Vershun’s Brain Dump

3:30 AM and not looking like we’ll get done anytime soon.

Really looking forward to some R&R in North Carolina this weekend.

Today was the first time I realized my month-long trip turned out to be my permanent move.  C’est la vie.

Too many places to see, too many people to meet, too many things to do to root myself in any way.

Cincinnati until September 1st then I’m off to the Maine to work my way down the east coast.  Life is pretty damn exciting when you situate yourself in it correctly.

Hiked back to my car from the Badlands. Pretty uneventful except for the smell, which was epic in all the wrong ways. I also collapsed at my car in an overly-dramatic display of tiredness which made a couple campers ask if I was OK.

Drove to Sioux City, Iowa. On one of the back roads (I couldn’t stand the farmland of I-90 I went through the town of Gayville, which I was immature enough to laugh at but but unfortunately a little too mature to stop and take pictures.

Been staying at Sam’s house for the past couple house. Been great in pretty much every respect except for me falling flat into a clover bowl at the skatepark here. I’m still limping but it’s a little less noticeable.

Sam, Morgan, and Ross kicking back before a bomb ass dinner of chicken, potatoes, and pure deliciousness.

It should be noted:

Sam is a fucking ninja.

I woke up fully around 8:30 AM after a few hours of drifting in and out of sleep to the early morning’s warmth. The sun was already high in the sky when I came out of my tent. Late start. After eating a quick breakfast of oatmeal I packed up my daypack and went down to my giving tree to try to find my throwing star. After about 10 minutes I found it stuck in some brush about 15 yards behind the tree. Its weight and circular design and made it bounce off a lot further than I expected. A quick round of throws and then I was off, headed toward some Brule formations I could see far in the distance.

As a came to the crest of a fairly large, gradually sloping hill an enormous valley opened up before me. A small herd of buffalo were grazing and the Badlands rose on the other side behind them.

In no way does this picture do the valley justice. Its enormity cannot be captured on film. The barely visible dark dots in the upper left-middle are enormous bison. The Badlands cut the horizon.

It took me a while to trudge through the valley. Even though I avoided the bison by a fairly large margin (I’m not sure what the temperament of bison are, but I sure and hell didn’t want to find out), they still got spooked and ran off behind a hill.

The bison running off. Them being scared of me was a happy twist I wasn’t expecting.

Getting across the valley took longer than I thought. The ground was soft like all the rock in the Badlands, but there were sections where the desert-like ground was saturated with water and became mud as slippery as ice.

The transition between the dry, caked ground and the wet, caked skating rink.

“Funny” thing about the badlands is when you look across the valleys leading up to them it looks like a straight shot. However , in a lot of places the valleys just sinks down into a canyon that you have to navigate around the edge to find a good place to drop in and come out of on the other side. You can’t see these from any sort of distance away because the valley continues happily at the other side of the canyon at the same height. It’s not until you’re within a quarter mile that you notice the valley isn’t continuous and you should start watching your step for deep holes and cliffs as you approach the canyon.

One of the many “canyons” you have to navigate through to reach the other side of the valley.

I finally came out of a canyon and reached my destination for the day, the outer skirts of the Badlands. I decided to climb up the nearest formation to me and get a better look before I started heading back.

The formation I was going for is directly in the upper middle-right.

Getting up it proved to be extremely tricky. With every 10 steps or so following the razor-sharp ridge the ground would give out on me and I’d end up sliding a few feet down the steep slope until I caught myself with my hands or flattened my feet enough to stop the slide. As I got toward the top the slope steepened which dropped off nearly vertically a couple hundred feet. I was only about 20 yards from the top, but I promised a couple people very important to be that I would ignore my natural disposition of being an idiot and be careful. I also figured that being around 10 miles from the nearest other human was reason enough not to risk a fall. Where I was offered a pretty decent view anyway.

From the near-top of the Badlands formation thinger I climbed up.

I was still pretty sore about not going that extra little distance on my way down until I slipped and slid about 10 feet toward the edge of the drop, stopping a 5 or so yards about it by flattening out my entire body on the slope.

As I made my way back through the canyon I was 2 jumps from getting back on the prairie when I came across this guy.

