One afternoon, determined to be helpful, I cooked lunch with my mom. It was just the two of us. Her older daughters, Estefani and Vanessa were away at university in Cusco, Sabino, her husband, was driving a group of tourists to Lake Titicaca, and the younger kids hadn’t come home from school yet. I had bought way too much fruit the day before, and had a pineapple left over. I’d placed it on the kitchen table with a note scribbled on a square of toilet paper and skewered onto the spiky crown, Para mi familia, un beso, Susana. Feliciana got the hint. Something else about Ollantaytambo that is different from my home in huge, desert-y Utah: tropical fruit is dirt cheap here, and most of it is grown less than 100 miles from Ollanta. But despite the cheap fruit, Andean cuisine consists of starch, protein, more starch, and few vegetables. Potato soup with rice, chicken, and shredded carrots. Fried potatoes with rice, fried eggs, and two slices of tomato. Boiled potatoes with pasta, ground beef, and onions. On this day, we used my pineapple to make a fruit salad, adding apple, papaya, and banana, then pouring fresh-squeezed orange juice over the fruit as an extra sweetener. Heavenly, sweet, and fibrous! Feliciana also made a squash-based vegetable soup (with chicken and potatoes, of course). Feliciana ran out to buy dishwashing soap, herbs, and vegetables, and I sat on the tiny, rectangular stool in the corner of the kitchen and pared the skin away from white and yellow potato flesh with a keen, home-sharpened knife. Dropped the dirt-encrusted half moons and spirals into the brown wastewater, dug the tip of the knife into the odd divots, flicked away the eyes and spots of rot.

Feliciana came bustling through the door. Peruvian women bustle differently than women from the United States. US women sweep through their hurry, rushing with long, efficient movements. Peruvian women scurry, taking smaller steps the bigger a hurry they’re in, holding their body close to themselves as they rush. Like mice. And they smile while they do it, as if amused by their tardiness, excited to get where they’re going, or embarrassed, smiling to let the world know that they’re appropriately abashed and are moving quickly to make amends. Bustling through the door, Feliciana smiled at me, down on the floor. She said something I didn’t catch. “Como?” She paused. “Susana, you can do things! Rebecca” (Rebecca was the family’s very first – and most favorite – homestay volunteer) “couldn’t do anything. You can wash your clothes, you can help cook. Rebecca always said, ‘Oh, I’d love to help, oh, but I can’t.’ She just didn’t know how to work.” This may be the best compliment I’ve ever received.  Scooping the peeled potatoes from my bowl with rough brown hands, she dropped them quickly into the water boiling on the stove. “It goes so much faster with the two of us!”

The floors in Feliciana’s house are painted concrete. Stone and mud mortar make up the bottom two thirds of the walls; the upper third is adobe brick covered in plaster. Trying to be helpful one morning, I swept the kitchen floor, then the dining room floor, then the hall, then my downstairs bedroom. I ran the broom over the rafters to break loose a few cobwebs I’d seen. I poked at the plastered bricks near the ceiling, and then swept the stone walls. Chunks of dried mud crumbled and fell, and brown flowers of dirt dust bloomed. Ah, I thought. Don’t sweep walls made of dirt. The ceiling is wooden and doubles as the floor of the upstairs rooms: round eucalyptus trunks support simple two by six planks. There is no insulation. Heels clicked and tromped over my head as I wrote in my journal at night. Jeans with change in the pockets thumped onto the floor. Light dripped through the cracks. Pillow fights made the bed creak and the kids shriek. Feliciana and Sabino have four children and three bedrooms (including the one I used), but only use the two upstairs, even when their volunteer room is unoccupied. The kids (aged 6 to 24) sleep three or four to a bed and often climb in with their parents, well beyond the age when American parents strictly establish the importance of personal space. During a visit to the Awamaki weaving cooperative in Patacancha, I met a girl named Magdalena. She and the other women of the cooperative were learning how to make placemats, a piece of household frippery that doesn’t exist in Peru. Sixteen years old, Magdalena is already the secretary of the cooperative. I admired her placemat design, and she began to ask me questions. “Where are you from? And your parents?” Still living, I explained, but in a different part of the country. “But…” her serious dark eyes were perplexed. “How will you know when they die?” I didn’t have the words to explain that in my culture, it is expected that children will leave their parents and forge a life apart.

Toilet paper goes in the trash can instead of in the toilet, and hot water for showers trickles from a terrifying electric shower head. I washed my hair three times in the four and a half weeks that I lived with Feliciana. Differences abound, but in the end, Ollantaytambo felt like home. This is the challenge that keeps me traveling. Plopping myself down into a foreign situation and figuring it out is thrilling, because it’s always different, always new, always enlightening. Learning how to respect and enjoy the way of life in Ollanta and other towns and countries makes me a better, stronger, broader person. I’m addicted. Viva la diferencia!

