By Camille Cusumano

“Everywhere I look I see dead eyes,” thinks a Buenos Aires expat as she visits the Feria la Salada, a market that lives up to its reputation for danger and desperation.

“You cannot go to this market, es muy peligroso,” said my friend Carmen. I watched her big blue eyes bug out, emphatic with the probability of harm befalling me if I went to Feria la Salada. We sat in the comfort of my 10th floor apartment in Recoleta, Buenos Aires’s upper-crust barrio. Another Argentine friend, Oscar, nodded in agreement with Carmen. I had just greeted him hello and noticed his neck was fragrant with Paco Rabanne cologne—real Paco, not the knock-offs reportedly available at the market in question.

“Oh, but I have a private bodyguard,” I joked, referring to a fellow journalist, Marc Haefele, from Los Angeles, who had invited me to check out the market with him. He piqued my curiosity, saying, “La Salada is a thieves market.” It was the world’s largest illegal market, he told me, denounced by the European Union, but locally pronounced unstoppable because tens of thousands of customers support it weekly.

The hints at danger, which I often find exaggerated by locals who listen to the news more than I do, ramped up my desire to take a glimpse. I had been living in Buenos Aires for nearly three years, absorbing the culture mainly in sultry tango dance halls and classes. I was streetwise enough to deal with rowdies and mischief makers. Besides, I wanted to get out of my complacent routine here in chic Recoleta. That black market was said to sprawl in a malignant belt of land, replete with polluted meadows, just south of Buenos Aires. Time to get a close-up view at the underbelly of my adopted home, I mused.

Oscar, who like Carmen, had never set foot near La Salada, said dismissively, “It’s full of the junk they sell at Retiro bus station.” The Retiro was one of my favorite offbeat places in the city. (Only once did I have to shrug off would-be pick-pockets.) My mind kneaded a vision of stall after stall with Hong-Kong-like knock-offs crossed with Tangiers’ bazaar-like ambience. It’s big, it’s unstoppable, and it makes the news regularly. So there must be something to see at La Salada.

The market opens at 3 am on Sundays. Mark said we had to get there early to get the good stuff. So we met at my place at 5 am and hailed a taxi. The first driver said, “No, I don’t go to La Salada, too dangerous,” and took off. The second taxi said the same and sped off. The third one, a good-natured driver, said, “I’m heading home that way, so I’ll drop you.” He asked which point of entry did we prefer, Punta Noria or Punta Mogote. “Whichever is safer,” I said. “That would be Mogote,” he said.

© Olmo Calvo

A Rank River and the Dregs

La Salada started in 1991 when a handful of Bolivians set up shop on the forgotten land near a rundown swimming pool park long past its prime. They found it profitable to sell “imported” clothes at a market they called Urkupiña. Eventually two more markets sprouted and joined forces. According to La Nacion, the gangly collection of flimsy bamboo-and-sheet-metal booths or warehouses on 20 hectares of the banks of the River Riachuelo moves some $9 million weekly and employs 6,000 people to serve the 20,000 customers who come from all over the country. And it’s all illegal.

As we rolled along the ingress road, Marc told me that indeed the land here was designated during the Juan Peron years (half a century ago) as a resort for the poor. The roadside was now lined with billowing tall grasses, reeds, willow trees and a deep layer of the usual Styro-plastic urban trash, bagged and otherwise, no less visible than if the place were a designated dump. A vivid heap of some synthetic fabric cuttings in a fluorescent rainbow of colors that might have been pretty in another setting caught my eye.

As soon as Marc and I paid the cabbie, he spun around and high-tailed out of the no man’s land. We joined an ant line of people (largely Bolivian, Peruvian, Paraguayan, and other much-lamented undocumented workers of Argentina). To get to the market stalls we had to cross the Riachuelo River, rank with years of slaughterhouse detritus and god knows what else. I started having my first misgivings.

