South America Trip - 2005

Buenos Aires, Argentina - The End

2005-12-14T06:18:00.000-08:00

This will be the last entry.

I´d hoped to wrap this up with some kind of broad, sweeping statement about the meaning of life and the virtues of travel but the truth is I don´t think I´ve learned anything over the past couple months except how to buy a bus ticket in Spanish. I´ve met some really fine people, seen some pretty amazing things, and had more fun than you could fit into a wheelbarrow, but if anything I fear this trip may have retarded my ability to become a functioning member of society rather than fostered it. Living the good life is no way to motivate yourself.

So I´ll get on plane in a few hours and start trying to reprogram myself for the real world.

In closing, here are a few things I´ve seen and heard over the last couple days.

While walking through La Boca I passed a small hardware store and peeked in just in time to hear a kid who looked about seven tell the shopkeeper, "I need the paint to be this color." In his hand was a kind of outdoor light fixture with the blue paint peeling away. It was still attached by bolts to a couple of softball-sized chunks of concrete which I can only imagine used to be part of the outside of his house.

Before dinner the other night, we were sharing a few liters of beer while our old Aussie friend Amanda (who you may remember from such episodes as "snowed on at 16,000 feet on the way to Macchu Pichu," and who happened to be in B.A. at the same time as me) regaled us with stories of punching Owen Wilson in the nose at an Aspen ski resort and hopping over a guardrail to steal a guitar during a band´s setbreak in Vancouver to protest the lame cover of "Sweet Child Of Mine" they´d just played and sprinting away from security guards while performing what she considered to be a far superior version. When her Cuba Libre took a while to arrive, someone offered to pour her a beer and she said, "No thanks, I stopped drinking beer when I was four."

Last night I hung out with, among other good folks, a Scottish guy who chucked it all to come down here and kite surf. He spent the better part of an hour extolling the virtues of the kilt, insisting it´s a great ice breaker, a beautiful cultural exchange, and the perfect way to meet girls. He suggested that everyone should wear a kilt, and that it wouldn´t be the least bit of an affront to the Scots if everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. "After all," he said, "It wouldn´t have been too keen if the guy who invented sliced bread hadn´t shared it with the rest of the world, would it?"

I´ve unwittingly adopted the British tic of ending all my sentences with questions. Haven´t I?

I´ve seen several sunrises and sunsets.

I´ve photographed the buildings which stand in the locations where the homes of Che Guevara and Jorge Luis Borges once stood. I have no idea why.

I finally learned how to make a phone call.

So that´s that. I´ve got 32 hours of travelling to get home which begin in about 8 hours. Assuming I don´t "find myself" in that short period of time and veer off in some bizarre and unpredictable direction, I´ll see everyone in Seattle at the Park Pub on Thursday night around 10:30. That´s exactly where I was on Thursday night three months ago and very likely where I´ll be come the first lame Thursday in February.

I need a huge plate of sushi, a dinosaur-sized Blue Med salad from Costas Opa, a ticket to the Seahawk game, and a place to live. If anyone can help please email me.

Otherwise, keep the peace, take care, talksoon, and be good.

-chad

Buenos Aires, Argentina - Part 3

2005-12-12T07:26:00.000-08:00

Went to see a Boca Juniors soccer game yesterday with a guy from London and a guy from Brazil. It was exciting for me because I´ve never seen a professional soccer game, but these guys were going nuts because Boca apparently is one of the world´s famous clubs: home to Maradonna, housed in a famous stadium nicknamed "The Cauldron," and the pride and joy of La Boca, which is B.A.´s toughest, roughest, blue-collarest neighborhood. The antics of the fans there are legendary.

I was feeling pretty good about it until the guy from Brazil (who lives in Sao Paolo, mind you, one of the most-populated and insane cities in the world) approached me a little bashfully before we left and said, "Chad, do you know if we´re supposed to wear all neutral colors today or is would it be ok to wear this shirt with this blue stripe?"

I said, "Are you serious?"

He shrugged and walked back to his room. I immediately went back to mine, dug through my "luggage," and found a brown t-shirt, which I considered complimenting with a pair of brown pants. In the end, I figured I was safe in blue jeans but spent most of the rest of the day with my hands in my pockets, clutching my wallet and camera.

The game didn´t disappoint. I´ve never seen anything so ridiculous. Not even if you multiplied Crutcher by 60,000 would you have a collection of sports fans more intense than this. The visiting fans from Independiente were literally quarantined in one end of the stadium, sectioned off by 15-foot fences with barbed hooks on top. Just after halftime, the visiting fans started launching red plastic bags filled with urine and feces over the edge of the second deck, drilling more than a handful of hometown Boca fans directly in the heads and chanting "Now you´re the shitty ones who´ve been shitted on." But there was nothing to be done. The cops weren´t about to go up there to stop it and I was amazed at how well the Boca fans took it. I suppose those things were settled after the game, regardless of the fact that no Boca fan was allowed to leave the stadium until all of the visiting fans had been escorted out by police in riot gear.

I asked if this was special treatment due to the pissbag episode but was assured that it happens every game. "The pissbags or the police escort?" I asked. "Both," said the guy in front of me as he waved his Boca jersey above his head and chanted the words to one of the many songs that were sung throughout the game.

I´ve never seen so many people jump up and down in one place for so long without stopping.

Boca won 2-0 and people were really happy about that.

After the game, we went to watch people dance tangos in the street.

It was Sunday, so I got to bed early, around 3:00.

Buenos Aires, Argentina - Part 2

2005-12-10T09:28:00.000-08:00

There is a passion here that outweighs all other national interests. It supercedes the love of the tango, the madness of Maradonna, the addiction to máte, and the burgeoning psychoanalysis industry. It's bigger than the images of Che Guevera painted on every back alley wall and more intense than the graffiti desecrating every equestrian statue of General Julio Roca. It is the grandest of all Argentinian customs.

It is "leaning in doorways."

Everywhere you look, on every street, there are men leaning in doorways. Sometimes they smoke or sip máte, but mostly they just stand there, appearing to stare into space and guard doorways. The doorways never seem to lead anywhere. Upon closer investigation, you realize that these men are neither staring at nor guarding *anything*, as these words both suggest some minimal amount of purpose or activity and the people we´re speaking of are engaged in nothing of the sort. Often, they will raise one arm to about ear level in order to support the weight of the body as it is leaned against the concrete edifice of the doorway. People walk past them and they simultaneously appear to notice and not notice this happening. Many of them are balding and all have hairy arms. The sleeves are often rolled up. The faces are always severe.

It is a kind of stationary dance, the elements of man and doorway sometimes becoming so artfully intertwined that it´s impossible to distinguish one from the other. I´ve tried, when no one is looking, to lean in a few doorways myself, but have yet to even approach the level of skill that would be necessary to lean in a doorway publicly. Perhaps someday.

All throughout the city people go about their business, buying and selling and throwing bad attitudes at tourists. Vegetables fall on the ground and are picked up without a second thought. Traffic speeds by and newspapers are halved and quartered. Babies are carried in cloth sacks and children try to sell you cigarettes. And all the while, the unsung heros of Buenos Aires maintain their solemn vigil. Standing. Watching. Leaning. Always Leaning.

Leaning Men of Argentina, ¡I salute you!

Buenos Aires, Argentina - Part 1

2005-12-08T18:57:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to mince words here. Buenos Aires is outstanding.

Very much a city of contradictions, which isn't surprising considering it's history. They're very proud of Argentina in this town, and relatively convinced they're a cut above the rest of South America (and the rest of the country, for that matter) but just like in the U.S., nobody's really a native. They exterminated most of their Indians and the majority of the population came over from Italy, Spain, and Wales less than 200 years ago. B.A. was mostly a smuggler's paradise (like that planet where Han Solo blows Guido away) and when the Spanish Crown, way back in the day, declared that it was going to compliment the major port of Lima with an east-coast counterpart, the naming of Buenos Aires was akin to the U.S. declaring Las Vegas to be it's second capitol. Before that, the favorite pastime around here was trapping stray cattle and skinning them for the leather, leaving all the meat to rot in the fields and feed the stray dogs (which I'm guessing was the genesis of *that* whole problem.)

Not only was today the feast of the Immaculate Conception, but it also marked the 25th anniversary of the assasination of John Lennon, a wound from which the world of music still bleeds. I celebrated at the esteemed Jorge Luis Borges Cultural Institute by viewing two exhibits. One was a collection of sketches, paintings, and sculptures by Dali, taken from the period of time when he was obsessed with Don Quixote, along with his series of Tarot Cards, the Twelve Apostles, and the Ten Commandments. It was pretty austere and incredible. The other billed itself as a tribute to John Lennon: His Birth, Music, Art, Life, Politics, and Death. This turned out to be a poorly edited VHS tape illegally cobbled together from various sources (Anthology, Imagine, The Complete Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour, etc.) and projected from a portable machine onto a small screen. The quality was so bad that those little rainbow lines appeared between many of the cuts and several scenes were completely repeated. I paid the exact same entrance fee for these two exhibits.

I went to the Plaza de Mayo this afternoon to watch the Mothers of the Desaparecidos conduct their weekly march. In the late '70s and early '80s, Argentina conducted a little-discussed operation now known as The Dirty War, during which 30,000 intellectuals, students, and political dissidents vanished into the backseats of large black automobiles, never to be seen or heard from again. Most families never found the bodies and were never informed as to the reasons for the disappearances. This was a pretty moving spectacle, with the mothers, siblings, and children of the Desaparecidos marching, chanting, singing, and carrying signs, but was also a bit of a party, with many supportors turning out to cheer them on, sell and buy food, and gather with friends to read, talk, and sleep on the beautiful lawns that make up the plaza. A very odd combination of mourning and celebration.

Two nights ago, I went to the opera dressed in the same cords and shirt I've been wearing for the last three months. The general appearance of most of the people there, not to mention a sign out front, suggested that the appropriate attire for gentlemen was a coat and dark tie. I later learned, however, that in addition to catering to Buenos Aires' social elite, the opera house also sells standing room only tickets in the upper balcony to anyone who wants one for the equivalent of about three U.S. dollars.

