DOWNLOAD HERE!

DOWNLOAD HERE!

You can check out Mrs. Labarbera’s Media website here.

A quick show to let you know we are moving to The Coach Jeff Podcast

Sponsors!!…. Coach Jeff and The Power Up Podcast are supported by

The Sufferfest – www.thesufferfest.com

In 2 Adventure – www.in2adventure.com.au

Vibram Five Fingers from Barefoot Inc – www.barefootinc.com.au

Injinji Performance Products – www.injinji.com.au

Allez Sport – new website online store coming soon

Infinit Nutrition – www.infinitnutrition.com.au

Be a part of  The Power Up Podcast community!

• Please send us your feedback / questions / race reports to info@coachjeff.com.au
• Leave a comment here on the show blog ….just click on the comment link.
• Visit us on iTunes and leave your thoughts and maybe a show review
• Follow Coach Jeff on Twittter  and on Facebook

The Power Up Podcast  is one of several great shows produced by Coach Jeff.

Check out our other shows and services at www.coachjeff.com.au

The Power Up Podcast  is produced in conjunction with the Lifestyle PodNetwork.  

You’ll find more great podcasts like this one at LifestylePodNetwork.com

If you’d like to join the Lifestyle PodNetwork please contact us at talent@lifestylepodnetwork.com

Sponsors!!…. Coach Jeff and The Multisports Podcast are supported by

The Sufferfest – www.thesufferfest.com

In 2 Adventure – www.in2adventure.com.au

Vibram Five Fingers from Barefoot Inc – www.barefootinc.com.au

Injinji Performance Products – www.injinji.com.au

Allez Sport – new website online store coming soon

Infinit Nutrition – www.infinitnutrition.com.au

Be a part of  The Multisports Podcast community!

• Please send us your feedback / questions / race reports to info@coachjeff.com.au
• Leave a comment here on the show blog ….just click on the comment link.
• Visit us on iTunes and leave your thoughts and maybe a show review
• Follow Coach Jeff on Twittter  and on Facebook

The Triathlon Podcast  is one of several great shows produced by Coach Jeff.

Check out our other shows and services at www.coachjeff.com.au

The Multisports Podcast  is produced in conjunction with the Lifestyle PodNetwork.  

You’ll find more great podcasts like this one at LifestylePodNetwork.com

If you’d like to join the Lifestyle PodNetwork please contact us at talent@lifestylepodnetwork.com

A quick show to let you know we are moving to The Coach Jeff Podcast

Sponsors!!…. Coach Jeff and The Running Podcast are supported by

The Sufferfest – www.thesufferfest.com

In 2 Adventure – www.in2adventure.com.au

Vibram Five Fingers from Barefoot Inc – www.barefootinc.com.au

Injinji Performance Products – www.injinji.com.au

Allez Sport – new website online store coming soon

Infinit Nutrition – www.infinitnutrition.com.au

Be a part of  The Running Podcast community!

• Please send us your feedback / questions / race reports to info@coachjeff.com.au
• Leave a comment here on the show blog ….just click on the comment link.
• Visit us on iTunes and leave your thoughts and maybe a show review
• Follow Coach Jeff on Twittter  and on Facebook

The Running Podcast  is one of several great shows produced by Coach Jeff.

Check out our other shows and services at www.coachjeff.com.au

The Running Podcast  is produced in conjunction with the Lifestyle PodNetwork.  

You’ll find more great podcasts like this one at LifestylePodNetwork.com

If you’d like to join the Lifestyle PodNetwork please contact us at talent@lifestylepodnetwork.com

Join Annemarie Cross as she speaks with Global Social Media Strategist – Keith Keller

Keith talks about:

-      The difference between social media networking and traditional (push) marketing

-      What NOT to do when using social media tools

-      A success one of his business clients had in using social media in their communications, and much more

To find out more about Keith Keller go to: www.GlobalSocialMediaCoaching.com

What do you think? Did you find this helpful?

Please share this audio with your friends and colleagues by clicking the buttons below. And, please leave a comment – it’s great to hear from our listeners.

Till next time – stay inspired!

Are you struggling to distinguish yourself from your competitors? Feel undervalued and underpaid? Access our 7 step series to get noticed, hired and PAID what you’re worth, INSTANTLY! http://bit.ly/chargeyourworth

Sponsors!!…. Coach Jeff and The Triathlon Podcast are supported by

The Sufferfest – www.thesufferfest.com

In 2 Adventure – www.in2adventure.com.au

Vibram Five Fingers from Barefoot Inc – www.barefootinc.com.au

Injinji Performance Products – www.injinji.com.au

Allez Sport – new website online store coming soon

Infinit Nutrition – www.infinitnutrition.com.au

Be a part of  The Triathlon Podcast community!

• Please send us your feedback / questions / race reports to info@coachjeff.com.au
• Leave a comment here on the show blog ….just click on the comment link.
• Visit us on iTunes and leave your thoughts and maybe a show review
• Follow Coach Jeff on Twittter  and on Facebook

The Triathlon Podcast  is one of several great shows produced by Coach Jeff.

Check out our other shows and services at www.coachjeff.com.au

The Triathlon Podcast  is produced in conjunction with the Lifestyle PodNetwork.  

You’ll find more great podcasts like this one at LifestylePodNetwork.com

If you’d like to join the Lifestyle PodNetwork please contact us at talent@lifestylepodnetwork.com

PEOPLE HAD: been spouting excited stories about Utila as far back as Zacatecas, Mexico, and we had come to imagine a lethargic island of sandy streets and wild, all-night parties. But first impressions aren’t great; from the moment we set foot ashore we are pushed to the side of the concrete roads by motorbikes, ATV’s, golf carts and tuk-tuks roaring past at ridiculous speeds by shirtless American boys with bleached hair. We wander aimlessly with our backpacks sticking to our backs in the heat. A portly American bellows at us from his front verandah to offer us a room.
“Everywhere better than mine is full up!” he yells, “There are cheaper places, but they’re shit! Just dirty, rotten shit!”
We continue walking.
“Hey you!” he shouts to his elderly neighbour, “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you! They want a room!”

At the Treetanic Bar we have a couple of beers before the place fills up with divers. A bell is rung and the bartender calls out that Portia has today passed her divemaster course; he says she has one last test to complete. Portia sits up on the bar, a ruddy-faced Australian in a bikini top.
“Show us your tits!” someone shouts.
Portia dons a snorkeling mask and the bartender pours blue Curaçao into the snorkel until, finally surrendering, she yanks the snorkel from her mouth and spits the liquor across the people in front, most of it dribbling down her chin and stomach.
“Show us your tits!” someone shouts again.
The bartender is now pouring beer into her goggles, which Portia is sucking through her nostrils. The beer is finished, Portia’s hands are thrown skyward, and the party begins.

Next morning after a breakfast of johnnycakes stuffed with ham, eggs and cheese, we’re ready to see Utila with fresh (though bloodshot) eyes. We see a postcard: white sand, azure water, swaying palms. On the hot streets, young girls on bicycles, their hair in pigtails and cornrows, scream at each other in the gentle Caribbean cadence of their unintelligible Criolle. Rotten tomatoes sit in boxes out the front of the pulperias, the bananas soft and covered in tiny flies.

We rent bicycles and roll down to Chepes Beach for a swim, the powdery sand clinging to our feet. Then east around the point on a hot dirt road, the rustle of lizards darting off on either side. The sand and scrub to either side is littered with Private Property signs and occasionally a dirt bike whines past us. We pull up on a rocky outcrop overlooking the sea, separated from the ocean by a three-foot strip of plastic bottles and trash. Adam tries to go for a swim but punctures his feet on the urchins and dead coral. Erin and I turn back for Bando Beach while Adam and Dan look for a sealed road back to town. At Bando a couple of girls lazing behind the bar, gossiping in Criolle, take our entrance fee and we swim in the warm clear water, a baby shark swimming circles of Erin’s shins. Dive boats rumble past in the distance.

The following morning Adam and Dan head to the first day of their open-water dive course. Erin and I push off toward their dive school to hitch a ride on the one o’clock dive boat. We sit on the warm wood of the pier while the divers, laughing and joking, load the old wooden boat with the grey clinking oxygen tanks. The divers are young and tanned and full of fun, all shirtless and most sporting a small beer gut from their time on the island. We head out to sea, sitting on the front deck of the boat in the sun.

In the open water we stop and the divers disembark. We stay aboard with a handful of other snorkelers – two Scandinavian girls and Brian, an Australian – and Hoover, a native Utilan who is driving the boat. Brian asks Hoover some inane question about Henry Morgan’s fabled treasure. Hoover looks distantly out to sea.
“Man, I wish I had dat treasure,” he murmurs, “If I had dat treasure, man, I wouldn’t be drivin’ dis fuckin’ boat. I’d be far away from everyone, man, no more people, no more of dis fuckin’ ocean, man, jus’ me and some cows and grass and fuckin’ pigs. Somewhere widout de heat. But not cold, man. Jus’ cool.”
“So, New Zealand, then?” asks Brian.
Hoover grins. “Yeah man! New Zealand! Take me to New Zealand. Anywhere but here.”

We try to snorkel in the open ocean but the sea is rough and we are overcome by jellyfish. Hoover looks at us gravely as we board.
“Dis is why I don’t swim, man. Dere are t’ousands of dem fuckin’ jellyfish, billions of dem, de whole ocean is infested.” He almost spits the last word.

We sit back out on the front deck in the sun and await the divers. Without warning, Erin, who has shown no signs of seasickness all trip, looks at me and vomits, all over the deck and her sarong, and now she is looking at me in panic. She can’t breathe. Her eyes are terrified. She’s choking. I go to help her; she coughs and I look to see if she is alright, but she is still choking and I run behind her and start pounding on her back, shouting out for help, but there is only her and I on the front of the boat in the open ocean. The horizons are empty. There is nobody here. I shout again and people start running to us but finally she gasps and sucks in air and sits down to recover.

Hoover drives us all to the next spot, which is clear and shallow over a reef of coral and gently rippling seaweed. The blood is still bursting in our veins from the panic, but the fish are brightly coloured and curious, and for a long moment there is peace in this, the long gawking stare at a different world. The fish pass in front of our visors like traffic on a main road.

Another day passes; we wake early and walk the already warm concrete to the pier of the diving school. The sun beats down on the steel-blue wood of the front deck. Adam and Dan are along on this boat ride, the final day of their dive course, and Erin is doing a fun-dive with them. At the first dive site the fish are clustered close to the surface, electric blue, yellow and black stripes, dull grey. The divers sink in a fountain of bubbles and I strike out in my snorkeling mask and flippers, swinging the underwater camera with an outstretched arm. The world beneath is incredible, but jellyfish in little string beads prick at my back and arms and salt water pours into my mask and snorkel; coughing and spluttering I head back to the boat. I make three more attempts and then pass out on the bench behind Hoover as the water squelches beneath us.

Adam looks exhausted after the dive but Dan and Erin are happy and excited. We lie out on the front deck for what seems an eternity as Hoover does a sweep of the north side of the island in search of whale sharks.
“How do you know where they are?” someone asks.
“Look at the sky,” answers Diego, the stocky Argentinian instructor with a shock of blonde hair, “Where there are birds, there’s probably a fish boil, where hundreds of fish are churning up the water in a circle. If there’s a fish boil, there’s almost definitely a whale shark circling it.”

