Where:   Ecuador

Who:  My twin sister Cat and me

What:   Ayahuasca Journey with a Shaman

Why:   Transformative Healing

Cat and I hooked up with a U.S. grassroots organization offering an opportunity to engage with about a dozen shamans, or spiritual healers, in the Amazon and the Andes.  The indigenous hosts advocated “reverse missionary” work, encouraging Westerners to come to their territory not to proselytize our way of life, which they regard as bankrupt, but rather to learn new dreams, as they put it.  The shamans challenge Western visitors to change our vision to one where humans are no more superior than a rock, a leaf, a bird, a star.  To change our vision to understand that a non-material reality shares validity with the material world.   To change our vision to protect and help indigenous communities to preserve their land, the rain forest, their way of life. 

Our small group flew on a six-seater Cessna airplane into Shuar territory in the Amazon basin.  Four rivers in Ecuador flow into the Amazon, and the Shuar live along the most southern one, the Pastazos River.  The Shuar were once deadly feared as “headhunters.”  Although they had forsaken that practice some fifty years ago, a certain macabre reputation lingered.  The Shuar settlement we visited, Marisal, lives outside the monetary system, without phones, television, and infrequent electricity from broken-down generators.  They travel in pirogues (dug-out canoes) rowed with six-foot long poles.  Six months prior to our visit Peru and Ecuador settled a land dispute, resulting in a reunification of Shuar peoples and families who had been separated for half a century by artificial borders.  The Shuar continue to be vulnerable to the avaricious encroachment of Western oil companies. 

Shuar territory is thick jungle.  Tarantulas as big as a fist.  Blinding blue butterflies that whizz by like a dream image.  Four-inch long beetles with glistening metallic green backs.  Toucans, parrots, monkeys, tapirs and trees so wide six people hold hands to encircle them.  Usually the temperature is excruciatingly hot and humid; you sweat just sitting still.  Plus constant rain.  Yet, during our visit the climate befriended us with Palm Springs weather and not a drop of rain.

I came to the Amazon for an ayahuasca healing with a medicine man.  I was introduced to Mariano, a shaman who had never done healings on Westerners.   He spoke some Spanish but mostly his nephew translated from Shuar to Spanish which I speak and understand.  In a private session with him he asked me what healing I needed.  I told him:  I am basically a happy person but I have these nubles oscures around me that I want to be free from.  These “dark clouds” I referred to were the bane of my existence, my addiction to cigarettes, a pack a day for 27 years.  I tried the patch.  I tried bets.  I tried cold turkey (once for a year).  Each effort was an exercise in sheer will power, with one path of self-dialogue (“I can have just one”) eventually trumping all internal dissent. 

Ayahuasca is a very integral part of the Shuar people’s culture and spirituality.  It is one of the most potent natural hallucinogens in existence.  It comes from the vine of a tree and the shaman prepares it in a liquid form.  The Shuar take ayahuasca to journey for information/wisdom from the other world, and to heal.  We visited a Catholic mission run by a Belgium priest with a long white beard who’s lived with the Shuar for almost 40 years.  Respecting the Shuar, he incorporates their beliefs into the Catholic church, but the Catholic part is hardly recognizable.  For example, in the round straw hut which is the church in the spot where the crucifix would normally hang, instead there is a drawing of a Shuar indian getting divine inspiration while on ayahuasca.   

After listening to my case for why I had come to him, Mariano inquired, “Have you ever done ayahuasca with any other shaman to cure this problem?”   “Uh, nope, uh I can’t say I ever have.”  I chuckled to myself — Not many practitioners of this sort in my neck of the woods. 

Mariano instructed our little group to fast the entire day and to hike four hours in the jungle while he prepared the ayahuasca for that evening.  The hike was a marvelous adventure that culminated at the sacred waterfalls.  They are the only hot springs in the Ecuador Amazon.   There’s one spot where you stand under thermal water falls and an arms-length away are regular waterfalls.  You move from hot to cold, hot to cold, hot to cold, a wondrous sensation.   At one point Cat bumped into an oblong nest hanging from a tree and within seconds she was covered with thousands of ants swarming her body.  Fortunately we had just crossed a creek; our Shuar guides grabbed her before she had a chance to panic and flung her into the water.  The ants were not poisonous but could bite.  For hours thereafter Cat picked drowned ants out of her hair and off her clothes. 

