Travels with Celary

They still have heroes...

2010-01-10T15:30:00.000-08:00

They still have heroes in Latin America; not just celebrities. When Victor Jara was re-buried in December 2009, 36 years after his first clandestine hole-in-the-wall burial in Santiago’s central cemetery, over 10,000 people accompanied him to his final resting place. Another 5,000 leant out of their windows and balconies to shower the procession (40 blocks long in places), with confetti, and to serenade Victor with their own version of his songs.

Many thousands more spent the previous 48 hours at Victor’s wake, where they danced and clapped and sang along with the rock bands, folk musicians, world famous classical pianist, choirs, school troupes and young dancers, all of whom were honoured to donate their talent to the memory of a working-class hero, despite the fact that many of them weren’t even born at the time of his brutal murder. Thousands lined up down the side of Plaza Brasil, round the corner and down 6 blocks of Calle Companía, and waited for hours, in belting sun, to file past Victor’s beautifully restored coffin, lying centre stage and spot-lit in the performance space known as the Galpόn Victor Jara, a cool and tranquil refuge from the fiesta going on outside. They bought their babies, toddlers, pooches, their flowers, their teddy bears and their poems, and these last three were strewn round and on the coffin, without touching Victor’s red and black campesino poncho that warmed the coffin’s head. Then wave after wave of mourners, standing to attention three each side of the coffin, their heads held proud in the spot light, stood guard for Victor. It was the least they could do for him. Many cried when they left, all were visibly moved. Just as Victor’s mum had often played her guitar and sang for the dead, the midnight hour belonged to the traditional keeners with their haunting, improvised songs accompanied by fingerbells, tambourines and guitar. What the posters everywhere said was true: Victor Jara – en el corazόn de su pueblo (in the heart of his people).

The distance the funeral procession had to cover from the Galpόn to the central cemetery is 4 km. Santiago is flat. It shouldn’t have taken long, given that the accompanying crowds were a joyous, flag-waving, music-loving multitude. There were none of the hazards that can beset huge bodies of people on the march in London – no rain, no impatient traffic and astonishingly, no police. The procession’s guardians were angelic, rather than uniformed and gun-toting. They were a volunteer host of 250 young people assembled by the Fundaciόn Victor Jara’s human dynamo of a director. They guarded the coffin, they helped people when they tripped over, they cleared space for the dancers in Native American dress, they carried babies and mopped brows when the vast crowds occasionally got stuck down some of the narrower, sun-drenched streets. It took 5 hours to walk 4 km! 5 hours of walking past elders who stood in shady doorways clutching ancient photos of Victor, 5 hours of shuffling through fountains of confetti, 5 hours of sweating in sympathy with the dancers in their brightly coloured woollen clothes, 5 hours of impassioned call and response, ‘Compañero Victor Jara?’ ‘Presente! Presente! Ahora y siempre!’ (Here, now and always!) and best of all, 5 hours of heart-felt singing, with Victor, as his voice led the crowds onward.

Santiago’s vast central cemetery with its tall trees cooled the hot and dusty funeral procession as it finally crawled to a halt outside the moveable barriers operated by the volunteer brigade of youngsters who told us they’d been guarding Victor’s final resting place for the past 7 hours. Victor’s family and friends filed through for 20 minutes alone with their beloved, and it was touch and go as to whether the huge funeral crowd would stop their calling, their responding and their singing to give the family some well-deserved peace. The volunteers asked the front rank of marchers to be quiet, and explained why, the shushes were passed from person to person back across the tombs, down the long corridors of the dead and into the spacious tree-lined avenues where the marchers had set up temporary camp beneath their flags and banners. Paradoxically, silence broke out to the accompaniment of cicadas, birdsong and a lone Argentinian troubadour, who looked like he might have walked the thousands of miles across the pampa and the cordillera, specifically to be here at Victor’s funeral, just so as to hold this silence with his guitar. What he played, so gently, was what Victor lived and died for, El derecho de vivir en paz, The right to live in peace.

Peace is also what defines the various Chilean national parks that we have visited. From the black and white striped granite pillars of the Torres del Paine mountain range in the Province of Last Hope in southern Patagonia, the sweetly scented broom forests of the island of Chiloé, to the Christmas pudding shaped, smoking volcanoes, complete with their topping of creamy white snow, reflected in the mirror lakes of Parque Nacional Huerquehue. These parks aren’t the sort of place for a drive and a picnic, or at least, only up to a point. Beyond that point lie the last remnants of Chile’s wilderness. The shortest hike takes around 7 hours. The longest about 7 weeks. There are trails, but nothing you could ride a bike along (let alone a vehicle), but a horse, yes. Mostly, the terrain is vertical. There are no tea shops, no rubbish bins and no mobile phone signal. What you carry in, you better carry out.

The fauna is impressive, particularly the black necked swans bobbing like so many question marks on the Sound of Last Hope, or the buff-necked ibis with its scythe-like beak, yellow head and indescribably raucous call or indeed, the iconic (i.e. ugly), whackingly huge Andean condor. Did my binoculars catch the glimpse of a tail feather disappearing into the clouds of this fabled creature? Pass. However, Celine, staring out of the bus window on our way to the airport at the end of the world, saw not one, not two or three, but FOUR Andean Condors. And were they circling high above the Patagonian steppe or soaring gloriously over distant peaks? Were they heck! They were skulking about in a field by the main road, whilst Ms Binoculars here had her head in a book!

The flora isn’t bad either. The great stands of Araucaria (Monkey Puzzle) forest in the Lake District were around during the Mesozoic era, and the 50 metre tall Alerce trees, out of which Chilotés build their wooden houses, can live for 4000 years. They grow one cm every 15 years and their trunks are a library for reading about the climate changes of the last 4 millennia. Let’s hope, despite the principle-free politicians of Copenhagen, these living archives will still be here in another one thousand years, along with us, polar bears, penguins, in fact the whole caboodle, even the not so heart-warming mosquito and bindweed.

Our year-long stay in South America ends, as it began, in Chile, the continent’s impossibly long and fragmented backbone, the borders of which encompass every geographical feature from the most active of snow-tipped volcanoes, through the world’s highest geyers to its driest desert. Why spend so long in Chile, seasoned gringo travellers ask? It’s boring and US influenced. Well, no and yes. It is US influenced. The legacy of US “not in my back yard” foreign policy exists, in different ways, in each country we’ve visited. But what’s boring about a socially conservative, catholic country with a single parent, atheist, female president (the most popular ever, even right at the end of her term of office)? How amazing that a country with a tiny population of 16 million can produce a Violeta Parra, a Roberto Bravo, a Mahani Teave an Isabel Allende, a Victor Jara! And what about the Mapuche Indians, who mounted a 300 year long defence of their lands, the most spirited in the whole of South America! How brilliant that at the end of the first decade of our celebrity-obsessed twenty-first century, Chileans turn out in their thousands to bury a hero, the son of a peasant woman, an artist and musician, a man who believed in, and defended, his people.

Buenos Aires

2009-11-01T13:32:00.000-08:00

Small means big in Argentina and big means gigantic. “Tiny” Uruguay on the other side of the River Plate from Buenos Aires is only small in comparison with Argentina itself. It could gobble up about three European states. The river is almost Amazonian in its vital statisticsI (120 miles wide at points). A big ranch here might be half the size of England. Buenos Aires is home to 13 million; it’s the second largest conurbation in South America and capital of the 8th largest country on earth. Yet the total population (40 million) is far smaller than that of teensy Britain. Cattle (54 million) comfortably outnumber humans. Despite everything Buenos Aires has going for it (size, architecture, art, cakes, coffee), it seems oddly cut off both from its neighbours and even the rest of itself. Geography doesn’t help. There’s the vast Rio de la Plata to the east and the titanic pampas (grass, grass and more grass) to the west. Nor does temperament assist. Porteños (people of the port of BA), have little patience for the parochial concerns of the rest of the country, especially as a third of all Argentinians live in the capital anyway. So Celine and I should be forgiven for not having left BA in six weeks because, why bother with the world’s greatest cataracts, the western hemisphere’s highest mountain and lowest-lying lake, still advancing glaciers, when you can spend 48 hours a day eating (cake), dancing and demonstrating?

Nothing is as it should be. So you think they speak Spanish (Castellano) here? The River Plate has a lot to answer for, even giving its name to the language – Rioplatense Spanish. It’s spoken with Castellano speed, French “je’s”, Italian “che’s”, Meditteranean handwaving, Neopolitan lilt and in your FACE! Then there’s Lunfardo, the underworld lingo of Buenos Aires – Cockney rhyming slang x Parisian argot x Kinkering Congs. You get the picture. We’re in South America but where are all her black-haired, brown-eyed people? Porteños look European (as does their beautiful city). This is a country of immigrants. They even outnumber the descendants of the conquistadores. Where are all the indigenous people? There are very few in BA and not even that many in the rest of the country. Their story is the tragically familiar one of genocide carried out both by the original colonisers and their offspring. Whilst in many other Latin American countries , people proudly proclaim their Aztec, Inca or Mapuche roots, most Argentinians’ ancestors came from the boats fleeing southern European poverty, political repression, civil war and fascism.

