Post 8:

A believer from Utah named Norman,
had five wives but could not stop whorin'.
As pious proclivity
belied sinful activity,
old Norm was dubbed "The Oxymormon".

Along with Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marques, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is regarded as one of the foremost literary figures to come from South America. A winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, Neruda spent much of his life overseas, initially as a diplomat and later as a leftist exile. Nevertheless, for long periods of his life he lived in Chile, and after his death in 1973 many of the houses in which he had lived were preserved in the public interest. It is not just fans of literature who will be intrigued by a visit to one of the poet’s houses, but also anyone with an interest in design or architecture; Neruda designed many of the houses himself and they are all full of historic curiosities collected from a lifetime scouring auctions and salvage yards. Valparaíso is one of the largest Pacific ports in South America situated on a series of hills 2 hours west of the Chilean capital Santiago and houses more than one of Neruda’s former dwellings. It is not surprising that the poet chose to live here for some of his life given the ramshackle beauty of the place; its multicoloured slums clinging haphazardly to the sides of the hills and its UNESCO listed ascensores - public elevators which consist of little more than garden sheds with wheels, creaking up and down tracks built into the sides of some of the steeper slopes at inclines of 65° and more. Neruda's "La Sebastiana" dwelling sits atop one of the aforementioned hills, boasting enviable views over the city and harbour, and mounted on the wall of the top-floor study is one of the most notable objets d'art: a map of the Americas drawn and annotated in 1690 for the Dauphin of France. On the matter of Chile, the 17th Century writer claims that as the region is sandwiched between the foothills of the Andes and the cold currents of the Pacific, it is prone to coldness so severe that it has been known to kill. The comments on the map go on to report stories of conquistadors on horseback, frozen solid still clinging to their reins, and the reputable reporter concludes by saying that it is little wonder that the European conquerors of the territory christened it "Chile" as this is another word for "cold" in Spanish.

Although the creator of this map confused his Spanish with his English, it is interesting to note that a similar association may still be made more than three centuries later. Since our arrival, we have constantly had to resist the temptation to make predictable jokes utilising the same play on words in what would be a grim and futile attempt to use humour as a source of warmth. It isn’t that Chile is particularly colder than anywhere else in the winter (for the most part), it’s simply that here central heating (or any heating) is a privilege, not a right. As a spoilt suburban kid whose idea of a cold room is one with a plug-in heater instead of a radiator, it took a while to get used to the notion of long johns and multiple blankets as the primary source of warmth at night. Difficulty adapting to this scenario was exacerbated by my inability to manipulate the shower in our hostel in such a way as to produce hot water, resulting in two days of skulking around with greasy hair, grumbling about how it appeared that Chilenos did not grasp the concept of agua caliente. After a five minute conversation with a Kiwi regarding the mysteries of Latin American plumbing however, it transpired that the locals - while perfectly aware of what agua caliente meant - were even more familiar with the phrase gringo estupido.


In my defence, the jetlag somewhat dulls your senses. Leaving Auckland and travelling east to Santiago, you take a ten-hour flight, which passes through eight time zones (losing an hour each time, as the clocks go forward) and also crosses the International Date Line (where you gain a whole day, with the clocks going back 24 hours). The confusing result of gaining a net 16 hours is that you leave New Zealand at dinnertime and arrive in Santiago at lunchtime. On the same day. Although a little involved thought led us to realise that this apparent travelling backward in time had nothing to do with Einstein’s relativity theories, it was still fairly perplexing. At any rate, if the concept plays such havoc with the conscious mind, it is little wonder that the body gets so befuddled as to give rise to what has been called "the worst jetlag in the world". Early efforts to adjust were hampered by a wine tasting in the hostel the day after our arrival, where we were amongst a dozen backpackers who sampled a dozen wines. It wasn’t a "tasting" so much as a "quaffing"; the bottles were all duly polished off along with the jug for collecting the remnants from the glasses after each wine had been tried. Justification for the latter - not hard to come by after the guts of a bottle each - was that only a few people had poured wine into it (if it was a wine they particularly didn’t like), no one had been seen spitting into it, and that the same assemblage of wine was sloshing around in our bellies anyway. The experience left us in high spirits - I was ridiculously pleased with myself, saying que syrah, shiraz to anyone who would listen (as we'd been told they were the same wine, different name) - and we stayed out partying until 3 in the morning. There is little doubt that rising the next day at 3.30 pm had a part to play in the fact that for the next few days we were operating on completely different time zones, neither of us ever asleep at the same time.