That evening the ayahuasca ceremony took place in a round straw hut with a fire in the middle and an opening in the roof for the smoke to escape.  Jungle birds made exotic sounds — oooAH, oooAH.  Some of the shaman’s assistants were snorting liquid tobacco to be able to stay up all night for the journeying and they contributed to the aural strangeness by shouting out cryptic words that I was told meant, “The anaconda is here,” or “The spirit of the jaguar has entered the room.”  Their shouts were the equivalent of a congregation’s enthusiastic Amen for a rousing preacher. 

The ayahuasca that Mariano prepared was a neon orange liquid as bright as a traffic cone.  It tasted utterly vile!  Cat once described ayahuasca as tasting like lizard vomit.  I was given a shot, followed by a slug of firewater, a crude alcohol.  Violent vomiting is the standard response to a dose of ayahuasca, but I didn’t vomit.  I didn’t hallucinate deeply either.   I was disappointed that nothing was going to happen to me.  Little did I know . . .

Mariano wore a pair of skimpy loincloth-like shorts.  Entranced from the ayahuasca, he softly wailed an eerie sing-song.  I can still hear his voice in my head, sort of high pitched the way you would imagine a fairy chanting.  His singing put me in a different mood, different space, even though I wasn’t hallucinating.   I was lying on a bench in front of Mariano, naked from the waist up, as he had instructed.  Mariano did an energy scan on my body and then without warning he began to suck my stomach.  He sucked as if he were a hyena eating fresh kill – he made these primitive guttural noises and then spit on the ground.  Eventually he made his way up to my eyes.  He was standing on a little stool hunched over my face and was ravenously sucking my eyeball.   I envisioned him as a vulture-like bird with both claws perched on my left cheek.  I swear if he had wanted to he could have taken my eye out of its socket and spit it on the ground. 

After about a half hour of sucking and singing, Mariano told me to go to bed, adding these promising words, “When you awake in the morning you will be cured.”  The ayahuasca kept me up all night, but not like some restless tossing and turning state of insomnia.  I lied on the cot in my hut serene with my eyes open.  Although I didn’t sleep the entire night, the next morning I felt rested as if I had slept eight hours.  It was as if sleep were suspended. 

The next morning I met with Mariano and he gave me three orders.   I was not to have sex or eat meat for a month and something to do with wearing a hat outside.  I faithfully followed his instructions.  At our guides’ suggestion, I gave him twelve American dollars. 

2009 marks the tenth anniversary of my ayahuasca healing and I have not once been tempted to smoke.  Whereas I used to have to rally my will power and galvanize an inner discipline to stop smoking, now after that miraculous exorcism the mere smell of tobacco nauseates me.  Shape shifting is how the shamans call it.  My shaman sucked negative cigarette energy from me, spitting it out of my life, and cured me of whatever turbulence had manifested itself through a loathsome addiction.   Blessed be to those healing spirits.   

I don’t drink beer. I drink wine.  When I go out for dinner or meet up with friends I enjoy a glass or two of red wine. Most of my friends drink wine. I know a lot of people who drink wine. But I don’t know many wine drinkers who have picked the grapes that make the wine.

I was scarcely above legal drinking age when I had my first grape picking encounter. It was 1974 in France in the Bordeaux region around St. Emilion. A new program invited foreign students to stay with a local family and help them during the vendage, as the wine harvest is called in French. I lived for two weeks with the Rivière family, along with another American, Candy from South Dakota.

Picking grapes is hard work. You squat so that you are eye level with the vine and snap the fruit off with a pair of clippers. Eight hours a day squatting in the fields. My thighs were ridiculously sore. But it was hilariously fun. Everyone constantly drank wine at all meals and breaks. At breakfast they sipped café au lait from a small bowl held in both hands and after the last gulp they poured wine in the bowl and drank it, too. During the vendage, the electric lights were turned off in St. Emilion, a medieval village with cobblestones and a moat. The town twinkled in the abundant glow of candlelight like a fairy tale setting.

Decades later in the early weeks of my romance with my partner Yiannis, he used to court me with bottles of luscious Greek olive oil. On the third or fourth date, he brought wine for the first time. I had not yet told him about my vendage experience. I was shocked when he presented a bottle of St. Emilion 1974. Spooked! Needless to say, I followed that guy home to Greece.

