I took two shots, both of which I think are good in different ways. Which one do you like better, and why?

Since I am making manakeesh (a sort of Lebanese pizza), I ask Bobby to go get my iPad. He looks upstairs, but it isn’t there. He looks downstairs. Not there either. He even walks down to my car, but nothing. Then I look around the usual places, but my luck isn’t any better. Finally I fired up Apple’s ‘Find My Phone’ app on iCloud.  Every time I misplaced my phone I’ve use this app, and it has always shown that my phone was (figuratively speaking) right on my head.  A minute later, I am looking at this:

Zooming out, I find that my iPad is indeed in Sausalito:

That’s distressing in that my house is down at the bottom of the screen, where I put the red speech bubble. So the iPad isn’t in my house, or even down in my car. Strangely enough, it appears to be two valleys over in our little town of Sausalito, a considerable distance for an iPad to travel without assistance.

I mentally backtrack. I remember seeing it while driving furiously uphill in my car, intent on catching a bus into San Francisco to hang out with Bobby after work. Sitting at the bus stop, I realized that I’d missed the bus and that even if the bus had come on time, I was still very late in getting to SF to meet Bobby. To make things worse, traffic was crawling past the bus stop at roughly my standard (though admittedly fast) walking speed. I made the easy decision and texted Bobby to tell him that I wouldn’t be coming down to San Francisco, and that he should just come meet me in Sausalito. I returned to my car and drove down the hill to my home. Without my iPad, which I remembered with painful clarity was sitting on the bench in the Spencer Avenue Southbound bus shelter.

Ding ding ding damn.

I tell Bobby that I’ll be back soon, get into my car, and drive up Spencer Avenue to the bus stand, where I find two people kissing while they wait for the Marin Airporter. It’s all terribly romantic, but no iPad. That’s okay… Thanks to the Find My Phone app on my iPhone, I know roughly where my iPad was.

The problem is ‘roughly’.

I drive down Spencer again and make my way up to the top of Santa Rosa Ave. I park on the hairpin turn embracing the top of that particular canyon. There are no street lights and there are homes scattered around the hillsides both above and below the road.  I park in roughly the area where the iPad is shown on the map.

I pick a likely house, well-lit and prosperous-looking. I walk up and push the doorbell button. I don’t hear anything. I push it again.  Then I knock, and behind the door I hear an explosion of barks spanning three dog octaves. Then an impatient voice yelling “Who is it?!”

I never know how to answer that question. I’m still figuring out who I am, and probably will be for the rest of my life.  ”I’m an artist” seems pretentious, but “I’m a creative yet insecure 15-year-old trapped in the rapidly-aging body of a 50-year-old” sounds pathetic. Should I mention that I’m gay? It’s clearly an important part of who I am.

After thinking about this for a good 30 seconds, I answer through the closed door “It’s Ron, I’m a neighbor.”

The door opens and an older guy looks out at me suspiciously. ”This might sound weird, but did you find an iPad a little earlier today?  It’s telling me that it’s somewhere around here.” He smiles and says no, he hasn’t seen one, and wishes me luck.

I go to the next house.  This one is less welcoming. Three flights of rickety, crooked, creaking stairs lead down to a dark door through which I can see what is clearly an Old Person’s House.  An old person who hasn’t redecorated or done any maintenance since the Nixon administration. I press against the doorbell, and hear nothing. After a minute, I press again. Nothing. I knock, and I hear a chair creak, footsteps, and a man appears at the door, staring at me through the glass.  His hair is gray and shaggy.  He looks like a grumpy Einstein on a bad hair day.

“Hi, I’m a neighbor” I say, lamely.

He opens the door and stares at me. The porch light comes on.

“Um, I lost my iPad and now it’s telling me it’s around here somewhere. Did you by any chance find one?”

He stares at me, then says “Nope” and shuts the door. The porch light goes off.

I climb back up to the street and pick my next target. I decide to go for a dicey-looking home on the other side of the street. The path leading up to the house crosses a broken curb, past a car up on blocks (Honest to god! In Sausalito!) and various piles of stuff covered with tarps. Through the windows I can see bare walls decorated with a single photocopied flyer for a ‘Truck for SALE’.

I press the doorbell, hear nothing, and knock on the door. After a moment, it opens.

