trip trap

goodbye

2007-05-31T14:15:00.000-03:00

dear readers,

this blog is now closed. due to the recent snow, the plea bargain, and my lack of sleep my attorney's have advised me not to comment. however, to give a little hinty-hint it's got to do with the NEW BLOG that i've got going on. this NEW BLOG is not about travelling and is about being an expat in buenos aires. I highly recommend the NEW BLOG. Please update links where applicable. Etc, et al.

Lots of love,
Nathan

PS.
NEW BLOG

Life Takes Visa

2007-04-10T16:13:00.000-03:00

I just read this article called Monopoly ditches cash, goes plastic. My understanding is that this is relatively old news but then... Visa Takes (on) the Game of Life.

This is nuts! Games are meant to teach things. One of the only redeeming qualities of Monopoly is that it teaches small kids to count cash and, hopefully, use it wisely. Life is similar. For little kids, who are realistically the only people who will enjoy these two games, should be learning arithmetic. The Visa Card essentially puts a branded calculator in the boxes. Except it's worse. Research, which I heard somewhere once, says that people spend about 15% more with credit cards than with cash so we're certainly teaching them something, but what?

What is a good game to play when you're sick?

2007-03-20T12:27:00.001-03:00

Do you have folks to play with? If you do, you guys probably have your own games you can play and you probably don't want anything structured anyways. But let's say you have 4 or more folks who you can play with: ASSHOLE. It's a fun game because you can roleplay the with the Great Delmuti terminology. Just now the President is the Great Delmuti and can be a kind and benevolent ruler or a mean one. The Vice President is the Lesser Delmuti to be respected not as much as the Greater Delmuti. And the Asshole is the Peon, who can be either subservient or rebellious, whatever.

The real fun of the game comes from playing your role. If you're sick and the peon you can moan and be miserable and oppressed. If you're the Great Delmuti you can just lie back and order around the commoners who kiss up to you.

But the real issue about being sick is not what to do with your friends, it's about what to do when you can't think and you don't want anyone around and you're too tired and irritated to do anything creative. You'd stare at a computer monitor but it gives you a headache. Nope, you need something low key but interesting, yet something you can put aside so you can drool and stare at the wall.

Knitting? Yes!!!! but if you want to a game, i highly suggest Choice (also called Dice Solitaire in Sackson's Gamut of Games). All the rules you need are downloadable from boardgamegeek.com. All you need are 5 ordinary dice and pencil/paper to keep score with.

Learning new games is no fun when you're sick so I highly recommend learning these before getting sick and adding a deck of cards and dice to your "Sick Kit" (you have one don't you?). Even better, don't get sick.

Anyone know any more games?

My companionship / Massages for a Car

2007-03-16T17:08:00.001-03:00

Looks like folks in Buenos Aires are learning a bit about the wonders of craigslist.

My companionship / Massages for a Car

Reply to: sale-294885816@craigslist.org

Date: 2007-03-16, 5:45AM ART

Hello,

I'm a single lady 29 y/old. From here,very sexy. I would really love to have a car -suv . I can trade my "time" for it. I'm very outgoing, sweet intelligent.

Serious replys Only,

Sofia

I reside in Buenos Aires.

* Location: Buenos Aires

* it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 294885816

Supermarkets: Buenos Aires

2007-03-16T11:12:00.001-03:00

I had two great supermarket experiences yesterday:

LUNCH
I brought some nice lentil soup to work and then thought to run to the supermarket to buy some bread rolls. So it's lunchtime and there's tons of people at the bread counter. You grab a number. Unfortunately I was holding mine (98) upside down and I thought it was 86. So the helper lady calls out the next number (me) 98 and it takes me a second to recover. Only a second but in that time someone has already said "I'm number 99!" and been helped. She commiserates with me "Oh. You shouldn't hold your ticket upside down" she says. Yeah. I know. So in theory I should be the next person. The lady behind the counter knows this but she still calls out "Ok. 100" WHILE LOOKING AT ME. So I say "Oh, I'm 98." All I want is two pieces of bread. But then this guy (Number 100) says "Hey, all I want is..." and then he lists off a few things but he does it like he's ordering it. He's way sly, like he just completely cut in front of me, KNOWING that he's screwing me over for the second time. I say "Ok. Well I'm first and all I want are two pieces of bread." So he and I have both said what we want and as far as I'm concerned it's up to her to decide who to serve first. The lady behind the counter looks at me, waits, almost as if to say "Do you really want to go first?" I get the distinct idea that I'm breaking some cultural rule by taking my rightful place in line. The guy chimes in in this pleading voice: "I have these raviolis and they're getting cold. Please let me get out of here without my raviolis getting cold." The counter lady slowly goes towards the bread and, still with this look on her face as if I am forcing her, takes out the bread, puts it in a bag, weighs it, and gives it to me. The guy says "Oh. you only wanted to get bread. I thought you wanted to get facturas and sandwiches and... Oh, you're just like me. You just wanted to get something small." He is still talking as I walk away.

It's so crazy because when I first got here I would have just bowed out and let the guy go first. After all, I'm a guest in his country. I think becoming a legal resident has given me this kind of backbone I didn't have before. It's hard to respond quickly when you don't speak the language (which is what started the whole episode) and when I return to the States I vow to respect people who don't speak English as their first language a bit more.

DINNER
I was returning from work and I went to this large supermarket near my house. It's an upscale neighborhood and I always see things in the supermarket that seem interesting and new. So this time near the cheese section I see this dried fish for really cheap. So I buy 5 pesos of it and am going to take it home to see what it is and what it tastes like. I feel adventurous, putting it in my basket.

What I really came to the store for was some onions and while I'm getting them the guy who weighs the vegetables asks me how to prepare my dried fish. "I know you can't just take it home and eat it" he says. "Right" I say, faking like I know what I'm talking about. "So how do you prepare it?" he asks. "I don't know exactly" I say. In reality I don't even know what it is and if it didn't say it was fish on the label, I wouldn't have been able to tell him. "Right. But you have no idea at all?" "No. I really have no idea at all." He looks at me like I'm crazy. I don't know what to do so I just say "I'm buying it for a friend." That seems to satisfy him. He finishes weighing my vegetables and, as I walk away adds, "I would buy some if I knew how to prepare it but I don't have any idea. All I know is that you can't eat it like it is now. You really have NO IDEA?" I smile bravely as I walk away, but as soon as he's turned to help another customer I sneak the dried fish back to it's place on the shelf, where it belongs.

In the Shadow of Fu Manchu

2007-03-14T14:49:00.001-03:00

Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. –The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu

You can listen to the 1933 series here. Kitchy to the extreme.

Visiting Friends

2007-03-12T16:24:00.001-03:00

One of the things all expats love and dread is the visiting friend. "Oh, you're in Buenos Aires? How lovely! I'll stop by. I only have a few days but we can go see all the sights together!" There is that delicate balance because living abroad means that you haven't seen these guys for awhile and you aren't going to see them again for awhile.

It's great to see them but I get the same feeling as when I'm at a tourist site. It's like I feel obligated to "do" things. Like there's something I ought to be doing. This is, of course, all in my head. The friends actually don't really care at all. Much like families at Christmas, expats tend to imagine the "ideal" visit to Buenos Aires and prepare it all for their friends.

For me there's historically been a crazy: my world here is different than back home. I feel a bit schitzophrenic because they think I've changed but I haven't. It's more like I just have a different life because stuff here is different from home.

You realize all these crazy things about yourself, about your friends, about your life and about the city. It's a crazy litmus test. It's essentially travelling without travelling.

It's pretty amazing to be able to invite another world to sleep on your couch.

barely legal: getting a work permit for argentina

2007-03-09T16:21:00.001-03:00

When I was first hired as a project manager I asked about a work permit. My boss told me that we should wait a year and then see how useful I was to him. A year later I asked again and he said we should start the process. That was last September.

For a US citizen, the process begins with getting an original birth certificate and a background check from the USA. These then need to be certified, translated by an official translator into Spanish and then apostiled, a word with which I have become intimately familiar. This is probably easier if you are in the United States but I wasn't and basically my mom did all this. It took her a few weeks and it only worked because we have a family friend who is a notary public.

These items were then sent to me and the long slog of bureaucratic bungling began. The forms were sent off to my company's lawyer and a few months later we heard back from them. After weeks of wrangling over trying to get clarity of what I did or did not need, the office secretary assured me that everything was ok and that I should just relax. Every week I asked her if things were going well with my application and every week she reassured me that she had called the lawyers and that all was fine. After about two months of this it was discovered that about the only thing that our secretary was doing was embezzling lots of money. She was fired and it became clear that no progress had been made on my application.

After the new secretary was hired, things began to bumble along. There was an English guy at the office applying at the same time and it was good to go through the ordeal with someone else. It was hard to imagine the level of disorganization. One of the things we had to do was to get fingerprinted. We called the lawyer to get a date to do this. He said Monday. However, when we arrived at his office, he was not in and his secretary had not heard of us. His assistant glared at us drunkenly because we had displaced him from his seat. After waiting for 45 minutes the lawyer was located and the assistant was instructed to take us a few blocks to the fingerprinting place where we would meet the lawyer. He turned out to be a tall, thin fellow who looks like he is consolieri to the Argentine mafia. He explained to us that it was his understanding that we were to call him to confirm that we were coming and, as a result, he had not done what he had said he would do. This was an absurd lie but since the secretary had made the appointment, there was little we could say.

The next and final step was to go to the consulate in Uruguay. He told us that there was no need to book this because they were always available. Later he told our secretary that we would need to wait another month or so.

But the point is that this is something that CAN be done, despite the ridiculous bureaucracy, and yesterday my coworker and I went to Uruguay and received our Permisos de Ingreso to enter the country as legal workers.

THE NICE CONSULATE WOMAN

checkmessenger.net

2007-03-07T10:26:00.001-03:00

In Buenos Aires, the big craze is MSN messenger. The first thing we do when people start at my office is get them a .net account and download the latest version of messenger. It's crazy. We all sit in rooms surrounded by people with headphones on and we "chat" by typing into our computer. It's like a library. I feel bad to talk.

People live a lot on this thing. They use it to keep in contact with distant friends, to share pictures and songs. A little message displays their mood, a quote or even what song their listening to. Being someone's internet buddy can be quite intimate.

But then the time comes to stop being internet buddies. Perhaps you broke up in real life, perhaps you just don't want the bother of having to make idle chitchat with old friends. Whatever the reason, messenger includes the option of making yourself disappear completely from someone's life. They can never tell if you're online, any messages they send get lost in the mail, and the best part is that they don't even know you blocked them. At least... until now.

For awhile now there's been this thing called CheckMessenger which allows you to check to see who has blocked you. This revolutionizes the idea that you can anonymously disappear. Undesirables still can't send you messages but now at least they know you don't like them. Furthermore there's a badge of shame associated with checkmessenger because if you use the service it temporarily replaces your name with an advertisement for their site. As you log in, there are a few seconds that all your friends can see that you don't trust them and are checking to see if you don't like them.

but... are there bagels?

2007-03-06T17:01:00.000-03:00

I love the Lonely Planet Thorntree. It's this place where people who really have no clue at all can ask folks who're actually in the places they're going. And it totally works. They get real (conflicting) opinions! It's great and you can give as well as get.

I was just visiting the Uruguayan Thorntree thread and there was this question there.

are there bagels in Montevideo? how to get them there?

I have a child visiting Montevideo on a term abroad. He misses two things: his cat, and BAGELS. Anyone know of anyplace in Montevideo where a bagel can be found? Anyone heading there in the next few days or weeks and willing to take a dozen for me/him? Any ideas on shipping from here to there? Help!

Thanks

Wow. Fun vacation. I realize that the bagel is for the kid... but what kind of a kid goes to Uruguay of all places and has to have his bagel? I can't imagine the Uruguayans visiting the States and pulling this: "But mummy, how can I go to America without my special mate and the medialunas that I adore!" I think it's really interesting how people want to take their homes with them. It's different than not simply having faith that they'll have a place to stay and nice food to eat... They want the food they have at home. Aside from being further from home, why are these people travelling? I dunno. I'm probably overreacting but if that kid is over 4 years old, it should be able to understand that different countries have different foods.

However, big surprise for me: There are bagels in Uruguay.

Cheating

2007-03-05T12:18:00.002-03:00

Cheating on someone is wrong and really interesting as well. To me it's simple: you're not supposed to. You give your word and you're not supposed to break it. To me, the key is honesty. No one is forcing you to be involved in the relationship; you're choosing to participate. You could always tell your partner: you know I just want to have sex with other people and that's what I'm going to do and you should know that before I do that: that's just the way it is. It's honest. It's healthy. It's understandable. Honesty and communication are the two of the most important things in a relationship.

As someone who's never cheated, I make it into a moral issue though I don't think cheaters see it in this way. Here in Buenos Aires cheating is more accepted than in the States. The joke here is that Thursday night you go out with your mistress, Friday with your friends, and Saturday/Sunday with your girlfriend. I don't think that there is more cheating than in the States but I do think it's more ok to talk about it. In the States people judge you. Here they judge the relationship.

GIRLS CAN BE SNEAKY CHEATERS

Friends of mine cheat. I think it's really strange to be in a situation where you're forced to lie. It's like working in a place you hate but instead of saying anything to your boss (and making things better) you just pretend you like it until you can't take it anymore. During this time you're concentrating on looking for other jobs to make sure that you're financially secure.

Similarly cheating comes from fear and insecurity. Fear of being alone and unwanted so you hang on to what you have.

how people find my blog

2007-03-05T10:00:00.000-03:00

I just put a statcounter on this blog. A lot of people come across blogs because they typed some words into google and google spits out some relevant sites. Well, statcounter can tell you what people typed in that brought them to your blog. This is mine:

Let's just comment on these:

There is no real schedule for lanchas in Iquitos. You just head to the docks and see which boat is leaving.
The halter should fit snugly. The plow should have two blades.
Don't eat sardines in Peru. Period.
This is the only thing on the list that my blog actually addresses. Yes, you should have said yes.

Villa Crespo or Bust

2007-02-28T13:40:00.001-03:00

My philosophy up till this point has been to take whatever housing that destiny or chance offered me. I moved from living with friends in Caballito (2 months) to living in a stark one room cell with kitchenette and toilet in Congreso (5 months) to a nice 2 bedroom in snooty Palermo. Now I've been given the oppurtunity (spelled g-a-r-a-n-t-i-a) to live wherever I want and so I'm lifting up my skirts and hightailing it to Villa Crespo.

Everyone likes Villa Crespo except for some foreigners who count every block further from Palermo as blocks away from the fashionista bars they attend nightly. No worries expats, Villa Crespo is still comfortably near your nightclubs and, as a result, prices are soaring.

Buenos Aires Housing: The Garantía

2007-02-28T11:13:00.001-03:00

So a friend of mine very kindly decided to give me a guarantia and so
now I'm moving from ultra rich Palermo Chico to nice, normal, good vibey Villa Crespo. The first thing to understand is that are weird archaic housing laws and customs here. At least on paper, in the USA it doesn't matter where you come from or who your family is, more what your actions are. Anyone can get a credit card, make payments, build a credit history. When you go to apply for renting an apartment they use your public credit history as a way of seeing your financial character.

Here in Buenos Aires it is much different. There is much less banking infrastructure than in the States and many people don't have accounts. I, for instance, can't open an account here without having a DNI (it's like a social security number). I get paid in cash every month. Apartment owners here can't check anything about me or most other people. Furthermore there are these medieval, complicated renting laws and it's virtually impossible to evict anyone.

In my second apartment here, in Congreso, I heard a horror story about a bad previous tenant. The renter stopped paying rent and but the owner couldn't evict them without a court order. What the owner can do, however, is make a double-or-nothing bet and pay all the remaining rent owed in the contract to the court as a kind of escrow while the renter was evicted. If the owner won the case, she would get her money back and be able to evict the tenant (and presumably get back rent) but if the owner lost she would lose all that money. After a huge battle, which dragged on for months and months, she eventually won and got her money back from evicting the woman.

So, in order to protect themselves, most landlords require a garantía. A garantía is essentially a note written from someone who owns property in the city who will guarantee that you will pay the rent or they will take responsability for it (and face losing their property). It's a big thing to give one to someone and needless to say, most foreigners don't know someone who will. There are some seedy places that sell them for about 10+% of the rent you need to pay but this is expensive.

Consequently there are two markets: One for locals who are from the city and run in circles of local property owners and those who don't. A typical apartment for locals comes unfurnished (no fridge, nothing) and a typical two year contract. One for foreigners comes fully furnished (frequently with television and appliances), no contract, and costs three times the price. Most expats start with the fully furnished places and, after some time, work their way towards a nice nepotistic deal. This could be finding an owner who trusts them enough not to require a garantía or it could be a room in a house where someone else has one.

Luckily, one of my friends has offered me the holy grail of garantía and now I am starting my adventures in househunting local style.

Ña Serapia and El Preferido

2007-02-26T17:58:00.001-03:00

Ña Serapia and El Preferido are awesome argentine restaurants in very different ways. both are small and both are super established in the community. both contain mostly locals but both are known to tourists. both have great "normal" homecooked food, though different types and with completely different vibes.

the main difference is that they both capture a different and well preserved part of the buenos aires culture. Ña Serapia is from the north and serves awesome comida criolla: empanadas, guisos, soups, tamales, etc. I get the tamale every time. They have an excellant couple of hot sauces that aren't chimichuri and that's really great. But this isn't the reason why it's great. It's great because every time I go there the owner comes up to me and looks into my eyes and shakes my hand in a very serious way. Also, even when he's not smiling, which is rare, he has this lighthearted look about him like he's doing what he wants to be, like this is his first day of owning a restaurant and he wants to make a good impression on the customers.

El Preferido is completely different. The food is also homespun. My favorite dish is the tortilla de papas (potato omelete) During lunch it has many waiters wandering around and they never speak to you. This is another classic porteño thing. They ignore you perfectly, always finding a distraction elsewhere in the restaurant when you need the check. On the plus side this means you can chill out for hours with your orange juice as they flutter about you obliviously.

Both are intimate in their different ways.

Chinese Food: Buenos Aires

2007-02-22T11:04:00.001-03:00

Wherever you go in the world you'll find Chinese food. I have not been anywhere but I know this is true because there are literally a billion chinese people and most of them eat chinese food. Also it is very tasty. Also it is easy to make. Also it is cheap to make. And finally, it can taste really good.

You can go to the Peruvian Andes, Lesotho, wherever and there is chinese food. It is so ubiquitous that I'm surprised they can still keep their nation identified with it. You would think it would have splintered into "Rice with Meat" but no... it's just called "Chinese Food."

The other weird thing about Chinese food is that it can be really good or really bad but it's generally impossible to tell anything by looking at it. It all looks the same and costs about the same. Even the taste can be deceptive because they might add tons of MSG, a "flavor enhancer" and very popular ingredient. The Chinese food where I live (Palermo Chico) is three times the price of anywhere else in the Buenos Aires but that has, as you shall find out, nothing to do with the quality.

The first time ate Chinese food in Buenos Aires was at Lysa's house. Unlike the states, everyone delivers and Porteños prefer ordering out to actually going to restaurants. Though tipping isn't so common here (5-10%), drinks are expensive and there is frequently a significant cover charge for the table (a la Europe) so it's usually cheaper and more comfortable to have them bring the food to you for free. Lysa and I ordered Chinese food from this place all the time. It was delicious. Then one rainy night when my parents were visiting we decided to order Chinese food from Lysa's house. We feel bad about making the folks walk to the house in the rain so we decide to walk the 5 minutes to pick it up ourselves.

When we got there I was surprised; I had been envisioning the place as a nice sit-down restaurant. Instead it there was a single table where you presumably waited for your food to be finished to take away. During the few minutes that we waited for our food to be ready a woman hurredly took orders on the phone while a half-dressed boy of about seven years ran screaming around the room, waving his penis and throwing things. Every so often the woman would ask the customer to hold, look at us, look at the boy, and say "Hey, calm down" and go back to taking orders. We thought it was funny until the boy gave an especially loud yell, looked directly at us, grabbed his penis and began to urinate on a toy of his. The woman on the phone looked at both us and the boy with complete disdain. Somehow even after this incident I continued to order Chinese food, at least up until last week.

Last week, shortly after eating half a plate of Spicy Pork I felt incredibly tired. As I lurched off to bed, I made a quick detour to the bathroom. Which became a longer detour... I felt sick... very sick... and it reminded me of the time when a year ago I had eaten some bad food at a restaurant and had been bedridden for a week with a terrible stomache virus. And for good reason: it was happening again.

Fortunately, I was supposed to be organizing a treasure hunt at work the following day and though I loathed to blow it off, I had no choice. I woke up with a fever of 102F (38.9C) and the hunt was postponed for several days... A doctor came to my house, which was awesome and only cost 12 pesos. Incredible. He was really nice and told me to take some things to bring down the fever. I don't remember too much about being sick except that Anna took care of me by cooking me mushy things that wouldn't make me sick for the next few days. Definately the worst thing about being sick is that you're not well to enjoy it...

Game Costumes: The Chest Set

2007-01-28T20:22:00.000-03:00

Awhile ago I signed up to take an experimental design class. It's funny cause I have no idea what it'll be about or involve but it sounds pretty exciting. One thing I'm a little worried about is that it will involve making clothes. What I really want to design are games. Board games. A game box would be cool too. I dunno. Anyways, I don't really want to make clothes but just in case I'm already coming up with ideas.

Gentlemen, I give you the Chest Set:

THE CHEST SET

In reality in the context of a clothes class I would make a tight shirt out of it and have it so you could play chess with felt velcro pieces. Perfect for smart college parties...

errr... something like this:

EXCELLENT FOR NAUGHTY COLLEGE PARTIES

Stargate Review

2007-01-27T00:00:00.000-03:00

Ok. So I just went to see this movie, Stargate. The movie is about how in 1920 the US made an archeological discovery in Egypt which the government confiscated pretty quickly. This in itself is interesting because it was actually Britain who controlled Egypt at the time. Anyways we cut to the present day where one archeologist, Dr. Daniel Jackson (James Spader), is having a terribly difficult time convincing scientists that the pyramids are, in fact, much older than we suppose. He is down to his last pennies when he is picked up by the air force and taken off to a very top secret lab where these "long lost" ruins are kept. So the air force (of all people) have been conducting research on the project for two years. Which means it sat there since 1920. It turns out that the hieroglyphs are a map with coordinates to open another artifact, the stargate. The earth men send a robot probe through and, after it transmits back that the other planet is habitable, it promptly runs out of juice. So the military decides to send a group of men through on a reconnoscence mission and this is where the interesting subtexts begin to show. The group is led by Colonel Jonathan "Jack" O'Neil (Kurt Russell) who has been depressed ever since his son shot himself. Once they get to the planet they appear in a replica of the Giza pyramid complex and find other humans who spend pretty much all their time mining special crystals. Unfortunately, Dr. Jackson can't find the coordinates back. It's just a matter of looking around, he feels. The people have been forbidden from writing or reading and when he tries to show them the symbols they need to return, the people take him away to be washed. After that they bring a beatiful young girl into his room. He doesn't want to have sex but he does want to show her the symbols. At first she resists but then she draws the symbol he wants to see. Which looks like this:

THE SEVENTH SYMBOL LOOKS MAKING WOOPIE

It turns out that she is no novice to the world of writing and she takes him to the underground tunnels where there are lots of symbols written on the walls. It is here that he learns to speak their language (based, basically, on hyroglyphics). He reads that an alien was about to die but tried to cheat death. He visited another world in his ship and one little boy was adventurous and came close and the got inside his body and possessed it, like a parasite. By transferring from body to body he could perpetually cheat death. He had first visited earth but then the earthlings eventually kicked him out and he skedadled off to some other planet (presumably this one). He had also learned from his mistake and not allowed these new slaves to read or write. Anyways, as Dr. Jackson is reading all of this, the alien comes back, takes control of the pyramid (and the stargate) and begins capturing all the military folks (there are 8 or so on the mission).

The military people would have been doomed but they have instilled the spirit of revolution in the slaves. They rise up and, after some touch and go fighting where tens of people die, the slaves use the American technology to beat Ra's henchmen. Ra tries to escape but his ship is blown up by a bomb that he intended to send to destroy earth.

The most striking theme in the movie is the way it sees American interventionism. Here a bunch of unprepared marines show up in a world they know nothing at all about. They don't know its name and couldn't even find it on a map. This turns out not to be a problem, despite the fact that no one can speak the Stargate World's language very well. Doctor Jackson only figures it out in the last third of the movie. Even then it's mostly an expedient to make the movie more enjoyable for the viewers as we now get subtitles instead just gibberish. In the movie everything is simple. Nothing is complicated. We see nothing of their real culture and problems, only glimpses of our common humanity. Having a common spoken language is nothing compared to the shared experience of fighting oppression. Released in 1994, the USA was still flush from the first Gulf War, our victory over Iraq, and our freeing of Kuwait. No surprise that there's a desert theme. This is truly how we Americans saw ourselves and our foreign policy. As my brother Felix would say, "we were drinking our own Kool-aid."

The second interesting thing was the reaffirmation of traditional family values and heterosexuality in the movie. For one thing the movie has virtually no women. There are some civilian women working on the project back on earth, most especially the daughter of the original archeologist who discovered the stargate. She serves as a kind of mother figure for Dr. Jackson. Then there's Jackson's beatiful girl who is offered to him by the leader of Stargate World. There are some old women who playfully wash (fluff?) Jackson before he meets his girl but that's mostly just to establish that both Earth and the Stargate World are procreative. Jackson and O'Neil are heterosexual men, to be sure, and actually this needs establishing because they stand in stark contrast to the alien and his entourage. Despite the way he presents himself in the King Tut mask (complete with phallic beard) he looks mostly like a girl.

In fact, Ra doesn't seem to be able to reproduce like us humans and as a result has to resort to keeping a harem of submissive boys around him as well as strong male guards in kinky outfits:

To contrast Ra's court, there is the reaffirmation of traditional American values. There is a fairly overt scene where a Kurt Russell and a long haired boy in a halter top (showing his midriff) first shows him how to light his lighter and then the boy reaches for cigarettes he later reaches for Russell's gun and Russell becomes angry and says it's dangerous. The boy parallells the boy who is first intruiged and then entered by the alien. Russell, who is not gay, warns the boy off from his own sexuality. The movie is rife with sexual symbolism from the one pyramid penetrating another to the seventh symbol itself.

RUSSELL AND SPADER: TWO WAYS OF BEING HETEROSEXUAL

The most intense reaffirmation of traditional values is when Jackson refuses to touch the woman throughout the movie. Finally he hears someone say that he has already married her. Only after having heard that he did, in fact, marry her. He allows himself to sleep with her.

Overall, the movie was so thin that it was hard not to be distracted by the symbolism. I thought the movie was ok. But most interesting if anyone wants to know why the US got itself into the mess it's in now.

Thomas Friedman

2007-01-22T17:27:00.000-03:00

Man... I really liked his book, From Beruit to Jerusalem, but then I listened to him on On Point and I just couldn't stand him. He sounded so full of himself as if his opinion mattered more simply because he's famous. He wasn't very coherent though.

Then I poked about and apparently I wasn't the only one who noticed this show. It didn't take long to find out why he seems like such an apologist. It's because he is!

I pretty much just stick to NPR for news but it's absurd how these pundits just talk talk talk the way people talk about sports. It's not like talking about things in which they can take action, it's much more gawking at the big stars. Or at least that's the effect.

Selling hope

2007-01-19T16:37:00.000-03:00

“In the factory, we manufacture cosmetics, but in the store we sell hope.”
-Charles Revson, founder of Revlon

A big war... by our currents standards

2007-01-19T11:37:00.000-03:00

From this online U.S History course we're making:

World War II was the most destructive war in the world’s history up to this point. Tens of millions of lives were lost, millions of acres of land were destroyed, billions of dollars spent, homes and government offices were obliterated, and lives were shattered. At the end of the war, the Allied forces stood victorious, but nearly every nation lay in rubble.

World War I was "the war to end all wars." Check out how we hedge our bets now! I mean "up to this point." One would hope that we'd never have a war like that again but what we teach our students is that everything is possible.

Bitch Tours

2007-01-17T11:48:00.000-03:00

Ok. So i think i saw this person advertise her tours in craigslist months and months ago (back when I still read craigslist) but, man, she hits it dead on:

http://bitchtours.blogspot.com/

As tours are mostly sold word of mouth the "are you good enough to take my tour" attitude has MAJOR appeal. Having read her blog for only 30 seconds, never communicated with her or heard anything about her, let me highly recommend the service she provides (if only to see what service she provides). It's the only Buenos Aires tour I'd take, which I won't.