The river was so thick with trash you could cross it on foot but risk its flesh-dissolving waters. No flora or fauna survived in it. The tonnage of humanity drawn to this Hades of merchandising had to use one of two pedestrian bridges, one more hair-raising than the other. We chose to walk the plank, a sling of metal, with jerry-rigged wire railing gone in most places. The thick, hideous stew of toxic garbage in the river below threatened life much more than the actual 30-foot fall. One blogger described the potential fall like “bungee jumping without a rope.”

But the pilgrimage, four and five people deep, moved relentlessly to the altar of mercantilism. Just before Marc and I were to mount the metal sling, I spotted the three-cup monty, or shell game scam, off to our right. I wondered what sucker they were ripping off. Two men and two women were obviously in cahoots. How many times had I seen this game pulled off on unsuspecting riders of San Francisco’s Muni bus—street guys getting 20 bucks a pop? Then, as I passed, one of the women tugged my arm lightly, not unfriendly, and encouraged me to play. It was me and Marc they’d had their eye on all the time. I had carefully dressed in loose cargo pants, all my few valuables in tightly zipped pockets. I wore my decrepit running shoes. I’m dark and Argentine looking, how could they spot me among the thousands of shoppers here?

“Get your hands off me,” I scowled, angrily pushing the woman’s hand away. “Fock you,” she yelled violently after me.

“This isn’t good, Marc,” I said. “Getting into a defensive mode is not good.” It was not even 6 am. I was cranky and not yet caffeinated.

In less than ten minutes we were across the river, joking about whether an engineer had lately examined the safety of the structure. I discreetly removed my 18-karat gold earrings from Florence and tucked them in a Velcro-locking pocket. I had brought my camera but would never take it out of my left zip-lock pocket.

We were in the heat of the market. We could only proceed with the packed crowds languorously. The flow was one huge sloe-eyed sea of poor people hungry for Stuff. Need or whim for that stuff could only be measured by the beholder. “Everywhere I look I see dead eyes,” I muttered.

Continue to Page 2 – Buenos Aires Market

By Tim Leffel

Venturing into the wild adventure capital of Mexico, a group of tour guides gets a lesson in what not to do with their clients.

The rafting had been good fun, but the elation quickly wore off as we stood shivering in our wet clothing. An ongoing drizzle didn’t help. Whenever any of us walked across the grass, our shoes got sucked into the mud of the saturated ground underneath. The van was supposed to be here 40 minutes ago. Our hope was fading as we stood outside a riverside shack in rural Chiapas, southern Mexico.

A hen and her chicks pecked at the ground around us. The mother living in the house pulled fingernail-sized grains of dried corn from a stalk while sitting on a crude bench. The children milled around and sat on tree branches, never taking their eyes off the shivering gringos in bright clothing.

“We need to go into the village and find someone with a pickup truck,” said Albert, one of the other members of my group. It seemed a bit extreme to me, but our so-called guide Renaldo wasn’t very encouraging. Any and all questions about why our pickup was so late got a reply of, “I don’t know.” There was no cell signal here and he had no radio. Or any kind of a Plan B.

“Do you guys know where we are?” someone asked the rafting guides in Spanish. No, they had just rafted this river for the first time yesterday. Thanks for not telling us that before we got on the water.

After an hour, we gave up and started walking. We found a pickup truck and a driver willing to let us pile in. All 16 of us. As we bounced on speed bumps and potholes through the countryside, we held onto the side panels and each other to keep from tumbling over. After about ten miles of this we arrived back at the put-in point, with no van there either. It was lost in the countryside. We were cold and wet, with no change of clothes, but at least there was a restaurant serving lunch.

The Downsides of an Organized Tour

I was here on this mangled tour with, ironically, a bunch of people who run travel tours for a living. It was before a big adventure tourism summit and this was our pre-conference excursion. So far we’d mostly seen the inside of a van. Our very first day, with most passengers having arrived from flights of between six hours to a whole day and night, we spent 10 hours riding. I was amused at the absurdity, but the experienced tour guides and itinerary planners with me were livid.

We independent travelers are often already a bit leery about organized tours. There are fears of regimented schedules, of too much time in transit to check off sites, of a lack of control over our time in the country. The good tour companies know how to get around all this. I was riding with some great ones, people with experience guiding groups through dozens of countries, often on bikes or on multi-day hiking trails. They do most everything right and their customers are thrilled.