I’m face-to-face with the Most Stoned Man on the Planet.

He stares at me, his eyes red and puffy, and his body swaying slowly from side to side. He stares at me some more. After a moment he focusses a little and says “Uh?”

“I know this sounds weird, but have you found an iPad today?”

His body becomes just a hair less relaxed, he half smiles, and he says “Oh, man, that’s so weird!  How do you know that?”

I explain that I have tracking software and that it’s telling me that the iPad is here. He walks back to his kitchen, reaches over the bar, and pulls out my iPad in its bright-red case. For a full minute he stands there , holding it up, almost modeling it for me.  I don’t say anything.  Is he going to ask for a reward?

“Wow, I’m not even going to make you prove this is yours.  You’re here, so it must be yours.  It’s like fate! Fate!“ He drifts back towards me and hands me the iPad. I exhale loudly.

“Wait, man, you have to come in, this is so great, I didn’t even want this around, you know? My name’s Brando! Brando! Well, no, it’s Brandon, but you can call me Brando!“

I walk in.  At this point I had started noticing his living room.  Instead of a sofa, the living room has four TV dinner tables and six folding chairs. There is stuff scattered everywhere on the floor, but mostly molecular-like constructions in various shapes and configurations. If I were to draw an architectural floor plan of his living room, it would look something like this:

Each of the small folding TV dinner tables is also covered with things.  One has perhaps fifty dice, roughly sorted by the number of sides.  Some have the traditional six sides, others have 20, 30, and even 100 sides. The 2o-sided dice are some of the largest I’ve ever seen, a dozen orbs the size of my fist.  Other tables have parts for constructing the molecular objects, and one is covered with sketch pads and roughly torn pieces of paper.

The net effect is almost as horrifying to me as if there were body parts scattered around.

My host is looking at me expectantly and proud, as if waiting for me to compliment the magnificence of his interior design.  ”Umm, these things are great!” I say, broadly gesturing around the room at the many shapes scattered everywhere.  ”What are they?”

Brandon’s grin grows wider, and he says “Well, that’s not a simple thing to answer. They’re like kid things, but they’re so much more, you know.  It’s like a model of the entire universe.”  He gets down on his knees and starts rummaging through bins of parts. “They’re called Zome!  Zome!”  He pulls out a booklet and gives it to me.  It’s the Zome Manual 2.1. “Take it.  I have lots of them.”  I flip to a random page, and I wonder if Zome drove this man mad.

Finally I make my excuses and leave.  But as I am driving away, a thought enters my head that scares me more than anything else so far.

I want to go back and spend more time with Brando.

The wall painted with a life-sized rendition of Maria Elena’s dancing abilities may be quite common on the small island of Santa Cruz del Islote, but to me it seems beautiful, full of joie de vivre, and campy all at the same time.  Here are some images from the trip that took me by surprise and delighted me.

And from Ecuador…

In the small town of Patía, Colombia, we stop to fuel up the truck. A man sits by the curb cuddling with his girlfriend. As we pull in, he waves a red cloth to get our attention, and then tells us that there is no fuel. The truck stop across the street has no fuel either. It’s not clear why, but we still have plenty in the tank, so we continue on towards the border, 250km away (155 miles).

Every fueling station we pass has signs on the pumps “SIN GASOLINA”. Some fuel stations have a few dozen trucks lined up at the pumps, but no fuel.

150 kilometers down the road we come to the small town of Pasto. Here, hundreds of trucks, buses, taxis, and cars are lined up at each end of town for fuel stations that are “Sin Gasolina”. Traffic is snarled throughout town as lines cross one another at intersections. It takes quite a while, but we finally make our way through town.

Along the way, we learn what is happening. Colombia is divided into departments, similar to U.S. states. Apparently the southern departments have run through their monthly allocation of fuel. They will get new fuel on December 1, three days away, and everyone is lining up so that they will get their vehicles refueled then. They will wait in their car/truck/bus for the next three days to be one of the first to get fuel when it arrives.

Just before arriving at the border town of Ipiales, we stop at the Las Lajas Sanctuary. The sanctuary was built after an image of the Virgin appeared to an indian woman and her daughter as they sought shelter from a storm under an overhanging rock. Since then thousands have attributed miracles to the sanctuary. (When I ask if any amputations have been healed no one seems amused.)

