My day began with an “oh shit” at 5:55 AM, at which point I was awake, which was good, but seemed not have gotten up at my alarm going off at 5:15, which was bad in terms of getting to the station in time for the train to Machu Picchu.

I ended up getting out the door in 10 minutes, so I actually departed only 5 minutes later than I intended to, but considerably more flustered. Amazingly, I made it out with everything I really needed. Except sunscreen, on which more later. Some frantic searching for a taxi and a brief ride later I was at San Pedro station at roughly the planned 6:30 to line up for the 6:55 ride. The sene there was a little chaotic, some eople were in line to buy tickets and some had tickets and were in line to get on the train, except both groups were in one line and noone knew where to go.

I did end up on the train though, next to a lesbian osteopath from Vancouver, so all was well. What could not be well with a seatmate like that. Theres roughly a four hair train ride to Aguas Calientes, the small town at the base of the mountains that hold Machu Picchu. Incredible scenery along much of the way, narrow mountain passes, rushing rivers, that kind of thing. When we finally descended (to an elevation of 6500 feet, which, although high, is way down from Cusco) the landscape was whats known as “cloud forest”, the very lush neo-tropical rainforest feed by the precipitation on the eastern side of the Andes).

Aguas Calientes itself was suprisingly confusing to navigate considering how small it is and that its only purpose in life is to send people to Machu Picchu. Some sweating and panic later I finally found my way to the bus that rumbles up the mountain to Machu Picchu via a series of narrow switchbacks. The stone peaks swathed in green and mist on te top glimpsed along the way served to mellow me out a little. Getting there did the rest.

I wondered how it would hold up, being such a fmailiar image in a lot of ways, but Machu Picchu is extremely impressive in person. And much grander than the pictures convey. As you negotiate the maze of stone walls and buildings, you truly appreciate how big it is and what monumental effort it must have been to construct it there on the side of a mountain. It was a gorgeous sunny day too, with big blue skies streching to mist-capped mountains in the distance.

Therein lay something of a problem given my lack of sunscreen. I tried sticking to the shade at first, only to discover something that I have not seen adequately advertised- Machu Picchu is thick with mosquitos. Every time I got in the shade they{d descend. I think I got 15 bites on my left arm. Fewer on my right, maybe they were thrown off by its constant camera wielding. So back into the firty sun sans sunscreen.

Mosquitos and suburn to one side, I wandered around the area for an hour and a half and loved it. It truly lives up to the hype. And on the train on the way back the porters put on a fashion show of fine alpaca clothing accompanied by the sounds of Abba and the Pet Shop Boys. Thats a whole attraction in its own right!

Tomorrow Im going to seel out and take a guided tour around Cusco and some of the outlying ruins. So far Ive done everything in this trip by myself, and while I appreciate what Ive learned about my resources and the ways that things work themselves out, I think its time to sit my ass on a bus and have someone else show me around for a change!

You know, high as in altitude. 10,900 feet, to be precise. Mind you, this would be a great city in which to be an active addict. Products made from coca leaves are a cultural mainstay, I was handed a flyer to a hemp club with “special homemade brownies” and get getting massage offers as I walk down the street. Thank goodness Im not practicing anymore.

So, I just flat out love this city. Its very laid-back and mellow, and the vistas are consistently stunning- mountains in every direction, steel blue skies and big puffy white clouds. The whole place is pretty much geared to tourism, which is double-edged. On the one hand, you cant help but reflect on the us and them divide and any time you pause or make eye contact, somebody trying to sell something will intercept you. On the other, it makes everything so easy to do and to find and figure out, which definitely was not the case in some of the smaller towns I was in.

Today I started off in the Iglesia de Companeras Jesus, a Jesuit church with one of the most stunningly ornamental gold altars Ive ever seen. Like 30 feet tall and stuffed with sculpture and paintings. I was drawn in just by the church aspect, Ive always been powerfully drawn to Catholic things. I think I probably was Catholic in a past life. Not a very Christian notion, although we could have an interesting discussion about early Gnostic beliefs, but thats why Im not Catholic in this life, so I can entertain notions like that.

