17 Sheep

Seventeen sheep is what Celso needs to complete the forty-five required to marry Juana.  Taquile has complicated and beautiful traditions that are adhered to by the almost 2,000 inhabitants on this remote island in Lake Titicaca.  In 2005, the island was declared a world treasure by UNESCO for the beautiful textiles produced by both the men and women.  Men knit and women weave.  Both learn their trades as young children and much of their worth is determined by the detail and quality of the images they weave into caps, belts, shawls, and purses (worn only by the men).   The textiles tell stories of their own lives and their cultures.

Juana began weaving Celso a wedding belt when he came to live with her and her parents when he was 20

and she 19.  Each couple must live in each other's home for a year before the local elected headman might approve their marriage to be held in May.  The parents carefully watch for qualities in the possible couple that will suggest they will have a successful marriage.  There is no divorce so this is an important period of trial and testing.  Throughout it, the bride to be expresses her thoughts of her possible groom in her weavings of his belt.  He is also busy knitting a red hat (he must wear white if single) and a purse to hold the coca leaves married men exchange in greeting rather than handshakes or hugs. 

Despite an obvious successful match, a house, and a 6 year old, Juana and Celso remain unmarried, wearing clothing traditional to singles in their society.  They lack the 45 sheep this almost completely vegetarian society will feast on in May for a five day celebration.  Normally, the parents of both the bride and the groom provide the sheep; however, Celso is the 5th of 6 children and the sheep of his parents are gone.  He must

work in a society with little material wealth to earn the soles (Peruvian currency) for each sheep.  Without marriage, neither Celso's nor Juana's voices may be heard during the weekly communal assemblies and decisions of their island.

He had 28 and needed 17 sheep as our home stay with three other travelers from Ireland, Scotland, and  Czechoslovakia began.    We pooled our groups resources, bought weavings and knitted products, and donated money.  By the time we left, the family was three sheep nearer to a May wedding....

Pictures are from Taquile, Peru of Jess and Celso, Juana showing the wedding belt as Celso knits, and of Wilfredo, their 6 year old son.    Posted in La Paz, Bolivia

Thankful

It seemed like an easy task. The Secretary at the Bolivian Consulate in Puno, Peru, asked us to take our dollars to a bank, deposit them in the Bolivian Consulate account, and return with a voucher from the bank, so that we could finish our process for a visa.  The task perfectly illustrated a challenge faced by much of Latin America… reliable infrastructure.

Each day is a mystery.  We may or may not have water, electricity or internet.  Busses may or may not arrive on schedule and if they do, they may not have the mechanical ability to make it to their destinations.  While any of these things could, on occasion, or in times of natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy, be absent in the U.S., most days one can rely on their presence.  

We are even more thoughtful than when we left the U.S. about the local, state, and national taxes we pay that assure us of infrastructure reliability.  While we complained about high utility and internet bills, we increasingly understand that much of what we purchased was the ability to count on the product being available if we flipped a switch.

In Costa Rica, the infrastructure was significantly better, litter was virtually absent, and water was drinkable from the tap throughout the majority of the country.  Peru has been a very different story.  The litter, sewage, and lack of dependable water, electricity and internet are a part of the daily lives of the people.  Places such as Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, may illustrate this well as the influx of tourism and the bounties of the water have brought too many Peruvians and tourists to the site too fast.  The town is overwhelmed and the stench is undeniable.  Services simply cannot keep up with the demand.

So in Puno, when one goes to the bank to make a deposit, the bank may not be able to take it that day.  The computers may be paralyzed, and innovation and the can-do attitude so much a part of our daily lives in the U.S. are not prioritized.  It may take hours or even days to make the deposit.

We all know intuitively that we take so much for granted.  Each day, life is a teacher providing us with lessons in Latin America.  The most important lesson is a perfect one for Thanksgiving week.  We are so thankful for all we have had and all that we do have.

Pictures include a women riding on a bike transport in Puno, a family foraging through the trash on the shores of Lake Titicaca,and an example of missing infrastructure from a house across the main square in Puno. Posted in Puno, Peru

Master Architects

Dark hands creased with time unconsciously cradle the drop spindles that transform wool from llamas and alpacas into multicolored cloth. The resulting beautiful weavings are a source of rainbow-hued pride, outlining the native population against green-terraced mountainsides and grey-block cities.  The alpacas and llamas are the threads of life in the Andes, and they are present everywhere, leaving their droppings even on the modern cobblestone streets of Cusco.  They are the first, rich, organic smell sensed as one steps out onto the incredibly engineered terraces of Machu Picchu where the gentle animals keep the forest at bay as they graze on grass covered platforms among gaping tourists.  

