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Not My Idea of Travel

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Cruise Ship Traveler “Discovers” Chichén Itzá

I may be revealing myself to be a grouch, but I dislike American travelers who spend the money to visit another country and don’t take the trouble to understand anything of the culture, history, or language of the countries they visit. These are the travelers who, when they ask me questions, get answered in Hungarian.

Perhaps I take my travel too seriously. For instance, when I visited Guatemala in 2019, I read nineteen books on the subject starting in February 2018. Although I frequently hired English-speaking guides at the ruins, I was at the knowledge level of a graduate student in archaeology, with a minor in history and geography.

I keep thinking of a pediatrician friend of mind who went to Europe for the first time with her fiancé and spent only a day or two in each country, just walking around and not even making an attempt to concentrate on the most interesting sights. She wound up marrying the guy and divorcing him shortly thereafter. She felt cheated, having spent so much money and seeing nothing.

It’s like visiting the Grand Canyon and spending all your time walking around the shops and restaurants in Grand Canyon Village.

Looking at the picture above, which was taken from a current American Automobile Association (AAA) travel catalog, I wonder if the young lady standing by the Maya pyramid considered the possibility of sunstroke. Of all the thousands of people who visit Chichén Itzá every day, she was probably the only person not wearing a hat.

Looking more closely at the AAA catalog, I noticed that the ruins are an optional side trip from Cozumel, which is 2-3 hours from Chichén by ferry and bus. The grounds are extensive, as the ruins occupy several square miles. If I had to spend 4-6 hours in transport alone, I would not have much time at the ruins before having to return to my cruise ship. (I spent three days and two nights at a hotel near the ruins on my last trip there.)

Sexy Woman

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The Inca Ruins at Sacsayhuaman, Near Cuzco

To a generation of Gringo tourists visiting Peru, the impressive ruins at Sacsayhuaman near Cuzco were as often as not pronounced “Sexy Woman.” This will probably persist as long as Americans refuse to learn the intricacies of the Quechua language. When I visited Peru in 2014, I never made it to Sacsayhuaman. I wish I had. I have just finished reading George Woodcock’s Incas and Other Men: Travels in the Andes about a six week trip he took in the Summer of 1956. In it, he had some interesting things to say on page 199 about Sacsayhuaman:

But in fact nothing less than the elaborate centralized organization of the Inca realm at its peak of power could have embarked on such a project [as Sacsayhuaman], and modern scholars are now agreed that the fortress represents the master work of the great public engineers of the fifteenth century. Victor von Hagen, who examined the evidence critically, suggests in his Realm of the Incas that it was started around 1440, not long after Pachacuti began his campaigns of conquest, and that construction took seventy years and employed about 30,000 men, recruited by the mita system of forced labour. The stones seem to have been dragged to the site by teams of men using wooden rollers (presumably brought from the montaña since few trees grew around Cuzco until the eucalyptus was introduced a few decades ago), and to have been placed into position by a complex system of levers and earth ramps. The final shaping and fitting, other archaeologists have suggested, may have been done, after a rough cutting to size, by rubbing the stones against each other, with sand and water between their edges. Again it is largely conjecture, but whatever the methods used to assemble these gigantic walls, their patterns of vast polygonal surfaces have an extraordinary beauty which, combined with the massiveness of the fortress as a whole, make Sacsayhuaman by far the most dramatic building in Peru.

The White Veil

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Lima Peru Looking Toward Desamparados Railway Station

As I read George Woodcock’s 1959 book about his travels in Peru (Incas and Other Men), I am reminded about what Herman Melville wrote in Moby Dick about the City of Kings:

Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of and skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;—it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can’st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.

Even knowing in advance Lima’s reputation as the Gray City, I wound up loving the place. It is a city of saints (count them: four!), churches, culinary delights, and a park full of friendly stray cats (Parque Kennedy in Miraflores). I wound up spending a week there on my 2014 trip to Peru.

If you are interested, you can read my blogs beginning on September 8, 2014 by clicking On to Peru and following subsequent posts.

Tierra de Volcanes

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Antigua Is Surrounded on All Sides by Volcanoes

Antigua, Guatemala was the fourth capital of Guatemala, the other three being destroyed by earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions. Then, in the eighteenth century, it was Antigua’s turn to succumb. Today, the capital is Guatemala City.

Although it is full of picturesque ruins, Antigua is a more popular destination than the capital. (Also, it is a lot safer.) In fact, there are several shuttle services that will whisk you to Antigua from the Guatemala City airport.

One of the Ruined Churches of Antigua

Antigua was once a city of many churches. Today, most of them are in ruins. Surprisingly, they have become tourist attractions. An attempt was made to clear some of the most dangerous debris. What was left was frequently picturesque and even photogenic.

