Why I hate Venezuela

Perhaps its a bit pre-judgemental to judge a county based on my first 12 hours in it, but given my current mood, I´m going to anyway.

Maybe it´s because I had to pay $65 dollars to get here on the bus from Columbia. Maybe its because I had to pay $35 for a taxi ride from the Bus terminal to a shithole of a town near the airport that is conveniently located 45 minutes outside of Caracas. Or maybe its because the cheapest hotel i could find anywhere is $30 a night, in an area that is innundated with prostitutes, street thugs, drug dealers, and any other dispicable walk of life you could imagine flooding the streets. It could be because I found out I have to pay a $48 departure tax leaving the airport, that the beach sucks, or even because the food is shit and its becoming oh so temping to end that 7 month ´McDonalds free´ streak and go for a Big Mac. But most likely, Its because i just realised that I got robbed of $40 US by a customs official at the border. And to think, I almost made it through South America without getting robbed. So close...two more days to go, and of all people, a fucking customs official.

What makes me the most pissed off about the situation is how he did it, which blows my mind. After waiting 2 hours in line to get my passport stamped, the customs officials select three people from the bus to get searched. Oh, you choose the three Gringos? Thats Convienient. Is it because they are most likely to be the ones smuggling drugs? Of course not, its because we have money! So buddy takes me into a room and makes me empty all my pockets, and searches me only to find no drugs. Nuts, he can´t take a bribe from me then. So then he asks if i have had my yellow fever shots. I show him my vaccination card and he expresses a dissapointed look on his face. Nuts, nothing to pin on me for a bribe. Then he goes through my money belt, and begins to act like its not allowed for me to have $100 US in cash on me. Apparently, thats enough to warrant a bribe. He keeps going off about how i have to give him $40 so that there is ´no problem´ and everything will be fine. To which i Reply, no, there is ´no problem´, and you´re not getting any money. Finally he gives up, and realises that he´s got nothing on me and lets me go. I gather up my shit, and go back to the bus to laugh with all the people around me as I tell them how he tried to intimidate me into giving him $40 and Didn´t fall for it. A person behind me who spoke good english told me that they do that to all the tourists, trying to intimidate them into giving up cash if they are scared or intimidated. But i wasn´t at all. He wasn´t getting any money from me. Or so i thought.

Which brings me to an hour ago when i Just realized that I´m Coincidentally $40 US short in my money belt. Now would be a good time to mention that this is hard to type cause i think my pinky finger is broken from punching the wall.

The bastard was so smooth in however he got the money that it boggles my mind how he did it. It never even crossed my mind to count the money after i left the room because it never seemed suspicious at all. He found the cash, counted it, and gave it back to me. thats when he said i wasn´t allowed to have the cash on me, and tried to get me to give him $40 to take care of the 'Problem', and i say no. From this point on, i was holding it in my hand, and before that, I was watching everything really closely. He had to have somehow taken the money before he gave it back to me and even before he told me to give him $40, possibly knowing that i would say no and not count the money again. Bastard.

The thing that stings the most is not the loss of the actual money itself, but the fact that getting robbed in that sort of way leaves a real sour taste in your mouth. You feel so stupid for falling for it, to the point that you would almost rather be robbed straight up where you knew there is nothing you can do about it. And now that I've jinxed myself by saying I'd rather get robbed straight up, you can check the blog again in a few days to read about how i get robbed straight up on the streets of my passport, money, and everything else i need to catch my flight home.

By the way, for those of you who don´t know, I get home Boxing day and am going straight up to squamish for a few days before heading off to Victoria to try and find a place to live for January.

The Lost World

Welcome to the Jungle.

If you'd have told me two years ago that I'd find myself trekking through the Columbian Jungle at this point in my life, I'd have probably said you were crazy. But, after what has pretty much been the most exhausting 6 days of my life, I can now say that I have been there, and done that.

The reason for such a trek through the dense Columbian jungle: Ciudad Perdida, literally translated to `The lost City`. Unlike Macchu Picchu, which is easily accessible by train for the lazy old white package tourist, this lost ancient city is only reached by foot, 6 days of foot. Wading accross rivers, climbing up mountains, climbing down mountains, slashing through dense vegetation, passing by cocaine farms and laboratories, sleeping in hammoks, and drinking beer with Paramilitary soldiers....this trek had it all. My ankles hurt, my knees hurt, my back hurts, my shoulders hurt, I'm covered in mosquito bites, I'm sick, my clothes are filthy, I haven't had a decent sleep in 5 nights, I'm exhausted, and I'm just generally bunged up. But it was worth it.

Covering an area of 2 sqare kilometers, the city is essentially in the state now as it was 30 years ago when it was first discovered. Taking off on my own and getting lost, I felt as though i was the first one discovering it. Stone paths led in a laborinth of a maze through the jungle, from one stone platform to another, where the houses of the ancient tayrona people once stood. There were no sounds around me other than those of the jungle itself, which has reclaimed the city and buried it in vegetation. Macchu picchu and its 3500 tourists a day is overrated. This is the real lost city of south america as far as I'm concerned. 6 days of serious sweat and hard work to reach the city and suprisingly, no package tourists there.

9 Days Later...

So i finally made it to the Caribbean Coast. Only about a month and a half late. After flying into columbia, I planned on spending about a day or two in bogota, before leaving for the coast. And, well, 9 days of binge drinking later I finally motivated myself to get out of the city. Its a real shame that i don't have more time here in columbia, and that I took so long to get here. The travellers scene is awesome, the people are super friendly, the girls are beautiful, and the beach...well the beach is everything you'd expect the caribbean to be.

My plan is to spend my last two weeks trekking into the jungle, scuba diving, and lying on the beach. However, with time rapidly running out, I've been toying with the idea of postphoning my flight and not coming home for a while. Oh, how tempting that idea is.

Anyway, I don't really have the motivation to write anymore. So, thats all i'm gonna say today. Tomorrow i'm off on a 6 day trek into the jungle to see a lost civilization that wasn't discovered until 1975. After seeing machu Picchu and how hyped up and raped by tourism it is, I'm really excited to see this lost city. there's only one trip a week into it, so i'll only have to share it with the 7 other people in my group. should be amazing. Won't be checking email or posting for a week, don't think there will be internet access deep in the jungle.

Things to Accomplish Before I die

#23 - Attend a live South American Football (Soccer) match......Check!

#18 - Dance with a Really cute Latino Girl.....Check!

#377 - Spend a night getting wasted in a Columbian Gay Bar getting hit on by Guys all night Because it is the only kicking discotheque open on a sunday night......check!

#52 - Emerge from the dark atmosphere of a South American Stip Club to the bright rays of the rising morning sun shining down upon my face......Check!

Land of the El Dorado

Chapter three of my journey officially began the other day, as I departed from the land of Incas, landing in a place better known for its drug production, civil wars, and Guerilla insurgents. As I stepped off the plane in Columbia, I felt lost. Gone were the familiar sites of peruvian women dressed in traditional clothing and the Cold mountain air. I had no clue how much a Columbian Peso was worth, how much i was paying for a taxi, or where i was going. I couldn't find an enchalada or any anticoucho to eat. It was pissing down rain, i was hungover, running on one hour's sleep, and I just felt lost.

Its funny how so much can change in such a short plane ride. Not that columbia is really all that different from peru or bolivia relatively, but when you spend day in day out in a place you really begin to feel comfortable. You know what you're doing. You just 'feel' the country, for it has become your home. You know how much you should pay for things, you know what food you like... you're secure. You travel for twelve hours on a bus and one thing may change from one town to the next, but on the whole things remain essentially the same. Then you switch it up a bit and you have to re-learn ever little aspect of life.

Along with the confusion, however, comes a great deal of anticipation and excitement. Landing in the airport, going through customs, waiting for your bag...You just can't wait to get out on the streets. Its a feeling thats tough to describe. A part of you is nervous, landing in a city of 8 million people and third world chaos, where you can't communicate because you don't speak the language and you have no idea where you are going. At the same time however, you know there is a whole new country just waiting for you to explore. New people, new customs, new traditions, new history....its all there, waiting for you to get to know and love, or perhaps hate. Only time will tell.

So, I'm now presently hanging out in Bogota, the capital city of Columbia. Though the first part of my journey seemed to go on forever, the days are now rapidly beginning to fly by. I know that before I know it, I'll be back home in school dreaming up another scheme to escape reality and take off to a different corner of the globe. 25 days to acomplish all the paragliding, trekking, scuba diving, and lazing on the beach i plan to do is not nearly enough. Man, life just isn't fair.

Meet Buster

Meet Buster, the friendliest street dog I have ever met. Despite the way he looks, he is not angry at all. He is just a poor, rural, Peruvian street dog who cannot afford an orthodontist to fix his underbite and crooked teeth. I just had to put this photo on my blog, cause he makes me burst out laughing every time i see him.

Drunken Chaos, Midday Fiesta, and Laser Tag!

