Marco-YOLO

Home to UVA, Charlottesville is a large-ish college town surrounded by a multitude of smaller towns with their own personalities and good bed and breakfast options. Nearby Staunton boasts the world’s only recreation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre, the Blackfriars Playhouse. Colleen and I have come here three times now, watching Titus Andronicus, Othello and Hamlet in that order. Staunton also hosts outdoor concerts, one of which we caught on our last visit, and features good dining options with an emphasis on organic and locally sourced foods.

Two other excursions we took near Charlottesville was watching a movie in a drive-in theatre, a first for me, and driving through Virginia Safari Park where we hand fed free-ranging camels, ostrich, llama, goats and deer as we drove through the 3-mile long safari park. The park also had a zoo-type section where the coolest animals were Bengal tigers, cheetahs, giraffe and several types of monkeys. Both experiences were thoroughly enjoyable, although an ostrich made a mess inside our car when it stuck its head through the window and tried to wrestle the animal food away from me with its beak. Ostrich necks aren’t very strong but what they lack in torque, they make up for in speed. Those beaks strike fast! You’ve been warned!

The drive-in theatre experience made a convert out of me. Car seats are far more comfortable than theatre seats. I doubt I’ll ever see a cinema with reclining, heated, ventilated seats with adjustable lumbar. The audio also exceeded my expectations. The theatre tells you what radio frequency to tune in to and you get audio through your car stereo, 13 speakers for two people in our case, which sounded quite nice. If you get a chance to see a movie at a drive-in theatre, jump at it. We saw “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and ducked out before “Captain America” started because it was getting late and also because it hadn’t received good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

We drove down from DC and spent a week between these three scenic cities. I have to say each of these three cities was pretty cool in its own right. Savannah was the most impressive with all its history and character. Charleston had much of the same but was larger and more modern. Hilton Head wound up offering some fun fishing (we caught 6 sharks), reasonably-priced golf on great courses, and good shopping.

We toured a number of historic houses, took long walks on the beach on Hilton Head, visited America’s oldest standing plantation house, toured the Navy aircraft carrier in Charleston and thoroughly enjoyed the delicious Southern cuisine throughout the trip.

Given that we drove down from Washington (~7 hour trip each way), it wound up being a very reasonably-priced vacation.

We went to the big island of Hawaii for a little over a week in December, 2008. The weather was fantastic. I got to snorkel up close with a large Manta Ray, touch a green sea turtle, relax on some unbelievably beautiful and deep beaches (Hapuna Beach and Mauna Kea), charter a boat to hit all the top snorkeling spots around the Island, play some golf, go to a luau and check out some volcanoes. All in all, a nice trip. I got in some nice photography too.

Now for the bad – Hawaii is f**king expensive! Sure, it’s beautiful and everything but seriously, its a long-ass and expensive flight followed by being stuck on islands where everything is super-expensive.

If you ask me, hit up Cancun instead (as we did in Nov, 2009). The service is better, its half the price, and half the flight.

Highlights:

Pompeii – The city is so well preserved, you can actually see and feel how the people there lived 2,000 years ago.

Venice – Gondola rides really are very romantic if cliche and touristy.

Monte Carlo Masters – We got to see the World #1, #2 and #4 play on clay.

Granada – The town parties late, the Al Hambra is magnificent and the General Life gardens (pronounced “Henerale Leefay”) are serene and beautiful.

Learnings:

Europe is F-ing expensive

There are more churches in old European cities than there are shopping malls in Dubai

Lock your checked in luggage

Sometimes you have to pay for using a toilet, even in Europe

Everyone in Europe drives a manual transmission

Almost everyone drives a hatchback

Almost everyone speaks some English and is eager to use it, even in Paris (this is new)

Italian and Spanish are remarkably similar languages

The French discovered a lot of things

When travel blogging, it is best to write an entry every day, otherwise you forget things

Tour groups are not for us, although maybe we’ll like them more when we get older

Paris is not a clean city

The Piano was born in Florence

Dante’s Divine Comedy was the first book to be written in Italian

The Catholic church has a long history of corruption and hypocricy

Venice stole the body of a “Saint” to compete with the influence of Rome

Venice used to be a vast empire and its downfall was the discovery of a new trade route when Christopher Columbus landed in America

Prostitution is out in the open in Europe

(I will add to this list as I remember more things)

I am back in my apartment in Arlington. Immigration in Charlotte pulled me aside for “special” questioning and searching for the 3rd time in the 3 trips I’ve taken this past year. The 1.5 hour delay almost made us miss our connection from Charlotte to DC. Even at the Guatemala City airport, where I was supposedly among fellow brown men, I was searched 3 times, twice more than regular passengers. All this does make me a little depressed.

