Aventuras Nicas (Segunda Parte)

Hey everybody,

Yeah I know it's taken me over a month to finish the second part of the trip story.  I'm not going to blame it on Trump like everybody else.  Just lazy.  As a bonus for you though, dear reader, I did manage to put together some videos from the trip.  So if you have ten minutes to kill or if you like to use your tablet while you're pooping... you're welcome.  Just be thankful I didn't upload the 30 minutes of jittery motorbike riding between Playa El Coco and Playa Hermosa.  To view bigger images click the fullscreen or the watch in YouTube links on the bottom right:



Ear update:  We received an unexpected souvenir of our trip when a dead bug fell out of Dawn's ear about two weeks after we got home.  Don't worry she's fine.  Dawn... not the bug.

So where was I?  Oh yeah... Ometepe.  It's an island formed from twin volcano eruptions in Lake Nicaragua.  There are several places to take the ferry to the island and apparently the term "ferry" is used loosely in Nicaragua.  Since it was Sunday the regular ferry was not running so we had to settle for the "lancha".  If I tell you that it was one of those boats where they hand out life jackets to everyone until they run out I think you'll get the picture.  We were herded to the bottom level to a wooden bench near the engine.  For the entirety of the 90 minute boat ride there was a guy manually operating what looked like a butter churn but I think was actually a bilge pump.  At least we had a nice breeze since there were no windows on the boat.

On Ometepe we stayed at Finca del Sol, a small eco-lodge operated by a Canadian/Italian couple Sheri and Cristiano.  We had a nice little bungalow with a two-layer mosquito net (sweet) and a compostable toilet (not as sweet).  Cristiano had an impenetrable Italian accent and spoke in a constant, punctuation-less stream.  Sheri organized an all-day tour for us on our first day with Eddie, a chubby local cab driver with a sweet minivan.  We spent the first morning on a kayak tour through the Istian river on the isthmus between the two volcano islands:  Maderas and Concepcion.  Our guide Willy navigated us through the mangrove swamp that was surprisingly free of mosquitoes.  We saw lots of turtles, herons, wasps and even a few caimans.  The thing that I stood out in my mind, though, was that it smelled nice... like fruit.  After a lunch of whole fish topped with shrimp we spent an hour or so floating through the Agua de Ojo mineral spring.  Eddie then drove us to the Charco Verde reserve where I visited my first butterfly sanctuary.  I have to tell you... it was beautiful.  I could have stayed there for hours watching the colors floating around me.  It has to have some kind of therapeutic value.  From the sanctuary we walked around the reserve to where we had a view of the volcanoes in the distance over a lagoon by sunset.

The next day, our last on Ometepe, we went for a morning hike with Arles up Maderas to a lookout spot and on a tour of local petroglyphs (rock art carved by the natives of the island).  We walked through a banana farm and saw a plantation house from the Somoza dynasty days.  We found out Morning Glory seeds can be hallucinogenic.  We saw Arles make a trumpet out of a flower stem.  We found out that the Seiba tree makes great filling for pillows but is also known as the "makeout tree" since couples can hide away in the trunk.  We saw monkeys, goats, pigs and chickens. We found out that Arles' grandfather lost all their family land because he was an alcoholic.  I ate a goat burger that Sheri made from one of their own goats.  It was a busy morning where we tried to pack in as much as possible before leaving Ometepe.  Dawn and I took the afternoon ferry back to San Jorge and were picked up by Pedro (a taxi driver friend of Cristiano's) for the ride to San Juan Del Sur.  Pedro was an incredibly animated character that really stretched my approximately 40% comprehension of the Spanish language.  In the hour-long ride he discussed how Cristiano talks, his work, the Nicaraguan economy, tourism, motorbikes, and Trump.  At least I think it was Trump since he pronounced it "Tronk" and said we were all getting kicked out of the U.S.  Then he laughed.

San Juan Del Sur is a small surf town on the Pacific coast that's packed with expats, mostly from the U.S.  This is not necessarily a bad thing but it did give the town a more touristy vibe than anywhere else we had visited in Nicaragua.  Along the beach there are huge restaurants and bars with brightly (sometimes garishly) lit outdoor seating and waiters dressed in the uniform of whatever theme the restaurant happens to have landed on.  Farther toward the center of the small town things seem a bit more normal with small bodegas and comedors interspersed with fancy surfwear shops.  The beach in San Juan is not really that nice so it's more of a rallying point for people who want to experience the beaches up and down the southern Pacific coast.  Dawn had a pretty relaxing few days lounging around the town.  We got a massage, had a few pints at Nicaragua's first craft brewery (SJDS Cerveceria) and went ziplining along the treetops on the hills surrounding San Juan.  The operation (Da Flying Frog) is run by 8 Nicaraguans from surrounding towns and featured some fantastic views of the ocean.  We also happened to be in San Juan for the night of La Griteria which is the culmination of the 9-day festival I mentioned in my previous post.  All the streets were packed with locals wandering around, standing in lines to go into either stores or people's houses to sing religious songs for food or treats.  A large procession wound its way around town behind a float topped with an alter of the virgin Mary which ended with fireworks at the church in the town center.

On our last day in San Juan we rented a 200cc off-road bike from a couple that ran a nursery and their chubby, crazy-eyed baby.  I subjected Dawn to about 90 minutes of dirt biking up and down the coast across rocky trails, streams, and cow crossings.  We visited Playa El Coco reserve which is meant to be one of the nicest beaches in Nicaragua.  It's about 2 miles long and very secluded due to its being bookended by cliffs.  It wasn't as impressive as the guide books had made it sound and it started raining right away forcing us to abandon any plans for sunbathing.  We rode on to Playa Hermosa which is exclusively accessible from a surfer's ecolodge just south of San Juan.  The beach was much longer than El Coco and almost as nice.  There were hammocks and bungalows along the beach that were filled with backpacker residents talking their usual nonsense so had lunch and a beer and left.  I was fairly disappointed since this was the only day I could've tried surfing the Nicaraguan coast but all the breaks were closing out.

The next day we were again picked up by Pedro for a two-hour ride to Managua to catch our flight to the Corn Islands.  This time he was a bit less animated until we stopped at a gas station so he could get "Dragon" which is apparently some kind of energy drink.  After that he was a nonstop talking machine.  We found out that he had a lady friend who had killed someone while drunk driving and got sentenced to 10 years in jail, although 30 is the maximum.  They really throw the book at drunk drivers.  Anyhow, he went and visited her a few times in the women's prison and all he could talk about was how all the women there would throw themselves at him and try to get him to sneak off in to some closet.  Then he'd laugh and whoop hysterically.  Then he's say, "No, no really women's prison is rough and horrible.  My friend had a tough time there.  But man... those ladies really come after you.  It's hard to resist!  Woo!  Haha!  No, no... but I'm a married man.  I would never do that. But woo!  One man!  A lot of ladies!  Woo!"  Meanwhile Dawn is cracking up in the back seat.

I wish I could say that our 4 days on Little Corn Island were the highlight of our trip.  That was the intention.  Finishing the trip with a few days on a 1.6 square mile Caribbean island snorkeling and sunbathing sounded pretty fantastic.  We landed on Big Corn Island and rushed over to the dock to take the panga (small boat) for the ride to Little Corn.  They weren't sure that the pangas would be running given the waves and bad weather.  Since a boatful of Costa Ricans died when a panga overturned a year or so ago the Nicaraguan navy doesn't allow he pangas to run if the wind is over 20 knots.  The fact that hey had to consider this was the first bad sign.  So we get on the panga, are handed life jackets (of course), and for the next 45 minutes are flying across the ocean, bobbing up and down like a demented rollercoaster while trying not to heave overboard.  And this was arguably the better of our two panga rides.

