The tour bus had me, a English printer, a German woman, a young shy French map maker girl, and an older English guy who went to Tibet every year to buy rugs to sell in England. This guy lived in Kathmandu and was married and had kids. He said he made 45 thousand dollars the year before doing that. We started at about six in the morning and drove a little bit to the east and then drove up a dirt road a little bit to a town were we did the boarder formalities.

After crossing the boarder we went up all day long past the jungle and into the Tibetan tundra. Pretty soon we were in a desert landscape where there was no vegetation at all inside a big wide canyon that slithered along until we got to a roadside inn. This part of the world was very desolate, and if it wasn't for the traffic coming through I don't think there would be anybody living there. But I was very interested to see that there seemed to be ruins of an ancient city in one of the empty valleys we drove through. In this valley I saw like fifty very ancient ruins of two story buildings spread out over an area of about a square kilometer. I pointed it out to my tour mates, but they didn't seem very interested though. The entire tour to Lhasa took eleven days, so I don't remember every place we slept at, but I remember after the driving around the desolate river valley, and seeing a couple of exhausted looking bike tourists, we entered a perfectly flat and barren alpine tundra, and looking to the

south and seeing Mount Everest in the distance just shooting straight out of the flatness. Our pit stops were very primitive, the toilets were just holes in the ground, and all the stores sold were crackers and water. After a couple days we climbed up a long shallow graded mountainside up and over a pass that was over 5,000 meters, and down down and down and passing some more ruins and finally low enough for the first trees to reappear at an impressively high 13,000 feet.

For the whole trip the Tibetan people were obviously of a distinct racial group. They had Chinese looking faces, except a little bit chubbier and with darker skin and big thick curly afros. The first town we arrived in was obviously influenced by China because half of the buildings were lined with tiny square blue tiles that I found to be tacky looking.

The next day we drove down a wide river valley towards the east, passing occasional farms. The landscape was desolate except for the trees lining the river. After a day or two we arrived at the second largest city in Tibet called Shingatse. Here we did a tour of a monastery that according to my Lonely Planet book used to be a rival of the Dalai Lamas group in Lhasa.

Tibet has had a pretty rough last 50 years because of the Chinese invasion in the fifties. Since then the Chinese government moved nine million Chinese into Tibet, and now out number the seven million Tibetans left. From these statistics one might think that this would lead to racial tension, but I didn't hear of any, nor did I notice or feel any stress or segregation as I walked the streets.

The next day we drove a couple hours down the road to a famous ancient monastery whose name I can't remember. It had the same layout as the one in Shingatse, with the main temple a large square building with a big room in the middle and a lot of their gods painted on the walls.

Lhasa is in a beautiful setting in a valley surrounded by mountains. It is a little dry for my tastes though. It is about the same size as my hometown of Boulder, which is smaller than I expected it to me.

When we got to Lhasa we stopped and checked out an old statue carved into the roadside cliff. Then we went straight to our hotel, which was a huge monstrosity surely built just for the tourists who go there.

Just as soon as we got there we were greeted by a really up tight and angry Chinese guy who told us he was our hotel guide, which is the weirdest thing. Who needs a hotel guide? We spent the first day doing tours of a couple monasteries around the city. There was one monastery in the foothills that was built up on the hillside and had a lot of buildings connected to each other with walkways. It was in a beautiful setting because there were huge rocks all over the place. The place used to be a lot bigger but had shrunken a lot since the Chinese invasion in 1955. Our guide took us around showing us the artwork and relics and telling us about Tibetan mythology and gods but I hardly understood what he was saying.

The first day I was there I tried to get money out with my Visa card but was surprised to find out that no bank in the whole city accepted Visa. I should have known though seeing that this was Tibet, where the idiot Chinese try to make things difficult for tourist who only come there to see the Buddhist stuff; but that makes the Chinese really upset, whether its because they are paranoid that we will help free Tibet, or they are just embarrassed they invaded and destroyed another country I don't know. When I told my group that I couldn't get any money out I said I was thinking about just riding my bike out to the next big city where I surely could get money out. One guy in my group, an older English guy who went to Tibet every year to buy rugs told me he could get me a Tibetan visa with a lady he knew, but for some stupid reason I didn't take him up on that. I eventually told them I would just sell my stuff off to get a place ticket.

While I was collecting my stuff to sell in my room our guide told me my group wanted to talk to me so I went down to the bus and they all took turns telling me that the paranoid Chinese guide guy told them that if I wasn't on the plane back to Katmandu with them, they couldn't go either because they were on a visa tied to mine. They were really freaked out. I told them not to worry and set out riding my bike around the town. The first place I went to was another, smaller more posh hotel where there were a lot of Singaporean's who bought some of my stuff. I sold my altitude watch and camera and some other stuff to them. I saw a lot of Tibetan street vendors selling stuff in front of the hotel and so I set my stuff up next to them. After a couple minutes they all came up to me and gave me money, and after a couple minutes they had given me about 30 bucks! I felt a little awkward after that so I got my stuff and rode around to some other places and sold stuff to some tourists. Lhasa has a lot of tourists there as you might imagine, being the home of Buddhism. The Chinese tried to destroy it after they invaded by kicking out the monks and destroying the statues, but in the last ten years or so, various groups have been donating money to replace the statues and monasteries and stuff. Probably one of the strangest traveling scenes I have ever experienced was the monks and nuns doing their prostrations around the Pokhara palace like they had been doing for hundreds of years, except now they had to do in in the middle of traffic with cars and buses swerving around them!

The tour up the palace was fascinating because it was absolutely huge. It is built up on a hill that is smack dab in the middle of the city. It housed hundred of monks and nuns back in the day and was full of big meditation rooms. The center of the palace was nice, it had a plaza with a dining room kind of on stilts above it. The second most interesting place we went to in Lhasa, which exists in Katmandu also, is the monastery where the debating monks are. This is were the monks all get together in a big yard in their monastery and debate about the laws of the mind or whatever. The way they did it was unlike anything I have ever seen. They were all in there together making a ton of noise. They were in groups of two usually with one guy practically yelling, though with a smile on his face, and clapping his hands as he made his point, and on when he made his final point he would make a giant clap and let one of his hands sail through the air as if it was over. It was funny seeing all of the monks making the same clapping gesture. We went to another monastery where they were doing a special kind of prayer using incense.

Lhasa was an interesting mix between the Chinese and Tibetan cultures because everything that was Chinese was so different that what was Tibetan. The Tibetan buildings were all white washed and roofed with wood, whereas the Chinese buildings were all covered in tiny blue tiles that made them look really cheap and cheesy to me. The people looked noticeably different also because the Tibetans are browner and have darker, thicker, curlier hair. The Tibetan dress is also different than the Chinese. The Tibetans wore old used robes and the Chinese were just in plain trousers.

While I was in the hotel all by myself once, one of the hotel employees wanted to go to a restaurant and have a bite with me, so we went to a noodle place about a block away. I talked a lot to the guy who could speak a little English. He wasn't very outgoing though and hardly said anything, which was strange and made me thing later that maybe the angry hotel guide guy put him up to it to see if I was a spy or something. Our hotel guide was really strange, he was almost angry with us, and especially me when he found out I couldn't get any money out of the bank. It was as if he was himself telling us that Tibet belonged to his people and there was nothing we could do about it, even though we never implied that it wasn't.

The flight back to Katmandu relieved how much of a dessert of rolling hills Tibet was. I got a glimpse of Mount Everest out of the right side of the plane which was higher than we were, which was cool because we flew right buy it.

I called ex-students of Joe and Rana right from the Airport, and afterwards I tried to find out which way was north so I could orientate myself with the map I had, but literally no one there knew, so I had to just ask which way Seoul was. It took me a couple hours to get to the Coffee shop that Joe and Rana told me about, and sure enough I saw some whities there who told me where I could find a place to stay. I stayed for a couple days in a place that was full of foreigners. The living situation there was different from what I had seen before. There was a central area that was basically outside other than the fact that there were sheets of steel placed above to keep it dry when it rained. It was a cozy environment though.

Joe and Rana told me that Korea was a very safe place and I got that feeling also from the obvious homogenous and routine ways of the people. So I didn't bother to even unlock my bike from a post across the street even though it was smack dab in the middle of the city. But sure enough when I went to unlock it it was still there. After a couple of days in the residential I heard of another one that that was smaller that I liked more so I moved. My room was tiny and the only furnishing it had was a mattress, but it was good enough for me, and worth the rent of $130 because it was in the center of the city. I had four western roommates in that small place, and I don't even remember any Koreans living there besides the owners of the place who were a man, woman and their son who we never talked to. There was a rock climber from LA who was just traveling, and three other English teachers: An American guy Brian, an American girl Amy, and an English girl whose name I don't remember, and an English guy whose name I don't remember. They had all been in Korea a couple years and made their money giving private classes, which paid like twenty bucks an hour.

When I first got there I got a part time job teaching in an Institute not far from where I lived, but that didn't last long because I just took over for the last few hours of the course. The English teaching there was fun and easy. I just went into the classroom with half a dozen students and we would just talk and sing songs together. I tried to bring lessons but the students were really laid back and just wanted to have fun. There were a lot of cute girls there who wanted to know if I had a girlfriend, and I went on a date with one of my students who called herself Moonbeam. Most Koreans who study and relate with Westerners have Western names because they don't think we can pronounce their Korean names. I didn't call her anymore though because I got involved with this Christian group that took most of my spare time.

When I arrived there I didn't have any money and even went to a homeless shelter for free food where they gave me some cookies but told me to not come back because it was for Koreans. After a couple of days there some fundamentalist Christian girls who taught English and were soldiers in the base approached me to talk about God, and one of them told me the school she worked for, called a ''Hogwon,'' was hiring. So I called the principal of the school and was hired at $1.8 million Won a month. I liked the idea of teaching little six year olds so I took the job, but after my first day of work the woman Mrs. Cho called me in her office and told me my salary was actually 1.4 million and I just accepted that. But the next day when I went in she told me it was actually $1.1 million. That night I told my roommates and they said that that kind of behavior was typical in Korea and that if you give them an inch they will take a mile and to be very careful because most English teachers there get ripped off. So the next day I went into work and told her I wanted 1.5 million won and she said it wasn't up to her to decide and that I had to call the central office and ask an American guy who was supposedly in charge of that. I didn't bother and told her that I was going to get work elsewhere and she suddenly told me that 1.5 million was fine. There was another institute that was begging me over the phone when I was in her office talking to her, but I decided to work for the Hogwon because I was more interested in teaching little kids than adults.

At that school, which was called PSA (pre school academy) there was a system where each class is shared by a Korean woman and the foreign teacher. I took over the foreign teachers job from an American guy named Vaughn. My partner teacher was a Korean girl who grew up in Africa for a while and then Vancouver and had lived in Vancouver for the last eight years. This girl could speak English fine but she had zero personality, so we just ignored each other and did our own part. I was in charge of taking the kids in the other room and doing the workbooks with them. After school I also did a reading class with a smaller group of kids. During lunchtime they had playtime in the basement which was fun.

I also had three hours a day in the afternoon at another school for kids from 13-15 at a private English academy. That job was alright with the younger kids, but the fifteen year olds were down right depressed and didn't have any interest in learning English, and I didn't really blame them either because the book I had to use with them was really boring. It was just a story I we had to read together about some cowboy or something. At that school I had I think three classes a day separated by ten minute breaks when I would hang out with the other English teachers. The other teachers there were Vaughn, and a Canadian girl, a young American guy, another older American guy who was openly gay , and an ex-army American dude. They all got their jobs from the states so they were on year long contracts and were living in normal Apartment buildings as roommates near the school. They had a totally different living situation than the people I lived with and hung out with in the Internet cafe I went to.

I went to an internet cafe that was frequented basically only by westerners. There were a lot, all of whose names I can't remember any more. Most of them were Canadians. There was Cam who had lived there a couple of years and was renting his own house. He had a party once that was fun. I got really drunk and hungry and bought a can of soaked cock roaches at the local convenience store-hole in the wall. I don't even know why they sold soaked cockroaches, but at the time I assumed they were for human consumption so I took them back to the party and began eating them. I remember they were quite filling, but they were very bitter and after about half the can my mouth was burning with excruciating pain so I had to stop. I tried to share them with the others but nobody was interested. There was a world cup game on that morning that I watched before crashing out there. The next morning I went to work.

Another guy who was always there was from Boulder, he made his money selling Dungeons and Dragons type playing cards to the soldiers. He only worked on Sundays and had the rest of the week off. Amy my house mate was a regular there, and there was a Canadian couple who had been there a year. I think the guys name was Jerry, and he coincidently knew Cam from Canada. For some reason most of the English teachers in Korea were Canadian. There was another American couple from Seattle, and an American high school girl who was an exchange student. I think there were some more but I can't remember them.

That internet cafe acted as a home away from home for everybody. I didn't hang out there as much as the rest of the people though, it seemed like most of them were there all the time. An ex-pat living in Korea definitely needs to have a support base of other foreigners because Koreans are very strange and don't mix well with foreigners. We had to get together and talk trash about the Koreans in order to keep a healthy state of mind.

Korea is a very strange country, mainly because it has historically been very isolated from the rest or the world. This has fermented strong ethnocentrism and fear of other countries changing them. For example, Koreans are always trying to push their customs on people who come there, not because they make sense, but because ''that is how its done here''. For example you can't ever take your shirt off even if you are in the middle of the woods. Another example is one day we had a parent teacher conference in the preschool I worked at, and in an attempt at conversation I asked one of the fathers what he did and he said, "Businessman''. The girl I worked with overheard that and told me that in Korea it is rude to ask someone what they do.

I found out throughout the years that in poor countries it is kind of awkward asking what people do; they don't seem to want to go there. I think it is because it exposes how boring or screwed up their lives are and just becomes embarrassing for both of us. So if you want to strike up a kind of relationship with them you have to get good at small talk. Another reason is that in a lot of undeveloped countries the people are used to compartmentalizing responsibilities and knowledge so that the people in power can keep their power and continue to lie. Its difficult to explain, but this issue comes up a lot in places where I got to know a little bit. It obviously isn't like that with everyone, but its worth mentioning.

I had some private students while I was there. A doctor and his wife in their apartment building. They were fun to teach because I just talked to them for an hour with the help of a conversation topics book. I had another woman who I talked to and proofread her masters paper on sea biology. I also taught her teenage sons a couple times. I also taught a little girl a couple times, but my time was limited with her so that didn't last long. Another guy I had for the whole time I was there was a college English professor who taught English by recording news in English and then writing the transcripts. He would pay me for an hour a week to listen to the news with him and complete the words that he didn't understand.

From teaching them and waling around the neighborhood I got to see how the city layout is. Seoul is a very new city. It sprung up out of the ashes of the Korean war fifty years ago, and is now the the tenth largest city in the world. One website even said it is the third largest city in the world. It has about 20 million people it it. It is pretty big in size, but the people are packed in there good because I didn't see any houses. In the historical and business center where I lived there were residences packed in between the large buildings. But in most of the rest of the city everybody lived in big twenty story apartment buildings that were packed together for as far as the eye can see.

There is one unhealthy thing about their lifestyle though, and that is their national alcoholic drink called Soju. Soju is the absolute cheapest way one can derive alcohol from rice. A liter of the stuff costed less than a dollar and if you try to drink the whole liter than its bye bye; you will literally black out. I remember one time I went drinking with some of my house mates and I accidentally drank too much Soju which needless to say is easy to do because it is so strong you could probably run your car off of it. The last thing I remember was we were outside in a little park area and I went to a bush to take a whiz, and the next thing I remember is suddenly waking up at three in the afternoon the next day in my bed with puke all over me. I got up and walked downstairs my house mates were there sitting on the steps of their rooms in the central circle. They all laughed when they saw me with the puke all over my shirt, and I had to ask them what happened. They said I went to the bush to pee and suddenly fell over it and passed out. They said when they woke me up I took my pants off and tried to start a fight with some sober koreans walking down the road. From then on I treated Soju with a fear based respect, but kept buying it on occasion, but letting a litter last a few days. I wasn't the only fool to fall victim to soju though. I little bit before I arrived there, there was a story in the newspaper of three executives of a big company who were found dead with a couple of empty bottles of Soju next to them. I was selling cigars on the street while I was there, and it was very interesting so see all the drunk people. Koreans got drunker than anybody I have ever seen, including the drunken Indians I ran across in the states. In fact, can't imagine any group of people drunker than the Koreans. Up until then my idea of a drunk was someone who was stumbling down the road blabbering incoherently, but the Koreans take it to a whole new level. Every night I went out I saw a bunch of Koreans, male and female, slung over their friends shoulders because they were completely passed out. I even saw a bunch of professionals with their business suits on passed out on the sidewalk; and that is all because of the Soju.

The Korean people have a love-hate relationship with Westerners. On one hand I was always coming across Koreans who wanted to talk to me and invited me to hang out with them, and even thanked me for freeing them from the Communists and kick starting their country as if I was an an ambassador for the west. But on the other hand I came across a lot of Koreans who were down right rude to me. I was given the finger on the street once, and it wasn't uncommon for them to give me a dirty look. Also the women I worked with didn't want to have anything to do with me, but that could have just been the school I worked at. There was just as much of a chance that if I had of been at another place they would have wanted to hang out with me.

Koreans were basically going through a bit of an identity crises. For hundreds of years they were known as the ''Hermit Kingdom'' because of their unwillingness to trade with other countries. For more than a thousand years they have had their own language and they tell me they even look a little different than the Japanese and Chinese. So after the Korean war when America came in and kick started their economy with American businesses and our political system, they had to suddenly open up to the rest of the world. They were still a third world country until the Olympics in 88 when they started to get a strong electronics industry going. Until just a couple months before I went there Korea and the rest of Asia was in such a big boom exporting goods to the States and Europe that their currency deflated by like %100 or something and pretty soon a lot of people were out of work. When I was there Koreans were always trying to tell me that their country was going through a tough time but I didn't see any crises. I think the Koreans over reacted a bit to that crises because the IMF bailed them out anyway. But because of the crises a lot of people stopped taking English classes, but even more English teachers left because the currency devalued, so there were still Koreans falling over each other trying to hire English teachers.

The Koreans were kind of having an identity crises between the sexes also. Traditionally the women stayed at home and the men work, but I could see that would have to start changing pretty soon because of the increasing influence of the Western world. Because women were kind of oppressed there and were super hot because of the healthy diet, a lot of the male Westerners had Korean girlfriend. I say male westerners because in was obvious that all the guys had Korean girlfriends but non of the female English teachers had boyfriends. The main reason is that the Korean girls are so hot and slave over their men, but the men are generally kind of nerdy and not very respectful of women. One example is I was having lunch in a restaurant with a Korean girl who hung out with us in the cafe. She was spoke perfect English an was married to an American guy. While we were talking she accidentally let out a little belch, and these two suited middle aged men sitting next to us yelled at her in Korean and told her she wasn't being lady like. So she yelled something at in Korean to shut up and that she can belch if she wants to. I could tell how some of the Korean women I worked with didn't seem to like men. One reason they didn't really want to talk to me could have been because I am a man. I remember one time at the institute I worked at we were going out to have something to eat and drink with the guys who worked there, and one of the guys invited the lady who managed the place and she said, ''No I don't want to hang out with a bunch of guys''.

After three months in Korea I had to leave the country to renew my visa, so I went to Tokyo for three days. Overall I was in Korea for only five and a half months but I had a lot of different things going on. I had four distinct groups of Westerners that I hung out with. 1) My housemates, 2) The people in the internet cafe, who strangely enough, other than Amy weren't the same as my housemates even though I lived like two blocks from the cafe. My housemates went to two different cafes. 3) The contracted teachers in the institute for teenagers that I worked at. 4) The Fundamentalist Christians. I also read the majority of the two thousand page book called A Course in Miracles when I was there, and went to the gym regularly. I think I got the biggest muscularly than I have ever gotten when I was there. I remember at one point I weighed in at 74 kilos.

For the first couple months I was there I was heavily involved in a Canadian and American group of fundamentalist Christians. I met them from a few girls who stopped me in the subway station and wanted to talk about God. I had never been involved with Jesus freaks so I decided I would go to their church and see what made them tick. I went to their church group and the men were very eager to meet me and give me a series of lessons. After I hung out with them a couple of times one American guy whose name I don't remember became the leader in their quest to convert me. For a couple months, other than their Sunday sermons, I hung out with them like three or four times a week where they would give me different lessons in a very specific order.

As far as I can remember the order of the lessons where something like this: 1) Every part of the Bible is the word of God, so you can't question any of it. 2) No other book in the world is the word of God, and any other book that claims to be of any moral or philosophical authority is of the Devil and therefore ''dangerous''. 3) The final and most important lesson was the ''light and dark'' study. Its basic thesis is that you are either with God or with the Devil. If you are with God you will go to heaven for eternity when you die, and if you are with the Devil you will go to hell for eternity. Although none of them accepted my challenge to look me in the eye and tell me I was going to Hell for eternity when I die; which shows that they weren't one hundred percent sure of that part of their lesson.

The way their conversations with me would go is one of them would explain the principles of their beliefs to me as long windedly as possible and then the next guy would basically repeat word for word what his friend before him said. And as soon as they were finished with their speeches they had to take off before giving me the change to say anything.

Most of the meetings where just me and the kid who took it upon himself to be my main ''guide'' into their faith. But the final lesson, the ''light and dark'' study, was attended by two other guys. They were very serious about this meeting because it was their final class with me before they wanted to convert me. While they were giving me the lesson they told me that they planned to Baptize me the following Sunday, and talked so seriously that I was sweating the whole time like I had just come out of a shower and it wasn't even hot in the room we where in, which was very strange. This lesson was mainly about the dangers of the Devil, so the meeting was full of fear and dread. All of them liked to point out how joining the Church saved their lives. One guy told me that he was sure he would be gay if he hadn't joined the Church, and another guy freaked out and told at me yelling with tears in his eyes that he was seduced by the Devil and screwed a prostitute once because he wasn't part of the Church at the time. I tried to get a word in but as usual they became tired because we had been talking until four in the morning

So in the end after the thirty or so times I had met with them I had never actually said anything to them. The whole time was them preaching to me and then suddenly having to go. The reason they didn't kept the hope alive that they could actually convert me was that I did listen to them for so long, and they must have never met anyone who had listed to them so much and not joined them. I just wanted to see if they were capable in listening and philosophizing. I didn't go to their church for about three weeks after that meeting because I was busy and problems with the metro, but when I did manage to go back and see the guy who was in charge of my conversion, he kind of exasperatedly said, ''What do you want Kyle?'' as if he had given up on me. I just said I wanted to philosophize to him and mainly wrap up what we had been talking about for like two months, so we went to the local coffee shop in the building. I tried to answer the different points they made but they didn't want to talk about that, so I said I just wanted to philosophize and he said he didn't philosophize, which is mainly all I wanted him to say, admit that he didn't philosophize. And they also admitted proudly that they were ''blind followers'' which they said in their own words. One of the main things they prided in themselves were their ''conviction'' which meant their ability to be blind followers of the very specific rules that they went by. The two guys I meet with only wanted to talk for a couple minutes and had to go because they seemed to see me as a lost cause. But before I let them go I asked them to look me in the eye and tell me that I was going to hell when I die because I'm not part of their church as they had told me with conviction that they believed that at least 90% of the people in the world were destined for an eternity in hell, even other people who called themselves Christians but weren't real Christians for this reason or that. They couldn't look me in the eye and tell me that though, and then I told them that I wasn't destined for Hell and that in fact we would see each other one day in another life time even if it was millions of years in the future in another planet, but all they could say was that they hoped to see me again in this lifetime.

So that was wrapped up and I learned a lot about how to deal with fundamentalists. The main lesson was to make it clear to anyone that I would speak to in the future that I am already familiar with their beliefs and don't need to hear them over and over again, and make it clear that I want them to listen to what I have to say and if they don't, not to waste their time and expect me to follow them. When talking to fundamentalists it is important to very quickly get to the main points which are: 1) Explain why they shouldn't be so preoccupied with the Devil and evil, 2) Why they should have a more open mind to similarities to their religion in other philosophies, 3) Why they should believe in reincarnation. If I ever talk to a fundamentalist who is able to listen to those three points then I am sure they won't be a fundamentalist for long, as the very definition of a fundamentalist is - someone who is unable to even listen to any idea that is outside of the rules of their narrow minded framework.

A lot of foreigners in Korea make their living selling goods on the street that they buy in warehouses there. Joe and Rana made three thousand dollars in three days selling jewelry on a vacation island in Korea, so they flew home for a week but when they went back there were cops there who didn't let them. One of the activities that I had while I was in Korea was Cigar selling. I got into it because some of my friends were selling jewelry on the street, and my roommate was selling cigars that he bought from an Irish guy and a South African guy who bought them in the Philippines. Those two guys had me, Neil, a couple from the states, and another American guy selling for them. They told me they were seeded in Cuba and put stickers on them that said they were Cuban cigars, and that is what I sold them as, but they weren't very good. On the weekend nights I went to the pedestrian mall near where I lived and sold them for a few hours. I just stood there and watched people walk by, and every once in a while someone would buy one from me. At the beginning I would yell that I had cigars for sale, but I don't think that helped much and I stopped doing that pretty quick.

It was from was selling cigars on the street that I noticed how drunk Koreans get and how they all dress in conservatively in black. Mostly they were friendly enough to me, but one young guy gave me the finger, and another time some guy tried to take my cigar and walk off without paying for it, but his friend stopped him; and one time a guy spit it out. I made about a hundred dollars a day for three or four days for their national holiday where they are supposed to buy presents for each other, but the cops kicked me out of the mall I went to on the last day. I sold in three different places. I went to one place to sell with my roommate Neil once. We would play video games, and sell, and play some more video games. I got really good at one car racing game that I played every day because video games are cheap there and the arcades are all over the place. One time while I was selling during the holiday a really drunk guy walked up to me and kept trying to talk to me for about a half hour. He was trying desperately to communicate with me, but he wasn't even speaking Korean, it sounded like he was trying to pronounce something in English but was nowhere near pronouncing anything. He spoke exactly like a severely retarded person. It was weird because he was in good shape and dressed normally. After I realized that he wasn't going to go away I went back home, but he followed me all the way to the subway. When I paid to go past the gate he just jumped over it and followed me in the subway. In the subway he became more desperate and started to yell and cry at me, but all I could do is stand there and look at him because he wasn't making any sense. When I got out of the subway and was a block from my house, I ran away from him the long way around to block to shake him, and he chased me for a little bit, but luckily I was able to out run him by the time I got to my house. One time while I was selling in another mall an American fundamentalist came up to me and told me he felt sad for me when he saw me selling there on the street and wanted to convert me to God, so I told him of my experience with the fundamentalists there and then told him about aliens and the Urantia book for about an hour; and I actually had a really good night selling that night while I was talking to him.

On the street I noticed that there were a lot of really drunk American soldiers out there on the weekends, but they mainly hung out where the prostitutes are. Once I went there with my friends from the institute. It was an an inclining strip on a small street where there were no cars at night a couple blocks from the Mosque. The place was lined with a bunch of whore houses with nasty looking prostitutes and had tons of drunk hill billy soldiers who were eager to talk to me. There were a lot of corn cobbed hip hop looking black soldiers who looked like they were right out of a Snoop Doggy Dog video, and there were a couple of huge Military Police standing guard. The American soldiers had a bad reputation for raping Korean women there. I saw a couple demonstrations on the street against the violence of the soldiers.

I talked to one girl for a while who had nothing but bad things to say about being in the military, and that she can't wait to get out. When I told one guy that I was from Colorado he said, ''Oh that's where all the tree huggers are from!''. I was standing next to the gay guy I work with and one soldier just out of the blue started yelling at him and telling him he was going to kick his ass, so my friend just stood there, but the guy kept going on. Pretty soon after that we went to a Korean restaurant.

There were about 40,000 soldiers on the base in Seoul and on the surrounded bases and the five or so kilometer wide demilitarized zone on the border with North Korea. I walked past their town within Seoul once and it looked just like a middle class American neighborhood with the houses, schools, and streets exactly like it is in America; which was weird because Seoul has nothing but big apartment buildings. A lot of the people in my Christian group were soldiers.

I had a TV in my room and every night I would watch the tonight show on the army bases channel. It was a government sponsored channel so there weren't any commercials, so they played really weird progaganda-type commercials. The strangest one was a of a toddler riding his tricycle along the median of a highway with semis driving by, and the narrator says, "This child has less of a chance of getting hit by a car than you do of getting skin cancer, put sun screen on!''. There were a lot of anti suicide commercials also. They would usually show a depressed looking kid in his room and the narrator would say, ''If you are sad, seek help!'' and then it would show his friends coming in and taking him out to do something fun and he would cheer up.

My time in Korea was fast and fun, and when I left I had $6,700 in the bank.

The Tokyo airport was very large and not near the city. I had to take a van for what seemed to be a couple hours to the train station. Tokyo was similar to Korea because the people look similar the infrastructure is built up with many large buildings jammed together. But Tokyo was clearly more built up and cleaner. The main difference between Tokyo and Seoul is the difference in personality between the citizens. Koreans are very loud and are always laughing and smiling, but the Japanese were very somber and walked very fast as if they were late for something. There was a marked difference in dress also. Koreans dress very formally with suits and black clothing, whereas the Japanese dress down more. I saw a lot more of them dressed in blue jeans. The first thing I did when I got off the bus was walk down a narrow road to have a bowl of noodles. I immediately noticed how expensive Tokyo was after looking at the menu, but the place was very clean and smartly decorated. After that I took the subway to the center where I got a veggie Subway sandwich and a drink for six bucks. I can get a Subway sandwich at home for three and a half bucks. Then I went to the biggest arcade I have ever seen. It had two levels and was filled with lots of games I have never seen before. It seemed like the social scene of the teenagers was centered around the arcades dance games, because there was a group of about ten kids surrounding each beat step game religiously watching the participant.

I had been thinking about dancing in Tokyo at one point because I had been working out and I had met a guy in Denver who said he went there as part of a Chip 'n Dales troupe and make 75 thousand bucks in one month, so I asked some people if there were any Chip n Dales type dance places. I asked a few people if

they spoke English and a few of them decisively said no. But I found a waiter walking down the road who took it personally upon himself to take me and ask everyone on the street where a place was. He asked an old lady and she non chalontly gave directions to a place down the road, so the waiter took me about four blocks out of his way to find the place but we were successful. After dealing with that guy I had noticed that the Japanese people will either totally ignore you and not even give you the time of day, or they will go totally out of their way and personally drop you off at where you want to go. They didn't seem to understand the idea of just pointing me in the right direction. Sometimes it made it kind of a pain to find my way because I would have to ask like fifteen people before someone was willing to help me. I had this experience a lot around the metro with people taking me by the hand and taking me all the way to the metro stop. I wish I knew how to say ''OK that's enough you can go on your way now'' in Japanese. I felt invisible in Japan compared to Korea. In Korea people stare at me a lot more and approach me wanting to talk to me, but in Japan that didn't happen even once.

The subway in Tokyo is ridiculously expensive. It costs three bucks just to ride one line, and if you have to transfer you have to pay another three bucks! So what if you have to get to a place that takes three separate subway lines?! Because of how expensive the subways were there I was surprised that I hardly saw any people commuting by bicycle.

The foreigners I saw walking the streets of Tokyo were different than in Seoul and there were a lot more of them. In Seoul the people were a lot more dressed down and generally younger, whereas in Tokyo the Westerners were very somber looking and dresses like million dollar executives. While I was walking the streets looking for the dance bar I ran across a couple discos that only allowed Japanese. I walked in a couple of bars that were just Americans; the Hard Rock Cafe being one of them, which was totally packed with partying people. I saw a lot of Black people working there in restaurants, I saw lots of black people working the streets in the pedestrian section trying to get people into bars. One very persistent and annoying black man approached me and was trying to get me to just walk into his bar, but I didn't want to. He asked me to guess where he was from and so I guessed some African countries and he got mad and told me he was from Jamaica. I noticed that the Japanese like making sex symbols out of the women. Everywhere I turned I saw drop dead Japanese girls dressed up in the streets. They must have been dancers or prostitutes. There were rooms all over the place were you pay to see a girl do a strip dance on the other side of the glass, but there were no places for guys. The guy who talked to me must have been on a special tour or something. I don't think I would have ever actually danced in a Chip 'n Dales that anyway.

The other weird thing about Japanese people is how they are always saying ''hi'', which means ''ok''. They would pronounce it in a very quick and powerful way as if they were sneezing the word out. They said ''hi'' so much I was almost cracking up to myself everywhere I went because they were always saying it. For example I would present a drink I wanted to buy to the cashier and she would say ''hi'' and take my money and then say ''hi'' again.

