And so many people seem impressed by how “brave” I am. And that is so not true! I fear for my life a lot of the time. Just not when I am out there, in the wilderness. Honestly, out there is where I feel safest.

But this common reaction makes me reflect on what fear is. Or, more accurately, what leads to a perception of danger. Many of my girlfriends here in Port Alberni won’t go running on trails alone because they are afraid of “something” happening: a fall, a bear encounter. Yet they will go on long road-bike rides, 40 or 80 or even 100 km (my sporty girlfriends here are pretty impressive, I must say!)

I do rides like that too. But it’s doing road rides like that, with cars hurtling past – sometimes only inches away from my body – that makes me experience legitimate fear. Not being alone in the wilderness.

It seems to me that many people’s fear is not proportional to the actual level of danger. It is more about a comfort zone, and what they are used to. Honestly – in my 30 or so years of adventuring, in very wild places around the world, sometimes travelling with others and sometimes alone, I have come across only one serious accident: a hiker in Patagonia who had a very bad fall, and ultimately ended up having his lower leg amputated.

Then I go to some place like Toronto, and drive on those highways, the 401 and 400 and 407 etc. – I see thousands of people enclosed in metal and glass boxes zipping past one another at combined speeds of 200 km/h or more, apparently experiencing no fear! In spite of the fact that the radio is broadcasting a constant stream of info of serious traffic accidents, and that Ontario drivers simply get used to detouring past smashed-up cars every so often, some of which contain dead or injured bodies.

Honestly, in all of my wilderness trips, I have never detoured past a dead body. City drivers just get used to this. And then think I should experience fear in the wilderness.

I recall, back in 2000, when a drunk camper was bitten by a wolf on an island off of Tofino. The incident was headline news around the country. It happened that I had been photographing the wolves involved a few weeks earlier. So, next thing I knew I was fielding all of these media calls.

I talked to one editor in her high-rise in Toronto. She was horrified by the idea of these wild animals appearing from the bush and attacking. I tried put to it into perspective for her. Something like 3000 people are killed in motor vehicle accidents in Canada each year. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians are bitten by dogs every year. On average, one person is killed by a wild animal across all of North America per year (a fraction of the number actually killed by domestic dogs).

But Canadians are used to dogs – just as they are used to cars (and car accidents). They have lost their fear of the situations that present true danger, and instead fear what they don’t know: wilderness or wolves or bears.

So what should we be afraid of? In my ideal world, we would all make the effort to become properly informed, and to define what truly are the dangers in our lives.

Ironically, the wolves that were involved in that attack provide an example. Those wolves had become habituated to humans. They had been around people so much that they had lost their natural fear of us. That is why I was able to photograph them, it is why they ended up close enough to a drunk camper to end up biting him, and it is why they were shot.

And that same habituation or desensitization is happening to us now. The things that are most dangerous to us are so intermingled with our daily lives that we do not fear them: fast food and lack of exercise; far too much sugar in the North American diet; cars and car accidents; our industrialized way of life and what that means for global warming and coming food shortages. These things are already killing thousands of people every year, and they will kill many, many thousands more.

These are all very scary to me. Much more so than cougars and wolves and bears.

Not sure if you will get this in time but I have a hankering for that bean and rice dish we had while you were here, but I can’t remember the details.

Even though Lucy and I are not in regular contact, we are those kinds of old friends who can pick up the thread of conversation as if we only saw one another yesterday – even if it has actually been a year or more since we were last in touch. She was one of my first room-mates when I moved to Australia in the late 1980s. My last visit that she is remembering was back in 2008.

But I’d already been thinking about that rice and beans dish, and how intertwined it is with many of my friends around the world. I first learned the recipe back in 2005 or so, when I was staying with a friend of a friend in San José, Costa Rica.

Gallo pinto (which literally means something like “painted rooster” or “speckled hen,” in reference to the speckled nature of the black beans mixed with the white rice) is standard breakfast food in Costa Rica. Rice and beans are served with most dinners there. In the morning, the leftovers are mixed together to make gallo pinto. My friend’s friend’s wife Nana showed me her recipe (ingredients in bold):

Boiling the beans: OK, in North America, everyone seems to claim that they are too busy to soak and boil beans, so they get canned beans. Don’t do it! Canned beans come out about ten times more expensive, they are watery and flavourless, and all that shipping of metal and liquid around is bad for the environment. Soaking and boiling your own beans doesn’t actually take any of your time, it just takes a bit of planning.

