So a few days ago, I found out from my family that another family friend, who had gotten his green card, lost it because he had been out of the US for too long.
After some research, I found out that I need to physically be in the US for 6 months out of every year. As such, I won´t be able to visit many countries in South America and will come back to the US in November, probably to NYC.
Not sure what I will do when I come back. After traveling for 3 months, it´s hard to imagine living life any other way.
I have met people who have been traveling for more than one year. What an awesome way to live!
With another 3 months to travel, I will visit Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Peru and Argentina
I lost my laptop and camera this morning and felt pretty shitty all day. Thinking about the travel I have ahead already has made me feel much better
So I spent the last two weeks diving in Utila, Honduras, boading down volcano slope on a homemade wooden board, being a cowboy for a day, riding horses and ox-carts, milking cows, lassoing in Leon, Nicaragua, learning how to surf on the pacific coast of San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua and hiking the baby volcano Madera in Isla Ometepe. Definitely the most action packed two weeks of my trip so far.
I took a lot of great pictures and since I was traveling with 5 other backpackers from UK, Australia and Canada, we traded pictures and awesome videos. I had written my blogs and was just about to update.
Then last night while we were all dead tired from hiking the volcano, someone came into our dorm in the middle of the night and took everyone´s daypacks. Mine had had my laptop and my camera.
All my pictures are gone, but fortunately I still have my passports, credit cards and money.
The people at the hotel were absolutely no help. The Nicaraguan police thought I stole my own laptop and spent half of the time questioning me rather than investigating.
I felt a lot of animosity towards every Nicaraguan I saw after my things were stolen. It could have been any of them. Strange how a little event changed my feeling towards a whole country of people.
I asked Justin, backpacker from the UK, if he felt animosity towards local Nicaraguan too and he said he did as well.
Well tomorrow I leave for Costa Rica, and hopefully I will be able to put this behind me. As they say, it´s water under the bridge.
I spent my last two days in Guatemala boating down Rio Dulce to Livingstone, a port town on the eastern border of the country. On the way down, the captain swung the boat to a fortress at the mouth of the river. In all seriousness, I think it is the smallest fortress ever built, ever.. From a distance, it looked like someone’s villa with watch towers. Two small cannons gaze out of their peepholes on the side. If I saw this fortress, I would want to be a pirate just so I can raid this city.
Moving along, we stopped at a few bungalows on the river for quick snacks. These bungalows are isolated from the rest of the world. They interact with their neighbors, make some good to sell to tourists and otherwise they are pretty far apart from civilization.  Surprisingly though, one of them had a modern American-sized oven which a local lady uses to bake bread to sell.  Local carpenters worked away on half built furniture while kids paddled in half tree-trunk rafts on the river. It was just another regular day for them, but I was taking all in the beautiful surroundings.
Livingstone is the only city in Guatemala that has a large percentage of black populations. Their ancestors were slaves brought from Africa and settled on the nearby islands. Many of them wore dreadlocks and seemed how I imagined what Jamaicans would be like. I didn’t stay long there except visiting the local pretty site – the Seven Altars. After walking along the beach for what seemed like forever, I got to the seven cascading pools. This was well hidden in the woods; it’s a wonder anyone ever found this place.
I am not really scared of heights. But jumping off of anything takes some bit of thinking. My friend’s camera started recording. I had some doubts. Why was I up here and why am I going to jump off this? “Hey, the camera is rolling.â€Â That’s all I needed. I jumped. “Hey that’s wasn’t too bad. Do you want to do it again?â€Â So we jumped off twenty times.
Well, actually it was more like two times. I am really not a water mammal. I like lying in the water. That’s about it. However, by the end of next week I should have finished off my Open Water Diving courses in Honduras. I have never swum more than 50 meters or floated more than probably 2-3 minutes at a time. Time to step it up. This is what traveling is about – new experiences. Onward!
