Sky Colors, Buenos Aires

Virtual-->Personal

Yesterday morning I upped my handshake count of Matador staffers to 5, in an all-too-brief Austin brunch with Matador Nights editor Tom Gates and Matador Sports intern Lindi Horton.


These faces to names were added to Kate Sedgwick (other half of the Nights duo) and Adam Roy (head man at Sports), both of whom I met last year in Buenos Aires, and new intern Cathey Franke, a San Antonio local who joined Carey and me for lunch at Madhatters, a shared favorite Southtown joint.

How many more to go? I'm not even sure. Maybe about 30 just counting the team, and like 12,000 when that opens up to the community at large. Better get started.

Groupsource My Travel: Spain and Morocco

2003, Mediterranean coast

I may be deep into the homebuying process, but that doesn't mean I'm putting off an opportunity to hop on a plane and fly 5,000 miles across the ocean. We locked in our tickets back in December, anyway--before we knew whether the house dream was going to happen. So it's not total irresponsibility. But there's zero margin for missing our flight back--the scheduled closing date is three days after our return.

I've trained the upper half of Spain's Mediterranean coast a couple times, but this trip will be different. It starts in the north in Santander and Picos de Europa, stops in Barcelona for a day (Easter), and then settles in Málaga and Granada for a few before cruising back north to Madrid.

The final four days of overseasdom will roll out in Marrakech. This will be our first trip in 6 years sans-Lonely Planet. I've opted instead for Matador colleague Paul Sullivan's Hedonist's Guide to Marrakech. To be LP-free is liberating and disorienting. But I'm betting we survive.

That's the itinerary. Have you been to these places? If I were your puppet, where would you dangle me? Where to go, what to see. Groupsource me.

The History of a Rip

March, 2010

The pants hang over the back of the chair, butt end up.

Six inches below the right rear pocket, a tear in the fabric runs vertically down the leg about two and a half inches. The way the pants are hanging makes the rip open into a puckered oval. A tongue of white fabric (the interior of the pocket) sticks out of it.

I worry that maybe I shouldn't wear these pants to any sort of "function." I'm going to the bank tomorrow to see about a loan. I shouldn't wear them tomorrow. People standing behind me can see my underwear through the rip.

I'm kind of upset about that. I like the pants.

October, 2009

Colonia is nice.

People say it's too touristy, and maybe they're right. Maybe I like touristy.

It's right on the Río de la Plata (I always have trouble calling it a río because it looks a lot more like an ocean or at least a gulf to me), a straight shot northeast from BA. It's really small, and the UNESCO area (the old Spanish colonial part that's been preserved) is even smaller. Just a few square blocks of narrow cobble streets, some plazas, bougainvillea, rusty cannons, and a lighthouse with a disappointing view.

But I don't know any of that yet. I just walked through the original city gate, a big stone arch with a pair of rusty cannons, followed the old wall east about a hundred feet where it drops into some terraced park space and then the water.

I'm sitting on a rough section of terrace wall. There are maybe six other tourist pairs and individuals, six tourist units, sharing the terrace space. We're all spaced pretty evenly. We've claimed our "spot." I'm looking out at the water and thinking it's too bad you can't see BA from here. It would look pretty cool, hazy sky and skyscrapers.

The rocks of the terrace wall are not mortared. Their edges are jagged, carved from 300 years of erosion maybe. It's kind of painful to sit on them. I do a little seated roll to get up, and I feel something catch on my pants, maybe six inches below my right rear pocket.

"Damn," I think. "I think I just ripped my pants."

March, 2009

I feel incredulous.

I'm incredulous that I've found what I'm looking for, in my size, in the first shop I checked, in what people like me like to call the largest open-air market in Latin America, in the middle of Bolivia.

The pants are pretty much an exact match for the ones I'm trying to replace, the ones I gave away a week earlier. They're made of the same synthetic, thin, almost parachutey material, with the same cargo pockets that I adore, the same color, with even the same fold in the fabric covering the zipper so that sometimes it lifts away from the zipper and makes it look like my fly is down.

I do an awkward probando dance in the back of the shop to verify the sizing of these secondhand pants who came from God knows where to be resold in this backstreet stall of the Cancha in Cochabamba. They fit nice.

I give the señora my 60 B's. She's overcharging me. I don't really care. I'll pay $9 for magic pants any day.

March, 2009
I go outside to the gate, thinking he's selling fruit.

His face is dark brown and leathery. His hair is dark black and matted. He's wearing a lot of clothes, and they're all dirty. He's not selling fruit.

I have a hard time following real Spanish conversations. It's extra hard when I'm talking to a homeless man who may or may not be fully coherent.

He says he's from Peru. I tell him my name is Enrique, and he tells me they have that name in Peru, but in Peru they often change it to "Renrique." I think that sounds odd.

He asks me for money, or food, or maybe he's just asking for anything. I'm living in a volunteer house, so I figure I should oblige. Then I get an idea. "Espera un momentito," and I run into my room, open the door of the wardrobe that smells like cat piss (just the door, not the inside), and grab the pants.

