Planes, Trains and Autorickshaws

It would be an understatement to say traveling makes me feel alive. From the moment I wake, my senses are acute and my mind is swirling with a plan for the day. I have found that my style is best suited for solo travel and no time is it more obvious than in the morning.

I jump from my bed and survey the familiar surroundings of an Indian guesthouse. A fan spins lazily from a fixture on the ceiling that appears destined to loose its shady grip. One light dangles from an uncovered wire and barely provides enough light for one to notice the crumbling paint on the walls. The atmosphere is uninspiring, even gloomy, yet revered for its utter calmness. For the short time spent dressing and packing in this vacant room will be the last moments that I spend alone the rest of the day- the only personal space that I will know during months spent traveling in India.

I rarely have much of a plan; just a destination. The previous night I inquired about bus schedules and the distance I wished to travel to the South Indian city of Chennai. I?ve learned to accept answers only as opinions and never take anything too literally. In places like Asia, I do as the locals do and travel early, while the sun is still low in the sky and there is the most amount of daylight in which to travel. Opposed to overnight bus trips, daytime travel allows me to view life from the perspective of a local, traveling along local bus routes and paying local fares, while observing and interacting with local people in their own environment.

From the moment I arrive at the bus station, the game has begun. Immediately, I am approached by the familiar squad of local men who seem all too eager to help me locate my bus. These men work on commissions paid by private company bus owners and can be helpful locating a bus that provides more direct and (sometimes) comfortable, yet more expensive transportation. Still eager to experience life from the local perspective, I bypass the reclining seat and so-called air-conditioning of the private buses and board the dilapidated, open-air buses that usually only locals ride.

One sensation of travel never seems to leave me- the feeling of boarding a packed local bus with every eye upon me, my skin the whitest some of these people have ever seen as I slowly maneuver down the aisle and locate a seat. I admit the attention is often overwhelming, for during this 8-hour trip I will be engaged in conversation nearly the whole time. Each person that sits beside me shares their own story, their many questions or just the simple smile of somewhat who cannot verbally communicate with you, but has just said more in a single smile than the man who spoke for hours.

After hours of broken English conversations and death defying stunts by our Indian driver along the highway, an overnight train journey actually sounded relaxing. And since a first class train ticket on this 8-hour overnight journey to Chennai cost 10 times that of second class, I bought the cheaper ticket figuring I was in for an experience. I also knew that timing and position was everything on Indian trains and these can only be accomplished by force, determination and complete disregard for others.

As the train pulled up and the Second Class berth shot past me, I broke into a full run and fought my way onto the train that was already as packed as a cattle car. As I expected, no seat was available. So instead of hanging out the open door like a local, I pushed my way to the center of the car where there was room to stand. Benches that held four were all packed six deep. Overhead bunks were occupied by whole families sleeping on one another. Luggage couldn't fit in overhead racks because full grown men were sleeping there already and the same goes for under the benches. So as the train pulled away, I plopped my bag onto the floor, thankful just to have a cushioned seat. There I sat (and tried to sleep) for 8 rickety hours. The sleeping man beside me quickly became my back rest and I, his pillow. The elderly man who slept on the narrow walkway kept my feet from moving, though his presence didn't deter people from pushing past us and stepping on us both. That's merely the way it is.

I love the thrill that comes with "roughing it" while traveling. But in conditions like those in India, even the toughest travelers will be tested at times. It is an assault on the senses nearly all of the time, but I feel it is important, even for just a few hours, to follow the lead of the locals and experience the country as they do. It would take far more for us to ever understand what it is really like to live as a local in a place like India, but by making some small adjustments to travel arrangements and to our accustomed level of comfort, we can get a better idea what day-to-day life is like for people all over the world.

Wonders do happen

There we were, sitting for hours on the tollgate short before Neiva, Colombia. We spent the previous night already here. Something seemed to keep us from getting further. About once every hour we stopped a car, which was not going further than Neiva. After five hours waiting and no result, I spoke out of my feeling: "Let´s go to Ecuador!"

