January 26, 2006 was the departure date on my airplane ticket from San Francisco to Bangkok. From Bangkok, I’d go to India, and from there to Bali.

India has beckoned me for years, especially Kerala. With more and more jobs being exported to India every day and with its new role as an emerging world power, India seems destined to be a next best place. I wanted to meet the Americans and Europeans who are moving to India, to get a glimpse of what their lives are like.

Bali - On this island I’d felt so at home during my five months there, that I left some money in a bank account and a box of personal effects with a friend. How is it that three years later, I’ve yet to return? There have been things like bombs that went off in the night. And the sticky web of time and commitments in the States. But maybe its just that at some level, I fear that I will discover that, Yes, Bali is home. Which means taking the final (or first?) step and going.

On January 30: A week before my planned departure, I received a call from EscapeArtist.com. They were hatching a new online travel magazine and wanted to know if I’d be interested in wearing an editor’s hat.

And so, one week before departure date, I aked my travel agent to re-route my trip to Argentina.

Two months later, March 26, 2006 - I began my stay in Argentina last month on a 75-acre farm in the wine and orchard region of Mendoza.

Today I am sitting in my lovely apartment in Buenos Aires, Argentina finishing what will be the first issue of EscapeArtist Travel Magazine.

There have been rabbit trails, oh yes. Like the emergency appendectomy I had in a rural hospital, followed by a move to Buenos Aires, and a trip to Uruguay for an international real estate conference. I’ll tell you all about it in EscapeArtist Travel Magazine, www.escapeartist.com.

See you in Turkey June 3 for the experience of a lifetime!!! Sign up now!

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Hello from Robin in Argentina. Please click the link below to join Larry Habegger and me in Turkey this June as we learn to write ‘The Personal Travel Story.’ See you in June!

PDF: The Personal Travel Story (Turkey, June 3-10, 2006)

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Brazil
August 22, 2005

Why have I moved from checking the pulse of Asia to revisiting South America? And why Brazil?

Brazil is categorized in investing circles as a developing country. Which means it’s a poor country with lousy infrastructure and unfathomable corruption OR it is a country overflowing with natural resources and on its way to becoming a first world country.

Brazil is both, the former being a legacy of its past, and the latter its growing reality. From developing country to an emerging one. While America has focused post 9-11 on security and imperializing Iraq, Brazil has been busy setting up a partnership with China – one based on supplying the world’s growing super power with raw materials.

Why should Americans consider moving to Brazil?

Europeans rediscovered Brazil and have been moving and investing there in droves, most noticeably over the past five years. In fact, so many Portuguese have bought up Northeast Brazilian land lately, that lawmakers in Brasilia are trying to pass laws limiting the amount of Brazilian land that can be purchased by the former colonizers.

In Brazil I repeatedly met with surprise when people learned that I was American. So few Americans visit Brazil, much less live there. Yet, certain regions are filled with French, others with Portuguese., and although I didn’t make it there, Southern Brazil is full up with Germans.

Sixty-nine percent of North America’s population is between the ages of 40 and 59. That’s a lot of aging baby boomers who are or will soon be concluding that their dream of owning a home is a pipedream. And that they’re going to have to continue working like indentured servants just to stay even.

There is hope though, that by moving across the U.S. border, an American’s financial picture can brighten considerably. Not only can one buy a house, but they’ll have access to quality health care, delicious fresh food, clothing, a warm, laid-back environment – and still have money left over to squirrel away in savings! The cost of living in America has soared, while the benefits of being an American dwindled.

I’m betting that American zenophobia will have dissipated within the next five years - after most of America’s corporations have taken many of their (American) employees with them. As anyone who reads or watches the news knows, this process is well underway.

While immigrants chasing the American dream will continue to stream across North America’s borders, I believe that aging Americans who have tired of the game, not to mention gone broke, will head South. Younger ones will follow as business opportunities and a better life beckon them.

Case in point: Huge numbers of retirees travel regularly over our northern and southern borders to buy medications, to have dental work done, to have surgery, to buy second homes. How long will it be until they decide it’s cheaper and easier just to move acrossthe border? And how about the number of major corporations moving to foreign countries, and the jobs opening in those countries. How long will it take young Americans to realize that an American salary goes 10 times further in a foreign country?

