Brilliant Blue Backpackers

One of the first rules of traveling I try to live by is... Whenever I visit a new place I always find the Australian (there always is at least one) and hang out with them. Invariably wild things happen and good times are had by all.

The first Australians Tyler and I really got to know on this trip were Tom and Chani Blue. They were at Casa Rosario when we arrived, showed us the ropes of life in San Pedro, and told us about the first 6 months of their year+ round the world trip.

The reason I mention them is because Chani (sitting next to Tyler in the picture above) writes for a magazine and just published an article about life and traveling in Guatemala. Not only is it a good snapshot of what it was like to bum around, but she used a picture of ours of Tikal. If you're curious the article is here.

My Life as an Amphibian.

Long ago, before I left the US for the first time I was amazed by how different places were within my country. To go from barren mountains above the treeline, to the controlled chaos that is Manhattan offered such a breadth of experience it was awe inspiring. But then, once I got to Europe, I realized that many of the experiences I'd had before were similar and that Europe was totally different. It still bewilders me to know that a three hour train ride can take you too a different country with a different language, food and customs. It's not that uniqueness neccesarily makes things better but it is really spiritually refreshing. But then, alas, I got to Japan. There I realized that despite all the differences Europe and the US share a lot of how we think and interact and so, in many ways, are very similar. It was Japan that was totally, totally different.

Yesterday we took our first ever scuba dive in the ocean. It was incredible, and after 15 minutes of practicing skills (we spent 3 hours the day previous doing others in a pool) we got to swim around a coral reef for about half an hour. And I'm utterly flabbergasted. We saw thousands of brilliantly colored fish that make me seriously doubt pure Darwininian evolution. How could something evolve to be so aesthetically beautiful and to stand out like a masters painting on such a breathtaking backdrop? Floating in the water like a hummingbird was surreal but oddly felt really comfortable as well. However things work out for the rest of my life, I know this... There will be more scuba in my life. A lot more.

I also realized something else. Of all the places I've ever been they've been defined by one overriding factor. They were all generally dry. In other words they're all nearly the same. Life Underwater, however, is totally different.

Mandatory Merriment

... And thats an order!

I left our readers hanging at the end of my last post. We had just become fully aware that we were suffering a drug-induced deppression from the medication we´re taking to prevent Malaria. I didn´t know what we´d do, or not do, about it. And truthfully we still don´t.

Malaria is one of the worlds deadliest diseases, about 400 million people get it every year,and about 4 million die from it. And although most of those suffering catch it in Sub-Saharan Africa it hits pretty hard around here too. The French, for example, had to give up digging the Panama Canal because they lost so many people to it. And although some cases are readily cured, others stick around for a lifetime.

Our symptoms could come out of a psychological textbook for minor depression. We´re finding our selves a little listless with low energy and not totally appreciative of things we used to enjoy. We find ourselves eating more, yet more hungry. Neither of us are used to sleeping much, but now we sleep a lot. Tyler used to open his store at 4am and I´m a lifelong insomniac, but now we´ve found ourselves averaging over eight hours a day of sleep. It´s not that things are bad, they aren´t and we´re having a lot of fun. It´s just that I don´t feel quite like myself sometimes and thats quite disconcerting.

So we have been, and will continue to, look into alternatives (Does anyone out there have any suggestions?) but our latest plan is to tackle it with Good Ol´Fashioned MacAllen Stubborness.

If our symptoms of those a normal psychological depression, could the solution be to treat it as if it was? Since we´ve identified what was happening it has gotten a lot better. When something I normally enjoy comes up, but I just don´t have the energy to do it...I force myself to do it anyway because I won´t be beaten by medication. And then I invariably end up enjoying it just as much as I´m used to. And we´ve both started putting a little excercise back into our daily routine and feel better for it. We´re trying to eat and sleep regularly and slowly I´m feeling myself come back into it.

The true test comes tomorrow, when we are due to take another one of our weekly pills. Thats when we hit our bloodstream with the heaviest dose, therafter it gets weaker and weaker and we naturally feel better and better.