I was going to wear apples on my ankles to remind these guys why they lost their goddamn legs.

Was about a 4-5 footer. Not sure if that’s big or not but the fact that in a couple seconds I would’ve jumped on him was enough to give me a little bit of a scare.

As I circled around him checking him out (this was my first encounter with a rattler and I wanted to make sure I remembered what they look like exactly in case I saw another in the prairie), once again I had to fight back my overwhelming urge to provoke it into rattling at me. What’s an encounter with a rattlesnake if it just sits there? But fictional images of springing snakes flying through the air and biting my jugular where soon floating through my mind and I figured it’d probably be best to just leave him be.

When I got back to camp I still had some time so I went down and threw around the knives again and read “The Road,” which turned out to be pretty morbidly bleak and fairly high on the awesome scale. I splurged and ate one of my freeze-dried spaghetti dinners and it was delish.

Sleep came quickly, thank God.

The next day I decided to stop by “Wall Drug,” South Dakota. I’ve been seeing billboards for this place for nearly 100 miles and my curiosity overcame me when I found out it was the same exit as the one I was taking to get to the Badlands.

Wall Drug is pretty much just a small, rustic mall located in Wall, South Dakota. A major tourist attraction, no doubt, but for someone with little use of novelty gifts it wasn’t that spectacular. I did, for whatever reason, get suckered into buying throwing knives and a throwing star. Awesome.

Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota. The man in the bottom-right is very representative of the kinds of folks there.

I made it to the Badlands fairly early and had time to take drive around the “scenic loop.” The Badlands hold a myriad of geologically interesting formations, with the eroded buttes and spires being the most impressive. It reminded me a little of Moab, but instead of the hard sandstone and solitary giants of Utah’s desert, these were crumbling and all clustered together; societies of withering exiles.

Looking into the Badlands. Brule formations in the distance.

Even if you aren’t using the primitive camping lot, the Sage Creek road is worth going down just for some of the views it offers and some up-close-and-personal bison encounters.

I don’t think I’ll be stopping at this overlook.

The primitive campsite is situated in a valley pretty far from the fun desert-like formations I saw earlier. A few bison grazed fairly close to my car. I hoped that wouldn’t be a problem.

So off I went. Open trail policies are awesome, especially in this kind of habitat. The prairie is so wide and gentle you can see your destination off in the distance and beeline straight to it with minimal amount of meandering. I set out toward the center of the park.

I stopped a few miles in when I reached the “yellow hills.” I have no idea of their real name but my goal was to reach them and when I did I happily set up camp. The wind was constant and unforgiving. Every time I raised my tent even a little it would fly up in the air, mockingly waving goodbye to me as I gripped it tight before it flew away.

Noob mistake, I forgot the damn stakes. I loaded up all my stuff into the tent to keep it from blowing away and tried to get some sleep.

The tent violently shifted in the wind, sometimes getting blown so hard the side of it pushed firmly against my nose as I lay on my sleeping bag. Impossible to sleep; it was like being the star in a rebirth ceremony.

I decided to hike around camp a bit. I grabbed my knives and star and found a tree about a half mile away. It ran right next to a “creek.” I use the term loosely. All the water that I saw there is still-standing and impossible to drink due to its extremely high content of minerals. You can’t see an inch beneath the surface and that’s about as deep as the water gets anyway. Note that you have to pack in all of your own water, a concept I wasn’t familiar with and the 3 gallons I brought in weighed me down heavily. Down at the tree the wind was less intense and I was able to relax and bit and through around my new toys.

I lost my star, and the remaining hour or so before I had to go back to camp was desperately searching the grasses for it. Sucked.

There are quite a few animals out and about for a climate so harsh. Deer, antelope, jack rabbits, bison, and a myriad of birds of which I heard more than I saw. Bison shit everywhere. I reeked of it and so did my tent; it was impossible to get away from. In the fading light an antelope appeared on a nearby hill and made the weirdest noise I’ve heard coming from an animal. Grunting into a kazoo would probably make a similar noise.

Sleep came in spurts. In the middle of the night I walked out of my tent and saw the entire landscape illuminated by the moon, giving everything a light blue tint.

I take the first step of a million more,
and I’ll make mistakes I’ve never made before,
but at least I’m moving forward.

