Check.

Learn about biological father.

Check.

Lose too much weight, most of my bets, and a girlfriend in the process.

Check.  Check.  Check.

Not to pat myself  on the back too much here, but I have to say, this whole boondoggle wasn’t too shabby an idea.  It sure turned out to be a phenomanel way to see the world. 

It had it’s drawbacks certainly…Never spending lengthy times in one place…The solo nature of it at times…The scraping by after losses.  Overall though, who wouldn’t want to rip through a dozen countries gambling, siteseeing, mingling with untold strangers all the while learning a little something about one’s past?

I may never do it again, but I highly recommend some variation of it for anyone looking to shake things up.

—

Thanks to everyone who has been reading these posts along the way.  It was great knowing there were people along for the ride.   Hopefully in the limited time/space I had for each entry, I was able to give a glimpse of what was going on.  Now, whereas the blog was a ‘glimpse’, the book will be more of a ‘gawk’, with plenty more details to fill in the blanks (as well as a few secrets I just might have held back on…).

—

My last hours in Colombia were spent alone in the rain in Bogota.  Not an auspicious way to cap off the trip, but one thing I’ll probably always remember about my last day was the airport search.

They are pretty tight there what with the drug smuggling and all, but still I didn’t see them yank anyone from the ticket line until they got to me.  When the security agent told me he would have to go through my bag, I was thinking, hey knock yourself out…you’re the one that’s going to have to dig through all the grimy, wet-from-the-rain, clothes that were last washed, oh, in Thailand.  By this point in the trip, I can re-pack that bag, blindfolded in about 30 seconds anyway, so the pain-in-the-ass was his not mine.

My pack checked out.  And after a pat down that was extensive enough that I think the guy still owes me dinner and drinks, I was let on my way.  When I later went to the bathroom, I looked in the mirror and saw that I had two white smears caked on both corners of my mouth.  I guess that morning while rushing for the airport, I hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t washed the toothpaste spit that was on  my face.  Funny most places.  Not in a Columbian security line where it looked like the smuggled cocaine-filled condom I had just swallowed was slowly leaking and I was foaming at the mouth. 

Cleaned up and presentable, I got to Orlando a few hours later, answered a couple questions…

“Are you carrying over $10,000 in cash?”

Don’t  I wish.

“Are you bringing anything into the country I should know about?”

Nope.

“Are you bringing anything you don’t want me to know about?”

Just that burst cocaine condom.

And with that I was welcomed back to the USA.

A couple friends, Bruso and Jeff, picked me up and we headed to Joel’s house for a belated group birthday weekend that also included Ed, Mickey and Teddy.  Since I haven’t yet had a chance to get signed affidavits from them on what I can and cannot reveal, I’ll have to give you the redacted version of the weekend:

After we finished a round of golf in which I crushed Mickey per usual, we went to a Magic-Bucks NBA game and then a rooftop bar called Latitudes where xxxxxxx, until xxxxxxx, whereupon xxxxxxx disappeared.  After a 3 AM breakfast at Steak and Shake, the cops pulled us over and xxxxxxx, until magically Joel talked the cop into allowing us to go home, sans ticket (or worse).  When we woke up in the morning, xxxxxxx, who we had lost the night before, was lying on the couch having found his way home bloodhound-like, despite not having Joel’s address.  We might have been worried somewhere along the line, but it seems to be a trend with him.  First time he visited me in NYC, we lost him in Manhattan and hours later I got a voicemail saying, “not sure where I am, but all the tall buildings are on the wrong side of the river”.  And yet, somehow he found his way from Brooklyn into Manhattan and out to Queens to my apartment without directions.

The next day, xxxxxxx, xxxxxxx,  and then xxxxxxx after which Joel’s buddy Andy took us boating.  Three hours worth of re-hashing old stories later, and I think Andy might be regretting it.  He’s going to have certain unwanted images of Teddy seared to his brain for years to come.

—

In a perfect conclusion to the gambling portion of the trip, my final bet came down to the final play of the game.  Missouri, down 7 with 8  seconds to go and the ball.  The game effectively over, but the point spread very much alive.  A meaningless last basket and the game would end at 5, covering the 5 and 1/2 point spread, giving me the win.

Mizzou guy dribbles the length of the court, lays it up off the glass for two and…

…and keeping with the prevailing trend of the trip’s bets…misses the bunny to keep it at 7 and put an exclamation point on whoever is trying to tell me I really shouldn’t gamble.

— 

Thanks again to Joel for a great weekend.  And to his neighbors whom Joel went to on Thursday and apologized ahead of time for any stupidity, nudity or outright illegality that they may be witness to while we were there.

And with that, I got on my last  plane of the trip and completed the circle back to Vermont…all the while thinking nothing except, wouldn’t it be ironic to crash on the final leg after logging 30,000 miles or so?

We didn’t.

It would have made for a definitive ending to all these posts though.  Instead, let me close with one last thing about the person who inspired this whole escapade–that entertaining, live-life-to-the-fullest man my mom met flying over Cambodia, aka my biological father.

To be completely honest, over the early years of my life, I never gave my father a lot of thought, but one thing that I have dwelled on is this…I wonder what those 8  months were like when both of us were alive.    I was obviously little more than an eating, crying, crapping machine at that point, but still, interaction was had.  What happened?

Years ago when I learned that my parents were separated at the time of my birth and that they weren’t even living in the same country, I obsessed on the thought of, ‘I wonder exactly how much time we spent together’.  He was in Mexico  and I was with my mother and sister in Vermont.  How many weeks or days or was it hours were we in sight of each other?  I never wanted to ask my mom this, so I never really knew.  Then, a week or so ago, I was sitting in Santa Marta, Colombia and I realized I had the answer right there in my pack.

His passport.

