Venezuelan Sugar and Coffee

On our way to lake to Lake Maracaibo to visit the lightning, our tour guide Alan brought us to a sugar factory, and a coffee plantation.

Here is what the sugar factory looked like as we approached:

The process works like this:

In the lower left of this picture is a huge pile of cane. Which gets handed to the shirtless guy, who puts it through the crushing machine. The crushing machine outputs sugar cane juice, and crushed cane.

The crushed cane gets hauled out into the sun to dry:

 After the cane dries in the sun, they burn it to boil the cane juice. This guy's job is to haul the dry cane into the furnace bit below the boiling tubs.

The boiling tubs look like this:

This guy's job is to stand by the boiling pits preventing boil-over, and generally moving scum towards the right, and yummy to-be-sugar to the left.

All the way to the left of that guy, was a big table, where they take the sugar and form it into blocks.

Alan purchased 2 blocks for one or two dollars each. It ended up being the sugar we used in our coffee for the next few days.

The scum on the right kept being pushed towards the final tub, where it was boiled down to make molasses.

This is molasses. They use it to feed animals.

After visiting the sugar factory, we drove up a hill to check out some coffee.

There was a narrow concrete path down the coffee plantation.

This coffee plant has lots of beans growing.

But only one ripe red bean.

It was steep jungle all around.

Back in the processing building, Alan weighed himself on the bean scale.

They washed the beans in this big tile area for several days.

Here is their huge roaster.

We drove back down the mountain and enjoyed a fresh cup of coffee. Lisa has a "grande".

We were asking about exports, when Alan explained, that Venezuela doesn't really have any exports right now, and is importing a lot of food just to feed everyone.

Infrastructure across Colombia and Venezuela

I doubt I'll ever again see worse poverty than the slums in Nairobi, but I was still shocked by some of the inconsistent, and often lacking infrastructure of both countries. Overall, Colombia is doing much better than Venezuela. In Colombia there were a lot of iron gates/bars, no major highways (that I saw even going across 1/3 of the country), and stop lights were only a suggestion. We planned parts of this trip to be spontaneous so we didn't have a hotel reservation for the day we landed. The next day we were going to hop a bus to Venezuela so we weren't feeling picky. At the airport we saw a poster for the Best Western Plus so given our lack of planning we told the taxi driver that's the hotel we wanted. He was quite confused and eventually we just told him to pick one for us. On the way we drove past the gutted concrete and rebar shell of the Best Western Plus. Across all of Colombia we saw thriving shops beside crumbling buildings. That contrast was very striking.

Venezuela was an entirely different thing. The currency is destabilizing. The bank exchange rate was fixed by the government at 6.3 Bolivars to the US dollar. However, every restaurant or hotel exchanges somewhere around 25 Bolivars to the dollar (at the moment). That rate varies, but it's such a discrepancy from the 'official' rate we constantly found ourselves thinking things were very expensive, no wait, really cheap, etc. I was very curious how wage rates compared to the cost of living when the value of the currency seemed to be so unclear. The answer was the people were struggling with a lot of basic items. When I went to a major grocery store in Merida (a big city) there was no toilet paper. The store often doesn't have milk but did get a shipment that day so everyone in line had 1-4 containers of milk. Items like toilet paper and toothpaste were sold in the street where they were highly desired. Electricity wasn't stable everywhere we went and some of the toilets were genuinely gross, even by my post-Kenya visit standards.

Honeymoon in Colombia and Venezuela

For our honeymoon, Lisa and I decided to go to Colombia and Venezuela.

We picked South America, because neither of us had traveled there. We wanted to see the Catatumbo lightning, take a jungle hike, and do some scuba. The lightning narrowed our options down, and we ended up basing our trip out of Santa Marta, Colombia with a visit to Venezuela.

The posts that follow will be Lisa and my recollections and pictures.

Deeper Meditation

I've had a couple days to settle back into my normal routine, diet, media-scape, etc... and contemplate the seriousness of the brain-shift acquired while traveling abroad.

People asking me "how was my trip?" and "did you have a good time?" ... and my answers tend to be complex (as my uncle pointed out) just like India.

We were a group of seven. That was a couple, a couple, a couple, plus me. It was the odd-one-out quite often.

Seattle time was always "local-time minus 1.5 hours, and flop am/pm"... Noon in India is 10:30 PM Seattle Time... bed time in India at 9PM is 7:30AM Seattle Time. So many days, I woke up, read every email and tweet I was going to all day, put my phone in my pocket and spent he next 23.75 hours disconnected. It was some seriously cold-turkey shit compared to my normal life, on so many layers.

I had about a half a dozen skype calls, half a dozen phone calls, a handful full for SMS and google-talk interchanges. In Three Weeks... otherwise, I was with my family. I can't remember the last time I spent that much time with my Mom and Dad. I can't remember the last time I spent that much time away from whomever my closest friends were at the time. The communication I got from "the real" world while I was on the other side of it was deeply grounding to me.

I think a lot about culture, and power, and religion, and their pros and cons. And to visit a place with such deep history is just... unlike anything in the US of A.

The lows are so much lower, that three blocks-away, having such opulence becomes a serious juxtaposition in my western eyes.

Its weird enough looking at homeless crackheads in my neighborhood, and to know they have a place they can get fed and get shelter as messed up as our system is... as much poverty and squalor that i saw, I never saw an abundance of sick people, or dying people. I wonder if that was just kept from my sight. I never visited a hospital or one of Mother Teresa horrible death homes.

Dark thoughts aside, I think back to the slum tour I wasn't allowed to take pictures of (I want to blog about it as much as possible before I forget the details). My over-riding feeling of the slum tour was how hard they were all working, and how much good they were trying to do.