The sanctuary is a gothic revival structure built in the canyon of the Río Guáitara. There is a cascade of water flowing down the mountain behind the church, which makes for a very dramatic scene.

We drive down into the village surrounding the Sanctuary, then get off the truck and begin walking down towards the basilica. Before we get far, however, we come to a half-dozen men shoveling mud from the paved path leading to the church. Mud has come down the hillside, crossed the path, and swept away the substantial stone railing on the downhill side. The men tell us we can cross, and we slowly make our way through the very slippery mud, well aware that there is a several-hundred-foot drop less than a yard away.

Past the slide the uphill side of the path is carved from the stone of the canyon, and recipients of miracles have left plaques thanking the virgin for her favors. There are thousands of plaques set along the path. None of them are specific as to what was healed or what miracle was performed, but clearly people are grateful.

I take a few pictures of the sanctuary from the path. It’s beautiful in the fading light of dusk.

I want to get a better picture showing the basilica and how it sits in the canyon, and I know that means I have to find a way to go back along the canyon. I climb a trail that goes upwards from the church towards a crypt yard. The paved trail is cut deeply into the hillside and crypts line the uphill side of the trail. I keep climbing higher until I am able to climb behind the stone crypts and onto a path that leads down the canyon away from the church. I follow the grassy path along the canyon wall as the dusk grows dim. The path follows a shelf in the canyon wall that’s about 5′ wide, rising up steeply to my right and dropping off just as quickly down to the river on my left.

Suddenly the grassy trail no longer exists. A 20′ wide mud flow has swept over the grass from above. The trail narrows to three feet wide as the slide has eroded into the shelf, and the flow disappears over the edge, falling into the canyon below.

I really want to take the picture. Like a thief, I take exaggeratedly gentle steps across the mud, my shoes sinking in as I try to walk across on cat feet. I feel just as ridiculous as I know I would look, if there were anyone around to see me. Ten slow steps across and I’m on grass again. I take a few more steps, look back, and set up my tripod to take photos.

I’m taking my fourth shot when I hear rocks and dirt start to fall across the slide. The sound of falling dirt gradually increases then fades. I finish my photo. It’s dark now, and I can barely see the path. I wait a few minutes for the slide to quiet, hold my breath, and quickly walk across the mud. It doesn’t move, and I make it to the other side. My hands are shaking, and my chest feels tight for the next half-hour.

Walking back up towards town, I come across a paved and lit area that seems to serve as the town square. Adults are sitting around talking while children play basketball and fútbol or skateboard around the periphery of the area.

When I get back to the bus some of the group is still down at the sanctuary, so talk to the owners of a shop near the top of the path. It’s one of those small-town shops that seems to carry every imaginable thing that a small town might need as well as religious artifacts. It also seems to serve as a diner. The old couple who run the shop are very friendly, and insist that I take their pictures.

That night we sleep in Ipiales, right on the Ecuadorian border. The town is nondescript, and the only thing I remember is the artwork in the hotel, which was either intensely religious or amusingly erotic:

We arrived in Popayán in early afternoon, and it almost immediately started to rain, and then it rains harder.  People are trapped under overhangs and in doorways, cafés become refuges, and foot traffic in town halts except for an unfortunate few who desperately need to be somewhere, and who run from shelter to shelter in a false hope that they can stay somewhat dry.

Afterwards several us go for a walk around town.  We order coffees at a Juan Valdez coffee shop on the main plaza.  Juan Valdez shops are an attempt by the Colombia coffee growers to promote ‘premium’ colombian coffee à la Starbucks.  We’ve been told that the Juan Valdez shops are horrendously expensive, but my vanilla iced cappuccino costs $3… not an outrageous price for a country that seems at least as pricey as the United States.   And it’s delicious.

While the others drink their coffee I wander around the square, fascinated by the dozens of epiphytic bromeliads that have fallen from the trees in the rain storm.  Then range in size from a few centimeters across to a few meters. I look up and find that the trees are heavy with these non-parasitic parasites. These plants are considered beautiful exotics back in the states, and they’re laying everywhere.  Each looks like a carefully-composed bouquet that has been tossed to the ground, and I start taking photos.

