Oh No! Who Let These Guys Into the Wine Tasting in Mendoza, Argentina

Dave ad I together make quite the traveling duo. He's dark skinned and locals often mistake him for at least partially Latino, and there is no mistaking the fact that I am a gringo. If someone walks up to the two of us without fail they will speak to him in Spanish and me in English, always. This has had it's advantages, but one thing that always made me laugh is when I order the bottle of wine with dinner they present the bottle of wine to Dave, because he has no idea what he is doing. Dave is the type of guy that a good selection of beer is Coors Origonal and Coors Light. I adimitedly am not much better but know enough to not look like an idiot (well, any more than usual).

So knowing that we would be going to the wine capital of Argentina Dave and I took it upon orselves to do some research on the finer points in wine tasting. We were very diligent an learned a lot of vocabulary like the five S's: 1) see 2)swirl 3)sniff 4)sip 5)savor. We learned key words that are often used to describe wines that we would be sampling, for instance the Malbec often is described as tasting like violets, fruit, or beer. The Cabenet Souvignon reaks of blackcurrants, eucalyptus, chocolate, and tobacco. Beyond that, we leared other common words in wine tasting descriptions such as mown grass, minerals, pepper, bramble fruits, and (my personal favorite) pencil shavings. Besides our vocabulary, we also took it upon ourselves to practice our pretentiousness. We became so good at the whole gig that we decided that wine tasting was not abiguous and pretentious enough yet and the second day of tasting we needed to up the antee some.

So we dressed in our finest trucker hats, workout shorts, and best socks and sandles combo, rented a couple of bike, and went out to show Argentina how wine tasting should be done. Like any good taster we started with our sparking whites which Dave described as being ¨surprisingly light for its darkness.¨ Not to be out done I decided that there was no adjective that was good enough to describe the sample and thus had to describe it as being ¨violently¨. I tell you, that describes it the best.

Sample two was a good (how we pernounced it) Cab-er-ett So-vig-non, to which I went first. Just the nose of the wine made me want to faint, but I pushed through and tried it only to angrly spray down the server exclaiming, ¨Why would you serve this Nazi boot polish?¨ I bet she learned her lesson. Dave actually enjoyed both his glass and mine, and to quoth him, ¨The Maggotty cheese sensation was balanced quite well with the hysteria of the obviously new barrels. It tasted so angry white boy polka.¨

After making a couple of recomendations to the other impressed tourist for Chared-o-nayse that was comfortably numb or more accurately like Lynn's track cletes (hey sis) we moved on to the next winery. This time we were introduced to a wine that neither of us had tasted. The Pee-not No-ire was quite good. It was so very electric that I had o take my finger out of the light socket. It reminded me of a tropial beach on a fall day, and Dave of the color yellow and Bob Barker's retirement.

The cement our fame into the wine tasting history books, Dave and I pulled a move that was described to me by a wine tasting legend who shall remain nameless (but his might begin with `A´ and end with `dam Pivetta´). After going through all the S´s it was so obvious what the wine tasted like. So I opened my eyes to the gathering crowd and announced, ¨It tastes like, like, like... grapes!¨ As everyone rolled their eyes and walked away, I couldn´t help but think how accurate the description was, nor why the owners has not personally invited me to stay as their permanent wine taster. I guess they just don´t tallent if it hits them on the taste buds.

Final Breakdown on Chile:

Country of Origin: Bolivia
Total time in country: 56 Hours
Music: Same-same, but different from the rest
People: Very happy to take my money.
Transport: Maybe some of the best in the world.
Landscape: We saw half of the country from the bus window, and it was as if someone was playing a loop of desert scene for the entire time.
Food: Worth every cent we paid, and there were a lot of them
Safety: There were safety belts on the bus
Gas prices: 648 Chilean Pesos per Liter (5.18 US dollars per gallon)
Surprised by: The pride in the voice of a Chileno when he told me that Chile was the second most expensive country in the Americas (second to the USA)
Final word: Damn, and I mean DAMN, get me out of here and step on it!
Next stop: Argentina

A Chile Shaped Chili

I've always wondered if Chile's namesake came from the fact that it is long and skinny. Not unlike a Chili Pepper. Then Dave ever so crudely bashed the idea to smithereens, reminding me that those who named Chile (a) don't speak English, and (b) spell the country's name differently. I still wonder though...

