Because postcards are so passe

Home again

2010-09-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

This post has two main purposes: 1) to announce that I have officially survived my 8 months in South America and 2) to steer readers (if any still exist) to my new blog: Birds on the Brain

After a 30-hour reunion with my Peruvian friends in Lima I hopped on my red-eye flight to JFK. They were a nice few days in New York catching up with some buddies from Brown and readjusting to luxurious, but expensive consumer society. Ironically about the only pictures I took were in the tropical house at the Central Park Zoo.

These are supposedly the largest pigeons in the world (and arguably the prettiest). Time to start planning a trip to New Guinea!

After flying back to to North Carolina I went almost straight to Emerald Isle for family beach week. We were delighted to learn that there were several Loggerhead Sea Turtle nests in the vicinity of our section of beach. While we missed the 3 am hatching of the closest clutch, we did get to see "turtle patrol" volunteers excavate a couple dozen survivors that were still trapped under the sand a few days later.

I'm finally back home and have just started a doctoral program at Duke's Nicholas School for the Environment. This marks the conclusion of my travels and this blog (for now). Who wants to read about environmental aquatic chemistry anyway? But for some revisiting of South American birds and updates on local bird happenings check out: Birds on the Brain (for those too lazy to scroll back to the top).

So until next time (perhaps the climate change summit in Cancun in October? and definitely the Mediterranean in May 2011) Scott is signing out.

Jungle to Jungle

2010-08-07T06:19:00.000-07:00

I had a great time at the Durand brothers lodge. It is under construction, so conditions are really basic, which I really liked and it also meant that the price was miles below any of the competion. It was a perfect setup, just the basic things that are needed and an epic old growth forest with a great trail system.

I´ve encountered a lot of impressive trees, but none with na´vi living in them! Ok, it wasn´t quite Hometree, but you get the idea. (Sorry for the avatar references, I saw it in Spanish during one of my recent 12+ hour bus rides).

Unfortunately the Harpy Eagle nestling took off sometime in the last month and wasn´t around, but there were plenty of birds around to be seen.

Oropendulas were all over the place and came in four different types. This one has the unimpressive forename of "Olive." I think it deserves better.

There were lots of bright macaws around as well, but none willing to pose for a photo. I also saw some red howler monkeys, saddle-back tamarins and an arboreal anteater called a tamandua.

So that´s pretty much what´s been going on the past few days...living in a dirt floor hut without any electricity, wandering around the rainforest all day everyday, looking for a seemingly inexhaustable supply of exotic tropical wildlife. I could´ve easily stayed three more days or longer. In fact, I can´t wait to go back...though by the time I get around to it the place will probably be just like any other lodge: frilly, pricy and filled with tourists. Having seen the "before" picture though, it sure would be an impressive transformation. And for the sake of the brothers, I do hope things go well.

So I go from the green jungle right into the concrete incarnation: New York City. Of course I´ve got about 30 hours in Lima in between...it seems like an appropriate halfway acclimatization point--huge city, but still Latin America.

This may very well be my last blog post for sometime. Once I stop travelling I tend to lose interest in both writing and photography and thus blogging. I´ll probably start a new more bird-focused blog that will be less about me and more about birds and written less for general consumption and more for Pajareros. I´ve already got a few names in mind...any suggestions?

Hiking the gringo trail

2010-08-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

My friend "Juan" decided to come along with me for my trip to Cuzco and Machu Picchu (he had never been to either). I think he experienced a bit of culture shock though being essentially the only Peruvian. Really the high-season tourists were almost as much of a spectacle as the ruins themselves.

We woke up at 3 am (yet another rediculous wakeup call) to go wait in line for the first bus to the ruins (at 5:30). There were already nearly 100 people in line when we showed up, so we ended up actually catching the third bus, which ended up being fine. Only the first 400 visitors are permitted to hike up the nearby peak of huaynapicchu, which overlooks the main ruins and has its own structures around its peak as well as access to the temple of the moon.

Is there really any point in putting up a picture? Everybody has seen machu picchu photos. At least this one is from a different angle (from the summit of huaynapicchu) than the cliche and includes a bit more of the surrounding topography. The views from the entire area into the surrounding peaks, a few of which are capped by glaciers, are absurd and require some sort of 360 degree camera lens to capture.

No matter where you walk around the site you are invariably ascending or descending a pretty irresponsible grade. After hiking up to Huaynapicchu, down to the temple of the moon, up to la puerta del sol (the sun gate) and then all the way back to Aguas Calientes we were pretty beat (my legs are still sore). So I didn´t really have much energy to check out the catherdrals, churches or museums in Cuzco, but these aren´t really my forte anyway.

Here´s the Plaza de Armas though, which makes for a nice photograph. If you can believe it, this was later in the day when it was less packed with tourists and yet it still looks pretty full.

Wasting no time, I hopped a night bus down to Puerto Maldonado. I´m not going into the Manu Biosphere, but another spot that should be just about as good, way cheaper and way more accessible. Last chance to see harpy eagle or contract some incurable amazonian illness.

Lake Titicaca will have to wait for my next trip I guess.

2010-07-27T10:18:00.000-07:00

My trip up to Bosque Unchog with 66-year-old Reyes, whistling through his remaining 7-and-a-half-teeth to coax out birds, was a success. Despite a bank of clouds that rolled in around 9 am and enveloped us for the most of the day, we managed to spot our quarry just as I was ready to give up...

...the rare endemic and endangered Golden-backed Mountain-Tanager. Reyes said flocks of 7 or 8 used to be common in the area decades ago, but nowadays seeing a flock of three is cause for some celebration.

I had one last quarter chicken dinner in Huanuco before catching a bus back toward Lima.

The city had really started to grow on me and I nearly got stranded there for an extra day as the bus station was a madhouse of people trying to get places for Fiesta de la Patria, a vaguely

defined holiday period centered around Peru's independence day, July 28th.

After another 8-hour bus night I was in Chosica, near Lima, where every highschool student from the area seemed to be involved in some sort of massive marching-band-type parade. Other than that it was mostly a well-needed rest day to prepare for a trip up into Santa Eulalia Canyon.

The plan was to meet a group of avitourists coming from Lima. When it turned out that they would be getting a late start, I set out up into the canyon on my own with the assurance that they would pick me up from the side of the road around 3 or 3:30. When the sun set below the rim around 5:15 I was relieved to see an overcrowded bus winding its way up t

he switchbacks toward me. I crammed in and wound up at 3,200 meters in the cliffside town of San Pedro de Casta where I encountered a group of students from Lima planning to climb up to Marcahuasi, some Incan ruins some 800 meters and three hours up above town.

It sounded cool, so I decided to tag along rather than try to track down my lost tour group.

We set off with our 70-year-old guide at 5 am and had a gorgeous clear morning wandering around the dilapadated ruins and unusual rock formations. It was no Machu Pichu, but the views sure were stunning.

Can you spot the gringo?

We made it back into town for lunch where we discovered that the two buses that normally serve the area were both defunct. It seems most people have a "chicken bus" story from travel within latin America, but I now present to you the "cow bus."

There were three huge cows and about 20 passengers. The goal for everyone was to avoid getting trampled or covered in manure. It was a combination of hectic, hilarious and terrifying as we all lurched down steep potholed switchbacks, staring half the time off a shear 2000 meter precipice and the other half into oncoming overhanging tree branches and cactuses that raked the sides of the truck and threatened to tear desperately clinging fingers. All the while the cattle jostled and fought against their tethers like fish trying to wriggle loose from their hooks. Miraculously, through the three-hour trip, the only casualties were one tent and two backpacks (heavily fertilized), fortunately none of which belonged to our party.

My new friend, "John," a mechanical engineering student in Lima has been nice enough to let me stay with him. Though desperately in need of some decent sleep, I woke up before 5 am for the third time in four mornings to take a taxi to the marina to catch a boat out to the continental shelf with a crew of ornithologists and birdwatchers. As coincidence would have it, one of the other passengers was a profesor who completed his doctorate in zoology at Duke, where I'll begin my own PhD shortly.

Obviously a big incentive for making this trip was to see some unique pelagic bird species. But I also wanted to venture out onto the "Peru Margin" to see the area from which the sediment core was extracted that I studied for my honors thesis at Brown. What makes the sediment

as well as the marine life in the area so remarkable is the upwelling nutrient-rich water characteristic of the ocean here. High primary productivity supports high concentrations of fish and pescavores. Seeing penguins, albatrosses and sea lions was awesome, but the highlight was definitely the group of humpback whales that came up so close to the boat that it became unclear as to who was watching whom.

Whales are always hard to capture on camera, but rarely because they are too close! (I´ve uploaded this picture four times and it always comes out sideways no matter how I orient it in MS Paint...sorry).

Since I have a free place to stay and friends on holiday, I'll probably stick around Lima for some behind the scenes touring and fiesta, though this will leave me with some tough choices for how to spend my remaining time. I want to visit Machu Pichu, Manu and Lake Titicaca, but will probably only have time for one of the latter two.

I´ll be back in the US before I know it!

Bienvenidos a Peru

2010-07-21T16:59:00.000-07:00

Turns out buses are well in abundance here. Parks however can be tougher to come by.

I blasted out of Tumbes for an 18-hour haul to Lima...not nearly as bad as it might sound.

I checked into this cool hostal that had pet tortoises and parrots running around its roof deck restaurant. This Red-and-Green Macaw was trying to protect David's nether regions from an incoming pigeon poo I guess But I didn't even stay the night as it turned out. Given advice from eminent Peru-based ornithologist Gunnar Engblom, I hopped on another bus--this one a 10-hour jaunt to Huanuco. From this area supposedly one can access some of the best areas of remaining cloud forest in the country. The city, Huanaco, is not even mentioned in my Moon guidebook for Peru. This is probably because the area used to be a haven for Sendero Luminoso until recently, so it has been more than off the Gringo trail. Given my track record, this forgotten corner of the world should be making headlines any day now. I just have to find where they're building their drug smuggling zeppelins.

Huanaco is quite a bustling place and the swarms of three-wheeled taxis buzzing around through the narrow street gives it a bizarre southeast Asian feel (not that I have been). The surrounding desert hills remind me more of the Himilayas (and I haven't been there either) than the Andes I know. Anyway, it's a loud rather confusing place.

And the nearby cloud forest that brought me here? It turns out to be an hours drive away. Finding a ride there isn't too difficult unless you're on a birdwatching schedule. I arrived there over an hour later than I had hoped this morning (though this was more to do with my alarm not waking me up...maybe I didn't get as much sleep as I thought on the previous two nights' bus journeys). There were a few birds around, but the forest, at least that along the road and anonymous trails is in pretty awful shape.

While Ecuador's abundant national parks are not always managed so well, they are miles superior to the lack there of offered by Peru. And this is some 11 hours from Lima in what is supposed to be one of the best sites the country has to offer for this sort of habitat. I can't say I wasn't a bit disappointed. It is always fascinating, though sobering, to see the interface between pristine wilderness and encroaching distruction. Apparently much has changed since a team of ornithologists from LSU surveyed the area back in the 70s and disovered a handful of previously undescribed species bringing (relative ornithological fame to the area).

I did manage to see this Masked Fruiteater, one of the area's endemic specialties, right by a freshly slashed-and-burned patch of former cloud forest.

And tomorrow I'm visiting a different even more remote and (hopefully) more intact section of higher elevation cloud forest with none other than the original guide that lead the group from LSU back in '74. So it will be quite the early morning...4 am wakeup to try to get to Bosque Unchog for 6:30. Let's hope it doesn't rain!

park bus park bus park bus

2010-07-17T19:43:00.000-07:00

A series of long bus rides punctuated by a stop in Bahia de Cariquez to catch the world cup finals brought me to Cuenca where I successfully encountered "Mike," (the Danish birdwatcher who had beena volunteer at Bilsa).

We immediately left for nearby Cajas National Park.

It was gorgeous and had its share of interesting birds despite the rather srubby and windswept habitat. On our way it a thunderstorm came out of nowhere and pelted up with sleet/hail? Whatever it was, we went from being very hot to very cold in a matter of seconds.

We thought about harvesting some wool from this llama (or is it an alpaca? - I´m better with birds than mammals)

Next another quick 5 hour bus ride to Loja where we hiked around a park owned by the local University. Thanks to some tainted peanutbutter, I lost my breakfast and lunch (unbeliveably, my first throw up in Ecuador!) on the way up to this peak overlooking Loja.

On to Zamora, but we broke up this bus ride with a stop at Arcoiris Cloud Forest Reserve, part of Podocarpus National Park. The place was deserted, which was fine with me, because that meant nobody to collect money and free access to trails.

Zamora is probably my favorite town in Ecuador. We ended up staying at this inexplicably inexpensive hotel with an awesome roof deck that yielded great views of the town´s immense clock imbedded in the hillside.

(it says, "Zamora, Ciudad de aves y cascadas")

From here we went to (where else) another national park. Actually it was still Podocarpus, but a different section at much lower elevation than Arcoiris (900 meters vs. 2100) meaning different climate, ecology and wildlife. We didn´t find exceptional numbers of birds, which I blame on this white-faced capuchin monkey that followed us around for the better part of an hour shaking branches at us and no doubt scaring away all sorts of birds that consequently remain unknown to science.

We doubled back to loja and parted ways. "Mike" directly south to Piura, Peru on a mad 7'day mission to some remote volunteer outpost in Bolivia and myself on to, yes, another park. Though this one gets special mention as it is the largest petrified forest in South America. The significance of this claim is not really clear since the petrified trees don´t actually form a forest...they are mearly fossilized remains of what was once a forest some hundred million years ago. There is of course a new forest growing over the fallen ancients that has some impressively thick and presumably quite old bottle-shaped green Ceiba trees.

Today I crossed into Peru and I am already missing Ecuadors busses and national parks. There are supposedly some well-protected reserves near Tumbes, but they are apparently rather inaccessible without arranging a private tour with an agency. As a single traveller this is costly and apparently alltogether impossible to arrange on a Sunday. So I will probably forego the entire region and dive right into some more long bus rides down to Lima.

More Buses and more national parks!

