Maui

Been out here on Oahu for about two months now. I stopped here last year for a week on my way to Japan, so I had seen many of the tourist sites. This time I've actually only left the base maybe a dozen times in two months. But with one of the best military golf courses in the country on base I really don't need to. That and the marina on base (one of my good friends has several Sunfish sailboats and has taught me how to sail), keep my free time occupied. I've been sailing around Kaneohe Bay a bit. Learned that sailing is much more fun when the wind is blowing...we normally have pretty consistent trade winds here, but the past week has seen them die off for the most part, making sailing and life generally a bit less pleasant, while at the same time improving my golf.

I did get to take a trip over to the Maui, the 17th largest island in the US. A few buddies and I took the Superferry over...it was scheduled to leave at 6:30 AM, but stepped off just after 6...most of us barely made it and one of our group didn't so he had to fly over and meet us. The ferry arrived about 15 minutes late...leave early, arrive late - Hawaii punctuality. If you're not taking a car with you, you're definitely better off flying as the prices are comparable. Maui is different from Oahu...bigger, less craggy mountains, with more wide-open views. Not much doing on Maui as far as nightlife is concerned. Mostly couples.

We drove up to the top of Haleakala, which was around 10,000 feet up. The Haleakala crater is 21miles in circumference...Haleakala is so massive it essentially is the island of Maui, though the western part of the island is made up of another volcano which overlaps and connects with Haleakala. Luckily the clouds cleared up while we were up top allowing us to see most of the crater. The view brought back memories of Ometepe in Nicaragua as the two islands are geologically similar in that they're made up of two overlapping volcanoes connected by an isthmus. I had to work much harder for that view of Ometepe though.

After spending a month or two in any one place I tend to be ready to move on to somewhere else...but I haven't felt compelled to leave Hawaii since arriving here. I could certainly live out here...only bad thing being the 6 hour time difference with the East Coast makes it tough to keep up with friends and family, especially during the week. That window of opportunity to call home after work is in the middle of my golf time.

Posting

These days I'm mostly just kicking it at home with my parents...awaiting what's next. Been keeping myself busy by studying for the GMAT, which I'm going to take next week. Whether I'm going to go to business school or not is still up in the air, but studying for the test has given me something to do. I actually considered starting a GMAT study blog (yes, there are lots of these floating around on the internet), but decided my time would be better spent studying for the test rather than writing about my experiences studying for the test.

I recently finally found out exactly what I'm going to be doing next...an all expenses paid trip to Afghanistan. I volunteered and ended up getting exactly the job I wanted so I'm very happy. After having not worked for a year, you could say that I'm ready to do something productive again...not to mention my bank accounts are getting a little thin. I'll head over to Hawaii (not a bad deal, right?) for training in a month or so and then we'll head out to Central Asia sometime in November most likely.

I'm confident Afghanistan will provide ample material to continue this blog, though given the nature of what we'll be doing I may be relegated to producing funny stories and observations rather than actual day-to-day stuff. Ah, the funny stories are better anyway.

In Sum

I spent about 8 months in total traveling and living in Latin America; traveled to 14 different countries - Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina were the only countries in which I spent more than 2 weeks. Uruguay was the country in which I spent the least am0unt of time...only 2 days. During the Central American part of the trip I visited all the Central American countries, save El Salvador, in only about 6 weeks. 6 weeks is not as much time as one would like, as the countries, though small, really do have distinct identities. This large distinction between the Central American countries is part of what made that part of my trip so great...the countries are small and easy to travel between, but different enough from each other to keep things interesting. Certainly the South American countries have distinct identities as well, but their sheer size makes it tougher and much more time consuming to travel between them, and as such takes some of the enjoyment out of it all.

As for my favorites...in Central America I really enjoyed Nicaragua - friendly people, beautiful scenery, safe, cheap, lots of things to do outdoors, relatively un-discovered by tourists. I would say many of the same things about Colombia, although it's not nearly as cheap nor as safe. Colombia is the one country I really want to go back to since I only spent a week there and only visited two places. I really kind of cheated myself by traveling Colombia the way I did - one week and I flew between the two sites. My one other big regret is that I never did a jungle tour to the Amazon. But, I suppose this gives me a couple of things to do in the future, and I most certainly will be traveling back to South America, hopefully sooner than later.

