October 1996 to August 1997 I spent traveling from California to Tierra del Fuego overland, by bus. Bolivia was probably the most interesting country and, at the very least, made for the best stories. Here is a letter I sent from an internet cafe once I arrived in Santiago Chile. While not as amazing as the Freddy Tour, my silver mine tour and really bad bus ride are interesting as well.
The Potosi Mine Tour
After La Paz and that infamous prison tour I wrote about in my last letter I headed south to Potosi. the city sits at the foot of a hill at over 13,000 feet, making it the highest city in the world. The chief attraction to Potosi, however is the hill behind it and the some 5,000 mines (mostly abandoned) bored into it. The hill has been mined since Incan times but it was the Spanish who turned it into a big time operation. The silver from the mines financed the Spanish crown for over two centuries and turned Potosi into the second largest city in the world during the 17th century.
While most of the silver is now gone, mining continues albeit on a small scale. it is possible to tour one of these small, cooperative mines and observe the working conditions which are straight out of Dickens.
Tour companies arrange for tourists to go inside the mines and have a look around.Our guide was a former miner who had studied Englished and switched over to the more lucrative (and safer) profession of tour-guide. Before going up the hill we stopped off at the miners market to buy gifts for the miners, things such as bottled water, cigarettes, coca leaves, and dynamite (the miners typically have to buy their own so it makes a very useful gift). We were also with a coat, hardhat, and a gas lamp. We also began chewing coca leaves as this is supposed to help with, among other things, claustrophobia. The mines are at nearly 14,000 feet so it is hard to breathe even when you are not in a shaft barely the diameter of your body.
The entrance to the mine was a simple hole in the side of the mountain about four feet in height and hidden behind a pile of junk ore. At the entrance sat several miners calmly chewing coca and looking in no hurry to begin their work. The miners chew prodigious amounts of coca leaf for the dual effects of warding off fatigue and hunger. It allows the miners to work monstrously long shifts.
Geronimo and I entered the mine and descended several levels, crawling thru passages about four to five feet high. After a few minutes of descent we met yet more miners resting and chewing coca. It was morning and Geronimo informed us that they had been working since the night before. There was a manager (an equity holder in the mine) and two hired assistants. they had dynamited a passage and were now extracting the ore, carrying it up four levels in 90 pound sacks on their backs. this was a good find. When a passageway is mediocre a manger will work it by himself with a pick ax, not wasting expensive dynamite.
Next in the tour I was lowered by Geronimo down a 90 foot shaft with nothing more than a rope tied around my waist. Geronimo followed me sliding down the rope (an old miners trick, no doubt). I was a little surprised by my courage but by this point in the tour I had been chewing coca for quite a while and my judgment was, to say the least, suspect. At the bottom of the shaft we encountered two miners, brothers aged 19 and 15 working in the place of their father, who had recently died. Most miners, I learned, retire by the age of 35 so strenuous is the work. Even so, miners typically do not live past the age of 50, dying from one of the many miners diseases. Still, for the poor, indigenous residents of Potosi it is one of the few ways to make a living.
As bad as the conditions are in the mines today they are a vast improvement over the past when the Spanish sent thousands of Indian slaves to their deaths in the mines. Today, at least, the miners have a stake in the profits of the mine (there are some 200 mines in operations, mostly very small scale) and can take rudimentary steps to insure their safety. Last year (only) 48 miners died in accidents.
On the day of my tour there was a special ceremony going on involving the slaughter of llamas to give thanks for a prosperous year. After our emergence from the stifling mine we witnessed the slaughter of several llamas, all slit by the throat. Later the miners cooked up the meat on a large grill and buried the entrails in a offering to mother earth.
Geronimo and I descended to a lower mine where they were already cooking up the meat and helped ourselves to some. A miner came to us and bragged that llama meat has the lowest fat and cholesterol of any red meat. It struck me as a little odd that miner who will probably die before sixty would know anything about fat and cholesterol.
The meat was not bad, I should add, altho nothing compared to alpaca, which is delicious.
The Worst Bus Ride
It goes without saying that by this point in my trip I have become quite accustomed to bus rides. If ever I had an aversion to long rides I have long since gotten over it. Up until Bolivia my worst ride was a night bus from Arequipa to Cuzco, in Peru. For 13 hours I was subjected to the coldest, bumpiest, and dustiest bus ride of my trip, all while sitting next to a very large man with precious little respect for my personal space.
All this was mere preparation a ride I took in Bolivia. Since Colombia I had been hearing stories about the horrid condition of buses and roads in Bolivia but for the most part I had been quite lucky. My luck, however, ran out when I had to take a bus from Tupiza to Uyuni on a road connecting two of the most isolated corners of the Andean highlands.
The bus left at noon and the nice woman in the ticket office told me the ride would last six hours. Despite what notions you may have of how Latin Americans keep time, estimates of this sort were usually pretty good. This time it was an utter lie. The bus never arrives in under 8 hours, I later learned. Even so, an 8 pm arrival would have been a blessing.
My first inkling that all would not go smoothly came about four hours into the trip, after two hours of crawling up a not so steep road at barely 10 mph. At 6pm we pulled into the small town that marked the halfway point on this otherwise desolate journey. That is halfway, distance-wise. I assured myself that surely the road would get better if we were to make it even close to our schedule. In fact the road got worse.
Within 10 miles of this town we had two flat tires, the second of which took well over an hour to change. When I heard the clanging of a swift hammer on metal, I knew it was not an ordinary flat. From then on every time we slowed down to navigate a rut, which was quite often, I feared we were stopping for yet another flat. My body tensed up in the fear that we would not even arrive that night. The road was deeply rutted with a washboard grating and the bus (whose shocks were long gone) vibrated with such intensity that items in the overhead bins shook loose and it seemed the entire bus would come flying apart at the bolts.
To avoid the washboard sections the driver often choose alternate routes along the side of the road. This got us into our next bit of trouble. An hour outside of our final destination the bus got bogged down in sand and we all had to get out and push. At first I just had to laugh at the turn of events but the laughs soon turned in shivers. It was a cold, cold night in the desert. We were at 13,000 feet and the sun had set long ago. The temperature must have been in the teens. Thanks to that nice woman in the ticket office, who led me to believe we would arrive by sunset, I had left all my warm clothes in my pack, now totally inaccessible on top of the bus.
It took us an hour to get out of the sand, going 2 meters at a time. The driver and his assitant would dig out the area just in front of the back wheels and place a couple of boards there. The driver would rev the engine and the bus would lurch forward, rolling over the boards and then immediately bogging down in the sand again. It was while watching this farse that I decided that this was my worst bus ride, by far. Still, I mused to myself, it was not nearly at bad as some of the horror stories I had heard about buses in Bolivia, which included having the wheel fall off and being stranded by a flooded river and waiting 12 hours for the water to go down.
By the time we arrived it was just past one in the morning. it had taken us over 13 hours to go just under 100 miles. I got my stuff and quickly found a hotel room. I undressed and, filthy, went to bed, trying and failing to get warm under the thin sheets.
Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Adventures in Bolivia
October 1996 to August 1997 I spent traveling from California to Tierra del Fuego overland, by bus. Bolivia was probably the most interesting country and, at the very least, made for the best stories. Here is a letter I sent from an internet cafe in La Paz on May 16, 1997.
The best of these vingettes is the first, my tour of a Bolivian prison. It's followed by my ride on the Death Road and Skiing at 17,000 feet.
The Freddy Tour
Or my first acquaintance with the Bolivian penal system
I first heard about this tour from two American girls I met on last weekend's ski trip (which see). It is a tour of Bolivia's national prison given by the infamous (at least amongst travelers) Freddy, an inmate in the jail.
The National Penitentiary, as it is called, occupies one city block in the heart of La Paz. The main entrance faces a quiet tree lined square where children play and women sell gum and candies from kiosks. I walked up to the entrance with three other travelers. It was all hustle and bustle; guards searching visitors and checking their identification and prisoners on the other side of the gate waiting to see if anyone had arrived for them. Before we had much time to assess the situation a long-haired man standing on the prisonerÍs side of the gates called out, "I'm Freddy, it's OK, come with me." The guards briefly searched us, more concerned that we were not carrying any cameras than they were about drugs or weapons, took our passports (so they would know we weren't prisoners when we tried to leave) and let us in.
Once inside the man who had called out to us explained that his name was Ruben and that he was Freddy's assistant. It was his job to wait at the entrance and usher tourists into the jail. Freddy was busy with another tour but would be with us shortly, Ruben explained, so we could just sit and relax for a few moments. Ruben took our money, the price of the tour was 20 Bolivianos, or about four dollars. Freddy got to keep about half of this, the rest went to pay off the gaurds and his assistants.
Now that I had a few seconds to breathe I looked around the prison yard to gather some first impressions. First of all the place didn't look like a prison at all. The area where we sat looked more like the interior courtyard of a standard budget hotel (a little nicer, in fact). There were three floors with doors leading out onto a balcony. Each doorway was attractively painted white with a pine green trim. In the courtyard, where we sat, trees and shrubs were planted giving the place an almost park-like feel. Along the sides were kiosks selling candies and gum, just like one sees everywhere in Latin America. On the ground floor was a pool hall and a restaurant. The prisoners were all dressed in plainclothes and moved about with freedom. The only people in uniform were the guards who, aside from the entrance, were almost entirely nonexistent.
Freddy arrived and introduced himself. He was dressed in a red T-shirt, bluejeans, and a baseball cap emblazoned with the Nike logo. He started off telling us a little about the tour. He explained that we had nothing to worry about in terms of our safety. Freddy knew everyone at the prison and they all knew not to mess with him. He added that in the year he's been doing these tours nothing bad has happened, "until today" he said and smiled.
