Travel Archives - Page 3 of 22

Learn from My Peruvian Travel Mistakes

July 14, 2018 by James Trumm 3 Comments

From 2013 to 2015, I traveled regularly to countries in the developing world. I ventured to China, Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco. I developed good travel habits I was proud of and that served me well. But I haven’t been traveling as much recently and I’m obviously out of practice. My recent trip to Peru drove home to me how rusty my travel skills had become. So here’s a list of my Peruvian travel errors as a reminder to myself and as an aid to people who might be contemplating a similar trip. Learn from my mistakes!

Mistake #1: I Took the Wrong Footwear

I used to tell people that the most important thing to pack was the stuff you wear on your feet. You walk a lot when you travel. It’s a great way to see a country and its people and is often the only way to see the sights. If your feet hurt or you don’t have the right shoes, you won’t enjoy your trip nearly as much.

My old go-to travel footwear was a pair of Merrell hiking shoes. I wore them everywhere. They had good arch and ankle support. These things are important in parts of the world where sidewalks and streets are not as smooth and obstacle-free as they are in North America. They looked good, too: not too flashy but suitable for all but the most formal environments.

Strangely, though, in the last year, they began to hurt my feet. I don’t know whether the shoes or my feet changed, but those shoes simply weren’t comfortable anymore. I meant to replace them, but I hate shoe shopping and kept putting off the errand. When it came time to go to Peru, I opened my closet and was faced with a choice between Converse Chuck Taylors and FILA athletic shoes. I took the FILAs. Though they’re well-padded and comfortable for all-day wear, they don’t have the kind of ankle or arch support that’s needed for walking across uneven terrain. They have relatively smooth soles and that doesn’t provide much grip on hilly terrain. And they’re fluorescent green. I paid for this poor choice on the Inca Trail. The lack of ankle support put a lot of stress on my knee and hip muscles and left me limping for the last quarter of the trip.

Lesson (re-) learned: take appropriate footwear.

Mistake #2: I Took the Wrong Jacket

If you know me, you know I love my leather jackets. They look and feel great in spring and fall weather. They’re durable and have lots of pockets, which are good for travelers.

For walking around Lima, when the morning and evening temperatures dipped into the 50s, my old brown leather jacket was great. But it was an extremely poor choice for hiking the Inca Trail. Yes, it kept me warm—but too much so. All that exertion made me sweat and the leather trapped the heat and moisture inside. I was soon way too hot and damp. So I took off the jacket and crammed it down inside my day pack. But this added a good 12 pounds to my day pack and added so much bulk to the pack that it was hard to get anything in or out of the pack. I felt the extra weight as I struggled to get enough oxygen while climbing up the train ascents.

It would have made much more sense for me to have taken a down or fiberfill jacket — something lightweight that could be vented easily. I own a couple I could have used. But I was thinking more about walking around urban Lima than about hiking the Inca Trail. I should have gone for functionality over style.

Mistake #3: I Didn’t Do My Homework

Ah, arrogance. It’s so easy to fall into. “Machu Picchu? I’ll just go to Cusco and get a bus there or something and walk around and see what’s to be seen.” That was the extent of my planning. And in a lot of places, that would have been enough. But by the time I realized that there was a lot more to it than that, it was almost too late. And to make matters worse, I had laid out nonrefundable hotel deposits on accommodations that just wouldn’t work for what I wanted to do.

Had I researched this trip with my usual diligence, I would have realized some pretty basic facts:

–You need a permit to hike the Inca Trail and such permits are limited in number.

–You need a ticket to enter Machu Picchu and such tickets are limited in number.

–You can’t enter Machu Picchu on your own; you have to have a licensed guide with you at all times.

–Trains and buses that operate in the vicinity of Machu Picchu are booked up months in advance.

