The last ten days

Haven't had much time to write since Megan came down, as we bussed through the desert, mountains, and pampas of the rocky south. We left Lima for Arequipa, an ancient Incan city built on the lands of the Collagua natives, constructed of white volcanic rock that formed from the tempermental eruptions of the Misti, Pichu Pichu, and Chachani volcanoes that ring the city like an unkept Andean mouth.
After the Incans came the conquistadors, followed by the missionaries, who planted a cross in the dirt and built the modern city around it. The Inca left mummies on the peaks around the city as offerings to their mountain gods. Juanita, the ice maiden, was one such offering: a thirteen year old girl who walked from Cusco with priests and load-bearers, climbed Mount Ampano, was given intoxicants and was killed by a blow to the head while kneeling in prayer. It is thought she knew of her fate long before she left for the journey to the mountain. The museum housing her body holds relics from her tomb, woven shawls and cloaks, quippus, ceramic and cloth implements for the afterlife, and gold and silver offerings. Her body itself is like a monument to a civilization, their ideals and beliefs, frozen in supplication and in rigor mortis before her blood and skin could begin to decompose. She is a window into this other world, offering such a richness of understanding that a good long look at her, with the knowledge of her accepted fate and the forces of the society that brought it on, allows one to transport oneself far away from the morality of our western world and into a relationship with natural divinity and the forces of human existence. It is a brief and powerful experience. Looking at her face from straight on is arresting, hollow eyes and parchment skin, framed in hair frozen solid, with teeth made large by withering lips, one can still imagine her devotion.

We left from Arequipa to go to Colca Canyon, driving through desert up through the Pampas, peppered with llamas and alpacas, with condors circling overhead so large that they seem much closer than they are. We stayed in Chivay that night, and saw a folk music and dance show with beautiful Andean pan pipes, flutes, and small guitars accompanied by hauntingly hollow voices echoing through the cavernous room. I ate alpaca steak as the man and woman danced traditional dances of the Collagua, sometimes getting the audience involved. In one fertility dance the man put the woman on the floor and whipped her briskly with a riding crop, after which the woman did the same to the man, punctuating each series of whippings by straddling his face and shaking her skirt over his head suggestively. When an old gringo was led into the center of the room for his turn at the dance, he uncertainly began to whip the woman lightly, then, encouraged by the audience and the woman herself, he quickly became enthusiastic and raised and lowered his arm with repressed urgency. After awhile he was forced to stop, though only after a hilarious chase around the woman on the ground, during which he didn't stop whipping her for an instant.

The next day Megan and I took a bus with a group of Peruvians out into Colca Canyon, one of the most beautiful places in the world, and one of the world's deepest canyons. Riding with us were two Peruvian boys of about eight who were products of such spoiling that they had to be spoon fed when we stopped to eat, and whined like infants. It was ridiculous, and I tried not to listen to them as they acted half their age, focusing instead on the terraced fields of a thousand shades of green climbing the walls of the mountains on either side of the river that, farther on, had cut the canyon for thousands of years.

It is hard to describe the beauty of Colca Canyon. Suffice it to say you can see the largeness of the world from a perch atop its steep walls, you can understand the magnificence of earth by feeling the presence of that space between those walls of rock. I would say more but I'm running out of time.

After Colca we bussed to nazca and took in a few of the lines. The were interesting, smaller than I expected, and in the middle of a giant desert that slopes slightly towards the sea under a sky of fantastic blues. A german woman named Maria Reiche spent forty years studying them only to conclude that her best guess was that they were some kind of astrological crop calendar. I intend to study her life in-depth. The hostel we stayed at had the funny people that I'm by now used to meeting traveling in this country. The owners of the place seemd content to share a Peruvian woman who wore short skirts and went off in the middle of the day with first one then another of them. They also liked to complain about the locals, Nazca, tourist traps in general, and offer friendly advice. Taken as a whole, they were eccentric, lost old Dutchmen. Also in the hostel were another Irish couple who were a blast: we watched episodes of family guy late into the night and were invited to Dublin at least ten times.

Following Nazca we traveled through the desert, not the rocky kind of the interior but the pure white sand desert of the coast, with almost no vegetation and strange little shacks of palm fronds with unguessable purpose. We arrived in Huacachina, an oasis of resorts and green outside of Ica, surrounded by massive dunes on all sides, and walked to the top of the biggest one and watched the sunset. It was an amazing experience, one of the most beautiful sunsets of my life, watching the shadows of the contours of the desert morph with the changing angle of the light as the sky overhead went through a spectrum of reds and oranges and blues. The wind covered us in sand as we watched the red fade from the sky.

