mycofarm

Visit to Finca

2010-02-16T14:04:00.000-08:00

Finca El Gibraltar between Buca and Baranca Bermeja...just studying and learning about the plants here...There are large forest reserves with hundreds of species of rare dry forest tree species...among other things...

One of the cow fields showing the general terrain of the area...

This is a shot looking across the Rio Sogamosa, there is a dam being built will flood thousands of hectares of amazing forestlands...

The Rio Sogomosa is not flowing at this time of the year..It just consists of these giant stagnant ponds until the rains comes around April...It´s really hot here and humid and you sweat like pig on a treadmill...

This is a spiny tree in the Fabaceae...I don.t have my notebook now but I´ll dedicate a large set of blogs later to my fieldwork in the Magdalena...

This is pod from the Orojero...the ear-maker tree..it´s similar to the tamarind and the cows really love it according to the Farm Folk...

This is the flower from a tree famous in the region called the Gallineral...

Ok...and now for somthing completely different...here´s the downtown lowdown...I´m shimmying up this tree,yet another member of the Fabaceae and just minding my business and this giant bird, which is behind the oildrums there...Starts to attack me...it has a wicked sharp beak(thanks albondigas) and and talons on it´s elbows and it starts screaming at me and chases me out of the forest...I walk backards looking at the bird for like 300 feet and still it chases me...so I throw a stone at the bird, it bounces if the bird andf the bird proceeds to peck the hell out the rock and still come towards me....ahhhhhh! It´s Chavari´ very mean very crazy...So i hide for a minute and the find the bird behind this fence and manage to get a photo and video...but maiming possibly endangered birds is not in my job description so I don´t venture back in to that part of the forest

To San Gil to Eat the Ants and Swim in the Piscinas conchichi, the beautful and amazing Middle Magdalena Valley

2010-01-31T17:35:00.000-08:00

This is view around Chicamocha National Park(look it up). The road through the Magdalena is treacherous and hot, people passing each other like crazy on a winding 2 lane highway and a sheer 600 or 700 foot cliff straight down to the valley floor. That would definately leave a mark. Previously in the last decade this area was controlled by the paramilitary/cocaine smugglers/mercenarios we all know of to some degreeI have no idea whats going on right now...

These are the asses of the queens of the giant leaf cutter ants. There are 41 species of leave foraging ants in Colombia, that's alotta culona. They are called hormigas culonas, which literally means big ass ants. They were an agricultural pest until some genius decided to gather up the Flying queens and munch on their bums. There is a some dubious rumor that they taste bad, but in fact quite a delicacy and I enjoyed them quite alot, they taste like perfumed unpopped popcorn. They have a floral flavor sort of...You only eat the butt not the whole ant...

They are pretty big and uniquely Santanderean. The look like some nasty roach pupae though. I will definately eat these nasty bleepers again...

Ok the comida tipica de Santander. Ok we have cassava frita (the white sticks), fried green plaintain(ick) it's like a sweet greasy tadpole in your mouth, the white stuff is nice salty rice, stewed peas on left, a beet salad called ensalada roja, at the meat is a smoke dired steak like stuff that has an amazing flavor but the texture of new tire...

The giant ant in the backround in a monument to the culona in San Gil. San Gil is the adventure capitol of Colombia nd here you can paraglide,whitewater raft, ride atvs...etc. The remnants of the tropical dry forest, or Magdalena Dry Forest to be exact are incrediible full of Ceibas and Mimosas. This road leads to the Parque Gallineral, and amazing forest park with a giant spring fed swimming pool...simply amazing!

This is the Pozo Azul a spring different pool, natural, there are fossils all over the rocks here and people like this place becuase it is cool and free, though the beer at the bar is over priced a bit... would paI mean who in their right mind would pay a dollar for a beer?!

These are the silly/gay ducks looking for food in the algae lining the chute that leads the pool. They were nice with that brown gravy...

Another view of said chute

This is the flower of a tree in the Mimosa subfamily of Fabaceae. It's silky like Archbishop Don Magic Juan...the green in for the money, the gold is for the hunnies...This is the genus Albizia I do believe

Another view of the upper falls...this place was crawling with nasty biting flies tiny nasty flies! and countless ants of numerous species...

Another view of the giant fiberglass ant...what a morsel

Julie and I before drinking a 50,000 bottle of whiskey...it was good but damn that's spendy...It should be noted that Julie is made of crab bits glued together.

The old drunk guys behind us couldn't remember their own name most of the time. The fish painting was rad. I wanted to buy it but Julie wouldn´t let me. :I

This was the central square in San Gil, just abunch on youngins tossin down the hooch.

A little spingfed steam that is clear and beautiful and surrounded by tiny biting flies that really suck alot

The entrance to Parque El Gallineral, a nature park thatis beautiful and full of amazing tree of flower species. There are also lotsa of brids flitting about....

Two squirells in el parque. they were very red and one had giant huevos.

This me most probably icthing fly bites...they itch forlike 5 days.

The treesin park have giant Spanish Moss, which is actually a bromeliad, aerial roots hanging down from all of the trees.

This is a lovely ginger plant: Zingiber

The Ceiba trees produce a ton of inedible green fruit, it falls from the trees and pops you in the head.

The Emperors Staff is a flower in the ginger familiy I do believe. It was imported from africa many moons ago.

This is the very cold spring fed pool at El Gallineral. It is amazingly refreshing and the water just flows through like a river...It´s 10 feet deep at one end and 3 feet deep on the other.

In this region instead of seagulls you have American Black Vultures. They are ominous and fly and hover and roost all over. They like to fight over various pieces of rotten crap.

San gil has steep streets and is pretty tranquiloooooo. I liked it here but is very small and I could see getting bored here quickly, back to my new job atFondo Ganadero. I´m organzing a planbt diversity study of therforest reserves on the rangeland owned by the company....should be interesting.

Discussions of the relative oddities of South American and Colombian customs as compared to those of The Union Of The United States of Americas

2010-01-28T11:06:00.001-08:00

Okay this entry will be in the form of list/poem
mostly list
i think
ok
i love pan de yuca
On the topic of street customs:
1. Street food usually consists of something far less than 1 dollar
2. People sell movie DVDs like they are produce; also often around 1 dollar, I love this, I know someone who bought Sherlock Holmes the other day...They said it was seedy...like a pitihaya
3. The fresh fruit vendors yell out about their wares..."AGUACATE!" TAMARINDO!"
4. Buses are sales floors for many products, a gentleman or lady will offer some product for sale
ateach bus stop, these are not bus riders...They can be life savers on a 10 hour ride.
5. Private Security is everywhere and they carry not but a stick and whistle
6. These private security agents, when with whistle, continually walk their beat and blow such whistle;often
7. The whistle blowing is to scare off thieves
8. The security guard in our neighboorhood is like 60; I'm sure does know much kung foo and I'm almost certain can't run very fast, though he is a steadfast bicycler and whistle blower he has lungs like the Zeppelin.
9. You will be at some point referred as Mr Gringo, I prefer being called Dr. Gringo
10. Although it is 87 degrees everyone wears jeans and I can't say I'm getting used to it yet
11. Colombianos wear a clear plastic glove when eating fried or roasted chicken, it is funny.
12. YOU CANNOT FLUSH THE TP!
13. you cannot flush the TP!
14 There is this hombre who sells almojabanas(yuca bread with cheese) and bunuelos(doughnuts made with a yeasty tangy cheese) on his motor cycle he sings"ALLLLMOHA BANAS< BUN YOO_WEY_LOES!" it's quite good I will spy video it for you...Tinto and a song about bread!
15. The use of racial perjorative and those perjoratives that we might considers rude like "fatty" or "little blacky" or "meany" are often compliments, or at least non-perjorative.
16. The people of Colombia are extremely warm hearted and smile more than any people as a whole i have ever encountered.
17. I think people really like the cheeba...if you don't know what that is don't worry about it...and they like fried stuff...
18. It is perfectly socially acceptable(i hear that whistle again) to sell cold drinks like Kool-aid or fruit juices from an old aquarium, pictures to come...
19. Haggling is part of the custom, you must! Even for a bus ride...
20. In eveywhere I've been "rico" means delicious, it seems to mean cool here as well...i have't heard the word chevere in Buca.
21. I don't like shelled beans
22. When people beg for change they are old or infirmed in some way not some young punks who drink box wine all day. I always give, not to the drunk bums...
23. Lunch always comes with soup...this is called something that kicks ass...
24. The level of sanitation is the US is borderline rediculous, as is the use of high fructose corn syrup
25. They recycle glass bottle BY ACTUALLY REUSING THEM, and not just smashing them into dust...
26. The coca cola is made from cane sugar, is not canned, and is delicious. The coca cola in the US isn't fit to be served to little rats sitting at a tea party...

More Buca and the smell of hanging meat

2010-01-27T04:17:00.000-08:00

As I write this the swifts are swooping all around me and making this crazy twittering sound...There is a shrill whistle that sounds at random times throughout the day and night and it drives me mad as Lou Ferigno as the Incredible Hulk, someone get me some gamma rays. If I could find the whistler or whistle I may have to cease the existance of at least the whistle. This whistle is like a fork on a chalkboard.

1/26

Today I decide I'm going to the plaza central, home of the central produce market, near the city center and the Parque Santander. This is across the citt about 80 blocks fortunatley it's not that hot because there is some nice cloud cover. I buy a cup of pineapple for breakfast for 1000 pesos and trek on my way to Mercado. I stop to get keys made at a small tienda and 2 of the 6 keys do not work. I stop in a gambling hall and watch this crazy Colombian roulette/craps combo game i guess they play here. It involves a giant board for placing roulette style bets and these giant 16 sided dice and this weird pool ball thing...I wanted to give it a shot but decided against it...

The sellers in the mercado are very very aggressive so I use their aggressiveness to get the best deals I can as an obvious gringo. Around the market is crazy hundreds of vendors selling anything you'd ever need. Alot of ropa(clothing) utside the market and alot of veggies fruits and meat(the meat floor made we want to hurl a couple times) along with freshwater fishes like tilapia and this giant freshwater catfish like thing with tiger stripes, I forgot the name. The market is dimly lit but vibrant in it's color contrast and the other floors do not smell that bad. The market has 3 produce floors, fruits, legumes, and meat/cheese/eegs and one dry goods floor that includes hot food vendors and some bars. I have 2 aguila which i mispronounce agui-yah, the correct is AHgee-lah. For 2 USD(there goes that goddamn whistle again and again again) I am served a hot meal of a caldo (goat meat soup with ground corn and cassava in this case) , the seco (chicken quarter with hot sauce, a quarter pound of delicious steamed cassava, 2 boiled papas(poh-tay-toes), 2 fried potato slices, salad of cabbage and green tomato with lime, a ball of rice with coconut milk, a pile of frijoles which I hate usually but these were good and a Jug of tamarind juice. Tamarind juice is good but takes a little getting used to because of much it tastes like tangy soy juice with lime or something.

I walk back through the market buying and bargaining for produce.

When I'm done I wander back across town a ways before getting a cab because I have walked about 120 blocks. The cab driver brings we back to La Florest and does not change for the 20,000 peso note so I walk into the panaderia and buy some almojabana, yuca bread baked with tangy cheese, and give a piece to the driver along with his 5000 pesos for the ride. He smiles and looks at the bread like it is a long lost lover.

Later on I prepare dinner for when Julie gets back first I make juice from the market fruit, carmabola and maracuya with lime. Carambola is starfruit, native to SE Asia but abundant and cheap here. Maracuya is a giant passionfruit which is amazingly delicious.

I the make the main dish of cracked rice, used for dogfood but my favorite rice, with stirfried red peppers, grilled pineapple and ajo (garlic). This is combined in a pan with 2 eggs to make a sort of stir fry. It is delicious.

bucaramangering!

2010-01-24T17:50:00.000-08:00

Sunrise over Central America, I think. This is hour 12 of our 16 hour ride from Portland to Medellin. The plane does land and we do not crash and burn, the wine is free...Chilean! This Juan Gabriel our couchsurfing host in Medellin, the other guy is me, note that I haven't slept in three days. Juan Gabriel is a great guy, a computer programmer and engineering student. He lives above a rock bar and 24 hour copy shop so night 2 brings no sleep.

This is Medellin, Escobar is gone and so to is Pepe his hippopatomus who escaped to the Rio Medellin (a large concrete torrent) and was murdered by the government. Look it up! Medellin is clean for a South American city and bears reminders eveywhere that the people of Medellin are concerned with the environment. The people are so friendly and the weather is like being in a sauna. The midday sun grinds upon me like cassava upon a tin grater.

This is a view from the Metro. The Metro is a light rail very similar to the max. It costs 1500 pesos to ride. 75 cents roughly The metro zooming by. In these stops there are auxillary police, 16-17 year old young men with batons who keep order but by no means are menacing. This gives jobs and other to otherwise wayward youth. The force is quite large. One of them told me to get my feet off a concrete block, I obeyed as to not be met by his truncheon.

This is an image a giant space worm

Along with the growing environmental conciousness, there is a growing sense of community and well being and the government holds free fitness classes throughout the city. We saw three going on and one was quite large with several hundred people rhythmically moving their hips to electro beats.

You can translate this yourself! Tomas was a muy famoso colombian poet.

"Happiness, so long as we create it, is not outside, it's inside ourselves, sensory or however you call it. We must be quiet as so not to scare it, as it's a bird that flies away at the slightest noise. Let it repose within us, so that it might emerge when we least expect it. It's true that happiness that does not always rest in any soul, but the souls have their summers, and the swallows return; they have their spring and the roses open."

