I am sitting in an internet cafe in Lima, the leaden sky pressing down on the busy streets of jostling cars. I have had a cold for the last five days after being infected by Seb and my stay in the mountainous town of Huaraz, famous for being framed by the Cordillera Blanca where "Touching the Void" is set, was therefore curtailed. Im my boredom, Ive worked out how far I´ve travelled in South America.
As you remember, I started my trip in Buenos Aires and headed south across the arid, flat pampas, unsure of what the future would hold. Puerto Madryn and fishing escapades later, I found myself in the "land of mist and snow", Patagonia, gawping at glaciers and climbing mountain crags. The cold, bleak immmensity of the landscape got to me in the end and I yearned to head back to civilisation. It came in the form of the street vendors and sooth-sayers of Santiago, in the "cafe con piernas" and deep seats of Starbucks. My love for Argentina meant that I would cross back into the country of the gauchos twice on my way up Chile, visiting Santiago and the beautiful Salta. Mystery lay in the "magnetic" valley of Cochiguaz, near the Elqui valley and exquisite beauty in the star strewn mantle thrown above me. San Pedro was the tourist nexus of the north, drawing me in and spitting me out again within two days, my jeans a little more ripped from sand boarding and the valle de la luna. Trains have been a continual disappointment in South America, and Calama was no exception. It wasn´t a lurching steam engine that awaited me, but prostitutes on street corners and an Italian with a beard who went by the name of Alberto.
"Dawn in russet mantle clad" walked not "oer dawn of yon high eastern hill", but over the rosy, rotund faces of the Bolivian women in their top hats, my most enduring memory of Bolivia. The mountains of salt led on to Tupiza and Tarija, nearly falling off a horse and sampling some foul Bolivian wine. Refreshed, I travelled on to Potosi and the bowels of hell, only to emerge suffocated and humbled. The white walls of Sucre provided the perfect setting for independence celebrations and prepared me for the din of La Paz`s streets, "the shanghai of the Americas". The cross into Peru was imperceptible, both of the Andean peoples of Lake Titicaca descending from the Tiahuanaco tribe. Enjoying David´s company, I gained an interesting insight of how people live on the islands of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, so different from Puno where people entice you into their hostels in the hope of foisting a sub-standard tour upon you.
Arequipa was a pleasure, Cusco a chore. The first was as elegant and relaxing as the second was vulgar and stressful. It was made up for though, by the first sight of Machu Picchu as the sun rose over the surrounding mountains that had lain inviolate for so many centuries before the arrival of Bingham. Much of the area did not even appear on the map of the famous Italian cartographer, Raimondi. I have travelled progressively more slowly as time has passed, and by the end I was content to just keep on keeping on.
Argentina was my favourite country, but does not compare to Bolivia in terms of difference and "culture shock". The people of Madagascar seemed more akin to Europeans than the Quechuan speaking locals of Uyuni or La Paz. In all, I have travelled 13,000KM across dry pampa, silken grass land, barren mountains and icy precipices. The sand dunes of the Chilean and Peruvian coast would seem to stretch on forever and then suddenly give way to snow-capped peaks and green foliage. The pampas north of La Paz was an even greater contrast, home to flitting kingfishers, parrots, dolphins and caimans.
I´ll certainly miss the four sol dinners (though Ive eaten too few and am surely running low on funds), the staggeringly high, six thousand metre mountains, meeting new people at every destination and the feeling of freedom you experience when you pack up you meagre belongings and get back on the road. In terms of culinary highlights, the steak of Argentina stands out, as does the ice-cream of Bariloche, the humitas of Bolivia, Israeli food in La Paz and above all, Cappricio cafe in Arequipa where oozing slabs of artery blocking chocolate cake would be served up with nonchalance.A place to be remembered and its not even in the Lonely Planet.
The smelly socks will not be missed, though, nor the swiss-cheese trainers and jeans that haven´t bear the scars of chimichurri sauce and ceviche juice. I believe some bugs may have found a willing home there. The bread here in South America is nothing short of crap; a sort of sweet, crumbly dough that doesn´t bear up well to the rigours of jam spreading. God knows why they have a word for homemeal bread, pan integral, because nobody eats any. To be added to this growing list are holes in the ground where you are expected to urinate, toilets without seats, carrying toilet paper around in your bag wherever you go, supermarkets that don´t cater to the individual, pharmacies that refuse to sell plasters, illegal driving, continual strikes, contempt for the Gringo, poor water pressure in the showers, hair in the plugholes, marauding Israelis, laundries that shrink your clothes and people who have no sense of civic pride. It made me yearn at times for some sort of benign dictatorship that would make the buses run on time. There are no trains left to run on time.
As Orwell said, everything feels heavier in England and people with knobbled faces apologise for being pushed or jostled (apart from London, of course, the least English part of England. Will people be protesting in the streets about Britain´s complicity in the torture of terrorist suspects. I doubt it...the Ashes are a far bigger concern. It may rain, but its still home. TAKE ME BACK TO DEAR OLD BLIGHTY....
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Machu Picchu or Picchu? Cusco or Qosco?
Peru would be alright if it weren’t for the people, the women on every street corner with leering smiles who entice you into their “massage parlour” with calls of “mister, mister, massache”, the taxi drivers and tour operators who brazenly lie to you, the bus drivers who let their country go to the shit in order to protect their own narrow interest. The people who jeer at you and call you “gringo” with a contempt that you would reserve for the lowliest of beings, while relying on your money to survive, the greasy haired libertines who grab at you as you walk down the street and whisper “You want weed man, coke?”. Of course, these people comprise only a small proportion of the population, but they do enough to take the shine off a city that should overwhelm a tourist with its culture, elegance and heritage.
“Cusco”, a perversion of the Quechuan word “Qosco” was literally the heart or navel of the Tihuantinsuyo (Popularly known as the Inca empire), the four districts of which stretched to the north into modern day Columbia, to the south into Chile and Argentina, to the East into the Amazon and to the West to the coast. The word “Inca” only refers to the head of the tribe, a descendant of the sun God Inti. Under the reign of the Inca, Pachacutec, Incan lands were transformed from a tiny collection of small villages and hamlets into a vast, sweeping empire containing tens of thousands of people who owed homage to the Inca and worshipped the sun God in the ceremony, Inti Raymi. The creative force of this empire was concentrated on Qosco. Pachacutec remodeled the city, building upon the stonework of earlier inhabitants and turning the modest Temple of the Sun into Koricancha, or temple of gold. Much of this spectacular work can still be seen today in walls and fortifications that have borne the winds and rain of half a millennium and today support a modern city. I stayed in the artsy district of San Blas and every day, when walking to the Plaza de Armas, I would pass an exquisite Inca wall built in the expansionist style; hulking, irregular shaped masses of rock fit together seamlessly without the help of mortar and polished to create a shiny finish. This contrasts with an earlier style of rough hewn rock glued together with mortar and a later style of shiny, regular blocks fitted together seamlessly in uniform lines. The expansionist style seems to me to be the most ingenious and intricate. Without the help of the wheel, the Incas fitted strange shaped stones together so perfectly that not a blade of grass can fit between the seams, built the walls to withstand earthquakes and would lay the foundations for a modern city that pays little attention to its own roots.
Koricancha is a fantastic example of Inca masonry. When the Spanish arrived, much of the Sun Temple was dismantled, but the foundations and fortifications were retained in order to built a Franciscan monastery above it. The smooth, curving outer wall looks like a breaking wave and contrasts favourably with the clumsy Spanish structure it supports. Inside, two perfect chambers that are mirror images of each other hold niches where the Inca would have sat during the winter solstice, the sun shining on him alone. All the walls lean inwards and the two hunks of rock that form the door run horizontally from a trapezoidal lintel in order to spread the weight in a world that had no conception of the arch. Because weight could not be distributed more efficiently, all the Inca buildings I have seen are squat and made of monoliths of rock, suggesting that the city itself was made of low-rise buildings. Despite all the Inca remains that litter the city, it is difficult to visualise exactly how the city would have been, like seeing a stumps of wood where once a forest stood. The old centre of the city is reputed to be shaped like a puma, the head being the ceremonial site of Sacsayhuaman where the Festival of the Sun, Inti Raymi, would be held. Outside the city walls, fields and terraces would have stretched off into the distance, feeding Qosco and the rest of the empire. Probably because they lived in temporary dwellings, the ordinary farmers and citizens of Qosco have left few visible signs of how they lived.
Yet within Qosco, it is easy to forget that you are living in one of the most historically important cities in the world. Locals prostitute their centuries-old culture by posing for photos with as many goats and llamas as they can muster, young children of nine and ten are forced to make a living by making up information about the Incas and feeding it to gullible tourists and one man dresses up as the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, complete with all his regalia: colourful tunic, gold headdress, sandals and golden axe topped off with a husk of corn. There is a street branching off from the Plaza de Armas where you are sure to be offered drugs and at the end of the street lies homogeneously Israeli area, complete with Israeli signs and budget restaurants. Party hostels like The Point and Loki cater to the needs of the gap year English who want to get slashed and humiliate themselves without even leaving the comfort of their hostel and the staff refuse to speak to you in Spanish. In the centre of the city, you see nearly as many tourists as locals. There is little living in Qosco that is authentic, not even the name. Only some old walls supporting modern decadence. This is such a shame in a city as beautiful as Qosco, where two beautiful Mestizo churches grace the central square against an azure sky invariably spotted with billowing cumulous clouds.
Are modern Peruvians any more developed than the Incans? They may talk on mobile phones and use computers, drive cars and look into space, but their running water is polluted and many children don’t go to school or are forced to work at an early age in order to earn a living. Some are abandoned by their parents and stuck in orphanages where they are helped by willing tourists. On my Machu Picchu trek, I met a girl called Lydia who had volunteered in an orphanage in one of the riches cities in Peru, Arequipa. One day, someone proposed raising money to give the children new clothes to wear at school. The money was raised, the clothes were bought and given, but the next day they had disappeared. They had been sold for drinking money. The people are fired on by their own government and so demand their rights in transport strikes that paralyse and impoverish the country. Yet despite all their ostentatious catholic piety, many Peruvians have yet to learn to treat each other with respect. This became glaringly obvious when we went to watch Inti Raymi in the head of the puma, Sacsayhuaman. We arrived at 9 in the morning in order to secure seats for a ceremony that would begin at 2 in the afternoon and were soon heckled by a woman behind us who whined throughout the day about us being too tall and obscuring her view (Nobody can whine like a Peruvian). For the first hour of the ceremony, we were given an uninterrupted view of the parade ground where the Inca was being carried on a litter to a central platform where he would perform a libation with chicha (a fermented drink made from corn) and make a symbolic sacrifice of a llama. As the hill overlooking Sacsayhuaman became more crowded, you could feel the tension in the air and some people stood up to get a better view to a chorus of “Bajate, Bajanse”. When they refused, the people above threw bags of rubbish and stones at them, despite the fact that there were tens of young children in the crowd. Plastic bags rained down, one of them hitting me on the back. The people below retaliated and in the tumult, hundreds of innocent onlookers decided to leave, standing up and angering those above yet more. From then on, we saw nothing. An old man struggled up a slope and then collapsed onto his knees before fainting. He was quickly helped up by a woman who hauled at his limp body, pressing his face into the folds of her blouse and restricting her airway. He was laid on his back and people jumped down from the terraces above with their own home brewed remedy. One woman proposed putting alcohol in the man’s nostrils, while a young adolescent offered to perform CPR. Luckily, a young American medical student was on hand to save the day. Meanwhile, wave upon wave of Peruvians tried to push their way through the throng while an old man lay on the floor, perhaps about to die. Crazy.
My four day jungle tour to Machu Picchu was fantastic, despite a conceited, unfit guide who would lag behind the group and abandoned us the day before we went up to The Lost City of the Incas. Our tour included Rachel and Scott, sun brazed Californians who live in San Francisco and work as an artist and teacher respectively, the two Johns, funny, gay Canadians on a short tour to Peru and Lydia, a bubbly English girl who has been surviving on five soles a day since her credit card was stolen. The tour started with mountain biking on a road bordering the Urubamaba valley, the Sacred valley of the Incas. We sped round tight corners as we descended from a high mountain pass to humid jungle, at times leaving the road for a dirt track whose bumps unseated both of the two johns who tumbled over the handlebars. Yohan consoled us by boasting that he could jump 10 metres on a bike. The second day included a steep hike through jungle to an Inca trail, past a group of ailing Irish who often stopped to catch their breath and later collapsed into hammocks or vomited into toilets. The Inca trail was one of the most spectacular sections of the treck, with perilously narrow steps and nothing separating you from a two hundred metre precipice. Yohan performed an Andean ceremony to the surrounding Apus, or mountain Gods, which involved addressing each mountain in turn and stripping three coca leaves to the stalks. With this, we were granted safe passage all the way to Machu Picchu. Salcantay loomed ahead of us, laden with snow, but it didn’t compare to our first view of Machu Picchu the following day as we stood on a rickety metal bridge riddled with holes. A vertical cliff face rose up hundreds of metres to an Inca trail that somehow traversed the impossible gradient. On top of the mountain, the three windows of the sun temple were silhouetted against the sky. The boring slog along the railway tracks finished in Aguas Calientes, a bizarrely modern tourist town crouching below towering mountains covered with trees and tropical vegetation. That same day we braved the vertiginous climb up Putucusi mountain to the side of Machu Picchu. We clambered up a series of almost vertical ladders, struggled up the rocky slopes with quads burning and gained the summit for our first view of Machu Picchu. We saw it from ninety degrees, as if in cross-section, the mountain of Machu Picchu descending into a hollow where the ruins stand. A ridge takes up on the right where the ruins end and bumble along to the foot of Huayna Picchu where some ruins still cling. To climb this mountain, you have to be one of the first four hundred people to enter Machu Picchu, and so the following morning, we crawled out of bed at 3:30 and began to walk at 4.
The torch beams swung around crazily in the darkness as we walked towards the bridge in the pitch black. For the first ten minutes we met nobody, but soon picked up the trail at the start of the steps. Despite the hour, the air was hot and humid and we were all bathed in sweat after the first flight of steps. Unusually for Seb, he hung behind, nursing his blisters and a brewing cold. In the darkness, the steps seemed to go on forever and I had to grope around to find the next step. After an hour of hard climbing, we began to smell bacon wafting from the 900 dollar-a-night hotel next to the entrance to Machu Picchu. We were among the first people to sit down on the steps and easily gained admission to Huaynu Picchu. The city looked spectacular as the sun rose slowly over the surrounding mountains. Llamas munched lazily at the grass covering the terraces and we were surrounded on all sides by tumbling terraces, constructions that looked like rustic cottages and the smooth stonework of sacred buildings. Next to the steep steps, irrigation channels carry water down the hillside. The water is supposed to come from an underground lake and the flow is constant throughout the year. We were given a tour by a man called Percy that was less than illuminating. All we were left with was uncertainty; uncertainty about what Machu Picchu was, how it was constructed and who was truly the first person to discover it. Some archaeologists have claimed that the site served as a haven for the Virgins of the Sun because only female skeletons were found in the cemetery. Others claimed that it was a prison, but the consensus today is that it was a get-away for the Inca Pachacutec and was one of the last safe havens for Incas fleeing the Spanish invasion. The trails leading to Machu Picchu were blocked and the lost city was not officially found until 1911 (of the 1880s depending on whom you believe), although the local people had known of its existence for centuries. The problem lies with the Spanish who seeked to destroy rather than to understand. Contrary to popular belief, Machu Picchu does not mean Old Mountain, but is a meaningless name coined by the Spanish. Furthermore, no Spaniard ever deciphered the complex Incan cords where the key to understanding the Tihuantinsuyo may lie. They are multi-coloured strands of fibre with knots of various types and colours. The size of the knots, their colours, the space between them and the direction of twist may all carry meaning. That said, they may merely have acted like the rosary in the Catholic Church, reminding the Incas of important facts and dates in a primarily oral culture. Quien sabe?
The late afternoon was magical as the slanting rays of Inti picked out the strict contours of the terraces and the rising hulk of Huayna Picchu. Exhausted, we took the tourist bus back down to Aguas Calientes, a rip off of Starbucks and some extortionate Mexican food. Quite a day!
“Cusco”, a perversion of the Quechuan word “Qosco” was literally the heart or navel of the Tihuantinsuyo (Popularly known as the Inca empire), the four districts of which stretched to the north into modern day Columbia, to the south into Chile and Argentina, to the East into the Amazon and to the West to the coast. The word “Inca” only refers to the head of the tribe, a descendant of the sun God Inti. Under the reign of the Inca, Pachacutec, Incan lands were transformed from a tiny collection of small villages and hamlets into a vast, sweeping empire containing tens of thousands of people who owed homage to the Inca and worshipped the sun God in the ceremony, Inti Raymi. The creative force of this empire was concentrated on Qosco. Pachacutec remodeled the city, building upon the stonework of earlier inhabitants and turning the modest Temple of the Sun into Koricancha, or temple of gold. Much of this spectacular work can still be seen today in walls and fortifications that have borne the winds and rain of half a millennium and today support a modern city. I stayed in the artsy district of San Blas and every day, when walking to the Plaza de Armas, I would pass an exquisite Inca wall built in the expansionist style; hulking, irregular shaped masses of rock fit together seamlessly without the help of mortar and polished to create a shiny finish. This contrasts with an earlier style of rough hewn rock glued together with mortar and a later style of shiny, regular blocks fitted together seamlessly in uniform lines. The expansionist style seems to me to be the most ingenious and intricate. Without the help of the wheel, the Incas fitted strange shaped stones together so perfectly that not a blade of grass can fit between the seams, built the walls to withstand earthquakes and would lay the foundations for a modern city that pays little attention to its own roots.
Koricancha is a fantastic example of Inca masonry. When the Spanish arrived, much of the Sun Temple was dismantled, but the foundations and fortifications were retained in order to built a Franciscan monastery above it. The smooth, curving outer wall looks like a breaking wave and contrasts favourably with the clumsy Spanish structure it supports. Inside, two perfect chambers that are mirror images of each other hold niches where the Inca would have sat during the winter solstice, the sun shining on him alone. All the walls lean inwards and the two hunks of rock that form the door run horizontally from a trapezoidal lintel in order to spread the weight in a world that had no conception of the arch. Because weight could not be distributed more efficiently, all the Inca buildings I have seen are squat and made of monoliths of rock, suggesting that the city itself was made of low-rise buildings. Despite all the Inca remains that litter the city, it is difficult to visualise exactly how the city would have been, like seeing a stumps of wood where once a forest stood. The old centre of the city is reputed to be shaped like a puma, the head being the ceremonial site of Sacsayhuaman where the Festival of the Sun, Inti Raymi, would be held. Outside the city walls, fields and terraces would have stretched off into the distance, feeding Qosco and the rest of the empire. Probably because they lived in temporary dwellings, the ordinary farmers and citizens of Qosco have left few visible signs of how they lived.
