By Luke Armstrong

After the first attack I rushed to find first aid. The clock was ticking. The longer I left the wounds un-washed the greater the risk of even larger problems. The attack was so aggressively unanticipated that it never occurred to me that a second, far more brutal attack was mere minutes away.

“You’re drunk.” Marcos’ sleepy German accent answered from his darkened room as I knocked impatiently on his door.

“That’s true,” I said, knowing it was well past an acceptable hour to be knocking on anyone’s door, “But that’s not why I’m knocking. I need your help to unlock the kitchen. I need first aid, man!”

I knew that next to Marcos was the Dutch girl he had been hooking up with and that the last thing either of them wanted to do was dress and face the world at this late hour. But this was important. This was really, really important. Blood was trickling down my leg and my joint was tightening. Soon the stiffening would limit my mobility.

Finally Marcos emerged from his den. “What’s up man?” he asked affably despite the late hour. I pointed to my knee and he responded with a customary, “Dude! Holy shit!”

We traveled quickly down the bungalow’s stairs towards the kitchen. Marcos was a few steps ahead of me as he entered the safety of the kitchen as I walked through the open-air dining room. A thatch roof was set above me upon low-laying rafters. Marcos was trekking across Central America and had been gleefully grounded for a month in La Casa de la Iguana in Livingston, Guatemala where he bartended to pay his room and board.

Located on Guatemala’s carefree Caribbean coast, Livingston provides a pleasant departure from Guatemala’s Pacific coastline—unlike most Guatemalan beaches the waves here tend not to drown you. The area is gang controlled and is a transit port for USA-bound cocaine. Because these days the gangs are relatively established entities, a tenuous stability remains in place. But the flow of drugs makes Livingston a place you would not want to bring Grandma to—it’s a place where lynchings are far more common than the court-delivered justice.

As Marcos entered the kitchen, I explained to him how I had been washing my face, getting ready for bed, when the demon-beast had appeared out of nowhere and sunk his incisors into my leg. At first I thought it was a dog, but then the unmistakable mask and satanic eyes revealed my easily recognizable assailant.

Reign of Raccoon Terror: the Sequel

As I concluded telling Marcos the tale of the first attack, the satanic raccoon materialized again. From underneath a table he resumed mauling me. I let out a war cry that people later described as me “screaming like a girl” and ran in circles in an attempt to shake the coon.

But the coon had already tasted blood ad was not about to let me off as easy as he had after the first attack. He continued to hold and bite. When I shook him off for an instant, I jumped up on a table to remove myself from the reaches of the little bastard.

Some readers may scoff at this part and think, “raccoons can’t fly.” But with Marcos as my witness, when I jumped up onto the table, the Raccoon raised his front paws in a oh-you-did-not-just-jump-up-on-that-table type way, and flew to the table to continue to wreak havoc upon my gashed legs. At this point I picked up a chair and began to beat the raccoon and when I missed, my leg, with it. Time hit the fast forward button and my mind returned to its primordial way of fight-or-flight thinking.

When the chair I was wielding landed a good hit on the fiend’s masked face, he finally let go and I grabbed a rafter and raised myself up into the thatch roof.

At this point Lenny, the Dutch girl who had been bedding down with Marcos, appeared in the doorway. I held out my hand to her and shouted, pleading with her to come up to the safety of the rafters. Behind her came Ashley, a half Canadian half Welsh girl. I pleaded with both to escape doom and come to the rafters. As neither had seen the raccoon just own me, both took my urgent yelling and beckoning to the rafters to mean that I must be tripping out on something.

In a desperate voice Marcos from the kitchen window confirmed that if they did not take to the rafters something very bad was about to happen to them. Confused, but getting uneasy at our pleas, they climbed up to the rafters and in adrenaline-rushed speech I informed them of the exciting goings-on of the coon-filled night.

