Wednesday, 8 October 2008
END
I came back. I was sad. I started a course in post-graduate journalism at Cardiff University. I finished it. I am here.
Monday, 16 June 2008
Mostly about confectionary
Off bus, friendly taxi driver, bag on shoulder, sleepy shuffle through hostel door, few deep breaths, sign in and...
The Peruvian President, our hosts clucked, was in town, laying the first block of a new museum outside the Temple of the Sun. So, before you could say, "An attempted rape scene? At five in the morning? I mean, come on, man," we were utterly not sleeping. Instead, we were out in a taxi and scooting off towards the Pre-Inca ruins of the Moche civilization.
Of course, President Garcia was gone - long gone - by the time we got there. But Clara, of Casa de Clara, our hostel, would give us a "special price" for Michael, her moustachioed husband and trained guide, to take us round the temples.
Michael talked lots. Very garrulous, he was. His guiding repertoire included a string of pre-prepared jokes and a dusty collection of fisher-price philosophical digressions. At one point, he described every tiny individual drawing on a huge, crescent phantasmagoric mural. It took about ten minutes. It was painful, painful. Michael did his best to make the fascinating ruins, which were being further excavated even as we wandered round, seem pretty damn dull. Nice guy. Bad guide. We went back to the hostel and rested.
(The Moche, incidentally, were pretty interesting chaps. They worshipped the mountains, like the Incas who would subsume them, were big on priests, and were burdened with a vast array of very weird, very demanding gods, plastered reverentially over the ancient walls - and frequently appeased with big, fat, messy, mass human sacrifices.)
The Peruvian President, our hosts clucked, was in town, laying the first block of a new museum outside the Temple of the Sun. So, before you could say, "An attempted rape scene? At five in the morning? I mean, come on, man," we were utterly not sleeping. Instead, we were out in a taxi and scooting off towards the Pre-Inca ruins of the Moche civilization.
Of course, President Garcia was gone - long gone - by the time we got there. But Clara, of Casa de Clara, our hostel, would give us a "special price" for Michael, her moustachioed husband and trained guide, to take us round the temples.
(The Moche, incidentally, were pretty interesting chaps. They worshipped the mountains, like the Incas who would subsume them, were big on priests, and were burdened with a vast array of very weird, very demanding gods, plastered reverentially over the ancient walls - and frequently appeased with big, fat, messy, mass human sacrifices.)
But now, while we're resting there, in Casa de Clara, after visiting the Moche temples of the sun and moon, it's surely a propitious time to discuss the confectionary of South America.
THE TOP FIVE CONFECTIONARY PRODUCTS OF SOUTH AMERICA
5. THE PUSH POP (with Spray)
It turns out that the sweets of my teenage years never actually died; they just moved to South America. Remember push pops? They were crap. Really, really, crap. Basically a stick of phallic, flavourless, hardened candy that you could push up and down within its plastic sheath. Vaguely sexual, really - and not nice at all. But in South America, you see, they come - sometimes; you have to seek them out - with a spray attached. And this spray is a bunch of flavoured chemicals sloshing about a little container. It lasts forever and it tastes of liquified push pop concentrate, strong and sharp and tangy. You can have competitions to see who can do the most sprays in their mouth in a row before they start watering from the eyes or wigging out on the E-numbers. It's fantastic. The push pop is fun to suck on for nostalgia value - but, honestly kids, it's all about the spray. The blue flavour is particularly reccomended.
Available in: Bolivia and Argentina
4. GELOBUGS
A gourmet sweet this one. Little nodules of gelatine filled, in a little squidgy parcel at top, different in colour to the main sweet - and this, internet, is the good bit - with a fluorescent 'fruit juice'. You only get about seven sweets in your tiny yellow bag, and they're quite expensive. But oh boy when you pop that little chap in your mouth and masticate it until the juice seeps out, man, you just know you're heading back in to the shop to buy another two packs and screw it Andy I'll have enough change because the bus fare probably isn't that much anyway.
Available in: Argentina
3. SOUR SKITTLES (Lime green packet)
I have a problem when I return to England, because I can't go back. Never again can I purchase a packet of regular, red skittles. I've tasted the sour ones. And I can't go back. Not ever. It's like owning a dishwasher. Once you've owned a dishwasher, washing dishes in the sink is - well, it's just horrible. You feel cheated. Filled with regret. Folorn. Sour skittles, then, are the dishwasher to the regular skittles sink. Andy and I were on a packet a day through most of Peru - and some of Bolivia. Sour skittles. They look like regular skittles that have been coated in sugar and they are just bursting with sour flavour and there are raspberry ones and strawberry ones and watermelon ones and apple ones and lemon ones. Andy likes watermelon the best; my preference is raspberry. Each flavour, though, has its merits. I live in hope that they have been made available in the UK during my absence, and here in Argentina my roving eye still searches the tiendas for them, though their time, I know, has passed.
Available in: Peru, Bolivia
2. NERDS
Nerds! You must remember nerds. I'd get them from Mr Polly, just outside the school gates, probably most afternoons for over a year, back in the days when all the girls were taller than all the boys and football at lunch time was the only thing that mattered. And then they disappeared. But in South America, you can get FOUR different packets, each with TWO flavours, in SEPARATE compartments, which are IMPOSSIBLE to open without ripping. It's magical. Combinations include watermelon punch and wildberry, and strawberry and grape. But the best ones are the sour ones: atomic apple and lightning lemon. You get lots in your pack; enough to make you feel quite sick if you eat them all in one go, actually - but it's worth it. It's definitely worth it.
NB. Internet research suggests there is a shop in Kent which still imports them. Lucky Kent, I say.
1. THE EGOCENTRICO
We bought for the name. We stayed for the taste. Without a doubt the greatest ice-cream on the continent. Think Feast, but cylindrical, with vanilla ice-cream, and a much bigger chocolate centre. And the great thing was that the chocolate centre varied. Sometimes you'd get a bad one that crumbled as it met the stick, and sometimes you'd get one that was so huge it crowded out the ice-cream and kept going right down to the base. The outside shell was crunchy chocolate with chippings of nut. I would get whingy if I went more than a few days without one. I miss them, internet. I miss them every day. And when I think that I might never go back to Peru and taste one again oh dear god it makes me want to weep.
Available in: Peru
Finally, Bolivia deserves extreme kudos for being - so it seems to me - the only country in the world, other than the UK, that sells Salt and Vinegar crisps (Pringles). For that, and many other reasons, it will always be my favourite. And I don't even care that they cost almost as much as a steak. You go Bolivia. Go Bolivia. Go.
THE TOP FIVE CONFECTIONARY PRODUCTS OF SOUTH AMERICA
5. THE PUSH POP (with Spray)
It turns out that the sweets of my teenage years never actually died; they just moved to South America. Remember push pops? They were crap. Really, really, crap. Basically a stick of phallic, flavourless, hardened candy that you could push up and down within its plastic sheath. Vaguely sexual, really - and not nice at all. But in South America, you see, they come - sometimes; you have to seek them out - with a spray attached. And this spray is a bunch of flavoured chemicals sloshing about a little container. It lasts forever and it tastes of liquified push pop concentrate, strong and sharp and tangy. You can have competitions to see who can do the most sprays in their mouth in a row before they start watering from the eyes or wigging out on the E-numbers. It's fantastic. The push pop is fun to suck on for nostalgia value - but, honestly kids, it's all about the spray. The blue flavour is particularly reccomended.
Available in: Bolivia and Argentina
4. GELOBUGS
A gourmet sweet this one. Little nodules of gelatine filled, in a little squidgy parcel at top, different in colour to the main sweet - and this, internet, is the good bit - with a fluorescent 'fruit juice'. You only get about seven sweets in your tiny yellow bag, and they're quite expensive. But oh boy when you pop that little chap in your mouth and masticate it until the juice seeps out, man, you just know you're heading back in to the shop to buy another two packs and screw it Andy I'll have enough change because the bus fare probably isn't that much anyway.
Available in: Argentina
3. SOUR SKITTLES (Lime green packet)
I have a problem when I return to England, because I can't go back. Never again can I purchase a packet of regular, red skittles. I've tasted the sour ones. And I can't go back. Not ever. It's like owning a dishwasher. Once you've owned a dishwasher, washing dishes in the sink is - well, it's just horrible. You feel cheated. Filled with regret. Folorn. Sour skittles, then, are the dishwasher to the regular skittles sink. Andy and I were on a packet a day through most of Peru - and some of Bolivia. Sour skittles. They look like regular skittles that have been coated in sugar and they are just bursting with sour flavour and there are raspberry ones and strawberry ones and watermelon ones and apple ones and lemon ones. Andy likes watermelon the best; my preference is raspberry. Each flavour, though, has its merits. I live in hope that they have been made available in the UK during my absence, and here in Argentina my roving eye still searches the tiendas for them, though their time, I know, has passed.
Available in: Peru, Bolivia
2. NERDS
Nerds! You must remember nerds. I'd get them from Mr Polly, just outside the school gates, probably most afternoons for over a year, back in the days when all the girls were taller than all the boys and football at lunch time was the only thing that mattered. And then they disappeared. But in South America, you can get FOUR different packets, each with TWO flavours, in SEPARATE compartments, which are IMPOSSIBLE to open without ripping. It's magical. Combinations include watermelon punch and wildberry, and strawberry and grape. But the best ones are the sour ones: atomic apple and lightning lemon. You get lots in your pack; enough to make you feel quite sick if you eat them all in one go, actually - but it's worth it. It's definitely worth it.
NB. Internet research suggests there is a shop in Kent which still imports them. Lucky Kent, I say.
1. THE EGOCENTRICO
We bought for the name. We stayed for the taste. Without a doubt the greatest ice-cream on the continent. Think Feast, but cylindrical, with vanilla ice-cream, and a much bigger chocolate centre. And the great thing was that the chocolate centre varied. Sometimes you'd get a bad one that crumbled as it met the stick, and sometimes you'd get one that was so huge it crowded out the ice-cream and kept going right down to the base. The outside shell was crunchy chocolate with chippings of nut. I would get whingy if I went more than a few days without one. I miss them, internet. I miss them every day. And when I think that I might never go back to Peru and taste one again oh dear god it makes me want to weep.
Available in: Peru
Finally, Bolivia deserves extreme kudos for being - so it seems to me - the only country in the world, other than the UK, that sells Salt and Vinegar crisps (Pringles). For that, and many other reasons, it will always be my favourite. And I don't even care that they cost almost as much as a steak. You go Bolivia. Go Bolivia. Go.
Friday, 13 June 2008
A Bus Journey to Trujillo
There was a bit of a scrap on our night bus to Trujillo. A guy was adamant he had paid and lost his ticket, was refusing to pay again. Watching the scene unfold through the window, shouts muted by a shroud of half-sleep, it was all very entertaining. Then a guy in a red T-shirt went for the ticketless chap with a stick. That seemed a bit unnecessary. A policeman was leaning against his car and just watching it all. This appears to be the move policemen in South America are most fond of.
Earlier, we had been treated to The Girl Next Door in dubbed Spanish - lapsing sporadically into English when the colours on screen liquified. This sounds bad, but was a nice change from the usual South American bus-movie-diet of Steven Seagal flicks; I must have seen Under Siege four times by now - and around five of Seagal's other 'films'.
(So you don't have to watch any of them, what happens is Seagal goes to a place where there are people of different ethnicity to himself, learns their fighting techniques, and defeats the baddies USING THEIR OWN MOVES BETTER THAN THEY CAN! Also, he sports a pony-tail that makes you want to cry and call his mother.)
Another film came on at around half five in the morning, slicing my slumber time down to around four hours, and containing - oh, yes, internet - a pretty graphic attempted rape scene. Sure.
It was called, I think, The Condemned, and was a WWE production starring Stone Cold Steve Austin and many other wrestlers. And Vinnie Jones. Yes, Vinnie was there, dubbed into Spanish, swishing a knife about. Naturally, The Condemned was watched with horrified fascination by the numerous children on board. I spent the next twenty minutes watching some young Peruvian minds disintegrate.
Ah, but outside the window, away from Steve and Vinnie and the traumatised faces of wide-eyed kids, we were travelling through a desert. Green scrubs pocked the barren brown and - with appropriately filmic feel - a lone, ravaged dog trotted past, heading from nowhere to nowhere.
A cop slumped down next to me. You could have bottled his odour and called it Swarthy Musk. Stevedores and builders would wear it and it would have a small cult following of women. The cop became the third person of the very young day to stamp on my bare feet. I let him off because he had a gun and could doubtlessly take me. Instead of protesting, I returned to the window; the desert was beginning to misbehave.
Great black crags ruptured up from the arid floor. On top of one, the dirty white shell of a building sat, ill-advised, rightly-abandoned, justly-alone. This was good. This was as a desert should be.
But then, suddenly, sprouting out from the dusty wastes, were endless fields of long, swaying, green corn. Now, this was just not on. Deserts were not supposed to behave like this. This was my first desert and it should act like one. But it would not. The landscape: lush green corn, dead desert, lush green corn, dead desert, lush green corn, dead desert. On the desert sections, the buildings by the side of the road looked like burnt-out husks from an apocalyptic Western's finale. But, frankly, it wasn't good enough.
I decided, then, that this would not count as my first desert.
A week or so later, Huacachina would behave properly.
Earlier, we had been treated to The Girl Next Door in dubbed Spanish - lapsing sporadically into English when the colours on screen liquified. This sounds bad, but was a nice change from the usual South American bus-movie-diet of Steven Seagal flicks; I must have seen Under Siege four times by now - and around five of Seagal's other 'films'.
(So you don't have to watch any of them, what happens is Seagal goes to a place where there are people of different ethnicity to himself, learns their fighting techniques, and defeats the baddies USING THEIR OWN MOVES BETTER THAN THEY CAN! Also, he sports a pony-tail that makes you want to cry and call his mother.)
Another film came on at around half five in the morning, slicing my slumber time down to around four hours, and containing - oh, yes, internet - a pretty graphic attempted rape scene. Sure.