Soak the dried black beans in about twice their volume of water, for 5 to 12 hours (so you can put them in overnight and boil them in the morning, or put them in in the morning and boil them when you get home from work). Get them up to a boil, and skim off any foam that comes to the top of the pot. Then add chopped garlic and fresh thyme – 8 or so branches of it. (And salt)

You can buy thyme at your local supermarket – or grow a pot or two of it over summer. The leaves fall off as it boils – when it is all done, the stems are long and solid and really easy to pick out. Both the thyme and the garlic make a HUGE difference to the flavour of the beans, so don’t slack off here! If you’ve bought your thyme, put the remainder of it as it is into a ziplock bag, squeeze the air out, and put in the freezer. Remove stems as needed: you’ll probably have enough for another 4 or 5 bean-boilings.

The beans usually take an hour and a half to boil (covered) but that varies with the freshness of the beans. Taste one after an hour or so. When they are mushy on your tongue, they are done.

Then for the gallo pinto: Boil white rice as normal. (As for quantities, usually you want 2 to 3 times as much cooked rice as cooked beans. I like cooking extra of both and using the leftovers in other meals).

Chop and fry a medium onion in some oil on low-medium heat. Don’t be shy about adding oil – it is the only fat in this dish, and fats are actually good for you. The onions shouldn’t really be browning, or maybe just a tiny bit.

When the onion is pale and transparent, add the cooked rice (doesn’t matter if it is cold leftovers or warm and freshly cooked) and some salt. If you didn’t use enough oil, the rice might stick – stir it constantly in any case.

Coarsely chop a big handful of fresh cilantro. Throw it in, stir. Add cooked black beans, trying not to get the liquid (it tastes fine with the liquid, just colours all the rice purple and doesn’t look at pretty). Stir more til it is all hot.

I make big batches of it. It keeps five days or more in the fridge, so I can take out a serving and heat it up really quickly. I eat my gallo pinto every morning – and I mean every morning – for breakfast, with a fried egg on top and salsa on top of that. For vegans, it is tasty with the just the salsa (it’s already a complete protein) or you can smush some avocado on top instead of the egg.

I don’t function well on sweet breakfasts (like granola, or toast with jam). I really need my gallo pinto, and I go to the effort of gettting the ingredients when I am travelling. Last year, visiting my sister in Ontario, I made it there – and now black beans and gallo pinto are regular menu items in her household! This December, staying with my friends Pato and Angela in Punta Arenas, Chilean Patagonia, I made it and they loved it too! When I headed further south, past Tierra del Fuego, to visit friends Cristina and Oli on Navarino Island, I brought a big tub of it already made – and their two year old there loved it too. While on Navarino, I received an email from Pato:

Hoy vinieron a almorzar unos amigos de Natales vegetarianos. Angela preparó los porotos negros con arroz integral al modo de Jackie, con salsa chipotle y lo disfrutaron mucho.

…saying that they had some vegetarian friends visiting from Puerto Natales, that they cooked them rice and beans “a la Jackie” and that it was a big hit!

And then, stopping through Phoenix, Arizona, on the way home, to support friends Deaune and Mike in the running of their first marathon there, I cooked up another batch of gallo pinto -and, again, a hit! Deaune wrote me later, to say that my healthy recipes had inspired her and her family to make positive permanent changes in their eating habits!

So, even before receiving this email from Lucy, I had been thinking: What a great thing, rice and beans around the world. Nana’s recipe, shared with me many years ago in Costa Rica, has travelled to so many distant corners of the world: southern USA and eastern Canada; southernmost Chile; Australia and – now that Cristina and Oli have moved to Germany – to Europe as well! A pretty delicious connection, linking so many of my friends around the globe.

Please comment here if you cook up some gallo pinto, so we can all see  how far this connection continues to travel! (Comentarios en español beinvenidos… ¡los traduzco!)