I wish I had more time to write, but I've got stuff to do and places to go...and i'm coming home day after tomorrow. But the pictures speak for themselves.

Love you guys.

The hostel and some history

The people of this hostel are fascinating. It's amazing how, turned introspective by illness and un vieja largo I've become a sort of mirror for these fellow travelers to cast their images upon. There is the Japanese man who's been to 86 countries over the last two years, who sets out to ‘get’ countries, a former copyright lawyer who is silent by day and a party animal by night. He told me happily one night, in between calling people d%&kface and asking woman if they want to make F&*% with him, that nothing impresses him anymore, and he only cares about chicks and drinking. He studies Portuguese during the day, we converse in my limited Japanese, I make a mistake, and he calls me Chimpugao! But he feels an affinity for me, perhaps because I lived in Kyoto and one of the first things I said to him was 'nihon ryoori wa totemo oishi desu nee?' He's done ayahuasca twenty times while living in Columbia, and he told me the times he did it without a shaman, like once in a nightclub playing noise music, he really wanted to kill himself; I suppose some of the other times with a shaman were far better, as he kept coming back. His electronic ensemble gives him instant access to any gathering - he's got fourteen thousand songs on a beat-up ipod that's seen its fair share of the world. He is hilarious.
Then there's the Irish couple, also quiet in the day, the bloke thumbing through a biography of some footballer, the lass a worn novella of some sort. At night, she disappears immediately and he becomes belligerent with drink - though again, never towards me. One unsteady night he struggled to play jinga with the last vestiges of the guests and myself, as the birdsong was just beginning over the tile-topped walls of the courtyard. Failing, he turned to me suddenly and whispered 'you're quite cool, mate.' I struggled not to laugh, failed, and somehow got him to laugh with me.
There are these four Australians, three men and a woman, who have been playing out a kind of drunken soap opera for the past few days, each confiding in me as I sit silently, nodding, inwardly grimacing, that love is a this and who-needs-desperate-housewives-that. The convolutions of the tale would be too high a word count for this entry, but suffice to say it's been going on for months and they seem to derive some kind of pleasure from it - because they still travel together. The men resemble large children, leprechaun-like and history-less, while the woman is an ex horse-trainer turned bar tender with a friendly nature that seems to get her in trouble.
Then there are the ones who seem to take their situation a bit too seriously, like the dangers of the hostel in Peru are unfathomable yet ever-present, and they must remain vigilant, trusting no one. These are the ones who don't leave often but prefer to stay on their bunk beds eyeing their things and checking their pockets for their wallets: they tie their food up inside the plastic bags they buy it in, and then struggle to write their names legibly across the obstinate plastic, proceeding to secure a place at the back of the lowest shelve in the refrigerator where they hope the food-thieves won't think to look.
There are also the new arrivals who enter the room in the middle of the night, earn a few groggy hellos, and are gone before anyone wakes up - the only proof of their existence being a slept-in bed and half-remembered, dream-like shadow-images.
There were two Polish girls who had been traveling awhile, and had come to Lima to meet a kind of modern pen-pal one of them had been fostering for two years. He was a very interesting biologist who'd studied capybara dispersal and mapped macaw salt-licks, spending up to three months in the jungle alone, with tales of a Puma tracking him for three days and encounters with natives. Five hours and many drinks after they met I heard from my bed a passionate conversation in which the poor guy, obviously too drunk and a bit inexperienced, exclaimed 'So what do you think about me? Yes or no?!'
He left without saying goodbye to anyone - and I'm going to write his story.
Along with the many interesting people I've met, the cycle of the hostel itself has been interesting to experience, the rotation of people from different countries, each coming to try out things that were tried the day before by others, all of their reactions different but collected, like a field full of a single species of flower, all of them different upon closer examination because of the ground they grew from.
The extinction of the mega fauna of South America occurred with the last glaciations that saw the rise of the Central American isthmus, after which cross-migration brought human predators south and we commenced to hunt everything to the tip of Patagonia and extinction. The Megatherium, or giant sloth, was one of these beasts, an herbivore that stood twenty feet tall on its hind legs and weighed five tons. Saber tooth tigers could not hunt it for its size and the toughness of its hide. Reports from the end of the 19th century claimed to have spotted lumbering hulks of fur resembling the Megatherium, an animal that was impervious to the bullets the explorers fired on it, in southern Patagonia…

The end of Burnt Norton by T.S.Eliot

Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness. Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence, Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now. Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. Shrieking voices Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, Always assail them. The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation, The crying shadow in the funeral dance, The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
The detail of the pattern is movement, As in the figure of the ten stairs. Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being. Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always—Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.