I sort of split the middle by scalping an upper deck reserve seat off a woman who turned out to be a government official and college professor. She worked a neat little scam where she sold me her ticket for $10 and then bought a standing room ticket for $3, claiming that she "was not so much liking Strauss" and figured she "might be leaving early." A few minutes after I sat down in her seat, she followed and plopped down next to me.

"It seems to me," she said. "That the lady who usually sits in this seat very much likes Verdi and Puccini, and does not so much like Strauss. It seems to me she is not coming."

She was right. The lady never came, and my scalper saved herself $7.

I have a feeling that's more or less the way the Argentinian government works.

Need to get going now, as it's nearly midnight, which means dinnertime.

The computer I'm writing this from, by the way, is a Commodore.

Carmen de Patagones, Argentina

2005-12-06T06:53:00.000-08:00

It´s been a whirlwind 48 hours with not much happening, so this may be a confused entry.

Jumped on the train in Bariloche for a 16-hour ride from Westernmost to Easternmost Argentina, and was immediately greeted by about 30 13-year old kids heading out on a fieldtrip to the beach (much like the class trip to Washington DC I took in 8th grade) and the crazy British guy named Robert who I´ve now bumped into on the boat to Puerto Natales, the trails in Torres del Paine, the bus on Route 40, and the train to Viedma. It´s pretty uncanny. He´s a nice guy, older, very animated, and is constantly scribbling down notes. His handwriting is bad and I´ve never been able to figure out what he´s writing.

On this particular day, on which I learned that of several hundred passengers on the train I was impossibly seated next to Robert, it turns out that Robert was experiencing some severe nausea and general gastronomical discomfort, the development of which he described to me in excruciating detail during the first hour of the train ride.

"It´s really quite amazing," he´d say, examining his rather substantial belly with both hands, as though searching for a baseball that may have become lodged in there. "I´m really quite certain that I´ve no idea how this came on."

"Yes," I´d say. "It sounds awful."

"I mean, I´m just miserable," he´d answer. "It´s as though there´s something alive in there. I´m really feeling quite ill right now. I´m not certain how this will play out."

More rubbing of the tummy, to which we now add profuse sweating and shivering.

"I can´t imagine it´s anything I´ve eaten. Perhaps I´ve allowed myself to become dehydrated."

Later, when he was feeling better and the ride got a little bumpy, he did his best impression of that crazy piano player from the "Shine" movie, giggling uncontrollably in a way that betrayed his fears that the entire trip would be this bouncy.

"Oh-ho-ho! Here we go, Chad! Here we go now! It´s going to be a rough one it is! Oh my, my, my! Ho-ho! Dear, dear this could be a rough one, couldn´t it, Chad! Ho-ho-ho!"

Meanwhile, the 13-year old kids took a shine to me and gathered around in droves to chat in English and correct my Spanish and ask me to listen to their favorite songs on their CD players. It was good to be a curiosity rather than an annoying tourist for a change.

Enjoyed the perks of the train, which included the ability to walk around and even a decent dinner in the dining car. As for scenery, it was very much a repeat of Route 40, furthering my knowledge of the vastness of the nothing encompassed by much of this country. (8th largest in the world, I learned.)

The train arrived the following morning, just as I was finishing yet another breakfast of coffee and small pieces of round toast covered with this stuff called "Dulce de Leche" which essentially is a creamy caramel spread that is so addictive I´m convinced there are at least trace amounts of some opiate in there. Got to chatting with a guy named Jon from Brown U. who´d been studying in Mendoza for a semester and was now finishing off his time in Argentina by travelling around a little with his buddy on a very tight budget. He was kind of a slow-talking, granola-stoner type, and if he wasn´t from Cali or Colorado, he certainly should have been.

Met back up with him and his pal at the bus station and they were kind of a sorry pair. Even dirtier than me, with all kinds of odds and ends tied to the outsides of their backpacks with bits of twine and carrying torn plastic bags full of leftovers and a metal grill which they´d been using to cook. They said they were heading south.

"If you´re heading south, why did you take this train all the way east?" I asked them. They stood there, sleep-deprived and doe-eyed, staring blankly at me like I was a map of a city they´d never been to rather than a person who´d just asked them a perfectly reasonable question.

Something finally registered in Jon´s brain and he blinked.

"Oh," he said, as though he was thinking about it for the first time. He paused a second and then said, "I don´t know."

His friend then had the same revelation -- you could see it in his face.

"Oh, shit," he said, slowly letting one of his bags slip to the ground in a gesture that reeked of defeat. "That´s right..."

Keep in mind, these weren´t homeless guys -- one goes to Brown and the other lives in Monterey.

In any case, they finally bought a ticket to some godforesaken town on the eastern coast and headed off to a campsite to spend the night. After a quick pass through Carmen de Patagones, I´d decided it would be in my best interest *not* to stay there for the night and instead bought an 8pm ticket to Buenos Aires, making it two all-night trips in a row for me.

With 10 hours to kill, I figured I´d follow the fellas to their campsite while they set up their stuff and then head into town with them to grab some pizza and beers or something, seeing as how they were pretty good folks, the quality of whose company far exceeded their planning skills.

The walk to the campsite, though, went on much longer than I´d anticipated, and was punctuated with various fits of delirious laughter and beleaguered groaning as we turned corner after corner, negotiated a divided highway, and finally crossed a huge bridge. Jon´s buddy Rory was walking ahead and small pieces of food started to poke their way out of the torn shopping bag he was carrying. At one point, as we were walking single-file over the bridge, an entire loaf of bread worked it´s way out and fell on the ground without Rory even noticing. Jon turned around, giggling stupidly while the metal grill split into two pieces and fell to the ground as well

"Oh, man" he said to me, closing his eyes and looking skyward as he continued laughing deliriously. "Did you see that, Chad?"

I had seen it. I had also seen about enough. As politely as possible, I begged off and told the guys I was going to turn around and head into town, suggesting we try to meet up in a couple hours.

"Yeah," said Jon. "Good idea. Peace out, Chad."

As I said before, they were good guys and I really did hope to meet up and have a beer later rather than wander around solo for ten hours, but it was not to be.

Instead, I went to the tourist office where a woman who reminded me of the wardrobe specialist from "The Incredibles" gave me a 3-hour presentation on a 20-minute "historical walk" she suggested I take and loaded me up with 20 pounds worth of brochures advertising attractions around town which I would spend the rest of the day unable to locate. The place was absolutley dead, there were no people, and of the few establishments which existed most were closed. I finally gave up and went to have a beer at the only open cafe I could find.

Ten minutes after my beer arrived I looked up and there was Robert at a table across the room, sorting through the exact same unwieldy pile of brochures that I´d been given.

"Chad," he shouted from across the cafe, waving his arm. "Chad, hello! I´ve just had the most *extraordinarily* fascinating day! Isn´t this place marvelous?"

I went over to his table and set down my beer.

"Did you really see all these things?" I asked him, gazing down at the brochures for the abandoned fort, the secret caves, the captured British flag, the first school, the old house, the famous restaurant, the bar with the curious history.

Robert sipped his coffee and examined the mess of information spread before him.

"Not a bloody one of them," he said.

Bariloche, Argentina

2005-12-04T06:19:00.000-08:00

If anyone is wondering what Casey Affleck is up to, I can tell you with absolute confidence that he´s posing as an Irish backpacker and running around Argentina with two of his buddies who are so sunburned from a long day on a Chilean volcano that they´re shedding more flesh than a leper colony. Two days of banging around this vacation town with those guys has been entertaining and fun but hasn´t yielded any fantastic stories -- it´s been more like watching a Three Stooges marathon on The WB.

One of the dogs from El Bolson followed me here.

There are three bars in this town and all of them are Irish pubs, which rather dismayed the Irish lads. Last night one of the Irish pubs had a flamenco band with dueling guitar players decked out in full-on tight bodysuits with flared sleeves who absolutely blew the roof off. There´s a tune which is kind of like the Latin American "Cissy Strut" that I´ve heard everywhere I´ve been, but last night´s version took it to a new level.

This is the paragraph about housekeeping: Time is starting to run short down here. If anyone in Seattle needs or knows of someone who needs a roommate or a subletter for a few months in early 2006, please let me know. I should be back in the rainy city Thursday, December 15, but will be leaving the following Monday, the 19th, for Christmas Recovery in Michigan, returning to the rain again on the 28th.

Something that has been left out of these entries due to the fact that I´ve gotten so used to it that it no longer seems remarkable:

Toilets. I think I touched on the TP issue earlier, but what I haven´t mentioned is the fact that sewage systems down here are very delicate and can´t withstand repeated flushings of toilet paper. To solve this problem, every bathroom in every city in every country has a sign asking you to kindly place your used toilet paper in a little plastic garbage can rather than flush it down the toilet. This was very difficult for me to do at first and I´ll fully admit that I cheated for a while. You eventually fall into line, though, and now it´s second nature for me.

If the picture isn´t clear to you, or this all sounds confusing, I´ll break it down: Your shit-stained toilet paper goes into a little bucket with everyone else´s shit-stained toilet paper. I´d wager to guess this never happens in the U.S.

So if I visit your house in the next few months and, upon my departure, you find some vile, nasty, filthy stuff in your garbage can, please forgive me. I´m a creature of habit.

I suppose that wasn´t the best story to tell following my plea for a place to leave.

El Bolson, Argentina

2005-12-02T09:27:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, a tired and beaten-looking Argentinian who was sitting next to me and gazing dejectedly out the window of our bus said, without looking at me, "This country is run by dogs," to which I responded very enthusiastically by reeling off everything I knew about Peron, The Dirty War, San Martin, and a whole host of other tumultuous episodes in Argentine history. He looked at me, a little puzzled, and then pointed out the window toward a kind of ragged shanty town that we were passing.

"No," he said. "I mean dogs."

He was right. There wasn´t a human being in sight but the little township was abustle with canines of all shapes and sizes, methodically conducting their business.