A small stream (the Río Molino) runs along between downtown Popayán and the El Callejón neighborhood to the north.  There are two bridges across this stream.  The tiny Puente de la Custodia was built to 1713 to allow priests to visit the sick in the poorer northern neighborhood.  Around 1870 the larger Puente del Humilladero was built, an impressive long, 11-arch bridge that became a major entrance to the city.

Below the Puente del Humilladero a woman is singing, and couples dance on the wet stones of the plaza beneath an arch.  Dan, Sorin, and I spend some time looking down from the bridge, watching the gentle sway of hips as couples of all ages salsa below.

I take a few more photos walking back to the hostel as night falls.  Popayán is an entirely charming city, and I wish I could have stayed there longer.

We go back to the coffee plantation ranch house to get our gear for the day.  While we’re there, a crew from the plantation hacks a path through the vegetation.  We are once again given knee-high rubber boots.  With our shoes and cameras in hand, a line of men helps us across the tangle of broken bamboo and mud.  On the far side is a puddle of accumulating water to wade through, then more mud, and finally the tourist bus, where there is somewhat less mud.  We change from the boots to our shoes, balancing on one foot to avoid having muddy socks for the remainder of the day, and climb aboard the bus.  Our guide for the day, Milton, introduces himself and we’re off.

The bus growls up the muddy road, sliding around corners.  Given the state of these roads, it’s no wonder that busses in South America are often associated with the verb ‘plunge’.  As we drive uphill, my mind is constantly devising escape plans, involving a brave leap through a tiny window to safety as the bus and all of the other passengers slides off the side into the green abyss.  But my plans are for naught, as we reach the top of the road safely.

From Manizales we drive uphill, making our way towards the volcanic heights of Parque Nacional Natural Los Nevados.  Along the way we pass numerous other slides. Most are a small mound of mud on the road, but about an hour out we encounter a slide that has traffic stopped in a line winding up the hill as far as we can see.

Milton tells us that if we wish, we can walk up the road, so long as we watch for traffic to start moving again and we’re prepared to jump onto the bus as it rolls past.  Dan, Sorin, the two Michaels and I jump off and start walking up the road.  Milton follows along.  We wave to trucks as we pass them, and people seem amused to see us walking.  We clown around, we walk some more. The clouds seem to be hovering a few feet above our heads, blessing us with a steady drizzle of cold rain.  The scenery is incredibly beautiful.

We pass a corner where a muddy stream crosses the road.  Milton explains to us that a year ago, this stream was blocked by a landslide upstream in the hills.  Water backed up behind the mud until it formed a small lake.  When mud dam blew out, it sent a wall of water rushing down the canyon… this wall crossed the road just as a large bus was coming around the corner.  The bus and it’s 60 passengers were swept down the canyon and into the river below where the bus was torn apart by the swollen river and boulders.  There were no survivors.  On the hillside by the creek were crosses for each person killed, including a row of smaller crosses for the children.

You see crosses like these often in Colombia.  Sometimes there will be a single cross with a name, and sometimes there will be an ‘estrella negra’, a black star painted on the road or on the a roadside wall.  The black star will often contain an image showing who was lost.  On one stretch of road we passed a black star containing the classical figures of dad, mom, and child.  They’re a constant reminder to drive carefully.

Eventually we come to a small restaurant alongside the road where the road crew has made its base.  There are a few women inside, cooking for the men working on the road.  We stop and order some steak and eggs, and when they come, they are the most delicious food we’ve tasted in a long time.  The eggs are perfectly cooked, and the steak is tender and wonderfully marinated.  Just as we’re finishing, traffic starts moving and our bus appears.  We jump on and continue on to Los Nevados.

At the entrance to Los Nevados park, we stop at a small food stand.  We all order a cup of coca tea to fortify us for the heights.  It’s good… the tea is prepared very sweet, which counters the bitterness of the coca leaves.  I have a slight buzz, but I’m not sure if it’s from the coca leaves or the altitude.

We continue up the dirt road that climbs the mountain in Los Nevados.  The road is made of cinders, and the bus slides through it easily.  The scenery is amazing… different than the verdant lush below.  This is a starker landscape, but still rich.  There are some very unusual plants growing here.  One is a deep green moss that looks softer than silk, but feels like rock.  Milton explains that this moss is like coral… as it grows, it leaves a hard ‘skeleton’ behind, and so constantly expands as a rock-hard mass.  On this one, a few small mushrooms grow.

