“How long ya been down in Middle Earth?  -Boss JUST because the hike down was so exhilarating and the terminus so eye-widening, I found myself trekking for a second time from the small town of Mirador down the inside of an extinct volcano to Laguna de Apoya, a 48-square kilometer crater-lake so deep that its…

The last time I traveled extensively abroad, Obama had just been elected to his first term, and people around the world were in love with America. Europeans in particular were enamored, due to part to Obama’s tour of Europe while he was campaigning—I remember one pundit saying that his loop was “the first time an…

 Bruja The Witch—pt. 1 Bruja- (Spanish) n.-A Witch ~ My room at the GM was a single. I had always stayed in the dorms at hostels, other than copping a single my first night at Poste Rojo under the misguided assumption that I would get laid during the Anti-Valentine’s Day party. Whenever I think I’m…

  Granada is uninhabitably hot during the dry season. The fact that 90,000 people inhabit the city nonetheless is confounding to me. They also do it while wearing shirts—I’ve recently noticed that the only dudes going around bare-chested are cheles. So, in another one of my weak attempts to not appear like a culturally-insensitive tourist,…

Granada’s market is a multihued riot of shrieking-fresh products and booming sales-pitches: capitalism before The Man took over. Crooked wooden stands haphazardly jut in from the boring buildings-proper, barely allowing a river of shoppers, motorbikes, three-wheeled tuk-tuks, and the occasional car, horn wailing, to slowly pass through. In the maze, you can cop gutted fish,…

I met Hassan in Castle Tam, the San Juan, Costa Rica hostel that was called “John’s House of Wayward Misfits,” by a disgruntled former employee that had bailed to other employment. John was the owner; Hassan was a tenet who was trying to find employment there, having partied his way down to his last hundred dollars. Even though…

Watching the Superbowl is a near-necessity for American citizenship. Instead of having immigrants memorize factoids about the founding fathers and recite the Pledge of Allegiance to gain permanent access to our salt-saturated culture, we should simply ask them for the scores of the last dozen Super Bowls: that’s what REAL Americans care about, anyway. I…

Part I The Naked Tiger had an impressive layout. The bottom floor looked like a scaled-down version of a upper-class Puerto Rican resort and included a bar, lounge area and café. The whole thing opened up through always-ajar sliding glass doors to a series of pavilions and a large pool, which in turn opened up…

After the mostly Costa Rican riders got their things, the bus pulled a loop and revved its engines back to the central valley. I stepped across into non-country through a loosely-guarded checkpoint. I had expected sniffer dogs inside. Instead, there was a little strip of corrugated metal shacks selling food and water stuffed inside the…