But there are neither birds nor fish boils and finally, without even realizing that we have turned around, we are flush up against the north side of the island, where waves crash against a rocky escarpment.

The boat lurches drunkenly, and it’s difficult for the divers to assemble their gear. I wait until everyone has disembarked and it is only Hoover, Diego and the two trainee divemasters remaining aboard. Diego looks at the two trainees disparagingly.
“Come on guys, let’s have some role model behaviour here. You look a shambles. Look, that’s all twisted, that’s on backwards. Think about it, guys! You’re supposed to be examples. Now get in there and gather everybody to the side of the boat.”
As they jump in he shouts after them: “Do as I do and as I say!”
He shakes his head at Hoover. After three years on the island, Diego is one of the few foreigners who can speak the island dialect without sounding like a fraud, and now he says, “Evrebody wanta be a divemaster; nobody wanta act like a divemaster.”

I dive in but the sea floor is blank, an empty grey, and the tide sweeps over me viciously. The divers have entered a subterranean canal of coral populated by spotted drummer, puffer fish and rays, but it’s inaccessible to me. I rise from the water and sit on the swinging ladder, the fins still on my feet, the sun drumming on my back. The boat rolls deep to the right and there is the clang of an oxygen tank rolling against one of the benches.

When everybody is up again we gather on the front deck. Everyone is abuzz with the news, reported by Hoover this morning, that the silent dreadlocked German who ran the barbecue at Evelyn’s Bar and Barbecue for fifteen years had, the night before, grabbed his .38 seemingly at random and shot two tourists, a man and a woman. The man had blocked one shot with the lid of an icebox and the second bullet had grazed his scalp. The woman had been shot twice in the back and was taken in a boat to the hospital in La Ceiba. The gunman was being held in the lockup on Roatan Island.
“You just can’t go around shooting tourists in the head on this island,” says one American instructor, smiling, “In the leg, maybe. But not in the head. It’s bad for business.”

Hoover appears on the front deck, pressing a mobile phone to his head and scowling at the horizon.
“Yeah, I t’ink I see you, man. You fuckin’ kiddin’ me. I dunno – that be fuckin’ far man. It fuckin’ far. I don’t know.”
He disappears inside and the engine is started before anyone has a chance to do roll call. A whale shark has been spotted and we are heading toward the horizon. The American instructor briefs us:
“If we come up on a whale shark, everybody is to put on snorkels and fins and enter the water quietly, two by two. If you’re lucky enough to swim with one, don’t come too close to it, definitely don’t touch it, and don’t surround it if you’re in a group. And Hoover’s come out this way on his own time, so anyone that swims is to tip the captain two hundred Lempiras.”

After a few minutes a clutch of vessels becomes visible in the distance, and our boat growls through the water toward them. There are half a dozen dive boats from Utila, as well as a couple that have snuck over from Roatan. Diego lifts his sunglasses and surveys the scene.
“This is why I never go swimming with whale sharks,” he mutters, “It’s a fucking zoo.”
He looks over at us all sitting idly on the deck.
“This stuff happens fast, guys. If you expect to see a whale shark today, get inside and get your gear on. Now!”

Inside the boat, all the dive gear is piled haphazardly in the middle of the floor. About a dozen people are lined up with fins on and snorkel mask hanging limply around their neck, waiting.
“All of us out here and there’s not even a fucking fish boil,” someone says quietly.

After twenty minutes another boat idles up close and the two captains have a shouted conversation in Criolle, entirely unintelligible except for:
“She a big fuckin’ bitch, man. T’irty feet.” – from the other captain. His boat drives away, and there is a pregnant pause as everybody looks at our captain expectantly, looking for a nod or a shake of the head. Looking for a sign. Hoover gazes despondently at the endless blue before him for a minute, then turns the boat around and revs the engine.
“She gone, man,” he says to Diego, “She gone.”

Under a blazing orange sunset we sit by the pier of the dive school, watching boys throw themselves into the water and take pictures of themselves doing it. A small boat chugs in. A group of the instructors and divemasters have spent the day in the cays for the birthday of a pretty Australian girl named Jennifer. They are all hopelessly drunk now. As the boat comes to a stop, Jennifer pulls her big pale breasts out of her bikini top and waves them at a passing dive boat. The girls behind her take up the chant.

“Tits! Out! For the boys!” they sing, “Tits out for the boys!”

The boat nudges against the pier and Jennifer tumbles back onto her seat, sprawling over the empty bottles and cans. It takes two of the boys to lift her out of the boat and onto dry land.

-

Only two tracks this time out but they’re good ones – Anastasio y los del Monte with “Dias Pasados”, and Neon Indian’s stone-cold classic “Deadbeat Summer”, from his Psychic Chasms LP of 2009.

Music from the show:

Jah Roots- Stepping Out of Babylon – SELASSIE_I_DUB_INTRO

http://www.archive.org/details/JAHROOTSSteppinOutOfBabylonFirstalbum_0

Scoot Joplin- Maple Leaf Rag

http://www.archive.org/details/MapleLeafRag

Join Annemarie Cross as she interviews Mandy Napier

Mandy will talk about:

-          Negative habits that can hold us back from building the business we want and how to change these negative habits into positive ones;

-          How to make changes in our lives and stay permanent;

-          Her own journey in developing a mindset of success, and much more.

To get in contact with Mandy go to: www.mindsetforsuccess.com.au

What do you think? Did you find this helpful?

Please share this audio with your friends and colleagues by clicking the buttons below. And, please leave a comment – it’s great to hear from our listeners.

Till next time – stay inspired!

Are you struggling to distinguish yourself from your competitors? Feel undervalued and underpaid? Access our 7 step series to get noticed, hired and PAID what you’re worth, INSTANTLY! http://bit.ly/chargeyourworth

Join Annemarie Cross as she interviews Mandy Napier

Mandy will talk about:

-          Negative habits that can hold us back from building the business we want and how to change these negative habits into positive ones;

-          How to make changes in our lives and stay permanent;

-          Her own journey in developing a mindset of success, and much more.

To get in contact with Mandy go to: www.mindsetforsuccess.com.au

What do you think? Did you find this helpful?

Please share this audio with your friends and colleagues by clicking the buttons below. And, please leave a comment – it’s great to hear from our listeners.

Till next time – stay inspired!

Are you struggling to distinguish yourself from your competitors? Feel undervalued and underpaid? Access our 7 step series to get noticed, hired and PAID what you’re worth, INSTANTLY! http://bit.ly/chargeyourworth

All this and some great music from http://www.musicalley.com/    featuring: “time is an illusion“ by Piercing Silence.   “train of thought” by Andrew Lubman and of course our intro song “March” by the band Goodwin and our outro “the promised land” by Ioannis Anastassakis

Sponsors!!…. Coach Jeff and The Triathlon Podcast are supported by

The Sufferfest – www.thesufferfest.com

In 2 Adventure – www.in2adventure.com.au

Vibram Five Fingers from Barefoot Inc – www.barefootinc.com.au

Injinji Performance Products – www.injinji.com.au

Allez Sport – new website online store coming soon

Infinit Nutrition – www.infinitnutrition.com.au

Russ Aimz Music – www.russaimz.com

Be a part of  The Triathlon Podcast community!

• Please send us your feedback / questions / race reports to info@coachjeff.com.au
• Leave a comment here on the show blog ….just click on the comment link.
• Visit us on iTunes and leave your thoughts and maybe a show review
• Vote for The Triathlon Podcast over at Podcast Alley 
• Follow Coach Jeff on Twittter  and on Facebook
• Send us Audio Feedback by email

The Triathlon Podcast  is one of several great shows produced by Coach Jeff.

Check out our other shows and services at www.coachjeff.com.au

The Triathlon Podcast  is produced in conjunction with the Lifestyle PodNetwork.  

You’ll find more great podcasts like this one at LifestylePodNetwork.com

If you’d like to join the Lifestyle PodNetwork please contact us at talent@lifestylepodnetwork.com

Keep those iTunes reviews coming it, we love them.

Music from the show:

Jah Roots- Stepping Out of Babylon – SELASSIE_I_DUB_INTRO

http://www.archive.org/details/JAHROOTSSteppinOutOfBabylonFirstalbum_0

Scoot Joplin- Maple Leaf Rag

http://www.archive.org/details/MapleLeafRag

In this episode of The JBC Talk Podcast, we bring you Part One of our fascinating (and we should add, very long) interview with Rabbi Mike Comins, author of Making Prayer Real – Leading Jewish Spiritual Voices On Why Prayer Is Difficult and What To Do About It, published by Jewish Lights. If you aren’t already familiar with Making Prayer Real, you may want to check out Yair’s recent review of the book, which can be found here. Also, if you would like to have a peek at the book itself, there are several excerpts available in PDF format here.

Part One of our conversation with Rabbi Comins focuses on a few of the broader topics related to prayer, including: What is prayer?, What is Jewish prayer?, How is Jewish prayer different from prayer in other traditions?, What roles does prayer fulfill in Jewish life?, What is the role of individual prayer in Judaism?, and What is the role of communal prayer in Judaism?

Stay tuned for Part Two of of our interview with Rabbi Comins. In it, we focus on several of the more practical and challenging aspects of prayer.

We hope you enjoy this episode of The JBC Talk Podcast.

Rabbi Mike Comins, the founder of TorahTrek Spiritual Wilderness Adventures and the Institute for Jewish Wilderness Spirituality, is author of A Wild Faith: Jewish Ways into Wilderness, Wilderness Ways into Judaism (Jewish Lights). A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of UCLA, Rabbi Comins made aliyahand lived in Israel for fifteen years. He studied classical Jewish texts at the Pardes Institute, earned his MA in Jewish education from Hebrew University, and was ordained in the Israeli rabbinical program of Hebrew Union College. He was a founding member and the first director of education at Kehilat Kol Haneshama in Jerusalem. Finding his calling in life, Rabbi Comins became a licensed Israeli desert guide and led Ruach HaMidbar desert trips in Israel and the Sinai. He participated in the Mindfulness Leadership Training program at Elat Chayyim, the Jewish Spiritual Retreat Center, the first rabbinical cohort of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, and the Kol Zimra: Chant Leader’s Professional Development program. He founded TorahTrek while serving the Jewish Community of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Currently, Rabbi Comins lives, teaches, and writes in Los Angeles; he leads TorahTrek programs and serves as a scholar-in-residence around the country.

Links and Resources

• Making Prayer Real – Official book site which includes a useful study guide as well as other resources, including information on (forthcoming) distance learning opportunities.
• Talking To G-D: Prayer in Judaism – A Chabad.org resource page.
• Prayers and Blessings – Information from JewishFAQ.org.
• Day To Day Judaism: Prayer – Rabbi Maurice Lamm via Aish.
• Addressing God – My Jewish Learning’s resource page on prayer.
• An Ancient Prescription for Inner Peace – Article from RJ Magazine.
• Finding God in the Prayer Book – Article from RJ Magazine.

If you haven’t already done so you can subscribe to our podcast series via iTunes or our RSS feed. We can also reached by email at jbctalk@gmail.com, or by voicemail at 323-906-7688.