Miraflores

Miraflores is the affluent section of Lima, framed on three sides by less wealthy neighborhoods crumbling under the salty sweep of the wind, and to the west the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I have to remind myself that as I walk down Jose Pardo Avenue, one of the main drags of Miraflores, I'm walking down Peru's answer to Fifth Avenue. I pass a young, wealthy couple pushing a designer stroller with wheels more appropriate for the Inca Trail, with a baby inside making the flat-lipped, bubbly face of a born gurgler. To my left is the Brazilian Embassy, a forbidding affair of well-manicured but empty palm gardens behind an insurmountable fence, the building itself more a bomb shelter than anything else. To my left, the offices of Taca Airlines, of 'Alive' fame, seemingly trying to glitz the passerby out of any recollection of the past. People walk across intersections fast here, as there isn't much time. To cross busy streets without stoplights, one must simply plunge ahead and hope in the reflexes of the drivers coming at you.
All of the major airlines have their offices on Pardo. There is a grocery store that's alot like some of the high-end organic grocers in America, Vivanda, with inviting open spaces, fresh and clean produce, and a delicious selection of prepared foods - though the resmblance is only skin deep, with nothing organic available on the shelves. Here at any given time of day one can find what I would estimate to be twenty percent of the gringos in the city, avidly scanning the aisles for brands they recognize. I myself can be seen there at least once a day, trying to find things-lowfat.
Other than these embellishments, the avenue is not unlike many avenues throughout the rest of the sub-city, with apartment buildings, hair salons, restaurants, and inestimable numbers of travel agencies and copy stores. There are still armed guards with bullet-proof vests at the entrances to all the banks, hard mouths begging for toothpicks to break with practiced tension. Old men with battered bean cans still scrape popsickle sticks along them tunelessly, mumbling misfortunes, the rattle gaining effect with each coin tossed in. The air is just as dirty, smog suddenly enveloping the walker and making it truly difficult to breath. The difference is not in what is not here, so much as it is about what is here; the location of the primary facets of affluence make this part of town the wealthy part, draw the joggers and four-wheel-drive strollers and glamorous women in darkly tinted cars, but it doesn't edge out what the rest of Lima is like, the crumble and grit of the wider city of eight million souls. There is stark contrast on the streets of Miraflores, like a medieval morality tale playing itself out with accidental actors, observed piecemeal by people glancing out of planes for moments as they enter and leave the distant airport. The richness of the city is here, but it hasn't managed to overshadow the poverty of the city itself.

[As once the winged energy of delight]

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.

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Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the greathollow half-treetrunk, which for generationshas been a trough, renewing in itselfan inch or two of rain, I satisfymy thirst: taking the water's pristine coolnessinto my whole body through my wrists.Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;but this unhurried gesture of restraintfills my whole consciousness with shining water.Thus, if you came, I could be satisfiedto let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast

a trip to the hospital

I just returned from a stop at one of the local hospitals. After struggling to get over all of the small illnesses that plagued me from the boat, I spent much of last night with intense pain in my abdomen and back. I rose and coughed up a bunch of stuff, and then spent alot of the day hunched in the same kind of pain. I remembered having similar pain once in Tibet, which was the last time I went more than a few days without a shower - though I'm not sure that has anything to do with it.
So instead of boarding the sixteen hour bus ride I had booked for Arequipa, I went to the doctor, with not a little prodding from some of the women in my life - thanks mom and Megan! That would have been rough.
The doctor himself was a nice man, unlike the ultrasound guy or the needle dude. He made light conversation about the origins of the word gringo, saying that green was meant to signify the opposite of Russian red, and go was where the Mexicans under Pancho Villa wanted the Americans to Vamos.
In the hospital I was treated to a chest x-ray that showed healthy lungs, followed by an ultrasound, jelly and all. I learned I've got a gallstone blocking my gallbladder and that it was causing the throbbing ache in my torso, knowledge disseminated by a doctor who relished scaring me with exclamations of surprise in me having one so young, and descriptions of how the surgery would go should it have to be removed. He made graphic drawings and laughed at my facial expressions. I thought about hitting him a couple of times.
At least it wasn't legionairre's disease. So I got a needle full of something to ease the pain, applied none too gently by a man who did not seem to like me, and then some pills to take for the next few days. And now I'm on a low fat diet - which has me a bit confounded in this country of animal products.

