Hitchhiking Planet

Rasthof Bergstraße→Berlin

2012-05-16T12:45:33+00:00

In Bensheim ist der Rasthof an der A5 in wenigen Minuten vom Bahnhof zu erreichen. Und dort ist schon der Berliner Ring!

Am Rasthof selbst stand ich dann aber eine ganze Weile und die Sonne tat wirklich, was sie konnte; das war für den Augenblick angenehm, wurde später jedoch zu heftigem Sonnenbrand.

Mitgenommen wurde ich schließlich von einem niederländischen Lieferwagenfahrer, der gerade erst tags zuvor nach Süditalien gefahren war und sich nun wieder auf dem Weg zurück nach Utrecht befand. Wir unterhielten uns über seine ADHS-Schulzeit, die Ritalin-Medikation und wieihm auch später Speed ihm beim Konzentrieren half. Heute vertraut er auf die gelegentliche dicke Tüte. Er bestätigte, daß seine Landsleute nicht so gern Tramper mitnehmen würden und schob das auf die hohe Kriminalitätsrate.

Dann ging er daran, verschiedene Bevölkerungsgruppen nach ihrem (Gewalt-)Kriminalitätslevel einzuordnen, da waren wir aber glücklicherweise schon am Rasthof Wetterau, von wo mich ein Bauleiter mitnahm, der per Freisprechanlage fast den ganzen Weg bis nach Kirchheim verschiedene Baustellen koordinierte, Preise verhandelte, technische Empfehlungen gab und mir zwischendurch das eine oder andere über Autokräne, Rüttler und Bohrungen erklärte. Zum Schluß kamen wir kurz auf mein Buch zu sprechen, und seine erste Assoziation zum Thema Rausch war das Tanzen. Er meinte, daß seine Arbeitsbelastung zwar immer größer werde und es im Grunde kaum noch möglich wäre, all die hereinprasselnden Informationen und Mitteilungen zu verarbeiten, daß er aber dennoch alles ohne Aufputschmittel, sogar ohne Kaffee bewältigt.

In Kirchheim dauerte es wieder ein bißchen. Wie meistens dort hielten lauter Leute an, die nicht weit oder in die falschen Richtungen fuhren, so daß ich in einen kleinen LKW einstieg, der nur nach Sömmerda mußte, in dem ich aber bis Eichelborn mitfahren konnte. Der etwa 50jährige Fahrer wohnt im Ostharz, wo ich ja herstamme, und wir sprachen über die ganze Gegend; ich erzählte ihm, warum ich irgendwann dort wegmußte. Er schien das besser zu verstehen, als ich angenommen hatte. Außerdem nannte er mir einige Orte in der Region, an denen “Drogenpartys” stattfinden würden.

Als ich in Eichelborn ankam, war es irgendwie schon ganz schön spät – ein bißchen Stau, ein bißchen Gewarte und schwupps war der Tag rum. Jetzt gab es aber noch mal ordentlich Beschleunigung durch einen polnischen Lieferwagenfahrer, der jede Woche einmal von Wiesbaden nach Warszawa und wieder zurück fährt, und entsprechend zügig unterwegs war. Während der Fahrt lief der ziemlich brutale Film “Setup” mit Bruce Willis und 50 Cent, der in einigem Kontrast zum ausgesprochen freundlichen und aufgeräumten Fahrer stand.

Ich stieg am Rasthof Fläming aus, um dort jemanden zu finden, der nach Berlin reinfuhr. Da die ersten paar Angesprochenen recht barsch reagierten und es mittlerweile schon auf Mitternacht zuging, fand ich schließlich Schönefeld doch ganz okay als Ziel, und wurde auch nochmals beschleunigt. Der Fahrer kam gerade aus Norditalien und war in einer Art Rennauto unterwegs, so daß wir gefühlt nach ein paar Minuten in Schönefeld ankamen.

Dort fährt aber schon vor Mitternacht gerade keine S-Bahn mehr; es gibt Ersatz- und Pendelverkehr mit Bussen und nur vage Auskünfte, so daß ich schlußendlich erst um 2 daheim war.

Hitchhiking the USA, and a Few Thoughts on Trust

2012-05-01T19:21:00+00:00

The deranged nutcase, the psychopath, and the serial killer. In the USA the idea of who you are changes quickly once you've accidentally mentioned that hitchhiking is one of the things you like to do. It would be amusing seeing the conflict on people...

Summer plans

2012-05-01T13:15:57+00:00

We’ll spend this summer on Gotland, which is a small Island in the middle of the baltic sea. It’s where we both grew up and where our families live. Our plan is to learn how to grow our own food, and to enjoy the summer together with friends and family. If you happen to pass by Gotland, let us know!

To this date we’ve planted:

Haverrot
Chili
Paprika
Spinach
Potatoes
Leeks
Artichokes
Strawberrys

… and more!

Let us know if you have any tips or ideas for how to do gardening.
We’ll post occasional updates here, while we’ll post much more often over at our Swedish blog Mangolandet.se.

A House For Everyone

2012-04-24T08:14:53+00:00

For two months, from mid-March to mid-May, Anton Krotov and his friends from the Russian 'Academy of Freedom Travels' (AVP) are renting a house on the European side of İstanbul, in the district of Yedikule ('Seven Towers', at the Southern end of the İstanbul city walls). The house is open to all and every traveller who wishes to explore the city or country and invest her- or himself in the community for the time of their stay.
His house is full of all sorts of different adventurous, interesting characters and their stories. There is those who for the first time in their life went out of their province of Russia to come to Istanbul, and those who have been several times around the world. There is those who hitchhiked here from a wedding in Afghanistan, and those who just flew in from neighbouring Ukraine.

A French traveller who stranded at the house after meeting one of the girls on the street described his find with gleaming eyes as a ''socièté sécrète de voyageurs'':
Every day grechka (buckwheat) is cooked for everyone (including those without money to contribute), black, cumin-spiked Borodinskiy bread is cut on the side, tea is brewed and different kinds of pechenie (cookies) offered for dessert. Universal delight arises when someone brings fruit, mayonaise, or a whole kilo of sugar. These are seen as luxury goods in the given situation.
In the evening the mountain of shoes piling up at the entrance can be impressive, and finding a place for 25 or 30 sleepers and their sleeping bags is a nightly puzzle to be solved.

In her book about Mongolia with 50 Roubles (1,50 Euro) in her pocket when crossing the border, his ex-girlfriend depicts Anton as a ''grown-up man hiding his face behind a wild beard, but whose eyes glow child-like''. Indeed, his shaggy, dark beard, which he first started growing as a teenager and has never completely shaven off for twenty years, just now begins to have streaks of grey in it. His blue eyes are of magnetic intensity.

Much like in his flat in Moscow (which I visited first seven years ago and which most of the time is also open to everyone), all over the walls there are pictures compiled of Anton's travels: Apart from the typical naked kids in rainforests, the tundra at sunset, and the group shots of friends with folded arms outside of dessert castles, there is also more insolent things such as statues of tea-pots from Morocco, ladies in burqas looking at lace underwear from Kabul, or the AVP flag flying from a burnt-out tank somewhere in the ex-Soviet Union. He is an indefatigable adventurist, though, and is currently in Damscus, the capital of war-torn Syria.

The books he authors and sells sport titles like ''Hitchhike to Sudan'', ''Hitchhike across India'' or ''From -50 to +50 -'' (including trips both from Siberia and from Africa). One book is titled ''Hitch-hiking around Socialism'' (from a friend who travelled around Cuba). Anton likes that sort of thing. From the amount of effort he puts into communal life I guess you can attest to the fact that he stayed a bit of a communist at heart.

To somehow organize as many people as pass in such a small space, Anton printed out clear rules and hung them up the wall: ''Take responsibility! If there is something wrong in the house - it is your fault! Buy more food, clean up the mess, take out the rubbish!

The same is valid if there is anything wrong in the city, the country, or the world! ''
You may not find this kind of approach anarchistic enough, but at least the formula works, and I admire the project for that. There is no trouble makers, no parasites, hardly ever even any tensions between the transitory inhabitants of one of his houses. People share what they have, be it food or stories, no one goes hungry, people respect each other, and everyone has a great time. And it has been going on for 16 years!

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-04-23

2012-04-22T23:19:00+00:00

Next #DevOps #Malaysia #meetup coming on Thursday April 19, for details and signup http://t.co/efF83XEO #puppet #sysadmin # excited to see @mine_akman do her first #socialmedia presentation at #wckl #OpenCoffeeClub! Will it blend? # Top Tweeters for #startups are @davemcclure @venturehacks @fredwilson full results http://t.co/pTW0GrpG (via @HooSaid) # Top Tweeters for #puppet are @puppetmasterd @puppetlabs @kartar [...]

Where did all that time go?

2012-04-21T13:01:06+00:00

In the last four months I divided almost all my time between the local organizational work within the GartenCoop and spreading the word about CSA and food sovereignty.

In the GartenCoop I helped moving our accountancy-system towards GNUCash, co-organized the general assembly of the GartenCoop on the 18th of March, produced the monthly radio show GartenCoop on Air, started the construction of a chicken tractor, planted grapes at our farm, organised a concert on the International Day of Peasant’s Struggle and gave workshops about the use of our internal website.

For spreading the word I was part of a group travelling in Hungary, Czech Republic and Austria and giving public talks about CSA. I was taking part in the Reclaim The Fields Assembly in Turin – holding a workshop about CSA. Participating in the Steering Comittee Meeting orgnizied within the second axis of the Nyeleni Movement for Food Sovereignty, preparing a european conference about “CSA and other distribution system for Food Sovereignity” in October 2012. Was invited by a Food-Coop Conference in Warsaw and gave a talk in Berlin to reinforce the CSA idea there.

This was a very intensive time for me and I feel like I need a little change in my life. Not very radical – just another trip to South America (Brasil, Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay) in the end of the year. Getting my mind free and do sth. different from my present occupations. In Brasil I will pick up my journalistic work doing an internship with the alternative news agency PULSAR. Until I will try to travel less and really enjoy the summer in the Rhine-valley.

Autobahnauffahrt Schriesheim -> Freiburg

2012-04-20T13:49:59+00:00

Ich hatte mir ein Nahverkehrsticket bis nach Sandhausen in der Nähe der Raststätte Hardtwald gekauft, hielt es aber nicht länger als bis Schriesheim in der OEG aus, stieg also aus und lief zur dortigen Auffahrt. Dort ging es so schnell, daß ich in Hardtwald eine kurze Pause einlegen konnte, um einen Regenschauer, zwei andere Trampern und eine Polizeistreife abzuwarten, und dennoch schon wieder wegkam, bevor ich mit dem Nahverkehr dort angekommen wäre.

Der Mann, der mich die kurze Strecke nach Bruchsal mitnahm, fand meine Ausführungen zur Signifikanz des Datums (Yom HaShoam und Bicycle Day) nicht so interessant, der, der mich dann bis nach Freiburg-Süd fuhr, hingegen sehr. Er war auf dem Rückweg von einem Motivationsmeeting seines Konzerns, über das wir uns lustig machten. Außerdem berichtete er von seinen weniger schönen Erfahrungen mit Acid vor 20 Jahren (Party mit den falschen Leuten, nachts allein im Wald) und von diversen Umgehungen und Ausnahmen von Drogenverboten (Absinth und Cannabis) in der Schweiz und Spanien.

Um von der Autobahn in die Stadt zu gelangen, mußte ich ebenfalls so gut wie nicht warten, so daß ich auf der ganzen Strecke nicht dazu kam, die neuen Songs zu üben.

Pssht.

2012-04-18T11:48:26+00:00

With Eline on bikes, searching for empty houses to occupy in the North of Amsterdam, across the river IJ. Right next to the industrial area we are roaming, an inviting wooded path takes you bang into what feels like the middle of the Dutch countryside. Preposterously cute streets lined by wonky, multi-coloured brick houses with their stair-stepped gables. The insect-like metal whizz of the bikes rushing past carrying their brightly blond riders. Groups of dazzlingly blond children in their pink dresses or yellow shirts with their ice-cream or balloons.
Steeples guide you to the small marinas of wooden sailing boats that they overlook.

Hard to believe we are technically in a nearby suburb of the capital city of this country.

Keep it a secret, don't tell anyone.

Home through the eyes of a stranger

2012-04-18T11:48:08+00:00

One evening this September, I was watching a shitty DVD while lying on the sofa out in the vast hall of our squatted car repair shop where we arranged what we call our living room out of a large square of moquette and a rather wild assembly of furniture once found on a scrapheap. Next to me, somewhat squeezed, was Andy, who had recently charmed me with his assumption that the capital city of Finland was "Heineken".

It had been a rainy evening, and the sound of water drops plopping in the back of the hall reverberated over to us through the dark. In the past our living group had tried several times to fix the leaks in the roof with asphalt cartridges or tarpaulin, but evidently it had proven too formidable a task for us. This made the atmosphere rather spooky, especially late in the night as it was now.

It was already two o'clock when abruptly our cosy-eerie get-together was interrupted by Eline's voice echoing over from the entrance via the former reception desk: "Hoi Iris, ik heb een verjaardagskadootje voor jou!" It wasn't my birthday, but, hey, whatever, I propped myself up on my elbows and turned my head. Accompanying our friend as she approached was a young, stridently blond woman. "Here, I found a chick for you to speak Russian to," Eline introduced the girl jokingly, and after asking her to sit down, added with a wink, "thought you would like her".

Natasha was her name and she told me she had just run into Eline after having been desperate enough to choose a Centraal Station train platform as a publically available bed. She had been dropped off around an hour earlier in Amsterdam by a driver who had picked her up hitchhiking all the way back in France. After having reached his destination in Western Belgium, he had taken it upon him to do the long, 250 kilometer haul to the Dutch capital city, seemingly entirely out of a mixture of sheer kindness and a good measure of boredom... until he proposed to drive her all the way to Berlin a few days later, if she'd first come back to Belgium with him.
The girl declined, and that was that.

Natasha was a Russian beauty from Nizhny Novgorod with water-blue eyes and near-translucent skin, adorning herself with elaborately ornamented silver and turquoise earrings. The jewelry didn't mean she wasn't a tough girl. For her it was the end of a two months hitchhiking and wild camping trip around Spain and Portugal, and she was on her gradual way home. In Barcelona all her valuable belongings and money had been stolen out of the tent she and a friend had pitched on the beach, and she was left with a 20 Euro bill handed to her by a French travel mate from a week back.
Conditions being as they were she announced, "I am leaving straight away tomorrow morning".
Supine Andy groaned that he wanted to hear what the actors were saying, but me and Eline, after a short translation action on my part, began to remonstrate vociferously : "You can't just come and breeze through like that, you have to at least come on a bike tour around the city tomorrow!"

Natasha's opinion could be swayed. She was to be with us the following day.

Being the house's only Russian speaker, I automatically became the designated tourist guide. It turned out to be raining cats and dogs, and coming from our house in the rather far out yet lovely, canal and river-streaked suburb of Zeeburg, by the time we'd reached the centre already we were soaked to the skin. Natasha was none the less enthusiastic. I asked what she wanted to see first, and the answer was direct and curt: The Red Light District. And not only that, she wanted to see "those girls behind their window panes."

For inexplicable reasons, despite having lived this long in Amsterdam, I had no real idea how to precisely locate the hookers and their walk-in windows and had to touch-feel my way around the Red Light District. We started along Warmoestaaat, one of the oldest streets of Amsterdam, a touristy main artery adjacent to the real seedy areas of town. It is lined with innocuous pubs and the one or other sexshop. On our way we came across what you can really also see elsewhere in the city centre: Naked female mannequins wearing strap-on dicks, vitrines stuffed with granny fetish porn, and drunken Germans hanging drunkenly out of coffeeshop doors shouting "Scheiße, Scheiße" at this still early forenoon hour. Ducking into a small alleyway to the left, and then again left, we finally found the stuff Natasha wanted; dapper young ladies behind glassdoors, strutting their stuff under the soft glow of crimson tinted lamps in nothing but black bras and panties. She was positively thrilled of her discovery, "Какие они красивые!" - "Wow, what beautiful girls!" One young lady, having wrapped herself up in a large dark towel, was just striding out on dizzyingly high high-heels, leaving her door open. Natasha and I glanced inside and could see all sorts of mountaineering equipment, with which the lady was daily tying up up expectedly large, quivering mountains of customers to mount them and flagellate and generally mistreat. "Look at all the stuff she has in there! Handcuffs, whips, studded leather straps!", Natasha shrieked happily.
Around us, all other tourists were men alone. One Dutch guy stood out who looked about 16 years of age, affecting airs of having stranded here by accident and being the least of all interested in the women on show, casting only sidelong glances at them; although we presently would see him come circling around the same alleyway a second time. A fat Italian guy with his group of homies was negotiating half-jokingly, leaning to the brick wall near one of the display windows fractionally held ajar by the "inmate" on the other side, just enough so her voice could be filter through; "nah, I think I will come back after a few pints with my mates", the Italian seemed to be saying, then waddled off after his friends.

Next, Natasha was less interested in seeing some of the quainter small streets and canals of the Jordaan, as I proposed, than in doing a round of the famous squats, real deal or legalized. So we breezed on, through the rain, to the other side of the city centre, through the verdant Vondelpark and the villas exorbitant in size and comforts surrounding it. I took her all this way to catch a glimpse of the Occii, the formerly squatted now legalized punk rock club, and seriously one of the most beautiful ancient buildings of Amsterdam. It still being early in the day and the place being closed, we could only glance at the façade, but that being the Occii's prime touristic allurement, that may have been all the better. I myself remembered the building from before the summer, remembered the moldy, dark wood carvings whose desolate state spoke of the great age of the building, and found its newly renovated, particoloured and shiny as if lacquered, present state rather tacky.

On we went to the Hallen, the imposing former tramway depot. Robbie having left her bike there some Friday bar-night and having handed me the key to pick it up turned out a perfect excuse for ringing the bell and letting Natasha see the building's entrails. Its inside being similar to our own industrial area squat, although a bit larger, and maybe even damper, it was the outside, the vastness and the gloom of the row of high gables under the cloudy sky that Natasha found more impressive than the saw-tooth roof of our own current home back in Zeeburg.

We went to the wonderfully cheap and multicultural neighbourhood market round the corner to buy a small picknick, then we popped into a big-chain supermarket where, taking into account that all her money had been stolen, I looted all the ingredients for Natasha to cook Borshchsh later on tonight for the gang at home. On the way back, we rode through parts of Amsterdam home to my own or our living group's shared history in the city, and I could not stop myself from telling stories.

First we cycled past the bar my friends from another, smaller town squatted one and a half years ago, with whom I first came to the city, helping them with the action and the first week's occupation.
About ten days after the opening of the squat, I had just had a quick breakfast and gone out the house, as one of the lads, Matt, was trodding around in his pyjamas probably searching for the coffee, when a man politely knocked outside at the door. Neighbbours had been regularly presenting themselves in this way, and Matt, in all innocence suspecting nothing, unlocked the door from inside and... - found himself grabbed like a kitten by the scruff of the neck and put out on the street in his socks. Around the corner, in a blind spot from the door, eight other men had stood in wait, and they were now flowing inside, quick to change the lock. Then they dug into the crate of beer they brought along for the occasion, much like squatters themselves do the day of an action.
Now, the nice detail was that at those times, squatting was still legal, and Matt being the legal resident had no qualms about going to the police. So in the very same evening, it was Matt, Étienne, I and our friends back in there, drinking their beer.
It is not always possible to rely on the righteousness of the law-enforcers, but when it happens, it can have some amusing outcomes.

Although, to be honest, I don't know why I still tell this story. Matt and Étienne clearly were fly-by-night squatters. They had not even barricaded the door in the simplest of fashions.
Coming to think of it, maybe Matt was actually lucky, being so harmless and naïve to even open the door for the guys. A gang of musclemen assembled for the very purpose of coming in would probably have been ready for rather more distressing actions.

The next stop on Natasha's and my road was a house where I lived for a few months: "A friend of mine from a smaller city started it. She knew the location and figured as a squat it would might have a chance to last a while. In the last minute before the action, she ended up giving her room away to someone else, being from then on involved only as an outsider. The first few months the one-house squat bided its time quietly, but then, in the summer, the three houses next to it were occupied by squatters as well, and the whole thing rapidly swole up into a city-wide campaign against the company owning the dilapidated structures, the speculation giant Ymere. Not a week went past that there wasn't at least a small notice about it in one of the national newspapers."
That I (luckily) had already moved out when that sort of craziness started and am on bad terms with most of the members of this particular gang of hippies today, I conveniently left out.

Then, as we began crossing a bridge over the river Amstel, I pointed my finger at a row of appartment blocks on the other side, nice examples of riverine architecture: "It was in one of the appartments of those houses, that we all met, Eline, Robbie and I".
It was Eline and her friend Dirk's plan to squat two adjacent properties each one million Euros worth. The space required more people though. Eline somehow chanced upon this new girl Robbie, whereas Dirk invited his friend Dotty, who invited her friend Dolly, who invited her friend Iris, that is, me.
The action itself had rather more political motives than being a good plan for setting up a domicile: Still a few years ago, the building had been ascribed for social housing. The inhabitants however had got evicted, in order to renovate the flats and sell them for a much higher price. The owner at the time was a well-known speculant and low rank Mafiosi, the middleman for big scale drug-dealers, white-washing money through buying up immobilia. He finally had died through a bullet in his head in 2004, after which the house was sold to the large Estate company Libra.
When so much money as a million Euros is involved, it could only be expected that we would last no more than three weeks in the habitations, which is exactly what happened.
Yet, new friendships were visibly kindled. We were the core of the living group of the new industrial squat we were to open, around whom a bigger group finally gelled.

Natasha was getting dizzy from all the talk and exclaimed, "Jesus, I want to come and live in Amsterdam. How can I get a job here?"

That evening at dinner, with our house group of eight complemented by our two guests, Andy and Natasha, all of us slobbering tasty Borshchsh (typical Russian vegetable soup bloodred from the beetroot in it), and with everyone joking around and laughing, I guess it was exactly what Dutch people call gezellig - convivial, cosy, fun.
At the dinner table, Natasha spotted a cute guy, and started riotously flirting with him. The cute guy was Andy. Always one quick to accomodate myself to the fact that my lovers will be snitched by lassies of a more extroverted fibre, I resigned myself to do nothing but sort of wiggle my chair further away from the table and let the free love axiom run its course.

Anyway, later on that night, I correctly assumed Andy would be up for coming along on an evening adventure: Eline and I wanted to round off the evening by taking Natasha to a coffee shop, an activity she had wished for during the daytime. It just so happened that on our way to Muntplein, where we knew a nice exemplary, I wanted to get some beer, because neither Natasha nor I actually smoked weed. So I spurted into a supermarket and pilfered a six-pack, which spurted mucho-macho Andy, peeved at my superior stealing skills, into wanting to outdo me, so he pilfered another one... Suddenly we had a lot of beer, and somehow we ended up in a park, drinking.

Not too late after midnight, the beer was finished and the air started to become night-time nippy. Time to go home. Natasha had expressed interest in the archetypal Dutch experience of riding on the rear carrier, usually a rather uncomfortable way of travelling, although in the given case it was probably msotly an excuse to be able to pat Andy's back. So Eline and I took our two bikes, leaving the couple with the third one we had brought and shouted: "Andy, just don't forget to take your girlfriend with you!"

The next day, after breakfast, Natasha stood bright-eyed at the kitchen table, said she had a gut feeling it was time to leave, hitchhike on. On Tuesday her school started, 400 km East of Moscow, some 3000 km from here.
The whole group of us protested emphatically: "You cannot leave yet, you only spent two nights here, that is hardly a flattering gesture of you to want to leave!", each and every of us providing a different reason for her to abide with us for just a few more days. After all the incalculable hospitality I personally have received around the world, I must honestly say I was extremely happy my so very disparate group of housemates, bike-nerd Tobbie, opium-eyed Matza, trippy-hippy Eline, and usually so lackadaisical Robbie were all so readily and unreservedly hospitable.
In the end, Natasha's gut feeling won over our collective expostulations though, and Eline, Robbie and I got Tobbie's car and drove Natasha to the motorway.

Our road took us past the kringloopwinkel (that's a second hand shop) round the corner, over the bridge under which Matza spraypaints his artwork, over the riparian, lush greenery hugging the IJ's confluence with the IJmeer, straight past the student homes we sneak in to wash our laundry for free. There we turned into a garage to tank up and buy a last souvenir, a packet of drop (liquorice).
At the exit back to the ring road, another hitchhiker. Eline, ever the communicator, approached him. He was a German student, living in the very same student residence we know so well, and who had just walked out his door and started hitching from right there. Bad idea, he had been there for an hour already. Heading he was to Hamburg for the birthday of his older brother.
That is more than half the way to Berlin, where our guest was heading for.
Great news for Natasha who now had a hitch-hiking partner.

Indeed, she was duly delighted, "Oh cool, I think I'm going to Hamburg next!"

Berlin -> Weinheim

2012-04-18T10:41:07+00:00

Trampen als absurde Maschine. Ich stehe insgesamt etwa zehn Minuten an der Ausfahrt des Rasthofs Grunewald.

In dieser Zeit kommt ein anderer Tramper vorbeigelaufen, fragt mich abrupt und aufdringlich, wo ich hin will, woraufhin ich sage, daß ich an der Ausfahrt stehe, weil ich erstmal nicht soviel reden mag.

Er zieht beleidigt ab, findet schnell ein Auto, das dem Kennzeichen nach zu urteilen nicht besonders weit fährt; ich halte eine Gruppe von drei Schweizern an, mit denen ich bis ans Ziel zwanglos über Berlin, Drogen, die DDR und Arbeitsfetisch plaudern kann.

"Hell, yeah"

2012-04-17T14:04:30+00:00

At the end of our street lives a man whose remarkable skills and talent I cannot laud enough, whose virtues and good intent it is impossible to exaggerate: He has refined the great art of vodka distilling. His products indeed excel in quality, and can usually be ranged somewhere on a scale between delicious and ambrosial, except the one or other misfired jugful every eight weeks or so.
The house where he lives is a curiosity in and of itself. Having initially been a glue factory, it was used after several years of emptiness as a building for the Dutch police to train themselves on evicting squats. They would move in once or twice a month, smash in doors just to replace them, saw through barricaded windows or even the roof. This sort of business went on up until the day before the squatting action. Reparing work on the building evidently represented an almost sisyphian task, but the squatters did an ingenious job of it and live in a very cosy and even rather swank place now, almost two years later.