Went to laser tag hungover in Cochabamba. Two girls in the back we met the night before when we all got plastered with the intention of going to laser tag wasted. never actually made it, so went the next day just because I was in bolivia, and there was laser tag. Had to try it. Kid in the front middle was a street kid i picked up an treated to a free game.

Midday Fiesta getting half-cut on homemade corn beer in the rural Cochabamba countryside. Ah, nothing like drinking moonshine out of a bucket, made by old ladies chewing up corn, spitting it out, and letting it ferment. Mmmm, just waiting for pete the parasite to return after that one.

Our hour of binge drinking and doing shots before laser tag. ended up puking everywhere that night and was unable to walk to the bathroom. Damn, laser tag would have been fun in that state!

Ryan´s Travel tip of the Day:

An empty bottled water container with the air squeezed slightly out of it makes a pretty decent pillow while sleeping off a hangover on a park bench.

A Bugs Life

Discovered the macro mode on my camera the other day, which allows me to focus on objects at extremely close range. Took this photo in the rural bolivian countryside in an area recently burned by a fire. Life goes on.

Click on the photo to see the full size version.

So Many Miles to Paradise

As of a few days ago, my travels had left me in the town of Villamontes, Bolivia. For the first time in a good couple of weeks, I finally had a hot shower. After spending the first month and a half of my trip high in the cold mountain elevations, this would seem to come as a blessing. The only problem with this shower however, was that the mercury outside had risen to over 45 degrees, and the last thing i wanted was heat. But of course, there was no cold water, and my only option of attempting to cool myself down was to bathe under the water that was only slightly cooler than the air, literally almost fighting fire with fire.

So, after only arriving early that morning, I decided that i was getting the hell out of town, and booked a train ticket for 7:30 that night. I´d had enough of the heat and it wasn´t even midday yet. I chilled out for a while in the local park, downed what was possibly the most refreshing beer I´ve ever had, and contemplated life for a while until it was time to head to the train station. The train, i thought, would be a nice alternative to the slow, crowded, bumpy bus rides I was becoming all to familiar with. I was wrong.

7pm. Hour Zero.
I arrive at the train station a half hour early to purchase my ticket for the 9 hour train ride north to the city of Santa Cruz. Once again, my useless Lonely planet book (I don´t know why the damn thing is so popular, its an incorrect piece of shit) was wrong, and the train ride was 11 hours, not 9. No big deal i thought, whats another 2 hours. I search around the train station to buy some food and water to take with me, but to my suprize there is nothing. No big deal i thought, people will sell me stuff on the train. I wait patiently, swatting away giant bugs and mosquitos, and gazing in amazement at the lightning show that is taking place above the nearby mountains.

8pm. Hour one.
The train still hasn´t come yet. Now a half hour late, my paranoid self begins to worry that the train isn´t coming, simply because there are hardly any other people around and I feel like i´m just hanging out in some abandoned train station. I wander off and pee on the train tracks, just because i can. While doing so, i hear a horn in the distance, and 15 minutes later, the train light appears in the distance as it slowly chugs its way along into the station. I board the train to find that my seat sucks. most of the seats have some sort of window access, but mine: wall. window beside the seat in front of me, window beside the seat behind me, but no window beside me. This really wouldn´t be that much of a problem normally, but remember, its fucking hot and i have no water to compensate for the liters of sweat that are leaking out of me every hour! I spend a good 2 minutes cleaning off my seat which is covered in dust, dirt, and sand, and i can´t figure out why. I sit down to find out that the seat is horribly uncomfortable, and prepare myself for a long 11 hour journey.

9pm. Hour two.
I´ve by now realized why my seat was so covered in shit. Because of the desert like landscape, and the fact that the window in front of me is wide open, all the dust and debris that the train engine stirs up seems to perfectly time itslef to fly in through the window and land on me. Even though its dark, i have to put on my sunglasses to stop myself from becoming blind. The guy in the seat in front of me tries to recline his seat but i take a stand. I´m tired of being treated as a stupid gringo, and figure since a lot of people are pricks to me, i´m gonna fight back. No more nice guy from canada. Give the guy credit, he kept trying to push his seat back, but every time he met my knee. I wasn´t budging.

10pm. Hour three.
buddy is still trying to recline his seat and keeps turing around to give me evil death stares. I play either dumb, pretending to stare out what would be a window if i had a normal seat, or I point at my legs to show that i can´t move them. Bolivia is not made for people taller than 5ft. If i sat up, i could accomodate his desire to recline, but i don´t feel like trying to sleep in an upright position. he can go to hell. I´m also starting to get hungry and am really thirsty. where are the annoying people that always seem to board busses and trains and sell you shit now? They never come. I guess they just don´t work this route. sometimes i think the world is out to spite me. 9 more hours to go.

11pm. Hour four.
I have a deep moment of reflection. Why am I here? What am i doing? I ponder this thought for almost an hour, attempting to answer the question to my own satisfaction. This desire in me to travel the world has lead me to some amazing places, and at other times, placed me in situations such as this. I manage to lift myself mentally out of the shitty train ride, and for a while, into a state of deep thought. I satisfy myself knowing that all the pain is worth it.

I think i might sidetrack a little bit here.

The more shit I see, the more I realize that there is an uncomprehendable amount of shit to see in the world. I spend so many long nights on busses, gazing out the window and thinking of plans of how i can see it all before my life is over. I know i can´t, but i can damnwell try. I become slightly angry at the fact that i can´t seem to motivate the majority of my friends to do what i´m doing, mostly for my own selfish reasons. I constantly meet groups of people who are travelling with their best friends, and i can´t help but think how much more fun this would be if i was in the company of my best friends, the ones who get my stupid humor, who could defend canada with me to loudmouth americans, and who could reminiss with me years down the road when all this travelling is but a distant memory to me.

That moment passes and I switch back to myself, and devise a plan to live nomadically for the rest of my life. I wonder how anyone can believe the fact that we´re just supposed to spend our entire lives working 9-5, always looking forward to the weekend, or our 3 weeks holidays, or our retirement. Before long, the monotonous weeks are going to turn into months and years that fly by before we finally come to realize that its time to retire, but we´re to old to do what i´m doing now. So I convince myself that I won´t let that happen, that I will never fall into that mold. But then I realize that at some point i want a family, and a place to call home, and I wonder how i´m going to make the two worlds possible. what the hell am i to do? I realistically can´t spend my life roaming around the world alone, sleeping in shit hostels and eating parasite contaminated food. But I´m determined not to live my life looking forward to the future as i believe so many people do. the train ride is begining to become tolarable, based on the fact that i am so glad i´m doing what i want now while i´m young and I will never be able to regret anything years down the road. Then asshole tries to recine his seat. again.

12am. Hour five.
My deep thoughts on life lead me into a light sleep, and I begin dreaming thoughts that are no longer within my control. Whatever i was dreaming about, it came to an end as the train came to a screaching halt. In the middle of absolutely nowhere, were three extra oil tanker cars, and apparently we were picking them up. So, we proceded to go back and forth allong the switchyard, slamming into the cars and re-aranging the order of the train´s contents. So much for sleep. I brush off the thin layer of dust that has accumulated all over my body, and think about how surely this delay was going to set us back timewise.

1am. Hour six.
Still playing with the order of the train. Ryan´s really getting frustrated now. There´s something about transport down here that gets under my skin when we´re not going anywhere. It doesn´t matter if the vehicle is moving 5kms/hr, at least its getting closer to the destination. But when we spend an hour and a half going nowhere, it really makes me mad. My clausterphobia was getting bad, and i began to consider the consequences of getting off the train and sleeping on the grass. naturally common sense kicked in and i thought that idea might not be so wise. Sometime after, we finally get moving, three cars heavier and consequently moving even slower. 6 more hours to go.

2am. Hour seven.
we come to a stop at some train station and the couple sitting in the seats in front of me leave the train. Instantly i get up and move my shit to their seats, so excited at the idea of having a seat with a window. I´m not even sitting there 2 minutes when two people board the train and claim that i´m in their seats. Before, Ryan would have given up the seats and returned to his seat beside the wall, but at this point, i wasn´t moving. Remember, Ryan doesn´t care about being curtious anymore. They yelled at me, i spoke a bunch of english saying i wanted the window, and eventually, they gave up. victory was mine. Calmed by the gentil breeze and two seats to myself, i was able to strech out and relax, and i finally drifted into another light sleep.

3am. Hour eight.
dreaming of rainbows and butterflies.

4am. Hour nine.
wake up briefly to change positions and gain feeing again in my legs that have fallen completely asleep and left me paralized from the waist down. Clean the dust off my arm, eat the one chocolate bar I was saving until absolutely necessary, and fall back asleep.

5am. Hour ten
Dreaming of Hockey and Froot Loops

6am. Hour eleven.
Its now eleven hours since I arrived at the train station, expecting a 9 hour journey. The sun has risen up against the prarie horizon, and the mountainous terrain i have become so accustomed to is long gone. I am excited at the prospect of arriving soon, as even with the late departure and delay picking up the extra cars, we should still be arriving within an hour or so. my stumach has begun to digest its lining, and my mouth is lacking any moisture whatsoever. The train passes by a few pastures of cows grazing and i come to a conclusion. At any given time in a pasture of 20 cows or more, its guaranteed that at least one of them is shitting. Check it out sometime for yourselves.