We enjoyed approximately 10 minutes of sun in 4 days on Little Corn Island.  No snorkeling.  No sunbathing.  The hilltop bungalow we had booked for ocean views turned into a prison where the echoes of the constant rain banging against the tin roof made it impossible to sleep and the 15 minute walk to the village made it impossible to stay dry.  The incredibly uncomfortable bed and door that wouldn't close all the way did not help matters.  We managed to get in a few short hikes around the island between downpours but mostly were seeking shelter in cafes and bars.  We trekked to the north part of the island to the exclusive Yamaya resort in order to at least say we lounged at a beach bar.  The lonely bartender looked surprised that anyone would even show up since, as you may have guessed, we were the only patrons.  We did enjoy some great seafood and probably the best pina colada of my life.  I fulfilled my quest to swim in the ocean for a good 10 minutes and if you squinted you could sort of kind of visualize how lovely it would look on a sunny day.  That's what everyone there kept saying anyway.  "It's such a shame... it's truly a paradise!"  Dawn and I decided to make the best of it and enjoy the one feature of the island no weather could ruin:  lobster.  A lobster dish cost $8 and was enough for both of us.  We ate lobster 7 times in 3 days.

Don't get me wrong.  Little Corn does look like it would be incredibly idyllic on a normal day.  The problem is that we got stuck on this tiny island with shit weather and no escape for 4 days.  Literally no escape.  The panga boats did not run because the weather was so terrible and waves were over 2 meters.  It rained almost nonstop and it was none of that light drizzle business... we're talking sitting under a shower.  We got stuck loitering either in our shack or at one of two or three cafes and constantly running into the same people.  The island can't fit more than a few hundred people so that shouldn't have been a surprise.  There were a few tourists like us who had nowhere to go but mostly it seemed like either locals or long-term backpackers who had decided to make Little Corn their home for a few months or even years.  It was a strangely cliquey environment among these expats, most of whom were nice enough to the tourists with a nod and a wink mostly kept within their own groups.  There were a lot of inside references thrown around, sometimes more loudly than necessary, and the number of t-shirts that read "I <3 Little Corn" or "Rondon" seemed a bit excessive among this crowd.  I couldn't help but wonder if that's how I looked to people when I was living in Thailand.  I hope not.  Anyhow, of the handful of bars and restaurants in the village only a couple seemed to be owned by locals.  Bridget's is where we had the best lobster and she also made us a plate of Rondon which is a lobster and whole fish stew.  I hesitate to draw broad generalizations based on only a few days but to me it looks like Little Corn is on the verge of jumping the shark.  The backpacker expats have reached detente with the locals but will eventually dominate by erosion.  I'm not saying that's good or bad... I've visited plenty of beautiful places that are tourist-friendly to lesser or greater extents.  After all we would never have come to the island if it wasn't in the Lonely Planet.  I'm just letting you know what to expect.  I will freely admit that our perspective was skewed by the weather and lack of options.  Everyone kept telling us how beautiful and wonderful the island is and how disappointing that we couldn't see it that way.  As we were leaving the Lighthouse bungalows one of the owners was saying something to this effect and I said, "I'm sure we'll be back someday."  We both knew it was a lie but it's one of those things that you just silently acknowledge with a smile, say your goodbyes and move on.

Luckily there was a break in the weather on the day of our flight back to Managua.  The downside was that the panga for Big Corn Island left at 6AM and there was no shortage of stir-crazy tourists wanting to get off the island.  We arrived at 5:30 and the line was already 20+ deep.  By the time we started to board there was a mob of people on the pier including a not-too-happy few who weren't allowed on due to the 40 person limit.  Dawn squeezed into the very back row while I was stuffed one row in front of her on the very edge of the boat.  On the way to the island our boat was only half full so the front half stuck out of the water but now we were fully packed so we rode flat.  What this means apparently is that the sea spray generated from the front of the boat does not go to the side of the boat... it goes over the top of the boat.  About 5 minutes in when we picked up full speed this realization hit the 40 people aboard the panga.  A salty shower of seawater rained down on all the passengers and there was a mad scramble to unroll a plastic tarp from the front of the panga.  I grabbed on to my end, yanked back and realized that the tarp was only long enough to reach over my row.  Uh oh.  I pulled some more but there were 30 other people holding the tarp in place in the other directly.  I looked behind me and saw the look of resignation on Dawn's face as she slowly pulled the jacket completely over her head.  As we rode along for the next 40 minutes I would occasionally peek over my shoulder at Dawn's jacketed head being rained upon by salt water and wonder what was going on under there.  At the end of the ride she removed the jacket, shook her head and just said, "Let's find someplace to sleep."  We found a taxi to take us to a nice hotel and I managed to talk them into letting us have a room for a few hours until our flight back to Managua.  It was the best sleep we'd had in days.  The sun came out for about an hour.  We ate ceviche for lunch, roamed along the beachfront and decided that if we ever come back we're staying on Big Corn Island.  We flew back to Managua and stayed at a cheap hotel near the airport because of our early morning flight home the next day.  If you're ever looking for a sign that your vacation is over it's if you're at your hotel eating a "hamburger" made of unidentifiable meat on white bread and a cat walks by your leg crunching a mouse in its mouth.  Time to go home.

A few random observations we made during our trip:

• It seems like old school buses from the U.S. end up in Nicaragua, are painted a multitude of bright colors and then used for public transportation.
• Nicaragua is way more Catholic than I expected, although the Caribbean side is Evangelical.
• People drink a lot of soda.  We saw a ton of kids drinking one bottle after another.  Sheri from Finca del Sol told us that diabetes is a real problem in Nicaragua.
• It was surprisingly hard to find good coffee.  All the top stuff is exported and most Nicaraguans drink "presto" (instant coffee).
• The canal project is very controversial.  The Chinese want to build a canal from the Pacific to the Caribbean that would flow through Lake Nicaragua in order to bypass the U.S. monopoly of the Panama canal.  Everyone I asked about this, especially folks in the tourist industry near Lake Nicaragua, think this is a bad idea. They think mega tankers floating through the lake would destroy the environment and that the money for the project would only go to the rich and the government.

So that's it until next year's trip.  Thanks for reading.  Click the link below for the pictures.  Woo!  Haha!

https://goo.gl/photos/wahxG46LEHajTRVm9

Take 'er easy,

Dave

Aventuras Nicas (Primera Parte)

Hey everybody,

"So... Why Nicaragua?"  It's what Nicaraguans kept asking us while we traveled around the country.  They were legitimately curious as to exactly why we were there... like they were happy to see us but a little surprised.  It's not as if we were the only travelers, but Nicaragua seems to just be getting its tourism legs so people really want to know what drew you to their country.  They regarded us with a mixture of curiosity and puzzlement, like if you open a kitchen cabinet and find the one sock that you thought you'd lost a month ago.  You're happy to see that sock but you're also like... where did it come from?  How did it get in the kitchen?

Leon

My buddy Mauricio (a co-worker, native Nicaraguan and known communist) assured me multiple times that he would pick us up at the airport and give us a ride to Leon... until he called me the night before our flight to say he had to go to a party.  I can't fault the man's priorities but it did leave us scrambling for a ride.

