Maa ngi tudd Gaberoo

[ I had to temporarily deactivate the pictures, since they were breaking the site.... not quite sure why. ]

So, the wedding is over and all I can say is: “Wow, phew, oooh, man, wow.” It was amazing. All those stories you here of extraordinary Indian wedddings? Well, they’re true… but let’s start from the beginning.

I got to Delhi almost a week ago now. The flight was fine and all, just a little bit strange that the only 5 white people in coach seemed to be seated in 5 adjacent seats. Coincidence? I think not. But I arrived at the airport in one piece none the less (whatever that means) and was greeted by the Indian kindness you hear so much about: “Hello, sir, where you want to go?” Green and naive as I was at the time, I wasn’t able to refuse the kind gesture of guidance toward the ATM, who’s location I already knew, of course. Newly funded, I now displayed an even greater asset to the vulturous/friendly airport assistance agents. Having learned quite a deal from my previous travels, I eventually did manage to break their grasp and land a seat in a pre-paid taxi with two fellow travelers fighting for their independence.

We thus arrived at the New Delhi Railway Station only 70 rupees shorter (50 rupees = US$1) and began venturing into the infamous Pahar Ganj market, the backpacker’s den. I had arranged to stay with a Couchsurfer over the week-end before joining the rest of the wedding guests at a more elaborate hotel, so I strolled into an internet cafe and zapped into the electronic world. Much to my discomforting surprise, I had not yet received an answer from my host. “Ayeayeaye, stranded in Delhi, all alone, I will perish,” is what went through my mind. (Acutually, that’s not totally true, but it flows nicely.) Resourceful as I am, I attacked this situation without much effort. I decided to check into a guesthouse, just in case I was not able to find a suitable host in such short time, and given that the dorm beds cost 100 rupees per night ($2), it seemed a worthwhile investment.

I thus spent the rest of the day, checking my mails, napping in my 100 rupee bed (needed to make it worth it) and wandering around Pahar Ganj until finally my calls where answered from Nepal, where a kind man offered the hosting services of his friend that was currently house-sitting for him.

Although the guest house manager gave me strange looks when I checked out in the middle of the afternoon, I gathered my things and hopped onto an auto-rickshaw to find Lajpat Nagar III and a person also known as Anna.

The craziness of Pahar Ganj behind me, I arrived in the more residential neighbourhood and after some aimless wandering finally found my new lodgings. Thank god, for I must say a private room with bathroom and a comfortable bed definitely beats prison-style bunks and a dirty turkish toilet. Completely worn out, I plopped onto the bed and dozed off into a full night’s sleep.

The next day I awoke around noon. Anna had already ventured forth (it was to be her last day in Delhi) and so I voyaged to the neighboring enclave called “Defense Colony” to get some good South Indian food for lunch. (I know, I know, South Indian food in North India on your first day?!? but Avi had just told me some things I should eat and I wanted to try them, so there!). Fully stomached and ready to go, I spent my day wandering on foot and seeing some of Delhi’s sights in the area (Huyaman’s tomb, some-other guys tomb that I originally mistaked for Huyaman’s tomb, and some other stuff I forgot). As the evening came along, I slowly returned to the house to get ready for the first pre-wedding dinner.

The dinner was on the other side of town, but I did eventually mange to get there. I met and mingled with all the guest, eat good Indian food and such and such. After the dinner, I accompanied the peeps back to the New Woodland Hotel (which would as of the following day be my residence as well) and took part in some beer-bonding with my future hotel-rommate Eli, and Liz and a bunch of other people that kept arriving throughout the whole night from the airport. Feeling the need to sleep at one point, I boarded a auto(-rickshaw) and retured to Lajpat Nagar and Anna for one last night.

Ok folks, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’m rusty again and slow and it’s late and I need to get off the computer and my fingers hurt. But I promise I’ll get more soon. Up next: “Wedding gear, Henna parties and a peeing man.”

Well, I’m back in the old Schweizerland taking a Ferien from the Ferien. After 3 months Central America and 1 week wedding mania, I probably need it too. Now all that’s left is to officially gradgatate and figure out what life want from me.