Tikal is the most famous Mayan site in Guatemala. There are something like four thousand buildings there and while only fifteen percent of them have been excavated. At the height of the civilization which dates back twenty five hundreds years, more than one hundred thousand people live there. Tikal dates back before the other Mayan sites. But just like other Mayan civilizations, Tikal faltered and by the time the Spanish conquerors came, Tikal laid in ruins. It was discovered again in the mid-1800s, but archeological studies of the site didn’t begin until the mid-1900s by UPenn. Naturally, many artifacts were moved to the US and other museums. If the temples could be moved, they probably would have been moved too.
           Unlike Chichen Itza or Uxmal in Mexico, Tikal sits in the middle of a thick jungle. The temples have not been scrubbed and prettified. A few climbing structures have been built on the temple so visitors can climb to the top without risking their lives. I started the trip at three O’clock in the morning, taking one and half hour to get to the site by shuttle. Howler monkeys howled and they howled hard and loud. They hopping from tree to tree and swung freely. At one point in the walk, the guide told us about a temple a bit higher up from where we were that has not been excavated yet. From looking at the surrounding areas and trees, I could not tell at all that a temple sat above me. Many wild animals roamed in their natural habitats. We men are intruders into this jungle that is their home.
Even though I have already been to a few other Mayan ruins and heard the stories of their lives, I still enjoyed Tikal immensely. I was there early before the arrival of the balk of the tourists. Of the three guides there, two spoke English and one spoke Spanish. I went with the Spanish guide. I understood maybe sixty percent of what he said. Midday sun set in. The jungle heat began to cook. After six hours at the ruins, I hopped back in the van back to Flores.
I have a thing, or I would so much as to call it love, for natural waterfalls and pools in the woods. Semuc Champey is one of those places, complete with a trail, clear blue water, thick green forest surroundings and rocks in the pool. It reminded me of El Nicho in Cuba, still my favorite “El Natural.â€Â I stayed in bunglow huts in a nearby town called Lanquin where a river runs nearby.
The river guides had just scouted the river the day before in preparation for white water rafting trips. Justin, the Brit, Danielle, the Hawaiian sailor, Laura, elementary school teacher from Oregan, Laura ex-doctor-to-be from Germany and I along with the guide took our plunge as the first group this season to go down the river in high water. Before end of the trip, two of us would be thrown off the raft into the river. The water looked faster and more aggressive from the banks than it actually was. We coasted for about 10 minutes down the river before the rapids picked up. Naturally I sat in the front where the action is. This level 3 to 3.5 river was a good start for a rookie. We got instructions on how to paddle forward, backward, duck and the most important one, throw ourselves on the floor of the boat to brace for bumps.
If you have never tried white water rafting, you have got to get yourself to a river and try it. It’s not the same as the ones in Great America amusement parks where you are nicely strapped in like a baby onboard an SUV. When the river tosses you around, sending you into the air while you are half leaning over paddling with all your might, you get a rush like no other.
Towards the end of the trip, as we approached a drop, our guide called for the safety guide in another boat. We were off course because his paddle got stuck in the branches. He had lost one of his two paddles. The safety guide, well, was too far ahead and couldn’t hear him. So much for safety guide J This was their first guided trip together, apparently there is some kinks to work out still. So we went over the drop, head of the boat diving in first, hit a slight bump, my side of the boat went up and immediately Laura and Justin on the lower side of the raft got dumped into the rapids. Her paddle went into the water and I instinctively grabbed it and threw it back into the boat. But as I reached for Laura who was closer to me, the paddle got bumped out of the boat again. I grabbed her by her hair and started to pull her back in, but quickly realized I was dragging her by her hair!
Water was rushing by and our boat bounced on the rapids. I let go of her hair and this time grabbed her by the sides of her dandy life vest and pulled her back in. Quick count! Have we got six in the boat? Ok we are all good. Two paddles lost in the river, but what a rush!
Nearby the lodge, there is a bat cave. I expected a few bats hanging upside down where we could shine our flashlights on. When I got there near dusk, literally thousands upon thousands of bats rushed out of the cave. They first came in small waves and then hundreds and then thousands. They kept coming and coming. Bats would fly so close to my head that I could hear them whizzing by. I held out my hand in mid air and one bat with dysfunctional sonar actually ran into it. Even after 20 minutes, the bats did not let up a bit. They were hungry. I would be if I was hanging upside down for the whole day. I caught the last bus back into town in time for the American-sized vegetarian buffet. I ate a mountain of food
After climbing Tajumolco, I needed a vacation away from my vacation. What better place than the beautiful Lago de Atitlan to get some hammock time? The lake is just as pretty as the last time I visited.