It’s August of 2008 and we’re on Thirasia, the least touristy of the several islands composing Santorini. We have friends there, Petro and Adonia, true blue Santorinians – their parents and grandparents on both sides were born and raised in Santorini. Everyone calls Adonia’s father Pappou which is Greek for “grandpa.” He’s in his late seventies and still harvests his own grapes.

Pappou is a character. I don’t know that from extended conversations with him because I understand little he says — he talks fast and speaks no English. I have never heard him say one word of English, like “thank you” or “hello,” phrases that most any Greek will test on you. I know he is a character just by watching him. He seems to be always grinning about something and he is pure old school. Yiannis tells me Pappou used to be a boxer, and I see truth in that claim because his nose is seriously bent.

At 7:00 am the old man fetches Yiannis and me and we follow him to his fields about a 20 minute walk away. Pappou travels by donkey. He uses straw baskets to gather the grapes, dumps them into milk carton crates and ties the crates on to the donkey’s wooden pack saddle with a rope. He doesn’t even use bungee cords. He delivers the grapes to the local co-op consisting of some thirty wine growers who share the cost of pressing the grapes into wine. On this Sunday morning, Pappou is the only harvester I see transporting his grapes by donkey instead of something motorized. As I said, old school.

Santorini resulted from a violent volcanic eruption millennia ago. Consequently, the earth is gray or black volcanic ash. You look at the ground and wonder how anything can grow in what appears to be dead soil. But, the ashen lava is the secret ingredient of Santorini’s wine success. Another unusual feature is the fact that Santorini grapes are not cultivated horizontally like in France and every single other place else I’ve seen grape vines, from California to the Côte d’Ivoire. Rather, the Cycladic vine is circular and looks just like a wreath. It lies in a depression in the ground to protect it from the strong Aegean winds. New shoots are woven around the stump in the shape of a basket or wreath, a clever technique allowing water, a scarce item on Santorini, to collect from nocturnal fogs.

The Santorini trigos (grape harvest in Greek) strikes me as harder work than what I recalled from France’s vendage because you have to bend closer to the ground to cut the grapes. Additionally, you have to look for the grapes as if the harvest were an Easter egg hunt. The fruit isn’t just dangling before you; some bunches are lying on the ground under leaves while others hide behind clumps of thick vines. I did my clippings and moved on to the next cluster only to watch Pappou trace my steps and readily find one or two furtive bunches.

Pappou harvests white and purple grapes. We were picking the purple ones, known informally as mavro (black in Greek) and technically as Vinsanto.  The juice looks like dark blood on your skin.  The white grapes are sweet and known as niktera since they are picked only at night (nikta in Greek).

Whatever season it is, Pappou always has a stash of his home brew to share with us. He stores his wine in a cave carved from the pumice walls of Santorini’s famed white cliffs. Until only a few generations ago islanders used to live in such cave homes and they were usually mammoth enough to house a stable for the animals, too.

Pappou drinks wine daily. I suspect it accounts for his sprightly longevity.

My grandfather, Oreste Spadafora of Sicilian stock, also used to make his own wine from a modest grape vine in his back yard. In a peculiar version of the French breakfast, he had a habit of putting wine in his black coffee and drinking the two together. Grandpa drank wine daily and he lived to be over 100 years old.

The ancient Greeks honored the Old World profession of wine making. They gave us Dionysus, the great Olympian god of wine, pleasure and festivity. Pappou and my grandpa, Mediterranean men to the core, are not gods but I say they come close to immortality by harvesting hearty vineyards whose resulting wine assuredly contributed to their robust health in their elder years. In the end, isn’t that what any reasonable mortal should hope for?

How did someone with a name so completely Celtic as Colleen McGuire come to possess an Italian passport? 

My mother’s parents immigrated to America from a little village in Italy, in the exact center of the country, in the region known as Abruzzi.  My grandfather did not become a U.S. citizen until after his daughter was born (1924) which in Italy’s eyes made my Chicago-born mother a de facto Italian national from birth.   As if to convey a poetic confirmation of her roots, my grandparents named her Ora Lora Spadafora.  Say it three times and you just might start to levitate. 

Although Mom has never visited Italy, the circumstances of her birth trigger some loophole in Italian law that permits her children to become legal Italians.  My sister and I applied for citizenship through the Italian Consulate in New York City, a process which required the seemingly unattainable production of seemingly extinct documents, such as Grandpa’s 1886 birth certificate and our grandparents’ marriage certificate.  

