The Absurd Traveler's Guide

Route 25

2012-05-02T18:24:00.002-07:00

The Road - Patagonia, Argentina, South America

New piece for The Itinerant Writers Club where we each submit a 500 word piece monthly and then critique each others work. The theme for the below was 'On the Road'.

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“Be careful,” a friendly Argentine I had met in Puerto Madryn told me, “Patagonia is wild.” I remembered his words standing by the side of the road, my eyes and ears straining, waiting for salvation. The nerves in my stomach were spreading fast as the sun beat down and the wind chafed my skin raw. Somewhere between Buenos Aires and Puerto Madryn on the Atlantic coast of Argentina, I had decided to hitchhike alone across Patagonia to The Andes. Years ago reading ‘On the Road’ by Kerouac catalyzed something which opened and expanded and encompassed all the extraordinary and miraculous things that were hidden in my dreams, but were too damn afraid or self-conscious to come out. Its lines and wonders spilled from the pages to make adventure seem attainable.

Few cars were passing by. It was the off-season for tourists and Argentinian holiday makers. I had taken a bus to the town of Dolovan, which was deserted. The inhabitants, if you can find them, are Welsh descendants. Their ancestors escaped the upheaval of the industrial revolution to start Welsh speaking colonies along the Atlantic coast. The welcoming statue outside Trelew is a magnificent sculptural rendering of … some sheep. Patagonia was not as inviting as they had hoped and even now the wilderness encroaches on the town at the frontier of the Argentine wastelands. Walking outside the town to the highway, I stuck out my thumb.

A truck went by and didn’t stop. Looking at a rudimentary map, Las Chapas was the nearest town in the right direction. I scribbled the name on a writing pad and held it up. Crossing the whole of the country in one go seemed too ambitious so I aimed for the nearest town. Another truck slowed down, “I’m saved” I thought and reached for my bag, but it was only for the driver to stare at the strange woman standing at the side of the road, and it quickly sped off again. Perhaps a trek back to the town and then a bus to Trelew and a hostel would have been best? What if someone stopped and turned out to be a hideous, depraved, criminal with an axe hidden under their seat just in case they find a hitchhiker to chop up into tiny, indistinguishable pieces? A white pick-up looked as if it were going to pass but then came to a stop in whorls of dust. “Where you going?” asked a stocky middle aged man with a kind face. “Las Chapas, if that’s okay?”. “Okay, Okay fine” he said.

Mauro, as it turned out was not a depraved criminal but an ex- narcotics policeman on his way to a small town in the Andes to surprise his wife. “I take you to Andes” he said as we passed Las Chapas which was nothing but a tin hut in the wind on Route 25.

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Island Magic

2012-04-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

First published in The Irish World Newspaper, London 25th April 2012

Bequia Police Sergeant and Rafael

After three days of nonstop action I wondered how everyone at The Bamboo Chute, Bequia (pronounced Beckway), kept going. Rafael gave me some food and said something incoherent. Then I realised that everybody was drunk. That’s how they survived.

Oliver was my boss, Simone a lovely and fierce bartender from St. Vincent and Rafael an amorous and bighearted cook. Over the course of days that I lived and worked with them they had started work at 10.00am and finished at 4.30am drinking the night through. The bar was the perfect place to engage in all kinds of wonderful, interesting and disturbing conversations.

I met merchant marines, professional sailors who deliver yachts to far-flung places, fruit sellers, a man who exports conch and lobster to neighboring islands and a whaler. Bequia is one of the few places in the world where they are allowed to hunt whales he told me. Four a year, though they rarely catch that many, with hand-held harpoons and small, wind-powered boats. He said that when they do catch a humpback, and they aren’t allowed to export the meat, it takes the island one or two days to consume a whole whale.

Before I left Barbados for Bequia, part of St.Vincent and the Grenadines, I had emailed practically every hotel on the island asking for food and a place to stay in return for work. Consequently, I was staying at The Bamboo Chute and had slung my hammock on the back porch with a view of Admiralty Bay in exchange for helping out. It turned out that it’s the place where local people hang out, without a tourist in sight. After working in the bar on the first night the next day I walked down the main street to calls of “Hey bartender!” having unwittingly befriended half of the island with the simple act of exchanging beer for money.

The Bamboo Chute - My Hammock and Admiralty Bay

This was strikingly different from the rich Bajans I had boat-hitchhiked with from Barbados. It took 16 hours to sail between the very fancy Port St.Charles and Bequia and most of that time was filled with awkward conversation and the sense that I was being weighed-up and catagorised. When we got there the owner of the huge and luxurious yacht asked if I wanted a shower and if I had everything I needed. I told him he was very kind. His response was “Well, we have to treat you like a human”. “As opposed to what?” I asked. “Well, as opposed to, to, er, something else.”

Easter is one of Bequia’s biggest events. While well-healed visitors engage in the Regatta the locals have a fête. Under the almond tree the Bamboo Chute employees and I sat selling beer and over-proof rum as a DJ rammed out heavy reggae tunes. (Incidentally, the hit song at the moment is called “Who Jumped d Sheep”) The Ugly Man Competition was preceded by squalls of children chasing a greasy pig and followed by a fierce tug of war. Bequia is one of the Caribbean islands with magic. Not all islands have it. Sometimes you find yourself very clearly defined as a tourist, where tourist equals money, and it takes determination to get over the antipathy that image seems to evoke. Not so on Bequia. Here everyone's your friend and sleek yachts, at the peak of the Easter Regatta, race through turquoise Caribbean waters while men compete for a case of beer by drinking 5 cans in under a minute. A police sergeant walked by and asked Simone what I was doing there. “She’s with us” she said in a tone that brooked no argument and he moved on looking like a naughty schoolboy.

Easter Tug of War - Bequia

We were feeling a bit ropy, we'd been dancing the night before. It was a bit of a shock. DJ’s were raised up high on a platform at the back of the club. Sweltering and humid, bodies writhed together to the reggae beat. A group of women danced at the center of the floor bent over and grinding against the gyrating hips of men. Hips articulated in ways I had never seen before, sex was the agenda unconcealed and evident in every move. I gave the dancing a go and did my own slightly tamer version of the dance everyone else was doing with Rafael’s cousin Barry.

Under the almond tree, the fête was progressing in a chaotic and beery manner. I went for a wander in search of some interesting conversation and found a St.Lucian Rastafarian chef called Fernando playing backgammon. I asked if he new anyone sailing north as I wanted to get to the British Virgin Islands. “I’ll ask a friend and find you tomorrow” he said. The following morning I was eating fresh barbecued fish on the beach with a professional sailor who had good connections. Fernando found me and said he had a lift for me as far as Antigua . “By the way I’m sailing across the Atlantic. Would you like to come?”.

Admiralty Bay - Bequia, St.Vincent and the Grenadines

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The Accidental Writer

2012-04-08T09:56:00.000-07:00

Hello Readers...

It's funny where life takes you. One minute you're in Brazil teaching gay military doctors English and the next you seem to have spontaneously become a travel writer. (An unpaid travel writer, but none-the-less a travel writer.)

Here's what's happened:

My first contribution to Vagablogging has now been published. A field report from Dadanawa Cattle Ranch.

Craic On - The fortnightly travel column I write for the Irish World Newspaper, London is in full swing though currently only available in print.

I have just been accepted to do a six month internship at Green Global Travel for which I will write one article a month, get advice from a professional editor as well as hopefully getting a piece published in INsite Magazine.

Savannah Ghost Story has just been featured in The Guyana Times sunday magazine with my pictures on the front cover.

I am also a member of the Itinerant Writer's Club which is really interesting and helpful and there will be one piece a month from that on here too. Beginning with The Island.

And of course this blog is doing splendidly with your help and has recently been featured on TravelBlogs.com.

So, I have to go and do some serious typing, luckily there is enough adventure-having to go around...My next article will be about boat-hitchhiking across the Caribbean.

Thank you for visiting and for your support.

Kris

Artificial Cow Insemination, Guyana (That's me with my arm up a cow.)

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The Island

2012-04-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

I have joined a writing club online called The Itinerant Writers Club. The idea is we each submit a 500 word piece monthly and then critique each others work. The theme for the below was 'First Steps' about our first travel experiences. This post is also a part of the BootsnAll Indie Travel Challenge.

This is the wrong Island it is Anegada in the British Virgin Islands (I don't have any of Tenerife - Sorry)

He sat in an old wicker chair as wilted and listless as the Christmas tree that stood behind him. The sun seared through the doorway and carried the image of my father into the future, where I turn it over in my mind. He lifted his hand to his mouth and took a drag of his cigarette. Inside, he was lost.

We were in Tenerife renting one of those apartments in blocks with a pool and a view of the sea. Christmas spirit was in full swing: The package holiday hordes with plastic smiles in the plastic town of Playa de las Americas were busy affecting expectation-edged cheer. Complicit, my father, sister and I sat in a neon-lighted restaurant clapping sympathy for a sweaty man, playing unwanted love songs, on a synthesizer hammering the thing belching out karaoke specials trying desperately failing loosing hope he was looking at the exit. In the gloom of an unspoken ending we tried to find solace in our seafood platters and monkey shaped cocktail sticks.

The visceral remembrances of a child are all I have left of my father who turned his face away and never looked back. Our relationship was as disposable to him as inflatable sun loungers, blue drinks served in fake coconuts, an empty love song.

The following year Tenerife consigned to enmity by my father's departure was salvaged by my mother. Her lambent smile blazing. A right-handed cigarette between the tips of two elegant, brown fingers. We yelled out the words of a song as sunlight reverberated from the crashing Atlantic and lit the walls of ancient caves. Salt was in the air and on my tongue as sandy pools collected around my limbs. ‘Spaghetti, Spaghetti!’ bellowed Bernardo, an Italian, owner of a restaurant made from driftwood on the beach. An enormous briery beard his only garment. He was a pasta sauce mastermind, nudist beach bohemian, a model of life unconventional and of freedom.

The beach was also home to a family of hobos who built their houses out of the surrounding volcanic hills. The hovels were made of black porous rock with a piece of wood for a bed and a store for stolen avocados. They loosened my fear and took me into the breach of violent waves, clung to me as one of their own, naked we danced, we lived and were free. We shook-off a thousand plastic monkeys.

Tenerife, superficial and profound. Cartographers once named it Island of Hell and legend tells us it is part of the lost paradise Atlantis. Like all places and all memories that echo though our time-trapped minds it is rich with what we are willing to make of it.

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How to Make a Monkey Laugh

2012-04-02T15:48:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple videos from my time at Dadanawa Cattle Ranch, Guyana, South America featuring Monkey and Spider Cat.

Monkey is Golden-Handed Tamarin and an integral part of the family. When she's not trying to scavenge food she's on Uncles Duane's shoulder be it at the computer, in the shower or on the back of a dirt bike.

This is Monkey wrestling with Spider Cat who has other names such as Super Trooper and Pocket. Spider Cat arrived as a surprise 'gift' from Lethem and proceeded to yowl incessantly for days. Despite feeding the kitten more than its own body weight in milk and other things it still wouldn't shut up and finally took to grappling its way up my leg while I was standing at the cooker/sink, sitting at the table or doing anything else so he could yawl some more.

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Down The Rabbit Hole

2012-03-29T07:33:00.003-07:00

This is a bit of a flashback to Buenos Aries...

Have you ever found yourself transported into someone else's reality whilst traveling?

Stripped wooden floor, psychedelic fish circling the walls and an occasional Ganesh, staring. Is it a home or a waiting room? There was a fridge, I remember that, with beer. There were magazines with scantily clad ladies covered in tattoos.

In the next room an old barber’s chair, red leather and chrome, gleams in the swirling fog. A man sits on a stool surrounded by images of Yoda, rolling something between his fingers, a knuckle-duster with LOVE written on it lies nearby. ‘Sweeney Todd’ I say and point to the chair. He grins and shows me a cutthroat razor blade.

My friend sits in the chair as the man begins to draw on her arm. There is a picture on the wall of him playing the harmonica. Above the door is a longboard with a silvery-blue helmet shaped like a tear. I learn the man is capable of speeds up to 80km per hour.

The smoke thickens. Pizza arrives and Vinnie Jones is murdering someone on TV. I set about photographing a collection of knives. A strangely intimate thing. A man called Spike materializes sporting a toothy skull and a collapsed lung as a goldlen cat waves its paw and ticks quietly. My friend sighs and I photograph my shoes in blurry purple intensity against a profusion of wall and religion.

This was the home and studio of Walter Gandini, Buenos Aries, Argentina. Apart from being an excellent tattoo artist, he is a long boarder, Hare Krishna, knife collector, harmonica player and Star Wars fan. It’s a privilege when traveling to be invited into other people lives. I won’t forget Walter in a hurry, a lovely and talented guy who has a surprising amount of weaponry for a pacifist. If you find yourself in Buenos Aires and in the mood for a tattoo you can contact him through Facebook.