It was called, I think, The Condemned, and was a WWE production starring Stone Cold Steve Austin and many other wrestlers. And Vinnie Jones. Yes, Vinnie was there, dubbed into Spanish, swishing a knife about. Naturally, The Condemned was watched with horrified fascination by the numerous children on board. I spent the next twenty minutes watching some young Peruvian minds disintegrate.
Ah, but outside the window, away from Steve and Vinnie and the traumatised faces of wide-eyed kids, we were travelling through a desert. Green scrubs pocked the barren brown and - with appropriately filmic feel - a lone, ravaged dog trotted past, heading from nowhere to nowhere.
A cop slumped down next to me. You could have bottled his odour and called it Swarthy Musk. Stevedores and builders would wear it and it would have a small cult following of women. The cop became the third person of the very young day to stamp on my bare feet. I let him off because he had a gun and could doubtlessly take me. Instead of protesting, I returned to the window; the desert was beginning to misbehave.
Great black crags ruptured up from the arid floor. On top of one, the dirty white shell of a building sat, ill-advised, rightly-abandoned, justly-alone. This was good. This was as a desert should be.
But then, suddenly, sprouting out from the dusty wastes, were endless fields of long, swaying, green corn. Now, this was just not on. Deserts were not supposed to behave like this. This was my first desert and it should act like one. But it would not. The landscape: lush green corn, dead desert, lush green corn, dead desert, lush green corn, dead desert. On the desert sections, the buildings by the side of the road looked like burnt-out husks from an apocalyptic Western's finale. But, frankly, it wasn't good enough.
I decided, then, that this would not count as my first desert.
A week or so later, Huacachina would behave properly.
Wednesday, 21 May 2008
Filth and Trickery and Sand and Schizophrenics
Reading music festival and Peru are dissimilar. Within seconds of entering both, however, one is offered drugs. In Peru, one is also offered sex.
Stunned, I attempted levity, and pleaded tiredness. But the chap wasn't going for that. And my "maybe later" gags were also being met with more seriousness than I had intended. In the end, we half-walked, half-ran away with a taxi driver who was also babbling at us. No safety though. He and his fluffy-moustachioed compadre seemed anxious to push women on us as well, calling out to senoras as we trundled past on the tuktuk (called a mototaxi in Peru). "No, no, God, no," I whimpered, trying to disappear into my seat.
But we got to a hostel without any further problems, went out and had pizza in a little restaurant where the owner was very jolly and laughed lots and lots, looked at all the bats that lived in the trees on the plaza and went "Ooooh", tried to find somewhere to get a Magnum ice cream, failed, and went to bed. This is what we did.
The next day we headed out toward the bus station but were stopped by a huge parade in the Plaza de Armas. Army troops were lined up along the square, a group of suits were looming by an important looking doorway, and, as we passed, hunched under our backpacks, a sextet of policeman began a langurous frogmarch out to the centre. We sat down on the Cathedral steps to watch.
It was all terribly exciting: a series of flag-hoistings and bellowed songs before a guy stuffed into his green military attire whistled at us to be upstanding; it was the national anthem. The only words I remember are the shouted "Viva Peru!" at the close. And then everyone paraded round - first the army, then the big-band school kids (one of them, bless her, couldn't do the spinny baton thing and was clearly very conscious of it), then banner-holding kids. ("We have the right to an education", "We have the right not to be abused," read a couple. Andy and I agreed wholeheartedly.) After the kids came matching-T-shirted adults, who didn't so much march as stroll as far as the waiting ice-cream vendors and then disseminate in chaos.
The army continued to march stolidly through the tangled mass. We followed them out of the square. And then we started to make mistakes.
Our first mistake was to decide we felt too lazy to walk to the bus station and get in a taxi; our second was not to think it weird that the taxi driver had a friend with him, sat in the back. Our third mistake was to get worried when these friendly, friendly chaps started telling us there was a protest on the road today and there were no buses and recently tourists had been all stabbed and whatnot and it was all terribly dangerous and most people flew straight from Quito to Lima (I knew that wasn't true. Lots of mistakes were made, I tell you.)
Our fourth mistake was to allow our worry to create trust in the taxi driver and his friend, who would kindly take us down to the beach resort of Mancora for a good price.
Our fifth mistake was not to argue harder when they kept insisting gas was 100 soles.
Sixth mistake: paying for the gas. Seventh: not getting out at a checkpoint when we had seen that buses were - lo and behold! - heading down the Panamericana. (In fairness, we were unlucky: for the first twenty minutes of the trip, when we were trying to decide what to do, not a single bus passed. If one had, we would have got out and saved our pennies.)
But enough mistakes. We knew we were getting screwed and there was very little we could do about it. In truth, the journey itself was not unpleasant. The road, for starters, was beautiful - huge seabirds and vultures wheeling and eddying about an ethereal yellow and brown landscape; and the beautiful blue sea - at last the sea - on our right. The conversation, also, was very interesting. Bad people, perhaps, lead more intriguing lives. Probably the most notable thing that came up was that the guy in the back was going to go and fight for FARC in a couple of years. He and the taxi driver both reckoned that Chavez would pay him around a million soles for two years work. I was dubious, but they were both steadfast. Scandalous, eh.
The point when I really gave up on the twenty quid they wanted from me was when I began trying to talk round the taxi driver. His riposte went something like this: "You go off to Mancora and Machu Picchu and Bolivia and wherever, and we stay here the whole time. And we need the money." And i just thought, Well, yeah, you're right.
Most of the fight went out of me then; a token effort upon arrival in Mancora to talk the price down was abandoned when an intimidated mototaxi boy we called over told us that we were being charged the right price. We all knew we weren't and I wanted, more than anything else, the two guys to just admit they were screwing us. But they wouldn't and we gave them the damn money and they left.
That is the worst thing that has happened to us on the whole trip. So we're doing pretty well, really. In Peru the guys who are being nicest and giving you the most advice on how to avoid thieves are often the ones whose hands are creeping towards your bag. Trouble is, most people, especially Peruvian women, are just genuinely helpful and lovely - and the necessity of being on your guard all the time means you might not be as friendly as you'd like. The amount of times I've probably been quite cold to a chap who just wanted to know if I liked Peru and shake my hand makes me quite sad when I think about it.
But anyway. Mancora. The touristy, uber-popular, hippytastic, surfer's paradise beach-resort of North Peru; a jumble of bars and restaurants splayed along the Panamericana with a fisher-price red-and-white-striped lighthouse overlooking them on the cliff behind. On the dusty path down to the beach, cheap cafes served a one pound set lunch menu with ceviche - raw fished doused in lime juice - as a starter. We quickly fell in love with Peru's most famous dish.
Our hostel room had cockroaches and an expired mouse in the bin. "There's a dead insect in my bed," said Andy stoically, while doing a cursory inspection. We loved it. It was right on the beach, had an air-raid-siren as a doorbell, and cost three pounds a night. Every evening, coming in from one of the bars, we would wake the owner at evil hour with a tonally-ascending whine that you could imagine heralding the end of the world. Then we would giggle and apologise our way to bed.
Everywhere were round black insects which would fling themselves at you from the air pointlessly and skitter - tictictic - along the floor when kicked. Apparently, a few weeks before we arrived it had been their mating season and they had been all over the streets in a swarming plague. That would have been worth seeing. It would have ruined the beach, of course, but plague-like scenarios are rare and one must, I feel, snatch at them when they arise.
Our four days in Mancora were a slothful drift of late mornings and late nights; days supine on the beach and evenings playing extreme Jenga and getting beaten at table football by lethal local barmen. (Honestly, this one guy could score from defence almost every time. He was a machine. In the end I hit upon the non-tactic of just juddering my arms at breakneck pace; this bought him down to a goal every four shots or so; it also annihilated my forearms.)
One highlight of these lazy days was a dog that dragged itself along the road with its two front paws, the back two bobbling in the dirt. "That's horrible," said Andy. "Yeah. I can't even look at that," I replied, grimacing. When we had passed the dog got up onto its four healthy limbs and trotted off. It was faking two broken legs and begging for food. This was one smart dog. If i had had anything to give it, the trick would have worked; I've no doubt that it works on many tourists every day. As I recall, it was pretty fat.
A more disturbing moment came in a family fast-food joint on our first night. The camarera was chuckling away at our ordering of yet more cheap and tasty burgers from the barbecue when a little girl emerged holding a toy gun. She proceeded to shoot the pretend hell right out of a little baby in a pram, now bringing the gun right up to its mouth - POW! - now hiding behind a pillar and loosing off a few rounds - BLAMBLAMBLAM! - all under the placid gaze of a policeman, sitting at a table with a very real gun dangling at his side. The baby burbled away happily, delighted at each and every extremely loud mock-assasination.
And then there was Nelson. Nelson was a schizophrenic who would dance the nights away on the Panamericana, gyrating outside the bars and occasionally heading in to encourage patrons to join him for a boogie on the road. "Every week," a local told us, "he has a different dance move." Now, Nelson was crazy but, crucially, he was happy-crazy. Everyone treated him really well, and judging from the way he was always looking off into the middle-distance and waving, he was forever playing to a large and adoring crowd; one that only he could see. We will never forget Nelson for as long as we live.
But the sunsets, internet! They were gorgeous, don't you know. From white to yellow to orange to red with the sun warping in shape as well as colour before plunging down into the horizon and then bleeding - bleeding so, so quickly - across the vast ocean.
The days in Mancora. They were idyllic days. But I cannot finish without mentioning a half-Columbian, half-English guy, who attempted to hit on our friends Jess and Steph, who we have bumped into around seven times now (it's a small world - and it's a smaller gringo trail). The pick of his many sumptuous lines was, "Touch my crystal. I want to feel your energy."
Go buy a crystal necklace and get out there folks. What's the worst that could happen?
Stunned, I attempted levity, and pleaded tiredness. But the chap wasn't going for that. And my "maybe later" gags were also being met with more seriousness than I had intended. In the end, we half-walked, half-ran away with a taxi driver who was also babbling at us. No safety though. He and his fluffy-moustachioed compadre seemed anxious to push women on us as well, calling out to senoras as we trundled past on the tuktuk (called a mototaxi in Peru). "No, no, God, no," I whimpered, trying to disappear into my seat.
But we got to a hostel without any further problems, went out and had pizza in a little restaurant where the owner was very jolly and laughed lots and lots, looked at all the bats that lived in the trees on the plaza and went "Ooooh", tried to find somewhere to get a Magnum ice cream, failed, and went to bed. This is what we did.
The next day we headed out toward the bus station but were stopped by a huge parade in the Plaza de Armas. Army troops were lined up along the square, a group of suits were looming by an important looking doorway, and, as we passed, hunched under our backpacks, a sextet of policeman began a langurous frogmarch out to the centre. We sat down on the Cathedral steps to watch.
It was all terribly exciting: a series of flag-hoistings and bellowed songs before a guy stuffed into his green military attire whistled at us to be upstanding; it was the national anthem. The only words I remember are the shouted "Viva Peru!" at the close. And then everyone paraded round - first the army, then the big-band school kids (one of them, bless her, couldn't do the spinny baton thing and was clearly very conscious of it), then banner-holding kids. ("We have the right to an education", "We have the right not to be abused," read a couple. Andy and I agreed wholeheartedly.) After the kids came matching-T-shirted adults, who didn't so much march as stroll as far as the waiting ice-cream vendors and then disseminate in chaos.
The army continued to march stolidly through the tangled mass. We followed them out of the square. And then we started to make mistakes.
Our first mistake was to decide we felt too lazy to walk to the bus station and get in a taxi; our second was not to think it weird that the taxi driver had a friend with him, sat in the back. Our third mistake was to get worried when these friendly, friendly chaps started telling us there was a protest on the road today and there were no buses and recently tourists had been all stabbed and whatnot and it was all terribly dangerous and most people flew straight from Quito to Lima (I knew that wasn't true. Lots of mistakes were made, I tell you.)
Our fourth mistake was to allow our worry to create trust in the taxi driver and his friend, who would kindly take us down to the beach resort of Mancora for a good price.
Our fifth mistake was not to argue harder when they kept insisting gas was 100 soles.
Sixth mistake: paying for the gas. Seventh: not getting out at a checkpoint when we had seen that buses were - lo and behold! - heading down the Panamericana. (In fairness, we were unlucky: for the first twenty minutes of the trip, when we were trying to decide what to do, not a single bus passed. If one had, we would have got out and saved our pennies.)
But enough mistakes. We knew we were getting screwed and there was very little we could do about it. In truth, the journey itself was not unpleasant. The road, for starters, was beautiful - huge seabirds and vultures wheeling and eddying about an ethereal yellow and brown landscape; and the beautiful blue sea - at last the sea - on our right. The conversation, also, was very interesting. Bad people, perhaps, lead more intriguing lives. Probably the most notable thing that came up was that the guy in the back was going to go and fight for FARC in a couple of years. He and the taxi driver both reckoned that Chavez would pay him around a million soles for two years work. I was dubious, but they were both steadfast. Scandalous, eh.
The point when I really gave up on the twenty quid they wanted from me was when I began trying to talk round the taxi driver. His riposte went something like this: "You go off to Mancora and Machu Picchu and Bolivia and wherever, and we stay here the whole time. And we need the money." And i just thought, Well, yeah, you're right.
Most of the fight went out of me then; a token effort upon arrival in Mancora to talk the price down was abandoned when an intimidated mototaxi boy we called over told us that we were being charged the right price. We all knew we weren't and I wanted, more than anything else, the two guys to just admit they were screwing us. But they wouldn't and we gave them the damn money and they left.
That is the worst thing that has happened to us on the whole trip. So we're doing pretty well, really. In Peru the guys who are being nicest and giving you the most advice on how to avoid thieves are often the ones whose hands are creeping towards your bag. Trouble is, most people, especially Peruvian women, are just genuinely helpful and lovely - and the necessity of being on your guard all the time means you might not be as friendly as you'd like. The amount of times I've probably been quite cold to a chap who just wanted to know if I liked Peru and shake my hand makes me quite sad when I think about it.