In the land of emeralds

2010-07-10T17:34:00.000-07:00

Before we get started here´s a pcture of Pululahua Crater that I wrote about last time around.Believe it or not there´s a charming little hostal down there with a wind turbine and solar panels and a 70-something retired electrical engineer trying to start an organic farm.

Far from this eden-like paradise down on the sticky-humid northwestern corner of Ecuador lies a gritty frontier backwater called San Lorenzo where I wrote my last update. Many concerned readers have contacted me regarding the secret drug-smuggling submarine factory that was discovered in the mangroves near this town. Indeed it was no coincidence that the 150 militia raid came on the heels of my visit to the area. Check out this photographic proof:
Above you can see the manglares de mataje where the base was hidden and below the town of San Lorenzo.
I´ve been working for the DEA all along. I can admit this now that I´m done in Manabi province where the Colombians can´t reach me for retribution. Bird watching is the ultimate cover for any spy. It´s an excuse to visit far-flung out of the way places and carry around high-end optical equipment and cameras.

But this blog post is going to focus on the past week I´ve spent in the province of Esmeraldas, meaning "emeralds." Enterprising Americans supposedly relieved the area of all its precious stones years ago, but the name still sticks.

With my work finished in the mangroves, I headed south down the coast to Sua.

This was the view from my private room that cost $8. I sure will miss the Ecuadorian prices when I´m back home.

From Sua I backtracked briefly to head inland toward Bilsa Biological Station that contains one of the largest rare patches of remnant lowland wet forest left in Western Ecuador and the Choco mega-diverse bioregion. En route I met the first gringo I had encountered in several days, a lovesick and hungover Swiss guy who scarcely new where he was going. His goal, Baños, being some 12 hours distant (it was at this point 2 in the afternoon) I suggested he come with me to Bilsa.

We made fast friends and promptly got stranded in Quininde where we had missed the last camioneta for la Ye de la Laguna. Fortunately it was Saturday night and the grand finale of Quininde´s cantonization day. Some sort of a celebration of political independence celebrated by fireworks and of course Salsa dancing. It made a perfect substitute for the 4th of July that I was missing back home, only it came a day early.

The fireworks were probably the most exciting I have ever seen. Not becaus eof theirhigh quality per se, but because of an almost complete disregard for the safety of spectators . They numbered in the thousands and pressed close to the arsenal of mortar tubes stationed in the city park, a concrete slab surrounded by a 12-foot high steel fence, just to make sure nobodycould escape ground zero should anything go awry. Many of the mortars seemed to have blast radiuses greater than the height that they ended up exploding so that glowing fireballs were raining into the crowd. Car alarms were going off everywhere fromthe shockwaves and everyone was constantly dusting fallout from their heads and shoulders.

The next morning "Dan" and I got up early to catch the pickup to la Ye, a 2 hours ride, which was followed by a 3-and-a-half-hour tromp down the muddy clayey "road" to the Bilsa station. That bulldozer was there to graded the road to make it passable for vehicals with 4WD, but most transport is made by horse or donkey.

The station had a few confused volunteers and researchers, but the folks who would have resmebled volunteer coordinators or directors were away on vacation unfortunately. Of course, I didn´t need any help or coordinating and set right out each and every day to look for rare Choco endemic birds with a Danish birdwatcher who used my presence to get out of volunteering responsibilities.

On my first day I got some great looks (but but no pictures) at the famous and rediculous-looking Long-Wattled Umbrellabird, an endangered species I had been trying tofind for some time. On my last day I saw probably the rarest bird I´ll ever see anywhere (except for maybe Okarito Brown Kiwi), the highly sought-after, but seldom encountered Banded Ground-Cuckoo. A large endangered terrestrial bird.

From Bilsa I left for Mompiche, a quiet off-season surfer village, and then to Bunche to visit some interns from Great Wilderness who had been working on community development projects with cacao farmers there all the while I had been at La Hesperia.

I´m currently blitzing my way south to try and dodgethe Colombians and meet up with my new Danish friend in Cuenca so we can do some birdwatching together in Podocarpus national park in southern Ecuador.

Hopefully I can sustain my phenomenal luck.

¿que pasó?

2010-07-01T18:12:00.000-07:00

I just cannot seem to find spare moments to write this blog.

So much has happened since my last post and I sent all my photos home with my parents (they came to visit for two weeks by the way) so this will be a wall of text, unfortunately. But I´ll try to just touch on a few of the highlights and milestones to keep it from becoming excessively overwhelming.

I finished up my La Hesperia work and responsibilities about three weeks ago. But a managed to cash in my last few vacation days I had saved for a excursion down the east slope to the Tena area in the foothills. I ended up mostly visiting other volunteer projects, which I really should have been doing months ago befor finishing my work as coordinator of a volunteer program.

One, El Arca (like Noah´s Arc) was an animal rescue center with all sorts of caged Amazon animals the proprietor had rescued from indigenous digestive systems by exchanging fish and chicken for what in many cases were pretty special animals (i.e. nocturnal currasows, macaws, an ornate hawk-eagle, monkeys, an American Crocodile, etc.). The volunteer program was barely off the ground and the friendly owner was very excited with the prospect that I might somehow bring her lots of volunteers.

The other, Jatun Sacha (meaning big forest) is one of the oldest private reserves and volunteer programs in Ecuador. La Hesperia up until last year used to in fact exist under the Jatun Sacha Foundation´s umbrella. The most remarkable thing about my visit, other than the insanely precarious canopy tower that made for some splendid bird-watching, was the derth of volunteers present. Other than a couple confused gap-year girls fresh of the boat from New Brunkswick, the place was dead. Given this, I am impressed that La Hesperia has been able to maintain such a decent-sized (8 to 18) volunteer population during my tenure. I have heard that the San Cristobal, Galapagos Jatun Sacha Reserve usually has 25 to 30 volunteers.

On the way back toward Quito I met up with "Colorado" and "Komandatey" in Tena and managed to blagger my way into a rafting trip with them for less than half the dvertised price. This was my first ever serious rafting trip and the river was super-high (it´s name, Jatun Yacu, meaning "big water" was very approprite), so I found the intense sections and biggest towering waves thouroughly exhillerating. And when I was knocked overboard I found myself laughing maniacally. With 8 people in our boat we had 8 nationalities represented (though not all had qualified for the world cup - see Poland and Austria).

Speaking of la copa mundial,...after watching the US fortuitously tie against England with a crew of volunteers in Quito I went back to the east slope to check out some legendary birding spots that I had skipped out on to go rafting. I rushed back from Cordillera de los Guacamayos, one of the Ecuadors best bird watching locales, to meet my parents at the airport.

I took them straight away to La Hesperia so they could see what I had been up to for the previous 5 months first-hand. We all kept insisting that they had chosen the perfect time to come, the "dry season," despite the fact that it rained all afternoon all three days. "Komandatey" and the directors threw me a surprise going-away party one night. Somebody bought me a machete and everyone signed the blade. "El Vaquero" made me an awesome leather sheath for it as well.

I think just being at La Hesperia and seeing all the work and maintenance everywhere that needed to be done exhausted my parents. Luckily they had signed us all up for a comparatively luxurious cruise around the Galapagos. Despite the archapelago´s exalted reputation, the visit really exceeded all expectations. The wildlife was all rediculously tame and abundant. The hardest part was avoiding stepping on a camophlaged marine iguana or nesting booby. Our little (20-passenger) boat´s staff really made the trip special though. It wasn´t long before we were all repeating our favorite naturalist guide´s catch-phrase exclaimations in genuine or mock-enthusiasm (and unfortunately the Ecuadorian accent doesn´t translate into text): "Oh my goodness!"..."Take a Picture!"..."Come Quickly!"

It was sad to see my folks go, and not just because of the dramatic increase in food and accomodation budget. At least they didn´t have to leave me on the side the road with my thumb in the air like they did in northern New South Wales.

Nevertheless I started to feel oddly homesick the day of their departure, so I blitzed out of Quito for Mitad del Mundo for a change of scenery. It´s about as close as you can come to tourist-trap in Ecuador with indigenous displays of questionable accuracy and gimick demnstartions designed to prove the magic of the ecuator robed in speudoscientific explanations such as the Earth´s oblate spheroid shape and the coriolis effect. It was reasonably entertaining to pick these apart in my head. A couple Australian girls were blown away, but I thought it better to let them believe in magic than to reveal to them that the tooth fairy isn´t real.

I had read about a nearby crater, Pululahua, that had been made into a national park, so I hoped a local bus and then hiked up a long deserted road to the entrance. The park warden encouraged me to stay the night at the hostal. Not quite understanding the implications of this advice I wandered over the mirador. Several hundred meters below lay a patchwork quilt of farmland. If it were not walled in by shear mountains it could have passed for somewhere in rural America.

I estimated it would take the better part of an hour to descend the steep winding trail down from the rim, and then more for the return. At this point it was already 4 pm, so I heeded the warden´s advice, provisioned myself for a night´s stay, ditched my large pack in his office and started my steep decent.

It turned out that one of the owners of the hostal at the bottom is a bird guide. He didn´t offer to take me out anywhere, but he did give me some advice on what trails to cover the next day. He´s got a pretty nice Ecuadorian Bird Blog: birding-ecuador-responsibly.blogspot.com

After a tiring trek out of Pululahua, I road a series of buses to Otavalo, the most prosperous indigenous population center in all of South America. It is most famous for its markets, though for me at this point in my travels, I´m not exactly looking to pick up a thick wool tapestry to lug all the way down to Peru.

I considered trying to sign up for some sort of tour to one of the nearby high altitude lakes or the raptor rescue center, but when the recommended travel agency had not opened by 10:30 I decided to move on. I will be making my way back to similar highland environements later and these sort of things are best booked with a group anyway.

So I took a bus to Ibarra and then straight downhill toward the coast. The decent was stunning with the andes seeming to never end. Finally, I arrived this afternoon at the remote mangrove outpost of San Lorenzo. It was only recently opened to overland transportation and is a world apart from everything else I have previously seen in Ecuador. I may as well be in a different country.

Tomorrow I plan to hop a ferry through the mangrove archipelago to La Tola where I should be able to visit the tallest mangrove forest in the world.

Congratulations if you made it this far and doubly so if you are still awake.

I promise pictures will be featured next time around.

Conferences, Cotopaxi, Children, Cock of the Rock

2010-05-25T12:59:00.000-07:00

Conferences, Cotopaxi, Children, Cock of the Rock

All kinds of stuff has been going on since I got back from Colombia a million years ago:

1) La Hesperia hosted 25 exchange students for a conference.

2) I climbed Ecuador’s 2nd highest peak, Cotopaxi.

3) A group of 17 11-year-olds visited from their private school in Quito.

4) I visited Angel Paz’s refugio de aves.

I also published my first book, Birds of the Tyler Place.

I’ve been working pretty hard on writing up information about the bird inventory here at La Hesperia. That, along with everything else that’s been going on and the usual power/internet problems have kept me off the blog for far too long.

There isn’t too much worth saying about the conference, especially since I don’t have any pictures. There were a lot of presentations about projects students had worked on all over Ecuador, but I was pretty busy and only got to see a few.

Afterwards I went to Quito with vague plans to travel around and see some birds for a bit. I hadn’t had a day off in three weeks so I was ready to take some time away from La Hesperia. But I ran into a bunch of the visiting students and some volunteers in Quito who were planning to climb Cotopaxi. After several aguardientes I decided to tag along. And that is how these sort of mountainous decisions are best made: quickly. That way if any of the multitude of potential snags (bad weather, injury, hypothermia, altitude sickness, etc.) gets in the way, there is less feeling of failure or loss.

Anyway, Colorado, Monkey Dentist, Charmadizzle and I all dragged ourselves out of bed early Saturday morning to acclimatize.

We hiked around in the park on a gorgeous afternoon with this white-capped beast looming in the background.

I haven’t read the manual on altitude acclimatization, but I hoped that my physiology would be able to keep up with the schedule. I am well used to living around 1400 meters (the elevation of the Volunteer House at La Hesperia). I then spent one night in Quito (~2850 meters), one night in the Cotopaxi park hostal (3750 meters) and then a night in the refuge (4800 meters). Though that last night of sleep was really only about 4 or 5 hours.

While the top generally gets plenty of snow to feed glacial advance on all sides, during a sunny day, the snow and ice begin to melt and the risks of avalanches and of ice bridges collapsing into crevasses increases significantly. Therefore one who hopes to summit must depart from the refuge around 1 am with a head lamp in order to leave the glacier by noon.

I awoke at midnight with a splitting headache (probably a result of brain swelling from the altitude) and had no appetite for breakfast (altitude also tends to be hard on the digestive system). But once we starting hiking up I started to feel much better. After an hour-and-a-half or so of hiking up loose gravel and stones, we stopped to slap on crampons and tie on our ropes.

The next four hours were spent trudging slowing up the steep glacier intermittently wondering how much time might have elapsed and how much further we would need to climb, though our guide, advised us not to worry about time or elevation. We began under a clear night sky with the handle of the Big Dipper and Quito lights at our backs and Scorpio visible just above the mountain face in front of us. Around 6 am the sky began to lighten and we could see Cotopaxi’s perfect pyramid shadow stretching out toward the western horizon.

After just under six hours we finally reached the caldera rim.

We saw some fumaroles venting smoke confirming the volcano’s active status and minutes later we saw a huge cloud of ash billowing from another volcano some hundred kilometers to the south.

After only a few triumphant minutes of soaking up 360 degrees of views that included views of essentially every other significant Ecuadorian peak, we had to begin our decent. While we were exhausted and walking down steep glaciers is rather difficult, the weather was brilliant all the way.

Just after we got back to the refuge, an Andean Condor flew by as if to congratulate us.

I’m no mountain climber, though after Cotopaxi I can certainly understand the allure of the pastime. While I’ve somehow learned to derive satisfaction out of spotting a particularly rare bird, reaching the pinnacle of a mountain with whatever superlative attached (second highest peak in Ecuador, world’s tallest active volcano, etc.) is a real thrill that anyone able to achieve such a feat can appreciate.

