Will I ever find …

IPad Art by Erin J. Bernard

Old friends, new ideas and the ides of late spring

Well, well, well. Hello old friend! It’s been a minute.

Oh, I’m talking to the blog. Not you. I don’t even know you. Anyway.

After a long afternoon of sending interview queries, researching such scintillating topics as casinos and coastal art organizations for a few freelance stories, and attempting to navigate the quagmire that is government employment and labor statistics for an independent data-gathering project I’ve been commissioned to, I figured I’d drop in for a visit. It was either this or do push-ups, the last thing on my goals list before I get to quit working and eat dinner. So here we are.

I can’t help but feel a little shamed by the sour note you and I left things on last month, when I used our time together to publicly air a few personal grievances and to generally complain about a nasty and oh-so-persistent case of low-grade malaise – the same one that seems to hit me every time this year. Call it spring fever, call it whatever. I always get an itchy heart when the April rains come.

Now, it’s May. It’s still raining on the Oregon coast, but I’m in better sorts, these days. Although: dreadfully busy. This month marks my sixth as a freelance journalist and I am almost afraid to think/talk about how well it’s going. I don’t want to jinx my good fortune, but I will say that I’m actually at the point of possibly needing to start turning down work, which feels like a milestone, definitely.

I’m doing all manner of projects, from commercial photography to newspaper and magazine features to governmental research, and the variety is definitely keeping me on my toes. But I feel ready to hone my focus a bit. I am bummed about the fact that I haven’t had any time lately to devote to my personal writing projects, including this blog, but I’m already working 6-7 days a week and I’m in training for the Hood to Coast relay this August, besides, which eats up another 10-12 hours of my time each week.

So all of that equals me needing a stunt double, or possibly some performance enhancing substances. KIDDING!!

It does mean I need to work harder at balance. I’ve been hitting yoga class three times a week, which goes a long way toward that end, but I know deep down that it’s going to take something bigger for me to stop fretting. I’m heading to Indiana in a few weeks to spend time out in the country with family, so that should help. I think.

In other news: I’ve become completely fascinated with the political philosopher Michael Sandel, and, praise be the digital gods, many of his lectures are available on YouTube, including a Harvard course he teaches called “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to do?” I’ve been listening to the lectures while I edit manuscripts and the ethical dilemmas they invoke are seeping into my dreams, my speech, my everything. It’s great. I recommend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY.

I’ve come to philosophy and jazz – two of this planet’s greatest ideas, EVER – relatively late in life, but better to be fashionably tardy to the party than never to arrive at all, right?

 

What the water wants

“What the water wants is hurricanes, and sailboats to ride on its back. What the water wants is sun kiss, and land to run into and back.”

-Sufjan Stevens

Seven weeks ago, as Morgan and I were packing to leave for El Salvador, I wrote this little lyric in the front of my little travel journal. It had been rattling around my head all that Saturday morning, and as consumed as I was with anticipating what the next month and a half would hold for us, I liked the obtuseness of the words. The way they hinted at some unexpected and much longed-for kind of chaos.

Anyone who has spent extended periods of time traveling, followed by extended periods of time not traveling, can probably relate.

I’ve always been perhaps a bit too enamored of the concept of The Shakeup. Of inviting noise and messiness into one’s life in order to bring the calm, still parts into better relief. During a long, long bus ride through the Salvadoran countryside a week or so back, I got to thinking about Me (a favorite subject!) and about which qualities define me most broadly. I came up with: Restless, curious, anxious, and, for good measure, throw in latent perfectionist tendencies punctuated by broad bursts of shocking laziness.

Mix all that together and I think you get a pretty good description of my mental state on any given day. It also goes a ways in explaining my lifelong obsession with strange and distant lands.

But my misadventures abroad have been pretty legion, as my poor, long-suffering parents would attest. I’ve come to accept the scrapes and bumps as par for the course, but they still smart.

How do you reconcile what you want with what you actually get, ever? Really, though, I’m not being rhetorical. How?

El Salvador was beautiful and warm and visually fascinating and full of wild smells and friendly locals. It was also full of salmonella poisoning and ill-wrought plans and shabby Internet connections and irrevocably changed places that bore little resemblance to their former selves.

And now I’ve been spit back out the other end of said hurricane. Where does all the whirlwinding of these last months leave me, besides just simply Home Again? Sort of at a loss for words and not really digging the whole premise of a contrived and self-contragulatory trip post-mortem. A clean, concise summing up of events feels wrong here, although I am working on a few longer-form narrative pieces about my time down south, especially with regards to what I learned about the civil war.

For once in my life, I don’t want to talk (IE, write) about any of it just now. Instead, how about I just show you two pretty pictures from two great moments? Yes? OK then.

Girl - La Libertad, El Salvador

Pescaderos - Playa Intipuca, El Salvador

Last dispatch from El Salvador

Happy April Fool’s Day. I tried to pull the wool on Facebook by posting the outrageous claim that Morgan and I had purchased a piece of property on the beach down here and were relocating to El Sal permanently come summer. But I guess for anyone who’s even been remotely paying attention to the tone of my recent blogs, that would be a tough cookie to swallow. Or, how’s that go? A bitter pill? A crumbling cracker? At any rate …

What’s definitely, immutably true is this: It’s our last night here in El Salvador.