Headless Walter

More photos are available on my Facebook page.

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Savannah Ghost Story

2012-03-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

Published in The Irish World Newspaper UK 29th February 2012

Looking out over the Kanuku Mountains at Sunset for Towa Towan

Duane Defreitas, adventurer, stopped mid-step. His bare foot suspended above the creek water like a jaguar catching sight of its prey. His whole body listened intensely. I, less acclimatized to wading through creeks in south american jungles, came to a hasty stop on a patch of clay executing the flailing-armed windmill maneuver, barely avoiding a rendezvous with an early bath. He cocked his head and noiselessly began to move forward.

Standing in the creek which runs over rich, deep red earth, cutting through the mountains and valleys its high walls surrounding us, closing us in: we were armed to the teeth. Hidden in a gallery forest, itself a smudge on the edge of a mountain in the vast landscape of southern Guyana, is a drinking place, where tapir, deer, puma, ocelot and jaguar leave their prints in sandy banks like ghosts in the winds that blow across the savannah. Birds make exotic music as insects, busy and industrious, go about their business. Squadrons of mosquitos followed us in close formation. Trying to find their target.

“It’s not like Africa” Duane told me. “There are a lot of animals but they’re elusive and difficult to see. Mostly you find their tracks.”

By the high wall of the creek bank something sped through a clump of long grass making my heart race. The dark back of an animal disappeared as it ran to safety. “Probably a paca” said Duane. The paca is a large rodent, called labba in Guyana and it has good reason to run. They are considered a delicacy here as well as in Mexico. In Nicaragua they farm them. They are so popular that the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has looked into using them as a high-priced food source for the tropics. Later, I mentioned seeing the paca to Asaph, a Wapisiana amerindian who is from Katoonarib village. His eyes lit up. “Where was it?” I could see him mentally reaching for his bow and arrow in anticipation of a labba roast. Most of the people who hunt in the savannahs of Southern Rupununi live in the 11 wapisiana villages which lie in the protective range of the Kanuku mountains.

Trevor Chan (left) and Duane Defreitas setting a camera trap on Towa Towan

Duane and I were there for trapping of a different kind. A week before we put up some cameras near the roads and byways of the forest close to where we had seen jaguar tracks. They trigger automatically when something passes by them and take either stills or video. “I set them just to see what is about and for tourism or conservation. I’ve been doing it for five years and have shared what I’ve found with Panthera and other conservation organizations.” We waded on stepping carefully to avoid turtles, alligators and anaconda finding some tracks as large as my hand. “A tapir. Fresh” he said. The early morning sun filtered through tall, leafy trees bathing the creek in dappled light, striking off the glistening rose of quartz rocks. The golden hour - a magical time of day when the quality of light is warm and rich. A time for photographers and adventurers pausing in suspended moments, closeted in secret waterways surrounded by invisible burgeoning life.

The earth pulsed and my mind sang Yeats:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Memory took me back to the open savannah where moonlight glossed the wilderness. Thousands of candle flies leapt about the grass rendered pitch by the fallen sun. Pinpoints of light dancing in parody of the stars leaning out from the firmament. Standing on the edge of a living, dancing mirror, our feet in the stars. Mystical renderings in the land of medicine men and ancient gods its creatures veiled in dark places hiding in the folds off the earth.

Duane up a tree (I climbed the tree when we went back for the camera later. It's quite high and there are a lot of ants.)

“What can you see?” Duane called down from his perch in a tree high above the ground. I was below with his computer checking the memory card from the camera we’d placed there. “A Tapir.” The card held a video of a big pig-like creature with an elongated nose which it was using to snuffle about in the undergrowth. We replaced the card and headed back down the creek.

I stopped to take a picture of some leaves, white with black veins, curled and beautiful and realised there was a perfect paw print beside them. Duane crouched down and touched his finger to the sand for comparison to see how fresh it was. It was very fresh. An ocelot, (a medium-sized wild cat) had passed by very recently crossing over the path of our own footprints. We hadn’t seen or heard it. It had stepped silently behind us, watching, and then it vanished.

Ocelot pawprint

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Dirt Bikes and Rattlesnakes

2012-03-26T13:05:00.000-07:00

Published in The Irish World Newspaper UK 15th February 2012

Fixing it up. Evi Biologist doing Jaguar Research

Time passes at Dadanawa ranch in Guyana, South America in an abstract way. I have the feeling that I’ll get sucked into its workings and one day leave only to find that I am 50 not 31. Everything feels familiar but slides along a scale parallel to your own frame of references, a lost world of experience. It’s the remoteness of it, the subjugation of clock time by the laxity of the people who have not been regimented by first world routines.

“And why not?” wrote Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness “The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage - Who can tell?”

Duana Defreitas, Dadanawa Cattle Ranch, Guyana, south America

‘Get my Gun’. Walking back to the house I heard a rattling noise. My torch was dim, inadequate, but I saw three cats surrounding an object and instinctively knew what it was. ‘Uncle Duane! Rattle snake!’ He came out of the door with a Ruger 22 Magnum in hand, walked up to it with a watchful swagger and shot it in the head. It was about to bite a cat. Duane, ranch manager of Dadanawa Cattle Ranch, has a long history with rattle snakes. He used to keep them as pets until he got bitten and was faced with the prospect of chopping his own finger off. (He still has his finger and managed to recover without much treatment) After the offending snake had been examined, gutted and fried up, its skin already half way to the tannery he said ‘I don’t know why I did that, I normally leave them alone’.

When we find ourselves on the edge of danger our minds encompass a mixture of intense, conflicting emotions which turn to acton sometimes out of the ordinary. Certainly, joy collided with fear and a sense of resignation as I realised I could no longer control the dirt bike I was riding and I flew over the handlebars my face making its inevitable trajectory towards the sandy highway.

My mind clung to the memory of the truck, carrying the people I was with, speeding into the gloaming horizon. Necessity is a great motivator and I leapt to my feet, slightly crooked though uninjured, and hit the switch which cuts off the engine. Grabbing the handle bars and twisting them for leverage I wrangled it to standing thinking that if it was left on its side too long the carburetor would get flooded with fuel and it wouldn’t start. I was alone on a deserted road with only a general idea of where I was and where I needed to go. Danger is the implicit element of adventure.

It’s not the first time I’d fallen off a bike but I am used to road bikes. There is nothing quite like speeding along good roads, avoiding the occasional bit of gravel, sweeping through corners close to the ground with poetry of movement and metal. On those long trips through the Pyreneese or the sunflower fields of southern france I was with friends; between us we had helmets, amoured jackets, boots, kneepads, kevlar jeans, waterproofs, com systems, GPS, heated handle bars, camel packs, and enough camping gear for a small army of bikers.

Evi - Biologist Researcher doing Jaguar work for Panthera

My first encounter with a dirt bike here was as a passenger with a kamikaze Wapisiana man named Trevor. We raced through the gullies and sand pits of the savannah with just the bare essentials. When we arrived at a tricky bit like a creek crossing he would exclaim ‘Oh no! No breaks!’. Apart from breaks we were missing helmets, jackets, gloves and shoes but we carried with us a feeling of unbridled freedom.

It’s only when things go wrong and you remember there is no medical assistance to be had for miles that you marvel at how close a relative stupidity is to bravery. Trevor found this out a few days later when he caught one of his fingers in the chain and had to travel for four hours to get to the nearest doctor. It didn’t take much time before he was riding again and Dadanawa, lost world, Guyanese Wild West stronghold did its work and we all carried on amnestic but free.

Trevor Chan

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Home on the Range

2012-03-26T12:41:00.001-07:00

Published in The Irish World Newspaper UK 1st February 2012

South Rupununi, Dadanawa Cattle Ranch, Wild Horses and the Kanuku Mountains

You might wonder how it is that a 31-year-old Irish opera singer could find herself on a newly broken stallion facing down an angry bull in the Savannah's of Guyana, South America. She might be wondering the same thing herself. Life sometimes provides you with strange twists of fate to which multitudes of relocated, displaced, and fortune seeking Irish before could attest.

The Savannah's of Southern Guyana are surprisingly Irish. Having grown up in the wilds of West Cork may be smaller scale and ever so slightly colder but there are similarities. Being on a cattle ranch with cows, sheep, geese, ducks, chickens, pigs and horses with the Rupununi River running through the expanse of sandy, grassy plains feels strangely like coming home. Growing up we had an almost identical menagerie with the Brinny River running through our fields. The people are similar too. English speaking with a lilt, Caribbean rather than Celtic, knit-closely by land and history, covertly funny and innately generous. That however, is where the similarity ends.

In Guyana rum replaces whiskey, the fish can be life-threatening, the animals wild, and the family pet, depending on the winds of chance either a monkey, a rattle snake or a jaguar. Dadanawa Ranch, where I am working in exchange for food and board, is one of the most remote in the world about four hours or a week away from the nearest town depending on the season. There is no mains electricity (we have a generator - when it’s working), no telephone, and a solar powered satellite connection for the internet. The bread is home baked, fruit such as coconut, passion fruit and mango picked from the trees, meat slaughtered about 200 yards from my room, and the local tipple called Karee made from cassava. Walking between buildings can be hazardous due to snakes and if you fall off your trail bike the nearest hospital is a flight away, malaria is a common problem. It’s this century’s Wild West where people live on a rum doused edge between survival and disaster.

Wild Horses, South Rupununi, Guyana

This was just dawning on me as Covino a handsome, silent type was muttering ‘These cows are wild. Dangerous.’ in the quiet way the Amerindian vaqueros here seem to have. A vaquero is a cowboy, the word having been imported from nearby Brazil, and in this area the Amerindians are mostly Wapisiana and Macusi. I was reacquainting myself with riding after a bit of a break since 1996 on a half wild stallion called Smokey. The horses live wild on the Savannah. A few are caught every now and then to work shoeless and spirited, there is no horse whispering here. Covino is a rodeo champion.

Amerindian Vaqueros, branding and castrating and occasionally rising wild bulls in the corral.

They rounded up about 300 cattle from the outlying lands of the ranch which covers 1,750 square miles and put them in the coral for branding, castration and record keeping. Once a week they are taken to a creek and some fields to drink and graze to which I’d come along trying not to confuse my horse with a rising trot, hoping he wouldn’t throw me off. ‘Dangerous at both ends and damned uncomfortable in the middle’ is what Oscar Wilde said about horses but he left out the bit about them being a lot of fun. I was galloping inelegantly along the edge of the heard whooping, whistling and growling like the vaqueros at the cows which seemed to intimidate them into going in the right direction feeling like part of the team. The team being Covino, in his prime, Nicodemus, 16, and William, about 80.

I saw Nico, off his horse, throwing rocks at a huge, horned and angry bull it’s eyes red with rage, nostrils snorting in and spurting out the dust kicked up by his pounding hooves. He was heading for Nico. I spurred Smokey in their direction with no notion of what to do when the bull caught us in his sights and Smokey came to an abrupt halt. All four of us stood frozen in various stages of indecision, bravado and terror. The bull started to bare down on us. Smokey and I quickly turned and galloped off to hide behind a bush. The bull went back to the heard to stamp his authority on another poor cow. ‘Er Covino, you know you said these cows are dangerous? Do they ever charge at you?’ He looked at me as if I were simple, it’s his way of life and blindingly obvious to him. ‘Yes, look at the horses, they have scars on their backs’. I asked what to do in such a situation. ‘We run away, we defend ourselves’. I asked what he had to defend himself with and his silence was response enough.

Wild Cows

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How to Get Eaten by Jaguars

2012-02-09T10:16:00.000-08:00

Jaguar Kill - Evi, Ben and Duane

Jaguars are a part of everyday life on the ranch. It’s the fresh paw print in the sand near the corral or the vultures circling the carcass of a dead cow in the Savannah that tells you you are living in close proximity to a deadly predator. The animals themselves are illusive. Thousands of years of evolution have given them a vanishing aesthetic making them very difficult to spot. They weave in and out of jungle, savannah and through the lives of the people who live there.

Diane McTurk of Karanambu Ranch told Evi, a jaguar researcher for Panthera a story. She woke up one night to find a jaguar in her house that had chased a chicken inside. Having found a source of fast food it became a regular nighttime visitor and though they don’t see humans as prey and didn’t attack anyone, they had to take care of it. Most people like Diane and Duane Defreitas of Dadanawa are conservationists who try hard to find ways to live with jaguar without harming them. This becomes difficult when they decide to pay house calls or when they start eating too much of your profits. At Dadanawa in the last month five cows worth thousands of USD’s have been killed by Jaguar.