Tokyo was very expensive to get a place to stay in. I heard that the cheapest place to stay were small beds that slide out of the wall. That would have been interesting but it wasn't worth the 30 bucks that I heard they costed, so I found a place to camp under a bush on the other side of a tall metal fence in a park. It was a little drizzly that night but I slept well. My brother later told me that it actually is legal to camp out in the parks in Tokyo as long as you are up before the sun rises. My brother did that but was awakened by a foot of an angry territorial man in his ribs. Personally I would never have done that. As a rule I usually only camp where no one can see me which generally isn't that hard to do.

My first full day there I walked around the parks looking at the parks and the beautifully trimmed trees. Then I went to the imperial palace which is where the

Emperors of Japan lived for like a thousand years or something. The palace was was up on a hill surrounded by a wide mote. The palace itself wasn't that big but it was surrounded by a very large and pretty garden.

After the palace I walked down the bike path full of fit looking athletes a couple of blocks to the children's science museum which was very good. While I was touring the museum I got the impression that the Japanese are very intelligent people who have a very developed sense of how they want their world to look like in the future. They had models of underground buildings and parking garages, and a lot of interesting interactive science exhibits that taught me a lot.

My final day there was a Monday so I went to the Korean consulate. The consulate was kind of tucked away in an obscure corner of the city and took me a lot of time walking around looking for it. I quickly learned that the Japanese call the Koreans ''Honguk''. At the embassy the girl told me that I couldn't get a visa on such short notice but I told her that my plane was leaving the next day so she gave me one.

I camped in the same place as I did the night before, and got up early the next morning because I had to catch the plane back to Korea. I had a little trouble finding a place to eat so early, and walked into a fancy hotel, but after seeing that a small breakfast with a tea, two eggs, and a piece of bread for eleven bucks, I had to back out. The waiter was understanding though and told me where I could find something to eat that was more reasonably priced. After I had breakfast I went back to the airport and flew back to Seoul after three days in Tokyo.

The first time I went to Bangkok after Nepal I knew about Khowsan road, but had forgotten about it or wasn't interested, I can't remember which. But nevertheless I got a hotel in the center of the city across the street from a big indoor supermarket which I took a walk through. But most of the couple day I was there, besides the trip to the Korean embassy to get my Korean visa, I was just Chillen in my hotel room because it was so nice and I had a TV with cable and I just wanted to hang out. I remember I really liked the Janet Jackson video, ''Party all night'' or something like that.

After Korea I had kind of a culture shock seeing bunches of grungy spaced out tourists on Kowsan road in Bangkok, I bought myself a tie dye outfit and quickly got used to the relaxed world of being a tourist. After three days of getting caught up on all the new movies (I loved starship troopers) and seeing the sights, I got a desperate urge to "get the fuck out of Dodge" and hit the Tai autobahn.

Riding through Thailand was great on the grounds that I had a huge shoulder allowing me to groove to my newly acquired tunes. When I got to Surat Thani I went to Phan Ghang island and tried to do the scuba diving class. But I told the anal Germans who ran the place that I have asthma, so I had to do the course on Samui island.

Breathing under water was a little freaky for the first twenty seconds or so, but after I got used to it, it turned out to be a fascinating activity that I can't see myself ever getting bored of. I think I want to buy my own scuba gear one day, an Irish guy told me you could get a used setup of as little as $500 U.S. I didn't see a whole lot of fish though because I was there at the same time as the boat sinking, plane crashing storm.

I tattooed my scar there and loved the party atmosphere, but was eager to leave when the diving was done.

I have been thinking about a movie I want to make called ''ultimate warrior'', it is about a man who lives on a planet about 100X the size of earth who was recently catapulted from the stone age to present technology because of an upliftment mission from earth. They brought all this technology, but the people don't understand were it came from and don't really care about it. They don't travel because of an ignorant cultural habit of being afraid until one day the hero, Martico, who is very gullible and open minded but not too bright meets an old drunk man walking down the road at night who babbles, "The golden amulet make money and power,

midnight runners know; help me, help yourself". Martico takes this to mean he must travel the globe to find the golden amulet and give it to the midnight runners to save Gargantuan's, or something like that. Because of the vastness of the planet and all the different tribes there are so different, the hero has a magnificent adventure and meets strange people.

When I flew into Bangkok I had heard about Kowsan road and wanted to stay there so I took the bus there with the other tourists who wanted to stay there.

Khowsan road is the place where all the cheap travelers hotels are and it is lined with cyber cafes, Thai related stores, and restaurants that play movies every night. The travelers there were pretty closed up in their own worlds though and I didn't really meet anybody.

The first day I was there I did a tour of the old royal city which was similar to the royal city in Katmandu in architecture but the buildings were much more elaborate and shiny. A couple of the buildings were covered in gold, and the ones that weren't were painted like new. The whole complex was walled in and was kind of like a mini city within a city. There was also a museum there that was housed in the old government building where the French ruled over Thailand for some time.

Then I went to the famous Thai massage school where they give Thai massages but I was stupid and didn't get a Thai massage there, instead I got a Thai massage later from an old man on Khowsan road who gave me a pretty bad one. Because Thailand is famous for Thai massages, a lot of untrained Thais advertise that they give Thai massages but they are really bad. Then I went to see the reclining Buddha which is a giant gold plated Buddha that is laying on his side. I saw a couple more things at that complex which was near the royal city but I don't remember what was there.

I also did a tour of the market place near the river and did a river tour. Bangkok is connected by a network of rivers similar to Amsterdam. Where a lot of people get around the city on transport boats.

I knew about the sex bars where there are holes in the bar where girls zip down your pants and suck your member, and where they shoot ping pong balls out of their orifices, but I didn't know where they were and didn't have the motivation to find them so I skipped out on that tourist attraction.

After a couple days there I rode my bike down the the flat barren countryside where there are grain farms. I drafted behind a tractor for a little bit, and made pretty good time until I got to a small town and got a room. I went for a walk there and was the only white person I saw there but nobody seemed to be staring at me. As I continued south it got junglier, populated, and poorer. Pretty soon there were primitive road side stalls all over the place where I could stop and have a good cheap seafood meal. I remember one town I stayed at was pretty famous for a buddhist monastery in the hills nearby, and I went for a walk in a sort of festival market going on and pigged out on all the kinds of food they have. One cool thing about Thailand was the plethora of healthy cheap food. It really works well for when you are bike touring to have a lot of healthy food in your stomach all the time.

A couple days into the riding I caught up to an older guy who was going in the opposite direction as me but we were riding into town which was a little out of the way from the highway. He was really mellow and was riding slowly. He said he had done this same route like seven years beforehand and was doing it again in the opposite direction. We rode into a seaside town and got some seafood. He said he had stopped at that town on his trip before and even remembered eating at the little restaurant we were eating at. Then we got a room together to save money because it was like eight bucks a night for the cheapest room, but the shower was nice and modern and warm. He got up at like six the next morning and I got up at like eight.

I rode down another day and got a room in a run-down tourist beach resort for Thais. The beach wasn't that bad but there was trash everywhere, and it made me notice that apart from the tourist places the Thai do make a mess of their country with plastic bags and trash. I got a room in a hut that was amongst a few others that were empty and clearly hadn't been used in a while. I rode down to Ranong where I was going to take a boat to Ko Phan Gang but it had been storming really bad that year which caused four boats to sink and a plane to crash, so the boats to Ko Phan Gang weren't operational because of the large waves, so I took the bus to Surat Thani.

I put my bike in the back of the bus with me and laid down. I had my bike bags with the bike in the seat in front of me and I was looking up at the ceiling of the bus which was a mirror so I could see the bags and make sure nobody robbed anything from me. I saw that one of the guys who works for the bus was rummaging through my bags, and I waited until he took some of my tapes out and I sat up and took them out of his hand. He was startled and tried to tell me they were to play the bus. For some reason I didn't tell the guys he worked for, but I should have. He looked kind of embarrassed for the rest of the ride and then gave me an angry glare as I got of the bus. I guess I didn't tell his co-workers because I felt sorry for him, I don't know.

When I got to Surat Thani I booked the next boat to Ko Phan Gang and saw saving private ryan in the theater in Thai. The boat ride was pretty cool because the boat was pretty small and instead of having seats the open area under the deck was just flat, so the people but their sleeping bags there and that was it. It was cool because it was so warm and we were so close to the water. The boat ride went through the night and we arrived at the island in the morning.

I rode across the island to the northern shore and back down the western coast to a small tourist place where I got a bungalow on Sri Thanu beach. My first night there the host of the place was trying to sell magic mushrooms to as many of the tourists as she could so make a trippers party. I bought some and sat on the small quaint beach on the full moon with about a dozen other tripping travelers. We started out by listening to techno music. At the time I wasn't used to techno music as it wasn't really popular where I was from in America. I remember we were sitting there on the porch of some guys bungalow listening to the techno with some guys radio, and I was thinking to myself, "This techno sucks, I can't believe nobody is telling this guy to put on some Reggae or something, I feel embarrassed for him,'' and just at that moment someone said, ''Wow this techno is awesome,'' and everybody else sounded in agreement and the guy was like, ''Yeah, I know''. I was like, ''wow'', I guess I need to be more open minded. Then we went down to the beach and hung out for the rest of the night. I was trying to do handstands in front of everybody for like two hours straight which was totally cracking this one couple up. They were like, ''He just doesn't give up, he keeps trying and trying, and one day he'll do it!" Then I got the idea to try to do it with another guy so we could support each other, and we did for a little bit but weren't that successful. Every once in a while somebody would walk by and the couple would be like, ''Hey look! there goes another one of those walking post cards!'' The funniest thing about the whole night was the host lady who was frantically running all over the place making sure we didn't do anything stupid. I remember one time I wanted to get in the water and she ran up to me and said ''No don't get in the water! You'll die it's dangerous, stay right here!'' And I was like, ''OK if its that important to you I'll stay right here. But on the south end of the island where the big mushroom parties are, tourists have had a history of getting loopy and swimming off in to the ocean never to be heard from again.

The next morning I rode to the south end of the island to do some scuba diving.

The boarder between Thailand and Malaysia consisted of a kind of demilitarized zone because the place where I got stamped out of Thailand was like a kilometer from the place I got stamped into Malaysia. The roads were wider and smoother in Malaysia and it seemed like the whole country was tree farms as far as the eye could see. After a couple days of riding I got to the Island of Pedang, which is also known as Georgetown because it used to be a Dutch fort-town for many years. I did the tour of the base which still exists and saw a lot of old Dutch buildings. There were quite a few of tourists on the main street which was interesting. A lot of them were hanging out in a bar called Reggae bar. It was interesting to see that in Asia I saw a lot of Reggae and Bob Marley related themes. After riding around the island which seemed to be entirely inhabited by the large city I took the boat to Sumatra.

After a couple of days I was thrilled to find the roads in Malaysia are just as plush as in Thailand, and they speak English unlike Thailand, or any other country other than Katmandu for that matter. But I was only there for two days because I went straight to Indonesia, which is worlds different from a cyclists perspective.

After I came back from Sumatra I stayed in the same place as I did the first time I came through here. I was kind of sick in the lungs to I went to the Georgetown hospital to buy an inhaler but they gave one to me for free because Malaysia has a public medical system. Malaysia was much more developed than I thought it was. After Georgetown I rode south towards Epoh, but after riding over a large pass I got sick and barely rolled into the town. I stayed in a hotel there and went to the hospital the next day for a Malaria test which they gave to me for free. I came up negative and they gave me another inhaler for free. I got some new stuff for my bike also. I saw a movie there and noticed that most of the movies in Malaysia are Chinese which was odd because Malaysia is the only country in Asia other than Nepal where the people speak English, but it is also the only country where most of the movies are Chinese. The next day I rode towards Kuala Lumpur on the highway and stayed in an obscure village. Now read the journal below:

I am in a town now 110 KM south of Epoh. I was going to go to Kuala Lumpur today, but the cop kicked me off the highway and I don't want to ride at night on the frontage road. He told me the fine was 85 bucks but he didn't fine me because the sign was written in Malay. I started riding at 11:00 today because I ate bread and hot dogs and oranges which takes forever. In these cheap countries I should eat out. It saves time.

I rode a small road to Kuala Lumpur the next day and got there in the afternoon and went straight to the Petronas towers, the highest buildings in the world which needless to say I could see in the distance. I couldn't go up the towers though because they were just for offices, but there was a tower next to them that was just as high because it is up on a hill. The center of Kuala Lumpur looked just like any first world country with the big buildings, and well maintained roads and gardens.

I had a meal at an American chain restaurant and got some money at the bank and then went down to the Chinese part of town where the markets and cheap hotels are. I got a bed in a dorm room but I was the only person there, and went for a walk around the markets and looked for a movie theater; and was surprised to see that all the movies in the theater were Chinese!

The next day I went to the top of the tower and snapped some photos of the city. I was surprised to see that the city wasn't very big. I was expecting a large skyline because the center of the city was so well developed, but that was just the center of the city, and beyond that it was just arms of lower buildings stretching out through the trees which came in arms that almost touched the center.

The next day I rode out of Kuala Lumpur towards Singapore but couldn't find a frontage road so I went back to the city and got a bus ticket. On the way back I got stuck in a median in a highway for like a half hour because of rush hour traffic. After I broke through and rode through the city I noticed that there was a large Mosque there too and a lot of traditional Muslims there.

I was surprised to see how developed Malaysia was. They had a good public health care system, the roads were in good shape, a lot of the people spoke English, and there were lot of foreign businesses there like fast food joints. Malaysia was surprisingly cosmopolitan also, with an even mix of Indians, Natives, Muslims and Chinese.

While I was waiting for my bus to take off I had a meal at a Kenny Loggins fast food joint which was the best one I had ever been too because it was pure health food. It was a buffet with grilled chicken and vegetables.

That night I took a bus about four hours down to Singapore. The guy sitting next to me was a friendly Muslim guy in a turban who showed me his mosque when we drove by it.

I got off the bus al like midnight right at the northern end of the island on the Malaysian side. Instead of getting a bus to the center like I could have I opted to ride my bike. The bike ride was cool because Singapore had the infrastructure of a first world country and I didn't have to share the road with any cars. I rode on a highway that was in really good shape and remember passing under a lot of freshly painted pedestrian bridges with perfectly manicured vines growing on them. I was riding for like two hours though all over the place criss crossing myself because I kept following arrows that said I was going to Singapore, but I just couldn't find the skyscrapers. I finally gave up and stopped at an oceanside outdoor bar where there were a lot of foreigners around and got a four dollar Margarita and a plate of some good food. I had someone point me in the right direction and found the skyscrapers and went into the trees in a park to camp and found a mattress to sleep on.

I got up pretty early the next day and rode into the Indian section which is were the cheap hotels are. I got a room for eight bucks a night with my own TV. It was cool to watch TV there because all the channels were in English because English is their national language.

That day I walked around the place and noticed how cosmopolitan the place is. There were tons of Indians dressed in traditional Indian garb, and a lot of Chinese looking people. I had a nice Indian meal in one of their restaurants, and then took a bus around the island to check it out. I noticed that the whole island was inhabited with city. But I don't remember many actual houses, most of the residences were apartments. Then I went and did a tour of the island to the south of the main island where the Dutch had their base and saw all the canons and forts. I also did a train tour to see the various wildlife there. I shared the gondola on the way to the island with a kid from Denver Colorado. The Gondola went right over the Singapore harbor which is the biggest in the world.

I went across such a pathetic part of the Rio Grande river that I could have walked across it without getting my shirt wet, but as soon as I got to the other side I was in another world. Mexico had narrower streets and the buildings were older, smaller and unpainted. It was exciting to be in another country for the first time in almost a year. The first thing I did was go to a bank to get Pesos, but the ATM was busted so I asked a lady who worked at the bank where another one was and she was struggling to tell me because she didn't speak any English, in fact the only thing she said in English was ''across the street'', but that was enough to locate the place. I went to the central pedestrian street and found a hotel there. Because I was in an undeveloped country I though I could bargain the price of the hotel like I did in Asia, but the guy didn't have any of it, which was alright because it was nice and cheap. It was nice to be staying in a bed again in my own room after sleeping on the side of the road. Pretty soon I forgot about some bike stuff I forgot to get when I was in Brownsville so I crossed back in America and delt with some pretty big culture shock even though I was only out of the country for a couple hours. America was just so much more organized and cleaner and the roads were so much bigger. After I went back to Mexico I had a walk around the pedestrian mall where there was a market and looked for a good restaurant to have some Mexican burritos as my favorite food in the world are burritos. While I was about to go into the restaurant a Mexican guy said ''Hi how are you'', or something like that and so I automatically thought he could speak English so I started speaking English to him as if he could understand me but he just had a blank look on his face. I can't remember what the burritos were like in the restaurant but I don't think I was impressed.

I bought a pump and a tube and stuff and then went across the Rio Grande into Mexico. The river was a little non moving creek. I rode over the bridge, and when I got to the half way point on the bridge the trash started. Now I was in Mexico, how exciting. I went to the city center and went to the various hotels and bargained but found out that they don't do that here, but it was still cheep, about 11 bucks for a room. The next day I got a tourist card and went back to America to get a translator computer and camel back water bladders because the boarder official said there was no water between Matamoros and the next town, San Fernande, 137 kilometers away, presumably against the wind in the heat. I was like ´this is going to be like Australia´. But it wasn't a challenge at all, there are taco stands and ´mini supers´ all along the route.

The next day I rode down south. Matamoros is a huge place and it took me a while to get out of the city, but when I did the terrain was nice and flat and the roads weren't too bad.

The first day I had my own lane and was thinking Mexico is made for bikers. My hotel room that night was 18 bucks but I had air conditioning for the first time, and it was nice and had a TV that played American movies in English all night which was very luxurious. The next morning this guy was all, 'you want dope´? and I was like, 'yes, all right'. He got me this quarter bag of good stuff from the south for six bucks. He said there were only three dope sellers in the town and the rest were crack sellers. I thought that was weird, he asked me if I wanted some crack as if I did. I have to say is that the drivers here are crazy and the roads are narrow.

After I got to Mexico I started having to ride during the day. But I am in good enough shape to ride in the day now and not wish I was dead or watching TV in an air-conditioned room or something. The first day in Mexico was with big 'ol shoulders on the road. And it was great, because I noticed almost immediately they don't give bikers the kind of space they do in America. Probably because there aren't as many bikers here. The first town I stayed in south of Matamoros was after a 137 km day. It was still against the wind, but not as bad as in America. I got an air conditioned room and watched movies on my TV in English. I was like, 'this ain't bad one single bit'. But the other TVs I got since then are all in Spanish, and my Spanish ain't that good yet to hear what they are saying. But I learn a little and still enjoy the Simpson's and stuff. Luckily this dude hooked me up with weed in that town, and I was set from then on out.

The next day was like 132 kilometers. Then I did 115. Then I wanted to rest and learn some Spanish from my phrase book, so I took a rest day. I didn´t totally learn Spanish that day, but it gave me an idea. Then I rode into Tampico, and two days after that to here, Poza Rica. This is an oil city of almost two hundred thousand people. Downtown is crazy, it is very crowded and has lots of weird stuff for sale, like 40 cent fruit juices. The food here is good and healthy.

I just came back from El Tajin, one of the 7 main Mayan ruins here in Mexico. It had eleven ball courts between pyramids. The biggest pyramid is 18 meters high. Back in the good old days 1500 to 2000 years ago, the loser got his heart cut off. I have taken pictures of hills that look like pyramids and wondering if they are pyramids buried under there that they don't know about. That is how El Tajin was until a couple hundred years ago when they found it and cleared it. El Tajin was definitely made by humans, but there are rocks there that look like they were cut by power tools that I took a picture of. (Written later: Actually I don't think El Tajin was made by humans.) At the entrance of the ruins they were doing a show that the Mayans used to do where they would climb to the top of a tall pole and tie themselves to rope and then let themselves fall as the rope unraveled.

I am psyched about the next ruin, Teotihuacan, which is one or two days riding from here. It has the third biggest pyramid in the world at 70 meters high, and the base is %97 the size of the great pyramid! It is in-between in size of the two biggest Egyptian pyramids. And there is a pyramid even bigger than the biggest Egyptian pyramid in a town called Pueblo near Mexico city but it is overgrown with vegetation.

I am entering the coolest week of my traveling career, and probably coolest I will ever have, because 50 miles from Teotihuacan is Mexico city, and then a 53 hundred meter mountain I want to climb just outside of the city right next to the smoking Volcan El Popo. Then I will go to the biggest pyramid in the world. Then a few km's down the road the third biggest mountain in north America at 56 hundred meters. Then all the other Mayan ruins after that.

Tomorrow I will hit the mountains for the first time in the trip. I am excited about that because so far I have been riding on the flats. I love to get stoned and ride, and then get really stoned half way through my ride again in the bushes and ride some more. I am into the rhythm now where I just ride like my legs are pistons that just gracefully go without me having to be constantly hammering or standing up and sitting down all the time because of crotch soreness. But I can stand up and sprint fast too, and go up the mountains at a good pace. The wind hasn't been against me but I think it may be with me on my way into the mountains. It's gonna be dope when I see the big 'ol winding road up the mountain and can say, ´yea, kick ass!´ and then proceed to kick ass as I cruise up the mountain with my tan legs glistening in the sun and slowly collecting dust until my buzz wears off. Then I go into the woods for part two, when my legs are warmed up and I really move along the road like a cowboy. I like this Trek bike I have, although these spokes I have are gonna start popping like corn as soon as I get to the mountains. But I am going really light so I feel like I am just on a pleasure cruise outside of my house.

Mexicans are cool, I feel like one of them. They don't blatantly stare and don't over react about me being a foreigner like waving and talking to me all the time like in Asia, and they are nice and try to communicate with me instead of getting grumpy angry like they do in France and Spain. I would consider Mexico a second world country. The peasants still live in thatch huts with limited electricity and running water, but they have cars and live lives very similar to us technology wise. Out of all the countries I have been to, it seems that mentally Mexico is the most similar to us; although I have only been here a little over a week. Hotels on average cost around 12 to 15 bucks a night, but the one I am staying in now is only 6.3 US dollars. They clean my room when I am gone when I stay more than one day. They took my can pipe. I gotsta watch it from now on.

The only worry I have now is if my bag a' weed lasts long enough to get me to Cancun or some cool town where I can get me more dope, cause at this stage in my life dope and biking might as well be the same word. I love this traveling stuff, in some ways I wish I didn't blow all my dads life insurance money when I had it. After I enroll in my Spanish class and live with a family in the town just north of Guatemala city for a month, I plan on riding to Panama city or San Jose Costa Rica, and flying to Ecuador. Then riding to the coast of Peru and teaching English there and making some more money. The longest left hand surf wave in the world is there 75 kilometers north of Trujillo. Over and out.

So´s I done gone to Mexico city. The ride up the digidy dog mountain was big just as I expected. It was flat from Poza Rica for a little bit, and then kaboom! straight the #%$!#$% up for an hour and a half. I rode near deep jungle gorges by big 'ol waterfalls and sawn vines on trees and all these trees growing off of sheer cliffs and whatnot. At the end of the climb I was at the same height of this mountain that I saw from the plains and remembered thinking to myself that mountain is as big to me as pikes peak is to Colorado Springs. But I thought, 'I betcha I'll go higher than that today', and I did cause I went down a little to a town and back up climbing, and down a couple of little descents until I done got hungry and stopped for food. But the dang place took a half hour to cook my fish a little. Then I did afternoon tokage, and went up again. This dude said 30 more km's of straight up, but is turned out to be more like 50 km's. Lucky for me pretty soon after I started riding up, this digidy rigidy came up on me all slow so I grabbed it and they hauled me up for like 45 minutes, and before I knew it I was amongst Pine trees and Aspens and grass and cool air. I was like, ´digidy dog´ I am in the Valle de Mexico.

It leveled off a bit and the dudes turned off and I waved goodbye and hammered up the last 30 km's to the town. At the beginning of the day I was at zero meters and at the end I was at 21 hundred meters and level with Mexico city, but my body was thrashed. I couldn't ride out of the saddle without my arms burning, because when I put my rack back on I put it high on the seat post and so when I rode out of the saddle it was like lifting weights. What happened a couple days beforehand was I was riding and I had just entered a town and was going slow up this climb and my rear wheel locked up and I looked back and discovered my rack cracked. So I took it and looked over and guess what I sawn, that's right, metal workers. So the dude said for fifteen bucks he would make me a new clamp portion of my rack in an hour. So in an hour I was on the road again; trippy huh? So anyway, I was getting excited cause now I was in a home-like climate and near the pyramids, city, and mountains. So I got up late the next day and rode to Teotihuacan and in two hours was there even though it was 50 km's away. I forgot how fast you can go when it ain't straight up. I pulled behind a truck for a while though.

I went over this hill, and saw this town with these two huge brown lumps in it and said 'yea, Teotihuacan', and went there and walked up the big one. It was cool and impressive but standing on it was far from geometrically even; no divine influence here like in Egypt. It was the 6th biggest city of its day is the 5th century. It is said to be situated on the northern slopes of the lake that existed 500 years ago. (Now it do think it was divinely influenced).

Then I rode the last 50 km's to the city, but by then we were in the suburbs of the city. I rode 25 km's, and then some guy led me what I thought to me the wrong way (I found out later he was telling the truth) for a bunch of kilometers because I went one direction a long way before turning around and going the other direction, because there is a big mountain to the north of the city that I couldn't figure out which way to go around. Then it rained so hard the six lane freeway turned into a river. Kids were holding on to poles to avoid being swept away, and cars were stopping. The buses were still gunning through it and me fighting, walking my bike against it. When I got to the top of the hill and rode down and through another river in the freeway. I held on to buses in the slow parts, and made it to the historic district just before sunset.

I had insomnia that night, but didn't mind cause I was reading the lonely planet book and the language book. Then at like 4, holy fuck! at 4 I had excruciating pain in my abdominal area, and then got the shits. In the morning I was so feverish I was having nightmares about leading Spanish armies to the annihilation of the Aztecs, and was freezing under my two blankies and sweating like a pig.

I went to the top of the tower anyway the next day and took pictures of the city. To the north I sawn hills close by, but the city is surrounded on most sides by big mountains. On the southwest side after maybe three km's, there was just a brown fog I took a picture of. The city is I think 2000 square kilometers. After the tower I bee-lined it home and went to bed for the rest of the day and didn't eat anything. That was two days ago.

Yesterday I went to the Aztec ruins of the pyramids and temples and saw the museum. This down town area is on the site of the island that was the Aztec capital of the big lake that they drained. Now all these buildings are tilting over from the bog, because back yonder the town beyond the pyramid-fortified capital island of maybe 7 km's in diameter was build up bogs of grass nailed to the lake floor that grew their food. These neighborhoods were built up around the various islands in the lake connected by floating bridges. The people lived on their little islands and got around on gridded causeways of water on boats. But they got waxed by the Spanish in 1521. In all the murals around town the Spanish look like devils with crooked noses, evil squinty eyes, and pointy chins as they stick guns in serene looking Aztec bellies.

Today I feel well enough to move around, but it is Sunday and I am in a Catholic country so everything's closed. I can't even go to the big ass park with the zoo because I have shorts on. So I will stay here tomorrow and hopefully will have the energy on Tuesday to make it up to the 14 thousand foot town at the base of the smoking volcano just 80 kms from here. Tomorrow I will get maps and advice about what clothes to buy for it. Last night I just watched Sex in the City, this jail movie, the Chris Rock show, and some other movies. I forgot how raunchy and vulgar HBO is. It is chill to toke it and drink big 'ol cheap beers and watch American cable in a nice hotel and then go out and explore this awesome city. The city has this huge boulevard from the historic part that goes straight for like 5 kms to this hill in the park. I couldn't go where the old palace was, but there are lots of huge palaces here. The guard actually yelled at me and was mad just cause I wanted to enter the park. Like I should have known on Sundays you don't do that, and that you can't lock your bike to any fences. Then I started to notice they are very somber here in this country; I attributed that to their poorness. But there are lots of rich people too. Their Denney's-like restaurants are just as expensive as they are at home, but the food stalls are cheap. I keep being a fool and going to the restaurants. You can save SO much money if you just stick to the mom and pop food places. I hope I remember to go there before I run out of money. So anyway, these volcanoes look like cones in the post card, so I think I can climb it. I hope I am well day after tomorrow, cause I am already jonesing for some altitude gain. There are a lot of French people here, which is interesting because they are nowhere to be found anywhere else in the world except France. I bet ya they'll be in America del Sur too.

Mexico City is a very interesting city because of all the Aztec ruins scattered throughout the place. The central plaza is situated on the central plaza of the old Aztec capital, and the old Aztec pyramids are literally just across the street from the Cathedral about 30 feet away. I saw some other pyramids in another part of the city also. The layout of the avenue that goes straight from the plaza to the hill where the old governors palace is was quite artistic. From the porch of the palace you can look right down the avenue straight to the plaza. The city still has remains of the old canals from the Aztec days in the southern part of the city.

It took a while to get out of the city because it is so big and the traffic is so bad. I remember it took me forever to get onto the highway because there was a constant street of cars driving down the exit that I needed to cross. I arrived at the town at the base of the mountain in the afternoon. I rode up the road almost to timberline the next day but turned around I think because it was colder than I expected, so I bought some clothes in the market and climbed the mountain the next day.

The ride up to the mountain was beautiful. After I turned off onto the road that goes straight up the mountain the road got very steep and passed a little village. Then it entered a pine forest and winded up through the cold mist until I got above timberline and was surprised to see a little village. I looked over and saw El Popo there and it was tempting to climb but illegal and I didn't want to risk getting busted so I rode north up the road until I got to the base of the trail that goes up the mountain. I locked my bike to a post and hiked up the trail through thick fog. After a couple of hours I arrived to where the snow starts and hiked up to the top. When I got to the top I was impressed to see an old Japanese guy up there. The view from the top on this clear day beautiful. I could see the smog blanket of mexico city to the west and El Popo to the south that looked about as high as I was, and Puebla in the arid plains to the east with the third largest mountain in north America a little beyond. When I got back to where I locked my bike I discovered the lock had been cut and it was stolen. I deserved it though because I was stupid enough to have a cheap lock as I had lost my good lock a couple days beforehand. I had to hitch hike back to the town I was staying at. The Mexicans who drove me back told me that someone must have followed me up there and ripped me off because I was American.

The next day I took a bus back to the city and got a bus straight to Belize as I had lost my motivation to tour the Yukitan without my bike. I had some extra time so I took the metro to the University and walked around campus a bit. The campus was nicely situated at the base of some mountains and out of the reach of the fog. The metro in Mexico was interesting because there was a large underground labyrinth of narrow tunnels solidly lined with shops.

The bus ride to Puebla would have been a cool bike ride because the descent into the town at the base of the mountain was huge. The bus ride through the Yukitan was kind of boring because it was just straight roads lined by jungle. Every so often the bus was stopped and searched by soldiers. At the time there were problems with Yukitan separatists.

I got off the bus at a boarder town with Belize where I got a bus ride to Belize City.

The bus dropped me off on a small boarder town on the boarder with Belize. I waited in the station for an hour or so and got a small school bus to Belize city. The bus ride was crazy because it was really chaotic. There were young school girls and boys getting on and off the bus at haphazard intervals, and everybody seemed to know each other. The bus was insanely crowded too, with people crawling all over each other to get on and off.

The Belizean countryside was pretty simple. There were trees around but we weren't in a jungle, although it probably was a jungle before it became inhabited with all of the villages that lined the cross country highway which was just a dirt road.

When we got to Belize city I hooked up with an Irish girl, and English girl, and another girl whose name I can't remember and I can't remember where she was from. Right next to the bus station there was a group of Belizean Mennonites. Those are some strange people because they seemed so out of place because they are lilly white blond haired people in the middle of black people. They were all there working loading up all of their furniture in trucks. The furniture looked nice and I heard they were renowned for their furniture making skills and that all they do is make furniture. The men had long beards and the women were dressed in old dutch dresses and they had their children with them.

We all got a dorm room in a nearby hotel, and went out for something to eat. Belize city at night made me feel like I was in Armageddon because old raggedy drunken old men with missing teeth showed up all over the place. One of them even yelled something at us like ''What are you looking at!? Get out of here I'll kill you", but we walked a little faster and he just stood there and yelled at us. There were no lights in the streets either and there were no shops of any kind open.

We were lucky enough to see some action though as a huge carnival-like parade popped up out of nowhere that we latched onto and danced through the city with all of the excited dancing Belizeans.

