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.

Varanasi Day Two Part Two

A few minutes after that last post we went and visited the Buddhist museum in Varanasi. I touched stone carvings from the 6 century and saw some as old as the 3rd century-B.C. Most of the items in the museum were buried when the Mughal Empire tried to stamp out Buddhism in India, and were underground until excavated by an archeologist about 100 years ago. We got to see the ruins of the old Buddhist temple.

We visited a Jain temple (had to take off all leather, shoes, and wash hands and mouth before entering).

Then a re-creation of the original Buddhist temple runes built (funded) in the 1930's by Japanese Buddhists.

A quick lunch/snack thing, and we were off to get classic pressure point massage. They ruled.

I'm too tired to think straight. Will try to write more tomorrow.

Varanasi Day Two

Woke up pre-dawn, quick shower and shave, then jumped into a van back down to the Ganges river. We took a boat from the dock, up to the primary place they perform cremations (no photography allowed). We were on the river as the sun rose. We got to see the locals coming down to bathe and wash their clothes in the filthy, sewage, polluted, corpse infested waters of the holy river they consider their mother. Talk about epic clash of ideas.



We drove through the University, and visited a Temple of Shiva. It was fairly modern, built only 60 years ago. We then visited another temple. 800 years old. Our guide Ravi explained that non-Hindus aren't allowed in the temple, and he didn't want to go in, but we could walk around inside and no one would hassle us (as long as we didn't take pictures). I took my shoes off and walked around inside. One of the Brahmins called me over, pointed at a statue and said "Shiva" a few times, then beckoned me closer.

He tapped my head and shoulders with a whisk similar to brooms, tied a simple black knotted string around my neck, poured some water from the Ganges into my hand and indicated I should pour it onto my head (which I did). He then put some red paint in a dot on my forehead, followed by a dot of ashes. Then asked for some money (I gave him 100 RU).

Participating in unfamiliar religious ceremonies is very interesting. It evoked the same sort of emotional response that I remember taking communion, or getting the ash on the forehead from ash Wednesday in my youth. A kind of "this is something special" feeling that rituals are suppose to cause in people.

I know these feelings aren't supernatural because I've experienced them before doing drugs, and the first time I was zapped with a violet ray (/hat-tip 3ric).

I want so desperately to yoke the good/healthy psychological benefits of such ritualizations, while making a clear distinction: this is not super-natural. This is real.

I'm thinking violet rays might be my angle.

Now I have colored hair, and a red/grey smear on my forehead. I could be wrong, but I think the hotel staff is treating me with slightly more respect and deference (which I didn't think was possible until it happened).

Current time 11:44
Next tour event: 12:00
Later tonight, I'm getting some kind of crazy pressure point massage. Totally stoked.

An Atheist in India

Today we woke up at 3am to fly to Varanasi, one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the planet at over 6000 years old. The city is quite a bit different than Mumbai.

We got to visit the silk manufacturing center and watch jacquard loom's in use. I got video I need to upload.

We went out on a boat on the Ganges river to watch a Hindu ceremony. During the boat ride, we were each given a leaf-flower-candle-float to drop into the river and make a wish upon. I wished to experience a luminous/transcendental experience while in India. As a skeptical atheist, that's a pretty tall order, but then again, it was just a "wish".

India is amazingly religious. And I'm constantly wondering how much better off the people here would be if they focused their energy more on improving the welfare of their citizens, and less energy burning incense and candles and praying to imaginary forces. If they spent more time concerning themselves with this life (*cough*, only life) instead of seeking eternal whatever.

Tonight at dinner, I kinda picked a fight with the rest of my family about religion in general.

It started talking about anointing oil... I was telling my family about an interesting article I had read in the past that indicated that the early christian church used Cannabis as an ingredient in their anointing oil.

My mother laughed contemptuously, and told me flatly "you're not going to convince me". That pissed me the fuck off. I got mean. I said blunt, rude, crass things like "I don't have to convince you... I know I'm right, and you're wrong." and "Faith is one of the dangerous concepts in human culture." They countered with "do you believe everything you..." and "I'd like to see some peer-reviewed..."

Yeah... Right...

Do you believe everything you read in the bible?
Do you believe anything you read in the bible?
Why?

Peer-review?! HAHAHAHAHA

People who believe in things without evidence (aka "Faith") like... say... Bronze-age-mythology, who then try to lecture me about my intellectual rigor... yeah. no. That shit don't fly.

About half the people at the table just wanted me to shut up, and wanted the discussion to stop because (I'm guessing) it makes them uncomfortable to question their own beliefs.

The other half of the table was suggesting the "debate" (major danger-quotes) about creationism should be taught in A.P. Zoology, and kept trying to bring up string theory.

Normally I thrive on being the beacon of capital-T Truth against the hoards of the ignorant, but when its my own family, its way more frustrating and disappointing.

I got back to my room and spent a couple hours researching and writing an email to them all. But I doubt many (if any) of them will skim it... much less read it... much less watch all the attached videos... much less pay attention.