So, in other words, tomorrow morning we´re both waging an internal war with a pharmaceutical. Can living deliberately defeat the malaise of Chloroquin?

My Malaria Malaise...

For the last couple weeks Tyler and I have both been in an odd mood. We have been going from one phenomenal experience to the next but along the way we´ve been feeling kinda disengaged and uninterested. We both loved Casa Rosario and really miss our teachers and the wonderful friends we met there. But by the end we were both kind of sick of it. Not really upset our unhappy but we had started feeling detached from a place we had cherished as a really wonderful home away from home. We didn´t really talk about it because we barely noticed it ourselves and everything seemed to be going well. We left San Pedro with a little geek graffitti in the dead of night.



From there we got to travel with our dear friend Kristina through Coban and onward without a hitch. It was fun, mostly. We had no complaints and had a good time with great company but I felt only partially engaged. Not that I don´t have my down moments, but I generally try to engage with life. I like to choosing what I do and then pro-actively throwing my whole self into whatever that may be. That´s what ´Live Deliberately´ is all about. And I was doing that, I suppose, but for some reason I sort of felt like I was going through the motions. From there we went to Semuc Champey which is heartbreakingly beautiful. We ended up spending two full days exploring this phenomenon where crystal clear water (with an emerald green tint) cascades through a series of natural pools via waterfalls.



Although there were others there, it wasn´t uncommon to have one of these clear pools to oneself. I´d swim with tiny brightly colored tropical fish, exactly like those I had in a ten gallon aquarium in Albany when I was 13 years old. We swam in awe, looking around at the massive cliffs and jungle around us and thanked the universe for letting us be here. I enjoyed it,loved hiking around it and swimming amongst it, but oddly when I wasn´t totally dazzled I felt just a little detached from it and from myself.



We visited Semuc Champey as day trips from the nearby town of Lanquin, where we were staying at El Retiro a paradise of another sort. Nestled in the crook of a rapid river we could tube in those emerald water from some distant caves to the little collection of thatched roofed buildings we called home.



El Retiro was laidback and fun with a running tab on inexpensive food and drink, and a preponderance of hammocks. Not to mention there were so many scantily clad lovely travelers it was the place of my adolescent (and honestly, my current) dreams.



Tragically I wasn´t, frusteratingly enough, the Don Juan my fevered pubescent adolescent self imagined I would be. It was still a wonderful place, I met some really cool people and the place was so comfortable that it was still just as much fun to stay solo. It´s not that I´m a playboy ever, but it did seem odd that for the entire six days we were there I barely even flirted with anyone. Have I just inexplicably given up on women, one of the better parts of my whole life? Although we were happy to stay there five days, on our last Tyler was chomping at the bit to leave this paradise as well.

It seemed odd, because it was a place designed for laidback human interaction with folks from all over the world. Or, in other words, Tyler`s ideal habitat. Tyler shares a very similar ´Live Deliberately´ philosophy with a powerful focus on the connections he makes with other people. Those of our readers who know him understand that when Tyler is with you he is focused on nothing but you which can make him intoxicatingly charismatic. But, oddly, Tyler was anxious to leave partially because he didn´t really feel like he was deeply connecting with anyone. We had a wonderful time I´d recommend to anyone but were happy to bust out of there and race north into the mosquito filled jungle around Tikal.



Tikal is amazing, it was the capital city of one of the largest and most sophisticated civilizations ever to exist in the Americas. But around 900AD, when the civilization collapsed, the city was misplaced. It´s hard to imagine that a city of upwards of 100,000 people could just be lost and forgotten but that makes it all the more fascinating. It wasn´t until 1848, nearly a millenium later, that a Swiss scientist stumbled across these ruins deep in the monkey filled jungle. Although only a small fraction of the enormous stone structures have been uncovered what there has been is staggering. Tyler and I spent a full day strolling around caught a sunrise and sunset from the top of two enormous temples and spent the night in a hammock sharing the jungle with screaming howler monkeys.



