Navidad Days: Photos from Rancagua

i have spent almost every day being exausted by requests to play different sports. here was a break in the action (cristobal , me, sebastian- note i finally have a touristy NZ shirt to go with my touristy latin american shirts (now numbering 4)! it's a collection! thanks mum!)

as far as i'm aware there's not big nazi problem around here - i certainly haven't seen any swastikas waving in the wind - but there's really nothing like drawing an adolf apostrophe on a person's upper lip... where ever you might go.

mari-v and geraldo have five cherry trees that you can climb for fresh black cherries (aaaahhhhh!!!)

valley of the dolls.

this is what i managed to do to my toe, just walking across a lawn.

bebe finds what is said to be Santa's cape, lost as he was fleeing the scene.

dances with butterflies

in coroico, bolivia there are two main day walks to do. one leads up cerro uchimachi - a leg grabbing march up up up through jungle and scrub to a mountain top in the clouds where you can see almost nothing but at least it´s so cold you´ve stopped sweating - and the other to a pair of waterfalls, locally simply known as las cascadas. both of these waterfalls are interupted halfway down by a deep fenced-off reservoir (though the fences have somehwat been pulled apart by eager children and backpackers looking for a chilly dip) that overflows into the jungle below.

at the second cascada Marce and I stopped for lunch. after a few minutes of quiet munching, the dragonflies and butterflies put on a show. this one, in particular, liked me (and later returned to feast or fondle my forearm):

back in santiago

after a 9 hour bus from La Paz to Arica - via a shed in the Andes that is used for Bolivan customs (thanks for not searching me, i had two swiss army knife and a bottle of liquid gas on me) - then 10 hours waiting around Arica photographing hawks on El Morro and visiting a beach or two (where vendors carrying plastic boxes bring Chilean pies and donuts to you, to you on your towel)...
...then three hours at the Arica airport (nowhere near Arica) talking in pigeon-Spanish to a lovely family from Peru about the charms of New Zealand (lots of space, a socail welfare system, low levels of corruption), one hour waiting for our delayed flight (at 3am), 3 hours on a plane to Santiago, 20 minutes on a bus and half an hour on a packed morning-commuter metro to Marce´s brother´s apartment... and I´m wide awake it´s morning.

