The Desert - What a surprise!

For backpackers travelling without popular travel guides (e.g. "Lonely Planet") or people like us, who usually do not know more than the currency rate of the country we are crossing the border of, the South of Peru and North of Chile can be quite a surprise.

After hitch-hiking a plane out of the Peruvian jungle (from Iquitos to Lima, the capital of Peru), we ended up staying with our friend Carla in the Comas district of Lima. A step out of the house and we had a great view onto two sandy hills without any vegetation. The only change in landscape was due to people's houses living on the hills. Carla's house was maintained mainly by her mom and brother who had to clean the dust each second day. If they would not wet the sandy street in front of their house each day, the desert would be in their house soon. We were astonished to see a completely shiny bathroom get covered in dust within only three days. At that time we thought it is only because of the hills which accidently happened to be in Comas. We did not realize that there the desert actually begun.

Moving on towards the South of Peru we noticed that all along the coastal highway was only sand and hills without any vegetation. Everything seemed drier than anything we had seen before. The only light were fields prepared for agriculture, which were showing how much this dry dusty sand can change into fertile ground once it gets watered.

Staying in Tacna (southern most Peruvian town) showed us more clearly the extremes of temperatures a desert has. During the day we enjoyed modest temperatures, not too hot, not too cold, simply pleasant. The nights got terribly cold though. Also this was not the worst so far since we stayed inside a house, slept inside a bed, and enjoyed all amenities of being "adopted" by a local family. Once it came to the shower, we did try to avoid it since night temperatures got close to zero degrees and ice-cold water showers were its result.

Heading to the Chilean border we still did not get aware of what may be ahead of us. We imagined Chile green and mountaineous. How wrong we were we understood during our first ride in a Chilean truck. We drove along vast areas which were nothing more nor less than pure desert. The Chilean desert is far from the Saharan like picture. It consists of mountains and hills covered by stones, sand, and salt. Sometimes a green valley appears (an oasis), where surprisingly many people live.

We also got a chance to stay for a couple of days in Lluta valley (Valle de la Lluta), about 10km North-East from Arica, which is close to the Peruvian border. Since my geographic lessons at school, I was dreaming to get to an oasis, and now I was staying right there. An amazing feeling. You leave the main road and you enter a green spot which never would let you guess you ended up in the desert. Water flowing in rivers, birds chasing each other through bushes and fields, greens instead of dust on our shoes. Life everywhere.

With few hazzles we arrived to Iquique, where the whole picture of the desert gets the biggest and most ridiculous contrast a desert can have: the sea. How can a desert exist if it has the sea right aside? Difficult to understand, especially when living right on the sea, being "guarded" by two huge mountains of sand in the back of our friends house.

We continued our trip through Chile by visiting Pica. Wind seems absent in this 95°F (35°C) degree hot oasis, and nights are way more warmer than we were used to. Pica's plus: a tranquil tiny town with several thermal baths reachable by foot. A little paradise if it only was not so terribly hot during the day.

The driest desert of the world - the Atacama desert - was our next stop. Our destination - San Pedro de Atacama. The road seems endless. The time waiting in the heat for a ride equals ages. We succeeded though, after spending a night in a service station on the crossroad towards Calama. Water is precious and expensive here, but through a warm-hearted lady in the service station we managed to get sufficient drinking water for free. Her boss should not know, though.

San Pedro - a famous tourist destination in the Atacama desert. The main reason coming here was a chance to earn a bit for our living on the road by programing a website (Augustas speciality) for one agency selling horse rides. Stephanie, a Swiss girl dedicating her momentary life to work with horses leading tourists along unforgettable desert trails, cared for us in every possible way. Through her we enjoyed San Pedro, survived 23°F (-5°C) or less degree cold nights in our tent, got hot showers, a place to work, rest, eat, and even a horse ride. With her we found a great friend. Thank you, Stephanie!

San Pedro and the Atacama desert seemed to be the most extreme places we have experienced so far in the desert. The days are hot. Sun burns skin immediately, if not having a 60+ suncreme at hand. Lips break like paper, hands turn old, dry, ugly. Eyes get hurt without sun glasses. Nights are freezing cold. 23°F (-5°C) or less degrees are not inviting to camp, but we had no other choice.

Though it is beautiful. Walking at 4 a.m. to the Moon Valley for enjoying the sun rise, riding gracefully through Death Valley, falling over a long dead horse, witnessing the leftovers of a goat served as a dinner, listening the wistles of animals living below earth. Nothing so extreme, nothing so beautiful. The desert is magic.

El Fin del Mundo

Disfrutate! Estas al fin del mundo!

(Enjoy yourself! You're at the end of the world!)

