I’m baaaaack…

Like a cockroach.  step on me, swat me, spray me with Raid, set out a trap, poison me…not even empty pockets, empty bank accounts, broken vertebrae and legs, hunger, heartbreak, worn-out shoes, hot days, cold nights, dust, huge thundering buses, dump trucks, sunburn, chafed nipples, dehydration…none of it stops me from continuing this interminable walk.

Sure, I’ll be 70 when I finally reach alaska, but I’ll whistle through the gaps in my rotted teeth, pull my beard and cackle with red-eyed glee all the same.

The 3 people that actually read my blog on a regular basis can skip the following paragraph.

I just got back to Colombia (and the walk) after almost a year spent at home juntando plata, making cash…subbing in high schools and junior highs (woot, waluga!), working with grade schoolers, tutoring bright but distracted minds, slinging shoes at outdoor equipment retail stores,  falling into indentured servitude with my parents, babysitting the nieces and checking the change dispenser of every coke machine I passed . 

So now I have money.  Not tons, but hopefully sufficient to see me all the way up to alaska.  I’m sure I can do it in a couple/three years if I follow some simple guidelines:

1. do not ride in jeeps late at night through mountain passes with a sleepy driver with disturbingly small hands.
2. do not eat raw vegetables  that haven’t been, irradiated, chorified, triple boiled, steam blasted, antibiotocized, and jet-washed  with certifiably purified, sterile water before your very eyes.
3. do not walk into this or that town, blink, and find yourself still there for no good reason, lying on the couch of some hostel one month later, the latest in a marathon string of pirated movies flickering on the tv.
4. do not try to cut down any tree in any jungle anywhere at any time…it would probably be wise to not even cut shrubbery or even a blade of grass.
5. do not fall in love with anyone, especially wonderful people who you know you will put into slot 2 on your priority list, directly behind this quixotic journey.
6.  do not walk into bars with newfound friends, yelling “drinks are on me!”.  those friends will leave in a few days to the next tourist destination and the total in your bank account will sink as if wearing cement shoes.
7. do not accept candy from strangers.  Especially if they are carrying AK-47s.
8. do not get caught by the FARC, ELN, or any other drug-financed, ideal-blurred organization.

 if I’m not mistaken, there will be many more guidelines to come.

It’s so nice to be back in south america.  I smiled when the  sleep-talking customs agent  gave a half-lidded glance at my passport and mumbled “bienvenidos a colombia”.  wow!  what a welcome. 

big signs in the bogotá airport, promoting tourism, state “the only RISK here is never wanting to leave” with a shot of a beautiful girl standing in front of some lush scenery…

great slogan, a bit optimistic though, given the stats…3,000 kidnappings per year, grenade explosions in video stores, mass killings in the countryside, multi-billion dollar drug cartels, decapitated tenents of housing projects.  but really that just adds spice to the visit, right? 

that sign should say “the only risk is that you may never HAVE A CHANCE to leave.”

I stepped out onto the street.

took in a huge pull of mountain air, and felt cancer cells instantly proliferating in my lungs.  jesus christ but the air pollution in latin american cities make los angeles look like a sterilized clean room.  Everything is belching visible clouds of particulates into the air.  And loudly.  I guess that mufflers never made it this far south. 

I got into a taxi. 

After a brief hello and the directions, he hit the gas like  leaving a NASCAR pitstop.  You never forget how to ride a bike, they say, and the same goes for my reaction to riding in South American taxis:  clench something, anything till the blood leaves my hands and then assume the fetal position.  Sometimes, though, I forget myself and actually clamber for a seatbelt…silly me.  Along with mufflers, seatbelts are an unknown quantity down here. 

It’s a point of honor here to merge without signalling or looking to see if anyone is trying to pass you (and there ALWAYS is).  Motorcycles blithely weave in and out of already weaving traffic, people brake with nauseating suddenness, stop lights are only very reluctantly obeyed and everyone honks every 2 to 3 seconds.  I’m beginning to think that the frequent use of the horn here is some sort of specialized echolocation trait that latin drivers have evolved over the last century.  Batpeople.

I got to a street.  and a house. 

A former student of mine living in Bogotá, Grant Canary,  generously offered up his couch to me.  I accepted.  (of course)

He’s renting  a many-bedroomed place in the city and subletting it to gringos while he finishes up his masters in “Management and Design of Processes, emphasis in Systems Logistics and a thesis in Biosystems”  (WTF??)  which, from what I can figure, means that he tries to find cool ways to make one thing turn into another thing in the greenest way possible.  Right now he’s taking organic waste, introducing the Black Soldier Fly to it, they lay there eggs there, larvae pop up, eat all the gunk and then  he harvests the plump, gooey bags of protein, dries them, grinds them up and sells them as fish, chicken and other animal food!  it’s an awesome idea. 

I got on a bus.

9ish hour ride to medellín along narrow, cliffy, mountain roads.  I yawned.  After riding in buses in bolivia (voted the worst fucking buses in the history of ground transportation 73 years running), it would take seeing the fiery image of Satan himself behind the wheel to make me even bat an eyelash. 

But a few minutes into the ride I sat up straighter in my seat and removed my earbuds.   the flatscreen tvs had folded down from the bus ceiling (greyhound, eat your heart out) and  the Jean Claude Van Damme masterpiece, IN HELL, came on.  I was excited not because of the technology of the flatscreens but because I was about to reach a milestone.  IN HELL would turn out to be my 500th viewing of a Van Damme film on a South American bus.   If that guy got a penny for every time a flick of his popped up on a bus down here, he’d be putting Billy Gates to shame.  VIVA VAN DAMME!

I got to my hostel.

it hasn’t  changed since i was there last year.  a ton of young travelers either getting drunk, stoned, or coked out of their gourds, or recovering from one or all of the above.  Just this morning I was wakened by the dulcet gurgling sounds of a dorm mate vomitting all over his buddy’s bags, all over the hallway floor, all over the bathroom floor and, I presume, (if he had anything left in him) all over the toilet.  It was the same guy who’d been talking the evening before about having taken a couple vicodin (a pain killer) before his busride (so he could sleep) but the bus stopped 20 minutes later for a dinner stop and he and his mate were wobbling around the restaurant bumping into things.  sigh.  am I really getting so old that “idiot” is the only word that pops into my head when I think of my barfing amigo?

I got rid of the supercart.

Yes, the end of an era.  my faithful 3 wheeled companion.  I went into the garage of the hostel where it had been mildewing and corroding for a year (on a brief sidenote, the owner of the hostel, in a tribute to  the spirit of machiavellan capitalism tried to get me to pay him for storing the thing, even though when I left I actually cleaned up his garage for him, made more room and secreted the cart into an unobtrusive corner.  I told him I might buy something for his hostel like a lamp…i’ll give him a plastic spoon from the ice cream joint down the street…call me an ingrate if you want)  anyway, I took it out, pumped up the tires, wiped it down and pawned it off to a passing painter named Orlando.  Thanks Orlando, may the cart serve you well.

I met people. 

And that makes me realize yet again how amazing traveling is.  (even taking into consideration the puker).  How it brings me into situations I wouldn’t otherwise enter into, how it gets me meeting people I wouldn’t otherwise have met…

and that has me stoked for this final push for Alaska…there’s nothing, NOTHING better than being on the road.