7am. Hour twelve.
we should be arriving by now, but all i see for miles and miles is nothing. I´m so hungry i contemplate eating the scraps of food i see on the floor of the train, but i´m not letting ´pete´ back into my body. with the daylight present, i decide to pull out the book i am reading, ´the Motorcycle Diaries´. Apperently this is quite well known, especially the movie, but i knew nothing about this. Esentially, its a journal written by a young Ché Guevara during his yearlong trip around south america, before he helped castro overthrow Cuba. I can´t help but notice a striking similarity and relation to myself in his writings and adventures, and wonder if i too am destined for greatness. Just a thought.

8am. Hour thirteen.
I must have missed the station in Santa Cruz and am now on my way to brazil. I struggle with this thought for quite some time, reasuring myself only by the fact that the rising sun is still on the right side of the train, meaning I am heading north (after Santa Cruz the train heads east). But the paraoid part of me still stews over this for quite some time and i begin getting wrestless. I can only sit for so long before i start to pluug out and a weird feeling just eats at me from the inside. I seriously contemplate throuwing myself and my bags out the window of the train and dealing with the consequences later. Ché would have done it. Perhaps I´m not quite as cool as Ché as i thought.

9am. Hour fourteen.
Oh good God are we still not there yet? I ask the guy beside me how long till santa cruz, almost hoping he tells me we passed it so i have an excuse to jump out the window. he says about one hour more. I don´t know if that was good news or bad, but i took it with the realization that i just needed to calm down and be patient. Us whities are always in a hurry and the locals don´t get why we can´t just chill out. My stumach acids have burned a tunnel through my intestines and have now peirced through the surface of my hip.

10am. Hour fifteen.
my anxiousness and stress become reduced when i once again enter a state of deep thought and reflection as we pass some rural villages on the outskirts of Santa Cruz.

I think another tangent is coming.

There´s something I´ve almost written about a few times on this trip but never found the right context in which to place it. Not that it really fits in anywhere but its something i think about a lot and I wanna write it down. Since I don´t keep a journal, this is my only means of remembering my thoughts, and well, my life is an open book so you can contemplate it too.

I suppose its kind of cliche and rhetorical, but it becomes real when you see it on a regular basis. Poverty. A big part of me feels guilty being down here, both because i have the opportunity to be and because of the circumstances with which i am. I´m on a trip funded mainly by our canadian government, and the unemployment insurance system we have in place to protect our citizens when they can´t work. Not that I don´t feel I deserve it because of the ordeal i went through in Thailand, but there are millions of people down here who suffer through much worse and don´t get a penny for it. Miners in Potosi that knowingly work in conditions that will end their career in ten years, shortly before they die of siicosis. They do so because they have no other option, and they need to feed their families; Families that are left with nothing when they die before the age of 40. Something is wrong with that.

I am constantly reminded of my thoughts as a child, when nothing was ever good enough for me. I remember Christmas as always being a competition with other kids, comparing the dollar value of what i recieved with my other friends. I always felt like i didn´t get enough, that other kids got more and that wasn´t fair. Not fair. That´s what i thought it was. Flashforward 10 years and I find myself sitting on a curb in peru, playing with a little child at midnight. Her mother is 20 feet away, selling a few goods on a blanket on the sidewalk trying to make enough to get by. The child is maybe two years of age, dressed in rags, covered in dirt, and playing with 4 plastic cups. plastic cups. As i stack them on top of each other she thinks its the most fascinating thing in the world, and laughs histerically when she knocks the pile over, as if this idea of stacking the cups has made them a completely new toy. I can´t help but feel ashamed at how greedy i was as a child.

But its not my fault. That is the society I was raised in. How was i to know what existed elsewhere on the planet. Sure we all hear of poverty, but as far as we´re all concerned, it doesn´t really exist. Down here, where i see it everyday, I can´t help but constantly struggle with the question of why. Why wasn´t I born into a bolivian family where i´m forced to shine shoes at the age of 6 when i should be off playing and being a kid?. Why don´t i spend my entire life sitting on a street corner selling bottled water and snacks? We´re too lucky back home, and I don´t think we realize it.

In the affluent western world, even the most incompetent indiot can make it through life relatively easy. If you happen to fall through the cracks, we have welfare systems and others to take care of you. We have no idea how easy we have it. Down here, you have nothing. Its different from asia too. In asia, even the poor people seemed to have a lust for life, and always seemed happy. Here, I don´t sense that. People seem sad, depresed and just generally very unsatisfied with their lives. I think that´s what is getting to me. I wanna help but i feel like there is just nothing i can do. I feel like i don´t deserve everything i´ve had handed to me in life and its just not fair. I keep using the word ´fair´ but its the only word that comes to mind. the fact that our affluence in the western world cannot exist without this kind of system in the third world just makes my guilt worse, and i struggle with what I´m supposed to do to make the guilt go away. I don´t think it ever will. Its ironic the amount of bitching i do about the ´rough times´ i have down here travelling and such, but in reality, its nothing compared to what these people go through on a day to day basis their entire life.

11am. hour sixteen.
The train has finally come upon the outskirts of santa cruz, and I am so excited that the trip is almost over. We pass by a lot of oil refineries, symbolic of the source of all the conflicts and problems in bolivia recently. After another half hour of chuggin along though the city, we finally reach the train station.

11:30am. Hour sixteen and a half.
time to get ripped off by a cab driver, get some food, some water, and some fucking sleep.

Time to Kill

Once again, the Bolivian Transportation System is doing its best to test my patience. So, With 10 hours to kill in a dusty haphazard shithole on the Bolivia/Argentina Border, I have nothing else to do but pass the time doing what I do best: Writing about nothing.

I´m here strattling the border because the idiots at Bolivian Immigration only give tourists from Canada 30 days in the country. Peru gives 90, Argentina gives 90, but the country Ryan actually wants to spend more than a month in: 30 days. Israilies get 60, but for some reason Canada isn´t quite so welcome. So, despite the fact that I like their country and want to spend a shitload of money within their borders, they make me go through a hell of an ordeal to cross the border and back. Completely useless if you ask me, since they have no problems letting me leave the country, spend a night 100 meters away, and then welcome me back in. So that´s exactly what i did, and now, thanks to my useless Lonely planet guidebook that lied to me telling me there was a morning bus to my next destination, i have 10 hours to kill untill my bus leaves. Thanks LP.

So while I´m here, I might as while write a bit more about what´s been going on lately down here in the southern hemosphere. As I hinted at in my last posting, my 4 day trip around southwestern bolivia was absolutely amazing. I really seriously can´t put it into words. The Five photos here in order of appearance are: Pink Flamingos chilling in a Laguna, The sun rising over the fire red Laguna Colorada, the famous wind eroded Rock Tree,
The hotel made almost entirely out of salt that I spent a night in, and finally me inhaling a bunch of sulphur spewing out of one of the many geysers that dot the landscape.

The Salar de Uyuni itself was absolutely surreal, surpassing the former most surreal landcapes I had ever seen of Mount Bromo and Mount Rinjani in Indonesia. In between running and jumping around like an idiot trying to capture amazing photos, I just stared in amazement at the image of flat, baron expanses of salt for as far as the eye could see. Bolivia is really something. Many of you know how much I really love indonesia and plan on going back there one day, but bolivia is rapidly becoming competition for that Asian Archepelago.

By the way, as you may notice in my profile picture, the dreads are gone. I put up with them long enough to almost make the 10 hours of tourture getting them done worth it. In the end, I realized that dreadlocks are really overrated, and not worth the hype. After the mine tour in Potosi, they were pretty discusting from all the shit in the air, and i had time to kill there waiting for a bus so they met their demise.

One thing I´ve realized since having the hair cut off: I´m a sexy son of a bitch! If only I could speak spanish, then I´d have the ladies all over me.

Words can´t describe

Wow. I know in the past i´ve used the phrase ¨words can´t describe¨ when attempting to explain certain experiences I have enjoyed. But the last 4 days have been something else. I really don´t know how to sum up 4 days of the most surreal landscapes and natural phenomenons I have ever experienced. I wanna start typing about it but I know I´ll just go on forever and I got a bus to catch in an hour.

Basically, I drove around southern Bolivia for the past 4 days in a jeep with 6 other people sleeping in hotels made of salt, eating llama, having hot sulpheric gas from geysers blown in my face, observing thousands of pink flamingos chilling in red, green, blue, lakes, climbing windblown rock sculptures, driving around insane volcanic and desert landscapes, and the highlight of all: staring in awe at the Salar de Uyuni. The worlds largest salt flats, the Salar is a baron expanse of flat, gleeming white salt for as far as the eye can see. Surrounded by volcanoes in some directions, and cactus filled islands in others, It is by far the most surreal landscape I have ever seen. It did not dissapoint me as being the most anticipated destination of my whole trip.