Monseigneur in Town

2007-01-15T11:37:00.000-03:00

I have been listening to the podcast of A Tale of Two Cities. Here is an excerpt from the chapter, Monseigneur in Town:

The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising way of setting them right, half of the half-dozen had become members of a fantastic sect of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within themselves whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the spot--thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the Future, for Monseigneur's guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a jargon about "the Centre of Truth:" holding that Man had got out of the Centre of Truth--which did not need much demonstration--but had not got out of the Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying out of the Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre, by fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much discoursing with spirits went on--and it did a world of good which never became manifest.

But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant swords to look at, and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would surely keep anything going, for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells; and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and his devouring hunger far away.

It's pretty shocking how startlingly relevent this stuff is. It so vividly reminds me of of the kitchy consumeristic hipsterism of the US. Shiny objects, precious collections of useless junk.

The other day I heard on Studio 360 they were interviewing a woman collects the clothes that the munchkins wore in the Wizard of Oz. It's hard to put the connection into words but these munchkins were paid $50 a day and told to leave. Their costumes and sweatpants then passed into the unreal world where people buy these items on ebay. They spend money, good money, on this completely unreal stuff. It's not new, people used to buy relics all the time: the hairs from Mohammad's beard, a piece of Noah's boat, a bit of the cross, etc. Even so, I think that only churches or rich people bought that stuff. Your average guy on the street didn't own magical stuff touched by history. Perhaps this isn't so much an example of oppulence as much as consumors buying into their own crazy myths.

To me the most striking thing about the passage is the complete unreality of the whole situation and the permanence with which everyone views it. The world knows that time is on their side and that the USA will not be dominant for too much longer. Be we chubbily walk around, completely ignorant of the world outside who looks bitterly into our absurd society that creates physical and psychological disorders from excess.

Learning

2006-12-15T10:59:00.001-03:00

Here is an excerpt from the class we're developing on interpersonal communications:

When you first join an organization, you probably feel somewhat uncertain about what is expected of you and how the organization operates. During your first few months on the job, you undergo a socialization process where, by observing what the organization says and does, you learn how the organizational culture operates.

Understanding the culture helps people recognize what is important in the organization. It also helps them feel connected to the organization and develops an esprit de corps and a sense of belonging. The culture helps people predict and control what goes on in the organization.

Ideally, the culture also operates as a set of guiding principles for the organization. It sets a tone and guides the company’s actions both inside the organization and with the public.

Just reading this stuff reminds me of what a bad start I had at my job when I began a year or so ago and the uncomfortability that resulted from the poor choices I made. I had not anticipated the intense cultureshock mixed the language barrier and the moving to a new place. Wow! Looking back, I can't believe I did it. A teacher at the Seattle YMCA told me before I left about Machu Pichu and after her trek up it she believed she could do anything. Perhaps I done everything in Buenos Aires with style and grace, but I am still here with good friends, a great job, and a feeling that now I can do anything.

way too much time

2006-12-15T10:15:00.000-03:00

I was talking with my coworker about getting some steak for lunch and i drew him a picture on MSN Messenger:
The conversation continued like this:

coworker: you have way too much time on your hands
nathan: jeje. don't worry. i have the same amount you do. 24 hours a day
coworker: jajaja
nathan: people tend to link creativity and art with wastefulness and lack of productivity. it works to my disadvantage
coworker: jajaja - sorry that was art? dude you have spent too much time at the modern art museums
nathan: i'll take it as a compliment

And the fact is that in a way it WAS a compliment. I work hard at my job and I try to do it with humor and in a way that brings something nice to the office. My coworker was trying to be funny. He is a really nice guy, no two ways about it. His comments, however, taken at face value show how needlessly negative we are as a culture in how we joke.

one year later...

2006-11-28T09:26:00.000-03:00

It's been about a year and a half since I left the states and about a year since I've been silent on this blog. It hasn't been intentional... But the fact is that it's super super hard to write when you know the folks you're around. Not just because they might read it and judge you for it but also cause you feel like you're spilling intimate secrets. It's ugly to spill your guts out for all to see but i'm also scared to sanitize all, focusing only on lowest common denomenator, the pithy messages that tell little about my own life and experiences.

But I think that now it's time to start writing again. In about 3 weeks I'll go home and I want to document as much as I can.

the joys of technology

2005-11-10T16:49:00.000-03:00

After a month here in Buenos Aires, yesterday was my first difficult day. I couldn’t figure out what exactly how to do what I wanted: buy some headphones and some shoes. The clothing stores seemed all be closed and the headphones were all prohibitively expensive. I just couldn’t seem to find the cheap stores. I felt lost in a city that didn’t understand me. That night I had a dream about traveling.

In the dream I had just finished traveling for awhile in South America but for some reason I had to take a break. I was in my parents’ house so I probably returned to the USA for an event. Now the field had changed and it might be easier for me to travel in Europe than in South America. But I was torn on where to travel and I asked my dad for advice. He responded in tersely like “get with the program, buckaroo, why aren’t you just doing it?” The dream ended with my mom asking how many people would be eating tomorrow and my father saying something like “there’s Nathan cause he will never finally get out of here” and I said “I won’t be here for dinner. Tomorrow I’ll be traveling.” And everyone got upset because they wanted me to stay and they wanted time to say goodbye.

Why this dream… and why now?

I’ve decided to do something similar: stay in Buenos Aires for at least a year or so. I will be just living here and working, no plans, just sopping up the city.

Luck comes and goes. When I lived in Seattle I felt hard pressed to find a lucky break but here in Buenos Aires luck seems to grow on trees and the streets are lined with it. Joe’s parents say that lots of serendipity points to being in the “correct place.” After a month and a half I have a good paying job and a great place to live. I seem to be making some friends and already have a location for my first murder mystery party, to be written entirely in Spanish. I am aiming to have it in February in El Tigre. All are welcome.

Another stroke of luck was a couple weeks ago when, by chance my, mom’s dental hygienist was visiting Argentina and brought me a new camera along with my laptop. Both items are twice to three times that of the price in the States. I’ve noticed that writing has been very difficult without photos to illustrate it. This is conspicuous because in the month between the time I lost my camera and the time I received my new one I blogged perhaps only once or twice.

The other windfall was my laptop, which I am writing on now in my room. When I bought my laptop a month before I left on my trip I had thought it a “mistake.” When you measure a laptop against two and a half months of good travel, the choice is clear, especially when you can’t reasonably take a laptop backpacking. There’s no internet connection so it’s perfect for me now. I have a place I can sit, reflect, write and read email without having to be connected all the time. Also Lisa is lending me some amazing speakers and combined with downloading songs on the internet at work I have an amazing stereo. After 3 months without my own music in my life, it’s wonderful to have it here.

On it I had done my preliminary planning for the trip. I had Excel spreadsheets that inaccurately laid out my budget for my time abroad, lists of things to do before I left and final farewell emails. And there was music. I remember before my trip my mom telling me that all my music was sad. And she was right! Take for example the syrupy sad Jackie Green album “Gone Wandering” that I listened to nonstop before I left:

I woke up Wednesday morning with bad weather in my brain
I laid awake awhile just ignoring all the rain
Cause everybody’s talking about who they want to be
Everybody’s talking everybody except me

And I got a little money and I got a little time
And I got myself a pickup truck that I can call mine
I got myself a guitar and I got myself some friends
Some folks say I’m lucky but I think it all depends

On the lens that you are looking through and the music that you hear
‘Cause sometimes you don’t recognize your own face in the mirror
And I can’t help but think about what I done wrong
To deserve this roaming, this traveling song…

The notes I wrote reflect this same confusion.

BEFORE.TXT (5/16/05)
bring stuff to sharon's house

-bring stuff to devon's house
-WAMU deposit
-goodwill run
-teruki DINNER

-steal pie and meet with sharon's friend?????
-practice guitar

TOMORROW
pack up car
move big stuff
clean house
mathew bookcase
christina
meet with felix and cindy, say bye and thanks

TRAVELPLAN.TXT (5/30/05)
travelplan

peru
- mostly nature stuff
- hiking
- meeting people
- learn some peruvian music?
- english language schools

bolivia
chile
uruguay
paraguay
brazil
panama?
argentina?

then

guatamala
costa rica
mexico
etc

good map of south america

FEELINGS.TXT (6/15/05)

relax before the trip
enjoy being somewhere at home
it's ok to relax

-contact SERVAS people
-bike into choices
-read books
-play games with jolene
-READ

I left on 6/28/05 and I have not looked back. I am not even sure if there is a back anymore, it seems that returning the United States is just another step on the journey.

accepting work

2005-11-10T16:47:00.000-03:00

I was invited back for a second interview which contained a kind of short test to see how well I operated in Word. Mark offered me the job and I accepted. I had decided to accept the job before we talked about the particulars. I was happy and I wanted to work.

It felt wonderful to go in and be treated as part of a team, working on a common job with a common goal, to be rewarded with money and praise, with people who believed in their project. It felt good, a friendly relaxation from feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders. Perhaps Atlas was tricked or perhaps without the world resting on his shoulders he felt too light, too weightless and without intertia.

But in the same moment it was strange. Here after so long out of the fold of standard work it felt strange that their priorities were all product based. At the school I worked at, my main work experience thus far, we were process oriented. We did not measure our success by grades, tests, overall graduation rate, or anything else. We actually had no objective means of measuring our success at all.

What we did have was goodwill, love, resources and a means to distribute them to kids. Perhaps we did have some standard by which we judged ourselves but I was never aware of it at the time. Our philosophy was very Christian in it’s basis: “go out and do good” and “We come not to destroy the Learning Objectives and the Average Daily Attendance but to uphold it.”

Our standards were more like did our students smile more, did Sarah like math now, or did we have more or fewer things to stamp, sign or photocopy. But these were never objectively measured and we never would have wanted them to be. We shied away all form of measurement, perhaps because our job was more art than science. We were the caretakers of the cracks pushing back those near the edge who were losing their balance.

Perhaps, standing back and looking at the numbers (and by “the numbers” I mean people’s lives and the work and value that they place on those lives) there are patterns that form and perhaps by working harder in one area while focusing less on another we could, perhaps, have done a better job. Perhaps then we could have reduced our art to science, perhaps made it capable of being performed by a computer program while we hurried around doing something else, but there was something that always struck me as intense when I see the resistance that many teachers have towards measuring progress. Perhaps it is in the measuring of lives we place values on those lives.

I have a friend back in Utah working for a large multinational corporation named Honeywell. She needs the job for her baby, who is about 4 months old at the moment. She has a family to support. But Honeywell is a company that does bad things like make parts of bombs. Recently there was a bomb that was marked as food and exploded a lot of people in some far away country. That bomb was partly made by Honeywell. She feels like she does bad things in order to feed her family.

WE MAKE REALLY NICE LOOKING ONLINE COURSES

Like many large projects we see only one small piece of the puzzle and will never understand the impact that our work has on the world. Our job is to fill the textbooks, to make them more efficient, so that students can learn the data inside. The company’s goal of providing quality educational resources seems to be pure but I doubt there’s a single employee who thinks much about the students, except as he might feel a twinge at not finishing the last morsels of his plate because of the “starving children in India.”

The Online Job Hunt

2005-10-29T20:48:00.000-03:00

Job postings on the internet were scarce and it is strange to see http://buenosaires.craigslist.com postings, usually an informal way for people to connect cheaply, adapted to fit the US tourist/expat market abroad.

For example, under the FOR SALE catagory:

Are you a female that wants to become an american citizen. If you are this is your chance. Is it worth 5000 to become an american citizen. If it is Email me

The housing market is little different, the standard advertisements for apartments are at a weekly rate and about five times what is paid by Argentineans.

The jobs were almost all for e-commuting webdesign jobs. Argentineans are well educated, have access to technology and will work for cheap. Freelance outsourcing is the rule here. One job stuck out a bit more than the others. It was for a project manager with web design experience. I responded and it turned out to be a freelance curriculum development company based in Buenos Aires. Why are they in Argentina? I quote their website: "And the significant cost savings made possible by our Buenos Aires production facilities makes our solutions affordable."

I got an interview and I waver over how much to ask for. I have calculated my expenses at $800 a month. This gives me leeway. If I were living as a porteño I would only be spending about $400 but it would be difficult to find housing that cheaply without a guarantia and also I want to get out and do more things than the average person who grew up here would want to do.

The interview goes great. The owner, Mark, was very helpful and offered to assist in the apartment hunt whether or not I got the job. Getting an apartment in the city is a little difficult since Buenos Aires has a fairly archaic system of rental laws. For this, the landlords demand a "guarantia", which is essentially a guarantee from a friend of the renters who owns land, guaranteeing that rent will be paid or their property will be forfeit. This is partly due to archaic rent laws which state that once in an apartment it is near impossible to remove a bad tenant who refuses to pay. It is also partly due to a feudal class system of excluding those who lack land (or a friend who does) from living in the city. There are apparently ways for foreigners to get around this, all of which involve paying a bit more.

He said he was not getting many applicants. He had advertised on craigslist and got replies from people in the USA asking to be flown out. He thought not.

Half the interview questions were about why I was in Argentina. This I found difficult to answer. To be assured I wasn’t going to say I just wanted a job cause it suited me. So I said that I had traveled here specifically for that, which was more or less true. Why Buenos Aires? I like it here. Bad answer. I should have said: “cause I’ve always wanted to let my dog shit on the sidewalk.”
The best I could come up with was “when I return to the states and live in San Francisco I don’t know what I’ll say at the interview there.” Then I countered by asking why it was an important question and he told me he didn’t want travelers. And I assured him by telling him that I was not a traveler and I was here to work. It was a lie but it was nice to get all that out in the open. I doubt he was totally convinced but I didn’t care. I fit the job profile better than anyone else he’s looking for: I’m young, eager, cheap, smart, and have experience in everything the job asks for. If I didn’t get it, he’d have made a hiring mistake.

The next day I checked my email even though they told me they’d be calling back only next week. I somehow hoped the next interviewee would not show and they’d just give me the job by default. That seems to be how I get most of my jobs. But I’m good on an interview and I enjoy talking to people.

Over the next few days I became worried about staying too long in Buenos Aires and things not working out. People would ask me what I was doing and what my plans were. Every time that I answered that I was going to live here I would build up my failure if things did not work out. I almost decided to leave the city so I wouldn’t have to worry about hearing back from the job.

In the meantime the freelance jobs I had applied for were not responding. The only one I heard from was a person wanting a web design project done in Flash. I have no experience in Flash but I want to learn. I realized that I didn’t even have my laptop. There was no way at all that I could learn how to use this complicated software using internet kiosks.

The Buenos Aires Job Hunt

2005-10-29T20:35:00.000-03:00

Anna, who is also toying with the idea of living here, got great job listings from the French Embassy and everyone I talked to suggested the American Embassy would be an excellent resource. Armed with an up to date resume I marched off to find out for myself. When I went I was surprised American Embassy in Buenos Aires is attended almost entirely by people who do not speak English and not US citizens. After being told various things ranging from the Embassy was not open that day to being misdirected in various lines I finally found myself in a room containing people lounging around in chairs and waiting for something to happen. I took a number and waited with them. After half an hour of no one being called I asked them if there was anyone attending the window. “Oh yes,” they said, “You just go up and ring the bell.” I went up and rang the bell which was marked in Spanish “Ring for Immediate Attention” and I was served at once. It turns out that the only service they offer is providing the address of the American Chamber of Commerce website. This being done the lady promptly bid me a good day and disappeared, presumably until someone else rang the bill.

The American Chamber of Commerce is in on the 10th floor of a large building next to the courthouse. There were a large number of people and press gathered outside. I asked the doorman what was up and it turned out to be a protest against the sentencing of a boy accused of a serious crime. The crowd was friends and family who insisted on his innocence. My Spanish is poor and as a result I perceive the world through the eyes of a child. Because I get confused between words like “judge”, “court case”, “courthouse” and “sentencing proceedings” I must be content with overly simplified explanations: “There is a bad boy but we are not sure if he is bad. So now we are seeing and these people like him.”

My Spanish has improved by leaps and bounds. It is not consistently good or bad but rather fluctuates depending on my energy level, my level of comfort, the context of the conversation and who I am talking to. The most important factor seems to be comfortability with the conversation. If I am not comfortable then I simply cannot speak in Spanish.

The nice girl at the American Chamber of Commerce referred me to the website but agreed to take my resume and hand it on to interested parties. “The website is good though,” she confidently assured me, “companies log in and do a search of your qualifications and if you have skills that match what they’re looking for then they call you. You will be probably be looking for a job in…” She scanned my resume for a minute or two and then said, less confidently, “Oh I’m sure you’ll find something…”

Acclimatizing

2005-10-29T20:24:00.000-03:00

The next day I decided to treat my hosts, Juan and Malena, to a dish from California. Because California cuisine is really a mixture of food from all the cultures that live there it’s hard to find things to single out as uniquely Californian. I decided on California rolls (vegetarian sushi that replaces fish with avocado) because tortillas for burritos are not available and, as I found out in Lima, I do not have a good tortilla recipe.

I did, however, need seaweed to wrap the sushi and for that I had to go to Chinatown. The materials were easily found if not expensive, actually about twice the price in the USA. But the notable part of the journey was when I saw an English teaching school with a girl outside handing out flyers for it. I asked her if she knew if they were hiring new teachers and she said I would have to inquire within but if I wanted to teach her friend, who was working next door, I was welcome to.

I went inside and asked how much I would be making were I to work for them: 8 pesos ($2.40) an hour and they couldn’t guarantee any amount of hours per week. Not a good job though I told them I’d call them when I had a resume for them. As I left the flyer-girl’s friend came out to convince me to take her on as a student and I said I’d call her as well. She would pay 8 pesos an hour for two hours a week. I returned home that day with sushi materials (which cost about 40 pesos all told) and one potential client.

As in Japan and the USA sushi is a delicacy and Juan had never tasted it before. He loved it and everyone was pleased. Afterwards, to compliment the dish I got my first sample of real matte etiquette.

Besides cheap, plentiful and organic wine, the official drink here is yerba matte. It is drunk in a traditional wooden cup with a metal straw. More ritual than thirstquencher, you cannot buy it in restaurants because it is a personal thing to be enjoyed at home. Despite this it is completely ubiquitous. You see people in the park, at the news stand, walking to work with their thermos and cup of matte. Police officers drink it on the street, sipping at their cups over the half hour period it takes to finish their thermos of hot water. Matte has lots of caffeine and helps with digestion. I have always dreamed of a city where slightly bitter herbal tea is considered the drink of choice.

MATTE IS DRUNK IN OFFICE SITUATIONS

Juan taught me how to make a wall with the leaves so that you could keep the same flavor for 20 cups in a row and how to pass the cup with the straw facing the recipient to signify friendship.

Arrival

2005-10-29T20:21:00.000-03:00

The city of Buenos Aires is large. It has 12 million people. A lot of people say it is very like a European city. Perhaps this is because almost no Argentines have Argentine grandparents. The vast majority have grandparents from Europe who came over during the early 20th Century because of the wars. Also they were encouraged to come by Argentine immigration policy. Once the Indians had “gone away” the Argentines had an immense country to fill and no people with which to do it. In the same way as the USA settled “The West” they gave free land to anybody who wanted it and wasn’t Indian.

Most of the new immigrants came from Spain and Italy and, as a result of this their food is fairly European: their pastas, pizzas, and ice-cream rival those of their mother countries. The city certainly has a kind of cosmopolitan European feeling. It has lovely old buildings, a bustling yet tidy city center, and a fascist past. People also might say Buenos Aires is like Paris because the sidewalks are littered with dog poop. If you step in dog poop in Paris, they will tell you it is good luck. If you step in dog poop in Argentina they will growl under their breath something nasty about “living in a third world country.” The Argentines carry a heavy load, having previously tasted the first world only to have it snatched away by international loan sharks (read: IMF, the World Bank, USA, etc.).

I arrived in Buenos Aires and immediately went to stay with fellow traveler Anna, with whom I had traveled from Salta to Cafayate. She had some French friends in the city who were working on an architectural project together. Apparrently they don’t get on. Partly because one of the girls is cheating on her boyfriend back in France who is also the best friend of the other girl. Anna tells me there are more issues like this. It’s remarkable how people stay in relationships in which they get no joy: always arguing and never at peace. They become enmeshed in each others lives like ivy and slowly strangle each other. They are unhappy but sedentary, too scared to leave the safe stagnation of each other’s company. Happily the day I arrived they left for France to report on their architectural findings and left the apartment to the travelers while. Anna and I got to use it as a base to explore the city.

Buenos Aires is filled with parks, which are sometimes neat and tidy, and McDonalds. McDonalds are everywhere where there is a demand for 40 cent dulce de leche ice cream. Here McDonalds are different. They are much much nicer. People here have apparently figured out that you don’t get a lot of real food for your money at McDonalds and so McDonalds is now pretty nice looking. Every location has a second story with a balcony to overlook the city streets. Also they are made with shiny wood and brass, not yellow and red plastic from the 1960s. They are the kind of McDonalds where they waiter takes your tray as soon as you finish your last freedom fry.

EVERY PARK SEEMS TO HAVE ITS OWN MERRY-GO-ROUND

We wandered the streets and hung out in the parks San Telmo, a historical neighborhood famous for it’s tango bordellos. I bought a small travel guitar at the Antigua Casa Nunez, which is well known store in the city for good, reasonably priced guitars that are all made in house. Some days it was sunny and others it was warm and nice.

Anna soon returned to Paris and I began calling SERVAS hosts for places to stay. You’re supposed to call days or weeks before to let them know you’re coming. Technically I had done this but no one had answered their phones. I think that this is a gray area in SERVAS culture. Anyways, I called about 20 people. Calling 20 people you do not know in a language you hardly speak and politely asking them if you can sleep on their couch can be frightening. Eventually, I got hold of an incredibly friendly girl who had traveled with SERVAS in the USA and Canada. She said I could stay with her but she was going out to a music show and we would have to meet there.

The show was a band of a standup bass, 2 guitars, a ukulele, a flute, two drummers and a lady on the bandoneon. It was at that show that I discovered Buenos Aires has ton of cultural events. Free cultural events. All large cities have "The Arts". But Buenos Aires is passionate about them: they have hundreds of theatres, art galleries, dance venues and music shows, including an incredibly beautiful opera house. The city also has the rare egalitarian idea that fine art should be accessible to all levels of society. For instance two days ago I saw an opera in one of the finest opera houses in the world for a dollar. Every weekend there are free concerts in the city's many parks.

After the show and a late dinner it was about 12:30am. They returned to the apartment to drop off me, my backpack and my newly bought guitar and, the night being young (about 1:30am), they left to go dancing.

Due to a recent economic collapse the dollar goes a long way here. Quality of life is much higher in Buenos Aires than in any of the countries I had visited so far and, if my faulty memory can be trusted at all, the USA as well.

Over dinner I had mentioned to my new SERVAS hosts that I was considering staying awhile in Buenos Aires. By the morning sleep had solidified these words into an immediate plan to set up roots and get a job and an apartment.

Uyuni Blues II

2005-10-24T11:49:00.000-03:00

After the necropolis:

The night was cold and the extra sleeping bag was absolutely necessary and sufficient. Would have been fine with what I came with but all my warm clothes are gone in anticipation of the lowlands. No one could sleep well. No salt today but lots of lagoons. Multicolored ones rocks shaped like trees, kind of like Utah. It was a day filled with driving interspersed with 10 minute stops to see a rock or a lagoon, then another 10 minute stop. We ended in a place (hostal) where everyone else did. Or rather 6 other groups did. 36 tourists doing the same thing as you are for, perhaps, probably, a different price. Everyone in my car had paid different prices for the same thing. The girls had paid $60 each (less than I did) and the Germans had paid $85 but that included return to Potosi. $65 was average for the cheap outfits.

Often the commodity itself is the expense. I was once told that VCRs that people do not trust $20 VCRs, they believe they will simply break and instead choosing the $40 or $50 models even though they are the same brand and probably the same components. They simply believe that a good VCR should cost a certain price and a cheaper product will almost certainly be lower quality.

Ours had problems typical of the cheaper outfits: our car’s starter and/or sparkplugs were dirty and/or broken. The salt is hell on the cars and they need heavy and constant maintenance. Many did not work, ours no exception. We pushed it to get started every time. Stephan and I did. One time we were stopped at a particularly boring group of rocks which were one the tour and it was freezing. It was always freezing but sometimes the wind was intolerable. Extreme conditions would be putting it lightly. I sat to write but our guide came and wanted to talk. He wanted to know where I was from and all that. “Very cold, huh?” was his favorite expression. I asked what his favorite part of his job was. “The tips.” He said. “Like your salary or the tips,” I asked. “The tips” he replied again.

It certainly takes the cork out of seeing beautiful things when you realize your guide doesn’t think they’re so beautiful. If it paid as much as tourism he’d stripmine the natural wonders in a heartbeat. There it was again: how does one understand how to give a good tour having never been on one and never having had the desire to go on one.

We saw many beautiful and amazing things. All the rock is igneous pillar lava. We saw a half squirrel / half bunny called a vinculla (?). We saw tons of flamingos. There was either salt / ice / borax / lye / or, were told, sulfuric acid in the water. The flamingos cared for naught except chilling out and running away from us, it seemed. I don’t think any fish live in these toxic waters but perhaps they looked for worms. Our guide told us that there were times when the lagoons were frozen over and there were no flamingos. They just disappeared for 2 months a year.

At the end of warm car vs. freezing outside we arrived at our hostal at 4:00 or so. Early. We played UNO (with German rules and ordinary cards). So the games were less interesting. We were playing with cards that had mixed drink recipes and pictures of the drinks on them. One of the Irish girls claimed to have the “greatest rule of all time”. It turned out to be that if the drink contained rum we would have to drink rum and if the drink contained whisky you had to drink whiskey. “With your permission of course” she added as an afterthought (she had not brought anything to drink). The game promptly ended when she added that you could only play hearts that were royals. Boring. With power comes responsibility.

People wandered around until dinner was served at 7:30. Lunch was veggie hamburger with salad and pasta. Dinner was spaghetti which BARELY passed for bolognaise. Lovely. We were freezing but sated. I offered to read Tarot cards for people from the deck of Coca Cola playing cards we had been playing UNO with. The 3 Irish girls were enthusiastic, giggly and skeptical.

They all asked similar questions about what would happen in the future about where they would live, their friendships, etc. These were all questions that had little to do with the future itself but rather things they had extreme control over. There is a big difference between “Will John and I be dating in a year?” (a question over which you have complete control) and “Will John still be in London when I return?” (which is a real question about the future, not just about things that are defined by your own actions). It turned out that, perhaps because of their shuffling (or lack thereof), the cards were almost identical for all three girls. Their questions were not entirely innocent either because they related to each other. For instance, will the 3 of us still be friends in a year will probably get a nasty answer 50% of the time. All this stirred the pot but by the time it got around to Stephan and Anna, who actually believed in Tarot cards, the three girls were more or less believers. Amid the hoots and hollers from the girls I turned over the cards. Stephan was more tuned into it than the girls and was easier to read. The reading seemed to indicate that he had just finished work on something and beginning something new. This new thing might fail due to naysayers. His lack of any reaction, positive or negative, told volumes. At this point Anna might have felt pressured into a reading and I believe she was. But it was out of my control now and the girls wanted to see what the cards had in store for her. It was becoming hard to concentrate but I felt in tune with the cards though not really aware of what I was saying. I had also built up enough courage not to hedge bets but to rather say things categorically. I told what the cards told: “Your biggest challenge is pragmatic: making sense of your money and finances … you have recently chosen a spiritual path, a path of exploration, in the future there will be victimization by you or others.” I looked up and she was crying in a very reserved way. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she said, “It’s just a little close to the truth.” Everyone was a little shocked though I’m not sure what else we had expected.

Neither Stephan nor Anna revealed their questions afterwards so their secrets were safe but I assume that they were similar in that they related to things which they secretly knew they must address but were asking about because they wanted reassurance before they stepped out to do it. Not finding guaranteed providence was hard for them. I felt guilty for hurting them and I tried to explain that I had only said what the cards had told me.

I read by candlelight for some time. I got to the part where Harry discovers about the philosopher’s stone.

The night was freezing and we were woken at 5:15 to start the car by pushing. We quickly realized we needed more folks. The magic number arrived at was 6 and 4 more men (tour guides) were rousted from their warm beds to help. They were none too happy but they did it. We pushed the car a good 20 feet before we discovered it was too cold for the engine to turn over and we would have to wait till the magical time of 6am. What they expected to happen at 6am I was not sure but the sun did not begin to rise until 6:15 or 6:30 so it was none too much warmer. We ended up using the rubber ties on top of the truck combined with my hammock ties to tow the 4X4. I was sure that they would break as the security lines were made only of rubber tires. They didn’t and with the tow and 3 people pushing, the car started and I returned to hot coffee and cookies and dulce de leche.

I used the “flush” toilets (bring your own flush) and we left late again to see the sites. Its funny how there can even be a late when you’re on vacation but somehow that happens when you’re working with other people’s agendas. For me, I don’t really have a time schedule. I will stay in a location for as long as it suits me or for as short as suites me. It is a marvel how easily we become the will slaves to the priorities of others, our betters, our leaders.