In anticipation of an early-ish flight, we’ve landed at a sweet little hotel in the center of big, nasty San Sal. It’s called Hotel Villa Florenzia Centro, and though it’s not much to look at from the outside, it’s got a courtyard with all kinds of great light and views and a surprisingly clean and pretty interior. Our room is up on the third floor, and aside from a broken window pane, I’d say we made out well. $15 bucks a night for clean, centrally located hotel digs with shower and television. How many capital cities can boast this? In Japan, $35 just barely got me a capsule pod in a high-rise building with a coin-operated mini-TV and a pair of rental slippers. Digression.

We spent the afternoon hopping buses from here to Metro Center, which is essentially a massive amalgam of high-priced shopping malls, colorful food courts and messy rows of market stalls. The trek from our hotel to Metro took us through some crazy rough areas of town. I am endlessly amazed by how massive and filthy and teeming with humanity the planet’s larger cities are. Of course, the cities of Central America have a unique kind of charm, what with the machine guns and the particularly colorful piles of garbage and the thumping reggaeton and the roving cows, goats and horses. OK, only goats in this particular city, but we were nonetheless taken aback by the sight of a man selling goat’s milk straight out of the creature’s teet, right on the side of a busy market street.

We passed the afternoon wandering through Salvadoran dollar stores, eating pizza and donuts, and playing arcade games, then we came back to the hotel to watch TV and rest.

The last time I visited San Salvador was pretty rough … I blogged about it then and don’t care to rehash, but suffice it to say, the misadventure ended with me wandering unbeknownst through the ghetto of central San Sal, dodging flying vegetables, and locking myself into my hotel room for like half a day with a bag of chips and some beer and a blessedly potent WiFi connection. This time around, hate to say it, having a man by my side emboldened me, and it also kept the would-be hecklers at bay.

Still. Post-colonial charm notwithstanding, this place gets mighty rough after dark, and we’re knee-deep in a purple-orange kind of twilight time as I write, so I doubt we’ll be venturing out again till the morning, when we head to Comalapa airport.

So we find ourselves at an end. I feel a bit sentimental, a bit exhausted, a bit road-weary, a bit wiser, a bit more aware of a few choice personal shortcomings that I’d do well to work on. This trip definitely kicked my ass in certain ways. It’s like this: if traveling during your 20s is all about learning to make bold beginnings, to question assumptions, to open yourself up to unpredictability, to accept adversity, to consider new perspectives, then if you get it right, traveling during your 30s comes to entail a new set of opportunities and challenges. Namely: hewing to principle, pursuing opportunities for deeper growth and learning, seeking authentic experience and asking bigger, better questions, both of yourself and of the places and people you encounter. It is a transition for me, but it feels like the right one to be working toward.

I have so much less to prove now. I know who I am and what I’m after. As we prepare to return home, I’ve got all kinds of new and better Spanish skills under my belt, a journal full of observations and quotes that I hope to turn into a finished, sellable article, and a deeper appreciation for the life I’m a creating for myself back in Oregon. This is the first time in awhile that I’ve had a home of my own to return to after a long backpacking trip. A beautiful home at that, with a big kitchen and a sweet little library/office that I’ve lately been daydreaming of . Morgan and I must be getting sentimental on account of our time away from that magical little beach house … last night we bonded with a beautiful, slightly stoopid boxer we found wandering around outside our hotel. He was sweet as pie and we let ourselves fantasize awhile about getting a dog of our own.

In the harsh light of morning, we semi-bagged the idea, and, in fact, I balked in terror at the idea of committing to something, anything, for (UGH!) 14-16 years, but you get the point. Life on the road is romantic and beautiful and painful and infinitely interesting. But life at home has its own kind of charm. Like, you know how amazing and life-affirming it feels to take in a massive breath of fresh air, just suck it down into your lungs and really relish for a moment the feeling of being a thumping, pumping, ever-evolving carbon-based life-form? That’s sort of what travel is for me. But, as author Terry McMillan so sagely pointed out back in the ’90s, you’ve also got to exhale. And that’s what home is for me. A long, luxurious breath out. The other shoe dropping after a deliciously protracted pause. The  ever-anticipated and completely natural second act, so sweet in its inevitability.

I keep circling back to that word. “Sweet.” Because it is, really. All of it.

Goo cakes, green mango and other tough-to-swallow things

We’ve made it to our final destination … Suchitoto! Check out this view:

View from our room at Villa Balanza, Suchitoto, El Salvador.

It’s a great little artsy mountain town an hour out from big, smelly San Salvador. We’re staying in an adobe house perched right at the very edge of a mountain overlooking Lake Suchitlo – La Villa Balanza. It’s at the bottom of the steepest cobblestone hill I’ve ever seen. Ever. The views are crazy and so is the wildlife. Between the roosters, the cicadas, the orioles, the snarling pups and the roving band of drunken men that congregates outside our window each evening, it’s hard to fall asleep before midnight or to stay asleep after 6 a.m. A bat even flew into our room last night! So we’re siesta-ing a lot.

