Southern Hemisphere tour 2010

The first thing I remember is the ride there.  It was a freezing, fume-filled bus and I had slept maybe 2 hours the night before.  I had my ipod blaring, jamming out with myself in my little bus seat.  As we got closer to our destination, everything started looking different-greener, and surprisingly void of trash on the side of the road (an eyesore everywhere else in Central America, the plastic bag epidemic is a world-wide disease.  I don’t know why they would destroy their beautiful country like that…).  At any rate, I remember thinking to myself that just because I had been traveling for so long, I still didn’t know what was ahead of us, and I had to let myself be surprised by what my travels had in store for me.  And that’s the best way I could have prefaced our next destination, because Playa Venao blew me away.

Its one of those things that has become so special to me, it’s hard to put into words.  I cried when I left, and I still feel a pang when I think about it.  Here’s an excerpt from one of my travelogues: “Today we are in Playa Venao, possibly my favorite place yet.  The beach is unlike any I’ve seen so far-black sand that sometimes looks like gold paint, unyielding storm-colored waves, places right under our feet that look like entire worlds seen from an airplane.  I could stare at the sea forever, get lost in it and lose all pre-conceived notions of time and living.  It’s been raining all day, just now starting to let up, soon we’ll go sink our feet into the earth and let our pulses become in sync with the tide…”

And let’s see, there were blankets of stars at night that we watched from the best seat in the house (lying flat on our backs in the middle of the completely dark road), fireflies, surfers, river hikes where monkeys were passing by right over our heads, a trampoline, sweet cats who cuddled in hammocks with us, a plethora of good food and smoothies, yoga every morning (not that I went every morning, but I could have), parties on the weekends….. I think the thing that best sums up the entire time for me was my afternoon jogs, where it was just me, my ipod, and the cows, and I would dance in the middle of the road with the biggest smile on my face that has ever existed.

Oh, and by the way this place is super cheap and awesome, and in 5 years the whole area is probably going to be overrun with hotels and condos, so I would suggest to anyone that they should see this awesome place before they die, or before it’s ruined.  Oh, and I surfed!  I was actually better at it than I thought I would be, but that still didn’t change the fact that it was pretty much 98% a wrestling match between me and the ocean, and 2% “surfing”.  But that one wave……..totally worth it 🙂

Yes I have missed the point of a blog, but its not that I haven’t been writing.  My travel books are probably my 2nd favorite items I carry around with me(ipod is the first).  I keep a very good record of everything, actually-scraps, writings, drawings, daily accounts of things I’ve been doing.  I just hate sitting in front of a computer in general, but especially while I’m in some exciting part of the world where there are things I want to do and see…But I digress

SO, I’m in Australia!!!!!  and it’s EXPENSIVE!!!!!  holy hell is it expensive (coming from someone who’s obsessed with New York).  But at least in New York there’s cheap food, here the food is absolutely INSANE!  I paid 2 dollars for an APPLE at the GROCERY STORE… But there’s really good deals on clothes, what kind of sick twisted irony is that?  I can afford something I really want but don’t need, but when it comes to basic elements for survival (food and Shelter) I’m scraping the barrel!

But as far as the last 4 months of my life, they were…..Amazing.  This is why I’m no good at the blog thing, I just can’t do justice in writing to the experiences I’ve been having. I almost feel like it waters down the actual events and what I’ve been experiencing.  I’ll give a brief run through: PANAMA! -City of David is hot and terrible, there’s nothing to do, the men make me want to snap into crazy mode, and the people in the shops follow you around like a foot behind (I was so bothered by it I started weaving in and out of the clothes and erratically changing directions.  It was pretty funny because they just kept following me, but it was so irritating I walked out of the stores) Then we went to Panama City, which I LOVED.  We stayed in this awesome hostel called Hospedaje Casco Viejo, where the beds were like clouds.  We would walk everyday around the neighborhood, which was old French-Colonial style and right on the shore.  You could see the skyline of the city from across the bay, and anyone who knows me knows I love my skylines.  So we walked around the city for a few days, indulged in some amazing cafe and homemade icecream,  and started getting antsy for the beach, so we headed to the Carribean Coast, to a WUNDERFUL little Hostel called “Wunderbar”

Wunderbar’s website told us all these lies about internet, restaurant, low rates, hot water, free coffee….all lies!  We get there and it’s the most ghetto outdoor-kitchen-crawling-with-crabs,giant spiders, and huge toads-run by this crazy German lady and her 3-year-old-spoiled-daughter dump we stayed at the entire trip.  The worst part was when we asked the lady about all the amenities the website told us about, she was just kind of like “oh, no we don’t have that right now”…At any rate, besides almost getting our faces bitten off by the biggest spider I’ve ever seen, it definitely made for a memory.

The only good thing about Wunderbar was that it was right next to Isla Grande, where we spent the next week or so basking on glorious Caribbean beaches with cristal-clear  turquoise water, 10$ Lobster dinners, lavender and fuchsia skies every night, and lazing in hammocks in our spare time….One night the electricity went out and we still couldn’t have had a better time. blah blah blah Panama is amazing blah blah blah back to the city blah blah on to Playa Venao (this is my favorite place so I feel like I should dedicate a blog specifically to it)

*this one I started back when we first were in Panama, that's as far as my blogging went :)* Ok, its hard to keep the blog updated, I must say, so sorry to all of you who I know are just ... [Continue reading this entry]