One in a Million Chance. No, make it 20 Million

Sorry for the lack of any updates in the last couple of weeks. My internet
time has been taken by my nightly capoeira classes. Instead of regaling you
with tales of my journey, I have been busy doing handstands, cartwheels, and
break dancing. But I have found a bit of time here, so I will offer you some
tidbits about my time between Iguazu Falls and Rio de Janeiro (I have been
in Rio for about a week and half now).

Who´s laughing now? I am

Among backbackers, there are a few standard conversations. They typically include the ´´where are you going?´´, ´´where have you been?´´, ´´how long are you here?´´ , ´´how long are you traveling?´´ variety of questions. Most people, whether they are interested or not, act excited and intrigued by your travels. That was until I finished my stay in Argentina.

Because the first place in Brazil that I would be visiting was Sao Paolo, I naturally answered the ´´where are you going next?´´ question by saying ´´Sao Paolo.´´ In response to this answer, some people laughed and others asked ´´why?´´ Most suggested that I go directly to Rio and bypass Sao Paolo.

Logistically, it didn´t make sense but more importantly, 20,000,000 people live in Sao Paolo (actually, only about 11 million in the city itself but many more in the metro area). It is the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere. If nothing else but to see such a massive metropolis, there must be something interesting in Sao Paolo.

And I found it. In fact, I would probably say that my experience in Sao Paolo was the best of any city I have visited in my travels. I stayed with and hung out with some locals, who showed me around Sao Paolo. I went for a walk around the downtown, went to shul, walked around the central park, visited the central fruit market, attended a soccer match, went to see Batman and experienced the nightlife.

I´m going to be the subject of a documentary

After arriving in Sao Paolo, I went to lunch with the guy whose apartment I was staying at. While eating, one of his coworkers, a 50-something Jewish mother, walked into the cafe. We started talking, and it turns out that she is in the middle of making a documentary about Jewish foods.

I told her about kugel-offs, my mom´s challah, hotdog carts, assorted other Shmooze topics. Two days later, I was braiding challah in her kitchen. I will pass along the link to the video when she puts it on YouTube.

What are the odds?

The common phrase when something unexpected happens is that is was a ´´one in a million´´ chance. But when you walk into someone who you know in Sao Paolo, I would describe it as more of a ´´one in 12 million´´ chance.

With great population comes great congestion: In Detroit, there are problems with traffic and fewer than a million people live there. Imagine how bad it would be in Sao Paolo.

The municipality of Sao Paolo has an interesting solution: make it illegal for people to drive. Depending on the last two numbers of your liscense plate, there is one day a week that you cannot drive.

Zero tolerance

In Brazil, there is a zero tolerance law when it comes to drinking and driving. If you have any trace of alcohol in your breath, you get in trouble. Many people are made about this, saying that you could eat a chocolate with a bit of liquor inside and get ticketed.

This law has really hurt the bars in Brazil because people aren´t going out as much. Some bars even offer to pay for cabs within a 10 km radius so they don´t lose that much business.

True love

The first thing that I was told when I got to Brazil was: ´´In Brazil, you can change your religion, you can change your wife, but you can´t change your football team.´´ They kind of take that sport seriously down here.

When I was in Sao Paolo, I went to a Sao Paolo FC game with a friend. Sao Paolo won the game 2-1. Despite a lackluster effort for the first 30 minutes of the second half, I saw enough to commit myself to Sao Paolo. Now, I´m Sao Paolo fan for life.

Parati on, Wayne

After Sao Paolo, my next stop was the colonial beach town of Parati. The downtown area is gorgeous and so are the beaches. It was my frist real beach vacation experience.

The cool thing about Parati is that it is built right on the water. When the tide comes in, it floods the streets of the city. Because of this, the streets are made of stones, making them unfriendly to pedestrians, bikes, and cars. Actually, I can´t think of a mode of transit that they are friendly to, so I would just describe them as unfriendly.

The beach was gorgeous but I can´t take too much sitting at the beach and doing nothing. I have to be active, whether it be running, talking Portuguese, playing soccer, etc.

While I wanted to tell you about my experience in Parati, I mostly wanted to make the outstanding Wayne´s World reference in the notebook slug.

Brazilian foods I like

Like any country, Brazil has its unique cuisine. In Brazil, I have developed a few favorite items. The top of the list would be the queijo con banana sandwich, which is essentially a grilled cheese and banana sandwich. It´s very good and available at most street corner cafes.

I´ve also fallen in love with Guarana. It´s a fruit juice/energy boostin drink. It´s best served chilled, on ice with an orange slice.

My name is different down here

When a word begins with ´R´in Portuguese, it is pronounced with an ´h.´ So, my last name would not be pronounced Robinson down here, but rather Hobinson.

That means that whenever you say the name of Brazil´s famous soccer players Ronaldo or Ronaldinho or Romario, the words should begin with an ´h´ instead of an ´r.´ Rio de Janeiro is called Hio de Janeiro. as well.

I could be a soccer player

With my name, I have everything it takes to be an outstanding soccer player in Brazil, except for soccer talent. Imagine the story: student journalist/hotdog salesman/usher turned world class soccer player (actually, I would accept mediocre soccer player. I don´t need to be world-class).

Get Me My Barrel

I´m writing this blog from Ilha Grande, an island off the Brazilian coast between Sao Paolo and Rio (Brazil = awesome). To give you a sense of the setting, yesterday I was told by a local: ´´If you don´t pass a monkey on your way to the beach, it would be a disappointment. Oh, and beware of the snakes.´´

Now, I will regale you with stories of my experience at Iguazu Falls.

Niagara * 1000 = Iguazu

Iguazu Falls is on the border between Argentina and Brazil. Unlike Niagra Falls, which is just one huge waterfall, Iguazu includes 270 distinct large falls. While Niagara is in the middle of the city, Iguazu Falls is in the middle of the jungle. You don't have loads of hotels, casinos, restaurants, ferries, bridges, etc blocking your view. Mostly, it's just the falls and nature.

Apparently, when Eleanor Rooseelt saw Iguazu Falls, she said ´´Poor Niagara.´´ So, did I. At Niagara, they love telling stories about people going over the falls in a barrel. Maybe it´s because I don´t know the Spanish or Portugese word for barrel, but I never heard one.

This is one of the locations where the accompanying photo explains much more about it that what I can write, but there are a few good stories to mention.

Normally, everybody laughs at people who swim with t-shirts on

One of the options for activities at the falls is to take a boat ride next to them. You get to see the falls in their majesty and get really wet. Everybody said this was very cool, so I signed up. I didn't realize exactly how wet you would get, but when I saw people walking around the park who were completely drenched, I knew that I was in for a shower (which is good because it had been five days). I also only have one pair of pants on this trip, so I couldn't really afford to have them soaked. I decided to go on the boat trip without any pants, and because it would just look awkward to be in a t-shirt without any pants, I put that in my bag as well. Interestingly, there was a sign that said you couldn't go into the boat barefoot. So, there I was standing in my underwear, Tigers hat, and running shoes (went straight to the falls from my overnight bus and didn't change into sandals). I wore the fewest clothes of
anybody on the boat.

Whenver someone goes swimming with a shirt on, they look funny. If someone takes a shower in their clothes, it looks weird. But why do people strangely look at someone who goes on a ride into the waterfalls in standard swimming attire?

This is when it pays to know the lunar calendar

In preparation for my trip to Iguazu Falls, I looked into what activities I could do there. One of them piqued my interest: falls by moonlight. You can go to the largest of the falls in the middle of the night and witness its awesomeness by moonlight. But you can only do these tours in the four days around the full moon. Knowing that the 17th of the Hebrew month of Tamuz was in three days, I knew I came to the falls at the right time. (The Hebrew calendar follows the moon instead of the sun. The month is 30 days long and the 15th day of the month is the full moon.)

The falls were very cool by moonlight (Sorry if the photo is unclear. The light wasn´t great for photos and my camera isn´t a miracle worker). I can now add that to the list of things I´ve done by moonlight in my life: volcano watching, biking in the Chilean desert, watched a movie featuring Doc Graham.

No duty

On the bus from Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, to Iguazu Falls, I noticed the girl sitting behind me was wearing a Duty Free jacket. Either, she bought the jacket from the store and I would ask where I could get one or she works there. She works there. I´d never talked to a Duty Free shop employee before, except to say ´´not interested.´´ Nothing to interesting about this bullet point except I can make the comment. Do you know what they say about girls who work at the Duty Free shop?

No duty.

My Duty Free experience was much more pleasant (and legal) than that of the B´nai Sakhnin soccer team in Israel. As the team was leaving for a match in Spain, some of the players decided to stop at the Duty Free shop at Ben Gurion to pick up some cologne and perfume. They also decided not to pay for said products.

Iguazu is natural awesomeness. Itaipu is manmade

In addition to being the home of Iguazu Falls, Foz du Iguazu, Brazil is also the site of one of the largest dams in the world. Depending on who you listen to or what metric you follow, it is either the largest or second largest in the world. After completing my tour of the falls, I had seven hours before my bus to Sao Paolo. So I hopped on a bus for a tour of the dam. I've never really toured a hydroelectric facility before. Most of my knowledge of how they work came from Sim City 2000. Well, this was quite an impressive site.

I missed the part of the video that talked about how the dam was constructed, but I learned that it took nearly 30 years. I did catch the part about how the company tried to correct the environmental effects of its project (large national park, big lake that is used by fishing industry, channel that connects both parts of the river and allows fish to continue to spawn, corporate social responsibility awards won by the company, etc.).

At the peak of its construction, Itaipu Dam employed nearly 40,000 people. Before the dam, the town Foz du Iguaçu was just a small town. Because of the boom created by dam construction, 250,000ish people live there now. (All of this is according to the University of Illinois-educated engineer I met on my Itaipu tour.

Was I in Paraguay?

Itaipu Dam is built on a river that divides Brazil from Paraguay (actually, the dam was one of the main reasons I wanted to go Paraguay and I didn't know that I could see the dam from the Brazil side.). The dam is constructed on a sort of binational/neutral territory between the two countries. I didn't have to get my passport stamped Paraguay to go to the dam, but the side of the river that I was on was the Paraguay side of the river.

Because I don´t see myself visiting Paraguay ever again (odds are, because I wrote this sentence, the Peace Corps will add a Paraguay program next year), I´m leaning toward claiming I was there.

