Pretirement

It’s 2:30 in the morning. I’m in a hospital waiting room with my mom curled up next to me. Dad’s down the hall getting a cat scan. He’s having abdominal pain. They said they think it’s gastritis, whatever that is. Sounds like an easy sort of sickness you get from bad tacos, and the doctor gives you antibiotics and you go home. Fingers crossed. I spent the night in the hospital two months ago. I’d hate for Dad to have to do that.

That was, how long, two months ago now. Living in London, trying to get a job so I could stay there for a while with Roxanne. I’d been searching for jobs for two months, and that’s when I got malaria. It felt pretty bad. I had to go to the hospital twice. They didn’t diagnose it the first time because, really, malaria?

Dad’s back from the cat scan. Nothing wrong with his pancreas or his appendix. They’re giving him something called a GI cocktail and then I don’t know what.

The second trip to the hospital was traumatic I guess. The fever comes and your body shuts down. You take all your clothes off and soak the sheets in sweat, but the fever keeps going up. Roxanne called a cab and we went to the hospital. They gave me the royal treatment that day, they ran all sorts of tests, and they had me sitting outside the spinal tap room and someone came out. “They know what you have. Go back downstairs.” Downstairs the doctors were all smiles. Malaria.

God, then I got kicked out. It only took a few days to get over the malaria once I was on the drugs. And the NHS was great for treating me and not charging me a dime. If I’d needed all that hospital care in the US I’d have been screwed because I didn’t have insurance. But I left for a week to visit friends in Europe and renew my visa stamp and when I came back to England they wouldn’t let me in. First plane back to Switzerland. The Swiss police met me at the airport and held me there until I bought a ticket to the US. I got on the first flight in the morning back to NYC.

I’ve been here ever since, in Springfield. Two months. Roxanne and I don’t know what to do. You know, about us. She had some time off coming and visited me for two weeks. We talk on the phone.

I have an apartment for the summer in Chicago. After that I don’t know. If you’re in Chicago come visit.

Dad just drank his cocktail. He said it was gross. They figured out the problem is a drug he’s taking for something else, and we can go home now 🙂

hi from london! as you know, the blog slowed to a crawl last year and then stopped altogether about six months ago. a lot’s happened, and it’s time i wrote it down.

at the last post, roxanne and i had just taken a boat trip from panama to colombia and were staying in cartagena, loving it and really excited about the continent that lay at our feet, waiting to be explored. we began with energy and enthusiasm, seeing medellin and bogota and some amazing small towns. it quickly became our favorite country. but despite the added energy, we found we were at a crossroads. the vast distances of this new continent were a shock for us. it takes something like sixteen hours on a freezing night bus to get from cartagena to bogota, for example. at that rate, we knew it would take over a year to complete even a modest tour of the continent. money wasn’t an issue – dollars and pounds go very far in the poor countries of the andes. we were both healthy and could easily find another year of things to see. but for one reason or another, we felt we had to get home to see the people we loved.

as with everything else, we decided to make an adventure out of our homecoming. we bought plane tickets from bogota to miami and from miami to seattle, where i began my trip. from there we would pick up my car and do a sightseeing drive across the US, camping along the way, and ending a month later in springfield to spend thanksgiving with my family. we planned the next three weeks to see the eastern US, looping back to chicago where roxanne would fly home in time for christmas with her family in london.

odds are i saw you on that trip. it was like a tour of my entire life and everyone i know.

seattle was great to come home to. thanks especially to andy for being our generous host and constant social director, and to gautam and divya for being good friends to us when we needed it most. it was good to see everyone there and feel right at home, if just for a few days!

we did have to leave, of course, because we had another adventure planned. my car, of course, was essential to the road trip, and after sitting unused for a year, it had some problems. the repairs were relatively minor but delayed us about six days. with every day of waiting we started to doubt a little more what we were about to do. we almost called off the whole trip a couple of times. so when the car was finally ready, we left the city immediately with the late afternoon sun already slipping toward the southern horizon. by the time we bought supplies, packed up the car, ate dinner, and got on the highway it was 9:00 and we still didn’t know where we would spend the night. it didn’t matter. i was prepared to set up the tent in a field an hour south of town if we had to, as long as it meant that we were on our way.