I remember the day when all those facts hit me. And I wanted to hit myself back. How could I have been so careless about my plans? I had to scramble to save my vacation. Fortunately, I lucked upon Adios Adventure Travel. Unlike some of the other outfitters I contacted, they were fine with working around my schedule instead of forcing me into theirs. I rarely hire outfitters, travel agents, or guides, but this was one instance where I needed help. Adios came through for me and arranged for all the transfers, transportation, and accommodations I needed for the Machu Picchu leg of my trip. But it was a near thing. Had I discovered the fundamental planning errors I made a couple of weeks later, I probably wouldn’t have been able to make the trip at all. As it was, I lost some money on useless hotel deposits, but I saved my trip.

Mistake #4: I Didn’t Train Right

I knew that hiking the Inca Trail and climbing around Machu Picchu would be a major physical challenge. And so in the nine weeks before I left, I made a concerted effort to get into shape for it. I ran the stairs at my apartment building. I lost eleven pounds. I worked out with free weights. I took long walks. I took my vitamins and ate my Wheaties. But the Inca Trail kicked my sorry ass anyway.

The elevation was part of it—and frankly, I don’t know what I could have done short of running with a plastic bag over my head to cope with it. Puerto Rico is a few hundred feet above sea level. Machu Picchu is over 8,000 foot above sea level. Cusco is 3,000 feet above that. I took Acetazolamide before and during my stay at elevation, but I hated the side effects it caused. Though I didn’t get altitude sickness, I was still chronically short of breath out on the trail.

I should have done a lot more to train with sustained aerobic activity. My aerobic efforts tended to be short but intense. Long and moderate would have been better.

Mistake #5: I Didn’t Read the Fine Print

As my mistakes on this trip go, this was a minor one, though it could have been more significant if I’d run into any serious problems.

I have a Samsung Galaxy J7 smartphone that accommodates two SIM cards. When I travel abroad, I simply buy a local pay-as-you-go SIM card and slide it in. Then I’ve got an in-country phone number and data plan that is far cheaper than paying international roaming charges on my regular US account.

When I was in the Lima airport, I went to a Claro kiosk and saw a sign promoting a one-week all-you-can-eat SIM card for a very reasonable price. I bought it. And it was great for data. But when I wanted to make an in-country phone call, I had to dial a six-digit access code first. Supposedly I could have used this to text out of the country as well, though I was never able to make that work.

As it turned out, the Claro data plan was enough to keep me connected via WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. But on the one occasion where I had to make an actual phone call, it wasn’t very useful. I didn’t want to be fiddling around with access codes and trying to figure out if I needed to use a country code or a +1 to make it work. Next time, I need to find out more about these SIM card deals before I plunk my money down.

Filed Under: Lima, Machu Picchu, Peru, Travel Tagged With: Lima, Machu Picchu, Peru

Return to Machu Picchu

July 13, 2018 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

The next morning, I rendezvoused with Ismael. The massage I’d had the night before had helped with my hip, but my right knee was still talking to me. I downed a healthy dose of Tylenol and we were on our way. A bus took us on the 25 minute drive from the center of Aguas Calientes to the entrance to Machu Picchu.

How does one describe a place that’s been dubbed as one of the new seven wonders of the world? More than any other of the world’s most famous historical and cultural monuments, Machu Picchu is beautiful because of how it relates to its surroundings. I can imagine, say, the buildings of Angkor Wat in another place, but Machu Picchu’s structures would lose their ability to awe if they were removed from their mountaintop location. It takes nothing away from the genius of the people who designed and built Machu Picchu to suggest that if the buildings there were transported to an open plain, they’d just be little more than a set of old but not terribly remarkable stone structures. In their environment, though, they are sublime.

The people who built Machu Picchu were first-rate architects who used the dramatic natural backdrop of the mountaintop setting to bring their designs to life. They worked with broad brushes. There are few elements of minute detail left in the ruins of Machu Picchu. The rocks are honest rocks. They fit together perfectly — and we still don’t know how the Inca managed this feat with the tools available to them — but they haven’t been ornamented or decorated.

Machu Picchu struck me as an engineering marvel. I’m not the only one to feel that way. The American Society of Civil Engineers conducted a study of the ruins and concluded:

Machu Picchu represents civil engineering and environmental design in harmony with its environment, along with the use of the design standards of the Inca Empire to create a visually beautiful royal estate. Site preparation and foundation engineering are exemplary, hydrological and hydraulic engineering were thorough, and its urban drainage design sets a standard of care for modern engineers. It is a prime example of early, integrated city planning in the western hemisphere.

