last south american email

hey everyone,
so right now i'm making a brief stop in the yucatan before heading home. its been an absolutely amazing trip, but traveling alone really isn't my thing right now and i'm excited to see my friends and sleep in my bed and not live out of a backpack for awhile.
anyways, in my last mail we had finished traveling the amazing patagonia and were back in bariloche. we spent christmas there with lots of friends in a great hostel, we all had a big argentinian BBQ. there were tons of argentinian families staying in bariloche and one night we heard that some big band was playing in the square for free. they turned out to be this ska band called el calzone that totally rocked!!!! everyone in the crowd were singing the choruses and dancing around like crazy spinning their shirts in the air, throwing their beer on everyone, and not just kids. the thing about argentina is it seems like families do everything together, all the dads had the little ones on their shoulders, and the grandparents were next to them swaying back and forth and laughing, and all of this was happening at like 1am. argentinians are definitely on a different time schedule than most of the world. if you are hungry at 1am, not only are there plenty of restaurants open but they are packed, with families!!! its pretty cool!! the only part i dont like is that night clubs dont get going till like 4am, and by then i just want to go to bed.
after bariloche we headed to buenos aires. what a city!!! i stayed over three weeks there and could have easily stayed longer. this was a time for hanging out with friends, some i had met on the road and some in BA. we did lots of fun stuff and ate lots of good food, mostly steak and pizza since it seems like thats pretty much all they eat in argentina. one night i went to a tango show with a bunch of my girlfriends that i met at the hostel. we decided that we couldnt afford one of the typical super-fancy tourist shows (picture a grand ballroom, fog fills the stage, laser lights flicker in the sky, the spotlight suddenly focusses on the beautiful young couple in passionate embrace as the booming voice over the loudspeaker says "THIS IS TANGO!!..TANGO!!..TANGO!!..) and really, who wants to see that phony las vegas shit anyways. so i found a supercheap show down in a seedy part of town in this dark dirty old hotel ballroom in buenos aires. the room was stained black from years of smoke, the paint was peeling off the walls, and the performers were all like 100 years old. and it was amazing!!!!! so much passion!! these people really did the dance because they loved it, they lived it!! you could just feel the sexuality exuding from these dancers. i kept imagining them as the people who had kept tango alive in the back rooms of la boca during the decades it fell out of popularity. just dancing for themselves. and now in their later years they were again in front of crowds, doing the dance they love. it was really REALLY great!!!
so for new years we had another bbq on the rooftop of my friends apartment. during the week we went out to many different places in the city but monday nights were for la bomba de tiempo. i first heard about them from one of my friends who lives in BA, they are this 20 piece drumming band with a conductor and various guest musicians that plays outdoors in this little square boxed in by buildings and covered in art. when they play they are so loud and together and tribal that you cant help but to move, and their songs will build and build and build until the whole square is just one sweating and dancing mass of humanity, like one living entity, an extention of the drums. then they stop..BOOM!..and all of a sudden you stand in silence, disorientated, wondering vaguely what you are doing. then the drums begin again and everyone sceams and howls at the sky like the animals we all are, and then we begin to move again. la bomba de tiempo is not to be missed.
so sarah left to go back down south and do some more camping and i had a week to kill before my friend kristine flew into BA. so i went to uruguay and hung out on the beaches for a while and rented motorbikes to explore the countryside, i would get lost among farmland then cut in towards the coast and find empty beaches to lie on and read. it was lonely but good.
when kristine got here we jumped a 17 hour bus to iguazu falls. now i dont know if i've mentioned it before but as far as physical looks go, argentinian women are the most beautiful women in the world. it can be quite distracting just walking around. i have to seriously concentrate sometimes just to keep from walking into traffic. the only thing is that half of them are like nine months pregnate and the other half are totally stuck up....and by that i mean they wont give me the time of day. i have never seen so many pregnate women in my life, and not like american women who are like...i'm going to wear a big moomoo to try and hide that fact that i'm getting bigger...oh no, in argentina being pregnate is the perfect excuse to break out the old tank top half shirts you wore when you were sixteen, ride that baby up to the top of your huge shiny distended belly and stick that thing out there, inside out belly button and all. it takes some getting used to....ok i never got used to it. anyways, as a direct consequence of all the pregnate women you have tons of babies everywhere, which means that pretty much every bus is full of screaming children. but none could compare to the little beast that inhabited our 17 hour bus ride to iguazu