The Incas were a pinnacle of a maturing civilization stretching from Central America to deep in South America over 500 years ago.  They, like their contemporaries in 4 other great civilizations around the world, were acquiring advanced astronomical knowledge, developing engineering skills, and perfecting the science of artificial selection in ways that are still unfathomable.  Unlike the other ancient cultures of the Mayans, Aztecs, or Anasazis (whose sites we have wandered), the Incas were massive transformationists of the abiotic and biotic environment.  Signs of their civilization are present everywhere in the many varieties of potatoes and corn, in the quality and quantity of wool-producing alpacas, in the smoothly engineered massive grey blocks which are the current foundations of Andean cities and villages, and in the richly unmistakable faces of their descendants.  These are a people who dared to rebuild mountains soaring above deep, mysterious valleys by constructing terraces reaching toward the heavens.  They are a proud civilization in which today, local people share jokes and understanding in Quechua rather than choosing to speak with each other the Spanish of their long ago conquerors.   As their oral knowledge is increasingly coupled with educated scholars of their own race, a nuanced understanding of the Inca civilization emerges and old myths and misinterpretations provided in the past by the Spaniards are being struck down.  Many campesinos, or highland natives, are learning English as they seek new sources of wealth from visitors (tourists and trekkers) to the sites of their Incan heritage.  

As we reclined on terraces high above Machu Picchu, we wondered what life in South America, and in fact all of the Americas, would have been like if the Spanish Conquistadors had failed in their bid for land and wealth across the ocean.  There was a sophistication of the Incas that was centuries before their time.  Like other cultures, the diseases of the invaders were terrible, leading to dark ages where 60-90% of the population died in one generation and knowledge was irretrievably lost.  Their current issues associated with poverty are significant, but recent elections suggest an opportunity for change for the average citizen in a society long dominated by those with great wealth.  The hands that weave colorful patterns of culture and symbolism into stunning llicllas supporting new generations on the backs of women are capable of weaving a new society with greater equality and opportunity.  The people in the Andes have the feel of a recovering society sitting on the edge of greatness.
 
Images of Machu Picchu, a Chincherra woman working alpaca wool, and Renato, our guide extraorinaire from Cusco Native.  Posted from Cusco, Peru.

Strangers in a Strange Land

The concept of seeking to "learn with humility" is not just a fundamental principle of our travel goals, but a daily necessity of our new life.  We intrinsically understood this from the very first morning as we woke up in Costa Rica to a way of being, not a vacation.

We are "students" in the lessons taught to us by the "Ticos" or natives of Costa Rica, as well as from the myriad young folks who have and are traveling the world.  We know nothing of hostel life (which we are loving), little of public transportation (having grown up in the USA), and only a moderate amount about the biology or the reserve designs of this wonderful country in Central America.  Our ignorance cannot be diminished by Spanish dictionaries or translation programs alone.  For example, each meal is an adventure as each place and country has unique names for its restaurants (Sodas in Costa Rica and Picantrias in Peru), and its cuisine, drinks and deserts. Even the word "menu" means meal of the day rather than a description of restaurant offerings in Peru.

So, we must study our texts, ask questions with humility and a thirst for knowledge, and learn from our teachers, wherever they appear.   We have always understood that personal growth comes from learning.  We need a new language of global travel and the hard earned knowledge of locals who have encouraged us to, as one put it with a reference to Oz, "look behind the curtain" of the gringo trail, the tours, the landscape and better understand the social and environmental costs of what we "buy" or see.  Such knowledge has taken us a lifetime in our fields of resource management, conservation, and education so we have little illusion of what a year or two abroad can teach us.  But we can try to learn with humility.

Costa Rica is an amazing place, with people who have valued clean water and land and conservation decades before most of the world.  But it is also a place in which the natural world suffers as economic development for tourism and agriculture competes with preservationist and conservationist ideals.  The diversity is amazing, but like our own county, animals such as the golden toad, once an icon in Monterverde, have been driven extinct by anthropogenic actions and choices.  Like the arctic in our "beauty and the beast" blog entry, this is a place that is a harbinger of change and choice.

Posted in Lima, Peru.  Images are of a tour guide, a hostel room, and an Emerald Basilisk or "Jesus Christ Lizard" which walks on water.

Living in a Cloud

How do we live an almost completely mobile life carrying belongings in small, 20-25 pound packs?  In part, we live in a cloud.

As we prepare our last bags tonight at our friend Lisa’s house and head toward Latin America in a few hours, we are wondering if the preparations of the past three years will work.  During those years, we slowly converted everything we could to electrons.  We have learned a lot from reading reviews, blogs, and asking others about their path to freedom. 

We scanned most of our old photos (or at least Jess’s nephew Jack did!) and in the end, sent the last few hundreds to Digmypics.  They professionally brought the memories of a lifetime to us via a DVD and albums on Google’s Picassa.  The images are more available than they have been to either of us in the past decades and the memories are rich.  We converted all of our music with Itunes to mp3 files.  We took pictures or scanned things that we had moved from house to house for years including notes from friends, old sports awards, etc.  We went through our filing cabinets and scanned important papers.  All of these and more are available to us on the Ipod Touch, Iphone, and Ipad as well as anywhere there is web access through a wonderful program called Dropbox.

