Hiking Big Cypress Florida Trail

This is a writeup of my experience backpacking 30 miles in Big Cypress on the Florida Trail in January 2023.

This trail is tough! It’s slogging through the muck, the guck, the sludge for days. Hiking poles are essential. You will fall. There’s a four hour stretch where you have no choice but to pick up your feet and tredge on, with no dry land as far as the eye can see. The mud will form a plaster-like cast around your toes. Pulling your feet out of the mud is as hard on the calves as hiking any peak.

It’s beautiful. Epiphytic plants cling on to the cypress trunks, creating hanging gardens. You’ll see butterfly orchids and wood storks and many many animal tracks.

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Sailing to Panama (1)

Parts of journal notes from a sail trip Florida to Panama

We leave from Miami at sunrise. The channel is directly upwind so we motor the long 15 mile narrow stretch, navigating crab traps and fishing boats. We will be in Bimini, the Bahamas by late tonight. It’s the closest island and we have to check in to customs. After Miami’s towers disappear over the horizon, we raise the sails and it’s just us and the waves. 

We see shore an hour after sunset. There’s hundreds of lights pulsing from the island, the largest sign of civilization since the morning.

We anchor next to a charter boat and a dozen millionaire yachts docked at the marina. On shore there’s a mix of wealthy tourist spots and scrappy houses hidden in the palms. By the afternoon we’re off to our next island.

There’s no sign of the moon for the next few nights and the sky is a black sheet strewn with unobstructed stars. 

After two more days of sailing we pass a rocky barren island surrounded by shoals. On the eastern point there’s a massive shipwreck. At first I think the cargo ship is anchored but I realize it’s resting at an awkward tilt too close to shore. We sail by it a quarter mile away and the I can see the rusty brown hull and bright turquoise shoals. So much metal and money lost to sea. There’s no sand, nothing but breakers on the island where they violently crash with the power of the wind. To starboard sun flares block our vision and we pray there’s no coral obstructing our path. 

After the island we hit pockets of coral and JB thinks the charts are mislabeled. The other crew, Nick and I stand on the bow and look for coral heads to avoid.

At night, there’s still no moon. The sea is black and the sky a lesser black. I squint towards the horizon, trying to determine what are lights, stars, or islands. I am alone on night watch deep into the night, and I spend the time staring at a distant red dot that turns out to be a stationary marker, probably a warning about one of the random rocky points in the middle of the sea. 

JB has traveled this path before and I ask him about every island we see. He says there’s an island where the mail boat comes once a week and the whole town throws a party. I keep wondering how any government functions with territory this spread out. Maybe I’ll be back on another day to understand the day to day of island life, but for now we are just passing through.

This island world feels so large and America with its cities and pace feel serious and silly in comparison. 

Every night there’s a star so bright and colorful like nothing I’ve seen before. It flashes the rainbow, flashing red purple green white on repeat. A thousand foot cargo ship looks like a twinkling island with evenly spaced lights slowly creeping past us.

A month ago I was traveling these same seas on one of the largest cruise ships in the world and it feels like the opposite experience in almost every way. A cruise feels so loaded with humanity while our sail feels dominated by the ocean and nature’s will. A number of cruise ships pass us on he journey. When they pass each ship creates a halo of lights pollution that block out the stars. As they cross our beam, their many lights reflect on the water like a rising moon.

A catamaran experiences a different kind of rocking than a monohull. Waves crash across the bow and hull so loud. At first I am restless, but as the days move on I learn to sleep with the thunderous slapping of water against my hatch.


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Another Bus Ride/Journal Notes

Plans in Nepal are difficult to make and even more difficult to keep. “Nepali Time” means buses, taxis, and pedestrians must proceed at a leisurely pace without attention to any kind of schedule. During monsoon season, this becomes especially dramatic.

Travel here is easy, though, in some ways. As the only pale skinned woman traveler, I am easily found and can never hide in anonymity as I could in a Western city. Everyone will ask where you are going and they will certainly tell you when to get off the bus. Although I was nervous catching the bus from Ilam to Kathmandu, the bus driver himself retrieved me from the café I was waiting in.

Claiming that the roads are rough would be an understatement. Landslides this year have killed hundreds. Although the highway is paved, the countless potholes make comfortable travel impossible. The bus has woken me up too many times with a whack to the head just when I think I am getting used to it. My window is attached in such a way that a 5mm crack opens the bus to wind and rain. I place my rain jacket up as a shield.

Although the ride up to Ilam endless mountains spread across the sky to the east, now the fog obscures any view beyond the road. Maybe it is better that the fog masks the steep cliffs the road falls off into; I am deluded into safety. On these bumpy bus rides, motion sickness is all too common. Travelers will simply stick their heads out the window and vomit to the wind and all that is below the bus. Last ride, I gave some motion sickness pills to a grateful grandmother.