falls. at first i didn't really notice it, it was, after all, a few rows up from us. but soon enough the screaming turned to wailing as the little monster found its voice and somehow it had already mastered circular breathing because the noise just didnt stop. i put on my headphones turned up my i pod and forgot about it, then i plugged into the bus headset and watched a couple of movies. thats when i glanced at kristine and she had this pale vacant look on her face, i removed my headphones to ask if she was ok, and thats when i heard it, she looked at me desperately and said in a shaky voice "rocky, it hasnt stopped".....and it hadn't, and it didn't, for 17 hours straight. at one point i walked up to get a look at this screaming machine, and i was shocked, this baby was so tiny and wrinkled i think this mother must of just gave birth to it in the waiting room and hopped on the bus, i couldnt see the chord but i wouldnt be surprised if it was still attached. no wonder the baby was pissed.
so if you've never heard of iguazu falls, its these waterfalls more than 250 of them all in the same area on the brazil-argentina border. i cant imagine waterfalls anywhere being more impressive. in this chasm you are in, everywhere you look are warterfalls surrounding you, coming through bright green tropical vegetation blooming with flowers, making innumerable rainbows. we took a boat wich drove us into one of the bigger ones and it was amazing, you could hardly breathe with all the water. one falls though, dwarfed all the others. it was called giganta del diablo or throat of the devil, and the argentinians have built a series of walkways to get to a platform that is right in front, a little above, and facing the enormous falls. the effect is staggering!! the sheer power and enormous volume of water is so overwhelming to look at...to feel...that its almost terrifying!! it takes your breath away, you almost cant look at it to long at once with out feeling like you are being sucked into it. amazing!!!!!!! you cant even see the bottom because its just a giant cauldron of steam and rainbows.
the next day we relaxed, swam in the river and played with all the butterflies, good times.
so after iguazu we went to salta where we decided to splurge and geta nice room with a balconey overlooking the main square, which was perfect for throwing the doors open in the morning and singing "DONT CRY FOR ME ARGENTINAAAAAA!!!!" to crowds of indifferent locals.
we made our way to the atacama desert in chile where we would begin our jeep trip into the high altitude deserts of bolivia. the day before leaving my camera broke and it took a desperate mad scramble to make it to a town big enough to sell cameras and buy one and make it back in time for the trip. but i am sooooo glad i did!!! the connections are to slow here to upload pictures, as they were in bolivia and peru, but i got some really great ones!!!! i will share them as soon as i get home.
we traveled way up into desolate country where the air was so thin and the sky was so blue it was magic. past lakes and waterfalls and snow capped peaks, though moonscape valleys with thermal vents shooting steam into the air. we spent the night in mud huts on the shore of a red lake surrounded by pink flamingoes. it was like another world. the people who shared our jeep were really great too, 2 german brothers, a french couple, and us. we had a really great night when we finally got to our destination, staying up in our hotel room drinking some rum and peach drink and somehow comunicating through a complex mixture of french, spanish, english, and german. good times.
kristine and i then made our way towards a town called samaipata where her friend was in the peace core. the town ended up being like a bolivian pai...for those who havent been to pai it was a peaceful town in a beautiful valley with walks through the jungle to waterfalls and all sorts of other good stuff. her friend was very cool too and showed us a great week.
ok i'm ready to stop this email. just one more thing i should talk about. mountainbiking down the worlds most dangerous road. theres this road that was the way into la paz before a few years ago when they built a new safer one. its gravel, like 10 feet across with no railings and sheer 1800 ft. drops. during its use there were times when a car a week would go off to its grave and the valley below is a garden of twisted metal. along the sides of the road were hundreds of crosses (bolivian caution signs). oh, and its also incredibly beautiful!! to compound the danger we did it in the rainy season, in the rain. first they take you up to 4700 meters. like 15000 ft.! where its freezing and snowing like crazy then you make your way down the road through mist covered valleys with countless waterfalls, some coming down right onto the road, through streams, over boulders and finally down into the tropics where you have to shed all your clothing because its to hot. i loved it!! but i'm definitely not the extreme sports guy, no matter how i felt that i was absolutely flying down this road, i was always last. and not just barely last, like everybody waiting and wondering if i had fallen off and maybe they should check on me last. oh well, so much for changing my nickname to bullit.
anyways, now that i'm done i'm going to buy a ticket home and see if i can get together enough money to go to india in june and make my way through nepal and tibet into china for the olympics.
love you all,
Rakhal
p.s. i went to machu pichu last week and it was also pretty sweet.

