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Tom Cruise has braces now, too. I’m right in style.”

August 9, 2012

It’s back to hibernation I go. The day will be hot and humid, mostly humid. I turned the AC on last night so the house is now quite comfortable. Gracie rang her door bells at 8, and I let her out, waited for her and then went back right upstairs to bed. I woke up at ten. I was surprised.

Some commercials are now filled with back to school clothes, school supplies and happy kids. I don’t get the happy kids part.  A new pair of pants or a shirt just isn’t enough to make up for the end of summer. The school year looms and it’s always long. Summer is a mere 9 or ten weeks and school is eons, months and months. I never thought about them until I was older: school pictures. They take them early in the year, and I finally figured out why. If it were later, not a kid could smile.

My first grade picture is of a little girl wearing a white blouse and a skirt with straps. My hair is long and curly at the ends. I have crooked, buck teeth so in the second grade I had started to go to an orthodontist, not so common back then. There were none where we lived so my mother and I had to walk uptown to take the bus to Sullivan Square where we took the subway to Kenmore Square. I remember going to see Dr. Nice. His office was in one of those grand homes along Commonwealth Avenue which are still beautiful today. The waiting room was a big as the downstairs of my house. It had couches and lovely lamps on the tables. His receptionist sat at a giant desk, or at least it looked giant to me. Dr. Nice wore a white jacket with buttons on the shoulders like Dr. Casey’s later on TV. Dr. Nice was an old man with white hair. His office faced the street. I didn’t see much of it when my mouth was open. All I saw was the ceiling. I liked Dr. Nice.

I went through all the stages of braces. Early on my teeth were covered in metal. I looked like Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me. No one else I knew had braces. Some needed them but going to the orthodontist as a rite of childhood was off in the future. I was embarrassed by those braces. In my second grade picture I didn’t smile. I hid my braces. It is not a pretty picture.

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“If things are getting easier, maybe you’re headed downhill.”

August 7, 2012

Mother Nature turned off the humidity switch early last evening and cool, dry air blew through the opened windows and doors. The evening felt glorious. This morning is the same, simply beautiful. The sunlight is sharp and a breeze is blowing. It’s a day to be outside.

My car got dinged in a parking lot a few weeks ago. The car before this one I had for ten years, and it got dinged only once. This car I haven’t had but a few months, and it already needs cosmetic surgery. It went into the shop yesterday to get pretty again so I’m without a car until some time tomorrow. On Sunday I filled the larder and bought bird and pet food so I’m set to be house-bound. Mind you, I’m not complaining. I’m happy to be stuck here. You know how much I love not getting dressed and sitting around in my cozy clothes. I’ll do the usual wash up and tooth brushing and maybe I’ll even comb my hair.

My trip is less than three weeks away. I have my visas, the luggage I bought last year, mosquito wipes, anti-malarial pills and a full iPad of books. The only thing left is new underwear. My mother would be pleased.

I bought pencils, sharpeners and crayons to take with me as gifts for the local primary school in the village where I’ll be staying. Guests should never come empty-handed. Franciska, with whom I’m staying, has yet to leave the US for Ghana. She wants to be there ahead of me so she can tidy up her house and clear the yard of grass and weeds. It’s been two years since she was last home.

It still amazes me that I am back in contact with all these former students of mine, and that over the years they never forgot me just as I had never forgotten them. My memories of those days in Bolga are bright and vivid, and they have always brought me joy.

Soon enough I’ll be making more memories. I feel ever so lucky though Franciska would say I am blessed.

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“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”

August 6, 2012

It rained early this morning: just what we needed, more humidity. Already the weather has a stranglehold. I went out to get the papers and gasped. The weather woman claims this humidity will end today but Cape Cod will be the last place to feel the change. I guess I’ll just have to hang out in the AC.

Today is our last visit to South America.

When we were leaving Argentina for Uruguay, we decided to take a short hop plane ride across the Rio de la Plata to Montevideo. The plane was an old prop. When we got on board, the stewardess gave us each a small ticket and a hard candy. Come to find out the ticket was for a drawing. The winner, the man in the seat ahead of me, won a lady’s handbag. That was the first and has been the only time I was part of an in-flight drawing.