BACK IN: San Salvador, we find an ancient station wagon posing as a taxi; our driver is short and rotund, bald but for a horrible slicked-down combover. He squints and has a gold tooth that he sucks on between sentences. Winking, he reaches in the rear door and releases a rope that holds the rear door closed. It pops open and he screams “Automatic!” with a laugh. He’s giggly, chattering and obsessed with distances.

“Oh, the border!” he says, when we tell him our plans, “From La Palma, the border is eight kilometres. From here to La Palma is sixty-seven kilometres. So altogether it is seventy-five kilometres.”

“Oh,” I say, looking out the window.

“In a straight line,” he says, leaning in close as if telling me a secret, “it’s only forty-eight kilometres away. But because the road is so windy, it’s seventy-five kilometres to the border!” He giggles abruptly.

At the bus station hustlers try to approach us with their broad American accents. There is a concrete guard tower full of soldiers, and most of the buses have several windows smashed in, the spiderwebbed glass throwing the sun into our eyes.

On the other side of the border, between rows of parked semi-trailers stretching as far as the eye can see, a pickup truck full of men in cowboy hats stops and picks us up. The back smells of manure. We pass two cow skeletons lying in ditches by the side of the road, pieces of hide still attached like ragged clothes. These will be the two trademarks of Honduras: cowboy hats and roadside cattle carcasses.

Central America is often spoken and written of as if the countries were indistinguishable from each other, each one a tiny jungle kingdom of corruption and tropical decay, but it’s been pleasing to discover that each has its own distinct personality – laidback Belize, reserved and polite Guatemala, brash and fun-loving El Salvador. Honduras is the exception, the country without a face; it is, in fact, its very facelessness that is its defining characteristic. But it’s not necessarily a negative trait; for a lot of our stay Honduras plays like a best-of album of the countries visited so far, retaining the raw edge of Guatemala with the rural friendliness of Mexico and the Salvadoran fondness for a good party.

In Santa Rosa de Copan, Adam and I step gingerly into a dimly-lit pool hall in a quest for beer. The place is packed out with old men on stools clutching Salva Vida beers, young men in flannelette shirts and moustaches holding pool cues to their shoulders. All are staring at us through bloodshot eyes. A thick fog of silence and tobacco smoke descends; I can hear my footsteps tap clearly on the dirty tiles as we walk to the bar – and then, as if someone has pressed play, the entire hall erupts into smiles and shouted questions -

“Where are you from?”

“Do you like football?”

“Is it cold in Australia?”

“Do you play volleyball?”

“Can you buy me a beer?”

“Come on, amigo, buy me a beer?” – this familiar Latin friendliness always showing up where it is least expected. Over the shouts we try to order a few beers to take back to the hotel, where we meet up with the girls carrying hotdogs drenched in six sauces, and we sit on the wet balcony over the empty street and salute this new country that is so much like the old ones.

In the morning we follow the garbage truck down to the highway and jump another bus for Copan Ruinas. Adam pops the roof hatch of the bus so that he has room to stand, drawing roars of laughter from the entire bus. The girls do battle with the wandering hands of the cowboys as we stand in the crowded heat. Halfway along a man disembarks at a large sugar mill with a revolver in his hands. The bus driver beeps the horn at him; he slides the gun casually into the back of his waistband and continues walking up the path. A Honduran man spots Adam’s camera and, pointing at it, asks suspiciously, “Are you taking those photos back to America to show your government?”

The screech of macaws overhead as we walk through the great ruins of Copan, their red tails trailing behind them like a plane tugging a banner. The intricate carving of the stelae in the courtyard, the huge heiroglyphic staircase jumbled by archaeologists, the tombs and tunnels, the massive tree roots snaking through the rock and the trees towering above the ruins as conquerors.

The next day we head for the hot springs. We stand on the corner, looking to hitch a ride, eating chip packet after chip packet, until at last a large flatbed truck with a livestock cage attached pulls up. We climb clumsily into the back. The truck groans and shudders around the rough dirt road; we grip the bars until our knuckles are white. Attempts to sit are shortlived as our spines crack against the jolts of the road. As we near the hot springs the driver picks up speed and roars through the jungle. Branches are whipping about the cage and the wind is in our hair and people hoot with laughter as we pass and to be part of this forever we would give almost anything. The hot spring is a small steaming waterfall that dumps scalding water into a creek. A few men are bathing downstream, their bodies covered in soap that floats downstream on the warm currents that are swallowed up in the cold of the brook.

In La Ceiba we are picked up by a mumbling cab driver who tosses our packs in the boot and carries us into the jungle on a rough dirt road for which he has insufficient clearance. After an hour of scraping and cursing he pulls up to a man working at the engine of an old engine and asks for directions.

“It’s three blocks on,” says the man, and turns back to his work.

We look around us, at the endless thick jungle, the rushing river off to our right. What the hell does three blocks mean? The taxi crunches away on the gravel and, three kilometres on, we arrive at our guesthouse.

At the guesthouse, met by the friendly German owner on horseback, we swim off the heat in the half-filled freshwater pool while a large toad hops slowly along the edge and into an adjoining pond.

At noon the next day we gear up for our whitewater rafting trip. Along with us there are two guides – Ryan, a square-jawed American, and Damien, an Irishman with a large black ring piercing his lower lip who refers to everyone as ‘friend’ (as in, “Friend, would you hand me that rope?”). Over lunch we discuss our next destination, the island of Utila. Ryan relates a story that occurred a couple of months ago: there was a theft of drugs from Colombian smugglers passing by the island. The Colombians responded not by interrogating people and trying to recover the drugs, but rather by immediately assassinating the thirty people on the island they knew or suspected to be involved. They made no attempt to recover the drugs stolen. All thirty were killed the same night.

We slip on life jackets and river shoes – too big, with holes in the toes – and trek down the hill to the riverbed. The mighty Rio Cangrejal is running low and the guides, carrying the heavy rafts atop their heads, have already informed us that we will be unable to raft the entire way. The river still looks strong. Large boulders are scattered about. A group of Honduran kids are all playing about on the nearby rocks, all wearing lifejackets. Some of the older ones are carting rocks from the river up the steep bank in rafting helmets.

Ryan teaches us how to angle our swimming to cross a fast current and we reach the other side of the river, haul ourselves up onto a ridge and hurl ourselves off again, falling twelve feet below into the water, the life jackets jolting us to the surface before we have a chance to react. We cross the river again, the current grabbing and pulling, and the guides assist us in climbing the sheer smooth face of a large boulder. We slip and slide upwards, our knees grinding against the rock, as the rope looped around our life jacket tugs at us. From the top, the river stretches out in both directions, littered with boulders that change position each year in heavy rain. We jump into the water from halfway down the boulder, over a lip of rock, and I rise to the surface gasping and trembling, heart pounding.

Finally, we board the rafts. I secure myself as well as possible with my feet wedged under the seats in front and behind me. Toucans are making their insect noises from the trees. We splash water on our faces “for the river karma”. The raft spins and dips, bounces off rocks, rolls down falls. “Forward!” yells Damien, “Hold on! Lean in!”. Erin overbalances and is nearly overboard, but Adam and Dan wrench her back into the boat. After every serious rapid Damien exhorts us to raise our paddles and “rub it up, rub it up!”. A toucan flits from tree to tree overhead.

The final rapid is also the largest; Ryan and Damien are wary of flipping the rafts and force us all to disembark and examine the rapid from the shore before attempting it. Erin and I are the first to go down it, with Damien in the back. Even here, Honduran children in their red life jackets are throwing themselves into the calm eddies to the side.

“Forward!” shouts Damien. We plunge our paddles into the river, straining against the force of the water. The rapid approaches, a thin lane between two boulders. We cannot see the bottom from the top.

“Forward!”

The boulders close in. Our bodies are pistons. The raft begins to plummet.

“Get down!” shouts Damien.

We throw ourselves into the middle of the raft. And for a second there is nothing. Nothing. Just this pale blue sky above and this churning white mass below and the sound of this blood hissing through our veins.

-

Two songs in this episode – we open with the funky “El Animal” by Alto Mando and close with the Khaoticos’ “Luna de Papel”.

Join Annemarie Cross as she interviews Jennifer Bishop

Jennifer will share:

-          What ROI you can expect from Linkedin, especially in comparison to other social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook;

-          How can Linkedin help with your SEO;

-          And what to do once you’ve uploaded your profile to leverage multiple opportunities to build your connections, your credibility and your business.

Jennifer has also kindly extended an offer to all Business Success Podcast listeners to attend her upcoming FREE workshop.

-          http://smcmelbmay.eventbrite.com/#m_1_100

Jennifer also runs Beginner and Advanced Linkedin workshops.

>> LinkedIn Workshop Basics, from zero to 1000 network connections in a day

http://bit.ly/dSZNrd

>> LinkedIn ACCELERATOR Workshop: LinkedIn Superusers

http://bit.ly/hBJ3W2

What do you think? Did you find this helpful?

Please share this audio with your friends and colleagues by clicking the buttons below. And, please leave a comment – it’s great to hear from our listeners.

Till next time – stay inspired!

Are you struggling to distinguish yourself from your competitors? Feel undervalued and underpaid? Access our 7 step series to get noticed, hired and PAID what you’re worth, INSTANTLY! http://bit.ly/chargeyourworth

IN ANOTHER: little town on Lake Atitlan named Santiago de Atitlan, we find our way up a gravelly path to the shrine of Maximon, the infamous ‘Wicked Saint’, patron of drinkers, smokers, gamblers and prostitutes. Each year at Easter in towns across Guatemala, Maximon does battle with Jesus in the main square; each year Jesus wins, and Maximon must find a new home in the town. Naturally, the Catholic church does not endorse Maximon as a saint – but that hardly affects his popularity. Before the huddled figure of the Wicked Saint are scattered a dozen candles and two towers of whiskey bottles. A burning cigarette hangs from his mouth. To the left of him stands a saint with a skull for a head; to the right are a motley collection of smaller saints, Jesus among them.

Outside, we’re taken under wing by a freckle-faced dental nurse with a thick Minnesotan accent who refers to white people as “our people” and Guatemalans as “their people”, as in, “One of our people got hit by one of their drunken tuk-tuk drivers last night”. We escape to pay for the bus to Antigua but I mangle my Spanish; instead of asking “How much for two people?” I ask “How much for God’s people?” and the driver stares at me, baffled.

The mistake is premonitory: there are two Mormon kids on our bus from Santiago. Neither could be over twenty, though both have “Elder” stitched onto their shirt pocket. They are both pimple-faced, with sharp noses and small eyes, but seem friendly enough. They ask what we are doing, and we tell them to constant interjections of “That sounds fun!” and “Oh, wow! Fun!” from the brown-haired one, who is clearly the leader. We finish our story; he exclaims “Fun!” one more time and then is silent, as his blonde companion takes up the thread of conversation.

“Man, Guatemala is awesome! Right?” he gushes over the rattles of the bus, “The people here are so fun and neat! I think that’s what separates an awesomely crazy country from a not-so-awesome one! Am I right?”

The bus is full with Mayans returning home from market. Above the bus driver are two portraits of Jesus, identical but flipped and facing each other, both looking down as if conferring privately. Two old Mayan women sit across the aisle from us. Their teeth are all akimbo and their hands smell like the coriander they have been picking. We’ve come out of the mountains, and the air is thick and pressing and stale.

