Lance, Kelly, Holly, Crumb, Chris, Verena, Jarrett, Justin

This is post-riding day #2. Unbeknownst to some of us innocent celibates, dirty naked acts are to take place in this very same hot tub, just a few hours from now. Fortunately, at this particular point in time, we can all still see our skin through the water.

Kelly on day #3 - "I don't want a blacklight near the hot tub!"


This was the "luckiest" couple of the weekend. Most, if not all, sexual commentary will be in reference to Justin and Savannah's extracurricular goodtime having behavior.

Justin - "It (my penis) may be small, but it's a scrapper."

Lance - "He made her Holler last night..."



This was good food night. Oh wait, every night was good eatin' time, thanks to the chefy ways of Mr. King, Verena, and Lance. Nothing sexier than big, full, naked bellies. After dinner Jarrett, however, showed a bit more than his belly.

Savannah - "Jarrett, you flossed your nuts with my shorts!"

C'mon Savannah, they were hot pants, not shorts.
(SOMEONE MUST POST A PIC OF THE FLOSSING.)


Coincidentally, Holly Mae and Savannah both had Michael Jackson tanks to suppport the mid-evening, post-flossing dance party. And yes, it goes without saying, us all being official products of the 80's (excluding Savannah) - Thriller ROCKS! and the enitre OFF THE WALL album! oh, and "The Man in the Mirrror" and of course "The Girl is Mine" duet with Paul McCartney. I could go on and on here.

Savannah - "Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones."

Nothing like keepin' it real. Thanks savannah.


Of course, no excursion is complete without THE INFAMOUS FLIP OFF GROUP SHOT. (All included in photo above except a few weekend stragglers and the beautiful photographer.)

 
On Night #3 Lance aroused everyone by making his traditional "Let's Party and Get Naked" Margaritas. They were so tasty that some people chose to drink them the next morning in place of coffee. Yummy. Thank you Lance. You make a mean margie!

Although I have no picture, Crumb needs to be recognized for the most eccentric drug sharer. Tyson we love your sharing, caring, nutsy rhetoric, dog-walking, good ways. Without you there, the weekend would have made more sense. Furthermore, I wish I could slip you into my pocket and pull you out whenever I wanted to freak someone out.

Crumb (a.k.a Tyson) - "I am a little blotchy, the dogs have been beating me up!"

Pony- "Let me put some round-eye in ya!"


This picture is posted for the sole purpose to prove that I don't have to be on E to look like this. It simply translates to me having a good time. Sorry Lance. Sorry Kristi. I'll never do E at your wedding again.

By the way did anyone see ABC's report on E. Apparently, it's not that bad for you. Huh, who knew? Let's start doing more drugs!


Day #4. Time to go home.
I believe it was Boyz to Men who coined the phrase "It´s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday"...and I think they could be right, but I am not really sure because the pot brownie I ate on the way home erased most of my memories from this afternoon. Ahh, good times.

Needless to say, the weekend was a genuine Fruitpole experience. Cheers everyone. Until next time.

Paul thanks for igniting this. You make me so proud.

I was there, I swear...the shit was mystical, man. Machu Picchu, dude. Mysteriously abandoned Inca mountain fortress shrine...not unlike my vision for Fruitpole´s world headquarters.


In Cusco, I found that there were many large stones, such as this exceptionally nice 12-sided one. Cusqueños are so proud of it that they put it on the label of the local beer. I was so impressed that I have decided to use such stones in the construction of the Fruitpole visitor center and bathroom complex. All I need now is the slave labor and a mandate from the Sun God. I have been working on the latter, but I burn so easily...he has no respect.


Just in case any of you were worried that all this time away from home may have changed me, I present this evidence of the fact that I still love donuts. I mean, look at that face! That is a donut-loving American. I am considering a career in law enforcement upon my return to the States.


Yes, I wear silly hats now...but, wait!!...I always wore silly hats! I have not changed!!

This pic is me on top of a small mountain on an island in Lake Titicaca, at a shrine to the Earth Goddess, Pachamama.