All the time we were getting drunk and whinging about the cold and the jetlag, we were also putting what little Spanish we had to good use. A few emergency lessons in Melbourne had us up to speed on the basics, but it wasn’t until the fifth day in the country that I was struck by the significance of the fact that the Spanish word for "name" is "llama". Thus posing the question "what is your name?" in Spanish may just as easily be interpreted as an enquiry as to the identity of one’s wild or domesticated, wool producing, cud-chewing, ruminant mammal indigenous to South America. Surprisingly, this does not appear to be the source of much confusion in Latin America, except perhaps when two Andean shepherds are trying to introduce themselves.

Given the time pressures of trying to cover as much of a substantial continent as possible in two and a half months, it was necessary to head north from Valparaíso and Santiago within a week of our arrival there. A 24 hour bus ride later, and we were in the Atacama Desert on the western slopes of the Andes, where we stopped for a bit of horse riding and sand boarding before jumping in a 4WD for 3 days to take us higher into the Andes and over to the Bolivian Salt Plains. It must be said that a winter night in the Atacama Desert at an elevation of 4,700 metres put a new perspective on the cold experienced in central Chile. Trying to sleep in a stone hut with no source of heat when the temperature was tipping -20°C was understandably sufficient reason to try to wear all one’s clothes at once, and given the well known difficulties associated with adapting to such ridiculous altitudes, it was little surprise that the following morning’s breakfast consisted of panadol and coca leaves.

Chewing coca leaves (the same leaves that cocaine is made from) is said to relieve altitude sickness and act as a stimulant. The practise has a long history in the Andes with evidence that it dates back to pre-Christian times and that it had been cultivated as a crop long before the rise of the Inca Empire in the late Fifteenth Century. The arrival of the Conquistadors in the middle of the Sixteenth Century saw a change in ownership of the vast deposits of gold and silver in the mountains and with it, a change in the working conditions of the miners who relied heavily on coca. The Catholic Church banned use of the plant, declaring it to be the work of Satan (after rigorous research into the issue, one would assume), thereby depriving the mine workers of the most essential of their essentials. Working conditions in the shafts were so appalling and hours so long that miners found coca to be their only means of making life bearable. Deprived of this, it is little surprise that productivity in the mines plummeted. Alarmed by the decrease in the output of Spanish Gold, King Philip II had a polite word with the nice chaps in the church, who at that time - it must be said - made up for their lack of thoroughness with a very pragmatic disposition. 3 years after it was declared a satanic substance, coca was back on the menu in South America; the church bestowing both its blessing and a 10% liturgical levy. As if this does not sufficiently emphasise the central role of this crop in Andean life, it is said that at certain times, demand for coca was so high that it was better to be worth your weight in leaves than in gold or silver. Such cultural insight lends perspective to America's war on drugs; in trying to eradicate a 2000 year-old tradition in Bolivia alone, a 230 year old nation spends more a year than Bolivia's GDP *.