Unfortunately we needed to drop off the Irish girls at a bus stop near the Chilean border, which was really a small mining town named San Pedro. The girls needed to connect with San Pedro de Atacama. I had chosen to return to Uyuni because it’s cheaper to take the train from there ($5) to Argentina than the much shorter ride from San Pedro de Atacama ($35). San Pedro is expensive because… well… because it’s expensive. People often can’t provide good reasons for things being expensive. Things are just more expensive in Chile. They especially like to say it when there are outside Chilean companies coming into their country. I believe that the hateful trains to Machu Pichu are Chilean.

We visited a few things in rapid succession but the only thing we really cared about after 3 days in freezing cold and no showers was the hot springs. In such freezing weather the hot springs were a godsend. After these we visited a lake of copper. When the wind came fast the copper in the lagoon oxidized and became a brilliant green. I THOUGHT we had a strong wind but apparently the lake disagreed and there was a large red copper stripe shooting through the green. Then we dropped off the girls and returned to the thermal baths where we relaxed in the lovely water for almost an hour while Candy prepared lunch. Or rather, Stephan and I did and Anna wrapped her coat a bit tighter in her coat and dangled her feet in the water. It was absolutely lovely but I think it did us in. I think that it was at this point we bit off more than we could chew. Or perhaps sometimes it is in the moment of relaxation after stress (in this case stress on our bodies from sitting still for long periods, constant temperature change, dust and salt flying at our bodies in high wind) that we broke down. It also could have been the lunch…

The lunch was rice with “tuna” and salad. The others didn’t know the danger but I could recognize an old foe when I saw it. I immediately rooted through the trash bag to find the can. As I suspected, the can did not say tuna, only “fish.” If they did not specify the type then they did not also specify the parts used, though the can’s contents were replete with eyes, mashed bones and scales.

Perhaps in my tiredness and hunger I somehow doubted that it was this material that had caused Marco’s Disease in Machu Pichu (I have since heard from Marco and he is safely home in Sao Paulo). But, along with everyone else, even after examining the cans, thinking through the consequences I chose to get back on that wretched nag that threw me into the ditch and ride it, come what may.

And...

Nothing happened to me!

Stephan, however, became violently ill within minutes with many of the same symptoms Marco exhibited before drifting into oblivion. The severe diarrhea hit almost immediately. When we stopped to pay a visit to yet another lagoon he took the opportunity to first stumble and then crawl into the wind whipped desert and throw up in an attempt to expel the sardines. It sounds callous but I’m glad I got a picture because it really looked as if he one of those left to die in the desert with no food or water. This was as close to the middle of nowhere as you could wish for.

He was sick and became progressively worse. It got to the point where, when we were descending hills Valerio would ask if we needed a bathroom stop so we could restart the car if necessary. Valerio too was exhausted. Completely exhausted. He had been driving 10 hours or more every day since we had left. He also had the additional job of restarting the car, fixing the wretched Landrover and a million other tasks. Most of the fourth day he spent swerving on and off the safe track among rocks which we called, for simplicity, the road.

I had been coughing up a lung from being sick BEFORE I came here and the trip had not improved much. Both the Candy and Abel were also sick and we were all probably cross-infecting each other. Anna was feeling perfect, great – couldn’t be better. Except for her the tour was an infirmary on wheels.

Valerio tried his best to commiserate with Stephan’s illness. “It is probably the altitude,” he said, ignoring that Stephan had been at altitude over a month, “Many tourists have problems with the altitude when they first get here.” Then he added, “I’ve also been sick because of the altitude. Before I drove these tours I worked in a sulfer mine inside a volcano. On the first day it was so hard that I fainted. I understand how he must feel.”

By the time we arrived where we were to rest (3pm or so) Stephan couldn’t hold down pills and Anna was just beginning to criticize his self pity. Valerio went straight to bed and began writing and brainstorming ways to get medicine inside Stephan. Candy and Abel disappeared into the kitchen, presumably to cook dinner.

RESTING

2005-10-15T22:55:00.000-03:00

This blog is not dead. Ony resting. It'll probably wake up on Friday, October 21 (at which point i will have both a laptop and a camera).

thanks for reading,
nathan

2nd day

2005-10-12T17:55:00.000-03:00

Came in early by mistake. Maybe my clock is wrong at home.
Got my rhapsody subscription but boss doesn-t like headphones. No headphones

Tired at end

Actual yom kippur

Designed the 6 degrees thing.

I suspect that this is an unhealthy environment. Took a break to read. I talked to aviva on chat. She liked the conversation and saved it. I was saying I thought I was being unhealthy, sought out unhealthy relationships especially with women who need help. She wants to help me. Says I help her.

News: Trouble Brewing

2005-09-22T10:42:00.000-03:00

Probably the Administration's view:
The communist menace reappears in South America

but then...

Chavez Raises His Profile at U.N. Summit

In the same day of the NY Times:
Chavez Will Try to Improve U.S. Relations

Chavez: U.S. Plans to Invade Venezuela

BBC:
Venezuela to limit foreign mining

Katrina

2005-09-12T13:32:00.000-03:00

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. . And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

-- Former first lady Barbara Bush about Katrina evacuees housed in the Houston Astrodome (hear the quote)

I recently received the following email from a friend in the States;

Been wondering what you've heard about New Orleans. Does the media where you are talk about it all? It's really outrageous, Nathan. It's appalling how irresponsible and incompetant our government is. It's really depressing--the last shred of trust I had in our government has been completely obliterated. It's pretty clear now that I can't depend on them for the bare minimum. Yesterday Jessica and I listened to This American Life. Ira Glass was interviewing a woman who had been in the convention center. He almost started to cry, listening to this woman tell about the horrific conditions inside. I certainly cried.

If this doesn't change the attitude in our country towards George Bush, I really don't know what will. If the aftermath of Katrina doesn't make this country realize that extreme poverty and racism still exists in the United States, I don't know what will.

How does this news meet you?

Today, as well, is September 11th. My oh my.

The answer is that for news on South America I have my news page I set up on my website. I mostly just check that so I didn’t even know about the hurricane till I received an email from a family friend on September 1:

Dear Nathan, I don't know how much you are hearing or seeing about New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but it is truly horrible. We were in Santa Cruz without a TV so we didn't see the pictures until yesterday. People are dying because of lack of medical care. Apparently, there is no communication system. The hospitals are closing because they have no electricity or supplies and our president played golf last Monday. Yesterday he thought he would look at the damage from the air for the first time. They can't even seem to get water to the people who are walking out of the city on their own. We are very angry. It is a disgrace. I have a friend in one of the hardest hit towns and I cannot reach her.

It was actually confusing to get this email. I was in a small town in Bolivia and I had no idea what she was talking about. I don't know the spìn in the states but the a Guardian Unlimited article didn't seem to agree with Mrs. Bush. But this stuff is big news in the foreign press as proved yesterday when I asked about the price of a Harry Potter book at a bookstand and I was approached by a 13 year old Argentinean kid who told me that my president is racist and doesn't care if black people die. A 13 year old in a book store told me this. I asked him why he thought that and he told me that he thought it because of the hurricane. I told him that it was very sad to go to another country and have to hear that about my president (especially from children). He was very polite about it.

THE PERCEPTION

Super Deens

2005-09-11T13:23:00.000-03:00

Peru, oh! What a wonderful country!

The Tour: Salt, Salt, Salt

2005-09-01T04:17:00.000-03:00

We drove off into the Salar. The terrain became whiter and whiter and eventually turned into pure salt. Like in the rest of Bolivia there was not really a road, just a place where people drove. But unlike the rest of Bolivia, it was really not different from anywhere else. It was flat as far as the eye could see and it was because of this you needed a guide. I had always thought of needing a guide in places like jungles and mazes but the sheer openness of desert it is far more frightening. I was reminded of a story by Borges, the famous Argentinian writer:

The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths

It is said by men worthy of belief (though Allah's knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way. Most unseemly was the edifice that resulted, for it is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder. In time there came to the court a king of Arabs, and the king of Babylonia (to muck the simplicity of his guest) bade him enter the labyrinth, where the king of Arabs wandered, humiliated and confused, until the coming of the evening, when he implored God's aid and found the door. His lips offered no complaint, though he said to the king of Babylonia that in his land he had another labyrinth, and Allah willing, he would see that someday the king of Babylonia made its acquaintance. Then he returned to Arabia with his captains and his wardens and he wreaked such havoc upon kingdoms of Babylonia, and with such great blessing by fortune, that he brought low his castles, crushed his people, and took the king of Babylonia himself captive. He tied him atop a swift-footed camel and led him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then he said to him, "O king of time and substance and cipher of the century! In Babylonia didst thou attempt to make me lose my way in a labyrinth of brass with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Powerful One has seen fit to allow me to show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor walls to impede thy passage."

Then he untied the bonds of the king of Babylonia and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of hunger and thirst. Glory to him who does not die.

As we drove through this snowy wilderness we would stop at various touristic places. First there was the salt refinery. It is family operated and everything is done by hand. There was once machine run factory down the road but it had to shut down because they could not afford to keep the machinery running. Now there are about five families and they each work a different salt patch. It is hard to explain but these people literally live in a world of salt. All they have to do is walk outside their house, put a shovel in the ground and they have a shovelful of salt. Many of the houses are even made of salt. The families do not own the salt, no one does, but they do not let anyone else mine the patches.

We had come during the windy season when they could not refine any salt. To refine the salt they use fire and the fire can quickly spread to other buildings. I assumed that they had learned this from experience. All the work in the refinery was done by hand, without gloves. I asked why they couldn’t use gloves but they just said it wasn’t possible. The lady told us that the salt burns their hands terribly but this is the only way they can do it.

We were invited to buy salt ashtrays, salt llamas and salt dice-cups with dice made out of salt. We didn’t buy anything. I wanted to but I have no way of carrying souvenirs.

The next stop was a salt hotel. Instead of asking for a “propina” they required you to buy a small, overpriced item from their store. We all did. It was a house made of salt with crushed salt on the floor. I was impressed only with its ugliness, its dirty salt bricks. If you go there expecting a shiny white building, think again. Imagine living in a sugar cube for a few years… then imagine the bathroom. More than that I cannot say.

The third, final and best stop of the day was Fish Island. Fish Island is in the shape of a fish though I doubt any fish has lived on it for several million years at least. It is, however, made of coral. It was part of the seabed in the ocean that once was here. Millions of years ago volcanic activity isolated this part of the ocean from it’s source and the sun dried it out, leaving only the scorched salt. It was this same volcanic activity that made Lake Titicaca.

In this ex-oceanbed cum desert the wind has free reign and whips through relentlessly in the winter months. I have been in a minor dust storm in the crater of Mitzpeh Ramon in Israel but I would hate to be in a salt storm.

At Fish Island we ate llama steaks, quinoa and salad. Delicious. The Irish girls had said they did not eat llama. We told them it was cow and they loved it.

From Fish Island it was a few hours to where we would sleep that night. The vast majority of the tour involved sitting in the car and making small talk. The three Irish girls sat in the back and I sat in the front with the German couple. The backseat talked mostly amongst themselves about the places that they’d been and things they’d found there. They liked Argentina for its steaks and wine and they liked Mexico for its mixed drinks on the beaches. Two had worked together in a bank: one in equities and another in fidelities. The other is a speech therapist. All had quit their jobs to move away from London together. This trip was their big fling before the move.

German couple was composed of two university students: the boy (22) of information systems and the girl (20) of geography. I made small talk but with them but it kept turning to politics, which they did not like. At one point I remember saying “I feel great… I feel like I…” “Like you’re 20 again?” the girl said, completing my sentence for me. We both laughed.

We arrived at the place we were to sleep that night. The I went with the Germans to view the Necropolis nearby. When this land had been underwater, long before the Andes were formed, the Necropolis was a coral bed, the kind you could imagine the little mermaid playing in. We explored the labyrinth of natural mausoleums in the half dark. These coral caves now store the bones of some forgotten people.

We returned to a lovely dinner: Vegetable soup and chicken suprema (which is chicken, fries and fried banana). Foodsharing is an important art and this German couple could have been professionals. For example, above the usual snacks like chocolates, candies, chips, and cookies they had brought loaves of bread, ham, cheese, condensed milk, 10 liters of Coca cola and whisky to mix it with. They had even brought limes. It was very impressive.

Before I had been feeling alone and isolated. It was nice to be stuck in a car with people who had nothing better to do than talk to me. It was also interesting to see what it was like for people to travel in groups. The girls were firmly stuck in their group of three. That evening I explained about SERVAS over a game of liars’ dice. One of the Irish girls said, “I’d love to do something like that but I’m traveling in a group…” It made me very happy to be alone, compromising nothing.

The wind howled outside. It sounded as if there were people trying to open the doors and windows, to get inside. I thought of the skulls tucked away peacefully in their coral beds while the wind raged around them.

The Tour: Exit Uyuni

2005-09-01T04:01:00.000-03:00

I got up at about 8am and bought my train ticket out of Uyuni for when I returned from the tour on Saturday. Then, once I had spoken with the tour company I had to return it because it turns out they had made the tour an extra day (“at no extra charge… of course”). I did not want an extra day on the tour, I just wanted to get out of Bolivia. I was not given options and I did not really care that much so I went along with it.

On the trip was a German couple and 3 Irish girls on an “around the world” ticket. However, we did have to wait a few hours while 3 of our trip staged a sit-in protest in the tour company’s office. They had been promised an English translator and there was none to be had. They wouldn’t leave without one. The tour company was very upset and did not want to leave without them. They did call the Irish girls all sorts of nasty things including “foul people” and “Israelis”. The tourist police were eventually called. Unlike her counterpart of the day before, she was sober, at least enough to say “There is simply nothing you can do: you must go on the trip.”

The tour company was completely befuddled by the whole process. Even the tourist policewoman was confused: “Usually tourists get upset because they find out at the last minute that they are being overcharged for their English guide. But this is the first group that wanted to pay extra for one that I have encountered. I don’t know why these girls don’t just learn Spanish and enjoy our culture.” I tried to explain that the girls had really been upset by the cultural principles involved in keeping one’s word and I think it was lost on them. While everyone in the town seemed to be involved in the touring business, I doubt there was one among them who had ever been on a tour in his life! They offer products they do not consume themselves and, like the chef without taste, the blind traffic cop, and the deaf composer, often wonder why they have dissatisfied customers. Beethoven was a prodigy and we shall speak no more of him.

The Irish girls held out for another hour until someone’s grandmother was summoned to translate English. At this, the point of the Irish girls was proved and they decided to go on the trip and give some money to the German girl who spoke excellent English as well as Spanish and, of course, German. She would be their translator.

Personally I’m glad we didn’t have a paid guide who spoke in a second language. They often feel they have to speak just to prove that they can. They are misleading at best.

Uyuni Blues

2005-08-31T02:05:00.000-03:00

When one is traveling it’s easy to see how one small decision can lead to others, your choices swirling together, one following another: the ebb and flow of your life as it washes against time. Perhaps our decisions are so based on past decisions that we hardly even decide and our lives are more like a game of Snakes and Ladders. If so, I had just landed on a snake that stretched half the continent: since Lima I had been dropping southwards at increasing velocity. Bolivia was the country I had been most excited to visit and here I was boarding a bus South after a single week. I could visualize those at home interrogating me about why I chose to miss the backpacker’s paradise of pristine rainforests and one dollar hostels. I felt guilty because I visualized things from a moment looking back. Later, in Argentina, I emailed a fellow traveler about meeting up on the road: “Things look bad for our heroes,” I wrote. To which she replied: “We are not heroes and our lives are not stories.” Though we did see each other again in Buenos Aires she was right: seeing your life as part of a larger story can either make you feel either too secure or too insecure but rarely just the correct amount. But at the time I felt as if I were going against some greater plan, ignoring a list of things I “ought” to do.

In Bolivia the roads are not paved and as we bumped our way through the desert dust filled the bus, covering everything. Some windows were stuck partly open and at every turn the couple in front of me would get a dust shower. The kid next to me would not speak but would nod or shake his head. Are you going to Uyuni? Do you live there? Do you go to school? He played possum and eventually I let him alone.

There was a girl on the bus who is dressed in a red jumpsuit. She also wore a red cap jauntily on her head. She was very stylish and pretty by Bolivian standards. She was also a master at Bolivian busmanship. She had two seats to herself and chose the one near the aisle. People would try to sit by her but she would make her legs rigid and would not move them. “I think it’s easier if you sit on that seat over there” she would say to them. Invariably, as they stumbled off confused, they would find that to be the case.

Before the bus trip I asked the man at the kiosk how much the bus cost: 25BS. At the end of the trip the conductor, a short man with aviator glasses, came and asked me for my money. Change being hard to come by, I wanted to pay 30BS and get change. I held out my money and asked how much it cost. He looked to see how much I had and then said: “30 Bolivianos”. I told him I’d heard it was only 25. He said: “Well, it’s 30.” I gave him 25 and told him: “That’s the correct amount, right?” He winks at me and we both laugh.

Uyuni is a nasty little tourist town with only one thing to do: take the tour of the Salar de Uyuni. These tours last 3 to 4 days while you drive around a magnificent salt flat in a Land Rover, witnessing the wonders it has to offer. There are 8 people on a typical tour: 6 tourists, the driver/guide and his cook (which is usually his wife). If you go a tour company they will form a group of 6 for you but you have more bargaining power if you already have a group of 6 when you arrive. Trying to form this group was my first order of business when I got off the bus. It was about 3pm so I had plenty of time.

There were other tourists on the bus and I asked some of them what they intended to do. They avoided me in a kind of ambivalent way that I have only seen people do in Bolivia. I felt like I was trying to sell them something. Many tourists and backpackers are like this in Bolivia. I have no idea why. But if there’s one good way to find tourists it’s with the Lonely Planet. The Lonely Planet is the first word in travel guides and, since 90% of backpackers use it, it’s the best way to find other tourists quickly.

The Lonely Planet is a large guidebook of about 700 hundred thick pages: they did not want their book falling apart and prepared it for extreme conditions. I do not enjoy carrying this book around towns with me because of the weight and also because it’s like having a big sign above your head saying: please try to sell me something I don’t want. When I arrive at a new place, usually the first thing I do is tear out the applicable pages of my Lonely Planet and just carry those in my pocket.

I was crouched on the ground by the bus ripping apart a book when I heard a voice: “Have you got a tour agency. What agency do you have?” I ignored the voice. I did not want to look for tours yet and I continued tearing my book. “Hey. Excuse me. I asked what tour agency you have.” “Calm down,” I reply, not turning round, “I’m trying to do something here.” “You don’t have to tear apart your book. You can just tell me what agency you have,” the voice told me. I stand up and turn around to find a man in military fatigues. “Who do you work for?” I ask. “I’m the tourist police,” he answers.

I was relieved not to have to deal with a salesman and, having retrieved the pages I needed, I told him that I had no tour agency and asked the man if he had one to recommend. “Cheap or expensive?” he asked. I could smell his breath: pure vodka. “Well” I said, as I always do in these situations, “Good value. Comfortable price.” “But there are so many!” he said. I affirmed. “Far too many!” he said again. But now he was interrupted by a man in a black shirt. At first I thought he was harassing this officer for being drunk on the job but it turned out that he too was drunk and was trying to stabilize himself by resting his head on his friend’s shoulder. The cop kept pushing this man away, stumbling as he did so. “I can’t speak for these businesses” he said, pointing to the bus with his left hand, “they might be good and they might be bad. But,” he said, motioning towards a pizza restaurant with his right, “these are ok.” I thanked the man and, having performed his duties for the day, he hobbled off with his friend.

There are 65 tourist agencies in Uyuni and they all offer the same tour for more or less the same price and varying levels of service. They will all try to cheat you and it is impossible to know what you are getting. They are probably not even sure of they services they intend to provide until they are on the road. How did I choose? I chose the first one I walked into. I had no real criterion for deciding anything. I was a lamb and they were the wolves…

That night I hung out with some fellow tourists over a pizza and got to play a real steel string guitar that someone from Sweden had brought. Talking to the people reconfirmed my fear that most folks traveling for six months or more either had problems to keep them from home or were depressed.

I spent “a lot of money” that night ($7) but it was worth it. It’s weird how life is relative, money is relative.

I went to bed that night, eagerly awaiting the tour, the last thing I would do before leaving Bolivia.

sliding on to...?

2005-08-30T21:59:00.000-03:00

I woke up the next morning and laid in bed for 2 hours worrying about the past, present and future. Is this trip the right thing to do? Should I be at home in the "real" world instead out trying to find it?

It was at that point that I remembered back in cozy summer Sacramento I had said many times I wanted to avoid the cold and that I would escape the Andes as soon as I could. I had spent almost a month in the Andes (which are amazing!) and was feeling all the effects I had feared. It occurred to me that I could just cut Bolivia short and go to Argentina via Uyuni...

I'm torn between the two choices and decide to flip a coin. I flip it but then am confused which sides is heads and which is tails: the money is different here. I flip again and it comes up for staying in Bolivia. I am filled with worry. As I walk to the bus terminal the sun shines down with ferocity yet somehow cannot manage the strength to melt the ice on the late morning ground.

I walk past the Uyuni part of the bus terminal, ice crunching beneath my feet, and go to ask the bus times to my next Bolivian stop: Cochabamba. Uyuni would be a perfect idea but I worry that Uyuni is considered an "Almost Wonder of the World" (along with Machu Pichu). How could I visit an "Almost Wonder of the World" with no pictures to bring home?!?

I decide just to ask the times for a bus to Uyuni. A bus leaves in 10 minutes. I buy a ticket and 20 minutes later (Bolivian buses are inveriably late...) I am on my way to what I believe are warmer, southern climes.

and it was there my troubles began (long version with kierk)

2005-08-30T16:07:00.000-03:00

From my journal:

I just bought a coke and am sitting by Lake Titicaca with the most spectacular view imaginable. The thing Corona commercials are made of. I could hope for shade but where in Bolivian Andes the sparse brush doesn’t have that occupation. Instead its job is to indicate where there is dirt (by occupying it) and where there is only rock (by avoiding it). There is not much foliage. The air is crisp and cool and the sun, while not exactly hot, is powerful. In the distance the snow covered mountain peaks are visible. At almost 4000m high they are not that far off. A group of workmen lounge near me. I pay with a disturbingly large 20BS bill (worth $2.50) the woman struggles to find change and a workman provides it.

But all was not well. It was on the island that I began to have dreams.

That night I dreamed that I had returned to Seattle. Somehow I was in seattle. My aunt had died and I was sleeping in her bed but somehow I was calling people to hang out with them I had trouble dialing the numbers, I had trouble getting a connection. My ex girlfriend was pregnant with my child and I remember feeling like I was going to have to try be a good father and always be in this life. This did not excite me. She was so happy to be pregnant but I had somehow forgotten she was, which made me feel bad. I felt like I needed to call her but either she couldn’t, wouldn’t pick up or I couldn’t call her. My aunt had had 3 different phones by her bed so people could call her but they were in a tangled mess, impossible to use. On one some of the numbers didn’t work. On another the cord would come loose. The third worked fine but I could never remember which one was the good one.

I was able to call my brother to hang out and he was really aloof. “Oh. Yeah? Fine…” “You want to go out to lunch?” “Fine… Where…?” “I don’t know, you’re the one who knows this place.” “Oh…” He was distracted, doing computer stuff. “Aren’t there some great lunch deals?” “Tons…” “Ok, what’s a good one?” Then he told me where he usually went and we decided to meet. The atmosphere was light...

Weightless...

This was not the first time I have had this dream. When I was 16 I visited South Africa for two weeks with my parents. Also I was taking antimalerial drugs and they enhanced the dreams I would have. I remember that every night for week I dreamed I was calling my friends but they could not hear my voice over the phone and would hang up, thinking it was a prank call. I would dream of speaking to them seperated by glass.

I remember feeling frustrated like I did when I began travelling in South Africa.

Calling. Calling. No one listening…

----

A kite soars high in the air looking down on the fields below. By their nature kites have a paradoxical relationship with their string: it is their very attachment to the ground that gives them the ability to soar above it. How must a kite feel about the chain around his leg, does it dream of being let go, flying forever?

As I write this I remember that before I left an ex-girlfriend gave me a kite that I decided not to bring because it reminded me of her.

----

The dreams shook me. And I began to be filled with self doubt. I called home and it helped. But only a little.

The philosopher Kierkegaard once wrote that there were three different modes for living a meaningful life: the aesthetic, the moral and the religious.

The aesthetic life is based on the physical. The goal is happiness and the aesthetic person survives by feeding those pleasure centers of the brain. And why not? After all there is nothing else! Sadness is wasted energy. Instead the aesthetic person moves from project to project, never “hoping to change the world” for such changes are meaningless as any. For the aesthetic person all meaning is relative and thus “changing the world” in any objective sense is also meaningless. Instead the goal of the aesthetic person is to “make the most of life” by measuring progress against his own standards. Of course objectively speaking this too has no meaning and sometimes the aesthetic person has “bad dreams”…

The moral person believes in an objective truth, in ideals, and in a world with rules, standards and right. For the moral person there is a “better” way to do things and in a given situation a set of “right” things to do. This person believes in progress, in objective goodness and possibly in evil too. To the moral person you can strive, perhaps through education or willpower, to be a “better” person. Perhaps the moral person does not even pretend to know or understand this objective truth and morality in the universe but he does believe it exists. Perhaps we do not know the standards by which we will be judged, but there are standards. But he also accepts that we can never achieve those standards: they exist only as a goal to be reached for, as a yoga instructor might tell you to “reach for the stars” in order to “improve” our posture. His is a sad lot, knowingly striving for an unachievable world.

Finally, the religious person also believes in a world of objective meaning, of rightness and justice. But, unlike the moral person, the religious person truly has faith that the perfection he strives towards will come to pass. He has utter fath in the world and that the world is as he understands it. The aesthetic clings to nothing but himself, the moral has his rules, but in his time of need the religious has rock solid conviction in his hour of need.

To illustrate the differences Kierkegaard uses an analogy of three nights in love with a princess. To illustrate the differences Kierkegaard uses an analogy of three nights in love with a princess. The aesthetic knight is rejected by the princess. 'you're not a prince' she says. 'i only date princes'. he loves her but realizes that their love will never happen. he leaves disappointed and eventually dates the millers daughter and they are happy together, though he always reads the papers to find out what is up with the princess. Sometimes he dreams about her though he cannot tell his wife.

falling...

2005-08-29T20:17:00.000-03:00

That night, August 28, two months after I set out, things came to a head. After Lima my trip had become more emotionally difficult. After I entered Bolivia I had been consistently dreaming of calling friends and having them not hear me, not answering the phone. I dreamed of talking to people through glass, of being in a car driving away and not having them hear me over the engine. There were things I needed to tell them that they were not worried about hearing. This was not the first time I had had dreams like this. I had almost the same ones when I visited South Africa for the first time at age 16.

For the first time on my trip I was homesick. I do not know if it caused the physical illness or visa versa or if they merely fed on each other. The truth is that I was tired from the cold and the altitude. I also had been eating poor food and sleeping only a few hours a night. And I was cold every night. For some reason I was not taking care of myself and the dreams got worse.

That night my camera and wallet were either stolen or somehow left in a taxi, I will never know. It happened because I was worn down and my defenses were simply nonexistent. I wasn’t even aware that I was missing anything until the next day.

Initially hardest blow was my camera. It was something to fight boredom. It was a conversation starter. It was an amazing recorder of my journey and I lost over 400 photos of the festival alone. But most importantly through it I could objectify the world around me. “It’s a pretty picture,” I could tell myself as I snapped away. It was a filter and I used it to give a lot of my trip direction. I did not know any of this until I lost it and in it I had lost my confidence.

I felt as if I were drowning.

Whenever I get this feeling I remember taking my PADI diving certification. A SCUBA diver has neutral buoyancy in water and controls his upward and downward movements (his buoyancy) by expanding or contracting his lungs, in other words by breathing. It is breathing itself that allows the divers to move effortlessly through the water. You only sink when you exhale and you only rise when you inhale.

It is almost impossible to get a new diver underwater for the first time without lots of extra weights because the new diver refuses to exhale! I was no exception though with practice I learned to fight the instinct to hold my breath underwater. Then on my first dive I was down 18 meters, the limit for beginner divers, and saw a big shark about 30 feet away. The shark was really really big. There was nothing I could do to fight my reaction, though it was the opposite of what I should have done: my eyes bulged and I took a big breath and held it, shooting straight to the top like a frightened cork. I was smart enough to breathe out almost immediately but the damage was done and I couldn’t relax enough to go down again for another 10 minutes.

Here a knee-jerk reaction took hold of me in a similar way. I couldn’t ignore that something was wrong but as I wandered the streets with folks in traditional dress leftover from the festival, I was confused as to what I should do.