Copacabanas are lovely places. The one here in Rio is known for a catchy Barry Manilow tune, and hookers. The one in Bolivia, where this picture was taken, is known for trout and hippies. The views here were spectacular, and every night began with a sunset like this one.


I liked Copacabana, Bolivia-stylie, so much that I decided to declare myself emperor, appointed by Divine Mandate. Here I am posing for a modest little statue that will tower over the town and cow the populace into submission.


You might think the previous picture and statement a bit arrogant, unbelievable, rude, ignorant, et cetera. If so, I suggest not visiting Copacabana (Bolivia), as I would have my minions sacrifice you with crude, not to mention blunt, stone tools. But I will save you the trouble, and your lives, by proving my Divine Mandate.

One day while walking in town, without the least thought of subjugation or iron-fisted theocracy in mind, I stumbled across this sign from the heavens. I took a picture of this poster in a hair salon in rural Bolivia, which shows what is clearly a desirable hairstyle for local men and ALSO bears the name of my, and hopefully your, good friend - Samir Younis. Shocking, huh? What else could I have thought, except for that it was a signal from above for me to assume my rightful position as local deity?


From Copacabana, we headed over to La Paz, the de facto capital of Bolivia. You may one day win a Trivial Pursuit game by knowing that Sucre is the official capital. One of the first images that greeted me upon arrival to La Paz was an 8 year old girl having diarrhea on the sidewalk. The good news is that, from there, my impresions only improved. In fact, I liked La Paz a lot. None of this has anything to do with this picture.

From La Paz, we rode mountain bikes down the World´s Most Dangerous Road (ooooh) to a small town called Coroico for a night´s rest in a beautiful little posada nestled into the hillside among the jungley foliage. The next night, however, was hell. We rode 15 hours in a bus in what can only be described as the World´s Worst Fucking Bus Ride Ever (oooh). This also has nothing to do with the picture.

Our destination was Rurrenabaque, a small town on the edge of both the Pampas (like the Everglades) and the Amazon Basin (like the Sabine River Valley in East Texas...maybe with more jungle and monkeys, but they do both have rivers.) This picture was taken on our three-day trip into the Pampas, where we saw and, probably irresponsibly, played with amazing amounts of wildlife.


This is the son of one of our guides in the Pampas. Behind him is a capibara, a huge rodent that most reminded us what a six year old would draw when asked to depict a horse, or a dog, or a hamster, or anything really. It looks like a rectangular head, sitting on a rectuangular body, with four stick-like legs. Try drawing one. Go ahead, I´ll wait.

See? Easy. Now, the boy is a little harder to draw. And it´s a little harder to look his name up on Google when you forget it, like I did for the capibara (you thought I remembered the word capibara, huh? Well, I lied. Sucker.). But he was ultimately much more interesting than the capibara, because he spoke and we could approach and touch him (not that way Jarrett!).


OK, maybe I have changed. Here is me with an angry crocodile over my shoulders which I single-handedly wrestled out of the murky waters of the river. Or maybe it is the crocodile that our guides spotlighted and then tied up...whichever, I am now a crocodile wrestler - not a whole lot of those in East Texa...hmmm...OK, maybe this is nothing special to many of you. But I was in Bolivia!!


To prove my skills to my fellow tourists, I wrestled this creature off of his feet and hoisted him onto my shoulders. Look how ferocious!! Shortly after this picture was taken, he bit my ear off, and I was forced to feed him to the crocodile in the previous picture.


A sad consequence of the grinding poverty in Bolivia is that many crocodiles are forced to resort to pornography and prostitution. I had heard of such things, but was loathe to believe them until our guides coerced this one into a photo shoot for Hustler...at great personal risk, I was able to smuggle this picture out.


After the Pampas, we returned to Rurrenabaque for a little R&R (tourism is hard work) before heading back out on another three day trip...this time into the Amazon Rainforest. Here I am having shimmied my way up a thick vine into a Mapajo tree, one of the largest in the rainforest.

