Sunday February 28, 2010 Full moon….
Day three of our travels to Argentina, having left Alto Paraiso on Friday morning…. These are long hot days driving south through Brazil. There never seems to be a good place to stop when you are ready, making the final resting place one to simply eat something and then collapse into an exhausted sleep. We’d take the travel more slow and easy if there were inviting places to stop, but this direct route through central Brazil south west from Brasilia has nothing really of interest. We have driven through miles and miles of soy beans as far as the eye can see. It’s rather depressing actually to see what was once beautiful forest filled with wildlife turned into nothing but enormous corporate farmlands growing genetically engineered crops sprayed with poisonous chemicals to control the bugs. Driving past the tractors spraying the crops, one can hardly breathe as the chemical fumes waft into the road. Several times I’ve had to put a scarf over my mouth and nose to mask the stench as I can feel the poisons entering my lungs. Soy beans and eucalyptus trees are being farmed all over Brazil as we have passed through the states of Goias, Mata Grosso, Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo and Parana and seen little else.
I find the cities to be repulsive. There is still manufacturing here and in the south it is much more prosperous because of this as there are jobs for people, but the pollution is so bad, one can hardly breathe driving past on the roads that pass through. One has to wonder that the people have any state of good health living in these places, breathing this air.
We did stop at a lovely peaceful little city two nights ago, however. A walk through town at dusk to find dinner showed us a very clean, lively little town full of youngsters on bicycles and people strolling though town. But not so inviting we’d consider more than passing through.
Tomorrow we will arrive at Foz do Iguaçu where Brazil meets Argentina and Paraguay as the three frontiers come together at the enormous waterfall which has Niagra Falls pale in comparison.
Meanwhile, just before leaving Alto Paraiso, I was struck by an email from our youngest member of the family who reports being overly stressed out from the pressures of school, And she is not alone as our second youngest also reports the same. I feel so distressed that these girls who should be enjoying this time in life are already in league with the rest of adult humanity feeling the pressure of needing to succeed in a world full of competition where everyone fights to get ahead of the rest simply to have some measure of success at surviving! If only I could pass along one or two things I’ve learned along the way, like waiting for someday when something different happens (and here one must fill in the blank) to be happy, never actually happens. One must choose in the moment to be happy now. I think too that all the rules have changed now. The old ways simply no longer apply. If one looks closely at what’s really going on, it’s not that hard to see that the “American dream” no longer exists. You can’t simply go to college, get a degree and go out and find a great job doing something you really love, making enough money to buy a house and a car, great clothes and all the rest of the things you think you really want because you’ve been so bombarded with advertisements everywhere you look convincing you that you’d be happier if you had them. The real trick is to not want stuff and to find happiness in the little things: a smile from a stranger passing by, a beautiful little flower you happen to notice, a fresh breeze blowing by on a hot day…..But these are the kinds of lessons one must learn on their own, they really can’t be taught, I suppose.
I’ve been watching Olivia who is not yet two years old. She is being raised very simply without very many toys or TV, without being compromised by vaccinations and artificial ingredients in her food. I am amazed at how she stops to listen when a bird is nearby. I can watch her learning as she stops to observe and think about what she has just seen. I’m not exactly sure why I bring this up, maybe the simpler life will lead to an adolescence and young adulthood less full of stress. I think this child’s education won’t drive her towards a frenzied need to succeed at such a cost. As our two youngest girls get their college educations at a cost that will put them in debt well into their old age with little hope of ever getting the kind of employment that will repay the loans interest let alone the principal, now that our world economy is crashing down around us. But I am not in a position of influence and so I can only sit idly by and watch what I consider to be a grave mistake.
Monday March 1, 2010
Writing from a hotel room somewhere close to Maringa while the rest of my traveling crew still sleep….. Not a good place for sleeping in my opinion. The noise from the highway traffic and the city traffic together with little break other than maybe the hours between 3 and 5 mixed with the city street lights coming through the window are not compatible with my need for darkness and quiet to get a good sleep.