After living in relative comfort on pocket change in Bolivia, we were brutally awakened to the fact that Chile is in fact NOT Bolivia and prices reflected this. I'm sure there is some economic vocabulary word for the enjoyment that one gets by saving money and getting to do something cool, and therefore the opposite is also true. Case in point, while we walked around the driest desert in the world in Valle de la Luna near San Pedro de Atacama, seeing some of the most amazing countryside in the world, I couldn't help but give it a lethargic ¨yippee¨ and get easily distracted by all the other tourists that could not take enough tacky pictures of the lamest things (including themselves). I know, I know, I know! I am guilty if this as well, but at this time I couldn't help but feel sorry for all of the friends these people have back home that will have to sit through all the awful pictures (and video is worse) as these people share their trip and experiences. To my friends and family I apologize now, well in advance.

I realized though that I can't blame them. They are trying to appreciate the small time they have to appreciate the masterpiece that this country side is. The fact that they show up, say ¨yep this is cool¨, take the tourist photo, mark it off the list, and get back on the bus to go to the next place on the list is too critical. Especially when I considered the fact that I have traveled for almost three months since finishing Peace Corps so to some degree this slump I appear to be in should be normal. The more time one spends admiring something the less impressive the next thing gets. It's like walking through the Louve, the Vatican, or the Smithsonians. Eventually everyone gets to the point where they go, ¨Oh, another masterpiece, who wants a beer?¨

But then I remember what my other options are. Suddenly I feel like I may have missed something, maybe I'll go back for a second look.

Final Breakdown on Bolivia:

Country of Origin: Peru
Total time in country: 24 Days
Music: The national Andean music was a little hokey and redundent, but all the independent music was great.
People: They are friendly, helpful, and honest. They haven't figued out that they can charge a tourist more than a paisano.
Transport: You pay for what you get. We were only on a paved road for five of the 40+ hours of traveling we did.
Landscape: In the western half we saw all the different regions of Bolivia from marshland/jungle, to beautiful mountains, to high desert salt plains.
Food: As much as I wanted to continue to eat ceviche I thought it may not be the best idea in a land locked country. Llama and alpaca were good, but I still perfer goat to them.
Safety: I think the Bolivians were more worried about our saftey than we were.
Gas prices: 3.50 Bolivian Pesos per liter (2 US dollars per gallon)
Surprised by: It was harder to get an entry visa from the Brazilian Government than it was from the Bolivian Government
Final word: Bolivia (sometimes called the 4th World) is a great place with cheap everything and a range of things to see. It was a good vibe from a people that are still unjaded to the tourist, but I could see it changing within the next five years.
Next stop: Chile

Will You Pass the Pepper With the Salt House in Uyuni

We made it back to La Paz for the new year. After spending a week trapped there we figured we knew all the ropes to make for a good night out, but due to some bad Cuban food I was sadly in bed at 10:30 pm wondering why it felt like there was a three hundred pound midget sitting on my stomach trying to rip out his circus partner from inside my intestines. Our escape from La Paz was finalized despite the scare of a blockade on the road we were traveling. After the all nigth bus we climbed right onto an SUV and trip through the southern Bolivian salt flats, through the mountains, and finally to grandmother Chile's house.

For the advertised salt flat tour of three days we spent a total of four hours actually on the salt flats. Of these four hours three were spent in the car waiting for the rain to stop. The rest of the trip we spent in the truck doing stupid calculations because honestly there was nothing better to do. According to the guide, the salt flats cover 12000 square km (slightly smaller than Connecticut), and at the deepest points get up to six to seven meters thick (20 ft). That is a lot of salt that is farmed to sell for household use all over South America. How much salt you ask, there is so much salt that they cut it up to use as bricks to make houses, tables, chairs, and gravel sized salt is use floor hotels. It was certainly strange, and the most surreal location we had been since the floating reed islands on Lake Titicaca.

The salt flat is created from two tectonic plates move together, isolating an ocean, elevating and drying it over time. The ocean at the point of being closed off in Bolivia would be roughly the size of all the great lakes put together, or 100 times as big as the Great Salt Lake in Utah assuming they started with the same salinity. It weights roughly 34060 Tg (tetra grams, X 10^12), or enough to give each person on the planet 5500 Kilograms (11000lbs) of salt (almost an H2 Hummer and a half). If you were to farm all the salt for building, it would be possible to build 10,000 Hoover Dams. I realize that salt would not be the best material choice for a dam, but it gives you an idea of the size. Please make all the ¨engi-nerd¨ jokes you want. They are well deserved and very doubtful there would be anything I had not heard before. I really don't know of a better time killer for the rest of the two and a half day trip through the high desert to the border. Honestly I am just relieved we got out of La Paz.