My guide Ishmael, who runs a hostel in the area and has spent many years visiting and studying Machu Picchu, believes that it was built to be a kind of university for the Inca empire. Students came there from all over the Inca territory to study astronomy, botany, and other subjects. The conventional view, however, is that Machu Picchu was a royal estate for the emperor and has family. But that view and Ismael’s interpretation are not mutually exclusive. Concepts like “university” and “royal estate” are our way of ordering our society. Presumably Inca society was ordered differently. It’s not hard to imagine that Machu Picchu could have been both a royal retreat for Pachacuti and his family as well as a center of learning.

Another way to view Machu Picchu is as an ancient observatory. The sun rises and sends its rays through very specific windows on the days of the equinox and the solstice. This rock has been carved and placed to map out the constellation of the Southern Cross, which was obviously known to the Incas 500 years ago.

Machu Picchu may not have been finished before it was abandoned by the Incas after only 90 years. This pile of stones was presumably the Incas’ quarry and spare parts department.

The authorities who run Machu Picchu have done an excellent job of keeping the site clean and noncommercial. There are no trash cans in the complex itself; you have to pack out what you bring in. One of the functions of the guides is to make sure that not so much as a candy wrapper or water bottle cap gets thrown on the ground. And you can’t get anything to eat or drink inside the complex unless you are a baby llama.

This is a monument to the guinea pig, a Peruvian delicacy that I did not try, but that apparently sustained the Incas.

I was lucky to have had such an excellent guide during my time on the Inca Trail and in Machu Picchu. Ismael Huaman Zapata was patient, good-humored, encouraging, and very knowledgeable about the historical and natural world of the Incas. He’s got big plans to build an eco lodge and run tours to organic coffee farms. I hope he realizes them — but in the meantime anyone who needs a guide to Machu Picchu couldn’t do better than to have him as a companion.

When my stay was over, I took the bus back to Aguas Calientes and then boarded the train for Ollantaytambo. I was sore and exhausted, but I felt a powerful sense of physical accomplishment and a deep satisfaction in finally having experienced one of the most iconic landmarks to humankind’s artfulness and ingenuity.

Filed Under: Machu Picchu, Peru, Travel Tagged With: Machu Picchu, Peru, Travel

Five Years Lived

June 20, 2018 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

Five years ago today, I changed my life.

In the 19 months before that, I’d lost my marriage, my job, my home, and my gall bladder. I was on the shady side of 50 and acutely aware that the time remaining to do the things I’d dreamed of doing was growing shorter with each day. I was tired of feeling paralyzed by inertia and my own apprehensions.

So on this day in 2013, I sat in a departure lounge at the Detroit airport waiting for a plane to China.

I thought of backing out. I told myself that none of my friends would think any less of me if I left the airport and headed back home. But when my flight was called, I stood up, got in line, handed the gate attendant my boarding pass, walked down the jetway, and boarded the plane.

That the first day of my new life and I was traveling on a one-way ticket.

I spent a year living and working in China. That experience led me to Tunisia, where I lived for the better part of a year. After that, I returned to the USA, but left again last August for my current home in Puerto Rico.

The photo below shows me in 2013, 2014, and 2018 in China, Tunisia, and Puerto Rico, respectively.

Along the way, I used my foreign homes as bases from which to travel regionally. I visited Hong Kong, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Morocco, the Dominican Republic, Curacao, and Panama.

Living as an expat taught me self-sufficiency, resourcefulness and patience. It showed me what it is to be a racial, ethnic, and religious minority–for as Robert Louis Stevenson said, “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”

I took major steps toward becoming the man I’d always wanted to be. I met wonderful people around the world whom I call my friends and am still in touch with. My experiences simultaneously fed my curiosity and left me longing to see new horizons.

