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Originally Posted by jopperm2 I was actually trying to be dsomewhat facetious as I'm sure PJ was too. |
That's not what this means: "That about sums it all up for me. From what I have heard, no matter how satirical his narrative is, Mr O'Rourke hits the nail on the head with this one." In other words, you're saying he's accurate, on the basis of no prior experience on your part, but because he's a guy who has the same political bias as you. All I have going for me is the fact that I know he's full of it, because I've been there a couple of times, and know his story doesn't check out. I realize that puts me at a disadvantage, but still...
I've heard from friends of mine.. I used to hang out with hippies and other such. Many of whom have gone on such trips only to be disappointed that the only difference between the trip and sitting in front of the discovery channel was no A/C.. A large portion of these things are highly commercialized gimmick machines like the one described above.
The Amazon isn't a place hippies go. It's a rain forest, not Costa Rica. So I've no idea what you mean in the above. The two packaged trips we tried in Canaima and Porto Ayecucho were certainly not "commercialized gimmick machines," and I find it difficult to believe that most such arrangements there would be. Nor have you provided any evidence they are. The information O'Rourke provided was on the very far side of unbelievable.
The trip that he took was designed for 30, but was only 6 due to violence in Peru at the time. The ten loud women were hippies bound for elswhere. I'm sure they were quite concerned with the .65% of people in the Hawkeye state that are homeless.
This is what Mark Twain meant by "lies, damn lies, and statistics." "Less than 1 percent of Iowans" sounds tiny, but 19,000 homeless people, two-thirds of them children under the age of 12, sounds a lot larger. It sounds larger still when you recall that you said there weren't any, in another post.
Like I said earlier, I used this example to point out how much of a farce a lot of these trips are, hence no native languages, or music. The natives in that area listen to Spanish style music and speak spanish just like everyone else in Peru.
We experienced two of these trips, and as I wrote above, none of it mirrors the heavy-handed satire of O'Rourke. If you have some honest, factual accounts of trips to the Amazon from your friends, with some detail, I'll gladly hear it. Until then, it certainly sounds like you're just buying O'Rourke's line because you like his politics, where humor substitutes for fact.