He began the tour with some explanation about life in the prison. The bottom line, he said, was money. With money a prisoner can have and do anything within the walls of the prison. For a price a prisoner can buy a nicer cell, have any kind of drug that exists, even bring his wife and kids into the prison to live with him (probably the oddest sight in the whole place was toddlers playing in the prison yard). And of course money can buy your freedom. "Your money is your justice," was a phrase oft repeated by Freddy during the tour.
The courtyard we were standing in was, what Freddy called, the five star section of the jail. It was here that the big drug dealers and traffickers lived. A cell in this section starts at $5000 and goes up from there. For this price a prisoner can get several bedrooms, satellite TV, even a Jacuzzi. When a prisoner enters the jail he is either assigned a cell in the bad section or giving an option to buy a nicer cell from an outgoing prisoner. At various points along the tour I saw 'for sale' signs tacked up outside of cells.
We left the courtyard and continued our tour. On the gate of the section we had just left was a sign with five stars on it and the name of the section, Los Pinos (The Pines).
Next up was the four star section. This section's yard had no trees and shrubs but was still nicer than some of the hotels I've stayed in on this trip. It was here that the assistants to the drugs lords; the chemists, and pilots lived. A cell here went for a minimum of $1000. In the corner was a restaurant serving rotisserie chicken.
The tour continued down thru the stars and into the prison's slums where, as Freddy put it, the dangerous motherfuckers lived. He told us that every year at least 20 people died in fights, mainly in the bad sections. The weapon of choice is a spear made from a sharpened steel rebar. Freddy recounted a couple of fights he had been in while a prisoner. He said it was not like the movies. It was best to kill your opponent with the first blow, no drama.
Presently we came upon a young and rather unkempt young man slouching in a doorway. Freddy walked up and kicked him a couple of times, hard, in the face and slung a long list of obscenities at him as he stumbled away. As he left away Freddy added a couple more kicks for good measure. Freddy turned to us and said, "That man is a junkie and he owes me money. If he does not pay me I will break his arm." During the tour Freddy's demeanor was friendly and courteous but I had no trouble believing that he could turn the bad motherfucker if need be.
Next we passed by the section where the prostitutes live. They, for the most part, are not prisoners, but they live in the prison because, presumably, business is so good. "Those bitches over there," Freddy said, "they are the ugly bitches. They cost 30 pesos. Over there, those are the good looking bitches. They cost 80." He seemed to like to use the word bitch. His surprisingly good English was peppered with obscenities, including the ubiquitous, "motherfucker. "
Next he led us into his cell, a cramped two floor cell in the three star section. Freddy paid $600 for where he lives. Here he talked a little about the crimes he had committed and what he was in for. A couple of years ago he was caught robbing a jewelry store and has been in jail since, altho, like most criminals in Bolivia, he's been involved in the cocaine trade. In fact, while we sat in his cell he offered us each some cocaine "98% pure" and only $3 a gram...almost as cheap as Colombia.
Freddy lives with his girlfriend, a Yugoslav woman he met on a tour about a year ago. She liked the drugs so much that she decided to stay, altho she is not a prisoner. Apparently the drugs inside the prison are the best and cheapest available in Bolivia. The girl works at night as a stripper, collecting tips and occasionally lifting the wallets out of her drunk customer's pockets. Freddy does quite well, all things considered. Through word of mouth this tour has become quite popular and he sometimes leads up to six tours a day of ten people each. Due to this income, and the money he gets from his girlfriend, Freddy saved up enough money to paid off the judge on his case. In less than a month Freddy will be released. $2000 was the price that bought his freedom. "Your money is your justice," he kept saying.
Our last stop on the tour was the section where they keep political prisoners (mostly terrorists and guerrillas rather than dissidents and activists). These were the only prisoners who could not pay off a judge to have their sentence shortened. The government turns a blind eye to most corruption but not any that actually might endanger their power.
And finally the tour was over. Already another group of tourists was waiting for Freddy. We stood at the gate while the guard looked for our passports (a tense moment) and we were free. Of course, the outside didn't seem all that different.
The Death Road
Later that same day I took a bus to Coroico, a small town about half way down to the Amazon basin from the highlands. The road from La Paz drops over 10,000 feet in less that 50 miles on its way down. The road is far from safe, in fact, in 1994 the World Bank declared it 'the world's most dangerous road.' Amongst tourists that route is known, affectionately, as the Death Road.
Last year there were 26 accidents on this road, all fatal. What makes the road so dangerous is that it is a single lane flanked on one side by cliffs that are almost sheer and drop down sometimes as much as 500 hundred feet. Guard rails are in a universe far, far away. The day I went I made sure I got to the bus station early so as to guarantee a seat on the driver's side. If I was going down the Death Road it wouldn't be with my eyes closed.
On this road, as opposed to all others on the continent, cars pass each other on the left side. There is some sense to this. The cliffs are on the left side (going down) and the driver is better able to see how close the wheels are to plunging off the edge. This can make for some tense moments when the bus has to pass oncoming traffic and the wheels are literally less than a foot from the edge. There were points on the journey when I would look out my window and see nothing but air for 500 feet below me.
When the dangerous section started an Argentine traveler in front of me turned around and said, "do you believe in God?" I was not scared, altho there were some tense moments. I tried to treat the ride as a roller coaster. Of course, I think that any country would shut down a roller coaster that caused over 100 fatalities a year. At several points on the road the track was literally cut into the cliff, sheer face above and below us. We passed *behind* several waterfalls.
At the road's more dangerous curves little crosses and shrines are sprinkled about, memorials to less fortunate souls who did not make it. I've heard these referred to as Bolivian caution signs. As we paused at the edge of the precipice I had plenty of time to read the names of those who did not make it. There was this one plaque with a star of David on it and written entirely in Hebrew, memorializing some Israeli travelers who had gone over the cliff. Nationals aren't the only ones who fall victim to the road. The plaque was dated February, '97.
I arrived in Coroico safely having enjoyed the ride but relieved that it was over. But as I stepped off the bus I realized there was only one way back to La Paz.
Skiing at 17,000 feet
The weekend before all of this I took a one day excursion out to Chacaltaya, a downhill ski resort about 20 miles outside of La Paz. Among the resorts many distinctions are being the only ski resort in the tropics and the highest downhill run in the world. Base elevation is at 17,000 feet.
At 8 am that morning I met a gathering group of travelers outside the offices of Club Andino Boliviano, where we met the bus that would take us up. After a few requisite stops for food purchasing and gas we were on our way up the steep and narrow 4wd track that led up to the ski lodge. At such an altitude I half expected to pass out upon standing up, but surprisingly, I felt fine.
After a few minutes standing around the lodge we began to rent our equipment. It was as bad as I had heard. My boots were from the early 80's, my skis from even before that. And they were in horrible condition. They ran out of equipment before everyone had a pair of skis and several people had to share. Finally, tho, most of us were all suited up and we skied down to the base of the lift.
The lift is a story in and of itself. Dating back to the resort's inception in 1939 the list is but a plain, unadorned cable run by a small diesel motor that can barely cope with the altitude. The method of going up is that of a poma tow, whereby we are dragged up the slope by the lift while leaning back on a disc or T-bar stuck between our legs. The trick with this lift, tho, is that the skier has to hook his or her own T-bar onto the cable which has no hooks and precious little friction. In the disclaimer they had us sign (This was the first and last disclaimer I ever had to sign in South America!) there was a sentence concerning the lift that I particularly like. It said, "Based on our experience it should not take you more than 12 times to learn how to use the lift."
I myself never managed to hook onto the cable even once. The first time I was helped by the staff and it was all I could do to keep the hook from slipping off as I rode up. I got to the top, happy that I had made it but sorry that I left my camera back down in the lodge. I skied down to get it. When I went back out I found that one of my bindings had slipped and my boot no longer fit. By now that altitude was really starting to get to me and I just couldn't muster the effort to get it fixed. I decided I had accomplished what I had came for--skiing a single run --and retired to the ski lodge.
The best of these vingettes is the first, my tour of a Bolivian prison. It's followed by my ride on the Death Road and Skiing at 17,000 feet.
The Freddy Tour
Or my first acquaintance with the Bolivian penal system
I first heard about this tour from two American girls I met on last weekend's ski trip (which see). It is a tour of Bolivia's national prison given by the infamous (at least amongst travelers) Freddy, an inmate in the jail.
The National Penitentiary, as it is called, occupies one city block in the heart of La Paz. The main entrance faces a quiet tree lined square where children play and women sell gum and candies from kiosks. I walked up to the entrance with three other travelers. It was all hustle and bustle; guards searching visitors and checking their identification and prisoners on the other side of the gate waiting to see if anyone had arrived for them. Before we had much time to assess the situation a long-haired man standing on the prisonerÍs side of the gates called out, "I'm Freddy, it's OK, come with me." The guards briefly searched us, more concerned that we were not carrying any cameras than they were about drugs or weapons, took our passports (so they would know we weren't prisoners when we tried to leave) and let us in.
Once inside the man who had called out to us explained that his name was Ruben and that he was Freddy's assistant. It was his job to wait at the entrance and usher tourists into the jail. Freddy was busy with another tour but would be with us shortly, Ruben explained, so we could just sit and relax for a few moments. Ruben took our money, the price of the tour was 20 Bolivianos, or about four dollars. Freddy got to keep about half of this, the rest went to pay off the gaurds and his assistants.
Now that I had a few seconds to breathe I looked around the prison yard to gather some first impressions. First of all the place didn't look like a prison at all. The area where we sat looked more like the interior courtyard of a standard budget hotel (a little nicer, in fact). There were three floors with doors leading out onto a balcony. Each doorway was attractively painted white with a pine green trim. In the courtyard, where we sat, trees and shrubs were planted giving the place an almost park-like feel. Along the sides were kiosks selling candies and gum, just like one sees everywhere in Latin America. On the ground floor was a pool hall and a restaurant. The prisoners were all dressed in plainclothes and moved about with freedom. The only people in uniform were the guards who, aside from the entrance, were almost entirely nonexistent.