Leon is the leftist, revolutionary center of Nicaragua that houses one of the country's main universities.  It was a good place to start easing our way into a new culture and adapting to the heat and humidity.  Dawn and I spent our first day wandering the city center, eating, drinking and napping.  Leon is gritty and busy, where tourists have to adapt to its environment and not the other way around.  The facades of all the buildings are in various states of decay except for the immaculately maintained cathedral.  The city center is packed with folks going on about their daily business to and from the central market and university students doing whatever it is that they do.  We visited the Museo Ortiz-Gurdian which is supposed to be the best contemporary art museum in Central America with works from Chagall, Miro and Dali.  To be honest, I preferred just walking around the grounds since the museum was built in two old hacienda-style buildings with beautiful central ponds, fountains and gardens.  We lingered around the town center for a while to watch some of the preparations related to the celebration of La Purisma, a 9-day festival dedicated to the virgin Mary.  There are processions every day through town that end up through the front doors of the cathedral.  Did I mention that Nicaraguans are super Catholic?  Part of the celebration also includes lighting fireworks and firecrackers in the streets at random times throughout the day and night.  More on that later.  The highlight of the first day, however, was our visit to the Museum of Myths and Legends that is housed in former political prison from the Somoza dictatorship.  This is a difficult place to describe.  There's no doubt that it's a prison from the high outer walls with guard turrets and barbed wire mesh.  Someone decided to repurpose the building, though, in order to tell the story of Nicaragua's various myths and legends using papier-mache statues in the various cells and communal areas of the prison. On top of that, they decided to depict vignettes of the daily lives of prisoners by painting them on the walls of all the rooms.  So you're in a prison surrounded by creepy statues and drawings of prisoners being tortured.  In one of the rooms they even set up a strobe light which gave it the cozy ambiance of one of the "Saw" films.

Let's be honest, though.  The real reason to visit Leon is not for any of that cultural stuff.  I have two words for you: volcano boarding.  Essentially, you hike to the top of a volcano with a plank of wood then hurl yourself down along the volcanic ash at a 45 degree angle.  That's right.  You're surfing down a freakin' volcano.  Armed with a board, gloves, goggles and a protective suit we headed to the Cerro Negro volcano in the national park a half hour outside of Leon.  Our guide was a young guy named Luis who explained that the last time Cerro Negro erupted was in 1999 showering the city of Leon with ash-filled rain that led to many collapsed roofs.  Cerro Negro is one of two active volcanoes left in Nicaragua and if you dig deep enough under the surface ash you can feel heat and see steam coming off the rock itself.  The hike up and elevation of the volcano gave us striking views of the surrounding countryside all the way to the city of Leon which made the steep incline down the side all the more intimidating.  That is why I "let" Dawn go first.  Once I saw that she was safely out of sight I got kitted up and followed suit down the mountain.  I'll be honest... it was not as scary as it looked.  The incline is steep but you never get quite enough speed to feel like you're in any danger.  Maybe it's because the "board" is more like the top of a shipping crate with a rope attached.  What you do get plenty of, however, is volcanic ash.  Everywhere.  In your shoes, stuck to your head, in your pockets, in your ears.  It's like you just walked out of a coal mine.

The first couple of days were also a bit of a challenge when it came to communication.  One of the things about speaking Italian is that you *think* you can speak Spanish even though you really can't speak Spanish.  Most of the time you're bullshitting your way through a conversation with random words that sound right but may or may not apply and somehow you manage to communicate just well enough to achieve a basic understanding.  That also describes communication between most Italians so maybe it's just something inherent to the language.  Or to Italians.  Anyhow, it's not usually a big deal unless you're ordering from a menu in Spanish and think you're getting tapas and shrimp but instead get a plate of olives, a hot bowl of soup and two warm shots of rum... the perfect combo when it's 90 degrees.

Coffee country

Getting cozy with my new  minibus friends

Everyone from the hotel staff to other travelers told us not to take the chicken bus to Matagalpa.  It's too slow, too hot and too crowded.  Take the minibus, they said.  It'll be nice and air-conditioned, they said.  You'll ride in comfort, they said.  I kind of liked the idea of riding in repurposed U.S. school buses painted like they belong in a Pride parade but for the purposes of expediency we opted for the minibus.  We arrived amidst the chaos of the Leon bus station at 9AM to try and catch the 9:30 minibus to Matagalpa.  The taxi driver drove into the station and dropped us off in an area where people were waiting in various lines under an awning next to various stalls selling merchandise and food.  He pointed to one line, said "Matagalpa" and drove off.  Dawn and I scrambled over with our stuff and stood in the line that the taxi driver had identified.  There were several Nicaraguans of various ages in line ahead of us and there were other lines to our right and left.  An older man seemed to be in charge of corralling all the minibus passengers to various destinations.  He made it over to our line and handed out slips of paper on the back of which were written numbers denoting your place in line.  We got 7 and 8 which gave us plenty of wiggle room for an 18 seat minibus.  As we stood there sweating 9:30 came and went, as did 10 o'clock.  The line was growing along with the impatience of the would-be passengers.  People kept walking up to the old man to ask what the hell was going on and he kept blowing them off as other destinations required his attention.  10:30 passed by.  At this point there were at least 25 people in line or lingering around the line sweating and waiting for the minibus.  Tensions were running high... at least based on my limited Spanish and the snappy chatter surrounding the old man.  Dawn and I were confident, though, because we had our numbered scrap of paper.  As the minibus approached at around 11 o'clock the line quickly degenerated into a swarm of people headed straight for the sliding door of the bus.  As the tallest person within half a mile I had a unique perspective on was going on around me and people were taking no prisoners.  Fat guys were elbowing old ladies for position, old ladies were using grandchildren as human shields to bully their way to the front... it was anarchy.  Dawn and I were holding up our "tickets" in vain as the old man was swarmed by a mob of scrap paper-wielding would-be passengers.  At that point I realized that this numbered scrap of paper system has some serious flaws, like the fact that scraps of paper are fairly easy to replicate.  I mean... you don't really "forge" a scrap of paper; you just have to make a scrap of paper and it ends up looking like every other scrap of paper.  The old man should really consider moving to a barcode-based system.  Anyhow, there were only a couple of seats left as we shoved our way to the front and I couldn't enter until I'd secured our bags on top of the van.  When I looked down I could see that Dawn had wedged herself into the entrance of the sliding door, bodily holding back a tide of angry Nicaraguans until I could fasten our bags.  As surprise mixed with admiration and concern I must have sort of frozen because Dawn was staring at me with a gaze whose unspoken significance could only be interpreted as "Hurry the fuck up you idiot".  We scrambled inside and grabbed the last two seats, which were not really seats but lawn chairs with the legs removed so they could straddle the aisle allowing for maximum contact with our fellow sweaty passengers.

