Our house in Iquitos

For the last 4 weeks we stayed in Iquitos - world's biggest city without road access - which is located in the middle of Peruvian jungle.

Our main host was Pilar. This girl we got to know through Egle - a Lithuanian girl, which used to make a research about shamanism in the Peruvian jungle, and now is working on other projects and ideas in Peru.

Everything was happening in a house on a crossroad. Neighborhood is neither very poor, nor rich. Houses are mainly built of wood or bricks. Our house is a corner building on the junction of two streets, made out of vertical wooden boards. The roof is covered with wavy sheeting, so if the sun gets hot (and it gets really hot), the house becomes a sauna. In such moments our tent should only be entered by a sauna-lover from Finland. The main door of the house does not have any lock. Only a small metallic latch, which is carefully pushed towards the door every evening by the house mother señora Maria. Additionally, she also moves a small table in front of the door. Just in case...

Everyone entering the house is welcomed by a cemented living room. Here almost every evening our host Maria and her friends are playing Bingo. Around 10pm gather 4-5 female smokers and for the next 3 hours one can hear continuously the announcement of numbers. Randomly somebody shouts "BINGO!" and the winner collects the money, which is put on the table of each players. The idea of Bingo is to cover the announced number on the table of numbers you have. Each woman has about 12 such tables, thus the game is quite intensive. If there is a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row of covered numbers, shout "Bingo!" because that means you win. The lots of numbers are covered with corn seeds in Maria's house. Bingo seems really the hit over here in Peru. Even on one of the boats we took along Rio Napo, people were in Bingo-Fever, blocking a complete entrance and exit area while putting their corns on the numbers shouted (and this until late in the night).

Let's get back to the house. During Bingo episodes the living room is decorated with 4 small tables, amply sufficient space usually occupied by children during daytime. Next goes a 12 meter corridor that leads to the kitchen. On the left and right side of the corridor are separate rooms with walls made of wooden boards. There are two rooms on the left and three on the right. Half of the corridor is cemented, another half consists of pure earth. Two rooms have ground floors as well.

In one of the freshly cemented rooms we squeezed our tent and tried to make ourselves comfortable. It is important to sleep under a mosquito net here, and our tent does well protecting us from insects. To tell the truth, there are not so many mosquitos here, but still, they might appear randomly. Doctors say that there is not much of malaria in the city, but Dengue fever is a very common infection Iquitos citizens suffer.

There are 5 rooms in the house. All of them occupy around 36 square meters. Three rooms have the size of 2m×3m, the other two a tiny bit bigger. We live in the small one. The second is quite empty, furnished with a small bed, and occasionally equipped with a sleeping and gurgling 2 months old chicken. The third is Pilar's room. She has a bed and a TV.

Maria and her husband Serapio sleep in one of the bigger rooms on the left side. Alcoholic Serapio is always happy. When his wife is deeply disappointed about him (he was sober for a year, and one months ago had a relapse) she hits his right cheek. Instead of feeling angry, Serapio offers her his left one, too. A clever trick to make Maria smile, because she does hit the other cheek with pleasure. In such moments they sometimes both disappear in the small backyard behind the kitchen, where chicken are swirling around, and Maria starts pulling out Serapio's gray hair. Even though the owner of the house is everyday drunk, members of the house are always friendly to him, feed him, express their concern about his health in a happy, often funny way, in other words they take care of him as if he was a baby. We didn't observe any serious conflicts nor fights, only that Maria likes to hit Serapio with a lid of the biggest pot or her strong hands on his tiny back (she is much bigger than him). But it is a minor issue.

Finally, the fifth room hosts Pilar's sister Maribel, her husband Carlos, their 12 year old daughter Carolina and Carlitos, the 9 year old son. Maribel's husband works as a night guard, so he mainly sleeps during the day in the cemented and better ventilated living room. Maria and Serapio are his parents.

In the back of all the rooms, you arrive to the kitchen with a long wooden table. It looks like in the last couple of years it has absorbed everything: water, oil, human saliva and a sufficient amount of chicken shits. A smaller table in the corner hosts the potable water. The bare kitchen floor is made of red earth. Actually it is very practical. If you still have oil in the pan just pour it down on the ground, nobody cares. Not mentioning water or rests of food being dropped on this earth. Some of this stuff is happily eaten by chickens who often break into the house via the bathroom.

