(13:10, 21 November, hostel in Taganga, a small fishing village just outside Santa Marta, Colombia) It rains every day. At least once. Sometimes, like it is now, so much and so hard that water crashes in waves of mist, into even the most fully covered areas. Sometimes it splashes down and recedes in a few minutes. Sometimes it rises like a tide, increasing slowly and steadily up to its height and then retreating after dominating for hours. This is usually when it starts at night. Sometimes you hear it arriving in the dark hours, after the afternoon’s light has disappeared even earlier than normal behind ominous grey-blue shadows. Other times, it steals in unseen, long after a cloudless sunset has promised a dry darkness. Read the rest of this entry »
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(Sunday 17th October, in a cloud, sitting in the upstairs dining room of a community project hostel, Quilatoa, Ecuador) After Independence Day in Guayaquil, I took a bus to Riobamba, sitting next to a young man, who even when I told him I was engaged and would be returning to South Africa to plan my wedding whilst my fiance completed his studies, insisted on paying the taxi to my hostel, walking me in and gifting me with an enormous bag of bananas. The next place I wanted to spend a few days was Banos to the north west, but from Riobamba there is a road southeastwards to the jungle town of Macas that goes right through the middle of Sangay National Park and I wanted to see what Ecuadorian cloud forest and rain forest is like. I could have done an organized trip from anywhere here on the tropical side of the country, but they’re not cheap. So instead I took a few very affordable buses and made my own little scenic detour. Unfortunately my camera was dead, so you’ll have to take my word for it – the journey was amazing! Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Culture, Friendly people, Nature, Spanish
(Thursday, 6 October, on the bus to Ingapirca, north of Cuenca, Ecuador) A blind man at the front of the bus is strumming a guitar and harmonizing with a young woman, baby in arm – a terribly sad song. In the lyrics I can make out something about being alone on a beach. We have stopped at a station en route where a number of tailored business men and women, in pinstripe and elegant polonecks and shiny leather shoes, picked up their briefcases and left the bus. The Spanish descriptions of fruit salads and potato crisps have been repeated so many times by the vendors walking down between the seats that they have each merged into one especially long sound of intenations and syllables that lasts all the way back out of the bus. Three identically dressed women outside on the pavement are bent around a basket, their traditional pleated skirts covering their stockinged legs. The black rope plaits emerging from their panama hats jiggle against their backs as they work. They are fastening a canvas bag across the top of the basket to stop the chicken inside it from getting out. Her creamy-canvas-colour, feathered-healthy head is blinking and bobbing with an air of surprise and shocked indignation from one end. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Culture, Educational, Food, Transport
(10:45, 1 August, taking refuge in our room, San Ignatio de Moxos, Bolivia) I’m definitely not hung-over because the drink on offer last night was Leche de Tigre (Tiger’s Milk), warm milk with spices and near pure alcohol, so I probably managed about 4 Tablespoons over the 8 odd hours we spent in the improvised bar, dancing with a local pregnant woman and her husband and sister. Nevertheless my brain has the distinct feeling of being removed from reality, like that which comes with the morning after. It may have something to do with the fact that there is a live brass band surrounded by drunk dancing men just outside our door in the courtyard of our hostel. Tireless! They have no doubt been playing all night, one of the older guys is asleep, his head hanging forward and his trumpet fallen to the floor beside him. It’s coming down in buckets and the drunk hostel owner’s wet clothes are evidence of the harzards of having a tiled floor. But the rain hasn’t dampened the energies of the few wasted guys trying to convince anyone walking past to join in by cajoling damply into your ear and feeling you up. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Culture, Friendly people, Nature, South Africa, Spanish
(15:15, 26 July, Immigration Office, Santa Cruz, Bolivia) I wasn’t the cut-off exactly, but it was the woman just 2 ahead of me who was the last to be served before Immigration closed for lunch. When I was in Sucre I went to the office there to check because my 30-day visa expires on the 28th of July. The Santa Cruz office, being in a big city, is much bigger and quite well organized (in fact I have written this entire blog post on the little slip of paper they gave me listing what I would require for an extension and how to go about getting one step-by-step), but there are obviously far more people available for making queues.