What kind of political system might such a radical crowd create for themselves? — Peronism. OMiGod! What is it? Right, Left, Centre? Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? Facist, Populist, Socialist, Capitalist, Isolationist? It’s probably all of these and just about every other contradictory description you can think of. All commentaries consulted remind me of those emigmatic statements of Buddhist belief. “There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way”. Yeah. Right. You think you know what it means until you realise you have absolutely no clue. For example, a supporter of General Perόn coined the popular slogan, “To save Perόn, one has to be against Perόn.” Yeah. Right. What?! Fortunately, there are two illuminating adjectives on which all Peronist commentators are agreed:
1) it’s unique
2) it’s Argentinian
Whatever else it may be, it also got schools and hospitals built, gave women the vote and work to workers. Nowadays, politicians like to signal where they stand in relation to Perόn. So there are Peronists of the right AND of the left (and of all permutations in between). I’m glad that’s clarified Peronism for you. Readers should realise that this clarification is unique in its own way. You will find no other definition that dares not to mention the name of You Know Who (Don’t cry for me, Argentina). Nor will other commentaries mention the little known fact that YKW, resplendent in sky blue evening cloak embroidered in gold, had a remarkable resemblance to the BVM.

Buenos Aires’ hey day was before World War 1. The city’s fabulous wealth was laid out in its gorgeous architecture, grand boulevards and fountain-filled plazas. It then stumbled from one economic crisis to another, its beauty showing distinct signs of wear and tear, until in 2000, capitalism did what it’s now threatening to do to the rest of us in the economic north. It collapsed from its own internal contradictions (Marxist analysis) or went belly side up (Barry-Plews analysis). What we in the economic north could learn from Argentina’s catastrophic collapse. But no, we are diligently doing the ostrich thing and hoping that our very own Perόn, otherwise known as the white man’s hope – the impossibly burdened President Obama – will save capitalism from a nose dive from which the only recovery is via a total disconnect of the capitalist apparatus. Ouch. Those heads that wrench themselves out of the sinking sands of bankers’ bonuses will be reading about how a couple of hundred Argentine factory workers stood up to their bosses (who fired them at the first hint of economic melt-down), took over their workplaces despite threats and real violence from the defenders of private property, and formed cooperatives. They succeeded in running the business their bosses pretended had gone bankrupt. The workers found that, freed from the immense burden of management costs, they could run their factories safely and democratically, whilst paying themselves a fair and equal wage, and even turning parts of their workplace into classrooms for further ed, exhibition and cultural spaces for the local communities who had supported them through various battles with the state. [Read Sin Patrόn (Without a Boss) by The Lavaca Collective]. Celine and I went for a cuppa in one of these reclaimed workplaces – The Bauen Hotel – slap bang in the middle of the city, where a waitress, beaming with pride, agreed that it was a great place to work.

You walk round a corner in this, South America’s most European-looking city, and stumble across something that isn’t remotely European or even particularly South American. It’s not really very Argentinian either. But it is Porteño. You see a smartly-dressed couple, their upper bodies zipped together in a still embrace whilst their legs and feet glide through a mind-boggling array of steps, complete with dazzling turns, twists, changes of direction and shifts in weight. Our adviser says that anyone can learn the tango, and fiendishly suggests that, as complete beginners, we should attend a Women’s Technique Class. This turns out to be all fancy foot and knee twiddles (called adornments) and no actual dance steps. Imagine trying to figure out what the Atlantic looks like from studying a dewdrop. The teacher regards our lack of 3 inch stilettos as a serious character flaw (or possibly it’s our substitutes – £5 patent plastic flatties, and in my case, pyjama bottoms masquerading as dance trousers...) The music’s great. Eight strong beats: slide-walk forward for 4, then back for 4, what could be easier? Actually, sky diving, winning the Lottery, seeing a baby pigeon. The more attention you put on walking, the wobblier it gets. Then there’s what you have to fit into those 8 beats. Walking is just what you do to pass the time between frisky kicks, toe taps, heel clicks, thigh slides, knee twirlies and back flips. So we decide to go to a proper beginners class. Steps without the frills. We discover that the word ‘beginner’ in BA means (everyone else) being really good! Beginner’s tango (from my limited experience), means being propelled backwards or sideways (never forwards). It means the inalienable right not to be able to work out from the hand clamped to my back whether it’s backwards or sideways, and it means having absolutely no idea what kind of adornment I am supposed to execute at any given moment, except when dancing with the teacher. With him, for about three seconds, everything magically slides, glides and whirls into place. Celine and I danced some tango. It was magic!

For a country whose history is punctuated with bouts of terrifying violence (the dirty war waged by the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 saw the disappearance, death and/or torture of some 30,000 civilians), the people follow some very gentle pursuits. Kissing, for instance. Lips to cheek whenever women meet, men and women meet, and yes, even whenever men meet. ‘Do soldiers kiss when they meet reach other?’ I ask an Argentine male. ‘Yes of course. Why not?’ is the reply. Perhaps if this practice were more widely adopted there would be no time for war. Dog-walking is another. Three times a day young, professional walkers think nothing of attaching 14 or 15 dogs to their glove-held mistress lead and setting off for the nearest green space– a happy, waggy, yappy dog plough of the pavements. Then there’s drinking. When the spring sun shines, Porteños, young and old, head to their parks and lakes. When they go home, they don’t leave behind any beer cans or wine bottles because they don’t really do alcohol. They’ve been sipping maté (herbal tea), all day. This is drunk from a specially seasoned gourd through a metal straw. You do not hog your maté. You pass it round. Nor do you get selfish about the straw. The same one is shared with everyone. To get out a hanky and wipe said straw, muttering apologetically about swine flu, would be catastrophically rude. Don’t do it. They say Oink! Oink flu isn’t so bad...

Our bedsit is next door to the hospital where Mercedes Sosa died last month. She was Argentina’s Victor Jara – a folk singer with a big political vision and a huge voice, whose stage, eventually, became the whole world. The dictatorship banned her songs and forced her into exile after death threats and an arrest. There must be something about military uniforms that scrambles the brains, because of course no-one forgot what she stood for, just because she was forcibly absent. She returned to Argentina as the dictatorship began to crumble and the series of concerts that she gave on her arrival packed out the opera house and helped focus opposition to the regime. When she died she lay in state in Congress, whilst thousands of Argentinians came from all over the country to say goodbye. They also accompanied her coffin to La Chacarita cemetery despite shedloads of rain. The story of her life and her music was broadcast on every TV channel and took up miles of newsprint. The funeral, shown on TV was simple, chaotic, huge and homely. Afterwards, the thousands who had come to give thanks for her life showed their love and appreciation by, for once, singing to her. Gracias a la Vida.
(www.mercedessosa.com.ar)

Peru

2009-09-09T17:46:00.000-07:00

Living for a month in the spiritual capital of the Inca empire (1200-1532), 11,000 feet up in the Andes, in a human-sized, truly beautiful city that likes to party(brass bands and dancing in the streets most days), does something to you. The evidence of that extraordinary people is everywhere you look. The massive, hand-carved and angled mortarless stones they polished for their buildings still support the myriad of churches built by the conquistadores on top of the gold-covered temples they pillaged. You see the faces of the Inca in their descendants who live in Cusco and its surrounding villages, and who still speak Kichwa. The history of the devastating collision between the Inca and Spanish empires whispers from the 30 metre high zigzagged rock walls of the fortress Saqsayhuaman, built in the shape of a puma’s head to guard its body, the city of Cusco, stretched ready to spring across the valley below. (The zigzag walls are the puma’s teeth). One stone from the battlements weighs 300 tons, making Stonehenge look merely cute by comparison. Beside the ruins an illuminated Christ figure now stands.

After 300 years of Spanish rule and 200 years of independence, an accommodation of sorts has been reached between the Incas’ descendants and the conquest’s legacy of Catholicism. Hence the Feast of the Assumption is celebrated with Mary being paraded through the streets, followed by hundreds of whirling indigenous dancers in a blaze of traditional outfits. The Church hitches Corpus Christi on to the great Incan festival of the sun, Inti Raymi, the celebration of the winter solstice on 21st June. The dancers wear clothes woven in patterns inherited from the Inca’s weavers – “Meandering River”, “Footprints of the Puma” and “Man from the Jungle”, to name but a few, and still worked on pre-Hispanic back strap looms. Inca weavers were the best in the world. They used 500 threads per inch in their tapestries, whereas renaissance Europe could only manage 85. You even see this accommodation between civilisations in the religious art of the Cusquena school. The artists were often indigenous or mestizo and painted Mary with freely flowing black hair, wearing clothes that gave her the shape of a mountain – Pachamama, sacred Mother Earth. The food at the Last Supper is all indigenous fare. (In fact the meat looked rather like a guinea pig!)