But back to Aad, and why I write about him here. At the end of the nineties this guy went on a quite incredible round-the-world trip with his brother. In a small port on the Dutch island Texel, they "abducted" an over 20-metres long luxury yacht which was worth something to the tune of two million Euros; then they sailed it around the world for one and a half years.
They started off sailing down to Spain and Portugal. From there their prime intent was to move away as fast as possible from the police on their heels, choosing whichever direction the trade winds would take them. This happened to be first to Madeira, then across the Atlantic to Brazil.

Initially I was sceptical about Aad's story. You hear all sorts of people making up all sorts of tall tales after all. So, I tried to verify at least one partof it: Aad said at the end they abandoned the yacht in Senegal and he hydro-hitchhiked from Dakar North on a ship transporting French wines.
Having myself worked on a cargo ship in Senegal in the year 2003, I was in a good position to ask those of my sailor friends who were there before me, whether such a ship as Aad claimed existed. In my time in Senegal and neighbouring countries, there was no single other vessel transporting anything except the one we were on ourselves, the Oméga, a French owned, Tonga-flagged eighty meter long cargo ship which carried anything, from carparts to rice sacks. Those sailor friends I asked informed me from the nineties until 2002 there indeed was a ship that did the very route Aad asserted, that is from Senegal to France carrying wine. Its route was nicknamed Le Tour du Pomerol, Pomerol being a kind of French wine. The near-infinite stacks of alcohol sure must have kept Aad happy for the time of the voyage.
This is no proof, but I am not completely disinclined to believe Aad's story after all.

It usually being three or four in the morning when we chatted, I have forgotten most of the numerous anecdotes Aad told me from his journey. There is only one story I have been able to retain, one about Italy, from the very end, when Aad and his brother got arrested. The two of them spent the initial few weeks of their two year prison stint in Italian jails, before being sent to their home country, the Netherlands.
"Sure, the cells were more squalid, but on being transferred to Dutch prisons, there was one outstanding feature which made me wish I had remained down South: They gave you a pack of wine each Friday there. It wasn't enough for the whole week, but it got you sufficiently drunk for a day. In my second week, I went on a short, alcohol-fuelled prison riot. I managed even to kick down one of my cell's walls - it was a very old jail as you can imagine. In consequence they first they put me in solitary confinement, but later they had me change cells, and put me together with six Moroccans. They were all Muslims, so that meant I had six times the ration of alcohol. I could not have wished for a better result of my violent outburst! "

There is one question Aad is understandably asked a lot: Were two entire years of being locked up worth the 18 months trip around the world?

"Hell yeah", is his answer.

View from Iris' conservatory

2012-04-16T22:13:54+00:00

Round Ireland with a Limp, Episode 3: Cork to Cahermore Monday 16th April 2012 It’s impossible to say “Cahermore” in an English accent and have people understand you. “Ohh – Caa-herr-mohrr” – locals roll it through their mouths like wind rolling through a tunnel, when they finally work out where it is you want to [...]

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-04-16

2012-04-15T23:19:00+00:00

Early bird for our #puppet master #training in #Malaysia ends in < 3 hours, this is your very last chance! http://t.co/1o6SwajZ #DevOps # Powered by Twitter Tools

Dersim

2012-04-15T12:26:33+00:00

Many lifts further on, evening is approaching.
Picking a random village on the map, we decide to make it our end-point for today. Two roads lead there, and we have been dropped not far from where they branch off. Rüya looks on the map and with practical judgement says: 'The road on the right is the fastest one, that's the one we have to take''. I, however, employ a different logic. I like to travel in counter-intuitive ways. The road to the left, longer and more curvy on the map, is probably the one with the nicer views. I even sometimes like to stop a direct lift somewhere, just so that I can take a side-road that took my fancy. Indeed it is the side-roads, that make me come back for more to Kurdistan. If one year I take one road, I am bound to see another one branch off, a road to take next year.
Anyways, this time around, I try to have my way: 'I think we agree, that the road itself is the goal here, and all we lose by arriving an hour later is a few cups of tea among the three of us', is how I go about persuading my road-buddies. They are not entirely convinced, but chance acts in my favour, and the first ride that comes along goes to a village that is on the way that I chose, along the longer road. So off we go.
The landscape is indeed superb, and finally sundown comes around. With the lift we just got, we have wound our way up a steep escarpment, when our driver says - 'I am taking the way to the right here, up to my village', pointing at a dirt track winding higher still. Personally, standing on the road in the dusk does not appeal to me, but taking a road further up the mountain does, so I ask, in the name of all of us, if we can come along. The driver says, 'sure, as you wish', Rüya and Onur don't remonstrate, and so we are on our way. It does not take long until I feel that this was the right choice. The views up there are sublime. The outlines of many peaks align on the horizon, beneath them the deep waters of barrages take shape, discolored by the livid twilight sky. When the driver lets us out in the centre of the small group of houses that constitute his village, the few young people lingering on the small square acknowledge our presence with a laconic ' hoş geldiniz' -'welcome'. 'You can see immediately this is a Turkish village', says Rüya, ' if they were Kurds, their welcome would be so much warmer!', and Onur had to agree with her.
We decide to walk away from the settlement, possibly make a fire somewhere under some trees, and then go to sleep in the warm summer air. The road winds its way out of the village and around the following mountain most invitingly to my eye. However, we do not get far. We just watched the mountain gulp down the glib red egg yolk of the sun fanning its last golden rays across the sky, when a car with several men inside pulls up beside us. A man with white hair and a white beard introduces himself as the muhtar, the village chief, and demands to see our papers, “You cannot sleep outside here, this road leads straight into guerrilla territory, there isn't even a last military post there”. Perfect, I think. Anyway I am more afraid of the military than the guerrilla who have a reputation of treating hostages well, but the men really won't let us go. They say they will let us sleep in the villages’ administrative building and ask us to show our ID once again. Having toured lost little mountain villages in Eastern Turkey all over, I know this is standard procedure, but Onur, unaccustomed to travel in a war zone, refuses. Or maybe it is that I am without principles. I would have just done as we were told, but he is truly anarchist. In any case, he makes a whole fuss about it, will not show his ID. So it turns out, we cannot stay, and the idyllic village on top of the world is being relegated to memory too soon: We are escorted back down to the main road in someone else’s car.
Another lift materializes from out of the dark mercifully quickly. It is a road engineer from Diyarbakir, having come to the region to work on the local infrastructure. The road until the next village feels a bit like a slalom race, so many military road-stops are there. Of course every time we are asked to identify ourselves. I cast a slightly reproachful glance to Onur. Now he is well obliged to deliver his ID, but we're already out of paradise. At the entrance to the village we have chosen as our endpoint, Yayladere, the military commander, a friendly, podgy man in glasses, does not only glance at our passports, but takes them inside the hut for a minute. When he comes back out, he adresses Onur, who is sitting on the passenger seat: ' Niye buraya geldiniz?'- 'Why did you come here?' Onur seems at a loss for a coherent answer, 'uhm, we, uh...' he stammers. I think I know what will sound good as an answer and jump in: 'We were on our way to the festival in Kıği, but thought it started tomorrow. We heard today that it starts two days later, so are taking a detour to see some villages.' The military commander seems understanding, but admonishes us: ''This is a very dangerous region. The fighting is intense. There is 80 of them out there, they are constantly doing actions. Be careful''. And he waves our car through.

Whole story here.

Justina & Maarten

2012-04-13T14:50:07+00:00

It’s 28 January, and in my inbox I find an email, reading completely unchanged (except for making the links clickable)

Hi/hallo/labas Robert!

We are Justina & Maarten, two graduated journalism students from Lithuania and Belgium. We got your email from Augustas and Katja. I hope you don’t mind this is in English? We contacted Augustas and Katja because of their website. They told us they are no longer on the road, but they told us a little about you.

We are planning to go travelling in April and it is out intention to film our entire trip. By next week we will have our website (Live on the road). The name maybe gives way our goal, we want to make “live reports” about people’s “life” on the road. We want to show why people travel from point A to point B, wether [sic] it is a trucker, a musician, a circus artist or… a hitchhiker. We want to travel together with those people and let them tell their story. Looking around on your websites, you would be just the guy for us.

We would like to ask you if you are planning any trip somewhere in the end of March/beginning of April and if it would be possible to follow you for a while?

Anyway we would like to wish you success in your further traveling and we definitely hope to hear from you soon!

Kind regards,
Justina & Maarten
www.liveontheroad.tv

Always interested in being “famous for 15 minutes”, I write them back, and after that a few more emails sail back and forth between us and eventually we agree to hit the road on 3 April, and when that day comes ever nearer, I do get a bit frightened, as will be hitchhiking as a threesome, and according to Ken Welsh, author of the long-out-of-print “Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Europe” “To try hitching in the company of more than one person is crazy.”. (1996 edition, page 24)

They arrive on Monday 2 April, of course by thumb, and after dinner they do the first of many little interviews with me and eventually, far too late in the evening, we go to bed. After waking up at the ungodly time of 5:20, we have some breakfast, and then walk the almost 4 km to the start of the A10. It’s just about light when we arrive at my usual point of departure, and given the humongous backpacks Justina & Maarten are carrying (and a big camera bag and a tripod), I’m, to express myself rather politely, somewhat worried about getting a ride.

However, my worries turn out to be totally misplaced and after what cannot be more than 10(ish) minutes, we get our first ride, from a guy who has picked me up just a few weeks before. He drops us off on the Jabbeke petrol station, and another 10(ish) (11 to be precise), ride two follows, taking us to the petrol station at Drongen, just before Gent. Here the wait is ridiculous, just eight minutes, but the destination is somewhat worrying. The driver, who works for a Japanese company, has traveled all over the world and when I tell him that my wife and I spent our honeymoon in Japan, he actually starts speaking Japanese – Audrone and I never got much further than “Please”, “Thank you”, and “Are you going in the direction of …”. His destination is a bit of a problem, Zaventem is not a good place to get rides, so in the end we are dropped on the “Groot-Bijgaarden” petrol station just before Brussels, which is rather bad if you’re on your way to Germany, but which turns out to be pretty good for getting a ride into France: when I ask a driver if he happens to go towards Leuven or Luik, he tells me he isn’t, but that he can give us a ride towards Paris. After a “three-second” discussion with Justina and Maarten, we decide to accept his offer and at 12:19 we find ourselves on the “Aire de Lisses”, next to Fontainblau, well south of Paris, and potentially towards the Mediterranean! We take a bit of time out, finish off Audrone’s sandwiches and J&M do another one of their little interviews.

The next ride will take us to “Aire de la Forêt”, and it will also take us into weather that is a lot less pleasant. On the aire we take another break, have a coffee, J&M do another short interview and then something pretty amazing happens. Two mini-buses stop and from the look, they would have no problem taking on an extra three people, so I approach the driver of the first, and ask her for a ride, explaining that there are three of us. Without any hesitation she agrees to take us, and once we’re back on the road, an even better offer follows. Isabelle works at the Maison Familiale Rurale de Saint Laurent de Chamousset, a boarding school that combines in-class with on-the-work-floor education and she invites us to spend the night at the school, complete with dinner and breakfast, and she promises to drop us back on a petrol station on the autoroute the next morning. This time our discussion takes a bit more longer, but in the end we decide that the offer is too good to refuse. After an excellent dinner, and a bit of small-talk, we are taken to out own room and we enjoy a good night. The next morning we have a nice breakfast, Isabelle has even gone as far as getting croissants especially for us! After thanking the others, Isabelle takes us to the “Aire La Plaine du Forez”, on the autoroute towards to Clermond-Ferrand.

It’s again raining, and it takes us 1h35, the longest wait of our entire trip, and only one of just two(!) waits longer than one hour, to get a ride. The driver is going into Clermond-Ferrand, and so we decide to get out at the last aire before it, “Aire de Limagne”. We are now at one of those places that is difficult to get away from, and in the end it takes us almost an hour to do so. The two guys that give us a ride are on their way to Paris, but they very graciously decide to take us to the “Aire de Veyre”, south of Clermond-Ferrand – if their SatNav had any human emotion, it would have been screaming at them for nor turning around at successive exits…

On the aire we have just enough time to put our backpacks against the wall, before Seb(astien) returns to his car. When I ask him for a ride, he doesn’t have to think about it and immediately offers us a ride into the direction on Montpellier. The aire is on the A75, Seb is on his way to Perpignan, and that means we will cross the river Tarn on one of the most amazing structures in France, the Millau Viaduct. Seb’s passed the place before, but to do us a favour, he stops at the aire just before it and together we spend a good half hour climbing up to the vantage point and taking pictures. Going out of the aire, J&M go for a scary piece of filming by mounting their camera on the front bonnet, to produce a shot of us driving away. Once we’re moving again, Seb asks us what we want to do once we get to Perpignan (we’ve already abandoned Montpellier), and we tell him that we might try to go to Andorra. What follows is pretty extraordinary! Seb tells us that he’s not needed in Perpignan until around 13:00 the next day, and that he will take us to Andorra, where he can pick up some cheap cigarettes. During a stop I try to find us a place to stay via Couch$$$urfing, but the only member in Andorra seems to have logged in from Barcelona earlier in the day and I do not get an SMS back. (Once back home I find out that he was visiting his brother in Barcelona, and wouldn’t be able to host us). In the end it doesn’t really matter, as the weather is really horrible when we approach Andorra (snow and temperatures only just above zero), and we decide to go back to Perpignan with Seb, who eventually drops us just before the péage south of Perpignan, at 21:56, which is pretty late to continue. We spend a little time organizing ourselves, before walking to the péage. Hitching at these places is officially illegal, but there is a small car-park behind this one, which would allow us to tell any police that we were dropped there by a driver on his way to Spain.

Fortunately, there is no need for this, because at 22:45 we are offered a ride that will take us almost 300 km up north, to a petrol station after Toulouse, where we end up spending the night. J&M do their final long interview, and just when I’m starting to fall asleep at around 06:00, Maarten finds us a ride. The driver is on his way to Clermond-Ferrand, but agrees to take us to the last aire before turning off. He misses it and eventually drops us on the “Aire de Puy de Grâce”, which is in essence just a car-park with a toilet, and a place that should be avoided at all costs if you’re hitching, but like the whole trip until now, luck is again on our side. A few minutes after our arrival, another car stops. Maarten goes off to talk to the driver, but eventually comes back empty-handed, the driver is from Bulgaria and equates hitching in France to hitching in Bulgaria, where, if we may believe him, most hitchhikers are in fact bandits. Then something amazing happens, the guy goes back into his car and while driving towards us, he actually offers us a ride. It will be the last one the three of us start together.

Twenty-four kilometres later we stop at the “Aire de Porte de Corrèzze”, just before Limoges. Justine and Maarten get out here, they want to spend Easter with a friend who lives in the place, and after saying goodbye to them, the Bulgarian doctor (he turned out to be a pediatrician) takes me another almost 400 km, to just south of Paris. After answering a call of nature and a quick cup of coffee I walk back to the pumps, just in time to catch Albert and Janne, a Dutch couple who’ve been visiting their son who emigrated to France a decade ago to start a farm. About three hours later they drop me off at the petrol station “Kalken”, between Gent and Lokeren. It’s on the wrong side of the motorway, but the map shows two nearby bridges and the one just south of the place is easy to get to and across and once on the other side, the ditches are narrow enough to jump over. The first driver I approach gives me a no, but the second turns out to be going to Zandvoorde, and a mere three minutes after arriving at this side of the motorway, I’ve got my final ride. Once in Zandvoorde I decide to take a bus, but after finding out that the buses are temporarily suspended, I end up walking home, for some well-deserved sleep, unlike German Raststättes, French aires don’t seem to offer a decent place to get some sleep, and even now, three days after returning home, I still feel the effects of the night without sleep.

As for the experience of hitching as a threesome? It was simply amazing. As I wrote near the beginning, I was more than a little worried about it, but in the end it turned out to be an incredible experience, what most stands out is the fact that many of the drivers went out of their way to help us. Maybe it was because of the unusual combination of an old guy with two people who were young enough to be his children, maybe because it was because of the camera that was always prominently visible, whatever it was, it was a blast.

As for some, there he goes again, boring facts and figures? Total distance as a threesome: 2,225.4 km in 22:11 (pure driving time), so averaging a very respectable 100.3 km/h, just marginally slower than my 32-year average of 100.7 km/h. More amazing were our waiting times, averaging just under 36 minutes, vastly better than my own long-time average of almost 53 minutes. Also, our average distance of over 171 km/ride compares rather favourable with my own average of just over 123 km/ride. The highlight for me? My first visit to Andorra, but somewhat strangely I do have mixed feelings about this, because I didn’t actually hitch any rides in the country itself…

Copper Coast

2012-04-12T20:36:39+00:00

https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=206077022155566650492.0004bdb765fdc9126017e&ie=UTF8&t=m&ll=52.042355,-7.481689&spn=0.844687,2.466431&z=8&output=embed View Hitching Ireland: Tramore to Cork in a larger map The oldest city in Ireland it may be, but Waterford feels a little bland to me when I cycle in for the day from Tramore on Karen’s bike. It was built by Vikings in 914 and I’m sure it was a hive of activity [...]

View from The Strand

2012-04-10T18:46:40+00:00

Episode One: Dublin to Waterford I tried to embed the map, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Click the link to see my journey. Red pins are start and finish points; green pins are hitching pick-up points; the blue pin is Hook Head. https://maps.google.ie/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=206077022155566650492.0004bd6bce09c46fb50a7&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=52.669534,-6.62879&spn=1.040632,1.066221&t=m&output=embed View Hitching Dublin to Waterford in a larger map Perpetually [...]

Two days in the life of a hitchhiker.

2012-04-03T13:31:00+00:00

Instead of updating you on everything that happened, this time I will just share two stories of two separate days of being on the way hitchhiking, one in Venezuela, and one in Colombia. I hope you like them. --- I´m standing next to the road ju...

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-04-02

2012-04-01T23:19:00+00:00

Pls RT: Announcing the first #puppet master #training in Kuala Lumpur: http://t.co/jfpH2hhy Sign up now to get early bird discount! # RT @shamhardy: let's start a twitter meme! follow #WhyKLbeatsSV and tweet reasons you think Malaysia is the next Silicon Valley # #WhyKLBeatsSV 4 billion people within 4 hours flight #justsaying # #WhyKLBeatsSV Places like [...]

At the Syrian border

2012-03-29T12:15:42+00:00

The present situation being forbidding as it is, most of the people in this town have never been across the border to meet their ethnic kin even before the recent war. Kati and I stopover in an demographically Arabic settlement in Southern Turkey, right next to a border gate. An enormous Syrian flag waves proudly in the wind, higher than even the tallest houses.
''The people from here don't go to Syria much, no. As for me, I have never been. If people go, they go over small roads away from this village, coming back carrying sugar, cigarettes, gasoline or tea'', laughs the shop assistant that I am chatting with. In some places we are told there are land mines planted on the strip that seperates the two countries.

The border was only opened for Turkish citizens without a visa one year before the civil war erupted. Before that, there had been moments when they were temporarily opened for Turkish Kurds and Arabs to reunite with those members of their families and tribes that were separated by the creation of the two states and the fortification of the communal border. Visiting Turkey regularly before and after the permanent opening of the border, I imagined myself to remark changes in the country: The influx of beautiful new fabrics seemed to slowly change the headscarf fashion away from the artificial silk. Shops in the small towns near Syria started to overflow with cheap goods from there. The fashion to spice kebabs with mint made it all the way to İstanbul.

Famished as Kati and I are, we wind up for a snack in a kebab house. An Arab man of imposing physique sits down across from us clinging to a wooden walking stick. From his questions you might think he is an undercover cop suspecting us of being spies, but it is probably just a case of typical Middle Eastern curiosity: 'Who are you? Where are you from? What brought you here? What is your jobs? Do you know anyone in the region? Why do people like you not go to Antalya?'
His darkly tanned face, sporting a prominent nose, is deeply furrowed. Accompanying an earth-coloured dishdasha he wears an open red keffiyeh on his head topped with a three-fingers tall, gold-plated agal, looking a bit like a crown.

Finally it is time to move on. Out on the road, we stick our thumbs out and get an immediate lift. The men stopping for us in their unassuming and dusty Volvo are border guards on their way home from work. The border has been closed over the past 2,5 months, but the two guards sigh they have to go to their work place every day anyway. The boredom is unsurpassable. What do they do all day? Watch videos and surf the net. Usually 35 people work at that particular border gate, now it is down to eight.
As for the Syrian side, they allege that one single soldier is stationned there. It seems the regime has more urgent uses for its military force.

Our lift takes us all the way to the holy city of Urfa. I remember it from years ago as exuding a slightly chaotic atmosphere with on the streets exotic looking elderly ladies with facial tattoos. I would have qualified the place at the time as the city that felt the most Eastern of the country, although geographically it is not. The past years however have made developments catch up, and the town centre now paradoxically may well be the most sleekly commercialised one of all cities of the East.

hitchtheworld

2012-03-28T02:10:17+00:00

On the news in the entire state of Pará….For the moment I leave you with just this, and a brief translation for those of you who don’t speak Portuguese:

O jovem americano Patrick Falterman, encantado com as belezas amazônicas resolveu encarar um grande desafio que vai se transformar numa verdadeira aventura entre dois estados, Pará e Amapá. Este é um percurso feito na maioria das vezes por grandes embarcações, só que ele resolveu ariscar se aventurando nesta pequena jangada, de pouco mais de quatro metros quadrados feita com materiais retirados da floresta e uma cobertura improvisada.

The young American Patrick Falterman, enchanted with the beautiful Amazon, is determined to take on a grand undertaking that will transform into a real adventure between the two states of Pará and Amapá. This is a passage usually made by large ships and navies, yet he is resolved to risk being an adventurer in this tiny raft, which is just a little more than 4 square metres made from materials taken from the jungle and an improvised cover.

Patrick fez a obra com ajuda de ribeirinhos e quer tentar chegar a Macapá utilizando apenas recursos naturais, e poucos apetrechos que leva a bordo. A sua maior bagagem é a coragem de enfrentar os desafios envolvidos no projeto. A pequena embarcação pesa cerca de três toneladas e nos primeiros dias de viagem nosso aventureiro já passou por algumas dificuldades e deve encarar mais desafios na longa aventura pelos rios amazônicos.

Patrick completed the project with help from local people and wants to try to make it to Macapá using only natural resources and the few materials he has onboard. His heaviest baggage is the courage to face the trials involved with the project. The small vessel weighs nearly three tons and in the first days of the trip our adventurer faced some difficulties and will surely face more during this long adventure along Amazonian rivers.

Muitas pessoas foram à orla de Itaituba para conhecer nosso corajoso navegador, que deixou os estados unidos, para conhecer as belas paisagens naturais de nossa região. O desafio parece inacreditável já que a embarcação rústica é feita de palhas e madeira e tem o mínimo de conforto e poucos objetos para diminuir o risco dessa grande jornada. Embora para alguns a proposta do americano seja extravagante, ele tem uma forma clara de explicar seu objetivo e dizer a quem mora na região o quanto aprecia o desconhecido é gratificante.

Many people went to the riverside in Itaituba to meet our courageous navigator, who left the USA to explore the beautiful scenery of our region. The undertaking seems unbeliveable since the rustic vessel is made from palm fronds and tree trunks and has a minimum of comforts and few objects to minimize the risk of this grand journey. Some may think this American’s adventure seems extravagant, he has a simple way of explaining his objective and says that those who live in the region should explore it and be grateful for living there.

-MN

Filed under: Brazil

My host and his charge

2012-03-27T19:29:06+00:00

I am now ready to write this story. It’s a long story and it’s been a long time coming, so I will blog it in chapters, sifted from diary fragments and memories and a longer piece I am writing, which maybe, someday, I will publish. Chapter One It’s early September, a blazing Wednesday in Istanbul. [...]

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-26

2012-03-25T23:19:00+00:00

Out to dinner with our Estonian friends, then celebrating #nowruz with flatmates, yay! @mine_akman # We pinned down the dates for our first #puppet training in Kuala Lumpur: 25-27th of April. Stay tuned for more info! # Powered by Twitter Tools

Quedlinburg -> Thale

2012-03-22T18:58:29+00:00

Er hat sich mit diversen Tätigkeiten zum Teil in Finnland bis ins Rentenalter manövriert und holt seine Frau von ihrer Arbeit in einem von Quedlinburg nach Warnstedt umgezogenen Betrieb ab. Er fährt mich von Warnstedt noch über den Hügel bis kurz vor Thale.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-19

2012-03-18T23:19:00+00:00

Seems like everybody who is someone is at #SXSW Wonder if it is possible to stand out from the crowd when trying to gain traction there? # RT @choonming: Productive meeting over dinner and fun times with @BikeshL and @walterheck # Just had a nice dinner with our #rockstar C #developer @felixleong at a great [...]

wild fruits I have known,

2012-03-13T22:26:54+00:00

The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer

The small tree in front of my little house has sprouted flowers. It is the only blossom so far in the garden. Spring has come cartwheeling towards me.

Along my arms are deep scratches without maps. They appeared while waiting for a pizza handmade at the front of the shop by an Italian man born from the centre of an oak tree.
Every time I arrive back here, I look forward to the sound of the pavement slabs moving underneath my tyres just as I approach home.
Each evening when I drink tea, Ian approaches me believing that he is invisible. I gaze straight at him as continues to creep. He would not fare well as a deer.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-12

2012-03-11T23:19:00+00:00

RT @olindata: First #Puppet meetup for #Malaysia Come and join us to learn more about #puppet #devops on March 15th: http://t.co/3nAc9gSA # Guess I should start using twitter more actively again now that I'm back in #malaysia . # Meeting @mine_akman from #delightwave in a minute to talk about #socialmedia for @olindata. Curious to see [...]

Made Possible by Squatting

2012-03-11T22:22:32+00:00

Assignment 11 in the MatadorU Travel Writing Course: Shoot a series of 6-8 sequential shots that tell a story you want people to deduce just by looking at your photographs. Post the photos on your blog without any captions and invite friends and family to view the essay and leave comments. ———–

2012-03-07T12:43:55+00:00

In the night, as you course through Germany's Ruhrgebiet on its arteries, its motorways, the glaring lights of the SciFi city that is the chemical plant show how far it draws out - over many kilometers.
We are let in through the gates nearby the port by the security man.
Finally, Daniel's car is lifted onboard, comically swinging mid-air over the quay when the crane is stopped a second.