Tags: Culture, Food, Mistakes and Mishaps, South Africa
(17:52, 2 July, Internet café in Uyuni, Bolivia) I considered sticking around in Tupiza for a while to ride a horse where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid met their maker but, having enquired at tour companies about tour groups with spaces for the Salar de Uyuni since we arrived that afternoon, I decided to write my name down with Rob, a guy I meet on the train, with the first very lovely woman we had spoken to. The fact that I could get to the reasonably sized town of Potosi to watch Argentina play on Saturday may have sweetened the deal. So we met, bags packed, for coffee on Tuesday morning and having introduced ourselves to the driver and cook we embarked on something my tired brain can only call indescribable.
(13:30, 3 July, Koala Cafe, Potosi, Bolivia) Honestly, I don’t know how to explain this tour to you all. We drove for 3 and a half days across the southwest of Bolivia, through some of the most incredible and surreal scenery and always up and up and up. We saw green lakes, red lakes, white lakes, multi-coloured mountains, black volcanoes, deep brown sand dunes, beige deserts. It was like the whole landscape had turned up the colour. The sky was a bluer blue, the grass more intensely golden, the weird plant that grows on the occasional rock was so dynamically green it was almost luminescent. It’s as if the normal world, where things exist at normal altitudes, is blurred and stunted by the extra layer of atmosphere it has to bear. On the antiplano, the sun is that bit nearer, the muffling insulation of air is thin, everything is crisper and sharper. Including the cold. The mornings and evenings were painfully cold! The freezing wind blows uninhibited and penetrates to your bones through the tiniest gap between scarf and hood or cuff and glove, and dare you wash your hands! Even at midday, water waits to be released by the sunshine, frozen in patches of shadow that won’t be moved until the seasons change.
And amongst the thermal pools and sulphuric geysers and the expanses of ice, are flamingos and strange rodents and llama and sheep. And people! An implausibly large number of people, growing their crops and tending their animals. There is something confused inside of me when I see a “village” of five families, a cluster of stone buildings, from which, every day, a team of men walk out to work on the tiny goldmine on their doorstep. Or when I see a woman in long socks and a traditional pleated skirt, knees bare, walking along a frozen riverbed in the frigid hours of the early morning. The tour in its entirety is one of those things that makes you wonder what it’s all for. And there’s nowhere better than sitting in the middle of a salt flat, in a dichotomy of extreme blue and extreme white, to feel like the answer must be simply insolvably simple.
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(20:30, 13 May, Hostel Colonial, Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay) I know it’s only my second country, but Uruguayan men are definitely my favourite so far. They’re laid back, friendly, incredibly good-looking and they don’t try to convince you into anything more than good, friendly conversation. Although “No” really does mean “No” in Spanish, Argentinian men only seem to understand when you’re shouting it into the faces.
I wish I had got the name of the traveller from Uruguay that I met in Buenos Aires who convinced me that missing the country altogether would be a huge mistake. But although I’m unlikely to see him, I’m excited to hit Montevideo for the weekend.
Tonight I’m taking it easy in the sleepy town of Colonia. I caught the ferry here from Buenos Aires, arriving in the early early hours of this morning.
I had spent some time looking at the map and deciding how I would get to my hostel. But sitting in the fancy arrivals’ lounge…
(13:40, Thurs 14 May, bench under pink-flowered tree, Plaza Major, Barrio Historico, Colonia) Fell asleep, sorry…Sitting in the fancy arrival’s lounge at the ferry station in Colonia, with all my kit I decided against walking there in the dark and braved the stares of the security guards and the cleaning crew who worked around me and slept against my pack on a bench in the station.
