Erin’s weblog of travel & interesting local stuff

Highway 11 goes from New Orleans to Albany. In suburban Knoxville it is better known as Kingston Pike, the road which leads sprawl ever westward. It’s the start of my Spring Break and the end of Kent’s, so I’m hitching a ride north. Our mission: to drive to Philadelphia following Highway 11 through its various name changes, zig-zaggings, and occasional swallowings by Interstate 81.

Seeing no real reason to include Kingston Pike on the journey, we skipped to downtown Knoxville. Kingston Pike becomes Cumberland Avenue, or the Strip as it is better known by UT students, a slew of bars and cheap food next to campus. From there it’s pretty unclear what is Highway 11, but about a mile away you can get off the interstate and pick it up at Magnolia Ave., which is difficult to follow through the maze of interstate ramps. Giving up, we got on I-40 and exited again further out of town where it’s more rural.

It’s open highway through the countryside with a few small towns and a suburban hiccup of Morristown until you get to Bristol at the Virginia line. 11 doesn’t go through a populated part of Bristol, but it does happen to be the road to the Bristol Motor Speedway, and it happened to be a race weekend. Oops. There are some four-room houses perched beside the highway and the owners are directing cars onto their front lawns for what’s surely a nice supplement to their income. We get closer and see the stadium itself, an unbelievably huge structure draped with ads for big companies and seating 160,000 people. Incredibly, nothing is built around it besides tiny aging houses and a church. There are no strip malls and no McDonald’s. I’ve heard you can get stuck for three hours here, but fortunately it’s still two days before the race and the traffic consists of pedestrians and a sea of RV’s to either side. Flashing lights on red and white striped tents announce t-shirts and deep-fried Oreos. The Baptist church posts a sign in the sloping field that is its lawn: Parking, $20 suggested donation.

A few miles up the road, we walked around Abingdon, VA, one of those picturesque colonial towns with quilting and antique stores. Everything was closed and it was raining, which was honestly fine with me.

We began looking for hotels around Marion, but were shocked when the Best Western started at almost $200 a night. 2 hours from Bristol, they were still charging event rates. We were able to talk another down to $50 but the room smelled so bad we broke our Highway 11 vow, speeding up I-81 towards Roanoke and half expecting to pay more than we really wanted to. But I had a hunch when we passed a sign for Christiansburg with a lone Budget Inn sign, where we found a decent $50 room with an award-winning cheap diner called Anthony’s across the street. Auspiciously enough, it was on Highway 11.

Day two we took 11 to Lexington, VA, another picturesque colonial town but this time with a small college campus and some open shops and cafes to wander into. We sort of abandoned 11 from here. Took an hour or so of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a tourist road built by the CCC, which winds along the tops of mountains in the middle of nowhere. Lots of places to stop and look down into the valley. Took I-81 to Harper’s Ferry, intending to walk around the State Park there but turning our nose up at the $6 admission. Started down I-261 into Maryland for the final stretch to Philadelphia, but after two days seeing America to either side instead of semi-trucks, we turned around and improvised a route through Gettysburg and York. It was a big relief, and I even got to see a pair of Amish carriages, primitive but for an array of red lights flashing in the dark.

The places we drove through really alternated between small brick downtowns and miles of Wal-Marts and Smoothie Kings. Only one stretch through Roanoke had some older commercial development with all local businesses—no chains. Without affluent neighborhoods around, it was a lot like North Knoxville (though that’s changing), where by some strange force of economics the chains don’t care to enter. Where do most people tend to move? Maybe not tiny brick downtowns, because they’re old and expensive and there’s no parking. Cute to visit, but no one actually lives there, right? I’m not so sure. In the past 5 years, downtown Knoxville has been “revived” and is getting cooler all the time, and they’re even talking about building a brick downtown Farragut with small blocks and storefronts. We’ll see!