Yet within Qosco, it is easy to forget that you are living in one of the most historically important cities in the world. Locals prostitute their centuries-old culture by posing for photos with as many goats and llamas as they can muster, young children of nine and ten are forced to make a living by making up information about the Incas and feeding it to gullible tourists and one man dresses up as the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, complete with all his regalia: colourful tunic, gold headdress, sandals and golden axe topped off with a husk of corn. There is a street branching off from the Plaza de Armas where you are sure to be offered drugs and at the end of the street lies homogeneously Israeli area, complete with Israeli signs and budget restaurants. Party hostels like The Point and Loki cater to the needs of the gap year English who want to get slashed and humiliate themselves without even leaving the comfort of their hostel and the staff refuse to speak to you in Spanish. In the centre of the city, you see nearly as many tourists as locals. There is little living in Qosco that is authentic, not even the name. Only some old walls supporting modern decadence. This is such a shame in a city as beautiful as Qosco, where two beautiful Mestizo churches grace the central square against an azure sky invariably spotted with billowing cumulous clouds.
Are modern Peruvians any more developed than the Incans? They may talk on mobile phones and use computers, drive cars and look into space, but their running water is polluted and many children don’t go to school or are forced to work at an early age in order to earn a living. Some are abandoned by their parents and stuck in orphanages where they are helped by willing tourists. On my Machu Picchu trek, I met a girl called Lydia who had volunteered in an orphanage in one of the riches cities in Peru, Arequipa. One day, someone proposed raising money to give the children new clothes to wear at school. The money was raised, the clothes were bought and given, but the next day they had disappeared. They had been sold for drinking money. The people are fired on by their own government and so demand their rights in transport strikes that paralyse and impoverish the country. Yet despite all their ostentatious catholic piety, many Peruvians have yet to learn to treat each other with respect. This became glaringly obvious when we went to watch Inti Raymi in the head of the puma, Sacsayhuaman. We arrived at 9 in the morning in order to secure seats for a ceremony that would begin at 2 in the afternoon and were soon heckled by a woman behind us who whined throughout the day about us being too tall and obscuring her view (Nobody can whine like a Peruvian). For the first hour of the ceremony, we were given an uninterrupted view of the parade ground where the Inca was being carried on a litter to a central platform where he would perform a libation with chicha (a fermented drink made from corn) and make a symbolic sacrifice of a llama. As the hill overlooking Sacsayhuaman became more crowded, you could feel the tension in the air and some people stood up to get a better view to a chorus of “Bajate, Bajanse”. When they refused, the people above threw bags of rubbish and stones at them, despite the fact that there were tens of young children in the crowd. Plastic bags rained down, one of them hitting me on the back. The people below retaliated and in the tumult, hundreds of innocent onlookers decided to leave, standing up and angering those above yet more. From then on, we saw nothing. An old man struggled up a slope and then collapsed onto his knees before fainting. He was quickly helped up by a woman who hauled at his limp body, pressing his face into the folds of her blouse and restricting her airway. He was laid on his back and people jumped down from the terraces above with their own home brewed remedy. One woman proposed putting alcohol in the man’s nostrils, while a young adolescent offered to perform CPR. Luckily, a young American medical student was on hand to save the day. Meanwhile, wave upon wave of Peruvians tried to push their way through the throng while an old man lay on the floor, perhaps about to die. Crazy.
My four day jungle tour to Machu Picchu was fantastic, despite a conceited, unfit guide who would lag behind the group and abandoned us the day before we went up to The Lost City of the Incas. Our tour included Rachel and Scott, sun brazed Californians who live in San Francisco and work as an artist and teacher respectively, the two Johns, funny, gay Canadians on a short tour to Peru and Lydia, a bubbly English girl who has been surviving on five soles a day since her credit card was stolen. The tour started with mountain biking on a road bordering the Urubamaba valley, the Sacred valley of the Incas. We sped round tight corners as we descended from a high mountain pass to humid jungle, at times leaving the road for a dirt track whose bumps unseated both of the two johns who tumbled over the handlebars. Yohan consoled us by boasting that he could jump 10 metres on a bike. The second day included a steep hike through jungle to an Inca trail, past a group of ailing Irish who often stopped to catch their breath and later collapsed into hammocks or vomited into toilets. The Inca trail was one of the most spectacular sections of the treck, with perilously narrow steps and nothing separating you from a two hundred metre precipice. Yohan performed an Andean ceremony to the surrounding Apus, or mountain Gods, which involved addressing each mountain in turn and stripping three coca leaves to the stalks. With this, we were granted safe passage all the way to Machu Picchu. Salcantay loomed ahead of us, laden with snow, but it didn’t compare to our first view of Machu Picchu the following day as we stood on a rickety metal bridge riddled with holes. A vertical cliff face rose up hundreds of metres to an Inca trail that somehow traversed the impossible gradient. On top of the mountain, the three windows of the sun temple were silhouetted against the sky. The boring slog along the railway tracks finished in Aguas Calientes, a bizarrely modern tourist town crouching below towering mountains covered with trees and tropical vegetation. That same day we braved the vertiginous climb up Putucusi mountain to the side of Machu Picchu. We clambered up a series of almost vertical ladders, struggled up the rocky slopes with quads burning and gained the summit for our first view of Machu Picchu. We saw it from ninety degrees, as if in cross-section, the mountain of Machu Picchu descending into a hollow where the ruins stand. A ridge takes up on the right where the ruins end and bumble along to the foot of Huayna Picchu where some ruins still cling. To climb this mountain, you have to be one of the first four hundred people to enter Machu Picchu, and so the following morning, we crawled out of bed at 3:30 and began to walk at 4.
The torch beams swung around crazily in the darkness as we walked towards the bridge in the pitch black. For the first ten minutes we met nobody, but soon picked up the trail at the start of the steps. Despite the hour, the air was hot and humid and we were all bathed in sweat after the first flight of steps. Unusually for Seb, he hung behind, nursing his blisters and a brewing cold. In the darkness, the steps seemed to go on forever and I had to grope around to find the next step. After an hour of hard climbing, we began to smell bacon wafting from the 900 dollar-a-night hotel next to the entrance to Machu Picchu. We were among the first people to sit down on the steps and easily gained admission to Huaynu Picchu. The city looked spectacular as the sun rose slowly over the surrounding mountains. Llamas munched lazily at the grass covering the terraces and we were surrounded on all sides by tumbling terraces, constructions that looked like rustic cottages and the smooth stonework of sacred buildings. Next to the steep steps, irrigation channels carry water down the hillside. The water is supposed to come from an underground lake and the flow is constant throughout the year. We were given a tour by a man called Percy that was less than illuminating. All we were left with was uncertainty; uncertainty about what Machu Picchu was, how it was constructed and who was truly the first person to discover it. Some archaeologists have claimed that the site served as a haven for the Virgins of the Sun because only female skeletons were found in the cemetery. Others claimed that it was a prison, but the consensus today is that it was a get-away for the Inca Pachacutec and was one of the last safe havens for Incas fleeing the Spanish invasion. The trails leading to Machu Picchu were blocked and the lost city was not officially found until 1911 (of the 1880s depending on whom you believe), although the local people had known of its existence for centuries. The problem lies with the Spanish who seeked to destroy rather than to understand. Contrary to popular belief, Machu Picchu does not mean Old Mountain, but is a meaningless name coined by the Spanish. Furthermore, no Spaniard ever deciphered the complex Incan cords where the key to understanding the Tihuantinsuyo may lie. They are multi-coloured strands of fibre with knots of various types and colours. The size of the knots, their colours, the space between them and the direction of twist may all carry meaning. That said, they may merely have acted like the rosary in the Catholic Church, reminding the Incas of important facts and dates in a primarily oral culture. Quien sabe?
The late afternoon was magical as the slanting rays of Inti picked out the strict contours of the terraces and the rising hulk of Huayna Picchu. Exhausted, we took the tourist bus back down to Aguas Calientes, a rip off of Starbucks and some extortionate Mexican food. Quite a day!
Sunday, 21 June 2009
Odyssey
After ten days in Arequipa, gorging ourselves on chocolate cake and visiting the occasional site, David, Seb and I decided to take a bus as close as possible to the colonial city of Cusco to the north. In Arequipa, no-one had been able to tell us definitively if it was possible to reach Cusco; they would often furrow their brows, grumble about the “paro regional” and advise us that we should just stay in Arequipa for the next few days. We were like Odysseus’s men, lured into Circe’s abode and fated to gorge on food forever as pigs.
Nobody in Arequipa could tell us exactly why the inhabitants of the Cusco region had left their jobs and erected blockades around the city. Some speculated that it was in response to government atrocities in the north of Peru, where indigenous people were fired on by police, their bodies later dumped into the rainforest. Others thought that this merely provided a convenient pretext for some disorder. We later found out that the strike had more to do with the local water supply that the government is attempting to privatise.
Six hours after catching the bus, we found ourselves in the dusty, desolate town of Espinar. Despite the protestations of a local taxi driver, nothing was open and we ended up sheltering from the bitter cold in a hostel where we grabbed two hours of sleep before continuing on to Sicuani. At six in the morning, the bus jolted up to a roadblock, a line of huge stones traversing the road, surrounded by locals huddled round a campfire. Unusually for South America, we found all our bags waiting outside when we got off the bus, and the driver was in such a rush to leave that David got trapped inside.
We still had no idea of the walk that awaited us. A motorbike driver agreed to take us as far as he could, which I took to mean the town from which the bus would leave. We were soon to be disillusioned. Squashed into a truck, I experienced a feeling of adventure and exhilaration that I have never felt reclined in a comfortable seat on a large bus. I had just finished Che, La Vida por un Mundo Mejor by Paddy O´Donnell, and had his Bolivian “heroics” in mind. Without maps or communications with Cuba or La Paz, Che and his men hacked their way through the selva surrounded by soldiers trained by the American military. They had little to eat and Che was paralysed with asma attacks that left him incapacitated, laid out in a hammock carried by his men, smelling his own filth. He was captured with an orange in his pocket, weighing less than sixty kilograms. I am not idealistic enough to think that such a fate holds any charm.
The trailer shook with the vibrations of the motor and after fifteen minutes, several figures on bikes started to come towards us. The driver slowed down and pulled in to the side of the road. We were soon surrounded by gesticulating Peruvians, one of whom pulled out a nail from his pocket and punctured the wheels of the motorbike. They shouted at the driver for taking tourists and breaking the “paro”. We paid him what we could under the watchful gaze of the strikers, and left.
The road was perfectly straight and stretched off down the valley past fields of maize and lowing cows. We shouldered our bags that must have weighed thirty kilos and trudged off into a mirage of melting tarmac. Others walked in the same direction, many of them locals who were simply trying to get home. Three Cusquenas (inhabitants of Cusco) had been caught out by the strike while another woman was carrying a muti-coloured sack. A baby cooed inside. There were far more roadblocks than I had anticipated, many of them simply low lines of rock, perhaps topped off by a gnarled tree root. The bigger blockades consisted of trucks parked across the road. Locals congregated in wide circles and discussed the strike, ordinary people able to take the floor and express their views. We stopped once to listen and heard a small man speak in monotonous tone and ending each sentence with a resounding “Companeros”, comrades. I wonder if this strike has a socialist, anti-Western tinge. Later on in the day, we sat down at the side of the road and were mocked by the passing cyclists who laughed, called us gringos and told David that he was slow. In the last town before we caught the bus, the locals glared at me and an old woman had the temerity to hit me over the bottom with a wooden switch, much to the pleasure of the surrounding villagers who guffawed, revealing their discoloured, rotten teeth.
We knew that we would never make it to Cusco walking alone, so we paid the extortionate prices demanded by motorcyclists, tuc-tuc drivers and small children with trailers to take us the few kilometres between the roadblocks. On one occasion, we hopped into a trailer pulled by a small child on a bike and crawled along the rock-strewn road. Shortly after getting off to help the child push the trailer up a hill, we saw some bicycles racing towards us. Baja, baja (get off, get off) the child cried. In an ecstasy of fumbling, we ripped our bags from the trailer and pressed some coins into the child´s hand as he turned round and fled from the oncoming strikers. He got away, but a tuc-tuc driver wasn’t so lucky. A cyclist hung on to the window, grabbed a huge rock and threw it at the driver through the opening. I assume he missed because the tuc-tuc sped off into the distance.
Five hours after beginning our walk, the sun was at its zenith and was beginning to take its toll, despite the wide-brimmed leather hat that shaded my face from the sun. At one village, Tinta, the locals told us there was no lunch on offer because of the strike, and it was a similar story at the next village where an old man disappointed us with relish. Luckily, one comedor had stayed open and we forced down a revolting pasta dish that wouldn´t have been out of place in the Twits. Thereon in, we didn´t manage to catch any more transport and so had to brave the sun and the burning tarmac for some fifteen or twenty kilometres. Groups of locals on bikes patrolled the road, sometimes sending scouts further to ensure that no locals agreed to carry tourists (the irony is that locals themselves were let through). The most zealous of the strikers were young men of 18 or 19 years who took malicious pleasure in halting a motorbike and puncturing the wheels. They smiled at us mockingly as we passed. Huge blisters appeared on Seb´s feet and walking became toil. David himself began to suffer and lagged behind, rising over the brow of the hill with a vacant expression, his jumper wrapped around his head.
We passed over a hundred lorries held up before a bridge, passed locals playing football in the fields and had begun to despair of reaching Cusco that day when we reached the village of Checacube. Some motorcyclists refused to take us because they said their tyres would be punctured (pinchados). Luckily, a huge red truck pulled up on the square and the driver agreed to let us board, for a price of course. As we approached the barricades, we pulled our mochilas above our heads to deflect any flying rocks. But, the rocks never came. Instead, some of the strikers who were tired of their work decided to board the truck and go home. Che wouldn´t have been impressed. This is what saved us, because from then on, we passed through the blocks without any trouble and reached the bus shivering because of the icy wind. An odyssey indeed!
I sympathise with the strikers, but erecting roadblocks and paralysing a huge city is no way to protest or effect change. Surfing on the internet, I have found that this is no isolated event. The same thing happened at the end of 2008. Such actions can only harm the people of Peru in the long run by reducing GNP and discouraging foreign investment in the country. The government is perhaps reluctant about breaking up the strike because of what happened in the north of the country, but actions like this should not go unchallenged. We need peaceful protest, not disorder and violence.
After ten days in Arequipa, gorging ourselves on chocolate cake and visiting the occasional site, David, Seb and I decided to take a bus as close as possible to the colonial city of Cusco to the north. In Arequipa, no-one had been able to tell us definitively if it was possible to reach Cusco; they would often furrow their brows, grumble about the “paro regional” and advise us that we should just stay in Arequipa for the next few days. We were like Odysseus’s men, lured into Circe’s abode and fated to gorge on food forever as pigs.
Nobody in Arequipa could tell us exactly why the inhabitants of the Cusco region had left their jobs and erected blockades around the city. Some speculated that it was in response to government atrocities in the north of Peru, where indigenous people were fired on by police, their bodies later dumped into the rainforest. Others thought that this merely provided a convenient pretext for some disorder. We later found out that the strike had more to do with the local water supply that the government is attempting to privatise.
Six hours after catching the bus, we found ourselves in the dusty, desolate town of Espinar. Despite the protestations of a local taxi driver, nothing was open and we ended up sheltering from the bitter cold in a hostel where we grabbed two hours of sleep before continuing on to Sicuani. At six in the morning, the bus jolted up to a roadblock, a line of huge stones traversing the road, surrounded by locals huddled round a campfire. Unusually for South America, we found all our bags waiting outside when we got off the bus, and the driver was in such a rush to leave that David got trapped inside.
We still had no idea of the walk that awaited us. A motorbike driver agreed to take us as far as he could, which I took to mean the town from which the bus would leave. We were soon to be disillusioned. Squashed into a truck, I experienced a feeling of adventure and exhilaration that I have never felt reclined in a comfortable seat on a large bus. I had just finished Che, La Vida por un Mundo Mejor by Paddy O´Donnell, and had his Bolivian “heroics” in mind. Without maps or communications with Cuba or La Paz, Che and his men hacked their way through the selva surrounded by soldiers trained by the American military. They had little to eat and Che was paralysed with asma attacks that left him incapacitated, laid out in a hammock carried by his men, smelling his own filth. He was captured with an orange in his pocket, weighing less than sixty kilograms. I am not idealistic enough to think that such a fate holds any charm.
The trailer shook with the vibrations of the motor and after fifteen minutes, several figures on bikes started to come towards us. The driver slowed down and pulled in to the side of the road. We were soon surrounded by gesticulating Peruvians, one of whom pulled out a nail from his pocket and punctured the wheels of the motorbike. They shouted at the driver for taking tourists and breaking the “paro”. We paid him what we could under the watchful gaze of the strikers, and left.
The road was perfectly straight and stretched off down the valley past fields of maize and lowing cows. We shouldered our bags that must have weighed thirty kilos and trudged off into a mirage of melting tarmac. Others walked in the same direction, many of them locals who were simply trying to get home. Three Cusquenas (inhabitants of Cusco) had been caught out by the strike while another woman was carrying a muti-coloured sack. A baby cooed inside. There were far more roadblocks than I had anticipated, many of them simply low lines of rock, perhaps topped off by a gnarled tree root. The bigger blockades consisted of trucks parked across the road. Locals congregated in wide circles and discussed the strike, ordinary people able to take the floor and express their views. We stopped once to listen and heard a small man speak in monotonous tone and ending each sentence with a resounding “Companeros”, comrades. I wonder if this strike has a socialist, anti-Western tinge. Later on in the day, we sat down at the side of the road and were mocked by the passing cyclists who laughed, called us gringos and told David that he was slow. In the last town before we caught the bus, the locals glared at me and an old woman had the temerity to hit me over the bottom with a wooden switch, much to the pleasure of the surrounding villagers who guffawed, revealing their discoloured, rotten teeth.
We knew that we would never make it to Cusco walking alone, so we paid the extortionate prices demanded by motorcyclists, tuc-tuc drivers and small children with trailers to take us the few kilometres between the roadblocks. On one occasion, we hopped into a trailer pulled by a small child on a bike and crawled along the rock-strewn road. Shortly after getting off to help the child push the trailer up a hill, we saw some bicycles racing towards us. Baja, baja (get off, get off) the child cried. In an ecstasy of fumbling, we ripped our bags from the trailer and pressed some coins into the child´s hand as he turned round and fled from the oncoming strikers. He got away, but a tuc-tuc driver wasn’t so lucky. A cyclist hung on to the window, grabbed a huge rock and threw it at the driver through the opening. I assume he missed because the tuc-tuc sped off into the distance.
Five hours after beginning our walk, the sun was at its zenith and was beginning to take its toll, despite the wide-brimmed leather hat that shaded my face from the sun. At one village, Tinta, the locals told us there was no lunch on offer because of the strike, and it was a similar story at the next village where an old man disappointed us with relish. Luckily, one comedor had stayed open and we forced down a revolting pasta dish that wouldn´t have been out of place in the Twits. Thereon in, we didn´t manage to catch any more transport and so had to brave the sun and the burning tarmac for some fifteen or twenty kilometres. Groups of locals on bikes patrolled the road, sometimes sending scouts further to ensure that no locals agreed to carry tourists (the irony is that locals themselves were let through). The most zealous of the strikers were young men of 18 or 19 years who took malicious pleasure in halting a motorbike and puncturing the wheels. They smiled at us mockingly as we passed. Huge blisters appeared on Seb´s feet and walking became toil. David himself began to suffer and lagged behind, rising over the brow of the hill with a vacant expression, his jumper wrapped around his head.