Don't Smile at a Crocodile in Rurrenabaque

We were standing around with our tickets to Sucre in hand when I says to meself, ¨hey, self, why are you going to another city when you don't like cities all that much and you have spent the last week stuck in one?¨

A good question indeed, and with 15 hours we had sold the tickets to Sucre, and were on our way north to Rurrenabaque by boat. North of La Paz, Rurrenabaque is a horribly hot town that makes most of Panama look like a ski resort, but is on one of the many tributaries that eventually finds its way to the Amazon. The Madidi National Park has original primary forest still, and the pampas (think everglades - I'd imagine) is a highly dangerous tour where if the crocs, anacondas, and piranhas don't get you there are still plenty of mosquitoes, flesh eating diseases, and the every scary candiru that will track you down.

The three day boat trip took place on our luxury cruise liner (read glorified canoe) that I called the Sloop John B, and despite humming the Beach Boys song for three days the name never caught on. The passengers turned out to be quite the mix of galling French Canadians, cute German girls, a South African couple that were great storytellers, and a pair of hilarious English sisters of which one was so scared of everything it makes me wonder how she got started on the trip to South America to begin with.

The boat trip was fun, except that Dave and I were the only ones to actually bathe for the three days. As accustomed as I was to peeing in large bodies of water it was quite painful to have to hold it for fear of the candiru who's common name seems to be the penis fish. The candiru's brain is wired to swim against a given current, so if one is urinating in the river, you may get an unwelcome parasite to swim up your urethra and expand its spines into the inside of your... *OUCH* For those of you who don't believe me I am not smart enough to make this stuff up, so here is the wikipedia link for further research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candiru.

The boat trip would have been a lot more fun with a libation of choice and an innertube. Canoes are not exactly made for white water, and we spent most of the time avoiding all the fun parts of the river. Even this tributary which is probably 1000 miles away from the start of the Amazon river was huge, and pumped serious volume. I cannot imagine the size of the Amazon at the mouth of the ocean.

One afternoon we went piranha fishing which turned out to be anticlimactic. Before I could get a picture of the only one we caught as a group, the Canadian that caught it threw it back in. We also got to go on a jungle hike in the national preserve that was just like anything we saw in Panama, with the exception of the wild boars. The last day of our trip was Christmas Day, and because of the heat and jungle tour did not feel like Christmas at all. To compensate for the lost holiday we went out and had the traditional holiday meal, pizza.

Reason 327 why I love Bolivia... On a given day you find yourself in the middle of town with nothing to do, so you walk up to the motorcycle taxi stand on the street corner and say, ¨I want to borrow your motorcycle.¨ After assuring the owners that I knew how to ride a motorcycle (I didn't), and talking the price down, I took off my very own motorcycle, rented all afternoon for a mere $10. The crazy part is that I left no deposit or anything of value to insure I would return the bike. They just gave me the bike on good faith that I would not drive it back to La Paz to sell it, crash it, or run someone over. He didn't even ask for the name of the hotel we were staying in. I wish I had some jocular remark to make about the situation but to be honest I'm still dumbfounded.
We drove around town like bandits until we realized why they weren't worried. There wasn't exactly any place to go. After a picnic lunch, watching some lassos fly, and scaring at least one old woman out of three years of her life, we returned the motorcycles without a scratch, that the owners found anyway.

During our afternoon tour we took five minutes to get signed up for a tour of the Pampas. Upon arriving the next day in the swampy bog I immediately realize why I have never been to Mississippi. I imagine this place was similar to the quagmire of the bayou and I have seen leach field that look nicer to swim in. It was miserably hot, muggy, and filled with mosquitoes and toothless locals. The allure of the worlds largest snake, the most infamous carnivorous fish, and the age old question: is it safe to smile at a crocodile? were just too much; we had to investigate. The guide would say that we had a successful trip in that we swam with pink dolphins, fed bananas to monkeys, and saw some amazing birds. Blah-blah-blah, I say the guide is full of bull-pucky. In the one full day we had in the area we saw exactly nothing. I won't be sorry that we did not see an anaconda, but only piranha fishing for 30 minutes was just pathetic. Any fool could have driven the boat to a random spot had us throw lines in the water and claimed, "oops they're not biting today." Not to mention the guides total lack of enthusiasm and gregariousness. Make an effort!

All was forgotten when we got back and found that Oregon State showed why they are the number two rush defense in the nation holding Maryland to a mere 18 yards on the ground as they dominated their bowl game in the miserable San Fransisco rain. Oregon finally got a victory without Dixon so congrats to them, and my money is on a USC route of 21 points or more over the Fighting Illini.

Will someone please explain to me why three teams from the Big Ten which actually has 11 teams (idiots need to go to a better conference to actually learn something) got three BCS bids; including Michigan who finished 8-4 (with a loss to Appalachian State, a Div. 1 AA school), and the Pac Ten only got one bid. Any correct answer will include the phrase 'east coast bias'.