The jeep in front of the bus’s bumber reads “OCEAN GIRL”. The owners have certainly never been within 400 miles of the ocean.

We arrive at ten in the morning, 20 hours after leaving Ilam. I have not slept. This is the third cross-country bus ride I have taken, and all have been longer than expected.

A Western View of the Sacred Mountains of the Himalaya

Machapuchare, a sacred peak in the Annapurna range

 

Reasons I, like so many humans, like mountains:

Mountains are a powerful symbol of nature dominating over man, of endless, relentless apathetic power. The mountains don’t care, they simply exist at the will of the earth and its tectonic plates beneath. In this ancient Himalayan culture, a number of mountains are held sacred. Mt Kalish, a Tibetan peak, is sacred to the Hindus along the Ganges plains hundreds of miles south. According to Hindu myth, Shiva resides in a cave at the top of the peak. To Buddhists, Mt Kalish has a historical significance as the location of the beginnings of tantra. Machapuchare (“Fishtail”), in the Annapurna range of north-central Nepal, remains a sacred peak banned from climbing expeditions. In 1957 the British climber Wilfrid Noyce failed to reach the treacherous summit by only 50-200m (accounts vary). Nepalis banned the peak from future ascents.

 Many other mountains are held sacred by locals. Often Western wanderlust is the only thing driving the Nepali guides and porters to eschew their sacred beliefs to make money to support their families that are increasingly influenced by globalization in the forms of Western clothing, cell phones, and packaged foods. These porters will leave offerings along the trails, thank-you’s to the mountain for a safe passage. In the animist Bon religion, more ancient than Buddhism, spirits are everywhere and must be placated. All along the tallest trails in the world, from Everest to Annapurna, Tibetan prayer flags, Lung Ta, drape from cairns and sway in the breeze. Both Nepalis and foreigners leave them to spread good fortune along the path, and the wind will carry this good fortune to all it touches according to Mahayana Buddhist belief.

The foreigner’s relationship to Nepal’s environment is inherently different. We don’t have thousands of years of history of spirit offerings. We cannot see them. Yet the fantastical pops up despite religious or spiritual differences. Foreigners still found the supernatural in the Yeti, findings which arose when Westerners began to explore Nepal’s mountains in the 20th century in great numbers. But what is sacred in the West? North American groups have declared many sacred spots, but the US government, in its complex relationship to Native American land management, has determined which groups have remained in their ancient homes and which have been forced to relocate, abandoning their sacred spaces to oil companies, national parks, or private land for houses. Is there a future for the sacred in the West?

Ilam, goodbye

I’ve been on the farm for ten days now, and the days have warped together into a long stream of tea picking and stomach illness.

A grassy path leads down a hill to the tea farm. Two buildings, a kitchen and bedrooms, sit behind a green grass lawn. It is the only grassy patch like this I have seen in this country. The buildings are made of a mixture of bamboo and thin wooden sheets, and all are a deep green. My room is upstairs, past a set of wildly angled and open-backed stairs.

To the left of the house (facing out from the porch) is a thick bamboo lattice with a ceiling of cucumber vines. The large fruit drop below and hand singularly in the air below. At the lattice’s base, a row of pink and red flowers form a natural wall. Some are perky, some wilted; lately the monsoon has not delivered as promised.

I wonder how many thousands of years these lands have been cultivated by humans. How many ears have those water buffalo yawns reached? How does it remain so fertile after so many souls have lived and died on the same ground? I have become so used to the noises here so that when I hear a new insect or bird, I can tell it does not belong to the usual cacophony. The constant layer of cricket chirps form a wonderful white noise, but one pesky bird calls in a most irritating fashion, and to my annoyance, has continued for the past half hour.

Mostly, I think about how monotonous life seems here, especially for the elderly. With only a family to interact with, and slow farm work, I can see that growing up here could be tough. But still, there are neighbors nearby, and goats and kittens for company. Nearby neighbors are playing a slow Nepali melody filled with violin and tenor male voices filled with longing.

The electricity has been out for nearly a week. A wretched thunderstorm destroyed the power box (what’s the name for this?) and the village must wait for a repair part to come from Kathmandu. Kushila only shrugs, and say sometimes the power is out for weeks or months. They are thankful for any electricity they do receive when it does work. In this kind of unreliable structure, they have learned not to depend on it. With all other lights out, flying insects surround my headlamp and ram into my forehead. I am reminded of the time on my first trek in this country when myself and some friends used our headlamps to herd the bugs on our ceiling into a corner for some internet-less entertainment.