Running into New Zealand Miguel from Xela, I started my day with an enormous fruit shake sitting by the dock overlooking the lake. An afternoon message followed. Even though the quality doesn’t compare to the Brazilian massage I got in Florida when I hurt my neck, for $7 USD, it was well worth the price. The rain usually came in the afternoon, making it the perfect setting to relax on a hammock.
Since my traveling, I have met people in different cities, or even countries and then saw them later again. At San Pedro, a village on the lake, I ran into the three Belgians, Jerone, Lynn and Toon and Katy from Texas again. We had met on a bus from Mexico. What are the chances?
In his spare time, Jerone farms bee for honey. He gets stung by bees a few times a week just for fun. Toon said he studied philosophy at a bad university and now he teaches in a terrible school. He is a funny guy with a very warm laugh.
Katy’s friend Meghan is a math smarty who will attend NYU in a few months. I told her that I was one class shy of getting a math minor at my university. After two days sitting in advanced algebra, I decided I will probably never use those crazy formulas. I was right.
We had pizzas made in an oven that is the Buddha’s belly at a restaurant called the Buddha bar. James and I shared an eggplant and chicken pizza mixed in a special green sauce. Much fun was had by everyone at the hot tub afterwards.
Next day I shuttled my way to Chichicastenango for the Sunday outdoor market, supposedly the largest in Central America. I am pretty convinced that most of the good are not made by hand locally because many items looked the same. There were the usual fried chicken with rice and beans. And then there was Kellogg’s cereal with rice milk. Merchants sold handicrafts, masks, bags, towels, blankets, cheap toys, lime stones used as soaps, flowers, wood, beans, meats hung on metal hooks, incense rocks and fresh fruits – I especially like the pineapples. I wasn’t tempted to buy anything except for a machete. Everything was for sale, even the used, dull and rusty machete with enough kinks on the blade to be used as a saw. Bargaining was a necessity to buy anything at the market.
As the sun started to set and rain came down, the street stalls began to close one by one. Canopies held up by metal or wooden posts are taken down. Twice a week, merchants come here the night before to set up for a full day of market. Empty handed, I walked away with a full stomach and was glad my backpack was not any heavier than before.
And…. this little fire hazard sits above the market.
Pictures here
Tajumolco is the highest point in Central America, all 4222 meters of glory. Led by a crazy Guatemalan guide, Carlos, who always seemed to be smiling, I climbed the beast along with 8 others from the UK, France, and Holand. In fact, I was the only one from the US. We packed our changes of clothes, 4 liters of water, food, sleeping bag, mats, and set off at 6 am in the morning. I don’t think I have ever been to altitude that high before. The only thing that could stop me from getting to the top is if I got altitude sickness, or so I thought.
Switching buses through two different towns, we were dropped off at the side of the road,which hardly seemed like the starting point for the hike to the highest point in Central America. I expected a grand entrance with guards. But this is Guatemala – on a tight budget, so all we get is a sign. Carlos, standing no more than five feet five inches, was easily carrying 60 lbs of supply on his back. My backpack felt heavy because I carried all of my clean and dirty clothes just in case I got cold. After all, at the top it could get close to freezing with wind chills. The only difference between hiking and living in cold weather is that during a hike, there is nowhere to hide from the cold.
We walked through farm fields on a dirt road, which quickly turned narrow.  Not far into the hike, we were already way above the other nearby villages. The French couple fell behind the group since Carlos kept a pretty quick pace. The French girl gave her backpack to the second guide to carry, but still they were falling behind. We took turns walking behind Carlos. The air chilled and wind picked up. My Pirates of the Caribbean hat and gloves warmed me pretty good, but I sensed that they were going to be enough for much farther into the trip. Our bags felt heavier the higher we climbed; pretty soon we were all taking deep breathes to get more air to our lungs. Having climbed Tajumolco 28 times this year, Carlos had no trouble at all and kept a steady pace, only stopping when we all seemed like we were gasping for air.