Camera Trap on a stick

The vaqueros at Dadanawa check everyday to see if a cow has been killed or rustled. (There is a problem with local cattle rustlers and more organised gangs who come over the boarder from Brazil.) A fresh kill was reported recently while Evi and I were running. We came back to the news and drove out in the night to see the prone body of a calf, its skull pierced. A trademark jaguar kill. They sometimes return to the site in the early morning or evening to feed over a period of days. Evi set up camera traps which trigger if something moves in front of them while I took random pictures in the dark and captured a pair of eyes. Something was watching us.

Calf - A Jaguar Kill Evi, Ben and Duane

A Dung Beetle taking advantage of the situation

Eyes in the night

Evi and I like to run, barefooted when the mood takes, (followed by a spot of yoga) out of the compound in a circuit not too far from the ranch. We pass the corral and a little creek following along cow tracks under enormous skies and the ancient, reassuring presence of the Kanuku Mountains. Most people take huge knives called cutlasses, guns or bows and arrows with them into the savannah but I find them inconvenient when out for a jog. I've been running in the area alone before though Evi tells me it’s better to go with someone else for safety. I tend to sometimes ignore those kinds of warnings thinking that people can be overcautious and I have an inconstant tendency towards fatalism.

Jaguar Track

Yesterday we were supposed to go running with James a visitor to the ranch and Chung the Chinese/Canadian anthropologist’s father but Evi wasn’t feeling well so James and I went together. We made it to the creek after circumnavigating an enormous bull and then headed off on the track I normally use. I knew we had to turn left but to the untrained eye smaller tracks are very difficult to spot, Evi and I have missed the turning before. We kept on but quickly realised we were slightly lost. The mountains are reassuring because they are landmarks in the vast and cryptic savannah. I knew which direction the ranch was in because of where we were in relation to Darkoban, Tup Tup Yar and Shiriri but didn’t recognise the area. We ambled on coming across bush islands and a lake by which we stopped to have a look and finally came across a road that took us back to the ranch.

A couple of hours later Duane came back from inspecting a fresh kill. Another calf had been taken the previous night by a mother and two cubs. It had been killed by a lake with the trees full of expectant vultures. The tracks were fresh from yesterday and early that morning and beside them they found the prints of James’ shoes and my feet. We had passed by not noticing the dead calf or the tracks of the jaguars, most likely watching us, with the vultures circling above.

Jaguar Track and Footprint

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Dadanawa Cattle Ranch, Guyana

2012-01-23T11:18:00.000-08:00

The Cattle Ranch

Click on the pictures to see them better

Branding Irons

Dadanawa is a working cattle ranch, using most of the same practises since it was established in the 1920's.

Dadanawa Brand - HH

There is a big problem here with cattle rustlers (I'm serious). The cows roam free range and wild over 1,750 square miles of unfenced Savannah. They are branded for identification. The ranch has outstations for the Vaqueros (barefooted Amerindian cowboys) when they ride out to heard cows and bring them back for branding, castration, riding or slaughter. There is a two day cattle drive to Lethem, the only town in Region 9 and the Rupununi area of Guyana, about once a month when the cows are brought to slaughter.

William, Vaquero at The Corral

Some people have worked here all or most of their lives. It's a way of life. Families live on the ranch, they are the mainstay. Then there are nomadic people who come and go, bartering labour for a pair of boots or clothes or rum. Recently there has been a lot of going due to a gold rush in the jungle and gold fever. (I'm serious, it really is the Wild West).

Covino, A Diehard Cowboy

Covino lives on the ranch with his parents, wife and kids and is a rodeo champion riding horses and bulls (he's mad, the bulls are scary). This bull was branded, castrated and ridden in the space of about half an hour. He had a really bad day. (The bull I mean. As far as I could tell Covino had a great time)

Lassoing

They like lassoing things around here. It's impressive when they chase a cow on horseback and lasso them from the saddle. I couldn't get a picture of that as I was riding, bouncing up and down, holding on for dear life (and running away from bulls and steers).

Vaqueros, Gaffing - Kanuku Mountains in the Background

Like any place Guyana and this area, The Rupununi, has it's own vocabluary. They speak English, Guyanese Creole and some speak Wapisiana, Macusi, or Wai Wai, which are the main Amerindian tribes in the Rupununi. Gaffing means chatting (a lot)in creole. This is quite a rare thing to see. Generally the vaqueros are a quiet bunch. When I went herding with them the other day Covino told me 'These cows are wild. Dangerous.' What he meant was: Stay away from the cows they are scary wild and will charge/gorge/trample you if you aren't careful. Many of the horses have scars on their backs from being gorged. Vaqueros have been gored too and in some cases badly injured but luckily no one has died. It's a dangerous job. The other day Covino rode out with a shot gun over his saddle for protection against jaguars and other cattle rustlers.

The Corral - Cows

Cow Related Information: These are the descendants of the original cows bought for the ranch in the 1920's. Originally from the Iberian Peninsula they have since been bred with Brahmans, Texas Longhorns and other breeds.

The Slaughterhouse

The meat is fresh. The only electricity on the ranch is solar generated, consequently there isn't a lot of refrigeration going on. To preserve the beef they dry and salt it to make tasso, a kind of jerky. That's why the slaughterhouse is open air, it's also locked. Tasso is popular.

Rawhide

No really. It is. Wild West, I'm telling you.

Rawhide and a Lasso

They use rawhide (rolin', rolin', rolin') to make lassos because it's much stronger than leather. It can only be worked into a lasso between 2.00am and 8.00am in the morning when the air is moist and the rawhide is supple. You have to wind it around your waist to get enough leverage to plait it.

The Tannery

The Ranch Manager Duane DeFeitas is a tanner, amongst other things. Before he was manager he spent some time making naughty underwear out of leather in Canada. Sadly the bottom fell out of the naughty leather underwear market and he came back to Guyana.

Tanning Bark - Curshpat - Anadenanthera Peregrina

The tannins in the bark help the rawhide become leather. Curshpat is the Wapisiana name for it. If you really want to know about tanning click here. It's also a hallucinogen used in spiritual rituals, in some places, and can be used as snuff too. I haven't seen anyone going about sniffing leather though.

The Tannery

The vaqueros, they live here. Stan Brock who was once the ranch manager, is an author, TV presenter and founder of RAM, told me that in his time they made the bricks for these buildings on the ranch, the roof is made of palm leaves in typical Amerindian style. RAM or Remote Area Medical is a free flying medical service. They stopped by recently.

Vaquero Leggings and Spurs

Most of the vaqueros go around barefooted. Sometimes they wear wellies or flip flops. When they ride barefooted they put the edge of the stirrup between their toes.

Ozzy - Ranch Foreman - Dude

The Salvation Army - Boobly, Jussy, and Rasta

Every year during the rainy season the water rises so much that the area the ranch buildings are on becomes an island. That's why most of the buildings are on stilts. The tractor which is 27 years old is known as The Salvation Army because it rescues many vehicles out of mud and water at that time of year.

Eco Tourism

Air Guyana - On the Airstrip

Though Dadanawa is foremost a working cattle ranch they also provide accommodation, and river trips. Guests can fly in from Georgetown, Lethem or between ranches.

The Guest House and the Staff House in the Background

Guest Room

They have running water pumped from the well, for showers etc. No electricity, so they use candles which are lovely and bring about a general feeling of nostalgia. The guests come here to get involved in the ranch or to see the wildlife like jaguar, giant anteaters and the red siskin they are generally looking to enjoy a bit of ecotourism which is big business in Guyana. Some of the people here are guides and rangers who work on river/jungle expeditions organised out of the ranch for tourists, researchers and sometimes documentary makers.

South Rupununi Savannah - Foothills of the Kanuku Mountains

People often compare Guyana to Joseph Conrad's book about sailing up the congo river - Heart of Darkness. It's only a little bit true so I have added some quotes:

'And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.' Conrad - Heart of Darkness.

Wildlife I found on the Ranch a Shidaro Snake - Shidaro is a Wapisiana word

Black Vultures - Referred to here as The City Council
(because they clear up all the organic rubbish)

Black Bellied Sheep from Barbados

My Room in The Staff House

Foghorn

I've named this calf Foghorn. He lives a precarious existence between the staff house and the slaughterhouse. He belongs to Conrad who is in charge of the compound. Conrad has lost 5 cows to jaguar recently so brought foghorn here for safekeeping. Temporary, safekeeping obviously. He has a disproportionately loud moo to body mass ratio especially at 4.00 in the morning.

Danielle - Rescuing a Blue Grey Tanager

They are very keen on conservation. Jussy found this Blue Grey Tanager which must have fallen out of it's nest and gave it to us to look after until it can be released.

Left is a Mouse Opossum which Rasta found. We took a picture and let it go. Right is a pig. All the animals wander around freely. Sometimes they disappear... Jaguars in this area have been known to snatch dogs from doorsteps in the night, and one even chased a chicken into a house while the occupants slept. They were ok, the chicken was not.

Puppies Sleeping

Everything is multiplying at the moment. The cows are calving, the sheep are lambing, the chicken hatching chicks, the dog just had puppies and we have a pregnant cat.

Trooper, Dolly and Monkey (A Golden-Handed Tamarin)

Uncle Duane

'He is a prodigy,' he said at last. 'He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else' Conrad - Heart of Darkness.

People who are in charge or are older are generally referred to as Uncle or Auntie. Uncle Duane is the ranch manager. He is a legend. He holds the place together with some sort of magic glue made from humour and humanity. He has many responsibilities but is rarely bossy. He seems here but apart somehow transcending and embedded at the same time.

'He was great by this little thing that it was impossible to tell what could control such a man. He never gave that secret away.' Conrad - Heart of Darkness.

Here he is attacking a cow heel for Pepper Pot (a local dish) with an axe and a hammer. This was the first day I met him...His wife is Auntie Sandy, who is similarly lovely, is currently in Canada.

Uncle Duane at the creek with Maya and Leo - Fish Whispering

People go to the creek to swim, wash laundry (all washed by hand), canoe, get eaten by black flies and to fish. Often someone will pop by with some fish for lunch. (If someone comes to your house with meat or fish and says 'dawourd' it means it's a gift for you.) I love swimming here and mostly don't worry about the piranha, electric eels, anaconda, sting rays or caiman.

Trevor - Fishing

Fishing is done in various ways. Using a cast net and a tangle seine like above, with a bow and arrow and with poison. The poison is really the leaf of a tree which is balled up and thrown in the water. The fish eat it and go a bit loopy so then you can catch them with your hands. I've heard they sometimes use rods too but haven't seen that.

Burley and Leo

Big Mary and Little Mary (Covino's mum and Missus) Wapisiana ladies doing their laundry

Auntie Mary - Formidable but lovely and staunchly Catholic Ranch Matriarch

Evi Paemelaere

'But the wilderness had found him early...I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.' Conrad - Heart of Darkness.

Many researchers and volunteers pass through Dadanawa Evi is a Belgian biologist working for Panthera, researching jaguars on the first jaguar study to have been conducted in Guyana. She's here for the next few months. She is normally in 'the field' on a dirt bike with Trevor setting camera traps or staking out a kill or typing away on various computers and figuring out how to charge all her batteries. Today she went off with a vaquero called Richard on horseback, barefooted. Richard was carrying a bow and arrow and a cutlas for protection.

Chung - A Canadian/Chinese Anthropologist

He stays here for long periods of time. Hanging out and helping out. He doesn't like to be photographed.

'If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth.' Conrad - Heart of Darkness.

Hangouts

The Staff House

This is outside my room. It functions as a church, place for ranch meetings, and entertainment/rum drinking area for guests.

The Ranch Store

The Ranch is actually owned by a company called The Rupununi Development Company ltd. Uncle Duane is the manager. This is the company run store. It's full of random treasures.

ex-Black Piranha

Tasso , Farine, Bananas

Handmade Saddles

The staples here are tasso and farine which is little yellow rocks made from casasva. I helped out with a stock take recently and they had about 2,000 pounds of the stuff. Tastes quite good. These saddles are handmade here with the leather they make. They also make hats, horsewhips, lassos, holders for cutlas's which are big knifes most people carry about with them.

Where the rum is kept

The rum is El Dorado, it's as much a staple as farine and tasso.

The Kitchen

The kitchen is the hub of the ranch. People come here for breakfast at 6.30am, lunch at 11.30am and dinner sometime after 6.00pm. Apart from meat which is homegrown and a garden maintained by Danielle (and the iguanas) all food has to be brought in from Lethem. Lethem is about 4 hours or a week away depending on the season. In the rainy season when it's difficult to get out of the ranch food is sometimes dropped in by air.