When the sun finally rose, I discarded my hobo impersonation and walked outside only to find that Colonia is so small, my hostel was a few hundred metres away. They let me check in as soon as I arrived so I had few hours sleep before I went sight-seeing. I had specifically chosen Hostel Colonial because they had free bicycles available. What they say about riding a bike is true but I still ended up giving it back after 20 minutes or so. I had decided that the loose seat was bearable and had hopped on again after visiting the first site – the old City Gate. I was just getting my balance in the first few metres when the next thing on the itinerary, went by. Most of the attractions are in the Historical Neighbourhood of Colonia and the place is so small they are generally a couple of steps from one another. From where I am sitting I am basically looking at 8 of the 15-odd things to be seen. It’s a lovely little historical town that was a smuggler’s port to Buenos Aires in its day and is now an attraction for local and international tourists, with decent information and beautifully kept and restored quaint cobbled streets with 18th century blue and white tiled name signs on the stone walls of old Portuguese and Spanish styled homes. I’ve changed some money to Uruguayan pesos so today I’m going to all these gorgeous little museums full of the most incredible things. From the fossilized skeleton of this crazy enormous sloth-like animal called a Lestodon discovered in the area, to beautiful antique porcelain maté cups.
Maté is this great thing, a really authentically South American pastime. So it was so amazing to see these very European cups, displayed amongst the Portuguese vases and Spanish bullfighting costumes, were used by the wealthy to do something so distinctly un-European. Like we go for coffee socially or meet for tea, South Americans have maté. At any time of day you will see them with a little gourd of herbs with a metal spoon/straw, which they top up with hot water from a flask or kettle. The thing I like so much about it is that when you meet for maté you don’t each have your own; one maté is made and topped with water as it’s passed around. I tried to explain the warm fuzzy feeling this communal ritual idea gave me to the Argentinian who was telling me how it works, and he suggested that whilst it was a lovely sentiment, it wasn’t something most people thought about when having maté and perhaps I was reading into it a bit much.
(14:30, 14 May, Plaza Major, Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay) I can just hear Edith Piaf drifting from a nearby café. I’m surrounded by this stunning flock of squawking green and yellow birds – they look a bit like cockatoos – who are hopping around in the branches above me, showering me in big pink flowers. I have one or two more museums to see and then I think I’ll head up to the beaches a little way away to enjoy the sunny afternoon. My bus to Montevideo leaves just before midnight so I’ll hit the city for the weekend. While it’s only 1.5 million people, nothing like Buenos Aires, the lovely little Colonia del Sacramento has been a wonderful change of pace.
Heading back to the urban, there are a couple of lessons I learnt in Buenos Aires. Whilst the subway system’s routes are labelled A, B, C etc and the stations are marked on the street with a round coloured sign of the letter, heading for a round blue E sign won’t help you, no matter how many times you do it. E stands for estacionamiento, and since you are looking for the subway, a car park is unlikely to be useful to you.
Also an abbreviation: when filling your water bottle at a basin, avoid the tap marked C. The one you are looking for has an F for frego, or cold. C, I think is for caliente and you will undoubtedly melt your bottle because the geysers here are all set way too high.
Speaking of which, the clouds are edging in and I’m keen to maximize the warmth in Colonia.
Tags: Culture, Educational, Food, Spanish
Haha, now that I´m typing out what I had written, I see that the date was actually the 8th May and it wasn´t even Sunday, it was Saturday:
(18:35, Sunday – not sure what the date is, edge of round hall in Palais Glace waiting for fashion show to begin, Recoleta, Buenos Aires)
Finally I´m on time for something! I´ve been all over the city this week going to various attractions, but aside from this I keep arriving at places at the wrong time, even when I go by the book. The day the museum doesn´t open, the time the gallery closes its doors, and more than once in the last few days, I´ve arrived like 20 minutes after the English tour began.
So there´s usually not much happening in these amazing exhibitions and venues and I walk them slowly and alone, taking it all in.
(20:00, end of fashion show) I love doing it, but it is nice to be amongst a crowd every now and then. This was a real treat, the kind of random thing I´d hear about via the grape vine in Johannesburg, and would make an effort to go see. The Palais Glaces (Exhibition Centre) is hosting an exhibition of installation art about various women in South American history, part of the government´s Bicentenary activities. There was a big colourful wooden box with peep holes through which one could watch a revolving miniature stage and living room back-to-back. There was a painting of a native Argentinian woman with a spear, standing over a pit of dirt and desert plants, with an upward facing television buried in it showing images of the desert and every 5 minutes or so a vulture or a pair of boots. (I know, I watched for quite a long time because I kept expecting it to change).
Turns out the boots belonged to the subject of the piece and were displayed along one wall with all sorts of other clothing and accessories which had belonged to the women of significance featured in the exhibition.
