Travelogue 40, Easter Island, Chile: A Tourist Amongst the Moai

          I spotted my big brother’s Alma mater peeking over a headrest about ten seats in front of me. In unison with ding-“the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign”, a blaze-orange “GO HOKIES!” embroidered on the back of a burgundy baseball cap popped up high enough to clarify my doubts. “Hokies?” I said to myself, “As in Virginia Tech Hokies? I’ve just landed on the most remote inhabited island on the planet, 4,100 km from Tahiti, 3700 km from the Chilean coast…and most significantly 7,541 km from Blacksburg, VA.

What are the chances that somebody that close to home would come here, too?” The wearer didn’t exude American tourist; he looked kinda skinny and tribal, and so my honest to goodness first guess was that some college student doing an exchange program in Chile brought the cap as a gift for his host family and they donated it to a thrift store in Santiago and this guy got it there.  Obviously, a projection of my own personal habits of acquiring clothing onto his.

I was way off on that guess. My interrogation at baggage claim whittled down to the uncanny—not only is he a Tech graduate, but he is ALSO from my home town AND went to my high school, AND we both had Ms. Hoffman for Health. As for why we got on the subject of teachers—déjà vu made me ask. When Ms. Hoffman saw mention of Easter Island on my  Facebook wall, she posted something about a Glenvar High graduate living there. I had forgotten about it, until…yep, he and I were elbow to elbow watching the bags on the belt go round and round. He came to the island many years ago, fell in love with a native, stayed, got married, had kids and took them to Busch Gardens this summer, which is from where they were returning at the time of our encounter. Sweet love story.

I don’t know where I am going with this other than it mimics how I started the last travelogue, with a "spotting", and I like that kind of parallel structure when I’m writing.  Too, of late, I’m longing to be the protagonist of my own love story. To be blunt, I’ve had a sack full of being single. These two “spottings” (values on a t-shirt, alma mater on a hat) gives me the idea that I should start wearing a conversation starter when I’m traveling, something that would provoke a spiritually grounded, passionate, outdoorsy, kind, loving, healthy, single, cute and available woman to tackle me in an airport terminal, because she absolutely has to ask me something about the words I am wearing. I’m open for suggestions as to what that conversation starter might be.

Anyway, enough about the greener grass I’m not chewing on. The woe of a singleton comes and goes in waves. On with the latest adventure! Easter Island! No boxing matches, no haircuts, no skivvies dipping nor conga parades. I don’t mean to say I didn’t have a good time, because I did; I always do when I travel, but this wasn’t a rip-it-up, wild-hair-free-for-all like I usually have. The primary reason lies in a great irony I came to discover this past week: I am a tour director who abhors being a tourist.

First of all, when standing in front of some inanimate object of historical significance listening to a lecture, I have the attention span of a 3-year-old raised on Coke and video games. Thus, after four days of guided tours visiting all the major ruins on the island, my version of what Easter Island is all about goes like this:

A long time ago, some people somewhere got on a raft and set off for nowhere. After months at sea, they ended up on this island. There must have been at least one woman amongst the bunch of rowers, because the population grew in number. Somewhere along the line these people started sculpting huge statues to worship called moai (pronounced MOW-eyes).

And they built ahus (pronounced like a sneeze, minus the “chew”: ah-WHOs) to put them on, similar to an alter.

Nobody knows how they moved those suckers miles across the island given that some  weigh over 10 tons! It’s all a huge mystery. The descendents still living on the island say the moai walked to their positions. No factual evidence to support that. Eventually there were over four hundred moai erected on the island, some worshiped , some not, depending on the status of their eye sockets. When a statue was ready to embody the spirit of an ancestor, the natives lined the eye sockets of it with white sea coral and added obsidian stones for a pupil

…then some more stuff happened…..then the people population grew so big that it divided into tribes and then it all went to hell in a hand basket. The tribes got so obsessed with making these ahus that they forgot their priorities.

