I should be dead.

I should be dead so many times over.

There are so many stories I never told my mother, because I really should be dead.

I only told my mother about malaria the first time I was sick.  It kills more people around the world than AIDS, but it just doesn't tend to make the news so much.  And, when my mother learned about the first time when I was in the Peace Corps, I knew better than to ever tell her about the other four bouts with that disease.

Yep, malaria could have killed me.

I don't have the best record with transportation either.  My best scar is on my right elbow.  I got that flying over the handlebars of my motorcycle while in the Peace Corps.  I'm one of the reasons why Peace Corps Volunteers are not allowed to ride motorcycles any more.  I had multiple wrecks.  Once upon a time, motorcycles were the number one way that volunteers were killed while in service.  I still stay away from motorcycles if I have to drive them.

I've had problems on buses too.  I've been involved with a minor wreck in Morocco and a head-on collision in the Ivory Coast.  Then, a tap tap (public transportation truck) in Haiti lost its breaks as we careened down a hill.  The only option was to hit a vehicle in front of us or run into the ditch on the side of the road.  We actually did both of those options.  The vehicle slowed us down before the ditch.

And, there's my driving.  I totaled my car once, spinning out of control on a gravel road.  Two trees, one on each end of my car, prevented me from flipping over and dropping ten feet into a ditch.  There were only two trees there that could have stopped me.  My car managed to hit them both just right.

Walking hasn't always been safe either.  While crossing a bridge in the heart of the Ivory Coast's capital, my two friends were nearly mugged.  Some men tried to steal their backpacks.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the rogues chase after my friend, his arm raised with a knife in his hand.  I ran after them both.  What do you do when approaching a rogue with a knife?  I took a flying leap into the air -- Superman's got nothing on me -- and knocked him to the ground.  It was later that I learned that those rogues never hesitated to slice people up with their knives.

Yep, I should be dead.

Even on my most recent trip to Fiji (I know, no sympathy.) I took a major fall in the dark on a wooden stairs.  My leg slipped into the space between the steps as I fell down to the ground.  I don't see how it is possible that I didn't break my leg, knee, wrist and skull.  All four were cut, bruised, sprained or bumped, but I basically walked away unscathed when it could have been a disaster.  It should have been a disaster.

Other stories include typhoons, earthquakes, an angry voodoo priestess, near drowning, prison and poison.

See what I mean?  I seem to have more lives than my two cats.

I've always joked about guardian angels.  Some people have suggested I've worn mine out and should get new ones.  I reply on those occasions that I'm not giving up on angels that have done such a good job protecting me.  My mama didn't raise no fool.  She just raised a son who never stayed as close to Ohio as she preferred.

Well, this week as I channel surfed in my car one day, I stopped on a Catholic radio station.  I've never done that before in my life.  I'm not Catholic.  But, the conversation captured my attention.  They were discussing guardian angels.  I've never really heard anyone seriously discuss guardian angels before.  I don't think I ever actually considered them as a real possibility.  Bible passages were cited and the Catholics even had a prayer for guardian angels.  Who knew?  I didn't.

Okay, now I'm seriously not going to ask for a replacement.  The guardian angel assigned to me has been doing a super job and never once complained about overtime.

I will continue to wander away from Ohio, protected.

A couple of years ago, I traveled from Cancun, through Belize and Guatemala, and on to Honduras.  I've had a lot of amazing experiences in my life but this is one of the top two months that I remember.  (The other, if you are curious, was my return to Liberia this year.)  It wasn't discovering the Maya ruins of Chichen Itza, Tikal or Copan that made the trip so memorable.  It was the amazing personal connections I made along the way.  This was my second trip to this region and I was on a mission to find some people I photographed on the previous trip.  I'd drawn some portraits of those who crossed my path.  I wanted to see if it might be possible to give prints to some of the individuals who inspired me.  I'd never been able to do this in the past.

I had success beyond any expectations.  Imagine the shock that these strangers experienced.  First of all, they were amazed that anyone would take the time to draw their portraits.  Secondly, they were shocked that I made the effort to look them up.  Javier, once a mighty Aztec king in my photograph, hugged me.  Two Aztec warriors on the beach were so grateful that they each plucked a feather from their headgear and very formally presented them to me.  You know they can't do that too often.

I'm not sure which of us was more moved.

And then on my return home, riding the bus to the airport, I sat in front of this young man who had the most "wonderful" time in Cancun.  He talked loud and long about all the different parties he attended in Mexico.  Seriously?  If your only reason to travel to another country is to drink all you can possibly consume, there is no reason to own a passport.  Save yourself a lot of money and stay at home.  I was truly sorry for the young man.  I had such an amazing experience on this trip and this traveler simply had no clue.