i’m sorry, i have to go to bed! it’s four in the morning here and i have a big day tomorrow and i’m going to try to get some sleep. i’ll write again very soon, i promise. i have so many stories left.
lots of love everybody!
your friend,
phil

Two weeks ago I arrived in Panama City, the average backpacker’s southernmost stop in North America. To go further south would take you to Darién, the Panamanian province that borders Colombia. It’s an area of dense jungle with no roads for thirty miles. Infested with fer de lance snakes and Colombian guerrilla hideouts, the land crossing to South America has only been done by a handful of explorers outfitted with Land Rovers and large expeditions led by native guides. I decided to skip that adventure and booked passage on a yacht sailing to Cartagena, Colombia.

Posters are up all over Panama City and Cartagena, but a Panama City hostel, Mamallena, will do the booking for you. Incidentally, this hostel has a weight bench and free breakfast all day and is a hundred times better than where we stayed: Voyager, the aging Lonely Planet Central America’s top pick for Panama. Extremely helpful Lee at Mamallena told me that two yachts were ready to leave. I signed up to sail with Guillermo on the Tango three days later.

Panama is on the Pacific side of the great Canal, but the yachts to Colombia all sail to Cartagena on the Caribbean side. Crossing the Canal costs a 35-foot yacht about $800 each way, so captains wait for passengers in a scattering of sleepy ports on the Caribbean side. So on the morning of our passage, Roxanne and I took a series of buses to Portobelo where we found Guillermo and the three other passengers waiting for us.

Portobelo has a nice old dilapidated church whose most famous feature is a striking figure of Jesus carrying the cross. It’s one of those life size sculptures Catholic churches always keep behind glass. This Jesus is wearing a purple robe with silver accents, wears a silver crown, and is totally black. Proud street vendors outside the church doors sell little Black Jesus action figures, and one of the chicken buses passing through the town had an image of Black Jesus airbrushed across its hood. Other than Black Jesus and two little forts that were sacked by the dread pirate Henry Morgan ages before he became famous for his crummy spiced rum, Portobelo is dead. Luckily we were the last passengers to arrive so we got underway within an hour of our arrival.

After hearing bad stories about some captains, notably Carlos and John, who took away one groups stash of rum on the first day of their trip, we were immediately relieved to meet Guillermo. He’s an Argentinian who’s been running the Portobelo-Cartagena route for a year on his 34-foot Tango. Guillermo is a competent sailor and a remarkably open, friendly, and interesting guy. I recommend him to anybody taking that trip.

Sailing was unremarkable. Seas were flat and the wind was dead, so we motored all but about two of our 36 hours. We “sailed” through the first night and arrived in the San Blas islands at daybreak. San Blas is home to the Kuna people, an indigenous group that managed to fight off first the Spanish and then the Panamanians to maintain a proud culture and an autonomous direct democracy. Kuna women, with their pierced noses, banded leggings, headscarfs, and brightly colored molas, have in my opinion the best traditional dress of anyone in North America.

We spent three days and two nights in the islands. On the second day we ate smoked fish and coconut rice cooked by the lone family living on a neighboring island. Interestingly, two of the men in the family were a gay couple. Panamanian officials were driven off the islands a generation ago for trying to enforce Roman Catholic values on local people, and this family was enjoying the fruits of that victory. We bought some beautiful molas that we had to hold high above the water as we swam back to the yacht, and then set sail for Cartagena.