They used up the natural resources (especially trees), and food got scarce and the tribes started fighting among themselves and dining on each other.  The ones that weren’t eaten knocked over the other’s statues

….some more stuff happened until…at some point they formed this “bird-man cult” and had a competition amongst the tribes to determine which one would be the head bird. Every tribe selected a young man to represent it in the race to swim out to another little island, collect the first egg laid that spring, swim back and present it to the high priest

….then some more stuff happened… and then Chile claimed the island and kept the natives prisoners for a while, but something was finally done about it and so now everybody is free and happy and making money off the tourists. The end.

I highly recommend that you verify everything I just said with an authoritative source before repeating it. Kevin Costner made a gag-me-with-a-spoon cornball cheesy movie called Rapa Nui, that’s plot is so predictable, it’s nauseating, but the historical context of it gives a fairly accurate idea of what life was like on the island.

          After that tremendously rough rendition of the history of Easter Island, I feel the need to interject here that I am a tour director, not a tour guide. I’m sure the above summary makes it clear why. Besides not being able to remember facts, I have number dyslexia and said one time during a translation in Cuba that Columbus discovered the Americas in 1924. I didn’t even realize it until some smartass asked if he arrived in a Model T. Best I stick to making amazing stuff happen at the present moment instead of recalling amazing stuff that’s already gone down.

Reason number two that I hate going on group tours is I’m hyperactive. For the first four days of this trip, I felt like a prisoner chained by the ankle to a gang of 8 gay guys and a lackluster tour guide.

Three of the eight

Don’t get me wrong—I love gay guys! Some of my best friends belong to that denomination (sounds cliché, I know), but I wasted half of every day waiting around for the queens to get ready. The other half I wasted waiting on the van to pick us up, waiting on the guide to pay the entrance fee, waiting on the group to finish eating, etc. Hell, by the time they were ready to start the day, I could have already climbed a volcano,

swum across the crater lake in its center

and had a pedicure.

Reason number three I don’t like group tours is they are as sterile as mule balls. How am I supposed to have an authentic cultural immersion when a Japanese driver in a mini-van zoomed us around like George Jetson in his space bubble from one tourist stop to the next? All the commentary was given in English (of course) by our guide who is a native of the island, but quite Americanized by his wife from Oregon.  Most nontour talk amongst the guys was about U.S. current events, work and penises, of course. Not my cup of tea.

Once the tour part of the trip was over, I was left with a day and a half to spend my way. First thing I did? Dump the hotel and rent a tent.

The next day I hiked 17 kilometers, ALONE, at my own pace, around the northern coast of the island where the only beings I encountered were wild horses, cattle and the spirits of the moai. Go to this link to see a picture log of the day:   
Hike around North Coast           
When I made it to my destination, a beach on the other side of the island,

that deep faith I have in the goodness of humanity manifested. A group of young Chileans stacked up on each other’s laps to make room for me in their car to give me a lift back to camp. And not only that, they insisted I take the front seat since I was a guest in their country. See? That shit doesn’t happen on a tour bus.

O.K., I’ve been working on writing this for two days and I’m done, whether it is or not. I’m flying standby on a flight attendant friend’s passes and didn’t get a seat on the first three flights I tried, so I’ve had many hours to dedicate to it.                    

          So, what’s next? The only sure thing is a trip to Cuba Oct 26-Nov 8. Between now and then, I’m considering finishing the Camino de Santiago in Spain, which I did a small section of back in September of 2011. I just now remembered I promised to write a travelogue about that experience and never did. Woops, maybe a chance for redemption is around the corner. There is some reason why, despite the gazillion emails and calls I’ve made to tour companies, no work is showing up. The Universe is providing the time and resources for me to follow my heart’s desire. Got to make the most of it, because I am banking on my “performance” on the training trip to slam my spring schedule with trips to Cuba. In the meantime, I’ll be hanging at my friend, Roxanne’s, house in Oakland, dedicating hours each day to a conversation starter worthy of print on a piece of travel apparel. 

I having spent HOURS trying to upload pictures from the trip to Picassaweb and I'm out of patience. If I get it done, I'll send a notice.