I only have a few more hours at the end of the world. I'm in Ushuaia, Argentina (the southernmost city in the world). It is roughly 1:15 am, and I have to catch a bus to El Calafate, Argentina in less than four hours, and then across the Chilean border to the sleepy port town of Puerto Natales. It should be one of the more pleasant 20 hour bus rides I can think of. Driving across the island of Tierra del Fuego as the sun rises, boarding a ferry to cross the Strait of Magellan, and onward towards some of the most prized peaks in the Andes.

Nice.

This past week in Ushuaia has been one for the books, for sure. The hostel I'm at has easily been the best hostel I've stayed at on this trip. Exceptionally clean, great music, heated floors, friendly staff with great smiles, free breakfast, coffee, tea, $1.50 for a liter of Quilmes, unbelievable views of the Beagle Channel and los Dientes de Navarino (the teeth of Navarino, a jagged Chilean mountain range across the channel). Boating through the Beagle Channel, the same waters Captain Fitzroy and his companion Charles Darwin sailed nearly two centuries ago. But the best thing about this week has been the people I've met here. I bumped into three guys from Calgary my first morning in town, with whom I went trekking in Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego. We got absolutely pounded with rain, but managed to have a pretty deep conversation whilst doing some primetime birdwatching. Three guys I will definitely contact when I find myself in the Canadian Rockies.

My second day I ran into two girls from Salt Lake City, a guy from Philadelphia, a guy from Ann Arbor, and another girl from New Zealand. Some the closest friends I've made inside of 30 minutes. I'm not sure if all of us were relieved to transcend the recycled, surface-level Spanish conversations we've been having, or if we were all supremely compatible. But we fell into one of the friendlier rythyms around within the first few hours. Joking, laughing, asking fairly personal questions without thinking twice. Something usually only good friends do. We spent a few days clambering around the city, traversing the sides of snowy mountain faces and through rainy mushroom forests, and had one giant pot luck dinner. Perhaps the best days of my trip were spent with that group of people marching around Tierra del Fuego.


It's too bad that they all have gone their respective ways already. It would have been nice to have somebody to walk with today... I took a stroll through the woods just north of the city to check out the fall colors. Everything was going well, birds chirping, good weather, good tune in my head, boppin' right along. But as I was nearing the end of my walk, I heard a pretty ferocious bark. I looked up and saw a very hungry dog running at what seemed its top speed directly towards me. The only thing I could think to do was yell "HEY! HEY! HEY!" I thought by making a bit of noise the dog would stop, or at least pause. But what my 'hey hey hey' must have sounded like to him was "I AM MADE OF THE MOST DELICIOUS LEMON PEPPER STEAK AND I WILL DISAPPEAR IF YOU DO NOT CONSUME ME WITHIN THE NEXT 4 SECONDS!" I thought the dog had already been running at top speed, but when I yelled, it picked up its pace at least two fold. I really had no time to respond, so I kind of braced for a big angry dog-pouncing. It came within five or six feet of me and started pacing, barking as aggressively as I've seen a dog bark, showing all of its teeth. Some dogs bark while wagging their tail, showing you that they're making noise but have no real intention of chewing your legs. But this dog had serious intent in its eyes. I've never before been afraid of a dog, but this dog scared the absolute daylights out of me... It somewhat cornered me against a thick patch of trees, and I thought it was going to make its move. I was still about 1 km away from town, so I figured I'd better try to get the dog before it got me. I grabbed my half full nalgene bottle thinking that it would actually impact the dog's behavior if I threw it at him. I raised my arm to throw the bottle, and the dog backed up a few feet. Suprisingly. (Although I have seen dogs back away from a potential rock throw throughout Argentina). I did this a few more times, all the while backing my way down the trail. I kept backing away until the dog was no longer visible behind a bend in the trail and then took off on a dead sprint towards town. I turned around within 5 seconds or so to see the dog sprinting towards me, teeth exposed. I stopped and grabbed a rock, turned around and raised my arm to throw. The dog stopped. This trend continued two more times until I finally threw the rock, missing him by about a foot or so. I collected more rocks and uneasily made my way back home until the dog finally decided that I simply had too many rocks. Given the fact that I was already bitten by a pretty angry dog in Bariloche about two weeks ago, I assumed that this dog would also not hesitate to bite and bite and bite me. I don't know how long the whole ordeal lasted, but I wouldn't put it much over three minutes. And even though I've never before been remotely afraid of a dog, I will say that these were three of the most genuinely frightening minutes of my life.

At least dogs in Patagonia don't have rabies. Or so they say...

Onward to southern Chile!

International Munchkin

International Munchkin

This blog is almost always a commentary about me and my adventures traveling and working abroad, but this time I want to talk about my smallest travel companion who has survived and supported all these changes with a smile and an adventurous spirit. She began this blogging journey along with me traveling to China and she has always supported our free-moving lifestyle. Thank you my little munchkin!