The next day got a small motor boat to Kaye Caulker 45 minutes away. Kaye Caulker is the smaller of the two major tourist islands off of the coast of Belize. The boat ride was cool because the water was light blue and we zipped in and around marshes and islands of all sizes. When we got to the island we stayed in a hotel on main street. I got a room with a guy from LA. Kay Caulker was cool because there were no cars, it was just a couple square blocks of dirt road, but had houses on it just like a normal neighborhood. It only had one main street that was lined with hotels and restaurants. There were some retired Americans there who had little sandwich shops and stuff who were just hanging out all day enjoying the most relaxed life you could imagine. The local people said it was illegal to run there and some guys even yelled at me for running at one point.

Our first day there we went on a boat tour to swim with the sharks that suck the mollusks out of their shells. These sharks were really tame because they were fed every day by the tour operators that take tourists there everyday, so we could grab their tails and pick them up out of the water. There were also stingrays swimming past and even bumping into us. We were about a half mile from the island where the barrier reef broke the waves from the sea, and we were snorkeling out there against the waves as the water went out again before the waves crashed again.

That night we went to Karaoke for my first time ever and I sang the Irene Cara song ''Fame'', but I don't think that was the right choice for me. I signed up to sing ''Pass the douchi from the left hand side'' but I went outside to get stoned with Sarah and when I came back someone else had already sung it.

The next day the guy who I was staying with suddenly got really horny and wanted to go chick prowling with me on the island, and he was flirting with all of the women on the island who the black women who worked there seemed to feel natural with.

The Belizeans there were super cool. They were really outgoing and talked really natural like you were their buddy. They were basically just like Rasta people from Jamaica. A lot of them had dreadlocks and they talked the same. I invited one guy who worked there to kayak to San Pedro with me which was about ten miles to the north. He would have been a good kayak partner because he got fourth place in the last years around the race with the tricycles they have there instead of cars. But he his boss signed him up for a last minute shift and he couldn't go.

But I got a kid from Seattle to go with me. It was a full moon so we left at sun down. The light of the moon was bright enough to clearly see all the formations on the sea bottom which was only about ten feet down the whole perfectly smooth way to Kaye San Pedro which took us about four hours to get to. When we got to the tip of San Pedro we just put our boat upside down on the beach between two closed down restaurants and hid our paddles and life jackets under it. We walked down the main street into the downtown area and got a meal in one of the central restaurants. San Pedro was clearly much more developed than Kaye Kaulker. Kaye Kaulker was just bamboo and cardboard houses, but San Pedro was full on apartment buildings, stone multi level hotels and Cars. It was a totally different scene and strengthened how cool and much more relaxing Kaye Kaulker was. After our meal we went back to the boat and paddled back. It was darker now and we could see a few different islands in the distance and decided correctly that Kaye Kaulker was the one with the light house shinning. I was cool to kayak through the perfectly still water in the middle of the night, but it was kind of erie not knowing what was below us. At one point he had to change because he was getting cold or something but he was afraid to get in the water. So he had to do some acrobatics in order to change without getting wet. When we arrived at the northern tip of the island we got out of the boat and did some midnight snorkeling with the snorkeling gear that I rented. There was a lot of phosphorescent grass on the sea bottom that when you touch it it lights up.

The next night I went to one of the local discos that was a little more out of the way from the main tourist strip. I was astonished to see that the whole disco was filled with black couples who were all doing the doggy-style dance where they dance as if they are having sex doggy style standing up. And that was basically the only dance they did, just the doggy style in various different ways. I felt kind of self conscious there because I was the only single person in the place. But later more tourists came and I felt more comfortable. But at one point I tried to do a break dance style move where you get down on your back and spin around and I accidentally kicked one tourist girls legs and made her fall right on her ass. I tried to apologize but she and her group here all freaked out like I did it on purpose or something. But one girl who wasn't in their group was totally cracking up. I'm glad I didn't knock any of the black people on their asses though because I heard two weeks beforehand one of them was shot to death right outside of the disco, and my buddy Glen got his tooth chipped in half from a local kid who elbowed him in the face in a soccer game there.

One day there we did some snorkeling on the beach on the north end of the island. The girl I was hanging out with were hanging out with some of the black locals on the island and because I had just recently left the states and had been listening to Art Bell radio a lot I was talking a lot about Aliens. They seemed interested but one guy got kind of emotional telling me it was all hogwash.

After about six days there I took the boat back to Belize city and got a bus to Guatemala. While I was sitting in the bus station I saw a bunch of Mennonites there waiting for a bus. I was tempted to talk to them but they seemed so weird because they weren't talking to anybody, seemed to be speaking another language, and looked in bread to me. I heard they are originally from Holland and went to Canada, but left about a hundred years ago because they didn't want to be attached to any kind of social system and could be more unattached and anonymous in Belize.

On the bus ride to Guatemala I noticed that most of Belize was jungle. The country was really undeveloped. The road that went to Guatemala was just a two lane dirt road that crossed a couple of small villages. I wasn't even on a proper bus, it doubled as the school bus for the local children and the bus for the locals to take small trips in. So it was always stopping to let people on and off it. For a little bit I was sitting next to a Belizean girl who lived in one of the small villages there and was a dentist. She said the best way to learn Spanish was to kiss a Spanish speaking girl to know how the tongue works.

I got of in the first town in Guatemala so I could do the Tikal tour the next day.

This one here is part five and I am now in Guatemala living in a town called San Pedro on a lake called Atitlan. I got here a week and a half or two weeks ago. I have to take the boat across the lake to the other town to get money and do the email. The town I live in don't got no cars where I live my life, which is right there on the lake side.

After Belize I gone to Tikal the Mayan ruins and sawn the tallest pyramid in Latin America that was the rebel base in star wars. It just

poketh out of the canopy the top of it and the rest just overgrown with four foot wide oak trees man. Back in the day there weren't no trees there, but now there's trees every which way going right out of the pyramids. Nature in very resilient. I went to the meditation chamber in the temple next to the two central temples and sat down and got me these thunderous bolts of energy that made me very emotional and I could sit there for hours and not seem like hours, powerful place. This German dude in my tour group said pyramids expand energy from top to bottom. They did the sacrificing there, only there they sacrificed the winner of the ball game, not the loser.

I stayed for a night in the Guatemalan border town of Flores so I could go to Tikal the next day. The part of the town where I was in wasn't anything special because it was right on the dirty highway, but the historic part of the city was very interesting because it completely inhabited a small island with buildings. I walked down the causeway to the island with an Israeli kid who was staying at the same hotel I was and we walked around the island checking out the markets and the plazas and streets. It was very beautiful and touristy but too expensive for my tastes.

We got a bus from our hotel at about six the next morning for the 45 minute or drive to the ancient Mayan ruins of Tikal. The drive was beautiful because we were in a jungle and the fog was still really even after we entered the park. We were with a group of about ten tourists and had a good guide give us a tour of the place for the day.

That night I went to Guatemala city and then straight to San Pedro. This one town called Solola I was walking around in before I got there was in the middle of this yearly independence celebration or something and there were thousands of dressed up schools kids marching around. I was struck with all the Guatemalan clothes being worn by all the locals. I'm sure you all know what I am speaking

of, very colorful garb from head to toe on every man, woman and child; or most anyway. They were the best dressers of anywhere. It kind of reminded me of Tibet, and there faces also do, and china. I tell you it's just plain silliness to say the china people didn't colonize this here place back yonder sometime after you looked at some of these Mayans.

When I got at san Pedro I saw this American dude who said for fifty bucks he would instruct me about the craft of speaking the Spanish language for 4 hours a day for five days. He was a good teacher. When I originally got here I was like, 'I will got to school for a long time', but after after, I was more like, 'fuck school, I know enough, all I need to know now are the darn words', so I study the words from now on, and maybe school in a couple months. There are a lot of interesting characters here as usual. My teacher is very cynical about this country, in between drillings he would go off on these weird theories and stories, which lots of ex-pats do (an ex-pat is someone who has lived in another country for a long time), the type of people who come to third world countries for long periods of time come here because they don't really fit in back home. like they don't like to work, or at least that competitive stressy work we are used to back home. But they are still ingrained with the mores of the first world, so they get pissed off at the laziness and silliness of the locals, and sometimes get cynical and talk trash to all there ex-pat buddies about the country they live in. My Spanish teacher told me that during the civil war here the government killed off all the smart people which added to the inbreeding that naturally happens to village people. These locals are pretty primitive, but they seem smart enough to me. The women smile at you

and say hi, which is more than can be said of some other third world countries I have seen in Morroco and Asia where they are really shy. Here its the women who bother you to buy banana bread, not the men. Actually they aren't women, they are little bitty girlies. They're cute, they ask me my name and I say 'perrrrrrrro loco'. My teacher is moving back to the states in a couple days and a took his house from him. So now I have a house with two bedrooms, a big 'ol flat ceiling, a nice front yard with a half dozen different kinds of trees and green grass, and cable and a stove and toasters and blenders and furniture, and all that for only 66 bucks a month for the whole house. I heard this cool Colorado kid is coming back pretty soon and is bringing his TV, so I will let him and his TV move in so i can watch my MTV 2, which is better that American MTV because its all videos and no stupid game shows (I never got a TV). Ever since I got here I have been sick. I smoked dope the other week and almost died

of an asthma attack. I was walking in circles at two in the morning asking Jesus of Nazareth our savior from the evil dark forces for the sparing of my life, and luckily for me the great one was kind enough to grant me a third chance. But that's all right cause there's boomers (mushrooms) here. I heard every week Mayan women from the south come by the house bringing big 'ol bags of it. Plus the Beer and Margaritas and stuff are cheap. Two bucks for a liter at the bar were all us ex-pats and travelers hang out, we see a movie every night at seven and a half. Everyone here are cocaine heads, its all right, only thirteen bucks for a gram, which would cost a hundred bucks back home. So most of us stay here because of that drug (not me). Its a cool feeling having a numb face and being all awake, and if you do a lot you get all motor mouthy. But you can get grumpy coming down. Plus it kills your appetite, I couldn't even force the food down. This one guy went down four belt notches here. All these ex-pats are broke though, this one French dealer was all freaked out because he didn't have the doe to pay the gangsters from the city back so I gave him 90 bucks to save his teeth from getting knocked out, then this other kid borrowed a hundred and twenty bucks from me and also sold me his digital camera for a hundred bucks. Then this other skinny ass junky borrowed three bucks from me last night. Then today this Belizean dude wanted a bite of my fruit salad, but started eating all of it. I quickly got a reputation for loaning money out to losers, and one day one of the bartenders at Geno's came buy my house to stop it because I would never be paid back and all the travelers here are dirt bags. I had never loaned money out before and not been paid back, so I felt like I just needed to cross that bridge and learn from experience. It's weird just hanging out with the same people in the same bar all the time. I teach them Pente the board game, but now I play it too much. I am the only one studying Spanish, they either already know it or don't bother learning it. So I will hang at my house and memorize it all real good there and be fluent when I leave which may be as long as six months. I don't know, there is this place across the lake where they all dress in white robes and talk to the Pleiadians and live in pyramid shaped huts, this one guy charges like ten thousand bucks to take men into the jungle and strip down to their underwear and bang on drums and cry together. I haven't been there yet, I just heard, I will though, I like the Plaiedians. I'm all hung over now from the cheap beer, I think I must have Vodka orange juice from now on. Anyway, section six will be in a month or so because like I said before there ain´t no email, or cars or international banks were I live, so party on and wish me luck getting my dinero back from the white stuff lovers. peace out.

well, I ain't going to any new places this part of my life so the stuff to report on must therefore be the weird ass scene that I have become part of. Firstly though I am proud to say that I am done with my house. It took many a long time to fix it up, two weeks, cause my Spanish teacher and his buddy stayed there two weeks longer than they said they would because he never got his money from his mom in the mail. They are the biggest slobs ever and left the house in a shambles. And then when he got the money and wanted to get his passport (which was lost a couple years ago) they didn't think he was American cause he is half Korean, and he didn't have any records back home so he was thinking of sneaking back across the boarder, but then his mom found some ID. After I finally cleaned the place up I made a bitching gym on my roof, complete with the sit up inclined padded bench, the back up bench, the bench press bench, the curl bench, and the inclined military press padded seat, a 150 pound barbell, a 100 pound barbell, and three sets of dumbbells; all out of cement. Its pretty dope, and in my spare bedroom I done gone went and made a massage room and put up a sign and flyers. I only charge like ten bucks for an hour and a half massage but I don't know if I will get any business because people come here for the cheap drugs. They probably think I am a coke head trying to get laid or something. But I give free massages to the workers of the bar restaurant I hang out at in place of a tip. Today I will by me a new bike with V brakes, 21 speeds and double racks for 115 bucks. It weighs like 50 pounds, but you get used to that. Then I want to buy a boat, they paddle them standing up here. When I get into my routine, I tell you, I will be living like a king. I will send pictures on the net soon and all of yall will see what a dank ass place this is. But the funny thing is, nobody seems to appreciate the beauty of this place, because they are too busy appreciating the drugs. I don't understand cocaine, the couple of times I have done it, I sit around trying to figure out if I am high or not. But some of these people NEED the shit. There is this one kid from Canada who has been here for years who looks like a holocaust victim, he says he don't got no money so he eats a little bowl of rice a day and spends the rest of the day walking ten feet in the bar and then standing there for 5 minutes, and then walking to the chair and sitting down for a half hour and then walking off to the next place where there are people to do the same thing over again. You see, people come here because they don't like to work, and here you don't have to work and you still fit in. One time that Canadian kid wanted to freebase (make coke into nuggets and smoke it up) with me, and borrow the money for it. So I did it cause I had never done it. We got high, it was cool, but after 5 minutes we came down and then he's like, 'lets get more, please'. So he talked me into getting more two more times and the second time he was begging me and has this pathetic puppy dog desperate look in his eye. I had compassion (or pity or stupidity) and gave him five bucks and was like, 'I'm leaving but enjoy, you owe me'. Then a couple days later he was following me all the way home begging me for more money like he was about to die and I was the only person in the world who could help him. Now every time I see him I'm all, "Where's my money man, you said you would pay be back the next day", and he's all, "I'm broke man, I just eat rice, but I'll pay you back". There's an American girl here who leaned on a wall then gave way and fell 60 feet off a building through four roofs and landed in a basement next to a bed where all these people were doing crack, and one of them worked in the embassy and took the initiative to call her rich uncle and tell him she fell cause she was on crack. Their house is even bigger than mine, three bedrooms, and a huge ass living room, and they pay the same as me, 66 bucks a month. The bar I hang out at is cool, its right on the shoreline of the lake. English people work there, but there is one Mayan girl who works there and they just found out she is a snitch, which explains a lot, because the cops barge in and searched the local coke dealer, but lucky for him he had it stashed in his dreads at the time or he would have been fucked. Another time I was smoking a joint with some Americans on the porch and 20 minutes later the cops came and went right to the porch and searched everyone there. But that Mayan girl doesn't work there at night anymore.

One word of warning: If you have asthma, whatever you do, don't smoke coke. Cause last week when my two best buddies here were leaving, they wanted to go out with a bang of sorts and sniff coke all night before there bus leaves at five in the morning; they wanted to leave in the morning cause people get stuck here and they figured they wouldn't be able to leave unless they just blazed at night without telling anyone, my other buddy did that too, but he left owing me 120 bucks, but i could probably get his email, but anyway, they left me with some extra coke and so I sprinkled it on my bowl all day and smoked it. But you see, coke is a serious ass producer of mucus, so the next day my nose was constantly dripping snot and I had a rock in my face for two days, and it went to my lungs and I was fighting for my life for two or three days. I had to do two different kinds of asthma inhalers and two different kinds of asthma pills. But I pulled through, and now I have decided to quit weed too, cause I have been sick since i have been here and am ready to be healthy.

So I am rolling the rest of the weed I have left into a joint that is like ten inches long and two inches in diameter. I am using two packets of extra sized rolling papers just to make this one joint. I will smoke it up on the Halloween party on Tuesday, and never ever smoker never ever ever again, ever ever. And be healthy god dammit.

The rich girl also said that the Mayans told her that giants live in the volcano behind us and aliens live in the volcano next door, and she saw a ship fly out of the top of it once. So I want to camp out up there and find the hole or something. Anyway, I am leaving on February 20 and going off yonder, and the next email I do will be about all the cool kayaking I am doing and mountain biking accompanied with pictures man, I am excited.

One sad thing that happened here the other week was a bus from my town crashed head on into another bus from the next town and 23 people died from this town and 19 people from the other town. I was tripping on the day they had the memorial service, with all the people and women wailing up on the hill near me, and right then in the middle of the wailing there was an earthquake. The first earthquake I had ever felt. Then these rocks get broken off the bottom of the lake and float to the top, can you believe that? Floating rocks! A heard they cost ten bucks a piece back home but there are every were here after earthquakes, people use them to wash with.

I also want to teach tie massage at the new age place across the lake in return for some Spanish classes, but learning my Spanish in the most important, but you can quote me on this, I will talk Spanish real good when I leave here in February. Party on.

I am no longer a stoner, but now a sober. It has been like three weeks or a month since I smoked weed. And I am sure it will be evident in my writing style, because I am no longer cracking up (laughing) inside anymore, but being serious and old man like. The lungs are under control, but I still have to overdose on the inhalers which make me shake all the time. It is because these houses like the one I live in are from concrete and the toxic cement is always falling off and getting into the air, or maybe weird plants, which there are, because I am always sneezing (I found out later it was from the Coffee field next door). But nevertheless, I am still managing to learn my Spanish, which is the number one priority, the number two priority is to learn to dive from the 30 foot cliffs here, but I haven't had the time for that yet. The weirdest thing about being here is that time is going by very very very very slowly. One week feels like one month and a month is a lifetime ago, people come and go, and my mind goes here and there and that sort of thing. It's really weird, but cool, because that means I can stay young longer, and there is more bang for the buck.

Since the last time I wrote I bought a local two man kayak for 110 bucks that I talked about before that you can paddle standing up. I paddled it seven miles to the other side of the lake and back one day. They are really slow because they are flat on the bottom, but they're cool. This lake is so deep and windy the waves are like 2 and three feet high in the middle, but as soon as the sun goes down the wind stops and it is like paddling on glass. I have canoed to the other side of the lake (the near other side, only 3 kilometers away) to the hippy place twice to do the cliff jumping. One time after the bar closed, this kid wanted to kayak to these ruins like 4 or 5 km's along the shore near the next town for arrowhead hunting. I took advantage of his enthusiasm and slept for an hour in the boat as he paddled, because the bottom is flat. Then we went to the top of this little mini volcano the hard way, climbing up this 30 foot high sheer cliff and machetying through five foot high grass. At one point while I was doing this, he's all, "watch out, the cliffs right there". I was right next to the cliff and didn´t even know it because of all this grass. We bushwhacked through this man high grass until we made it to the top. He was barefoot which I thought was impressive. From the top there was a beautiful view. All of these little hills here are toped with rocks to stand on. There were no pyramids or anything, just foundations. We were bummed and walking back, and then we looked down right on the trail and noticed that all of the rocks were actually pottery shards. Then he found an arrow head, and then I found one, and in forty minutes we had like 20 each on our way walking back on the trail. When we were canoeing back we noticed these amazing cliffs coming out of the lake.

For the last few weeks I have just been studying Spanish all day. I know all the conjugations, and have like a 2500 word vocabulary, and am about to memorize all the irregular verbs. I just can't speak very well cause I don't have to, but I am building a good base so I am sure I will be Mr. fluent by the time I get to Santiago Chile. There are different levels of fluency though, I am on level one, where I can get my point across whatever it may be, and I can understand whatever someone is telling be, but it is slow going. Then there is level two fluency where you can speak fast and correctly and understand most people, and you can even dream in Spanish. i think i will be there when i am in Chile, and then there is level three fluency, which is when you can understand anyone who speaks Spanish, which is a place that i know i will never be. hell, sometimes I can't even understand my English friends when we are all drunk and they are talking fast to each other, it is like they are speaking another language. I actually get off on learning Spanish, it is like playing checkers with yourself. I like it so much that i plan on going to Taiwan and learning Chinese after this Latin America thing. this place is cool to learn Spanish because for one, its cheap cheap cheap, and for two, I its pretty, for three, there's cool people, just ignore the wasteoids and they don't bother you that much. that one kid finally paid me back, not in money because when he gets it he buys coke, but in weed, which i sold. the dealer is only like 20 bucks away from paying me back, and he will. what you have to do if you want to be paid back from an unreliable person and be their buddy, but bug them every time you see them, and they will eventually pay you back. we had this cool Halloween party last month, were all these French DJs who brought all their huge speakers and mix tables and scratch boards and lasers from home entertained everyone all night on top of this hill in this town, i had to go home though because this foot long joint i made took like two hours to die and knocked me on my ass and all these people wanting to pee kept falling over me. there is another one on the beach next week, and then this space buffet (eat the weed buffet) on Christmas and then new years and some more in between. it is cool i am getting all my partying out of the way now so all i want to do in Santiago is work and make money. speaking of partying, I sure don't smoke weed any more and will never again, but you got's to do the coke on these all-nighters, it gives you energy to dance and it is only like a buck a line. I don't like to communicate with anyone when i am on it though, you get kind of paranoid on it, not the same kind of paranoid as with weed, on weed you are timid paranoid, you don't want to say the wrong thing and piss someone off, on coke you are pissed off paranoid, where its the other guy who is always saying the wrong thing and pissing you off, a am only not paranoid on it when i am drunk off my ass. and then the two drugs are made for each other. but to tell the truth, the strongest drug that made me bounce off the walls and get in peoples faces and chat up every one the most of them all is this drug my mom gives me called Dexedrine, this Canadian kid said they do it as his high school, and we took eight times the recommended dosage and it made coke feel like a cup of coffee. anyway, enough with the drug talk, that stuff is bad, it makes people violent, there is this young English dude who lives in the hotel next door and comes by my house and cooks all my meals for me in exchange for me allowing to cook for himself also, so save money, if you cook your own food here, oh my god, it is sooo cheap! a meal is like 25 cents, no joke, no wonder you get these people who come with a 1000 bucks and expect to party for six months, and they do it too. i don´t because i eat out a lot and a eat a lot. but anyway this kid was head butted my this crack head and got a black eye, so he picked up a brick and smashed his face open, and hid a my house for a day. but that guy was run out of town or something later on. as far as the socializing with the locals is going, i was hanging out with these 10 year old banana bread selling girls, they came buy every day and lifted weights with me and did my laundry and cooked for we and talked and stuff, but then they sold me an orange with a slice in it and so i want a free one, but she says she didn't do it, so I said get lost. i think it kind of hurt their feelings but the way you treat these third world kids is double faceted i think, because they are untamed and will go overboard if you let them. they are much more mature on one side, because they fend for themselves by working from a young age and taking care of their baby siblings when the parents are in the fields or what not, but on the other side the ones who hand out with the tourists tend to go overboard sometimes, and the only way to show them when they are out of order is to put your foot down. like there are these little kids who play outside my front yard flying kites and screaming and beating each other up and setting off grenades every two seconds that their parents buy them and they were always afraid to come in my yard, and one day they did, a gang of like ten of them from 3 to 9 or so. and i thought that was cute and let them because i have a nice yard, nicer than the gross alley they play in, but then my neighbor who is my landlord came by and said they aren't allowed in my yard because they are too loud for him and they will steal from me and i was like ok too bad. and the next day they woke me up by playing in my front yard, they ripped my bamboo fence apart and were playing sword fighting with them and i told them to give me my fence back and they all ran home and i chased after them to their houses and took it back and told their parents, who just blamed the other kids. but they don´t come in any more. the point of the story is that it is good to be friends with the kids and give them gifts and be Mr. nice guy, but when they turn into little devils you should make it clear to them what the correct way to act is. too many tourists just write them off and get grumpy and ignore them, with isn't good. this local dude is lifting at my gym now, but he doesn't know that good of Spanish, and I lift with my English friend, but not that much, I am in Spanish mode now. weight till you see the pictures, they will blow you away. no wonder the people here are so happy, they say Buenos noches in this sing song voice and are always laughing. people back home think these people are in survival mode, but i think they are in camping out vacation, saved from all the bullshit stress of the civilized world mode. I'm sure the city is different. but people from the city seem pretty laid back also. the last week I am here I think I will go to the new-ager place across the lake, there is this big rivalry between here and there, San Pedroans (which is where i live) think the San Marcoans (across the lake where the cliffs are) are crazy loopy holier than thow's, and they think san Pedroans are all crack heads and drunken violent degenerates, i think both these places have a pretty wide spread reputation. I go to San Marcos to the massage exchange, this couple who does massage wants to exchange with me after i gave the guy a massage. i haven´t given a massage here more money yet and i ask way less that they do in San Marcos, and the masseurs in San Marcos are always booked and I heard this one lady wasn't even that good. it just goes to show how tourists go to certain places for certain things, and then go to other places for other things, and don´t like to mix their activities in one place so to speak. oh well, sorry for not having pictures, but i assure you, the next one will have nothing but pictures and no words and it will be the best explaining one yet, this place is groovy. until next month or whenever, wish me luck finding someone to show me how to use this here digital camera, no just kidding i know a guy, he is just in the city now. later. number 9 yea so I broke free from San Pedro. But a lot happened since the last time I rode one of these. like i went to Honduras with my friend Stasia and saw Copan the ancient Mayan ruins in northern Honduras. they were cool, big 'ol pyramids connected to one another next to a river. since their hay day the river meandered into the ruins and made some temples fall off, making the biggest archeological cliff in the world. the other interesting thing about Copan is the huge size of the open areas of grass that were perfectly flat, with these eight foot tall statutes of men with really long straight beards. i think those were the aliens who came down and started a school here, because the whole place was a series of flat plazas surrounded by steps for people to observe presentations and performances and things, all of different sizes, and they had one ball court. and the tunnels that went for the observation the games were the perfect size for those big statues. but don't worry, I won't think ye aint weird if ye don't believe me. the place we stayed was expensive but we had a TV, so subtitles in English though. the Hondurans were nice enough but the guy driving us back in the mini van to Antigua was a jerk, the border people forgot to stamp my passport and I needed to get it re-stamped to not have to go to the city and weight a week there, and it was only going to take like two minutes, but he didn't want to let me so i ran out and did it and so he was going to leave me there, and started driving with one lady half way out of the car and this other guy trying to explain to him it was only a couple of minutes and they all wanted to weight, so the guy got all mad and in his face and said i wasn't his brother so what did he care. then the people said they wanted to go the city but he said it was too dangerous, but they said they had friends there, and he said so what, he did too, but he eventually agreed to do his job and take them there. so i guess you got to watch out for the bus drivers in any country you are in except for Austin Texas, they are really nice there, anyway. after that i climbed this big 'ol volcano 3500 meters high the 7th highest in the country, volcano Atitlan, with these two dudes, taking my canoe out at 230 in the morning 5 kilometers to the next town Santiago, and set off climbing, I was frying in the alpenglow was most beautiful as the sun was rising, and as we got higher we could see all the areas of non forest, just six foot tall prickle grass that we machetied through, and figured that was their old farming ground, and after they exhausted the soil they moved somewhere else. we bush whacked all the way to the top, almost anyway, the last kilometer or mile or so was scree, but at the top the whole mountain was steaming all over and the earth was warm, you could spend the night here naked and stay warm. then we saw the volcano fuego blow steam a thousand feet into the air next door which is right next to Antigua, it was right next door, but a three hour bus ride, because these roads are so narrow and they stop so much to let people on and off. we slept there for an hour and then hiked down at two, but we didn't remember where the trial we blazed up was so we had to blaze another trail down, which took many hours, then it got dark and we got funneled into a canyon where all the huge ten foot tall grass was, and soon it was lined by cliffs, so we had to go down the bottom of it. but the grass was so high we had to either swim on top of it until we got to the flood stop ups of wood and dead grass and dirt that we had to spelunk down under the logs through holes barley big enough for us. then i realized i left my backpack at the last rest place, and had to spelunk 20 minutes back up to get it and down again, then we got to a cliff, but we couldn't see the bottom of it, I though about jumping and hoping it wasn't that far, but then my light and my buddy glen's light died at the exact same time so we were in pitch black, so we made a fire, and laid next to it all night, and it was supper cold because we only had our shorts and jackets on, but the fire made it alright, in the morning we hiked for an hour and found a trail and three hours after got back to town and boated back, me, glen from BC, and Gregor from Slovenia. so next time you climb a jungle mountain remember to stay on the ridges at all costs, and remember exactly where your trail up was, so you don't have to bush blaze twice, and be careful were you step because cliffs can appear out of nowhere in all that grass, and go in long pants because my legs were raw after that. after that it was party season, i missed this full moon party they had on the beach cause i was in Antigua, which sounded like fun cause every body was whacked out of their minds on all sorts of stuff. that is San Pedro for you, drug lovers. like 18 year old Curtis from Canada who i did the other trail blazing trip with who had counted the 130 hits of LSD he did, and said he made 20000 bucks selling ecstasy at a party, but gave it all away to charity the next day, and 18 year old john who's dad imported coke from brazil and bought a castle in Scotland and in London from it, or bud who i loaned 70 bucks to so he wouldn't get his ass kicked by the drug gangsters, which he paid me back, but then i gave him 50 more bucks to get me heroin, but he was got for two weeks and when he came back didn't remember me giving it to him or even where my house was. or my Vietnam vet friend who was flying over Costa Rica in a helicopter and had a flash back and jumped out and ran through the jungle for nine hours running away from the gooks. he was cool, got his 2700 bucks a month from the government and spent it on beers entertaining his friends. i hung out with the Deno's crowd, who liked drugs but also had there shit together. i have to say the best thing about that place was the movies every night. i didn't speak any Spanish, but i studied a lot, and am confident i will be fluent a month or so after i travel by my self. party season was cool enough, on the 23 the drug dealer and some friend of mine came over and we smoked crack and sniffed coke until six in the morning, and right when the sun was rising we went up on my roof to my gym and were working out, and nick, the rich local Mayan dude, who is my neighbor, came out and was laughing at us. then there was the French DJ party on the 24, and the Christmas space buffet, i was greedy and hogged all the gravy thinking it wasn't strong enough, but got all comatose and had to go to bed, which is too bad cause they played Austin powers two that night. then the new years thing until sunrise was cool, they had all these new drinks, and i had all of them and probably would have puked if i didn't have a big 'ol line. then after that i finally went to Spanish school for five days. my teacher was only 20 years old and didn't speak a word of English, and i don't even think her Spanish was too good because i had to show her all these conjugations and rules and stuff. but it was the first time I actually sat down and talked Spanish with someone, and found out that i am fluent, I just need practice accessing all the conjugational stuff and putting it right, and she was good at that, correcting me and stuff. she is a full blood mayan girl complete with the colorful outfit and all that like all the women here have, but when I started getting philosophical with here she had the same attitude as your stereotypical fundamentalist Christian. saying spirit channelers are all of the devil and witches and all that, and that Santiago the next town over is were all of them are. and she was preaching about Jesus and how they all go to church at five in the morning every Sunday. this country pretty much shuts down completely on Sundays because of church, there are 13 churches in San Pedro alone and my book says it only has six thousand people in it, it has Jehovah's witnesses, and the catholic church is the biggest. i thought that was strange cause the Indians back home are so anti establishment and pro "our way, the every thing is alive spirit way" time thing. that is one reason i am excited to learn Spanish. I will talk up the wazoo with them Incans, cause I will be by myself and double fluent in Spanish then I tell ya. there was this big 'ol annual rainbow gathering there that week but I was too busy to check it out, I saw all the dared-locked hippies all over though. after class, I climbed the highest mountain in central America with Glen and my friend Eric from Sweden. 13,800 feet high. that was a cake walk cause the bus took us way up there and the hike was through open fields and pine forests like back home, none of this jungle stuff. it was beautiful, we could see the second highest mountain in central America right across from us sticking out of this eternal and quiet thick cloud blanket. then we went home and the next day i sold my boat for 40 bucks and all the contents in my house for 30 bucks and blazed with my buddy mat from northern England and Glen from BC. and partied in Panajachel, the big tourist town across the lake for three days. where they got themselves some local girlfriends and made me take care of their fat sister who had no personality and kept giving me these faces like my Spanish was bad, but she taught me how do dance salsa, which seemed to me at the time like the simplest easiest kind of dancing around, you just step around and follow the steps of your partner, and that's it, but plus these girls kept correcting our Spanish which was great, like we were in school, if i can find people like that to hang out with i will be talking like a local in just a few months. after that they invited me to travel with them down to Monte Rico, the beach resort on the pacific coast. very beautiful this place is, wide dark sandy beaches stretching as far as you can see, and cabanas also, but only four tourist hotels on the whole stretch, quiet undeveloped and ready to blow, if they pick up the trash they keep throwing down. it is fun traveling with other people, i have never traveled with other people before, I have pretty much totally lost my ability to speak Spanish though, since speaking English with them so much. one thing i forgot to mention is that when we were in Panajachel we felt that big earthquake that happened off the coast of El Salvador that killed 350 people and made 3000 go missing, it was a 7.9, at like 10 in the morning i was sleeping and was woken up by my bed shaking violently, i thought my buddy was shaking it and looked up and we were all in our beds looking at each other like "wow", that lasted like a minute. we were about a hundred miles off the epicenter. yesterday we arrived in el Salvador. this place is different than Guatemala in that the people are more Spanish looking and less Mayan looking, and they all try to speak English to me. plus when i go to the bank they give me dollars, because a couple of weeks ago they decided to switch from Colonas to dollars, so every business I go to I have the option of paying in dollars and getting my change in Colonas, so they are always doing these mathematical calculations with these conversation charts figuring out the exchanges rate. i tell you what, it sure feels like i am not spending much money when i pay in dollars. like now i am in the second largest city in El Salvador, Santa Ana, and I give the hotel three dollars, and a get all these colonas change from it. so i am still with these two guys, it costs double to take by bike on the bus, but the last bus didn't charge me, so maybe not all of them will. it definitely is different worlds traveling with other people, always hanging out together and whatnot. after this we will go to a lake and then surfing in La Libertad, I guess the best surf spot in Central America. then Honduras. mat (who used to work at Deno's, the place i hung out in San Pedro) is going the same route and pace as me, so we may stick together a while, if it isn't too much for the bike. one cool thing about traveling with these guys is they really take their time in each country and place, and i usually zip through places, so it is teaching me to be patient, but then again, I wanted to take my time in south America and climb those mountains. i plan on flying to this island in panama from the city for 27 bucks and then sailing to Cartagena Columbia for 185 bucks and taking the bus to Bogotá, and then the bus to Ecuador. i haven't seen one other tourist here in this city which is weird, cause you seen many of them all over usually. I guess tourist don't really like El Salvador, maybe that is why the locals are so outgoing and eager to practice their English. anyway, that's about it. the next chapter will probably be when i am at last on the road by myself intermingling with the locals.