      

Much love and many thanks for taking the time to read, G

Travelogue 39, Cuba: Open and Courageous in Cuba! Living the Values!

          I spotted my values in the airport today, riding atop a bouncing set of breasts…the values were riding atop the breasts, not me! Dang those dangling participles! Actually, that one isn't dangling, it has a stated subject, it's just not clear which one is being referred to and that kind of ambiguity in the mind of the wrong reader can get a girl in trouble. Anyway, “LOVE ALL, TRUST A FEW, HARM NONE!” proclaimed the white lettering on the front of the breast owner’s black t-shirt. “Right on, sister!” I wanted to say and continue the conversation over coffee, but she disappeared down the concourse before I could tackle her, and thus we parted ways with nary a word exchanged.

I’m taking that spotting as a direct sign from God to refocus my telescope, and I don’t mean on women’s boobs. I mean on my values. This last trip to Cuba got mine all rearranged. Well, actually, it would be more accurate to say I was forced to adopt new ones that I didn’t even think of as ‘values’ per say, much less pillars of conduct worthy of handing out on a wallet-size, laminated card.  

This was supposed to be an annual training trip taken each July to “team-build” and polish our product (i.e. boost the Cuba programs’  #3 ranking in the company to #1) , but the training, honestly, was secondary to me. I was on a mission of greater importance. I’m not talking about one of those religious mission trips that announces itself in the airport with brightly colored t-shirts spouting Bible verses and proclaiming good intentions to save the poor, pitiful, ignorant, heathen souls of the third world. No, I’m talking about a self-serving, self-preservation charge: TO GET ME SOME WORK!  Of the nine trips I was scheduled to run this year, all but four have been cancelled. This “training” trip for me was about getting my name at the top of my manager’s list of favorites, any way I could.

I went about it deliberately and strategically; by playing the Cooperate America game. I’ve told you before that I love my job as a tour director and that hasn’t changed. What I don’t love is the return to: policies, hierarchies, chains of command, rules, reprimands, acronyms, competitiveness, bottom lines, hypocrisy,  brown-nosing, favoritism, ego stroking, image inflating and it’s-all-about-money bull poopy. I left teaching in public schools precisely to get away from all that crap. The saving grace here is that, at the end of the day, the ONLY thing that matters to the company is that our clients bypass "good" and check the “excellent” box on the post-trip evaluation forms. I don’t doubt my ability to make that happen, yet it can’t happen, if I’m not on the road with a group. But to get on the road, I’ve got to get on the schedule, which means influencing the people who make it…see where I am going with this?

We spent the first day of training in sultry Miami, freezing our asses off in a hotel conference room, drilling The (company)Values! and dissecting the reasons why we are failing miserably at them as a whole, despite our #3 ranking in the company (out of 40 some countries we travel to, mind you).

          After eight hours of pure who-ha, we, the non management peons begging reprieve, at the request of the management poobas, set as our number one area for improvement, a distillation of company values #1 and #2: 

“Open and courageous! Take Risks! Live the values!”

        Before we ever stepped foot on Cuban soil, it was clear to me that my mission for the next eight days was to be more opener, more courageouser and more riskier than any of my competitors. A whatever-it-takes attitude possessed me, all sense of prudence fell to the wayside and here’s what happened:

Chance # 1 to impress the hell out of them-- the boxing ring. One day we visited a boxing gym in Old Havana, where some of the best young boxers in Cuba train. We had the good fortune of finding one of the finest there to interview. We circled around him and did the same-ole, same-ole question and answers we call “people-to-people exchanges with the Cubans.” Boring.

“Isn’t anyone going to fight him?” I ask.

Glances exchange. Shoulders shrug. No volunteers.

“I will!” I shout, answering my own question while tallying up the brownie points this blatant act of open and courageous and stupid risk taking is going to earn me.