We passed over a hundred lorries held up before a bridge, passed locals playing football in the fields and had begun to despair of reaching Cusco that day when we reached the village of Checacube. Some motorcyclists refused to take us because they said their tyres would be punctured (pinchados). Luckily, a huge red truck pulled up on the square and the driver agreed to let us board, for a price of course. As we approached the barricades, we pulled our mochilas above our heads to deflect any flying rocks. But, the rocks never came. Instead, some of the strikers who were tired of their work decided to board the truck and go home. Che wouldn´t have been impressed. This is what saved us, because from then on, we passed through the blocks without any trouble and reached the bus shivering because of the icy wind. An odyssey indeed!
I sympathise with the strikers, but erecting roadblocks and paralysing a huge city is no way to protest or effect change. Surfing on the internet, I have found that this is no isolated event. The same thing happened at the end of 2008. Such actions can only harm the people of Peru in the long run by reducing GNP and discouraging foreign investment in the country. The government is perhaps reluctant about breaking up the strike because of what happened in the north of the country, but actions like this should not go unchallenged. We need peaceful protest, not disorder and violence.
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Stuck in Arequipa
I walked out of our hostel into the blinding sunlight that beat down upon the cobbled streets and bounced off the white sillar walls that stretched down the road towards the Plaza de Armas. Small, yellow taxis that might once have been Fiat Puntos, screech round corners and beep their pathetic, plaintive horns in the hope that someone will make way. Walking down the street you pass street vendors selling a non-descript meat scewered on a wooden pole and left to sizzle for hours on a charcoal burner, looking sad next to some dessicated, shrivelled potatoes. Toothless men in rags shelter in doorways and hold their caps out to you as you pass. Women pass in suits, shopkeepers throw water onto the pavement and scrub and you gain tantalysing glimpses of quiet, damp courtyards where people laze around and relax to the sound of gurgling water, surrounded by geraniums and the blue or ochre walls of yet another colonial building.
This is Arequipa, the City of the Eternal Blue Sky, a large, prosperous city in the South West of Peru that is renowned for being conservative and resenting the domination of Lima. The historic centre of the city has been declared a World Heritage Sight because of the uniformity of the architecture; almost all the colonial buildings are made of an off-white volcanic rock, Sillar and the city is dotted with mestizo architecture, featuring intricate stonework, leaves and grapes. In front of every church stands a green cross with a ladder that represents the fusion of the Catholic church with Incan and Pre-Incan religion. Despite the attacks of Dawkins and the onslaught of evolution, religion is still going strong here in South America (though perhaps it is on the decline) and signs of religious devotion can be found at every turn. It is, after all, called the Rome of the Americas. Near our favourtie nightclub, Deja Vu, the outstretched arm of a stern looking priest beckons the traveller onwards and in the adjacent street lies the huge monastery of Santa Catalina. It was opened to the public in 1970 after over three hundred years of seclusion and is a city within a city, its narrow streets and passageways winding their way past cloisters, potted plants, fountains and the cell of one Sor Anna who was made saint by Pope John Paul II for the miracles that she was said to have performed.
There was something exciting about losing yourself in this haven of tranquility, calm and peaceful despite the hundreds of tourists who pay to enter every day. Wherever you wander through the thick walls, you are confronted with the imposing outline of Misti volcano which hangs over the town, only a few kilometres from the city centre. It is still active and the overwhelming power of Arequipa´s tectonic forces have been can be seen in the ruins of one part of the monastery. Earthquakes devastate Arequipa on a regular basis and in 1868, the city was almost razed to the ground, only to be rebuilt by its industrious citizens. People are still drawn to the volcano, though, because of the fertile volcanic ash that is spewed over the surrounding fields and on a tour of the city, we saw hundreds of small, tin-roofed shacks and homesteads creeping their way up the steep slopes.
Where today´s citizens of Arequipa look to science to predict an earthquake, their ancestors looked to the Gods. The Andes mountain chain that runs up the Western coast of South America bristels with volcanos and no city more so than Arequipa which is surrounded by the Misti, Chachani and Pichu Pichu volcanos. The Inca empire expanded rapidly in the fifteenth century under the Emperor, Mayta Capac. Walking through the desert with his soldiers, they stumbled across the beautiful oasis of Arequipa, then inhabited by primitive, semi-sedentary tribes. The legend goes that tired by the long journey and in seek of rest, or enticed to live in the area by the beautiful, fertile land, Capac´s soldiers asked him if they could stop there. He replied in Quechua, "Ari Qhipay" (si quedaos), which means "Yes, stop here". Hence the name Arequipa. When natural (and perhaps political?) disasters occured anywhere in the Inca empire, a human sacrifice would be offered to the Gods to appease them. The Incas viewed volcanos as living beings who could be beneficient or wrathful, taking revenge on humans with ash and smoke. Many daughters of noble families grew up in the knowledge that they would be sacrificed to the Gods and their umbilical cord was kept so that it could be buried with them, a bridge to the beyond. Whenever an eruption occured, a ceremony would be performed in Cusco and a party would set out with the sacrificial offering, sometimes travelling thousands of kilometres to reach volcanoes of 6000 metres or higher. They scaled the mountains in replacable straw boots, cut steps into the hillside, survived artic temperatures before finally killing the intoxicated charge with a swift blow to the head. In the 1990s a thirteen year old girl, Juanita, was found on the volcano, Ampato (following the eruption of a nearby volcano that melted the thick layers of ice) and was moved to Arequipa for preservation. She is startling well preserved, hunched up in a chamber of ice, her skin and nails perfectly intact, except for drops of fat purged from her skin. Her eye sockets are black holes. The irony is that we are just as impotent as the Incas in preventing earthquakes and eruptions. At least they had peace of mind.
The Arequipenas are said to be rather haughty and consider themselves superior to the rest of Peru. In a nightclub I got chatting to a girl who asked me what I thought of Bolivia. When I replied that it was my favourite country so far, she furrowed her brow and retorted that all Bolivians were ugly and uneducated and that their cities were nothing compared to Peru. She obviously hasn´t been to Potosi or Tarija. In one breath she cast scorn not only upon Bolivia, but upon her compatriots in the Peruvian jungle and countryside who look not towards Europe and America but towards Pachamama (mother earth) and Pachatata. This kind of attitude may explain the muted reaction to government atrocities in the province of Bagua, northern Peru, where police opened fire upon indigenous protestors. The government has passed a law that is inimical to the indigenous citizens because it allows the government to exploit their natural habitat in order to extract oil and gas. They set up roadblocks and the government responded with violence. Around twenty policemen were killed along with an undetermined number of indigenous, whose bodies may have been collected by the police and dropped into the thick of the jungle from planes. Here in Arequipa, people put up posters denouncing the government and a small procession filed through the square, but there was no great public outrage. The air didn´t buzz with the news of murder. People continued to drink their coffee and eat oozing slabs of chocolate cake with blissful apathy. This is surely what happens when people see murder as an every day occurrence.
There was no chocolate cake in the Colca Canyon, a deep scar on the land that is reputed to be the deepest canyon in the world. Some even claim that it is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, but David and I have been lied to so many times in Peru that we now assume a healthy scepticism. We took an overnight bus to the canyon, tried to sleep on an overcrowded bus that jumped around on the rough road and I almost lost my walking boots in the bustle. Our first view of the canyon was spectacular. Unlike the Grand Canyon that drops vertically down from the desert, Colca Canyon looks like a valley whose narrow bed curves between interlocking spurs and outcrops of rock that look like the butress roots of some great redwood. In some places, the hillside descends in sheer drops of lineated rock, but they are few and far between, allowing the hiker to walk down into the canyon on a steep path. We passed walkers who couldn´t speak for shouldering their packs and small, wizened locals who skipped past us on shortcuts worn into the rock. We reached the base of the canyon within three hours which is surprisingly green given that the river Colca is almost dry and that the deep gullies that descend from the snow-capped mountains are full of rocks show no hint of moisture. We climbed again, drank an Inka Kola (which tastes identical to Irn Bru, but contains yellow colouring instead of orange) in front of a stuffed fox and skidded our way down once more towards the Oasis where I collapsed into a hammock, surrounded by brutal, orange rock.
The narrow path zigzagged its way crazily up a hillside in a steep ascent that would have befitted the Incas. It was five in the morning and the sun had not yet come up as we began the climb, bananas in hand. The path was lit by a full moon and the sky glittered with stars. The first half of the walk passed without incident, apart from a rabid dog that gave me a nip on the knee. We scared it away with stones. The second half of the treck showed me how unfit I have become. As the sun began to rise, casting its horizontal rays over the canyon, David began to forge ahead and I lagged behind, breathing hard and looking at my feet. The path stretching on ahead was just too depressing. By the time I reached the top, I was my back was bathed in sweat. Orios have never tasted so good. The canyon is also famous for Condors and we went in search of them, attempting to reach a viewpoint by climbing over a wall. As I raised my weight onto a stone, it gave way and my outstretched hands fell forwards onto a cactus bristling with spines. Five long spines had pierced my left hand through my alpaca gloves, one of them driven a few centimetres into the skin. I tried to pull them out myself, but couldn´t handle the pain. A tour guide led me to a hospital draped with a poster warning against hepatitis. The nurse inside reassured me that I would live by recounting the story of a tour guide who had fallen backwards onto a cactus. One of the spines had pierced his lung.
I am writing such a long and convoluted blog because I can. A transport strike around Cusco has meant that no buses have left Arequipa for Cusco in the last four days. Today a normal service was resumed and we hope to travel to Cusco tonight, hopefully avoiding the marauding mob armed with stones. I have not yet mentioned the food here in Arequipa. The city is known as the gastronomic capital of Peru and much of the traditional food is served in Picanterias which serve spicy food and meat in an intimate setting. Cebicherias (this may be a spelling mistake since the dish is called Ceviche) serve raw fish marinated in lime juice and served with chilli and sweet potato. Chicha is a strong alcoholic drink made from maize and Rocoto relleno is another famous local dish. Rocoto is a spicy vegetable similar to Chili and about the size of an apple which is rellenado (filled) with meat and fish. And of course, you can´t forget the cuy (guinea pig) which arrives on you plate with head intact and leering teeth.
On a more frivolous note, nobody here in Peru seems to understand the difference between Scotland and England. Walking around a supermarket, I caught sight of some sweets called English toffees. On the packet is a picture of a rabidly scottish scotsman with flaming hair, kilt and bagpipes. A local newspaper referred to Andy Murray as English, an unpardonable offence, and the official drink of Arequipa is Kola Escocesa, a sickly purple drink which has no discernible link to Scotland. Do you think Scotland receives a share of the profits? I am also wondering whether the harsh wind of Patagonia has marred my virgin looks. When I got into a taxi to take me to the bus station on Saturday, the driver started questioning me about how I could afford such an expensive trip. I answered and then looked out of the window again. A minute later, he suddenly blurted out And how does it feel to leave you wife back in England?
This is Arequipa, the City of the Eternal Blue Sky, a large, prosperous city in the South West of Peru that is renowned for being conservative and resenting the domination of Lima. The historic centre of the city has been declared a World Heritage Sight because of the uniformity of the architecture; almost all the colonial buildings are made of an off-white volcanic rock, Sillar and the city is dotted with mestizo architecture, featuring intricate stonework, leaves and grapes. In front of every church stands a green cross with a ladder that represents the fusion of the Catholic church with Incan and Pre-Incan religion. Despite the attacks of Dawkins and the onslaught of evolution, religion is still going strong here in South America (though perhaps it is on the decline) and signs of religious devotion can be found at every turn. It is, after all, called the Rome of the Americas. Near our favourtie nightclub, Deja Vu, the outstretched arm of a stern looking priest beckons the traveller onwards and in the adjacent street lies the huge monastery of Santa Catalina. It was opened to the public in 1970 after over three hundred years of seclusion and is a city within a city, its narrow streets and passageways winding their way past cloisters, potted plants, fountains and the cell of one Sor Anna who was made saint by Pope John Paul II for the miracles that she was said to have performed.
There was something exciting about losing yourself in this haven of tranquility, calm and peaceful despite the hundreds of tourists who pay to enter every day. Wherever you wander through the thick walls, you are confronted with the imposing outline of Misti volcano which hangs over the town, only a few kilometres from the city centre. It is still active and the overwhelming power of Arequipa´s tectonic forces have been can be seen in the ruins of one part of the monastery. Earthquakes devastate Arequipa on a regular basis and in 1868, the city was almost razed to the ground, only to be rebuilt by its industrious citizens. People are still drawn to the volcano, though, because of the fertile volcanic ash that is spewed over the surrounding fields and on a tour of the city, we saw hundreds of small, tin-roofed shacks and homesteads creeping their way up the steep slopes.
Where today´s citizens of Arequipa look to science to predict an earthquake, their ancestors looked to the Gods. The Andes mountain chain that runs up the Western coast of South America bristels with volcanos and no city more so than Arequipa which is surrounded by the Misti, Chachani and Pichu Pichu volcanos. The Inca empire expanded rapidly in the fifteenth century under the Emperor, Mayta Capac. Walking through the desert with his soldiers, they stumbled across the beautiful oasis of Arequipa, then inhabited by primitive, semi-sedentary tribes. The legend goes that tired by the long journey and in seek of rest, or enticed to live in the area by the beautiful, fertile land, Capac´s soldiers asked him if they could stop there. He replied in Quechua, "Ari Qhipay" (si quedaos), which means "Yes, stop here". Hence the name Arequipa. When natural (and perhaps political?) disasters occured anywhere in the Inca empire, a human sacrifice would be offered to the Gods to appease them. The Incas viewed volcanos as living beings who could be beneficient or wrathful, taking revenge on humans with ash and smoke. Many daughters of noble families grew up in the knowledge that they would be sacrificed to the Gods and their umbilical cord was kept so that it could be buried with them, a bridge to the beyond. Whenever an eruption occured, a ceremony would be performed in Cusco and a party would set out with the sacrificial offering, sometimes travelling thousands of kilometres to reach volcanoes of 6000 metres or higher. They scaled the mountains in replacable straw boots, cut steps into the hillside, survived artic temperatures before finally killing the intoxicated charge with a swift blow to the head. In the 1990s a thirteen year old girl, Juanita, was found on the volcano, Ampato (following the eruption of a nearby volcano that melted the thick layers of ice) and was moved to Arequipa for preservation. She is startling well preserved, hunched up in a chamber of ice, her skin and nails perfectly intact, except for drops of fat purged from her skin. Her eye sockets are black holes. The irony is that we are just as impotent as the Incas in preventing earthquakes and eruptions. At least they had peace of mind.
The Arequipenas are said to be rather haughty and consider themselves superior to the rest of Peru. In a nightclub I got chatting to a girl who asked me what I thought of Bolivia. When I replied that it was my favourite country so far, she furrowed her brow and retorted that all Bolivians were ugly and uneducated and that their cities were nothing compared to Peru. She obviously hasn´t been to Potosi or Tarija. In one breath she cast scorn not only upon Bolivia, but upon her compatriots in the Peruvian jungle and countryside who look not towards Europe and America but towards Pachamama (mother earth) and Pachatata. This kind of attitude may explain the muted reaction to government atrocities in the province of Bagua, northern Peru, where police opened fire upon indigenous protestors. The government has passed a law that is inimical to the indigenous citizens because it allows the government to exploit their natural habitat in order to extract oil and gas. They set up roadblocks and the government responded with violence. Around twenty policemen were killed along with an undetermined number of indigenous, whose bodies may have been collected by the police and dropped into the thick of the jungle from planes. Here in Arequipa, people put up posters denouncing the government and a small procession filed through the square, but there was no great public outrage. The air didn´t buzz with the news of murder. People continued to drink their coffee and eat oozing slabs of chocolate cake with blissful apathy. This is surely what happens when people see murder as an every day occurrence.
There was no chocolate cake in the Colca Canyon, a deep scar on the land that is reputed to be the deepest canyon in the world. Some even claim that it is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, but David and I have been lied to so many times in Peru that we now assume a healthy scepticism. We took an overnight bus to the canyon, tried to sleep on an overcrowded bus that jumped around on the rough road and I almost lost my walking boots in the bustle. Our first view of the canyon was spectacular. Unlike the Grand Canyon that drops vertically down from the desert, Colca Canyon looks like a valley whose narrow bed curves between interlocking spurs and outcrops of rock that look like the butress roots of some great redwood. In some places, the hillside descends in sheer drops of lineated rock, but they are few and far between, allowing the hiker to walk down into the canyon on a steep path. We passed walkers who couldn´t speak for shouldering their packs and small, wizened locals who skipped past us on shortcuts worn into the rock. We reached the base of the canyon within three hours which is surprisingly green given that the river Colca is almost dry and that the deep gullies that descend from the snow-capped mountains are full of rocks show no hint of moisture. We climbed again, drank an Inka Kola (which tastes identical to Irn Bru, but contains yellow colouring instead of orange) in front of a stuffed fox and skidded our way down once more towards the Oasis where I collapsed into a hammock, surrounded by brutal, orange rock.
The narrow path zigzagged its way crazily up a hillside in a steep ascent that would have befitted the Incas. It was five in the morning and the sun had not yet come up as we began the climb, bananas in hand. The path was lit by a full moon and the sky glittered with stars. The first half of the walk passed without incident, apart from a rabid dog that gave me a nip on the knee. We scared it away with stones. The second half of the treck showed me how unfit I have become. As the sun began to rise, casting its horizontal rays over the canyon, David began to forge ahead and I lagged behind, breathing hard and looking at my feet. The path stretching on ahead was just too depressing. By the time I reached the top, I was my back was bathed in sweat. Orios have never tasted so good. The canyon is also famous for Condors and we went in search of them, attempting to reach a viewpoint by climbing over a wall. As I raised my weight onto a stone, it gave way and my outstretched hands fell forwards onto a cactus bristling with spines. Five long spines had pierced my left hand through my alpaca gloves, one of them driven a few centimetres into the skin. I tried to pull them out myself, but couldn´t handle the pain. A tour guide led me to a hospital draped with a poster warning against hepatitis. The nurse inside reassured me that I would live by recounting the story of a tour guide who had fallen backwards onto a cactus. One of the spines had pierced his lung.
I am writing such a long and convoluted blog because I can. A transport strike around Cusco has meant that no buses have left Arequipa for Cusco in the last four days. Today a normal service was resumed and we hope to travel to Cusco tonight, hopefully avoiding the marauding mob armed with stones. I have not yet mentioned the food here in Arequipa. The city is known as the gastronomic capital of Peru and much of the traditional food is served in Picanterias which serve spicy food and meat in an intimate setting. Cebicherias (this may be a spelling mistake since the dish is called Ceviche) serve raw fish marinated in lime juice and served with chilli and sweet potato. Chicha is a strong alcoholic drink made from maize and Rocoto relleno is another famous local dish. Rocoto is a spicy vegetable similar to Chili and about the size of an apple which is rellenado (filled) with meat and fish. And of course, you can´t forget the cuy (guinea pig) which arrives on you plate with head intact and leering teeth.