As we headed toward Matagalpa we passed several industrial coffee farms along the main road.  They looked  more like internment camps; walled compounds with raised guard towers where workers were using rakes to spread out the coffee beans to dry out in the sun.  When we reached Matagalpa we switched from the minibus to a taxi to take us up into the mountains to Finca Esperanza Verde, the coffee farm lodge where we'd be spending the next couple of days.  It took about 45 minutes to travel five miles up a dirt road through a couple of small villages until we reached FEV.  The open-air lodge is located in the flat part of a mountain valley surrounded by tree-covered hills.  Our cabin was a bit of a hike up from the lodge but from our balcony we had beautiful sunset views of the forested mountain landscape.  There were only a handful of other guests staying at the Finca:  Alex the German backpacker who just quit her job and decided to travel until her money ran out, John and Lizzie who were at FEV for a month on a project to catalog bird species and migrations for a museum in Tennessee, and James and his wife who were trying to negotiate the purchase of a nearby coffee farm.  There was also Jacks the dog who spent almost the entirety of our second day acting as a trail guide and an annoying three-legged cat that decided that 6AM is a good time to plant yourself on our doorstep and start meowing. We spent the next couple of days enjoying the extensive network of hiking trails around the property surrounded by sloths, howler monkeys, migrating birds, chickens, dogs, trees, coffee, waterfalls, Ewok bridges and variably-legged cats.  There was free coffee!  We had a guided tour of the coffee farm where the coffee manager showed us the entire process from composting to planting, picking, sorting, milling and drying.  FYI, bad beans float.  Everything was done by hand except for the mill that ran on water power.  Also... there was free coffee!  The food was fantastic and the vegetables were grown onsite in the organic garden.  It was dark by 7 and we were isolated enough where all you could hear were the sounds of the forest.

On our second night we were settling in for a good night's sleep, or at least as good as you can have on a lumpy mattress under a mosquito net with a three-legged cat meowing outside,  when a renegade gnat (or mosquito) decided to pierce the idyllic peacefulness of our natural surroundings.  My rest was disrupted by a series of wild flagellations punctuated by exclamations of "ohmygodtheresabuginmyear" amid a stream of curses and weird squealy sounds. The next 15-20 minutes are kind of a blur.  I watched helplessly as Dawn windmilled around the room chanting "Itsstillbuzzingitsstillbuzzingitsstillbuzzing".  I succumbed to the clutches of panic as one thought climbed to the surface:  Vacation Over.  I began to visualize the logistics of how exactly a helicopter would land in the coffee farm to airlift us out of there.  Would we get adequate help in Managua or would Dawn insist on returning to a hospital in the US?  Somewhere in the background I heard Dawn say something about bugs laying eggs in her brain but I was too preoccupied to pay attention.  Is insect attack covered by travel insurance?  What kind of claim forms would I have to fill out?  If they had to cut out part of Dawn's brain could she go on disability?  What if they had to cut off her ear?  Ewwww. Eventually the panic gave way to grave concern so we were able to consider possible solutions.  The buzzing had stopped so either Dawn's frantic head movements had shaken the bug loose or it was dead.  We decided to go for a water flush and inspection just to be safe.  Side note:  You know you've reached a new level of intimacy in your relationship when you're probing into your partner's ear using an iPhone flashlight and a pair of tweezers.  Anyhow... it was a long night.  The next morning I went to breakfast and solicited help from some of the other guests.  John said it happened to him once and he had a bug in his ear for two days before he could get it out.  James said that one of his ex-girlfriends had a grasshopper fly directly into her earhole and get stuck, which sounds like something straight out of a cartoon.  Since the buzzing was long-gone we decided to play it safe and get some isopropyl alcohol from the staff to flush out Dawn's ear again.  Crisis averted... or was it?  I guess we won't know until the egg gestation period has safely passed.

Granada
The city of Granada seems to be the traditional, colonial counterpart to Leon.  Most of its buildings (including the b&b where we stayed) are those old haciendas with a central open-air courtyard that has either a garden or a fountain or both.  Ours even had turtles.  Our first night we wandered around the city admiring the colorful facaes and the central square that was bustling with food stall.  The main cathedral probably the tallest building in the city, immaculately maintained and facing right onto the central square.  The highlight of that first night, though, was seeing an old man successfully give his wife the Heimlich at dinner.  The unfortunate combination of Purisma fireworks and mosquitoes (who happened to have an affinity for Dawn's legs and, later, her face) combined to make it yet another rough night for sleeping.

My precioussss

On our second day we took a boat tour of Las Isletas, the chain of over 360 mostly private islands that lie just outside of Granada in Lake Nicaragua.  Our guide Vladimir navigated us through the archipelago, pointing out many different species of migratory birds as well as the usual standbys of egrets, herons, vultures and crows.  The individual islands all have power lines which extend in a webbed network from the city of Granada.  A large portion of the homeowners only use the islands as vacation spots so quite a few locals are employed to simply maintain the properties.  We saw camouflaged tree bats and visited Monkey Island where Dawn got a chance to feed Panchito the spider monkey.  On the way back we saw a couple of fishermen fishing with nets and hauling in their daily catch of bass.  In the afternoon we visited the Choco Museum, a touristy setup albeit with tasty chocolate liqueurs, and we climbed to the top of Las Maderas church for 360-degree views of the city.  The most memorable activity of the day, though, was the night tour of the Masaya volcano.  I had never seen real, actual lava flow in my life but it's something that will stick with me forever.  You can only stay at the viewing station for 15 minutes until they kick you out but I could have stared at that bubble and flow for hours.  I was like Gollum... I wanted to dive in there.  Swim in it.  The raw power of the earth, man.  That shit can be overwhelming when you're face-to-face with it.

The next day was to be, sadly, the best beach day of our vacation (more on that in the next installment).  It was a mostly uneventful day trip to Laguna de Apoyo, a freshwater lagoon that happens to be in the crater of an extinct volcano.  Other than Dawn getting harassed by construction workers on our way down we had a pretty chill day laying in the sun, swimming in the crystal-clear and oddly mineral water and kayaking around the lagoon.  When we got back to Granada we wandered around the public market so we could find a lady that made vigoron, a mixture of yucca, cabbage slaw and chicharrones served in a banana leaf that's a local specialty of Granada.  We also tried quesillos which are essentially tortillas with cheese although I'm not sure exactly how they differ from quesadillas or guirilas.  There are a lot of dishes that combine some sort of cheese with a tortilla.  Dawn also made me buy a disgusting candy apple from a street vendor that was so mealy it almost disintegrated upon contact with my mouth.  I couldn't even get a stray dog to eat it (true story).

One thing I also need to mention is that the breakfasts we had in Nicaragua were fantastic.  Seriously.  You should just visit the country to have breakfast. Nica breakfast with tortillas, pinto gallo, eggs and cheese.  I mean, the food overall and especially the seafood was great... but the breakfasts.  Damn.  Too bad the coffee mostly sucked.  All the good stuff gets exported so in-country you're mostly stuck with "presto" a.k.a. instant coffee.

So here are some pics of the first half of our trip.  In case the picture link below doesn't work try this:  https://goo.gl/photos/6feCRL4UPrPweC5B6

Aventura Nicas (p.1) photos

In the next installment:  Isla de Ometepe, San Juan del Sur, and the Corn Islands.

Take 'er easy,
Dave

Belgian Beer and other stuff

Hey everybody,

I don't know why it's taken so long to post from our trip to Europe last October.  I blame global warming/terrorism/the rise of Trump.  At this point all I have for you are some pictures of England, Amsterdam, Belgium and Italy and not much of a story other than I gained a new appreciation of Belgian beer and I got to wear a medieval helmet and wield a broadsword at a museum in a castle.  Those were pretty much the highlights.