At the boarder Glen and I had to pay a fifteen dollar tax but Matt didn't. We had to have a bus transfer to get to Santa Ana. The final bus ride was beautiful as it went up and over a big jungle pass. Santa Ana is a nice colonial city with the ruin of an earthquake destroyed church on one of the two central plazas. After spending a day here I broke off with Glen and Matt because I felt like bike touring so I rode to San Salvador and they climbed a couple of volcano's. I spent a day exploring San Salvador. It is a pretty big city with no modern skyline that is built on a slope in a large valley. It was kind of boring because there was nothing special to see. There were American flags all over the place and a lot of the people I met told me they had relatives in America. El Salvador had some political problems in the 80 like most of the countries in central America and the states let a bunch of El Salvadorians take refuge. I rode down to the beach to see if I could do some surfing but the waves weren't good. I had a really interesting hotel room in that town of La Libertad. I don't know what my room was originally, maybe a big water tank, but my room was up on a tower up above the building, and one of the highest buildings, and it had windows on every side, so I had a 360 degree view of the whole town.

The next day I spent walking around the market and checking out the beaches. Then I took the bus back to San Salvador.

The next day I rode my bike up a steep dirt road to the boarder with Honduras, but they didn't let me in because my passport photo was completely smudged away from the moisture under my stairs where it was kept in Guatemala, so I had to take the bus back. I noticed on that ride that most of El Salvador is deforested so it is kind of ugly. They do have their share of volcanoes and lakes though. That night I went to the hotel next door to get a beer and asked the people there if they had seen Glen and Matt, and they happened to be there, so I hung out with them which was cool.

The next day I went to the Embassy to get another passport, and the American woman who attended me kept telling me I should have taken care of the passport. I kept explaining to her that they shouldn't have given me an unlamented photo, but she seem to be listening. She asked me when I wanted my new one and I said immediately and so I got another one in about an hour, but I had to pay 60 bucks, luckily with a lamented photo. The next day I took the bus into Honduras.

The second time I attempted to enter Honduras was the successful one. I took the bus down some beautiful jungle mountain roads. Bus left me off at the first town so I could ride across the rest of the country. I stayed in a town called Nueva Octopeque. The town reminded me of the towns I saw in Spain and Portugal where they are all small and peaceful with almost no cars and narrow ancient cobble stone roads, and white connected buildings. I stayed one night there. I happened to have a TV in my room and that night the super bowl was happening so I got to watch it. One team trounced the other one, I don't remember. It was the 2001 Super bowl. The next day I opted to take the bus to the next town. I think the second biggest town in Honduras called San Pedro Sula where I stayed for a night. On the bus ride I was talking to a guy but I don't remember what it was about. The city is in a valley on the east side of the mountains, I know this because I remember descending the hills in the bus while I was talking to the guy. I got a hotel about ten blocks from the short pedestrian mall marking the center of the town. There were some friendly looking young Honduran girls working the desk but I got hypnotized by my TV watching an American TV show. I remember in those days I used to be transfixed by American TV and addicted to Movies when I was traveling. I spent a day there when I rode my bike down to the center. While I was locking up my bike one black girl approached me and asked me

I had to stand in a long line to cross the border into Nicaragua. I could tell immediately that this was a poor country because of the dismal state of the buses. We drove through a temperate area and past a fascinating looking huge bare brown cone volcano and into Managua.

Managua is an interesting place because it has a historic city center right on the shore of a huge lake that is totally dilapidated. In 72 there was an earthquake that killed 10,000 people and destroyed the center. But when international donations came the dictator, Samoza stole all of it so they never rebuilt it. So today there are plazas, parks, churches, and government buildings that are broken apart and abandoned. There weren't any other businesses there either, just drunks sitting around. I stayed in a house-hotel in a peaceful little neighborhood not too far away and saw a movie at the local indoor mall. I went to an internet place next to the stadium where they play their national sport, football, and was talking to an African guy who was there on vacation.

I had to do something, I don't remember what it was, but I had to ride to another part of the city and noticed that apart from the traditional center which was abandoned, there was no city center. Just roads leading through fields to the various businesses that a city has. On the ride back I checked out the lake that was near the historic center. It was a perfectly round natural lake surrounded by cliffs. It looked like a comet had comes and punched a hole in to the earth that then filled up with water.

The ride to Granada was nice because there wasn't too much traffic. I stopped off for a tour of a pretty colonial town on the way called Malasia. It had cobble stoned streets and some nice outdoor cafes. Granada was beautiful because of the colonial buildings and friendly feel. It seemed to me as an aspiring tourist town. I stayed in a hotel with a lot of other tourists in it. I rode along the nice sandy beach lining Lake Nicaragua which I couldn't see the other side of. I could see the giant volcano in the middle of it off in the distance.

Granada has a cool history. It was one of the major colonial towns back in the day because the Spanish could take their ships all the way up the river into the lake and park them on the shores of Granada, so it was like a coastal city.

The boat ride to the island was exciting because the waves were really high and it was at night. There was a mentally ill Nicaraguan woman in there who was screaming nonsense in a very suffering voice at the top of her lungs for the entire multi hour journey, but nobody paid attention to her. On that boat I was talking to a German girl named Silka and her Argentineans friends.

The island in the middle of the lake was very primitive. The main city a couple kilometers inland was connected by an unkempt dirt road, and had just dirt roads. The plaza was surrounded by just tiny stores and was very slow. I stayed in a nice little hotel where I met a German kid and a guide who worked at the hotel who took us up the volcano the next day. The guide was a native of the island and was into Tai Kwan do and had traveled around a little bit going to competitions. We got up at like five and walked up the trail through a beautiful jungle trail through some trees with huge leafs. The guide was funny because he was practicing his punches as we were hiking. We dropped the guide and got to the top of the volcano in a cloud were we couldn't see more than a few feet which bummed me because the view would have been awesome. It was also incredibly windy. The guide said it was always like that. For a little bit I could see south to the next volcano which was a little shorter. I wish I had climbed that one too because it has a lake on the top of it, which sounds really mystical. I could see how the two islands were together and remembered how the book said that they were two separate islands when the Spanish arrived but an eruption from the southern volcano caused them to grow together a couple hundred years ago.

The next day I took a boat to the south western part of the lake where the river that the Spanish took lets out into the Gulf of Mexico and got stamped out of Nicaragua for the boat ride down another little river to Costa Rica.

I got stamped out of Nicaragua and then tried to get on the boat but it was too full to accommodate my bike so I had to weight for the next boat that was a couple hours later. As I was leaving the shed where they stamp people in and out the boarder agent asked me why I hadn't left on the boat and I told him I would have to weight for the next boat and I wanted to roam around the town until then. He told me it was illegal to let me out of the building and back into Nicaragua once I had been stamped out so he told me not to go anywhere and let me out. When the next boat came it was just like the one before. A small long and narrow tour boat powered by a small outboard motor, but they let me put my bike on the roof.

My introduction to Costa Rica was very interesting because it was a nature tour and a Boarder crossing rolled into the same experience. Because I was the first person there I got the front seat of the boat and got to see all sorts of cool animals. I saw crocodiles swimming in the calm narrow river, I saw turtles all over the place, there were trees with vines growing off of them, I saw storks and parrots and other birds of all colors and sizes. I was really cool.

The first town I saw in Costa Rica was a far cry from the third world dirt road town I left from in Nicaragua. This town even seemed like it was in a first world country from the looks of the well paved roads and freshly painted buildings and cleanly cut healthy grass.

The bike ride to San Jose would have been very nice but I didn't have the patience so I got a bus. The woman I sat next to on the bus was a school teacher and I talked her ear off because I was in the mood to practice my Spanish, but she wasn't very talkative. Costa Rica was a very beautiful country judging from the hilly jungle countryside, the tidy towns we passed through and the winding roads.

I arrived at San Jose at night and got a hotel in the center. The next day I rode my bike around the city and checked out their zoo which was OK. I tried to go to the casino on the top level of the big hotel so I could look out over the city but the doorman wouldn't let me because I had shoes on. The city was smaller than I expected it to be. It didn't even really look like a city because it wasn't very big and there were no skyscrapers. It did have a nice pedestrian mall though. I went to an internet place there and asked for a computer and I heard the guy tell me to wait so I took that to mean that there were no computers available so I went for a walk and came back a half hour later and he tried to charge me because he thought I had been on the computer. I told him that I thought he said the computers were full up so I went for a walk, but he told me I owed him money for the time anyway. I tried to explain the logic to him but he wouldn't have it, so I had to leave and find another internet place which for some strange reason wasn't easy. That night I went to the indoor mall they had there and saw Castaway with Tom Hanks which I liked.

The next morning I rode out of town towards the south. After an hour or so of riding I got to the pass and rode up the jungle mountain which was beautiful because I was in the foggiest jungle I had ever been in. The fog was just coming and going, and when it was at its strongest I could barely see a hundred meters in front of me. I rode to a bird sanctuary near the top of the pass to do a bird tour of the jungle but it was too expensive so I just stayed at the hotel they had there. It was beautiful and peaceful there because it was in the middle of the jungle up on a hill offering a good view, and it was cold, which was cool because this was the first time I had felt cold since I had been out of the U.S.

That night I was talking to some Columbian American guys who lived in Miami and I told them that I planned on going to Columbia, at which they preceded to take it upon themselves to earnestly try to persuade me to not go for about an hour. They told me that their friend had just had just gone there to visit for a couple days and disappeared and was surely murdered, and that if I went I would surely be dead within two days. They told me other stories of people they knew who had been kidnapped and murdered there and frightened me in such a way as though they thought I was crazy enough to go their even though they told me not to, so I figured that I had better not go to Columbia this time.

The next morning I rode a little bit up to the top of the pass and then rode down one of the longest downhill's I had ever ridden to a small town where I had some hamburgers, and then rode up again to the top of another pass where I descended down to a popular surfing beach I think called Dominical. I got a room there and went for a walk down the dirt main road next to the giant beach. I saw a sign for a place that gave massages so I went in and offered a trade for a Thai massage. They were a man and a woman, and I gave the massage to the woman and the man gave me some kind of Reiki treatment. Then we went to watch a soccer game at the bungalow I was staying at.

The next day I rented a surfboard and surfed for the day. The water was nice and warm and it was fun swimming around in the waves, but I didn't catch anything because I didn't have a giant board and the waves broke straight against the beach and weren't all that big. There were a lot of surfers there though.

The next day I road down south towards Panama and got a hotel in a small town of which the name I can't remember. I went to a karaoke bar and sang I'm looking for a white Christmas in the best Frank Sinatra that I could do and the people seemed to think it was amusing. The next day I rode into Panama and got about half way to the city but I got bored and got a bus the rest of the way.

I was excited about Panama city because of the canal. I got a cool hotel room in a historical ancient hotel with high ceilings with my room facing the historical plaza. I found it strange that one of the cheapest hotels to stay in in the entire city was also the most historical and right on the historical central plaza next to all of the historical landmarks. I spent a day there riding my bike around the city center that had a lot of modern sky scrapers. Panama has a nice pedestrian mall that is an experience in itself because you can see just how cosmopolitan the place is. Is was like a picture from a science fiction movie where all the races of the world live together harmoniously in their traditional garb. I saw East Indians with their garb all over the place, West Indians such as Guatemalans in their traditional cloths, blacks, whites, middle easterners, everybody. Clearly the canal had the obvious effect of mixing the place up, but in a very powerful and interesting way. I also rode my bike out to the edge of the peninsula along a nice bike path that was shared by a lot of vacationers and exercisers which offered a nice view of the impressive Panamanian skyline.

I rode out to the gates of the canal a few kilometers inland to do the tour. I had to pay a few bucks (which is the money they use there) to get in and sit on a platform where they explain what is going on over loudspeakers. They have those gates to control the flow of water through the canal because one side in like fifty feet above the other. The boats go in one side and then are raised or lowered in a tub and then let out on the other side. After seeing the gates I rode through a huge park and up to the top of the local hill and enjoyed a great view of the city.

While I was walking downtown I bumped into Monica, the German girl who I met on the boat in lake Nicaragua. She was hanging out with some Columbian guys who where living there and invited me to party with them in their apartment. They were really cool and played Shakira for us, who I wasn't aware of at the time.

The next morning I set off to ride my bike to the airport and I saw an indian guy all decked out in cycling gear riding a road bike and asked him where the airport was and he told me. When I got there they didn't let me put my bike right on the plane, I had to pay like twenty bucks to have it wrapped in plastic like twenty times. Then I was off to Ecuador.

Arriving in Ecuador was one of the most exciting times in my life because I was actually going to the magical continent of South America. I was supposed to land in Quito but because of cloud cover we had to land in Guyaquil, which is actually the biggest city in Ecuador. We all got on a bus to a really nice hotel. I got my own room with two beds, cable TV and a nice bathroom. I was totally stoked to be staying in a nice place like that for free, but the other people in the plane were mad because they just wanted to go on with their short vacations. There were a couple of American women who were doing a tour of the Galapagos islands, and an English engineer who was there on business helping design bridges. I went to the hotel gym on the roof and saw another American guy from the flight who shared the same excited sentiments as myself. We lifted weights for a little bit and then I went to my roof and watched TV until late. The next morning we had a nice buffet breakfast in the posh dining hall. I saw my pilot who happened to be the indian cyclist who gave me directions to the airport in Panama. That was pretty wild. Then we boarded and flew to Quito.

I ended up staying in Quito for three weeks. Quito is one of the coolest places to visit because it has a lot of unique characteristics. It is really high at 2850 meters and only 22 kilometers from the equator, so it has perfect year round weather. There are 4300m mountains just to the west of the city that are green all the way to the top. Quito is the city with the most market difference between the historical center and the commercial center. I usually get a hotel in the historic part of town, but I heard that the hotel ''center of the world'' in the commercial center was a fun place to go. The guy who ran the place, a gay French Canadian dude, did the brilliant thing to turn the place into a big ''do it yourself'' travelers resource center, and party place all packed into one. I think every city should have a place like this. He had photos and descriptions of all of the cool places to visit pinned up all over the walls, and a lot of big rooms filled with bunk beds. And had a kitchen that we could all use and a patio in the back. On Fridays he would fill up a glass tub with Cuba libres (Rum and Coke) and have competitions on who could identify travelers photos. He divided the whole place into two groups of about ten people and we had to take turns deliberating on where a photo was then make our guess. I was excited to play and thought we were going to win, but I was the guy who was delegated by my group to say where it was, and I was really drunk and accidentally said the wrong place even though I meant to say the right place and we lost.

My first day there I did a tour of the historic center which was interesting. It was built up against a hill which marked the south end of the city before it descended into the valley which leads to the south. There are a lot of old traditional buildings there. There was a traditional plaza and a big parade happening when I was there which happens a lot in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. I did a tour of a colonial art place and the girl who did the tour for me told me that the difference between North America and South America is that the Catholic church brought people to South America, but people went to North America on their own volition. I did another tour of an old house of an aristocrat. The my first Saturday there I tried to ride by bike down to where they have the bungee jumping, which is 90 meters high off of a big bridge but I went the wrong way so I did it the next Saturday, wich is the only day they do it, by bus. I went there alone, and got their just in time to see a girl standing on the edge for a couple seconds and then jump. She fell for a good few seconds before stretching out the rope and she continued to fall for a really long way down. There were about 50 Ecuadorians watching from the parking lots on both sides of the bridge who had apparently come there just to watch the tourists jump. Then I walked up and didn't have to stand in line behind anybody. They took my 50 bucks and told me that if I chickened out they weren't going to give my money back. So I got hooked up and they explained to me how they were being really careful and the I was not only hooked up to the rope by my feet, but by another normal harness around my waist and legs. The guys who worked there did a count down from five and I jumped about a second after they all said 'go!'. The fall was the most intense experiences of my life, even more intense than what I expected, because in no time I was falling headfirst so fast that I could hear the loud wind rush through my ears as if I stuck my head out of a car going 60 miles an hour, so the screams were ripped from me. I screamed uncontrollably as loud as I could for the entire fall until I slowly slowed down from the stretch of the rope, and then started screaming again as it pulled me way up again to were I could see the faces of the people on the bridge and fell again. I screamed a little more on the third rebound, and rebounded about a half dozen times before I lay hanging for about a minute not very high above the river below me. They all pulled me up by getting volunteer spectators to grab the rope and walk along the bridge. When I got back to the top I was still in shock and they were kind of laughing along with me. I left right after that and didn't see anybody else in line to jump after me.

I met a lot of people who were there for about the same amount of time that I was. Towards the beginning of my time there I climbed Mt Cotopaxi 5800m with a South African guy. We rented the gear from a place about two blocks from the hotel, and then stocked up on food at the supermarket, and left really early the next morning on the bus to the next town over where we got a taxi to take us up the dirt road to the parking lot a couple couple hundred meters below the shelter. We hung out that night for a little bit with a Columbian couple and an American guy and his friend and a girl from Boulder who had traveled there alone but had a harness and hooked American guys rope. Cotopaxi is a volcano that is covered in glaciers and has crevices on it. The American guy was trying to talk us out of going the next morning because we didn't have a rope, but they all let us hike up with them the next day. We hiked up the scree slope in the dark, and the sun started to rise about the same time we started walking in the snow. We got to a point in the middle of a mellow area where we had to cross a crevasse that was about six feet wide over a bridge that was about six feet wide. I looked down it and just saw blackness. After the five roped together people walked across it no problem, we scampered across it as light footed as we could. Then it started to get steeper and we got to the sheer rock cliff which you can see all the way from Quito and walked around it. After that it was a straight shot to the top up a 50 degree slope. We got to the summit just as the sun was rising over the mountains, and we could see the giant cone shaped shadow the mountain made over the terrain. I could see Mt Chimborozo about 50 miles to the south, Quito to the north, and some other high mountains to the north east. We could look down the caldera which was smoking a little bit. We hung out up there for almost an hour and then hiked back down. That night the others got away because their drivers came, but hour taxi who we pre-paid for half of the ride never showed up, so we had to pitch a tent and catch a ride back the next day with some American English teachers who had tried to climb the mountain the day after we went but couldn't because the weather wasn't good enough.

Quito has a nice park with a big skate converted from an old fancy pool, and a BMX race course and a big half pipes were full of people as well as the whole park which was huge. We went to the park in a group of like 15 people once. We did everything in huge groups. On the weekends we went to the Discos which were just a couple blocks from the hotel. While I was there I went to the a dentist on the main commercial street to have my teeth looked at, and she put in like eight fillings. I asked her to fill in a chip on my front tooth that my uncle had put there three years beforehand but I had broken off five months earlier when I was eating a cake stoned and put the whole fork in my mouth and bit down on it. At first the lady told me she couldn't do it so I told her that my uncle did it, so without asking she started drilling into my tooth. I was kind of stupid and let her do that for a second until I realized what she was doing and told her to stop and she said she had to to make it work and I said she didn't. Then she splooged on the stuff on my tooth in a haphazard glob and charged me and set me off. It was a really bag job because it wasn't even on my tooth at all and fell off about five months later.

After my trip to Cotopaxi I wanted to make another one to the top of Ecuador's highest mountain, Chimborazo, which, standing at 6310m, is the closest point on earth to the sun because it is so close to the equator. I got some people interested in climbing it and then a lot of people signed on so we got a couple of guides to take us up in a van. It was my first trip though the rolling Andes hills and I saw the Llamas for the first time which make South America unique. After we climbed out of the green pastures and into the barren rocks and moss we started driving on snow that had been falling for the prior couple days. At one point we got stuck in a switchback and everybody got out to puke except me and then the guy just kept driving which wasn't necessary. I told him to weight but he said the hotel was just a little bit further but it wasn't. The others had to hike about ten minutes to get there. The guides cooked for us and we hung out at a nice fireplace. The next day we hiked a couple hundred meters more to the next refuge. We spent a day walking around the snow and sliding down the snow and practicing self arrests. We got up at like three the next morning and hiked about an hour up to a steep place and then turned around because they said it was storming on the top. There were some Indians in a group behind us who continued but turned around a couple hours late. Our guides told us they thought that was weird because Indians are usually superstitious of the mountains.

The ride out of Quito was interesting because I descended a lot to get into the valley that led to the south. It started raining really hard on me before long and I didn't have a rain coat so I was kind of uncomfortable. I saw some train tracks coming up and I knew that because it was raining if I didn't want to wipe out I would have to pick up my front wheel while I went over the tracks that I was hitting at 45 degrees. I lifted up my front wheel, but my back wheel slid all the way down the tracks until my bike was at 45 degrees and banged the road pretty hard as if I was landing a high jump; I didn't wipe it though. I saw a sign for a bed and breakfast on the side of the road so I rode up to the place but it was a guy alone in a nice house. He claimed to not have any food in the house at all which I found puzzling because he had to survive there. He told me about a place nearby where I could buy food but I couldn't find it so I sent him to get me something. I hung out with him that night which was cool because I hadn't had many opportunities to practice my Spanish before then. The next morning I rode into the town south of Quito and stayed the night there, but the next day I took the bus to the next town, and then rode my bike down into Baños. Baños is a cool place because it is a nice little tourist town in a deep valley, in fact a very deep valley because it is at the base of a 5000m mountain. It is really lush there and caters to tourists so there is a nice pedestrian mall and a lot of good restaurants with pizzas and stuff. I stayed there one night and went to the local natural hot springs which offered a nice view of the valley. I didn't have the motivation the next day to ride out of the valley so I got a bus. While I was sitting in the bus lot waiting for my bus I saw the weirdest traveler ever. This gringo kid rode his bike past me with a box strapped to his back rack with a happy boarder collie sitting back there. The guy took his dog bike touring with him!

I took the bus to the big southern town of ?. It was an all day ride and probably the most beautiful of all in South America because it was up and down misti green mountainsides on narrow roads. The hostel I went to in that town was unique in that my bed was right next to the bar restaurant party place. I was kind of tired and didn't feel like drinking or hanging out so I went right to bed, but from the noise I might as well have been in the bar. It didn't bother me though, I actually thought it was kind of cool. I spent a day there riding around and checking out the markets. The city was beautiful because it was in a valley next to a pretty big river, and the buildings were colonial. That afternoon I got a bus ride out and over the mountains for another day of constant climbing and descending. It would have made great bike touring. I can't remember why I didn't have the motivation to ride, I think it was because I was so excited about going to Peru. I stayed one night in a small town that was pretty off the beaten path. I got a room next to the plaza and spent a day walking around. I was the only tourist I saw there. The next day I took the bus to the boarder to Peru.

My entrance to Peru was pretty interesting. It was at night and I didn't feel like riding my bike so I was asking the bus drivers to let my take my bike on with them but nobody wanted to. I eventually got a ride on a taxi who took me to a small town north of Piura, from which I took another bus to Piura. The drive was interesting because there were cows all over the road for the first half hour or so of the ride, and they didn't want to get out of the way. I noticed right away from the dirt roads in the town and the dilapidated roads that Peru was less developed than Ecuador.

I went to Piura for no other reason than that it had a map in the Lonely Planet book. It had a nice big plaza with a big tower in the middle of it, but unfortunately it was closed to the public. I remember noticing a few furniture movers loading a truck and seeing how they just threw everything together instead of packing the stuff first like they do in the states.

After Piura I took the bus to Trujillo. The bus ride surprised me by how much of a desert the Peruvian countryside was. It was basically one big sand dune, with some very primitive wood stick huts lining the road every once in a while. I was excited to arrive in Trujillo because I had heard that it had the longest wave in the world 75 kilometers to the north of it, and that it was a good place to teach English. But it was much smaller than I expected it to be. It was just a small town in the middle of the dessert, but it was quaint and I liked it. It seemed like a happy oasis.

My first day there I rode my bike seven kilometers out of the city to the old ruins of Chan Chan. This place was fascinating because it was enormous. The original city covered 26 square kilometers and the ruins seemed to cover about that area also. The center of the ruins was a walled in city built in AD 1300 that contained 10,000 dwellings. Even though it was seven hundred years old, parts of the walls looked brand new. The inside of the city was like a giant labyrinth, and in the middle was a large area where the central garden was, which reminded me of what the garden of eden must have looked like. There were actually still plants growing in the old pit they dug for the garden, which was really interesting because there were no plants anywhere for kilometers around. There was a lookout built in the grounds were I could look out over the wall which was really tall and made that place look like a real fortress.

After I left Chan Chan I went rode around exploring and noticed that there were old dilapidated and ignored pyramids all over the place. I rode my bike to one of them, which by now didn't look much more than a mound of rocks, but was still clearly an old man made pyramid.

After Chan Chan I rode my bike through Trujillo and to the other side to some ruins of another temple at the base of a hill called Huaca de la Luna. This is a well preserved multi layered building that had some well preserved wall art.

400 meters from Huaca de la Luna was a very interesting old temple called Huaca del Sol. Even though it is ancient and the largest pre-columbian structure in Peru, it was just sitting next to a neighborhood unprotected by any fences. I rode my bike around it marveling at the giant structure that consisted of 140 million adobe bricks. It is fascinating to look at these old structures and see how they deteriorate with time. I think the Huacas del Sol and La Luna were from the civilization before Chan Chan, which lasted from 0-700 AD, so these structures were almost two thousand years old. I recommend anyone who comes to Peru to come to Trujillo and see these ruins because there are so many of them and you can see how there was once a huge city here.

The neighborhoods of Trujillo were interesting to me because the houses were so simple, being just adobe huts, and the neighborhood roads were just sand. I stayed in Trujillo one more day just walking around and surfing the web. I also saw Erin Brockovitch in the Cinema.

I though about riding my bike to my next place, Huaraz, which would have been a beautiful ride, but I wasn't very excited about riding through the dessert, so I took the bus.

I remember arriving in Huaraz was very exciting for me because I could see huge mountains around me in a beautiful mountain town. I could see Huarazcaran from the town, which is the highest mountain in Peru at 6700 M. I wanted to climb it but I heard later that it was too early in the year. I stayed in a hotel for one night until I found a better place where I met some cool people. But I was riding my bike on main street the next day and a Swiss guy on a bike rode up to me and started talking to me and showed me a better place to stay which was tucked away in an alley. I can't remember the Swiss guys name was, but he was really cool and I wish I had gotten his email. He was living in Huaraz making his money doing handy work for the Peruvians. He had a little cabin there that I never visited. He was there in Huaraz running every day training for a marathon that was coming up in a few months.
One day I rode out of town with him to one of his friends houses who was selling weed. The guy was interesting. He was an indian but was interested in Indian from India mythology and was vegetarian. I started talking to him about aliens and he believed that they were here on earth and also believed that they made the Nazca lines and the stones in and around Cuzco.

A lot of people in Peru seem to be alternative in one way or another. I met a few other vegetarians there, and there are a lot of fruit stands and vegetarian restaurants in Peru. I was a regular at one vegetarian restaurant that was in a meat market where there were dead animals hanging everywhere. The owners of the restaurant were Christians and liked to talk to me about the Bible.

One day my Swiss friend hooked me up with a huge bag of pretty strong weed for only six bucks, which broke my four month or so long break from smoking anything, and eventually led me into the biggest burnout of my life because the bag I bought would have killed me if I had tried to smoke all of it, so I made sixteen hundred super strong marijuana cookies in the hostel kitchen.

The hostel in Huaraz was the coolest hostel I have ever been to, and the coolest hostel you could ever have, because believe it or not, the owner of the hostel not only didn't live there, but was never there. So we had the whole place to ourselves, complete with the kitchen with all the appliances and a TV room upstairs which we never used because we had a big common area in a patio outside and a bar-like hang out room above the kitchen. The owner was really cool too, and never acted like she didn't trust us. She did have some caretakers there, but I never saw them and when they were there they just hung out with us like they were one of us.

One time I ate a bunch of my super cookies at the crack of dawn and my Swiss buddy came over and we took a bus to the outskirts of town and met with one of his Indian buddies who showed us to the trail that led to Mt Huaraz, which was the local 5,000 meter peak that we were going to climb. I remember in the wee hours of the morning I was so stoned off of those cookies that I couldn't even talk and didn't understand anything they were talking about and I thought his friend was coming with us. I was so stoned that I don't even remember much about the approach to the mountain, but I remember as we started to climb the steep part of it, for some reason I thought I was stronger than him and offered to take his back pack for him, but he turned out to be way stronger than me; which made sense because he had been training for a marathon for the last few months and I had been getting absolutely no exercise for the last few months apart from cruising my bike around the streets of the towns I had visited. So after a little bit he offered to take my bag for me and I took him up on that. We had to walk through some hard snow fields above sheer cliffs on the way up and down which sketched me out a little bit because the shoes I was using were loaners from him and were really old and had no tread on them. When we got to the summit we cooked up some soup and tea and enjoyed the incredible view of the Huaraz valley and the huge 6,000 meter mountains and their snowy ridges next to us.

We ran the whole way down through the pastures where the indians lived in their adobe huts with grassy roofs. The indians there seemed really content as they worked in the lush green countryside; and I felt like I had traveled back to the pre-columbian days.

I had some cool friends while I was in Huaraz. When I got there there was a cool Dutch couple but they left after a couple days. There were also two Germans from Munich there, Marcus and Philip. A little later two more cool Germans came, Marcos and oops I can't remember his buddies name. They were there the whole time I was there. There were also two English guys there for a while and two cool Swiss girls there, Melanie and I can't remember her friend name right now. There was also an English girl staying there for a while. And also my German friend who I met in Nicaragua and saw again in Panama and then again in Ecuador showed up and stayed there for a week or so. She was traveling with a cool Israeli girl who talked me into combing out my dreads with avocados. There was also a big Peruvian guy who was friends with Marcus who would come over and hang out with us. One time I have gave him three of my super cookies and he got totally stoned and could barely speak. There was also a big Israeli guy there who claimed to have never been drunk or stoned in his life. I gave him three of my super cookies once and he said he didn't feel anything.

My days there were filled with just hanging out in the patio with my buddies and roaming around the town, and at night we would have these Pisco sour parties. Huaraz was were I was first introduced to Pisco and Pisco sour. Ah, I had some good time there.