In the meantime I’ll start looking through my photos from the trip. Here are the first of the selection. It’s not much yet, but the ~900 photos I have are somewhat intimidating.

I’m alive!!! No scurvy, wasn’t eaten by a shark and our boat didn’t sink! Hurray to us! Here we come, Colombia! Now to continue the tale…

Back in possession of my passport, we returned to our hostel in the Casco Viejo of Panana to confirm our boat trip to Colombia on the following Monday. Much to our distress, we were kindly informed that this particular boat has already been filled (even though we had pre-reserved spots) and the next boat was only to leave around a week later. However, there was a boat that had not been filled yet and was supposed to debark that day. A quick phone call to the skipper convinced him to wait one day for us to arrive and so we hastly packed up our belongings and rushed away from Panama City somewhat prematurely. If you are reading this, Panama City, I bid you a farewell and may our paths cross again soon.

So with this we finally arrived in Portobelo on the north coast of Panama that evening and went aboard ship on the “Frederica” captained by a 5 foot Colombia boy called Tilson. Funnily enough, as we boared, I looked over and recognized a New Zealandi Rastaman named “Mark” we had previously ran into on the Corn Islands in Nicaragua. With the boat now full, we cheerfully went to sleep awaiting our departure in the morning.

Well, somewhat morning. Tilson has his own time schedual, as Mark and Kerrence can certainly confirm, who had been misinformed of a depature 5 days earlier. But finally, we did set sail on Saturday afternoon and began the overnight voyage to the island paradise of San Blas.

I’m not sure how to put San Blas into words, especially without pictures, but let’s give this a try. Imagine the vast ocean on a beautiful sunny day with clear baby blue skies. Now add a batch of sand in the middle of it, no larger than say 100 by 100 meters. Now put some palm trees on your sand bank. Now add about 20 of these palm-tree islands to the picture. Getting nice, no? Just to top it off, have dolphins jumping over these islands and beautiful mermainds sitting on the beach giving you a massage. That’s San Blas! (Okay, I might have over-done it a bit with the dolphins…) If you don’t believe me, go and Goolge Image “San Blas”. Ha!, told you so.

We spent two days in this tropical paradise, snorkling in cristal blue waters, eating lobster and crab and enjoying the star filled night sky of the Carribbean. On the eve of the second day, our full boat got even fuller with the arrival of three Swiss (there everywhere!!!). The more the merrier, right? We had our spots to sleep on the boat, so what can we say and we enjoyed the end of San Blas before sailing off into the night for the second leg of journey.

There is actually much to say about our Captain, but I’m not sure that it’ll go over well on paper. He’s definately nuts, too much diesel fumes mixed with salt water or something and most of the stories are quite amusing (in retrospect), e.g. the time we wore a surfboard sock over his body and went tumbling around deck instead of driving the boat, or the time he decided to hop of the bow, grab onto a line dangling from the mast, swing ’round and smash into the starbord side of the ship, and and and… I think most of us that were there will in deed find this funny (knowing we’re still alive), but the others might have to await the stories told in person.

Since the trip from San Blas to Cartagena takes around 50 hours, the ship sails all day and all night, and at night we had to take shifts at the helm. So, on the first night I get woken up at 1am to “drive the boat”, as Mark would say and in order to stay awake for the next 3 hours, we had music blasting out of the speakers and I sang along to the tunes of the 80s, including “R.O.C.K in the USA”, “Country Roads”, “St. Elmo’s Fire” and so on… so much fun, no? Thankfully Kerrence hooked up her iPod on the next night. What a lifesaver (not like there were any of those on the boat… right?).

Finnally we did spot land and docked in the Cartagena Marina late morning on Friday. The Marina didn’t have an immigration, so our friendly captain organized a friend of his to pick up our passports, drive them to the airport on his motorbike, get them stamped and (thank god) return them to us. I of course wansn’t one bit worried, since I am now a certified expert passport renewer. But anyhows, everthing worked out fine and we fell asleep to the rocking feeling of land-sickness.