The expat life was not without difficulties. I had visa problems in China. I was robbed in Tunisia. I had to flee Puerto Rico to avoid Hurricane Maria. Still, I see these events through the lens described by Yvon Choinard, the mountain climber who founded Patagonia sportswear: adventure is what happens when things stop going according to plan.

My expat and travel experiences also led to my rediscovery of love and a life that I now share (though not often enough) with my darling Lori. That wasn’t part of the plan—and it may prove to be the greatest adventure yet.

Filed Under: Travel

Gilligan’s Island, Puerto Rico

March 23, 2018 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

Yes, Virginia, there is a Gilligan’s Island.

The trip began when my houseguests — my son Spencer and his friends Kyle and Alex — were looking for someplace interesting to go where they could see the Caribbean side of Puerto Rico. When they told me they want to go to Gilligan’s Island, I thought they were kidding. But they insisted that it was a real place, right here in Puerto Rico. It took a web search for me to admit that the place did indeed exist.

So we packed up the 4Runner Sunday morning and headed south toward the coastal town of Guanica. From there, our plan was to catch the ferry that supposedly ran to the island, which was just off the coast. But when we got there, we discovered to our dismay that tickets to the ferry were sold out for the day. So we drove around, stopped by a few houses and hotels, and asked if there was anyone we could hire to take us to the island. We finally found our skipper and his motorboat, and for a few dollars we started from a tropic port aboard his tiny ship. We got there at about 1:00 and asked the boatman to return to pick us up at 4:00. We wanted the three-hour tour.

The sea there was warm, calm and clear, quite a difference from the Atlantic waters I’ve been used to. The island was surrounded by mangroves and thronged with Puerto Rican families taking their ease. The choicest real estate had already been claimed by people with tents, Hibachis, boom boxes, hammocks, and beach chairs, but we managed to find a sandy inlet by the mangroves to make a little camp of our own.

We soon had company.

The water was shallow and the seafloor was smooth enough to allow us to sit right down and admire the view.

When our time was up, the skipper returned for us at the appointed hour and we headed back to San Juan.

Filed Under: Puerto Rico, Travel Tagged With: Gilligan's Island, Puerto Rico, Travel

BioMuseo: The Museum of Biodiversity in Panama City

November 12, 2017 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

Imagine you blew up a contemporary glass, concrete, steel building. Then imagine you stacked the rubble and painted the roof fragments in the kinds of bright primary colors you find in a kindergartener’s crayon box. Then you would have some idea how the BioMuseo in Panama City looks from the outside.

The building was designed by Frank Gehry. It’s the real star exhibit of the museum. It has a jaunty, child-like look. It’s dramatic and pleasing to the eye.

The building houses a didactic museum — it’s intended to teach you something. What is has to teach (the importance of biodiversity) is vital to know. The experience of walking through the museum is like walking through a book. You learn a lot as you go through the pages.

The museum’s book-like method of delivering information, though, is its chief weakness. So much of what it has to teach is rendered in words, not exhibits, objects, hands-on displays, or even interesting photos. This is, in effect, a natural history museum, and so I compare it against the best of that genre. And by that measure, it comes up short.

Yes, there are fossils and bones. There is a cool ten-minute video presentation on screens that surround you. There are white plaster representations of animals. Very occasionally, there is some kind of interesting artifact – an earthquake measuring device, a notebook kept by a scientist who was cataloging insects, etc. But these are few and far between. There are many plaques and walls to read and the items that accompany them are disappointing. Most kids would be bored by the place and even adults would find little reason to visit more than once.

There are numerous helpful guides who are all very eager to share information (in Spanish and English) about biodiversity. Still, most people don’t come to a museum for a lecture. The museum does have plans to expand into a wing that is, at this moment, relatively unused. And it seems that there is money behind the museum, so perhaps as it matures it will be able to fund some more engaging exhibits. The building itself is interesting to see and it conveys the messy chaos of nature quite well. But the funhouse atmosphere feels forced after awhile, especially when what’s inside the funhouse is just not all that stimulating.

