Another Summer Come and Gone

My 9-year-old niece Callie recently reprimanded me for my blog being way out of date, so I’d better get to it.

My summer as an active travel trip guide for Backroads in Yellowstone/Tetons has come to an end. This adventure started out in the beginning of June with three weeks of intensive training in Salt Lake City in the ninja art of preparing elaborate meals for 25 out of the back of a trailer in the wilderness, driving a sexy 15-passenger van with trailer attached, and racking a bike on top of it in under 60 seconds. I spent training with a group of 27 other freshmen, extraordinary folks (below, with the backdrop of the Tetons) who were then scattered over the globe to places like Ireland, Hawaii, Portugal, Switzerland, Croatia, and the Czech Republic.

Humble and sophisticated self-named TBTGE (The Best Training Group Ever)

Backroads does high-end one week trips all over the world, and the Tetons and Yellowstone in Wyoming were to become my home for the summer. Welcome to my office:

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Lower Canyon Falls

Geothermal hot springs

And of course Old Faithful. After all these years there's still a man behind the curtain pushing the button every 90 minutes or so.

Don't mind me...

Buffalo: Truly amazing creatures with a fascinating history. Used to be 30 to 60 million of them roaming our continent just 150 years ago and we managed to almost wipe them out. Yellowstone spearheaded our first endangered species success story, protecting the 25 buffalo that existed in the park at the turn of the century and increasing their numbers to currently around 5,000.

An animal jam on the road

Yellowstone sunsets

Half of the trips I helped lead were family inn trips, half were family camping. The term “camping” must be qualified however, as purists may scoff. For the guests, a Backroads Deluxe Camping trip means being attended by a team of 4 Backroads leaders, three elaborate hot meals a day, wine and appetizers before dinner (albeit out of plastic cups), hot showers, a camp assistant to set up your tent and roll out your sleeping bag and extra-thick sleeping pads, and guided hikes, bikes, and kayaking trips through the parks. For me and my leader team it meant playing chef, bike mechanic, knowledgeable local expert, and entertainer of kids all at once. It meant 18 hour work days, cooking three meals a day out of the back of a trailer, and what’s popularly known among us as “permadirt”, the result of camping for a week with one shower, making for a layer of grime on your hands and feet that only starts to dissipate after your third post-trip shower. A camping high: I’m pretty mean with a dutch oven now...coffee cake, lasagna, chocolate mousse, roasted veggies. A camping low: The nasty black eye I got a few weeks ago from my face being crunched between the van and the van door due to an unfortunately-timed gust of wind. I told the guests that my co-leader Joel took some action b/c I wasn't pulling my weight around camp.

And then there were the inn trips...spas, long dinners with guests at nice restaurants, bison steaks, 600 thread-count bed sheets, hot showers every day. Nice.

The guests: Pretty much across the board wonderful and interesting folks. Somehow I've developed this assumption that I don't like kids/am not very good with them, yet interactions with the kiddos ended up being one of my favorite things. I met a 10-year-old who has a better vocab than I do (using "vile" and "parody" in everyday conversation), a 14-year-old pilot, and a kid with a photographic memory (kind of scary when you're only mostly sure about some of the details you're spouting off).

On the job with guests.

One of my most excellent leader teams: Joel, me, and Tanya

When not on trips I lived at the leader house in Jackson Hole, an old dilapidated ranch house with bunk beds jammed in every corner to accommodate the 20 leaders rotating in and out, and a septic and hot water tank designed for one. Its saving grace was that it was set on the banks of the Snake River, very convenient for frequent tubing excursions. Also went home twice, once for a wedding, once for the funeral of a dear family friend. Also had the opportunity to go out to Portland to see my brother John, dear friends Adriana and Monique, and travel bud Kieran.

Amazing Adriana, daughter of my close friend Monique, my former roommate and boss from when I taught in Guatemala in 2003. This girl melts my heart.

Some of my favorite moments this summer:

-Inner tubing down the Snake River with a group of my colleagues, putting in right from the backyard of our house, drinking PBR out of Twizzler straws. The 3 bald eagles that followed us much of the way down the river was icing on the cake.

-Leading a group of left-leaning Bay Area adults on a bicycle ride through the Tetons on a less-traveled dirt road and being left in the dust by VP Cheney’s entourage of 5 black Escalades (in town for a little R&R) and their subsequent heckling comments.