Our time with Therese becoming limited, we’re staying in Cartagena for a few days, and will persumably head up the Carribbean coast to a national park, returning here at the end of next week to say our good-byes to our temporary companion and continue the last leg of our journey south on the trail of Pablo Escobar.

Until then, good night and good luck.
Swiss Temporary Passport holder Gabi

Well, not to beat around the bush, even the invincible myself is subject the unjust truths of our world. Yes, I am no longer in possession of my passport. It has been taken from me and not returned. Not to worry, for it is only a piece of paper (many pieces, actually) and fortunately can be replaced without too much hassle… this is how this happened:

We arrived to Bocas del Torro just under 10 days ago (nine to be exact) on a small boat that swept though the canals of a Chiquita banana plantation (the real thing). Bocas is something of the Mallorca of Panama: beautiful island paradise complete with secluded beaches on poppin’ nightlives. The parties were good, the beaches beautiful and the sun burning. All in all good fun for a few days, but none the less I am reminded that I don’t have the tendency to vacation in Ibiza either, so sooner or later overdoses happen (all different kinds ).

So, with slightly modified skin colors we again packed our bags and decided to travel along the path to Panama City, with a stop in a mountainous town commonly referred to as Boquete. Much less crowded, much less yuppie and much much colder we didn’t really manage to feel *at home*. I guess there comes a point when you need to decide how much volcano-hiking, waterfall-swimming and hotsping-sitting you can do (how pretentious is that, ha!). The urban-me began to win the war against the rural-me and plans we put into motion to move to Panama City.

Compared to the rest of Central America’s capitals, Panama City feels like Miami (yes, I got that sentence from the guide book). In my own words, I’d say Panama City is to Central America like Hong Kong is to China. It has the authenticity of Latin America, but this is most definitely mixed in with wealth and money more common in the greedy western nations. Then again, I did love Hong Kong…

It was on the way here that some unfortunate soul (may he be punished by the wrath of the Dark Side of the Force) managed to rummage though my murse and rid it of the following items: passport, leatherman knife, frontal flashlight, cell phone and a little bit of Honduran currency that nobody wanted to exchange for us. Thankfully I had most idiotically left my camera in my other bag, that was basically on presentation for anybody to take and am therefore still in possession of the beautiful pictures.

I noticed the happening only minutes before the bus pulled into the terminal and we informed the conductor, who called the bus terminal police so that they’d be waiting for us upon our arrival. Feeling the need to perform their duty to the utter most perfection, the police started letting passengers off the bus one by one, frisking them and checking their bags (much to their discontent). However, it soon became obvious that the soon-to-be-dark-forcedly-punished no longer was on the bus and we agreed that the chance that the thief would suddenly decide to surrender my passport was fairly slim and the police thus seized this operation and everybody was let free.

The men… sorry, persons in blue now felt the need to take care of us. The empty bus thus transported us to the police station, where we were to file a report and wait for the tourist police to pick us up. My spanish, however, turned out not to be proficient enough to sign the police report and we were informed that we needed to return the next day to the judiciary police and report my loss when the official translator was on the clock. Nathalie did not qualify as an official translator, most unfortunately. Once the tourist police came along, we were informed to get into their van, so that they could drive us to our hotel. So we got in, and hung out with Sargent and Detective while they went to buy a midnight snack for the precinct and drop us off at our hostel. Wow, hats off for the Panamanian police!

At least this gave us something to do while waiting for Therese to arrive and join our party, so the next morning we took a trip to the Swiss consulate, filled out all the forms, took new pictures, etc etc etc only to be informed that my emergency passport application would only be sent to the embassy in Costa Rica on Monday (it is Friday by this point), since the Swiss stop working on Friday at noon and the Consul no longer is around to sign my form and send it off. +1 Panama, -1 Switerzland! Lazy bastards… [I hope they don't read this and take even longer to get me a new passport... if you are: I'm sorry I said that. I love Switzerland and everything/everybody Swiss. We are one big happy family!]

