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Capn's Blog
#51
RE: Capn's Blog
(October 12, 2018 at 4:59 pm)mlmooney89 Wrote: I started a new position at work and I don't have time to get online much anymore but I had to stop in real quick to check up on your story. So worth it. I too would buy your book in a heartbeat.

That's so nice of you! Really encourages me to keep at work. I'm starting a late night drafting session right now. I'm more than 100 pages in so far. It's so much work. I guess I'll try to bang out another chapter. I'm not really writing a biography though, it's more an instruction manual for going on the road. How to build out the back of a truck to live in, how to hitchhike, etc. This is really the first place I've ever had anyone read something I've wrote, aside from school.
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#52
RE: Capn's Blog
*cough*
“What screws us up the most in life is the picture in our head of what it's supposed to be.”

Also if your signature makes my scrolling mess up "you're tacky and I hate you."
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#53
RE: Capn's Blog
(October 30, 2018 at 1:25 pm)mlmooney89 Wrote: *cough*

Capn's blog.

This is the true story of my friend Dan and I hitchhiking from Las Vegas to Patagonia in 2011/12.

December 2011
Always another mudslide/ the weed fairy.

“Did you ever think that you’d be happy to be locked in the back of a moving truck in Columbia?” Dan asked me.

“No, I can safely say no.”

     We were happy. We had been stuck in the Columbian rain on our way to Medallin. Some people had told us that people might not be driving the road that we were trying to hitch because of the rain. Even though it was supposed to be the start of the dry season, it had been raining hard for the two days that we had been in Columbia. We had also been told there was a detour that people were taking, a long way around that avoids the mountains. However google maps for South America in 2012 gave u no indication of what that detour might be. We stood there in the rain. Cars that occasionally passed us. The road that we were traveling on was no longer the Pan-America Instead we had cut inland in order to check out a small climbing area in the middle of the country. The Pan America is generally well kept and in good shape. Every other road in South America can be considered questionable and the prospect of heading off into no mans land during the rain storm was not an appealing option. Another car passed us by.

“They must be going somewhere.” I said to Dan.

     It was a meaningless statement. It was getting late and our morale was low. We were facing the prospect of finding shelter or setting up our tents in the rain. That’s when the moving truck stopped. It was a father and his two young sons, they were literally just people moving houses to Medellen, store owners and part of Columbia’s middle class. They stopped and bought us Dinner, pirhana, which was good but boney as shit.
The rain blasted through the night. The road that we were traveling on had once been paved. Now it was in a half paved, half potholed state of decay. Dan slept not at all, but instead stayed up answering questions that the children in the back had for us. I was told all were at marvel at my ability to fall asleep, as the truck violently rocked and thunder boomed throughout the night. I awoke to the truck coming to a stop. It was just barely getting light.

“What’s going on?” I asked as I came to.

“I don’t know.” Dan answered.

     The back latch opened and we got out. The driver started explaining something to Dan in Spanish.

“Yeah, he said there is a mudslide blocking the road. They are going to turn around and take the detour. But he said there is a town just a few kilometers ahead, and we can just walk around the mudslide.”

     As the morning got lighter, the rain was also lightening up. There were a small flow of people walking from that town to the bundle of cars and trucks trapped with us behind the mudslide. They were there to make sure everyone was okay, and to help with any rescue efforts. Some were digging at the mudslide to try to clear the road. There was no official road crew at all, just literally the people from town shoveling away at a massive massive mudslide. People also were taking the opportunitiy to see food and other neccesities to people trapped in the mudslide. We said goodbye to our ride and thanked them. We would learn later that there were mudslides behind us as well, that we had been sandwiched between them, so they undoubtedly spent quite a bit of time stuck between mudslides.

     Fuck it, we decided to walk it. It was huge, stretching at least a quarter mile and like nothing I had ever seen before. There were boulders in it the size of small houses and many the size of cars. It was also a moving, flowing almost living thing. The occasional crashing noise, or noise of snapping tree branches did not help make it a comfortable walk.