It is one thing to vacation for a month but it is quite another to travel for an extended period of time. In order to travel for a year you must break off a lot of everyday ties and close up shop back home for awhile. This adds a certain sense of weightlessness and planlessness that is necessary for a long trip to succeed.

I sat in a greasy spoon diner watching local folks suck on coffee and down greasy hamburgers and as I often do when I’m in a tough spot I began focusing on plans. From how I would get past the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama to the question of forging onward tickets for countries that required them, everything was pulled into question. What would be my route to Brazil? Did I have enough money to travel for that long? I thought about how I needed onward tickets out of so many countries in order to enter them, would I have to forge them? If I wanted a new camera then the cheapest option was Paraguay, the shady smugglers’ capital of South America. How would I get there? What were the symptoms of Dengue Fever (which is rampant there)? In my weakened state everything was fair game.

I was lonely and alone in a foreign country. Perhaps this is what I had wanted from the beginning.

Potosí: Festival Day 2

2005-08-29T19:45:00.000-03:00

I decide to head to fiesta. The groups on the second day are far more professional. One school has done something hp and new. They have dressed in rags with chains and blackened their faces, perhaps to represent slaves or miners or both. One girl in rags wants to dance with me but my hands are filled with a green jello desert with creme fresh. As I watched the group dance away I wish I had said yes but there was something that had held me back. These days something was always holding me back.

Street vendors honk their Harpo Marx bicycle horns and a woman walks by wearing an umbrella strapped to her head to block the sun. Fireworks explode in the clear blue sky.

In one group a girl stands out, dressed completely in pink while everyone else is in purple. She is far and away the best dancer. The reporters and videomen clamor around her. Young men offer her drinks, a beer? For one day at least she is a moviestar. Some of the dancers are shy of the cameras, others mug and pose. Obviously for some this is their moment to shine in front of the whole community in their borrowed finery. For others they have been pushed into ridiculous outfits and forced to dance like a circus bear or worse. Both only reinforce their fates.

It is like any country festival in the United States only better. The food is fresher and the prices are hardly inflated. If you don’t like the prices you can walk into any supermarket that lines the street and buy whatever you want. Beer, at least, is the same as supermarket prices. It is also drunk openly by all. There are no wristbands but I see no children drinking. Everyone seems involved and knows what to do and the event itself is free to all though you can pay if you want nice seats to sit in. There is beautiful kind of informality in it that is, perhaps, only possible in countries where lawsuits and regulations, if existing, are ignored. There seems to be no pressure to it: it is less a show and more of a community event.

The indigenous folks wear their traditional clothes and sit quietly on the sidewalk or sell things. The modern, western dressed crowd is usually very involved in the show. I think they are mostly out of towners in for the weekend. They shout, clap, and drink beer for fun. The indigenous crowd also drinks beer but they seem to drink it because tradition requires it. They do it slowly and with solemnity as if watching a Tennessee Williams play.

It could be because they have less money but they also don’t seem to buy that many things. Except sweets. They love sweets, popsicles and ice cream. An old Indian woman sits across from me, her face wrinkled like a prune. She sits among the folds of her skirt, shaded under her wide brimmed hat from the 1800s. She sucks on an ice cream and smiles a crinkly grin.

Bolivian Magic Show

2005-08-29T12:23:00.000-03:00

He begins with a troll doll with a string threaded through it. Comically it slowly rises and falls, rises and falls, with no seen force. Then he has a spectator tie a knot in a hankerchief and, in the magicians hand, the knot disappears. He explains that there is nothing special about his hands or, for that matter, any part of his body. He has only learned these tricks through training. To illustrate this point he pulls out a popup book of anatomy and begins ttalking about where babies come from. He’s proud to be a man he tells the crowd and then he pulls out a large machete and nun chucks. After performing a few karate kicks he returns to the point that he has normal hands and feet just like anyone else only can perform magic tricks. He continues pulling things out of his grab bag of tricks. Next are condoms, male and female. He starts talking about how sex is good but you should be very careful. The next item to come out of his bag is a stack of newspaper clippings: “Woman leaves man because of no sex.” He shifts gears to talking about taking care of your prostate and has newspaper clippings with color photos of inflamed prostrate glands as well as full color glossies showing operations. He shows pictures of people urinating through catheters and other types of tubes. The magic show is forgotten and the freakshow is in full swing. The crowd, all men, peer to get a closer look at the horrific pictures. He explains the biology of anything and everything. Is everyone wondering what I am wondering? Where is he going with this?

He gets folks to huddle around closer to hide the pictures from passersby. A girl dressed entirely in purple comes to see what the fuss is about, stays 2 minutes and then wanders off. I wonder to myself: in a catholic country how people learn about sex? In school? From parents? The show ends as suddenly as it begun: “Thanks for watching, folks, I’ll be performing this same show tomorrow. Tell your friends.”

I felt compelled to approach him afterwards. I ask him what the point of the show is. “Usually I sell vitamins.” He tells me, “but not today.” He sees himself on a crusade fighting poor Bolivian sexual health. “This is a Christian country” he says sadly, “people don’t even know what tantric sex is…”

Potosi: Festival de los Cau'tillos

2005-08-28T15:33:00.000-03:00

I arrived exhausted in freezing Potosi and my companion, Carlos, took me to look for hostals. They were all full except one. They were all triple price as well. After an hour or so of searching I took a nap before venturing out to explore the city a bit more.

For 50BS ($7) you can buy a seat for the weekend. At the end of the street is a gate and behind that gate are the dancers, the processions. The first day are the local schools: amateurish and cute. They have been preparing for this for months, longer maybe. Every few minutes you see dancers dressed to the hilt in feathered caps that look like industrial sized dream catchers walk arm in arm with a parent to behind the gate.

The streets of Potosi were lined with empty bleachers, each marked with seat numbers. A million noises crowd the air: “Seats! Seats! Get your seats!” “Beer! Only 8BS! Ice cold!” Vendors raced around trying to get their products sold. People’s cares drop away as the groups prance and twirl down the streets under a blue banner reading:

NO ABUSES DEL ALCOHOL
SI QUIERES DISFRUTAR MUCHOS CAU'TILLOS
HONORABLE GOBIERNO MUNICIPAL
TRABAJANDO EN DISAROLLO HUMANO

At first there is the feeling of a school play, the children sometimes simply promenading, not dancing, down the mile long gamut lined with spectators. They munch on food and drinks and talk to eachother and look fearfully at the thousands of people in the bleachers. But as the day progresses and more beer is drunk the kids get into the show and just do their thing. They have seen from those who've gone before that nothing bad will happen to them.

An old woman, face wrinkled a gorilla mask I just saw in the parade, sits in the same place she did 5 hours earlier. Candied apples. A group dressed in pink sun hats shouts "Vamos chicas!" in drunken enthusiasm.

A group passes in hats that were probably the height of fashion in 1492. Each group is accompanied by its own marching band. Some bands are the main event, hamming it up with their styles of "marching". As the dancers go down the street they sometimes pull their boyfriends or girlfriends (or possibly just people they wish were) out of the crowds to dance with them. It is all very informal and endearing. Between each group the street fills with crowds and with women selling snacks from trays and pushcarts. A boy walks down the street with a jug and some plastic dixie cups: "hot coffee! hot coffee!" In those thin cups I hope it was only tepid.

I have never seen finer costumes than in this festival. There were more costumes than I would have thought existed in Bolivia. There were, I guess, 500 groups of 30 dancers and a full marching band each. All were dressed in absolute finary. The girls usually in what the Brits lovingly refer to as FM boots and a corset and lace skirts. The boys were dressed as all kinds of objects ranging from alters to large condors.

Each group has its own personality. There is a band of dancers who sort of hop along to a steady repetative beat. Then there are some groups who have a "spirit" who embodies the group. Sometimes it is a particular dancer or a person dressed as an animal. One group had man on a horse who swung a dead animal around his head while screaming

As his group dances down the street, an old man with a symbolic traditional water jug in one hand and a regular water bottle in the other walks among them, tired. It has been a long day and the sun is setting but the pink hats cry for more. The sequen covered costumes glint off the setting sun.

These photos have been borrowed from a very nice girl named Fiona who I met in the Salar de Uyuni. Her photopage is at: http://05.fotopic.net

running...

2005-08-27T17:09:00.000-03:00

I sat in the plaza Alonzo Mendoza La Paz whirled around me. I had forgotten to eat and my blood sugar had dropped. I spent the day in front of the computer, typed 5000 words to update my blog. In the park children played on a grey concrete moniument. On it is a fresco of the conquistadors and the Incas and on the top is a bronze statue of a conquistador with knee-high boots, a funny Spanish helmet. He is comical, straight out of Don Quijote. In one hand he holds a book, the other is on his sword. It is getting late and the photographers who line plazas like this the world over have vanished. The children run their hands over the fresco as if attempting to understand something, as if the monument could tell them something. They play, respectfully, under the gaze of Alonzo Mendoza. In Peru plazas are beautiful. The community comes out and walks around them at night, greeting each other, lovers sitting and whispering to each other on the benches. In Bolivia the plazas are concrete affairs, usually locked after dark to prevent people from sleeping in them.

I chatted on Yahoo Messenger for the first time since I’ve been abroad. I chatted with people back home. "Are you doing exciting things?" I realized I have no way to measure that anymore.

Last night I bought a stuffed potato on the street. A man in a suit introduced himself to me:

MAN: Where are you from?
ME: The USA
MAN: What do you do there? Your profession?
ME: I was a high school teacher. History and politics.
MAN: I am an assistant minister in parliament. In the government building. I also sell alpaca wool.
ME: I hear that it’s expensive.
MAN: Now always. I want to export it but I have no contacts outside Bolivia.
ME: Oh. Maybe you could give me your email.
MAN: Would you like to visit the government building? Tourists are not allowed but you could come as my guest. Here are both my work numbers. Tomorrow is perfect. We never do anything on Fridays.

I wanted to call him but I lost his number. This was how things were going for me at the time. Everything was golden but I kept missing connections. Asynchronicity.

I decided to go to Potosi. Move on. There was a folkloric festival there. It was South and I had intended to go to the North, the jungle. In travelling and in life one frequently makes decisions which lead to others.

On the bus I sat next to Carlos, a friend in had made in La Paz. He was a student, studying to be a CPA. The bus left late as it had sold too many tickets. This was standard practice and it was usual for some people to sit in the aisle. But it was against the national bus standards and a representative told the women sitting in the aisle to leave. After some arguing and passive resistance the police were called and arrived with a “What’s all this then?”. The women left but they didn’t take some large bags with them. It turns out the bags were just for using as a bed but the police said we could not leave until the aisle was clear. For some reason no one would just move the bags off the bus. There was a stalemate. Until the policemen had to be called away for something else. Immediately the bus pulled out of the station, bed in the aisle and all, and we headed off to Potosi. However, by now there was already a group of people standing to protest the bad business tactics of the bus company.

Carlos and I set to discussing differences in culture and politics. He told me about how in some parts of Bolivia they use “Bos” and “Che” like the Argentinians. Then another uproar began.

At first it seemed just that a woman was sick. Then she was very sick. People began to gather in the aisle, dodging the bed, and asking for items like water, smelling salts, medicine. Everyone felt bad for her. Then, somehow, it was discovered that she did not have a proper ticket and the faction at the front of the bus (who had relaxed since the beginning) began to see red. They stood up again and began chanting. “Throw her off the bus!” they shouted. A faction in the back, near the woman, took her part: “She is ill! She needs a hospital! You are heartless people!” they hollered back. It was bedlam. After 15 minutes of this the bus driver finally did the only thing he could do: he turned off all the lights in the bus and everyone had to sit down, for safety’s sake. Eventually everyone was quiet again. The bus sped on into the night

Night buses are the hardest parts of travelling. I sit in the dark, haunted by thoughts of home. I cannot sleep.

Fingers in the Pot II: Venezuela

2005-08-26T17:36:00.000-03:00

Two of the top google news stories for South America

Chavez Wins Friends in South America

The False Intelligence Game in South America

La Paz means "The Peace"

2005-08-26T14:25:00.000-03:00

A baby on the bus is crying. Out the window an Indian woman sits by a burning trash can by the side of the road. She is not using it for warmth. She just sits by it. Another Indian woman stands by the side of the road surrounded by doors torn off their hinges. They are of all colors, shapes sizes. All destroyed. Does she sell them to people with broken houses?

La Paz is built into a canyon and is really a city of two cities. We are in upper La Paz, which is very high up. As we wind down the canyon you can see the brown houses with multicoloured roofs built into the hills. Way down in the valley of the canyon skyscrapers raise up. At the outskirts of the city the streets are paved with rocks but as we get closer to the center the rocks become black gravel bricks and finally asphalt. The buildings go from adobe, blending into the hillside, to red brick or concrete.

I immediately notice the political graphiti. Somehow Peruvians seem to keep their country clean of it but in Bolivia, perhaps as a result of the recent protests, it is everywhere. “THE VAMPIRE MINISTERS WILL PAY!” etc.

"THE ASSASSINS OF DR. VITALIAN WILL PAY WITH BLOOD"

I recently finished the excellent book, Inca Cola: A Traveller's Tale of Peru. The author travels for a few weeks in Peru and Bolivia in the 1970s. He writes about the political climate:

There is a paradoxical feeling of permanence about Bolivia’s turmoil It is a durable sort of fragility, for, in a way, they have hit the bottom. You feel that it was ever thus and life, now, will go on.

Peru had been strangely different. It was a feeling that life might stop going on, for quite a large number of people, and quite soon. There is a bourgeoisie in Lima and Arequipa – a class which ha done well enough to have something to lose yet not so well as to be able to take it with them on a jet to the US and a Miami bank account. They are stuck and they face a peasantry who are till able to hope and who have a sense of justice to be affronted. These are fertile soils for the revolutionary left and the populist right. It could yet come to civil war between them.

In Bolivia the hateful gods of political and economic blight take their human sacrifices daily, predictably, according to some bleak and unspoken pact with history. Peru has made no such peace with its gods. There is a threat in Peru, that the elements of conflict might turn finally and face eachother. All that threatens Bolivia is a continued threat of despair.

Inca Cola, pg. 109

We get off the bus near the cemetery. It stands with beautiful arches, all the dead buried above the ground in mausoleums. I reach for cities to compare this one with: the hills of San Francisco? Descending into the crater makes San Francisco’s hills seem like speed bumps. The roads spiral in a kind of switchback pattern. You wind up or down, never across and you could never hope to keep control of a vehicle headed straight down. The picturesque vibrancy of the markets of Naples or Old Jerusalem? All of La Paz is an open market and every street corner lined with merchants selling everything under the sun. Everyone sells the same and everyone charges differently. I buy some toothpaste from an old Indian woman who is sleeping at her stall. It was 2.50BS and I pay with a 10BS note. She has no money to provide change. She goes to her neighbors for help but, one by one, they either cannot or will not help her. She wanders the stores with my 10BS note plaintively begging in a singsong voice: “Change me… Change me…”

I purchase a pocket copy of the first Harry Potter book. It’s tiny and only costs a dollar. Bolivians cannot afford the original books so they photocopy them and, to save paper, make the print half the size. It’s really perfect to practice my Spanish. I learn Spanish like a baby: hearing words over and over and only later deciphering their meaning. Now with this book I can finally use the dictionary I’ve been travelling with.

If there’s one thing that La Paz seems to lack it is good, fresh food. In Lima I felt as if I couldn’t walk a block without someone trying to sell me delicious food. Bolivians are chubby but only because they deep fry everything. Even hot dogs are put to the fryer before they deign to step out onto their buns.

I shared a hostal room with a German named Martin. He was very congenial and, when I returned after uploading some pictures to the internet, I kept him up chatting for a few hours and then we went to sleep.

Until:

A loud banging at the door awoke me. There was also a sort of scuffling and scratching at the door. I did not know who it was but I remember calling “Hey! Martin!” in a sort of urgent whisper. He reacted, though not convincingly, by groaning. He was clearly awake but ignoring all that was to take place. The banging continued, now accompanied by sobbing: “Let me in. The door is locked…” At first I thought it was the man at the desk but as it dragged on and I began to really wake up I realized it was the man in the room’s third bed. He was completely, wretchedly drunk. He wailed and wailed. The door was not locked, he simply could not find it to push it open for, without a handle on the door, that was all it really needed. I went, timidly, to the door, opened it and slunk back to my bed. After taking a few minutes to realize that he had been saved from sleeping in the cold he stumbled into the room.

Once inside he began to fumble for the light switch. “Apaga la luz! Apaga la luz!” (“Turn off the lights!”) he mumbled. But of course the lights were already off, so he got no help from me or Martin, who was quiet as the dead. He said that for five minutes but I think it was a deception: he just wanted to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. And he wanted to do it loudly. I had a friend back home who, when melancholy was upon him, would get drunk and cry and moan and break things. This was freedom to him: a baby elephant tearing at small trees. I don’t believe I would have understood anything the man said regardless of language. He spoke like a mixture between a baby and some who had lost a close friend, in his case sobriety. He sounded like he might cry or might already be crying. After some success in removing his shoes, filling the room with their smell, he moved on to getting under the blankets. And then, after about 20 seconds of complete silence came his snoring. Loud, drunk snoring. The snoring was like a physical thing. It filled the air with it’s scent, the stench of cheap vodka mixing with his shoes. I could not sleep and Martin tossed and turned a bit. I felt set upon by his snores. I felt as if they were coming out and attacking me, poking me, preventing sleep. I was forced to remind myself that this was irrational, that I could sleep through most any noise and, finally, I drifted off again.

I do not know if Martin did. In the morning Martin said: “That was really too much!” He felt as if the man had lacked respect and felt, through past experience, that had we told the man to shut up he would probably have wanted to fight us. I was immediately transported, again, to Tortilla Flats, the masterpiece work by Steinbeck. The man was Danny, fresh back from the war and trying to get into a fight.

In the book we love him…

Isla del Sol

2005-08-24T16:40:00.000-03:00

Pretty much everyone on the bus to Copacabana was a tourist. I do not know why it was that way but I have learned that it is an indicator that there are cheaper ways to travel. A few minutes after the border a man dressed as a policeman came on the bus. He was selling tickets to enter the “sanctuary” of Copacabana. “Gringo tax…” moaned the passengers. The tax was 1 BS (about 12 cents) but the folks on the bus took it personally.

Copacabana is a cute colonial style little village with magnificent surroundings and is very popular with the tourists. As a result it has the seedy kind feel that results from overcompetition for a seasonal market. As the bus stopped it was mobbed by the usual hostel and restaurant tauts. to Isla del Sol, the reason I was there in the first place. Boats left all the time for the island from the main ports but I didn’t want the hassle of choosing from competing boats or being with other tourists. I was to hike to a small village (who’s name I forget) about 17km away from Copacabana and take a boat from there. It was closer to the island and presumably cheaper.

It was a beautiful day, as it always is around Lake Titicaca, shining and crisp. I collected my backpack and made a beeline out of the city thankful that I could easily carry all I had and didn’t have to check bags at a hostel. As I walked away from the touristy center of town the houses began to look run down, rural, and then finally like a small town slum. An old woman sat in the middle of the dirt road and cleaned fish, throwing the stomache parts into the street where ominous dark birds competed with pigs for the piles of garbage.

OMINOUS BIRDS

I walked for about half an hour before I was joined by an Indian woman going my same direction. I would ask her questions about the area and she would misunderstand. “Wow. All the houses are built the same way!” I would say. “No, we don’t have those here” she would say. Just another classic example of a helpful Aymara speaking local who didn’t understand my Spanish.

The walk was ended up being about three hours but the altitude and the sun made it more difficult than I expected. We took a shortcut along an old Inca trail, all uphill. We stopped and shared water. I was going to take a picture of the view and just seeing the camera made her cringe. Traditional Bolivians really don't like the idea of photos.

TROUT FARMS

She was a trooper, carrying the ubiquitous bag that seems to be the only way of transporting anything. She probably made this walk every day. She looked like she was 50 but it was really impossible to tell. Peruvians and Bolivians either look under 15 or over 30, the age of youth disappears under large clothes, hard work and the unrelenting sun and wind. She could have been 30 for all I know.

HELPFUL AYMARA WOMAN

She eventually reached where she lived and I carried on, overtaken by an American in the last five minutes. We hired a boat and a small boy rowed us out to the island.

A BOY AND HIS BOAT

The next two days I relaxed on the Island eating trout and drinking Coca Cola. It was heaven, and a cheap heaven at that. I wish there were more to say about it but it was essentially relaxing and calm. The views were simply incredible.

INCREDIBLE VIEW

Better than just describing it would be sending the reader over the the Lake Titicaca Photo Gallery.

But soon it was time to move on and, planning my next moves, I took hitched a boat back to Copacabana with some Italian mountain climbers. One had a camera and took a photo of me.

DEEP IN THOUGHT

Bolivia at last!

2005-08-23T17:36:00.000-03:00

I woke up refreshed, after about 11 hours of sleep. It was wonderful and I was cured of Marcos’ Disease. But for some reason, as I woke up that morning, I began to have a funny feeling. Perhaps it was the price of the train, perhaps it was spending a month more than I’d planned in Peru, perhaps it was staying in mostly tourist spots: it could have been any number of things. But the feeling was that I needed to move and I needed to move quickly. I was like a horse, slapped on the rear by a tourist guide in a hurry. I moved, though I wasn’t sure why. I returned to Urubamba to say goodbye and to thank Yoyo but he wasn’t at home. I played for a bit on the internet, checked again. Still no Yoyo. I took a bus to Cusco.

The bus climbs the rolling hills. Was it that the hills were almost naturally terraced or were they all terraced by the ancient civilizations that had lived here so long before? Out the windows of the bus I could see people making mud bricks for their houses. Animals of all types: horses, dogs, cows, goats, burros, llamas. We would pass people carrying their children or possessions in blankets. They reminded me of African women, carrying possessions on their head: a completely different system but similar in its “one size fits all” application. The sky was cloudy with blue peaking through windows in the clouds. We finally reach the crest of the biggest hill and the road flattens. We can see the hills below us, houses dotted about, surrounded by their farmland. The grass is yellow and in the fields patches of red, almost purple, dirt is visible where the land has been plowed. The air is chilly, the horizon pink. Eucalyptus trees grow in small forests where the rocks have made way to let them. Llamas graze in yellow soccer field. As the light fades the city of Cusco spreads out below us, a seeming metropolis with it’s brown terracotta roofs. As we enter it becomes more and more city-like. Now some of the houses are painted, now all of them, phone lines appear, now signs on windows, stopsigns, sidewalks, traffic lights, apartment buildings, street vendors selling food: popcorn, Inca Cola.

We arrive and I need to get to the main bus terminal. “Taxi?” a man asks. I ask if I can walk there. “You need a taxi” the man says. In the car I ask how is his business. “Bad” he tells me. “The gas prices are going up.” “It would be good for the president’s campaign if the gas prices were lowered.” I said. “We do not have a president like in the USA.” He tells me.

He drops me off just outside the main terminal. It costs extra for a car to enter. I walk in and go to the first bus counter. I should mention that in Peru, and I suspect most countries, there is a lot of competition between bus companies. Most people don’t own cars and public transportation needs to be cheap, accessible, and generally reliable. Competition seems to do some of this and also explains why two monopolies, Greyhound and Amtrak, are the laughing stock of the USA. You go to each company’s office and ask prices and check out the buses. The first company charges 40 soles. The second one charges 70. I ask why they are so much and the young man tells me that his bus is direct. His is the only direct bus. Everyone else stops in Puno to change buses. “Excellent bus.” He says, “Lots of tourists! Only tourists!” I say I will go ask the other company how much time they take to get there, but money is money and 70 is too expensive. “No don’t go.” He begs me, hanging onto my sleeve. “They will LIE to you. They all lie! They will tell you they do not change buses, but they do! Everyone but us does!” I tell him to calm down and that I promise I’ll come back. He lets go of my shirt. I go to every other company that goes to Copacabana and they all charge the same: 40. Ask them if they change buses, they say all the buses get there at the same time, changing or not. The bus leaves at 10pm and the border only opens at 8am. They all go through together. I return and confront the expensive liar with this information. He senses something is wrong. “So all the buses are the same.” I say. “Ok. Ok. 45 sols” he offers. “But there’s no reason to pay more for the same service” I say. “Fine,” he tells me “40 sols. Which seat do you want?” “But you’re a liar.” I say. And then as if I hadn’t heard his generous offer the lady at the counter next to him tells me “No no! He said 40 sols!” They are still probably confused as to why I walked off…

I bought my ticket at the first counter I went to. I wanted to change about $5 to sols to spend on food en route. The lady where I bought my ticket offered to do it but gave me a terrible rate (2.5 instead of 3.2). I laughed. She tells me to wait and goes to ask her neighbor something. While she's gone I hear the girls at the booth laugh as well. "What a terrible rate!" "It's like robbery!" they say. The lady returns and I tell her the rate is better in the center. "That's the center." She tells me. "It costs money to get there."

I leave the station and ask if the center is close enough to walk to. Many Peruvians don't understand a word I say but it's really not because my Spanish is bad. It's because they only speak Quechua, no Spanish. The man I ask is one of these and he mumbles something about the center and taxis. A woman overhears and invites me to share a combi for about one sixth of the price of a taxi. I arrive at the center, change my money and play on the internet again, renaming my pictures on the website. It’s so strange to see them immediately. In the old days I would have to wait till I got back to see them. It was more of a surprise. I eat dinner and walk back to the station.

The bus arrives in Puno at 5:45am for our 2 hour layover before heading on to the border. The tourists here are different than I had encountered in Northern Peru. They are not off-the-beaten-track tourists but rather almost-off-the-beaten-track tourists. The difference is that actual backpackers tend to flock together while these tourists avoid each other, secretly hoping the others would go away so they could enjoy some authenticity. But those backpackers travelling for longer times (a year or more) tend to be a bit more standoffish, hardened and more realistic. But perhaps the dynamic in the Puno station was more of a difference between those travelling alone and those together. Those who are alone tend to seek out adventure and initiate relationships. To travel with others is to be conservative, having to take into account each new element added to the group. Often travelling in groups involves sharing each other’s company while the scenery changes.

We wait for the connecting bus. I have breakfast of fried eggs and coffee. My original ticket said Pony Express at 7am. It changes to Colectur at 8am. I begin reading my Lonely Planet on Bolivia and get excited.

The bus skirts the lake passing abandoned boats. In the fields they seem to have planted chewing gum wrappers and they have now bloomed into plastic bags of all colors of the rainbow, neatly separated in their white, blue, red, green, pink splendor. The sun shines brilliantly off the lake and the sheet metal roofs reflect the light like a thousand mirrors. Our bus is cosy, warm after the freezing night. Cows graze in the yellow scrub grass. We seem to be in the slowest bus and buses full of local Indians scream by us.

LAKE TITICACA: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

A huge yellow walled off area, probably a stadium of some kind, rises out of nowhere. There is nothing inside but some donkeys who seem to be grazing in the uneven dirt and plastic bags. Now there is a kind of village with stone walls of rock placed on each other to form a kind of hedge maze. They are delicately balanced as if they were made of one rock originally which somehow shattered but never realized it and a single push or strong wind would scatter the wall for good. Our bus picks up speed and the driver slams on the horn as we pass through an isolated roadside market, scattering people.

SHEEP GRAZE NEAR THE BOLIVIAN BORDER

Everything along the lake is half finished, as if at some point everyone here just gets tired of his job and decides to stop and start another project. The dirt brick homes have no roofs, the fields are half tilled, the gates are either half built or half mended, it is hard to tell which. In the fields there is no organization to the houses, none that I can see. People seem to simply build and then grow crops around them. But some houses have no crops. And some crops have no houses. Soon it all dropped away as we rose above the shining blue lake and made for the Bolivian border.

Borders are those peculiar places that don’t quite make any sense. They are the spaces between the lines on the map. They make one realize that all of the rules we recognize and respect are simply conventions worked out between those in power with those out of power. It’s especially obvious when there are border conflicts. One day everyone respects the border: “But of course! These are Bolivians/Chileans/Palestinians over there. We are different from those guys and must respect the borders!” The next day, the border simply moves because of brute force. National identity is effectively determined by your ability to defend your borders.

We passed through with little ado. The most relaxed border crossing I’ve ever had. The official merely looked for an empty place, found one next to a USA one where it said “exits” and stamped away, little caring about the confusion it might cause for every other official stamping my passport.

I was in Bolivia.

The Great Aguas Callientes Ticket Scam

2005-08-21T17:53:00.000-03:00

All I knew was that with every fiber of my being I wanted to get out of Aguas Callientes that night. Things were expensive enough that it was almost cost effective to take the $30+ tourist train. After being severely misdirected by locals who buy cheaper tickets on seperate trains, I found the office did I discover that Helmut at SAE was right: there were no train tickets to be had. I cursed her under my breath but there was nothing to be done.