We saw a fabric wood-block-print workshop. They invited us inside. I accidentally kicked over a bucket of dye. I was so embarrassed. They told me it was fine and threw a paint-stained-tarp over the whole mess and kept telling me it was not a big deal. They gave me a stamp on the sleeve of my woot shirt I was wearing. But at some point, someone showed up and I could tell was asking "whats up with this mess!?" I noticed one of the guys held a finger to his lips, and waved his head in a "not now, the white-people-are-watching" kinda way... i felt extra bad about kicking over the bucket... was some random guy going to get a load of shit and lose his wages that day in exchange for that bucket of dye, or was it going to be not-a-problem because I graced their lowly existence with my magnificent presence... and was that bucket of crap I kicked over really worth a day's wages or was it just 5 minutes worth of mixing $0.50 worth of ingredients? talk about context-collapse... We're worried if our 4-star hotels are going to live up to their stars, and these people have running water three hours per day.

In India I watched people sweep piles of garbage into piles of garbage into piles of garbage... then sometimes, they just lit the big piles of garbage on fire. I've lived in Boise Idaho during a winter "inversion" where the smoke of the wood-fires doesn't escape the valley quite right and it smells kinda stale... but in India... most everywhere we went... the air was full of burning... burning wood, burning cow-shit, burning garbage... not to mention the million people's worth of cars and busses and auto-rickshaws. Varanasi and the Ganges River smelt of burning corpse once you knew what to smell for.

Suddenly, I'm back in Seattle, and I have the privilege of taking my glass recycling out, and separating it from my cardboard recycling. It all suddenly seems so bourgeois to be have the luxury to be required to sort my garbage. On the clean street behind my building... on yeah, the same alley a few weeks back I caught a heroin junkie with a needle in his arm. He'd said "Sorry man, just trying to get straight, I don't mean no harm, I'll be out of here in a minute." In a way I knew he'd be gone before the cops arrived if I'd bother to dial 911.

The difference in the "dirty" spins me about.

The I walk to my fancy job in the fancy building, and I look at the skyscrapers before me, and I think of multi-hundred year-old runes I touched... with my bare hands... and the petty dramatic distractions of who-said-what-about-whom just seems so... boring.

Home Safe

Made it home safe to an entourage then a drama shit storm (of mostly my own doing). Work for a day, sick for 2 days, back to work in recovery mode. I've been to busy then sick to get any photo sorting or blogging done, but its comin soon.

Ready To Be Home

India is beautiful and stinky. Rich with history, and filthy with poverty.

I'm sorta all templed & palaced out. Ready to be back home with my tribe eating comfort food and drinking fat tire. (not to mention other things).

The internet has been non-existent at the last several hotels. Thus, no blog posts in many days.

My original grand plans of uploaded pictures and video and blogging real-time-ish have been utterly foiled... so the plan is to upload pictures and video and blog about 'em when I'm back home.

Its 1:30 pm now. I'm at an internet cafe that costs 20 rupes / hour. I'm waking up tomorrow at 6am to get a 8:20 flight to Mumbai. Then a flight to London. Then a flight to Boston. Then a flight to NYC to change planes. Then (finally) a flight home to Seattle where I'll arrive Saturday afternoon at 4:44pm. JetBlue Airways, Flight 83.

Speaking of that... anyone wanna arrange a ride home from the airport for me? I spent too much money on crap here and shouldn't really pay for the cab home.

Runes, Temples, and a Mosque

Wifi was $20 (USD) per day in Deli, and I wasn't in the hotel enough to make it worth it. Got to Agra today and its only $12, so I got some catch-up work to do.

28th -
About all we did Monday was fly from Varanasi to Deli, and checked into the hotel. I went for a solo walk about to see what I could see, and as it turns out, our hotel was in a crappy spot for such an exercise. I walked around for an hour through essentially residential type neighborhoods. Saw lots of cigarette venders, and some fruit/veggie stands, but nothing really of interest. After an hour I got bored and jumped into a tricycle-rickshaw back to the hotel. Just across the street from the hotel was the touristy shopping with bars and restaurants. I got some domino's pizza and sat at a bar reading The Diamond Age. Got back to the hotel before 9. Should have let my mom know I was back safe because she was worried about me all night. Heh, oops.

29th
Tuesday we got up early, visited some ruins of some Hindu buildings that had being conquered by Muslims, then the Muslims build on top of the Hindu buildings extending them. Seriously amazing stone carving. After that we visited the Lotus temple. Stunning. Elegant. A mighty place to behold. After that we visited a (the?) Krishna temple. A huge Hindu complex with many rooms and shrines. Our guide that day was a practicing Hindu. We could tell because when he entered this temple, he got down on his knees and touched his forehead to the floor in front of the primary shrine in the entrance. The ruins were very impressive for the intricacy of the designs. The Lotus temple was epic in its scale, and elegance. They made the Krishna temple pale in comparison... which is quite a feat considering the majesty of the temple.

30th
On Wednesday we visited the world's largest Hindu temple. It was large. It was epically large. It was so large and grand and magnificent and big and huge... I'd need to get a thesaurus and add another dozen or so adjectives to explain how big it was. It was very recently build (20th century) and man-oh-man was it big. There was also this lotus garden with a bunch of quotes from various well respected people from cultures and tribes all across the planet all saying pro-religious stuff.

I find it deeply cynical to quote people who were either atheist or at best deists to promote theism. The 3 grossest offenses were Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, and Einstein. There were also a couple quotes that weren't positive at all, just atheist bashing that I didn't much appreciate.

We got a bicycle-rickshaw ride through a crazy market (youtube video to come) and then visited our first Mosque. After the details in the ruins the day before, and the grandeur of the Lotus temple, the Mosque was a little boring. How quickly we become so cynical.