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Showing posts from January, 2008
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Mountainous, Northern Ecuador. A pleasant sight to awake to groggy on a bus indeed.
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Beautiful scenery on the three day bus trek from Santa Marat, Columbia to Quito, Ecuador. The scenery was the best part because spending three days and two nights on busses otherwise pretty much sucks.
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Birthday picture with Tatiana, me and Aviv and the birthday altar in the foreground! YAY!
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Sunset over fishing boats
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The winswept coastal cliff trail to beaches near Tagonga. Following is an excerpt directly from my journal so you can get a taste of what it´s like to be here and now, and also find that I write to you very similarly to the way I write to myself. ¨January 16, 2008 To get to the non-fishing, swimable beaches near Tagonga, Columbia you must follow a narrow trail etched into a white limestome cliff. It is a bit of a precarious track, steep, loose rocks and directly above a drop of about 80 feet to the sea. My sort of trail. After following this very trail to Playa Grande, and then a bit futher along though the water until we found out own less populated beach, we spent a perfectly lovely afternoon lounging in the sun and sand. There were fishers about trawling (not my favorite) and we were cautioned not to swim too far lest we become entangled in their nets. Time passed, as it does, and it became dusk when it occued to us that we had come to this beach via precipitous cliff and thought i
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Mary in a cage
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Fishing nets can be beautiful too
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Fishing boats at Tagonga
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Tagonga, Columbia. Cactus and the Carribean, pretty great!
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Sunrise as we left Bocas del Toro (Panama)
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Fauna, Iguana
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Petroglyphs on Isla Ometepe, Nicaragua
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The streets of beautiful Cartagena, Columbia. I am in love with this city. Ta da!!!!! We have triumphantly arrived on the continent of South America and fallen under it´s most magical spell. Honestly right out of the airport, where a crazed Columbian customs officer made hilariously bizzare faces and sounds at me while he stamped my passport, we were taken in by the fabulousness that is Columbia. So far the two countries that I was warned against by the collective worries of the ¨West¨ (Nicaragua and Columbia) have prooved the be the countries I have most enjoyed/ am enjoying. Perhaps it is only Cartagena, because Cartagena is quite possibly the most blissfully perfect and beautiful city I have ever visited. You see, I love cities with narrow winding roads that have tightly packed buildings with balconies overlooking the street... and Cartagena has these in abundance and with gorgeous flowers hanging over the balconies to boot! It also sports carribean weather, delicious food, refreshi
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Gulls flying around our ferry in Costa Rica. Yes, these pictures are not in chronological order but there aren´t many and your going to look at them all anyway so what does it really matter. I personally have lost pretty much any sense of time anyway so this is more like my experience.
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Roots of a ficus tree (Panama). I love trees, in fact I can´t get enough of them. I stood here in a forest of these gnarled and twisted but elegent ficus trees, water pooling between the network of roots and stared, open mouthed in astonisment for about 10 minutes. Then I took pictures.
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The lovely sunset view off the back porch of our hostel on Bocas del Toro in Panama. We could wake up, do yoga on the dock and jump right into the water afterward. Wow Greetings friends! Happy New Year!!!!! Aviv and I, and our new good friend Tatiana from Barcelona, are in the Carribean now so this email may be more relaxed than the others, and when I say relaxed I mean it may make considerably less sense to anyone who is not also presently in the carribean. We are on the Islands of Bocas del Toro (mouth of the bull), Panama. We arrived here on December 30 late at night by water taxi from the mainland. This was the first time being back on the Carribean sea for me since I sailed 3 years ago. Me and my turks head (woven sailers bracelet-which I have had woven onto my wrist all this time) were happy to be back here. The taxi over, which was a magical after hours taxi we only met because we were ripped off by a road taxi who only took us half way to the harbor where we got on a bus in the
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One of the two volcanos that make up Isla Omeptepe. Conception, the active one with its everpresent cloud friend
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The beautiful San Ramon waterfall on the island of Ometepe. A somewhat arduous hike up up up in the boiling heat, worth the shower at the end
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Me and Aviv play in a tide pool in Costa Rica, our own private, natural spa! Dear all, Taj Mahal: A monument to love, also, a momument to San Jose's Indian food scene. Wow so much good! Aviv and I were becoming more and more obsessed with the idea of getting Indian food somehow (this is something we both love dearly) and last night our fantasy was fulfilled with one amazing meal. Picture the most amazing tastes and aromas from you favorite food, add to that a stunning setting with beautiful interiors and a warm tropical breeze blowing through, visualize moonlight and multiple courses. Best Indian Food I've ever had and it was in San Jose, Costa Rica. Rewinding a bit... I'm in Costa Rica (those of you who receive more regular emails from me to assuage your fears of my doom already know this). We crossed the chaotic (at best) border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua on the winter solstice and the weather obliged by not burning us with tropical sunlight whilst we stood in line
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Tatiana and Aviv... We took a boat to the wrong island and failed to snorkel so we drank at the bar where we found out we were on the wrong island, siliness ensued