the hot water kids

These kids loved the camera. When I showed the little boy the video of him and his sister he lost it with joy. This is in Aguas Calientes, from early March, the day of completing the Machu Pichu trek. My old pal Pete and I bought them ice cream. It was real nice. (I've already told you about Pete, and these kids. Here is the story if you missed it.)

FROM THE ARCHIVES: CUZCO

* Much of the writing I have done so far on this trip has been by hand. I got to thinking that maybe some of it may be neat for you to read, so I am going to retype some of it and post it here as a "from the archives" thing.

This next post is a continuation (or more accurately, a prequel) to that rant I made about all the fear driving through me at the start of the trip. It shows the foundation of where these feelings erupted and the beginning of what would become a slight epiphany. It is a really long entry from a red spiral journal, written in very messy, sometimes impossible to read, thin black ink. I have tried to edit as little as possible of it.

One last thing: I don't want you to think I am so melodramatic as this next post would indicate. I was reading a lot of Malcom Lowry at the time, and I think this entry was kind of an exercise in detailing the psychotic, crazy little experiences perceived when traveling through mysterious, awful and beautiful worlds.


***



Sun/March 8/ 2009/ 10:15 p.m.

(Night bus to Puno and Copacabana)


"What am I looking for?" This is the question that bluntly kills me.

It looks like lightning is erupting, in soft tiny patches, above the Cuzco horizon of the dark Andes. Yes, it is lightning. It is getting larger now, and shooting out horizontally; looks as if light of a passing car momentarily strikes against a giant curtain, descending down toward old Inca valleys and lost empires.

How! Now each time I look up the light is becoming more fierce. But there is still no thunder. You can see the mountains only by their silhouettes against these eruptions in the sky. The forgotten mountains, or the invisible. Tonight there are no stars and only the street lights throughout the valleys and plateaux of Cuzco city make its land visible. Twinkling symbols of a desire to consume, either ourselves or this place.

Leaving town on this bus, now that we’re out of the city centre, the restaurants and hostels and tourists have disintegrated. Left behind are the insoluble inhabitants of this colonial scandal — pariah dogs, crying dirty children, women in bowler hats and rainbow ponchos — More lightning! No strikes, none audible, not yet. Two children hang like monkeys on the locked gate of a cement-block bodega, looking in. Driving past, we cross an outdoor party; it descends into an open field some distance away, where a band plays Quechan folk on a green wooden stage.

Near the road, just before the slight grassy slope approaching the stage, three young teen boys seem to be robbing — or molesting — a girl their own age. She screams and swings at them with a glass bottle, they laugh and tug at her clothes. Drivers sit in their taxis with bright lit signs, smoking or chewing coca leaf, and maybe forty other locals nearby, just watch. Or seem not to notice. A bottle smashes, a horn squeals in the distance, like a greasy finger rubbing against glass. Driving, still further, more vagrants have set up shop on the sidewalk: selling maiz, seeds, fruit, cigarettes. “Mate! Mate! Sandwich de pollo, Sandwich de pollo!” yells a woman, a dirty beige cylindrical bowler, with a wide ribbon the same colour. It has started to rain. The cement and mud brick houses don’t melt; a gas station is empty except for two attendants, one pissing into the road, facing our bus, the other tosses a cigarette. It’s raining, it’s pouring. The lightning, now flashes closer, brilliant neon purple. Still, no thunder… but maybe there is; it’s perhaps that distant roar. The sound of hundreds of revving engines, buried beneath the rock and mud of the great Andes. The mountains, in the mountains! And now, not even the Cusquenian sky or city or anything are visible. We have left the city.

Briefly, I pray to St. Christopher. The rain, the storm: As I’m leaving Peru! (I am always afraid of dramatic deaths, well timed, and symbolic.) The bus skids and drunkenly resumes it’s way. Ah, but here, more city, more buildings. Another empty gas station. And then another.

- No thunder, but the voices of the city haunt me, bother me.
- Mate! Mate! Sandwich de Pollo
- llamada, llamada
- massages! Massages!
- Puno Puno! Arequiiiiiipa, Arre aree are are-queeeeeeeepa. Ica ica, iiiica, La paz.