On a more frivolous note, nobody here in Peru seems to understand the difference between Scotland and England. Walking around a supermarket, I caught sight of some sweets called English toffees. On the packet is a picture of a rabidly scottish scotsman with flaming hair, kilt and bagpipes. A local newspaper referred to Andy Murray as English, an unpardonable offence, and the official drink of Arequipa is Kola Escocesa, a sickly purple drink which has no discernible link to Scotland. Do you think Scotland receives a share of the profits? I am also wondering whether the harsh wind of Patagonia has marred my virgin looks. When I got into a taxi to take me to the bus station on Saturday, the driver started questioning me about how I could afford such an expensive trip. I answered and then looked out of the window again. A minute later, he suddenly blurted out And how does it feel to leave you wife back in England?
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
The islas and goodbye to an old friend
It has been a tumultuous five days, not just for me, but for the world; I have torn myself away from Bolivia, crossed the border into Peru, visited four islands and read of a massacre of farmers in the north of the country. Gordon Brown looked as if he was going to be forced from office, he was accused of using women as "stagprops" and Roger won his first French Open against the surprise finalist, Robin Soderling, making him only the sixth man to have won all four grand slam titles and equalling Pete Sampras´s astounding tally of fourteen majors.
After spending a day in La Paz and being treated like scum at an Israeli restaurant, I boarded a bus in the frenetic, dirty city of El Alto towards Lake Titicaca. As we left La Paz, the landscape quickly changed, the tall buildings and suffocating fumes of the capital giving way to flat, light brown countryside stretching off to my right towards rippling, snow-capped mountains. Wheat and barley is grown in this area, just as it was under the Tiwanaku culture which began as early as 1500BC. The shores of the lake, and the islands that dot it, ripple with hundreds of uniform terraces that are either Inca or Pre Inca and are used to prevent soil erosion and to allow farming on steep hillsides. My first view of the lake was spectacular. As we rounded a bend, a vast expanse of water lurched into view, made all the more picturesque by the countryside that surrounded it. A light wind rustled the surface of the water, but in the lee of the islands, the water looked like a mirror, creating sweeping bands of dark blue and blinding cristal. The name, Lake Titicaca is believed to come from the Aymara language. "Titi" means Puma (a sacred beast) and Kaka, grey (important to distinguish from the Spanish which means "shit"). I also read on Wikipedia that the lake is supposed to resemble a darting Puma.
Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) was my first destination, a mass of rock resembling an octopus that is reputed to be the birthplace of the Inca sungod and the first Inca emperor, Manco Capac. He is said to have emerged from an outcrop of rock that is now called "titikala", or "roca sagrada". Next to this rock lies a sacrificial table where offerings were made to the gods and a little further from Inca ruins that resemble the dry stone walls of Yorkshire. I visited this "laberinto" (laberyinth) on my second day on the island and had to crouch down to fit through the succession of four foot doors that led from one small room to another and eventually ended in a dead end.
Once you pass the steet sellers and women forcing you to buy a pass of entry to the island, you discover a land of strange contrasts that has changed little in some areas since the time of Manco Capac. From the dock, I laboured up some moss-grown Inca steps that climb up the hillside and ate the local speciality, trout, in a low, rustic restaurant that overlooked the wide, sparkling bay. A string of snow capped mountains could be seen distinctly through the thin, limpid air. Once I had gained the height of hillside, fending off the approaches of street sellers, I walked south down the spine of the island amidst some of the most beautiful countryside that I have seen in South America. Because so little rain falls each year, the villagers plow their meagre terraces by hand and plant it with wheat, barley and other cereal crops that shined in the sun and created a patchwork of contrasting coloured plots that cascaded down the hillside towards the water below. As I walked, breathing hard in the mountain air, I saw women with billowing, voluminous dresses and dark shawls ushering sheep this way and that on barren slopes. They carried wooden switches that they would use when the sheep dared to disobey. Large spits of land descend into the water, tapering to join Inca ruins that now lie below the surface of the water (the water level was once much lower than it is now). As I ascended a small hillock, I passed a huge, fat American woman who was being followed by her "guide", a tiny, emaciated boy who could have been no older than seven or eight. He bent under the weight of her heavy bag, but seemed to be faring better than his charge who seemed to be at the point of capitulating to the thin air. Her swinging posterior was eventually lost in the distance.
I stayed that night in the village of Challapampa which sits in a cradle of land between the mainland and a spit in the north-east of the island. I had rushed to reach the village before dark fell and was rewarded with a view of pigs grazing in the fading light and children playing a variant of marbles with plastic bottle tops. As I sat on rock, overlooking the bay, a young girl tried to make me pay for taking a picture of her cow. Luckily, there was electricity that night, but when I ventured out for dinner, the dusty streets were deserted and the signs outside dwellings, reading "restaurante" and "comedor" seemed to mock me, for there was no light inside. In a narrow sidestreet off the main drag, a feeble light glowed in the blackness, beckoning me into a low room, which I first saw through a chink in the two doors. Sitting at a table were Hector and Paddy, the two lads from Leeds who used to play for Horsforth Dynamoes and whom I had previously bumped into in Puerto Natales (Patagonia) and Salta (northern Argentina). I sat down for a beer and a fat trout. Maybe there is a God.
On the way back from Isla del Sol to the mainland, I met David, and Englishman from Telford who attended Cambridge as a post-graduate. He let slip that he was glad that he hadn´t studied at Cambridge as an undergraduate and had to backtrack swiftly when I told him of my situation. We decided to visit the three island of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, but that first meant crossing the border to Puno and saying goodbye to my beloved Bolivia.
The country has treated me very well. It is a land of great natural beauty and the people are as friendly as any I have encountered in South America. Yet they labour under the injustices commited to them in the past; a naval sign on the wall in Copacabana proclaimed that Bolivia has a right to a sea port and that it should be a priority of the government to reclaim it from Chile (It was lost in the War of the Pacific). The day I left, the people of Uyuni began a six day strike to protest against the government´s decision not to pave the roads to and from Uyuni. Transport in and out of the town was blockaded and when some tourist tried to escape with a bribed taxi driver, a crowd surrounded his car and slashed the tires.
We had been told that Puno was a "shithole" and so we were pleasantly surprised when we found some great bakeries and some pool halls, despite the stinking green water around the dock. After playing some pool amidst drunk locals who sporadically broke into violence, we departed for the "Uros" islands, over thirty floating islands constructed of totora reeds, which sit a few kilometres from Puno. They are hidden in the reeds like a secret community. Some people believe that the Uros people were descendent of Polynesians, and they once spoke their own distinct language, Uro, before it was gradually replaced by the Aymara language. (the last Uro speaker died in the 50s). The Uro people fled to these islands in order to escape Incan contamination of their culture. As we approached the island, we were mobbed by women who greeted us in their local language, and we replied by saying "Wakili", hello. The reed islands rest on a base of roots that release a gas as they decompose, helping to keep them afloat. The reeds, however, have to be continually replaced, an arduous chore that falls to the women as the men go off fishing. All the buildings are also made of reeds and the women wear huge, colourful dresses and sell souvenirs from low stalls. The islands are a self-contained community, containing a school and a basic medical centre. A low women with a stoop told me that the people here prefer to cure their ailments with the plants that they grow in rectangular, upraised plots, not surprising in a country of curanderos (shamans or healers). The small girls wear a bell shaped hat coloured white, green and pink that is said to resemble the national flower of Peru, the Kantuta. All the small children stared at us inquisitively from uinder their broad-brimmed hats, hiding the terrible sunburn that blotched their smooth skin.
After an hour or two there, we travelled on to Amantani, a small, barren island where we would stay in the adobe house of a local, single mother called Maria. Her son was a tiny, smiling cutie called Roy and he had a sister called Luz. Maria was outwardly friendly, laughing at almost anything we said, but it was a laughter borne of loneliness and insecurity. She never told us what had happened to her husband. We were served eggs and quinoa soup in a low kitchen whose walls had grown black from the smoke of an open fire which was used for cooking. Maria would bustle round us and also attend to her three children and her mother, who spoke only Quechua. That night, we were draped in a poncho and Andean hat and led through the moonlight to the town hall where we participated in Andean dancing. It involved little more than locking hands with our respective hosts, rocking the shoulders back and forth and then being led in a long, winding snake. The women wore white blouses and black shawls and tucked their bulging stomachs under tight corsets which led down to pink dresses that twirled around as they danced. It was a relatively tame affair and by half past ten, we brushing our teeth in the light of a lone, guttering candle.
Our last stop was the island of Taquile which lies to the south of Amantani. As on the other islands, draught power is not used on Taquile because there is not enough pasture to support horeses and cows. The island is famed for its tight-knit textiles and the men a sombre outfit of black trousers and white shirt with black waistcoat. They also wear bright hats though, whose colour varies depending on whether they are married. A red hat means that a man is married, red mixed with white denotes that the man is single. Single men are expected to knit their own hats and their suitability as marriage partners depends on their skill at knitting and fishing. Traditionally, fathers judged their daughters´marriage partners by holding one of their hats above the sea and filling it with water. If the water seeped through the wool or alpaca, the man was considered unfit to marry the daughter. Once a man has decided to marry a woman, he must live with her for a trial period of one year because their is no divorce on the island. It is called the "watching" time. If the couple subsequently split, they must travel to the mainland to find another partner because they are considered "sullied". Jane Austen could have lived on Taquile. And so, our heads buzzing with all this information, we sat down on a rooftop terrace that overlooked the sea to enjoy a lunch of steamed fish mixed with onions and cumin seeds. Quite the life...
After spending a day in La Paz and being treated like scum at an Israeli restaurant, I boarded a bus in the frenetic, dirty city of El Alto towards Lake Titicaca. As we left La Paz, the landscape quickly changed, the tall buildings and suffocating fumes of the capital giving way to flat, light brown countryside stretching off to my right towards rippling, snow-capped mountains. Wheat and barley is grown in this area, just as it was under the Tiwanaku culture which began as early as 1500BC. The shores of the lake, and the islands that dot it, ripple with hundreds of uniform terraces that are either Inca or Pre Inca and are used to prevent soil erosion and to allow farming on steep hillsides. My first view of the lake was spectacular. As we rounded a bend, a vast expanse of water lurched into view, made all the more picturesque by the countryside that surrounded it. A light wind rustled the surface of the water, but in the lee of the islands, the water looked like a mirror, creating sweeping bands of dark blue and blinding cristal. The name, Lake Titicaca is believed to come from the Aymara language. "Titi" means Puma (a sacred beast) and Kaka, grey (important to distinguish from the Spanish which means "shit"). I also read on Wikipedia that the lake is supposed to resemble a darting Puma.
Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) was my first destination, a mass of rock resembling an octopus that is reputed to be the birthplace of the Inca sungod and the first Inca emperor, Manco Capac. He is said to have emerged from an outcrop of rock that is now called "titikala", or "roca sagrada". Next to this rock lies a sacrificial table where offerings were made to the gods and a little further from Inca ruins that resemble the dry stone walls of Yorkshire. I visited this "laberinto" (laberyinth) on my second day on the island and had to crouch down to fit through the succession of four foot doors that led from one small room to another and eventually ended in a dead end.
Once you pass the steet sellers and women forcing you to buy a pass of entry to the island, you discover a land of strange contrasts that has changed little in some areas since the time of Manco Capac. From the dock, I laboured up some moss-grown Inca steps that climb up the hillside and ate the local speciality, trout, in a low, rustic restaurant that overlooked the wide, sparkling bay. A string of snow capped mountains could be seen distinctly through the thin, limpid air. Once I had gained the height of hillside, fending off the approaches of street sellers, I walked south down the spine of the island amidst some of the most beautiful countryside that I have seen in South America. Because so little rain falls each year, the villagers plow their meagre terraces by hand and plant it with wheat, barley and other cereal crops that shined in the sun and created a patchwork of contrasting coloured plots that cascaded down the hillside towards the water below. As I walked, breathing hard in the mountain air, I saw women with billowing, voluminous dresses and dark shawls ushering sheep this way and that on barren slopes. They carried wooden switches that they would use when the sheep dared to disobey. Large spits of land descend into the water, tapering to join Inca ruins that now lie below the surface of the water (the water level was once much lower than it is now). As I ascended a small hillock, I passed a huge, fat American woman who was being followed by her "guide", a tiny, emaciated boy who could have been no older than seven or eight. He bent under the weight of her heavy bag, but seemed to be faring better than his charge who seemed to be at the point of capitulating to the thin air. Her swinging posterior was eventually lost in the distance.
I stayed that night in the village of Challapampa which sits in a cradle of land between the mainland and a spit in the north-east of the island. I had rushed to reach the village before dark fell and was rewarded with a view of pigs grazing in the fading light and children playing a variant of marbles with plastic bottle tops. As I sat on rock, overlooking the bay, a young girl tried to make me pay for taking a picture of her cow. Luckily, there was electricity that night, but when I ventured out for dinner, the dusty streets were deserted and the signs outside dwellings, reading "restaurante" and "comedor" seemed to mock me, for there was no light inside. In a narrow sidestreet off the main drag, a feeble light glowed in the blackness, beckoning me into a low room, which I first saw through a chink in the two doors. Sitting at a table were Hector and Paddy, the two lads from Leeds who used to play for Horsforth Dynamoes and whom I had previously bumped into in Puerto Natales (Patagonia) and Salta (northern Argentina). I sat down for a beer and a fat trout. Maybe there is a God.
On the way back from Isla del Sol to the mainland, I met David, and Englishman from Telford who attended Cambridge as a post-graduate. He let slip that he was glad that he hadn´t studied at Cambridge as an undergraduate and had to backtrack swiftly when I told him of my situation. We decided to visit the three island of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, but that first meant crossing the border to Puno and saying goodbye to my beloved Bolivia.
The country has treated me very well. It is a land of great natural beauty and the people are as friendly as any I have encountered in South America. Yet they labour under the injustices commited to them in the past; a naval sign on the wall in Copacabana proclaimed that Bolivia has a right to a sea port and that it should be a priority of the government to reclaim it from Chile (It was lost in the War of the Pacific). The day I left, the people of Uyuni began a six day strike to protest against the government´s decision not to pave the roads to and from Uyuni. Transport in and out of the town was blockaded and when some tourist tried to escape with a bribed taxi driver, a crowd surrounded his car and slashed the tires.
We had been told that Puno was a "shithole" and so we were pleasantly surprised when we found some great bakeries and some pool halls, despite the stinking green water around the dock. After playing some pool amidst drunk locals who sporadically broke into violence, we departed for the "Uros" islands, over thirty floating islands constructed of totora reeds, which sit a few kilometres from Puno. They are hidden in the reeds like a secret community. Some people believe that the Uros people were descendent of Polynesians, and they once spoke their own distinct language, Uro, before it was gradually replaced by the Aymara language. (the last Uro speaker died in the 50s). The Uro people fled to these islands in order to escape Incan contamination of their culture. As we approached the island, we were mobbed by women who greeted us in their local language, and we replied by saying "Wakili", hello. The reed islands rest on a base of roots that release a gas as they decompose, helping to keep them afloat. The reeds, however, have to be continually replaced, an arduous chore that falls to the women as the men go off fishing. All the buildings are also made of reeds and the women wear huge, colourful dresses and sell souvenirs from low stalls. The islands are a self-contained community, containing a school and a basic medical centre. A low women with a stoop told me that the people here prefer to cure their ailments with the plants that they grow in rectangular, upraised plots, not surprising in a country of curanderos (shamans or healers). The small girls wear a bell shaped hat coloured white, green and pink that is said to resemble the national flower of Peru, the Kantuta. All the small children stared at us inquisitively from uinder their broad-brimmed hats, hiding the terrible sunburn that blotched their smooth skin.
After an hour or two there, we travelled on to Amantani, a small, barren island where we would stay in the adobe house of a local, single mother called Maria. Her son was a tiny, smiling cutie called Roy and he had a sister called Luz. Maria was outwardly friendly, laughing at almost anything we said, but it was a laughter borne of loneliness and insecurity. She never told us what had happened to her husband. We were served eggs and quinoa soup in a low kitchen whose walls had grown black from the smoke of an open fire which was used for cooking. Maria would bustle round us and also attend to her three children and her mother, who spoke only Quechua. That night, we were draped in a poncho and Andean hat and led through the moonlight to the town hall where we participated in Andean dancing. It involved little more than locking hands with our respective hosts, rocking the shoulders back and forth and then being led in a long, winding snake. The women wore white blouses and black shawls and tucked their bulging stomachs under tight corsets which led down to pink dresses that twirled around as they danced. It was a relatively tame affair and by half past ten, we brushing our teeth in the light of a lone, guttering candle.
Our last stop was the island of Taquile which lies to the south of Amantani. As on the other islands, draught power is not used on Taquile because there is not enough pasture to support horeses and cows. The island is famed for its tight-knit textiles and the men a sombre outfit of black trousers and white shirt with black waistcoat. They also wear bright hats though, whose colour varies depending on whether they are married. A red hat means that a man is married, red mixed with white denotes that the man is single. Single men are expected to knit their own hats and their suitability as marriage partners depends on their skill at knitting and fishing. Traditionally, fathers judged their daughters´marriage partners by holding one of their hats above the sea and filling it with water. If the water seeped through the wool or alpaca, the man was considered unfit to marry the daughter. Once a man has decided to marry a woman, he must live with her for a trial period of one year because their is no divorce on the island. It is called the "watching" time. If the couple subsequently split, they must travel to the mainland to find another partner because they are considered "sullied". Jane Austen could have lived on Taquile. And so, our heads buzzing with all this information, we sat down on a rooftop terrace that overlooked the sea to enjoy a lunch of steamed fish mixed with onions and cumin seeds. Quite the life...
Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Days of rain and some crocs
The whole week before I rode the most dangerous road in the world, people had been spreading rumours about an English guy who had fallen over the edge to his death. I didn`t take any notice, went with the same company and ended up shivering on a mountain 5000m above sea level, the surroundings wrapped in a mantle of fog. The first hour of the descent was not dangerous, though I did worry about catching hypothermia as the wind whistled through my clothes. The hail and rain was so intense at points that you had to squint into the grey beyond, occasionally closing your eyes. This first stretch was on paved tarmac, but it soon deteriorated into a steep, downhill dirt track, effectively a ledge cut into a vertical hillside, giving you incredibly views down into the valley below, but causing me to apply the brakes sharply at every turn as we approached the edge. I had expected to be so scared by the road that I would ride like a timorous beasty, and kick myself later, or feel bootganged into riding as fast as everyone else. The surprise was that I have never felt more secure on a bike, and for much of the time, it felt as if we were cycling on any other steep downhill road, maybe because the thick cloud hid the vertiginous drops from view. The vegetation here is a lush, semi-tropical green. Everything was saturated in water, and cascades of water dropped hundreds of metres from cliffs above. We stopped for lunch on a wide outcrop of rock at the head of which stood an Israeli monument. It commemorates the Israeli who died close to this spot. Him and his mate decided to make a video while riding the bikes (Sound a bit like tig on bikes, Alex?) and he strayed over the edge.