Another Trivial Pursuit tidbit: one of the trees, and the vines, that you see in the rainforest is called a "matapalo" - which means something like, branch killer...I suppose it could also mean pole strangler but that would be confusing, possibly not politically correct, and definitely certain to raise the ire of Chris King, who would claim to have long since earned rights to that nickname. Anyway, the matapalo starts as a vine that drops roots from the branches to the ground. Once they take root, they grow thicker and multiply. Over many years (25 or more, depending on the size of the tree), the vines surround and begin to strangle the trunk, eventually killing it. What is left looks like a tree, but is actually the now fused vines of the matapalo vine. Neat, huh?


Huge chronological leap...after Rurrenabaque, a hair-raising 12-seater flight back to La Paz (no way we were going back on the bus), and 3 straight days of bus travel, I arrived in Cuenca, Ecuador, to do some work for Putney Student Travel.

This picture is just to show that occasionally, occasionally, occasionally, the good ol´ US of A is not as immensely popular abroad as we might hope. This graffiti reads "Get Out, Killing Gringoes!!" or, more literally, "Assassin Gringoes, Out!"




Here is an equally sinister and unsettling image from Cuenca. I have no idea what is happening here, and feel that it may be wrong to speculate, but I invite you do so by commenting. WARNING: don´t stare too long though, as I suspect that "Yoda-like Ecuadorian Santa child dances," as I chose to name this picture, may have certain hypnotic powers and could lead you to shrink, become Ecuadorian, dress up in religious-figure-come-commercial-icon costumes, and dance in town squares. Not sure.


To unwind and unburden myself of the troublesome days and experiences of Cuenca, I headed for the beach with a Belgian friend I had met in the Galapagos (those pics are next). There we drank, surfed, caroused, and generally had a wonderful time. I liked the local beer so much, I did a commercial spot for them (self-proclaimed Bolivian ruler-gods are a powerful marketing tool in Ecuador). This picture is a still from that commercial. Pilsener - Cerveza de los Dioses!!


This is a gratuitous shot of a hot Ecuadorian girl on the beach as the sun rose after our all night Bacchanalian orgy. She is an actress in a Ecuadorian soap opera...really. Alas, she was spared my romantic attentions, as my Belgian friend had entranced her with talk of the strong, flavorful beers and world-reknowned Freedom fries from his homeland. I could not compete.






My mom had come down the previous week, and we went to the Galapagos Islands together on a 5-day cruise. It was everything the Discovery Channel had ever led me to believe it would be. Beautiful landscapes and exotic wildlife that was utterly unphased by human presence. The top picture is the result of some merciless whip-training of the seals on one island. The next is a seal that took a liking to me...oh Arf Arf Arf, I miss you so. The final picture is a giant tortoise preparing to eat me. Herbivore, my ass!! Cat-like reflexes had me back on the mainland before he actually took a step forward.


This is a rather dull shot of the Colca Canyon. It is the deepest or the second deepest canyon on earth, depending on who you ask. If you ask me, I say say, "deepest, without a doubt." Deeper than most of my penetrating, um, insights into South American culture. Anyway, I did a hike that most people do with a guide over 2-3 days alone and in one day. I could not walk very well the following day and generally spoiled the final three hours of stunning scenery by only being able to think about the pain in my legs. I am sure there are shocking statistics about this canyon and the distances I hiked, both horizontal and vertical, and I encourage you to look them up if you care about the truth. If not, here´s some I just invented: I hiked 15 miles and over 20,000 vertical feet over the course of one 9 hour day. It was 105 degrees Fahrenheit...I ate nothing...a rabbit bit my pinky toe, which subsequently got infected and fell off at hour 7...I drank only goats milk, straight from the teat...and I lived to tell about it!!!!


This was one of my favorite signs in English. It is for a hostal in one of the extremely small towns in the canyon (for the pussies who actually want to enjoy the hike and stay overnight). I really wish I had photo-catalogued all such signs around Peru and Bolivia. You know, if you enter "Donkey Show Playa del Carmen" into a Yahoo search (Google too, but farther down the hit list), you get www.fruitpole.com. I think that really indicates that Fruitpole has achieved the level of class and sophistication we were aiming for.