By the time we stopped for lunch, my pants and shirt were soaked from my own sweat. The strong wind on the plateau made me not want to move, but as I stayed stationary, my body temperature cooled down fast. Not long after, I was freezing even through my jacket and sweater. I should have changed into a dry shirt then, but I was too cold to want to move. Our simple ham and cheese sandwich with onions and tomatoes tasted great after our initial stage up.
After lunch, the trek got much steeper; my quads were beginning to ache, but nonetheless we continued on. The distances between everyone, which had been pretty close, were now starting to spread out. We passed a few wild mountain cows, or maybe they were bulls. I don’t know. Who knew there are wild cows thousands of meters up on a mountain? I was beginning to regret not leaving all of my dirty clothes back at the hostel. I could drink my water to lighten the load on my back, but I wanted to save it for later.
I knew the hike wouldn’t be a piece of cake, but reality was setting in that I would be working hard to get to the top of this mountain. My left quad was tightening up more and more. We breathed quicker and took smaller and slower steps. Man, I signed up for this; I have got to get to the top. Eventually, we reached our camping ground. By then I was totally beat. I crawled into my sleeping bag and was happily wrapped up.
It must have been my wet shirt and the humidity trapped in my water tight pants that made me feel like an ice cube. I was pretty uncomfortable to say the least. The rain started to come down. The tent was kept dry luckily. Carlos cooked up some warm soup and spaghetti, which I chowed down pretty fast. By sunset, I was deep asleep.
Later in the night I would be woken up many times. I remember liking camping when I was in middle school. But after all these years living comfortably in cities, I am really not a camping person. I like my warm room, pillow-top beds, air conditioning. That night I was trapped in a completely pitch black tent with nowhere to run to.
And then the worst came. I woke up with a headache. I thought altitude sickness finally set in, but secretly I was hoping that I was only dehydrated. I am not a big fan of taking pills, but I was still 200 meters of steep climb from the top of the Beast. I wanted to get to the top. I needed to get to the top. I took the pill from Carlos.
We began the final ascent in the dark without our backpacks. This was the steepest part of the climb. Carlos didn’t let up on the pace; in fact without our backpacks he set an even faster pace. I would look up at the top of the mountain but each time the view didn’t change much. Looking up trying to see over the top is probably the biggest taboo in hiking because that just makes the hike that much harder. I could hardly see where I was stepping, but as light started to creep in, my steps became more secure. The morning wind blew right through my jacket. Somewhere along the way, my headache vanished. Other guys turned off their head lamps. We were just meters away from the top.
Holy cow! I felt great to make it up to the top. The cold, the leg cramps, the headache and whatever else bothered me no longer mattered. I got to the top. From there, we could see all the way into Mexico. The air was crisp. I took many deep breathes. I was no longer out of breath. How high up was I? It didn’t matter. I conquered it. Hella Yeah.
Dad and I made our way to a little beach town north of Merida called Progresso. It’s a quiet port town; one of its specialties being the mangrove and red tide. When I visited the keys, I saw a whole bunch of mangrove down there too. In Florida, people hate mangrove. They prevent the rich people from building nice docks behind their homes. Mangroves are vegetation that grow thickly together and protect the shoreline from being eroded away. When we did a walk through, the mosquitoes ate me raw. The guide gave me a tree branch to smack my legs with. I beat myself silly and still came away with bunch of bites.
We went to the grocery store and I found this. Who knew Ramen Noodles were a popular breakfast item? Apparently they come with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes!
So my dad came to Mexico to attend the ASPB annual meeting, basically lots of professors get together and talk about how to make bigger and better plants that can survive another ice age or a nuke. One of the award winners from previous year showed how her team figured out genetically why a leaf on one side of a corn grows faster than the leaf on the other side. I am glad someone is dedicated to solving these mysteries. Now, next, how do we get cheap energy? Knock on my door when that problem is solved, so I can buy back my 6 cylinder.