After that, I took notice in nearly every town. Esquel was swarming with dogs. Perrito Morena, too. El Chalten and Ushuia and Rio May were all crawling with dogs which I wouldn´t call strays, since they more or less act like they own the places. Often times you´ll see the same ones day in and day out, hanging around their favorite restaurants, parks, and bars.

But nowhere has been like this. They´re plotting something here. I´m sure of it. My Israeli roommate got bitten. They´ve been following me everywhere I go. When there´s not one following me, I can feel them watching from behind bushes and around corners. At night, lying in bed, you can hear them in the streets. Thousands of them. Barking and growling and shouting and plotting. It´s otherworldly. Sometimes it feels like you can understand what they´re saying, and what they appear to be saying is, "Take heed, humans! Your time is very fucking nigh!"

Yesterday I wandered south of town to a little-visited area in search of a brewerey (cerveceria) that´s supposed to be out there. I came upon a pack of about fifteen dogs who obviously didn´t expect to be disturbed or interrupted so far from town, and who immediately set upon me. I narrowly escaped with all my body parts by hauling ass across the street and clumsily imitating a kind of clucking sound with my teeth and tongue that I heard the owner of the hostel (who clearly is either a co-conspirator or made some kind of deal) making the other day. These particular dogs were extra fierce- and intelligent-looking. I think they were the leaders of the movement. The core of the junta, if you will. I really need to get out of here before the shit hits the fan.

In other news, yesterday marked the first day of the "Fifth International El Bolson Jazz Festival." It´s international because there´s a pretty ragged old British ex-pat baritone sax player who´s been hanging around here for a few decades. The rest of the acts were all local. In the afternoon, I witnessed a rather awful but still exciting free jazz experiment between the sax player and a pianist. When I learned that they were playing again at midnight in a bar I figured I´d go to see what kind of dangerous things would ensue. I was both delighted and disappointed to show up at the bar several hours later, knock back a few drinks, and watch these free jazz experimentalists play the *exact same disjointed atonal set* note for note.

Truly a thing of beauty.

A British woman shushed me twice during this display and I couldn´t help but laugh.

Now, it´s time to find a bus. The dogs are barking. I can see them in the streets. I can hear them in my head. I can feel them in my shoes. Our time is running out.

Route 40

2005-11-29T11:59:00.000-08:00

The storied Route 40 stretches the entire length of Patagonia in Argentina, running north to south along the eastern side of the Andes. The majority of it is unpaved and in many places it´s too narrow for two vehicles to pass each other. The landscape in this part of Patagonia is remarkable mostly for the vastness of it´s emptiness. I was literally on a bus for two days, rambling over washboard roads and watching the exact same scrub brush passing by like so many dead, dull-green porcupines. Everyone warned me about this trip -- it´s actually faster to take a bus on decent roads all the way the east coast to get to where I´m going -- but it seemed like one of those things that a person should see.

And it is. You get the impression that the land allowed this tiny road to be cut across it the way a heavyweight would offer you one free shot at his chin just before pummelling you. Just because you´re on a road and in a vehicle doesn´t for a second mean you´re in charge.

Two days. Fortunately, there was a pretty fun crew on board and once the cabin fever set in things degenerated into borderline madness. Our overnight stay in a Perrito Moreno (hardly even a town) motel with holes cut in the floorboards for toilets spilled over into the poolhall across the street and lasted much later than it should have, making day two kind of brutal for a slew of folks.

Would write more on this, but have to go catch a bus. Today was a day of tracking down literary ghosts in Esquel, just off Route 40, before heading off to the hippy outpost of El Bolson. I talked an off-duty cabbie into letting me pay him way too much money to drive me out to the cabin where Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid spent a couple years in semi-retirement before returning to a life of crime. Bruce Chatwin writes about this in his Patagonia book. Also went to see "La Trochita," the train Paul Theroux nicknamed "The Old Patagonian Express" in his book of the same name, which chronicles his train trip from Boston to Argentina.

My fantasy football team continues to impress me.

All for now. Gotta catch a bus.

Coming Soon: El Chalten

2005-11-26T16:14:00.000-08:00

This town doesn´t have a single square foot of paved road, but it´s
completely zoned out and the area they´ll be using for Main Street is
already a 4-lane parkway with a decorative median. It´s tucked right
into the Fitz Roy range of the Andes and dramatic snow-capped peaks
jutt up everywhere you look. Right now, there´s nothing to offer
beyond a modest system of trails providing access to the mountains,
but in five years it will surely be Aspen.

Unfortunately, the word is out and the tourists have a head start on
the contractors, which means four out of our five visits to the
coolest little bar/brewpub I´ve ever had the pleasure of patronizing
have been ruined by large groups of well-heeled, smugly-dressed,
over-fifty British tourists who delight in mocking the owners´
generous (and relatively skillful) attempts to address their
complaints about the menu in English. It made me want to start
swinging a two-by-four.

Enjoyed a gluttonous Thanksgiving feast with The Duchess at a
restaurant named after one of the Tierra del Fuegian Indians Fitzroy
kidnapped and and brought back to England for training in manners and
language (see "in vein of literary tradition stretching from Pygmalion
to My Fair Lady") only to see his efforts fail miserably (due to
several factors, not the least of which were the mid-20s male Indian´s
obsession with and frequent attempts to rape the adorable
12-year-old-girl-and-namesake-of-aforementioned-restaurant), inspiring
him to find a ship to haul their asses back to South America ASAP (a
role which was filled by a boat undertaking a scientific trans-world
voyage several years longer than what Fitzroy wanted to sign up for, prompting the
vigorously-Christian captain to tragically invite a young student
named Charles along to keep him company) where the dinners all actually came with sides rather than just being enormous chunks of meat on plates.

Got a little tongue-tied while trying to explain the American
tradition of Thanksgiving, and am convinced that I´ve forgotten some
very important part of it. I got through the part where we give
thanks for all our blessings on Thanksgiving because in late November
a few hundred years ago some Indians bailed out a bunch of hapless,
white settlers on the East Coast who were about to spend the winter
starving to death, for which we repaid them soon thereafter by systematically exterminating them. After that, I got stuck. Is there something more in there that I´m forgetting?

El Calafate, Argentina

2005-11-22T13:15:00.000-08:00

Went to see another glacier today, this one with enormous chunks of ice calving off and tearing into the aqua-blue lake below. Ho hum. Had another steak as big as my head for $5 last night that was so tender I cut it with a butter knife and am getting quite bored of this kind of thing. More insanely good local red wines that I´ve never heard of and the only real treat was that I finally got a real cup of coffee. Not sure I can take this much longer.

Had a good night at the casino on our last night in Ushuia with Alex and Fiona (Aussies) after draining down beers at John Lennon´s bar and feasting on king crab. This was a good thing, but also brought back memories of the rather bad night at the casino in Puerta Natales, which I had somehow managed to completely forget. So if you´re counting, Tindall, that´s even-steven in match play on the "Gambling South of the Equator Scorecard" though I fear I´m still way behind on strokes.

Rented a car last night to take to the glacier this morning with a British guy from the Ushuia hostel who´s had malaria before, a pretty wet-behind-the-ears vegetarian kid from Birmingham, AL, who is about to go into med school because he couldn´t find an investment banking job, and The Duchess. I stood there with the two other guys after finishing off the paperwork. We intended to leave the car at the agency overnight and return the next day for our departure. The car, however, had to be moved from the driveway into the street.

I, unfortunately, am still suffering from severe tennis elbow which has rendered me incapable of skillfully operating a manual transmission. The British guy looked at me and said, "I´ve had a beer, so I´d rather not operate this vehicle." The Alabama kid, being somewhat in awe of this older, distinguisted-sounding Brit, concurred.

"Yeah," he said. "I drank a beer, too."

"Jesus," I said. "Are you guys wasted?" It was only eight o´clock in the evening. The dinner restaurants weren´t even open yet.

"No," said the Brit. "But I´ve had a beer."

"Me too," said the American kid.

"For the love of God," I said to myself, preparing to go move the car myself, tennis elbow and all.

"Do you think you can just, you know, pull the car 15 feet to the curb?" I asked the Brit.

"Surely," said the Brit, "This fellow has another key and can move the car for us later.

He then proceeded, in broken Spanish, to make this request. It is a request that would be absurd in any language under the most ideal conditions, but in broken Spanish I´m sure it sounded even more ludicrous. The owner of the car shop looked over at me and made a gesture like, "Is this guy serious?"

I had no choice but to nod back in grave affirmation.

"No," said the man in Spanish. "I do not have another key."

"Do you think," I asked the American, "That you can move this car 15 feet to the curb without crashing it?"

"I don´t know," he said. "I´ve had a beer." He said it exactly the same way his hero, The Brit, had been saying it.

"Surely," said the Brit. "Surely we can just leave the car in the driveway tonight."

More broken Spanish.

"No," said the owner. "The car must go in the street."

Finally, the British guy assented and got behind the wheel to move the car 15 feet to the curb.

And sure enough, he just about damn near pulled into traffic the wrong way and killed himself.

Ushuia, Argentina - Tierra del Fuego

2005-11-20T09:59:00.000-08:00

Ushuia, on the island of Tierra del Fuego, bills itself alternatively as the "Southernmost City in the World" (Geographically Inaccurarate) and the "Ass of the World" (Anatomically Inaccurate and Exceedingly Self-Depricating). It´s situated on the Beagle Channel, and I´ve absorbed more Darwin history in the past 48 hours than in the rest of my life combined. Need to do some more investigating, but was shocked to know that the HMS Beagle originally sailed with half a mind to validate the Christian Genesis story, and that it´s pivotal role in Darwin´s development of the most heretical scientific theory of all time drove the ship´s captain, Robert Fitzroy, to eventually do himself in.

Took a boat into the channel the other day and climbed to the top of an island where it was possible to see both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Then took a walk down the harbor and found a bar named after John Lennon. Then stood in the middle of an intersection with jagged, snow-capped mountains down one street and the the rough blue sea down the other.

I like this place.

There are two Irish bars and no Irish people. The prices (now that we´re back in Argentina) are much nicer than in Chile, where I was absolutely scandelized by the $17 I paid nightly for the hostel in Punta Arenas.