I’ve always known that I’m not a big fan of cities, but lately my aversion to them has increased tenfold. I can not tolerate the noise or the pollution or the mix of energy
from so many people all in one concentrated place. Now with changes coming I worry about the welfare of the people who live in cities. When the infrastructure collapses, how will food and water get to the people with no way to access it directly?
Codex Alimentarious has been passed into legislation. Have you become aware of what this is? I’d recommend doing your own internet research on this horrendous bill which outlaws nutrients in foods and certain vitamins and supplements. Organic gardening too has been outlawed as well but I think that’s a different bill. So what is left available to eat are foods devoid of any nutritional value. The vegetables have been genetically modified which is changing our DNA. The seeds which are now available to the public are all treated with Monsanto’s chemicals so the poison is inherent in the food even before it grows. And of course the water has been poisoned for years with fluoride which they wanted us to believe was for the health of our teeth but turns out to produce impotence in men, sterilize women and generally pacify and subdue any tendency to protest what is being done to us. So unless you have your own underground spring or well, you are likely not drinking pure healthy water, our life substance. Recently we’ve discovered that they are now putting fluoride into bottled mineral water, so finding pure water when traveling away from home has become nearly impossible unless you can find a river close to its source before it becomes contaminated with sewage….
I don’t wish to be a naysayer or a source of depressing information, but how can I sit silently by and say nothing while we as a human species are being targeted for our demise in this way. At the very least we all need to know what’s being done so we can stand up and object and make an effort to change things.
I don’t necessarily think that moving to South America is the answer, even though I may have led you to believe that I thought it was. I’ve been looking for a better place and a better life than the one I’ve been witnessing and been a part of, but the real truth is that all over the world it’s the same, more or less. In places like Alto Paraiso, people arrive from all over the world looking for the same, a better life, free from the tyranny. And to some degree there are a few places where people are beginning to create a better life. But Paul, for instance, doesn’t like Brazil very much at all. I think he’s yearning for some of the comforts he’s accustomed to that he remembers from the past, long ago but confuses with places like North America and Europe. Unfortunately I don’t think they exist any longer. I think he’s yearning for a time of innocence when life still seemed good and worth living and held promise for a better future. When we journeyed to Canada, for instance it seemed like we’d left the 21st century and time traveled back to 1950 and life seemed more simple and better.
Saturday March 6, 2010
Sitting in the bedroom of my friend’s sister’s room, with the window open to the streets of Buenos Aires, alone for a while with my computer…. Uta, Olivia, Paul and Rocket have left the house to walk 5 blocks to the veterinarian to have a look at some weird fungal looking rash that is spreading on Rocket’s belly.
Yesterday we left Posada in the Missiones province of Argentina around 6:30 pm to drive the rest of the way to Buenos Aires, straight through the night to arrive today around 11:00am. What’s most impressive about Argentina is the presence of military police on the roads. There are checkpoints quite often, manned with a small group of officers to check for suspicious passers-by, once in a while reviewing documents. We’ve been stopped on a few occasions. I am hoping that this presence is concentrated to the corridors where there are borders, particularly with Paraguay and that there will be more tranquil areas of the country where it is not such a dominant feature because I am finding it to be very oppressive in that way. Paul keeps saying that the presence of military police exists just the same in the US now, but looks different because there they hide in the bushes, for the surprise of finding you driving in excess of the speed limit, for example, while here they announce their presence with a sign that foretells, “CONTROL.” For speeding they have set up routinely placed cameras to photograph your car speeding and simply mail you a ticket and deduct points from your license. But the drivers, here in Argentina as well as in Brazil, drive at crazy excessive speeds, way beyond the posted limits.
Aside from this unfortunate aspect, everything else we’ve encountered we’ve been delighted to find. The roads are in excellent condition and well marked with signage so you can actually follow a map and know where you are, unlike in Brazil where nothing is marked with signage and no one really knows where the town after the next is, but if you stop and ask enough times, eventually you get there. The food here is actually good,
(What a pleasant change!) We’ve decided that we think that this is a much more European influenced culture. It feels much more reminiscent of the US than did Brazil. And it maintains many of the things we enjoyed about Europe in the 70’s and 80’s when it was much cooler (in our opinion) before the Illuminati got such a tight hold on controlling everything.