Maya - Duane's Granddaughter

I never see any food in the kitchen but somehow every mealtime a feast appears apparently out of nothing. There are plenty of fruit trees about. Mango, passionfruit, cashew, grapefruit, pomegranate, coconut, lime, lemon, orange, brazil nut etc. Where the trees overhang the metal roofed houses the fruits fall with startling attack. For a while I woke up in the middle of the night thinking someone had shot a gun in the Savannah but it was a mango falling on the roof of the staff house. Coconuts are the loudest.

The Kitchen

Making cinnamon rolls. Alison, in the middle here, works in the house and keeps the place and people in one piece. The houses are open air, on stilts and have views of the Kanuku Mountains. Visitors normally sling a hammock on the porch.

Books

They have a great library of books and DVDs which they watch on their Macs.

The Garage

The garage is another main hangout, mostly for the guys. They have an amazing ability to take random parts and make them into something that works or mostly works. There is a land rover graveyard behind Duane and Sandy's house, an effigy to necessity and skill. Transport is pretty important here. This is Rasta. He works on the jungle expeditions and apparently he is supper strong. He is one of those steady people who works hard at everything and does it quietly, he likes to look after people.

'In the tropics one must before everything keep calm.'...He lifted a warning forefinger....'Du calme, du calme.' Conrad - Heart of Darkness.

The Bedford

This is the first truck to have run The Rupununi. That is 'no mean boast' says Jussy. It's an ex-British Army truck.

A Thing Of Beauty

This is a homemade Land Rover put together from about four deceased rovers. Sometimes a thing is rendered beautiful through effort, simplicity or purpose.

'The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words...A Voice! A Voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper.' Conrad - Heart of Darkness.

Jussy the Lion

Duane's son, fixer of broken vehicles, national swimming gold medalist at 14, bushman.

Blue Grey Tanager

As a bushman he knows a lot about the native birds and other wildlife. He rescued this Blue Grey Tanager when it fell out a tree. He helped to identify the red siskin, a new but endangered species of bird, in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institute. He also heads up a local conservation organisation called SCRS to look after the siskin and river turtles among other projects.

Tracking

People here are really good at tracking. Recently I crossed a very sandy track and a river on a dirt bike alone. When the truck caught up with me they could see exactly how I did and where I got a bit stuck, the fact I went across the river at the jeep crossing rather than the bike crossing etc. I asked Jussy (Boobly helped too) what he could tell me about the above: He said at a common brown dove had been pottering about, a horse had passed by and a dog, he also identified the back wheel of the trailer, a slipper (sometimes worn by vaqueros - they have more variety of footwear than I do) and my foot.

Feet

Jussy grew up here and speaks Wapisiana. He goes everywhere barefooted except when going to the city or riding a motorbike. The thing that most impressed me about him was when we were visiting a Wapisiana village called Rupunau and he was talking to a lady. He noticed that she was missing one of her animals. That's how communities are built, how to be followed, and also how to charm an old lady out of her socks.

The Archives

This used to be the managers house as far back as Turner the first manager in the 20's. It's where Jussy, Erin (Jussy's girlfriend) Rasta, Chung and other crew who are in and out stay. It's a bit rickety and has a great sense of history but basically it's a glorified tree house.

Antique Skins

The first one isn't antique. It was a randy goat called Buju - He terrorised the ladies of the neighbourhood so much that he was murdered by a local at Sand Creek who left cassava water (cyanide) lying around for him to find.

The Rum Comes out at Night

'Anything--anything can be done in this country' Conrad - Heart of Darkness.

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A Drunken Gambol

2011-12-30T17:38:00.000-08:00

Dadanawa Ranch, Guyana

A few days ago I crossed the border overland from Brazil. Though only a mile or so into Guyana the cracked pavements and letchy men of Manaus quickly melted away into obscure remembrance to be replaced with the ramshackle charm of the Guyanese. After traveling for three days I arrived in Lethem. It’s the main town of the Rupununi area and sits on the boarder with Brazil. The tourist visa is 30 days and $140. I crossed with a Guyanese friend who managed to persuade the immigration officials to give me a two month visa, for free. She went to the air strip to catch the small plane to Georgetown and I was left with a mad racer of a taxi driver/money exchange agent/father of four and ladies man called Blackie. We raced over the dirt roads, occasionally he came to a grinding halt in a cloud of fine, red dust to yell out of the window ‘You know where Dadanawa people at?’. At about 10.00 am we stopped outside Don and Shirley’s Airport Shop center for misplaced travelers and a local institution. It sits beside the Guyana Geology & Mines Commission and began in the 1920’s as bar owned by Rupununi legend, Scotsman Harvey Prideaux Colin Melville. He was a charismatic though ethically challenged prospector who settled in the area with a Wapisiana woman and was the original owner of Dadanawa Ranch my destination. The shop is even now owned by Melvilles and they are still affectionately described as crooks.

It was outside Don and Shirley’s that I met Justin, Jussy or Lion as he is known. A tall man, with a bandana and goatee to match, roguish, and barefooted looking like a savannah pirate. He is the son of Duane De Freitas, manager of Dadanawa and was there to pick up supplies, me and his girlfriend. The first order of business was beer, as was the second and the third. Depending on the season it’s a four to six hour journey to the ranch. Consequently people who live there make the most of their trips to Lethem. We went to the Savannah Inn and chatted to some people who were also visiting from neighboring ranches. There was a real sense of community, people are friendly, generous with their beer and their time and know each others business.

The Pickup

A bit the worse for wear I was deposited outside Don and Shirley’s while Jussy and Erin, his girlfriend, a Northern Irish geologist, ‘went for a drive’ to I didn’t know where. I sat with a man called Norman the Mormon and wondered when they would return having with them my money and all my possessions. Norman asked once again what he should do about his girlfriend who apparently doesn’t like him very much. The sun began to wane and I decided to go for a walk. The sandy road stretched out before my drunken self, passing palm-roofed huts, some cows, and Amerindian families and I wondered if the wild west had some how been transported to the East of South America. On my way back a pick-up stopped and I squeezed into it with a local family going back to town. When I arrived the Dadanawa people were there looking a little surprised at my exiting a pickup with the driver yodeling opera at me. Like doctors at a party who are presented with peoples illnesses in the hope of advice, when you tell people you are an opera singer their first response is to offer you a sort of yodel-squawk approximating classical singing, an audition of misbegotten hopes and left handed dreams.

Norman the Mormon

More beer was ordered and the battered pickup was filled with bags of flour and other supplies, a queen sized mattress, a bicycle, a live chicken and a kitten. Eventually eight of us crammed in where we could and took off toward the ranch. We sped over the rutted, sandy road enthusiastically called ‘the highway’. The chicken seemed content enough and the kitten pooed all over Erin, Jussy our driver was swigging rum and singing. The pickup broke down, torches were gathered and a piece of string used to stop too much fuel from getting into the carburetor. We arrived in Shulinab a predominately Macusi village half way between Lethem and the ranch to stop at a store and to have more beer with a man called Sparrow. We changed pickups and were again hurtling down the sandy highway in the dark minus a door and any breaks. We stopped every few miles to top the radiator up with water. The vehicle is usually left in the village as it can’t go to Lethem because it doesn’t have any papers. People make do. They pull together and do their best. They acquire many skills and rely on a mixture of proficiency and luck to get by with a good deal of laughter and rum thrown in. It’s a kind of lawless freedom and careful knowledge that holds things together.

Fixing it up

We turned off the highway onto a truly cratered road and Jussy said ‘We’re going local’ meaning on ranch property. Arriving at 23.00 having gone through various stages of drunkenness, sobriety and hangover. At 4.00 am the cockerels began to crow and a cow let out a solitary moo as bats flew above my bed. Amerindians began their Novenas, a catholic service practiced before Christmas, singing and praying in the room next to mine. A surprising and moving awakening in the still of the early morning and the beginning of another journey not yet defined.

Sunrise - First Morning at Dadanawa Ranch

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Boat from Bethlehem

2011-12-19T05:19:00.001-08:00

Boat on the Amazon Belem in the backround - Hammock class.

Things were getting messy. Habibi shoved 20 Reals into my hand. Two men. Brazilian and Swede were sitting at a plastic table, hands clutched together, eyes fixed. The air was tense. Where had that bottle of whiskey come from? The Brazilian looked determined, the Swede quietly confident, the audience suspended in anticipation, the table stressed. Half an hour ago we were eating crackers and stolen tomatoes. Claudio, the encyclopedia salesman, was trying his best to look sexy while eating desiccated prawn heads. Now shuffle-footing it around the table he began yelling for it all to begin, veins throbbing in his neck, mind completely lost to the battle. It must have been after the Martini Rosso ran out that the whiskey arrived and arm-wrestling was the spontaneous result.

(Left to right)Daniel, Fredson, Habibi, Sesa, Ishmael and Gustavo

Taking bets

‘They’re cheating!’ yelled Daniel the Swede. His friend Camilla and I stood chatting to Fredson who spoke English. He had just come back from China visiting a friend who was there for stem cell therapy. Habibi, a bit of a scammer and aspiring ladies man who started the day with a can of beer, grabbed his 20 Reals back. The Swede had won. Lightning fractured the darkness putting a stop to our moonlit wrestling debacle. We headed to the bar but it was closed. Fredson sang and clapped out a *brega tune while Claudio showed me how to dance **Forro. We ended the evening, Fredson and I facing Camilla and Daniel, lying the wrong way across two hammocks chatting and keeping warm on an unusually chilly night until sleep came.

The Liberty Star is old, notoriously tardy and mechanically unreliable. It has four decks. The top, open deck dotted with garden furniture and some al fresco showers. The next deck down with the bar, some cabins, the cockpit and a space for hammocks is open to the elements and was where Fredson, the Swedes, me, and the rowdy contingent of Brazilians had pitched up. The deck below is enclosed with air conditioning, the canteen, more cabins, more spaces for hammocks, Dave the English/American/Canadian pensioner, a couple of families and Carlos the living statue.

The Liberty Star

The bottom deck was full of cargo (not a hold a deck, for fruit). Tomatoes, mangoes and oranges piled to the ceiling. It was because the cargo was being loaded that we left Belem (translated as Bethlehem) at midnight rather than 18.00. As soon as we set off for Manaus large quantities of fruit mysteriously migrated to the upper decks. Fredson said ‘We will eat like kings on this boat’. Everyone else seemed to have the same idea. The crew were accepting of our collective thievery.

Fredson and I quickly became friends. We were hammock neighbors and both fans of Buddhism. We spent an afternoon translating a book he had into English and discussing different ways to meditate. In his town which is small, on the river and only reachable by boat, he is involved in politics. He is part of a campaign to get his friend elected as mayor. He told me about the current mayor who is corrupt and how government money was diverted from building a school for the local children to build luxurious houses for those in power. The school still isn’t built and the kids have to go a long way to neighboring towns. Due to his involvement in the campaigning he was once badly beaten up by the opposition who broke his arm. He also narrowly avoided being killed when a hit was taken out on him.

Left to right - Gustavo, Samuel, Sesa and Fredson. My Neighbours.

As we chatted rain began to fall. Well, in the Amazon, it doesn’t really begin to fall but rather pours down in large quantities all of a sudden. As the crew unrolled the tarpaulin to keep our hammocks dry Fredson and I headed upstairs to the top deck to revel in being cool for a change and got completely drenched. ‘I’ve found a good place’ I told him and took him to the very front and top of the boat, a restricted area, but the only place which was quiet and had a unrestricted view of the river. ‘nam myoho renge kyo’ Fredson began. We sat in the downpour chanting, happy, rain running down our faces. Two blue streaks flashed noisily over the canopy, parrots on their way to shelter. The rainforest was flat and went for miles only occasionally dotted with tiny communities of stilted houses each with a small church and a school. Men in canoes laying fishing nets, children fetching water and women doing the laundry waved as we passed. He says ‘The government gives them money because they are so far away from everything like hospitals. They have a good life’. The river narrowed in places or sometimes the boat stayed close to the banks. There were hawks to be seen, snatching their food out of the water and taking it back to their trees and flocks of small green birds, squawking and very fast. The place came alive at dawn and dusk when every creature was busy, boto or river dolphin were easily seen and the air burgeoned with expectation. The deck began to overflow with rainwater causing massive flooding below so we spent some time brooming water over the sides of the boat hoping it wouldn’t sink.