Someone turned the music up: waino, the music of the campesinos (a word that translates literally as “peasant”). A male emcee shouts the name of the singer, usually a woman, repeatedly throughout the song. Sometimes shouting directions to the crowd, “Manos arriba, manos arriba, manos arrrrrrrrrrribaaaaaa!” (hands up, hands up!), sometimes calling out names of Andean towns and communities, sometimes repeating the main themes of the song. Harps, drum machines, and high-pitched vocals add a unexpected dash of oriental flavor. The songs are either about tragedies, heartbreak, or about getting drunk. Tonight, at least, there were no tragedies. More chicha, more beer, and soon I was apologizing to the woman who cleared my plate, still half full of potatoes, noodles, and meat. Too loud to talk, people continued raising their glasses, clinking them, mouthing ‘Salud’, then refilling.

I ducked out for a bit, running through the rain to meet up with a few of my fellow volunteers. I told them about the party. They rolled their eyes. “At least you missed the dancing,” one said.
“Oh, no, I’m going back. I promised my host mom.” My friends blinked.
“Really? Have you been to a waino party? This is how they dance – ” one friend grabbed another’s hands and started shaking them. “One time I tried to move to the rhythm of the music with my dance partner, but she shook her head and made me dance like this! Nah, no no no. I just don’t like it, I don’t want to do it.  You know they’re all going to want to dance with you?” I shrugged. This is why I’m here. To dance waino and eat too much starch and drink too-sweet beer and pour the dregs at the bottom of the bottle onto the floor.

An hour or so later, I was back at the closed restaurant, knocking on the window to be let in. The boy who answered was one I hadn’t met yet, and he was confused, thinking I was looking for the internet café, or the restaurant. “No, no, we’re closed,” he said.
“No, no, I’m invited,” I said.
“No, it’s a private party,” he said.
“Yes, yes, I know, Maria invited me. I’m living with her sister, Feliciana,” I said.
“Oh…” he said. Inside, drunkenness had proceeded with abandon. One uncle dozed where he sat. A cousin sat with his face on the table, passed out. Feliciana and my host sisters had left, but Maria recognized me and invited me to have another beer. I sat with Balthasar, Feliciana and Maria’s brother. His wife, Adela was deep in conversation with another woman across the table. The drums and harps were still thudding and chirping away, but I’d evidently arrived at a break in the dancing. “Salud!” Balthasar clinked his bottle against mine. I couldn’t find a clean glass, but Adela pushed hers over to me. “Where are you from?” he shouted. I told him. “Ahhh. And how do you like Peru?” I nodded and smiled, and gave my well-practiced line about how I’d been here three years ago, and fallen in love, and how I was called back by the country’s magic. “Ahhh. Si. And what places have you visited?” More well-practiced lines. “Ahhh. Do you like this music? This is our music, the music of the campesinos. Should we dance? Let’s dance.” We joined Maria, another woman, and the elderly aunt of the pink sweater and soft, wobbly hat. The elderly aunt shouted along with the emcee on the stereo, and others gathered around, clapping a rhythm. We held hands and danced in a circle, stomping our feet, swinging our hands and hips from front to back and side to side. The movement made perfect sense to me, and I relished the trembling of the wooden floor beneath our heavy steps. The elderly aunt drove the whole circle, swinging her arms vigorously, pounding her heels in time to the music until the nylons on one leg began to sag and slip down off of her knee. She let go of the hands next to her and spread her arms like a child pretending to be an airplane, and spun in a circle, kicking with one leg and pivoting on the other. The crowd loved this, and shouted in time with the music, “hay, hay, hay, hay, haaaaaay,” shouting giving way to trilling tongues and cheers. Moving along with the rest, I laughed, and smiled at the strangeness, the unselfconsciousness, the faroucheness of it all.

In the morning, Feliciana and I walked to Balthasar and Adela’s house to hang laundry. Both brother and sister-in-law were outside, nursing hangovers. “Ahhhh, buenos dias, Susana. I was drunk last night. But I remember what we were talking about. Today I, today the cerveza is a bit too much, but there are other interesting places here. Much history. Today I can’t, but next Sunday I will tell you about our customs and show you the places I know.” I worked in the morning, and arrived home for lunch late, but Feliciana wasn’t there, and the stove was cold. An hour later she arrived, bustling in her very Peruvian way, obviously upset. “Oh, Susana,” she tsked. “I’m so sorry I’m late. Ahhh, but what bad children my sister has! Five children she is raising, paying for them to go to university. And they don’t appreciate it. They don’t understand. The oldest daughter left school because she got pregnant. And now Maria is supporting her grandchild and new son-in-law. And now, the second oldest, ahhh.” Feliciana picked up a pot, put it back, picked up another pot and started boiling water. “The second daughter, she’s pregnant, too. Five months! Five months pregnant, and she’s been keeping her belly wrapped up tight so her mama wouldn’t know. What was she thinking? How is she going to finish school with a baby? She just thinks her mother is going to take care of her? And the baby, too?” There had been an intervention this morning, Feliciana told me. Certain family members who knew about the pregnancy had decided that it was time for Maria to be told. Feliciana had walked in expecting to have a drink with her sister and relive the party the night before, and instead had found the entire family gathered, several crying, older brothers furious, other relatives preventing them from taking to the streets and finding their sister’s boyfriend. “My sister was in shock. She fainted. Her brother had to catch her; her husband is in shock, too.” Feliciana was chopping potatoes. Small chunks shimmied off the cutting board and onto the floor. “Five months, without saying anything to her mother! Oh, Susana, what was she thinking? Maria was so happy yesterday! Drinking, dancing, with all of her friends, and today, well.” She sighed, putting both her hands on the edge of the counter and resting her weight against them for a moment. “Poor Tia Maria.”