So, thats all I´m going to say. I took over 400 photos on the trip, and still didn´t get everything cause i just got sick of taking photos and wanted to enjoy the experience. Everyone will Just have to wait till i get back to hear all about it and see all the photos. If i find a decent internet connection (not very likely), I´ll try and post some more photos.

For now, I´m off to the Argentina Border to cross for a day and renew my Bolivian Visa. There is just too much to see in this country and i need more time to see it all.

To the Dark Depths of Hell

Went to hell today. Litterally, if you go by the Bolivian legends that describe the mountain of metal that has been steadly and productivly mined for over 400 years. Though it was no walk in the park tour, it was definitly an amazing experience. Kms deep into the mountain, with temperatures reaching upwards of 45 degrees, one meter high ceilings in parts, 4400 meter elevation, complete darkness, and toxic chemicals such as silica dust, arsenic gas, acetylene vapours, and asbestos. Not to brag, but i was the only one out of 12 people who was adventurous (or stupid) enough to descend down 20 meter holes into clausterphbic abysses and see the miners workplaces deep within the laberinths of tunnels. With nothing more than a knotted rope to hold on to and a few sketchy rocks to place my feet, I couldn't help but observe how once again I'd put myself in a possibly fatal situation (sorry mom). What I gained from the experience was a shitload of respect for the miners who work in such horrid conditions. An average career span lasts 10 years before miners begin to suffer fatal deseases from years of working in such toxic conditions in a manner that should have phased out with the middle ages. I may write more on the mine later when i get around to posting some pictures, but for now i'm going to rest up for another tourturous busride tomorrow. Only a few days till I reach my most anticipated destination of my whole trip: The Salar de Uyuni.

Update:

I hinted in my last posting about how we got conned by an ex-inmate and failed to get inside San Pedro Prison in La Paz. Well, it turns out that the American fellow I was scheming with to get into the prison happened to run into the ex-inmate who conned us. Turns out Mikey, as we call him, made a legitimate effort to get us inside the prison. When that attempt failed, he split with the money we gave him and blew it all on a hotel, a hooker, and a bottle of booze. At least he spent it well.

As for me, I have finally left La Paz and am chilling out in Potosi, the highest city in the world at 4090 meters above sea level. Tomorrow I'm going down into the depths of hell. I'll post more on that when I get back.

Life on the Road: Reflections on La Paz

Shit in a cup again today.

Life on the road has become a little more stationary in the past few weeks. There is no rooster waking me up up at 4am, but my little friend ´pete the parasite´ has taken over in its place. However, sometimes even the ´shittiest´ of situations can turn out to be ok in the long run. Being stuck here over the past ten days, the City of La Paz has grown on me. Though I only planned on staying here a couple days, my problems down below have forced me to stay put for much longer than initially intended. What i´ve come to realize is that La Paz is a very dynamic place, probably one of my favorite cities i have ever stepped foot in. About the size of Vancouver, it lacks the excess pollution, traffic, and poverty of most third world megacities. While it does posess some these negative qualities, the positives combine to far outweigh the downsides. The entire city is essentially one giant street market. I´ve spent days just wandering around the streets in amazement of the sheer complexity and size of the informal economy, and the fact that you can buy anything your heart desires without stepping foot inside an actual store. We don´t need Wal-mart. The people here in Boliva are something to admire, not taking shit from anybody. A country that has been through 190 governments in 160 years, they stand up and do something about it when they get fucked around. While this can lead to zero progress in many cases, I can´t help but think how we in Canada could learn a lesson or two from them about standing up to our government.

I decided to take some spanish lessons while here, which gave me a chance to slow my pace down for a while and get into a routine. Though it only lasted 5 days, I came to enjoy my routine half hour walk to school each day, taking a different route each time and stumbling upon some of the treasures La Paz has to offer. Whether it was sampling different types of street food for breakfast each day, buying usless shit like kareokee DVDs, or testing my luck on the public transportation system, every day was a new adventure. There´s just something about this place that seems real, so much more so than back home. I can´t figure out what it is, but its here.

The unnamed few of you who made my short list to recieve a dried Llama fetus in the mail can be thankful that the Canadian embassy informed me that Customs Canada would not let such an item accross the border. Damn.

Only in La Paz can you spend an entire day trying to get into a state prison. Though unsuccessful, we did learn a lot about life behind the walls of one of the most entriguing prisons existing. Essentially a Co-op, the inmates have to earn their own way inside the prison without any state funding or they simply starve. Entire families live behind the walls with their convicted relatives, paying their own way for food and accomodation. If you can afford it, you can live in luxury, and if not, you battle it out in the basement for whatever you can get. Tourists used to be allowed in the prison to observe it first hand, but are no longer allowed due to legal dispositions. The word on the street however, suggests that it is still possible to bribe your way in. we came close many times, but ended up getting conned by an ex inmate, and threatened at gunpoint to leave the premesis. Nuts.

So, as I await my second fecal results, which will determine whether or not ´pete´ is dead, I will enjoy my last few moments in this city before taking off tonight to southern boliva. though my time here has been good, spending 12 days out of a 30 day visa in one place really limits one´s ability to see the rest of the country.

So, ciao from La Paz

I got worms

Yesterday, I took a shit in a cup.

let me explain. So the posting a little while ago about life on the road was made up entirely of true events that have happened to me so far on this trip, all compiled into one complete, entertaining story. The part about the bad chicken happened to be the most recent, and has since morphed into something a little more irritating than a couple bad shits. Worms. Parasites. Bacteria. You name it, I got it. The little buggers have been causeing me a lot of grief and pain the last few days, so i finally decided to go get checked out by a doctor. To my suprise, i have more bacteria in me than they could identify, and i specific parasite that i have yet to ´google´and find out more about. So, a shitload of medication, a shot in the ass, and a fun adventure giving a stool sample later, i have about a week to chill out here in La Paz, Bolivia and recouperate. I appologize for the graphic details as to my bowel movements as of late, but since this blog is intended to keep everyone up to date on my travels, its only fitting. It has been, after all, the focus of much of my time the past little while. I hope you all enjoy reading about this as much as I enjoy experiencing it first hand.