But anyway. Mancora. The touristy, uber-popular, hippytastic, surfer's paradise beach-resort of North Peru; a jumble of bars and restaurants splayed along the Panamericana with a fisher-price red-and-white-striped lighthouse overlooking them on the cliff behind. On the dusty path down to the beach, cheap cafes served a one pound set lunch menu with ceviche - raw fished doused in lime juice - as a starter. We quickly fell in love with Peru's most famous dish.
Our hostel room had cockroaches and an expired mouse in the bin. "There's a dead insect in my bed," said Andy stoically, while doing a cursory inspection. We loved it. It was right on the beach, had an air-raid-siren as a doorbell, and cost three pounds a night. Every evening, coming in from one of the bars, we would wake the owner at evil hour with a tonally-ascending whine that you could imagine heralding the end of the world. Then we would giggle and apologise our way to bed.
Everywhere were round black insects which would fling themselves at you from the air pointlessly and skitter - tictictic - along the floor when kicked. Apparently, a few weeks before we arrived it had been their mating season and they had been all over the streets in a swarming plague. That would have been worth seeing. It would have ruined the beach, of course, but plague-like scenarios are rare and one must, I feel, snatch at them when they arise.
Our four days in Mancora were a slothful drift of late mornings and late nights; days supine on the beach and evenings playing extreme Jenga and getting beaten at table football by lethal local barmen. (Honestly, this one guy could score from defence almost every time. He was a machine. In the end I hit upon the non-tactic of just juddering my arms at breakneck pace; this bought him down to a goal every four shots or so; it also annihilated my forearms.)
One highlight of these lazy days was a dog that dragged itself along the road with its two front paws, the back two bobbling in the dirt. "That's horrible," said Andy. "Yeah. I can't even look at that," I replied, grimacing. When we had passed the dog got up onto its four healthy limbs and trotted off. It was faking two broken legs and begging for food. This was one smart dog. If i had had anything to give it, the trick would have worked; I've no doubt that it works on many tourists every day. As I recall, it was pretty fat.
A more disturbing moment came in a family fast-food joint on our first night. The camarera was chuckling away at our ordering of yet more cheap and tasty burgers from the barbecue when a little girl emerged holding a toy gun. She proceeded to shoot the pretend hell right out of a little baby in a pram, now bringing the gun right up to its mouth - POW! - now hiding behind a pillar and loosing off a few rounds - BLAMBLAMBLAM! - all under the placid gaze of a policeman, sitting at a table with a very real gun dangling at his side. The baby burbled away happily, delighted at each and every extremely loud mock-assasination.
And then there was Nelson. Nelson was a schizophrenic who would dance the nights away on the Panamericana, gyrating outside the bars and occasionally heading in to encourage patrons to join him for a boogie on the road. "Every week," a local told us, "he has a different dance move." Now, Nelson was crazy but, crucially, he was happy-crazy. Everyone treated him really well, and judging from the way he was always looking off into the middle-distance and waving, he was forever playing to a large and adoring crowd; one that only he could see. We will never forget Nelson for as long as we live.
But the sunsets, internet! They were gorgeous, don't you know. From white to yellow to orange to red with the sun warping in shape as well as colour before plunging down into the horizon and then bleeding - bleeding so, so quickly - across the vast ocean.
The days in Mancora. They were idyllic days. But I cannot finish without mentioning a half-Columbian, half-English guy, who attempted to hit on our friends Jess and Steph, who we have bumped into around seven times now (it's a small world - and it's a smaller gringo trail). The pick of his many sumptuous lines was, "Touch my crystal. I want to feel your energy."
Go buy a crystal necklace and get out there folks. What's the worst that could happen?
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Leaving Ecuador
In Ecuador, we learned how to avoid being overcharged on buses. (Confronted with linguistically compromised gringos and the chance of a few easy centavos, many conductors would submit to temptation.)
The technique went thusly:
1. Consult the Footprint guide to get estimate of price.
2. Ask locals what the cost of the journey is: "Disculpe Senor(a). ¿Cuanto cuesta a INSERT DESTINATION HERE?" If too timid to talk to locals, watch how much they give to the conductor carefully.
3. Having learnt the precio, get the correct money ready and when the conductor comes up slap it into his hand and say "Para dos," oozing confidence.
4. Say "Gracias" and turn to face the window, or bury nose in book.
On our penultimate bus in Ecuador, down from the rain-sodden streets of Andean Cuenca to the sweltering heat of coastal Machala, we employed the technique - now well honed - and settled in for the long trip. Before long, a clutch of locals were nestled wobblingly between our legs; the bus was the busiest we have been on before or since - there was not an inch of space. I could not see the cloudforest out of the window, but could feel the crackly rise in humidity that announced it. A couple of seats away, one of the cutest kids we have yet encountered, hair forced by beaming father into a sticky side parting, shouted the sweaty hours away.
Machala bus station. A kid walked round with a three-litre bottle of water, flimsy cups stashed in his black plastic bag; a few glugs for a few centavos. He had a couple of takers. Meanwhile, beside us in the waiting room, a baseball-capped chap slumbered jerkingly.
Then we were on the bus and waiting - "Vamos! Vamos! Vamoooos!" shouted a couple of passengers, banging on the window. (This is standard practice in South America. I cannot imagine shouting, "Let's go! Come on! Let's go!" at a bus driver in England; but I confess to joining in with the locals a couple of times over here.)
And so ended our time in Ecuador. Our border crossing was trouble free: the bustly female conductor rushed us through Ecuadorian immigration, flirting with the two police officers cacklingly, and a wily kid helped us out filling in forms on the Peruvian side; we both gave him a well-deserved dollar.
We were in Ecuador for 50 days - the longest I have ever spent in another country. We tracked bears, climbed volcanoes, abseiled down waterfalls, damned ourselves to hell (by drinking alcohol on a holy day), got confused by a jam that promised to make you strong, were amused by some incredibly ineffectual guard dogs, failed to balance an egg on a nail at the centre of the world, fell slightly in love with our bear-tracking cook's daughter. And wielded flaming machetes.
Peru has been wonderful and Bolivia, where we have just arrived, promises to be similarly great. But I still often think about the little country where campesinos go on five day and five night puro benders; where the cars meander about the road in a snaky motorcade, ignoring lanes, vehicles, cliff-edges, sanity; where Saved By The Bell gets dubbed into Spanish - including the outtakes at the credits - for the pleasure of bus-journeyers; and where omnipresent pink-and-blue shellsuited Yogotas men sell ice creams from the huge plastic drums hanging at their stomachs.
And the guards lolling against walls outside department stores have guns bigger than your leg; and on every wall, inside and outside, is a huge beneficent Jesus, staring languidly down; and in every hamlet and every village and every town and every city is a volleyball court, or five, or fifty; and in every bus station the conductors roam the floor yelling, over and over, "Quito. Quito, Quito. Quito, QuitoQuitoQuitoQuito, QUITOQUITOQUITO!".
Here is a picture of a pig and a cat.
Sunday, 4 May 2008
Cuenca
To get to Cuenca we had to catch many buses.
Eventually the bilious switchbacks finished and we passed through a village where entire sliced and slashed pigs dangled from outside tiny wooden tiendas. A little further down the track, two unslashed and unsliced chaps snuggled together by the roadside, wearing porky grins; I hoped they wouldn't wander a little further uphill and behold their nasty dangling future.
And what a lovely city it was; more charming, attractive and compact than Quito. Ramshackle churches on every corner and beautiful dilapidated buildings hulking over the streets. Everything seemed to be slowly falling apart - but very, very prettily.
That night we went out to a bar with Lindsay and her friends. We got on well because Lindsay would talk lots and lots and we therefore didn't have to stretch - as we so often, alas, are forced to do when meeting new people - beyond our natural laconic borders. ("Do you guys get off on silence, or something," she asked us at one point.) Also, incredibly, Lindsay could use the words "cats" and "honeys" without sounding like an idiot. As in, "I could teach you cats some Spanish words to bag some honeys if you like". Superb. Just superb.
TOP 2 PHRASES LEARNED FROM FOREIGNERS ON TRAVELS TO BE INCORPORATED INTO LEXICON AT FIRST OPPORTUNITY
2. "Let's blow this popstand!" American. Meaning: Let us leave this below average establishment. (For example: "You wanna go? OK, let's blow this popstand!")
1. "Man up!" Australian. Meaning: I think you should act in a way in which more testosterone, more machismo, more, as it were, balls, are manifest. (For example: "Why don't you just man up and take me on, chuffy?")
The next day: a museum. Incas. Pots. Paintings. Poems. Fascinating things. In the gardens outside, I stalked birds with my camera, temporarily certain that I was an excellent wildlife photographer after at long last capturing a hummingbird on film. In the evening, we ate dinner at a pizzeria in which lived perhaps the most awful artwork I have ever seen. In garish colours, hung about the room, were portraits of Barry Gibb, Rod Stewart, Bono - and many other unidentifiable nightmarish visages, staring out with rictal grins. The worst, though, was a picture of a rubicund, completely naked blonde on a beach, striding along, pinkly leering at the diners. "Why?" we all murmured to each other in disbelief. "Why?"
Luckily, Jethro Tull's Locomotive Breath was on the stereo. This caused me to forgive everything.
At a bar after dinner in which every spirit could be mixed with chocolate in some fancy concoction, I decided to try the chocolate beer. I don't know what I expected. It tasted like chocolate and beer. It tasted terrible. I glared at it - thick brown sludge - until we left.
The next day, we set out for the border, heading over to the Terminal Terrieste with the greatest taxi driver ever to grace planet earth. This man was incredible. This man was unbelievable. This man, truly, deserved all of his dreams and desires to come true. He deserved a huge ceremony in which little children would scream and shout and horns would blare and trumpets would squeal and beautiful women would fashion idols of him in gold and silver and platinum and dance round them with red robes flashing through the air singing, "Hero, hero, heroooooo". This man, I tell you, he deserved the world.
His taxi was a rusting old banger; scarred inside and out. He wore a tight green baseball cap and his face was thickly stubbled around his permanently clenched jaw. He was, we quickly learned, almost deaf. He bawled at us as he got out of the car.
Hero Taxi Driver: (Right beside us, shouting) "De donde eres?"
Me: (Mishearing, frightened, thinking he was asking where we were heading, not where we were from) "Mancora, Peru"
Hero Taxi Driver: "Ah, Polca!" (Polish)
Me: "Er..."
Hero Taxi Driver: (To Andy) "De donde eres?"
Andy: (Regaining composure) "Inglaterra"
Hero taxi driver: "Ah, Ingles!"
The cab had no left indicator. When we had to turn left the driver would fling his arm out of the window and yell at the street. He would also do this when he wanted to overtake someone - which seemed to be all of the time - indicating with his fingers where the car should place itself (behind him). At junctions, on the rare occasions when he could not overtake without going on the pavement - yes, he overtook at junctions; he did this frequently - he would beep his horn repeatedly and shout at the windscreen and the cars in front. He got the finger from a guy in a van. He seemed surprised. I was not. The hero cab driver would also yell, seemingly randomly, at pedestrians, static cars by the roadside, and animals. Everyone seemed very shocked, but there was also a glint of recognition in their eyes. I suspect everyone in the city must have known him.
As a finale, just as we were pulling into the bus station, he screeched at a young child by the roadside to shut his car door. The car was by the side of the road, about ten yards from where we passed, in no way an impediment. To anyone. The kid looked terrified; Andy and I were in hysterics. As we slung on our mochilas, I gave him a long, long two-handed handshake.
He yelled that he hoped we would have a pleasant journey. And then he scurried back into his cab.
Monday, 21 April 2008
Baños
Baños was a gringo town, swarming with burnt-nosed Caucasians, nestled in a narrow valley, protected from Tunguruhua, an active volcano, looming over it, constantly coughing billows of thick ash, by a great slice of verdant mountain. The slice of verdant mountain had a long, thin waterfall. This cascaded down next to the thermal baths. The place was, then, unrubbish.
To see the volcano - and because we are bear-trackers, trained in walking - we scrabbled up the hillside, past some sleepy tapirs, to the pylons atop a huge pointy rock-wodge. Baños got tinier and tinier as we zig-zagged steeply up. But, long before we reached the ridge aimed for, we realised the clouds were going to foil us.
The clouds. They loved that volcano. They hugged it so tight. They would barely allow a glimpse. (They were still great, though. There were convex ones, dappled yellow, that suckled tight to the ridge tops like cake-icing, covering them completely.) Eventually, just enough air cleared for us to be able to discern which were volcano-coddling-clouds and which were spurts of mushrooming ash. It was enough: we had seen an active volcano.
A few days ago, as we lounged in the beach resort of Mancora, North Peru, Tunguruhua erupted again.
We saw just one person in the four or so hours it took to ascend. He was walking his dog; we gave him a wave, he waved back. Then we headed stutteringly downwards. The sun was sliding down the angle of the ridge, morphing from yellow to orange, and in the hazy valley swifts - little black and white ones - were dipping and weaving. Careening, really. One just missed my head, becoming the third bird to narrowly avoid a collison with me (the other two, for enthusiasts, were fighting hummingbirds on Tabla Chupa, Intag, Ecuador). Talking of hummingbirds, a few moments earlier, a little green fellow had lightninged into view above the ridge before zapping away. And, oh, also, there was an area of proper English woodland, complete with brown spines littering the floor and a piney smell, that we stumbled suddenly into and out of on the way down the mountain.
At dinner that night there was free pool while we waited for our meals. This is a theme in South America: free pool, free table football, and extreme Jenga and Connect 4 strewn around the bar. This probably doesn't seem like such a big deal, but to someone who has had to fork out a quid a game in Cardiff for the last few years, it's pretty special.