Racing away from southern Peru, I went into northern Chile and a small desert town called San Pedro de Atacama. Incidentally, the Chilean flag is weirdly similar to the Texan flag, which caused some momentary problems of the "Where the fuck am I?" kind on more than one occasion. San Pedro is popular with hippies, artists, pot smokers, jewelers, mystic burn outs, and backpackers. Plus lots of cool excursions into the deserts, canyons, and salt flats that surround it. This is me in the Valle de la Luna, looking pensive and mystical.


This is my German friend Andrea, on a big dune. The dune is impressive, but even more impressive was that she had spent the previous three months cycling alone through the Andes of Peru and Bolivia. Aside from the fact that she endured the great deal of possibly annoying attention which an attractive blond German girl must attract among 4 and half foot tall Andean Indians, she also almost died of hypothermia two nights before I met her while trying to cross the Bolivia/Chile border at 14,000 feet. I am pretty sure she could have kicked my ass on a whim.


I left San Pedro to head back to Bolivia via a four day Land Cruiser tour through the altiplano and into the Salar de Uyuni (the largest salt flat, or lake depending on the season, in the world). This was one of our first stops, the border into Bolivia. For me, this was an almost surreal trip because all of the scenery was this desolate, weird, otherworldly and completely unlike anything I had ever seen.


This poster, hanging prominently over the border officials head, brought me back to reality and grounded me in things I knew. Boobies.


But then I stepped out of the border station and saw this. I think I remember thinking, "What the fuck?" Or maybe it was, "No fucking way!" You get the idea...all the scenery was like this. Well, this was the only abandoned, psychedelically painted school bus sitting on a windswept, multi-colored plain at 12,000 feet we saw, but it was all strange like that.


Further along, we came to the first of a string of high altitude lakes...each a different color due to the high concentration of one mineral or another. I should so sell this picture to Lonely Planet.


Just to illustrate the multi-colored lake thing...here is me, mystified by Laguna Verde. There was another one that was red, a few blue ones, and some changed colors while we watched, depending on the light (no shit).


Here you can just barely make out the flamingoes on this reddish colored lake. Lots of the lakes were covered in bright pink flamingoes, hundreds and hundreds of them. Again, fucking surreal. Hard as I tried, I just could not get a really good picture of them. No good zoom, and they were not quite as tractable as the Galapagos crowd...they kept flying away when I tried to get close.


Once we left the string of lakes, we headed back through another high desert. Aside from weird landmarks like this funky rock, we were also surrounded by towering 18,000 foot peaks, and a huge, massive, vast, and otherwise large expanse of desert. Our two Land Cruisers sped along, side by side, choosing routes at random (there was no road), while the passengers occasionally broke out of trance-like "Whoa" states induced by the scenery to moon our fellow travelers in the other car.


Me and the same funky rock. While there were no rules about what you could and could not climb on (Viva America Latina!! No rules anywhere!!!! Litter anywhere? Go ahead! Shit on the street? No problem? Vandalize a beautiful place of natural beauty? Con gusto y sin verguenza!!!), I decided to refrain from summiting the funky rock. My desire to not be the asshole who tipped over this funky rock outweighed the tantalizing notion of proudly standing on top and peeing off of it.


Further proving their status as the most secure nation in the world, here a nearly illiterate 18 year old soldier handwrites the passport info of every tourist who passed through his altiplano post. Notice how close is head is to the table as he writes (which allowed me to take this forbidden picture...hee hee) and notice the portraits Simon Bolivar and some other famous South American liberator (whose name I forgot) looking down on the operation in approval. The post, by the way, fit into the surreal scenery of the previous few days perfectly. It consisted of small dome buildings built in pairs, joined ever so daintily in the middle, and painted in a blue camouflage. Of course, these brightly colored concrete boobies blended so well with the bleak desert landscape that we had trouble picking them out, and very nearly sped by without stopping.


Wicked boiling mud cauldrons of doom. I think that about says it. Bizarre, I tell you.


And then came the highlight of the trip...the Salar de Uyuni. During the dry season, it is a vast, blindingly white expanse of salt. During the wet season, when I was there, there are about 4 inches of water across the entire surface, making for some bizarre visual effects. Basically it makes the horizon disappear and makes you feel like you are floating in a void.