A bat was in my room for the second time last night. The first was a few nights ago, maybe the first night of the sickness. I was afraid I was just seeing things, or it was simply a moth’s larger shadow in my headlamp. I quickly opened my doors and it disappeared completely. I had felt quite insane, but this time I am sure he was there. I saw him before I entered my room’ the door was open and he fluttered noiselessly inside. Fearfully I retreated to the hallway, unsure what to do, but he soon followed me out and into the dark, rainy night and vanished once more. I will take him as an omen. He came a week ago to bring me plague, and departed again when my illness is retreating.

 I have been so restless here. My head wants to run and run but my body doesn’t agree. Nearly a week of stomach illness have left my body frustrated, weak, and confused. My mind keeps leaving Nepal and entering a worry filled land of my future in America. 

At night, I am visited by visions of disembodied goat heads, eyes white and empty, staring intently and eternally into the dark.

The Farm (Part 1: The Food/Rant about Organic Farming)

Food and life are not separated in rural Nepal. Food is life and life is food. The farmers work to plant and eat and live. Subsistence farming is an entirely different relationship to the natural world than modern America has with its ubiquitous desk job lifestyle. Many of us easily remove ourselves from the natural world by forgetting that food means plant, land, and farmer. The organic movement embraces this cycle and urges people to understand the origin of their food. At Reep Republic, I lived these virtues and fully seek to enact them wherever I may travel.

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Chitwan, Dherai Garmi Chha (It's too hot)

A moderate heat is the worst kind of heat. It tricks you, letting you dry and cool for a brief relief before bringing you back to the inevitable swelter. It is an array of ebbing and flowing unpleasantries. It will lie to you. The constant, humid, tangible, sauna-like heat of the jungle is a different beast. It never pretends you will feel comfort in the form of dry skin, or slow, deep breaths. It is honest and cruel. The sweat will fall from forehead to eye, from nose to ground. You will taste the salt of your body on your lips. It will never cease. But this itself becomes a respite: your expectations are always matched. This is the way of life in the summer heat of Chitwan National Park.

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Dandelion Tea Recipe

Dandelion Tea/Coffee Recipe

Find Dandelion growing in your garden or elsewhere

Pull up the plant including the root; discard stem and flower

Take the root and cut into pieces; lay out to dry until it becomes brittle

Roast the root

Grind up; use like tea or coffee

The taste is quite similar to a coffee taste, but dandelion root contains no caffeine.

Manaslu with Flowers

Entering Nepal (Again)

I’ve seen the sunrise almost every day. The sky lightens just before five, the haze lifts, and the car horns begin. This morning, the hotel owners next door began their day with a dose of Nepali pop music that drifts from their open windows. Street dogs bark back and forth, call and response. Believe it or not, this---the courtyard of the guest house, tucked far behind the main roads---is one of the quietest spots I’ve found in the city.

The climb to Swayambudanth temple was embarrassingly difficult. After climbing the city’s hills, its 263 steps from the base to the top where the stupa sits is a hearty challenge. Near the top of the stairs, just below the stupa, a man blocks the path almost entirely with baskets of seeds and spices, colored power and necklaces. He is performing a puja, a worship to Shiva, whose statue sits across from him. I walked past him, clockwise following the other worshippers spinning prayer flags that line the circular base of the stupa. It is covered in the multicolored prayer flags of Tibetan Buddhism that spread good fortune through the air that passes through them.

While shooting a video of swaying prayer flags above, a monkey steals my water bottle. I go after him. He’s a baby, and futilely tries to attack the screw-off lid with his teeth while I growl and lunge in hopes he will leave it. Instead his mother, watching close by, growls back with barred teeth. I retreat; the baby has won. Soon she gives up on the bottle and it rolls down the hill into a pile of trash that I assume was also stolen from other unsuspecting humans.

I spend another day at the Bouddanth stupa, alternating between walking around it in the traditional clockwise fashion and hiding in cafes when the rain hits. With feet full of new-shoes blisters, I hesitate to risk much extra walking. Earthquake reconstruction has finally finished, and the stupa is once again adorned with its golden spire whose buddha eyes stare across at worshippers. At a rooftop café, I watch a number of men climb a ladder up the dome to the base of the spire to hang prayer flags. Even as the rain and thunder hits, one man continues with his armful of prayer flags. He dutifully hoists them in the air while I hide under the café roof, taking his photograph from afar.

The city feels familiar. Fighting street dogs, goat head vendors, lounging cows, ruthless taxis, deformed beggars---it doesn’t feel as rough as before. I walk without the anxieties of a newcomer.

 

Washington DC/Tourist Season

After a red eye from Denver to DC last Wednesday, I ordered my first ever red eye coffee far before the sun rose and before the clock hit 5. I was the only person leisurely strolling the Mall with a camera and a backpack at this unreasonable hour. Everyone else was an ambitious runner who likely has an ambitious DC job. Here's some shots from the morning and afternoon. 

 

 

Spring in the Garden

I spent the afternoon in Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. It was 75 and the cherry blossoms were in bloom. Life is good.