You have one guess as to who sat behind me on my flight out of Mexico.

And now this brings me to this week when headlines like "Liar, Liar, Speedo on Fire!" embarrass our country and totally offend another.  I know I've made mistakes.  I know I've told lies.  I know I'm not perfect.  But, this situation is way beyond "boys will be boys".  It has me shaking my head again how some people can travel to the ends of the world and completely miss out on what they really should experience.  The best of Brazil is not in some nightclub that remains open until dawn and leaves you incapable of acting maturely and responsibly. 

In this whole situation, I think there is one hero who has almost totally been ignored by the press.  One Brazilian man, who spoke English, tried to help resolve the situation at the gas station.  Imagine just how very brave that was!  Those Olympians were big men, big drunk men doing disorderly things.  I don't think I would have been brave enough to step in front of them and try to ease any situation.  He's the unsung hero in all of this, and he is certainly the kind of person I hope to meet in my travels.  He is the best of Brazil.

I know we live in a culture where everything celebrities do, both good and bad, makes the news.  I'm much happier being the most non-famous world famous artist around.  My art is used in schools around the world and my murals are in twenty-four countries and counting.  Yet, nobody knows who I am when I arrive on the scene.  Still, I gather cultural experiences and friends who sincerely want me to return, after each mural experience.  I think I'm doing something right.

Now, you get one guess as to where my next mural location is scheduled.  I'm hoping for no international scandal or national embarrassment.  And, I know I will not be out all night long in search of a hangover.

Yep, Brazil.

   

Sometimes life is so hard.  To get to Nauru on the proposed date, I had to fly to Australia.  However, I missed that date and flew to Nauru directly from Fiji three days later.  But, my return flights remained the same and for the first time in all my travels, I came to a land “down under”.

I keep track of the countries I have visited.  Some of them are no longer countries (East Germany and Czechoslovakia).  Some of them were really colonies at the time (Macao and Hong Kong).  And depending who you talk to, one of them never, ever was a country.  (Transnistria)   They all count as far as I’m concerned.  So, this first trip to Australia is memorable for lots of reasons.  But, perhaps the most remarkable is the fact that it is country number one hundred on my list of places visited.  It’s been a long time coming.

My flight was to Brisbane, with a brief connection on to Melbourne.  However, there was one little glitch in my scheduling.  I didn’t notice that my departure wasn’t an “AM” flight.  Nope, I had a twelve hour delay in my plans and a surprise day in Brisbane. 

I thought maybe it would be good to spend the day at the hotel attached to my computer.  I’d been Internet deprived for most of three weeks.  However, the woman who ran my hotel didn’t agree with that at all and wasn’t afraid to say so.  She sent me in the direction of a lovely boat ride from the airport to the center of town.  The skies were blue, the sun warmed up, and I had to agree that the woman knew better than me.  And, she liked hearing that.

I teamed up with a fellow wanderer in Melbourne.  I met Shane while painting a mural in Albania.  He tried to help me get involved with an international mural competition in Tasmania, Australia.  Alas!  I was not invited to participate.  And, I’m not so very forgiving.  They will never get another entry from me and they just don’t know what they’ve missed.  That event was this past Easter, while I painted murals in Liberia.  I never dreamed I’d set foot in Australia just five months later.  Yep, the universe has some wonderful surprises at times.

Shane said there was absolutely one thing that I had to see while in his part of the world, the Twelve Apostles.  My list was a little different and a whole lot harder to do.  I wanted to see kangaroos in the wild.  A friend of mine in Ohio considers deer to be rats with antlers.  I think that kangaroos are in the same category, rats with pouches.  Neither “rat” is all that easy to locate when you want to find them.

The Twelve Apostles are dramatic rock formations along Australia’s southern shores.  The beaches were lined with towering cliffs.  The apostles, formed by the constant erosion of the waves along the coast, stood as columns in the waters by the shore.  The waves continue to pound, and they have successfully caused a few of the apostles to fall.

It’s possible – though not recommended at all – to see the Apostles on a day-trip tour from Melbourne.  Vast hoards of tour buses arrive at the park around two in the afternoon.  Even with winter’s chill, it’s still the top attraction in the state of Victoria.  I, fortunately, spent the night at a bed and breakfast in the nearby countryside and arrived at the feet of the apostles several hours before the trippers.