Ha! It says that Lima is "the best airport in South America". Ha! I say again.

OK, I thought I’d be fine for my travels back to Canada because I would not pass through Santiago de Chile (airport affected by the recent big earthquake); my routing was Buenos Aires – Lima – LA – Vancouver. Especially after checking in in BA: they gave me my boarding passes right through to LA. All seemed good.

Then I got to Lima where, upon disembarking, the screen showed my 1:05am flight, at Gate 21, to LA (along with a whole bunch of other LAN flights) as “Delayed”. So those of us with the same connection lined up and waited patiently…  I heard the Australians in front of me being told that the flight was now going at 5:40am, but then the agent told them to be at Gate 21 at 12:30am. So the flight is going? Hmm.

Then it was my turn. The agent told me the flight was delayed til 5:40. I told her then I’ll need her to revise my connection to Vancouver. “Connection?” she said. “In that case,  you go on this flight, departing at 1:05am. Be at Gate 21 at 12:30.”

“So my original flight is going, after all?” I asked.

“No, it is a different flight,” she responded. Just with the same flight number, time, and gate. Hmm, very strange.

So we board, and wait. And wait. An hour passes, then close to another. Then the Captain comes on and says that the airport is closed for scheduled maintenance (it is now 2:10am, which is actually 4:10 am for me, Buenos Aires time) and we will now depart at 3:30am. Fortunately there is an empty seat beside me (why were they trying to boot people off this flight then, if there was room? another hmm). At least I am able to doze a bit.

An announcement wakes me. It is the Captain. My watch says 6:22am and we are still on the ground. “We are very sorry, we have exceeded the crew’s legal work time and we must leave you now. This flight is cancelled. Please disembark and follow the ground crew’s instructions.” Looks like I am staying in Peru. I set my watch to local time, 4:22am. And this is where the real fun begins.

The mob at the unmanned immigration booth, 5am.

OK, so we get off. People are already pissed off (we’ve been sitting on the plane for 4 hours now – you’d think they could have seen this coming a bit earlier?). Some are yelling at the LAN

staff, who are simply telling us that we must pass through Peruvian immigration, that they will get us a hotel, and that at 2pm tomorrow they will have information about the flight. 2pm!! There are several hundred of us – it is clear that we are not going to be in any hotel room for hours yet.

I have to decide upon my strategy. Go it on my own and try to rebook my flight (at 4:30am? I don’t think so) or follow instructions. I abandon the crowd, who are stalled at the arrival gate yelling at Claudia, the LAN staff person.

I get to immigration, along with the dozen or so others who elected to follow instructions. But there is only one booth – and no one is at it (the airport is closed, remember? no inbound flights). But we line up politely anyway, and try to keep our spirits light and make jokes about how ridiculous this is (remember, we’re all kind of giddy for having been awake for 24 hrs). I make friends with an American named Mike, who was on the coast in Peru when the tsunami following the Chile quake hit. He’d seen the videos of the Indonesia tsunami, and knew what to do when the bay in front of his beach-house suddenly emptied.

Claudia tries to figure out where to lead us.

So we wait and hope. Eventually the angry crowd joins us, still yelling at Claudia as they approach. And they are not in the mood to make an orderly line-up, so they crowd in front of our straight little line-up, forming a mass mob in front of the one unmanned immigration booth.

Then Claudia shows up and calls in Spanish for anyone who is in transit (people like myself, who boarded in another country and did not visit Peru on this trip) to go with her. I try to help the English-speaking people understand what she is saying, so they know whether to go or stay. I explain to Mike “I have to go with her. You have to stay.” I wave to him above the crowd as I am whisked away “I don’t know which option is better! Maybe I’ll see you again!” and the 16 of us who boarded in Buenos Aires follow Claudia.

OK, now here is where my memory starts getting fuzzy. By now, I am dehydrated (remember, they’d taken my water bottle? which I was going to fill before getting on the flight to nowhere) and just trashed. We wind around corridors and passages and through metal doors and glass doors. Eventually we get to a different, bigger, immigration area.

Trying to convince Customs we're here. 6am.

