Medellín and Salento

In recent history, Medellín was one of the worlds most murderous cities. Today it is one of the most innovative and transformed places. Pablo Escobar and his drug cartel terrorized the city in the 80s and 90s. Today, visitors flock to the museums, boutique restaurants, and yoga studios using The Metro, a super clean and cheap rail line that runs the entire length of the city. There is even a system of cable cars that connect the slums on the outskirts of town. We were super impressed with this city and its people. We took the one-of-a-kind Pablo Escobar tour, run by two locals that lived through Pablo's reign of terror and even lost friends and loved ones in the senseless killings and bombings that plagued their home-town. The tour guide, Paola, was unapologetic in the way she described the toll Escobar and cocaine has had on her city and country. 

After Medellín, we went to Salento, gateway to the Valle de Cocora. The valley is home to the national tree of Colombia, the Wax Palm. These are Dr. Suess-esque trees that stand nearly 200 feet, with slender trunks and no branches except for the palms at the very top. The following day we toured a nature preserve called Kasaguadua. It is owned and managed by two Colombian guys, Carlos and Nicholas, with a lot of passion for their project. They are experimenting with natural methods for reclaiming their land from its former use as a mono-cultured grassland for grazing livestock. They are also building an eco lodge using Colombian bamboo called guadua. We learned on the tour that the Wax Palms in the Valle de Cocora will likely be gone within the next 20 years or so and will never return because the grasslands that humans have replaced their former habit with are not conducive to the natural regrowth of new trees. Very sad stuff, but encouraging to meet people like Carlos and Nicholas who are working toward better understanding our environment so we can avoid the same mistakes.

This evening we will take a short domestic flight to Bogota where we will meet up with Jenn´s mom and spend the holidays with the Colombian fam. Feliz navidad! 

Cable car in Medellin

Colombian civil war museum (consider it a living monument because the peace accords have not been finalized yet).

Former headquarter of Pablos drug cartel. Now it has a restaurant on the first floor.

Jenn standing at the base of a Wax Palm.

Wax palm selfie

This valley used to be a forest full of bio diversity. 150 years ago the entire valley was logged. The only reason the Wax Palms remained is because they are useless as timbers because their trunks are fibrous.

Eco lodge hut at Kasaguadua made of Colombian bamboo, The joints are made of recyled plastic bottles and bags.

Disco Volador 2600

Ultimate Frisbee is about the only sport I know of where you can show up to a foreign country and be welcomed to play on team full of people you've never met. I just spent the last four days playing in an Ultimate tournament in Bogotá with a group of Americans (mainly from WI and the Midwest) that called themselves the United States Amateur Team. I was put in touch with them by a mutual friend of the team captain/organizer. We ended up losing by one in the quarter finals to a very talented and super fast team from Cali, Colombia. I was honestly happy that we lost such a close game. That may sound odd, to be happy to lose. But to put it in perspective, the US (not our team, but the country in general) is the best in the world for Ultimate Frisbee, having invented the game in the 60s. So for this team from Colombia to play 'the best in the world' and win a very close game was something that they will long remember. We did our best to explain the word 'amateur' and that half of the team had just met each other a couple days ago, but to the Colombians, they beat the USA, so it didn't matter. The end of the game high five line was full of tears of joy on their side. It was beautiful.

After the four day long tournament, Jenn and I have left Bogotá for Medillín. We just arrived after a long 9 hour bus ride. We will explore this part of the country for the next week or so then back to Bogotá for Christmas with Jenn's mom and the Colombian cousins.

The squad. The United States Amateur Team.

The Apaches. Team from Cali that beat us in the quarter finals. 

Trading jerseys with other teams is common at international tournaments. The USA jerseys were a popular trade. I met this guy, Cesar, from Pamplona, Colombia, and swapped shirts with him.

El Jardin de la Vida

We followed up our last ascetic volunteer experience in Honduras (see 'Cutting tanks and fire ants' post from November 12) with a decadent volunteer experience in Nicaragua. Jenn and I spent the last two and a half weeks at an eco hostel on Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua. We slept in the hammock dorm while "working" at the hostel. We checked in guests, mixed cocktails with homemade juices, served beers and cooked dinners for the guests, the owners and ourselves. The owners are an American couple that loves to cook and eat delicious food. The kitchen was stocked with fresh local produce, chicken that had been smoked in a homemade smoker, and a healthy supply of homemade bread dough. We went from weight loss program in Honduras to a weight gain program in Nicargua. It was a fun, decadent couple of weeks. And as a side project, I created a promotional video for the hostel (as it just opened in July and they're trying to put the word out). The link is below.

