Camille Cusumano

All photography, except for the third and fifth photos down, by Polly Cole; all available for sale; details at her site.

A family reunion in the old country—it had such a nice ring to it. But when I read my brother Tom’s email suggesting our clan meet in Sicily come summer, I had misgivings. He doesn’t remember what it was like, I thought, the 12 of us—10 siblings and two parents—under one small roof, sharing one-and-a-half bathrooms all those years ago.

These days, a family gathering means more than 50 people when you include Mom, spouses, and 39 kids and grandkids. And then there would be a few dozen relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, three generations of our late father’s first cousins. That’s a lot of pressure on the plumbing, not to mention the nerves.

I love my brothers and sisters to no end. We are your classic tight-knit big Italian family. Our affectionate (and sometimes querulous) emails stream over the Internet. Birth, christening, marriage, and occasionally an elder’s passing on are annual mandates for our inimitable brand of Sicilian conviviality.

Yet, if you look at the distance we’ve put between each other since leaving that overcrowded nest—our homes spread from New Jersey to California, from Prague to Timor, and down to Buenos Aires—you might conclude as I did that we required a lot of space to vacation together.

I knew that many “normal” families happily cruised together on city-size ships. But, I didn’t think that even a whole island was big enough for the likes of our mercurial bunch.

OK, so I was wrong this once.

It turned out to be one of the best family vacations since our parents stuffed 10 of us, crates of food, and beach paraphernalia into a station wagon for a few days at (poor) Uncle Pasquale’s beach house at the Jersey shore.

In fact, there was a fairytale aspect from the moment I arrived in Cefalú, on Sicily’s northern coast. The popular resort, an hour’s drive from Palermo, is picturesquely framed by the Mediterranean Sea and a sheer craggy rampart of the Madonie Mountains. Brightly painted wooden fishing boats park on sand or rock beaches where warm and gentle glass-blue waves lap the shore.

The family home for the next week was a palace. The Palazzo Maria, a far cry from the 1,000-square-foot Cape Cod we had grown up in, was a restored medieval building, with a restaurant and enoteca (wine shop) on its ground floor. Bordering the Piazza Duomo, it rose five floors catty-corner to the imposing 12th-century basilica, or Duomo, with its two steeples, abbey, and cloister built under the reign of Roger II.

Tom, who undertook the yeoman’s task of booking our lodgings and planning the week’s events—which would include festivities with the Sicilian branch several days after our arrival—did well in choosing Cefalú as a base. It offers a crowd-pleasing mix of beauty, outdoor activities, shopping, art galleries, cultural sights, and, of course, plenty of restaurants.

Cefalú comes from the Greek word (Kephaloidion) for head—and it’s instantly apparent why this name was bestowed on the area. The “heady” Rocca, a massively bulging promontory, 270 meters high, dominates the village. A crenellated wall and other ancient ruins crown its summit. If you don’t mind a stair-master-from-hell workout, you can hike to breathtaking (literally and figuratively) views and ruins.

Another plus was that from Cefalú one can easily take day-long or overnight excursions by car to any of Sicily’s important sites. One day, a group of us drove to Agrigento to walk the impressive Valley of the Temples. Within easy drives on Sicily’s well-maintained auto-routes are Erice with its lofty perch and mystical pre-Greek vestiges; Taormina, the aptly-called “aristocratic jewel” above the Ionian Sea; Siracusa with its abundance of ancient sites and archeological treasures; and Selinunte and Segesta where there are also Greek temples and ruins. A hydrofoil offered daily departures from Cefalú’s harbor to the Aeolian islands. But for me, having traveled Sicily often over the past 30 years, la dolce vita under my nose and spending time with family was enough.

The only drawback was that not everyone could make the voyage. My oldest brother Jim’s wife became pregnant and would deliver at the time of the trip; my youngest sister, Donna, couldn’t leave her United Nations post in Indonesia, due to outbursts of civil unrest there; and poor Mom, 84, fell and broke her hip and was still in rehab come her departure date.

However, 32 of us made a good show. Over several days in late June, we arrived to storm the palace and its six spacious, antique-furnished apartments. Each sported a plaque on its door with its name—Ruggero, Turiddu, Costanza, Guglielmo, Federico, and Joanna—and all were decorated in a rich palette of primary colors. A few families spilled over into apartments a five-minute walk from there, but the palazzo with its splendid rooftop terrace would be the nightly gathering area. We’d run in and out of each other’s flats to visit and see who had the best-stocked pantry and fridge.

Just like the old days, I shared my quarters, the airy royal-blue interior of Turiddu, with two sisters, Tina and Grace (left). We loved sitting on our little third-floor balcony with its views to sunset over the sea and the Aeolians or watching the bustle below in the cobbled square with its fringe of café and boutiques.

We could see who among our group was exercising his or her blood-right to far niente (do nothing) in the cafes whose espresso machines we kept hissing and whose stock of custard-filled brioches and cannoli we seriously depleted.

From the piazza, each day, by and by, a clutch of us would make the five-minute stroll to the main beach down narrow streets, sometimes clogged with cars and small fruit-delivery trucks. On the way, we’d pass the Museo Mandralisca, which holds archeological artifacts, such as Greek and Arab vases, old coins, and paintings, including the Renaissance Portrait of a Man by Antonello da Messina. Shops overflowing with lovely hand-painted ceramic wares, much of them from nearby San Stefano di Camestre and Caltanisetta, would stall us in our tracks.

We’d stop to marvel at the waters still running into basins under a pink stone arch in the lavatoio medievale, a former “village laundro-mat” that dates from the Middle Ages. We’d walk through another venerable Arab archway, called the Porta Pescara, and, ecco, there was the broad scallop of sandy beach plastered with wall-to-wall towels. In summer, Cefalú can get packed with sun bathers, but none of us minded them, especially the hand-gesticulating crowds, who recalled the Italian ghetto of our youth (in New Jersey).

Occasionally, I took refuge in the relative solitude of a beach at the edge of town, past the lighthouse and Torre Calura, a rocky tower ruin. To get there I had to walk a brisk 15 minutes, hugging the coast, through the Porta Giudecca, the historic Jewish neighborhood (which disappointed my Jewish brother-in-law, Dan, for its lack of an interpretive plaque); past the boat harbor; and little cottages fronted with bougainvillea, lanterna, and oleander. After a libation on the cliff-top terrace of the Hotel Calura, I’d climb down the staircase about 200 feet to the secluded beach and swim out to a rock with snorkelers.

Early or late in the day, when the sun was not so intense, some of us would make the invigorating climb up the Rocca, following the signs and arrows up steep alleys or stone staircases, then walking the dirt trail until we were atop the sheer precipice. Amid stone pines we looked vertiginously down on the Duomo and out to sea for miles. It was absolutely stunning. There were many relics to visit on the way up, including ninth-century castle ruins, a couple of small churches, ancient cisterns, the fortress wall that belted the Rocca’s precipitous border, and my favorite, a small pre-Christian Temple to Diana where I would spend some contemplative time.

One afternoon, my brother, Sal, and I walked along the rocky seacoast where young bronzed men with well-defined muscles were spear fishing for octopus (pulpo). They showed us how they stored the ghostly white fish, that appeared on many village menus, in a tide pool with seaweed. As Sal and I slid off the rock into the clear water to cool off, I said, “I hope they don’t mistake our legs for octopus tentacles.”

We laughed and bobbed in the salty sea and as we soaked in the perfection of the moment—the sun’s warmth in a cloudless blue sky, the Rocca facing us like a forbidding monolith onshore—we decided we would cook the family meal that night. This was a harmonious change from our standard political debates.

That night we added our own sizzling garlic to the smells that wafted out from the nearby restaurants. The sausage and rigatoni we cooked up for our masses was just one of our memorable meals that brought us together on the roof. After a long, hard day of sun, sand, and sea, we’d take siestas, and showers, then sip aperitifs on the square. Dinner, with respect for local custom, was never before 9 p.m. We’d all contribute goods gathered from the many town purveyors.

A spread might include marinated sardines, tangy caponata, an array of sharp and creamy cheeses, crusty breads, fresh peaches and figs, oil-cured olives, prosciutto, pepperoni, sun dried tomatoes, pesto dip, bitter greens, local olive oil, and arancia (deep-fried rice balls stuffed with meat, cheese, and veggies).