     There was nowhere to go that we could truly escape the mud. Instead we walked to the edge, where other people were already traveling across and picked the path with the least mud river flowing through. Thick deep mud is one of the slowest things you can walk through. At some points we were up to our knee caps. I even had a brief moment of sinking like quicksand into the mud, with Dan holding out a stick to me. The worst bushwacking I have done in my life was not a quarter as terrible as traversing that mudslide.

     By the time we had emerged on the other side, the sun had even started to come out. We were drenched in mud. Nothing had escaped being covered in mud. As we started the long walk towards town, a man in a motorcycle rickshaw came up dropping off an old woman at the base of the mudslide.
He saw us and immediately saw an opportunity.

“ten dollars to town. No, eight dollars?” He made the haggling easy “six dollars! four dollars! two dollars!”

It was worth two dollars to not walk through any more mud. We jumped in. The ride was stomach turning. We stopped and crammed in a third person. Now we were 4 people being driven by a 150cc engine through a road that had almost gotten taken out by a mudslide. We rocked back and forth and crashed through huge waterfilled ruts in the road, but eventually we made it to the edge of an idyllic little Columbian jungle town.

     Small waterfalls came down with crystal clear water from the side of a cliff wall. We used them to wash as much of the mud off as we could. We entered the town and it gave us our first taste of rural Columbian life. First thing is that everybody seemed to get around on a small motorcycle, the same as the kind that dragged us on a rickshaw into town. You would see set ups of whole families, a father and mother with two kids in between and one strapped to a back.
   
     Every third motorcycle had a superhot chick on it. Women in general in Columbia were mega-gorgeous.
We became an instant spectacle. Two white guys with huge backpacks emerging out of the mudslide, in a town so far off the main path that it literally wasn’t on our map. Columbians are extremely friendly people, who are quick to initiate a conversation with you. People would stop in the middle of their day or even their job to come and talk to us and ask us what we were doing.

     “We are hitchhiking to Argentina.” We told one girl, young and beautiful, who had stopped to talk.

“Is that possible?”

“Well we are here, right?”

“Yeah, but what are you going to do about the mudslides?”

     We thought that we were through the mudslide. As it turns out there were 20 something mudslides altogether, the next one only five miles up the road. We were not sure what exactly we were going to do, but the girl on the motorbike offered at least a temporary solution.

“You guys smoke weed?”

     She sped off and returned a few minutes later with a small cousin and a small bag of joints, which they gifted to us. We also learned the Columbian method of smoking a joint. Rather than puff puff pass, in Columbia everyone just lights up their own joint. So we did, it was hard to imagine that earlier in the day we had been knee deep in mud so thick it was sucking our shoes off our feet. We smoked with these strangers and talked about life, life in the US and in their village.

“Well if you can’t get out of the village, come find us.” Said the weed fairy and her cousin as they sped off.

      Faced with the next mudslide, I wanted to hunker down in the village for a little bit. Based on what we knew it was full of beautiful women who randomly give you weed. Dan however pointed out that if we are going to stop somewhere, it might as well be a rock climbing area and there was one just a hundred miles away.

     One hundred miles and 15 mudslides away. It also could start raining at any time, and we had no idea when the mudslides might be cleared. So we put together a plan. We heard that there was another village past the next mudslide and we reasons that the same way people were brining supplies in and out of this village past the mudslide, they must be doing it to the next one.

    So we started hitching, mudslide to mudslide. Walking past them and continuing on. At one point we got on a cheap bus, but ended up on it for 24 hours, stopped by more mudslides and this time not by a quaint little village, but in the middle of nowhere. Then, on our third day of mudslide travel, a Columbian General decided he was going to drive that route to Medellin and like magic all of the mudslides got cleared in a day.

     We got to our climbing destination in central Columbia and ended up spending Christmas with two other rock climbers, a local Columbian who had developed most of the routes out there and a Chilean dirtbag, living off of rice and coffee and staying with the Columbian. We spent a week there, and in my life from that moment to now, I’ve never seen another mudslide.
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