The graffiti is rad. There are alot of octupus themed diddies and as some you might now that is sort of my mascot. Viva cephelopa! This one seems to have "problemas con su pelo."

Holy shit! This is our apartment in Bucaramanga, la ciudad bonita. It is really, really nice. 2 bedrooms lotsa furniture. I don't own furniture, some of you may also be aware of my furniture phobia. I own no furniture of any merit, I am proud of this fact. I do enjoy having a couch looking out over the city though. The apartment is really sweet and i feel very fortunate to have it as most people here struggle to make 500,000 (250 bucks) pesos a month and live in communal situations with extended families. I am insanely fortunate to be so free, I thank the universe for my current prosperity. This reminds me of how much educated,intelligent, free people owe to the other billions. We have a different debt, maybe two, discovering the nature of our debt (not monetary) and finding the bravery to begin to repay.

This next image is the leaf cutter and which seem to really like red flowers to chop up and grow their fungus on. They are ubiquitous.

These are crazy little pollinating wasps. They come back to the paper-tube hive in a manner that looks like they are being sucked in the hive. You can see the pollen on their legs as they come back, they are not bees.

A main street in Buca, lotsa trees and hot as hell down in the center of the city.

Up near La Floresta (paradise) in the hills there are many tall condo buildings and huge arboreteum that called La Flora , it's like a big maze...

Your host with the most.

Making jugo de pina from fresh pineapple and drinking Aguila cervesa. The pineapple was 1.50 US and was amazingly sweet and fresh. It was from the hills about 30 minutes from here. This pineapple was hard as a ****ing rock and the knife was as dull as a bleeping stone.

The virew from our balcony. At night hudreds of murcielagos(bats) gobble up the mosquitos. It's a great sight at they whip back and forth at eye level.

Yo prepare' un vaso de jugo de pina. Pineapple is my favorite fruit...i love it.

a few more snapshots

2009-12-14T17:21:00.000-08:00

The Christmas decorations have come out in full force, especially for the Virgin de Guadalupe Day feast which took place on December 12th... there were a lot of firecrackers going off and public gatherings in plazas, and pinatas!
I love all the lights everywhere. I've had it pretty easy here actually, in terms of winter darkness: it was 26 degrees C today but it's going to be 8 degrees C tomorrow.... Aaaaaaahhh!!
I had the best street food that I've had during my time here at this cart... omg. I don't remember what it was called, where it was or how I'll be able to find it again. But if you happen to be in the neighborhood near the Parque Viveros (this huge park where families like to hang out and have BBQs), ask somewhere where the taco cart is, across the street from the Pemex gas station and OXXO convenience store, that serves the amazing sopes with carne asada and cheese... you won't regret it, I promise.
Ghetto cooking in Nuevo Laredo. Yes, that is a floor tile... (I clean it!!)
BURRO! I love burros. The man who was driving the truck shouted out "Se vende!" (For sale!) as the loan officer and I pulled away.
Driving with the loan officers is always a mildly terrifying experience, especially when the cars are lacking sidemirrors.
An example of a house in Nuevo Laredo, permanently under construction.

Nine days left...

A Visit in Nuevo Laredo

2009-12-04T09:47:00.001-08:00

Corey is now gone but the signs of his stay are still all over my apartment: the black peppercorns spilled all over the floor (he was smashing them with a floor tile to put into my pepper shaker), the two magnets of Mt. Hood on the fridge that he brought me to give as gifts to people, the box of leftover shrimp rice in the fridge (I should probably throw that away). All in all it was a wonderful visit. Even though we didn't go anywhere (neither of us felt like dealing with long bus rides), it felt like a real vacation. On Thursday and Friday we had to go to the office because I had work to do but we left after 3pm on Friday. We did all the Nuevo Laredo things I wanted us to do. On Friday night we went to the karaoke bar and met up with my friends. On Saturday morning that we took the bus to the Wal-Mart mall, bought a ticket to 2012, watching 3/4ths of it and then sneaked into Inglorious Bastards (what a pointless, boring movie). We tried to stick it out but left shortly after Brad Pitt dug his fingers into the German actresses' bullet wound. We ate a LOT. Corey ate so many meat tacos, I was actually a little shocked. We also went to some nice seafood restaurants. On Sunday afternoon we went to the market; in the afternoon we walked over the border together (the first time I've been in Laredo, surprisingly enough!), said goodbye and I sent him in a taxi. It was a wonderful visit and best of all I'll be back in Portland for Christmas in only three weeks. And then I guess we need to start planning our trip back to Ecuador... eek!

Here are some more photos:
Driving across the border with my amazingly kind and nice co-worker who took the time to do so. There were so many cars, it took well over an hour to drive across the bridge over the Rio Bravo (when I walked across it, it took about two minutes).
Too bad I got the time of Corey's arrival wrong; we ended up waiting in the Laredo airport for 2 1/2 hours. Whoops!
Corey arrives! We are happy to see each other, obviously. I think this is a pretty cute picture, even with the blurriness and my Skeletor hand.
Daaw.

And that's it. I took NO pictures during his visit because I am made of FAIL. Honestly, I think taking pictures is kind of annoying, which once again makes me wonder about the purpose of this blog... it has such a weird, ambiguous, almost pointless identity for me. I guess it's sort of a vague travel blog? Hmm. Maybe when we go back to Ecuador things will become clearer...

Anyway, here's some photos of my apartment when I first moved in. Check out the nasty fridge (that was no fun to clean, I tell ya) and the random bucket crusted over with dry flakes of cement.

In Nuevo Laredo

2009-11-21T09:57:00.000-08:00

I miss writing here. I've been writing for the Kiva Fellows blog while I complete the Kiva Fellows internship in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, with Fundación para la Vivienda Progresiva (FVP). I recently learned that for my next placement I might be placed with a partner microfinance institution in Quito, Ecuador. I really hope this ends up happening because it would be really great if Corey and I could return to Ecuador again. How funny if we were to have the chance to return to that strange little equatorial country.

Anyway, so even though I now officially have less than a month (!!) here in Mexico, I'm going to try to update here during the little time that remains. So to start with, here are some pictures of my time so far in Nuevo Laredo.

This is the view from the office window of the two competing taco carts across the street, Tacos Tony and Tacos El Guero. Apparently the the GM merger, many office staff wondered if a merger of the two carts would result in Tacos Tony El Guero or Tacos El Guero Tony. Thankfully, said merger never took place.

FVP's mission statement: "to generate positive, enduring change..."

Ensalada de nopales in the local vegetarian restaurant, El Nuevo Sol.

A lady stops by the office once a week to sell tamales, including 10-peso chicken tamales with salsa verde. I'm always so excited when she comes, because they're soooo good.

One of the loan officers cuts her birthday cake. Office birthday parties are definitely a cause for excitement, especially the mango cakes. Too bad there's no more birthdays left for the year.

Just hanging out, eating and cracking jokes, business as usual at FVP.

Local neighborhood Jesus wall. Landmarks such as these are important for locating clients on confusing streets.

A quesadilla de carne asada prepared by a Kiva/FVP client. So much for vegetarianism, eh? You gotta accept the gifts you're given, though!

A lot of FVP clients run little albarrotes, or grocery stores. You walk past these all the time, but you never really think of the story behind the person who runs it, you know?

The intern prepares for the client interview.

Nelly the loan officer manhandles a giant calculator (she left her own calculator at home and had to use the one the client had for sale in the store) in an effort to calculate whether or not the client's business is resulting in a profit or a loss. Stressful!

Just a regular Nuevo Laredo street.

Going door-to-door visiting clients' houses (this one already had several loans to FVP for housing improvement. Looks pretty nice, doesn't it?).

A menu that fills my heart with joy.

A huarache, which also means leather sandal. God, this was so good.

Quesadilla de huitlacoche, a type of corn fungus. O, as Corey so lovingly put it, rotting corn. Wikipedia is a little less harsh with the term corn smut. These are really, really delicious, very salty and shroomy-tasting.

Local gardening in the form of papaya trees. People also tend to grow chili peppers.

A client I visited who made gorgeous art work. She ended up giving me a pillow with the Virgin of Guadalupe on it, complete with sequins and glitter. I keep it on the armchair in my apartment. Now whenever I sit on this armchair I always inevitably end up with red and blue glitter on my clothes.

My workstation, filled with the most common accessories. Note the screen recovering the crashed Open Office documents, the Styrofoam cup of banana batido (I've stopped buying these since), the mess of papers and the cluttered nightmare desktop with Excel documents.

A michelada, or beer with lime, salt and chili smeared around the rim. Quite tasty.

Eating a cheese quesadilla after consuming a big bowl of menudo, or tripe soup. It was actually quite tasy, perfect stuff for a rainy, gray day.

I swear to God we walked 5km, looking at stall after stall of clothes bought from Ross and the Goodwill bins from the U.S., TVs, computer parts, washing machines, refrigerators, mattresses, pirated DVDs and CDs, children's toys, cellphones... basically anything and everything you would ever need, you could find here.

At las pulgas with co-workers and their kids. Las pulgas means the fleas, which I assume is short for flea-market.

Estacion Palabra is like the local reading/cultural center, built with money from none other than Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who apparently traveled through Nuevo Laredo while embarking on his road trip through the U.S. south (which he writes about in "Vivir para contarla"). I told you the world was small!

LOOK AT HOW BIG THAT HAMBURGER IS. It was the size of my head!! But it was sooo good. Man, I want one now. Mexico, you have turned me into a vicious carnivore, much to my chagrin.

Competition for FVP? (It's a pretty sketchy flier advertising easily available loans, no questions asked... interesting that the interest rates are not posted...)

Laredo's version of the border wall. Pretty different from the five fences in the Tijuana-San Diego region, complete with helicopters, Batman-like lights at night in the sky and helicopters chopping away overhead.

My puny view of America, on the other side of the fence. I haven't walked across the border since I got here, but I will tonight when I go to pick up Corey at the airport... :)

Huge Mexican flag right by border wall. I wonder if the American one is this big up close.

On Guerrero, the main street in Nuevo Laredo.

Mural in a square. I thought it was interesting the text was in English. Nuevo Laredo and Laredo are often referred to as "los dos Laredos" in the media. There's plenty of newspapers that cover news for both cities, and also in dialogue many people simply refer to "Laredo" when speaking of Nuevo Laredo, as though the two terms were interchangeable. It's definitely the healthiest, friendliest relationship between two U.S.-Mexican border cities I've ever seen (compared to Juarez-El Paso and Tijuana-San Diego).

This was line to see "2012" at the Wal-Mart mall. It was so long!! My friend was REALLY happy to see this many people, because he said it was good for Mexico's economy.

Miau sardines ("miau" is the sound a cat makes).

These birds always make so much noise in the evening! They're crazy, always cawing and calling away.

My street.

life, London, this moment in June

2009-09-06T12:37:00.000-07:00

Wow, this blog really died in 2009. I guess we weren't traveling so there wasn't really any point in updating it. We just got back from a two week trip to England and Paris, so for what it's worth here are some photos:

We fought through jetlag and went to the Natural History museum.

The dodos were fake, unfortunately.

Cthulu is everywhere.

Waiting for our train at the Eurostar station.

Notre Dame statues look quizically at the dude holding his own head in his hand.

Amour en Paris.

Free bikes! Too bad the machine woulnd't accept our debit cards (for liability reasons) so that we never got to ride them :( ... why doesn't Portland have a system like this?

Watching street performers. The guy in the orange shirt wasn't part of the troupe, but insisted on participating anyway. I think he entertained the crowd more than the actual dancers.

Poker is popular in France, apparently. Or maybe it's just Tom Dunn.

We went to a bar in the Latin Quarter with crazy red lighting.

The anarchist angel.

Relaxing in the Tuileries gardens, feeling like a character in a Henry James novel. From the Oxford World Classics Introduction to Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady: "In 1869, [James] took his first journey to Europe alone and sent back ecstatic letters about his adoration of the ancient cultures of France and Italy, places that seemed steeped in rich history against the thin soil that barely supported American letters... One of James' abiding themes was the encounter of the Old and New World, in an era when political and economic power was inexorably shifting toward America yet Europe retained much of its cultural authority." (pgs. vii-ix)

It's always one shoe that's randomly lost in the metro or the street, never both. Someone should discuss the mathematical law explaining this. I guess the shoe isn't really "lost" if its mate is present.

We ate crepes in a classically cramped Versaille apartment with our friends.

We visited the founding place of Truth, Beauty and Love...

.. but mostly found sexy toy shops instead. (See England? Paris doesn't hide its sexytoys!)

Amusing poster inside the bathroom of a cafe--just in case you were confused as to whether or not you were in the right one, I guess.

Obviously the French hippie house in Montmarte, the Amelie neighborhood.

By the Bastille.

Walking around the Pompidou (modern art museum).

Amusing street performer.

At first I thought this sign was saying that you weren't allowed to do sit-ups, but I guess all it meant was no lying on the grass.

We ate escargot and rabbit at this really great resteraunt called Chez Paul that Emily took me to the first time I visited Paris. It was good.

Then we drank beer and Pisco, which was wretched and made me ill.

I liked documenting the random graffiti.

I liked the classic cobblestoned Parisian streets too.

The night we went out with our gracious Parisian hosts, Corey confronted a seafood feast of the most epic quality.

All that the sea promises and more.

