packing

My room looks like a bomb went off, which is not a real deviation from standard practice, but gives me anxiety all the same.  I've realized that 3 years of living out of a back pack has given me some strange habits; the one at hand being a deep desire to know that I am all packed up and ready for the next day's adventure.  The problem is that this packing for this departure is a bit more complex than my normal day to day packing and repacking of Poppy (my Osprey waypoint 65L pack).  In the next two weeks I have to brave November in Toronto, the beginnings of the dry season in Costa Rica ( I just checked the weather there: a high of 80 with thunder storms), and then I wrap it all up by moving to Antigua, Guatemala... for a year.
Moving is not my favorite activity, though the prospects of having my own little place where I can grow a basil plant and make coffee and put up photos sounds AMAZING.  Right now I am focusing on those images rather than the overwhelming feeling that thinking about packing brings up. ufff.
Catch you in Guatemala or Chepe or Toronto.

travel residue

I was laying in bed last night reading Paul Theroux's brilliant Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and found myself sifting through my memories of Asia.  The sounds, the smells, the snippets of memory which stay with you.  It is funny how after time memories of travel begin to feel dreamed up, how what once were crisp edged experiences become more and more hazy strange.  What is even more striking is that a writer can capture aspects of these places which bring memories back to life.  They awaken forgotten sensations and experiences, sharpen soft edges, and stir up emotion.  There is something about Theroux's writing which so captures places.  It makes me want to re-read the Great Railway Bazaar, a book I read on my first travels to South East Asia and re-live a bit of that adventure.
Thinking back on all of it I wish I had spent more time writing and drawing about all of my travels.  I suppose there is no time like the present.

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.

3 years on.

Today on the breezy bus to Rio Dulce I was ruminating that it is closing in on three years since I started this blog and my adventures to Central America.  It is hard to believe what started out as a dream, "man I wish someone would pay me to travel!" has turned into a reality.
These days things have seemed to melt into a sort of soup of memories and dreams.  My waking reality is so much like my dream time that I often find myself struggling to find the borders between memories and things I've dreamt up.
In that vein I just finished watching Apocalypse Now Redux which was a trippy experience to say the least.  The critical traveller eye in me wanted to know what dreamed up ruins Kurtz was hanging out in.  Another part of me was horrified to see such a familiar landscape under the damaging hand of war.  Watching these American soldiers thrashing around in the Vietnamese jungle fighting a senseless war dredged up some of my current thoughts on my Motherland.
As I spend more time out of the states I feel like I am getting a better understanding of how the rest of the world sees us.  This goes hand and hand with my slowly growing understanding of our history of forcing ourselves upon impoverished nations in the name of founding democracy while extracting huge economic benefits for ourselves.  How are we fooled over and over by this same story?  What happened during the last century in Asia and Latin America is playing out again in the Middle East.  It is hard to feel proud of a nation which values improving our economy over the lives of people.
None of this is meant to sound like arrogant rantings of an ex-pat. Ex-pats are generally overweight and have tanned themselves with in an inch of turning into leather so I'd generally like to avoid that classification.  Anyhow, sorry for the absolute random tangent that this blog entry has taken.  I blame all the deet I had to use yesterday in the jungles of tikal.

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.

suchi

After a day of following unfit people up hillsides and listening to Don Pablito's recounting of the atrocities of the civil war, the sun went down-- but not before doling out an insane sunset.  I'm not totally sure how this photo happened, my skills aren't very precise, but finally after taking about 50 shots I managed to grab the exact gold of the clouds.  I was standing up on the rooftop of my hotel where I could catch the sounds of Suchitoto settling down for the evening.  Rooftops have that lovely way of managing to let you observe with out forcing you to be a part of everything, sort of the perfect place for me at the end of a long day.  I like the quiet that evening brings, the chattering of birds as they settle down for the night, the slowly quieting hum of people heading home at night.
I'm in Suchitoto, a small town about two hours outside of San Salvador which sparkles with that magic of a not quite discovered place, and makes you feel like an ultra-savvy traveler for just knowing it exists. I've spent my last two days here soaking up the beauty of its white washed walls and tile roofs.
There is something so satisfyingly beautiful about those curved red tiles.  They turn a range of reds and browns at sunset, colors which I have fallen in love with.  The roofs were the same in Trinidad, where I spent most of an afternoon trying to coax the color from the worn-out palette of my 16 year old water colors.

a surreal life

My life lately has taken on the feeling of a chapter out of 100 Years of Solitude: multiple generations of my family eating meals at long tables telling stories of my great grandparents, grandparents, and parents; dreams which feel like life; life which feels like dreams.  Add to all that my outing to see the Surreal Friends exhibition at Chichester's Pallant House Gallery and every thing has started to take on a sepia tinted fuzzy-ness. Surreal Friends focuses on three European women who fled Europe during World War II and met in of all places, Mexico.  Their work is influenced by the surrealist movement and is rich with magic filled details, straight out of the works of Hieronymus Bosch (that's a remnant of all those expensive Art History courses I took at the Dub, parents take note!).  I went with my mum/mom, and her best friend Judy. Watching them chatter in hushed voices in the galleries reminded me of a trip to the museum of Modern Art in San Salvador which I took with a one, Alexandra, a bit earlier this year.
Seeing the art and learning about the lives of these 'European Bitches,' as Frida Kahlo nicknamed them, was inspiring.  Even more so after Eva told me that if I found myself an apartment in Colonia Roma she might come join me to live in D.F. The serendipity of her comment being that Colonia Roma is where these three women made their home during the 40's.
Learning about these creative women standing around their kitchens, telling one another stories, finding inspiration in friendship, laughing about the absurdity of life, sharing their knowledge and encouraging one another to create art, all during a time when women were expected to be perfecting their Sunday roasts, gives me even more faith in the strength and determination of the fairer sex.  Though these days my dream kitchen in Colonia Roma has to be a virtual one, formed of brief emails, inspiring blogs, long winded chat sessions, and the occasional post card from my breath taking group of friends, I am grateful for what I have.
(image: Leonora Carrington, The House Opposite)