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Eight months under the influence: I headed out of Los Angeles on the 10 freeway. Little did I know it would be eight colorful months before stepping foot on U.S. soil again. The expedition began as an exploration of Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America), complete with two anthropologists/documentary filmmakers, both with cameras, one with a car. We had a small arsenal of maps and two guidebooks of the region. They would often come in handy and often get us lost in the middle of Chiapas looking for indigenous communities, hydroelectric dams, or zapatista autonomous zones. Our days and nights were filled with conversations, interviews, filming, driving, and an occasional argument. We split the driving up, one person per day, and generally stuck to that except when the car owner needed to be driving (Anthony entering Guatemala) or when the weather conditions were so crazy that no one else would dare (Spencer in Nicaragua). At each opportunity, we discussed the Plan Puebla Panama with locals and ate traditional foods (well, except for me not being able to swallow crickets in Oaxaca). Sliding South After three months in Costa Rica spent replenishing my discovery fund (i.e. working), Brazil beckoned. I arrived in São Paulo on Christmas Eve and ventured deep into nature for two weeks of speaking amidst silent vipassana meditators in the physical and spiritual interior of the state of Rio de Janeiro. Diving head first back into the world of verbal communications, my next call was as an interpreter at the World Social Forum 2005 in Porto Alegre. Forty hours later, a bus dropped me off for two months in Santiago, Chile, for the birth of the honeybird herald. Just before boarding the plane to LA, I ventured south to the heart of the Mapuche Nation: Temuco. ¡Marrichiweu! |