Notes to Self

I’ve been tagged. Caitlin over at Roaming Tales has nominated me to share three travel secrets under the Trip Base Blog Tag. I tend to not like the idea of highlighting obscure places, because I’d like for them to remain obscure. But for Caitlin and the travel blogging community, why not?

My whole raison d’etre for traveling is to study, see works of art, architecture, and archaeological sites outside of my art history books, to study and photograph landscape, and to eat local food. So my three best kept travel secrets have to be listed under one or more of these categories. My three best kept travel secrets also happen to sit in plain sight.

1. The Maya Ruins

Any Maya ruins. Yes, yes, Chichen-Itza is now one of the seven wonders of the world, but even still, there are many Maya archaeological sites in southern Mexico and Central America that remain almost in isolation even though they’ve been “discovered” and uncovered and are ready for visitors.  If you’ve only been to Chichen-Itza, you haven’t yet been really immersed in the ancient culture of the Maya. Or at least not in its archaeology. Beautiful, mysterious, and full of mythology, there are number of sites where you can walk alone, or almost alone, through the jungle.

2. Big Sur

In the last thirty years I have traveled often up and down Highway 1 through Big Sur and in all that time the landscape has never ceased to amaze me. It has probably never been the same landscape twice, on any one of my road trips through the area. Most people drive from one end of Big Sur to the other as fast as possible – like it’s something they don’t really want to do, but want to tick it off of their must-see list. It’s like they are seeing the multiple hairpin curves as obstacles rather than nature’s way of getting them to slow down and look. And rarely do people take the time to camp and hike in the area. For me, even though I had spent a lot of time in Big Sur because I lived at the south end for a number of years, it wasn’t until 2002 that I stayed more than one night along the coast in Big Sur. It’s not only my favorite stretch of road to drive in California, now it’s also my favorite escape when I want a couple of week’s worth of camping in the off season when no one is around. Big Sur is a landscape artist’s dream and taking the time to really spend some time in the area is a peaceful gift to oneself like no other.

3. Winged Victory

How many people in this photograph are actually looking at Winged Victory? It’s like she isn’t even there. Invisible in plain sight. The Winged Victory of Samothrace is that one piece of art in the Louvre that is constant. Throughout the years, as the museum has undergone its changes, while pieces have moved, as pyramids have been built, Winged Victory has always remained in the same spot at the entrance to the Denon wing of the museum. I always look for her on my visits to the museum. She serves as a touchstone, a centerpiece, a starting point.

I’m nominating these 5 bloggers to share their top 3 travel secrets on their blog:

Caroline Wampole at RoadMuse
Cheryn Flanagan at DestinationTBD
Christine Cantera at Miss Expatria
Angela Nickerson at The Gypsy’s Guide
Tara Bradford at Paris Parfait

The final list of Top Bloggers’ Best Kept Travel Secrets will be published in a special blog post on the Tripbase blog and shared across the internet.

These travel secrets have also been included in the Tripbase Travel Secrets e-book series.

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In my mind I have been hankering for travel. But I haven’t been able to get the body to cooperate. This has been going on since April. It is now the end of December. I know where I want to go. I have personal projects to accomplish in my next destination. A revisit, to a place I’ve been to before. But my heart hasn’t been in to making the definite plans.

I was out in The Escape Pod three days ago, the day before Christmas. I had decided to store campy type things from the van in the house, so I was getting the portable kitchen items out from under the bed when I discovered my old traveling shoes.

I pulled them out from under the bed and held them in my hands. A pair of boy’s slip on Campers with a wide velcro strap. Size six or seven, I can’t remember. I remember buying them at Shoe Pavillion. The last time I had these shoes on I was flying home from Paris. It was 2005. My last long trip.

I held those shoes in my hand and thought about all of the places they had taken me. All over The Yucatan, San Francisco, Paris, Reims, Epernay, Vertus, Fontainebleau, Chartres, Beauvais, London, Berlin, Pottsdam, Prague, Dolni Bezdekov, Kutna Hora, Zurich, Aix-en-Provence, Marseilles, Arles, Tarascon, Beaucaire, back to Paris, and then home, back to the van in San Francisco. And many points in between. Airplanes, trains, boats, and buses. Subways, metros, and trams. From the boulangerie to the cemetaire, to l’eglise. Through all of those little villages in Champagne. Sitting in cafes drinking wine, pivo, or coffee. Shooting photographs. Mulling over decisions. Standing next to the graves of my ancestors. Two and a half months of being somewhere other than the place I call home.

I brought those shoes into the house, with the other stuff, and put them on. Immediately they felt, no, I felt, like I was home in some way. The memories of the places they had taken me came flooding back. I felt my psyche shift from someone who wants to talk myself into traveling to someone who has traveled, who is going to travel. Like, ok, I’m going now.

мебели

They feel so comfortable on my feet. Familiar. I’ve been wearing them for three days, even though both soles are cracked through and they need a shine.

Photos: Above is walking the 2kms between Bratonice and Dolni Bezdekov, the first home of one of my grandfathers. The bottom photo was taken in the square in Arles, opposite from Saint-Trophime.