It seems to have an even more affordable economy than did Brazil. For example, earlier in the week during our endless days of driving through Brazil into Paraguay and then into Argentina in more powerful heat than either of us has ever encountered, the thermostat on our little Chevy stopped working and the engine needed to be rebuilt after driving at boiling temperatures for two days. At the first opportunity to find a mechanic to diagnose and fix our problem, we were amazed to be given a quote that amounted to the equivalent of around $125. A bargain we thought. Unfortunately it wasn’t in the end to be so simple or so affordable when the only parts available in Argentina would not fit a car made in Brazil, so after a day sitting in the back yard of the mechanic’s house (and shop) when this became clear, he drove us back to the chalets on the river where we’d spent the previous night so that he could cross the river the following day by ferry to Paraguay to buy the part we needed and in the end, the price went up to 1100 pesos which is 550 reais which is about 325 dollars, more or less. WOW! Imagine that job done anywhere in the US, a rebuilt engine and hours of the mechanics time to travel to another country to retrieve a part???? I guess there isn’t Fed Ex or UPS here for deliveries. We almost had to take a bus ride back to Brazil which the day before covered only 300 kilometers but took more than 8 hours to drive with all the police checkpoints and a protest which closed down the highway for about an hour in the hottest sun of the midday.
Traveling through South America isn’t exactly easy by road. Everything is farther than anyone ever leads you to believe or you can judge yourself by looking at a map. And it’s freakishly HOT! Well, I’m not sure you can say this is typical or related to earth changes (which by the way if you haven’t already noticed are induced and created by the Illuminati.) Call me crazy and naïve if you want to, but there is multiple proof from different sources that they have been caught setting off explosions to trigger the horrific catastrophic weather events such as the one in Haiti. So you have to ask yourself that the recent earthquake in Chili and the one that is expected to happen in California any day isn’t another of their tactics to create havoc and destruction, eliminating a little more of the overcrowded population of the planet and putting in the groundwork for martial law, more military presence, more restrictions of movements…. Honestly, driving through all these check points feels like war time in Nazi Germany. You may think that nothing like that will ever happen in the US, but look carefully at things that are beginning to happen. Don’t be taken by surprise.
The triple frontier was crazy! You have to go through one border crossing after another, showing your documents, being scrutinized and hassled. Personally I wasn’t hassled by it; it was simply an exercise in being patient on a very hot day. We arrived very late in Foz do Iguaçu nearing 5 o’clock, thinking the drive would get us there by noon. Uta had some concerns about the border crossing but wouldn’t tell us why or elaborate much that she had overstayed her time limit in Brazil and might have to pay a hefty fine. For this reason she warned us in advance that she might prefer to leave the car and cross the border on a public bus with her daughter, telling us where to meet her in the event she chose to do this. We took a wrong turn and drove into Paraguay rather than Argentina and needed to pass immigration before we could turn around to pass through the Argentinean border. The border crossing in Paraguay which was once merely a small hut is now being reconstructed by the Illuminati as a large dominating building, by the way. Hoping out of the car, Uta instructed us to find the bus station on the Argentinean side of Iguaçu, that she would arrive within two hours at most. Driving off without our interpreter and guide, we found the bus station after what we thought to be a rather easy border crossing and asking only two different people for directions. Spotting a bar, the three of us (Rocket, Paul and I) pulled up a couple plastic bar chairs in the shade and settled in for what we thought might be a two hour wait. When darkness fell, and three hours had passed, we began to worry that they hadn’t arrived. We’d been enjoying a conversation with a Brazilian couple but thought they too were visiting the Argentina side of Foz. A few beers later and with Paul’s purchase of a map of Argentina, I suddenly thought to confirm that we were in Puerto Iguaçu, the determined meeting place, but NO, turns out we’d re-entered Brazil, from Paraguay, not Argentina! Now after dark, well after the two hour waiting time to meet back up, we hurriedly left with directions from our new friends and the bar man to cross the frontier into Argentina and then find the bus station once there.