Earlier: The California girls trying to take pictures with the Peruvian woman on the street: ‘un foyo parami? Para mi para mi.. un foto…no? no!” The lady, shaking her head, her sad eyes, begging to understand; why a photo? Why me? A smarter tramp might have ask for a Sol or two. But maybe there’s dignity here. In it’s tiniest shred. The starving, the bitter, the inability to even want or know how to deal with the ignorance of a Catholic Supermodel Gringa. (Soon after this, I ate fries and pollo brasa with the girl and her friends. We said grace and prayed before eating.)

The bus slips, we are on a dirt path. Another gas station. We have stopped. Peddlers come on board the bus. A woman selling giant round rolls of flat bread – bigger than accordions. “pan solo un sol, pansolounsol.” The same whiney, nasal pitched scream as them all, as the bus station yodlers (Ica icaaaaa, arerrearrerarrequiiiiiiiiiiipa!) or the cellphone street vendors (yaaaamadas yaaamadas), these voices haunt me! Lightning and rain, pouring, filling up in rapid puddles on the blackened cement at the GRIFO gas station. Two men buy their tickets here, to Puno. They board soaked and sit far ahead. They own several plastic bags full of whatever, and stuff them in the rafters above and in the aisle before the stairway down to the first level of the bus. No one can manage to get by without tripping or barely tripping. Aha! More bread for sale. One of the passengers takes out a bag of flat loaves and makes his way to the back. “pan pan.” A man begins to snore. Two Scandinavian girls behind me laugh and talk. The snoring, the snoring. Driving through my thoughts. It seems to have stopped shooting lightning. The rain has slowed. A woman loads blankets and hats, and more bread, into the trunk of a hatchback taxi parked next to us. Still: no thunder, only from the phlegm filled snorer.

We have left the station, the snoring appears to have stopped for now, and I am the only one with a reading light on. Soon I shall turn it off and there will be no light, and no sound but of the road the splashing rain water. I will sit and wonder: “What is it I am looking for?” More truly, I am sure, since I know what it is, but “Why? Why am I here?” Why have I come to witness my own hell, human hells . . . Why alone? Dante takes with him Virgil, a ghost. Jacob is alone, without humanity, when he faces God, in his journey across the deserts of redemption. Where’s my angel, my anti-body, where’s the hell guide? It is here: the thunder. The bursts of fear and the longing — for love (indecipherable) happiness — the dreadful solitude and the blissful peace, alone. It is my words, my sickness, St. Christopher. Pachamama! It is fear that asks questions, which only get answered through gods or fate or whichever. Fear can be my only true conquest and amigo. It will be fear and mystery that keep me alive and kill me.

Your name is so regal

Buenos Aires is not an easy city. The name is confusing, false, a denial: "good air" supposes friendships and sweet rides, easy rides. As they say 'no hay aca': not here, there isn't.

But it is not a hard city either. Tonnes of drunks, transvestites, prostitutes, hostelers, backpackers, journalists, police, cabbies, art-deco mansions, clubs playing Oasis, nexus, plexus, rich ones, poor ones . . . spirals, stone, tall buildings, all of it. And so on. Is it really 7:48 a.m.? Is it really Thursday! Of course, of course it is. Two days ago I watched the sun come up, as I have several times this trip, with a few odd travelers, and I thought that this, this was something: "no one sees these things, no sees the city so naked, not like this..."

But today I saw the same sun come up - this time it looked more Tang and neon - today, and realized that maybe these nights aren't so special. Half the city sees this sun... but I can't decide if this is something to write home about or not. My roommates and I watched a man water the drive as the sun came up, through the rust and green paint terrace, we watched him three stories up, the sun reflecting off the puddles.

But who cares?

Anyway: no one sees the city so naked, not even us.

---

Spanish lessons and Tango. Living here in the Palermo Soho, Edificio de Burges y Armenia. A small maids room with a trundle bed and a private shower - where I sleep and make the bed each morning. So far the drill is wake up make coffee and read, then chess or read in the Parque Japonesa down the street. I am getting better at chess - play aggressive! like life! - and worse at reading: Miller is coming slowly, anxiously to an end.Let me just say, that if you pick up any of his books, you must give it time. . . the moments he paints are like amber trapped mosquitos: precious icons of time gone and beauty past, all of that.. etc etc... He makes art out of the pure human, (whats that word?) moment... What is that word....? The word starts with an "H". (Means takes joy from fruits and love, makes gods out of pleasure...what is that word???)