So after the conference and a delicious Argentinean steak dinner together, my dad went on his way to Cuba while I headed south through Palenque and back to San Cristobal. On the way, I visited Agua Azul, another beautiful natural waterfall and also another river that runs through a grand valley. However, what I will remember the most is my visit to a local village called Chamutla. This is probably the biggest cultural shock of my trip.
“Are you there?â€
“Yes I amâ€
That’s the literal translation of the local Mayan greeting. Really what they are asking is if the spiritual being is there because obviously, the physical body is there.
The locals watch TV just like we do. When we watch the Discovery channel and see indigenous people live in clay huts and we think to ourselves that we are much more advanced. In the similar way, the local Mayans watch TV and see modern tiled floors in houses. They don’t think that they are any inferior because they have dirt floors. Dirt floors have worked for them for centuries; they feel no need to change.
For them, a whole family lives under one roof. It’s perfectly normal for parents to be having sex and the kids to be in the same room. If you grew up with that, then the idea would seem normal and natural. For the rest of us who did not grow up that way, that idea is far out. Also as a subsistent community, the Mayans think of the family more of a unit since everyone work and produce together to grow crops or whatever the family business is.
They drive cars. They have cell phones. They believe in Jesus Christ, but for them Jesus is not the same as the Jesus in Christianity. Jesus is simply the name for another deity. In their mixed religion of Christianity and Mayan religion, there are no demons, only gods, but gods can be good or bad. They make offerings to the Gods with whatever they have, such as fruits, food or even coke, in hopes of keeping a good relationship with their gods. They ask nothing for their offering, but one day when they do need help, they will already be in good relations with their higher beings.
They have hospitals and then they have healers. Hospitals are for emergencies, but for general illness, they go to their healers. Their healers provide care for them in the traditional Mayan methods via prayers, burning candles, and herbs.
Economically, they could be involved in many jobs other than growing corn. For example, the family I visited produces flowers on their farm behind the house and exports them. On Monday morning, they don’t all rush to the office. Pace of life is slower and simpler than in the cities.
Culturally, they have managed to preserve their way of life and thinking amongst the growing modern society around them. They know about capitalism, the internet and materialism. They desire little and are more satisfied. Such is a rarity in today’s world.
In San Cristobal, I also visited the Mayan medicine museum where I picked up a book of Mayan herbs and applications. On a quick flip through, I happened to see the herb Ruta Graveleon. I recall this is the herb used by the Indian father and son doctor team to treat brain tumors in India. What a coincidence that Mayans also use the same herb, except that Mayans don’t use it for pains of the head.
My trip from Xela up to Merida Mexico to meet my dad would be my first long bus trip, including 3.5 hours from Xela to the border, 3.5 hours from Mexico border to San Cristobol, a few hours wait there, 5 hours to Palenque, a few more hours wait and then another 7 hours to Merida. Buses in Mexico are actually very comfortable; the seats recline far back and come with plenty of leg room. If it had a wet bar, it could definitely used as a party bus.
It’s been almost a year since I saw my dad. We were supposed to meet at the hotel, but by chance we ran into one another on the streets of Merida. We were both very happy to finally meet again. He was wearing one of the Carnegie Mellon robotics t-shirts I had given him a few years back. We found ourselves a street BBQ buffet and gorged on skewers of fish, chicken and pork. Half way through dinner, rain came pouring down. Not deterred, we finished our meals inside the restaurant.
Over the next two days, we visited Uxmal and Chichen Itza, both Maya ruins. The road there took us on a lonely road cutting through the vast forests of the Yucatan peninsula. The forests stretched as far as the eye can see. Undeveloped and protected, the forest reserve showed the incredible rich natural resources of Mexico. The land has never been cultivated before. Just imagine what could be produced when one day we find a bio-renewable energy source – besides corn. Converting corn to feed automobiles carries a very negative connotation, especially outside of the US, because the people ask why we should feed corn to cars when corn is a food for people.
Uxmal is about 1500 years old, abandoned in the 1200’s. Most of the buildings there are for ceremonial purposes, such as one for priests to pray to the rain god. Mayans have their own calendar of 20 day months, 18 of these months make up one year. Many of the symbolic numbers are built into the temples themselves such as the number of steps up to a temple, the number of doors on a building. I think a lot of the ruin is reconstructed because just by looking at the different colors on the building, it’s obviously that the higher parts of the buildings tarnished in black and gray contrast deeply with the skin color stones on the lower parts of the buildings. The buildings were all painted colorfully at one point, using a mixture of colors from plants and fine mud.