After two years of de rigeur Italian bureaucracy (lost files, documents confused, mistaken instructions to re-apply at the Boston and Chicago Consulates), I finally received an Italian passport on Valentines Day, 2005.   Italian citizenship means I am also a European citizen and this coveted status allows me to live and work legally in Greece.  It’s been quite useful having a US and European passport, but I’ll save those capers for another story.

Although Mom’s father Oreste was born in Abruzzi, his father immigrated north from a Sicilian town called Spadafora which means “swords out.”   Family lore has it that the Spadaforas were guards of the principality, although I wonder if this is just an Old World euphemism for Mafia connections.   

Sicily was an historically prominent colony of ancient Greece, as evident by the glorious ruins abounding in Siracusa, Taormina and other Greco settlements.  Mighty King Agamemnon who launched the Trojan War had a son named Orestes.  These two factors (Grandpa’s Sicilian origins and his storied first name), although scanty evidence by my lawyerly standards, compel contemporary Greeks to insist that I am Greek, too.  I am content to let that myth float . . .

I was the first to return to Italy, in 1974, to the little village of Corfinio in Abruzzi where Oreste and his wife Francesca Colella were born and married, but died an ocean away.  Grandpa lived to be 100 years old, yet once he settled in the New World he never returned to his homeland.  We still had lots of famiglia in Corfinio, including Grandpa’s nephew, Alfredo Trippitelli.  

My most vivid memories of my first visit surround the meals and eating.  Hand-rolled pasta in a multitude of crazy shapes and colorful names.  Spaghetti sauce, not from a jar, but from hand-squashed shiny red tomatos.  Wine from grapes grown on the backyard vine. My relatives incessantly commanded me to “eat, eat” in their Abruzzesa dialect,“man-yia, man-yia.” (The correct Italian pronounciation is “man-jah”).  Unaccustomed to the volumes of food served, early on I threw up, prompting Fiorangello (“Little Flower”) weighing in at 300 pounds, to heartily remark, “Bene.  Now you can eat more” as if he were a manager at one of those ancient Roman vomitorium. 

Over three decades passed before I returned to Corfinio in the summer of 2006, this time with my sister Cat.   We still seem to be related to half the town.  Villagers approached us detailing the bloodlines that tied us to them.   Everyone seemed to know our business, where we were staying (at Achille Colella’s self-built hotel) and when we were returning to Roma (about 2 hours drive away).   One of the things that intrigued me most this time was the history of the town itself.

During the Roman Empire Corfinio was known as Corfinium.  Tiburtina Road (which still exists in Rome today) passed straight through Corfinium, beginning in Roma and ending at the Adriatic.  It was the east-west version of the Appian Way which runs north-south.   Remnants of the ancient wall lining the Via Tiburtina still tower in Corfinio over 2000 years later. 

A number of tribes in this region united under the name “Italics” to challenge Rome’s authority and domination.   The capital of the Italics was Corfinium and money was minted in Corfinium.  The name on the coins was “Italia.”  Corfinio’s modern residents proudly assert that these coins were the first known reference to the word Italy.  Later in Rome, we asked a professional tour guide, an archaeologist, the origin of the word Italy.   Unconvincingly, she replied, “It’s always been this name.”  

Eventually, the Romans overthrew the Italic peoples and Corfinium’s name was changed to Pentima (accent on first syllable), perhaps standing for repent.   The town’s name remained as Pentima for almost 2000 years until 1928 when Mussolini, enamored with resurrecting Italy’s ancient glory, changed the name to Corfinio.  My sister and I spied a public water tap with “Pentima” written on it which is how our Nana used to refer to her hometown.  

What a lark that I wound up living in Greece instead of Italy.  No matter.  When Greeks and Italians encounter each other, they fondly proclaim, “Una Fatsa Una Ratsa,” (one face, one race) which means they come from the same stock.   Honestly, I feel at home in either land.  

Do you know how easy it is to be a vegetarian in the United States? 

OK, admittedly only certain pockets of the country abound in vegetarian choices, namely the East and West Coasts.  Yet, nowadays grocery stores in most small-size cities have a “health food department” stocking frozen fast foods from Amy’s Kitchen or bags of Bearitos, while Burger King and McDonalds provide veggie burger options.  The V word no longer scares Heartland America. 