Tomorrow, we’re going on a horseback ride through the mountains to check out some guerilla camps.

Truth told, though, I think Morgan and I are both ready to go home. My belly’s been rumbling again and we’ve both grown tired of the seemingly unending stream of logistical hardships that befall us at every turn. Does that sound grumpy? Hmpf. Something about the five-week mark regularly turns my traveler’s heart weary.

Food has been the biggest issue on this trip, no contest, and I’m not even complaining too long or too loudly about our mutual cases of salmonella poisoning, because gastrointestinal distress is pretty much par for the course when you venture into the developing world. Fair enough.

What I take hearty issue with is the service itself. Take this morning’s breakfast. Neither Morgan nor I was in  a great mood for starters, and I’d already logged two hours of work before we began the hike up the hill to the hotel’s restaurant, which conveniently doesn’t open till after 9 a.m. On the way up, we got into an argument about whether the kitchen’s water was filtered and drinkable – the girl we asked said yes but I was concerned she hadn’t understood the question, as I’ve noticed “yeses” and “nos” around here don’t mean quite the same thing they do at home, and are, instead, approximations.

My breakfast was passable – it’s hard to screw up scrambled eggs and beans, which is one of the few things I’m eating at this point – but Morgan took one bite of his pancakes and just about turned green. He spit a mouthful of half-chewed cake into a napkin and then by way of explanation dug his fork into the middle of the remainder of the cake. Goo oozed out between the tines. Totally raw in the middle.

We semi-politely sent the cakes back, and while the kitchen girl was giving them another go on the obviously not-yet-heated-up grill, a pair of Salvadoran health inspectors walked in for what I can only guess was a random check. Five minutes later, while the inspectors were busily checking expiration dates of bottled beer, the cakes came back. Still raw in the middle. And I’m not talking a little chunky or runny. Totally goo.

So we sent them back again. The staff seemed super annoyed, perhaps partially on account of the inspectors’ presence, and Morgan was pretty much fuming. I told them we didn’t even want the nasty cakes anymore (less politely, but still politely enough). A few minutes later, they landed back on the table yet again, looking rather tattered by this time after their third round on the grill, but still oozing batter.

At that point, we ditched the whole project and headed out the door. I could tell the proprietor was offended. Feeling mutual.

I recognize that there are different standards of service in different parts of the world, and I’ve learned after these many years of travel to leave my North American expectations of quality and cleanliness at home. But it ain’t easy, especially when the problem seems to be people just not trying. We’ve had similar issues pretty much everywhere we’ve gone, and at this point, eating is less a pleasure than a pain, which is saying something considering how much I love food!

Everything takes an hour, even if you’re the only customer. And half the time it’s not even what you ordered. Or there will be random hunks of raw potato or beef or what-have-you just hanging out in the food for no discernible reason. Or the chef will switch out the listed sides for whatever is already cooked up and ready to go. Or the server will tell you they’re out of 2/3rds of the menu items and you can’t help but suspect that they just don’t feel like making them. Or a place will close early on whim.

And the worst-best part is if you peek through any given kitchen’s door, you’ll often see like a zillion people working in said kitchen, and yet they STILL can’t get the food out quickly or correctly. For every 10 kitchen workers, two will be hugging, three will be texting, a few more will be chatting and joking and wrestling and maybe one or two will actually be cooking or cleaning.

It is, indeed, hard to reprogram your standards. During my year in Mexico, I became deeply, intimately aware of the fact that we North Americans all subscribe subconsciously to a Cult of Efficiency. Things must be fast, the credo goes. Things must be pleasing to look upon, and to smell, and to taste. Things must be done correctly, consistently, and with spirited haste.

In other parts of the world, abstractions such as Relationships and Relaxation and Mutual Accommodation are prized over speed and service. Time is less linear than circular. An hour is less a standard unit of measure than a vague marker of an arbitrary hunk of time that’s going to pass you right by anyway, either way, so why stress?

And if you didn’t order (and what’s more don’t really care to eat) that pile of food that has just been set lackadaisically before you, well, does it matter all that very much? Have a few mouthfuls of cold, crusty scrambled egg ever sent anyone to his early grave? Couldn’t you suffer through a few rogue potato peels in your margarine-soaked vegetables without coming to any real bodily harm?

Won’t a sour, underripe and slightly mangy-looking mango fill your belly just as well as its sweet, yellow brethren?

In theory, yes. In practice, No. No it will not.

Maybe if the prices weren’t so high and the expectation of a generous tip so unabashed, I’d feel more charitable. Maybe I just have a lot more evolving to do. Probably a little – or a lot – of both.

With that, I’m off to hunt down some lunch from the downstairs fridge. Soggy, salty, pizza leftovers here I come, if the proprietor’s son hasn’t eaten them, that is. He’s got a nasty reputation in these parts for just such offenses.

Oh, and a Virtual PS to whoever stole the two pairs of underwear I left hanging on my windowsill: Really? You’re welcome. I think.

Flight home is Monday.

El Cuco loco!

Still no computer cord ... excuse the lo-res ... La Tortuga Verde!