(Incidentally, on my last day in Punta Arenas I stopped on the sidewalk for 10 minutes to watch a small, wiry man mop his brow with a handkerchief in between brief sessions of attempting to break up the concrete in his driveway with furious swipes of a woodaxe while his daughter practiced doing handstands a few feet away. He seemed slightly perturbed and confounded by the task, but not the least bit discouraged.)

Have met several people here on the way to Antarctica, one of whom was going to attempt to retrace Shackleton´s embattled route across South Georgia Island.

Rented a car yesterday with Alex and Fiona (Aussie couple), The Duchess, and Pedro the Columbian Lion, whose driving was absolutely fearsome. We took gravel roads over mountain passes at speeds I wouldn´t have thought possible even on a flat grade in such a vehicle (VW Golf knockoff) and saw more of the island in 12 hours than most people probably see in a week.

Pedro really wanted to see penguins, and when it became apparent that our day was going to end without having seen any penguins he got angry in a way that I can only describe as "Columbian." It was at this point that the driving became particularly acrobatic.

The electricity went out in our hostel today and I didn´t even notice it for two hours. I´m not exactly sure what the significance of this is, but it struck me as being somehow poignant and a good sign.

Punta Arenas, Chile

2005-11-16T09:35:00.000-08:00

Arrived in Punta Arenas last night with The Duchess and we proceeded to gorge ourselves on the King Crab and Scallops that are the local specialty. Could barely move afterward.

Spent the day wandering around the local Municipal Cemetary, where a person can be dead in some serious Catholic style or some serious Catholic poverty, depending on your preference. Saw everything from the massive mausoleum of the main local sheep baron, which supposely is a scale model of some famous monolithic European monument that I´ve never heard of, to a hand-pained wooden sign announcing the premature death of a nine-month old child hung over a small patch of fenced garden about the size of a notebook. The graves are all decorated with that enthusiastic disregard for symmetry and composition that typifies the religious Latin American aesthetic, with as many flowers, figurines, framed photographs, grisly crucifixes, beatific Madonnas, thick candles, and tacky plaques crammed into the colorfully-painted plastered concrete-walled sites as possible. Enormous Marge Simpson topiaries separate the rows and the outer edges are lined with vaults about eight high where a coffin is inserted morgue-style behind a small picture window displaying the various aforementioned devotions. A wheeled ladder of the kind you might see in a nice bookstore allows people to pay their respected to loved ones in the upper rows.

Heading to Tierra del Fuego tomorrow by the usual route after our plans to take busses across a less-trodden path were foiled by the destruction of a gravel road somewhere in Argentina.

Learned this today: Even though the water flushes in a different direction and the constellations are all different down here, the smell of freshly cut grass in the sun is exactly the same as back home.

Also: This may be the house where Shackleton came to ask for a Chilean boat to go rescue his men when he finally arrived in Punta Arenas:

Torres del Paine, Chile

2005-11-14T14:17:00.000-08:00

Just finished four days of backpacking in Parque Nationale Torres del Paine and it was among the best I´ve ever done, due in no small part to the fact that we experienced the nearly uheard-of phenomenon of nearly 100 consecutive hours of beautiful and wrathless Patagonian weather. Hiked up to the terminus of the South Patagonian Ice Field, which was a little too to wrap the noggin around, as well as two groups of bizarre rock formations called The Horns and The Towers.

Managed to negotiate the park with an unwieldy but outstanding group of ten folks, which was a feat in itself. Pedro the Columbian Lion ("I went to college in the United States, at Lehigh in Pennsylvania. You know, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Lehigh...") led the charge. Also present were Paul and Tony Finn (the crazy Irish cousins with the traffic cone company) and Graham the Brit (who you might remember from such adventures as "Bombarded with Snow and Misery at Salcantay Pass in Peru" and "Abandoned by the Side of the Road in the Middle of the Night Somewhere Outside La Paz, Bolivia." Tim and Faye, who were in on Freddy´s Bolivan Jeep Ride also made it, along with Alex and Fiona (really cool Aussie couple I met on the bus from Pucon to Puerto Montt and who came madly correct on The Boat), some random Israeli guy who actually disappeared halfway through the trip, and a marathon-running, wise-cracking, PR/Investor Relations-slinging girl from London who actually says things like, "I waited diligently for the chap ahead of me to cross the suspension bridge before proceeding as per the notification on the signpost only to find the Irish lads bouncing about behind me, sending the bridge asway to and fro like a couple of muppets," and who I suspect may also be a Duchess.

Was introduced to a different philosophy regarding backcountry eating on the first night when Graham and the Irish lads scoffed at my dehydrated pasta held forth with a sumptuous dinner of asparagus soup, crackers with pate, a can of corn, a can of pork and beans which they ate with hotdogs fried in butter (from a tub), a whole loaf of baked bread (with more butter from the tub), condensed milk, a liter of wine, and (I shit you not) a *whole* roasted chicken in a plastic container. I immediately tore into them, mocking their big-city ways relentlessly until they finished eating and offered me their leftovers, which I devoured ravenously in what would become a ritual I craved and anticipated furiously for the remainder of the trip.

Back in Puerto Natales now, where the church in the main square has been piping secular music into the air all day long through god-awful PA speakers in a scene reminiscent of the detainment camp where the Russians throw the parents in Red Dawn. A few minutes ago, some guys set up a stage with a somewhat bigger PA *directly in front of* the church, pointing straight at it, and are in the early stages of organizing what I can only assume is going to be a kind of "Karaoke in the Streets" festival, blaring "You Can Leave Your Hat On" directly into the face of the church´s choral music. As you can probably imagine, watching this happen was a rather bizarre experience.

Saying goodbye to most of the crew yet again tomorrow as they head toward New Zealand and I start the push down to Tierra del Fuego.

Amazingly, I´ve run out of books and was reduced to picking up a Spanish translation of Bukowski´s last novel to practice my Spanish. Not sure it´ll be the best primer but it´s sure to be full of some colorful new words.

Puerto Natales, Chile

2005-11-10T10:34:00.000-08:00

Trying to recover this afternoon in Puerto Natales, Chile, having dug down deep to make sure I did my part to contribute to the festivities and reveries aboard the cargo ship Magellan over the past four days while it passed through various fjords and channels in Chilean Patagonia. After years of taking bribes from eager travellers seeking passage, the owners of the Magellan finally just added "tourists" to the array of freight they´re willing to transport and built some no-frills accomodations into the vessel. The result is kind of a backpackers´ Cancun on water, complete with "pub," "dining room," "meals," a visit to South America´s largest glacier, and a heavily-encouraged day-trip to a completely uninteresting island community which survives by giving tours highlighting the degree to which the island is unremarkable.

Spent days lounging on deck in the sun while mountains rolled slowly by, catching up with various folks I´ve met along the way, getting sunburned, reading, and then tearing into a vastly enjoyable string of grade-school era cocktail activities, most of which were initiated by the Brits who apparently have elevated the common "Drinking Game" to a form of High Art. A Columbian guy we met introduced elements of counting in Spanish to a game I remember from 6th grade Algebra and I´m quite certain that I remember another game we played, which combined stomp-clapping in rhythm and various ludicrous hand-gestures indicating the identities of various participants, from my brief stint at Aunt Betty´s Pre-School in Wheaton, IL.

Also, the views and vistas were breathtaking.

One of the Irish guys was up all night last night and arrived at breakfast this morning insisting that he´d slipped undetected into the bridge during the early morning hours only to be confronted with the alarming and stupifying reality that the boat had been navigating through twisting, 80-meter wide channels on auto-pilot for the entire night.

It is not known for certain whether this is true.

Tomorrow we head to Parque Nacionale Torres del Paine for 4 days of hiking along a route we´ve coined "The Bolivian Prance" in honor of Pedro, the Columbian guy with all the good info.

In other, more important news, Tom Brady and Marvin Harrison went absolutely berzerk last Monday and led my fantasy football team to a stunning, 60-point comeback victory over the Montlake Maulers.

Puerto Montt, Chile

2005-11-07T07:33:00.000-08:00

Nothing happened today, unless you count the merciless beating my fantasy football team suffered for the third straight week. I'm worried that Cadillac Williams' career might be finished before it ever began.

Spending the next four days on a boat, and am hoping the medicine I bought for motion sickness is actually medicine for motion sickness and not for heartworms.

This is a picture of me standing on salt:

Valparaiso, Chile

2005-11-04T10:31:00.000-08:00

Went to visit Pablo Neruda´s house only to find that Pablo Neruda no longer lives there. Apparently, he´s dead.

This may have worked out in my favor, however, because I´m not sure the living, breathing incarnation of the Nobel-honored poet would have invited me in and let me go through his stuff the way it turns out I was able to. Photographs were strictly forbidden, and though my secret plot to sneak a shot of his fourth-floor writing desk at the changing of the security guards during lunchbreak was foiled, I did manage to smuggle out a photograph of his third-floor bar.

I walked past a metalworking shop today where four Chileans were rocking out to "It´s So Easy" under the sultry gazes of three dozen naked women pinned to the wall.

They still say Pinochet´s too caved in the brain to stand trial for disappearing half the population of his country during his reign. What a sham.

Finished the Che biography, and though he turns out to be a character I could never really get behind (Heavy suppression of the free press, compulsory executions for *all* post-revolution political dissidents, insistance that armed conflict is the *only* way to effect political change, etc.) there are too many Clint Eastwood anecdotes about his superhuman dedication to a cause he truly believed in for me to resist admiring, to some degree, certain aspects of his life.

I should say, however, that if any knee-jerk lefties out there are considering getting a Che tattoo, t-shirt, or towel rack, you may want to read up on him a little. He´s not the exactly the kind of guy you´d want your kids looking up to.

Been trying to find a Spanish edition of one of Jorge Luis Borges´ books to practice with, but having a devil of a time. The Chileans hate him because he´s Argentinian and the Argentinians are down on him for being too European. On top of this, bookstores down here are not only lacking in any kind of alphabetized schema, but also full of translated novels by Elmore Leonard and Tom Clancy.

A girl from Buenos Aires asked me why American movies are so violent and I told her I honestly didn´t know. She said that Sex and the City was much better than any American movie and I found myself unable to argue.