Continue to page 2 of Guatemala raccoon attack

• Packing to move from New York City to the Hudson Valley, dismantling your life which even with very frequent travel  has seems very fixed. Manifestly it is not — not when it is so easily swallowed into boxes and spirited to another place.
• Leave for a long-scheduled week-long trip to Canada in the middle of the move. Arrive airport for flight out already exhausted. Nap during taxiing. Awakened from nap by announcement that plane is returning to the gate to let off a passenger who has suddenly realized she cannot leave her two year old for vacation in Jackson Hole with friends due to the approach of Hurricane Irene. Suspect she really wanted to go shoe shopping.
• Delay causes missed connection. Add 5 hour layover in Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport. Struggle to stay awake until flight to Vancouver. The airport lights seem too bright, everyone speaks too loud, wonder which bathroom Larry Craig liked to frequent.
• Arrive at Shangri-La Hotel and it is lovely. Very hungry and too tired to wait for room service. Open bag to discover packing for a trip in the middle of the move generally went okay, except for restocking the emergency snack bag, which contains only: one ziplock baggie of Splenda packets, a few tubes of energy drink powder and three very old Dove chocolates that have gone chalky. Eat the chocolates. Press  many buttons from the control panel on the side of the bed, causing blinds and sheers to open and close madly and various lights to dim and brighten until figure out the right one to hit to make all the lights go out.
• Hurricane Irene arrives in Northeast the next day. Monitoring news and coverage from home while walking around Stanley Park on the sunniest, golden lit, most pleasant weather day imaginable.
• Visit The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art, the most comprehensive exhibition of Surrealist art ever to be shown in Canada, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Consider what Dali’s lobster telephone would sound like if it rang.

For all of us in the central US (and other places) who are suffering from drought, a small reminder that the rains will come again….

This photo was taken outside of Abilene, Texas, after fires burned up thousands of acres of nearby ranch and farm land.  I know that wildfires are not the same as drought, but let me tell you, that blackened part is pretty much how we’re feeling these days.

As my friend Jen Wojcik jokes, “Hey, Satan called. He wants his hell back.”

Here in Texas, we are re-reading Elmer Kelton’s landmark book The Time it Never Rained about the “drought of record” in the early 1950′s, just to see how much worse it can get.

As we enter 70+ days of triple-digit heat, and I find dead birds in our bird bath, our yard withers despite judicious watering, the famous local Mexican free-tailed bats come out earlier and hunt further for nonexistent bugs, our fence is starting to fall over because the desiccated ground has pulled away from the concrete supporting the fence posts and I’m finding ants all the way upstairs in their determined search for water….

I can’t do much more than hope that this isn’t permanent, and that the green will return.

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As shown by the upcoming royal visit to Canada and California of newly married’s Will and Kate, it’s almost impossible for royalty to go anywhere in the world without pre-planning, media releases, and huge entourages.

But in New Zealand recently, one royal visitor – an Emperor Penguin all the way from Antarctic – managed to do just that. He simply turned up on New Zealand shores last week, completely alone, without fanfare or entourage.

In fact, the visit was so unexpected that stunned residents, on coming across the emperor penguin standing on the sand at Peka Peka Beach on the Kapiti Coast, thought their eyes were playing tricks on them.

It was, after all, a most unusual sight.

While many breeds of penguins make their home in New Zealand, emperor penguins do not (in fact, the only other sighting of a emperor penguin in New Zealand was in 1967 at Southland’s Oreti Beach.)

Like most royalty, the newly arrived emperor penguin (dubbed ‘Happy Feet) soon attracted camera happy crowds and media who smelled a story.

It also attracted it’s own bodyguards, local residents who, having quickly became highly protective of their visitor, were determined to ensure that the crowds (and the media) kept their distance.

But Happy Feet wasn’t so happy.

Homesick and stranded on a beach thousands of miles from home, he was becoming dehydrated and overheated and started eating the sand (possibly mistaking it for snow) and driftwood. It was a diet guaranteed to make him became lethargic, weak, and dangerously unwell.