          Who? 5ft, 98lb farm girl me? Scared of a 6ft, 200lb, sweaty black man? It wasn’t as if I had never boxed before. When we were kids my brothers tried to train me to beat up our mentally retarded neighbor. They made a boxing ring in the basement out of sofa cushions, put a 45 of  Rocky's anthem, “Eye of the Tiger”, on the turntable and told me to dance around and punch the pillow they held up. Much to their disappointment, at the end of the summer, when it came time for the big match, I chickened out. Nary a punch was thrown. So, here was my chance, thirty-some years later, to prove myself, this time against a much more advantaged opponent.

          “Bring ‘m on!” I said, taking off my footwear and sliding between the ropes while somebody ran off to get some gloves. The smallest pair they could find swallowed my hands and arms half-way up to my elbows, which sort of splinted my wrists into prostrate, which painted the scene to be more of a wife beating her cheating husband with a rolling pin than a boxing match. ANYWAY! Some of my fans were shouting in Spanish, “Hit him in the balls!,” which I thought rather  unladylike, so I tried to mule kick him in the ribs instead.

The ref said that was illegal. So what?, I said, I won anyway just because I'm a girl.

Chance to really go out on a limb #2: Skivvies dipping

To break up the monotony of a five hour bus ride, we made a pullover stop along the coast for a look at the bluest of seas lulling into large swells down below a high cliff.  Without asking permission, I scaled off toward the beach, followed by a few puppydogish colleagues. For about 5 minutes we waded in the waves up to our knees, then someone whined that she wish she had her bathing suit and they should have warned us that we would have a chance to swim.

“What’s the hold up?” I asked, “You’ve got underwear on, don’t you?”

She looked at me like, “get real.” I looked back like, “dare me.”  Without hiding behind the rocks, I stripped down to not-matching bra and underwear and went plunging into the waves as if the whole ocean itself were a long lost lover.

Pretty soon the beach was littered with clothing and a group of seven was floating in the waves, belly up, like a pack of sea otters.

In an ultimate sacrifice to show I can Live the Value! better than the rest, I took off my bottoms in the deep water and slung them around above my head like a cowboy roping steers. Just in case the powers-that-be weren’t looking, I let off a war cry that would raise a dead walrus.

Chance to take one for the team #3—volunteer to be a haircut victim. In the case of the haircut, it wasn’t exactly that I volunteered, but rather that I didn’t resist when the barber came into the crowd yanking on wrists. A mere interview with a Cuban barber is not enough to get an “excellent” rating on the evals. Somebody has got to get in the chair for an authentic, entertaining interaction to take place.

Without consulting me as to what I might like done, he dove right into chopping out chunks. "Aren't you going to wet it?" I wanted to know.  No answer. The long “snip-snip’s” continued as I watched the expressions on my colleagues’ faces wordlessly warp into, “OMG!” When he spun me around to face the mirror, I saw he had combed my hair forward in an Austin Powers’ sort of goober-do, probably to cover up the bald patches he made.

 “It doesn’t look so bad,” one of my friends said as I got out of the chair and she handed me my ball cap a bit too eagerly.

“Thanks. That’s reassuring.”

“Now, that took some guts,” my boss said as he high fived me, “I never would have let them touch my hair.”

“Great,” I wanted to say, “I appreciate your verbal admiration, but if you really want to show some love, schedule me for a least ten trips next season and promise not to cancel them.”

Chance to take it to the hoop #4—jump in the conga parade. Cuba celebrates Carnival the last week in July and it's a huge affair--kind of like Mar-tea-graw minus the nudity. I’m not going to describe this one. You can see it for yourself, live, at the end of a video a friend made for me. “Gigi Gets in Trouble” he titled it. “Gigi Lives Does Will Do Whatever to Get More Trips” I call it. The first part is footage he took of Cuba and will give you an idea of what it’s like there, which lots of people ask me about. The rest…well…it’s what I do for a living. Enjoy!

Really, don't you think I deserve to be a prominent figure on the schedule?

I’m off to Easter Island tomorrow where I will spend a week being a tourist with a company I hope to work for some day. Then back to Oakland, CA and then ??????  until Oct 26 when I go to Cuba for reals i.e. get paid to do it.

Much love to all.