Thirty-six hours of sailing, two days and a night on the water. We saw lots of dolphins. Roxanne and two others suffered from seasickness the whole journey, but we arrived on time to Cartagena on the morning of our fifth day since leaving Portobelo. We’ve been here a day and I’m in love with the city. But I’ll save writing about Cartagena for another day…

i’ve had a lot of adventures lately. roxanne and i were in roatan to meet up with her brother for a week. roatan’s nice. i’m an advanced diver now. certified. 30 meters pal. did you drop your glasses in 30m of water? need somebody to get that for you? i’m certified. i’ll get you those glasses!

then we spent a few days in la ceiba, which is the coolest town in honduras. then a few days of hiking and whitewater rafting in a cool little place in the jungle close by honduras.

when we came back, la ceiba was having a festival! a no-bullshit big-time festival! we found jonathan and warren on the street, and since the last time we’d seen them in el salvador they’d picked up three more guys. this was a perfect excuse to celebrate the last two days of the festival.

just like mary and joseph, we couldn’t find any hotel rooms. there weren’t any stables though so we checked into a crummy whorehouse.

i played a beebee gun game and was frighteningly accurate. after we went to bed somebody shot a gun on the street. he wasn’t as good a shot as me because when we looked out the window nobody was hurt.

warren ate a lot of chicken.

the next day was the big parade. we were walking through the street when two girls ran up to me and asked me if i’d like to be in the parade. i was bashful. i said “aw shucks.” they said come on do it. i said here my friend will do it. they were worried he would be ugly. i shouted to warren and he said hell yeah i’ll be in the parade! they said, hmm, take your shirt off and we’ll see. he took his shirt off and they said ok.

they asked us all to come to the carrion department store and they would give warren a pair of glittery pants and the rest of us would get beads and free tshirts.

this is warren being excited and jonathan interviewing him 

THEN i started to feel stupid because i coulda been in the parade but i was too bashful. i mean, that’s really stupid right? but the story has a happy ending. when we got to the carrion store warren went into a back room and then came back out and said, “phil, you got the call buddy.” they still wanted me in it! turns out they needed two people.

the parade was amazing and they had lots of free booze for us and kept giving us beads to throw to people. there was a glitter cannon on the float. the girls on the float were models. the guys we jackasses they pulled off the street.

and that’s how we ended up in silver glitter pants.

ok ok i know i’m travel blogging but i found a good picture and i have to share it. this is richie. richie is special and lives in chicago. we bought matching reebok classics one time at meijer because they had them 2-for-1.

the picture is inside a gymnastics gym in coal city. four of us went there on a friday night because coal city is a good place to have adventures. the rest of us were playing in the foam pit when richie came running out of a back room wearing this thing and his argyle socks and clapping for himself and started doing tricks awkwardly on the equipment. i’d forgotten all about this picture until now. i hope you enjoy it as much as i have.

(click on that pic to see more pictures of richie!)

Long time no posting, right? Last time I posted I was in Guatemala. I spent close to a month there and had lots of adventures. After a month of circling the country, I settled in Antigua for a few days to take some Spanish lessons and look for volunteer opportunities. Shadie, the guy in the black tshirt in the first photo, was doing the same. Now a lot of people asked why I was taking lessons when I could already get by. The simple answer, I guess, is I wanted to learn how to cuss better.

I ended up taking lessons with a nurse and single mother of three. In three days the only expressions she taught me were old sayings about how it’s bad to be friends with sinners. My favorite was the vaguely threatening, “If you walk among honey, something will hit you.” Shadie had better luck. His teacher taught him things like cerote and pajas (meaning “turd” and “bullshit”, respectively). After a chance encounter with one of his teacher’s friends, Shadie got invited up to a farm outside of town to hang out for the weekend.

We had big plans and six of us from the hotel were going up there to camp on the farm for the weekend, but in the end, all but Shadie and I thought better of it. Actually everyone else went out to the farm too and decided after seeing it that the whole thing was sketchy. But for toughing it out and being brave in the face of certain sketch, Shadie and I were rewarded with the little gem you see pictured above.

Luis Felipe and his friends own the farm. It’s not much. Mostly a shack and some open land, a couple of trees, one smart dog and one lazy dog. But when the sun went down and we got to drinking, Luis’ neighbor came by to see what all the commotion was. As you can probably guess, he stayed for a while.