If I looked at the stamps going to and from Mexico the year leading up to his death, I could count the days and get the exact number we spent together.  Taking it a step further, I could subtract 8 hours a  day for sleep, and say, another 8 for other stuff he was doing during the day, and I could probably pin it to a fairly educated guess as to how many hours we spent together over the course of our lives.

104.

We spent more or less 104 hours in each other’s company.

104 hours with your old man.  And they weren’t even the quality ones like, learning how to throw a curveball or talk to a girl.  It was me filling diapers and sucking my thumb.  Good times.  Good times.

I’ll admit, after tallying this, I wasn’t exactly the most chipper guy sittiing there in this dingy cafe.  I might have even been thinking…this all sucks.  Him dying.  This trip.  Writing about it.  Me.

And then a thought crossed my mind.  Not a ‘clouds open, sun ray shining upon thee’ epiphany moment…probably more a ‘cheap-Colombian-beer-kicking-in’ moment, and I thought about a conversation I had with someone on this trip.  Sometime on one of those Cambodian bus trips, that girl Flor and I were talking about an Ashton Kutcher movie–The Butterfly Effect.  And from there we  started on about how the littlest thing can push you this way or that…you know, that whole concept of a butterfly flapping his wings in the Amazon can alter the entire world, yada, yada.

Well, 104 hours with my father kinda sucks.  But had he lived, there is a whole lifetime of things and people I never would have had in  my life (by the way, yes, I do realize how self-serving this thinking is…given the choice I don’t think Hector Senior would have wanted to kick it just so that I could live the life I have.  But nevertheless, humor me a moment).    Had he lived I would have likely grown up who knows where.  Mexico?  The Phillippines?  Some 20 difffferent countries in 18 years?  Who knows, but it wouldn’t have been Vermont.

And if it wasn’t Vermont, then I’d never have met my first and longtime friends Toofie and JL.  Or later, picking up lifelong friends Bruso and Mickey…without whom I don’t know Joel, Teddy, Jeff and Molly.  College might have been great in whichever country I ended up in, but I wouldn’t have had Shawn, Cardoza, Colin and the rest in my life.  Summers wouldn’t have been at the Tyler Place, so there goes Gord, Lynn, Dunc, Emily, the Garretts, both McNeils, Malaney and Singer. 

It always fascinates me how even the tiniest deviations can, boom, lead you along a whole thread of difffirent people.

No New York, and there goes the Adam, Ed, Mollie, Laurie, Wayne, Kelli, Carolyn, Delinda thread.

LA?  Boom, I miss out on the Labatto, Roers, Catherine, Pauly, Yanika, Travis, Tim, Chad, Brad, Dave, Jo, Chris, Burks and the rest of Rick’s thread.

Maybe I’d be married to a wonderful Mexican woman right now, but, boom, I would have  missed out on Paige, Tracey and Megan…who deserves a thread of her own.   (Again, I reiterate, this is all very self-serving.  I’m sure there are some exes of mine who are thinking, “where was the Butterfly Effect that could’ve kept that #%&hole out of my life?”) .

I do regret never getting the opportunity to know the relatives on my Mexican side better, but had I lived there, I would have missed out on all the great times I’ve had with my cousins on my Uncle Ted’s side–who deserves special mention himself by the way, for those years betwen Hector Senior’s death and my mom re-marrying, during which time he would include me in camping trips and father-son events with his own sons.

I could go on and on with these threads….I’m leaving out so many people.

-

As I just read back over this, I have to admit, I considered deleting it because it seems a little heartless to essentially say, ‘oh, no worries…it was a good thing my father died young’.  But I’m including it anyway.  I thought it; I may as well admit to it.

And while generally I’m a pessimist about most things, with this one I feel like looking on the bright side and I’ll take the chance of sounding like a rank sentimentalist in taking this roundabout way to tell all these people that, while I would have absolutely loved knowing my father, I couldn’t be happier with what the alternative brought.

More in a couple days…

It’s little more than a long layover, but it’s my final stopping point before heading back to the states.  After this it’s Orlando for a long-ago planned weekend with a group of 7 friends from Vermont (our Virginia buddy, Ed, got an exemption). 

Right now I’m eating my last South American breakfast.  I’m going to miss my South American breakfasts.  The Arepas and Empanada (which if you like deep fried wads of dough, crammed full of meat or cheese, then these babies are for you) are delicious.  Add a kick-upside-the-head cup of Colombian coffee and a fresh squeezed fruit juice, from one of the 700 or so different kinds they seem to have here and you’re looking at the best sub-$2 breakfast you’ll ever eat.

And it wouldn’t have been complete without someone coming up to me asking if I wanted to buy something.  This time, emeralds.  He’s barking up the wrong demographic with me on that one.  

I am going to miss that omnipresent sales pitch that is a day in Southeast Asia or South America.  At times it feels you’re constantly holding two conversations at once…the one with the person you’re with, and the continuous stream of ‘no, thank yous’ to the offers of taxis, sodas, beer, candy, woman, T-shirts, marriage, souvenirs, drawings, salvation, food, coke–both kinds–guesthouses, weed–one kind–tours and pretty much anything you can think of…including just yesterday…coloring books.  Again, I ask, am I really the right demographic for this guy to be wasting his time trying to sell a coloring book to?  My favorite offer though is the ambiguously wide open, “What you want?  I get it for you.”  And I don’t doubt he can either. 

“What you want?  I get it for you.”

“Oh yeah?  Well can you find me a case of uncooked #8 spagetti, cut them all exactly 3 and 5/32ths of an inch, paint 33.8% of them blue,  and build me an exact replica of Tampa stadium and then re-enact the entire Super Bowl with little rigatoni-Steelers and penne-Cardinals, but this time have the Steelers cover the spread?”