10:40 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

last patagonian email

hello all,
First of all, i am SOOOOOOOO sick of living in dorm rooms!!!!! AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!! give me some fucking privacy already!!!! ok, its not like i expect sympathy. i know i'm fortunate to be out here seeing the world but sharing room after room with a bunch of sweaty stinky farting snoring strangers can get to anyone after awhile. its not just the people either. bunk beds....i cant stand bunk beds!!!! do i pick the top or the bottom?? i used to prefer the top until i started thinking about what would happen if i rolled off and fell six feet head first onto the cement floor. i could be killed!!! i began wondering if there was some statistic that hostels around the world kept hushed up about how many backpackers a year are killed from plunging off these death traps. sort of like the number of tourists killed every year in the tropics by falling coconuts. once i got this into my head i couldnt sleep, i could slide all the way to one side against the wall but it made no difference. you just dont know what you will do once you fall asleep, right??? even after one particularly logical german roomate asked me if i had ever in fact fell off a bottom bunk....or any bed for that matter...no...it made little difference. theres a first time for everything you know. so i started requesting bottom bunks, and that worked for a while until one night in uruguay when i slept under a particulary large brazilian man with a tendency to thrash around in his sleep. as the ancient rickety old bunk bed, probably made of the cheapest wood money can buy, groaned and creaked above me, it occured to me that if this bed were to collapse on my head it wouldnt be much better then falling off it. in fact in this particular case it would be quite a bit worse. and again, i couldnt sleep.
and another thing. they often give you the choice of a bathroom in your room or a shared bathroom outside. on one hand its nice to have a bathroom close by that you can just roll out of bed and stagger into without having to find your clothes and make your way through the hostel, but do you really want to hear and smell the bodily functions of everyone inhabiting your room??? the situation is already much to intimate for a bunch of strangers in my opinion. and of course there are the inevitable inconsiderate roomates who stumble in at 5am turn on the lights and wake everyone up regailing us with tales of their adventures and wondering how on earth we could all be sleeping when they had such an AMAZING night. ok wait.....i've been that guy. hmmmmm...
anyways, the other night i was awakened at 4am by three brazilian girls going in and out of the bathroom trying on outfits to wear at the clubs that night.... actually once i had gotten over my initial annoyance at being woken up, that was quite nice. and then there was the group of swedish girls who had a tendency of walking around in there underwear and occasionally hitting each other with pillows.....
i guess after further contemplation, when it comes to dorm rooms, you just have to take the good with the bad.
so, where was i?? ushuaia patagonia!!! my birthday at the end of the earth!!! ok so the twins took the car to pick up their dad who was flying in to travel with us for a week. i met some guys and had a couple cool nights waiting for them to get back. one particularly embarassing morning i apparently sleepwalked into a couples private room while they were at breakfast. imagine the horror when they returned to their room to find a big hairy patagonian sasquatch all curled up nice and cosy in their big double bed. they were actually quite nice about it. i suppose i gave them an interesting story to tell when they got home.
in ushuaia there was a trip for tourists to see penguins. basically you pay a hundred dollars to get in a big boat with a billion other tourists and pull up to the edge of the colony and take pictures without actually walking around among them. sounds kinda crappy right?? so somewhere we had read about a colony that apparently was the second biggest in south america. it was way off in the middle of nowhere, off the highway, hours down a dirt road at the point where the straight of magellan meets the atlantic. we thought that sounded much more appealing. so we went. after hours driving through desolate desert landscape we finally got there and found that we were the only tourists there. the penguins were everywhere!!!! and so damn cute!!!! they had no fear of us, once i started taking pictures, they all just waddled up to me and checked me out twisting there heads back and forth trying to figure out what my deal was. then they got bored and waddled off to do other things they found infinitely more interesting like standing around in big groups and chattering noisily. as if this all wasnt amazing enough, the babies had all just recently hatched and there were burrows everywhere with the cutest fuzzy grey babies you've ever seen. my experience with patagonia was that every time i thought it couldnt get more amazing, it would. the day we spent alone with the penguins is a perfect example. after that we walked to the lighthouse which sits on the point where the straight of magellan hits the atlantic. the lighthouse is perched on the edge of jagged cliffs high above the raging sea. as we stood there with the wind whipping through our hair staring off at the endless sea, we truly felt that we were at the end of the earth.
next we headed to perito moreno glacier, one of the last advancing glaciers left. its an amazing huge wall of ice rising dramatically out of a beautiful glacial lake, its constantly cracking and popping as it expands outward. every 15 minutes or so there would be a loud bang like a gunshot and a huge chunk would come crashing down into the lake followed by an enormous eruption of water into the sky. sarah and i hopped the fence of the tourist area, headed past the "danger no entry" sign and followed an old trail down to the edge of the water among the icebergs, it was beautiful!
after they took their father back to the airport we picked up a forth member to our group, charlie, a friend i met in ushuaia. then we headed out for the last week of our patagonia journey, into chile to follow route 7 otherwise known as the careterra austral an isolated dirt road that snakes through the andes past countless lakes and valleys filled with flowers surrounded by snow capped peaks, past endless streams and rivers and waterfalls. it was an incredible week to end one of the most amazing months of my life. the first day didnt start out so smoothly however. we drove out into the desert headed for the border of chile down an empty gravel road known as route 40. we would maybe pass another car every half hour or so and, feeling festive, i decided to break out a bottle of glenlevit scotch the twins had got me for my birthday. so we passed it around and had a great day driving through the endless nothing, singing along to the portable ipod stereo i brought, with the warm desert wind in our faces. we stopped and got out of our car to watch the sunset, and it wasnt until after dark that i noticed the gas was getting a bit low. there was supposed to be a town somewhere up ahead but since road signs were few and far between, and we hadnt really been paying attention to how far we had come, we really had no idea how far we had to go. as the night wore on and the needle got further and further into the red i became convinced the somehow we had gotten off the highway and were lost. that is until sarah in all her wisdom pointed out that if we were on a road at all, which we were, that it had to be the right road since it was the only road there was out there. somewhere around midnite, running completely on fumes, we saw lights and minutes later pulled triumphantly into town, and by town i mean five houses and a gas pump, only to learn that they were out of gas and that "maybe" there would be gas the next day. we were to tired worry about it at that point and we went to a shack built from random boards and corragated sheeting with a sign proclaiming it to be the "ruta 40 hostal". sure enough it was packed with bunk beds, it looked as if without the beds in there it would probably have just collapsed. the whole scene was so comical as we lay shivering in our beds with the cold desert wind ripping through the holes in the walls that i fell asleep giggling like a crazy person.
gas did indeed come the next day at about 5pm and were very relieved and we learned our lesson that on a road so isolated, you fill your tank at every town you come to no matter how much you have left.
so like i said, the careterra austral was amazing. we stayed in lots of beautiful little villages, my favorite was punta tranquillo....just the name says it all right?!?! it was at the edge of a big lake and the whole valley was abloom with these yellow flowers, and everytime the wind blew the air was full of their perfume. we had our own cabin with a wood burning stove and spent the night playing cards and eating good food and drinking good wine and listening to good music.....the good stuff.
thats all for now. i'm still over a month behind in my emails, but the next one should be quicker since i mostly just stayed in the cities.
love you,
write me!!
Rakhal
 