This note is coming at you from the wilds of eastern El Salvador. The semi-wilds, at very least.

We hadn’t planned to venture this far off the map, but things in Tunco just weren’t what we’d hoped for, so plans changed. Nobody’s fault, really. It’s just not the chilled out little enclave it once was. If I were 21 and looking to get wasted and laid, sure thing, give me Tunco with its noise and its clamor and its careless procession of fiestas. But I’m not 21. I’m 30-and-a-half. And it’s not just my changing tastes that cause issue. It’s my need, more and more, to be amongst my own kind.

So strange. Have you ever been somewhere that just felt wrong? In a deep and unsatisfying way? It was like that with Tunco, and so we cut our losses and begged our way to a partial refund from Papaya’s Lodge and were on our merry way, no hard feelings.

We spent a few days in the northeast of El Salvador – Perquin and Mozote, to be specific, both former FMNL guerilla strongholds during El Salvador’s bloody civil war. We did some pretty intense guerilla tourism up there and I’m working on a piece about it, to be unveiled at a later date. It was definitely the highlight of our trip, for me at least, and I got some amazing material and met some pretty awesome Guanacos. After that, we decided to hit the beach by way of San Miguel.

The bus ride to the playa was rather eventful. I struck up a friendly conversation with a talkative if slightly rough-looking hombre seated in front of us. He was sorta greasy and slick, but he spoke good English and I smiled politely as he told me how he used to live in Virginia, how he knew right away I was a gringa, etc., etc. Morgan was being super rude to him and refusing to join the conversation, and I figured it was simply because he didn’t like the locals flirting with me.

As soon as the guy hopped off the bus, however, Morgan was like, “Didn’t you see his hands?!”

Apparently, they were covered with “MS-13” tattoos, identifying him as a member of El Salvador’s most notorious and violent gang, the Mara Salvatrucha 13 (“Clever Trout Gang” in English). We tried to decide which would have been worse: if he and his companion had tried to start shit with us, or if they’d tried to be our friends. Probably, the friends scenario would have ended worse, we agreed, because how do you beg off a night out on the town in the company El Salvadoran gang members without causing offense? You don’t.

Sometimes I am not the most observant soul.

In any case, we eventually made it safe and sound to our destination, a long, thin double lot of beachfront paradise called La Tortuga Verde. It’s essentially a backpacker resort and turtle sanctuary located on a long, dusty road between Playa El Cuco and Playa Esteron in the far east of this tiny, vaguely mango-shaped country.

Tortuga is the pride of a blissed-out Miami Beach expat called Tom, and it’s as close to perfection as we’ve come on this bumpy, five-week sojourn. Cheap, clean rooms with screened in porches and huge bathrooms (nevermind the family of cucarachas that lives in our soap dispenser) hammocks everywhere, a full menu with some good seafood, and a big, clean pool.

The beach here is huge and empty and full of strange looking sea and sky creatures. I go running in the morning and walking in the afternoon and I wish desperately for a telephoto lens.

Things have been quiet since we arrived last Monday and we’ve slipped into a sort of routine.

Mornings, we wake up ridiculously early – say around 6 a.m. – and Tom and Morgan head to Las Flores, a point break a few minutes west of Cuco, for surfing. On their way, they drop me at Tom’s office in Playa El Cuco so I can hook up to high speed Internet and get some of my writing and editing work out of the way. Tom’s office has not got much to recommend it by way of atmosphere – it’s an empty, unvarnished first-floor apartment in the middle of town with a broken toilet, a plastic table and chair, a standing fan, and a single solitary boarded up window. It abuts a brothel / beer bar on one side, where I’m told the whores cost $3 and which I almost mistook for a regular bar on my first day in town. Most days, I leave the officina door open and the iron safety gate shut so I can watch the taxi drivers and the drunk fishermen wander in and out of the whorehouse. Sometimes, the ladies themselves even venture into sunlight, usually to escort a customer back to his car after the visit is finished. These women are dumpy and usually dressed in shiny, skin-tight, synthetic tops, but they don’t seem unhappy. However, my efforts to take in the scenery and breathe in a bit of fresh ocean air are often thwarted by a few key subversive El Cuco forces.

One: when the door is open, I’m easy to spot, and people constantly try to sell me mangoes and coco water and really ugly souvenirs through the metal grates. On Friday, a brown hand reached through the grate and push the inside door open and when I stood up to confront the intruder, I was greeted by a schoolteacher and a crowd of about 30 high school students all staring at me in bewilderment. I couldn’t figure out what they wanted, but the teacher kept holding up a little plastic baggie which appeared to be filled with pepper and asking for something indecipherable and I wasn’t in the mood to translate or pantomime, so I just shook my head and pretended I spoke no Spanish.

“No vivo aqui,” I kept saying, and eventually they gave up and went away.

My best guess is they wanted a pair of scissors, a drink of water, or perhaps were on a scavenger hunt of some bizarre sort. You figure it out.