That’s life, the waino musicians sing. The world can change that quickly. One minute you’re drinking with friends, spinning, soaring, the next, trying to forget the pain of being human. The contract that we sign by default, being born, requires us to live each moment. Opting out means escaping the bad times, but missing out on the good ones, too. But, this is why I’m here. To drink the sweet chicha and the bitter dregs, and to move along with the rest of the circle, squeezing the hands of the people next to me as we swing in tune with all the songs, even the ones I don’t like.

Speaking of animals.
“Do you know how to kill a duck?” Feliciana ducked into her neighbor’s doorway. “No? Ya, mami, gracias.” She giggled, and soft-shoed down the cobbled path to the next house, Estefani, her daughter, trailing behind with the panicked, unlucky ducky, and I (and my camera) trailing after Estefani. “Si? Ya, mami, gracias,” There was a flurry of feathers as Estefani transferred the duck into the hands of the señora with the stick. The señora laid the duck’s head on the dirt floor of the cook shack. I could hear cuys chirping in the shadows. The body she grasped with both hands, and Feliciana placed the stick over the duck’s neck. “Ya, listo.” The señora stepped on the stick with one foot on either side of the duck’s head, and pulled. Wings flapped, in vain, and the rose-colored beak struggled to open and draw air through a crushed windpipe. “Ya esta.” It is done. Feliciana thanked the señora, collected the limp but still twitching body, and shuffled quickly back down the path to her mother’s cook shack. Water was already boiling over the wood stove, and Feliciana plunged the duck into the water, head first. Careful not to burn her fingers, she pulled the body back out, dropped it into a plastic bucket, and began pulling feathers. White down stuck to her hands and knees and drifted in the air like ashes. Soon the white gave way to yellowish pink, thick skin pocked with stubble. The clean, white, quacking duck was quickly reduced to a carcass hanging in the butcher’s window. Without its feathers, it was suddenly just a piece of meat. Raw. Undignified, inanimate. My sympathy kept trying to revive the struggling, snowy animal that had been picking at grains in the courtyard only a few minutes earlier, but the animal was gone, and lunch was in two hours. Time to get cooking.

Criollo is a soulful, passionate music that comes from the coast. It consists of guitars, gently strummed, mournful accordions, and male and female voices belting their woes to a sympathetic audience. I fell in love with it on my last trip. Of all the different types of music I endured on the many long bus rides, criollo was the first that caught me humming along, the first with which I connected in this foreign land. I like it for the same reasons I like Billy Holiday and Edith Piaf. It has that same antique quality; as if it’s being sung into a black and white room of suited men smoking cigarettes wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and women in nylons and smart evening dresses with gloves, heels, and matching clutches. Or, today, into a small, crowded kitchen lit with one bare light bulb, to a sympathetic gringa, her Peruvian madre shredding carrots and butchering a chicken breast, and her hermanita (little sister) in a sparkly pink sweater with her hair falling out of a tight bun. After every third or fourth song, the same macho announcer would remind listeners everywhere that they were enjoying “¡Criollo a las doce!” courtesy of “¡Radio Felicidad!” – Radio Happiness!

A stubborn cold has resigned me to low-energy activities for the last few days. “It’s because you wear sandals everywhere!” Feliciana scolds. It’s kept me close to home, where I’ve been able to work on bonding with my host family. Before lunch today I helped carry bags of textiles, hats, and other souvenirs to the plazoleta (small town square), where Feliciana presides over a wooden stall next to her cousins, nieces, and other relatives. The plazoleta is at the base of the famous ruins, through which all the tourists funnel. Unlike other tourist areas (the train station, for example), here the women sell passively. Their brightly colored wares attract enough attention without the women hounding the tourists: “Poncho, lady? Blankets? Hats?” I sat and practiced counting in Quechua (joc, iskay, kinsa, tawa, pisac, socqta, canchis…), wanting to regain the little proficiency I gained on my last trip. Feliciana helped me count, and I helped her translate each of her items for sale into English. Camila and one of her thousand cousins played with a stick and a red ribbon, and I took pictures. I had imagined doing this on my first trip to Peru: sitting and passing the time in the market, a fly on the wall instead of another staring tourist. The society of women and  children there fascinated me, but I was too shy to talk to them, too wary of offending with my very gringa presence. Today I felt protected by my position as Feliciana’s (paying) house guest. I was invited, welcome to sit and submerge.