 

11:06 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

patagonia 1

hello everyone!! happy christmas and new years and all that good stuff!! right now i´m in buenos aires argentina and a lot has happened since i last wrote.
after colombia we flew to santiago chile.
some things about santiago....there are benches everywhere. and as the lazy ass that i am, i love it! every city in the world can learn from santiago when it comes to providing their citizens with places to sit. no matter where you are, if you feel the need to rest, just fall backward and odds are you'll land on a bench. brilliant.
another thing about santiago...and the whole chile for that matter, is that everywhere you go people are making out in public. and i dont mean, ya know, holding hands and kissing. serious tongue wrestling!! you'll be in a busy bus station sitting on a bench between an old lady with her shopping bags and a couple with their children, and on the bench right in front of you are this couple going at it, sucking face like its oxygen, while the old man sitting next to them just leans on his cane and ignores them. the grass in the parks are a mass of writhing bodies like a damn roman orgy. crazy....but you know what they say...when in rome...
what else...their wine is amazing!!! their favorite snack seems to be the completo, which is a hot dog smothered in mayonaise, mashed avocado, and tomatoes....icky. their country is unbelievably beautiful...but i'll get to that later. and last but not least, the absolute best thing about santiago, antonia!!! for those who dont know her she was an exchange student at davis years ago and she showed us a great time in her home town. during the weekend she brought us to her families beach house. on the way there i asked her if you could see the water from the house, she just kind of smiled and said yes. when we got there it was perched on this cliff right over the ocean and you could see the coastline stretching out as far as the eye could see, with no other houses in sight. the walls of the house were all glass and you could actually lean against the glass and it was like you were floating over the water, and as if it wasnt beautiful enough there was a dolphin jumping around and playing in the bay in front of their house. "oh yeah, he's always there" she says matter of factly. we spent the day outside drinking white wine and eating all kinds of local seafood, some of which i've never even heard of, if you ever get the chance, try this shellfish called "loco"....yummy.
some of you probably saw pictures of the house on my website.
so after santiago we headed south and stayed in some cool towns and then headed to bariloche in argentina which is this beautiful town on the edge of a huge lake surrounded by snow capped mountains. it was in bariloche that we made the best decision of the trip, we decided to rent a car for a month to explore patagonia. it was expensive but i cant even imagine how much less we would have got out of our trip if we hadnt had that car.
patagonia. what can i say?? in the month i spent there i saw some of the most beautiful scenery of my life. as you head south the land just opens up, its beyond huge, the road just stretches out in both directions until the curvature of the earth makes it disappear into infinity. some times you'll go for hours without passing another car. sometimes we would just stop the car, get out, and just stand there in the great nothing. the land is so flat and desolate, the sky is so huge, the clouds are all stretched out and feel as if they are right on top of you. all you can hear is the wind. its so overwhelmingly beautiful you feel like you should be whispering.
occasionally we would pass by a watering hole where a flock of pink flamingoes would be feeding. the animals you see seem as alien as the landscape. guanacos are like a cross between a camel and a llama, and they are everywhere. they look at you disdainfully, flashing you their haughtiest looks as if they have no time for a group of silly humans, then they trot away. nyandus are also common, they are basically ostriches, and they look quite silly running around in panicked groups in front of your car. and of course the completely ridiculous looking armadillo. i had never seen one in the wild before and one day while driving, one crossed in front of me. i pulled the car over, grabbed my camera, and took off after him. apparently armadillos arent the fastest of runners, they look quite awkard actually, bustling about. after it realized it couldnt outrun me it just froze and we just kind of stayed there and looked at each other for a while. it actually let me pet it....it was sooooo cool!!!!
so after days of driving through the great nothing we began to see in the distance, blurry like a mirage, jagged snow capped peaks appear out of nowhere like the jagged teeth at the end of the earth, then as we got closer, all of a sudden the ground dropped away in front of us and we found ourself looking down on a huge glacial lake, impossibly blue, the kind of blue you only see in science fiction movies, like radioactive turquoise. surrounding the lake are a ring of dramatic jagged snow capped mountains, and coming from the lake and snaking through the desolate desert valley floor was a river of the same impossibly turquoise blue water. WOW, doesnt even begin to describe it.
el calafate and el chalten are the names of the towns in this area and it was here that we spent thanksgiving. the day that i hiked in el chalten was the most beautiful hike of my life.
we kept headed south crossing into chile and back again. we did so many border crossings it filled my passport and i had to go to the embassy to get more pages stuck in....they just tape them in, it looks pretty ghetto.
anyways, after many beautiful places, usually having to do with lakes and oceans and jagged snowcapped peaks and dramatic clouds and forests of wild twisting angry looking trees, we took the ferry across the straight of magellen to tierra del fuego, the land of fire, and pretty much the end of the earth. we drove to ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, which is where i spent my 37th birthday. 37.....wow....i cant believe i'm 37. its all going way to quick.
anyways, while i waited in ushuaia, the twins drove to pick up their father who flew in and spent a week travelling with us. ushuaia is where people go to catch the boats to antarctica and i briefly toyed with the idea of going but the $5000 for 10 days was a bit steep, even though its half of what people payed to book their trips from back home. it all came down to the fact that there are a lot of places i'd rather go for the money.
ok so thats like half of patagonia, and the photos i've been uploading are done and i'm hungry. so thats all for now, i'll write the rest soon, and upload the rest of my photos.
love you all,
Rakhal