The pants are old. They have rips, but I can't remember their histories. There's one in the back, just beneath one of the pockets, and there's one big one under the left knee, like the pants are ready to convert to shorts. I've almost thrown them away a couple times now. It'd be a good way to lighten my suitcase.

I run back out and pass the pants through the iron bars of the gate to the man. I tell him I hope they're his tamaño. He looks pretty happy, and then he starts off down the sidewalk again, towards Plazuela Sucre.

Back inside, I sit on the bed and feel happy. Then, I feel sad.

May, 2005

I'm really happy.

My parents and sister flew into Seoul last night, and I have a lot to show them. But the first thing we've done is hop on the Green Line and subway over to Technomart. I need some pants.

Technomart is a great place to buy things in Seoul. It has that Korean shopping mall setup, with a tall, semicircular foyer and then escalators shooting up to about ten floors of kiosked shopping. It's called Technomart, but it's best known (to people I know) for it's clothing.

Towards the edge of the clothing sector, I look through a rack of pants and find a pair I like. They're brown, made out of a synthetic, thin, almost parachutey material that seems fast drying. It's got sweet cargo pockets.

I try them on in the tiny closet of a fitting room and they feel pretty good. "얼마예요?" The 아줌마 wants 12,000 for them, but it's pretty easy to get her down to the standard 만원. 10 bucks. I decide to wear them out the door.

My family and I find our way out of Technomart, through the hall and past the roasted nut vendors to get back to Gangbyeon station. We get on the subway. It's close to noon. It's time for their first Korean meal.

I'm sitting on the subway bench wearing brown, thin, synthetic pants. I'll take these pants with me when I leave Korea to bike through Southeast Asia. I'll wear them on the streets of Hue, at an "eco-resort" in Laos and a hostel in Phnom Penh. They'll be in my pannier in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Honolulu. I'll put them in my dresser, the one I had as a kid and stripped and refinished, in Portland, Maine. I'll wear them at campsites in Nova Scotia and on top of pyramids in Mexico. I'll pack them, rips and all, to take to South America. I'll wear them in Cuzco, in Copacabana, in Cochabamba. I will give them away to a strange Peruvian beggar on Calle Bolivar, and replace them with a pair I find in la Cancha. I will look at the replacement pair hanging on my desk chair in about five years, and they will inspire me to write a blog post.

But I don't know any of this. I'm just sitting in a subway car with my little sister and my parents. I'm about to introduce them to kimchi.

Trees

Photo by H Dragon

In November of last year, I got an email from Ross Borden. He wanted the Matador Trips team to publish this article:

"Where to Find the Largest Redwoods on Earth"

and this photo essay:

"The Oldest, Most Massive Living Things on Our Planet -- Seeing the GIANT Redwoods"

I ran with the prompts and started research. I exchanged emails with Mario Vaden, a tree enthusiast and professional horticulturalist from Oregon, and did a lot of Internet digging. The pieces I later produced were the funnest I've written for Matador, and both got some decent pageviewage:

Guide to the Redwood Groves: Where to Find the Tallest Trees on Earth
Photo Essay: GIANT Redwoods, the Tallest Living Things on Our Planet

But that wasn't the end of the story. Or the beginning.

***

I've always been a climber. Rocks, walls, roofs, trees. I'm not sure what appealed to me more as a kid, the actual act of climbing or that feeling of getting to a place that lets you see things from unusual angles. Probably the second, since I also spent a lot of time squeezing through drainage grates. Suburban safari.

Sam and I used to walk the streets--Parklane, Stanford, Luther, Belvidere, El Prado--scoping for a good-looking magnolia or oak or pecan, hop the chainlink and start up it. The neighborhood wasn't a 1930s, upper-crust subdivision. It was a forest.

In high school, I remember being pretty fumed when Jon's neighbors butchered the limbs off their 65-year-old oak. I thought I might make them an unmixed tape that played only one song--Jefferson Airplane's "Eskimo Blue Day." The refrain is "doesn't mean shit to a tree." I guess I was a treehugger back then.

But I forgot about trees in New England. It's hard to climb trees up there. They're sappy and snowed on. I forgot how it felt to see things from unusual, secret angles.

***

In my digging for the Matador pieces, I found an NPR interview with Richard Preston, author of The Wild Trees. The interview was intense and interesting, and I used this quote in my article:

"…the truth of the matter is that redwood rainforest is exceedingly difficult to move through, physically. You get out in there, and it takes a physically fit person up to 12 hours to move two miles. You’re belly crawling, you’re crawling through thorns, your skin gets all bloody, you can’t see anything. It’s absolutely thick.

And then you come across these piles of redwood trunks that have fallen down like pick-up-sticks. These are trunks that are anywhere from eight to 12 feet in diameter piled up, and…you get a wall of wood that may be 30 feet tall. And as you climb over it, if you slip down into a crack, you can fall into the pile — 30 feet — and break your leg and never be heard from again."

My eyes didn't catch just on Preston's words, but also the familiar title of his book. My wife and I had bought it on Amazon a couple years earlier to give to her father for his birthday. The Wild Trees.