So what was so great about the Inca empire? Aren’t all empires brutal in their conquests and savage towards their colonies? Certainly British and Spanish imperialists are worthy competitors for Plonkers of the Century in the way they wrote off the people they conquered as “savage”. How can the creators of Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal or Great Zimbabwe’s walled city be described in this way? The Incas didn’t do free-thinking, it’s true. So if you objected to their rule, you were dead meat, but if you accepted it, you wanted for nothing. You were held within a rigid, paternalistic hierarchy where you never became rich (unless you were related to the Inca himself!), but where, also, you never suffered poverty. You were expected to work, but if you were unable to do so, you were cared for. You weren’t free, but nor were you a slave. Gold, silver, jewels weren’t regarded as objects of value, merely as objects of beauty. When the Inca died, his fabulous riches died with him because his houses were sealed in case his spirit might wish to return. His children therefore had to shift for themselves, free from the burdens of inherited wealth.

Here in Peru, as in many South American countries, the inequities caused by imperialist rule linger on with the conquistadores’ minority white descendants holding the reins of power, and the Kichwa and other indigenous nations still lagging behind in terms of access to economic equality. The working class of Lima earn, on average, US$ 200 per month. The Kichwa living in the villages around Cusco earn a fraction of that. A village man, working on a building site, earns 5 soles a day (just over £1). His wife and child, kitted up in traditional clothes carrying a lamb in a knitted bonnet, can earn 10 – 15 soles per day having their photos taken by tourists in Cusco. (Not, however, by the tourists we saw one day, kitted up in their traditional clothes – North Face hiking boots, £250 and Levis, £50 – who refused to pay a single sol).

We were able to visit one local village, Ccaccaccollo (Place of the Rocks), whilst filming with a Canadian crew who were making a short about what happens to your money when you opt for an eco tourism alternative. Here, villagers are learning to ride the consumer-capitalist rollercoaster that has taken over where the conquistadores left off. Many of the men work for GAP adventures, an eco tourist outfit, as porters and trained guides. Seeing how the money the men earned was transforming their village (a primary school and trained teachers), the women asked Planeterra (GAP’s charitable arm), to help them recover their weaving skills. These had been partially lost due to the introduction of synthetic wools and knitting machines. After expert weavers came to the village, the women are now using local mosses, lichens, the bark of eucalyptus trees and various plant extracts to dye their alpacas’ wool naturally. They are producing knitted goods and tapestries in beautifully muted colours that echo the rusts, coppers, dusty greens and greys of their rocky, red-earthed environment. GAP takes tourists up to the village three times a week, so the women can both sell their goods and display their centuries-old weaving techniques. Also on display are their new sit-down looms, bought for the village by Planeterra so that even finer goods can be produced. The women have resolved to buy more modern looms with the profits they make from the tourists. They won’t be sorry to say goodbye to their back-breaking backstrap looms, no matter what a great picture they make with the women sitting in a circle, all bound to the tree in their midst by the straps of their looms. The other end of the loom is tied around their waists. Each time they whack the pole of the loom towards them, you can hear the sickening thud as it hits their stomachs.
Ccaccaccollo women know how to do colour. White embroidered blouses peek out behind layers of clashing patterned shawls, overlaid by the ubiquitous dazzlingly bright carrying cloth (for baby, firewood, alpaca grazing). A hand woven belt, which may have been the first thing they made as a child, holds up a one-size-fits-all black wool knee length skirt, also lavishly embroidered. A red crowned hat with a slanting white brim worn at various rakish angles tops the outfit. They find the plain colours of their tourist visitors too boring for words and, working in twos, the women hurl a skirt over your head (it weighs a ton so inhibits objections!), whilst they wind shawls around you and lasso male tourists with brilliant red and orange ponchos. The village men, unlike their avian counterparts, are a little dull by comparison. But their ear flap hats, which they probably knitted themselves, are prettily patterned and they aren’t afraid of pink fluffy balls dangling from the ends.

One place where, apart from tourism, there has been no accommodation between invader and invaded is Machu Picchu (old mountain). The conquistadores never found it! It was abandoned by the Incas around the time of the invasion and lay beneath its blanket of Andean forest for 400 years until Hiram Bingham of Yale University “discovered” it in 1911. (He also nicked quite a lot of its moveable treasures and Yale University has so far resisted all requests for their return). He was led to the lost city by an eleven year old settler lad called Juan Pablo Alvarez. The Spanish never found it because the surrounding terrain, even now, is pretty impenetrable. The sacred valley of the Urubamba river narrows to a deep, heavily forested gorge just after Ollantaytambo (a small village also awash with Inca ruins), and remains like this all the way to the encircling mountains that protect Machu Picchu from view. To walk there takes four days, three if you have a death wish. It involves mile upon mile of vertical scrambling, hikes over three mountain passes, the highest of which exceeds 12,500 feet and is encouragingly called “Dead Woman’s Pass”. (We took the train). Machu Picchu looks like what all the Andes would have looked like before deforestation – the rolling green roof of the world.

We rise at 4.00am to begin our assault on Machu Picchu. We are aided by a bus which saves us from three knee-crunching hours of uphill slog. We arrive around 6.30am at the entrance. It’s light but the sun hasn’t climbed to the top of the snow-capped Veronicas yet. All we can see is wave after wave of undulating green mountains topped by jaggley white ones and an immense sky. We have reached a place on the planet where it’s impossible to stand on the level and spine-chilling drops to the valley floor are eight inches away from your right foot. It’s not surprising the corkscrew paths are crumbly, they’re over 500 years old. Our feet are wobbling on stones trodden by the Sun’s son, the Inca king himself! Up, up, up we go, hot despite the early hour. The only sound, the rustling of the bamboo forest around us. We emerge from this, just as I am cursing the Incas for their inability to understand vertigo, and we have arrived. At THE place. You know it – you’ve seen it on a thousand postcards and websites – an escarpment jutting out over the entire sacred city and bang opposite the rounded green summit of Huayna Picchu (young mountain) which, now that I see it in the flesh and off-line, had to be the inspiration for London’s Gherkin! But no postcard prepares you for the sheer power, scale and magnetism of what lies around, before and beneath you. Poetry in stone. Nature and architecture pack a combined punch that is staggering and leaves Celine and I in tears. The city, hugged by its surrounding agricultural terraces (andenes), has been hand-carved, smoothed, shaped and polished out of 250 million year old granite, gleaming with quartz. The stones have been so exquisitely fitted together that a blade of grass cannot be slid between them. Looking down, we see the buildings running east-west in orderly rows, so as to maximise the amount of light and so that no building casts its shadow on another. Looking up, we float with the rising mist amongst a ring of mountains. Opposite, Huayna Picchu, to the west, glacial Pumasillo, Salcantay (wild mountain) looms behind us, over Machu Picchu itself, the Veronicas guard the east and below us, folded into foothills, the rainbow flag of the Incas flutters on top of Mount Putukusi.

Climbing even higher, we sit on a rock and watch the sun creep over the eastern ranges to breathe heat and light into the ancient stones. The thought occurs that these aren’t just ruins. This is where people gossiped in the Sacred Plaza, sweated in the terraces, chewed coca, harvested maize, tended their amaryllis (Machu Picchu has its very own species), and perhaps implored the Sun God to, next time, let them build a city on level ground! This is where stonemasons carved the head of a condor between two soaring wings of natural granite to represent the flight into the afterlife. The rising sun of the winter solstice still spills its rays through the eastern window of the Sun Temple onto the altar behind and this is where, at midday on the solstice, the sun continues to hitch itself to the Intiwathana (sun) stone, in which position, it casts no shadow. No, this place isn’t just history – Machu Picchu rocks!