9:52 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

colombia 2

ok, so after exactly three weeks we flew out of colombia. what a great country!!!! from one end to the other the scenery was amazing, the people friendly, the women unbelievably gorgeous, the food excellent....especially the jugos (fruit shakes), i cant even believe i cant just go out and get a guanabana con leche any more....AAAAAAHHHHHH!!! there are so many fruits to choose from, and i have tried them all. every place will have at least 20 different kinds and many of them you can only find there in colombia.
anyways, after my last email we were headed to the carribean where we lounged in a town called taganga with a place right on the beach and saw some amazing sunsets. you can see pictures of those on my website,
kodakgallery.com/rakhal
inexplicably, one night as we were sleeping some menswear fetishist shimmied up a drainpipe and climbed onto our balcony entered the open window and stole my shorts. i´m still at a loss for a possible reason why this thief walked by three ipods, three cameras, and an array of womens undergarments just to run off with my shorts. i did have my wallet in them, but it had only about $50 in it, thankfully no credit cards or passport!!! well i guess it gives me something to do in santiago...shorts shopping!!
after taganga we went to cartegena. cartegena was sooooo cool!!! a total walled pirate city!! all narrow coblestone streets and restored old buildings and houses with big old wooden doors. it was very cool! i got sick here a few days....fever, stomach cramps, peeing out of my ass...you know, the usual. aaahhh the romance of travelling. because i was still a bit sick, i flew from there to medellin while the twins took the bus. when i got there i had a raging party night in medellin with a big group of travellers from my hostel. we ended up at some big niteclub with pounding techno, lasers and fog. at some point i ended up locked in a bathroom stall with some colombian police snorting coke off of keys. they were like "if you want the best stuff, you get it from the police" aaahhh the crazy shit i get myself into. the head cop ended up giving me his cell number in case i got into trouble with any other medellin cops. for the most part though i´ve stayed away from that crappy, yet extremely common drug. Early the next morning the twins arrived and somehow dragged me out of bed and into a bus to a town called salenta, its in the coffee growing region. the area is incredibly beautiful! we went on a long hike following this river that snakes through a valley surrounded by steep unbelievabley green mountains that go up and up untill they finally disappear into the clouds that cling to the peaks. we followed the trail until the valley became narrower and narrower and finally disappeared into a gorge where we were plunged into thick jungle. as we made our way through the jungle the path kept crossing the river over crazy suspension bridges where you were forced to cross one person at a time to keep them from breaking. as you walked across you couldnt help but notice all the  boards that had already been broken. it definitely made you step lightly, especially with the wild river rushing below you. then the path climbed up and up into the cloud forest where everything looks completely surreal shrouded in mist. after a while you become used to the quiet eerie world of the cloud forest where all you can see is what is immediately around you, everything else fading into white, so when you finally decend below the clouds all of a sudden the sun hits you and you find that you are at the top of this huge sweeping valley and everything is so green and huge and overwhelming that it practically knocks you on your ass!!!
when we got back to the hostel we met up with a bunch of people and went out for fresh river trout and many cervezas then we went to this place where people play tejo which is this crazy colombian sport that basically involves hucking big chunks of metal at packets of gunpowder until they explode with a loud BOOM, whereupon everyone gives a big yell and continues pounding beer. its seriously fun!! and definitely one sport that would never be licensed in the states, could you imagine trying to explain it to an insurance agent? "um yeah so i´m going to have drunk people throwing big hunks of metal at explosives"....it would never happen.
by the way i hit it twice....BOOM!!! BOOM!!!....sweet.
the next day we were eating dinner when all of a sudden the owner of the restaurant ran in and started closing and boarding up the doors, when we looked up the streets were full of people running away from the main square in panic screaming and yelling. a few people made it in the restaurant and huddled together crying and wailing in terror as they looked towards the doorway. needless to say, we were seriously freaked out!!!! we just stood at the back of the restaurant with everybody else and stared expectantly at the closed doors waiting for something to happen. its crazy how helpless you feel. It turned out that it was a guerilla scare, people are still pretty scared of guerilla attacks here. after a while they opened the doors again and we hurried back to our guest house through empty streets that were just minutes before completely full.
it kind of made us realize, even though we felt safe and welcome the entire time in that country, its still colombia. and colombia is still a little wild.
hope you are all well,
Rakhal

