el bolson, goodbye dear friend

hey, it is now the end of march and after a little extension of our time in el bolson, vida and i are now back in mendoza. the time in the mountains was fantastic. we did two multi-day trips into the andes near town, one to el cajon del azul and los laguitos and one to cerro lindo, and spent some time on vida´s friend´s farm in between. the whole thing was fantastic. el cajon del azul is a hardcore little canyon area on the rio azul, which by the way is one of the most amazingly pristine rivers i have ever seen, and los laguitos are a cluster of lakes further up the river valley from the cajon. both places are filled with mind-bending beauty. cerro lindo is a hell of a climb straight up for 12 kilometers to a collection of peaks and small creaks winding their way through alpine meadows. on almost all of the hikes around el bolson there are rufugios where you can camp or stay in the cabin and have access to a nice little rustic kitchen. all of the refugios are manned by refugieros who are wonderful mountain people often times homesteading there. many of them make homebrews and bring supplies up on horseback, grow as much food as they can, and make dulces out of wild berries. basically they are a bunch of badasses living in the sticks. it has been so nice to get some serious mountain time. the farm we were at was excellent as well. it is run by vida´s friend alex and they have been organizing the first csa in the area(which could potentially mean that it is the first in argentina) and holding natural construction courses, the whole nine yards. as far as the pictures go, the first two are from chile, the next two are of the cajon, and then one the second lake at los laguitos and a waterfall at cerro lindo. i am running out of time on the internet at the moment, but will post again soon, with more pictures and such. all my love.....................

wow, a lot of catch up to do

hello everyone, i have been seriously slacking and have to catch up a bit. so, since the last time i posted there was a big ass earthquake down here..... quite a big deal too. as i´m sure you all have seen on the news the quake was an 8.8 and caused a lot of damage and loss. tunuyan, argentina is almost at the same lattitude as the epicenter but on the other side of the andes. however, even after its journey through the mountains it still measured around 5.5 when it reached us and woke me up in the middle of the night on the second story of a building that is still under construction, shaking me around for somewhere around a minute and a half while i made my way down the ladder to the ground level...... quite the experience, i´ve never felt such a strong one before. there was a strong aftershock about fifteen minutes later, and yet another aftershock strong enough to wake me up the next night. luckily the house was not damaged at all and we have been able to continue working as usual. life on the farm has been quite nice with good people coming and going. now, vida, sarah, and i are on a little vacation down south. with the way the timing of the season is working out both vida and i had to renew our visas so we took a little trip into chile and spent a few days in a little cabin on a beautiful lake in a town called entre lagos. it was truly spectacular with vivid green pastures, epic mountains, swimming in the crystal clear lake, and indulging in a little bit of television. now we are hanging out in el bolson, a great little hippy mountain town in the lakes district (northern patagonia), drinking really good beer, going hiking in the mountains and haning out on the farm of some friends of vida´s. anyway, i´ll be in touch again soon and hope that you are all have had a lovely winter as i imagine that the first signs of spring are starting to come around now. love you all........................

ps. here is a link to a blog from our friends jeff and tamara who were a couple of awesome volunteers on the farm. these particular posts have a lot of pictures of the farm and of tunuyan.
http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bakpaknbizclass/2/1267124808/tpod.html
http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bakpaknbizclass/1/1267000696/tpod.html

the good life

yo yo,
so, today i woke up (in the upstairs room of the house, which is the first picture in the last post, because i officially moved in there in the past few days) went out to the balcony and watched a flock of thirty plus green parrots go at the sunflowers in the garden for about an hour. then i made everyone orange banana custard crepes, and followed that up with an eggplant curry..... oh the joys of cooking and hanging out on a day off. we have started putting up the straw bale walls in the house, which is very exciting. otherwise, life is just cruising along and the time is flying..... before i know it i will be back on the road heading north, wierd. anyway, gotta go now, check in again soon. all my love......

settled in and lovin life

wow, it´s been some time....... but man has it felt good to just check out for a little while. anyway, life here in tunuyan is great. eating fresh from the garden at every meal, hanging out with wonderful people, and constantly doing the good work. most of the time on a daily basis is spent working on the house. we have been mudding walls like crazy people and have made an amazing amount of progress in doing so. recently there has been a lot of bottle art going into the walls, very exciting, and the construction of the straw bale walls is about to begin. i have also been working on doing custom frame and sill work for windshield windows, a job that has been challenging and fun. in the garden we have just begun to do a bit of cover cropping, and are trying to keep up with the harvest by doing a good amount of food preservation including drying and canning. otherwise life is just rolling by filled with beauty every day. i love you all so much and miss you with all of my heart, but damn is it good to be in the middle of summer right now. all of my love...........

