The 'I'm Not Posting' Post

This is a travel blog, I repeat to myself as I morosely stare at Pura Caitlin's stagnant screen. No one wants to hear about your naval gazing. Unless you're doing it in a rainforest with your life's possessions strapped to your back. Running from mosquitoes the size of pterodactyls. Or malicious Mayan spirits.



But what I have been doing is stridently awesome, if not as blog-friendly as the gypsy life. Namely, enjoying the summer in the company of those I love the most. Gena, that enterprising little devil with whom I've been besties since Sellwood Middle, '95, even initiated a little cross-blog documentation:



http://www.hungoverportland.com/2009/07/reader-submission-from-our-holiday-weekend.html



The digital universe has confirmed my existence! I drink sugary alcoholic beverages at one in the morning on holidays!



Oh, and you know what's cool? Knit graffiti. Renegade crocheting.




Dang P-Town, I think I love you...



Kissing you all over your Benson Bubbler,

C. Donohue

Home

That title should be followed up by one thousand exclamation marks because Portland, Oregon... oh Portland, Oregon. There is nothing like home, which you forget mightily when you are touring the globe because everywhere seems incredible, each new place an adventure mountain. But when you get home, I'm talking about home home, where every street is tagged with a memory and you run into your people at every gallery show, boat dock and hot dog stand- man, it doesn't get any better.


So I'm talking about Portland, just like the New York Times likes to do.

We took Sean's boat on a spin down the Willamette River yesterday, the strip of blue in the middle of my fair city. We ducked under the (still standing!) Sellwood Bridge and the Ross Island Bridge and just when we hit the Burnside Bridge we caught the strums of the Waterfront Blues Festival, the biggest one of it's ilk west of the Mississippi, so we anchored in with the rest of the lucky waterbound and hung out. Sunscreen, beers, heckling of the other boats... becoming one with the panorama.

Portland is the hippest city ever, ya dig? Like, we're reinventing the cool kid wheel out here. I like how the scenesters here are scruffybeautiful, like really pretty 1950's style dresses you dig out of the Bins (oh, you don't know the bins? You haven't truly lived til you've been up to your elbows in unwashed piles of societal cast offs in the Goodwill donation center. You pay for your stuff by the pound, people! And there I go talking about the bins again...).


I croozed First Thursday last night, yuppie downtown's excuse to get arty with it on a monthly basis. Me and a couple of dear friends walked through a parking garage to get to a sweaty staircase that took us to a sweatier artist's co-op on the top floor of the Everyday Music building on West Burnside. Talked to a "sweet and salty art folk" lady guitarist (holler Mindy! hope you're grooving on the blog), caught some coulda-been-colder drinks and prostrated ourselves on the hardwood floor. And you know, we're laughing...

And sweating like hell (humidity not being all that common in the land of the Perfect Summer) and rolling around on the wood being poor-as-hell rockstars. And I realized I have friends who know me and belong to me and that I'm not getting rid of, no matter how many times I take out that passport.

Which rocks,

Peace and Love,

CD

Bethesda, Maryland

It feels good to be back. In the States, that is. Hung in San Fran for a few days, but was way too excited with flush toilets and feather mattresses to blog to you right away. And in short order, I was scooped up by Peter Donohue himself to go on a truly luxurious East Coast foray to visit Grandma and Aunt Sara.

We flew Virgin Airlines cross country, in the first class cabin. The sensuous pleasure of this experience is beyond my powers of articulation. Let it be known that there were free Bloody Mary’s consumed and extreme levels of reclination.

I woke up in my own hotel room in Bethesda, the embodiment of “New Urban,” a place where corporate America can walk from office to lunch hour jewelry shopping and after-work drinks. All the architecture is post 9/11- downtown is a little like a mall turned inside out. On my rambles through this be-suited, tastefully highlighted reimagination of a city, I get asked a lot if I’m on my way to the beach. Barely free of the load of my backpack, I have little in the way of “polished outfits.” I feel clumsily subversive.

Maryland, or at least the Maryland immediately adjacent to our nation’s capital, is a upper class suburban sprawl of the highest order. Towns like Bethesda run into Chevy Chase runs into Rockville runs into inappropriately clogged highways and monolithically remote office parks. We drive from Grandma’s senior home, where we witness odd series of conversational fragments between stroke victims to my Aunt Sara’s lovely three story house, where my seven year old triplet cousins rule the roost with their Bermese mountain dog. Kisses are exchanged in on intergenerational cheeks and there is much catching up to be done.