11:08 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

colombia

hello everyone!!
greetings from cartegena columbia!
so far everythings gone fairly smoothly so as a consequence i dont have any particularly crazy stories to share, but i'll try to quickly get you up to date with my travels.
i flew into bogota and made my way to the guest house where i met the twins, my friends sarah and leah for those who dont know them. they had just returned from a 12 day boat excursion deep in the amazon and were covered head to toe in bug bites and popping malaria pills like candy. the amazon definitely does not appeal to me, way to many crazy diseases to catch. they said they had a great time though, except for one member of their group from minnesota who developed some sort of strange eye fungus that deteriorated quickly into an infection that got so bad that by the time they got him to a place where he could be flown to civilization and on to a specialist in the states, the loss of his eye was likely.
scary shit in the amazon.
so we spent a few days checking out the city and going out at night. sarah recommend the botero museum, apparently the most famous colombian painter, anyways as soon as i got in there i recognized his stuff. he's the guy that paints people who basically look like they got an airhose shoved up their ass and then inflated to twice their normal size. he does the same shit with fruit too. sarah thinks he's brilliant and apparently a lot of other people agree, but i just dont get the appeal. all the people have exactly the same expressions, with their beady little eyes and their lips all pursed up like....well, like they have airhoses shoved up their asses. anyways, after walking through hall after hall of his stuff i just felt bloated and irritable. i did see a sculpture of his that i really liked. it was of a little bird blown up all huge and fat that you just know no matter how hard it flapped its little wings it was never getting off the ground. it was cute as hell and i had to resist the urge to slip it in my backpack and take it home with me.
so after a couple of crazy nights, one in which me and sarah found ourselves way out of town at some after party at the house of a bunch of local college kids we met at a club, we took a bus north towards the carribean. the scenery here is amazing!!! its so green!! climbing mountains going through forests down into river gorges with waterfalls all around and mist hugging the tops of the hills that surround you, and the little towns where every house and building and machine is painted in a huge variety of super bright colors that clash against each other in such away that they seem so alive!!! and then all the traffic with every kind of outdated vehicle you can imagine broken up every now and then by the occasional cart and donkey. i could sit for hours just looking out the window of the bus as colombia goes by and never get bored of it. our first stop was villa de leyva a beautiful old colonial town with a big cathedral and cobblestones streets. unfortunately my big memory from here was waking up in the middle of the night and running to the bathroom where i spent the evening dizzy, nauseous, thinking i was dying and promising god, myself, and anyone else that would listen that i would NEVER eat a hot dog from a street vender again.
ok, this is running a bit long. so after that town we did a marathon 20 hour trip to the carribean coast at first we had a nice bus but of course we ended up on a crappy old bus for the overnite where nothing worked except for the air conditioning wich practically blew snow and the soundsystem for the one crappy tv was so loud that drowning it out with an ipod was out of the question. so we spent the night shivering, watching one badly dubbed arnold schwartzenegger film after another at earsplitting volume. by the end of T2 i was still doing ok but after T3 and EL PREDATOR i think i was starting to lose it, giggling like an insane person every time arnies face came on the screen.
so other stuff has happened but its time to go out so i'll write more in a week or two.
love you all,
Rakhal
p.s. i posted new pictures on my photo website.