In front of the kitchen we have a toilet combined with a washing place. It is a cemented space of about 6 sq.meters with a broken shower curtain. The back wall of this bathroom is made of a Maggi poster and few random wooden boards. It also works as a separator between us and the neighbors. The shower is represented by two big plastic bowls filled with the water from the plastic pipe.

The back wall of the house is made of horizontal wooden boards fixed with 8cm space between each other. This space is sufficient for the smallest chickens to sneak in. Behind the back wall there is a miniaturistic yard (6m × 5m), where 10-12 chickens are in charge. Every morning these birds make fiestas on the kitchen table, mark right on it their territory, and check the situation in the living room. They enter the house by flying over the wall, which separates the toilet and the back yard. When we go to make breakfast, we are not surprised anymore if there are feces on the table. Chickens like to check out the pots with the food of the previous day. The view is rather disgusting, but in a week or so one gets somehow used to it, and does not mind any more to cut his vegetables on top of it.

Before finishing this story, few more observations from the life in the house.

• A couple of times we saw Maria catching a chicken, pulling one of its feathers out, and cut it into half. One part was thrown on the kitchen floor, and the other one she soaks shortly into liquid in a green soda bottle (we guess, it is spirit). And then, guess what? She starts cleaning her ears!
• We cook here on a gas stove. Gas is very expensive in Iquitos. Here 10kg (about 15 liter) empty bottle is exchanged with a full one for 33 soles ($12). In Ecuador the gas bottle is almost twice bigger and costs around $2.
• Pets. As you probably understood, there are lots of chickens in this house. However there is also a 2 months old, very special chicken. In the yard none of the other birds liked him. Other chickens would start kicking its ass, picking his feathers... The only solution is to keep this poor chicken inside the house. The problem is that there is no dedicated place for him to spend a night. So he slept on the chair in the kitchen, in random dark places of the house, or even on our shoes. Once I got up very early, when the sunlight was just coming out. The visibility was poor. I kept my shoes and brown socks in front of the tent. I looked that direction and it seemed that one of the socks fell down from the shoe on the floor. I grabbed this sock, and it started to complain. It showed its real face and escaped from our room. It was that poor chicken! I woke him up and even scared him. I was so sorry...
• One more frequent guest in the house is a gray cat. She is a loner, and does not seem to belong to anybody. At some point in the past she started to appear in Maria's kitchen, and was started to be feed by the house residents. To tell the truth, everybody is happy to have her around, because since her appearance, mice are not of any problem anymore.
• Locals drink water directly from the plastic pipe in the toilet-shower. We did not want additional parasites in our intestine, so we were buying 18 liter bottles with purified water. It is the cheapest way to get such water. It costs only 2.5 ($0.85) soles to refill the bottle and for us both it lasts at least for 2 days. In Mexico the same stuff was twice as expensive - 16-18 pesos ($1.60).

So, that was our house for the last 4 weeks. Here we got sick, were cooking vegetarian meals, were dying from the heat... But all this is already the past, because recently we have arrived to Lima with our first ever hitch-hiked airplane.

Finding It by the Road

According to standard of procedure, my roommate Eric wasn't supposed to stray farther than twenty feet from the road to collect trash. As a grounds employee, part of his job description was to collect rubbish and litter within twenty feet of the park's roads. If a piece of litter was thirty, forty, or fifty feet from the road, he was not supposed to clean it up. This generally was no problem for him. There wasn't much litter in his district in Yosemite to begin with, let alone far from the park's roads and parking lots.

