On a recent Saturday, the streets were filled with bicycles. Bells rang and horns sounded as the cyclists wound their way throughout the city like a moving train of youth and energy.
This wasn’t in Portland, or Paris, or any of dozens of bicycle-friendly cities around the world. This was in Guatemala City, a city known more for its violent crime rates than its progressive bike culture.
But one group is trying to change that. Biketun is a new organization started by Javier Mata and Lucia Pivaral with the purpose of promoting a more sustainable way of life and transport in Guatemala.
The group’s signature event is a nighttime bicycle tour of Guatemala City. The first was held in December and drew around 250 people. The second, held in February, drew more than 500. The goal is to one day attract 10,000 cyclists to Guatemala’s streets.
According to Pivaral, Biketun’s mission is to show the country that a better lifestyle is possible – “a lifestyle in which Guatemalans own not only public spaces, but most of all, our freedom. A lifestyle in which we can go out on our bicycles, go to the park, walk on the streets, and interact with different people without any worries.”
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Pivaral says that public spaces in Guatemala City have been abandoned because of fear, which then leads to degeneration, negative perceptions and danger. Parents keep children at home because they are scared that they will be exposed to drugs and violence on the city streets.
“This is similar to a field with bad grass,” she says. “When we don’t use the field, bad grass grows and the only way of removing it is re-taking control of the field and making use of it. This is what this movement is about.”
Biketun events wind through different parts of Guatemala City. The December event was centered on the main avenues – Bulevar Liberación, Avenue Américas, Obelisco, Reforma, Plaza 30 de Marzo, Septima Avenida – with an itinerary designed to take in the Christmas sights and lights. The second event was organized in cooperation with the Municipality of Guatemala, which provided an educational tour of different sites in the Historic Center of the City, like the National Palace, Iglesia La Merced and Railroad Museum.
“Doing this regenerates my energy and soul, along with my hope for humanity,” says Pivaral. “I deeply believe that for a city to progress, we need to take into consideration sustainable ways of living. The best way to approach this, for me, was not talking about it, but starting to live it.”
The next Biketun event is scheduled to coincide with Earth Day in April. There is no cost to participate, and a limited number of bicycles are available for rent on the organization’s Eventbrite page. For more information, visit Biketun on Facebook.
I’ve never thought of surfing as a hyper-competitive sport. For me, it’s more of a lifestyle. I’m not a surfer but I’ve met scores of people over the years that have rearranged their lives to be in proximity to the big breaks. I can understand why surfers might want to compete so they can measure their skills against others but the surfing culture doesn’t exactly lend itself to competition.
It’s more dude-pass-that-joint than let’s-throw-down-I’m-going-to-whip-you, so when I was invited to attend and write about a surf competition/bacchanal called Pitaya Fest in San Juan del Sur, (SJDS) Nicaragua, I leapt at the chance to see what competitive surfing was all about.On a Saturday morning in February, I piled into a stifling hot van outside a backpacker hostel in SJDS with my wife and two little boys and found myself sitting knee-to-knee across from a host of beautifully idealistic young American do-gooders and a pair of German girls wearing royal blue T-shirts that read “Christian Surfers.”
The do-gooders were a delightful group of young people who were taking a year or more off after college to help people in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and they regaled us with stories, including one about a girl they encountered who gave birth at age 9. I got the feeling that they’d learned more in their brief time in Central America than they did in college.
As we struggled to hold our ground on the bench seats as the van breakdanced across a rutted dirt track toward Hermosa Beach, outside SJDS, I wanted to bottle up the group of idealistic Americans and release them the next time someone anywhere in the world tells me that Americans are greedy, selfish people who don’t lift a finger to help anyone else in the world.
Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, next to Haiti, and it’s impossible for anyone with a conscience to visit the country and not feel motivated to help the legions of poor people who live in improvised, ramshackle dwellings alongside almost every major road in the country. Plenty of tourists come to Nicaragua for the beaches and the prospect of a cheap holiday, but are motivated to stay on as volunteers after they arrive.
Playa Hermosa is a lovely, huge, crescent-shaped beach where some scenes from Survivor Nicaragua were shot in 2010. I was told that the abysmal road leading to the beach was even worse before Jeff Probst and company rolled into town. Before we made it into the event, we passed by a security checkpoint manned by a guy with a bulletproof vest brandishing what looked like an old AK-47. In the last few years, a few tourists have been robbed in around Playa Hermosa, so they now have security to protect what is one of the country’s few privately owned beaches.
The surfing competition was already a few hours into its second day when we arrived and the first competitors we saw must have been part of a beginners’ heat, because they appeared to have no idea what they were doing. In fact, none managed to remain upright on their boards for more than ten seconds at a time.
The event appeared to be co-sponsored by the Christian Surfers group (Quicksilver was the primary sponsor) but the DJ’s choice in music wasn’t very Christian. One of the first songs we heard went something like this:
(Unintelligible) Mumble, mumble, mumble Shake that ass girl (Unintelligible) Mumble, mumble, mumble, Shake that ass girl
Later in the day, my wife saw the Christian Surfer group sitting in a circle on the beach, holding hands, eyes closed in prayer. Perhaps they were praying for everyone’s sins.