In any case, yes, wowed by the church, but even more intrigued by the things I learned from the student guide. The Spanish clearly co-opted the local culture- building churches on the remains of Inca palaces, planting crosses atop mountain worship sites, converting and intermarrying with Inca nobility and installing them as figureheads, etc. But the new pseudo-Inca elite did some coopting in return. Hence pantings of Christ as an Indian, statues of Mary in the style of an Inca goddess, and angels with parrots wings in imperial Inca colors. There was also an anti-Protestant painting that I thought was hilarious- Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, readings his rules of religious practice to cowering figures labeled with the names of Protestant leaders- Luther, Calvin, John Wyclffe, etc.

Later in the afternoon I visited two museums, one devoted to the Inca and one to the pre-Inca pre-Colombian period. This later one was my favorite. While it featured historical and archeological information, it treated the exhibits as an art musueum would. It featured descriptions of the artisitic aspects of the artifacts juxtaposed with quotes from modern artists- Matisse, Gaugin, Klee, Picasso, etc. that made clear the influence that so-called primtive art styles had on Cubism and other areas of modern art.

I finished up the evening by going back to the Iglesia for mass (something about the visit in the morning had inspired me to) and then heading back to the neighborhood Im staying in, San Blas, for dinner. The area is kind of an aglomeration of tourist and local artist hangout spots, so I had dinner at a place that was a combined restaraunt and art gallery. Cause thats how I roll!

Tomorrow I am rolling, extremely early, to Macchu Picchu. More to follow…

That´s largely what I have to say for the moment.

I got in by the overnight bus this afternoon, with zero kidnappings, robberies or ravine plunges. I think it was good that the trip started at night- I could tell myself that those dark spaces by the side of the steeply winding road were just five foot drops to a field of flowers, rather than 500 foot mountain cliffs. We´d gone through most of the really rugged passes by the time dawn came, and then we were simply in the Andes, way high up, with stunning peaks and mountain valleys all around. Early in the morning, though, we did pass a tourist bus that had it´s front end smashed up, and on the other side of the road a truck equally smashes up, with one wheel over the edge of the road. Ulp.

But alls well that ends- this was always going to be the most grueling part of the trip, and I´m done with long distance buses now. Hallelujah! I´m doing pretty good with the altitude. Every ten minutes or so I get a little hammering heart action, and doing seemingly simple things like sitting down and then standing up again make me a little woozy, but it´s not as bad as some of the “we were laid out for a whole day” stories I´ve heard. I think I did the biggest adjustment last night on the bus as it was climbing, when I did feel headachey and naseous. Hard to tell if that was altitude or just switchbacks and trying to sleep on a cramped bus seat.

Anyway, due to fitfullness of said sleep, this is about as ambitous as I plan to be for the day. Off to bed, and then in the morning I´ll tour sights around the city center. Which is, may I say again, ridiculously beautiful.

It seems I did have a chance to write again. I´m back at the hotel now after a day of sightseeing, cooling my heels between now and getting on the overnight bus to Cusco. In the conference room next to me an incredibly loud (but good) group of musicians has gathered and is playing for what looks like some kind of conference roundtable. I can feel the vibration in my breastbone!

Still and all, a pretty good day. I got down to the front desk at a little after 8 for my flight over the Nazca lines, only there were two problems. They had no record of the flight reservation I´d made online, and it turned out it was 7 instead of 8. I´m still not sure how that happened, I think maybe my tricky radio clock radioed itself in and reset itself for US daylight savings, undoing the manual time change I´d made. Technology.

As for the reservation, I took a deep breath while they made calls to the agency in Lima, trying to practice my awareness, as it´s developed on this trip so far, that nothing happens quite like it´s supposed to, but it all works out eventually. They verified my existence (something I´ve had trouble doing all by myself sometimes) and informed me that ym flight was at 2. I then did what any sensible person would do- went back to the room and took a bath. Soon after they called and told me I´d been upgraded to 12:30.

We went up in a small plane, the pilot and 5 passengers. Some of you may know I don´t much care for flying (as in sweat, armrest gripping and sheer unreasoning panic), but that´s mostly on jumbo jets. I actually enjoy the small planes, because it feels much more controlled in an odd way, almost like flying a la Superman. I´m super glad I did this, becuase the sheer volume and scope of the miles long lines in the desert was stunning. The figures were great, but I actually liked the lines and geometric patterns better for their vastness and inscrutable purposefullness. I was alos very glad I wasn´t the Argentinian girl next to me, who spent most of the 30 minute flight heaving into a plastic bag. In her defense, there was a lot of banking and turning.