A few weeks ago, Eric was collecting paper cups, empty bags of chips, and other miscellaneous items a few park visitors chose to throw out their windows. It was a pretty slow day. Not much trash on the ground, not many visitors in the park. As he meandered down the side of the road, he noticed a piece of paper folded up, resting at the base of a tree about sixty or seventy feet from the road. He figured since it was his job to collect litter, he might as well stray from the road and hike halfway down the hill to grab the garbage. When he reached the piece of paper, he realized it wasn't trash. It was a letter dated June, 2005. It somehow was lost by its owner, found its way to the Wawona District in southern Yosemite, and had survived nearly three years in the open air in the Sierra Nevada. Two and a half winters in the Sierra. Some of the most torrential storms I've ever seen occur in the winter months in the Sierra. Seventy mile/hour wind gusts. Seven inches of rain in twenty-four hours (no exaggeration). Forty inches of snow in twenty-four hours. Wild fires. And the letter survived. It wasn't in a water-tight bag. It was by itself, folded neatly, weathered, half-torn, and legible. Out of curiosity, he unfolded the piece of paper and read what was written, front and back.

After enduring nearly three years unprotected in Yosemite's weather, my roommate decided that it would be a disservice to throw the letter away. The letter survived this long; he might as well keep it going. He brought it home and let me read it. I couldn't contain my smile. He asked if I would hold on to it since he assumed he would lose it. I told him I'd make sure it wasn't lost, thrown away, or forgotten. Sure, it was a thank you letter to dependable climbing partners and a goodbye letter to close friends. But as much as anything, the letter was about clarity. Clarity in her life and clarity within herself. As she put it in her closing words, "I am at peace."

It's strange. I read her letter with admiration. I also read it and relate to everything she wrote. It's free and sincere. It's honest, introspective, and real. It's beautiful. It really is beautiful.

Like most young adults at various points in their lives, this girl reached the precipice of introspection. On the eve of her twenty-sixth birthday, she raised questions about the socially expected linear progression through life, the validity of passion, and the importance of human connection. Did the life of a climbing bum answer any of these questions? Was the life of a climbing bum equal to happiness? She was in her mid-twenties and as she put it, she had no home, no job, and no boyfriend. She had a few hundred dollars to her name. In this society of standards, could that be considered happiness?

As the letter continues, she answers her own questions. Saying her thank you's and goodbyes, she recollects some of the closest bonds she's ever made in her life. Climbing partners becoming best friends, friendships becoming the type of human connections generally described as soul mates. Praise, gratitude, honor, love. Clarity.

Equally as clear was her love for climbing. Climbing is often described as an addiction, an obsession, an incurable craving. Such was not the case in her letter. The clarity of her love for climbing was sincere. There was nothing phony about it. Nothing to hide, nothing to fabricate to impress anybody. Her love of self-reliance, dependability, trust, endurance, and improvisation. Her love of granite walls from below and open vistas from the top.

Everyone has insecurities; nobody is free from them. Insecurity is what makes this letter so special. She was homeless, jobless, boyfriendless, and broke. Had she blown her chance at stability? Had she thrown away her chance at happiness for the trivial attempts to climb a few walls? The answer could have easily been yes. But rather than settling, she continued to climb and continued to be inspired by the spires, cliffs, and fellow climbing bums of Yosemite. She could have given in, packed it up, and resorted to the standard linear progression through life. But she overcame her insecurity, understood what was important, and denounced the social expectations that make so many people insecure. The goodbyes in the letter weren't concessions to the life of climbing. She wasn't folding only to find herself in a life that made her unhappy. Rather, her goodbyes were temporary as she was leaving for multiple-month first ascent of an unclimbed line in the Himalaya. She didn't concede. She had the strength not only to endure, but to be at peace with herself while doing so.

I'll never meet the author of this letter. But that doesn't matter. What matters is the sincerity and the soul of what she wrote. We all have our insecurities and our self doubts. We all question the validity of our passions and the wisdom in the life choices we've made. We all reach introspective thresholds at some points in our lives. There will be countless opportunities to concede, to take the safe route, to sacrifice peace with oneself by turning one's back on that which makes them happy. But strong people will continue to pursue their passions. And I will always be inspired by those that have the strength to pursue experiences that allow them to reach a brilliant realization...

I am at peace.

One Day, Ten Millennia

It is time, at last, to finish my story about our Yellowstone trip, which I started here and continued here. We spent our last night at Old Faithful, and once Dustin was settled, I slipped out for a while, walking around outside in the pitch black, looking at the stars. I had a hard time enjoying them, because I spent much of the evening worried about the next day. Would we be able to find anything? I had made my first trip to the place we were going back when I worked here, and I had only gone once. Our only guide would be my imperfect memories. There were no official trails, where we were headed.