Previously, as we were walking, Marco told me: "You talk a lot." "Sorry." I said. "No no." He said, "You talk to lots of people, it's good." He was right in a way, not talking to people is dangerous. I travel by myself but I am never alone. When things go tough, the people around you can help you or hinder you, it's almost always better that they're your friends. The cheapo Americans might have been irritating but they pulled Marco and me onto the truck when everyone else (including the driver) hollered that there was no room. Later in Tupiza I hung out with a guy from the Check Republic. He said “hola” to absolutely everybody be they man, woman or animal. “Saying hello doesn’t cost you anything” he said, “and smiles are universal!”

I would have thought that making funny faces, like everyone does at babies, could be universal but it isn’t. The French are notoriously bad at languages, often knowing no more than French. To make up for this, François (one of the French tourists Marco and I hung out with at Machu Pichu) would make a lot of funny faces. This actually ended up disturbing Marco a lot: “Why does he do that!” He said, “Is he trying to insult me?” Clearly they don’t have the “let’s make a funny face when we’re uncomfortable” policy in Brazil. Good to remember.

As I was leaving the station I ran into these same French tourists (Emanuel, François, and Loire) that Marco and I had hung out with in Machu Pichu. Once again it had been helpful to talk to people. They had run into the same problem as I had, no ticket, but because they had been earlier they had been able to talk to someone. In 20 minutes they were going to meet with a woman who could get them tickets and they said Marco and I could try with them. I raced back to delirious Marco and tried to get my stuff packed up as quickly as possible. We barely made it, supersick Marco leading the rear, almost delirious he kept asking people where the train station was instead of following me. He would always receive the wrong information because we could not buy the tickets to the regular train, only the tourist train which was about 10 times more expensive.

We arrived at 3:20 to argue for tickets to the 3:30 train. After a lot of arguing and explaining, the guard finally let us through to join our French speaking friends. It didn’t matter because none of us caught it. We almost made the 4:20 train. Just as the train was about to leave the conductor asked us for money. As we hurredly got it out the conductor said “Oh well. Never mind. The train is going!” We all had a good laugh over this funny joke except Marcos who threw up into a bag of bananas near the train man’s shoes. Emanuel and I began making plans that if we didn’t catch this next one we would walk back all the way back to Santa Teresa. I was weakened but I was not staying in Aguas Callientes. Marcos… I did not know what would become of him. François began playing my flute and begging for money. “Propina… propina...” he would whine, imitating the singsong of Peruvian street orphans and their mothers. Times were desperate.

We made the train. Barely. And paid 104 sols (or three days traveling) for our 2.5 hour train ride. Outrageous. We had all wanted to go to Cusco but the train ended a stop early in Ollantaytambo. Emmanuel took the bus to Cusco and Marcos promptly staggered to the nearest hospidaje. An hospidaje is a cheap Peruvian hotel. I think Marcos went into a hospidaje. It might have been better if it were a hospital. Before he left I gave him my email and a bright orange Cipra pill. Cipras have been my psychological edge against desease. “If you don’t behave I’ll pull out the Cipra and then it’s toasties for disease!” I tell my body. I haven’t had to take a Cipra yet and I haven’t heard from Marcos.

It was only maybe a half hour to Urubamba but the sickness had been creeping up on me throughout the day and I decided to take dinner with François and Liore. I ordered Arroz a la Cubana which is rice with a fried banana and a fried egg on top. François also ordered us two beers. He haggled over the price of the beers for about 10 minutes. The whole restaurant watched. I wanted to crawl under the table but François relished practicing his few Spanish words: “No no. Señor. Nosotros pobres! Seis Soles!” We ended up paying the full price ($2.50) for our litre of beer each.

Peruvians like grease and this restaurant was no exception. I hadn’t especially wanted a beer at first but when the food arrived and I discovered that simply smelling the grease made me sick, the beer became an exciting alternative to eating. We clearly had too much beer though and François solved this problem by making a little contest out of finishing the beer. Half way through my second glass of beer I excused myself to throw up. I returned cured and, though I did not finish my Arroz a la Cubana, I went to sleep exhausted, mildly drunk and incredibly happy that I had been spared what we shall call “Marcos’ Desease”.

Machu Pichu-d

2005-08-20T15:59:00.000-03:00

DAWN IN THE SACRED VALLEY

Marcos and I ran off to the place where we were presumably to have the best view: the Hut of the Caretaker of the Funerary Rock, from which the classic Machu Pichu pictures are taken. We gazed down and the ruins stood there, majestic and grand. Awesome. Mist hung in the morning light, like a feint veil layed over the past.

MACHU PICHU

We waited for the sunrise...

And waited...

And waited...

After awhile of not seeing the sun rise, hoping it would and realizing it wouldn't, Marco's hunger took control of him and we went to eat breakfast. Marco was so hungry he wanted to eat everything. The food was opened and and I followed suit.

A TERRIBLE TERRIBLE MISTAKE

We had not slept much and were not thinking clearly. Obviously sardines and yoghurt don't mix under the best of circumstances. Obviously this is not a balanced breakfast. It was clear to a reasonable person what would shortly happen.

We were not reasonable people. I had about two good hours before we started feeling the effects of sardine poisoning. Marco had about 20 minutes.

I THINK I'M BEGINNING TO FEEL THE SARDINES

We set about exploring the ruins again which, for me, included sitting, drawing and writing. I sat in the sun and was finally warm. The only problem was that every time I got comfortable the Machu Pichu police would whistle to get me to move, or at least sit up straight. You may sit in Machu Pichu but you may not lie down. I had had little sleep and was exhausted and I excused my lethergy with "overexposure". But Marco was beginning to complain of nausea. He got worse and I began to feel sick as well. We were both too tired and sick to climb anywhere.

MARCO IS ILL

There are many places that make no sense without a guide. But Machu Pichu is, perhaps, the most amazing and least understood Inca site there is. Everyone has a theory and the truth isn't really relevant. I mean you overhear guides saying, "Oh and this is where they conducted the circumcision rituals." But these guides could never explain why it was they thought that. They probably just thought: small dark room: circumcision rituals. Anyways, I don't even think the Incas practiced circumcision...

A GUIDE EXPLAINS HOW THE INCAS WOULD GO TO THE BATHROOM IN THE WOODS

The place was magnificent. But it was hard for me to believe that we had simply stumbled into this place of wonder. It was too clean to be lived in, to well built to be untouched, too half built to be a real city. I felt as if someone had found a wrecked house and, instead of rebuilding it, had polished every broken place until it shone.

It was not Disneyland only because it was authentic. But, though all the original stones were there, it was 80% (I am making this figure up) reconstructed and "authenticity" becomes an issue.

I climbed about the ruins for a few hours, trying to make the most of being at a wonder of the world. But perhaps the most interesting thing I noticed about Machu Pichu was the bathroom grafitti, with which I became intimately aquainted.

PRO SHINING PATH PROPAGANDA

The grafitti was old, from the 1980s, pristine and untouched. It called for socialist goverment by any means, declared the previous election, stated that Oscar Valencia [the leader of the Shining Path terrorist group] was a true hero. It made me wonder, why was this grafitti still here, in such a public place, after all these years?

We were sick. But not too sick to walk back to Aguas Callientes, a feat with which I will always be impressed with. Marco went back to our hostal to pick up the things we'd left there (and to use the toilet) and, in no ability to walk to Idro and then to Santa Teresa, I went to inquire about train tickets back to Cusco.

The First Tourist to Machu Pichu

2005-08-20T14:55:00.000-03:00

Our main reason for waking up at 3:30 was, get this, we were scared of missing the sunrise. The sun was supposed to rise at 6am but we were also told that the gates only opened at 6am. A conundrum we did not ponder. So we silently awoke with our 3:30 alarm, took what we needed and set out. The moon was bright and we hardly needed Marco's flashlight.

Just outside of Aguas Callientes there is a campground for $5 per tent. Just outside this campground, on the road, we saw the tent of the Americans. It was so predictably funny and absurd. It reminded me of how I travelled in Turkey when I was 20. Sustainable for a few weeks, harmful over a few months and a spiritual killer over a few years.

We continued on the path and encountered some Frenchmen who were adjusting their packs. They had got up extra early to be the first ones to Machu Pichu. "When we get there we will be heros." Francois explained. Two of them (it turned out they were twins) had asthma and could not go fast. We soon passed them and continued up the stone Inca trail into the darkness.

We were overtaken by a local man, presumably the ticket seller. We had been going 45 minutes and asked him if we were about halfway. "Not yet!" he yelled behind him as he scampered up.

DAYTIME ON THE TRAIL TO MACHU PICHU

A half hour later met a Japanese couple who were resting by the road. There was a sort of formulaic conversation that took place anytime tourists met on this trail. First we would greet eachother in Spanish. Then where are you from? How many people did you pass? How many passed you? From this information, calculating in the speed of the people we had met, we could accurately estimate how many were at the top.

Having heard the terrible stories of $7 burgers and $3 cokes at the top, we were overloaded with food. Despite this we progressed fairly quickly, taking turns to carry our one backpack. We had a really funny trading etiquette. Trading was initiated by one of us asking to carry the pack. The other would immediately say, "Oh no. Just a little longer" and then after another minute or so they would say "Oh, that's just about right" and hand off the pack to the other person. Actually if I remember it correctly it was Marco who always asked for the extra 2 minutes, I think I remember giving up the pack as soon as I was asked.

We made it to the top as about the 12th people up. Everyone had been concerned with being first up: the first tourist into Machu Pichu. They were kitted out in headlamps and hiking poles. Marcos and I had been only worried about the money for the bus and being able to see the sunrise. We were determined not to miss it.

As we sat about lazily for the next 45 minutes, I thought back over our decision to get up so early and also about my own decision not to bring a warm second layer. I was sitting at 3,000 meters in a T-shirt soaked in sweat. I was very cold. At about 5:50 a bus showed up and people started pouring off. A line quickly formed of those who had walked up to prevent anyone from taking their place.

A LINE QUICKLY FORMED

They should not have worried because the bus people formed a second line to the right. I asked what it was for. A lady told me it was for people who had prebought tickets. Prebought tickets!!!! No one who had walked had prebought tickets. the whole idea smacked of cheating! A few minutes later the people who ran the show opened the booth and the hordes of people from the bus poured in ahead of those who'd walked. The first tourist into Machu Pichu was not some trekker with a headlamp but a pushy middle-aged lady with a ticket.

Marcos and I bought our tickets and hurried through the gates, eager to find the best spot for watching the sunrise.

The Road to Machu P: Aguas Callientes

2005-08-19T14:06:00.000-03:00

We were hungry and all the restaurants on the way were too expensive, run by lunatics, or had no food. But we were more tired than hungry and made a solemn pact not to sit down for food before we had booked a room.

Finding a room in Aguas Callientes was an exhausting endeavor. Firstly, the town is on a hill. You start at the bottom near the highest priced establishments and slowly work your way up to the more moderately priced ones. Marcos and I began miscommunicating as a night with little or no sleep will cause. "Should we go that way or that way?" "Which way or which way?" Eventually we settled on a moderately priced place where we could share a room.

We ditched our packs and began the search for a reasonably priced restaurant and came up golden with the cheapest place in town, serving a menu of soup and fried trout with rice and fries.

Now it was just a matter of finding information about how to get to Machu Pichu. The consensus was that we could either take a bus:$12 roundtrip. Everything to do with Machu Pichu is in dollars. Or we could walk uphill for 1-2 hours, "depending on how you walk". We went to a local market and bought supplies: sardines, lime, bread, yogurt, and water.

We spent the rest of the evening browsing for artesenias in the giant tourist market. A journal style book caught my eye. Unfortunately, like so many beautiful tourist items, the cover was marred by a garish CUSCO: CITY OF THE INCAS, embossed on the beautiful leather cover. I asked the lady how much it was. "45 sols! It is leather. Maybe 40 for you but that is all I can offer." I told her the book was nice but I wasn't really interested. She began to open the book and show the quality. But as she turned it over we simultaniously noticed the yellow price tag for 35 sols. She quickly masked her surpise (and, possibly, embarrassment) and said "It's expensive because of the leather. But for you, 35 sols!"

We returned to the hostal and packed our bags for the next morning, resolved to get an early night and an early start. I set the alarm for 3:30 and fell asleep, exhausted, pen in hand.

The Road to Machu P: Santa Teresa

2005-08-19T12:21:00.000-03:00

I awoke to a knock as promised and stumbled out to the combi in the cold. A crowd was already gathered and the Americans, who had set up there tent next to it, began to stir. The combi was crowded. I had thought I had seen full combis before but I think we set a good record with 22 people into the minivan. I was impressed. We probably could have fit more but the three Americans monopolized the back seat which was actually meant for four people. Space was cramped and everyone carried their luggage, no matter how much, on their laps.

The road to Santa Teresa was to be about 2 hours. On the way people got on and off. At one point the minibus waited by the side of a cliff for a few minutes, the driver muttering under his breath "he'll come... he'll come." Then up the side of the near vertical cliff appeared a man with a flashlight, he'd climbed the whole way from his house below. He was soaked in sweat and couldn't speak for several minutes.

HOW TO GET THERE

I began talking to a Brazillian tourist, Marcos. Neither of us spoke Spanish all that well but it was our common language. He really spoke Portuguese and faked his way through. He had heard about the route from an English traveller. It was at this point I realized that my information was by far the most accurate of the group. This route was not in guidebooks and the only way to know it was through word of mouth. Word of mouth had been working though. I was told that the year before there were about 2 tourists a day, this year there were about 20 per day. It was like watching a town in the path of a flood. I wonder if they knew what they were in for once they made it into the Lonely Planet.

SANTA TERESA: A TOWN ON THE VERGE OF DISCOVERY

The locals got dropped off where they needed to be while the tourists got escorted to a breakfast place. And had fried egg sandwiches and coffee. Then we hulked down to the local thermal baths.

Peruvian thermal baths are usually built up a little bit and cost a nominal fee to enter. I had heard these were free and expected a river with some hot water bubbling into it. The pools for these thermal baths had been under construction for some time and were the nicest I've ever seen. They were beautiful, made of slated stone, the water filling and draining at the same rate to maintain the level. Around the area construction workers hewed and hauled rock for the pools, presumably hurrying to finish them in time for the town's entry into the Lonely Planet.

THE AMERICANS

I whipped out my swimming trunks and took the plunge. The water was tepid but perfect for the day and I soaked for almost an hour while the others dangled their feet. On the way back Marcos complained that his foot was hurting him. He told me he had hurt it while running to catch a boat on the floating islands in Lake Titicaca. They are covered in terraces and he had fallen over one, spraining his foot. He and I lagged behind the Americans and I espoused the high altitude breathing I had learned from my painter friend in Maray.

MARCOS TAKES A PICTURE

We returned to Santa Teresa and bought juice and snacks to prepare us for the road ahead. We left the Americans and set out on our way to the tourist town of Aguas Callientes.

OLD WOMEN CARRYING TOURISTS' LUGGAGE

We began our path down to the river, which we would have to cross. On the way we encountered two old women each carrying four heavy backpacks. They lurched and stumbled forward, clearly overweighted. "The weight, the weight! It is too much." they cried. Marcos and I wanted to help but it was awkard, like helping the bellhop at a hotel. We each took a sleeping bag, allowing the women to use both hands on the heavy load, and carried them with our packs down to the "bridge".

There was no place on the river to anchor a bridge so the locals built a kind of ripline with a bucket.

THINGS ARE PLACED INSIDE THE BUCKET

There was a bit of a line for the bridge and I got a chance to ask the old ladies about their work. Each tourist pays 10 sols ($3) for that service. Eight bags equals 80 sols per day. They each make 10 sols a day to carry the bags. This leaves 60 sols ($20) in profit for the tour guide or agency. An amazing business!

Soon it was our turn to cross the bridge and Marcos and I bundled in and crossed.

video of crossing the bridge

CROSSING THE BRIDGE

There were trucks we could wait for to catch a ride but we decided to walk along the road and hitch a ride on one when it came by. On the way we passed a graveyard all set with flowers. Interestingly one of the graves had been defaced with political propoganda.

GRAVEYARD WE PASSED

We walked for about two hours until the truck came but it was full and the driver called that he would not stop for us. Up ahead there was a local Indian woman hailing the truck and I saw the driver slow to explain why he could not pick her up.

"Run!" I yelled. And Marcos and I sprinted to the truck and climbed on the back. The driver got out to tell us that we could not come on but we were already over the top and trying to find space. We immediately noticed the Americans. They had been further behind and had been picked up before us. They took our packs from us, pushed them further into the truck, and helped us aboard. The driver was right, there was simply no room. But room was found and Marcos and I perched on top of the backpacks the women had brought for the tourists.

THE BACK OF THE TRUCK WAS CROWDED

We were dropped off at Idro, the power station behind Aguas Callientes, at about noon. This station was the final stop of the Cusco tourist train and one stop past Aguas Callientes. We were on the other side of Machu Pichu.

YOU CAN SEE MACHU PICHU FROM IDRO

Now it was clear that there were about 15 or so tourists. Among them was a pack of 7 Israelis. They were sitting by the side of the road arguing with their guide. "You told us it was only one hour, it was two!" I asked them about the train. They told me that they were not interested in the train, they would walk to Aguas Callientes. I asked them how long it would take: "2 hours of walking, 3 hours in the train!" they laughed. Everyone I asked gave me a different answer on when the train was to come, everything from 1:30 to 4:00. Marcos and I decided not to worry about it and, after exchanging some Jewish jokes with the Israelis, we set off walking up the track. Marcos and I talked about US and Brazilian politics, the idea of united South America, music, and absolutely everything else. And, as we hiked among the breathtaking views, it inspired Marcos to sing: Big Rock Candy Mountain to which I responded with This Land Is Your Land.

"AS I WAS WALKING THAT RIBBON OF HIGHWAY..."

On the way we would pass various houses, restaurants and forest restoration projects. People would appear at the door and invite us in or give us advise on the trail. We also passed a train called the Hiram Bingham train, named after the discoverer of Machu Pichu. The train from Cusco to Aguas Callientes and back is $75: expensive. The Hiram Bingham train costs $500. We asked and were told under no uncertain terms that we could not get a ride on this train.

THE HIRAM BINGHAM TRAIN
(PROBABLY NOT WORTH IT)

A half an hour later we were in Aguas Callientes.

The Road to Machu P: Santa Maria

2005-08-18T22:26:00.000-03:00

I discussed the plans for getting to Machu Pichu with Yoyo and many of his SERVAS guests had gone this route. He was quite enthusiastic. The first stop on the route to Machu Pichu was Santa Maria. From there I would need to catch a connecting combi to Santa Teresa. Everyone I asked, meaning everyone at the bus stop told me there was a lot of transport between the two towns. The only person who disagreed was Yoyo. "Fine, take the early bus." He chided, "You will either wait here or in the cold in Santa Maria. I was updated on the blog and had nothing else to do, and it was in keeping with my First Principles of Travelling: I took the early bus.

On long distance Peruvian buses you have assigned seating. I was assigned next to a young man about my age. He was wearing a very old sports jacket and smelled terrible. He said nothing to me the entire trip. The other passengers were in a hurry. Every time we stopped to drop someone off or pick someone up the bus would yell "vamos! vamos!" until the driver took off again. The trip was a journey into another world. Immediately we began to ascend. In the fading daylight I looked out over the yellow scrub, an ancient landscape. Two pigs chased eachother for what seemed like miles in a valley below the bus. As we ascended into and past the clouds the air becomes thin, dry, rarified and my nose began to feel funny. I thought of the term "nosebleed seats" and, probably due to the lack of oxygen, laughed quietly to myself. There are people who live in these clouds. They are completely bundled up. We pass a few men in a field; one is giving a soccerball a halfhearted kick.

Then came the dark and, for a few hours, nothing but me and my thoughts. And the smell of my companion. As we approached Santa Maria locals got on and off, using the bus to travel short distances, pueblo to pueblo. Indian families would pile on with their children, sit in the aisle, and pile off at some remote roadside location 20 minutes later. When we arrived in Santa Maria it was about 10pm and, Yoyo was right, there was no transport to Santa Teresa till 3am.

To my surprise, there were a few other tourists who also were following the same route. The ones who stood out most were 3 Americans who piled off the bus at the same time as I did. These Americans were of a certain breed of traveller. I have a certain aversion to travellers who "do" places rather than visit them. "Have you done Bolivia yet?" they would ask, as if Boliva was the villiage tramp, putting out for everyone. But unlike the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed trekkers, these Americans were of the "do-everything-as-cheap-as-possible-because-we-are-incredibly-poor" variety. I thought they might go for the $1.30 3 course meal or the $2 room (including shower and a 2:30am wakeup call). They couldn't be bothered. They would sleep outside and eat their stale bread and cheese. It seems odd to me for a law school student or a phone company executive to pay $500 or more to travel to another country for three weeks only to live like a hobo. Admittedly, it's fun to live like a hobo, but these people had brought $200 sleeping bags, $50 pants, $80 cook stoves to do it. They could have eaten out every day and not had to carry any of that stuff and still saved money. Having time to kill and no one to share a cup of tea with (the Americans went nuts: "30 cents for tea! It's 15 cents everywhere else!") I decided to wander the town.

The town was almost completely dark, the only place open being the ubiquitous internet cafe. There were a group of boys all huddled around a single screen playing the latest network game. They seemed surprised at my appearance but the boy in charge, if there was one, asked me if I wanted a machine. I asked how much and he told me it was about $1 an hour, three times the price of anywhere else. I asked him why it was different. Seeing as there was a Telefonica monopoly, they should charge everyone the same exhorbatant price. They told me that Telefonica did not serve this location. Instead, a satelite company did. Needless to say it was not Peruvian. They thought it was Arabic, or maybe Chilean. Peruvians really hate the Chileans.

I walked about the town for a bit more in the dark then returned to my hostal, read some of Inca Cola, and went to bed.

As I write this there is a young man next to me looking at pornography on the internet. There is a very beautiful girl on the other side of him and she keeps giving him mean looks that he does not notice.

A Day in Ruins

2005-08-17T21:21:00.000-03:00

MORNING IN URUBAMBA

I woke up, stumbled out the door and into a breakfast place. I had wanted to take a shower but the water main only comes on three times a day for a few hours each time. There is a water shortage. After stuffing myself with eggs and coffee I hopped on the next combi for a town called Mara. Actually I just got dropped off at the junction where Yoyo had told me to negotiate for good prices. “Just act like you don’t want anything.” He advised, “Then other tourists will come and you can negotiate with them for cheaper prices.” I didn’t listen and allowed a self-serving taxi driver to talk me into getting a ride into town. “Lots of tourists go there to eat lunch!” he told me.

MARAS: WHERE THE TOURISTS GO FOR LUNCH

As soon as we arrived it became clear that he lied. The town had nothing besides an old woman selling vegetables that looked like they were from her childhood. Especially when he turned to me and said, “I will drive you where you want to go for [outrageous amount]. So I got out and was about to ask the town’s only policeman if many tourists stopped here. Before I could get the words out he said, “You want to walk to Maray? Just go that way, no more than an hour.” “But…” I said. “Oh, afterwards you want to go to the Salineras? Then you just walk back the way you came and it’s an additional hour extra.” I thanked this policeman, who was singlehandedly ruining his town’s taxi business, and walked off in the direction he had told me.

It’s funny that walking is so much more rewarding than just arriving somewhere in a car, as if you were magically placed somewhere you had no business of being. Also you get to meet people along the way. I began walking with a young boy who paints pictures of different sites and tries to sell them to tourists. He walked the road every day. The walk was difficult for me because of the altitude. He told me that the way to breath while walking in the mountains was to take a deep breath, hold it for 10 seconds, release, and take another breath. It isn’t something I could do anyways and I just panted my way up the hill. But I didn’t forget what he told me and later this technique helped me a lot climbing up to Machu Pichu as well as hiking around Lake Titicaca.

INCAN AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT OR UFO LANDING PAD?

Maray is an old Incan agricultural experiment which involves terraces. The best I could understand it is that on different levels they would grow plants that came from different parts of their empire while making good use of the hilly landscape. The result is impressive to look at. So impressive, in fact, that Yoyo told me many new age tourists come there to pray and soak up the power of this farm, mistaking it for a site of some special religious significance. Almost all of this part of Peru is terraced and it was hard for me to tell what was so special about these terraces that loads of workers had “restored” them to their former grandeur.

I explored the ruins a little while and then sat with the same boy who accompanied me up the hill, drawing while he halfheartedly hawked his paintings. While the tourists did a circuit of the ruins, the tour drivers would come and talk to us about cars and look at the pictures. I got to talking to one driver about politics and Fujimori. I asked him why Peruvians would complain that all their politicians were thieves and then vote for a person who left his presidency (and the country) in disgrace because he stole millions of dollars from it. The driver countered, “Sure he was a thief but during his time the roads worked and he built things: now there is nothing! We want him back!” Later I learned from Yoyo that Fujimori legally could not be president because he was not a national, he had forged his citizenship papers. A reporter did an expose on this and was nearly killed as a result.

I negotiated with the pro-Fujimori driver for a ride to the Salineras, my next destination, for 10 sols. Once there he pleaded with me, “Please, 11 sols.” I do not know why I gave him the extra sol. On the one hand he needs it, but on the other, renegotiating the money is something that is demeaning to everyone involved. It’s also something that happens a lot in Peru, not so much because of Peruvians but because of the tourist culture it spawns. This had happened before but in Cusco it would happen constantly.

LOTS OF SALT

But it didn’t matter, I was at the the Salineras. I don’t quite know how it works but I assume a salty stream of water comes down the hillside. The Incas pulled out the old terrace idea but compartmentalized the terraces into pools. The water would flow from pool to pool as it made its way down the hill leaving their salty deposits behind. The result is the most amazing salt mines I will probably ever see. White sodium deposits covered the hillside like snow in the middle of summer. Harvesting the salt is very difficult work but completely natural and, presumably, sustainable.

TOURISTS WALK ON THE SALINERAS

That night all the internet in the town went out. Another example of the danger of monopolies. I later found out that the internet went out for Cusco as well and, for all I know, the whole of the country. No one knew what happened, when it would be fixed, or anything. There wasn’t really anyone to call to tell that there was a problem, they just waited for it to be better.

Fingers in the Pot: Bolivia

2005-08-17T14:36:00.000-03:00

Outsiders taking an interest in Bolivia's government? This looks like something the US should take notice of!

U.S. sees foreign hands behind Bolivian unrest

Rumsfeld, Paraguayan President Discuss Mutual Concerns

US warns of Bolivian interference

Rumsfeld, in Latin America, Voices Democracy Concerns

It must be hard to report this stuff with a straight face, considering that the US military operates in most of these countries. Of course, there's the drug trade and the now ubiquitous excuse of international terrorism.

Urubamba Yoyo

2005-08-17T03:56:00.000-03:00

The next morning came and I awoke and slunk out of the hostal at around 8am. The girls went to enjoy their breakfast and I had a lovely one in a hole in the wall on the street while waiting for the SAE to open. I call it the “Peruvian Breakfast”: a fried egg sandwhich, Nescafe, and juice. Then I hopped over the SAE office only to find out that they had neither internet nor coffee, which made me wonder what kind of a South American Explorer’s Club they were. I asked a woman, who I believe was named Helmut, about the route I planned to take to Machu Pichu.

Machu Pichu is only reached by the town, Aguas Callientes or by a 5 day hike along “The Inca Trail”. The Inca Trail costs about $200 to hike with a tour group, which is the only way you’re allowed to hike it. Because many tourists want to see Machu Pichu they limit the amount allowed in through the Inca Trail to 400 people per day. When I arrived in Lima in June the Inca Trail to Machu Pichu was booked up through September. 400 people per day, in itself, would be a large number of tourists for any other Peruvian tourist site. Most of the ones I had previously visited averaged about 3 or 4 a day. However most people do not visit Machu Pichu via the Inca Trail but rather take the infamous tourist train from Cusco to Aguas Callientes. There is one train a day and it costs $35 (or about 3 days of my budget) each way. This does not include the $20 entrance fee which brings it up to a healthy $90 total.

I had heard from a fellow SERVAS traveller in Trujillo that there was another way. First, I was to set out for Urubamba. From there I was to head by bus to a town named Santa Maria, from there to Santa Teresa. From there I could essentially walk to a power station one stop after Aguas Callientes and take the train into town for only $2.

Helmut was unimpressed: “You will spend many days doing this. First you must go to Quillabamba. That is 12 hours. Then you must go to Santa Maria, another 5 hours… Finally if you can do this then you will be in Aguas Callientes without a return train ticket and you could be stuck there.” The SAE is a club with information and librarians to guard the resources and prevent theft. I assume they’re also supposed to be encouraging and upbeat.