My conscious now settled, we started into the week-end with a good time at some wanna-be punk band concert, a good day breaking even at the horse races and some chilled beers on comfy couches. Hopefully, hopefully I will no longer be a sans-papier by the end of this week and we will be able to board ship and sail off to Colombia!

Cheerio,
[no official name at the moment so I can't sign]

The last time I wrote was in El Salvador. That was such a long time ago, (or so it seems…). There’s so much to write and most likely I will have either forgotten the details of things long ago and/or get tired by the end of this post and leave out the details of things not so long ago. So in any case, excuse the lack of detail (if there is any).

I last left you in a surfer town south of San Salvador. Well, we didn’t stay there forever, but left behind the surf and seafood for a new adventure, this time in Nicaragua. Time has been running a little tight, with our set date of August 16th in Panama City, and only a few places have been fortunate enough to receive us.

The first of these was Granada. Another of the colonial town throughout Central America (always those colonists), Granada actually has a really cool feel to it and slightly reminded me of the impression I had when I first visited Macau. Europe not in Europe. There are some cool things there, and with that a bunch of language students and other backpackers, which, unfortunately, removes some of the charm. None the less, we walked around town, climbed a volcano (without a guide, even if we weren’t supposed to) and survived and visited a market town.

Hanging around in Granada we arrived at a decision point. Off the Carribbean cost of Nicaragua are the Corn Islands, home to pirates and sharks and usually associated with paradise. However, they’re kind of off the trail and hard to get to. Having not been to a real beach in quite a while we decided to spluge, book a flight and “here we come, pirates!”.

Being a little bit sceptical at first about taking a plane on this trip (doesn’t really fit in to the whole, “I’m a super-cool backpacker who doesn’t need any luxury” lifestyle, I’m not quite convinced that this metal object counts as a real aircraft. T’was a tiny little propeller plane that fits 12 people, shoulder to shoulder with eachother and the pilots (I kid you not). Basically you can describe the thing as a flying cockpit. It flew, however, quite convincingly and got us to Big Corn Island.

Big Corn is the larger of the two (dah!) with it’s smaller counterpart quite imaginatively called… you guessed correct… Little Corn Island. Most of the cheapo places are located on Little Corn amoungst its 700 residents, so we boarded the lancha (cool expression for a mini-boat) and began the high-speed and bumpy traversal accross the rough Carribbean Sea.

It was raining when we arrived to the Corns, but we didn’t let this small detail spoil our spirits and awoke the next day in a small hut on the beach, with the sunrise right in front of our eyes and no cloud in the sky! Yipee! Now, this Island is really small. And when I say really small, that’s what I mean. You can walk from the east to the west coast in 20 mins and from the north to the south pole in 40 minutes. Appropriately, there’s not much to do except soak in the sun and go diving. So this is what we did. I got some really cool diving in, where I saw a bunch of small nurse sharks and bigger ealge rays but when we went hunting for the local hammer-head shark, he had left for lunch. Dinner’s there consisted mostly of seafood: Shrimp and Lobster for $8 (the days of $5 lobster are unfortunately over!) and evenings were spent hanging out with the local dive crews.

But just like all good things, this too had to come to and end and after ony 4 days we reboarded the miraculous flying can and returned into regular backpacker life (booo!).

Not quite willing to get rid of Island life, our next destination was chosen to be Ometepe Island in the big lake of Nicaragua. Just like Little Corn is really little, this big lake is really big! On the map, it looks like it takes up half a Nicaragua. The boat from north to south takes 14 hours and from east to west about 5 hours! Anyways, in the middle of this lake are two volcanoes that have joined together to form one single island (I guess you could have they got married).