Haven’t seen Christine the whole trip except for on New Year’s Eve. She’s been working the whole time. She is a fishmonger at Whole Foods, having taken a break from studying forensic psychology. She’s really smart so within a few months she knows more about fish than people who’ve been there for years. She’s also kind of a metalhead, so the irony is priceless. She goes on colorful rants about how people ask her about wine pairings and she’s just like, dude, if you like it, you should probably drink it. She also tells people where the bathroom is in German. I’m going to leave that vague so it sounds like she tells everyone where the bathroom is in German, and not just German people, because it’s way more metal that way.

Anyway we’re also waiting for Andrew to call us back, because he rode the bus from Philly to NYC in order to get a ride back to Knoxville, although we’re going through Philly so he could have stayed there. His phone’s dead. We walk around Brooklyn for a long time as the air gets colder and colder. It’s neat to see all the kids going to school, it reminds me of Florence and Sienna, seeing kids smoking or whatever across the street. It’s sort of weird to me since all our schools are on grassy campuses and you’re not allowed off grounds and you certainly couldn’t get away with smoking where anyone could see you.

Only then I realize they’re not going to school, they’re going home from school because it’s 3pm. I’ve been zoned out for a few days, which may be a combination of being out of my element (a strange feeling that I seek out and am fascinated by) and sleep deprivation. Or it could be a hangover.

Make phone calls, drive to Christine’s, get lost, get found (“Just go west! Go west!” Christine instructs), hang out for a while. We walk through the now-painful cold to a fantastic sushi place for dinner when Andrew finally shows up. I told him to take a train into Brooklyn and our cross street, and he took a train that was nowhere near us and had to go all the way back through Manhattan.

The hours leading up to a trip’s end always feel anticlimactic and kind of aimless. The world looks a little less polished. You’re low on energy and know the fun’s pretty much over, yet you feel obliged to squeeze a little more out of your time there. So I drink four or five cups of excellent green tea, fighting exhaustion with caffeine and antioxidants, until we finally pile back in the car for Philadelphia, and the next day “scruffy” old Knoxville!

I’ll borrow from JW here; he’s the real writer among us and sort of narrates his own life like it’s a novel whenever we’re hanging out. He couldn’t sleep much through New Year’s morning and described the sounds he heard bouncing off the backs of the neighboring buildings and through the patio door. Apparently everyone sort of simultaneously woke up and groaned.

We weren’t much better off, and spent the day in a surreal daze with very few tangible goals, among them to eat miso soup and to sit down somewhere. We went to a movie. Later on we returned to Manhattan to meet our friends for Indian food and hang out where they’ve been staying. It’s an empty apartment in Chelsea with some air mattresses covering the floor. Someone in the music blogging or booking or some kind of business I don’t really understand keeps this apartment for out of town bands. It was so hip we totally threw a party and trashed the place…just kidding, we lay around listlessly and watched stuff on YouTube. Go 2008!

JW is leaving with the band tomorrow morning so we overstay our welcome and go back to Brooklyn without him. Roommate Danny doesn’t leave the heat on all the time and the temperature drops overnight, so it feels like 45 or so in the basement. Watched some episodes of the Russian-produced TV version of my favorite book, The Master and Margarita. No subtitles, but Kent translated some and I knew what was going on anyway. They’re pretty true to the spirit of the book! The low budget adds to it in an amazing way.

We head into Manhattan to meet the band. They’re called Senryu and they consist of my roommate Steve, his friend Wil, and a guy named Mike who lives in Boston and is one of the ever-changing “rest of the band.” It’s something like 2 in the afternoon and they’re in a diner, Wil looking sort of miserable. They went to a place called World Café (I think) and had grasshopper tacos the day before. Wil has been puking up grasshoppers ever since. We buy him some Pepto Bismol and head out to find something to do until midnight.