Instead, we got these guys. Around 2:00 on the first day someone asked when we were stopping for lunch. “You want lunch?” Renaldo replied. We vetoed his suggestion of a convenience store.

When we asked about the places we were passing on the route we got answers like, “I’ve never been here before.” Half the people on the trip spoke Spanish, so we asked the indigenous guy with the long white tunic and the ponytail. No, he wasn’t from around here. We’d get to his village at the end of Day 3.

Late afternoon on that first day we arrived at our only scheduled stop: Chiflon Falls. As we set off up the trail, past the rushing river at the bottom, we noticed that the people coming down were soaking wet. Did they go swimming somewhere? “I’m not going in the water,” exclaimed one woman in our group.

She did go in the water. We all did. Or rather the water came to us. Chiflon Falls is not some pretty postcard cascade viewed from a distance. In autumn anyway, it’s a fierce explosion of water that makes it seem like Mother Nature is really angry about something. The water sprays so far and wide that anywhere close feels like a rainstorm. It’s impossible to get a photo of it from the trail because the lens gets instantly covered in droplets. The impact is so strong when the water hits the bottom that I saw boulders the size of a BMW Mini swirling around like twigs.

When we got back to the van, it looked like we’d all been swimming. Since nobody told anybody this would happen, there wasn’t anybody with anything else to wear. Out came all the carefully packed suitcases that had been fit into the back of the van like puzzle pieces. Out of those came one more item that would keep reappearing in different forms later: a bottle of tequila.

“In about three hours we will get to where we spend the night,” said Renaldo. Surprised silence in mid-tequila-shot, then a collective groan.

Chiapas in the Clouds

This was all a sad tragedy because Chiapas is a great adventure destination. This is the wildest part of Mexico, a former revolutionary hotbed that was off limits for many years. Ironically it’s now one of the safest states in the country. It has Maya ruins, unspoiled jungle, spectacular lakes, interesting crafts, and a colonial city that sucks you in and makes you start looking at real estate prices. In other words, like Guatemala but minus the crime part.

Late at night, in the blackest dark imaginable, we arrived at our lodging spot of Las Nubes (the clouds). Our relief did not last long. “There are not enough rooms for all of you to have your own,” said Renaldo. The next thing I knew, my wife and I were sharing a room with a British hiking tour company owner we had just met that day. Four of the women traveling by themselves were stuck together, despite all the cabins but ours looking to be empty. At 10:15 p.m. we had dinner, accompanied by some tequila that two people had the foresight to bring along. Las Nubes does not serve alcohol–even to those who just spent 10 hours in a van.

We slept to the sounds of the waterfall next to the camp, but some slept better than others. “There was rat shit in my bed,” said a Turkish tour company owner the next morning.

“I slept with my pillow at the foot of the bed because the ceiling was dripping on my head,” said a bike tour company guide.

After breakfast we went for a hike by the waterfall and to a panorama point about a mile away. Two people in our group stopped to take pictures and were left behind. We found them back at the camp. Renaldo had never taken a head count, so he didn’t notice they were gone.

Enter The Africans

A trip that goes wrong always makes for a better story, but even the best disaster needs a good sub-plot. Ours was supplied by The Africans.

The fate of our tour was really foreshadowed at the start by an hour of waiting for an African couple to make their way from their hotel room to the van. They had a long flight across the ocean, so we cut them some slack. But then the husband began the ride with a spiel about his tour company and a hard sell to those on board to please book business with him in the future. Odd and inappropriate, especially since we had all just met, but also because he was from a country known more for ethnic strife, fundamentalists, and corruption than any wildlife or tourism attraction. Still, we chalked it up to cultural differences and took a nap, assuming the business attire they had on was some kind of confusion over the first day’s itinerary.

The next morning, however, the strange got stranger. Mr. Okoro came to breakfast wearing wingtip dress shoes, dress slacks and a pressed shirt with a collar. Mrs. Okoro had on dressy shoes that went well with her fancy ruffled blouse. While the rest of us just looked at each other with raised eyebrows, my tagalong wife asked the mister, “Aren’t you going rafting today?”