We have just arrived in Bogotá, Colombia to embark on the next six weeks of our trip. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLC5Uc_8cGU

Riding along the beach during our three days off work. We bike around the island. Throw back to this past July's RAGBRAI.

Gaffes of the traveling gringos

Nicaragua has a reputation for being one of the safer countries in Central America and thus has a more developed tourism industry, greatly increasing the risk of experiencing opportunistic bamboozlement by touts and thieves.

Within our first week, we got ripped off in the following ways:

A cab driver in cahoots with a guy at the bus station in Managua "confirmed" for us that the bus running to the beach town of El Transito was no longer in operation (false) and gave us a "discounted" ride for $50. Net loss = $45

Tim's iPhone was stolen. Net loss ~$425

Some rando on the bus from Managua to Rivas posing as the driver sold us tickets, i.e. paper on which he wrote our destination, for 600 córdobas. Much confusion ensued when the actual driver came around to collect our fare. Net loss: $17

(Editor's note: Lest you think we're a couple of rubes, I assure you that their techniques, the details of which are too lengthy to describe here, were wily and sophisticated.)

As is often the way of the world, we also had a number of lovely experiences with the good people of Nicaragua that counterbalance the few negative experiences:

We stayed at one of the nicest Couchsurfing locations (in Managua) either of us have ever encountered and took a much needed rest day to do laundry and teach 14-year-old Johnny the meaning of various Obie Trice lyrics. Net gain: a more nuanced appreciation of Obie Trice's musicality, and ~$40 saved on two nights hostel in Managua.

At the beach, we relocated from a rundown hostel owned by a gringo from Ocean City, NJ (!) to a gorgeous hostel run by two Nicaraguan brothers who lived in Philly for twenty years (!) that cost half the price. They were very friendly and gave us a parting gift of a bottle of honey from one of the brother's own hives. Net gain: good conversation, good sleep, $60 price difference, and honey.

We hitchhiked a 15 minute stretch of busy PanAmerican highway with an older Nicaraguan gentleman named Mario who invited us to stay at his coffee farm (we had to pass, unfortunately). Net gain: conversation plus saved $15 on cab ride.

A friendly guy on the bus named Marlo - the bus on which we bought fake tickets - helped us get the local rate for a cab from the bus station in Rivas to the Ometepe Island port town of San Jorge by pretending he was going on vacation to the island with us. It was unclear until the very end of the ruse if he was actually going to try to come with us or maybe rob us. Net gain: good conversation on the bus with Marlo plus $3 saved on the 'local' cab rate vs the Gringo rate.

After a fun time last night in Altagracia, a town on Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua, celebrating the feast day of San Diego, we were awoken at roughly 3am and every hour thereafter by a neighbor's radio playing the worst kind of 90s alt rock and a series of roosters literally outside our door. Both of us have added learning how to kill chickens with our bare hands to our list of desired WWOOFing experiences. Despite our lack of sleep, we were able to put our newfound discernment skills to good use this morning when a guy - carrying a beetle the size of his hand, as one does - told us the buses aren't running today (false) and offered us a $26 cab ride to our next destination (Eco-lodge/farm called Jardin de la Vida) on the other side of the island. We told him we'd think about it, then found the bus, as scheduled, 30 minutes later. Net gain: $24

While it's infuriating in the moment to be tricked, ultimately we're talking about differences of a few dollars here and there. Being Americans, Tim and I have the freedom and resources to see parts of these countries that their own citizens may never visit. An iPhone is an embarrassingly expensive belonging when its value is converted to córdobas for a police report ($C 22,500). Furthermore, as we've been conversing with locals and reading more about the countries we're visiting, we've gained a much better understanding of the sad history of the United States' influence in the region, including training and arming the militaries of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua to massacre their own people throughout the 80s and 90s. As Andy Staub would say "perspective is a bitch," and we've decided to view our losses as reparations on behalf of the Reagan (and probably Trump) administration.

More Honduras pics

Who knew four kittens could convert a lifelong cat-hater?

Rosie helping make tortillas.

Silly pic with the the gals

Harvesting coffee

Honduran tractor

Cutting tanks and fire ants

Halloween trick or treaters!