Stay tuned for my next entry when I bake a challah, try and prove 20 million people wrong, make a great Wayne´s World reference, and find my true love. Depending on whether I can take an entire day of sitting on the beach, I might send this email out in a few hours.

El Gaucho Judio

I wanted to do this blog chronologically so it would be the easiest for you to follow, but if you want to skip to an incredible story (probably the most) go to the last notebook slug.

Trapped in Buenos Aires - and loving it

Saturday morning, I went to the boat terminal in Buenos Aires to catch a ship to Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. The staff at two different youth hostels told me that it would be no problem to get a ticket the day of the ship. I arrived three hours early just to be safe.

Well, after waiting twenty minutes in one line, fifteen in another, and half and hour in a third, I finally spoke to ticket salesman. He told me that there were no tickets available (in the tourist class) until Monday morning. If I was going to go to Uruguay, I wasn´t going to take the eight-hour bus from Buenos Aires to Montevideo. I was going to do this crossing like every other tourist does - by water. I kindly thanked the salesman for giving me reason to spend two more days in Buenos Aires, purchased my ticket, and went in search of a place to stay.

My taste buds love me, but arteries are about to go on strike

Why was I most excited about the opportunity to spend two more days in Buenos Aires? The two more steaks that I would eat for dinner. In my three meaty meals in Buenos Aires, I sampled three cuts of meat. Do you know that feeling of meat melting in your mouth? Yeah. (Back to being vegetarian)

Some people go to London to shop, others to Paris

I go to Buenos Aires. I have my store, as well. It´s the Coto across the street from the mall with the McDonald´s in it. In two trips to Argentina, it is where I found the best deals. Becuase my bag didn´t have too much space in it, I had to restrict my purchases a little. I bought a really soft, zip sweatshirt for equivalent of 10 bucks and a three pairs of socks for two dollars (I don´t want to go into how necessary it was for me to get new socks. Dire straits is how I would define the situation).

Missed My Tiger - or Tigre

Last time I was in Bueos Aires, I passed on the opportunity to visit the suburb of Tigre. It´s about 20 km from Buenos Airest on the Parana River Delta. Many people from Buenos Aires have homes in this area. The main form of transit in this region is boat. I would say that not going to Tigre last night was a mistake. Luckily, I had this chance (Don´t worry about the water being brown. It´s because of sediments in the river, plus I didn´t drink any of it).

U R Gay. Ha, ha, ha

The first 21 years of my life, the most I knew about Uruguay is that Homer Simpson doesn´t know how to pronounce - or read- the country name.I also knew that they won two World Cups in soccer (including the first) and that a player with one arm scored a goal for Uruguay in the 1930 World Cup.

Well, Uruguay is probably the most tranquil country in South America. There is a relatively high standard of living, a stable currency, and great beaches (in the summer). It is a great change of pace from the cosmopolitan lifestyle in Buenos Aires on the other side of the River Plate. Yesterday morning, I took the boat from Buenos Aires to Colonia del Sacramento, as I had planned on Saturday, and ambled through the towns enchanting old streets before catching a 4:30 bus to Montevideo. I went to dinner in Montevideo before a midnight bus to a town on the Argentine border.

My stay in Uruguay was brief, but there is very little to do there, especially off-season. I can tell people that I was in Uruguay, but the lady at border control messed up when stamping my passport and you can barely read that it says Uruguay.

Probably the best story of my trip

I arrived in Concordia, Argentina at 9:00 a.m. this morning with no clue of what there was to do in this border down except smuggle stuff. The city isn´t really covered in my Lonely Planet book except for the fact that it exists as a border crossing with Uruguay. I went to the municipal tourism office to see if they had any ideas for how someone could occupy 11 hours here. They gave me a map and sent me on my way. I perused the map and something caught my eye - Museo Judío. Then, I checked my dictionary to make sure there wasn´t another meaning for the word Judío that I was unaware of. I checked and the only listed meaning was ¨Jew.¨

Off I went. My expectations were minimal. After all, I was in the middle of the pampas. I knock on the door and the curator, Adolfo (but he prefers Nito), welcomed me in. As has been my strategy with other Jewish institutions in South America, I started talked Hebrew so the people there know you are Jewish and don´t confuse you as a threat. He said that he doesn´t speak English (not even recognizing the Hebrew. maybe my Hebrew is just that bad), but then I told him that I understood Yiddish. That one sealed the deal.

Her might have been the curator of the museum, but he had more questions for me than I had for him. It is also that he was such a good curator and didn´t leave much unanswered.

The museum, which opened last year, tells the story of how the Jewish population in the fields of Argentina became the Jewish community in the fields of Argentina. It started with the pogroms of 1882 in the Pale of Settlement (Poland and Russia). In response to these, the Jews of France petitioned to Baron Mauricio Hirsch to help the embattled communities.

He assisted in getting thousands of Jews out of Poland and Russia and into the developing agricultural communities of Argentina. He set up agricultural collectives (very kibbutzy) where the Jews lived, farmed, went to school, went to shul (synagogue), etc. All the collectives were named after Hirsch or his family members. The settlements were throughout northern Argentina. In the schools, the children learned Spanish and Yiddish (which explains Adolfo´s language situation). Half of the day in Yiddish and half in Spanish. They also welcomed non-Jewish students to the school, as well.

A couple years ago, when the Jewish community was raising money to build the museum, a 100 year old man came to them with a check. He wasn´t Jewish, but he spoke perfect Yiddish. He wanted to thank the community for what it had for him in providing an education.

Adolfo, whose grandfather was sponsored by Hirsch to come to Argentina and who was born on one of the settlements (the settlements don´t exist anymore), said that the people in the community had a saying about how successful the Jewish communities were. ¨They grew wheat and turned it into doctors.¨ He says it's a testament to the value that the communities placed on education that the youth became successful professionals.

He just published a book all about the settlements that I bought (It´s in Spanish, so I should finish it in the next decade)

In the temporary exhibition room, there was a display about Rambam in honor of his 800th birthday.

Next door to the museum is the JCC. I sat in there with the guy at the office for a while, just shmoozing. There are about 200 families in the community in Concordia and just one of them keeps kosher. Services are held Friday night and Saturday morning. Like many cities (including my own), the Jewish community is plagued by the exodus of the youth to the big cities.

Well, that´s it for now. I am off to catch my bus to Iguazu. Hope you found this tale as interesting at I did. If you ever want to borrow Adolfo´s book, let me know.

Food Coma

Before reading this blog, I suggest that you get some visqueen or something to cover your keyboard from the saliva that might drip out of your mouth.

I am writing this dispatch from an internet cafe in Once, the Jewish neighborhood in Buenos Aires. If you know anything about Argentina´s reputation as one of the best places in the world for meat, you know exactly where I am going with this one.

As someone who keeps kosher, I have had very few problems being a vegetarian in South America. You might have to walk to a few different restaurants to see if they have a vegetarian dish, but it´s not that bad. And, to be honest with you, the meat that I have seen so far hasn´t been that unbelievable appetizing looking. That was until two days ago in Salta, the first city I went to in Argentina.

I went to a restaurant with three other backpackers. They all ordered large portions of meat. I ordered the vegetarian pizza (which, for some odd reason, came with ham). Just looking at the meat on their plates, I couldn´t resist the urge for meat that much longer (The only meat I have eaten in two months was lukewarm piece of chicken at the JCC in Quito). So I booked a bus ticket to Buenos Aires, one of my favorite cities in the world and a place I knew I could find tongue-hanging-out-of-my-mouth good meat.

My original plan was to take a bus to a city north of Argentina, but I reasoned that a great steak is worth going six hours out of my way.

I spent the day visiting some of my favorite Buenos Aires sites from my Spring Break trip to this outstanding city last year (Teatro Colon, a protest of the madres de la plaza, the most beautiful water company building in the world, the only kosher McDonalds outside of Israel). I took someone I met while traveling on the Ian Robinson Reality Tour. Then, when dinnertime hit, I booked it to the Mi Parilla Restaurant on Tucuman in Once. (For those who were on the trip last year, it is the meat restaurant around the corner from Hotel San Luis. The waiters carried huge knives on their belts.).

I sat down at the table and skipped over all parts of the menu but one: the meats. Looking at my choices for meat, I would not be able to take myself seriously if I didn´t order a large piece of meat. There was no time to fool around with burgers or sausages. I ordered a ¨tiro de asado¨ (cut of roasted meat) and waited anxiously.

After I finished ordered, three unkempt Israelis walked into the restaurant speaking Hebrew well above the restaurant´s noise level. We exchanged pleasantries as they passed, and they asked me where I knew my Hebrew from and where I was from. The next thing I know is I´m talking Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball (truly a shame that Moni Fanan left the team last week. He´s a Maccabi institution) and about the Red Bull boycott of Israel.

We fill the time between ordering and dinner with conversation, but when the food arrived, I was all business. No fooling around with ketchup. Just attack, and appreciate, meat. I did a number on this animal.

Because I rarely eat meat at home, I understand what it´s like to be a vegetarian. Aside from shabbat dinner, I would almost consider myself a vegetarian. But what differentiates me from vegetarians is that I still crave, and can eat, meat. So, if I were a vegetarian and I saw my friends dig into that meat in Salta, I wouldn´t have the same desire for beef.

Is it weird that I have more photos up about a meal than for Galapagos and Machu Picchu? No, it´s not.

A brief recap

Well, while the photos load, I´ll give you a bit of an update on what I´ve done lately and what the next step is in my journey. Before Salta, I had spent three days in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. It is the driest place on earth, has the second largest salt flat in the world, and is close to the highest geyser in the world. From there, I took a 12-hour bus ride to Salta, Argentina. Actually, it was a nine-hour bus ride because the bus forgot to pick up seven passengers, including me, at San Pedro de Atacama. So, they paid for a van to take us from San Pedro de Atacama to the the Argentinian border, where the bus had been waiting for an hour as the passengers enjoyed the John Wayne classic ¨Trails of Hate.¨

That night, July 8, we arrived in Salta. The next day was Argentinian Independence Day. So, we (all the backpackers in the hostel, collectively) thought it would be a pretty happening bar night. Even though people were out in the middle of the week, there were no signs that people were out to show their pride for Argentina´s independence. We did go to a bar named after Barney Gumbel from The Simpsons. That was pretty cool.

