Answer to the most popular question

How do you pack for a year? Good question. I am not the one to answer it. I took this pic before I packed. Later that night I took out enough stuff to fill a shopping bag. And even so my backpack is still roughly the size and weight of an Escalade. Two days in and I'm already looking to unload stuff...

Damn you, Alma

You know that tropical storm that just formed in Central America, the first named storm of the hurricane season? She's sitting right overhead. In the back righthand side of the pic you can see where it rained so hard it knocked down a banana tree inside the hostel courtyard. I took the picture while sitting at the computer typing this!

Luckily there are a bunch of great people to hang out with in the hostel. Some of us are hoping to head out tomorrow, weather permitting, to check out Ometepe, a volcanic island in Lago Nicaragua.

Itinerary

This is the plan for the trip, although this is likely to change on a daily basis:

Nicaragua
Costa Rica
Panama
Morocco
Spain
Russia
Mongolia
China
Tibet
Nepal
Thailand
Cambodia
Laos
Vietnam
Argentina
(Antarctica?)
Bolivia
Peru

Day 1

Today was the first day of what I hope to be a year-long backpacking trip. I'm posting this from my first stop, in Granada, Nicaragua. I'm pretty zonked from a crazy couple of weeks and a long day of traveling. I was still making arrangements while I was sitting at the airport in Miami, canceling car insurance, canceling my celphone service and whatnot. But already I have a pretty amazing story that I can't help but see as a good omen.

The trip went surprisingly smoothly, aside from a mysterious hour-plus delay after we boarded the plane for Managua. I planned on taking a taxi from the airport to the bus station and then the bus to Granada. But since I was tired, running late and anxious to get where I was going before dark, when a taxi driver offered to drive me from the airport to Granada I accepted. It cost much more than a bus ride, but the convenience factor was huge.

I had booked a hostel in Granada online and written down the address. When we got to the city he couldn't find it. And no one seemed to know where it was. So we drove around for a little while, but we found it. It was only when I got to my room and emptied my pockets that I realized my celphone had fallen out in his cab.

Oh well. I'm not going to use it for a year anyway, so while it's a nice phone, not a big loss in the grand scheme.

A little later I was talking to a couple fellow gringos, one of whom is a Peace Corps volunteer here and thus fluent in Spanish, when an employee of the hostel told him he had just gotten a phone call from a taxi driver wondering if anyone in the hostel had lost a celphone!

A taxi driver -- never mind the country -- who calls a hostel trying to find the owner of a lost celphone?! It's a Treo, which costs several hundred dollars if you buy it retail. In the western hemisphere only Haiti is a poorer country than Nicaragua so Javier (the driver) probably could have sold it for a small fortune. I'm flabbergasted. The Peace Corps guy has lived in Latin America for six years and has never heard of anything like it. So I told him I'd pay him the fare again if he drives back with it tomorrow. It's about a 45 minute drive...

It's going to be a good trip.