The other issue with keeping the office door open is that the cocteleria across the street has by some stroke of fate come into an old fashioned jukebox packed to the gills with Mariachi numbers and terrible modern Spanish pop, and as soon as they’re up and about – usually around 7:30 a.m. – they start blasting it full tilt. I’m talking the loudest, thumpingest music you’ve ever, ever heard. Even from across the street, it makes my ears bleed and my stomach ache, and worst of all, they enjoy changing songs halfway through, which has always been a personal pet peeve. It seems like a losing strategy for attracting breakfast crowds if you ask me, but very, very loud music is sort of due course around here. I’m talking ridiculously, insanely loud, so loud it rattles your skull and you can begin to hear what the person a foot away from you is saying.

Tom, who is fond of punch one-liners, has made up a little joke about it:

Why do El Salvadorans play their music so loud?

To drown out the silence.

Bada-boom bada-bing. There is definitely some truth there.

At any rate, Tom and Morgan usually pick me up around 10 a.m. and we head back to Tortuga for breakfast and hammock time. I’ve been eating tons of fruit and eggies and suffering the bad coffee. Afternoons, we sun on the beach and by the pool, take siestas, go for walks, etc. A few days back, we took a boat ride out to the nearby Mangalay Bay, a twisty, turny maze of mangrove that feels a bit like the mini-Amazon. We also visited the shrimp boats in search of dinner that day, although too late, as they’d sold all their catch off.

Evenings are more food, more reading, a few Golden beers or coco locos if the mood strikes, and off to bed ridiculously early. We’re talking 8:30 p.m., here. I am definitely becoming an old lady. I like it.

Best of all, Morgan is doing some design work for Tom in exchange for a generous room/food tab, so we’re pretty much living for no cost these days. It’s wonderful, but all good things must end, and we’ll probably head out in a few days. We’ve got about a week left of vacation and we want to hit up Suchitoto before San Salvador and the airport. Supposed to be a lesser cultural capital and it’s on the way, besides.

There’s much more to say, but my thighs are stuck to this plastic chair and my laptop is overheating, so I’ll sign off. Photos and thoughtful, eloquently penned essays on the wonders of this sweet, slightly downtrodden country to come. We return to Cannon Beach April 2, soon enough that we’ve begun to make up a mental list of things we want to do and eat when we get back. Top of the list: good coffee and pizza, plus ribs at Bigfoot’s in Seaside for Morgan, hot showers galore, high speed Interneting, and, for me, lots of long-distance running.

PS: I bragged on The Facebook that I’d read 15 books since we arrived and someone requested a list. I guess I’m going to make myself look slightly less erudite when I reveal the full spread of titles, as many were cheesy, mindless indulgences. Ah, well. I’m up to 17. Here goes:

Books read during this trip, with authors included as I recall them:

“Empress Orchid” – Anchee Min

“Flint” – Louis L’Amour (The best Western writer of all times, introduced to me by my late Papa Tom. Gracias, Papi!)

“La Societe du Spectacle” – Guy Debord (Nothing does wonders for your Spanish skills like reading a book in French, believe you me)

“Tanner on Ice”

“Tanner’s Virgin”

“A Long Line of Dead Men”

“Working” – Studs Terkel

“Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married” (Terrible but sort of awesome Brit Chick Lit … abandoned halfway through)

“The Wayward Reporter: The Life and Times of AJ Liebling”

“Salvador” – Joan Didion

“The Carrie Diaries” – Candace Bushnell (give me a break, it was all this one hostel had!)

“Start Something That Matters” – Guy who invented Tom’s Shoes

“Cat’s Eye” – Margaret Atwood

“Surfacing” – Margaret Atwood

“Light on Snow” – Anita Shreve

“At First Sight” – Nicholas Sparks (worst book of ALL TIMES! AVOID!)

“Shirley” – Charlotte Bronte (In progress, because I’ve gotten a hankering for reading material that will stimulate my brain instead of merely my spinal cord)

“Sophie’s Word” (In progress)

Notes from the campo

After almost three weeks baking at the noisy, busy beaches of El Salvador, we’ve decamped for the countryside. We got up at oh-dark-thirty this morning and waited for an hour on the side of the highway for a northbound bus, where we entertained ourselves by throwing bits of a granola bar at a brood of scabby chickens pecking away at the hardscrabble earth and dodging massive, wobbling double-trailer semi-trucks as they roared past a mere four feet away. Never to worry … bus 287 ferried us safe and sound  from El Tunco to Sonsonate. It was a cramped and crowded ride, but as our brilliantly cast chicken bus climbed in elevation, we were treated to a steady breeze and some wonderful Mariachi music – a blessed departure from the massive quantities of Bon Jovi and bad Sublime covers we’ve been forced to digest in Tunco. In general, aside from a creepy dude staring at me for the whole 2.5 hour ride, it was most enjoyable. Our trip took us along La Ruta de Las Flores – The Route of Flowers – so called for the massive bunches of colorful flowers and foliage that line the road certain times of year. Things are a bit dried out now, as rainy season has yet to even begin to suggest its presence, but there were definitely some wonderful views of volcanoes and even a few swatches of red and purple.