We broke camp and drove for two hours, until we had almost left the park. We ditched the car (almost literally) and set out across a sagebrush flat, then up and over a hill that led into the creek drainage that I remembered--and, I was happy to see, to the creek itself. We were on what looked like a strong trail, and I decided to follow it for a few hundred yards even though it led in the wrong direction. We hiked up the slope on the far side of the drainage and found another first, times four: here was the first wholly intact elk antler I had ever found, and another, and another, and another. How had they gotten here? At first, I theorized that the park service had dumped them, that the trail was made by NPS maintenance people dumping roadkill elk parts here to keep them from going to the quack-medicine trade--an improbable theory, but not as improbable as the idea of tripping over four full-grown elk antlers right next to a trail. But we were on multiple trails that day, and I realized later that all were made by animals, by elk and deer following the leader. The antlers had been dropped here by their former owners, and had sat here untouched because we were the first humans to come this way in a long while.

We kept going upstream, passing a steep rockfall from the shoulder of the mountain to our north. We found another trail at this point, one so clear that I thought it might lead directly to our goal (it was actually another game trail). So we started upward. We went almost straight up through the forest. The landscape opened, as if we had climbed a mountain--which is just what we were doing, in fact. We found nothing. We climbed back down, searching all the way, but we could find no trace. And by this point, Dustin and I were both exhausted, our eyes stinging with salt, our breath gone, our legs at the end of their tether. Dustin at last yelled, "Whoa, Dad!" I had by now learned to dread that yell, which meant danger and savage beasts and worse. He was pointing down at the creek, where there stood a wickiup.

It seems an anticlimax to describe, but it wasn't much to look at, just a conical arrangement of wood from the forest, not quite six feet tall. But it was the remains of someone's home. It had been built by one of the last generations of native people to inhabit the park, over a century ago. I've been vague about its location because the park service wants to keep that quiet, but if you work in the park, you always learn about it eventually.

There was enough wood on the ground, in a wickiup-shaped heap, to make at least one more, and the wickiup still standing had lost much of its structure. So they were not pristine, but what else would you expect of structures that were about 130 years old? I admired what remained of the workmanship, as did Dustin. "Look at that," he said, pointing toward the one intact wickiup. "Look at how they fit together at the top." He had been expecting classic Hollywood teepees, and happily, I had explained that these had been rotting at their bases for over a century. This wickiup was short because it had been sinking since Ulysses S. Grant was president. The wood was fragile, combustible, deeply grooved, and silver with age. But it was also uniform: the wood was all the same length and width, and that exact size is not in fact easily available. The builder had put some work into these.

And that, of course, is the charm of such a place. I recall visiting the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena for the first time, looking hard at the brushstrokes on the Van Goghs they own, and thinking, "Vincent Van Gogh did that himself, one afternoon a hundred years ago." Hairs from his brush were embedded in the oil, the paint itself sculpted deeply on the canvas in his characteristic later style. Here in this canyon, too, we could observe the remnant of labor that had been obscure in its time, and admired today in part merely because it has survived. It really did not matter that one had fallen. It was still possible to feel a connection with these people.

And who were they? Sources are often vague on this subject, saying they might be the Shoshone, or the Bannock, or somebody else, but in this case, I think I have an answer. I did some research when we got home, and found a catalog of images that the NPS has put online, digitized versions of film photographs that people have taken over the decades. In the collection, I was able to find photographs of our wickiups, two taken in 1964, and one in 1973. Given a detailed look at the construction, I was able to go to expert sources I knew of, and finally decided that these were Sheepeater wickiups. The Sheepeaters were a branch of the Shoshone and the only permanent residents of the park in the nineteenth century; they got their name because they hunted bighorn in these mountains, although that was not the only animal they hunted.

As always, I was a little short on deep thoughts. I felt a connection with these people, but it was awfully vague. I know so much more about Vincent Van Gogh, and can imagine a day in his life with little effort. With the Sheepeaters, I immediately slip into generalities or Hollywood baloney or misappropriated amateur anthropology. As I stood there, I tried imagining a day in their lives, and immediately thought of a woman who looked like the Land O Lakes trademark, pounding cornmeal. Corn. In Yellowstone.