There is also a ball court with two rings sticking out sideways from the wall. There were games often for entertainment, but every 52 years, a sacrifice of one of the captains of the team is made after the game. No one really knows whether the winning or the losing team captain was sacrificed, but either way, it was great for the family of sacrificed as they get lots of material good as well as respect from the community. Mayan culture center on farming and since are no rivers around, they relied on natural rainfall to water their vegetation. Civilization without water nearby or irrigation system to bring water from far is like standing on a thin ice layer on top of a lake. Maybe the Mayans encountered a drought here and the people moved to other Mayan cities in the 1200’s – the most logical explanation.
The guide said the Mayans here also didn’t use wheels for transportation. If true, that would make the constructions of the temples here amazing feats. These temples have a solid core. Imagine trying to move all the heavy stones by manual labor!
Civilizations come and go. The Mayans had observatories to see the skies centuries before Galileo was born, but now their buildings lay in piles of stones. I wonder what the people will say after us if one day our civilization was destroyed and people manage to find a McDonalds’s yellow M next to a 1000 meter tall skyscraper in modern day New York. They would probably say something like “Those people in the 21st century had all the material goods, but they ate like pigs and probably all died of heart attacks†Who knows?
Yup, try to say that word. It’s definitely one of the weirdest word ever created. It’s also the name of an archeological Mayan site, which differs from other Mayan sites because it doesn’t have large monuments to see. Much of the site remains in the states as they were discovered, carved rocks laying in different formations which archeologists called monuments. Unlike other Mayan sites, local Mayans still go there on a regular basis to pray, perform rituals and communicate with their higher beings. Some sites were used to pray for the sick to get better, for the unfertile to get pregnant, for a good harvest and also for money. The numbering on each of the hundreds of stones gave me a glimpse of the amount of work that goes into excavation of the site. Many of the ruins remain under about five feet of dirt. In one monument, I saw rocks formations which clearly were used as roads.
That rocky road would pick up farther away at another monument. And in between, the road remains buried. At the park, there were many interesting fruits of trees, some colorful, some long and eerily furry and some delicious. At the park, there’s also a small zoo housing a host of exotic animals. By exotic I mean I have not seen them before but they are probably common for the area. And who would have thought to put turtle and crocodiles in the same cage?
The next day, a couple friends and I took a trip to Georgina Fuentes, a natural hot water spring. I’ve never been to one before, so I was definitely psyched to check it out. The day started out pretty hot, so I was a little worried that it would be too hot to get in the hot tub. As we stood in the back of a truck and felt the mountain air starting to cool down the higher we climbed, I felt much more at ease. In fact at the natural spring, we could see our own breathe because of the cool ambient air. There are three pools, one funneling into the other and getting successively cooler. I was a huge fan of the hottest one since this was the closest thing to a hot bath I could get. The skin on my hands got wrinkly, but I didn’t care. The water felt great and supposedly therapeutic too, who knows? Most people there were Guatemalan families taking a weekend getaway trip. Many families were barbequing there, which made me very hungry. On the way down, we stopped by a Mayan town to visit their market. I picked up half a dozen string bean looking fruit. Inside there is a neatly lined-up row of white cotton-textured fruit meats engulfing large black seeds. The meat tasted like a mix between cotton candy and Lychee. Before the bus arrived home, I had finished my bag of string bean fruit. I am amazed at all the different fruits that are out there. Even though Guatemala is relatively close to the US, I had never seen such a fruit before. I can only imagine what I will find when I get to Brazil.
Another delicacy in Guatemala is a cerviche that’s made from a certain part of a bull. I won’t say what it is, but its texture is pretty close to soft conche. The grandmother at the house hadn’t had it in 18 years, so when I brought a portion home to share, she was thrilled. So far I have been pretty adventurous in eating street food and trying local specialties. Luckily I haven’t gotten stomach problems. But for sure, I would meet my match when I get to Mexico.