I’m not sure who was more unimpressed: her with my plan for getting to Machu Pichu or me with her for being the least explorative person I had met so far. She had the kind of aloofness one gets from dealing with a lot of stupid people. It was almost as if there was a desire to be stupid rather than have to explain a new route to 1,000 fresh of the boat tourists. She understood that what she said affected the itineraries of tourists and with this came a certain lack of humility and enthusiasm for the information being given. In Lima the SAE was more of a kind of cheerleading agency while in Cusco it was an overpriced library. Luckily, I was picked up by Cynthia and Maru. We decided to wander the immaculate streets and soak up some culture at the Pre-Colombian Art Museum.

The museum was nice. Really nice. It further reenforced my opinion that in it’s attempt to please the tourists, Cusco had become a small European replica, at least within the tourist zone. After the last few weeks it was strange to see so many white faces in one location.

THIS MUSEUM IS LIKE ANY OTHER IN THE WORLD
AND UNLIKE ANY OTHER IN PERU

The museum was an attempt to bring “primitive” art out of the historical sector and into the artistic sector. The museum treated its pieces as having been created by anonymous masters of another time, which they were.

Hiding realism deliberately, the sculptor demonstrates a total understanding of sculptoric handling, for ruital and religious requirements. This small mass of great complexity and symbolism allows us to imagine the process of manufacture as well as the desire to shape beliefs and postulates of mythological order.

“Genius” was a word the museum like to throw about a lot, as was “perfect forms” and the ever recurring “primitive.”

But for me part of Cusco’s (and perhaps all tourist cities) charm lies in being able to find the local deals. And we were: after the museum we stuffed ourselves on a three course meal beginning in a tripe soup and ending in chicken in a kind of antipasta. Delicious! (and $1.50)

After lunch I was finally able to contact Yoyo and so I said goodbye to my Ecuadorian friends and walked over to the SAE office to pick up my bag and get some grudging directions to the bus stop.

Catching the bus went without a hitch and I brought my backpack on board with me. I shoved it under the seats where my feet would go. At one point an Indian lady got on and sat down next to me. My backpack blocked a little of her foot space and I offered to move it. I never should have because she immediately called the driver’s helper “Boy! This boy needs your help to move his backpack!” I felt embarrassed. I could easily move the pack if she would move her leg, which was on the pack. The helper looked confused. He did not know where to move it. It seemed fine where it was. “If it’s bothering you ma’am, perhaps you would like to sit in a different space.” “No.” She said, “I want to sit here. It’s my right!” She was a nutty one and now, because I had mentioned it, she was intent on having my backpack moved to somewhere else on the bus! It was only when I was sitting in a seat in the back of the bus with my bag and she had placed her own bag on my vacant seat that I realized her plan was to relocate me from the beginning. I had been completely outmanouvred in a classic game of Peruvian busmanship.

It was night as we descended into Urubamba and I could see a very large circle of fire burning on the hillside. I asked an Indian woman on the bus about it. She told me it was because of the university. They were celebrating after exams.

I called Yoyo on the phone. It costs the same to call his cellphone as it does to call the USA so he was in a hurry to talk. I told him I was at a gas station and he said he’d meet me and he hung up. I was surprised when he and a large shaggy dog walked up to me 3 minutes later but he told me: “There are only two gas stations in town! Anyways, I once asked a SERVAS guest to describe what she looked like and she told me that SERVAS people just know eachother! And she was right!”

We walked back to his house. He is an architect and is renting the house next to the one he is building. He owns two dogs and a parrot and is looking for another parrot to match the one he has. “Parrots are very particular.” He told me in English, “There are many different kinds of parrots and they different types don’t like eachother. Also with some parrots it is impossible to tell which sex they are without a DNA test. They can make love and be two females. They are physically identical!”

We talked for a little over some ham and cheese sandwiches with tea and he told me that the following day a good idea was to visit some nearby ruins called Maray and Salineras.

Off to Cusco

2005-08-16T13:16:00.000-03:00

I returned to Lima for a few days which was relaxing as can be. I really needed it. It was the end of my first month abroad and time to take stock of all the whos, whats, whens, wheres, hows and whys. It was also time to steel myself for the next leg of the journey: Bolivia, Argentina, and Uruguay. I stayed with Tanalee at the SAE, which seems to be the only place in town that serves moderately good drip coffee. It was a healthy, lazy time spent almost entirely updating my blog and other dithering.

After a few days I left for Cusco, the tourist capital of South America. The journey was 24 hours by bus.

THE BUS RIDE IS TIRING

The bus first travelled straight south along the PanAmerican Highway along the coast. I had happily avoided this, the best road in Peru, for some time. But now I wanted to make good time and for speed and comfort the coast road was not to be beat.

WELCOME TO THE SOUTH COAST

The coast of Peru, from North to South, is essentially a desert. There is really nothing there except the shacks built by penniless folks with dreams of homeownership. The desert is free and anyone can build there if, for some reason, they would want to.

I DON'T THINK YOU HAVE TO PAY TO BUILD A HOUSE HERE

The only other buildings in the desert are chicken farms and there are a lot of them. These long tentlike buildings house thousands of chickens. They are in the middle of the desert and I have no idea how they get water.

ARR... CHICKENS BE LIVIN' HERE

Soon after we hit Nazca we picked up white tourists and headed inland towards Cusco. My luck for interesting developments struck with a vengance when a rock slide covered our roadway and we were waylaid for several hours waiting for a small and hopelessly outmatched tractor to clear the rubble.

AND THESE ARE THE GOOD ROADS...

I befriended a couple of Ecuadorian girls and when we arrived in Cusco that afternoon I went with them to find a hostal. I tried to call my SERVAS contact, named Yoyo, in Urubamba but his phone was disabled. I called many times and only found out the next day that the problems were caused by Telefonica's purchase of BellSouth: apparently all the phone lines and connections were screwed up. The Spanish company Telefonica has enjoyed a monopoly here for a long time. Apparently the secret to being a Peruvian president is privatizing and granting monopolies in exchange for large contributions to your bank account. This happens a lot. I heard a story where one Peruvian president granted exclusive international flight privileges to American Airlines in exchange for a personal helicoptor effectively closing the national airline.

CUSCO IS LIKE FLORENCE... SORT OF

Throughout the day I explored Cusco with the with Maru and Cynthia indespersed with unsuccessful calls to Yoyo. Of all the cities I know, Cusco reminds me most of Florence. Both cities are cheerfully aware that while their many great deeds and accomplishents are far in the past, they are quite proud of their past and don't feel a need to make cultural waves anymore. Instead both cities are quite content to polish and reconstruct their rich history for the tourists. Many times a day there are processions and dances for tourists. Locals dressed in traditional clothes beg to have you take a picture with them for a small price and street vendors sell the same artesenias for the same prices. Cusco is definately more tourist savvy than the rest of the country. Here vendors skip the hard sell ("You buy useless product now stupid gringo!") and go straight to the more effective soft sell ("gee your feet look tired. i bet these authentic inca sandals will be comfy!") They also have a one-ticket-for-all-the-sites dealie. and the like...

THEY SURE LIKE THEIR CULTURE HERE

One funny thing here is that the Cusceño flag is the rainbow. Like the gay flag. The Cusceño flag is far older than the gay movement but the gay flag is far more famous. This is funny for tourists and irritating to the traditional Cusceños. I have heard that they are thinking of changing their flag.

The day was hot and the night a little chilly, but nothing like what people had warned me about. Lima is by far the coldest city in Peru but Limeños will do anything to convince you that the rest of the country is like the North Pole.

TWO (CHILLY) ECUADORIAN GIRLS

Not having heard from my SERVAS host I went shared the room with Cynthia and Maru. We only had to pay 15 soles extra but I had to leave before 8am because the guy working the night desk wanted to do it under the table and pocket the money.

Huanuco

2005-08-07T18:30:00.000-03:00

Huanuco is located in the stunning sierras and is poorest district of Peru and if that is any indication, and it probably shouldn't be, the folks there are the friendliest I've met so far.

THE TEMPLE OF THE CROSSED HANDS

They had one fairly uninteresting tourist site, The Temple of the Crossed Hands, where I met some French tourists. We both told eachother that we were the first other tourists we had found in weeks. Most of the tourists I meet are French. Apparently there are different trails. The most famous to me is the Gringo Trail but I somehow can't find it. I can only seem to find the French Trail and sometimes wander onto the British, Israeli, and South American Trails, the latter which is made up of, well, South Americans. I am startled at how few tourists there are in Northern Peru.

CLOTHES DRY IN THE HUANUCEÑO SUN

My second evening I sat down in a local bar,bought a large beer, and determined to finish my night alone and friendless in a foreign city. But the world saved me from myself, as it is apt to do these days. After no more than five minutes the neighboring table motioned for me to come over. They were a linguistics teacher and his son in law and they were drunk:

"Are you alone? How hard it is to be alone! How solitary! You must drink with us! We are from Huanuco. My parents were from Huanuco. Their parents were from Huanuco! We are Huanuceños and! And you are just a traveller. But we are friends now! Friends for life. Where are you from my little son? Oh, California? And my listtle son, you are far from home but you are not alone anymore, you are surrounded by friends! Why tomorrow you must lunch with us! We are having a lunch with the whole family! Yes! You understand me. You know how to swim? Good! For we shall go to a swimming pool too, my little son, my friend for life. How old are you? 25? That is the same as my son! Oh what a pity, I have not seen him for three months. He is in Lima to work. There is no work here in Huanuco. **slams fist on table** How Sad! How sad this country is! We are nothing! Our government, they take everything! How we do live!!!

And he was right: life is hard for Huanuceños. When I first arrived in Huanuco I noticed that all the police car windshields were covered in steel wire to protect it from stones and all the police wore a form of riot gear.

POLICE VEHICLE

I asked a local kid why and he said it was because of protests. I asked why there were protests and he just looked at me and said: "Because of everything." That was the most I could get out of him. The more I discuss politics here, the more I am reminded of my conversation on the boat about military governments.

Peruvians feel as if they are at a dead end. To give a sense of what kind of trouble they are in, they want their old President Fujimori back. He has a few obstacles in running for election as he fled back to his home country of Japan after stealing tens of millions of dollars near the end of his last term. Most of his cabinet is in prison. But still you see a large amount of "Fujimori in 2006" campaign signs up and their is a startling amount of popular support. Peruvians tell me that "In Fujimori's time he built roads and he built colleges. The country worked!" I was also told other facts, that all the money he stole came from illegal narcotrafficking and not from the state funds at all. I pointed out that Peruvians always complain that they have poor candidates, that their governers are thieves and then they all rally round a known thief! But life is complicated here. Here the tracks of power run deep and those who have it are not likely to give it up anytime soon.

But if there's anything these people know, it's how to welcome guests. It seemed like every shop I entered the owners would offer me their home phone numbers in case I needed anything or ran into trouble. When it came time to leave I was scared to go into a bar because I didn't feel like making new friends right before leaving and though I was hungry I felt bad about buying food because they would always serve me too much, even for 2 sols, they would give me a multicourse meal that I could never finish.

Such are the fears I wish to have.

Pucallpa to Huanuco: Pueblo Unido!

2005-08-05T19:33:00.000-03:00

The bus trip from Pucallpa to Huanuco was, of course, eventful. All the overnight bus trips I take seem to leave at 9pm and take 8hrs. This puts me at some lame part of time at about 5am and to befuddled to be grouchy. So I generally hope for eventfulness on the journey so we can get delayed for an hour. I should but I do. I'm glad that I still enjoy the eventfulness of travel in Peru because it happens so frequently. The folks who gotta be at work at 5am (most of 'em) probably don't appreciate it so much though.

The bus left on time but just as we left it began to rain. It rained for about 20 minutes. In the jungle it only rains for about 20 minutes but in quantity it's worth about a year of Seattle rain. To cut a long story short we reached a muddy stretch of the road and there were about 30 trucks stopped in the mud all over the road. Here there is no policy of "hey it's raining, let's all wait till the mud is dry", there's the the "let's dump some of the load we're carrying on the road and then put our foot on the gas" policy. The result as that we ended up going on foot in the pitch black night from truck to truck, waking up the drivers and then arguing with them for about 15 minutes till they moved their truck 10 feet so the bus could get past.

THE BUS LIGHTS ILLUMINATE OUR VIGILANTE ROADCLEARING MOB

We couldn't get too far ahead of our bus because it was dark and we were in the Jungle and, as one fellow passenger put it: there are 20 foot anacondas in the jungle. "Are you really worried about anacondas?" I asked this fellow, who lives in the area. "No," he replied, "I'm going to stay here." If the reader wishes to try his hand at this kind of puzzle, I suggest Rushhour, which happily avoids the six inches of mud, the mosquitos, and the "human element" which is a mob of 30 irritated passengers screaming obscenities at an equally irritated truck driver who wants to sleep rather than move his truck who inevitibly claimed that his truck was stuck in the mud and couldn't move till morning. Sometimes the driver was right and his truck really WAS stuck and 30 irritated passengers would push a fully loaded truck the requisite distance for us to get by.

CAN THE RED CAR MOVE BEFORE MORNING?
TRUCK DRIVERS SAY NO

This also reminded me of a different ill fated bus ride from Chachapoyas to Tarapoto (5 hours: ha!). So on mountain roads buses careen around steep one lane mountain roads. As we climbed the hill an overly eager bus driver decided to remove our side mirror. I think he wanted more but we had a stingy bus driver. Needless to say buses around here don't carry third party insurance. The police showed up in record time and quickly came up with the solution. The offending driver must pay out of pocket 50 soles (about $15) for the ruined headlight. "A slap on the wrist!!!" I thought. Not so: needless to say the driver lacked said money in a serious way and we waited for 2 hours while he somehow obtained it and we could move on.

On the plus side my journey from Pucallpa to Huanuco made me plenty of friends on the bus. On of the men was a travelling salesman. Here there's a fiesta in every city every couple months and lots of people selling junk travel from town to town cashing in on the buying fever. He had enough money for one night in Huanuco and we split cab fare to the economic choice for hostals in town. It's nice travelling with Peruvians, you don't have to pay Gringo Tax.

Pucallpa and onward

2005-08-05T00:03:00.000-03:00

We arrived in Pucallpa at 3am that night. Everyone stayed on board because Pucallpa is quite dangerous at night. The stories are that the taxi drivers take you off to some deserted place, kill you for a few dollars, and dump your body in the lake. Who knows if there is any truth to these stories but after the pirate incident I decided to head that same day for terra tranquila: Huanuco.

Pucallpa is a crossroads city, flourishing as the necessary junction from the river to several roads. Dirt roads. It is hot, humid and the dust from the dirt roads is intolerable. Every city in Lima has a plaza, some of which are nicer than others. But I think that only Pucallpa has an open urinal in theirs.

PUCALLPA IS DUSTY

David, Lucy, Jarden and I all left the boat together in the morning and went exploring. Jarden is a Pucalpeño and knew the territory. The four of us visited the tourist strip: a mosquito ridden lake, quite beautiful but with litter and abandoned boats everywhere. It was much as one might imagine a tourist strip in the deep Louisiana bayou.

PUCALLPA IS FILLED WITH ABANDONED BOATS
We then proceeded to the market where we ate watermelon.

JARDEN LIKES WATERMELON

Lucy Pucallpa, which is bad because she and Jarden are stuck there until they earn enough money for onward tickets to their next destination: Lima. Jarden’s brother owns a car in Lima and Jarden could rent it from him to use as a taxi. As I mentioned before, Jarden and Lucy intend to travel the country together, visiting family. Before they both had reasonable jobs that paid the rent and put food on the table. Lucy worked in a restaurant and Jarden was a mototaxi driver by trade. They each earned about 10 soles ($3.30) a day in income, which paid the rent but left no savings. It is hard to imagine that I used to earn in one day what one of them made in over two and a half months (of working every day, of course). It is hard to comprehend the fact, it is impossible for me to understand why. Here in Pucallpa their family didn’t approve of their unmarried status and they felt more comfortable sleeping outside than they did with Jarden’s relatives. They estimate that, working hard and sleeping outside, they could save the money they need (about $25) in about three weeks.

I gave them my sleeping bag and $1.50 (capable of buying a day’s worth of food) and I caught the evening bus to Huanuco.

LANCHA pt. 4: Pirates!

2005-08-04T08:28:00.000-03:00

The next day passed quite as the others: sunny and lazy. But that evening there was quite a bit of a stir.

Most of the boat was watching Titanic. Meanwhile my game of Casino had turned into a conversation about Peru’s governmental problems, of which there are many. Like most other Latin American countries Peru has been plagued by thieving civil servants who view their primary task as looting the people. One of innumerable examples would be the 80km road that was built in the jungle connecting Iquitos to the neighboring town of Nauta. The road ended up taking 10 years and costing 48 million dollars. The reason was that over that period every regional president used the project as a kind of slush fund to line their own projects. Three separate regional governors did this until it was finally uncovered. There are many parties in Peru but only really a few serious ones, all of which are crooked. Peruvians are very frustrated.

I remember when I was teaching my room decided to have an “island theme.” I wanted to tie this into the whole idea of tying the island into different subjects. If we were really on an island we could study geography, history, and government. I was most excited about government. My plan: the initial idea was to give the kids an imaginary island and they could draw a map of the island, write up their own laws, etc. It turned out that this was a little openended for most of them so I decided to give them a preexisting island. For some reason I chose Haiti and, as the projects came in it became clearer and clearer that Haiti was in serious trouble. I would ask my students: “Ok. You’re the president. Now what’s the best way to solve this country’s problems.” We would talk for hours but I never found a student with a solution other than revolution. So we had a revolution: for art students would design the new flag, new rules, new everything. The project continued for a month before it ran its course and we moved on. Two months later the actual Republic of Haiti decided to follow our lead and had a revolution.

The point of the Haiti story is that, looking at a country’s options actually isn’t something only specialists understand and it’s becoming more and clear to me that Peruvians seem to feel that they are out of options. They are not big fans of democracy because over and over they elect people who steal from them and, sometimes, kill them. Something that has been coming up more and more in these conversations is turning to a military government.

I was raised anti-military and I have always believed that military governments are the kinds of things that begin with elite commandos raiding congress in the dead of night. But it seems that no government rules without popular support of one kind or another and there is currently a lot of support for the armed forces.

I asked my friends why the military government would be better than now. “The military provides more order. Our country needs more order,” they said. “But the problem isn’t that there is no order in the streets, the problem is that the government takes all the money. Do you think the military will steal less?” I replied. “There is more order with the military. The government too. There is just more order in general.”

I was unconvinced but at that moment there started to be a bit of a hullabaloo. People ran around the room and looked out the windows yelling “Saltaro! Saltaro!” meaning “Jumper! Jumper!” Since I got onboard I had been scared about the idea of falling out of the boat. The night before I had seen a large snake’s head moving about around the boat while we were stopped. The room became electric and people started becoming more and more agitated, running in circles and looking for something to do. But then people began to run away from the windows, quickly shutting them and then moving away. Some people began to hide under tables. Then a few shots rang out. “Oh!” I thought. “They meant ‘assaulto’!” I was in no position to understand exactly what was happening but had the overwhelming feeling that I would like to hide under the table with the others. Under the tables were a lot of crying children and I heroically gave my polar fleece to a 12 year old girl to put over her head. At least it felt heroic at the time. The atmosphere was very tense but after two minutes everyone came out and it was somehow all over. As we sped away into the night, leaving the attackers to gnaw at their bones, all anyone could talk about was the assault.

I heard stories from everyone about what had happened and every story was different. Jarden told me that the attackers were terrorists and that there was a terrorist village downstream and we had turned around and were returning to Iquitos. Others told me that they were just ordinary robbers, only after the money in the boat’s lockbox but we had outrun them. Gemma told me that this happens frequently and that they steal from all the passengers and frequently rape women. But the only story I believe is the one that I heard while standing while talking to a fellow boat passanger who was also on my bus from Pucallpa to Huanuco. Apparently there were no robbers at all. There had been a robbery four days earlier and, in the dark, a small boat didn’t respond to the captain’s hail. Our jumpy captain had started yelling that there was an assault underway, fired some shots in the air and hit the gas.

LANCHA pt. 3: filling up

2005-08-04T07:55:00.000-03:00

On the third day the ship was entirely in a routine. I awoke late for breakfast (café con leche) but so did everyone else – apparently if we are to be served the same every day then we are not as excited to rush. I noticed pretty early on that I’d been mistaken in my assumption that because of my precautions against mosquito bites had worked for the past few days, I no longer needed to take them. I woke up to find a healthy 20 bites about my feet and legs. I had been so confidant in my shorts for protection but their weaknesses became immediately clear to me. The bites itched like hell for the next 3 or 4 days. Mosquitoes here don’t play around: the bites are about 3 times larger and a sight more itchy than those of their American cousins. The mosquitoes were also more devious and I had numerous bites on the soles of my feet. For the next few days it was terrible to walk in sandals and shoes burned like fire.

I spent little time in my pueblito instead in the restless spirit of my trip I decide to play the social butterfly flitting from floor to floor. The time passed lazily as whiled away the hours playing cards, drawing the scenery, taking photos as we stopped to load and unload cargo. People would get on and off the boat but more would get on than off and soon the boat began to become crowded. By the evening meal the landscape of the second floor had completely changed and our small backwater pueblito had become a bustling city complete with a bustling nightlife, food vendors and possibly a criminal underworld. It was so crowded that people would board the boat with hammocks and have no place for them. This is astonishing for anyone who has traveled in a boat where everyone slept in hammocks because, alternating high and low, you can fit more people into a small space in hammocks than any other method of bedding. That night people slept in the doorways and with the animals on the prow of the boat. Upstairs Gemma faced a problem because a two very large women had moved in so close to her that they simply could not both be in their hammocks at the same time. Every time Gemma sat down in her hammock the woman would cry out in pain but greeted any attempt at talking it out with cold, grim stonewalling. She knew she was in the wrong but she simply was not going to sleep out in the cold.

Our pueblito’s new immigrants posed another problem as well: with all this movement our baggage was no longer secure and constant guard was placed on our bags. But late that night while the pueblito circled wagons I donned my long pants and other mosquito protection and headed out to the explore Cantamana, a passing town, with some friends (Pedro, Gemma and Patty) from the boat. They were excited because the town had a telephone and they could call their families.

That night I stayed up looking at the stars a bit longer. Then went back to my pueblito and passed out.

LANCHA pt. 2: Fiesta on the 4th floor

2005-08-04T06:12:00.000-03:00

I woke up much more rested. Breakfast was cafe con leche whcih is served in a bowl and has little to do with coffee or milk, looks like Amazonian river water and tastes like a Frapuccino fell in a vat of boiling water. The object of the game is to dunk your ration of 3 stale pieces of bread in the brown broth and soak up what nutrients you can. While to the reader at thome this may sound scant but I assure you that to us it it was like angel food cake with fresh strawberries and we finished our last drops with gusto. Well, I didn't exactly finish but, as was to become the custom with all meals aboard ship, I would offer my food to Jarden who, at first with reluctance and then with increasing eagerness, accepted my gifts. Filled with bread, warm water and an eagerness to stretch my legs I decided to set off to see the other floors.

The boat begins in the hold, which is reached by a very large dumbwaiter attached to a winch and contains a lot of exotic cargo.
The first floor of the boat is also reserved for cargo and extends into the prow, where the larger cargo is stored: everything from contstruction equipment and boats to farm animals and large bags of dried fish. Boats and airplanes are the only way to transport anything to roadless Iquitos and for bigger ticket items the only real Previeweconomic way is boat.

THE PROW OF THE BOAT FILLS UP AS WE GO

As we go down the river we stop by tiny pueblitos and upload their cargo of bananas, fish, rice and other jungle produce and offload our travelling vendors who stay the night to sell their wares and then catch the next boat one stop to the pueblito downstream. We also take on people and as the voyage progresses hammock space becomes more and more dear.

SMALL COMMUNITY GATHERS TO GREET OUR BOAT

THEN THEY CARRY STUFF ON

The second floor of the boat is where I live and sleep. It is the biggest, the most crowded and it contains the kitchen. Every time the cook banged his spoon against the cooking pot everyone ran to get food. At first this wasn't important as everyone got the same but, as the final days of the voyage approached and the kitchen began to run out of food, not everyone on the crowded ship got to eat.

The second floor also housed the majority of toilet/showers. The shower was directly over the toilet so, in theory you could wash yourself as you went about your business but I never tried this luxury. At first they were clean and self cleaning but later the drains become clogged and water and human waste piled up leading to an unpleasant for the unwary late night visitor.

The third floor was somewhat the executive level. While anyone could sleep here, there is less space and only two bathrooms which keeps the population lower. It also has a better stocked kioske which serves beer at the outragous amount: $1 per can. On Amtrak they charge $4.50 for a beer but here on land you can buy a delicious steak with all the trimmings and a drink for $1.50.

Aboard the Don Segundo it was virtually impossible to be without companionship and I needed only wander a few steps before finding new friends. Or rather they find me: everyone wants to talk to the gringo. I took a few pictures of children eating things off the ground the next thing I knew I had been invited to the 4th floor for a drink. Not wanting to arrive empty handed I went downstairs to get my supply of canchita, a treat for anyone who enjoys the the toasted but unpopped kernals of corn usually left at the bottom of the bag. Usually served on top of ceviche it is a tasty treat in its own right and on board the Don Segundo, best kept under lock and key. I kept it in a black plastic bag similar to my toiletry bag and every time I would go to get my soap Jarden would ask: "Canchita?" I had hidden some canchita in a blue bag and, suspicions unaroused, I ran back up to join the party.

The party was a real party complete with an MP3 cd player busting out the top 150 cumbya music hits which might as well be the top 5 because they all sound the same to me. After the cramped conditions below I was entirely unprepared for the sight. An MP3 player pumped out the Peruvian Top 150, which might as well have been the top 5 because they all sound the same to me. Young men and women danced, joked and drank beers in the sun.

YOUNG PERUVIANS READY TO PARTY

I had imagined a 5 day Amazonian boat ride as a rather grim endeavor best remembered as a tough experience overcome with your fellow travellers. This might be true on the lower levels where people complained of the bread prices: "30 cents for five loaves? Outrageous! It's half that at home! I would rather go hungry!" These high rolling 20 somethings had strewn the roof level with their empty, and expensive, beer cans. The only other inhabitants of the roof level seemed to be small children who took glee in throwing the cans off the side into the river.

Peruvians love to litter and, though I don't pretend to involve myself with noble task of changing their culture, every time I see it I am filled with the burning desire to say "You know, one day you or your children are going to have to go down to that river and fish that bottle back out just to put it in a garbage can. It'd really be easier for everyone if you just put it there now."

I FINALLY LEARN THE DANCE CUMBYA

The day was idyllic and we danced the hours away.

LANCHA pt.1: Aboard the Don Segundo

2005-08-04T05:08:00.000-03:00

This is a long post and I suggest the reader find a nice cup of Tension Tamer tea, a quiet place, and only then venture on the voyage found in the following pages. You have been forwarned. Avast!

Florence and I went to the market this morning and bought the necessary items for our respective journeys. His is the logical next step from Iquitos, the gateway to Brazil: a three day journey to the border town of Tabatinga. I, on the other hand, was doubling back on my route back south to Cusco and then on to Bolivia. We bought hammocks and ties, plastic bowls, utensils, flashlight. And water.

We are, of course, to be on a river which has plent of water. But as the ship also has bathrooms and the products of those bathrooms get dumped in the river, I concluded that I would need five days of water. I decided on 10 liters, fhat our 2.5 liter bottles.

Florence and I got a mototaxi to the docks where we had inquired earlier. Almost there it appeared as if there were a group of protesters spilling into the roadway. As we neared they began screaming at us "Pucallpa! Pucallpa!" and I began to realize that they were boat tauts, no more and no less than the the guy on the Lima buses who screams the route to, somehow, drum up business from people who thought they wanted to walk. I asked the driver and he said that there were two boats leaving tonight for Pucallpa but the food was better on the one we'd just seen because it was cooked by women. He also told me it was cheaper. Both facts turned out to be blatant lies intended to get more fare from us for my return journey back to the first dock.

We dropped Florence off and he and I bid eachother a fond "adieu" and I returned to the other dock. The taxi driver charged an additional price for our short return journey (3.5 soles) but had to wait while I got change by buying my ticket. The ticket cost about $22 for 5 days, including food. Unfortunately my change was returned to me as two 5 sole coins, which meant I had to rely on the driver to give me more change. He promptly decided that his time waiting for his increased fare was worth more than he'd thought and changed his price to 4 soles. I glared at him until he gave me another 20 centavos in change and then ran for the door.

It's ironic that I should care about so little money but somehow it comes down to "principle", had he quoted 5 soles in the beginning and stuck to it that would have been fine but the idea of changing prices because I am a gringo is upsetting to me and puts me in the position of haggling over 50 cents every time I buy something.

I BOARD THE GOOD SHIP DON SEGUNDO

After my friend, the mototaxi driver escaped with an extra 15 cents, I wondered bewhildered up the flight of stairs leading to the second and middle floor of the boat, wondering if I ought to set up my hammock now or later. I finished clunking up the stairs with my 4 bottles of water I was greeted by a humming beehive of activity.