Here I am looking impressively alone, solitary, rugged, and exploratory. I hope you are impressed. If you are not, go away.


I am hoping that Toyota will create a time machine and use it to come back first to the present, where they will buy this picture from me for various millions of dollars, before going back to the late 80s to use my pic in their ad campaign. I am just waiting for that to happen. Any minute now....


Eventually, after driving for hours across the salar, we arrived at this island in the middle of more nothing. It is, as you can see, covered in cacti and makes strange reflections on the Salar.


This picture gives something of an idea of what it was like to be in one of the only two things you could see in any direction. The little spot off in the distance is the other Land Cruiser, driving along at 50 miles per hour. The jeeps left a wake behind them and splashed salt water up 10 or 15 feet on either side as they cruised along.


I think this is the best pic I got showing the disappearing horizon effect. Oooooh. I definitely took more pictures in the three days of this jeep trip that in the previous three weeks.


This picture is, for some reason, the only one that I have chosen from my eight days of decadence in Salta, Argentina. No wait, it´s not even from Salta, it´s from Mendoza. Well, even more so than I was originally thinking, it is representative of nothing about that time so much as what one chooses to photograph after many days of nocturnal living.

I am leaving out the couple of pictures that I have from the hellish journey from the south of Bolivia
into the the north of Argentina. The normal route is a two hour train ride from Uyuni to Villazon, on the border, and then a four hour bus ride to Salta. But rains had washed out the tracks, and so I had to take another Land Cruiser trip. This time, though, it was not the 4 people to a car, all food and guides provided affair I had enjoyed getting to Uyuni. This was the 10 passengers plus the driver, sardine can experience. We set off from Uyuni and headed straight across the plain for a while until getting to a road, and everything was fun and novel and even a little funny being crammed in with all those smelly people.

Then we got to the first river we had to cross. We all got out, and the driver took the Land Cruiser through the churning waters while we crossed the railroad bridge on foot, and I buried one foot up to the ankle in orange mud. Back in the car and off to cross no less than 10 rivers. The best crossing was when we arrived at a river where there were already 15-20 jeeps and trucks waiting to cross, which was weird since we had left at 6 am. I learned that they had been waiting since the previous night for the waters to recede. So we joined the crowd sitting there impotently watching the river. Finally, one of the jeeps that left Uyuni with us fired up and, without saying anything to anyone, and without unloading its passengers, blasted across the raging river, water churning up over the wheels...and they made it. We went next, and my sphincter tightened while I made my emergency "Kick the Indian woman out of the way and swim out the window plan." But no need, as we made it safely. Then it was a free for all, in which every other car got stuck, so we (yes, me too) spent an hour digging, pulling, pushing, and winching cars out of the river and mud.

We arrived at a small town and changed jeeps and set off again. This time I did not trust our machine, and I trusted our driver even less. You see, the look in his eyes reminded me of nothing more than Keanu Reeves...you know that look he has in every movie he has ever made. That look that says, "I have no idea what I am doing, I don´t know why they chose me for this, but I am going to take it seriously and try to convince people that I am not an idiot." I had little faith. 20 minutes outside of town, as we were driving along a river bed, (oh, by the way, most the previous segment of the trip and the one I am describing now were completely off-road, along river beds) the car started to sputter. Keanu looked concerned, but then again he always did, so I stayed calm. Then it died, in the middle of the river bed. And then it started to rain. We discussed possible causes, and I agreed with the stinky old man to my right (ie, on my lap): we had run out of gas 20 minutes into a 6 hour ride. Keanu said it was impossible but nonetheless headed off on foot with a gas can, looking sheepish.