After that, I took a tour out to Chuachilla, a pre-colombian burial site just outside of town. Tour being just me, in a car for hire that the tour öperator¨from the kiosk next to the hotel flagged down and told where to go. The driver did stick with me and tell me about the cemetery, though, (extreme) limits of my comprehension of spanish permitting. The whole field is the sight of tombs of one of the civilizations that preceeded the Inca, which have been extnsively looted since then, but some of which have been reconstituted complete with mummified remains.

It was an amazing scene. Inherently somber, and I was moved by the obvious care with which the burials were done- most were wrapped in extensive linenes, some had decorative wigs, and thay all contained pottery and even dried food offerings. In-between the ropped off walkways leading to restored tombs, the desert snads were littered with bones, pottery and linen frgaments. The real live wind whistling across the dry desert plain and big copper-colored mountains looming in the background gave it the proper stark and yet meaningful feeling.

So now I´m resting and gathering my wits for the 14 hour overnight bus ride to Cusco. I sort of wish more of it would be during the day, since going through the Andes must be spectacular. This is probably the portion of my trip most prone to kidnapping or plungng into a ravine, but assuming none of that hapens, I´ll write more from Cusco tomorrow eveing. See you then!

I´m in Nazca now, arriving this afternoon after a 2.5 hour bus ride from Ica. It´s a lovely city! Ica seemed very hectic, and had some bad vibrations emananting from it (I was born in California, I can say things like that), hence camping out by the lagoon. Nazca, though, is much more mellow, it feels like the kind of place you can walk around, and talk to people in shops, etc.

After arriving I checked in to my hotel, and then headed for the local archaeological museum. Archaeology is cool, but the grounds were also home to peacocks and kitties, which is super’cool! I was expecting to catch a cab to my next destination, but there are no cabs, unlike Lima and Ica, where half the cars on the road were taxis. There are collectivos, little cars which go around and pick up and groups of people and drop them off at various locations, but I can´t figure out how and where to flag one down.

All of this led to quite a walk to my evening destination, a planetarium that had a show on the Nazca Lines. For those not familiar, the lines are geometric shapes and figures of animals drawn across the desert surface some time between 220 BC and 200 AD that can only be observed from the air. Whacky those Nazca were. There´s all kinds of theories about why they did it and how, most favoring astronomical observation, key positions related to irrigation, and ritual purposes. There´s also the ever popular extraterrestrial theory. Those of you who know my well might expect I fancy that one, but that´s just silly. Why would aliens teach local people to draw monkeys that only they can then see? My personal favorite is from the researcher who belives that the Nazca people had hot air balloons that thye could observe the figures from. Pre’colombian hot air balloons! Now there´s a theory.

Despite my affection for the town, I´m camping out a bit outside the city center. In this case in a hotel by the airport, from whence I depart on a morning flight over the lines. I´m then going on a desert tour involving an ancient burial ground with mummies (mmm, mummies) and in the evening I´m off by overnight bus to Cusco. I don´t know if I´ll have a chance to write again before then. If not, expect a communication blackout until Friday evening.

I hope to write you all again from 10,900 feet! If only I can first figure out how to get a ride back to my hotel tonight…

Im writing this from Huacachina, an honest to gosh desert oasis comprised of a bunch of hotels and hostels clustered around a dark little lagoon near Ica, Peru. I arrivd by bus from Lima, a roughly 5 hour ride down a coastal highway with la playa on one side and the desert on the other. It was beautiful, and not too long. Anyway, I got to share the experience with a double-decker busload of European tourists, and what could be better than that?

I did meet one American today though, a minister from a church group that brought 300 people here to visit prisoners, provide medical care to the poor, etc. He said they even gave some people heart valve replacements. This made me wonder-are there church groups in the US arranging for poor people to have heart valve replacements and I just dont hear about it? If not, there ought to be! Not that its a replacement for a national health care policy, but in the lack thereof it would be a nice adjunct.