We changed buses at the Sonsonate bus terminal, which was slightly filthy and gloriously noisy and teeming with humanity as the locals geared up for their morning commutes. Breakfast was 2 cafes con leche, plus a caramel donut and a little vanilla tart and this strange but also strangely wonderful parfait thing with layers of pie crumb, custard, whipped cream, fruit and candied peaches. Plus there was a nasty looking strawberry on the top, but I threw that out. It was more of a dessert than a brekkie, I guess, a concept that is, I think, highly underrated. I call it breakfessert and it’s at least as good as cold Chinese or pizza in the early hours, especially when preceded by a long, cramped bus ride in a strange and foreign land and accompanied by very strong coffee. So, yeah. Breakfessert. Pass it on!

Our visit to the bus station also provided occasion for a little fond reminiscence. As we wandered the dusty yard in search of autobus 249, I pointed out to Morgan the very spot where, three years earlier whilst embarking on the very same bus route, I’d almost shit my pants, 50 feet from of a public bano, and how would that have been for irony? I’d literally been forced to throw my backpack to the ground and make a run for it, opportunistic thieves be damned, because nothing else mattered in that terrible moment. I was feeling nostalgic this morning, so I made another visit to the bano of my discontent, and that particular sanitario is definitely as dees-goosting today as memory served. I literally had to step over a giant, smashed cucaracha to reach the toilet.

We were dropped off in Juayua at mid-morning sans map, but it’s a small and neatly laid out kind of place, so after wandering about for a mere 15 minutes, I managed to locate the Hotel Anhuac, which is definitely at least as cool as it was back in 2009. We scored the last private room and we’ve spent the day relaxing and enjoying the fresh air.

So far it’s been a slow, easy go. We visited the Black Jesus that Juayua is famous for (far be it from me to offend, but that’s what they call it … Cristo Negro … And that’s pretty much what it is), ate some amazing food at the weekend market and had a siesta. I’ve also been trying to read one of the Spanish-language papers every day to improve my vocabulary and keep up on current events. This eats up a good chunk of one’s day when you read as slowly as I do.

It can also lead to bad siesta dreams, as almost every story is about the machinations of the Zeta cartel (Yes, they’re a Mexican gang, but apparently they’ve hijacked the entirety of the Pan-American highway and its environs) and terrible car accidents and innocent families being slaughtered in their sleep. But if working in the newspaper biz taught me anything at all, it’s that the contents of a newspaper don’t, and can’t, and aren’t trying to, paint a complete picture of any given place. It’s just news. Alas.

Tomorrow, we’re going to hike to some waterfalls and see a coffee plantation. I’ll take tons of pictures, but I won’t be able to upload them, as I still have no computer cord. Again, alas.

The Hot Trot Rot-Guts

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

Convalescing in Tunco

I’ve always maintained that the lead-in quote is sort of a lazy man’s way to begin an essay, but you’ll have to excuse my sloth. I’ve been puking and shitting myself for the better part of three days, now, and my brain feels like it’s full of frijoles revueltos. I have little cleverness to offer this warm, tropical evening.

But I do aim to please, so if the aforementioned quote has a bit too much in the way of ipso facto sentimentalism for your taste, how about this one?

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux

That feels very true right now.

Wednesday night went off without a hitch. Morgan and I, playing gin rummy and drinking off a bottle of rum and giggling a lot and watching “The Big Lebowski” before bedtime.

My stomach started rumbling as I drifted off to sleep to the sounds of a bunch of wasted Saldavoreans playing a drinking game across the street. I’m not sure what the premise was, but at least one of the rules seemed to dictate that everyone scream as loud as possible each time someone took a shot. Which many, many people did, over and over and over.

By four in the morning I felt woozy and my whole body hurt. I couldn’t think straight and I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t wake up and there was all the time this terrible, terrible feeling in my gut. I knew something bad had been done, was coming, and you pick which end from. You can fill in the rest. It was violent. It was ugly. It was excessive and excessively noisy. It was accompanied by fever, and a sleep so deep it felt like being dead.

Three days later, it’s still not done.

I don’t know what got me in this state. I don’t know if it was the generous amounts of pickled lettuce and chili pepper I’ve been unadvisedly slathering onto my pupusas, or perhaps the chicken and cheese quesadilla with fresh salsa on Wednesday night that remains, as it happens, the last solid food I’ve eaten in half a week. I don’t know if it was the swimming pool, or the licuados, or those couple of times I brushed my teeth with tap water. I’ve been fairly careful, but there you have it.

Theories abound. Some nasty stomach virus is going around town, or so my friend Stav told me when I ran into her on the street last night. It was one of my first outings since becoming ill – Morgan thought it would be good for me to get up and do some walking – and I would have stayed to find out more details, but was a mere minute from pooing myself and had to not-so-gracefully bow out of the conversation.

I hear the gaunt, fevered look is in again this year.

It’s mostly been like that. At this point in my convalescence, I’ve graduated to violently expelling matter from the lower half of my body only, and I’ve even become able to stomach plain pasta and salty soup a few times a day, but the problem remains that my body usually allots me a five-second fire drill before the floodgates open, which means I pretty much throw my fates to the wind every time I venture more than a few dozen feet from my toilet.