Amazon Queens

2009-08-12T17:57:00.000-07:00

It’s fascinating how history throws up someone like a President Correa, who, despite their class background, has some slack, and principles that aren’t satisfied with the business-as-usual-fiddled-expense-account brand of politics. Foreign oil companies and other big businesses are being forced to cough up the back taxes they’ve spent years assuming they didn’t really owe to the Ecuadorean people. 16 year olds have been given the vote. Teachers who can’t, face re-training. The poor can expect their voices to be heard, and the corrupt, to lose their jobs. Correa sacked nearly all the country’s top judges after being elected, as backhanding their way to retirement had become a way of life. Moving against the entrenched interests of those represented by the judiciary, before they move against you (as ex President Zelaya of Honduras discovered to his cost), was a master stroke. It feels as though Ecuador hangs between the forces of Bolivarean socialism and the business-as-usual right who think nothing of the fact that in 2005, five former presidents and vice presidents were either in exile or in jail. The right – in the name of the “democracy” that had Honduras’ newly unelected President announce that kidnapping the elected Zelaya in the middle of the night whilst still in his jimjams, and dumping him in Costa Rica, was NOT a coup – are using the media to try and re-assert themselves. In this way they hope to discredit the socialist experiment. So Correa’s businessman brother is being pilloried for fraud, some dodgy video has been released, apparently “proving” that Correas’s last election campaign was financed by FARC, and (you know when the right are under pressure), there are even rumours that Correa is gay... Will Ecuador go the way of Honduras, or find its own path to socialism (with a little help from old hands in Cuba and Venezuela, and newer hands in Bolivia and Brazil)?

Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest no longer hangs between left and right, because its very existence is in jeopardy thanks to the twin actions of oil and logging. It’s still magnificent, one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, but it’s disappearing faster than you can read this. Some Indian communities (the Cofan and the Secoya), have almost been wiped out by 30 years of oil extraction, spillage, deliberate dumping (some estimates say more than 30 times what the Exxon Valdez spewed over Alaska has been dumped), and the creation of a toxic environment that has caused cancer rates to soar. Why is it that oil companies only ever find oil in the world’s most pristine places, and never under the corridors of Whitehall or the White House? Of course there’s a fightback, albeit a somewhat unequal one. The Indian nations whose land this is have developed different strategies for dealing with the multi-nationals, from sometimes lethal confrontation, to lawsuits, to deals whereby oil company X agrees to leave so much land alone, in return for mining the crude in another area. In the past the oil companies and the government have been too busy greasing each other’s palms to give a fig for the local people or what was happening to their Garden of Eden. With Correa it looks a bit different (Google Yasuni Green Gold), but it’s early days.

Someone asked us why, given the oil, was Ecuador so poor? After 3 months we’re on the way to at least one answer: *In 1970, just before the oil boom, Ecuador’s national debt stood at less than $300 million – not solvent, but manageable. In 1990, after the extraction of $1.5 billion of oil, the national debt soared to £12 billion. Why? The then Ecuadorean government had signed a contract which basically allowed the oil company to recover the cost of their investment before Ecuador saw any of the money. All well and good, except that the company, a few months after its first well became operational, announced that its costs were going to be much higher than anticipated, with the result that the money the government had borrowed on the strength of its supposed oil wealth couldn’t be repaid in the short term; interest accumulated and the debt grew. The more oil that was extracted, the further the country fell into debt. More than a quarter of every dollar earned from exporting oil went to service the debt. Ecuador then had no choice but to keep producing as much oil as it could in the shortest and cheapest possible time, on the strength of which it could borrow more money. To remain eligible for credit from those bastions of first world thoughtfulness, the World Bank and the IMF, successive governments imposed austerity measures. Prices for cooking oil and fuel would spiral overnight leading to strikes, unrest and coups. The $12 billion debt was run up paying for petroleum equipment, services, supplies and servicing the deposit accounts of petroleum executives and corrupt Ecuadorean government officials.* [*Savages, Joe Kane, 1995, Vintage Books].

The descent from the heights of Quito, with its cool, Spring-like climate, over the eastern precipice of the Andes, into the steamy Amazon jungle, brings many surprises:
1) It’s steamy
2) It’s jungley
3) It’s a rainforest so it rains like you’ve never been wet before
4) You can climb stairs (if there were any), without running out of breath, and
5) This river is definitely not the Thames. Think fast-flowing, the colour of toffee, with whole trees hurtling downstream and VAST. It would take a channel swimmer at least half a day to cross. It’s called the Rio Napo and I’m thinking, crikey what must the Amazon itself be like, if this is a mere tributary?
Celine and I race down this monstrous river in a motorised canoe for three hours and admire what we think is unbroken rainforest on either shore, but it’s not, it’s secondary forest, i.e. what has regenerated after the devastation wrought by the oil companies’ roads. A road doesn’t just destroy trees, it maroons wildlife (animals won’t cross it), and it brings settlers – landless folk from other parts of overcrowded Ecuador, who destroy even more jungle by planting land-hungry cash crops such as coffee and bananas (for guess who??), to make a living. Only after we transfer to dugout canoe, hang a left by an island, stick on a sandbank, from which we dislodge ourselves by rolling from left to right in unison, do we meet primary rainforest. Everything is transformed: the 100 lane sky-embraced Napo motorway becomes a twilit country lane of shadowy water, with light excluded by battalions of massive trees marching down, and into, the river. Some trees have fallen right across, making lichen and moss covered bridges. A symphony of crickets, cicadas, birds, leaf rustle, fish plop and wing beat accompanies us into this new world. We glide along (think Amazon Queens), and slowly, patches of sky can be glimpsed through the legions of palm, tree fern, bamboo, you name it, until our new world lightens and brightens, glint of evening sun on water, and we are soundlessly paddled by Kichua Indians into their beautiful Challuacocha black water lagoon. We are to spend 4 days in Sani Lodge, owned and managed by the local Kichua community. All profits are ploughed back into the Lodge and the community itself which, as a result, has its own primary school, health clinic, community centre and, perhaps most importantly, football pitch and spectator stand!

I think this lagoon and its attendant jungle the nearest I’ve been to paradise. Celine is more reserved; she, after all, she has had to undergo aversion therapy in Quito’s snake house in order to brave the jungle’s reptile population. Strangely, we are the only visiting gringas who get even close to seeing where a snake once slithered by – we step over its outgrown skin. The group who went for a nightwalk in search of an anaconda had to settle for half a tarantula (the other half sensibly refused to leave its hole). We attempt to pass ourselves off as twitchers and are rewarded with Guillermo, Sani’s number 1 leading bird expert, as our guide. He sees through us straight away, but that doesn’t stop the most phenomenal number of birdies – over 100 – dropping by to aggravate us by never staying still long enough for us amateurish types to locate the correct tree, let alone the precise branch and leaf behind which the little buggers chortle away! My favourite was the Rufous Potoo (think orangey owl), and not just because it was fast asleep and thus relatively easy to locate. It rocked gently back and forth on its branch, a breeze ruffling its coat of feathers, totally oblivious to Celine and I crashing around on the forest floor below, trying to ‘fix’ it with my Christmas cracker standard binoculars. Celine’s favourite was the darling little Purple Honeycreeper who (and this is rare in bird nomenclature), actually is purple with a natty turquoise head. Mrs. Purple Honeycreeper, on the other hand, is green, but sports a matching turquoise moustache.

Birds apart, for me, it’s the assault of greenery that takes my breath away. There are shades, shapes and textures of green I never could have imagined. The forest floor is dark (if not exactly cool), and mountains of dead leaves crackle underfoot. Here, the gloomy greens hold sway. 30 metres above the earth, up a tree tower built into an even higher Ceiba (Capok) tree, the zingy yellow greens clash with the mustard greens, the blue greens, the grey greens and the emerald greens. It’s magical – a rolling, spikey, jagged ocean of (yup! you guessed), green. Do not be tempted to wander off on your own. 10 metres from the lodge you could be utterly lost, as to our untutored eyes, one part of the shadowy forest floor looks exactly like another. I ask Guillermo for handy orientation tips. “The sun,” he says pityingly. “But,” I venture, “At the equator, the sun doesn’t vary much from the 12 o’clock position.” (This completely ignored the more obvious point that we were in thick jungle and couldn’t actually see the sun). Undeterred, Guillermo strode off into the undergrowth, found a patch of sunlight, snapped off a twig and thrust it into the ground. A slight shadow was cast since, fortunately, we weren’t dead on the equator, and from this Guillermo was able to declare “North”. As I looked none the wiser, he explained that North was where Sani Lodge was. I mentally make a note not to lose Guillermo, ever, and definitely not at night. He tells us there is no danger of dying of thirst in a rainforest, and that the dead bark of certain trees, which you hack off with your machete, makes a brilliant water carrier. Plus the place is absolutely falling down with edible fruits, provided you have a penchant for shinning up trees which are branchless for the first 30 feet or so. You use your machete as a handhold to assist. “There’s always mushrooms,” he added, clearly doubting my tree-climbing and machete-wielding abilities, “but not those ones”. If you crave fish, just spin a line from a particular palm fibre which, handily, doubles up as a razor. You can carve a spear (with machete) from the wood of a Chonta Palm (don’t ask) or, if there’s a blowgun handy, your chances of fricassee of howler monkey are greatly increased. You can save yourself from death by mosquito by doing something with termites (it probably involves a machete), and for desert there’s the reputedly delicious lemon flavoured ant. The bottom line for survival in the jungle, as you’ve probably gathered, is don’t, whatever you do, lose your machete. To improve sour breath, chew the leaf of a pretty, mauve climber, and if accompanied by gurney infants, there’s any number of plants that will improve their humour. That’s about a zillionth of what’s on offer if you’re in the know. We are walking through the world’s largest larder and pharmacy, and it’s completely free. How anyone could possibly, even for one nano second, destroy it, is totally beyond me. The dawn and dusk sounds of jungle-wandering are unforgettable. The air is heavy with bleeps, crrks, whirrs, plops and reddits. Occasionally, we hear the eerie growl of the red-eyed caymen that lurk in the lagoon. Then there’s the smell. It’s so heady, I just want to sniff all day, because we are walking through the planet’s most brilliantly managed compost bin.