While we waited, the rain continued and got more intense. Then something I had never actually seen happened: a flashflood. All of a sudden (in a flash, you could even say), a torrent of water came rushing down one of the side canyons and joined the river bed, exactly where our car was stranded. The river bed began filling rapidly, and we all jumped out to dig a ditch around the car, which was futile, so we directed the woman and children to higher ground, and I jumped on top of the jeep to untie the bags and throw them down, so that when the jeep was washed away, I could still brush my teeth and read my Lonely Planet. Just when things were looking really bad, Keanu bursts back onto the scene astride a white stallion, a shining tank of gas in his right hand!!!! We fill ´er up, fire ´er up and tear on outta there. Phew.

From there on, the trip was mostly uneventful, but it did take a total of 14 hours to make it Villazon, where I spent the night before catching a bus to Salta. Arrival in Salta meant nothing more than fine food, a nice place to stay, great night life, new friends, and beautiful women. I chose to stick around for a while.


Here we are, the Dream Team. This is Nate, my friend from Cuba (he is not Cuban, in case you were confused), and his friend (now mine as well) Neil, a young doctor. I met them in Santiago, Chile, where we rented a car from a shady dude who also mentioned that he dealt in cocaine and women if we needed to fill the car up before we headed out of town. We opted for the PG-13 version of the car and split, heading south for Pucon.


But first we stopped in Talca, a nothing little town where we had trouble finding a place to spend the night. Until the attendant in our parking lot mentioned that we could stay for free in the abandoned building next door. Seemed like a great idea!! This is us waking up in the morning, and getting the hell out.


Upon arrival in Pucon, a beautiful resort town in the Chilean lakes district, the first thing we did was head for the beach, to let the ladies in town know we had arrived. As you can well imagine, this trio of lady killers had no problems finding ready and willing honeys of all nationalities.

Actually, we spent most of our time with this 18 year old heavy metal loving Chilean kid named Jorge. He had learned all of his English from Iron Maiden and Ozzy records, and so used the words "fuck" and "meat" more often than a native speaker. He spoke pretty well actually, and only got confused a few times...our favorite Jorge-isms were, "I feel better when I am drinking...alone." and, "I love fucking you guys!!"


One day, on a beautiful hike up into the mountains at a nearby national park called Huerquehue, Neil and I decided to make official the growing feelings of mutual respect and affection that we had for each other. Nate presided over the ceremony and took this picture afterwards for us to send to our families.


Huerquehue was full of many beautiful sights, like this one.


I love nature, and wanted to express my feelings for it in an innocent Michael Jacksonesque way.


Here you are treated to a rare glimpse of my and Neil´s asses. The awesome beauty of our surroundings was too much to bear, with our pants on.


Nate, Neil, and I are tough mother fuckers, as evidenced in this picture us climbing a fucking volcano!!!! Volcan Villarica is a perfect cone which stands over 9500 feet tall, is active, and constantly spews smoke from its crater. The wind was blowing about 40-50 miles an hour that day, and all groups except for ours and a film crew for National Geographic-like Chilean TV show turned back before even beginning. For those of you who get Chilean TV in your homes you should watch for the Villarica episode of the show...they interviewed me twice. Because I am a fucking animal, and I speak Spanish.


It was so tough climbing that volcano that my and Neil´s pants fell off!!! Imagine our embarassment!!


And then it happened again when we reached the summit. Actually, I feel that most of my power comes from my deceptively small, white ass. Hence the name of this picture, "Volcano falls to the power of our asses." Volcan Villarica will never be the same.


Aside from showing our asses at 10000 feet, I also enjoyed the descent. We slid down the entire glaciated top of the volcano and then ran down then volcanic scree at the base. A six hour climb was followed by a one hour descent.


Hanging out with me was hard on Neil and Nate (actually, thank God I was behind the camera that morning - I was in rough shape as well). Here they are after our last all-night bender with Jorge. Nate and Neil, I love fucking you guys!


Buenos Aires, like me, is known for its highly cultured sense of refinement. And so, I leave you with this image of me, fucking a startled looking cow on a busy street of that magnificent city.

Here is the picture that started it all. With Lance to lead and guide us, philosophically, spiritually, and at times by just showing us who is boss (as we see him doing here with Dr.Brandt), Fruitpole will move forward.


Here is a little something from summer 2002 that I thought I would show off to all those who might have wondered exactly what it is I do during the summer and while travelling.