| The Flying Marmot |
| Jessica Bernstein |
| Jessica Moon Bernstein is a U.S. schoolteacher who went to Peru in 2006 on a grant from Fund for Teachers. She posted articles and photos of her travels around Peru on her own blog spot, published by Blogger. Jessica’s blog, The Flying Marmot, takes you from a ceramics studio in Urubamba, Peru; to Machu Picchu; to shamanic ceremonies; to Peruvian villages. Her photos open the door to a part of the world most of us will never see. [view full item] |
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| Road Tripping: Mexico |
| Sean and Erin |
| We had fixed the camper with every little want, stuffed it full of cameras, books, stereos, lap tops, surfboards, clothes, tools, luggage, fishing equipment, cd’s, a generator, and more as well as decking out the camper with solar panels, pumps, extra tanks, new tires. The Toyota Tundra under the thing would have been quite a score by itself – a true “unintended consequence”. We had created the grand bon bon of gift offerings to the Third World (or US, for that matter). The more you got, the more you got to lose. [view full item] |
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| Road Tripping: Canada to California |
| Sean Barry |
| Erin and I fled the Front Range/Denver Area May 27th, 2006 in our handmade truck camper which we bought for $1500 bucks and spent a year prepping for the trip. I ended up installing a 40 gallon H20 tank (for extended stays at beaches/climbing areas), a stereo, an awning, stairs, an ac unit, a propane fridge, vent fan, a tv/dvd player, a bike rack, space case and way too much other stuff. [view full item] |
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| A Surfing Trilogy |
| Laif Gilbertson |
| Only a few times in my life had I been so excited. I laughed like a little girl – sat on my board giggling like an 8 year old, thinking, “I’m surfing in Mexico, I’m surfing in Mexico.” The fact that I had yet to catch my first wave was insignificant to my joy. And that’s when I fell in Love…with surfing. [view full item] |
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| Pieces of Conversations |
| Rob McGregor |
| I follow, listening. The two women are talking about the young girl – perhaps seven or eight years old. “And now she has a focus and a goal,” One woman says. The little girl interjects, “Yes, and when I have a focus and a goal, I’m bossy, but when I don’t, I’m not!” I start laughing, and fall back so they can’t hear me. I can’t imagine hearing a similar conversation in Spanish while leaving Gigante supermarket. Little Mexican girls just don’t say things like, “When I have a focus and a goal, I’m bossy.” [view full item] |
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| Erin's Story |
| Erin Needham |
| There is something special about being in an ecosystem where time moves slow and every resource is guarded and utilized to its fullest. It feels pure and clean. I feel the same thing every time I climb in an alpine environment, surrounded only by only rock and sky. It is clear, and it is cleansing. Maybe in the end it isn't about where you are – the desert or high above the ground – but who you are when you are there. In those places, who I am is stripped down, open, and able to see things in a most elemental way. This trip has provided that experience for me many times, and in many different ways. [view full item] |
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| Down the Rabbit Hole: My Gonzo Journey to the Laredo Border |
| Laif Gilbertson |
| I headed down to Playa del Carmen, hoping to score a Dive Master’s job for the winter and get some badly needed cash. Two weeks later things just weren’t panning out, so I packed up my backpack, my guitar, and my little brown dog, Michi, and walked out to the highway. I had 20 or 30 pesos in my pocket... [view full item] |
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| Mexico Travels |
| Peter Lippman |
| Ambar explained to us how Mayan healers consider words to be powerful, and they study the way words can heal the afflicted. During a healing ritual they will hold the forearm of a patient and pray words that go into the patient's veins and fight with the evil words that may be residing there. Then the good words and the evil ones will go up into the air and fight, erupting into a ball of flame.
Ambar showed us a massive avocado tree she planted in the courtyard of the Taller thirty years ago. She has been interviewing shamans and healers. Once she went and taped an interview with a woman in a village, and the tape turned up blank afterwards. She went and re-taped the interview with the willing healer twice more, each time the interview becoming more and more rich and detailed. But each time the tape came out blank. So she wrote a fourth interview by hand and transcribed it into her computer. Then the computer de-formatted the lines of text, and the genders of the articles in the Spanish language switched around and played games with her. Her techies couldn't fix the computer. So she called a shaman who prayed to the computer and passed a live chicken (a powerful article) over it, making incantations. That cured the computer. Now, when the techies find a problem they can't solve, they call that woman. [view full item] |
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| Trees, Dogs, Bears and Leopards |
| Ben Gilbert |
| King Dog ridge rose up sheer and terrifying, black rock to the sky and far below the glacial stream roared and rumbled on its cascading journey down from the icy, giant rock pinnacles to the Bay of Bengal. Half a mile high and two long, this natural, vertical barrier was our route into a lost and hidden Himalayan paradise. To the east - the river had no bridge and its seething white torrent impossible to cross; to the west - the hanging ice and giddy spires made it an unthinkable option. [view full item] |
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| The Exotic American Woman Who Sings in English |
| Gabrielle Silva |
| I was lucky enough to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Los Angeles in 1989 when I got the good idea to sell my car and my computer and fly to Salvador, Bahia, in Brazil. It was the only way I could think of to get some time on the beach and perhaps recover my nervous system and possibly my sanity as well [view full item] |
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| A Rat Catcher's Tale: Chapter 4 |
| Ben Gilbert |
| My father had introduced me to the writings of Carlos Castaneda when I was about fifteen years old. He handed me two paperback copies of the first two books and said I may enjoy them. Like a virus they infested my blood, intoxicated me, changed my worldview, threw me into disarray but I absorbed every word, letting them disrupt the world of my everyday. The magic world they conjured up was so seductive I bought and greedily devoured every new book and, at thirty eight years of age, now stood in a Barcelona seminar realising I had been tricked by writing; writing and reading were the only magical ingredients of these tremendous books, the tales they told, like this one, may have been real, but to the reader just words, no action, and it was time to throw the words away, throw the writings of Carlos Castaneda away, throw it all away; again this is a journey to extinction. [view full item] |