Some Rumi from Zenda:


Listen to your essential self, the Friend.
"When you feel longing, be patient,
and also prudent, moderate with eating and drinking.
Be like a mountain in the wind.
Do you notice how little it moves?
There are sweet illusions that arrive
to lure you away. Make some excuse to them...
I have indigestion, or I need to meet my cousin.
You fish, the baited hook may be fifty
or even sixty gold pieces, but is it really worth
your freedom in the ocean?
When traveling, stay close to your bag.
I am the bag that holds what you love.
You can be separated from me.
Live carefully in the joy of this friendship.
Don't think, 'But those others love me so.'
Some invitations sound like the fowler's whistle
to the quail, friendly,
but not quite how you remember
the call of your soul's Friend."
--Rumi

‘All memory is present.’ -Novalis

‘We are, all of us, pilgrims who struggle along different paths toward the same destination.’
-Anthony de Saint-Exupery

“To tune the spirit when someone is trampling it is called control.” -Don Juan

‘…but to traverse the world for years on end of his own free will, in order to get to know it, to plumb it, to understand it? And then, later, to put all his findings into words? Such people have always been uncommon.’ -Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘The past does not exist. There are only infinite renderings of it.’ -Ryszard Kapuscinski

The rest of the voyage was harrowing, to be pithy. Let me set the scene. A river boat with three hundred Peruvians of the jungle and myself, the amorphous gringo. Three decks, the first for cargo, including fresh-cut hardwoods from the Amazon, livestock, a motocarro destined for a circuitous route in a town with no roads leading out. The second two decks for passengers, long, open-air spaces where each person hangs a hammock, like rows of eyelash specimens in every combination of color. Eyes that never stopped looking, observing, checking. Voices that whispered and shouted and laughed and cried. The sinks and showers pumped brown river water which cooled after it was allowed to run for a few minutes. Showers and toilets in the same rooms, four of them per deck, about three feet by four feet each, with poor drainage so that at any given time in the day four inches of brown water, mixed with unimaginable substances and dead and dying insects, stood stagnant on the bottom of each stall. The metal housing of the boat made it boil in the daytime sun and freeze at night. I befriended everyone I could, which amounted to about twenty people, mostly men my age and elderly folk. Thieves walked around regularly, as the boat stopped at small river towns and villages where a few thatched roofs hovered over the wall of foliage on the banks of the Ucayali, snaking things from unwary passengers and disembarking in the night. Stops were frequent, at all hours. When the boat stopped in a larger town, scores of indigenous women and children would board the boat vending tapioca, manioc, yucca, gelatino, water, soda, pre-made meals, cigarettes, chiclets, lollipops, fruits, and fried fish. The few men who were in the groups of vendors where the only ones who sold cigarettes, something I assigned to the ever-present machismo. It was better not to look at the toenails - though sometimes I did, drawn by a terrible fascination. Every ten minutes of continuous propulsion the boat, which roared when it was at ease, would pick up volume, the engine chattering the metal casings of the entire ship into a rising crescendo that sounded as if a jet was hovering overhead. This happened throughout the night, framed by the continuous and incredibly loud music the night captain played each night, emphasizing his favorite points with wild shouts at the Southern Cross. The boat woke at five, and it was impossible to stay asleep afterwards. The food - cooked by a gay man who seemed incredibly unhappy and who only left his cabin to make the food, returning immediately after he’d served it - was at times not so bad, but other days it was truly inedible. I blamed those days on the whistles and catcalls the poor man got from some of the younger men when he would walk to the shower in the evenings - his only other venture outside. The problem with those days is that the inedible food would be served for all three meals. I sweated buckets. The Paiche I was served on the boat, with more salt than it seems possible for a creature to have in its body, belonged to the inedible variety of food, though with my sweat flowing freely I was glad for the electrolytes and ate what I could swallow.
I ran out of water a couple of times, and then the boat ran out of water, and everyone was drinking soda. For most of the day people lined the sides of the boat or hung in their hammocks and simply stared, when they were not collected in an appraisal of me and my things, my behaviors and my concern for hygiene, which was uniquely comical to them. Often one would be sent towards me like a projectile from a group to ask why I tip-toed into the bathrooms.