Freddy arrived and introduced himself. He was dressed in a red T-shirt, bluejeans, and a baseball cap emblazoned with the Nike logo. He started off telling us a little about the tour. He explained that we had nothing to worry about in terms of our safety. Freddy knew everyone at the prison and they all knew not to mess with him. He added that in the year he's been doing these tours nothing bad has happened, "until today" he said and smiled.
He began the tour with some explanation about life in the prison. The bottom line, he said, was money. With money a prisoner can have and do anything within the walls of the prison. For a price a prisoner can buy a nicer cell, have any kind of drug that exists, even bring his wife and kids into the prison to live with him (probably the oddest sight in the whole place was toddlers playing in the prison yard). And of course money can buy your freedom. "Your money is your justice," was a phrase oft repeated by Freddy during the tour.
The courtyard we were standing in was, what Freddy called, the five star section of the jail. It was here that the big drug dealers and traffickers lived. A cell in this section starts at $5000 and goes up from there. For this price a prisoner can get several bedrooms, satellite TV, even a Jacuzzi. When a prisoner enters the jail he is either assigned a cell in the bad section or giving an option to buy a nicer cell from an outgoing prisoner. At various points along the tour I saw 'for sale' signs tacked up outside of cells.
We left the courtyard and continued our tour. On the gate of the section we had just left was a sign with five stars on it and the name of the section, Los Pinos (The Pines).
Next up was the four star section. This section's yard had no trees and shrubs but was still nicer than some of the hotels I've stayed in on this trip. It was here that the assistants to the drugs lords; the chemists, and pilots lived. A cell here went for a minimum of $1000. In the corner was a restaurant serving rotisserie chicken.
The tour continued down thru the stars and into the prison's slums where, as Freddy put it, the dangerous motherfuckers lived. He told us that every year at least 20 people died in fights, mainly in the bad sections. The weapon of choice is a spear made from a sharpened steel rebar. Freddy recounted a couple of fights he had been in while a prisoner. He said it was not like the movies. It was best to kill your opponent with the first blow, no drama.
Presently we came upon a young and rather unkempt young man slouching in a doorway. Freddy walked up and kicked him a couple of times, hard, in the face and slung a long list of obscenities at him as he stumbled away. As he left away Freddy added a couple more kicks for good measure. Freddy turned to us and said, "That man is a junkie and he owes me money. If he does not pay me I will break his arm." During the tour Freddy's demeanor was friendly and courteous but I had no trouble believing that he could turn the bad motherfucker if need be.
Next we passed by the section where the prostitutes live. They, for the most part, are not prisoners, but they live in the prison because, presumably, business is so good. "Those bitches over there," Freddy said, "they are the ugly bitches. They cost 30 pesos. Over there, those are the good looking bitches. They cost 80." He seemed to like to use the word bitch. His surprisingly good English was peppered with obscenities, including the ubiquitous, "motherfucker. "
Next he led us into his cell, a cramped two floor cell in the three star section. Freddy paid $600 for where he lives. Here he talked a little about the crimes he had committed and what he was in for. A couple of years ago he was caught robbing a jewelry store and has been in jail since, altho, like most criminals in Bolivia, he's been involved in the cocaine trade. In fact, while we sat in his cell he offered us each some cocaine "98% pure" and only $3 a gram...almost as cheap as Colombia.
Freddy lives with his girlfriend, a Yugoslav woman he met on a tour about a year ago. She liked the drugs so much that she decided to stay, altho she is not a prisoner. Apparently the drugs inside the prison are the best and cheapest available in Bolivia. The girl works at night as a stripper, collecting tips and occasionally lifting the wallets out of her drunk customer's pockets. Freddy does quite well, all things considered. Through word of mouth this tour has become quite popular and he sometimes leads up to six tours a day of ten people each. Due to this income, and the money he gets from his girlfriend, Freddy saved up enough money to paid off the judge on his case. In less than a month Freddy will be released. $2000 was the price that bought his freedom. "Your money is your justice," he kept saying.
Our last stop on the tour was the section where they keep political prisoners (mostly terrorists and guerrillas rather than dissidents and activists). These were the only prisoners who could not pay off a judge to have their sentence shortened. The government turns a blind eye to most corruption but not any that actually might endanger their power.
And finally the tour was over. Already another group of tourists was waiting for Freddy. We stood at the gate while the guard looked for our passports (a tense moment) and we were free. Of course, the outside didn't seem all that different.
The Death Road
Later that same day I took a bus to Coroico, a small town about half way down to the Amazon basin from the highlands. The road from La Paz drops over 10,000 feet in less that 50 miles on its way down. The road is far from safe, in fact, in 1994 the World Bank declared it 'the world's most dangerous road.' Amongst tourists that route is known, affectionately, as the Death Road.
Last year there were 26 accidents on this road, all fatal. What makes the road so dangerous is that it is a single lane flanked on one side by cliffs that are almost sheer and drop down sometimes as much as 500 hundred feet. Guard rails are in a universe far, far away. The day I went I made sure I got to the bus station early so as to guarantee a seat on the driver's side. If I was going down the Death Road it wouldn't be with my eyes closed.
On this road, as opposed to all others on the continent, cars pass each other on the left side. There is some sense to this. The cliffs are on the left side (going down) and the driver is better able to see how close the wheels are to plunging off the edge. This can make for some tense moments when the bus has to pass oncoming traffic and the wheels are literally less than a foot from the edge. There were points on the journey when I would look out my window and see nothing but air for 500 feet below me.
When the dangerous section started an Argentine traveler in front of me turned around and said, "do you believe in God?" I was not scared, altho there were some tense moments. I tried to treat the ride as a roller coaster. Of course, I think that any country would shut down a roller coaster that caused over 100 fatalities a year. At several points on the road the track was literally cut into the cliff, sheer face above and below us. We passed *behind* several waterfalls.
At the road's more dangerous curves little crosses and shrines are sprinkled about, memorials to less fortunate souls who did not make it. I've heard these referred to as Bolivian caution signs. As we paused at the edge of the precipice I had plenty of time to read the names of those who did not make it. There was this one plaque with a star of David on it and written entirely in Hebrew, memorializing some Israeli travelers who had gone over the cliff. Nationals aren't the only ones who fall victim to the road. The plaque was dated February, '97.
I arrived in Coroico safely having enjoyed the ride but relieved that it was over. But as I stepped off the bus I realized there was only one way back to La Paz.
Skiing at 17,000 feet
The weekend before all of this I took a one day excursion out to Chacaltaya, a downhill ski resort about 20 miles outside of La Paz. Among the resorts many distinctions are being the only ski resort in the tropics and the highest downhill run in the world. Base elevation is at 17,000 feet.
At 8 am that morning I met a gathering group of travelers outside the offices of Club Andino Boliviano, where we met the bus that would take us up. After a few requisite stops for food purchasing and gas we were on our way up the steep and narrow 4wd track that led up to the ski lodge. At such an altitude I half expected to pass out upon standing up, but surprisingly, I felt fine.
After a few minutes standing around the lodge we began to rent our equipment. It was as bad as I had heard. My boots were from the early 80's, my skis from even before that. And they were in horrible condition. They ran out of equipment before everyone had a pair of skis and several people had to share. Finally, tho, most of us were all suited up and we skied down to the base of the lift.
The lift is a story in and of itself. Dating back to the resort's inception in 1939 the list is but a plain, unadorned cable run by a small diesel motor that can barely cope with the altitude. The method of going up is that of a poma tow, whereby we are dragged up the slope by the lift while leaning back on a disc or T-bar stuck between our legs. The trick with this lift, tho, is that the skier has to hook his or her own T-bar onto the cable which has no hooks and precious little friction. In the disclaimer they had us sign (This was the first and last disclaimer I ever had to sign in South America!) there was a sentence concerning the lift that I particularly like. It said, "Based on our experience it should not take you more than 12 times to learn how to use the lift."
I myself never managed to hook onto the cable even once. The first time I was helped by the staff and it was all I could do to keep the hook from slipping off as I rode up. I got to the top, happy that I had made it but sorry that I left my camera back down in the lodge. I skied down to get it. When I went back out I found that one of my bindings had slipped and my boot no longer fit. By now that altitude was really starting to get to me and I just couldn't muster the effort to get it fixed. I decided I had accomplished what I had came for--skiing a single run --and retired to the ski lodge.
Udate: September 1999
This is an email I sent off to friends, family and acquaintences to let them know of my progress, about two months after moving to Buenos Aires.
Unfortunately I don't have any wild stories, honestly. I think Buenos Aires just isn't that kind of place. In my last email I told you a little about my apartment (1 bedroom, 400 sq. ft. $600/month). I've since learned a little more about my neighborhood, Recoleta. The neighborhood is basically Buenos Aires' Upper East Side; dense, rich, old, expensive. It also has a bit of old Times Square thrown in as well. The area surrounding the cemetery, where Evita is buried and just a block from my apartment, is notorious as a zone of high class prostitution. All around the cemetery are flashy discos with names like "Fun Girl," "Top Hat," and, oddly, "Hippopotamus" which are really just fronts for wealthy business executives to shell out $300 for a discrete night of pleasure (I told you Buenos Aires wasn't cheap). Of course, when I mention my address to any porteño (as the local residents are called) they inevitably point this out. I tell them that I am just a poor recent graduate and ask them if they know of more economical prostitutes, perhaps any they can recommend from personal experience. (this is much easier to ask in Spanish as I can just use the verb 'conocer' which means to know, on a personal level)
Today's newspapers were all abuzz with stories about deposed Paraguayan strongman Lino Oviedo. He's taken refuge in Buenos Aires, under the protection of his old buddy Carlos Menem, the president. As Menem is soon to leave office there is pressure mounting to exile Oviedo to Tierra Del Fuego (sounds very 18th century). Oviedo has requested that any decision regarding his fate be delayed for 60 days. His reason: recovery time for a recent face-lift.
