About three weeks before leaving on the trip around the world, we went on a short excursion to El Salvador and Colombia. Dave’s niece Annika left on a trip to Central America a day or two earlier.
Tuesday, February 21
Dave’s niece Annika showed up on her way to a planned vacation in Central America. I picked her up at the airport (several steps here omitted), and immediately upon arriving back at the house, the power went out. I think this will become a tradition, just to make sure you have to pack in the dark.
Dinner was not impacted, however, because we already had a date to join our friends Wanda and Joe for a hello-goodbye dinner at Da Sichuan. Da Sichuan is still the most entertaining Chinese restaurant on the Peninsula although mostly empty now that civilization has collectively decided to do takeout. Civilization’s loss, not getting to banter with the owner. We had green bean cake, tofu, Mongolian chicken, eggplant and garlic sauce, fish noodles, lamb and sour cabbage hot pot, and gong xin cai, the hollow stalk spinach which is sold under a bunch of different names and is always a good green. I think Dave and I had it the first time when our guides picked it wild and boiled it before the eclipse in 1988 on Mindanao.
Joe was pretty perfect as a dinner guest for Annika. He told us all about driving a VW bus to Guatemala in 1962, with college mates, with a nebulous intention to hunt jaguars, for which they had brought a rifle. The road was out at some river, so eight or ten guys lifted the bus onto a small barge to cross into Guatemala, at which point they were arrested for smuggling a .22 rifle into the country (you see, it is possible to have a civil war and still have gun control). His friends spoke Spanish and talked their way out of trouble but they were deported immediately. Good news for the jaguars and also instructive for Annika: what she can expect; although challenging travel always seems to be in the past. Richard Halliburton wishes he were Richard Francis Burton who wishes he were Ibn Battuta.
Wednesday, February 22
The power was still out. I got out of bed as soon as it was light enough to see, and made plans to eat all the meat in the refrigerator as a first priority. As we are in the J’s in the alphabet world cooking project, we had Jerk Chicken.
Thursday, February 23
We woke up to a few inches of snow, more than we’d ever seen in 30 years of living here. The snow was about halfway down 84, but no problem driving for me, unlike the repeated incidents involving Amazon drivers who think the skid road into our backyard is Medway and get stuck in the mud. Amazon’s map says that. I saw it, a driver showed me it. The Google Map doesn’t make that mistake. With no power, we took Annika on a tour of San Francisco. She wanted to go to a bookstore, so, City Lights. Then with Carla and Mike to A Mano, finally, where we ate expensive food with atmospheric sound effects of the grease recycling truck growling greenly the whole time. There was some rain involved, too. We had to charge the car in San Bruno since the home power station isn’t.
Friday, February 24
A PG&E truck got stuck in the ditch in front of our driveway. Paul helped winch them out (anyone who ever lived in snow would have been able to rock it out in a minute). But it was all worthwhile, because the truck people turned the power back on in the afternoon. The power being out had made me put off configuring a computer for travel. I tried to do that today but discovered it wasn’t going to work so I went backwards. Annika flew out to Guatemala. We finished packing.
Saturday February 25
And so to San Salvador. My electronic boarding pass didn’t work so I had to get a paper one. Watched from the window seat, the sun set over the vast Sonoran desert. The only other surprise was the passport lady calling me “caballero” instead of “señor”. Dialect? We discovered the easiest way to get to our hotel was to use Uber. It was too late and tired to go out for dinner, so, tortilla soup at the hotel. As we were the only ones in the hotel restaurant, the waiter turned the stupid music down for us. Extra stars in the review!
Meanwhile, in the Annika-verse, the inclement weather had closed Los Angeles Airport and she was stuck there all by herself for a day or so. Dave and I did not hear the whole story, which was mostly filtered by way of her dad forwarding messages. Maybe she will blog.