The sun has not come up yet, and before unloading starts, there is a few hours left to sleep.
"Why is this man up so early?", I ask, incredulously, as I spot a worker hanging out of the door of the railway engine parked next to the ship. "You don't know, maybe at home he has a whole
collection of toy trains, then this morning he woke up early thinking, 'let's go and play with the real ones already!' "

The ship is 107 meters long, and carries 3000 tons of coal. As the morning unfurls, I watch the diminishing landscape of the coal mountains being moved from hull to train by the excavator. Three towering volcanoes, each almost perfectly conical, their slopes a neat 38 degrees, are gradually dug away to reconstitute as a desert scenery, an erg with its bluffs and hollows, gradually sinking, gradually levelled out, until reduced to nothingness.

When this ship tanks, it pumps in 12,000 litres of diesel. We pay a visit to the engine room: The impressive piece of machinery is 1110 horsepower strong.
Before my inner eye, I see a thousand stallions gallopping.

2011, a review

2012-03-05T21:58:47+00:00

Another year has passed, so it’s worth looking (somewhat belatedly) back at the highs and highers of 2011…

One of the most striking things that happened in 2011 was the fact that Audrone and I hitched together again for the first time in almost seven years, and that we did so near the gorgeous Lago di Como, celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary.

The three rides we got, spread over three days, included the shortest ride ever, a mere 800 metres from the railway station in Stezzano to our hotel, and given that it took us about half a minute to get the ride, it saved an eight to 10 minute walk in the heat. Our main modus transportandi for this particular trip were “that” airline, buses and the very nice ferries that cross the Lago di Como. There are some private ships on the lake, but it’s my guess that it would be pretty hard to hitch a ride on any of them.

Of course this triplet wasn’t the first of the year; my goal for 2011 was to hitchhike in every month of the year. I had set the same goal a year earlier (and missed out on it), but in 2011 I succeeded, although I didn’t hitch on every weekday, I had no rides on Sundays.

The year started with a trip that spanned January and February. The idea was to do a bit more Raststätte Hopping, but if you’re hitchhiking for hitchhiking’s sake you need to go with the flow, and after three rides I found myself in Zwolle, after four in Hengelo and although that is perfectly located for rides in the direction of Hannover and Berlin, I got a ride towards Hamburg, with two Swedes. They dropped me off at Raststätte Ostetal and here I accepted a ride into Denmark, for the first time crossing from Germany into Denmark via the A7. Dropped off at a petrol station some 50 kilometres in Denmark, in the rain, in temperatures just above zero, my luck kicked in and two rides and three-and-a-half hours later I found myself in the suburbs of København. After finding my way to the station and discovering that it would close at around 01:00, I decided to continue. Walking in the centre of København in the early hours of the morning is not a pleasure, every twenty steps your approached by prostitutes offering you their services.

It took me around 90 minutes to walk to the place to hitch out of the city, the traffic-lights at crossing of Vigerslev Vej and Fole, a spot that was already mentioned in the “Use-It” leaflets in the early 1980′ies and it took me about an hour standing under the streetlights in the drizzle to get a ride, from a Turkish guy. Just seven minutes and only 12 kilometres further he dropped me off at a sliproad onto the E20 in Vallensbæck. I wasn’t a very happy bunny, but “Als de nood het hoogst is, is de redding nabij” and miraculously after a wait of just five(!) minutes another Turkish guy stopped an gave me a ride to the petrol station at Karlslunde. By now it was pouring down, and I spent the best part of the next two hours sitting trying to get some sleep. Eventually, just after five in the morning I went out again and the first driver I approached, a Somali refugee who had built himself a new life in Norway, gave me a ride, all the way to Dammer Berge, one of the two German Raststättes that bridge the Autobahn. From here followed a short ride with a French guy and nine minutes after he dropped me off at Raststätte Münsterland, I found myself on my way to Luxembourg, arriving there just twelve hours after leaving København. I was dropped off near Inga‘s place, where I spend the night. The next day it took me four more rides to get back to Oostende, and, for a rare change, I actually got a ride around Brussels, saving me the hassle of crossing the city by public transport.

Trip two of the year, and trip 95 of my hitchhiking career, was another exercise in Raststätte Hopping, and like the first, it spanned two months, I left on 30 March, and returned on 1 April. The only memorable facts from the trip were the facts that I got my second ride with a driver from Kazakhstan and that the first seven drivers had seven different nationalities, with two consecutive non-European drivers, the Kazakhstani was followed by an American.

The next trip was different, in May Audrone and I flew with “that” airline to Lithuania for her father’s 75th birthday and although I could have flown back on my own, Audrone was staying a bit longer, I decide to hitchhike. It took me just over 36 hours to cover the distance from Vilnius to Oostende and the last driver turned out to be living in our street and she dropped me off right in front of the door.

In June followed another trip into Germany and if a coolant hose hadn’t broken in the vicinity of Wismar, I would have covered the only major stretch in Germany that I have never covered, Hamburg to Berlin. It took well over two hours for a rescue truck to pick us up, dropping us at a garage in Wismar. Given the time, well past nine in the evening and the fact that I was on the wrong side of Wismar, I decided to hitch back toward Lübeck and eventually slept in the forest just outside Raststätte Buddikate. The next day I made it to Raststätte Vaterstetten just past München, from where a woman took me 451 kilometres back to Bad Camberg. Despite the hour, we arrived there at 1:31 and I had a bite until 2:27, I decided to try to continue a little more and after a wait of just under an hour I got a ride to Raststätte Siegburg, just south of Köln, where I finally called it a night and caught some sleep. Later that day another four rides took me back, not to Oostende, but to Oudenburg, where I took a bus for the last little bit back home.

Four trips had seen me hitch in the first six months of the year, I was halfway my set goal…

Trip five was as unexpected as it was brilliant. In July Audrone and I drove (yes, drove, you cannot hitchhike with a dog and four cats) to Vilnius for our summer holidays, leaving the house in Oostende in the care of our neighbours. Just over a week after our departure we got an email from them, telling us that the house was suffering from an infestation of fleas. As the cats and dog had just had their anti-flea treatment, we eventually decided to buy a vast amount of insecticides, and it fell upon me to use them… So I hitched back to Oostende for the weekend. I left Vilnius on Thursday morning and just before midnight I arrived at the aptly called motel “Nevada”, some 50 kilometres before the Polish-German border. A fair distance, but not exceptional.

However, the day was exceptional for another reason. It took me four rides to get from Vilnius to the last petrol station before the Lithuanian-Polish border, and 12 minutes after getting there, I got a ride from a Latvian couple, Guntars and Marina, members of “Quattro Differente” a clarinet quartet. They eventually dropped me of near Sochaczew, and here an amazing series of five rides started.

The place where I was dropped of was just a cross-roads and I didn’t really have any other option than to stick out my thumb. Of course this most basic method of hitchhiking still works, but it’s rare for trucks to stop. Not so this time.

I got in, the truck-driver spoke a fair amount of German and at some stage he asked me if he should try to get me a next ride using the CB. I didn’t object, he succeeded and near Kutno I seamlessly slid into the next car and near Konin the process was repeated, with me sliding back into a truck. This driver, and the next, both repeated the process and where before I had had only nine previous no-wait rides, I now had four in row!

The next day was not good, I lost a lot of time due to someone mistakenly thinking that Raststätte Am Fichtenplan was before her exit into Berlin, and it took me almost three hours to get back to Raststätte Michendorf. Arriving on Michendorf through the back-entrance I got another “no-wait” ride, the first driver I asked for a ride took me to Lehrer See, the last Raststätte before Hannover. Here the five “no-wait”s were cancelled out by a three hour wait. I eventually accepted a ride towards Hengelo/Enschede, and that probably wasn’t the wisest choice. It took me four more rides to get through the Netherlands and at 0:30, at the petrol station just after the Kennedy tunnel in Antwerpen I called it a day and tried to get some sleep. On Saturday I finally got home and went in for the kill. I sprayed anything and everything, vacuumed, sprayed again, vacuumed again, put a set of deep plates with dish-washing liquid and tea-lights everywhere for the night, repeated the whole process on Sunday and that seemed to have done the trick, when walking through the house with bare legs, they stayed flea-free.

On Monday I went to Brussels for a selection test for medicine research, and on Tuesday I finally went back to Vilnius. I left at just after 6:00; got my first ride at 6:44, and at 11:51, another six rides later I had covered a miserable 231 kilometres. The next ride turned out to be a bit longer. The driver was Lithuanian, absolutely stone-deaf, which made it impossible to tell him where I was going, until I remembered that I was carrying a business card with our address in Lithuania. That did it, and just under 21 hours later I was in Kaunas, after the sixth longest ride of my life. It took one more ride to get me to Vilnius, where my stepdaughter picked me up.

July was followed by August and another exercise in Raststätte Hopping, and the afore mentioned September triplet near the Lago di Como, which was my 100th hitchhiking trip. As I was planning to go to the 15th anniversary of VAK, I thought it would be useful to cover a little more distance and for the fourth time in 2011 I sped off into Germany, adding almost 2,500 kilometres to what I would hope would be enough. A few more kilometres were added hitching to Vilnius at the end of the month, but it was all in vain, as Vilmantas had once again covered more than anyone else, my 28,000(ish) kilometres were well short of his 40,000(ish), the whole story can be found in my previous entry mentioned just above.

After returning from Vilnius, the trip counter had reached nine and although one more trip straddling November and December would have been enough to reach the goal of having hitched in every month of the year, my ambition took over, and I decided that hitching less than 12 times, even if that would have meant hitching in every month of the year wasn’t real enough.

So two weeks later I left again. The plan was Luxembourg, Inga had told me that there was a festival of foreign movies. I send her an SMS from my PC the evening before (which for some reason never got to her) and the next morning I left. I got to Luxembourg fast, in fact so fast that I decided to do a yo-yo back towards Brussels before going again to Luxembourg. We met in the old town, watched a few movies and had a bite at her place. It took me three rides to get back the next day and at the end of month 10 the trip counter also read 10.

Trip 11, which started a month later, was intended to be just another, yes you know…

The first six rides followed more or less the usual pattern, from Oostende via Brussels and past Liege into Germany, in this case to Raststätte Frechen. The wait here wasn’t up to scratch, 1:18, but who complains about waiting time if it’s followed by a ride all the way to Slovenia, with someone from Bosnia who needs to extend his visa. I was dropped, in the early hours of the morning, in temperatures well below zero, at the big petrol station just across the Austrian-Slovenian border next to Maribor and spent a few hours sleeping in the still unfinished bridge restaurant, until I was told that this wasn’t allowed. Fortunately there was also a heated baby changing room and I spent the next two hours sleeping there, until I was very rudely awoken by a cleaner. I got out, it was still freezing, but fortunately I managed to get a ride towards Ljubljana pretty quickly. From here I got a ride with a Romanian truck driver into Italy, the temperatures rapidly climbed into double figures, and when I was dropped off at Area Servizio Gonars, I could walk around in a T-shirt, in the middle of November! After a quick espresso and a freshly made sandwich I got a ride from an 83 year old retired surgeon, all the way to the Brenner Autostrada. He was kind enough to drop me of at an Area Servizio past his destination. Three more rides followed and at 18.47 I was dropped off, just inside Austria, at Autobahnstation Gries/Brenner, which is the second petrol station in Austria, and which was pretty quiet, which isn’t really surprising given that there is one just across the border. It took slightly over half an hour to get a ride, I had hoped for one directly into Germany, but you don’t throw away a cent hoping to find a euro later, and half an hour later I was at the next Autobahnstation, “Vomp”. By now it was pretty cold again, but fortunately I didn’t have to wait very long, helped by the fact that I had already ditched my “avoid-trucks policy” in Slovenia, I quickly got a ride with a young German truck-driver, who took me to Raststätte Haidt, just before Würzburg. I slept in a quiet corner of the restaurant. The next day was not good, I didn’t get back to Oostende, but only, at 21:44, to Blankenberge, which meant having to spend another 40 or so minutes on the tram. The problem was a 3:08 wait at Raststätte Siegburg, nobody I approached was going towards Aachen or Belgium, and those that were going that way all seemed to hide behind the pretty lame “Sorry this is a company car” excuse…

The twelfth and last trip took place in December. It was another, yes… but it was pretty spectacular. After the third ride I once again found myself on Frechen, and although I didn’t get a ride to Slovenia, the 404 kilometre ride to Raststätte Aurach just before Nürberg was also pretty good. Five more rides followed and at 22:16 I found myself at the only other Raststätte bridging the Autobahn, Frankenwald, which turned out to be a lot nicer than Dammer Berge. I had a plate of freshly made spaghetti and soon after I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until about six in the morning. I left Frankenwald at 6:52 and two rides later, at 10:12 I arrived at Michendorf, on the Berliner ring. From here it seemed no more than logical to go to Hannover and back to Belgium, but I decided to have a bit more fun, and just before midnight I was back on Raststätte Fürholzen near München. It took me the best part of half an hour to walk to the northbound side (the previous evening two businessmen, one of them who had parked his car earlier on the day on the northbound side, had taken me to that side in just five minutes), but once on the other side I very quickly got a ride to Raststätte Nürnberg-Feucht, where I slept at my usual(!) table, and again slept very well, without waking up every few minutes. The first ride the next day was another beauty, straight to a petrol station just before Leuven in Belgium, 604 kilometres in 4:55, interrupted only by an eight minute stop. Sadly, the next 141.8 km took 5:22 (Ouch!), which was caused by a strike of public transport in most of Belgium, which in turn made getting from one side of Brussels to the other a venerable nightmare.

Once I got home, I wasted no time entering the trip data into my PC and other than the fact that I had for the first time in my hitchhiking career hitched in every month of the year, the output of the program revealed quite a few more interesting titbits, the December trip turned out to have the highest quality and at just over 3,400 kilometre in three days it’s also the one with the highest average distance per day. The triplet near the Lago di Coma had already set the record for lowest quality and shortest average distance per day. Looking at some of the more obscure statistics generated by my program also revealed that I had rides with drivers from 29 different nationalities (while visiting only 10 countries) and that combining the last two rides of trip 104 with the first two of trip 105 gave me four consecutive rides with women. I also beat my 365 day record which dated back to 2000-2001, but the whole year record I set in 2000 still stands, I missed it by less than 500 km. The combined distance of trips 104 and 105, 6,567.5 km also set a new personal record, but even that falls well short of the feat Ilmar Island achieved in 1979: it took him just 5 days, 20 hours and 52 minutes to cover the approximately 5,200 miles (~8,370 km) between Key West in Florida and Fairbanks in Alaska! Who knows, 2012 is still young…

From the Spine of the Americas

2012-03-03T15:01:00+00:00

Sitting in an internet cafe in Merida, a city in the Venezuelan Andes, I don´t know whether to start with an apology for not writing for such a long time or with telling you how beautiful it is over here. I think I´ll just go with the latter :) Bu...

agirlandherthumb

2012-02-25T21:51:58+00:00

For all you travellers, anarchists, hippies and vagabonds out there who will be roaming Europe this spring and/or summer, uncertain what to do with yourselves, I’ve just added a European Events Calender with activist camps, festivals and other big gatherings like Rainbows and the European Htichgathering –>here<– Comment with events and if they feel fitting, [...]

Hitchhiking

2012-02-20T00:07:27+00:00

The piece below was written for my first assignment on the MatadorU Travel Writing Course. The assignment was to write an ‘evergreen’ article – one with content that doesn’t quickly go out-of-date. People often ask me how to start hitchhiking – “so do I just, like, put my thumb out and wait?” Well yes… and [...]

vanishing,

2012-02-19T14:30:32+00:00

Edison’s anti-gravitation under-clothing, 1879

And I feel I have something to say before my destruction,
- Kendall, letter to Anais Nin.

Impossible things refuse to jump out of my hat any more.
I pass much of the time, these days, inside of this hat speaking with a rabbit over tea and biscuits. And time constantly tumbling past me in a flurry. I hold onto it sometimes and it drags me, half dead to the sea. I rub my eyes, astonished to still be alive, perplexed that this is my life and that it is not full as it should be, it is not bursting with passion in this moment. The greatest crime I could ever commit - licking away at the sun and murmuring about forgotten days, wishes made in the wilderness.
In this time, I am not a magician.

New Book: The First Time I Rode a Freight Train other hitchhiking stories

2012-02-17T18:19:07+00:00

A new book on hitchhiking.

agirlandherthumb

2012-02-14T14:07:00+00:00

Months have passed and all the while, this blog has sat patiently awaiting my words. A lot is on its way. I have been busy taking an online travel writing course with MatadorU these past 12 weeks and have written plenty of assignments for that, including the last piece I wrote on here – There’s [...]

Brasil

2012-02-14T06:08:21+00:00

Continued from the post Hitchhiking in the Amazon: A westerly pilgrimage down the Trans-Amazonian Highway

As the Trans-Amazonian highway faded away behind the old truck, we rolled down what was for me a new road: the Cuiabá-Santarém highway, or the BR-158. I was, as usual, in the bed of the pickup as we bumped along, accompanied by a large piece of welding equipment that rocked alarmingly back and forth as we bottomed out at the end of each hill.

Many drivers drove fast in the Amazon on substandard dirt roads, but this fellow gave a new meaning to the phrase reckless driving. As the way narrowed to roughly the width of the 4-wheeler trails they had on our deer lease back in East Texas (for those who don’t know: that’s narrow as fuck), we continued to zoom along at about 60 kph. Now, keep in mind that this road is a two way, and that around every curve (and I assure you, there were plenty) there could be a semi barreling down in the opposite direction, destined to take out an old pickup and a gringo hitchhiker. Yet somehow the driver always managed to avoid what seemed to be certain death, squeaking by impossibly close to the trucks while taking out low-hanging tree branches whom were foolish enough to grow in the pathway.

The only thing that seemed to occasion slowing down for my driver was bridges, which he took at the comparatively snail-like pace of about 15kph – before he gunned it once more as soon as the front tires left the wood. This meant, of course, that the back tires hit the elevated end of the bridge going considerably faster, and usually bounced me a few feet into the air. And that huge, heavy piece of welding equipment? The ropes holding it to the cab seemed to scream in an agony that sounded like death throes after every jolt. I could just picture the headlines: “Gringo hitchhiker with his whole life ahead of him crushed by giant welding machinery in the middle of nowhere.” Awesome, I thought, gritting my teeth as we zoomed across another bridge, I flew eighteen inches into the air, and those ropes got just a little bit weaker…

The only good thing about this ride was that it would take me to Moraes de Alamieda, where I would proceed to change highways once more and enter the Amazon’s remote gold mining sector. We rode for about five hours – yes, five hours of insane driving and the constant fear of being smooshed. The last two hours were dark, and it rained hard while at the same time giving me front row seats of what was easily the most impressive lightning show I had ever seen (again, remember the hunk of conductive metal I was currently right next to…)

When we finally arrived to Moraes I practically fell out the back of the truck, giving the driver a half-hearted falló patrão, I guess, since I didn’t die after all, and wandering off in search of something to eat. It was around nine-thirty and most of the restaurants were closed, but I did find a couple of people lounging around on their porch who were happy to cook my half-bag of pasta for me. I devoured it in short notice, thanked my culinary benefactors, then found my way over to the local gas station, where I hung my hammock in the troca de oleo and went to sleep.

The next morning I awoke with a sore rear end and a craving for coffee. It was raining, like always – that steady, heavy drizzle that you know is liable to stick around for days, that gives everything a depressing grey tone and turns the streets into quicksand. The rear end, unfortunately, had no immediate cure that I could see, but at least the morning worker at the oil change shop had a thermos of coffee. He pointed me in the direction of the nearest grocery store and construction surplus centre.

I had decided to do my shopping in Moraes, since I didn’t know if the things I needed would be available in the creporição. My list included the following:

Leather gloves (I had left my old pair back at the fazenda in Amapú)

Large pot for boiling water

Cup

Eating utensils

Coffee

Salt

Vegetable oil

As much rice as I could carry

My first stop was the construction surplus store in search of leather gloves, and I found the perfect pair of welding gloves (irony?) that were thick, sturdy, and came up to my elbows. Perfect for full-on protection from the jungle, so I wouldn’t have to worry about petty things like thorns and venomous reptiles, and would be able to plow, worry-free, through the underbrush like the wild animal I strove to be. The only problem was, they were R$25. I talked the girl behind the counter down to R$20, but as she wasn’t the owner, I couldn’t get her to go any lower. Twenty reais, in my humble opinion, was far too much to pay for gloves, so I set off to the supermarket to buy my other necessaries, resolved to come back when the owner was there and get my gloves for twelve reais, or bust.

The grocery store supplied me with everything I needed, and it turned out the most rice I could shove into my pack was ten kilos. This, along with my additional surplus, cost me thirty-eight reis and left me with an absurdly heavy load – probably around seventy-five pounds, all told. More than half my weight. I remember thinking, this can’t be good for my back, as sank up to my ankles in mud and left footprints of a obese person along the side of the road.

That just left the gloves. I went inside and found the owner, setting them on the counter before her.

“Twenty reais,” she said.

I emptied out my pocket of the last of my money, which came out to thirteen reais and forty-five cents. “And,” I said, whipping out my Bag O Foreign Coins that I had scavenged from my coin collection Stateside, “fifty escudos from Portugal.”

She picked up the fifty escudos, smiled, and said, “Sorry, but I can only accept reais.”

I dug around some more. “I’ll throw in a bicentennial Silver Dollar. You don’t see one of those every day – not even in the US!”

She smiled again. “What do you need these gloves so badly for, anyways?”

I told her.

“A raft?”

“Yep.”

“In creporição?”

“Mmhm.”

She examined the silver dollar. “Well, I suppose this is pretty neat. Take the gloves – and good luck with that raft!”

I smiled, thanked her, and walked out into the pouring rain, brand-new welding gloves slung over my shoulder. They had that velvety, new-leather smell to them, and were soft like a chinchilla. I turned west, my back aching with every step under the weight of my enormous, overloaded pack – bound for the snaking dirt path that led into the apparent green nothing of the Amazon rainforest – the rodoviária do ouro.

————————————————————–

“Waterfalls? Oh yeah, the Crepori has got plenty of those,” said the gold miner to me from his perch on the spare tire. “And rapids. They’ll swallow a canoe in half a second or less, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“Hm,” I said.

I had waited in the pouring rain for about half an hour with the two gold miners in Moraes, before a pickup stopped and we all piled in. I and my helmet bag had managed to stay relatively dry thanks to my tarp/raincoat, but my pack wasn’t so lucky. It sat before me in the damp, rusty bed of the truck, soaked and covered in mud.

The miners figured a raft on the Crepori was nothing short of suicide, and told me story after story of hellish river conditions for the duration of our trip together – which was about thirty minutes.

The rodoviária do ouro was in a deplorable state. Unlike the Trans-Amazonian Highway and the Cuiabá-Santarém Highway, which were currently being half-heartedly paved, this road was dirt and probably always would be. The pickup swerved through lakes of liquid that was too thin to be called mud and too thick to be called water. Wud, I suppose you would call it. Though my map called it the rodoviária do ouro, we passed a sign that said we were currently travelling on the PA-112, known colloquially as the trans-garampiense.

The rain continued to pour as we progressed through the wud, though it wasn’t so bad as before since the cab of the pickup blocked a considerable amount of the water. After about twenty kilometres, we arrived to a small town that the miners told me was called Jardim do Ouro – Garden of Gold.

Here in Jardim do Ouro our ride ended, and we were left by the driver to find our way across the Jamanxim River – a great massive thing blocking our path, swollen with rainy season overflow. The river had basically flooded the entire town – something that’s apparently completely normal in these parts. The people were prepared, it seemed – all the homes were high up on stilts, reminding me strongly of parts of Louisiana in the Atchafalaya Basin.

Down closer to the main river the water intruded into the street and people’s front yards, where a current carrying things like children’s toys and empty coke bottles formed eddies around signs and telephone poles. Elaborate walkways had been put up for people to get from house to store to house, consisting of five-gallon buckets weighted down with rocks and placed strategically in the eddies, connected by long planks. People sauntered lazily along the walkways, laughing and talking, apparently absolutely un-concerned about the fact they no longer lived along the river – they lived in it.

Jardim do Ouro

Dogs trotted along the walkways as well; they yelped and leapt into the river whenever people came by, preferring a swim to a kick in the ribs. Cats were more careful – you could see them scheming on porches, waiting for the perfect moment before scampering nimbly across the boards to the adjacent house, where there was somebody throwing out perfectly good fish bones. Children leapt joyfully off the walkways and into the river, where they would wait for the current to send them back to their front steps. Giggling, they ran back out along the planks to repeat the process, as men paddled their canoes by and tied them up to the kitchen sink. Even motorboats droned through from time to time, weaving between the telephone poles like skiers in the slaloms, their propellers on the ends of long poles which were pushed out of the water whenever it got too shallow.

The three or four buildings closest to the river were flooded past the roof, their weather vanes carving long V’s into the current; this reminded me of hurricanes, and I wondered how the homes weren’t damaged after six months a year in the river. A group of men sat at one of the bars, drinking beer and fishing out the windows with long bamboo poles. The rain fell harder than ever, pouring down off the tin roofs in great waterfalls and sending foamy white bubbles downstream, where they meandered around the walkways before crashing into a stilt and popping out of existence.

Water was everywhere – dripping, flowing, swirling, cascading off of anything and everything –the ground, the home, the church, the air – nothing was immune, and in Jardim do Ouro anything that dared declare itself dry was subjected to a leaky roof and sideways rain. This was a wet world. This was a water world.

I sat on the doorstep of somebody’s house, smoking my pipe as I decided what to do next. There was a ferry across the river that left in an hour’s time, I was told by a carpenter whose shop was ankle-deep in murky water filled with woodchips. On the other side of the river the road continued for another hundred kilometres to Mundico Coelho. I stared out over the Jamanxim; it was wide, smooth, and looked very deep. I thought about the miner’s warnings, about the rapids of the Crepori – and the waterfalls.

Now, I had figured that in the case of waterfalls, I would dock the raft a few hundred metres upstream and portage her overland down to the bottom. The only problem was, I had no nautical charts of the river – and therefore had no idea where the hazards actually were. What if something snuck up on me and I was unable to get out of the water in time? Over I go…

This was a troubling thought. My pipe went out as rouge rain drops zeroed in on the one thing I really needed to stay dry, and I tapped wet ashes out onto the doorstep and thought about how it must feel to drown at the bottom of a waterfall.