Coffee farm 

The bare essentials

Our first week WWOOFing at The Leadership Center involved a lot of "cutting tanks," or weed whacking, as it's commonly known. This seemed an easy enough task until we learned how easily one can inadvertently whack a fire ant hill. First you feel a few sharp pricks on your shins or calves, which cause you to look down and notice several small ants crawling on your shoes. First you do some awkward slow-motion hopping while kicking the ground to try to shake them off and prevent them from moving north. Then the burning sensation increases and you realize with horror that the ground below you appears to be moving - you're standing in the middle of a teeming mound of fire ants. Not wanting to shut off your weed whacker (better to get those tanks over with before your hand goes numb and you incur permanent hearing loss), you begin to do a series of rapid backwards courtesies in an attempt to squash the ants inside your pants between  a knee and the other leg. As you feel the bites beginning to move up the thigh, you finally drop the whacker and start whacking your legs through your pants to squash the ants or pull your pants down entirely, all while whispering expletives, because you already took the Lord's name during the quarterly staff-student soccer match, and the classrooms are open-air and very close by, and not using profanity at in-opportune moments has never really been your strong suit. This happens every day for a week.

The food was also VERY simple. It is not an exaggeration to say we ate beans and tortillas every single meal of every single day, sometimes accompanied by steamed vegetables or less than one whole scrambled egg or, on better days, one chicken leg (see photo above for one of the sadder meals). One long-term volunteer lost 40 pounds the first month he was there. So of course we blew our last 50 lempiras on knock-off Oreos and cans of Super Cola from the snack shop, savoring every last crumb. 

But these (mildly amusing?) anecdotes don't do the experience justice. It was easily one of the best we've had on the entire trip. We spent two and a half weeks with some of the most lovely people, particularly the Honduran students, one of the teachers, a radical Black feminist (her description) from a Creole community in Louisiana, and a badass family of five from Oregon who have traveled all over the world, all of whom we hope to remain in contact with. The weather in the valley was beautiful and perfect while we planted shade trees or picked coffee beans. I (Jenn) gave three lessons on birth control and STDs/HIV during a health class and Tim made all the girls laugh during our time in the "honest chair," an English class activity in which the girls can ask the honest chair occupant any question they want so long as it's phrased grammatically correctly in English. Overall our time and conversations there gave us a lot of good ideas for how we want to live going forward, and everyone was incredibly generous with their friendship and their baked goods as we got to know them better.

Last night we arrived in Nicaragua, and we've just completed a sunset surf lesson from a guy from Wildwood (NJ, holler!). Having a wonderful time and missing you all.

Utila - Kathy's visit

"I need help calming down." Jenn scribbled on an underwater sketch board to our instructor Dave. We were about 5 meters under water, on our first open water dive off the Caribbean island of Utila. She had already surfaced once and Dave was determined to keep her calm and underwater, taking deep, slow breaths through the respirator. Dave was able to calm Jenn's nerves, and after a few minutes, my friend Kathy, me, Jenn, Dave and another instructor Amanda were off, swimming around the world's second largest coral reef. We saw heaps of cool underwater creatures; crabs, flounder, and an array of beautiful and colorful fish. Our tanks lasted 45 minutes. We surfaced, got back in the boat and went to another point of interest in the reef for a second dive. This dive went much better, as our nerves had calmed and we knew what to expect. We dove to a depth of 12 meters, and got to see the shelf of the reef sloping down behind us, to its seemingly endless depths. 

After our day SCUBA diving we spent the rest our time on the island snorkeling and kayaking. The island is primarily a mangrove forest. Only 15% is developable, buildable land. The rest is a sea filtering, mysterious forest of mangroves. The island was an awesome experience, and a nice break between working in farms. Super fun for us to have a visitor. Kathy was an awesome travel partner for the week! 

Kathy flew home yesterday from San Pedro Sula, and Jenn and I hopped on yet another bus 3 1/2 hours south to Comayagua. We met up with a CouchSurfer named Josue and his uncle Nahúm. Two extremely generous souls. They picked us up from the bus stop, gave us a tour of their city and even took us out for a delicious meal last night.  Try CouchSurfing if you can. It will restore your faith in humanity. 

We are off this morning to work on another farm. We won't have Internet for two or three weeks. ¡Adios!