I suppose I should mention the oft tossed about fact that Buenos Aires has the highest rate of plastic surgery of any city in the world. While I haven't actually seen this fact verified by a reputable source, I have come across some local data points. A friend of mine causally mentioned having a nose job when he was 15. He seemed very nonchalant about the whole deal. His family's insurance plan covers one operation (of any type) per year. No one needed any work or had any emergencies that year. Why let it go to waste? Besides, his nose was horrendous, so he says.
Some of you have asked what kind of work I have found for myself. Unsurprisingly, I am working for an internet start-up. We are really just in the initial stages, working on a business plan and a beta web site. My boss is a guy named Patricio. He's Argentine but has spent the last three years in Miami selling beef. You know those miniscule ads in the New Yorker for $50 Argentine steaks? Well, his company is probably behind them.
Our website won't be selling beef, or any atoms for that matter. Our idea is to sell Argentina (and Latin America) to the world. In the end this is that different of a business. For someone to shell out $50 for a cut of beef that costs $1.50 here they have to be sold on some image, romantic gauchos, endless pampas grass, etc. Patricio is fond of telling how he gained Balducci's as a client (they sell in inflight magazines). The founder, Mr. Balducci himself was on a tour of Argentina. Patricio took him out to one of the estancias to show him the natural conditions the cows are raised under: no hormones, enhanced genetics, or even grain fed animals, just happy cows munching away on abundant pampas grass. Mr. Balducci, so taken with the natural scene and the happy cows got down on his kneeds, grabbed a clump of grass and started chewing it himself.
Someday, we'll provide that very same experience.over the web =)
chau (which, btw, is spelled correctly if you're saying it in Spanish)
thomas
[September 28, 1999]
Unfortunately I don't have any wild stories, honestly. I think Buenos Aires just isn't that kind of place. In my last email I told you a little about my apartment (1 bedroom, 400 sq. ft. $600/month). I've since learned a little more about my neighborhood, Recoleta. The neighborhood is basically Buenos Aires' Upper East Side; dense, rich, old, expensive. It also has a bit of old Times Square thrown in as well. The area surrounding the cemetery, where Evita is buried and just a block from my apartment, is notorious as a zone of high class prostitution. All around the cemetery are flashy discos with names like "Fun Girl," "Top Hat," and, oddly, "Hippopotamus" which are really just fronts for wealthy business executives to shell out $300 for a discrete night of pleasure (I told you Buenos Aires wasn't cheap). Of course, when I mention my address to any porteño (as the local residents are called) they inevitably point this out. I tell them that I am just a poor recent graduate and ask them if they know of more economical prostitutes, perhaps any they can recommend from personal experience. (this is much easier to ask in Spanish as I can just use the verb 'conocer' which means to know, on a personal level)
Today's newspapers were all abuzz with stories about deposed Paraguayan strongman Lino Oviedo. He's taken refuge in Buenos Aires, under the protection of his old buddy Carlos Menem, the president. As Menem is soon to leave office there is pressure mounting to exile Oviedo to Tierra Del Fuego (sounds very 18th century). Oviedo has requested that any decision regarding his fate be delayed for 60 days. His reason: recovery time for a recent face-lift.
I suppose I should mention the oft tossed about fact that Buenos Aires has the highest rate of plastic surgery of any city in the world. While I haven't actually seen this fact verified by a reputable source, I have come across some local data points. A friend of mine causally mentioned having a nose job when he was 15. He seemed very nonchalant about the whole deal. His family's insurance plan covers one operation (of any type) per year. No one needed any work or had any emergencies that year. Why let it go to waste? Besides, his nose was horrendous, so he says.
Some of you have asked what kind of work I have found for myself. Unsurprisingly, I am working for an internet start-up. We are really just in the initial stages, working on a business plan and a beta web site. My boss is a guy named Patricio. He's Argentine but has spent the last three years in Miami selling beef. You know those miniscule ads in the New Yorker for $50 Argentine steaks? Well, his company is probably behind them.
Our website won't be selling beef, or any atoms for that matter. Our idea is to sell Argentina (and Latin America) to the world. In the end this is that different of a business. For someone to shell out $50 for a cut of beef that costs $1.50 here they have to be sold on some image, romantic gauchos, endless pampas grass, etc. Patricio is fond of telling how he gained Balducci's as a client (they sell in inflight magazines). The founder, Mr. Balducci himself was on a tour of Argentina. Patricio took him out to one of the estancias to show him the natural conditions the cows are raised under: no hormones, enhanced genetics, or even grain fed animals, just happy cows munching away on abundant pampas grass. Mr. Balducci, so taken with the natural scene and the happy cows got down on his kneeds, grabbed a clump of grass and started chewing it himself.
Someday, we'll provide that very same experience.over the web =)
chau (which, btw, is spelled correctly if you're saying it in Spanish)
thomas
[September 28, 1999]
Udate: February 2000
I sent this off as an email to friends, family and acquaintences to let them know of my doings, eight months after moving to Buenos Aires.
My life has slipped into boring routine now in my 8th month here in Argentina. I have a job which I go to from 9am-7ish pm M-F, I have friends whom I occasionally see during the week for coffee or a movie and then go out to one of several bars and discos on the weekend. In fact, aside from the fact that my life, work and social, is almost entirely in Spanish, there is really no difference from what I would be doing in the US. Still, every now and again when I'm crowded into a Taxi at 3am heading off to some nightclub with a group of friends and we're hurtling down Avenida Corrientes past the neon lights of theatres and bustling cafes towards the Obelisk on 9 de Julio, I get a little thrill at being here in Buenos Aires.
I have not been spending all of my time in Buenos Aires. Last week I was given vacation and I took the opportunity to Torres del Paine, in the far south of Chile, where I spent five days backpacking through some really incredible scenery. The typical vacation here is to go off with all of one's family and friends to the beach and spend two weeks soaking up the sun and partying at night. If you're middle class you do this in Mar Del Plata, if your upper in Punta del Este in Uruguay. That I would go off, alone, to the cold south and spend nearly a week of hard, physically straining hiking, is inscrutable to most people I know here.
Aside from this most recent trip, I have taken occasional jaunts over to Uruguay to renew my tourist status. It's really quite easy. Everytime I leave the country and reenter (even if I only leave for a day) the immigration officials automatically stamp my passport for another 90 days. My last border crossing I did not even have to get off the bus. I know foreigners here in Buenos Aires who have been doing this for two years. Basically if you are American or European they don't care. Immigration officials are only looking for Bolivians and Peruvians illegally in the country.
My work life has been a bit chaotic so I'll give a brief summary since the beginning. My first couple of months I spent working on a project to sell "broadband" Latin American "experiences" to the world. It was fun to work on and I got to surf the internet a lot but we (it was just the founder--the former beef salesman--and me) never really came up with a plan that seemed workable and in the end the beef salesman killed the project (he's back at it, tho, with a business to business site that seems to be attracting a lot of interest, altho it has not launched yet).
My second brief career began shortly after my last general letter, in late september. I went to work for one of the contenders to be the ebay of Latin America. It was a fun, chaotic place to be for the first couple of weeks. However, when I found myself spending entire days making cold calls to surly retailers (in Spanish, mind you), I realized that perhaps the job was not for me. I learned a lot in the seven, stressful weeks I spent with there. Unfortunately, as my dad wisely pointed out, most of the lessons one learns in life are of the form 'oh, I'll never do *that* again.'
And so now I am working for a web service company that builds sites for corporate clients. It's still internet, but the stress and chaos level isn't quite at the Spinal Tap 11 that auction site operated at. My job, basically, is to surf the internet and figure out what kinds of solutions we can or should be offering to our clients (pardon the consultant speak, it's hard to fight its creeping encroachment on my vocabulary). I like the place and the people are very nice, but integrating myself and making myself useful has proven challenging. But then, language barrier or no, I suppose this is the challenge of any job.
[February 29, 2000]
My life has slipped into boring routine now in my 8th month here in Argentina. I have a job which I go to from 9am-7ish pm M-F, I have friends whom I occasionally see during the week for coffee or a movie and then go out to one of several bars and discos on the weekend. In fact, aside from the fact that my life, work and social, is almost entirely in Spanish, there is really no difference from what I would be doing in the US. Still, every now and again when I'm crowded into a Taxi at 3am heading off to some nightclub with a group of friends and we're hurtling down Avenida Corrientes past the neon lights of theatres and bustling cafes towards the Obelisk on 9 de Julio, I get a little thrill at being here in Buenos Aires.
I have not been spending all of my time in Buenos Aires. Last week I was given vacation and I took the opportunity to Torres del Paine, in the far south of Chile, where I spent five days backpacking through some really incredible scenery. The typical vacation here is to go off with all of one's family and friends to the beach and spend two weeks soaking up the sun and partying at night. If you're middle class you do this in Mar Del Plata, if your upper in Punta del Este in Uruguay. That I would go off, alone, to the cold south and spend nearly a week of hard, physically straining hiking, is inscrutable to most people I know here.
Aside from this most recent trip, I have taken occasional jaunts over to Uruguay to renew my tourist status. It's really quite easy. Everytime I leave the country and reenter (even if I only leave for a day) the immigration officials automatically stamp my passport for another 90 days. My last border crossing I did not even have to get off the bus. I know foreigners here in Buenos Aires who have been doing this for two years. Basically if you are American or European they don't care. Immigration officials are only looking for Bolivians and Peruvians illegally in the country.
My work life has been a bit chaotic so I'll give a brief summary since the beginning. My first couple of months I spent working on a project to sell "broadband" Latin American "experiences" to the world. It was fun to work on and I got to surf the internet a lot but we (it was just the founder--the former beef salesman--and me) never really came up with a plan that seemed workable and in the end the beef salesman killed the project (he's back at it, tho, with a business to business site that seems to be attracting a lot of interest, altho it has not launched yet).
