This author has yet to write their bio.
Meanwhile lets just say that we are proud FHW contributed a whooping 154 entries.
I joined ten other motorcyclists for two weeks following the Dakar circus from town to town in South America. I had always dreamed of getting close to the Dakar. The old saying, “be careful what you wish for,” has new meaning for me now.
If you’re going to Little Big Sur, you should read this.
Each year a group of us guys spend a weekend partying in the desert, affectionately called “Desert Storm.” This year we changed venues to Little Big Sur and the first-ever “Jungle Storm” was launched.
For those of you who were there, you’ll find this story painful in a “what were we thinking?” kind of way. For those of you who own a place in Chonchos, you’ll find this story instructive. For those of you who are neither, consider this just another amusing-from-a-far day in our Mexican “resort.”
My vision of resort living goes something like this: I arrive a week after KR to give her plenty of time to unpack and set the place up. KR greets me on the beach with porters to carry the luggage up the Mule Highway to Little Big Sur. Once unpacked, I shuffle down to the beach to catch some rays and waves…
2008 marks the beginning of a new phase in Little Big Sur’s life, namely shifting from building it to using it! After a fist full of “mananas,” we’ve now spent two holidays moving into our little palapa. Little Big Sur is 90% done, missing “only” the furniture, full electricity, and assorted finishing touches. Here’s the report from our last visits.
The next hint that maybe this wasn’t going to be your average, slightly vexing vacation home construction project was the small little fact that the only way to get there was via an hour long water taxi ride. At the time, I didn’t understand this is the only way that we could get there and it was the only way that anything was going to get there. Which turns your sense of project planning and timing upside down since things like the hundreds, if not thousands, of bags of cement used for construction needed to come via water too. Other things useful for construction, like power tools, were not in abundance either since the place is off the electrical grid and runs primarily by solar, generator and mule power. Heavy emphasis on the latter.
This is the story of how we became owners of a 500 sq. ft. beach casa on a turtle preserve in the jungle 30 miles south of Puerto Vallarta, violating most of the rules of smart real estate buying in the process. Along the way we crashed an international conference on real estate (apparently not learning much), got familiar with the emergency procedures for a scorpion bite, discovered the finer points of getting on/off a water taxi, and partied in an Old Town PV bar in which the most popular way of entering or exiting was on the back of a donkey. Puerto Vallarta would seem to be our kind of town.
Sometimes a bottle of Scotch and a pipe of hash lead to good decisions
A couple of days travel outside of Kathmandu takes you to a different time
I married the right woman
Public burials take on a new meaning along the Bagmati
Surviving four days in the “streets” of Nepal on a motorcycle goes next to not killing myself on the banks of Daytona as my proudest motorcycle accomplishment.
There are few rules in Kathmandu’s traffic and most of them are unwritten.
Religion permeates almost every part of this society, but it’s a very different kind of religion than we’re use to in the West.