Our very gracious hosts... <3 without their hospitality, there's no way we could have afforded this trip.

Peace monument near the Eiffel Tower.

We visited one of those giant glass malls that Zola wrote about, where Corey looked at cacti.

Best falafel ever. Ooooomygod. I could easily eat this a thousand times over.

I like the centerpieces in the storefronts of the Marais neighborhood.

Parisians encourage young children to smoke, apparently.

Corey's riding the Eurostar face.

Back in London, at the British Museum, we came to the following conclusion: ancient civilizations were visited by aliens. I mean, c'mon... men with wings? Really?

Dude... the Egyptians were aliens. I mean just look at them.

Who's the paragon of the decline and fall of civilization now, huh? Huh?!

Little kids laughing at the statue's weenie. Very mature.

Dude... total Illuminati.

The infamous Elgin marbles. I wish I could remember what I learned in my freshman year Humanities 110 class about them. I liked the pamphlet the British Museum had set up in front of the exhibit that basically said "fuck you Greece, we're keeping 'em." Har har har dee har har. Good thing the museum is free--doesn't make much sense to charge for shit you stole, you know?

You gotta take pride in the $5 pint.

From the essay called 'The American Heroine,' published in 1875, by Agnes Macdonnell: "[The American Girl] is not bone of our bone; she has passed from among us; she has emigrated to new spheres; and we examine her with wonder and admiration mixed with some little amusement. She is possibly representative of a future era in fiction, and perhaps we are destined to see the day when we shall meet her in the pages of English novels."

All the phone booths in my cousin's neighborhood were plastered with these sexy calling cards at night. Confusingly enough, they were always removed during the day, leaving nothing but stray lumps of glue on the wall. Imagine having that job, darting from phone booth to phone booth, either taping up the sexy cards or tearing them down.

Check out this crazy spaceship-like building; it made me think of "Men in Black" and wonder if it was built for future intergalactic exploration.

I dragged Corey to the Tate Modern, where there was some interesting mushroom art that we both enjoyed.

This was the last photo I took before the security guard scolded me; this piece is supposed to represent a lightning bolt, a goat and a sheep (decide for yourself which object is which)

A cool poster at King's Cross station.

Admiring the punts on the Cam.

I make it a personal goal to sample as many papitas as possible on my journeys. Thomas is an eager participant, in this random pub by the river that had all these posters of Pink Floyd on the wall (I think the singer used to go there--the pub owners were obviously very excited about it).

We visited this random natural history museum in Cambridge and looked at a whole bunch of really cool and really old fossils that inspired a lot of contemplative meditation, such as "God, imagine seeing that guy in the water coming after you."

Charles Darwin's fossil collection added to the celebrity "wow" factor.

Some kind of round church that had something to do with the Knights Templar (according to my dad). I think it maybe had something to do with the DaVinci Code too. Or maybe it just seems like the kind of thing the DaVinci Code World would dig.

Busker in Cambridge playing inside a garbage bin. I can easily say that I've never seen *that* before.

The absolutely terrifying "time-eater" clock in downtown Cambridge. I can easily say that I've never seen anything like that before, either. Apparently it's supposed to represent how your life gets eaten up by the passage of time by a terrifying black bug reminiscent of the Alien films.

Note to self: a pitcher in England is more than what you expect.

My dad took us to this creepy dark pub in Harston (the Cambridge suburb where my grandma lives). It was filled with creepy stuffed dead animals, including this river otter.

It was called the Queen's Head, as I recall.

Double rainbow at Harston.

Punting down the Cam does not necesarrily mean fearing for your life with a look of horror.

At ease for a picnic lunch.

Photographic evidence that the Cajuns punt with the best of them.

Bowling at the random AdventureFun ArcadeLand we stumbled into in London.

Corey fights the Battle of Britain and saves the Houses of Parliament.

Promoting American tourism, Pennsylvania style.

We went back to London to go to the Notting Hill Street Carnival, a very interesting, New Orleans-esque affair. There was something like 500,000 people the day we were there. Best of all were the food stalls with amazingly good Caribbean food everywhere. People were serving meals straight out of their houses, like the Ghana lady at the beauty salon who let us use her bathroom in exchange for us eating her saffron rice and chicken.

One of the sillier English pub names that we saw.

I dunno what was up with the paper mache Popeye and Olive.

Chicken was definitely the theme of the day. There was a lot of jerked chicken (this particular chicken was the best that I've ever eaten in my life!)...

... and crazy parades.

And, of course, before we left, exemplifying the best of England, there was fish and chips, mushy peas and arcade games that were impossible to beat.

And that is our classicaly bourgeoise trip to Europe.

A whole, exactly, tragedy unfolds before our eyes in Paris, Prague, Venice or Berlin to name but four, as the moon, vast and orange, rises over the renaissance domes, baroque palaces, nineteenth-century zoos and railway stations, and the modernist slabs of social housing exemplifying the dictum form follows function... the rise in speculative building coincided with the aspirations of the liberal bourgeoisie to create monumental architectural schemes such as I'm thinking particularly now of the Vienesse Ringstrasse which made such an impression on the young Adolf Hitler as he stood one morning before the Opera.
--Or one of the great Parisian boulevards.
--Or one of the great, exactly, Parisian boulevards.

--from Martin Crimp's play Attempts on her Life.

we get excited when it snows in portland

2008-12-15T10:53:00.000-08:00

(an alternative title for this post is "yes, elyssa, you will need to bring your long underwear")

Corey and I went for a little walk around our neighborhood Sunday afternoon to explore our new snow world. I was surprised by how rural and out-of-the-way it looks with snow everywhere.

The titular duck pond, frozen over.

I'm glad I don't live in Minnesota.

The 'burbs.

Some brave souls sledding.

Attention, all the funemployed: the Christmas tree farm is now hiring.

I can't decide if the giant cut-out Asian Santa at the Christmas tree farm is amazing or just a tiny bit terrifying.

Lots of snow-covered groves of trees and forest in the neighborhood.

What were these? Deer prints? Paw prints of a weird-footed dog? Shoe prints of a little kid wearing a really weird shoe? A disoriented peccary?

A picturesque holly from the Aquifoliaceae family.

You are not supposed to eat the snow.

I thought the sky looked really pretty when I took this photo. It's of the onion field near our house.

Walking home on the Narnia-like pathway.

Duck pond minus the likely very surprised and perturbed ducks.

Duck pond estates.

View from the living room window.

fankstiving

2008-11-30T23:10:00.000-08:00

View from Black Hill, mistakenly called Black Mountain by the family all these years. Note: if you can climb it in 20 minutes, it is not a mountain.

La pareja feliz

When the tide is out, it's good for fishing. We did not catch any fish. We did, however, find and eat some delicious mussels and crab claws (don't worry, Corey researched the Internet for hours to make sure that our chances of getting hauled away to jail after hauling our bounty away from the beach would be virtually nil). We boiled them in hot water with salt, pepper, and cayenne, and then dipped in hot butter. Delish. I hope this isn't turning into a food blog, but I daresay we consistently find ourselves eating some pretty amazing meals.

Although they did not catch any fish, Corey and my younger brother did however successfully have long conversations with what J might call "the shaggy man" (more on J and his conspiracy theories later, hopefully, perhaps) and what Corey not-so-affectionately called "weird Californian hippies." Despite the shagginess, Corey gave away all his remaining stinky squid bait to them.

20 pounds of non free-range, non organic, Food-4-Less love.

The famous turkey in this infamous, eponymous portrait of my sister and I:

Corey and electric carving knife vs. 20-pounds Food-4-Less steroids

Corey: 1

Seconds before I mushed it all together and greedily slurped it down, smacking my lips eagerly and wiping my fingers off on my pants.

The happy family: near centennials, Generation X, Generation Whatever-a-Mid-80's-Birth-Is-Called, and Generation World of Warcraft (behind lens) Reprezentz.

Can you spot the monarchs of Pismo beach. Hint: those brown things that look like leaves? They're not.

Damn you global warming, and your 1-2 degree changes of temperature in a specific region.

Cindy McCain's birthplace. McCain is not nearly so old as the Ancient Ones; his outer shell has not yet even calcified.

Walking among the trees and on the pier of Pismo beach.

Local wildlife.

At the IHOP, the gourmet experience of lunch with my grandparents was complete.

Classy eating is free refills.

We watched the sky this weekend and saw lots of good stuff.

Man, look at this fat seal! This guy was so fat he just kind of rolled around in the water while the restaurant workers tossed him scraps! When he didn't like what they served him, like fish skins, he would just spit it lazily out and the seagulls and pelicans would squawk over it! (The subsequent 3-way tug-of-war that ensued between 2 seagulls and a pelican was equally entertaining to watch) He was so fat he could barely open his eyes, just had them in little slits! Ladies and gentlemen, this is the piniped version of the Dude!

Man, don't you just want to be an otter and lie on your back in the water with your little feet peeking out while your little kid white-faced otters roll around and splash and play behind you? What a life.

Or how about these rock squirrels? Man, I'd like a fat belly from granola bars (from a box that say best before 2005) and peanuts.

The surf was crazy on the jetty. I'm glad we didn't go fishing there. Even if the jetty is distinctively lacking in shaggy men.

More local wildlife (blue heron).

A post-Thanksgiving family portrait.

clamming quest

2008-11-16T21:47:00.000-08:00

Corey and I went clamming this weekend with some friends in Seaside and had (to put it quite simply) a blast. We stayed in a little duplex right by the shore. The place is owned by one of J's (Corey's co-partner in the Mushroom Guys Milwaukie Farmer's Market enterprise) friends. From the doorstep, could walk straight out and head down to the beach. Much fun was had by all.

Little clam butts. We cut these off and used them as fish bait.

Slicing and peeling.

OK, so admittedly they look pretty gross. Kinda squishy, while simultaneously vaginal and phallic. But I promise you they were scrumpdiddlyumptious.

As picturesque as they come: the razor clam, soon to be in my belly (after 3+ hours of cleaning and preparing, minus cooking and hunting time)

The sea is good to us, as exemplified by her exquisite bounty.

Egging and breading.

The final product, fried to perfection and eaten with tartar sauce. So, so worth it.

Lacterius deliciosus, or a milkcap. The Russians dry it with salt and eat it like potato chips. Contrary to the scientific name, this mushroom is actually not that delicious, and was picked more out of novelty and curiosity rather than for a culinary purpose.

We walked by the seaside. I mean, we were in a town called Seaside. So, yeah.

For fishermen, maybe? In South America you see crosses on the sides of the road everywhere, which I kind of miss in the U.S.

Both of these are Amanita mascaria. These were everywhere! The Oregon coast is really pretty ridiculous. It must be in the top 10 most fertile mushroom habitats on the planet, if not #1.

We walked down to the jetty to go fishing.

Unfortunately the waves were a little crazy and wild. The sea is a harsh mistress.

The landscape felt straight out of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" for me.

The J-dar

I was excited we could see our shadows. The weather was beautiful and sunny all weekend; we really lucked out.

The terrible trio, representing three respective generations of mushroomery.

That white-capped dome is Mt. St. Helens!

Hygrocybe conica, or witches' hat.

The sun sets around 5pm now. We went clamming at night because of the low tide, setting out between 6-7pm. The tide won't be as low for another three months.

Getting our clamming equiptment ready. Basically, you stick that tube in the sand, wiggle your hips and huff and puff while you try to push it down as far as possible, press your thumb over the little hole at the top and then use all your strength (while trying not to strain your puny back and shoulder muscles) to pull it out of the ground. The tube sucks up the sand with suction, hopefully pulling the clam up with it. It usually took two to three times to get the little buggers. They like to burrow away quickly from you in the sand. It took me a while to catch one, but I got the hang of it once I learned what to look for in the sand: to me, it looked like a small indented volcano poking out, sometimes with water spurting out.

I wore my hiking boots because I was stupid and didn't bring any other shoes with me. They got very wet and sandy and smelly.

The moon was crazy that night. Huge and yellow and cheesy.

We sucked ourselves up a dungeness crab as well, much to our surprise. We were initially terrified to see this huge lump moving under the sand after we pulled the clam out. Much to our relief, it wasn't Cthulu.

Man-on-horseback, one of the few edible mushrooms around on the coast during this time of year.

We dined like kings all weekend, climaxing with this meal: halibut wrapped in prosciutto with spinach salad with blue cheese and pear. ........... words fail me ..........

Suzy Q, chief chef. My taste buds applaud her and bow down in eternal servitude.

Did I mention that there also was fresh crab, dipped in hot butter?

And to wrap this entry up, here are the mushroom guys themselves, with J balancing a mushroom on his nose while Corey attempts to push a mushroom into J's ear. Even on a clamming quest, mushrooms still have the spotlight with this crowd.

Mushroom hunting photos

2008-10-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

Mushroom hunting at the coast with the Guidry boys, aka Corey and his father, whom he affectionately refers to as "Pops," among other things.

This shrew died shortly after this photograph. It was pretty traumatizing. It just lay down in the middle of the road and stopped breathing. Corey and I were like, "...did that just DIE?" We witnessed (and perhaps were the cause of) the passage of its soul into the Shrew Netherworld.

There are crazy trees in Oregon too.

Amanita phalloides, aka the death cap. DON'T EAT THIS MUSHROOM! IT WILL KILL YOU IF YOU EAT IT. This is one of the three deadly poisonous mushrooms in Oregon.