The next day, I walked through the center of Salta to observe the Independence Day festivities. They´re more into gauchos, Barney the Dinosaur, smiling suns, and blue-and-white ribbons than fireworks. But there was still quite a bit of life. At 1:00, I boarded a 20-hour bus to Buenos Aires.

Jimmy John´s day-old bread is to Ann Arbor as Salon de Té is to San Pedro de Atacama

Like any tourist city, San Pedro de Atacama is obviously going to be more expensive than other places in Chile. And, given it´s desert location with limited natural resources and direct access to fresh food, food will obviously cost more there. But, for a backpacker trying to live on a budget, San Pedro de Atacama is a place where you expect to go over your budget (I did).

But that doesn´t mean you can´t try to stick to your budget.

After completing a thorough check of the city´s restaurants, I struggled to find a vegetarian, or any, meal under 2500 Chilean Pesos ($5) [On a backpacker budget, that translates to gourmet. In Peru, I had gotten used to a three-course meal for $1]. I did find one restaurant that cost just $3 for a vegetarian omelet, toast, and jam.

In the course of my stay in San Pedro de Atacama, I went to this restaurant five times. In fact, when my friends wanted to find me, they looked at the restaurant first before checking to see if I was at my hostel.

Well, I´m being kicked out of this internet cafe.

Machu Picchu. G'zuntheit

I´m writing this dispatch from Arequipa, Peru. It is the country´s second largest city and the launching point for journeys into the deepest canyons in the world (something I will begin tomorrow morning). When we last left off, I was asking you to say a r´fuah shalemah (prayer of healing) for my camera. I am happy to report that she is back to full health.¨Now, the picture viewing and uploading on this computer leaves something to be desires, so I will try to have a photo email with pics from the end of Galapagos and more from Machu Picchu when I return from the my trek (We´re gonna need a montage).

The Inca Trail to Machu Picchu is one of the most famous hikes in the world. The four-day, three-night adventure on the stonepath crosses ruins and high mountain pass on the way to Machu Picchu. For those who complete, it is an unrivaled experience. For those of us who didn´t plan three months ahead (I fall into this category), you have to do an alternative to the traditional Incan trail.

In the highland city of Cusco, the former capital of the Incan empire and my favorite Peruvian city, you can´t even leave your hostel without someone trying to sell you on an Incan Trail alternative. I decided to take the five-day, four-night Salkantay Trek, which takes you under the summit of one of the holiest and most beautiful mountains in the Incan Empire.

Let me give you a brief overview of the trek before I get into the play-by-play. After waking up at 4:00 from your hostel in Cusco, you take a three-hour van ride to a small village for the beginning of the trek. The first day of the trek rises slowly through a forested mountain landscape. There are awesome views of the valleys below and condors flying overhead. You camp the first night at the base of the 6,200 meter Salkantay, Quechua for ¨savage mountain.¨ The next morning, you climb to about 4,700 meters (It´s difficult to tell the exact altitude because the signs that are supposed to tell you the altititude give about three different readings) before spending the rest of the day descending into the cloud forests. On the third morning, you continue to descend into the jungle regions before arriving at a small village for lunch and a one-hour bus ride to your campsite. On the fourth day, you walk 20 km to Aguas Calientes, the city below Machu Picchu, and spend the next day exploring the ruins. (Wow, that reads like I took out of a travel brochure. I didn´t try to do that or copy it from another site.

From class pet to dinner

In Peru, guinea pig (or cuy) is considered a delicacy. In Mrs. Drewes´s first grade class, it was the pet that you took home for a weekend when nobody was at school to take care of it.

On the first day, we ate breakfast in a small, family-owned restaurant at the base of the trek. The barn behind the restaurant was filled top to bottom with guinea pigs, or, as the family refers to them, dinner for the next three months.

Trekking, in luxury

Normally, when someone says they are going on a trek, it means they will be carrying all of their gear and cooking equipment. I searched for an Inca Trail alternative of this variety but couldn´t find one.

On this trek, a horse carried my backpack and a chef prepared all of the food. Hey, in my defense, I still walked the entire trail - well, except for when we took the van.

You think that´s cold ...

The first night of the trek, it got very cold. We were sleeping in an exposed valley at about 3,800 meters. By about 5:00 p.m., I was already in my long underwear. A few minutes later, I looked like I was ready to go to class in the middle of February. Judging by my water bottle, the temperature dipped below freezing that night.

I slept in all of the clothes I brought and was fine. The Dutch guy in our group was not. He was what I would define as hilariously cold. Not only did he sleep in all of his clothes in his sleeping bag, he also slept with his hiking boots on (and was still cold).

The Dutch guy also had trouble figuring out our guide´s name, for the entire five day trip. So, he just gave up and started calling him by a pet name. Our guide, Urbano, doesn´t have the most difficult name in the world. But Rob could never quite figure it out. So, he just called him Ubu - the entire time. Ubuuuu!!!

¨The point is not to feel your face¨

Peru has a reputation for being one of the world leaders in cocaine production. But in addition to being used in narcotics, coca leaves have been used by natives as a way to ease the adjustment to high altitudes. Either chewed or infused with tea, the medicinal power of the leaves is released.

So, obviously, when we were approaching the highest pass on the second day of our trek, the Peruvian guides pulled out a small pile of coca leaves (it felt like the chewing tobacco scene from Sandlot). You´re supposed to chew it by biting into the léaf´s veins to release the juices. After a little while, it will have a similar numbing effect as novacaine at the dentist office.

Or as one of the other guides so correctly put it: The point is not to feel your face.

Standing on my head

I like playing soccer, but I like playing soccer more in remote locations. So, when we finished the trek on the second day, after climbing 1000 meters and descending 1800 more, the locals at the village we were staying challenged us to a soccer match. (Village is a bit generous. It was a collection of five houses about a two-hour walk to the nearest road that a car would drive on).

In a game up to four, we fell behind 2-0 out of the gate. This was mainly because they didn´t explain that we could have a goalie. So, I stepped between the pipes, or, in this case, rocks.

From that point on, we hung tough. It was a pretty even match, never mind that two of their players were about 11 years old (those two were still better than 80 percent of our team). I was seeing the ball well and made, what I thought were, some tremendous, game-saving blocks and catches. I never think I have cat-like speed and reflexes but on the pitch in Collapata, I did.

At that moment, I thought back to the Michigan Daily Sports Broomball team´s playoff victory over the School of Social Work´s team. When our goalie went down early and I had to fill in. Although I was criticized on the blogs, I gave our team a chance. And as Michigan hockey coach Red Berenson says, that´s all you can ask from a goalie.

Back to the Peruvian wilderness. The sun had already set and the game was tied at four. Next goal would win. After fending off the rush, I pounced on the ball and looked for an open teammate. The only one I could see (or barely make out in the limited light) was the Dutch guy standing near the other team´s goal. I tossed it up in the air, and it tipped of his foot.

If you´re keeping track of my great soccer triumphs, this would rank second to the Jewish Academy´s win over the Kibbutz Ketura preschool about four years ago.

And if you´ve ever talked goaltending with me, you know how much I like the phrase ¨stand on his head.

Hidden from the Spanish

While the Spanish conquistadors defeated the Incan Empire they were famous for taking the Incan gold and stones to build cities and cathedrals. One place the Spanish never conquered or exploited was Machu Picchu. This allowed it to remain intact and become the major tourist destination that it is.

It was not until 1910, when Yale professor Hiram Bingham was searching for the last city of the Incas (Vilcabamba) that Machu Picchu was known to the Western world. Perched on a hilltop between two mountains at the edge of the Andean highlands as they fall off into the jungle, Machu Picchu is one of the beautiful settings. In fact, when Bingham ¨discovered¨ Machu Picchu, there were two native families living in the ruins.

Because the Incans didn´t write anything down, nobody knows exactly what the purpose of Machu Picchu was (beyond general awesomeness, of course).

Nothing like it

With words, I can´t really capture what it´s like to see clouds around Machu Picchu. Luckily, my camera can capture the light at that moment and relay it to you in a picture. It reminded me of the scene from Motorcycle Diaries when they arrive to the fabled ruins at dawn. Probably, because it was almost exactly that moment.

Right in time

Currently, there is no park entrance fee to do the Salkantay Trek. The only registry of any sort is a guy in a cowboy hat who carries around a clipboard with a notebook and speaks broken English. Apparently, the government just announced that it will charge 140 soles for people to enter Salkantay.

This fee will make the trek much less popular, and Urbano predicts that the horsemen might organize to boycott the new policy because horsemen are all from the villages at the start and finish of the trek. Their livelihoods depend on the trek, but if there is a 140 sole fee (about 45 dollars), their income is going to go down.

Well, I´m off to pack from my trek. Great to see the Tigers back on track. My friend in Minneapolis says the Tigs are rallying. So hopefully we don´t fall back to .500.

I´ll spare you the details about how great it feels to take a piss in the middle of the wilderness, in pitch black, when it´s below freezing outside. Damn. I didn´t.

What is the Secret of the Ooze?

I grew up on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Behind Travis Fryman, Joe Dumars, and a Case 580K Operator, they probably had the biggest influence on me as a child). Every day, after preschool, I would go back to my friend´s house and watch the cartoon. At my 6th birthday party, Leonardo (himself) showed up and taught us some awesome moves. When the first movie came out, it was probably the most anticipated day of my young life. That meant expectations for the second Turtles movie (The Secret of the Ooze) were about as high as the expectation for the Tigers offense this season.

Most thought that the Turtles movies and television shows were pure fiction. Just a scheme to make some money and provide entertainment to the world´s youth. I was in that camp, too. (notice the past tense) After going to Galapagos, I now believe in the secret of the ooze.

(Warning: only two pictures because my camera decided to seizure halfway through uploading (When you go to the dunes, put your camera in a case; not your pocket). It´s a very tense situation here, but I just want everybody´s thoughts to be with my camera. I hope we can recover and send pictures next time I have internet access)

Nature´s joke on everybody

The Giant Turtle is the most hilarious species on this planet.The combination of size, shell, slow movement, Darth Vader-like noises when it moves its head or legs, and general lack of proportionality make it impossible to take it seriously. (Look at the attached picture and try not to laugh It´s impossible) When people were first landing at the Galapagos, they weren´t taking the tutle population seriously, either. Because the giant turtles are huge and can go more than a year without eating (adding to its hilarity), pirates would take them from the islands and store them on the boats for long voyages (both for food, tortoise rides, and to turn on their backs and knock around like green Mario shells). The problem is that the pirates took almost all the giant turtles from Galapagos and put the species on the brink of extinction.