There were hammocks everywhere, old men, women, babies, kids, people of every shape and size imaginable. Among these hammocks kids flitted about selling products ñole bowls, soap, water, soft drinks, and home cooked meals for unprepared travellers while families hauled their worldy possessions about the large cabin. The occupancy of the boat said 250 but with the "bring your own hammock" policy I was sure no one was counting. In my bewhilderment I heeded the advice of everyone I had spoken to which was "pretty much every place on the boat is the same", which turns out to be a complete lie, and I chose a place directly above the furnace and next to the kitchen, bar, and the only garbage I saw on the ship. The garbage can turned out to be the cleanest place on the ship as no one uses garbage cans in Peru. For our nonrecyclable items there is the river or, better, the floor of the cabin. The smell of raw, market-bought chicken pervaded the air, as did the five songs that get repeated over and over at every discotech. Luckily on board the Don Segundo the CDs were so scratched that you only had to listen to half the song.

At first I was worried this might not be enough but once on the boat I was happy I did not spring for the 6 bottle pack as the eager young water salesman suggested because just as I was beginning to realize that I was losing about one liter of water every hour from sweating in the 90 degree humidity I opened my first water bottle and heard the familiar "hhssssss" of sparkling mineral water, which is packaged exactly like still water, or as they like to call it "water without gas". It is as if on the third day God Almighty first seperated land from the gaseous water and only later seperated regular carbonated water from it's redheaded stepchild "gas-less water".

I turns out gaseous or no, almost no one else brought water. To this day I do not know how Peruvians drink it, probably in the privacy of their own homes. In public they stick to juice, soft drinks and beer. If they do drink water then it's the cursed carbonated water. I hoped to find some poor Peruvian who had, by some mistake, bought still water so that I could trade them, perhaps at a profit.

It only took me a couple of hours to realize the error of my ways and, though I hated to appear as if I were leaving my neighborhood with delusions of upward mobility, I bid a silent goodbye to my neighbors and slunk off to the front of the boat and crept into small space between two hammocks far from the noise and heat of the engine, which rocked the whole boat.

IN THIS BOAT THERE ARE MANY HAMMOCKS

I then had an hour or so of reading my book before the typical getting to know you chit chat started up. On my right side was David, studying to take the university entrance exam in a private school and on my left was Jarden and Lucy, two penniless lovers who dreamed of travel but had no money. They go from city to city, visiting family and trying to save for the next onward ticket.

DAVID STUDYING

JARDEN AND LUCY PLAY CARDS

As I set up my hammock I noticed a girl of 20 or so years more tickled than most at the new addition to the neighborhood. Every move I made, tying my knots which made me nervous and I ended up tying them loosely. As we drifted off to sleep I notieced that this girl had no hammock and my neighbors told me semi-jokingly that she wanted to sleep with me. I glanced over in disconfirm this rumor only to find an unequivicable statement of affirmation on the girl's face.

After talking for some time we slept as we could and woke up with the sun, around 6am. There was various movement as people went about their morning ablutions and then all of a sudden a man started banging loudly on a pot and within seconds the air become electric: we rushed with our tupperware towards the kitchen. Breakfast turned out to be Quaker (pronounced QUAH-KERR) which is Quaker Oats, very thin with condensed milk and water. Very sweet, and with some stale bread: delicious.

After breakfast we became more jovial. I offered my cards up and they became popular immediately. We played on teams and my team lost famously until I figured out that folks on the boat actually knew American style Casino and that I knew the strategy.

Far from the lonesome voyage down the solitary undergrowth, somtimes pushing fallen trees aside while dodging anacondas and unfriendly indians with blowdarts. Instead I'm playing games called "punch" and "dirty ass" with new friends while drinking Bimbo Break Lemon Lime Soda.

After this I passed the time writing, reading, and talking. I tried to read my Lonely Planet but it is like reading a phone directory for Disneyland so mostly I spent my time talking. Everyone likes to talk to the foreigner and everyone knows someone in the United States. Who knows if they actually do but they sure like to talk about it. They like to hear about my journey and differences in culture.

Also I have become more culturally prepared for the food sharing. I am careful not to offer things I want to keep for once something has entered into the community it belongs to community and is there to come and go as the members of the community wish. For instance, I offered my sleeping bag to one girl the other night and the next night she offered it to my neighbors, Jarden and Lucy. Also with precious soda: once one other person takes a sip of it it might pass the lips of the other 248 passengers before it returns to the original owner. But still, it's worth it. Despite the fact that I am now the one buying drinks for everyone, I am pleased. At least people seem to have their own stories, own agendas, and not looking to get drinks from the rich gringo tourist.

I am the only gringo on the boat for five days and no one speaks a lick of English except for the occasional "Thankyou noproblem" which is followed by giggling at the use of a different language.

The days aboard the boat are divided up by meals. Lunch was typically rice, noodles, a very small piece of chicken (like a beak or a leg), and a dozen beans. Dinner was even better: chicken soup, minus the chicken. They do not serve drinks and, water being expensive ($1 a liter) no one really brought any. With good cause I began to see the writing on the wall: on day three the drink line was going to form around me and I remembered the best training manual I could have ever read: Tortilla Flats by John Steinbeck.

There are people who are happy that everyone shares for they have nothing. What a windfall to this culture I must be and while there is something to be said for the respect of private property, there is also something uncomfortable about having more and not sharing, asking those with less to sit and watch you enjoy your happy life. There's something anti-community in, though at the same time I think respect of one's "betters" and their wealth seems to be a cornerstone of society. Still, it's interesting and refreshing having to rethink my bounderies, learning to keep that which is Ceaser's unto Caeser and also asking myself who really needs these things more: me or the others around me. All private property is theft from the community and it is ironic that we feel this idea of loss most when our own private property leaves us and is distributed among the community, among those who want or need it more.

By lunchtime my enamorada had invited me to hear her sing at church and gazed at me with a look that could only mean she had the names of our first five children already worked out and that I would have to hurry if I wanted some say in the names of the second half of our family.

By now we had settled into a comfortable routine of playing cards and talking, broken every so often by Jarden turning up with new alcoholic drinks he had liberated from another "neighborhood".

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

One of them, translated to "7 deadly sins" - essentially an alcoholic aphrodesiac that is "guaranteed to give you an erection" could well be the official drink of the jungle. All alcoholic drinks in the jungle seem to be aphrodesiacs. They are sold in the market, not the stores and all have names like "Breaking the Panties" or "Losing the Virginity" or something like that. They are all made from trees and are homebrews marred by no brand names. They are sold in markets by old women who probably ought to know better.

THESE LADIES SHOULD (AND PROBABLY DO) KNOW BETTER

I now learn my Spanish in themes of conversation, much like the chapters in a Spanish textbook. I traded card games until late into the night with two twenty year old "boys" who ran their own business selling clothes. They explained words like "profit", "investment", and "factory mistake". They would travel from Lima to Iquitos and back, selling their clothing to very small villages at a 150% profit. But even this outrageous markup, they explained, was the market price as the cost of travel to these villages is prohibitive. Many times they would only break even. But, if the reader chooses to browse the photo section of the blog, he will find that on this boat ride the rural villagers living in towns accessable only by boat wore new clothing only a few months behind that of Lima. I was very impressed by these boys and they were so impressed by my impression that one of them gave me a clipon reggae earring that he claimed to have made by hand.

Tired and interested in how it felt to sleep in a hammock I decided to retire. After one failed attempt which left me sitting on the floor I successfully entered the thing, pulled up my sarong over my body for a sheet and mosquito protection, and drifted off to sleep.

NEXT:
PART 2: Fiesta on the 4th Floor

Foreigners in America Beware!

2005-08-04T03:49:00.000-03:00

So I searched on googlenews.com for "South America" and the number two article (after "South America Headed Towards Unification" was this article: Foreigners in America Beware! Not up to date on the news and being a foreigner in America, I quickly checked. I suggest you do the same.

I guess here's a little something I'd forgotten after being a month in Peru.

My favorite quote:
Foreigners in America beware! Someday our patience will end, and then the despicable, lying mouths of the foreigners and corrupt politicians will be closed forever.

It's hard to look in the mirror. I would like to tell myself that this is not a strongly held opinion but it was number two on googlenews for some reason... probably because lots of people check that site out...

forever is a really long time...

Iquitos Policos

2005-08-03T05:21:00.000-03:00

Iquitos a tranquilo city in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon. I met up with Tan of SAE and sister on their final day in town. I called my SERVAS host to leave a message that I was going out with them and we danced all night, only returning at 5am to sleep for a few hours before their plane. It was Fiesta Patrias and the main center was shut down for military parades. It occured to me that the USA rarely has large public military parades. When we want to show off our strength we use another country for our parade. I told this to Florence, who is from France, and he laughed...

On returning to my SERVAS house in the early afternoon I was greeted with the unpleasant news that she had not recieved my message and had notified the police and was on the verge of notifying the papers. It was unbelievably embarrassing to have to go the police and explain in my broken Spanish that I was alivea and had not been killed. In retrospect I want pictures of the police station but I felt too bad to take them at the time. In theory everyone had done everything right but I somehow felt I had been a burden and I decided not to go dancing again the next night.

The next day I went to buy stuff for the boat ride with Florence. I bought a hammock, water, flashlight, eating equipment, etc. I used up my last few Soles and literally had 15 cents to my name. We went to get cash and had one of those Holy Shit moments when the machine ate my card. The bank was closed and wouldn't help me and only with the aid of a swiss army knife and some scissors did the damn thing come out, one hour and one very freaked out Nathan later. Scary scary.

COMING SOON ON NATHAN'S BLOG:

NOTES ON AN AMAZONIAN BOAT RIDE

travelling light

2005-07-29T15:23:00.000-03:00

So when I left for this trip I was surprised at how OCD I became about the size and weight of my backpack, weighing out everything that was to enter it. I was obsessed with "travelling light".

People travel heavy because they do not trust the world to be there for them tomorrow. Perhaps they don't trust that the place they visit will have things like coffee or tea and they bring their own. Perhaps the place they visit will not have people to talk to so they bring books. Perhaps the world will be hot or cold and the world will not provide shelter so they bring clothes for all situations. Many people travel by bringing their worlds with them, frequently on their shoulders. The typical story is that of course the world provides things and the instant coffee brought from home never gets made. The heavy packers end up either hanging onto their stuff for the trip (too scared to throw it away because perhaps they might need it some day) or they throw it out (and make the conversion to light packer).

ZEN

But there's also another kind of heavy packing. I recently found that I would frequently preoccupy myself with plans and eventualities that simply never got used. I carry many thoughts ("What job will I have when I get back to the States?", etc.) like a 60 liter backpack! It's uncomfortable to carry my worries but it's hard to let go and not worry, allow the world to provide and enjoy the weightlessness.

Treehouse Haircut

2005-07-28T19:21:00.000-03:00

BELIN, IQUITOS - Here many houses are built on stilts because the Amazon floods half the year and the city becomes like Venice, except imagine your Venecian Coke costing ten cents rather than two euros. Soda is definately cheaper and more readily available than water.

MR TREEHOUSE

I needed a haircut and got one in a stilt house. Really cool.

I'M HAPPIER WITH MY SIXTY CENT HAIRCUT THAN I LOOK

So just realized that I'm in the same location as Blanka from Street Fighter II.

HERE BLANKA DEFEATS KEN AT MY HAIR SALON

Iquitos

2005-07-26T14:59:00.000-03:00

I missed the boat. But I got a plane and consequently...

Greetings from Iquitos, the world's largest city which is not connected by any roads! Instead it is sort of an island surrounded by the Amazon River and then doubly isolated by being surrounded by hundreds of miles of dense rainforest with nary a city or town inbetween. Outrageous really. What is the city like? It has about 500,000 people (though when I asked, the mototaxi driver said 20,000) and it is loud and bustling. It's super hot and humid year round. Way too hot for shoes. Also it is expensive because almost all regular items have to arrive by plane. To be honest, I'm not sure why so many people live here. Though perhaps I'll find out.

Right now I'm full of delicious caiman, which I had for lunch in a buttery sauce that would make the Cheesecake Factory blush. I was just walking back to my SERVAS host's house to get my travel wallet, which I seem to have left here. Perhaps I will also take a nap and go out later.

THIS CAFE OVERLOOKS THE AMAZON RIVER

My initial impression of the city is one of drama and crazyness: a party city in the middle of the jungle. Many tourists. Many locals wanting to get laid. In fact, outside of Iquitos the only thing Peruvians could tell me about the jungle was that there were many "mujeres callientes". And they don't mean "calliente" in the way that a cup of coffee or fresh bread is hot. Time after time I would mention I was going to the jungle and Peruvians would advise me to use protection. "Maleria?" I would ask innocently. "Condoms" they would reply. One particularly macho Peruvian looked at me with fear in his eyes: "Sometimes I am not wanting to have sex and I say to stop and they do not stop."

So needless to say, Iquitos has a somewhat sleazy reputation. But what do the locals think about their city? I asked my SERVAS host who owns a taxi rental business: What makes the jungle different from other places in Peru? She answered that without a doubt it was the "mujeres callientes" that gave it the local flavor. Cheerfully she pointed out a liquor on the shelf of a store: "This is called 'Breaking the Panties'!" Apparently a local favorite.

SIGN THAT YOU ARE IN A SLEAZY CITY

Every time I hear about this I ask if this cultural phenomenon is true, if it's dangerous because of deseases, if it's new and why it exists? The answers are 100% consistant and they are:

TRUE? yes, everyone says it's true.
DANGEROUS? yes, everyone says it's good to be ultra safe though no one says the place is desease ridden.
NEW? not a single person has any idea whatsoever about how long it's been like this (though I'm guessing it's old as the trees)
WHY? 2 explanations: 1) no one wears any clothes around here, which is partly true. Most people are half naked. and 2) there's nothing to do in the afternoon because after 1pm it's really warm and people just kind of lay around.

Synopsis: I have never been to a city where the promescuity of the local population is attached to a sense of pride.

JUNGLE TOWN

Finally the pictures are up to speed with my trip. Mostly. I'll be going back and doing more pictures as I get them uploaded. There are many many but if you want to see them, check the gallery my brother set up for me. There are many pictures and without explanations and I'm sure they're boring.

Global Challenge

2005-07-24T02:38:00.000-03:00

While trying to price out trips to Lagunas de Los Condores in Leymabamba I came across what looked like a group of 15 British teen tourists. I figured they'd know about tour companies but it turned out to be a British group called Global Challenge, volunteers who come to Peru to help out Peru. This seems good because Peru has plenty of problems. They were filled with youthful optimism but they weren't quite sure where to start. Having looked around the town they found that the most pressing job they could do was to paint the market and when I encountered them they were looking for paint.

Yesterday I came across the same group, this time in Tarapoto. They were eating at the best restaurant in town. I asked them how the painting went. "Not good" they said. The first problem was there was no paint in the town. Only a couple buckets so they had to leave the job half finished. The second problem was that the paint was ugly: red and green. "Christmas colors?" I asked. But the guy said no. The third problem was that the local Leymabambans kept telling them that they were painting incorrectly and wasting paint. This was infuriating to them and they sort of had the attitude of "hey! we're doing this out of the KINDNESS OF OUR HEARTS! We've just payed about $3000, maybe as much as you make in a year, to come on a trip to HELP you guys by painting your market. You could be more appreciative!" What was most interesting to me was that while there was confusion, no one had really grappled with the main questions: Why was there no paint to be had? And why hadn't the Peruvians taken care enough to paint their own market?

The cost of transporting this British labor was tremendous, if it was about getting the market painted they could have sent a cheque for about $30 but what it was really about was feeling charitable and teaching Britain's youth to be good global citizens. Happily they told me that now that the market painting was over the group was off to spear pirhanas. I told them I thought that that sounded difficult. "What do you use?" I asked. They didn't know but they were sure it was going to be easier than painting that market.

up the river

2005-07-23T18:24:00.000-03:00

My aunt died yesterday and it's hard not to be there for the funeral. The best way The only way I can really comprehend it is to imagine my brothers getting on the plane and my mom and dad at my aunt and uncle's house. Dear family, when you read this, my thoughts are with you and I love you all and wish I were there.

I remember a conversation with Mrs. Culpepper I had before I left about loss. She said one way to view life is as a permenant condition of loss. Every moment we lose something and as we change we lose our old selves. We define ourselves in how we accept this loss and change. I believe travelling for long periods is a case study in accepting loss, a lesson in saying goodbye. Every day I meet new interesting people, close connections, and must say goodbye. Every day I find amazing places that I love and but there's always the next bus.

To misquote somone:
life is but a memory and a forgetting...
trailing clouds of glory do we come.

Tomorrow I plan to set sail from the port town of Yurimaguas to the big jungle city of Iquitos. I'll be leaving Tarapoto at 4am in a car going over super nasty dirt roads. It's supposed to be 4-5 hours and I hope I make it before the departure time of 10am. Otherwise there isn't another boat for 2 days. Tough stuff.

At the SAE office I took some unused maleria pills (Chloroquine & Proguanil) but in Tarapoto you can only buy Chloroquine. I did. 20 tablets of 250mg. On the plus side it's cheap, on the minus side there's some choloroquine resistance in the Amazon. Not good. Also the woman told me to take 500mg a day while CDC tells me 500mg a week. Confusing. Will look for Doxycycline in Iquitos.

I am tired and must now go to the market to look for clothes for the trip.

laguna de los condores

2005-07-23T18:08:00.000-03:00

Leymabamba is a tiny town of a couple thousand, most famous for it's museum of fairly grotesque mummies. Or at least grotesque to me. In Cajamarca the family I was staying with told me to go there and showed me pictures of the mummies.

MUMMIES LOOK BETTER STILL IN THE SACK

What the Chachapoyans (the mummy guys) did was suck out everything that wasn't skin and bones, crumple it up and put it in a really pretty sack. Then they would draw what was essentially a cute happy face on it. Then they built a small building behind a waterfall and shoved in about 250 of these guys. It's actually in plain view and you can see it if you know what to look for but no one really did. Not for at least a thousand years. Locals had a good idea of where it was but wouldn't tell anyone for fear of grave robbers. It was eventually discovered when a European (I want to say Dutch) archeologist's wife insulted a local saying that he would never find it and the local guy brought them straight to it. It's tough to get to - essentially a cliff overhanging a black lagoon.

BLACK LAGOON

It's an 8-12 hour horsey ride in and then an additional 2 and a half hours from the hut we stayed in.

HARD TO GET TO

I am led to believe it always rains there as when we set out it was raining and our guide looked up and said "good day for hiking! It's hardly raining!"

GOOD WEATHER

I'm not usually into the concept of guides but this one was amazing and was highly involved in the project from discovery to removal of the artifacts. It was an amazing experience though it was cold and I got to take a little cold home with me as a souvenier.

Celendin to Leymabamba

2005-07-17T20:00:00.000-03:00

On the combi from Cajamarca to Celendin I sat next to one of the guys who stops cars and searches them for drugs. He's on vacation and visiting Celendin because they're having an ongoing celebration for the next month. I asked him about the route I want to take through the jungle. Apparently there is some narcotrafficking. He said it was no problem. I arrived in the Plaza de Armas in Celendin alone with no plans and nothing to do until the next bus left for Chachapoyas 4 days later on Sunday (tomorrow).

Tired, I wandered around the center looking for a hostal. I had a great one for 15 sols ($5) with private bathroom with hot water at all hours. But the management was shady and kicked me out because they found people who would pay more. I ended up finding one for 10 sols and a more rustic feel. I was made aware that there was a fiesta in progress by the sound of fireworks being fired off the roof. We are not talking about the kind of fireworks that remind you of 4th of July. They´re the kind of fireworks that remind you that your insurance doesn't cover acts of war.

THIS BAMBOO STRUCTURE IS RIGGED TO GO OFF
OFF THE HOOK THAT IS...

I decided to check out the plaza. There were thousands of people and in a town with 5000 people that's really saying something. But being alone in the midst of a crowd where everyone knows eachother makes you feel alone, like an outsider. i began feeling a little sorry for myself, telling myself that travelling alone is tough and scary. But the fact is that it actually requires some effort to be alone. People are only alone by choice. By nature we're social animals, seeking eachother out. And after about 10 minutes of feeling lost and alone ion a new city I got up some nerve, scouted out an appropriate throng of youngsters and began conversation.

Like most Peruvians they were incredibly friendly and asked me the usual questions about where I was from and what I was doing around. Then in a little bit the men ran off and bought some rum to mix with sprite. And it was here that I began to notice the differences in culture. They had a 2 litre of Sprite and a litre of rum and a dixie cup. The object is to pass around the dixie cup, the sprite and the rum and mix yourself a 1/8 of a drink. This progresses rapidly and in half an hour the bottle was done and and we proceeded to a bar where they began to drink heavily.

THAT AIN'T THE CAMERA THAT'S BLURRY
IT'S MY VISION

In the next few days, the local 20 year olds adopted me and took me around the town and to visit the local hotsprings. It was nice.

MMM HOTSPRINGS...

I coordinated with Tanalees from SAE back in Lima. She's on vacation with her sister and I cought a combi to Leymabamba to meet her. I arrived the day before and had a chance to explore the town. I met with two nice European ladies who were visiting the local weaving and milk products factories. Peru is my training grounds for checking out new travel styles and it's cool to see different traveller types. These guys go into every store and ask "hey, where do you get this stuff". Then they visit the factory. Pretty cool.

Cajamarca

2005-07-14T19:05:00.000-03:00

I arrived in Cajamarca at 4:30 in the morning and waited till 6:30 in the bus station to show up at the host´s house. Made some progress in "Roughing It" (Mark Twain). The hosts were very welcoming and treated me to a lovely breakfast and afterwards the daughter, Sandra (16), took me around the town and I bought a shirt for 5 soles ($1.30).

In the afternoon I hung out in the town plaza. Every town over a thousand has a Plaza de Armas. Really cool concept. It's a beautiful place surrounded by wonderful colonial buildings. A place where people come and stroll in a little circle to see and be seen and lovers come and cuddle in the cool evenings. I felt a little apprehensive. Peru seems more "normal" now, like Nevada.

Something interesting is that SERVAS hosts seem to think it is more interesting that I'm Jewish than it is that I´m from another country. Lots of questions and confusion. For most people I'm the first Jew they've met and in a Catholic country it's pretty interesting for them. I had incredibly interesting conversations with my hosts about politics and culture. SERVAS is really amazing. Everyone has been so kind and generous.

Also most SERVAS Peruvians have heard of David Copperfield but have never seen a cardtrick before. People are very appreciative. Also it's interesting to see how my tricks become more physical as I lose command of the language. But I can finally make jokes.

Here's a bad one I just made up:

Por que personas piensan que vacas son perezososa?
Porque todo el tiempo estan en VACAciones!!!

JOKE INSPIRATION

Sadly (actually probably happily) it does not translate...

MULE TRANSPORT IN ACTION

I HIKE IN CUMBA MAYA

The next day I went on a long hike to Cumbe Maya with Sandra and one of her friends, Sarah. It was about 4.5 hrs uphill (2 hrs back) and it kicked my butt in parts and if you don't ask directions you're liable to get lost.

THIS GUY HELPED US FIND OUR WAY

But it was super fun. Humorously none of us knew that Cumbe Maya is a famous ancient aqueduct so we showed up, ate lunch, and walked back without actually seeing the site. We returned and I took the family out to dinner at Super Chicken, a restaurant which serves... guess what... CHICKEN!!! Super tasty broaster style chicken with fries. Very popular here.

The next day I continued the hiking around Cajamarca with Sandra theme. First we visited some built up hotsprings with an historical twist: this is where Atahualpa bathed. Atahualpa is famous for being the last Inca leader and for being kidnapped about 10 minutes after the Spanish showed their white faces on the shore. In the small museum there was a the mummified corpse of a 20 year old woman who was sacrificed by the water cult. I wonder: was she beautiful? Full of life? How did she face her immenent death? Did they sacrifice the best or worst of the community? Or randomly? What stories did they tell the sacrificed before to get them to go along with it? And all to believe in a meaning. Something to keep away the darkness of disorder? Anything so long as it isn't nothing... It is better to leave a scary world that makes sense than a meaningless one... or so people believe...

SANDRA AT BAÑOS DEL INCAS

After the baños we went hiking for four or five hours to some 1000 year old cave paintings. If this seems recent, keep in mind South Americans never invented writing. In terms of recording data, llama drawings were high tech in South America.

LLAMA DRAWINGS

I THINK THIS IS PART OF THE EAR!

On the way I got to sample my first piece of tounge and head meat in a delicious soup. It was scary looking but tasty. We returned and went to a very late lunch at Sarah's parent's restaurant. Upscale. Tasty.

That night I entertained the troops with some improv card magic and the next morning I left for Celendin.

Lima a Trujillo

2005-07-10T15:44:00.000-03:00

So much to tell and I keep putting it off and it just builds up and I forget it. But here goes for some of it.

My last night in Lima I went to a marinera dance class with Tanalees, an girl from the US working in the SAE. She was amazingly helpful during my two solid days spent there plotting my course and researching. The dance class was just what I needed to loosen up for my overnight bus ride to Trujillo (a coastal city in the north).

HUANCHACO BEACH NEAR TRUJILLO

Trujillo is a lovely city, much more relaxed than Lima but it still bustling with about a million people. It was the economy bus and I didn't sleep much but it was worth the $8 savings. I arrived and stayed in spartan quarters. It was nice of the hosts to take me in too because I called a day in advance and they only signed up to have girls stay with them. They were, however, an awesome family and were incredibly welcoming. They took me around to check out the city. There were a mother, father and five daughters. I was visiting one of the daughters: Elva, a firecracker of a schoolteacher and activities director. She reminded me a lot of the Choices counsellors. The first day I visited some ruins with one of the sisters, Rosana, who is a archeology buff. The Huaca de la Sol y la Luna was awesome. It's an old pre-inca city with lots of colorful painting.

PERUVIAN DOGS HAVE NO HAIR... EXCEPT THE MOHAWK...

HUACA DE LA LUNA

More interesting was that on the way we passed a sign which says: Chicha de Hora which turns out to be a drink. As best I could understand it's a corn based beer/alcohol made in plastic buckets and left in the sun for a few weeks. Like many recent food experiences it was tasty but scary. It also threw my stomach for a loop. Best so far is the ceviche: raw fish with lemon and garlic. Unbelievably tasty and on my last day in Trujillo I even tried Ceviche Mixta which comes with raw octopus, squid, and conches. Good but the fish is the best part.

CEVICHE MIXTA: WORLD'S PERFECT FOOD

8 YEAR OLDS PERFORM TAI KWON DO

I visited Elva’s school and watched a mid year show of their artistic talents. Pretty cute watching 8 year olds do a taikwondo workout. But it was cool and the flutes demonstration in the evening was awesome. I ended up leaving with a party on my last night, drinking more than I expected at Elva’s friend’s birthday party. Her friends are mostly English speakers because her school is an English speaking school, Flemming High School.

Trujillo sports its military pride by having the local school bands practice for Fiesta De Las Patrias, Peruvian Independance Day.

Elva's family followed the typical pattern of bread with butter and Nescafe for breakfast, a huge lunch with meat in it followed by more bread with butter and Nescafe for dinner. Elva was really shocked that I wanted to help with the dinner dishes (not that there were many). “Men don’t do that here” she exclaimed.

ELVA (TOP LEFT) AND FAMILY

Elvas sisters make awesome crafts but it’s weird because they’re all USA style “country” crafts: the kind of stuff that goes with potpourri. I don’t think Peru has learned about potpourri but I think it’s be all the rage with Elva’s family.

My fourth and final day in the city I met a fellow SERVAS traveller. He had hurt is foot and didn’t want to go hiking in Cajamarca so I got to stay with the host where he was planning on staying. Seeing a fellow SERVAS traveller gave me a lot of good reinforcement. We gave each other a little advice. Mine was on calling hosts. He had been emailing them weeks before. My system so far has been to call them up on the phone at the wrong hours and stuttering out “I am traveller from SERVAS. Sleep you please?” Talking on the phone is infinitely harder than in person, quite possibly because the people on the other end can’t see my apologetic looks as I stumble through tying to tell them that I only want to meet them if it’s convenient for them. When I called the host in Cajamarca I spoke to a child. Or I thought I did. It was confusing. I called back later though and braved it again and spoke to the mother. I think.

Anyways, that night I took a bus to Cajamarca. It was fancy: we had beds and were served tasty sandwiches and hot drinks and I arrived rested.

tourist culture

2005-07-08T12:59:00.000-03:00

Having never surfed, let me say that I think travelling is in some respects like surfing. You get up a certain amount of speed and ride the wave, which eventually ends and you need to paddle out again to catch the next one. It's billed as a cool relaxed lifestyle but when you're actually doing it it's exhausting. There are a million things to think about and everything is just a little more difficult.