I also started to remember why my father-in-law had wanted that book. About his discovery of technical tree climbing, the skill set traditionally used by arborists to gain access to tall trees that had become something of an underground sport, with periodic competitions. Kinda like those lumberjack tournaments you see on ESPN2, only climbing trees instead of cutting them.

And then I remembered just last Christmas we'd set him up with a technical tree climbing course, run by the South Georgia Tree Climbing Association outside of Atlanta. I'd watched a video from them that covered the basics: how to hook a line over a limb using a weighted sack, how to belay a climber, like in rock climbing.

I thought it was a little weak. I thought climbing a tree with ropes wasn't really climbing a tree.

But things were coming together. The Matador stuff, the redwoods, the technical climbing. It felt like the right time to read Preston's book. I borrowed my father-in-law's birthday gift and dug in. I loved it.

***

We're going to a wedding in San Francisco in July. I'm psyched for the family time, to see the city, and to celebrate with the bride and groom. But as soon as I heard the location, I knew I'd be taking a week after the ceremony and heading north.

Up Highway 101 through that huge chunk of California that it's easy to forget about. Up about 5 hours to Humboldt Redwoods State Park and the Avenue of the Giants. Then farther, through Eureka and Arcata and into Redwood National Park and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Way up to Crescent City and Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.

I don't want to belly crawl through thorns and poison oak, or fall through a pile of dead redwood pick-up-sticks. I don't want to search for Hyperion. I don't want to hang from a rope 30 stories off the ground. Not this trip anyway. I just want to see them.

Photo by briandrum

A Story of Two Photos

The road out from Turco was unpaved, just like the road to Turco, but the ride went quickly, the white peaks of the Nevados de Quimsachata bulging bigger against the white sky.

Chachacomani is one of those pueblos that disappears into the mountains behind, so it wasn't till we got within half a km that I saw it, even with the line of sickly electrical poles running out of it, down the Altiplano and to the horizon.

I was pretty nervous. This was our first "site visit," the first time we'd left the Energética offices in Cochabamba and gone "into the campo" to see what it was this organization was up to. We'd been in the car for something like 12 of the last 24 hours, conversing with Don Fredy and trying not to expose just how shitty our Spanish was. After a night in an Oruro hotel, we'd driven on to Turco, dropped our stuff in a cold mud-brick room, and continued west on the road past Sajama to this tiny pueblo 5km from the Chilean border. I felt lost.

We were supposed to be "documenting." Doing photos and interviews about the energy situation in rural Bolivia. I don't think Don Fredy knew what to make of it. He didn't offer help. He was busy trying to collect the community leaders and get some feedback on how the new power lines were working and what their current needs looked like.

Care and I slid out of the Land Cruiser. We looked at our feet. Nothing seemed to be happening. We kind of zigzagged, in that time-killing kind of way, down a grass-covered lane. In about 100 meters the pueblito ended. Nothing by shrubs, garbage, and llamas out there. We photoed the llamas. They got nervous and jogged away, up the first slopes of the Nevados de Quimsachata.

Back at the "main plaza," people were gathering. There were some chicos with heavy metal t-shirts and nice-looking bikes, showboating, hopping curbs and big rocks. Some cholas were sitting on the curb in front of the church, each with a dozen skirts and a bowler cap. They were drop-spindling llama wool.

Non-Bolivians with cameras are drawn to cholas. I slipped over to them, trying to find an opening in their quiet Aymar-llano. I went for it, said hello, explained what the hell I was doing in their nice little village by the mountains. "Puedo sacar una foto de Uds.?" There was a short comprehension lag, and then a forceful shaking of heads. Nobody moved. One of the younger ones smiled because of the tension. The others waited for me to leave.

I walked back to the car. "That's a no," I said to Carey. I turned around and snapped a photo of the huddle, from the outside.


The whole thing, our project, looked like it was going to tank. Don Fredy had better things to do than give us a proper introduction. Everyone was ignoring us. We walked off in the other direction, thinking we'd better find some more llamas to photo.

Chachacomani was bigger down the hill. There was a school, a health clinic, a two-story brick building.

We got to the other end. There were no more llamas, just the flat, brownish Altiplano spilling out like a flood to the east. We kept walking along the "main road," the one we'd driven up to get into town. North of us, Sajama's pyramidal bulk hid behind a sheet of blowing snow.

By the road, an old man in a green sweatshirt was mortaring together a small cubic structure. He looked at us and smiled.

"I'm gonna try," I said. I went over and gave him my spiel. "Energética," "voluntario," energía," "entrevista." He kept smiling, then nodded his head.

His name was Pedro Apaza Mamani. He'd come to Chachacomani 3 years ago looking for work, and now he was stacking together this outhouse by the road. He answered all of my questions, speaking into the dinky Olympus digital recorder, while Carey stood back and photoed. When I played it back a week later in Cochabamba, his voice was almost washed out by the wind. He said he was thrilled to have electricity in his home, even if it only powered a 25-watt light bulb. That was our first interview.

When we got back to the plaza, the Land Cruiser was packing up. Time to go, on to Campo Grande as the sun set, which is where the picture in the previous post was taken. Campo Grande means Big Country.