One night, my sister, Terry, made cucuzza, a tomato-rich dish packed with memories of our grandmother who grew the long crooked green squash in her garden in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Nostalgia came in many bites—from the eggplant appetizer, biscotti, and Torrone nougat candy to the many bottles of red wine, especially the popular Cusumano label (which we pretend is our relative).

Strains of Mob Hits, The Big Night soundtrack, and Pavarotti sounded from Tom’s iPod as the lemoncello, Fra Angelica, and Sambuca flowed into glasses after dinner. We shot digital photos against the stunningly spotlighted Rocca and occasionally danced and sang with the little kids. We told the same old family stories but with new twists and turns, over and over, until 4 a.m.

Although there were plenty of restaurants, our best meals were our own up on the roof. Several of us had had a few disappointments in the local eateries—no doubt the result of too many tourists in town. However, two places pleased us. We enjoyed the seafood and pasta dishes at Ostaria di duomo and Il Saraceno, both of which seemed capable of dealing with our unwieldy crowd.

THE REUNION
Then came time for the Big Moment—the raison d’etre of our trip—the reunion with the cousins in the two villages, San Giovanni-Gemini and Cammarata, where our respective maternal and paternal grandparents were born. Only a handful of us had ever met the Sicilian branch. They, occupying the land of our bloodline since time immemorial, had never set foot on American soil. Only one in their group spoke some English, while only about four of us spoke some Italian.

A bus transported nearly three dozen of us (left) to the neighboring villages, about two hours south of Cefalu. Many of us sat silently gazing out at the passing landscape, harsh and rugged, yet in places irrigated to a quilt-work of lushness to grow food. Tom pointed out Monte Cammarata, the highest point, over 5,000 feet, in southern Sicily.

Watching the bones of rock pierce through a velvet-green mantled peak, some of us thought sadly how our father should have been here for this historic meeting. He had seen Sicily only once, late in his life. But he drilled us as kids about how the island was a crossroads for every tribe of people—the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and the Serbs, Goths, Vandals, Saracens, Arabs, Normans, Byzantines, and Spanish. When he was feeling especially proud of his heritage, he had told us we were not Italian, but Sicilian. He had many pithy sayings, including his favorite, Salsiccia his own (a word-play on To each-a his own)

The bus, too long and wide to travel the village-proper streets, deposited us in a square of San Giovanni. Our cousin, Rena Tuzzolino, and her husband Enzo met us and after a hundred hugs and kisses took place began touring us on foot through the village, which I first saw some 30 years ago. It had not changed much since then and as always its Middle-Age past was still in strong evidence in many edifices.

Thirty-two of us, ranging in age from eight months to sixty-one, followed Rena and Enzo up and down narrow, winding cobbled streets. Taller than the average Sicilian and dressed like foreigners, with our Teva and Birkenstock sandals, we were a curiosity. Although my siblings and I are no less Sicilian, blood-wise, than our father’s cousins, our next two generations are a classic American stew seasoned with Irish, English, Norwegian, Ukraine, Russian, Philippine, Chinese, and African American blood. Old villagers came out of their dark doorways to peek at us and greet us with friendly nods, smiles, or handshakes.

Ducking under many sturdy archways erected during Arab rule, we visited the old Norman Church, the castle ruins, and stopped by a nondescript gray stone house. We peered in at its ground floor where animals were once kept. This was where our grandfather was born in 1887. In 1903, he set sail on the Palatia from Hamburg, Germany, for America, coming through Ellis Island. He died in 1938 and never met any of his grandchildren.

Across the way, lived Nicolo Tuzzolino, our Dad’s Sicilian counterpart. The reigning patriarch and his wife, Concetta, dwell on the top floor of the four-story marble and concrete home that also houses their four children and seven grandchildren. The home is built into a steep hillside and many times I have savored, from its terrace, vistas of the alternately straw-brown or farm-green land. On clear days, I’ve seen all the way to smoking Mount Etna.

I watched seventy-nine-year-old Nicolo’s swarthy face, framed by wine-dark hair, light up as he received us. In the past, when some of us have shown up at his home, he has burst in tears of joy. But when my father came, he was paranoid briefly that it was to reclaim the land my grandfather left behind. Nothing could have been farther from the truth—our father was a city slicker through and through.

Paces away from Nicolo’s home, Rena and Enzo led our straggling procession to the town hall, where the mayor, Vito Mangiapane (who shares a surname with our maternal great grandmother) met us and gave each of us a signed book on the history of Cammarata. He told us he was honored that we made the long trip back to his little mountain village of 6,500 inhabitants. He pointed to the town’s age-old emblem—a woman nursing a serpent on either of her breasts. It was designed by a Spanish count to represent how the Cammaratesi welcomed foreigners. “Nourish others and let yourself go hungry,” Rena translated the symbolism, explaining how the people here had always welcomed strangers.

This revelation of such extreme generosity hit a nerve as we all remembered how anyone—friend or stranger—who appeared on our doorstep at meal time was invited to sit and eat. I recalled a letter from my father, years into his empty nest, in which he said he was in the process of “adopting 10 more kids, one for each of you guys,” from around the world, spreading his postal-worker pension thinner than we could imagine.

That evening in nearby Casteltermini more than fifty of us sat down together to break bread—and twirl pasta—in the Lupo Nero, the restaurant in the agriturismo Parco Sette Lune. a 300-acre reserve with horses, donkeys, skeet shooting, and hunting. Tom who had just begun discovering Sicily in 2000 and meeting with the warmth and hospitality of our Sicilian kin had gone all out and even had commemorative T-shirts made for every one of us. They featured an insignia with our names and the date with the bright red and gold, Trinacria, the ancient three-legged symbol of the tri-cornered island. Best of all, each of us received a seven-foot-wide family tree dating back to 1834 that Tom, Rena, and Enzo had assembled.

As we all sat and marveled how Tom’s planning of this impossibly successful trip led to this moment, he stood and gave a 20-minute brindisi, or toast. Tom spoke the English and his fluent Italian-speaker daughter, Christina, (who dates home-grown Sicilian men), repeated all in Italian.

Punch drunk on wine, food, toasts, and the hyper-smiling and gesturing one does to reach across a gap of language, time, and place, we all stayed up late, well past exhaustion.

Back in Cefalú we still had a whole weekend to recover. Each day, we slowly collected in an al fresco café and discussed for hours where the day might go. The church bells might remind us there was a thing called time. We avoided the heated, nerve-jangling political debates our family often engages in. Topics of conversation were nothing more controversial than whether to have a second espresso, where to shop, or who did nephew Michael’s new, fat baby, Olivia, who was born in Italy, look like.

It was as if after years of having gone out into the world to slay our respective dragons, we could finally far niente—do nothing—but savor la dolce vita. In this sense, this trip was a coming home of the most memorable sort.
Oh, and last I heard, Palazzo Maria has had no plumbing problems.

Four generations meet in Cammarata, Sicily

Guidelines that made our family reunion abroad successful (or not):
1. We had, Tom, one person willing to take charge of the big planning—finding a suitable place, lodgings, time frame.

2. Tom used our family email list to check in regularly on who was on board with the idea. Since we spread from Prague to California, the Internet was indispensable for us.

3. He began to plan the trip and its time frame about eight months ahead of time. Because we have teachers in our family, we were not able to choose off-season times, which would have been cheaper.

4. We had the benefit of Tom’s having been to Cefalu and seen the lodgings. But still for our large group he needed to work with someone abroad—Massimo TK of Sicilian Break.

5. Each individual or families were responsible for their own airline arrangements, but we shared tips on possible airfare bargains.

6. When planning this far out, it’s important to check on lodging cancellation policies.

7. And trip insurance would have saved my brother, Jim, the loss of a lot of money on our mother’s first class airfare. Mom fell and broke her hip and was still in rehab come departure time.

8. If people had gripes with their lodgings (invariably they do) once they arrived, it was their responsibility to work it out with Massimo, not Tom, who had done his best to meet requirements.

9. Never discuss politics on a family vacation. We were golden here.

10. Eat, drink, and recall the good times with gusto.

SERVICE INFORMATION

Sicilian Break, Via Porpora, 11; tel: 39-0921-925060; fax 39-0921-922259; www.sicilianbreak.it

Information on Cefalu: www.cefalu.it

Palazzo Maria · Piazza del Duomo, 18 · 90015 Cefalù (PA), Italia · Tel. +39.0921.925060 Fax +39.0921.922259 · info@palazzomaria.it

Lupo Nero at the Sette Lune Park. The web site (in Italian only at this time) is: www.settelune.com.