Sunday, February 26
We met our guide, Adonis, for tours of three Mayan ruins. He was a university student, considerably overqualified. The first site he took us to was Joya de Ceren. We learned that El Salvador has 150 volcanoes. Joya de Ceren was built on the ashes from the eruption of one of them, around 500 AD. It lasted about 150 years, until the eruption of another one. The most fascinating diagram in their museum showed several layers of ash from the site, with each layer labeled with the name of the volcano which erupted. Though all of the residents managed to evacuate before the eruption covered the village, the village was exceptionally well-preserved by the ash. They did discover a skeleton of a duck on a leash. It was also nice that one of their national bird species, the torogoz, or turquoise-browed motmot, was perched on a wire beneath the roof covering the ruins of several buildings.
Joya de Ceren is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, because UNESCO felt so bad about having a thousand palaces piled upon temples upon forts, and, you know, Italy, and they wanted to put in a preserved ruin of the way people actually lived, which you can see well in this site. Volcanic ash does a good job of preserving details of the lifestyles it is destroying. The Inquisition did that, too. Much of what we know of the lives of ordinary people in Europe, was written down while they were being killed. Here, you can see the crop furrows, and deduce what they were growing. How their huts were furnished, minus what was carried away in haste.
Back to Pyramids. The second ruin was San Andres, was also along the Río Sucio, so named because of volcanic ash, not litter, at that time. San Andres seemed mostly to consist of mounds covering pyramids, after walking through a small museum picturing the overall layout. It’s a good thing that everything in the world hasn’t been excavated, since everything we dig up, we seem to wreck, eventually.
We took a break for lunch at a little view restaurant next to a crater lake, which had watercraft buzzing around it much like Clear Lake.
The third ruin was Tazumal. It prominently featured a large pyramid which had been partially restored in the mid-twentieth century to “what it would have looked like”. Cue, once again, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc: “To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness which could never have existed at any given time.” Families were enjoying the afternoon in the park.
An American told Ray he had a nice beard. He told him that LAX had been closed for two days. (Poor Annika!) He lived in Pasadena. Ray said he went to school in Pasadena, he said “PCC, thats a good school”, Ray said “the other one”.
We did finally get good news about Annika; that she made it to Guatemala, and found her tour group to hike to the volcano, and she sent some impressive photos of the ongoing eruption that she saw, at night.
Monday, February 27
The Holiday Inn in San Salvador has a good breakfast. They have a pupusa station.
There was an earthquake in Nicaragua as we waited for our departure to Panama City. Nothing special, just an additional experience. Also, on the flight, my map kept changing to Portuguese.
A comfortable connection to our flight to Medellin. Generally speaking, I am deprecating the whole concept of connecting flights when trip planning. In this case, I would not have minded getting stuck in Panama City because it is an interesting enough place, and our stay in Colombia was planned to be long.
Icelandair really started a fad, with the safety briefing images transmuted to outside. Every airline in the world does that now. Your life jacket is under your seat, but the video shows a young adventurer reaching under the seat in a canoe or on a beach.
The flights were about an hour. We got to Medellín more or less on time. There is no Uber there, and taxi drivers of varying legitimacy vie for your attention after getting through customs. Ours turned out not to be very legitimate, although he did give himself the advantage of grabbing us first out of the welcome door and quoting the tourist best price, what a tourist would bargain a random driver down to from 200,000. He drove very aggressively, but not the most aggressive on the road, and asked for more money once we got to the parque in Barbosa. Barbosa is the nearest town at the bottom of hill where our host Tibi lives. Dennis and Tibi were there waiting for us. Tibi figured the driver was “coked out”. I think his first evaluation was “alert”. Trying to sound neutral. We stopped at a roadside chorizoria for some grilled pork, sausage, and chicharron on the way to Tibi’s house. It was pretty darn good. Tibi knows all those guys.
Tuesday, February 28
Dave set up in his favorite remote work office, where Tibi works with a glass wall opening to the rain forest in his back yard. One of Tibi’s friends, a masseur, came by earlier in the day with his table and gave massages to the house guests. Marco went to school in the afternoon and we picked him up afterwards and wandered around town getting snacks and beer.