One day I paid a Swiss French kid twenty bucks to take me paragliding from 900 meters up the valley of Huaraz down into the town to the north of Huaraz. Paragliding is one of the coolest sports in the world because you can feel and hear and air cutting through the para glider and you can steer it really easily. We got up early in the morning and took a van down to the next town. In these vans they make all the passengers sign their names on a piece of paper. The French guy told me it was because every few weeks one of the vans drives into the river and they need to identify the bodies. After we got off at the town we hitch hiked up the valley to the place where he likes to take off. We went to a place at the top of a cliff and after he set up the para glider he told me to stand in front of him and when he said 'run' to run as fast as I could, so I did. But as I was running he tripped over me and instead of taking off we just fell down the three meter cliff and he fell on top of me and I cut my thumb wide open on a rock. After we bandaged up my thumb and covered my hand with a pair of his gloves we hiked up to a perfect spot and barely even had to walk to take off. He let me steer for a little bit which was surprisingly easy. Then he showed me his skill by pointing to a tree in the distance and telling me we were going to brush the top of it, and sure enough we did just that. As we were approaching the town I asked him where we were going to land and he pointed to a soccer field where a game was going on, at which point I reminded him about the game and he said it didn't matter. We approached in a circle the same way a plane does before it lands. At we were were about to land the people stopped playing and everybody watched us. We were approaching at about twenty miles an hour, and right before we were about to land he pulled back on the string and we lunged forward and slowed down enough to have a successful running landing. After we grabbed the para glider we walked off the field and packed it up with dozens of people standing around watching us.

For the six weeks I was in Huaraz I did some mountain biking, although not nearly as much as I wanted to because of the fact that I could never get up on time. One day I rode down to the town that is at the base of Mt Huarazcaran which is the highest mountain in Peru. And from there I rode up the mountain to go over the pass which was around 5,000 meters, but I turned around because the top part of it was covered in snow and I didn't want to get my feet cold trudging through it. The last part of that pass was awesome because there were like thirty consecutive switchbacks on the last part. I did that ride twice. I also did rides up both sides of the valley that Huaraz was in, but I never got to the end because I left too late one day and got an asthma attack the other.

While I was there all of my friends were going on treks but I never went on any because I just didn't feel like it. I wanted to go climb a 5400 meter mountain with the Germans once but I got really sick the day before they left from eating Crevice, which is raw fish that they sell from stands in the blazing sun. I had been eating it the whole time I was there because its delicious but that time it must have been rotten.

If there were ever a place that I would like to go back to it would be Huaraz peru. The mountain biking, mountain climbing and paragliding there are great, and the town is a nice quaint size. But after my the Germans came back from their successful summit trek I was still sick as a dog and felt like I needed to get out of Huaraz. (now I'm writing stoned) For some really weird reason which I can't explain because it has never happened anywhere else, but for the whole time I was there I thought that Lima was on the other side of the mountains, when in fact the mountains were on the east side of the town. I remember driving in the bus us the valley taking a right instead of a left and being surprised. The drive back was beautiful because we went over a tundra pass with a beautiful view of a lot the high mountain valleys. The drive down the road continued steadily until we got to the desert again.

I was excited about getting to Lima because I was thinking about maybe living here and teaching English for a little bit and learning how to para glide because there is a paragliding school there for three hundred and fifty bucks were they take you out to the san dunes outside of Lima and you can learn all day long paragliding and being driven back up. Plus I imagined the surfing being really nice there because it was warm and on the Pacific ocean. I arrived at night and rode down to the center of town two blocks from the Plaza near the river to the hostel I wanted to go to. Although the ride through the center was congested, I felt like I was riding in a town instead of a huge city because the roads are narrow. The hostel I went to was really cool. It's on the roof of a tall building in the center, and has plants all over the place and two large land turtles walking around, so it's really quiet and peaceful. The people weren't really sociable there through and I was really sick when I got there and was chowing down on my cookies every day and was in kind of a stoned out haze, so I didn't talk to anyone besides a couple of English girls who were there when I first got there who gave me a Bolivia Lonely Planet book and talked about La Paz and made it sound really trippy.

My first day in Lima I rode my bike down the bike path in the middle of the main avenue to the beach eight miles away. The coast was unlike anything I had ever seen before because it was cliffs for the whole thing, which made the view of the ocean awesome and allowed people to para glide. where the bike bath hit the cliff there was a nice park that led up to a cliff that people were paragliding off of. I watched one guy jog off the cliff and soar to the north along the cliffs for like five or ten minutes until he landed a few kilometers down the road on a big parking lot. I could see all of the beautiful, perfect surfing waves all along the coast. Unfortunately people don't surf there because the water is polluted with human waste.

I found a place where I could walk down and checked out the beach. To my disappointment although the beaches were large and sandy, there was nobody there. There were, however, a half dozen kids out surfing in the waves even though the white sea foam that comes in wasn't white but brown and stinking. Then I rode back to the plaza and walked the peaceful pedestrian mall down to the other plaza on the other side, which is unique.

I did a tour of the Catholic church there which was interesting because it had long catacombs in the basement where they organized the bones of 70,000 people into mosaics in the pits where they dump them. It had a large central plaza also. I like that style of architecture with the plaza in the middle surrounded by the various balconies. My high school like that. Then I got a taxi up to the top of the hill that overlooks the city that is just across the river in the center. I took a taxi up there because someone told me that people attack tourists on the way up, but in retrospect I would have been fine to ride up there. The view was fascinating because I could barely see the plaza even though it was only like a kilometer away. I could see that there were slums of houses built of of adobe brick and tin roofs just to the south of the center which drove home just how poor Peruvians actually are.

After Lima I took the bus to Ica where the sand boarding dunes are. Ica was in the middle of the desert and had a peaceful feel to it like all of the towns and cities in Peru. While I was there I was walking across a restaurant in front of the plaza and a Peruvian girl from Lima who I was dancing in the disco with three weeks beforehand in Huaraz recognized me and we dun hunged out. She was there on business selling stuff to the pharmacies.

Ica is the place where the Alien skulls were found, and I remember talking about that with a guy who was standing on the plaza with all kinds of alien literature spread out in front of him. I don't even think he was selling anything, he was just evangelizing the coming of the aliens.

My first day there I rode out to a lake called Huacachina that is surrounded by sand dunes which makes it look like the ultimate oasis. Huacachina is famous for sand boarding but there were only a couple people up there doing it. I rented a board and hiked up where I could see Ica and the surrounding villages in the middle of sand. That was one of my coolest days traveling. I was stoned off my ass on the cookies and listening my my walkman all day long sand boarding. There were two sides of the dune for boarding. The steep side facing the lake and the flatter side facing Ica. I started our on the side that faces Ica so I could get the hang of it. Sand boarding is different than snow boarding because there is much less control in sand boarding because the feet just loosely fit into two straps. I had a couple cool runs where I went down a little bowl and went up the side of it and did a 180 and went down it. After I got warmed up I went to the steep side. The steep side was at first a little intimidating because you can't turn and you can go really fast. There is only one way to surf the steep side because you have to put the grease on the board to go and it won't go even on the steep side if you don't put the grease on. I got pretty good where I got up to about 30 miles an hour and about half way down the slope until I would crash because the board would shimmer too much from bumping from the speed. There was a dilapidated old lift for the sand boarders of yesteryear. I was a really small sled with a cable that led to the top where there must have been an old motor of some sort. That would have been cool to be able to surf that dune all day long by way of a lift. I think if someone does that they could get a really good business going if they manage to get the word out to the tourists who come there, or convince the Peruvians that its a fun thing to do. On the side of the dune on the way that people go up I boarded down the entire part of the slope and rode it all out until it leveled off halfway down the dune. Right at the end of the day my walkman broke because it got too much sand in it and never worked again.

The next day I rode my bike to Nazca. This was the first stretch or road that I bike toured in Peru and it was all desert. I little before I got to the plateau where the Nazca lines are there was a river that I had to climb out of. I rode past the platform where they look at the lines but it was closed off so I couldn't climb it, not like I would have seen anything anyway because it was night. It took me later than I thought because I was having flat problems.

Nazca is a nice small town with the foothills to the mountains that lead to Cuzco on the western side and the plains that have the Nazca lines that point to the sea on the eastern side. There is a little river that runs through the town where the indians made an intricate system of aqueducts that went through tunnels and had pools that fed the terraces crops that led to them. The day that I spent there I saw a parade for children. There are a lot of parades in South America I have noticed. I got the plane ride over the Nazca lines which was an awesome experience because I got to ride in a small plane taking steep turns to check out the lines. I saw hundreds of designs on the flat plains and on the hill sides, but the most amazing thing I saw was the perfectly straight lines that criss crossed all over the place and above all one line that was about as wide as a road and pointed perfectly straight to the east literally as far as I could see even from the plane! At the museum across the street from the airport was an interesting museum where they had a mummy in a glass box and they showed a video about the lines. The video was mainly about an old American woman who had lived in Nazca for like thirty years studying the lines and came up with some kind of theory about what they were made of. When I saw my friend ? who was one of the Chimborozo climbers in La Paz she told me she had spent a couple weeks there hanging out with a guy who had been studying the lines and had decided that the lines were made by dousing lines following underwater water ways. That makes sense to me, but I would like to know why they criss cross all over the place.

That afternoon I got a bus to Cuzco. Almost immediately the road. The drive went up and up and up an up and over a pass and then down down down a river valley in a bumpy dirt road on a bus that was decked out to drive over anything. It's so high there's probably people who could do the limbo under it. After going down the river we went way up and over the mountains and down again into cuzco at 3326 meters. It's actually quiet a pity that I didn't do that ride, it would have been awesome, but I was so anxious to just get there. Cuzco is half the size of Trujillo with 326,000 people but to me it seemed bigger. It is in a nice sloping valley surrounded by rolling hills. From the bus station I rode up the valley to the central plaza and through the narrow pedestrian alley where all the tourist restaurants are and took and left and went in the hotel on the end on the left. This hotel was cool because they played movies every night on a large movie screen upstairs. My room was in a little courtyard in the back. When I was about to go in a movie there I saw Dan, the Israeli kid I saw in the hostel in Quito and then again in Huaraz. He was going on the same Inca trail tour the next day with a German girl I happened to be going on.

We left from a small bus the next morning with our tour group and one other who was kind of like our sister tour group. The bus ride to the trail head of the Inca trail was over lush green rolling hills for a couple hours until we got to a town where we had a meal. Then we drove a little more to the trail head. We started the trail next to a big river and hiked up it along a big trail. From the beginning I was hanging out with Dan who was a really interesting Israeli. Actually Dan is the ultimate Israeli. He literally never stops talking, he's like a talk radio station, just talking and talking and talking about stories and stuff. But none of it's negative so he's never a pain to listen to. He's like the radio show I like to listen to when I work on my computer, the Laura Lee show. I don't actually listen to 95% of what I hear because I am busy concentrating on my work, but the background music of people happily talking away is relaxing. At the end of the Inca trail the mother in an English mother daughter couple likened me to Kenny in South park. I had never watched South Park, but later in Cuzco I rented it and saw that Kenny is the kid with the hood over his head. She must have said that because I was the silent friend of the ever talking Israeli kid. Once in the train he was telling a story and the daughter in the mother daughter pair actually tried to physically cover his mouth to stop him from talking in a sort of joking fashion, to show how he just talked and talked and talked. I remember one story he told. He said when he was in the Israeli army he sprained his ankle or something and so the other soldiers had to carry him on a stretcher for some kind of thirty mile death march. And he was saying how he was just sitting on top of the stretcher just cracking jokes all day long.

The first night we spent was near the rive on the right side of the photo to the right which looks down the river towards the beginning of the trail. The photo is taken from the beginning of the pass that we had to climb to go the round about way to Machu Pichu. Only the nobility could take the direct route along the river. The next day we hiked up the river again and had to take a left up into another canyon to the side. The pass was at 4200 meters, but we camped at the base of it. The third day was the pass day, where a few groups who started at the same camp sight busted up and over the pass to camp that night at the bottom of the next valley. Our groups was always one of the late risers, but that was cool because after the group broke up at the beginning of the pass I actually enjoyed passing people all day long. I think I counted that I passed like 132 people on my way to the pass. The hike was cool because for the first part of it we were in the jungle hiking along a trail that was very well paved with large rocks. The second part we were hiking up the treeless tundra part until we got the the summit of a pass that had a saddle of about 20 meters. The view was nice with some snow-capped mountains in the distance and the river way down there. One of the most fascinating parts of the whole trip was the view of the descent off of the pass into the next valley, because It was a perfectly paved stone road about ten feet wide down from the pass into where the trail follows along the side of the valley leading to the main valley. While I was waiting for my group at the top of the pass I was chewing on my couple bags trying to see how much of a buzz I could get off of those illegal coco leaves. My mouth did turn numb, which was a cool experience in itself, but I do remember getting kind of high off of it. I wasn't drowsy when I ate the two bags of leaves so I don't know if it would have kept me awake which is what the Indians supposedly eat it for. I wish I could buy those leaves, chewing leave is a cool savagely natural way to get a pick me up.

The camp at the end of the canyon was cool because we had a little river running through the terraced camp site. Because this canyon was smaller than the last one, all of the groups had to cuddle up on the same terraced hill, which made apparent how many people were in fact hiking this Inca trail. The next day we hiked up the side of yet another canyon even though the trail could have taken a right and gone the river to the main river to Macho Pichu, but no, we had to go up another ridge. Half way up this ridge we encountered a ruin which was built on a steep enough part of the mountain side that the lookout of the building had a front wall that was about three meters high. About 45 minutes after that ruin we got to the summit of the ridge. But instead of descending back into another valley we went steadily along a small steep valley until we got to the coolest ruin on the whole trail. It was a kind of a mini Machu Pichu because it was a developed little town, or rather sophisticated mansion on a steep ridge. On the end of the ridge there was a nicely sized little patio area overlooking the alpine jungle view. At the upper end we saw the carved aqueduct lead from the mountain above and over the doorway to the ruin. About a half hours hike we camped in a little field.

The next day was the most magnificent. It began almost immediately with an emergence onto a new ridge where the trail suddenly became very well paved. We walked along this ridge offering views and began to descend a little until we had lunch at a tree less area where we could see the main river again and aguas calientes, the town that supports Machu Pichu and the hydroelectric plant that was right below us. About a half hours walk down the trail from there we got to the second coolest ruin on the Inca trail, another mansion that had the best view platform whose face was like five meters high because the ruin is built on a 30 degree hillside. There were some interesting aqueducts in a line down the mountainside that filled with the cascading water. The coolest thing about this ruin was how the thick fog would roll in and out very quickly. I took a photo of when the fog was in, and another one five minutes later when It was perfectly clear again.

From this ruin the trail was descending down the steep hillside, so we started walking down 500 year old stairs. Because we were descending, the trail started going through a thick jungle which totally blocked out the sun. A couple hours later we to a huge terraced farm built up on the steep mountainside that supported Machu Pichu. A little down the hill all of the groups camped together in a big terraced camp site. We all had dinner together in a building and the energy was really high. One guy got up on a table and made a toast to everybody in the building although I didn't understand anything he said. The next morning the days wave of Machu Pichu tourists began their final trek to Machu Pichu a couple hours later. Our group was one of the last ones yet again and I took off kind and was passing people in the super crowded trail, but I stopped passing people because I didn't want to be rude, but then came Dan who was just plowing through people, so I got behind him and we passed people until we got to climb up a stair section where I dropped him and hiked up to a ridge that offered the first view of Machu Pichu below us. This had a little ruin built there and I was listening to the explanation of the area to another tour group. This was known to the Incans as the 'keyhole' or something, where they would have a ceremony to 'behold' the city or something like that. Then someone else from my group showed up, and we ran down the trail to the ruins and were the first ones there for the day. I sat up at the farm terraces above Machu Pichu for a few minutes next to a hut where they kept three Llamas. I walked to the left part of the terraces and saw how they were built until the huge sheer cliff started. The fog is amazing in Machu Pichu. It is just like in the mountains in Costa Rica. One second it is totally clear, and they the fog just rolls in at like ten miles an hour as if the place is flying through the clouds. But after the people came and the sun got higher the fog dissipated and our tour started. We had a special Machu Pichu tour guide who was kind of a character. At first he was angrily collecting and gathering all of our attention before he would get started. At first I though we was kind of an angry person, but after he got started on the tour I realized he just took his job very seriously.

He took us around showing us the impressive cascading aqueduct system and stonework. There is a patio on top of the ridge that the city sits on that had a sheer cliff on one side that looked like it went all the way down to the river. He said they were still finishing it when they had to abandon it so the Spanish couldn't find it, and he showed us a large stone sitting in the middle that they were working on dragging across to be placed upright as a pillar. He showed us a large rock field next to us and said that was where they got all their rocks to built the city. On the other side of the plaza there was a cliff that led to the impressively large central plaza which had a big farm patch next to it. Behind the farm patch was the beginning of the trail that led to the top of the steep hill that you see in the photos. I had no idea there was a trail up there because it was so steep, but they made stairs up it! I don't think I would have been able to climb that hill without the stairs put there for me. When I got near the top I saw a staircase that went up to the left very steeply, almost too steeply for me, to a building that had a view of the river almost straight down below. From there I climbed a little way to the top where there were some large rocks that we sat on. The view of Machu Pichu from the top made the city itself looked very small and I noticed most of the terrain was terraced farms.

Another interesting part of the tour was the condor, which was a condor head made in a little plaza next to the neighborhood part of the ruin that had two naturally looking wings raising from it. He said the Incans were good about using natural formations to build their structures, and showed us how the buildings were build up on existing rocks. Next to the condor was a little cave that we walked through and came out the other side.

The energy in Machu Pichu was very powerful in a similar was as Tikal, where I could feel myself get really energized to the point that I felt fidgidy, so I walked down to the entrance area where the buses are with Dan and his girl friend and we sat down and waited for our group which didn't all show up for like a half hour. And then we decided to walk to Aguas Calientes instead of take the bus, I can't remember why. The hike was cool though, and the town or Aguas calientes was interesting. It was small, about the size of Machu Pichu. After having lunch with my group in a restaurant we got on the three hour train and rode the valley down the big river that only the Incan nobility used to get to Machu Pichu back to Cuzco.

My next day in Cuzco I rode up the valley that was right next to the plaza about ten minutes to the ruins of Sachsayhuaman, which is the most impressive ruin I have ever seen because of the huge rocks there. This place is a three level high terraces wall built in zig zags to emulate the jaw of a Jaguar. It is made with granite stones that weigh 300 tons and stand twelve feet high, and are fit together perfectly. When the spanish came there they tried to take it apart because it was a religious temple and could only dismantle four fifths of it. Next to the wall there is a large plaza were they have festivals. On the other side of the plaza there is another peculiarly unexplained thing. Carved perfectly straight into the granite rock there is a type of award platform or something. This was amazing because of the precision that it was cut. After Sexy Woman, as people call it because nobody can pronounce it like it is supposed to be, I went to a couple more ruins nearby, one of which had an impressive 500 year old man made waterfall that was still working.

Smartly I didn't bring my super cookies with me on the Incan trail because I wanted to be able to communicate with the people in my group, but I began eating them again when I got back to Cuzco, and was starting to get burt out. I remember the day I did the tour of the city I left my bike sitting in the flower garden in the central plaza for about nine hours in the middle of the day completely unlocked, and nobody stole it! However my camera was pick pocketed that had all the best photos form Machu Pichu in it.

The city of Cuzco has some very cool sights as well. The original incan walls were all over the city, built into the modern buildings just like they are in Rome. It was amusing to see the stark difference between the vastly superior stonework of the Incans to the impressive attempt at duplication by the Spanish. There is one famous giant rock near the center that has nine sides to it and is fit perfectly with the other stones surrounding it. The catholic church next to the plaza is impressively large and intricate, but I was most impressed with the other church down the road a little bit. It was originally an Incan temple, but the Spanish dismantled it and put their own church on top of it, but they didn't completely take apart the walls, so I could see them inside the church. The difference in stone work was so amazing, because the Spanish needed to use mortar to fit their stones together, but I could see that the outer wall of the Incan temple didn't have any! It stayed together because the stones were cut together perfectly. There were some parts where the stones had separated from each other a bit from earthquakes, but the wall was still safely intact. I walked up the tower and got a nice few of the skyline, which is something I try to do at every city I go to. Cuzco had no modern looking sky scrapers which added to its charm. All the buildings were the same brown color.

I hung out in Cuzco for like five days after the Incan trail. For a couple days I tried to leave but I was so stoned on the cookies I couldn't get up on time and I don't like leaving late. There was an interesting thing there that I hadn't seen since Korea, the video rental houses. I went there once and rented South Park.

I rode south towards Lake Titicaca from Cuzco. The road followed up a river at a nice mellow grade. I stayed at a roadhouse hotel one night, and the next day I took a right turn and up into the barren hills towards Arequipa. While I was riding up the steep grade I passed a kid who was walking, and he ran beside me for about ten minutes. Then I saw an old Indian woman running with her blanket pack on, which was very impressive. I rode up to a quaint town and got a room. I was well off the beaten path now so most the indians I was riding past will have only seen a white person a few times in their lives, if ever, so the stares started to come. I spent the next day there because I was getting my walkman fixed at a shop in front of the plaza, which was the only business I remember seeing surrounding it. A lot of guys who apparently didn't anything else to do went with me to watch me do business with the guy. Seemed to me excited to be talking to me and was acting macho by interrupting me and telling me how he was going to fix it and that I would have to wait. It would be cool to live in a tiny super primitive town in a beautiful setting for a little bit. I would bring a few computers and open computer using school and then sell the computers to them on consignment.

The next day I rode up and over a pass in the treeless hills and down into another town. I got a flat in this town and had to fix it. This town must have never seen a gringo because while I was fixing the flat in a market area on the main street a crowd of about thirty people came up and completely surrounded me and stared at me. The first row were of small children who kept trying to offer me their ice creams. When I left I waved and all of them waved back together. That was one of the weirdest traveling experiences I have had. I was a little behind schedule because the the flat problems so I had to descent from the next pass in complete darkness because I didn't have a light. But it was cool because my walkman worked again and I was stoned out of my head enjoying my music. This town was in a fair sized valley and I think it was the capital of the between Cuzco and Arequipa wasteland. I spent three days there because I couldn't get up in the morning because I was too stoned because I continued to eat my cookies. I went to the internet one day, and walked around the market and got some meals at various restaurants. I was the only non Peruvian there the whole time I was there. From looking at the market I saw how much these people live off the land because they were selling every bit of the all of the animals that they had around and even some weird much room like growth from the land. I didn't talk to anyone there and felt like I was in another world. The roads were dirt and their were no cars. After the third day I gave up in trying to get up on time and just took the bus to Arequipa. The approach to the mountains was impressive. I got to Arequipa at night and rode to a hotel in front of the plaza which is what I try to do every time I go to a latin town.

Arequipa is in one of the coolest settings of all the cities I have been to because it is a big city literally right at the base of a huge perfect cone volcano. Arequipa has a million people and sits at 2324m. The whole city is on a slope because it is next to Volcan Misti which is 5800m. My hotel was cool because it had a nice patio on the roof with a nice view of the mountains and the plaza which was one of the most beautiful because it had a lot of big trees in it, and the church was pretty with the two tall spires.

The first day I was there I did the tour of the convent that was built in 1580 and used to house 450 nuns who lived completely secluded. Now just a few live in the northern part. It was fascinating because it was like a walled in city. It had a lot of plazas inside and a main steet-hallway, and a lot of tiny residences, a few large dining halls, a huge kitchen, a garden, and a few small apartments sized residences. The hallways zig zagged in a kind of laberinthy way to make it difficult to remember the layout. I remember one fountain near some huge rooms that are now colonial art display rooms.

I liked Arequipa a lot because the view of 5822m Misti and 6075 mt snowcapped Chanchani. It has peaceful cobbled roads and not too much traffic. There was a good pizza restaurant I went to.

The next morning I left really early to climb Mt Misti, but I rode up the wrong road and found myself at the entrance to a military installation on the wrong side of the river that runs through Arequipa. The next day I left at midnight to go up the more direct route. I rode through a up and up and over a slum neighborhood until it ended. After I stashed my bike in a little dry river valley behind a dump yard where they burn their trash I started hiking and realized I forgot my flashlight, and it was completely black. I didn't manage to find the road that leads right up to the base of the mountain and was still a long ways from the base so I hiked all night through the blackness until I got to a part where I was at the edge of a little canyon. I shimmied down and couldn't feel the bottom so I slid off thinking it wasn't very deep, but I was about fifteen feet deep and I landed on my side luckily in a sand pit. I remember seeing stars all over the place. After I landed I just laid there for like five seconds and then tried to breath and noticed that my wind was knocked out of me. Luckily I wasn't hurt any because I was so stoned when I stashed my bike that I forgot to take my helmet off. I tried to get out of the little canyon I was in but it just kept slithering along sheer cliffs and I couldn't climb out because of the pitch blackness. So I went back to the sand patch I landed in because that was the only place I could sleep in the rock strewn canyon and went to sleep. When I got up the next morning after the sun rose I found a place where I could climb out and started hiking up the face of the mountain which started right after the canyon. This mountain was huge because it started at about 2400 meters and went up to 5800 meters, but being that it is a perfect cone shaped mountain the hike up it was really straight forward which was cool. I had the unfortunate experience of not having any water to drink the whole day because I made the mistake of filling my camel back water bladder with carbonated water which burst the seems and let all the water run out and over me while I slept. I had a bunch of super cookies for breakfast and I got dry mouth but had no water to moisten my mouth up. I hiked as high I could but I had a raging headache and had no energy and it was getting lake so I had to turn around, but I was almost at the top. I figured I was about 100 meters from the top, but I just didn't have the energy. The view of the city from up there made it look like I was looking down on the city from a place because I could see all of the roads and suburbs with the lights. The hike down wasn't very painful because Mt Misti is just a pile of rocks and sand and it wasn't difficult to find some sand shoots to run down. As I was descending I saw the canyon I fell into and noticed that there was a road that led right up to the base of the mountain, so I got on the road and ran down it until it got pitch black again. I had to start walking through the blackness feeling my way with my feet again, only this time totally paranoid about falling in another hole. I blamed the debacle of the weed cookies, so I threw the bag as far as I could into the blackness, vowing to never smoke again on my trip. I managed to find my bike because of the glow of the burning trash dump it was next to.

The next day I decided I would try to climb the other mountain next to Misti, which was 6075 meters high. This mountain was on the other side of the river and farther away from Misti, so I talked to a taxi driver and paid him half of the fair in advance to meet me in front of my hotel at midnight. He took me up to the base of the mountain where I stashed my bike and started to hike. The view was beautiful because there was a little bit more of a moon and I could see the reflection of the snow on the mountain top, but my brain was so saturated by the weed, or maybe I was just unmotivated for other reasons, but I didn't have the motivation to hike anymore. It was just too quiet and I felt lonely, so I turned around after about a half hour of hiking and rode my bike back. This was the second time I had done this ride in the darkness. It was interesting because it was a huge neighborhood build up on the side of the mountain, and was very steep, so the descent was very fast and very long. On my descent I had one of my strangest traveling experiences. As I was approaching the outskirts of the hilled neighborhood, I approached a giant roadside building that I guessed was a slaughter house that was making more noise than I have ever heard from animals. I stopped and stood there listening to hundreds of animals screaming and wailing as loud as they could as if they were in hell. I was trying to understand why they were screaming like that because is was in the darkness before the sun rose. They kind of sounded like people screaming. I got back to my hotel way before dawn and slept in.

At this point I was kind of having a motivation crises but wasn't too stressed out about it. That night I bumped into a French guy who I had seen in Quito and again in Huaraz, and he told me about a big concert at the university that was happening that I went to, but didn't stay very long because I wasn't into the music.

The next day I was in the internet and suddenly the murmer of an earthquake started to happen and everyone just sat there looking at each other. After a few seconds when it didn't stop everyone ran outside and the streets filled with people standing in the middle of the road in case the buildings collapsed on us. All of the women and children were sobbing and I was even a little scared for a little bit because the ground was moving a lot and I could hear a loud rumble, and if it had been a little stronger I could imagine the buildings crumbling around us. I saw a a few thirty pound stones break and fall off the roofs of the buildings around me and land on the cars parked there. The whole thing lasted for maybe a minute, during which time I could see a plume of dust rise up from the ground and engulf the city until I could barely see Mt Misti. When it all ended I went straight back to the plaza because I remembered that the church there had two exceptionally tall towers and I wanted to see if they were still standing, and sure enough one had collapsed into the plaza, spilling bricks all over the road. I went to the roof of my hotel and retook photos of the mountain through the dusk and the collapsed tower so I could have the before and after photos. (I showed those photos to he and she in Santiago and after they moved out those photos were stolen, so one of them stole them, I think it was Jo because my Harry Potter book was missing also and she had read that). That was the biggest earthquake in Peru for like a hundred and fifty years and killed a bunch of people on a coastal town near the epicenter in the ocean. That night I decided to treat myself to a Peruvian delicacy, the groundhog. Why it is a delicacy I have no idea because it has barely any meat on it and it is expensive, about 20 bucks. But the meat that I did manage to eat was good.

The next morning I left on my bike towards the desert where I would loop around and climb up to lake Titicaca. The ride that day to the town of Moquegua was cool because I had the road all to myself again because they were closed from the rubble of the earthquake. Most of the day was on a flat desert highway, and at the end I turned west again and climbed up a little to the town. I think I spent two nights there because I couldn't get up the first day, the second day I got up at like eleven but left anyway. The ride was awesome because it just went up and up and up switchbacks. It got black pretty quick into my ride because I left so late and I rode up until it got so cold I decided to stay the night in a dirt floored restaurant. I was hanging out with some Bolivian truck drivers there and one of them offered to drive me to the lake. The next morning before the crack of dawn I managed to get up before he left and got a ride with him. The view was amazing as we were driving along the high antiplano surrounded by huge snowcapped volcanoes. The guy dropped me off at a boarder town on the south west corner of the lake.

The truck driver dropped me off at a primitive town that was pretty close to the south west shore of lake Titicaca. A few miles before we got to the boarder I could see the snowcapped 6000m Andes mountains and the expanse of the Lake Titicaca, which was one of the most exciting times of my life because I have been fascinated with this area since I was in seventh grade. I didn't have the patience to ride my bike to the lake so I took a van to the boarder, and to Copacabana, which is a tourist town just on the Bolivian side of the boarder. I happened to be there during a very strange time because the Campesinos, the poor Indian Antiplano farmers, were protesting about something the government was doing that they didn't like. They were blocking all the roads that led to the capital city of La Paz and to the lake to bring attention to themselves. So as a result of this the tourist town of Copacabana was practically a ghost town. It seemed like there were only like a dozen tourists there, even though the shops and restaurants remained open. I remember a lot of the places there served pizza which I found pleasing. Copacabana is in a beautiful setting nestled between the rolling hills and a small bay. It had an enormous church there that looked like a fortress that had a very nice tree filled plaza in front of it. If I remember the story right, after the Spanish came and defeated the Incans, the last Incan emperor converted to catholicism and moved to Copacabana and had that church constructed and made a famous black Jesus.

After I was in Copacabana for a couple days I rode my bike to the northern edge of the peninsula and paid some kid a couple dollars to row me over to the Island of the Sun. The place where in Indian mythology the tall white bearded god who constructed the ruins at Tihuanacu appeared from. Where the kid dropped me off happened to be the site of an interesting cliff-lake side ruin. I rode the trail over to probably the most interesting setting of a town that I have ever seen. This town, Yumani, kind of reminded me of San Pedro in Guatemala. This kind of town takes you back to the days before cars, where all of the buildings are connected by walking paths. But here I was the only person who seemed to have even a bike. Another cool thing about this town was the majestic view over the great expanse of the lake due to the fact that the island jutted out of the lake like a mountain. The town was on the side of the hill, so you can only go up or down, and all of the buildings there were one story mud huts except for one. When I arrived in Yumani I sat down at a quaint outdoor restaurant and saw the only other two tourists on the whole deserted

tourist island and started chatting with them. They said they heard that the island was usually flooded with tourists so I felt very fortunate to feel kind of like an honored guest in a hidden paradise as I was one of the only tourists there in a place full of people who are used to catering to people like me. They told me about the place they were staying at which was on the top ridge of the island, right at the top of the town where you have views of both sides of the lake, so I went and stayed there. The view was amazing. The next day I rode my bike around the western shore of the island along a wide path through some other small towns. I was the only tourist I saw on the trail the whole day. On the north western end of the island there is a rather large and clearly ancient ruin complex built right up on the lake side. I spent a few minutes exploring around the labyrinths of the rooms and and climbing on the tops of the walls. I remember seeing a large round table that was carved out of rock surrounded by a bunch of seats carved out of rock sitting in a flat

plaza type area and just being flabergasted by the mytical view. After that ruin the trail led back to the southern end of the island right along the top ridge which made for some amazing pictures that I unfortunately somehow lost. I stayed one more night at that hotel, and the next day I took put my bike on the sail boat that the guys I met had rented from Copacabana and we sailed back. The trip back was awsome because the wind was just pushing us at a steady four miles an hour almost all the way, so all we had to do was just sit there and enjoy the view.