Next day: Canyoning. That is, abseiling down waterfalls. And blow me down did Andy and I look pretty darn super in our wet-suit get-up. Cor! It was lots of fun, but over too fast - and, without wishing to go all danger-junky, the waterfalls were quite small. Only afterwards did I realise the extent to which I had burned. Burned - and been savaged by mosquitos. For the next few days I wore an angry red skin-vest complemented by crusty orange welts speckling the ankles. I slept little. Now? Bite-free and golden brown, thank you internet; I sleep sandily but soundly.
Before we headed for Cuenca, our last stop in Ecuador before we hit the Peruvian coast, we felt we had to try the hostel's steam bath. After signing up for the 7.30am slot, we went for a pleasant visit to the sweltering thermal baths. An Ecuadorian Mackenzie Crook lookalike, clearly high on some drug, gurned at us from across the brown musty waters. Elsewhere, a viciously beautiful woman fondled her stoic boyfriend's immaculate face on the perch at the side of the pool. Other canoodling couples were not so pretty. Dipping one's head into the opaque pool was the best tactic when a giggling, droopy twosome embarked on yet another series of amorous ticklings.
We left, ate, went to bed, and scratched ankle through the night.
The steam bath. This little Ecuadorian chap placed us in wooden cuboids in which only our heads protruded. Think the robot designs of a three-year-old, or really rubbish-looking torture equipment. Then he left us and I got scared. A little lever inside the contraption altered the speed at which steam shot out from near your feet; but I was more concerned with just how the hell I was supposed to itch my face when my arms were trapped in a box. Blowing didn´t work - and there was the danger of saliva leakage, which would cause further itches. Meanwhile, my hair turned into gluey tendrils which stuck themselves into my retinas.
Luckily the Ecuadorian chap came back and released us, taught us the towelling down with cold water technique.
That was nice, I thought.
Then he put us back in the box.
This went on for a while: put in box; get itchy face; twitch face about in frustration at not being able to scratch; Ecuadorian man comes back; taken out of box; cold water towel down method.
But then subtle variations were brought in. One time, Andy got out of his box and with no warning at all the guy slung a big tub full of cold water over him. I was ready for that. But I wasn´t ready for the part where - after another five minutes itchiness in box - we were taken to separate rooms and instructed to sit down in a porcelain, curved inlet full of cold water up to the chest.
The Ecuadorian guy began to rub vigorous circles into my stomach.
"Wow," I thought. "I wouldn't have believed it was possible to win at life this much before breakfast. But here I am getting a stomach massage from a tiny Ecuadorian chap after being forced to sit in a robot box. Happy, as they say, days."
I was enjoying my stomach being rubbed so much that I wasn't really listening to what the guy was saying; didn't realise he was just demonstrating how I should do it until he was practically shouting at me. Eventually he saw that I finally understood and left. So I tended to my stomach alone for a while. Pleasant.
At the end we got a proper hose down during which we were instructed to assume lots of strange positions like some very wonky signalmen. For breakfast there were pancakes.
To see the volcano - and because we are bear-trackers, trained in walking - we scrabbled up the hillside, past some sleepy tapirs, to the pylons atop a huge pointy rock-wodge. Baños got tinier and tinier as we zig-zagged steeply up. But, long before we reached the ridge aimed for, we realised the clouds were going to foil us.
The clouds. They loved that volcano. They hugged it so tight. They would barely allow a glimpse. (They were still great, though. There were convex ones, dappled yellow, that suckled tight to the ridge tops like cake-icing, covering them completely.) Eventually, just enough air cleared for us to be able to discern which were volcano-coddling-clouds and which were spurts of mushrooming ash. It was enough: we had seen an active volcano.
A few days ago, as we lounged in the beach resort of Mancora, North Peru, Tunguruhua erupted again.
We saw just one person in the four or so hours it took to ascend. He was walking his dog; we gave him a wave, he waved back. Then we headed stutteringly downwards. The sun was sliding down the angle of the ridge, morphing from yellow to orange, and in the hazy valley swifts - little black and white ones - were dipping and weaving. Careening, really. One just missed my head, becoming the third bird to narrowly avoid a collison with me (the other two, for enthusiasts, were fighting hummingbirds on Tabla Chupa, Intag, Ecuador). Talking of hummingbirds, a few moments earlier, a little green fellow had lightninged into view above the ridge before zapping away. And, oh, also, there was an area of proper English woodland, complete with brown spines littering the floor and a piney smell, that we stumbled suddenly into and out of on the way down the mountain.
At dinner that night there was free pool while we waited for our meals. This is a theme in South America: free pool, free table football, and extreme Jenga and Connect 4 strewn around the bar. This probably doesn't seem like such a big deal, but to someone who has had to fork out a quid a game in Cardiff for the last few years, it's pretty special.
Next day: Canyoning. That is, abseiling down waterfalls. And blow me down did Andy and I look pretty darn super in our wet-suit get-up. Cor! It was lots of fun, but over too fast - and, without wishing to go all danger-junky, the waterfalls were quite small. Only afterwards did I realise the extent to which I had burned. Burned - and been savaged by mosquitos. For the next few days I wore an angry red skin-vest complemented by crusty orange welts speckling the ankles. I slept little. Now? Bite-free and golden brown, thank you internet; I sleep sandily but soundly.
Before we headed for Cuenca, our last stop in Ecuador before we hit the Peruvian coast, we felt we had to try the hostel's steam bath. After signing up for the 7.30am slot, we went for a pleasant visit to the sweltering thermal baths. An Ecuadorian Mackenzie Crook lookalike, clearly high on some drug, gurned at us from across the brown musty waters. Elsewhere, a viciously beautiful woman fondled her stoic boyfriend's immaculate face on the perch at the side of the pool. Other canoodling couples were not so pretty. Dipping one's head into the opaque pool was the best tactic when a giggling, droopy twosome embarked on yet another series of amorous ticklings.
We left, ate, went to bed, and scratched ankle through the night.
The steam bath. This little Ecuadorian chap placed us in wooden cuboids in which only our heads protruded. Think the robot designs of a three-year-old, or really rubbish-looking torture equipment. Then he left us and I got scared. A little lever inside the contraption altered the speed at which steam shot out from near your feet; but I was more concerned with just how the hell I was supposed to itch my face when my arms were trapped in a box. Blowing didn´t work - and there was the danger of saliva leakage, which would cause further itches. Meanwhile, my hair turned into gluey tendrils which stuck themselves into my retinas.
Luckily the Ecuadorian chap came back and released us, taught us the towelling down with cold water technique.
That was nice, I thought.
Then he put us back in the box.
This went on for a while: put in box; get itchy face; twitch face about in frustration at not being able to scratch; Ecuadorian man comes back; taken out of box; cold water towel down method.
But then subtle variations were brought in. One time, Andy got out of his box and with no warning at all the guy slung a big tub full of cold water over him. I was ready for that. But I wasn´t ready for the part where - after another five minutes itchiness in box - we were taken to separate rooms and instructed to sit down in a porcelain, curved inlet full of cold water up to the chest.
The Ecuadorian guy began to rub vigorous circles into my stomach.
"Wow," I thought. "I wouldn't have believed it was possible to win at life this much before breakfast. But here I am getting a stomach massage from a tiny Ecuadorian chap after being forced to sit in a robot box. Happy, as they say, days."
I was enjoying my stomach being rubbed so much that I wasn't really listening to what the guy was saying; didn't realise he was just demonstrating how I should do it until he was practically shouting at me. Eventually he saw that I finally understood and left. So I tended to my stomach alone for a while. Pleasant.
At the end we got a proper hose down during which we were instructed to assume lots of strange positions like some very wonky signalmen. For breakfast there were pancakes.
Thursday, 10 April 2008
Despues Los Osos (Part 2)
So we went down to Quilotoa crater lake and gawped and whispered and bathed deep in nature's magnificence; and then we climbed back up.
Later, we slept - very cold at 4000m, with sputtering stove.
There were no buses back towards the big road which takes one down through the mountains to the big towns. (There were not even any buses to the smaller roads, the give-you-jaw-ache roads, which take one, doubtlessly, to more little villages like Quilotoa, where there are many children who shout and dogs who bark and people who smile; to put it concisely, there were no buses at all.)
So we began to walk back towards Zumbuhua, the nearest village, 13km away. Pack-laden, it was going to be a hard trek, but the distant, ice-speckled ridge to our left was more than enough to keep spirits up for the thirty or so seconds it took for a truck driving past to offer us a lift ($2 each).
When we were bear-tracking, we would get a lift most mornings on the milk-truck, bumbling along on the rounds, waving at all sentient beings we passed, stood-up and holding tight to the central rail as more and more people jumped aboard amid the clanging canisters. We must have caught almost a hundred lifts on the back of trucks by now - and it remains fun every single time. There is no better way to see the country than speeding along, clinging to a wobbly post, hoping your arm doesn´t pop out of your shoulder socket.
The lift on the truck to Zumbuhua was a particularly special lift. Great green sudden thrusts of mountain pyramided up into the air all around. One peak - my favourite - looked exactly like a witch´s hat, kinked kookily at top and doughily crumpled at base. There were no clouds save thin, spiky ones hacking at hazy ridges in the far distance. It was perfectly clear above: pure deep blue with a white void of sun. And the road was smooth, well-maintained. A couple of locals hopped aboard and I attempted to keep my eyes open against the whipping, frigid wind. It was the best truck ride so far - though also the most expensive (Don Jose would charge us 25 cents for the lechero in Intag).
Zumbuhua Saturday market, just starting to get into full swing as we arrived, was a great deal more colourful than teeming Otavalo´s. Pink, red, and rainbow ponchos were particularly stinging on the eye - in contrast to the navy blue and white, plaited-pony-tailed and be-trilbied men and women of Otavalo market.
(A note on the trilby in Ecuador: a near-requisite for men over 40 and women over 25, before it appears most males gel their hair to a thick, oily slick - or wear a baseball cap. They are brown or green or sometimes dull black, and the most beautiful of females seem to spurn them. I want one, for mine - deep, dark blue - is on a bedroom shelf in England.)
The market took place on the main square, at the centre of which was a large rock, pasted with the plaza´s title. A badly-tuned radio blared out fuzzy Andean tunes across the whole village, but nobody seemed to mind. We wandered through the food-court section where perhaps twenty, perhaps fifty corrugated dogs scavenged beneath battered tables and benches. Trundling vendedors wound past - one selling light bulbs, the next plastic cups of red jelly festooned with a swirl of pink froth. Climbing the central rock, we watched a woman fry a truly enormous empanada while closer, leaning against our boulder, a group of identically-clad old men passed around shots of stinking purro. From the top of a nearby bus a sheep bleated over the hissing radio.
After savouring the sights, sounds and mostly smells of the market, we retired to a small park to sit and read - waiting for a bus back to the Panamericana. On the bench opposite, some small girls giggled as I tried to take a photo of them. Eventually, I managed to get a good shot of the tiniest one, later slung up and tied to the back of the tallest girl, wrapped into an oblong bundle using a yellow and black sheet.
While we sat and read, the girls slinked through some railings and played a game that involved bashing each other with sticks until someone fell over. When someone fell over - I suspect intentionally - they would be set upon by the three others and sat on and smashed some more with sticks; also, smothered in grass and leaves. It looked a good game. Back up at Quilotoa the day before, walking back from the lake, we had encountered a group of boys and a group of girls slinging huge clumps of mud at each other. As we passed, I watched a tiny chap, skittering away from the girls after a unstrategic assault, squeal with delight as a huge wodge of dirt disintegrated against his back.
And then we took a bus to Latacunga, another to Ambato, another to Banos (with he who sold the green-boxed Colon Cleanser).
In Banos, there were more great things. However, there were no DVDs as great as this one, found on the table of our hostel in Quilotoa.
Tuesday, 8 April 2008
On the day after we left bear-tracking we were in Quito and as we wandered back to our hostel I noticed a small boy, four or five years old,
staring down at the trail he had just urinated right out into the centre of the road. He looked simultaneously utterly shocked and quite pleased with himself. Nearby, the security guard of a shoe-shop idly traipsed his fingers down the silver barrel of his pump-action shotgun, and looked on impassively.
Top 5 Weapons The Police Carry In Ecuador
5. Nine-millimetre Handgun
4. Pump-action shotgun
3. M16-esque machine gun type thing
2. Really massive sword
1. Rapier
Top 5 Weapons The Police Carry In Ecuador
5. Nine-millimetre Handgun
4. Pump-action shotgun
3. M16-esque machine gun type thing
2. Really massive sword
1. Rapier
Monday, 7 April 2008
Despues los osos (Part One)
And so we left the casa de oso amid much hugs and the stench of burning swords - and we went to Otavalo.
Andy bought a poncho. It is big and blue and very nice indeed. I refrained, despite the great temptation of many lovely grey ones, and the come-hither smiles of gilt-toothed Otavelenos.
The next day we boarded bus and trundled down the sierra to Latacunga; the starting point for our trip to the crater lake of Quilotoa.
A DIGRESSION ON VOLLEYBALL
Everybody plays volleyball in Ecuador; and every settlement - from the tiniest church-and-two-huts hamlet to the sprawling megopolis of Quito - has at least one court. Quito, in fact, probably has thousands. Often people play for money. Sometimes as much as $50. Big bucks anywere - ridiculous here. The quality on show is usually good, but not excellent. Ecuadorians, on the whole, are really not tall enough for volleyball. Andy, at 6 foot 3¨, is at least a head taller than almost everybody.
In Latacunga, however, we came across a match, on one of many courts behind the huge fading market, around which were clustered hundreds of people, toes tight to the blue rope that marked the court´s edge. They play three people on each team here: a guy who sets the ball, a smasher/tipper and an all-rounder. In Latacunga, each side had an alpha male, who would spit insults in the vague direction of his teammates when a point was lost. At one point, red-t-shirt guy - the alpha of the younger, late-teenage team - squared up to the referee, pressing his nose into his face in that peculiar, slightly homoerotic way some guys do when they want to look like they want a fight - but do not actually want a fight. It was tense. There was a long break in play when an older gentleman in the audience started lecturing red-t-shirt guy. Would the lanky youth punch him in his wrinkled face? It turned out no. But man was the testosterone winging about. I felt that we were one bad refereeing decision away from a proper ruck.
