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Where to begin...

...well the last few months have been quite the life changing experience for me. Beginning the day after my last post I headed to the Rainbow Gathering. We took a boat ride through the jungle and landed on an island of sorts, greeted by the smiling faces of a dozen or so hippies, shouting, "Welcome home." Little did I know that these people would impact my life dramatically and I would soon come to call our little oasis home. There were plenty of discomforts, such as the thousands of sandflies that really enjoyed the taste of our imported blood, leaving you with hundreds of itching bites that would wake you up scratching violently in a primevil bloody orgasmic kind of way... Anyhow through those annoyances we became very close and I learned a lot about adaptability and my own abilities to endure. Everyone was very loving and through them I learned a lot and was able to release most of my demons that I have held on to for too many years, but lets not turn this entry into a spiritual diatribe, eh?

Unfortunately I became lazy about journalling and looking back on it I wish I hadn´t. A lot has happened and I have been all over the place; exploring jungles, getting paid to play with fire, practicing my spanish, and doing a lot of meditation on my life and where and how I want to live it. The details of these adventures and background for the cast of characters would require more time then I have over the next two weeks, so they will have to wait to find their life in ink in my memoirs. So with this being stated, I´ve decided to save the final half of my trip until I get back to share around campfires and dining tables in the company of my family and friends and the blurry line that divides the two more often then not...

...until next time...

Aventuras (Changuinola, Panama)

Journal Entry 1.20.10 6:00pm

I left San Jose this morning at 9:30 am, Panama bound. The busride was uneventful, yet comfortable enough, the border crossing was a bit time consuming but standard, but when I got to the bus station in Panama things got a little funny. So, the info I had on the gathering was pretty vague, I knew it was at a place called Finca 6 but that was the extent of it. I fortunately had the smarts to not just jump into a cab and head there and instead tried to explain what I was trying to get to in spanish which proved harder then I though. What I got across was along the lines of "a party for peace every year in different places all over the world." Luckily for me one of the drivers figured out what I was talking about and mentioned a guy named Orlando whom I remembered from the info. He called him up and withing ten minutes Orlando was there explaining to me that I would have to spend the night here with a friend of his and then we would leave in the morning as it requires a boat ride down a river to an isolated area next to the ocean! We jumped into a cab and headed to a random neighborhood and Orlando took off to explain the plans to some other gringos. So now I am sitting on the porch next to the neighboring police station getting eaten by mosquitos, watching small planes fly around crop dusting the numerous banana fields surrounding the house I am staying at. The fields belong to the Global Fruit Company which ships it´s bananas up to the states under the infamous Chiquita banana label. I love travelling. Well I think tomorrow should be the begin of an interesting aventura and I´ll let you know all about it...