To get there, we took pretty much every mode of transportation possible (aside riding a camel): At 7am the lancha left Little Corn for Big Corn, where we hopped into a taxi to take us to the airstrip (that’s what you call a place where planes land when there’s no real airport building). The flying tin can brought us back to the capital of Nicaragua from which we caught a chicken bus down to Rivas. This is where you catch a boat to go to Ometepe – well, sorta boat, however, more along the lines of a motorized plank. Finally on Ometepe (by this time it’s around 2pm), we catch the sunday bus that tours the whole Island. The roads on the island kind of form an “H”, the top part and the bottom part of the “H” being the two volcanoes. Our boat arrived at the top left corner of the “H” and the hostel we planned to stay at was located at the bottom right of the “H”. Usually, there are buses that go from every corner to every other corner, but since it was sunday, there was only one bus that went from top-left to top-right to bottom-left to bottom-right. This whole adventure consisted of 3.5 hours of bumpy dirt roads, but on the bright side, we did get a free tour of the whole island. Finally at our hostel we exaustedly collapsed on the beds and slept till morning.

The main attraction on Ometepe is volcano climbing, so this is what I did. For those of you who know me, I don’t usually like doing anything the easy way, so what I did was turned it into “Extreme volcano climbing” and picked the one day to climb that was haunted by a tormendous thunder storm! Yay! Four hours up (in the rain) and four hours down (in the storm). I was cool though, since ususally volcano climbing is rewarded by a “wow, nice view,” our adventure on the other had was concluded by a “wow, we’re alive”. So that will definately be remembered. (I also have help from my sore legs that tend to constantly remind me of this undertaking.

Not having hiked enough that same day, we couldn’t resist the weekly pizza night at the neighborhood eco-farm that was “only” a 50 minute walk from where we slept (in the dark). But this was fun too. More on the food note, the next and last day on Ometepe we spent on the beach and waiting for dinner. We wanted to eat a mid-afternood Linner at this place that we got to at about 3pm, but by the time it was served it was already dark and 6pm. Talk about fresh food. These ladies litterally made everything from scratch (like cutting potatoes into strips to make french fries) and cooked 4 completely different dished on two stoves that all arrived at the exactly the same time and were not cold! Take that, fast food!

Sadly, Ometepe also came to an end and we were only 10 days from Panama City – still a long way away. So the decision was made to skip accross Costa Rica (expensive and full of gingoes) and head straight for Panama. We spred the trip accross two days, with one stop in San Jose with some Couchsurfers and another on the Carribbean coast in Puerto Viejo before finally traversing the infaous metal bridge into Panama and onto the boat that took us to Bocas del Toro from where I have told you this story.

More stories from Panama will follow, the adventures should include Bocas del Toro, an prison-island turned nature reserve and The Zelenkas. Come back soon and love to all!

Well, it´s been a while since my last post. Let´s hope I can remember everything.

When I left you last, I was in Antigua Guatemala, waiting to catch a 4am bus to Copan. Such a good idea, these 4am busses. That way, when you get to where you are going, it´s still only morning and you have a whole day to do so many things. Technically, it works this way. Technically… We, acting all grown-up and all, of course decide to go out the night before, since we didn´t want to pay for a whole night at the hostel that we would only use half of. “We can sleep on the bus,” we said. Ya ya ya, I just forgot the small fact that Latinos tend to be about a foot shorter that me. Try sleeping in the back row of a mini-bus with your knees squished by the hard-wood seat in front, while you head keeps banging against the window and the bus zippes around twisty mountain roads. Definitely should remmber that for the future.

We did make it alive and in one piece, however, and found ourselves bright and early in Copan, Honduras. While we were walking around this quaint little town, we could already feel the hot Honduran sun burning on our heads. Soon we found a cute little hostel, checked in and cooled off in some cold showers.

Now, there are genreally two reasons that people go to Copan. The first are these cool Mayan ruins that you can go walk around in (we did that) and play with the colorful Macaws that life there that made me think of Nissan and Tuki. The other thing is that you continue on the “Backpacker Trail” that heads up north to the Bay Islands for the supposedly best diving in the Caribbean (we did not do this). Being super cool and all (we are), we decided to be all unique and hip and started the trek south towards El Salvador.