I spent that night in the small, mountainous town of Coroico before taking a bus to Rurrenebaque for the Pampas tour. The rain never let up, flooding the towns narrow streets and turning the alleys into a mud bath that I traversed in flip-flops, only to find that I had left my flip flop behind. All the people in my group for the Pampas tour were great, two bubbling, quirky Canadians complementing a funny Englishman and his uninformed Chinese girlfriend. Two Israeli girls made up the group. The other group that stayed in the same accomodation as us contained an interesting German family. The father loved to harrass animals with large sticks, wore socks with his sandals and had a squint. At dinner time, his wife would launch forth in her harsh, grating German accent, demanding that we give her the leftovers from our table and later complaining that the weed nowadays isn´t as good as in her day (presumably in the heavanly sixties). It is difficult to pinpoint what was exactly wrong with the daughter, but she had a vacant look, like an immolated cow.
Getting to the Pampas was an adventure in itself. The 4x4 lurched around in the thick mud, bringing out Schumacher-like driving from our chofer, and at one point several lorries had to be pulled out of the mud by a caterpillar. The Pampas here are a wide connection of waterways, divided by reeds and wetlands, which eventually drain into the mighty amazon. The three hour boat ride to our lodge on the first day gave us ample opportunity to marvel at the wildlife. Cranes and herons stood motionless on branches with their long beaks upturned, while the sound of the boat´s engine would disturb a resting stork which would swoop up into the air and beat its wings in undulating flight, its legs straight out behind it. We rounded bends to find caimans and capbybaras, a kind of overgrown hamster that is entirely vegetarian, while we were treated to the flight of the kingfisher, that would fall from a branch and flit its way along the surface of the water. The tiny, yellow squirrel monkeys provided some entertainment, but it was astounding to find two caimans waiting for us when we pulled up at the ranch (sitting at the front of the boat, it was always my job to tie up the boat). At first sight, it looked fiersome, long thick body rippling with prehistoric scales, its whole body motionless, ready for the strike...except that it was about as tame as a dog. Our guide, Reinaldo, went as far as to stroke its snout, and the following day we found it lolling around under the veranda, its mouth full of unfinished rice and pasta. When I suggested to the other guide that this animal was no longer wild, he looked riled and gave me the evil eye, which I returned. How is a caiman supposed to scrape rice from its mouth if it doesnt have a tongue. On the first night, we went looking for caimans in the dark. We found what we thought was a frog, but the silent peace of the night made up for any disappointment. There was no electricity in the cabins and I struggled to find my way with the dim light from my dying phone. Eventually, though, I settled down to the sound of cicadas and beguiled my soul with sleep.
On the second morning, we failed to find an anaconda in the cold, wet conditions (as cold blooded animals, snakes like to bathe in the sun) but the highlight of the day was fishing for pirahnas.We primed our hooks with small pieces of meat and launched them into the water where they were attacked by swarms of pirahnas that pushed the meat this way and that as they hit it like missiles. The problem was that they only ever nibbled the meat, making it nigh impossible to hook them; the best that I could do was a tiny, pubescent pirahna that was no bigger than a salmon par. We were all upstaged by one of the Israeli girls who looked like she had been pirahna fishing before. On the last day, we went swimming with dolphins, or rather, in the vecinity of dolphins, because the animals just wouldn´t play ball. I was the first to strip off and plunge into the warm water after a dolphin that had curved above the water´s surface just moments before. I kept swimming through the water that kept changing in temperature from pleasantly warm to freezingly cold, but the dolphin never resurfaced. I ended up being hauled back into the boat like a beached fish, only to see a whole family of the long nosed pink dolphins rise out of the water again. This time four of us jumped in, banged our palms against the boat to attract them and generally made a racket. We never saw another dolphin. Swimming in crocodile and pirahna infested waters just for that...a sacrifice too far.
I spent that night in the small, mountainous town of Coroico before taking a bus to Rurrenebaque for the Pampas tour. The rain never let up, flooding the towns narrow streets and turning the alleys into a mud bath that I traversed in flip-flops, only to find that I had left my flip flop behind. All the people in my group for the Pampas tour were great, two bubbling, quirky Canadians complementing a funny Englishman and his uninformed Chinese girlfriend. Two Israeli girls made up the group. The other group that stayed in the same accomodation as us contained an interesting German family. The father loved to harrass animals with large sticks, wore socks with his sandals and had a squint. At dinner time, his wife would launch forth in her harsh, grating German accent, demanding that we give her the leftovers from our table and later complaining that the weed nowadays isn´t as good as in her day (presumably in the heavanly sixties). It is difficult to pinpoint what was exactly wrong with the daughter, but she had a vacant look, like an immolated cow.
Getting to the Pampas was an adventure in itself. The 4x4 lurched around in the thick mud, bringing out Schumacher-like driving from our chofer, and at one point several lorries had to be pulled out of the mud by a caterpillar. The Pampas here are a wide connection of waterways, divided by reeds and wetlands, which eventually drain into the mighty amazon. The three hour boat ride to our lodge on the first day gave us ample opportunity to marvel at the wildlife. Cranes and herons stood motionless on branches with their long beaks upturned, while the sound of the boat´s engine would disturb a resting stork which would swoop up into the air and beat its wings in undulating flight, its legs straight out behind it. We rounded bends to find caimans and capbybaras, a kind of overgrown hamster that is entirely vegetarian, while we were treated to the flight of the kingfisher, that would fall from a branch and flit its way along the surface of the water. The tiny, yellow squirrel monkeys provided some entertainment, but it was astounding to find two caimans waiting for us when we pulled up at the ranch (sitting at the front of the boat, it was always my job to tie up the boat). At first sight, it looked fiersome, long thick body rippling with prehistoric scales, its whole body motionless, ready for the strike...except that it was about as tame as a dog. Our guide, Reinaldo, went as far as to stroke its snout, and the following day we found it lolling around under the veranda, its mouth full of unfinished rice and pasta. When I suggested to the other guide that this animal was no longer wild, he looked riled and gave me the evil eye, which I returned. How is a caiman supposed to scrape rice from its mouth if it doesnt have a tongue. On the first night, we went looking for caimans in the dark. We found what we thought was a frog, but the silent peace of the night made up for any disappointment. There was no electricity in the cabins and I struggled to find my way with the dim light from my dying phone. Eventually, though, I settled down to the sound of cicadas and beguiled my soul with sleep.
On the second morning, we failed to find an anaconda in the cold, wet conditions (as cold blooded animals, snakes like to bathe in the sun) but the highlight of the day was fishing for pirahnas.We primed our hooks with small pieces of meat and launched them into the water where they were attacked by swarms of pirahnas that pushed the meat this way and that as they hit it like missiles. The problem was that they only ever nibbled the meat, making it nigh impossible to hook them; the best that I could do was a tiny, pubescent pirahna that was no bigger than a salmon par. We were all upstaged by one of the Israeli girls who looked like she had been pirahna fishing before. On the last day, we went swimming with dolphins, or rather, in the vecinity of dolphins, because the animals just wouldn´t play ball. I was the first to strip off and plunge into the warm water after a dolphin that had curved above the water´s surface just moments before. I kept swimming through the water that kept changing in temperature from pleasantly warm to freezingly cold, but the dolphin never resurfaced. I ended up being hauled back into the boat like a beached fish, only to see a whole family of the long nosed pink dolphins rise out of the water again. This time four of us jumped in, banged our palms against the boat to attract them and generally made a racket. We never saw another dolphin. Swimming in crocodile and pirahna infested waters just for that...a sacrifice too far.
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Sucre and the Shanghai of the Americas, La Paz
Today I saw the first cloud that I have seen in Bolivia, a cauliflower cumuluous cloud, scudding across the sky. That was before I went to a local bar to see Man United humiliated by a Barcelona side who make an art out of keeping the ball.
Two days ago, though, I was in Sucre, a pretty city of gleaming white colonial buildings that was named Bolivia´s capital in the new constitution. It is the most European city that I have visited, with wide sweeping streets and simple, yet elegant neoclassical facades. When I arrived, the city was in the grip of celebrations marking the bicentenary of the revolution of Charcas, or as the press in Sucre tried to claim, the first spark of Latin American independence. For the two days that I was there, a neverending parade of dignitaries, soldiers, musicians and citizens piled down the central street, Avenida Arce to the booming of a brass band. Sitting in cafes bordering the street, the windows and light fittings would literally shake with the reverberations of the drums outside. The church of San Francisco stood immediatly outside my hostel, and it is reputed that it was here that the bell first struck to call the people of South America to freedom. A dignitary gave a speech calling on the people of Bolivia to unite together to create a strong nation (The Bolivian moto is Union y Fuerza). Yet these celebrations showed what a divided, disunited country Bolivia is, despite the goodwill of the thousands of people who lined the streets to see the local chess and football club pass by. Morales decided to hold the bicentenary in a small village over a hundred kilometres from Sucre in a deliberate affront to the capital. Last year on the 25 May, a group of campesinos affiliated to MAS (Morales´s party, Movimiento al Socialismo) marched into the central square of Sucre and were promptly attacked by some Sucre residents who beat them, stripped them of their clothes and gave Sucre the reputation of being a racist city. Morales has also undermined the basic legal right to presumption of innocence by issuing a decree stating that the goods and property of people implicated in terrorism would be immediatly confiscated. He is not popular in Sucre, where a taxi driver told me that he was a mentiroso, a liar.
Tiring of the incessant street parades, I moved on to La Paz on a freezing bus, wearing only a tee-shirt and jumper. At first, La Paz seemed to be just like any other big city; busy, polluted and noisy. But the city revered by Ernesto Guevara de la Serna as the Shanghai of the Americas soon began to work its charm. Many of the old colonial buildings have been knocked down and rebuilt, but behind the church of San Francisco, narrow, cobbled alleyways still wend their way up the hillside towards El Alto, the fastest growing city in Bolivia, whose houses twinkle round the rim of the canyon at night. Poverty is as evident here as elsewhere in Bolivia. After drinking a coffee at the bourgeois Cafe Berlin on my first morning in La Paz, I passed a small indigenous women who had crouched down in a busy street to pee into a drain. She seemed to feel no shame or embarrasment at suffering this indignity. In the central square, pigeons flocked around a man holding seed in his hands and an old hunchbacked man stared plaintively into a shop window at a watch that he would never be able to afford. A plaque on the wall commemorated the people who were shot dead in this square by the government of Sanchez Lozada before it fled on mass to the USA.
The central artery for traffic in La Paz is El Paseo, more like a motorway than a central street. Colectivos stop every few yards so that a ticket seller can lean out of the window and holler the destinations in a piercing, machine gun spanish that I, at least, cannot understand. The mercado de hechinceria (witches market) consists of a long line of stalls on a shaded, cobbled street where old indigenous women sell dried llama foetuses (for good luck), animal amulets and plates of offerings to pachamama, which contain piles of coca leaves and fake money. Aphrodisiacs crowd the shelves. The owners of these stalls sit on the pavements in their black and grey protruding hats, so drowned in petticoats and shawls that they look like squat mushrooms, their legs and arms nowhere to be seen. High above was the central produce market selling everything, from beds and electronics to dried, stinking fish and cows innards. These markets are always fascinating because of the density of the stalls and due to the incredible sense of activity and vitality that they exude. On every corner sits a women selling freshly squeezed fruit juice and popcorn. The comedores, or eating halls are built of corrugated iron. Inside, small, dark men bend over their steaming soup, ladled out from huge vats by rotund women. There was even a pet section, assuming of course that the white rabbits and budgies were not being fattened up for tomorrow´s lunch.
La Paz has a big drug scene and while eating lunch in a cuban restaurant below a looming portrait of Che, two greasy Bolivians who I hadn´t spoken to up to that point slipped me a post-it note with a telephone number on and explained that I could ring it at any time to buy weed or coke. My brush with drugs continued as I visited the fascinating coca museum and later when I was led to the notorious route 36 by two of the guys in my hostel. Our taxi driver knocked on an iron gate that seemed to lead to an ordinary house and it was opened by a guard who scanned the street sheepishly before ushering us in and patting us down. Inside, the air was thick with smoke and people were ordering lines of coke from the bar, which came on top of CD cases. As the other guys snorted away, I sank into a chair, feeling somewhat out of place.
Two days ago, though, I was in Sucre, a pretty city of gleaming white colonial buildings that was named Bolivia´s capital in the new constitution. It is the most European city that I have visited, with wide sweeping streets and simple, yet elegant neoclassical facades. When I arrived, the city was in the grip of celebrations marking the bicentenary of the revolution of Charcas, or as the press in Sucre tried to claim, the first spark of Latin American independence. For the two days that I was there, a neverending parade of dignitaries, soldiers, musicians and citizens piled down the central street, Avenida Arce to the booming of a brass band. Sitting in cafes bordering the street, the windows and light fittings would literally shake with the reverberations of the drums outside. The church of San Francisco stood immediatly outside my hostel, and it is reputed that it was here that the bell first struck to call the people of South America to freedom. A dignitary gave a speech calling on the people of Bolivia to unite together to create a strong nation (The Bolivian moto is Union y Fuerza). Yet these celebrations showed what a divided, disunited country Bolivia is, despite the goodwill of the thousands of people who lined the streets to see the local chess and football club pass by. Morales decided to hold the bicentenary in a small village over a hundred kilometres from Sucre in a deliberate affront to the capital. Last year on the 25 May, a group of campesinos affiliated to MAS (Morales´s party, Movimiento al Socialismo) marched into the central square of Sucre and were promptly attacked by some Sucre residents who beat them, stripped them of their clothes and gave Sucre the reputation of being a racist city. Morales has also undermined the basic legal right to presumption of innocence by issuing a decree stating that the goods and property of people implicated in terrorism would be immediatly confiscated. He is not popular in Sucre, where a taxi driver told me that he was a mentiroso, a liar.
Tiring of the incessant street parades, I moved on to La Paz on a freezing bus, wearing only a tee-shirt and jumper. At first, La Paz seemed to be just like any other big city; busy, polluted and noisy. But the city revered by Ernesto Guevara de la Serna as the Shanghai of the Americas soon began to work its charm. Many of the old colonial buildings have been knocked down and rebuilt, but behind the church of San Francisco, narrow, cobbled alleyways still wend their way up the hillside towards El Alto, the fastest growing city in Bolivia, whose houses twinkle round the rim of the canyon at night. Poverty is as evident here as elsewhere in Bolivia. After drinking a coffee at the bourgeois Cafe Berlin on my first morning in La Paz, I passed a small indigenous women who had crouched down in a busy street to pee into a drain. She seemed to feel no shame or embarrasment at suffering this indignity. In the central square, pigeons flocked around a man holding seed in his hands and an old hunchbacked man stared plaintively into a shop window at a watch that he would never be able to afford. A plaque on the wall commemorated the people who were shot dead in this square by the government of Sanchez Lozada before it fled on mass to the USA.
The central artery for traffic in La Paz is El Paseo, more like a motorway than a central street. Colectivos stop every few yards so that a ticket seller can lean out of the window and holler the destinations in a piercing, machine gun spanish that I, at least, cannot understand. The mercado de hechinceria (witches market) consists of a long line of stalls on a shaded, cobbled street where old indigenous women sell dried llama foetuses (for good luck), animal amulets and plates of offerings to pachamama, which contain piles of coca leaves and fake money. Aphrodisiacs crowd the shelves. The owners of these stalls sit on the pavements in their black and grey protruding hats, so drowned in petticoats and shawls that they look like squat mushrooms, their legs and arms nowhere to be seen. High above was the central produce market selling everything, from beds and electronics to dried, stinking fish and cows innards. These markets are always fascinating because of the density of the stalls and due to the incredible sense of activity and vitality that they exude. On every corner sits a women selling freshly squeezed fruit juice and popcorn. The comedores, or eating halls are built of corrugated iron. Inside, small, dark men bend over their steaming soup, ladled out from huge vats by rotund women. There was even a pet section, assuming of course that the white rabbits and budgies were not being fattened up for tomorrow´s lunch.
La Paz has a big drug scene and while eating lunch in a cuban restaurant below a looming portrait of Che, two greasy Bolivians who I hadn´t spoken to up to that point slipped me a post-it note with a telephone number on and explained that I could ring it at any time to buy weed or coke. My brush with drugs continued as I visited the fascinating coca museum and later when I was led to the notorious route 36 by two of the guys in my hostel. Our taxi driver knocked on an iron gate that seemed to lead to an ordinary house and it was opened by a guard who scanned the street sheepishly before ushering us in and patting us down. Inside, the air was thick with smoke and people were ordering lines of coke from the bar, which came on top of CD cases. As the other guys snorted away, I sank into a chair, feeling somewhat out of place.
Saturday, 23 May 2009
Tupiza, Tarija and the mouth of hell"
From Uyuni, I travelled on to Tupiza and then to Tarija with an ex-English teacher, Stewart, with whom I spent a happy week. Tupiza is a small dusty village that sits in a narrow valley, surrounded by interesting rock formations and canyons. I visited these on a large, black mare flecked with grey that knew the path so well that it wouldn´t obey my futile tugs to right and left, only obeying its master, a taciturn fifteen year old boy, who could send it into a gallop with a smacking of his lips. The problem was that the horse only knew two speeds, a stupefying plod that made you feel like a corpse lolling back and forth, and a gallop that forced me to grip the saddle with both hands and had a deleterious effect on my posterior. After the first hair-raising sprint, I resolved to just plod along, but the boredom overcame me again and again, with the result that I was never truly in control.
"Control" was an important theme for Stewart who was interested in Eastern spirituality and was reading a book called the "Bhagavad Gita". Wheras western philosophy treats the body and the mind as separate entities, eastern philosophy establishes no distinction between the mind and the universe. Drinking wine, cracking open peanut shells and playing backgammon, we discussed his philosophy. He believes that humans can achieve enlightenment, that an immutable core lies at the core of every individual (and therefore "the bourne from which no traveller returns" does not mark the end) and that you can choose to influence your environment in any instance. He contests that you can choose to roll a double four in backgammon; he himself admitted that this implies that he rejects reason and the enlightenment. What confused me was why he chose to reject reason in this case, and accept it in every other. During the time I spent with him, he never once walked towards oncoming traffic or threw himself off a building.
The city of Tarija is prim and wealthy. Tree lined flowerbeds line the streets and palm trees dot the central square. People there are whiter than they are in the rest of Bolivia, perhaps because many Andalucians emigrated to this area. As we ate empanadas and chicken in Plaza Sucre, we would watch the local bad boy set making circles of the plaza, boys hanging on to tailfins and music ripping through the soft night air. Despite the hulking hummers, though, child beggars wander the streets with a plaintive air, calling you "tio malo" if you don´t give them some money. On our second day in Tarija we visited a bodega in nearby, Valle de la Concepcion where we were taught to swill the wine, smell it and savour it by a camp Bolivian teenager. All his advice fell on dead ears. Even the most expensive wine was acid and astringent
, leaving your mouth and throat burning. This was made up for though, by another nearby bodega where a solid, self-styled campesino, called Jesus sold us a fantastic bottle of wine and showed us around his wine cellar.