Montevideo was a lovely city with beautiful parks, statues and huge sculptures. It was small, especially in comparison to Buenos Aires. I was drawn, as I had been in so many other cities, to the old town. Many of the buildings there, dating from the colonial period, were a bit run-down, but it was still my favorite part of the city. You could see water from both sides of the main street. There were small places to eat, little holes in the walls where we stopped for lunch. The entrance to the old town was the last bit of the wall which had once surrounded the city. Later, we took a bus tour to orient ourselves. Part of the tour was a walk through the General Assembly building. It was empty. The military had taken over the country in 1973 in a coup and dissolved the branches of government. We saw the assembly room with its rows of empty seats.

We finally did some shopping just for the sake of shopping because with the trip nearing its end we didn’t mind hauling extra stuff. I bought some beautiful gold bracelets: one for my mother and one for me. My mother wore hers for the whole of the rest of her life.

We flew from Montevideo to Sao Paulo and had a bit of culture shock. The city was huge, and I felt like Country Mouse. There were skyscrapers, shopping centers and cars, lots of cars, and even back then millions of people. We wandered the streets and stopped in beautiful parks and a few museums, but we didn’t stray far from the center of the city, from the downtown. My Spanish had gotten pretty good throughout the rest of South America, but here I was pretty much at a loss with the Portuguese. I could figure out menus, but that was about it. Sao Paulo was my least favorite stop of the entire trip. We stayed only three days as we were eager to get to Rio.

We flew to Rio and took a bus into the city where we found a really nice hotel through happenstance. We walked by it and liked the looks. Our room was huge and even had a table and chairs.

I loved Rio. It had tons of things to see and great restaurants with wonderful food. We took trips around the city every day. One trip was to Copacabana and Ipanema. Even though it was winter in Brazil, we had to walk the beaches and across the sand. It seemed like a rite of passage. We did some shopping in the stores around the beaches, but they were a bit rich for me. I did buy a few small gifts to take home.

Another trip was to Sugarloaf Mountain. I had seen pictures of Sugarloaf jutting out of the water but never imagined I’d be there. We took the tram to the top. From the tram, as we traveled up to the mountain, we could see Rio spread below us, but it was the view of Rio from the top which was spectacular. Also from the top I saw a US submarine. It was the first time out of a movie I had seen an actual sub traveling on the water. It looked small from where I was standing, but the conning tower was prominent.

Of all the symbols of Rio, I think the most magnificent is the Christ the Redeemer statue on Corcovado Mountain. It stands over Rio as if to guard it or maybe bless it. A picture of that statue had been in one of my geography books. It was so beautiful I had kept the picture safe in my memory drawer, and I couldn’t believe that so many years later here I was standing on that very spot. We rode to the mountain then climbed the steps to the statue. It towered above us both awesome and breathtaking. Spread out below us was the city, the water and Sugarloaf. I felt on top of the world.

We were in Rio five days. The city was beautiful. We ate in a variety of restaurants, some hole in the wall spots, always favorites of mine, but on our last night we ate in an expensive restaurant as a sort of going away present for ourselves. We were celebrating what had been the trip of a lifetime. We had traveled from Caracas to Rio and been gone eight weeks. That last night we toasted our trip and each other. The next day we flew to New York then on to Boston. We arrived home filled with memories I have never forgotten.

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“Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.”

August 4, 2012

I turned off my AC this morning just to bring in some fresh air. The cats immediately gravitated to the sun streaming through the front door. Fern sprawled. I heard the dog down the street barking and barking and counted two cars driving down my road. The house temperature rose from 68˚ to 74˚ in a little under an hour. I figured fresh air is over-rated, and my street is far too noisy. I’ve closed doors and windows and turned the AC back on. If I really want fresh air, I’ll step out on the deck for a bit, take a deep breath, exhale then hurry back inside the cool house.