And, there was another reason why I was happy to stay at that inn.  The owners knew I wanted to see kangaroos.  On occasion, kangaroos and koalas roamed on that very farm.  But, it was cold and damp.  Very cold and damp.  Too cold and damp to go wandering unless success was guaranteed. 

There were no guarantees.

However, just before leaving, the owner popped in to suggest another little village that we never would have considered otherwise.  If I was going to see kangaroos in Victoria, this was most likely the place.  So, it had to be explored.

A local connection, anywhere, is always a valued treasure when traveling.  I guess nobody ever told the tour buses about our secret destination.  They were nowhere in sight.  And, I’m not spilling this secret because I’d hate to see it ruined.  And, it would be ruined.

Yes, I saw kangaroos.

This location had a mob (yes, that’s what they’re called) of about six or eight kangaroos just over a small hill.  They were close enough to photograph, but certainly too shy to let me get nearly as close as I’d like.  Then, I spied a mob scene in the distance.  It was about 35 to 40 kangaroos!  Shane had never seen so many together in the wild.  I was so very pleased on a trip that was mostly a rerun experience for him that he shared this great Aussie moment.

The trip down under was short and sweet.  I find it better to stay too short than too long.  And, after three weeks of muraling in Fiji and Nauru, I was ready to go home.  But, it was a very memorable time in Magnificent Melbourne.  Number one hundred did me well.

I’m kind of hoping that my next one hundred countries doesn’t take quite so long.  And, I have an extra day to start the process.  I left Australia at 10:00 AM and arrived in the US at 6:00 AM the same day.  I love crossing the International Date Line!

I was in Nauru five days and I spent every day looking at the same wall.  I had one brief tour of the island’s interior, but the rest of every day was in the heat, trying to remain under a faulty tent for shade, usually ten hours a day.  Under the circumstances, it was a little hard to meet a lot of people and do the usual things I do when I travel.  I saw no little market places.  Nauru had no buses.  There were no taxis.  There really weren’t any kind of destinations.  And besides, when I travel, I don’t normally go out at night.  I went back to my hotel every evening in recovery mode, falling asleep early. Then, I faced the heat all over again.

So, the final day of painting, I felt a little sorry for myself because I hadn’t had my usual experiences.  But, the universe decided to smile down upon me.  First, people showed up to see the mural progress.  Then, they took so many photos of the mural, of me with the mural, of themselves painting the mural and of me surrounded by them.  And why, you may ask, did it happen on the last day?  Because, they heard about the project on the national radio station.  It was news to me.  I hadn’t really done a radio interview, but the dialogue from the television segment worked well.  I hadn’t actually seen the tv spot, until today, and I came across intelligible.  Nobody really wants to look stupid on national programming, no matter which nation.

As I painted the final strokes on the murals, which you should know were the eyes, the rains began.  Tropical rains.  Flooding rains.  Soaking rains.  And, thankfully, cooling rains.  They didn’t last long.  They didn’t ruin anything on the mural because the winds came from the proper direction.  Besides, I’m fairly convinced that all paint was cooked dry as soon as it was applied to the burning wall surface. 

The storm clouds disappeared as quickly as they arrived.  And, with the clearing came the best treat of the day.  Aquinas, one of my painters from day one, also performed in a traditional dance troupe that recently represented Nauru at an international program in Guam.  There were no performances while I visited the island, but Aquinas relented after incessant begging, and showed up for a photo shoot.  Not only did he look tremendous in the outfit he created especially for me, but he sprayed himself up with coconut oil.  He smelled delicious.  There were about nineteen members of his troupe, but Aquinas assured me he was the best looking member.

And, if you need F.Y. I. like me, here goes.  The complete attire for his Eamwit tribal costume was called an ekirira.  The Eamwit are one of the original twelve tribes on the island, represented on the twelve pointed star on the Nauru flag.  The skirt, which he himself wove from coconut leaves, was an ebweni.  Aquinas said his great grandmother passed that skill down to him.  Orange, woven throughout the costume, represented the Eamwit people.  The black and white bands stood for the black noddy bird as well as the white dove. The big shell on his hip was mother of pearl while the smaller shells on the necklace were found on local beaches.

I wasn’t sure I was going to get a portrait photo while in Nauru.  All fears were set aside.

As I returned to my hotel for my final night, again in recovery mode and about to fall asleep way too soon, I had to smile.  I spent five days in Nauru basically looking at a wall.  I didn’t have exactly as much time as I would have preferred, and there was a good dose of stress along the way, but I still managed to have an excellent cultural experience.  And, I pulled off an incredible mural, number 48, with the help of some very wonderful people in the Yaren community.