And you would not believe how good they were. This one kid, he can´t have been any taller than 5 foot 9¨, would leap about twice his height to bash the ball right in the very corner, or prod it just a millimetre over the net. There were sneaky shots and cheeky shots and show-off shots and flukey shots, but mostly it was just really, really fast and agressive and impressive. In the end, the salmon-like kid walked off, fed up, I think, at the violence spilling about everywhere. But while it lasted it was sublime.
END OF DIGRESSION ON VOLLEYBALL
The bus out to the little village of Quilotoa from Latacunga was clad entirely in red felt, the televison - also red - holstered in a cube of red plastic. Two dirty white frills ran the length of the vehicle, hanging down over the top of the windows. It felt like an oversized hippy-wagon.
There were a few other gringos, huddled together on the back row - Quilotoa lake is one of the country´s biggest tourist-draws. Indigenous locals filled up the rest of the bus; they all fell asleep, green and brown trilbys lolling drunkenly, within a few minutes. I have yet to master this impressive Ecuadorian art.
As ever, an array of goods were on offer.
A DIGRESSION ON THE SALE OF GOODS ON BUSES
At bus stops (and when the bus slows down, and when it doesn´t really slow down but perhaps changes gear), men and women hop on and shimmy down the aisle hawking their wares. So far in Ecuador, solely when bussing, we have been offered the following products: needles and thread; fritados; sweets; newspapers; music CDs; digital watches; regular watches; apples; bananas; DVDs of Hollywood movies; strange and unknowable meats; strange and unknowable fruits; around 10 different variations of ice-creams and lollipops and ice-cream/lollipop amalgamations - and pornography.
Occasionally a seller will begin their bus-rush with a mournful monologue; I only understand about one word in every four or five, but the tone of voice tells the story - and it´s never a happy one. These sellers tend to do a little better than their more vociferous compatriots. But most don´t sell a thing. The average seller spends perhaps thirty seconds on board before they hop off.
The best product-pitch so far was a couple of days ago on the bus from Ambato to Banos, where we have spent the weekend and today (Forgive the chronologal rupture, internet.) The man looked Eastern-European, but his Spanish was fluent - undoubtedly his first language. Every one of his features was slightly wrong. His nose hooked cruelly to a narrow point, encroaching on his top lip; greasy tendrils of hair escaped sporadically from where they had been slathered into the centre of his head, drawn away from thinning temples; his eyes were wild, impassioned, flitting from passenger to passenger as he lurched back and forth down the aisle, barely keeping his feet with the jolts of the road; his facial hair, clustered around top-lip and chin, looked like tiny sprinklings of iron-filings.
He pitched for over half an hour, handing out little green boxes to every passenger - except Andy and I. It took me about five-minutes of neck-craning to read the white capital-letters on the box. "Colon-cleanser," they pronounced. No wonder he felt he had to put on such a performance.
To no avail, though. After an age of pleading and plugging, the little green boxes were collected back up into his suitcase. I didn´t see him take any money at all, but I like to think someone surreptitiously slipped him a couple of dollars, burying their little green box deep into a seatside bag.
END OF DIGRESSION ON THE SALE OF GOODS ON BUSES
At Quilotoa, we dumped our bags at a hostel and wandered off to the lake. The lake in a crater. A volcanic crater (inactive, unlike the volcano near us here in Banos; don´t worry, internet, the lava runs down the other side).
I have overused the word beautiful to a silly degree in these blogs. And anyway, the word doesn´t do justice to the sight of a crater full of bright emerald water surrounded by jutting, craggy mountains, soaring up into the clear blue sky. It just doesn´t.
"That´s one of the most beautiful things I´ve ever seen," said Andy - and it didn´t seem a hackneyed or embarrasing thing to say at all. Because it was - for me, too.
And now I´ve been hogging the computer for too long and have written barely a quarter of what I would like. But I must go.
Today we abseiled down waterfalls. It was good.
Andy bought a poncho. It is big and blue and very nice indeed. I refrained, despite the great temptation of many lovely grey ones, and the come-hither smiles of gilt-toothed Otavelenos.
The next day we boarded bus and trundled down the sierra to Latacunga; the starting point for our trip to the crater lake of Quilotoa.
A DIGRESSION ON VOLLEYBALL
Everybody plays volleyball in Ecuador; and every settlement - from the tiniest church-and-two-huts hamlet to the sprawling megopolis of Quito - has at least one court. Quito, in fact, probably has thousands. Often people play for money. Sometimes as much as $50. Big bucks anywere - ridiculous here. The quality on show is usually good, but not excellent. Ecuadorians, on the whole, are really not tall enough for volleyball. Andy, at 6 foot 3¨, is at least a head taller than almost everybody.
In Latacunga, however, we came across a match, on one of many courts behind the huge fading market, around which were clustered hundreds of people, toes tight to the blue rope that marked the court´s edge. They play three people on each team here: a guy who sets the ball, a smasher/tipper and an all-rounder. In Latacunga, each side had an alpha male, who would spit insults in the vague direction of his teammates when a point was lost. At one point, red-t-shirt guy - the alpha of the younger, late-teenage team - squared up to the referee, pressing his nose into his face in that peculiar, slightly homoerotic way some guys do when they want to look like they want a fight - but do not actually want a fight. It was tense. There was a long break in play when an older gentleman in the audience started lecturing red-t-shirt guy. Would the lanky youth punch him in his wrinkled face? It turned out no. But man was the testosterone winging about. I felt that we were one bad refereeing decision away from a proper ruck.
And you would not believe how good they were. This one kid, he can´t have been any taller than 5 foot 9¨, would leap about twice his height to bash the ball right in the very corner, or prod it just a millimetre over the net. There were sneaky shots and cheeky shots and show-off shots and flukey shots, but mostly it was just really, really fast and agressive and impressive. In the end, the salmon-like kid walked off, fed up, I think, at the violence spilling about everywhere. But while it lasted it was sublime.
END OF DIGRESSION ON VOLLEYBALL
The bus out to the little village of Quilotoa from Latacunga was clad entirely in red felt, the televison - also red - holstered in a cube of red plastic. Two dirty white frills ran the length of the vehicle, hanging down over the top of the windows. It felt like an oversized hippy-wagon.
There were a few other gringos, huddled together on the back row - Quilotoa lake is one of the country´s biggest tourist-draws. Indigenous locals filled up the rest of the bus; they all fell asleep, green and brown trilbys lolling drunkenly, within a few minutes. I have yet to master this impressive Ecuadorian art.
As ever, an array of goods were on offer.
A DIGRESSION ON THE SALE OF GOODS ON BUSES
At bus stops (and when the bus slows down, and when it doesn´t really slow down but perhaps changes gear), men and women hop on and shimmy down the aisle hawking their wares. So far in Ecuador, solely when bussing, we have been offered the following products: needles and thread; fritados; sweets; newspapers; music CDs; digital watches; regular watches; apples; bananas; DVDs of Hollywood movies; strange and unknowable meats; strange and unknowable fruits; around 10 different variations of ice-creams and lollipops and ice-cream/lollipop amalgamations - and pornography.
Occasionally a seller will begin their bus-rush with a mournful monologue; I only understand about one word in every four or five, but the tone of voice tells the story - and it´s never a happy one. These sellers tend to do a little better than their more vociferous compatriots. But most don´t sell a thing. The average seller spends perhaps thirty seconds on board before they hop off.
The best product-pitch so far was a couple of days ago on the bus from Ambato to Banos, where we have spent the weekend and today (Forgive the chronologal rupture, internet.) The man looked Eastern-European, but his Spanish was fluent - undoubtedly his first language. Every one of his features was slightly wrong. His nose hooked cruelly to a narrow point, encroaching on his top lip; greasy tendrils of hair escaped sporadically from where they had been slathered into the centre of his head, drawn away from thinning temples; his eyes were wild, impassioned, flitting from passenger to passenger as he lurched back and forth down the aisle, barely keeping his feet with the jolts of the road; his facial hair, clustered around top-lip and chin, looked like tiny sprinklings of iron-filings.
He pitched for over half an hour, handing out little green boxes to every passenger - except Andy and I. It took me about five-minutes of neck-craning to read the white capital-letters on the box. "Colon-cleanser," they pronounced. No wonder he felt he had to put on such a performance.
To no avail, though. After an age of pleading and plugging, the little green boxes were collected back up into his suitcase. I didn´t see him take any money at all, but I like to think someone surreptitiously slipped him a couple of dollars, burying their little green box deep into a seatside bag.
END OF DIGRESSION ON THE SALE OF GOODS ON BUSES
At Quilotoa, we dumped our bags at a hostel and wandered off to the lake. The lake in a crater. A volcanic crater (inactive, unlike the volcano near us here in Banos; don´t worry, internet, the lava runs down the other side).
I have overused the word beautiful to a silly degree in these blogs. And anyway, the word doesn´t do justice to the sight of a crater full of bright emerald water surrounded by jutting, craggy mountains, soaring up into the clear blue sky. It just doesn´t.
"That´s one of the most beautiful things I´ve ever seen," said Andy - and it didn´t seem a hackneyed or embarrasing thing to say at all. Because it was - for me, too.
And now I´ve been hogging the computer for too long and have written barely a quarter of what I would like. But I must go.
Today we abseiled down waterfalls. It was good.
Wednesday, 2 April 2008
On Tracking Bears
We´re out of the cloudforest, the bear-tracking is over.
There´s far, far too much that I´d like to write about - and there is no time. There is never any time. So i must restrict myself to highlights. Highlights and perhaps a few pictures.
But first: practicalities. How does one track bears? What does it mean to be a bear-tracker? Does an ability to track bears make one greater than the average human? (Probably.) Did I get the chance, at some point, to set my machete on fire and, thus, wield a flaming machete (Oh, yes.)
So. We tracked the bears - four of them ostensibly, but really just two females; the males being too far away at the time - using radio equipment. The bears are fitted with radio collars after being trapped using a cage and a tempting cow leg; the collars transmit a frequency that the bear-tracker tunes his radio to; the bear-tracker then notes the location of the bear using a sighting compass, after finding the direction that the beepbeepbeep of the bear´s collar is coming from; the bear-tracker repeats this process from at least two other stations (points in the cloudforest from which a GPS reading has been previously taken). Then, using the three points of data, the position of the bear is triangulated to a decent degree of accuracy. And then, this point of triangulation is plotted on a satellite map of the Intag cloudforest area. Finally, once lots of these points have been plotted, a polygon - the bear´s home range - is established. This information can then be presented to Ecuador´s Ministry of the Environment, who will, doubtlessly, then ensure that the cloudforest in this area is not deforested. The bears are saved! Hurrah!
That´s the general idea, anyway. Very roughly.
In order to track the bears, mostly we went on walks; beautiful walks along the roads, and down into the jungle, and up the hills, and along the rivers. On the walks we saw many wonderful things and smelled many wonderful plants and ate bear food and used our machetes to smash paths joyously through what Mother Nature had begat.
Smells: There were leaves that reeked of citrus. There was a lumpen fruit - I think it was a fruit - that when sliced open gave off a distinct odour of disinfectant. There was a wooly-surfaced, small, purple-green plant that filled the air with the sweet stench of bubble-bath. When the forest did not smell of these and other things it smelt of wetness, or decaying matter.
Sights: We trekked up to 20km a day through swollen air and sweating forests - luminous green and emerald green and oil-green and other greens - dipping into gloomy inlets where creamy waterfalls fell to glide tinkeringly over our boots. We rolled sometimes down the steeper banks, if they were covered in vegetation softish on the flesh. I lost a pot of jam on our camping trip in doing so; it was worth it. We became used to spectacular views all day, every day - would occasionally stop, panting from the effort of climbing a near vertical slope, and look around amazed, having forgotten in fatigue the majesty of our surroundings.
In the side of the mountain near Apuela, our nearest town, the features of a man looked out - eyes, nose, moustache. The locals told it was an Inca warrior watching over them, but we at the bear house felt it resembled more closely Friedrich Nietsche.
Tastes: The bear food, bromeliads, tasted of water and plant and mush. There was a fruit called grenadias which you cracked open the smooth yellow shell of to feast on the frogspawny insides. Very special. Tree tomatoes: not so much. Incredibly sour lemons, plucked from the trees, were fun to suck on. At the lodge we ate mainly rice and beans and lentils. For breakfast sometimes there were empanadas and they were wonderful. Cody and Mara, our fellow bear trackers, occasionally made cookies and the days in which they did were happy days.
Those were the tastes of bear tracking.
But there were hummingbirds. Ecuador has something ridiculous like 150 species of hummingbird. I must have seen at least five - species, that is. I also saw, very briefly, a toucan - and innumerable different types of parrot. The parrot is like a particularly boring sparrow to me. I see a parrot and I think, "Another parrot? In the wild? In a flock? Flying in a pretty symmetrical pattern? Rubbish. I´m going to go and watch The Thin Red Line on the laptop".
(Never watch The Thin Red Line. It is terrible, beyond awful. Put up even with multi-coloured parrots to avoid it.)
The best bird I saw - better even than the black and yellow chap who hung out at the thermal baths, or the menacing turkey vultures, or the swift-like swoopy things - was the cock-of-the-rock. Apparently, it is one of the rarest birds in the world. Go and search google images for the cock-of-the-rock. Go on. Do it.
Look at it! It´s all red and pretty and it has a fantastic eighties hairstyle in a swoop back from its brow. Look! Cor ... it´s great.
Anyway, we had to get up at four in the morning and head down to the river in order to see the cock-of-the-rock. The air was a muggy obsidian and we utilised Andy´s wind-up torch for the first hour. Then the sun came up, though it was hidden behind wispy, carpeting clouds, and engulfed the world in a bluish pallor. It was a very different kind of beautiful, and lasted only a handful of minutes before the bilious brown of the river and green of everything else emerged.