Any time I find myself in a city with time to kill and it’s that awkward time of day when you’re not really supposed to have fun yet but nothing else really comes to mind, I usually end up in a bar. So we went to the Double Down Saloon and were tended by Mishelle Meow, this amazing-looking punk rock woman. She had cascades of tangled candy pink hair with black roots and lots of tight necklaces and tight leather clothes and she completely ignored us aside from serving drinks. She was talking on her cell phone the whole time like “Yeah, he fucking got my name tattooed on him, can you believe that? Last Wednesday. And he’s like ‘look you can bring someone else home and throw me out of bed, I just want to be with you!’ What an asshole.”

Among the graffiti in the bathroom was a note that said, “Never date bartenders.” I couldn’t help but think it referred to Miss Meow. They had X playing on the jukebox, and pinball, and free condoms for paying customers, and a sign that said SHUT UP AND DRINK. I highly recommend it.

Later on JW took us to this great second-hand store he had described the day before, and it matched the description pretty perfectly. It’s this weird shed on a street corner with two proprietors: a suave older guy in a suit who will talk mysteriously to you while he smokes cigarettes and an old hippie. There is a mannequin with DAVE written in permanent marker on its forehead, a stuffed bear, and one of those Zoltar carnival fortune-telling machines up in the rafters. Ate dinner at Bubby’s Pie Co., and got a taxi to The Knitting Factory, a venue where our friends were playing a benefit for Education Through Music. We got a taxi because we had no idea where it was, and the GPS in the backseat told us we were only two blocks away and we didn’t need a cab at all, so we rode two blocks, paid $5 and were on our way.

I had these fantasies of sauntering past a long line at the velvet rope and saying, “We’re on the guest list…” while the waiting hipsters scowl and then, being the nerds that my friends and I are, giving high-fives as we walk through the door. It happened pretty much like that except that we were there early so there was no one else waiting.

Senryu’s fan base consists mainly of teenagers, but it worked out sort of by coincidence that we had a slew of Knoxvillians through all of our friends who either live in NYC now or made the road trip. Christine and her girlfriend Melissa, JW, Kent, Rupa and her boyfriend Josh who does art for the band, myself, and JW’s upstate New York native Jewish roommate who has never been to Knoxville but kept screaming Yeah, Tennessee! made for an impressive entourage.

One of the bands was called Care Bears on Fire, and the members are all twelve years old! Their parents serve as manager and bookie. They had a pop-punk Ramones style and played in just a handful of chords. The singer was this cute kid with an all out pink and black skirt, leggings, and leather vest getup with wristbands. Polished and sort of nervous. The girl drummer was all about it—confident and zany, super energetic. Then they had this lanky boy on bass with long hair in his eyes, totally Nirvana, and he didn’t say much. (Though on their interviews they all just act like twelve year olds talking about school and camp and stuff.) The audience was super into it, cheering with nostalgia and the general cuteness of the scene. Hopefully the band didn’t find it too annoying when everyone went Awww… Their biggest hit was “I Met You On Myspace.” When it was over JW’s roommate spoke for us all when he said, “I don’t know anything anymore.”

I am scared to drive in New York City. I’m used to driving in Knoxville, and granted I’m a Knoxville city driver as opposed to a Knoxville suburbs driver. I can parallel park, in fact I can park illegally around campus with great finesse, which is an instinct all its own. I certainly have the frying-pan nerves these days to react quickly. So okay, Brooklyn is only a few steps up—but I’m not going anywhere near Manhattan.

We come in over the bridge from Staten Island having now paid over $20 in tolls since entering Pennsylvania. We haven’t really figured out the route from here, mostly because it’d be out of character for me and I’m counting on one of my friends answering the phone when I call. Once we get over the bridge the turnpike and freeway feel quickly gives way to more of a ramp winding above 5-story buildings feel. I call JW, hey we are coming up on 3^rd Ave. I’m thinking, three is a low number, let’s not go to Manhattan, and I exit. Um, make that we just got off on 3^rd Ave. We’re nowhere near his house but getting there is basically a straight line for 60 blocks.