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LINK TO 3 YEARS OF MY TRAVEL PHOTOS.

http://www.kodakgallery.com/rakhal

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travel pictures!!! tons and tons of them!!!!

i just put a bunch of my pictures on a web site. http://www.kodakgallery.com/rakhal i think i have 13 albums up and more to come. if only i had gone digital sooner!!!!

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3rd costa rica email
Category: Writing and Poetry

hey all,
so santa elena is an amazing beach. i met a couple of guys there from florida and we shared a room with ac.......aaaaaaaahhhhhhh air conditioning.
new years was great, the beach bar flew in some big house dj from sf of all places, and over a thousand people  drank, danced, set of fireworks, and burned bonfires till well into the morning.
a couple days later i decided to join my new friends in their car to drive to la fortuna, i had already been there but i wanted to go on this rafting trip i had been hearing so much of. apparently rafting the pacuare river is one of the most beautiful trips on earth, and every person i talked to who had rafted it said it was one of the best things they had done in there lives.
so we go, after three hours driving deep into the cloud forest, our van cant go any further. so we walk the last kilometer down into this gorge. its constantley drizzling rain and the clouds are hugging to the tops of the hills. everything is bright green, but not just green, a hundred different shades of green. birds are everywhere, toucans, and parrots and all kinds of other tropical birds. when we reach the rafts we get a couple minutes of training then we are off. this trip goes for 21 miles through 38 rapids, class 3 and 4. honestly, any words i say cant possibly describe how beautiful this trip was. deep in the cloud forest, rafting down a narrow gorge with the forest coming right down to the edge of the water. every minute we were passing another waterfall, as all the hundreds of streams emptied out into the river. some small trickles, but most roaring out of the forest, sometimes landing twenty feet into the river. the gorge would go from 30 feet across to all of a sudden open up into a huge valley, then we would be sucked back into a passage and rapids. oh shit the rapids! crazy fun but i have to admit i was scared shitless. if you get injured here there is nowhere to go. we came up to a class 4 and it seemed like we were going over a cliff, we are bouncing all around and i can barely hear the guide say get down, then we flip. all i remember is paddles and people falling over me, i get immediately sucked down, i try to reach the surface but the current is to strong. as i am pulled down the river i am bashed against rock after rock, when i finally reach the surface i try to take a breath and inhale a lungfull of water. i hit more rocks and look around me, the other boats are still far away and as hard as i try i cant get any air in, my lungs are to full of water. finally as the current gets calmer i am able to reach the boat where i am pulled inside to lie puking water and gasping on the floor....oh precious air!!.
besides that though it was fucking amazing!!!
before i go i have to say one thing about the style here. after travelling asia for so many years, i have to say the women there dress relatively conservative. very suttle in their sexuality. here its like im in the middle of a latin hip hop video. cleavage and tight pants are the norm, the more outragious the better. there is a commercial that plays over and over on costa rican tv that has a group of girls that turn around one at a time to expose their horribley saggy pants, and they sigh and moan in disapproval. then a girl comes from out of nowhere with some particular brand of jeans, they all change, then they come out to discover that their butts are now....BAH BAAM!!!! big and round and tight, whereupon they all jump around in joy and high five each other......now, i realize this commercial was probably aimed towards women, but i have to say, its one of my top favorite of all time. definitely superbowl worthy.
hope you all are doing well.
love,
Rakhal

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first costa rica email
Category: Travel and Places

so.... here i am again in some sweaty little internet cafe banging away on the keyboard with my two index fingers like a caveman, fully aware that every dirty backpacker in the room can hear what a crappy typer i am. ahhhhhh costa rica, where to begin..... ya know, every time before i travel i think about how i will avoid getting food poisoning, this time will be different, i'll only eat at places packed with locals, only fresh food....blah blah blah i inevitably get sick. never in my wildest hypochondriac fantasies did i think i'd get it before i even left the country. the miami airport, just writing it makes me nauseous. i hate you miami airport!!!! ok, to be fair i didnt get it near as bad as sarah (my travelling compadre for 3 weeks for those who dont know her) who got pretty violently i'll and was pretty much knocked out for a few days. i just felt slightly queasy, constantly.
so anyways, to make a long story short, if you ever find yourself in the miami airport, avoid the jose cuervo mexican restaurant at all costs. unless you enjoy peeing out of your ass.
ok....so first we headed for the carribean side through a confusing mix of walkling, taxis, busses, and a boat. tortuguero has no roads in, so the only method of transport is by boat. it is surrounded by thick rainforest with hundreds of canals and waterways running through it. the forest goes right up to the beach. the third day there we went out on a canoe through narrow little waterways into the forest, its hard to put into words how amazing it was being in a small wooden canoe silently drifting through the forest with wildlife all around us. there were monkeys in the trees, orange spider monkeys hanging by their tails stuffing figs in their mouths, howler monkeys screaming so loud you cant believe that noise came from a little monkey, white faced monkeys jumping from tree to tree across the river. there were crocodiles and caimans with there sly little grins daring you to take a swim. we saw a sloth with a baby in tow slowly making its way up a tree. we saw tons of birds of every color. we even saw a tapir, which is a pig-like animal the size of a small adult cow with a big ole elephant looking snout. it was lumbering through the forest ungracefully crashing through everything in its way, then it jumped into the river where it promptly sank leaving only a trail of bubbles across the water as it walked along the bottom then emerging at the other side where it continued on into the forest. while all this life is going on around you, you are almost suffocated by trees and plants of every shade of green and bright flowers of every color, and in the air electric blue irridescent butterflies the size of birds are flying by, and the air itself has that clean smell like it just rained except magnified like 100 times. amazing.
so now we are in puerto viejo de talamanca a sweet little beachside town which appears to be party central for every brand of grubby backpacker in the world. not that thats a bad thing, being at the moment a grubby backpacker mtself.
 ok, gotta go. i miss my hammock.
love,
R