A fowl obsession in Mexico

By Camille Cusumano

Armando Santiago Navarrette is impressively quick on the draw. Where I see only the dense canopy of the Mexican cloud forest’s coffee bushes, palms, gumbo limbo, and soft-shell fig trees, he sees a rufous-bellied chachalaca, a citreoline trogon, a red-headed tanager, or a golden-cheeked woodpecker. Upon each sighting, he positions and focuses his high-powered spotting scope. As I look through the lens, he flips open to a colorful line drawing of the scoped bird in A Guide to the Birds of Mexico by Steven Howell. All this takes place in under 30 seconds.

A fluent English speaker who has worked as a guide for more than thirty years, Armando has led bird lovers from as far as Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and, of course, the United States around his native San Blas. His tranquil Pacific Coast fishing village of 45,000 sits along a major flyway, a pleasant two-and-a-half-hour drive north of Puerto Vallarta.

“I have never met such cooperative fowl,” I joke with Armando after I have just logged species numbers 27 and 28—a black-throated magpie jay and Sinaloa crow—on my newly initiated life list. Both are among some 20 species, along with the purplish-backed jay, rusty-crowned ground-sparrow, and red warbler, that are found only in West Mexico.
I hadn’t planned on becoming a birder on this, my first visit to San Blas since the late 1970s. My boyfriend Dan and I had driven up from Puerto Vallarta only to take a couple of days’ backward look at my old haunt. We checked into the Hacienda Flamingos on Calle Juarez, formerly a weathered, but cheap and sturdy, 100-plus-year-old hotel where I had made my nest in ’70s.

Having noted on our drive into town some unsightly damage from the 2002 Hurricane Kenna—downed power lines and peeling or abandoned buildings—I was delighted to find that the Flamingos, had morphed into an upscale gem with gorgeous décor and landscape. Our spacious room with marble bathroom opened to an arcaded courtyard patio with leather chairs.

After a bathe in the aquamarine pool, I was content to laze, taking in a riot of color—a yellow-and-lilac stone bench here, a terra-cotta wall overhung with yellow trumpet vine and magenta bougainvillea there. But Dan, a de facto naturalist never content to leave stones unturned, or feathers un-keyed, had found in the hotel lobby this 38-page booklet, A Birding Guide to San Blas, Nayarit by Thomas P. Ryan.

In it, Ryan recommends three local guides, and it was serendipitous that we chose the first name on the list, Armando’s. When we called him to set up a trip, he must have run (flown, perhaps) over to the hotel, because he was there in five minutes outlining our plan for the next morning: “Bring lunch, bug repellent, and water. See you at 6 a.m. sharp¬—cost is $100 for the day.”

And so at this morning’s darkest hour, he arrives cocking his ear, naming the playful hooting sound we barely notice—of a pygmy owl. We drive in our rented car for less than 30 minutes to the cloud forest above nearby La Palma and hear the call again.
Dawn breaks, and the first bird we see is the fashion-conscious russet-crowned motmot. It styles a notch in its long tail by pecking away a circle of feathers a few inches deep in the tail and it makes us think of the mullet hairdo on hipsters who similarly clear-cut their hair in a circle around their skulls.

I keep waiting for a lull between sightings. But nothing eludes Armando. His eyes are peeled, his ears are ever poised. “Here that? A happy wren. It’s very speckled.” The book is already open to the image. I’m grateful I’ve worn long cargo pants, a hat, and a Buzz-off shirt which minimize the need to swat, so I can write as fast as our chirping guide names things.

“Birders love it here,” Armando exclaims, “because they can stay in one hotel in the village and depart daily to a different habitat within a sixty-mile circle and watch an astounding variety of species: pelagic, coastal, shore, marshland, flatland, mid-mountain, and high-mountain (4,800 feet) birds. In other words, they can see migratory birds, non-migratory birds, endemic birds, occasional visitors, and vagrants. They can increase their life lists by up to 300 species in a week.”

Jump-starting my own list, which will eventually number fifty-seven species in two days under his tutelage, I’m a believer. I recall a day of birding during a trip to Belize that didn’t bring this many colored feathers to my eye.

San Blas hosts the country’s largest estuary (some 200,000 hectares), which has its headwaters in the Sea of Cortes (called the “world’s aquarium” by Jacques Cousteau). So Armando leads many tourists on sea-faring trips to watch bottle-nose dolphins or humpback whales or to fish the teeming waters. But he makes the most money at bird guiding.

He tells us that San Blas started becoming a well-known secret among birders with the publishing of a guidebook in 1969 by Peter Alden, Finding Birds in Western Mexico. In 1986, another popular book followed, Where to Find Birds in San Blas, Nayarit by Rosalind Novick and LanSing Wu.

Our spirited guide’s expertise seems so second nature that it is hard to believe his amusing account of his first bird guiding trip 30 years ago. “I identified birds solely by their color, black or brown,” he says. Today he owns 17 birding books and his enthusiasm is infectious and persuasive. When he wrote an editorial in his local newsletter column, Ecologia, criticizing well-to-do Mexicans who for personal prestige kept birds caged, a rash of these pet owners set their birds free.

Even as we look for a spot to sit, he names and describes things. “Watch this vine—it’ll tie you up like a rope. . . thrrrr, thrrrr . . . that’s the call of a jay. Ah, here’s a royal lemon tree. Taste the best citrus there is— no acid.” We squeeze the proffered fruit into our water bottles for a pleasant agua fresca. He points to an elongated maroon flower, that falls and leaves finger-size would-be banana-lings.

“The Japanese import them and make banana flower soup,” he says as we plop on rocks to eat. Butterflies flit through the forest. Armando recounts an Aztec tale for one, the papillote, that received its name for its white and papery appearance. One fritillary the color of papaya lands on this very fruit which we are sharing, then flies off. “He found his papaya—now he is looking for his mamaya,” Armando laughs.

He says we absolutely must see, the nocturnal northern potoo (Nyctibius jamaicensis), a bird that scrunches up its face by day to blend in with a tree snag as it sleeps. The line drawing reminds me of a cabbage patch doll. But we would have to take an evening trip San Blas’s Rio San Cristobal. Dan and I, overwhelmed with the spectacles of six hours and some 28 species, beg off. But we enlist Armando and his boundless energy for another early trip the following day.

We take the afternoon to look around the San Blas of my “mis-spent youth.” I tell Dan how Playboy magazine had called it a dump not worth the effort it took to get there. Which was why I had made beeline for the place that is still low-key, charmingly time-warped, and not overrun with tourists or fleshpots like PuertoVallarta.

Along with waves of other aimless gringas, I had parked my bikini-clad body under palm fronds at the still-popular nearby Matanchen Bay scoping out two-legged creatures—young bronzed surfers, domestic and foreign. We all threw back cervezas and Presidente brandy. We roasted freshly caught shark on a beach grill and ate it with our fingers. We watched ingenious Mexicans burn green coconut husks to stave off sand flies. Ah, but then, most of us spread our wings for the flyway of life.

The Flamingos, a former German consulate, is across from the remains of a 19th-century customs house, which recalls San Blas’s glory days as a port center of trade, with flamboyant Spanish galleons passing through. It was also from here that the Franciscan friars embarked on their indoctrination of the Californias.

Dan and I stroll two blocks to the plaza, where we visit the decaying old church El Templo de San Blas (circa 1810), its stone and wood, a place of worship as much for the faithful as for life forms from fungi to smut to termites. Right next to it, the never-completed newer one (La Apostolica Romana de San Blas—begun in the 1960s), also in sweet decline, stands like a metaphor for the never fully conquered spirituality of Mexico.
Off the plaza is the mercado that still purveys, among the various raw ingredients of lively Mexican cuisine, much tropical produce. We buy some sugar cane to snack on and look for the vendor whose seething slabs of chile-lime-spiked jicama were once the sole and satisfying bulk of my midday meal.

We drive down the main street, Calle H. Batallon to Borrego Beach for a pleasant sunset walk, then consider where to dine. The restaurants from the old days—Amparo’s, MacDonald’s, Diligencia, Torino’s, Las Islas—are all still there offering their simple interpretations of the fresh local shrimp, oysters, lobster, red snapper, pampano, or butterfish.