We saw the cock-of-the-rock at around ten am, having searched fruitlessly up the river for the preceding few hours. It was a vague red blob in a tree. But Christine - the wife of John, the ex-president of the International Bear Association and catcher of over 1600 bears, by the way - had binoculars. And I saw the red swoop hairstlye in profile, and watched it sit there for around twenty minutes observing stoically the raucous rounds of a flock of parrots. And then we went home smiling all the way like people in a crap novel which has a happy ending.
So, that was a highlight. There were many more.
But that is all I have time or energy for - for now. Hopefully I will find some seconds and some minutes soon in which to talk of other things we did when volunteering as bear-trackers, as well as record our latest exploits as we move down the Ecuadorian sierra towards the sun and sand of the Peruvian coast.
Here is me with a flaming machete. We achievied it through the enforced contiguity of blade, paint-thinner and cigarette lighter. A lifelong dream fulfilled. Marvellous.
There´s far, far too much that I´d like to write about - and there is no time. There is never any time. So i must restrict myself to highlights. Highlights and perhaps a few pictures.
But first: practicalities. How does one track bears? What does it mean to be a bear-tracker? Does an ability to track bears make one greater than the average human? (Probably.) Did I get the chance, at some point, to set my machete on fire and, thus, wield a flaming machete (Oh, yes.)
So. We tracked the bears - four of them ostensibly, but really just two females; the males being too far away at the time - using radio equipment. The bears are fitted with radio collars after being trapped using a cage and a tempting cow leg; the collars transmit a frequency that the bear-tracker tunes his radio to; the bear-tracker then notes the location of the bear using a sighting compass, after finding the direction that the beepbeepbeep of the bear´s collar is coming from; the bear-tracker repeats this process from at least two other stations (points in the cloudforest from which a GPS reading has been previously taken). Then, using the three points of data, the position of the bear is triangulated to a decent degree of accuracy. And then, this point of triangulation is plotted on a satellite map of the Intag cloudforest area. Finally, once lots of these points have been plotted, a polygon - the bear´s home range - is established. This information can then be presented to Ecuador´s Ministry of the Environment, who will, doubtlessly, then ensure that the cloudforest in this area is not deforested. The bears are saved! Hurrah!
That´s the general idea, anyway. Very roughly.
In order to track the bears, mostly we went on walks; beautiful walks along the roads, and down into the jungle, and up the hills, and along the rivers. On the walks we saw many wonderful things and smelled many wonderful plants and ate bear food and used our machetes to smash paths joyously through what Mother Nature had begat.
Smells: There were leaves that reeked of citrus. There was a lumpen fruit - I think it was a fruit - that when sliced open gave off a distinct odour of disinfectant. There was a wooly-surfaced, small, purple-green plant that filled the air with the sweet stench of bubble-bath. When the forest did not smell of these and other things it smelt of wetness, or decaying matter.
Sights: We trekked up to 20km a day through swollen air and sweating forests - luminous green and emerald green and oil-green and other greens - dipping into gloomy inlets where creamy waterfalls fell to glide tinkeringly over our boots. We rolled sometimes down the steeper banks, if they were covered in vegetation softish on the flesh. I lost a pot of jam on our camping trip in doing so; it was worth it. We became used to spectacular views all day, every day - would occasionally stop, panting from the effort of climbing a near vertical slope, and look around amazed, having forgotten in fatigue the majesty of our surroundings.
In the side of the mountain near Apuela, our nearest town, the features of a man looked out - eyes, nose, moustache. The locals told it was an Inca warrior watching over them, but we at the bear house felt it resembled more closely Friedrich Nietsche.
Tastes: The bear food, bromeliads, tasted of water and plant and mush. There was a fruit called grenadias which you cracked open the smooth yellow shell of to feast on the frogspawny insides. Very special. Tree tomatoes: not so much. Incredibly sour lemons, plucked from the trees, were fun to suck on. At the lodge we ate mainly rice and beans and lentils. For breakfast sometimes there were empanadas and they were wonderful. Cody and Mara, our fellow bear trackers, occasionally made cookies and the days in which they did were happy days.
Those were the tastes of bear tracking.
But there were hummingbirds. Ecuador has something ridiculous like 150 species of hummingbird. I must have seen at least five - species, that is. I also saw, very briefly, a toucan - and innumerable different types of parrot. The parrot is like a particularly boring sparrow to me. I see a parrot and I think, "Another parrot? In the wild? In a flock? Flying in a pretty symmetrical pattern? Rubbish. I´m going to go and watch The Thin Red Line on the laptop".
(Never watch The Thin Red Line. It is terrible, beyond awful. Put up even with multi-coloured parrots to avoid it.)
The best bird I saw - better even than the black and yellow chap who hung out at the thermal baths, or the menacing turkey vultures, or the swift-like swoopy things - was the cock-of-the-rock. Apparently, it is one of the rarest birds in the world. Go and search google images for the cock-of-the-rock. Go on. Do it.
Look at it! It´s all red and pretty and it has a fantastic eighties hairstyle in a swoop back from its brow. Look! Cor ... it´s great.
Anyway, we had to get up at four in the morning and head down to the river in order to see the cock-of-the-rock. The air was a muggy obsidian and we utilised Andy´s wind-up torch for the first hour. Then the sun came up, though it was hidden behind wispy, carpeting clouds, and engulfed the world in a bluish pallor. It was a very different kind of beautiful, and lasted only a handful of minutes before the bilious brown of the river and green of everything else emerged.
We saw the cock-of-the-rock at around ten am, having searched fruitlessly up the river for the preceding few hours. It was a vague red blob in a tree. But Christine - the wife of John, the ex-president of the International Bear Association and catcher of over 1600 bears, by the way - had binoculars. And I saw the red swoop hairstlye in profile, and watched it sit there for around twenty minutes observing stoically the raucous rounds of a flock of parrots. And then we went home smiling all the way like people in a crap novel which has a happy ending.
So, that was a highlight. There were many more.
But that is all I have time or energy for - for now. Hopefully I will find some seconds and some minutes soon in which to talk of other things we did when volunteering as bear-trackers, as well as record our latest exploits as we move down the Ecuadorian sierra towards the sun and sand of the Peruvian coast.
Here is me with a flaming machete. We achievied it through the enforced contiguity of blade, paint-thinner and cigarette lighter. A lifelong dream fulfilled. Marvellous.
Saturday, 15 March 2008
Clouds
I have escaped from the cloudforest for just a few hours to Otavalo, famous for its artesanias market all over the continent. There is a surfeit of ponchos here. A veritable surfeit. But I haven´t got time to gabble about the really very groovy intricately carved wooden bottles and tiny chess sets and swarms of hippy trousers. I have to catch a bus back to the middle of nowhere very soon so that, barring landslides, I make it back for the party at the thermal baths tonight. I´ve never been to a party at a thermal baths before and it sounds very indulgent. It makes me think of Romans and spies and the word lozenge. Lozenge. Another reason I must be rather speedy is that the guy in the cabin next to me has been searching on google for "machine guns" for the last half an hour. He is now on a Swedish militia site. I worry, internet, what his next step will be.
So I want, in the brief time I have, to talk about clouds.
There are many types of clouds in the cloudforest and they are all truly excellent clouds. A friend of mine once said that if clouds existed in only one place people would come from all over the world, and pay hundreds of pounds, to see them. He´s right. Clouds are great. Really top. And the clouds in the cloudforest are some of the best clouds there are.
Sometimes the clouds seem coughed out by the forest itself, forming from nowhere into tiny pockets, clinging to the serried trees where the mountains dip away; sometimes the clouds cluster suddenly and chase you up and down the trails, impossibly fast, and thickly threatening; sometimes the clouds splatter themselves into a meandering path of pearly globules on the strip of struggling milky blue at the horizon; sometimes the clouds choke the sky in layers of thick grey carpet, closing in, slowly darkening and darkening through the afternoon until they burst and fill the world with rain for hours and hours and hours; sometimes, when you´re very high up, machete-hacking your way through a verdant plateau, the forest disappears in the swarming miasma and it´s possible to believe you are standing on some magical floating island, glinting every hue of green above an endless, vaporous void. Occasionally - and only ever in the mornings - some determined blue fights its way through the grey and white; and
even more occasionally, the sun, usually a jaundiced yellow, barely visible, sweating behind viscous layers, burns itself a searing hole and threatens our skin and our eyes.
But it doesn´t matter so much. The sun will come later. At the coast. In Peru. For now, the clouds - not to mention the jungle, sweltering in the swollen air; the local children, perma-smiled, tiny, and ubiquitous; and the locals, forever offering lifts, greetings and scarily strong purro - are enough to ensure I am a very happy bear-tracker indeed.
So I want, in the brief time I have, to talk about clouds.
There are many types of clouds in the cloudforest and they are all truly excellent clouds. A friend of mine once said that if clouds existed in only one place people would come from all over the world, and pay hundreds of pounds, to see them. He´s right. Clouds are great. Really top. And the clouds in the cloudforest are some of the best clouds there are.
Sometimes the clouds seem coughed out by the forest itself, forming from nowhere into tiny pockets, clinging to the serried trees where the mountains dip away; sometimes the clouds cluster suddenly and chase you up and down the trails, impossibly fast, and thickly threatening; sometimes the clouds splatter themselves into a meandering path of pearly globules on the strip of struggling milky blue at the horizon; sometimes the clouds choke the sky in layers of thick grey carpet, closing in, slowly darkening and darkening through the afternoon until they burst and fill the world with rain for hours and hours and hours; sometimes, when you´re very high up, machete-hacking your way through a verdant plateau, the forest disappears in the swarming miasma and it´s possible to believe you are standing on some magical floating island, glinting every hue of green above an endless, vaporous void. Occasionally - and only ever in the mornings - some determined blue fights its way through the grey and white; and
even more occasionally, the sun, usually a jaundiced yellow, barely visible, sweating behind viscous layers, burns itself a searing hole and threatens our skin and our eyes.
But it doesn´t matter so much. The sun will come later. At the coast. In Peru. For now, the clouds - not to mention the jungle, sweltering in the swollen air; the local children, perma-smiled, tiny, and ubiquitous; and the locals, forever offering lifts, greetings and scarily strong purro - are enough to ensure I am a very happy bear-tracker indeed.
Sunday, 2 March 2008
How to disappear completely
This week has been a busy week.
On Monday we went up to Secret Garden, Cotopaxi - the home-cum-hostel of Tarquin and Catherine, who set up Secret Garden, Quito five or so years ago and have now moved out to the mountains. We got there late morning, lazed around all day, marvelled at the price, the view and, later, the food - then we got beaten at Scrabble by an American bird enthusiast called Justin. He got Martinis as his first word. We never caught up. This was a blow; Andy and I have spent over ten grand learning how to be good at Scrabble.
The next day we toddled off early to climb up to a glacier on Volcan Cotopaxi. It´s possible for beginners to make it to the summit - something like 19,000 feet, I
think - but the cost was out of our range (100 quid). Just as well. Hannes, a volunteer in Quito who went on the trip with us, stayed at the refuge for an attempt. His guide fell through the thick snow and they had to turn back. No refunds. Ouch.
The walk up was exhausting, but fantastic. The altitude defeated two of our fellow day-trippers, Katrin and Phil, who gave up at the refuge at 4800m. To be honest, I couldn´t really identify the glacier as a glacier due to the vast amount of snow that was falling. This did not, however, detract from the sheer joy of gazing across a vast, craggy, deadly expanse of pure white. On the way down I ran and got a severe headache. Nonetheless, I definitely won. There´s no doubt.
Wednesday was the best day. We trekked upriver, waded through pools, jumped from jagged stone to jagged stone, got caught in a hailstorm, managed to make our way back; then I got sick, threw up, felt better. It was great. I will never again be so convinced I am Indiana Jones. As for the illness, I don´t know what happened. One minute I was fine, the next a twinge, then a gradual gut-crushing for two hours. Then release. Weakness. Recovery. A proper 24-hour affliction.
But the river! Oh, the river! Twirling, soaring plants of every shade of green intermingling with each other and cutting out the darkening sky; clear trickly water bursting into surprised rapids behind huddles of soaked, lumpen stones; cookies and tea on a sudden clearing; mudslides and moss and indescribable smells and secret shuffles from behind the thick foliage. And then the hail. Hard and painful. And Andy had no jacket.
I suppose it was quite dangerous. One slip and a twisted ankle would have left us all in trouble. But I had my superb waterproof coat on and was quietly euphoric behind my serious instructions to less scrabble-happy comrades.
Thursday: I was supine, recovering from my strange ailment; Andy went bike-riding, cut his leg up a little, tired himself out. He had a jolly good time.
Friday we quite fancied horse-riding, but didn´t go for it. Legs still too weak. We´ll horse-ride later. We played Scrabble. Got Fecund. On a triple word score. We both felt much happier with our reading degrees after this.
On Saturday we came back to Secret Garden, Quito, from where I write this. And today we went to the centre of the world - and the museum that lies upon it. There´s a horrifically touristy complex of shops and restaurants and all kinds of rubishy things around a monument where the French got the equator wrong by 200m or so. The much more well-hidden museum on the actual ecuator was far better. THE WATER WENT STRAIGHT DOWN INSTEAD OF SPINNING CLOCKWISE OR ANTI-CLOCKWISE! YOU COULDN´T WALK STRAIGHT DUE TO CENTRIFUGAL FORCES! THE GUIDE BALANCED AN EGG ON THE HEAD OF A NAIL! Needless to say, it was pretty great.
But this is the last you´ll hear from me for a while, dear Ecuadorian internets. We´re off to the Intag cloudforest to track bears for four weeks. I probably won´t have a chance to get online until April.
I have to go; I´m missing dinner. There are many more photos on Facebook. Including this one.
That´s Quito, that is.