---

Sorry for all the stream of consciousness. I am tired and it is 7:57 a.m. I want to assure you that this is a perfectly respectable bed time for anyone here in the city of easy air, of beautiful air... and plus, there's a holiday tomorrow to commemorate the soldiers who died for the Falkland Isles. No one works tomorrow, except for: the taxi drivers, the waiter (mozos), the waitresses (mozas), the cell phone companies, the McDonalds, the lawyers, the tax men, the government, the police, the kiosko men, the carniceria men, the carniceria women (if there are any), the dude who makes emapanadas two blocks up Borges (God hope so), and finally, me. I work tomorrow. Must sleep.

Buenos.

Txo



ps: the word I couldn't remember was: HEDONISTIC.

Frozen in carbonite

This is my last day as a solo traveller. Tomorrow I meet two friends at our new apartment in Palermo Soho.

Time has flown by. I remember in Lima having some slight anxieties about the long stretch of weeks that laid before me. Actually, those anxieties, they weren't slight, not slight at all. I was damn worried, depressed even, and I kept asking myself: What have I got myself into? What the hell am I going to do here, in this crazy country, for the next 3 months?

But I can hardly believe that was me at all now. I miss Peru, I miss the people and the food. I never got to try the Guinea Pig roast, ha; there are many other cities I would have liked to see. And it seems I just flew right through Bolivia - what happened to Potosi? to Santiago? (the San Pedro prison tour...) The memory of these places flicker through me. Sparkle, fade, etc, etc...

As I said before - getting off the bus from Bolivia, into Chile — I felt like I left some stupefying circus, writhing and happy and dirt cheap. Like some kid terrified of a roller coaster, which he is persuaded to ride, and getting off, wishes the twisting, twirling steel-and-wood tracks would never come to their inevitable, terrible finish. I miss the roller coaster, although I hate it. Although it is reckless, dirty and cheap.

The essence of my trip is about to gain an entirely new flavour and formula; this writing is the nostalgia I am having for the first part - all things ineffable, I am trying to capture something about a brief part of my life which is all but over already. So brief and liquid it's hard to believe it happened at all - it is impossible to even really know what it is I am missing: but let's try to stick a few pegs around it.

I was alone and the people I met did not know me. Strangers all of them, and that made me a stranger too. There was no plan and no need to stay anywhere, or do anything. I spent days, too many, in Lima, not speaking a word of English. At least one third of the nights up there were in night busses, watching stars and finding constellations that don't exists in the skies back home; being the last one - every time - with the reading light on. Waking up too early, or too late, eating alone. My heart stopping almost every hour for the first two weeks from fear. Fear! That's the word.
The wonderful, horrible fear that existed for this first month and half, that is fading, is evaporating. What is left is the pulp, the idea of it: night bus to Trujillos; the cab driver who cursed me at the Huaca de Luna, only minutes after he drove off the road down a dirt path, through a twisting alley way of concrete , full of pariah dogs and chikens — scarred chicken missing feathers — he is trying to rob me— he says he is only taking an alternate route, and that the main one is closed. I grab on tight to my rucksack and ready myself to jump out of the yellow, rusted cab... wait, we have arrived. He tells me the cost is doubled and I tell him I am no estupido.... he spits on the ground at my feet and tells me I will regret it all. (Later, I see him waiting in the parking lot for me...I take the dirt path past the Huaca de Sol - a still buried temple - and get onto the collectivo mini bus. I ride back to town with farmers missing teeth, Peruvian wives and girls, and two perros sin pelo (dogs with no fur, sick black muts with tuffs of vomit coloured, wirey hair sparsely occuring on the muzzles and backs).

This alley way on Chile St., here in Buenos Aires, which I can't even explain or entirely remember.... I am with three Swedish boys, and we are looking for a bar party, and the American at the hostel has given us the wrong directions. It is three a.m. and a woman with her two toddlers playing in the shadows behind her - a normal sight here to see small kids on the street, playing with the stray dogs or eachother, at any hour - tells us that we are looking for this place, right there across the street. Foolishly the Swedes thank her, and offer her two pesos for the help - she inexplicably refuses the cash, perhaps because of the two police cars parked down the street, officers eye's trained on the gringos....the swedes foolish as always and very young meander into the dark building... inside a dark alley way...inside is not inside, but it is a roofless shanty court yard, a large wooden desk with a glass shield and a leading to this reception area is a line up of ten or twenty homeless, young and old, men. They lambast us all for our cigarettes and some spare change (monedas). This is not the party we are looking for, the Swedish boys are exhilirated and want to stay. They are buying drugs.... Watched the yolk -or pudding - sun come up over the Avenida de Mayo later that morning - this, after breaking into the rooftop terrace of a neighbouring hostel, and smashing the light sensor on the brick wall...

fear, destruction, discovery, some moments of absolute joy: this is life. And moments of absolutely loathing too. This is life?