-Cooking a stellar meal for 27 people on my first camping trip.

-Singing and playing guitar around the campfire for guests.

-Getting paid to drive a company vehicle on my own from Berkeley, CA to Salt Lake City, on the way spending a day perched on a rock overlooking Lake Tahoe on a perfect day, and then watching a huge wind and lightening storm whip across the Nevada desert as I drove straight into it.

In reality it’s been a summer of both highs and lows, feeling the weight of needing to make some major life decisions, asking big questions about future and where I want to be, a clear sense of exhaustion setting in from a lifestyle of constant mobility, never sleeping in the same bed for more than a few nights at a time, living out of a backpack, feeling the urge to slow down just when everything seems to be speeding up. A lot of you may be saying "yeah right, Susie", but Susie may find herself with a permanent address sooner than later.

I’m blowing through DC right now for just a couple days and then am off again to Guatemala for several weeks! I’m taking a small group of friends and family down for a week, a trip that’s been in the works for several months, I'm very psyched for it. I’m doing it under the auspices of my own company to see how I like doing this sort of thing on my own, with a long-term vision of perhaps doing service trips for families with adopted Guatemalan children or with high school groups in the future, a possibility that could actually co-exist with this whole settling down idea. Lots of decisions to make, priorities to determine...watch this space.

Swimming with Jaws

Roatan, Bay Islands, Honduras

Sunset on Roatan from just outside our hotel

A hard day at work

Our last stop on the trip was a week of scuba diving in the Bay Islands of Honduras. All week the big plan was for the crowning glory of the trip to be a group shark dive after everyone got scuba certified. Get a load of this, they actually take you down 50 feet with a bucket full of bloody fish, the sharks catch a whiff from some amazingly far-off distance, come swarming around in droves, the bucket is released into the water and you watch the show as they go ape. No cages, no glass wall, just you and a swarm of 4- 6 foot sharks from straight out of Jaws, you could reach out and touch them if you wanted. Unbelievable.

Jaws in the flesh

And the anti-climactic conclusion to this exciting tale (for me, at least) is that while Nate, Armen, and Johnny were down in the depths experiencing said adventure watching the sharks thrash about, Susie was thrashing about in bed with strep throat and a 103 degree temperature, barely able roll over, much less frolic with sharks. Curses! All was not lost, however, as I did get to chalk another one up in my cache of Central American experiences...I finally got to experience the magical shot in the ass, seemingly the cure-all for any ailment down here, one I have heretofore avoided due to my usually stellar immune system. But I was feeling like a million bucks 24 hours later, so what can I say, it works.

The crew at sunset

Jess and me geared up for snorkeling...sexy!

As this chapter comes to a end, some new ones start. I'm back in the States, I got to sing in the wedding of two very special ladies these past two weekends; my sister Jen in Austin, and one of my college roommates Tracy in North Carolina. Right now I'm in Salt Lake City and heading to Yellowstone tomorrow for training for a sweet new gig leading biking and hiking trips for the summer with this great company, Backroads (www.backroads.com).

And in the midst of that, I'll be hosting my first trip on my own to Guatemala in September with a small group of family and friends to see how I like doing this thing on my own...

All exciting stuff, but it's been a pretty non-stop fast pace and and the idea of sleeping in my own bed and being in a familiar place with friends and fam for a bit sounds really good right now...

Hope all is well with all of you out there!

With my sister, the beautiful bride in Austin

And a couple of very handsome men at the Texas hoe-down (my dad and brother, Will)

(Most of) my best girls from college at Tracy's wedding

LEAPNow Trip Slideshow

LEAPNow Central America - Spring 2007

starring Armen Haftvani, Amanda Thorne, Jessica Lehrman, Johnny Bowman, Nate Marcus, & Susie Gaskins

Digging Ditches

We spent two weeks in the small, dusty town of Cofradia, Honduras working at this wonderful bilingual school called BECA that provides affordable bilingual education. The words "affordable bilingual education" are rarely found together in the same sentence. Being bilingual is one of the most viable ways to a better future for most of today's Central American kids, but usually it is reserved for society's elite. The school was started several years ago through a partnership of some community members and an American woman. Every year, a new team of volunteer English teachers come down and teach for a year and live in the community getting paid zilch, pretty phenomenal people. We passed through here on our last trip, so it was cool to get to catch up with the folks we'd spent time with in November.