From Tarija, Stewart and I went our separate ways, he to Bermejo and I to Potosi, the highest city of its size in the world. On the bus, I was squeezed against the window next to a huge indigenous woman whose layer upon layer of clothing must have hidden obesity (I have yet to discover how these women become fat on a diet of vegetable stew and the odd slice of llama). Potosi is a city of contradictions. The intricate stonework of the colonial mansions and the sumptuous churches belie the poverty of the tens of thousands of workers who made that wealth possible and continue to toil in terrible conditions, extracting silver, iron, lead and zinc. The cathedral´s adobe wals were washed away by heavy rains to be replaced by huge concrete slabs and the biggest bell in Bolivia, the core of which is made of gold. All this work was performed by slaves. Cerro Rico, where the metals are extracted, can be seen from all over town, an orange monolith cut into terraces so that lorries can beetle their way up the steep slopes. I was persuaded to take a tour of the mines on my first day in Potosi. We first visited the miners shop, where we were entreated to buy coca, drinks and explosives for the miners. The history of mining in Potosi explains why these humble gifts are so important.
The mine was originally owned by two powerful Spanish families who forced the miners to work as serfs. With the 1952 revolution, the mines of Potosi were nationalised, the workers were granted life and health insurance and education was provided for their children. In the years leading up to 1985, the price of tin fell and the cooperatives were formed; ten or more miners would approach the state and buy a concesion, giving them exclusive rights over a particular section of the mine. Despite the word "cooperative", the mining of today is a very individualistic business. The miners are not told where to work, they return only 30% of their profits to the cooperative and they have to buy all their own equipment. Ironically, the Iraq war increased the price of basic metals, enticing the young men of Potosi back down the mines where they worked up to 24 hours a day, conscious that their good luck could turn at any moment. The guide also let us try a liquour called quitasuenos (literally, take away you dreams) that the miners drink to dull the torment of a life spent underground in terrible conditions. It is 95% alcohol. They also make offerings of quitasuenos to the two spirits that preside over the mine, Tio and Cochamama (mother earth); inside the mine we saw a sculpture of the Tio, a red, devilish creature with a gaping mouth ready to receive the sacrificial offerings of the miners in return for their life and health (as the guide told us, Cerro Rico is a swiss cheese of winding tunnels and an article published today in the local newspaper suggested that the upper section of the hill has become structurally unstable). God does not exist in what a sixteenth century chronicler described as "the mouth of hell".
We then went to a processing plant where the silver is separated from the waste rock, before descending into the mine itself. The guide confided to us that much of the metal that is extracted nowadays is plena basura (complete rubbish). When the spanish first began digging holes into Cerro Rico, they found veins of silver that ascended up the rock like the trunk of a tree, splitting off into smaller veins. As Niall Ferguson recently explained in his "Ascent of money", the Spanish mined so much pure quality silver that they reduced the price of the metal on the international market. With the passage of time, the quality of the silver has been gradually decreasing and the miners have diversified into tin and other metals. A kilo of poor quality silver can sell for as little as 10bs. When you reflect that a safety helmet costs around 40bs, the mining seems barely profitable.
We entered the narrow entrance to the mine standing up, but were soon crouching down and shuffling through low, dark passages past carts and sweating miners stripped to the waist. In the light of our headlamps, we could distinctly see particles of dust, like snow round a streetlamp. On the walls hung thin, delicate strands of crystals that the guide explained to us were aspestos. The life expectancy of a miner in Cerro Rico is 45-50 years (even Glasgow doesn´t compare). As we delved down further into the mountain, passing from level to level, the passages became ever lower and narrower, forcing us to crawl, breathing in dust and touching walls smeared with stinking sulphurous deposits. The water bottle in my belt dug into my stomach and the fetid air meant that my breathing was laboured despite the red bandana that covered my face. At one point, we stopped in a low cavern to watch a miner at work. He was rythmically knocking a hole into the rock with a hammer ready for a stick of dynamite. In the gloom, we could make out his naked, muscular torsoe. He answered our questions with difficulty, in a hoarse, rasping voice that seemed barely human.
Like many miners, he left Cerro Rico in the 90s, couldn´t accomodate to life in the open air and crawled back down the narrow shafts. He was in his thirties, but seemed far older, with cheeks inflated with coca and sunken eyes. He was in the process of mining a sliver of a vein of silver, barely 2mm wide. Despite the fact that he had been working continuously for a month, he hadn´t yet blown out enough silver to sell. Miners who belong to the cooperatives may work up to 24 hours a day. They can´t urinate onto the rock because it releases methane, so they pee into their trousers instead. By thirty, a miner is considered done. Conditions have not improved yet under "Evo". To the sound of hammer beating against spike, we crawled back up again towards the light.
"Control" was an important theme for Stewart who was interested in Eastern spirituality and was reading a book called the "Bhagavad Gita". Wheras western philosophy treats the body and the mind as separate entities, eastern philosophy establishes no distinction between the mind and the universe. Drinking wine, cracking open peanut shells and playing backgammon, we discussed his philosophy. He believes that humans can achieve enlightenment, that an immutable core lies at the core of every individual (and therefore "the bourne from which no traveller returns" does not mark the end) and that you can choose to influence your environment in any instance. He contests that you can choose to roll a double four in backgammon; he himself admitted that this implies that he rejects reason and the enlightenment. What confused me was why he chose to reject reason in this case, and accept it in every other. During the time I spent with him, he never once walked towards oncoming traffic or threw himself off a building.
The city of Tarija is prim and wealthy. Tree lined flowerbeds line the streets and palm trees dot the central square. People there are whiter than they are in the rest of Bolivia, perhaps because many Andalucians emigrated to this area. As we ate empanadas and chicken in Plaza Sucre, we would watch the local bad boy set making circles of the plaza, boys hanging on to tailfins and music ripping through the soft night air. Despite the hulking hummers, though, child beggars wander the streets with a plaintive air, calling you "tio malo" if you don´t give them some money. On our second day in Tarija we visited a bodega in nearby, Valle de la Concepcion where we were taught to swill the wine, smell it and savour it by a camp Bolivian teenager. All his advice fell on dead ears. Even the most expensive wine was acid and astringent
, leaving your mouth and throat burning. This was made up for though, by another nearby bodega where a solid, self-styled campesino, called Jesus sold us a fantastic bottle of wine and showed us around his wine cellar.
From Tarija, Stewart and I went our separate ways, he to Bermejo and I to Potosi, the highest city of its size in the world. On the bus, I was squeezed against the window next to a huge indigenous woman whose layer upon layer of clothing must have hidden obesity (I have yet to discover how these women become fat on a diet of vegetable stew and the odd slice of llama). Potosi is a city of contradictions. The intricate stonework of the colonial mansions and the sumptuous churches belie the poverty of the tens of thousands of workers who made that wealth possible and continue to toil in terrible conditions, extracting silver, iron, lead and zinc. The cathedral´s adobe wals were washed away by heavy rains to be replaced by huge concrete slabs and the biggest bell in Bolivia, the core of which is made of gold. All this work was performed by slaves. Cerro Rico, where the metals are extracted, can be seen from all over town, an orange monolith cut into terraces so that lorries can beetle their way up the steep slopes. I was persuaded to take a tour of the mines on my first day in Potosi. We first visited the miners shop, where we were entreated to buy coca, drinks and explosives for the miners. The history of mining in Potosi explains why these humble gifts are so important.
The mine was originally owned by two powerful Spanish families who forced the miners to work as serfs. With the 1952 revolution, the mines of Potosi were nationalised, the workers were granted life and health insurance and education was provided for their children. In the years leading up to 1985, the price of tin fell and the cooperatives were formed; ten or more miners would approach the state and buy a concesion, giving them exclusive rights over a particular section of the mine. Despite the word "cooperative", the mining of today is a very individualistic business. The miners are not told where to work, they return only 30% of their profits to the cooperative and they have to buy all their own equipment. Ironically, the Iraq war increased the price of basic metals, enticing the young men of Potosi back down the mines where they worked up to 24 hours a day, conscious that their good luck could turn at any moment. The guide also let us try a liquour called quitasuenos (literally, take away you dreams) that the miners drink to dull the torment of a life spent underground in terrible conditions. It is 95% alcohol. They also make offerings of quitasuenos to the two spirits that preside over the mine, Tio and Cochamama (mother earth); inside the mine we saw a sculpture of the Tio, a red, devilish creature with a gaping mouth ready to receive the sacrificial offerings of the miners in return for their life and health (as the guide told us, Cerro Rico is a swiss cheese of winding tunnels and an article published today in the local newspaper suggested that the upper section of the hill has become structurally unstable). God does not exist in what a sixteenth century chronicler described as "the mouth of hell".
We then went to a processing plant where the silver is separated from the waste rock, before descending into the mine itself. The guide confided to us that much of the metal that is extracted nowadays is plena basura (complete rubbish). When the spanish first began digging holes into Cerro Rico, they found veins of silver that ascended up the rock like the trunk of a tree, splitting off into smaller veins. As Niall Ferguson recently explained in his "Ascent of money", the Spanish mined so much pure quality silver that they reduced the price of the metal on the international market. With the passage of time, the quality of the silver has been gradually decreasing and the miners have diversified into tin and other metals. A kilo of poor quality silver can sell for as little as 10bs. When you reflect that a safety helmet costs around 40bs, the mining seems barely profitable.
We entered the narrow entrance to the mine standing up, but were soon crouching down and shuffling through low, dark passages past carts and sweating miners stripped to the waist. In the light of our headlamps, we could distinctly see particles of dust, like snow round a streetlamp. On the walls hung thin, delicate strands of crystals that the guide explained to us were aspestos. The life expectancy of a miner in Cerro Rico is 45-50 years (even Glasgow doesn´t compare). As we delved down further into the mountain, passing from level to level, the passages became ever lower and narrower, forcing us to crawl, breathing in dust and touching walls smeared with stinking sulphurous deposits. The water bottle in my belt dug into my stomach and the fetid air meant that my breathing was laboured despite the red bandana that covered my face. At one point, we stopped in a low cavern to watch a miner at work. He was rythmically knocking a hole into the rock with a hammer ready for a stick of dynamite. In the gloom, we could make out his naked, muscular torsoe. He answered our questions with difficulty, in a hoarse, rasping voice that seemed barely human.
Like many miners, he left Cerro Rico in the 90s, couldn´t accomodate to life in the open air and crawled back down the narrow shafts. He was in his thirties, but seemed far older, with cheeks inflated with coca and sunken eyes. He was in the process of mining a sliver of a vein of silver, barely 2mm wide. Despite the fact that he had been working continuously for a month, he hadn´t yet blown out enough silver to sell. Miners who belong to the cooperatives may work up to 24 hours a day. They can´t urinate onto the rock because it releases methane, so they pee into their trousers instead. By thirty, a miner is considered done. Conditions have not improved yet under "Evo". To the sound of hammer beating against spike, we crawled back up again towards the light.
Monday, 18 May 2009
Bolivia, an Italian and some serious salt
I am now in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in South America which has been subject to more revolutionary upheavals than any other. For the last week I have been travelling with an Italian from Milan, Alberto, a bearded, hook-nosed clone of Adam Sandler. Like all Italians, he is in the habit of "hablarse a codos" (to rabbit away) and ends every sentence with a rising "eh", raising his shoulders and putting his hands together like a beggar. The biggest difference between Bolivia and Chile has been the buses. In the border town of Ollague, we left our comfortable Chilean bus and boarded a tall, rusting hulk filled to the brim with Bolivians and their bags, boxes and other belongings. To reach our seats we had to climb over legs and arms, and when the bus finally stuttered into motion, potatos started to rain down from the overhead departments. Pictures on the outside of the bus taunted us, showing air conditioning, drinks, food and comfortable seats. Needless to say, I didn´t get much sleep. I had a similar experience travelling South-East from Uyuni to Tupiza. After crawling for two hours along a rocky excuse for a road, we stopped in a small town with a damn for a "pequeno descanso" (small break). Two hours later, I was still sitting on the side of the road playing backgammon and waiting for the driver to fill up the bus. I had a far better experience on the bus to Tupiza. The comfy seats just about made up for the danger of the journey; in some places, the bus was crawling along the ledge of a mountain, barely wide enough to accomodate both wheels. As we rounded the hairpin bends, the front edge of the bus hung tantalizingly over the edge, and the people in the front seats with it. I read in the newspaper today that a trucker had died on the "Paso de Jama", the road that I will take from Tarija to Potosi. It is locally known as "Paso de la muerte)
I haven´t yet bored of oggling the old women here in Bolivia. There are small, stunted and surprisingly rotund, clad in the traditional blouse and petticoat in whose deep recesses they pocket their change. Tall, protruding bowler hats perch on top of their heads, attached around their knecks with an elastic cord and they sport thick, alpaca stockings which keep out the freezing wind of the Antiplano. They often carry striped sacks on their backs, filled either with food or with tiny infants whose tiny hands poke out from the folds of cloth. Some look like witches about to catch a spell, while the taller women look like the nobility of some alien race.
In Uyuni, we saw ample evidence of superstition. Before embarking on our Uyuni trip, Alberto and I made a tour of the market, passing tables loaded with brightly coloured fruit and a meat hook from which a flayed cow was hanging. The thick crowds outside hid the most interesting thing, though. A small, fat man stood next to a steaming vat of putrid liquid, stirring it with a spoon and shouting repeatedly "que mas contiene" (what else does it contain). The vat was thick with seaweed, medicinal wood and the head of a small crocodile. He claimed that this concoction could cure dolor de huesos and an infinite number of other ailments. Another man extolled the virtues of a saint who could be contacted, for a small fee of course.
Uyuni is a small, dusty and ugly town, lost in the immensity of the desert plain. On the first night we ate at a local comedor for ten bolivianos (around one pound), enjoying a soup of quinoa and vegetables, meat and rice. The great attraction of Uyuni is that it is the starting point for the Salar de Uyuni tour which encompasses the biggest salt flats in the world, numerous lakes spotted with pink flamingoes, hard volcanic rock twisted into improbable shapes (such as a tree) and steaming geysers. The salt flats were undoubtedly the highlight for me. My legs tucked up beneath me in a Toyota 4x4, I looked out of the window over miles of glistening white salt, piled up in places into mountains of hard crystals and twelve metres deep in the centre. Our guide told us that a sea had once covered this area. It receded and left a lake, which then dried to leave huge salt deposits. The salar was magical in the evening as the sun began to dip below the surrounding mountains, casting pink rays over the perfect, geometrical panes of salt. On the second day of the tour, we saw a mountain of seven colours, the different shades of red and green bleeding down the rock, and on the third day, after surviving a night where the temperature dropped to -7C, we bathed in a steaming pool fed by geysers and wandered round the Valle de las rocas. Wind and rain have sculpted the rock into birds, cowboy hats and holes, while huge boulders balance on tiny ledges, ready to be pushed on to a passing foe.
On the way back towards Uyuni, we passed a small village, hidden under the shadow of the rocas and barely perceptible just a few miles away. Around the village, llamas drank in the brooks and field upon field gleamed with golden sheaves of quinoa. Quinoa is supposedly a supergrain, similar in texture to cous-cous, and it commands such a high price that many farmers have stopped rearing llamas and have begun cultivating the crop. I mention it because the husk of the quinoa plant is used to make a powder that is added to coca leaves, which releases the alkaloids contained in the coca (among them, tiny amounts of cocaine). Coca leaves have been chewed since time immemorial in the Andean countries to combat altitude sickness and to alleviate hunger and fatigue. The spanish conquistadores first banned coca before they realised that it made their workers more productive during their forty hour shifts. Therafter, it became compulsory. Alberto and I bought a big bag of coca and put it to good use once we climbed over 4000m and my head began to throb with the increased pressure. You take around ten coca leaves, roll them into a ball and slowly chew them until they are moist. The green gunge is then placed between the top lip and the gum and sucked. The quinoa powder is applied using a wooden utensil to avoid direct contact with the skin.
Evo Morales began life as a llama herder and came to power largely because he vowed to protect coca producers in Bolivia against the pressure of the United States, which considers coca production in Bolivia to be fuelling the global trade in cocaine. Many steps are needed to turn coca leaves into cocaine, and I certainly never felt a high when sucking the coca leaves, only a slight numbness in my tongue (Coca was formerly used as a commercial anaesthetic).
Everywhere you go in Bolivia, you see the "Evo" daubed on the walls, along with "Vote si por la nueva constitucion" (vote for the new constitution) which, among other things, establishes Sucre as the official capital of Bolivia and allows Morales to rule for a further two terms. He is a man who polarises opinion. I asked the owner of the hostel in Tupiza whether he likes Morales. He pulled a face and declared brusquely, "Me gustaria quitarle la cabeza" ("I would like to take his head off) Like the famous Peruvian novelist, Maria Vargas Llosa, he believes that by emphasising his Amerindian heritage, he increases tension in a largely mestizo (mixed blood) South America. Today I have been reading articles about Morales in a Tarijan daily which are surprisingly explicit in their criticism of the President given that he is pursuing a case against anther paper for defamation. One article begins;
"In these times, it is worth asking oneself where resides the spirit of the Bolivian people to vigorously oppose a regime based on deception, demagogy and lies. For the current government to cling to power, it only needed to loan our sovereignty to the Venezuelan petrol-empire and make us believe that it was liberating the people after five hundred years of exploitation".
Yesterday, I read an article claiming that the previous government of Lozada had fleed to the united states to escape punishment for their involvement in the "Black October" of 2003 in which over seventy protestors were killed in a riot that would lead to the overthrow of his government. Today, the matter doesn´t seem so clear, though. Some influential figures have stated that if Lozada is to be tried, so should Morales who armed the crowd with Molotov cocktails. The judiciary is not independent in Bolivia. Under political pressure, the President of the Supreme Court of Justice has been removed. The government has no qualms about resorting to summary justice. Several weeks ago, three alleged terrorists were killed in their beds in the city of Santa Cruz because they had allegedly been planning to assasinate the President. The security cameras were cut by the police and the "terrorists" were shot in the back. (Reichstag fire, anyone). Lastly, a prominent indigenous leader recently had his back reduced to bleeding shreds because he opposed the changes that Morales is introducing. Those who persecuted this act of barbarism have not been caught. I am sure that little of this news is published in Britain. Morales is championed on the left as part of a broad movement in South America to liberate the indigenous, but at what cost?
I haven´t yet bored of oggling the old women here in Bolivia. There are small, stunted and surprisingly rotund, clad in the traditional blouse and petticoat in whose deep recesses they pocket their change. Tall, protruding bowler hats perch on top of their heads, attached around their knecks with an elastic cord and they sport thick, alpaca stockings which keep out the freezing wind of the Antiplano. They often carry striped sacks on their backs, filled either with food or with tiny infants whose tiny hands poke out from the folds of cloth. Some look like witches about to catch a spell, while the taller women look like the nobility of some alien race.
In Uyuni, we saw ample evidence of superstition. Before embarking on our Uyuni trip, Alberto and I made a tour of the market, passing tables loaded with brightly coloured fruit and a meat hook from which a flayed cow was hanging. The thick crowds outside hid the most interesting thing, though. A small, fat man stood next to a steaming vat of putrid liquid, stirring it with a spoon and shouting repeatedly "que mas contiene" (what else does it contain). The vat was thick with seaweed, medicinal wood and the head of a small crocodile. He claimed that this concoction could cure dolor de huesos and an infinite number of other ailments. Another man extolled the virtues of a saint who could be contacted, for a small fee of course.