My second brief career began shortly after my last general letter, in late september. I went to work for one of the contenders to be the ebay of Latin America. It was a fun, chaotic place to be for the first couple of weeks. However, when I found myself spending entire days making cold calls to surly retailers (in Spanish, mind you), I realized that perhaps the job was not for me. I learned a lot in the seven, stressful weeks I spent with there. Unfortunately, as my dad wisely pointed out, most of the lessons one learns in life are of the form 'oh, I'll never do *that* again.'
And so now I am working for a web service company that builds sites for corporate clients. It's still internet, but the stress and chaos level isn't quite at the Spinal Tap 11 that auction site operated at. My job, basically, is to surf the internet and figure out what kinds of solutions we can or should be offering to our clients (pardon the consultant speak, it's hard to fight its creeping encroachment on my vocabulary). I like the place and the people are very nice, but integrating myself and making myself useful has proven challenging. But then, language barrier or no, I suppose this is the challenge of any job.
[February 29, 2000]
Reports from Argentina and Chile
November 2000
Parque Pumalin, Cybercafes in the Atacama, little trains and more.
The Camino Austral
Southern Chile resembles the Alaskan Panhandle with twisting fjords, glaciars, forests, and steep mountains. For most of the regions history, it was only accessible via the flatter Argentine Patagonia, a fact which much have annoyed General Pinochet to no end. In 1978 he began a road construction project of great cost and questionable economic value to connect up all these isolated settlements. The result is a twisting, whimsical road that goes over mountains, valleys, lakes, and fjords. It looks cool on a map and even better in real life. As a kid I would often look at maps of remote regions and imagine some amazing road that cut through the mountains and swept down into valleys (yes, I was odd even then). Pinochet obviously must have had the same fantasies, although as dictator for 17 years he had the power to make them reality.
Parque Pumalin - Southern Chile
Near the north end of the Camino Austral is a nature reserve founded by American mulit-millionaire Douglas Thompkins. About ten years ago he came in and bought up about a million acres of virgin rain forest and made the land into a park which he offered to donate to the Chilean government who nevertheless refused. Chileans, for the most part, cannot understand why someone would spend so much money and then just do nothing with the land. Thompkins' presence in Southern Chile has generated endless controversy. For an excellent overview of this story rich with the irony of post-modern life, you should really read this article from the Atlantic Monthly by William Langwiesche
I stayed right in the heart of the park with this old couple who have lived there for 40 years and are the last of the original settlers not to sell out to Thompkins. The old couple moved there in 1960 and raised ten children on fishing, and tending livestock. These facts I learned not from them, but a Spanish glossy magazine they had in the living room with a cover story on Doug Thompkins. In the article was a side-bar on my hosts. The interior of their modest home is covered with puma skins which they've trapped over the years to protect their sheep and cows. The old man showed me the trap outback where he lures in the pumas. He said, with sly understatement that "Don Doug" doesn't like him to trap the pumas, but what is he gonna do, he's gotta protect his property?
On either side of their home are two settlements of "Project Pumalin", an effort to show off sustainable agricultural practices. Thompkins' efforts are directed at more than just saving forest but at promoting a philosophy known as Deep Ecology which basically promotes de-industrialization and a return to an agrarian lifestyle (read the article for more). The two settlements are a collection of modest wood homes with wood stoves, gabled roofs, and multi-paned windows. Everything has a sort of Restoration Hardware aesthetic and I wondered how much of it had been shipped in direct from Marin County. The neatness and deliberateness of the constructions is an incredible contrast from everywhere else in Latin America where economic exigencies bring about a haphazardness to architecture. The forests were certainly beautiful, but I couldn't help feeling that they place had a sort of Disney feeling of unreality.
La Trochita - Patagonia
Skipping back into Argentina, I had the pleasure to ride on La Trochita, the narrow-gauged railroad made famous by Paul Theroux's "Old Patagonia Express" where he described the train as "a samovar on wheels". With a gauge slightly over two feet wide, the passenger cars are definitely of diminutive proportions. There are no regular passenger services anymore, just a Saturday tour about 10km out of town and back again. The steam engines and passenger cars are originals from Germany, imported in 1922 when construction was started on the railroad. The guide explained to us with the bitter irony typical of Argentine's that unlike the rest of Argentina's rails, which had been efficiently constructed and run by the British, La Trochita was an undertaking of the Argentine government and thus took 23 years to complete is 400km run as each economic and political crisis stalled construction.
Internet Cafes in Arica Chile - The Atacama
Internet cafes are everywhere now and prices have come down so much that the clientele in most places are locals, students and whatnot. Of course, they are not really cafes (which was sort of a stupid idea to begin with, coffee on the keyboard anyone?) but small shops packed tight with computers. Its a cut rate, low margin business. In Arica, the northernmost city in Chile, I saw something new; each of the little posts were separated by dark curtains so your neighbors can't see what you're looking at, or, as seems to be the case, who you're chatting with. I'm sure the admins of the cafes have a great time looking at the caches and history files at the end of the day
Border Disputes
Maps of Latin America seem stable, but they don't really reflect the open wounds and harbored resentments of past wars and present border ambiguities. Maps are, of course, political documents as any quick glance at an Argentine or Chilean map will show. Both claim large (and overlapping) slices of Antarctica as national territory and of course the Faulkland Island aren't really British. Bumper stickers in southern Argentina proclaim "The continental ice sheets are Argentine!", disputing a recent treaty between Argentina and Chile. Peru and Ecuador only recently resolved overlapping claims of the Amazon. Venezuela claims about a third of Guayana and Belize is just another province of Guatemala depending on your point of view.
Here in Bolivia they have never quite overcome the psychological blow of losing their coastal provinces to Chile in the War of the Pacific in 1883. La Paz is filled with references to the Bolivian "Litoral", litoral being the Spanish word for coastal region. Just yesterday the most respected newspaper here ran a long op-ed piece warning against a deal selling water rights in southwestern Bolivia to Chile. The writer warned that this was an incursion on Bolivian sovereignty and part of a well-defined Chilean policy of territorial expansion whose goal is to take the region in 50 to 100 years time.
Parque Pumalin, Cybercafes in the Atacama, little trains and more.
The Camino Austral
Southern Chile resembles the Alaskan Panhandle with twisting fjords, glaciars, forests, and steep mountains. For most of the regions history, it was only accessible via the flatter Argentine Patagonia, a fact which much have annoyed General Pinochet to no end. In 1978 he began a road construction project of great cost and questionable economic value to connect up all these isolated settlements. The result is a twisting, whimsical road that goes over mountains, valleys, lakes, and fjords. It looks cool on a map and even better in real life. As a kid I would often look at maps of remote regions and imagine some amazing road that cut through the mountains and swept down into valleys (yes, I was odd even then). Pinochet obviously must have had the same fantasies, although as dictator for 17 years he had the power to make them reality.
Parque Pumalin - Southern Chile
Near the north end of the Camino Austral is a nature reserve founded by American mulit-millionaire Douglas Thompkins. About ten years ago he came in and bought up about a million acres of virgin rain forest and made the land into a park which he offered to donate to the Chilean government who nevertheless refused. Chileans, for the most part, cannot understand why someone would spend so much money and then just do nothing with the land. Thompkins' presence in Southern Chile has generated endless controversy. For an excellent overview of this story rich with the irony of post-modern life, you should really read this article from the Atlantic Monthly by William Langwiesche
I stayed right in the heart of the park with this old couple who have lived there for 40 years and are the last of the original settlers not to sell out to Thompkins. The old couple moved there in 1960 and raised ten children on fishing, and tending livestock. These facts I learned not from them, but a Spanish glossy magazine they had in the living room with a cover story on Doug Thompkins. In the article was a side-bar on my hosts. The interior of their modest home is covered with puma skins which they've trapped over the years to protect their sheep and cows. The old man showed me the trap outback where he lures in the pumas. He said, with sly understatement that "Don Doug" doesn't like him to trap the pumas, but what is he gonna do, he's gotta protect his property?
On either side of their home are two settlements of "Project Pumalin", an effort to show off sustainable agricultural practices. Thompkins' efforts are directed at more than just saving forest but at promoting a philosophy known as Deep Ecology which basically promotes de-industrialization and a return to an agrarian lifestyle (read the article for more). The two settlements are a collection of modest wood homes with wood stoves, gabled roofs, and multi-paned windows. Everything has a sort of Restoration Hardware aesthetic and I wondered how much of it had been shipped in direct from Marin County. The neatness and deliberateness of the constructions is an incredible contrast from everywhere else in Latin America where economic exigencies bring about a haphazardness to architecture. The forests were certainly beautiful, but I couldn't help feeling that they place had a sort of Disney feeling of unreality.
La Trochita - Patagonia
Skipping back into Argentina, I had the pleasure to ride on La Trochita, the narrow-gauged railroad made famous by Paul Theroux's "Old Patagonia Express" where he described the train as "a samovar on wheels". With a gauge slightly over two feet wide, the passenger cars are definitely of diminutive proportions. There are no regular passenger services anymore, just a Saturday tour about 10km out of town and back again. The steam engines and passenger cars are originals from Germany, imported in 1922 when construction was started on the railroad. The guide explained to us with the bitter irony typical of Argentine's that unlike the rest of Argentina's rails, which had been efficiently constructed and run by the British, La Trochita was an undertaking of the Argentine government and thus took 23 years to complete is 400km run as each economic and political crisis stalled construction.
