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It’s been a busy few weeks getting settled in Portland, but the settling is going well. I’m actually starting my second week as a programmer at Rentrak, and that’s a big part of why I haven’t written anything earlier: full time jobs take a lot of time. It’s fun to be working again though and this seems like a really good company. I had never heard of them, but they do test first development and pair programming (like a buddy system so you’re not writing code alone). By programming with someone else next to me, I’m learning a lot more quickly than I would on my own, so that’s really cool.

Badass new bicycle

Kim and I each bought bicycles this last weekend, so today was my first day biking to and from work. It’s about 8.5 miles by bicycle, so about the same as my commute in Seattle with much smaller hills. I splurged and spent the most I ever have on my bike since I’ll be using it for commuting as regularly as possible. It’s a pretty flashy looking racing bike, and it really feels way faster than anything I’ve been on, but I do worry a little that someone might try to steal it. Another nice thing is that if I don’t feel like biking, or only biking part way, I can take the MAX train almost directly to work.

On the home front we’ve got a studio apartment in Portland’s Southeast Belmont area. The apartment’s a little smaller than we ideally wanted, but it’s ultra cool and the location is too. We’re walking distance to a ton of stuff, and biking distance to even more! We have a huge covered porch that if anyone visits will essentially be their guest room, at least once we find a futon to put out there. We’ve been going to a bunch of yoga classes since we got to Portland too since there’s yoga everywhere you look. The food coop we joined even has free classes. There’s a climbing gym about 10 blocks away that we may decide to join when the weather gets nasty, and it offers free yoga classes too if you’re a member.

Overall we’re having a great time, and it’s really nice to finally have a place our own again. We may look into buying a house in the near future, but we’ll see how we feel getting used to all the newness.

We’ve made it to Portland and so far so good. We’re staying with Travis, a friend from college, while we do job interviews and look for a place. Our first day here and we each had interviews and spent some time getting to know the prospective neighborhoods we might live in. The interviews seemed to go well for each of us today, and there’s more to come. Tomorrow we’ll be looking at some rental options and meeting with some other old friends who live here. Overall it looks like this is going to be a good place for to settle down for a bit, and we’re looking forward to being stationary after all that traveling.

The third day was hard for me! It was hard mostly mentally, but a little physically as well. Perhaps it was knowing that the next day I’d be eating (even if only a tiny, tiny bit), but I felt physically hungry late at night. It’s interesting getting to know the difference between feeling physically hungry and just psychologically hungry. The last three day fast we did the third day was the easiest for me, since by that point I had gotten mostly past the cravings. Interestingly, I lost no weight today. I weighed the same as the previous night all the way through the day. I can’t wait to eat tomorrow!

In preparation for our current fast, Kim and I have been eating only raw food for the last 5 days. We were only planning on doing 4 days, but we made more food that we thought and had a lot of leftovers. Most people to prepare for a fast will go vegetarian or vegan for a few days, but since we’re already eating vegetarian we thought we’d try something new. Eating raw means that the food isn’t cooked above 105 degrees. The idea is that raw food has more nutrients and energy.

It turned out to be fairly difficult to stick to a raw diet, mostly because the food was incredibly fatty and left you craving carbs. Mosty of the food was made from a lot of nuts which are very high in fat. Examples of meals were partly what you’d imagine in cold soups (nut based), salads and dressings, but the entrees were pretty interesting. Kim made a taco with nut based meat and a cabbage leaf for the shell. After a few days of eating like this I started having a piece of bread with the meal and that helped a ton. Everything was very tasty, but it’s like trying to eat 6 avacados, it’s delicious at first but the fat just starts to get old.

Anyway, now that we’ve done 5 days of eating raw (mostly at least), we’re onto what will probably be 3 days of juice fasting. I’ll post more on how that goes this time. We might do more than three days, but three is usually our max because we tend to lose a bunch of weight in those three days (weight loss not being the overall goal, it’s just that losing too much at once isn’t healthy).

Kim and I have been enjoying some downtime to do whatever we want these last few weeks. I’ve picked up a ton of books and video games among other things. One thing that I’ve finally done is create a “best of” set of photos on flickr for our South America trip, so instead of looking through the overwhelming thousands of photos taken over seven months I’ve narrowed it down to under 200. I’m also working on a slideshow presentation with music and narration that should be ready soon.