We settled on the other side of the tollgate, towards Cali. One more hour waiting and we got a ride directly to Cali. Francisco was unique, funny, and a man of unexpected actions. Once he stopped, jumped fully dressed into a dirty river. Smiling he came back and sat, wet as he was, straight down on his chair. During the ride heavy rains happened upon us. Knowing our backpacks without rain protection on the outside of the drivers cabin, we prayed they would stand it. Due to the rain, Francisco took us into his motel room that night. Arriving at the motel, we got soaked with water within seconds after getting out of the truck. After unfastening our backpacks, we had to run towards the motel entrance. I ran, of course, directly through the deepest puddle. Seemed I was not wet enough. The next day Francisco delivered his cheese. We wondered who in the world would need that much cheese. Passing a bakery, I knew the answer, because all bread in Colombia seems to be made of cheese. Bad place for lactose intolerants, I can tell. It was a bad day for Francisco. He discovered his truck being hit. Must have happened during the night at the parking lot in front of the motel. The last delivery turned out a disaster. 450kg of cheese were missing. Francisco felt broke, he saw his one week old job threatened. On top of that, he delayed about 4 hours after leaving us in the shopping center nearby his hometown. Happily, he could repair the truck in his hometown Pradera. After spending a night in his house, Francisco finally brought us to the road towards the Ecuadorian border.

After several rides, we ended up with the last one in Colombia. Rene was crazy. Driving as if being hunt by guerillas or paramilitars, he speeded along a terribly curvy road, right through the Andes mountains, with at least 38mph. His tacho didn´t work anymore. Feeling near death, I avoided to be afraid. I didn´t want to face the negative consequences of the law of attraction. Instead, I thought of useful strategies how to survive in case we would jump over the edge and fly down the mountain. I knew we would survive the worst-case scenario. We did survive, without worst-case scenario.

Passing the Ecuadorian border, we managed to get a ride on the back of a pick-up straight to Ibarra. Dark, windy, and cold, we crept in our sleeping bags, watching the wonderful night scenery of the Andes mountains. Lights everywhere, life everywhere. Simply beautiful.

We asked the driver to leave us on a police control point. Instead, we ended up in Ibarra, in front of the central police department for the whole Imbabura region. Standing in front of its gate, we hesitated for a short moment, but we had no choice. Good we did not have. We got the best accomodation since long. We could stay in a lectures room for police officers. We enjoyed sleeping on a wooden floor, inside a building, with private - disgustingly dirty - toilets. We were in heaven. In the morning we were just about to leave, when a group of 100 police man rushed inside the lectures hall before we could escape. Some were shocked, many surprised, a couple of them laughing. Nobody understood how we white fellows made it into their lectures room. Before they could ask, we were gone.

Ecuador greeted us with wonders. Everywhere along the streets we could find overdimensional statues, for example Jesus with lifted arms and hands showing open towards the sky. The night before we passed fairy tale figures and a beautiful butterly on top of a bus station. The butterfly reminded me Kinga Freespirit. It was made for her, I was sure.

Without waiting long we got a ride to Quito. From there it was a small hazzle getting further, because a train accident blocked the road. Luckily, we found two men, who were determined to get through anyway. Continuing with two adventist church pastors and a young guy we made it to a tollgate before Riobamba. Waiting was not waiting anymore. Cars stopped in seconds, offering lifts to Riobamba. We wanted to get to the end of it. Accepting the promises of the seventh driver, we ended up right in Riobamba. We had to take two buses to get until the crossroad, where we could continue straight towards Cuenca, while the bus headed to Guayaquil.

The road was empty. No cars, only countryside. We still managed to get a ride on a red pick-up, which would bring us 30km closer towards Cuenca. Still a long way to go, and we wondered where we would spend the night. "Now a wonder must happen that we arrive in Cuenca today", I said. We sighed. A bus appeared on the horizon, following our pick-up. 'Just a tourist bus', we thought. He would probably never take us "home". The bus came closer, and Augustas recognized it as the one we had seen in Riobamba. This bus must have had a bad accident, and was probably going to the repair. When the bus was close enough we hitch-hiked. Both holding our hands to the right, thumbs up, I formed with my mouth the word C U E N C A. The driver nodded, and by means of non-verbal communication, we agreed he would take us. Our red pick-up finally stopped in a gas station, and while I ran to the bus to get the verbal confirmation for having the ride, Augustas struggled with the three pick-up guys demanding a payment for the ride. I saved us, running back with a huge smile on my face, eyes shining brightly, and shouting: "He is taking us to Cuenca! Thank you guys very much!"

