Two in a row?!? It can't be!

Actually, it can. I told you I don't have much to do, so I'm trying to stay committed to this blog for at least a few days. After a long time of saying I should do it, I finally went to a crossfit gym today. Rather than typical weightlifting, as I've been into for a couple years now, crossfit basically aims to get you into top shape in every sense- strength, endurance, speed, flexibility, agility, power, etc. I would say 8 of about 12 people in the class were women, and so naturally I thought I was gonna be the man and show everybody whats up. Wrong. I got my ass kicked. My endurance is awful and I'm SOOOO slow. This dainty little 30 year old woman made me feel like I was walking when we had to do sprints, so needless to say, I'm going to get into crossfit so that never happens again.


When I left off, we were in a stranger's truck in the middle of nowhere in Bolivia, about 3 hours away from civilization, surrounded by scrubby brush and some seriously horrifying looking cattle, with no idea of where we were headed or control of the situation (Dad, check on mom, is she still breathing? Good). Finally, we pull up to what appears to be a small campsite at a river basin, and there are about 15 30-foot long motorized canoes tied up to the shore. Our driver tosses our bags off the roof onto the ground and speeds off. As we struggled to grasp the reality of how absurdly hot it was outside, a small Bolivian man named Jose walks up and introduces himself as our guide. Let me take a second to describe Jose. He was about 5'5", had ripped muscles, wore a black sleeveless undershirt, camouflage cargo pants, had at least a couple gold teeth, a flattop haircut, big black combat boots, and a solid 10" knife hanging from his hip. If he had a machine gun, he would be Rambo. Jose led us and 3 young Belgian girls down to one of the canoes and told us to load it up with our stuff. At this point, after a flight, a bus ride, and a 3 hour Land Rover expedition, we thought we were already there. We were wrong.


We took the canoe for a casual 3 MORE HOURS up the river. As we headed deeper into the wilderness, the scary desert wasteland mentioned earlier quickly turned back into a semi-tropical forest, and we found ourselves surrounded by alligators, caimans (another type of alligator, just as scary), monkeys, capybaras (literally just 200lb guinea pigs), exotic birds, turtles, and more. Alligators/caimans were not a rare species, and by that I mean there was probably one of them every 10 feet or so as we traveled along...for 3 hours. It was pretty scary because you could see them swimming towards the boat and suddenly they would submerge and completely disappear. Truly horrifying. Here are a few pictures I took during the canoe ride:

Exotic bird (a hoatzin), a bad shot, but this thing was sweet. There were tons of them.

Adorable little monkeys. The little guy up at the front walked down that branch almost onto my shoulder, but when I stuck my arm out and touched his head he scrambled away.

If you click this for a larger view, you can see some capybaras hangin out by the shore, apparently trying to get snacked on by some gators.

Either gators or caimans, doesn't really matter, neither of them likes you anyway. I bet that if I took a picture every 15 seconds as we traveled along, 3 out of every 5 photos would have a similar number of gators in it. Also, you can see some turtles climbing on rocks/logs in the foreground.

Finally, we pulled up to our very humble abode- a camp sitting atop a small hill next to the river. The camp was comprised of about 3 sleeping cabins, a bathroom cabin, a kitchen/dining cabin, and a hangout cabin- all connected by catwalks raised about 6 feet off the ground "so that you don't stumble across gators in the middle of the night" according to Jose. Here's some more pictures:

Our sleeping cabin on the right, catwalks in the foreground, and bathroom cabin in the back left.

Our sleeping cabin. The green things come down as mosquito nets, of course.

The hangout cabin

View of the river from the camp

We had a blast exploring the camp for a while and getting a small amount of rest after a seriously long day. We were called into the dining cabin for dinner, where a woman had prepared an excellent meal for us. As she put the plates down on the table she said with a wink and a smile, "Cuidado con los monos" which means "Be careful with the monkeys". Now you would think that by this point, after all of the stuff we had been through and seen, we would no longer assume that everybody was joking with us and we would actually take people seriously with such a warning. Well we didn't. A few minutes pass and we start to hear a light pitter-patter on the roof towards the other end of the cabin. Suddenly a couple branches on an outside tree start swinging and we see some monkeys climbing around and being monkeys. As we are all watching these adorable little animals play around, their friends sent a flank attack from the other direction and stole our food right off of our plates. I didn't actually see it happen because they were so quick, but a girl shrieked and as I turned around I saw 2 or 3 monkeys scramble up a support post and climb out the window with some biscuits and veggies in hand. I'm pretty sure I saw one of them smiling and giving us the finger as he ran away, too.


The series of events that follows were some of the coolest I have ever experienced, so I'm going to save them for another post. Plus I might give Mad Men a shot before I pass out tonight. Cheers everybody, goodnight.