I’ve begun a job search and been very surprised at how many recruiters started contacting me as soon as I posted my resume on dice.com – a ton. So many in fact it’s gotten annoying. Recruiters really don’t seem to in general know squat about technical jobs and have been forwarding me so many job descriptions for things I’m not even remotely interested or qualified for and in places I have expressed no interest in. It was nothing like this when I was looking for a job in 2004 out of college and the tech market was seemingly dead. Since Kim and I won’t actually be in Portland until mid June I haven’t followed up any job to seriously.

Kim and I will be doing a fast during the next few days, something we try to do twice a year. We’re currently eating raw food for four days before the fast. The idea behind these dietary changes is to clean out toxins that have accumulated. Kim also has been wanting to learn more about raw food lately. I’ll be posting more about this as it goes on, but I’m sure Kim will have even more detailed information on her blog if you’re interested in learning more.

Leaving Leymebamba and heading into the jungle we thankfully didn’t have to spend much time in Chachapoyas. It was Sunday so the highway wasn’t closed between Chachapoyas and Pedro Ruiz, but we did have to take a LOT of different shared cars and do a little stint in Chacha. Our journey went Leymembamba to Yerbabuena to Chachapoyas to Pedro Ruiz to Nueva Cajamarca to Moyobamba.

We spent a few days in Moyobamba enjoying being back in a city where you can buy more types of food than potatoes and rice. We found some pretty good vegetarian Lasagna at La Olla de Barro. We also saw the miradores, which are lookout points to see the muddy river that winds into the rain forest. We also saw a really cool orquidium that had something like 400 species including four that the owner had named himself. Nearby we went to the hot springs, which were pretty nice since they were pools outside, but the water wasn’t that hot and you’re sharing the pools with all the local families blasting cumbia music.

The highlight of sites around Moyobamba was the waterfalls in Lahuarpia. About a half hour out of Moyobamba there’s a little trail out of the village that’s actually well maintained, with garbage cans and a bathroom, that leads to three waterfalls that you can swim in. There’s even signage about the local animals and plants. Apparently not many travelers make it here, which for now makes it even nicer as we had the whole place to ourselves. We could have spent more time there, but we got there in the afternoon and didn’t leave until dark.

From there we wanted to head directly to Tarapoto, but after dark it’s hard to pick up transport, so we went back to Moyobamba and then to Tarapoto. We’ve been in Tarapoto a few days now and been pretty lazy, which has been nice. One weird thing about these hostals in the jungle is even the cheapest ones have cable TV’s. Most don’t have hot water, but TV’s are essential. We’ve been watching sitcoms in English more than we should because of this. Every night we eat pizza from a place called Cafe d’Mundo that’s AMAZING. It’s not the best in the world, but after some of the food people here try to pass for Italian food, it seems like it. The coolest thing we’ve done here was rent a moto scooter for a few hours and ride around the city. It’s a rush getting around in traffic here. There really are almost no rules, but everyone seems to be paying attention pretty well, so once you get used to it there’s a flow to it.

Unfortunately now I’m a bit sick with the flu. We’re in a nice hostel watching movies to pass the time and I just found out there’s wireless internet. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow and from there either do some more touristy stuff in the area or head to the coast for some fun and sun. Something interesting about all the cheap hostels here is they have cable TV, even if they don’t have hot water. I just thought of that because tonight we splurged, and got one with hot water.

Before leaving Leymebamba we went on a three day trip to the Laguna de los Condores. It was really an adventure. We went with Stephanie and Elena, so both our guides were women, something the men in town seemed concerned about. It was about 11 hours on horseback and hiking to get there. This included lots of treacherous rock slopes, swamps where the horses sank up to their bellies, drenching rain for hours and a 12,000 ft mountain pass. Kim got a little altitude sickness at the pass, and we arrived at the cabin drenched and tired. One of the nice things about arriving in all the rain is the surprising quantity of waterfalls all around the valley. I didn’t take any pictures of them though because it was raining too hard!

The cabin is pretty basic with no running water or electricity. The cooking is done over a wood fire as well as the drying of clothes. The land around the cabin is used for cattle. You can’t see the lagoon from the cabin, but it’s not far to where you can see it. It gets really cold at night so we slept with our small sleeping bags and a couple of blankets each.