Having had her passport stolen in San Pedro, Erin is now in something of a bind – Australia has no embassies in central America, so she needs to travel twenty-five hours on a bus back to Mexico City to obtain a new passport. First though, we catch a chicken bus into the sleazy chaos of Guatemala City to get an emergency travel document from the Canadian consul.

Bus seats in Guatemala are designed for three people, and with half the bus full a man comes and sits next to Erin and I, spreading his jacket over his legs. The seat is too small for me, and as he presses against Erin I am being shoved against the window, a bolt digging painfully into my knee. I push back, and the man grows irritable.

“These seats are for three passengers,” he grunts.

“There are plenty of other seats,” says Erin.

After grumbling to himself for twenty minutes, the man gets up and leaves the bus. Erin grabs her bag from her lap to pay the bus fare – only to notice the long, straight razor slash marking the front. What little money didn’t get stolen in San Pedro has now been removed by the shoving man. Erin has been robbed twice in the space of five days.

Then Erin is away to Mexico and I am back in Antigua, tripping over yet another network of cobblestone streets. Antigua is a very pretty town under the shadow of volcanoes, full of rooftop bars overlooking ruined churches, but it feels as if something is missing from the city; it all comes off as rather bland – but perhaps at this point we’ve simply been spoiled for colonial Spanish towns. Adam and Dan and I all head to the Jungle Party Bar, which is neither in the jungle nor much of a party. Around an open fire out the back a bearded American in a felt hat is holding court with a couple of girls.

“San Francisco used to be pretty rough,” he’s saying, “But since then it’s become pretty gentrified.”

He looks around the fire solemnly.

“Does everybody here know what the word gentrification means?”

Without waiting for a response, he gives us all a definition.

“Oh,” we say politely.

The following afternoon we head out to Volcan Pacaya, photos of which are strung up all over Antigua, showing great red streamers of lava ejecting from the top. In the small village underneath the volcano, hawkers are selling marshmallows to cook over the volcano’s heat; small boys are selling hiking sticks, each one calling out in a broad American accent, “Wanna stick? Is necessary!”

It’s pouring rain in the village and we all buy a brightly-coloured piece of plastic to use as a poncho, patiently sitting through the guide’s overly-forced jokes before embarking up the hill, a long line of plastic-wrapped foreigners. It’s then that the guide drops the news sheepishly: Pacaya has not erupted since May and currently has no visible lava.

But the need to conceal our disappointment is shortlived; after an hour we can see the bowl of the crater, smoke curling in on itself viciously within, and it’s an enthralling vision. The rain has cleared and the view from the ridge takes in three different volcanoes. The ground underneath is gravel of black volcanic rock, crunchy “like Coco-Pops,” Adam observes. We skate down the slippery path, the wasteland  under our feet actually hot to the touch, wisps of steam from the earlier rain dancing and weaving across the land like a fog.

It’s our final stop in Guatemala – a wonderfully surprising country – before we enter El Salvador, and the disparity is marked. Where Guatemala was mountainous, cold, drenched in natural beauty, El Salvador is hot, developed, overpopulated. Where Guatemala’s poverty was crushing, entrenched and conspicuous, El Salvador is a country on the move, an economic tiger. And where Guatemalans themselves were polite and friendly but reserved and often distant – a national character more reminiscent of southeast Asia than of Latin America – Salvadorans are loud and brash and open and fun-loving. The only thing the two countries have in common, it seems, are a bloody history of civil war and a culture of alcoholism undisguised and prominent in every small town.

On the bus to Juayua a line of hawkers stretches from the front seats to the rear and five metres out either door. They are selling pens, chewing gum, cucumbers, super glue, anti-fungal creams, spring onions, unidentifiable red pills; a walking supermarket, a conga line of consumer goods.

Juayua – besides being a ridiculously unpronounceable word – is a friendly town of colourful streets and smiling passersby – but it’s the bright fluorescent light of the first proper supermarket since Mexico that sends us into spasms of joy and we skip down the aisles, piling things into baskets. It’s here that Adam begins his love affair with pupusas – the famous bean-and-cheese pancake of El Salvador – downing almost thirty in three days. The greasy little parcels of goodness draped in pickled cabbage are a constant, beloved companion for all of us throughout our week in the country.

We’re eating at a pupusa joint in town when a drunkard on the street tries to talk to us in broken English; the waitress turns on him suddenly and claps twice, hard, and points at the door without a word, as if he is a stray dog that has wandered into the kitchen.

The next day we catch a bus to San Salvador. Between the pen salesman and the miracle-ointment salesman, a survivor of the civil war boards the bus to beg for change. He is on crutches and has only small black holes where his ears should be; the back of his head is wrinkled and hairless and burnt, a desert stretching from his shirtneck to the top of his scalp and outwards to the two black ear holes. He shouts his plea in broken sentences, raising his shirt to demonstrate the ugly bullet wound on his belly. He hobbles the length of the bus and back to the driver. The driver slams on the brakes and the man overbalances on his crutches but regains his composure, thanks the grinning driver, and disembarks.

The streets of San Salvador have razor wire coiled on top of razor wire, some of it electrified, some at head height. The streets would look pleasant if they didn’t so resemble a prison. The bars and cafes all lie on main roads, full of the stench of traffic and with huge fast food franchises strung in a line around them, Pizza Hut, China Wok, Burger King, Mister Donut, McDonald’s. All the variety and choice in the world.

Erin rejoins us that night with her new emergency passport; together, the next day we head west to El Salvador’s fabled beaches via La Libertad. In Libertad, two men are having a drunken fistfight in the middle of the road, swinging wildly. There is the occasional slap of flesh on flesh but not many punches are landing.

At Playa San Diego we walk out to the beach, a bleak four miles of nondescript black sand, the whitewash churning back wildly for hundred of metres. We wander along the sand to a ramshackle bar, where the overweight, sweating owner rushes to offer us beer. Behind us, a man is passed out at a table with an empty three-litre bottle of rum standing sentry in front of him. A couple of men, clearly drunk, are clinking glasses and laughing loudly in the corner. One is sharply dressed in a white button-down shirt, pressed khaki pants and leather shoes, looking ridiculous in the sand and the heat. He looks sharply at Adam.

“You looking at my shoes?” he asks in a thick accent, lighting a cigarette.

“What? No, no,” stammers Adam, caught off guard.

“Why are you looking at my shoes?” asks the man, staring hard. Suddenly there is a note of aggression and the bar becomes silent. The other man stands slowly and turns toward us. We are a long way from anyone who would care if we were beaten into the ground by a couple of drunken gangsters on a lonely beach in the tropics. Adam stands his ground, holding the man’s gaze.

The tension is only broken when another pair of drunks – one with a horrible, inflamed skin infection across his face and arms – come bowling out of a nearby door, arms around each other’s shoulders, shouting and laughing. The man with the skin infection playfully grabs the well-dressed man by the collar and pushes him backwards over a table. The well-dressed man never loses his cool; he continues puffing on his cigarette as if tolerating a minor annoyance. We take the opportunity to pay our bill and leave.

This uneasiness, this undercurrent of violence, was something we encountered everywhere during our short stay in El Salvador, contrasting sharply with the open-faced friendliness we found to be a standard character trait there. Of all of the war-torn countries we passed through, it was only El Salvador where it felt as though the blood had not yet dried, as if the demons had not quite been put to rest.

Our hostel is a completely different world, a ridiculous wonderland of pools and games and drinks and manicured lawns. We get drunk and try to teach a couple of shirtless American surfers how to play handball, but our arcane system of promotion through the squares baffles them, and they leave us to our game.

The next day we cross back through La Libertad to El Tunco, El Salvador’s most famous beach but, it turns out, strictly for surfers – the beach itself is ugly and pounding and black, covered with rocks and driftwood, the sand muddy and scorching. Adam and I, as we have done several times before and will do several times afterwards, swear up and down that this is the place we will finally learn to surf; but when it comes to our final morning, I complain of an ear infection and Adam claims to be too hungover. We agree to try again in Nicaragua. A man out the front pushes a wheelbarrow full of green coconuts filled with rum. We sit down to have a drink.

The people of El Tunco – all surfers – look straight out of a sports magazine. They’re all bronzed, blonde and fit; they do odd things like go for jogs along the beach or spend afternoons playing beach volleyball, even during happy hour. They’re all terribly nice, each and every one – but they’re also young and rich and good-looking, which are never qualities to be trusted.

-

This video starts off with our favourite Guatemalan ska band, El Tambor de la Tribu, with their excellent “Tu Mujer”. Then it’s El Salvador’s LA, with “Cerveza”, Barry White’s masterful “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Baby”, the pumping merengue of Alfredo Jose and the Collection’s “El Botecito”, and we finish with “Tu Cuerpo” by Funk Deluxe.

IN ANOTHER: little town on Lake Atitlan named Santiago de Atitlan, we find our way up a gravelly path to the shrine of Maximon, the infamous ‘Wicked Saint’, patron of drinkers, smokers, gamblers and prostitutes. Each year at Easter in towns across Guatemala, Maximon does battle with Jesus in the main square; each year Jesus wins, and Maximon must find a new home in the town. Naturally, the Catholic church does not endorse Maximon as a saint – but that hardly affects his popularity. Before the huddled figure of the Wicked Saint are scattered a dozen candles and two towers of whiskey bottles. A burning cigarette hangs from his mouth. To the left of him stands a saint with a skull for a head; to the right are a motley collection of smaller saints, Jesus among them.

Outside, we’re taken under wing by a freckle-faced dental nurse with a thick Minnesotan accent who refers to white people as “our people” and Guatemalans as “their people”, as in, “One of our people got hit by one of their drunken tuk-tuk drivers last night”. We escape to pay for the bus to Antigua but I mangle my Spanish; instead of asking “How much for two people?” I ask “How much for God’s people?” and the driver stares at me, baffled.

The mistake is premonitory: there are two Mormon kids on our bus from Santiago. Neither could be over twenty, though both have “Elder” stitched onto their shirt pocket. They are both pimple-faced, with sharp noses and small eyes, but seem friendly enough. They ask what we are doing, and we tell them to constant interjections of “That sounds fun!” and “Oh, wow! Fun!” from the brown-haired one, who is clearly the leader. We finish our story; he exclaims “Fun!” one more time and then is silent, as his blonde companion takes up the thread of conversation.

“Man, Guatemala is awesome! Right?” he gushes over the rattles of the bus, “The people here are so fun and neat! I think that’s what separates an awesomely crazy country from a not-so-awesome one! Am I right?”

The bus is full with Mayans returning home from market. Above the bus driver are two portraits of Jesus, identical but flipped and facing each other, both looking down as if conferring privately. Two old Mayan women sit across the aisle from us. Their teeth are all akimbo and their hands smell like the coriander they have been picking. We’ve come out of the mountains, and the air is thick and pressing and stale.

Having had her passport stolen in San Pedro, Erin is now in something of a bind – Australia has no embassies in central America, so she needs to travel twenty-five hours on a bus back to Mexico City to obtain a new passport. First though, we catch a chicken bus into the sleazy chaos of Guatemala City to get an emergency travel document from the Canadian consul.