On Monday we went up to Secret Garden, Cotopaxi - the home-cum-hostel of Tarquin and Catherine, who set up Secret Garden, Quito five or so years ago and have now moved out to the mountains. We got there late morning, lazed around all day, marvelled at the price, the view and, later, the food - then we got beaten at Scrabble by an American bird enthusiast called Justin. He got Martinis as his first word. We never caught up. This was a blow; Andy and I have spent over ten grand learning how to be good at Scrabble.
The next day we toddled off early to climb up to a glacier on Volcan Cotopaxi. It´s possible for beginners to make it to the summit - something like 19,000 feet, I
think - but the cost was out of our range (100 quid). Just as well. Hannes, a volunteer in Quito who went on the trip with us, stayed at the refuge for an attempt. His guide fell through the thick snow and they had to turn back. No refunds. Ouch.The walk up was exhausting, but fantastic. The altitude defeated two of our fellow day-trippers, Katrin and Phil, who gave up at the refuge at 4800m. To be honest, I couldn´t really identify the glacier as a glacier due to the vast amount of snow that was falling. This did not, however, detract from the sheer joy of gazing across a vast, craggy, deadly expanse of pure white. On the way down I ran and got a severe headache. Nonetheless, I definitely won. There´s no doubt.
Wednesday was the best day. We trekked upriver, waded through pools, jumped from jagged stone to jagged stone, got caught in a hailstorm, managed to make our way back; then I got sick, threw up, felt better. It was great. I will never again be so convinced I am Indiana Jones. As for the illness, I don´t know what happened. One minute I was fine, the next a twinge, then a gradual gut-crushing for two hours. Then release. Weakness. Recovery. A proper 24-hour affliction.
But the river! Oh, the river! Twirling, soaring plants of every shade of green intermingling with each other and cutting out the darkening sky; clear trickly water bursting into surprised rapids behind huddles of soaked, lumpen stones; cookies and tea on a sudden clearing; mudslides and moss and indescribable smells and secret shuffles from behind the thick foliage. And then the hail. Hard and painful. And Andy had no jacket.
I suppose it was quite dangerous. One slip and a twisted ankle would have left us all in trouble. But I had my superb waterproof coat on and was quietly euphoric behind my serious instructions to less scrabble-happy comrades.
Thursday: I was supine, recovering from my strange ailment; Andy went bike-riding, cut his leg up a little, tired himself out. He had a jolly good time.
Friday we quite fancied horse-riding, but didn´t go for it. Legs still too weak. We´ll horse-ride later. We played Scrabble. Got Fecund. On a triple word score. We both felt much happier with our reading degrees after this.
On Saturday we came back to Secret Garden, Quito, from where I write this. And today we went to the centre of the world - and the museum that lies upon it. There´s a horrifically touristy complex of shops and restaurants and all kinds of rubishy things around a monument where the French got the equator wrong by 200m or so. The much more well-hidden museum on the actual ecuator was far better. THE WATER WENT STRAIGHT DOWN INSTEAD OF SPINNING CLOCKWISE OR ANTI-CLOCKWISE! YOU COULDN´T WALK STRAIGHT DUE TO CENTRIFUGAL FORCES! THE GUIDE BALANCED AN EGG ON THE HEAD OF A NAIL! Needless to say, it was pretty great.
But this is the last you´ll hear from me for a while, dear Ecuadorian internets. We´re off to the Intag cloudforest to track bears for four weeks. I probably won´t have a chance to get online until April.
I have to go; I´m missing dinner. There are many more photos on Facebook. Including this one.
That´s Quito, that is.
Saturday, 23 February 2008
Quito
Hello Ecuadorian internets.
So. We arrived yesterday at 5pm - 11pm British time - feeling understandably dazed (having been up since 4am in London). The flight was a couple of hours to Madrid and then 10 and a bit hours to Quito. The most exciting part of the trip over was having to run through the terminal in Madrid in order to catch our connecting flight. For some malevolent reason they had moved it forward by 20 minutes. It was fun, though. I felt like I was in Home Alone 2, which is all you can ask for from an airport visit, really.
Today, after a zonked out nine hours sleep, we have wandered round the Old Town. It´s all so very beautiful; the graveyard we visited today was a particular highlight - almost a town in itself, filled with glorious ostentatious monuments vying for the recognition of their inhabitants.
Quito is surrounded by mountains that emerge sporadically from their dense fog shrouds. It´s the wet season right now and the mornings are hot and sunny before the angry clouds close in around mid-afternoon. Andy burnt his arms a little earlier, but right now, a proper biblical thunder-and-lightning rainstorm is attempting to negotiate a violent path through the hostel´s roof. It´s really rather good. Might wreck the barbecue we´re signed in for later, however.
I´ll attempt to put some photos up soon. The plan for the next few days is a proper exploration of Quito before heading up to Cotopaxi volcano to ride horses and walk on glaciers and ride a mountain bike down some craters.
Can´t complain, can´t complain.
Oh, and we bumped into some bear tracker guys at our hostel (http://www.secretgardenquito.com/), down for their Saturday off. Apparently the ex-president of some international bear association - who has caught over 1600 bears and tagged them so they can be conserved - will be staying at the lodge at the same time as us in March. So that´s nice.
So. We arrived yesterday at 5pm - 11pm British time - feeling understandably dazed (having been up since 4am in London). The flight was a couple of hours to Madrid and then 10 and a bit hours to Quito. The most exciting part of the trip over was having to run through the terminal in Madrid in order to catch our connecting flight. For some malevolent reason they had moved it forward by 20 minutes. It was fun, though. I felt like I was in Home Alone 2, which is all you can ask for from an airport visit, really.
Today, after a zonked out nine hours sleep, we have wandered round the Old Town. It´s all so very beautiful; the graveyard we visited today was a particular highlight - almost a town in itself, filled with glorious ostentatious monuments vying for the recognition of their inhabitants.
Quito is surrounded by mountains that emerge sporadically from their dense fog shrouds. It´s the wet season right now and the mornings are hot and sunny before the angry clouds close in around mid-afternoon. Andy burnt his arms a little earlier, but right now, a proper biblical thunder-and-lightning rainstorm is attempting to negotiate a violent path through the hostel´s roof. It´s really rather good. Might wreck the barbecue we´re signed in for later, however.
I´ll attempt to put some photos up soon. The plan for the next few days is a proper exploration of Quito before heading up to Cotopaxi volcano to ride horses and walk on glaciers and ride a mountain bike down some craters.
Can´t complain, can´t complain.
Oh, and we bumped into some bear tracker guys at our hostel (http://www.secretgardenquito.com/), down for their Saturday off. Apparently the ex-president of some international bear association - who has caught over 1600 bears and tagged them so they can be conserved - will be staying at the lodge at the same time as us in March. So that´s nice.
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
I am the key to the lock in your house
That's it.
I'm done.
No more Daily Mails. No more lottery. No more scratchcards. No more wincing as someone buys Psychic News and rips into it as if - well, as if their life depended on it. No more staring in bemused fascination at Chat magazine, who have felt it necessary, with characteristic helpfulness, to furnish the headline "Rapist gave me HIV" with the explanatory legend "Tragic!". Just in case you thought it was a humour piece.
No more smiling at sweet little children only to then accidentally jump-cut the smile to their conspicuously unsweet mothers; paper-skinned, perma-snarled, terrifyingly young creatures from very bad dreams, with faces that one can obtain oneself by adhering to the following steps.
1. Buy Cosmopolitan.
2. Cut out a model's face from an advert in Cosmopolitan.
3. Colour in the model's face with old watercolours and dying pencils.
4. Smash the model's face into your own repeatedly in a desperate attempt at emulation.
If exclamation marks were something I indulged in, I would fill up the whole of the internets with them at this point.
And so it ends.
Observation the last: The Human Creature Is A Shameless Voyeur
We all - or the vast majority of us, anyway - have that rather worrying tendency to crane our necks at car crashes as we dribble past them on the motorway, hoping/not hoping to catch sight of a body. It's not an attractive instinct, but it is understandable; a kind of fascination with human frailty combined with sheer horror, I would say. And that's fine.
What isn't fine is when one takes this suspect instinct and gorges it on the misery and pain of others. I am speaking, of course, of the publishing phenomenon that is the Tragic Life Story. At first these type of books did well because they were well-written, interesting and emphasised the triumph of the human being over horrible and disturbing adversity.
I think a list of some of the titles of the modern crop of Tragic Life Stories illustrates what has happened now.
Now, I assume the poor victims who write these books achieve some kind of catharsis out of them, as well as the promise of some pennies. Calling your book Please, Daddy, No seems a strange way, to me, to deal with the abuse one has suffered. But, really, what do I know? I've never been through the terrible things the author has been through and it would be unfair and stupid to criticize him or her for dealing with their issues in this way.
What concerns me is the many, many, many people who buy these books. Glancing at a car crash is all very well, but these people are stopping the car, running over to the crumpled vehicle and jamming their faces into the mangled guts of the unfortunate driver. Seriously, what kind of person buys a book called When Daddy Comes Home? What are they thinking?
"Ooh! This one's definitely got a lot of incest and abuse in it. I might read it twice!"
It's horrible and it's wrong and it's strange and it's sick and we'd all be going to hell if there was one which there isn't.
But I'm going to Ecuador. And, surely, they only write magic realism over there.
Goodbye UK internets.
I'm done.
No more Daily Mails. No more lottery. No more scratchcards. No more wincing as someone buys Psychic News and rips into it as if - well, as if their life depended on it. No more staring in bemused fascination at Chat magazine, who have felt it necessary, with characteristic helpfulness, to furnish the headline "Rapist gave me HIV" with the explanatory legend "Tragic!". Just in case you thought it was a humour piece.
No more smiling at sweet little children only to then accidentally jump-cut the smile to their conspicuously unsweet mothers; paper-skinned, perma-snarled, terrifyingly young creatures from very bad dreams, with faces that one can obtain oneself by adhering to the following steps.
1. Buy Cosmopolitan.
2. Cut out a model's face from an advert in Cosmopolitan.
3. Colour in the model's face with old watercolours and dying pencils.
4. Smash the model's face into your own repeatedly in a desperate attempt at emulation.
If exclamation marks were something I indulged in, I would fill up the whole of the internets with them at this point.
And so it ends.
Observation the last: The Human Creature Is A Shameless Voyeur
We all - or the vast majority of us, anyway - have that rather worrying tendency to crane our necks at car crashes as we dribble past them on the motorway, hoping/not hoping to catch sight of a body. It's not an attractive instinct, but it is understandable; a kind of fascination with human frailty combined with sheer horror, I would say. And that's fine.
What isn't fine is when one takes this suspect instinct and gorges it on the misery and pain of others. I am speaking, of course, of the publishing phenomenon that is the Tragic Life Story. At first these type of books did well because they were well-written, interesting and emphasised the triumph of the human being over horrible and disturbing adversity.
I think a list of some of the titles of the modern crop of Tragic Life Stories illustrates what has happened now.
- Please Let It Stop
- The Family Friend
- Dance For Your Daddy
- Daddy's Little Girl
- Tears at Bedtime
- Daddy's Little Earner
- Tell Me Why, Mummy
- When Daddy Comes Home
- Please, Daddy, No
Now, I assume the poor victims who write these books achieve some kind of catharsis out of them, as well as the promise of some pennies. Calling your book Please, Daddy, No seems a strange way, to me, to deal with the abuse one has suffered. But, really, what do I know? I've never been through the terrible things the author has been through and it would be unfair and stupid to criticize him or her for dealing with their issues in this way.
What concerns me is the many, many, many people who buy these books. Glancing at a car crash is all very well, but these people are stopping the car, running over to the crumpled vehicle and jamming their faces into the mangled guts of the unfortunate driver. Seriously, what kind of person buys a book called When Daddy Comes Home? What are they thinking?
"Ooh! This one's definitely got a lot of incest and abuse in it. I might read it twice!"
It's horrible and it's wrong and it's strange and it's sick and we'd all be going to hell if there was one which there isn't.
But I'm going to Ecuador. And, surely, they only write magic realism over there.
Goodbye UK internets.
Friday, 15 February 2008
The words are coming out all weird
Last week I worked 64 hours. No words can adequately describe the vacuous stupor I had regressed to by the time Saturday - my only day off - rolled around. As a Sales Assistant, you basically act as an automaton, spewing out a few set phrases while handling the cash and dying inside. It's not challenging work, to say the least, but, as I discovered, once you do it for ten hours a day, things quickly start to go wrong.
What happens is that those mechanical sentences that you blurt out to customer after customer, day after day, start to become interchangeable. Already devoid of meaning due to endless repetition, they begin to arbitrarily swap places. So instead of saying "Do you want a bag?" to the woman who has loaded herself up with trash mags and paid, you shriek out, "No problem". Then, disturbed by her confused gaze, numbly aware that you have done something wrong but unsure what, you yelp, "Good morning!". Which you've already said. Twice. And it's the afternoon. The woman scuttles off, befuddled and bagless. Meanwhile, you're barking "Bye! Take it easy!" to the businessman who's just sidled up to the counter to buy cigarettes.
Semantics no longer apply to the overworked retail pleb.
It has thus been a very easy ride this week, with a much more piddly and sensible 25 hours spent acting as conduit between consumer and hate-rag. What's more, refreshed after last week's brain burnout, I have been able to finalise my anthropological study of the shopping human.
Observation the third: The Human Creature Is Fervently, Relentlessly, Unwaveringly Solipsistic
The thing about humans is they assume that you care. They really do. They assume you care, they assume you remember them, and they assume you want to engage them in a discussion. What they do not understand is that, to you, the zombified lackey, they are just a stack of dull colours conveyor-belting past the desk, droning and cluttering coins and cards. There are no individuals from the perspective of the Sales Assistant; and the human desperately needs to learn this before, driven over the edge by some jovial Telegraph reader's account of his scout days, a pleb attacks their own face with a stapler while screaming about the lack of a Darwinian imperative to empathise with humans not in one's social circle. I reckon I could last about two more weeks before I'd do it.