Every once in awhile I sneak out to hang with my peer group- Jess and Jay, dear friends from the college years that are making a go of it in Washington, DC proper. Jay works for Bill Clinton and Jess is a defense contractor. They both live in wonderful apartments, easily affording tickets to baseball games and rounds at the bar. I am a hobo. We booze heavily and reflect wisely on the different paths that life can take you. They pay, mostly, for the drinks. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them.

I’m back in the country, sure, but there’s still plenty of journey to be had. Planning on continuing ‘Pura Caitlin’ until that settles down a little so no worries, my pet, because at least for the next few weeks I am

Yours!

CD

Cancun

Cancun, Burning Man called and it wants it´s noise pollution back. Man, you should really let people know when they check into your overpriced hostel that their kickin´ air conditioning system will be augmented by a non-stop stream of ¨DOOF DOOF DOOF¨ into the wee and then the not-so wee hours of the morn.

But that´s neither here nor there.

So the last stop of the trip! I cannot believe that this is where seven months of mayhem has brought us... Cancun, the Señor Frogged, high-risen, underaged pina colada center ring of the ugly tourist universe. I suppose it serves as a kind of decompression chamber for us on our re-entry into the States, although this is nothing like any America I´d want to live in.

But I can´t say we haven´t had a blast. The last week has seen some serious budgetary concerns on the part of Team Erik and Caitlin- some haphazard math left us with about 189 pesos per day between the two of us. A little disconcerting when your tent spot alone runs you 125. But we lived lightly, discovered the utility of red dresses and blonde hair when hitch hiking the Yucatan, sold our loyal tent to an interested Mexico Cityite, and came up on a few extra bucks for celebration on our last night in Latin America, hell, even enough for the bus ride to the airport.

Cancun gets a whole lot more fun with a six-pack of Sol. My only regret is missing the Lucha Libre fight that went down across the street from our hostel. Big, burly men grappling in superhero masks? Si hombre, los mejicanos son locos.

Mark my words, I´ll be back in Mexico before long. I´ve fallen in love with Oaxacan cheese and the phrase puta madre, yelled at a shrill pitch and high volume.

Sigh. But onward and upward! Thus concludes my last missive from abroad.

Over and out,
La Catalina

Fish Tacos in Paradise

The laguna our buddy Pete took us to on our epic Yucatan road trip. Glory be...

Last camp of the trip. Please note our cinderblock table and improvised tree-shelf in the upper- right hand corner.

He´s a man of many talents...

If you´re going to quit eating all animals for a few months, a Mexican fish taco is a great way to break the fast. Eat them at your campsite´s thatched hut beach joint, where the staff is always sleeping and everything, but everything comes with a lime. Delicious little cubes of fried fish and corn tortilla and salsa and FOUR alternative condiments on the table to speed your way... now this, this is living. Thank you Tulum, your grub is awesome.

I wish I could say the same about the Yucatan Peninsula in general.

This being the bell lap of the Latin American adventure, I am more broke with more miles between me and gainful employment than ere before in the life of Caitlin. We had carefully crafted a budget a few weeks ago that would get us to that June 19th flight outta Cancun without resorting to illegal vending or straying too far south of that line between backpacker and hobo.

And then we got out here, to the ¨Maya Riviera.¨ And we realized our backpacking trip had ended earlier than we anticipated. Cuz there´s no ¨budget travel¨ here.

An old man who called himself ¨Tasso Picasso¨ and sold his dubious oil pastel portraits of jungle lesbians on the beach told me the saga of Tulum. How once, long, long ago, hippies ruled this land and there was free camping on the beach and ¨lots of grass and naked girls.¨ Oh, the glory. And then the landowners got wise to the scene, and realized that while hippies had very little disposable income, yuppies had bunches. So they razed the camp grounds, put in concrete cabanas at prices the poi set could not afford and generally deprioritized public transportation.