But we know what these people did for a living. They hunted and fished, and they did a great deal of what we would call hiking (the Sheepeaters had no horses when the earliest explorers arrived, according to all sources I've seen. They did have dogs, to which they hitched their travois poles). At this moment, I had just spent most of a week proving to myself that I could still negotiate the backcountry--better, indeed, than I could in the old days, when I hiked with a cigarette in my mouth, literally. The Sheepeater life now looked pretty good. At the same time, it is always easy for me to imagine the harshness of that life, one spent in total isolation, splendid or otherwise; individual bands wrung a living from this unforgiving country with hardly any help from a larger society. No metallurgy, no communications, no footgear worth mentioning, no medicine; imagine trying to treat brain cancer or a broken spine with leaves and roots. One moment the wickiups looked cozy, watertight and warm. The next they looked like hovels so wretched that even a medieval European peasant would turn up his nose at them. Here is a house that is smaller than the interior of a Mini Cooper, and about as easy to stand up in. Its owner would not have any choice but to embrace the outdoor life.

And then we switched millennia. We returned to the trailhead and rested, sore, but much pleased with our success. A string of horses ridden by bearded, dusty cowboys appeared. "Real Montanans," I said--and then most of them got into expensive cars and drove off. They were upscale fly fishing clients, wealthy orthodontists and tax attorneys and the like, from distant cities that had nothing to do with Montana. We got back on the highway, headed for Bozeman. While we had been looking for the wickiups, we had begun to smell smoke, faintly at first, and then stronger as the day advanced; it came from forest fires that were burning everywhere. The distant Gallatin Range ahead of us grew blurrier and ever more brown. We drove into traffic bad enough for me to get that not-enough-time-to-make-it-to-the-airport feeling in the pit of my stomach. The sky grew more dense all the while.

We left the mountains and passed, slowly, through Gallatin Gateway and Belgrade, the sky now brown as a stool sample. It was actually getting hard to breathe. The afternoon was desert-hot, and the two towns were a tour-de-force of commercial debasement, eyesore after eyesore assaulting my already grated senses: Liquor! Discount Cigarettes! Girls Girls Girls! Flies Flies Flies! (The kind you fish with). I had been told that the housing bubble missed Montana, but given what I saw here, I have to disagree. I saw the kind of lunatic housing developments that are the special province of the bubble. It all came to a head as we raced through Belgrade, not much time left to spare, and ground to a halt amid one last traffic jam, this one caused by a pair of cars that had caromed off one another on the highway. As we slowly coasted past the wrecks (the drivers were up and walking around), I peered through the murky brown air and saw, on the south side of the road, an open gravel pit. Trucks were chugging in and out of it. And on the rim of the gravel pit, with a marvelous view of its open expanse--barely visible to me through the murk and the glare--sat a row of little plastic housing-bubble houses. Under my breath, I muttered, "It's like a vision of hell."

But then--moving forward in that millennium--we went from the auto age to the jet age. The airport was small and sane and air conditioned. The airport security people were friendly; we took Dustin's water bottle through the checkpoint by accident, and they were honestly apologetic when they had to dump the last of our Neolithic Yellowstone water lest it turn out to be nitroglycerine. Everyone was friendly. We hopped to Idaho Falls, where we stopped only long enough to exchange passengers and luggage, then hopped again to Boise. We spent a happy two hours in the airport here, our only layover, and perfect for dinner, which we ate while looking at Idaho Air National Guard planes with our spotting scope. Then we got on the plane for a leisurely flight to Sacramento. Our three flights home were perhaps the mellowest, sanest part of the whole week.

The moral of the story: you can make generalized statements about entire societies or historical periods. You can do that. But you will always be wrong.

Grab on and Give it Your All

Life always offers chances to learn and if you are looking for those chances they are there... all you have to do is grab on and give it your all.

I'm back in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. The blue waters of the Caribbean, sunshine and palm trees have all welcomed me back to paradise. I lived in Playa del Carmen two and a half years ago before my family and I began our adventure in China. Pancho and I had always talked about coming back here and we've made that reality.