I was in Antigua for almost a week in 2019. That gave me time to visit most of the ruined churches and take pictures.

One of the Most Damaged Churches in Antigua

I frequently wondered why the churches built by the Spanish were so damaged. My guess is that Spain has not seen that many serious earthquakes; and I suspect there are no active volcanoes on the Iberian Peninsula. The resident Maya, on the other hand, were used to earthquakes and volcanoes; so they built their ceremonial centers to last. The step pyramids of the Maya were built to last. In this respect, the Spanish conquerors had a lot to learn from their “primitive” Maya tenants.

My vacation in Guatemala lasted almost a month, so I was able to see most of the sights that interested me, including the Maya ruins at Tikal and Quiriguá. I even stepped across the border into Honduras to see the ruins at Copán.

The Beagle Channel

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Les Éclaireurs Lighthouse: “The Lighthouse at the End of the World”

There are three ways to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific at the southern tip of South America. You can take the Straits of Magellan; you can take the Beagle Channel (named after the ship that Charles Darwin took in 1831-36); and all the way around Cape Horn.

When I was in Ushuaia in 2006 and 2011, I took cruises on the Beagle Channel to Estancia Harberton to see the Magellanic penguins on Isla Pájaros. On the first trip, the weather changed abruptly so that we had to return to Ushuaia by bus rather than on shipboard. The second time, the weather was perfect; and Martine and I were actually able to land on the island and walk among the penguins.

Martine on Isla Pájaros with Penguins

Now Magellanic penguins are much smaller than Emperor or King Penguins, but they are penguins nonetheless. I suppose we could have dished out $10,000+ plus each to take a Russian icebreaker across the stormy Drake Passage to Antarctica to see the Emperor penguins, but we were (and still are) short of cash.

Seeing the penguins was nice, but Estancia Harberton was interesting in its own right. It was founded by the English missionary family that settled that part of Tierra del Fuego. The son, Lucas Bridges, is the author of perhaps the greatest book on the are: The Uttermost Part of the Earth.

I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in Argentina and Tierra del Fuego.

The Cafes of Buenos Aires

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Inside on Cafe Tortoni on Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires

In my library, I have an entire bookcase dedicated to works relating mostly to Mexico and South America. Today I picked up one of my favorite titles—Gabriela Kogan’s The Authentic Bars, Cafés and Restaurants of Buenos Aires—and felt waves of nostalgia breaking over me as I turned the pages.

I have been to Buenos Aires three times. The first time, even though I broke my right shoulder later in the trip, I fell in love with the country and its capital. One of the things that impressed me most was the café culture—and I don’t mean coffee, which I never drink.

There are dozens of neighborhood eating spots, many of which was been around since the late 19th century. In my visits to the city, I patronized the following traditional cafés:

  • La Puerto Rico in the Montserrat neighborhood
  • El Tortoni, also in Montserrat
  • El Preferido de Palermo in Palermo
  • El Rincon in Recoleta, right across from the famous cemetery

I cannot look at the book’s glossary without licking my lips:

  • Berenjenas en Escabeche: eggplant marinated in a sauce of vinegar, onions, carrots, and peppercorns
  • Conejito a la Cazadora: traditional preparation of rabbit, with garlic, vegetables, white wine, tomatoes and mushrooms
  • Choripán: spiced pork sausage sandwich (my favorite)
  • Fabada Asturiana: bean and bacon soup
  • Fugazetta Rellena: “folded” pizza with onion, filled with cheese
  • Matambre: meat roulade filled with vegetables and hard-boiled eggs (another favorite)
  • Pejerrey Gran Paraná: a white meat river fish from the Rio Paraná served with boiled potatoes
  • Suprema Maryland: a dish made with breaded chicken, fried banana, french fries, and corn custard

In 2011, I went to Argentina with Martine. She is an incredibly picky eater who eschews the slightest hint of spiciness. Yet she loved the food she ate at the Buenois Aires cafés.

Casa de Hopes-You-Die

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Villahermosa and the Grijalva River

It was December 1979. My brother and I had just landed in Villahermosa in the State of Tabasco. It was a humid tropical evening, and the Grijalva River was in flood. At one point, I saw the bodies of cattle that were drifting by in the rushing current. I had never before experienced such humidity.

Villahermosa—“Beautiful City”—was anything but. It was a city located in the middle of an extensive swamp.

I had planned a trip that roughly followed Graham Greene’s itinerary in Journey Without Maps, starting in Villahermosa and heading over the Sierra Madre to San Cristóbal de las Casas and thereafter to Oaxaca and back to Mexico City.