At the border we were held by the Duenas while they reviewed all the documents we’d brought for Rocket, being told to pull over and submit to a series of questions which we only hoped to understand. In the end it proved not to be a problem at all, but it had Paul sweating it a bit and mentally constructing all the possible scenarios that might be playing out, before we eventually knew that it was a simply some formalities that needed to be followed. I was not concerned except for the late hour at which we might or might not find Uta and Olivia. The thought of functioning now in Spanish of which I knew practically nothing without Uta had me a little intimidated. Fortunately for me there are many words that sound somewhat similar so that when speaking in Portuguese to Spanish speaking Argentineans, there is a small modicum of understanding. Thank God! Otherwise I’d be starting over from scratch just as I was really getting a handle on this new language.
I suppose it was well after nine pm when we eventually found the right bus station in the right country. Driving down the street after stopping several times to ask directions, we heard the familiar cat call from our friend as she spotted us driving down the street. Happy to be reunited we went in search of a hotel for the night and a late dinner after an eternally long travel day!
The next day was a scheduled day for shopping in Paraguay where the prices are known to be about a third of the prices for items like technology than in Brazil or Argentina, where all the prices are super inflated for these kinds of purchases. I was led to believe it would be a quick easy trip, that we would hop a bus, cross the border, buy the stuff we needed and be back in a flash. But here is where I finally learned that to a person from South America, what qualifies as short, fast and easy is far different from my own estimation of what this means. After a several block walk to a bus stop, we waited in the hot sun for close to an hour for the right bus, after which we rode the bus for some 35 minutes or so before stopping at the border crossing where we all departed from the bus, showed our documents and then re-boarded the bus and drove for another 20 minutes to another border crossing. Here we encountered a problem with Uta’s documents and every effort she had made the day before to avoid paying fines was to be confronted in a pleading argument with the authorities which did not end well for her. Told she would be arrested if she refused to sign several papers, she reluctantly signed but was more than distressed. I had lost all interest in pursuing my quest to even visit Paraguay where I was on a mission to replace my broken camera, feeling that the cost of the expedition was not worth the price of the hassle. However my friend assured me that it was not a problem, that we were almost there and not to worry. Once through the bureaucratic nonsense, we walked across a bridge crossing the river which separates Brazil from Paraguay and began a long hot crowded walk through the market place where everyone was desperate to sell us something. Entering the camera store, I was determined to make a selection quickly, finish my business and get the hell out of Paraguay, back on the bus and back to the hotel where Paul and Rocket were waiting by a cool refreshing pool. But as usual hours of hot sticky daytime passed by as we completed our mission and sat to wait for the bus that would take us back through what I previously described in the opposite direction. I think we left around 11:00 that morning, expecting to return around 3, but eventually arrived close to 7pm (a typical extension of predicted time- a little more than twice as long!)
So here we were in Foz do Iguaçu, a place famous for its incredible magnificent beauty around the world, but our time had nearly run out to arrive in Buenos Aires for a family birthday party (our determined arrival time) and we would not all be permitted to visit the falls with Rocket, so rather than leaving Paul and Rocket behind as offered, I chose to skip the attraction and move along, waterfall unseen. We reasoned that we were not actually traveling as tourists, but with a mission to find the perfect new location for home, so it wasn’t important to see the tourist attraction, in spite of its beauty. And besides, it could be that we will return through this direction once again when we go to retrieve the things we left behind with friends. Paul now has determined without question that he does not wish to live in Brazil while I still keep the option open as a possibility, simply because I love the people there. But he and Uta like to remind me that I will love the people wherever I go because they are simply a reflection of me and my love for them. I suppose this could be true….
The following morning, just before leaving, we met the most strikingly beautiful woman who because of falling in love with Rocket at first sight engaged Paul in a long conversation while I was off in the room finishing up. She wanted to share with us the perfect location in the world to live and have a business. It seemed very important to her that she give us this information and the connection we made with her was quite special, so we were in no doubt that she was an angel dropped into our path to deliver a message. I will say her more about her later because I believe our paths will cross again.