Foxgloves contain atropine, a tropane alkoloid. It has a similar chemical in it that's similar to the deadly amanita. It's a stimulant... when people die of drug overdoses, they inject a chemical similar to this into their hearts, and it gets their hearts beating again. Think Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction."

Amanita mascaria! The eponymous mushroom from popular culture and likely the most familiar mushroom in the world. It is thought of as being the soma of the Rigveda (an ancient Indian collection of Sanskrit hymns). There's a substance that people use call the "soma," which brings dreams. That's this mushroom right here. They were EVERYWHERE on the coast this week... never seen anything like it. They're mycorhizal, so they grow with the roots of trees. People would dry them and use them as Christmas tree decorations because they grow with pine trees. Let's hope Little Billy in the suburbs never got his fat Game Boy playing lips around any. Then again, let's hope he did.

The oyster, our hero from Ecuador, dwells here in Oregon as well.

Reishi (ganaderma lucidum)... I remember the first time I went mushroom hunting with the Brian and the Jess they found oodles of these... you can make a disgusting tasting but very healthy tea out of them... Corey taught the recipe to Don Delio (our shaman friend... god, that sounds weird! I can definitely say I never thought I would have a "shaman friend"). It's used for cancer treatment, immune disorders and for cleaning the blood and has been used in Asian medicine since ancient times. I love that phrase, "ancient times." It makes me think of the phase he is not nearly so old as the ancient ones.

A pristine chanterelle. God, we found so many this year! It was a bumper crop, as they say. Corey and Jay were gathering 40-50 pounds in ONE TRIP and selling them all on Sundays at the market. On Friday and Saturday nights our refrigerator would be full of giant paper bags, with stray pieces of dirty and grass all over the floor and kitchen counters.

A cauliflower mushroom. I'd never seen one of these before. Damn, they look weird. But they're also really good. Corey's friend and fellow mushroom partner in crime Matt gave us this one after finding four or five.

He fried some up for us and it was delicious, sweet and wonderful. Corey said that some people cook them in the style of pasta too... peeling them off and then boiling them in a big old pot.

Corey and Jay at the Milwaukie farmer's market. See that ghetto ass sign? Yeah, I made that, with tape from the Dollar Store.

Our latest bounty. Corey picked so many of them he was carrying them in his shirt and they were falling out. We had porcini burger for dinner last night. It made it all worth it, even the falling down the mountain 40 feet and landing in a blackberry patch.

if it's one thing I know, said El Bo, it's where the chanterelles do grow

2008-10-10T17:14:00.000-07:00

Selling last Sunday at the Milwaukie Farmer's Market was really fun. Unfortunately it was absolutely freezing cold and raining. We made about a $90 profit, but everyone else who was working there said that it was by far the worst and slowest day the market had ever had. I could definitely understand that: there's no way I would have been there if I hadn't been selling.

Nevertheless, it was a great way to meet interesting people, despite the icy cold rain and my dazed slow chuchaki head from the dinner-wine-and-hottub party last night (such parties are seemingly slowly but surely becoming a Saturday-night tradition at the Duck Pond house, a good way of hanging out with friends and eating delicious fresh mushrooms collected that same day). I love being part of a new community. The farmer in the stall next to ours gave us a little tin of pesto, which was amazingly delicious and consumed by me that evening in 0.9 seconds. Another guy gave us an ... I can't remember the name of the fruit, you peel it and eat the tips of the leaves, and then the flower in the middle is the best part? I'm not on the top of my game today, apparently. But whatever it's called, we ate it last night with olive oil and butter and DA-HAYM it was good. It's a pretty sweet deal: whatever we don't sell, we trade with others and get amazing farmers' market food. I love sharing with other people and giving them the chance to try amazing new mushrooms, to see the nervous or heisitant expressions on their faces fade away when we tell them all the different things you can do with a chanterelle, a lobster, a matsutake. As I've said before, we always find more mushrooms we can possibly eat ourselves, anyway.

Corey and his mushroom-hunting partner-in-crime Jay went to the coast yesterday and only found a couple of porcini. It's still just a little too early, but it's good to see that a few are popping up! We had porcini on toast with red peppers for dinner last night. Corey also found some meadow mushrooms, which he's saving to cook for my mum tonight, because she once said that she and my grandad used to find and eat them when she was a little girl in England.

Porcini is Corey's favorite mushroom. It is pretty good. I have wonderful memories of my first time eating a porcini, in an omelette in Corey's apartment. Mmm. It was a porcini I had walked right by but that Matt had scooped up immediately afterwards, recognizing it's true, treasured identity. Then because Matt is a great guy he ended up giving it to me and Corey anyway. Anyway, believe it or not, I still haven't decided what my favorite mushroom is yet... I sure like that fried lobster Corey cooked that one time (MMM! better than potato chips!), and the grilled matsutake (so thick and indescribably cinnamony and faintly spicy). And, of course, you can never go wrong with the infallible chanterelle.

Corey an Jay went mushroom hunting today too, in one of their best spots, and found over 40 pounds of chanterelles, and 10-20 pounds of lobsters. Hopefully tomorrow we'll go get some more matsutake, and maybe even take my little brother along, to baptize him in the ways of the Hardcore Mushroom Hunting (wear boots, rain pants, and be ready to get soaking wet and freezing cold anyway). Crazy! Get ready, Milwaukie! I sure hope it's sunny on Sunday!

Some relevant updates, here from the PDX mycorenewal front:

2008-10-01T17:12:00.000-07:00

- Went mushroom hunting with Corey and his dad on the coast. We experienced a moment of horror when we thought the porcini were infected with this terrifying white-powdery mold, but then much to our relief Corey deduced that they were another species, Old Man something, which is good because first of all it is far too early for the porcini to be out and second of all they are so delicious, a mold that killed them all would be tragic beyond words.

- We went to the Milwaukie Farmer's market last Sunday. Surprisingly, there was no culinary mushroom stand in sight! So we talked to the market managers, and it turned out they had a space they were more than eager enough to rent for us. The idea of going into the mushroom-selling business still feels a little hard for my brain to wrap around: very self-made man, little-house-on-the-prairie. But very appealing for my increasingly hippie-like brain. We found about 20 pounds of chanterelles and lobsters last Friday alone, so we have more than enough booty to share. We’re thinking of selling five-dollar units in little baskets. Most prices we’ve seen (at other markets and in Whole Foods and the like) seem outrageously expensive, like ten dollars for a pound of chanterelles (!). I guess that price can be considered a reflection of the labor that goes into retrieving those “golden treasures,” what with all the gas price drama. But such a price can really turn off people from ever trying wild-grown mushrooms.

- Don Delio (our shaman friend from Cuyabeno) called us at 1:30AM this morning, after we'd nodding off in the middle of an episode of "The Wire" (rented from the local public library). This would make it about 4:30AM Ecuadorean time. From what I could understand in my blurry, fuzzy head sleep-state, he was in Lago Agrio just calling to say hello. I hope everything's all right with him and his family, regardless... I can definitely say that I never thought I'd be awakened in the night from a phone call from a shaman. The experience was unhappily reminiscent of all those terrible "who will take the 3AM call???" advertisements airing on the idiot box.

Some more links-happy-go-clicky fun:
- In this current political climate, Chevron doesn’t want to be left out of the fun!

- The case continues to move forward (this article has an especially good summary of the extent of the contamination in the community, as well as of Chevron’s tricky-dicky dealings with the trial up to this point)

- This is interesting too, although I have to admit I had to look up “indict” just to be sure that I understood what the article was about (hey, don’t I seem refreshingly open and candid compared to most other “blog” “writers” with such an admission?). I like the plaintiff’s summary of Chevron’s supposed clean-up attempt as “merely dumping dirt on pits of oil and water rather than removing the pollutants.”

a list of things that are ecuatorianamente refrescante

2008-09-15T12:59:00.000-07:00

- the little town between Quito and Ambato that seems to consist of nothing but ice cream shops, with brightly painted popsicles flaunting on every other concrete wall
- the salsa remix of ¨Billie Jean¨
- garbage cans shaped like clowns or cartoon characters´heads (the Bart Simpson one is particularly grotesque)
- Drinkable Kiosko yoghurt. WHY is there no drinkable yoghurt in the EEUU WHY WHY WHY it is beyond delicious.
- plastic bags of mandarinas sold by children on the street, 10 for $1
- handing over a $1 bill and holding your breath while you wait for the inevitable question from the storekeeper: tienes cambio? (do you have change?)
- uncoooked french fries, squishy white in the middle
- juices with the consistency of marmalade
- rows of houses with open roofs, piles of gravel and sand in the yard, in a seemingly frozen limbo of construction and rennovation
- mean dogs barking at you and snapping at your heels. Brian, who is proficent at a Phillipino form of martial arts, commented that he had to refine his technique to fight the dogs rather than the humans here, since they were a bigger threat.
- old women in braids leading cows or donkeys around on frayed rope
- gasoline at $1.48
- the ¨camaron camaron camaron camaron¨ song and the ¨creo en Jesus Cristo, quien me va llevar al cielo¨ accordion ditty, easily heard on any bus sound system
- foreigners in sandals, shorts, and those olive green knee-high drawstring pants
- political graffiti: Colombia Hermano, Uribe Terrorista, Armas de Destruccion Masiva: Television, Radio, Media, Mucho Mineria, Poco Amazonia.
- hairy fuzzy pigs on the side of the road
- brown toilet paper; in Corey´s words, ¨Bible paper.¨
- yoghurt-flavored Bon Ice. I´m going to miss Bon Ice so much. They´re these folks dressed up in bright blue suits with a polar bear logo, selling these tube-filled frozen ice creams and yoghurts, with yummy tropical fruit flavors.
- the sweet thick smell of Palo Santo, a kind of incense: it looks like a thick piece of wood, and it´s burned to drive the evil spirits away, which more often than not consist of the evil poo-smelling spirits hovering over the single toilet in a house which has up to nine people living in it, all of whom have their bowels affected in one way or another by the lovely grease-rich diet.
- dead roasted pigs in wheelbarrows
- The guts market at La Floresta, a lively outdoor barbecue venue that sells all the intestines and stomach lining you can eat, right by our house. If guts aren´t your thing, they´re are always the deliciously amazingly bad for you yucca fries, which we successfully made ourselves the other day (note: frying yucca takes a LOT of grease, and it´s a good idea to cut it with a machete, and also to boil it first before frying).

I´ll try to think of more to add here................

As written earlier, our time in Ecuador is coming to an end! A new adventure in Portland is about to begin! (or more specifically, in Milwaukie, at the infamous duck pond house). Our plans for it include chickens and a huge garden. For the time being, we have a ticket to return to Quito on January17th 2009. I´m not sure what will happen between now and then, but anyway, we have a ticket, and there´s a group for Mexico that may be coming in January for Amazon Mycotour Version 2.0, so there´s that too. Until their return to ´keets in November, Jess and Brian will be running around California-Montana-Oregon-Illinois attending speaking events, so hopefully that will result in some useful promotion and outreach. I´m not sure what will happen to this blog during our time in Oregon; I´m thinking we´ll maybe use it for mushroom-hunting related posts and so on (without giving away our location secrets, of course!). And we´ll keep posting stuff about the Amazon Mycorenewal Project, the Amazon Defense Front and the Cuyabeno reserve, naturally.

On that note, the Chevron case is moving forward(this is an audio file sent to me by a Reedie alumni freelance journalist, also living in Quito).

Also, here are Danny´s awesome flickr photos of the first (and hopefully not the last!) official Amazon Mycotour. Danny´s an awesome photographer with a kickass camera; I really recommend checking them out... I especially like this one of Corey-- it really captures the whole Mad-Scientist-Geek side of his personality).

guapulove

2008-09-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

Corey typing now... The Guapulo bus is a beast of burden, a lazy fat hobbit, and a bumpy ball bender all at once. The bus system in Quito is a fuming cauldron of black vapors that make my eyes burn and throat sore, Guapulo is much cleaner...though the perrenial dog orgy makes one think.

Los Conquistadoresy La Tolita...my Quito home...whole roasted pigs in wheel barrowsThis is me scratching my ass I think...We climb this hill every day...a couple times...it still makes me tired...eeek

Graffiti.

This is my best good friend Bubba and no we are not relations...No shrimp boats in the Andes but randomly placed donkeys can often be observed pooping.

Brian A. Pace and Corey R. Guidry, esquire, smoking cuban cigars...We like tobacco sometimes.

Ashley Jordana Payaguaje, aka Super Jungle Baby, is shown here in her Chanel hammock with matching versace drool blanket. This is Don Delio´s baby, she is a new Siona-Secoya person who will have to deal with the strange contrasts of living in a national park(3 hours downriver) and trying to interact with the outside world. We brought her a blanket, the green one, I think she peed on it.

This is Motora (Grillo).Sshe is a little stray cat we adopted. I´m allergic to cats...but damn she´s cute.
Another cat photo...and some species of jungle monkey... J. pachicoensis.

mmmm garbage

An average American family goes out for Sunday brunch.

It´s interesting living in Guapulo because you´re in this village valley with chickens and pigs and donkeys and eucalyptus forest and then you look up and it´s the city skyline hovering above you...

These are some black people who tried to attack us. According to most South American these people are dreadfully dangerous...

Another chicken of the woods...Jess discovered it...it was kinda corky...

Hmmm..in what activity are these individuals engaged?

I hate cats as you can see.

Preparing a fresh meal of Ecuadorian Chifa(chinese food).

My clean room for fungal cloning and basting turkeys.