I went on a hike with Todd the next day to the top of the hill behind Copacabana and see the northern edge of the lake. Another day I rode around the outskirts of the the town to an old Indian ruin where they had some little aqueducts and a pool inside of an old walled in area. I bumped into an old Indian campesino on my way there and talked to him for a little bit. I asked him about the myth about the god coming from the island and he seemed to know the story but wasn't very interested in it. Then he started telling me about how he was mad at the United States for destroying all of the Coca fields in Bolivia, and I told him I agreed with him. There is also another cool place in Copacabana which you can see in a lot of the photos of it. There is a tall hill on the east side of the bay that has a trail that leads up to the top where there is a little plaza offering an amazing view of the lake.

While I was there I was spending my nights at one of the hotels where they had some videos that you can rent and watch in their little video room. Watching American movies is one of my favorite things to do when I am traveling because I temporarily transport back to my country. I met another bike tourist there who had ridden his bike from Patagonia. He told me that he saw a lot of other bike tourists there but it was so incredibly windy in one area that you can barely even ride the bike and he saw a lot of bikers just huddled under tree afraid to ride at all. He said it was so windy that he was actually sliding sideways on the dirt road he was riding on. He could have been exaggerating though because he also told me that he was from northern Scotland but he spoke with an American accent and that he had hiked 50 kilometers around Copacabana that day.

When I left Copacabana the Campesino protests were still going on so I had the road all to myself. The road out of Copacabana was was beautiful because it led up to the top of the hill allowing incredible views of the lake. I rode through maybe a half dozen large rock fields that the Campesinos put there in order to deter cars and as I descended down to the town where I had to pay someone to row be across the ismus to the other side of the lake. I saw about 30 campesinos standing on top of the cliff above me watching me. One of them threw a large rock at me but deliberately missed me by about twenty feet. Another one raised a large rock like he was going to through it at me but I waved 'no' at him and they all waved back. On the other side of the lake there were still no cars but the people still had to get to work so everybody was ridding their bikes which was so cool. I just put on Led Zeppelin and peddled away on the giant bike path with all the other bikers. As I was riding down one long strait away I could see all the Bolivian cyclists in front and behind me, and I pulled up next to on old guy and he told me he was riding to work in El Alto, which is the antiplano suburb of La Paz, he said he rode sixty kilometers to work every day and sixty kilometers back. Which surely was an exaggeration but it was still impressive seeing that he was about 60 years old. The Bolivian Campesinos are very athletic.

I was riding alone at one point when I saw a kid on the side of the road having a seizure. He had apparently had the seizure while he was ridding his bike because it was laying beside him and his face was bloody from the crash. He was choking on his tongue because he was laying on his back and he had a backpack on and his head was tilted back; so I ran up to him and turned him on his side and held his head for about thirty seconds until his seizure stopped. I tried to ask him if he was OK about a dozen times but he just looked at me like I was a ghost. I saw some bikers approaching after a couple minutes and I didn't want to have to explain to them what happened because I didn't think the kid was going to be able to talk, so I took off before they arrived, but I looked back and saw they had stopped to check him out.

As I got closer to El Alto the occasional van started to appear, which was loaded to the brim with people and their bicycles to take them into town to work. El Alto was enormous and took my a while to reach the canyon where La Paz was. I was expecting an incredible view because I had heard about it from other tourists. They had told me that it sneaks up on you because you are approaching the mountains and you don't even know that there is a canyon there, and then all of a sudden you are standing on the edge of a deep steep valley and at the bottom of it is a metropolis complete with skyscrapers and neighborhoods built up on the sides of the hills. The view that I had was no less amazing than I expected, it seemed unnatural to me. The ride down was fast, and when I got to the central plaza I noticed how this place was the only pretty much all Indian metropolis in the world.

I stayed in a hotel one day and then I met up with Todd and he showed me his hotel which was much cooler. Spent a few days hanging out with him and a couple Argentinean guys. We got a tour to climb the local 6000 meter peak Potosi. We had two guides for the three of us. They were young Indian guys who were cool. We spent the first night in a mud hut on the roadside at the base of the mountain, and the first day we walked along an aqueduct about thirty feet up a sheer cliff. On the way up they took us ice climbing which was cool, then we hiked up to the base camp at the bottom of a snow field. We got up super early the next day and hiked up, but Todd and one of the Argentineans got altitude sickness and had to turn around, so me and the other Argentinean climbed the mountain. The final climb to the summit was awesome because it was up a 60 degree slope for a couple hundred meters. I would like to climb a mountain like that again because you really feel like your high. The summit was no less intense because it was only about the size of a room and the other side of the mountain was a sheer cliff. The view was amazing because I could see such a varied landscape. To the north were a bunch of six thousand meter peaks, to the north west was the entire expanse of the lake, to the west I could see volcano Sajama in the distance, to the south west I could see the valley of La Paz, to the south was the pass to the jungle, and to the east was the Amazon jungle way way way below us. I was going to develop the photos immediately but I think the helper guy who rode on top of the truck stole my camera so I could never do it. It was ironic because the guys I was with fumed at the owner of the travel agency for making the guy ride on top with the bags, but he was perfectly happy to do so so he could rip us, or me, off.

After that last form letter, it was over a year before I wrote another one. I kind of lost motivation. I think I was smoking too much weed. But I did get a newfound motivation to write rhymes, and in the course of a few days I read my rhyming dictionary and finished a rhyme I was working on for about six months and a ballad, limerick, and the like. My time in La Paz was kind of a vacation within a vacation. I did a lot of hanging out and partying. I hung out with an Israeli guy and his Israeli friends who where all hanging out in the same hotel. They virtually took over a bar with a beautiful view of the city, and all had their meals in an Israeli restaurant. There were a couple of American college girls staying in the place for a while who were studying in Santiago and were talking about how nice of a place it was to live.

The day after my New York friend left I bumped into an English girl who was in the group I went with up Mount Chimborozo in Ecuador. She had been having a nice trip, she was dating a journalist and hung out with the newly elected president of Peru during the independence festivities in Cuzco. She was hanging out with some French engineering students. We got really drunk one night in their room and I blacked out. Later I ran into them on the street and they said I puked out of their hotel room window.

I also came up with the (weed induced) idea of making a shell-sled to drag with the help of a dog to the South Pole and back. It's a pretty cool idea. It's a collapsible sled, that during the day is a sled and at night is a tent. It is to save the hassle of putting up a tent in a blizzard.

One day I rode my bike up to the highest ski resort in the world at like 5100 meters, and hiked up to the hill in the background at 5400 meters.

Another day I did the bike ride down to Coroico at 2100 meters. From the city of La Paz, I rode up to a pass at about 5000 meters before the descent into the jungle. It was an amazing ride. In the first part of the descent the road was surrounded by huge snow-capped jagged peaks. I was riding almost too fast because the air resistance was so low. Then the pavement became dirt and the descent down the jungle canyons started. For most of the way the road was on the edge of almost sheer cliffs, which was pretty freaky because it was such a narrow road, that the trucks and buses had to take turns stopping to let each other by at parts; and there was never a side rail. I had heard through the grape vine through a lot of different sources, both Israeli and non Israeli, that a couple months beforehand a young Israeli girl rode her bike off the road and died. I wanted to ride my bike back up to La Paz, but when I got up at four the next morning my bike had a flat and I lost my motivation. The next day I didn't have the motivation and took the bus.

Coroico is a beautiful town perched quaintly on the edge of one of the ridges that leads down to the river; with

beautiful views of the huge mountains that surround La Paz to the west, a big river way down below to the north, jungle plains to the east, and jungle hills to the south. Being that it is perched on a jungle mountain ridge, the streets were very steep, even the central plaza.

One day I rode my bike towards Illimani, the 6400 meter mountain to the south of La Paz, to climb it; but my bike rack broke under the weight of my pack.

A couple days later I bumped into one of my Argentinean friends who was in La Paz buying stuff for his place in Copacabana, and we met up in a bar that night. At the bar after he left, I met some Columbian artisan's and went to a disco with them. After the disco I went to a whore house with one of them and his friend who happened to live in the same hotel as me. We were hanging out with their friend who said he was the manager of the place. We weren't there to bang any whores, but to do cocaine. I felt like it might have been better to be there for the prostitutes though, because they were just sitting there looking bored. Hopefully it was just a slow night.

After that I was kind of losing motivation to hang out in La Paz, so I just left one night at midnight because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it during the day. The next day I had ridden for about 10 miles and had decided I was bored of bike touring. I think mainly because I didn't have enough good music and had sold all my weed to my Argentinean friend. So I started looking at the surrounding artisan houses and wondering if any of those farmer people would be interested in buying my bike. I rode up to one house and asked for water and asked a boy if he knew anyone who wanted to buy my bike. He took me to his neighbor-relative who was interested. I said I wanted 30 bucks for everything. I let him bargain me down to 15 bucks (which he paid me in change), but on the condition that he give me room and board for six days. I didn't go for that though, because the conditions they were living in was way too boring for me to stand. They had three buildings: The main building where they all lived was I think three rooms, then there was another building of two rooms, one of which I stayed in for one night, which was dirt floored. The other building was an outhouse-sized pile of unevenly-piled adobe bricks with huge gaps in it where the bricks didn't line up evenly. The land they lived in was a barren landscape of dry half-dead grass, with a small stream running through the town center about two hundred yards away. When I say "town," I mean about five families by the roadside and the stream. I saw a large pile of sticks in front of their house and asked what that was for and they said it was the fire wood for their stove. By the sticks was a pile of small rocks; that was the material for their up-coming second house. That night they made me sheep-gut soup and a dry-doeish concoction, and while I was waiting for it I discovered I was not only the guest of honor, but the nights entertainment. The man of the house, and his three or four sons came in, not all at the same time, to ask me all kinds of questions; like how much I make and if I am married and have any kids and why not. They seemed to think everything I said was hilarious, which amused me enough, especially when I noticed his daughters peeking at me through the windows. I sang them a few of the songs I wrote when I was in La Paz, which they loved, and the next day when I announced I was leaving, they all tried to make me stay. I got on the bus with my huge backpack and headed south.

The bus and most of the passengers seemed to be ancient, and they looked at me like I was an alien, which wasn't anything new to me, but I did feel strange to be bus bound. At the next small town there was a junction and I had to make a bus change. There I was mount Sajama, the biggest mountain in Bolivia, 6500 meters. It is a beautiful perfect cone mountain. I wanted to climb this mountain with those French kids, but the snotty ones didn't want me to come because they thought I was too much of a wasteoid. While we were waiting on the side of the road I thought it would be amusing to whip out all my money and count it before paying a shoe shiner boy. I had about five hundred dollars in small bills, because in my delusion in La Paz, I thought I would need it for my many months journey biking and climbing through the Bolivian outback. Little did I know how low on motivation I would turn out to be. I thought it would be funny going through a two-inch thick stack of money in front of all those people, but none of the Bolivians seemed to notice, but I did see a couple of Frenchies roll their eyes out of the corner of my eye. If you think this is dangerous, you don't know the peaceful nature of the Andean Indians.

The next town I got to was (?) a large town in the altiplanian wasteland, but it had some nice volcano-looking hills around. I only stayed there a few hours while I waited for my connection bus to take me to Potosi. While I was there I went to a restaurant and saw a telenovela, I don't know from what country. There was a hot girl who was overacting with her boyfriend problems and was being comforted by her fat friend. I remember thinking it was kind of lame the fat chick was put so bluntly on the sidelines. I tell you nobody makes TV like the good 'ol USA; music and movies too for that matter.

The bus ride to Potosi was nice, I could see the huge Salar de Yunui to the right for a large part of it. Then we got on an almost four wheel drive dirt road going over the almost 5,000 meter tundra to Potosi. Potosi is an interesting place. It is commonly known as the highest city in the world at 3800 meters, but according to my altitude watch, it is exactly as high as El Alto, the altiplano part of La Paz, which is bigger than Potosi. Potosi was founded in 1585 after the Spanish struck silver in the nearby 'Cerro Rico,' or 'Rich Hill'. It became the biggest city in South America, and was the richest for about 200 years. It is built up on the side of a hill, so all the roads were either up or down, including the central plaza. It was pretty apparent that Bolivians were poor by looking at this place. The infrastructure was underdeveloped, and it just seemed quiet overall and there weren't many tourists. I did the famous mine tour with four German kids from Munich (where most traveling Germans seem to come from). Our guide was a cheery young former miner whose English was quite good. The information he gave us was in conflict with what I read in my Lonely Planet book. In the book it says that the miners die an average of ten years after first setting foot in the mines of silicone poisoning, but the guide said they live an average of 60 years. He let us into large caverns for a couple hundred meters, and then we climbed down angled wooden beams another five or six layers; then got on our hands and knees and shimmied even farther down until we got into a steaming-hot room that was lined with this glowing, dripping, fluorescent-looking rock sap stuff. This was the silicone, the stuff that causes the room to be so hot, and give the miners the lung diseases that eventually kill them. He offered to lead us down even farther down a hole barely big enough to fit in that looked vertical, but we were with a 55 year old dude who didn't want to go. Not long after a gruff-looking group of miners hurried out with big cloths filled with rocks slung over their backs. One of them was about fifty years old, and he was next to a kid about thirteen. Our guide cheerily said the kid was the old dudes son. We shimmied back out of through the tunnel and another group came up behind us. This tunnel was barely big enough to go single file, but these miners were passing us like we were standing still, and they weren't being very courteous about it either. They passed us by whacking us on our heals and physically pushing us out of the way. They looked like they were in a race. Our guide said these miners make something like a hundred bucks a month which is more than doctors in Potosi make. But they make their money according to how much silver they mine.

When we got back into the main tunnel we were passed-up by another few groups of miners pushing little rail buckets filled with about a thousand pounds of silver ore. These guys didn't even bother to yell to get our attention, they just smashed their cart into our legs to force us out of the way. When we got outside, our guide took his T-shirt off and carried it off about a hundred yards and put it on a stick of dynamite to show us the kind of explosives the miners use. After about thirty seconds the T-shirt just disappeared into thin air, followed about second later by a deafening thunder which carried out like a computer generated echo as it bounced off all the other hills around and faded away. I remember thinking the entire city must have heard that dynamite go off.

The next day I did the tour in the mint that used to make the money for the entire Spanish new world empire. That museum was a real wake up call to the horrors of slavery. Eight million slaves have died in Potosi since it's founding, and none of the black slaves they imported or their descendants lived to tell the tell; according to the guide it was because black people can't take the cold. She showed us the place where the slaves stood for hours on end pressing the coins; we knew exactly where they stood because of the indention's their feet carved into the wood floor.

After Potosi I went to Yunui, the only real town that lined the great Salar de Yunui, the largest salt flat in the world. On the bus there I was talking to a friendly Bolivian guy who said some interesting stuff, but I don't remember what it was. When I got off the bus and grabbed by stuff, I saw a thin 16 year old Bolivian girl with huge tits walk buy with her friends, and then I walked across the street and looked to my left and saw an intense-looking bearded white man talking to a Chinese dude. I continued down along the central paseo and walked by a group of shit-faced dudes from Ireland, America, and Australia. They were amped and asked me why the hell I had a bike helmet strapped to my backpack, and then asked me to drink with them; so I sat down. Not long after a pretty blond German girl walked up to me and said she noticed my helmet and said her boyfriend was looking for someone to replace her on a tandem bike ride across the Altiplano to Chile. So I walked over and talked to the bearded man who was Sebastian. A 20 year old German dude who organized full sponsorship from a bunch of different bike-parts and mountain-gear companies for his "come with me" tour. His plan was to bike from La Paz to the southern tip of South America with about 12 different partners taking turns helping him ride his new tandem bike. He even had a website www.gobybike.com, and had already done a bike tour through Central Europe and Scandinavia, and two years beforehand had ridden his mountain bike with another German dude from his hometown to Beijing, China, the last day for 40 hours straight because he wanted to see his dad before he went back to Germany. He had just met a Swiss-German kid named Dan who had also just ridden his bike across the salar, and had ridden around Europe and Iceland.

Those guys wanted to leave the next day for the trip, but I hadn't seen the salar yet and wanted to do the one day tour, so they waited for me. The next day I did the tour in an old Toyota Land Cruiser, which is about the only car you see in the Bolivian antiplano. Because of the corrosivity of the salt, the tires have to be replaced every four months, but that didn't deter a constant flow of eighteen wheelers from going across it; not on a road, but a series of tracks that continually take turns being the choicest one depending on which one is the smoothest at any given moment. The first place we stopped on the tour was the edge of the salar, where the workers unload the trucks that collect the salt onto huge piles to later be shoveled onto larger trucks and taken off to be sold. I walked up to the shovelers and was about to take a photo but they looked at me scornfully and told me they wanted like five bucks to get their photo taken, so I walked back and took a photo from the distance. I would have said 'fuck you' and taken the photo anyway, but Indians all over the Americas are religiously apprehensive about getting their pictures taken; something about compromising their soul.

Then we drove in about an hour to a hotel that is made entirely out of salt. The walls, the floor, even the furniture is made out of salt. The people there were nice and didn't make us pay to take photos of it. Then we continued in about another hour and got to the Isla de Pascua, an island in the middle of the salar, littered with giant cactuses. The island had a really cool feel too it. The salt on the edge of it was broken up by all the tourist traffic, and resembled a nice beach that went on forever. I climbed to the top of the hill and looked around to the edges. It was definitely one of the most spectacular views I have ever experienced. The edges of the salar were way off in the distance, barely definable. And I could see snow-capped peaks in every direction, which made me want to climb them. I could see more Toyota Land Cruisers coming in, which looked like tiny specks. I spent the rest of the time there throwing rocks at cactuses with some of the drunk guys I met the day before. I heard one of them wasn't allowed on the train they took part of the way there because he was too drunk.

That night back in Yunui I went to the local movie theater, and saw a cheesily entertaining American 80's made for TV movie about a woman doing some kind of revenge thing against an evil army renegade with the help of a couple Indians who told her he had, "seen her in his visions about a white woman who would return and avenge the angry nature spirits of the land".

That night I hung out with Sebastian and got my bike shoes stolen out of my hotel room, which pissed me off because I wanted to attach my pedals to his bike for more power; little did I know we would not need it on the rough terrain that was to follow.

We rode on the gravel road out of town and past the massive train graveyard the next day, we were kind of huffing it to catch Dan who left the day beforehand, which felt good to be getting exercise again. We had way more gear on that bike that I ever thought you could pack. We had my 30 pound backpack that had everything you could possibly need to hike and live in snowcapped mountains, plus all of his bike gear and the camping gear that he brought which was for two people. So we had gear for three people. The bike must have weighed at least a hundred kilos. Not too many kilometers out of town the gravel road became sandy in spots and we had to push the bike a lot. We rode a few hours into the night and camped next to a river that we were going to have to wade through the next day.

The next day we rode about twelve kilometers until we noticed my crampons fell off the bike, so I rode back to the campsite, but someone had already grabbed them. That afternoon we arrived at a town and the locals said they met our friend who was waiting for us on a hill outside of town. Sebastian got Dan and brought him back and we hung out for a bit purifying water and entertaining the huge crowd of kids that had gathered around to watch us. We later on got used to having huge crowds of curious kids surround us at every town we arrived at, and started to enjoy different ways to entertain them. They are so easy to entertain. All you have to do is make monkey sounds or dance around like your having an epileptic seizure, and everyone would burst out laughing. Maybe everyone would burst out laughing too back home, but way out here with these strange Bolivian village folk, there was absolutely no embarrassment factor.

The first night with the three of us together, we camped out about a half mile away from a small town in the middle of nowhere and made a huge fire with all the dead branches. The town had a nice thatch roofed church. In that town we met a group of about 30 Italians who shipped their own four-wheel-drive vehicles over from Italy and where driving them as a club all around South America. They had old people lounging in chairs, young people, wives, and people on motorcycles.

The next day we rode over some hills and into a large valley where we camped. As we were packing up our stuff we saw the caravan of Italians cruise by. About an hour after we started riding we saw an adobe house with some kids playing outside, and about an hour later we arrived in another town. This town was interesting. It was pretty big, but in the middle of nowhere. It had dirt roads all over, and all the houses where adobe and thatched roofed. There was only one place open in the whole town where we could get water and buy food; and the only food they had was rice. A crowd gathered to watch us here to, but they weren't as outgoing, and Sebastian thought they were unfriendly.

From here we could see a snow-capped condor looking six thousand meter mountain to the west. In Bolivia and Peru a lot of mountains are called Condorini, because the Condor is a national animal, and a lot of mountains look like a flying condor, with a head mountain in the middle, flanked by two slightly lower mountains on either side. Not long after we rode out of town we started to climb, which was cool because I was finally getting some exercise. Until then most of the riding was really easy because we had to take it easy not to pinch the tire under all the weight we had. The road became pretty much four wheel drive, and the landscape became very pretty with the valley behind us and nice rock formations all around.

We camped out in a nook in the rock formations away from all the wind, and stayed up until about two next to a full-on bonfire. The next morning we were having some trouble with flats and decided we wanted to make a little more headway so we flagged down a truck to take us to where they were going. The first truck we flagged down picked us up, it had two guys and a girl. I got in the front with them and Sebastian and Dan got in the back with the bikes. They said the girl was the wife of one of the guys and was just there to keep them company for the ride. There were a lot of huge trucks outfitted to rough roads passing by that where filled with a certain type of cactus. It was empty when they picked us up because they were heading up to collect their load of cactuses. They had gotten up at about five o'clock and said it was a three hour drive to the place where they collected their load. They said it would take three hours to fill the truck, and then go back that night. They showed me where they were headed, the top of a mountain that looked about 5 thousand meters high. The kind of cactus they were looking for was all over the place, I can't remember what they used it for. I heard it took like a hundred years for them to grow, but these trucks were coming in like a steady train to collect them. I didn't have the heart to ask them how much money they made. It was kind of a pity we took the ride, because the part they took us was the best part in the whole trip to ride; the road was a smooth two track with a steady curving climbing. I tried talking to them but I could tell they weren't very outgoing. When they dropped us off at the base of the condor-looking mountain they stood there waiting for a donation, so we gave them a couple dollars and they seemed happy. They said there was a shelter way up at the base of the mountain, so we started to ride up there on another road that lead there, but Dan and Sebastian were tired and pitched a tent while I ran up a couple kilometers looking for the shelter which turned out to be way up there, so I went back.

The next morning at four or so Dan and I got up and hiked up while Sebastian stayed behind to watch the stuff. When the sun rose we were at about 5000 meters. It was a beautiful sunrise, slowly lighting up all of the salt plains and mountains. It was about then when we hit the steep part of the mountain and we climbed up the rocks next to the snow field because we didn't have crampons. We summited the 6000 meter peak at about eleven. It was a beautiful view. We could see the mountains just over to the west that formed the border with Chile, and the mountains in the South that were the border with Argentina, we saw a salt flat just to the south, and we even saw the great Salar de Yunui (?) kilometers to the north-east. We descended on a different ridge than the one we climbed up, with was a bad idea because we didn't have crampons and Dan didn't have an ice ax. We got to a place where we couldn't descend on the ridge so we had to go on the ice field which was about 60 degrees and more than a thousand meters down. If it had been me without the ice axe, I would have climbed to the top again and gone down the ridge, but Dan wasn't too scared so we opted for me to hack out foot holds for him while I was under him to catch him in case he slipped. When we got past the sketchy part, I took the backpack and slid on my ass to the base of the glacier and fell asleep until Dan caught up to me.

The next day we encountered another house where we could buy crackers and bread. From here it was (?) kilometers to Laguna Colorado, which was next place we could get water, so we stocked up. The guy who managed this place was very friendly. We rode for another couple hours and camped out at another lake, the first of a series of lakes before we were to start a steady climb that would lead us to a flat 5,000 meter desert. This lake had a high concentration of salt like all the lakes around there, but it had flamingos living in it. In the morning when we got close to take a picture, they all flew to the other side in a huge pink mass. On the other side of the lake were a couple of 6,000 meter peaks that were the boarder of Chile.

That morning we saw a lot of tourist trucks stop to see the famous flamingo lake. We saw some Chileans drive up in their own truck and get approached by a Bolivian ranger who turned them around. At this point Dan commented that that was because the Bolivians and Chileans don't like each other because of their historical boarder disputes. He said those mountains we were looking at on the other side of the lake were littered with land mines. He said me met a bike tourist who was riding on a road near the boarder and saw a Lama get blown away by one. I don't know how true that comment was, but it made me feel lucky about meeting those guys, because I was planning on hiking all over those mountains. As we were climbing up a hill away from the lake we dropped Dan, which is what we always did because we had extra power with two riders, and we passed a Land Cruiser. We waited for Dan at the top of the hill and he said one of the people in the truck was my German friend Marcus who recognized me. Realistically speaking, about 80% of the people we met in the Bolivian antiplano were Germans or Swiss-Germans. It was really strange.

After the lakes ended we started climbing up a valley that must have been about ten kilometers wide. We camped at about the top of the 5,000 meter "pass", if you could call it that because it was just a big sand dune, it was too sandy to ride, so we pushed for about an hour until the sun started to set and we saw a rock, the only rock for miles, to camp under. We felt lucky because it was getting really windy. The next morning we climbed about another hundred meters to the top of the pass and had our first descent for days. We were running low on bread so Sebastian and Dan flagged down some more tourist Land Cruisers for more food. At this point asking for food and water from the tourists was comical because we had asked so many times, it was beginning to be like a regular routine. If we got hungry instead of going in our bags, we just flagged down a truck and were given as much of whatever we wanted. It was so funny we had to try to keep from laughing when we asked for the food. Sebastian tried to get me to ask for it, but I always feel guilty asking for give-outs unless I am really desperate, so I let him take care of it.

Sebastian is really guilt free, when he wants something he asks, and the interesting thing is he gets. He had the perfect personality to organize a fully sponsored trip like this. More power to him is my attitude, I hoped one day I could one day ask like he does. So the trip was going really well, we didn't have to worry about food or water, and we were milking the wild quiet energy of that 5,000 meter desert. After descending we got to another large plain and started another steady climb for the whole day until we got back up over 5,000 meters, even higher than we were before. Because we were so high and we were in a flat desert with no mountains near by, it was getting to be ridiculously windy, but eerily quiet. Probably the strangest place I have ever been. The sun started to set, but we wanted to camp at the famous tree rock, and Dan's GPS told us it was only a couple kilometers away, so we continued in the direction the GPS told us. We had to trust the GPS because their was no one road. It was like the Salar de Yunui, just dozens of parallel tracks leading in the same general direction, and we knew the wouldn't all lead to the rock tree because some of the tours skip it. We didn't see anything in the direction the GPS told us, but we trusted it, and sure enough, the obscure bumps in the distance turned out to be the formation where the rock tree was. It was a beautiful camp sight, with large rocks everywhere, plenty to break the gale force winds and give us a peaceful campsite.

This night we all slept in my two man tent, which was very cramped. It snowed again that night, and we woke up to a couple on inches of snow. We climbed to the top of the rock tree and took some pictures, and then took off into so much wind at our backs that we barely had to pedal even though we were on a bike that had about 400 pounds and we were climbing. When we turned the wind was at our sides and we had to keep it at like a 30 degree angle to keep it balanced. The wind must have been going more than 70 miles an hour. We arrived at Laguna Colorado that evening, where we could buy some food and replenish our water. We camped at the side of the lake and decided to have a rest day. In the morning I took off to climb the 6,000 meter volcano that was next to the lake, but I made the mistake of running in my boots and got a bloody blister and had to go back. At this point Dan and Sebastian were starting to get on my nerves because they were talking to each other in German all the time; and I hate feeling like the odd man out, so I got really grumpy. Also, we found a new rip in the last rear tire we had and I told Sebastian I didn't think the bike would make it to Chile with me. So those guys went on a hike, and when they came back they asked me to leave. The next day they left late and I reserved the last seat in the last Land Cruiser to the boarder with Chile.

That night I sat around watching all the tourists eating their meals, and the hosts of the place felt sorry for me so they let me eat the left-over in the pots, which was more than enough to stuff me. While I was eating I overheard some tourists that were coming from the other direction talking about how they met a couple guys on bikes who asked them for bread, which gave me a chuckle.

One of the Bolivians that lived there told me that some terrorists killed some people in New York. I remember wondering why he would tell me that. It seemed odd. How could a Bolivian living hundreds of kilometers from the nearest town know, or even care about a couple terrorists killing a few people in New York? The driver of the truck I found said his group that was filled with Irish people (which was odd being that all the tourists there were German), was going to leave at five thirty in the morning, so I set my alarm clock for five, and double checked it and triple checked so it was activated. But it never went off, and I naturally woke up at six and freaked out thinking I missed my only chance of getting out of there that day, so I grabbed my clock and it was on and set for five, which baffled me. I franticly got dressed and ran out to the place they slept and luckily they hadn't left yet. So I went back and packed my stuff, but my clock had magically disappeared.

After Lake Colorado there was another big climb, but steep, that curved around to the other side of the mountain where I saw Dan and Sebastian's camp sight. They hadn't gotten up yet. In the truck I asked one of the Irish girls if she knew anything about the terrorist attack in New York, and she said some Arabian guys flew a couple planes into the world trade building and they completely collapsed. She said it like it was no big deal, and none of them were talking about it, so I didn't know whether to believe her or not, but I remember being anxious to get to town and find out if it was true.

Just about at the top of the 5,000 meter pass we stopped at a geyser that blew up like old faithful every minute or so. A couple hundred meters farther was a large area of small pools of bubbling mud. This was the highest we went on the trip, from there we descended to some hot springs that were on the edge of a green lake and soaked for about a half hour. Then we climbed into the land cruiser and were one of the first in the entourage of about twenty land cruisers to leave. Our driver got into a race with one of the other land cruisers. They were taking different tracks and hoping it was the quickest at the time. We won. Then we went to another lake that was so salty it has huge salt foam waving up against the shore. This lake was at about 5,000 meters too, and at the base of a 5,900 meter mountain called Lincanbur which didn't look very big from where we were. It was so cold and windy up there most of the people didn't even want to get out of the cars. Then we climbed some more until the boarder with Chile where we got into another van. We descended down a dirt road for a little bit, and then it turned to a nice paved road that descended down to the town of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile.

The next day I got on the bus for Ushuaia Argentina; the southernmost city in the world. Ushuaia is on an island called Tierra del Fuego, which means "land of fire" in Spanish. It's called Tierra de Fuego because when the Spanish came they saw fires all over the place because that was the local natives way to keep warm. The island was only about a half kilometer from the mainland but we had to take a ferry across. We drove on a dirt road on the bare grass and very windy Chilean part of the island for a couple of hours until we got to the border with Argentina. The bus dropped me off a couple hours into Argentina at the second largest town on the island called Rio Grande. I waited there for an hour and got on another bus to Ushuaia. There were a few more trees on the Argentinean side of the island, but it was still pretty barren. The final part of the drive into Ushuaia was beautiful. We entered a pine forest and went past a nice long lake surrounded by mountains and up a pass and descended down into the city. Ushuaia is one of the prettiest towns I have ever seen. It's in a bay that looks more like a lake because you can only see the open ocean on the south east corner of it, and it is surrounded on all the other sides by mountains of all different shapes. There is one very large mountain that springs right out of the edge of town that looks like a perfectly symmetrical pyramid, and the other mountains are perfect for hiking. On the southern part of the town there is a nice ski run with a lift that springs right out of the town itself. I saw a map while I was there of a ski resort that was about an hour away, and it looked just like a ski resort back in Colorado. It had a bunch of lifts and runs through the trees and a couple of lifts that went to the treeless top of the mountains it was on. I got the impression it was like a little paradise that nobody knows about, tucked away in the corner of the world.