Today is shark day on the scyfy channel. It should be dedicated to Cape Cod as a man in Truro was bitten on the legs by what is presumed to be a great white. It was the first attack since 1936. People on shore saw the fin, and I’m thinking visions of Jaws danced in their heads. No one jumped in to help except the man’s son, and I suspect no one wonders why, even the victim himself. Nine great whites have been tagged on the cape this year attracted to these waters by the huge seal population. For the sharks seals mean dining al fresco. For beachgoers, sharks mean wading in shallow water and scanning the horizon for fins.

Asunción, Paraguay was our least favorite stop. The city seemed poor in comparison to the bustling capitals of the other South American countries. Keep in mind this was 1976. We stayed in a hotel, a middle of the road hotel, which looked over the river. We sat on the porch and had breakfast each morning. In the center of the town was a park and a restaurant with outside tables. We were having lunch at the restaurant one day when a man approached us and asked if we were Americans. When we told him yes, he asked to join us. We said sure. He said he seldom saw Americans in Paraguay and was glad to sit and speak English again. Come to find out he was the PanAm chief of South American operations and was going to every country to say good-bye as he was retiring. He told us great stories about the 50’s and particularly the Eisenhower trip. It seemed some airports did not have long enough runways to accommodate the president’s plane. That man’s job was to oversee the construction of lengthening those runways. We sat for quite a while. He thanked us for the company and bought lunch.

The hotel where we stayed was owned by a Chinese family originally from Taiwan. The son worked at the front desk. He spoke with us often as he wanted to practice his English. One night he invited us to a midnight movie. We said sure. It was a Kung Fu movie dubbed in English with Spanish subtitles. Everyone in the audience took part in the movie yelling and screaming and making appropriate death rattles when a Kung Fu master dispatched his enemy. It was the funniest screening of a movie I’ve ever seen. The young man walked us back to the hotel, thanked us for our company and went home.

We left from Asunción for the Iguazu Falls on a bus. We had to pass into Brazil to get to the falls which lie on the Brazilian-Argentinian border. The bus dropped us at a magnificent hotel across from the falls. It was cheaper than we expected given it even had a casino, beautiful gardens and was a three-minute walk across the road to the falls. We were there a couple of days. The first day we took the cat walk around the falls which were so beautiful they almost defy description. The water ran so quickly over what I found out later was Devil’s Throat that the picture I took looks impressionistic, not real water at all but dots of color forming falls. We got soaked every walk we took.

We returned to the city after a couple of days to the same hotel and wandered around looking at the statues and the small parks until we could leave. I had read of a three-day trip down the Parana River to Argentina, and I was hoping they had empty cabins as the boat had originated in Buenos Aires and this was their return trip. Luckily, they had space, and we boarded a day later. Our cabin had two bunk beds but just the two of us. Come to find out only one person on the entire boat spoke English so they were kind enough to sit us with her. She was from England and married to an Argentinian. It amazed her that my pidgin Spanish had gotten us so far. The boat was an old one made of wood. I loved that cruise. They had a movie, The Producers, one of my favorites, in English with Spanish subtitles. We went on a couple of shore excursions. On the last night was the gala. It was the night when people wore costumes. We managed shawls and wore hats we had bought. The most handsome bald man was chosen as was the best costume, the best dancer and on and on. The food was delicious, and we laughed and enjoyed ourselves the whole evening.

The next day we arrived in Buenos Aires.

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“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have traveled.”

August 3, 2012

I’m still hibernating. The air felt cooler when I went to get the papers, but the weatherman says 84˚ so I might as well keep the AC running. Usually I never watch the television in the daytime, but I’ve been watching the Olympics: the women’s soccer and track and field as well as men’s water polo. I think I’m addicted.

We’re in Puno and we’re boarding the hydrofoil to go across the lake. My friend and I could have chosen a cheaper regular boat, but a hydrofoil was on my list of things I wanted to try. The sensation was neat when the boat rose in the air and then flew off across the water. We made three stops on Lake Titicaca; all were on the Bolivian side. The first two were the Islands of the Sun and the Moon, del Sol and De La Luna. Both have Incan ruins. The Sun is a large island and is believed to be the birthplace of the Sun God. We got off the boat there to see some of the ruins, but the only one I remember is the Sacred Rock. The shores of both of these islands were filled with rocks, and we only saw de la Luna from the boat as there was little to see on the island. Our last stop was Copacabana, Bolivia where we went into the town and visited the Cathedral. I remember the statue of Our Lady of Copacabana was in a niche and it was the first time I’d ever since one dressed in real clothes.