A few chicken bus hours later (1 normal hour = 4 chicken bus hours) we finally arrived in the El Salvadorian border town of El Poy. This border is definitly not well frequented by travellers. The border crossing consists of a car barrier thing, about 100 yards of no-mans-land, followed by another car-stopping-thingy. Nothing (really) happened when leaving Honduras, we just sorta “left” and upon entering El Salvador we were stopped by the border guard, who did look at our passports but then spent way more time looking for maps to give us and telling us how to go where and what to do. Everybody always said El Salvadorians were extremely nice, I didn’t expect this though.

The first place we stopped was a town called La Palma wayyyy in the north close to a national park. In this park there is the highest peak in the country, something around 2700 meters or so. My Swiss blood (I have so much of it) started running faster upon hearing this and we promptly decided to wake up at the crack of dawn the following day in order to conquer this beast.

The beast, however, had another plan for us and we found ourselves at 8am in the neighboring village of Itsnameishardtorememberville, passing our time waiting for the bus. As we were performing this extraordinary task, El Peten (the beast) sent upon us a fierce rage in form of falling water bullets. Not accepting defeat, we consulted with the local shaman (an old man in a truck) about the chances of survival when going head-to-head with El Peten in these conditions.

“Oh…. very bad, today is,” he said. “Many many bad grey blobs from the north approach. Most angry are the blobs from the north and the trail to El Peten right through their territory passes. Last time tried I this quest, fought for my life, I did.”

It is never a good idea to go against the word of the shaman, and so we finally accepted our defeat and returned to ol’ La Palma to pack up our stuff and continue on to San Salvador.

Arriving in El Capital towards the evening, we followed the directions to our next host Lucho’s house. Greeted by him and his brother Rene, we unloaded our things and were immediately hauled out to the standard first-time-in-san-salvador-couchsurfer-pupuseria (pupusas are the local fast food, the fallafel, the doener, etc etc) where first contact was initiated between us gringos and Lucho and his friends. Two of them, Nelson and Daniela, decided they wanted to kidnap us for a week-end trip the next day and were to pick us up at 10am, since Lucho and Rene both had to work.

So it happened that on that faithful Saturday we took vacation from our vacation and visited some cool towns in rural El Salvador. We went to Ilobasco to see the miniature makers thake make miniatures out of pottery. These are little tiny scenes out of every day life hidden under little globes that you uncover by lifting them up. Some example include Illeagal emmigration to the US, where the main character faces the challenge of passing throught Guatemala and Mexico, finding black market work in the US and finally marrying a American girl so that he can stay, The circle of life, conception-birth-childhood-marriage-kids-death, and so forth.

We went to San Sebastian, where they weave fabrics into hammocks using middle-aged wooden weave-machines (i kid you not!). And finally we got to Suchitoto, a cute little town north of San Salvador on the lake where you can drink the tap water and the recycle. We stayed with some french people working there on NGO projects and participated in the local police-dog demonstration (I had to hold a bag full ok real cocain and weed for the dog to find, but unfortunately the policeman didn’t want to let me keep it as a prize…).

Back from our vacation-vacation, we visited some sights in San Salvador. The Museum of Popular Art holds an amazing collection of the already mentioned miniatures, Monsenior Romero Center in the University of Central America is a tribute to the some of martyrs that died during the civil war, including the ones that were executed right there in the University, all of which is recorded on photos, including the dead bodies that were found and their “parts” (this was in the 90s, so there was already color photography!!!). We ate some awsome street food and found out that the street-food-man makes around 500 of these little corn-chesse-patty things a day. And finally we visited the Gotham City district (awesoooommmee!!) since it’s always good to treat oneself with some goodies from the western world after a while.

Done with El Capital, we next ventured forth to the beach for some sun’n'fun, where we are now. I tried surfing, but it turns out that “some of the best breaks in the world” is not necessarily the best place to learn to surf and I finished with acheing shoulders and a scratched up arms. Oh well, better luck next time. Maybe it would also be a good idea not to try and surf right after a huge storm… hmmm.

Well, my fingers are getting num from typing so I’ll sign off for now. Next we’re off to Nicaragua. Only three weeks left before we need to be in Panama to meet up with Therese.

Hang loose.