“if you’re in the market for a new baby, i hear guatemala has good ones.” mike and jenny said “OK, sounds good,” filled out a bunch of paperwork, and came down here last week to pick up wil. i’m sorry to say it, but that’s more or less all i know about the decision process that led to wil becoming my newest cousin.

mike and jenny started the adoption process a few months before wil was born. that was about fifteen months ago. the US state department website quotes the average here as nine-and-a-half months, so they’ve spent the last few months trying to be patient while doing everything they could to get wil home soon.

meanwhile i’ve been moving further and further south down this continent of ours, reading jenny’s email updates in dodgy internet cafes and hostel computers. with every frustrating setback they experienced, i got a little bit closer. i was in chiapas when the news finally came that the paperwork was cleared and mike and jenny had a flight booked for late march. two adults to fly from st. louis to guatemala city, two adults and a baby to return. we emailed back and forth and arranged to meet up last sunday, and i arrived on the night bus from flores at dawn sunday morning.

i checked into my hotel and caught a taxi to where mike and jenny were staying. even in our four days in the same city, doing the same things together, we were approaching the city so differently. i ate breakfast at a strange woman’s house after she picked me up on the side of the road. mike admitted to shaving with bottled water. i saved them like $1.50 on souvenirs (half of which have “guatemala souvenir” knitted into them here for some reason) and they used this flimsy justification to pay for pretty much everything i did with them.

jenny and i went to the worst museum ever. i went to the zoo when they were busy at the consulate. we took a day trip to antigua. we saw a place where they cut jade and to an old convent. i spent a creepy three minutes in a crypt trying to find the light switch. then i found it and took a cool picture of a skull. there was a candle-making workshop. the candle makers liked wil and they gave him a candle in the shape of a duck that he’ll either eat or treasure forever.

it was a full day for wil and they went home to guatemala city. i was moving on to antigua so i stayed there and said goodbye to them in antigua on a pretty cobblestone street. jenny brought a picture of me with my backpack on to show everybody that i’m not getting too skinny. we had a great time. i like my family. i’ll see the rest of you soon!

last post was from flores, guatemala. this one’s from flores too. i just made an enormous circle.

palenque was great. the jungle is full of mosquitoes and hippies. the ruins are full of french tourists. took conni back to cancun and now she’s back in ohio for six more weeks before heading back to austria. austria is hardcore. she’ll have to kill a bull by headbutting it to be allowed back in. that’s just what i hear.

spent four or five days in cancun this time. went to the hotel zone. it’s weird there. i can’t afford to pay $40 just to get into a club so i didn’t go out there where all the spring breakers go. but i’ll settle this for anyone who’s still wondering. SPRING BREAK IS A HOAX. it’s an illusion created by mtv and club promoters who only need to sell you the plane ticket or hotel package or entrance fee and have no incentive to follow through. the image of the ultimate party is maintained by pride. you might not have had enough fun to justify the $4000 you spent for the week, but when someone asks you how your vacation was, what do you say? it was amazing!

conni’s spring break was the best two weeks of traveling i’ve ever seen anyone do.

yesterday i went snorkeling in a place called yal-ku. there were lots of fish but no really cool things like sharks. thank you diving for spoiling the water for me forever.

then i took a bus to chetumal and slept in the bus station, and today i rode through belize and back to flores. more stamps in my passport. belize makes you pay $17.50 USD for the privilege of being in their country for two hours. it’s always the most corrupt governments that make you pay the most stupid fines. thank you belize.

flores is on an island in the middle of a lake. it’s really beautiful. everyone who travels here goes to the ruins at 3am to see the sunrise. so it’s really boring too because everyone is in bed.

that’s why tonight i posted pictures. the last of cuernavaca, some carnaval parades from puerto escondido, and the most awesome thing – a shipwreck! enjoy. it’s on my flickr page.

tomorrow night i leave for guatemala city! my cousins mike and jenny are adopting a guatemalan boy named wil. they get here sunday afternoon and leave with him (finally!) on wednesday. i’m super excited because it’s a really special trip for them, and i haven’t seen them in a while…and i haven’t seen any family for four monhts.