Wednesday, March 1
Ray took a sick day today, which may have been the Holiday inn breakfast where not everything was perfectly hot. Or, just adjusting his intestinal flora. Everyone else drove up to Tibi’s airbnb in the town of Concepción, and up and coming tourist destination about an hour up the road, and a similar distance to the airport, which is where the tourists will come from. The prime goal was retrieving Dave’s large monitor for the rest of the week’s work. Ray was better by the afternoon.
Thursday, March 2
Dennis taught Tibi his capoeira exercises this morning. They are harder than the dance stretching Ray does with Cyndi. Dave worked. Ray made brownies in the afternoon. At night, we streamed RRR. Dennis noticed that the rendering in RRR was less complete in the last half of the film, as presumably they ran out of money. I noticed that it was pure fascist propaganda for Hindu superiority.
At some point Dennis decided that Marco shouldn’t watch it any more. Buckets of blood, no breasts.
Friday, March 3
Ray did what he could of the Capoeira exercises. Nothing involving being upside down. Today the plan was to go shopping for furniture and supplies for the airbnb up in Concepción, and then go to the airbnb and set it up. Only the first half happened. Tibi and Marco and I went to the mall, Dave stayed and worked. Marco was feeling intermittently bad and feverish, especially in the car and when he was getting tired. He also is starting to think of himself as a man rather than a baby, which means he doesn’t like to appear weak, and that makes him angry in addition to feeling sick. In the mall he was mostly OK, at home he was mostly OK, but we were running late.
We picked up Dave and went to the trout farm near Tibi’s house, for the afternoon meal. The trout farm is still good. They serve one thing, the fish they get from their ponds, grilled, with patacones (like tortillas, but made from plantain) and salsa.
The intent was to go all the way up the hill but it didn’t happen. Marco was clearly tired. When we got home he perked up and began crawling all over me until we all came to bed around ten.
Saturday, March 4
Dave stayed and worked. The rest of us went to Concepción and installed all the things you associate with Airbnb’s the world around. Dennis and Marco and Ray decided pretty early on to go into town (about two blocks down from the airbnb) and wander around. Marco escaped for a few minutes to where Ray didn’t know exactly where he was, but he found him, or some of the hive mind moms and sisters found him and pointed to him. He was a little upset by that too, but recovered on the 100-meter walk back to the airbnb and immediately stopped crying “Papa” and went to play with some other little kid.
Then we went to “The Beach”, which is a sandy river bank with a tourist cafe. One is told not to go swimming in tropical fresh water and not to eat junk food at tourist cafes with impressively bad art on the walls. Ray took photos instead.
Dennis left for the airport. Papa is needed with Lukas. Next time, I hope he can bring Lukas and they can be friends the way everyone in the world is, using English as a Second Language. Tibi and Marco and I drove away. A borracho called from a bar, that Tibi should come and join them, but Tibi called back that he had the niño and couldn’t. We were back at his house by 7.
Sunday, March 5
We spent the day enjoying nature.
Monday, March 6
Dave worked. It was a quiet day for Ray. At 5:30 we went down to meet Marco and Val and bought beers and bought street food empanadas and came back. Val had got chicken for Marco who was hungry. We have all been contributing to cooking, as Val is also in school and everybody is everything part time.
Tuesday, March 7
Ray saw the full moon at about 4am. One and a half more months to the eclipse! Ray seems to have written 28 post cards.
Wednesday, March 8
We got up at 5am. At 6:20 we left in a taxi which chose a route with an immense no-reason-traffic-jam so the airport was two hours away. Despite the traffic, we arrived at the gate with time to spare, and flew to Panama, where Ray had a short connection to Orlando, which he made easily, and Dave had a six-hour layover before flying to San Francisco. Dave bought a “day pass” to the airport lounge so he could do a bit of work. A lot cheaper than flying business class in order to use the lounge. He arrived home late, and took a $60 Uber home.