“Sure, sure…Give me 5 minutes.  I have a friend…”

—

I don’t seem to have the best sense of who to pick to take photos for me.  Check this beauty out. 

That’s me on the right, next to me is Steve, and then Kevin and Ragu, the two Canadians I spent time with in Santa Marta.  They had been off camping, but then we ran into them again here in Cartagena.  Seeing as they proved to be such good luck charms on the last bet, I told them to come along  with us to the casino…The sight of this picture.

It was a pretty scruffy place.  The lettering on the felt table where I dropped my roullette bet was faded and discolored from years of clumsy players spilling rum and cokes.  There was no consensus from the other three, so I opted for the 1-18 section.  If it hit between those numbers, the four of us would be testing out the Cartagena nightlife with house money.  If it hit 19-36 or Zero, then the four of us would be…well, we would be testing out the Caragena nightlife.  Only now, they’d have my dead weight and empty wallet along for the ride. 

I don’t know if it was the Canadian human good luck charms or a lucky bounce, but the ball popped out of 21 at the last moment and rolled over to 8. 

I cashed the chips, we took the picture and piled into a taxi and went looking for Cartagenian fun. 

Perhaps the Canadian good charms only work when it comes to gambling, because we happened to have chosen the one day of the year that Cartagena apparently shuts down.  One would think, ‘holiday’ would equate to ‘festive’, but whatever this holiday was, festive it was not.  We asked Freddie, a local guy we had met earlier what holiday it was.

He shrugged, “somebody was born.  Or maybe they died.  You never know.  We got holidays for everything.”

With Freddie leading the way, the five of us piled…clowncar-like…into a tiny taxi and headed, I don’t know, east? west?  somewhere out of town in search of “a place he knew”.  Steve was already down one wallet after the Bogota incident, so we were hoping “place he knew” didn’t turn out to be an abandoned factory with Freddie’s buddies waiting for us. 

Instead, it turned out to be the Pleyboy Club.  And, no, that isn’t a typo.  Who knows, maybe the owner was worried about Hef coming to Colombia and suing him for copywright infringement.

If one were looking for women, this was your place.

Though it was only your place if you should also be looking to pay for said women. 

We were not.  Or at least no one in the group was fessing up to it if they were.  So back in the clowncar we piled…Freddie in the front, Ragu, Steve and me in the back and about 4 feet of Kevin’s 6 feet 5 inches in the back and the remaining 2′ 5″ hanging over into the front.  During the ride Freddie told us about the time he rode in a container on a cargo ship to the states about 10 years ago.  He and a bunch of other guys were put inside the container with water, fruit and tins of tunafish and when they got to Houston area, the container was opened and they were snuck ashore.  He stayed a few years and then either came back or was sent back. 

We tried a few more places in the Getsimani area but they were locked shut for the holiday.  The few places that were open were graveyards, so we continued our wild goose chase.  Again, it was oddly difficult to spend the winnings.  Except for clowncar cab fare.  That we were burning up at a fast pace.

Finally, after numerous other dead ends we found a suitable place to squander my ill-gotten gains.  It took til 4:00 AM to do so, but do it we did. 

Another thing I’m not?  4:00 AM Guy.  I can do it, mind you.  It’s just that the next day I become Worthless Piece of Humanity Guy.  And the entire next day would have been shot if we hadn’t found the basketball game. 

After two months of seeing basketball courts filled with people playing soccer, finally a court was actually being put to proper use, and so Steve, Kevin and I jumped at the chance. 

Great thing about basketball is, no matter where you are or who you are, if you can play you can walk up to any pickup game and get in.  The other thing you can count on whether you’re playing in NYC, Vermont or Colombia?  There’s always going to be a ballhog.  I don’t know how you say it in Spanish–poleta de cerdo ?–but Steve got the short end of the stick and wound up with one on his team.  Steve was twice the player this guy was, but he would shoot most everytime and then bitch at Steve for not getting the rebound on the inevitable miss. 

Still, it was a blast to get out and play, get the competitive juices flowing again, and–after two months of trying to be unfailingly polite seeing as I was a visitor in someone else’s country–it was cathartic to jaw a little over bad calls. 

One other thing about the basketball…it confirmed my thesis that the less you spend travelling, the more enjoyable it becomes.  Whether it’s staying in cheap guesthouses where you’re bound to interact with cool fellow travellers, unlike in a ritzier hotel where there is little chance or encouragement to get to know other guests.  Or eating at cheap eats places where you’re crammed in at communal tables with entertaining strangers as opposed to being sequestered off in your own booth at a nice restaurant.

Or buses vs. planes.  Buses can be a major pain in the ass, but I’m going to remember bussing through Cambodia with a Spaniard or bribing cops along the border of VZ and Colombia much longer than I will my Hong Kong to Manila flight.

And I’m going to remember playing hoops with some good friends and some local Colombian guys on a cracked-asphalt court in a park in the middle of beautiful Cartagena as the sun set a lot longer than a good many other things I’ve done.  And it cost me nada.

—

I think this might be the penultimate post.  I get back to the states tomorrow, then it’s Orlando with friends as I mentioned.  I probably won’t get the last post up until Monday or Tuesday, but check back then for the last bit of Colombia, the re-cap on Orlando and my final bet.  (actually, I take it back…this won’t be the penultimate one, but rather whatever ‘third to last’ is.  I’ll drop one this weekend to let you know ahead of time what game I will be betting, then finish up with one final one on Mon or Tues).

I find it kind of funny that the trip began with Vegas–home of casinos like Paris Vegas or The Venetian that try to recreate foreign spots–and then ends with a stop in Orlando, home of Disneyland’s Epcot Center–a place that also tries to present its own sanatized version of the world.

And how about this for a bookend?  Check out the name of my last hotel in Colombia…

What starts in Vegas, ends in Vegas…

Simon Bolivar plaza.