Back to the kitchen. The humid childish warmth of Camila leaning on my knee, and her inquiring smile as she’d look at the dictionary and then at me as she practiced reading the letters made me feel relaxed, at home. A part of the household. The music swelled and ebbed, invisible men and women asked not to be abandoned, asked for their love to cherish them forever. Feliciana shouted up the stairs to her son, Aaron, with a mother’s loving frustration, stripped another hunk of meat from the chicken carcass, and rolled her eyes at me with a smile. And then the announcer came back; in case we’d forgotten, we were listening to “Radio Happiness! The best songs of your life!” Maybe. The best songs of my first week back in Peru? Definitely.

Linda works for an environmental consulting firm.  Last spring, knowing that I have a degree in English, she mentioned that the company was looking for a part-time editor.  At the time I was packing to hit the road for the summer, and knew I’d committed to snowmaking in the fall.  Interested, yes, but it felt like poor timing.  A month ago she got in touch to tell me they were still thinking of taking on someone new, so I sent in a resume and cover letter.  It was the most challenging job application I’d completed oh, since college, probably.  I haven’t applied for a serious, “professional” job in five years.  My food service, customer service, and outdoor/physical labor resumes are in tip top shape, but an editing resume?  Um.  Well.  Yes, I have this degree, yes I worked in a publishing house (seven years ago), yes I’ve always been very good at grammar and research, yes I’m a perfectionist and a good reader, but phew, finding solid work experience to back up all of those general acquired skills was challenging.  I spent the better part of a day compiling, wording, and re-wording my resume and writing a cover letter.  I wasn’t sure it would be good enough to get the job, but I told my parents about it, bragged to my boyfriend, and felt a warm, satisfying pride in actually doing it.  I can still complete hard assignments!  I do have some innate talents, five years out of academia!  Kari, Linda’s boss, wrote back immediately to tell me that my resume had been received and was “in the mix”.  Ah well, I thought, at least I tried.  It took another month for her to call me and offer me the job, but she did.  I was sitting in the waiting area in my local Firestone while the mechanics changed the oil in my car, and I accepted.  I started the next day.  That was three days ago, and I’ve been giddy every since.

What is this new job?  Say that Kennecott Copper Mine (the largest open pit copper mine in the world! the website brags.  I can literally see it from my house) wanted to dig another pit.  The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) provides laws and regulations that the mine must follow in order to do any expansion, so Kennecott would hire the company I work for to run tests, inspect the site for archaeological artifacts, and write up an Environmental Impact Statement, which I would then edit.  The writing is technical, but fascinating.  In two days of work, I’ve already learned about the history of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe of Idaho, and that one of the major issues with building a solar panel farm in the Arizona desert is the amount of water the farm would require.  I feel like I’m listening to NPR or reading National Geographic articles while working.  I love it.  I’m getting paid (well) to learn new things and use my college degree!  The best part (or, one of the best parts) is that I’ve been hired on a temporary/part time basis.  I don’t have to commit to working in an office for the next year.  Kari (who’s my boss now, too) told me they could have anywhere from zero to twenty hours of work for me a week.  I’m more or less functioning as a contractor.  And once I get the hang of the company’s style guidelines, I will likely be able to work from home, on my own time.  This is a dream come true for me.  I’m building skills and connections that will ultimately allow me to earn a living from home.  This is just the beginning.

So, a new job!  On top of still making snow at Alta (we should be finished any day now, except the weather won’t cooperate.  Salt Lake is stuck in an inversion: polluted, 35°F air in the valley trapped by high, 45°F air in the mountains.  I scrape frozen pollution off my car windshield every morning.), I’m coming up on the dates when I told Brighton and Solitude Resorts I’d be able to start work.  Weekends at Brighton, weeknights at Solitude (no housekeeping this time, just reception/bellman work at the Inn), and my daytime hours split between skiing and this new, professional editing position.  Plus, I have friends!  GIRL friends, even.  I’ve stuck around long enough to make meaningful connections with women whom I admire and respect.  And strangely, staying put seems to be helping me to achieve some of my greater life goals: writing, adventure, travel, baking… I’m writing more, and more easily, than I have in a long time.  Adventure lurks around every corner (motorcycling in Moab, downhill mountain biking, dating a man with a 10-year-old).  I’m planning my travels purposefully instead of randomly (at least for the moment).  The next trip is slated for mid-March, back to Peru, with a possible two week side trip to Colombia.  And while I still rely on store-bought bread for my own personal use, next weekend at Brighton I’ll be selling all kinds of baked goodies at the 2^nd annual craft fair.  Life is moving like a flooded river: fast, and full.  It is good.