Fast like mice escaping a cat we appeared in the bus and set off. A whole tourist bus only for us. Who cares about the broken window and the destroyed front. We were delighted, confirmed in our opinion that wonder do happen. The bus was one of them. The ride was long, through dark, curvy roads with attractive views into the deep valleys surrounding us. Suddenly, a couple of front lights turned off. A dangerous moment. Javier stopped the bus and took about 40 Minutes to repair them. Provisory. Short time later, while driving again, Javier became tired. He was likely to fall asleep on the stiring wheel. We tried to keep him awake with food, drinks, sweets, and endless talks. Unfortunately, Augustas, sitting right beside him, could not stand the tiredness anymore. His eyes fell asleep, thus Javier offered him to have a rest on one of the many other chairs. I was alarmed, watching Javier whenever possible. Once, I looked too long out of the window, and when having the next glimpse at him, he just managed to escape a frontal crash, nearly caused by him drifting to the other side of the road while his eyes closed for a second. Augustas didn´t really notice what was going on, thus I decided to entertain Javier until the bitter end. I succeeded. We arrived alive, happy, and healthy in Cuenca the same day at 10.30pm. Good we had a host arranged, thus we were taken care of soon after our arrival.

A Deeper Intimacy with the Earth

"Social capital" is a term that you learn in a college Intro to Sociology or Poli Sci course. It refers to the benefits that we all take from being part of the groups that we belong to, groups of all sorts: economic, fraternal, religious, etc. As the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard explains it, "the term social capital emphasizes not just warm and cuddly feelings, but a wide variety of quite specific benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks." Discussions of social capital tend to always focus on economics or politics in the abstract, and so put this English major to sleep, but the thing itself is central to anyone's life: "When a group of neighbors informally keep an eye on one another's homes, that's social capital in action. When a tightly knit community of Hassidic Jews trade diamonds without having to test each gem for purity, that's social capital in action. Barn-raising on the frontier was social capital in action, and so too are e-mail exchanges among members of a cancer support group. Social capital can be found in friendship networks, neighborhoods, churches, schools, bridge clubs, civic associations, and even bars."

Social capital is, one often hears, on the decline in this country, and where I live, that's easy to believe. Things are not as bad as in the famous incident in Queens, New York, when a woman named Kitty Genovese was murdered; all of thirty-eight people witnessed some part of the attack, but none called the police. This response--exemplified by the now-famous comment of one witness that "I didn't want to get involved"--is the opposite of social capital. But cities are like this, and I think they always have been (the Genovese case, we should note, happened all the way back in 1964). I am myself no angel in this matter; here in urban California, I communicate with strangers and even some acquaintances in grunts and glares. But in Yellowstone, things are different.

Every time I go back, I remember just how different. In the communities that surround the park, strangers talk to one another on the street. On our most recent trip, I even had a near-stranger invite me into his home. I have been writing for much of this year about the positives and some negatives of the Yellowstone life--in this post, for instance. And here is another example of a positive, one that does not get as much publicity as the geysers and the bears: the stock of social capital in Greater Yellowstone is ridiculously high.

Let me give a small example--small for me, at least, but a great adventure for the central figure in this story. During a trip to Yellowstone, I found myself one morning in sole charge of our toddler Lewis, who was then about two and a half. We wandered around for a while and had a look at the visitor center, but a national park visitor center is a tedious place for him (he didn't want to learn from the exhibits; he wanted to destroy them). However, there was a construction site nearby, where a crew was building a new sewage treatment plant. Lewis likes nature; he likes bison and elk, for instance, although when he sees elk, he tends to yell "Neigh, horsie!" But he really loves construction equipment.