Just like no self-respecting city in Asia goes without a Chinatown, no town in South America would dare not have a Bolivar plaza to honor the guy who brought them independence. 

Get off any bus into any town, point yourself in the direction of the center of town, close your eyes and start walking.  If you don’t bang headfirst into a statue of Simon on his horse then you ain’t in South America.

Here’s the one in Cartagena. 

I was supposed to meet my buddy Steve here.  He was flying in from NYC for a few days.  His plan was to spend one night in Bogota and then come to Cartagena on a flight in at 8 AM. 

Noon rolled around and no word from him. 

No problem.  Maybe just a mix up on the flight. 

I kept checking my email throughout the afternoon.  4:00 still no Steve.  I was beginning to wonder, but wasn’t too worried…he’s the type of guy who it wouldn’t surprise had gotten delayed by a nice Colombian woman.

By 8 that night though, and still not even an email, I began envisioning all the scenarios they warn you about in the Lonely Planet guidebook.  I started wondering how hard it would be for me to get a last minute ticket to Bogota, and whether I should start with hospitals or police stations first, and what the word for ‘dead American guy’ is in Spanish. 

Around 9:30 PM an email comes in that says–and I paraphrase–”shit hit the fan.  Stuck in Bogota.  Tomorrow”. 

I guess I wasted all that time practicing how to pronounce, “tiene uno gringo muerto?”.

I’ll have to wait and get signed clearance from Steve before I reveal  what “shit hit the fan” means, but suffice it to say it involves the usual suspects…beer, Colombian women, Canadians, cops, and shady after-hour joints.  Until I get full clearance, you’ll have to piece the scenario together yourself.

—

It seems amazing to me that I only have 3 days left on the trip…and with each day I realize how much stuff I haven’t been able to fit into the posts that I wanted to.  Basically I’ve only hit the surface on both the trip and my father’s story.  On the plus side, I guess it leaves me with tons for the book (he says, already in not-so-subtle plug mode).

Especially the part of my parents’ story.  As I’ve reached this latter point in their journey together it’s tough to get it out in a couple breezy paragraphs.  Knowing the expiration date on that part of the story, and having seen/read all the excitement at the start of it, it seems all the more tragic as I put together  the pieces leading up to his death. 

I won’t get into it all now because I don’t want to get gloomy on you, but letters from this period definitely sad to read.  From the looks of things Hector Senior was caught in an unhealthy perfect storm of tropical illness, work that was taking him on insane trips–at one point hitting 20 countries/islands in 19 days!– and a drinking problem that was beginning to get out of control.

From what I gather, he was by no means a mean or sloppy drinker, more just someone who after years of living that era’s lifestyle–particularly that of a social business man where a few martinis at lunch, a few more at dinner, scotch at cocktail parties was the norm–somewhere along the way had crossed that invisible line.  As someone who clearly enjoys his beer, I always wonder if I’m pre-destined to follow the same fate (as you can see from some of the posts, it obviously hasn’t detered me though).

You know what’s funny is that until I was 17, I thought he had died when a car fell on him while he changed a tire.  I’m sure I was told the real cause but somewhere along the line as a kid I had made this up as the way it happened.  It wasn’t until I got caught drinking in high school and during the ensuing discussion a reference was made to “…what happened to your father.” 

I’m sitting there wondering what’s a car dropping on someone got to do with getting caught drinking by that f#%&ing rat Louie?  (can you tell I still harbor a grudge over that one?) and then I find out the real reason.  Weird.

Anyway, I don’t want to drag this down because from what I’ve learned about Hector Senior is that even to the bitter end, ‘dragging things down’ was something he never did.  There are stories of him still the life of the party (sans alcohol) at a stint in a rehab clinic.  Then again, sometimes it worked out the wrong way–like when his AA sponsor came over and the two of them proceeded to have a grand old time getting liquored up together. 

The person I do feel for during this period though is my mom.  It seems it was a year or two rollercoaster ride–moments of hope that it was turning around, followed by inevitable relapse.  And then to finally lose him–she only 29 with two kids, one of them a newborn.  Wow.  I can’t say enough about her.  I think Book #2  and 3 deserve to be about that amazing woman.

—

So…

How about an espionage palate cleanser so as to not leave this post on a down note…

Hector Senior’s Colombian time adds a little more to the CIA  intrigue I mentioned before–there are numerous mentions of troubles going on here…him having to pop off somewhere in the country or off to Chile for some vague business.

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but man, the number of references throughout his travels to coups and curfews…and a tendency always to end up “selling ad space” in the dodgiest areas…they start to add up.  It may be coincidence, but whereas I used to think it was a stretch, I’ve now moved from ‘maybe’ to ‘feasible’ to ‘I’d be surprised he wasn’t’.

One other palete cleanser…on a trip here his visa wasn’t up to date, so he needed to go to the Venezuelan Consul in order to get a permit updated before getting back into VZ.  The consulate refused to grant the permit, so he left and just restamped a new date onto the old one.  When he got back to VZ, the official looked at his documents, took him aside and asked him if he was aware that the minister who supposedly signed his papers last week had died last year?

Hector Senior said he thought that was most interesting.

And as always…he slipped on through.

C

Recognize these guys? 

Well, you know the short guy.  The tall, metallic, long haired dude in the back you may or may not depending on your soccer IQ.  It’s Carlos Valderrama, the captain of the 1990, ‘94, and ‘98 Colombian World Cup teams, known as probably the greatest Colombian footballer ever.  You won’t get an argument from anyone here in Santa Marta, the town he grew up in.  Here they remove the Colombian qualifier, and he is ‘the greatest footballer ever’.  Even a relative non-follower of soccer like myself recognized the long shag of blond locks.  I don’t know what they used on the statue to do the hair, but it’s a classic. 