Emergency medical treatment was needed if the emperor penguin was to have any chance of survival.  Department of Conservation officials transported Happy Feet to Wellington Zoo for emergency surgery.

A team of Vets and the Department Head of Endoscopy at Wellington Hospital went to work scoping and removing clumps of sand (watch video footage of procedure here) that were starting to form into lumps of concrete from Happy Feet’s stomach.  This procedure, along with intravenous rehydration therapy, looks like it might just get Happy Feet back on his feet.

Then it will just be a question finding a way to help Happy Feet get back home.

(photo credit: Tony Lewis)

“We never used to have all of these picky eaters with their food allergies.”

As a thrifty child of the Depression, my Mom has no patience with people who won’t just shut up and eat. I get that, and until recently I’ve been able to eat pretty much anything and so has my family, so I agreed with her.

Now, however, my teen daughter is tussling with some digestive issues and has become lactose-intolerant.

We spent a few weeks figuring out which fake milk tasted best and didn’t have a weird taupe color (winner: the H-E-B grocery chain’s Mootopia) and suddenly, I’m having to think about dietary restrictions in a way that I hadn’t before, including when traveling.

How Some Travelers Handle Food Restrictions

Here are some thoughts and resources….

From travel photographer Alison Cornford-Matheson:

“This is a hot topic for me right now as I just learned I may in fact have to go gluten-free. I’m experimenting with it now as I wait for a diagnosis. I live in Belgium and food and dining out is a big part of my life. It’s starting to be more recognised in Brussels at least but still not easy. Bread and pasta free Europe… not so fun.”

From writer Lanora Schoeny Mueller:

“France + Italy + LactAid = dairy-free tragedy averted.”

From entrepreneur Shennandoah Diaz:

“I was born on a dairy farm and have to take my own food with me to visit my parents. If I eat gluten or dairy it’s bad for me. Just suffered in Cancun – everything had gluten, dairy, sugars, etc. in it. Should have packed more food! I took gluten-free snacks, nuts, dried fruit, tea, Kashi instant oatmeal, snack bars and Splenda, but everything they made had dairy in it, even the vegetables. I wasn’t prepared.”

Shennandoah also told me that she wishes she’d checked luggage so that liquids restrictions wouldn’t have applied and she could have taken some almond or soy milk.

From traveler and author Aline Dobbie:

“India is [a good] country for gluten problems; they even have other breads made from chick pea or corn flour (but glorious rice is the answer.)”

Extended world traveler Jeanne Dee of SoulTravelers3 fame has been dealing with recent severe dietary restrictions lately (not sure why, she jokes that she, “Must have eaten the wrong Indian food while in Penang,”) but here’s how she’s handled it in remote areas:

“…had to carry a whole bag of herbs and medicines…but I managed quite well. I did miss out on some great food, but I enjoyed some special things too, since I could have bread and simple soups. Bhutan was harder because I cannot have any spice and the food tends to be very spicy. Jordan was fairly easy as I can have bread and hummus. I carried seaweed and miso in my bag too so that I could make a soup out of hot water if nothing was available that I could eat, but didn’t need to use it too much. I could only drink warm water, so that was a challenge, but I managed with a small thermos.”

Jeanne had all of this written down by a doctor to make airport security checkpoints do-able.

Some Resources for Travelers

**  Debbie Dubrow has a series of posts about food allergies on her Delicious Baby family travel blog.

**  Tripbase has a post telling you how to say “I’m Allergic to Peanuts” in 45 languages.

**  Celiac sufferers can get language cards on Celiac Travel that explain their situation.

**  Katie Aune launched a whole blog called Globally Gluten Free: A Resource for Gluten Free Travel.

Since this is all new to me, I’d love to hear more comments and feedback below about how you handle dietary restrictions while traveling. Thanks so much for your thoughts!

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