Life on the Road: An average day in Peru

4am. The roosters begin their wake up call. You try and go back to sleep, but it´s no use. You´re in the Andes and the temperature in your room is barely above freezing. You curl up in a ball, attempting to maximixe any degree of warmth remaining in your sleeping bag. You manage to fall asleep for another couple of hours, but only untill the thunderous noises of god knows what begin rattling your hotel walls. You´ve managed to retain enough heat in your bed to stop the shivering, but the bowels begin to move and you need to get up. You climb out of bad, throw on your flip flops, and dart your way to the bathroom. You realize that you have no more toilet paper because you used it all on the 3 shits the night before. Must have been that chicken you ate for lunch yesterday that cost you 30 cents. You quickly get dressed and dash out to the street to buy some TP from a local street vendor. You ask how much in your broken Spanglish and she tells you double what you know it´s worth. Obviously judging by your state of panic, she she knows she can get away with it. You pay your 1.50 soles and rush back into your hotel. You enter your bathroom that smells exactly the same as the sewer 15 feet below. As your ass touches the rim of the bowl, you swear that someone just shoved icicles in your ass. As you sit there, you rack your brain trying to think where the toilet seat could have gone. It´s been three weeks now in Peru and you´ve noticed that 95% of the toilets are seatless. Where do they go? Were they always missing? Were the toilets sold seatless? Is there a big profit to be made from seats on the black market? After a few minutes of contemplating this issue, your focus switches to the numbing in your ass. You finish your business, and scurry back to bed to attempt to get a few more hours of sleep to help the hangover wear off. Last night was a gong show. You got smashed on free liquor, swear you got drugged, and passed out on a sofa in a discotheque. Luckily an english guy was there to watch your back, but you lost your bandana and that really pisses you off. Anyway, you get your couple hours of sleep, and then get up to go get your free breakfast from the hostel restaurant. It is then time to risk electrocution in a shower that heats itself by means of shotty wiring and duct taped electrical cords. it doesn´t really matter though cause the heat doesn´t work and the shower is as cold as the toilet seat. as you dry yourself off and almost stop your teeth from chattering, its time to smell-test your clothes. you haven´t done laundry in a while, so its time to search for the lesser of the evils. You decide that wearing your boxers inside out is the best option, and your best shirt, well, who cares, you´re in peru. You´re pants have melted chocolate in your pockets from the candy bars you forgot about the other day as you sunbathed on the roof of a boat. meh. As you eat your breakfast, you spend 20 minutes practicing a phrase in spanish to recite to the hotel guy. You want to ask him if you can check out and leave your bags there for the day. Today is a travel day. You´ve seen all you wish to see in this town, and its time to move on to the next tonight. You´re 100% confident that you have memorized the 3 sentences you need, and go for it. You suck at spanish. Your phrases come out in a sort of half assed spanglish mix mash, and somehow you substitued the word backpack for chicken. The hotel guy rambles off a bunch of spanish to you, none of which makes any sense to you. A little bit of sign language and moving around like a moron later, you get the point across and set out for the day to kill time until your bus leaves that night. But you need a ticket first. You´re too lazy to walk all the way down to the bus terminal like you usually do where you know you can get the best price. The chicken from the day before is still taking its toll on your body, and your back is fucked up from your river rafting expodition the day before. You go to a package tour offfice and decide to treat yourself to a nice luxurious bus for your 13 hour ride that night. You knowingly pay more than you know you should, but you´ll thank yourself that night. From there, its off to wander around the markets for the day, resisting to buy huge quantities of useless shit just because its cheep. Need a llama fetus to ward off bad spirits? no problem. You kill time there for a while, maybe check out an old cathedral or something, and then decide you want some more food because the free breakfast wasn´t exactly all it was cracked up to be. Should you go with the tried and tested ¨carne¨ burger from a street vendor again? 30 cents for a ¨meat¨ burger. Yes, you´ve come to love that mystery meat burger. But today you crave change. You wander out of the touist district and find yourself a little local establishment. the special today: pork. You order the deep fried pork and corn, and then wander into the back to use the bathroom. Damn yesterday´s chicken. Along the way you see something you wish you didn´t. There really is no good way to accept the fact that the dismembered pig carcass lying our in the sun and butchered to hell is gonna be your lunch. You use the bathroom, squating indonesia style on the rim of the toilet cause there´s no way you are letting your ass touch this rim. damn that chicken. You go back and eat your meal, which tastes suprisingly good. You then decide to hit up an internet place and check your blog to see how many people responded to your story about the scariest trek of your life. To your suprize, a whopping 6 people cared enough to respond to the fact that you almost died. You then wonder if anyone even reads the blog at all because they are to lazy to click on a link. From here you kill a few more hours wandering around seeing the sites, bump into a few dozen Israilies throughout the day cause there´s 30,000 of them in peru. Eventually its time to make your way down to the bus terminal and get on that nice comfy first class bus you booked. Yeah right. In reality, you board the ´rust-o-matic express´ and curse yourself for getting scammed at the ticket office. You go to you assigned seat, only to find that its broken and doesn´t recline. its ok though, cause the seat in front of you evens everything out, reclining further than any other seat on the bus. As you remove your knees from your abdomen, you let out a few expletives. Could this bus ride get any worse? of course. tonight´s on board entertainment: One cheezy latin music CD played on repeat over and over again for 13 hours throught the night. its not too bad though, cause sometimes its hard to hear the music over the guy next to you snoring (his seat reclines). You try and sleep through the potholes, horn honks, swearving, snoring, and music, but its no use. Halfway through the ride that chicken peaks its little head again, and you need to go to the bathroom. Quick. What, the bathroom is broken? cool. you pinch it for another 7 hours, something you´ve gotten good at on the road. Eventually you get to your destination and the floodgates open at the bus terminal Baño. You haggle with toot after toot at the bus station before finally just agreeig to go to one of their hotels cause you feel like shit and haven´t slept all night. The hotel is a shithole but you don´t care. You take the room, roll out your sleeping bag, and curl up in a ball in an attempt to get warm. the cycle continues again.

So Ryan, you ask, What the hell are you doing in Peru? That sounds like absolute hell. Well, Its not. You see, there´s just something about being on the road that i find really hard to explain. Every shitty thing that happens somehow adds to the experience and i wouldn´t have it any other way. Living off a budget of like $20 a day, seeing awesome scenery, meeting amazing people, going on crazy treks, and just plain living life has a magical feeling to it. Something that you can never understand unless you get your ass down here.

What did YOU do yesterday?

So I just got back from a three day rafting adventure in the Andes Mountains. The river was nuts, and as cool as the photos look, they don´t do justice as to how insane it was. Definitely worth the money, and though i could have died in parts if I fell out or we flipped, i was willing to take that chance. These are some of the best photos, and you can find me by the sunglasses in the front right position, or the dumb air guitar poses. As i was floating down the river in a calm part after being thrown out of the raft by my loco guide, i couldn´t help but think that I am a lucky son of a bitch. I don´t think the adventure could have been any more fun.

A slight case of bed head

So yeah, Dreadlocks are overrated. If i was a CIA agent held capture and being tortured by means of dreadlocks, i would have confessed everything i knew after the 5th dread. No joke, this was by far the most painful experience of my life. 10 hours of having my hair pulled and yanked on, all for a hairstyle that isn´t even low maintenence. I thought they´d be all easy to maintain and take no work at all. But no, its tough work looking like a hippie who doesn´t give a rats ass what his hair looks like. they tangle together, they flatten out, they come undone, and they itch like hell. I think i might have fleas. So yeah, they do look really cool, but we´ll just see how long my patience holds up.

Cheating Death.....again

The point of no return is long gone. Five hundred meters above the river below, I cling to the cliff face, struggling to find stable ground to position my feet. The rock I am holding comes loose, shattering any sense of confidence I have in preventing my own death. As the loose sand and ash beneath me begins to give way, my feet begin to slide, faster and faster towards impending doom. I have no choice but to begin leaping, one foot after another across the collapsing mountainside, with no time to stop and consider the consequence of each individual step. I come to a stop on a patch of semi-solid ground, frozen in fear, cursing myself for coming this far. Why have I resisted the voice inside my head telling me this is a bad idea? Above and below me I can see and hear the sounds of small stones and soil tumbling down the mountainside. My limbs begin to shake, trembling with a fear I have never once experienced in my entire life. The only thing between me and death is a one foot wide path, covered with sand and ash, sloping on a 45 degree angle towards the valley, collapsing under its own weight. The forest fire that swept up the slope only days before, and the resulting vegetation loss has led to a fragile mountainside of crumbling rocks and dirt. The 900 year old Inca support walls made of stacked rocks have been rendered completely inept, and are no longer capable of supporting the excess weight. I have no choice but to continue on, step by step, praying I don´t become food for the Condors deep below.

To understand how I got myself in this situation, I have to go back a few days. I was close to the Bolivian Border, about to cross, when i decided to do a bit of backtracking. Originally, I was going to skip the city of Cuzco, out of pure spite for the thousands of package tourists that have taken it over. The reason for all the tourists: Maccu Piccu, the lost city of the Incas. At the last moment, I decided that I would regret being so close and not experiencing Maccu Piccu, so off I went, minus a couple of american hillbillies. I got to Cuzco, booked a four day excursion to the lost city, and took off the next morning on an adventure I´ll never forget. four days of the funnest/craziest/scariest/terrifying/exhausting/gratifying time of my life. A motto I´ve learned down here: you get what you pay for.
So the cheapest way to maccu piccu begins like this. I never planned ahead and booked a spot on the actual Inca trail, so I had to take a different route. Day one started off with a 4 hour bus ride high up into the Andes Mountains. After getting off the bus in the middle of nowhere, I, along with a couple english guys, began our five hour descent on mountain bikes. Five hours of downhill, dirt road, white knuckle, rez-dog speed mountain biking. Around corners, dodging oncoming traffic, through puddles and swerving to avoid goats and chickens. This ride had it all - probably one of the funnest experiences of my life. I thought the bumpy ride would help my non-existent bowel movements, but it didn´t.
Day two: Not so fun. 12 straight hours of trekking. Uphill, downhill, Uphill, downhill. Apparently, the incas never heard of just building a flat path. I swear, they were just plain masochistic. By far the most exhausting experience of my life. Oh yeah, and I almost died to, which kinda left me in a bad mood. Basically, as described above, a forest fire swept across the mountainside days before I got there. The nice lade who fed us bananas in the middle of the jungle warned us that the path ahead was not safe, and that the day before a goup of trekkers turned around and came back because the path was not passable. But our guide ignored the warning and lead us into a death trap. The fire killed all the vegetation, which caused the dirt and rocks to all slowly, over the course of a couple days, fall down the slope and settle on the path. this left the path incredibly dangerous, and not safe to pass by any means. I´m all for adventure stuff, and don´t get scared easily, but this was different. My life was not in my hands. All the dirt, sand, and ash had covered the entire path in many parts, leaving nothing but a 45 degree angle of loose scree sloping down off the cliff. the stones stacked to support the trail could not handle the excess weight, and were slowly giving out. there was no solid ground to walk on, every step i took slid off toward the cliff. I couldn´t hang on to the cliff face with any strength because it would give way in my hand and just make things worse. in some parts, there simply was no path. I had to hang on to watever i could with my hands and do leaps of faith to the next point of solid ground. And i´ll just throw in in here that there was nothing beneath me but a long, long way down. What scared me about this was that i had no control over my own fate. I can handle balancing on a narrow path high in the air when i have control, but this was bad. the ground was giving way at my feet and one unlucky step and lights out. I´m mad at myself for even attempting the path and not turning around, against the wishes of the guide who wanted to keep going. The two english guys were yelling at the guide for getting us into this mess, and were just as terrified as me. At one point, i litterally began sliding off the cliff, and had it not been for the guide reaching out his hand, i probably would not have stopped sliding. I´m getting chills just writing this, and i only hope i get the image accross just how crazy this was.
so yeah, after almost falling to my death, the trek continued. up, down, up, down. Burn the thighs, kill the knees, burn the thighs, kill the knees. I drank 4 litres of water that day and took one ten second piss, thats how much i sweat. By the end of the 12 hour jouney my body shut down. I had absolutely nothing left.

and now, a poem.