We found a tree that threw some shade next to the temporary fence around the construction site, in a spot where we could see inside. We watched a dump truck make a run; a pair of big dump trucks were being loaded in turn by an excavator that, we now saw, was digging a hole about the size of a baseball infield, and maybe twenty feet deep. We watched the dump trucks make multiple runs, building a mound of volcanic rock to one side. A driver waved, then later honked, and the horn did not go "beep." The dump truck had an airhorn, which varoomed like a locomotive. Lewis was entirely absorbed by the spectacle: "That's a big truck!" was all he could say. "It's got big tires!" We moved closer to the excavator, the center of the action.

Which was a monstrous piece of machinery, a Cat 320CL, I can see now on the photographs I took. The operator sat in a cab and dug with a bucket at the end of an articulated arm. The arm and cab sat on a turret that spun atop the main chassis, and could in fact spin 360 degrees; the whole machine could move around on tracks, like the tracks on a bulldozer, or a battle tank. I later found Caterpillar's brochure for this model on the internet. It weighs over twenty tons. Measuring from the bottom of the tracks to the teeth of the bucket at maximum extension, the arm can reach thirty-five feet high and dig twenty-five feet deep. If I am reading it right, as long as it does not have to lift it far, the arm can pick up 20,000 pounds, about nine tons. Our excavator had to lift the load high enough to drop it in the dump trucks, so the bites its bucket took were not so hoggish. As we watched, though, it filled a truck about every five minutes.

Inside his glass cab, the operator of the excavator pointed toward us. I assumed he was pointing at something else. We moved in to get a closer look, and he pointed again, this time very definitely at us. I assumed we were in violation of some safety rule--but no, that was not it, not at all. Finally, he talked to one of the dump truck drivers, who jogged over to us, pointed at Lewis, and asked, "Does he want a ride on the excavator?"

You've got to be kidding. But no--of course, they're not kidding. This is Montana, almost (the contractor was from Butte). I carried Lewis to the excavator. The seat in the cab was six or seven feet off the ground, so I had to kind of hand him up. The operator, a rough and ready Montanan, arranged things so that Lewis was up close to the front window, but strapped in. The excavator, I saw, was controlled by two joysticks, one on each side of the seat. The operator closed the cab door and got ready to operate. Lewis never, through this whole experience, had any look but one of deep fascination. He kept his pacifier in his mouth and said nothing.

I had to get out of the construction zone now; I turned around and looked at the bucket, which seemed really big up close, then walked back out the gate in the temporary fence. I now noticed the "Hard Hat Area" sign on the fence (elsewhere, the signs were more emphatic: "Construction Area. Danger. Keep Out."). But even as a perpetually anxious father, seeing menace for the kids under every leaf, I could tell that this was not really dangerous. The operator fired up his machine and started working, with Lewis sitting in the window like a pilot, spinning back and forth, and focused intensely on the action of the bucket as it bit off rock, hoisted it into the sky, and dumped it with an explosive clatter into the dump truck.

They filled two dump trucks while I stood there watching. The operator paused in between the two, and asked--yelling so that I could hear him over all the idling diesel engines--if he could fill another. Hell, we can do this all day, I thought, nodding emphatically. I felt like the greatest dad in the park.

I doubt the construction guys ever worried about whatever rules they were breaking, but they did decide that two dump trucks was enough. When the second was full and clear, the operator threw the joystick that controlled the "turret" motion all the way over. The turret started spinning on its chassis, and of course that whole elaborate arm-and-bucket spun with it. He spun the machine around and around like a top, then finally dropped the bucket into its rest position on the ground like Ripley dropping a crate with her cargo loader (Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, that is, the one who kills the aliens). "He was a good little helper," the operator said when he handed Lewis down, his pacifier still in his mouth and a look of intense concentration still on his face.

As I said, theorists of social capital talk mostly in terms of its large-scale political and economic effects, but this event was an example of social capital in action, too. People in that part of the world simply trust more easily, and worry less (and since social capital involves debt, too, I have obscured one crucial detail about this incident, to guard against the possibility, probably remote, that the construction guys might get in trouble). Lewis immediately added the word "excavator" to his vocabulary, the only four-syllable word he knew, and he talks about the experience to this day.