The Eduardo VI dropped us at the pier in Lagunas, the town that serves as the entry point for the Reserva Nacional Pacaya Samiria. Here we organized a canoe and two guides and embarked for a four-day canoeing/camping trip into the jungle. During the days, we paddled. Javier and María, our guide and cook, talked over our heads in heavily accented jungle Spanish – a disjointed melody with stops and uplifted notes in an exotic patois. Their voices stayed in my head like a song, working, knocking around until the tune was familiar, pleasant, and I could almost sing along. In moments, our paddles struck the water in perfect unison, propelling us through the quiet, dark water, between narrow river banks overhung with dense greenery. Papagayos (macaws) and parrots exploded from the canopy, feathered fireworks of red, green, blue, yellow. Small yellow butterflies landed on Jesus’ bare back, tasting his sweat. Our guides’ sharp eyes picked out monkeys in the trees and spotted the markings of crocodiles and turtles on the sandy banks. The first day, it rained – poured. I sat in the canoe and tilted my head up, drinking the warm rain, letting it drench me, feeling wild and real and alive. At night, we searched for caimans and hunted the fish that jumped in the shallows, spearing them with a three-pronged lance. We slept on spongy palm branches under tarps and mosquito nets. After dark, we went to the bathroom in pairs, checking the ground and branches carefully for spiders and snakes before squatting. I fell asleep every night listening to the whooping of the frogs and counting the flashes of the lightning bugs flickering through the dark trees. This is the Amazon, the real deal: there are trees that walk, and other trees that kill, clinging with their roots to a healthy trunk like a giant squid wraps its tentacles around a ship, squeezing, strangling, subsuming.

There’s a potent magic in the jungle. Primitive, elemental, it stirs something deep in our bodies, something we already know but have forgotten the words for. Jesus and I returned to Lagunas enchanted. Time passed differently. I caught myself drifting, waking after minutes, hours; four more days slipped through our fingers. We spent hours at “the beach”, and more hours in the town’s only bar, drinking cold beer and watching the heat shimmer on the packed dirt of the main street. There was lots of walking barefoot and playing volleyball in the street with the same group of kids, every afternoon at four. There was nothing to do and so much time to do it in, but no one ever seemed bored. Different to the culture of the States: Do MORE in LESS time – IMMEDIATELY!! Life is simple: simple foods, rice, eggs, fish, bananas, and yucca, simple homes with dirt floors that still need to be swept, hammocks instead of beds. And yet, in the month I spent in the jungle, I saw more people laughing, more smiling and joking, more families at ease: more enjoyment.

I took a lot of pictures. The town of Lagunas is incredibly photogenic, the grass and trees are tall and bright green-yellow against the blue and green houses and the dirt streets that look golden in the baking midday sun. A girl moves through the grass with a bucket of water on her head, a toddler walking at her side. Women use machetes to chop at the grass in front of their houses. Half-naked boys stand on the gunwales of their canoes, leaf-shaped paddles in hand. A fisherman hauls his nets across the river, shouting and stamping his feet to scare off the pink river dolphins that circle his catch. The realization that came to me was simple, but powerful. These images, these faces and scenes in front of me are real. Not from the pages of magazines, romantic, exotic, staged, or contrived. This is life. These people don’t know that they’re beautiful, that what they’re doing is special or photogenic. It’s just life. It’s just the jungle.

Just.

15 July – 6 August

Angus and I arrived in Puerto Montt on the Sunday morning bus, and chose Casa Perla at random out of the guidebook.  Perla herself met us at the front door of the homestay, urging us to hurry up, come in, drop our stuff, and ¡vamos!  She spoke too rapidly for me to catch what, exactly, the hurry was, or where we were going, but there was a small cluster of people at the door, clearly waiting for us to join up and get on with it.  “It’s a curanto (coo-RAhn-to),” Trina (a Kiwi woman about my age and fellow guest at Casa Perla) explained as we trooped down the hill toward the waterfront.  “But I’m not really sure what that means.  It’s a traditional Chileno meal, and we have to go to this island, where there’s this woman cooking it.  And that’s all I know.”  Lunch on an island in Chile.  Okay.

At the bottom of the hill, we waited for a bus.  We stood next to the Sunday market, and the scent of fish was overpowering in the 80F sun.  Standing room only on the bus; I found myself pressed up next to Clementine, a Frenchwoman who spoke better Spanish than English.  We communicated between languages, using words and hand gestures and facial expressions.  Closer to the front, Angus met the perfect mate to play Cheech to his Chong.  He and Stace, a sixty-year-old English/Dutch yoga instructor, had somehow grabbed seats and were cracking open their cans of beer, the hoppy odor adding to the sticky air inside the bus.  Stace had a frizzy silver-and-ginger beard and long, thin hair pulled into a tight knot on the top of his head.  Small wisps of light red hair ringed his forehead, ears, and neck.  Off the bus and down a long cement ramp to the edge of the water, where a small, brightly-painted boat waited to ferry us the ten minutes across the sound to Isla Tengla, then another ten minutes walking to the opposite side of the island to the farm where the mysterious curanto was meant to take place.