(* The great thing about writing a blog is that using sources such as bar banter for important statistics will not endanger your ability to write future blogs)

Having acquainted ourselves with coca, we continued the high-altitude travel to the largest Salt Plains in the world in Uyuni, Bolivia. The vast expanses of bright white salt, formed into what look like a set of irregular polygonal tiles and set against the bright blue sky gave us the opportunity to take some perspective-skewing pictures. It is bad enough travelling in English-speaking countries like Australia and new Zealand and meeting fellow travellers whose impeccable English is their second language, but it is really too much when - for instance - you meet a Dutch couple on the world's largest Salt Plain who converse together in Dutch, with you in perfect English and with the driver/guide in near fluent Spanish. When it came to mastery of languages, it seemed that some of the abundant substance surrounding us was destined for rubbing in our wounds. Thus we took comfort in the fact that when said couple was interrogating their English language guidebook for places to stay in the next town, they paused and asked us native speakers what "a manatee" was. The question seemed a bit off the wall, but a meandering explanation involving dugongs and sea cows was nonetheless given, followed by an expectant silence. It transpired that our Dutch friends were slightly confused, as their newfound knowledge was inconsistent with the context provided in the book, which inexplicably mentioned "a manatees" in relation to most hotels and was preoccupied with their quality.
On the subject of hostelry facilities, it became clear that the minor jetlag-related issues I had with Chilean plumbing upon our arrival were small-fry. As our journey progressed, it became increasingly obvious to us of the importance of hot water as a selling point to tourists in search of accommodation. This was clear both as a result of our own hygiene/comfort requirements and the fact that it was heavily advertised as a feature of all hostelries. To be fair, every place we stayed that made the claim had made some attempt to feature a hot water shower. However, the majority of these shower heads were suspiciously oversized and loose electrical wires trailed from them into the unfinished concrete wall on which the head was mounted. All told, they looked like they would have been more at home in the armoury of some of the more inquisitive members of the Abu Ghraib military than stuck to the wall of a Latin American lavatory.

One of the must-do experiences for any gringo beating a trail through Bolivia is to mountain-bike down the "world's most dangerous road". Said road departs La Paz (the capital city at the highest elevation in the world) and descends into the valleys outside the city, dropping 3km in altitude over a distance of 60km as it winds around spurs and outcrops. At any point, the road may be as narrow as 3 metres and may have a sheer drop of up to 400 metres to one side. There are no barriers or walls on this road. The reputation of the world's most dangerous (others have suggested thoroughfares in Basra, South Central LA, and Moyross Co. Limerick) is due in part to the marketing of biking companies and in part due to the 200-400 lives claimed every year until a new road was opened in 2006. The death toll has decreased significantly since, due to the current lack of vehicular traffic; the occasional fatality now usually involving mountain-bikers. In fact, in the 9 years that the road has been used by commercial biking companies, only 14 cyclists have been killed. We are obliged to question if it was the perilous road to blame in all cases, given the fact that during some of the inquests, the authorities were considerate enough to accept monetary investigatory assistance from the biking companies in question to help return a verdict of "spectacular suicide" rather than "their brakes were fucked and the guides repeatedly ignored complaints to this effect". In addition to the fact that less people complete the route by bike than once did by automobile, another reason for higher vehicular-related fatalities is that it is much harder to get trapped inside a burning bicycle that someone else was driving which has fallen off a cliff. All told, the jury is still out on whether or not it was a good thing that due to the cloud on the day we did it, we could only see the first 20 metres of any given drop.

Having descended via the bikes to a more sensible altitude, we felt that it would be a good idea to spend some time in the warm Bolivian lowlands of the Amazon basin looking for wildlife. The wetlands are a great place to find nature, and we took a 3-day tour up the Yacuma River to see what we could find. The first day was quite intimidating due to the sheer number of caiman on the banks. Caiman are another member of the crocodilian family, and although not quite as large as their Australian counterparts, nevertheless share the evil countenance. Most disturbing though, was their tendency to slide insidiously into the river en masse as we approached just as they do in the movies as soon as the hero hits the water. With our own personal escort of vultures circling overhead, we were left to wonder if "nature" seemed to know something we didn't about the integrity of our dugout canoe. The second day saw us go in search of pink river dolphins, which Gráinne had a perverse fascination with given the reports in Ché Guevara's "Motorcycle Diaries" regarding how the more lonely locals use them for the same purposes that spring to mind when "Welshman" and "sheep" are mentioned in the same sentence. The gruesome coda to the aquatic version of this "pastime" is that in order to effect his "escape", said lonely local would have to kill the dolphin in question due to some form of post-coital contraction. At any rate, this might have explained why the dolphins remained at a distance of a few metres when I was persuaded to swim with them; swimming only being permitted in the stretches of river where dolphins were to be found, as they kept the caiman and piranhas at bay (although the 2.5m reptilian specimen sunning himself 30 metres from where this tasty morsel was splashing about seemed quite unperturbed by the presence of dolphins). After the swim, we tried our hand at piranha fishing a few bends downstream. I say "fishing", but in reality it was more like "feeding", the little bastards being adept at taking the perfectly good red meat off our lines without getting hooked. We came to the conclusion that if you are considering catching piranhas for dinner, it is more economical to eat your bait.