By contrast, try living a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle in a foreign country.  Apart from a scanty few vibrant European venues and, of course, India, a vegetarian’s mecca, it’s tough for our breed.  I’ve traveled to over seventy countries and can report that vegetarianism is not, regrettably, a global phenomena.  Even in Third World nations where you’d presume meat or fish is too costly, I am always surprised by its prevalence. 

I currently reside in Athens, Greece at the foot of the Acropolis.   This essay does not constitute The Vegetarian Voice of Greece; I simply share my own experiences. 

The good news is that Greek cuisine is robust with a cornucopia of delicious and wholesome vegetarian foods.  I’m not just referring to the tasty fare familiar to patrons of U.S. Greek restaurants, including spanakopita (spinach pies), tsaziki (yogurt, garlic and cucumbers), or dolmades (stuffed grape leaves).

When you immerse yourself in traditional Greek culture, you are treated to truly original and tantalizing tastes, such as, yellow zucchini flowers stuffed with rice.  Or dakos, a Cretan speciality made from hard barley rusks smothered in tomatos, oregano, feta and olive oil so luscious you can practically drink it. 

Yet, these types of dishes are all regarded as mere “starters.”  Dining in a taverna, I’ll share a half dozen appetizers with friends and be happily satisfied, but the waiter will inevitably say something to the effect, “OK, now what are you having to eat.”  Translation:  choose a meat or fish entrée.   Greeks seem oblivious to the fact that their exquisite appetizers are worthy of the prime course. 

There was once an exclusively vegetarian restaurant in all Athens, a city of three million plus residents.  Eden’s menu was decent, but it was jarring to be in a supposedly vegetarian environment where ashtrays sit on every table and get good use. 

In private homes where Greek hospitality knows no bounds, hosts tend to get flustered.  What do we serve her?  As if an animal free diet involves either perplexing recipes or just munching on raw carrots.  Indicative of the latter narrow view, the Greek word for vegetarian is hortofagos meaning “eater of greens.”

Within a two block radius of my midtown Manhattan apartment there are at least three places to purchase a shot of wheatgrass, and when I am there I consume one daily.  Here, wheatgrass is as foreign as chocolate covered ants.  I have seen only one store selling fresh squeezed vegetable juice but the sole selection is carrot juice, even though the outdoor markets all sell spinach, beets, and cucumbers.  The first appliance I bought upon arrival was a juicer. 

Although I know many progressive minded Greeks, at the moment I cannot think of a single one who is vegetarian like me: no meat or fish, ever, period.   This concept is seemingly difficult for most Greeks to grasp.  I try to explain by saying I eat nothing with eyes.  Invariably someone will invite me to sample some fried kalamari arguing that squid is exempt from my criteria.  In this carnivore culture there is even a word, psikna (ψηκνά), that means the smoky smell of grilled meat. 

I am almost a vegan, but, my goodness, it is a Herculean task to abstain from the dozens of varieties of fine feta cheese.  And I can’t resist a bowl of fresh local yogurt that makes Dannon taste like glue.  When topped with thick Delphi honey and crushed walnuts, it surpasses your favorite childhood ice cream sundae. 

I fast regularly—juice fasts mostly, but I once did a fourteen day water fast.  Greeks are very familiar with fasts.  Around Easter, during Lent, you’d be surprised how common fasting is.  I chuckled once I found out that “fasting” in this period means simply not eating meat or dairy for forty days.  God forbid. 

Yet and still, Greece is an ancient, sacred land where the earth and animals were once worshiped for millennia.  Its palpable spiritual energy compliments and empowers my compassionate daily diet. 

My sister, Cat, and I are twins, born on April Fools Day (unbeknownst until that moment to our mom and her doctor), and we wanted, as usual, to do something special on our birthday on April 1, 2007 when we were, for a change, both in New York City.  

Exuberant Lynette Chiang of Bike Friday had introduced me to an architect, David Holowka, who had created an architecture bike tour of Harlem.  He agreed to host a birthday ride and he graciously extended the invitation to the New York City Bike Friday crowd.  

Seven of us gathered on a Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m. at Central Park North under cloudy skies — a perfect day for an urban tour.  Had the weather been sunny, we all might have instead been cruising down River Road.  Also, few drivers had yet ventured outdoors.  