Useless
By Ryan Harrington

I am Useless
I have no purpose on this planet.
I am born, and then I die
There are trillions of us on this planet
all with the same goal:
To piss off as many humans as we can
Hovering, landing, sucking.
I have no purpose
I have no purpose
I have no purpose
I am a Mosquito
and I am uselss

Day three began at 4am when the roosters began waking up the neighborhood. Almost as useless as mosquitos, but at least we can eat them. only 6 hours of trekking that day, but given the previous day´s events, i could hardly move. But really, not an eventful day, just a bunch of trekking through the jungle. I still haven´t shit in three days at this point.

Day 4, things finally pay off. Beginning at 5 am, we begin the one our climb to Maccu Piccu, the famous lost city of the incas, hidden deep in the jungle. Not far enough away however, for the shitloads of package toursists who bus in somehow, making my death-taunting excursion seem somewhat all for nothing. But despite the three thousand other tourists, the rain, the fog, and the exhaustion, absolutely nothing could take away from the mystical sight of Maccu Piccu. I placed my hands on the positive energy rock, and climbed to the top of wiannu piccu, the high mountain peak overlooking the city. then i hiked down and up the other side to the sun gate. then i just spent hours exploring the city, marvelling in sheer amazement at the monumental task that would have been creating the city. Words simply can´t explain it.

So now I am back in Cuzco, trying to find a spanish language center where i can spend a week learning a bit of spanish so i can pick up the ladies. Its pissing out rain right now, which has given me plenty of time to compose this story and create a new blog. Words of advice: When all the text on the computer is in spanish and you are trying to change settings on your blog, be carefull. You might just delete the whole thing.

Adios amigos

Fun while it lasted

Hey kids

Sometimes in life, shit just happens. And when it does, it may be tough to deal with, especially when it comes in the form of a thai taxi driver cutting your dream vacation short by three months. But through all this, I've come to realize a lot of things, and over the past couple weeks i've had a lot of time for it to sink in and accept it. My Trip is done....for now.

So unfortunately, this will be my final mass email for I have nothing more to brag about. I finalyl left ko phangan a couple days ago after 3 weeks of doing nothing all day long and endured one hell of a difficult journey to bangkok to get checked out by a decent doctor. The news wasn't good, and it turns out that my injuries were more severe than i thought. My knee should have been imobilized from the start and kept in a brace, but i've been using it as my good leg for crutches all a long, which may have done permanent damage to it. the wound on my foot, is still huge and open after almost three weeks, and the doctor recomended that i have a skin graft done. The orthopedic doctor told me that i should be shifting all my weight off my left leg and knee and onto my right foot, which is impossible considering that i can still hardly put weight onto it because of the sprain.

After the accident happened, I had a lot of people, especially my parents, telling me that I should come home. This was absolutely out of the question at the time, and i was determined that i was going to stick it out, and keep on going. I knew all a long in the back of my mind that coming home would be the best thing to do, but there was no way i was going to let that happen. My parents even tried to lure me back by offering to pay my airfare for me to go again any time it wanted. I told them there was no way i could accept that, and figured that even if i was out of commision for a month, i'd still have another two good ones after. Things changed though when i got to bangkok and became aware that i was risking my future health and propper healling process by staying there. It was going to be another 4 weeks untill i'd be able to use my knee again, and without a skin graft on my foot, i was risking infection and it would take a long time to close up. I'd also have to find nursing clinics every day to get it cleaned up.

After almost 3 weeks of doing nothing all day and spending a lot of money immobile and doing nothing, i began to do a lot of thinking. I began to question how worthwile it was to stay, and I finally began to consider coming home. Even after i toughed it out for another 4 weeks and if my injuries healed up fine, i still wouldn't have been able to do lots of trekking or diving, or been fully agile enough to do all the things i wanted to do. The cost and time lost in the healing process would have been a complete waste, in addition to the three weeks i had allready spent sitting in a hammock and watching movies all day. I didn't want to be stupid and risk future problems with my legs because i was too stuborn to come home, especially when i had such a generous offer from my parents.

So this is why I'm writing this email from my parents house in Squamish where i am freezing my fucking ass off! Does anyone else realize how cold it is in this country? My trip seems like a big dream, and it feels really weird to be home. Its a bummer that it had to end this way, but i had a real eye opener on the flight home. The guy beside me was in an accident 30 years ago when he got run over by a train. He lost both his feet in the accident and now has stubs at his shins and prosthetic feet. Here i am bummed out cause i had an accident that ruined a holiday, and this guy is living with a far greater handicap than me and going about his daily life with a better attitude than me. Its funny how things work out like that, and it really puts into perspective just how stupid it is of me if i let this get me down. My injuries will heal, the remaing funds from my trip are going into the bank, and the generous offer from my parents still stands. So really, my vacation is not finished, simply postponed. I will be back, its just a matter of when i decide to go.

So i'm back now and can be reached at my parents house (604-892-2354) if anyone wants to call me or come on by and visit the cripple. I don't know when i'll make it down to vancouver or victoria though, I'll prolly stay here in squamish for a while. So no more photos or email updates to share, just my ugly face limping around this freezing country to annoy you all 1 by 1.

Litterally "chillin" in freezing cold Squampton

Ryan

My Christmas gift from Karma

Disclaimer: I appologize to the older generation of readers for my language in the following documentation, but there is simply no way of expresing this story without the affiliated obsenities. I have not imbellished this story at all for theatrical effect. Everything written here is my story to the best that I can remember it, with some gaps of the incedent itself filled in with the help of those who witnessed the accident happen.

And now, by popular demand, here is my story of A holiday season I'll never forget:

I remember quite vividly the moment i rolled out from under the truck, confused as hell, and still trying to get a grip on what had just happened. The brief moment of silence was quickly replaced by the sounds of my friend Gayna screaming "oh my god oh my god oh my god!", the swarms of people flooding to my side asking "are you ok, are you ok?", and my indistructable sarcastic voice uttering the word "ow" over and over again. I remember taking one look at my left knee and thinking "fucking hell, my trip is done!"

The event that had just occurred had spawned a number of "firsts" in my lifetime, many of which, i'd prefer never to experience again. It was my fist time dislocating a knee. It was my first time getting stitches. It was also my first time in shock. It was the first time I'd ever been rushed to an emergency room, as was it my first time on a stretcher and my first experience with a needle in the ass. I got to spend my first night in a hospital bed, and i'm currently in the process of dealing with life on crutches for the first time. All of these, of course comming as the result of my first time being run over by a truck. Some of you may recall the funny story of how i ran into a parked truck riding my bike a couple years ago, but this one was a lot more serious and I've been a bit slower to find the humour in this situation.

Karma somehow always has a way of comming back to bite you in the ass. I assume that somewhere along the line in the past 3 months I managed to do enough bragging and gloating about how much fun I was having in "paradise" to warrant someone smacking some sense into me. I fully expected this to happen of course, but what i did not expect was that it would come from a pshyco Thai taxi driver driving a pickup truck.

I get the feeling that I'm going to be telling this story an aweful lot in the months and years to come, so i might as well save myself some effort and get all the details out of the way. If you're the type of person who just skims through long mass emails and doesn't have the patience to read them line for line (hey, i'm guilty of that sometimes too), then no worries, i'm sure you'll get the gist. It'll prolly get long and boring in parts, but i figure while i'm at it, i'm just gonna spill out every detail so I have a written record of the scariest moment of my entire life. It'll make a good bedtime story to read to my grandchildren some day. If you do enjoy reading my long emails and really want to know what happened to me, then I suggest you print this out, sit yourself down with a cup of tea by a warm fire, and enjoy the tale of my brush with death.

To understand the full complexity of the issue and the hell i went through in the days following my accident, i have to begin a few days prior to the event. I was chilling on Ko Tao, a wee little island off the east coast of Southern Thailand. It was december 23rd, and I was toiling with the idea of spending christmas on the peaceful island, or heading up to Bangkok to spend it in Urban Chaos. I ran in to a few guys from vancouver and a girl from england (Paul, Alex, And Gayna) while checking my email later that day, and after a good night of drinking, i decided to take them up on their offer to tag along with them to Ko phangan, the meca of giant beach parties and home to the infamous "full moon parties". There was a full moon party on the 26th, and in addition we figured that christmas would be pretty kick ass there as well. So, christmas eve we hopped on a boat to Ko phangan where we found a nice little bungalow, and went for dinner.