“No, I can’t swim,” said Mr. Okoro. “And my wife is afraid of the water.”

It was quickly becoming clear that this couple had not read the itinerary of the tour they had signed up for. There were simpler choices they could have picked that involved coffee plantation lodge stays or nice nature tours that looked for butterflies and birds with binoculars. But no, the Africans signed up for the one that clearly stated there would be several steep walks, two white-water rafting runs, and a very long hike through a jungle. Were they in it for the van rides?

Each morning at breakfast, as the group rolled out decked in waterproof Gore-tex and footwear meant for water or mud, The Africans showed up looking like they were ready to man a trade show booth. At an eco-lodge on Day 3 they asked about an iron.

Continue to Page 2 – Chipas Tour

Welcome to the Carnival of Cities blog carnival, where we tour the world in a single post, via submissions from a variety of different blogs, all about any aspect of one, single city or fair-sized town.

The previous Carnival edition was hosted on Sheila’s Guide, and you’ll find the next one (January 25, 2012) there as well.

If you would like to host a future Carnival edition on your blog, please contact me at Sheila “at” sheilascarborough “dot” com. Thanks!

Off we go….

Cities in Europe

London, England Tui Cameron presents Kensal Green: a Historic Victorian Graveyard in London posted at Mental Mosaic: Even Home is a Travel Destination, saying, “London’s Kensal Green Cemetery was the first of London’s for-profit cemeteries, a group which came to be known as the “Magnificent Seven.” This beautiful garden-style cemetery is a great spot for bird-watching and taking photos, so bring your binoculars as well as your camera. If you’re lucky, you might even see a fox!”

Lisbon, Portugal April D. Thompson presents A Tasty Tease in Lisbon posted at The Absolute Travel Addict.

Berlin, Germany Carole Terwilliger Meyers presents Good Eats: Hasenecke/Currywurst, Berlin, Germany posted at Travels With Carole.

Stockholm, Sweden Lola Akinmade Åkerström presents Christmas Market in Gamla stan, Stockholm, Sweden posted at The Swedish photo blog — blogs.sweden.se, saying, “I finally hit a couple of the Christmas markets (Julmarknader) around Stockholm this week and here are scenes from one of the more popular markets located within Stortorget in Gamla stan (Old town). Here, you can pick up a variety of porcelain ornaments, festive decorations and wooden gnomes as well as dig into gingerbread cookies (pepparkakor), mulled wine (glögg), candied almonds, jams, and deli meats.”

Rome, Italy Shelly Rivoli presents Rome’s tradition of the Befana… and her trouble-shooting small broom posted at Travels with Baby Tips by Shelly Rivoli, saying, “In Rome, Babbo Natale (Santa Claus) is not the only one to pay a call to children over the holidays. The beloved witch “Befana” may also bring treats Epiphany Eve in a Roman tradition that is centuries old.”

London, England Karen Bryan presents 7 of the Best London Museums posted at Europe A La Carte Blog, saying, “London has some great museums and most of them are free to visitors.”

Berlin, Germany Nicole Blake presents Berlin State of Mind posted at nicole is the new black, saying, “A picture post about the strange things I see in Berlin.”

Cities in Asia

Singapore Alex presents Eating like the locals in Singapore posted at Hejorama.

Bangkok, Thailand Brian Spencer presents BKK Must Eats – Feasts at Jae On posted here at Perceptive Travel Blog.

Cities in the Americas

Rochester, New York, USA Koketso Ferreira (via Meg Colombo) presents Kwanzaa Family Day at the MAG (Memorial Art Gallery) posted at Rochester Arts.

Cuenca, Ecuador wandermom presents Family Friendly Activities in Cuenca Ecuador posted at WanderMom.

Asheville, North Carolina, USA Globetrottergirls presents Independence through Independents – Asheville, NC posted at Globetrottergirls.

Orlando, Florida, USA Eileen Ludwig presents SeaWorld Christmas Celebration Winter Wonderland Ice Skating posted at Freelance Tourist: Travel Tips.