notes from Arica, in La Florentina (best sandwich in town, 1,300 pesos):
1. how can it be that the same scandalous affair-a-minute soap opera - Lola - is on every time we come to this restaurant, even a month between visits, at different hours? interupted only by ten minute news flashes, this program seems to centre on a man in woman´s body mediating the lives of her friends (a group that changes with each episode i think). is this a Lola-only channel?
2. 1,300 pesos buys me a sandwich here. in La Paz it would get me the sandwich with fries and a coke.
3. Bolivians love fried chicken. those in the know will point out to you that Peruvians know their food. cerviche, trucha, milanesa, sopas, they do it all, with variety and spice... but something has happened to Bolivian cuisine at some point to put their culinary compass at opposites with their neighbours. nearly every single street in La Paz has one, if not two or more, places to buy fried chicken (always served with french fries). I did not see a McDonalds or KFC in all of Bolivia or Peru (though I spied one Burger King in La Paz), however you can barely walk a block without coming in sight of a Pollo Frito, with its yellow and red lettering and small waddling-chick-in-a-baseball-cap logo. these places are so popular, many of them are open all night and have djs spinning the wheels of steel through a pumping PA as you rip through the crispy crumbed flesh. for two nights I thought it was radio station outside our hostal playing booty-shaking hits into the night - one night at 2am Night Fever was followed by Staying Alive only to have the senatorial voice of the dj announe the triumphant return of Night Fever to the night air - only to make the connection later between the disco rhythms and the fecund odour of 11 herbs and spices. the poultry place was pumping, on a wednesday night!
4. Gyspies. I saw, I believe, my first gypsy in Latin America today, at first from afar as she seemed deeply engaged in a conversation with a couple. She was quite fair in a hippy sun-dress like brethens at the beach, sun wrinkles like whiskers around her eyes and a look in those eyes like an aunt telling stories of noisy neighbours. she was, it developed, harrassing the couple for money 'for bread'. She went as far as to lay a hand on her subject´s shoulders, breaking what I thought to be part of the beggar´s contract.
I had seen this contract broken once before - when one of the many desperate child-laden and brightly-coloured Aymara women on the streets of La Paz reached out and touched the arm of small boy, gaining an instantaneous and irrate response from the boy´s father - and had had it broken in Coroico when a small messy-mouthed boy with clean clothes, sticky hands and big eyes blank as blackboards got fed up with my definite no´s and reached out for my arm and then my leg as I, in shock at the first touch, backed away.
The gypsy woman did not, as it turned out, address me. I was instead asked for money by her facsimile, bringing up the rear. She touched my arm like a cousin and asked me, in Spainsh, 'young man do you have any money?'
Afterwards Marcela told me I was right to not reply and keep walking. She informed me these 'gypsies' could be found in Valpariso and should be, under all circumstances, avoided. Do not talk to them, even to say 'no', because this will bring on a conversation of spiralling abuse. One word is taken as an oppourtunity to follow someone home, begging and barrating.
The popular history then handed to me as explanation is that these are the beggarly remains of a once productive and unproblematic group of emigré gypsies. Whereas the socially acceptable and productive have, over time, been absorbed into their adopted country's nationality - what once was gypsy now lives by another name - the remains are the only ones to still bear the sign 'gypsy' and thereby justify the well-worn stereotypes and all the spite they require - harsh, lazy, thieving.
Can this all be ture?
5. in La Paz I walked 6 blocks for bread when there was a bakery across the road.

christmas card time:
waving to all youse in New Zealand, from Arica, Chile.

one photo only

near Lago Chungara, Región 1, Chile

my beard is more impressive now.

collected notes: Bolivia

1. in new cities it is funny how you don´t see people you know, of course, but their mutations, adaptations, alternate lives. celebrities, acquantainces, close friends, all reincarnated.

2. in latin america in general you can find anything for your domestic life on the street. in some cases it is a form of begging (clothes hooks, individual band-aids for sale), but usually it is just someone´s business, on a table, on the street. you also find that shops exist in clusters , selling exactly the same thing. the interior of the shops will even be identical. it´s like they´re modelled on a bus station rather than a village. oh look, i´ve come to the sandpaper district!

3. Marce was 'accidentally' splashed with a bottle of water and I was finally called a 'gringo' (by a small shoe-shine boy).

4. in La Paz, maybe shoe-shiners wear full sleeves and balaclavas, despite the heat. apparently, so we found out, this is to conceal their identity.

5. mountains cut off like a sponge cake by a ceiling of white icing.

6. a landslide occurs 25kms out of Coroico. we stop and I go to the front of the queue of minivans. various men start clearing away the boulders by hand. I pick up one big stone and move it to the side of the road, dust off my hands and give everyone a satisfied smile.

7. Coroico. it rains very hard here in the Yungas (essentially the beginning of the Amazon basin). on our first night here at El Cafetal we witnessed what I took to be some very hard rain and some very loud thunder. the following day our hostal's crepe-making owner - Augustine (big french nose, jandals, short shorts) - told us that was 'nothing'. the rain, he said, gets so hard sometimes 'you really shit' (my translation). apparently what happens is that the really hard rain falling on the corrugated iron roofs (the roof of choice around here, apart from thatching) creates an electrical charge that can then be dispersed through your houses circuit board, destroying your appliances and making your fridge spontaneously combust. when it starts raingin around here (and it can rain for 5 days straight), people unplug their fridges... if they have one.

8. there are birds here that sound like cats crying.

9. a beautiful pink and black butterfly got its 'mack on' with my forearm. Marce captured it on camera.