With some of the volunteer English teachers

Our days were spent helping out in classrooms and digging a 10-foot sewage hole for the new bathrooms for the kindergartners. Glamorous, right? Local ranch hands would mossy on by and were quite amused at the site of gringos in their country with shovels in hand performing hard labor under the blazing sun. The irony was not lost on them, either.




My new nickname is "Susie Snacks" (as I'm always snacking) and my students have almost convinced me to open up my own line of snack food by the same name. A business idea to ponder.

We took a weekend trip to this spectacular 150 foot waterfalls, actually hiked down INTO them (deafening and borderline painful with the power of the water coming down) and got to hang inside them for a bit. Never seen anything like it.

Another highlight of this portion of the trip is being 45 minutes away from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the site of a most excellent mega-mall that we affectionately call "America". Shiney marble floors, vaulted ceilings, a massive food court with every fast food option imagineable, the works. Malls, which I usually loath, never looked so good after two months of blissful hippie simplicity and non-materialism. It's nice to be a good old consumer every once in awhile :).

Hitching a ride to the airport in Don Max's rad truck.

One of the more hilarious signs I've come across in Central America (and there have been many). "We sell firewood, popsicles, sugar water, and rabbits."

Nicaragua

Border crossing from Costa Rica to Nicaragua

We had a week of free travel where the students decide when and where we go, and they chose to spend the week chillaxing in Nicaragua. Easily overlooked, Nicaragua for me comes in a close second to Guatemala in its natural and man-made beauty, and historical and political interest quotient, was glad to get to head back. We headed first to Leon where the big item on the agenda was volcano boarding (literally surfing down a volcano through volcanic ash like you were snowboarding), only it didn't happen as the only tour was booked for the next two days and we had to be on our way. Bummer.

On to Granada, the oldest city in Central America...it's easy to see the vestiges of Spanish colonialism here.

Drinks the park

Gorgeous central park fountain by night

We stopped in at one of my favorite spots The Monkey Hut for a night, a beautiful spot on azure blue crater lake Apoyo.

Lago Apoyo from the Monkey Hut

Armen makes a friend

Rats, Sharks, and Sea Turtles

Last week was spent kicking it on a turtle preserve on a remote beach on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast. Our days were passed lazing in hammocks with the occassional beach soccer game with the locals and our nights were spent taking 3-hour shifts patroling the beach for massive endangered leatherback turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs before heading back into the depths. Lots of downtime...I came armed with an iPod chock-full of the mighty triumvirate of Lost, The Office, and Family Guy, my guilty pleasures, to help pass the quiet nights sans electriciy. God bless the video iPod.

Jessica living The Life

So the turtles...these amazing creatures can live upwards of 150 years and average 4 to 5 feet and lay 60 t0 120 eggs the size of golf balls. They face a bit of a battle against nature as well as humans...poaching became a big issue in years past (and still present). Turtle eggs fetch a pretty penny here as they're believed to have natural aphrodisiac effects, about $40 for a batch from one turtle, which is a good night's salary for these local folks. And if the poachers don't get them first, their nests oftentimes don't even survive in the wild from being washed away by the tide or eaten by natural predators. And even if the babies do get to the point of hatching and making it out to sea, about 1 in 1,000 make it to adulthood; the sharks are big fans of these cute little guys. So Costa Rica has recently become quite pro-active in protecting them and helping them bolster their ranks, which means snatching the eggs from the mama after they're laid and relocating them to a hatchery where they can be monitored and protected until they hatch.

On turtle patrol with Johnny and Jessica at some ungodly hour of the night

Although we enjoyed oceanfront digs, swimming was not much part of our daily activity due to the very shark-infested waters we shared our beach with. There were several reports of sightings alarmingly close to shore while we were there, which quickly cured me of my need to take a refreshing dip. And a word about the oceanfront digs -- really a crude shack we shared with ROUSs (Rodents Of Unusual Size for the Princess Bride ignorant) that came to visit every night. I like to think I have a high threshold for such things, but I did almost lose it the other night when I left for my three-hour turtle patrol in the middle of the night and came back to fresh rat poop on my BED. Not cool.