Annapolis, Maryland, USA Jeremy Branham presents Annapolis welcomes me home posted at Budget Travel Adventures, saying, “Here’s an overview of Annapolis Maryland – a place that doesn’t get enough attention.”

Greenwood, Mississippi, USA I wrote Travel Post Friday: Peace and Quiet on the Tallahatchie River on Sheila’s Guide.

Fairbanks, Alaska, USA Nancy Brown presents Insider Tips on Things to See and Do in Fairbanks, Alaska posted at Nancy D Brown, saying, “I enjoyed visiting Fairbanks in the height of summer and the dead of winter. This is a unique Alaska city.”

Grapevine, Texas, USA Adam Groffman presents Hipster things to do in my hometown: Grapevine, Texas posted at Travels of Adam, saying, “Recently revisited my hometown and discovered it was actually pretty cool.”

Quito, Ecuador Tom Bartel presents Looking down on Quito – Andean Drift posted at Andean Drift.

Boulder City, Nevada, USA Kayla presents Hoover Dam posted at Adventures in Heritage, saying, “During a trip to the Grand Canyon and Vegas I stopped at the Hoover Dam, an amazing engineering feat.”

That concludes this Carnival edition, and thank you for visiting.

Please submit your (ONE, non-spammy) blog post to the next edition of the Carnival of Cities using our carnival submission form.

Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Story and photos by Joshua Berman

Travelers’ tales about Tikal inspire a sunrise photo quest—and a race against park guards and time.

On my first morning in Tikal, Guatamala, I blinked awake an hour before my pre-dawn alarm, anticipatory endorphins surging through hungry traveler’s veins. I could hardly believe where I was—Tikal. At sunrise. It was a legendary place-time combo. I just prayed it was not overcast as it had been the previous afternoon. I wanted that sunrise.

I’ve never been a check-it-off-the-list kind traveler, hopping from sight to sight for bragging rights and passport stamps, putting quantity before quality. But after years of listening to incomplete and deficient tales about Tikal, I knew I had to go. I’d met too many travelers who were at a loss for words when trying to describe it.

“It was spiritual,” said a freckle-faced, blond backpacker during a rum-fueled story swap in Managua, years before I ever made it to Guatemala. “You’re in the forest and it’s so far, and it was just…”

She paused and we waited. This was during my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nicaragua, an exotic and confounding land in its own right, but devoid of any massive old cities like those of the Maya region. Don’t get me wrong—I love Nicaragua. I loved living there. I had a life, a house, friends, possessions, a job, a cat—all in a dirt-road pueblo on the Panamerican Highway. But each month, when I traveled to Managua, I stayed at Hospedaje Santos, a $4-a-night, freak-magnet of a flophouse planted firmly on the Central America gringo trail. There I met people in motion, backpackers on long, linear journeys; they bought “open jaw” tickets, starting in Cancun or Chiapas and working their way all the way to Panama, sometimes beyond.

Santos had a wonderful open balcony that lorded over its common space and mismatched rooms. We gathered around the plastic furniture and fraying, filthy hammocks and talked and listened and laughed. The southbounders threw around names like Utila, Cayo, Caulker, Antigua, Atitlan, and Palenque. These were strange-sounding, wondrous words, and when the bright-eyed, blond woman talked about Tikal, there was a hush in the hospedaje. Someone tinkled ice into their glass and we leaned forward.

Finally, she decided to compare it to Copan, a Maya archaeological site in western Honduras. I’d been to Copan and had been impressed—each Maya king built a new city atop his predecessor’s. The site was a deep, deep layer cake of indigenous history, full of some of the most intricate carvings and stelae in the Mundo Maya, the “Athens of the Mundo Maya.”

But, said the girl I did not know but whose opinion I trusted completely, compared to Tikal, Copan was “like a golf course, all manicured and cut grass.”

“Tikal is different,” she said. “Tikal is wild.”

Two Guards Between Us and Sunrise

I stepped outside to look at the stars. They were bright. I did a silent hallelujah dance for the clear sky. I got dressed and double-checked my camera bag, took a cold shower, then went outside to meet a friend.