As well as traveling and familiarizing myself with these different countries, I had one other main objective: to learn Spanish. It has turned out to much tougher than I expected...and I know it wouldn't be easy...but I'm happy to say I did pretty well on that goal. I've learned that speaking Spanish effectively is going to be a lifelong endeavour that will require consistent effort through the years. Even after all that time I'm still far from fluent and even basic communication can be tough at times. At any rate, I was happy to have the goal of learning Spanish as that gave me something to do every day while traveling. Otherwise, I would have felt pretty bad about doing nothing but traveling for so much time.

Garbage

Certainly, they have a different attitude to garbage here in Latin America...the attitude apparently being that they don't mind having it around them, filling up their yards and streets, and littering the side of every highway. Honduras was the worst I saw regarding trash. On the bus to SPS from Tegucigalpa the couple in front of me threw 3 bottles and two wrappers out the window. I can remember being appalled by the trash I saw on my first couple trips to border towns in Mexico...and not just appalled but a bit depressed and scared to think that many of the people who created the mess were intent on coming into my country. I guess it really wasn't that long ago when people regularly used to litter the highways in the States, but I can't imagine there was ever a time when Americans lived amongst garbage in their yards the way many of the people in Central America do. It's as if the technology of disposable goods has arrived before the technology to deal with the result. But then that's the case for us as well as we really don't recycle very well...we just hide it better in the landfills.

Many people will attribute the filth to poverty, or culture...i.e. it's not easy so clean it up when you have no trash bags to put it in. But then if you can afford a bottle of Coke you ought to be able to afford a plastic bag. Or perhaps poor people have better things to worry about than garbage, like where their next meal is coming from. But then, poor people in these countries are poor because there are no jobs and they don't work, not because they're too busy to clean up after themselves. I would posit that living in a litter-filled environment is not only unsanitary but also discourages progress in that a person is apt to be effected mentally living in filth...becoming less likely exert himself to better his station in life. Many of the Iraqis I worked with left trash all over the place, which I thought was disgraceful for a military unit. We didn't have a lot of luck changing that habit of theirs, and really didn't try that hard to change them, considering it a 'cultural' thing, and, of course, we can't try to change someone's culture. To me, attributing these practices to 'culture' is not helpful for dealing with the problem...it's just making an excuse for bad behavior.

Yucatan

Getting over to Mexico involved a 30 minute flight on a light aircraft. The plane came in, we got on board, the pilot moved a few people around, and we took off about 5 minutes after the plan had landed. It was cool getting to ride right behind the pilot and watch the gauges. One sees the tiny runway in the distance and wonders how we're going to get on it...thankfully, the runway gets bigger as you get closer to it.

As for the 3 days we spent in Mexico on the Yucatan Caribbean coast...well, let's just say the area has a well-developed tourist infrastructure. Saw the famous Mayan ruins at Tulum, the only Mayan ruins on a coast; beautiful scene with the ruins on the cliffs overlooking the turquoise Caribbean waters and the narrow beach at the bottom of the cliff, which was taken full advantage of by the visitors. The whole scene seemed contrived though, with the walkways fully paved and roped off (other ruins I've been to you can climb all over), and the ruins themselves were so...clean, almost like a Vegas theme hotel or something. My cousin and I were joking that the whole complex was probably built 10 years ago to attract tourists to an otherwise unusable strip of beach.

Hit up Playa del Carmen for a couple days...'bout an hour south of Cancun. Amazingly, it was only a tiny village 25 years ago, but with the ferry to Cozumel leaving from the south side of town, it suppose it was inevitable it would grow, and grow it has. If not for all the different languages you hear being bandied about you might think you were in any number of beach towns back home in the States.

The six weeks in Central America ended with a cheap flight home from Cancun.