It was sweltering hot and thank God that coconuts abounded in this virgin tropical paradise, we kept ourselves cool gorging on cocolocos, or rather straight up coconut milk drunk straight out of the coconut with a straw. The group got really good at cracking open coconuts with a machete by the end of the week.

Cocoloco party

Hiking in to the beachfront camp

We've lost one of our ranks, Amanda, who decided to take the independent travel route and split off from the group to do her own thing for a few weeks. We were sad to see her go!

Ommmmm...

So this past week was spent on gorgeous Lake Atitlan, the part of the trip where we practice yoga every morning and meditate in the lotus position, looking out our third eye and chanting "ommmm" for hours on end in a huge wooden temple shaped like a pyramid, complete with incense, candles, and a guru with long black hair wearing flowly white robes. It's another world. Not your everyday experience and not for everyone, but it's one of my favorite parts of the trip. Balancing chakras, reading auras, lucid dreams, holistic medicine, and astral travel are all normal breakfast conversation around these parts. Welcome to San Marcos and The Piramides Meditation Centre. You have to see this place to believe it. In the past 20 years, this tiny little indigenous lakeside town as become a veritable hippie Mecca. People from all over the world have settled here to soak in the energy of this place and do spiritual exploration. They actually claim that San Marcos holds a unique energy and vibration due to energy meridians crossing at this very spot on the planet or something or other.

Who knows? But I do feel something special when I'm here. San Marcos is one of my favorite spots on earth. I started coming here on weekends every chance I could when I was a teacher in Antigua in 2003, usually by myself with nothing but a book and a single change of cloths, and with no other agenda than to soak in the energy of this place, read, eat great vegetarian food, and not talk to a soul, surrendering to my closet hermit inclinations.

Particularly interesting is that San Marcos is a random hippie Mecca against the backdrop of a intensely evangelical indigenous village. The two very distinct communities co-exist quite peacefully for the most part. However, the numerous churches around here have taken to broadcasting their daily services over loud-speakers that canvas the entire valley with competing congregations of a capella singers with excruciatingly poor pitch, piercing the otherwise exceedingly peaceful atmosphere several times a day. I guess a place can't be perfect.

I got to see my friend Nicola from England who was part of the fantastic group of people Nate and I met here on our first trip and have stayed in touch with since then. Nicola loves San Marcos so much she stuck around and now calls it home.

The Lovely Nicola

We absorbed a couple other members into our group this week, Nate's friend Tom and my old friend Neil who came to check out what all the fuss was about the Pyramids as well. Great having them along.

I ended up doing another show at this great venue in town, Blind Lemon's, a repeat gig from when we passed through here last October, lights, sound system and all, which is a rare thing around these parts. We packed the place out again and it goes down as another great memory. The owner of Blind Lemon's, Carlos Funk (whose "real" name is Charlie Smith or something mundane like that) pulled out his bass and accompanied me for a bit, very fun.

Doing my thing with Carlos

We even had a surprise guest appearance from Pieter and Chris at the show (courtesy of Nicola), our good buds from the last time we were here...in the form of a blown-up color photo taken at the last show.

Actual publicity for the show, funny.


The boys of the San Marcos dock, loading the lancha

A local fisherman on Lake Atitlan.

Now we've bid Guatemala farewell and just landed in Costa Rica. We head out tomorrow for a week working with endangered leatherback turtles, helping protect their eggs as they come up out of the ocean onto the beach to lay their eggs. Sounds pretty romantic, but in reality it means a lot of downtime in a really isolated place during the day and four hour shifts patrolling the beach back and forth, back and forth in the in middle of the night. Eh, not my most favorite part of the trip, but here we go. Then off to Nicaragua for a week of free travel!

Lahar

lahar (lä'här') n.

1. A wet mass of volcanic fragments flowing rapidly downhill. Lahars usually contain ash, breccia, and boulders mixed with rainwater or with river or lake water displaced by the lava flow associated with the volcano.
2. An avalanche of volcanic water and mud down the slopes of a volcano.
3. A destructive mudflow on the slopes of a volcano usually brought on by massive amounts of rain.

I would like to amend the statement proffered in my last blog, that in Guatemala when you see an erupting volcano, you go towards it instead of away from it and no one will try and stop you. I have officially experienced an exception to that rule.