It was a phenomenal experience, of a life altering sort for a burgeoning history buff like myself. It´s a pity that we were both so blase about the whole thing. Don´t get me wrong, it was really cool and I´m glad we went. But it was so hot and humid that we were almost too tired to slap at all the potentially malaria ridden mosquitos circling us. So, after we´d seen and done enough to feel we´d been there we high tailed it out of there for a little Ecotourism destination called Finca Ixobel.



There we got to hang out with the house parrot, eat a great communal meal and swim in their pleasant little pond. While there we got to climb a "mountain" that was a perfect pyramid. After seeing those uncovered at Tikal Tyler and I are certain we were standing on an undiscovered Mayan temple but were both too apathetic to bring a shovel. Finally, one of us broached a topic that both of us were feeling but neither of us wanted to bring up. Why was it that while living such an utterly wonderful life were we not totally enamored and connected to it? Where did this subtle malaise come from and why were we both so uncharacteristically apathetic? We traced it back to three weeks ago, right before we left Casa Rosario. But what could possibly have happened?



Three weeks ago we started taking our Malaria pills, Chloroquin. We´d heard of all sorts of awful side affects that people experience while taking their Malaria preventative medicine: uncontrollable diarrea, pain, nightmares, depression and violent rages. A week before we went into a malaria zone we took our first pill in the weekly dose with trepidation, unsure of what we were in for. By the next day the only side effect we´d had were some really vivid and bewildering dreams. That night, and I´m not joking, I was car-jacked by a very grumpy looking Napolean. It was more fun than anything, and we started joking about taking all the pills at once to see how cool our dreams would become. Now I´m rocked back, more aware than I´ve ever been of the subtle effects drugs can have on our thinking and our lives. More than that, because of how it suddenly appeared and subtly affected everything I´m painfully aware of the insidious effect of long term depression. It´s been the first really hard lesson of my trip.

Pictures and Ponderings from a Pleasant Place

... but more on that later, when I get some pictures ready for stories.

Until then I´ve been doing a lot of thinking about life the universe and everything lately. This trip thus far is starting to act as a small microcosm of my my whole life until now.

We´ve been gone for about a month and half (I haven´t a clue what the exact date is today, and love that fact). Through good fortune and helpful advice Tyler and I were able to hit the ground running and grinning in Central America. After a month of classes our Spanish while not fluent can get us from here to there and in a babytalk conversation along the way. We´ve cut our teeth on crowded chicken buses, obscure little towns and the joys and pitfalls of travelling in a developing country. People we´ve met along the way have been kind and helpful and without them this experience wouldn´t be a fraction of what it is. But lately I´ve been feeling a tug that there should be something more. Its hard to sit in the paradise I´m at and look out onto such poverty and imagine that all is well with the world.

That mirrors much of my life in the past 28 years. Although I´ve had my share of challenges I´ve also lived a fortunate life that I´m deeply grateful for. Through generous people, rewarding experiences and more grants than I can count the world has really taken a gamble that I´ll somehow contribute at least as much as I´ve been given. In my youth throughout grad school, despite doing what I could, I definately felt that I was being offered far more than I was offering. The last few years of working and paying bills felt like in the grand scheme of things I was (and am) breaking even. Although the world, through some particularly generous people, were still investing in the man I may become I was also doing my share to make their investment worthwhile in the short term. But that, when I am honest with myself, doesn´t begin to pay back my karmic debt for the many things I´ve been given. I´m not sure how, or what, I should do. I just have an increasingly nagging feeling that I should do it.

Tyler and I, by mutual desire, are fully aware that we´re in the pure vacation part of our trip and that its end is approaching. We´ve spent a month with people teaching us Spanish, visited spectacular natural wonders and are looking forward to ancient ruins and a couple weeks living the beach bum life in Honduras. But although we´re comfortable and happy we are starting to wonder what we can do to help. We´ve lined up some volunteer work already. We´re helping out in an ecovillage in Ecuador and spending a month or two working on some South American organic farms. But we´re both getting antsy to leave Central America a little better than we found it. We´ve caught wind of a way to spend some time building Nicaraguan homes with Habitat for Humanity and another helping out a beleagured species of Sea Turtle. With that in mind we can thrive on the bliss we´re in now knowing that our turn to help is coming soon.