Only I hadn’t planned for Villahermosa. At a local eatery, my brother ordered shrimps that were delivered to the table partially coated in tar. We didn’t have a hotel. It didn’t take us long to discover that all the hotel rooms were block-booked by Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), as we were near the Cactus oilfields of Tabasco.

All we could find was a small Casa de Hospedaje (guest house) where we spent a restless night. My bed had a lateral groove in the middle, whereas Dan’s bed had a vertical groove down the middle. And the beds felt wet with the humidity. We were near the cathedral, where the bells chimed every quarter of an hour. That was not the worst of it: There were chickens on the roof, and the rooster among them crowed every few minutes through the night.

When we woke, we found that the shower head was directly over the toilet, which we had to straddle to wash ourselves off.

Dan summarized the experience by referring to the place as the Casa de Hopes-You-Die.

Ghost Town

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Decaying Buildings in Ghost Town of Bodie, California

I have visited several ghost towns in California and Nevada, but by far the most impressive is Bodie in Mono County, California. Here you will find no Disney-esque reconstructions: The town is as it was in 1915, when most of its inhabitants decided to relocate elsewhere. And when they left, they left most of their goods behind, where they still are today.

And why shouldn’t they? The town sits at an altitude of 8,379 feet (2,554 meters). To reach its, one takes a washboarded gravel road thirteen miles (21 km) from the end of pavement roughly midway between Mono Lake and the town of Bridgeport. During the winter it is bitterly cold. In fact, the town’s founder, variously called William S. Bodey and Waterman S. Bodey, froze to death in an 1860 blizzard while riding to pick up supplies.

Tomb of the Founder of Bodie, in the Ghost Town’s Cemetery

Bodie was a gold mining town. At its outskirts are the ruins of a large stamping mill which is off limits to tourists because of exposed mine shafts and rusting equipment. For a while around 1880, Bodie had a population of 7,000-10,000 people and was one of the largest cities in the State of California. Over the years, the mines there produced some $34 million in gold and silver (in 1986 dollars).

But like most boom towns, Bodie went bust. Today, the Bodie Historical District is a national and California historical landmark. The state had decided to let Bodie remain as it was when it took over in 1962. No attempt will be made to prop up falling buildings, of which there are many.

Buildings Are Allowed to Collapse

When you visit Bodie, you will see a real ghost town. There are no gunfight re-enactments. In fact there are no services, no cafés, no gift shops. There is a rest room in the parking lot, but little else.

Where Wood Is Scarce

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Sod-Roofed Farmhouses at Reykjavík’s Árbær Open Air Museum

There is an old joke that goes: What do you do if lost in an Icelandic forest? Answer: Stand Up.

Because of the Arctic winds that scour the island of Iceland, there are no substantial forests. At one time there were more than there are now., but the early settlers burned them for fuel. Even then, in no case was there enough wood of the right kind to build structures, unless the wood was shipped over at ruinous cost from Scandinavia.

Notice in the above photo the sparing use of wood on the short sides of the above structures. The photo was taken at the Árbær Open Air Museum in Reykjavík, which includes buildings that had been moved to the museum from other parts of the city and country.

Shown below is the layout of the turf house at Stöng in Southwest Iceland:

Farmhouse Layout at Stöng

The single largest room consists of two rows of benches where the residents slept. There was no living room as such, though there was a combined dining room/kitchen on the left. Add a storeroom and a lavatory, and that’s pretty much it.

If you read any Icelandic literature, such as Halldór Laxness’s Independent People, you will find that, before independence, the lives of Icelanders were grim to say the least. Now Iceland is enjoying prosperity due mostly to tourism.

It’s an expensive country to visit, but note that the tourist season is only three months long: from June through August. Some people visit in the winter, mostly to see the Northern Lights, but the weather can be forbidding.

Museum … Zoo … Botanical Garden

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Walkway at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

When Martine and I were in Tucson in April, we ran into 100° Fahrenheit (37° Celsius) temperatures. While we visited the spectacular Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, I was constantly seeking deep shade and cool water. As a result, we saw only a fraction of the museum’s grounds, which were substantial. There is no doubt in my mind that we must revisit it during the winter months.

In addition to several buildings housing reptiles, birds, fish, and so on, there is a zoo along a pathway that winds through the grounds. I spent a lot of time watching the desert bighorn sheep, because I could view them from a nice shady place. We missed most of the other outdoor zoological exhibits, as well as the desert plants in their immediate vicinity.

To get an idea of the museum’s variety, click here to see the various exhibit categories.

In the vicinity of the museum are a number of other interesting sights:

Until our short visit in April, I had never visited Tucson, though Martine had long ago to visit her aunt living there.