10. the 'World´s Most Dangerous Road' (La Paz to Coroico) did not feel very dangerous, even with a minivan full of 16 Bolivians (18 of us in total). in comparison to Ruta 11 in Chile, it´s not even nail-nibbling. the corners have large margins and fences and very few verge on sheer drops of more than 300m. this is not to say the figures of deaths on this one road are remiss (100 a year) but that it is not the most dangerous - to my mind - in terms of the leave your lane = die for sure equation.

11. in Villa Fatima, La Paz you get the chance to see the backs of a lot of economico buses (same price as a minivan, but a little more room) which are usually adorned with an airbrushed image. prime choices include:
Mufasa in the clouds
Speedy Gonzales
Goku going Super Sayan
a detailed depiction of the Twin Towers memorial in New York City flanked by busts on Osama Bin Laden and Jesus H. Christ

12. many camioneros on Ruta 11 drive with a female companion. she is routinely a white blonde woman in a red dress that reveals ample mamories. each time it takes a moment to realise she is a seat cover.

13. i bought a charm of the Virgin of Copacabana and attached her to my swiss army knife. now i cut with the miraculous.

from la paz, bolivia

hey kids, so, since we last talked there was... a lot.

macchu picchu to agua calientes to cuzco
this was about the time I started to feel less than swell. after climbing wayna picchu I waited around the front gate of macchu picchu for marce and some other from our group to come down. I contemplated buying a bottle of water to perhaps restore me but found out the prices were almost what they´d be in New Zealand. 18 sole sandwich? puh-leaze. after this we went to agua calientes where there was a big lunch for our trekking group... the scotish boys were also not feeling good, only ordering a place of potatoes and then staring at them, solemly, untouched, while all other chowed down. matthew the moutain-goat roofer from dorset bought the porters one of the comically large bottles of beer you see here (he´d already had two).

the train ride to cuzco was interesting because, firstly, i talked alot - having been seated across from two of my favourite people from our group (mara and sarah), who helpfully asked about my research interests, and then race relations in new zealand - and secondly because our train did something I´d never known a train to do... it went backwards and forwards, in near equal amounts. the first time it decided to make a radical change in direction I was seated on the toilet, watching the county-side wizz by. peru rail likes to segregate its trains in such a way that you do not have different classes in different compartments, but whole different trains. our tour company had put us on the touristico train, backed with backpackers. as we left agua calientes i looked out my window and saw the local train - peruvians only, standing room mostly - just in time to see two little incan angels flip me the bird.

anyway, the multi-directional train. basically for 4 hours we went backwards and forwards in varying amounts, receiving the explanation from the ticket agent that, well, this is how the train always goes to cuzco. brilliant. at around the four hour mark, most people having fallen asleep, the train aburptly stopped and we were informed there was a bus for 5 soles that would take us to cuzco in 10 minutes flat, or we could stay on the rockin-est train in south america for another hour. why did the bus take 10 minutes and the train 60? "because the train has to go back and forth into the station?"

well, we missed out on the bus. that was full in about a minute.

next time:
cuzco to puno to copacabana

i´m alive

yes i am, despite getting myself a nice high fever straight after the Inca Trail. day one i headed the pack. day two was slow torture. day three i mistook myself for an active person and ran, a lot, even going much further than i had to. day four, much of the same, including climbing wayna picchu. day five, back in cuzco, i was delusional and very week, doing cruel things to the hostal bathroom amenities.

i have lots of notes, and drawings. three from today:

1. on top of a micro, five sheep, their legs tied and entangled, lying on their backs watching as the altiplanos rise at 85kms per hour.
2. our bus driver has some kind of zen sense. we top a rise on the wrong side of the road and, at the same time, a van comes the other way, breaking the same rule.
3. 100 peruvina soles in the hand is much more valuable to a Bolivian border guard than an i-pod nano.

many more soon, and photos, i promise!

Tim