Planned foreign communities are popping up in exotic locations. Foreign banks are beginning to offer mortgage financing abroad. And hey, consider the sheer numbers of expatriates who have already retired to Mexico and Costa Rica.

The mass migration has not only begun, it is in full swing. “Go west young man!” has become “Go South Old Man.”

I am back in Brazil to meet the expatriates who have already arrived. To get a feel for the land, the community, the culture, the politics, the economy, and ultimately to find out if Brazil is a place where I’d be willing to tie up my horse.

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I have a soul connection with other expats I meet in the world, an unspoken understanding that I don’t
have with non-traveling Americans. When I meet another world traveler, it’s as if I have come home, found my tribe. It is not uncommon for me to run into someone in one country that I met in another. And I can tell within a moment of conversation "back home" if a person is a citizen of the world. It’s not so much what they say, as a way of being.

My gypsy soul rules my roost - home is here, it is there, it is everywhere! I really do need a base, or so I think sometimes, and so I am told nearly all of the time.And so I continue to look for community, and a place where I can live comfortably doing work I love. (Or at least leave my stuff while I’m gone.) Maybe I should consider hard core journalism…being on the scene to report what’s happening behind the scenes at the planet’s latest disaster. Maybe not. Working for a non-profit? Perhaps. But non-profits as far as I can tell, are in serious need of good business managers and an army of organizers, not more story tellers.

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September 24, 2005 Back in San Francisco Well ya’ll, I’m back from Brazil. I guess you’ve noticed I didn’t post anything while I was gone, much to my self-flogging chagrin. I’m resisting the urge to lay out reams of excuses here, so let’s just say that the world is not yet San Francisco. My plans for being the blazing road blogger went the way of my four-wheel on the dunes of Northeastern Brazil. It sunk.
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Auguest 26, 2005
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

I took my Apple to the new highly touted Mac Spa in San Francisco. When I picked it up the night before leaving for Brazizl, my Mac G4 had received a new brain called Tiger. I added lots of new and improved memory, and a mic so that with Garage Band, it could function not only as my secretary, but as my traveling sound studio.

My Mac had received a new iLife!

Brazil bound and ready to blog!. There´s more than one way to tell a story I´ve been heard to say (a lot) lately.

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Posted: August 28, 2005
Ilha Grande, Brazil

I’m pecking this out during a quick pitstop on an island called Ilha Grande just off the coast of Brazil, located halfway between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. My son, his girlfriend, and I have been sailing for two days among the 300 plus islands of Angra dos Reis aboard the Leo Louca, a private 42-ft. schooner. Ry and Jess will remain on the island an extra day to explore its trails and remote beaches. Reinaldo, Bernadette, and I will set sail for the city of Angra dos Reis, where I’ll check back in with you via the internet. Tomorrow, Jess and Ry will arrive here on the ferry, and together we’ll bus to Rio.

Just moments ago, I read that some kind of disaster - a storm? - has hit New Orleans. Not a word about it until now, despite the fact that Bernadette has received numerous birthday wish calls aboard the boat. It’s unsettling AND a relief to know that it is possible to be out of the reach of CNN and BBC, if only for a few days. I am reminded once again, that the U.S. is not the center of the universe.

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August 30, 2005
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

I was out till late last night with Ryan and Jessica. We attended a huge street party in Lapa. THIS is what I didn’t get to do when I was in Rio alone last year. There was olundum drumming and bossa nova and people crowded in the streets and fresh caipirinhas and dancing all night long. And my son sending me home in a cab at 2AM.

Rio a city aptly named Ciudade Marvillosa - Marvelous City. You can feel it breathe, heave like the vital city that it is. It is winter and it is hot - not too bad today as it´s overcast, but I can go out at night wearing sleeveless tops, shorts, and sandals, and not get cold. Love it!

I´m having an entirely different experience in Rio this go-around because I’m in Copacabana among the tourists. Last year I stayed in Santa Theresa, where I will move later today. We’ve decided to stretch our stay here to a week. And so to save a money, I will move up the hill. It will be interesting to see if my experience of Rio changes with the neighborhood.