The next day we woke up early and waited for the rain to subside a bit as it was pouring. Fortunately as we set off for the hike to the mausoleum’s on the cliffs above the lagoon, the sun actually poked out for a bit. The hike to the mausoleum’s actually makes you feel like you’re in the jungle, which I guess technically you are. To get to the cliffs there was a lot of ladders to climb and we walked through a few small waterfalls. There’s a few skulls left over in the houses built into the cliffs, but most of the remains have been moved to the museum in Leymebamba. I don’t know how anyone ever found these cliff tombs or why the Chachapoyas built them where they did.

Going back was a quicker trip (maybe 9 hours?) since it didn’t rain as much and Kim breezed over the pass thanks to chewing coca leaves, drinking some booze and eating chocolate. There were some exciting parts where the horses sank into the mud really deep, but they got out after a lot of shouting at them. We arrived back at our lodging in town dirty and tired, so thank goodness there was running water for a shower when we got back.

We met the new volunteer the next day and gave her the info she needed to continue the classes. We said all our goodbyes and left the next morning.

The month in Leymebamba has been a tranquil one. There’s been a lot of free time and the last few days Kim and I have begun to discuss what we’ll do when we return to the US. I think this is the first time in my life that my options have seemed so open ended to me. I’ve definitely decided that I don’t want to go back to a traditional office job. So I’m just going to muse on the future options that we’re considering.

One of the most serious options is starting my own company. I want to create software, and I already have an idea that I’ve been working on a bit. Much of the influence for this idea came from reading the essays of Paul Graham. I believe that the idea of a typical job will change a great deal in the near future as the tools to create things of value to others become so much better, but so much more complex. Those who can use these tools and provide something of value will be compensated according to the value instead of just how many hours they work. It’s already this way for those who are willing to take the risk, but the risk is becoming much less as access to these tools become so much less expensive. Anyway, once of the barriers to this idea is much research indicates that having a partner greatly increases the chances of success, and I’m not sure I’ll find a partner. I have a few friends that I’ve approached with the idea, but I’m dubious that when the time comes they’ll be willing to make any commitment to the idea.

Therefore another idea is to return to school for an advanced degree. Since leaving school the more study I’ve done into computer science the more I’ve wanted to know. I’ve missed the environment of school. What’s more, I might meet fellow grad students that would be interested in some starting some sort of company. One major problem with this idea is that we don’t know where we’re going to live. We don’t know if we’ll find a place to live first and then decide what to do or vice versa, and if there’s no good schools for computer science, why bother going back. I haven’t looked into online universities though.

Another new idea is to continue this vagabond life without home and hike the Appalachian Trail. We’re already without a job or home to worry about, and getting to that point in decent financial shape is quite a bit of work. So while we have that would be a great time to take advantage and take some months to do something like this, that I’ve always wanted to do. A problem with this is that we’re already feeling a little homesick and missing creature comforts. And it could be a little expensive.

Of course, we could decide to keep on traveling through Latin America. It really is cheap compared to living back home, and our house is probably appreciating faster than we’re spending money here, so even though we’re not earning any money, in theory our net worth is going up. Right now we’re both leaning toward coming back in mid April, but we could change our minds once we head to other countries. Right now the general plan is to head south to Arequipa, then through Bolivia, and then to Argentina. We had considered going to the jungle, but since it’s the rainy season in the highlands in the jungle until around May, we’re thinking going south to get a nice summer in the southern hemisphere might be more pleasant. We still want to go to the jungle at some point, but we might do it in Bolivia or when we come back north from Argentina and Chile.

Having all these options to consider is both exciting/fun and a little scary. Before there’s always been the next year of school to look forward to or a job after graduating. School and job are still options, but not in the same certain way they were before. Kim and I both definitely miss having a routine and schedule to our lives, but I don’t think either of us want to fall into a stale routine. I think the excitement and fun of exploring something new usually outweighs the fear of risk.

Leymebamba Viewed From the Museum Trail

Two weeks have passed fairly quickly in this quiet little mountain town. We’ve been plenty busy teaching English. When we arrived there were only about 10 hours of class a week for each of us, mostly for adults that have major attendence problems, to the point that some nights only one of us teaches the few students who attend. That’s far too much free time in a town this small. We already had too much downtime at the farm in Ecuador, so here we wanted to be busy and involved, so we started teaching at the local schools.

Every week day we’re teaching an hour at the grade school and a half hour at the preschool. We’ve rediscovered a few of our childhood songs for teaching purposes like “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”. Classic and perfect for little kids who would much rather move than memorize. We’ve got songs for days of the week and colors too. We also started another afternoon class for kids who want to come.