Everyone who visits the jungle has a jaguar story, or rather an absence of jaguar story, since they’re rare, very shy and nocturnal. The luckier tourists may see a muddy paw print on one of the remoter trails. We, too, have a jaguar story. Floating down the Challuacocha at 6.00am with the mist rising, the leaves dripping (all specially adapted to drip barrel loads of water onto the tree below), with the flycatchers catching flies, the kingfishers fishing and the Golden-headed Manakin showing off, there was an enormous SPLOSH! A jaguar, still dreaming of last night’s supper, had fallen off an overhanging tree trunk into the river, right beside our canoe. I’ve never seen anything streak so fast through the water, up the bank and into the dark stillness of the jungle.

From sleepy jaguars and mysterious rainforests, it is a mere 18 hour bus ride (we flew!), to the Pacific Ocean, and the dusty, half-horse fishing village of Puerto Lopez. It was shocking to hear cars and helicopters and see piles of rubbish everywhere. We take a bus through one of the world’s last remaining coastal dry forests. It certainly lives up to its name. There’s hardly a hint of green anywhere; just a skeleton army of bare branches, a giant tinderbox. Compared to Puerto Lopez, Quito seems almost a first world city with its paved streets, flashy nightlife, copious high rises and busy, purposeful crowds. Here, nothing rises above 2 storeys, streets turn to sand and if anyone was busy, they did a good job hiding it, swinging in their hammocks. Nightlife was concentrated on the beach in the early hours when the fishermen brought home their catch to a raucous but appreciative gathering of pelicans, frigate birds and fish-eating humans. To this scruffy, sleepy village came President Correa for one of his Saturday morning question and answer sessions with the people. A few white canopies were erected beside the beach, there was a conspicuous absence of red carpet or freshly painted loo, but there he was, and there they were, the people. They got up from their white plastic chairs when they saw him arrive, sang a patriotic song and clapped, (whilst Celine and I cried). Bus loads of school children arrived and listened with rapt attention, whole families gathered in their Sunday best, elders nodded gently in the sun. Armed police milled about. One burly, automatic machine gun toting corporal had to wrestle his weapon aside in order to try on various pairs of sunglasses that were being hawked around. It was pretty relaxed. The President talked a lot, the people listened. They asked questions, he answered. He made them laugh. They liked him, you could tell. I liked him, and I couldn’t even understand what he was saying! Maybe, despite what the right wing press would have you believe, Correa’s on a roll, because what the forces of reaction in Ecuador have never figured out, is how to talk and listen to ordinary working people, let alone make them laugh.

Otavalo and more

2009-07-14T14:02:00.000-07:00

The thing about volunteering is that if you don’t like it, you can quit. So we did. Not because the market children weren’t lovely, but because the organisation was ropey, to say the least. So now we don aprons and brandish enormous, blunt knives in the kitchen of ‘Los Abuelitos de las Calles’, (Street Grandparents). We assist the tiny cook, Laura, to produce 100 breakfasts and 100 three-course lunches per day for the hungry grandparents who, despite the name, for the most part aren’t homeless, but who have to work in the streets to pay the rent. They do everything you can think of, from selling single sweets and biscuits out of the packet, to guarding your humvee when you decide to spend the evening in your favourite salsateque. So ‘Abuelitos de las Calles’ has to substitute for the non-existent (here) old age pension. All the food is donated and past its sell-by date, so the cook never knows from one day to the next what her menu will be; it all depends on the beneficence of Supermaxi (Tesco’s) and what middleclass Quiteños don’t want to put on their dinner plates that day (squishy fruit and slightly furry veg in our experience). Sometimes there is no rice, rarely is there meat, but a day never goes past without there being sackfuls of potatoes. Celine and I have now peeled enough to recreate the entire Andean range. Despite these drawbacks, Laura manages to produce highly nutritious meals from her set of gigantic cauldrons. Picture this – on our first day there was a fiesta and chicken was on the menu. The two gringa vegetarianas were set to work stripping the cooked and grease-oozing chickens by hand, without gloves, in a cold-water-only, soapless kitchen! Fernando comes 4 times a month to bake for the abuelitos. This is on top of getting up at 3.00am every day to bake for wages. It’s fantastic to watch a maestro work. Thick blankets of dough are rolled, punched, thwacked, slapped and tweaked into mouth-watering empanadas, crusty rolls, curled Chelsea buns and delicate croissants. Everything comes out of the oven absolutely perfect, except when Celine and I had a go – what we produced tasted great but looked like baggy monsters!

As everywhere, one of the oppressive social divides in Ecuador is race. At the top of the heap are the white descendants of the conquistadores (about 6% of the population), followed by the mestizos (the mixed white/indigenous people, who number around 65%), the indigenous population at 25% and at the bottom of the pile, the Afro-Ecuatorian people who, until very recently, weren’t even recognised as a distinct ethnic group. It is now thought the 2001 census was wrong in showing they only formed 5% of the population and new thinking reckons there to be double that number, or about 1.2 million people. Racism operates between white and indigenous, white and mestizo (we’ve witnessed a couple of unpleasant incidents of this aimed at our Spanish teacher), white and black and indigenous and black. How the different indigenous Kichwa groups rub along, to say nothing of how the Shuar get on with the Kichwa, or the Huaorani get on with the Chachi, we don’t know, but as colonialism is still a potent factor here, then the fall-out from the old colonial divide and rule tactic (whereby racism gets internalised), is probably still making its ugly presence felt.

It was interesting spending a few days in Otavalo (3 hours north of Quito) in the northern sierra, because it’s a mainly indigenous town. The hotels and businesses are run and owned by Kichwa people, as is the world famous textile cottage industry that operates in many of the surrounding villages, where weaving families have been perfecting their craft since before the invasion of the Incas. The atmosphere here is very different to Quito. The indigenous people here are the majority; they don’t have to tread carefully, but can walk tall and take up lots of (colourful) space. The Otavaleños Kichwa dress differently from the Kichwa women in our Quito compound. They wear long black skirts slit up one side to reveal a cream underskirt, the whole caboodle fastened together with a woven band. Their frilly white blouses are beautifully embroidered and set off with soft wool shawls. Headdresses range from the Homburg hat (less common here), to a long black cloth hanging down the back, like an old fashioned nun, to a dark, triangular headcloth (fachalina), reminiscent of an eighteenth century Dutch bonnet. Otavalo men don’t do bald and wear their hair in a long plait. Despite the bustle and dust of a prosperous market town, they wear spotlessly white, loose trousers and ponchos, always in one shade of blue. We saw two indigenous men wearing knee-length skirts which, we think, indicates they come from another part of Ecuador altogether. People here can tell precisely what village you come from depending on the way your fachalina is tied or the pattern of weave in your shawl.

Shopping hasn’t featured much in this blog to date, but that is about to change. You CANNOT visit Otavalo and not buy presents for friends and family you didn’t even know existed. We’re carpeted, ponchoed, hatted and pictured out! The huge market drowns you in the warm, earthy, home-dyed colours of carpets, rugs, wall hangings, hoodies, hammocks; your fingers tingle with the textures of alpaca and llama, honey-roasted peanuts assault your taste buds and your feet get tapping to the competing sound systems. The vendors chide you, their sister, not to waste your precious time buying from any other stall; they graciously forgive your attempts at bargaining and murmur that, for you, their first lucky customer of the day, the poncho is yours, despite the utterly absurd price you have offered. And that’s just the textile market (aptly called Plaza de Ponchos!) For early risers (5.30am) you can also experience the delights of the animal market – delights not shared, I may say, by the enormous porker squealing his indignation at the several farmers trying to prise him out the back of the pick-up truck he was clearly very attached to. The hens hanging upside down, five to each hand, demonstrated their distaste for the whole market shenanigans by a total absence of clucking. Even the cuys (guineapigs), being held up by the scruffs of their necks to show how fat and juicy they were, remained silent. Only the ducklings put up a spirited resistance to their date with the roasting pan by escaping from their baskets and scarpering in all directions, a gang of toddlers in hot pursuit.