JW’s roommates, bless them, share their dinner; it’s around 11. We left Knoxville at 9:38 that morning. I drove most of the way but Kent helped around Philly because that’s where he lives, and we dropped two friends off there. JW’s room is in the basement surrounded by bookshelves, strange pictures, and a stack of his girlfriend’s things in the corner. Red curtains cover a patio door leading to a small back yard, complete with an overturned umbrella and some chairs. Half of it is concrete and half of it is grass, and there’s even a tree growing in the fence. The yard is about the size of my bedroom. I like it, so I stand out there in the cold for a long time listening, mostly to an indistinct hum of traffic and wind.

We got about two hours of walkaround time in São Paulo, on the main drag by the art museum. Not enough time or freedom for my curiosity really, but it was fun to shop with Clinton, one of my fellow participants from the Bahamas who flirts with every girl he sees. We got to chat with plenty of store clerks in a mix of English and Portuguese words. We managed to agree that Ronaldo had gotten fat, the t-shirts were expensive, and Mariana did not want to give Clinton her phone number. Really, idle chatting is a breeze across the language barrier, because you don’t say much important anyway!

But there the trip ends, and we bussed to the airport for our overnight home.

Flew back to São Paulo, about 4 hours and 2000 miles away from the Amazon. Getting travel weary. Delays. Ate dinner from the mini bar when we reached São Paulo after midnight. Which was alright since we crammed in yet another feast for lunch before leaving Manaus. We went to a churrascaria called El Toro Loco where they brought us endless supplies of very excellent meat. If there is one thing I really missed on this trip, it wasn’t my bed at home or my friends, it was kale. No leafy greens around here…

We visited another small artists’ cooperative, started by a village of maybe 100 which has been able to become completely self-sufficient. They made jewelry, purses, and blow dart guns, which are actually as cool as they should be…you blow on it and a dart comes out the other end very quickly! The local school was there, the standard stilted, one-room board building, painted blue and white. Paper crafts hung festively from the ceiling and spun in the wind. The kids were done for the day and all the boys were playing soccer. There was an enormous set of three fields with goalposts, two short ones and a longer one which spanned across them the other way. It looked like it took up about as much land as a cluster of homes, i.e. the entire town, nearby. Some folks from our group played soccer with the boys for a long time, and the little girls struck up their own game on a small patch of land near the shore. Soon the school “bus” came–a standard motorboat that is the mode of transport here, and what we’ve been using as well. The kids climbed downhill to the shore with plastic backpacks on.

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Went to the home of another manioc farmer, same type of land, house, giant iron manioc toasting stove… But he also some IPÊ beehives going. IPÊ is working to spread native beekeeping as a source of value-added income that doesn’t require deforestation. The bees are “blonde with blue eyes,” and stingless. They can supposedly bite, though we were soon to see just how placid they are. The farmer had chopped down an old hollow trunk full of bees and dragged it to his manioc shed. There, he proceeded to hack a square out of the trunk with a machete, pulling it back to reveal the hive inside. You’d think the bees were all on sedatives because they just buzzed lazily about their business, some flying back to where the trunk was supposed to be in the woods and hovering, confused.

Now, I love bees, honey, and everything about them so this was really fascinating to me. A guy from IPÊ then pulled out sections of the hive and found the queen, which he transferred to a new wooden beehive along with some comb and any worker bees he could pluck off the stump. The rest would follow once they figured out where the hive had moved. He then broke open a lumpy section of hive and started pulling honey out with a syringe. He was having trouble balancing it, and I seized the golden opportunity, holding out my bare hands to cradle the papery mass. Bees tickled my fingers as they climbed in and out, and honey dripped down into my palm. I think I’ll keep bees someday.