Still, it seemed odd to me that I thought, as we walked away, That was the perfect Yellowstone experience. Why? We were not exactly communing with the Earth Mother, and would not be unless the excavator bucket opened up Her subterranean lair and killed Her. But it was obvious why: for Lewis, it was the highest of high adventure. And of course, something like this could only happen here. It would be impossible to imagine, in California.

100 Nights

I had a long night a few weekends ago. It was the night before a Teton summit and I was setting up camp with a friend in an alpine canyon in Wyoming. The Weather Channel told me there was a zero percent chance of rain that night, and the sky seemed to agree. Like many nights such as this particular one, I decided to forego setting up the tent, unrolled my thermarest, and prepared to fall asleep under the stars. However, within a few minutes I heard a slight scratching noise on my pillow. I assumed it was my face rubbing against the pillow's surface and continued to drift out of consciousness. A few seconds later, the noise returned, followed by the sensation of a small rodent crawling up my neck. The realization came quickly: mice were thwarting my attempt to sleep. I sat up immediately, brushed my neck off twenty or thirty times, and hoped I had scared them away. Yet the same sequence of events continued throughout the night. I'd drift halfway into sleep, vaguely open my eyes, and make out the image of a mouse twitching his nose and inching his body up my sleeping bag. I'd brush the mouse off, roll over, catch five minutes of sleep, and repeat.

Since I wasn't sleeping much that night, I had a lot of time to think. While lying on my back cursing the mice, half hoping they wouldn't return, and half hoping they would so I could scare them away, I came to the realization that I had spent over 100 nights outside in 2007. Nights in thunderstorms near the Mexican border, windstorms near the Canadian border, in tents, under the stars, on river beds, sidewalks, picnic tables, boats, parking lots, bus stops, and softball fields. The pavement in the middle of a seasonally closed highway in Colorado with a friend from Sweden, on a bench at a bus stop in London, on a picnic table in Phoenix, under the stars on a Norwegian lakeshore, and in the middle of an active sprinkler system on a softball field in Utah.

One thing I found throughout these 100 plus nights spent outside was the ease of life lived under a roof. For example, this morning's temperature was in the mid 30's. Yet I woke up comfortably in my bedroom, threw on a pair of shorts, strolled into the kitchen, and put on a cup of gourmet coffee. I heated a bagel in the toaster and drank a cold glass of orange juice. It is supposed to rain throughout the night tonight, but I don't have to make any preparations to keep my food dry, to make sure my rain fly is staked down securely, or stay in my tent and read until I'm tired enough to fall asleep. I can take it easy and coast through the evening with leisure or go down to the pub with a few friends.

Another thing I found is that civilization can be just as interesting as living outside, and vice versa. They each have their strong points; they are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to enjoy them both and live both lifestyles. I enjoy every second of my time spent outside adapting to the elements, but I always love returning to civilization. There is nothing like falling asleep next to a raging river flooded with spring runoff, waking up to a pink sunrise radiating off the face of an unnamed mountain, or being eased into consciousness by the sounds of birds rather than car alarms, but it is always enriching to return to civilization. There's no need to limit myself to one style of living. Rather, I prefer being comfortable not only in the outdoors, but also when returning to the city, traversing familiar intersections, exploring statues in an unfamiliar megalopolis, or communicating in broken English and hand gestures in a foreign country.

The problem I'm running into is that there are too many good options to pursue. Should I move to a remote mountain fold in California for the winter? Of course. Should I spend a few months in Argentina learning Spanish and immersing myself in an unfamiliar culture? Absolutely. Should I find a job in downtown Seattle and spend my evenings amongst the wide variety of cultural opportunities? Indeed, I should. Are there dozens of other options waiting around the corner to lure my attention? Most likely. The time to make a decision is approaching, and I'll soon need to choose amongst the growing list of destinations. Like many coolworkers, I'm unsure of where I will be in November. However, I've got a strong feeling that I might stray out of the woods and venture into the city for a while.