With pavements prone to alarming changes of level, including total disappearance, it’s perhaps not surprising that since we arrived in Ecuador, we haven’t seen a single pushchair. Plus the tin can buses are not pushchair-friendly – you enter up a steep, narrow set of stairs, the driver always tears off before you’ve quite found a handhold, and woe betide you if you’re daft enough to imagine that grabbing the leather strap hanging from a rail above your head will assist, because it slides, and away you go – whoosh – down the aisle, until either you collide with another passenger or the driver brakes, which has the double effect of lighting up the Virgin Mary statue on his windscreen and sending you careering back down the bus on your movable handhold. So pushchairs are out of the question, but the bonus is that babies get carried and you rarely hear a child cry.

Celary in Ecuador

2009-06-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

There´s a colour and exuberance here in Quito that was missing in Santiago de Chile. The Ecuadorians haven´t had to survive Pinochet, although there have been plenty of military coups and a different Presidente every time you blink, until recently. Maybe it´s partly to do with the fact that capitalism doesn´t have the same stranglehold over the hearts and minds of ordinary people, because here it´s not a question of how much of the capitalist pie you can get, but whether you have any pie at all. There is a wealthy elite and a growing middleclass, but most people are still poor with little hope of change in the short term. The poverty is evident everywhere, but so is the optimism and spirit of entrepreneurship. In the respectable working class area where we live (a mainly native American Kichwa community), women turn their front rooms into cafés, people "borrow" crumbling kerb stones to hold down their corrugated iron roofs and women graze cows on the grass verges between blocks of flats. But the city´s streets are full of shoeshine boys who should be in school, yet aren´t, and youngsters performing juggling tricks at major traffic junctions to eke out a precarious and polluted living. In the markets of south Quito, where we volunteered, 5 year olds looks after week old babies so their mothers can work, and work they do. They sell everything from coal to 20 different types of potato (the potato was discovered here), to pigs heads piled up in neat pyramids grinning as the vegetarians scuttle past, to 120 different kinds of delicious fruit, most of which have no translation in English, to t-shirts with New York stamped across them, to women repairing your clothes on their sewing machines for 25 cents, to old men keeping the washstands clean or minding your truck while you load up with crates of tree tomatoes, granadillos (sweet, frog-spawn like fruit), lychees, physalis, a bright pink hairy fruit whose name I can´t remember, 10 types of melon, orange, coconut, pineapple, sweet corn, bits of pig, chickens and goats (alive), but not for long, as the cook pot awaits them. Oh! and maybe a cardboard box full of fluffy ducklings, also on their way to the great Daddy Duck in the sky.

There´s no state pension here for elders who haven´t worked for the government or some big company. So, if you´re poor, you work until you drop. There´s no safety net, either, if you lose your job. You rely on your family, or you work the traffic, or you hustle tourists. Tourism is HUGE here, far more so than Chile. There are definite benefits if you´re a chocaholic or caffeine addict (thank God, an end to Nescafé!) The downside is that tourists (amongst others), represent a wealthy target. We´ve discovered a mall downtown, full of all the stuff that´s been nicked from the gringos. You can even go and buy your camera back - at a great, rock-bottom price!

Maybe having the socialist President Correa running the government accounts for some of the optimism. He´s cancelled Ecuador´s debts to the first world, run up by previous corrupt administrations largely for their own benefit; he´s taking the oil back under Ecuadorean control (with the multinationals fighting him every inch of the way) and he wants to move the country away from over-dependence on oil. Many people think he will help the poor, except the local hairdresser´s Dad. He is by no means so sure. He reckons this socialist fandango is all very well, but does it put pig on the plate or get Eduardo a decent job? (All this declaimed at 100 decibels, whilst an amazing number of locals were squeezed into every nook and cranny of the hairdresser watching me get shorn, like I´d just won first prize at the Yorkshire Show!) So the long term transformations promised by a Socialist President may not be enough.

There are 3 women-led households in the adobe-brick apartment block where we live. The women wear traditional Kichwa dress comprising a brightly coloured, pleated, wrap-around skirt, a white blouse with frilly sleeves that also acts as a petticoat (in case the skirt unwraps?), a differently brightly coloured shawl that acts as either a baby sling or a sun shield, and the dark, Homburg hat when they go out. Black, plastic soled espadrilles and hand-strung gold bobble necklaces complete the outfit. Their sons all wear levis and sweat shirts but are not averse to hanging out the washing or sweeping the yard. From our roof top verandah we see plenty of young men doing the family wash by hand, using the ridged scrubbing boards I remember from the fifties. The daughters of the house wear mini skirts and croptops, except when Grandma is visiting! One of the compensations for having to hand-wash everything (until we discovered a laundry), was looking up from the wash tub to see Cotopaxi Volcano sparkling with snow on the horizon and Quito´s ragbag of eccentric housing, including the skyscrapers, flung across the valley below us and up the sides of Pinchincha volcano and countless other smaller mountains and hills, stretching back forever into the blue, misty yonder.

Desert, Sea and Stars

2009-05-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

Nine hours north of Santiago, centred around three rocky outcrops pounded by Pacific rollers, is the Humboldt National Marine Reserve. Wrapped up like arctic explorers against the sun (hot), the sea (wet) and the breeze (cool, yet with a penchant for turning gringa skin lobster red), we stepped into a boat, reminiscent of the kind played with in the bath as a child. In other words, it didn´t look up to the choppy conditions! I gave up being concerned that the boatman was doing last minute repairs to the engine as we set out, and that his mate was holding up a fuel line to keep the motor going, because I had spotted a fin skiing through the water towards us. It was joined by another, and then another, until an armada of bottlenosed dolphins surrounded us, skimming the bow wave in perfect unison. When the boat slowed the dolphins leapt out of the water to perform tail-swishing pirouettes, before flopping back beneath the waves for a spot of underwater ballet. They were so graceful, and every performance was accompanied by a heart-stopping smile.

The dolphins were replaced with zillions of fat-bellied sea lions flopping about on smelly rocks. We witnessed one guy who decided to take a swim, slither head-first down 20 feet of vertical rock before head-butting his way into the Pacific with a sound like a heavy weight boxer being decked. An incredibly rare sea lion (name forgotten) was then discovered doing roly polys that just broke the surface of the waves right beside the boat! First one frilly flipper would dangle above the swell before being twirled out of sight, and then the next flipper and so on (with this maneouvre, it looked like there was a never ending supply of differently frilled flippers rotating). They can do this for hours. What a life!

The boatman virtually stopped the boat and I heard him murmur something. Standing stock still on a rock ledge were six small penguins. Pingüinos de Humboldt thrive in the cold Humboldt current that washes the Chilean coast, but they´re very nervous and so the boatman had cut his engine and suddenly everyone was whispering. Even the slightest of loud noises can give pingüinos de Humboldt a heart attack. We stared at each other, penguin and human for a while, before the humans regretfully took our leave of these six perfectly frock-coated beings.

As we drove back from the Islas de Choros towards the Trans-American highway that runs the length of South America, we crossed desert scrub. The Atacama is slowly spreading south, just as the Sahara is creeping northwards. We drove along a dry river bed through a gorge of bare, copper coloured hills, not a tree to be seen, the only greenery provided by clumps of cactus that punctuated the flat scrub like exclamation marks. Some were in bloom with blood red flowers interspersed between their spikes. Our guide announced it would take two weeks to walk out of this desert (if you survived). Yet people live here! In the midst of this arid plain there was an oasis, an underground river, a bright green tangle of trees and plants that were like an “up yours” to the surrounding heat and dust. There was even a government scientific station growing aloe vera in very straight rows, a village school and a doctor´s surgery (the most remote in Chile).

We fell in love with the stars at Mamalluca Observatorio, high in the clear air of the hills bordering the Elqui Valley. With the naked eye we saw the hunter, Orion, disconcertingly upside down, with the three stars of his belt and his very bright and faithful companion, Cirrus, the dog. Opposite was the Southern Cross which doesn´t signal south at all (!), but which provides the wherewithall for working it out when you´re lost in the southern hemisphere on a cloudless night. The twins, Castor and Pollux, shone side by side and through the telescope we saw the rings of Saturn. What was one star by sight alone was transformed into fifty through the telescope. The International Space Station made two guest appearances, an improbable blob streaking through the heavens with its human cargo. Apparently it takes the brain three days to adjust to the discomfort of zero gravity and the internal organs floating about like lost souls. The Milky Way wrapped everything we saw in a silky scarf of stars until the horrid old moon rose and filled the night sky with unwelcome light!