Bus seats in Guatemala are designed for three people, and with half the bus full a man comes and sits next to Erin and I, spreading his jacket over his legs. The seat is too small for me, and as he presses against Erin I am being shoved against the window, a bolt digging painfully into my knee. I push back, and the man grows irritable.

“These seats are for three passengers,” he grunts.

“There are plenty of other seats,” says Erin.

After grumbling to himself for twenty minutes, the man gets up and leaves the bus. Erin grabs her bag from her lap to pay the bus fare – only to notice the long, straight razor slash marking the front. What little money didn’t get stolen in San Pedro has now been removed by the shoving man. Erin has been robbed twice in the space of five days.

Then Erin is away to Mexico and I am back in Antigua, tripping over yet another network of cobblestone streets. Antigua is a very pretty town under the shadow of volcanoes, full of rooftop bars overlooking ruined churches, but it feels as if something is missing from the city; it all comes off as rather bland – but perhaps at this point we’ve simply been spoiled for colonial Spanish towns. Adam and Dan and I all head to the Jungle Party Bar, which is neither in the jungle nor much of a party. Around an open fire out the back a bearded American in a felt hat is holding court with a couple of girls.

“San Francisco used to be pretty rough,” he’s saying, “But since then it’s become pretty gentrified.”

He looks around the fire solemnly.

“Does everybody here know what the word gentrification means?”

Without waiting for a response, he gives us all a definition.

“Oh,” we say politely.

The following afternoon we head out to Volcan Pacaya, photos of which are strung up all over Antigua, showing great red streamers of lava ejecting from the top. In the small village underneath the volcano, hawkers are selling marshmallows to cook over the volcano’s heat; small boys are selling hiking sticks, each one calling out in a broad American accent, “Wanna stick? Is necessary!”

It’s pouring rain in the village and we all buy a brightly-coloured piece of plastic to use as a poncho, patiently sitting through the guide’s overly-forced jokes before embarking up the hill, a long line of plastic-wrapped foreigners. It’s then that the guide drops the news sheepishly: Pacaya has not erupted since May and currently has no visible lava.

But the need to conceal our disappointment is shortlived; after an hour we can see the bowl of the crater, smoke curling in on itself viciously within, and it’s an enthralling vision. The rain has cleared and the view from the ridge takes in three different volcanoes. The ground underneath is gravel of black volcanic rock, crunchy “like Coco-Pops,” Adam observes. We skate down the slippery path, the wasteland  under our feet actually hot to the touch, wisps of steam from the earlier rain dancing and weaving across the land like a fog.

It’s our final stop in Guatemala – a wonderfully surprising country – before we enter El Salvador, and the disparity is marked. Where Guatemala was mountainous, cold, drenched in natural beauty, El Salvador is hot, developed, overpopulated. Where Guatemala’s poverty was crushing, entrenched and conspicuous, El Salvador is a country on the move, an economic tiger. And where Guatemalans themselves were polite and friendly but reserved and often distant – a national character more reminiscent of southeast Asia than of Latin America – Salvadorans are loud and brash and open and fun-loving. The only thing the two countries have in common, it seems, are a bloody history of civil war and a culture of alcoholism undisguised and prominent in every small town.

On the bus to Juayua a line of hawkers stretches from the front seats to the rear and five metres out either door. They are selling pens, chewing gum, cucumbers, super glue, anti-fungal creams, spring onions, unidentifiable red pills; a walking supermarket, a conga line of consumer goods.

Juayua – besides being a ridiculously unpronounceable word – is a friendly town of colourful streets and smiling passersby – but it’s the bright fluorescent light of the first proper supermarket since Mexico that sends us into spasms of joy and we skip down the aisles, piling things into baskets. It’s here that Adam begins his love affair with pupusas – the famous bean-and-cheese pancake of El Salvador – downing almost thirty in three days. The greasy little parcels of goodness draped in pickled cabbage are a constant, beloved companion for all of us throughout our week in the country.

We’re eating at a pupusa joint in town when a drunkard on the street tries to talk to us in broken English; the waitress turns on him suddenly and claps twice, hard, and points at the door without a word, as if he is a stray dog that has wandered into the kitchen.

The next day we catch a bus to San Salvador. Between the pen salesman and the miracle-ointment salesman, a survivor of the civil war boards the bus to beg for change. He is on crutches and has only small black holes where his ears should be; the back of his head is wrinkled and hairless and burnt, a desert stretching from his shirtneck to the top of his scalp and outwards to the two black ear holes. He shouts his plea in broken sentences, raising his shirt to demonstrate the ugly bullet wound on his belly. He hobbles the length of the bus and back to the driver. The driver slams on the brakes and the man overbalances on his crutches but regains his composure, thanks the grinning driver, and disembarks.

The streets of San Salvador have razor wire coiled on top of razor wire, some of it electrified, some at head height. The streets would look pleasant if they didn’t so resemble a prison. The bars and cafes all lie on main roads, full of the stench of traffic and with huge fast food franchises strung in a line around them, Pizza Hut, China Wok, Burger King, Mister Donut, McDonald’s. All the variety and choice in the world.

Erin rejoins us that night with her new emergency passport; together, the next day we head west to El Salvador’s fabled beaches via La Libertad. In Libertad, two men are having a drunken fistfight in the middle of the road, swinging wildly. There is the occasional slap of flesh on flesh but not many punches are landing.

At Playa San Diego we walk out to the beach, a bleak four miles of nondescript black sand, the whitewash churning back wildly for hundred of metres. We wander along the sand to a ramshackle bar, where the overweight, sweating owner rushes to offer us beer. Behind us, a man is passed out at a table with an empty three-litre bottle of rum standing sentry in front of him. A couple of men, clearly drunk, are clinking glasses and laughing loudly in the corner. One is sharply dressed in a white button-down shirt, pressed khaki pants and leather shoes, looking ridiculous in the sand and the heat. He looks sharply at Adam.

“You looking at my shoes?” he asks in a thick accent, lighting a cigarette.

“What? No, no,” stammers Adam, caught off guard.

“Why are you looking at my shoes?” asks the man, staring hard. Suddenly there is a note of aggression and the bar becomes silent. The other man stands slowly and turns toward us. We are a long way from anyone who would care if we were beaten into the ground by a couple of drunken gangsters on a lonely beach in the tropics. Adam stands his ground, holding the man’s gaze.

The tension is only broken when another pair of drunks – one with a horrible, inflamed skin infection across his face and arms – come bowling out of a nearby door, arms around each other’s shoulders, shouting and laughing. The man with the skin infection playfully grabs the well-dressed man by the collar and pushes him backwards over a table. The well-dressed man never loses his cool; he continues puffing on his cigarette as if tolerating a minor annoyance. We take the opportunity to pay our bill and leave.

This uneasiness, this undercurrent of violence, was something we encountered everywhere during our short stay in El Salvador, contrasting sharply with the open-faced friendliness we found to be a standard character trait there. Of all of the war-torn countries we passed through, it was only El Salvador where it felt as though the blood had not yet dried, as if the demons had not quite been put to rest.

Our hostel is a completely different world, a ridiculous wonderland of pools and games and drinks and manicured lawns. We get drunk and try to teach a couple of shirtless American surfers how to play handball, but our arcane system of promotion through the squares baffles them, and they leave us to our game.

The next day we cross back through La Libertad to El Tunco, El Salvador’s most famous beach but, it turns out, strictly for surfers – the beach itself is ugly and pounding and black, covered with rocks and driftwood, the sand muddy and scorching. Adam and I, as we have done several times before and will do several times afterwards, swear up and down that this is the place we will finally learn to surf; but when it comes to our final morning, I complain of an ear infection and Adam claims to be too hungover. We agree to try again in Nicaragua. A man out the front pushes a wheelbarrow full of green coconuts filled with rum. We sit down to have a drink.

The people of El Tunco – all surfers – look straight out of a sports magazine. They’re all bronzed, blonde and fit; they do odd things like go for jogs along the beach or spend afternoons playing beach volleyball, even during happy hour. They’re all terribly nice, each and every one – but they’re also young and rich and good-looking, which are never qualities to be trusted.

-

This video starts off with our favourite Guatemalan ska band, El Tambor de la Tribu, with their excellent “Tu Mujer”. Then it’s El Salvador’s LA, with “Cerveza”, Barry White’s masterful “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Baby”, the pumping merengue of Alfredo Jose and the Collection’s “El Botecito”, and we finish with “Tu Cuerpo” by Funk Deluxe.

Keep those iTunes reviews coming it, we love them.

Music from the show:

Jah Roots- Stepping Out of Babylon – SELASSIE_I_DUB_INTRO

http://www.archive.org/details/JAHROOTSSteppinOutOfBabylonFirstalbum_0

Scoot Joplin- Maple Leaf Rag

http://www.archive.org/details/MapleLeafRag

It’s the episode to match the wedding of the week, yes we’re talking about Wills and Kate, mad hatters and sexy sisters on this royally fun edition of Two Schooners – even if the sound on the video didn’t work, we still got some good snapshots.  Enjoy this edition of Two Schooners – no notes and a glass of bubbly as we celebrate The Royal Wedding.

cc.Flickr/clarescupcakes.co.uk

Like to taste what you see in the picture (except for the obviously photoshopped 2Schooners cake?)Checkout http://www.clarescupcakes.co.uk

In the episode, Dr. Brown mentions the Standford study on Charter Schools. You can link to that study by clicking here.

There is also an excellent speech by Diane Rayvitch that is worth reading. You can find that speech here.

Here comes Jupiter in Taurus! (Wellcome Collection)

Ahead of the arrival of Jupiter in Taurus, there are plenty of inner planet transits to lead the way. If you are a Taurean born in late April, then gradually, each of these planets in turn will trine your natal Sun, allowing you to shine more brightly, more easily. If you also have heavenly bodies or points in the sign of Taurus, and you know these are in the early degrees of the sign, you will also begin to see expansion and growth in your life mid-year as the trines begin to take hold. Whatever your natal chart looks like, the ingress of Juipter in Taurus, explained by Adam Smith in the May show, is good news for at least one department of your life, as the relevant house of your horoscope will start to reflect Jupiter’s change of sign. Jessica Adams will look at specific dates for you. And while Neil Spencer is away, we’re putting together some special features for you in June, including The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to William Lilly by Julian Venables.

Join Annemarie Cross as she speaks with Kay Vrieze

Kay is a Senior Manager with Sendoutcards.com and shares some fantastic tips and strategies on how you can strengthen your relationship with existing clients as well as really make a significant impact in the minds and attitudes of your potential clients.

Kay speaks about:

-      Why planning TOMATO seeds is so important so that you can be the first person someone thinks of if they need your products/services

-      Some of the characteristics you do NOT want to emulate when networking

-      And much more

To find out more about Kay Vrieze go to: www.sendoutcards.com/60236

What do you think? Did you find this helpful?

Please share this audio with your friends and colleagues by clicking the buttons below. And, please leave a comment – it’s great to hear from our listeners.

Till next time – stay inspired!