At the Charles Darwin Center and the Giant Turtle Breeding Center, they are trying to reintroduce these creatures back into the wild.

A few fun facts about the Giant Tortoise before we continue:
-At its maximum speed, the giant tortoise can move 300 meters/hour. That's a forty-yard ¨dash¨ of about eight minutes.
-Most of the turtle shell contains the animal´s liver. So if an animal has a liver that big, it must have a high tolerance.
-Turtles can live for over 170 years
- Other than Galapagos, giant turtles are only native to Seychelles (off the African coast)

The world´s most famous and eligible tortoise

His name is Lonesome George. He is on the only surviving member of the Pinto Island Turtles (A new species evolved on each island). He is 100 years old and is expected to live a full 170 year life. There are no females of his species remaining.

They tried to bring in female turtles of similar species to see if he would breed with them, and the guy who cloned Dolly the sheep spent a few years at Galapagos. But George remains lonely.

I think that they made a mistake by naming him George. From what I know from Seinfeld, things with the name George are very complex.

The pushke at the Darwin Center is in the shape of Lonesome George.

What are the odds that I see another erupting volcano?

I could run some type of simulations using Excel and probabilities, but I think I already know the answer: slim. After watching the volcano in Baños, I thought that I had seen enough lava flows for my entire life. But the night that we arrived in Isabela (after the Galapagos cruise, Ari and I spent three days in the most remote of the inhabited Galapagos islands), one of the two active volcanoes on the island erupted.

It´s far enough away that it doesn´t pose any threat to the island´s inhabitants, but close enough that you can get a pretty awesome view. But Ari and I went to sleep before it started erupting, and no one woke us up to see this ¨once in a lifetime¨ event. The next day, it was cloudy, so we couldn´t see if it was still erupting.

The next night, as we were walking through town after dinner, Ari noticed an orange/red light in the direction of the volcano.We also noticed the entire town transfixed on the volcano. We weren´´t going to pass up this opportunity. We had to get the best view we could.

Everybody said the best possible view was from a lookout point seven kilometers from town. We put on our bug spray and pants and got our flashlights and headed down the road, hoping we could hitch a ride with one of the locals who was also going to the lookout point, unfortunately everybody went the night before and wasn´t as ambitious on the second night.

We didn´t know exactly where the viewpoint was but because there is only one road on the island, it would be nearly impossible to get lost. We stopped at every viewpoint along the way, until we finally arrived at the last one. To get there, we had to pass through Muro de Las Lagrimas (Wall of Tears), whch is a wall constructed by prisoners of the Ecuador jail that operated on Isabela in the 1950s. The prisoners were put to work to construct their own jail without the assistance of concrete of anything to hold the rocks together. After starting our excursion at at least 10:00, we finally arrived to the viewing spot.

From there, you could clearly see the lava flowing and bubbling up, but we were far enough away that you couldn´t really hear it.

I´m 21 years old, and I´m yelling ´moo, cow´ in a river

Now, I wasn´t actually driving the herd. I was simply riding a horse. But for me, any opportunity to make a City Slickers reference will be seized (and probably abused). On our first day in Isabela, we went for a horseback ride to the Sierra Negra Volcano, which erupted a few years ago and you can see the lava flows.

My horse´s name for the adventure was Puropaso, and no matter how much I tried to control him, he just seemed to do whatever he wanted. He would only listen to our guide, Carlos, or to the guys from the stables.I´m glad that he had a pretty calm demeanor because one of the people from our group got bucked off.

It was my first time back in the saddle (literally) in at least a decade. And I could feel it after.

The other name I was considering for this email section was: Everyone, this is Puropaso.

Wait, the internet is on computers now?

There is no internet on the island of Isabela. It is the only place in the world that I have been that does not have an internet connection. The municipality maintains a website, but I think it has an office on one of the other islands.

There is even a building that claims to be an internet cafe, but it just has computers in boxes.

A car quota

As the city of Isabela started to sprawl out (it´s a relative term), the citizens started bringing cars to the town. But as more cars arrived, traffic, congestion, and noise accompanied it. The municipal government of Isabela decided to put a stop to this by imposing a quota on the number of cars that can be in the city (65ish).

People can exchange their old cars for new ones, but they can´t buy a new one. It makes for a really pleasant, pedestrian-friendly town. But this policy would only work on islands. Otherwise, it would be nearly impossible to manage.

Mystery, Alaska in Galapagos

Now, I don´t really remember too much of the movie except that the New York Rangers traveled to some remote town in Alaska to play an exhibition game against the local pond team. Why the Rangers would travel for such a ridiculous game is beyond me, but that is unrelated to the message of this bullet point.

On Friday afternoon, when everybody was done with work for the week, a bunch of men from Isabela gathered on the municipal soccer pitch for a game of pick up futbol. In one of the most remote places on Earth with limited connection to the outside world, the beautiful game is the most popular sport. And at that time, nothing mattered more to them than the pride (and few dollars) of winning the afternoon´s game.

Now, all they need is for a professional soccer team to come play an exhibition on Isabela. I´m pretty sure every MLS team would lose (That makes two MLS digs in the blog, Ian. Come on.)

Is that a sea lion? No, it´s my guide

On our last day in Isabela, we had the chance to go snorkeling with sea lions and penguins. As I said in the previous email about Galapagos, the animals here aren´t afraid of people; they´re curious. It´s the same on land and in the sea.

When you are snorkeling near a sea lion, they want to swim near you and play with you. All of a sudden, you turn your head and there are three sea lions within a few feet of you. At one point, I confused our guide, Carlos, for a sea lion. He has the same body shape, and when he´s wearing flippers and I´m not wearing my glasses, it´s easy to confuse them. Carlos got a good laugh out of it.

Penguins are very quick animals. They will swim within a few feet of you and then quickly bolt away.

Galapagos Triage

When the volcano erupted a few years ago, the tortoises living on the island were airlifted to safety. Some of the best animal research and treatment in the world is available to the Islands´oldest (and slowest) citizens.

At the same time, there is no hospital for humans on the Galapagos. It might take up to 10 hours for a human to get treatment because they would have to fly to the mainland.

There was once an oil spill in the islands. Environmental organizations would pay locals a lot of money to assist in the clean-up effort and save the animals. Because these organizations offered a lot of money, the locals didn´t really care what safety precautions were being taken. But the environmental organizations didn´t properly protect the locals and many got sick from assisting in the oil-spill cleanup.

I saw snow today. Did you?

I don´t really know what the weather is like back in Detroit, but I´m pretty sure that people were using the golf courses for golfing instead of cross-country skiing or snow-shoeing (or walking on tennis rackets as the Israeli I met in the bus put it). In Cashapampa, Peru, it´s a different story. Although I don´t know whether or not they have golf courses, if they were to, they would have kept the clubs in the bag today.

(By the way, Cashapampa might be one of the greatest names for a city I have ever come across)

To get out of the chronological order of these email journals once again, I would like to give you a recap of the 3-day, 31-mile trek I completed this morning in the Andes (My guide book says the trek is typically completed in 4-5 days and, even at that time, lists it as a moderate-to-difficult venture). While I´m not a natural-born mountain man, I wouldn´t consider myself a greenhorn when it comes to the outdoors (staffed a trip to Algonquin Park, family hiking trip to Canadian Rockies, plenty of skiing experience, two brothers with Ramah tripping staff experience, seen ¨Alive¨).

I organized the trip with a guide from the Casa de Guias in Huaraz on Thursday morning (aka met two Canadians who were planning on doing the same trek and a guide) and prepared to leave the next day. The trail that we were on is the most famous trek in these parts and is considered one of the most beautiful in the world (it´s called Santa Cruz Trek). Now, there is a lot that happened on this trek, and telling you about everything would take too much time (plus the internet cafe is going to close soon and I have a bus to Lima to catch).

A cross between Curly, Smeegel, and Drake Savage

By far, the most interesting and controversial figure of our quartet of trekkers was the guide (what´s controversial about two French Canadiens who don´t support separatism?). Let me give you a little bit of background on Victorino.

He´s been a guide in these mountains for thirty years. He was part of the first graduating class of official guides and worked as a porter and donkey driver before that. In 1984, he and guide friend of his scaled the 6,700+ meter Huascaran Mountain in 12 hours and made it home for lunch. When he takes tourists on this mountain, it takes seven days. (He says it´s a world record and that he has the newspaper at home to prove it. I´m not going to doubt him on this one.).

He said that his father, grandfather, and uncle all died while climbing mountains in this range. He has three sons, but his wife won´t let them become guides because she doesn´t want them to die in the mountains. She´s already accepted that Victorino is going to die in the mountains.

He also likes repeating the same thing over and over again. I heard the same story about how he set a world record about six times. He also repeated the same joke about how he goes at a Guide pace while the tourists all go at at Gringo pace (guide pace is about 70 times that of a Gringo pace). The first time it might have been funny. But at the end of the trip it got demeaning.

He also likes thinking about what Victorino wants and not what the clients want. Like when he goes off on his own 400 meters ahead of me, when he doesn´t really explain anything about the trail or mountains, and when he decides to burn his plastic trash in a camp fire (part of the zero trace policy involves carrying a trash bag for your waste).

Here´s the line that I have been saving up to close this section. I thought of it as soon as I saw him: He knows these mountains better than he knows his sons. He said he has done the Santa Cruz Trek about 400 times in his life.

Hypox-Ian

I am so happy I got to use that pun in this blog. So, I don´t really know what elevation we were at in Baños, but I set a new record for heights I climbed to. At 4,750 meters (over 15,000), I now know what it feels like to be in thin air. When I go skiing, I have never really felt the different in oxygen at altitude. As I neared the top of this mountain, I did.

I would have to stop every few steps just to catch my breath. But, using the one-step-at-a-time philosophy, I reached the summit.

I´ve never seen so much livestock in a national park

I don´t think I´ve ever seen any livestock in a national park. In the United States and Canada (places where I have national park experience), I don´t recall seeing cows grazing in fields as campers trek through the wilderness.