On the second day, we ran aground in the middle of the river. Another boat passed us and the captain, fresh on the scene and feeling cocksure and invincible, did the same thing a bit further in. Eventually we pulled our boat out of it and found the narrow channel of flow on the far side, leaving the ready captain of the other boat still churning the waters browner. A father with his child next to my hammock played throughout the day, and the child was struck by my presence, my book, my skin, the uniformity of early consciousness holding the world within, beholding a new piece to add to itself. A woman boarded on the third day with a monkey on a leash, dressed up like a hairy little girl in shades of pink, replete with the mannerisms of an effete, timid senorita. The eyes were constant, always on the banks and myself. I tried to imagine it all through their eyes, the great trip upriver, the lone gringo reading and writing in his hammock, always wet with sweat. An ancient woman who looked like a shaman, with vestiges of red dye rosing her face, boarded on the fourth day and simply looked at me the rest of the trip, expressionless.
Some of the friends I’d made played a card game they called casino, much like the game tunk in America. One young man simply sat at the back of the boat all day reading the bible in the sun, sweating like me though I believe from a different ailment. Amidst laughter over my forced use of the toilet, I was told “Peruvians have the kitchen in the bathroom!” Along the banks the slivers of shadows between all that green tangle invited my mind to fill them with its own shadow-beings.
I remembered the split, and saw it between the innocent world-ego of children and the enculturation that gradually follows with age: how the complexity of culture incrementally distances us from the original oneness, the rejoicing and acceptance of newness-as-beauty. The culture driven complication regards the new and other as dangerous and, forced to operate over the love of the new-as-beautiful slowly edges this original perspective out; thus leading those revelations and recognitions of new-as-beautiful to make themselves increasingly less possible with their own mechanism. Without interruption or informed effort, culture takes over the complexification of humans from our inherent love of newness, co-opting the drive to seek newness and replacing its targets-abroad with a homely placebo - the paleness of cultural advancement. Culture can be seen, in this way, as fear of other that grows over love of other, through the subversion of our tendency towards awe for some mysterious ulterior motive - though perhaps that is a very limited view.
The journey.
Every day the rain, every night the lightening on the horizon. Once the rain came so quickly it sent us all scurrying for cover. Reaching in my pocket I found the stinger of a bee. He had been searching for cover as well, and did not seem keen on sharing my pocket with my hand. The variations of light on the water of the river and the vapor of the clouds kept me fascinated for hours at the beginnings and ends of the days. Clouds opened upwards at night like a hand’s fingers uncurling in offering. Then the stars erupted, the lights of the boat fired up, and thousands of insects were called to them, dancing tethered by their love of the brilliance. We floated south.
The pirates came late in the night on the fifth day, armed with shotguns and intent on plunder. They motored up in a tiny dinghy and fired twice. When the men of the river boat fired back with shotguns of their own, a brief exchange occurred, clamorous, frightening. The dinghy sped away, someone in it screaming.
Other nights, between the roar of the engines and before the night captain put on his soundtrack, the cries of birds sounded like a squeegee being raked on wet glass. I saw that butterflies live at constant right angles, and felt the approach of the other in everything my senses perceived. Sounds, objects, tastes, smells, textures all had their own being. By dividing all of it into a progressive infinity of levels of being, I was able to see that it all has to come together as well. I was at the boundary of my awareness, and I was learning from what was ahead. It was an incredible trip.
Disembarking from the four day turned seven day voyage, I evaded a group of men who were planning on robbing me by feinting and striking out in a different direction, using a crowd to block me and jumping in a motocarro.
My infirmities included a cold, congestion, a mangled toe, multiple bites, a sore ear from something unknown, diarrhea, jock itch, dehydration sickness, chafed nose, and general hunger and fatigue. But the journey inspired me, and let me look into a different world, and seeing made me live it.
I took a flight to Lima for eighty dollars, reducing the past five weeks journey to an hour in the air for the price of a day’s labor in my country, and it was a revelation of difference. There was even coffee on the plane.
And now, I’m recovering.