So with that as my final beef for this year, Happy New Years everyone! Even to those of you from the Big Ten, congrats on the strong bowl appearance. It's not your fault you live in the east and can't count. I just hope I never have to drive across a bridge in Pennsylvania that is suppose to be eleven meters long if engineers from Penn State helped to design/build it. To everyone else, I hope y'all go out and makes a new years resolution and then promptly break it. The only good thing about a new years resolution is when one discovers that resolutions are crap and forget about theirs. Thus my new years resolution shall be to find a job.

The Internet Wanderings of an Idle Traveler Still In La Paz

Picture this, Dave and I were running around town for a third day trying to put together the package of information to get our visas for Brazil. We had to show proof of the yellow fever vaccine again, but this time we needed the original. So we are up early on Monday morning to go to the Bolivian health center to get an original document (not a shot) with the same piece of paper that was denied the previous Friday. It didn't pass the Common Sense Test to me, and I had half a mind to tell her that. The most annoying part was that she was not going to keep the original, she only needed to see it. She knew that we had received the shot and could have overlooked the minor discrepancy, but had to be a jerk about the whole thing.

So we went back, ready to do battle the next day. Needless to say she found some other nit-picky things to send us scrabling to get done, so we fix that and went back, oh did I mention we were trying to catch a bus in the morning so that we could get out of La Paz? I ran 14 blocks in the high capital in the world to pay the processing fee, and had all my ducks in a row. I was looking at the clock realizing that the bus was leaving from the other side of town in five minutes. In my optimism I told myself the bus won't leave until 15 minutes late, we are totally fine. As I turn back to the same evil secretary she looks up and smiles in her unique way (uh, this can't be good) and says "I'm sorry but you don't have any pages left in your passport." From the euphoric look on her face I think she may have had an orgasm from the joy in providing such bad news.

¨What about the three pages at the end, there is nothing on them.¨ I reply in my ignorance of passports.

You could see the tingle of pleasure run down her spine as she turned my passport back to me and showed me the three pages, ¨It says right here that I can't put any visas on these pages, (euphoric shutter) you are going to have to go to your embassy first.¨

Bastards! Dave could get his passport processed, but he was going to need more pages as well. Between the two of us we needed to be in La Paz everyday for the next week (for maybe ten minutes). That meant that we were not going to make our bus that day or for the next week, and we were not able to go chasing after alligators, anacondas, and piranhas fishing in the Amazon Basin. Bastards!

The week off gave us an opportunity to do some good ol' fashion college style internet time killing. In the past two years the internet has improved greatly. It has gone far beyond Al Gore's expectations when he discovered it all those years ago. At least he finally got his credit for the discovery this year in the form of the Nobel Peace Prize. A couple of those discoveries I will share since I seem to have nothing better to do with myself than waste the reader's time.

First I started to YouTube (can YouTube be verbed?) the debates for our next presidential candidate. In the process I watched some of the participant's propaganda that they also leave up on the website. Based on one advertisement I have selected my dark horse, and because my candidate as lost every time I have voted for president I have no problem shamelessly plugging former Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson.




There is also a huge sub-culture based around everybody's favorite ass kicking Texas Ranger, Chuck Norris. At http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/ one can get a glimpse of why Chuck Norris is a better man than you. My personal favorite: ¨Every night the boogeyman checks his closet for Chuck Norris.¨

Not to send y'all away from my blog, but there is a button that automatically comes up on most blogs that are affiliated with this website. If you scroll to the top you will discover as I did the ¨Next Blog¨ button. This button will allow you to go to another blog by a random person somewhere in the world. After an hour of mindlessly pushing the button I realized that most blogs are absolute crap. Which begs the rhetorical question, do other people think my blog is as crap as I think their's is? It probably is. Blogs are crap.

The largest waste of time on the internet was done without Lane's knowedge, he would be very disappointed in me if he knew I was search for a... hold on... Ok, he's gone, in search of a (whispered) Jay-Oh-Bee. That's right, I have been reviewing his bank account balance, and by the time he is done with this South America thing he will be more broke than if Chuck Norris would have roundhouse kicked him in the face. That's right a job (gasp!), so if anyone out their is interested (or knows someone that might be) in giving this future-less engineer a job (preferably one that pays more than monopoly money and boild green bananas) let him know, but you didn't hear that from me.

With that I must leave in search of more garbage on the internet. If you have not burned enough time at work yet I recommend starting with the ¨Next Blog¨ button, I wonder how many times I would have to push it to randomly come across the blog of someone that I know? There is only one way to find out...