Gonna make a brand new start of it in old New York

Friends, family, confidants, and potential employers who found this blog from my LinkedIn page,


I'm moving back to New York. Yes sir and madame, you aren't just drunk, I did actually say I'm moving back to New York. My internship at WePay is coming to an end this Friday, and I have decided that there is much more for me, in many regards, in old New York. California has been a total blast, I made some awesome friends, saw and did some very cool things, learned an absolutely tremendous amount, and apparently, realized that I belong on the East Coast. As much as I wish things at WePay could have worked out better (because its an incredible company with some incredible people, and WILL be the next big thing), I have always been a firm believer in "Everything happens for a reason", and so I am entirely optimistic about what the future will bring me and extremely anxious about what my next adventure will be.


All of that said, let's tell some stories! Since my gym membership is now finished, I have nothing to do, so grab a beer or eight, this might be a doozie of a post. 


Back when I actually used to write things on this blog, I left off right as the boys and I had left Cusco, Peru and headed back to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. La Paz is an incredible city, sprawling across the valley and surrounding hills in much the way San Francisco does (a great sight at night when all of the lights are on). La Paz's physical infrastructure is a bit...dilapidated. Streets are filthy and super overcrowded, hundreds of wires look like giant bird nests atop telephone poles (see photo, click it for a larger view), people are peddling any sort of item they can acquire, and the smell of dirty, delicious street food pervades throughout. 


We spent a day or two exploring the city, particularly the Witch's Market, where I bought Marie and myself each a pair of the coolest pajama pants I've ever seen. We also headed to the Coca Museum, an entire museum dedicated entirely to the coca plant, famous for its role in the product of cocaine. Coca apparently is a very useful and versatile plant; it's used in Coca Cola, teas, for curing altitude sickness, in soaps, of course for drugs, and much more. The hostel we stayed in was awesome- a giant house with a courtyard, of course filled with drunk American and Australian students. Some of the BC girls that studied in BsAs with us were traveling as well, and we were fortunate enough to spend a few nights in the same hostel with them.


Here's where the cool part starts (don't give up yet!):
One of the biggest attractions of La Paz is "La Ruta del Muerte", or Yungas Road. This is considered the most dangerous road in the world, and was closed to all vehicles but pedestrians and bicycles back about 16 years ago. From the time of closing until the time that we went, about 1 year ago, approximately 27 people had died on foot or bicycle (I don't believe that estimate included the bus that fell off a cliff on an opened stretch of road about 4 days before we were there). So naturally, we road our bikes down it. There are tons of tour companies that will take you on a 4 or 5 hour tour along the route, after you sign a mountain of paperwork. We suited up in helmets, gloves, knee pads, elbow pads, etc. and set off with 3 guides and about 5 other daredevils on a nice cool morning. The route started on regular open highway roads, where one guy lost control and ended up covered in road rash, but it wasn't really dangerous (he sucked at riding a bike). A little later on it got sketchy. We went under waterfalls, around hairpins, across super narrow land bridges, and all on some seriously rugged dirt roads along massive cliffs. It was awesome. We got to the end and were completely exhausted, so we hopped in the van and drove over to a "spa" nearby. We got some good food, hung out by the pool, and took showers- much needed break after an intense ride. 


We got back to the hostel and had some celebratory beers (nobody died!) and went to bed. Because we hadn't had even close to enough adventure, we hopped on a plane at 6am the next morning and flew to a little place on the edge of the Amazon called Rurrenabaque. That is actually the airport in that photo on that Wikipedia page, it is not a joke. And this is actually the bus that came to pick us up and bring us into the town, although that photo makes it hard to see the bulletholes (also not a joke). The landing strip at the airport was literally just a strip of blacktop in the middle of a small rainforest. Here's a photo I took:

The bus took us into a small town that looked like a Vietnamese village from a Rambo movie, filled with Jeeps and Land Rovers, thatched huts, animals running around, and people playing soccer, of course. We checked in with our tour company and they told us to wait a bit for our ride to come. We headed off to find some food, and with a little luck, I found a friendly Bolivian woman who offered to make me some sort of meat thing with a side of some other kinda stuff, cooked on some sort of dirty fire-producing mechanism placed behind a tarp, designating the kitchen. It was scrumptious. After a few more minutes of waiting, our ride shows up. A stern-looking Bolivian guy grabs our bags and straps them down to the roof of his Land Rover, and we set off...for 3 hours into the middle of what appeared to be absolutely nothing. I used this time to crush through the end of The DaVinci Code, although I have no idea how I didn't throw up on the insanely bumpy dirt roads. We continued further and further until we were outside of the tropical-looking area and more into a desert-looking area filled with small streams and frighteningly ghastly cattle. Finally, we arrived...or so we thought. Stay tuned!