I remember a friend telling me that in France the popular children’s character “Dora the Explorer” speaks in French and teaches children to speak in Spanish. Here in Mexico, Dora speaks Spanish and teaches English and in Canada Dora speaks English and teaches Spanish. I think it’s great that Dora’s creators have made her internationally accessible. Denya, my daughter, loves Dora in any language. She’s Denya la Exploradora and she’s my own little International Munchkin.

Denya is always surprising me, she speaks English and Spanish and when prompted she sputters out words in Mandarin and French. Her food favorites are quesadillas, dumplings, miso soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, seaweed snacks, beans and maple syrup. She has had day caregivers and teachers speak to her in Mandarin, French, Spanish, English, Portuguese and Arabic. She has traveled by train through China, Thailand and Laos; by plane across the Atlantic Ocean and the North American Continent; and by car to the Mexican deserts, the Canadian Mountains and the US Northwest and she’s only three!

What does all this do to a child? I guess the long term effects won’t be known until she’s grown but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for fantastic results.

I suppose all this cultural understanding comes with the turf. She’s half Canadian after all, a people known for their love for other cultures. Growing up in Alberta, most of my friends were of Ukrainian or Dutch descent. I ate pyrogies and cabbage rolls as part of my regular diet. Multicultural living was normal for me as it is (in a different sense) for Denya. She has spent a large portion of her life in Montreal and Playa del Carmen, both cultural exchange centers where everyone gets along. The Montreal utopia is an amazing cultural success story where East meets West, South meets North and French and English share the communication rights with plenty of other languages. While in Montreal Denya was exposed to a wide array of languages, cuisine and cultures. Some funny situations arose from all that diversity. When she was getting to know her little neighbor in Montreal she thought his name was “Bonjour” since that’s what I would call when we went to see him. She would say, “Bonjour, come and play,” or, “Bonjour, ¿quieres jugar?” Another common occurrence was that she spent most of her time singing African songs she picked up in her mama’s singing class. This was funny because people would stop us to ask where we were from and what language she was speaking.

Here, back in Playa del Carmen, Denya can communicate easily with almost everyone. She has, however, been a little bored in her preschool English class. My parents have been visiting and so she speaks English with them all the time and we’ve had several friends come down from Canada with their children so Denya and her little buddies Annie, Dylan and Avery chatted away in English. Of course she gets full on Spanish treatment when her Abuelo (grandpa), Abuelita (grandma) and Tios (uncles) come to visit from Mexico City.

Denya’s world is small and she often states plainly that she wants to go to Canada, or to Mexico City, or to Beijing… as if they were just around the corner. With time, her concept of distance will develop normally and she will understand that it takes time to travel from one place to another.

Sometimes our friends and family question Denya’s traveling ways. The most common concern is that she will have to settle down once she starts school – we’re looking into the logistics of where and how she will be educated. Another concern is that she will live far from her families – I figure that makes all the more traveling necessary to make sure we visit often! Something that I think about is what Culture she will call her own. Without firm roots in one place how will she define herself? I’ve met people in my travels that when asked where they are from they begin with, “it’s a long story,” or, “we moved around a lot,” or, “well, I was born in such and such place but I speak such and such language and my parents are from such and such countries”. I guess she will define herself based on her experiences and I envision that it will be an advantage for her. I know that I feel lucky to have been exposed to different languages and cultures in my lifetime and Denya is getting that exposure right from the beginning. If she keeps going at this rate Dora won’t be able to keep up. ~ ;-)

Indoor Nation

On the afternoon of our first day in Yellowstone last year--a dusty, too-hot Montana afternoon--I had to search out a payphone in Gardiner, the park's northern gateway community. I had not dropped coins into a telephone since I had been here the previous year, and the phone I used then had for some reason been removed, and with no finesse whatsoever; all that remained was the wall bracket, looking stripped and skeletal, like the scene of a crime. Cell phones work fine here sometimes. Sometimes they work as well as two tin cans and a piece of string.

Which is fine with me (I don't own a cell phone any more). On the payphone, I called various places, looking for Bill Berg, the founder of this website. I talked to some Cool Works people, and discovered that Bill was going to the potluck and literary reading that he had told me about some weeks earlier, which was to be held in the "community center" in Gardiner. I had not known they possessed such a thing, and did not know what to expect from such an event, although it was surely a troubling wrinkle; given the hour, we would have to eat dinner at the potluck, to which we had not properly been invited and for which we had nothing to bring. I was uncertain about this whole affair.