then…i’ll be around guatemala for a few weeks. if you want to come visit, fly into guatemala city and come find me. i’ll be in one of the towns on lake atitlan. see you there?

holy crap we did so much diving! i found out that yellowfins are really beautiful, curious, brave, and confident fish. too bad for them they taste amazing. i saw a ray, a lobster, lots of pretty stuff, some dolphins, and SHARKS. they were nurse sharks. they were as big as me. they swam up to check us out but they didn’t want to be petted so i didn’t press the issue.

now i’m open water certified and i have a tshirt to prove it. belize is super expensive and has only american products. they don’t really sell produce. even fish was expensive on the island. how is fish expensive on a reef island. there’s a lot about belize that doesn’t make sense. but the beaches are out of this world beautiful and stewed chicken beans and rice is four bucks so there’s good and bad.

after my first shark decided not to eat me, i bought a necklace made of shark bones. that’s tempting fate a little bit, i know.

i went to a barber for the first time in like four years. getting your hair cut kicks ass. he gave me a great fade and edged my whole head with a razor blade.

conni and i left yesterday for guatemala. we’re in flores, a city on an island in the middle of a huge lake. it’s an hour from tikal, one of the big three mayan sites. the cool thing to do there is go with a tour service at 3:30am. they pick you up in a van, drive you to your site and take you up to sit on some pyramid’s steps to watch the sunrise. we have a ton of spooky pictures of old temples rising up out of jungle and mist. show ya later.

tired now. conni isn’t. that’s annoying. we got here at 10:30 last night, and the most helpful taxi driver ever took us to the only working ATM in the city, woke up a travel agent so we could book our morning trip to tikal, and found us what must be the best $6 hotel on the planet. today the hotel clerk, who moonlights as a travel agent, sold us our tickets to palenque. there are more ruins there and it’s supposed to be a great place to stay. so we’ll stay there a few days, then back to cancun for Spring Break Round Two! yeah! bye!

somehow it feels like there was a time when i was blogging every time i got to a new city. that might have only been four or five cities, but i’m pretty sure it happened. this time i’ve been to i think six places that i didn’t write about. this is the monster post that will cover them all. i hope you’re wearing a helmet.

san cristobal was very cold. i went there with curtis and evelina. curtis shouts a lot and interrupts, which is annoying, and he interrupts with encyclopedic facts, which is boring. he’s awesome but i can’t tell you why. i’ll show you though. he lives in seattle.

evelina is swedish but she’s actually pretty nice. i asked her for some good things to tell swedish girls. she taught me how to say “you’re beautiful” and “you’re a damn whore”. she taught me “will you marry me” but i forgot.

we spent one night there and i took the overnight to cancun. they went south. i had a  moderately crappy night’s sleep on my eighteen hour overnight. it’s ok though because conni got there that night. we went to isla mujeres the next day. the hostel was pretty good and you can rent a scooter to drive around the little island. they found mayan ruins right on a cliff overlooking the southern point of the island. it’s peaceful there and crawling with iguanas. the isla mujeres tourist bureau commissioned stainless steel sculptures in primary colors to make a sculpture park on the rest of the point. you have to pay $3 to go in, “for maintaining the sculptures”. i’ll put up pictures when i get a better connection. it’s pretty gruesome.

then we went to tulum. there were a lot of mosquitoes there. i found most of the puerto escondido crew there the second day. they told me how everyone was. they found curtis in palenque and lost him again when he fell in love with a married woman in the jungle.

conni and i took off for belize city the next morning. it’s four hours from tulum to the border town of chetumal. then you gotta cross to corozal. then it’s a four hour bus ride on a converted US school bus to belize city. there’s only like 50,000 people there. we stayed at a really good guest house and had late night chinese food.

now we’re on caye caulker. i start diving tomorrow. today was all boring videos. gotta go. internet’s really expensive here for some stupid reason. arrrright.