But we try a new place, El Delfin, the restaurant in Canela Garzas Hotel, where the Cordon Bleu-trained chef cooks the best meal of our trip. We start with a crisp Semillon white from Chile that pairs deliciously with the tender, chunky ceviche; the butter-sweet squid; seafood-and-goat-cheese-stuffed poblano chile in a creamy salsa verde with almonds; and grilled garlic shrimp in a caramelized brown sauce.

San Blas, with its liquid boundaries on all sides, whether ocean, lagoon, or mangrove swamp, is practically an island. So there are many places to choose from for our second outing, including a hardcore birder’s paradise, the local sewage pond. We opt for a popular La Tovara (a Nuahat word meaning “where water is”), an excursion on Rio San Cristóbal, in a panga, a motorized boat, through one of San Blas’s jungle-smothered estuaries.

As we ply the brown waters through dense mangrove, dragonflies swarm the air, vibrant red bromeliads—related to the pineapple plant—burst into view. We hear the tick tick of a Louisiana water thrush. A Mexican treefrog goes burp, burp.

Within minutes, we spot the memorable boat-billed herons (they remind me of Heckle and Jeckle), ahninga (a waterfowl that hangs its wings out to dry like cormorants), belted kingfish, calandria (a stunning black and yellow bird that builds hanging nests like over-sized beehives), and several other herons —yellow-crowned night, green, black-crowned night. Oh my.

We hardly use our binoculars. The feathered creatures appear to us in foliage, tree snags, or fly so close, we can key them quickly. A cloudy sky affords perfect flat light, too. At one turn in the lazy river, Armando is uncharacteristically quiet as he keys a bird, then hands me the binoculars.

“You are lucky—it’s a rare Colima warbler.”

I don’t tell him I’m not impressed—it’s so small . . . and brownish. (But a couple of days later I read about this very species in Mark Obmascik The Big Year, in which three inveterate birders undertake extraordinary and bank-account-breaking adventures to spot, among others, that very bird. This “tale of man, nature, and fowl obsession,” proves to be the perfect companion for the trip.)

We spot from the safety of our boat three crocodiles—looking lazy, cartoonish, and benign. Armando explains that they were almost extinct but the government brought them back through farms. They grow up to 21 feet long and live to be 100 years.
We also see several coatimundi (an odd creature somewhere between a raccoon and an anteater) lounging in trees. Crows high in a sour custard tree drop the fruit to feed turtles below. And many fat, bright green iguanas camouflage themselves by hugging branches.

“The green iguana will make you a friend in five minutes,” says Armando, “but the black iguana, never. It’s very aggressive.” He explains that in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero, the iguana eggs are a delicacy. “You pay about two pesos for 20 eggs and they taste like chicken eggs.”

Driving back to town from La Tovara—having logged 26 species—we spot what at first looks like pink flamingoes. But it’s the roseated spoonbills They mingle, just off-shore on their breeding ground along Highway 15, with the snowy and great egrets They are related to the ibis, says Armando. It’s one of the most thrilling sights—and we didn’t need binoculars.

We tell Armando that we will spend a couple of nights in San Pancho (or San Francisco) on our way back to Puerto Vallarta. Naturally, he has a bird that we must see there, the lilac-crowned parrots. “It’s easy. Just turn left as you go out of town, go under the bridge. Take the trail about 300 yards. You’ll see a flock of them. You can’t miss them.”

Easy for Armando to say.

We did just as he instructed (though to this day, I wonder if we only went 200 yards). We saw no parrots. We did see a calendria and its tenement-size nest. But heck, you can see them everywhere. Now, It’s those lilac crowns I dream of now and of that comical potoo’s scrunched up face. My list will grow by at least two next time—with Armando’s guidance, of course.

SERVICE INFORMATION:

GETTING THERE – I flew Alaska Airlines direct/nonstop from San Francisco.

SLEEPS
Hacienda Flamingos , Juarez No. 105, 63740 San Blas, Nayarit,
Tel: (323) 285-0485- 285-0930; about $77/doubles til December (seems to have gone down since my visit in 2005)
Hotel Garza Canela, Paredes #106 Sur, San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico, 63740; tel/fax: (323) 285—112; about $110/doubles including breakfast.

EATS – For breakfast or lunch, ou can get some good fish tacos and other local Mexican food at the counters in the mercado off the plaza where local eat.
For fine dining and a great wine list: El Delfin in Hotel Garza Canela.
Other good local restaurants: La Isla, Mercado y Paredes, (328) 5-04-07
McDonalds, Juárez No.73, (328) 5-04-32.

BIRDING INFO:
Look for A Birding Guide to San Blass, Nayarit by Thomas P. Ryan in Hotel Garza Canela, Hacienda Flamingoes, and other hotels in San Blas. You can also order a copy at www.sanblasbirds.com or by emailing sanblasbirds@aol.com.
The local guides:
Armando Santiago – 011-52-323-285-0859
Chencho – 011-52-323-285-0716
Manuel Lomeli – 011-52-323-285-0558

WHEN TO GO – November through April.

DRIVING: We rented a car when we arrive at Puerto Vallarta airport, from National–$230 with all taxes and full insurance for 8 days. The road near San Blas was a little potholed in areas, but nothing serious, and we heeded the guidebooks’ advice to drive only by day. You can also take a bus to San Blas from Puerto Vallarta.
Highly recommended “traveling companion”: The Big Year by Mark Obmascik, an exhilarating and inspiring account of three dogged birders competing to spot the most North American species in one year.

The story below recounts my first visit to awesome Patagonia. During my second visit in 2007, I had an experience that I’ll remember for life. Please read about it at the noteworthy Perceptive Travel Web Magazine.

“I wonder when the last rock slide occurred,” I say to Holger, my German hiking companion, as we scramble, occasionally on all fours, to scale this steep rubble. Our target point, atop a nearly vertical incline, is the lookout for the three towers.

It’s another wet and windy day in Torres del Paine, Chile’s national park where these Patagonian treasures have grown up over the eons. Holger seems unconcerned with geological instability here at the stem end of the earth, where tectonic plates meet. He powers up ahead of me, no poster boy for the dangers of smoking on which I have given up lecturing him.

We hooked up back at the Las Torres Refugio, where we are lodging, to hike to one of the park’s namesake attraction. (Torres is towers and Paine, Pie-ee-nay, is transliteration for the indigenous Nandu people’s word for blue, the color of so much water here.) We’ve left all vegetation behind just after the five-mile mark of the trail to reach this slope that looks like a demolition site where a wrecking ball felled a structure and spread the jagged debris over the ridge in chaotic fashion.

Sharp-edged boulders tumble over each other precariously ready to slide with just the right pressure. But as I watch the steady stream of hikers persevering upward, I realize I’m wrong, this ground has been well trampled.

The last time I had similar visions of being entombed was in Southeast Alaska when I climbed the Chilkoot Trail out of Skagway. In fact, that trail’s last kilometer, a near 90-degree angle of stacked rock, was called “the tower” by the 1898 gold-seekers climbing the pass into the Yukon’s Klondike. It’s as if I’m ascending the planet’s mirror image of its northerly 54th parallel.

With little chance of stone cairns balancing or standing out, bright orange slashes of paint on the boulders guide the hiker toward the top. (The Chilkoot used orange poles.) Holger and I make it to the summit safely and I expect to look down on a symmetry of more talus, falling into a basin.

But the spectacle, austere as the moon, features a snow-fed jade-green lake at the base of the sheer granite obelisks. We catch up with two other fellow lodgers, Sunny (from India by way of the Bronx) and Laurie (a man, from England). Along with about a hundred other gawkers, we take in the bare bones of the uplifted granite, gray igneous monoliths still partly sheathed in black sedimentary rock. Laurie and Sunny rock-hop down to the lake for photos of the towers, named South, Central, and North. The last, at an altitude 2,850 meters, is the highest.

There is some hushed chat about a man, who appears to be in his late sixties and in good shape. He fell, lower down the talus, about the time I was worried about rock slides. He landed on the side of his face and got a deep gash that will no doubt require medical attention. It’s about eight inches long and bandaged with lots of gauze, thanks to his friends. He was determined to summit and has not let this wound turn him back. What a trooper.