As we got closer to Bolivia we saw a few reed boats and men fishing off them. One of the boats was small and had room for only one. It looked a bit like an oversized kayak. Those reed boats made me feel as if I had been transported back in time as their method of construction has never changed. When our boat landed on the coast, the Altiplano of Bolivia, we boarded a bus to la Paz. The Altiplano almost defies description with all its beauty. Mountains ring along the side and the landscape is stark. It looked a bit like the moon must when you’re standing on it. I think I hurt my neck swiveling my head from side to side to look out the windows. We rode for four hours or so; I don’t really remember. I just know it was dark as we got close to la Paz, the highest capital in the world. We came in from the mountains, and the city was below us built in a canyon. Lit up, La Paz looked like some giant Christmas decoration with lights spread across the canyon. The sight was mouth dropping in its beauty.

We found a hotel close to the bus stop and fell asleep in a heartbeat. But by this time I had a cold, a winter cold, and that hotel was so damp I woke up shivering. We decided to go plush in La Paz and got a room in a really good hotel. It had a buffet breakfast which I enjoy every morning but only for a little while. We explored la Paz. The streets were windy and seem to go higher and higher. Many were cobbled. We wandered all over not at all bothered by the altitude as we had been in the mountains since Venezuela. We went to the witches’ market and just stared at all the weird stuff on the tables. We saw pouches with what I think were potions, dried stuff I didn’t want to know about except I think I saw a few mummified frogs, not so great for souvenirs. We saw parks filled with statues and sat in a few. The hats had changed again. The women wore brown bowlers. The clothing was still colorful. We visited the Iglesias de San Francisco. The outside of the church had all sorts of engravings. Inside, we took almost cave-like stairs to the roof. The view was well worth the trip. La Paz was my second favorite city after Quito.

We decided to fly from La Paz to Asunción, Paraguay as we thought an overland trip, correct that to an over-mountains trip, would take too long. The La Paz airport was high above the city, and we got the view in the daytime which had astonished us at night. La Paz looked tiny below us, like a kid’s toy, but it was no less jaw-dropping.

I’ll always remember waiting at that airport. We were standing there when a whistle blew. Afterwards I figured it must have been lunch time because all of a sudden armed soldiers appeared from everywhere. They must have been hiding along the runways in the tall grass or behind structures. I swear there were at least twenty of them all carrying machine guns, but that only made us chuckle. They all went to lunch at the same time leaving us to our own devices.

The plane was making only a stop at La Paz, and when we got on it, there were already people sitting there sucking on oxygen. That was the first time I’d ever seen anyone actually using the drop down oxygen masks. I thought it a bit over the top as they had never left the plane. I had been in La Paz for four days and once I’d thrown up each morning I never thought anything of the altitude. I sort of snickered, a bit of arrogance I guess.

We flew to Paraguay and left the Andes behind us. We had been in the mountains for over six weeks.

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“Like you’re riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an instant it’s sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely for a few moments.”

August 2, 2012

The humidity of the last few days has prompted an early hibernation for me. I started out with doors and windows opened then raced to close them and turn the AC on. Today and the next few days will be in the 80’s, warm for us, so I’ll hunker down and enjoy the cool air.

On with the travelog!

First, I apologize for the oversight so I’ll introduce the other half of the we I keep using. It was my roommate Francie, who had traveled only once out of the country on a guided tour of Italy with a bunch of high school kids, so this was, for her, a huge risk. She was the best of companions.

In Cuzco, we went to the market and bought some fruit and some coca leaves. We had read that chewing them allows the Peruvians to work at high altitudes without getting overly fatigued or hungry. We figured they’d help so we gave chewing them a try. The leaves weren’t worth the chew. We found out later they are mixed with something or better consumed in tea.