Even in a one-caballo town such as Tunco, where public bathrooms come in short shrift, that limits my mobility pretty significantly.

I met up with a friendly doctora in the hostel this morning who escapes the capital to surf here each weekend, and she was kind enough to take stock of my symptoms.

It is most likely salmonella (umbrella term for any number of bacteria that cause food poisoning, and can lead to typhoid fever if not treated, in case you were curious, as I was) or perhaps a parasite, or perhaps that nasty virus Stav mentioned.

The doctor took me to the local “pharmacy,” which was basically a glass case full of random medications in a shuttered Internet café. We chatted for awhile as she and the shopgirl dug through baggies of free-floating blister packs and half empty boxes of medications in search of Ciproflaxin and Metronidazole, which were both blessedly there.

So now I’m on my way.

Morgan has been my savior. He takes my temperature with the back of his hand, pours Gatorade down my throat, makes me chamomile tea and insists he’s “not bored,” even though we’ve done absolutely nothing in four days.

I’m trying not to be upset about my ill luck, even though, just saying, if you add the duration of this illness to the duration of the flu I caught when I arrived, it equals up to me being knocked on my ass ever since the day we arrived.

I’m trying to enjoy the rest. I’m reading voraciously, sleeping ad infinitum, drinking lots of fresh fruit shakes, and biding time, waiting to be shot of this insidious thing that has crawled into my gut and delayed my fun.

There’s one of those evil, evil Life Lessons in here somewhere, I’m sure.

“Everything is good for the story,” editors are fond of telling stymied reporters.

I think it’s a sentiment that can be writ much more broadly. Everything that happens is, in its own demented way, sort of good for us. Illness builds character. Adversity breeds, well, maybe more character? I dunno. I’m stretching, here. It’s hard to be profound when you’re on the supermodel diet.

I’m gonna sign off here. I need to go buy a new toothbrush and a coconut with a straw in it. Doctora’s orders.

Your pity is welcomed.

Strange encounters at equator’s edge

No camera cord ... pixelated photobooth is the best I can do.

Well, well, well …

It’s a sultry mid-morning here in El Tunco, El Salvador – our eighth morning on the beach, by my calculations – and I’ve finally managed to dredge up the motivation to crawl into a hammock and write up a few notes about the trip so far.

I’ve been a bit surprised by my complete disinterest thus far in capturing our adventures via either pen or camera. Little literary bits pique my interest countless times each day – the thin, scrappy dogs rolling themselves around in the rust-colored dust, mention of a gunpoint mugging at the north end of the beach last Saturday night, passing conversations with taxi drivers and the way the old Dona cruising around with a bucketful of donuts on her head swindled Morgan and I out of a dollar the other day. Usually, I’m sort of compulsive about documenting my time away from home. But this time around, I’m just letting it all slip past me. Just Being isn’t my default modus operandi, to put it lightly, but I suppose it shouldn’t surprise; The Unexpected has materialized as the general theme of this trip hence far.

I wasn’t expecting quiet, timid El Tunco to have been recast as a thumping, bumping surfer enclave in the three short years since I last visited. Business is booming, priced have doubled, and jocky, fratty, orangey-brown-colored surfer boys prowl about the hostel and beach like sleek, rutting silverbacks.

I wasn’t expecting to get knocked flat on my ass with an insidious case of flu the moment we hopped off the chicken bus and checked ourselves into Papaya’s Lodge. This sickness has left me dizzy and feverish, unable to do much so far but sleep and eat and read old Western novels. I’m on the up and up, still struggling to wiggle out from under this sickness. Despite solid nights of sleep and more fizzing vitamin C tablets that I’d care to remember and despite the gallons and gallons of fruit shakes I’ve been sucking down since we arrived, I’m still hacking up yellow-green phlegm and have scheduled a visit with the local naturopath this afternoon in the hopes of a cure.

I wasn’t expecting to forget my camera cord, which has rendered me totally unable to upload pictures. And I wasn’t expecting to care so little about the lack of such an essential journalist’s tool.

There have been plenty of good surprises, too. I’ve reverted with much gusto to the Spanish tongue, and I feel as if I’ve really reached a new level of proficiency. I haven’t been overly tempted to smoke cigarettes, although there was one lamentable incident with a Beedi that mysteriously appeared on the floor of our room the other morning. I’m adjusting well to the heat and the cold showers, and although I’ve been battling mild episodes of the runs, my stomach is holding up quite well in this humid, bacteria-rich clime.

I wasn’t expecting any of this, but I wasn’t really expecting anything at all, I guess. I’ve been too busy working these past few months to spend much time pondering how this trip would be.

If I sound unhappy, I’m not. All of what’s happened here so far makes life feel strangely immediate and insular in a way that is comforting. It also makes home that much further away.

Last night, Morgan and I met up with our friend Stav for Italian food at one of the new restaurants, Tunco Veloz (which means something like Velocity Pig, although I may be overlooking some subtlety of translation).

Stav is Israeli, and she was one of the first people I met during my 2009 trip to Central America. We traveled together awhile through Guatemala and El Salvador, and were indeed in each other’s company when we both first discovered the magical El Tunco. For her part, Stav fell so slam bang in love with the place that she’s spent the better part of the time since living here.