The community center, it turned out, was in the local Fraternal Order of Eagles lodge. A pair of bronze eagles stood at attention next to the door, looking out of place in front of the unpretentious lodge building, like Marines in their dress uniforms standing watch as honor guard over a donut shop. We entered and saw that, at the moment, we knew no one here--but were made to feel immediately welcome, in part because they needed our help setting up. Bill arrived, looking somehow harried and unflappable at the same instant. He had been at a meeting of the county planning commission, trying to make the local trophy-home developers remain within the bounds of the law, and the meeting was apparently just like the gunfight at OK Corral, only less friendly. Changing the subject, I asked him what he needed from me for Cool Works. He answered me immediately, without thinking: he needed people--to work in national parks and such places, that is. At that time, there was a shortage of employees through the entire industry, even though it was only the beginning of the summer season. I have been reflecting on that comment ever since.

Plenty of you will probably be thinking that they could solve the problem easily enough by paying more. That's surely true--but the summer tourist business has been in existence for well over a hundred years, and the pay has been low for that whole time. (When I worked in national parks, I always thought it was more the lack of privacy in the housing that was the greatest problem; give people a little space of their own, I thought, and any retention problems would ease). While the pay has been what it is for a long time, the shortage has gotten worse recently. I think it is a problem with society itself.

"Many members of my generation grew to adulthood taking nature's gifts for granted," author Richard Louv writes in his book Last Child in the Woods; "we assumed (when we thought of it at all) that generations to come would also receive these gifts. But something has changed. Now we see the emergence of what I have come to call nature-deficit disorder." Just over the last thirty years or so, Louv argues, parents (in the developed world, at least) have become protective of their children to a degree that resembles clinical paranoia. The natural world has become, for children today, a distant and difficult place that holds no appeal compared to all the glowing screens in their lives. Louv interviewed kids all over the country about this phenomenon: "I think often," he explains, "of a wonderfully honest comment made by Paul, a fourth-grader in San Diego: 'I like to play indoors better, 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are.' In many classrooms I heard variations on that answer. True, for many children, nature still offers wonder. But for many others, playing in nature seemed so...Unproductive. Off-limits. Alien. Cute. Dangerous."

It's that last that's the real problem, and the children are not necessarily to blame. The parents I know are often scared of everything; in the city, children are chauffeured everywhere, in car seats that resemble the ejection seats in an F/A-18. They don't go to the country at all because it's full of coyotes and snakes and West Nile Virus, and the sun is hard to get away from in the country. The sun can be a real source of terror for the modern parent. This trend has been going on for long enough to produce what amounts to an indoor nation. There are exceptions (the people reading this blog are mostly exceptions), but if you doubt me, look at the indicators. To give just one example, look at the obesity problems swelling forth everywhere, among children especially; look at the degree to which diabetes has become common in all age groups.

This trend is part of much larger historical changes. The urban revolution--the movement of people from farm to city--is not over; I have watched it happening in my own life. A generation ago, it was still common to have parents or grandparents who grew up on farms. Mine did. That meant that I was exposed to countrified pursuits at an early age even though I grew up in the most urban of places--and one must be exposed at an early age, or else those pursuits look odd or inexplicable. While I had grandparents and relatives in the country, my children do not.

But what Louv calls "nature-deficit disorder" is not the whole explanation. I think also of how different the cultural climate of the 1970s was from more recent years. In the mid-'70s, there was a hiking fad; John Denver's hit song "Rocky Mountain High" was its anthem. Backcountry visitation in national parks reached numbers not approached before or since. Big brown Vasque waffle-stomper hiking boots, though shaped like the boots Apollo astronauts wore on the moon, were fashionable on high school and college campuses, a badge of authenticity. Compare that to the situation today, when to be "urban" is what the average college kid wants, desperately. Among my students at UC Davis, a major preoccupation is trying to convince the world that you grew up in an inner-city ghetto (most of them are from wealthy San Francisco Bay Area suburbs, and have only visited ghettos as brief and nervous tourists). Acoustic guitars and the all-natural life are not their major focus.

And it's bigger still than that. When, after the Second World War, industrialized countries grew wealthy--a process that happened in the United States first, later elsewhere--people were offered a choice: they could either have more money or more time off. Europeans took the time off, while Americans took the money (so did the Japanese, who have a word, karoshi, for death from overwork; the phenomenon is common enough that they need a word to describe it). People work hard in this country from a very early age. Although they are fatter--that is undeniable--they are not lazier. The goal is the comfortable life of the upper-middle-class urban or suburban professional. Since becoming a successful doctor or attorney is a hard slog, people caught up in this process will hardly think of taking the time off to work in Alaska. Pure snobbery can also play a part; such people may also think it beneath their dignity to take a job bussing or cleaning rooms.

In such a cultural environment as this, going off to live in a national park, or something like it, requires a willingness to flout social convention, and adventurousness of an Indiana Jones intensity.

But people really have no idea what they're missing. Half the town showed up at the Gardiner community center, but there was still plenty of food. We were made to feel altogether welcome, and went away happy. We spent almost two weeks in the park; having worked here, of course, it's a second home for me. We let the kids get as dirty as possible every day, and they were sad when it was time to go back to the city.