In those days, there was no tourist train to Aguas Calientes, the stop nearest the road to Machu Picchu, so we got up early and took the local. It was filled with Peruvians with their produce and reminded me of travel in Ghana. All that was missing were the goats and chickens. It was an amazing train ride. We traveled on rail so twisty we could see the front of the train from the back. I hung my head out the windows many times to see the train and the view along the way. We passed through Pisac and Ollantaytambo in the valley of the Incas and could see terraces up the mountains, places where the Incas planted their crops including potatoes and quinoa. After about four hours on the train, we arrived at the station where we had to buy bus tickets to get to the ruins. The road to the ruins was an amazing back and forth twist of a road, a zigzag switchback allowing travel up the steep hill.

All the pictures I see of the site now are filled with people roaming around. I didn’t find that. There were few people so I could take pictures without anyone in them. Machu Picchu is easily recognized as it sits between two mountains. The first view I saw of the ruins was from the hill which overlooks all of Machu Picchu. I don’t think I could move for a bit, astonished as I was by the sight. Finally I headed into the ruins where I walked around for hours. I went up to the sundial whose corners each point to a different direction. I took pictures through windows of the same view the Incas must have seen. I walked up and down the terraces. I took picture after picture of the ruins, the mountains and the ruins across from us on another mountain. I sat and just looked all around me. I think I forgot to breathe.

On the way down to the train, small boys raced the busses which had to negotiate the twisty road. The boys beat us to the bottom. We boarded the last train and headed back to Cuzco where we’d spend one more day exploring other ruins including an Incan foundation which still runs with sweet cold water. Then we took the train to Puno, a regular train back then. The ride was magnificent with the snow-capped Andes beside us for hours, the stops at small stations where we saw Peruvians in bright colors sitting in the sun, and in my mind’s eye, I still see the small children dressed in colorful clothes, red shawls are what I remember the best, who waved at us as the train passed. We always waved back. The second part of the trip was over the Andean plains, an amazing contrast from the mountains but no less beautiful. There we saw llamas, herds of llamas, shepherded by boys who followed behind them.

The trip to Puno took about 11 hours. We found a hotel and then wandered. Puno is right on the shores of Lake Titicaca. When I was a kid, that name always made us giggle when the nun said it. It was as if she were swearing somehow. We bought dinner from a stall along the street, and I bought a small, woven woolen wall decoration from another stall. The cloth was green and on it were appliquéd people who looked like all the Peruvians we had seen. One of them was playing Andean pipes. I still have it.

The next morning we went to the lake and booked passage on a hydrofoil guided tour which would stop at three islands on the lake then take us across to the Bolivian border where we’d board a bus to La Paz.

The journey continues!

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If no man could become rich in Peru, no man could become poor.”

July 30, 2012

No movie last night: it was “spitting rain” as my mother would have said so my friends and I played games, ate inside and watched the Olympics. Today is still a bit damp, but I think the sun is making a decided effort to appear. The morning is a lot lighter than it’s been.

We’re still in South America, in Guayaquil, Ecuador. We got here on a small boat from Duran where the auto-bus had finished its run after scaring the heck out of us while showing us the most amazing sights. Guayaquil was hot, and the hotel we found had no screens so I was a mosquito magnet. I don’t remember anything about the city. I just remember swatting and scratching all night. We stayed only a day as the city was really planned as a transit stop. The next day we took another local bus toward the border, and the people were again most accommodating in the passport transfer from the back to the front. We got to the Ecuadorian/Peruvian border too late to cross so we had to stay in Ecuador overnight. That border town reminded me of something out of an old western movie. People were walking out and about all night, and the cantinas were all open and crowded, mostly with men. Our hotel was right on the main drag, a cheap hotel right near the border. For a bathroom it had a hole which necessitated good aim. The hole was out back.