————————————————————–

An hour later the ferry plowed off sideways into the strong current in the centre of the Jamanxim River, loaded with a handful of motorcycles and a semi sagging under the weight of thirty or forty tons of timber. I watched it go from one of the plank walkways; my pipe had gone out again.

I felt guilty giving up on the Crepori without actually going there – but the stories of the townspeople in Jardim do Ouro matched those of the miners: waterfalls, rapids, and apparently Satan himself kept a summer home there. I had deduced that it was pointless to travel to a river I knew was un-navigable, with the express intention of navigating it, on a home-built vessel with limited maneuverability, and with no maps or charts of the unpopulated wilderness where I was headed. There is a fine line between adventure and suicide; gamble, by all means – but at least make sure the odds are in your favour.

The Jamanxim was looking like a nice alternative, however. I knew from countless hours studying the blue lines on my map of Brazil that the Jamanxim flowed into the Tapajós about a hundred kilometres south of Itaituba, and I had already marked it as a backup in case the Crepori didn’t work out as I had hoped. I asked someone waiting on the ferry about waterfalls, and he told me that the Jamanxim was smooth like this all the way to the Tapajós. It didn’t take long before I was back on track and scanning the tree line for balsas. My hatchet sat in the side pocket of my bloated pack; I could almost hear it begging to be used. Time to get to work.

———————————————————-

I spotted a grove of balsa trees behind a row of houses about 300 metres from the main river. They seemed to be in about five feet of water – but hell, I was already soaked to the bone, and a swim wouldn’t hurt anything. I located the house immediately in front of the grove, which was also a little store, and asked the owner dozing in his hammock if I could cut the trees.

“A jangada, eh?” said the owner, using what I would soon learn is the Brazilian word for “log raft.” “Well, I don’t own those trees, you’ll have to go out into the jungle over there – (he pointed out of town, back towards Moraes) if you want to cut trees.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “And one more question…I’ve got this bag of pasta, see…”

—————————————

Twenty minutes later I finished my meal of rice, meat, and farinha, and had changed into my jungle gear in the bathroom. Monserrat, the owner, assured me my pack was safe with him whilst I went balsa hunting in the jungle. The rain kept coming down as I walked down the muddy road, headed for the dark green strip of forest on the horizon, hatchet in hand and machete bouncing merrily at my side.

As I got closer I spotted a cluster of telltale broad leaves sticking out the top of the jungle, ten or fifteen yards in. I veered off the dirt road, hacked through 100 metres of ten-foot razor grass and assorted vines, and entered the jungle. Here, at least, the razor grass stopped, but to get that fifteen yards to the balsa was no easy feat, with walls of vines that refused to yield to the machete blocking my path, twisting their way around my legs and ankles and tripping me up on every step.

Finally I made it to the tree; she was a monster. God, she was perfect, but how the hell was I supposed to get her out of the jungle, through 100 metres of razor grass, and 1 km back to the Jamanxim? I didn’t know, and in the end decided that getting the tree back to the river was impossible, and so continued through the jungle in search of a more manageable specimen.

I found another cluster of smaller balsas about twenty metres away in a small clearing that had been planted with pineapple. These trees were more than doable, and so after hacking off a thorny vine that was winding up the trunk, I chopped the tree down.

She was light and easy to manage, and I had gotten her out of the jungle and through the razor grass in just fifteen minutes, having used the path cut earlier by my machete to exit. Once I got back to the road I heaved the large end of the trunk onto my left shoulder and proceeded to drag the tree back into town.

Oh, the stares I got. As if I’m not already different enough, with white skin and blue eyes, here I was dragging a bloody tree through a flooded village in the middle of the Amazon in aviator boots, camo pants, and a boonie cap, with numerous cutting implements tucked into my hemp belt and an unlit tobacco pipe jutting from my mouth. As I passed every dog in the world descended upon me, barking like mad and snapping at my heels – probably confirming the villager’s suspicions that I was, indeed, the Antichrist.

I finally got the tree back to the port, where I tied it to the carpenter’s shop after securing permission from the carpenter. The current swished by and I could feel a couple of hundred eyes upon me, and whispers from the bars, the word extrangero and jangada both being used numerous times.

On my walk back to the jungle I deemed the other balsas in the clearing too small to be used for my timber raft, and so headed back to the road in search of other candidates. I followed another mud path that peeled off the road to the south, which came out in a cow pasture about 500 metres downstream from the port. I saw a balsa growing right next to the river, and asked a group of men lounging around nearby on motorcycles if it was all right if I cut it down.

“Why are you asking us?” one of them said. “It’s just a little tree. Cut it down, do whatever you want.”

Well all right, then. I cut it down and dragged it to the river about ten metres away. After a moment’s consideration, I decided to leave this tree here and head into the jungle on the other side of the pasture in search of more, with the intention of floating the trees I cut the half-kilometre back to the port at the end of the day.

The grass in the cow pasture was thigh-high and full of ticks, but when I got into the jungle I realized I had just hit the jackpot. Huge balsas grew everywhere, their trunks two feet around or more – the perfect size for my raft. I located the one closest to the edge of the jungle and began chopping.

This was by far the biggest tree I had cut down so far, and it took a good half hour to fall her with my little hatchet. After I had cut about three inches into the base of the trunk, one chop apparently hit some sort of tree-jugular, and tea-coloured water spurted from the crack like blood. A few chops later I heard a distinctive pop reverberate from the centre of the tree, followed by successive faster pops, before the tree groaned, leaned, and plunged into the jungle with a thunderous crash. But my work here was just getting started.

Being as this tree was very tall, her top branches had gotten caught in the branches of the surrounding trees – meaning the balsa didn’t fall all the way down. Five metres up the trunk where I wanted to cut was still two metres off the ground. I stood, scratching my head and pondering for a few moments, before deciding that the only solution to this unforeseen problem was to shimmy up the trunk and start cutting from there.

This was far more easily said than done, as a mess of thorny vines and other unpleasant vegetation clogged the first two metres of tree, which I had to hack away at with my machete while simultaneously clinging precariously to the trunk with my legs and swatting at huge clouds of mosquitoes whom, it seemed, took a particular liking to biting the very back of my neck and flying directly up my nose.

Despite these minor discomforts, I scooted my way up the trunk and began chopping awkwardly at the spot I had judged was roughly five metres from the base. After a few hundred swings, the trunk groaned and bent, and I sunk down one metre closer to the forest floor, whereupon I dismounted the tree and cut the last of it from a standing position.

Now that she was cut, I needed to drag her back to the river. Unlike the first two trees, which had been a breeze, this monster was a real workout. I tried heaving the tree onto my shoulder and dragging it behind me, but it was so heavy I crumpled under the weight like an empty coke can. I sufficed with holding it cradled in my arms, my fingers laced in leather gloves below it, and heaving with all my might until my energy ran out – which was usually no more than a metre or two of dragging.

As if being ridiculously heavy wasn’t enough, the tree often caught on vines and branches (usually just as I was in the apex of my hauling sprint, causing me to fall directly into the mud), and I would have to go back with my machete and chop away at the offending botanical barriers. The only direction she would go was straight ahead – for if I tried at any time to turn her with the small, muddy cow trail I was currently slipping her along, her sheer length would become caught on some tree or another and make it impossible to change direction. Hence, I went straight as an arrow – a lovely direction which took me through pleasant jungle features including, but not limited to, poison ivy, razor-like vines, foot-long thorns, huge nests of fire ants, and beehives.

After half an hour I finally emerged into the cow pasture, covered with sweat, scrapes, and fire ant bites. Just when I was looking forward to the cool rain out in the open, the clouds vaporized into nothing and the sun beat down upon me. Of course.

Here I took a brief rest from tree hauling and walked ahead to plot my route through the pasture. The distance overland directly back to where I had cut the other tree was roughly three times the distance to the nearest part of the Janamxim, which was a flooded swamp about 300 metres upstream from where I wanted to go. I decided to drag the balsa as far as the swamp, where I would float her around a small bend and to my growing stockpile downstream. Happy that I would at least get to go swimming, I walked back to my monster tree and prepared to continue my trunk-toiling.

The pasture was much easier, since it was free of vines. Each time I picked the trunk up I grunted loudly – an ugly, sweaty creature – and sprinted as fast as I could to various landmarks ahead that I had designated as being my rest points.

“Ok,” I said out loud to a cow nearby, who was dully observing my labours and pooping. “I’m going to get this tree as far as that old stump over there.” The cow did not respond in any way whatsoever, so I maneuvered the balsa into my arms and commenced sprinting, making what I’m sure were frightening noises as that tree just got heavier and heavier and that bloody stump just stayed right where it was, no thank you, I don’t want a tree nearby. And then I was suddenly there, and I dropped the tree, narrowly avoiding crushing my own feet before collapsing into a heap and breathing as if I was in labor, giving birth to a child the size of a fucking tree, or something.

This went on for fifteen minutes or so, with various other old stumps and bushes also having the dubious honor of being possibly the last thing I would see before I had an aneurysm and massive hernia simultaneously – but then I finally arrived to the swamp, where the tree caught stubbornly on the only vines in the entire area before slipping into the water and floating – and look, I can move the bastard with just one hand now!

Perhaps no man has ever leapt into a murky swamp in the Amazon with as much joy as I did then. I didn’t care if there were leeches and electric eels and mysterious, smooshy submerged obstacles – my tree was floating and I could move it with just one hand.

Swamp

I followed the edge of the swamp with one arm slung over the tree, my aviator boots trodding cautiously along the soggy bottom of the black water. Generally, I was up to my neck in the mire, but sometimes I crossed a drop-off and I had to cling to the trunk and awkwardly doggy paddle my way along until I touched bottom again.

The key to navigating in the swamp, I soon learned, was to be close enough to shore where you could touch bottom, and far enough away so that you were out of the cross-hatching of plants and vines which grew around the edges. These vines, which were annoying enough since they wrapped their tendrils around ankles and legs as if they were consciously trying to impede you, were also important to avoid since they usually housed masses of floating fire ant nests whom had been flooded out by the rainy season thunderstorms, and whom took delight in invading my tree and non-submerged body parts in a painful biting bonsai.

But these, as I mentioned before, were only minor discomforts – now I was cool, and no longer risking death by sheer exhaustion. The swamp smelled fertile and full of life; each step I took was silent, and I glided through the water, feeling crocodile-like with only my head slipping noiselessly across the surface. I felt comfortable. I felt happy. I felt at home.

I rounded the corner of the little bend, and now I could see my stockpile of one tree. Five minutes later the monster was lain next to the smaller tree, and my work was done. I looked at my watch; it had been almost four hours since I had first started chopping down the big tree.

Two down. Six to go.

——————————————————————–

I went back to Monserrt’s house after that, being as it was nearly dark by that time. I was soaked and covered with mud and duckweed. Monserrat grinned toothily at me as I came up.

“Find some trees?”

“Found some trees,” I confirmed.

“Heavy?”

“Sorta.”

I changed out of my wet clothing and sat down on the doorstep to smoke my pipe; at least the construction was underway. I planned to bring some lengths of rope the next day, which, if used correctly, would help me to get the trees out of the jungle a bit less painfully. First, however, I needed to secure food and lodgings for myself in Jardim do Ouro. Monserrat seemed very nice, and I decided to offer him a trade.

“One old iPhone, chipless, in exchange for food and permission to hang my hammock on your porch while I’m here building my raft,” I said to Monserrat, handing him the phone. The iPhone was my grandfather’s old one, which he had given to me to use with WiFi, him having upgraded to whatever new ridiculous model Apple has out nowadays – but WiFi wasn’t easy to come by in these parts, and anyways, I had a laptop. The iPhone could be a valuable bargaining chip in a place where zero iPhones exist.

“Hm! Well I suppose so,” said Monserrat, taking the phone. “Want some dinner?”

“I’d love some,” I said, happy that at least I would have food to fuel the toil of the upcoming days in Jardim do Ouro.

———————————————————-

The next morning I awoke to coffee and a pack of crackers, which I finished before changing back into my wet gear and heading back to the cow pasture, sure to remember to bring about twenty metres of rope with me this time.

I returned to the jungle and chose another balsa to cut down. This one was around the same size as the one from the day before – perhaps a tad smaller – but I had the method down and the process sped up considerably.

In order to prevent this tree from falling onto the others in the area, I looked around the forest and chose the sector with the least amount of sizable vegetation. I then cut a large notch in the side of the tree facing this area, and tied about ten metres of rope in a timber hitch as high up the trunk as I could reach.

After this I proceeded to chop away at the opposite side of the tree, keeping a close eye on the high branches so I would know when I had weakened the trunk sufficiently. After awhile I heard almost inaudible twisting sounds coming from the heart of the balsa, and I knew she was close to coming down. Tucking my hatchet back into my belt, I put my gloves on and wrapped the end of the rope around my hands, then went to stand about ten feet away from the trunk of my future raft. Pulling the cord taut, I braced my boot on a sapling, took a deep breath, and commenced heaving.

At first the tree hardly moved at all; just a centimeter towards me, and then back in the other direction. The goal here was to get her to fall towards me, where she would hopefully crash all the way down to the forest floor without becoming entangled in the high branches of other trees. If she fell in the other direction life would become very difficult for me, as there were a number of huge, ten-foot wide samaoma trees in the fall path of the balsa.

I heaved again; she moved again, very slightly – but this time I utilized the leftover momentum the tree had from my first tug and added it to another tug immediately afterward. This time she moved a little more, and I kept adding momentum to the swinging of the tree until she was rocking back and forth like there was a hurricane coming. Suddenly I heard a massive snap, and I braced both my boots on the surrounding saplings and pulled the tree towards me with all the strength I had.

There was a pause, and time seemed to stand still for a moment; every muscle in my body stood taught, veins popped out of my arms and neck, and my eyes were squinted shut. My teeth clenched painfully together, and my breath was held tightly in my lungs as I put every ounce of strength in my body towards pulling that rope. Suddenly there were two sharp cracks – one right after the other. The saplings I had been bracing against had snapped under the pressure of my boots, and I fell flat on my back onto the jungle floor.

I could see the top branches of the balsa above me silhouetted against the grey sky, swaying, as if in slow motion; then there was a thunderous bang followed by the distinctive grainy twisting sound of wood being bent under tremendous weight. I saw the branches start to lean towards me – directly towards me – and barely had time to roll out of the way as the tree slammed down into the spongy soil where I had lain just seconds before.

I stood up, brushing assorted ants and dirt off my face. The tree had flattened four or five saplings, and had fallen exactly where I had wanted it to go. The trunk was just a few inches above the forest floor. I dropped the rope, which was still wound tightly around my hands, and tried hard to slow my racing heart. Satisfying. Exhilarating.

——————————————-

After cutting the top off the balsa, I took my two sections of rope and tied each of them in a timber hitch around the end of the trunk, with each hitch opposite the other so that the two ropes came off opposing sides of the log. I wrapped a rope around each hand, with my back facing the tree, and ran a cord over each shoulder, creating a simple but effective harness for pulling. I leaned forward, so that my shoulders took the bulk of the pressure and my hands just held the rope in place; then – once again – I heaved.

At first I went nowhere; my boots slipped in the mud and I fell down for the fifteenth time in the past 24 hours. No traction. This was a problem, but not a very complex one; I simply cut a few lengths of sapling and anchored them into the mud, giving my boots at least something to grip into. After heaving again the tree moved, and I gained enough momentum so that when the saplings ran out my boots, now with the tree already moving, found traction somewhere on the muddy cow trail.

Getting the tree out of the jungle was much easier with the ropes, and with the help of my machete I even managed to turn a few times. Then we were in the cow pasture again, and I got the balsa into the swamp with only two stops to rest. Feeling very Apocalypse Now-ish, I floated the tree through the swamp with just my boonie cap poking out of the water, breathing through my nose and wondering how many leeches I would have to pick off my legs once I came back to shore (answer: zero. Was secretly a little bit disappointed).

I had the method down; all I was missing now were a few more trees.

——————————————————————–

During the next day I continued to cut balsas from the jungle and drag them back to my staging area. I had the method down, sure – but after three more trees I began having trouble finding suitable trees in the immediate jungle. I had emptied the first twenty or thirty yards of decent-sized balsa trees, and consequently was forced deeper into the forest, away from the cow trail, in search of more raftable candidates.

One of these trees I found after a long search through thick vines and underbrush. Perfect size, very straight, no offshoots. I cut her down, trying to get her to fall into what seemed to be the clearest sector of jungle. Unfortunately the tree was taller than I had figured, and caught as it fell on a medium-sized tree I hadn’t been able to see through the underbrush.

Fell is a very liberal verb to describe what this tree did. Leaned is probably more accurate; the trunk was still at an 80° angle. Frustrated, I tied a timber hitch around the base and tried to wrestle it down a little further, to no avail. The only solution, it seemed, was to cut down the other tree as well. Grumbling to myself, I cut my way to the base of the offending tree and began hacking at it as well. It was only a little smaller than the balsa, and had much harder wood. Getting it to fall took a good hour – and when it did, it caught on another tree further down! Argh! Would I have to clear-cut my way out of this damned jungle?

This other tree was considerably bigger than both of the previous ones, and I quickly decided that I would not go to the trouble of cutting that one down, too. Instead I returned to the balsa tree, which was now leaning at a 60° angle, or thereabouts. As I did with the first big balsa, I climbed up the trunk until I was at the place I wanted to start chopping, and did so. Being as I was at an awkward angle this was rather cumbersome, and I couldn’t swing the hatchet like I needed to. It was slow going, but eventually I made it through. The unfortunate part was that, unlike the other trunks I had cut (which slowly twisted apart, and never snapped) this one gave a crack and broke clean in two, after a particularly angry blow from my hatchet. Remember that I was on the trunk, and that it was around four metres above the ground…

The tree fell with me straddling it, clinging on for dear life like Dr. Strangelove riding the nuke out the bay doors of a B-52. I squinted my eyes shut and braced for impact, hoping my legs wouldn’t become trapped under the tree – when we stopped just before the ground. I looked behind me; a massive thorn bush had stopped the trees’ decent. I hopped off the trunk and gathered my rope.

I never thought I’d say it, but thank God for thorn bushes!

————————————————————————

As I was arming the timber hitches, I heard the sound of a chainsaw coming from nearby. I immediately grew worried.

Earlier that day, I had just finished floating the fifth balsa to the staging area, and noticed that there were only three trees where there should have been four.

“Hey!” I said to one of the men lounging around nearby. “Where’d my other tree go?”

He shrugged.

“You didn’t see anybody here?”

“Nope.”

I clenched my teeth and looked around. I saw sawdust. It didn’t take a lot of figuring to figure out someone had cut up one of my balsas – and absconded with the pieces! Each tree – hours of work and sweat and mosquito bites – and now there’s a balsa thief wandering around with a chainsaw.

This was not welcome news.

Furious, I told the loiterer that these were my trees, and that it was a lot of work to bring them here from the jungle, and to not let anybody come sniffing around my goddamn balsa logs.

“Okay gringo, tranquilo, nobody is going to take your trees.”

I grumbled angrily under my breath and headed back in the direction of the jungle. “My trees,” I reminded him before disappearing back into the high pasture grass.

“Yeah, OK, your trees, I get it.” As I slid through the grass, I heard him mutter something under his breath that sounded like gringo doido – crazy gringo.

It wasn’t the first time I had heard that word.

————————————————————————-

I stood there a couple of hundred yards into the jungle, listening to the sound of a chainsaw and thinking about my missing balsa. All of a sudden I was sure that the balsa thief had returned, and was stealing more of my trees! Enraged, I threw down the rope and plowed through the jungle as fast as I could, hacking indiscriminately at all plants in my path with my dulling machete. I burst out of the forest and into the pasture, heading towards my staging area at a fast run through the waist high pasture grass, still hacking away at the occasional vine or branch that was imprudent enough to try and impede me. Soon I flew out of the grass and into the mud of the staging area, where I slid to a stop. I stood there in the mire, breathing heavily, covered from head to toe with mud and minor scrapes, clenching a machete in one hand and a hatchet in the other.

I saw nothing. The sound of the chainsaw continued; it was coming from the town. My balsas were all accounted for. No thieves, it seemed.

The loitering man was still there; he was fishing now. He gave me a look, shook his head, and this time I clearly heard the words gringo doido.

Okay, maybe I was doido. But these were my trees at stake here…

———————————————————

When I returned to the jungle, I realized that I had…erm…lost my tree. Yes, I had left the jungle so quickly before that I neglected to remember my landmarks and now, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find the spot where that perfect, straight balsa tree –and my rope – lay in wait. I found trails that led straight to all of the other trees I had cut – but the trail I had left to my most recent botanical conquest continued to elude me.

Before you accuse me of being completely without sense of direction, I must inform you that in the jungle, there is no direction. There are no points of reference. Everywhere you can only see green and vines, and trees that look the same as all the others. Every once and awhile you find something to use as a landmark: a weird, twisted stump, or a tree that grows at a perfect 45° angle, or an enormous beehive. You remember which side of that landmark you pass, and the next landmark after that one, and must be sure to cut a vine or some sort of plant every five feet or so, leaving a trail to follow later. But there is no north, south, east, or west. Even if you go into the jungle correctly oriented with east and west, after half an hour inside, what you think is west is probably anything but.

Balsa hunting, passing landmark code named "the tree with the ridiculous roots."

The problem is, you make little turns to avoid vines or thorns or fallen trees, and when you try to turn back to keep the straight line going you over-correct, or under-correct. Sometimes you turn without even realizing it. To walk a straight line in the jungle is an impossible task without a compass. After a fifteen or twenty minutes you’re always going in a completely different direction – and sometimes you end up popping out of the jungle in almost the exact same place you went in, having made a 360° circle despite the fact you were consciously trying for a straight line.

Notwithstanding, I was determined to find my tree. It had been a lot of work to get her down – and my rope! I didn’t want to lose that. So I hacked my way around in circles for about an hour, discovering old landmarks and coming across new, completely unfamiliar ones. Finally, I found the last landmark I remembered – a tree, growing out of a tree, growing out of another tree – and managed to locate the misplaced timber at last.

Happy, I picked up my rope – and promptly forgot which way the river was.

———————————————————————-

After reorienting myself, I began hauling the log out of the forest – but ran into yet another obstacle: the jungle was too thick! Back on the edge, there was always a few clear spaces where I could maneuver the tree around and eventually get it out. But here? Walls of vines and stands of saplings growing less than an inch apart! Just to get the tree two yards, I spent fifteen minutes cutting a pathway. And I had a couple hundred yards of this to go until I reached the edge of the jungle. This was going to take days!

Dejected, I sat on the trunk of the perfect balsa. Sighing, I undid the timber hitches, then stood up and followed my trail. I passed the tree growing out of a tree growing out of another tree, the random mossy boulder, the tree with the ridiculous roots, and the rotting log with a stick I hammered into it with my hatchet. Soon I was back on the cow path, and emerged at the edge of the jungle; the perfect balsa would never make it out of the forest. What a waste.

—————————————————————————–

Good balsa trees continued to elude me for the rest of the day – except for two, which were pretty good, only when I chopped them down they refused to fall all the way – one of them fell all of one inch before becoming entangled in the branches of some massive nearby tree. No matter how much brush I cleared or saplings I hewed, or how hard I tried to shimmy up the barely leaning trunk for a high-altitude chop, I simply could not get any of them to fall all the way to the ground; consequently, I was forced to abandon them – though this was not without much reluctance.

Damn damn damn damn.

At the end of the day I retired back to Monserrat’s house without having managed to successfully retrieve a single tree from the forest the entire afternoon. I now had a total of four trees.

Originally, I had planned to construct the raft with eight logs, but since the four I had cut so far were so massive, I figured that six would probably do the job equally well. Also, the first tree that I had cut I had deemed to be too small after further consideration, so I left it with the carpenter. Therefore, I needed two more before I could start lashing them together. As I sat on Monserrat’s porch eating my dinner, I wondered where the hell I was going to find two more good-sized balsas that I could actually get into the river.

Word spread fast around Jardim do Ouro of me and my rafting plans. As I sat in my chair people passed by, smiling and friendly now that they knew I was not the Antichrist after all, though all the dogs still hated me. They would ask questions (the people, not the dogs), usually all about the why of the whole project, to which I responded vaguely, since I really didn’t have a solid answer to that.

If was from these passerby that I learned of the Jamanxim River’s true nature.

“It’s called Ao Portão do Inferno,” said the fisherman seriously. “A waterfall, twenty metres high. You’re never getting around that. Nobody gets around that, not even with canoes.”

“But I thought the river was all smooth!” I protested.

“Who told you that?” said the fisherman, raising his eyebrows.

I shrugged. “Somebody at the port.”

He snorted. “That person knows nothing. I’ve been navigating this river for forty years – and I promise you that the Jamanxim is most certainly not flat. It’s a wild river with many waterfalls and rapids.” He sipped his juice and pointed at me. “This thing that you’re doing, it’s not adventure – it’s suicide. You’re on a raft, you have no motor; the first waterfall you come to will suck you right down.” He shrugged. “There’s nothing you can do about it, you’ve got no control. And I promise you, my friend,” he finished his juice and set the cup deliberately down on the windowsill, giving me a solemn look. “Once you go down…you’re not coming back up.”

“Hm,” I said.

————————————————————–

The next day I went out and managed to find two more balsas to cut that actually fell down. Granted, I had to walk three or four kilometres upriver to find them – but at least those kilometres were mostly floated on the return trip. I had the trees ready for assembly by around 1500 hrs, and had them completely lashed together by nightfall. The only obstacle that surfaced during the day had been a shortage of rope, but this problem was solved by breaking into my reserve para-cord, of which I had a few hundred feet in my pack. The finished craft was about five metres long by one metre wide.

I stepped a foot on board; the raft did not sink. I then boarded the vessel and found that it floated about ½ inch above the water with my weight. Satisfied, I snapped a photo and retired for the day.