So I’ll just stop here for a moment and attempt to sum up our 1st week of travel. It was far more distance to cover than either of us imagined and moved slower than the pace of a snail. It was incredibly hot! There was nothing but mile after mile (or I should say kilometer after kilometer) of soybean fields in every direction as far as the eye could see with the occasional field of corn and even less frequently sugarcane. The air was so polluted you could hardly breathe because of chemical spraying and manufacturing. The intensity of the sun and the oppressive heat was a force to be reckoned with and another reason why it was hard to catch a breath of fresh air. Even at night the temperature didn’t drop to a temperature of any relief. There was barely food to eat with any nutritional value and it was almost impossible to find unadulterated water, pure enough to sustain life. But we four are happy travelers and none of these factors dampened our spirits as we surround ourselves with the love we hold for each other and the world around us. We arrived on day 8, a week and a day after leaving High Paradise, with enough time for a rest before the anticipated reunion at the niece’s birthday party. A small delay kept us in a town for an extra day, while we repaired our car, but we found there a little cottage to stay in with a great pool by a river and a little kitchen to prepare our own food, complete with air conditioning and Olympic figure skating on the TV. So, here we are in Buenos Aires. We’ve enjoyed the time we are spending in the house where Uta grew up and being here with her sister. Her mother is away on vacation, so it is only the 5 of us and very relaxed. I am getting a real flavor of life here, seeing Uta’s world and her life in old photographs and both Paul and I feel a real sense of deep knowing and memory of her. It struck us both a little differently but intensely as he felt a memory of a father, daughter relationship and I felt a deep past knowing of her as a younger person than she is now. It’s hard to explain but it’s a memory that transcends time. For Paul it sometimes occurs as a memory of the future. For me, it sometimes occurs as a memory of a past life…..
Our first impression of Argentina is a good one and other than the excessive military presence of controlled road checks, we like the way it feels a little more sophisticated, more European, better cheese, better pastries, better wine, better road conditions….. Comparing somehow feels a little wrong but I suppose it’s only natural for a selection process- which feels better, here or there, where should we stay……??? Our criteria has changed a little. We still have more or less the same objective though. We want to find a place with as little interference from the Illuminati as possible where we can live a free and simple life. Where we can live independent of any infrastructure that may collapse or otherwise cease to exist, for example growing our own organic food, providing clean water from our own source, generating whatever income we need from our own artistic talents and skills….. A place of natural beauty, crisp fresh air where we can watch this child whom we’ve been gifted with grow up in a world all of us are entitled to live in filled with love and appreciation. After the raw wild nature of Brazil, Paul knows that his comfort level is different than mine, a little more upscale and choosey. He likes cities with restaurants and bars where he can sit with a good beer and watch people go by. I like mountains where I can be away from people and watch the water flow by in the rivers and the birds and insects fly by. For a moment we questioned that we could each find our happiness in the same place and might need to choose different locations but these days we think we are going to find the perfect place where this exists. I almost hesitate to say too much and place us anywhere on the map, wishing almost to lose myself somewhere in the world and let all my concerns drift away in the wind. Perhaps those of you whose path parallels mine will find me and join me again for a time, if not in this life maybe in another…….But more than likely paths cross for a moment and then diverge. In that instant of connection all that needs to transpire does without spoken language but in the spark of recognition in the twinkle of an eye.
I’ve been recognizing souls and been the object of recognition my whole life. Sometimes it happens in airports; sometimes it happens in the checkout lane of the grocery store. Often it happens between me and babies- these new souls just coming back. Last night a young boy of nine recognized me. He kissed me took my hand and showed me the way to the bathroom. We recognized each other. It’s so cool!
Last night at the party I watched as the guests arrived. Each person greets everyone with a kiss before settling into whatever group they are going to sit with to talk. This is a custom I so love to see. There are different customs for kissing. In some places it’s only one kiss on the check, in others it’s a kiss on each cheek. And then there’s the kiss one check, the other and back to the first again. Sometimes it’s a full embrace or an embrace and a kiss. And then there’s my new Italian friend who grabs your shoulders, pulls you in close and gives you a big wet kiss full on the mouth! I can never understand what his name is well enough to remember it so I just refer to him as “beijo me mucho”, or beijo-me for short.
