Tag / travel

It is a banana. It’s not a banana. It is a banana. It’s not a banana.

Warning to all my fellow raw fooders: tropical travel with ruin you forever. For after three weeks on the remote island of Dominica, only 26 miles long / 15 miles wide, I sit here now, in springtime Lincoln Park Chicago, trying to convince myself the thick-skinned-no-seed-having yellow piece of food I just paid $1 for at the coffee shoppe is indeed a banana.

It’s not a banana.

The last my taste buds remember, a banana was small, sometimes bite-sized fruit, ripe only when fully brown and soft as jelly, erupting with multi-dimensional flavors – sometimes aromatically figish, sometimes undeniably hibiscus. But this…this fruit I am eating now I think is some kind of artifcial syrup pressed into an elongated phallic shape, created in a laboratory to match the taste of Runts candy – America’s accepted standard for fruit taste. I am ruined forever.

How can I forget the farmer’s market in Roseau (with a population of 10,000, Dominica’s biggest village): I asked to taste a mango, ended up eating the entire thing, and when negotiating price for her goods, the vendor charged exactly what the earth had charged her that morning. This happened repeatadly, this gifting of fruits – handfuls of yellow island “cherries” or bundles of sugar cane stuffed in my hands. Tell me now, with generosity like this, what health food salad bar can compare in nourishment?

Or what about the roadsides, practically polluted with jelly coconuts: so available are these bowling ball sized treats, the locals commonly carry machetes for impromptu hydration breaks. So abundant are these delicious rocks in the sky, the Pirates of the Caribbean ll & lll movie hired an official coconut cutter to protect the unaware noggins of cast and crew. And so fresh and clean was the green coconut’s tonic water, I fear I may never be able to stomach the over sweet and pesticide dipped Thai atrocity again.

If that wasn’t enough, this equatorial paradise spoiled my palate with an array of exotic new fruits, picked right from the tree myself. Count on two hands: the consciousness altering fresh cacao pod, the feathery vanilla-like cass pod meat, the cinnimon/date flavored chapotilla, the similar-textured brown-golfball-sized tambrine fruit, and the luscious mango/pumpkin flavored mame apple (known to the locals also as “apricot”). But even the more common fruit fare in States is reduced to factory flavors when compared to Dominica’s in-season watermelon and powerful pineapple. Still, by far, nothing lifted the proverbial produce veil from my eyes nor had a deeper affect on my total being than one oddly shaped, smallish spiked, iguana green fruit blob, eaten soft as a mother’s breast, with pulp the color of dawn…with a texture stringy and almost transparent and as softly sweetened as heaven’s iced tea…these statements might not be FDA evaluated, nor the potency of said effects legally regulated, but my personal research confirms in repeated double-blind studies, the strange sour sap is officially a dangerous aphrodisiac.

How can one go back to limp raspberries in a plastic container after that?

So I beg you, raw fooders and produce lovers alike, give up your gardens, abandon the farmer’s markets and stay as far away from the southern Caribbean as possible. Leave the life of wandering and compulsive perpetual travel to those of us who have already bitten Eden’s apple, dooming ourselves to a destiny of dining dissatisfaction and fatal fruit snobbery.

So until I can return to the volcanic coasts of some tropical jungle, eating precisely the way climate, season and location dictate, I shall somehow try to relish a bag of baby carrots. But as far as bananas go, this spirit is unbroken, and Dole, and their new “organic line” can kiss my Dominican pawpaw!

Desert road trip. I’ve got the costumes and soundtrack selected. I’ve got the whip and rhinestones ready. I’ve got a map with x’s and a rock and roll fantasy.

If I had a classic hot rod … if I had someone else’s dog I stole. If I had an extra two thousand bucks from undisclosed means, it would be easier to get swept away. In the dust devil on the horizon.

I like to go. I like to go. I like to drive. I like the getting there. I am a roadtripper. Two days, five days, ten days – what’s there to see?  If I’ve never done it before, that’s what I want to do.

In Albuquerque I’m headed to meet the real renegades of the state. The women who dress up just to take it off. The men who fight for a living. I’m the naked fighter sharing a thought that gets us somewhere – like back on the road. With my voice raised and the windows down. Eyes scratchy and squinting, for the desert wind, so dusty hot dry. Throwing sweaty clothing into the backseat. Ready to fight and fly.

Episode 10 of The Eco Tourist, my web series documenting a 3 week volunteer conservation trip to Thailand where my travel partner and I work with the endangered Asian elephant.

Told from the perspective of two Hollywood-based high raw vegans working in the film/television industry, in this tenth episode, you’ll see some very healthy and hilarious behaviors of Asian elephants. If the zoo, circus, sanctuary or trekking camp you are considering attending does not provide the opportunity for their elephants to exhibit these natural instincts, then find another. Find a true sanctuary where the elephants are free to:

1. scratch all day! 2. rumble, trumpet, squawk and communicate with other elephants 3. dust themselves with loose dirt 4. forage for wild plant food 5. roll in mud pits! 6. touch constantly and socialize with other elephants continually 7. raise the youngsters with familial discipline 8. be free from poking, stabbing and beating with the bull hook

These elephants at the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand (a real elephant sanctuary) are free to exhibit all these natural behaviors and are obviously healthy elephants.  Just take a look:

Read about the difference between most circus, zoo and trekking elephants vs. HEALTHY elephants in sanctuaries in my award-winning column, Clean and Green Every Day, in EcoHearth online magazine here: Circus Elephants Life and Exposing Cole Bros Circus Elephant Cover Up.