The sizable crowd was a fair sampling of the gringos who wash up in SJDS as visitors or expats. Backpackers in need of a shower and some clean laundry. White guys in dreadlocks with their tattooed, wasted-looking girlfriends and poorly groomed dogs. Middle-aged North American snowbirds, missionaries and assorted cheapskates looking for a cut-rate version of Costa Rica. Alcoholics attracted by Nicaragua’s cheap rum. Miscellaneous mid-life crisis and I’m here to change-my-life or maybe catch-something-that-I-might-be-ashamed-of types. The aforementioned do-gooders. Surfers, wannabe surfers and their dogs, some of them with coffee colored skin and incongruous orange-colored hair.
Aspiring North American coffee-shop revolutionaries in Panama hats and Che Guevara T-shirts who like totally aspire to stop the military industrial complex, global warming and the genocide in Darfur and various other places they know nothing about. Unemployable Latin American studies majors who aspire to start NGOs with vague goals involving “sustainability” and “empowerment.” Nicaraguans with substantial coolers sitting on uncomfortable white plastic chairs or lying on hammocks plus assorted riff-raff and ne-er-do-wells like me.
The surfing and the music got better. Much better. And the people mentioned above got more drunk and more stoned. At noon, I smelled my first whiff of ganja and wondered whether the surf announcer, who tried to sound like the beachside equivalent of Andres Cantor, the Latino soccer announcer famous for his GOOOOOOOOOOOAL! calls, would ever shut up.
Surfing isn’t much of a spectator sport but surfers make damn good company and they know how to party. I made a few lame attempts to understand what was going on, but it’s hard to stay engaged with a competition that has 56 different divisions and drags on for hours or days on end. From what I gathered, the surfers had 15 minutes in each heat to ride as many waves as they could, but only their two best rides counted towards their overall score.
Set back from the beach, there was a stage and a lineup of bands, plus a host of booths offering everything from $1.50 rum and cokes, chocolate cookies to pulled pork sandwiches.
I met a 40-something expat volunteering at a BBQ pit who told me that he moved to SJDS in 2009 to “do something different.” He said that that the town’s real estate market mirrored that of the U.S. There was a boom from 2004-7, followed by a bust and a sputter that lingers to this day.
“A piece of land that was 25K in 2007 was going for about 15k by 2009,” he said.
My children made friends with some gringo expat kids whose parents moved to SJDS from Lesotho (seriously!) and I met a host of interesting people as well. I was struck by how open and friendly people were and how easy it is to become part of this community in a place that I would assume is as transient as they come. I met more interesting people in six hours on the beach than I would in six months in Chicago. And I found out that the event was a fundraiser for local charities, which inspired me to have a few more rum and cokes, in order to support the good cause.
At 2 p.m., the surf competition DJ, operating under a tent on the beach, wisely shifted from the angry gansta rap to Bob Marley’s “Legend” compilation. What’s a surf gathering without some Bob Marley, right? Fifteen minutes later, a band took the stage and launched into Marley’s “So Much Trouble in the World” as the DJ played “Stir It Up” simultaneously. Competing Bob Marley tunes was still better than the gangsta rap (see video below).
Shortly thereafter, a small Nicaraguan guy in a faded tank top began puking just yards behind my little patch of shade underneath a tree behind the surf tents.
He was serenaded by a group of inebriated hippies who were mashing it up to Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier.”
Fighting on the Rye-ver, Fighting for Survival Wye-yo-yo, Wye-yo-yo-yo, Wye-yo-yo-yo-yo!
Soon, a succession of drinkers followed, one-by-one, to piss in my general vicinity and I decided to move from what was becoming a de-facto toilet.
By three o’clock, I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone as a “Grease” cover band called Bario La Planeta launched into their set. Only in Nicaragua can you wash up at a beach and find yourself singing “Go Grease Lightning” in the company of of junkies, flunkies, do-gooders and gringos with baffled looking Nicaraguans looking on in puzzlement (see video).
Late in the afternoon, guys and gals who actually knew how to surf – and how to surf well – got into the act but I still had no idea what the hell was going on and I’m pretty sure that most in attendance didn’t gave a damn who won. I’m told the party raged until 3 a.m. and Agusto Chamorro won the men’s open competition. In the world of competitive, but not exactly cutthroat surfing, I’m betting that none of the “losers” left the beach broken hearted.
Audiophiles are a tough group to please and traveling audiophiles even more so. They demand the absolute best sound out of their equipment and they seem to always be on a quest for better music quality. That’s a challenging enough prospect when they’re at home with a full-fledged stereo system at their disposal, but when on the road it can be nearly impossible. A good pair of headphones and a high-quality, portable music player can help, but unfortunately most headphones don’t provide the level of quality that an audiophile is looking for.