I think clothing has quite an importance here and it really seems to be regarded as a significant expression of personality. In this case for instance it was used to represent the role of each woman as well as their kind of femininity in itself. You may think I´m reading into this more than I should (Brendan) just because I´m excited that I got to see a real live fashion show, but it´s everywhere.
It seems quite sensible to devote a substantial part of a church museum to the priest´s dress, especially when each piece has a special meaning, not to mention that each is beautiful and ancient and intricately made in golds and silks. But even the Museo Eva Peron showed and explained the outfits she wore at each event and stage of her life. Some locals took us to this insane party on Saturday night, and all I wanted to do was sit and stare at all the indie styles pushing past me in the enormous crowded venue. In Argetina, it seems it’s all about the attire.
So in my fashionista hiking boots, I followed a stream of people upstairs, to find, with much excitement, a fashion show of designs inspired by the various ages in Argentine history going on. I couldn’t help thinking that at a fashion show in Cape Town, the models would be more professional, basically better at walking, but it was most impressive. Especially by modern standards which, as far as my limited FTV experience has taught me, attribute value based on the amount of flesh visible – how short the dresses, how transparent and clingy the fabric, how blatant it is that the model isn’t wearing any underwear.
(6pm, 4 May, lobby of Tango Backpackers, Palermo, Buenos Aires) A friend asked the other day if I´ve gotten used to the sounds, the language, the smell. As you may know, some cities smell. Cape Town for instance, while undoubtedly beautiful, smells. Of fish and industry. But there are things that will make any city smell, like stepping in dog poo. It´s not that Buenos Aires smells, its that the streets of Buenos Aires have crazy crazy amounts of dog poo that is easily stepped in. It seems everyone owns a dog and walks it along the sidewalk to do its business, the evidence appearing in concentrations between one every 10 metres, to one a metre. So yes, despite my diligence, I have experienced the smell of Buenos Aires at least once.
The language. In theory I can speak basic Spanish, ´introductory level´. In practise, when someone speaks to me I freak out and struggle to even tell them in Spanish that I don´t speak much Spanish. I even said Dankie to the receptionist at the Art Museum today. And thus the soundtrack to my walks in the streets is still Michel Thomas, language instructor to the stars.
(12.15pm, 5 May, lobby of Tango Backpackers, Palermo, Buenos Aires) I moved to a different hostel yesterday. Not because I didn´t like the one I was in. En contrario, I seriously recommend it and will definitely stay there when I come back to the city to fly home. The dorm I was in had its own en suite bathroom, and there were extra showers and toilets just outside our door. The cleaning staff never stopped – they even made the beds – and all for 36 pesos a night (about R64). Plus the people were really awesome. We had a big jam on my last night for the barman´s birthday.
The new place actually works out cheaper because I get my fifth night free and its also a great spot so far. Much bigger and a lot more English speakers – even an American guy who was born in South Africa. I went out with him and his mates last night, my first official night on the town. Verdict: clubbing in Buenos Aires is much like clubbing anywhere in South Africa. Loud, fun, some good songs, some bad, smoky… I didn´t really feel very glam in my hiking shoes, but what can you do.
The reason for the change of hostel was to move to a different area of the city. I am now in the barrio of Palermo (barrio being a neighbourhood, like a big suburb) and it is truly beautiful. San Telmo and the Microcentro, where I have spent most of my time so far, was a beautiful area of old buildings,
(14:34, 10 May, lobby of Tango Backpackers, Palermo, Buenos Aires) Sorry, had to do something so stopped mid-sentence the last time. Will finish this post soon.
(20:50, Mon 11 May, lobby of Tango Backpackers, Palermo, Buenos Aires) I’ve been putting off finishing this post because I know I’m gonna struggle to explain what Palermo is like. Green spaces at every corner and so many incredible sculptures and monuments that eventually it overcomes you and you start to forget that they are so extraordinary. Palermo has the Rose Garden (another world!), the Zoo, the Eva Peron Museum, but it also has the nightlife. The streets are dotted with bars and restaurants and people taxi from all over the city to join in the party. Basically its amazing and whilst I was sad to leave Tango City in San Telmo, I’m so glad I moved to a new side of town.
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