Pronunciation really is difficult for Spanish speakers since there’s so many sounds they just don’t have in their language. I’ve spent HOURS trying to teach people to make a “th” sound. I’m teaching to all beginners, every class, so I’ve been going over basics like numbers, days of the week, greetings, etc a LOT. Kim has the only advanced class and she’s liking it, so that’s cool.

The weather has been mostly sunny and the scenery around here is gorgeous. We’re in a valley with a pretty river and green mountains all around. I think the rain is even pretty and I’ve actually enjoyed the rainy days when they come since it rains hard and washes everything. We’re techinically in “winter” now, but they only have two seasons here, and they’re really just the rainy season, which they call winter, and the not rainy season, aka summer. It hasn’t been too rainy for us though so far.

We’ve gone to the museum which has a bunch of mummies that they discovered on the land of the family we’re staying with. There’s dozens and dozens of ruins and discoveries of past civilizations in the area. They’ve only really just begun to develop this area for tourism. The problem with most of the sites for tourism is that they’re hard to get to. The Laguna de Condores, where they discovered the museum mummies, is a three day trip from Leymebamba, and getting to Leymebamba is no day trip either. It’s 3 or more hours down a bumpy dirt road from the nearest “city”, Chachapoyas, which is only accessible right now by a highway that’s under construction so that it’s passable only at night. They’re improving the roads though, even if slowly, and I think that will make all the difference in developing the region.

We also went to Kuelap which is an ancient Chachapoyan (people of the clouds) fortress that supposedly rivals Machu Pichu for grandeur. We definitely liked it. We hiked to it instead of taking a car since we didn’t know the schedule and might have had to wait for hours for a car to get there. The hike was a little over four hours of all uphill. We climbed a little under 4000 feet in that time. I think the downhill was harder though since we were already tired and downhill is so much harder on joints.

I’ve been reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books and playing some old Nintendo games in my down time. I was definitely going through video game withdrawal for awhile. I realllllllly missed playing video games, but the laptop I have with me really isn’t fast enough for many games and downloading anything from here would take forever with the slow connection. Then I remembered you can download Nintendo emulators and the game files are tiny, so I’m playing some of my old Super Nintendo favorites. That’s actually a big help when I start feeling homesick.

Aside from school Kim’s been cooking a lot. The family we’re living with includes a couple close to our age, Omer and Estefani, and Estefani wants to learn to cook some of our favorite foods since they’re opening a tourist restaurant in a few months. There’s kitchen so it’s great that we have space to cook our own stuff since we’re in general NOT big fans of Peruvian food. I’ll rant about that later.

Julio and Wilma are Omer’s parents and the owners of the hostal, and there’s a child, Omer Jr, who is going through a bratty phase right now. It’s nice living with a family and still having plenty of our own space and downtime. Although I’m a little jealous of the previous volunteers who were in a different hostal that was quite a bit more modern with a washer, private bathrooms, and windows in the rooms. We have a shared bathroom here with one of those damnable electric water heaters that scare me to death and only warm a little water at a time. Our room has a balcony which is cool, but there’s no windows, just the wooden doors to the balcony, which we don’t really want to leave open at night, so in the morning when we wake up it’s pitch dark no matter what time we wake up.

I’ve really begun to realize how great a lot of the appliances and utilities we have back home are. We washed our clothes by hand today and that just sucks. It’s so much less efficient than a washer. I don’t mind hand drying clothes as it’s fairly easy, not messy and uses less energy, but washing by hand is not efficient at all for the water usage. I also really miss reliable water. A lot. I can’t wait to get home and turn the tap and have hot water, drinkable water, and have it all the time! We haven’t had running water all day. When we do have water we have to let the dirt in it settle, then pour it in a pot and boil it. The water comes from the local river and the sewage gets pumped right back into that same river. The power goes out frequently. In fact it was just out for five minutes as I write this. They have internet and phone in the village via satellite so phone calls are expensive and internet is slow. Amazingly Skype works, so we can use that to call home cheap, even it is a little laggy. They have 3 telephones in the town, so if you want to call someone here from another city, you call, someone answers, you tell them who you want to talk to and hang up. Then you call back in 10 or so minutes and hope the person could be found and came to the phone.