Our time in Ecuador is drawing to an end!

cali's last hurrah

2008-09-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

In Cali for what is very possibly the last hurrah for my family. I thought Corey and I would end up spending a relatively quiet, down-tempo time here, mostly watching movies and catching up on U.S. politics (an endeavor which ended up disgusting both of us so much that the phrase "ignorance is bliss" is beginning to make a lot more sense to me now). However, we ended up doing what we do best: being quite Busy Little Bees, buzz, buzz, buzzing around, this time (to our relief) in cars, instead of noisy, dirty buses, which made a huge difference in terms of comfort and sanity.

On Tuesday, Corey, my mother, Omar (the family driver/all around handyman and great guy) and I drove to Silvia, a small town in the mountains about 2 hours away in Cali. At the tollbooth, we purchased a yummy, if a bit crazy-looking and strange-tasting fruit called zapote. It peels naturally in that star shape, and you kind of suck on its fruity fuzziness like a toothless baby. One minor example of the amazing variety of fruits in Colombia, most of which are endemic to the country, Julie types in her best business-like guidebook tone.

The Silvia Tuesday market is huge: Indians from surrounding villages come in to sell and buy fruit, vegetables and handicrafts. It is amazingly busy and fills up the entire town: pots and pans, hair ties, chontaduros (a yummy palm nut you eat with salt), plantains... you see folks everywhere in their woolen skirts and hats, not so much "traditional Indian dress" as it is evidence left over from the days of oppressive rule by the Spanish, who forced the indigenous community to dress in such a way in order to mark them as visually obvious Indians. I wonder if people continue to dress like that nowadays as a mark of pride or simply because over the course of time it has become traditional... Anyway, it's interesting to visit a place with such a large and colorful indigenous gathering in Colombia, where such a thing is the exception rather than the norm (as it is in places such as Ecuador's Otavalo).

This bird told my fortune: its owner blew on it, it hopped down to the bottom shelf of the wooden box and landed on a piece of paper, which was then promptly turned over to me as my fortune. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly what it said, something about learning to appreciate my luck, I think...? Anyway, it was definitely a first for me. There were a lot of small stalls selling all kinds of interesting herbs, including a dried-up bear claw.

I love hiking around in Silvia, passing the people on horseback, the giant pigs, the chickens rolling in the dust, going over the little bridge...

On Wednesday Corey and I paid a visit to my father's workplace. It was too bad that we weren't able to give my father a little more advance notice about our arrival, because he commented that in an ideal world, he would have loved for Corey to have been able to give a seminar both about his thesis work on Bt corn and about our work in Ecuador. For next time, maybe...? There isn't much in the way of mycorrhizal (let alone mycorenewal) research going on there, but we got to talk with a soil scientist and check out a bean experiment meant to breed drought tolerance. Some of the many beans you see in the photo above are meant to represent drought conditions, others represent irrigated ones (apologies in advance for my faulty scientific terminology!).

This was an especially cool experiment because it wasn't using any fancy genetic work, meaning that they were no bacteria or jellyfish or harpy eagle genes pumped into the beans. Nope, it was good old-fashing plant reproduction. So, it was nice to see that that's still going on.

Another aspect of the bean project concerned aluminum toleranace. Here I begin typing eloquent dictation from Corey: "all plants are affected by aluminum concentration in the soil so they're trying to breed aluminum tolerance because the soils here and in other areas such as Brazil are high in aluminum concentration." Thank you, Corey! The long root in the photo above is the root of a bean that has demonstrated more resistance to aluminum than the short, stubbly root.

We also visited the biotechnology lab, full of impressive glowing white rooms, plants in jars, humming machines and soylent green.

Cultures for yucca, genetically manipulated so that they'll produce betacarotene. Some of them already appeared orange, even at this early stage, frozen in their little plates.

Genetically manipulated yucca plants. Some come out looking weird, others look quite normal. This isn't exactly related, but on the car-ride towards my dad's workplace, I read an interesting article in UK's The Guardian about the effects Bt cotton in India(http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/30/gmcrops.india) which kind of colored my view about the whole genetically modified food business. More on that later, maybe.

This is just a random crazy insect my younger brother found outside by the swimming pool, an example of Colombia's (or more specifically, our back-yard's) insect diversity and all around "whoa!" quality.

On Friday we embarked upon an Epic Pachico Family Adventure, in which we drove two hours to Popoyan, a very pretty colonial city to the south of Cali. Corey and I last knew Popoyan when we flew in to the Popoyan airport from Gorgona: after spending 8 hours in the Guapi airport, waiting for the delayed-from-weather flight, we were deliriously happy to be in Popoyan. This time around, we (thankfully) got to see a little more of the city than the airport lobby.

My parents very kindly treated us to a night in a very nice hotel room, in an old colonial building with a huge courtyard that was once a Franciscan monastery.

Those monks sure did live it up.

Popoyan is full of narrow streets and whitewashed buildings. In fact, everything is so white that when the sun is out and you take a picture everything appears as a white smear, as though an angel or vampire or the creepy girl from "The Ring" or some kind of otherworldly creature darted into your frame and messed up your photo.

That weekend was the Festival de Gastronomia (Gastronomic Festival!) in Popoyan, which meant that there were all kinds of exciting booths set up in the lobby of our hotel and others, with delicious free food ranging from black free-range coffee grown by a women's collective in the region to french fries (advertised under the brand name "McCain"--John, I didn't know you were in the papitas business!) to fried sausages (which I didn't try, because of the mad horde that rushed the booth the second the sausages were ready). My mother was given a free bottle of expensive Chilean olive oil--I guess she must have a nice face.

On Saturday we drove up to Coconuco, a small town famous for its volcano and hot baths. There were a lot of signs in the town for "Yoghurt Natural," so maybe their yoghurt is famous too? We spent a nice day soaking in the baths, getting all prune-wrinkled, and then my parents and Corey and I went for a small hike up a somewhat steep dirt path in front of our hotel, where we got nice views of the surrounding valley and a waterfall.

Corey and my dad discuss manly topics, such as map making, compass directions and geology/geography.

We were lucky enough to glimpse the snow-capped rim of the volcano, the first time I have ever seen snow in Colombia.

Today we drove back from Coconuco and made a brief stop in Popoyan just to explore it a little more one last time. Popoyan is full of these houses with these dramatic courtyards, which you can peep quickly into and admire the fountains and flowers.

The sight of this llama at the park inspired a discussion centered around a very important question: can you ride a llama, if you're not a) a small child or b) a short person from the Andean region and indigenous descent?

I wanted to climb this hill, but Corey said he was too tired. So, instead we got ginger cookies and pandebono (a yummy Colombian bread pastry of which Corey has become very fond), which was just as nice if not nicer.

The one family photo in which there wasn't at least one person making a silly monkey face.

One of the things I was thinking about on our first day in Colombia, in the back of the car with Omar driving and Corey in the front seat, returning from a trip to the mall to get Corey some contacts (yes, one of the first things we did after arriving in a rarely-visited foreign countrywas go to the mall), was that Cali is really just any other city after all. It took me living for a significant period of time in another South American city (a bigger, dirtier one) to get rid of Cali’s symbolic baggage. Quito has the same “pueblo town”quality as Cali—-a significant lack of throbbing, underground culture, the kind that produces yoga classes or art in the streets, the feel that I imagine that Buenos Aires or Bogota might have. Thinking of Cali this way (as similar to other places, as opposed to this wholly unique, unreplaceable spot) is a comfort rather than a downer for me… it makes Cali easier to leave, I guess, if it feels like other places, rather than this unique site. Not to say that there are certain things about Colombia and Cali that are and will be to me simplyirreplaceable, but I'm not going to dwell on that right now, for fear of getting sentimental. After all, people move away from their childhood homes all the time. Just because this has been my home base for the past soon to be 23 years (even when my family was living in Virginia and I was living in Portland, Cali was always argubably, without competition, home), doesn’t mean that leaving has to be, I dunno, a big deal. Oh, well.

Also, as a kind of random aside, here are some recent news updates relevant to Ecuador and the mycorenewal project:

This just happenned in Cuyabeno: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-08/14/content_9288163.htm. I know you read stuff like that in the news every day but it´s different when it actually happens to a place you know. I mean, picture the Willamete and the hooplah that would take place if the spill had happenned there. Makes me sad to see what it looks like, the Aguadulce (Sweetwater) river, when we go back there later this week. Sell your cars, folks.

Also, here is a somewhat hilariously inaccurate (at least to me) article about the mushroom project: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/08/eaecuador208.xml

Mushrooms eat trash!!! No, really!!!!!!

coasting

2008-09-04T08:16:00.000-07:00

Look at all those crazy caterpillars! This is the hotel at Playa Escondida, where I last stayed two years ago with the other Ayuda Directa volunteers. It was muy relaxing and pretty but also muy expensive. Ths time around, Corey and I realized we didn´t have enough money with us because we´d lent some to a friend of ours and because I miscounted the amount in the money belt since I am damn good at math like that. We tried fishing for our food and eating only bread and jam that we´d bought at the bus station, but after one successful meal and three non-meals we decided that no beach, no matter how relaxing or pretty, was worth near starvation. Especially because the caterpillars didn't look particularly appetizing.

Anyway, so this post is the long-delayed update of Julie and Corey's most excellent beach adventures! After two weeks in the jungle, Julie needed a little vacation or her little brain was about to explode! So after a nightmarish journey in which we basically traveled across the entire country in, oh, a day, we met up with the Brian and the Jess in Mombiche with the B´s parents, who visited Ecuador for an epic three weeks. Mombiche is a very quiet, sleepy beach town, a decided contrast to Atacames (which we passed through on our way), another beachside city stuffed to the gills with Ecuadorian families on vacation with little kids drinking enormous batidos the size of their heads and the throbbing bass of reggaeton.

Corey's triumphant catch! The one meal that we did have in Playa Escondida was very good, though: Corey caught fish that were either sea bass or sea trout (the google images are misleading) and we ate it on a big bonfire on the beach, wrapped in aluminum foil. Very, very delicious.

The lone fisherman assumes his position.

Gorgeous beach rocks.

We went swimming when the tide was out and kept banging our knees and feet against the rocks.

This was such a comfortable hotel, I'm sorry we had to leave due to monetary troubles. It was a nice one-year-of-knowing-each-other treat for Corey and I, though (the dates nicely coincided).

We hitched a ride to Playa Escondida on the back of a banana truck.

It went memorably fast.

Pretty handmade necklace Corey made me, which I've lost since then. Bummer.

This fish made a noise like a cow!

Corey caught a lot of these catfish, but we kept throwing them back because we didn't think they were good to eat. The laughing old men, incredulous at our silly gringo fish knowledge, informed us otherness. Oh well, one fewer catfish lunch to eat in this lifetime, I guess.

Wiggly little fellows!

Goopy green horse pond, seen on our hike in Mompiche.

I got excited by the pelican formations in the sky.

Mushroom hunting (unsuccessfully) in the tall grass.

Yeah. Birds are exciting.

This tree reminded me of the Lion King.

Fishing for giant weird fish in the lily-pad filled pond.

Corey sneaks a peek into the bat cave, out of which I ran out squeaking in startled fear upon the sight of the little hairy beasties flying around, panicked visions in mind's eye of their little claws tangled in my hair.

Searching for cool stones and shells. We could have spent all day doing this, because we are dorks like that.

Cool fossilized brain-like coral. Fun to look at, not so much fun to walk on (cut, sore feet).

It's Mr. Crab from Spongebob! These little guys were hard to catch. Corey and I mastered a strategy that involved a lot of shouting, sand-kicking and fast movement.

Points for you if you can ID these!

Cool black sand.

A cool bug we found a long the trail. He had a little dingleberry hanging out there for a while.

El Christof, our steadfast beach adventure traveling companion and beloved housemate!

We walked down a long hot trail in search of the black sand beach.

I think Corey said this was a type of milkweed.

I always make an effort to take pictures of the fishing boats for my dad, since I know he likes them. Portugeuse fisherman heritage represent.

OK, Julie, you liked the birds. Jesus.

We hired a boat to take us back from Cojimies, where we stayed for the Corvina Festival on August 9th. Corvina is sea bass. Long live the sea bass! Anyway, the boat took us by lots of mangrove forests. It was nice to see that they hadn't all been completely devastated (yet) for the production of cheap frozen shrimp in glowing supermarker aisles.

Our chill Capitan, encapsulating the motto of coastal living: reeeelaaaaaaxxxx.

We had a delicious lunch with the leftover shrimp we used as bait.

I was told repeatedly not to step on the darker fish, as it apparently had poisonous spines.

Corey gestures excitedly. The thrill of the hunt.

This is the BIGGEST COCKROACH I HAVE EVER SEEN (and I've seen a lot of them), smashed by my shoe in a fit of un-trademark Braveheart bravery and brutality in our little beach hut in Cojimies. For an idea of scale, that is an Ecuadorean 5-cent piece (the same size as the U.S. nickel.

Long live the sea bass! It was party time for Julie and Corey, as in we stayed up late until 12.30am instead of our usual 8.30-9pm bed time. We are such wild kids! There was a cool salsa band and lots of friendly sketchy drunk guys, and, of course, no sea bass festival is complete without the scantily dressed ladies shaking it onstage by a giant inflated hot-air bottle of alcohol.

This soup, complete with a whole lobster, langostinos, and a squishy queen conch piece, was purchased for the most excellent price of $3, much to the delight of our pockets and bellies.

