che! more argentina pics

these are my kids! (just kidding...)
cooking communally in our (cold) digs. it snowed for the first time in 87 years in buenos aires!
us at dejalo ser, dejame hacer. it is a center for the mentally and physically handicapped. i made the best friends and had the most amazing time here
here´s a party where we invited argentine futbol (soccer) players. turned out more than language was exchanged....

me and lupe gearin´up for a game with bungee cord and harnesses.

argentina = MEAT!!!

fourth of july. these are the REAL THING -- we woke up the whole village of Lujan....



me and a street dog....

argentina first week

in argentina! first week...

i´m leading a Putney Student Travels language-learning and community service trip to argentina with 16 US students, our home base is Lujan and on weekends we go to buenos aires. here is me ¨pepe¨, my crazy co-leader ¨lupe¨ and our 16 angels. more details to come.

the basilica in lujan, the town where we are staying




my co-leader, ¨lupe¨, digging the cementery where evita peron is buried, in the recoleta, in buenos aires
crazy window washers


argentina, week 1

Pulapansak

Today we went to Pulapansak, in Honduras, to see the waterfall there. Absolutely amazing. Breathtakingly beautiful. One of the most powerful experiences on the trip, it´s a must-do, it would never be allowed in the states for lacking any safety standards. The waterfall is 42? meters high, do the math and that´s a lot of feet. The force of nature was felt by all. We took a guide with us to go under and through the waterfall. It felt like we were in a powerful hurricane as we approached it from below. We made a friend, Curli, who brought an underwater camera and that´s how we got some of these pics. We dove off some of the rocks and then incredibly found a moment of refuge from the noise under a cave, under the waterfall. The water was clean, and it was probably the cleanest we´ve been since we first saw a chicken bus. It was pefect.

on top of the world

here are those pics i promised...

climbing santa maria, a volcano that overlooks a (very) active volcano, santiaguito, that we hiked up with the group the day before. without more than an hour´s rest, tom made his way from guate city to quetzaltenango and the two of us left at 11 pm for some hearty soup and at 12 midnight to start the 5-something hour hike to the top. up, up, up -- and undoubtedly worth every effort. we went with quetzaltrekkers, and i forgot how many meters high it is. but it seems to be pretty darn high

tom looking down onto volcano santiaguito, which nearly destroyed us the day before with one of its lahars (read an entry below), it erupts smoke every thirty minutes

here we are with host mom, jovita, a jehova´s witness who taught me everything i know about the bible and blew me away by how open-minded, educated and dedicated she was to teaching the original doctrines of the good book. a wonderful person

here we are leaving san pedro, sick as can be from eating some sort of curry but otherwise content from a nightly outing dining with a giant buddha.

turtle time

we adventured 6 days, 7 nights, like the movie of the same name, into the wilderness to work at a leatherback turtle project called Quelonios del Caribe on the shores of Costa Rica, the shimmering ocean in front of us and the canals of the rio Pacuare to our backs. we were surrounded by nature, and all the gazing into the stars, the waves on the beach, the coconuts and pine trees, clear skies and sunsets has reduced my tolerance for looking at a computer screen.

we took an active role patrolling the beach at night to save the mamoth "baula" or leatherback turtle from extinction: one in ten thousand leatherback turtle eggs reach the age of a mature adult turtle. mostly because poachers steal their eggs when they come to the beach. some things you didn't know about leatherback turtles:

they lay 80 to 100 eggs at a time

they mate by mounting each other and staying mounted for two weeks (!)

the females travel 25,000 nautical miles (larger than a mile) and still lay eggs on the same beach where they were born.

they travel by "flying" through the current

they eat jelleyfish

there was the boat journey from the rio pacuare, an incredible reserve. here we are painting the walls, we love our turtle guides sabrina, arnold and ben. i made the alien spaceship sending love. it has something to do with turtles, somehow. also pictured is the hatchery where the nests are re-dug by us and watched over to protect them from poatchers 24 hours, every day.

still on the road

jungle people on a suspension bridge on our way up volcano santiaguito in guatemala. we packed everything but our humility as we set off on a rocking adventure... without knowing how much adventure we would soon boast about
you have to look very carefully, but you can see the natives

charlie's angels, with our friend Rea from switzerland, getting ready to take off from xela on our trek

here is where we set up camp - in the middle of the jungle. here we are drying our wet clothes
we arrived to a gorge about 40 feet deep. we could hear the rumbling of a volcano... which was really a lahar, a mud slide mixed with ash and steaming vapor that came spewing down the gorge like an avalanche and sent mud flying several feet over the edge, eroding the cliff near where we were standing. without knowing how much danger we were in, we stood stunned as our guide said, go. Go. GO!!! we ran down the path pouring rain ankle deep in water and slid down a waterfall all the while the loud rumbling behind our tracks
here is volcano santiaguito, daring another group of people to test their supposed superiority over nature and its awesome power again

Fun times in XELA (Quetzaltenango) - this is where we took spanish classes at casa xelaju, went to the hot springs at fuentes georginas, met some more travelers and ate swiss food at a restaurant called panarama.
amanda, jessica and neil, susie´s (and now our) friend with a gift of adivination. this was taken in san marcos la laguna, where we took meditation, yoga and metaphysics classes and learned about the tarot and the kaballah as well as astral traveling and lucid dreams

Susie's WILD BIRTHDAY (Aug. 8)

here is susie with a life-size blow up doll of someone special to her. the hair is pantyhose, the beard is cotton candy, the shirt says 'hello i am your jungle boy lover' and yes, the doll was manufactured to be anatomically correct. she loves it

to celebrate we went to a guatemalan drag show, where britney spears gave us all he/she had in a whopping rendition of hit me baby one more time

i'll leave you with a sneak peak of the top of non-active volcano santa maria, on a midnight hike with tom. more of those pics to come. now it is off to costa rica, where we'll be dancing with sea turtles on moonlit beaches