I thought I had happily escaped the holiday madness by visiting a Buddhist country during the season in question.  Little did I suspect the Elephant Nature Park had a very unexpected event planned for the park volunteers:

Christmas party at Elephant Nature Park, Thaland

The volunteers of Elephant Nature Park, Thailand

Mae Lana, the rescued elephant

Read why I try to get away from the US during the holidays here: “Christmas Is Trying To Kill Me“

See more photos from this volunteer trip to Elephant Nature Park, Thailand.

Let’s hear it for mother nature.  Let’s have a round of applause for the still spectacular events that one can and can not imagine, powered by earth, wind, fire and water – better than the movies and a thousand times more original.

I fly a lot.  In my life, I’ve flown a whole lot.  But today it feels like I’m flying.  Two weeks ago to Vegas:  nope.  Three weeks ago to New Orleans:  not so much.  But today, we boarded in daylight, and from my window seat watched a flamboyant twilight cloak the shoulders of strong men loading the plane, signaling the traffic, rolling into the distance now just orange directional lights waving around in some secret code language.  Now dusk.  Now a dramatic jet-powered take off down a run way through Los Anglees.  Buildings I recognize pulling away, a left turn passing families, volleyball nets and piers at the beach.  Over the glorious ocean slapping against the rocky, natural Pacific coast and into an alchemical California sunset – purple, orange, red – mother nature really knows how to make magick out of human pollution.  Let’s hear it for these sunsets.

I know some hippies.  But I’m not one.  We have deeply much in common, but my heart is macabre and wholly busy balancing the Light with the Dark (even the Light can become an empire when it tries to take over).  I’m not a hippie, but I feel like one when I lift the arnica homeopathic pellets to my lips cause I got a tweak in the neck from goosing at this sunset so hard and so long.  I’m a lot like a hippie, that’s for sure.  A cultured, macabre, heavy metal, genius hippie – give me that.  My carry on is packed with loose shilajit, MSM and chia seeds.  Self-capped turmeric, wild enzymes and fermented B12.  A script printed out on the back of a script I already read.  My MacBook, iPhone, iShuffle and iBrain working wirelessly as external lobes.  I mixed my own clove, cinnamon and vanilla essential oil vial today.  And if you asked, I’d say I’m opalizing currently, by wearing lots of opals near my skin and next I’m moving towards labradorite, of which I am palming a sphere.  I’m tonguing a Jupiter spagyric.  Happy Winter Solstice.  I’m not a hippie.

Like a radical roller coaster ride, only a thousand times more massive, this plane accelerates into a turn and my window points almost directly up in a sky lit by a sun saying a magnificent farewell.  I feel like I’m flying this time.  This loop around quickly takes me over Los Angeles and I love how strangely calm it looks as I send good byes to the palm trees.  The city sprawls until it’s arrested definitively at the base of our first and sudden mountain.  Snow covered peeks, glowing gold ilke the pot at the end of the – this is beauty.  This is alchemy.  Mother nature does it again.

This city is rotten with inspiration. This city is your healthy lunch left in a hot car for 3 days with 80% humidity. This city sounds like the breath of a broken man’s smile amplified through brass. This city’s streets are crumbling from speed humps the ground threw up itself just to slow you down. This city feels like nothing to do/no place to be. This city knows beauty isn’t always pretty.

In episode 5 of The Eco Tourist, my travel partner and I shovel dung, scoop the mud pit and harvest corn – all volunteer chores at the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand.

View episode 5 of The Eco Tourist here:

Read how I kept the rain forest mosquitos away naturally – without chemicals – while working at the Elephant Nature Park in my award-winning column in EcoHearth magazine: Natural Inset Repellant.

In episode 4 of The Eco Tourist, my travel partner and I arrive at The Elephant Nature Park, where we will volunteer with this endangered species. But on our arrival day, a special treat – we get close to a baby elephant.

Read 6 Ways To Drop Tourism and Really Travel in my award-winning column in EcoHearth magazine: Lodge Locally, Public Transit, Seek Out The Cultural and Natural.

The Eco Tourist, episode 3 is LIVE! In this episode, I lose my Steripen virginity. UV water sterilization made this trip the FIRST ever wherein I did NOT suffer the digestive repercussions of traveling a developing country. Thank you, Steripen!

Read about other ways I approach being a vaccine-free traveler in my award-winning column in EcoHearth online magazine.

And some other thoughts on clean water.

The Eco Tourist, Episode 2 is LIVE! In this episode, we arrive in Chiang Mai, Thailand and adventure the Sunday walking street (coolest weekly art fair in the WORLD), Awana House (artsy city lodging for $18/night) and the Wat Suan Dok temple with the famous golden Buddha and Pun Pun vegetarian restaurant.

I wrote about why I believe Thailand and the Buddhist culture is so affluent in vegetarian culture while there.

If you wanna know, read about why I personally went vegetarian, vegan and eventually raw vegan in my award-winning column in EcoHearth magazine.