Hello from Karl

Hello everyone. I hope you are all doing very well and liking your jobs and any new family members you may have, or are in the process of creating. Congrats if you happen to be pregnant- you know who you are (or do you?). And, Julie M.: thanks for creating this very cool blog.

Anyway, Kelly and I are back in the U.S. and it is good to be back. We are appreciating the U.S. like never before - all the good coffee, orderly traffic, tasty produce, etc.

Just a brief description of our trip: In a nutshell, we left Portland the day after my last rotation on our trusty motorcycle (a Kawasaki KLR 650) and headed east through Idaho (Carly- it was lovely, just lovely!) Then south through the Rockies and crossing the Mexican border in Arizona. Mexico is definitely a great country with fast roads and wicked tasty chile rellenos. Then we rode down through Central America to Panama City where we flew the bike to Bogota, Colombia. Colombia is fantastic country with very warm and energetic people, beautiful cities, and pretty countryside. Thanks to America’s hunger for cocaine and military aid, there is a huge police presence on the roads to deal with a high crime rate and scattered guerilla activity. My lousy driving skills (bad on pavement, worse on dirt) were tested by chaotic traffic with cars sharing our lane and country roads plugged with slow moving semis that forced us to pass on windy mountain roads. Ecuador was lovely as well, with warm indigenous people who treated us very well. We mainly stuck to the Panamerican highway which, although it is the only north-to-south road, is often in horrible shape and reduced to one lane. We were soon cruising down the squalor of the Peruvian coast which leads into the Atacama Dessert of northern Chile. Here is hasn’t rained in hundreds of years and the landscape looks lunar, with no vegetation and few towns. Two weeks of riding (Chile is loooong) found us south of Santiago, were we took ferries to different islands and coastal communities. On New Year’s, we arrived at the bottom of Tierra del Fuego where the road ends, literally. Patagonia’s winds were amazingly violent, making it difficult to simply stand up in. We constantly felt that we were about to go down as we leaned the bike into the wind, but somehow managed to stay on 2 wheels. Heading back north we spent time in Bolivia, where an election to reaffirm the Indigenous president Evo Morales was underway (he won). There, we rode through amazing Andean terrain with salt flats, llamas, flamingos, and hardy people who make a living by herding and farming in an infertile landscape. After crossing the Andes we drove back to Ecuador and flew to Panama where we biked northward to the States by way of Belize (yes Clay, some lovely fish were caught). After around 25,000 miles we are thankful to be back without any serious accidents or illnesses, aside from some diarrhea (details spared).

Pics: Camping in the Bolivian altiplano, Torres del Paine Park, church in San Pedro de Atacama.

Anyway, we are settling in the four corners area where we will both work at Shiprock Indian Hospital while living in Cortez, Colorado.

If any of you are in the area, our house is your house - come visit. And if you ever feel like working in Navajo country, give me a ring. The patients are sick, the pay is pretty good, and thankfully there is loan repayment.
Cheers. (And a special thanks to Skye and Sam who watched our mutt Tanaya!)