So here are some pics that may help tell the story:

In case the photo links to the album don't work try this:  https://goo.gl/photos/13o4yQnsMirAkyK66

Take 'er easy,

Dave

Turkish Delights

Merhaba everybody,

Our story begins with a sad tale.. a tale of a backpack lost in the wilderness.  A backpack that ended up sitting for 17 days in Turkish Airlines storage hall 2 at Ataturk airport, a place where baby strollers go to die.  A backpack that somehow was tagged with the name "Samir Brescic" which will now be my new alias (replacing "Ron Mexico").  A backpack that had all my clothes, shoes, and (most importantly) underwear in it.  In Istanbul, a city which averages 83 degrees and 70% humidity in August.

At the Blue Mosque

I'm not going to pretend that I don't stress out a bit when I set out on a trip, but I would not suggest attempting the following tasks in the two-week period prior to leaving on vacation:  Moving in with your girlfriend (our story's special guest star Dawn), negotiating a move-out agreement with your previous landlord, going on two job interviews, finishing a work contract, and dealing with certain maniacal distant relatives which is a soap opera unto itself.  Let's just say that between all that plus the lost bag plus the crushing jetlag due to 10 hours time difference and 20 hours traveling... I may not have been the best traveling companion for our special guest star during the first couple of days in Turkey.  Thanks to Turkish Airlines' crushing incompetence they could not tell us where the bag was or when it might be found.  "Call back tomorrow.  Call back in 5 business days.  Please fill out the online form.  You need to talk to the baggage department but they don't have a phone number, only email."  I had to buy clothes bit by bit since I didn't know if I'd be getting my bag today or never.  By the way, I found out the hard way that Turkish clothing runs about two sizes too small.  Had I known that from the beginning I would not have started my shopping with underwear, even though the need was dire.  It was a tough lesson to learn.

Istanbul can be a bit of a sensory overload, with 14 million inhabitants plus who knows how many tourists.  It's overwhelming from a historical perspective as well, with buildings and structures dating from Roman through Byzantine and Ottoman periods.  During our first couple of days we weaved through many historic sites such as shopping centers, outdoor clothing bazaars, backpack vendors, and of course the historic alleyways of the power adapter vendor neighborhood.  Thank you Turkish Airways for enabling such a culturally rewarding itinerary!  Oh sure, we visited the Blue Mosque, but that paled in comparison with the excitement of haggling over an undersized pair of knock-off shorts.  We enjoyed a cruise on the Bosphorus,the strait that separates Europe and Asia, for about 15 minutes until we both passed out.  We also enjoyed an extended power outage which rendered the fan in our room useless. For two days, I was a sweaty, anxious, delirious mess.  So even though Istanbul is a fantastic city it was with a bit of relief that we traveled to Selcuk, in search of a clean slate and a true beginning to the vacation.

We found that in the 2000-year-old Greco-Roman ruins of Ephesus.  Maybe it's because ancient Greece and Rome were my favorite subjects in college but walking through what was once the third largest Roman city in Asia Minor felt overwhelming.  These remains are about as close as I'll ever get to being able to visualize how an actual city of that time looked.  We walked around with goosebumps down the original marble-paved roads, through ancient temples, amphitheaters and even a brothel.  From the temple of Hadrian to the ancient terraced houses that are being painstakingly restored by a squadron of archaeologists, it was like stepping back into history... if you could somehow erase the legions of tourists from your perception.  Of course, every once in a while I'd hear "Ooh look a kitty!" and catch Dawn taking a picture of some random cat lying across a slab of marble or ancient Greek carving.  We have about 20 cat pictures in that roll that I had to edit out of my uploads.  Did the ancient Romans have to deal with ADD?  Anyhow, another plus is that Ephesus lent its name to the #1 brand of Turkish beer, Efes, a pleasant reminder of these wondrous ruins every time we cracked open a bottle.

The Library of Celsus at Ephesus

Selcuk also houses a couple of other notable historical ruins namely the Ayasaluk Fortress that was in use up through the mid 14th century and the Basilica of St. John where it's said that his remains are buried.  Supposedly St. John and the virgin Mary retired to this area after that whole crucifixion business went down.  The thing we might remember most about our time in Selcuk however is the conversation we had with the owner of a souvenir shop named Osman.  As is usually the case in Turkey it's difficult to walk down a street without someone trying to wave you into their shop and when you are traveling with a certain Miss Dawn who has been known to enjoy the purchasing of goods it is easy to become ensnared.  The aforementioned Miss Dawn became interested in Ottoman shoes so that's how we ended up partaking in a conversation, or more like a lecture, with our new friend Osman the Kurdish Turk who looked like a klingon.  Suffice it to say that Osman has led a very interesting life... from growing up as an impoverished dirt farmer in eastern Turkey ("We had to burn dried animal shit to stay warm.  If you did not bring animal shit to school they would not let you in.") to his unsuccessful immigration to Italy ("I jumped out of the boat and had to swim 4 kilometers to shore but the police caught me anyway and kicked me out of the country") to his opening of the shop in Selcuk using the money he made selling his dead grandmother's rugs, it has been quite an adventure.  Apparently he also has a cousin that owns a restaurant named Dunya in San Francisco that he insisted we go to, but one thing you find out when you're in Turkey is that everybody has a lot of cousins and they are everywhere and can get you anything.  "Oh, I have a cousin who's a pharmacist right around the corner.  My cousin has a pant store down the street if you need some pants.  Oh yeah, I have a cousin that has a bus that can get you to the coast.  You're Italian?  I have a cousin that lives in Italy!"  Anyhow, 45 minutes later we didn't even end up with a pair of Ottoman shoes.

Side note:  Everyone thinks I'm Turkish.  They get about 5 sentences in before they realize I'm giving them the old deer in the headlights look and then the guessing game begins.  Spanish?  Greek?  Italian?  My ethnically ambiguous features strike again!

Dawn's new calling

From Selcuk we took a day trip to Pamukkale which is a series of travertines and hot springs that date back to ancient Roman times.  It's said that Cleopatra used to bathe in the mineral waters there, which are said to be excellent for your skin.  To be honest, I wish the waters contained bleach considering the number of people that were sharing what is essentially a giant outdoor bath/bacteria broth.  We did discover, however, that Dawn may have a second career  in the spa industry spreading mud over old ladies.  Makes sense.  Sometimes it's hard to reach all the nooks and crannies so you should ask some random person to go ahead and lather you up.  I have to admit, though, that I've never seen anything quite like those blindingly bright white travertines that have formed over millennia through the accumulation of calcium carbonate.

Our next stop was in Fethiye, a coastal boating town that was the jump-off point for our 4-day Gulet cruise along the Turquoise coast.  They used to be sailboats but now work strictly under engine power.  The crew consisted of three guys:  Yusuf, Volken (aka Volcano) and Captain Salami.  Yes, that's his real name.  The pictures will speak more to this experience than any words would do, so the only thing I can say is that at the end of the four days I was ready to jump back on the boat and do it all over again.  It's not called the Turquoise coast for nothing.  The water is absolutely gorgeous and we spent as much time swimming as possible.  The food cooked on board was fantastic and everyone on the boat (mostly Americans and Australians) was friendly and relaxed, although Dawn sprung the classic "Are Australians always this loud?" question on me to which I replied "Yes.  Yes they are."  We would cruise along the waters enjoying bbq and beers then stop for a couple of hours to hike up  the Byzantine ruins of St. Nicholas island.  We waded over the sunken city of Kekova, climbed to the top of the old castle at Simena, then at night were ferried over to a pirate bar that could only be reached by boat and smelled like sewage.  Hey, nothing is 100% awesome all the time.  In that vein, at the end of our cruise we had a couple of days in Olympos, renowned for its bungalows and treehouses among the forest near a rocky beach.  While this village has been set up to give off the hippyish backpacker vibe with its loungy reclined outdoor booths and baggy linen pant-wearing clientele, I still can't get my head around how they can charge $80/night for a "bungalow" which is more like a sweatbox straight out of Cool Hand Luke.  We found some good ice cream though that got served to us in a waffle that had the consistency (and flavor) of styrofoam.