The bus dropped me off on main street, and when I got out there was an old woman waiting there who wanted to take me to her hotel a couple of blocks away. She was talking to me the whole way to her hotel. I stayed in the front room with an Israeli guy who had been there about a week hanging out with some girls he met there and teaching them Hebrew. This woman was very religious and talked to me for like a half hour every time I was in the kitchen. The Israeli guy said she was doing the same thing to him and that he told her he doesn't believe in Jesus because he is Jewish and she got all upset because of that. I decided to make her happy and told her that I loved Jesus too which made her very happy and started talking to me like I was her best friend. She told me she was really sad because her husband and son weren't religious and started to cry and then left for the church which she seemed to do like five times a day. She made a point to tell me every time she went out that she was going out to meet people from her church. Once a guy came over and she said he was from the church. I told her if she wanted some help talking to God she could buy some Rose essential oil and smell it, and she got really excited and got out her pen to write it down, but I told her it was expensive but she could buy Rose petals and that would help. I saw her husband sitting in the kitchen one day. He had really long hair and a really long beard. I asked him if he was her husband and he said "yes, unfortunately". He was drinking wine and looked bemused. He started telling me about how there are financial problems in Argentina and it's Americas' fault because we're racist against Argentineans. Then he went into his sons room on the other side of the hallway. Their son was always in his room listening to Bon Jovi and playing video games. Ushuaia is in a cool setting with the town built up against the mountains. It was very expensive though, I spent 20 bucks just for two days worth of food at the supermarket. It was there that I had my first Argentinean barbeque with all sorts of different meats which was delicious, and a stark difference from Chile.

After Ushuaia I went to Rio Gallagos which was the windiest city I have ever been to. I stayed at a camp sight near the bus station and walked into town and it all seemed kind of depressing, mainly from the gale force wind. Then I took a bus to the town of El Calafate and got a room. The next day I went to see the glacier Moreno which was very interesting. It is a glacier about 18 kilometers long and five wide. It was the only glacier in the world that was still growing up until 1988. It was growing because in 1930 or something some kind of ice-barrier broke up in the mountains which allowed another glacier to feed into the main glacier and add more pressure to push it forward so it came 75 more meters forward at a fast rate until it blocked a lake-river that the glacier comes at from the side, until one side of the lake is like 10 meters higher than the other side and the pressure blasts all the ice away every four years until the last time it happened in 1988 which was attended by the president of Argentina.

This was a tourist town but it was totally empty which made me kind of sad. It was in a beautiful setting next to a lake up against the mountains. I bought a couple of cartons of white wine and drank both of them with my dinner which was a mistake because all of a sudden I was totally hammered and crazy and decided I needed to get weed, so I stumbled outside and started asking everybody on the streets if they knew where to get weed. I walked by a little tourist agency hut and saw about 10 young guys in there and because they were young and it was at night, I automatically figured that they were having a party so I walked in and asked them if they knew if I could find weed and they said no, so I started telling them how much I loved weed until they all walked outside and one guy was left and I was talking to him until I realized he had never said anything to me, and had just been watching me. So I started walking home and the next thing I remember is waking up the next morning with barf all over me and feeling like hell. I needed some good food so I went to a nice restaurant that was empty except for me and I told the waiter how I thought Argentinean wine was bad and he said it was really good and I told him that the cheap white wine was bad and he said "of course". I got on the empty bus back to Rio Gallegos and took the first back and then got the first bus to Puerto Madrin on the way to Peninsula Valdez.

Puerto Madrin was more interesting than Rio Gallegos. This was a bit of a tourist town where people buy tour to see the peninsula. I took a tour to see the whales in the bay. This is the only kind of whale in the world that floats when it is dead so they were almost driven to extinction by the whale hunters because they are so easy to kill, because all they had to do was shoot them and go off and shoot another and round them up at the end of the day. We got on a boat that was on a trailer and then was backed up by a tractor until the boat was in the water. We floated around with a whale family for a while which consisted of the father, the mother and the baby. They were swimming under the boat and spitting water. There was an American guy on the boat who was translating what the tour guide was saying. This American guy had lived there for five years after he went to Bolivia to take a picture of an eclipse. He was selling videos of killer whales on the peninsula attacking and killing sea lions. Then we drove the eastern edge of the peninsula and stopped at a plateau that overlooks some beaches where the sea lions live. There was a beach to the north that was as long as the eye could see, that was actually an estuary and was loaded with Sea Lions. I walked down a trail to a lookout a little bit above a pool where there were many Sea Lions and Sea Elephants basking in the sun, which seemed to be all they did with their lives. I walked in the distance and saw a couple of Killer Whales hanging out waiting for a Sea Lion swimming in the ocean looking for fish. Then we drove to another cliff and looked down on hundreds of Sea Lions and a few dead ones. I looked in the distance and saw thousands as they extended as far as I could see. That night I saw Kiss of the Dragon with Jett Lee.

That night I took a bus to Mar Del Plata which is the biggest sea side city in Argentina besides Buenos Aires. It was a pretty city with rolling hills and a nice beach in the city center where I watched a roller blade relay race. I stayed there one day, and the next morning I took a train to Buenos Aires. The train was a rickety one and the guy sitting next to me was looking at me with eagle eyes for a while and then asked me where I was from. He was a basketball referee. He said the reason Argentina was having economic problems was because Argentineans aren't patriotic as a country and just stab each other in the back, and the politicians are thieves. He said the other reason was the floods and he pointed out the window as we were rolling by the outskirts of a suburb of Buenos Aires where we could see water totally inundating a residential section, drowning out the cars and getting in the houses. He said nothing could grow and the cows didn't have enough good grass to eat.

When I got to Buenos Aires I walked into a neighborhood were there were some hotels and a cheery old man approached me and told me I should stay in his place for eight pesos a day and he would give me a rate if I stayed longer and I could bring girls there. So he showed me the door and walked off, so I knocked and a stupid-grumpy looking guy answered it and I said an old man told me he owned it and it was eight pesos a night. But the guy said no it was ten, so I left and was looking for another hotel when I saw the old man again and he took me back and said the guy who lived there was just the host and it was eight pesos. I got a room and called my friend Santiago.

Second time after my trip to Brazil

The bus to Buenos Aires was nice because most of the passengers on the bus were Argentineans and I felt refreshed to be around more civilized people who I could actually speak to. I stayed in the same hotel as before because they had my backpack, but it wasn't in the basement anymore, it was in the old guys house which I thought was weird because the basement was empty. My bike was at his house to and I had to wait a couple of days for him to bring it over. I went to the same bar, the Shamrock bar and met a dude and an English couple had just arrived and were doing a tour of southern South America. After a little while they said they wanted to go and catch the new episode of Angel and they invited me so we was an episode about an old guy who takes Angels body and tries to screw lots of girls but can't get anywhere because he's too violent and scares them away and kicks peoples asses. Then we went out to another bar that was totally empty except us, and then ate at a restaurant and they were marveling about how cheap and good the food was. I took them to the "cathedral", a small Tango place where Mariana took me and we were waiting for a show to start and Mariana showed up. At the end of the night there we went to a Chinese restaurant and then went to my room at about four in the morning. At about five in the morning the caretaker woman came to my door and was pissed off that Mariana was there and said she would have to leave at eight in the morning. I told her that Rodolfo told me at the very beginning that I could bring girls there and she said I should have told her that Mariana was there and told her we got back at four but she said that didn't batter. Mariana and I were up for another hour or so and went to sleep at about six and the lady was buzzing me at eight and said she had to go at that minute so Mariana said she knew a nice hotel that was only 20 pesos so I gathered up my stuff and we went there. The new hotel was way better. It was within walking distance to Mariana's' house and the Cathedral. I ended up hanging out in Buenos Aires that time for 20 days because the institute I worked for, Barrigi consulting, kept delaying paying me. When I first got there I went into the place and they remembered that they owed me money for the two months that I worked there but they said they needed boletos so I brought them the same boleto book that I showed to Gisela but she said it wasn't the right one but when I showed it to the other woman she said it was good but they told me I needed a proof of residency document so I went and paid the 10 pesos for that and showed it to them so they said in a week they could pay me so I showed up a week later and picked up my check but it was only for October and I had to remind them that I worked in November too and they told me I would have to wait another week for the other check. When I got home, I noticed the check was post-dated for April 25 which wasn't for another three weeks. And when I picked up the second check and I couldn't open one for myself but Mariana still had a bank account on the outskirts of town so we took a bus about 50 minutes to it and discovered that you have to deposit the check the same day as it is post-dated for which meant a big pain in the ass for Mariana so I called them and asked them if they could change the date so I could get the money before I left and the guy said no and started to explain it in Spanish so I gave the phone to Mariana and she talked to him a little bit and she told me they didn't know I was going to Santiago. But I didn't complain because she was still willing to cash the checks and send the money to me when she got it, but when she did she sent me an American Express check but I couldn't cash it because there are no American express check but I couldn't cash it because there are no American Express offices in Santiago so I had to send there check back to Mariana to get the money back from the bank but she said all the banks in Buenos Aires closed down for a month and wouldn't open up until after she left to Portugal but her mother would take care of it but she didn't and Mariana didn't return any of my emails until recently and now she says she is trying to figure out what is going on with the bank. The time I had there with Mariana though was very nice. She was spending all her spare time with me in my hotel room and i was hanging out in there smoking weed that she hooked me up with on the mall from a friend of her ex-boyfriend. I got a huge block of strong weed for like 18 bucks. I was listening to music and relaxing, it was a nice time for me.

The ferry ride across the river to Uruguay was unique because the river was almost totally flat and brown, which made it seem peaceful in an erie way. It was a night boat so when I got there I tried to get a place in Colonia but it was too expensive so I just walked around and checked out the ruins and looked across the river. Colonia is a nice little town with a similar feel to Argentina except more laid back.

Then I took the bus to Montevideo, which is a pretty big city with an old broken in feel to it because there wasn't a real modern skyline. However it did contain the an old building that used to be the highest in South America. The historic center of the city which is right next to the commercial center, is totally decapitated. Almost all of the buildings are big and sturdy looking stone structures, but are totally boarded up and abandoned. It gave me the impression something went terribly wrong with the place.

The most hilarious thing about Uruguay is how all of the people are totally addicted to Maté, which is an herb that was first introduced to me in Argentina that is put into a wood cup with a small opening, mixed with hot water, and drunken with a special filtered straw. I thought the Argentineans were fanatical about this stuff because they have to have a couple times a day, but almost all of the Uruguan´s carry their thermostats and mugs around with them every where they go. It seemed like some kind of national addiction.

The hostel I got in Montevideo was cool because there were some cool travelers there who I hung out with in the TV room and kitchen. There was an American guy who had met an Argentinean girl and was thinking about going back, and a German couple who had sent their VW van to Uruguay and were going to drive it around South America, but it was late coming in.

The Uruguayan people looked just like the Argentineans, who are a large part just as white as me because of the Spanish, Italian, and Jewish ancestry, as well as a few people from north western Europe. They are more laid back and less stressed and depressed and more excited to be talking to me though. When I asked them who they were more similar to between the Brazilians and the Argentineans, they always said the Brazilians.

The next place I went to was Maldonado near Punta del Este. I went there because it had a map on the Lonely Planet book and I wanted to see a small Uruguayan town. It was peaceful, but too peaceful. It didn't seem like anything went on there. I stayed in a little hotel run by an old Irish guy who was telling me about all of the problems that Argentina was having. He said the people who run Argentina and Uruguay are all crooks. He said that the politicians of Argentina were filling up eighteen wheeler trucks with cash and shipping it out of the country in anticipation of the impending devaluation. He said that Uruguay had a scam that all of the rich people in power kept their friends wealthy and powerful by inventing new political offices for them. He said that because of this Uruguay had like a hundred Generals in their army. He was pretty typical of an old ex-patriot running a business, or living for a long time in a third world country. They always jump at the chance to say negative things about the country they live in to the tourists they meet. It makes you wonder why they are there in the first place. The next morning I did the tour of an old military compound and walked up an old tower that they used to spot invaders. It offered a nice view of the quaint little town that was obviously suffering some sort of economic depression. Maybe it was just out of tourist season for them.

Then I took the bus to Punta del Este. This is a popular vacation spot for Argentineans in the summer. It is a peninsula geared towards tourism and has some nice beaches. I spent a night there in a large tourist hotel. That night I walked down to the famous huge hotel that was a casino. The building was beautiful with high ceilings and large rooms, and there were a lot of tourists there. The next morning I went to the huge crowded beach and jumped into the freezing water and did some body surfing with about fifty other people.

I tried to get a bus to Brazil and the people in the station told me I needed a visa to go to Brazil and I had to go back to Montevideo to do that, whoops. So I went back to Montevideo and luckily it only took a couple days to get the visa which was only good for two months and costed me 60 bucks. The next day I was off to Brazil.

The first Brazilian town I went to was Porto Alegre. When I arrived at the bus station I was excited to hear people speaking another language. I walked into the center of town from the bus station and was disgusted by the rotten smell of the discarded food from the market, and felt like I was back in the third world because of the less fancy dress the Brazilians had, and a little disconcerted by all the fat people. After I got my money I went for a walk up to the cathedral and central plaza, which was up the hill from the river where I could see the huge city stretching over rolling hills. I stopped in a cafe and was working on my book when a 19 year old waiter who knew English excitedly approached me and started rattling off all of the American musicians he knew. He said Brazilians like rap.

Then I went to Florianopolis, which is supposed to be the best beach-surf town of Brazil. As I was approaching it I could tell it was very well developed. The city was straddled between the mainland and an island. I saw lots of prostitutes calling me as I walked down the alley to my hotel. There was one older prostitute standing in front of the hotel I wanted to go to who grabbed me and tried to pull me up inside and I said "Is this a normal hotel, I want a normal hotel". She said "No", so I started to walk away, but another prostitute told me that it was a normal hotel, so I stayed there. I didn't go to the beach there.

Curitiba was the next town I went to, It didn't have skyscrapers but it went on forever like Porto Alegre and Florianapolis which got me thinking about how huge the cities in Brazil were compared to those of the other countries in South America. In the other countries, you enter the city and not too long after that you are at the bus station, which is usually within walking distance from the hotel. But in Brazil the bus stations are in a different part of the town so you have to get on the bus and find the hotel district which is like a half hours bus ride away. Curitiba had a nice pedestrian mall and a lot of white people. It seemed the most like a developed country of all the places I went to in Brazil.

The bus station in Sao Paolo was the biggest I have ever seen and was connected to the subway which was like three levels up. I took it straight to the central plaza, but it seemed abandoned by all the business and was kind of a wasteland for the wasteoids. There was, however, a preacher fuming to a small crowd about Jesus. So after about two minutes I was board and even felt a bit unsafe even though it was broad daylight, so I consulted my lonely planet map and made way for the cheap hotel district to one of the two hotels that weren't whore houses. Luckily for me, the roads I chose were the main pedestrian mall, but you wouldn't have noticed it if it wasn't for the fact that it was narrow and cobble stoned and careless, because there were NO business open and only about 3 people per block were walking on it. After a couple of blocks the street widened and descended down into a crossroads with a perpendicular mall, which Santiago and Buenos Ares have also. As I was descending a Chilean man and his wife approached me and said he had lived there for like ten years and warned me that I should be careful of all the muggers and that not even Brazilians dare to walk around those parts. When I got to the central fountain I took a picture of the other pedestrian mall, which was ear lily wide and empty. I continued a few paces on and was approached by an older white man who told me that this wasn't the best part of town, that an other avenue, of the heroes, where the biggest skyscrapers were, was actually the real center of town. And that is where I would find b beautiful white Brazilian women and not this black garbage. When he said this he acted like I gave him a look like he was racist, which I didn't, and bid me a good day and strode off.

A few steps later I walked past a young black man sitting against a building wailing with half his hand inside a huge gaping hole in his stomach with blood gushing out and a cop and his friend casually approaching him. I called my friends again, but there was no answer, so I walked a couple more blocks and found my hotel. After I put contacts in for the first time in a year and a half I went out for dinner. After I ate I was heading b back home and was hoping to come across a bar of disco where I could hear some music.

I walked past a glittery place where there was a cute young chunky Indian looking girl standing outside and started talking to me and told me that was a strip club and there was good music. So I thought, wow, I have never been to a strip joint before. Naked girls, yea lets go. So I went in with her and we started talking and she asked me if I wanted a beer and gave me a little score card and said I could keep track of the drinks and pay when I left. But when she got up to get a beer she got into a yelling match with the bar tender and I was thinking, yea more good 'ol South American confusion. Then she left and came back with a mini skirt and I thought Dam, this girl isn't as hot as I thought, she has a belly. Then she started lap dancing on me which didn't turn me on at all, but I was excited because a girl has never done that before to little 'ol me. Then really good American rock music and disco music came on and some of the hottest girls I have ever seen before came out and did a sexy dance routine slowly took all of their cloths off. And then after a few super hot girls came on stage the girl who was sitting next to me drinking my beer got on stage and almost immediately took all her cloths off and was rolling spread legged all over the stage and winking at me and I was thinking "Oh nasty, go away", not that I have a problem with girls with bellies, its just that this girl was too overtly sexual to be sexy. Then she ran out to the crowd and started lap dancing on all the guys, giving special attention to me. When she left nobody clapped but she didn't seem to care. I ran out of money but I was having a good time so I went home and got more money. When I came back I sat at the same place I was before which was next to that girl. She had a leg slung over another guy and put another leg over me as if to say "look at me, I have two guys". I looked at the other guy and he looked at me and mimicked with his hands that he didn't want this girl and she was all mine if I wanted. And I said I didn't either. I had some more beers. and then I noticed want this girl and she was all mine if I wanted. And I said I didn't either. I had some more beers. And then I noticed that the guy was gone and I was enjoying the show, which that girl didn't like so she was lap dancing on me furiously trying to take my attention away from the dancing girls and getting in my way so I couldn't see, so I moved my head and she shifted to block me so I moved to the other side and she blocked me, al the time lap dancing on me in frustration. But she didn't bother me because the show was so good with naked dancing girls and good American dance music, the town going really well together. Then one of the hot dancers sat down so I told this girl who was on top of me that the other girl was hotter and I wanted to hang out with her so I went over and told her she was the hottest in the club. So she said "Why?" and I said because she has a nice body and her glasses and short straight blond hair made her look sophisticated and smart like a secretary. So she said, "I don't thing I'm smart," and she got up and moved us farther away to another part of the club, and she asked me to buy her a beer, but I told her I didn't have any money left so she promptly left like the ho she was, and the original girl came back. She was sitting next to me and somewhere along the line I went back to my hotel for more money and came back and was drinking with the two girls. At this point I was really drunk and started telling the young black girl that she was the hottest girl in the place and that I was going to go back there to work in Sao Paolo and marry her when I am done traveling through Brazil and unlike the other girl who just rolled her eyes and said I was just saying that, she was leaning over me and loving every minute of it and was all over me. The chunky girl was listening to every word of it and must have been burning up with jealousy because when the dancers stopped coming out and the place was closing up she got in my face and with furious eyes, barked at me that I owed 30 more dollars which sounded like way too much to me, but I wasn't counting and was way too drunk to argue in any language, much less Portuguese, so I said I only had 20 bucks so the bouncer came up to me and was angry too, and said he was going with me to my hotel to collect the money, so I said "yeah, whatever, just weight because that young black girl is coming with me". And when she came out and we left, the bouncer was just glaring at me when I walked off, so he must have forgotten, or decided he wasn't going to try to rip me off. I had a bad hangover the next morning but I wanted to leave early so I could put that wild night into my past ass quickly as possible. So I started packing at like nine and after I said buy to the cute young black girl I didn't want to spend anymore time in Sao Paulo so I decided to go straight to Rio, but I wanted to see the main skyscraper avenue of the heroes first so I went there. But it wasn't very interesting, the buildings weren't as high as I expected them to be, so I went back to the bus station and got a bus. I fell asleep almost immediately and didn't wake up until i got to Rio.

I was really excited to get to Rio ever since I saw the movie 'Blame it on Rio' which made it seem like a light hearted tropical paradise. When the bus stopped I immediately and didn't wake up until I got to Rio. When the bus stopped I immediately knew I was in Rio because of the jungle cliffs all around, and I became very excited because I have always wanted to go to Rio, and had the preconceived notion that Rio was the ultimate party town, which I later discovered to be true, provided that you have tons of money. But I also discovered it was the craziest most violent place I have ever been. When I stepped off the bus an outgoing guy approached me and offered me advice on where I was, but the couldn't find the bus station on my map and then said I should stay at his friends hotel which was just across the street, so I followed him just to look at the hotel, but what he meant was his car which wasn't a taxi was across the street and he was going to take me to his friends hotel, which I didn't like so he showed me his drivers license as if that was supposed to prove to me he was cool and he said "see, he'll say I'm cool and pointed to a cop who was walling buy, but the cop threw up his hands and said "I'm not vouching for that guy", so I told him I just wanted to know what part of the city I was in. So he insisted I get in his car about 5 more times and I said no, so he blew up with fury and told me I had a bad heart and wasted his time and yelled at me on his way across the street. Then I asked a cap driver where I was and he was able to show me so I took a bus to the cheapest place in the book. I checked in and then went to the front desk to drop off my key and noticed a tourist was asking the guy where the police station was, so I asked him what happened, he said he met some Brazilian guys who went back to his room with him and slipped something in his drink, and when he woke up his passport and money were gone. Then I walked out to see the town.

I walked a few blocks down the road and noticed a white guy holding a book I read in college so I started talking to him. And it turned out he went to my grade school and junior high and was a friend of my brothers. So I went to an outdoor bar with him and his Italian buddy. And we were talking to a Brazilian ex-cop and ex-pat Argentinean guy. The Brazilian was totally amped and was ranting on out how the American government sucks, but that the Brazilian government sucks also and was streaming at his friend which looked like a fight but turned out to be just a partying. Then the Argentinean invited us to a jazz place, which was an open night with different bands coming on every 20 minutes that were really good. When it ended Patrick and I decided we wanted some weed so I asked a guy and he turned out to be one of the guitarists and could speak English, and he gave me his number and told me to call him later. The next couple of days I explored Rio. There is a tram that goes up to the top of Corcovado mountain at nearly 800 meters, this is otherwise known as the Christ Redeemer statue. I only know from pictures that this mountain has the most beautiful view of a city in the world, because it suddenly clouded up only long enough for my visit so much that I couldn't even see his face 30 meters up. I did catch glimpses of the downtown area and the Botafogo section which was literally right below me at the bottom of a sheer cliff. The I went up the other beautiful view on top of the sugarloaf rock which is 300 meters up. From here I really got the feel of how this city is truly unique because of the fact that it is a giant mass of huge buildings sprawled over and upon jungle cliffs between steep mountains and beautiful beaches. If there wasn't any city there now no one would even think about putting a huge city there. But I guess over time the circumstances allowed for this intense landscape, allowing it to be workable with tunnels drilled through the granite and bridges arching their way over the mounds and concrete walls to catch the loose rocks that tumble down the near sheer faces from time to time.

After a couple days I finally made the 15 minute subway ride from the center to the famous Copacabana beach, 4.5 kilometers of one of the most crowded beaches I have ever seen. The most striking part of this beach weren't the women like my friend was going on about a couple night beforehand, but the men. Every few meters there was an outdoor workout center filled with serious looking super buff dude, more that I have every seen, which suddenly made me reel really little. I came across a couple of young girls with a massage chair so I started talking to them about massage. It was right before their lunch break so they invited me to eat with them. One of the girls was black and had naturally green eyes and blond hair which was a first for me. I mentioned to them about all the buff guys and they said "Well, they're not nice, they think they're better than everybody else". after we went back to their table they offered to do a trade the next day. When I came back the next day I gave one of the girls a massage and the other one game me a massage, which incidentally was the third time I have trades massages like that on this trip. A couple days later I sent back to that beach at night to see what that was like, and it was very busy. I was sitting at an outdoor table watching the people and a guy sitting at the next table watched me over. He could speak English and was a young guy and was sitting with one of they buff guys. He was telling me he was famous in those parts because he used to get drunk and go crazy and cause all sorts of trouble, then he offered me some cocaine. I was apprehensive but he said everyone there knew him and so I took some. Then he wanted more and got four bucks out of me to buy some. Then he wanted to get more so I left for the disco. At the time I didn't know that 99% of the women there were prostitutes. All of them are dressed very sexy and a lot of them had different themes, at one point a girl dressed as wonder woman tried to dance with me. I was very taken back by how they were all coming up to me and wanting to dance. They dance with you for a couple minutes and then they kiss you, then they ask you to buy them a beer, and then they dance with you a couple more minutes and ask for another beer, and if you say no, they go dance with another guy. Almost all of the girls are young and dressed very sexy. Most of the men there were flabbergasted Americans acting totally blown away by how forward the women were acting, but not all of them seemed to know they were all prostitutes; I remember one guy saying "good luck" to me. Maybe what he meant was 'good luck screwing one for less than fifty bucks'. I talked to one American guy who had been mugged on the beach earlier that day. He it was daylight taking a piss on a non-crowded part of the beach and a few guys came up and held knifes to his throat and asked for his wallet.

The next day I was hung-over eating in my local dinner and a scruffily-dressed white guy in his 50's was sitting across from me and suddenly out of the blue asked me if I was sick because my eyes looked foggy. I said no, and he excused himself to just say that to me but a lot of people there had yellow fever or something that is spread from mosquitoes and I should go to the doctor if I felt sick. Then he came over and started talking to me. He had been an indepentantly-employed English teacher there for a couple years. I asked him why he chose to live in Rio and he said "it's my mission". He used to be some kind of cop for the CIA and had been traveling for the last ten some-odd years. When I told him where I lived he said I should move to his hotel because it is cheaper and better located and nicer. He said it was where all the thugs lived but they don't mug tourists in their own neighborhood so it's same. He did say though that he saw a dead body just outside of the hotel just last week. The place was much nicer and better located, it was just near famous steps that go up to the hilly Santa Theresa neighborhood where all the artists live and the slums. There is a nice trolley-ride I did to get up there and see the city which I took. When I got to the last stop I walked up farther until I got to the beginnings of the Flavelas, which are very primitive slum neighborhoods that are basically nothing more than wooden and corrugated steel huts thrown tightly together. They don't have open yards, just dirt walking paths between them. I was very tempted to go in there but I had my camera and passport on me and didn't feel like getting mugged. I should have done the tour. I was a very beautiful view though. The day after I moved into the new hotel I was walking down the road with the English teacher and bumped into my French friend Juan-Charles, he had been there one night and was staying where I had stayed before, so I showed him where my hotel was and he moved into the room next to mine. We went down to Copacabana beach and he talked me into going to the prostitute disco again with him. I told them they were all prostitutes, but he kept treating those girls like they were normal buy asking them if they had a light. He didn't try that very long though, because every whore he asked just rolled their eyes at him like he was an idiot for forgetting a light, which pissed him off. At one point he started talking to a girl in a little school girls uniform and this Spanish guy in his late sixties started yelling at him telling him that she was his 'girlfriend'. I got really drunk and lectured her friend who was also dressed as a school girl that she shouldn't feel ashamed to be a prostitute and that I knew she had a soul inside. A couple days later Carnival started. I spent the days along because Juan-Charles got up earlier than me. During the day there are parades of people all over who dance along with large floats playing loud carnival music. I went to one parade on Ipanema beach one day, it was kind of boring. I was pretty surprised at how guys would just piss on the side of the road without trying to hide their penises, so I did that too. One night I was at a parade at night and saw I girl who looked to be about fifteen walking down the road topless. During the night there were three different places where they had concerts that lasted all the through the night until about eight in the morning.

Juan-Charles and I left Rio at about two in the afternoon and arrived at Salvador de Bahia about a day later. The bus dropped us off about five blocks form the central plaza of the old part of the city. We decided to stay in a dorm room at a hotel one block from the plaza. Salvador was a very beautiful town because it looks very similar to how it looked in colonial times, with narrow cobble stoned streets and churches and old buildings. It was also pretty because it is hilly. The modern downtown is just below on the waterfront of the bay at the base of sheer cliffs. There is a lookout point from near the center of the old city where you can see the other side of the bay and the tops of the tall buildings are just below eye level, thus not obstructing the view. There were a lot of Paquera dancers there also. We were watching one guy gracefully doing back flips and the like. While he was talking to us he flexed his enormous bicep of us showing it off.

I bumped into Patrick while I was there, we were talking for a couple minutes when a guy walked up to him who was selling hair ties. They knew each other and were talking for a few minutes and the guy said he knew where to buy weed so we followed him a couple of blocks away to where the weed sellers were and a guy approached me and showed me some weed so I bought it. Then the guy who lead us there showed us another guy who was selling so Patrick gave him money and he went into a house and came out a couple minutes later with a couple of friends and just walked past us and acted like they didn't know us. Then the guy who brought us there told us we owed him money for taking us there but we didn't want to pay him because he introduced us to a guy who ripped us off so he got mad and said he would tell the cops who were everywhere, and Patrick said "go ahead then" and I said "no!" because I had weed on me so I told Patrick to stand in line at the store to get change and I waited until the guy wasn't looking. On the 3rd or 4th attempt to escape I was about 30 feet away before he noticed and started yelling at me so I ran back to my hotel and hid the weed and went back and saw Patrick there but the guy was gone. Patrick said he gave him some money to get him off his back. That night I went for some drinks at an outdoor pub with some travelers from the hotel and one of the Brazilian guys who worked there. The Brazilian guy was the guitarist of a death metal band and showed me the lyrics of one of their songs. One day we were there we went to the beach. It said something about being anti Christian. Jean Charles said he want' going to be able to do the Amazon river trip so the next day I took the bus to Natal which is on the eastern edge of South America. I went there because the surfing was supposed to be good there.

As with all the other cities in Brazil, Natal was a huge sprawling one with the bus station nowhere near the city center. So when I got there I had to take a 20 minute bus ride to where the hotels were. Natal didn't really have a city center. I remember seeing a plaza, but it was deserted and there were no businesses or government buildings anywhere near. It was really strange. I checked into the hotel and walked to the beach which wasn't too far away. The beach was pretty nice but there weren't very many people there. There were some small waves with some kids riding them, but I wasn't very impressed that that was the place where most Brazilians said was the best surf spot in Brazil. I left the next day, but after I got to the bus station and got out my money belt for my passport I remembered I left it and my money under my mattress in my room, so I went back and luckily the maid hadn't gone in there yet.

The next place I went to was Sao Luis. I went there because it was a colonial city. It definitely kept it's colonial feel to it with the narrow pedestrian cobblestone streets. It had a couple of narrow market pedestrian streets crisscrossing. It had a cool bay there that filled up during high tide but was dry for low tide. I was talking to a cute young girl who worked at the information booth for a little bit.

The next day I went to Belem. Belem is a very large city on the bank of the Amazon as it begins to widen into the ocean. I had to stay there a night because the boats up the Amazon didn't leave every day, but I could stay on the boat for no extra charge. Belem had a couple of plazas which was kind of like having two city centers. One was large and surrounded by government buildings and palaces that are now museums, and the other was smaller and closer to the businesses. When I first got there I was sitting on a bench in the plaza and a black girl walking buy me staring at me. She walked to the corner and was there for a couple minutes and then came back and gave me her phone number and asked me to call her. She was pretty hot, and had a funky-looking afro, but she had a little spittle on her lip which freaked me out so I didn't call her. On the boat I me a guy from San Francisco and a guy form Canada who were traveling together. I went to a movie with them before the boat took off but I didn't hang out with them much during the five day trip to Manaus because they were kind of annoying me with their condescending attitude towards the Brazilians and they didn't seem to like me very much. I remember one one occasion I sang a goofy song called "I am X-hero" and the Canadian guy proudly announced that he wasn't American. Brazil had a lot of these kinds of travelers who come for a short period of time and haven't traveled very much.

There were a few boring Israelis there too, which I took note of because Israelis are usually fun to hang out with. I was hanging out with an older German guy for a little bit who was traveling with a German girl for a little bit who he met along the way, but they never hung out together on the boat. He told me a funny story of a time he was in Mexico and he got really drunk and crazy one night with some young English kids and got on a bus the next day for a long ride and took a lot of Valium so he could sleep through the whole ride, but the bus broke down just after they got out of town and they all had to get out of the bus and take another bus back to town to get another bus, and he was barely able to walk because of all the valium he took, and the English kids who happened to be on the bus to were looking at him like he was a total wasteoid There were some other Germans there too who I talked to some.