In Huascaran National Park, it would be unusual if you didn´t come across a cow or donkey every 400 meters. That´s actually what helped keep me on the trail. And these animals roam on their own and aren´t really tended to by any type of human or herder.

It´s also popular to have donkeys and horses go along with trekking trips to carry equipment and be there in the case of an emergency.

I don´t care if I am lying in shit

I´m not sure if my body has been pushed like it has the last few days. When I completed hiking for a day, I would be so relieved that I would simply collapse. However, I had to fall over in a way to avoid the manure and cowpile that dots (more than dots, actually) that campsites. Two days, I was so exhausted that I told the Canadians: ¨I don´t care if I am lying in horse shit because it feels so good.¨ Also, given how numb my body was from all the walking, I probably wouldn´t have noticed it.

I threw a snowball today

Nothing really to add to that one, except that it missed its intended target.

Ruby would be proud

We spent two nights in tents and both nights we were in our tents before sunset.

Wanna get higher

So we passed a campsite near the peak of Punta Union called Taulipampa. My obvious reaction was: wanna get higher? (Towlie from South Park if you don´t understand)

Well, that´s about it so I don´t miss my bus.

"These birds are so silly they forgot how to flee¨

Finally, the much-awaited-for post on Galapagos (well, actually two posts).

I was thinking of how to title this post, and I decided this quotation from the Bishop of Panama´s unintentional 1535 visit to the Galapagos would work (He was trying to go Peru but got lost). The other title I was choosing between was ¨We need a montage,¨mainly because of how many photos I plan on including in this message. I was trying to think of something Darwinian, evolutionary, tortoise-y, finch-y, or booby-y, but I couldn´t think of any.

For a little context: I am writing at an internet cafe in Loja, Ecuador. Tonight, I will end my Ecuador adventures and take a bus from here to Pirua, Peru (a town about 40 minutes across the border). So will begin my Peruvian ones. I expect them to be very similar.

On with the Galapagos.

A bit of information of how we booked our trip before I delve in. The mother of the family I stayed with in my first few days in Quito has a friend who is a travel agent. She talked to her friend and hooked us up with an eight-day, seven-night, four of those nights on a cruise ship trip. Our boat, the Encantada, is one of the oldest and smallest tour boats still operating in the Galapagos. Because there is a limit to the amount of tour boats that can be in Galapagos, there has been a shift ..to bigger ships that can fit more people.

The Galapagos Islands are special for a variety of reasons. They are a collection of volcanic islands in the middle of the Pacific that didn´t break of any continent, so any animal or plant that resides there had to travel there at some point and then evolved. Several ocean currents lead directly to the Galapagos. Because of these currents, there are sea turtles and penguins from Australia (think Finding Nemo) in these equatorial isles. Also, because there has been limited human presence on the islands, the animals do not show the fear of humans that other animals show. Therefore, you can walk within feet of a bird without it flying away or swim within meters of a shark without it biting you.

I don´t really know how to structure this e-mail because I have so much information about the islands, the animals, and my experiences. I warn you that it might be difficult to follow but I will try my best to make it reader-friendly.

Hallo, Polly. You for SCUBA?

We booked out trip through SCUBA Tours, and our guide for the cruise, Juan, is very similar to Claude from Along Came Polly. He grew up on the islands and just exudes island lifestyle. He was born in Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island, the biggest city on the Galapagos (16,000 people). There are three islands where there are cities on the Galapagos and there are about 40,000 Galapageños. On the first day and for a few days after that, Juan wore a Michigan basketball jersey he bought on a vacation to the United States (from the looks of the shirt, it was about 17 years ago).

In 1998, the Ecuadorian government passed a law to curb the amount of people living in Galapagos by saying that, in order to reside there, you must be born in the Galapagos or marry someone who is a citizen of Galapagos. Because of this law (and genuine love between the couples), there are many foreigners married to native Galapageños. Juan didn´t answer our question of whether there is a high divorce rate in the Galapagos. (Also, to be a tour guide on Galapagos, you must be a citizen of Galapagos. We passed someone on a trail whose first visit to Galapagos was on one of Juan´s tours. She married a tour company owner and is now a tour guide.)

He also has a pretty sweet work schedule. He takes cruises out for four weeks in a row and then gets two weeks off. Those two weeks don´t count to his vacation time, either. He says he likes to escape paradise during his time off, so he goes to the big cities.

He also says he wears shoes once a week: Sunday at church. Otherwise, it´s barefoot or, when he was lounging on the ship, some flip-flops. We walked on some volcanic surfaces which I thought were pretty jagged rocks, but Juan had no issue walking on them barefoot. He received some ooohs and aaaahs from tour groups we passed.

A hint of the Galapagos

As I walked off the plane at the Baltra Airport (A U.S: airbase in WWII that is now the main airport in Galapagos), a grasshopper jumped onto my shirt. And even when I try to get it off, it stayed there. This just shows you how trusting and friendly Galapagos animals are.

After we got on the boat and navigated for a few hours, we all unloaded onto a motorboat to go on a water safari in Black Turtle Cove off Santa Cruz Island. The brief trip, we saw red crabs, red mangrove, white mangrove, sea turtles, frigots, sea iguanas, black-tipped sharks, jumping mallet fish, and a feeding frenzy of birds on tuna fish. I´ll highlight a few of the facts that our guide told us about the animals we saw.

- Juan used to eat the crabs after church on Sundays as a treat. They are now a protected species on the Galapagos and can´t be eaten. He says they were delicious.
- Sea turtles will only eat red-rooted mangroves - not white-rooted - even though they grow in the same areas.
- Sea turtles can spend over an hour underwater before coming up. Darwin discovered this in one of his experiments.
- People used to mix the blood of the sea turtle with Coca Cola and go diving in the water believing that drinking the blood of a sea turtle will allow you to stay underwater longer.
- There is no such thing as a black and a green sea turtle. It´s the same species. It just depends on the amount of algae.

Organic shit

The next morning, we went for a short hike on Rabida Island to observe the cactus forests. Juan told us that the French once put a bid down to buy all the guano (bird crap) from the Galapagos for fertilizer, but the Ecuadorians said no, but this allowed Ari and I to make numerous jokes about Galapagos guano being organic because of the limited human presence and plenty of comments about the French also ensued.

Afterward, we went snorkeling along the beach there. Also hanging out on the beach were a bunch of sea lions. They´re pretty friendly, and the fathers make great yelping/heaving noises if you get too close. After snorkeling, we took a walk along the red beach (it´s red because it older and has a higher iron content than other beaches) and saw a group of pelicans just chilling. Now is when I insert my obligatory mixing cement in a pelican´s mouth comment.

If Russell Crowe attacks hotel employees with phones, what does he use in the middle of Galapagos?

On our second day on the cruise, we passed a spot where they filmed Master and Commander. I´ve never seen the film, but one of the Australians on our boat was really excited when we passed the spot. It is actually one of the most famous sites in all of Galapagos (the picture with beaches on the right and left divided by an isthmus). It looks out onto an island that was formed less than 200 years ago. A guy named Sullivan was in Galapagos when he witnessed a volcano erupt. He documented the event and watched the island form (the island in the background is known as Sullivan´s Island).

When you are in Galapagos, you can really see how volcanoes shaped the landscape. On many islands, you can see in what direction the lava flowed and dried (in some places, you can walk in tunnels formed by how the lava dried). When you walk on newer lava landscape (hundreds of thousands of years old), you feel as if you are walking on Mars).

My first penguin and booby

If you think that I have just been being really immature but repeatedly saying booby, you are right. but i have actually seen plenty of booby birds. they are what Galapagos is very famous for (I have purchased two I Love Boobies shirts). We also saw a manta ray, but it´s not nearly as hilarious to say that I saw a manta ray as it is to say that I saw a booby.

While walking around the next day, a booby came up to Rolf (a Swedish guy on our boat) and started pecking at his foot. It was more of a getting to know you peck than a get the hell off our island peck. Remember: that type of peck doesn´t exist in Galapagos.

Frigots are hilarious

The frigot is another type of bird that is very common around Galapagos, and if I would´ve come to the islands at any other time of year I would not have appreciated their hyjinx (sp?). We came during mating season, which means that that male frigots are doing everything they can to woo the females, chiefly among them is showing off their huge breasts (or protrusion coming from their chests). To impress the females, the males blow up these giant red air pockets on their chests and shake their body to make a funny clicking/clucking noise.

We went to a place on Genovesa Island that looks like a scene from The Birds. There are thousands and thousands of birds just flying around and perched on whatever they can be perched on. In the Hitchcock version of the Galapagos, these birds would then attack unsuspecting tourists. Luckily these ones remained peaceful and didn´t kill.

Streak still alive

Before my trip to the Galapagos, I had never been on a tropical, island-traveling vacation. One thing I worried about beforehand was how my digestive system would handle an extended period at sea (the majority of my nights on water before this were spent in the Petoskey harbor). With the ocean waves and constant movement, I thought my body might succumb to seasickness. And the boat that we were on was one of the smallest cruise boats in all of Galapagos. So when there are big waves, everybody feels it.

But I came out victorious. I can´t say the same about the other 12 people on the Encantada. At one dinner, only six people came to the table and just four ate anything substantial. The chef made rice pudding for dessert, but nobody remained to eat (He already served the black and white cookie). My stomach felt a bit out of sorts at that meal, but it might have been how unbearably warm the dining room was. One person on our boat threw up directly on the equator (We had the GPS coordinates to prove it). I didn´t take an official tally of people on our boat but I would say that fewer people kept all their food in than didn´t.

My vomitless streak that started July 25, 2006 will remains intact. Refer to this link for more information about how much pride I take in keeping my food down. http://hearyoni.blogspot.com/2006/07/i-think-it-was-black-and-white-cookie_26.html

So that will conclude the first of two Galapagos e-mails. The next one will include our time off the boat and on land. Subjects to be covered include: watching another erupting volcano, a bachelor with no hope, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mystery, Alaska, and Pleasantville.

What a ride

I´m on my own for the next two months. Ari has returned to Ann Arbor, and I continue southward. But before I get to my recent and upcoming, solo adventures, I would like to return to the chronological style I have adhered to until my shabbat shalom message.

We pick up in the city of Cuence or, rather, on our way out of Cuenca, which is a gorgeous city that deservingly received UNESCO World Heritage Site status for its architecture. We are riding the bus from Cuenca to Guayaquil to pick up our flight for the Galapagos Islands, which leaves the next day.