Preparing to leave Bolivia for Peru, we were given advice we had heard many times from well-travelled friends. The details were different, but the bottom line was the same; when crossing the border, put your money in your socks. One of the upshots of the aforementioned war on drugs is that thorough searches are often conducted on tourists crossing the Bolivian border. Although drugs may not be found, the authorities are adept at locating "counterfeit" currency, especially if it is US. Of course all these bogus bills must be confiscated for the good of the people (certain people in particular). At first, I put this down to the mild corruption of the border guards the way everyone else does. I now realise that this questionable convention represents a clandestine second front on the war on drugs. It is well documented that a high proportion of US currency carries traces of cocaine, suggesting that banknotes are a favoured means of administration of South America's most illicit export. By seeming likely to confiscate any dollars they come across, Bolivian border guards are forcing such currency into the socks of sweaty travellers. It is fair to say that a decent proportion of US money that enters or leaves Bolivia has had at least a few hours' shoe-time. Cut to the yuppie apartment in a nameless American metropolis where the tenant has procured a small quantity of white powder in spite of the best efforts of numerous law-enforcement agencies. As he extracts a banknote and begins to roll it up, his mind goes back to dinner the previous weekend where a friend mentioned how she kept her money in her sock while on holiday. He pauses and looks at the cylinder of currency in front of him, vaguely wondering if it is possible to get Athlete's foot in one's nose. The money promptly goes back into the wallet, and after a brief and fruitless search for a straw (yuppies don't keep straws in their apartments), the powder goes in the bin because this is all way to much hassle. A small victory for the war on drugs; less spectacular than the seizure of a major haul, but a victory that may be repeated many times over with minimum effort.

Having crossed into Peru financially unscathed, the first thing we noticed was how the tourist industry there was so much more developed than in Bolivia. This meant that the quality and cost of service was more in line with Western standards, but also that locals hustled for your gringo dollar a lot more. It became particularly evident on the Isla del Sol on Lake Titicaca - the island on the sacred lake of the Incas that was supposed to be the birthplace of their civilization. The island features a few ruins and some sacrificial altars which are usually surrounded by handicraft vendors engaged in the hard sell. Also knocking about were children of no more than five clad in traditional garb rather persistently requesting that you take their picture (in return for remuneration of course). As we were passing through some ruins these kids appeared, and did not seem to take our refusals particularly well. At the time it was cute, if mildly annoying that one little girl blocked our exit from the site. As we laughed patronisingly at her and reiterated our refusal to give her money, she said something darkly to Gráinne that we didn't quite catch. It was only after we had effected our escape that I realised threats had been made to throw rocks at my girlfriend's head. It seems some Peruvians need lessons in sustainable tourism.

While in Peru, we also visited the Nazca Lines and Machu Picchu (very expensive, but ultimately worth it) and also spent 8 days in search of Paddington Bear in what is supposed to be one of the best protected areas of rainforest in the Amazon basin. Seeing giant otters was an important objective of my visit to South America and it ranks as the highlight of the Peruvian Rainforest visit, along with getting hit on the head by my latest souvenir - an 18 inch machete which fell out of the luggage rack on the bus.

Although it has been enjoyable, we are looking forward to the flight from Lima to Rio since the second leg of our South American tour (taking in Brazil, Argentina and possibly Uruguay) will involve less touristy activities and so should be less demanding on the budget.