Staying at the hostal reminded me that there is a whole culture built around providing services for people with too much money: drugs, sex, companionship, etc. It´s crazy though cause local people infected with this culture act overly friendly and then lay their agenda on you, then act shocked when you are suspicious. I assume that as long as there's been tourism there's been this odd culture of service but it always catches me by surprise, perhaps because it involves a certain amount of deception. These people aren't your friends any more than a prostitute is your lover. In this fairly magical culture people use phrases like "you're my good friend" and "just for you" and "oh... there's just one thing i have to do on the way" to hide clearly suspicious activity ranging from trying to get me to buy something to bring home to trying to getting a money loan so they can buy drugs.

There's a sad cycle involved. The vendors push trinkets and things for you to buy because people do buy them. If there were no buyers they would not try so hard. But they do it because they know they might succeed. People want the service.

THE PARADOX OF TOURIST CULTURE
But the other (and perhaps more insidious) side of the coin is that there is a huge demand for this type of attention. People want to go somewhere far, have a one night stand with a local who tells them they´re the greatest lover in the world, engage in semidangerous situations that end with them losing their money and gear. Apparrently for a lot of people that's what travelling is all about. If the sites were free, who would go look at them? These days people like to pay for fun otherwise how will they know if they're enjoying themselves and having an "authentic" experience.

Everyone wants the illusive "authentic" experience and looks jealously at other travellers because everyone else is having the more "authentic" experience. Two hardcore trekkers in the SAE made a rookie remark: "We want to go where there are there are no white faces: there are too many white faces in this room." Irritated and trying to be clever I retorted: "well, there's really only one way to fix that! though I really ought to have said "I think you're going to have that problem wherever your go".

So many people travel to escape themselves only to find a million people just like them. It's very What the Bleep Do We Know? but until they change their own lens, very little will change for them.

REAL INFORMATION: ARREQUIPA STRIKE
At the same time there are lot of services that are not provided. In fact actual information like the fact that you can't get to Arrequipa (and consequently the Southern part of the country) is blocked off by strikes and no buses or cars can enter the city. Most people are unconcerned about this. Saying "I think a might head off to Arrequipa" will ellicit a response of "oh, lovely weather" not "hmmm... I think Arrequipa might be difficult because there's a lot of burning tires and broken glass (not that I'm saying there is, it's impossible to tell). It's a normal phenomenon like clouds in the sky and no one is going to go do tough reporting on clouds in the sky even when it involves violent confrontations with the police.

Puño

2005-07-03T21:28:00.000-03:00

Yesterday I left my first host family in Servas and set off for my next one, which I connected with back in Sacramento when my Spanish was completely unintelligible (currently people understand the words I say but they´re fairly meaningless: "yes i like fish nights"). Anyways, typical of my 3 year old SERVAS list, the guy who is actually in SERVAS now lives in Berkeley but his family was more than happy to put me up. More than that, they got really excited about showing me around and hanging out. Last night some of my host´s friends took me out to a Peña, a kind of bar where they play the traditional music of black peruvians. Between sets, they play music and everyone dances but during the sets, people sit at long tables and appreciate the official dancers. At some point in the night there was a dancing competition between everyone who was not Peruvian. I was hauled up in front of probably 150 people and had to dance by myself for about a minute in a spotlight with a live band while everyone clapped along in time. There were about 10 other people and I ended up winning wby audience applause and got a big trophy filled with beer. Apparently I can dance now.

Today I went to the beach with my hosts. The beachfront is a lot like Tel Aviv´s (but cold) and has many modern looking buildings. It´s weird how some amenities are available and some not. For instance the very affluent house that I´m staying in has unlimited internet but no hot water. I think hot water is rare and no one seems very excited about the concept.

Every day there is new fruit to discover. Many are the same but larger. For instance: 4 kilo papayas. But there are just some crazy fruits that are hard to describe. Many of these are used as popular ice cream flavors.

Tomorrow I will leave these hosts (2 night rule) and check into a hostal. It will be good to talk to other travellers and get tips. Maybe meet people who´re also travelling. I´ve stopped into two hostals so far just to check them out. I get a funny feeling from them. There´s a really interesting aura surrounding them that it's hard to put my finger on. I´m sure I{ll start writing about it as soon as I start staying in them. I remember feeling a little isolated and alone in hostels of South Africa. It´s infinitely better to stay with people: I constantly practice my Spanish, which has still not regained its former glory. It´s like being a tourist is my job and when I come home from work I can just be a visitor for awhile. When you stay at hostels you´re a tourist all the time. It´s a nice feeling to be able to switch it up a little.

PERUVIAN FOOD REPORT

2005-07-01T22:35:00.000-03:00

All righty. Had some requests to tell about the food.

Good food abounds in this tasty country of goodness. Lessons learned? This is a list of stuff I already suspected but had reconfirmed by delicious Peru.

1. Everything can be made better with eggs. Including mixed drinks.
2. American food is generally toxic and should be avoided.
3. You can make a pate out of most things. Peru invented Anchovette fish paste.
4. The world needs more spicy cheese sauce on everything.

and the list goes on...

On my first day here I crawled out of bed at 11:30am and was welcomed to what would become my staple breakfast her: ham on bread. Delicious. I´ve always hated ham and still pretend to. Maybe I was just hungry. I don´t know. It was delicous. Bread is good here. Also there are two types of oranges. The orange kind that we have are only for eating. Here there is a second kind only for juicing. And let me tell you now: they juice well. Also this is a country where Nescafe reigns king in middle class households.

But then we come to lunch:
A delectable conconction beginning with yellow potatoes in a spicy cheese sauce that keeps popping up. Everything is made fresh, none of this prepackaged stuff from US of A. After the potatoes came Chicken top of Spanish rice with a little salad.

Perhaps it´s the hosts I´m staying with but they don´t seem to eat dessert. Only coffee or tea.

Today I arrived back at 6:00pm long after lunch (the main meal) but they apparrently made and saved me food: beans, rice and a modest portion of rich meat. Once again, delicious. I ate it while drinking: Inca Cola. It tastes kind of bubbly otter pops. which is frighteningly appealing. Peruvians are very proud of it. "it´s from 1935" says Brian. They point to it as a part of their cultural heritage which is helping them resist imperialism. Coca Cola will never catch on in all of Peru, Brian tells me: Inca Cola complements more Peruvian food.

Pachacamaq

2005-07-01T21:38:00.000-03:00

THE RUINS OF PACHACAMAQ WITH CITY OF PACHACAMAQ IN BACKGROUND

I´m back from Pachacamaq and taking full advantage of the free email at my host´s house and taking this oppurtunity from my day to NOT speak Spanish. The last time I experienced this kind of immersion was in Israel when I spoke Hebrew all day. But that was in class. Before i came i was worried that perhaps people wouldn´t want to speak spanish to me, just respond in english so they could practice. Luckily it turns out: no one really speaks english! Until now it was really hard to speak either Spanish or Hebrew because I would just get confused between the two. But now my spanish is finally winning the war against the hebrew. there are still many things i cannot say but that´s probably for the best :) On the minus side it means that leaving my room means thinking constantly, which is exhausting.

And I joined the South American Explorers´ Club. The name sounds really dumb but the club is a superb and impressive resource. They have every book on travelling South America, free tea and coffee and brownies, maps, information from the workers, free internet, etc. really cool. i think i´m going to spend some good time there in the next week planning my trip.

Tonight I´m going to get an early night. I kept everyone up till 1am last night regaling my hosts with magic tricks in broken spanish: "Oh but seven hearts is also magician and it is causing things and ohhhh this your... deck?" Luckily magic is visual and they told me they enjoyed it. At least I think they did...

Estados Unidos... es Peru...

2005-06-26T23:25:00.000-03:00

"It comes so soon, the moment that there is nothing left to wait for...." -Marcel Proust

Ah yes, the first entry from the new country: PERU! I know what is expected, those exciting tales of adventure: how my guitar was stolen at the airport by a pair of thieving taxi drivers, how i navigate my way perfectly around the bustling city in spanish, how i have taken up drinking brandy and eggwhites, how my sleeping bag is currently my favorite possession, how my current host family dines me on delicious peruvian food. Yes, I know what is expected, and perhaps I can deliver all this and more. But first I will write of less interesting things, like the Museo de Nacion that I visited yesterday.

MY FIRST SERVAS HOSTS

I´m staying in Surco which, it turns out, is a 20 minute taxi cab ($3) or bus ($.40) ride from the city center. Getting to museum was no problem because Brian, my hosts´ son, helped my catch the bus. Here the buses are very similar to the ones in Mexico except here they drive like New York taxis and there is a guy hanging out the door trying to drum up business. ("Downtown! Downtown!" he yells, "You want to go downtown!") Buses are privatized which I guess is good and bad. I assume it keeps prices low so it´s good. But then again, there´s no bus schedules, just bus drivers on the same route trying to cut eachother off and steal eachother´s business. It´s so decentralized that there are guys who sit on main intersections and and count the numbers of the buses that go by and mark the time. For a tip he will tell the bus drivers who then tell their controllers as they pass them on the route. I assume that in this way the controllers can keep an eye on the competition and know which bus routes are becomming saturated.

Anyways, I took the bus to the National Museum and saw lots of fairly boring artifacts all relating to the cultures that existed here throughout history. There were a few really interesting ones though. There was a particular mural where many of the cultural artifacts are rising up and attacking the people. The symbols we create rise up against us. The culture that was our child comes to kill the father. Similar perhaps to the way we currently love and fear our computers, perhaps the old cultures of Peru feared their bowls and hunting instruments.

HERE A SCEPTRE CHASES A MAN WHILE RITUAL OIL SPILLS ON HIM... HA HA!

For the most part the museum was good for wrapping my head around the country´s many cultural births and deaths that culminated in the short lived Incan civilization which so many Peruvians claim as their heritage today.

I have no specific pattern set out yet and am still getting my bearings. This is like no other trip I´ve undertaken in that I´m not in any rush, per se, to "get on with it" though I fear I may leave Lima pretty soon. Unfortunately the country, especially in the Andes, is cold right now: very much like Seattle in the winter (the irony is killing me). Lima is good though because I have joined the South American explorer´s club here and they have a massive amount of information on travel for me to dig through. I think a week here doing research would be well spent and allow me to acclimatize to the language and culture (as well as to phone servas hosts along the way in advance). However, I am pretty much set on the plan to go through La Paz (which is supposed to be freezing in the winter) and then down through to the coast of Brazil, then up. More on this later. For now I am heading off to Pachamachaq, old adobe ruins outside of Lima.

backpack

2005-06-26T06:40:00.000-03:00

I'm obsessive about backpacks. Completely obsessive. I have the same backpack that I bought when i was 13 and starting high school. It's an Eagle Creek bag rucksack. Nothing special, meant to hold books. I've had it for 12 years now and it's covered with scars the scars of memories. I travelled with it for a month and a half in South Africa and Lesotho. It was wonderful to travel so light but it was embarrassing that every time I went to open it there was a loud "pop" as the contents of my bag exploded over the floor. I essentially wanted a small backpack that had side pockets for water. Well, I found it. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Porter 30L. It's only 30 liters which means... not much room. Packing my backpack is almost like organizing very complicated military manouver and, sadly, it still makes a popping sound when I try to open it. It's about the same size as my old one but has an internal frame for back support, tons of little straps, and side pockets for water so i don't have to open my pack to drink something.

The following is going in the backpack:

TOILETRIES

toothbrush and paste
some anti diarhia medicines
mosquito repellent (100% DEET)
soap
razor and blades
shaving cream
grapefruit extract
dr bronners magic soap (dilute!!!! dilute!!!! dilute!!!!)
deodorant

CLOTHES (in backpack)

1 pair pants
flipflops
3 pairs socks
4 pairs underwear
3 shirts
swimsuit
jacket

MISC

sarong
sewing kit
sleeping bag
ziplock bags

RECORDING AND ENTERTAINMENT

tape recorder
one music tape and 3 blank tapes
camera and camera supplies
lonely planet guide to south america
pen and ink supplies
cards
2 books
guitar strings

PAPERS

passport
shots record
important phone numbers and addresses
SERVAS papers and lists
envelopes
pens and pencils

and of course... my guitar

All of this obsessing about stuff strikes me as a little obsessive for someone who is bringing less cause he doesn't want to be weighed down by stuff. And it's really interesting how travelling can do that to you. A lot of what travelling about is finding a sense of home where you are and with what you have. With some luck (and a lot of time) I hope I can learn to do without. My bag is full now but my sleeping bag takes up about 1/3 of the room so when I leave the Andes and ditch my sleeping bag, I'll have a lot of room, which is very exciting to me. It's very odd thinking about packing for 6 months. It's hard to fathom.

Oh, and I talked to my first SERVAS people on the phone. They're in Lima. It was super exciting and I'll write more about it later. I'm looking for ideas of some small something to bring to people I stay with. Any ideas?

I think a little about stuff I should pack but it's all pretty much covered I think. No worries though, I still have one more day.

the long hard swim to the middle

2005-06-23T18:53:00.000-03:00

This last weekend I went to San Francisco and hung out with Mary and Ben. Mary has an awesome new apartment in the Haight. I bought a camera off craigslist to replace the broken one and took a bunch of pictures to try it out.

On the way to get the camera Mary and I went to Ikea got a bookcase and a chest of drawers to put in her new room. In this picture Mary contemplates the strange relationship with my friends: I help them move into new places, to get more established, and live vicariously through them. Then I get mobile and travel and they live vicariously through me. The grass is always greener I guess.

I believe that it's easy to become settled, to start a life, to go down one road that leads to a million more and on and on. Your resume leads you to jobs you have experience in. You become established, entrenched in your environment. Most of my friends, the ones who're happy, have found something they love doing and have dedicated themselves towards it. Perhaps they don't even realize that they have yet, but they have a directions and goals and with those come comfort.

Sacramento has been good to me in my time here. Especially working at Choices has been very healthy for me: giving me something to focus on before I go. I never realized how much I enjoy working on excel spreadsheets and solving math problems before I worked at that school.

It's been really hard posting publically. Many of my thoughts and insights are about the people i've been interacting with daily and it's hard to walk the tightrope of appeasing all my readers and myself and I'm looking forward to a much easier job in South America, where no one knows me and I can write about whatever I want without any reprecussions. The best I can hope for is that people who are interested in my life and want to know what I think and feel will come and read about the blog. I'm reminded of the HoboTraveler Blog where Andy takes some friends to Machu Pichu and then writes about how Machu Pichu is actually a big lame tourist trap. No doubt word got back.
Anyways, this is a picture of me in Utah, but it's the picture I'm sending out with all my SERVAS emails.

mis padres en sus jardin

2005-06-20T18:52:00.000-03:00

father's day

momma

2005-06-20T18:50:00.000-03:00

zack has been my guitar teacher here in sacramento. everything i know about the boogie, i owe to him. :)

camping and graduation

2005-06-08T05:00:00.000-03:00

this last weekend i went car camping with ben and jake. the first night we went to this great place, aroyo seco. we hopped down to the river and i got in some guitar and swimming.

The next night we camped at the Andrew Malera State Park campsite, an old college stomping ground. It's great cause it's got flush toilets and all that, but you have to go about a quarter mile from the parking lot. This means no RVs and not a lot of people bringing in too much junk. It's right on the coast.

I came back for the Choices graduation which turned out to be awesome. A few students I had had were graduating and it was great to see. Then off to the Choices dinner at El Torito. It was a set price, of course, and we each had little placemats which contained our orders. Kippie, the office manager, was organizing all the little logistical intricacies, Marie hobnobbed with the district brass, and the sportsloving men got loaded and raucous. Everything seemed in its place, like a little world where everyone has their own role. Friendships, hierarchies and alliances changed and shifted, like a little ecosystem. It's reassuring, reminds me of my visit last fall.

it's the waiting that gets ya...

2005-06-05T05:05:00.000-03:00

i just ate a small piece of typhoid. or at least i think it was a small piece of typhoid. last couple days i got all my shots out of the way. all i have left are these pills which i can only assume are made from live typhoid. all they told me was that i have to take one every two days so as not to overdose. and the box says that there are living things in it. the whole concept of innoculations is weird. it's like you get one of the enemy soldiers all tied up and blindfolded and give him over to the defense forces and they just beat the shit out of him. then apparently you're immune.

i'm on this crazy sleep cycle. i have to get a handle on my schedule. i'm either tired or i can't sleep; i'm doing nothing at all and then all of a sudden i'm rushing to keep up. it's all a symptom of not having a home base or structure. no calendar, no regular meals, no place to store my clothes. my parents have essentially converted their childrens' rooms into storage rooms, piling up the things they never use but won't throw away. because no one uses the stuff in the rooms everything is overstocked, things falling off the shelves. it becomes a game of my moving stuff from shelf to shelf or out of one room and putting it in another. My clothes litter the floor because the dresser is filled with sheets, blankets and nicknacks and the clothes rack overflows with suits my dad hasn't worn in 10 years. books are piled two deep in the bookshelves. it's too much for me. i lost my phone today and had to search for over an hour to find it disguised on a shelf with a million objects that made no sense together. i swear i will clean this room out. make it safe for civilization.

i can't wait till the end of the month. i was thinking of ways to keep occupied. since spending all the money on the plane ticket i feel crunched for cash. so then i figured i might do some kind of job for a week or two. but what kind of job could i get for that amount of time? sharon tells me that i should get excited about something. i think i may get excited about making a travel website. that'll keep me occupied for a few days...

what the [bleep] do we know?

2005-05-30T16:42:00.000-03:00

what the [bleep] do we know?

If the goal of the movie was to spark conversation, it worked. The first time I tried to watch it (with my behavioral psychologist friend) we watched the first half and turned it off for an argument. Last night she, her philosophy major boyfriend and I made it through the movie with moderate heckling and a nice long discussion afterwards.

in the end, it reminded me of a conversation i had with aviva. she was telling me that scarcity was simply a matter of opinion, taking a point of view, like being optomistic or pessamistic. she chose to believe that the world was an abundant place, full of everything. the idea is that if you choose to view the world through that paradygm then it becomes that way.

If the movie has a message it's that you shape your own reality and that while reality seems to be fixed one way, it may just seem that way because of your conditioning. I think that my reaction to the movie says far more about me than it does about the movie itself. Viewed one way What the [bleep] do we know was like a video you'd show junior high schoolers explaining that this idea. It was filled with academic (and some nonacademic) talking heads describing new age phenomena that didn't seem to be in their field. What was most interesting about it was that it almost seemed like a propaganda movie advocating nonreligous spirituality.

For every emotion you have there's a peptide chain and when you see or think of things that you associate with that emotion your body pumps out the peptides for an emotional reaction. Your cells react accordingly and you can become addicted to peptides you experience too often. The movie urges people to break their addictions to peptide chains (emotions) that they crave to the point of destruction. Craving these emotions has a physical effect of denying your cells the proper protiens, waste management resources, and water that it needs to last a long time. All your cells' space is taken up with more and more receptors for the peptide chains that you're addicted to.

The movie also urges people to stop living in the past, allowing your brain to form closer ties with old neural nets, and instead "create your day", creating a new neural net that you like more (or at least you chose).

I liked the movie but I still don't know what to do with my life :)

tickets, please...?

2005-05-26T05:40:00.000-03:00

In the last couple days I've done a massive amount of research on
getting to South America. Why is it that I'm always travelling to into
the winter? I just can't get enough of it. South Africa to Seattle to
South America. I just can't seem to hit summer! At least it beats the
Sacramento summer. It'll be 93 degrees tomorrow and it's not even
June. And I'll have plenty of time to suck up some sun before my
estimated departure date of June 21.

i think i've found the ticket i want:

Either
$547 to Santiago, Chile
or
$411 to Lima, Peru

I'm thinking I should just get a one way ticket. There is an onward
ticket requirement in both these countries. Apparantly customs cares
much less than the international airlines who won't let you board the
plane without an onward ticket. Perhaps this is why customs can be so
lax...

My plan is to buy a fully refundable ticket from American Airlines for
an outrageous amount and then... cancel and get a full refund. It
sounds obvious but too good to be true... It feels weird to buy a
$1,300 item solely to return it. I almost expect it not to work out
just so someone could say: "Hey, I told you so. You were just trying to
cheat the system." I hope I stop feeling weird about stuff like this
cause it's not helpful. I need to buy my ticket to Chile or Peru by May
28, before the offer expires.

I've worked out that if I spend $15 a day I can travel for a year.
That's not bad, plenty of stuff I could do on $15 a day. My guess is
that places to stay are about $5 a night. Then food is about another $5
a day. Then that leaves $5 funmoney every day. That's an outrageous
amount. I don't think I'll travel for a year but I do think that I'll
be travelling as cheaply as possible.

Everyone keeps telling me to buy the darn ticket, that way I know I'm
going. I can see why. It's scary to buy it but when I do I know
there'll be an incredible weight lifted off my shoulders.

Last night I fixed up my $20 guitar with steel strings and a new bridge
saddle. The action is still really high and it still sounds... well...
like a $20 guitar but I can't wait to play it on the road. I'm gonna go
now and learn how to play sad breakup songs. Tonight's special: One
by Johnny Cash.

Well its too late
Tonight
To drag the past out
Into the light
We're one but we're not the same
We get to carry each other
Carry each other
One

...

hobotraveler.com

2005-05-23T16:30:00.000-03:00

The American investment banker was at the pier of a small
coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one
fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several
large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican
on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, "Only a little while".

The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer
and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to
support his family's immediate needs. The American then
asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little,
play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria,
stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and
play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life."

The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and
could help you. You should spend more time fishing
and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the
proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several
boats, and eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats.
Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would
sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your
own cannery. You would control the product, processing
and distribution.

You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village
and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles, and eventually
New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.
" The Mexican fisherman asked, "But, how long will this all take?"
To which the American replied, "15-20 years."

"But what then?"

The American laughed and said, "That's the best part.
When the time is right you would announce an IPO and
sell your company stock to the public and become very rich,
you would make millions."

"Millions.. Then what?"

The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small
coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little,
play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village
in the evenings where you could sip wine
and play your guitar with your amigos."

(from andy's hobotraveler site

The last day or so I've been immersing myself completely in this hobotraveler website/blog. It's amazing. As the trip progresses and the years pass on, the trajectory of the author changes. He doesn't talk about it but you can almost sense the searching and the loneliness of permanent impermenance.

I ask myself. What is my trip all about? What am I searching for? When will I have found it? That's probably not the best way to approach all this. It's almost like I'm really hungry, craving food, and asking "What am I really looking for in a meal?" I guess I'm looking for travel to fill me up. The website suggests:

Pick a route of what you like.... i.e. party, archeology, nature,
trekking, poverty, ecology, and make a route to these
types of travel locations. Your trip will be better.
I like to see people, and culture, so I stop at lots of small towns.
Do not take someone else's trip, Find out what you like to do?

Here I have been given a gift. I have been given the time and the means to travel. I can choose any trip I want. I'm excited. and intoxicated.

I'm writing this from Joe's house. He's scooting around me, packing for his trip to Spain. He'll be there over the summer. I tell him that if he comes back with a Cathtilian accent then I'll make fun of it even more than I do of his French. He promised he'd try to lose it as soon as he could, possibly by visiting another country.

I'm debating on the computer issue: should it stay or should it go... If it stays I won't have trouble. But if it goes it could be double...

Joe: take the computer!

Common Traveler Types

2005-05-22T17:57:00.000-03:00

Checking out travelblogs I ran into travelblog.org which sums up different traveler types. They talk about the gap year traveller, the pre-kids travellers, and then they talk about me:

Mid-Twenties Crisis
Vast numbers of people mid-way through the start of promising careers realize that this is not what they wanted to do their whole lives! This often coincides with finally paying off the debts from university educations, or the saving of enough money to put a deposit on a house, and then realizing that there is more to life than careers, office politics and material things, like increasing the size of the DVD collection. One massive positive out of all these negatives is that confused, possibly disillusioned career people can embark on one the most worthwhile experiences of their lives, which might well be life changing.

Typical characteristics : often the lone traveller, usually from a 'good job', discovering more about themselves than they had ever imagined. They are often found in very adventurous situations!

yep. i guess i can admit it. i'm in my quarter life crisis...

top secret mission

2005-05-16T00:01:00.000-03:00

I'm sitting at the Fuel coffeeshop. Victrola, my usual coffeeshop has banned laptops on the weekends. They want to encourage conversations and save tablespace. It was getting to the point that you'd have the whole coffeeshop full of people staring at screens. I'm typing onto this little Dell laptop I bought because I was so freaked out that I didn't know what else to do but buy a laptop and I kept it because I was too lazy to return it within the deadline. It's plasticy and heavier than I would like but it gets the job done and the wireless is pretty on top of it. It came installed with Encarta Encyclopedia and a lot of other useless software which I immediately uninstalled. They're almost dinosaurs compared to the speed and reliablity of Wikipedia and other opensource solutions that come with a broadband connection to the internet.

I'm in a coffeeshop right now because my ex girlfriend is at my apartment rooting through my old stuff and deciding what to take for her new place. It's strange. I want her to have the stuff but contact with her, even distantly, still rubs at the old wounds. Happily Dan took care of organizing everything.

Protecting yourself becomes a top secret mission.

Dan calls me: "we'll be gone in five minutes."

Then I can return. It's like I have a disease. I can't be exposed or I will relapse into indecision and low self-esteem. It's weird admitting your own limitations, your own failures. We wish we were stronger and we value our weaknesses but admitting the problem is the first step to recovery.

But now it's time to go back and take a nap, pack some stuff up, and relax before watching motorcycle diaries with a beautiful girl later tonight. Life is easier when you're about to move away.

God's Window, Utah

2005-05-07T16:23:00.000-03:00

god's window utah

meggers is preggers!

2005-05-06T21:27:00.000-03:00

the end of mediocrity

2005-04-26T04:37:00.000-03:00

a few weeks ago i freaked out and called everyone to tell them i was freaking out, that i didn't know where my life was going, that i was a bit depressed. everyone was very supportive, very nice. main point of advice: stop talking to aviva and either start travelling or get a job.

i went back to sacramento and made an appointment to see a career counselor. it was cool. i met with the nice lady and today i took her career aptitude test. it turned out to be a glorified personality test, dividing people into four catagories. it nailed me pretty well and then went on to describe careers from photojournalist to art therapist. it felt pretty good to be done with the test and it made me think a bit about where i want to go in the future.

so i'm sitting here waiting for aviva's call and it's like 1am and she's clearly not going to call. it's sad. i figure she probably just has more important things. i break down and call. i go straight to voicemail: her phone is off. probably dead. she was complaining that she had no batteries.

yknow... it makes sense. sure. her cellphone is out of batteries and a bit dysfunctional. i wonder if one day i could take her cellphone out to coffee. we'd probably have a lot to talk about.

bitter, i remind myself that she has many other friends who can provide support. i surf over to friendster and it turns out that she has 147 friends and glowing testimonials that say things like:

This girl is like no one else in the
world. I fell in love instantly. She
can make the darkest days into
colorful, messy, silly, hazy costume
parties. She has the softest upper
arms of anyone. It's quite obvious
that I miss her terribly.

and

This girl is gold!!! If you meet her,
don't let go.

with that kind of fanclub she doesn't need me waiting up at 1am for a phonecall that doesn't come.

then i notice that friendster has given aviva and i a joint horoscope:

You and Aviva can overcome any bumps on the road.
It's time to share the love -- affection abounds right now, in a myriad of forms and a multitude of ways. The time is right to let someone (or someones) know just how much their presence has really brightened up your life. It doesn't have to be mushy and sentimental, nor does it have to be perfectly expressed. What matters most is sharing your sincere appreciation of your relationship. So go ahead -- express yourself.

yeah...

screw you, friendster.

Get Over It

2005-03-21T17:28:00.000-03:00

It's funny how you can get caught between two diametrically opposed points of view. Both are equally valid but to the exclusion of the other. I'm caught between travelling and putting down roots, between hoping that Aviva and I will get back together and getting over it. I'm sitting in Victrola listening to Ira Glass wax on about the screwball comedy notion of "just" friends in Get Over It.

In the episode he and his exgirlfriend go to Saks Fifth Avenue. They have been broken up for six months but still talking on the phone a few times a week. No sex but relying on eachother for emotional needs. In the small moments of her emotional distance, his trying to make the connection, whether he comes into the dressing room to see her try on clothes or not, her getting a black miniskirt for a date with a new guy. It all makes him wonder: what am I doing here?

It's so interesting the difference between making a decision and following through. It's so easy to talk about the green grass over there but making the journey "over there"

How much information do you want about the new guy/girl?

You want them to be happy BUT it's sad that they're happy without you.

I am happy. I enjoy my days. Yesterday I had a great time working with Teruki on the computer and eating dinner over at Devon's. I'm learning a lot on Flash. Ira talks about willing yourself to get over someone or something. I want it to be NOW. I want it to be OVER. I want to have MOVED ON.

ugh...