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| A Rat Catcher's Tale: Chapter 3 |
| Ben Gilbert |
| Hana had been just another e-mail enquiry; someone looking for a company in Nepal to fix up a peak climbing trip. There had been nothing out of ordinary in her request to be taken mountaineering except the fact that she lacked any real experience outside a few basic climbing courses in British Columbia. We ran an agency that supplied logistics to experienced mountaineers, not a climbing school, and therefore had turned her down. I had admired her naive daring and especially so when she informed us that she was untravelled and really knew nothing of mountains... Suddenly, with absolutely no regard for Hana, I was inventing an outrageous budget trek. I had already hijacked her trip well before she ever set foot on Himalayan soil; the terrorist in me unleashed by her unwitting invitation. [view full item] |
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| A Rat Catcher's Tale: Chapter 2 |
| Ben Gilbert |
| I ambled down the muddy street towards the office with a clutch of e-mails carelessly thrust into my pocket. Feeling slightly listless after my jaunt with Santos I pulled out one of the pieces of crinkled paper to settle and focus my wandering mind. Whilst trekking life is active and full, back here in Kathmandu, I find myself bored with not much to do; Hana had e-mailed asking for a letter. She told me to be introspective as I wrote my journal. Having witnessed me marginally demented (or perhaps there had been no margins) she couldn’t believe I was thinking of writing a book. I stood in the busy street staring into the void: a book! What had I been thinking of? It had never been my intention to write a book, only expose the impostor and the mirage of words that sustained it. I was daydreaming of Hana as I stepped off the street and into the office full of Tamang guides and friends drinking tea and spewing their fatuous gossip. [view full item] |
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| A Rat Catcher's Tale: Chapter 1 |
| Ben Gilbert |
| When I travel to far away places making transient stops, it is as if I am a phantom, aimless and disconnected. I had been to Nepal many times before, had run a company in Kathmandu, trekked all over its mountains, breathed its fresh air, but it was never enough; my demons always wanted more. As I stepped off the plane in Kathmandu, I had no idea of the extraordinary time about to unfold and how I would walk away blank, like a piece of paper, suggesting writing, that once written is thrown away. [view full item] |
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| Twelve Days Across the West |
| Rob McGregor |
| This was our first real long-distance ride – 1500 miles in all – and we took it at a leisurely pace of about 100 miles a day. We took rest days in Lake Tahoe, Virginia City, Eureka, and Salt Lake City. Riding was half the fun, but visiting the towns, taking photos and learning a little about western history was an important objective of the trip. This is more than a chronology of our ride. It is also a commentary on what we saw and learned along the way. [view full item] |
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| Crossing the Darien Straights |
| Sean Barry |
| The political situation in Colombia had reached the boiling point again and the guerillas were using the Darien as a refuge. This group has a reputation for what the Colombians call "road fishing". This meant sitting by the edge of a road and essentially robbing or kidnapping whatever comes into their path.... [view full item] |
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| One of Those Days in Ecuador |
| Ingrid Tistaert |
| The hillsides were comprised of the terraced fields of small farms and it looked as though a large emerald patchwork quilt had dropped from the skies and settled into gargantuan piles with steep valleys between. Small brown adobe houses had smoke from burning waste curling upward from side yards to mingle with the wet clouds that hung low to the ground. [view full item] |
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| Christmas Cheer |
| Ingrid Tistaert |
| In the far southwest corner of Bolivia, the sun begins its slow descent behind the volcanoes on the other side of a blood red lake. I sit atop a large rock for an hour admiring the deep red hues of the lake’s waters contrasting the snow-white mounds of borax along its shore. When the sky darkens from gold to lavender, I begin my descent down the small mountain... [view full item] |
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| 30 Days in Mexico |
| Peter Lippman |
| Freelance journalist Peter Lippman shares his travel diary during 30 days in Mexico: I have always felt that it was funny to spend so much time in the Middle East and Europe, while Mexico is right there in our—no, we are in their back yard. So finally I made it there, with the main goal of visiting and seeing a little of the land. Briefly, it reminded me of Egypt. Both places once had a high civilization, and the traces are everywhere—in the art, in the culture, in the faces of the people, which so often look uncannily like those in the stone carvings of the Aztecs and Mayas. [view full item] |
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| Guatemala Journal |
| Peter Lippman |
| The Chixoy Dam was Guatemala’s showcase development project in the late 70s and early 80s, intended to solve the country’s desperate energy problems and start Guatemala on the road to development. It was funded by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Instead, it put the country deeper in debt, enriched a series of brutal dictators, doesn’t work well, and worst, resulted in the massacre of half the village of Rio Negro, people who refused to leave their ancestral home quietly. [view full item] |
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| Ecuador Journal |
| Peter Lippman |
| The bus we took to Lago Agrio was a solid but ancient one. The brake pedal squeaked every time it was used. The bus smelled of sweaty people before anyone even got on. We crammed into our seats and leaned back, trying to go to sleep, but with little success. It was after 10:00 p.m. when we left. We couldn’t see any scenery, but we were going down, down down down towards the Oriente, the eastern/jungle part of Ecuador. A Mexican telenovela played on the television at the front of the bus. It was a rude ride. [view full item] |
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