And Tulum is still considered ¨earthy¨ by Yucatan Peninsula standards. Venture north and you hit Playa del Carmen, where Lacoste stores and your overweight uncle from upstate New York have taken the place of taquerias and fishermen. The beach is parceled out into ownerships by massive, all inclusive resorts who seem to be in a competition for who can build the most monolithic security gate. Venture further north and you hit Cancun. ´Nuff said. ¿Donde estas, Mexico? Sooo a bit of an odd place to spend the last weeks of a trip characterized for the most part by places where the McDonalds´arches don´t shine.

But don´t feel too bad for me. We went swimming in one of the cenotes that dot the Peninsula other day, the natural sinkholes that one person told me were the result of a meteroid impact on the area. We´ve managed to snag a pay-to-camp spot under some mangrove trees a few meters from the beach, where on most days the most taxing activity is stringing my hammock between the right palm trees. Yesterday we went snorkeling off a reef in our front yard and I communed with purple, orange and green parrot fish.

Oh, and did I mention that the real Tulum is right down the beach? The Mayan city, built from white stone on a sea cliff where craaaazy happenings are rumored to go down at night? Did I mention we snuck in for a midnight commune with the cosmological ancestors themselves? How did it go you ask?

I mean, I have to save some stories to tell for when I get back, guys. Buy me a beer in a few weeks and I´ll weave you the tale. ´Cause God knows I won´t be able to afford my own.

Love,
CD

Palenque

Chiapas, once you descend from the mountains where San Cristobol sits in it´s chic urbane sachet, is hot. Very hot. And humidity that likes to melt ladies of Celtic-Euro ancestry like yours truly.

But it´s a pretty, if moist, descent into the jungles. Your colectivo passes you through the heart of tierra zapatista, past the community-run schools and the caracoles, the seats of pueblo power that strike fear into the heart of Mexico City bureaucrats. There are homemade signs that tell you not to litter and federal government erected signs that tell you not to make your own speed bumps (why haven´t US neighborhood activists just done and made their own speed bumps?). We changed vans in Ocosingo, a tiny town where bloody shoot-outs went down between campesinos and their government´s army, all over the right to use the land their ancestors are from as they saw fit. From the road, I saw nary a plaque in commemeration. I was silently impressed.

And then we swam through the heat waves to the ruins of the Mayan city Palenque.

Like the lands of the Zapatista struggle, I was struck surprised by how much awe Palenque generated in me. It was like standing and looking at the Parthenon, so epic were it´s proportions. There are some sites that strike a chord somewhere deep in your soul, like touching on a treasured human archetype. This is one.

I liked the Temples of the Cross the best, which were constructed by some long-ago Mayan king each to honor a god, the glyphs on the walls designed to bridge god-time and Maya-time, looping them into the same continuum with the temple at it´s focus. I stared at one elaborate stelae for a long time in the blessed shade of one of the smaller temples and suddenly it´s meaning of sun worship became clear to me, sans explicatory map, sans bi-lingual sign. These Mayans, man, masters of disseminating information.

Plus, it´s deep in the jungle. The buggy, sweaty jungle. We emerged after our day at the ruins exhausted and gratified and ready for our jungle cabana.

Oh yeah, those. So Mom says I think everywhere I stay is ´super great!´ and I guess up to this point that´s been true but El Panchan, the hostel-jungle path-campout where the backpackers hang, was by far the most depressing place I´ve hung my hat in awhile. There was this elaborate hippie camp, Rakshita, that we´d heard about all the way down in Guatemala and when we got there it was deserted and run down and under construction and rainy and unloved... a jungle palace gone from it´s glory days.

I think I see a theme here. On to the Yucatan!

Love,

CD

San Cristobol de las Casas

Hey, do you like lychees? They are spikey, but you don´t eat the spikes, and inside you find a taut little white fruit that measures up within an inch of it´s spectacular outwardly appearance.

Also, we are in San Cristobol de las Casas. It was here that the Zapatistas, the Chiapan-Mexican rebel group (popularily referred to as the ¨first postmodern revolutionaries¨) took over from the national government in the mid 1990´s. They took over the city in the name of democracy at all levels of Mexican government, land rights for the indigenous and social justice in general. They are awesome. Nowadays they sell little black-masked figurines affixed to earring posts and on silk-screened T- shirts, which I find infinitely preferable to the ¨I Heart Tacos¨ t-shirts and it´s souvenier market ilk.

I could live here.

Love,

Sub-Commandante Donohue