I now understand all the readers who wrote last year to tell me that they didn’t experience Rio as a dangerous city in the way I had. Even one of my American female friends told me she had a blast when she visited Rio, partying until late in the night. What I am learning this time in Rio, is that your perspective depends on what part of Rio you are living in.

NEXT DAY -

Copacabana - I can walk about safely with a minimal amount of watchfulness. Especially if I gesture, dress, and look Brazilian.

However, there WAS this incident our very first night in Rio, not two blocks from my hotel. As we stood at a street corner waiting for the light to change, a bus lurched to a stop. Inside the lit interior 0f the bus, people were standing, fists flying, shoving, jumping over turnstiles, pouring out of the bus, chasing some hapless soul down the street. Probably someone who got caught picking the pocket of a Brazilian on the bus. It served as a reminder, just a couple hours after our arrival, that Rio is a city that can at any moment break out in song OR a shooting.

Today I’m in bohemian, artist-centric Santa Teresa among the old houses that crawl up the hills, the streets that snake around and around. This old bohemian hood, it’s houses walled off, guarded by rottweilers, is surrounded on two sides by favelas. I ask Louis about the fireworks I hear going off. “Oh that,” he says. “That means that the drugs have arrived.” What about the occasional firecracker?” I ask him. “That’s to signal inhabitants of the favela that the police have arrived.”

I don’t carry my laptop in this neighborhood. Nor anything that I don’t mind giving away at gunpoint or a shard of glass.

I ask Adrianna why an end isn’t put to this terrifying hold that the favelas have on the city. She says that the police don’t do anything because they know that the favelas are as well armed as they are, maybe more so. “How can that be?” I ask. “Some say that there are insiders in the military who are selling arms to the favelas.”" Adriana, a woman who has lived in Rio all of her life tells me that the fear is always there. She says that just two weeks ago favela lords duked it out from different ends of the ????? Tunnel, a heavily used road through the ?????Mountain from Leblon to ?????. “Brazilians caught in the tunnel panicked, abandoning their cars and running for their lives.

There you have it. The Marvelous City. Heaving with vitality and set to go off at any moment.

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September 6, 2005
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Oi! (Brazilian Portuguese for hello).

I have a computer bloated with stories and photos meant to be passed on from me in South America to you in North America. But there is a language problem. My Mac speaks a different language than Brazilian PC’s. I spent hours last night trying to get online. Macs are as rare here as glaciers so you can forget about Mac support. The host of the home (castle actually) where I am staying works in I.T., but since he has a PC, he doesn’t speak Mac-ease and I don’t speak PC. He speaks Brazilian Portuguese with a smattering of English and I speak English with a tiny splash of Brazilian Portuguese. We gotta a major communication problem here.

I hired a taxi today to take me “somewhere where there is internet” pronounced internetchi. Through tunnels, speeding along highways, down residential sidestreets, our mission was to find an internet connection! He pulled up in front of “Shopping” - the Brazilian moniker for shopping mall. And he assured me that here I would find internetchi.

I walked the floors of that mall back and forth, first floor, second floor, but no internet cafe. Internet? I asked security. I asked security. They pointed me to a MacDonald’s restaurant at the end of the mall. Huh?, but sure enough, when I stuck my head inside, there were three computers for customer use. Now that’s one way to get me into a MacDonald’s.

I don’t understand. Usually the more remote a place, the more internet cafes. Perhaps the deal with Brazil is that it has gone in the past few years from third world to second, meaning lots of folks now have their own computers, resulting in little need for internet cafes, sort of like in the U.S. (ever try to find an internet cafe in San Francisco?) And so I stepped under those Golden Arches prepared to sell my soul in order to get online. Maybe I could skip the burger part I thought sneaking over to the bank of computers.