I missed a couple days of work with the Cotopaxi trip, but made it back just in time for 17 11-year-olds to show up for a few days from the British School in Quito. I taught them about birds at La Hesperia (their favorite was the Ruddy Pigeon because it says “what’s the problem?”) and took them camping.

For the weekend me and Colorado took off for Ecuador’s unofficial bird-watching capital, Mindo, to visit the highly regarded Angel Paz. His Refugio de Aves is a private plot of primary cloud forest where live a startlingly high density of rare and endemic bird species. He really put on a show, introducing us to all his “friends.” It started with a group of lekking blood-red Andean Cock-of-the-rocks (unfortunately a tour group of 8 grizzled Brits tromped in late and scared them away before the sky lightened enough for good photos). Next, a close encounter with the rare Giant Antpitta, “Maria,” that he feeds worms (this day his other antpitta friends found their own food, as can happen this time of year). At the fruit feeding station, Angel hand-fed bananas and grapes to mountain-tanagers and Toucan Barbets and tossed scraps down to eagerly waiting wood-quails and quail-doves. Topping it all was probably the hummingbird feeders around which at least 12 species swarmed like bees.

It was all capped off by a sighting of the rare Orange-breasted Fruiteater eating berries in the Mora patch. One photographer had come specifically to photograph this bird and while the guide urged us all (and especially the Pommies) restraint, Colorado charged in and snapped a few decent shots before the bird flushed leaving the professional empty-handed.

I've only got a couple weeks left at La Hesperia, so I've got to make them count.
This is Cayambe, another volcanic peak I probably won't get to climb, the evening before we climbed Cotopaxi.

Colombia, where everyone is a millonario

2010-04-28T07:53:00.000-07:00

I made it back to La Hesperia from Colombia with a few bug bites, but no kidnappings, muggings or trouble with drug cartels or paramilitary groups. I think the bites were worth this spot.

With my visa problems finally solved after a fifth trip to the Ecuadorian consulate, I went straight for gorgeous Tayrona National Park where lush jungle meets the Caribbean Sea.

I was fortunate to find a pack of crackers and some cans of tuna somebody had left in my locker. In the park food costs 3 to 4 times what it does pretty much anywhere else in the country because it has to all be brought in by horse along well worn (and fertilized trails).

While trekking the coastal trails that turned from jungle to beach and back again I encountered several groups of these critically endangered Cotton-top Tamarins.

You can see where the name comes from. I happened to have studied this same species at the Providence Zoo for an animal behavior class a few years ago. To see them in the wild was an awesome surprise.

From the park I went back to Santa Marta, an old charming colonial city that lives in the tourist shadow of nearby Cartagena.

This is where most of the tourists brave enough to come to Colombia spend their time and its no wonder why. The city is a working exhibit in colonial architecture and surrounded by 12 kilometers of ramparts that afford views of city, sea and sound. I spent a full day wandering the maze of narrow streets drinking cheap and ubiquitous freshly squeezed fruit juices.

I was sad to leave the coast and sadder that I missed Colombia’s coffee region, but also looking forward to getting back to La Hesperia. Also another chance to spend some time in Bogota was nothing sneeze at.

For a city that’s probably just before Baghdad on many-a-person’s list of places to visit, it really deserves a second though. Everything is cheap, public transport, though perhaps a bit too “exciting” at times for some, makes getting around a snap, and the people quite friendly for such a dense city.

I rode the Teleferico up one of the nearby mountains my last morning and discovered its just too big to take in with one photo.

One final note: the Bogota futbol team I watched play earlier is called millonarios. But 1 million Colombian pesos is only 500 US dollars, so their name would really translate into something like thousandaires.

Go to Colombia and you´ll instantly be a millionaire!

2010-04-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

Bogota is a bit like Quito with its old colonial-era quarter, ugly concrete barrios and a backdrop of stunning Andes peaks, but it packs more than 4 times more residents within its limits. Riding around on the mini-buses (colectivos) is as entertaining as many a Disney World ride and costs just 65 cents.

I visited El Museo de Oro yesterday to see what pre-Colombian trinkets were salvaged from Europe{s ransacking of the regions precious metals. I also dropped by the gallery of Botero art (he{s the Colombian who painted the fat people see below)

They also had some work by Picasso and Dali and entrance was free.

Last night I went out Salsa dancing and this afternoon I went to a thrilling football match in which the local Bogota team "Millionarios" won 2-1. Colombian soccer fans lived up to expectations for craziness. In the proper sections (which I was told specifically to avoid; muy peligrosa!) they jumped and chanted the entire match.

Like Ecuador, essential goods and services are quite cheap by US standards. For example, at the salsa club last night four Cerveza Costeñas, cost just 5,000 pesos (2.50 USD). Back home you might be able to buy a PBR out at a bar for that price if youre lucky.

Tomorrow morning there will be a moment of truth when I find out for sure whether my visa problems are solved. If all goes well I will celebrate by making a b-line for colonial Cartagena on the Caribbean coast and then on to beautiful Tayrona national park.

I have now successfully met up with former Tyler Place staff in four continents. Asia and Antarctica will be tough to pull off though if I want to complete the circuit.

Again, no card reader, so you{ll have to use your imagination.

Life in exile

2010-04-16T18:22:00.001-07:00

I stayed to the bitter end of my 90-day visa in Ecuador and nearly didnt make it out in time as downpours caused landslides that closed the highway to Quito.

I ended up booking a flight in Quito two days ago for Bogota (they seem to be quite cheap last-minute), but found out as I passed through immigration that without applying for a new visa at the Ecuadorian Embassy I would not be able to return to country until January 2011.

So I went straight from the Bogota airport into a helter-skelter multi-bus journey through a concrete jungle of 7 million inhabitants in search of an Ecuadorian flag. Despite knowing the cross streets and asking a dozen or so strangers I could not seem to find any Ecuadorian Embassy (it wasnt even in the phone book). It turned out to be on the 7th floor of a random office building within a block of where I was looking. I caused a bit of a log-jam in the foyer security checkpoint as my bags were searched (I still had all my stuff with me), with slick suits muttering "permiso" and bustling past what must have looked to them like a lost hiker.

I stepped off the elevator and was immediately told by the guard (?) wearing an ornate uniform, epaulets and all, that I needed to visit the Ecuadorian consulate rather than the embassy.

Half-an-hour later at another random office building I found out that the Ecuadorian consulate shuts promptly at 1 pm (it was by this point nearly 4).

Anyway, this morning I arrived at the consulate early enough to get in and get the laundry list of required documents and forms to complete (which included fees totalling 162,000 pesos {about 90 USD} but no bribes), then run out and complete the scavenger hunt in time to return before the place closed.

I should have my passport back with a visa in it Monday morning (keeping my fingers crossed). My plans for Columbia have to change though; this means making some tough decisions about what to scratch from my itinerary. I really wanted to spend some time on the Carribean coast, but also to see Medellin and a bit of the coffee-growing region. The country is so spread out and mountainous that bis travel between ny two locations takes roughly a day. Being in Bogota for the weekend isn{t the end of the world though. I have four Colombian friends here, one of whom just graduated from a masters program in teaching English as a second language, so I have a party to go to tomorrow night.

Sorry for the wall of text. My computer is back at the reserve and there is no card reader on this computer, so pictures will have to come in the for of an addendum...perhaps tomorrow.

Elementary my dear Hoatzin

2010-04-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

I met Pedro at the Quito airport and we took off the next day on a 9-hour trip (involving a plane, a boat, a pickup truck and another boat) to Tiputini Biodiversity Station, a remote research outpost in the heart of a huge swath of pristine old growth lowland tropical rainforest.

The lack of hunting pressure on local populations of macro-fauna makes it a phenomenal place for seeing big game such as monkeys (we saw 8 species including this Squirrel Monkey…

…And these bite-sized Pygmy Marmosets…

…), curassows (we saw seven individuals in one day) and capybara (the world’s largest rodent).

The reserve’s Laguna was also home to bird that through the shear smelliness of its innards has managed to avoid most sources of predation all-together.

This Hoatzin or ‘stinky turkey’ is the only bird in the world that has a diet consisting entirely of leaves. It is also the only bird that has a prehensile claw on the wrist joint of its wings. Depending on which taxonomist you ask it belongs in an order or at least a family of its own.

A lot of other resident birds proved to be at times difficult to see given the immense height of the canopy (some 160 feet) and the density and darkness of the undergrowth. After six days of rather intensive bird hunting Pedro and I managed to collectively see about 170 of the reserves 550 or so species. Our list included some truly fantastic birds that are impossible to see most anywhere else in the world and would impress even the most cold-hearted bird-hater; see Scarlet Macaw, Salvin’s Currasow, Paradise Tanager and Bartlett’s Tinamou (sitting on a nest). Many-banded Aracari may or may not belong on the same line with the previously mentioned birds, but I got a decent picture of one (yes, he looks much like the Pale-mandibled from last time, but they’re just so photogenic).

If you think my photos are any good, then you’re wrong. You should see the ones Pedro has bagged with his 500 mm howitzer. The image quality comes at a price of course…both in cost and in weight. While he has to worry about lugging around an apparatus roughly 20 times heavier and costlier, I’m not sure if his images are actually 20 times better. There is some subjectivity of course. We’ll get a link to some of his best shots up soon.

We got back to Quito just in time to catch Duke’s nail-biting victory over Butler that earned the school its fourth national title.

There was no time to celebrate (we were exhausted anyway) as we got up the next AM several hours before dawn to make our way to La Hesperia for a 30-hour bird-a-thon. I took Pedro all the way from the highway (1100 meters) up to the summit (2000 meters) to see the Choco-endemic and near-threatened Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan (see below) and we saw some 75 other species along the way.

It was really too bad Pedro didn’t have more time to spend down here since he has 1400 or so more birds to see. But he did manage to help me find a couple of new species for the La Hesperia list and adding to those a handful of others found over the weekend while camping at the summit, the official total is now well above 300.

Well I’m sure that’s about as much birds as anyone can handle for one post (it’s Pedro’s fault). Next time around things will be different. I’m leaving this week on trip, destination unknown to renew my visa. I’m thinking Columbia, but possibly Peru. Any suggestions are welcome.

In the meantime I’ve got to decide on what I’ll be doing for the next 1 to 5 years of my life. Please, no suggestions.

2010-03-21T18:29:00.000-07:00

Sunday, March 21, 2010

The computer has been broken for awhile so I have no idea when this post will get out to all my concerned and alert readers.

I spent the weekend at La Hesperia, which meant no chance to watch March Madness, though the chances of watching Duke, I figured, were pretty low anyway from previous experience. For all I know they are playing at this moment for a spot in the Sweet 16.

Instead I got to go camp up at the summit of La Hesperia.

A beautiful spot and we got to hike back down through a portion of the reserve’s Bosque Primario the morning after.

I got to see flocks of the near-threatened Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan which, of all the1600+ species found in mainland Ecuador, is the one that is featured on the cover of my field guide.

Unfortunately none of the pictures turned out that well (too many orchids and clouds in the way). But here’s a good one of a very cooperative (and sad-looking?) Crimson-rumped Toucanet I found just by the volunteer house.

We lucked out on weather though and had the first non-rainy 30-hour streak I’ve experienced so far here.

Undoubtedly our good fortune was granted by this leprechaun disguised as a baby Ecuadorian Thrush that Jorge-Luis caught just as we were departing.

A lot has been going on…

In the past week we’ve built a caterpillar apartment in which we have begun a breeding program.

So far we have about 10 larval monarch tenants, two of which have already made cocoons. We’ll start planning and building a proper butterfly house soon.

Two Canadian farmers have completely renovated the organic garden and foolishly left me in charge of keeping it maintained.

Here’s the shot just after they completed their work. After a few weeks of misguided volunteer efforts I’m sure we can reduce these smooth rows into a smoldering crater.

Fortunately I’m off to the Amazon for a week come the 29th so I’ll be able pass the blame off to someone else!

Feliz Cumpleaños a mi

2010-03-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

This was written 12 years ago back on March 15, 2010....

The computer monitor died while I was away so I haven't been able to post.

---------

I went into Quito over the weekend for a few reasons: 1) to watch Duke basketball, 2) get a yellow fever vaccination for my upcoming trip to the Amazon, and 3) celebrate my 25th birthday.

1) There’s some sort of blackout on Duke games in Quito. On Friday night I got see Maryland play Georgia Tech and witnessed, with joy, enough Gary Williams exasperation to last me a season. But for the semifinal Saturday and final Sunday I was forced to watch Atlantic-10 garbage and hope for halftime highlights.

2) The Ministry of Health is closed on weekends so I had to extend my weekend through to Monday morning. But if it happens to be a weekday, the health care system here is amazingly efficient and cheap. I made it in and out in under 15 minutes and the cost?...a whopping zero dollars. They didn’t even charge an extranjero tax.

3) I had a really fun weekend and a great birthday. Somehow though my bank (Etrade grrr….) screwed up my last fund transfer and I ended up with essentially $20 for the weekend. Now Quito is a relatively cheap city, especially if you get away from the heart of Gringolandia, but my room alone was going to cost $12 per night. Luckily I had brought my driver’s license as proof of my quarter-century achievement which made asking favors of strangers and semi-strangers consistently successful. And since I had to stay through Monday anyway, I was able to put off paying for the room until cash came through.

Now usually I base my blog around pictures I happen to have taken, but really none apply to any of the above stories.

So here’s a massive slug one of the Canadians found when we were out hiking the other day.

Also, I’ll refer you back to my first post from Ecuador in which I expressed perplexity regarding the popularity of 3-on-3 white-collar volleyball in Quito parks. I recently found out the game is called “ecuavolley” and the players (and probably many of the spectators) wager hundreds or thousands of dollars on matches. We’re building a court at La Hesperia so we can practice and plan our great gringo ecuavolley hustle fundraising event.

I’ve got a lot of logistics planning to do in the next few days. Now that I have my vaccine I can go visit Tiputini (the most biodiverse place in the world). I’m trying to get my friend, ‘Pedro’ who’s coming into town, involved as well, but he doesn’t have much time and getting to and from the place can only be done on Mondays and Fridays and takes all day.