Observation the fourth: The Human Creature Is Afflicted With Bizarre Paranoia
This one actually does strike me as quite revealing. About one in every seven or eight customers will demand their receipt, justifying the need specifically as "just in case I get stopped and I've got no proof that I've bought it". For funsies, I like to pretend sometimes that I've thrown the receipt away by accident, just to witness the look of sheer horror that sweeps through the faces of those - young and old, male and female - who presumably envisage a burly policeman tapping on their shoulder and growling, "Have you got a receipt for that chocolate bar? NO? You're fucking nicked then, my beauty!"
When has this ever, ever, ever happened? What empirical evidence are this huge demographic working from that they feel there is a genuine risk of being collared for the lack of a receipt? Humans. There's CCTV cameras in the store; there's CCTV cameras on the high-street outside; there's probably CCTV cameras on almost every road you walked through to get here. If needs be, they can trace your properly purchased, receiptless 68p magazine through the whole town. You're not going to go to jail, but your every movement has been tracked. Your worrying, I feel, would be vastly better spent on this fact.
Observation the fifth: The Human Creature Is A Slave To The Gift Card
I have never understood why humans buy gift cards. Never have, never will. For what other almost instantly discarded product are sensible people prepared to stump up £5? Five pounds! For a piece of paper which is looked at for a few seconds, and then placed away and forgotten forever. In the run up to Valentine's day, it got worse: eight, nine, ten quid spent on cards with terrible, saccharine poems and big shiny red hearts. I'm sorry. But I really feel this is worthy of an italicised rant. This is what I have wanted to say to around 500 people over the last couple of weeks:
Hello fool. Do you realise you could buy three second-hand books for that price at the Oxfam shop down the road? You could also write your partner a letter expressing how YOU feel, goddammit, instead of conveying your affections through this fiscally hideous, prosodically toxic, folding bit of tree. Where's your god damn originality? You're supposed to be in love, for christ's sake. Buy a god damn book - at a third of the price - and write a message on the title page. Stop being such a passive, ovine lummox. Just think, your spouse'll flick through the book in twenty years, long after they've left you, and might get a rueful smile out of it. "How things change," they might reflect. "Isn't it interesting how ephemeral amorousness can be?" they might ask their younger, newer, betterer-than-you partner.
My final - and only 100% serious - observation on the human creature, gleaned from my time in the retail sector, I shall write a couple of days before I fly to Ecuador on the 22nd.
This time next week I'll be 30,000 feet above the Atlantic.
What happens is that those mechanical sentences that you blurt out to customer after customer, day after day, start to become interchangeable. Already devoid of meaning due to endless repetition, they begin to arbitrarily swap places. So instead of saying "Do you want a bag?" to the woman who has loaded herself up with trash mags and paid, you shriek out, "No problem". Then, disturbed by her confused gaze, numbly aware that you have done something wrong but unsure what, you yelp, "Good morning!". Which you've already said. Twice. And it's the afternoon. The woman scuttles off, befuddled and bagless. Meanwhile, you're barking "Bye! Take it easy!" to the businessman who's just sidled up to the counter to buy cigarettes.
Semantics no longer apply to the overworked retail pleb.
It has thus been a very easy ride this week, with a much more piddly and sensible 25 hours spent acting as conduit between consumer and hate-rag. What's more, refreshed after last week's brain burnout, I have been able to finalise my anthropological study of the shopping human.
Observation the third: The Human Creature Is Fervently, Relentlessly, Unwaveringly Solipsistic
The thing about humans is they assume that you care. They really do. They assume you care, they assume you remember them, and they assume you want to engage them in a discussion. What they do not understand is that, to you, the zombified lackey, they are just a stack of dull colours conveyor-belting past the desk, droning and cluttering coins and cards. There are no individuals from the perspective of the Sales Assistant; and the human desperately needs to learn this before, driven over the edge by some jovial Telegraph reader's account of his scout days, a pleb attacks their own face with a stapler while screaming about the lack of a Darwinian imperative to empathise with humans not in one's social circle. I reckon I could last about two more weeks before I'd do it.
Observation the fourth: The Human Creature Is Afflicted With Bizarre Paranoia
This one actually does strike me as quite revealing. About one in every seven or eight customers will demand their receipt, justifying the need specifically as "just in case I get stopped and I've got no proof that I've bought it". For funsies, I like to pretend sometimes that I've thrown the receipt away by accident, just to witness the look of sheer horror that sweeps through the faces of those - young and old, male and female - who presumably envisage a burly policeman tapping on their shoulder and growling, "Have you got a receipt for that chocolate bar? NO? You're fucking nicked then, my beauty!"
When has this ever, ever, ever happened? What empirical evidence are this huge demographic working from that they feel there is a genuine risk of being collared for the lack of a receipt? Humans. There's CCTV cameras in the store; there's CCTV cameras on the high-street outside; there's probably CCTV cameras on almost every road you walked through to get here. If needs be, they can trace your properly purchased, receiptless 68p magazine through the whole town. You're not going to go to jail, but your every movement has been tracked. Your worrying, I feel, would be vastly better spent on this fact.
Observation the fifth: The Human Creature Is A Slave To The Gift Card
I have never understood why humans buy gift cards. Never have, never will. For what other almost instantly discarded product are sensible people prepared to stump up £5? Five pounds! For a piece of paper which is looked at for a few seconds, and then placed away and forgotten forever. In the run up to Valentine's day, it got worse: eight, nine, ten quid spent on cards with terrible, saccharine poems and big shiny red hearts. I'm sorry. But I really feel this is worthy of an italicised rant. This is what I have wanted to say to around 500 people over the last couple of weeks:
Hello fool. Do you realise you could buy three second-hand books for that price at the Oxfam shop down the road? You could also write your partner a letter expressing how YOU feel, goddammit, instead of conveying your affections through this fiscally hideous, prosodically toxic, folding bit of tree. Where's your god damn originality? You're supposed to be in love, for christ's sake. Buy a god damn book - at a third of the price - and write a message on the title page. Stop being such a passive, ovine lummox. Just think, your spouse'll flick through the book in twenty years, long after they've left you, and might get a rueful smile out of it. "How things change," they might reflect. "Isn't it interesting how ephemeral amorousness can be?" they might ask their younger, newer, betterer-than-you partner.
My final - and only 100% serious - observation on the human creature, gleaned from my time in the retail sector, I shall write a couple of days before I fly to Ecuador on the 22nd.
This time next week I'll be 30,000 feet above the Atlantic.
Thursday, 31 January 2008
I'm not living. I'm just killing time.
The world of commerce is no place for the chronic misanthrope. Humans are bad enough, but once you've seen the things they spend their pennies on ... well, the temptation to scythe into one's wrists with the jagged end of a till roll is difficult to resist. For over two months now, I've slumped over a sales counter, brain putrefying, rictus grin, attempting to telepathically will The Public out of the shop so I can continue to surreptitiously read The Economist, perched out of sight below my desk. I can't take much more. I really can't.
And, thankfully, I don't have to. In twenty days time, Andy and I depart for Quito, Ecuador; on March 3 we begin a four-week stint volunteering as bear-trackers in the cloud forest region of Intag, to the north-west of the capital; and then it's a slow trundle down through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and, finally, Brazil for a flight home from Rio de Janeiro on June 30. I've wanted to do this ever since I read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was seventeen. And now it's so close. I'm so close to never again having to propitiate the exchange of currency for Jeremy Clarkson books. So close.
But before I go, since I will be studying - sort of - bears, now seems as good a time as any to present my findings on another mammal: the human. Because apart from boning up on the political ramifications of an economic recession on Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, (it's going to make this his toughest year yet, but he might pull through because the opposition Liberals are in such disarray - apparently) amateur anthropology has been my only distraction during the interminable sedentary hours of my working week.
If you look close enough and long enough at us humans when we are shopping, you'll soon become submerged in the big, black, numbing idiocy of the world. It's all there in microcosm; in the avaricious glint in the eye of someone who spies a discount; in the moronic grin of the man who asks for twenty five scratchcards; in the sweaty pallor of the woman excitedly purchasing part 108 of Build the Bismarck.
What's that? Does that customer's slightly apologetic whine when she asks for a plastic bag epitomise the West's langurous attitude towards firm and fast ecological action? I think it does, I think it does. Is there a vestige of the intractability of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in that man's hesitation over how many packets of Shrek stickers to buy? Well, no. But you've got the right idea.
Anyway. I have extrapolated, of course, from the small sample of shopping humans available to me; but i do not feel that this in any way attenuates the potency of my conclusions.
Observation the first: The Human Creature Is Painfully Homogenous
One does not expect to be inundated with original witticisms when ensconced in retail environs. Really, one does not. But around the fiftieth time someone asks for "a winning lottery ticket", or informs you that they don't need a bag because they've "already got one at home", you begin to realise that something is amiss. They're all telling the same jokes. And, worse, the same ones are telling the same jokes week after week after week. And it's not just the jokes. It's everything. Nobody ever says anything funny. Nobody ever says anything different. It's the same hackneyed brainfrizz time after time. Don't you realise that a hundred people have said that joke already today? Don't you realise that I am leering at you malevolently under these clenched lips every time you say it? Can't you see that you're killing me; you're killing me with your words and your eyes and your face. OH. GOD.
But there are exceptions ...
Observation the second: The Human Creature Is At Its Worst When It Believes Itself To Be 'Wacky'
You see, there are rare occasions when dialogue with the shopping human moves outside the realm of repetition. This occurs when you encounter a shopping man - always a man - who believes he is a 'character'; a shopping man who believes he is 'wacky', is a 'right one', is someone who 'cannot be tamed'. There are few things in the world as awful as this niche demographic of human. Below are some tips on dealing with them:
Do not humour the creature. Do not smile. Try to act confused or belligerent when confronted with the creature's 'antics'. Do not attempt to begin another task; the creature will take this as a cue for a joke, or to hang around longer. Retain eye contact. Under no circumstances say anything that even resembles an expletive. Do not allow your eyes to pass over a woman; the creature will view this as a chance to inform you of their experiences or affectations with regard to the opposite sex - in a conspiratorial whisper. Do not point out that the woman the creature is referring to looks around 17. Do not point out that the creature must be over 70. Do not throttle the creature. Try not to black out. When you do black out, drink some water, suck a mint, and prepare for the next one, for he may come at any time.
Next time: more observations. Soon after: dispatches from South America.
Twenty days to go. Twenty days.
And, thankfully, I don't have to. In twenty days time, Andy and I depart for Quito, Ecuador; on March 3 we begin a four-week stint volunteering as bear-trackers in the cloud forest region of Intag, to the north-west of the capital; and then it's a slow trundle down through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and, finally, Brazil for a flight home from Rio de Janeiro on June 30. I've wanted to do this ever since I read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was seventeen. And now it's so close. I'm so close to never again having to propitiate the exchange of currency for Jeremy Clarkson books. So close.
But before I go, since I will be studying - sort of - bears, now seems as good a time as any to present my findings on another mammal: the human. Because apart from boning up on the political ramifications of an economic recession on Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, (it's going to make this his toughest year yet, but he might pull through because the opposition Liberals are in such disarray - apparently) amateur anthropology has been my only distraction during the interminable sedentary hours of my working week.
If you look close enough and long enough at us humans when we are shopping, you'll soon become submerged in the big, black, numbing idiocy of the world. It's all there in microcosm; in the avaricious glint in the eye of someone who spies a discount; in the moronic grin of the man who asks for twenty five scratchcards; in the sweaty pallor of the woman excitedly purchasing part 108 of Build the Bismarck.
What's that? Does that customer's slightly apologetic whine when she asks for a plastic bag epitomise the West's langurous attitude towards firm and fast ecological action? I think it does, I think it does. Is there a vestige of the intractability of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in that man's hesitation over how many packets of Shrek stickers to buy? Well, no. But you've got the right idea.
Anyway. I have extrapolated, of course, from the small sample of shopping humans available to me; but i do not feel that this in any way attenuates the potency of my conclusions.
Observation the first: The Human Creature Is Painfully Homogenous
One does not expect to be inundated with original witticisms when ensconced in retail environs. Really, one does not. But around the fiftieth time someone asks for "a winning lottery ticket", or informs you that they don't need a bag because they've "already got one at home", you begin to realise that something is amiss. They're all telling the same jokes. And, worse, the same ones are telling the same jokes week after week after week. And it's not just the jokes. It's everything. Nobody ever says anything funny. Nobody ever says anything different. It's the same hackneyed brainfrizz time after time. Don't you realise that a hundred people have said that joke already today? Don't you realise that I am leering at you malevolently under these clenched lips every time you say it? Can't you see that you're killing me; you're killing me with your words and your eyes and your face. OH. GOD.
But there are exceptions ...
Observation the second: The Human Creature Is At Its Worst When It Believes Itself To Be 'Wacky'
You see, there are rare occasions when dialogue with the shopping human moves outside the realm of repetition. This occurs when you encounter a shopping man - always a man - who believes he is a 'character'; a shopping man who believes he is 'wacky', is a 'right one', is someone who 'cannot be tamed'. There are few things in the world as awful as this niche demographic of human. Below are some tips on dealing with them:
Do not humour the creature. Do not smile. Try to act confused or belligerent when confronted with the creature's 'antics'. Do not attempt to begin another task; the creature will take this as a cue for a joke, or to hang around longer. Retain eye contact. Under no circumstances say anything that even resembles an expletive. Do not allow your eyes to pass over a woman; the creature will view this as a chance to inform you of their experiences or affectations with regard to the opposite sex - in a conspiratorial whisper. Do not point out that the woman the creature is referring to looks around 17. Do not point out that the creature must be over 70. Do not throttle the creature. Try not to black out. When you do black out, drink some water, suck a mint, and prepare for the next one, for he may come at any time.
Next time: more observations. Soon after: dispatches from South America.
Twenty days to go. Twenty days.
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