Having taken you to the realms of desert, sea and stars, it is now time to visit the walled city of the dead - El cementario de Santiago. It´s massive and comes complete with people available to take your blood pressure as you arrive, lest you forget the temporary nature of existence! The cemetery clearly reflects the vicious nature of class-based society: the wealthy get fabulous detached houses, Greek temples, Egyptian ziggurats, vast, ornate catacombs to sleep the sleep eternal, whereas the poor get badly maintained, overcrowded concrete blocks, similar to the worst kind of run-down council estate. Honestly. Despite the size of the place, it wasn´t hard to find Salvador Allende´s memorial – just follow the singing. A band of Socialist Party followers were celebrating an anniversary there complete with red banners, red carnations and (by coincidence) a red-shirted me. We all sang ´The Red Flag´ afterwards. A few avenues beyond this, a Cuban band played a mean salsa beneath a portrait of Allende, and the twin flags of Cuba and Chile. Afterwards, everyone repaired to a bar outside the cemetery´s walls called “El Quita Penas” which translates roughly as ´Quit your pain´ or ´Drown your Sorrows´!

But my abiding memory of Santiago (as we get ready to leave for Quito), is of two octogenarian women freedom fighters, their grey hair shining in the afternoon sun, as they quietly discuss the next step the Fundación Victor Jara will take towards building a fair and just society.

Hidden Depths

2009-04-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

As you would expect with a country so long (2,700miles – the distance from Edinburgh to Baghdad) and so thin (150 miles – the distance from Whitby to Birmingham), there are hidden depths. These are sometimes revealed in a physical way (as when the volcano in Chaitén blew its top recently). It´s also noticeable on the buses. Simmering beneath the skin of every bus driver whacking up and down the great main drag of Santiago, known as the Alameda/ Providencia/ Apoquindo, depending on where you are, in their smart fleet of eco-friendly regulated buses, is the raging heart of a once unregulated racing bus driver. They drove their bone-shakers like chariots, with doors open, picked up (or not) whoever they fancied, drove any old how and disgorged passengers wherever they liked. What is the pent-up fury, that explodes whenever there´s a clear 3 metres of road, all about? (It can´t be that they all long for the good old days because deregulation didn´t mean job security or decent wages).

Santiago commuters face incredible temperatures on the sparkling metro (those who keep one step ahead of unemployment polish the metal bolts on the hand rails), and during rush hours, face sardine-packed buses driven by the aforementioned furies. Into this explosive mix, add icecream sellers, beggars who declaim the rights of all people not to be beggars better than any politician I´ve heard, plus often fantastic musicians, who wedge themselves and their instruments between sardines and the bucking bronco bus floor. Recipe for a commuter revolution? Or at least a posse of gobby schoolgirls loudly complaining? Absolutely not. Future mamas and the infirm unfailingly get offered seats, even 50 year old gringas benefit from a courtesy that is reminiscent of England in the 1960s. How does this acceptance square with the bus drivers’ ill-concealed rage?

Most days I´ll take a bus into town. As the driver swerves round the one way system I pass the pleasant looking Military Hospital. I was born in a military hospital, my father worked in one all his life, for me they are just ordinary places. This one tortured people under Pinochet. Santiago´s full of places like that, innocuous looking front doors, behind which Hell existed. Or you can catch a bus out to Peñalolén, a working class area at the foot of the Andes with spectacular views, and the lovely villa Grimaldi, one of Santiago´s most brutal detention centres. President Michelle Bachlelet and her mother were both tortured here. Pinochet ordered the buildings to be razed to the ground just before the return of civilian rule, and now it has been transformed into a peace park, Parque por la Paz. But for a national monument, it´s very low key. Over 5000 people were tortured here, more than 200 died, yet more disappeared, and yes, their names are movingly recorded on a great slab of rock, and in other ways. But it feels as though, after the beautiful memorial roses were planted and the gate through which the detainees were dragged was permanently locked (never again to be opened “nunca mas”), that the park´s creators held their collective breath and looked over their shoulders to check that Chileans of all political hues cold bear this tiptoe into the past.

Rage and courtesy; past brutality lurking beneath pleasant exteriors – the answers to these contradictions must, at least in part, be the responsibility of the 19 year long military dictatorship. And although it´s a long time since the coup, and compensation has been paid to affected families, and political refugees are given help on their return, justice has not been done on a large scale. Pinochet got away with it. Torturers walk free and have good jobs as accountants; that might silence a commuter.

So, I´m not sure how well the wounds inflicted by the dictatorship are healing. I think they are held within a delicate balance of wanting to forget and needing to remember.

And Hidden Dangers

In a country where many find it difficult to talk about politics, singing seems to do the job instead. So explains Natasha Young the journalist in the weekend review of the Santiago Times in a piece about a young popular folk musician here called Manuel Garcia. She writes
“The anthems of Cuba’s Nueva Trova and Chile’s own Nueva Cancíon movements (both meaning "New Song") are in the blood of most left-wing Chileans, and as García and friends switched between his own songs and those of folk heroes Victor Jara, Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés, the audience sang along with one voice."

Take a look at myspace.com/manuelgarciaepanico

Angelo Pierattini a Chilean Rock artist talks about cultural imperialism to Adam Fuller again of the Santiago Times.

¨Art is often viewed as communist,” Pierattini said. “There was great music being made in Chile by artists like Victor Jara. But when Pinochet came to power, they destroyed almost all of it, sending the Chilean music and art scene underground. Foreign groups were popularized in efforts to boost the economy, which created the image that everything outside of Chile is good and everything from Chile is bad…."“This kind of musical anti-patriotism is unique to Chile in comparison to its Latin American brethren. In Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Brazil – they have a great history of music and culture and they respect their artists…”

But, things are changing.

“We’re forming groups from our own country and producing new Chilean music. We’re not dead. More people are coming to shows and it’s spreading.”

There is definitely a sense that something is changing. We´ve met people who want to talk about the past. However. as mentioned before, what holds them back is the long running debate about remembering or forgetting.

“It is better to remain quiet and to forget. That is the only thing we must do. We must forget. And that won't happen if we continue opening up lawsuits, sending people to jail. FOR-GET: That's the word. And for that to happen, both sides must forget and continue with their work."
(Former General Augusto Pinochet, September 13 1995,two days after the 22nd anniversary of the military coup)

However the statement from the Derechos Chile group (a human rights group in Chile) counteracts that position nicely:

“If there is a call to forget, then it must be because many still remember.”

And the comment from Michelle Bachelet herself, that as a doctor she knows the power of healing but before healing can begin, the wound has to be cleaned thoroughly.
However is the need to heal and reflect on the past going to be possible, at a time when Chile appears to be the actor cast in the leading role for the next economic recovery block buster?

I refer to the sudden interest in things Chilean from the USA and the UK. You remember we wrote before about the visit of Charles and Camilla a couple of weeks ago. Lo and behold 2 weeks ago we had Vice President Jo Biden and Gordon Brown here pre the G20 summit in London.

Watch out Chile. It´s not so many years ago they were promoting the new economic phenomenon “The Celtic Tiger” in Ireland - and look at the disaster there today with the economy on its knees because of unsustainable economic growth which we now know was only ever built on credit.

Here in Chile, everywhere there are offers of credit, credit, credit and older parents are shocked at the spending of their children. They can´t understand how they can afford trainers at 62,000 pesos when many live on a weekly wage of 100,000 pesos (120 pounds sterling).
They can´t relate to a new world where their offspring are paying for the weekly food shop on credit cards! They are worried about where it all might lead…

These were our impressions of Chile´s difficult past two weeks ago; but things keep changing as we meet different people and have different experiences. And in case you think we spend all our time grappling with Chile´s hidden depths, our next blog will transport you to the stars and beyond with a few frolicking dolphins along the way!

Avanzamos!

2009-03-19T09:47:00.000-07:00

Well advance we do - on and on meeting lovely, generous, interesting people. We are cracking away at the spanish nicely and are now having real conversations which of course is giving us so much more insight into this wonderfully fascinating, wounded, complex and aspirational people.
Advances in Santiago are so obvious – you see all around you development after development of apartment blocks, corporate buildings and shops which have just been or are in the process of being completed. I’ve been noticing lots of adverts for young married and now single people telling them they can afford these new apartments on what appears to be 3 x their salary with so many months free if they sign up right now!!!
Morning TV is full of adverts for people to visit promotional sales apartments to see what the finished product will look like and of course it’s always gorgeous and everything that people would want.