A couple days ago our crew embarked on a popular two-day trek to one of Guatemala’s most active volcanoes, Santiaguito. As the volcano is far too active to summit, we camp at the base, the culmination being waking up in the middle of the night after the clouds have cleared to watch the fireworks show above as Santiaguito erupts every 20-30 minutes. If only we'd made it to base camp.

At the beginning of the seven-hour hike to our camp, we crossed over a frighteningly deep gorge that our guide Deek told us was formed 20 years ago by a massive lahar that ripped through the valley (see definition above). To give you an idea of its power, the lahar’s warpath tore straight through a church that still stands, now in two parts, on either bank of the gorge. (see photo below)



A few hours hiking through the grasslands, then uphill into thick, thick jungle towards Santiaguito. The skies began to open up after stopping for lunch. More thick jungle, more rain, more uphill. Finally only an hour to go, the skies were dumping buckets, we were exhausted and very ready to arrive at base camp and change into dry clothes. Still under cover of jungle, we couldn’t yet see the volcano, but started hearing short explosions every few minutes, informed by our guide Deek that it was the volcano doing its thing.

The rain continued beating down on us, and the uphill path we were scaling started looking more like a small waterfall at times. (And this is where I have to admit, I did kind of imagine I was Kate out of a scene from Lost, desperately tramping through the jungle in search of a secret hatch or running from the bad guys. Alas, Matthew Fox was nowhere to be found.) As we got closer to our destination at the base of the volcano, the intermittent bursts from the volcano changed to steady rumbling and eventually I could feel the ground vibrating beneath me. The bursts from the volcano seemed normal enough, but was this normal?

We finally approached a clearing at the ledge of the 50-foot gorge that separated us from Guatemala's most active volcano in the not-too-far-off distance, our first peek at Santiaguito. Deek was at the front of the group surveying the scene as we one-by-one gathered at the ledge before making the final 30-minute hike up the edge of the gorge to base camp. As I approached the clearing, I peered across the gorge and could see several small landslides tumbling down the steep terrain just across from us. Hmmmm. Suddenly, a usually extremely calm and collected Deek turns around and yells over the increasing rumbling and pouring ran, “Go back, go back! Go, go!” gesturing frantically with his arms and making for the trail we had just climbed up. I think the unnerving rumbling of the ground underfoot was enough to know something was not right, but especially considering Deek's usually collected manner and the new tone of urgency in his voice, none of us asked questions before turning on our heels and booking it straight down the mountain, 35 lb. backpacks and all, running on pure adrenaline.

Suddenly it didn't matter that we were exhausted and soaked to the skin. Rain was beating down harder than ever and the small trickle of water we had contended with on the way up just five minutes earlier was now a raging river that we had to basically wade through on our way down. It was a miracle there were no injuries.

We continued to hear the menacing rumbling for a good half hour as we distanced ourselves from whatever it was were were running from. We finally stopped and found out that there had been a live lahar approaching fast just around the bend in the gorge, apparently the first time in 10 years of doing these treks that a group has come upon one. Deek had seen it coming around the corner, a dark, angry cloud of mud, rocks, and water sweeping through the gorge. One of the other guides Landon had stayed behind for a few minutes out of a morbid curiosity and reported back seeing landslides from across the gorge and watched as a bizarre mixture of mud, water, ash, steam and rocks filled the 50 foot gorge in a matter of minutes, splashing up over the sides where we had just been. He said the power was unbelievable and that the ground underneath him was shaking so hard he doubted the ledge we had just been standing on moments before was still standing.

The even more frightening thing was that we were an hour behind schedule given a glitch when we stopped for lunch. We should have been at base camp by that time, with an almost non-existent escape route. Still kinda gives me the heebie-jeebies to think about.

The rest of the story is not quite as exciting, we finally reached a good distance, night was falling, and we somehow found a decent place to set up camp in the middle of a mountain covered with thick jungle where there really shouldn't be much clear, flat ground. But there it was, and there we stayed for the night. No volcanic fireworks show from this camp, but I think we'd just had plenty of excitement to make up for it and didn't mind a bit.

I like to think a little life-threatening experience every once in awhile builds character. At least that's my best attempt to frame this into a "teachable moment" for the kids. Right.

Some less-eventful parts of the trek...

And on a completely different note, photos from Semana Santa...