I didn't talk to many Brazilians on that boat because I was kind of worn out from trying to speak Spangese or Portugish or whatever you want to call it. But one day I went to the top level at the back of the boat and drank with some jolly Brazilians getting drunk while standing in the showers that were constantly on pumping water from the lake. I kept an eye out for the logging boats but only saw two on the entire trip. I saw some pink Amazon dolphins a couple of times. A kind of boat I did see a lot of was a tug boat that pulls a huge float behind it filled with trucks and giant crates. On one of those boats I saws a guy waving to us holding up a small dead alligator that he had apparently caught. All along the river almost ceaselessly I saw primitive houses on stilts with children in front of them waving to us and jumping into the river. All of the houses had a couple of cows and goats and a satellite dish. I could see the TV's on through the doors of a lot of them. All of the houses had boats and some of them had motor boats. Halfway through the trip we stopped at a town called Santarem. For a few hours. A huge cruise ship from the Caribbean shared the port with us so I got and walked over to it to see if I could get on it and check it out, but I wasn't allowed. On the dock I encountered a group of about 15 high school girls who where hanging out looking for foreigners to practice their English with. I stood there for about a half hour as they mobbed me asking me all kinds of questions. Then I got on the bus and rode it for about a half hour into the center as it weaved around a dirt road residential neighborhood. I checked out the town for a bit and then started walking the five kilometers back to the boat along a river side walking path. Along the way primitive-looking fishing-house boats, all equipped with a few pigs stomping in the mud eating the garbage their owners had thrown overboard. When I got back to the boat dock I saw a dread-locked artesian and asked him if he could hook me up with some weed so he took off on his bike and came back a half hour later with a bit. That was some of the weakest weed I have ever smoked before though. It was all leaves. that wasn't the only time I smoked leave-weed, all the weed I smoked in that area sucked. I thought it was weird that in the part of the world that is the most biologically varied the weed sucks. When I got to Manaus I went straight to the bus station and got the first bus to Boa Vista, which is the closest Brazilian city to Guyana.

I had to stay in Boa Vista for a couple days because I got there on a Friday afternoon and had to wait until Monday to take care of my visa situation. this town was very spread out and huge but the roads were almost empty and it didn't seem like many people lived there. I went to the visa place and was waiting in the waiting room and the guard who was a big muscle dude came in and started angrily yelling at me and told me to get out because I had shorts on so I had to go home in the center of town which was a long way away and get some pants and come back, but when I got back the place had closed, so I had to go back the next day and when I was in the waiting room I took my shoes off and the guard bounded in again and started yelling at me all pissed off again so I told him to calm down and that there's no sign that says you can't take your shoes off and he turned around in the doorway and kept saying "what!?, what!? what!?" That night I got on a bus to Manaus and goat a place in the boat but had to wait a couple of days again for it to take off. While I was there I did the tour at the famous opera house. The Opera House used to be on the backs of the river but is now about a quarter mile from the river because they filled in the river to make more land. I went to the other museum (?) but all they had were coins. Then I went to the Indian museum which was interesting. It showed a map of all the wild Indian settlements; most of them live in the Columbia, Ecuador, Brazil border at the beginnings of the Amazon. I heard it's difficult to find someone who knows where they are because they are dangerous to outsiders so no one wants to explore too much up there. Plus there's Columbian gorillas up there. I thought about going to the disco when I was there but I was trying to save my money and was kind of getting sick of traveling. Brazil is the kind of place you want to go to at the beginning of your trip when you are hungry for some excitement and new crazy stuff. I took the bus to the mall and watched all the movies at the Theater: Training Day, Black-hawk down, the Royal Tenenbaums, and some period English movie about a murder.

I was smart this time and bought a big bottle of Cognac for the trip so when the bus left I just hung out and read and slept and frank. I discovered there was a group of Israelis there. One guy who had an American father talked like a New Yorker and was taking about how he loves to sky dive, he had a broken leg, maybe from the sky diving. there was an Australian girl there who was traveling with them. That trip took me to Porto Velho and lasted about four days. We got off at the town before Proto Velho because we could catch a bus to Porto Velho before the boat arrives there the next day. I just wanted to go to Foz de Iguazu but I was so far from there I had to take three busses and like two days to get there.

When I got on the bus that goes to the Border with Guyana a Guyanese guy who I will call Dean sat down next to me and acted very excited and was telling me that he was a jungle guide in Manaus and had lived there for the last ten or so years and was returning to Guyana because his dad died and he had to settle the land he inherited with his brother who lived in the capital city of Georgetown.

The bus dropped us off at a Brazilian border town a couple of kilometers before the river-border. When we got there Dean wanted to be my buddy in Guyana so he took me to a Taxi whose driver was apparently a friend of his who he knew for his whole life. The taxi took me to the office to fix my passport problems because I forgot to pay to renew my visa after 30 days; but they never told me that when I got my visa in Montevideo or when I entered Brazil. So the guy put a note in my passport that I would have to pay the fee in Boa Vista when I came back.

Then we drove to the river and changed money and paid a little money for a canoe ride across the river into Guyana. The river was only about 10 meters wide and I could probably have waded across it. There were some construction workers hanging out who were working on the support towers of a bridge that was being built. When we got to the other side of the river there were a couple of cars with some dread-locked black guys hanging out waiting for passengers to take a couple of kilometers into Lethem. Dean was born and grew up in Lethem. Lethem is a small dirt road town in the high desert-like plains where it is really windy. To the south you can see mountains. The taxi dropped me off at a house where there were a few black people hanging out in the front porch. One of them stamped my passport and Dean took me to his father's wife's hotel and I got a room.

Then we went into the town to a store where we bought food for "Itol," which is a kind of vegetarian food that Rastafarian's eat. Dean borrowed like ten bucks from me to buy the Itol because he said he forgot to change money at the river. But the Itol only costed like two dollars. We went to his friends house which was a couple hundred meters into the trees. It was one of the most primitive houses I have ever been in. It was just maybe four meters on each side with two rooms, a kitchen and another dirt floored room with three hammocks strewn up. The house belonged to an old one-eyed man with dreadlocks. We had dinner there and smoked weed with the three dread locked men.

The only way to get to the capital city of Georgetown was on a four wheel drive road through the high desert plains of the south which turns into jungle for the northern half. The only cars that can make the journey are four wheel drive jeeps and SUV'S The only kind of truck that they have is an old truck from England called the Bedford which is from World War II. It is a huge truck with tires that reach your shoulders and has no suspension. Dean wanted to take one of these because they only cost 30 dollars as apposed to the 50 dollars that the smaller trucks charge. We couldn't go the first day because the trucks don't come by every day. The second day we waited all day long in the windy shade for another truck to pick us up. We reserved a place for one truck and Dean put his stuff in it but they changed their mind and said they didn't have room so they gave Dean his stuff back and we went and sat in the windy shade for the other truck to come. Dean said he had the money he owed me i his bag so I reminded his and he looked and said the guys from the other truck stole his money. His cousin was standing there and said ''oh, those duppies''. I knew that word meant evil spirit in Jamaica so I asked him what it meant and he said bad person. Geographically Guyana is in South America, but when your there its just like being Jamaica or Belize. While we where waiting we knocked the nut off a tree and roasted it over a fire on a piece of grated steal. This nut was very interesting because next to it was a sweet fruit that was very delicious. After a couple of hours the nuts were ready to eat and were quite tasty. We waited there with a woman and her little boy and an old man pretty much all day until about nine when one of those Bedford's came by.

It was almost completely full to the top of the metal bars that are made to hold the canopy over it, but we were using it as hand holds to keep us in place as we bounced down the desert. Every once in a while we hit a big hole and the whole truck jerked up so we had to be careful to not keep our faces too close to the metal. On one occasion we hit one and the little boy started to cry and his mother told him with a stern tone in her voice to be strong and stop crying. We bounced down the road for a couple hours until we got to a building and the old man got out and they took some stuff out and made enough room for me to climb in the back and sit between a crate and the back of the truck. We were up all night long until the sun came up slowly and illuminated the glistening jungle trees all around me. We got to the river at about nine in the morning and had to weight about an hour for the ferry to take us across. The river was about 70 meters wide and very calm. The river ferry was a big platform with an outboard motor attached. We put the truck and another four wheel drive SUV on it and went across and had to weight another hour before we got started again. I don't remember what we were waiting for. There was a way station there where I filled up my water bottle and went back to the road and was drinking and Dean was standing in the middle of the road and suddenly put his hand in his pants and started masturbating. After a couple of seconds he looked over his shoulders and remembered I was there so he walked to the other side of a dumpster he was standing next to to finish off. When they were ready to go we drove about a kilometer down the road and dropped the woman and small child off. She had a dirt floored house on the side of the road and her business was to sell food to the passersby. We helped unload all her food stuffs she bought in Lethem, but while we were doing it Dean and his cousin where eating her crackers and peanut butter and she was screaming at them to stop it and calling them thieves but they just laughed at her. We drove for another half hour or so and I saw a gaunt guy with a huge afro walking down the road. I was sitting on the top of the truck instead of down lower in the back because it was more comfortable but I had to keep an eye out for the huge branches that came across the road. When they came every couple of minutes I had to quickly scamper back and climb down until the branch passed by, then I went back to the top. it was cool sitting on the top of the truck breathing fresh air and able to stretch out after that night of being cramped and crushed by shifting boxes and bouncing around. At one point I saw a jaguar lazily crossing the road about 10 meters in front of me. Once I saw a branch coming across the road but it didn't look like it would reach us on the side we were, but I looked away for a split second and the truck shifted tracks to the right and when I looked up it was too late and all I could do was duck and brace myself and let the branch roll over me. It was very painful because it was covered in poisonous briars and when it was over I was covered in bloody scratches. We didn't see any other cars pass by us the whole day until we got to the pavement. A little before dusk we stopped to buy some crackers. It felt like Nirvana to finally not be bouncing around or worry about getting attacked by branches and we were going like three times faster. At dusk we drove past the first town. It had a lot of smoke stacks. Blake, Deans brother, told me they were smelting plants for all the ore that they mine there.

On the way down the road as the sun was setting Blake went to the back of the truck where I was and we started talking. He said the Jungle hills in the South of Guyana were the unexplored part of the country and there are wild Indians who live there, but you don't want to go there because they'll kill you if you do. He said there are all kinds of deadly animals back there too. He said there were huge Pythons that catch deer by staring in their eyes and hypnotizing them until they are close enough to strike. He said the snakes are very intelligent and live for a hundred years. He said the Indians don't have to worry about the snakes though because they have snake tooth necklaces and when the snakes see them they have respect for the Indian because it means the man is a predator of the snake. He said he was in those mountains once with a friend fishing in a pond in a small canoe with a friend and he saw something stick it's head up out of the water and look at them. He said it was unlike anything he had ever seen before and it was huge. He said they were really scared and he will never go back there again. Blake lived in a suburb of Georgetown but had gone to Brazil to buy some birds to sell back home. He had three or four cages of small birds. He said they were rare birds and was going to export them and each one costs about three thousand dollars. Every time we stopped he had to re-tie the cages to the top of the truck and was always getting annoyed about it and saying "Jah"!

It was night time when we got to Georgetown 26 hours after we left. We had some Chinese food and a beer at a restaurant and took a minibus to the center of town. The bus system in Guyana is interesting. Instead of having actual buses, they have normal vans. Most of which have been converted into painted-up low-riders that are constantly playing gangster rap of reggae. Each van had a name of the top of the windshield in the front and back. I remember seeing names like: Jah-love, Roots, etc.. We got off in the center and took another bus to his house because he said he was tired and dangers to walk around at night anyway. Deans brother looked kind of like him except paler. he was married to a big black girl. Their house was really basic and run down, but they had a TV just like most of the people in the 3rd world. His brother didn't seem very excited to see him and didn't have much to say to him even though they didn't seen each other for a couple of years. Dean never talked to the wife and they didn't have anything to say to me. I didn't bother to try to have a conversation with them because it was clear they had no interest in me and it would have been a hassle for them to tell me anything about their lives, so I talked to them about what I knew about the TV actors and programs we were watching, which seemed to be sufficiently entertaining to them. They let me stay in the second room in their house. Dean borrowed all of my money so the next day I didn't have any more and it was a Saturday. He had a mice meal at a restaurant of a guy he knew, but he couldn't get a meal for me. I was starting to get really hungry and Dean acted a little miffed and asked me why I didn't have US dollars like all the other tourists. I said I had Brazilian money so we traded a little with some Brazilians who were there and I ate. The next day I went to the Suriname embassy and paid 45 bucks for the visa and went to the left that afternoon. Even though it was only (?) kilometers to the border, I didn't get their until dark because we had to cross a river. But this river, even though it was only a couple hundred meters across it didn't have a bridge, so we had to wait in line for about an hour to get the ferry across. When I got to the river that is their border with Suriname I found out it was too late to get the boat to Suriname. So I had to stay in a hotel there. This town Corriverton was dominated by East Indians who had a little black blood mixed in. I could detect the Indian accent when they talked their English Creole. and there were Indian newspapers and Bollywood magazines all over the place and Indian restaurants. The next morning I took a van ten kilometers to the river and change money and waited about an hour for the boat to leave.

When I got to the other side of the river in Guyana I had no money for the van ride to Georgetown, but I remembered I forgot to get my key deposit at the hotel I strayed there. So the bus driver waited in front of my hotel for about 15 minutes while the hotel people where trying to figure out if they owed me the money or not. While I was waiting I ran out to the van and apologized for taking so long but no one there seemed to be in any rush to get moving. After I forgot my money and we started driving I started talking to a couple of young English guys who were living in the outskirts of Georgetown and teaching English and they envied me to stay with them. So when we got there at dusk (because we had to wait an hour again to get across the river) I met a couple more English kids they were living with. We were drinking and hanging out with them and a couple of young English girls who were in their program came over and hung out for a bit. there were a couple of small neighbor children hanging out there too. We bought some weed and got stoned and listened to music and sang along with Red Hot Chili Peppers songs until people passed out one by one. The next morning I went into town with one of them and was going to get something to eat with him so he went to use the email and I went to the bank for some money. he never meet me at the back so I went to the subway for some food and saw the only other white people other than the English kids that I have seen in Guyana. They were missionaries. I went to Deans' house to get the 30 bucks he owed me but his brother said he wasn't there and hadn't seen him for a while. I didn't feel like waiting around for him and had a bad feeling he was just going to tell me another hard luck story and ask to borrow more money to get to Manaus and pay me back there so I decided to get a truck back to Lethem that night. While I was waiting at the hotel where the trucks pick people up for Lethem I started talking to the only white Guyuanese guy I saw there. He was dressed really raggedly but said he was from the third richest family in the country and he made his money from gold mining. he said 15 years ago when he had a lot of money he went to Las Vegas and blew a hundred thousand dollars in two weeks screwing prostitutes and staying in the nicest hotels and gambling, but he doesn't have that kind of money anymore because the gold mines haven't been doing very well. he was with a woman who was friendly and talking to me for a bit. Then when she turned her back he told me she was a prostitute but she wasn't like a normal bitchy prostitute, she was cool and acted like his friend. He said he was going to Lethem where he lived the next day but was taking the plane and would never do the journey in a truck. he asked me if I smoked weed and I said yes so he told me he would get me some at his house and jumped on his motorcycle and took off. I was excited to smoke some weed for the hell journey but he never came back. The truck I got on was better than before, this time I was on a full-sized Dodge Ram with built in seats in the back. I shared the back with about five Brazilian guys. We took a couple hours just to get out of Georgetown because the truck was late and then they had to keep stopping to pick things up. When we got to the police checkpoint where the dirt road starts we had to show our passports to the cop who was on duty at the time. The guy was alone and drunk and being very belligerent. He wouldn't let us go for about an hour because he said my driver didn't have a permit to take passengers. But the driver kept telling him that he makes the journey two times per week and always uses the same permit and the cop got mad and kept interrupting and insulting him by saying things like "don't raise your voice at me"! But he wasn't raising his voice. then he just sat there with every one watching him for about ten minutes as he loaded his shot gun and then unloaded it and loaded it. When he checked my passport he said there was no entry stamp in it and asked me where it was but I told him I didn't know because I hadn't looked in it. then he sat there looking confused for a couple of minutes in complete silence as we all watched him and then out of the blue he told us we could go. When we got back in the pick up the woman who was sitting next to me in the cab was complaining about him and the driver said he was a drunken idiot. We arrived at the river crossing at about seven the next morning I was hungry and remembered when we dropped the woman off at her place so I walked there and ordered something to eat. While I was eating I saw that Afro-man walk up again and the woman got pissed off and started yelling at him telling him she wasn't going to give him any more food and if he wanted to be fed he would have to do something for her like go get firewood or something and he just stood there with a blissfully ignorant look on his face repeating nonsense non of which I can remember, maybe because I couldn't understand it in the first place. I noticed he was missing a finger on the other side of the river was where the nasty part of the road was and we kept getting stuck in the mud because the tires on the truck were too small. The first couple of times we were pulled out by Burfords but one time we got stuck for about an hour and we all had to get out of the truck and dig and pile the hole with logs and grass. We kept making baby-step progress until we were out of the bog. Not long after the sun se t adn we got stuck a few more times, but there were more Burfords coming along and pulling us out every time. We spent about a half hour at the way station owned by the white American guy where the high plains started and the truck driver bought me a beer why I don't know because he didn't want to talk to me. I just figured maybe because he felt bad we got stuck so many times but he didn't buy any beers for the Brazilians. We arrived in Lethem at about midnight and took a shower and went immediately to sleep. The next day I went over to the Rasta hut in the trees to buy weed and he hadn't seen Dean so he must have still been in George]town. I went back to the house where I got my entry stamp and was a little nervous because the cop the night before told me there was no entry stamp from when I came back from Suriname but I looked through it and it was there the guy at the border just put it in the wrong place. I knocked on the door and a grumpy guy came up to me and asked me what I wanted and I said to get stamped out and with out saying anything he just turned around and started washing his dishes. I stood there watching him washing his dishes for about a half hour until I asked him when he was going to be able to stamp me out and he asked me if I was in a hurry and I said "sort of" and he said I should have gone to the office to get stamped out and this was his personal residence and I told him I didn't know there was an office. I thought this was the office so he took my passport and stamped it.

On the other side there were about 10 vans waiting to pick people up. I got in one filled with young black girls. They were a grumpy-looking band they all seemed to know each other. I tried to talk to one of them but she just snapped at me so I minded my own business. We drove down a rough dirt road for about a half hour until we got to a paved road, and the van dropped us off and we got in a nice Honda accord. I sat in the front seat and we zoomed down the well-paved road about four hours to the capital of Paramaribo. The drive through the Surinamese countryside was a lot different than Guyana. In Guyana the road is almost constantly lined with houses but Suriname is a lot less populated. Most of the drive was along grass fields along irrigation canals and trees. We went through a couple of villages before the capital city. When I got there I got a hotel room at an old white Dutch guys house ands then went for a walk around the town. There was a central grass area that was surrounded by government buildings next to the river. I saw in the distance they were constructing a bridge. Next to the grass area there was a kind of park with trees around. I walked past a tall wooden yellow church. My book said it was the tallest wooden structure in the world. It looked wilted and the paint was falling off.

I couldn't really communicate with the people there because they all spoke Dutch or a Dutch Creole. So when I saw a white guy sitting down eating I sat down next to him and we started talking. He had been living in a small town in Guyana for the last couple of months staying at his best friend families house and teaching in a local school. he was on vacation in Suriname for a couple of days. The next day I explored the city, which by American standards would just be a town. I went to the bank to get more money but none of the banks accepted visa card, and I had no money left, so i figured the only way to get out of the country was to fly to Brazil of Venezuela, but that was expensive so I looked around and found a place where Brazilian miners work and I could change the Brazilian money I had. It was just enough to take the van back to Guyana, but I still had to eat so I spent the rest of the day looking for a place I could eat with my visa card. Luckily for me there was a place about five kilometers out of town a nice hotel where the Dutch people stay, but I had to eat 20 bucks worth of food which wasn't too hard because the place was expensive. The next morning at five I went to the place the vans leave for Guyana and got in a car. I asked the guy about five times if he went to the river and he said yes but he only took me to the beginning of the dirt road so I had to pay again to get a van to the river.

I went to Asuncion Paraguay for one day. It was on a weekend and the quietest emptiest and smallest city have ever been to. I walked by three movie theaters that were closed. It was a lot more developed than Georgetown and Paramaribo. I went to a park that was on the north and took a photo of the downtown area next to the very quiet river that is the border with Argentina. There I went to a coffee shop and was talking to a young German artisan girl who was traveling with her Peruvian artisan boyfriend and she met some of the German Mennonites who live there and couldn't understand anything that they were saying. The next day I took the bus across the country to a town called Ciudad del Este and got a room and the next day visited the Foz del Iguazu. They were interesting. there was a trail that lead down to a bunch of lookouts and went into an area that was between the upper and lower levels of the falls and then went to a tourist restaurant-store and went back up to the road where buses take people back. I had to stay in Ciudad del Este for a whole day because the buses didn't leave until Monday. Ciudad Del Este was stranger than Asuncion because it was just as dead and most of the people there were Chinese. A couple of blocks from my hotel was the city center indoor shopping center and all the people were Chinese. From the bottom floor bowling alley all the way up to the cinema on the top floor. I went to one of the empty Chinese restaurant and there were a couple of people standing outside but they said it was closed. I felt like they didn't want me there, like it was their haven. The Brazilian town on the other side of the river seemed like it was 20 times bigger and the bus station was on the outskirts like normal.

San Pedro is a nice small town in the Atacama desert a few kilometers from the mountains. Volcano Lincanbur looks a lot bigger from San Pedro. The streets are all dirt and the houses adobe, which is very pretty. It is a tourist town too. I am always excited to be in the first town of a new country. I went to a coffee shop and was surprised at how much a sandwich was. The woman there seemed more smug than the Bolivians. I was there for a couple hours and went to Calama.

The drive from San Pedro to Calama was beautiful. It was all desert, nothing was growing whatsoever. It was like being on mars. In the distance I could see snowcapped mountains. Calama was a nice town. It had a nice walking path, and you can see the snowcapped mountains in the distance. There were sand dunes just outside the city and places you can rent sand boards to ride them. It was here in the walking path in Calama where I first noticed some of the stereotypes of Chile: That they love ice-cream, and junk-food in general, and they have a well rounded worldly culture. They have a lot of the same clicks in Chile as in America. I was walking down the mall and I saw some long haired and dread-locked guys sitting outside a movie theater drinking coke with wine, which they call Jota. They asked me if I liked Reggae music and said there was a reggae concert that weekend.

The next place I went to was Antofagasta, the third-largest city in Chile. Antofagasta is between the coast and the steep hills that lead to a high plateau. We descended until we got there.

Then I went to La Serena. I went there because it had a nice beach. La Serena is a nice college town, but there was nobody on the beach. On the bus from La Serena to Vina del Mar I sat next to a German girl who was teaching German in a German school for Chilean kids.

Vina del Mar is a very beautiful place with well kept gardens and a central pedestrian street. I stayed there one night, the next day I went to Valparaiso to stay for a night. Valparaiso is an interesting place because it is wedged between the bay and hills. The downtown area that is wedged between is quiet small, and the way to get to the upper part is by elevators that areon rails. On the upper part of the city is the neighborhood part. I spent one night in Valparaiso. Then I went to Santiago which was exciting because I had planned on living there.

The drive to Santiago was nice. You climb out of the city up a hill and past forests with pine trees and past a couple of villages and through two tunnels. The second tunnel is on the top of a small pass, and when you come out of it you see the valley of Santiago and the snow-capped mountains on the other side. You can see the smog though. When I got to Santiago I went directly to the hotel Valparaiso which is right in the center of town right two blocks from the central pedestrian street. I happened to be there for the end of September week of independence, and I went to an outdoor festival along the parque Forestal which is against the river. Every hundred meters there were rock groups playing music. It was interesting how right when you get out of the scope of one band's music, you enter the sounds of the next. There were street performers too. I smelled marijuana every couple minutes. I was watching one group and saw a guy with a wife and two small children rolling a joint so I walked up to him and was watching him smoke so he and his wife offered to share their joint with me. Then they asked to have some of my beer so I shared that with them. I got really stoned and it was cool to be stoned again after going almost a month without smoking. There were lots of people selling and drinking beer at the park, I had a bottle of cognac with me. People were constantly asking me to share my cognac with them, and I guessed correctly that this is a culture of sharing. One girl who asked for cognac from me wouldn't go away and followed me for a bit and told me to sit down on some steps so we could finish the bottle together. While we were drinking it people were still asking to drink it, and she was trying to tell them there was none left. Then she kept saying "que onda?", which means "What's up" in Chilean slang. I got annoyed because no matter how I answered her all she could say was "que onda," so I left. I was in Santiago for three days, one day I went to the top of the hill San Christobal, which is a hill about 400 meters high that has a ten meter statue of the virgin Mary. It is a very beautiful view from there.

After Santiago I went to Chillan for a night. I walked around that town for a little bit, seeing the central plaza and the central shopping mall.

Then I went to Conception for a night. The drive to Conception was very beautiful because the road was along a thick and green pine forests that looked very similar to Colorado. It was raining when I got to Conception. The bus station was not near the center of the city, so I had to take a bus to the center, which was about a fifteen minute bus ride away. The city center was similar to Santiago because it had a large central plaza that was connected to two pedestrian streets that branch out in two directions. I walked to the train station, but it was abandoned.

Then I went to Temuco for a night. Temuco was on the highway in the forest. It's city center was surrounded by some nice looking sky scrapers.

Then I went to Pucon. Pucon was a very beautiful small town on the edge of a lake that is surrounded by hills. Pucon is twelve kilometers from Volcan Villarica, which is a beautiful active volcano that when you climb it you can look into it and see bubbling red lava. From the top is a beautiful view of the surrounding mountains and the lake and the town. I didn't climb the mountain though. When I first got there I went to see the beach with the lake. It was a beautiful black sand beach. While I was there I saw a guy holding a lot of didgeridoos and bamboo saxophones. Knowing that artisans almost always know where the weed is I walked up to him and asked him, so he led me across town to a cheap restaurant where one of the cooks sold us a joint. I got stoned with him and I invited him climb the volcano with him, and he wanted to. But the next day when I woke him up he said he wanted to do it with crampons but he didn't have the money for them. One day I was there rented some skis and went to the hotel where the buses leave for the mountain but couldn't go because that was the first day that the ski resorts were closed. I could see the ski lifts from the town. I rented a bike to climb the mountain one day.

The next place I went to was Valdivia. At the bus station a German man approached me and asked me to stay at his hotel. This man lived there with his Chilean wife and had a couple of children. He led me to his house and gave me a room. It was a nice house and the upstairs had a nice TV room. There were two other guys staying there. An architect from Los Angeles and a computer dude from Australia named Paul . the guy from L. A. had just been in Argentina checking out the architecture which he liked, I think the said it was like Swiss Architecture. Valdivia is a very beautiful city. It is at the confluence of two rivers in the forest. It has a nice plaza near the river. On the bank of the river there are sea lions eating fish. I walked to the college campus which is on an island in-between the two rivers. My first night there I went out for drinks with the two guys staying at the hotel and the German owner and his wife. His wife could speak English and German. The American guy left the next day but I spent four or five nights there because Paul kept asking me to go to the discos with him and I couldn't get up before the 11 o'clock check out time the next day. Paul was fun to go to the discos with because even though he knew no Spanish he was always picking up on the hottest young girls ands calling me over to translate and then leaving and hitting on another girl. One night we were at a disco just around the corner from the hotel and a girl grabbed Paul and started dancing with him. Then her friend grabbed me. We were dancing for an hour or so and I got really drunk and the girls took us outside and said they wanted to take us home with them but we discovered they were with about seven or eight guys. After we got into the cab a couple guys got in with us so the girls took us out and we got in another cab. While we were changing cabs I noticed one of the guys was very angry and had his fists clenched and was yelling and a couple of guys were holding him back. There was another guy there who said he was one of the girls brother and he lived with her abut was trying to convince us to come back with them. And another guy kept asking us if we liked to box. We got into another cab with the girls and I locked the door but one of the guys unlocked it and a couple of them got in with us and the rest of them got in another cab that followed us. We drove around the block and the guys in our cab were talking to the cab driver like they knew him stopped and the girls got out and were standing outside. Paul said he was nervous and wanted to go home so we got out and walked to our hotel which was only a couple hundred meters away.

The next morning I went to Puerto Mont, which is another very beautiful town on the edge of the sea facing south towards the Chiloe island. Almost as soon as I got out of the bus station I noticed that this town was crawling with grumpy drunk guys and I didn't feel entirely safe as I was walking around the town looking for a place to stay. A girl who approached me at the bus station took me to a hotel, but they couldn't find the key to my room after about twenty minutes so I left and searched higher up on the hill for a place I saw on my lonely Planet book but it wasn't there so I started to walk away, and at that point a boy of about 12 approached me and told me his house was a hotel. But it looked more like a house to me. I had a room on the second floor, but the woman who owned the place let me watch TV in her living room. My room had a beautiful view of the bay and the city and the snow-capped mountains to the east. The next day I b ought a ticket for the boat ride to Puerto Natales. On my way back from the dock to buy the ticket I walked into a kiosk that sold random decoration -type things and there was a really cute well-endowed young girl there. A couple of minutes after I left I decided I wanted to talk to her so I went back and we talked until her place closed and then we went for coffee for a couple of hours.

The next day I got on the boat on the boat I met a 20 year old dread-locked French dude who was staying in my room named Jean-Charles who was studying in Argentina and was on a little vacation from school. There was a Spanish woman named Cynthia sharing our room with us too, but after an hour or so we discovered that the boat was like a fifth full so they got their own rooms. It was great having my own room and shower for the trip, and the food was absolutely delicious. For the first three days I was hanging out with Jean-Charles and Cynthia, and the last day a Spanish couple, Juan-Jose and Patricia were hanging out with us. The boat ride was nice. We went in canal-looking waterways between rocky islands that had evergreens. In the background there were snow-capped jagged hills. On the third day we went out in the ocean for about four hours, most of it was at night, b but some of it was in the day. The boat was rocking a lot and I couldn't study my Harry Potter vocabulary without getting an eye ache. On the last day as we were making our way into the bay of Puerto Natales the boat had to squeeze through a very narrow area that was about 400 meters long. We had to slow down and maneuver it around in order to not hit the rocks. At one point we saw a ghost ship that had struck a rock and was just sitting there for the last 20 odd years. The final approach to Puerto Natales was beautiful. There were snow-capped mountains on all sides.

The town of Puerto Natales was quaint. When we got off the gang and I went to a hotel that was recommended to one of them. that night we went out and had a fun karaoke night. the next day they went to do a boat ride to the glacier at Torres Del Paine and I stayed back and relaxed because i wanted to hike around there later. the next day Juan-Jose and Patricia rented a Pathfinder and gave ;me a ride to the park. On the way we stopped by the road a few times to watch the animals. There is a large flightless bird there that looks like an Emu except it is smaller about as big as a dog, that is brown. They weren't very smart though, when we drove up beside them they would just run back and fourth against the fence that lined the side of the road seemingly trying to get away. There were tons of Eagles flying all over the place and perched on the fence. There were also herds of wild animals called (?) that looked like a mix between a Llama and a Camel. When we got to the park after we signed in we drove across a bridge that was so narrow we had to push the rear-view mirrors in order to fit. After we had a picnic in the grass at the first camp sight they left and I set up camp.

It was cool camping again. I felt like I was back home in the cool air. The next morning I hiked up to the camp sight at the base of the famous Torres. The next morning I hiked up there to the base of the towers. In front of them was a small frozen lake and then the rock shot straight out from the back side of the lake and split into the two tours about half way up. From suing my altitude watch and how high my book said the towers were I figured the Twin towers of the world trade center were about a third as high if their bases were at the lake. Then I hiked around to the other side of them along same beautiful lakes with mountains in the background. That night I slept at the base of a huge mountain that was covered in glaciers. And throughout the whole night I hears the crackling of falling ice every 3 minutes. the next day I hiked to the last camp sight before the hike to the glacier, but the next morning I just took the boat back because I figured I would just see the bigger glacier Moreno. The boat went across a lake that had neon blue water from the algae.

The next day I took the bus to Chile's southern-most city Punta Arenas. Near there was a colony of small Penguins on a nearby beach, b but I couldn't go on it because that week the Penguins were breeding.

When I crossed into Germany from The Netherlands I didn't know it because there is nothing, not even a sign. At least I didn't see one. I think the canal may have continued for a kilometer or so into Germany, but what really let me know that I was now in Germany was the dissapearance of the bike paths which are completely separate from the road. In the Netherlands the bike paths follow their own route, often so far from the automobile road that you don't even know where the cars are. In Germany the bike paths are always right next to the road, and in very bad shape because of all the tree roots that push three or four inch ridges of asphalt that run perpindicularly to your direction of travel. This is a major nuasance for someone who is used to the smooth roads in The Netherlands, and ended up spelling destruction to my rear axel the next day and bike frame a few days after that. It was so bad that I was tempted to ride on the road with the cars, but I knew that I would have been honked at, and I was still getting into riding shape and wasn't quite yet interested in riding as hard as I could.

I wasn't in Germany long until seven thirty came around, which was my que to start looking for a camp site. Finding a camp site is easier in Germany than it is in The Netherlands because it's less populated. The Netherlands is so populated, in fact, that you can ride for hours and not find a totally secure place to camp. The Netherland, according to your average Americans standards, is pretty much one giant city.