The customs official cannot deal with us, though. We have no “arrival” flight number for our form. So they argue with Claudia for a while, checking out the computer screens which, according to the customs official, prove that our flight is not here and therefore we cannot be here. We try to convince him of the evidence

before his very eyes (us!). The chief flight attendant shows up and tries to explain that we are really here. The immigration guy finally wraps his head around what has happened – supposedly the LAN people are supposed to fill out some special card when this happens – and eventually he stamps our passports.

So that is immigration – then customs. But no bags. Claudia takes us to international arrivals, where we wait a while at one carousel, then are herded over to another. The Australians are really thirsty, too, and asking for water. Although there are vending machines there, none of us has any Peruvian money.

So, after no bags appear anywhere, Claudia takes us over to national arrivals – I think it is like 6am or so local time by now – where it seems that some of the people who had boarded the flight in Peru have already picked up their bags. And there is Mike! We greet each other like old friends.

We know our bags are in there. 7am.

But alas, the door guards will not let us in, because we are coming through the out-door and not through the in-door (and there is no way we can backtrack through immigration to get around to the in-door). So we all fight and argue, but to no avail – the door guards believe that, since we have come in from Buenos Aires, our baggage can not be in the national section – even as we see other people from our same flight coming out with their baggage. So we yell and argue and threaten to bust through the door (I am quite ready to go through with it by now). The Australians are calling for water – one of them is feeling sick – and Mike needs medication from his bag. The chief flight attendant shows up, and then even the captain. I use my best Spanish: “Please sir, can you help us get our bags? We’ve been awake for 24 hours now, led all over the airport, and no one will help us.”

7 hrs later, some now in wheelchairs.

He smiles sadly. “I am in the same position. Just trying to get my bags, like you.”

The door guards insist that our bags can not be there – even though we knew that is not true. So eventually Claudia leads our group back to customs. An elderly woman who cannot walk any more is put in a wheelchair. I say goodbye

to Mike again, and we go back into international baggage claims, where our bags – of course – are not.

Back in the international area once more, people line up first at one place then another – I’m not sure why, we are just following one another around in a daze by now. The Australians have managed to change some money somewhere, and are slugging down bottles of gatorade. I am so thirsty; I find myself staring at their red gatorade sloshing back and forth in the bottle as they gulp. I am going to fall over. I have to turn away.

Claudia is out in the middle of the empty baggage claim room talking to someone, and my head temporarily clears enough to wonder what we are lining up for – if she isn’t even there. I stagger over to her. “Claudia. Our bags are not here. Better we just go to the hotel, ¿no?”

She agrees. So she herds us all up again – or what is left of us – and here is where the only good news of the tale comes. The hotel is right here at the airport, the Ramada Inn. No waiting for transport. Right next door where we can walk across the driveway and deal with bags, tickets, whatever, all by ourselves in the morning. Oops, I mean afternoon – it is already 7:45 in the morning.

No longer sure why we're lining up. 7:45am.

OK, the story could go on and on (and it has)… it’s now midnight and I’m writing from the Ramada Inn – yup, now over 24 hours in Peru. Almost all of that spent in line-ups at the airport today. I supposedly have a “confirmed” flight out at 3:40am (“confirmed” in the Latin American sense of the word). So I’m sitting in the hotel restaurant, trying to celebrate this unexpected visit to Peru by sipping on their national drink. When life hands you a bowl of lemons… make yourself a pisco sour.
Salud.

Epilogue:
I ran into the captain again on the elevator on the way to catch that “confirmed” flight. He tells me the delays were all on the Lima end. They took so long to load the luggage there that they were not done by the airport’s scheduled 2-3:30am closure (which makes sense why our rescheduled flight was for 3:40am, so as not to risk getting affected by that again).

So we boarded again… sat on the tarmac for another 2 hours again (I watched the luggage loaders sitting around, joking, getting in a fight, then making up and joking around again… but loading very little luggage, for most of those 2 hours). But finally we took off!

Once in LA I found out that the LAN people had mistakenly rescheduled my connection for the following day… so I spent my whole connection time there in a line-up trying to get them to swing my connection (and luggage) on to that day’s flight. And Wednesday night, after 4 days of travelling, I finally made it into Vancouver.