David rode a Brompton and loaned his other folding bike, a Moulton, to Zak.  Riding regular bikes were my sister Cat and me, former Transportation Alternative president Charlie Komanoff and another architect Roger.  We all envied Bennett’s Bike Friday, a shiny red Pocket Tourist.  My neon orange Bike Friday Crusoe was waiting for me in Greece. 

David led us to the Teresa Hotel where Fidel Castro once stayed and Nikita Krushchev visited him.  Across the street we studied the Adam Clayton Powell statue with all the legislation he passed noted on the bottom.   David pointed out Stanford White buildings on Strivers Row, Duke Ellington’s home, Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was assassinated, the apartment building where Thurgood Marshall and W.E.B. Dubois lived (which had unobstructed views of Yankee Stadium), and Alexander Hamilton’s home,  Hamilton Grange, that was originally located several blocks northward and was delicately moved in the 1800s.    

One apartment building we visited was known for its distinct terra cotta tiles that were also used at Ellis Island.  David said the tiles were made so well (a lost art) that during renovations to the immigration building only 17 tiles out of 26,000 had to be replaced.  (There are only a handful of artisans who can still make terra cotta tiles.) 

David introduced us to Sylvan Place, a charming one-block street that looks more like New Orleans than New York.  Behind it on a hill stands the Morris Jumel mansion, the oldest home in New York City.  George Washington used to stay and hosted many dignitaries.  

Astor Row is another unusual street for New York because the small apartments all have a sitting porch and grassy front yard.  

We capped the morning off with brunch at a delicious soul food restaurant (heart shaped biscuits!) called Miss Maude’s Spoonbread II on 125^th Street.  

It was a terrific two hour tour enhanced by David’s entertaining and illuminating stories.  We could not have covered so much ground in such little time but for the efficiency of our bicycles.  A number of Harlemites took notice to the effect, “Look. They’re all on bikes” as if cycling were a novel form of transport instead of the most effective means of locomotion in an urban environment. 

 Photo, Left to right:  Charlie, Roger, Cat, Colleen, Bennett, David posing in Sylvan Place

From Plaka, a pretty town north of Agio Nikolaos in eastern Crete, the island of Spinalonga looks invitingly close.  Just a hop, skip and a paddle away by sea kayak—or so it seemed. 

Spinalonga is a spit of land situated at the mouth of Spinalonga Bay.  Strategic since antiquity, in 1579 the Venetians erected a gargantuan fortress befitting of their superpower status, and indeed, its protectors defied Turkish conquest for several decades longer than any other Cretan garrison.  The fort finally fell to Ottoman rule in 1715. 

On a warm October day our energetic group of four Americans and four Greeks sought to kayak over to Spinalonga Island.  From there, we would head down its bay, a short portage, then down Poros Bay to Agio Nikolaos.  At most, the trip was fifteen kilometers.

From Plaka, a local fisherman can probably make the voyage to Spinalonga Island in about twenty minutes.  It took me about two hours. 

I should point out that I had never kayaked.  My initial hour was spent on land just trying to get a grasp of this sport and its paraphernalia.  We donned life jackets, colorful wetsuits and learned how to put on a “skirt.”  This is a sturdy cloth worn around your waist: when seated in your kayak, you attach the skirt’s hem to the open perimeter of your seat so that water doesn’t enter the boat.  Next were some rudimentary rowing lessons.  We sat on the beach, pretending we were at sea, and went through the motions of manipulating the oars. 

I reasoned that, being a first-time kayaker, I should buddy up with another novice, Pia, in a two-seater.  Wrong.  Pia and I didn’t know when to paddle, how to coordinate our rowing or even which direction to face when a strong wind blew.  Not but fifteen minutes after setting out to sea, one moment we were dry, the next moment we were wet.   The boat capsized so suddenly we didn’t even have a chance to shout the proverbial “Man Overboard!”   Sobered by the incident, we took our friends’ advice and got our own kayaks, and discovered that individual navigation was superior to teamwork, at least when the team was clueless in the art of kayaking. 

When I learned that Yiannis capsized in his kayak, too, I was beginning to fear our excursion would match the disasterous pre-Games rowing test events for the Athens Olympics which took place in August, 2003. The new rowing center at Schinias was vulnerable to the maltemia, the summer winds, which created whitecaps and forced Olympic officials to call off the opening day of competitions. Later, winds still dominating, the United States rowing team actually capsized. What a photo that made for the Greek press!  Within a day of their arrival the entire German rowing team, heretofore ranked number one, fell ill with food poisoning and immediately retreated back to Germany.   I prayed our rowing adventure would not suffer similar afflictions.

