Unfortunately its been some time since i have posted anything legitimate on here. the good news is my good friend Duffer seems to be hanging in there despite the certain finality of his particular condition. Today i depart to see him, traveling once again in the environs of the instability that airline employee travel provides, that said , no better way to get around for cost and i have no trouble with continuing on in the classic format that i had once traveled in a ways back in youthful days.

Rooster's Do Not Lie

A rooster crows for the third time its 5am. Leaning outside the door in the courtyard of Tres Balcone’s I spot the alarm clock perched atop the low facing Ceramic roof line. He struts across the peak as if to announce what we are in for. His brethren have done the same here for some 600 odd years, speaking volumes, as if to say “you should have been moving 3 hours ago”. He would be right... Our host Francisco Alcoser, an amiable Peruvian man
is up sorting out are breakfast down the stone steps in a semi open kitchen. The mountain air smells sweet.

Welcome to Peru, Welcome to Cachora Peru, an idyllic village squeezed into a canyon bottom quite neatly as if stone, mud and brick boxes were mechanically pressed here by some giant hand. Looming in the distance out the bottom end of the canyon to the north is the Salcantay range, so Grand and enormous in stature with peaks ranging in and out of 22,000ft it makes the Rockies look like the foothills.

My Friend since University of Minnesota Rugby days is Jeff Lien or “Duff” as I know him, a nick name he picked up when as kids his younger brother Dan would flub the pronunciation of Jeff. The two of us have traveled to the far corners of Peru to venture into the heart of the Andes and Choquequairo (pronounced “shokeekerow”), a lesser known mountain top Inca ruin. Abandoned around 1530 it is considered to be one of the last holdouts of the Incan Empire, an Empire internally fractured by civil war with the inevitable arrival of Francisco Pizzaro and his merry band of gold diggers. Fortunately for Pizzaro not a lot of digging was required, just the taking. The Conquistadors spent little time with pleasantries forcing one of the more sophisticated civilizations of its time to head for the hills, literally, inhabiting villages teetering on cliffs of extinction. So remote is Choquequirao it will take two days of vertical foot travel to get there.

This is not your Machu Pichu. No exhaust belching buses, no camera on polo laden tourist, no glossy brochures, and no descendants of an ancient empire hucking t-shirts, in fact no one at all, just a few suspicious mules and the singularly inconspicuous trekker.

Welcome to America. May I take your order please....

I arrived back in country from South America last fall physically exhausted. I am sure i was suffering from "bad sleep syndrome," the fatigue you suffer while travelling has a direct relationship to the one you no longer have with a comfortable bed; Yours.

As i sat half cocked over a travel pack on an uncomfortable stretch of classic airport gate seating, the kind you can get hemorrhoids from just looking at, my mind faded in an out of what i had just experienced, a knee busting, lung searing, eye popping trek; Climbing in and out of a river bottomed Andean-furnace, Twice. I recall the sleep fatigue and factor in a percentage of the physicality. Packs, tents,and mules in the steepest canyon on the planet makes for some humility and sleep only at exhaustion, the kind where dreams are neither necessary or obliging.

Atlanta -Hartsfield Airport is a general whir as an entire army of business travelers weave in and out of each other all desperate to make a connection or find a place like myself, just to hurry up and wait. My mind wanders, reading becomes a pointless endeavor as my gaze is continually pulled from the page to the endless human flow. I adjust my view too the cluster of high concept shops. The gate for my connecting flight into Chicago is smack in the middle of a mini mall. There is the shoe palace, (use you imagination,remember Richard Reed?) the ubiquitous fancy burger joint/sports bar, more takes on pattied cow flesh then high def televisions bolted to the ceiling and the mobile phone/techno device kiosk where a pleasing dread locked sales girl will make you care about the color of your mobile device.

At the TGI/Apple/insert name of: famous pro sports "jock", which by the way is big, autographed and in a glass case on the wall, it's the Monday morning extension of Sunday football on every screen, except for the one in the back corner. Above the bus station droning along in all its pixel'ed glory, there is something a little different, seems there are a couple of wars going on, brought to you by Coca Cola.

I turn my thoughts to Jeff or Duff as i know him, wondering if my trekking companion and friend of twenty years was still sitting in Lima, Peru, i wondered if he was as sore and tired as i was. I know he had lost almost 15 pounds on the trek and had been bitten in the mountains by a tick of an unknown variety which at the time had caused us some concern, I was sure he was waiting for the right moment to make an escape, a harried taxi dash to the airport weaving in and out of 8 million people all trying to get to the same place at the same time. I left Duff at 9:oo the previous night to catch an earlier, separate flight. We said goodbye after a successful adventure at our hotel in Lima's version of the cul'de'sac. This one in particular, a Peruvian styled Palm treed safe zone microscopically wedged into a city that cares enough to arm everyone with a sense of unease.

I was pleased upon how easy my re-entry into the my home country was a mere two hours earlier. I passed through every gated check point with over a thousand soldiers returning from Iraq, my freshly renewed passport slung around my neck, not one major hiccup through customs. Unusual to say the least considering where i had just come from.....

"Greetings from my corner of a mad planet"

Seems the time has come for me to register in with the so called "In" crowd, the suspense was killing me anyway and the voices in my head were only getting louder. The basic idea here, is to keep getting to the bottom of it, Scratch the itch until quite frankly it gets a little bloody. I make no claim to know what the so called itch is nor do i truly believe in a bottom or a top for that matter. I have no prepackaged, predetermined outline. In short, I might not know just what the hell i am doing and the idea that at some point i may even remotely get it sorted is laughable. I might just end up frog stuck in the process, Nonetheless i march forward, hammer in hand, determined to bust up the china shop, knocking over the Bull whilst plunging through the glass ceiling with crystal ball in hand -my approach always irregular but genuine, success a diversion only. I preface future Blogs by making no apologies for my "let come what may" attitude. I am aware in my travel experience that the tendencies of humanity to reach for the basics only to continually desire the savory drippings of the worlds so called fortunate ones - leaves all of us in chains of contradiction, In our attempt to clean the palette we sometimes subject ourselves to some pretty serious nonsense.

I have no desire to grub around measly hovels to experience some bloated sense of self and the always available human condition crap, i will however continue to get it on with the ones getting it on.

For the reader; As i explore the "Blog Option" a little further I hope not as much to be successful at getting some seemingly pointless rant across but to instill a desire in others to get out there and find your wall.... get dirty, get acquainted, be unsafe for a measure of time and most of all just check it out, then get up on the wall and make your decision about the view ....