This is outside the Santa Marta stadium where the local B-league or C-league team plays.  At the last minute, we met this kid, also named Carlos, who is a journalism student and he offered to take us to the game.  Actually, he offered to take us to two soccer games.  This one and his sister’s junior high game.  We opted for just the one.   Three  foreign guys lurking around the sidelines as a bunch of 12 and 13 year old girls played soccer?   Not sure that would go over so well with the Colombian soccer moms. 

Here’s the Santa Marta game (my memory in forgien languages is terrible so I don’t remember the team name).

The fans are intense.  A large portion of them spend the entire, and I mean entire, game jumping up and down, chanting and singing.  And when they score.  Holy. 

I loved their version of the Lambeau Leap.  The home team scored and the player ran to the chainlink/barbwire fence that separates fans from the the field , leapt up onto it (the chainlink portion) and started madly rattling it, as fans on the other side leapt up on it and did the same, but even more frenzied. 

Our guys won 2-0, but, since we found out about the game so late, I wasn’t able to bet in time.  Too bad because I would have bet on the home team for sure. 

So…remember these guys?

That’s right.  Me and the statue himself.

Any other situation and you couldn’t pay me to go up to a pro athlete and ask for a photo or an autograph.  Not Jordan.  Or even Bird.  Not even my man, Doug Flutie.

Alright, maybe Doug Flutie.

Here though, when the other Carlos told us Carlos Valderrama is a part owner of the team and was at the game, I went for the photo-op.  As you can see I’m in the classic, ‘no, no, you have to hold the button for it to clic-’ pose. 

El Pipe, as he is known, couldn’t have been nicer.  Thanked me in English for coming to see his team play.  So I thanked him in Spanish for coming to play in the states (other Carlos had mentioned he had played MLS at the end of his career), or at least I think I thanked him.  I fumbled through something like ’Me gusto cuando tu…ah shit, what’s the word for play? Playar?  Maybe jugo-something?  No that´s juice.  Maybe-  Jugar!  I can’t believe I just remembered that.  That’s freaking amazing.  Score one for the BFA St.Albans school system.  But how do I say it in the past tense? Jugared?  Jugando?  And I wonder if I should be using the tu or usted , I mean he may find it impolite if I presume-ah shit, he’s looking at me like I’m a crazed fan, I better spit something out…jugar  por Tampa Mutiny’.  

He smiled.  So if I screwed up, I didn’t screw up too badly.

—

After the game, we ended up at Carlos’ house.  The journalist student Carlos that is. 

And in what was about 5 weeks in the waiting, I finally got an answer to my Ollie question.  While we sat on their porch, his younger brother was practicing his skateboarding and after observing the technique carefully, I think, with a little practice, I’m ready to nail one now.

—

My father spent a lot of time in Colombia during the period they lived in Caracas.  He spent a lot of time in a lot of places actually during that period.  His work was bouncing him through a whole host of Latin American countries, as well as up to New York now and again.  There’s a poker story that happened during one of these New York flights that I came across.  He was flying up in the company plane with a bunch of the bigwigs and everyone was playing poker throughout the flight.  It seems the top dog was getting crushed by the time they reached NYC, so he made the pilot circle for a few more hands.  They kept the holding pattern for an hour til the exec’s luck turned.

Around this time though, I gather that all that travelling had lost its allure.  He was starting to get sick and the constant bouncing from one country to another, and all the inevitable social obligations, etc involved were not conducive to his health situation.  As to what he had, there seems to be no certain answer.  The doctors weren’t sure…I’ve seen mention of tropical fevers…malaria…Hepatitus.  Whatever it was, his bouts with it were starting to kick in during this time in South America.  This next part is common knowledge within the family so I don’t feel like I’m leaking some family secret or something…it was just another part of his life…a pretty common fact in a lot of families.

He was a bit of a drinker.  More than a bit.  And when he started to get sick, he was told by the doctors to stop as his liver wasn’t in great shape.  He didn’t. 

Things would start to get worse.

Took awhile to get here, as that bus trip over the border from VZ was comically slow.  The route I took was via Maracaibo, an oil town in the Northwest corner of the country.  It was about 10 hours to there, and then the next, I don’t know, 5? 7? hours was a slow slog through a succession of police checkpoints, bribery stops, and enough speedbumps to warm the heart of even the most protective of suburban moms.

At most police checkpoints we merely had to slow down before being waved through; others they did a cursory check of the luggage area.  Once in awhile though a gun-toter would come aboard and check passports or papers.  Only 3 of them asked for bribes.  Actually, let me re-phrase that, only 3 times were the requests serious enough that the locals deemed them bribe-worthy. 

It was nice to have a bribe liaison otherwise I’d have been clueless.  When a particular cop or national guardman was deemed bribe-worthy, one of the passengers would collect 2 or 3 Bolivars from everyone on the bus.  Mostly these were short little stops , but one time we waited about a half hour because some guy didn’t have papers, but also didn’t like the amount the cop was asking for in order to look the other way.  We were at a stalemate.  So everyone stood outside the bus smoking cigarettes until finally the cop either got bored or our guy ran out of cigarettes and the thing was resolved and back on the bus we got. 

No, this wasn’t us.  There seem to be two types of South American bus drivers…the plodders and the mad passers.  The former woudl like to be the latter, but they’re stuck in a beater with little power.  The latter will pass at any and all chances…pedal to the floor, rounding a corner, with another bus coming the other way being the optimum time to do so.  They have this unyeilding faith that they can always squeeze back just in time. 

But, as you can see above, all of us overestimate ourselves at one time or another.

—

At the border, after paying the departure tax (with all the mini-bribes and fees, it’s like taking the I-95 from NYC to DC, just minus the Easy Pass), then you get off the bus, make your way by foot to get stamped out of VZ…

And then walk the no-man’s land over to here to get stamped into Columbia…

Once there you get back on your bus on the Colombian side, provided it’s still there.  Our bus ened up picking up a couple dudes who had been left behind when their bus left them.