After dinner we ended up meeting a huge group of fellow drunkerds, and next thing ya know it was 6am christmas morning and i was on a beach, with a beer in hand, watching the sun rise up over the ocean. I was on cloud nine at this point (still plastered out of my tree) and this was shaping up to be one of the best holiday seasons yet. After finally making it back to bed at 10am, I spent most of christmas day sleeping till 6pm. We dicided to call it an off night and lay off the booze, so I had a nice relaxing christmas dinner of chicken curry, rice, and a banana milk shake.

By the time i awoke on boxing day, the historic event that rocked asia had allready occured, but because i was on the east coast, it didn't affect me at all (keep in mind as you read this that i am 15 hours ahead of vancouver time). I wandered down to the nearest little town around noon to call my folks and wish them a merry christmas, had a nice little chat, and everything was all good. The catastrophic event was not even brought up because none of us knew about it at the time. I said my goodbyes, and it was off to the other end of the island for the full moon party later that night. This was also when i checked my email to find a message from darcy, and as it turns out we were both on the same island but i had no idea how to find him and he had no idea I was here. I just figured I'd run into him at the full moon party. If not, it was no big deal.

So my friends and I decided that there was no point trying to find a bungalow for the night because we didn't plan on sleeping and they were leaving the next day at noon anyway. I was just going to find one myself the next day if i didn't run into darcy at the party. Alex and Paul had met a friend named keith a few weeks back, and he had a place for us to store our bags for the night, so thats where we spent most of the day boxing day and where i first saw the events on the news about the earthquake. I figured I should send out an email to everyone letting them know i was unaffected by the tsunami, but i was nowhere near internet and it could wait untill the next day. We chilled out at Keiths bungalow for a bit, met a bunch of people and then left to go to the party beach for a bit and said we'd come back later. We began our drinking got intoduced to a bunch more friends of friends, and the night was beginning to get good.

Around 9 or so we headed back to Keiths place to meet back up with them and this is where it all went downhill. We rounded up the clan and walked out to the road to flag down a taxi (just so you all know, taxis here are pickup trucks that have two long benches in the back and canopy over the top). One stopped for us and we all piled in. There wasn't enough room inside for all of us to sit, so I, along with many others, was standing on the back. I wanted to hop on the roof indonesia style but the driver wouldn't allow it (go figure, i would have been safe up there).

So off we went. About 100 meters later, going up a super steep hill the driver stalled. Vancouver people think boundary rd and hastings style, edmonton people think.....well....you don't have hills that steep. Just imagine maybe driving up rabit Hill. I remember the first time i saw that lousy excuse for a ski hill I laughed so hard I......Ok, back to the story.

So, being so piled full of people, the driver wanted the people on the back to hop off and help push while he tried to get going again. I did so, and I was standing at the back right corner of the truck. As he tried to start, the truck began to roll back, so i moved slightly out of the way to the side of the truck where i stood with my body facing it (also keep in mind that thais drive on the opposite side of the road so this put me out around the center of the road) The next thing i knew i felt a huge blow to my left side and i was on the ground looking up at the sky through about a 1 foot gap between two taxis.

What happened was that another taxi speeding up the hill did not want to stop on the hill behind out taxi, so he gunned it and sped around on the right, leaving no room to spare for me. He took me out with the front of his truck, and was more concerned with making it up the hill than with the fact that he had a human being lying under his truck. Rather than slamming on the breaks after he hit me, he proceeded to gun it, and run over my left knee and right ankle. Everything happend so fast that all i remember is falling to the ground, having no idea what was going on, and trying to protect myself as i was being slammed back and forth in the small gap between the two trucks. I remember falling to the ground, feeling a lot of pain, and seeing the taxi jolt as though it had run over a speed bump (but no, it was just me!). It crushed my foot so bad that It tore my sandal right off my foot - and i'm not talking about a flip-flop type sandle. This was one of those really good, strap on type that I had had for 7 years without the slightest sign of any wear and tear. Both straps were riped apart, and the heal support was ripped right in two where there wasn't even the weakness of a seam. Right through the thick supportive material! The metal pieces in the straps were what gouged my foot up and caused me to need stitches. Most horrific of all, I remember the image of a tire rolling within inches of my head as I lay helplessly on my back on the concrete.

I do not know for sure the exact details of how i got run over. I don't think i was under the actual taxi itself, but fell on the road in between the two taxis because i remember being hit and then squished between stuff. I also vaugely recall rolling out from under the back of the speeding taxi, but i don't think that would be possible for me to be completely under the truck itself, given their low ground clearance. At the time i thought it was just my right foot that got run over, and my knee dislocated from the initial collision, but the gentleman in the hostpital bed next to me the following day was observant enough to point out the undisputable tire treads through the road rash (or tire rash) on my left knee.

Like i said, everything happend so fast that I have no positive idea what exactly happend. all i know is that i got hit, knocked down, and my legs run over by a truck going anywhere from 20-60 kms an hour. I wont try and guess on the speed cause i don't have the slightest clue. All i know is it happend in a flash, hurt like a son of a bitch, and shook me up pretty good. It was by far, the scariest split second of my entire life.

People always talk about your life flashing before your eyes in a situation like this but that never happened. I think that happened to me once when I was a child, falling off a swing set and doing a header into the gravel, but not this time. I have no way to put into words the thought process that went through my mind in that split second, but it was scary as hell, I can tell you that much. Imagine a lot of fear, a feeling of "oh, what the fuck...?", pain, confusion, and the thought that this was not gonna turn out good. Throw into the mix some concrete, a half ton of steel, some rubber, and crash test dummy rolling around on the ground and you get the gist. I wonder about how they say humans only use like 10 percent of their brain power, and I can see that being true when you consider how many thoughts went through my mind in such a short time. Why is it that we can only tap into that other 90% when we are about to die or lying helplessly under a truck? just a thought.

So anyway, back to the story. As I was lying in the middle of the road after the accident, I figured my trip was done. anyone who's ever dislocated a knee cap may know that without the kneecap in its proper position, the whole leg looks incredibly fucked up. I thought i had blown my leg apart, and still cannot believe that nothing got broken (as far as i know). So I'm lying on the road, still trying to figure out what do do, when the next truck coming up the hill starts to honk his horn at me to get out of the way!!! I'm sitting there with a leg that looks like it is made of rubber, and an ankly bleeding all to hell after just getting run over, and the idiot has the nerve to honk! So after a minute everyone decided that I did have to get off the road (hey, people had a full moon party to get to, how dare I hold them up!). A taxi comming the other way said that he would take me to the hospital so my friends carried me into it where I laid down on the bench and met my Guardian angel.

I don't know who she was, but she held my head in her lap and talked me through my stage of shock that was beginning to set in. I never saw her face because of the darkness but I will remember that voice for the rest of my life. Perhaps it was the 6 beer I had previously drank, or the shock setting in, but I remember finding the humour in the situation to start going off about how she was my guardian angel sent to watch over me. That humourous situation soon passed as we wend over a bump sending the most excruciating pain through my dislocated knee. Alex asked me if i wanted him to try and pop it back in, but the flashbacks of Mike Hadican "knowing" how to pop my dislocated shoulder back in place years ago were all too frightening. This was also around the time I took a look at my ankle and noticed that it was problably worse off than my knee. There was blood oozing from it everywhere and there were two huge bumps forming. It looked like something from the movies. It was a bad idea looking at it though cause thats when I started to feel pain from there aswell.

A half hour later (maybe it was less, but it sure felt like that) we arrived at the hospital and the circus ensued. With no doctor on duty and 3 nurses who must have just passed their written examination to be qualified, Alex and paul did most of the work. They asked for a stretcher and the nurses just stood there clueless. trying to tell me to come into the hospital . Alex dragged one over and showed her my knee and kindly pointed out to her the fact that "he cant walk!" It was here that the nurses had the genius idea to put me in a weelchair, to which alex once again pointed to my knee and told them how it might be a bit difficult for me to crawl out of the truck and into the weelchair. So Alex and paul went and found a stretcher, and did all the work getting me into the hospital where i went for exrays. Thai nurses don't have much sympathy or compasion for bunged up extremidies as they twist and turn them trying to get the right position for the exrays. Luckily enough for me my knee popped back into place during this process, cause the nurses trying to do it would not have been fun.

Then it was off to the emergency room where they started to stitch up my foot without any freezing or painkillers at all. Me, alex and Paul started screaming at them to give me something, which eventually caused one nurse to come back and give me a shot of something in the ass. Whatever it was, it helped a bit, but the cleaning of my bunged up foot was not fun at all. Eventually, after about a half hour of hell in the emargency room (If you want to call it an emergency room), they shipped me off to my bed where i got a total of about, um, no sleep that night. Alex and Paul stayed and chatted with me for a bit, and I gave them Darcys email address so they could send him and email and let him know i was on the island and in the hospital. I then told them to get their asses to the full moon party and give'r for me. There was no point in them hanging around and I couldn't thank them enough for their help that night.