This whole thing is strange, though. Sure, part of it is the problems at Lima’s Jorge Chávez Airport. LAN tells us that the problem is because of the Chile quake, that they don’t have the planes. But that is not right – we had a plane, we were on it for 4 hours. And this issue of saying my 1:05 am flight was not going, then all of a sudden “another” flight with the same number, departure time, and gate was going – and then it didn’t go after all – is all very strange. There is something that they were not being straight with us about, something very strange about the whole affair…

OK, yes, it is the peak of summer, but this is Patagonia. Unfortunately, you can’t tell in the picture how windy it is! Not only is it high-latitude (53-54 degrees where I was, in and south of Punta Arenas – roughly equivalent to the latitude of Haida Gwaii/Queen Charlotte Islands). But in addition, the plate tectonic accident that has placed Antarctica symmetrically over the south pole (for now, anyway) means that, unlike in the northern hemisphere, the winds that swirl around the globe in the latitudes 50s, 60s and 70s are unimpeded by any continental mass here in the south.

The south tip of South America is the first point of land that juts down and intercepts these winds (check it out on a globe – South America’s southern tip is something like 1000 km further south than either Australia or South Africa. Sorry I don’t have a globe on hand to verify my figures, but something like that). That’s why southern Patagonia is so windy, and why the ocean currents are so treacherous.

So, I have been offline for a while. Over the next two weeks I’ll catch y’all up on the interesting places I have been to. I am officially down here to report on an adventure race, Xtremo6000, which is part of the Adventure Racing World Series and which will take place later this week in northern Argentina.

But I decided to take advantage of being flown this close to Patagonia by grasping the opportunity and heading down to visit my dear friends in Chilean Patagonia. I met the Cáceres Murrie family back in 2004 – they run a wilderness lodge at Cabo San Isidro lighthouse, the southernmost inhabited point of the American continent, on the edge of Magellan Strait. The Patagonia Expedition Race finished there a few years back – I was reporting on that race and, while waiting for the teams to come in, we all became friends. In particular, Benjamín and I really hit it off (he was 14 at the time), with our common interests in learning about gathering wild foods and trying to figure out how to make serviceable objects from found items, e.g. making urchin-catching spears (erizeros in Spanish – we don’t have a word for them in English) and weaving baskets out of the native reed junquillo.

Benjamín is now 20, and going into his third year in marine biology. (He’s also an amazing swimmer… more about than in an upcoming post). My visit coincided with his summer break, so we headed out to the lighthouse (or faro) with plans to hike to Cabo Froward: the southermost point on the American continent. Benjamín had some guiding obligations first (tourists who had come to hike and kayak from the faro) so I hung out with him, enjoying the hiking and kayaking and doing some photography.

By the time he had finished up his guiding obligations, Benja had a friend arriving back home in Punta Arenas (another champion swimmer, more about her coming up too). So we did our 4-day hike to Froward in just two days (i.e. 60 km of rough terrain: irregular coastal rock shelves, wet and spongy peat bog, and steep slippery rainforest trails in less than 36 hours!… carrying 4 days of food with us). There were 4 river crossings along the way – and we hit 3 of the 4 at high tide, forcing me to swim (Benja is used to cold water; I am not!). Out backpacks were stuffed into big garbage bags – as heavy as they seem, they still float!. We lucked out with the two sunniest days of my whole visit for the trek, and by the next morning we were back in Punta Arenas. (More on that coming up too… especially the dolphins leaping joyously at the bow of the zodiac).

So I’ll be posting more about the whole trip over the coming weeks – photos and words both. But the summary is…. a few days in Buenos Aires, overcoming the jetlag while taking in the tango scene, then 2nd a half weeks in the far south of the continent, then this coming week at Xtremo6000 adventure race (daily “live” reports coming on SleepMonsters, if you are interested).

It was a sad goodbye to everyone this morning… I’ve shared so many laughs these last few weeks, both with Benja out at the faro, and with the whole family, Pato and Ángela and their sons and all of their many friends. It’s tough when you have such good friends who live so far away… and you just never know if or when you will ever see them again.

OK, please check back over the coming weeks… for more about the faro, about our hike, about some amazing swimmers, about Andean condors, about Buenos Aires tango, about adventure racing…. lots coming.