Pottery Kebab

Speaking of which, one of the things we discovered during one of our (many) samplings of Turkish ice cream is that it's made with something called mastic gum which makes it a bit more chewy and strange to eat.  You can't really lick it... it's like licking teflon.  Nothing comes off.  You have to bite the ice cream.  I'm not complaining or anything, it's just weird.  Overall, the food in Turkey was fantastic.  There wasn't any one meal that blew me away, but the quality and freshness at almost every place we ate was superb.  Breakfast featuring dolmas, figs, fresh fruit and yogurt.  Kebabs, more yogurt, pide, eggplant, stuffed peppers and this spicy tomato sauce that's served with bread.  That was one thing that really surprised us, the quality of the bread.  It was fresh-baked and fantastic everywhere we went. There are fresh-squeezed juice stands everywhere you go, usually specializing in orange and pomegranate.  Surprisingly, it was tough to find good coffee.  If you like that thick and spicy Turkish coffee you're ok, but if you want regular coffee most of the time you end up stuck with Nescafe.  And, inexplicably, they charge the same for Nescafe as they do for regular coffee, like Nescafe is a really big deal.  Also, Turks really like plastic bags.  No matter what you buy, they will give you a plastic bag even if you already have one.  Sometimes they give you two.  They have custom sized plastic bags for everything from chewing gum to baby shoes to large backpacks.  Somehow, at the end of the day you end up with more plastic bags than items that you bought.  And I haven't mentioned the Evil Eyes yet.  Every house, car, and miscellaneous vehicle in Turkey has an Evil Eye in it.  You can see them sold everywhere... a flat blue ceramic disc with an eye-shaped pattern in the center.  The idea is that these talismans will protect you from other people's malicious thoughts so you had better put them everywhere you can.  Especially in gift shops for sappy tourists (like me).  Random Dawn quote:  "I love Turkish men's haircuts.  Rat tails make me happy."  There you go, some random shit about Turkey.

Anyhow, we had to take an overnight bus ride from Antalya to get to our destination of Goreme in Cappadocia at the center of Turkey and that's where things really started to head south for our special guest Dawn.  I may have declared at some point in the past that I will never take an overnight bus again because I can't sleep and even the best ones can only aspire to the rank of "shitty", but we had no choice since there is only one flight per week from Antalya to Cappadocia.  Dawn was already feeling crappy and the brutal discomfort and erratic driving of the overnight bus ride just blew it up.  On the plus side my legs were eaten alive by fleas.  Note to self:  Don't wear shorts on an overnight Turkish bus.  The first stop we made once we arrived in Goreme was to the pharmacy where you can get heavy-duty drugs and antibiotics for less than $5, so we pumped Dawn full of pills in order to catch our first tour of Cappadocia.  She's definitely a trooper.

Selime Cathedral

It's really hard to describe the weirdness that encompasses the Cappadocian landscape.  From above it looks like a series of giant brown meringues.  Sometimes you can see formations called "fairy chimneys" that are formed by volcanic rocks of different densities, with basalt on top and tufa underneath.  Cappadocia served as a sanctuary for Christians fleeing persecution in the 3rd and 4th centuries so there are many networks of cave shelters, cave monasteries and even underground cities.  It's truly something that has to be seen to be believed.  Many of these monasteries contained churches with 1500 year old frescoes still visible on the cave walls.  The crazy thing about these setups is the creativity that was exhibited in creating these cave habitats.  Basically, you had to carve out anything you used, but these guys were like the master builders in the Lego movie.  Dining table?  Bam!  Carved out of the rock on the floor, with bench seating.  Oven?  Dug out of the floor.  Recessed lighting?  Check.  Bunks for sleeping?  Done.  I'll bet if they'd had thermal waters we would've seen a jacuzzi in these caves.

The highlight for us was a trip to the Selime Cathedral, a remarkable series of caverns that served as the inspiration for the desert dwellings of the sand people in the first Star Wars movie.  The story is that George Lucas petitioned the Turkish government for permission to film at the monastery.  They wouldn't give him permission, however, so he took a bunch of pictures and reproduced the set in Tunisia.  As I mentioned above, it is a remarkable experience to be wandering through this warren of cave dwellings and imagining what it would be like to live there.  The cathedral reaches to the top of a hill with fantastic views through the cave "windows" onto a valley of fairy chimneys.  Another amazing place was the underground city that we visited, with 8 stories reaching 70 meters below ground level.  Dawn was not so crazy about this one since she is slightly claustrophobic, so it was a bit touch-and-go when we were stuck behind some chubby tourists on a long passageway that was only about 4 feet high.

And no trip to Turkey would be complete without a visit to a hamam, or Turkish bath.  In a traditional hamam like the one in Goreme, men and women are shuffled off into separate areas to be attended by members of the same sex.  I found myself in a sauna wearing only a bath towel and a facial mud mask and accompanied by a couple of guys who did not speak a word of English.  They, of course, did not have the mud mask.  After 15 uncomfortable minutes sweating up a storm and understanding only the word "tourist" as part of the Turkish conversation, the door to the sauna opened and this hairy, beefy specimen who looked like a fatter version of the serial killer from the movie "Manhunter" stepped in wearing only a pair of board shorts, pointed at me and beckoned me to go outside.  Flashbacks of Midnight Express ensued.  He led me into this marbled hall and pointed me to a bathtub where he told me to sit, after which he proceeded to pour buckets of cold then hot water on me.  Then after that he pointed me over to a marble slab and told me to lay down.  The slab was heated, which was nice, but then this guy started to knead me a ball of dough.  After about 10 minutes of that he led me to the tub again for another rinse, then back to the slab.  At this point it got a little weird because he started mixing together this concoction in a mesh bag an then proceeded to squeeze it out on top of me into some sort of soapy solution.  After I was completely covered in soap and bubbles he started massaging me again, which to be honest was not my favorite experience on the trip.  Not that there's anything wrong with a foamy, soapy massage from a beefy dude.

We capped off our time in Cappadocia with the requisite hot-air balloon ride at dawn.  Before you go thinking that this is some sort of extreme sport whimsy, just be aware that there are at least 20 ballooning companies in Goreme and that some of them have been operating for over 25 years.  This is a massive local industry, and one of the surprising early morning sights on the skyline is the sheer number of balloons that are floating in mid-air.  We were unfortunate in the fact that it was a windier than usual morning so our balloon ride turned out to be shorter than normal.  Even so, it was a fantastic experience.  To be honest, the views of the valleys themselves were great but the really amazing thing was being a few thousand feet up in the air along with about 50 or 60 other balloons.  The entire panorama was filled with balloons.  I will try not to mention the fact that I was a bit distracted by the fact that I am somewhat afraid of heights and was trying really hard not to poop myself.  Dawn was as supportive as could be expected, of course.  She tried to look the other way when she laughed at me.