And then after that I have to leave the country for visa renewal purposes. I’m thinking a week in Peru, though there was a landslide in Macchu Pichu so it may be closed. Any votes for Columbia or elsewhere? For whatever reason there are no direct flights to Buenos Aires so getting to Argentina is a bit more expensive and time-consuming.

It wouldn’t be a post without a bird pic.

I finally got a good picture of a Pale-mandibled Araçari, a bird found only in Ecuador. It looks almost like a Muppet no?

2010-03-11T09:16:00.000-08:00

I went to Quito last weekend to try to watch Duke demolish UNC in basketball. Unfortunately the game wasn’t being aired, but I did get to go to the Quito botanical gardens to photograph orchids and see my 900^th bird species (worldwide, not just in Ecuador!).

This Long-tailed Trainbearer’s tail is so long I couldn’t fit it in frame.

We might is well make hummingbirds a focus of this post. It took less than 24 hours to attract customers to this feeder by the volunteer house.

At least four different species have dropped by to visit in the first week including this Green-crowned Brilliant

…and this White-whiskered Hermit.

I would like to set up a whole row of feeders someplace where people can sit and watch them closely and take photographs (like the setup I saw in Mindo). So far I haven’t been able to find any feeders in Quito and most online vendors won’t ship to Ecuador, so I’ll have to have somebody bring some down for me.

Random notes:

Things have been going well with the Canadian high school kids who showed up yesterday. They’re pretty quiet, but seem to be enjoying La Hesperia and the cloud forest so far.

I gave a talk the other day about alternative energy (with essentially no preparation) that seemed to go over well.

After tomorrow I’ll be the only American (Estadounidense) at the reserve.

I turn 25 this weekend.

This isn’t the biggest spider I’ve ever seen, but it may be the bluest.

I’ve decided that this is so far the tardiest and most unimaginative of my Ecuador posts. There’s so much going on here all the time and I’ve taken on so many projects that are competing for my time (particularly that spent in front of a computer).

I am off to Quito again for the weekend…this time to try to find a yellow fever vaccination so I can visit the rainforest. Hopefully I´ll have luck with that as well as with the satellite feeds so I can watch some of the ACC tournament.

Donde esta el Baños?

2010-03-02T13:38:00.000-08:00

Banos is a cute little touristy town of ~20,000 nestled among the jagged hills of the Eastern slope of the Andes. It is named for its hot springs (baths or banos), not its toilets, though the mineral content of the water gives it a murky, brownish quality further suggesting the use of elementary-school humor.

The town was completely demolished by nearby Volcan Tungurahua and subsequently (perhaps foolishly?) rebuilt three times in relatively rapid succession back before 1850. Paintings in the main cathedral chronicle these events (alongside the time in 1930 when some tourists drove their car of a cliff and miraculously survived)

Paranoid geologists evacuated the town in 2000 when the volcano began spewing lava again, but after years without an eruption the inhabitants forced their way past roadblocks and reclaimed their homes. We saw a huge plume of ash ominously rising into the Friday afternoon sky that fortunately didn’t culminate in a catastrophic disaster (seems like there have been a lot of these recently in the region).

We went to the zoo (“animal prison”) to see a bunch of fauna native to Ecuador including many species of endangered birds that I likely won’t ever get to spot in the wild. Then they inexplicably had a cage with five American Wood Ducks.

Why they chose to include a relatively common, albeit beautiful, North American species among their menagerie of threatened Ecuadorians is beyond me.

Back at La Hesperia things are going well, except that the week before we were scheduled to receive funds for the school construction project from a Chilean organization an earthquake devastated the town in which it is located. Now we are in dire need of a new source of funding. As unofficial director of outreach and fundraising, everyone’s looking to me for some magic to happen.

Any ideas?

2010-02-25T09:06:00.000-08:00

This was supposed to go up yesterday, but we´ve been without power for the last 24 hours or so...

We went on another hike Friday, this time with the whole group of volunteers (needless to say ‘Martha’ opted not to come). No natural disasters this time around, though the hike ended up being way longer than any of us thought it would be. Between being a bit out of shape, not acclimatized to the altitude and twisting both ankles, one of the new volunteers did have a bit of a rough time. Walter ended up going ahead to get a horse to carry back the last bit. With the slow pace we ended up taking about nine hours altogether and I ended up missing out on a Friday night in Quito.

Oh well.

I went instead Saturday morning and inadvertently ended up couch surfing at this Canadian guy’s amazing apartment in the scenic and conveniently located neighborhood of Guapulo. Check out the view:

He had agreed to put up the volunteer I was with and graciously extended the invitation to me as well. He even cooked us curry and went out into La Mariscal with us that night. He teaches at a high school in Quito. So we’re going to try and get him to visit La Hesperia and maybe get his class to come visit for an end-of-year trip.

Back in the cloud forest all is well. We’re planning a lot of projects; hopefully some of them will work out.

Oh, and I saw a bunch of monkeys today.

I´m off to Baños for the weekend (the town not the toilet). Should be fun.

One of the dogs gave birth to puppies today, so I´ll try and get some super cute pics when I get back.

death and near-death

2010-02-18T05:35:00.000-08:00

So I posted the wrong picture of the Parula last time.

Check it. It´s really just here to soften the blow of the next pic.

This Rufous-naped Brush-finch wasn’t as lucky as the others.

Don’t worry we gave him a nice catholic burial out in front of the house.

We really need to invest in some stickers or something for the windows. I mean we’re supposed to be trying to preserve wildlife and biodiversity right?

At least it wasn’t a volunteer that died.

This morning I was re-cutting the cascada trail that follows a rushing stream up through lush humid forest. It’s gorgeous. There are fern-encrusted cliff faces, waterfalls, tropical flowers, and the nest of one of Ecuador’s marquee bird species, the Andean Cock-of-the-rock.

Here’s what the chicks looked like back on 1-24.

They’ve really plumped up and gotten some good color in the past few weeks and must be nearing time to fledge.

So far so good.

During the rainy season, the river swells and erases the path and redefining it becomes a bit of a Sisyphean task. For much of the trail, the path is simply the river itself, especially after the full day of rain we had yesterday.

After a lot of machete hacking and slogging through the torrent we reached the point where the trail diverges from the river and climbs directly up the vertiginous valley wall back to the farm. Just was I was about to announce our progress to my sole companion, ´Martha´ I heard an exclamation and turned to see her, several plants and a truckload of loose dirt which had just been part of the path disappear from sight.

Fortunately, despite falling a good 35 feet down to the rocky river, she hadn´t broken anything. I backtracked until I reached a point of the trail at her level and pressed through the thick vegetation, clawing at flimsy vines and stalks and the shear dirt wall. I found her a bit shaken and bruised, but otherwise seemingly fine.

Getting out was a challenge of its own. My two crossings of the impromptu path was all it could handle. Just as I reached its junction with the trail, what soil was left for purchase dropped away and suddenly we were separated: she trapped on a precarious platform of loose dirt, and thorny sticks and me on the path to safety just out of reach. So I retrieved my machete and cleared plants from above so I could reach down and help her traverse the gap.

While she is convinced that I saved her life, all I will say is that I perform well under pressure. It comes with the cool head.

No pictures obviously, but I´ll get some up later that will hopefully capture what ´a 35 foot fall into a rocky river´ or ´a landslide´ might look like.

Stay safe

2010-02-15T08:32:00.000-08:00

I went back up to the highest elevations of La Hesperia again Thursday…this time to collect data on Tangaré trees, an endangered species endemic to the Choco bioregion. Of course there were lots of new birds to be seen, though probably the most remarkable sighting captured on film was “the world’s smallest frog.”

We’ll set up a tent with red-and-white candy stripes and charge people a dollar each to take a peak.

It turned out while I was off climbing mountains looking for birds, a couple birds came looking for me.

This cute little Red-headed Barbet (a female hence the lack of a red head) bashed herself into one of the volunteer house windows. After a lengthy nap she pulled herself together and flew away.

And then there was a pair of Tropical Parulas determined to break into one of the rooms. One kept pecking at the window perhaps trying to pick a fight with his own reflection?

We had Friday off, so I took off for Quito Thursday evening. I somehow found myself at a club watching a Nirvana cover band. It was rather surreal. The front man really had the Curt Cobain image (longish blonde hair, plaid shirt) and even his voice down. I was quite impressed. And then between songs he would drop some banter in Spanish to the crowd and the spell would be broken.

The next night I somehow stumbled upon 5 volunteers from La Hesperia in the streets of Quito.Then we all got dragged into a bar/dance club by some promoters on the street promising us free entry and a free drink. None of us were complaining though we later found out that Ecuadorians are charged a $3 cover which seems a bit unfair to say the least.

Unfortunately I didn’t plan ahead properly and arrange to have Monday/Tuesday off for Carnival. All the other La Hesperia staff are away (it’s a national holiday), so I have to wrangle the volunteers, all of whom were likewise oblivious. Nearly everyone else in Ecuador is off to the coast or a few choice party towns for a couple days of parades, water fights and parties.

I can´t really complain though. Being back in the cloud forest is so awesome. And with everyone else away I am truly el jefe.

2010-02-08T05:02:00.000-08:00

Yes, the 7-year-old son of the president of Ecuador was here last week. I can tell you that now because he has left.

Here’s his school group when they arrived. Security was tight all week. See the police and secret service in the background?

Saturday I went into Santo Domingo to Skype home and buy some supplies. It’s not a terribly photogenic city, so just use your imagination.

This morning however was perhaps the most gorgeous I have seen since my arrival, so I set off after breakfast with all my birding paraphernalia up the trail to the highest point of the reserve (some 2000+ meters above sea level).

This is from about halfway up. By the time I reached the summit I was surrounded by clouds.

The best wildlife shot of the hike ended up being this cut little Western Red Squirrel.

Squirrels aren’t as common here as they are back in the US. In fact, every squirrel sighting is supposed to be recorded on a mammal sighting data sheet.

I saw lots of birds of course, including one species of woodcreeper that has not been recorded at La Hesperia before(!). Out in the forest, birds tend to hide themselves pretty well within the dense foliage. But when I got back to the farm for a late lunch, this guy just begged to be photographed.

So I put down my fork and obliged. (It’s a Fawn-breasted Tanager for those of you who may be keeping score).

I hope to get a more serious blogpost up soon about the idea behind La Hesperia. So much of the rhetoric about the place seems like it has never been properly read and edited by a native English speaker. I’ve got quite a lot of writing to do this week, so a little rain would not be so bad.

No puedo hablar

2010-02-04T12:36:00.000-08:00

No deaths or injuries so far with the muchachos which is quite good.

I walked with them up the big hill and heard a lot of “Cuanto falta?” So I distracted them from their exhaustion by talking with them in Spanish about America, wild animals and LEGO Star Wars.

On the left is not the president’s son, on the right is not the president’s son and none of the kids in the back struggling to keep up are the president’s son either. Is the president’s son here? Well, I can’t say.

What I can say is that I milked a cow and rode a donkey yesterday. I also helped build a new tree nursery because a huge avocado branch fell on the current one.

Here’s one of the volunteers “Chen” working the vaca teets.

Yeah, this is a quick post, mainly just to keep me in the habit. But it wouldn’t be a post without a bird pic.

This cute, noisy thing is a Pacific Hornero. They are everywhere here.

Hasta Pronto

Lindo Mindo

2010-02-01T09:44:00.000-08:00

So, we almost finished the school, just came up short a few pencils and teachers.

The Canadians took off for the rainforest and I left for the weekend for a little town called Mindo with the rest of the volunteers. It’s a tourist town for sure, but in an authentic and charming way. It wasn’t very crowded either, at least with other gringos, which I’d guess is partially a result of the season (wet) and economy (bad), though it may very well be typical.

Anyway, we all quickly agreed that we wanted to move to Mindo permanently. The scenery is gorgeous, the locals are friendly and the delicious breakfasts cost just two bucks and come with coffee and thick freshly squeezed juice.

I’ll have to go back soon anyway. The town has led the world in annual bird species recorded for four years running. But of course my traveling companions were not bird watchers so instead of wandering around in the forest all day gazing up at tanagers, toucans and mot mots, we ended up doing boring touristy stuff like this.

We did drop by an orchid garden with a butterfly house one morning and got to see some stunning mariposas.

They also had a row of hummingbird feeders around which hundreds of kolibris swarmed like bees.

It was another good opportunity to play with my new camera. I could never get these guys to sit still so close to me in the forest.

The Ninos have made it up the hill in one piece, so that’s a good start to the week. It looks like I’m not going to have to be as hands on with them as I previously thought, which will give me time to draft my proposal to the San Diego Orchid Society.

Hombres (y chicas) trabjando

2010-01-28T09:10:00.000-08:00

The manual labor has pretty fun and fulfilling so far. I just jumped in to help the volunteers do their stuff the first few days to get to know what the role is like since part of my job is keep volunteers happy and make sure they have work to do.

I helped put in the posts for this sweet chicken coop. The pits are for compost.

Some of the yucca we planted last week has already started to sprout.

None of the Canadian construction workers speak a lick of Spanish, so I’ve been acting as master-translator so they can communicate with the Ecuadorian maestros. They keep saying “man, it’s a good thing you’re here!”

I don’t think we’ll get it all done by Friday, but we’ve made a great start. Hopefully it will be ready for the school year to start in April. I’ve been taking pictures, videos and interviewing some of the participants. When it’s all said in done I should be able to put together a pretty suave utube video.

This wednesday, as always, we knocked off early for some futbol. My team won a thrilling 5-4 come-from-behing golden-goal victory.

Next week there will be a group of 7-year-olds here. Apparently it’s my responsibility to make sure none of them die. I’m sure a good belting of “There was a great big moose” should keep them out of trouble.

Then after that I should begin sinking my teeth into a bit of biodiversity research. I’ll be visiting other Ecuadorian reserves, learning some methods, and bringing them back to La Hesperia. Also they want me to summarize every (!) research study that has ever been conducted here, which should be quite a tall task.

Don’t worry I’ll keep the blogposts coming.