ps. my picture situation is pissing me off. i can´t seem to find an easy way to share a lot of pictures in a time efficient manner, so you´ll just have to be patient as i slowly get them to you a few at a time.....

back from the butter

wow, barreal is awesome. amazing little town in the desert with high snowy peaks on one side and sandstone foothills on the other. the town is way laid back and the people are awesome. got really drunk at the campsite, whew, nice every once in a while but it is nice to be going back to the farm for fresh veggies and lots of sleep. the machine i´m on right now doesn´t have an easy access usb and we have to catch the bus back to tunuyan shortly but the pics will be up for yáll to see next time i use the net in tunuyan. all my love.........
ps. rowan i forgot last time, final day count from mexico to tunuyan was 22. also, i´ll let you know about research potentials... i´ll be doing it as well but will have limited internet access. if you have the time it would be awesome if you could look up some info on pressure releases for the hot water side of things.

kickin it

yoooooooooo, well, i kinda dropped away there for a minute. but hey, how can you not when you show up to a little farm in the countryside. anyway, on the bus ride from lima to mendoza what happened was interesting. first we spent about an hour and a half in the middle of the first night pulled off at a truck stop while the bus drivers were assessing a situation with the suspension. well, they didn´t get it fixed then but we were able to go to the next big town along the way the next day and spent several hours at a mechanic trying to remedy the situation. after we got that all fixed up and were heading out of town to the border of chile we started to have engine troubles. so, back to town, and it was late enough at that point that we just had to wait till the next day to get a mechanic and work it out. so they put us up in a hotel for the night and in the morning the hotel manager comes in and tells me that i am to go to the bus at ten. when i get there i find out that i am one of three people on the bus who are going to mendoza rather than buenos aires and that through dumb luck that means that i get to get on a different bus that left about a half hour later. hell yeah, i don´t know what happened with the others, cause they were still working on the bus when we took off. then when we were about to get to the argentinian border a small landslide happened in the andes that had to be cleared before we could pass. but that ended up working out well because it put me in mendoza at six in the morning instead of three in the morning. anyhoo, tunuyan is awesome. its a nice little town with a great ice cream place and a fantastic view of the andes. the sunrises and sunsets are absolutely amazing. i´ll be uploading some great pictures when i get a bit more time. at the moment i am in san juan waiting out a bus layover to barreal. a little camping trip in the mountains with vida and her friend sarah. the other folks that are at the farm right now are wonderful, but by the time we get back almost the entire crew will have switched. it is very hot and the main work that we have been doing is plastering the walls in the house. everyday we go to the ditch to cool off and i can spend the entire day with no shoes......... yes. also exciting is that vida has decided that my mission while i am here is to design and implement an oven/hotwater heater combo for the house. excellent. more to come soon. right now i have to go check out what the guidebooks call ¨scenic butter¨. all my love...............................................

por fin, ya llego en tunuyan

i´ve finally made it to tunuyan. crazy bus ride including a breakdown and a landslide that held us up in the chilean andes. anyway, just wanted to let you know i arrived. gonna go to the farm now and rest for a minute. will post more details when i have not just spent 4 days in transtit. all my love...................

onward to mendoza

hey hey, the strike here in peru was resolved yesterday afternoon, so today i am off to mendoza. i was able to get a bus direct from here to there (60 hrs), which means that i will be in tunuyan on monday. damn right! yesterday was an interesting day, the morning was spent with other travellers trying to figure out the strike situation, since everyone has been somewhat ansy to get outta here. then in the afternoon i went with francis, the guy who runs the hostel i've been staying at, to run some errands. he had to go to the hospital to straighten out some things, and it just so happened that we ended up near the office of my bus company so we were able to straighten out that situation. along the way we went to one of francis' favorite sandwich joints and got a pan con chicharon. this sandwich was the size of my head with thick slices of roasted pork, sweet potatoes, and an onion/pepper relish. our final errand was to a metal shop to get some good hooks for putting up a hammock. it was awesome, these guys just started looking around the shop for different scraps and we watched them make some heavy duty hooks........ bending half inch thick rods into hooks, cutting up scraps into support pieces, welding everything together, the whole nine yards. anyway, it was a nice day for kind of stepping into everyday peruvian life. off to the bus here soon, all my love.....................

lima, lima, and more lima

hey all, sorry it's been so long since my last post. things have been calm, i just haven't put aside the time to post. my travels to lima went smoothly, there are crazy deserts here in peru. the deserts cover damn near the entire western half of the country and just go straight into the ocean. wicked cool. so, when i arrived in lima a transportation strike started for the whole country. all the buses and big trucks have just stopped. anyway, today is day four of the strike and i am still stuck in lima. luckily there is a nice beach here where i can pass the days. lima itself is an interesting city. there are ruins all over the place within the city and the food is fantastic. the bad part is the amount of people and traffic..... 12 million in the lima area. this makes for a fair amount of smog and a lot of congestion on the streets. it has deffinitely been nice to have a break for a moment, recuperate from the past travels and prepare for the next, but after a certain amount of time in a big city you just start to feel trapped and ready to leave. so, i'll be hanging on the beach till the strike ends. i have hope that i will be able to leave tomorrow, but we shall see. all my love...........