As we reminisced about our first days in Tunco those years ago and the way it has grown since, we got to talking more generally about how places change and will themselves into new iterations over passing time. About how every trip you take is different, and how that can sometimes be disappointing or disorienting if you don’t recognize that, yeah places change, but more significantly and more inevitably, we ourselves change.

There is an old Buddhist saw that says you can’t step in the same river twice. So it is with us humans. We can’t help but recast our own spots, over and over. Even in battling change, we change ourselves irretrievably.

Another Buddhist morality tale describes a man who spends his life wandering endlessly from town to town, eternally disappointed, chasing the thread of hope that, eventually, he’ll find “The Right Place.” One of those proverbial Wise Old Men sees him struggling and, aware that the seeds of dissatisfaction most often sprout from within, proffers this warning: “Wherever you go, there you will also find yourself.”

So true.

The Buddhists have some spot on parables, I guess. In my travels, I’ve found myself in some pretty strange and improbable places. Full disclosure: when I was in El Tunco last, I was in a pretty dark place, mentally. Fresh out of grad school and mostly unhinged by chagrin and loneliness and drinking far too much Cuban run and chain smoking like you’d never believe. Seriously, my habit had gotten so bad that even when I was smoking a cigarette, all I could think about was my next cigarette. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to smoke and watch the geckos and my heart would just rumble. I worried that I’d never, ever find my way. My brain kept resetting itself to Ennui, no matter what I tried, and it became a feedback loop: I chastised myself for being unable to relax, unable to let go, unable to outrun personal ghosts, and then I’d feel worse. I’d managed to get myself far, far from home, yeah, but jumping ship had never been the problem for me. Quite the opposite: I packed my bags and took off over and over, but the past never felt far enough away. Indeed, it crested eternally overhead, a wave that threatened at each moment to break and hurtle me far, far upshore, to even stranger and darker places.

If it sounds dramatic, well, it was. Like I said, encountering myself had proven a discomfiting proposition throughout my 20s, as I made my way across dozens of countries.

As it turned out, no address at all was, for me, the worst address to live at.

Cut to now. It makes my head dizzy to think of all that has happened in the past three years. So many new towns and new faces. A new love, who is at this moment swinging in the hammock to my left. A new career. And my own resolve to cultivate that elusive peace of mind.

To be honest, I don’t really think I’ve succeeded just yet, but I do know that it’s easier this time around for me to sit still without reaching for a smoke or a strong drink or the hand of a stranger. My mind feels quieter. Maybe that’s why I’m so sleepy and feverish this past week. I’ve been plagued by alternating bouts of nightmare and insomnia these past few years. Wanting to change myself but never really having the energy to think about how.

You don’t have to get far from home to gain new perspective, but it certainly does help. Tunco is like a soothing balm for all of the psychological ills my fevered Western brain can cook up. And, believe you me, there are many.

Who was it that said you don’t take a trip so much as a trip takes you? Perhaps the Buddhists again, I’m not sure.

What I do know is that hitting the road means encountering yourself in a way that is unsettlingly immediate. If you can get past the discomfort of that long, inward gaze, if you can stare yourself down without blinking, or maybe just blinking a little, wonderful things are in store.

I’ve gotta go grab lunch, but I’m committing to writing more quite soon. I may find a way to upload a few pictures, as well. Or I may not.

Hasta luego.

Salvador countdown!

It’s President’s Day. M and I are wasting time in a Portland coffee shop before our flight. The music basically sucks and I’ve got a kink in my neck and the ppl behind the counter are sort of useless, but I’m definitely digging this peppermint tea. We leave around Midnight, but we decided to hit the city early for beers, good food and a few farewells to friends. We’ve eaten take-and-bake pizza, brunch items, meatball sannies and leftover meatball sannies. Now we’re bored and it’s raining and most of our friends are at work.

In 12 hours’ time, we take off for Houston, where I’ve probably spent a cumulative week of my life waiting for various flights. (Seriously. I’ve spent so much time there I have two hiding spots where sleep and wi-fi are easy to come by, although one of them is behind a big wall of screens with flight info on them and I usually get kicked out of it after an hour or so). In 24 hours’ time, we’ll be landing in San Salvador. From there, it’s straight to the beach, boyyy! El Salvador is a mercifully tiny country, roughly the size of Massachusetts, and our destination is a mere 30 minutes from the airport.

I socked away a few too many books and medicines and camera accessories, but otherwise my pack is rather sparsely appointed. Six weeks is either an incredibly long time or an incredibly short time, depending on how you look at it, and it’s sort of an odd amount of time to pack for, esp. when you are a worst-case-scenario kind of gal.

This is something of a working vacation for me, which makes me feel old and definitely un-backpackerlike… I’m hoping to get a few pieces together to sell to travel mags when I return home to Oregon and I’ll also be doing my manuscript editing gig to keep the cash flowing. But who cares when it’s all happening from the comfort of a hammock?

Haha. Last night, we were out at Mash Tun and this super drunk chick was bothering Morgan and he said, “Don’t talk to me; I’m short.” HAHA

T Minus 12.5