The next morning, the doctor came in (nice of him to show up for work) and looked at my x-rays. In thailand, looking at a blurry exray with no visible breaks means "you're ok, good to go!" Legament damage, whats that? "Not boken, you ok" is the phrase I heard over and over as i tried to ask them if it was possible that there might be more care needed for a dislocated knee and a swolen up, bleeding, colors of the rainbow ankle. The doctor grabbed me knee, poked around a bit, and said "not broken, you ok".

I wanted to just park myself in the hospital bed but the nurses were telling me that I was ok and had to go. It was so frustrating when they kept asking me when my friends were coming to pick me up. what friends!?!? They just would not get it. With the english/thai language barrier, trying to explain to them that "The friends that were with me the night of the accident are not the friends that I can't get ahold of, they are just the people i was travelling with and they are leaving for Laos today but i need to get ahold of my other friends who are here on this island but I don't know where they are because i havent met up with them since i left them a month ago in indonesia and I don't have a place to go because I don't know where they are staying or have anyway of getting ahold of them and I don't have my own bungalow cause those other guys i was with and I got rid of ours because we didn't plan on sleeping the night of the full moon party and I was just going to find one the next day but I kinda can't now because I CAN"T WALK!!!!!" They would just stare at me with this look of confusion and smile. "its ok, not broken", says the nurse.

They were expecting me to walk out of there and I was trying to explain to them that it Kinda hurt to walk! So then, the nurse comes back with the genius idea of crutches! While they might be a great invention when you have one bunged up leg, using your dislocated knee as the good leg for support doesn't work so well. Regardless, i had no choice and was discharged from the hospital with no place to go. The only place i had was to go back to keiths where my bag was storred and try and figure out what to do from there. I took a taxi there and this is where i almost lost my grip on reality.

The only way to get to the hotel was to walk down a long, steep path from the road to the beach, where you had to walk along the beach, through water in parts, and many trails that were not designed with handicap accessability in mind. On two good legs the previous day, it took about ten minutes, but this day it took 45. I was in excruciating pain, and had a nice experience learning how to use crutches for the first time. I had sweat just gushing down my face and i was in so much pain from having to use both my legs to navigate through that I just started screaming "Fuck" at the top of my lungs quite frequently. Eventually I made it to keiths bungalow where alex and paul where just grabbing their bags to head for the bus. They were in complete awe that I had made it and wondered what the hell i was doing out of the hospital. I told them about how they discharged me and they could understand since they witnessed the mentality and chaos of the hospital the previous night. They offered to leave the next day and switch their tickets but i told them that wasn't necessary and they had done more than enough to help me, considering I had just met them a couple days ago. So we said godbye and they set off for Laos.

So now i was just making myself at home at Keiths bungalow, even though i wasn't a guest there and i'd really only hung out with this keith guy the previous day for a total of about an hour. I had nowhere else to go, and I was terrified of having to go back up that path. Keith was super understanding and helpfull, and one of his friends offered to let me stay in his room, so i took him up on the offer and decided to put off actually deciding what to do untill the next day. For now, it was just banana juice and BBC as I watched the information trickle in about the tsunami. I figured i should probably send out an email to everyone and let them know i was ok, but that was low on my priority list for i didn't feel like going anywhere.

The next day I had to do something. My legs were killing me, and the blood had soaked through the bandages on my foot so i had to go back to the hospital to get it cleaned up. I waited about an hour for a taxi boat to go by, cause there was no way in hell i was going to go back up that path. I took the boat a short distance to a spot where the road was in easy hobbling distance, and there i waited, standing in pain as about ten taxis just drove right by me. Once again, I let that good old "F" word and other explicits fly out of my mouth. Finally, one stopped and demanded an unreasonable amount of money to go to the hospital but I was so frustrated I just agreed and off I went. After getting to the hospital and getting cleaned up, I realized that the only way I was going to get ahold of Darcy was to email Him and let him know i was just gonna stay put at the hospital and hopefully he'd come meet me there and pick up my bag from keiths along the way. This was the only way I'd have a place to go, cause the entire island was pretty much booked up, and I was in no condition to wander around from bungalow to bungalow trying to find a room. So I once again paid an enormous sum to go in a taxi to an internet cafe and send Darcy an email.

This is when i found my inbox full of emails from everyone wanting to know if I was ok after the Tsunami. Go figure, everyone is scared for my safety because of what they see on the news, and little do they know that i'm lying in a hospital bed after being run over by a truck. Then there are the series of emails from my parents, worried sick and mad at me because i haven't sent them an email letting them know i'm ok. They figure I'm lying on a beach somewhere and just don't have the curtousy to email them and ease their worries. The way I saw it, I had allready spoken to them after the tsunami had taken place boxing day and told them i was on the eastern coast of thailand, so they would know i was ok. there was no need to phone them about my accident and get them all worked up until I knew exactly the full extent of how bunged up I was. Regardless, I bought a phone card to use back at the hospital, and back I went to spend the next three days in a nice clean prison.

Then of course, the phone card didn't work at the hospital, so I borrowed an english guys cell phone and left a message on my parents answering machine with the number of the hospital and told them to call there. There are no such things as collect or reverse-charge calls here in asia. they don't exist. If I was dead and lying in their hospital, they would not let anyone phone canada and tell my parents. I don't understand things here sometimes. Anyway, Darcy showed up that night which was really good to see a familiar face. I was going to go with him but I decided to stay at the hospital in case my parents phoned. They did, 3 times, but of corse, I didn't find out untill the following morning when the nurse told me so. I asked her why she did not tell me and she replied with "We though you go home".

So this was great, now my parents think I'm not only to lazy to call them, but i'm not where I say I'm going to be. At this point, my mom is freeking out back home cause she has heard from darcys mom (they talk through email) that something happened to me involving a truck and she knows i'm in the hospital. Unfortunatly, she'd have to wait a few more days cause i was stuck in a hospital bed and going nowhere.

Ok, I'm gonna start to shorten this thing up a bit cause its getting rediculously long and I'm getting tired of writing it. So Yada yada yada, I ended up getting out of the hospital, calling my parents and straightening everything out, meeting up with darcy and gavin, and taking over their bungalow now that they have left for burma. I have everything i need within a two minute crutches walk from my bungalow: Restaurants, 7-11, a heath clinic, and the beach. I spend the days sleeping, eating, writing this bloody email in sections (I've been writing it a little bit each day for about about 4 days now) and watching movies. My ability to navigate around on crutches is getting better by the day, and I'm becoming really good friends with the owners of my bungalow and the nurse at the clinic. The ankle and knee are healing slowly, and i'm just gonna take my time chilling out here until I am able to walk myself off this Island. Then I'm gonna head up to bangkok and get a second opinion on my injuries from a doctor i trust more.

Its ironic that my plan before all this happend was to kick off the new year in a ten day buddhist retreat where i was going to sleep on concrete, meditate, fast, and not talk to anyone. This is kinda the same thing in a way. I spend a lot of time alone in isolation, I might as well be sleeping on concrete the way i have to lie uncomfortably with my leg propped up as i sleep on my back, and instead of meditating, I focus all my thoughts on thinking about what i would do if I could come face to face with that taxi driver (who, by the way, fled the scene). I don't fast though, I just sit on my ass most of the day and feast like a king.

I won't try and act all macho and pretend like this hasn't shaken me up at all. After the accident, I was really having a tough time with it. Its not easy to deal with something like this and that damn cliche about whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger is a load of crap. What doesn't kill you is just seriously annoying, frustrating and makes you want to snap on everyone and everything! I try to look at the positives and tell myself over and over again that this could have been a lot worse. A week prior to the accident i was lying on a beach in Phuket, diving in the nearby waters, and sleeping in a muslum fishing villiage built entirely on stilts in the ocean which i imagine no longer exists. In addition, the fact that If my head had landed 6 inches to the side on the concrete it would have been it that got run over instead of my foot and knee. So I am fully aware that it could have been a lot worse.

Understandably, many friends and family members think I should come home and get my injuries checked out by western doctors. Unfortunatly, I worked way too hard and waited too long to get here and there's no way thats going to happen. I'm sticking it out here, and Unless things don't heal and get really bad, I wont even consider it. Today marks the exact half way point of my trip, so perhaps its fitting that things get a bit of a change-up and a new beginning.

I've become a bit of legend here on hat rin beach. I keep running into people that saw the event happen or were in either the taxi I was in first or the taxi on the way to the hospital. They come up to me, amazed that i'm standing, and ask me how i'm doing. They then turn to their freinds and say "this is that guy I was telling you about that got run over". Their faces light up in amazement and they shake my hand, also suprized after the story they have been told. It seems that my tale has been told to many people and I am now that guy in Hat Rin that got run over.

I said to many people before I left that I was prepared to face some sort of adversity during my trip. I knew it wasn't going to be complete smooth sailing, and while I figured the adversity would come more in the form of things getting stolen or lost, this is just something that I will have to deal with. When you think about it, it is quite remarkable that I got full-on run over by a truck and walked away with the relatively small injuries that I did. I'm a fucking Iron Man, and in the words of Freddy Mercury, "The show must go on".

.....and thats the short verson!