Internet Cafes in Arica Chile - The Atacama
Internet cafes are everywhere now and prices have come down so much that the clientele in most places are locals, students and whatnot. Of course, they are not really cafes (which was sort of a stupid idea to begin with, coffee on the keyboard anyone?) but small shops packed tight with computers. Its a cut rate, low margin business. In Arica, the northernmost city in Chile, I saw something new; each of the little posts were separated by dark curtains so your neighbors can't see what you're looking at, or, as seems to be the case, who you're chatting with. I'm sure the admins of the cafes have a great time looking at the caches and history files at the end of the day
Border Disputes
Maps of Latin America seem stable, but they don't really reflect the open wounds and harbored resentments of past wars and present border ambiguities. Maps are, of course, political documents as any quick glance at an Argentine or Chilean map will show. Both claim large (and overlapping) slices of Antarctica as national territory and of course the Faulkland Island aren't really British. Bumper stickers in southern Argentina proclaim "The continental ice sheets are Argentine!", disputing a recent treaty between Argentina and Chile. Peru and Ecuador only recently resolved overlapping claims of the Amazon. Venezuela claims about a third of Guayana and Belize is just another province of Guatemala depending on your point of view.
Here in Bolivia they have never quite overcome the psychological blow of losing their coastal provinces to Chile in the War of the Pacific in 1883. La Paz is filled with references to the Bolivian "Litoral", litoral being the Spanish word for coastal region. Just yesterday the most respected newspaper here ran a long op-ed piece warning against a deal selling water rights in southwestern Bolivia to Chile. The writer warned that this was an incursion on Bolivian sovereignty and part of a well-defined Chilean policy of territorial expansion whose goal is to take the region in 50 to 100 years time.
New Year's in Rio de Janiero
January 2001
New Year's Eve in the United States sucks. The best we have is Times Square where you have half a million people waiting out in the Extreme Cold for hours to watch a little ball drop. Of course Times Square can't fit so many, so most endure the Cold for nothing more than a picture of a big video screen.
And this is as good as it gets in the USA. Most other places people either shrug off the holiday completely (me most years) or desperately search for the cool party, always wondering if they've found it. The biggest problem with New Years in America, in my opinion, is that we are in The Wrong Hemisphere.
The party's in Rio. On a good year up to 3 million people will gather on the beach in Copacabana and watch a 20 minute spectacle of fire works exploding in the shadow of the Sugar Loaf. There is plenty of space and the party starts in the afternoon and because it is summer, they hang out a long time afterwards.
I was here with my brother who was smart enough to get a hotel close to the beach. When we saw the hour long lines at the bathrooms we understood the value of advanced reservations.
We were not so lucky with the weather as the afternoon of the 31st saw several major downpours that sent the crowds on the beach promenade scrambling to the building overhangs in a mass rush of a crowd. While the people waited for the rain to subside men would come by selling umbrellas. God Bless Capitalism.
When it was not raining we strolled up and down the beach indulging in Brazil's cheap and very street food. The best, tho, was the 50 cent beers. Oh yes, another thing that sucks about the US: open container laws. Not in Brazil.
Of course, one leaves behind certain securities and comforts upon leaving the United States. Brazil, and especially Rio, are Not Safe (and I'm not just talking about muggings, altho there is plenty of that). Just one small example: its a custom for people to dress in white, buy roses and toss them into the sea while making a wish. The roses naturally wash immediately back up. Rose stems on a beach...most have been dethroned, but not all.
As midnight approached my brother and I stationed ourselves on the beach. It had been cloudy and drizzly most of the evening but as the minutes counted down into the single digits the clouds burst forth in a massive tropical downpour. The rain was mixed in with the shouts of people and the lighting of fire crackers in ever increasing frequency.
Finally midnight struck with a glorious rain of fireworks. Six different stations curving along the beach all launched identical rockets for a marvelous symmetry. Halfway through the show I noticed a ways down the beach a massive exploding firework that did not get launched up, but instead exploded right in the middle of the crowded beach. After the show ended we wandered up the beach and as we passed this section there were injured people being cared for and being taken away in ambulances, taxis, whatever. The following day I read in the newspaper that 49 people had been injured and one man died. As I said, Rio is Not Safe. Of course, in Sao Paulo crowds got into a beer bottle tossing war with the police and injured 40. Everything becomes a little unglued. I imagine it's a little like Carnaval, except its just one night instead of four.
Unfortunately the rain continued and eventually Will and I went back to our hotel. Amazingly the next day the beach was nearly clean. Rio indeed knows what its most valuable assets are.
My brother is already talking of booking his ticket for next year. Carnaval certainly gets all the attention, but New Years must be a close rival.
New Year's Eve in the United States sucks. The best we have is Times Square where you have half a million people waiting out in the Extreme Cold for hours to watch a little ball drop. Of course Times Square can't fit so many, so most endure the Cold for nothing more than a picture of a big video screen.
And this is as good as it gets in the USA. Most other places people either shrug off the holiday completely (me most years) or desperately search for the cool party, always wondering if they've found it. The biggest problem with New Years in America, in my opinion, is that we are in The Wrong Hemisphere.
The party's in Rio. On a good year up to 3 million people will gather on the beach in Copacabana and watch a 20 minute spectacle of fire works exploding in the shadow of the Sugar Loaf. There is plenty of space and the party starts in the afternoon and because it is summer, they hang out a long time afterwards.
I was here with my brother who was smart enough to get a hotel close to the beach. When we saw the hour long lines at the bathrooms we understood the value of advanced reservations.
We were not so lucky with the weather as the afternoon of the 31st saw several major downpours that sent the crowds on the beach promenade scrambling to the building overhangs in a mass rush of a crowd. While the people waited for the rain to subside men would come by selling umbrellas. God Bless Capitalism.
When it was not raining we strolled up and down the beach indulging in Brazil's cheap and very street food. The best, tho, was the 50 cent beers. Oh yes, another thing that sucks about the US: open container laws. Not in Brazil.
Of course, one leaves behind certain securities and comforts upon leaving the United States. Brazil, and especially Rio, are Not Safe (and I'm not just talking about muggings, altho there is plenty of that). Just one small example: its a custom for people to dress in white, buy roses and toss them into the sea while making a wish. The roses naturally wash immediately back up. Rose stems on a beach...most have been dethroned, but not all.
As midnight approached my brother and I stationed ourselves on the beach. It had been cloudy and drizzly most of the evening but as the minutes counted down into the single digits the clouds burst forth in a massive tropical downpour. The rain was mixed in with the shouts of people and the lighting of fire crackers in ever increasing frequency.
Finally midnight struck with a glorious rain of fireworks. Six different stations curving along the beach all launched identical rockets for a marvelous symmetry. Halfway through the show I noticed a ways down the beach a massive exploding firework that did not get launched up, but instead exploded right in the middle of the crowded beach. After the show ended we wandered up the beach and as we passed this section there were injured people being cared for and being taken away in ambulances, taxis, whatever. The following day I read in the newspaper that 49 people had been injured and one man died. As I said, Rio is Not Safe. Of course, in Sao Paulo crowds got into a beer bottle tossing war with the police and injured 40. Everything becomes a little unglued. I imagine it's a little like Carnaval, except its just one night instead of four.
Unfortunately the rain continued and eventually Will and I went back to our hotel. Amazingly the next day the beach was nearly clean. Rio indeed knows what its most valuable assets are.
My brother is already talking of booking his ticket for next year. Carnaval certainly gets all the attention, but New Years must be a close rival.
Brasilia
January 2001
A planned city in the middle of nowhere
What is amazing about Brasilia is that it is the vision of a few men made into reality: Oscar Niemeyer, the architect, Lucio Costa, the loopy urban planner, and Juscelino Kubitschek, the ambitious politician who forever earned the ingratitude of Brazilian public officials by moving the capital from Rio to this godforsaken plateau in the interior.
Briefly, Brasilia was begun in 1957 and inaugurated in 1960, altho it took another ten years to flesh out the details. The city is laid out in the shape of an airplane. The main fuselage contains all the monumental buildings and the commercial sectors. In the cockpit are the Congress, Supreme Court, and Presidential offices. The wings contain the residential areas. All the main buildings are designed by Oscar Niemeyer in this tropical modern style very similar to Le Corbusier, but rather more sensual, as is the custom for everything in Brasil. The buildings are all glass facades and whimsical curves. The interiors contain large hallways covered with colorful shag carpet and space-age leather lounge furniture deisgned by Niemeyer himself. Hey, it was the 60s baby! Naturally, none of this can be changed.
Brasilia gets a lot of flack for being very pedestrian unfriendly. The main axis of the city is on a huge scale. Cars speed down the roads flanking the public buildings at freeway speed. There are few sidewalks and the crosswalks are few and far between. Of course, you can say the same thing about the Mall in Washington, DC, so I don't think the criticism is quite fair. There is a much more interesting story going on out in the wings where the people of Brasilia actually live and carry out their lives.
The residential area is divided into large blocks of small houses or long, seven story apartment buildings. The houses are on narrow, dead-end streets perpendicular to the main avenues that speed traffic to the center. On their backside the houses all share a common garden with the houses of the next block over. This makes it possible to walk between houses of different blocks without ever touching pavement. It's a nice idea, altho it does not quite work. This is, after all, Latin America, not Utopia. The backyards are uniformly guarded by high sharp bars. The common gardens are overgrown and unkempt.
The apartment blocks, with their hired securitymen and gardeners are nicer with their common areas. This is most of the residential wing and it all resembles a big college campus. Most colleges experienced a building boom right as the baby boom was entering colleges, leaving most campuses today littered with hulking concrete dormitories surrounded by common gardens and bicycle pathways. This in a nutshell is Brasilia. For you Harvard people, imagine 12 miles of building after building that all look like New Quincy: long, low apartment blocks of 7 stories (they are ALL 7 stories) with simple facades with highly emphasized horizontal lines.
In between each residential block is either a large green space or two small blocks of one-story buildings occupied by small shops, grocery stores and restaurants, with a very main-street feel. So in face, Brasilia has its own contained little worlds with all their services right there, easily accesible on foot: a place as if ripped from the pages of A Pattern Language, except for the seven story thing. It's quite pleasant really. I imagine it is like Cuba in its better days--everyone works for the government, housing, daycare, and other services are all subsidized and nearby.
