If you click on the Photos tab, you might be able to see a few random photos.

Go team!!

Hey, everyone! Long time no chat. I brushed the dust off this ol’ site, took down the viagra ads, and you know why? Because I’m off on another trip. Yeah, South Africa for the freekin’ 2010 FIFA World Cup

Amazingly enough, I’ve got tickets for the quarter and semifinals in Cape Town and Durban, respectively. While the US is no longer in the cup, I have a feeling I’ll be catching some pretty incredible matches.

Now, I wasn’t able to fully recover the old site – most of the photo links don’t work anymore. The photos are still on Flickr, but the links themselves are bad. But the new stuff should appear just fine and I’ll fix the old links when I return.

But first, a four hour drive to JFK and a 15!! hour flight to Johannesburg, SA. Since my last trip, technology has improved a bit. I should be able to do all my blogging via my HTC Fuze. It even has a GPS for those maps I liked. Wish me luck, and they’ll be more posts while I’m on the road. If you want to track the crazy flight, go here.

Well, so much for THAT New Year’s Resolution. Over a month since the last update. Sheesh. Until this moment, I haven’t had the chance to really tell you all about the last leg of the trip, the Amazon. Suffice it to say that I am glad that I went and didn’t chicken out. It was pretty incredible!

I arrived in Manaus in rainy weather. It was reassuring, the Amazon being a rainforest and all. Unfortunately, I arrived on a Friday night – too late to arrange for any river tours, too tired to go out and explore the city. But the next day, I wandered around the muggy, rainy city, poking my head into some of the many shops. And about those shops, there were about a thousand of them, all filled with clothing, cheap electronics and small appliances. I knew that Manaus was a free trade area, but it was still odd to see so much STUFF in the middle of the jungle. But I amused myself by watching the un-Bouncers trying to get people to come in their store. Normally, bouncers throw you out of a place, but these people were doing everything shy of grabbing your arm and pulling you into their store. Yelling through bull horns, showing clothing (or no clothing, if you get my drift), whistling, clapping, shouting. Mind boggling and loud.

But I walked away from the center of town and began to explore some of the gems of the city. The first is, of course, the famous opera house. Other than the timber used to frame it, every nail, window, tile and statue was shipped from Europe. See, the Europeans had been making a killing on the rubber trade and had a little money to spend. And what better thing to create in the middle of the jungle than an opera house.

The next was the shore of the Rio Negro, the large tributary of the Amazon upon which Manaus is located. Up and down the massive river floated large multi-decked ships – the “busses” of the Amazon. For a small fee, you could theoretically travel all the way down to the Atlantic or all the way up to Peru or Columbia. All one has to do is pay your way and kick back in a hammock for the two to six days it takes to get anywhere. What a way to travel, eh?

I finally arranged for a Amazon river tour. First stop, a few days at the Posada Amazonas on the banks of the Ariau, a tributary of the Rio Negro and Amazon. You know what? That stay gets an entry all to itself. See you tomorrow. For now, enjoy the photos (click on the camera icon above).

It was just a few weeks ago that I was camping in a native village in the middle of the Atlantic Forest. And not too much later, I found myself in the middle of Brasília, the high-tech capitol of Brasil. There couldn’t have been more of a contrast. In the village, life stopped when the sun went down as there was no electricity. In Brasilia, night was when life just got started.

It ended up being more Tommorrowland than Star Trek, though. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Costas and Niemeyer (the city planner and chief architect of Brasilia, respectively) were a pair of geniuses. Taking a hint from the foundation of Washington, D.C., then President Kubitschek, embarked on a plan to move the capitol of Brasil from the southern city of Rio to the center of the country, both to unify Brasil and promote development of the interior. What was amazing about the project was the speed. The entire city of “Brasilia” was built from 1956 to 1960. “Fifty years of progress in five,” were the words JK used to run for presidency, and in that he was correct. But walking around Brasilia today is walking around a 1960′s sci-fi movie set or Disneyland The tall modernist buildings with the flying spires, the nearly identical “Super-Quadra” neighborhoods, the amazingly detailed city plan, the magnificent cathedral – they all felt vaguely dated. More like a 1920′s view of what the future would look like. I enjoyed the city tour and took a bunch of photos of the very cool buildings.

But I attempted to walk around the city and realized that the scale was all wrong. The main “mall” of Brasilia is nearly a kilometer wide, much wider than the more human-scaled mall in Washington. Walking the length of the axis of the city from the JK memorial to the TV Tower to the Plaza of the Three Powers is an all-day undertaking. Built in the early age of the automobile, it was imagined that everyone in Brasilia would have access to a car. Heck, I’ve even heard that the original city didn’t have any stop lights – all traffic was routed through tunnels and overpasses. My advice, get a city map and plan on spending some time in taxis or buses.