—————————————————————-

I dreamed of water

a roaring world of foam and froth and sheets upon sheets upon sheets of falling water – a wet world, a water world, and I can’t tell where I am or where the surface is, and I try to walk – I try to move, but there’s just too much water, and I feel desperately around me, my frantic, clammy hands searching for something – anything! – a point of reference, a solidity to grasp a hold of, to cling to, to save me from these crushing cascades of white but there’s nothing, just frothing liquid pressing down on everything, on everywhere, and the weight is too much so I fall to my knees – only suddenly there’s no ground, even, no up or down or left or right, just more water, and I’m swirling around, the violent arms pulling at every cell in my body, tearing mercilessly in every direction, slipping slender tendrils into my nose, my ears, my mouth, my throat – they grab my lungs and clench their fists, then a swish of white and froth, a roar that fills my ears and squeezes my eardrums with deliberate malice, and now there is no more pulling, just pressing pressing from every direction, crushing, squeezing every inch of my body so I can’t move anything, anywhere, anyhow, and the pressure is inside me, pressing from inside my chest and outside, too – and I try to scream but I can’t open my mouth and I can’t close it either, there’s just no moving of any kind anywhere anyhow – a flash of agony – the pressure is gone, the white water is gone, the frothing angry fingers are gone, the cruel roar stops abruptly, and there is only black and silence and nothi

ing, trying so hard to see outside as the rain falls from the porch and beats holes into the dirt where it lands – gaping holes, holes filled with black water that grow bigger and bigger, swallowing up the edges of the porch like whirlpools, and the rain’s falling harder now and the black whirlpools roar a hollow, grim roar with no bottom or end or beginning, and the house breaks apart, the ropes holding my hammock snapping and I careen int

o the other side of the river, but no matter how hard I paddle the land remains distant and my raft surges up and down the waves as the thunder blasts and water crashes over m

y eyes staring and seeing only blue and I can feel the cold wet pressing into the sockets I c

an’t move can’t breath I

woke up to the sounds of frogs and crickets in the bog surrounding Jardim do Ouro. The night was still and the stars peeped out from behind invisible black clouds. No wind; the stillness was absolute. I could almost see the hot, humid air part as I breathed, see it as it swirled around, like smoke, as my breath drifted out into the stillness before coming to a slow, drifting halt.

So calm.

So soft.

So gentle.

———————————————————————

0900 hrs. My stomach was full of coffee and crackers, my feet wet inside my perpetually muddy aviator boots. In my hands I clenched a long pole, cut from the jungle. Beneath my feet was a long log raft with a few boards nailed to the middle, forming an improvised deck.

I floated slowly away from the staging area, poling the raft along in the sluggish side current of the Jamanxim. It was test run time, and the plan was to take her as far as the port of Jardim do Ouro, half a kilometre downstream.

As I walked out to the raft, the sky had been clear and sunny; however, as soon as I pushed off into the current, a strong wind manifested from nowhere, and dark, almost black clouds advanced upon the river from a blurry, miserable-looking horizon. I hadn’t been on the raft five minutes when the water came.

Impossibly hard rain, and wind howling like the apocalypse. I squinted through the water and tried to keep the raft in the side current and away from the swiftly flowing middle of the river. The rain was thick and fat, and I could see little further than five metres. The wind blew west – pushing me and the raft further and further out into the river. My speed was increasing. The trees were moving noticeably faster past the raft.

I poled with all my might, but suddenly the river was too deep and the pole didn’t touch the bottom, and I drifted downriver with almost no control of the vessel. There was a bend ahead, and on the other side lay the port. The current was taking me further and further from shore. I began to feel the tiny, sharp teeth of panic nibbling at my brain.

I passed an area with many large trees in the flooded river, and knew this was my last chance to get out of the current. Grasping in my teeth the rope I had used the night before to dock the raft in the staging area, I leapt into the river and swam with all my might towards the trees. I was fifty metres upstream, and still had ten metres to go to reach the trees. The current yanked at my arms and legs

violent arms pulling at every cell

and I swam with all my strength towards the east bank of the swirling

frothing

Jamanxim River. Five metres to go; the rope pulled taught. I was out of slack. I held the rope in my left hand as the trees approached, and reached as far as I could for one of the overhanging boughs with my free right hand.

There was a moment when time froze – a still, snapshot in my brain of my hand, reaching for the bough of the tree as the current whisks me by, so close, almost able to reach it – and then I can feel the bark in my hand and the memory continues in normal speed as I grab a hold and squeeze the tree as tightly as I can. The raft continued downstream, and I managed to quickly tie the other end of the docking rope to the bough of the tree before the full weight of the raft in the current weighed upon the opposing end.

Breathing heavily, I tried to figure out what to do next. I looked around me; I was, it seemed, entirely surrounded by river. On the other side of this small grove of flooded trees was a flooded house, up well past it’s eves in the river. Another tree protruded from the water on the east side of the house.

I didn’t want to lose the raft I had worked so hard on. I must save it, improve it. This could work. This would work. I climbed up onto the low bough of the tree, leaned against the trunk, and began towing the raft back towards the tree against the current. After five minutes or so I managed to wrestle her almost close enough to board – but boarding was not on the agenda.

I worked my way around the tree trunk to the opposite side, where it was a relatively straight shot to the flooded house and other tree. On this side of the tree was the less powerful side current; all I needed to do was get the raft into this current and I would be able to save her. This was managed with mostly brute force, and I ended up simply pulling the raft through the thin overhanging branches until the ones that impeded it broke.

Now we were in the side current; I jumped back into the river and towed the raft behind me as I swam for shore. We went about five metres before the current brought the raft to the flooded house, where it became wedged between the building and the tree. This, it seemed, was as far as we would go for the day.

I tied the raft to the tree, jumped back into the river, and swam with the current back to Jardim do Ouro, as the rain pounded down upon the brown waters of the river, and the thunder blasted from the sky and rocked the deepest corners of my soul.

——————————————————–

I sat during lunch on Monserrat’s porch as the rain continued. I thought about the raft, the river, and the fisherman’s warnings.

Once you go down…you’re not coming back up.

But portage…I can portage…

Once you go down….

…I can get out of the river goddamnit, I can portage…

…you’re not coming back up.

I remembered the feeling of the current yanking at my heels

tearing mercilessly in every direction

and how I just barely managed to grab the bough of the tree…

…I can get out! I CAN FUCKING PORTAGE.

Once you go down…

…you’re not coming back up.

—————————————————–

Three days later. Itaituba, Pará.

As I sit in the sunlight and write, I wonder if I’m going to see the logs float by Itaituba. I wonder if, after I unlashed the raft to save the rope and sent them solo down the Jamanxim, my balsa trees made it down all the waterfalls, the portão de inferno, and the 23 kilometres of the Maranhão Grande rapids on the Tapajós River. I wonder if they got caught up in low hanging branches, or if they were smashed to bits at the gates of hell. I suppose I’ll never know.

Monserrat wasn’t surprised when I told him I would dismantle the raft. “It’s a smart decision,” he had said, patting me on the back. Before I left he gave me back the iPhone. “I will never use it, anyhow,” he said, smiling.

I sloshed through the puddles of wud on the rodoviária do ouro in a gas truck as Jardim do Ouro vanished into the jungle mist. I had been there five days.

“So, what were you doing in that little town, anyways?” the friendly trucker asked me with a smile.

“Same thing everybody else is doing in creporição,” I said, running my fingers through my hair and watching the plastic Virgin Mary hanging off the windshield swing around in circles. “Chasing dreams.”

“Gold prospector?”

I smiled. “Sure.”

He nodded knowingly. “River didn’t live up to your expectations, did it?”

“You might say that.”

The trucker downshifted as we dipped into a pothole. “Well, don’t feel too bad. Panning ain’t an exact science. But you know, sometimes you just gotta trust in the Good Lord, and everything you need will come right when you need it most.”

I nodded.

“So where to?”

“The Tapajós River.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Not so much gold in the Tapajós.”

I nodded. “Yeah, well sometimes you’ve just got to trust your instincts, you know?”

He chuckled. “Hey amigo, if you never give up, you’ll eventually succeed.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

——————————————————-

São Luis do Tapajós is 41 kilometres upriver from Itaituba, and is situated at the end of the Maranhão Grande rapids. As I left Itaituba after a week of busking and writing, I wondered what it was like. Flooded, like Jardim do Ouro? Were there balsa trees nearby? Who would host me, feed me, cook my rice? Would people help me, or would I do the work alone? Was the jungle close to the river?

I’m not a religious man, but as the trucker put it, sometimes you just gotta trust in the Good Lord to send help your way. Like panning for gold, life ain’t an exact science – but if you never give up, you’ll eventually succeed.

New town, new river, new raft. And that jungle air, it never smelled so sweet…

-MN

Reference Maps

Location of Jardim do Ouro and creporição

Location of Jardim do Ouro and creporição in Brazil

Filed under: Brazil

me levanto,

2012-02-09T02:11:23+00:00

Fritz Goro - Sooty tern chick standing forlornly as it waits for its parents from their daily hunting on the Great Barrier Reef, 1950.

/.
I felt I was myself a crawling insect doomed to perish, seized by destruction in the midst of a whole world ready to go to sleep.
-Knut Hamsun

I collected herbs from the mountains and dropped them into my breast pocket of my coat. Every time I put it on now, I am taken back.
Each morning I cycle to the sea and work on my Spanish for at least an hour. When Siberia leaves, I will begin to run again. And there are certain books that I pick up that remind me of heightened senses. I try my best to avoid them when the sinking days are around, as if drowning myself voluntarily.
The sacred white tea that was found behind a bakery in Denmark is with me here, six months on. It still clears my eyes, steadies my breaths. I drink it rarely, in the important times.
This is an important time. I am no longer headless but I wish the existential crises' would just shoo. There have been so many over the last couple of years. Does it matter what I'm doing with my life? Shoo, shoo. It does not help in the slightest that there is a dog across the road with exactly the same problem. He and I howl together often but he's far more persistent than me and rarely sleeps.

You’ve been had big time!

2012-02-07T08:49:32+00:00

Just a couple of days ago I talked with some british folks about renewable energy and the german energy policy. Apparently German polititians finaly understood what the people have demanded for decades already. At least since the protests against the planed nuclear power plant in Wyhl in the early 1970s there is a big movement against nuclear power in Germany.
Ever since, the polititians repeated their mantra: “Without nucelar power we will have blackouts.”

Ignoring the fact that other major european countries do not use nuclear power in their energy mix. Ignoring the huge potential of renewable energy. Ignoring the dangers that nuclear energy brings even to high-tech countries.

My british friends made a deprecatory comment like: “Yeah it is nice to shut down your nuclear power plants and then import the nuclear energy from France.“.
That seems to be the narrative framed by the british media – or at least thats what stick with the people. Even though I don t know my friends for a long time I would guess that they are quite aware of politics and especially sensible for environmental news. So I was in fact quite surprised by their comment.
I answered, that even though we shut down 8 nuclear reactos after Fukushima, we still export energy to our neighboring countries. Reading the Newspaper this morning I could not resist a big smile when I read, that even while facing an unusual wave of cold wheater in central Europe, we are actually exporting energy to France – the biggest nuclear energy producer in Europe.

How did that come? Due to a German Renewable Energy Act, introduced by the green party and the social-democrats in 2000, Germany managed to boost the share or renewable energy supply on total electricity consumption from 6.4 % in 2000 to more then 20 % in 2011. Our Minister of Economy (head of a marginal 3 % liberal party) Philipp Rössler wants to undermine this law by cutting down on the secure payment of little solar power plants who are mostly owned by individuals or families as a personal investment or by cooperatives who try to build up local energy supply. Ignoring the fact that in these days of high energy demand the nuclear energy actually provides almost 10 000 MW in peak hours (that is the equivalent of seven nuclear power plants).

Face it! The future is renewable!

Raft on the river Jamanxim

2012-02-06T15:15:18+00:00

Quick update on the raft situation:

I tarvelled to the Crepori river, and found it swollen with rapids. This inspired me to start instead at the Jamanxim River, about 90 KM east of Mundico Coelho. I had passed it and it seemed wide and rapid free. So I spent four days there and built this raft:

My balsa raft on the Jamanxim River, with scavenged boards for my mangy deck.

The work was hard and balsa wood is actually very heavy when it’s in tree form and not made into little airplanes. The trees were about 1km into the jungle, so I had to drag them out using rope and a couple of timber hitches, wade through a swamp, and then float them downriver about 500m.

The locals had warned me about a large waterfall downstream known as “Ao Portão de Inferno” - translated, meaning “the gates of hell.” It is about 20 m (60 feet) high. I figured I would just disassemble the raft before the waterfall, portage it downriver, reassemble it, and continue. I also spoke with a few fisherman who had been down there and they told me of at least 50 smaller waterfalls between the place I was at (Jardim do Ouro) and the place where the Jamanxim flows into the Tapajós. Undeterred, I was determined to tackle the river anyways, and continued building my raft.

After the basics of the craft were completed, I took her out for a test run, and discovered just how unmaneuverable rafts are. If I went down the river, it was likely I would be unable to get out of the river in time to avoid the waterfalls. And so the situation changed, going from”possible death” to “probable death.”

I do love life. So there’s no reason why I shouldn’t just start the adventure further upriver, where there are no rapids or portãos de infernos.

New plan: Start on the Tapajós river in São Luis de Tapajós. Down the Tapajós to Santarém, turn east and ride the Amazon to Macapá. This takes about 250 km off the trip, but adds about 50 years to my life. I figure this to be a fair trade.

In Itaituba now, close by. Busking and selling paintings for some extra cash. To São Luis in a few. Take care.

-Patrick

PS: Also, I put up a new post about my time on the streets of Belém before I went home to the US for a month. Enjoy, and sorry for the delays!

Filed under: Brazil

2012-02-06T10:16:51+00:00

On my way to Iran, the last town I visited in Pakistan was Quetta, the most conservative of Pakistani cities, a mere 130 km from the Afghan border, mirrored on the other side by Kandahar, another 110 kilometers further on. To get there I had to pass many hours of the barren dessert and desicated hills of Baloochistan. On arrival, I made it to the town centre, where I strolled across the bazaar, for the two hours my local contacts gave me before they could come and pick me up.

I was surprised at how different this bustling market was from others like it around the country. Textiles as beautiful as elsewhere were on display, although of a completely different style than the gorgeous headscarves of Lahore or Gilgit –here, the patterns on the scarves were not woven in, but embroidered onto them. Women on the streets were extremely rare, and most of those on sight who showed their faces at all, exposed Central Asian features – they were Hazara, an ethnic in Pakistan only present in Quetta, whereas in nighbouring Afghanistan they constitute a considerable component of the population.
Most of the men on the streets wore prayer caps and sported the bristly beards shaved over the lip as worn by the prophet Mohammed himself. Many eyed me as curiously, in what seemed an entirely friendly and innocent fashion, just as I equally felt drawn to ogle them. This seemed to me the most exotic of all places in Pakistan.

Finally, I got a phone call from my contacts. Emran Khan, a bank manager fromAbbotabad who had picked me up hitch-hiking on the Karakoram highway a month earlier, had given me the phone number of his wife, who stayed with her family down here. She could not come herself, and sent her brother in her stead, who tugged along a friend. Both having donned white, embroidered prayer caps and crisp, white Shalvar Kameez, the two of them were choice exhibits of young, male Quettans, with their wild Islamic beards and the blue, piercing eyes of Taliban fanatics. Well educated, their English was excellent. To each other they spoke the language Hindko, called `Gunda` by themselves, which the Hazara of Quetta also speak, as well as half the Pashtoun across the country, from Abbottabad to Quetta. It counts as an Indo-Arian language, whereas Pashtoun itself is Indo-Iranian.

(part 1)

Riet Not Diot

2012-02-06T07:16:56+00:00

My hands are crusted with carmine flakes of dried blood coming off my skin, and there are brown stains of dried blood all over my clothes, only some of which are from my periods.
I have been smashing in glass windows like when I was a teenager.
Throwing strops like when I was a little kid.
The taxi driver in the late evening invited me to stay at his house. I took my usual precautions and asked whether he lived with his family. Yes, he said, with his wife and little boy. It just turned out that when we arrived at the apartment, they both had gone to see a relative. He kept saying, “she’ll be back soon”, but the wife never came. The inevitable happened: The guy tried to sneak a look at me when taking a shower, asked me whether at home in Europe I would wear what I was wearing and not shorts ending above the knee, -as if that would make me an extremely easy girl-, and was actually holding his hand on his crotch while he was asking me that, too. Ultimately, of course, he asked to sleep next to me. Usually I would leave the house in such a situation, but it was after midnight and he hadn’t actually tried to touch me, so I quickly took a room that I could lock from the inside and went to bed. It turned out fine. I slept till the morning and left the flat.

Nothing worse than that. However, as I stepped outside the house, I picked up half a brick and tried to smash in his car windows. I left out the windshield which is built of safety glass, with layers of plastic between, and so basically unbreakable. Althought they sometimes break with a single large pebble launched hard enough, this time around it took me several tries on the side windows, but I finally broke one of them, plus the car’s back window. I had to use both my hands to hold the stone, since my right hand was already weak from the previous day’s excesses –A soft drink vendor asked me for sex and I punched in his shop window with my bare fist. That the shop window actually broke was to my own surprise. I had to pull out my hand bleeding all over.
My second to last week in Iran, when my nerves were already thread-bare, I threw an item of canned food at some old fat guy who annoyed me with nothing more than a muttered "Masha'allah" (the equivalent of a wolf whistle in Europe) as I walked by on the street. A tree of sparkling blood branching down his forehead soon became the most appealing aspect of his physique. Had he been young and cute, I would have still thrown the can, although I might have cared less about throwing it that hard.
Other misadventrues include slapping as hard as I could a man sitting behind me on the bus trying to grope me, and emptying the content of an ice-cold water-bottle on a man in the city offering me a hundred dollars if I fucked him. The other three times someone grabbed my ass on the street and the other sixty-seven times I got verbally sexually harassed are, of course, not even worth mentioning.

By the way, I had a much better memory of the behavior of Iranian men from my first trip four years ago. That just goes to show that the tombola of one-off trips can yield very different impressions.

Fridges.

2012-02-06T07:07:01+00:00

Turmeric and Dodo went to check the Alberto skip down at
Papierkade. Usually all you would find would be maybe one pack
of yoghurt, two glasses of baby food or one or other small
thingamy. Into the bargain you would most of the time have to
bring a folding chair to be able to reach it, or you would just end
up hopping  up and down in order to swing your arm over the
ledge, a mostly pointless endeavour. This time, however, my two
housemates hit a jack pot: The skip was full of canned beer. Not
one or two beercans, and not one or two crates’ worth either - no,
there was at least a crateful of palatable Belgian beer,  many cans
of a popular type of mild white beer, and probably several crates
worth of some cheap generic brand. They  hardly had enough
space in their bags to carry everything on the back of their bikes.

Earlier that evening, Turmeric had shared an acid trip with Dodo
who took this drug for the first time. It was only a little LSD,
and the first hallucinatory effects set in on Dodo while sitting on
a park bench near the skip, opening the first can.  As she held her
drink, her arms grew long and longer and lifting it to her lips
became amusingly difficult.  She burst into a paroxysm of mirth
which turned into a long, low series of half-supressed peals of
laughter. A bag-lady in tattered, squalid clothes pulling a
shopping trolley came along, blinking puzzled at the tittering
girl and asked the couple if she could have one among the pile
of beers she saw there. Sure this was a moment to be generous
and they handed her even two more than she asked for. The
woman beamed a toothless, contented smile and off rattled her
shopping trolley over the paving-stones of Papierkade.

Home my house mates came with this large, accidental
treasure to share, finding the house empty. The first person
to come back was me, at around half past ten in the evening.
Dodo was already in an advanced state of alcohol-induced
merriment, and it was cheerfully that I acquiesced to the
reality that I would have to seriously dig in to catch up. We
talked around the kitchen table, sharing details of different
periods of our lives.

At the end of the night, the second fridge in the storage room
was stacked with the remaining beers. Without asking help from
anyone, it was of course Turmeric who during the following days
took to the chore of depleting the stocks, and that with seeming
effortlessness (I mean that you could never see that he was
drunk). Less than a week later, the fridge was completely empty
again.

Across the Atlantic in 27 days!

2012-02-05T12:43:00+00:00

------------- Statistics ------------- 9.1 --> knots, top speed of the boat (nautical miles per hour) 35 --> knots, top wind speed during the trip (force 7) 30 --> flying fish that jumped on board, more or less 5 --> meters, h...

TAH

2012-01-30T05:37:41+00:00

Somewhere in Western Pará, Brazil

I can tell when there’s a hole in my mosquito netting that needs repairing when I spot three or four bloated females buzzing sluggishly around in the space underneath my hammock after waking up in the morning. They can find their way in, but never back out. This, at least, gives me the satisfaction of systematically squishing them one by one and stymieing their reproductive efforts, leaving little spots of blood on the netting where they met their demise at the tips of my fingers.

Like the Medieval English hanging pirates to rot in the sun at the entry to their seaports, these serve as warnings to future violators of my sleepy little hammock world. Also like the pirates of the latter-day, other mosquitoes take no notice of these caveats, and continue to seek out flaws in my netting throughout the course of the night, forcing me to keep it in good condition.

Forget the wheel, the cotton gin, and the iPhone; the mosquito netting is man’s greatest invention. I cannot describe to you the satisfaction I derive from shining my flashlight up into the cross-hatched veil and seeing hundreds of mosquitoes and numerous other blood-sucking insects bouncing pointlessly off the barrier, their access to my sweet, nutrient-rich blood cut mercilessly off. It’s like tying up a hungry dog and putting a juicy T-bone just out of reach; they’re just (ahem) itching to get at me. Several times, I’ve given a devious chuckle and pointlessly flipped them off; they respond by continuing to be mosquitoes.

It was with relief that I stepped off US Airways Flight 1986 and back onto Brazilian soil in Rio de Janiero. The relief was greater still when my passport and visa were stamped with no complications. The 12-hour layover at the airport between flights was mostly uneventful, with the exception of when I changed 436 Argentinean pesos (a gift from my grandfather) to reals and got almost R$900 back. This, according to my recipt, was a huge mistake on the part of the exchange guy – he had accidentally punched “dollars to reais” into his computer instead of “peso (ARG) to reais.”

Despite the fact that 900 reais is a huge amount of money that I could have definitely used, I knew the exchange guy would probably have to pay the difference. After about an hour of intense moral deliberation, I went back to the exchange office and showed him his mistake. He was, understandably, hugely relived I hadn’t split for Belém with a whole bunch of his cash. I will admit that I came very close to doing so; I could have done so much with that money. Still, it’s only paper – and anyways, the loveliest things in life are free.

The bright side was I was heading back to Belém with about R$140 and an extra laptop for sale – which was a hell of a lot more than what I had left it with. TAM airlines flight 392 to Belém was delayed in Rio for a good two hours, so by the time I finally arrived to Val-De-Cãns International Airport on the shores of the Pará River it was around three in the morning and I was exhausted, having been running on insufficient airplane sleep for the past two days. I stumbled out of the jetway and collected my pack from the baggage carousel, checking to make sure TSA in Charlotte hadn’t confiscated my machete, hatchet, pocket knife, and other items that might have been deemed an unacceptable threat to National Security and the governor of North Carolina.

Appropriately, it was raining in Belém. The tropical air felt wonderful on my skin after a whole December in the northern hemisphere. I checked to see if the knife and fingernail clippers I had buried by the bus stop the month before were still there; not surprisingly, they were gone. I hoped their new owner was treating them well. Walking across the street, I pitched my brand-new tent in the middle of the traffic circle and went to sleep. Back on track, I thought to myself. Now, where was I…?

———————————————–

According to my brain and memory, I wanted to go to the Guyanas – and had been working my way there for the past five months from the Chilean capital. In Belém, I was just a hop and a skip away from French Guyana; unfortunately, you have to hop across the 200-mile wide Amazon delta and skip through malarial swamps and uninhabited islands. And no, there are no roads or bridges. The way I saw it, I had four options:

Pay about R$80 for a boat to Macapá, the city on the north side of mouth
Wait in Belém and see if I could hitch a free ride on a boat to Macapá
Hitchhike thousands of kilometres west to Manaus on a notoriously bad dirt road in the height of the rainy season, and enter the Guyana Shield vía Guyana
Hitchhike along this same notoriously bad dirt road during the height of the rainy season to some remote location in the Amazon Rainforest, where I would build a raft out of balsa trees and float with the current to Macapá whilst whistling the fiddle duel from The Devil Went Down to Georgia and hallucinating in the throes of malarial fever.

The obvious choice, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, was Option Number One. I paid R$80 and was in Macapá 24 hours later, happy with the safe, easy journey, and having met some lovely English tourists on the boat ride there.

Haha! Just kidding; you should’ve seen your face! The clear choice, as we all know, was Option Number Four. English tourists…as if!

——————————————–

Fast forward to a few days later. The streets of Belém had not changed much, though the temporary evangelical bookstore had been taken down, and the homeless harmonica guy had forgotten about me. Gabriel was still there in his hut, having made a new wooden airplane to replace the one I had bought.

Back in the US, I had been generously resupplied by my Dad and Gander Mountain with a myriad of equipment that I figured I would need for my upcoming adventures in the Amazon. These, among other things, included a cut down Tramontina machete, Gerber hatchet, great lengths of rope, some fishing gear, boots (my Dad’s own alert boots from his time as a KC-135 pilot in the Cold War), heaps of socks, an old Air Force helmet bag, and a bivvy tent.

I was happy to have gotten a tent in the US – which, since coming back to Brazil, has proven invaluable in urban squatting environments, where suitable posts in safe locations are sometimes hard to find. I set it up in the Praça da República right where I had hung my hammock before; I could still see the marks in the ground where the bookstore had stood for Christmas.

Tents are few and far between in the tropics, and I soon realized there is a good reason for this: they get hot. The cool breeze you feel in the hammock is blocked by the fabric, and you have to keep all the hatches battened down due to likely rain. Still, this was the price I paid for a shelter that did not need trees or poles to be set up, and provided more security for my belongings as I slept.

On the third night of tenting in Belém I was reminded of the first fundamental rule of tent-squatting in public places: look before you pitch. The revulsion I felt the following morning when I realized I had slept all night long with just the bottom of the tent separating me from a steaming pile of fresh human shit (I could tell it was human because there was toilet paper mixed in) was indescribable. And when I had to try and wipe it off with a handful of grass?Gua! Absolutely appalling! Weeks later, the smell still lingers…

I had remained in contact with the locals who had given me the “tour” of Belém at the docks, which proved to be a good move on my part; after the shit evening in the plaza I was invited to stay at their respective homes, where I remained for two days planning my river voyage. First I stayed with Sergio, who is openly gay and spent the evening watching chick flicks and crying intermittently.

“It’s okay,” I said consolingly as Sergio sniffled into his pillow. “I’m sure Ryan Gosling will get back with that rich lady in the end.”