At about 4,000 meters (13,000′) I see a crest in the road, rising two feet and then quickly dropping down three.  ”This won’t be good” I think to myself. I imagine the bus teetering on top of the ridge of cinders, wobbling back and forth slowly.  The bus plows over the ridge and down the other side, to my amazement.  And then it stops.  The read wheels spin, but we’re not going anywhere.  The driver tries backing up, but the bus just digs itself deeper.

Everyone gets off of the bus.  Dan and Milton inspect the situation.  It’s not good.

The driver gets out of the bus.  He looks concerned.  He walks around the bus to the other side.  He looks more concerned.  The rest of us stand on the hill looking down on the bus.  The driver looks down at the partially-buried tire, looks up at us, looks down.  ”¡Empujar a todos!” he says.  ”Everyone must push!”

From the hillside, there is a palpable sense of skepticism.  Muttering to ourselves, some of us line up behind the tour bus and push.  The men strain against the back of the bus, muscles bulging, their breath steaming like plow horses.  Wheels spin, but nothing else moves.  The bus could have been set in concrete.

Inevitably we turn to cannibalism to survive.

Burning in the dark disapproval (and unfulfilled hunger) of his passengers, Milton suggests we walk up the road to see the view of the volcanic crater.  I think he was being ironic… we’re standing in the middle of a cloud. Visibility is less than 50 feet.

About half the group shrugs, turns, and trudges uphill.  A Los Nevados ranger follows to keep us out of trouble.  We switchback upwards, breathing heavily in the thin cold air.

Four switchbacks up, we come to the snow line.  Ten feet later, wet icy snowballs are flying through the air.  Twenty feet more, and everyone has gotten that our of their system, and we continue upwards.

At 4,500 meters (14,800′) we lose track of the road. We’ve scattered across the snow field trying to find the path when Milton calls us through the ranger’s walkie-talkie.  ”Perhaps you should all come back now” he suggests.  ”There are very unhappy people here.  They are wanting to leave.”

We glissade downhill just in time to see the bus become unstuck.  It’s still facing the wrong direction, and the driver performs a frightening three-point turn.  At one point the rear end of the bus is dangling over the drop, and the rear wheels are beginning to slide over the edge.  From the bleachers, we all shout “Stop!  Stop!” as if the force of our voices could pull the bus back from the brink. The driver shifts into low gear, the bus pulls forward and disaster is averted, for now.

The journey back is uneventful, but there is a little drama.  The travelers who stayed with the bus are unhappy that Milton didn’t call for help.  Milton is upset that they didn’t trust his judgement.  There is a little shouting back and forth, a bit of British arrogance, a bit of Latin temper, but it soon settles down. In a few hours we’re back at the Hacienda, drinking espresso.  Life is good, and interesting.

This has been a very long post, so to reward you for reading this far, here is a photo of a hot guy from the hacienda:

A few hours outside of Medellín we come to our first mudslide.  A huge amount of red dirt has slid across the road.  A backhoe is trying to clear a path but has only succeeded in clearing half of the road, and barely.  Traffic crawls through the clearing, sliding and tilting and threatening to get stuck in the mud, which would stop everything.  Big trucks tilt precariously.  When it is our turn to pass through, Izzy steers the truck straight on into the cut, but deep ruts made it hard to steer the front wheels, and we slide towards the side of the road and a drop-off.  Towards the far side of the cut, our front wheels catch, and we lurch uphill towards the backhoe.  Just a few feet before we hit it, our wheels catch in another rut, and our truck straightens out.  We’re past the slide.

It should be the end of the rainy season here in Colombia, but the rains are not tapering off.  The mountains, already saturated, and giving way everywhere. Most result in small piles of mud, or individual boulders dropped on the side of the road.  (Some of the boulders would crush a car, and I wonder whether there is any warning before one falls.)  But some slides, like this one, cover the road, and the only option is to wait for a road crew to clear it.

The rivers are swollen as well.  Every river we’ve seen has been flowing fast, causing huge deadly rapids that also carve away at the edges of towns.  At a roadside truck stop, I see a news report talking of a town where 30 houses have fallen into a river.  The rest of the town has been evacuated.  It’s raining, and the river is not becoming less hungry.