Mendoza, Argentina + a bizarre episode

2005-11-02T10:40:00.000-08:00

After some mellow time in Argentina´s northwest it´s back cracking again in Mendoza.

On the night bus here, my vaguely prayer-like superstitious nagging to be seated next to a Brazilian supermodel was nearly answered when I awoke five hours into the trip, around 2am, to find an exotically stunning Argeninian girl hovering over me and declaring that she´d been assigned the same seat as me. My brain immediately snapped into action and came up with about 74 different ways we could go about sharing the luxurious semi-reclining window seat but just when I´d narrowed it down the the five most attractive ones she stormed off to find a conductor.

I suddenly became afraid that I´d missed my stop and was supposed to have vacated seat 33 several hours ago, so I asked the other folks in my row where we were. One of them responded that we were in seats 30-33. I then yawned, rubbed my eyes and said, "Yes, but in what city are we?" to which they responded with laughter and the answer, "Catamarca." I was safe, hadn´t missed my stop, and was suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of warmth and goodness at having actually cracked what was apparently a joke for a handful of locals.

In the end, the situation was unfortunately sorted out and I spent the night alone in my seat.

Spent two nights in Mendoza hanging out with a pretty colorful array of characters from my hostel, including an ex-pat Canadien who´s been down here for three years, a German pharmacist, a 22-year old dreadlocked hippy from Amsterdam who´d just finished medical school and was on her way to a Rainbow Gathering in Uruguay, and most stunningly of all a 23-year-old blonde, vegetarian, deaf, Swedish girl who was travelling by herself through South America for two months and, by her own admission, doesn´t even like soccer.

Since no one else knew sign language, much less European sign language, we spent our time communicating by scribbing things on pieces of paper and passing them back and forth, eventually even resorting to this method between the people who weren´t deaf. At one point it occurred to me that this didn´t seem the least bit strange, which in turn *did* seem strange, until I realized that I´d been in training for that moment for some time due to the ridiculous explosion of cell phone text messaging I´d been caught up in over the past year.

The Swedish girl was devastatingly sweet and funny, firing off missives in perfect English like "You guys are such *dudes*" in response to an episode of scar-and-injury show-and-tell and, "It´s too dark to talk out there," when someone suggested stepping into the back yard for a cigarette.

I´m pretty sure I wasn´t the only one smitten.

(Incidentally, it would be irresponsible of me not to report that *every* woman in this city is a walking magazine cover.)

Hopped on a bus with some folks to go see the 6,900m Andean mountain Aconcagua, the highest peak outside of the Himalayas, and was treated to a furious lunchtime discussion between a Spanish family and their future Argentinian daugther-in-law about the lingering effects of regional rivalries in the two countries and whether those rivalries were subsiding in favor of intra-city political rivalries. A couple other guys jumped in on the Argentinian side and I busted my ass to try to keep up, occasionally being called on by Pepe´, the Spanish family´s chainsmoking, gravel-voiced patriarch to throw in relevant testimony from the U.S. perspective, which I was actually able to do with a little help from the others. All in all, it was the best 20-minute meal with a 2-hour argument I´ve ever been a party to.

That night at dinner I ordered a half of a steak that looked like three cows sewn together.

Today, spent the afternoon drinking coffee in a shady, sidewalk cafe and enjoyed one of those moments where an otherworldy sense of sublime peacefulness descends on you and everything from the size of your socks to the temperature of the air seems absolutely perfect. Flipped through a book of Pablo Neruda´s poems in preparation for a visit to his home in Valparaiso, Chile, tomorrow, and was delighted to find that in addition to being touristically relevant they were also profoundly absurd, hilarious, poignant, humane, and sharp, especially for a person who usually isn´t into poetry. Score 10 points.

The reason I add this last, rather melodramatic anecdote is because the other one I have is rife with profanity and I promised my mom I would try to stop using the F-word in this blog. Ask me later if you want to hear it.

Ginobli and the Spurs are apparently being joined by another Argentine superstar who will no doubt be causing my Pistons even bigger headaches this year.

Finally, and most absurdly, I have to write about this:

Two nights ago, the television was on in the background at the hostel when suddenly everyone became hushed, the volume went up, and the attention of all the Argentinians went straight to the tube. A small, stocky, dark-skinned man was speaking to a large studio audience in Spanish and I suddenly realized that he looked very familiar.

"Is that Maradona?" I asked. The entire roomed turned to me and fired deathlooks that made it quite obvious I was an absolute moron for having to ask. Over the next few minutes it became quite clear that Diego Maradona, the soccer star from the 1986 World Cup, is now an absolute God in Argentina despite numerous stints in drug rehab, the siring of dozens of illegitimate children whom he refuses to support, and a bizarre episode in which he ballooned up to well over 200 pounds and then lost it all by having his stomache stapled shut. He is now the host of the most successful television talkshow in South American history. A girl from Buenos Aires told me there is a church and religion dedicated to him in Cordoba.

But wait, there´s more...

After dropping a multitude of balloons and confetti in celebration of Maradona´s birthday, the show inexplicably turned to an introductory reel of scenes from the Cuban revolution, starring the main generals Raul and Che and, of course, Fidel himself. This was strange enough, but when the conclusion of the reel gave way to an image of Maradona embracing the olive-clad, bearded Cuban dictator on an interview set I just about messed myself.

"That´s Castro!¨ I shouted in Spanish, pointing my finger at the television.

More angry looks from the locals in the room.

"Of course it is," said one.

"They´ve been close friends for over ten years," said another.

"Fidel saved Maradona from the demon of his drug problem," said yet a third. "Fidel saved our Maradona´s life."

With that, all attention returned to the interview, which apparently was only a 20-minute clip of over five hours that was recorded. I was afloat in the world of the surreal and began writing things down, the way you do in the morning with a dream that you don´t want to forget.

The kicker (no pun intended) came at the end, when a producer tossed a soccer ball to Maradona, who in turn tossed it to Fidel, who caught it somewhat awkwardly and then tossed it back to Maradona. (Maradona, if you remember, is quite skilled at manipulating a soccer ball with his hands). Then Maradona tossed the ball back to Fidel.

I´m serious. This really happened.

Then, holding the ball, Castro instructed Maradona to stand up and make a hoop with his arms. Fidel stood up as well. He bent his knees, sized things up, and then proceeded to bank a three-foot jumpshot off Maradona´s chest and into the makeshift basket.

With that, the interview was concluded, the television was turned off, and a reverant silence pervaded the room for about five minutes.

Then one of the employees unlocked the hostel´s refrigerator and we drank all the beer that was in there.

Tucuman, Argentina

2005-10-29T16:42:00.000-07:00

There´s no sense in beating around the bush. This place pretty much blows. It´s big and dirty and lacks the old-world feel of Salta. Also it´s been drooling gray rain all day and I feel like I´m in Seattle. The power just went out in this hostel but the ceilings are high so I´m giving it the benefit of the doubt. I´m over halfway through the Che Guevara biography I´m reading and have gone from kind of admiring the guy (in his younger days) to having nightmares about him. Shit´s getting pretty brown in Cuba and by page 600 I´m expecting the number of executed "counterrevolutionaries" to reach the thousands.

Cusco smelled like roasted corn and Cafayete (where very little happened except for the fact that I bought my first ice cream cone of the journey) smelled like bologna.

Having consulted my English/Spanish dictionary about 24 hours too late, I´m now 85% certain that I ate a pig´s testicle on my last night in Salta.

The cab driver who picked me up from the Tucuman bus station today put me through the most stressful 20 minutes of my entire trip, screaming in an indiscernable Argentine accent (they drop about 10 rather important letters from the alphabet entirely and mispronounce another four) about where to go and what to eat and who to drink and constantly scribbling down phone numbers for hookers and shoving them at me while steering with his knee and dancing with his left hand and right elbow to the salsa music that was blaring out of his radio. Was quite glad to finally get out of that cab, and actually lied about where I wanted to stay so I could get out earlier.

Then I went to an Internet cafe to avoid the rain and read Simmons´ blog, which is sheer genius.

Cafayate, Argentina

2005-10-28T16:37:00.000-07:00

Finally got moving today after three mellow nights in Salta. Veronica, the woman who owned the hostel I was staying in mothered me to a ridiculous degree, not only doing all my laundry for me but also folding and ironing everything -- including my skivvies. Spent the mornings drinking coffee watching cartoons with the little boy who fit into the labyrinthine family structure in some way I couldn´t quite suss out and the afternoons and evenings wandering around and sitting in sidewalk cafes with a book.

Tim and Faye, the British couple we lured into Freddy´s jeep back in Oruro, left a day earlier than me for Mendoza and though their company was wonderful as all getout it was relaxing to have some solo time again. Relaxing, that is, until my plan to be in bed before midnight after yet another enormous meal of beef and red wine was foiled by Fernando, the sole non-family member at the hostel (kind of like Al Jardine) who was also very eager to learn English and party his ass off every night. Walking home, I nearly crossed the street to avoid him but it was hopeless and before I knew it I was in a locals bar with him, one of the brothers, and two of their friends trying to explain the one-liners they kept asking about, things like "You can tune a piano but you can´t tuna fish."

It was all rather hilarious, and it ended at 3am with Fernando and the brother having offered and insisted that I accept a job at the hostel (quite seriously, I think) and then tearing off to a disco downtown, grinning broadly and shaking their heads from the window of a cab and shouting, in a way that was alarmingly reminiscent of my friends back home, "Fucking Chad! You come back to Salta, fucking Chad!"

I missed the 7am bus to Cafayate.

In other news, I´ve noticed that ever since Bolivia these internet cafes have become thinly-veiled dens of videogame iniquities. Every place I´ve been has been home to at least a dozen 13-year-old kids going berzerk over communal games of "Shoot the Shit out of Everything.¨ The one I´m in right now, actually, is hosting a mini-concert starring a 13-year-old kid with a guitar and a half-dozen co-ed admirers. So far the set has included Don´t Cry, Start Me Up, Californication, and the opening riff to Sweet Child o´Mine.