Originally, I had wanted to do a 3 month trip and include Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and maybe Antarctica. Based on what I read in guidebooks and saw on travel shows, this seemed a simple and easy trip to make. However, Chile and Argentina wanted 1 month EACH to process my visa and Belize wanted $350 for a visa. As a result I couldn’t visit Chile or Argentina and did my diving in Honduras (with a little trouble at the border) instead of Belize. If I held almost any other passport, the fees and processing times would have been much more reasonable and if I held a US/Can/UK/Aus/EU origin or even an Israeli passport, I wouldn’t even need a visa for any of these countries.

But the trip I ended up making was fun, relaxing, exciting, rewarding and educational. Having to spend more time doing things and less time travelling may have even benefitted me. I will save South America for a future trip (possibly after obtaining a US passport). I learned a good amount of Spanish, got my open water diver certification, put up the walls for a new school in rural Guatemala with others, climbed 2 volcanoes, read a few good books and got to spend some quality down time with Colleen. No complaints here.

I was playing pool with the young men of San Andres. All of I sudden, I saw the barrels of 2 AK-47′s come in from the door to the bar, which was closest to our table. A third followed and I was relieved to see they were in the hands of policemen. Then they indicated that they wanted everyone against the wall. Being as brown as I am at this point, they didn’t consider that I might be a volunteer or tourist so I made my way with the rest of the guys to the wall. The others kept looking back at me and smiling because they knew I was an international volunteer. Anyway, the cops were very courteous and just did a quick pat down. It was obvious they were only interested in guns, of which there are a lot in Guatemala. Even if I had a knife, which I carry occasionally, they wouldn’t have found it and even if they did, I think they would have let it slip.

The next day I went to Flores and from there to Tikal. I watched the sunset from Temple II, looking towards Temple IV and it was very beautiful. That night I camped at Tikal on the grounds of the Jaguar Inn. There were huge spiders outside the tent the size of tarantulas but much faster so I made my entrances and exits of the tent very quickly. Luckily nothing got in and the mosquitoes weren’t that bad either. The howler monkeys however, were something else. These medium sized monkeys make a tremendous sound and until a guide told me the next morning what they were, I thought I was hearing a Jaguar outside my tent. The next morning, I got up at 4:30 and my group left for Temple IV to watch the sunrise just before 5:00. I found it to be the most contrived tourist trap I have ever seen. There were probably over a hundred tourists there and the sunrise really wasn’t that spectacular. However, there was a lot of fog that morning so perhaps it would have been better had there not been any. The wildlife coming to life was nice but again nothing that amazing. I explored the ruins for another 4-5 hours and have to say as a whole they were unimpressive.

The guides could have been better also. They didn’t seem to know much about the Mayans beyond their standard repertoire. Part of the reason for this is that to this day there is much about the Mayans that we don’t know despite their not being that ancient a civilization. By building with limestone in a high humidity climate, the Mayans didn’t do themselves any favors. Their ruins, sculptures and especially records (In the form of Hieroglyphs) are badly eroded and barely legible. Ruins in Egypt and Pakistan that are 3,000 years older are in better shape and indicate a more advanced civilization than whats at Tikal. Currently, there is construction of new “ruins” taking place in Tikal, the idea being to portray what the past may have looked like. However, the recreations are not clearly marked (same as in Copan), which I feel is misleading to tourists who think they are looking at original artifacts. Many tourist I spoke to felt the same way about Tikal. After seeing 2 of the most famous Mayan ruins, I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to visit any Mayan ruins for historical/archaeological reasons unless you have a fascination with the Mayans specifically. The one saving point of Tikal however was that the jungle and whatever wildlife we did see were fun walking through.

A caravan of 5 dusty cars pulled by a old truck has pulled in to town and is all the excitement. The Red Top Circus is in town and I´m sure its old school all the way, really fat or majorly mustached women and all that fare I´d guess.

There was a big accident in town a few days back. A large truck ran backwards into a house when it lost traction on a steep gravel road. It took the whole house out. They had to put up supports for the roof before taking the truck out of the house because the truck and one wall were the only things holding up the roof. The streets around here are very steep. Much more than San Francisco. Luckily no one was hurt.

I´m trying to decide between leaving for Tikal tomorrow or the day after. They have zip lines running through the jungle which I think would be fun to do and I also really want to see a sunrise or sunset from Temple IV. Thats the update for now. Either way, will be in Antigua come Wednesday.