Daniela was a fellow amateur photographer who had also dreamed about Tikal. We’d crossed paths, quite literally, the previous summer while working on a fire in Montana. Like many National Park Service firefighters and rangers, we’d hiked, dug, scraped, sprayed, and camped all summer, all the while banking hundreds of hours of overtime and hazard pay which we used for traveling. Having shared so many intense moments of travel during the summer, firefighters would sometimes meet up in wonderful places in the off-season to create more. It was a self-perpetuating cycle.

We walked briskly across the hotel grounds and the abandoned airstrip, and discussed our prospects of sneaking in. The park didn’t officially open for another hour and we were desperate to find the perfect spot before the sun appeared. We thought we’d be able to slip right in; it was so dark and early, there couldn’t possibly be anyone else up, not even the guards. We were wrong.

Dozens of travelers—mostly young, from Spain, Australia, Israel, and the United States—were huddled together in the chill, mewing and whining their indignation at not being allowed to enter. We joined them. Two Guatemalan guards stood with shotguns.

“¡Por favorrrr!” cried a Spanish girl. Her cheeks glistened in the headlamps and fading moon light.

“We came from the other side of the world!” she said in proper Castilian. “For the sunrise!”

“Not until six,” repeated a teenage, hollow-cheeked Guatemalan soldier, rifle across his chest, olive cap pulled low over his forehead. His companion’s face was unmoved. The two were like jungle Mestizo versions of the Queen’s Guards.

Continue to Page 2 of Tikal Dawn

By Bruce Northam

“Your hometown makes you think of silly things, New York City makes you talk of them… and Rio makes you do them.” – an unofficial Rio street-crossing guard.

Flickr photo by xymoxi

Often, it seems like the poor people know their place better than the rich ones circling for parking spots. Copacabana meets the terms of classic beach resort-zone calculus: every block removed from the beachfront means compounding five percent price discounts and five percent decreases in predictability—reality sets in. So I kept walking…

Rio de Janeiro, an urban zone infused with lush tropical foliage, is a metro area of 14 million Cariocans divided into four districts in an area larger than New York City’s five boroughs. It is typically known for its beaches on the city limits southern edge. But there is more…Rio enjoys 46 miles of oceanfront, but most visitors only see the southern edge’s famous four-mile crescent strip that is Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon—sunbathing beachfront doubling as a volleyball training center and a thong runway.

Flickr photo by anthony goto

As opposed to being a tourist, I propose traveling as a poorist—gravitating to each country’s impoverished regions, because that’s often where the real fun hides. This sort of roaming is a lateral breed of responsible tourism, one that leaves money in the neediest pockets, not the greediest. Spending time and cash in poor neighborhoods helps sustain them better than some of the bloated nonprofit organizations trickling their minimal percentages back to the needy.

Nearly one-quarter of Brazil’s population lives rent-free in favelas, ramshackle cubicle communities that are custom-built on previously unclaimed land. The squatters in Rio’s favelas don’t perceive their neighborhoods as slums, because many of them border, and tower over, high-rent zones and enjoy prized bird’s-eye views of the magnificent, undulating cityscape. Like waterfalls defying gravity, these mountain-hugging, beehive-ish colonies crawl up narrow valleys behind posh neighborhoods, and thus have better views of the ocean-hugging city—the equivalent of shantytowns overshadowing Malibu.

Traditionally detached from the government, these self-policing neighborhoods eventually became independent states. Although still odes to free enterprise, they are integrating with society. Sort of. Favelas are typically named after a street that passes through them. Residents construct amateur, construction-codeless, brick and concrete compartments atop existing compartments. Penthouse rooftop decks endure until other apartments are built upon them. Often arranged in expanding concentric circles, some clusters rise as high as twelve stories. The explanation for why these inadequately constructed cubicle stacks don’t tumble down the hilly slopes bears a resemblance to why it’s impossible to keel over in a crowded subway. Many of the elaborate fort builders I met there also seemed to have a bit of electrician in them. The haphazard webs of overhead electrical wiring celebrate a free-market energy piracy I’d only witnessed in India.