-Hoobastank

On the 14^th I drove up to Rapid City, South Dakota. The drive was surprisingly beautiful, and with no obstructions to block the horizon the sky looked bigger than ever.

A little into Wyoming the landscape began to change. To call the perturbations of the land hills is perhaps giving them too much credit, but the ground rolled and flowed like a thin piece of fabric blowing in the breeze.

The sky had a million small clouds that seemed to mirror the prairies below. Standing on the top of a ripple gave you impression that the land and sky connected far off in the distance; that the land glided from underneath your feet into the horizon and returned to you different but similar far above your head.

My hope was to make it to the Badlands that day, but inclement weather and the fading day prevented me from getting there. Instead, when I got to Rapid City, I called up my wonderful friend Liz who actually grew up in the city and she gave me a memory-guided voice tour of the place. The difference between east and west Rapid City is night and day, and if you come up from the south east as I did I can’t stress enough that you should go at least a little east down highway 44. It’s gorgeous in the Black Hills. As the sun was setting on them I was able to see many small deer, cautiously watching me as I drove by.

I ended up in a hotel just east of Rapid City on I-90. Barely serviceable internet and a lukewarm hot tub.

Tomorrow I embark on an epic journey: driving to Ohio.

It’s not really epic and a Journey is a stretch (JUST A SMALL-TOWN GIRL), but I’ll be gone for a while and the unfortunate fact is I’ll probably write about it.  More unfortunately, you’re reading about it.

My first stop, which I hope to be at tomorrow, is South Dakota’s Badlands.  Since it’s a desert climate (I guess), I shouldn’t have to worry too much about the rain.  More importantly though, I won’t have to worry about bears.

I’ve never really encountered a bear so I can’t tell you how or when my irrational fear came about, but I’ve camped fairly extensively in the Colorado Rockies and I’m always afraid a bear will come into my tent and eat my face.  Maybe it’s their size, their horrifying teeth, or the teddy bear I owned as a child that told me to burn things, but something about me and bears just don’t click.

What’s more irrational, however, is my complete disregard of the danger of mountain lions.  I’m pretty sure more people are mauled by mountain lions than bears, but there’s something about the fact that they’re kitty cats that really makes them seem inferior.  When you encounter a mountain lion you’re supposed to look big, yell, throw rocks at it… whatever.  You SCARE the big predator away. Psh.  Try that to a grizzly.

A fantastic twist of fate would be if I got attacked by a mountain lion and bear attacks it, saving my life in the process.  I’d still hunt it down and kill it though.  Fucking bears.

So back to the Badlands.  Evidently the most dangerous wildlife there are rattlesnakes, which live in abundance.  I’m not quite sure how to handle this, but my guess is when you hear rattling you should move away from the source.  I also assume if you’re bitten it’s socially acceptable to bite back.

From what I gather my experience camping in the Badlands will look something like this:

(I hope you appreciate that screenshot because despite my absolute ridiculous awesomeness with all things Super Mario it took me 20 minutes to get to World 6).

Rereading what I wrote so far has shown me that I have to go to bed.  Drivel.

Check back (it’ll be more interesting I’m just setting the bar low… or something).

Well a few years back a few friends and I spent two weeks backpacking around Costa Rica. Like the Peru/Argentina trip, this is mainly for archiving purposes but someone might benefit from it… sometime I guess.

Three years is a long ass time, so I might not remember everything.

We started out in San Jose. It was pretty dirty, the drivers were horrifying, and one of our group got molested. However, there are some neat sites around San Jose if you can get to the resorts.

About a half mile into a resort hiking trail:

Manuel Antonio

The next day we were off to Manuel Antonio, a small, touristy beach town. If you’re 20-something this place is a must. Awesome clubs, hot people everywhere, and fun on the beach whatever hour of the night. There’s a club that’s built into a crashed plan, check it out (it’s downtown you can’t miss it).

One of the many beaches of Manuel Antonio:

Manuel Antonio also has a national park (I actually forget what it’s called, but it’s pretty big). Go in here and play. There’s sloths, spiders, playing monkeys, all sorts of fun biodiversity.