Sergio mumbled something that sounded like “mimerabaflpft,” and we had to pause the movie for a moment while he went into the bathroom to wash his face.

Left to right: Sergio, me, and Byron at the docks in Belém

The next night I stayed with Byron, a young man about my age just finishing up college. He lived with his family in a nice home in the suburbs of Belém, and the whole group drove me around for awhile to see other nice places in Belém that were not in Cidade Velha. I received vague visa advice from Byron’s Dad, who works for the Polícia Federal, then, like always, vanished down the road, leaving behind promises to visit again that I didn’t know if I would be able to fulfill.

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Rodoviária Trans-Amazônica – or the “Trans-Amazonian Highway,” as it’s known in English, starts in northeastern Brazil and crosses the majority of the Amazon rainforest, winding for thousands and thousands of kilometres through the jungle before coming to an end in the middle of nowhere somewhere near the Peruvian border. Starting in Marabá, the pavement ends and the BR-230 turns to dirt – or in the case of the rainy season, quagmire.

English Wikipedia offers little encouragement to the hopeful rainy-season hitchhiker, calling the road “inpassable” between the months of October and March. Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedia offer more information but still agree that rainy season travel is a no-go. A random website I found listed the route as “the worst in the world,” and had many photos of 18-wheelers being swallowed up by huge pits of liquid mud.

So basically, don’t go on the road between October and March.

The fact that I am writing this in February from Itaituba, about 2.000 km down the Trans-Amazonian highway, just goes to show you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.

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Me with my free shirt in Inhagapi and the man who gave it to me. The story goes as such: I was hitchhiking. The man picked me up. He is president of a local political campign. I get a free shirt supporting the campaign. It says "Fala Inhagapi!" on the back and "Um partido decente" on the front.

Wanting to take a different route to Marabá than the one I had taken to get into Belém back in December, I wandered my way south along the muddy back roads of the tropical state of Pará. I got very dirty and wet (it is the rainy season, after all), was stopped by a river on a few occasions, had somebody give me a free T-shirt, got lost and did some backtracking, ate lots of açaí, crossed several more rivers on ferrys, received 8,000 mosquito bites, and wandered around some more. Three days later I made it to Novo Repartimento, my starting place on the infamous BR-230.

It didn’t seem so bad. My first ride on the Trans-Amazonian Highway was with a woman from Belém driving a small, two-wheel drive Fiat. I asked her, wouldn’t she get stuck? She gave me a look and said of course not.

What Wikipedia fails to mention is that, for the past two years the Brazilian government has been hard at work paving the TAH. While it is indeed mostly dirt, the massive quagmires I had seen on the Internet had been mostly filled in, and there were even little 5 or ten kilometre stretches of pavement here and there. To be honest, I had been on worse roads in Bolivia – even the back roads outside Belém were worse than this. I would make it to my destination in no time!

Speaking of destinations…the decision on exactly where to start my balsa rafting adventure had been a difficult one to make, and I changed my mind several times over the course of the four additional days I spent in Belém after returning to South America. The first, and most obvious choice, was Santarém – a medium-to-large city located at the convergence of the sapphire waters of the Rio Tapajós and the brown, murky depths of the Amazon itself. It’s a straight, 600-mile shot downriver to Macapá. But I wanted a bit more; I didn’t just want the Amazon. I wanted tributaries and narrow little rivers and head hunters.

Further scrutiny of my map revealed a perhaps more audacious route starting in the city of Altamira on the banks of the Xingu river, around 1.000 km west of Belém. In spite of the tempting adventure the banks of the Xingu offered, this destination was ultimately dropped due to the fact that the Xingu flows almost directly into the mouth of the Amazon – a complex and confusing maze of islands and swamps that would be extremely difficult to transverse on a raft for the 200 additional miles to Macapá, going more or less cross-current on a man-powered vessel through the mouth of a river which discharges more water in a month than all the rivers in Europe put together in ten years. Not to mention the fact I possessed no navigational charts of the area.

Finally, I settled on Itaituba, a medium sized city situated in the sweltering Tapajós valley along the banks of the river of the same name. From Itaituba I would have about 300 miles to navigate down the deep, wide Amazonian tributary to Santarém and the Amazon itself. For a solid week, Itaituba was a green light – good to go. I told everyone in Belém that I would be building a raft in Itaituba and sailing it down the Tapajós and Amazon to the ocean, to which they responded with the dubious looks I’ve become so accustomed to seeing on the faces of nearly everyone I meet when I tell them about almost anything I have done or plan on doing.

However, as I bumped along the BR-230 with the woman from Belém, I got to squinting at my map – something I often do – and saw that there was what seemed to be a perfectly viable destination even further south of Itaituba – a town which lay tantalizingly in wait down a dirt road known as the “Rodoviária do Ouro” – the gold highway.

At the end of the Rodoviária do Ouro, along the banks of a river I had never heard of, lay Mundico Coelho – a hard-knuckled, frontier town on the edge of the Amazon Rainforest’s richest and most productive gold mines. The Crepori was my river; it was small and wound its way around blank areas of the map for a few hundred kilometres before flowing into the Tapajós. It looked narrow and full of head hunters. What could possibly be a greater adventure than this?

Well, I thought helplessly, go big or go home.

New destination: Mundico Coelho.

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The woman from Belém dropped me off a few hours later in Amapú, a couple hundred kilometres southwest of Altamira . There was only about an hour of daylight left, but I stayed out hitchhiking as the light bled from the sky, hoping to inch just a little bit further down the road before going to bed. This turned out to be a good move on my part, for just as the stars were beginning to come out a beat-up Ford pickup stopped and brought tidings of a ranch and free range hammocking spots.

“I’ll take you to a house where one of my cowboys lives,” said the rancher. “I’ll let him know you’ll be camping out there tonight.”

We soon pulled up to the fazenda, as ranches are called here in Brazil. The only occupants in the house when I arrived were a woman, and a young girl with long black hair around three or four years of age. I introduced myself, and the woman smiled and told me I could set up wherever I liked.

The fazenda

I had hung my hammock and mosquito netting between a few açaí palms, and was just getting ready to put the tarp up when the man of the house galloped up on horseback, returning from his day out with the cows. He came up and introduced himself, shaking my hand, and said I should put the hammock up under the porch in case it rained, and to let his wife know when I wanted some dinner. Now, normally I would have delighted in setting up under the porch where there was a roof, but another new piece of gear I picked up in the US was a tarp/poncho, and I was still working out some of the rain-proofing kinks.

While camping out one night in a cow pasture somewhere near Tome Açu (a town on the back roads near Belém), I had been faced with a night of violent thunderstorms and heavy rain. The tarp had not performed well, due to the fact that it was also a poncho and as the rain fell, water gathered in the hood (which I had tied off). Eventually, the weight of the accumulated water started leaking through. I figured the problem could be solved if I tied the hood up to an additional line strung above the tarp, thus creating a dome and making it impossible for water to leak in, as well as not tying the hood inversely shut. This system, while fundamentally sound, still lacked field-testing, and I had been hoping to get a rainy night out on the ranch to reveal any further flaws for correction.

Still, I had trouble explaining to the cowboy that I wanted to sleep in the rain that night, and in the end I gave in to his imploring and moved the hammock to the porch. The tarp would have to be tested another night.

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As I ate my meal of rice, meat, and farinha (a sort of powdered root that the people of Pará put on almost everything), I enjoyed the company of my hosts as we sat together on the porch of the Amazonian fazenda. As usual I was being treated very well and my hosts were pleasant. I watched the little girl sing and dance to Michael Telho’s Si Eu Te Pego (which is inarguably the most popular song in Brazil at the moment). Perhaps the most amusing thing about the whole performance was the fact that she didn’t dance like an ordinary little girl – she danced like a Brazilian woman. This, for anybody who hasn’t seen a Brazilian woman dance to sertaneja music, is an awfully erotic dance. Seeing a little girl dance like that is positively hilarious – but at the same time makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable – like, you shouldn’t be laughing at this, you perv.

As the night progressed, the cowboy seemed to be getting inexplicably drunk – I say inexplicably because I did not once see him with a drink in his hand. However, this mystery was solved when I noticed him taking frequent trips into the house and emerging each time just a little bit tipsier. After only an hour, the cowboy had progressed to the stage of drunkenness which can best be described as “sloppy.” His wife began commenting that maybe he shouldn’t be drinking so much, to which he responded with words that, when translated, come out to basically “shut up, woman.”

Around ten the woman and little girl headed off to bed, after which the cowboy started positively blasting vaquiero music from one huge, lone speaker he had set up on the porch.

“Hey!” he slurred at me over the music, “you want some cachaça?”

“Some what?” I shouted back.

“Cachaça!” he bellowed.

“Oh,” I said. “Sure, I guess!”

“Hang on!” the cowboy hollered, and disappeared into the house.

Cachaça, for those of you who don’t know, is liquor made from distilled sugar-cane juice. It’s mostly produced in Brazil, where 1.5 billion liters (390 million gallons) are consumed annually. Tonight, it seemed, my cowboy friend was doing his patriotic duty by contributing a couple more bottles to Brazil’s boozer statistics. He emerged a few minutes later empty handed, glanced nervously into the house – and then pulled a cup full almost to the brim out of the front pocket of his button-up shirt.

“Drink it quick, don’t let my wife see!” he yelled, motioning for me to take it all in one go. I gazed at the cup apprehensively. That was a lot of cachaça. I sniffed it, and gagged slightly; the stuff smelled like pure rubbing alcohol. With that drink I could have probably euthanized a bear, and still had some leftover to amputate someone’s leg and perform open-heart surgery.

“What kind of cachaça is this?” I asked the cowboy.

“My cachaça!” he said, grinning. “I made it!”

Moonshine, I thought, not really very surprised. Wonderful. Steeling myself, I tipped back the glass and filled my mouth with hooch. Immediately the overpowering alcohol smell flooded my nostrils, and my lips and gums tingled in protest. I sloshed it around in my mouth a couple of times as my stomach begged me not to swallow – but swallow I did. Three times, each gulp more appalling then the last, and then the glass was empty and little green stars were floating around the tops of my eyes. The cowboy grinned and laughed as an involuntary shudder ran deep down my spine and reverberated up and down my body a couple of times. He grabbed the cup and disappeared back into the house, returning moments later with the bottle, which had just a little bit of cachaça left in the bottom – along with a bunch of small fruits fermenting away that had apparently been nuked in the distiller for the sake of cheap, toxic booze.

He shared moonshine, I shared tobacco. He was very much excited about the whole corncob pipe affair.

“This was full when I came home today,” he slurred, chuckling, and finished off the last of it with a gulp.

I belived him.

—————————————————————-

Around midnight I was ready for bed, but the cowboy sure wasn’t. I retired to my hammock and said good night as the ranch hand dozed in his chair and kept the music blasting. After awhile, I saw him through my mosquito netting vanishing into the house, and wondered why he didn’t turn that damn music off before heading inside. I lay in my hammock for a bit longer before deciding the cowboy had probably passed out in there somewhere, and getting up to shut off the speaker. I had just gotten my netting untied when the cowboy, followed seconds later by his wife and daughter, came bursting out of the house. The man was angry and shouting, and the woman and the girl were crying.

The woman sat down in a chair next to me as the cowboy mounted his horse and galloped off down the road.

“He hit me!” she sobbed, pointing to her cheek. “Right here, in my face!” A bruise was beginning to form under her eye.

I was rather at a loss for what to do. “I’m…erm…sorry,” I said lamely, and patted her on the shoulder.

“I don’t deserve to be treated this way!” she bawled, and spent the next ten minutes howling and basically repeating herself. I felt horrible for her, and wished I could help, or do something about it. But what are you supposed to do in a situation like that? Call the police, who are 25 km away in Amapú and probably don’t give a hoot anyways? And who calls the police on their hosts? Anyways, I don’t think the house even had a telephone line.

The cowboy came careening back on horseback a few minutes later, followed shortly afterwards by a concerned neighbor. The neighbor talked with the cowboy, trying to get him to calm down, while the woman kept crying and spewing long strings of words I couldn’t understand. The girl sat on the ground and blubbered, tears running tracks down her dirty little face while mosquitoes buzzed around her hair. The men shouted and waved their hands, the woman moaned and held her head, all the dogs on the ranch were barking at the same time, chickens were sprinting frantically around the yard and bumping into each other – and that damn music, it just kept on playing.

Yes, ladies and gentleman, I had myself a good ole fashioned, swashbuckling cowboy night out there at the Amazonian fazenda – an evening of loud music, spittin’ and hollerin’, bathtub moonshine, and wife-beatin’. Guess the country folk act pretty much the same no matter where you go. The whole thing could have just as easily been a scene from my neighbour Raymond’s house back in East Texas.

Oh, the wonders of world travel…yee-haw…

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The next morning I awoke to an empty home. I looked at my watch; 0800. The only sounds I heard were the buzzing of flies and an old sow, shuffling around in the yard. I decided to give it a bit longer, and wait and see if anybody showed up. I dozed and watched the flies crawl around on my mosquito netting and the chickens pecking at some old rice on the ground.

0847. A small green lizard ate four flies and an assassin bug from his perch up by the ceiling. I applauded after each kill.

0849. Sleep.

0923. A rooster chased a grasshopper for ten minutes before losing it in the bushes. To nullify his defeat at the antenna of a lowly arthropod, he screwed two hens and crowed loudly.

0939. Killed two swollen female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes who had found a tiny hole in my netting somewhere, and spent the next ten minutes imagining symptoms of dengue.

0950. Sleep.

1000. Awoke from a half-dream, where I lived in a world where everybody had giant wristwatches where their heads should be.

1009. The old sow ventured onto the porch and pooped a couple of times. All chickens and flies in the immediate vicinity had a field day.

1018. A large, orange and yellow dragonfly landed on my mosquito netting and stared unnervingly at me for several minutes, probably wondering if I had any more Aedes aegypti hiding under my hammock.

1021. Stared at the wooden ceiling of the porch until I began to see faces in the grain.

1022. Spotted Jerry Seinfeld in the wood, and began thinking about bees.

1023. Had a brief craving for honey.

1024. Started thinking about that time when I was ten and ate an entire honeycomb at my Uncle George’s house in Missouri, comb and all. Remembered puking sometime later that day and fearing honey ever since.

1025. Remembered that I also hated red velvet cake, on account of I had puked it up once at my Mámá’s house while I had the flu.

1026. Went over the history of the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic in my head. Remembered the only place in the world with no reported cases had been a nearby island in the Amazon delta.

1030. Resumed imagining symptoms of dengue.

At this point the house was still empty, and I assumed that the previous night’s events had caused a break in day to day activities, and that everybody had vacated the home for the time being. Not wanting to waste anymore daylight, I packed up my hammock and bathed briefly in the outdoor shower. I was just about to leave when I heard the sound of hooves on dirt, and the cowboy came galloping up in rubber boots.

I waved. “Where you been?”

“Working,” he said. “Have you seen my wife?”

“Não,” I said, shaking my head. “I thought she was with you.”

“Ni pensar. Did you see her go anywhere?”

“I woke up alone.”

“Hm,” he said, scratching his head. “She probably went over to her Dad’s house in Amapú.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah, almost positive,” he said, sighing. He noticed my pack sitting on a chair nearby, loaded up and ready to go. “You leaving?”

I nodded. “I was planning on it. Didn’t know where everybody was.”

“Aw, but you should stay a little longer. Relax, I’ll bring you some lunch from town.”

Well…I didn’t need a repeat of last night. I could have gotten more sleep in the rain. Still, it was already almost noon, and perhaps the fazenda had more to offer yet…

“What the hell,” I said. “Why not.”

—————————————————————

Palm nuts

I killed an easy afternoon opening palm nuts I found nearby and nibbling at them. The palm nut is a tough nut to crack – pun intended – but the tasty yielding fruit is well worth the effort. For those interested, you’ll need either an axe or sledgehammer and a machete to get them open. I took note of the plant’s features and memorized them for future reference. This was perhaps unnecessary, as they are a distinctive palm which seemed to be practically the only large tree growing in the cleared jungle around the cow pastures – along with patches of açaí and balsa wood.

Balsa wood, I was happy to note, was extremely prevalent almost everywhere I looked. Smaller specimens (less than 20 feet) dotted the roadside, and were easy to identify by their distinctive broad leaves and pink flowers. A walk into the jungle revealed many more specimens of impressive proportions – some as tall as 120 feet, and with trunks easily 5 feet in diameter. This was good news, as balsa was what I intended to use for the construction of my raft, it being almost impossibly perfect for the job, viz., it’s filled with air pockets and floats like nobody’s business. The word “balsa” means “raft” in both Spanish and Portuguese for this reason, so that the direct translation of arvol da balsa is “raft tree.” I would be a fool to use anything else!

All hail the magic balsa!

Curious as to the properties of live balsa wood, I set out into the cow pasture and cut a small balsa tree about fifteen feet high for research purposes. My Gerber hatchet sank easily into the light, moist wood, which I noticed was soft and very malleable. I found the tree extremely easy to fall, the whole affair taking less than two minutes.

One discomfort I ran into while cutting was the presence of many fire ants in the tree, which make a habit of feeding on the nectar of the blooming flowers up top. These ants attacked viciously as I chopped, true to the instinct of the common fire ant – but I found that after cutting the top boughs where the flowers were, the ants abandoned the trunk after just five or so minutes, leaving me free to drag it back to the homestead and perform my investigative surgery.

I dissected the balsa and noted the gigantic air pockets running through the heart of the plant, some filled with dark, turpentine water. (Survival note: Balsa wood contains water. Probably not potable without purification). The pockets were so massive I wondered how the tree even stayed up during thunderstorms. Still, the boughs were strong, and would surely make an excellent raft in greater proportions.

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Later that afternoon the cowboy returned with some lunch, and invited me across the road to a friend’s house for a bit of socializing. Socializing in rural Brazil is apparently not complete without copious amounts of mostly homemade alcohol. In today’s case, the hooch consisted of two massive jugs of sweet wine – something I felt was a considerable improvement from the bear tranquilizer the night before. The cowboy set off on horseback while I followed behind on foot to the homestead across the road, about 1 km away.

We sat in the late afternoon sunlight and sipped the wine, talking about manly things and comparing machetes. I was fresh from my little expedition to cut the blasa tree, which had been situated in some very high and abrasive elephant grass out in the cow pasture, and as a result was still suited up in my jungle gear. This consists of camo pants, aviator boots, leather gloves, heavy brush pants, long-sleeves, hatchet, and of course, machete. Of particular interest to the group was the old knife sharpener which I had brought back from the US, which has the capability to put a keen edge on the blade of a machete in just a few seconds. I passed it around the group, and three or four rusty machetes were made razor sharp before being blunted again on pile of pine nuts.

We traded tobaccos, myself giving up a few pinches of my pipe tobacco for cigarette-rolling, and receiving in turn a pouch of moist, black maratá tobacco, which most of the gauchos and local people smoke in cigarettes rolled from corn husks or notebook paper. It left a thick, black cake in the chamber of my pipe that took twenty minutes to scrape out.

The small, two room dwelling where this family lived housed the rancher I had met before, his wife, two young sons, and teenage daughter, who herself had a small child of about one year of age. As night fell we ran a dangerous-looking conglomeration of electrical cords outside to where we sat, and hung a bare light bulb off one of the roof struts to provide light for the evening’s festivities. The cowboy disappeared back to his house and came back half an hour later lugging his giant speaker and DVD player, to which we rigged electricity in a manner that was perhaps the greatest fire/electrocution hazard I had ever seen. Then the music was blasting again, and more jugs of wine materialized from somewhere as tongues were loosened and barefoot children ran about, screaming and swinging precariously off overhanging palm fronds.

The two wild children, before presumably stealing the camera back from their sister.

The children were absolutely fascinated with my camera (yes, another thing I got from the USA), so I spent a few minutes teaching them how to use it, and subsequently turned them loose. I got the camera back the next day with 1.328 photos of mostly people’s feet and the television screen showing some soap opera or another – though there were a few keepers and a funny video of them running around with the baby and saying things like “Câmera, ação!”

We built a small fire, and as I was chopping up boards for kindling I saw the cowboy and the rancher dragging a pig bodily into the light. It squealed in that hedonistic way pigs do as the two men cut its throat out and hung the body up from the roof struts, so that the blood gushed freely out of the holes in the neck and accumulated in a stagnant pool below. The fatted pig had been slaughtered, and the feast was soon to come.

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I was curious as to how we would go about butchering the hog. In Bolivia, pigs were skinned and quartered, much like we do back in the US, but here a different technique would be used. Instead of skinning the animal, we simply removed the hair. This was accomplished by boiling huge pots of water over the fire, then subsequently pouring it over the carcass. This caused the skin to crinkle up and sizzle, whereupon we would scrape at it with the edges of our knives, thereby removing the hair – much like scaling a fish, in fact. We did this to every part of the body, even the ears and face, which would all be eaten at one time or another.

Gutting

After removing all the hair the swine was gutted – which is pretty self-explanatory, and was something that I had done many times before, both to swine and deer. We saved the heart (the best part) and cooked it over the fire, taking a quick break to eat it before continuing with the butchering process, which at this point just consisted of quartering the animal with our machetes.

The pig was cut into nine sections: two front legs and shoulders, two back legs and haunches, two racks of ribs, two strips of spine and backstrap, and the head. The ribs were taken inside and stored in the refrigerator, while we set about grilling one of the haunches over the fire and preparing the rest of the meat for smoking.

Quartering

This was done by cutting as much of the meat as possible off the bone and into thin strips about three inches long by one inch wide. Between the four men present, we managed to debone most of the meat in about an hour. By this time the haunches were ready, and the women came out with plates of rice and mashed banana, to which we added the sizzling haunches. After filling our plates we put some of the meat out to smoke over the fire (with the exception of the skin, which was taken inside and fried into what we call back in Texas “cracklins”).

We ate, drank, and were merry. The dogs descended upon us and begged, hanging around by the drying pool of blood nearby and lapping at it occasionally. By the time we finished our meal it was time to rotate the meat, which we did as the women came through and collected the bones, bringing them inside to boil for broth.

We drank the night away, the cowboy expressing remorse that his wife was in Amapú and the rancher expressing hopes of this pig lasting them a good week and a half after they got some more rice. The children galloped through, snapping pictures of everything and chasing the dogs around. The women giggled amongst themselved from their chairs and hacked open Brazil nuts with machetes.

And that vaquiero music; it played on from the cowboy’s speakers, blasting through the jungle and rattling mangos and goiabas like an invisible percussionist, enveloping us as the cantor sang what I felt were appropriate words:

Eu sou sertão sofrido

Mas de um povo hospitaleiro

Que faz da vida a cantiga

Briquitando o ano inteiro

Um catrumano valente

Que sobrevive contente

No aboio do vaquiero

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I vaguely remembered learning to dance to vaquiero music with the rancher’s daughter and laughing far too loudly for most of the evening. There were some armadillos in there somewhere, too. The last thing I did was hang my hammock up in the rancher’s living room (I had to make a trek to the cowboy’s house to retrieve it…not surisingly he had locked his keys in the house, and I ended up climbing in through a window), before sweet, welcome sleep enveloped me and I knew no more.

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The next morning we rolled groggily out of our hammocks, holding our heads in our hands and drinking coffee. I helped the rancher set out the previous night’s smoked meat to dry in the sun.

“You’re pretty interested in animal processing, huh?” he remarked as we salted the meat and draped it over the clothesline.

“Well, it’s not animal processing in particular,” I said. “Just different ways to do things I already know how to do. Plus, you never know – I might have to good fortune to kill an animal on the raft trip, and the local way of slaughter and meat preservation is usually the best way.”

He nodded. “Is that how you plan on feeding yourself on the trip? Hunting?”

“Oh, no. I was hoping for mostly fish and fruits. That’s one of the reasons I stuck around at the vaqueiro’s place yesterday. I was doing some independent research on plants.” Cutting down a balsa tree and bashing open pine nuts, I didn’t add.

“Well, if you want you can stick around here for a few days. I can teach you many things about plants in Amazonia.”

I stopped salting the strip of meat in my hand. “Really? You wouldn’t mind?”

“Of course not, gringo!” He patted me on the shoulder, a bit of salt flaking off his hand and cascading down my shirt. “You’re my friend, I am happy to help my friend. Anyways, we have so much pig meat to eat, you know?”

I did know. I grinned. “Well, I guess I’ll stay, then!”

“Very good!” The rancher clapped his hands with delight. “Um americano, in my house! This calls for more wine…!”

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“These,” said Igor (for that was the rancher’s name) “are known as goiaba. They are ripe to eat when they have turned yellow.”

We were out in the jungle surrounding my friend’s new house identifying fruits and edible plants, accompanied by his two sons. The goiaba was yellow, about the size of a baseball, and had a fleshy red interior filled with hard seeds. It had a sharp, tangy flavour that was not unpleasant., though the seeds were very hard, and I found it easier just to swallow them whole rather than going through the trouble of chewing them up. They grew from a tree that looked vaguely like a lemon tree.

We continued our walk, and soon came to a towering tree with many small, glassy, shiny leaves. Up top were a pair of enormous, spiky fruits. They looked like Asian durians, and Igor gave me a name for them that I could not remember. (Thanks to my freind Amit Evron for reminding me of the name: jaca) Still, they were extremely easy to identify, and Igor told me to climb up there and hack a couple of them down with my machete. I did so, but as I was just about to reach the fruits I heard the sound of a million angry wings buzzing.

This was taken .002 seconds before I realized there were bees in the tree

“Cut it and come on down!” shouted Igor at me from below. “There’s bees up that tree!” I swung my machete and the spiky masses sank to the ground, landing on the soft, leaf littered jungle floor with a dense plunk.

The buzzing was louder now, and I felt a hundred tiny wings and legs wriggling around in my hair and on every exposed bit of skin. I slid down the tree as fast as I could, and dropped the last six feet. Igor and his sons were busy covering their heads up with their shirts and running away. I followed, the bees hot on our tail.

The insects were everywhere, and I waited, cringing, for the feel of their stingers. It never came. Instead they just bombarded us, focusing primarily on our hair, burrowing down as deep as they could until they reached the scalp, where they would bite and then die shortly afterward. We ran back to the house with our fruits, a good number of bees still following us.

Picking bees out our hair

At least they were not stinging bees, I thought, picking one out of my hair, where I would continue to find dead bees for the next three days.

We left the spiky fruits by the door – along with our haul of goiaba – and sat down for our dinner of rice and swine ribs, while watching the soap opera Fina Estampa.