Copán Ruins

One thing we continue to learn is that transportation in Latin American takes about 3 times longer than in the US. We looked at the map when leaving the farm, intent on getting to Copán Ruins in Honduras the same day. It is only about 200 miles. We would make that trip in Montana in about 3 hours. Not here. About 5 hours into our bus trip we had just crossed the Honduran border (about half way) and decided it was too late to continue. (It gets dark here around 6pm and we didn't want to navigate public transportation after dark). We picked up the journey the following day, traveling another 4 hours to Copán. 

The ruins are considered the Paris of the Mayan world. Lots of ornate carvings, tombs and monuments. The place is practically a wildlife refuge for birds, too. Dozens of scarlet macaws flew overhead while we walked through the ancient site. And I was almost pooped on by one of those beautiful, exotic creatures while admiring from below. Everybody poops.

After spending a couple days at Copán we just arrived today to San Pedro Sula. Tomorrow we will pick up my friend, Kathy Keys, from the airport. She chose to take her vacation to visit us! We'll spend our time together on the Caribbean Bay island of Utila checking out whale sharks, snorkeling and maybe SCUBA diving.

The Bubble

We spent the last couple weeks working at a place called Casa Organica (aka The Bubble) in El Salvador. It's a school/permaculture farm started 8 years ago by a Colombian woman and her Salvadoran husband. They teach the local kids about organic farming and healthy eating in addition to English. Each day we experienced something new. A brief highlight of some our first-time experiences include:

Harvesting coconuts, bananas and plantains straight from the tree

Teaching English

Going two weeks without using toilet paper (post-dump showers were required because toilet paper is outlawed at The Bubble)

Cooking three meals a day over an open flame

Washing dishes with ashes in lieu of soap

Feeding and caring for chickens

Making pupusas (delicious Salvadoran stuffed tortillas)

Bartering tree saplings for basic food staples (rice, beans, etc.) in the market

But better than all of these new experiences was making a new friend, Mario. He is, we'll call it a "boarding student" at The Bubble. Since the age of ten he had been working at a local mechanic's shop. Two years ago (at the age of 18) he quit his job to live full time at The Bubble to escape the daily grind of city life and to learn English. He has aspirations of taking his new-found English language skills to travel the world. At the age of twenty he has never had the opportunity to leave his country (about the size of New Jersey). His positive attitude and love of learning are infectious, and he has a ton of energy. We hope to keep in touch with Mario and maybe meet up with him at some point along our trip.

The outdoor kitchen.

A little afternoon English pronunciation lesson (think about the sounds in "walked" - English is crazy, folks)

We traded tree saplings at the market for supplies, including these two little guys which we named Tom and Jane. People had trouble pronouncing our names, so Tom and Jane are our Spanish nick names.

Jenn walks back from the market with Tom and Jane in a crate on her head. #local

We took a day trip to nearby Lake Coatepeque

Personal protective equipment from falling coconuts  for providing ground support while Mario harvests the coconuts

Bounty of tiny, sweet bananas

El Salvador

The US State Department warns travelers to El Salvador that:

"crime and violence are serious problems throughout the country. Since a rise in violence in the summer of 2015, the current murder rate in El Salvador is among the highest in the world, an annual rate of 103.1 murders per 100,000 citizens for 2015. In comparison, the U.S. rate is 4.5 per 100,000."

The dangerous reputation is unfortunate. If anything, people seem to be perplexed to see gringos walking around, and everyone we've spoken to has been super friendly. The last 2.5 days have been spent couch surfing with Alfonso at his house in Santa Tecla, a city that is basically an extension of San Salvador. We spent yesterday walking all over San Sal taking buses, visiting museums and tracking down pupusas, and we didn't feel unsafe at all.

Prior to coming to Santa Tecla/San Salvador, we were at the beach for two days in El Tunco. El Tunco is the kind of place bros from California and Australia go to hang ten, or whatever surfers do, so a bit out of our league. However, we took a lesson from some guys at Puro Surf, a surf shop, which was super fun, and we both got up on the boards. It gave us a lot of false confidence in our actual abilities, as we merely laid on our boards while they "wheeled" us out into oncoming waves and pushed us into the surf at just the right moment to catch the wave and stand up. Day Two on our own was much rougher going, and I (Jenn) spent a lot of time getting dragged to shore by my surfboard.

Today we went to Juayua, on the Ruta de las Flores, in the hopes of trying iguana and whole frogs at their weekly gastronomic festival, but the most exotic food we could find was rabbit. We also swam beneath some pretty waterfalls and watched teenagers do some sketchy jumps off the mossy rocks midway up the falls. 