I realize I have been very negative about the journey. Don't take it the wrong way. I am happy to be here, I think that I am generally a cynic with all things: anyway, I am just being honest. Traveling isn't all peaches and pancakes. It's difficult, it is scary (for me at least), but it is wonderful!

I am glad that this thing is over, this solo adventure, but that I want it to go on. It is better to leave something wanting more, then begging for it to be over. I'd rather be dragged out than dig my way out.


UPDATES:

- been searching for video camera person via craigslist because I start to work with SPIN Magazine this next week. Have at least 3 or 4 meetings set up with local boys and girls this week to meet a good partner. This is a good way to meet likeminded people.

- My laptop is working, it turned on for me, that little tease....

- book report to come this week on Miller's BLACK SPRING. Damn good, so good. Look our for it!

- if you haven't yet subscribed as a FOLLOWER to this blog, please do so now!

Thanks,


xot

jo y bos

Mendoza. et puis et puis....

Helping a French woman with a script she has written. She studies cinema and is interested in documenting the radical changes taking place in France in the late 60s and the simultaneuous dictatorship reining at the time in Brazil. I told her I´m interested in these kind of things and we have been talking alot about it. Maybe she will need a researcher or extra writer. She says so, anyway. et puis et puis... shes assembled a neat narrative which follows a French journalist with Brazilian familly back into the jungle to rescue an old friend. Contexts are colourful and the climax et denouement occurs within Carnivale... I imagine.

I am in Mendoza, reading Henry M., and will be for a few days. Having fun and perhaps too much fun. Bike tour of wine country on Tuesday.

00000

List of bad stuff that has happebnned this week




- Yerba Mate. I bought a Mate, the gourd carved device used for drinking the Yerba, and a bombijja (the metal strainer and straw) but whilst I was being taught how to cure the receptacle, I noticed it was roto, broken, and so now it slowly leaks, cries. (see note on Yerba, at bottom).

- iBook G4. People said bringing a laptop with me was risky. It would get stolen or I would get mugged. Jesus. Well I was doing fine until yesterday or the day before... getting of the bus from Salta I hastily threw my waer bottle in the bag wuith the laptop. The lid wasnt snug, and the water entered expensive electronic exposing holes and now the screen hums and wont turn on. I hope the files, pictures, et al.. are secure and alive. (meanign no more picture uploads, for now, and likely much more difficult to work and write)

- vintage 1950s Raybans; stolen or lost at Salta hostel.

- sleeping bag; riding in trunk of some angry Bolivian cab driver. It fell off my bag and he took off, quick time.

- green sleeves. my cold has still not died.

- power. need yet another set of power adaptors, for Argentina has differnet plugs. Meanign I have no camera for a bit.

Good stuff;

- discovered Pancho V... hotdogs. Which are footlongs that are made with your choice from millions of salsa and sauces, and topped with mini french fries. Price; priceless.

- Arrived in Mendoza. Met locals and some guys from Miami who work here and hung out at their apartment in a posh neighbourhood.

- have been in touh with Spin Magazine and will likely start filing stories for them as soon as I am settled and find a cameraman in B.aires. makign my user profile tmro



AGENDA AND OTHER LISTS

- buy tailored wool suit in market for cheap , and buy new sun glasses

- grapple with my desire for a shaved beard vs. the coolness of having a huge beard and the naggign thought that this is THE best time to grow face hair

- if shave is a yes, find a barber that will do a wet shave. (and maybe get a trim too)

- spend no money on Monday (new day; no money mondays)

- read more write lots more


YERBA; you probably dont know about Mate and the huge ritual Argentines have for it. It is tea time with a bunch of friends who sit around with thermos full of hot water and they pass around the Mate pot in a circle. Its an herbal tea. It tastes rather bitter but some people add sugar, and other spices to make it sweeter. Everyone has their own die hard rituals and it takes 24 hours to get the MAte ready for use for the first time - to cure it - which is what I am doing right now. Needless to say Yerba is a good way to make friends if you are a lonely traveler in Argentina, or Uruguay.