Diamond in the Rio Rough
One labyrinthine favela maze I explored overflowed with wires, humanity, and talk of the recorde, a word whose meaning was lost on me. Entering this self-sufficient community meant navigating narrow, curving alleyways and improvised hill-climbing steps. Every other corridor had dorm room-sized businesses, including grocery stores, tire repair shops, and beauty salons. As I wove through the maze—high above Rio’s twilight buzz—several locals either nodded or pointed me in the same direction while soberly announcing, “recorde.”

I knew I was approaching the heralded mystery when a little girl led me by the hand and directed me to turn a corner I’d otherwise have missed. She presented me to an elderly, smiling, bald man who was sitting outside on a small stool and wearing oversized black eyeglass frames without lenses. In the thin man’s lap sat a mutt-fusing dachshund, beagle, and seemingly a bit of platypus. They both tilted their heads to the same side and gazed at me.

Flickr photo by domenicomarchi

“Hello, I am Fabio …” (Silent pause: the elderly man used his fingertips to uniformly elevate both of the dog’s droopy ears so they were level with the horizon, and posed them there.) “… and dis is de most loved dog in de world.” The man and the great one cocked their heads to the other side.

“Really … how do you know?” I asked.

“Looook at him!” Fabio gushed. He released the dog’s ears and began petting his head, each backstroke temporarily widening both sets of their eyes. The dog didn’t seem to be thrown by its fame, but Fabio certainly was. Simultaneous with appreciating that recorde is Portuguese for record, I petted the tail-wagging icon while surveying Fabio. A treasure near the end of a chapter in his existence, Fabio was glowing with the surety that his amazing partner goes unrivaled for adoration on the planet. No doubt a sainted hero among these hillside dwellers, he adjusted his windowless eyeglasses, flashed a calendar-resistant grin, and hummed, “World record.”

I wasn’t the first wanderer led to this reputable duo. But, like a perfect song, they intrigue and charm every time. After an hour of celebrity worship, and just before spinning on my heel to stride downhill through the mesh of cables, uneven steps, and passages leading back onto the paved street mainstream, a final question for Fabio, “What is your dog’s name?”

“Recorde,” he winked, and then re-elevated Recorde’s ears in tribute to their bond. It’s within us all to set our own records—we can’t all be the most loved, but we can certainly love the most.

Who’s Walking Who?
Recorde tugged a heartstring belonging to a beagle named Ben, my companion beginning in 1976 when he was presented as an abandoned puppy at my front door after being found near railroad tracks by a neighbor. I thank him, a long-legged beagle/mutt for some important life lessons, for instance: your territory extends far beyond your yard.

You don’t train beagles, they train you. Once a month, certain wayward males flee on two-day no-look-back female dog hunts. For the first year of Ben’s monthly disappearing act, my family panicked, roaming the neighborhood day and night, calling his name and interviewing people walking their dogs (on a leash?). As the years passed, a pattern emerged. He always came back, albeit exhausted, to collapse on the kitchen floor for a world record nap. Soon after, Ben would turn back into an enviable pet—nobody could pass him without stooping to share love.

When it was announced in 2008 that a beagle won the Westminster Dog Show for the first time since 1939, I sensed the universe sharing my enthusiasm.

Ben also helped me understand how standard education sometimes backfires. Ben, in fenced-in yard mode, occasionally refused to come into the house upon request. Training him to come inside for a treat soon flopped because he figured out that rushing back outside again created another treat cycle. Improvisation has its rewards.

A Buddhist kōan is an anecdote, question, or statement that typically eludes rational understanding but is within reach of intuition. Kōan traditions try to shock the mind into awareness. In the Zen novel The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac asks, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?” … “Woof”.

Bruce Northam is the author of Globetrotter Dogma. See his travel video series at American Detour.com

Related stories:

Sobering Shamanism from Peru’s Visionary Tea by Bruce Northam
Humble in the Jungle: Exploring Guyana’s Rainforest by Laurie Gough
I Was a Thai Travel Trinket by Darrin DuFord
Pirate Chic by Bruce Northam

Other South America travel stories