The farm was small, sheltered, and consisted of a few small buildings: a house, a barn with attached animal pens, and a round, open-ceilinged structure with long tables set for the meal.  Scruffy dogs bickered in the grassy space between the buildings, and older, dark-skinned men stood silently in the doorway of the barn.  Meanwhile a plump, soft-looking matron in a long skirt and lavender apron moved busily from barn to house, house to dining area.  I smiled at the men, asked if I could take photos, and suddenly I had an escort.  Pedro led me through a green arborway into the garden, and to the edge of the stone wall that separates the farm from the beach.  It was low tide, and the beach was huge and wet.  I took a few pictures, and then stood talking to Pedro, doing my best to understand his rapid Chileno speech and trying to respond with the right words when he paused.  He was perhaps seventy, and short, with a heavily lined face, a thick grey mustache, and dark eyes.  My comprehension was not 100%, but it was enough.  He told me about his life, about his travels: he worked in a factory in Connecticut, and later (or perhaps at the same time?) served in the Chilean air force, flying a route that took him through Toronto, Detroit, St. Louis, Dallas, San Antonio, Huston, Mexico and Central America on countless occasions.  It was from him that I learned that GW Bush was on a tour of the Middle East, and that Hillary Clinton had won out over Obama in NH.  He’d like to see Hillary take the general election in November, but agreed with me that change is important.  This feels like someone else’s life, like something I might read about.  And yet, this is real.  This is where I am.

Finally, we were called into the barn to watch them “open” the curanto.  In the floor of the barn was a poured cement hole, perhaps a foot deep and a meter square.  Perla, our expedition leader, stood next to me and explained the process in heavily-accented English.  To build a curanto: first, a fire is built in the bottom of the hole, on top of a layer of round stones.  The stones bake in the fire, and when they’re red hot, the cooks begin constructing the layers of food.  Several layers of huge wet leaves cover the rocks, and on top of that they lay alternating layers of shellfish, leaves, meat, potatoes, vegetables, leaves, more shellfish, more meat, and then on the very top, two kinds of heavy, rich potato bread.  The whole lot is covered with more leaves, then several burlap sacks.  For two hours, the food sits and steams and the fat and juice and flavors from the various ingredients drip and mingle and cook.  The smell, as Pedro and two others peel back each layer, is exotic and mouthwatering.

The shells clack and clatter against one another as the matron forks them out in their red net bags.  Two shy cats hide under the benches around the curanto, eyeing the fish and the people, and the dogs creep closer and closer to the hole until someone notices them and shouts them back outside.  The food, once served, fills the long tables to capacity.  There is a watery salsa to spoon over the potatoes and the mussels; bottles of cool white wine are passed while the pile of discarded shells grows on a tray at the end of the tables.  Jo the dog sits at my feet, licking my knee occasionally in hopes of a pork bone.  By the end, my fingers are greasy and my stomach groaning.  This is cuisine.

There is a siesta on the beach after the meal.  I sit with Angus, Stace, Trina, Ant (Trina’s partner), and Clementine, not talking, each of us in our own private digestive stupor.  There’s no need for words, no need to play the “getting-to-know-you” game.  The six of us, we’ve discovered, are going to be together for another whole week as we travel south to Puerto Natales on the Navimag Ferry.  It’s a four-day boat trip through the Patagonian Channels, and it’s the only way see Chile’s Pacific coast.  We will have plenty of time to talk in the coming days.  For the moment, I am easy.  I’m humming along with the universe, in the exact right place at the exact right time.

And now there is a soft gray cat in my lap.  Oh, the simple pleasures.

If I visualize this period of transition as a piece of music, then at this moment what I am hearing is the quiet reflective melody that follows a particularly powerful crescendo: The Hollyford Mission!  It was a ten day trip, through the remote wilds of Fiordland in the southwestern corner of the South Island.  Three days tramping along the beaten path of the Hollyford River valley with a few other hardy souls, three days living in a hut on the beach waiting for bad weather to clear, and four days of complete solitude on the hardest trail I’ve ever walked.  On day one, I hiked 30 km (18 miles – Huge.) and felt six of my ten toes and the bottom of my right heel develop large, swollen blisters.  On day three, I found myself caught out in a torrential downpour, complete with jagged bolts of lightning and crashing thunder, on the wrong side of a flooded river, and had to spend the night huddled between flax plants in a wet tent in a wet sleeping bag.  On day four, I waited for the eye of the storm, packed all of my (sopping wet) gear, crossed the river, and all but sprinted the last three kilometers to the Big Bay Hut.  Big Bay (as the name would suggest), is a large, rectangle-shaped bay on the northern coast of Fiordland.  It’s accessible only by helicopter, small fixed-wing planes, or a four day walk from the nearest road.  Remote.  Beautiful.  Even in the throes of the storm, the wild seas and gray, rocky beach were magic.  What a place to be stuck.