Well, I´ll think of it as they´re trying to keep us safe

Twenty minutes out of Cuenca, the bus pulls over to the side of the road where five police officers are standing. I am sitting in the first row of the bus on the aisle seat (I can see out the front window and know what´s going on). When the bus stops, everybody gets off and stands in the middle of the highway. Even though Ari and I are sitting in the front row, we don´t really pick up on the cue or know what is going on, so we are the last ones off the bus. The police will search the passengers. I´m not sure if this is for drugs or weapons or other stuff.

Once off the bus, Ari and I jump at the back of the line as the police search the other passengers. We didn´t realize that the passengers were standing in two lines - one for men and one for women. We were just a bit startled by the unannounced search. We get in the correct line and, once we start speaking (or not speaking) Spanish and show them our American passports, we get on without a problem.

The police didn´t seem to be taking this search too seriously, so they might employ it as a scare tactic or they must know what they are exactly looking for.

Something you never want to see

The bus continued on the mountainous roads for the next few hours until the bus suddenly stops in middle of a downhill section directly ahead of a sharp turn. The driver and official get out of the bus and rush to get boulders from the side of the road so that the bus doesn´t move. I think it´s pretty clear what the problem was in this situation.

Now, I know it´s the title of this section but let´s return to what I witnessed. The driver getting rocks from the side of the road so that the bus doesn´t continue going downhill. Harrowing? Yes. Confident in the bus driver? Do I have any choice?

The bus smelled horrible, and it smelled even worse when you opened the window. All the men get off the bus to check out what´s going on (Home Improvement style, argh, argh, argh). They simply stand on the side of the road as the watch the driver try to correct what is going on. Some of them also decide to go to take a leak.

If you are going to bootleg American movies, please do so with some quality films

For long bus rides in Ecuador, there is little do. Most people don´t bring books on the bus, and, although the scenery is breathtaking for an American who has never been to Ecuador before, they are not really wowed by the landscape. Sleep is a popular choice as well, but the most common practice would be to watch one of the movies the bus official decides to show.

Aside from my first long bus ride (when they tried to show Home Alone, but the movie skipped out), they have not shown a single quality movie on any of my long distance bus rides (and I have recently been longing quite a few hours in long-distance public transportation).

Let´s go through the list of movie titles that I have had to watch in the last couple of weeks. I had not heard of one of them before I saw it on the bus: Raw Deal, The Shepherd, Code Name: The Cleanaer, Littleman, some WWE Action movie executively produced by Vince McMahon.

A common thread among most of them: high-octane action featuring a lot of bad guys with horrible aims when shooting at the good guys. All the movies have Spanish dubbed over the original English, so the Arnold Schwarzenaegger (sp.?) voice from Raw Deal was just some Hispanic guy. You can tell that they are all bootleg copies because they don´t have a DVD menu. It just goes straight into the movie.

Also, keep in mind that there are plenty of little children riding the buses. These are the movies that they are being shown.

Shabbat Shalom

So I am going to jump out of my chronological retelling of events to share an experience I had about 40 minutes ago. And, to keep up with my one mass e-mail per shower pace, I need to send one right now.

Rabino is a great word

In Spanish, the word for rabbi is rabino. Ari and I decided that is a great word. One of the things that we wanted to do before leaving Ecuador was see the country{s Jewish community (sorry about the apostrophe. The button on the keyboard that normally has the apostrophe has the left bracket. I would take time to investigate this further but I must hurry up. You should expect some inconsistency with apostrophe usage and replacement in this post).

Ari{s cousin, who visited Ecuador last year, gave us the number of a member of the Jewish community. He put us in contact with the rabbi. Once I got ahold of the rabbi, he said that it would be difficult to spend the day with a family because of the short notice and that most of the community members live far from the shul. There is, however, two rooms at the synagogue where people who spend shabbat normally stay. For security purposes, we had to fax a copy of our passports.

Security, South American JCC Style

I arrived at the entrance to the JCC at 4:10. From the outside, you would not suspect the building to be the hub of thew Jewish community. The outside walls are non-descript. Having faxed my passport to the offices the day before, I assumed that I would have avoided all the hassle of getting into the synagogue. All I have to say is: I wonder what kind of hassle it would have been if I couldn{t find a fax machine to send the copy.

When we arrived, the guard asked to see our passport. I handed him the passport, and he went back inside. A few minutes later, a guard came outside to smoke and stand outside the gates. He was very serious looking, and my general rule with security officials is to not break the ice unless he does something to assist it. For 15 minutes, Ari and I wait. We talk about how this security is as intense as any security we had ever seen and that through numerous trips to Israel, we havent seen this level of security. We wonder if they are doing a background search, calling the American embassy, picking their noses, laughing at us through the two-way mirror glass, bouncing a tennis ball (we actually heard them doing this).

Each time a car or pedestrian would pass by the entrance, the security guard would give them a big time staredown (not so much Larry David style as Jack Bauer style). Eventually, the guard breaks a smile and I consider it acceptable to crack a few jokes and ask him about the level of security (he says that the Israeli embassy is stricter).

Twenty-five minutes later, a car pulls up to the entrance and the chief of security gets out. He is Israel and tells us to empty our backpacks so the guards can do a thorough search. I take everything out of my bag and explain to the guard what is in it. I go through my alarm clock, pocket knife, Clif Bars, underwear bag, dirty laundry, and everything else in my backpack. The guard suggests that I go laundry and allows us to enter.

I visited the JCC in Buenos Aires, which experience a terrorist bombing in the 1990s, and didn{t experience this level of security. I have never had to empty my entire backpack for someone. This just makes me wonder what they do at the Israeli embassy in Quito.

A room with a blech

We are staying in the synagogue{ guest room on the second floor of the synagogue. There are shabbat candle holders, a sink, a great bathroom and a blech (because Jews cant cook on shabbat, Jews use a metal plate to conduct heat from a low flame to keep dishes warm).

Incan Ruins on Strike

It feels like deja vu. Exactly twenty-four hours after I sent my last e-mail, I am back in the same internet cafe, pounding away at another one.

By the way: Way to go, Wings. A magical season, no doubt.

On another (much more somber) note, Boca Juniors (my soccer team) lost in the semifinals of the Copa Libertadores. It was a tough 3-1 loss to a Brazilian squad. Last night, the entire country was glued to this game because the winner would face Qutio in the tournament finals. Asking them to change the channel from the soccer to a hockey game would have been met with the ¨what is hockey?¨ question.

I regress.

Even the tourist sites go on strike

So the day after my adventure in the jungle, we visited the most important Incan ruins in Ecuador. Calling Inca Pirca the Macchu Picchu of Ecaudaor would be like saying the Argonauts are the Patriots of the CFL. While they might win championships, they are no comparison with the English squad.

Either way, we arrived at the entrance to the tourist site after a four hour bus ride and were ready to see some ruins. The entrance gate to the site is in a town a kilometer away. As Ari and I approached the entrance, some locals sitting at the gate told us the site was closed and that we should turn around. They had a rope going across the street, preventing us from going forward. Confused, we walked to the local police station to ask what was going. We walked to the precinct to find it abandoned and empty.

Reasoning that we would´ve heard about this being closed, we decided to walk to the side of the fence and continue along the path. Once we reached the ruins (about a kilometer uphill from the gate), our guide told us that the locals decided to go on strike, asking for money from the tourist site to fix a road leading into town. She said that the tourist site didn´t even make enough money to support itself, let alone share the money with the community. It was the eighth day of the strike, and nobody seemed to be giving an inch.

(Because of the strike, we didn´t have to pay the $6 entrance fee)

On the bus back to the city from the ruins. the locals would not allow the bus to pass through the gate. They refused to lift the rope, and our driver and bus official spent a few minutes arguing with the locals before they finally relinquished.

A scarlet Michigan hat?

As we walked up to the police station in Incapirca, we passed a both selling bootleg movies and apparel. One of the items on the rack was a red hat with a maize Michigan across the front. Pretty weird.

A horrible misnomer

Before I go into this story, I want to clarify a pretty common misconception. The headware commonly referred to as the Panama Hat actually comes from Ecuador. When Ecuador began exporting the hats to the rest of the world, they would have to travel through the Panama Canal. From there, people began to associate them with Panama, and the name stuck. But in Cuenca, the third largest city in Ecuador and probably the country´s most picturesque, there are numerous Panama Hat Haberdasheries. There is even the Sombrero Museum.

As soon as we arrived in Cuenca, we went to a Panama Hat factory to see how the headware is made. It is a pretty extensive process of weaving straw, bleaching, ironing, and folding. They can make them in different colors and have different bends on the brims. After the tour, we went into the store, where they sell hats a fraction of the price you would pay in the United States and bought some. They also have photos of famous people who have come through their store (Columbo, Jeff Goldblum, and all the Miss Universe contestants from a few years ago (these were actually in another Sombrero factory but I didn´t want to make another bullet point just for this one fact).

Oneg? No, confirmation

That night in Cuenca was a Friday night, so Ari and I went to a nice restaurant across the street from the central square (it also happened to be underneath the main cathedral in town). While we were eating dinner, we heard a windpipe version of ¨Shalom Haverim¨ play over the restaurant´s stereo. Before dinner, we saw people in the streets preparing for some sort of festival that would occur that night, but we had no idea what the occasion was.

We ate dinner in the window seat and saw people dressed in their Sunday best walk down the street. This seemed weird for a Friday night, so something special must´ve been going down. While we were eating dinner, we also heard fireworks and loud music coming from the central square. There was a massive party happening. When we left the restaurant, we found out that it was a mass confirmation ceremony for the kids in the town.

There were fireworks, sparklers, and flaming paper mache cows in the street. It was insane. On one side of the plaza there was a guy encouraging people to dance as he played some random music. He kept it up with traditional dance music all night but for one of the last songs of the night, he played ¨Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel.¨ I didn´t really think this fit with the whole Confirmation theme, but it definitely fit with the shabbat theme (except the fireworks and flaming cow didn´t).

When nature calls, go to Los Baños

So when we last left off, I was in an internet cafe in Riobamaba. Since then, I have seen more boobies than you will in your entire life (Galapagos joke).

Four days before I set foot in Galapagos, I traveled to the mountain city of Baños. It´s on the western side of the country, on the road to the jungle. The city is known for outdoors activities and the active volcano a few kilometers from the city that shoot lava into the air every half hour.

