramids at Tikal, the first scent of lavender in the fields of France, your first sip of wine, the smell of Hawaii as you step of the plane. After a while these things fade, they become less impressive, the become rote, or routine. After a little while Hawaii smells like any other place, our demons and hold ups follow us and we become ourselves, the same cranky self we are at home just in an exotic locale.
But here is the very lesson, those first moments are when we are hyper-aware, when our senses our sucking up every vibration of information, we are open and in the moment, more focused on the sensations, than the email we might have to send. And I am pretty sure that is where the delight in living life comes from, the more in-the-moment we can be, the more engaged in what is actually going on around us the more satisfied we feel with life.
The thing that scares me is that modernization and technology seem to want to move away from that very concept. Actually I am guilty of it as this very moment, I am sitting at the outskirts of, 'one of the world's new 7 wonders,' with headphones in, typing away on my netbook. What does this have to with Asia? When I made the choice to leave Asia I suddenly became aware that my time there was suddenly limited and I wanted to take advantage of everything. But I realized that running about like a crazy woman trying to do every last thing was never going to happen. I instead turned to trying to enjoy every last experience that I could have. But this isn't something one can do only while traveling, it is an everyday practice to enjoy the very process of living. When is the last time you took the time to enjoy the process of bathing? Of eating? Of sleeping? We have the chance to make our very living into a ritual of joy and pleasure and yet so many of us turn it into a chore.
Maybe this is all way too woo-woo and out there, but I think there is something to this. Something to finding pleasure in the very act of being. At least this thinking helped me get my expenses done.

a memory experiment

I was Antigua, Guatemala for the last 3 days of Semana Santa.   For a lot of people this is a reason in itself to come to Antigua.  And to be honest I had been wanting to see what it was all about since I had heard about it.  My friend Alex was with me for the first night (friday) and with her background in Art History and Latin she was pretty geeked out about the whole thing.  And I have to say the whole thing is really quite impressive, but I didn't take a single picture.
I didn't really think about it at the time, but a while into it I made a conscious decision not to take a photo.  I wanted to see if memory is really affected by not having a photo to reference it.  My idea being that for so many travelers travel has come down to digital images.  Imagine (or maybe you can just remember if this has unfortunately happened to you) that your camera is suddenly lost after an incredible 2 week vacation.  Feel that sinking in your stomach, that ache of desire, what is it that you are missing?  What is it about these images that we are so attached to?  Most of us never print our photos out.  Most of our friends aren't all that interested in seeing them.  And yet sometimes its seems that our photos are more important than our memories, in fact that our photos are our memories. 
I wanted to see if without a photo would my experience of Semana Santa be changed. Though a photo doesn't capture the smell choking smoke of Copal that turns the streets of Antigua in to eerie gray passageways, nor the thundering music which signals Jesus' death, nor the slow swaying walk of the men and women who stoop under the weight of the huge platforms loaded with life size wooden sculptures of Jesus, Angels, Saints and crying Marys, something still impels us to snap away. But what it is that makes us so attached to our images?  Is it this crazy idea that with out a photo we will some how forget where we have been?
I was thinking of this again today as I was walking down the streets of Livingston to the bank.  When we focus on capturing the image we forget to take the time to absorb the details.  Considering this as I walked I tried to take the time to absorb more details, the sounds, the smells, the people.  And now I wonder if my memories of those slow moving marches are sharpened by the fact that while they were passing me I could focus entirely on that moment and not on framing a photo, or if my memories will fade with age and I will wish for a photo to remind me that I was there.
The truth is, I won´t know the answer to this for quite sometime.  Memories take time to settle into the creases of your brain.  Some make an imprint so strong that they never seem to fade, and others are forgotten precisely the moment they happen.
In all honesty, my strongest memories don´t have a photo with which to associate them.  They are standing 9 miles out in the wilderness on my first back packing trip gazing out at an endless sea of evergreen and granite.  Or the feeling of walking out in to Little India my first night in Singapore, the scent of spices and rhythm of bollywood soundtracks pulsating through the heavy air.  Or a moon rising over the freeway overpasses with Mt. Tam in silhouette as I paddle in from practice.  Sometimes that ache or desire to capture a moment is the very thing that makes us remember it with precision.  In our inability to otherwise document it, we take the time to tatoo the present moment into our minds, where it will stay with us, regardless of crashed computers or lost negatives.