I felt sad that I am too old to go down these kinds of slides.

Jess devours a coconut.

The withered old guy in the corner of this photo was cool.

Our time in Mompiche was all about the laziness: I read a book I really should have read for my thesis, Corey drank beer and talked with little old men on plastic white seaside beach chairs about fishing (said conversation involved a fair share of hand gesturing). And, of course, there were sunsets.

And coconuts on heads.

I wouldn't be a young white girl if I didn't take a picture of my feet.

Corey forages.

I'd never seen this kind of sand dollar before.

Are you tired of sunset pictures yet?

In more recent, relevant updates:

- Corey and I have been in Colombia since September 1st, visiting la familia for what is more than likely my very last Cali hurrah before Portlandia becomes everyone's permanent address. We are enjoying having some time to relax (or catch up on job and fellowship applications, in my case)

- Today is my birthday! There goes another year. If the next one brings plenty of mushrooms and traveling, like this past one, I'll be pretty happy.

Lago Doings

2008-08-24T10:40:00.000-07:00

Lago Agrio reminds me a lot of Tijuana, in the sense that it´s the kind of town that a lot of people pass through, but never really stop to visit, or think about the people who actually live here all the time, as opposed to just move through it. It has very Wild West feel to it... the Colombian bakeries and hoochie clothing shops... the Nightclubs and Discotecas with copyright-violation cartoon characters as their logos... the sun that starts burning my shoulders to a crisp if I ever stand out in it for more than half a minute without sunscreen. I really enjoy the feeling of getting to know the city: knowing where to get the good 1 dollar batidos as big as your head, where to find air conditioned internet cafes, the lonely vegeterian resteraunt. It´s slowly but surely become my favorite place in Ecuador. It just feels warm and good and familiar, while much of Quito still has the big-city feel to me: I much prefer our little loveshack in Guapulo, huddled up against the enormous green hills dotted with eucalptus trees.

We´ve been here since late Tuesday night, involved in the inoculation of mycelium at the different experiment sites. It took all day on Tuesday to drive here, since the bridge near Papallacta was closed until 4pm, making our 5am wake-up time decidedly unnecesarry. Day 1 involved the funnest stuff, namely Brian wading out in the middle of Charapa (one of the oldest contamination sites, at 30-something years old) on a perilous bridge made of thin bamboo sticks and scooping up gooey, sticky oil into a bucket. Then we got to take the oil back to our central base (Donald´s house, who has generously offered his land as space for the project) and do the extremely fun task of pushing oil through a filtering net, in order to get the asphalt and rocks out. After a certain amount of time, the surgeon masks had to be busted out to avoid fume-induced headaches. We all agreed that anyone who wants to own a car should be forced to do a day or two of cleaning up spill sites and dealing with crude or 30-year old oil with their bare hands.

Day 2 involved less sticky oil handslegsclothes and a bit more brute labor. I carried sacks of old sawdust away from the experimental site pits and dumped them under a nearby tree to turn into mulch. We had to be careful not to dig up the layer of petroleum in the pits, as we didn´t want to be dumping oil-contaminated soil on Donald´s land! I reflected that for the past three summers now, my job or volunteer position has always inevitably involved some element of manual labor.

Yesterday we learned the art of making ¨burritos,¨ or a method of wrapping up the mycelium in cardboard to make them especially hungry and happy about growing and hunting for oil. We got to make a human chain while tossing the bags of mycelium (which to me look weirdly reminiscent of crushed, smashed Frosted Flakes) from the storage room into the car and then from the car to the pit site. It was like basketball practice all over again, as I huffed and heaved and tried not to smash Brian´s face as I hurled bag after bag of mycelium at him, trying to keep up with Corey´s tosses.

To celebrate getting done what we worried might be ten days worth of work in a mere three, we went out for some very important business: the drinking of chichi cara, which I am almost certainly spelling wrong. The adjectives used to describe this local beverage throughout the night and the blurry-eyed next morning included ¨bile from the Devil´s steaming entrails,¨ ¨butthole juice,¨ and ¨nasty schtuff.¨ Think aguardiente-flavored paint thinner. After the bar closed, we were invited to go to a salsa club by a group of large black men from Esmeraldas, and we ended up riding in the back of their very nice truck, after being poured more chichicara into plastic cups from one of the men, who carried the liquor around in what looked like a giant empty plastic bottle of cooking oil. Much salsa dancing and dance floor spinning madness ensued, including me frequently getting hit in the back of the head by the tiny beads on the end of the braids of the dreadlocked girl Brian was twirling enthusiastically around, and learning that one of our generous hosts was the owner of the brothel that we drive by every day to get to Donald´s h0use, the one with the cheesy mural with Avril Lavigne on it. This morning Corey asked me, ¨did we get invited to a salsa club by the owner of a brothel last night?¨, and I replied in the affirmative.

Today has been somewhat of a day off (Sunday is the day of rest, after all), as we all nurse our chuchakis (slang for hangover) and drink our cold batidos. This afternoon we stop by at Donald´s house for a final clean up, and then hopefully tomorrow or the day after we may get to go on another Toxic Tour to look for mushrooms at different contaminated sites and hopefully clone them in the little portable laboratory Corey and Chris built (think small greenhouse with plastic walls and tubes for a frame--it rocks, apart from tending to get very hot).

Brian and Corey have big plans for continuing the experiment back in Quito: the phrases they throw around in such conversations often involve ¨open-mouthed jars¨ and ¨small scale.¨ I have some pictures I intend on posting soon, including some of Lago I plan to steal from Jess, as well as some from our brief 6-day vacation in the coast a while back, including the famed Corvina (sea bass) festival, famed mostly in Cojimies, where it takes place.

In other important news, we now may possibly own a kitten, which Brian rescued from underneath a car last night. Brian lay in a puddle while I shone the little flashlight on the stranger´s cellphone I borrowed until I saw her, pulled her tail and Brian grabbed her. She has enormous bat-like ears, wide suspicious eyes and an extremely feral nature. I hope we get to keep her forever and ever.

Mushroom ID project on the Rio Shiripuno in Huaorani Territory

2008-08-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

Whether one believes in rebirth

or not

and whether one believes in religion

or not

there isn´t anyone who doesn´t appreciate

kindness and compassion.

Dalai Lamai

I try to live by this quote...

I discovered this quote after the irresponsible and untimely death

of my wonderful, kind and loving younger brother David J Guidry.

He was one of the most honorable and kind people you could ever meet

if you treated him and the people around him with kindness your cup would

overflow. Not in the material sense.

I think about him most everyday and miss him dearly, I´m crying as I write this 4 weeks from his birthday and almost 2 years after that tragic evening.

I know this will probably make my mom cry, but I had to send out some positive energy in his name.

Now for some fungi....

Coprinus dessiminatus
Hygrocybe miniata
A tiny bagre´ I caught. There are billions of fish in in this damn river and you would think I was a fish leper.
Look at his fat catfish(bagre) belly.
The Yasuni sunset

I went to Yasuni National Park to do some mushroom ID stuff and make a poster with some interesting mushrooms you might see on the trails. Julie talked to the owner of Shiripuno lodge about my mushroom geekdom so they paid my basic expenses and gave me room and board for 5 days. Basically I was hanging out in th jungle going along on the tours. The tourists can really wear you out especially when they complain. The French people were nice but they DO NOT BELONG IN THE FOREST. I mean that. I can say that a hot shower is nice though...I don´t really shower that often. I would be considered disgusting by most western standards. I consider most western standards disgusting anyway. I like being stinky.

I can also say I´d like a good game of 1-2 no limit texas hold em.

I´m not a good journalist. I´m better at laking about these things than writing

Ok a poem I guess

When we stand alone
in woody stands far
from any place,
we can wonder why people
are so cruel.

Why must we destroy everything
for a coca cola, a candy bar, a barrel of diesel.
This place in which I stand
only stands due to
The People (The Huaorani) (Wow-ranny)
they refer to us as cannibals
we definately are willing to consome everything
including ourselves.
Do you really own the things you have?

We´ve called them savages
but they knew more about everything
then we know about
anything.

texaco,repsol,mobil, conaco,shell...etc
and all the little unimportant idiots
that run the money machines
go fuck yourselves.

I think I believe in karma.
I´m not a christian
or evangelist.
Let the world and true human culture thrive or.
Death. or.
Death and rebirth. and.
I just can´t believe you burn for eternity for not
believing
in some superstition.
you should believe something because
it helps you spread kindness and
understanding. The age of doctrine and dogma is dead.
The boat will sink.

thank you.

Hairy cucina
Ganoderma Applanatum

Jelly tooth
Pluerotus ostreatus Lepiota species(green spored buddy)

¨if I can´t see dancing elephants then I´m not interested.¨

2008-08-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

Well, I´m in Coca all day, and the Internet at the hotel is free, so I´m jealously hogging it from the passive aggressive Frenchman lurking over my shoulder and uploading some photos for folks´ viewing pleasure.
The flooded forest of Cuyabeno.

Little caterpillars.
This was a cool tree. No one seemed to know the name of it, it was just ¨the white tree.¨ It´s white because it´s covered with a kind of fungus. It´s cool because the tree hardly has any leaves on it, so it´s as though the fungus and the tree are in a kind of symbiotic relationship with each other, where the tree benefits from the fungus and vice versa. Wow, my scientific writing is so wonderfully informative and accurate. What´s really cool about the tree is a) it glows in the dark (really! I saw it in Yasuni!) and b) when you rub your fingers against the bark the fungus comes off in a powdery, crumbly form, and apparently you can use it as a deoderant. Mmmm.
Earth tongue fungi (genus xylaria).

This fungus glows in the dark too! Bioluminescent fungi (genus mycena). The first cordyceps we found in Ecuador! Thank you Jessica (I mean, yeeeeeessica, her other alias), for being clever enough to lift up the leaf and spot it.

NOT A REISHI (a cool polypore you make tea out of it and drink for general health and well-being, following the example of the Chinese). Reishi have brown spores. Probably ganoderma applanatum.

Brian deconstructs our homemade laboratory, essentially a giant fishtank, in which exciting things such as cloning take place.
The cicada nest. You know, the bugs that are buried underground for 17 years and go EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE when they come out. Kind of like me very early in the morning.

An earthstar!

Corey doesn´t even know what this shit is.

Orange fuzzy cup happy fungi! i.e. Cucina
There are a lot of monkeys in the jungle.

A lot of pretty sunsets, too.
The yage or ayahuasca vine (the one with three leaves--Corey is mad at me for using this picture because he feels it isn´t correct, as there are three vine species depicted. My attitude is it´s in there suuuuumwhere, the shaman man told me sooooo!). otherwise known as Tori Amos´ favorite beverage. Thank you, yage, for blessing the world with such lovely ditties such as ¨Father Lucifer¨!

Also, this is a bit of a long interruption, but I wanted to cite an interesting Tori Amos quote from an interview concerning her experiences with this plant:

¨The drug which had a big effect on me was ayahuasca. It comes from a vine in the Amazon and you ingest it. You know that stuff they take in The Emerald Forest? It’s like that. I was hanging around with some medicine women and they suggested I try it. I was very lucid, but felt like I was walking around Fantasia, having a conversation with myself. It isn’t like acid. It’s more emotional, more mental. But it can grab you by the balls and just shove you up against the wall. I’ve been in a room with a woman who was literally trying to bite her own arm off. And this lasted for 15 hours. I wasn’t scared - just scared that I’d make a fool of myself. The funny thing was, I kept laughing and laughing, rather than sitting in the corner being intense. Then every so often, I’d say, I’m in a really rough patch. And one of the medicine women would come over and reassure me that everything was going to be alright. But it would keep on getting deeper. In the end, though, it was an educational experience. I learned a lot about myself. I haven’t taken it in a couple of years now. You can only really do it once in a blue moon. But the wild thing is that sometimes I only have to smell something and I’m right back there again, high as a kite. It just happens.

I’m really into moderation. Too much of anything will harm you in the end. Too much sugar. Too much pasta. I’m into drugs as a teaching tool, which is why I only take hallucinogens. I mean, it’s not like I’ve never done cocaine, but, on the whole, if I can’t see dancing elephants then I’m not interested.¨ [Q - May 1995]

Thank you for those wise and informative words, Tori. For more interesting Tori stories on journeys and more, click on the Tori Stories link at yessaid.com.

The Brian! We love the Brian! The mushrooms love the Brian too!

Moths don´t mind cigarette butts. This was at the bridge where we took the canoa into the park, mind you--not the jungle floor!

Pizza Hut takes the concept of salchipapa (french fries and sausages, fried together in the same gloriously sizzling oil) just a little too far.
Corey´s fish face.

Pipe lines running along the road in front of people´s homes, a common Lago Agrio roadside scene.

Back in Quito, we relaxed and recuperated for a few days. Corey, Chris and I went on a dayhike to Ilalo, a nearby mountain in Tumbaco. We originally wanted to go mushroom hunting but the landscape ended up being a bit too dry and arid, very California-like. Still, it was nice.