Tomorrow we go to La Burbuja, an organic farm, where we'll be working for the next 1.5-2 weeks. There probably won't be Internet, so our next dispatch will be from Honduras in mid-October!

Final week of classes

We spent the last week in a small village on Lake Atitlan called San Marcos. The lake is about 3 hours from Antigua and is the deepest in Central America. I was taking morning Spanish classes from a local teacher named Clemente and Jenn was working on the guitar. Clemente is a good teacher and a nice guy. He even took us up The Indian Nose, a popular hike with a great lake view, on Saturday. We got to take the most local form of transportation yet, the pick-up, with Clemente as our guide. About 20 people stand in the back of a pick-up truck and hold on for dear life as it swerves up the mountain switchbacks to the trail head. 

Today, we made our first border crossing of the trip. We are now in El Salvador at a surf town called El Tunco. Guatemala was pretty mild temperatures and often cold at night. But here it is summer again. ¡Hace mucho calor!

Our favorite spot on the lake

The pick-up ride to The Indian Nose trailhead 

Overlooking Lake Atitlan from The Indian Nose

Academia de Hongos (Mushroom Academy)

"Ok. Who wants to go first?" Masjid asked the group.

Jenn steps up to the 'glove box', which is a home made, hermetically-sealed plexiglass box with two, four inch diameter holes in one side. She dons a pair of lunch lady style one-time-use plastic gloves and sticks her hands into the glove box, just as Masjid had demonstrated. 

"Now pick up the bottle and remove the cap," Masjid instructs.

"Oh, no, the other bottle. Ok, yes that one."

There are numerous jars and bottles in the glove box. Each containing media for cultivating blue oyster mushrooms. 

The following steps are difficult to describe (as I was not completely tracking what was going on) but in short, it involved spraying everything in the glove box with a healthy amount of 70% alcohol for disinfection, then adding 1 ml of a mushroom growing nutrient dispensed from a syringe with an unnecessarily long needle, and then transferring media from one jar to another. 

"Don't touch rim to rim. It is very important to avoid contamination." Masjid constantly reminded as Jenn executed the mushroom media inoculation imperfectly. 

(Jenn here: basically I had to dislodge a bunch of moldy, er, "inoculated," pieces of grain that had congealed together in  repurposed soy sauce bottle, then shake them out, one by one, into the approximately one-centimeter-in-diameter neck of another repurposed glass bottle of un-inoculated grains. Everything was super slippery from the alcohol, plus I knew Tim was going to love how much I was struggling. Not only did I touch the rims together, but I dropped the whole damn thing and spilled inoculated (i.e., moldy) grains all over the box. Whoopsie.)

Next, it was my turn. Then, another guy from Georgia. Everyone got a chance to help with mushroom inoculation. Prior to helping with this important step in the production of mushrooms, we had a 2 hour lecture on the mushroom basics by Tanel, from Estonia here at the Fungi Academy. It is an intentional community in the hills above the town we are staying at (San Marcos) on Lake Atitlan. They started about 9 months ago with the mission of educating people on the power of mushrooms to save the world. They are currently working on a internet-funded campaign to purchase a school bus, which will serve as a mobile mushroom lab that they will drive around Central and South America spreading the word about mushrooms and their powers.

This was the most interesting place we have visited on our trip so far. Intentional communities are full of unique, interesting people. I hope to encounter more during our travels. If anyone knows of other intentional communities, let us know!

http://fungiacademy.com/about-us/

Taking a break at the academy de Hongos.


Eunice teaches us how to inoculate a log with mushrooms.

Poco a poco

I have learned after three weeks of Spanish classes here in Antigua that language learning does not come quickly. My teacher at Antigüena Spanish School, Ana, told me every day; 'poco a poco' (little by little). It is nice when I learn a new word in school and then hear it later that day in the street or at dinner with our host mom. Slowly, I'm training my lips to form words automatically and burning new neural pathways into my brain. It is fun, yet very exhausting.

Today we made the first big move of our trip. We have just arrived to Lake Atitlan (in the village of San Marcos) to spend one week here exploring the numerous pueblos surrounding the lake. I have found a Spanish tutor and will continue to study each morning with him while Jenn continues to work on the guitar.

My teacher, Ana

Exploring some ruins of a church/convent that was destroyed in an earthquake in the 18th century

Cerro de la Cruz. A vista point above the city of Antigua.