River Houses - Rio Negro

Dave and the quiet place

I showed Dave the same spot. ‘I remember when...’, ‘In Peru I...’, ‘When I had my restaurant...’. He’s a good man full of stories. We were sailing directly into one of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen. A boto launched itself out of the water in front of the boat and disappeared. ‘We used to sell soft-shell crab in the restaurant...’. I worry he spends so much time talking about the past that he misses the present but later he tells me he has felt very contented on the trip. Dave is, like me, homeless and traveling indefinitely. A veteran traveler and Savoy trained chef he recently had a hip replacement and carries amongst his belongings a fold up walking stick. He also tells me that he is a better person when he’s traveling. ‘Less stressed, happier’. Maybe some people aren’t meant to be static and transitory is a more natural state for them to be in. Nomads of the western, modern variety. He likes his routines though and rations out his enjoyments. ‘Tomorrow I’ll make guacamole, the day after you can copy some pictures onto my computer. I’ll save the tuna until Wednesday.‘ We all have our own ways of traveling and of being happy.

The Sunset - Ro Negro

Gustavo

By day three of the six day journey Fredson and the Swedes had left leaving Dave and myself as the only foreigners and English speakers on the boat. Gustavo became my new hammock neighbor. When my penknife disappeared on the night of the wrestling I asked if he’d seen it the next morning. He hadn’t but later I saw him talking to Habibi and looking in my direction. I went back to my hammock it was there and Habibi was looking sheepish. During the trip Gustavo’s mobile was stolen. He never found it but we all had our suspicions. When I woke in the mornings he would appear with a hot, sweet rice and milk dish, during the day he plied me with biscuits and in the evening with stolen mangoes. Sometimes he would sneak up behind me to give a hug and a friendly kiss on the top of the head.

Along the way we stopped at quite a few little towns. They were generally colorful, lively places battling the encroachment of the forest, every town with a church in a prominent position. Stopping at a port was a bit of an event for the passengers as it broke up the long days on the boat and gave us a chance to get some food. Some ports had scrawny boys balancing on the edge of the dock about 8 years old carrying huge water melons to sell. There is a big trade in cheese. One evening when we were all asleep we stopped and men burst onto the boat yelling ‘Queso! Queso!’ (Cheese!) like demented alarm clocks.

Logging and mining

On the boarder between the states of Para and Amazonas Federal police went through the boat with a sniffer dog. There are about 3,000 types of fruit found in the amazon and some 200 are traded as well as aluminum, lumber and on occasion drugs. Huge flat boats sailed passed loaded with the trunks of enormous ex-trees. We saw plumes of smoke coming from the forest where timber or minerals were being extracted. Brazil currently has a bill which protects the forest. It is very close to being revised to such an extent as to render it useless. When the powerful are corrupt the future suffers, and the forest with all it’s precious inhabitants will be safe only when Brazil deals with it’s endemic corruption problem.

Beer and Coffins

In Municipal De Gurupa we moored beside a boat unloading beer and coffins. Gustavo started shouting and calling me over miming the signs for ‘take a picture’. ‘Osama’ he shouted ‘Osama’. Slightly confused to have found the supposedly dead Al Qaida leader in a little village in Brazil I went to see what all the fuss was about. There, sure enough was a man who looked uncannily like the dead Osama (except he had both his sandals). He came aboard with many of the passages shouting and pointing at him. He took it well. Later I went to have a chat with him and found that he is from Fortaleza originally and was on his way to Manaus and the pre-Christmas rush to work as a living statue. His best money maker is standing on a stool, wearing a plastic machine gun, looking like Osama Bin Ladin, painted almost entirely in silver. He was a quiet, calm sort of person with a gentle presence who quickly won people over and made friends. Unlike the rest of us he didn’t have a hammock but instead slept on a piece of cardboard with a mat and sleeping bag. I wondered if he would sleep on the streets in Manaus. One of his few possessions was a sandwich maker, he spent most of his time grilling cheese buns and making tiny roses out of scraps of material while others watched.

Carlos his bed and his sandwich maker

Brazilians like to watch people. Often Dave would be playing dominoes with Claudio, Ishmael and Raimundo with an old man hovering and watching. Everything was of interest. Opening your bag, writing, reading a book, chatting to someone. At every moment people watched each other. Except for one evening I was busy writing when the lights went out. That was odd as they were kept on all night normally. I looked up and saw two glow worms chasing each other around an extinguished light fitting. A butterfly the size of my hand landed on me, then a moth. I saw the stars from my hammock for the first time. Beautiful and abundant in the clear of the dark. Tranquilly rocking with the motion of the boat I had gone from watched to watcher and was promptly plagued by a swarm of insects. It’s why they had turned the lights off. We were sailing though a biblically proportioned cloud of assorted winged things so we all retreated to the enclosed deck.

Kids playing around Claudio

There were a few women traveling with children on board but they kept to themselves and were difficult to start a conversation with. The kids were extraordinarily well behaved and never made much noise. There was only one noticeable one aged about 11 who stalked the corridors practicing his staring. Raimundo tapped my hammock as he went passed. People formed little communities and attachments quickly. Sharing food, stories, rivalries, Martini Rosso and laughter. A man wearing a lot of gold with hairy shoulders walked passed, staring. Brega music played over a mobile phone. Dave sat with is computer watching one of his shows, Carlos nearby eating a sandwich. The group of arm wrestling domino players had hung their hammocks together and were laughing and watching, laughing and watching. So the days and the old Liberty Star rolled forward.

The river has it’s own rhythm; the sun beats, rain drums, plants take measure, animals accent, humans live in counterpoint and the river itself, flows. On the amazon, modulating between clamor and silence, a community of travelers and an unlikely gang of Brazilians cruised in a battered boat with decks doused in Martini Rosso inexorably towards Manaus and the end of another adventure which, of course, is the beginning of a new one.

* Brega - Common, pikey, red-neck
** Forro

Check out Green Global Travel for cool stories about the amazon and other places.

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Prelude

2011-12-10T05:10:00.000-08:00

Living on stilts on a river beach - Rio Negro Brazil

This is a little story, a summary, or appetiser about the recent trip I made up the amazon river. It has been published on this website MarineCreatures.

The website is a stock agency for marine photography and is run by Rowan Byrne (among others) who is a marine biologist passionate about conservation, saver of turtles, national geographic photographer, and all round clever cloggs.

On the Amazon

I took the top cracker out of it’s plastic blanket and looked at the little creatures, lightening fast, whirling across the surface and through the holes. Shaking them off I took a bite like the most stoic of weevil-eating sailors on those great pioneering ships of the past. I am not a pioneer, but was at that moment on a boat, on the great amazon river, heading north, with a mouth full of insect infested cracker.

Read the rest here

Here are some pictures which go with the story. I will write about the adventure in full soon.

Sunset on the Rio Negro - Brazil

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Buses & Brothels

2011-12-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

‘Noel’ he said as he placed his hand on my thigh. I looked at him surprised and then pointedly at his hand, which he gingerly removed, his eyes no longer able to meet mine. A handsome man in his forties he ran his fingers through his hair and laughed nervously in rich baritone. I had heard that the men in the north are more macho. Brazilian women further south warned me that they see women only in terms of sexual gratification or reproduction and that they generally aren’t too keen about the latter. Even so, I was not expecting the bus driver to make a pass at me in a roadside restaurant called Mr.Ping.

It was 24 hours into a 36 hour, 2000km, bus ride from Brasilia to Belém. I had dragged myself out of the bus seat doing a good impression of a broken concertina. Caught for 24 hours between a teenager who liked to sing aloud to herself while perusing the bible and a lady who spent most of her time propping herself up on the back of my seat, whacking me on the head occasionally, until I put it back to go to sleep, to which she took offense and told me off in portuguese. I replied I didn’t understand (sometimes playing the dumb foreigner is an asset). Incensed, and to my amusement, she stomped to the other end of the bus to give me vengeful looks for the rest of the journey.

The reason I was surprised at Noel, having been forewarned, was that being on a bus for such a long time with no air conditioning or toilet leads to general greasiness and to smelling more of muck than roses. I supposed this must be the state of most of the women he chases if he uses his work as an opportunity to get laid. A Toulouse Lautrec* of the brazilian bus system, reveling in women’s more natural fragrances and pseudo post coital griminess. Artisan of the steering wheel and suicidal overtaker, unlike Toulouse, he was tall and sober which is how I left him when we got to the bus station at Belém.

The problem was that we arrived at 3.00am. We were supposed to arrive at 8.00am. At 8.00 all the buses would have been working, the hostels would have been open and the streets and their decaying houses would not have been deserted. With warnings of ‘peligroso, peligroso’ (dangerous) in my ears like the rhythmic snore of a narcoleptic city I found a taxi driver who assured me we would find an open hostel. We did not. To be fair he was good about it, drove me to several with no success, and didn’t rip me off, or try to touch me. (Maybe 31 hours is too well marinated even for northern brazilians or maybe it was the Jesus bumper sticker).

We pulled up outside a hotel near the dock where a man stood in the green glowing half-light behind some security gates. After a slightly panicked discussion on behalf of the taxi driver the guy agreed to let me and my bags sit behind the gates until the city was kicked awake by the wet heat of the sun.

The man, typical in his northern brazilian fashion for going around with your t-shit hiked up to your shoulders, sat reading a paper, resting it on the curve of his stomach, as a cat snuck in under the gate. The smell of urine permeated the lobby from the pavement and a hooker stopped by to ask for a light. Then another. Then another came up for a longer conversation. Eventually it dawned on me that there must be a back entrance to the hotel which was operating as a brothel. A cockroach crept out from under the counter, sheen and curious, waving it’s antennae and disappeared again as the round-bellied prostitutes walked by. One woman with a customer turned the corner to the back. She reappeared alone about ten minutes later hopping on one leg.

The man (or pimp) set about trying to extract some money from me. He wanted me to rent a room for 5 hours for $R50. I told him I didn’t understand (sometimes playing the dumb foreigner is an asset). Frustrated, he gave up. I wasn’t about to leave my bags, fall asleep, or take a shower until I’d found somewhere less red light district.

I sat there until 8.00am being eaten by mosquitoes and stared at by cockroaches. The pimp left for the bakery and locked me in. A woman came down to set up for coffee and unlocked the gate. I took my chance and my bags before the guy came back to try to separate me from my money with another rent by the hour offer.

Eventually, trudging around the streets with my bags through the skin melting humidity, over the broken pavements, passing the once grand houses of the rubber boom I made it to a hostel. I asked the guy at reception if he had a bed. ‘No’ he answered as I looked at him in despair after 5 hours in a brothel, 31 hours in a bus, and 2000km. ‘Only joking’ he said.

Bothel with the dock across the road

*I read somewhere Toulouse Lautrec enjoyed the natural whiffs of a woman and licking the armpits of prostitutes from the Moulin Rouge (or it may be that I have been reading too much Henry Miller).

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Buenos Aires - A Day in the Life of a City

2011-11-30T05:50:00.000-08:00

Click on the pictures to see them better.

La Boca - Early morning, people set up stalls in a tourist bubble surrounded by a very bad area.

La Boca - A painter with no hands and others getting ready for the tourists

La Boca - An American tourist strikes a pose. Ready to conquer. (With his camcorder)

La Boca - A gypsy figure sits in gloomy eternal stagnation

La Boca - Tourists have their picture taken with tango dancers

La Boca - Tango dancers for sale

La Boca - Two of the city's many itinerant dogs make their rounds

La Boca - One of the neighbourhoods many poor inhabitants makes his way through the tourists trying not to be noticed. A dog rolls in the sun trying to exchange charm for leftovers.

On Sarmiento street Mario goes about his business fuelling Argentines on their way to work in the city's financial district

The excellent strong coffee gives quite a kick and they find entertainment talking to a slightly lost tourist

A man by the door sits gloomily at the register waiting for exiting customers to pay - Spending his days outside of the activity an observer of cake scoffers and coffee guzzlers.

A tank sits proudly preening it's camouflage on the grounds of the Ministry for Defence

A Kid in The Hidden City looks over his shoulder

A Chilean anthropologist safeguards her treasures in the Museo Etnográfico Juan B. Ambrosetti in Barrio San Telmo

Angry Pottery

A Tray of Eyes

A Flamingo Hat

A Small boy looks over the Falklands or Malvinas war memorial in the sunlight.

Alem looks over the British clock tower

Music is played on the streets all over the city but here outside La Recoleta Cemetery they serenade the dead

A street food vendor smiles as a tourist accidentally tells him he has a pretty face

Apples sit in a sticky bed of toffee and popcorn

Elsewhere a one eyed street food vendor tries to short change an American as his cook shouts at her customers and threatens to burn their burgers.

Cyclists take over a street to promote awareness to the beeping annoyance of car drivers. A photojournalist takes her chance.

In a run down and crime ridden area a shrine to Gauchtio Antonio Gil sits. A saint by popularity, canonised for having his throat cut, posthumously curing a child and for sleeping around.

The Spector of Diego Maradona's youth haunts the city walls.