It would all be relatively amusing if the guitar wasn´t criminally out of tune and teenagers weren´t chronically annoying.

Salta, Argentina

2005-10-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

I´m waving my Gringo flag wide and high today.

First off, I´m finally getting some laundry done at the hostel, which means all I have left to wear today is a pair of shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt from a radio station. Salta is a pretty modern town, though not without it´s charms (the old central plaza, guys pushing huge fruit carts up and down roads strewn with VWs and even a Porsche or two) and the people, a fetching blend of Spanish, Italian, and Arab, tend to dress rather sharply. Long story short, even though it´s about 80 degrees here today, not even the little school kids are wearing shorts. Add to that a low population of tourists, and I´m basically a sore thumb.

Secondly, I´ve somehow taken to flashing the ¨A-OK¨ sign to people whenever they help me out. This is a pretty ridiculous gesture (thumb and forefinger create circle, three remaining fings flare like a rooster´s tail) which I´ve never *ever* used before. How I managed to spontaneously incorporate it into my arsenal of body language is absolutely inexplicable. This would all be rather neurotic and harmless if not for the fact that the ¨A-OK¨ sign essentially means ¨fuck off¨ in most South American countries, with various subtexts bringing into question various family members and alternative lifestyles depending on which region you happen to be in.

So imagine this: you´re walking down the street in Baltimore and a Spanish-speaking tourist comes up to you smiling with embarrassment and asks in broken but discernable English whether you can tell him where the nearest ATM is. You´re a good person, so you speak in slow, clear sentences and explain how to get to the nearest cash machine. You feel good about yourself, having done a good deed. The Spanish-speaking tourist, overflowing with gratitude, shakes your hand and says ¨Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.¨ Then, he steps back, smiles broadly, waves goodbye, and promply flips you the bird before wandering off.

I´ve done this three times today. I keep telling myself to stop but that damn little hand keeps flipping up and throwing it out. Really need to concentrate on this.

Had a good conversation with one of the sisters in the family who runs the hostel this morning. After three days in Boliva with good Spanish-speakers, it was good to get back to my rambling, stammering ways. At one point, when she said she liked Salta more than Buenos Aires because it was more laid back, I was actually able to communicate the fact that I liked the western U.S., also because it was more laid back. I also complained about how much vacation Europeans get and, for the first time, explained that I had gotten laid off from my job rather than just quit.

It would have been the beginning of a great day if not for the fact that I spent the rest of the afternoon telling everyone I met to fuck off.

Uyuni & the Bolivian Altiplano

2005-10-26T06:42:00.000-07:00

Had a little trouble on the bus from La Paz to Uyuni which I´ll elaborate on later. In the end, it was supposed to be a 14-hour trip with no bathroom on board so the fact that the trip was cut short a couple hours after departure was kind of a blessing. After a quick hitch in the back of a dumptruck and a hundred-mile cab ride with a Bolivian couple who were quite kind even though I think the wife was a bit put off by the Peru warmup jacket Graham was wearing, we arrived safely in a frigid town called Oruro just before midnight, in time to catch a few other Gringos at the bus station who you will learn upon further elaboration weren´t exactly in our good graces. Tired, hungry, pissed, resigned to the fact that we would *not* make it to Uyuni for a tour of the Salt Flats the next day, we did what any self-respecting travellers would do at half past midnight in a strange, dead, boring town in the middle of nowhere. We went looking for a bar.

After nearly an hour of padding around and finding all of the recommended establishments closed, we finally asked a cab driver for advice and he pointed to a sign that said karoake/coca-cola. This karaoke thing is becoming something of a recurring thing and I wasn´t very excited but we were up against the wall and had little choice.

Immediately upon entering, we were confronted with two men passed out on either side of a booth with a full bottle of beer between them and three very drunk guys spooning pisco sours out of a plastic bucket with a ladle. All in all, it was quite comfortable, though, and we enjoyed a couple quiet drinks while we decompressed.

In a moment of unadvisable enthusiasm, the decision to have a third got ratified and passed, which would eventually prove to be our death knell. Somehow, in the process of ordering that third drink we got a little chatty with the locals and the next thing we knew were in a full-on bullshit session, covering everything from politics to sports to where all the girls were (¨tomorrow, my friend...the women all come on fridays...¨). We got to feeling pretty cocky, no longer annoying tourists but legitimately interesting world travellers with whom the locals were eager to interact and swap stories.

After a couple hours of this, and due in no small part to the horde of invitations to private homes and parties we received, it became quite clear that this was a gay karaoke bar. The guys were all very nice about it, but after the confusion was sorted out Graham and I snagged a cab and made it to our hotel in time to grab about 3 hours of sleep before waking up to sort out our situation the next day.

Boliva is currently being rocked by three kinds of protests: students bitching about university funding, different provinces bitching about the reallocation of seats in Parliament, and folks in the South bitching about the government´s broken promise to improve roads and railways near the Argentinian border. As a result, blockades have been set up along many roads connecting major cities, and we awoke to the news that our bus to Uyuni would likely be stranded in Oruro. Graham had a flight to catch in Chile and was on a tight schedule, but as long as I could make it to Uyuni I would have no time constraints messing up my tour to the salt flats. Our bus was at 7pm. It was now about 10am. We were very tired of being on busses every day and having fun every night and longed for some boring days of rest.

It was then that The Dutchman approached me.

He asked if I was going to Uyuni and I told him that I hoped so.

He said he had met a local with a jeep who could get six people there for $250. The local, he said, knew all about the blockades and could get us through.

¨$250 is a lot of money,¨I said.

¨Yes,¨ said The Dutchman. ¨But my driver´s name is Freddy and he has inspired my confidence. $40 per person.¨

That was enough for us, and we set out to find two more people. Travelling during the day, avoiding another Bolivian bus ride, and travelling with this obviously mad Dutchman and his girlfriend all added up to well over $40 in value for us.

A few minutes later, we spied a weary-looking British couple straggling around the bus station. We approached them, trying not to appear sketchy.

¨Do you speak English and are you going to Uyuni?¨ I asked them.

¨Yes,¨ they said.

¨Well, check it out,¨ I said. ¨About 20 minutes ago I met this guy, ¨The Dutchman,¨ and about 20 minutes before that he met this guy named Freddy who said he´ll take six of us to Uyuni for $250 but there´s no way I can vouch for any of these people, although they all claim Freddy can get us around the blockades and haul ass to Uyuni in 6 hours instead of the 10 that the bus takes, but I haven´t even met this Freddy and don´t really know what kind of shape his vehicle is in or if it´s safe.¨

The English girl reached into her pocket and said, ¨Do you want the money now?¨

As it turns out, Freddy kicked ass. We left town around 2pm and 30 minutes later pulled off the highway into a vast expanse of desert scrub and circumvented the blockade (which equalled to about 30 students stonewalling well over 50 vehicles in each direction) about 200 yards off the road. The drive south was beautiful, and after the pavement ended and gaveway to a dusty, windy unmarked dirt road we all gave thanks that we weren´t on that damn bus (which, as it turns out, left without incident at 7 on the dot when the protesters went home for the weekend.) At one point just north of Uyuni, we got out to pee on the Bolivian desert and I´ve never seen so many stars in all my life.

The Dutchman, it turns out, was a painter and furniture maker who waxed poetic on Goethe´s theories about color while the English couple weighed in heavily on the economics and politics of South America. It was a really good ride.

The next morning, Graham took off for Chile to catch his flight and I reunited with the Irish cousins, Paul and Tony, the Aussie girl, Amanda, and Tony´s new muli-lingual, multi-national squeeze, Melissa, who´d flown down from Brazil for the tour. Three days in the Bolivan altiplano touring the largest salt flat in the world and passing several impossibly-colored lagoons turned out to be the highlight of my trip so far. I´ll get pictures up at some point because words just can´t describe. Got dumped off at the Chilean frontier with Iman, a sweet and smart doctor from Queens who was also on our tour and prepared to cross into Chile for what would prove to be a very short stay.

Said goodbye, yet again, to Paul and Tony and Amanda, though the way things have been going I can´t help but think that there will be several more goodbyes with those folks in the future.

(those are flamingos)

La Paz, Boliva

2005-10-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

Arrived in La Paz relatively exhausted last night after sucking diesel fumes in the back row of a bathroom-less bus for about six hours. At one point I looked out the window at a little four-door compact driving next to us and marvelled at the fact that we were on a one-way highway, wondering where the west-bound lanes were. After a couple minutes of this, with the bus and the car jockeying for position around several blind turns on a steep mountain road, I realized we absolutely were *not* on a one-way road and that both drivers were absolute psychopaths.

The trip included a "ferry" across Lake Titikaka, which essentially consisted of a bunch of wooden pallets tied together operated by a guy with a long pole and a tiny outboard motor. Thankfully, only the bus rode across on the ferry while the people where herded onto a tiny boat which was marginally less terrifying. I´ll post pictures of this thing when I get a chance because it´s really quite unbelievable. Vern Fonk wouldn´t touch this operation with a twenty-foot cattle prod.

Had more fun than we meant to last night, but for the most part La Paz has been a blurry, tired stop. Very much a city, with people going to jobs and buying vacuum cleaners and the like, very big and crowded and busy and strikingly carved into the basin and walls of an enormous natural crater -- kind of like Pittsburgh except bigger and dirtier.

We also accidently wandered into a karaoke bar with a very shady back room and insanely high drink prices, which has me absolutely convinced it was a brothel. There were no English songs in the karaoke book so we didn´t sing anything.

Copacabana, Bolivia

2005-10-19T09:27:00.000-07:00

Found ourselves officially jaded yesterday. After two full days on Lake Titikaka, we booked passage on yet another boat to go see Isla del Sol, believed to be the birthplace of the first Inca. After a pretty amazing experience staying with a family on one island, marvelling at the fact that a few others floated, and snapping too many panoramic photos of beautiful blue water and cozy Andean villages, this last stop was just a little anti-climactic. Two hours on a boat to spend 40 minutes on the wrong side of the island (never saw the Inca ruins) and then a quick stop to see a crumbling stone wall, followed by a two hour return trip. We played cards most of the way, and though the scenery was nice I realized at one point that we´d been so overloaded for the past two weeks that if the Taj Mahal were to rise majestically out of the cold blue waters of Lake Titikaka with dolphins doing back flips and shooting clay pigeons with shotguns while a team of alpacas hoisted up the Bolivian flag while singing the national anthem, it still wouldn´t have made an impression on me. We needed some down time.