After Cappadocia it was back to Istanbul for a couple of days of final sightseeing and, of course shopping (yay!).  The shopping (yay!) part of our trip is a new and apparently addition to our storied chronicles that was added by our special guest star Dawn.  Shocking, I know.  The only thing I wanted to do in our final two days is to get a Turkish shave from a Turkish barber who would give me a Turkish mustache.  So when we were finally done with shopping (yay!) we found a barber in the old town section of Istanbul and put him to work.  Out came the straight razor and he started with a clean shave on my skull.  Then the clippers came out and he shaped me a modern yet classic Turkish mustache, which of course I have not seen anyone else sporting in Turkey.  Then the straight razor went to work on my face and I thought I was done.  Oh no, I was not done.  Next, he lit this stick on fire and proceeded to hold the flame up to my ears which was apparently done to burn off any ear hairs I might have.  Next came the long shears which were stuck uncomfortably up my nose.  Then he pushed my face into the sink and poured cold water over my head which was followed by a vigorous massage, mostly of my face.  And there was my hot Turkish shave, one of the many highlights of the trip.

So we end our journey there, or in storage area 2 where I finally found my bag.  All I can tell you is... go to Turkey.  It's fantastic and has something for everybody.  It has kebabs.  It has Efes beer.  We should have had 4 weeks for the itinerary we put together but I'm glad we did it all.  Dawn didn't kill me, which is a plus in my book, although she did threaten on separate occasions to a) scoop my eyeballs out,  b) shove horse poop in my face, and c) put a tampon up my butt.  Between the two of us, Dawn and I took over 1500 pictures which I could only condense to about 500 or so (sorry) for your viewing pleasure by clicking on the album link below.  Without further ado:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/46MU5zMC5AeAkYwr6

Take 'er easy,
Dave

Halfway Home

Hey everybody,

It's hard to believe that it's already halfway through the course and I'm going to be back home in just over a month.  I don't have much on the adventurous or interesting side to tell you, unless you want to hear about the various metabolic pathways for brewer's yeast or how to design a HACCP plan for your brewery.  We've been neck deep in course work other than the weekly placements we have working at an actual professional brewery, though when I use the word "professional" it can be applied very loosely to some of these outfits.  It gives me hope, though, because if some of these clowns can produce and sell beer then why can't I?

I did get a two week mid-course break during which I took the opportunity to satisfy my mandatory "One new country visited per year" rule by taking a bus to Edinburgh, Scotland.  Edinburgh is a small, beautiful, and eminently walkable city.  The weather was pretty crappy and rainy during my two days there so I ended up creating my own brew tour of the city.  I did make it up to the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill that was formed from an extinct volcano and has excellent panoramic views of the city.  Other than that, I did the usual touristy stuff like walk around the castle and have a burger.  I tried to get some haggis, but wherever I went that had it on the menu said that they were out of it.  I went down to London for a few days to hang out with my niece (I hope you like baby pictures) and then back up to Belper in Derbyshire for a reunion with Lee, Anna, Mark and Richard.  We try to get together at least once a year for a few days that in retrospect none of us will remember.

Now we're down to the stretch run and I'm trying to focus in like a laser beam.  This is difficult since we are each producing approximately 25 liters of beer per week, most of which ends up back at our dorm.  It's gotten to the point where we're giving bottles away to the security staff.  Here are the pics...

Halfway Home

Take 'er easy,

Dave

Beer School

Hey everybody,

I'm in beer school.  In England.  When I say this out loud it makes me realize how awesome that is.  For the next 10 weeks, I'm going to be studying how to make beer, interning in a brewery, making my own beer and maybe even getting to sell it to some local pubs.  I'm on the Diploma in Brewing Technology course at Brewlab.  No, the other one... in Sunderland.

Around January or February I was actively brewing with a group of home brewers in San Francisco called Brewlab, sending out inquiries to a bunch of brewing schools in the U.S. and in Europe and everyone is telling me that they don't have any availability until 2014 (UC Davis said 2015 at the earliest).  So I'm working part-time and taking some classes and generally trying to figure out what I'm gonna do when I get this email from one of the schools in the UK saying they'd had a cancellation and would I be interested in signing up for the summer 2013 course.  I love British ales.  My work contract ends just before the school's start date.  The school is called Brewlab.  Too... much... serendipity.  Besides, I knew I had to come to England to see my newborn niece Alice.

Of course, summer is a relative term in England.  It's the season where it's slightly less shitty.  I've been here almost two weeks and I've gotten about 6 hours of sun, which I consider above average.  My previous experience had all been around the south, mostly London with a bit of Liverpool and Derby sprinkled in, so when I told my friends that I was going to be spending the summer in the northeast in Sunderland the reaction was universal bewilderment.  One of my English buddies wrote me that, "If you like to shag ugly, illiterate, indecipherable fat birds then it's the perfect place for you."  That sounds like something that should be printed on the cover of the Sunderland tourist brochure.  And when the British are making fun of a people for being ugly, I mean... wow.  Now that I've been here a couple of weeks I can tell you that everything they said was terrifyingly correct.  An incredible percentage of women here enjoy spray tans, which when combined with mascara applied with a paintbrush, neck tattoos, and an apparent disdain for exercise, should give you a typical picture of one of these orange horrors.  The guys aren't much better, with a large contingent of bald mouth-breathers sporting blurry forearm tattoos and wearing England football jerseys.

Okay, all the things I just said are really superficial and snarky (though probably not unfair), I admit that, so let me just say that almost everyone has been incredibly nice and has gone out of their way to make us feel welcome.  The most difficult bit has been getting used to the accent in the northeast, which in Sunderland is Mackem, closely related but not to be confused with the Geordie accent (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhHLmhchLrU) in Newcastle which is about 20 miles away.  A couple of the guys on the course are English and they warned us never to confuse the two and that under no circumstances should we EVER tell anyone in Sunderland that we are fans of the Newcastle football club unless "we want our face kicked in."  Everything in Sunderland shuts down at 6 o'clock except, mercifully, the pubs, so I've been in cask-conditioned ale heaven since my first day in town.

What else?  There are 12 dudes in the class (no women, so you can imagine how quickly things have degenerated), 6 from the U.S., 4 from England, and one each from Norway and Latvia.  A couple of the guys are from Newcastle so they've been giving us the low-down on places to hang out, which has been great, and Newcastle is much nicer and livelier than Sunderland and only about a half hour away on the metro.  We're all living in one building in the university dorms, which is weird, but I have my own room which makes it an upgrade over my usual travel accommodations.  Our head instructor Arthur is a northeast native with 30 years of experience in the brewing industry from micro to big ones like San Miguel, Heineken and Newcastle.  He's a soft-spoken beer encyclopedia with an incredibly dry sense of humor.  I asked him if he'd ever had an accident at one of his breweries where someone fell into one of those giant industrial fermenters and he said only once where a guy committed suicide by jumping in and drowning in the beer.  They didn't discover him until after he'd gone through a few batches in the fermenter, including caustic and acid cleaning. So Arthur says the only difference with those batches is that they had a bit of extra body to them.