I hope the conversation continues tomorrow... I think... kinda... sorta... or maybe I don't.

What I know for sure is that its approaching 1am and I need to be in a van at 5:30am to go watch the sunrise on a boat on the Ganges. Ergo: I need to sleep.

Whirlwind of Deli and Onto Agra

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 Market, Harry's, and the Taj Hotel

Started the day with a quick breakfast and then went to a big market. Hope to get some pictures uploaded later.

Highlight: tasting and buying a metric-shit-load of crazy spices.
Lowlight: new and interesting smells in the slaughter house (I was the only one to check it out in my family). wasn't allowed to take any photos in there... highest crow-density I've seen so far.

The market was pretty interesting. Guys in a 6'x3' box selling nothing but perfume, next to someone selling fruits and veggies, next to someone selling candy and cereal. Very crowded.

Next we went to Harry's. He sells jewelry, rugs, touristy type wood carvings and scarves. Harry kept bragging that Clinton, Kerry, Bush, Pelosi, etc etc have visited his store. Harry loves people from the school my sister works at, so we were getting hooked up (or so he kept telling us.) I spent way way way too much money on jewelry. Srsly, I got my shopping 90% done on day 2.

Dear girlfriends: you're going to love your x-mas presents.

After that we walked around and checked out some architecture and ended up having I food at a nice restaurant. (dinner for 7 cost around $40).

Then we checked out the Taj hotel next to a big arch, and I totally got scammed by a small girl child.

She started off telling me she liked my tattoos. Then she showed me her 3 tattoos (very young girl, Indian tattoo parlors must not have such strict 18-years-old-only rules). Next, she tried to tie some flowers around my wrist. I declined and she said "No Money" (the little liar). 30 seconds after I let her tie the flowers on me, she wanted 10 RU (about 20 cents). The flowers were nice, so I gave her the 10 and didn't feel so bad.

Being scammed is so much more pleasant when you're aware of it, and willing agree instead of realizing after the fact.

Made it home a little bit ago and opened some token x-mas presents.

Lovely day.

Imma gonna try to go jump on flickr and upload some photos.

Touring the Dharavi Slum

We arrived in Mumbai, got driven to my sister's house. We chilled there for about 30 minutes. Enough to take quick showers and get ready to head out.

We went out to the Dharavi slum with Reality Tours and Travel. It was pretty impressive.

Dharavi is a million people living in 2/3rd of a square mile. I smelled things I've never smelled before, and hope to never smell again. There were humans, dogs, goats, chickens, and cats.

The kids loved my hair. They would follow us around and offer to shake our hands. Some of the kids wanted to touch my hair. One asked for a single hair. The kids would often shake our hand and ask us our name. Some would just wave, and smile, and say "Hi" in a very friendly manner. (Never hello, always "hi".)

We saw plastic recycling, leather processing (everything but the tanning which is illegal), oil-paint-can and olive-oil-can recycling, ceramic pot making, and garment making.

To recycle plastic, they sort it, then grind it into scraps with a big machine. After seeing that, we walked around the next street where they manufacture the big grinding machines.

Most of this was occurring in filthy rooms with sketchy electricity, the occasional ceiling fan, but no AC... hell, they only had running water 3 hours per day (in those 3 hours they fill big blue buckets for the day).

The residential section was very interesting. Our guide listed off some various statistics. 40 some percent of people live in a home that is 10'x10'. Another 40 some percent of people live in a home that is 20x20. Only 9% of people live in places larger than that.

Everyone was exceptionally friendly and welcoming. We were warned outsiders get stared at, but my hair kinda pushed that over the top. Its one of those things I only kinda notice... but anyone walking behind me was constantly watching people stare, discuss, and point at me. My attention buffer is full to the brim. I likes it that way.

Hokay, its late, I'm hella jet-lagged. (10:30pm here... 9am back in Seattle). I need to get some sleep. Will try to write more tomorrow.

Shrieking Children

Three planes in three days. Seattle --> Boston --> London --> Mumbai. On each, sitting right behind me, was a shrieking child. Headphones FTW.

But I did get a chance to watch Transformers 2, G.I. Joe, and Harry Potter Half Blood Prince.

Right at a semi-climax point of G.I. Joe (when dude is trying to shoot down the missile heading for Washington), the whole plane's entertainment service crashed. The screens in the back of every chair went suddenly blank. A few minutes later the system rebooted. I got video of the RedHat boot sequence. If anyone is curious, I'll put it on youtube.

Boston

Red eye to Boston was quick. Fat guy sitting next to me encroaching on my space. Screaming child behind me. Child's mother didn't win points for being caring and attentive. Spotty sleep & cramped quarters... ahhh travel. It might sound like I'm complaining, but I'm not. These are good omens.

Flight to London tonight leaves in like 8-ish hours.

Off to India

Just about ready to depart from India.

Hope to tweet, and be uploading videos and pictures while on the trip.

http://www.youtube.com/yoyoj3d1
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37135205@N07/
http://twitter.com/yoyojedi