Modernist graffiti - Beauty born of desperation in a bad neighbourhood

A long boarder, Hare Krishna, knife collecting, harmonica playing, Star Wars fan and tattoo artist looses his head.

A not altogether sober Irish woman photographs his knives and later mistakes a policeman wearing a plastic hat for a statue.

Lovers embrace in the park

One of the many wild cats who reside in La Recoleta Cemetery - In ancient Egypt they were symbols of fertility, protection and motherhood. Here they keep company with the dead and make homes of neglected mausoleums.

Shadows cross a sleeping general's gave like sabre wounds.

Effigy of a dead man looks out over his coffin in a forgotten tomb

Marketers misjudge their audience and ask them to make a wish - La Recoleta Cemetery

On the footstep of a mausoleum - La Recoleta

La Recoleta Cemetery

Someone sneaks into an abandoned tomb and, trying not to disturb the coffins, imagines what it's like to take residence permanently.

Many tombs are forgotten with no one but tourists to visit them - La Recoleta Cemetery

La Recoleta Cemetery

Angels and the moon - La Recoleta Cemetery

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Couch & Slum

2011-11-24T12:05:00.000-08:00

Fresh from the train I walked bag-laden through the quiet, early morning streets of Palermo, Buenos Aires, and watched the evening’s last drunks make their way home picking up cigarette ends as they went. Green trees lined the streets and the remnants of old style Spanish architecture reminded me that Jorge Luis Borges and Che Guevara had lived in the once quite neighbourhood or Barrio. Now it’s a fashionable place with boutiques and cafés, street culture and a bohemian vibe.

I rang the buzzer, freshly baked pastries in hand, and wondered what to expect. Down came a very tall, tattooed, barefooted Coloradan called Cate, my first couch surfing host. A social movement where, through the internet, people offer travelers their couch to stay on so they get the inside view on the place they are visiting and can exchange ideas and cultures.

Cate - Getting a design for another tattoo

Cate is a photographer and recovering journalist as she puts it. She has a masters in anthropology, a vocation in photography, infectious curiosity and a passion for making the world a better place.

Her apartment is lined with beautiful and fascinating pictures. A house in Chile, a man wearing a rubber hat from a fashion shoot, a cityscape, her life and her art on her walls.

She also has a cat. His name is Magellan and I’m sorry to say he’s bad tempered and quite evil. Cate says his temper is a sign of over breading. I had other suspicions:

Could his swiping claws and malign eeeeaaaahhhwwweerrrrs be due to a permanent hangover? (Sorry Cate)

Currently she is working on her project about women in South America who have HIV/AIDS . It’s a big problem here she told me and says that mostly they get it from their partners who have slept around. She didn’t want to portray the women she’d met as dejected with the visible marks of their illness, but alive, fighting and optimistic in the face of death. It’s love, joy, and courage she captures in their faces.

Here is her website

Apart from this and about a hundred other things she has on the go she also volunteers two days a week in the slums or villas and let me come along to one of the classes in (or at least near) La Ciudad Oculta or The Hidden City.

It’s official name is Barrio General Belgrano after the man who created the Argentine flag. He is considered one of the main Libertadores who freed Argentina from Spanish Rule in the Argentine Wars of Independence. It’s ironic then that in 1978 the government built a wall around the area so that foreign media and visitors during the upcoming world cup wouldn’t see it’s poverty. It’s 16,000 inhabitants lost and shut out, an entire neighbourhood blacklisted from society. Today the main occupations there are crime and collecting rubbish to be recycled. Drugs, violence and crime are endemic, it’s humanity turned in on itself.

The biggest problem is Paco a cocaine derivative which is smoked. It’s highly addictive and often cut with harmful chemicals and toxins. Cocaine flooded into Argentina from Bolivia and Brazil especially during the financial crisis of 2001. Barrio General Belgrano then picked up another title, that of Villas Miserias translated as city of misery.

However, there are some independently run government subsidised schemes to try to improve the situation. Cate helps out at one such scheme called Ojo de Pez at Centro Conviven a community centre where kids from the area get to learn about photography. They are also given money or a becca to motivate them to attend and to help pay for travel costs and equipment etc.

Centro Conviven - Community Centre

Everywhere you go in Buenos Aires art, especially street art, spills out and over the streets. Argentines are passionate people who love beauty even in desperation and poverty.

This was the first time the girl on the right joined in with the other students. Usually she is surly and a loner. Earlier in the class she waved a lit cigarette lighter at a boy in a joke attempt to set him on fire.

Play-acting for the camera - Trying to recreate scenes from school.

I found these kids to be lovely, normal teenagers. If people from outside the slum, which includes prospective employers find out where they live they are discriminated against. It's very difficult for them to fight against the perspective others have of them.

Texting in class endemic in teenagers everywhere

Crackers and sweet mate at break time for breakfast

I accidentally dropped some change. They immediately started to ask me for money. Then they were interested in song lyrics and then wanted to know how to talk about marijuana in English.

This kid sometimes comes to class without having slept the night before as you can see from the next picture.

I wondered what hardships these kids have to face every day and what their futures held for them.

Having an interest in travel photography, I left them with a copy of these and other pictures . They were both shy and keen to be photographed.

After a few more days with Cate I found this graffiti on a wall in Palermo. It looks uncannily like her though she swears she isn't running around Buenos Aires stencilling pictures of herself. I left her to her many projects, continuing to put her personal safety at risk to help and document the lives of others. It left me grateful for the opportunities I have had in life and for luck in meeting good people as well as inspired to do more charity work while on the road.

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Three Stoned Canadians

2011-11-23T06:38:00.000-08:00

14 hours, about 900km, one puppy-rescuer, some sheep and one ex-narcotics cop later. I found myself in El Bolsón. A small, hippyish, strangely planned village surrounded by the snowy Andes. After wandering around the streets in the dark I found a hostel with the aid of a kindly pharmacist who wrung her hands in worry for the errant traveler who had ambled in to ask for directions. At the hostel I found a hot shower, a warm room all to myself with a double bed and The Three Stoned Canadians (downstairs, not in the bed, that was later).

Robbie, Brian and Dan

At that point they were still sober checking their iphones and watching Top Gun on TV. They overheard me asking for beer and after that home-brew, The Doors, Gene Simmons and cheese ensued. Once we’d left the hostel they immediately pulled out a pipe and lit up some weed. They told me they were from Saskatchewan and that there is so little to do there and it’s so flat and windy that everyone smokes weed. I suppose they felt right at home in Patagonia:

Patagonia

Robbie and Dan have been friends for many years and work together in an outdoors shop. Brian is studying neuroscience at university, is a mixed martial artist and likes to suck his thumb when he goes to sleep. They take hiking very seriously and were very worried over the fact that Brian had lost his hiking trousers. I reminded them that Mount Everest was conquered in a wooly jumper but they didn’t seem convinced. They were spending some months traveling around South America and had already been to Iguaçu Falls, on the Argentine side, where they’d found some fireworks, went into the Jungle, blew up some apples and scared the locals.

We went to a micro-brewery nearby. El Bolsón has quite a few restaurants which brew their own selection of beers. It was good. Too good. So good the rest of the evening descended into half-remembered randomness. Luckily I took photographs.

We ambled through the little strangely shaped park and ended up in a bar with some live music going on. There we made new friends:

Making Friends

Found Argentina’s answer to The Doors:

And found the Argentine Gene Simmons:

Dan, Robbie and the Argentine Gene Simmons

Somehow we made it back to the hostel and spent time in the garden chatting with dogs. I became mildly fascinated by Robbie’s 70’s lumberjack hairdo. It really was time for bed and I was ready for beer induced oblivion, commonly known as passing out, when there was a knock at my door. A hand appeared waving some cheese. The cheese looked tempting, the hand mysterious. Dan and Brian leaped into the room with an offering of cheese and crackers (Robbie was facedown on his bunk). Brian promptly stuffed the cheese in his mouth and they didn’t have any crackers. I think the pictures will better describe what was going on:

Dan and Brian

I was about as blurry as these pictures so chucked them out.

It was the first time in Argentina that I had hung out with fellow travelers. Normally I like to be as far away from other tourists as possible but it was good to have a laugh and see how other people like to travel.

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The Valley of Ashes

2011-11-08T10:23:00.000-08:00

It’s day time but darkness descends. The power cuts out and a fine dust covers the earth like a blanket.

Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano Ash North of Bariloche, Argentina

(Click on the pictures to see them better)

On 04 June 2011 the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile near the boarder with Argentina erupted. It had erupted before in 1960 spreading the valleys with ash for three months before it became dormant again. Volcanoes can keep throwing out ash for decades while the people who live in their shadows have to make do. This time 3,500 people were evacuated into temporary accommodation, while others refused to leave their homes. The once white and pristine Andes were overcast with black volcanic clouds while the smell of sulfur lingered in the air.

In October I traveled to Bariloche and saw the mountains covered in a hazy veil.

Bariloche - The Mountains in the distance look like they are covered in fog but it's volcanic ash.

Between there and Neuquen there was much more.

Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano Ash North of Bariloche, Argentina

Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano Ash North of Bariloche, Argentina - A farm in the valley

Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano Ash North of Bariloche, Argentina - A horse stands in the water

Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano Ash North of Bariloche, Argentina - The Rio Azul (Blue River) in the backround

Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano Ash North of Bariloche, Argentina

Ash can effect, machinery, airports and flying, weather patterns may be altered and breathing becomes problematic. It’s not all bad however, (when not inhaled) as it contains essential minerals and trace elements which eventually makes the soil fertile.

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The Adventure in the Idea

2011-11-08T02:29:00.000-08:00

‘You are loco’

In the kitchen of the hostel the manager looked bewildered as I told her about my day over a plate of spaghetti while her dogs slept by our feet:

The image I had of Patagonia was of tough, sun-browned gauchos with workers’ hands, riding sturdy horses while herding cattle through The Pampas. Somewhere between inspiration and delusion the image turned into idea and I decided to find a gaucho and borrow a horse.

Hungover, remembering the tender eyed recommendations of Mauro, a man with a heart full of homeland, led to sitting on a bus with a mess of rowdy Argentine teenagers, on the way to Lago Puelo. Spotting a gaucho on a horse I made for the exit. By the time I had reached the place where he’d been, he was gone, and I was lost somewhere between El Bolsón and Lago Puelo. I found a dirt road and, walking in the direction of the lake, met Maurito. A gaucho, tough, sun-browned, framed by the mountains, his history in his face...horseless.

Maurito - A Gaucho - Lago Puelo - Argentina

This was his house, a cabana, or wood cabin. The area known as the 42º Parallel has a micro climate which makes it a bit warmer than it otherwise would be. Communication difficult, I tried to imagine what life is like for an old, horseless gaucho when he can no longer work. I hoped he had family and covered his rough hand with mine in useless affection as I said goodbye.

Cabana - Lago Puelo - Argentina

Lago Puelo or Puelo lake is about 4km outside the town which is also called Lago Puelo by it’s 5,000 or so inhabitants. In the holiday season it’s a busy spa with activities and restaurants. In October it’s desolate, work is left half finished and houses are abandoned. It’s perfect in it’s stillness. I made my way past the people-less cafes and information office, to find the lake and walked along the beach.

The Beach - Lago Puelo - Argentina

There was a lone Argentine family there with a camper van. The couple reclining on the sand by a fire while two boys played by the water.

It took sometime but eventually I found a trail leading up one of the forested mountains. When I got to a natural rocky veranda this was the view:

Lago Puelo - Argentina

Lago Puelo - Argentina - The Andes over the lake

The park was not as vacant as I’d thought. It has healthy populations of puma, wild boar, huemul, pudú, fox, ferret, American mink and mountain cat among others. Didn’t see any though. Probably my blood alcohol content was too high for me to make an appetizing meal. Hot, I headed back down and decided to go for a swim in a secluded part of the lake.

My toes wriggled in the pebbled sand. A cool breeze came through the corridor between the snowcapped mountains and swept in over the ancient lake. It made music of the trees and scatted the images reflected in the water. The lake was long ago carved out by a glacier, the water that collects there now slowly makes it’s way through Chile into the warm embrace of the Pacific. It’s the smallest National Park in Andean-Patagonia, only 23,700 hectares, and I, an even smaller speck in this small park was standing on the shore, completely naked.

The water was cold and soon my limbs began to feel like ghosts and I wondered how I still had control of them. It was like being part of the lake, belonging there and nowhere else, peaceful, primordial and free.

A good spot for skinny dipping

I got dressed and made my way back along the beach where I found another gaucho on a horse with his dog. I tried to talk to him but he looked scared and rode off. Perhaps he sensed I was after his horse.

