{"id":672,"date":"2010-03-04T15:20:12","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T22:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/?p=672"},"modified":"2010-03-04T15:20:12","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T22:20:12","slug":"playing-tourist-4wd-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/04\/playing-tourist-4wd-style\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing tourist (4WD style)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today in our travels, we thought we’d just play tourist. So we signed on for an expedition into the cloud forests. Things got a tad adventurous when our wonderful guide (the young guy in the backwards hat in the photo) decided to take us off-roading.<\/p>\n

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The vehicle — a 1979 Toyota Land Cruiser — was certainly equipped for it. (And oh boy, do I know a young man who’s going to be very envious of that Toyota.)<\/p>\n

This particular Land Cruiser has more than 2.5 million kilometers<\/i> on its engine!<\/p>\n

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To explain the picture above, I could make up a hair-raising story about how we broke down miles from civilization and were in danger of being eaten by cannibals or swallowed by giant snakes. But actually, that’s just a fellow tourist (a scientist and all-round curious guy) who simply had<\/i> to look at such a remarkable engine. <\/p>\n

What the rest of us were doing during this stop was sampling some very strange fruit. To wit:<\/p>\n

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To eat this thing when no kitchen tools are handy, you cut the top off, squeeze until the pulp bulges, then suck it out. Tastes like a weird cross between a peach and a tomato.<\/p>\n

I can’t tell you the local name. But the tree it grew on translates into “tomato tree” in English. And sure enough …<\/p>\n

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This was just one of the many odd things we saw today. I’d post more, but the people on dialup or other slow connections are probably already cussing at me.<\/p>\n

Oh … okay, just one more, since I thought it was so funny. Although we’re in the tropics, conditions aren’t necessarily what you think of as tropical when you’re at altitude. And yes, it was a bit misty in the mountains today. We tourists were in shirtsleeves, or at most light rain jackets. But here’s our trainee tourguide — wrapped in fur-lined hood and gloves, and still shivering.<\/p>\n

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We saw other locals done up like that yesterday while we were sitting in an open-air restaurant dressed in tee-shirts, happily basking in the — to us! — glorious weather.<\/p>\n

I guess these things are all relative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today in our travels, we thought we’d just play tourist. So we signed on for an expedition into the cloud forests. Things got a tad adventurous when our wonderful guide (the young guy in the backwards hat in the photo) decided to take us off-roading. The vehicle — a 1979 Toyota Land Cruiser — was certainly equipped for it. (And oh boy, do I know a young man who’s going to be very envious of that Toyota.) This particular Land Cruiser has more than 2.5 million kilometers on its engine! To explain the picture above, I could make up a…<\/p>\n

Continue readingPlaying tourist (4WD style)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travels","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}