While I’m waiting for that passport to arrive, I’ve been traveling on the web instead of on an airplane or train. Which, if you are like me, gets a little old after awhile. Sure, I want people to come to my virtual web space and read my stories to research their next adventure, but as a writer, it is sometimes painful to read about other people’s trips. I’m always critiquing the grammar, the sentence structure, the cropping of the photographs, and sometimes even the experiences.

Last night I did something different. I traveled, through a lecture, to the Mirador Basin in Guatamala given by the archaeologist who has been directing the work and excavation in the area for over twenty years, Richard Hansen, PhD. I’ve sat through many art history slide shows and lectures in my life, but it is really a wonderful experience to sit through those given by someone who is actually working on site and excited about the work they doing. I brought my notebook so that I could take notes for this posting, but he talked so fast I just wanted to listen.

For those of you familiar with this web site, you already know that I got hooked on Maya antiquities while chasing myself around The Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico a few years ago. So it’s no wonder that I want to do some more exploring and expand my quest for lost culture that area.

So, where is it, you may ask? The Mirador Basin sits in the Petén region of Guatamala in an area that now holds the last existing virgin rainforest in Central America. Tikal is to the south and Mirador extends north, over the border and into Mexico. Currently, the only way into the area is by hiking for two or more days through mud, jungle, snakes, and mosquitoes, or to take a very expensive helicopter ride.

Besides rainforest and wildlife, there is one other spectacular find in the Mirador Basin. More than one ancient Maya city and by far the largest collection of them in one single area. While the ancient sites on The Yucatan Peninsula range from the beginning of the Classic period, around 300AD to about 900AD, to the end of the Post-Classic period, around 900AD to 1500AD, the sites being uncovered in Mirador are much older, and in an archaeological way of speaking, they are from a period of time, centuries in fact, before Christ.

It takes a minute or two to get used to Dr. Hansen’s pace of speaking. But after getting in the flow, I get caught up in his unflinching excitement about the place. He showed us slides and talked of the wildlife that live in the area and in the rainforest, including jaguars, reptiles, and birds. Then his talk moved toward the archaeology, the buildings and the artwork within them. I can picture the place, unkempt jungle, rugged in comparison to the sites already developed for tourism in The Yucatan – like the smaller and newer sites of Chichen or Uxmal, which as massive as those sites are, only give a hint at what lies underneath a layer of dirt in the Mirador Basin.

I picture in my over imaginative head a kind of Indiana Jones appeal to visiting the area. The last place of archaeological jungle adventure. Me and my camera, photographing every inch of every new find. Or just hand me a trowel and a dusting brush and I’ll sit for hours in the jungle heat and humidity, dusting off the past … For Dr. Hansen, it’s more about politics and economics than it is about adventure. It’s about gaining people’s interest in the area, to save the cultural heritage and ecosystem. Because of the location of The Mirador Basin, this area, the ancient sites, and the wildlife in it are, as he points out, threatened by advancing development (to put it nicely), artifact looters and poachers that do not have Mirador’s best interests at heart.

After the lecture I went up to ask him a question, leading in with a description of my interest … about how even though I studied art and photography, and art history, I had never been held captive by the Maya, or had never really known anything about them until that trip to The Yucatan a few years back and that I now found them fascinating. He laughed. A genuine laugh, the kind of laugh that meant he knew exactly what it is like to get hooked.

The wind is blowing and the rain falling down. It’s even really cold. Winter has arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area and as beautiful as this place is, there are times when daydreams of warmer climes are at the forefront of my thinking process.

There are times of the year when I daydream about traveling to particular places. October, I think about Day of the Dead and Mexican towns that celebrate it. In November I’m thinking about car camping in Big Sur. In mid-February I think about the trip I took to hang out with the grey whales in The Baja and yearn to go back. My birthday in the spring makes me want to hightail it to Rome or Paris, or some other romantic European city.

And about this time of year (January) I think about planning a trip to The Yucatan before the end of March, before it gets too hot to want to go.

So today I put a photo in the header of this blog (the blog has been changing, so this part of the post may not always be relevant) that makes me think of walking down a jungle road in The Yucatan. The photo was taken at Ik-Kil. It began to sprinkle as I walked into the park and towards the cenote.

It also resembles my daydreams.

A shocking bit of news from The Yucatan which is making the discussion board rounds over on Thorntree and at LocoGringo, is that there have been three ADO bus robberies made in a matter of 30 hours. Two of the robberies were made out of Valladolid. Three armed men got onto the Cancun-Merida first class bus as passengers and once the bus was out on the highway, they pulled out their guns and took the passengers money. The three men then get off of the bus and into a waiting vehicle to escape. There were about 40 passengers on each of the buses at the time. At this time the thieves are still at large.

This is not news for travelers in Mexico, but it is for travelers who know and love The Yucatan where bus travel has been extremely safe. While in other parts of Mexico, this type of robbery could take place at any time of day, they usually take place on the long haul overnight lines. These incidents in The Yucatan happened in the late afternoon, early evening, so they are considered to be even more brazen.

Here is the Por Esto! article dated January 10th, in Spanish. It appears that the robberies happened earlier in the week.