As long as Im waxing political, I should mention that I saw Obama posters on freeway overpasses all around Lima. That may not be a good thing for him- being popular with foreigners is probably a big negative in US Presidential politics.

All right, Im going to wax back in my room soon. I look forward to seeing the lagoon in the daylight tomorrow, and then going museum-hopping in Ica.

Ive wandered down to the hotel business center. Please excuse the lack of apostrophe- South American keyboards are perplexing.

I feel kind of like its (much) later on the same day I left, since my flight was after 1:00 AM on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Im just here for one night, then off by bus to Ica tomorrow. Ica has amazing archaeological goodies, and is on the way to Nazca, where the giant figures are drawn in the desert and only visible from the air.

My head is approaching maximum fuzziness, so Ill keep this brief, and head off to find dinner of some sort. The flights were really very smooth. Flights as in there was a stop-over in San Salvador, El Salvador. The most amazing part of that (other than a kerfluffle with an unanounced gate change that sent everyone connecting to Lima scrambling) was that there are active volcanoes on the way to the airport. Big cindery mountains, belching steam, which was quite a sight.

As for Lima, my exposure has been somewhat limited so far. I did notice that, for all the trepidation I had about not having done this kind of thing in so long, many of my travel instincts as honed in Asian are coming right back. In terms of physical infrastructure, if somebody made everyone here Asian and changed the spanish to chinese, it would be an a lot like a big city in China. It even smells like urban China- some kind of combination of diesel fuel and pervasive construction dust.

Ill share more, soon as can be. For now Im off to find dinner, and then rendezvous with the bath Ive been dreaming of for lo on these many hours…

Isn’t it funny how you can write something in one month, but if you put a dash before the name of that month and then insert the previous month’s name before the dash, it’s as if what you write covers both months? Magazines have been doing it for decades, so I figured it would work for me too. Now, with no further prologue, here is what I’ve been up to in my creative endeavors over the past two months:

Film- Echo’s Wonder, a short film for which I was a script consultant, production assistant and Best Boy, screened at the Victoria Theater on June 1st along with other films from the latest production round of the local independent film co-op Scary Cow. Gratifyingly, it won the audience award for best picture and best writing! You can see it here, we were team 12: http://www.scarycow.com/videos/round0005/round005.html . If you squint really hard in one of the bar scenes and you’re familiar with my shirts, you’ll also see me as an extra, seated at the bar. As you can imagine, playing that role was a real stretch for me. I’m participating in this current round of Scary Cow as well, and will be writing on at least one, and maybe two, projects. Stay tuned for further details…

Publication- Nothing new to report, but I have made a pact with myself: Barring serious illness, alien abduction, or prolonged periods out of the country (for which, see Blog news below), I will to submit something for publication to a different venue, print or online, every week for the rest of the year. I’ve got two submissions out the door so far in the first two weeks of July, so perhaps by the next update there will be something to report.

Novel- My agent assures me that several publishers are continuing to look at my novel, Out In The Neon Night, and that she’s on the lookout for new publishers to pitch it to as well. I’ll keep you posted.

Blog- I’m continuing to publish San Francisco Daze, a (nearly) daily reflection on life in San Francisco in prose and poetry form that I wrote in 2005, on my blog in monthly installments. Another thing I hope to do on the blog is report in from the road during a two-week trip to Peru that I’m taking in August. Did I say Peru? I did! It’s my first trip abroad since 2001 and my first ever to South America, and I look forward to sharing it. For that, and other bloggy topics ranging from the silly to the sublime, you can tune in at any of the following three locations: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/, http://chrisw-insf.livejournal.com/, http://www.myspace.com/chriswest_writerinsf

I’ll see you with more in August!

My first job in San Francisco, in the halcyon net-addled days of 1999, was with an Investor Relations firm. Investor Relations is a specialized sub-category of Public Relations, and operates along the same lines- you, the agent working at the agency, have various clients, for whom you try to garner positive coverage and prominent participation in media, events, etc. The wrinkle with IR as opposed to PR is that the clients are corporations listed on some stock exchange or another and the kinds of audiences you promote them to include the financial press, investor conferences and mutual funds.