Hasta luego

La vida silvestre

2010-01-25T10:37:00.001-08:00

I’ve just completed day 5 at La Hesperia. It’s really a rather phenomenal place operated by some pretty admirable people. The philosophy behind it all is already up on the website, which I will be redesigning and rewriting at some point, so I won’t get into it here.

Instead I’m just going to show you some photos of some of the cool wildlife I’ve managed to capture with my new camera. I’m really digging this Panasonic Lumix.

Compared to Australia everything here in the cloud forest is rather benign. But I’m sure it wouldn’t be much fun to get stung by this scorpion we found on the bathroom floor last night.

A group of exchange students from Boston University came up with their ecology professor for the weekend and we managed to find a brain living in this sea shell.

And this mariposa crystal.

Of course I have to talk about some of the birds. They are spectacular and come in a kaleidoscope of different colors.

Not a great picture, but these aracari were right outside my room having some sort of jousting competition.

I expected to see all sorts of exotic colorful birds, but not this little plain thing. It’s a Swainson’ Thrush, which I see in my backyard in Durham every spring and fall migration. Small world.

So this post is a bit misleading as I’ve been doing quite a bit more than just hunt exotic wildlife. In a post coming soon to a computer screen near you there will be some pictures of the chicken pen I’ve been helping build and the yukka I’ve planted. I should also be getting around to introducing some of the cool people I’ve met. The BU students left today, but were replaced by a group of 15 from Toronto with whom I’ll be helping build a school this week. There are 7 longer-term volunteers here at the moment who collectively represent 5 countries. I’ll likely be spending a good whack of time trying to source more volunteer talent.

That’s all for now.

Post comments!

En vivo

2010-01-21T13:32:00.000-08:00

So I’m just going to get straight to it. No point in trying to segue between Australia and Ecuador or cover the 7-month interim split between Durham, New York, Vermont, Scotland and the Outer Banks.

So I Made it. I did had to spend an extra day in Quito waiting for my bag to show up (it got left in Miami). I stayed at a pretty nice ‘hostal’ in the touristy section of town, ‘mariscal sucre.’ It cost a whopping $7 per night. The restaurant underneath was always packed at dinnertime with locals having romantic candle-lit dinners.

Mariscal Sucre (or ‘New Town’) is not really that special it just has all the flashiest bars, restaurants and hotels y entonces it is the best place to get robbed.

I spent my free day wandering through the city toward ‘Old Town’ which is the unique spectacular section, a relic of the colonial Spanish era.

On the way though while passing through one of the large city parks, I encountered a crowd of 100 or so spectators surrounding a cement court on which I assumed would be played some sort of soccer. To my surprise an intense game of 3-on-3 volleyball commenced. The players looked as if they had just finished a day at the office with their khaki pants and button-down shirts.

On my way back through some three hours later I found that the crowd had tripled in size and vendors were selling ice cream and chicken on a stick. Even la policia were among the audience gasping and groaning with the ebb and flow of the game play.

Here are some cool pictures of Old Town.

I’ll have plenty more chance to explore the city more properly, so I’m not going to bother really explaining what these buildings are for now.

Oh and I made it up to La Hesperia. The place is awesome and the trip here was quite the adventure. Next time I ride the bus I’ll try to get some pics of the hombres trabajando cutting steel rebar without gloves on the edge of a sheer 2,000 foot cliff face.

A pretty weak first entry, but I hate to post walls of text without at least a few pictures, and I have not been very good about taking them on my first day at the farm.

More to come soon…

ANZAC day, an alien and a sunrise

2009-04-30T22:23:00.000-07:00

I’m still in Lennox enjoying the beach life. Monday was ANZAC day, a holiday commemorating the sacrifices made by Australian and New Zealand forces during the battle of Gallipoli in the first world war. Aussies and Kiwis celebrate this occasion by playing a gambling game called “two-up” which is illegal 264 days a year.

I joined the chaos out behind the Lennox Head Pub. The action resembled the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with bets flying every which way often between strangers on opposite sides of the ring. And this was the population 7,000 small-town version; I can’t imagine what kind of havoc was going on elsewhere Down Under. I knew Australians had a soft spot for gambling, but it was essentially just legalized, glorified coin flipping. Anyway, I was loving it just as much as everyone else, for the spectacle at least, despite losing three straight coin flips and 15 bucks.

My mate, “Brett,” who has been graciously putting me up along with another wayward American ex-pat, took us both out fishing. Now I’m not really much of an angler, but I felt like a bass master pulling in bream after small bream much to the chagrin of my less fortunate companions. “Brett” ended up getting the catch of the day:

That’s right he landed an alien. Actually it turns out to be the Australian version of a catfish (g’day mate indeed). It’s venomous, like most things in this country, so getting it off the hook was a bit of an adventure.

I had a good chance to explore the beaches in the area which are diverse and spectacular. The surf is supposedly some of the best on the east coast and I gave that another crack with mixed results and some spectacular wipeouts. One thing I discovered about surfing is that it requires a lot of paddling, and like skiing, when done for the first time in a long time (or ever), surfing works muscles that are scarcely used for any other task. So I’ve had to take a bit of a break from the ocean until I can lift my arms again.

To pass the time I went ahead and rented a car and took off for some of the world heritage listed national parks that protect remnant stands of rainforest and contain, as goes without saying, a multitude of birds. I visited a couple cool waterfalls in Nightcap National Park

and the region’s fresh water supply: Rocky Creek Dam.

That night I drove up to the trailhead of Mt. Warning, a rocky peak that exists as a remnant of an ancient volcano. Its height (roughly 3,800 feet) and proximity to Cape Byron, the easternmost point on the Australian mainland, mean that outside of summer it catches the first rays of the rising sun. So after a ‘nap’ I woke up around 4 am to begin my trek to the summit. I had forgotten to bring a flashlight, so I hiked by cell phone light. By the time my battery died the sky was starting to lighten and the thick rainforest canopy had given way to scrubbier, less-dense vegetation. I know it sounds quite an ordeal, but

It was well worth it for this sight alone. Yesterday I was the first person on the Australian continent to see the sun. I was in no particular hurry to run back down and spread the news to the rest of the country that the sun indeed would be up again as expected; the views from the top survey 360 degrees revealing a vast caldera.

Tens of millions of years ago the area was above a hot spot that formed a massive shield volcano of basalt covering nearly 7,000 square kilometers. In an area of high precipitation the easily weathered basalt washed away over the ensuing 20 million years leaving the plug (Mt. Warning) and a caldera rim of more durable rock surrounding the lone spire.

After hiking back down the mountain, this time in daylight, I drove out to the Border Ranges National Park. Part of the park forms the western edge of the caldera and I got to gaze back on my vantage point from the early hours of the morning.

It had been a great day. I had been first to watch the sunrise, seen loads of interesting wildlife and plant-life and even dipped across the border into Queensland. So when I got back to Lennox and heard that Brett was out playing poker with his friends I cancelled plans for foodshowersleep to join in. Of course my luck was surreal.

1st hand: full house
2nd hand: straight on the flop
3rd hand: A K that became two pair on the flop
4th hand: I called an all-in bet from somebody with pocket kings, but caught an ace to win
5th hand: flush on the flop

My rush ended there, but I had all the chips at the end of the night.

One week left in Australia, who knows why I’m taking the time to blog!

Beachworld: the north coast

2009-04-24T20:10:00.000-07:00

A couple of low pressure systems off the coast have made conditions pretty wet and windy over the past few days. In fact rain has been a bit of a theme here since my folks arrived and it hasn’t ended with their departure. I had promised them a country of sunshine and arid red soil, yet no matter where we went each day yielded at least some precipitation.

It began in Sydney where they heralded not only heavy rain but a couple major power outages as well that took out most of the metropolis’s inner suburbs for a few hours at a time. This was something that local shop owners through clenched teeth assured us had never happened before. Our arrival Victoria brought much needed rain to the drought-stricken and charred region, which was great for the locals, but did make the views along the Great Ocean Road a bit hazy and damp at times. Yes we did spend a few days in the rainforest where, as the name implies, rain is expected, but even there rain had been scarce for four weeks prior. Everybody thanked us heartily for bringing the downpours that refilled everyone’s water tanks.

I’ve been hopping from beach town to beach town along New South Wales’ northern coast where cold rain and wind can be a bit of a downer for everyone. Not only does it make for bad surf conditions, but it also makes the grass grow meaning people have to spend time mowing when they could be out on the water. Luckily yesterday morning we all caught a sunny break and got to go out to a beach in Yamba. It was supposed to be the most sheltered of all the beaches in the area from the hard southern gale, nevertheless the surf was all a froth with waves as tall as houses and currents and rips going in every direction.

As far as waves go, I’ve never encountered anything in the same ballpark on the east coast of the US. Luckily there weren’t enough surf boards to go around so I got to get tossed around on a body board. Surfing looked like a bit of a Sisyphean task for a beginner. A pod of 15 dolphins swirled about with us in the waves sending hearty fish leaping skyward and hoping to sprout wings.

The Yamba YHA must be the best backpacker accommodation in the country if not the world. While most will nickel and dime you at every opportunity and try to sign you up on expensive third party tours and excursions, the managers take out a free busload of guests to wherever the best surf around is and provide boards and tips all for free. It only opened last October, so the building and all its appliances and equipment are brand new. Most importantly the owners opened it because they’re friendly and excited to show budget travelers a hidden beach gem of the north coast. One of the managers, Shane, does offer a “ten buck tour” that takes guests around to all the local beaches, to a few fresh water pools for some cliff jumping and finally to the wharf to hand feed pelicans and “piranhas.”

I’ve moved just a smidge up the coast to Lennox Head to see some friends, but I’m a bit torn about what to do next. I could take a bus up to Brisbane to see a new city, maybe rent a car there to take further up the coast or inland into the hinterlands and explore a new world heritage area. But I’m tempted to just stick around here where I can surf every day (weather permitting) and get by rather cheaply.

Enter the geriatrics

2009-04-19T19:33:00.000-07:00

So my parents turned up along with a couple of friends of theirs for a three week tour around the country lead loosely by myself. Needless to say this marked a severe change in my Oz lifestyle. No more hitchhiking or staying in hostels. No more staying awake past 8 pm (unless to play scrabble). The general activity pace slowed down to glacial. Every departure from a room or arrival at a destination required a triple cross-checking of an essentials list to make sure that in the process of opening and shutting a hotel room or car trunk no wallets, keys, passports, sunglasses, dentures or party members had vanished or hid themselves in someone’s pocket.

Just getting out of the car could sometimes take hours. It was a bit like watching a pot of water boil and I never stuck around to watch it all unfold. It always began with a hearty round of congratulations to the driver for successfully avoiding having an accident despite many close calls, then a reapplication of various sun screens and ointments, followed by a group scavenger hunt for items ranging from car keys just removed from the ignition to the tube of sunscreen that had just been recapped. By the time I had returned from my perusal of the tourist stop’s notable features: a five kilometer bush walk, a few placards to commit to memory, or a Great Barrier Reef dive, somebody would have remembered that the keys were still in the ignition after all. I would then put on an official sounding tour guide tone and formally announce the highlights of the area, usually in the form of a list of bird species, and we would all pile back into and carry on to the next landmark.

I could carry on for the rest of this post about the holiday behavior of the geriatrics, but I’d like to avoid too deeply offending any of my sexagenarian readership. Also the scenery is a bit more photogenic. The upshot of them being along was my food and accommodation budget increased by 1600 percent. This meant luxury goods, such as fruits and vegetables were incorporated into my diet and I got to sleep in a private room for the first time in months. In fact every place we ended up staying was immensely fantastic in one way or another: a guest house at the foot of Australia’s second highest lighthouse, Australia’s oldest single-family owned hotel, a bed and breakfast in the Daintree rainforest to name some of the more noteworthy spots.

A lot of the places we visited were places I had already seen and commented on, such as the Great Ocean Road, Sydney and the Hunter Valley, so I will gloss over those. I did get to enter the Opera House not just to use the toilet, but to actually see a Stravinsky ballet, which was pretty awesome.

Definitely the highlight for me was getting up to Queensland to see the Daintree rainforest and getting to dive on the Great Barrier Reef. Nowhere else in the world is it possible to walk from one UNESCO world heritage area directly into another. I got to see a wild, flightless, endangered bird called a Cassowary right up close.(no I didn't take this picture, but the bird I saw looked just like it and was just as close)

Cassowaries can grow up to six feet tall and have been known to disembowel unsuspecting would-be birdwatchers with their powerful legs and talons earning their species the distinction of being the most dangerous in world among the avian order.

My parents are unique in that they are among a small minority of people willing to go out bird-watching with me. With a winning combination of their car rental abilities and my eye-sight, hearing and intense study of field guides, we added nearly 90 species to my Australian list in just three weeks. My dad even forked over 100 Aussie dollars (a price haggled down from 130) at a Chinatown market in Sydney for a pair of brand-less, high-powered binoculars so he could see some of the honeyeaters and parrots himself.

It ended up being a pretty spectacular three weeks that ended more quickly than any of us could have imagined despite the fact that it was the longest vacation my parents (or any Americans for that matter) have taken in more than forty years. Somehow I convinced them to drop me off on the side of the road in Kempsey so I could hitchhike further north and continue my adventures, while they had to go back south to Sydney to catch 36 hours worth of flights home where three weeks of piled up work, mail and newspapers awaited them. It was an arrangement that did not seem in the least bit fair.

I offered to take my dad’s place and fly home for him so he could be a backpacker for a bit. I reasoned that since our first and last names are the same we could swap plane tickets without anybody catching on. But he pointed out that his patients would probably notice a difference in appearance and somebody would probably sue me for malpractice, which I don't think is covered under my travel insurance.

Anyway I’m making my way north to Byron Bay and then onward to cover a section of personally unexplored coastline reaching southern Queensland before I have to fly home myself.

Tassie

2009-03-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

Wow. Tasmania is one awesome place. I had hoped to put up some pictures midweek, but I’ve been pretty far from electricity let alone the internet. But before I get ahead of myself, we’ll start in Hobart.