But no, a gal with a pointed paper hat motioned to me that I’d have to buy something to earn 20 minutes on the computer. I mentally reviewed the list of menu items. I don’t like coke and I wasn’t hungry. I could probably be bribed into eating a Big Mac - but there was a long snake of a line of eager Brazilians in line ahead of me. There’s only so far I’ll go to get online. I hailed a taxi and returned to Ipanema. Later that afternoon I found a book store with computers. They weren’t cheap, but they were there.

I´ll be in Rio another day or two…

Ciou (Brazilian Portuguese for goodbye.)

.
Robin

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September 2, 2005
Rio de Janiero, Brazil

I´ve just moved into a castle. No joke! I moved out of a non-descript hotel room in Copacabana, to my own little Rapunzel room high up on a hill in a castle complete with everything but a moat. You can see the Valentin Castle from most of Rio and from the castle you can see almost all of Rio - a great place to watch Carnivale, as you have a dead-on view of the Sambadrome. There is a quaint, if noisy trolley car that jerks and sputters up a steep Santa Teresa to its front door. After entering through the heavy wooden door of the castle, you walk down a long, curving underground tunnel which ends at an old metal gated elevator. One day a maid in the castle refused to leave until I walked out with her. She said there were ghosts. I believe her.

The castle has arched doorways, 14 foot ceilings, parquay floors, pointed gazebos, a pool, verandahs. My hosts are Adriana and Louis, a young working couple, the latter grandson of the architect who built Valentin Castle over 200 years ago. Louis’s mother, an government employee, occupies the ground floor flat. She finances maintancence of the castle that was handed down to her and her siblings, by renting out sections of the castle as apartments, and my room, located in the third floor flat of Louis and Adriana. My room including breakfast is $25 less than the hotel room I’ve just vacated. The castle is backed up to a mountain, surrounded by jungle foliage complete with monkeys who steal bananas from the kitchen. The neighborhood is Santa Teresa - bohemian, hip, teeming with artists and musicians. But on either side of Santa Teresa, are favelas, which lend a certain edginess to the neighborhood, especially after dark.

Carlos, a young Brazilian, began the self-sustainable Santa Teresa-based bed and breakfast business called Cama e Cafe, that is responsible for my room in the castle. The idea behind the business is that tourists’ dollars remain in the community that drew them in the first place. Since tourists demand restaurants, shopping, transportation, business, and therefore the community thrives. Best of all, tourist revenue remains in the community that generatged the ambience that drew the tourists in the first place - not to hotel chains. This great concept of self-sustainable tourism, is the reason I’m now living in a castle for less money than it costs to rent a room in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

The day I am going to move into the castle, Carlos takes me out to a local restaurant. It turns out that eating out on a Saturday afternoon is a Carioca (what they call Brazilians who live in Rio) tradition - that and getting your car washed. Sudsy, wet cars were parked all up and down the streets of Rio surrounded by kids weilding hoses and sponges. We ate an amazing meal of fresh fish, the name of which I forget, and carne del sol (sun-dried meat), feijuadas (long cooked with meat beans), farofa (a fried kasava grain that is to Brazilians, what ketchup is to Americans), rice, salad, and Bohemia beer. All around us were happy boistrous Brazilian families and friends consuming like us, unbelievable quantities of food and beer . We finished with two shots of ginger juice, a traditional Brazilian apertif . Then slightly drunk in the middele of the afternoon, and full to bursting, we walked up and around, and up and around the hill pulling my bags until we had reached the castle at the summit. We pounded on the big wooden door until Adriana rang us in. A long, dark medieval tunnel through the mountain, led us to the elevator. Up, up, up we crept, until the elevator creaked to a stop on the third floor. The door to the elevator would not open. Jammed. Now what? I was trapped in a tiny elevator with a 27-year old guy who´s been coming on to me since the last time I was in Brazil, two years ago.

Which reminds me, Carlos asked me during our meal if I was a virgin. “What?!!!” I asked, almost choking on my Bobo Camarao. “Are you a virgin?” he repeated. Then it dawned on me that he was talking astrologically. Yes, I was a Virgo I told him. He invited me to a rave on a farm outside of Rio for my birthday. I told him I’d have to see. I hadn’t decided yet when I’d be leaving Rio for Fortaleza.

At last the elevator door opened, and Carlos emerged unmolested.

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