Last night was Graham´s (Brit guy) birthday and we did it up right. I´ll leave it at that, except to say that it´s probably a good thing we´re heading out of town this afternoon. This place is small and I think people recognize us.

I´ve come to realize that this trip has reduced me to a handful of very bare, stripped down, essential desires: food, toilet paper, and hot water. The first is easy because it´s so cheap and we consistently eat like kings and queens. The second is a little tougher, as we tend to need it a little more often than usual and the public bathrooms, when you can find them and they´re useable, rarely supply it. The third is the object of much confusion in many of the places I´ve stayed. Everyone claims to have it, but they often neglect to mention that they only have it during the day, or between 9 and 10 am, or on Tuesdays. When you find it...man...it ranks right up there with accidentally getting seated next to a Brazilian supermodel on the night train from Arica to Valparaiso (a pipedream I´m currently in the process of praying for.)

Lake Titikaka

2005-10-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

Lake Titikaka sits about 12,000 feet above sea level which dwarfs most of the mountains I´ve ever seen. We booked passage to an island called Amanti where we´d arranged to pay a couple native families to let us sleep and eat with them for two days. We sat in a tiny kitchen with a dirt floor, gossiping in Spanish with the family´s two kids Edgar and Christian (10 and 7 years) for about 3 seconds before they demanded that we go out into the potato fields to play soccer with them. Elevation is no joke and I was winded after about a minute. Kids in Peru apparently have runny noses just like American ones. Edgar was absolutely fascinated by our cameras and when we let him take pictures of us his face lit up like a bonfire.

The island is divided into four sections where three kinds of crops are grown. Every year, the crops rotate clockwise and one section is left empty. I asked someone what the 25% of the island does when their fields are vacant and he misunderstood, re-explaining the rotation system. I asked again, trying to be more clear. I wanted to know what happened when you had nothing to do for a full year on an island where all anyone seemed to do was work in the fields.

¨Oh!¨the man finally said. ¨I understand now. My friend, that is when you take a break.¨

On the boat ride back to Puno this morning I met a man from Belgium who was travelling the world in his yacht with his girlfriend and their 5-year-old daughter. For three years.

Three years.

I asked him if he was going to Africa and he said he was afraid there wouldn´t be enough time, but that he hoped to go there on another trip in the future. I asked him if he would visit the United States and he said it would be nice but on trip like this you had to make difficult decisions because not everything was possible. Vietnam? Perhaps in a few years. India? Not enough time on this trip.

Three years.

I nearly grabbed the guy by the throat and hurled him off the boat.

Just outside of Puno we were talking about names and the Brit finance guy said if he´d been a girl he was going to be named Leah. The Australian girl´s eyes lit up and she announced that she was going to be named Stephanie.

We lost the South African and his British girlfriend tonight, along with our Canadien glassmaking friend, which was very sad. Before she left, she cut her necklace into little pieces and presented everyone with a different hand-made bead of her own design. Things got a bit teary.

Ten minutes later I just about shit myself when I nearly lost it by fiddling with it in my pocket while walking down the sidewalk.

In other news, beer gets very foamy when you try to pour it into a glass at this altitude.

Saturday, October 15 - 2005

2005-10-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

Nothing happened today.

Machu Picchu

2005-10-14T08:44:00.000-07:00

For my next trick, I´ll attempt to use the word "unutterably" for the third post in a row.

Done.

Too much to cover here so will do some summarizing.

Reasons why the 5-day trek to Machu Picchu via Salcantay Glacier should have been an absolute unmitigated catastrophe:

1) 24 hours of intestinal warfare leading right up to the jagged edge of a 5am wakeup call to leave on a 4-hour busride (with no bathroom) to the trailhead.

2) Rain on muddy roads gets said bus stranded halfway up mountain pass, impervious to the efforts of guides and porters to free it using pickaxes, stones, and dead shrubbery.

3) Alternate bus is an open-air cattle car which is only slightly more mobile -- horizontal railing running down middle of passenger area appears ready to snap at any given moment. Vertical distance between road and valley floor increases exponentially as width of road decreases.

4) First day of hiking cut short due to #s 2 & 3, stomach continues to gargle, eating is difficult.

5) Day 2 ushered in with fog so thick you can´t see to your eyelids. 20 km of ball-busting hiking over 16,000 foot pass (yup...the pass was 16,000 and mountains on either side over 20,000) yields little in the way of reward as Salcantay Mountain and Glacier are completely obscured due to aforementioned fog. Beautiful views are replaced by freezing temperatures, rain, high elevation huffing-and-puffing, and best of all an even denser-than-the-fog snowfall. We are informed that had we arrived hours later the pass would have been snowed in and we´d have been turned back.

6) Trail descending into valley becomes river. Easy to follow, difficult to stay dry. Day 2 is delayed by various elements of nature and final 30 minutes are negotiated in near pitch-blackness.

7) Day 2 ends, mercifully, with camping at a small jungle homestead with beer for sale. Glorious nature of situation is soon undercut when we realize the guy we´ve been buying beer from is actually running an operation which competes with sales of the guy whose benches we´re sitting on. It becomes apparent there are as many bars as people on this homestead (two). Situation reaches Herculean levels of hilarity when the cheated bar owner discloses, in a heated tirade directed at those of us using his benches but not buying his beer, that the owner of the other bar (20 feet away) is his brother.

8) Multiple members of group succumb to intestinal problems of various types and intensities.

9) Day 3 introduces mosquitoes which have appear to have been genetically altered to suck every drop of blood from any object less dense than a piece of granite, possessing supernatural ability to penetrate cloaks of body odor, insect repellant, sunscreen, and other assorted funks so thick as to be visible while aquiring their targets.

10) Can`t stress enough how brutal #9 was.

11) Arrival on night 3 in La Playa is coordinated perfectly with a major blackout in the small town upon whose outskirts we are camped. Fortunately, the bars stay open and we are marched through town by our guide to a small back room which is opened up by a very sleepy townsman who very graciously allows us to drink by candlelight in his tavern with vintage Def Leppard and Guns ´n´ Roses posters on the walls. This would appear to be a positive experience, but after a few rounds our cook finally caught up to announce, somewhat furiously, that we were nearly two hours late for dinner. Fortunately, the usual situation where two or three bad apples misbehave and get reprimanded is augmented due to the fact that *everyone* is late, including our guide, so there is no one to do the chastizing.

12) Day 4 begins with temperatures spiraling into the upper registers of "too brutal to deal with." Short trip in cattle car results in two more episodes getting stuck and one game of chicken with another bus on a very narrow road. After game of chicken (and short scuffle with forces of gravity, inertia, and common sense) is very skillfully and terrifyingly won by our 14-year-old driver we encounter enormous boulder in middle of road. Boulder could not have been skirted by the other bus in game of chicken. It becomes evident that boulder has arrived in middle of road quite recently.

13) 5:15 am bus to Machu Picchu overheats.

14) Return train from Aguas Calientes to Cuzco nearly canceled due to a rockslide which has destroyed nearly 500 meters of track. We appear to be stranded in Aguas Calientes, but after several hours of waiting, three games of chess, 32 hands of Gin Rummy, a veritable Olympics of ¨throwing playing cards into a hat on the ground,¨ and a fist full of fraudulently photo-copied train tickets, we somehow manage to get on the train (albeit on the floor) and take it to the damage point. A tourbus somehow manages to pick us up (¨bus will meet you at kilometro ochenta y dos, ya...?¨ and we arrive in Cuzco, fithy tired and covered with horseshit, at 1:30 am.

Reasons why the 5-day trek to Machu Picchu via Salcantay Glacier will go down as one of the greatest trips of all time:

Not entirely sure how this worked out. Has something to do with the magic of Machu Picchu, but more with the amazing group of folks we got to go with. Disaster tends to breed bonds and no one was the slightest bit uptight or caused the tiniest riff. That´s not to say people weren´t stress-tested, but everyone handled it with humor and grace.

A brief catalog of the group as related in terms of offensively-reductive stereotypes: Two crazy Irish cousins who manufacture traffic cones, slender Canadien couple on honeymoon, French couple who kept to themselves but were nonetheless sweethearts, wise-cracking British finance guy, Aussie girl relocated to Aspen, somewhat crunchy Northwestern woman who now blows glass beads on an island off British Columbia, East Coast girl relocated to Seattle for oceanography PhD, South American/British couple who were dead ringers for folks I know back home and who gave me a phenominal lesson in S. African history by candlelight at the bar in La Playa, brakeman from Alaskan railway who´s about to move to Vegas and his girlfriend from California who´s now teaching English in Ecuador.

Our guide, Saul, was a whole chapter unto himself. I´ll pass over most of what could be told here and skip straight to our last night in Aguas Calientes, the evening before we were scheduled to visit Machu Picchu at 5:15 am. After several hours of reverie and merriment, the crew found itself stumbling out of a disco around three in the morning, trying to figure out what had happened, who was responsible, and whether there had really been disrobing involved.

Saul grabbed me in a headlock and, looking around to make sure nobody else was in earshot, said, ¨Chad...eef I go to seep now I weel note wake up. Weel be very bad.¨

I agreed with him. ¨Very bad,¨ I said.

¨Chad,¨ he said. ¨We must keep dreenking. I know a place. Weel be fun. Tell the others. Beer.¨

Later, the guy from South Africa related that Saul had also pulled him aside and said, ¨Tomorrow, I cannot talk about Machu Picchu. Es impossible. Andrew, *you* must do it.¨

The night ended with us arriving at the hostel only to find it locked and unattended, trying desperately find our way in while Saul pleaded with us to continue down the street with him. He gathered us together in a kind of football huddle, arms around each other´s backs.