I waited out the weather for two and a half days, and could have easily let myself forget the outside world and simply stay.  There were three surfers stranded with me for the first day, waiting for a break in the clouds so that their airplane could land on the beach and take them home.  Before they left they introduced me to our neighbor, a hunter named Aussie Bob, who was spending a few weeks in his private hut a kilometer further down the beach.  When the surfers finally soared away, it was just Bob and me and the beach and the wind and rain.  Bob was perhaps fifty years old, a sheep-shearer, and for 17 years had been hunting the coast and hills of northern Fiordland.  I wished, repeatedly, that I had a tape recorder to capture the stories he shared.  A genuine, multi-faceted individual, a true man of the land who could gauge deer’s bloodlines from the shape of the antlers of the stags he’d killed.  He described himself as a redneck, but he was the most open-minded and accepting redneck I’ve ever met.  “Different strokes for different folks,” he’d say as he shook his head over the lifestyles of the various people he’s met in his long and varied life.  He wasn’t sure what to make of me at first: a young woman on her own in the absolute last frontier of the NZ bush, confident of my abilities yet responsible and aware of the risks of the back country and the measures needed to counter them.  I walked down the beach to his hut the first night to listen to the weather forecast on his mountain radio, and stayed to chat over a can of beer.  As he listened to my stories of Antarctica and past tramping experience, I could see his respect for my independence grow at the same time as he sought to protect me.  Bob sent me home with flour and yeast to bake bread in my hut’s camp oven, and the next afternoon showed up with fresh venison back steaks (the nicest part of the animal) wrapped in a plastic bag.  These I cooked in a curry, using the ingredients that the surfers had left behind.  Venison curry and fresh bread baked on a wood stove in a little hut on the beach in Fiordland in NZ.  I’m not sure that cuisine gets any better than that.

For two days, life took on a simplicity and a peace that I would find difficult to recapture.  In the mornings, I stoked the fire, got it roaring, with a kettle on top of the stove for tea, then ventured out to the beach to check the weather and gather more driftwood to feed the fire.  The water would be hot when I got back, and Bob would pop in and join me for a cuppa while spinning yarns about his work and his misadventures as a young, redneck Aussie visiting New Zealand for the first time.  After tea I’d have a wash at the faucet behind the hut, sweep out the sand, mix up a batch of bread dough to rise, then sit and read and watch the birds, fantails, wax-eyes and tomtits, swoop and dive outside the window.  Eventually the rain stopped and I could go for walks on the beach, taking pictures and collecting shells.  In the evenings I’d walk over to Bob’s hut to catch the weather and listen to his stories.  I’d inevitably show up barefoot (it was warm enough, and it was easier than putting on wet hiking boots), which would make Bob shake his head.  ”You’re a tough bitch, aren’t you?” he said, in a tone of deep respect and admiration.  The night before I left, three of Bob’s hunting mates arrived by fixed-wing plane, and he invited me to come over for a roast (wild boar, pumpkin, kumara).  There I sat, smack in the middle of a kiwi hunting “man’s weekend”…how did I get here?  I marveled.

The rest of the trip was along the Pyke River valley: tough going.  This was a track that sought to break me.  It had already sent blisters, lightning, wind, rain, floods.  The second half tried to turn me back with fallen trees, mud, lakes, suffocating bush, thorns, vines, roots, slips, trips, falls, cuts, and bruises.  It thrashed me good, and then dared me to keep going – and I did.  Yet my memories are tinged with a glowing sort of magic.  I saw no one.  Red deer grazed along the sides of the rivers, and stags roared terrifyingly in the bush.  A NZ falcon swooped down from its lofty perch to examine me close up.  At one side creek, I balked at the murky orange water of questionable depth and the half-submerged tree stumps that poked out ominously.  Instead of walking through it, I took a gamble on a fallen tree that conveniently bridged the 8-foot creek.  It was narrow and smooth.  Too narrow and smooth.  So much for my dry sleeping bag and my mobile phone!  The next day I walked around Lake Wilmot, a small lake made nearly impassable by windfalls – it took me four hours to cover one kilometer.  Next was the Black Swamp, where I had to leap between tiny tussock mounds to avoid the sucking, stinking mud that at one point swallowed both of my legs up to my groin.  On the last day, I walked five kilometers through Lake Alabaster (yes, I had to walk IN the lake), climbing over slippery rocks and fallen trees, staring tiredly through my raincoat hood (it was raining again) at the waterfalls pouring down the cliffs on the other side of the lake.  Like the creature from the Black Lagoon, I rose from the lake at the end of the day, trudged wetly across the beach to the hut, and stood solidly on the porch.  I turned and surveyed the length of the lake I’d just conquered, and cheered.  The Hollyford – Pyke/Big Bay Mission: DONE!!  Satisfaction supreme.

24 April, 2007

(A real time update: Kelli and I are in Taupo, in the middle of the North Island, and all is well.  More to come as the (mis)adventures continue!)