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2nd costa rica email
Category: Travel and Places

Well its the day before new years and i´m on my own in a beautiful little beach town called mal pais, amazing sunsets here!
anyways, last time i wrote i was in puerto viejo.
neither of us liked the vibe there so we headed out to a town called la fortuna at the base of a giant volcano. this was easily one of my favorite towns in costa rica. for whatever reason its just an amazing feeling when no matter where you are you look up and the entire sky is dominated by this massive imposing volcano shaped like a perfect cone with steam drifting around the top. and the food in this town was delicious!!!!! have i mentioned the food yet?? this may be the first trip that i lose no weight. before i came here people told me the food would be boring....whatever!!!! the restaurants are a bit dissappointing so i go pretty much exclusively to these little eateries called sodas. these are where most locals go. the plates are huge and depending on where you are come with rice and beans, salad, mashed potatoes, tuna noodle salad and fried plantains. and for the main course you can get fresh fish cooked all sorts of ways, the other day i had it in coconut milk curry with ginger.....mmmmmmm. and you can get a steak marinated and serve with tons of grilled onions on top, or chunks of beef stewed for hours in homemade gravy until the meat just melts in your mouth, and dont even get me started about the chicken!
wow i have to stop, i´m salivating on the keyboard.
at la fortuna we took a tour to see the lava coming out of the volcano then went off to some hotsprings. the hotsprings werent what you might expect, they were super kitchy and fancy with roman pillars and swim up bars and big fake pyrimids and all these pools of different themes and temperatures. many of the travelers were disappointed because they were expecting something more authentic, i guess they were expecting a bunch of dirty little steaming pools smelling of rotten eggs. whatever, i say!! when in rome, do as the romans do! i spent the evening lounging in my personal favorite, the 109 degree pool with the jungle theme including jacuzzi jets and steaming hot waterfalls flowing out of the ¨jungle¨ on to my weary shoulders.....aaaaahhhhh.
after la fortuna we headed to monteverde to do the famous canopy tour, where you fly through the canopy on zip lines. it was soooooo fun!!!!! seriously, you hook youself on the line in the forest and start sliding and you are whizzing by all these trees keeping your legs tucked in so you dont hit any of them, then all of a sudden you fly out of the forest and everything opens up and you are a hundred feet above the forest with miles of green all around you. its totally exhilerating!!!
i did kinda hurt my back on the tarzan swing though....i´m not a spring chicken any more.
after this we headed to montezuma this beautiful little town on the pacific where we spent 4 days alternating between lazing in our hammocks and swimming in the sea. then it was time to head back to san jose to drop cera at the airport, i had heard it was much faster to take a speedboat to the mainland then catch a bus from there so we bought tickets. i should have known something was wrong when they put all our belongings in big plastic bags. i asked the boat guy if we really needed these bags, he looked out to sea, flinched a little and said ¨yes it will be wet¨. a minute into it we were already soaked and as we got further and further from shore the swells increased untill they were giant, like going up and down huge mountains. the boat was tiny, basically a dinghy with a moter, and every second when a wave hit we were slapped in the face with gallons of salt water, burning our eyes and filling our mouths. as more time passed the wind picked up and we were shivering from the cold and wet. as the waves grew even bigger the boat became more unstable and felt like it would capsize at any moment. all we could do is squint our eyes against the wind and water and gaze longingly at the shore we were headed towards which no matter how much time passed didnt appear to get any closer. i have to admit i spent most of the ride trying hard not to panic, if this little boat turned over, the ocean was so rough i dont know how long we would last in the water. we were miles from any land, and of course the boat had no radio. for three hours of a supposed one hour trip we were beat to shreds by the ocean and finally stumbled onto shore where we collapsed with relief and exhaustion and vowed to make a beeline to the nearest drinking establishment.
hope all is well with you all.
i love getting emails.
love,
R

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