In recent weeks you can see a trail of Peruvian and Bolivian tradesmen hanging about outside building trade shops advertising their availability for work. I think the pace of development even here is slowing and they are the ones who are immediately affected. I don’t know if developers are actually taking on new projects at the minute. I think that the sight of these expendable workers indicates probably not. Instead the developers are now doubling their efforts to off load their properties and their debt. Sound familiar?

International Women’s Day was interesting . It coincided with Charles and Camilla arriving in Chile. Michelle Bachelet sent a side kick to welcome him at the airport as she was holding an International Womens Day Party for women from all over Santiago which was reported in all the news events over the weekend with footage of Michelle passionately addressing the women of Santiago and, via the media, the women of Chile. La Presidenta then hot footed it into the aisle singing and dancing proud to demonstrate how much she enjoys the company of women.

We are surrounded by beautiful posters hanging from prominent places ‘Cuando Nosotras Avanzamos, Avanza Chile’ ( see attached). The sentiment is great but as is sometimes the case, the rhetoric is more advanced than the reality. Mercedes our landlady ( and now friend) worked 12 hours a day, 17 days in a row before getting 2 days off! We’ve been here a month and she’s had only 3 days leave from her job in the pharmacy of a local public hospital in that time. She’s 66 and hopes to retire in December.

Our Spanish is at a level where we’ve been able to talk to her openly about feelings she might have that she’s in the position she’s in and we’re in the position we are in. Always generous and gracious she is not openly critical but she must find it galling all the same! And of course it’s a challenge for us as well. Hil wrote in the very first blog about this year possibly encouraging inner journeys . We´re both aware of shifting sands beneath us. And no bad thing either, even if it is uncomfortable!

Che´s Wee Sister

2009-02-28T11:52:00.000-08:00

It rains in Santiago. Thunder and lightning. The temperature has plummeted to 75 degrees. The clouds have descended to obliterate the ´foothills´ of the Andes surrounding us, although to be honest they´re high enough to be the whole leg! Which reminds me, as we flew over the Andes in darkness on our way here, the sun chose that very moment to beam light around the horizon and illuminate below us a whole stack of pleated terracotta mountains. Magical.
For the sake of those of you yet to visit South America, we have risked life and limb (not ours, you understand), to clamber to the pinnacle of 21st century technological know-how. So, in order for you to avoid our mistakes, study the following:

Mobile phones

1. The 10 quid équipo / hardware (i.e. phone for those of you less techie than ourselves) ONLY works in Chile. It rejects all advances by Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Argentinian etc sim cards, thereby obliging you to
2. Buy a more expensive equipo, more welcoming towards foreign sims, but
3. Don´t expect to be able to buy this hardware just anywhere, and certainly not in the local supermarket (a breakdown in our communication systems), and not even in the biggest Entel store we could find. However,
4. If you´re prepared to sign a contract, you can get anything you like that goes wherever you want and does everything you need, all of which has led me to the conclusion:
5. Forget about mobile phones! You won´t know anyone here, so who´s going to phone you, and anyway, there are absolutely zillions of payphones wherever you go in Santiago that handily eat up all your coppers which weigh a ton. (And then there´s always the low tech phone card if you´re hankering after the sound of English voices – the YHA one works a treat!)

Mobile Internet (neat little satellite connection contained within a dongle gizmo, that according to PC World, Tottenham gyratory system, works anywhere there´s a handy satellite circulating overhead):

1. DO NOT BELIEVE PC WORLD!
2. E-mail me for the extraordinary twists and turns, ins and outs, ups and downs and unbearable suspense of this particular saga.
3. Just go to an internet café!

Now turning to the matter in hand: Santiago. You have to go to La Chascona, one of Pablo Neruda´s 3 homes. Make sure you get Gonsalvo as your multi-lingual guide because he was a mine of information and author of a truly great phrase (which I shall return to later). Neruda turns out not just to have been one of THE great poets and activists of the 20th centrury, who knew everyone – Hemingway, Frida and Diego, Picasso, Allende etc – but also a great big kid who collected things (not valuables, apart from the paintings his mates did for him), but fun stuff like paintings of watermelons, bottles, shells, coloured glass, Russian dolls, books. Oh, and boat-shaped houses – he had three, and La Chascona sails beneath the cliff of Cerro San Cristobal, a metropolitan mountain complete with funiculars, and has the most spectacular urban view right across the city´s rooftops to the Andes. Only slightly marred by some multinational plonker dumping 30 floors of unimaginative steel and glass in the middle La Chascona´s seascape of roofs. Neruda died about 10 days after the coup, but not before the junta had ordered La Chascona to be ransacked. Some of Frida Kahlo´s paintings were dumped in the river and most of the books were burned. The army running scared of art. Which brings me to Gonsalvo´s great phrase: ´Military intelligence ís an oxymoron.´ 100,000 citizens turned up to Neruda´s funeral, despite the military curfew on Santiago. There wasn´t a thing the army could do. Such is the power of art.

Nous sommes arrivees!

2009-02-21T05:23:00.000-08:00

Nous sommes arrivees … Wir haben angekommen …We have arrived, it takes being in Chile to bring all other languages to mind! Spanish doesn´t come easily but I think it´s Hemos llegado. And then there´s Chilean Spanish, what our friend Franklin calls Chilean slang, whereby ´s´ s are often omitted, even in the plural, and various verbs that we have learned one way sound quite different, so we are in for lots of brow-scratching. Celine and I spend all our spare time (i.e. when not enjoying the sunshine, sights, general atmosphere, sounds of people talking – even on the metro in rush hour), reciting Michel Tomas´s CD instructions to stress the first syllable in the present tense and hit the ending hard in the future tense. There are so many past tenses I forget what he says about those!

We are staying in Las Condes, the financial district, with massive skyscrapers competing with the great ring of mountains all around us. Our flat is part of a much older community which used to be surrounded by countryside, and which is likely soon to be swallowed up by the developers, once the community´s negotiators have settled on a fair price for everyone. It´s like a decent council block, although the shady, tree-filled courtyard is a bit different. Mercedes, landlady from Heaven, says that the community will probably be completely demolished within a couple of years.

We did a whistle-stop tour with the lovely Franklin round some of the major sites, spending about 3 hours over lunch in Bella Vista (think Broadway Market x Neil´s Yard + wooded mountain with cable cars and big yellow hot sun!), before wandering off to try and pay our respects to la Presidente, Michelle Bachallet, in La Moneda. The public are actually allowed in (like wandering into the White House), but in fact on this particular day, the guard took one look at us and decided that Michelle should be saved. He said something like, If we came back the next day at 10 she´d be out! There are elections due here next year and there is anxiety that the right are working hard to try and topple Michelle, also unfortunately some of the left.

We managed, amidst our hectic schedule, to fit in the film Che. Completely in Spanish, no subtitles. We understood one word in a hundred, but actually, because the acting is brill and the story well-known, we both enjoyed it. However, it´s put me right off becoming a revolutionary. For a start, you definitely have to be under 50, be extremely fit with a penchant for fording rivers, clambering up mountains carrying wounded compadres – always in driving rain – and that´s without even mentioning getting shot at, shooting, and having to keep your beret looking picturesque!

What is THE answer?

2008-12-03T04:22:00.000-08:00

There is a credit crunch - banks are bouncing. The car industry is crashing, the finance so-called "industry" has bottomed out, people are losing their jobs and their homes. So why exactly are we giving up perfectly good jobs to go to South America, about which we know so little and when Spanish is still so imperfectly understood by us?

If you have any ideas, please let us know, so we can adopt the best ones as THE answer to this troubling question...Amongst the responses I usually give (not untrue, but quite possibly not the whole of the answer), are:

To learn Spanish (Great, but Spain's nearer... )
To learn about Latin America (You can read, can't you?...)
To be somewhere they still have revolutions (Hmmm, so speaks the woman who is scared of ladders...)
To challenge my first world, topdog, western european mindset (Lord, you're beginning to sound like a missionary in reverse...)
OK, OK, so I just want to get away from Boris for a while (Now we're getting somewhere. Unfortunately, us Londoners can never get away from our inner Boris completely...)

I suppose physical journeys always involve internal ones. It'll be interesting to find out whether my mind travels to Latin America with me (or whether it gets stuck somewhere within the brackets of self-doubt)...

First Steps

2008-11-21T13:04:00.000-08:00

Steps on our way to Latin America for a year:

Learn Spanish ... (Hola)

Let our house (unsuccessfully to date)

Pack up chattels (other half refuses to get locked into attic)

Reduce garden to stubble so that future tenants will have nothing to do except enjoy British summer

Create this blog (so as to remind you all why you have decided to stay put!)

Apart from all that, the idea of being in Chile -say in about 6 weeks - is very exciting. How will we cope with empty diaries? No obligations? President Obama on the same land mass?

To find out, you'll have to become a "follower" ...