ecuador

damn, the andes are (excuse my french) fucking amazing. they are so huge and the canyons and valleys are so deep it is incredible. having spoken with a man on the bus from medellin to quito, i think that on my return trip i will be able to go and help out in an indegenous village in the ecuadorian andes..... how cool is that. this morning i was chillin outside the office of a bus company called ormeno waiting for it to open. while i was waiting a peruvian guy showed up to wait for the same bus. when it opened we found out that the bus for today was full, but we were able to get a different bus to the border and will be able to go to lima later today. he has been extremely helpful and full of information. he is from the amazon, close to iquitos. anyway i will travel with him to lima and then catch a bus to santiago......whoo hoo. only a few more days left to tunuyan. as always, all my love..............

colombia

hey everyone......... i´m in medellin right now waiting for the bus to take me to the border of ecuador. colombia is definitely a tourist destination... fairly modernized and safer than you would think of colombia as. haven´t been able to experience all that much since i have just been travelling through, but it has a range of climates, and so much fruit it´s ridiculous. dad, it´s not that i didn´t like panama, it´s just that i was stuck in panama city, which is very touristy and a party town. nonetheless while i was there i was able to buy local fish, eat lots of coconuts and pineapples and hang out with some good folks. i am getting close enough to the finish line now that i can feel it in my bones. i will be in quito tomorrow, and i think that i can get a bus straight from quito to lima, then lima to santiago chile. if both of those buses actually work out then i will be in tunuyan before i know it. at this point i am ready for that. it will be nice once i arrive to have a place to just hang out for a while. all my love............

fake out

hello everyone. i know i have not posted in several days, but i did not get on a boat when i arrived in panama city. actually, to sail is ridiculously expensive because it has been turned into some kind of tourist thing. it is possible to catch a cargo ship for much cheaper, but i missed it by one day. so, much to my dismay i have been reduced to boarding an airplane from here to cartagena. not too far so i dont feel that bad, but it still sucks. at any rate, i will be leaving tonight and arriving in colombia tonight. being stuck in panama city has been less than ideal, but i have made friends with many travelers while being here. i am very excited for the journey to continue after the flight. all my love..........

off to the south land

hey all, since i last posted i have gone through costa rica to panama. right now i am in david panama and will be getting on a bus at 11 tonight for panama city. i will arrive at 5 in the morning and have all day to figure out my boat situation. a man on the bus told me that he thinks that there are boats that leave from panama city and go across the pacific. if this is true it will speed up my journey a bit through colombia, and i might even be able to get to the coast of ecuador. it all depends, i´ll see when i get there. if i am able to get on a boat in the morning then it may be several days before you hear from me. hope all is going well in this new year for you. i am a bit tired at the moment, but couldn´t be in a better place. i love you all and love hearing your comments. it´s nice to know that i have my family and friends with me no matter how far away i am. all my love..............

in managua

i`m now in nicaragua and off to the costa rican border in the morning. the adventure goes on and i keep meeting locals that are very nice and willing to help me out. central america is a very interesting place. i like it a lot, but the level of poverty in some places is very sad. it is very strange to see people getting by on nothing, washing their clothes in the river, and having a mcdonalds just up the block. that said, the people i have met are awsome. dad, i met a dude on the bus that was a cuban version of you. he and his son were going to el salvador to visit his son`s gilfriend. he was a little firecracker of a guy and when i return i am going to stay with them in mexico on the beach :) all is well and the travels are going by slowly but quickly. i was a little bit stupid and got ripped off at the border of guatemala. didn`t lose much, but learned a lot. i will be able to avoid such situations in the future. i can`t tell you how much i appreciate the support of you all. i think about all of you when i am looking at the moon at night and know that you are looking at the same one. all my love.......

the weary traveller

so many amazing things have happened since i left the bosque. i had the dumb luck of having three locals, maira, elena and pita, take me to the reserva de mariposas. it was a cold overcast day so the butterflies were not in flight, but they were resting in the trees. que chido, there were thousands of butterflies in every tree and thousands of trees full of butterflies. then after the butterflies we went to the tour of legends in morelia for free since we were staying with one of the actresses.....wow, i'm so blessed. anyway, i'm in chiapas now, and off to central america today, then a boat, then the haul across south america. love to you all

mariposas

stayed at the bosque for new years..... concentrated the light of the blue moon on to everyone's third eye! now off to see an incredible butterfly migration..........................