Uyuni is a small, dusty and ugly town, lost in the immensity of the desert plain. On the first night we ate at a local comedor for ten bolivianos (around one pound), enjoying a soup of quinoa and vegetables, meat and rice. The great attraction of Uyuni is that it is the starting point for the Salar de Uyuni tour which encompasses the biggest salt flats in the world, numerous lakes spotted with pink flamingoes, hard volcanic rock twisted into improbable shapes (such as a tree) and steaming geysers. The salt flats were undoubtedly the highlight for me. My legs tucked up beneath me in a Toyota 4x4, I looked out of the window over miles of glistening white salt, piled up in places into mountains of hard crystals and twelve metres deep in the centre. Our guide told us that a sea had once covered this area. It receded and left a lake, which then dried to leave huge salt deposits. The salar was magical in the evening as the sun began to dip below the surrounding mountains, casting pink rays over the perfect, geometrical panes of salt. On the second day of the tour, we saw a mountain of seven colours, the different shades of red and green bleeding down the rock, and on the third day, after surviving a night where the temperature dropped to -7C, we bathed in a steaming pool fed by geysers and wandered round the Valle de las rocas. Wind and rain have sculpted the rock into birds, cowboy hats and holes, while huge boulders balance on tiny ledges, ready to be pushed on to a passing foe.
On the way back towards Uyuni, we passed a small village, hidden under the shadow of the rocas and barely perceptible just a few miles away. Around the village, llamas drank in the brooks and field upon field gleamed with golden sheaves of quinoa. Quinoa is supposedly a supergrain, similar in texture to cous-cous, and it commands such a high price that many farmers have stopped rearing llamas and have begun cultivating the crop. I mention it because the husk of the quinoa plant is used to make a powder that is added to coca leaves, which releases the alkaloids contained in the coca (among them, tiny amounts of cocaine). Coca leaves have been chewed since time immemorial in the Andean countries to combat altitude sickness and to alleviate hunger and fatigue. The spanish conquistadores first banned coca before they realised that it made their workers more productive during their forty hour shifts. Therafter, it became compulsory. Alberto and I bought a big bag of coca and put it to good use once we climbed over 4000m and my head began to throb with the increased pressure. You take around ten coca leaves, roll them into a ball and slowly chew them until they are moist. The green gunge is then placed between the top lip and the gum and sucked. The quinoa powder is applied using a wooden utensil to avoid direct contact with the skin.
Evo Morales began life as a llama herder and came to power largely because he vowed to protect coca producers in Bolivia against the pressure of the United States, which considers coca production in Bolivia to be fuelling the global trade in cocaine. Many steps are needed to turn coca leaves into cocaine, and I certainly never felt a high when sucking the coca leaves, only a slight numbness in my tongue (Coca was formerly used as a commercial anaesthetic).
Everywhere you go in Bolivia, you see the "Evo" daubed on the walls, along with "Vote si por la nueva constitucion" (vote for the new constitution) which, among other things, establishes Sucre as the official capital of Bolivia and allows Morales to rule for a further two terms. He is a man who polarises opinion. I asked the owner of the hostel in Tupiza whether he likes Morales. He pulled a face and declared brusquely, "Me gustaria quitarle la cabeza" ("I would like to take his head off) Like the famous Peruvian novelist, Maria Vargas Llosa, he believes that by emphasising his Amerindian heritage, he increases tension in a largely mestizo (mixed blood) South America. Today I have been reading articles about Morales in a Tarijan daily which are surprisingly explicit in their criticism of the President given that he is pursuing a case against anther paper for defamation. One article begins;
"In these times, it is worth asking oneself where resides the spirit of the Bolivian people to vigorously oppose a regime based on deception, demagogy and lies. For the current government to cling to power, it only needed to loan our sovereignty to the Venezuelan petrol-empire and make us believe that it was liberating the people after five hundred years of exploitation".
Yesterday, I read an article claiming that the previous government of Lozada had fleed to the united states to escape punishment for their involvement in the "Black October" of 2003 in which over seventy protestors were killed in a riot that would lead to the overthrow of his government. Today, the matter doesn´t seem so clear, though. Some influential figures have stated that if Lozada is to be tried, so should Morales who armed the crowd with Molotov cocktails. The judiciary is not independent in Bolivia. Under political pressure, the President of the Supreme Court of Justice has been removed. The government has no qualms about resorting to summary justice. Several weeks ago, three alleged terrorists were killed in their beds in the city of Santa Cruz because they had allegedly been planning to assasinate the President. The security cameras were cut by the police and the "terrorists" were shot in the back. (Reichstag fire, anyone). Lastly, a prominent indigenous leader recently had his back reduced to bleeding shreds because he opposed the changes that Morales is introducing. Those who persecuted this act of barbarism have not been caught. I am sure that little of this news is published in Britain. Morales is championed on the left as part of a broad movement in South America to liberate the indigenous, but at what cost?
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
You can see the hash coming from the volcano
The last week has been a hectic blur of bus journeys, screaming kids, glimmering salt lakes and pink flamingoes, towering rocks and cavernous hollows. I began in San Pedro de Atacama, and believing that I only had a week before my train left Calama (Chile) to Uyuni (Bolivia), I rushed around Salta, only to return today to the news that the last train left in 2007. I´m not having much luck with my travel arrangements.
The week started in San Pedro de Atacam, a natural oasis town of green trees sitting in a huge bowl between towering mountains to the west and the high, antiplano to the east, a small spot of green in one of the driest regions on earth. The town has a feeling of it with narrow, atmospheric streets with low adobe houses and walls topped off with sticks. They were so low that in the fading light of my first night, I felt that I could look over like a giant to the dry, shimmering plain beyond. Like Chalten, though, San Pedro has become a huge tourist destination and its native charm is somewhat eclipsed by the tour agencies on every corner and the artesania shops that occupy some of the oldest houses.
My stay here began badly as I got stuck in a small hole of a hostel, lorded over by a huge fat chilean with dumpling eyes swimming in fat. There was a guy staying in my room with thick, black curly hair and an impish smile who claimed that he had slept with a girl from every South American country except Bolivia and Paraguay, but vowed to battle on to complete the circuit. Anyway, when checking out, he was told that he couldn´t leave his mochila in the hostel and he couldn´t speak to his German friend in the hostel. This sent him into a spasm of rage, his German friend lost his typical Aryan restraint and called the owner a fat bastard and the greasy haired proprietor raised himself from his chair for the first time that day to tower over the Israeli, his paunch a good metre from his spinal cord.
Thankfully, the excursions went better. The second day I was there, I dragged myself out of bed to see the shooting geysers at 4AM, my head aching and banging against a rattling window. Some of the fumaroles gave off just steam, other geysers spat boiling water like oil from a pan, and others had been covered with beautiful, intricate patterns of mineral deposits, shining silver, green and ochre in the slanting rays of the early morning. When we arrived, the temperature was a chilly 12 below, a good incentive to get as close to the geysers as possible. At four that afternoon, I hit sandsurfing with two Japanese girls from my hostel who carried an electronic dictionary and estimated my age at twenty-five, much to my chagrin. Our guide was a slim chilian, a skater by profession who had been forced to guide because he had damaged his foot. His eyes were very blood-shot and he hid them behind big, red, plastic glasses. The sandunes were located in an incredible valley, Valle de la Muerte, a barren inlet surrounded by triangular mountains, piled one behind the other like sharks´teeth. I showed little aptitude for the sandsurfing, could not go five metres without falling over and got thoroughly impregnated with sand, but loved it nevertheless, even more so because we were left to it rather than being given lengthy explanations like other groups. Hurrying as the sun began to set, we toured the Valle de la Luna, visiting chiselled mountains of rock contracting with creaks as the sun descended, others that bristled with thousands of tiny creases running down the rock from sharp points and still another that looked like a surging waves of steps in the dying light. We were also hurried to the Tres Marias (three pillars of rock eroded into lunar shapes) the Amphiteatro (a mass of rock that looked like an accordion) and a huge sand dune, but the real highlight was seeing the sun set from a ridge, surrounded by active and extinct volcanos, the dying day slowly splitting the uniform blue of the sky into dark purple, blood red, orange, yellow, green and infinite shades of blue. After smoking a joint, the guide tried to explain to us the formation of the volcanos; "You see the hash from the volcano". Ten goes later and he was still staying "hash". "Hobbies" might have provoked similar problems".
I then travelled across a salt lake spotted with pink flamingoes and had my bag searched by masked officials before reaching Salta, a city that I would recommend to anyone thinking of coming to Argentina. It is the most visually beautiful city that I have visited, is cheaper than the rest of the country, is a lively university city and is surrounded on all sides by incredible scenery. Cachi and Cafayate are separated to the south by a dramatic gorge, while to the north, the multi-coloured, rippling Quebrada de Humahuaca winds its way through Purmamarca and Tilcara to the remote Iruya. I visited Pumamarca and Iruya, the former a tiny, dusty village surrounded by vivid, multi-coloured rock and mountains that descend from a ridge before fracturing again and again into hundred of ever thinner pieces of rock, exactly like the wide root system of a tree.The colour of the rock nearest to the town is a deep red, like Ibizan earth. Different strata of soft rock run through it, coloured chalk, a dark sickly green and a deep purple. In some places, it looks as if funeral monuments have been carved into the rock, while in others, bulging, bulbous bubbles of rock have solidified to form smooth, modernist sculptures that seem to twist and writhe.
The road north to the cheap Iruya (you can get a dormitory bed in Iruya for 10 pesos, less than two pounds) zigzags crazily across the mountain, forcing the bus driver to perform switchbacks that leave the front bumper hanging over the edge. But it is worth it. The landscape here defies all superlatives. From a viewing point, we could see a huge mountain sweeping down from above us, before suddenly crumbling into a gorge. The cut was not exact, however, because huge spurs penetrated into the valley, themselves eroded into thin, tapering spikes descending from a common centre. Fertile fields above are separated by a drop of some hundreds of feet from a dry river bed where a few donkeys plodded langorously along. It was a landscape fit for the dinosaur.
Everyone is smoking weed here, except me of course, and a bubbling Frenchman in Salta said he would bring us some Coke if we wanted. He has also been using prostitutes all over South America because they are so chep and because he doesn´t believe it is possible to meet a good women out on the open road. The Belgians who I shared a room with in Iruya were also into their grass, including other things, notably tennis. They declared that Tipsarevic was a presumptuous yuppy from new Belgrade, rejected my suggestion that Djokovic was arrogant and criticised Federer and Nadal as boring machines.
People in Northern Argentina are racially different from their counterparts in Buenos Aires or Patagonia, far similar in appearance to Bolivians, (the same may be the case for the people in the far north of Chile that was wrested from Peru during the War of the Pacific). In general, they are shorter and thicker set, their skin and hair is darker and their cheekbones are higher, accentuating their large noses and full lips. Their faces seem to be rounder. Furthermore, despite all the tourism in Salta, people in some of the outlying regions are poor. Jujuy bus station was dirty and slightly menacing, peopled by hawkers selling fruit jelly and barefoot children with mud-smeared faces and rags of clothes, throwing themselves on the pity of passers-by. People also seem to be ruder that in other areas of Argentina. Few people know how the queue, when I got up on a bus to give my seat to a pregnant woman, she did not thank me, and one of the bus porters was a monster. His voice was so high that he couldn´t speak properly, just like the German man in the famous Boomeran YouTube clip, but he made up for his defect by being an insolent bastard. When I approached him, he demanded money for dragging my bag two metres and when I told him that I didn´t have any, he threw it back into the hold.
Yet in the tiny village of San Isidro, some old people live as their anscestors must have hudreds of years ago. They grow their own crops, wash their clothes in the river and rear cattle for the slaughter. As I approached San Isidro during a hike, I small a tiny, wrinkled stick of a woman bent over and hacking away at a dry plant with an axe. When I returned down the path some twenty minutes later, she had hauled the bundle of sticks onto her fragile back and was walking across some stepping stones, struggling to protect her feet from the surging water.
The week started in San Pedro de Atacam, a natural oasis town of green trees sitting in a huge bowl between towering mountains to the west and the high, antiplano to the east, a small spot of green in one of the driest regions on earth. The town has a feeling of it with narrow, atmospheric streets with low adobe houses and walls topped off with sticks. They were so low that in the fading light of my first night, I felt that I could look over like a giant to the dry, shimmering plain beyond. Like Chalten, though, San Pedro has become a huge tourist destination and its native charm is somewhat eclipsed by the tour agencies on every corner and the artesania shops that occupy some of the oldest houses.
My stay here began badly as I got stuck in a small hole of a hostel, lorded over by a huge fat chilean with dumpling eyes swimming in fat. There was a guy staying in my room with thick, black curly hair and an impish smile who claimed that he had slept with a girl from every South American country except Bolivia and Paraguay, but vowed to battle on to complete the circuit. Anyway, when checking out, he was told that he couldn´t leave his mochila in the hostel and he couldn´t speak to his German friend in the hostel. This sent him into a spasm of rage, his German friend lost his typical Aryan restraint and called the owner a fat bastard and the greasy haired proprietor raised himself from his chair for the first time that day to tower over the Israeli, his paunch a good metre from his spinal cord.
Thankfully, the excursions went better. The second day I was there, I dragged myself out of bed to see the shooting geysers at 4AM, my head aching and banging against a rattling window. Some of the fumaroles gave off just steam, other geysers spat boiling water like oil from a pan, and others had been covered with beautiful, intricate patterns of mineral deposits, shining silver, green and ochre in the slanting rays of the early morning. When we arrived, the temperature was a chilly 12 below, a good incentive to get as close to the geysers as possible. At four that afternoon, I hit sandsurfing with two Japanese girls from my hostel who carried an electronic dictionary and estimated my age at twenty-five, much to my chagrin. Our guide was a slim chilian, a skater by profession who had been forced to guide because he had damaged his foot. His eyes were very blood-shot and he hid them behind big, red, plastic glasses. The sandunes were located in an incredible valley, Valle de la Muerte, a barren inlet surrounded by triangular mountains, piled one behind the other like sharks´teeth. I showed little aptitude for the sandsurfing, could not go five metres without falling over and got thoroughly impregnated with sand, but loved it nevertheless, even more so because we were left to it rather than being given lengthy explanations like other groups. Hurrying as the sun began to set, we toured the Valle de la Luna, visiting chiselled mountains of rock contracting with creaks as the sun descended, others that bristled with thousands of tiny creases running down the rock from sharp points and still another that looked like a surging waves of steps in the dying light. We were also hurried to the Tres Marias (three pillars of rock eroded into lunar shapes) the Amphiteatro (a mass of rock that looked like an accordion) and a huge sand dune, but the real highlight was seeing the sun set from a ridge, surrounded by active and extinct volcanos, the dying day slowly splitting the uniform blue of the sky into dark purple, blood red, orange, yellow, green and infinite shades of blue. After smoking a joint, the guide tried to explain to us the formation of the volcanos; "You see the hash from the volcano". Ten goes later and he was still staying "hash". "Hobbies" might have provoked similar problems".
I then travelled across a salt lake spotted with pink flamingoes and had my bag searched by masked officials before reaching Salta, a city that I would recommend to anyone thinking of coming to Argentina. It is the most visually beautiful city that I have visited, is cheaper than the rest of the country, is a lively university city and is surrounded on all sides by incredible scenery. Cachi and Cafayate are separated to the south by a dramatic gorge, while to the north, the multi-coloured, rippling Quebrada de Humahuaca winds its way through Purmamarca and Tilcara to the remote Iruya. I visited Pumamarca and Iruya, the former a tiny, dusty village surrounded by vivid, multi-coloured rock and mountains that descend from a ridge before fracturing again and again into hundred of ever thinner pieces of rock, exactly like the wide root system of a tree.The colour of the rock nearest to the town is a deep red, like Ibizan earth. Different strata of soft rock run through it, coloured chalk, a dark sickly green and a deep purple. In some places, it looks as if funeral monuments have been carved into the rock, while in others, bulging, bulbous bubbles of rock have solidified to form smooth, modernist sculptures that seem to twist and writhe.
The road north to the cheap Iruya (you can get a dormitory bed in Iruya for 10 pesos, less than two pounds) zigzags crazily across the mountain, forcing the bus driver to perform switchbacks that leave the front bumper hanging over the edge. But it is worth it. The landscape here defies all superlatives. From a viewing point, we could see a huge mountain sweeping down from above us, before suddenly crumbling into a gorge. The cut was not exact, however, because huge spurs penetrated into the valley, themselves eroded into thin, tapering spikes descending from a common centre. Fertile fields above are separated by a drop of some hundreds of feet from a dry river bed where a few donkeys plodded langorously along. It was a landscape fit for the dinosaur.
Everyone is smoking weed here, except me of course, and a bubbling Frenchman in Salta said he would bring us some Coke if we wanted. He has also been using prostitutes all over South America because they are so chep and because he doesn´t believe it is possible to meet a good women out on the open road. The Belgians who I shared a room with in Iruya were also into their grass, including other things, notably tennis. They declared that Tipsarevic was a presumptuous yuppy from new Belgrade, rejected my suggestion that Djokovic was arrogant and criticised Federer and Nadal as boring machines.
People in Northern Argentina are racially different from their counterparts in Buenos Aires or Patagonia, far similar in appearance to Bolivians, (the same may be the case for the people in the far north of Chile that was wrested from Peru during the War of the Pacific). In general, they are shorter and thicker set, their skin and hair is darker and their cheekbones are higher, accentuating their large noses and full lips. Their faces seem to be rounder. Furthermore, despite all the tourism in Salta, people in some of the outlying regions are poor. Jujuy bus station was dirty and slightly menacing, peopled by hawkers selling fruit jelly and barefoot children with mud-smeared faces and rags of clothes, throwing themselves on the pity of passers-by. People also seem to be ruder that in other areas of Argentina. Few people know how the queue, when I got up on a bus to give my seat to a pregnant woman, she did not thank me, and one of the bus porters was a monster. His voice was so high that he couldn´t speak properly, just like the German man in the famous Boomeran YouTube clip, but he made up for his defect by being an insolent bastard. When I approached him, he demanded money for dragging my bag two metres and when I told him that I didn´t have any, he threw it back into the hold.
Yet in the tiny village of San Isidro, some old people live as their anscestors must have hudreds of years ago. They grow their own crops, wash their clothes in the river and rear cattle for the slaughter. As I approached San Isidro during a hike, I small a tiny, wrinkled stick of a woman bent over and hacking away at a dry plant with an axe. When I returned down the path some twenty minutes later, she had hauled the bundle of sticks onto her fragile back and was walking across some stepping stones, struggling to protect her feet from the surging water.
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
A journey to spiritual enlightenment
From Mendoza, I crossed the border back into Chile, armed with Kafka´s "The Trial", a book that left me a little cold, and not in a good, chilling sense. Because of the crazy road system, I had to retrace my steps back to Santiago, passing through Puente del Inca for the third time, and eating salted, greasy chips in the huge bus terminal in the Chilean capital.