Listening to the young and old who have made this pilgrimage, as they shoot images of the bald scape, I decipher many tongues. Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Scandinavian, and Japanese blend with every brand of English, from Yankee, Cockney, and Queen’s to Kiwi and Aussie. I realize that Patagonia, a land mass of Andean peaks, plateaus, and plains pocked with bodies of water at South America’s tail end, is not so far-flung these days.

I once thought it was and that I would never get closer than the seat of my pants. Going on 20 years now, I’ve owned a pair of much-loved aquamarine pants from Patagonia, the ecologically-aware outdoor outfitter founded by French climber Yvon Chouinard. My pants are like a cloth travel trunk (pardon the pun) with patches or holes on butt, knees, and thighs, representing wear and tear from many walks on the wild side. Besides the Chilkoot, they accompanied me on New Zealand’s Routeburn and Rees Dart tracks, Kauai’s Napali coast, Italy’s Cinqueterre, California’s Trinity Alps, and countless times on the Sierra Nevada’s John Muir and Pacific Crest trails, including two of the range’s “fourteeners,” mounts Whitney and Langley.

But I won’t be adding Torre del Paine’s W or Circuit to the pants’ roster. These two backpack trips, requiring four to nine days outback, carrying 30- to 40-pound packs with lots of waterproof gear—maybe cement for tent stakes—I happily leave to the world’s many younger adventurers. Their dauntless trekking affords them access to some of the park’s most extraordinary scenery, including the desolate beauty on the back sides of peaks. But I don’t envy their having to all but mortar down their tents against fierce howling winds that make grown men and women go down on their knees and crawl.

Which is exactly what I have to do on my way back to Las Torres. Holger and I have separated because I lingered in the warm atmosphere of the Chile Refugio along the trail. I had no one to cling to as I tried to round a narrow ridge corner with a drop off, which the sudden wind—seemingly 60 mph—wanted me to test. I sat on the ground until the wind settled down.

I had no more such challenges the rest of my return down the broad rolling pampa steppe. After leaving the only trees here, thin stands of “lenga,” a sort of beech tree that turns golden yellow in fall, the vegetation is all low growth, mostly the calafate or blueberry bush (pity, there are no bears, only the lama-like guanaco, here to eat them).

The landscape mimics tundra in its open expansiveness with lots of big sky. In spring there are wildflowers, including virgin’s slippers. But it is late March during my visit, fall, so I see only the late bloom of a brilliant orange-red flower of the Chilean fire bush.

I have arrived the previous day from El Calafate, Argentina, a five-hour bus ride to the park entrance. From there, a van with guide (alwaysglacier.com) gave us all a brief tour of the park before depositing us at our lodging. As we rolled over the unpaved, packed-dirt roads, I could see the visual appeal here where the Andes give way to Tierra del Fuego.

Dark peaks, many still cloaked in snow, rag the horizon. Besides the druid-like towers, a formation called the Cuernos del Paine rises above Lago Pehoé, one of many lakes we passed, whose waters seem to come in three shades—emerald, aquamarine, and sapphire. When the relentless wind blows, it’s a sight to see hundreds of frothy white caps stand up and dance on their rippling waters.

We passed many native guanaco (llama kin) foraging on the plains, who having never been hunted let humans get very close—though still, with the risk of being spat upon. I saw a bird with a wide wingspan swoop down into the low brush. Daniel, our guide said it was a caracara, a type of hawk. I wanted it to be a condor. But I’d have to wait.

We parked near a sign that said “don’t feed the foxes (gray)” but saw no foxes, and walked 1,500 feet to the Salto Grande, a waterfalls that is a mini replica of Iguazu’s Devil’s Throat. It crashes with a forbidding gurgle from Lago Nordenskjold into Lago Pehoe, The wind knocked most of us down at least once and we found we could lean a good 45 degrees into it and not fall until it died. A common photo pose here.

Although we had some rain and clouds, we were lucky, Daniel said, to have unimpeded views of the usually mist-shrouded towers and cuernos. When a couple of rainbows appeared he said notice how they are flatter, given their location here at the bottom of the earth. But he is a biologist not a physicist to be trusted with commentary on curved space.

It’s not peak season during my visit, but the park still feels crowded at times, given its remoteness. A ranger told me that in 2006, the park received 117,000 visitors, most arriving in summer (December through February) and most of them backpackers doing the W or the Circuit. Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), where I spent 10 days in 1991 camping, rafting, and hiking felt much more remote and isolated. At that time ANWR, which unlike Patagonia can only be reached by bush plane, was getting about 15,000 visits per year. Which is about how many people go through the revolving doors at Grand Central Station in an hour (or is it a day?).

I am not at all disappointed by the number or quality of people. I meet mostly foreigners, hardly any Americans, many of whom share my home of three nights. The sprawling Las Torres Refugio, a stylish wood-log structure, features quarried-stone floors, beamed high cathedral ceilings, and large-paned windows. It’s spacious, airy, and crawling with young trekkers.

Back from my hike, I find its three wood-burning stoves roaring and Holger enjoying a hamburger—before he steps outside for a smoke.
I sink into a bean-bag chair seeking solitude in a commons area where throw pillows and an acoustic guitar suggest group sing-alongs occur. My bed is a comfortable lower bunk in a cheery dorm sleeping six, but I’m the only one for two of the nights. In the morning through my picture window, I see snowy peaks, wild hares browsing, and horses running loose from a nearby estancia.

There is other middle- and high-end lodging here, including the nearby Hosteria Las Torres ($141/night) and the exclusive Explora on the edge of Lago Pehoe (four nights run $2,170 to $3,110 a person including all meals and activities like horse riding, birding trips and nature walks-NYT). But I enjoy my refugio’s camaraderie and the buzz of young people who may shower or eat there before retreating to tents in the camp area. (I end up paying about $100/day for my bed, incidentals, and two meals a day, including wine.)

I find Holger, post-smoke, chatting with Juan, an Argentine man who has saved and planned many years for this trip. His eyes glow and tear with satisfaction—Patagonia has lived up to his wildest dreams. He works for utilities in a province outside of Buenos Aires, and Holger and I regret that he won’t join us for dinner. He retreats to his room, or tent maybe, to dine alone on food he brought in to save on expenses.

Holger, who is a structural engineer, Sunny, a research biologist, Laurie, a photographer, and I all sup together on the inn’s fixed menu, lasagne with meat sauce this night. At some point they seem to forget, or not mind, that I am there, and discuss their relationships, the women who’ve left them (Holger and Sunny) or whom they left (Laurie). It’s sweet to be included. Sunny says it takes four years to make a breakthrough in his research and relationships are much harder by comparison.

Then Holger tries to get one of the cooks, a young Chilean woman, to show him her country’s folkloric dance, the cueco, which is an aggressively flirtatious line dance between men and women, with pañuelas (handkerchiefs). She demurs, saying she doesn’t have the right music, but Laurie (who recoils into stiff British demeanor) and I think she is intimidated by Hoger’s wine-induced Teutonic exuberance.

She looks relieved when we lead him outside. There we crane our necks back to see stars, silver sparkles scattered thickly over black velvet, with the translucent Milky Way achingly close. The sky is so dense with stars, it’s impossible to pick out any constellations. Someone, not I, claims to see Orion’s belt.

GLACIERS
Given my more than half-dozen trips to Alaska, it is impossible for me not to compare it with Patagonia. Especially when it comes to the ice (one web site says Alaska has half of the world’s glaciers, but there are many here and I need to do more research to see how they compare quantity wise). In a March 4, 2007, New York Times article, the reporter writes, “Nowhere else are glaciers as accessible as they are in Patagonia.”

That may well be true, given that most of the glaciers I’ve seen in Alaska I’ve had to reach by boat or plane. Twice I’ve sailed to those in the Inside Passage’s famous gorge-walled Tracy Arm, where big ships can’t go. Once I cruised to those in Glacier Bay National Park to see many more tidewater glaciers (including Sawyer, Muir, and Marjorie) calving thunderously by the minute, with sea mammals sidling up on the floes. I’ve flown over LeConte, near Petersburg, in a small plane. Three I’ve approached by road vehicle and on foot: Portage Glacier, an hour from Anchorage; Exit Glacier near Seward; Mendenhall in Juneau.

Folks, my brown eyes have seen a lot of blue ice.