I stayed in a room in the “Hotel Sector North” and explored some of the nearby super-quadra neighborhoods, trying to get a feel for the sort of people that lived there. I poked my head in various stores and bars, trying out the best of my Portuguese. What I found were people that were generally proud of their city, while acknowledging the problems with overcrowding and traffic. A very healthy attitude and generally very friendly people.

I’m glad to have visited this city. As far as I can tell, it is unique in the world – a capitol in the middle of nowhere, imagined nearly completely by three men and brought to fruition. An attempt to implement a utopian vision. Only time will tell how well they succeeded. Succeed or fail, you can’t discount the power of their vision.

I’m on the road again. I have just spent a relaxing two weeks with my good friends Mike and Sarah, as well as my godson, Matty. I’d be the first to admit that we didn’t do too much. But as I’ve said before, it was good to get back on the road. Next stop is the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma. After visiting Santa Fe, I want to drop by Mesa Verde NP and Arches NP. While near Durango, I also hope to get some horseback riding in. I’m sure it will be nose-to-tail trail riding, but I want to eventually get enough skill to do some horse packing. I will take the Durango time to figure out if the experience matches the imagination.

Before leaving Houston, I stopped to get extra supplies. I walked out of Mike and Sarah’s house with six bottles of water, three fresh cookies, six rolls of sweet tarts, and about 10,000 Tic-Tacs (both green and white). While the tic-tacs seem endless, the cookies didn’t make it to Dallas.

Therefore, I stopped at a supermarket and got some rolls, cheese, Windex, and, much to my delight, a huge box of Little Debbie Star Crunch snax for just $2.99. I had lived off these things during college. It had the highest calorie to dollar ratio (350 cals/$.25) of anything in the campus food shop. Those and multivitamins got me through sophomore year. I took it as a good omen, so I bought a box and took a picture.

I drove to Wichita Falls, Texas last night and got a cheap room in a cheap hotel. My plan is to get going early in the morning. Let’s see.

P.S. I cannot get the stupid map on the left of the page to work right. I think I’ll have to drop in a Google Map when I get the chance. [ed: Fixed as of August 1]

I didn’t update my blog during the trip as much as I wanted. Internet connections were available, but I was just too tired or anxious to get on the road. Two more things. I was also not sure about what was so interesting about a blast across the country, sounded pretty boring to me. I also had a hard time updating the pictures on the site in a reasonable amount of time. Spending an 1/2 hour every day uploading pictures and arranging files seemed like a waste of time. I’d like to get it to 15 minutes or so. Looks like some PERL programming is in order. I KNEW I got that college degree for something. I also want to pick up a phone with a reasonable cell-data connection. That way, I could update my blog while at a rest stop, or wherever the urge grabs me.

Lots of time to think, lots of time to figure out what I want to do next.

First thing I want to do is find a better GPS mapping program than DeLorme Streets 2005.

Here are my main complaints:

• The program has fixed speeds for roads in it’s database. While I understand that there is no good database for speed limits in the US, at least compute the time of the current leg based on my actual speed. When I am doing 75, and the computer thinks that I am only doing 60, the time estimates are way off
• The map should zoom automatically when I am close to my destination or on a series of short legs. Too often, I was mucking around with the software trying to zoom in so that I could see where I was going.
• I was surprised at how well the voice recognition worked. Just using my laptop microphone, I got about 80% recognition and very few wrong commands (usually it just ignored me). What sucked is that the computer tried to recognize itself. I can’t tell how many times the thing panned while it was reading off the next turn. I’d disable the voice recognition while the Text-To-Speech was running
• The night mode kinda sucked. While the map was rendered in light colors on black background, all the other elements were bright Windows colors
• Periodic status updates were missing. “You have 500 miles to go” and all that.
• There was no “microphone off” speech command.

I’ll have to see how well the handheld version works.

All in all, it was a lot of fun, and not nearly so bad as it could have been. A book on CD got me through Sunday (James Patterson’s “4th of July”). I’ll have to play with Audible.com for more material.

Up an coming features on my blog site:

• Photo gallery
• GPS map (all my posts so far have GPS coordinated)
• Real-time GPS map updating via cell phone/SMS, hehe

Bye for now!

As the song goes, “On The Road Again”. Other than the “again” part, I’m on the way to Houston, TX to visit my godson and his parents. Oh yeah, I’m 3 days behind schedule. But, like I kinda assumed, the schedule went out the window pretty fast.

Let me just say that it takes a LOT OF WORK to get rid of 30 years of accumulated CRAP. That’s for another entry.

It’s 8:00pm here in Yuma and it’s HOT – still 102 degrees out. It smells like sand and dust. I wonder what makes sand smell kinda like old gym socks? Maybe it is the thousands of creatures sweating over the last million years. It does get hot here. It did stop at the Algodones Dunes and snapped some shots. When I get to Houston, I’ll work on getting the picture album hooked up to the blog. ‘Till then, you’ll just have to wait.

1321 miles to go.