Another 3 or 4 hours later I was in the coastal city of Santa Marta, along with Kevin and Ragu, the Canadian guys.

Here’s home for a couple days…

And here’s dinner…

I don’t want you to think this trip is an endless stream of boozy nights, but yes, I have had to tip the occasional beer for research purposes. 

This was one of those research nights.  I mean, if a Colombian beachtown doesn’t call for a cold beer, then I don’t know what does.  And a cold beer calls for some music.  And some musica en Colombia calls for…

…that’s right…

Shakira, Shakira…

Thus after a little wrangling, the discoteche (I use that term liberally) manager let me take over the sound system for a few songs.  Cliched or not, I was in Colombia and my night wouldn’t be complete without some “Hips Don’t Lie“.

As you can see, Kevin too was doing a little research of his own to test Shakira’s claims.

I think he’d be the first to attest to the fact that Colombian hips in fact do not lie.  Rather, they slap their palm on the bible and solemnly  swear to tell the the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

FYI…I vetted this picture with Kevin before posting in case their was a Toronto girl out there who might not appreciate the verisimilitude of Colombian hips as they pertain to her boyfriend. 

Also, I figured if he passes the site on to his parents–who are probably worried about their son and Ragu travelling through Colombia–they can rest assured that their son is alive and well…obviously, very well. 

(Somewhere in Canada right now is a proud father…but he’s also probably thinking to himself, why, WHY didn’t I go to Columbia when I was 24 and single?).

I was beginning to wonder if I had another win in me. 

Not sure if you noticed, but I had updated yesterday’s post a couple hours before the game because I found a straight up bet on the VZ team instead of the Even Run bet.  As it turned out, I would have won either way, but the straight up bet made it more exciting to watch.  The Even bet wouldn’t really have mattered until the last inning.

I know I’ve hit the travel wall, because even after the win last night, I woke up today with zero desire to move to the next destination.  Not only that…I woke up dreaming about Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon from PTI, breaking down the Phoenix Suns. 

When you´re in South America dreaming wistfully about two bald, middle-aged dudes you know you´ve hit a wall.  I´m amazed at the people out here travelling for a year or two.  More power to them.  Two months appears to be my line of demarcation.

Don´t think I´m about to hop on a plane back to the states today or something.  There’re less than 10 days left and I’m sure I’ll get a second wind (expecially with a friend of mine–Rooney–making the trip to Colombia to join up for a few days), but just for one day, man could I have gone for 8 hours on a comfy mattress, a Starbucks, an H&H bagel and a newspaper where I can make out more than three words a page. 

And maybe even the PTI guys in the background…

—

I watched the game with some Canadian guys I had met the day before, and they jumped on the VZ bandwagon once I told them that dinner and drinks were on me if they beat Puerto Rico. 

The two guys left and right of me, Ragu and Kevin, I’ve hung out a bit with and are great company.  They’re from Toronto and big Raptors fans and it was the first time on the trip I’ve been able to talk serious hoops with anyone.  Maybe that’s what got me itching for home.  I don’t think I’ve gone this long without playing a pickup game since I was 8.   Hadn’t realized how much I miss it. 

—

I just remembered….I was going to talk about the CIA today.

One fascinating thing about my father’s passports is if you match up the dates he was in certain places and what was going on there at the time.  The conspiracist in me (and my mom) has always wondered if he was doing more than just working for Time-Life.  When you consider he was in Vietnam as things were heating up there and Cuba right around the Fidel revolution, not to mention a whole host of other ‘business’ trips to 60’s hotspots, you can’t help but wonder. 

I haven’t done a whole lot of research on it yet, but during that time period, apparently American international companies like Time-Life were often willing to work with the US government.  I’m not saying he was pulling James Bond hi-jinks, but information gathering?  Or liason?  Seems feasible.  I mean, you start to wonder what a guy selling ad space for Time-Life magazine is doing running around areas of Vietnam in 1964 that probably had a subscription rate of, oh, three.  Being Mexican too wouldn’t have hurt, as he wouldn’t have aroused suspicions as much as an American would.

I bring this up now, because while talking to David and Walter (the friends of his from back in the Caracas days), they offhandedly mentioned that so-and-so who was in their poker group was in US intelligence and another guy was working with a European government. 

I started asking questions and it turned out that both Walter and David had been approached about recruitment back then.  They were working in Caracas for large American companies and had extensive local connections, so were approached about doing little things like getting payoffs into the right hands, etc, etc. 

They couldn’t say for sure about Hector Senior, but seeing as all the others were either involved or had been approached about being involved…it makes you wonder.

If I have time later I’ll write out some of the dates, places and what was going on historically there at the time, so you can judge for yourself.  Also, I don’t know if I can find anything out, but when I get back to the States I plan on trying to dig a little deeper into this angle.

Okay, today’s topics…(actually yesterday´s topics…for some reason it didn´t post last night)

Beisbol, shabbats, currency rates, Cuba and duck mixups.

But I’ll save the CIA for the next one.

—

Since Cuba and currency rates go hand in hand, I’ll start with them. 

One would think that it would be a breeze getting into Cuba from Venzuela given los presidentes involved.  That was my thinking at least going into this part of my trip.  Seeing as it’s illegal for US citizens to go, I figured with all the animosity from PreZ Chavz that he would practically be  airlifting in  any US citizen looking to defy the government embargo.  Turns out you’re limited to one airline and the price is exhorbitant for a foreigner. 

The official govt-manipulated exchange rate effectively makes everything here 3 times as expensive for anyone changing dollars as it should be.  If you go the black market route you can get a much better rate.  Unfortunately my stash of US dollars is running lowI can´t go that route and istead am relying on ATM withdrawals which kick out local currency…at the crappy rate.