A train of thought:

The loneliness of travel.  a catch-22, which captures me between a home with friends and family whom i love and a life that can't include any of those comforts but is ripe with adventures and discoveries.  To travel is to miss things, we set off and leave our beds, our toilets, our comforts into an unknown.  But by now most of what i encounter isn't an unknown, I have settled into a rhythm, not unlike from that movie, Up in the Air.  I am one of those restless souls, who sometimes looses patience with the need to document every moment digitally, I know the menu, I walk with purpose and direction, rarely with a map.  I hate my arrogance and impatience.  I miss the days of constant new-ness, where getting lost leads to a million new discoveries.  What is left is mostly routine, and yet the loneliness persists.  I am constantly leaving, constantly saying goodbye, creating new friendships with marked shelf lives, 2 days, 3 days, 2 weeks, one month.  I often feel like there is a zen buddhist teacher sitting in a slate kimono repeating an endless koan of, 'let go, let go.'  And it is true, this lifestyle is a lesson, we can't hold on, we are at our essence alone and yet a part of everything.  Beauty can morph quickly into sadness and loneliness, an unshared sunset, a missed joke, a lost story.  And yet beauty, magic, and mystery effuse everything: the discovery of a bright pink wall, grapefruit eaten in a park to the sound of bird song, a taxi driver with a map of where you are going.  I am coming to terms with the gray-ness of everything, in my life there is no longer a good or bad, everything just is. 

self-reliance and a very beautiful road

a blog entry inspired by two minds...

1.

"When you are traveling you are your sole support system, and that is hard and it gets tiring." -AG

Garrie makes an incredible point here, something that for so long I had been wanting to put into words. Every time I go to make a decision I have only myself to rely on, an exhilarating and exhausting prospect.

2.
“Travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from ego, is in my opinion the opposite. Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to loose yourself in an exotic place. Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life, or seeing a serious mistake. But this does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present. What makes the whole experience vivid, and sometimes more thrilling, is the juxtaposition of the present and the past--- London seen from Harris saddle.” (Paul Theroux – The Happy Isle of Oceania, which by the way is an INCREDIBLE book)

In my case it was Lake Atitlan seen from the karst of Vang Vieng, and that moment was so strong I felt like the breath had been knocked out of me. In the presence of so much beauty I was reminded of how much I miss my home. And maybe that is what this is, a realization that for me, Central America is home. It took flying half way around the world to realize that. I was talking to Sarah today about the possibility of coming back and she said, 'coming home?' and my heart said, 'yes, coming home.' I am home sick, which is a strange and yet lovely realization.

que EMO gringita!

The other day someone said to me that we never realize what we have until it is gone. This isn't a new or original idea, I think there is an extensive collection of literature, music, and art all dedicated to it, but it has been a long time since I've felt that way. I'm not sure if it is a result of being on the road for more than 2 years, or if it is my spiritual superiority over normal mortals, but I have started to learn how to appreciate what you have in front of you. I spend a lot of time thinking about this concept, especially as the world feels posed on the brink of a big shift (2012, global warming, financial crises, failing monsoon rains). My conclusion is that I think we should spend more time appreciating what we have right now and not worry so much about the stock markets, the price of gas (petrol for you pommies), and Jessica Simpson's fat but beautiful tour.

I find myself using my day to day struggles as good fertilizer for writing and for spiritual development. Even my reoccurring loneliness for friends, family, and far off places has begun to feel like reminders of what a great life I have rather than something that brings me down.

Yesterday on our epic overland tour of Highway 1, a drive which means a lot of back tracking over hundreds of kilometers (an incredibly inefficient travel day for an Edward like me) through Vietnam, I started thinking how we can never get away from anything. You can fly 100,000,000,000 of miles from home and find yourself depressed over the same thing. As soon as we accept our reality, as soon as we drop our habits of reacting the same way everytime we start on the real journey.