Gaucho - Lago Puelo - Argentina

Later, I heard the sound of galloping hooves behind me:

He really didn’t want to talk.

So my adventure ended, not entirely successful but certainly satisfying.

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Lost and confused at 20,000ft

2011-11-02T16:41:00.000-07:00

Gate 16. Some days, I don’t know what to do with myself. Maybe I have something on my mind and time stretches out like a rubber band which keeps snapping back in my face. Sometimes it’s that terrible mixture of routine and awareness that makes me feel like my life is slipping through my fingers, like sand through an hour glass. Sometimes I find myself in the waiting room, something is about to happen but I don’t know what. A wrestling match between anticipation and disorientation. This was the frame of my mind while waiting for the flight to Buenos Aires to be announced at the black hole of departure gates known as 16, Sao Paulo Airport. Every time I go there I always have gate 16 on the ticket and it is never gate 16 I leave from. It’s the place where flights are lost, consumed and reborn again into digital reconfiguration.

This is Brasilia Airport. I couldn't take a picture of Gate 16 SP due to the light sucking properties of the black hole and a phenomenon known as spaghettification.

This is what French anthropologist and fan of The Ivory Coast Marc Augé called a ‘non-place’. A place of transience, not for stopping in but for moving through. He says, summed up by Guardian Journalist PD Smith, ‘the anodyne and anonymous solitude of these non-places offers the transitory occupant the illusion of being part of some grand global scheme: a fugitive glimpse of a utopian city-world. ‘ Well if this is utopia then all I can say is that we have had an imagination bypass somewhere between there and dystopia. If utopia is equal to homogeny then I vote for the glorious mess of dystopia

While doing an MA at Dartington College of Arts (before it merged with Falmouth) we had a couple of guest lecturers. They took Augé very seriously. They attempted to make a non-place into a place by getting married at a motorway service station. A somewhat extreme endeavour in the pursuit of their concept of modern art. Mind you their other project was collecting bottles of piss truckers throw by the side of the motorway to save time stopping for a loo break.

Back at gate 16 the flight details were nowhere to be found. Equally illusive were the entire staff of GOL Airlines. I was attempting to harass some information out of a laconic security guard when a lady came up to us with the same problem. It had been changed to gate 27. However, in this section of the airport the gates only went up to 20. To get to 27 you had to go out through security which is not possible without serious injury and/or arrest. Together we figured out that we had to wait at gate 20 and eventually they would open it and we could go through to 27. We sat there directing other travelers looking for the path to gate 27.

She was a Brazilian lady of the middle aged variety. Quaffed, buffed, bejewelled, painted, highlighted, tottering on heels with jeans and frilly top combination. We chatted about Buenos Aires, she’d been there many times before. She gave me advice in a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese which mostly related to shopping. Then she told me that I was not going to get the bus to the city centre but that I would get the shuttle with her. Not only that, when she asked where I was staying and I told her ‘in a hostel’ she told me that I would be staying at the same hotel as her. I wondered if I had misunderstood. She took out her phone and began to call her hotel to book a room...for me. I had given no indication I wanted to stay anywhere but in the hostel I had already chosen. I put it down to other people frequently mistaking me for wholesome and in need of help. Sometimes this is helpful sometimes unwarranted and annoying. As to the wholesomeness I’d say it’s possible to contain degrees of opposition within the same space and I like surprising people.

The conversation ran dry when she saw I was not going to to be taking the shuttle or staying at her hotel. Then another very similar lady came over and sat between us. She flashed a look at me and my kindle, sizing me up for importance according to wealth. I was surprised to hear this new lady announce to the previous one that she was going to stay at her hotel and they busily began rearranging room bookings. Is it so awful traveling alone? Why were they there alone if that’s not what they wanted? Maybe we were are all feeling the pull of time against non-space. From that point on they talked continuously. The newcomer asked ‘what about her?’ and she jabbed her pen in my direction. The reply was an embarrassed ‘she doesn’t want’. I got an annoyed huff and disapproving look from the pen jabber. They resumed their chatter.

I have problems with people who talk incessantly. They don’t want a conversation as much as someone to throw their words at. Nothing makes me feel more invisible. The newcomer asked if I was American. ‘Irish’ I corrected her. She looked put out. They don’t like being corrected. It reminds them you are actually there.

Two chatty and slightly bossy Brazilian ladies, Sao Paulo Airport

Approaching Buenos Aires I had an overwhelming feeling of misery, loneliness and fear. Emptiness like an insidious disease crept over me in nauseating waves. Lost and confused at 20,000ft. Maybe the two ladies I had met weren’t such a mystery. Maybe it’s what they were trying to avoid. You can try to plug up the holes with the company of other people and distractions or you can hold on, ride through it and believe that however bad things are they always change.

In travel as in life feeling occasionally awful is normal. You can try to distract yourself out of it or you can stop and allow yourself to feel whatever it is you’re feeling. I find it goes away much faster that way. When you travel long-term you are bound to find yourself in difficult places, emotionally, physically and maybe financially too. It’s always comforted me to believe in the inevitability of change and to value all experiences not just the good ones.

I passed the two ladies browsing in duty free and went to catch a bus to the city centre with a load of Ecuadorians. I didn't know it then but within 24hrs I would be standing alone on the shore of the Atlanic in Patagonia feeling contented and happy again.

Patagonia

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Hitchhiking Patagonia

2011-10-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

Argentine Flag

(Click on the pictures to see them better.)

It’s not that easy to have an adventure. The tourist routes in many countries are so well established that you need a bit of ingenuity and determination to take yourself off the beaten track. Keep in mind that the tourist route is easy. Adventure isn’t. An adventure means taking the risk that you will find yourself caught between discomfort and uncertainty. You have to trust in yourself and in other people to get through. Unless you have ceased to give a damn. There are those kinds of travelers too.

So, I had spent the previous evening with a man who turned out to be a puppy-rescuer, in Puerto Madryn, and had with me one small bag and an idea. I would hitch across Patagonia, starting from The Atlantic, ending in The Andes. It's a great way to travel for free though obviously you have to be sensible about it. I hadn’t hitched since I was eight (but that’s another story) and quickly realised that there are logistical problems to overcome to do it successfully. You can’t hitch from the middle of a town for example. People are less likely to pick you up and to be going where you want or going on long journeys.

I took the bus south to Trelew. The Welsh came here when the chips were down in the homeland and carved out a niche. When entering Trelew you will be greeted by a statue of...can you guess? Sheep. (Of course, what else). It’s quite a big town which was bad for me as I needed a route out. I took the bus to a small Welsh town not far away called Dolavon. There I found an old flour mill, occasionally operational for touristic reasons, and scattered with relics of the past. Alone, having wandered to the top floor, walking above the mill through the dusty light shafts I imagined the Welsh settlers bringing their prized possessions to the desert, filling the land with sheep, recreating their home in someone else's backyard. Spiders now make their home where men once labored to feed their families. It was quiet as the desert.

Flour Mill Relic - Cash Register

Once Upon a time in Patagonia

I went to the bus station, ate half a sandwich, kept the rest for dinner and went to the loo to dig out my swiss army knife. The girl at the counter gave me directions to RA25, the road that leads across Patagonia. I walked out of town for about half an hour. It was exciting and nerve-wracking. It was not holiday or tourist season but I hoped that I would find a friendly trucker or, if lucky, a family making the journey.

It was 14.30 this was the road I waited on

There were few cars. Alone on the road waiting for kindness or serious trouble, depending on the outcome, is a lonely place to be. In fact we are always standing on this precipice, you never know what life has for you around the corner. It's just that sometimes this is more evident than others. Pitting yourself against fate purposefully, makes the ground beneath your feel seem less than solid.

Around my corner, that day, came two indians walking out of the desert towards Dolavon, and me. They looked startled and confused to see a woman alone on the empty road trudging along against the raging Patagonian wind. I had my army knife ready, but what I would have done with it I’ve no idea, it made me feel better. I passed them, heart beating, gripping tightly, trying to look intimidating and like I knew what I was doing. They kept going but looked back often gesticulating about something. Perhaps they were discussing how best to either rob or rescue me. On a lonely road quite a few possibilities of impending disaster occurred to me. I was lucky. They kept going. The wind kicked up mini tornados in the distance and the sand it bore chafed my skin raw.

Few cars passed and of those that did none stopped, so I scribbled a sign with ‘Las Chapas’ on it. My mind ticked over. I could go back to Dolavon and see if there was a bus back to Trelew and stay at a hostel. I could unpack my sleeping bag and crack open my SAS handbook for some open air camping. I could walk to Las Chapas and see what was happening there. On the rudimentary map I’d gotten from the tourist office it was the closest place from Dolavon going west and I thought it would increase my chances. It's at times like these I find myself inclined to believe in higher powers, but that passes fairly quickly. A white pickup sped passed but stopped at the last minute. I ran up to it and peered in the window. A hefty looking middle aged man peered back and asked me where I was going before I could ask him the same question. He got out, took my bag and put it in the back of the pickup. Bandit? Mass-murderer? Ravager of lone Irish women? Too late to turn back, I got in.

Mauro Ariel

His name was Mauro Ariel. Tentative conversation, on both sides, filled with anxiety, uncertainty, nervous questions and nervous laughter. Once that was done with, we got on great. Turns out he works for the electricity company and has to travel a lot for his job. He lives in Lago Puelo in The Andes and was heading that way to surprise his wife. I ask if he would take me all the way to the mountains and he was happy to. We passed Las Chapas which, it turns out, is nothing more than a shack in the vast expanse of the landscape.

He seemed very concerned for my welfare. He tried to give me food and hot maté, he asked if I was warm enough and gave me advice on how the car doors unlocked, reminded me to put my seatbelt on and what to look out for if I were to hitch again. He not only works for the electricity company but used to be a narcotics cop who left because he didn’t want to get shot again. He pulled out his laptop to show me his passion for photography and we discussed this common interest at length and as much as the language barrier allowed. Relief! I'd found another lovely Argentinian.

He waved or beeped at the occasional car that passed, sheep crossed the road and managed to do so just after one of the rare corners in an otherwise straight road. Red shrines are placed at intervals by the devout to praise their saints, who must have long forgotten this place. Mauro say’s they are ‘catholic fundamentalists’. We followed the Chubut river for a few miles which leaves green in it’s wake in a land where red and brown prevail. Guanaco wandered in groups blending in with their surroundings. Even here old people are to be found driving painfully slowly and erratically. I felt incredibly grateful and lucky to be there and to not be fending off any criminal, psychopathic, lift-givers which, was a bonus.

Patagonia and old people

As we headed west we were slowly ascending from the sea to the mountains. We went through a valley with flat-toped mountains (even they can’t withstand the wind) striated with red and yellow rock under an enormous sky. When the sky opened the rocks glistened in the rain and reminded me of the slate gray of the Welsh mountains.

His love for this land made his eyes shine with emotion and he talked of The Falklands War. He made sure I new that actually, in Argentina, it’s called The Malvinas War. He still has some small animosity towards the English but explained it was also a case of an unpopular government trying to distract it’s people. I explained that Margaret Thatcher had similar reasons and how she was jeered out of parliament. He was quite happy about that.

It wasn't just the English who put the names of these young men on marble. They were sent to Patagonia for training with insufficient food and clothing. Many died there due to the negligence of their own government. Patagonia is beautiful but also deadly. With such vast emptiness, changeable weather, and lack of shelter, it was too easy to imagine the sad and needless end that some of the Argentines came to.

The Malvinas War Memorial - Buenos Aires

Mauro was also a big fan of music and motorbikes. He was surprised when I told him I trained as an opera singer and rode a motorbike through Europe. He says riding a motorbike is his dream. He is full of dreams.

U2 played on the stereo, The Streets Have no Name:

We're beaten and blown by the wind

Trampled in dust

I'll show you a place

High on a desert plain

Where the streets have no name

Together we sang it at the top of our lungs, laughing and racing though the plain.

Patagonia towards The Andes

He asked: Are you traveling...Is it spiritual quest?

I laughed: No. I know who I am. It’s just that who I am and where I was didn’t mix so I had to get out.

We stopped for oil and met some Mapuche indians. While the decendents of the white settlers pass through here to more habitable places the indians eak out a living selling trinkets. It's not fair, is it? A small child selling handmade flint key rings circled the car. Mauro surprised me by buying me one as a gift. He wouldn’t let me give him money for petrol or get anything for him at the shop.

Patagonia The Snowcapped Andes in the distance

Eventually we got to the Andes. The temperature dropped and the light began to fade. I watched the scenery pensively. There is something about all that space, and emptiness. It's a shock coming from a culture which is 24/7 consume. Where silence and being alone is rare. Some people go into the desert and go mad others make sense of themselves. For me it's like the relief of silence after an explosion.