Finally, we all made it to Spinalonga Island, some of us quite wet and all of us looking a little goofy in our loudly colored outfits, especially the kayak mini-skirts. The tourists stared, mostly at Miltos.  While our skirts laid flat, his undulated with a flamboyant pink hem akin to an Argentine tango costume that got shrunk at the cleaners.  For some reason, he kept it on during our visit to Spinalonga which prompted endless guffawing. 

After Crete formally united with Greece in 1913, Spinalonga became a leper colony and remained so until 1957.  The island is larger than expected when you peer at it from the Crete mainland. One can easily spend several hours strolling its pathways and perimeters. The elegant Venetian architecture—curved arched portals, for example—contributes to Spinalonga’s beauty, yet a haunting feeling pervades, perhaps attributable to the cemetery whose open graves bear the assumingly impaired bones of the prior inhabitants. 

My afternoon kayaking was far more successful once I got the hang of it. And the disappearance of the winds helped appreciably.  Our group soared along pretty much all together instead of scattered leagues apart as we had been during the morning. The scenery in Spinalonga Bay is breathtakingly spectacular.  Mountains in the distance on a blinding shiny blue sea devoid of any other seafarers except the eight of us.  The rock cliffs on the coast mesmerized me: they were wavy, in layers, like slabs of thick uncooked bacon stacked on top of one another, truly of postcard caliber.  One area we paddled to appeared as if we were sheltered inside a cave, but actually we were in an open area on the sea. 

I eagerly recommend sea kayaking in Spinalonga Bay.  Beginners can complete the journey from Plaka to Agio Nikalao, with a pit stop on the island, easily in one day.  You will feel thoroughly exhilarated by the hearty aquatic workout and gain yet another reason to place Crete at the top of your Magnificent Mediterranean Islands List.   

Still curious and restless (hey, I grew up in the middle of cornfields), it took another two year odyssey 1976-1978 wandering through Latin America and West Africa before I returned back to a familiar part of the earth. Returning from that last trip, the moment I entered U.S. air space, I lapsed into a delirium which I suspect was the first case of malaria ever documented in the state of Indiana. 

In Latin America and Gambia in Africa, my brother Tom, 17 months my junior, traveled with me, sort of.  We’d separate for long stretches to do our thing and then in that pre-cell phone era we somehow managed to rendezvous even when we were several countries apart.  Sometimes we left each other notes at U.S. embassies where we could be found, while other encounters were just pure serendipity.

I can’t recall how we got this travelogue gig with the Lafayette Journal & Courier or who thought up the title “Postmark” with a colon, followed by the name of the country we explored.  They paid us ten bucks an article.  We didn’t travel with a camera so the newspaper came up with these corny drawings, a few of which I have included. I added some web photos to others just to spice ‘em up. 

From a “politically correct” perspective the travelogues are rife with embarrassments.  Yet, I surprise myself by what I took note of and observed at a still relatively raw age.  Ultimately, the articles are what they are, and I have resurrected them because, IMHO, they still make for entertaining reading.   

Our father berated Tom and me for “wasting” our youth when we should be in college, but as our monthly Postmark column grew in local popularity with everyone asking him “Where are they now!” he eventually accepted our wanderlust and its documentation.  

Thanks to Mom for saving the original newspaper with every single Postmark.   

By KATHY MATTER Staff Writer

Colleen McGuire, 22, is spending the summer following her junior year at Indiana University as a crew boss for corn de-tasselers in Benton County’s lush cornfields.

Previously, she has picked grapes in Italy and experienced the communal lifestyle of an Israeli kibbutz only five miles from the Lebanese border.

Tom McGuire, 20, her brother, is spending the summer after his sophomore year at I.U. building grain bins.

Previously, he has known the thrill of hiking to a tiny mountain village in Mexico and having crowds gather around him because he was the first American to

Unusual experiences for two people who grew up in the small town of Oxford?

Maybe.
But maybe not.

Traveling is education. Life is education. “If you don’t go out, life won’t come to you,” Colleen says.

“Traveling helps you find yourself,” she continues. “A good self image is the most important thing in the world, and Tommy and I found it by traveling.”

In 1974, Colleen set off by herself for a year, with money she had saved since childhood, to spend a year hitchhiking from Dublin to Cairo.   