¨My friends,¨ he said. ¨You have two options.¨ We all listened up. He was, after all, our guide, and he´d been fantastic up to this point. We were in a bit of a jam and we needed advice. It was beginning to look like tomorrow might be a problem.

¨One, we can sleep on the porch.¨ We all looked to see a dark figure hunched in the doorway of the hostel, fast asleep.

With this, the South African guy´s British girlfriend briskly left the huddle and made a beeline for the door to find a way to summon the hostel´s proprietor. The South African guy looked to the rest of us for advice and someone told him if he knew what was good for him he would follow her immediately. He did.

¨Or...¨ Saul pressed on, looking everyone in the eyes, studying the ground, checking over his shoulder as he contemplated option number two, working out the details in his head and growing more obviously pleased with himself as he cobbled together an ingenious method for extracting ourselves from this brownish, degenerating, mess of a situation: drunk and tired on the streets of Aguas Calientes just an hour before we needed to be up and packing. Option one hadn´t sounded so good and we were expecting something mystical and mindblowing out of number two.

¨Or we can go to dreenk more beer!¨

When people say they ¨fell down laughing,¨ they usually don´t mean they found themselves on the ground, rolling from side to side and clutching their their stomaches as they wept with laughter. That is, however, exactly what happened to us for about ten minutes before scraping ourselves off the cobblestones and staggering off to find a way into the hostel. The fact that we actually made it to Machu Picchu and navigated relatively cheerfully through the next day is proof positive that God does not always hate us. Which is good to know.

raiders of the lost art of not treating poor people like plastic fruit

2005-10-07T16:41:00.000-07:00

Took part in the ritual disembowelment of a once-proud people´s spirit by participating in an organized tour of ruins in the Sacred Valley. Hugo set this up for me, and even though it turned out to be a good return on very little invested effort the logistics were so sketchy that I vowed to bail out of the Machu Picchu trip he´d booked me on for the next day. I normally hate organized tours, but there´s no other way I would have gotten to these places 24 hours after arriving.

In between getting bussed to breathtaking hillside Inca ruins with exquisitely-terraced agricultural plots in places that seem utterly unaccessible (even in modern times) for 45-minute tours, we got dropped off for hour-long stints at the public markets in a handful of very small, very poor villages. Old women and young children (is no one middle-aged in these places?) dressed in traditional bright red shawls and porkpie hats set up in typical swap-meet formation selling the exact same souvenirs (alpaca sweaters, fake gold trinkets, wooden flutes, blankets, random used books, cigarettes...) in 50 separate booths. Fat white people with sunburns took turns arranging adorably dirty little children into pleasing arrangements with llamas and pigs for photographs to upload as wallpaper on their computers back at work, all the while missing the point that these people expect to be tipped -- at least nominally -- for swallowing their self-respect and participating in this twisted spectacle. It made me kind of ill and I spent most of my time wandering across the street to photograph crude coca-cola advertisements hand-painted on the sides of crumbling mud brick shacks and bony cows tied up with short rope leashes.

Arrived back in town and orchestrated a retreat from my main man Hugo (who´d rescued me that morning when the tourbus forgot me and hustled me into an entirely different, unrelated tour), and the travel empire he´s constructed which doesn´t quite measure up to his good nature, in the only way that seemed decent. I made up a lie. A whopper. About a woman. Figured that kind of thing would work down here, and it did. At one point when it became very unclear (since all this was happening in Spanish) exactly *why* I had to cancel my tour and leave to find this girl tomorrow Hugo asked me if I was sick, to which I responded, quite poorly, ¨Solomente en su corazon, Hugo. Solomente en su corazon.¨ Go to babelfish if you need a translation.

Then wandered back to the Crossed Keys, which I pretty much confirmed is the bar owned by the British guy who´s now the consulate in Cuzco and who Michael Palin tapped to take him into the Amazon on one episode of ¨Full Circle.¨ (eat your heart out, Webb...) The bartender was really nice and let me practice my pathetic Spanish with her. A few minutes after I walked in alone she asked me what I was doing and I replied, with great difficulty, ¨I try to listen to these men shout loud with anger to each other but the Spanish I have is ridiculous.¨

A beer later I got into a huge, drawn out discussion with two kids from England about politics, Bush, Blair, Brown, Iraq, Iran, Israel, the IRA, and a whole host of other very intense, very involved, very interesting subjects. They´d been on the move through Mexico, Central America, and South America for five months and told me, ¨You´d better be prepared, because everywhere you go people will have questions about what´s going on in America.

¨That´s ok,¨ I said. ¨Because I have all the answers.

They made me stay out too late drinking pisco sours (made from fermented sugarcane) and I paid for it.

The next day I took care of some must-do´s. Drank Inka Cola (tastes like Mountain Dew spiked with bubblegum), ate alpaca (tastes like pork) with quinoa (tastes like cous cous) and toured the Museo Inca, which was once again a bit of a letdown. I was the nerd on the tour of the ruins who kept questioning the tourguide (who, by the way, was flat out wrong about a *lot* of shit) and making offhanded comments about things he was omitting. I´m not proud of this, but had hoped to get over it with an informative day at the museo. No dice, and I still feel like an asshole.

Lunched on a balcony overlooking the main plaza where, in 1780, the local hero Tupac Amaru II was publicly torn limb from limb by the Spaniards after his desperate, last-ditch Indian revolt was quelled. Today there was a parade with solemn men in dark suits doing a strange two-step and women in multi-colored shawls looking bored and distracted.

The plaza is filled with countless little street urchins constantly trying to sell things to tourists. I started talking to one today and was surprised how friendly and forthcoming he was. He sat down and I tried to speak Spanish to him. I asked if he liked school and he said no. He asked me if it was my first time in Cuzco and I said that it was, and that I liked it very much. I asked him if he would go to college and he looked at me like I was insane, shaking his head with the world-weary resignation of a 40-year-old and sighing deeply as he made the ¨too much money¨ sign with his fingers. We talked a little about the Yankees, Micky Mouse, and Jean Claude Van Damme and we talked about the rain. Then he narrowed his eyes and cocked his head and asked me very slowly, ¨What do you think about your presidente?¨

I ended up buying a postcard from him which depicts two men horrifically dragging a live condor through the street by it´s outspread wings. It cost about nine cents.

When I got up to leave I asked him what his name was and he said, ¨My name is Hugo.¨

Cuzco, Peru

2005-10-06T05:53:00.000-07:00

Spent about 9 hours on an overnight flight from LA to Lima, during which I was the victim of some kind of sadistic psychological warfare waged by the flight attendants involving an oddly-inflected Spanish and a mysterious specially-ordered vegetarian meal which I just couldn´t manage to get rid of. To make things even worse, I had to listen to some hot-shit high school grad sitting behind me go on and on about how she´s had 15 years of Spanish (she must have only been 17) and was going to install stoves in the homes of native Peruvian Quechua Indians somewhere near Ollyantaytamba for the next three months. Jesus Christ...

Finally won a minor victory by getting a normal breakfast and landed in Lima without consequence, where I got to chatting with a guy from Santa Cruz who´d once been reported as a terrorist by a white woman in a bar there due to his slight brown-ness. Chatted up the hot-shit high-schooler a little who was actually quite pleasant once she became the only English-speaking person within ten miles of me.

Arrived in Cuzco tired, hungry, and a little woozy (elevation) and was astonished to watch my cabbie, Hugo, magically transform from driver to hotelier to tourguide to bosom pal to travel agent right before my eyes. It took all I had to concentrate on making sure I wasn´t getting ripped off while he booked me on a tour of ruins for the next day and Machu Picchu the day after. Inca trail is booked solid through November (¨es imposible´, senor...¨) so I´m on a different route that approaches via the side hatch, rolling over what appear to be some impressive mountain passes in the faded color photographs that hang in every travel agency´s window.

Around 5:00pm, a large commotion and crowd appeared out of nowhere in the central plaza of the town. A few minutes later, a cheap-looking race car came tearing around a corner of what I must stress is a very small, narrow, stone street and fishtailed into the crowd. People dove out of the way in every direction and the two teenaged boys who came nearest to getting flattened giggled stupidly as they landed on their stomachs. A beer company called Pilsen X-treme was having some kind of promotion with girls in skintight jumpsuit and tall bottles of inflatable beer. There were amateur reporters with tape recorders and video cameras mobbing the drivers as they tore into the plaza, about 2 minutes after each other. A drunk bald man tried to flag a race car like it was a taxi and everyone laughed. I asked a pretty distinguished-looking British guy next to me with grey hair and an expensive camera strap what was going on and he said it was a three-day road rally of the type he commonly followed in the U.K.

¨Very exciting,¨ he said. ¨But not exactly what I´d call an intense concern for public safety.¨

I nodded in agreement and then shrank back in terror as a furious string of firecrackers exploded beneath the feet of a rabid reporter, once again sending bodies flying to the ground as smoke and bits of paper rose up into the air and another race care squealed around the corner into the crowd.

new world

2005-10-06T05:50:00.000-07:00

Stepped off the plane to find myself surrounded by a loud and unutterably pushy throng of people. No English spoken anywhere. Everyone absolutely beautiful. All the signs in Spanish. Felt completely out of place and intimidated by the endless sprawl of the city as we descended to the airport.

God, I hate LA.

haven't left yet

2005-09-30T15:27:00.000-07:00

Not sure how well this will work, but if i can make it online from time to time this is where I'll be yammering away about stuff that happens, rather than cutting-and-pasting a bunch of emails to different people and pretending like they're personalized notes.

Long story short: the Internet company I work for finally had the heart to lay me off and now I'm going to South America for a couple months to celebrate. All my stuff's going into storage, the unemployment checks are rolling in, and I've been vaccinated against every disease known to man except the one I'll probably get immediately upon arrival.

When the tables were turned and I was still working, hearing about the exploits of my unemployed friends absolutely infuriated me, so no hard feelings if anyone is tempted to throw a hex on me. With any luck, this will be a document of the most miserable two months ever and serve to reinforce your suspicion that cranking out 9-to-5s for the Man really isn't all that bad.

Flight leaves Tuesday. Major concern right now is how to manage my Fantasy Football team from way down there.