Tasmania is a battlefield for logging interests and environmental warriors. A swarm of protesters marched from the capital city’s park to the police station to chant and wave signs and, of all things, arrest themselves.

It was a show of solidarity among the greenies whose leadership had been singled out and arrested two months prior at a rally attended by hundreds. Thirty dissenters successfully entered the station and turned themselves in for illegally trespassing on Forestry Tasmania property.

From the protest I went straight out to the front lines of the conflict at the Upper Florentine Valley where a dozen or so eco-sentinels were stationed at a blockade. To prevent Forestry Tasmania from simply arresting everyone and bulldozing away their camps and obstacles, the activists rigged cables up to everything, connecting all structures, gravel impediments to tree-sits manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that any sort of

intervention would be an effective act of murder.

The escalation of more elaborate methods by the Loraxes for self sacrifice for the sake of the forests is evidence for the duration of the conflict. They have people sleeping in cars blocking the logging track with their arms manacled to cement blocks embedded into the earth beneath, so that to move the vehicles without dismembering anyone, loggers must first disassemble the autos piece by piece.

And to prevent forestry from bringing in cherry-pickers to pull the “possums,” as the tree-sitters are called, from their 50-meter perches, the greenies dug some sort of tunnel under the road in which somebody resides full-time that is primed to collapse causing a gruesome death by squishing should any of Forestry’s fleet of heavy machinery venture across the road above.

Anyway, I was mighty impressed with all their courage and determination, but I’m not allowed to post any photos of the warriors online to protect their identity. For similar reasons they all go by groovy superhero pseudonyms like “skunk,” “quoll,” or “bones.” If you want to cheer them on or join the fight check out their website: www.stillwildstillthreatened.com

I continued my whirlwind eco-tour by cruising up the road to Lake Pedder, an artificial body created by the

construction of several massive dams that generate loads of hydroelectric power for the state.

Then straight after drove through the Franklin River National Park, a reserve created in a successful battle to prevent the damming of the river that was slated to meet a similar fate. The saving of the Franklin River was the first campaign of the Wilderness Society led in part by Senator Bob Brown who went on to found the Australian Green Party.

It was pretty cloudy that day. You could even see the clouds forming down below from this elevation. No rain though, which was lucky given the area receives 2 to 3 meters of it per year.

I also got to see some of the biggest trees in the world in the Styx Valley. Without the efforts of TWS they would be nothing but lumber and paper pulp.

I followed a map I got from TWS campaign center in Hobart, but it apparently landed me in some sort of active logging zone off limits to the public. A Forestry Tasmania official promptly escorted me back to the highway. I took some pictures of some of the awful clear-felled, still-smoldering remains of what used to be old growth rainforest, but none of them came out that well as I was snapping them furtively over my shoulder out the window while doing 90 km/hr down a winding gravel road.

I made it out to the west coast and combed the beach for an afternoon. On the way two towns: 1) Strahan, Tassie’s “tourist mecca” contained nobody under the age of 65. 2) Queenstown, the busted remains of a mining town surrounded by a desolate moonscape wrought such by acid rain and heavy metal contamination.

On my way back southeast to Hobart I woke up to this:

…and then on the Bruny Island, just 40 minutes drive and a short ferry ride from Hobart, but essentially the end of the earth.

I ran into a bit of a kindred spirit in a bloke from Queensland named “Pat.” No he wasn’t into birds, but he was into a bit of plants and trees, and was, like me, sleeping in his car, traveling alone and keen to explore the island’s natural wonders while spending as little money as possible.

We complemented each other well with, me pointing out and identifying anything with feathers, while he kept encouraging me to try different edible plants and berries.

We parted ways today in Hobart when he took off for the Tasmanian Peninsula, while I’ve got to fly back to the mainland. I have to say I’m a bit jealous. A week is far too short to spend on this island. It looks so small on maps, but I hardly had a chance to see half of half of it.

I’ve learned though that with traveling that no matter how long you plan to stay in a good place, it’s never long enough.

This is probably my longest post, yet it could have easily been quite a bit longer. Ironically my parents are en route to Sydney at the moment, so nobody will probably read it anyway. Ha!

2009-03-21T16:47:00.000-07:00

To be honest, not a whole lot worth mentioning has occurred over the past 10 days. So you might as well go back to watching the NCAA tournament…just kidding! I successfully turned 24, returned to Australia, and then flew down to Tasmania to check out some of those big trees and animals I’ve been working so hard to protect. Not many photos to show for all that, so it will be a quick entry anyway.

I ended up spending my birthday in Wellington with a couple of my friends I met while working at a resort back in the US: ‘Carl’ who I introduced a few posts back and a fellow American who requested an especially elaborate pseudonym that I cannot recall, so we’ll just call him ‘Grievous Vasquez.’

Here we are with several of ‘Carl’s’ mates carrying what sums to a shocking number of beverages through New Zealand’s capital city.

I managed to score a free ticket to Wellington’s massive waterfront music festival called Homegrown. You may not quite be able to recognize them (or be able to have ever heard of them before) but in the background there is no other than New Zealand’s premier drum and bass act, State of Mind.

I know how mighty impressed and jealous you are.

The days since haven’t really inspired my photographic muse. You all know what an airplane looks like and I’ve already spent better than 3 months in Sydney. I will say that Emirates is the best airline I’ve ever flown, just eclipsing my experience with KLM.

Also I woke up at 3 am the other day to catch the first round of the NCAA tournament with an American friend and basketball fan with whom I went to high school and who happens to be studying abroad at UNSW. For some reason ESPN stopped covering the action after 5 hours in favor of showing reruns of world’s strongest man, which means I missed seeing Duke. Anyway, my bracket is now busted with Wake’s pathetic first round loss.

I just arrived in Hobart a few hours ago so no Tassie pics yet, but stay tuned… I’m going to some Wilderness Society protest tomorrow morning and will hopefully meet some nature-lovers keen to explore a bit of the bush with me.

too many scenic vistas

2009-03-11T02:35:00.000-07:00

Wow. I’ve been so busy riding my thumb around the south island I haven’t gotten around to posting any pictures or stories in quite awhile. I left off just before Queenstown:

Gorgeous place and though it is a bit overrun by tourists, it has the only disc golf course I have encountered thus far in the country. I would have happily stuck around to play it, but with my tight schedule I had to get a move on. In fact that has been a bit of a theme for the south island—so many places that make me want to stick around for a week or two, but with only a month in the country it just isn’t possible to take things that slow. So I woke up at the crack the next morning to catch a tour bus to one of the most splendid sights on the planet, Milford Sound.

It’s really tough to capture the shear scale of the place. With cliffs jutting vertically up from the fiord 1,500 meters and capped by the occasional glacier, it sure is magnificent. It is also one of the wettest places on earth and I lucked out with the weather. It gets so much rainfall, 10 to 20 meters of fresh water rides atop the salty ocean water below, which creates a very unusual marine ecosystem.

Next stop on the whirlwind Thumbelina express: Stewart Island. But not before a stop off in my town.

Funny I must have founded it prehumously.

But on to Stewart Island...it is a pretty unique place. It rains there an average of 15 times per day and stops raining just as frequently.

These flightless birds called Wekas roam the island and don’t have any fear of people.

This one really wanted to eat whatever was in my bag and stuck his/her head entirely inside it. Another tried to jump in my lap as I was trying to make myself a peanut butter sandwich!

More fascinating than the bird life is that of the locals. I happened to be present for the live band Saturday night.

That’s right. A guitar, a one-string broom-handle bass, a washboard and a tambourine—the classical Stewart Island quartet. After they completed their repertoire of about 5 songs (for most of which the complete lyrics eluded them) they just went back to the top and repeated their set. Of course the gumboot clad fishermen scarcely seemed to notice and seldom managed a sip of Speights without spilling an equivalent portion on the carpet.

Back across to the mainland and planet Earth, I hitched to Dunedin, sister city of Edinburgh, Scotland, and New Zealand’s biggest college town. I rented a car so I could go see Otago Point and some of the Catlans National Park.

Unfortunately I forgot to recharge my camera the night before so this is the only shot I got of the beautiful scenery.

Don’t try to hitchhike in a hailstorm. It just isn’t worth it. Catch a bus. After about 5 hours of hiding out in cafés and of short rides with very friendly farmers going to the next town, I actually got picked up by a commercial bus. The driver charged me $20, but it was still a $10 discount off what I would have paid if I had done the smart thing: checked the weather and booked online.

This morning I signed up for a car relocation at one of the rental places, which is basically a $19 one-day rental. Of course it limited me to a straight shot form Christchurch to Picton, but allowed me to explore Kaikoura by car in between.

Yes another incredibly scenic place. I know you’re getting as bored of dramatic sea-scapes and mountains as I am. One of the big draws of Kaikoura is its close proximity to an extremely deep ocean canyon that attracts a vast array of rare sea birds, whales and dolphins. Unfortunately the water was far too rough to go out on a boat, so I explored the rocky coast and gazed at thousands of sea-birds too far away for me to identify.

There were loads of fur seals crashed out of the rocks everywhere. They always look like they're hungover from a huge night out.

I was going to try to go to farewell spit tomorrow, but I think it’s a bit too far for the time I have left, so I’ll probably just catch the ferry back to Wellington tomorrow. That will get me back to Hawkes Bay well in time for my 24^th. Friday the 13^th...yikes!

Why pay for bus tickets?

2009-03-03T12:17:00.000-08:00

So hitchhiking in New Zealand is a really easy and cheap way to get around so far. It did take four separate rides to get to Murchison for the kayak festival. A local logger, an ex-pat hippie, a New Zealand Air pilot and a fellow American traveler made up my relay team.

At "Bullerfest" they set up a massive 25-foot ramp out of plywood and scaffolding, lubed it up with cooking oil and dish soap, aimed it at the Buller River and sent off a slew of crazy fools in kayaks for a big air competition. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes an official X-games event. Heck they’ve already got a pair of color commentators and sent a drunk and naked local off the ramp who had never before kayaked.

Anyway, I met this really nice guy there who gave me a life down to Franz Josef. I found out he’s a glacier trek guide and not only did he let me stay at his flat, but he also hooked me up with a free full-day glacier tour.

I was pretty impressed with our leader, this Swiss girl who basically carved the group a set of stairs up, down and around the crevasses with a pick axe. Here’s me with her axe at the high point of our hike.

That night I went out on a Kiwi tour and after an hour of waiting in silence in the woods, a cheeky little snuffling wingless specimen, one out of the last 300 of its kind left in the world, probed the nostrils on the end of its bill into the ground 3 feet in front of me before hustling off into the bush.

No pictures allowed unfortunately.

The next morning I caught a ride down the gorgeous west coast with the ocean on one side and the Southern Alps on the other.

Those tiny dots down on the beach at Knight’s Point are fur seals. Unfortunately they weren't the rare Fjordland Crested Penguins that sometimes come ashore this time of year to molt.

It wouldn’t be a post without a bird pic.

This one’s an alpine parrot called a Kea. They supposedly have the intelligence of a 3-year-old and are known for stealing food from backpacks, dropping cameras off cliffs and peeling rubber seals from car windshields. Fortunately this one just came to check out our glacier hiking group.

I’m in Wanaka in the moment which is maybe a bit like Switzerland, not that I’ve really spent much time there. I like the feel of the place and am tempted to stick around a bit, but got to keep moving since I’ve got lots left to see and less than two weeks to fit it all in. The next target is Milford Sound, where cameras run out of film and poets run out of words.

Here’s me and my most recent ride, an Aussie surveyor on holiday from Abu Dabi, where we stopped along the Haast pass on the way to Wanaka. Hope the next one is this friendly!

Birds and Boats

2009-02-26T16:50:00.000-08:00

A quick review: I’m into birds. Unfortunately most of New Zealand’s terrestrial birds were flightless or otherwise hopelessly ill-adapted to predators. The vast majority went extinct when people brought over dogs, rats, stoats and the like 1,000 or so years ago. A few exceptions exist on smaller islands and drastic efforts have been put forth to try to save some of the more critically endangered species (see ‘ejaculation helmet’ from the last entry).

Here’s a cute little parrot called a Kakarito. I found loads of them on Matiu/Somes Island a small island in Wellington sound.

I took a break from exploring and birding to shoot down some enemy aircrafts from the one the island’s four never-used anti-air turret bunkers form WWII.

This isn’t just a fantastic example of my photography skills, it’s also a Saddlebird, a species that hasn’t bred on the mainland for centuries until it was recently reintroduced into a ‘mainland island,’ basically a large reserve surrounded by a massive ‘vermin fence’ and packed with special feeders and everything these fragile unafraid rarities could possibly need to survive and reproduce.

Take this guy, a New Zealand Robin. He will practically jump underneath your boots as you’re walking hopefully you’ll startle up some insects for him to munch on. Now as say a feral cat this throws the entire stalking strategy out the window. To eat one of the these guys all you would need to do is turn over a few leaves and shake a few tree branches, that is if you can find one!

I saw loads of pelagic birds on the ferry between the north and south islands, but I didn’t take any pictures (they would have just looked like clouds and ocean) so who cares!

The Marlborough Sound at the northeastern tip of the South Island is quite gorgeous. And nearly as soon as I got off one ferry, I got on another out to the Queen Charlotte Track to hike (or “tramp” as they call it here) through some amazing lush vegetation with some fantastic views of the sound.

My Camera doesn’t really do much justice to the gorgeous placid turquoise water or the 20 foot tall tree ferns, but I found an old oil drum that made a decent ledge so I could include myself in a picture. Look how excited I am. Go 10 second timer!

After a night camping out in the bush it was on to Nelson where I spent last night. As soon as I get this post up, I’ll stick my thumb out to try and hitch a ride to this whitewater kayaking festival in Murchison.

Mean times in Hawkes Bay

2009-02-24T00:16:00.000-08:00

So now that I am actually on the move and traveling and touring like a traveler and tourist should, I’m going to try to post more pictures and fewer words to make things a bit more readable and entertaining. I’ll start here:

No, I didn’t go through a wormhole back in time. I thought so at first too, but it’s just art deco weekend in Napier. All kinds of goofy-looking folks and ‘mean’-looking cars filled the town:
I’m not sure if that’s a model T Ford, but there were definitely quite a few of them putting around.