An enormous spider (size of my hand):

A very cute animal we found in Manuel Antonio named Tran (pronounced Tron, which tickles my geekhood):

Arenal and La Fortuna

This place is great and a must-see. We didn’t get to see the top of the volcano due to clouds but at night you can see the glow of lava. There’s a great service offered where they take you around the forest and up near the volcano at sunset. Then after you hit up the hot springs with bars you can swim up to (this is fantastic since getting out of hot water is such a buzz kill).

Also, right up the road you came in on (if you’re coming from the south) is a swing into a natural pool. This thing is AWESOME. I’m also 12.

Granted the hot springs are really hot, but I’m not sure about this:

Our group (the 2 guys and 3 gals on the right, Andrew in green on the far left):

Leaving Arenal (a picture of the volcano):

Monteverde

The cloud forest of Monteverde is a must-see. We only stayed there about 48 hours but it’s an amazing little town. Lots of stuff to do there (the girls did ziplines and we did a night-hike through the rain forest). Nice shopping and cool art is there too. The forest is constantly shrouded in cloud (imagine that) and so it has a mystical kind of feel.

Random picture of the cloud forest:

A recently shed bug:

Punte Ares to Montezuma

This was the last leg of our trip. We stayed in Montezuma for about four days and absolutely loved it. Fun small town, lots of hiking and swimming (waterfall jumping as well), and definitely one of the best atmospheres of the whole trip.

On the way to Punte Ares:

The beach we stayed on in Montezuma:

The booming city of Montezuma (seriously… this is about it):

LOL FRIEDMONKEY!

This is a tight waterfall. It’s a pretty popular path that goes right off the main road right before you enter the city. You can actually hike up and there’s two more smaller waterfalls above it. You can jump all the waterfalls but it’s really slippery and evidently right after we left some kid cracked his head open.

Here’s our hostel owner. I wish I remembered his name (A-something) because he was awesome. Dude could spin a basketball like he was in the NBA. Oh and he tried to convince us multiple times drinking your pee in the morning was really good for you. He also made Noni smoothies for Andrew and I (which we secretly watched him make in case he tried to pee in it).

Conclusion

Costa Rica is really fun.

What were you expecting something deeper? Wrong blog asshole.

OK so this was 2 years ago but I found a little writeup I did for the forums I post on. Hopefully someone will benefit from this.

Warning!  OK granted I wrote this but it was 2 years ago and I don’t feel like rewriting it so if parts are stupid blame my old self.

First flew to Buenos Aires, Argentina to pick up my best friend who’s been studying there.

Here’s our first night’s dinner (+ a chick we found) for $10:

Went to the mauseleum the next day, which is like an above-ground graveyard where, even in death, people get a plot of land.

roffle (yeah, I’m 8 years old).

Here’s an interesting story. This chick had epilepsy in the 40’s and she had a seizure and “died”. They threw her in a tomb and a couple days later they noticed it had moved. Turns out she was alive and woke up and tried to get out but the lid was too heavy (made of stone). Anyway, there were scratch marks and shit inside the coffin but she was dead from suffocation. New one was built.

GET OUT OF LIMA AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. SMELLS LIKE EXHAUST, LOOKS LIKE SHIT, SOUNDS LIKE BEING PENETRATED WITH A BIKE HORN.

A few days later we were in Pisco, Peru. Here’s a picture of a wall seperating our nice ass hostel from shitty ass Pisco. It’s depressing how removed tourists are from the real culture.

Did an awesome boat tour there and a bus ride around the desert.

Sexiest bathroom I’ve ever used.

Then it was sandboarding/wine tasting in Ica, where we found my friend’s twin (+ a little Napoleon Dynamite).

Colca Canyon near Arequipa is an unbelievable experience (second deepest canyon in the world), if you go to Peru, DO THIS TRAIL.

DO NOT PLAY SOCCER ON CRAZY BUMPY GROUND THE THE LOCALS WHEN YOU HAVE A 1500 METER ELEVATION GAIN HIKE THE NEXT MORNING!

Yeah, sprained my ankle pretty badly. The rest of the trip involved a lot of hobbling.