Salta'd

Last night a few friends and I went grocery shopping, here in Salta, a city at the northern end of vast Argentina. We bought four nice sized steaks and three bottles of red wine for under 10 dollars. Then we walked into the Plaza market and somehow got sucked into a casino; it took about half an hour to learn how to play the poker game, and about an hour to lose our 20 pesos each. Salta is fast and beautiful; I've probably had too much of the street meat, but it is all so good.

Not sure the plan yet, but might be headed to Mendoza tomorrow before finally arriving in Buenos Aires. But it's not exactly on the way: it's a 20 hour bus ride from Salta, and then once I leave Mendoza, it would be another 20 hours to BA. Yeah wine country and al of that, sounds good, but haven't really decided if its better to go solo and see all the other citites in between; Che is born in Rosario, Cordoba sounds exciting and uni-town-ish, etc...: these British friends of mine are going and I'm trying to figure out the plan.

Sad to have left behind the relative 3rd worldness of Bolivia and Peru now that it's gone. Trite to say it, but I am chastened from not having bought enough cheap Al Paca sweaters (only one, which I don't like much now) and cool leather goods. I didn't realize how different, and much more expensive this world would be. Getting into Chile felt like leaving the circus. All a sudden the roads are paved and the waiters expect tip.

Last week (I think), I travelled through the salt desert in Bolivia. At times, the vast white vista would reflect the sky (a thin layer of rain) and there would be nothing to tell you you weren't floating in heaven, except for the ground under your feet or the magic, enormous horizon of dead volcanoes. After a day of that you get into Salvador Dali territory (literaly, you see some places that he used as background for his work)... giant stone trees, smooth valleys and plateaux of brown sand desert, ornamented with stone obelisks and snow peaked volcano. (No hundred foot tall elephant nor gigantic eggs, however...)

Slept in salt hotel on outskirts of this tiny, beautiful city in the desert, where we bought wine (of course) and played cards with the other tourists, after taking in the sun set.... At night the skies twinkled as in Disney movies. The stars on and off like millions of beacons... bright... Orion the only one I can recognize (I think actually, someone told me, that the Southern Hemi stars are completely different...all except Orion and his bright, definitive Beetlejuice.. maybe his dogs - Cerebus...?....) The southern cross, what looks like teh big dipper upside down. I remember the second night walking 20 metres away from the camp and being completely lost in the sky for about 20 minutes. Later when the moon was out it was easier to walk...

I even met a Basque photo journalist, working freelance in San Pedro de Atacama (the entrance, beautiful, city ion Chile from the Bolivia border..I stayed one night...). He was a doc filmmaker in this town once and now was back to take some pictures, of all things, of the stars from Atacama observatory. Good life, good job, makes me wonder...

Have been trying to figure out the plan for summer. It was my One Month anniversary for taking off a few days ago (St Pats day I think...) Go sailing the Baltic? Live and learn on some boat which I have no idea how to work, but defintely would love to learn how... or get a job writing or something in Canada...(I am waiting on an offer, I hope, from the Montreal english daily.) Anyway: anyway: anyway: it's taking up a lot of thought.

BOOK REPORT:

just finished Lowry's UNDER THE VOLCANO. It is the most beautifully written, and yet awfully depressing, book I have read. A masterpiece work for its narrative - the plot takes place in one day, the day of the dead, in a small Mexican town, in the life of an ex-British consul...but it occupies a Shakespearian sort of eternity. I think it is mostly a Adam and Eve type story (the woman's name is Yvonne...) an attempt to sneak back in the garden. Or a lament of the fallen state of things (love, his own life). But what is lost is lost.

Lowry is either a Canadian or a Brit, depending who you ask. Canada in the book occupies the role of New Eden. The Mexico is hell (or not Mexico, but the self imposed vision, mythology, of the Mexico, is... I do it too, I have been doing it, mythologizing the difference of the people here... my hell. My heaven.)

The fact that 300 pages are here weaved and the plot lasts only hours, and stays stressful, interesting, tense, till the end, is wonderful, impressive. When traveling you are supposed to give up your books once read...but I love the verse so much I might read again. Or I might retype the parts I really loved to learn the poetry of them, to realize maybe how to do it... (a trick picked up from Hunter S Thompson, who used to retype Melville. And Melville probably did for Shakespeare...and so on... "you can see where the great tide has finally receded"...)

TODAY: gondola ride up Salta's volcano, bus station, laundry, and relax and write.

La Peace

Safe in Uyuni, and 1 hour away from embarking on a 3 day tour of the salt flats, via hired Jeep.

See you soon

T