Filed Under: Panama, Panama City, Travel

Motorcycles & Street Art in Panama City

November 7, 2017 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

My two weeks in Panama were not a vacation for me. On weekdays, I stayed close to my hotel or cafes where internet service was available so I could continue working. I took a lot of photos in that immediate vicinity, namely, the El Congrejo neighborhood of Panama City. I took them on my way to and from the cafe where I spent most of my work time. And a lot of them were of motorcycles and street art. In the four years I’ve maintained this blog, I’ve put up many posts about those two interests of mine. I’m combining the two here.

I didn’t get the sense that Panama City has a booming motorcycle culture. Most of the bikes I saw were either fast food delivery vehicles or police cycles. Both tended to be Suzuki 150s.

I also didn’t see a whole lot of street art in this neighborhood, but I loved this piece that was just down the street from my hotel. The branches look something like a crown of laurels.

My favorite neighborhood eatery was the New York Bagel Cafe. One day I saw this beautiful new Vespa parked in front. There’s also a Vespa dealer on one of the more commercial streets in El Cangrejo. I was tempted to buy one and ride it all the way back to the USA.

The streets near the NYBC are lined with apartment towers. It’s a middle- to upper-middle class area, so there wasn’t a lot of tagging to be seen. So I was surprised to come across this.

Perhaps coincidentally, it was near there that I saw one of the only Harleys I laid eyes on here.

One of the most interesting works of unauthorized public art I saw was in an unlikely spot. The park that runs by the waterfront on Avenida Almador near the Bio Museum generally has an upscale feel to it. But right next door there are some modest apartment complexes where I spied this. In Spanish it reads

Somos seres humanos experimentando una forma de pensamiento que caduco hace mucho tiempo y seguimos sufriendo de ello porque tenemos medo a aventurarnos a los recónditos de perdernos cuando en realidad va estamos perdidos.

The best English translation I could come up with (which is admittedly rough) is

We are human beings experiencing a way of thinking that expired a long time ago and we continue to suffer from it because we have the courage to venture into the recesses of losing ourselves when in reality we are lost.

There were also some upscale bikes in Casco Viejo, the Spanish colonial part of town. The photo immediately below of the Yamaha is one of the finest motorcycle pix I’ve ever taken.

Filed Under: Motorcycles, Panama, Panama City, Travel, Unauthorized Public Art

Living Next Door to Roberto Durán

November 6, 2017 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

I was taught that if your last name isn’t Windsor, you have no business having stone lions in front of your house. Unless, of course, your name is Roberto Durán. He’s got lions plus Roman statues of women with perfectly hemispherical breasts. I just found out he lives right next to the hotel I’m at. That’s an Excalbur replicar in the garage.

Filed Under: Panama, Panama City, Travel, Wheels

The Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal

November 5, 2017 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

It was a 20-dollar/20-minute taxi ride from my hotel in El Cangrejo, Panama City, to the Miraflores locks of the Panama Canal. We drove by the port of Balboa and passed scores of cranes loading and unloading thousands of Danish shipping containers onto and off of Chinese freighters. Then dozens of white three-story buildings with red-orange roofs appeared on the right, military-style residences from another era. “The Americans lived there,” my driver remarked.

At my destination, I walked up three flights of stairs to the visitors center, bought a ticket, sat through a 15 minute film about the canal, and went wandering through the four story building. The center integrated a museum and a series of observation platforms directly opposite the locks. As I climbed upward, I got different perspectives on the canal.

From the top level, the size and scale of the canal became apparent. The enormous doors of the locks (made in Pennsylvania, by the way) hold back tons of water that fills the deep canal. There is a cog railroad track on either side of the canal. The engines that ride on it (which are called mulas, or mules) pull the ships through the channel. Since the water level in the locks rises and falls, the tracks also run up steep concrete inclines so they stay more or less level with the ships.

To my left was a channel that, in just a few kilometers, empties into Panama Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

To my right was the bulk of the canal system, 65 kilometers of lakes, canals, and locks that end in the city of Colón and the Caribbean Sea.

Behind the visitors center, I could see some of the infrastructure that keeps the canal running. This, I believe, is the power plant.