Amazingly Caracas is the most expensive place I’ve been on this trip.  You could get by cheaper even in Paris.  Which gives Caracas the unenviable combo  of being expensive and dangerous. 

I’m happy to do cheap and dangerous.  Or safe and expensive.

Not so keen on expensive and dangerous.

With fees and departure taxes tacked on as well, the Cuba ticket is already pricey.  Now triple that and it’s way out of my price range at this point in the trip.  I did consider saying, screw it, and putting it on a credit card–I mean how many chances do you get to go to Cuba?—but even that’s out fo the question as they wouldn’t take a US credit card for the purchase.

So, looks like I’ll have to save Havana for the sequel.  

Bummer because I had looked forward to betting on the Cuban national team in the World Baseball Classic that’s currently playing out.  On the plus side, VZ is still alive and I’m going to put a bet on them their next game (note added today…Caracas has turned out to be not exactly the best place to find a bookie.  Straight robbery would likely be my BEST case scenario, so this go around I´m using my online site.  They don´t have the line for VZ against puerto rico, probably because one is too big a favorite but I can get a bet on Total Runs Scored being an Even Number.  I like the 50-50 nature of it as well as the fact even if someone is getting blown out the outcome is still in the balance to the last out.)

Okay, that’s Cuba, beisbol and loan shark-esque exchange rates.  Now for the Shabbat…

I’ve been terrible about pictures here in Caracas, so I don’t have any from it, at least not until Arlene emails me the ones she took.  I do have this picture of David and Arlene–the couple that my parents hung out with here back in the  60’s.  Their hospitality has been legendary. 

This particular picture is after they took me out for dinner to celebrate my birthday the other night.   And David refuses to let me get around the city on my own; instead insisting on sending someone to pick me up and drive me around.

Here they are back in the day. 

David is the guy to the left, leaning back.  Arlene’s upper right, next to my father giving the toast.  My mom is two to his left.  Walter, who I’ve also met here, is the guy looking up at the camera.  He, David and Hector Senior used to have a weekly Monday night poker game (coincidentally ours too,  back when I first lived in NYC).  It’s interesting what random things stick in peoples minds–the last recollection Walter has of my father was lunch together and a worm crawled across his lampchop.  Then again, eating wormy lampchops is something that would sear its way into my brain too.

One of my favorite stories I heard from my parents’ time in Caracas was when at a cocktail party they were talking about my parents´ recent trip back to Vermont.  My mom was telling the assembled group that my father had been hunting with my Uncle and they had shot something like 10 ducks.  Nothing about this would have stood out had she been relaying this story in, say Mexico City.  But the word for duck that she used; in Venezuelan Spanish, I guess it’s slang for homosexual.

—

The other night David and Arlene continued their hospitality by inviting me to Shabbat with their family–which included their four children and 12 grandkids (with an odds-defying 11 boys).

Apparently, there are no rules against having an agnostic at a Shabbat, so there I was drinking manashevits (?) wine and chomping on the challah bread.  My Hebrew’s a little rusty though so they were spared from being subjected to my singing.

I had a blast.  And ate like a king.  I think I’m going to have to give my buddy, Adam, crap when I get back for never having invited me to one all these years.  Speaking of my Jewish amigo, I want to congratulate Laurie and him on their engagement yesterday.  It´s about freaking time.  I´ve been paranoid that I would blow the secret to LAurie, as I´ve known he´s had the ring for the last 3 months.  It´s actually the real reason I had to leave the country for two months.

—

One side of me is tempted to  stick in Caracas for awhile–I have standing invites for a trip to Los Rios, another to an island called Tortegas I think, a Peter Gabriel concert and a round of golf, among others. 

Caracans sure don’t lack for hospitality. 

But time is ticking on the trip, and I’m already shedding countries, so I’m going to grab a bus up the northwestern part of VZ and head into Colombia overland.  Check out what the US state dept has to say about the border crossings.   

 http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1059.html#safety

Obviously they have to err on the side of caution, but it does make me wonder if I even need to bet baseball this segment.  The bus trip should be gamble enough.

 Why, you ask, do I have a picture of the quintessential American chain restaurant leading off my first post from South America?

Good question.

Simple answer.

I never turn down a free meal. 

I arrived in Caracas following a nearly 24 hour travel day thanks to a backtracking Frankfurt connection and an engine leaking fuel.  Not that I’m complaining…when the alternative is running out of fuel halfway across the Atlantic, then by all means, take your time, Lufthansa.  It’ll take 5 hours to get us a new plane?  Knock yourself out. 

By the way, now that I’m a good 15 flights into my trip, it’s probably a good time to tell you…I hate flying.  I mean hate it.  I’m the guy next to you having a near seizure every time some turbulence rattles the plane.  Well, our new plane–while not leaking fuel–had the structural makeup of orgami.  The thing was shaking and creaking like it was going to fall apart with the slightest touch of turbulence.  And then, just as I finally come to terms with the creaking, one of the stewardesses sprints by and disappears behind the curtain separating us from first class. 

There are a lot of sights that don’t usually bode well, and a stewardess bolting toward the cockpit has gotta be one of them.  As I waited for the pilot’s annoucement that we were about to pull an Oceanic 815, I looked across the aisle at the woman seated near me.

“She was running, right?”

“Looked like a run to me.”

“Can you think of any good scenario where a stewardess needs to run up the aisle?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither.”

Seeing as I’m writing this, nothing obviously happened (sorry to have built that up and not given you the payofff of a plane crash or at the very least, me peeing my pants), which is good.  But still.  It should be rule #1 in flight attendent school.  Never Run.  I mean, I’m sure the dude in first class needed his fresh baked chocolate cookie ASAP, but you just scared the crap out of about 50 coach classers, lady.   Maybe a purposeful stride could do the trick next time?

