As If It Matters

Today the adventure begins. In a few short hours I’m hopping on a plane for the south of Mexico, where Dave Pentecost and I hope to poke around and enjoy some stuff the ancient Mayans left around. Dave’s been writing about it on his blog and you might have seen some of the comments he’s posted here. For our itineary, be sure to read his post about the Gringo Collapse Tour. I hope to blog from the jungle; hell, maybe we’ll spotcast from the jungle.

This all started a few months back when Dave Winer introduced me to Dave Pentecost. Dave and I hung out a bit, and we got to talking about the jungle. I tripped back into my high school memories of the Malaysian jungle — a couple of trips to Taman Negara (where, in a terrible story, I broke my leg far, far away from anything vaguely resembling medical care in the world’s oldest rainforest), my beloved Bentong River (where Ackhurst and I spent many a weekend tubing and sleeping in jungle-deep hammocks, risking the snakes and bugs for love of Bentong), and even, two days before leaving for college in Williamsburg, Virginia, a trek in Boreno up to the top of Mount Kinabalu (or should I say Gunung Kinabalu?). Dave has a similar love of the jungle from his visits down to southern Mexico, and we hit it off.

Then I must have written something depressing on my blog, because Dave sent me this incredible email urging me to join him in the jungle for some recovery from the soul-murder of the daily grind. The expedition sounded too good to pass up, and a month later here I am packing my huge (and of years late unused) backpack, fretting over whether or not I should bother to bring a towel.

You can think of it as an anniversary celebration. Yes, somehow it went without official notice, but last week was the fifth anniversary of Nicco.org, formally inaugurated on March 9, 2000. So to celebrate five years, we’re off to the jungle! Spotcasts coming right up.

P.S. The new photo is one I took with my sidekick in New York City just a few blocks away from where I met Dave for coffee to plan our trip. He took me there in a light snow to show me the grave of John Lloyd Stephens, an American in the 1800s who grew obsessed with the Mayan ruins buried in the jungle. So we stood there, outside a snowy graveyard on the Lower East Side, considering Mayan culture, the jungle, and imagining in the midst of the misty snow the feeling of the tropical sun.

This entry was posted on March 14, 2005 at 5:33 am and is filed under Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.