And I never tire of gazing upon all those mounds of densely packed six-sided crystals. So my second day in Torres del Paine is as memorable as the first as I head toward Grey’s Glacier. It may be accessible by foot, but it’s a hell of a long day to get there from my refugio and not possible to go and return in a day. Had I gotten the right information, I could have taken a $44 cruise down Lago Grey to the glacier then hiked back. But the flow of info here is as speedy as the mail.

I figure I’ll go as far as I can. I take a 9 am shuttle to Laguna Amarga (Bitter Gap) where there is a small ranger station-cum-visitor center. After about 15 minutes a bus takes me to Lago Pehoe, where I have a scenic wait for a 12 pm catamaran.

The purser is about to de-boat me as my cash stash does not include dollars or Chilean pesos to pay. But a kind Israeli man comes to my aid, exchanging my Argentine pesos. It takes 30 minutes to sail the length of Lake Pehoé. By 1:15pm I’m on the far shore, where there’s expensive hostelry and a camp edging a broad valley, green with low stands of lenga and calafate.

The most salient aspect this mild day is the absence of wind. I let the droves of young backpackers go ahead of me, so I have to myself that rare silence in the wilderness you cannot bottle. I stop every now and then to let it fill me and my lungs and to look at the peaks off to my northeast, the cuernos or horns. There is a remarkably deep cleft, or couloir, between two. And they have names, too, Espade (sword), Hoja (leaf), Mascara (mask), Este (east) and Principal, the highest at 2,600 meters.

Up valley on the far side of the crest is a big, beautiful view of the expansive Lake Grey. I begin weaving with backpackers again who are doing the Circuit or the W. The trail hugs the ridge high above the lake through dense vegetation. I don’t make it to Grey’s face, but what I do see let’s me more than fill in the blanks.

I get far enough to see a dramatic seam in the lake waters, where it goes from clear to cloudy, suddenly thick with glacial flour ground off mountains. And I begin to see the “babies.” At least a couple of dozen fancifully shaped icebergs, some as blue as sapphire, have calved and floated away from the big mama. It’s pretty awesome, but the glacier is still a couple of hours away and I have to turn back to catch the catamaran by 6:30 pm.

My legs have no regrets. Back at Pehoe, late sun is turning the bunch grasses grass blond against the navy blue lake and shape-changing the Andes peaks, which are very close in view.

On the catamaran’s return trip, I meet a couple from Manchester England. They look very suburban, which is to say not terribly outdoorsy. But they have a serene look on their faces and they have a secret that they share with me. They came here 35 years ago. There was nothing, almost no one, not a shred of development. They hitched around, bivouacked against the elements, and experienced the fabled land that Bruce Chatwin, Patagonia’s John McPhee, wrote about.

Now they were lodging in high end comfort, while their son did the Circuit. They didn’t resent the development at all but thought it was great—now more people could come here. It didn’t detract from the emptiness they recalled. After all, the park is 242,242 hectares—California and Texas put together—so, if one were determined one could with some effort still find that isolation today.

I spend the morning of the day I am leaving to return to El Calafate at Laguna Amarga with Laurie where he sets up his camera and tripod waiting for sun to hit some snowy peaks just right. In those four hours, everything comes to me, including, at last, el condor. Charcoal black with a snowy white ring around its neck, it has a majestically wide wingspan of three meters.

First I see one, then two, then more than a dozen, flying and hunting on the nearby hillside. I change Laguna Amarga’s name to Condor Roost. Laurie and I suppose they could carry off a baby guanaco, some of whom have come down to munch near us. A little pond is filled with ducks including, striking upland geese, or caiquen, with barred bodies that remind me of herringbone suits. There are also some colorful songbirds nearby—a few long-tailed meadowlark, one singing on the ranger station’s antenna, with orange-red necks, and several rufous-collared sparrows. All we need is the puma that roams here and we’d have a good length of the food chain in one spot.

EL CALAFATE

Most visitors to Torre del Paine arrive by way of Port Natales, a scenic fishing town in Chile, a two-hour bus ride away. But, as I am based in Buenos Aires, I have come by way of El Calafate, a town that grew up around tourism. Still, it is attractive, situated on the huge Lago Argentino, and seems to have as many travel agencies as restaurants. They offer excursions to most Patagonia attractions, including Ushaia (the world’s most southerly town and departure point for Antarctica cruises), Fitzroy or Chalten (a lofty peak that you can view from a long hike) and to Perito Moreno, one of a very few glaciers that, despite global warming, is not retreating, but is in equilibrium. It’s one of Argentina’s stellar tourist attractions. You can’t go home without seeing it.

I meet up with California friends Dan and Diane, who are traveling around Chile and Argentina, to go see the Perito, which is located in Los Glaciares national park—along with 339 other glaciers. The whole excursion is packed with spectacularly memorable scenery, starting with the hour-long van ride to the park along Lake Argentina, which spreads, like an ocean, to the horizon with more Andes peak. There is a line of black silhouetted ones in the foreground against a background of pure snow-white covered ones in the distance. Absolutely stunning and unparalleled.

The park crawls with tourists but it’s quite organized. There are two ways to look upon the face of Perito, from a boat launch and from several tiers of footbridges. Dan, Diane, and I do both, starting with the launch.

We sail up pretty close to the face of this glacier, the likes of which I have never seen. It’s huge—30 kilometers long, being fed generously by the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the world’s third largest reserve of fresh water. Perito’s terminus, which is what we are looking at, is five kilometers wide, and 60 meters above the lake surface—about a 20-story building. Diane and I try to guess how much Bombay Gin and Aqua-Velva it took to turn the ice that gorgeous color.

From our perspective, the terminus-face appears so cleanly hewn, as if a giant spatula smoothed out icing on a cake. But the tall compacted ice towers are calving—casting off “rooms” or stories of ice—though not as prolifically as the tidewater ones in Alaska, about every 20 to 30 minutes. Everyone waits with bated breath and a chain of exclamations arises when a hunk breaks away and crashes into the lake. It’s better than fireworks.

From the footbridges we hear and see more calving and read a sign that says a few dozen people have died in the past few years from flying ice—hence, do not poach off bounds. We also see, perched on a branch of a lenga tree hanging over the footbridge, the cutest little pygmy owl. He blinks and lets us get really close, up to three feet—and becomes the most photographed pygmy owl in these parts. Diane thinks he might be so still because he’s going into “torpor” to conserve energy.

Back in El Calafate, we share a few good meals, including one at La Tablita— delicious lake trout and grilled lamb, which arrives on a cast-iron hotplate. We stroll the wooden sidewalks past storefronts packed with rhodochrocite, or Inca rose stone, the national gem of Argentina. It’s attractively set into much silver jewelry with turquoise and lapis lazuli.

Then Dan and Diane are off to Bariloche and I discover yet one more (unsung) treasure. The Laguna Nimez, a 15-minute walk from town, is a bird-lover’s haven right by the edge of the lake. About 100 species of birds, mostly waterfowl, use the protected wetlands around two lagoons to feed, breed, and stopover during migration (how strange to hear that birds fly north for the winter). I follow the trail around the bigger lagoon on two occasions and see many species, including black-necked ibis, coscoroba swan, Andean ruddy duck, and a few harrier hawks. Also to be seen are shovelers, wigeons, pintails, falcons, plovers, gulls, and geese. But my favorite is the big flock of Chilean flamingos, their vivid pink feathers so dazzling against the sparkling waters.

It was one more wild image to take back with me, along with a bottle of opaque purple liqueur distilled from the calafate bush berries (good thing there are no bears!). All would be savored for a long time coming.

Note: This trip took place March, 2007. The photos are from another trip to Patagonia, November, 2007. Photos copyright Camille Cusumano and Dan Taaffe.

A love apple a day keeps the doctor away
One tomato supplies 35 calories and almost half of your daily vitamin C requirement. Tomatoes are a source of vitamin A and the minerals iron and potassium. In 1995, Harvard researchers found a tomato-rich diet to be associated with decreased risk of prostate cancer-due, they believe, to lycopene, the substance that lends the fruit its color. The American Institute for Cancer Research says antioxidants like lycopene protect the body’s cells from aging damage.

By Camille Cusumano

If the colors of the West, as author Jessamyn West contended, are “the colors of earth, sunlight, and ripeness,” then a plump, juice-gorged tomato might be the perfect regional symbol. Few crops approach the taste equivalent of earth and sun that bursts forth from a bite of ripe tomato. Of course, we’re talking about a tomato that has not traveled much farther than an arm’s length from the vine.