But it was the most awful travel day for Ray, at least among those that don’t cause gross physical damage. When he got to Orlando the line at Budget was 45 minutes, their process of picking a car was novel and chaotic (pick any car with an open trunk and a key),and all those people in their Budget cars were on the road. He decided to drive through the country to avoid a forty-minute delay on I-4 (with the freeway tag for $25) but it turns out that Orlando is now stop-and-go suburbs literally all the way until you leave Haines City, and it was pretty much five hours from the time the plane landed until he got to the front desk at Hotel Jacaranda. “It’s the season,” said Steve at the desk; he’d sent Ray a voicemail asking when he’d arrive. He must know the situation.
The people at Budget were really fast, with me. Not so a guy with a small boy playing video games who was at the desk and on the phone to somebody the whole time I was in line, and when I left. The kid smiled at me, just to have something to do I guess.
It will get them all prepared for Disney World. I hear that Disney World has got a system to avoid standing in line. Budget should talk to them. The DMV and some embassies do. It isn’t rocket science, you take a number.
Thursday, March 9
Ray spent the day in Avon Park. He visits his college friend Mike there. They go out to Olympic, Captain D’s, Homer’s Smorgasbord, the Cuban sandwich shop south of Sebring. This time, only the first two. The waitresses all know Mike, or they are well trained in the art of Honey and Dearie. Mike had sweet tea. Florida is sugar country already, and what they call sweet — Ray diluted it about 1:3 with regular iced tea.
Before Mike woke up, Ray went to thrift stores. Why anyone would shop anyplace but a thrift store is beyond me. I wasn’t even shopping, but when it’s your last day on vacation, you permit yourself a couple of hundred grams of souvenirs.
As mentioned, the state is crowded with late winter snowbirds, and I was only able to book one night at the Jacaranda. The Jacaranda is a grand hotel from the days of the great Florida land rush of the 1920’s. Since the Kenilworth closed, the Jacaranda is the only local representative of the breed. To keep their doors open, they have leased out half the rooms to a local junior college, with the demographic effect that there is nobody in the building between the ages of 25 and 70.
So Ray had to leave for the Seven in Sebring, a representative of the new world of hotels. The Seven is named after a curve in the Sebring Raceway that no longer exists because competitors were failing to negotiate the turn and injuring themselves. It has a view overlooking the track. It’s strangely congruent to the Kenilworth, in that the long halls meet at an obtuse angle–same with the Jacaranda. But the rooms are corporate premium mediocre spare, as opposed to the Cabinet of Curiosities look that the Jacaranda and the Kenilworth went for a hundred years ago.
Corporate can be as creepy as old dark house.
Friday, March 10
Florida is no longer post card country. Ray was only able to find old dusty cheesecake at one place in an antique mall. Good as far as it goes, but no gators or palm trees or anything. They had pizza for a slow lunch but Ray didn’t give himself time to get to the Tampa airport, from which his flight left, so I was in a huge rush, didn’t fill the car with gas, had to be escorted to the front of the security line (old white privilege, though I’m not old as Florida goes) and otherwise made a foolish pest of myself. Fortunately, it’s 2023 and all the planes to everywhere are late. Dave met Ray at the airport at 22:45 and we went to a small eatery in Burlingame or somewhere. The same but different, from Florida: Lao coconut noodle soup, shrimp with okra, and instead of sweet tea, honey ginger hot drink. Mexican Ballads on the speakers. It is advertised as “fusion”.
The electricity at home had come on this afternoon, to herald my arrival.
Saturday, March 11 – Thursday, March 16
We spent a few days at home between vacations. We went to Yoshi’s on the 11th, SF Jazz on the 12th (our friend Lori Carsillo was singing in the downstairs room), on the 14th an Amazon delivery vehicle got stuck in our backyard (I’ve lost count). Paul tried to help them with a random tire chain but those are precision tools, you can’t just slap on a different size. We ate at Lers Ros, at Flea Street — the power was largely out from 3/11 at 3am until just before we left. This made it extra fun to try to configure a new computer for the trip. My current Macbook has a hinge that is about to snap off. Been there done that in Soroca in 2007.