We follow the Río Cauca upstream.  The Cauca is the same river that was passing under the suspension bridge in Santa Fé de Antioquia.  It eventually empties into the Caribbean sea.  It’s red with mud, and apparently is intensely polluted with both industrial and human effluvia for the majority of its length.  We pass the village of La Pintada, where the Cauca has flooded homes along the river.

Our trip south goes very slowly.  Numerous slides stop us along the way, waiting for one-way traffic to go in our direction.  At one site, traffic is stopped for two hours while the road is cleared.  Colombia is a country that is gently subsiding into its deep valleys.  It’s not easy to see how this will be fixed… the mountains are very high and vertical, and the valleys are very deep.  It rains a lot, and there is rich vegetation on the hillsides, which is taking any rock and decomposing it into more mud.

Just after sunset we arrive in the town of Manizales.  Manizales is built along the ridges between a number of valleys, and the city drops away in all directions. We’ll be staying in a farmhouse at the Hacienda Venecia, a coffee plantation in one of the valleys.

Just before entering the city proper, our truck does a tight 3-point hairpin turn off the highway and onto a dirt road heading down into one of the valleys.  In the pitch blackness of a deep valley without electric lighting, our truck makes its way down the one-lane narrow road, barely making turns and brushing the outer edge of the road where it drops down into blackness.  It is raining now, the road is muddy, and did I mention that our truck was not a four-wheel drive? Sometimes it feels like the front wheels are sliding around corners rather than pulling us through them.

A half hour down the road, a single man appears in the headlights.  He is standing in the mud on the side of the road, waving his arms.  He’s yelling “¡Alto! ¡Alto! No se puede pasar!”  I’m leaning out my window, and pass within a few feet of him, but I cannot understand what he is saying because of the wind and rain.  The truck continues it’s controlled slide down the road towards the bottom of the canyon.

Another half hour and Izzy brings the bus to a stop.  In front of us to the left the road has collapsed, a large bite missing where it has slid down into the river below.  15 feet further along the road is a pile of mud and vegetation that has fallen into the road from above.  Everyone on the truck is staring forward at the mess that was a road.  My first thought is “I don’t want to be in the truck when it tries to cross that.”

T.J. immediately wades into the mud, disappearing across the slide onto the other side.  Izzy is worrying about having to back the truck up the hill (it’s much too narrow to turn around.)  One of our group, Ray, walks out in his rain poncho to look at the slide.  In the truck’s headlights, he looks like a ghost.

(In the photo above, he’s standing right at the edge where the road collapsed into the river, and the mudslide is in front of him.)

T.J. reappears.  He tells us that the staff of the coffee plantation is coming and is going to bring us boots so that we can wade through the slide.  I think that this is a terrible idea.  (In my mind, mud slides are not passive things… There is always more mud ready to come down and it is often destabilized by idiots trying to squish through the slide.)

A dozen men appear, carrying knee-high rubber boots.  The largest that they have is size 42.  My foot will simply not fit into those boots.  I’m ready to walk across barefoot when the staff finds a pair of 43′s, which I squeeze onto my feet.  Along with the rest of the group, I squish across the mud, through a gathering pool of water, and between punji sticks of broken bamboo, finally getting to the other side.

When everyone has crossed, we walk in the dark a half mile to the farmhouse that we’ll be calling home for three nights.  We hose the mud off our legs and everyone begins to decompress.  Sorin, Sita, and I skinny-dip in the pool, much to the horror and/or delight of the kitchen staff.  (They don’t know how to react, so they bring us chicken sandwiches poolside.  ”No, don’t get up, here’s your sandwich.”)

After we’ve relaxed, settled into rooms, and have consumed one or three beers, and had a delicious dinner, things are feeling a little less critical.  That’s when five guys appear and begins to set up instruments and an amplifier.  They play, and they’re wonderful… high energy but also relaxed, and it perfectly fits our mood.  While others sit, dance, or swing in hammocks, I manage to take videos of three of their songs.  The band is called ‘Cumbé’, and I got permission to post the videos on YouTube for your enjoyment.  [More videos here and here.]