A baños joke would be too easy here

Our guidebook said that the best time to view the erupting volcano in Baños is in the night, when you can clearly see the lava bursting in the air. We arrived in town at 10 p.m., too late to take a nightly shuttle up the top of a mountain to view the volcano. We arrived at an Israeli-owned hostel (While checking in, I spoke three different languages), and one of the guests told us that it was cloudy and probably not worth it to see the volcano. But Ari and I though for a second: How many times in our life will we be able to see a volcano erupt?

So we went to a hostel down the street to inquire about other locations to see the eruptions. The hostel employee told us that there was a mountain opposite the volcano where you could hire a taxi to take you to the top to view. The opposite mountain is actually higher than the volcano so you can look down on it. We arranged a ride and headed to the top of the mountain.

Two minutes into the ride, we learned that our driver was also city councilman for Baños, who also owns the hostel we went to ask information. Here is a brief rundown about our driver, Fernando. He has been in office for two years and doesn´t seek any higher position. The biggest problem facing the city is the volcano (an eruption in 1999 forced the town to be evacuated for three months). The volcano can be a boon for tourism but poses a threat to the community.

At the top of the mountain (a new personal high for altitude), we witnessed lava spewing out of the mountain. We were lucky because the mountain wasn´t completely covered by clouds and the fact that we were standing at such a high altitude above the clouds allowed us to see more than we would in the town. A volcano sounds like really loud thunder and someone who gargles really loudly. We stayed at the top for about an hour watching and listening for anything from the volcano (if it only goes off every half hour, you have just a few opportunities to see or hear it). While we are watching the volcano that stands over Baños, Fernando decides to step aside and go to the baño next to his truck.

The next morning, we wake up at 4:45 to see the volcano again (Fernando said that a reliable time to see the volcano is around 5 a.m.). In the morning, we heard a really big boom but didn´t see anything because of the clouds.

Superman of Santa Agua

Given the interesting location of Baños, under a volcano, the people of the town have developed some very interesting traditions and religious practices about who protects the village from the volcano. Legend has it that the Virgin of Santa Agua protects the town from the volcano. In the town church, there is a museum tribute to the virgin (and a gift shop where you can by Virgin of Santa Agua gifts for friends and family).

The people also believe that she protects the buses that travel into and out of the city. There are models of buses in the museum that fell off the cliffs and into the gorges below but nobody was hurt in these accidents. The people credit her with preventing harm. I couldn´t help but think the creators of Superman knew of these tales before making the movie, or maybe the Virgin of Santa Agua is Superman?

If Dr. Quinn were Ecaudorian, she would live in the jungle

First off, a Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman reference. When is the last time you even thought about that show? Now onto its relevance to my trip.

From Baños, Ari and I took a bus to Puyo - a town in the middle of the jungle that has a nice trail that gives a good representation of Amazon plants and native culture (a taste of the Amazon, if you will). A guide will lead on the trail, explaining the medicinal value of plants that grow in the area and a bit about the local culture. Our guide, Maxi Maxi, is from the Shuar tribe (most famous for shrinking heads).

She showed us the different plants that grow along the trail and what ailments they would cure. She would eat them, tell us their utility, and then ask us to try some of them. She offered us some plants that would cure sinus problems, diarrhea, constipation, prostate issues, and a host of other problems. She would ask us to eat or snort the plants, even though we didn´t experience any of the problems.
(I have some personal rules about what I put in my body and how things get into my body. Aside from oxygen, nothing goes through my nose)

We have trophies, and they have heads

One thing the Shuar tribe is most famous for is the practice of shrinking heads. If a person were sleeping with your wife, you are allowed to kill that person. Then, as a sign of your dominance, you follow a tradition custom and preserve the head as a trophy. They would also shrink heads from wars, but this is something I learned at a museum later. In fact, in sixth grade, I did a website with my friend about the Shuar tribe and the practice of shrinking heads. I haven´t really thought about the whole shrunken head thing since.

I have some shrunken head photos but I didn´t know if you would be grossed out or not. So I chose not to include them.

Well, this internet cafe closes in five minutes. So the eight hours I need to catch up on all the stories and the bit of time I need to upload photos will have to wait.

Things to look forward to in future e-mails: boobies, boobies, boobies. I also ran into another erupting volcano. I swam with some sea lions, penguins, and sharks. The Mystery, Alaska of the tropics. Oh, they are closing. I have to send this before they shut down the computer.

Mi amigo Luis and a Sallah Shabati Moment

Wow, twice in a matter of minutes. I´m on a roll, and there is nothing to do in Guayaquil.

I ended the last e-mail with the end of my time in Quito (Monday afternoon). That night, we boarded a bus and headed an hour and a half to the south to Latacunga (Now is when I wish I had a map I could show you but you could simply Google it and find out).

Mucho gusto (Spanish for ´nice to meet you´)

On the bus to Latacunga, I sat in a window seat near the front of the bus with the aisle seat next to me unoccupied. After we make a few stops in the city to pick up more people, a kind-looking man sits down next to me. Within a few minutes, we start chatting about different things. We talk about his life, my life, politics, sports, his life dreams, Joe Pesci, etc. It´s all inclusive.

Here is what I learned about my this man. His name is Luis, and his a day laborer. He just returned from working on building a gas station in the north but he doesn´t have any stable employment. He makes enough money to feed his family but not enough to save. His life dream is to move to the United States and is very curious about how much money he could make there. He has also never seen Home Alone (which was the movie showing on the bus [bus movies merit their own special category but I will get to that in a later post. Right now, all you need to know that the long buses show movies]). I told him Home Alone was a classic in America and in my family, but the movie kept skipping so you wouldn´t be able to follow unless you knew what was going to happen.

Then he asks me what I am doing the next day, and he says that he lives in a village near the place I planned on doing some hiking. He told me that he would call me, and maybe I would be able to eat lunch at his house with his family. He says he has three sons and shows me a certificate that one of them received in school.

So, the next morning I wake up and get ready to go for the hike. I get in touch with Luis and tell him when I would be near his town. He says that he would meet me at the bus station in Latacunga, which I thought was about 20 minutes away from my final destination. I arrive at the bus station, assuming that Luis would be taking the bus up to his village with us. When we get there, he introduces my roommate and me to his niece and then shows us to the bus we are going to take to where we would hike. He boards the bus with us but then gets off. I ask him why he left the bus, and he told me that it was two hours away but that he would meet me there. I tried calling him when I arrived to see if he was there, but I couldn´t get any service.

The next day, when we returned to an area with phone reception, I sent him a text message telling him what happened and thanked him for his help. He replied with a message thanking me for helping him and answering his questions.

Lake Quilatoa = Awesome

Damn, this is another one of those times when a picture would really help things out. When I set something up for the photos, I promise to include a picture of this really sweet crater lake. It is one of the most beautiful images I have seen. We arrived there late in the afternoon and knew we wouldn´t be able to complete the four hour hike to circumnavigate the lake but didn´t want to miss this opportunity. When we arrived, it was perfectly sunny, but, a few minutes later, the rain came and we decided to turn back. We were lucky enough to get photos of the lake in all weather conditions (gorgeous, ominous, rainy).

Sallah would be proud

If you have never talked Israeli movies with me, you would probably not know that Sallah Shabati is my favorite movie of all time. It is about a Middle Eastern family that immigrates to Israel. The father figure, Sallah, is one of the greatest characters of all time. When I return, I would be glad to loan you this movie if you haven´t seen it. Either way, back to my story.

So the only back to civilization from Lake Quillatoa is to take a shared cab back to a nearby village (30 minutes) and then to take a bus back to Latacunga (1.5 hours). After we finished our breif excursion around the lake, we decided to head back. At the entrance to the lake we found a driver who would take us to the village for $3/each, which was 40% less than the competition. We loaded into his truck and took the bumpy road to Zambuhua.

On the way to the village, we passed the fields where the barley for the most popular beer in Ecuador is grown. Our driver, Daniel, asked us if we wanted to listen to English or Spanish music. We wanted Spanish but he put in a CD of English tunes. Along the side of the road, people were doing a variety of different rural village activities (farming, soccer, carrying stuff, riding horse, riding bike, just walking), With each person we pass, Daniel honked his horn. I asked him if he knew everyone in the town, and he said that he has lived here his entire life so he knows mostly everyone. As we near the village, he asks if we would like to continue to Latacunga (another hour and a half), I negotiate him down to less than half of his initial value, but he says that he needs to stop at home before we go to the city.

When we get to his house, he tells his daughter that he is driving to the city. She grabs her backpack and excitedly jumps into the back of the truck. Daniel grabs his baby boy Joel and assists his wife in putting a mattress in the bed of the truck. I had no idea what was happening. I figured that going to the city was an exciting adventure, so the entire family wants to come along.

We sit Ari, Daniel, and I in the front seat with his daughter, baby son, and wife in the bed of the truck and we drive down the Andean mountain passes. We go like this for about 20 minutes before we see woman in farm clothes running down the side of the hill as the truck passes. Daniel stops and allows the woman to hop in the bed. A few hundred meters later, a large group of farmers is waiting on the side of the road, trying to get a ride in the back of Daniel´s car back to their homes which are many kilometers down the road. At one point, there were 11 people and a sheep sitting in the bed of the truck and the three of us in the front seat, enjoying the gorgeous alpine scenery.

As the people begin to unload from the back of the truck, it becomes clear what Daniel is doing. He acts as a sort of cab for these mountain laborers. With his daughter playing the role of cashier, the laborers pay his daughter and Daniel is able to make a bit more money on this journey to the city.

Well, that will be about it for tonight. I must go to sleep and get ready for the Galapagos. If I have Internet access, I will send another update that details my interactions with the jungle equivalent of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, the saint who Superman is based off of, my volcanic encounters, the most random Oneg ever, and how my bus broke on a mountain pass.

Until then, I hope all is well. Tough loss by the Pistons. On the Ecuadorian football front, it appears that Liga Quito, the best team in the country, will face my favorite team, Buenos Aires-based Boca Juniors, in the quarterfinals of the continent-wide Copa Libertadores.

Quito Playing Gmes With My Heart

This time I am siting in an internet cafe in the coastal city of Guayaquil. It´s Ecuador´s largest city, with a population of about 2 million, but it´s also known as one of the most dangerous (Some people say that Great Theft Auto Vice City was modeled after Miami. I would disagree and say Guayaquil). But I´m trying to keep my time in this place as short as possible (Homer Simpson vs. the City of New York-style). I leave early tomorrow morning for the Galapagos Islands.