Because I had not slept the night before, I fell sleep right away and heard nothing. My friend was awake most of the night because of the noise and the people walking by our room right on the street. She was a bit frightened by the thought of our room being so central so I think staying up was really a sort of guard duty for her. The next morning we got breakfast and changed dollars into Peruvian sol as the rate was so much cheaper in Ecuador. We got double what we would have gotten into Peru, and knowing we were heading to Machu Picchu, we changed a lot of money. The two of us walked through the border into the first building, passport control. Signs were all over about the amount of Peruvian money you could bring into the country. We were way over the limit. We noticed clothes flung over a screen and realized someone was really being searched. My friend immediately started to panic as we had hidden a lot of money in our bras. I told her to write down on the entry form an amount of money above the limit so we looked honest. That worked. We got a lecture but that was all. The next building was to prove we had a ticket out of Peru before we could come into Peru. Anyone who didn’t was directed to a small building where they were forced to buy bus tickets they’d probably never use. I realized the guy checking tickets spoke no English so I gave him the sheaf of plane tickets, and he flipped through the pile and let me go. I told him my friend was with me, and he hand gestured her a wave out of the building as well. We boarded a bus to Lima.

More tomorrow if you don’t mind.

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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.”

July 29, 2012

Last night it poured. Lightning jigsawed in the sky outside the north window in my den and gave the room sudden bursts of bright light. The rumbles of thunder were like growls. The rain fell in giant drops which thudded against the roof and the eaves. Rivulets of rain water ran down my hilly driveway as if in a race to reach the bottom. I watched  from my backdoor. Today is cloudy and has a chilly breeze magnified by the dampness left by the storm. No movie tonight.

I was going to give you more of my travelog every couple of days, but the response was enough to know I wouldn’t bore you if I continued. It’s fun for me to remember.

We got a bus to Quito over the border when we left Colombia. It resembled a school bus. My friend and I were the only non-Ecuadorians. On that bus I saw Indians for the first time. Women wore colorful clothes and had shawls wrapped around their shoulders. They all wore hats which reminded me of the fedora my father used to wear. The bus was stopped a few times by police doing checks. Each time it was stopped, the people in front of us passed up our passports then passed them back to us. When we arrived in Quito, we decided to stay in the old city. Our hotel, a small one on a side street, was one block from the monastery in the center and a few blocks from La Ronda, the old street with colonial houses, a narrow street with some of the oldest buildings in the city. We wandered all over that part of the city and ate in some of the small restaurants. We took busses to the different markets outside the city. We went to Otavalo Market. Back then it wasn’t the tourist attraction it has become. We wandered all over. I bought a few pieces of hand-stitched Indian patterned cloth and walked all through the donkey market. I stopped to buy food from the women who reminded me of the African women who sat along the sides of the road selling fried plantain or yam. I don’t even know what I ate there. I just know it was good.

When we got back to Quito, it was quite late but we still went out to eat dinner. I tried Guinea pig, a national dish in Ecuador.  I was not going to be put off by eating something small and cuddly. I had gotten pass queasiness a long time before that dinner. The pig came roasted with all its parts though cut into pieces. I’m not big on the head and feet of any animals and was even less enthused by the Guinea pig’s. There wasn’t much meat, but it tasted like chicken. I swear it.

The next day we took a bus to the equator. A small shack was the only indicator we had arrived. Where was that black line I always see on globes? Just kidding! I stood right at the line with one foot in each hemisphere. It was an amazing feeling to be there. The small shack sold postcards which were stamped with 0 degrees latitude and 0 degrees longitude so I bought a few. I sent my family a postcard from each country so they could keep track of where we were, and I thought this was special.

We left Quito to go to Guayaquil on the auto-bus, called that but really a train. It was the most amazing train ride of my life. We had seats in the front, big mistake. Animals that didn’t get off the tracks were hit off the tracks. I stopped watching. The center aisle of the bus-train was filled with standing people who scrunched down whenever we went through a town. The train traveled through tropical areas where I saw banana trees filled with fruit. The train went up Devil’s Nose, a zig-zag section of track where the train goes forward and backward to reach the next town; it was both frightening and wonderful. We rode alongside the snow-capped mountains of the Andes. The train finished its trip in Duran where we took a boat across to Guayaquil. One of the few Americans we met came running up to us just as we were getting on the boat saying he had given his luggage to a taxi driver who disappeared. We commiserated. That was all the help we could give.

Tomorrow we’ll arrive in Guayaquil!