I have realised that I haven´t yet mentioned the food and drink on offer here in South America. There is a huge array of things on offer, many of which revolve around char-grilled meat. You have the tradtional, lomo, which is just a beaf steak, or can branch out and try the lomo a lo pobre, or poor man´s steak. A poor man would die for this steak, a huge slab of meat with a sloppy egg on top. This has been a favourite for the last few weeks. Down in Patagonia, restauranteurs specialise in lamb burgers, while in Bolson and Bariloche, I had the best ice-cream that I had ever tasted, dark, bitter chocolate interspersed with pieces of real orange and tart, refreshing grapefruit that tasted as if you were eating the real thing. Around Valpo, they go for their fish dishes, sopa de mariscos and reineta a la salsa margarita, being just a couple of the wonders on offer, the latter a delicate white fish bathed in an intolerably rich, creamy sauce. On every street corner in Santiago, streetvendors cry out in front of temporary stands piled high with caramel nuts and offer a strange peach drink, with sweetcorn at the bottom, too sweet to be recommended, while in the restaurants you are always given an appetiser of bread and a tangy tomato sauce, full of coriander. Wholemeal bread has yet to come to South America. They subsist instead on crumbly white bread filled with small holes, served on its own, or filled with hard pieces of fat. And then there are the empanadas, cornish pasty type confections filled with meat or cheese and ham. They are far bigger in Chile than in Argentina. The South Americans also maintain a fatuous distinction between the medialuna and the croissant, the former a very small, sweet pastry and the latter, a normal croissant as a European would understand it. Cakes they have inherited from the Germans and call them kuchen. When they try to create a native variety, it inevitably ends in an ugly mountain of whipped cream. Under the stars of the Andes and served by a local of indigenous blood, I ate a fantastic sandwich filled with steak, tomato salsa, lettuce, cheese and ham. On this trip up the Elqui valley, I tried Cazuela con ave for the first time, a steaming, refreshing soup served in a small, deep bowl, packed full of chicken, vegetables and coriander.
Pisco sour is a drink served in Chile and Peru and consists of the spirit, Pisco, lemon juice and sugar. Often it is topped off with frothed eggwhite and a sprinkling of sugar around the rim of the glass. One of the reasons for going to the Elqui valley was to see one of the Pisco factories that harvest the grapes hanging languidly from the vines and turn them into this strange concoction. The valley is spectacular for its contrasts; between the lush valley floor and the barren mountain sides, the bright green vines and the thousands of towering cactic, the sweltering hot days and the cold, clear nights. Such a climate is perfect for growing grapes, and also for viewing the stars. Many international organisations have taken advantage of this fact and have built huge observatories in the area. I took a tour to the Mamalluco observatory from Vicuna, a charming small village hidden between the folds of the hills, with low adobe houses and gardens where orange and lemon trees spring forth, the fruit almost indecently ripe. The tour to the observatory was spectacular, if a little marred by two screaming children (memory of your own childhood fades fast). The guide taught us how to locate the Cruz del Sur (cross of the south), an imperfect figure formed of five stars. If you measure four and a half metres following the line that connects the head and foot of the cross and then trace this virtual line vertically downwards, you will have reached due south. You must not confuse the cruz del sur with the Cruz falso, though, which will lead the unsuspecting traveller astray.
Yesterday, I ventured up the Valle Cochiguaz after poking my head into Pisco Elqui, a tiny village that seemed to have been lulled to sleep by the peaceful atmosphere of the valley. Almost no-one was around and I had to resort to asking directions to a cafe in a cerveceria where two fat men were repairing a toilet on the floor. The cerveceria alone was open for business. The settlements in the Valle Cochiguaz were established by hippies in the 1960s who believed that the age of Aquarius had shifted the centre of the world´s energy away from the Himalayas and towards this small tributary of the Rio Elqui. Significantly, the river in the Cochiguaz valley is not called the Rio Cochiguaz, but the Rio Magico. The valley looked strangely bleak in the grey light, but became more interesting further up as the rock changed colour from grey to a dark purple and the ubiquitous alamo trees reared up next to the river. Weeping willows, trumpet like flowers and thick undergrowth followed the line of the river and stopped abruptly at the valley sides, where tawny srcub and bulging cacti took over, clinging to the steep valley sides. I passed hundreds of bushes on the side of the road which must have evolved to conserve their leaves in this harshe, arid environment. Long, sharp thorns as big as my index finger (and I have a big index finger) spiralled out between the leaves, to deter the hardy, speculative goats that swarmed around (they make another local dish, by the way). Never trust the Rough Guide. The place where I had intended to stay didn´t exist, so I continued on up the dusty track, passing my first new-age hotel (surely it should be called dark age) which offered to unlock your bodies physical and mental energy through massage, reflexology, connection with the earth (I feel like writing galvanism) and magnetic therapy. Maybe a little like shock-therapy, or api-therapy, a treatment where you are repeatadly stung by bees in order to cure numerous ailments. You can fork out over a hundred dollars for this therapy in Alcohuaz at the upper end of the Elqui valley.
In the dirk back yard, concentric circles had been daubed in white paint, suggesting some rite. After hitching a ride on the back of a capricious horse with some gauchos, I finally reached my destination, a small hamlet whose doors shook in the howling wind. Cotton like buds had been blown off near-by bushes and were swirling through the air. After settling in, I set off in search of the Piedra del guanaco. It stands alone in an isolated field, guarded by Alsation dogs which threatened to make it an expensive trip. There are three different symbols scraped into the granite rock of the piedra, all of them stick-like. One is a strange symbol which looks like an upturned table with circular knobs, the second is the guanaco and the third is an impressionistic drawing of a snake (Inca). If I hadn´t known that the animals represented on the rock were supposed to be guanaco, I would have said they looked like deer (cue Karl Pilkington comment from podcast with Ricky Gervais). A sign to the left of the Piedra announced that that this was a Centro Magnetico, or Magnetic centre. The 60s have a lot to answer for. Incidentally, I see that Hazel Blears is being touted as the Labour Party´s Margaret Thatcher. If so, God help the Labour party.
I have realised that I haven´t yet mentioned the food and drink on offer here in South America. There is a huge array of things on offer, many of which revolve around char-grilled meat. You have the tradtional, lomo, which is just a beaf steak, or can branch out and try the lomo a lo pobre, or poor man´s steak. A poor man would die for this steak, a huge slab of meat with a sloppy egg on top. This has been a favourite for the last few weeks. Down in Patagonia, restauranteurs specialise in lamb burgers, while in Bolson and Bariloche, I had the best ice-cream that I had ever tasted, dark, bitter chocolate interspersed with pieces of real orange and tart, refreshing grapefruit that tasted as if you were eating the real thing. Around Valpo, they go for their fish dishes, sopa de mariscos and reineta a la salsa margarita, being just a couple of the wonders on offer, the latter a delicate white fish bathed in an intolerably rich, creamy sauce. On every street corner in Santiago, streetvendors cry out in front of temporary stands piled high with caramel nuts and offer a strange peach drink, with sweetcorn at the bottom, too sweet to be recommended, while in the restaurants you are always given an appetiser of bread and a tangy tomato sauce, full of coriander. Wholemeal bread has yet to come to South America. They subsist instead on crumbly white bread filled with small holes, served on its own, or filled with hard pieces of fat. And then there are the empanadas, cornish pasty type confections filled with meat or cheese and ham. They are far bigger in Chile than in Argentina. The South Americans also maintain a fatuous distinction between the medialuna and the croissant, the former a very small, sweet pastry and the latter, a normal croissant as a European would understand it. Cakes they have inherited from the Germans and call them kuchen. When they try to create a native variety, it inevitably ends in an ugly mountain of whipped cream. Under the stars of the Andes and served by a local of indigenous blood, I ate a fantastic sandwich filled with steak, tomato salsa, lettuce, cheese and ham. On this trip up the Elqui valley, I tried Cazuela con ave for the first time, a steaming, refreshing soup served in a small, deep bowl, packed full of chicken, vegetables and coriander.
Pisco sour is a drink served in Chile and Peru and consists of the spirit, Pisco, lemon juice and sugar. Often it is topped off with frothed eggwhite and a sprinkling of sugar around the rim of the glass. One of the reasons for going to the Elqui valley was to see one of the Pisco factories that harvest the grapes hanging languidly from the vines and turn them into this strange concoction. The valley is spectacular for its contrasts; between the lush valley floor and the barren mountain sides, the bright green vines and the thousands of towering cactic, the sweltering hot days and the cold, clear nights. Such a climate is perfect for growing grapes, and also for viewing the stars. Many international organisations have taken advantage of this fact and have built huge observatories in the area. I took a tour to the Mamalluco observatory from Vicuna, a charming small village hidden between the folds of the hills, with low adobe houses and gardens where orange and lemon trees spring forth, the fruit almost indecently ripe. The tour to the observatory was spectacular, if a little marred by two screaming children (memory of your own childhood fades fast). The guide taught us how to locate the Cruz del Sur (cross of the south), an imperfect figure formed of five stars. If you measure four and a half metres following the line that connects the head and foot of the cross and then trace this virtual line vertically downwards, you will have reached due south. You must not confuse the cruz del sur with the Cruz falso, though, which will lead the unsuspecting traveller astray.
Yesterday, I ventured up the Valle Cochiguaz after poking my head into Pisco Elqui, a tiny village that seemed to have been lulled to sleep by the peaceful atmosphere of the valley. Almost no-one was around and I had to resort to asking directions to a cafe in a cerveceria where two fat men were repairing a toilet on the floor. The cerveceria alone was open for business. The settlements in the Valle Cochiguaz were established by hippies in the 1960s who believed that the age of Aquarius had shifted the centre of the world´s energy away from the Himalayas and towards this small tributary of the Rio Elqui. Significantly, the river in the Cochiguaz valley is not called the Rio Cochiguaz, but the Rio Magico. The valley looked strangely bleak in the grey light, but became more interesting further up as the rock changed colour from grey to a dark purple and the ubiquitous alamo trees reared up next to the river. Weeping willows, trumpet like flowers and thick undergrowth followed the line of the river and stopped abruptly at the valley sides, where tawny srcub and bulging cacti took over, clinging to the steep valley sides. I passed hundreds of bushes on the side of the road which must have evolved to conserve their leaves in this harshe, arid environment. Long, sharp thorns as big as my index finger (and I have a big index finger) spiralled out between the leaves, to deter the hardy, speculative goats that swarmed around (they make another local dish, by the way). Never trust the Rough Guide. The place where I had intended to stay didn´t exist, so I continued on up the dusty track, passing my first new-age hotel (surely it should be called dark age) which offered to unlock your bodies physical and mental energy through massage, reflexology, connection with the earth (I feel like writing galvanism) and magnetic therapy. Maybe a little like shock-therapy, or api-therapy, a treatment where you are repeatadly stung by bees in order to cure numerous ailments. You can fork out over a hundred dollars for this therapy in Alcohuaz at the upper end of the Elqui valley.
In the dirk back yard, concentric circles had been daubed in white paint, suggesting some rite. After hitching a ride on the back of a capricious horse with some gauchos, I finally reached my destination, a small hamlet whose doors shook in the howling wind. Cotton like buds had been blown off near-by bushes and were swirling through the air. After settling in, I set off in search of the Piedra del guanaco. It stands alone in an isolated field, guarded by Alsation dogs which threatened to make it an expensive trip. There are three different symbols scraped into the granite rock of the piedra, all of them stick-like. One is a strange symbol which looks like an upturned table with circular knobs, the second is the guanaco and the third is an impressionistic drawing of a snake (Inca). If I hadn´t known that the animals represented on the rock were supposed to be guanaco, I would have said they looked like deer (cue Karl Pilkington comment from podcast with Ricky Gervais). A sign to the left of the Piedra announced that that this was a Centro Magnetico, or Magnetic centre. The 60s have a lot to answer for. Incidentally, I see that Hazel Blears is being touted as the Labour Party´s Margaret Thatcher. If so, God help the Labour party.
Friday, 1 May 2009
Bikes and wines
The last three days have been spent in Mendoza, a city in the West of Argentina which is famed for its red wine, Malbec in particular. The city was built on a fault line and was completely razed to the ground in the early twentieth century. Because of that, the roads are wide and lined with trees to prevent debris from falling buildings from damaging other buildings. On my first night in Mendoza, I was sitting near the central square drinking coffee when my chair started to rock back and foreward, as if someone had grabbed the back legs and had started to shake them. I looked down at the ground, bemused, and then at two old men sitting beside me who explained that it had been a small terremoto, or earthquake.
I had been told that Mendoza was a beautiful city, large and chilled out. I didn´t like it nearly as much as some of the other places I have visited. The wide roads seem to serve only to carry thousands of cars, making the city noisy and polluted. Plus, on the side of every road runs a deep ditch filled with stinking, fetid water. It also has the worst supermarket in the world, but more of that later.
The climatic conditions around Mendoza are perfect for the production of red wine. Almost no rain falls, preventing the grapes from being afflicted by the diseases that are associated with humidity. The long, hot days make the grapes big and juicy, with a high sugar content. This translates into very strong, bold red wines with an alcohol content of twelve to fourteen percent. Like every other gringo, I hired a bike on my second day and toured some of the vineyards in Maipu. I soon realised why the bikes had only cost 40 pesos for the whole day. The handlebars creaked, my right brake didn´t work and my rock-hard saddle kept slipping down, making it ever hard to peddle. Combine that with lorries and copious amounts of wine, and you might have had an explosive mix. Luckily, I am still here to write this blog. Despite all the hype, the wine was underwhelming, and I have since found out from a man in the hostel that the wine is superior in the region of Lujan de Cuyo. Despite being aged for two years in oak casks, the wine was acid and astringent, leaving tannins burning in your throat for several minutes after the tasting. Far better was the lunch that I had with two Frenchman from Paris and the liquour and chocolate store. In a tiny kitchen, on a road a few miles from civilisation, two cute, bashful women make a crazy array of flavoured liquours, from chocolate and dulce to leche to grapefruit. All the fruit liquours are made using the fruit that grows in the beautiful garden adjacent to the kitchen.
I took a bus back to Mendoza and saw an amazing advert on the side of a bus, featuring David Nalbandian and pain relief tablets. He was shown in battle garb, a metal helmet, a chainmail vest and a leather skirt hiding his podge. In his left hand, he clutched a spear and he was staring out from the bus intently, taking himself far too seriously.
The most interesting experience I had in Mendoza was in a supermarket, a huge Carrefour just a few blocks from the hostel. I had finished my wine tour and was lusting after a green Thai curry, with sweet coconut milk and handfuls of coriander. I hobbled over to the vegetable section in my new flip-flops and picked out two shrivelled, dessicated green peppers (red peppers were nowhere to be seen), a courgette, two chillies, a clove of garlic and two onions. I couldn´t find any ginger, so I went over to the women at the scales. She barked back at me that they only had powdered ginger, and that I would have to place each separate item I had picked out in a separate plastic bag. My vegetables now covered in metres of plastic, and some tasteless ginger and paprika shoved into a bag, I went back to the scales. The woman took one look at my things and declared that I couldn´t have the chillies, the courgette, the ginger or the paprika because they didn´t come to fifty grams. Those are the rules, she said, despite my protestations and those of an old local man to my right. Not once did she look at me, but continued to serve other customers with flashing arms, barking out replies through her slit of a mouth. Apparently you can´t eat if you are alone in Mendoza. I looked for some chicken, but they didn´t have any. Local argentines battled for asado beef, while bored looking cleaners swung their mops from side to side. So bored were they that the mop heads never actually touched the floor. I dropped the basket off in the wine section and beat a speedy retreat. If a country can´t organise a supermarket, how can it organise an economy. That said, the company is French, so maybe blame can be apportioned elsewhere...
Tomorrow, I go to La Serena in Chile and the Elqui Valley, complete with Pisco and hippies. My trip has suddenly started to revolve around alcohol.
I had been told that Mendoza was a beautiful city, large and chilled out. I didn´t like it nearly as much as some of the other places I have visited. The wide roads seem to serve only to carry thousands of cars, making the city noisy and polluted. Plus, on the side of every road runs a deep ditch filled with stinking, fetid water. It also has the worst supermarket in the world, but more of that later.
The climatic conditions around Mendoza are perfect for the production of red wine. Almost no rain falls, preventing the grapes from being afflicted by the diseases that are associated with humidity. The long, hot days make the grapes big and juicy, with a high sugar content. This translates into very strong, bold red wines with an alcohol content of twelve to fourteen percent. Like every other gringo, I hired a bike on my second day and toured some of the vineyards in Maipu. I soon realised why the bikes had only cost 40 pesos for the whole day. The handlebars creaked, my right brake didn´t work and my rock-hard saddle kept slipping down, making it ever hard to peddle. Combine that with lorries and copious amounts of wine, and you might have had an explosive mix. Luckily, I am still here to write this blog. Despite all the hype, the wine was underwhelming, and I have since found out from a man in the hostel that the wine is superior in the region of Lujan de Cuyo. Despite being aged for two years in oak casks, the wine was acid and astringent, leaving tannins burning in your throat for several minutes after the tasting. Far better was the lunch that I had with two Frenchman from Paris and the liquour and chocolate store. In a tiny kitchen, on a road a few miles from civilisation, two cute, bashful women make a crazy array of flavoured liquours, from chocolate and dulce to leche to grapefruit. All the fruit liquours are made using the fruit that grows in the beautiful garden adjacent to the kitchen.
I took a bus back to Mendoza and saw an amazing advert on the side of a bus, featuring David Nalbandian and pain relief tablets. He was shown in battle garb, a metal helmet, a chainmail vest and a leather skirt hiding his podge. In his left hand, he clutched a spear and he was staring out from the bus intently, taking himself far too seriously.
The most interesting experience I had in Mendoza was in a supermarket, a huge Carrefour just a few blocks from the hostel. I had finished my wine tour and was lusting after a green Thai curry, with sweet coconut milk and handfuls of coriander. I hobbled over to the vegetable section in my new flip-flops and picked out two shrivelled, dessicated green peppers (red peppers were nowhere to be seen), a courgette, two chillies, a clove of garlic and two onions. I couldn´t find any ginger, so I went over to the women at the scales. She barked back at me that they only had powdered ginger, and that I would have to place each separate item I had picked out in a separate plastic bag. My vegetables now covered in metres of plastic, and some tasteless ginger and paprika shoved into a bag, I went back to the scales. The woman took one look at my things and declared that I couldn´t have the chillies, the courgette, the ginger or the paprika because they didn´t come to fifty grams. Those are the rules, she said, despite my protestations and those of an old local man to my right. Not once did she look at me, but continued to serve other customers with flashing arms, barking out replies through her slit of a mouth. Apparently you can´t eat if you are alone in Mendoza. I looked for some chicken, but they didn´t have any. Local argentines battled for asado beef, while bored looking cleaners swung their mops from side to side. So bored were they that the mop heads never actually touched the floor. I dropped the basket off in the wine section and beat a speedy retreat. If a country can´t organise a supermarket, how can it organise an economy. That said, the company is French, so maybe blame can be apportioned elsewhere...
Tomorrow, I go to La Serena in Chile and the Elqui Valley, complete with Pisco and hippies. My trip has suddenly started to revolve around alcohol.
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