Danny and Clyde, i.e. Theresa. Danny was an absolute hero with his camera throughout the trip and is responsible for the amazing site chronicling all of our Mycotour mushroom finds, ranging from Cuyabeno to Mindo. Check it out: http://www.flickr.com/groups/mushroomsofecuador/ Rock on, Danny.
The lady who owned this donkey scolded us on our way back down the mountain for not making it all the way to the top. We bowed our heads in altitude-gasping gringo shame and scurried away.

notes from Julie´s Jungle Adventures

2008-08-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

I never thought I´d be ringing in a new month in Coca, another dusty, dirty oil town with some important redeeming qualities that sets it slightly above Lago Agrio: there are less Colombian prostitutes here, for example. There are a lot of jungle tour chivas rattling down the unpaved streets in the morning, with giant capital letters proclaiming ¨JUNGAL HABITAD¨ and inexplicable pictures of tigers. I´ve been working as a translator for visiting tour groups and have been in and out of the jungle. The jungle! You just never know where you´re going to end up a guess... write a thesis, graduate... move to the jungle... all in a life´s work, I suppose.

Corey flies in from Quito later this afternoon to accompany me with the next group (some Frenchies) to the lodge, which is right on the border of Yasuni National Park, the largest national park in Ecuador with a lot of unexplored territory. There are two tribes that are considered to be uncontacted here and two more whom no one is sure really exists at all. For a good read and introduction to the history of this area and the Huaorani tribe´s dealings with the oil company, read Joe Kane´s Savages. Anyway, Corey is going to be compiling a basic info sheet about mushroom species in the area to serve as a reference for both the guides and the tour groups. In exchange, hopefully the tour agency will provide some good contacts in terms of hunting down potential donors who´d be happy and enthusiastic about funding some oil-munching oysters in Lago Agrio. Ah, networking.

Here are some photos from the jungle, then:

What is this mushroom? Is it even a mushroom?? It´s a total mystery to me. It smelled very mushroomy. It was also huge by rainforest standards--from the tip of my fingers to the inside of my wrist. The stalk was very thick and white on the inside, very plant-like. Help me out here, smart plant people!

Stalking wildlife at the hotel in Coca with the offensive Huaorani statues.

I´m pretty sure these mushrooms were the same kind our guide Don D´leo pointed out to us in Cuyabeno, the kind that cure earaches.

Amanita!

Going through these photos, I find a lot of pictures of trees. I have to keep stopping and zooming in and wondering what it was about so-and-so tree that I found so interesting that it became imperative at the time for me to take a picture. I was impressed by the roots on this one, I believe.

Abundancia!

Awesome cortçdyceps. I didn´t even notice it was growing out of an ant at first, I thought it was just a speck of dirt. It wasn´t until I went back to the cabins that someone pointed it out to me and I let out a nerdy squeal of delight, and then went around waving it under the tourists´ noises trying to make them see the wonders of the killer zombie mushroom. My token explanation of cordyceps to people is that they´re mushrooms that take over insects´ brain, making them climb really high up in trees, where they die when the mushroom grows out of its body and disperses its spores. Paul Stamets discusses the use of cordyceps as a natural pesticide in every mushroom picker´s favorite book ¨Mycelium Running.¨ There´s a neat montage in the jungle episode of the ¨Planet Earth¨ BBC series, that shows a series of insects dead from a cortycep specific to each respective species. For me, it was really exciting to find cordyceps in the field, having only read or heard about them before. Man, it makes me nervous to think of some crazy people figuring out how to use them as a biological weapon against humans. It would be a scene straight out of a science fiction movie, all of us staggering towards trees and ascending them slowly, fungus stems poking their way out of our skulls.

Another tree in my series of ¨what did I think was so cool about this tree?¨photos. This was a cool tree whose bark peeled off, in order to protect itself from lichens and other unwanted growths.

A poison dart frog.

The conga (bullet) ant whose sting is said to hurt for hours, hence the name. I didn´t get bitten by any, though I did get stung by wasps when the guide accidentally hacked their nest open with the machete. I screamed at the tourists to get out of the way and shamelessly pushed a Swiss girl uphill away from the onslaught, placing my hands over her rear end and giving her a huge shove. They were a type of wasps that local people call ¨los pepsis,¨ because they´re shaped like a pepsi bottle and are kind of brown. However, their stings are not sweet and sugary--rather, they gave me goosebumps of tingly pain all over my body.

There has been surprisingly (to me) few orchids in the jungle, I guess because it´s the dry season.

The tree ferns made me nostalgic for a ¨Land Before Time¨ viewing session.

On the canoa, heading down the Shiripuno river. Getting to the lodge involved a three to four hour bus ride from Coca (depending on whether or not it rained), followed by a four to seven hour canoe ride (depending on the lowness of the river).

The awesome French Canadian guy attempting to ascend the ginormous capoc tree. I loved the Canadians.

The lagoon where we took folks pirana fishing, though people ended up catching mostly sardines.

Cuyabeno (In the Oriente). Amazonia. The Land of the Black Water.

2008-07-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

First Note: If you are reading this blog leave a comment so I know someone is out there

Second Note: b sharp

The Amazon is a place of wonder. On the outside, from the Rio Cuyabeno, it looks amazing and tranquil. It appears simple, a place that just works. The water flows in the tiny river with the force of a mighty storm. I takes these mental notes as I enter our motorized canoe assisted by Don Deleo our native Siona guide and his son: the deft captain of our boat. I can`t remember his name but I always greet him with a hefty ``Capitan!`` , the kid can catch piranha like a champ. I am not destined to be a professional piranha fisherman. I discover this as I flip raw hunks of meat out into to tannin stained river. Don Deleo constantly nudges me to discover if I have captured a mighty bangre` or even the lowly piranha. Ok tangent aside.

We jump into the motorized canoe and haul ass 50 km downriver from the Cuyabeno bridge to Jamu (Yah-moo) Lodge. Along the way we see the elusive yellow-faced titi monkey.

capuchins, howlers, etc. We peer upon the lankey Cecropias and various palms. We see birds and Giant Kapok trees, the monsters of this rainforest system. On the way to the lodge we cross Laguna Cuyabeno, a flooded forest basin, and get a glimpse of the pink river dolphins, later on we`ll get a closer look.

We arrive at Jamu lodge after 3 hours in the little canoe and my bum hurts. Jamu lodge is amazing and primitive.

More to come...

there will be fungus

2008-07-23T11:39:00.000-07:00

I like the little tiger logo: ¨protege el medio ambiente!¨

THE DOMINATOR

Donald shows off the paperwork for the lawsuit against Texaco (about 1.4th of the bookshelf). Donald is one of the cool leaders of the Amazon Defense Front and the awesome lender of land for the mushroom project.

This was a cool find, mushrooms growing out of oil! Jess dug it out of a can. Unfortunately a dog was attacking me at the moment of this photo so it turned out blurry. We are excited about cloning this little fellas and seeing what kind of magic they can pop out.

Spills near people´s lands and houses. You never had to walk very hard to find one, really.

Donald digs under the ground in front of the Jaramillo family´s house, a site Texaco was contracted to clean up.

They didn´t do such a good job. Donald only had to dig 3 inches before hitting a layer of oily water. Her son or nephew came out shirtless and blinking and onto the front porch and in response to people´s questions said yeah, on hot days like this one the oil fumes definitely made you dizzy and your joints and head hurt.

This site was a recent spill we drove past in the bus. Oil was spurting out of the pipe and splattering all over the ground. Here the rate of the oil flow is being measured... about a liter every two minutes.

Mushrooms growing out of the substrate placed at the Charapa site (the 30-year-old spill).

Brian shows off the yummy gunk. This is basically the consistency of the stuff mixed in with the sawdust and the mycelium.

Our superheroes.

Some birds nest fungi growing along with the oysters as well. A good sign with other species of fungi start moving in?

Here you can get kind of an idea of the layout of the experiment site: a kind of giant chicken coop, with chicken coop wire laid on top of the sawdust-mycelium-petroleum bins.

Brian kneeling in front of experiment site number 2, where petroleum is treated in large pits of substrate.

At Donald´s house, we got to chew on some tasty cacao. We sucked the juicy white fruit (which tasted sort of like lemon ice cream) off the seeds, which were then laid out to dry on the concrete in the sun. Exciting to think my saliva will be making a trip to Switzerland and eventually into some little kid´s mouth.

Several things that need to be said: considering we were only being shuttled around for about a total 4.5 hours, I was genuinely surprised at how many people we ran into who, upon hearing our little mycotour introductory spiel, rolled up their sleeves and showed us their chemical burns and their skin fungus and told us about their mother´s skin cancer or their blood diseases that caused them to miss a lot of work and rack up a lot of bills. I know discussion this issue runs the danger of coming off as just the listing of numb statistics: a bigger oil spill than Exxon Valdez, a total site size equivalent to Rhode Island. I know a lot of this runs the risk of coming off as just another Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action sort of stories (minus the Hollywood justice ending and multiplied by 15 years of paperwork and delays until a maybe verdict in the ends of 2009?).

In the end, I agree with what Corey wrote earlier: what really ending up getting me in the end was thinking about how I (or any of my friends or family) would feel if someone came along and dumped a 3 meter pit of oil in my front or backyard or neighborhood river. Not to mention how ugly those pipes looked, by the roads and in front of people´s houses, like hard copper bones jutting out of the landscape.

If nothing else, now that the tour is over and it´s appropriate to make these kinds of sweeping generalizations and pronouncements, I hope that people return to the U.S. with a deeper awareness of what many people have to live with in order for a select few to be comfortable. Maybe there are some things we are going to have to learn to do without: our comfort, our laziness, the easy convenience of our lives. Heavens knows there are enough people, including in Lago Agrio, who have gone without enough already: their health, their lives, their dignity. It sucks to hear a woman´s story of walking down a street made of crude oil with her two kids (one of the ways la compania cut costs was not paving proper roads but pouring crude excess waste out so that it would turn into hot and sticky asphalt), losing their sandals in the goopy mess and having to walk the rest of the way barefoot. Umm yeah people should have some say in how their land and territory is used, but unfortunately stuff keeps getting in the way of that relatively simple premise. It´s a complicated issue, to say the least.

One of the cooler long-term plans for the project is implementing a community-education project, where people can learn how to use these mycoremediations techniques themselves and clean up the messes on their own land without having to wait for the outcome of a lawsuit... god knows when that will work out, not just in terms of a verdict, but in terms of when people are actually going to be given money (the current number now is 8-16 billion). One of the more vital aspects of this project is the use of local, inexpensive materials, such as sawdust from a local broomstick factory. Some vague plans for the community education element include a graphic novel explaining the mycoremediation technique and an instructional film. Ultimately, people will hopefully be able to grow the mushrooms themselves, clean up the contamination on their own land and thus become actively involved in the remediation (both literal and metaphorical) of their land, themselves and their community.

The root of the problem or A crude awakening

2008-07-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

Lago Agrio is an oil town. It seethes with oil town agendas. Off gasing flames illuminate the night sky like prehistoric fire flies mating in Hell. PetroEcuador is the new polluter in town. The blatant disregard for people and ¨el ambiente¨, the environment, is as shocking at the 600 open uinlined waste pits left by Texaco(Chevron) and the 13 billions gallons of wastewater allowed to flow in the rivers and streams to the virgen forests of the Oriente´.

Lets start with Charapa, over 35 years old, leaching waste oil and tar into the water table for more years than I´ve been living, it´s a speck of dust in Big Oil´s wastepile. Charapa is 9 feet deep and about 10000 square feet at the surface. It´s a nightmare, the leaf litter has concealed the pit under about 4 inches of natural compost. The air here is volatile and toxic. The scent of petroleum 35+ years later is still fetid. The site is a focus of fungal remediation with some interesting succesion going on.

Random oil spill discovery on the way back from Charapa! This makes me sick. Look at the images. They tell the real story. This oil spill is the work of PetroEcuador and we clocked it at dumping about 55 gallons per 2 hours, 12 barrels a day into this stream. The cleanup effort was, get this, a stick hammered into the open pipeline. Yes, no $5 cap to stop the flow, no mending effort, just sawdust on the ground, and a big fucking leak. The leak looks small but 12 barrels a day is unacceptable. This blatant lack of regard for everything and everyone surrounding this place infuriates me. I have never experienced anger of this dimension before. How would you feel if crude oil was being sprayed on your lawn or garden, would it still be green? Think about the true price of fossil fuels as you wait to pay for the environmental damage of companies like Texaco right there at the pumps. Five dollars a gallon will never comes close to paying for the pain and destruction caused by these companies. How can we change things?

I´m too angry to continue and this keyboard sucks bad.
more soon.

I´m having problems with images so they´ll come later.

mycelium running

2008-07-17T16:02:00.000-07:00

THE MYCELIUM IS RUNNING!

Our mycotour in entirety was completely together by Friday: 12 people who are doing the 3-week tour in full, 18 people total who{ll be doing the Galapagos leg. We met some of the folks at a big shrimp boil held at our house in Guapulo, where I had the pleasure (re)meeting some pleasing Reedies. Then on Friday we all had dinner at the big hotel in Old Town where everyone is staying. It is good having grown-ups instead of teenagers in the tour group: there is no need for me to give my speech on the dangers of purling (“if boys re blue, and girls are red, then together, they make PURPLE, and we don{t want any purple here during our time together!”). Everyone can pretty much take care of themselves and is very low key and chill.

I cannot emphasize enough how much we lucked out on the group we have. Everyone seems really varied in terms of age and ackground, ranging from two Lewis and Clarkie soph-juniors, to an adorable Scottish-Irish-Canadian couple in their late 70s and early 80s respectively. But then again, everyone is from the West Coastish (California, Vancouver, Portland, Montana), everyone is liberal and of course everyone is fascinated by fungi to one degree or another: some casual hunters, others members of mycology clubs and two involved in remediation as a career).