California, to be sure, coaxes bushels of the other tomato from its sun-drenched valleys, producing 90 percent of the nation’s processed tomatoes (for canning and prepared foods) and almost 50 percent of the fresh tomatoes (a misnomer, since most are picked green). The commercial Lycopersicon esculentum is a predictable variety bred to stand up to the rigors of traveling. Trucks are piled high with tomatoes that can survive the weight of 25,000 pounds. Now that’s some thick skin.

No matter how you dice them, these rough-and-ready ones can never rival their ripe-and-ready cousins. Which is one reason that 85 percent of America’s home gardeners grow their own tomatoes. Those of us who can’t grow our own are still lucky, though. Demand for a more giving tomato that upon the slightest provocation from our teeth explodes into a tart, juicy episode is fueling a revolution.

Everyone I speak to remembers this fragile tomato and, pardon the expression, sees red because markets largely supply us with hard, lackluster spheres. And everyone remembers, as I do, a grandparent (or parent or neighbor) who grew the world’s slurpiest, tastiest tomato.

This collective memory of standing, salt shaker in hand, in some lost garden of earthly delight has inspired small growers and some big growers to cultivate tomatoes for flavor, not tensile strength. The quiet, colorful revolution is best witnessed June through November at local farmers’ markets, natural food stores, and at either of two annual festivals in Northern California.

Last September, when harvest- time was at its height, I attended the TomatoFest at Quail Lodge in Carmel Valley. This lively event, July 30 this year is (like the one held at Santa Rosa’s Kendall-Jackson Wine Center, September 9), frolicsome with music, cooking demonstrations, and a bounty of local wines and tomato dishes. Its capacity crowd of 1,200 includes people from as far away as New Jersey. For tomato devotees, the main attraction is the tasting at altarlike tables spread ceremoniously with bite-size offerings of 200 varieties of heirloom tomatoes (open-pollinated varieties passed down through generations). I took my place in the long shuffling queue, speared my first tender morsel called ace and anointed my tongue with what tasted like a ray of hope for the tomato. Savoring its depth of flavor next to the market-driven version is like drinking cabernet sauvignon next to jug wine.
people at Carmel Valley’s Tomatofest
Tomato fans sample some 200 varieties at the TomatoFest.
“Over the last 35 years, heirlooms began losing ground to commercial hybrids,” says Gary Ibsen, who originated the TomatoFest to help reverse that trend. Ibsen, author of The Great Tomato Book (Ten Speed Press), grows tomatoes in Yuma, Modesto, and San Juan Bautista, and is quick to note that good hybrids needn’t be run out of town by heirlooms. “Three excellent hybrids,” he says, “are big beef, lemon boy, and orange sungold cherry.”

But if you arrive at these festivals with only visions of time-honored hybrids-beefsteak, early girl-you’re in for a wild sensory awakening. Joining the red, yellow, and orange varieties are purple-black, blue, green, and white ones. Shape and size run from sprawling globes to shapely pear, plum, cherry, and currant; some are smooth, others are ruffled or pleated like a pumpkin. The tomatoes are segregated by color, which helps cooks match them with wines. Judy Walker, a consultant to Kendall-Jackson, says, “Lighter colored tomatoes tend to complement lighter colored wines and darker tomatoes pair with darker wines.”

But most of us had brought clean palates for the experience of pure tomatoness. The range and complexity of flavor was even more staggering than the rainbow of colors. Like wine, each varietal expressed its variables-acid, sugar, fruit-in a new, surprising pattern.

In the orange varietals, I tasted everything from persimmon and papaya to squash and carrot; the green varieties were laced with hints of lemon and other citrus; in the red tomatoes were suggestions of pomegranate, earthen minerals.

A woman in line urged me to taste an orange striped wedge called amana. It was spry, with a spike of citron and a mellow finish. The Paul Robeson, developed by a fan of the singer in Russia, was rich and robust like Robeson’s voice.

After my taste buds had a private audience with every variety, I turned to the feast where more than three dozen chefs had interpreted the vegetable-like fruit’s affinity for everything from strong aromatics, like brash and cunning chil-ies, to mild foods, like white beans and delicate buffalo-milk mozzarella. The lifeblood of Latin and Mediterranean cooking, tomatoes have long served as a hearty basis for ingredient-rich soups and stews, such as bouillabaisse, gazpacho, and ratatouille; for pasta and pizza sauces; and for salsas. At the festival, chefs had spun them in new directions-a tomato-truffle jus for risotto; a tomato-infused polenta; in pancakes with balsamic syrup; in cobblers and scones with tomato jam; in towers with olives and smoked cheese; and even in desserts-fruit compote, napoleons, and ice cream.

Tomatoes have certainly evolved from their wild days in the Peruvian Andes, where the berry-size fruit was first found. The cultivated fruit as we know it today was developed in Mexico. It reached the Old World with the conquistadores between 1504 and 1544 and for a long time was misunderstood. Germans called it “apple of paradise,” Italians, “apple of gold” (it was yellow then) or “apple of love” (another aphrodisiac to them). The British called it poison, a case of failed logic: The tomato is in the same family as deadly nightshade, or belladonna.

Food historian Clifford Wright, author of the exhaustive Mediterranean Feast (William Morrow) says the first written evidence of the tomato’s use in cooking appears in 1692 in Antonio Latini’s Modern Carver, a recipe for salsa di pomadoro, alla spagnuola. It preceded by a century the pasta sauce we know and love today, which first appeared, Wright says, in 1790, in Leonardi’s Modern Apicius.

Unlike, say, arugula or eggplant, tomatoes have long been a mainstay in American cookery-where would BLTs, Manhattan clam chowder, or the California burger be without them? As their original goodness is restored, so is their status among great chefs. California cuisine progenitor Alice Waters, who brightens salads with the striped green zebra, orders tomatoes from 15 different small vendors in California for her Chez Panisse restaurant. The caprese salad-vinaigrette-dressed tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil-is no longer just in Italian restaurants, but widely found in high- and middlebrow establishments.

Their prolific usage might explain why tomatoes, even though often hum-drum, are a major crop in California. If you’ve been subsisting all year on the poor relations, take your taste buds for an awakening this summer to Carmel Valley or Santa Rosa.

Information:
TomatoFest
(831) 620-8830; www.tomatofest.com.
Kendall-Jackson Tomato Festival
(800) 544-4413, ext. 770, www.kj.com.
Both festivals benefit local charities.

Original article in Via Magazine.

Jacques Cousteau, it’s said, put Belize’s coastline on the diver’s map. But beyond the reef and coral lies another side of paradise and you don’t have to be a marine explorer to get there.

By Camille Cusumano

Belize’s unspoiled Caribbean shores teem with brilliant sea life. With its 180-mile-long barrier reef and 200-isle archipelago, the Central American country was bound to be a haven for pleasure-seekers.

Snorkeling in warm waters and baking on white-sand beaches sounds wonderful for two days. It wouldn’t raise my pulse for eight. Beyond its seacoast, lagoons, and mangrove swamp lies Belize’s broadleaf rainforest. Twisting paths are overgrown with vines, lianas, and strangler figs. Black orchids and bromeliads proliferate amid mahogany trees and cohune palms. Thousand-foot falls and smoky rivers score the jungled face of mountains. The air waxes with the primordial calls of birds, insects, and howler monkeys, and throughout the forest, dark caves and Mayan ruins wait to be explored.

Put it all together with mountain biking and hiking, and my heart’s approaching its optimum rate. I’m not alone this April in choosing Belize to satisfy a tall order. Fifteen fellow travelers want to burn muscle, observe nature, and absorb culture on this amphibious tour, led by Backroads (of Berkeley). After six days exploring the wondrous rainforest on bikes and by foot, we’ll have our two days of liquid vacation on Ambergris, the largest of Belize’s offshore islets.

There’s not even a token couch hugger on this trip, which makes for one restless group the first day when our mountain bikes have not yet arrived. Our guides devise an appealing alternative in the Yucatecan Mayan village of San Antonio in Belize’s Cayo District.

Belize, an English-speaking country, was British Honduras from 1862 until 1973, but for three millennia it’s been home to Mayans. Our Mayan host provides distraction from itchy feet with a demonstration on carving Mayan gods in black slate, lunch of tamales and corn custard, and folk dance to marimba music. Just when it seems one more minute of “Yellow Bird” on the xylophone might reverse our contentment, our guides immerse us in nature.

