Eject
3/17/20 – 3/21/20 All day gravel. We didn’t feel like riding, but we didn’t feel like staying in Futaleufú. It was overpriced and the uncertainty was causing the Europeans in the hostels to smoke at an uncontrollable rate. Tried to thumb it as trucks passed, but no luck. Road was much better than expected though.
Non-Euclydian geometry, Mandelbrot, and the infinite washboard paradox
The Coastline Paradox is the counter-intuitive observation that it is in fact impossible for a land mass to have a well-defined perimeter. The length of a coast is limited only by the instrument used to measure it. A longer and, hence, less accurate unit of measurement means a greater degree of cartographic distortion. For example:
Switzerland
6/16/19 – 6/23/19 “How many vehicles would you guess are in the average rental fleet?” “Dunno, maybe two hundred. Why?” “Well just look at all the sand in this car.” “So what?” “So there is at least a cup of sand in this car. All these vacationers dragging sand in from the beach. One cup
Artisan soap does not remove chain grease
6/12/19 – 6/15/19 After a morning of jokes and coffee and gallo pinto and rain and wandering the little foot paths of El Castille turning over giant jungle leaves to find giant jungle grasshoppers and having awkward misunderstandings due to different cultures and languages and the physical stipulations they put on one’s tongue; we boarded
Rio San Juan de Nicaragua
6/10/19 – 6/11/19 Nobody tenderfoots around in the country mornings. I awoke at 4:30 to stereos, motos, machetes chopping wood to stoke ovens for the day, men yelling to one another across the street, roosters, pigs, all the birds in the trees, and metal shop doors rolling up and slamming against the backstop. All of
Nica, part two
5/30 /19– 6/9/19 By the time we arrived in Granada, on the thirtieth of May, my rear hub was trashed. In the preceding three or four days I’d been hearing intermittent clicking; like a plastic fork being snapped in half. Eventually it became a persistent and oppressive grinding and I knew it was the bearings.
Nicaragua part 1: Purchasing power parity and the misty morning mistress
5/20/19 – 5/27/19 “She’s all yours if you want her.” “Come again?” “What’s mine is yours, you know” “We’re just cooking breakfast.” “Alright my man, scramble those eggs.” Derek was from Chicago. He had a small house in Granada with an extra room for rent. I’d met him at a bar and mentioned I was
El Salvador is a lawless abyss
5/11/19 – 5/15/19 It was pure morning. Dew boiled off tarmac. Sun slid up from behind strident peaks. Smoke wafted from roadside tiendas grilling chicken and tortillas and mixed with the humidity and scent of nature’s decomposing surplus of bananas and mangoes which gravity constantly plucked from trees and forgot on the ground. Cars played
Guatemala: Part III
5/4/19 – 5/5/19 I struggle to load my bike onto the little boat at the docks in San Pedro and out of the corner of my eye see the porter trying to put Soph’s bike on the top. “Por favor no.” He keeps doing it. He can barely lift it, he’s knocking the drive train
Guatemala: Part II – Learning about Spanish and colonization
4/27/19 – 5/3/19 The thing about learning a language is that at some point you have to begin saying things that are more complicated than “Where is the bathroom?” If you’re a first-worlder in Latin America, even with the observational prowess equivalent to that of a grown man with a third grade reading level, you