Back to where we left off.

To address a few questions you might have had when you read my first e-mail.

1. Instead of working this summer, I decided to travel in South America. I had worked at an internship last summer and didn´t get the chance to travel as I had hoped (instead I churned out a pretty sweet camp newsletter and staffed a trip into Algonquin Park, which I was really glad I did. It just wasn´t traveling the world.) I also asked myself when I would have this opportunity to travel for a few months again. When the answer wasn´t in the next 50ish years, I decided to take this opportunity.

2. I used the term ¨host family´´ pretty loosely. The family I stayed with the for the first few days of my journey hosted a family friend of mine last summer for six weeks. When he found out that I was traveling to Ecuador, he called the family and offered to have my roommate and me stay at their house.

Now, onto further adventures (I promise to get some pictures up at some point, but I don´t have my cord with me at this point)

In the middle of it all, or so you think

As the country name Ecuador seem to say, the Equator passes through the country. In fact, Quito is located just next to the Earth´s waistline. Another fun fact about Ecuador´s location before I go into my adventures. The peak of the tallest mountain in Ecuador, Chimborazo, is the furthest from the center of the Earth and the closest to the sun of any piece of land in the world.

OK, so, to commemorate the country´s location near the equator, there is a museum a few minutes outside of Quito called Mitad del Mundor (literally ¨middle of the world¨). I´m not exactly sure why they chose this location along the equator over any other location along the equator for a museum, but my roommate says that it´s because the spot is one of the highest points on the Equator.

It turns out that the museum isn´t even on the Equator. With the advent of GPS technology and other cartographic developments, it became clear that the mitad del mundo monument isn´t even at the mitad del mundo. So, if you wanted to play the toilet-flushing game, you would have to move 240ish meters from the monument. But I did take the obligatory picture of standing in both hemispheres (and the obligatory Robinson picture of standing in one hemisphere, peeing into the other).

Trying new foods, even if I can find them at home

Although I would not classify myself as a picky eater, there are some foods that I have traditionally avoided, or would never really come across in everyday life. But in my first few days in Ecuador, I already stepped outside of my comfort zone.

I consumed my first hard-boiled egg. I don´t know what it is about this form of the egg that has botherd me over the years, but when I had no other options at a meal, I had to eat something. It wasn´t that bad but I would probably still pass over it when it comes around at the seder (no pun originally intended but after re-reading it I now intended the pun).

I also tried Tang for the first time. In the same logic as the hard-boiled egg. I was thirst and there was nothing else. I felt like Neil Armstrong (Don´t astronauts drink Tang?). At the time, I thought it was tomato juice, and only found out the next morning that it wasn´t. It was pretty good for tomati juice, but if I knew it had been Tang, I probably wouldn´t have liked it as much.

That is a perfect segue into tomato juice. I would have to say of the three foods that are easily accessible in America that I tried for the first time while I was in Ecuador, this was the best, but I would still probably not go out of my way to get it.

A national pastime

Some people might say soccer (futbol) is a national pastime in Ecuador. Everywhere you look, there is a soccer net. But I think I have discovered another - waiting.

These people have no problem waiting for hours for something to happen and do nothing in the meantime. It is still an adjustment. They will sit in their car and sleep or watch traffic go by or read the newspaper as they wait for something to happen. And they assume that I also don´t mind waiting either.

What would Dick Schaap have written?

On my third night in Ecuador, I went with my host family back to the military academy to drop something off for their oldest son. When we arrived, we noticed a booming noise coming from the gymnasium - boxing night.

It was my first boxing match that I had attended. After watching a bunch on TV and reading a bit of boxing journalism and talking to my grandfather, I would have to say that these Ecuadorian soldiers should stick to careers in the military and not pursue a career in pugilism. There was no style or grace involved, but they did have great introductions.

As each fighter was called up to the ring, they played a slideshow that gave the fighters some ridiculous nicknames and played hip-hop songs as they entered. One thing that was unclear was whether there was an undercard and a main event or just a bunch of scheduled fights without a big one at the end.

We then spent the next day and half planning our trip to the Galapagos Islands but did manage to fit in some cool museum viewing times.

Museum highlight

If you get a chance, Google ¨Incan Sun Mask.¨ It´s a sort of national symbol in this country and is really awesome.

Well, that is it for now. I will try and churn out another e-mail shortly because I don´t know how much internet I will be able to access in the Galapagos, but this marks the end of my time in Quito.

I just heard the Pistons are down by 13 in the fourth. On the positive side, the Tigers appear to have done well and the Wings are taking care of business.

I just can't Quito you

As some of you know (and others are about to find out), I am in South America this summer, traveling for three months. I started last Friday in Quito, Ecuador, and will return from Rio De Janeiro in the beginning of August. Right now, I am sitting in Riobamba, Ecuador, in an internet cafe (sans food), following the Gametracker of Game 2 of the Pistons-Celtics series.

I weighed the merits of maintaining a blog versus sending out mass e-mails, and I decided that, given the unpredictability of my internet access, a mass e-mail would be the best way for me to keep in touch and keep people in the loop of what I am doing this summer. I´m also excited to hear what you are up to.

And since I am already a week behind in these journals, I might as well get started. We´ll just hit on some of the highlights because I would be in this cafe all night if I were to write about everything I have done so far.

Ecuador military competition

My first morning in Ecuador, I went to a military competition at a military academy. The youngest son of the family I was staying with was competing, and it seemed like a much more exciting thing to do than lounge around the house. At 6:30 a.m., we left their house and drove through the hills/mountains of Quito. One of the coolest things about Quito is that it is a sprawling city build in the middle of the mountains. So there are houses built up the slopes, and the city doesn´t seem to end.

We walked into the stadium at the military academy as they were playing the national anthem (or some other similarly patriotic song). The academy was divided up into four teams to compete in a variety of events. The most interesting thing about the entire event was how much enthusiasm the non-competing teammates displayed. They brought massive drums and sang and danced throughout the event. This is definitely not something you would see in America. This is probably an extension of the soccer-fan culture that permeates South America.

My host family´s son´s team ended up winning the competition, and he was chosen to be part of his team´s relay squad.

(O.K. So, that wasn´t the most exciting story to start my South America journals with, but I figured I would go chronologically and thought that this experience merited a place in the journal)

Buses in Ecuador

Most of my bus-riding experience comes from the time I spent in Israel a few summers ago. One person is employed by the bus company to drive the bus, act as the cashier, and answer passengers´questions about directions. In Ecuador, it´s quite different.

There are two employees on the bus: a driver and an official. The driver´s job is simply to drive the bus. In my week here, I have not personally interacted with one bus driver. The other guy does everything else. He walks up and down the aisle, collecting fares, standing at the door to yell the buses destination to people on the side of the road, and answering other general question about the bus and directions. But, by far, the most exciting task of the official is to interact with other cars on the road. If he, or the driver, has something to say or whistle at another driver on the road, he is not shy about sharing his feelings (I haven´t seen a driver talk to any other drivers on the road). Also, if there is a bad traffic jam, and the bus is trying to get better position on the road, the official will get off the bus and stand in front of the other car on the road (setting a pick, if you will) so the bus can get by.

There are a few other interesting tips about Ecuador buses.
1. They don´t really stop. If you are getting on or off the bus, you have to be prepared to do so onto a moving vehicle.
2. The bus door never really closes. The official will stand at the door, taking in the fresh air, yelling at pedestrians (or, in the official´s mind, potential passengers), or sharing his feelings with other drivers.

Old Town

I guess it´s in the name, but one of the oldest neighborhoods in Quito is known as Old Town. There are plenty of churches, museums, municipal buildings, tourists, and people trying to hawk products for you to buy. In fact, it was recently featured in the New York Times´ travel section. Ari, my roommate who is traveling with me for the first three weeks of my summer adventure, and I ventured to Old Town Saturday afternoon.

After walking around the main square for a bit, we found the Numismatic Museum, which tells the history of the Ecuadorean currency. Now, normally I´m not fascinated by foreign currency museums, but the thing about this museums is that, for an American, it is a domestic currency museum. A few years ago, the country dropped its currency of the Sucre and decided to adopt the American dollar as the national currency. They still maintain their own currency less than a dollar but everything else is American. A few years back, the U.S: Department of the Treasury released a Sacajawea coin dollar that didn´t really thrive in the U.S. It seems as if the U.S. just sent all of those coins to Ecuador because they love the dollar coin here. (Also, they don´t accept the $2 bill, one of which I still had in pocket that had been change from Dominick´s).

A new personal record

At the top of Quito sits the Pichincha Volcano (one of the two volcanoes that sits atop the capital). Within the last few years, they installed a gondola that will take you up the Pichincha Volcano (4,100 meters above sea level). The view from the top is spectacular. We were lucky enough to be there on a clear day when you don´t have clouds or smog that blocks your view of the city down below. In future posts, I will try to include pictures so you can get a better sense of where I am and what I am doing. This would be one of those times.

At the bottom of the gondola, I saw a hotdog stand that was selling a hot dog and pop for $1.50. This is a better deal than the Hillel Hotdog Cart on North University. I really like to pride myself on serving the cheapest meal in Ann Arbor (hotdog for $1 and a pop for another dollar). I was in a bit of a state of shock when I saw this and spent the majority of the gondola ride trying to reason how this stand could sell its meal for a lower price than the Hillel Hotdog Cart, when we are looking to break even instead of making huge profits. Then I came up with a few explanations:

1. I serve kosher hotdogs in Ann Arbor, which are of a higher quality than whatever meat was sold at the base of the gondola.

2. A dollar goes much further in Ecuador than in the U.S. I did have to travel to the Equator to find this deal. The Ecuadorean equivalent of the Hillel Hotdog would be about .50.

Well, it´s getting late. I noticed the Pistons went to work on the Celtics tonight and head back to the Palace tied up at a game apiece. That´s good stuff.

I will continue to fine tune my mass e-mail, travelogue skills. And this is just two day´s worth of adventures. To give you a flavor for what is to come in future e-mails: think active volcanoes, 11 people in the bed of a truck, homeopathic medicine, and saving a bus (Superman-style) from crashing down a ravine.