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Santa Marta, Colombia

I had the eerie feeling that I was being watched.

As I dug through my pocket for enough pesos to make the taxi driver happy, I was vaguely aware that there WERE people watching me from every shuttered window and from behind the black iron security bars of every hidden doorway.

It was 02:00am and I had just arrived in Santa Marta on the north coast of Colombia – what was supposed to be the grand Caribbean finale to my 7 week trip.  For hours on the endless buses Alex and I had talked dreamily of the beach bungalows, white sand, and sapphire water that were surely waiting to reward us for all the thousands of kilometers covered.

Instead of rum and booty’shaking we were greeted with graffiti and barbed wire.

At first glance, the place I had been deposited didn’t look much like paradise.  The DMZ between gang territories would be a better way to describe it.  Rubbish had piled up ankle deep on the abandoned street where my hostel was supposed to be and there wasn’t a soul in sight.

This was probably one of the most dodgey places I had been so far (East Timor has nothing on this place!) and the taxi driver wasted no time in speeding off to leave us gringos standing with juicy bags full of expensive cameras.  With no map, plan, or machine gun it felt pretty exposed to say the least.

Suddenly an American voice called out from across the street behind a set of metal bars:

“You shouldn’t be out on this street….unless you’re armed!”

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The Nazca lines in the desert of Peru

“A man with no expectations is never disappointed.”

I wish I would have kept those words from Lao Tzu in mind when I went slightly out of my way to Nazca, Peru where the Nazca people scratched some interesting geoglyphs into the desert outside of town around 200 BC.

With no modern equipment, no GPS’s, no airplanes or way to view it from above, no satellites, this amazing tribe managed to…well….scratch a few crappy shallow lines in the sand and call it a day.  It sounded mysteriously fascinating and theories (mostly from people who have never visited the lines) even abound of the pictures of animals, people, and geometric shapes being drawn for aliens to see from space!

The Nazcas were a charming group that lived even before the Incas and were quite fond of severing heads which they carried around as trophies.  Apparently they took time out from a busy schedule of trying to survive in the desert, scaring the crap out of their neighbors, and everyday life to draw some pictures in the hard red earth of Peru.

They were even known to practice trephination which is a fancy way of saying a highly qualified witchdoctor would cut holes into people’s skulls (while they were still awake and conscious) for medicinal or spiritual purposes.  It wasn’t a good idea to complain of a headache after scratching your lines out in the heat.

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The sprawling indoor market in Cusco

One of the delights of budget travel for me is wandering a local market in a strange and unfamiliar place.

It is a welcome assault on the senses.  New mysterious smells (some pleasant, some not) mingle with brilliant colors, unidentified foods, and sounds that can betray some of the small mysteries of daily life for the locals.  It is a thrill just to walk through the swirling vortex of market life.

In poor countries the number one priority is to get something to eat followed closely by the desire to make money and trade.  These two passions coming together in one place make for an exciting, frenetic energy that vibrates in the air as people buzz around making deals, pulling scams, and do their best to live life.

Unlike our shopping malls which pretty much consist of one way transactions, markets in developing countries are dynamic, nerve wracking, and obsessively addictive. Our closest equivalent might be the messy, semi-violent floor of a stock exchange (with a few random pig feet and unmentionable animal parts on display).

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