Other than that, I've been making myself at home and expect to gain about 10-15 pounds thanks to real ales and Sunday roast.  The northeastern coast is supposed to be beautiful and from what I've seen so far that holds true.  I expect to make quite a few day trips on the weekends so hopefully I'll have some nicer pictures for you going forward.  Here are some pics which admittedly are mostly beer porn...

https://photos.app.goo.gl/nsHpa2vGuWjhNaxu9

Take 'er easy,
Dave

Ending with Machu Picchu

Hey everybody,

As George Costanza once said, it's important to leave on a high note.  The fact that I left Machu Picchu for the end of my trip, though, happened more out of laziness rather than purposeful timing.  I kind of didn't want to go, actually.  Machu Picchu is, by far, the most expensive destination in Peru.  Then I sat down and figured out that during my time here I've spent almost 80 hours on a bus.  To be honest, after six weeks of almost constantly moving around the last thing I wanted to do was to go on another long bus or train ride, but I knew if it ever came up in conversation that I spent a month and a half in Peru and didn't go to Machu Picchu people would give me all sorts of crap about it.  So yeah, I decided to go to one of the seven modern wonders of the world because I didn't want my balls busted.

I almost bailed out on the whole thing during a tour of the Sacred Valley.  We got stuffed into a bus early in the morning and spent the next six or so hours being hurriedly shuttled between touristy handicraft markets and overcrowded Inca ruins.  The guide was a friend of a friend who said he'd get us into the ruins at a discount but as he tried to get us through the ticket office at Ollantaytambo we got busted for trying to jump the line and kicked out.  Then on the cramped train to Aguas Calientes a Brazilian guy sitting across from me spilled a cup of hot coffee on my backpack which happened to be on my lap because there was no place else to put it. So with a moist lap and a backpack full of clothes smelling like French Roast, I pulled into Aguas Calientes thinking screw it, I'm going to enjoy Machu Picchu as much as I can.  And I did.

There are quite a few people that leave Aguas Calientes at 4AM in order to hike up a couple of hours and see the sun rise upon Machu Picchu.  I am not one of those people.  After hopping on the 7AM bus we rode up through the misty morning until we reached the main entrance to of Machu Picchu, where every tour group is for some reason scheduled to enter the city at exactly the same time.  You'd think that the ideal conditions for seeing an Inca city atop a mountain would be a clear, sunny day, but I have to say that spending the morning and afternoon in the middle of clouds and mist gave the deserted ruins a certain haunting quality that made them all the more impressive.  Machu Picchu wasn't formed as a settlement, more like a scientific research community.  It looks like the Incas used the location to experiment with agriculture, biology and especially astronomy.  Many different types of plants and crops were found that are not supposed to grow at these altitudes and the remains of bodies of different animals have been found in various states of dissection.  Observatories litter the ruins along with sun dials and fixed compasses.  From the available evidence it looks like the Incas fled Machu Picchu in a hurry, probably because they started to run out of food.  Since not much was grown up on the mountain they relied on imports from Cusco and the Sacred Valley, and when the Spanish invasion began the imports dried up.  Historically speaking it's lucky that the place was abandoned, however, because it also meant that the Spanish never found it.  If they had, they would have plundered and destroyed it, since that's what they did with every other Inca settlement they came across.  The plundering didn't occur until several hundred years later when Machu Picchu was "discovered" by Hiram Bingham, a professor from Yale.  Connecticut is where you'll have to go if you want to see the majority of treasures that were discovered in the ruins and the tombs back in 1911-1914.

It's difficult to fully absorb the ruins of Machu Picchu though because you never have a single quiet moment alone to appreciate what you're viewing.  There is constant motion and ambient chatter all around you no matter where you go.  There is no quiet corner.  The closest I came to solitude was the climb up to the top of Waynapicchu, the mountain directly behind the ruins.  Only 400 visitors are permitted to climb per day so that keeps the traffic low, and on this day the cold and slippery conditions made it so that people didn't linger too long at the top of the mountain.  The view of the ruins from that high are spectacular, and you can make out the perhaps intentional shape of a condor in the outline of Machu Picchu.  The rains started pouring down at mid-day and most people fled the ruins for the shelter of the lodge or the buses back to Aguas Calientes.  I waited them out for a while so that I could hike down the mountain and finally got my time alone with nature.  I wouldn't say that it was the most spectacular place I've ever seen in my life, but there was something about that place that makes you want to leap out and wrap your arms around the mountains.  I'm not sure how else to describe it.

After that it was a couple more days in Cusco and then Lima.  I don't have much to tell you about these two cities, to be honest.  I think that we had had enough of playing tourist and simply wanted to chill out before leaving town, me to San Francisco and Stefano and Caterina back to Europe.  The last few days we've spent most of our time relaxing, or wandering around looking for a good place to eat or have coffee.  I finally ate cuy (guinea pig) and it was delicious; a lot like rabbit.  I also tried Inka Kola and it was not delicious; a lot like bubble gum.  Peruvian drivers do not yield in any way to pedestrians and in fact seem to go out of their way to try and hit you with their cars.  Stefano and I have spent a large portion of the last couple of weeks daydreaming about pulling drivers out through their car windows and beating the crap out of them.  Peruvian people, while not unfriendly, are generally standoffish or grumpy with strangers though warm and affectionate with friends.  I'll miss taking afternoon breaks to eat Sublime chocolate bars with my brother, and I'll miss Cusquena malta.  Most of all, I have to say that Peru and Bolivia have surprised me.  Maybe amazed is a more correct term.  I had no idea of the variety of natural beauty that was contained in this region, and I've only explored the bottom half of Peru and the southwestern part of Bolivia.  Images of these places will stay with me for the rest of my life.

So now I'm heading home after almost 7 months on the road.  I hope nobody's expecting insightful words of wisdom or that I've had some major epiphany or something because that kind of stuff never happens on a schedule.  I've had a fantastic time and have gotten a lot out of my varied experiences... much more so than I initially thought when setting out.  It's also been nice to be away from a lot of the everyday crap like pop culture, sports, memes, and especially all the presidential campaign bullshit for the last half year.  Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that my hometown team won the world series, but I think I've seen maybe one baseball game this year and I don't feel like I really missed out on anything.  Above all, especially when compared to the other long trips I've taken, I'm returning home even more appreciative of the life I have and the place I live.  In the past when I left I felt like I was running away for a while, but this time I left not to get away but to go toward something... to have an experience... if you know what I mean.  I feel great and am happy to be heading home.  I realize how lucky I am not only to be able to take this time off and visit these places but to have all these fantastic friends that I've met with along the way.  The list is too long to mention but if any of you are reading this then... a big hug and a profound thank you for helping make these last few months so special.

A flower for the reader

I also want to take the time to thank those of you that have been reading my posts (I know there are at least three of you) but there's something about writing and taking photos and keeping up this blog that has kept me going these last 7 months.  I'm not going to deny that there's a little bit of narcissism involved (anyone who posts stories and denies it is a liar) but I want to let you know that it means a lot to me that people are enjoying or appreciating a thing that I'm creating.  I feel that I get a lot more out of writing these posts than people get from reading them for that very reason.  And there have been times where the posting has been what's motivated me when I've been lonely or anxious or whatnot.  Once I got going I ended up doing or seeing something awesome, all thanks to the push I received from people reading my stuff.  So thank you... it's meant a lot to me.

Like I said, I don't have any big words of wisdom with which to leave you.  When you're hiking, take the steeper path since it will probably have a better view.  Always try the street food and the local beer.  At high altitudes, cold showers suck.  Always pack toilet paper.  Other than that, I have a two-page list of stuff to do when I get back, the most important of which is written in bold at the top of the page... "Must Wash Hat"

Here are the pictures from Machu Picchu...

https://photos.app.goo.gl/VmaLNwG6MPj554We6

Take 'er easy,
Dave