Are you struggling to distinguish yourself from your competitors? Feel undervalued and underpaid? Access our 7 step series to get noticed, hired and PAID what you’re worth, INSTANTLY! http://bit.ly/chargeyourworth

ON THE: road out of Semuc Champey, the truck we are in pulls over at the top of a hill. The view from the hill is spectacular – verdant green valleys; a small, moss-encrusted church – but the hill itself is covered with trash, the refuse of the hostels along the river. A pack of scabby dogs fights over the scraps. Our driver jumps out and dumps a large barrel of waste onto the pile. The dogs jump at it growling, torn toilet paper trailing from their mouths.

We head further west, toward the Ixil Triangle, scene to some of the bloodiest massacres of the civil war. Mayan families drive past crowded into smoking pickups overloaded with furniture, a stove hanging off the end of the tray. I cling tightly to the rails of the roof of the minibus, my ass wedged as firmly into a tyre as can be managed, the rest of me splayed across the assembled luggage. Adam, behind me, clings precariously to the back ladder, which scrapes across the concrete speedbumps. At the top of a pine tree by the side of the road I see a child, eight years old perhaps, standing on a high branch without ropes, calmly cutting firewood.
“Did you see that kid?” I call out to Adam.
“All I can see is your ass,” he shouts.
Across the valley the low white clouds spill softly over the tops of the mountains and slide down quickly and silently, like death.

The clouds billow in over the mountain town of Nebaj, where the blinking red lights of the telecommunications towers provide the only light in the scrambled patchwork of grey monochrome. Here, the team splits up – Dan and Adam off for a three day hike to outlying villages; Erin and I on a day hike, walking up a steep dirt track toward Cocop. A man with a tall brown hat and a machete tied to his belt wants to know why we are walking when we could take the bus. I tell him we need the exercise, but he continues to look baffled.
“Where did you come here from?”
“Australia,” I say, but again he looks baffled, so I repeat it.
“Is that a village?” he asks. I smile.
“Coban,” I say, “We came here from Coban.”
“Ah, Coban,” he says, “It’s hotter there.”

At the village, the foundations of the razed houses are still visible in the paddocks, lilies growing profusely in the houses of the massacred.

The next day we walk another steep dirt track to the resettlement village of Acul. Along the way there is a gang of men working on the road with hoes and shovels. They are older, mostly, and speaking Q’echi. Some of the men wear white panama hats, and they are not working. As we come close the working men turn to us.
“We want water,” they say, reaching out their hands, “It’s very hot, and we have no water. A little water, please.”
Over the hill the track is as steep down as it was up. We pass a woman and some children herding goats up the hill, who stop and stare as we pass.

In the streets of the village an old drunk stumbles toward us, hissing, with eyes wide. In the main street another drunk is passed out, face up, in the middle of the road with the sun beating down. The clotheslines of the village are covered with the red skirts of the women.

While Adam and Dan continue their hike, Erin and I head south to the market town of Chichicastenango. We arrive in the dark, stumbling on the cobblestones through the skeletal city of scaffolding on which the market will be hung tomorrow. At the end of the street a group of women are laughing while they make tortillas, the dough making a damp slap between their hands as they stand over the black hotplate.

In the morning, walls of wooden masks stare down at us. Fabrics and bags and wooden saints. Buckets of chicken feet sit in the sun. The crowd heaves and swells. The shorter Mayans just put their heads down and keep walking, uncaring if they run into someone else, simply ploughing through like tractors in a muddy field, while the rest of us hesitate and are bogged. The church is covered in flowers, and two men are swinging cans of smoking incense in wide circles.

We escape the crowds to a Mayan shrine on a hill on the outskirts of town, marked by a thin plume of smoke. The priest, an old man in thick, black-rimmed glasses, baggy pants of an unpleasant green and a long-sleeve shirt of the same colour, shuffles slowly around the blue-black stone crosses, tending to the several small fires and chanting. The smoke drifts into the pine trees. There are only tourists present. A guide is explaining in German what is happening. A girl twists the focus on her camera. The priest picks up a bottle of whiskey and pours it into the flames. Back in town, the Evangelical churches echo with the claps of believers.

Under the shadow of three volcanoes we catch a boat across magnificent Lake Atitlan to San Pedro de la Laguna. A tout attaches himself immediately and we keep pausing and changing direction in the futile hope that he will leave. He has a cowboy hat and a laminated tag hangs across his chest.
“There is a cheap place over here,” he says.
“Thankyou, but we don’t need your help,” I say. He continues to follow us anyway. We find a room in a hotel run by Eliseo, who has a facial twitch and a desperate, pleading manner. When we have paid him he walks over to the tout in the cowboy hat and, with too much pretence of surreptitiousness, palms a few Quetzals into his hand. The tout strolls up to Erin.
“You want horse rides tomorrow?”
“Piss off! Leave us alone!” she hisses back.
He flinches, a little hurt, and then composes himself and turns to me.
“You want horse rides tomorrow?”

Barely-sketched clouds are suspended over the rugged hills of the lake. Adam and Dan arrive from their hike, full of excited chatter about tamales and teaching village children to fart with their armpits. Adam’s legs are a warzone of scabs and pus from mosquito bites.

In San Pedro we enroll in a Spanish school and organize a homestay with a local family for the week; for the first time in a long time our clothes come out of our packs and onto shelves. Juana, our hostess, is an older Mayan woman with a kind face who wears her long black hair in a ponytail down her back. Her daughter Jade is angular and steely-eyed, with a boyish face that flickers quickly and constantly between wolfish grin and adolescent boredom. She has an attitude typical of every thirteen-year old girl, everywhere -
“You speak very fast,” says Erin with effort, “It’s difficult for me to understand.”
“Yeah, I know,” replies Jade.
Juana works as a lecturer, teaching local women about the rights of women in Guatemala. She tolerates our broken Spanish with grace.

The teacher assigned to Adam and I, Leti, is friendly and sarcastic with a bubbly laugh but is a good and firm instructor who lets us get away with nothing. We sit each afternoon four hours, drinking the free black coffee from the table at the cafe. The light grows dimmer and the air grows colder. By the end of each lesson we are broken, Adam staring sullenly straight ahead and me hemming and hawing, searching the swamp of my brain for useful conjugations. We return home to a stack of homework and our own dispirited faces.

We break up the lessons with some kayaking, slicing through the smooth stillness of the lake. Terraces of vegetable plots tumble down the surrounding hills. A man in a long-sleeved shirt and red underpants tends the land at the shore. The hard reeds stroke our kayaks as we are sucked slowly through the reed bed as if on a conveyor belt. The volcano is stark and close, the silhouettes of trees huddled together like a line of pilgrims climbing to the top.

San Pedro, supposedly famous for its parties, is a fairly subdued place since a mayoral decree earlier this year mandated an eleven o’clock closing time for all bars. But word hasn’t gotten out yet, so people still flood in, and someone inevitably finds a hostel or supermarket still selling alcohol until the wee hours. It’s a good scene of people, including some familiar faces.

There’s the great Norseman Lars, whom we first met in Merida, Mexico – all hair and beard and glasses, telling fantastically drunken stories with a hoarse roaring laugh.
“My Irish friend James,” he says, “I have only insoolted him once [haw, haw, haw]. I said to heem, “You are a British coont!” and he poonched me twice in the head! He was expecting me to fall but I said, “Look at me! James, look at me!” and when he did I bitch-slapped him right in the face! [haw, haw, haw]” He pauses and looks into his beer a minute. “Now come smoke a joint, you Australian coonts! [haw, haw, haw]”. He is holding a polystyrene container with “Viking Food” scrawled across it in thick marker.

Then there’s Cooper, the extremely nice (if kookily New Age) med student from Caye Caulker. We have a few nights of conversation with him before we ply him with alcohol and he finally lets free the batshit-crazy that I always knew was lurking inside, using the word “chakra” three times, “psychic” four, defining “quantum energy” as “when you’re thinking about someone, and then they phone you”, and peaking with, “I don’t know if you guys know this, but practically every movie you’ve seen is real. Contact? That shit really happened. The Exorcist? It’s real.”

One night we are out with a Canadian couple, Jarred and Sarah, and a manic, giggling British teen named Rollo. We’re sitting outside a supermarket, drinking in the gutter, looking out over the dark vastness of the lake, chatting and laughing. The night air is cool and fresh, and we are all having a fantastic night.
Then there is a rustle from the shadows, the slap of feet retreating.
“That was weird,” says Jarred, “That dude just sprinted off.”
We all stare at each other.
Then Erin quietly murmurs, “Huh. My bag’s not there.”
Then chaos. Everybody runs everywhere, shouting. Nobody knows where they should be running or if anybody else does, either. It’s dark and dogs are barking. The thief is long gone; we are too late. With him goes Erin’s passport and bank cards, and the amulet of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers.

Next morning Erin is in tatters. I poke and prod her to leave the house and we make our slow tortured way to the police station. Either gunshots or fireworks resound loudly and suddenly through the streets periodically. A wedding is emerging from the church down from the station. The police officer we speak to is a surprisingly friendly, mustachioed man in unkempt uniform; he takes forever to compile our report but then says, in stilted English, “It has been a true pleasure talking to you both,” when we have finally finished.

To take our minds off the theft we do a walk up to Santa Clara, atop the mountains ringing the lake. Walking back towards San Pedro down the trash-strewn mountain, a tuk-tuk pulls up beside us and offers us a ride. We turn him down.
“Be careful,” he says, “There are many ladrones on the roads.”
“That’s okay,” laughs Erin, thinking he is trying to get a fare, “I don’t have a passport or money anymore. They can’t take anything.”
“No, you misunderstand,” he says with typical Guatemalan courtesy, “I am only giving you advice. I make my living from foreigners coming here and I want to make sure you are safe. Please be careful.”
I thank him. As he buzzes off I take my passport, in its little plastic bag, out of my backpack. I put most of my money into it and shove it roughly down the front of my underpants. When we reach San Pedro it is warm and coated in pubic sweat.

Our last day of Spanish class falls on a Monday, and Adam and I find ourselves feeling a little emotional saying goodbye to Leti.
“We’ll miss you,” says Adam.
“Really? I won’t miss you,” she says, smiling.
“Oh, this is sad,” says Adam.
“No, not for everyone,” replies Leti, “Actually, I’m quite happy to be rid of you. See you never, boys.”

We’re taken aback for a second, but then we smile back. For the first time on the trip, we understand perfectly when someone is making fun of us.

ON THE: road out of Semuc Champey, the truck we are in pulls over at the top of a hill. The view from the hill is spectacular – verdant green valleys; a small, moss-encrusted church – but the hill itself is covered with trash, the refuse of the hostels along the river. A pack of scabby dogs fights over the scraps. Our driver jumps out and dumps a large barrel of waste onto the pile. The dogs jump at it growling, torn toilet paper trailing from their mouths.

We head further west, toward the Ixil Triangle, scene to some of the bloodiest massacres of the civil war. Mayan families drive past crowded into smoking pickups overloaded with furniture, a stove hanging off the end of the tray. I cling tightly to the rails of the roof of the minibus, my ass wedged as firmly into a tyre as can be managed, the rest of me splayed across the assembled luggage. Adam, behind me, clings precariously to the back ladder, which scrapes across the concrete speedbumps. At the top of a pine tree by the side of the road I see a child, eight years old perhaps, standing on a high branch without ropes, calmly cutting firewood.
“Did you see that kid?” I call out to Adam.
“All I can see is your ass,” he shouts.
Across the valley the low white clouds spill softly over the tops of the mountains and slide down quickly and silently, like death.