Mail was a particular challenge for us.  Because we no longer have a physical address in Gunnison, Colorado, we had to find somewhere to receive mail.  The solution was a service called MailForwarding.com.  We changed our address to Michigan and the company there receives our mail, scans the envelope, and notifies us via email that it has arrived. We then may request that they open it, forward it, shred it, or scan and email it to us.  As a backup, Sally’s sister in Fort Collins receives any forwarded mail.   (Sandy, you rock!)

We researched the one financial institution that refunded ATM fees, charged no foreign transaction fees, and offered excellent online banking (Charles Schwab).   We obtained a credit card with the best exchange rates and no foreign transaction fees (Capital One). 

Piece by piece the physical manifestations of our life became electronic and accessible.  Our phone will be turned off at midnight but if our preparations have worked, we will be in contact through our emails, Skype accounts as well as this blog.

Wish us luck as we find out if the three years of preparation really did prepare us for our international walkabout.

Posted in Los Angeles, California

How do you choose?

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.   ~Dante Alighieri

As we turned our energies and minds toward planning the first steps of our broader world journey, we knew that we would eventually have to explain how we chose where we decided to go from the almost 200 countries that exist in the world.

As has been the case in both of our lives on the most momentous choices, we are making these choices remarkably blindly, ill-informed, and with little real knowledge or sufficient thought.  Whether it was our decisions about life partners, graduate schools, career moves, or family… we have always made our choices the same way and found that with work, luck, and the willingness to learn, we grew and thrived within the boundaries defined by those choices.

We have asked hundreds of people about where they have been, what they have loved, and why they have loved it.  We have read travel blogs for over two years.  We have researched methods and modes of travel around the world.  We are certain of one thing.  We are naïve and ignorant. 

So our choices derive from a few principles, the most important being that all places, and the people within them, have something to teach us.  We have chosen places that thrill us, unnerve us, excite us, and intimidate us physically, mentally or emotionally (and occasionally all three at once). We have learned it is in this state that we grow the most.  We are sure that our journey will diverge from the path indicated below, and if all goes well, it will only be the first year of the trip.    

By publishing the dates and places, we hope that some of our friends and family may choose to walk by our side for part of the experience.  And walk is the key word.  Our next task is to get all of our possessions into a pack that weighs no more than 20 pounds.

Warm, south and international… the next stage of the trip

Los Angeles, CA (Depart Oct 22)
San Jose, Costa Rica (Arrive Oct 22 – Depart Oct 29)
Lima, Peru (Arrive Oct 29 – Depart Nov 1)
Cusco, Peru (Arrive Nov 1)
Overland on our own through Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina and back to Chile

Santiago, Chile (Depart Feb 5) (Fly through Lima, El Salvador and Costa Rica to LA)

Los Angeles (Arrive Feb 5 – Depart Feb 10)

Rarotonga (Cook Islands) – (Arrive Feb 10 – Depart Feb 18)
Auckland, New Zealand (Arrive Feb 19)
Overland to Christchurch, New Zealand
Christchurch, New Zealand (Depart March 19)
Melbourne, Australia (Arrive March 19)

Overland to Darwin, Australia

Darwin, Australia (Depart April 19)

Bali, Indonesia (Denpasar) (Arrive April 19 – Depart May 3 and fly through Kuala Lumpur)
Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, Malaysia (Arrive May 3)

Overland on our own to Kuching

Kuching, Borneo, Malaysia (Departure May 24)
Singapore, Malaysia (Arrive May 24)
Overland on our own to Thailand, Cambodia (Angkor Wat), possibly Laos and Vietnam, later to Burma, India and trekking in Nepal by November 2013.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.  ~ Lao Tzu

Posted from Haines, Alaska

Putting Alaska to Bed

September in Alaska is a very different time than July or August.  It is a frantic time for many Alaskan residents as they seek to prepare for the cold, dark, nights of the upcoming winter.  Boats are brought out of the water, buildings and vehicles are winterized in a variety of ways, wood is put in, and the final harvests of beasts and berries are done regardless of the weather.

Fewer tourists are about, with no long lines of RVs at the gas pumps in the small towns, and the temporary “locals” working in the service industry are headed back south for the season.  Tour companies and the supporting food stands, Thai trailers, and coffee shops are closed, even gone, from the empty lots that once bustled with 5 am traffic from hungry fishermen and busy women.

Wildlife is different as well.  The bears are frantically finishing their feast of over 200,000 berry days and their sides move like Jello as they waddle across roads and meadows.  The final salmon, now decaying, white and slowly drifting in small streams, have successfully thwarted the seine nets, dip nets, and combat fisherman on the streams only to die after a final dance in their spawning grounds. 

The fall, short as it might be, gives up its last life in a burst of reds, oranges, and yellows that turn the once green hills into a mottled, earthly and rich landscape with snow encroaching slowly from the tops of the mountain ranges into the foothills.  And finally, the days have turned into days of longer darkness than light. 

Our goal was to come to Alaska until it was cold and dark and then to turn our attention and journey toward some destination south, international and warm.  We have begun that turn mentally and physically and look forward to posting about the next phase of our peregrination.  

Posted from Valdez, Alaska