The next day three of us go up  to look at the slide.  It’s a mess, and it’s hard to imagine how it will be fixed.  Our truck peeks from around the corner where Izzy has backed it for safety.

We return to the farmhouse and have breakfast, followed by a lecture about coffee, including a walk around the plantation.  The entire coffee process is explained to us, from hand-picking ripe berries to removing the outer skin, drying, removing the inner skin, and roasting.

While we were on the coffee tour, our truck Cindy appeared at the farmhouse, driven by Izzy.  We all cheered… the road was open!

After the tour, I walk up to see how the repair was done.  On the way uphill, I pass the road crew heading down.  Three guys with shovels and machetes did all of the work.  And the road looked amazingly better… Narrow, but passable.

The next day, we’re going to be take a bus up to Los Nevados National Park, a high volcanic park near Manizales.  It’s rained all night long, so after we get dressed, we walk up to the road to see how the slide is doing… only to find that a new slide has covered the road.  This slide is thicker and has brought down entire trees still upright within its mass of vegetation.

Looking through the tangled mess of palms & bamboo, we can see our tour bus waiting patiently for us on the other side.

… to be continued.

Guatapé has a unique look, with every building in town containing a row of brightly-painted tiles along the lower facade.  The images on these tiles are incredibly varied, with many showing images from the family business, or religious images, cartoon characters, and even dragons.

The entire area is dominated by El Peñón de Guatapé, a rock that rides 200 meters straight up from the ground.  (And like an iceberg, it goes down another 400 meters below the surface.)

On one side of the rock are two huge letters, “GI”, each 40′ tall.  The towns of Guatapé and El Peñol both claimed ownership of the rock, and one night (perhaps after drinking a few bottles of Aguardiente) the residents of Guatapé decided to settle the matter by painting the town’s name on the rock in huge white letters facing towards El Peñon. Only the ‘G’ and the first party of the ‘U’ were completed.  Some believe that they ran out of paint after painting the ‘GI’, and others believe that the residents of El Peñol simply shot the painter off of the rock.

In the 1960′s, the two entwined staircases were built up a crack in the rock (apparently by some insane genius hermit).  Dan, Sorin, and I climb the 644 steps to the top. I keep wondering how the whole structure stands on its own. Then I decide that since I’m 100 meters up the rock, it’s better just to trust that he was a genius.  At the top of the rock is a four-story observation tower filled with souvenir shops.

From the top we can see the lake spreading out in all directions, a maze of waterways that brings tourists to Guatapé, and which ensures an endless amount of waterfront property.

That afternoon the three of us rent horses and ride them up into the hills to a Benedictine Monastery.  The location is near the top of a valley, peaceful and quiet.  A sign on the lawn says in Spanish “This is a place for devotion, not a recreational park.”  The monks make chocolates that are well-regarded, so Dan buys 12, one to give every woman on the bus.  Dan tastes one, and then decides to follow a less charitable path of eating them all himself.  (The large chocolates are filled with caramel and figs, and are amazingly delicious.)

La Casa de Escobar

The next day we get up early to take a boat across the reservoir.  The boat will be visiting several locations along the way, but everyone is really there to see the vacation home of the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar.

We all climb into the small hostel boat at 9am and and the small engine strains to push us through the water.  The captain keeps shaking his head, staring sadly at me, and saying “Muchos pesos” and making gestures of hopelessness.  The boat pushes forward.

About an hour later we come to a small peninsula extending into the lake.  Unlike the mansions we’ve been seeing along the shore, the home here is a ruin, and is being taken back by the jungle.

The boat pushes against the shore, and we all get off.  The group is strangely hushed, and I am feeling a little spooked.

In 1975, a Pablo Escobar was a petty thief, a 25-year-old stealing cars and selling fake lottery tickets.  Then he decided to enter the drug trade, and he did so with maximum brutality, killing any opposition to the growth of his business.  He purchased judges and police and even was elected to the Colombian Congress.  At the peak of his violence, he was at war with the FARC (a Marxist–Leninist revolutionary guerrilla organization), the police, the Colombian Army, the U.S. government, and Los Pepes, a shadowy group that formed solely to destroy Escobar.

Escobar lived in Medellín, and naturally had a vacation home in Guatapé.  At one point, the Colombian army bombed Excobar’s Guatapé home, and he was shot to death in Medellín in 1993.  Since then his vacation home has been looted of anything that could be hauled away, and the remnant is slowly falling apart.