Tom, intrigued by Mexico after a brush with it on a trip around the U.S., decided to load up his backpack and set off for four months by himself in Mexico.

And although he admits it sounds corny, Tom says that his experiences in Mexico sparked an interest in his college studies that pulled him from warning slips to the dean’s list.

Now teaming up, the two McGuires plan to hit the road again at the end of August, traveling through Mexico to South America, and across the Atlantic to Africa.

“People’s first reaction when they hear about us is that we’re irresponsible and dropouts from society. We’re not,” Tom says.

“We’re not vagabonds. We keep clean and try not to look scruffy because that’s important for our own self image,” Colleen says.

Of course, any kind of traveling costs money, but they have saved for it, and believe they can live on about $3 a day by hitchhiking, camping out (they’re taking sleeping bags) and buying and fixing their own food.

And if they bypass resort cities in favor of poor out-of-the-way villages, and ruins and cross-country trips on llamas, it’s because that’s the country they want to see.

“The main thing I want to do is just talk with people,” says Colleen, which shouldn’t be too hard since both she and her brother speak Spanish fluently (she also speaks Portuguese and French).

Over Christmas we went to Mexico for three weeks, and while we were there we talked and made friends with at least 40 people,” Tom said. “It’s something we never would have done here.”

On previous travels, both have found people to be friendly and willing to share their homes and a portion of their lives with them.

You have to approach travel with the right attitude and be friendly yourself, Colleen believes, and says that no one has ever been really mean to her.

“We just don’t think about anything bad happening,” says Tom. “If you think about something bad happening, it probably will.”

They plan to travel through Mexico and the Yucatan, poking into Inca and Mayan ruins, heading south to Peru and Brazil, and up the Amazon River on a boat to the Atlantic coast.

From there it will be a trip on a banana boat, or another cheap transportation, to Africa where they are to meet an African friend made at college who will be their host as they explore Africa for six months.

“From there we’ll be gone as long as it takes us to get back to Oxford,” says Tom.

Probably he and Colleen will split at that point. If money holds out, Tom would like to go the rest of the way around the world, coming back to the U.S. across the Pacific Ocean. Colleen would like to return to the kibbutz in Israel where she lived for several months on a past sojourn.

But they plan to come back. “I want to finish my education. That’s very important to me,” says Tom, who’s majoring in Latin-American anthropology and Spanish. Colleen agrees, and adds simply, “This is my home,”

Wandering children can be hard on parents, and Colleen and Tom say they have had nothing but support from theirs. “My influence to travel was my mother,” Colleen says. “When I was in fifth grade and was the only girl carrier of the Journal & Courier in Oxford, she was the one who encouraged me to go on, so that I could save my money to travel some day.”

I just wish I could pick up all of Benton County and put them in Egypt for one day,” she says, “They  would just die. Here you can earn $3 an hour working the cornfields. There they work over eight hours a day just to make 50 cents.”

“Traveling really opens your eyes. When I came, back to the United States, I took a good hard look at everything we have here — TVs, cars, bathrooms that flush — we just don’t realize how fantastic this country is,” she says.

“The best way to appreciate it is to leave and come back”, Tom adds in agreement.

“I love this country,” Colleen says, “and I couldn’t say that when I first left.”

This doesn’t mean they were never scared. Both admit to being very apprehensive before they first took off on their own, but it was something both wanted to do bad enough to overcome the fear.

“Every day, something happens,” says Colleen of traveling, “even if you’re just sitting someplace by yourself. It’s new because you’ve never been there before.”

“And when you’re on your own, nobody knows you who are and you have to learn to survive, to think and make decisions on your own. You learn whom to trust and whom not to trust,” she says.

Besides jeans and T-shirts and necessities like soap that they will stuff into their small backpacks, and sleeping bags, the only other thing the twosome plans to take are books — books to write in and books to read.

“I want to read classics.  If I’m sitting on a beach I can read,” says Colleen, “while I can’t during my breaks in the cornfields.”

“I want to bring a blank book and fill it myself,” says Tom.

Tentative plans call for them to take about six months to travel through Mexico and the Yucatan, poking Inca’ and Mayan ruins, heading south to Peru and Brazil, and up the Amazon River on a boat to the Atlantic coast.

From there it will be a trip on a banana boat, or other cheap transportation, to Africa where they to meet an African friend made at college who will their host as they explore Africa for six months.