The clouds billow in over the mountain town of Nebaj, where the blinking red lights of the telecommunications towers provide the only light in the scrambled patchwork of grey monochrome. Here, the team splits up – Dan and Adam off for a three day hike to outlying villages; Erin and I on a day hike, walking up a steep dirt track toward Cocop. A man with a tall brown hat and a machete tied to his belt wants to know why we are walking when we could take the bus. I tell him we need the exercise, but he continues to look baffled.
“Where did you come here from?”
“Australia,” I say, but again he looks baffled, so I repeat it.
“Is that a village?” he asks. I smile.
“Coban,” I say, “We came here from Coban.”
“Ah, Coban,” he says, “It’s hotter there.”

At the village, the foundations of the razed houses are still visible in the paddocks, lilies growing profusely in the houses of the massacred.

The next day we walk another steep dirt track to the resettlement village of Acul. Along the way there is a gang of men working on the road with hoes and shovels. They are older, mostly, and speaking Q’echi. Some of the men wear white panama hats, and they are not working. As we come close the working men turn to us.
“We want water,” they say, reaching out their hands, “It’s very hot, and we have no water. A little water, please.”
Over the hill the track is as steep down as it was up. We pass a woman and some children herding goats up the hill, who stop and stare as we pass.

In the streets of the village an old drunk stumbles toward us, hissing, with eyes wide. In the main street another drunk is passed out, face up, in the middle of the road with the sun beating down. The clotheslines of the village are covered with the red skirts of the women.

While Adam and Dan continue their hike, Erin and I head south to the market town of Chichicastenango. We arrive in the dark, stumbling on the cobblestones through the skeletal city of scaffolding on which the market will be hung tomorrow. At the end of the street a group of women are laughing while they make tortillas, the dough making a damp slap between their hands as they stand over the black hotplate.

In the morning, walls of wooden masks stare down at us. Fabrics and bags and wooden saints. Buckets of chicken feet sit in the sun. The crowd heaves and swells. The shorter Mayans just put their heads down and keep walking, uncaring if they run into someone else, simply ploughing through like tractors in a muddy field, while the rest of us hesitate and are bogged. The church is covered in flowers, and two men are swinging cans of smoking incense in wide circles.

We escape the crowds to a Mayan shrine on a hill on the outskirts of town, marked by a thin plume of smoke. The priest, an old man in thick, black-rimmed glasses, baggy pants of an unpleasant green and a long-sleeve shirt of the same colour, shuffles slowly around the blue-black stone crosses, tending to the several small fires and chanting. The smoke drifts into the pine trees. There are only tourists present. A guide is explaining in German what is happening. A girl twists the focus on her camera. The priest picks up a bottle of whiskey and pours it into the flames. Back in town, the Evangelical churches echo with the claps of believers.

Under the shadow of three volcanoes we catch a boat across magnificent Lake Atitlan to San Pedro de la Laguna. A tout attaches himself immediately and we keep pausing and changing direction in the futile hope that he will leave. He has a cowboy hat and a laminated tag hangs across his chest.
“There is a cheap place over here,” he says.
“Thankyou, but we don’t need your help,” I say. He continues to follow us anyway. We find a room in a hotel run by Eliseo, who has a facial twitch and a desperate, pleading manner. When we have paid him he walks over to the tout in the cowboy hat and, with too much pretence of surreptitiousness, palms a few Quetzals into his hand. The tout strolls up to Erin.
“You want horse rides tomorrow?”
“Piss off! Leave us alone!” she hisses back.
He flinches, a little hurt, and then composes himself and turns to me.
“You want horse rides tomorrow?”

Barely-sketched clouds are suspended over the rugged hills of the lake. Adam and Dan arrive from their hike, full of excited chatter about tamales and teaching village children to fart with their armpits. Adam’s legs are a warzone of scabs and pus from mosquito bites.

In San Pedro we enroll in a Spanish school and organize a homestay with a local family for the week; for the first time in a long time our clothes come out of our packs and onto shelves. Juana, our hostess, is an older Mayan woman with a kind face who wears her long black hair in a ponytail down her back. Her daughter Jade is angular and steely-eyed, with a boyish face that flickers quickly and constantly between wolfish grin and adolescent boredom. She has an attitude typical of every thirteen-year old girl, everywhere -
“You speak very fast,” says Erin with effort, “It’s difficult for me to understand.”
“Yeah, I know,” replies Jade.
Juana works as a lecturer, teaching local women about the rights of women in Guatemala. She tolerates our broken Spanish with grace.

The teacher assigned to Adam and I, Leti, is friendly and sarcastic with a bubbly laugh but is a good and firm instructor who lets us get away with nothing. We sit each afternoon four hours, drinking the free black coffee from the table at the cafe. The light grows dimmer and the air grows colder. By the end of each lesson we are broken, Adam staring sullenly straight ahead and me hemming and hawing, searching the swamp of my brain for useful conjugations. We return home to a stack of homework and our own dispirited faces.

We break up the lessons with some kayaking, slicing through the smooth stillness of the lake. Terraces of vegetable plots tumble down the surrounding hills. A man in a long-sleeved shirt and red underpants tends the land at the shore. The hard reeds stroke our kayaks as we are sucked slowly through the reed bed as if on a conveyor belt. The volcano is stark and close, the silhouettes of trees huddled together like a line of pilgrims climbing to the top.

San Pedro, supposedly famous for its parties, is a fairly subdued place since a mayoral decree earlier this year mandated an eleven o’clock closing time for all bars. But word hasn’t gotten out yet, so people still flood in, and someone inevitably finds a hostel or supermarket still selling alcohol until the wee hours. It’s a good scene of people, including some familiar faces.

There’s the great Norseman Lars, whom we first met in Merida, Mexico – all hair and beard and glasses, telling fantastically drunken stories with a hoarse roaring laugh.
“My Irish friend James,” he says, “I have only insoolted him once [haw, haw, haw]. I said to heem, “You are a British coont!” and he poonched me twice in the head! He was expecting me to fall but I said, “Look at me! James, look at me!” and when he did I bitch-slapped him right in the face! [haw, haw, haw]” He pauses and looks into his beer a minute. “Now come smoke a joint, you Australian coonts! [haw, haw, haw]”. He is holding a polystyrene container with “Viking Food” scrawled across it in thick marker.

Then there’s Cooper, the extremely nice (if kookily New Age) med student from Caye Caulker. We have a few nights of conversation with him before we ply him with alcohol and he finally lets free the batshit-crazy that I always knew was lurking inside, using the word “chakra” three times, “psychic” four, defining “quantum energy” as “when you’re thinking about someone, and then they phone you”, and peaking with, “I don’t know if you guys know this, but practically every movie you’ve seen is real. Contact? That shit really happened. The Exorcist? It’s real.”

One night we are out with a Canadian couple, Jarred and Sarah, and a manic, giggling British teen named Rollo. We’re sitting outside a supermarket, drinking in the gutter, looking out over the dark vastness of the lake, chatting and laughing. The night air is cool and fresh, and we are all having a fantastic night.
Then there is a rustle from the shadows, the slap of feet retreating.
“That was weird,” says Jarred, “That dude just sprinted off.”
We all stare at each other.
Then Erin quietly murmurs, “Huh. My bag’s not there.”
Then chaos. Everybody runs everywhere, shouting. Nobody knows where they should be running or if anybody else does, either. It’s dark and dogs are barking. The thief is long gone; we are too late. With him goes Erin’s passport and bank cards, and the amulet of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers.

Next morning Erin is in tatters. I poke and prod her to leave the house and we make our slow tortured way to the police station. Either gunshots or fireworks resound loudly and suddenly through the streets periodically. A wedding is emerging from the church down from the station. The police officer we speak to is a surprisingly friendly, mustachioed man in unkempt uniform; he takes forever to compile our report but then says, in stilted English, “It has been a true pleasure talking to you both,” when we have finally finished.

To take our minds off the theft we do a walk up to Santa Clara, atop the mountains ringing the lake. Walking back towards San Pedro down the trash-strewn mountain, a tuk-tuk pulls up beside us and offers us a ride. We turn him down.
“Be careful,” he says, “There are many ladrones on the roads.”
“That’s okay,” laughs Erin, thinking he is trying to get a fare, “I don’t have a passport or money anymore. They can’t take anything.”
“No, you misunderstand,” he says with typical Guatemalan courtesy, “I am only giving you advice. I make my living from foreigners coming here and I want to make sure you are safe. Please be careful.”
I thank him. As he buzzes off I take my passport, in its little plastic bag, out of my backpack. I put most of my money into it and shove it roughly down the front of my underpants. When we reach San Pedro it is warm and coated in pubic sweat.

Our last day of Spanish class falls on a Monday, and Adam and I find ourselves feeling a little emotional saying goodbye to Leti.
“We’ll miss you,” says Adam.
“Really? I won’t miss you,” she says, smiling.
“Oh, this is sad,” says Adam.
“No, not for everyone,” replies Leti, “Actually, I’m quite happy to be rid of you. See you never, boys.”

We’re taken aback for a second, but then we smile back. For the first time on the trip, we understand perfectly when someone is making fun of us.

Make sure you guys stop by iTunes to leave us some reviews, love all the feed back so far especially the positive and even the negative (except the nonconstructive nonsense) Apparently I was PwNeD on my show at some point and people are really curious as to how I feel about that.

Music from the show:

Jah Roots- Stepping Out of Babylon – SELASSIE_I_DUB_INTRO

http://www.archive.org/details/JAHROOTSSteppinOutOfBabylonFirstalbum_0

Scoot Joplin- Maple Leaf Rag

http://www.archive.org/details/MapleLeafRag

DOWNLOAD HERE!

Lifestyle Jazz is a new contemporary, modern and smooth jazz show on the Lifestyle PodNework. It’s hosted by me James Williams and each show you can enjoy a half hour of some of the best jazz around. So let me invite you now to visit us on our website where you can subscribe to the podcast, look at who we are playing, and listen to a few shows.

If you enjoy the show, subscribe to the podcast using the buttons to your right, so you will not miss a show when it’s released.

Please let us know what you think of this new show. Leave us feedback in the comments section of this site, and follow the show on twitter @lifestylejazz

 
Become a Bandwidth Sponsor of Lifestyle Jazz

Would you like to be a Bandwidth Sponsor of Lifestyle Jazz. Bandwidth sponsors help us cover the cost of getting these episodes out to tens of thousands of listners. Right now you can sponsor a show for just $25 per episode, it’s peanuts and you’ll reach a dedicated global Jazz audience. Sponsor links and spoken endorsements are also includedin that low price. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of Lifestyle Jazz then check out our sponsor page on the website at lifestylejazz.com.

 
Download the Lifestyle PodNetwork Mobile App

Now you can now watch and listen LPN streamed directly to your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Nokia handset or Android device with our new line of Lifestyle PodNetwork mobile applications. Listen to your favourite shows as soon as they are released, wherever you are: at home, in the office, relaxing on the beach or even when you’re away on holidays. It’s available now for free.