There is, however, another Brasilia. The satellite cities. Built far away and out of sight, these areas were to house the workers who built Brasilia, the Candangos, poor immigrants from the Northeast and other poor areas of Brasil. Niemeyer was a socialist so I wonder what he meant for these satellite cities. Perhaps they were to live in pre-fabricated housing uintes and be shuttled off to ultra-modern factories in hovercraft where they would Manufacture The New Brazil. Something like that.
The reality is that these satellite cities are much more like South African townships--darker, poorer, and much more dangerous. People take the bus into Brasilia in the daytime and then clearout at night. My tour guide for the congress building commented that at night you only see good people about (her words). She kind of pinched her skin when she said this to silently emphasize what she meant about "good people". White people. Actually, she lamented that this is getting less so. Brasilia is a growing city with two million residents and counting. In an interesting twist on urban development (in a city that is full of them), the sprawl is encroaching *inwards* from the satellite city to the airplane.
There were a few more interesting aspects about the airplane wings that struck me:
- Hideous, brutalist monstrosities of architecture are Everywhere. Anywhere else a single one of these buildings would be a shameful landmark (I'm thinking of Boston City Hall). Here they are merely schools, churches, and hospitals.
- Street addresses are Very Logical. For instance I could live in Residential South, Superquadrant 108, Block B, apartment 312. A local would know exactly where this places me, both physically and socioeconomically. This plan is so logical, in fact, that street signs and building numberings are rarely necessary and frequently dispensed with. This makes it more than a little difficult for a newcomer to find his way around.
- The residential superquadrants are neatly contained pedestrian worlds surrounded by the freeways that bisect the airplane wings. Try to go to another area and you are faced with 16 lanes of speeding traffic to cross. If you look hard enough you can find the occasional dark, urine filled pedestrian tunnel. At the entrance to each is a newish sign with an illustration of a cat flattened by a car and a warning to use the tunnels because humans, unlike cats, do not have seven lives. Odd that in Brazil cats should only have seven lives.
A planned city in the middle of nowhere
What is amazing about Brasilia is that it is the vision of a few men made into reality: Oscar Niemeyer, the architect, Lucio Costa, the loopy urban planner, and Juscelino Kubitschek, the ambitious politician who forever earned the ingratitude of Brazilian public officials by moving the capital from Rio to this godforsaken plateau in the interior.
Briefly, Brasilia was begun in 1957 and inaugurated in 1960, altho it took another ten years to flesh out the details. The city is laid out in the shape of an airplane. The main fuselage contains all the monumental buildings and the commercial sectors. In the cockpit are the Congress, Supreme Court, and Presidential offices. The wings contain the residential areas. All the main buildings are designed by Oscar Niemeyer in this tropical modern style very similar to Le Corbusier, but rather more sensual, as is the custom for everything in Brasil. The buildings are all glass facades and whimsical curves. The interiors contain large hallways covered with colorful shag carpet and space-age leather lounge furniture deisgned by Niemeyer himself. Hey, it was the 60s baby! Naturally, none of this can be changed.
Brasilia gets a lot of flack for being very pedestrian unfriendly. The main axis of the city is on a huge scale. Cars speed down the roads flanking the public buildings at freeway speed. There are few sidewalks and the crosswalks are few and far between. Of course, you can say the same thing about the Mall in Washington, DC, so I don't think the criticism is quite fair. There is a much more interesting story going on out in the wings where the people of Brasilia actually live and carry out their lives.
The residential area is divided into large blocks of small houses or long, seven story apartment buildings. The houses are on narrow, dead-end streets perpendicular to the main avenues that speed traffic to the center. On their backside the houses all share a common garden with the houses of the next block over. This makes it possible to walk between houses of different blocks without ever touching pavement. It's a nice idea, altho it does not quite work. This is, after all, Latin America, not Utopia. The backyards are uniformly guarded by high sharp bars. The common gardens are overgrown and unkempt.
The apartment blocks, with their hired securitymen and gardeners are nicer with their common areas. This is most of the residential wing and it all resembles a big college campus. Most colleges experienced a building boom right as the baby boom was entering colleges, leaving most campuses today littered with hulking concrete dormitories surrounded by common gardens and bicycle pathways. This in a nutshell is Brasilia. For you Harvard people, imagine 12 miles of building after building that all look like New Quincy: long, low apartment blocks of 7 stories (they are ALL 7 stories) with simple facades with highly emphasized horizontal lines.
In between each residential block is either a large green space or two small blocks of one-story buildings occupied by small shops, grocery stores and restaurants, with a very main-street feel. So in face, Brasilia has its own contained little worlds with all their services right there, easily accesible on foot: a place as if ripped from the pages of A Pattern Language, except for the seven story thing. It's quite pleasant really. I imagine it is like Cuba in its better days--everyone works for the government, housing, daycare, and other services are all subsidized and nearby.
There is, however, another Brasilia. The satellite cities. Built far away and out of sight, these areas were to house the workers who built Brasilia, the Candangos, poor immigrants from the Northeast and other poor areas of Brasil. Niemeyer was a socialist so I wonder what he meant for these satellite cities. Perhaps they were to live in pre-fabricated housing uintes and be shuttled off to ultra-modern factories in hovercraft where they would Manufacture The New Brazil. Something like that.
The reality is that these satellite cities are much more like South African townships--darker, poorer, and much more dangerous. People take the bus into Brasilia in the daytime and then clearout at night. My tour guide for the congress building commented that at night you only see good people about (her words). She kind of pinched her skin when she said this to silently emphasize what she meant about "good people". White people. Actually, she lamented that this is getting less so. Brasilia is a growing city with two million residents and counting. In an interesting twist on urban development (in a city that is full of them), the sprawl is encroaching *inwards* from the satellite city to the airplane.
There were a few more interesting aspects about the airplane wings that struck me:
- Hideous, brutalist monstrosities of architecture are Everywhere. Anywhere else a single one of these buildings would be a shameful landmark (I'm thinking of Boston City Hall). Here they are merely schools, churches, and hospitals.
- Street addresses are Very Logical. For instance I could live in Residential South, Superquadrant 108, Block B, apartment 312. A local would know exactly where this places me, both physically and socioeconomically. This plan is so logical, in fact, that street signs and building numberings are rarely necessary and frequently dispensed with. This makes it more than a little difficult for a newcomer to find his way around.
- The residential superquadrants are neatly contained pedestrian worlds surrounded by the freeways that bisect the airplane wings. Try to go to another area and you are faced with 16 lanes of speeding traffic to cross. If you look hard enough you can find the occasional dark, urine filled pedestrian tunnel. At the entrance to each is a newish sign with an illustration of a cat flattened by a car and a warning to use the tunnels because humans, unlike cats, do not have seven lives. Odd that in Brazil cats should only have seven lives.
Six Days on the Amazon
February 2001
I arrived yesterday in Manaus, a city of one million improbably placed in the geographical center of the great forest, at the confluence of the Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes, which form the Amazon. I arrived by boat from Belem, at the mouth of the river after a six day journey.
It sounds exotic, adventurous, does it not? Six days on the Amazon. I am not, however, Paul Bowles. The boat did not make any calls at Corazon. I did not meet Kurtz. I may have traveled through the Amazon but I have yet to see any forest. The ride consists of slowly chugging up a wide, brown river. On the distant bank (the river is five or more miles wide in places) one can see a thin strip of green between the blue of the sky and the brown of the river.
The river barge is roughly 30 feet wide and 100 feet long, wood and painted white (given it a resemblance to riverboats of yore). It has three levels. The lower two levels are packed with hammocks with incredible density. The upper level has an open deck, a bar, and some private cabins. In more adventurous days I would have slung my hammock up with the masses down below. I have grown soft in my age and now pay double for the comfort and privacy (and security from theft!) of the cabins. The days and nights consisted of sitting on the deck, drinking beer, and gazing vacantly at the banks, occasionally spotting a riverine dolphin. More active types on the boat played dominoes or danced at night to the jumpy Forro that was blasted out on the bar's stereo.
The Amazonas may be Brazil's least populated region, but they all live on the Amazon. Every few hundred meters along the shore is a small wooden house raised on stilts (the annual variation between low and high waters on the river can be up to 50 feet). Canoes would approach from the side, loaded down with a cooler full of beer, paddle furiously and with a crowbar hook themselves on to our boat as it sped by. Not only was this a marvelous sight, but it also temporarily broke the bar's monopoly on drinks.
Just before Manaus is the famous confluence of rivers; the Rio Negro which comes from Venezuela and Colombia and is black from tannin leached from the trees and the Rio Solimoes (which the Peruvians and most of the world calls the Amazon) which is brown from all the sediment washed down from the Andes. At the point where they meet swirling eddies of black and brown water mingle in fascinating fractal patterns.
From here in Manaus I will be heading straight to Venezuela tomorrow, to the highland plane of the Gran Sabana, famous for the Tepui and Angel Falls. I could be criticized for traveling right through the Amazon and seeing no more forest than what can be seen in the botanical garden in Belem, but tropical rainforests are entirely too sticky and bug-filled for my tastes. I need to head for higher altitudes soon.
Instead I shall entertain you (I hope) with vicarious tales of others. This first from my brother who visited Manaus roughly earlier this month:
One day I took a canoe, a machete and the GPS (which I used constantly in the Amazon) and headed off for the day. I tried to get lost and knew that I had succeeded when, an hour later, I arrived back at my canoe thinking I was miles away. There is something very appealing about hacking your way through the jungle and there is something absolutely terrifying about being in the Jungle alone.
And this amusing story from my friend Jesse who shames me with his adventures and makes me realize just what a wuss I am when it comes to adventure travel:
I was in the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle in a community that had seen tourists only once before. I wouldn't`t leave the shaman alone. He was an old drunk and gave us AYAHUASCA, some hallucinogenic root that boiled all day in the cauldron...I asked him to cure my headache. He said he would "suck" me. (does this get any better?) He sucked away at my forehead with more screeching noises, lots of smoke, and spitting on the dirt floor. The next morning, I had no headache, but I did have--for the first time ever--a huge hickey right between the eyes! And from an 80 year old man!