But back to TGIFriday’s. 

Soon as I got in from the airport, I called this couple who were friends with my parents back when they lived in Caracas.  We set up a time to meet the next day and then the husband, David, asked where I was.  When I told him, he said, great; there’s a TGIF about three blocks from you.  I’ll tell them you’re coming.

Uh, okay.

Twenty minutes later, when I walked in the door, the host asked if I was Carlos Hill. 

“No, but close. ”

“But you’re friends with David?”

Friends is a bit of a stretch seeing as I hadn’t even met him yet, but I said, sure. 

As it turned out, David and Arlene own a couple Friday’s franchises in Caracas and I got the Friday’s VIP treatment as I watched the Venezuela-US World Baseball Classic game.  (I think I just found my next bet by the way).

There are obviously some serious safety issues around the city because everyone is constantly telling you to watch out and to stay off the streets at night, to the point that David had told the manager to have a valet guy walk me wherever I was going. 

I said I was fine, but they insitsted.  Once we were a couple blocks away I told the valet guy I was set and he could go back, but I noticed he kept following me, just now from about 20 feet back.  Boss said follow.  He was going to follow.  He didn’t want a mugged gringo on his watch.

Which is a good segue I suppose to this…

I saw my first ever knife fight today.  I was in line buying a bus ticket for when I leave Caracas, and right next to me two guys start yelling at one another.  Ho-hum.  Seen it before, right?  Someone probably cut someone and-

 All of a sudden the guy whose back is to me edges to his right and I see the knives (or more like shivs).  No exaggeration, this is at most ten feet away. 

Suddenly one guy lashes lightening quick and jams the blade into the other guy’s arm.  Immediately the latter is in shock…he doesn’t even try to yank it out.  He just sort of stares at it while the stabber starts sceaming something in Spanish, looking around at the rest of us, as if to ask if anyone else wants some.

I good; thanks for asking though. 

No cops in sight and the stabber walks off.  Five minutes go by and still no cops.   By this point the stabbed guy is on the ground and has a group of people around him trying to offer help, but no one dares–I guess–to pull the blade out. 

As I’m watching all this, the guy who was behind me in line and had seen me struggling with my Spanish trying to find out where the bus would be leaving from, offered to show me where the gate was that I needed.  It’s a weird dynamic here…to a person everyone talks about the dangers here, but then go out of their way to show that there’s another side to the city.  Even the Air France woman that I met on the minibus into the city from the airport insisted on getting me to the subway (bought my ticket even!), then took the subway past her stop to make sure I got off at the right stop, before she then she backtracked.

—

Sorry, got off on a few tangents.  I’ll tell you about meeting David and Arlene and their recollections of my parents in the next post.  

Here’s my parents’ apartment building though from back then.

And the view across the street….

I’ll be here in Caracas a few days.  My itinerary after that will depend on whether I can score the flight I wasn’t able to book back in the states.  Hope so.  I keep thinking of Warren Zevon…

I was gambling in Havana/I took a little risk/Send lawyers, guns and money/Dad, get me out of this.

First things first though…Tonight I have a shabbat to go to. 

Who’d have thought I’d have to come all the way to Caracas for my first shabbat. 

And to be perfectly honest? 

I really don’t know what one is.

I could look it up, but I hate ruining surprises.

Using that little black book I found in the chest with the passports and other memorabelia of my father’s, I traced what could have been a hypothetical night out for one Hector del Prado  in Paris circa 1963.  Places definitely have a long shelf life in Paris, so I had a ton of ones to choose from.  A majority of the cafes, bars, restarants listed in his book are still here 40 years later.  And were probably around for 140 before that.

So picture the scene…a young, fluent-in-French, single Mexican charmer on the loose in Paris…

And then there was my father.

(Just kidding.  The only one of the above that applies to me is ’single’.  And maybe Mexican…if you count the whitey-Vermont-gringo version).

Up first…an apertif at Cafe de Flore…

Then maybe dinner here with a stunning view of Notre Dame (and perhaps also a stunning view of the French girl I’m sure he had in tow by now)…

 Maybe a post-dinner walk along the Pont Nuef for a view of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower in the BG. 

Then for some of Paris’ topless cabernet revue at the Crazy Horse Saloon…

Topped off with a night cap here…

And then, depending on how the night transpired, a stop here the next day for–in his words, jotted below the listing–”onion soup after a rough night”…

Since today’s entry is photo-centric, here’re two more for you.  Here I am at Sacre Couer overlooking Paris my first morning here.  Looking pretty bedraggled after not having bothered to go to bed after arriving late from Thailand the night before. 

Not a great view up there because the weather’s been crap, but I did get to see this guy:

Quite possibly the world’s most talented lip-syncing, guiter playing-puppet puppeteer.  I don’t know how much competition there is in the field, but this guy’s going to be tough to beat.  The guitar licks and puppet’s mouthing were dead on, and he worked a repertoire running the gauntlet from James Blunt to my personal puppet-playing favorite, Rage Against The Machine.

I tell you, one seriously starts to think they may be having a hallucinatory episode when watching a puppet lip sync, “Ya either drop the hits like de la O, or get the fuck off the commode“ atop Montmarte, with the world-famous view of Paris in the background, and tourists from all over the world swirling around you…all the while you’re riding 42 hours without sleep wondering “wasn’t I in Bangkok yesterday?”.

—

Didn’t get a chance to upload those photos before blowing out of France, so I’m sending this post from Venezuela.  Just got into Caracas which was home for my mother and father after they left Manila. 

Oh, and it’s was home for one other del Prado too.  Just weeks before arriving in Caracas, my older (but far from old) sister decided to pop out and join the fun.