While you’re around Arequipa, might as well stop and watch the condors fly, biggest birds in the world with a wingspan of 12 ft. Our guide for Colca Canyon kept saying that if I couldn’t hike out I’d be food for his friend (the condors). I thought it was a joke, but he didn’t laugh when I did o.O.

We caught a flight to Puerto Maldonado which is still in Peru but nestled between Brazil and Bolivia. We only stayed here one night before our Amazon guides picked us up. If you plan on using this city as a jump before going into the Amazon, for Christ sake don’t you fucking dare stay there longer than you have to. It’s as hot as dog twat and smells like it too. Also, there’s bugs there that rhino would turn and run from. A neat part of the city though is there’s almost no cars, all motorcycle.

Ah the Amazon via InkaTerra. If you want class up the ass, go with InkaTerra. $240 for 3 days/2 nights (a lot on a poor college budget), but it was insanely worth it. You get pampered like crazy there and still get to go out into the Amazon a lot since there’s tons of tours all the time.

Roughing it in the Amazon.

Our frog friend we found in our bathroom. Nurga was huge (about the size of your outstretched hand).

Went to Cusco a few days later and explore the ruins there. The Incas were crazy bastards. Here’s some of their stonework.

Here’s up by SaqsayWaman (sp?). Couldn’t resist a picture (remember I’m 8).

SAS Travels fucked us over big time. Basically they woke us up 5 hours before we were supposed to go on the Inca Trail which we booked 4 months earlier to tell us they forgot to buy the permits. They offered us a different trek for like 50 bucks off (so $270). Still a bit drunk and tired as shit, we agreed.

The next morning we find out everyone that was going on that trek was paying $160, and our “special discount” was more of a “let’s see how much we can shove our penises into them.” So we said a big fuck you to the guys and they said they could refund some of our money but keep like $150 since we’re pulling out at the last minute.

Later that day we went to corporate and got a full refund.

Random picture of one of the main churches in Cusco

We hung out with this singer (left) for a while named Elias. These guys were way chill from Columbia and incredible musicians. If you’re in Cusco be sure you get your ass up to The Muse from enormous drinks and good music.

Since we had a couple extra days now since we go to Machu Picchu (fuck you SAS), we went to these caves up on the hill above SaqsayWaman. It’s not very touristy which is awesome and it’s really fun to explore. Tell your taxi from Cusco you want to go around 2-3 kms further up the road past SawsayWaman until you reach a sign for The Temple of the Moon. Go across the road and you’ll find lots of rocks which turn into caves and tunnels.

Picture from deep inside one of the caves only using the LEDs on my headlamp.

Aguas Calientes is a small town at the base of Machu Picchu and basically you have to go through it to get to Machu Picchu unless you’re going via the Inca Trail (fuck you SAS). This is probably the coolest mountain town I’ve ever been to (going to school in a mountain town for the past 2 years has kinda made me a bit of an elitest). If the Rocky Mountains are broad, the Andes are sheer. Actually some of the mountains there dwarf the Rockies, getting up to heights of 21,000 ft extremetely quickly.

Picture of Aguas Caliente.

Next day was Machu Picchu. THIS ALONE MAKES THE TRIP TO PERU WORTHWHILE. Make sure you get up at around 3:30 AM and hike up to Machu Picchu. You’ll get there around 6 AM right when it opens and being one of the first in to the park is absolutely incredible. The buses come quite quickly and Machu Picchu becomes Disney World later and loses a lot of its magic. When we went there was an early morning fog which made it that much cooler.

Machu Picchu in the morning.

View from the top of Huaynu Picchu (the tall peak). Took a while for the fog to clear up enough but well worth it.

Last picture of Machu Picchu before we left for the day ~3 PM

The next few days was a combination of traveling back to Lima, puking and consitantly feeling sick for the next couple days, flying to Buenos Aires, getting searched by random cops in the street, puking some more, and coming home yesterday.

Conclusion: Peru is pretty fun, we had a run of bad luck though. If you go be sure to do the Inca Trail (fuck you SAS), Colca Canyon, and the Amazon (InkaTerra if you can). Also, ALWAYS have a roll of toilet paper on you. There’s rarely toilet paper in any public bathrooms and be sure to remember to throw the toilet paper in the trash in the stall NOT in the toilet as their plumbing/sewage systems suck.