We walk by his pool, filled with green water.  During a party, Escobar discovered a waiter stealing silverware.  Escobar had the waiter bound hand and foot and tossed into the pool, where his guests watched the man drown.  He remained there in the pool for the remainder of the party.

The main house is fairly small, not much larger than the typical California mini-mansion, perhaps 3-4,000 sq.ft. (280-370 m²).  I imagine that the place was furnished with the standard acoutrements of the nouveau-riche, like gold-plated faucets and marble floors, but all of that was gone, and the only furnishings were mud and vines.

Not far from the main house is Escobar’s private futból field.  The goal posts are still there.  To one side of the field the bones of a cow are scattered across the grass.  I pick up the head and decide it would be very arty to photograph it on the field.  (“Oh, this would be symbolic!” I’m thinking to myself.)  I spend about 30 minutes positioning the skull, laying on my stomach to take the photo from a dramatic angle.  All of my companions are amused and start taking pictures of me taking pictures of the skull, and then they start copying my low-angle arty photo, which really annoys me.

I pick up the skull and start talking to it, Hamlet-style, which in the end makes a much more entertaining photo.

At the top of the hill over the house is a staff house and some stables.  Behind the stables is a trellis.  I notice some movement at the top of the trellis, and realize that there is a line of leaf-cutting ants hauling chunks of foliage across the top of the trellis.  I know that they have to come down to earth somewhere, so I follow the line to where they are marching down a fallen branch.  Where they walk along the ground, a 6-inch wide path has been cleared off to the distant nest.  The line is filled with ants hauling chunks of leaf, a constant movement back and forth of thousands of ants.

And then it’s time to go.  I walk back to the boat, past walls marked with graffiti and mysterious grave-sized freshly-dug holes.  I’m glad Pablo is dead, and I’m glad that, at least symbolically, I’ve been able to do a little dance on his grave.

Cindy is a custom-built expedition vehicle built on a Mercedes truck chassis.  She has a 6200cc diesel engine and in first gear, she can climb up the side of a building.

She holds 700 liters of fuel, a 400 liter fresh water tank, cooking equipment, tents, and spare parts.  She has skid plates bolted to her side, and large propane canisters slung under her belly in cages.  Every doors on the truck has a padlock.

She is piloted by T.J., a kid who is glad to be out of Texas, and Izzy, a tiny british woman who reminds of of Kaylee Fry from the TV series ‘Serentity’.  Both of them are in their 20′s.  While T.J. is the P.R. guy of the trip, making announcements and telling us what to expect, Izzy has the special bond with Cindy.  Whenever we’re about to drive a challenging / possibly-fatal section of road, Izzy takes the wheel.

Driving on a dirt road yesterday, there was a loud ‘ping’ from somewhere below where we were seated.  Today Izzy had one of the truck’s wheels off and was disassembling a hub to change a broken wheel bolt.  She’s like a pixie specializing in truck magic.

Inside the truck are a number of benches as well as windows that roll down to give the occupants a wonderful view of the surroundings and a refreshing breeze.  Towards the back are two four-person tables where passengers can play cards, read magazines, or simply have intense conversations about their dreams.

Overhead are elastic nets where we store hats, wine, fruit, and whatever we might need during the day’s journey.  There is a sound system with speakers over each seat, and anyone can hook up their music player to set the soundtrack for the journey.  (On this trip, everyone’s favorite album so far is “Flight of the Conchords”.)

Life on a Dragoman truck feels a lot like travel with a VW bus.  There are more people and a lot more space, and the vehicle is a lot bigger, but it has the same self-contained feeling of an expedition.  Sorin has been on many of Dragoman’s trucks, and he tells me that the people on the journey make a big difference in the ‘feel’ of the trip.  Australians are generally crazy, the Brits are generally stodgy, and there are rarely any Americans, because we don’t get enough vacation to take a 3+ week Dragoman trip.  There is always at least one person who is clinically insane.

I’m glad I’m on this trip, but I’m not sure if I’ll go on another.  It’s much more comfortable than Burning Man, but a lot less comfortable than Fiji, and you’re sharing tight quarters with so many people.  The personalities are complex and sometimes confusing.