On Saturday (the 12th) we left to the airport to Lago Agrio and the journey contained relatively little drama. We spent the afternoon in Lago giving a tour of the experiment site which hopefully Corey will have time to write about in more detail later, when Im not rushed to head off for dinner.

Oysters peeping out from the yummy substrate of petroleum and sawdust!

entre santos, no peregrinos

2008-07-08T12:36:00.000-07:00

I have a silly Mexican Christmas carol stuck in my head because I glimpsed a DVD in one of those illegal pirata stores that used one of the lyrics.

Yesterday around 8am Corey shook me awake out of a drowsy only-been-back-in-Quito-for-about-ten-hours slumber and asked me if I wanted to go to Mindo with Brian and Jess (I kind of want to refer to them collectively as PB&J, PB standing for Brian Pace reversed and J for Jess). One of the hotels canceled at the last minute and so it was imperative to scope out a new one. So the four of us hopped on a bus and took off for Mindo, a little town famous for its birdwatching and community-based tourism.

In one of those random turn of events that always seems to happen to us, the gentleman we were paying to drive us from hotel to hotel offered to take us to meet his brother, who had some private land with trails that were open only to researchers, not to tourists. His brother turned out to be one of the first individuals who campaigned for Mindo to transform their primary industry into tourism as opposed to hunting and agriculture (which involves clearing a lot of forests). He was a very interesting person: long hair, married to a German woman, excellent English (and German too from the little we heard!). He showed us the trail and it will be a great afternoon activity for the tour. We found some mushrooms along the trail, not too many but then again we were walking very quickly--some oysters, agaricus, shiny red ones, little white ones, a big black one that was either oreja de mico or oreja de cerdo, I can´t remember which. The trail goes all the way up one of Mindo´s highest peaks, where there is stil some ´primary´ cloud forest left (not really primary, since one of the concessions Mindo made to the government when switching over to tourism is that they cut down all the cedar trees. Lose the cedars, but save the forest--an okay exchange, I guess). One of the couples attending the tour is getting along in the years (late 70´s and early 80´s respectively) but even if we don´t hike the whole trail it´s still a great opportunity to hike a relatively unexplored area--the trail isn´t even completely built yet.

Something else that´s awesome is that Milton (brother of driver) is coordinating a taxonomy project of all the wildlife in Mindo--all of it. Daaaaayyymmmn. Don´t ask me how long that would take, since all the scientists I know always nod knowingly at comments at how complicated it is the classify the wildlife is in just a 2-meter space. For Corey, it´s a good contact to have in terms of a future volunteer opportunity... he´ll have to write about the details later, but apparently PSU has this crazy detailed moss and lichen (and-or maybe fern?) catalog... plus he´s, you know, good at all that mushroom stuff--Jess half-joked that for the tour she intends on making him a little nametag that reads ¨taxonomist.¨

So we booked the hotel in Mindo, right by the mariposeria that I visited with Laura when I was there, two years ago. Let me tell you, it was strange rattling down the same dusty unpaved road that I rode with Laura in a random pickup truck, to see the river and cloud forest that I took a picture of two years because I thought it was pretty, and yes, it still looked pretty, amazingly, awesomely so. This is likely reiterated enough to the point of stale cliche in Ecuadorian blogging, but it´s ridiculous how much the landscape changes in Ecuador, in as little as an hour and half long bus ride! I haven´t traveled enough over the land in Colombia to say the same, due to safety issues with the roads there and stuff. But that´s definitely been one of the cooler parts of our time here, just watching the landscape roll by the rattling windows of the bus, listening to either a scratchy 80´s music mix CDs or the dubbed grunts of Jean Claude Van Damme as he hacks and kicks away at the bad guys on the screen.

In terms of Quito-town going-ons, Corey and I officially have a room now in PB&J´s house as opposed to just a mattress on the floor, after one of their housemates moved out to go live in the jungle (yes, literally). So far today we´ve successfully bought all the snacks for the hike in Cuyabeno, where we´ll have three big (and likely very delicious) meals a day. Hikers will eat anything, especially TONGOS! Yummy chocolate covered mora flavored Tongo cookies, with such a special place in my heart! Oh, and we may or may not have gotten a fake $10 bill out of the ATM machine. Sin verguenzas, sin verguenzas (shameless, shameless).

Corey just saïd ¨I don´t know if I´ve been bit by bugs or if I have some kind of disease.¨ Hopefully it´s the former, since we haven´t even made it out to the Oriente yet. Mycoutour in T-3 days.

please wait while your photos upload

2008-07-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

In Cajas national park, with the prehistoric alien landscape.

What is this mysterious gloop? A new species of slime mold? An example of bacterial-fungi symbiosis? Jess solved the mystery by sticking her finger into the mess, licking it off and pronouncing it as peach jello.

Sad state of inca ´ruins´ outside of the Banco Central museum, which was very cool. Lots of shruken heads which the museum brochure was very excited about proclaiming as the main attraction.
Jess and Brian
Corey about to jump over a stream in Cajas. It was very cold.

Baños has this litte catacombs city area, with its own streets. From the mountain we climbed (yes, mountain. We climbed a whole mountain. It started off as two trails and us randomly pickin one, and then being too proud/dumb to turn back, even when we were scrambling up slopes of almost 90-degree angles), we had a nice view of the whole city, including this funeral procession.
CUYCUYCUYCUY GET YOUR CUY CRISPY BROWN AND FRIED. I actually think cuy is pretty okay, I just got a little tired of eating it the last time I was here in Esperanza. Corey is going to try cuy before we leave, even if it´s the last thing he eats, dammit.
In front of the hot baños (baths) of Baños. If you love screaming little kids with huge floaties bigger than their torsos attached to their arms and little old ladies who for some reason put on their bathing suits backwards so you get lots of wonderful shriveled balloon old lady boobies floating in the water near you, then you would love these baths! They were really relaxing and nice and brown and minerally. It was fun switching from the boiling hot to the freezing cold pool. It made your toes tingle. We all slept like dead burros that night.

View of the city from the mountain.
La Virgen. The trail began as stairs leading to her, and then afterwards it was just us, the bugs, plants and glorious muddy steepness.

The stations of the cross on the stairs leading up to La Virgen.

Downhill trail coming back down the mountain. We hiked up to the little town of Runtun, which was more like a community of scattered farmhouses than a town. It was too cloudy to see the peak of the volcano whose name I can never say, Tungurahua. It last erupted two years ago, the last time I was here, foiling me from visiting Baños then.
Mushrooms! Pollo del bosque! Polyporus sulphureus! That took a long time for me to type out correctly and it made Corey annoyed with my slow scientific name typing skills!

Thinking about the yummy mushrooms, soon to be in my belly the next day when we get back to Quito.

Wow, why are the Cuenca photos all the way down here? Never mind. Cuenca is a pretty city and has a nice river. Too bad the air is still dirty.

Corey imitating me tweaked out on pseudoephedrine. This is right when I was starting to feel a bit icky, a couple of hours before I puked on the streets outside our hostel. The guilty culprit is suspected to be a cheese sandwich, consumed in the bus station of Riobamba.
Amaranth, growing on the river banks of Cuenca.

Goodbye, Baños! You were a very pretty, nice, good city, worthy of many positive English 101 adjectives. Back to Quito now.

In the andes

2008-07-03T15:33:00.000-07:00

ok

Let me start by saying the computer just deleted my entire post and I have to retype it.

Traveling now Quito-Riobamba-Cuenca-Riobamba-Banos-Puyo next?

The night before leaving I get sick. Nasty sick. Like the kind of sick you get when you drink too much ditch water and pee. Ceviche...shrimp ceviche...Old Town Quito...Julie eats the same shit and doesn´t get sick...yet...I projectile vomit into the hallway after our housemate gives me some curare´made of grapefruit seed extract and frothy vitamin c extract. Instant emetic evacuation!

The air in Quito is like soup...people get rid of their catalytic converters to save gas money, gas is set at 1.48 per gallon by law. Diesel, 98 cents. So it can be hard to breath at time...so we travel...

The Andes

We get to Riobamba...a 5 hour bus ride from Quito on the way to our destination of Cuenca, a beautiful clean old city. Back to the Bamba. On the bus everyone tries to sell you something...paptitaspaptitaspaptitaspaptitaspaptitaspaptitas.....chifleschifleschifles....They extol the virtues of teh candy bard which they proudly remove from their briefcases.

Julie gets sick in Cuenca. Yaks alot. In the street. Talk about nasty street food...She gets better. Nothing to do in Riobamba but climbing Chimborozo or riding the Nariz del Diablo(which is being repaired.) SO WE´LL IGNORE THAT FOR NOW.

View from our hostal in Cuenca

Julie peeping on the germans!

Cuenca in the next post!

...

guapuloguapuloguapulo

2008-06-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

I want to get a job as one of those guys who stand in the bus entrances and yell ¨guapuloguapuloguapulo¨ when they zoom by you and ¨subesubesuberapidorapidorapido¨when you´re running to get on the usually still-moving bus.

My throat hurts from all the pollution and I have a tubercolosis-like cough from all the nasty air. I wasn´t expecting the altitude to affect me that much, but there you go.

The Mycotour starts on July 12th and everything seems pretty much set: all the arrangements and flights set up and the like. Brian and Corey are making big plans for building an autoclave or maybe just a pressure cooker to do some happy jolly mushroom activities. It´s been really great seeing Corey in this environment, where he just has so much knowledge about the stuff that´s being done... he´s really going to be a great help on the tour, I think. And mi! mi hablo el espanglish muy nice!

Corey and I may be leaving tomorrow, either for Riobamba or Baños. We´re trying to couchsurf--hopefully it´ll work out! I think minus my jugos naturales and bon yogurt naranjillo-flavored addiction, we´ve been taking care of our money pretty well. Set lunches and the grumpy ladies who serve them have definitely been our bestest friends in Quito. The winding confusing streets of Guapulo (especially at night when the entire neighborhood becomes enveloped in a foggy haze and finding our way home becomes even more difficult) and the grumpy dogs snapping at our heels before getting drop-kicked in the face by Corey have definitely been our enemies.

2008-06-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

Today again I woke at about six am to crow of the roosters in Guapulo. We trucked it across town back into Quito proper to a forest park in Quito in search of local mushroom species. We found 3. The park is all ecualyptus and I think this inhibits the growth of our fugal friends...Tomorrow we head for the cloud forest near Nano to get an idea of what´s poppig up there.Tonight a pub crawl through Guapulo, with my remaining 8 dollars for the day.

quito landia

2008-06-25T10:32:00.000-07:00

We are in Quito. Our flight was Portland-L.A.-Panama City-Quito. We got accosted in the PDX airport by a high-maintenance lady. ¨I´m going to have to have you buy a return ticket,¨ she told us, frowning in disaproval. We told her we would deal with it in L.A. Outside of PDX, no one seems to care whether we have a return ticket or not. We flew out of L.A. at 2am. This was for fun, not because the ticket was cheap (not). We ate a lot of candy in L.A. and it was good. Sweedish fish and gummy cola. Yum, yum, yum.

Then we tried to sleep in a small tuna fish can sized space. At least, I slept in my best curled up fetus impersonation, while Corey kind of grumbled and drank whiskey and watched the classic in-flight film ¨College Road Trip.¨

But then we arrived in Quito and it was all good! Brian´s beautiful bald head and Jess were waiting to meet us. They took us to their lovely little house in Guapulo, a suburban neighborhood on the edge of Quito. Guapulo is apparently the Hawthorne equivalent in Quito, lots of bohemians and hippies and young folks and the like. Apparently these Reedies are staying in a orange hostel nearby... damn Reedies, it really is true, you can´t get away from them. Brian and Jess rent the bottom floor of a house with their two roommates and entertain frequent visits from Bingo, the pet dog of the family living upstairs. Their house has an absolutely amazing view of the surrounding mountains and the gorge. Corey watched the sun rise this morning through the bathroom window while listening to the roosters.

Sorry, I can´t figure out how to put these photos in order and I can´t be bothered to fuss with it.
Then today we walked to the Santa Clara market for groceries only to find that it was closed, since all the market sellers have gone on strike for reasons unclear to me. We bought yummy stuff from vendors nearby: some corn I am really excited about eating for dinner, some cacao chocolate cookie thing I am excited about eating as soon as I finish this blog post. I am basically really excited about eating everything and anything in Quito, period. We had a really good lunch yesterday with Brian and Jess in the Mariscal, which is the touristy gringo neighborhood. We ate some fried snapper which Corey professed as one of the best fish he´d ever eaten. I had some ceviche which I put too much aji into. Live and learn (and eat, preferably without burning one´s tongue out of one´s skull). For dinner Jess cooked this amazing beet thing with quinoa, and for breakfast Corey made some potatoes and eggs, and we ate the rest of the qunioa with oatmeal. I´m surprised quinoa hasn´t caught on more with the yuppie crowd in P-land, maybe it has and I´m just unware. We had lunch in a park with all the various goodies we acquired from our meandering: sandwiches with tomato and avocado and onion, really good nuts, and some squishy orange fruit whose name I can´t remember despite asking Jess four times. Four organic avocados for a dollar is a pretty good deal. I can kind of understand Brian and Jess´s reluctance to return to the Estados Unidos, what with the amazing view from their $180 a month house and good cheap food.

El Bingo

La casa (I think?)

View from the bathoom. Makes pooping good.

View from the plane.

2008-06-21T14:36:00.001-07:00

ecuador