Honey tastes different all over the world, depending on the pollen available. Mental note: learn to describe honey like in fine wine terms and impress people at parties. This honey was light yellow and tasted very fresh and cool, for what it’s worth!

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Afternoon - Back in Manaus

After three days on a boat in the jungle, it was strange to dock again in Manaus and see it by daylight for the first time. My first view of the city was from the air at 3am, a sea of orange lights which suddenly ended in blackness—the span of the Rio Negro and the vast jungle beyond.

There is a chunk of original forest within Manaus as well, which is a park owned by IBAMA (Brazilian federal government). In a way it was more impressive than our too-brief walk in the real jungle. The trees were enormous; we were further inland. We saw tapirs scuttling free across the paths. They are bizarre rodents that look like giant guinea pigs with long rabbit legs. They had manatees in tanks and I got to pet a baby manatee, awwwww! It was rubbery and nuzzled its soft little mouth against my hand. The older ones were having their tanks cleaned and lay heaped on the drained-out bottom, occasionally wiggling closer together and nudging each other in the armpits.

And for anyone wondering how so much cute can exist in one place, it’s like a vortex of cute which must be offset by anti-cute. We saw the giant otters next. Now I was thinking, I love watching sweet little river otters swim around, and it seemed friendly enough as it ran over to us and stretched its fin out between the bars in greeting. As we’re oohing and aahing, it unexpectedly starts screaming. A diabolic, guttural bark of pure hate! And it’s jumping around, flopping its body all along the bars as we stare, horrified and wondering what we did to it.

The giant otter in the next cage has started up too; apparently they are competing females. Apparently they are just talking to us, and this is normal. Alright then. These moments in life stick with me—when you are presented with information your brain has no previous connections to, so you freeze in a feeling of unreality for a while until it sorts itself out. Finally we just laughed. So now I’ve seen a giant river otter. I think maybe this is what Zen is trying to get at.

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In the afternoon we took a stop at Manaus’ famous opera house downtown. The adjacent square is paved with black and white stone in a contrasting ripple. The design inspired the famous beach walk in Rio; it was really cool. It represents the Encontro das Aguas, the Meeting of the Waters, where the black water of the Rio Negro and the opaque brown water of the Rio Solimões meet and travel side by side for miles before mixing. Though this occurs just outside of Manaus, we didn’t see it; I must come back.

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We escaped the however-many-star hotel that night in search of a bar, and ordered a round of Caipirinha, a cocktail made from the sugarcane liquor cachaça and lime. There was a tribal dance act, which I’d be willing to bet was 90% inauthentic. Some fire breathing (I’ve seen cooler) and dancing bulls—the costumes had a black lump on the back where the guy’s head stuck out. But it was good to feel free, ditching the authority after being cramped up on a boat for three days.  Walked around, watched some soccer.

We took motorboats out on the river before dawn to watch and listen to the Amazon wake up. I think pictures speak better than words.

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Manioc is not at all a cash crop. It only grows in poor soil, and thus, only poor people tend to grow it and seemingly for a negative profit. It doesn’t have much nutritional content besides starch. Yet it is still sold and eaten, as a sustenance food for farmers, and a condiment for everyone else. We boat to a property nestled in the trees off the Rio Negro, where a farmer, his wife, and six of his ten kids (one on the way) live off manioc.

We hike a short way to his small slash-and-burn patch where the manioc grows, interspersed with a couple pineapple and sugarcane plants, and half-burnt tree stumps he collects for firewood. His daughter, around 12, uproots a plant and deftly hacks the potato-looking tubers from it with a machete.

Manioc is poisonous raw, so we begin this long process of peeling, soaking, grinding, drying, and toasting it into a grit. One estimate I heard was that a day’s work earns about $4. The man’s wife offers us a plate of boiled purple manioc for a snack, the sweet variety. Her face was sort of impassive, like after raising ten children on manioc, entertaining a bunch of American eco-tourists was a bit surreal. At least that’s how I’d feel.