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Days at Igor’s house were generally quite lazy, and there was always someone hacking away at a Brazil nut somewhere. One of the many things I learned at the ranch was how to open a Brazil nut with a machete in less than twenty seconds without losing a finger (though I can assure you there were numerous close calls, and I bear several scars on my left index finger to prove it).

Igor and his wife feeding the armadillos

Igor kept numerous pets, including three small armadillos (explaining the blurry memories I had of armadillos from the night before) and two rat-like creatures which resembled the capybara, only were much smaller, like a chipmunk. Every afternoon he would take the armadillos out to the grass and hoe around in the dirt so that they could dig for worms.

The capybara-things would hop around the house all day, begging for fruit and sitting in your lap for hours while making cute little peeping noises. One of them had a pink bow tied around its neck and would lick your finger and chirp specifically loudly whenever the theme song for Fina Estampa came on. These were probably the first rodents I have seen that I did not want to immediately feed to ball pythons.

Like a little Amazon chipmunk. Ok she was KINDA CUTE

Igor’s daughter, who seemed to be around sixteen, had the habit of nursing her baby quite without any shirt on. The fact that she was far from ugly and that if she wore a blue shirt, it would have been a huge blue shirt, was not lost on me. I spent many hours trying as hard as I could to look at anything but the great, massive breasts with a baby hanging off one end sitting right there in front of me, and tugging at my hypothetical collar. She took no notice of this, of course, and relentlessly bombarded me with questions about my computer and camera. I taught her how to make drawings on Microsoft Paint, and that seemed to occupy the giant breasts long enough for me to escape into the jungle with Igor and the boys to hunt for açaí.

Açaí is one of the major staples of the Amazon. It is a hard, purple berry which grows at the top of a tall and slender palm with droopy, feather-like leaves. While the palms are literally everywhere, finding one with ripe berries takes a little looking around.

Panoramic of açaí plams near the fazenda

“Ah, there’s one over there!” said Igor’s son excitedly, pointing. The palm was in the centre of a grove that was currently flooded with about two feet of water. We waded into the mire and prepared to harvest the berries.

One of the boys scooting up a palm

In order to harvest açaí, one must do a little bit of climbing. The açaí palms are never very thick but can sometimes grow to about 50 or 60 feet in height – and the berries are at the very top. Here in this grove there were three or four trees with ripe berries, so each of us picked one and shimmied on up. It was like climbing the fireman’s pole at the playground in elementary school – only the pole was a 30-foot palm tree with the occasional fire ant patrolling up and down it, and you were carrying a machete. Once you got to the top you would hack away at the little branch the berries grew on until it fell down, then slide gratefully back to earth, your arms and legs on fire with the strain of holding your whole self at the top of the palm.

The first tree was easy. We plucked the berries off the branches and deposited them into our five gallon bucket, as well as mopping up the other ripe berries that had fallen and were floating around in the bog. Then we set out to find more, which we did easily.

A cut branch of ripe açaí berries

The second tree was more difficult, and I found myself very much out of breath by the time I got to the top of the palm and had cut down the berries. The third tree was even harder, and stretched up to at least fifty feet above the ground, and my legs burned in agony as I clamped them down onto the trunk to free my hands for machete work. By the time I got to the top of the fourth tree I nearly fell out, I was so exhausted by that time.

The harvest

My hosts, at least, were equally tired. I had feared that they would be shimmying up açaí like chimps without even breaking a sweat, and there I would be, about to puke up my cracklins into the swamp. But by the end of the day we were all thoroughly exhausted and ready to return home. Our yield had come out to three buckets full of berries.

Next step: processing.

———————————————

Açaí is not generally eaten in its berry form, since it’s so hard, and is usually consumed in juice form. There is a simple process to transform the berries into the purple goop I had become accustomed to eating in Belém – simple, but like most things in the jungle, involving plenty of elbow grease.

First we soaked the berries in huge pots of warm water for an hour or two. Then, with the help of the entire family, they were pulverized in buckets with the use of a sturdy stick. The smack smack sound of açaí mashing echoed throughout the little house as we worked. Igor’s daughter, I noticed with relief, had put a shirt on. The thought of those giant breasts, bouncing along with the rhythm of the pounding…I would have had no focus whatsoever.

After mashing for a good ten minutes, we added a little bit of water and mashed some more. Then we mixed all the berries together into one big pot and took out as many as we could, leaving behind a considerable amount of juice and pulp in the big pan. After that we re-mashed the remaining berries, added more water, and mashed them some more.

The final step was to mix all the juice together and filter out the skins using a strainer. The end result was a purplish-brown liquid that was the classic açaí. Technically it was ready to eat now, but we let it sit in the refrigerator for a little while, which made the açaí solidify a bit and turn a darker purple. That evening we had delicious cups of açaí, mixed with sugar and farinha.

Straight from the jungle to you, I thought contentedly, stirring in more farinha and paying attention to Fina Estampa for the first time ever.

———————————————————–

I don't know what it's called - but I know you can eat it.

Over the next few days, Igor and his sons taught me to identify many different types of edible fruits and plants common in the Amazon, something I was careful to note and remember – for living off flora will be a great part of the raft expedition. Gladly I report to you that the jungle is just teeming with food – and to be frank I believe you would have to be quite stupid to starve to death in the Amazon. Fruits are everywhere, and they’re oftentimes large, with just one of them able to easily sustain you for a day. Though I understand that further in the jungle, where everything occurs on a random basis, it may be difficult to find some of these fruits. Still, apart from fruits, bugs are everywhere you look, with the underside of every fallen tree and rotting log home to at least one fat, edible grubworm.

Same for this one.

After awhile I began feeling like it was time to move on and start putting these new skills into practice already, so following four days at his ranch I let Igor know that I was headed out. I got my pack and other items back from the cowboy’s house, where they had been since I first came to the fazendas, and prepared for departure.

“Be careful in creporição,” said Igor, referring to the mining frontier where I was headed. “Lots of outsiders out there working in those mines. Shady characters, desperate folk. They’ll kill you if you’re not careful.”

I doubted this, but assured Igor I would watch my back. The little fazenda disappeared behind me as a light rain fell from the grey February sky. The mud of the Trans-Amazonian Highway caked itself onto my aviator boots, making each step unnaturally heavy as I slipped into fantasies of what the legendary-sounding creporição must be like. I pictured something like “San Fransisco, 1825,” but with jungle.

Soon a pickup stopped for my thumb, slamming on the breaks and skidding along the muddy road for ten feet before coming to a stop. Off I went to Altamira, one step closer to the enigmatic rodoviária do ouro.

A photo of my loyal papparazi pair that I really like

——————————————————–

After a ferry across the wild-looking Xingu River, a thirty minute drive brought us to the city of Altamira, a medium sized town situated basically in the middle of nowhere. I took this opportunity to make a post on this blog about the raft trip (the post preceding this one), as I was unsure if I would have any internet for the following weeks leading up to my departure from the creporição.

After being kicked out of a promising spot by a security guard, I pitched my tent in Altamira next to a university. The next day I planned to go to the hospital and see about obtaining some medicines for the upcoming trip – namely, quinine and antibiotics.

I was not totally broke; I had about R$100 on me, which was a combination of the leftover pesos I had changed at the airport in Rio and the R$50 I made selling the old laptop I brought back from the US on the streets of Belém. I still needed a few additional supplies for the journey, namely, rice and a large pot for boiling water. These, I hoped, would not run me too much money, and I hoped to have enough to get those items and the quinine from the hospital in Altamira.

When I got to the hospital and started yammering on about quinino, I was pointed to the malaria ward, where I sat in a plastic chair next to a sallow-looking man with circles under his eyes. He leaned over to me and said,

“Which strain of malaria do you have?”

“Hm?” I said, distracted. “Oh, I don’t have malaria, I’m just looking for medicines.”

“Oh,” he said, and sank back into his chair, giving me a strange look.

The nurse behind the table on the other side of the room called me up. “Have you gotten your finger pricked, sir?” she said tiredly.

“Um, no,” I said, whereupon she dug around in her lab coat and extracted a little needle-like device.

“All right, hold out your finger,” she clucked, pushing a little button on the device that seemed to arm it.

“Uh, no, I don’t need to get my finger pricked,” I said, keeping my hands in my pockets.

“Sir, we need to find out what kind of malaria you have,” said the nurse sternly.

“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t have malaria!”

The entire room seemed unnaturally silent after that last sentence, and it felt like everybody was sort of staring at me. I felt like I was at an NA meeting, and I had just said the words, “Hi, my name is Patrick, and – well, actually I’m not really an addict. I’m just here because of a court order.” I half expected the nurse to stand up, point at my chest and shout “Denial! The first step is admitting that you have malaria!”

Instead, she said, “Okay…so what are you doing here, then?”

“Well, I’m headed far out into the jungle, and would like quinine, antibiotics, and other preventative medicines.”

“Heading into the jungle,” she repeated. Sighing, the nurse reluctantly disarmed her finger pricking device and told me to wait a moment. She vanished out the back door, while I rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet, feeling the sallow-faced malaria patient’s eyes staring at me from the plastic chair in the corner.

The nurse came back several minutes later with a tall man who introduced himself as “Dr. Jorge, malaria specialist.” I shook his outstretched hand and we walked back to his office.

“Now, what can I do for you?” said Dr. Jorge, sitting down next to his microscope.

“I want quinine,” I said matter-of-factly, and explained to Dr. Jorge my plans of rafting along the Crepori river.

“Hm,” he said, drumming his fingers on the table. “Interesting. Well Patrick, let me tell you something. I have been to creporição, and the river you are heading down is not as isolated as you may think. There are pockets of both mining and native settlements along the Crepori, and we like to make sure we have a malaria laboratory in every community where there are more than five or ten families present.”

“Hm,” I said. “Interesting.”

“The point is,” the doctor went on, “you will probably not need any medicines we can give you, since you will be able to seek help at one of our labs there, should you fall ill. And anyhow, there are rules that prevent me from being able to give you medicines if you do not actually have malaria.”

“How come?” I asked, confused. “Travellers take preventative malaria medicine all the time.”

“Yes, but what you are talking about – medicine to take only on the occasion of you talking sick – we cannot simply give out. This is because we need to know specifically which strain of malaria you have, in order to treat you.”

“You can’t just give me simple quinine?” I inquired.

“We don’t have simple quinine. We have many diverse malaria medicines designed for specific malaria cases.”

“Hm,” I said. “But – well, for example: I become sick with malaria when not very close to one of your labs. Soon I am too weak to continue downriver to safety. Do you have something for that could keep the malaria at bay for long enough for me to find the energy to flee to safety?”

Dr. Jorge thought for a moment. “Perhaps. There is a drug called cloroquina. You can buy it in pharmacies. It will not cure malaria, but will keep you from becoming debilitated for long enough to seek help.”

“How much is it, more or less?”

Dr. Jorge stood up. “Wait here.” I waited. He returned a few minutes later with a few packets of pills. He handed them to me and said, “Don’t tell anybody I gave these to you. Take six pills the first day and four the next. This is two doses, which should be enough for you to get downriver.”

I took the pills reverently. “Thank you, Dr. Jorge. Also, I was wondering about antibiotics…?”

“What about antibiotics?” asked the doctor.

“Well, say I sustain an injury and want to stave off infection. Maybe some penicillin?”

Dr. Jorge sighed, smiled, and left the room, coming back several minutes later with 50 pills of sulfametoxazol trimetoprima. “These will work as both an antibiotic and temporary relief from dysentery – should you be unfortunate enough to fall victim to that.”

“Excellent!” I said. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

He waved his hand in the air. “It’s no problem.” He stood up. “We should go and see the director, he is more familiar with creporição than I am. He might be able to give you moregood information.”

“Cool, sounds perfect!” I said happily.

“Oh, but before we go…” Dr. Jorge took a digital camera out from his desk. “A photo? If I see you on Aló Brasil someday I will tell everybody that I know you.”

I laughed, and snapped a picture with him.

————————————————————

We went to see Dr. Vargeus, the director of the General Hospital of Altamira, in his office. Dr. Jorge told the director all about the adventure I had planned in creporição, to which the director laughed and called me insane. He was plump, jolly, and friendly, and was happy to dispense more advice about the Crepori River.

“That area has a lot of waterfalls,” he said. “You might find navigation kind of difficult.”

“Well, so long as I can always detect them before going over, I’ll be able to portage around,” I said.

He nodded, “Yes, you could. But it only takes one to sneak up on you, and then you’re done.”

I nodded. “True.”

We then talked about settlements along the Crepori and Tapajós. Dr. Varegus agreed with Dr. Jorge’s ascertation that the Crepori was inhabited mostly by isolated pockets of miners and natives.

“However, the Lower Tapajós is home to almost exclusively native peoples. There’s more than 50 tribes down in that area. Oh, and you should watch out for the Maranhão Grande rapids. They’re on the Tapajós about 25 km before São Luis, and go on for about 23 kilometres.”

“Noted,” I said. Twenty-three kilometres of rapids? This expedition was getting more ridiculous by the second…

————————————————————–

I lingered in the office for a few hours, chit chatting with my new doctor friends. They requested a concert on the harmonica, which I gave. Dr. Varegus paid me $10 reais afterwards and filmed the whole thing while chuckling lightly to himself. Then around noon I left.

“Good luck, and let us know if you succeed!” said Dr. Varegus, shaking my hand.

“And remember, the medicines I gave you will not cure malaria, they will only slow it down. If you fall ill go to one of our labs!” reminded Dr. Jorge.

“I’ll remember,” I assured him, and then I was gone, packing a first-aid kit containing a few potent new weapons that I hadn’t paid a dime for. The goodness of the world never ceases to amaze me.

Next stop: creporição.

—————————-

Getting out of Altamira wasn’t too difficult, though I did get a little lost looking for the other side of the Trans-Amazonian highway. I wondered how, by following the directions I had just received from a welder, this narrow dirt track filled with goats was going to take me back to the BR-230. But in Brazil directions from just about anybody are better than the Chilean’s “go up that way like, 5 or 9 blocks, and there’s a grocery store next to another grocery store and a tire shop. Turn left, then right, then go straight ahead when you see the old broken down pickup next to the chilote resturaunt.” The city spread uphill from the Xingu River, and I sweated and slipped along the muddy path, causing the goats to bleat irritably at me.

I made it to the BR gas station, where it had been recommended I hitchhike, but giving my good luck so far on the Trans-Amazonian highway I went here just for rest and some water. I noticed a few buses that had apparently been ex-city buses in São Paulo (I knew this because I could still see the place where the lettering saying “Cidade de São Paulo” had been) parked on the other side of the gas station. They had been converted into cross-country buses on the TAH, and the decal on the side read hilariously, “ASS Turismo.”

...it says "ass."

Now, I’m sure ASS is an acronym for something I don’t know – but then again it could mean exactly what it sounds like. This is Brazil, after all – a country widely known for being home to some of the finest asses in the world.

I began walking out of the BR and down the TAH, which reappeared on the top of the hill cresting over the Xingu River. I set up just on top of it, with a nice view of the wild-looking islands of the Xingu. I didn’t have much time to appreciate them, however, as a mid-sized pickup screeched to a halt and I hopped in the back.

Hitchhiking, I noticed, is extremely common on the Trans-Amazonian Highway – but, unlike the other heavily hitched areas I have passed (i.e., Patagonia, most of Argentina), all the hitchhikers here were unquestionably locals. In Brazil the busses are very expensive, and anyways, they pass pretty infrequently on the TAH, so hitchhiking is a common mode of transport from town to town. It helps that most (if not all) vehicles I saw west of Altamira were pickups of some kind or another, most of whom had no problem with stopping every ten minutes and throwing another hitchhiker or three in the back. The truck I was in drove me about 150 km to Medecilândia, and in that two hour ride we picked up no less than seven other hitchhikers.

On the TAH, it’s always best to be the first hitcher in the back of the truck – because that means you get to claim your spot in the front of the bed, where you can stand and hang on to the roll bars. This, I’m sure, sounds incredibly dangerous, (and it is), but it is infinitely more comfortable than sitting in the middle or back. The TAH, while it is undergoing paving operations, is still dirt, and dirt is not smooth. After fifteen minutes of sitting while bumping along at 50 kph, your ass wishes desperately that you had claimed those spots up front, where you can use your knees as shock absorbers.

Perhaps another reason hitchhiking is so popular on the TAH is the fact that hitching is infinitely faster than the bus. Not only do people pick you up no problem – they drive fast. In Altamira I had seen a bus leave for Medecilândia while I waiting at the gas station and laughing at the ASS Tourismo bus. I hadn’t been picked up until a good forty minutes after that, but an hour into my ride in the back of the pickup (with four new companions by my side who also realized that taking the bus was totally not cool), we zoomed by the public transportation, which was plodding along at 20 or 30 kph. I never saw it again.

When we arrived in Medecilândia, I noticed telltale dark clouds forming to the south, and headed to a nearby gas station to wait out the coming storm.

After more than a month in the Amazon during the rainy season, I’ve become adept at predicting when the rain will come and how long it will stick around. Dark, almost black clouds on the horizon that are sporadically separated by spaces of blue sky are heavy rain which will come, drench everything for twenty minutes to an hour, and then disperse, leaving the rest of the day mostly rain-free. Black clouds which blot everything else out on the horizon and make it hard to see trees more than 3 km distant are rain which will arrive quickly, rain very hard for 20 minutes to an hour, and then slack off to medium to light rain that sometimes lasts for days. Grey, flat clouds on the horizon mean it will probably rain lightly a few times during the day, but will mostly be just grey and dry. Huge thunderheads and high wind are signs of violent thunderstorms which bring impossibly heavy rain for at least an hour and truly impressive lightning shows.

Of course, there are the times when you just don’t see the rain coming. One minute there’s high stratus clouds up there with the airliners, next all hell has broken loose, and you’re seeing cloud-to-cloud lightning that streaks across ten kilometres of sky and has seventeen separate arms, while raindrops the size of cigarette lighters pound down on everything and the only sound you can hear is gut-blasting thunder and the low hiss of massive amounts of falling water. That’s the Amazon for you, I guess.

In the case of that afternoon in Medecilândia, the rain was the type that would rain hard and then disperse. I drank a coffee at the station and smoked my pipe as I watched the water cascade off the roof of the gas station and carve rivulets into the dirt parking lot. I thought about how futile it was to try and fight the power of water, noticing that the parking lot had been paved, probably as recently as ten years ago, but had already deteriorated to a state of ruin and massive potholes.

Right on schedule, the rain stopped twenty-five minutes later, and I slipped down through the mud back to the TAH, setting my pack and helmet bag down in some wet grass where it would not become as hopelessly muddy as my aviator boots currently were. The third truck that passed stopped, and I hopped in the back, leaving great globs of mud everywhere.

At least this one had a guardrail, which is more than I can say for most of the others....

We drove for awhile down the highway, passing many of the typical wooden bridges that gap the numerous small streams winding through the jungle. These bridges, at first glance, look alarmingly flimsy, and ceatintly not capable of holding the weight of the 50-ton semi truck barreling towards it down the muddy hill at 40 kph – but every time those tough little bastards somehow find the strength to hold up against the weight. I was certain that at one point, some those bridges had to have broken and sent a truck plunging into the creek – for in many places I could see the rotting, skeletal remains of an old bridge paralleling the one we drove across. Some bridges looked truly on the point of collapse, with large sections of wood missing, having presumably broken off and sailed down the creek into the jungle.

Speaking of jungle, the road was starting to become more of just that. Between Novo Repartimento and Altamira, much of the land on either side of the highway had been cleared, giving me the impression at times that I was not in the jungle at all. Here, however, the road was a bit narrower, and the trees had encroached to right up on the road, flush with either side.

I gripped the wooden struts at the front of the truck as we barreled down another hill at impossible speeds, and suddenly we arrived to a tiny crossroads, with two small dirt tracks leading into the jungle on either side of the highway where there lay, according to a decomposing old wooden sign, three borracharias (tire shops), and a place to buy cachaça.

These were something that there were no shortages of on the Trans-Amazonian Highway: borracharias and cachaça. The humor in the fact that in Spanish, the word borracho means drunk was not lost on me – and it seemed that many of the tire shop attendants along the TAH were oftentimes borracho, anyways.

One of the TAH's many "borracharias." Note the typical recycled tractor tire being used as a road sign.

Here was where I got off, apparently, and I thanked the driver in the manner I had seen local hitchhikers doing, by waving and saying falló patrão, obrigado! (meaning literally, “OK, boss, thanks!)

The intersection

I observed my surroundings; not much was going on at this crossroads, it seemed. There was a small bus stop nearby and that was about it. I did notice a large, 80 foot balsa across the road, and in a nearby tree I heard the distinctive cackling of a flock of green parrots.

If you want to kill a good hour of otherwise uneventful hitchhiking time in the jungle, listen to parrots talk to each other. Along with the distinctive squaaaaaak that you would expect to hear in the rainforest, a myrid of other sounds are also produced, viz, whistles, clicks, pops, shouts, cracks, whispers, honks, claps, raspberries, and numerous other sounds I cannot even begin to describe in words. My favourite were the raspberries; maybe it’s childish, but I got a good laugh out of hearing a bunch of parrots make unmistakable fart noises fifty feet up a Brazil nut tree in the middle of nowhere. It felt like they were putting on a show, ‘specially for me.

It was now getting dark, and I figured that I would probably be spending the night at this lonely little parrot crossroads somewhere between Medecilândia and Uruará. After seven, I officially retired for the evening, choosing the bus stop as the place to hang my hammock.

Finally, I had a chance to use my tarp again. The roof of the bus stop could scarcely be called a roof, as it had numerous gaping holes in it, so putting up the tarp was definitely called for. The posts were perfect for hammock hanging, and I spent a pleasant, industrious fifteen minutes rigging all my para-cord up for the tarp and mozzie netting. The end result, I’m proud to say, looked very spiffy and waterproof.

Commence sleeping.

I then curled up in my hammock, tied up the netting, smoked a bowl out of my pipe, and went to sleep in a good mood, listening to the sounds of the parrots saying their goodnights (in Parrot, the words “good night” seemed to be a long whistle followed by an African-sounding click).

Life was good.

————————————————————————————

The next morning I awoke to the sounds of “good morning” in Parrot (click-whistle-pop-pop), and found two bloated brown female mosquitoes and one Aedes aegypti, making a mental note to find that blasted hole in my netting and sew it up. I killed the mosquitoes, as is customary, and broke down camp.

It had rained steadily throughout the night, and quite a lot of water had leaked in through the faulty roof of the bus stop, which had rolled easily off my tarp all night long, without me getting the least bit wet. Pleased that I had worked out the tarp issue, I started hitchhiking around 0710 in a good mood.

As I waited I played with a bunch of plants known in Pará simply as “Maria.” They appear to be normal, grass-like plants with the vague appearance of a fern – but when touched, they immediately close up their leaves and shrink down into the ground, becoming practically invisible. These I found fascinating, and spent many hours hitchhiking in Pará touching Marias, watching them droop and seemingly die before slowly, cautiously, opening back up and turning to face the sun.

Igor’s older son had explained to me the origins of the name “Maria,” through a little children’s limerick.

“Maria received news that her husband had died,” the boy had said, squatting by a patch of Maria, “and Maria became saaaaad.” As he said the word triste he brushed his hands against the Maria and it shrank away into the Earth.

A couple of women and a few children going in the other direction came out and started trying hitching a ride, but were having no luck. I was having little luck myself; I killed mosquitoes and watched fire ants come haul their bodies away, as I eavesdropped on the women across the street.

“There’s no way she’s telling the truth,” said one of them, shaking her head.

“Yeah, but what other explanation is there?” said the other one.

“I don’t know, but I don’t believe it. She’s always been a liar, what makes this time any different?”

The woman shrugged “I don’t know. I believe her.”

She scoffed. “Then you’re a fool.”

It was then a truck came rolling west and stopped for my thumb, and I never got to learn anything more about who “she” was and what the issue in question might have been. I rode in the truck for about ten clicks until it turned off into a fazenda, where I waited for about two hours.

I theorized that there were three types of trucks on the TAH: Semis going to Santarém or Mato Grosso, who rarely stop; 4X4’s usually heading from one medium-sized town to the next, who sometimes pick you up, but more often don’t; and beat-up old fazenda trucks, who almost always pick you up and are sometimes going just a few kilometres and sometimes are going hundreds of kilometres.

After a long wave of 4X4’s apparently all on the “don’t pick up the hitchhiker” wavelength, the welcome sound of a rickety old fazenda truck echoed up from the opposite hillside, and, as if wanting to help prove my theory that fazenda vehicles are the best, drove me for three hours all the way to Uruará.

It was on this ride that I tragically lost my hat. I was standing in the front, hanging on to the roll bars like usual, when suddenly we crested a hill and began veritably flying down the next one to the bottom. The wind whipping past my face was suddenly at hurricane force, and I felt a brief tug at my hat and suddenly it was gone! I let out a cry of dismay and saw my beloved cap tumbling, free of my unruly hair, down the empty dirt road.

What I should have done was pound desperately on the roof of the cab and get the driver to stop – but we were just bottoming out at the end of the hill and were careening madly up the next one, and it seemed stopping might trigger some deadly navigational errors on the part of the driver. I saw a motorcycle come up behind us and spot my hat, and I signaled desperately for him to pick it up and bring it back. He stopped, turned around, and appeared to be on his way to pick it up when we crested the top of the next hill and he disappeared from view.

When we got to the next flat area about three kilometres further up, I pounded on the roof of the cab and we came skidding to a halt. I jumped out and went over to the window.

“I lost my hat!” I said to the vaquiero driver. He looked at me and said,

“Mm! Too bad!”

“Yeah, but there’s a motorcycle that I saw turning around to go and get it, and I tried to signal for him to bring it back for me, and I think he’s coming back in a minute or two.” I scratched my head; it felt bare and stupid. “Any chance you could wait a second?” I asked hopefully.

The cowboy shrugged. “Sure,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

Relived, I thanked the driver and squinted expectantly down the road, hoping to see the moto headed down the hill with my cap. A minute went by. Then two. Then five. Still no moto.

“Hey friend, I think that moto driver stole your hat,” said the vaquiero from his window, blowing smoke at the rearview mirror.

“But –” I stammered, “but I made clear signs for him to bring it up here!”

“He stole your hat, man.”

“Argh!” I snorted. “That’s my hat!”

“Hey amigo, it’s just a hat.”

“Yeah, but you don’t understand! It’s my hat! A hat is a friend!”