On the front page of the main Manaus daily yesterday read the headline, "Dengue claims it's first victim of the year". Apparently they are predicting a very bad summer all over Brazil for Dengue fever. Upon checking into my hotel room I discovered a swarm of mosquitos swirling out of the bathroom. I asked for spray and they gave me this foul-smelling tube which I used to fumigate the room, generously. I may die of cancer but goddamn it, I am not getting any mosquito bites. I suppose then my "Amazon Experience" is reduced to dodging mosquitos in this once-elegant, now rat infested city on the river.
I arrived yesterday in Manaus, a city of one million improbably placed in the geographical center of the great forest, at the confluence of the Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes, which form the Amazon. I arrived by boat from Belem, at the mouth of the river after a six day journey.
It sounds exotic, adventurous, does it not? Six days on the Amazon. I am not, however, Paul Bowles. The boat did not make any calls at Corazon. I did not meet Kurtz. I may have traveled through the Amazon but I have yet to see any forest. The ride consists of slowly chugging up a wide, brown river. On the distant bank (the river is five or more miles wide in places) one can see a thin strip of green between the blue of the sky and the brown of the river.
The river barge is roughly 30 feet wide and 100 feet long, wood and painted white (given it a resemblance to riverboats of yore). It has three levels. The lower two levels are packed with hammocks with incredible density. The upper level has an open deck, a bar, and some private cabins. In more adventurous days I would have slung my hammock up with the masses down below. I have grown soft in my age and now pay double for the comfort and privacy (and security from theft!) of the cabins. The days and nights consisted of sitting on the deck, drinking beer, and gazing vacantly at the banks, occasionally spotting a riverine dolphin. More active types on the boat played dominoes or danced at night to the jumpy Forro that was blasted out on the bar's stereo.
The Amazonas may be Brazil's least populated region, but they all live on the Amazon. Every few hundred meters along the shore is a small wooden house raised on stilts (the annual variation between low and high waters on the river can be up to 50 feet). Canoes would approach from the side, loaded down with a cooler full of beer, paddle furiously and with a crowbar hook themselves on to our boat as it sped by. Not only was this a marvelous sight, but it also temporarily broke the bar's monopoly on drinks.
Just before Manaus is the famous confluence of rivers; the Rio Negro which comes from Venezuela and Colombia and is black from tannin leached from the trees and the Rio Solimoes (which the Peruvians and most of the world calls the Amazon) which is brown from all the sediment washed down from the Andes. At the point where they meet swirling eddies of black and brown water mingle in fascinating fractal patterns.
From here in Manaus I will be heading straight to Venezuela tomorrow, to the highland plane of the Gran Sabana, famous for the Tepui and Angel Falls. I could be criticized for traveling right through the Amazon and seeing no more forest than what can be seen in the botanical garden in Belem, but tropical rainforests are entirely too sticky and bug-filled for my tastes. I need to head for higher altitudes soon.
Instead I shall entertain you (I hope) with vicarious tales of others. This first from my brother who visited Manaus roughly earlier this month:
One day I took a canoe, a machete and the GPS (which I used constantly in the Amazon) and headed off for the day. I tried to get lost and knew that I had succeeded when, an hour later, I arrived back at my canoe thinking I was miles away. There is something very appealing about hacking your way through the jungle and there is something absolutely terrifying about being in the Jungle alone.
And this amusing story from my friend Jesse who shames me with his adventures and makes me realize just what a wuss I am when it comes to adventure travel:
I was in the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle in a community that had seen tourists only once before. I wouldn't`t leave the shaman alone. He was an old drunk and gave us AYAHUASCA, some hallucinogenic root that boiled all day in the cauldron...I asked him to cure my headache. He said he would "suck" me. (does this get any better?) He sucked away at my forehead with more screeching noises, lots of smoke, and spitting on the dirt floor. The next morning, I had no headache, but I did have--for the first time ever--a huge hickey right between the eyes! And from an 80 year old man!
On the front page of the main Manaus daily yesterday read the headline, "Dengue claims it's first victim of the year". Apparently they are predicting a very bad summer all over Brazil for Dengue fever. Upon checking into my hotel room I discovered a swarm of mosquitos swirling out of the bathroom. I asked for spray and they gave me this foul-smelling tube which I used to fumigate the room, generously. I may die of cancer but goddamn it, I am not getting any mosquito bites. I suppose then my "Amazon Experience" is reduced to dodging mosquitos in this once-elegant, now rat infested city on the river.
Tear Gassed in Mexico City
March 2001
The title is a generous overstatement, but nevertheless accurate. It happened in Tepito, a large electronics market a few blocks north of Mexico's Zocalo. It's a massive six square block maze of crowded stalls, twisting passageways, and hidden warehouses. Essentially it's Mexico's casbah. It's the place to go for duty-free, tax-free (and probably stolen) electronic goods as well as pirated CDs. It was the latter that brought me there. My upper middle class Mexican friends shuddered at the thought that I would set foot in this place, but for a mere $1.50 I could buy any of the latest hits and a good selection of back catalog stuff.
I went four times, filling out my CD collection with Guns and Roses, Christina Aguilera, Billy Joel. There is little I won't buy for $1.50. That's less than my time value spent downloading these songs off the net. My first visit was on a Tuesday, they only day they were closed. I was lucky, though, because the next day the federal police raided the market, confiscating goods and arresting dozens of people. The merchants fought back, throwing bottles and punches. Fifty people were injured in the melee and the next day the riots (the Tepitazo) made the front pages of all the tabloid newspapers.
My next visit was a week later. Things had quieted down and dozens of stalls blared out Britney, Mana or Thalia in an effort to attract shoppers to their nearly identical offerings. The only lasting consequence of the raids had been a raise in the price of CDs from $1.25 to $1.50. I bought CDs until I ran out of money (you never carry much cash in Mexico City). The following two visits were more of the same, with me increasingly scrutinizing each stall's selection looking for something I'd like.
At some point during this last visit two vendors pushed me aside to get a clear view of a helicopter--a police helicopter circling overhead. I immediately noticed many of the CD sellers hurriedly packing up their inventory into boxes and wheeling them away on dollies. Other vendors seemed indifferent and continued selling, so I continued shopping. When I came to one stall that was setting up I asked if they weren't worried by the police presence (still nothing more than swirling helicopters from what I could see). They said they won't touch us, they're after the drug distributors.
It was just after this, having bought from them Billy Joel's Greatest Hits vol. 1, 2 as well as the hits of Argentine group, Heroes del Silencio, that I felt a sudden stinging in my eyes and throat, as if someone were cutting up a great quantity of onions nearby. I looked around me and noticed that everyone hurrying by had their faces covered with their shirts. I turned around and headed back towards the subway through the maze of stalls, bumping into people along the way. The tear gas, never very concentrated to begin with, was already passing. I slowed down and even paused to look at a few more CD vendors on my way back.
The title is a generous overstatement, but nevertheless accurate. It happened in Tepito, a large electronics market a few blocks north of Mexico's Zocalo. It's a massive six square block maze of crowded stalls, twisting passageways, and hidden warehouses. Essentially it's Mexico's casbah. It's the place to go for duty-free, tax-free (and probably stolen) electronic goods as well as pirated CDs. It was the latter that brought me there. My upper middle class Mexican friends shuddered at the thought that I would set foot in this place, but for a mere $1.50 I could buy any of the latest hits and a good selection of back catalog stuff.
I went four times, filling out my CD collection with Guns and Roses, Christina Aguilera, Billy Joel. There is little I won't buy for $1.50. That's less than my time value spent downloading these songs off the net. My first visit was on a Tuesday, they only day they were closed. I was lucky, though, because the next day the federal police raided the market, confiscating goods and arresting dozens of people. The merchants fought back, throwing bottles and punches. Fifty people were injured in the melee and the next day the riots (the Tepitazo) made the front pages of all the tabloid newspapers.
My next visit was a week later. Things had quieted down and dozens of stalls blared out Britney, Mana or Thalia in an effort to attract shoppers to their nearly identical offerings. The only lasting consequence of the raids had been a raise in the price of CDs from $1.25 to $1.50. I bought CDs until I ran out of money (you never carry much cash in Mexico City). The following two visits were more of the same, with me increasingly scrutinizing each stall's selection looking for something I'd like.
At some point during this last visit two vendors pushed me aside to get a clear view of a helicopter--a police helicopter circling overhead. I immediately noticed many of the CD sellers hurriedly packing up their inventory into boxes and wheeling them away on dollies. Other vendors seemed indifferent and continued selling, so I continued shopping. When I came to one stall that was setting up I asked if they weren't worried by the police presence (still nothing more than swirling helicopters from what I could see). They said they won't touch us, they're after the drug distributors.
It was just after this, having bought from them Billy Joel's Greatest Hits vol. 1, 2 as well as the hits of Argentine group, Heroes del Silencio, that I felt a sudden stinging in my eyes and throat, as if someone were cutting up a great quantity of onions nearby. I looked around me and noticed that everyone hurrying by had their faces covered with their shirts. I turned around and headed back towards the subway through the maze of stalls, bumping into people along the way. The tear gas, never very concentrated to begin with, was already passing. I slowed down and even paused to look at a few more CD vendors on my way back.
Nothing is Permanent
My first home page I created in the fall of 1994 on Harvard's FAS servers. Then I graduated and made a page on Geocities. It had a good run but the realities of the corporate world mean that Yahoo! is shutting down their long-dormant Geocities division. So, in order to rescue my content, I'm starting this blog to which I'll be posting the contents of my old Geocities page. Hopefully Google will be around for awhile but I full expect at some point in the future to migrate this content yet again. Such is life.
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