My direction has changed. I'm finally doing what I always said I wanted to do - yoga and performance.

I'm teaching yoga. One day, while visiting a hotel hoping to sell performances I ended up in a conversation with the special events coordinator. I had brought along my resume and when he saw all of my experience in yoga he asked me if I would be willing to give two yoga classes on the beach to a special group. I happily agreed and gave a trial class a few days later to that same director of special events and to the director of the spa. I thought I was being asked to do a couple of classes on the beach but it turned out that the spa was also in search of a yoga instructor for their private and daily classes. Well, my trial class went over well and I've started giving private lessons to the guests at the hotel. It's been a wonderful way for me to do what I love and be paid. Each lesson is different, depending on the participants, what they are looking for and their previous experience. I meet new people all the time and we spend our hour stretching, breathing and opening up while taking in the view from the guests' private terrace. Many of my clients have booked extra classes after enjoying their first meeting with me and I'm glad to know that I can make their vacations that much more enjoyable. Que rico! I'm now talking with the spa about the possibility of starting the daily classes for the resort. I feel so fortunate to have this opportunity to grow as a teacher and learn more as a practitioner.

My yoga classes are almost always in the morning and when I leave the hotel I head straight to rehearsal. For a month now six people and I have been creating a show. We have combined circus arts, dance, live music and song together in a show called Avatar and the elements: water, earth, fire and air. The rehearsals have been intense and it has been, and is a continuing lesson in performance and in life. Trying to ensure that seven people arrive daily to practice together can be trying at times and especially in a culture that condones lateness and absenteeism. Keeping everyone motivated and focused once we're all at rehearsal is a responsibility I share with a couple other members of the group. Even with these challenges, we've been able to put together something beautiful that grows and matures daily. We began this past week presenting parts of the show in front of the public in order to polish our numbers and gain stage experience with the show. We are a diverse mix of talents and some of us are beginners (or close to it) while others have years of experience under their belts so we need time to work together in front of an audience. It can be exciting and nerve-racking to put myself in front of the public, and with experience my mind is calming and I'm able to focus more and more on the job at hand and my role in making the show come to life. What an adventure!

Apart from the onstage duties, there are also all the preparations that need to be made off-stage. I've been buying materials, designing costumes, dreaming up props and mounting and dismounting plenty of circus apparatus, not to mention writing and checking off list after list after list. It's rewarding to see how our work is coming to life little by little.

Did you think that was all? Not yet. Three times a week I take a class in the aerial hoop. What´s that? It's a metal hoop with more or less a meter diameter. The first week of training was abdominals and arms strength building in preparation for the actual hoop. As with many circus acts, the hoop looks easy; yet one of the biggest challenges is the most basic - getting up. After our first month of training we have a routine and now it's all about attitude. For me, the strength training wasn't as difficult as just adding style to the exercises. How to move the arms and legs to create art - that's the part that I've really hd to work on. My teacher, Sergio, calls it casting a spell, and even if you aren't that advanced in the hoop, if you can cast a spell, an audience will love you.

Speaking of casting a spell, I've also been partaking in fire performances two or three times a week. I find this is another moment where I practice my attitude. Fire performance here in Playa is always sleek and sexy. Black and silver are the costume colors of choice. I'm not a hard core kind of girl but then again, it is performance. When I go out to spin fire I put on a spiked collar, leather bracelets and belts with chains. I wear black hot pants and crop tops and top it off with lots of crazy makeup. When I look in the mirror before I go on stage I still wonder if the people in the audience think I'm a masochist. It's all part of the show and what is portrayed to the audience and I make sure they know it's not really that dark.

With all this business I've had to plan out my days off so as to take advantage of the fact that I live near a beach. I managed well today and relaxed in the afternoon on the white sand beach and then went out on a hobie sailboat for an amazing ride out over the Carribean. Ahhhh...

The long and the short of all this is that things are changing and I'm both driving and riding the change. I'm having fun, making money and learning all at the same time and I don't think I could ask for anything more... wait, I could use a couple more hours in the day. Laugh, learn, love, and most of all, travel (even if it's in your own mind)!