A week of sunshine followed by two weeks of pouring rain saw me doing my best to help Susan out around the Dreamhouse.  Washing windows, edging gardens, cooking meals, vacuuming, dusting, mowing lawns, hauling wood, etc.  The rain cleared for a weekend, just long enough for the whole family to travel south to Hokitika for the world-famous Wildfoods Festival.  It’s an annual event on the Coast that draws up to 30,000 visitors from both NZ and around the world and celebrates the – ahem – wilder side of West Coast cuisine.  By way of example, I present a list of the delicacies that I, personally, consumed: venison, wild mushrooms, crickets (they were in peanut butter truffles, so they tasted okay, but when I was still picking legs out of my mouth a half hour later, I had to rate the crickets as the nastiest thing of the day), snails, homemade ice cream with organic strawberries, kava (a traditional beverage from Fiji), corn on the cob, kangaroo, crocodile (tastes like chicken), elderflower champagne, worms (chopped up and served in chocolate truffles), punga (native ferns), possum, horse (that one I could have done without), and huhu grubs (fat, white wood-boring critters that taste like nuts when roasted).  It was a day for daring and for strong stomachs.  I met up with Andre and Genevieve, two of my favorite Ice people, and spent the night with them out on the beach, relishing the opportunity to enjoy their company in the real world.  More rain…I visited Geoffrey’s gold mining claim and fell on my bum in the mud.  I also got to watch the whole mining process, do a bit of panning for myself, and actually hold raw nuggets of gold in my hand.  We escaped the rain for another weekend, this time across the Alps to Christchurch to watch the Crusaders (the local professional rugby team) bash the Bulls, a team from South Africa.

All in all, I spent a refreshing, fun (if a bit wet) three and a half weeks with Geoffrey, Susan and Navare.  It was longer than I’d planned to stay, but I’d mapped out a 9-day hike through the main divide of the Southern Alps, and couldn’t attempt it til the rains quit, as it involved numerous river crossings and fairly rugged, un-marked terrain.  Just as I was beginning to think I’d have to scrap the whole thing and move on, the rains cleared, and I was off.  Nine days… The idea for the trip originated with Lumir, and it was a doozie: gorgeous river valleys, tempting tall peaks, pristine lakes, natural hot springs, and two challenging mountain passes in the very heart of the Alps.  Definitely the road less traveled by.  For the first four days I was completely alone.  There wasn’t a soul living or breathing for miles…just me.  It was an incredible, empowering experience, having to use a map and compass to find a safe route, having to problem solve and navigate and take complete responsibility for every aspect of the trip.  The first night out, I slept next to the Waiheke River in a bivouac that I constructed out of a large blue tarp and a length of rope.  I woke during the night, rolled onto my back, and stared directly up into the clear, starry sky: wow.  I waded up one river, crested the first pass (the Amuri), and spent four days wandering the river valleys of the eastern Alps.  I camped next to Lake Sumner and was almost carried away, bivouac and all, by sandflies (wicked, demon biting insects that travel in gangs of millions) but was rescued by a kind, retired schoolteacher-turned-fisherman-and-violin-maker who loaned me an extra tent for the night.  He also shared his wife’s homemade cake with me and in the morning, wouldn’t let me leave until l’d sat and had a cup of tea with him.  Love, love, love this Kiwi generosity.  On the second to last day of the trip, I stood on top of the Harpers Pass (936 meters – approx 3,000 ft.) after a long, extremely difficult morning’s climb, and felt my soul absolutely fill to bursting with triumph – I had done it!!  Nine days in the back country, completely self-sufficient, learning, growing, and loving every minute.  It was a bit anti-climatic then, when I came down from the pass and had to stay put in a hut, a mere sixteen kilometers from the end of the trip and civilization, waiting for two whole extra days because of a wicked rainstorm and flooded rivers.  Two days, alone in a hut, reading, playing solitaire, watching the rain, doing jumping jacks, stoking the fire, and staving off the stir-crazies by working on the 1,000 piece jigsaw that some kind, blessed soul had left behind.  It was a relaxing way to end the trip, if a bit boring.  Eleven days later (nine days tramping, two days sitting), I strode out of the bush and made my way back to the Dreamhouse on the hill, stinking, filthy, but revived.

So now: freshly showered, clothing laundered and hiking boots dried, I’m off.   Last night Susan and Navare and I had a farewell marshmallow roast in the gia (a Mongolian dwelling, like a yurt…yes, they’ve got a yurt as well as a boat on their property.  They’re a pretty unique family.), and this morning Navare presented me with a piece of a possum jawbone for good luck.  It’s hanging from Dr. Gonzo’s rear view mirror, along with a piece of shell that Jenny gave me before I left Methven.  Ahhh, it’s good to be on the road again.  I’ve got three weeks before Kelli gets here, and way, way too many things to try and fit into that time.  Oh well.  A full life is a good life.  I’m back to the internet cafe scene, which means less time for emails and website updates.  With any luck I’ll be in the mountains most of the time anyway.  I’m a month and a half away from the Ice, and a month and a half away from home.  I’m at the balancing point, ready to make the most of the downward journey.  Let’s go have some fun!!