Monday March 8, 2010
Our 3rd day in Buenos Aires now and we finally got a moment to connect to the internet which until now has not been functioning here at the house. We’ve been seeing a little television while we’ve been resting up from our travels and noticed Obama talking about the elections in Iraq and figured it was a distraction to get the attention off of what the Illuminati has going on now behind the scenes. After all it’s March and time for the Bilderburg group to be meeting again to formulate their plans for the next 6 months. Because of this we were eager to connect to the internet to see if we could find any current news. Often we can scroll through world news headlines onwww.whatdoesitmean.com and see if there’s anything hidden among the headlines that might give some indication. Without seeing much there that alerted us to anything specific we noticed that Alex Jones interviewed Gerald Celente on the 5th and tuned into that interview on YouTube. Turns out Gerald was in Chile when the earthquake hit and had information for us that was very relevant. I’d recommend listening to the 40 minute interview yourselves…. Since I can’t get back on the internet now I can not provide an easy link, but you can use the search function on You Tube to find it.
At the moment we are waiting to leave again in the next day or two to continue our journey to explore two areas of Argentina that we think might be right for us to settle down and begin to prepare for what we continue to suspect will be hard times. The worst (or best) that can happen is that we will be prepared to survive under the worst of conditions without any infrastructure and this will never come to pass. But waiting for the eventuality to occur before taking actions will not suffice as by then it could be too late. So here’s the thing: preparing for worst case scenarios has its problems certainly; your friends and family think you are crazy and over -reactive, you may make bad decisions (like selling your beautiful home before you really needed to) but if the proverbial shit does hit the fan, we will be the ones who are in a better position to help the others. We alone will be prepared.
We watched a profound film once. Actually it was a poorly made film as far as artistic criteria is concerned but the message we got from it was rather profound for us. It was called “Cloverfield.” In it an event transpired, in this case it was a monster flick and an invasion of giant people eating creatures arrived in New York City, after which NOTHING remained the same. As we used to like to say, “In the flick of a horses tail….” everything changed; life as you knew it ceases to exist. Since then we have an awareness that a “cloverfield” like event could occur in any given moment. Particularly when we know that an agenda has been in place since the conception of life in the universe to cause a particular outcome. But what we see and understand is so different from the majority of the population because we somehow knew to unplug from the prescribed system when we were very young. We stopped watching TV and because of this we were less bombarded with the accepted view of life that most people on the planet have accepted as correct and apparently obvious, while deeming the rest of us who didn’t proscribe to be lunatics or at the very least, misguided!
So one of the things that Gerald Celente pointed out in his interview with Alex Jones was that no one in the hotel other than he and two other people were prepared to even exit the building to survive the earthquake in Chile. They were running around yelling “Call 911, call 911!” They were waiting for some outside authority to come to their rescue, trusting that there was such a thing. People, what we need to do is learn how to survive now in the event that life as you know it changes. In the event of a third world war, in the event of no fuel to drive the trucks from the farms to the city grocery stores, in the event of no energy to heat your homes in winter or cool them in the extreme heat of summer, what will you do? Who will you call? What’s so important now is people forming communities to help each other with our basic survival needs. As I see it that means growing food to sustain life, having pure water to drink, an ability to stay warm enough or cool enough from the extreme temperatures….after that a life that gives you some peace and some happiness where your loved ones are near, your children are safe…maybe some activity that brings you joy….although survival might occupy all your waking moments….its hard to say. But if for example you live in a city and can not get soil and seeds to grow food or cannot get drinking water, then what??? Can you get to a source from a rural area where you know the food and water are reliable? Can you support a local cooperative organic farm like a CSA(community supported agriculture)? Just think about it now before it’s too late to find your resources. If you put plans in place that never become necessary, all the better!
Enough for now, I hope…. More to come….