V-MODA, a company that specializes in high-end audio products, set out to rectify this situation with their Crossfade M-100 headphones. This is a product that was built from the ground up not just for audiophiles but by audiophiles. The engineers at V-MODA consulted with some of the most knowledgeable, not to mention picky, audiophiles they could find and it shows through in the final product. To call the sound quality from the M-100s amazing doesn’t fully convey just how fantastic these headphones sound. Music is clear and distinct in the low-, mid- and high-ranges, and vocals sounded stunningly pure, creating an experience that simply needs to be heard to be believed.
Personally, I’m no audiophile, but listening to my favorite tracks with a set of M-100s was a bit of revelation. Prior to testing the over-the-ear Crossfades, I’d never heard such pure sound from a set of headphones before. Every element of the music comes through in a very distinct and clean fashion, including the low-end bass, which can often sound distorted or muffled. It was an incredibly immersive and rich experience that gave me a glimpse of what an audiophile must hear all the time.But V-MODA designed the M-100s to provide more than just best-in-class sound. These headphones are also built to be incredibly tough, allowing them to survive the rigors of the road. Their sturdy construction means that you can take the Crossfades with you where ever you go without fear of them breaking. The same can’t be said for most other headphones on the market, many of which are highly susceptible to accidental breakage. Two metal shields on the outside of each ear cup add to the level of ruggedness, while giving these headphones a distinct look all their own. Those shields are also user replaceable and V-MODA offers a number of custom designs on their website allowing M-100 owners to further set their headphones apart from the crowd.
Military grade durability is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the level of detail that V-MODA has put into the design of this product. For example, the M-100s are also capable of folding in on themselves, reducing their footprint nicely. This allows them to take up much less room in a carry-on bag or nicely slip into the included hard case. That case provides yet another level of protection while traveling and also securely stows the headphones and cables as well.
Speaking of cables, the Crossfades ship with two audio cables that can plug into either the left or right ear cups. One of those cables features a microphone and an inline remote for pausing playback or picking up incoming phone calls on a smartphone or other mobile device. The second cable features a built-in audio jack that allows users to share their sound with a companion. This comes in handy when you want to watch a movie or television show with someone on a long flight. Both cables are thick, resist tangling and are very high in quality. In another nod to the audiophile crowd, V-MODA also includes a 1/4″ 24k gold pro adapter for use with home stereo systems as well.
In terms of comfort, I found the M-100s to be easy to wear, even over extended periods of time. While testing them, I often wore the Crossfades for several hours without much of an issue at all, sometimes even forgetting that I had them on. It did take a bit for the tension in the headband to loosen up, however, and until that happened, I occasionally had some discomfort due to the ear cups pressing against the arms of my glasses.
The M-100s do a great job of isolating outside noise, even though they don’t include an active noise-canceling system of any kind. While listening to great music with these headphones it is easy to become cutoff from the outside world, getting caught up in the rich sound that they deliver. It is nearly impossible to crank that music to a level that is too loud for the Crossfades to handle, but it can easily be loud enough that no outside sound can be heard at all. That is actually an excellent feature when you truly want to escape for a while.
All of this amazing sound and build quality comes at a price, however, and it is likely to be beyond what most consumers will want to pay. The Crossfade M-100s carry a price tag of $310, which is actually quite reasonable for a pair of headphones that offer audiophile levels of sound. That puts them in the same price range as the Bose QuietComfort series of headphones, which are also quite popular amongst travelers. While the Bose QC’s do offer active noise cancelation, however, they don’t perform nearly as well in terms of overall sound quality. Even to my non-audiophile ears, the M-100s simply sound much better. The build quality between the two headphones isn’t nearly the same either with V-MODA’s offering outclassing the Bose in every way. That is an important factor to consider when you’re shelling out $300+ for a pair of headphones for travel.
If you appreciate great sound and need a pair of headphones that can survive just about anything short of a nuclear blast, then the V-MODA Crossfade M-100 should be your top choice for music and audio on the go. Quite simply, these are the best headphones I’ve ever heard and well worth every penny.
Gadling’s Instagram feed is going to get a lot more Hawaiian this week, as I’m moving the Gadling lens from the snowy confines of the Alhambra in southern Spain to the sunny shores of Maui, Hawaii.
Though one could argue that Maui is a scenic place to photograph during all months of the year, March is a particularly scenic time on the Valley Isle since this also happens to be the peak of whale season.
Stay tuned over the next seven days as we take you behind waterfalls, stroll down sandy beaches, head to the water in search of humpbacks and while away days beneath the shade of a palm.
So where ever you may be, if the weather outside is looking more winter than summer, grab some coconut oil, put on your favorite Oren Masserman tune, and tap into the Instagram feed @GadlingTravel for some virtual Hawaiian warmth.
Want to get in on the action? Mention @GadlingTravel in your own photo AND use the hashtag #gadling, and your photo will be considered for our Gadling Photo Of The Day.
Train stations around the world all have their own personality. Often, they are great works of architecture. This photo from pkorsmok gives a different view of the lines and design of Southern Cross Station in Melbourne, Australia, capturing a quiet moment in a station that serves over 40,000 passengers a day.