 
Here’s what we played on today’s show:

Dado Moroni
“Nose Off” (mp3)
from “Live in Beverly Hills”
(Resonance Records)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
More On This Album

Tamir Hendelman, Marco Panascia, Lewis Nash
“Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams” (mp3)
from “Destinations”
(Resonance Records)

Buy at Napster
Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at Amazon MP3
More On This Album

Monika Herzig
“Heavy Burden” (mp3)
from “Come With Me”
(Owl Studios)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
More On This Album

Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra
“Suite Storytelling: The Glass Tree” (mp3)
from “Mezzanine”
(Owl Studios)

Buy at Napster
Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at Amazon MP3
More On This Album

Cynthia Layne
“Kings & Queens” (mp3)
from “Beautiful Soul”
(Owl Studios)

Buy at Napster
Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at eMusic
Buy at Rhapsody
Stream from Rhapsody
Buy at Puretracks
Buy at Amazon MP3
Buy at mTraks
More On This Album

Garaj Mahal
“Witch Doctor” (mp3)
from “More Mr. Nice Guy”
(Owl Studios)

Buy at Napster
Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at Amazon MP3
More On This Album

Monodeluxe
“One Night In Brazil” (mp3)
from “Urban Jazz Vol. 1″
(Vibe Boutique Records)

Buy at Napster
Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at Rhapsody
Stream from Rhapsody
Buy at Amazon MP3
More On This Album

Join Annemarie Cross as she interviews Roz Merry – expert in Network Marketing, with an impressive close rate of 80-90%.

On todays show Roz shares:

-      The strategies she uses to generate this high level conversion rate;

-      Skills you MUST develop as they are vital when it comes to selling;

-      The key question you have to ask yourself in order to power forward towards your goals and success!

Connect with Roz at: rozmerry@optusnet.com.au

What do you think? Did you find this helpful?

Please share this audio with your friends and colleagues by clicking the buttons below. And, please leave a comment – it’s great to hear from our listeners.

Till next time – stay inspired!

Are you struggling to distinguish yourself from your competitors? Feel undervalued and underpaid? Access our 7 step series to get noticed, hired and PAID what you’re worth, INSTANTLY! http://bit.ly/chargeyourworth

Join Annemarie Cross as she interviews Roz Merry – expert in Network Marketing, with an impressive close rate of 80-90%.

On todays show Roz shares:

-      The strategies she uses to generate this high level conversion rate;

-      Skills you MUST develop as they are vital when it comes to selling;

-      The key question you have to ask yourself in order to power forward towards your goals and success!

Connect with Roz at: rozmerry@optusnet.com.au

What do you think? Did you find this helpful?

Please share this audio with your friends and colleagues by clicking the buttons below. And, please leave a comment – it’s great to hear from our listeners.

Till next time – stay inspired!

Are you struggling to distinguish yourself from your competitors? Feel undervalued and underpaid? Access our 7 step series to get noticed, hired and PAID what you’re worth, INSTANTLY! http://bit.ly/chargeyourworth

www.theUFanCast.com

Last week we had a chance to talk to Shane and Raven from the U Fan Cast.  They gave great insight into University of Utah spring football including what we can expect from Norm Chow’s offense, whether the running backs can fill the shoes left by Matt Asiata and Eddie Wide III, and fill us in on which position Brian Blechen will be playing.

Shane and Raven also gave us their thoughts on new basketball coach Larry Krystkowiak and explained why they believe things may be looking up for the Runnin’ Utes.

You can catch all the episodes of the U Fan Cast at www.TheUFanCast.com.  Or find them in iTunes – just search for ‘The U Fan Cast’ in the iTunes store.

___________________________

Leave us a comment on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Send us an email at DogAndDeuce@gmail.com

Closing song: “Salt Lake City” by The Dwarves.  Music for this episode provided by Mevio’s Music Alley.  Check it out at music.mevio.com

GUATEMALA SHINES: an almost luminescent green as we fling ourselves south through the outskirts of Poptun to Finca Ixobel.

Finca Ixobel is something of a legendary traveler’s hangout started by two Americans – one of whom was kidnapped and horrifically murdered by the Guatemalan military in 1990. His wife continues to run the farm now, overseeing an incredible property that includes a stable of horses, a huge swimmable pond, a kitchen pumping out incredibly delicious food, and caves, forests, mountains and rivers nearby.

But we see very little of the countryside while we are there; rain follows rain throughout the week; everything has the texture and colour of wet tissue paper. An early attempt to defy the drizzle with a horseback ride through the surrounding forest leaves me three days later with no less than thirty cattle ticks protruding their fat little bellies from my legs and chest, each yanked painfully clear by an extremely patient Erin wielding a pair of tweezers with the deftness of a surgeon.

Instead we take the opportunity to take a holiday from our holiday, each of us lapsing into our own world, reading, playing solitaire, bathing in the pale glow of a computer screen, talking to the other travelers passing through – Duncan and Anna and Laura, and especially the two lovely British girls working at the finca, Chloe and Donna.

One night over beers Chloe finds out that I used to work with people with intellectual disabilities, and asks me to come along to the local school for children with special needs to help out for the day. Going back to that work holds little appeal to me, but I can think of no valid excuse not to go, so the next morning I am up at six to walk through the forest with her to town, each of us swinging out anti-dog sticks in low arcs as we walk.

The teachers at the squat concrete school are trying hard but they have very few resources and no training. I sit with a couple of deaf children while they go through page after page of mind-numbing exercises, drawing short diagonal lines in a choice of two colours – red and green (when I try to introduce a blue pencil, I am immediately rebuked by the teacher – “No! They don’t know that colour yet!”. The children have been at the school for a year).

The teaching style is a curious but sadly predictable mix of the inspired and the inept. The teacher working with the deaf children has devised, without any training, a method to teach them to vocalize sounds, which I find very impressive. But when I ask him for the name of one of the boys, he looks at another teacher blankly and they both turn and say “Maybe it’s written on his backpack!” and “Is it written there in his book?”.

Still, it’s an enjoyable day, much of which is spent running in circles around the hazardous playground (think swings held up not by chains or ropes but by lengths of steel hooked together, and see-saws that are not bolted to the ground but sit on large arcs of steel that habitually overturn or shift and crush the toes of nearby children). At the end of it Chloe tells the main teacher that I used to work with adults with intellectual disabilities. He rushes to me with wide eyes.
“Please,” he says quietly, “The government – they give us no training for disabilities. We want to do the right thing but we don’t know if we are doing the right thing or the wrong thing. Please. Tell me. What are we doing wrong?”
I look at him helplessly. I have no answer: everything and nothing. I couldn’t begin to answer the question in English, let alone Spanish. I will the words to come, but they flee before my grasp. I don’t know where to begin. Or where to end. Or what to say at all.

On our last night on the finca, Donna and Chloe open the long-promised bar out by the pond. Another handful of travelers has arrived from Germany, France and Holland, and after a few overly-energetic games of ping pong we convince them to sit down for a couple of rounds of the drinking game Kings. It’s a move designed to emphasize the drinking prowess of Australians, but within two hours Danielle is sick and in bed, I have made an absolute mess of one of the men’s bathrooms, and Erin is contaminating the pond. At three in the morning we stumble out through the dripping foliage and crash into bed, waking up hours later looking and smelling like a pile of dirty clothes. It’s time to leave Finca Ixobel.

The rest of Guatemala spills out before us in a dizzying coil of sublime images. Green pastures dotted with huge ceiba trees standing regally alone in the flat expanses. The sweating tangled limbs of twenty-seven people, two babies and a large turkey in a van built for twelve passengers. Floating down a canyon in a thin drizzle while a raggedly-dressed man with a Bluetooth in his ear paddles the canoe, whistling a sad lament that bounces off the damp canyon walls. The roar of howler monkeys in the trees as small children sell tortillas in plastic bags.

A steaming waterfall atop a natural sulfur spring, 70°C (160°F) at the top, falling to a perfectly hot forty degrees as it tumbles headlong into the cool river below, giving us our first hot shower in weeks and the best we would have for many months, diving and swimming through the hidden caves and tunnels. In Livingston, bright and hot and squalid, two giant crocodiles in dilapidated, unfenced concrete pits in the middle of a children’s playground. Dried fish heaped in piles on the main street in the blast-furnace sun, the smell wafting directly into our gag reflex. A boat to Puerto Barrios at furious speed, gaining air off every wave and almost crushing a flock of seagulls.

A succession of minivans across arid landscapes of orange rock, the road overcome with landslides stretching hundreds of metres. A deserted crossroads; “Be off the road by 4:30,” says the van driver with the childlike scorpion tattooed in blue-green prison ink on his forearm, next to a crude love-heart with corners, “This place is very dangerous. It’s important. Just be off the road by 4:30.” A pair of bouncing, googly-eyed toucans and a small, belligerent jaguar locked in tiny cages outside a crusty hospedaje in Panzos. A pleading drunk chased off by an eight-year old boy swinging a broomstick.

Two straight days of travel in boats, minibuses and in the flatbeds of trucks rolling down steep dirt roads, and we have arrived; Semuc Champey unfurls before us into a snaking river guarded secretively by a valley of caves and thick forest. Our hostel is incredibly situated though devoid of people; it streams down the hillside in a scattering of huts and dorms. We rent some tubes, buy some beers and head for the river for a peaceful hour gliding past kids throwing themselves off rocks and old women washing their clothes by the shore (though the tubes aren’t as stable as we’d hoped; I overbalance and drop my beer in the river seconds after opening it). Adam and Dan jump off the 11m-high bridge that spans the river, falling silently into the depths. Then into Semuc Champey proper, a series of almost fluorescent blue and green pools connected by small waterfalls along the river, where the roiling, heaving whitewater of the main part of the river disappears underground for a time. It’s a tiring day of jumping and diving and swimming and being bitten on the ankles by territorial fish, and it’s not long after the sun goes down across the valley that we make our way to bed.

At two in the morning I wake and try to make my fumbling way to the toilet block down the hill. The place is pitch black, cave darkness, and the dim light of my headlamp is no help. I slip off the path, find my way back on, circle the hostel. My headlamp finally gives a sad little sigh and dies, and I am left now without any idea of where I am. I run into a concrete building, stumble back, step into a mud puddle, slip, and fall into a trench next to the toilet block. And here we are amongst the pristine natural splendour of Guatemala, and I’m sprawled face-up in a ditch in the darkness, covered in mud and mosquitoes, with no means of finding my way back to bed. The stars are bright overhead, and a cool breeze blows up from the river.

-

The tracks in this episode include a special 1917 recording of “Besame (One Step)” by the Central America Marimba Band of Guatemala, as well as “San Valentin” by Linda Morada, El Tambor de la Tribu’s energetic “Me No Faltas Tu”, and the punta piece “El Baila Baila”.

Tools referred to in the podcast:

The ATO’s Employee/Contractor Decision Tool

The ATO’s Superannuation Guarantee Eligibility Tool

Podcast Synopsis

This second part of Episode 2 features an interview I conducted with Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, Senior Rabbi of Temple Beth Am in Los Ageless back in March of this year. Our conversation focuses on a assortment of topics related to the many roles a modern pulpit rabbi plays in Jewish life, as well as in the conversion process.

Show Notes

The JBCTalk Podcast is part of the Lifestyle PodNetwork. For more interesting podcasts visit the Lifestyle PodNetwork website.