Mauro asked: Are you in Love?

Road to the Mountains

The Patagonian soul seems a romantic one full of dreams and kindness to errant strangers and/or puppies.

Sunset Over The Andes

He put on some Argentine music by Gustavo Cerati and I had a strange feeling that we were about to be abducted by aliens:

He dropped me off in El Bolsón, not far from Lago Puelo, hippie central of The Andes, at about 21.00 and sped off into the night to surprise his wife. Another lovely Patagonian met and more still to come. Tired but exhilarated I found a hostel and encountered The Three Stoned Canadians. But that’s another story...

This post is part of the BootsnAll 30 Days of Indie Travel Project

The Argentine Puppy-Rescuer

2011-10-13T17:47:00.000-07:00

Buenos Aires

It was 19.55 and the bus still hadn’t been announced and wasn’t on the board. I was at the Retiro in Buenos Aires waiting for the bus to Puerto Madryn which was due to leave at 20.00. Near me I saw a man. All in black. With a beard. Looking nervous. Naturally I decided to ask him if he was going the same way. His face lit up when I talked to him in my broken Spanish and he replied in excellent English. Not an axe murderer then I thought to myself.

His name is Mike and he has lived in Puerto Madryn most of his life. He’s very friendly and we get on famously. He tells me the bus is about an hour late but when he looks more closely at my ticket he tells me that we are on different buses and that I need to go ask at the office. I lug myself and my bag to the first floor where the lady at the desk exclaims at my predicament and frantically calls the bus driver. I’m not sure why she has launched into a panic because as far as I can tell the bus hasn’t arrived yet. Then the man, also working at the desk, approached and started pointing, jabbing the air with a fraught expression on his face. I see my bus called ‘The Penguin’ pulling in. I wander off to the gate with the attendant following. He makes distressed hand signals in the direction of The Penguin. Mike is there waiting for me. He wants to make sure I get on the bus ok and gives me his number before I leave with an offer to stay on his couch. The man whose sole job it is to take my bag from my hand and move it a meter into the bowls of the bus demands a tip and then scowls at me when I give him two pesos.

20 hours on a bus in Argentina isn’t as bad as it sounds. They are big, well organised have comfortable, reclining seats, provide food and drinks and, if you’re lucky, they might put the telly on so a short Argentine man wearing mostly leather can croon at you. They have an excellent website called Plataforma10 where you can see all the companies, destinations and the cheapest fares. (Also try Omnilineas) Andesmar is a good one to go for and if you are going from Buenos Aires and it’s not high tourist season then you can get the ticket cheaper by buying it at their office in the Retiro (Estacion Terminal de Omnibus) a couple of hours before you go. My new hobby however, is stealing toilet paper. Make of that what you will.

The window frames the endless desert which is punctuated only by some low scrub bushes, the occasional mimi-windmill, farm gate, horse, cow, and excitingly, tumbleweed. The sun sinks into the wasteland and I watch the stars in the silky darkness as we pass under them.

Patagonian Desert

I’m woken in Puerto Madryn when the bus-hostess guy makes his round, shaking people by the knee. With effort I pull my face into it’s customary position and smile at him. It takes some time to come out of the bus induced catatonia. I walk to the sea and look out over the Atlantic, ridiculously grateful for the cup of hot maté in my hand, and desperate for a shower. I give Mike a call who comes and finds me.

Three things normally happen to me when I’m in a new place. 1) I end up in a supermarket 2) someone asks me for directions 3) someone tries to sit on me. I had just given directions to a Spanish tourist who looks a lot like Margaret Thatcher and doubt whether she will enjoy Argentina. Mike takes me to the supermarket to buy some food as he has none due to being in Buenos Aires for two weeks with a friend who is recovering from cancer. We get to his flat and I meet his dog , Lana, who sits on me.

I have a long-awaited and much appreciated shower as he makes spaghetti. While we eat he tells me about himself. It turns out I must have found the only (mostly) vegetarian, teetotal, metalhead, computer gamer, puppy-rescuer in Argentina.

He found Lana a year ago when she was starving, flea-bitten and close to death. There are large quantities of itinerant, ownerless dogs in Argentina, in varying degrees of health.

This is Lana now:

Lana - Rescue Dog

I ask him what he’s most proud of in his life and his response is:

‘Lana’

He tells me that people in Patagonia are nice to each other because life here is hard. When he was born in 1984 his mother wanted to call him Michael but the military dictatorship in charge had an approved list of baby names and Michael was too English to be on it. She settled for Miguel but it’s why everyone calls him Mike.

I tell him about my plan to hitchhike across Patagonia. He is very concerned and helps me with some hitchhiking vocabulary:

Helpful Hitchhiking Vocabulary

More of a futon really

We fold out his sofa and I get my sleeping bag sorted. He asks if I’ve had enough to eat, am I warm enough, do I need anything? Reluctantly I knock on his door in the morning and present him with a cup of hot maté. He’d been up most of the night playing games on his computer. He and Lana walk me to the bus station and he asks me about five times if I need anything or if there is anything he can do. He tells me to be careful and to call him if I get into trouble. His last word’s to me are:

‘As my mother always says “watch out for werewolves”’

Mike and Lana

Puerto Madryn is an unspectacular town, it’s best attraction is the local wildlife (didn’t see any werewolves). People of a voyeuristic bent come here to see whales humping, penguins canoodling and amorous sea lions. This is the Atlantic coast and I determine to make it across Patagonia to the Andes by the end of the day. I'm just not sure how...

Atlantic Coast - Patagonia

P.S. I’ve since heard from Mike that he has rescued another puppy and is looking for a good home for her.

This post is part of the BootsnAll 30 Days of Indie Travel Project

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Corruption. Ole!

2011-09-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

Click on the pictures to get a better view.

Brasilia. Brazil - Protest Against Corruption

It’s easy to forget that until about 1974 Brazil was a dictatorship. Not until 1985 did it become fully democratic. This might explain why it is difficult to find any news of the postal strike that is happening at the moment and the fierce antipathy towards anyone who is less that effusive about Brazil. There is some censorship in the media like the postal strike and recently there was a bad train crash in Rio, the company tried to hush it up but due to camera phones and the internet the news channels got the real story. This week they have also been reporting about a Judge who was assassinated in Rio. She was leading an investigation into some police who were operating a vigilante death squad in their time off. They murdered her and it’s a good sign that everyone is shocked.

Brasilia. Brazil - Protest Against Corruption

7th of September and it’s Brazil’s national day. A day for celebrating independence, military parades and flyovers. The students of the city have chosen this day to protest against corruption, they are very well organized and 30,000 people show up wearing black to support the march. Their anger was triggered by the news that federal deputy Jacqueline Roriz was filmed receiving money in exchange for favours given by her father, Joaquim Roriz, who is high up in the Federal District Government. She did this before she was made federal deputy and the majority of the government voted to let her keep her job and not to sanction her as she had received the bribes before she came into office. Corruption here is widespread with politician’s wives siphoning off food money for impoverished children to buy whiskey and perfume. Read more here.

So now you know why everyone was there...

It’s hot. Sweltering and dry. Some people carry umbrellas to hide from the sun. Other entrepreneurial types push trolleys through the heat, selling beer, water and ice creams made out of exotic fruit. There is a party atmosphere as we march down Brasilia’s main avenue. The official parade and organised events are happening on the other side of the road across the grass. So it ended up being government organised celebrations on one side and protestors on the other side.

Protesting side of the Avenue:

Protest side

Tall offices and government buildings line the avenue they have banners on them saying something like: Building Brazil’s future is on our hands. Government advertising. People boo and shout at them as we pass.

Government side of the avenue. There aren’t many people there. It’s a bit of a flop:

Brasilia. Brazil - Protest Against Corruption

On the plus side, they have locked up the children for safety:

Brasilia. Brazil - Protest Against Corruption

Eco-conscious Brazil instead of getting rid of mass dependence on plastic bags and imported goods I suspect they are making these kids jump in an effort to generate electricity. This might explain the power cuts I’ve experienced.

I think we annoyed the military...

Brasilia. Brazil - Protest Against Corruption

Ok, only kidding not bombers but Brazil’s version of the red arrows. They are fantastic and my heart contracts in delicious terror as one of them cuts his/her engine and enters a free fall restarting at the last moment.

There are a few characters attending the demo:

Superman

V for Vendetta

Scary Movie

Military Type

Quite a few people brought their dogs

Enough!

Why not wear bin liner on your head? It's only 35 Degrees

And some clowns:

On a Bike

Clown (Not a Dwarf)

Policeman Clown

Here are a couple banners:

This one is saying that the Roriz family should be sterilised

This one isn't complimentary either.

We round the bottom of the hill and make our way past the senate building. Suddenly people begin to break through the barriers and rush the senate. We end up in the pond in front of the building where many police have stationed themselfs. They yell and throw water at them chanting something I don’t understand but I recognise the word ‘whore’. I try chucking some water at the police but I’m not an angry or aggressive sort of person and am a bit embarrased about it. So my attempt ends up being a bit unconvincing and touristy, but at least I gave it a go.

Rushing the senate - Police wait

Cyclist Joins in - Not sure why he brought his bike

This girl is shouting 'whore' at the top of her voice.

Throwing water at the police

Water fight

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Samba in the Dust

2011-09-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

Gathered Around the Samba Table

It's a club for the employees (not the diplomats) of the ministry of foreign affairs. Clube dos Servidores do Itamaraty, in setor clube sul seems built in a kind of no man’s land. A basic bar with an extended tin roof amid the red savannah dust. It’s midnight and under the roof there is a long table around which men and women sit. Men on one side singing, playing instruments and women on the other side singing, flirting and drinking Cachaça. People crowd around to get closer and watch them make their music - a classic samba carioca. The heat of bodies in close contact warms the evening as they move with the rhythm. I love it and feel like I have found the heart of Brasilia.

We get some beer and stand by the table to watch. Mr. X tells me he’s taking dance lessons - Forro and Samba. He’s finding the Samba hard going and says ´I can learn the steps but we will never have rhythm like the Brazilians´. But rhythm isn’t cultural it’s there for everyone who can let go enough to find it*. Somehow, in the last few years I discovered I could dance. Not a particular dance, my dance, a fusion of salsa, belly dancing and something else, joy, maybe.

Around the Table - Samba Club

It takes a while to loose the awkward fish out of water feeling. I head to the bar to get some more beer but can’t see a queue though I know there is supposed to be one. There is a break in the crowd at the bar and I head for it. A guy starts up a conversation. He is good looking, in his forties, his is name is V and he speaks in French. He’s here with his friend who is rubbery faced and trying to prop up the wall. The wall post turns and waves some money at the bartender and soon an enormous bottle of beer arrives for me. V and I try to chat though it’s difficult with a mix of broken French and Portuguese on my side. He rests his hand on my waist and I let him because that’s what people do here. I see Mr. X and pull him over, proud, that I have found him a fellow French man. (he is French, Italian). It turns out that V is actually Brazilian and works in the Ministry for Culture. His drunken friend is the Brazilian Minister for Science and Technology. I say bye to V and his friend in the cheek-kissing way that is customary here and feel something wet on my jaw bone. Mr. X looks upset and indignant on my behalf; he asks if the minister tried to kiss me. I don’t know and think about the wetness on my jaw.

Around the Samba Table

I go back to the table with Mr. X and his friend and strike up a conversation with a guy called Georges who knows all the musicians, I introduce him to Mr. X. Soon V is standing beside me and commandeers our beer bottle with the pretence of holding it for me. I don’t mind because I’ve had enough and don’t want to get drunk. We dance and our dancing is punctuated by his exclamations of ´vow!´ (translated as ´wow´). I feel a tap on my shoulder and look down to see a short guy beaming at me. V waves him away and I like him a bit less for his imperious hand gesture. He pulls me closer but I’m not here for that, I’m here to dance. ´vow!´. I let the music take over, the rhythm seeps into my bones and I feel free. Dancing is like not existing sometimes. It´s oblivion. It’s like being suspended in a moment. ´vow!´

It’s time to leave and V frantically writes his number on some paper. As we don’t have a common language I guess that if I were to call him our conversations would be strictly...physical.

When I get home I see my shoes are covered in fine red dust and throw away the number.

*Unless you’re tone deaf, in which case you’re buggered.

Information:

Club: Clube dos Servidores do Itamaraty
Location: Setor clube sul, Brasilia, Brazil
Time: Unknown. Once a month, maybe the last week of the month or maybe every full moon. There is an email list that goes around to employees which tells you when but I don't know what it is, try to befriend a diplomat or go there and ask. Don´t go there before midnight.
Fee: None, you can donate if you like
Beer: Yes

Samba Carioca - Club for the employees of the Foreign Ministry.

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