So far it’s a great experience and the people are famously friendly. There’s much less noise and traffic than where we were before, which is amazingly nice. The students when they do show up are eager and grateful. I want to emphasize that I like it here, because I’ve been writing a lot about things that I miss and am about to talk about some cultural differnces. It’s just that differences and stuff that I miss is more interesting to read about than me going on about how pretty the countryside is. Besides, living without the conveniences and at a slower pace of life helps you appreciate what you have in the US when you return.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before about South America in general, the pace of life is much slower. People say they’ll do something at 1, which really means that they might show up at 1:30, maybe 2. Sometimes not at all. We’ve met a ton of people who say they’d like to go to English classes and that they WILL be there. They never show up. Many of our students who do show up for the 8 o’clock class show up at 8:30.

There’s no one grocery store here. There’s about a dozen very small shops though that all have close to the same stuff. However, if you want something other than rice, potatoes and onions you might have to go to 3 or 4 stores before you find what you want. We’re amazed at how few vegetables people eat here, excluding potatoes of course. I think they eat more rice than in China too. It sounds to me like people have lost a lot of the healthy eating habits that their ancestors had living off the land. Most meals consist of rice, potatoes, some meat and a lot of salt. Fortunately there’s one restaurant in town where the owner is one of our students, and the couple before us were vegetarian also, so the owner knows how to cook for us.

Phew, if you read that much congratulations. I’m sure the next two weeks will pass just as quickly if not more so. The children we teach are going on their “summer” vacation until march though, so we may soon have few classes. But with Christmas and New Years come up I’m sure there will be festivities to keep everyone busy. After Leymebamba we may head to the jungle, we may head to Argentina. Who knows. I’m leaning toward Argentina right now though as I hear it’s more modern and still really cheap. Plans always change though.

Kim Horsing Around

Kim found a farm project called the Neverland Farm on the Wwoof website that sounded interesting with agro-something-intersting and sustainable-blah-blah so we thought that we’d check it out. It didn’t turn out to be quite what we expected. It was an interesting experience, but unfortunately we didn’t think it was nearly as amazing as other reviews from volunteers.

To start, the lady who runs the farm, an American woman named Tina, wasn’t there while we were. She had to go back to the US to deal with family problems. There also weren’t any other volunteers. Therefore the remaining people on the farm were all Ecuadorian and weren’t as organized as we had hoped. Angel, aka Killo, seemed to be in charge of the running of the farm, even though he was there only a little over half the time. His brother Pio had only been there about a week so really didn’t know much. They were the only two people besides us who ever spent the night there. During the day Andres came from the nearby village of Tumianuma to work. Nobody talked much without prodding and everybody left a lot. They were all nice enough, but we were hoping for a more social atmosphere.

Us Near a Waterfall We Hiked To

We went to the farm with the intention of learning a little about gardening, sustainable living, or novel construction, but we found ourselves a bit bored. Whenever we asked what we could do to help we were told we could do whatever we like. However, we didn’t even know where the main garden was until our third day on the farm, let alone what kinds of projects would actually be helpful. We ended up cooking a lot, mostly for ourselves, weeding, and I went out hacking stuck with a machete which is fun (I feel kinda like Indiana Jones), but dangerous – I cut my shin when I lost my grip on spring tree branch. One of the first days we carried rocks to help make a wall for a new house, but we never went back to that project. We were hoping the pregnant horse would have her baby while we were there, but no such luck. I rode the other horse a little bit for trips back and forth to the nearest little pueblo, Tumianuma.

Mostly we read a lot. I read a few books from the Dahli Lama which were quite interesting. Buddhism really interests me – until you get into some of the weirder details. We also hiked a bit up the valley to a little waterfall. There was a guitar I got out to play a few nights. Other than that it was pretty slow.

The bridge on the way to the farm

Sleeping was a little difficult since our bed was dreafully uncomfortable. It was a very thin mattress on top of a bamboo frame. Two nights Angel was gone we slept in his bed and it was insanely more comfortable, but didn’t have a mosquito net on it. The bugs weren’t too bad while we were sleeping though. Just while we ate. Ugh. Don’t wanna remember that.

At the end of the week Killo asked us to pay $25 per person for food, which pissed us off a bit since we were told before we arrived there was no cost except bringing in some food, which we did (about $20 worth), since we were working 4 our more hours a day. There’s a sign on the kitchen that says $15 a week is suggested, so we paid that as it seems somewhat fair, but we’re still just angry about the lack of communication about it all. Overall we were quite happy to be leaving, but it was definitely an intersting experience for a week. Not that I’d choose to do it again – at least not without Tina there.