It's Laundry Day, Again...

It's not so easy packing for a long trip in South America.  In the North, they have dry seasons and wet seasons;  In the South, the standard four-pack, only inverted.  And the climatic conditions within the countries vary so much : there are scorching coastal beaches, blistering deserts, and dripping wetlands on the one hand and oxygen-deficient and freezing five- and six-thousand-meter peaks on the other.  In between, rainforests are crisscrossed by rivers and creeks with biting insects and caiman.  You have to be prepared for everything for all conditions.  It's no Estonia after all.


During the last four months, we've been mostly around the Caribbean coast, from the Orinoco delta in Venezuela to Cartagena in Colombia (Remember Romancing the Stone ?) and the only times we've felt cold were inside the night buses, which are kept at meat-locker temperatures.  The rest of the time, we were dripping, nay, bathing in our own perspiration day and night.  ...Like Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone.

One hundred percent of deodorants in Colezuela are antiperspirant, but I thought it'd be unwise to rub it all over my body.  Anyways, it was hell.  Like Florida's summer if you don't have A/C.  All the time.  And when your t-shirts gets soggy and disgusting after roughly three minutes of wearing, it means you have to do the laundry quite often.   And I can tell you, our backpacks were big and heavy and full of everything, everything except the washing machine.  So we bought a bar of laundry soap and rubbed and rubbed and rinsed and rinsed and wrung and wrung.  Every two or three days.

So it was with a cool sigh of relief, that we reached the mountains again, in Medellin, where the air is always cool.  The thermometer hardly ever moves; of course it never breaks a sweat.  And we walked around for hours and days.  And we didn't sweat either.  The mountains were our antiperspirant.   Imagine, you take off your shirt at the end of the day and you sniff the pits...and they smell of untainted flowers.  And days and days go by without the laundry bag getting filled up.  Well that was about heaven for me.