Inside the museum, I was especially interested in a working replica of part of the control room. I got the notion that if I pushed the right button, I could snarl international commerce for months.

The museum had many beautifully-wrought models of the early 20th century machinery that was used to build the canal. And it did a good job of conveying how monumental a task it was. Building the canal employed tens of thousands of men from Panama, the United States, the Caribbean islands, and China. A whole city had to be erected to house all the workers. Because disease and tropical conditions posed such a threat to the workforce, their housing was built with window screens, sanitary sewers, oiled cisterns to keep down mosquitoes, and other features that were not common to work camps of the era. But even with these refinements, the death toll from sickness alone was staggering.

Throughout the visitor center, I saw variations of this graphic. This particular one indicates the stairs, but others mark bathrooms and exits. All of them use the broken rectangle as the primary design element, representing the path between the seas.

I was thinking: we built this. We human beings built this huge, glorious thing. And we did it without modern tools and technology. And just as I was starting to convince myself that nothing could be more sublime, this bird showed up, alighted on the fence that ran beside the great canal, and proved me wrong.

Filed Under: Panama, Travel

The Nomada Eatery

November 4, 2017 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

Every now and then I walk into a place that’s so welcoming and aesthetically pleasing that I feel like I’m home–even though I’ve never been there. One such place is the Nomada Eatery. I was only there once for a fine American breakfast of bacon and eggs, but while I was there I felt the satisfaction of knowing that I was in an interior space that had been wonderfully and whimsically designed.

Located in Caso Viejo, the old quarter of Panama City, the Nomada Eatery is another one of those places that seem designed to attract a certain kind of traveler. It’s in the same building as Luna’s Castle Hostel, which may help account for its funky international vibe.

The bathroom there is a treat in itself. Books are glued to the walls and ceiling in front of and above the toilet. Graffiti seems to be encouraged.

And on the wall next to the toilet is a reflective reminder to zip up.

Filed Under: Panama, Panama City, Travel

Signs of Casco Viejo

November 3, 2017 by James Trumm Leave a Comment

I’m back with another photoessay about signs, this time in the oldest neighborhood in Panama City. This may be my last one, though. One of my favorite British road signs reads “Changed Priorities Ahead,” which is the best description of life’s vicissitudes I’ve ever encountered. After my posts about signs in Santo Domingo, Chefchaouen, Hong Kong, Nicaragua, and Fes, blogging pictures of signs is starting to feel a little old. But until I find some way to kick the habit, here’s what I saw in Casco Viejo.

This photo shows the contrast between the old and the new Panama City. Like Cartagena, Colombia, Panama City has done a good job of building a modern boomtown without ruining the character of its old historic city. The skyscrapers of downtown – “the Dubai of Central America” – are located safely across the bay from Casco Viejo, which benefits from its isolation on three sides by the Panama Bay.

The old city is no stranger to luxury. This hotel (with its name spelled out in a cool retro-font) is one of the chicest places in either the new or old cities.

But my chief interest lies in the downmarket signs. Here’s one for a math tutor trying to make a buck. I’d like to think that the tutor within is a genius on the order of Gödel, Newton, or Spinoza.

The signs in the pic below don’t tell the story; they just provide the context. Lady in a fancy white dress. Big suitcase. Helpful policeman. The story writes itself.

What would Panama be without Panama hats? Pretty much the same. The only people I’ve seen wearing them are tourists like me. But damn, they look good in them.

Stop. Do not enter this kitchen. We used to have a similar rule in effect at certain times when my sons were young.

I wonder if this Peruvian restaurant ran out of green paint, ran out of money, or both. But as long as they don’t run out of quinoa, kiwicha, or chili peppers, I think’s they’ll be OK.

I’ve always wondered where to find one of these. But alas, Jack Sparrow was not in.

Alley Oop and Slam Dunk are some of the only real wild style art I saw in Casco. Well done.

Nicolás Pacheco was a beloved Panamanian high school teacher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He also organized and taught night school classes for adults. He was, by all accounts, a very hard-working and modest man who was much admired by his students and their parents. This school is named after him.