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“To travel is to possess the world”

July 28, 2012

Clouds have descended permanently. The day is damp and grey. Thunder showers are predicted for later. I hope so as it is really dry.

Today I’ll harvest a few tomatoes. Okay, I’ll harvest two. They are red and beautiful on the vines in the raised garden I had built this year. My cucumbers are also growing. I expect they’ll be ripe when I’m gone.

Birgit asked about my trip to South America. I guess I’ll give you a few highlights. I did all the planning from all sorts of books, and my roommate and I left for Venezuela toward the end of June in 1976. She spoke no Spanish, but I spoke enough to get us by. I joked and said if we played our cards right, I could sell her, and we could come home with more money than we left with-she was not amused. We stayed in Caracas a few days then took a bus to Merida, in the foothills of the Andes. Back then, there were few tourists in South America, and we were the only non-Venezuelans on the bus. On the way we saw a crashed bus which had missed a hairpin turn and gone over the mountain. I heard muerte when the driver stopped to talk to one of the police along the road. I didn’t translate for my friend. We stopped once in a small mountain town and were told to try the fish. It was the most amazing trout I’d ever tasted.

We went to Merida because we wanted to ride the world’s highest cable cars. The next morning we were in line and waiting for the car to come back down the mountain when the wind started. It was fierce enough that they stopped the cars from going up the mountain, and those already there were stranded. We walked around Merida and went to the market but ended up leaving a couple of days later. The cars still had not gone up the mountain. We took a bus to Colombia and ended up at a small town near the border. The hotel was disgusting. I swore I was dirtier after my shower than before it. We left the next morning for Bogota where we stayed in a relatively expensive hotel compared to what we had been paying for the other hotels, and that start our pattern. We’d stay in dumps for a few days then in really nice hotels for the next few days.

I’ll give you the highlights of each country as I remember them.

In Bogota we went to the Gold Museum. The most striking memory I have of visiting that museum is being closed into a dark vault with thick doors. Nobody moved in the dark. When they turned on the lights, we were surrounded by cases filled with Incan gold. Every one gasped.

Another stop was the cathedral in the salt mine in Zipaquíra, about an hour or two from Bogota. I was amazed that the salt was black and asked a guard how the salt got white. He went away then came back and said we had permission to tour the factory. Off we went in his official car. We donned hard hats and walked all over the factory. I remember two things: how awful I look in a hard hat and how my mouth was salty the whole time from the dust. He gave us a chunk of salt more black than white which I still have.

I found the English-bookstore in Bogota, and we ate some great local food in hole-in-the-wall restaurants. I don’t know other than carne what we ate. It was good, and that’s all that mattered.

We took another bus and were on our way to Ecuador. The travelog will continue another day.

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“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”

July 27, 2012

It rained last night. I didn’t hear it, but I saw the street still wet along the edges when I went to get the papers. Back inside the house again, I opened the door for Gracie who dashed into the yard. I followed but only stood on the deck for a while to gauge the day. Nothing is moving and the sky is cloudy, but the sun seems not so far away.

I have a doctor’s appointment in Hyannis today. I dread the ride. On cloudy days the roads are jammed with cars filled with tourists looking for something to do. Hyannis is a prime destination with its Main Street filled with stores, candy and ice cream shops and t-shirt emporiums. You can even play miniature golf.  Some of the restaurants have outside tables where tourists can sit and eat their hamburgers and watch the crowds pass by. All of those attractions beckon tourists, but they make Hyannis the last place to be on a day like today.

I’ve become insular. I used to go to Boston all the time to see plays or to have dinner, but now I seldom go. I am content to sit on the deck with friends, play a few games and enjoy a barbecue or even just some appetizers. Most nights I watch baseball though that has become painful this summer. When the Sox are down by 5 or more, I have no guilt about changing the station. HGTV and the Food Channel are my escapes from endless reruns and a disappointing season. I even find myself talking HG. My master has no en suite!

I am traveling, and that will give the summer a bit more dimension. When I was teacher, I used to travel every summer usually for at least five weeks. When I become an administrator, I had to work summers so my travel was limited to a week or two at most and usually to only one country. Now I have all the time in the world to see the world. I just need to win the lottery!

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