“Well, I that moto driver stole your friend, then.”

I paced back and forth for a second. “All right, I’ll stay here and wait, just in case he comes back. Let me get my pack out of the back of your truck.”

“You’re gonna wait here?” said the driver incredulously. “But there’s nothing!” He gestured to the surrounding jungle.

“It’s my hat,” I said. “I’ve got to see if that motorcycle comes back.”

The driver shook his head. “Where you going, anyways?”

“Itaituba,” I said, still looking down the road for the phantom motorcycle driver, with my goddamn hat.

“That’s really far man, I’m going all the way to Uruará, that will take you about 200 km closer. You shouldn’t wait out here, you’ll be stuck forever.”

I sighed deeply. I knew he was right. But damnit, this was my hat we were talking about!

“You’re hat’s not coming back, amigo,” said the vaquiero. “Come on, let’s go to Uruará.”

I sighed. It had been fifteen minutes, and I knew the motorcycle wasn’t coming back. “All right, let’s go,” I said, hopping back into the bed of the old truck. The gaucho gunned the engine and we were off, and I cursed for a solid twenty minutes and felt like crap, because I hadn’t just lost my hat – I had lost my friend.

——————————————————————

As soon as we got to Uruará, I went immediately off in search of a new hat – because I sure as hell wasn’t going to tackle the Amazon in a balsa raft with my head un-covered. I had decided, while wallowing in self-pity in the back of the truck for the past three hours, that I would look for some sort of boonie cap – since there was no way I was finding a beret in a little town in northwestern Pará. Ni pensar, as they say in these parts.

I walked around for a bit, asking about hats, but only found a bunch of mediocre baseball caps. Finally I found a grocery store with an impressive selection of vaquiero cowboy hats, and a few types of boonie caps, in black, white, and camouflage.

“How much for the camoflauge one?” I asked the lady behind the counter.

She looked up from her magazine “25 reais,” she said.

I balked. “25 reais? For a hat?”

“It’s a good hat,” she said – but that’s what they all say. I examined it more closely and found that it was of decent quality, at least.

“I’ll give you ten,” I said flatly.

“No way,” said the lady. “Twenty, at least.”

“Eleven.”

“Ninteen.”

“Twelve.”

“Eighteen.”

“Twelve-fifty, or I’m out.”

She scrunched up her face. “Can’t you do fifteen? Help me out here, alemão.”

I looked around. “All right, fifteen – if you throw in some of those chocolate bars.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “All right, bargain-hunter. Take your chocolate.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, handing her the money and putting the boonie cap on my head. “Appreciate it,” I said, waving as I left and opening a chocolate.

“Yeah, yeah…” said the lady, going back to her magazine.

——————————————————–

In Uruará I got free range of a buffet after inquiring for pasta cookage at one of the churrascarias, and was back on the road by one pm with a full stomach and a covered head. I was still sore about losing my beret, but hopefully this boonie cap would serve me faithfully for many miles and adventures to come.

"Proibito" my ass. This ride's got my name all over it.

I also found a truck that bore my name on the windshield, along with, ironically, a no hitchhiking decal in the corner.

From Uruará I got a ride in the back of an unloaded semi for what seemed like endless hours all the way to Rurópois, another two hundred kilometres down the road. It was a hot, dry day and the truck kicked up massive amounts of dust. As a result, when I got off late that afternoon I had transformed into the dark red colour of Amazonian dirt. This, however, didn’t stop me from getting another ride in Rurópolis to a town my map didn’t mention.

—————————————————-

In Brazil, town names can be divided into four categories:

Genuine names (Belém, Goiâna, Palmas)
Named after saints (São or Santa something or the other)
Ending with –lândia (Uberlândia, Açaílândia, Cafélândia, Matelândia, Medecilândia)
Ending with -polis (Florianópolis, Rurópolis, Pirópolis)

The suffixes –lândia and –polis are most common in small, rural areas, and he who examines a map of Brazil with find many, many places ending with one of those two endings. Tonight, it was a –polis (which, fun fact, is Greek for “city”) and it was called Divinópolis – meaning, I supposed, “Divine City.”

Divinópolis didn’t look so divine – in fact, it looked much the same as every other town I had passed on my recent westerly pilgrimage through the jungle; one dirt road went through the middle of town, flanked by a couple of restaurants and bars, a place marked “Terminal Rodoviário” for the bus, and a run-down old gas station rusting away in the corner of it all. A couple of smaller dirt roads threaded their way a few hundred metres into the town and soon petered out in jungle or swamp. Welcome to Divinópolis, apparently.

—————————————

I was busy eating my dinner, which I had gotten once again from a buffet after another pasta-cooking attempt, when the owner who had just authorized my free feeding came and sat down next to me. He was a burly man with brown teeth, wearing a colourful Carneval muscle shirt, swim trunks, and flip-flops.

“You’re a traveller,” he stated.

“I am,” I agreed, chewing on a hunk of meat.

“You’re sleeping tonight – where?”

I gestured vaguely towards the dusty, practically derelict Divinópolis gas station. “Over there, maybe in the troco de oleo.” (oil change shop)

He shook his head. “No, no, why would you sleep in the troco de oleo? You know what, I’ll invite you to my place. You have a hammock, right?”

“Sure I do.”

“Wonderful, you can hang it at my place, no problem, no worries. Tá boa?”

I smiled and nodded. “Tá boa.”

He patted me amiably on the back. “When you finish eating, come to the bar over there, I buy you a cachaça, all right?”

“Falló, okay. Thanks!” I said, and he went off to the bar.

———————————————–

Estefan was his name, and he pulled up a chair next to him and gestured a bit too forcefully for me to sit down. It was obvious he was already three or four cachaças into his Wednesday night. We talked about his town (pop. 127), and my travels.

“Three years, you’ve been travelling like this?” said Estefan with disbelief.

“Something like that.”

“I’ll be you’ll never remember me,” said the burly man, chuckling and refilling his glass.

I disagreed, and told him I always remembered everybody – especially those who had helped me.

“Naw, bullshit Patrick,” said Estefan, refilling my glass. “I’m just another face! You’ll forget me by tomorrow!”

I protested, but had to admit I could see where his reasoning came from. I knew I had in fact forgotten many kind faces over the years – faces of people who had helped me. It was a shame, I thought, that I couldn’t always vividly recall every kind gesture and benevolent smile that I’ve come across during these years as an aimless wanderer.

As we sipped our cachaça I got to thinking: why was it that I had forgotten so many kind faces over the years, but remembered every hateful, hostile soul I had come across like it was yesterday? I recalled with vivid clarity the thugs who had robbed me in Salta, and the punk who tried to steal my laptop in Santiago, and the fisherman who had “donated” all my belongings to a prison in Puerto Natales. Yet I can’t recall the details of the faces of the Chilean miners who let me spend the freezing night in their quarters playing Mortal Kombat near Paso Sico, or the Ecuadorian family in Quito who let me sleep at their home for a night and packed me full to the bursting with food, or the Bolivians who gave me work and shared their food with me when I was stuck in Guayaramerín for 40 days. Why was this?

Was it because I only focused on the bad in my mind? I certainly hoped not. I hypothesized that it was because the friendly faces were so numerous that they became common and everyday – and sadly, forgettable. The hostility, on the other hand, was frightening and unexpected, thereby searing itself into my memory forever. At least, that’s what I came up with.

After a few more drinks Estefan showed me to my room, where I set up my hammock between two high ceiling struts in the light of the cheap fluorescent bulbs, which were kept alit by two bare wires rigged so that they would stay touching one another until you wanted to turn the light out, whereupon you separated them and a big spark jumped out at you before everything went dark.

I fell asleep wondering if this place would become lost in my memory like all the others. Divinópolis; I was there, January 28, 2012. Then I wasn’t.

To quote my friend Chale: “So it goes…”

—————————————————————–

The next morning Divinópolis, perhaps unwilling to be so easily forgotten, beset me with a grueling five-hour hitchhiking wait in boiling sunlight with little cloud cover. I sat on my pack and twisted grass into rope, then ran out of material and tied my triple-plaited grass to a telephone pole and forgot about it.

My ride came shortly afterwards. I guess all I had to do was leave a gift.

—————————————————————-

I rode down Rodoviária Trans-Amazônica for twenty more minutes with a pair of silent men in a 4X4 before reaching the crossroads of the TAH and the Cuiabá-Santarém highway, which snaked through extreme western Pará south to Cuiabá, the capital of the state of Mato Grosso. Here I got off and headed south, bound for a small town called Moraes de Alamieda – the birthplace of the infamous rodoviária do ouro, and the gates to the fabled creporição.

I hitchhiked at the crossroads for awhile, and soon an old pickup carrying a welding machine stopped. He was headed to Moraes – what luck! We zoomed south, the Trans-Amazonian highway fading away behind me into the humid, heavily forested hills of the Amazon rainforest. I vowed to return one day and hitchhike it all the way from beginning to end.

But not today.

I had a raft to build.

-MN

-Reference Maps-

Location of the State of Pará within Brazil

1. Free shirt 2. Novo Repartimento and the start of the TAH 3. Fazendas 4. Free drugs! 5. RIP hat 6. Divinópolis

Filed under: Brazil Tagged: açaí, Altamira, balsa rafting, balsa trees, BR-230, butcher, cowboys, hitchhiking in the Amazon, Itaituba, lost hat, moonshine, rafting, Rodoviária Trans-Amazõnica, Trans-Amazonian Highway

Giving Birth

2012-01-28T13:18:55+00:00

Obviously, I didn’t know what it would be like to give birth to a baby. Still, I stayed so convinced throughout my pregnancy that it would be a wonderful experience, and I was surprised to see how many of my girlfriends that came to me and asked me if I wasn’t scared to death. I wasn’t. But all I could do was to give them my personal thoughts about giving birth in general, not knowing if and how they would change when it actually happened. Now I know, and my thoughts haven’t changed a bit. It makes me concerned to see that plenty of young women believe it must be horrible to give birth since I know most of them want to have children. Therefore I’d like to share my experience with you.

It seems to be the fear of pain that scares people the most. I’ve used three helpful thoughts when it comes to going through the pain:

1, The pain itself doesn’t have to be a bad thing, only pain in combination with fear is damaging and traumatic. I read a lot about this in “Att möta förlossningssmärtan” (“Facing the labor pains”) by the Swedish midwife and author Gudrun Abascal, a book I highly recommend. Unfortunately there is no English version yet, only Swedish.

2, No matter how painful it might be, the time of the actual delivery is a fractional part of the looong pregnancy. You’re at the finish line!

3, Every single person on Earth has been born. I kept this in mind every time a walked through a big crowd through my pregnancy. Imagine how many successful births that is!

I can’t say giving birth to Kima didn’t hurt. If it wouldn’t hurt at all people could give birth anywhere out in the streets, which would be a direct danger to the baby. In other words, the pain is useful, it makes you perfectly focused on delivering your baby and nothing but that. Unlike other pain, this is a positive type. It leads you to the first meeting with your child. What a reward after 9 months of carrying it inside you! I guess I could compare it with running a marathon; it’s a huge physical exertion that I’m sure is not only pleasant, but it’s still an amazing experience to go through.

And really, I never found the pain any worse than that I’ve been looking forward to doing it again form the very second our daughter was born. I’m therefore convinced that anybody can manage even the most painful situation — as long as you don’t panic. I didn’t use any medical pain relief either, since the whole process was over in a few hours and I felt alright with just a heating pad and some hot towels. Though I think it’s great that all sorts of pain relief is accessible in modern hospitals, I believe it might make you even more afraid of how much it would hurt WITHOUT medical help, since no pain killers will numb the pain completely.

Another aspect that makes me critical towards using medical pain relief is that I’m not sure I would have felt completely how much and when to push or to take a break etc. And I found this to be the most fascinating part of the process — my body told me EXACTLY what to do and I just had to string along. Somehow I think that makes baby delivering one of the easiest things a woman can do, funny enough! And no matter what happens when you give birth, I’m sure the pride, love and relaxation you feel once you can finally hold your baby in your hand for the first time is the same.

I’d be incredibly happy if I could inspire a future mother or two who might feel anxious about giving birth. I look at my one month old daughter who I’m breastfeeding while i write, and I happily confirm my overwhelming conviction from early in the the pregnancy: Giving birth to her was absolutely wonderful.

Dr. Vargeus

2012-01-26T22:34:54+00:00

First of all, I want to apologise for leaving anybody who follows this site without news for so long. I assure you that the events of the past two months will be posted here. I hopped freight trains in Minas Gerais, was arrested, spent 1 month in the USA, squatted on the streets of Belém for 11 days, and more. Sadly, it may be some time before I can get them up, as I am deep in the jungle without Internet or electricity.

Excuse this break in the normal rythmn of the posts; I need to post this now, while I have the chance.

Greetings from Altamira, Brazil.

I am currently hitchhiking along the Trans-Amazonian highway through northeastern Pará, on my way to a microscopic town that Google Maps does not show, near the border with the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

Of course, the objective at first was simply to get to Macapá without paying. But, overdoer that I am, that soon was not enough in my mind. With every day that went by, I knew I would have to take the longest, hardest, most dangerous route possible. First I was going to start from here, then decided on Santarém. Then Itaituba. Finally, I figured, “go big or go on living life wondering about what you would have found down that unexplored river…”

So I chose Mundico Coelho, the last stop on a dead end gold mining road in southwastern Pará, as the starting place for my journey. I will float 1.356 km (842 mi) down the rivers Mapurá, Crepori, Tapajós, and Amazon. My raft will be constructed of balsa trees, of which there are many here in the Amazon.

River conditions along the Tapajós and Amazon are expected to be relatively danger-free, with reguards to rapids, as they are very wide and this is the height of the rainy season. River conditions along the Mapurá and Crepori are unknown. Will rely on information gathered from locals. Have spotted on SAT photos of the Mapurá what appears to be a waterfall about 100 km downriver from Mundico Coelho. Still not sure what to do about that. Perhaps will have to disassemble raft and pack it downstream.

I am well equipped for jungle, with machete, hatchet, plenty of rope, quinine pills, jungle clothing, extensive fishing gear, various types of mosquito netting, hammock, tarp, and various pots and pans, compass, map, and GPS locator from 2002. I’ve spent the past week learning of edible plants (of which there are MANY here in the Amazon) from a farmer I met somewhere north of Amapú.

While I fully expect to survive this journey, I am also fully aware of the dangers, and the fact that this adventure may be my last (there are no human habitations closer than 80 miles through jungle for the first 300 miles of the trip, most notably along the rivers Mapurá and Crepori). Yet I am a firm believer in the idea that no adventure is truly adventure without the very real possibility of not living to tell the tale. Anyways, I couldn’t think of a better final resting place than the heart of the most wild place on earth. If I do die, rest assured it will have been whilst doing what I love.

My other adventures pale in comparison to this one, which is either the most couragous or the most stupid thing I have ever done. Either way…I’m all over it. Normacly and security were never my cup of tea, anyways.

Hope to post here again. I really do like living and do not have a death wish, despite what some of you may think. Please don’t interpret this as a suicide note of sorts. I merely have a more…erm…flexible point of view, as to what level of danger is too much.

For anybody interested, coordiates of Mundico Coelho are somewhere around 6° 55′ 49.8612 S, 56° 53′ 13.9446 W.

Chao, my friends. Until…we meet again.

-Patrick

EDIT: Next day.

I visited the hospital here in Altamira to attempt to procure necessary medicines. After explaining my travel intentions to the nurse on duty, she took me to see the director, Dr. Vargeus. As luck would have it, he has been to the Crepori area, and was able to give me valuable information reguarding this river.

Due to it being in a gold mining area, it is not as uninhabited as I was led to believe. In fact, Dr. Vargeus assured me there were several malaria laboratories along it’s banks, along with isolated pockets of population, mostly either miners or natives. However, my suspicions that the Crepori has a waterfall were confirmed, along with rapids. Despite this, the director assured me the river is navigated by local boats on a frequent basis, and that the rapids are not so trecherous.

So, a few mysteries of the Crepori have been reveled. Hazards of isolation are expected to be somewhat less, while hazards of navigation may perhaps be more of a risk to my personal well-being. This, of course – like everything else, really – remains to be seen.

Dr. Vargeus has also worked along the sector of the Tapajós where I will be travelling. While there are no modern inhabitants, I am told there are more than fifty indiginous tribes who call this area home. I am assured that none of them are of the head-hunter variety.

The director and another malaria specialist (Dr. Jorge) assured me that malaria is indeed a risk, though that I will probably be able to seek help should I fall victem. Still, I was given as a gift a mess of quinine and cloroquina, which he states “will not cure malaria, but will keep you from becoming incapacitated so as you can seek help in one of our laboratories.” I was also given 50 pills of sulfametoxazol trimetoprima, which I can use as an antibiotic, as well as a way to fend off extreme cholera for long enough to seek help. All without paying anything. In fact, Dr. Vargeus gave me 10 reais and filmed me playing the harmonica in his office for twenty minutes.

Dr. Jorge. Malaria specialist, Altamira, Brazil

Dr. Vargeus, Director, General Hospital of Altamira, Brazil

Thanks, guys.

All right, now I’m really outta here.

-MN

Filed under: Brazil

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-23

2012-01-22T23:19:00+00:00

RT @tribily: Recommended reading: Getting rid of dependency on #google services: #piwik http://t.co/8BDfsIYX #googlealternatives #analytics # Powered by Twitter Tools

Pekka Haavisto vai Sauli Niinistö?

2012-01-22T21:52:47+00:00

Puolueiden kannatuslukemia tuijottamalla äänestyskäyttäytyminen oli taas melkoista!

Presidentinvaalit ovat kuitenkin selkeästi henkilövaalit, eikä niissä äännestyskäyttäytymistä siksi voi suoraan verrata eduskuntavaaleihin – ne kun taasen ovat puhtaat puoluevaalit. Rakennan näiden vaalien välille kuitenkin pienoisen aasinsillan ja poliittisen kehityskaaren, koska nämähän ovat kaikki arvovaaleja. Ehdokkaat ja puolueet edustavat tiettyjä arvoja ja maailmankuvia, joita sitten kannatetaan tai vastustetaan.

Eduskuntavaalien 2011 jälkeen vihreät syvässä häviöitsesäälissä rypiessään menivät julistamaan, kuinka heille tärkeät arvot nyt kokivat rökäletappion. Sulkeutunut, takapajuinen poliittiikka oli ottanut voiton. Näin siitäkin huolimatta, että edelleenkin kansan enemmistö äänesti myös sellaisia puolueita kuin Kokoomus, SDP ja Vasemmisto. Yli 80% äänesti muita kuin Perussuomalaisia.

Näitä muita puolueita äänestänyt enemmistö jatkoi suruvirttä blogeissa ja sosiaalisessa mediassa nostamalla esiin kokemattomien Perussuomalaisten edustajien sammakoita ja voivottelemalla että hyi kun kauheaa tommonen. Kattokaan nyt tätäkin ehdokasta! Kun oikein meni yli niin vertauskuvat menivät jossain Natsi-Saksan suunnassa. Myönnän, syyllistyin tähän kauhisteluun itsekin. Välillä syystäkin, mutta usein syyttä.

Alkoi myös näkyä merkkejä siitä kuinka syvät kansan perussuomalaiset rivit olivat ottaneet ulkomaalaiset, ulkomaalaisperäiset tai ihan vain muut kuin suomenkieliset sylkykupikseen. Nyt sai vihdoin sanoa! Ruotsinkielisille huudeltiin ja somaleja tönittiin.

Ilmapiiri oli selkeästi muuttumassa synkempään suuntaan. Näin kansainvälisen, avoimen ja modernin puolueen kannattajana tietysti hävetti.

Oikeastaan koko asetelman pystyi summaamaan siihen, että vihreät huusivat perussuomalaisille ja perussuomalaiset vihreille, eikä kukaan ottanut koko hommasta mitään tolkkua. Keskustelua ei ollut.

Kunnes tuli ihan perus Pekka ja otti hommasta kopin.

Kun Haaviston vaalikampanja pyörähti käyntiin, hän suuntasi ensimmäisenä Viitasaarelle, moikkaamaan kaveriaan Hakkaraista (ps). Sitten seurasi koko kiertue ympäri Suomen ja lukuisat TV-esiintymiset, joissa Haavisto antaa kiitosta Perussuomalaisille ja Perussuomalaiset Haavistolle. Koko kampanjan ajan vire oli selkeä; tämä mies kuuntelee ja tämän miehen kanssa voi keskustella.

Jos omassa agendassa on mitään tolkkua, pitää se tietysti myös pystyä perustelemaan. Jos Perussuomalaisten arvoja vastustaa, pitää voida keskustelemalla osoittaa mikä niissä on vikana ja mikä on vaihtoehto.

Näin on Haavisto tehnyt. Haavisto on kuunnellut mikä Perussuomalaisten mielessä Suomessa mättää ja puolestaan kertonut, mikä Perussuomalaisten käytöksessä mättää. Selittänyt, millainen suvaitsemattomuus ei vetele ja miksi.

Monilta on varmaankin mennyt ohi Homma foorumin seminaari joulukuulta “Samaa maata, eri mieltä”, jossa keskusteltiin maahanmuuttokeskustelun sävystä Suomessa. Keskustelu videolla on laadukasta sekä erityisen rauhallista.

Näen tämän nyt niin, että myös Perussuomalaisten suunnasta on tultu Vihreitä vastaan. Ikäänkuin molemmissa leireissä oltaisiin opittu kuuntelemaan, arvostamaan keskustelun toista osapuolta – sekä mikä tärkeintä – viimein myös argumentoimaan ja käyttäytymään sillä tavalla kun politiikkaan kuuluukin. Tajuttu, että ei tarvitsekaan huutaa, että huutamista ei kuuntele muut kuin omat (jos nekään).

Olen nyt yli puolitoista vuotta asunut poissa Suomesta ja viimeksi kävin siellä viime toukokuussa 2011. Luulen, että kun nyt tänä keväänä tulen käymään, saavun hieman erilaisen maan kamaralle. Maahan, jossa ei enää riidellä, vaan jossa taas viimein osataan käyttäytyä. Maahan jossa kaikki ymmärtävät paremmin toisiaan ja jossa toivottavasti myös eri kieliset, –väriset ja –kokoiset ihmiset saavat elää rauhassa.

Kun yksi henkilö kykenee kääntämään poliittisen kulttuurin näin vahvasti parempaan suuntaan, ansaitsee hän myös tulla valituksi johtamaan maata presidenttinä.

Siksi matkustan parin päivän päästä Kuala Lumpuriin äänestämään Haavistoa, koska Haaviston Suomessa on kaikilla paremmin tilaa hengittää.

» Pekka Haavisto
» Sauli Niinistö

Seek knowledge, even in China,

2012-01-20T00:21:00+00:00

Giambattista Piranesi: “Il Ponte Levatoio/The Drawbridge” (1761).

Suddenly, the temperature has dropped. Last night travelling back in the dark, a large boulder of a man picked me up and he looked at me and asked if he could dunk me in his tea as he did not have any biscuits.
I had two hundred and fifty grams of smoky tea from China in my bag, enough to last me until the summer and most of my hair swiped off like a goat by a man who once worked with Vidal Sassoon and in Hollywood. I didn't think that was so much to be proud of when he spoke of the glory and the celebrities but I like my ears just the way they are and his scissors were sharp. He was from Sicily and expressed dismay at my washing my hair with stinging nettles.

Off for the journey of two thousand kilometres where it will almost be thirty degrees warmer than here. A winter of tea and books and the sea. And a bicycle and a small house of my own. It doesn't feel real, right now, as if good things cannot come without great struggle and pain.
It has already been, I tell myself. Go towards good things.

[title - an old Chinese proverb].

Belize and Mexico.

2012-01-19T01:05:44+00:00

After an entire night of displaying my knowledge of Constellations and physics in general to my small but interested audience in Flores, Guatemala, it was still dark when I caught the next bus to Belize:

The last two weeks in Central America.

2012-01-19T00:56:09+00:00

The story was written in the picture in front of me:

Temmuzda

2012-01-16T11:00:30+00:00

dear fatih akin, on behalf of female hitchhikers: thank you for showing us as we are ---

strong, daring, assertive, emotional, patient, crafty, perceptive, resourceful, and still "real".

i love these stereotypes.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-16

2012-01-15T23:19:00+00:00

Are you prepared for #sysadmin disasters? 6 questions to ask yourself in a #disaster recovery plan: http://t.co/CLCMoQ0k #devops #startup # Powered by Twitter Tools

Shiny January

2012-01-15T21:41:42+00:00

After dealing with a lot of burrocracy in the last weeks I managed to sneak out of day-to-day work and enjoyed the sunny weekend outside.
On Saturday morning I woke up with a sunray in my face and decided to go hiking. Fetching my map of the region I decided to take Bike/train/bus and start my hike in “Glottertal”.
I decided on the following tour:
On the first 10 km I met one cyclist and a couple of hikers. After reaching the Rosskopf dozens of Freiburgers and tourists met my way which formed a nice contrast. With every step I came closer to Freiburg I met more people taking some time for enjoying the forest. On the first part of my trip I ve even met a fox in the woods.
Now I want to share two pictures with you.

After approx. 15 km I recognized that my favourite cafe had already closed. So I went back home where a deliciouse Pumpkin-soup was waiting for me.
On Sunday I took my bicycle and rode 50 km in the valley. Now I m tired and I m going to sleep very very well ….

Inside Guatemala

2012-01-15T02:39:43+00:00

Once inside of Guatemala my Central American trip took a change for the better, in that upon meeting an Ex-Pat American with a Guatemalan family I was able to experience a side of the country that many tourists never get to see.

Last trip out, Riding with Crazys

2012-01-14T15:10:51+00:00

Exciting, or scary, It's hard to label. Riding with the drunkest:

Hitchhiking, like a Virgin

2012-01-13T16:54:27+00:00

From LV to LA, and the inertia of a sparkie.

The Trainee

2012-01-13T16:48:01+00:00

Having Fun in Redwood Country.

to write means to give all,

2012-01-11T02:49:38+00:00

Letters from a shipwreck - recovered and delivered [source unknown]

migration
some of my writing, hopes and attempts at clarity will be here now - http://birdsongsofpersia.tumblr.com/.
This journal will most likely stay in motion but within another form. It has been dear to me during these last near-on seven years. Thank you all for reading through these turbulent, passionate, sometimes ridiculous growth of times.

With warmth and the promise of hot steaming tea on long winter days,
Jass