By the way if you’re in your late teens (which, let’s face it includes a good chunk of the early 20s now-a-days) and living in Hawkes Bay, then every other sentence spoken has to include either the word ‘mean’ (used in place of ‘great,’ ‘awesome,’ or when there’s no other way to describe an especially delicious pie) or ‘hard’ (an emphatic affirmative that replaces a valley girl/surfer dude’s ‘totally,’ or the ‘for sho’ of ebonics).

You have to talk this kind of lingo (and own several thousand dollars worth of equipment) if you expect to land a gig DJing at the prestigious Diva Bar in Havelock North.
The key to a good set is the chalk marquee.
Did I mention it was art deco weekend?

But now I’m in Wellington. It’s quite scenic despite the lack of 1930s style. Here’s the view from the top of the cable car track just in front of the botanical gardens.
The museum here is amazing. My favorite exhibit was about the rescue efforts of concerned biologists desperately trying to save a critically endangered species of flightless parrot:
Probably the second most significant item on display after the ejaculation helmet:
The only colossal squid on display in the world. It’s not full grown, so only 4 meters long, but would still make some ‘mean’ calamari if it weren’t pumped full of chemical preservatives. Got a few boat trips planned over the next couple days that should be opportune for seeing some ‘mean’ pelagic birds. ‘Hard!’

In New Zealand's fruit bowl

2009-02-19T18:17:00.000-08:00

After a brief stay in Auckland I caught a bus down to Hawkes Bay to visit my friend ‘Carl’ who I met back stateside. ‘Carl’s’ family has really opened their arms for me with a free bed and delicious dinners consisting mostly of the fresh produce grown in their back garden--yum! This part of New Zealand is known as ‘the fruit bowl’ and is packed with apple orchards and vineyards. ‘Carl’s’ backyard contains 41 varieties of fruit and nut trees/shrubs alone, not to mention a full vegetable garden, three chickens and a small aviary of exotic parakeets and finches.

The last couple mornings I have dropped ‘carl’ off at his tractor-driving job at a local vineyard and gone off to explore. The volcanic soil, a product of abundant volcanism arising from the nearby Pacific-Australian tectonic plate boundary, makes Hawkes Bay a prime area for agriculture and thus not much in the way of wilderness has been preserved barring a few exceptions.

Of course I have pretty much scoped all of them out over the last couple days: a small scenic reserve called White Pines Bush lies just a few dozen kms inland and shows just how lush the native vegetation was before the land was thoroughly cultivated. It’s a tiny rainforest oasis with trickling streams, massive tree-ferns and towering trees among a wider landscape of steep unnatural pastureland and tree plantations.

Further up into the mountains lies Lake Tuitira, which is a large deep lake home to New Zealand’s endemic grebe and ducks. It was quite gorgeous on the day I visited:

Just beside the rather large and sprawling beach town of Napier is the Ahuriri Estuary, an important habitat for local and migratory bird populations. I got to see a colony of about 157 Bar-tailed Godwits overwintering. In the next couple months they will make a 12,000 kilometer flight back to their breeding grounds in the Alaskan arctic, a trek that earns them the distinction of being the world’s farthest traveling migratory bird species.

In 1931 a large earthquake leveled Napier and it was rebuilt completely in Art Deco style architecture that was popular at the time, which makes it quite a unique and cute town. This weekend is art deco weekend, which means that Kiwis flock in from all over the country to showcase their relic 1930s automobiles.

I’ll stick around for the festivities and to see ‘Carl’ DJ with one of his mates at a local bar and then head down to Wellington after the weekend and then onward across the ferry to the south island where the truly stunning scenery is supposed to ubiquitous.

I’m hoping to catch up with ‘Carl’s’ brother, ‘Clive’ down in the south island in Murcheson, the whitewater capital of New Zealand. ‘Clive’ is a world-class whitewater kayaker and documentarian. Extreme kayaking has taken him all over the world and he has used his videos to raise money for charities in Africa that fight malaria and in Nepal that train women to be river guides. Another one of his videos earned him a year’s supply of Red Bull. Anyway, it seems like a fantastic opportunity to experience first hand the heart of one of New Zealand’s trademark extreme sports. Can’t wait!

Off to the land of the Kiwis

2009-02-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

How it ends so quickly. Four months in Australia gone in a blink. And I still have yet to travel anywhere outside New South Wales and Victoria.

I arrived at my hostel in Auckland, New Zealand after midnight last night and immediately wandered out onto the street where I met three young delinquents. “Where’s the nearest pub?” with an American accent immediately earned me a can of beer and an escort into heart of the city. They warned about a liquor ban, but everybody around was drinking on the street despite an abundance of cops who seemed completely ambivalent about enforcement of this said ordinance.

After catching the final few songs of a fantastic cover band over an 8 dollar pint of beer, I decided to call it an early night as I hadn’t managed much sleep in my final few days in Sydney. Here’s my first picture in New Zealand:

I spent two of my final four weeks in Sydney on work travel trips south and then north. Revisiting and camping at gorgeous and secluded Racecourse Beach along with getting a great view of a wedge-tailed eagle were probably the highlights. The drive up through the Upper Hunter Valley Sunday was quite scenic as well and we stopped off at a few wineries for some tasting and banter with lonely vintners. We did pass a few anti-scenic huge open cut coal mines, but they served as good motivation for a team of environmentalists. Here’s a sunset in the Upper Hunter:
On my last night I threw a going away party for myself at my flat. The Wilderness Society bought me an Australian bird book, which unfortunately will be dead weight for me in New Zealand, but was a very nice gesture. Everybody signed a card and one creative employee sweetly drew humorous little caricatures with bios of all the employees and several of the different stereotypical people encountered on the street at work. It was great way to say goodbye to everyone and my English flat mate was nice enough to clean up the entire mess (which was quite big) before I even woke up despite the fact that some of my work buddies’ friends were apparently complete dicks to him the night before. He did such a good job cleaning that I even got my entire bond back from my crazy landlord at 1:30 pm the next day! I owe you one mate.

It is always a bit of a transition uprooting oneself from a stable living situation, city, job and social group and hurtling into a new exotic location to start with a clean slate. I promised myself I wouldn’t linger too long in Auckland as my boss advised me that it’s basically just a smaller version of Sydney. New Zealand is about adventures and being outdoors. I haven’t planned a first move yet, but it will likely be to Lake Taupo to see some friends I met through my parents in Sydney who happen to be there for the week. It is also en route to a Kiwi friend I met in the US who lives in Hawk’s Bay. But before I can get out there I have to sort out a few tedious logistics such as my visa back to Australia, return flights, currency exchange and cell phones.

We had some very un-Australian weather for Australia Day:

Hope the elements cooperate in Kiwiland!

a brief outline of four weeks of mayhem and explosions

2009-01-25T03:15:00.000-08:00

I have tried to begin writing this entry several times. Far too many things have happened to cover adequately.

Just after my last report, I went to a music festival to cook for a band of cabaret performers. They gave me a ticket that would normally cost 280 bucks and all I ended up really doing on the culinary front was cut up a few tomatoes and wash some dishes. I was happy to let them paint my face and dress me up in goofy costumes and then wander around terrorizing people and helping promote their show, “the non-linear bohemian guide to love.” Probably the coolest part of the festival was this thing:

Basically if you can’t tell from the picture it’s a tennis court but with a giant wire and paper Mache dome in the center. It makes for a game of lobs and shouting ‘service,’ since you can’t actually see your opponents. Anyway, a few days I was about ready to run off and join the circus.

But I ended up leaving early to come back to Sydney for a hectic New Year celebration. Lots of people and flashy fireworks.

I got to do a bit of body-boarding (boogie) up in Terrigal with my boss, I would have rather given surfing another crack, but just had to work with the equipment on hand (body-boards and fins). There happened to be some sort of kids’ Australian triathlon going on with all these ‘nippers’ clad in bright suits and swim caps running up the beach, paddling boards and swimming through fierce surf and occasionally capsizing.

The Sydney Festival kicked off on the 10th with a bunch of free concerts. ANZ bank was handing out thousands of light sabers for the hordes of revelers. It left us wondering why a bank would give weapons to a mob of 300,000 people. I caught Grace Jones among the throng in the Domain. She was a James Bond villainess in A View to a Kill and apparently has a music career as well.

The next weekend I went on this tour of the Hunter Valley and got to hand feed port Jackson sharks, eagle rays, and some other cartilaginous sea creatures, go on a dolphin cruise and surf down some massive sand dunes (which by the way isn’t anything like snow boarding, though I think I’m equally bad at both). Hunter Valley is renowned for its wines and I got to taste quite a few of them at the cellar door along with some cheese and chocolate as well.

It was a bit tough getting back into work after the break, but training up some new talent helped me get back into the swing. I led another week-long travel trip. This time to the south: Wollongong, Gouburn, Nowra, Kiama, Batemans Bay. We ended up working a bit too hard for my liking. This Irish guy was absolutely voracious (when he wasn’t suffering from heat stroke) and helped set the pace. Last month I had the second-best fundraising results in the country: 52 signups. Some jerk down in Melbourne beat me by one, while the third place performer only had 39. I already have 48 this month with four more shifts to go. If I don’t take the title this time I reckon this new leprechaun will. He’s got the gift. A few people I was particularly proud of joining: a nuclear physicist concerned about the hard-line anti-nuclear energy stance held by many environmental organizations (including TWS as far as I know), a marketing student who complimented me on doing a good job, and a man who after saying ‘no’ and walking away, came back five minutes later to fill out the form and tell me he had schizophrenia (oh the irony).

I’ve got about three more weeks on this work visa. One of them will be spent on another travel trip. After that I’m off to Kiwi land for an unknown amount of time to do unknown things. I’ll miss Sydney for sure, but happy to be off on a new adventure in a new country.

A southern (hemispheric) Christmas

2008-12-26T02:27:00.000-08:00

I was going to title my latest blog entry “my first business trip” and cover the travel trip I co-lead up the central and north coasts of New South Wales with my fundraising team. But I got so fed up with being unable to publish most of the stories I most wanted to write about that I almost quit blogging for good. I got in enough trouble for mentioning -*gasp*- racial stereotypes last time. I can't imagine how my parents would react if I were to talk about ***** ********* and *** on the *****.

All I will just say it was an eventful trip. One English employee, to use the widespread AA euphemism, “fell off the wagon,” then got dumped by his finace, and had to leave after day 2 because he was too depressed to work. An 18-year-old Aussie kid who had scarcely left his home country town got caught in a rip current at Racecourse Beach and nearly drowned, and my co-leader, a Fijian fundraising veteran in his thirties dislocated his shoulder attempting a rescue. I returned to Sydney relatively unscathed and despite the casualties we, as a team, managed to hit our sign-up target for the week. Unfortunately I brought a dead camera battery, so no pictures =(

But back to the matter at hand, the birthday of baby Jesus. This has been my first Christmas away from home and, much like Thanksgiving, the holiday has had little resemblance to what I’m used to since I have no family around. Christmas dinner I ended up sharing with a group of Sri Lankans, one of whom I am friends with through work. We ate some traditional Sri Lankan food in the traditional way, with our hands, which was pretty awesome, and not nearly as messy as you might think given the fact that we were eating rice and curry. Apparently I’m “a natural” at Sri Lankan hand eating. Perhaps I was born in the wrong country.

I received one gift this year: a coffee table photography book of Sydney from the 30s and 40s. Not something that I would put at the top of my list and an item almost completely unusable for a typical backpacker/traveler. But the gesture was very sweet coming from friends of friends of my parents and I guess it will be good for the next seven or so weeks the duration of which I will at least have an actual coffee table for it to sit on. They also were sweet enough to have me over for Christmas Eve dinner for which they served seafood as Aussie tradition dictates: Sydney rock oysters and fish. Yum!

Today was Boxing Day, whatever the hell that means, so my flat mates and I took a ferry over to the entrance to the harbor (actually ‘harbour’ since we’re in Commonwealth territory) to see the sailing yachts take off for the annual Sydney to Hobart race. I'm tracking the race now one Google Earth and it looks like Wild Oats might take an unprecedented fourth straight victory. After the boats left sight around the corner en route to Tasmania we hopped a bus down to Bondi Beach, which was absolutely jam packed. I still managed to get in some decent body surfing in the less corpulent and supposedly much more dangerous section of the water. The lifeguards kept yelling at everybody through megaphones to move up the beach and swim between the red and yellow flags. But I don’t see how one can swim, let alone catch waves, when there are more people by volume than water.

Up next: I’m leaving Sunday for some music festival in the bush. I’m cooking for a band of 40 cabaret performers in exchange for free entry. It goes until New Years Day, but I’m going to dip back to Sydney to catch what is supposedly one of the most spectacular fireworks displays in the world. The morning of the new year I’m driving with my boss up to some idyllic beach/bay called Terrigal where we'll stay until we have to reopen the Wildos office on the 5^th. So the next week or so should be nice and hectic. Can’t wait!

Hope anyone who might happen to be following the blog out there has had some good holidays and will make it through to 2009 in one piece. Speak to you then!

Greetings from Asiatown

2008-12-06T21:10:00.000-08:00

The flat is on the 12^th floor and the view from the balcony is rather spectacular and a voyeur’s dream. Were I so inclined I could probably sit out in the sun with my bird-watching binoculars for hours of free entertainment peeping into the rear windows of hundreds of other flats and offices. It’s right in the heart of the city—wonderfully convenient for me since I can easily catch a train to any suburb in which I might happen to work. The majority of the immediately local residents are Asian immigrants who do most of the actual cardiac work of pumping nutrients of coffee, toast and muffins to the gray-matter suits who commute in for the city’s daytime cerebral tasks. Many cafes don’t even bother to open their doors on weekends.