The place being San Francisco, and the time being the halcyon net-addled days of 1999, the clients whose accounts I worked on were all Internet or other Hi-tech firms. This was all very heady, and I liked it tolerably well, but I never felt entirely comfortable with it. Promotion and all it involves didn’t seem like an instinct that came easily to me. I felt the same way with professional self-promotion. I remember milling around at various young tech business networking events of the era, trying to summon up the energy it took to interject myself into a conversation in progress or hand my card to a complete stranger and start hyping myself, thinking, “This just isn’t my thing.”

In all fairness, as a more-introverted-than-not, more-sensitive-than-baseline type, aggressive self (or other) promotion isn’t a natural strong suit. But I’ve come to realize since that a lot of this feeling had to do with right livelihood. (Apologies for not signaling in advance the abrupt shift into Buddhist discourse.) That is to say, projecting business interests with passion did not come naturally because my natural passion does not lie in business interests. It wasn’t the right focus of energy for me. No quarrel with that as a passion by the way, for some people it is their thing, and you can fairly see the energy of it come crackling off of them, which can be an inspiring sight.

My passion, which was largely dormant at the time but kicking to awaken, is for creative endeavors. And when it comes to promoting my own creative projects, or those of others that I admire, or just generally hobnobbing with creative types and hearing about what they’re up to, lo and behold, the needed energy and confidence is there. Case(s) most recently in point:

I’ve been working on this film, Echo’s Wonder (http://www.echoswonder.com/), that’s going to be screening at the Victoria on June 1st along with other films from the same filmmaking group I’m part of. The director asked me this week if I could take a stab at writing a press release to try and maximize turnout and interest. Also this past week my roommate/musician/budding producer Alex Mikes (http://www.myspace.com/alexmikesmusic) asked me to work on a mission statement for In Bloom, the independent record company he’s starting.

I have wanted to be involved with film and music for literal decades, and it’s so gratifying to harness the energies of my natural bent for writing in promoting these activities. Although they have nothing to do with my day job (financial analyst for a non-profit), working on these two ventures was the most energizing, satisfying work I did all week.

Three cheers for right livelihood!

Okay, ‘ya got me, I’m not actually any kind of girl at all. But the first time I heard that song from Maggie Estep,’s 1994 album No More Mr. Nice Girl, I totally identified. I had felt like I was different than everyone else my whole life. You know, not “normal”.

It’s taken me the best part of the last 14 years to realize that I wasn’t imagining things. I’m not normal! And now that I finally know what that means, I’m pretty excited by it.

Sayeth the oracle known as Wikipedia: “In behavior, normal refers to a lack of significant deviation from the average.” Which brings us to… “In mathematics, an average, or central tendency of a data set refers to a measure of the “middle” or “expected” value of the data set.”

Not being normal seems horrible, because “they” tell you it’s horrible. But you know what they are? Average! Which sounds awful to me, but we needn’t pejoratize that term either. All that all of this means, mathematically, is that if we took a group of one hundred people and measured them according to Trait X, 85 of them would line up one way (“normal”) and 15 another (“not normal”). And while people think much more in terms of “good” and “bad” about this as it applies to personality, it’s really no different than when it applies to eye color or blood type.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently as I’ve been reading Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person (http://www.hsperson.com/ ). Her basic contention is that some people are naturally (get ready, this is shocking) more sensitive to external stimuli than other people. This being a minority trait, these people often feel overstimulated by the world, and react to it differently than the not as sensitive norm expects. On the positive side, these people are often the first to notice when things are happening, draw connections between disparate sources, and because they withdraw into themselves more, produce a lot internally.
Keeping this in mind makes my emotional and social life make sense in the same kind of way that suddenly realizing, “Duh, I’m left handed!” would make the world make more sense.

It’s also brought to mind for me having the same feeling over the last few years upon reading Sasha Cagen’s Quirkyalone (http://quirkyalone.net/ ) and Anneli Rufus’ Party of One: A Loner’s Manifesto (http://www.annelirufus.com/index.html ). It turns out there are a lot of us who aren’t like everyone else, and while it may not be normal, it is a different way of being with deep roots

So there you have it- I’m not a normal girl. Maybe you aren’t either. Don’t despair, because it can be fun. As Maggie Estep says:

I’m not a normal girl/ I don’t think I’ll ever be a normal girl/ But still/ I’m terribly popular