In the pools of Rio On, that is, a series of water holes created as the On River flows over tiered granite. It’s our first intimate encounter with the wilderness of a country that scores high for its conservation efforts. Belize aggressively protects its rainforest, wetlands, and wildlife, with many national parks, sanctuaries, and preserves, including one for jaguars.

Our first day sans van is divided between hiking and biking, which brings us to King Vulture Falls. Across an emerald chasm, we train binoculars on the endangered scarlet-headed vultures that nest atop the falls. They pad around like tough guys in black leather and red bandannas. Maybe they’re watching us as we abandon our 21-speed Treks and hike to a vine-choked cascade, where the group’s daredevils leap 30 feet from slickrock into a deep pool.

We have yet to sight the odd-looking tapir, jaguar, ocelot, or jaguarundi said to roam this preserve. But as the day unfolds we get our share of biology lessons-from termites that distend the trunk of a tree and leaf-cutter ants that shear bushes to build “ant condos.” We set out an overripe banana and watch a blue morpho butterfly feed on it.

Israel, our Belizean guide, takes the helm, yanking at foliage, branches, and roots. He rubs an iodine-colored powder from one twig and says, “For ringworm in children.” He shows us Saint-John’s-wort, the antidepressant, and nine-leaf, used in babies’ pillows. Israel, whose childhood playground was the rainforest, amuses us as he describes a bird’s mating ritual as the Michael Jackson moonwalk. He presses the red rubeosa flower into his mouth and calls himself “hot lips.”

It’s a humid 94 degrees and our hardest day of cycling when I find my own identity. We’ve pedaled down the Maya Mountains on rolling dirt roads that are so corrugated, our bones keep rattling even after we stop. We all meet the van with the coveted ice chest in the shanty village of San Ignacio. You can almost hear cubes sizzle down sweltering flesh.

Gertie, a beauty consultant from New Jersey, and I lean our bikes against the little market and stroll the dirt roads. We give candy to barefoot urchins and locate the cinder-block home of fabled Mayan healer, Don Elijio Panti. As I fasten my helmet and mount my bike, Gertie commands in her German accent, “Come on, we bike together.”

She must be delirious, this seamlessly tanned blonde who looks ready for a high-fashion shoot even after a sweaty workout. But as we roll and her jewelry winks at me, I understand. Her eagerness for camaraderie stems from a morbid fear of Belize’s pit viper, the fer-de-lance.

As we strengthen our entourage with Terry from Malibu, I point out that we move more swiftly on bikes than any snake on its belly. Still, every vine or root clawing the dirt road is suspect and causes screams followed by laughter. I divert Gertie’s attention from the harmless striped snake she nearly embosses with her knobby tire.

Having survived all these would-be fer-de-lances, we need a name. “Cranksters” sticks-because we keep on cranking. The “club” provides the synergy we need to brave the heat. Between rounds of aimless laughter, we ford a river, bikes slung over shoulders; seek shade under palm fronds; get lost among orchards and citrus groves; and cross a ranch through cow flops and cattle egrets. We are the only ones to rise from hammocks at Black Rock on the Macal River and straddle our bikes. The rest of the group rides in the van the 8 miles to Chaa Creek.

Chaa Creek, the most magical spot on this trip, rewards our machisma. Its thatch-roof cottages are brightened by kerosene lamps and spread over a hilly clearing in the rainforest with plumeria, birds-of-paradise, and orchids.

We’ve spotted many of Belize’s hundreds of bird species, including parakeets, keel-billed toucans, and an emerald toucanette. But at Chaa Creek, the birds are having a convention. And insects have been invited, crickets on castanets, cicadas on the buzzsaw.

Each night, I imagine these arrhythmic screeches, hums, and groans coming from chanting monks or a John Cage orchestra-not bugs and birds. But one morning, amid the grieving-donkey moan of the game bird chachalaca and mournful call of pygmy owls, Israel points to nearly two dozen species of these racket-raisers. Rainbow-sherbet colors bleed across the lenses of our binoculars as we sight yellow-billed casiques, black-headed trogons, a wedge-tail saber, yellow-tailed saltater, and “that’s-no-banana-that’s-my-beak” toucans.

From Chaa Creek we can hike to undeveloped Mayan ruins, but the restored Xunantunich (Maiden of the Rock) is on our itinerary. Only the Cranksters cycle there. The others ride in the van to the site of this major Mayan ceremonial center. Its pyramid, El Castillo, rises 130 feet above the mounds, temple, and plaza, where thousands of Mayans wove the fabric of one of history’s most sophisticated societies from about A.D. 250 to AD 850. From atop the mossy ruin we sweep in views of the Peten Rainforest and Guatemala.

While the others go tubing on the Mopan River, the Cranksters pedal back to Chaa Creek. I climb a trail to the nature center and am mesmerized watching blue morphos break from cocoons, then hang their wings out to dry like satin parachutes.

Terry and Gertie take their knots and aches next door for massages at Rosita Arvigo’s Ix Chel, a place of healing named for the Mayan goddess of medicine. At Ix Chel, I purchase a few handcrafted “Rainforest Remedies,” tinctures of the plants that grow in the rainforest.

Many of us on the tour have been reading Arvigo’s inspiring book, Sastun, My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer (Harper Collins). An American, Arvigo came to Belize in 1981 to practice natural healing. In San Ignacio, she found Don Elijio Panti, one of the last Mayan curanderas (traditional healers), and asked to apprentice to him. Until Panti’s death at 103 in 1996, Arvigo learned from the bush doctor in his little home/clinic, watching him heal his countryfolk with his hands, prayers, and herbs.

Who would guess that Panti, who drew his pharmacopoeia from among rainforest plants, might leave his mark on modern medicine?

In 1987 Michael Balick from the New York Botanical Garden Institute was in Belize collecting tropical plants to study for use in fighting cancer and AIDS. Balick met and was impressed with Arvigo and Panti. With their help, he eventually shipped thousands of rainforest plants to the National Cancer Institute. Today, the extracts from five plants have advanced to clinical trials for treatment of cancer and AIDS.

Arvigo continues to practice healing the Mayan way. Thousands, inspired by her story, visit Ix Chel. Strolling the Panti Medicine Trail, built in honor of Arvigo’s teacher, I marvel at the ancient tradition that could intuit the healing properties of such scraggly looking plants as hogsplum (for diarrhea), trumpet tree (for high blood pressure), wild grapevine (an antiseptic).

With the jungle simmering, even the Cranksters are done with cycling, but not adventure. We visit Chechem Ha, a Mayan cave site with incense burners, altar, and pottery jars with morsels of corn. It was discovered in 1989, when the landowner’s dog chased a paca into it.

Our last jungle adventure shows how movies indelibly mark us. A handful of us just have to do the “Me Tarzan” swing from this vine. Johnny Weismuller made it look so easy. Not.Getting to that vine was just as tricky. It required a 2-mile scale down 400 feet of limestone cliff, a walk through a waterfall, and an upstream swim in the Macal River.

Once we’ve done our jungle time, we can eagerly watch the rainforest give way to hibiscus, bougainvillea, and the blue Caribbean. We’re one adaptable bunch, donning snorkels and fins to swim with the sharks at Shark Alley and, at Hol Chan Marine Preserve, dangle in awe over sea fans, sponges, parrotfish, triggerfish, and eels. For color, Belize’s brilliant coral and reef fish rival the country’s iridescent birdlife.

Despite being type A travelers, we really enjoy the pace of paradise-and margarita hour at our beachside lodging. One day we really kick back and boat over to Caye Caulker, a smaller islet, to lunch on local snapper. The sand streets are filled with friendly Rastafarians and American expats drawn to the ’60s feel. Shop signs sum it up: “No shoes, no shirt, no problem.” Really, I can’t think of a more suitable ambiance in which to return to our resting heart rate.

This article was first published in March 1999. Some facts
may have aged gracelessly. Please call ahead to verify information

If you’re going…

For more information: Belize Tourist Board, (800) 624-0686. For details on trips to Belize: Backroads, (800) 462-2848. Far Horizons, (800) 552-4575. International Expeditions, (800) 633-4734. Oceanic Society Expeditions, (800) 326-7491. Overseas Adventure Travel, (800) 955-1925.

Original article in Via Magazine.

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