To call the area Chinatown might seem superficially appropriate for an American such as me who cannot discern between different East Asian ethnic countenances, but it would really betray the true diversity. There are loads of Chinese, but also Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians and Thais (the restaurant below the flat is called ‘Thainatown’). The above nationalities have a terrible reputation among backpackers and flat-sharers for anti-social behavior: hiding in their rooms, not speaking English, emitting unpleasant aromas. I am lucky enough to share with a rainbow of foreign nationals: India, Germany, England, New Zealand, who all speak English and coexist well. As far as I can tell nobody born in Australia actually resides within the CBD. When somebody calls the flat on the intercom from downstairs the ring fittingly plays the tune of "It's a small world after all."

When I step onto the basketball court at the park by central station, typically as the only non-Asian, I’m greeted by awestruck faces as if nobody has ever seen anyone taller than 6 feet before (isn’t Yao Ming supposed to be Chinese?). The standard is always pretty terrible and the NBA jerseys most of the players wear rarely represent ball skills or game knowledge. I haven’t had any trouble at all meeting fascinating and friendly people; the climate and weather are great; and the city is exciting and busy. But the lack of a decent basketball game in town and the fact that I haven’t caught a single Duke game (more a problem with the time difference than a lack of potential venues) are what make me most homesick.

Actually the lack of decent grog is a rival problem. Like most warm-weather countries, the Aussie beer lacks diversity and flavor. It’s also extortionately expensive. A 6-pack of standard tasteless lager costs about 15 bucks and it’s tough to find a case for much less than 40. The popular alternative among backpackers is wine, which by comparison is essentially free. That is especially true of boxed wine which is referred to affectionately (or loathingly) by Aussies as ‘goon.’ Once the cask has been emptied, the Mylar sack within the box can be inflated like a balloon to make what supposedly in some aboriginal language is called a ‘goon,’ but what us Anglos would call a ‘pillow.’ Aboriginals have a reputation similar to Native Americans when it comes to drink. As they get decent government financial support, many make a profession out of public park alcoholism. You certainly can’t walk from central station to my flat with passing at least a dozen aboriginals that appear severely intoxicated. Anyway, all it takes to join them is $10, which buys a 4.4 liter box of dubious ‘wine.’ After finishing all that, especially if you’re in the park, you would certainly need a pillow, which just happens to be the prize at the bottom of the box. I guess I’m just spoiled by America’s craft beer revolution and the U.S. macro-brew economies of scale.

Do you drink beer? Then you could definitely afford to become a member of the wilderness society. All it takes is one beer a week (assuming you would have paid about $4.60 for it at a pub) to give us 1,000 lobbying points in parliament and save 150 hectares of wilderness per year!

Back in green

2008-12-01T03:23:00.000-08:00

In my last entry I pronounced the end of my stomach illness and of glitches in travel plans. Turns out I was wrong on both counts.

We arrived in Katoomba, the biggest cutesy mountain town of the Blue Mountains. I would probably compare to Asheville, NC had I ever been there. A nice lady at the train station info booth gave us a map and directed to us to a national park information center where we could learn about various bush walks in the area. What looked like a very short walk on our map ended up being a 40 hike up and down hills through the length of town. We made it to the tourist center at Echo Point just before the 5 pm closing time. The elderly ladies working there who looked as if they had never been camping in their lives enthusiastically recommended some hikes to us. It turns out they were a bit off in their times estimations though. Each hike ended up being twice as lengthy as they had estimated when they checked their reference books. The same ended up being true of their claim that it would take 30 minutes to hike the cliff-side trail to Katoomba Falls and the campground at which we hoped to stay.

At this point I’ve eaten about one full meal in the past 3 days, the pasta dinner I had cooked the night before. All I have eaten for the day is a piece of toast and a croissant neither of which felt particularly good settling in. So I’m not exactly in top form, and two hours of walking around carrying my backpack is not exactly what I had hoped to do this evening. So by the time I arrive at our camp ground, I’m ‘knackered.’ When I open my backpack—surprise!—no tent. I’ve left it in Sydney.

This presents a couple issues. 1) We have to walk back into town to find a place to stay. 2) It throws a wrench into our backpacking plans. We don’t have much in the way of camping supplies, but a tent was one item we thought we had covered. Both actually ended up being resolved within the hour as we checked into the local YHA which happened to have a tent they were willing to let us borrow for $20.

It all ended up really being a moot point as dinner that night treated me poorly and Montezuma returned with a vengeance. A tent is no place to abode for one in such a condition, especially when it’s 38 degrees outside and the nearest toilet is 250 yards away and requires a key to open. As my Scottish friend would say, I had “an arse like the Japanese flag.” So leaving the tent in Sydney was really for the best.

‘Brenda’ of course is not so into the silver lining. She took the news of my leaving the tent in Sydney like she had just been told her boyfriend had been, for years, secretly sleeping with her best friend. At current rates, it will probably take her just as many years to forgive me.

Anyway, so while ‘Brenda’ spent the next day hiking and horseback riding, for me it was walking from doctor’s office to pharmacy to diagnostics and then lab laying flat on my back in the hostel.

* * *

So at this point I will interject upon this narrative written one month and two days ago to inform the reader that having moved into a flat yesterday and regained possession of my laptop, which I had left at ‘Hank’s’ house for safe keeping, I can now resume blogging. And rather than continue the previous storey at the previous pace, I’ll pip the Tivo into fast forward a bit for the sake of your attention spans above all.

All I will say is that ‘Brenda’ and I left the Blue Mountains without really giving it the full go we had planned. We returned to Sydney and then parted ways. ‘Brenda’ Hopped a train up the coast to Brisbane to collect, fill out, and overnight an absentee presidential ballot that ultimately would not be counted and then meet up with a high school classmate of hers living in a lazy beach town called Lennox Head. I stuck around to follow up on what would be the final of many contacts that did not lead to a “sweet job” as I had hoped.

I did end up finding a job, though I wouldn’t describe it as “sweet,” except for maybe the title “Wilderness Defender.” It sounds like I should be out in the rainforest chained to a tree shouting at lumberjacks through a bull horn. Actually it’s basically a street sales job, except instead of peddling credit cards or cell phones, I sell the idea of environmentalism in the form of memberships to The Wilderness Society, an Aussie non-profit NGO.

With just 2 minutes of sales training from my boss ‘Richard’ under my belt I managed to sign up two people for 30-dollar-per-month memberships within my first hour-and-a-half of work. ‘Richard’ was ecstatic and hinted at a promotion in store for me in the very near future. I found this a bit premature as I still had very little idea of what I was doing. I reckon I know more about climate change, global warming and general environmental issues than 99 out of 100 people I would speak to on the street (which says just as much about the people on the street who are willing to talk to me as much as my academic background), but I don’t have a lick of sales experience.

After some ups and downs in the ensuing weeks and much coaching from ‘Richard,’ who says he has, over the past four years, “sold everything under the sun,” that promotion came. Today was my first official day as ‘Wilderness Defender Coordinator’ which simply means I get paid a bit more, get to carry around a company phone for calling banks and checking in with my underlings (I can call them that now *evil laugh*) stationed in various suburbs around the city, and will in the next couple weeks get to drive a team in the company van on an expenses-paid travel trip down to Wollongong.

In other news my I’m pretty stoked about my new flat. I now share a room with two others as opposed to the nine I have been used to in the budget hostel I lived in for three weeks just a block away. I’m on the 12^th floor and have a balcony that has a decent view.

I’ll have to post an update soon with more about the job and living situation and some pretty humorous stories that I've left out, but I’ll leave it here for now since this is already overly long. Too many backorders and backlogs at the moment thanks to my paranoia about computer theft.

A tale of two cities and a case of the hiccups

2008-10-22T06:54:00.000-07:00

If I were my older brother I’d have carefully crafted dystopic descriptions of Australia’s two premier cities, Melbourne and Sydney. Fortunately no aspirations of literary greatness have ever been a part of my ‘Brett Plan,’ so I have the luxury of using adjectives like ‘cool’ and ‘neat’ to vaguely describe the aesthetic beauty of each metropolis (and these words apply to both as I’m sure you were wondering).

Melbourne was the first of the two cities visited and the Greenhouse Backpacker, a cheap but friendly hostel, was home for ‘Brenda’ and me for three nights. As far as we could tell we were the only Americans, though everybody seemed to speak English among other languages, regardless of nationality. The city is probably the most tourist-friendly I have ever visited (for English-speaking tourists that is). There’s a free tram (that resembles a San Francisco street car) that makes a 12-block by 8-block rectangular loop around the heart of the city and plays a recording that describes nearby sights and landmarks as it goes. There’s also a separate free tourist bus that runs with the same concept only less frequently and takes a more circuitous route to cover different ground. Art galleries are free and we happened to be there during the Melbourne Arts Festival, a month-long string of high culture showings, performances, classy events and public displays. Quite a bit of it was free including the National Gallery of Victoria, and we were quick to take advantage. Melbourne also seems to have an abundance of public green space. They claim their Royal Botanical Gardens is one of the finest in world, though I was just happy to see some (to me) exotic ducks.

I was struck by the city’s newness. Every building so avant garde looked as if it were just unveiled last week, with an abundance of cranes ushering in the next cohort of angular steel and glass constructs. It makes American Cities (at least the east coast ones I’m familiar with) seem alarmingly old and dirty. And like the rest of Victoria, it seemed to contain well short the resident or tourist population it was designed to support. Sidewalks were rarely crowed and nearly all of the city’s approximately twenty-four-thousand restaurants were completely empty. ‘Brenda’ bemoaned the lack homeless people or a visible disenfranchised minority, presumably because when she moves to Melbourne she’ll have trouble finding clients as a public defender. Actually she got over Melbourne pretty quickly. Across Australia she has announced each new breathtaking vista as where she wants to be proposed to and each splendid looking apartment as the one for her to buy. But after a couple days in this city too modern, devoid of anything rooted in tradition or made of wood and with a relative emotional robot as her only companion, the romance had run its course.

In a fit of brilliance I managed to confuse train times and we arrived at Southern Cross Station with all our luggage 20 minutes after ours had departed. Continuing my streak, I blearily stumbled off our bus we rode as a substitute into Sydney the next day without my laptop (!spoiler alert! I’m typing on it right now). Fortunately we had my second “number one Aussie friend,” at the station to pick us up, show us around, lend us his iPhone so we could attempt to untangle all my blunders, and put us up for what we thought would be a night or two. ‘Hank’ was my predecessor at the resort ‘Brenda’ and I had just worked at together over the summer and lives in one Sydney’s prime suburbs, Manly with his girlfriend whom he had met at the same said resort. I’ll never go to India (Good luck out there ‘Brenda!’). I took the last train to Bombay and spent the better part of the next 48 hours ready to give birth to an acid-spitting alien on Hank’s living room floor. So, our stay with ‘Hank’ and ‘Lois’ was unnaturally prolonged, but I really couldn’t have picked a better infirmary.

As for Sydney, it’s like all of California combined into one metropolitan area, maybe less Hollywood, LA slums, and any other parts of California of which I am ignorant and accordingly of their dissimilarity to said City. The beauty of the harbor (I bet they spell it harbour here) is stunning—cliffs, trees, fleets of sailboats, oh yeah and then there’s the bridge and that opera house thing. The ferry ride into the city (Hank sometimes uses it to commute to work) should be a tourist attraction of its own, what costing only 6 dollars of monopoly money (you should see the currency here, I often catch myself asking for two houses on Marvin Gardens instead of a sandwich). The tour boat industry must be in dire straits. Something like seven of the ten best beaches in the world lie within city limits. This is really disappointing as Australia has all ten of the top ten most poisonous snakes.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that many Sydneysiders never leave home. Here you’ve got the country’s biggest city along with all the beauty and recreation you could ever need right at your feet. And if you really want to get away from the crowds you can catch a train a couple hours inland to explore the Blue Mountains, as ‘Brenda’ and I are doing tomorrow.

No pictures this time around. Just go to www.google.com/images and type in “Sydney opera house.”

Oztralia

2008-10-13T23:06:00.000-07:00

So here I am on the other side of the planet. The cars drive on the left side of the road. Everybody is extremely outgoing and friendly. The toilets actually flush the same way as in the U.S.

The Victorian coast seems to have a surplus of beauty and not really enough residents or tourists to appreciate it all. The shoreline alternates between gorgeous desert-red beaches and dramatic 200 foot cliffs. The chain of small beach towns seem to be quite community oriented despite a So. Cal. type real estate market. The prime beach front areas are typically devoted to public park space. Late at night in Lorne you can climb the fence and frolic in the trampoline park (or in the skate park if that’s your thing). The springs are super tight and with up to 8 rectangular launch pads lined up in a row you can really feel like a kangaroo traversing the lot. If you manage to break your leg you don’t even have to sue anybody since everyone has free health care.

Speaking of kangaroos though, I have seen a few, though they looked pretty sleepy since they’re nocturnal. The wallabies (at least the ones I’ve seen) have been a bit livelier and they look just like kangas only a bit smaller. I still wouldn’t want to be caught in the ring with one. Koalas are pretty sleepy as well but also itchy and into defecating. I’ve added about 60 birds to my life list so far including most of the stereotypical Aussies: just listen for laughter coming from the nearest gum tree to see a kookaburra; cockatoos, flaunting their sulphur mohawks wander around in some places as oblivious to people as pigeons; and many parrots are tame enough to be hand fed crackers. No emus yet.

Tonight I’m staying in only my second paid accommodation, a backpacker hostel in Melbourne. About three months ago the Aussie dollar was worth 98 US cents. According to a local radio host it is currently worth “3 buttons, but could drop down to a button and a half.” This is great news as I can scrap a few of my nicer shirts and annoying button-fly jeans in case money gets tight.

My number one Aussie friend, ‘Susan,’ has done an awesome job as tour guide/host, finding me and cousin and travel companion, ‘Brenda,’ free places to stay with her parents and friends, and driving us all over map. Unfortunately she had to go back to work today so our days of freeloading are at an end. Though the most innocuous events and people seem able to put ‘Brenda’ on emotional tilt, I’m happy to say she is doing quite well and thoroughly enjoying herself. She has only lost a few things and can carry all of her possessions for at least a block and a half without collapsing.

That’s it for now. I have got to go queue up for the free pasta dinner. Thanks for reading my long-overdue, first, and hopefully not last blog entry. Good on ya.