It's funny I created this blog to record my travels, but more than often it feels like a one sided conversation about spirituality, laced with personal references (inside jokes we called them when I was 13) and my weird sometimes romantic, sometimes existential, sometimes humorous views on the world that I am a part of.

Today I am in Vientiane, sitting by the window in cafe JOMA. I've limited myself to one cup of coffee and have been keeping watch of the weather for the past hour while I wait for the Internet to resume. It was very windy for 20 or so minutes while rain made vague threats and finally culminated in a brief but violent storm. Now the leaves are calm again, stirring in a slight breeze, and the sky has lightened a bit, though a dark patch remains. There is steady traffic at the 24 hour atm. I've got Emiliana Torrini playing on my ipod and I am not sure if it is the gray sky or her voice or the coffee or the rain, but it feels very Seattle-like this afternoon.

'you go number 2.'

I just got in from my most recent motorbike tour through Hue, which hands down has to be my most favorite thing to do in Vietnam. It is the ideal way to experience all the beautiful minutiae that make travel so exhilarating and breathtaking. Probably more so because motorbikes are so classically Vietnamese and somehow accentuate the whole experience, just like a good wine can do for a great meal.
The rice is turning gold in this part of the country and the stalks have begun to tip over from the weight of the grains. The lower part of the stalks remain green leaving the fields a lush green bronzed with ripeness. It is funny for me to think back on my first trip through Hue, when they were tilling the muddy fields and burning stalks from the last harvest. Now these same fields rest on the verge of another agricultural cycle and I am still here being stunned by Vietnam's beauty.
We stopped at one point to see water buffalo and two calves neck deep in green water staring at us from behind a cluster of giant bamboo. Then we passed a cyclo loaded down with fire wood being peddled by an old man. Another cyclo creaked by with two meter and a half tall gas canisters. Two girls squatted on their heels played in a flower pot, lost in their own world. Above it all the purple gray clouds just obscured the late afternoon sun. How much poetry can be locked up in one hour in Vietnam?
On our way home from the tour a moto passed me, the man driving was dressed in a white button front shirt with thin stripes, his girlfriend straddled behind him in a flowing pink blouse with a cascade of ebony hair down her back. He smiled at me as they passed, his girlfriend reaching under his chin to secure his teal helmet under his chin. They were so beautiful that it made my chest tighten, not in that air brushed hollywood way, but in that beauty of fitting perfectly into the scene.

The title is quote from one of the moto drivers explaining that one of my passengers would now be riding behind another girl after we lost the use of one of the bikes to a flat tire. It consequently made me giggle into the wind for five minutes straight.

tạm biệt!

a big happy slow family

I like dysfunction in simple tasks. To be more clear in this statement, I find dysfunction to be a zen koan put into practice. I love and hate dysfunction and in that way my reaction to dysfunction is an indication of where I am at with myself.
For some reason I keep going to the same place in Bangkok to get things printed by the same confused Thai lady. Talking to Eva today I realized why: it is totally Latin. It is that, "si dios quiere..." approach to life, you can't rush god, or cows, or thai photocopiers, or banana shakes, you know? Sometimes I find myself cursing myself for coming to the same damn place. Yet at other times I can't help but stand there and internally chuckle at how brilliant it is that a lady who runs a copy shop has to read directions about how to print a word document.
I mean efficiency is great sometimes. But at other times I am stunned by the coldness of all things efficient. I find myself wondering what happened to all the warmth and friendliness. I mean in the States I can get shit done about 20x as fast as I can here but it is usually without incident, or if there is drama it is yours truly that is causing it. I had a giggle fit calling my bank to find out my login information. Laying on the tile floor of my hotel room in Hoi An laughing while some poor guy in god knows where tries to figure out my damn login name. He must have thought I was crazy, but then again if you cause someone to smile are you really crazy?
The thing that I know is that happiness is a choice, you either make the decision to see the joy, to laugh at the absurdity of my thai photocopying lady or you can get all pissed off and start blaming people.
You choose: comedy or drama.
I'm planning on laughing all the way down the road, wanna come?