R + D | South America

If travelling is about self-discovery, I have discovered a few things about myself in the past few months. Most noticably, I am a poor planner. I´ve always known this, but it´s been made terribly obvious by watching Danielle dissect the Lonely Planet and guide us deftly through South America. I have big ideas but am short on the details. I was thinking today what it would be like to do this trip by myself (Danielle was giving me a hard time about eating all the chocolates we bought in Bariloche), and I decided it would have been a mess, although I wouldn´t have had to share the chocolates.

I made an executive decision (that Danielle actually made and told me about, I forgot, and then rediscovered and claimed as my own some weeks later) to head to Cordoba and skip the north of Argentina. Time is your enemy when you travel and overnight buses your friend. We got to Cordoba via two overnight buses with a day´s logistical stop in the beautiful city of Salta to which we will have to return one day.

Cordoba is like a miniature New York. Tall buildings, not many trees, lots of yellow taxis, and crowded sidewalks. Everyone thought it strange when we replied “como un pequeno Neuvo York” when asked “te gusta Cordoba?” But both of us were struck by the similarities. There is even a mini central park and east village (although it´s on the west side of town).

What Cordoba has which New York lacks though is an embarrassment of riches in the form of ladies underwear shops. Sure there is definitely more underwear for sale on a pound for pound basis in New York, but when it comes to underwear for sale per capita I would put Cordoba well ahead of any panty capital you can think of. At every turn we were confronted by a boutique dedicated to the trade of ropa informal or ropa feminina intima. I normally think of the buying of female undergarments as a private, if not secretive, affair. But here bras, panties, thongs, lingerie were everywhere and extraordinarily well advertised.

To go with this plethora of silk and satin were gorgeous women everywhere. All of them dark haired, dark eyed, with suave accents and no doubt great underwear. I didn´t really notice the men, but Danielle suddenly was looking everywhere and saying “ooowwww! oooohhhhh! look at him!” We held hands walking down the streets, but we were looking in opposite directions bewildered. There are a lot of hotties in Argentina.

After we arrived and situated ourselves at a coffee shop, I left Danielle to sip coffee and do Sudoku and struck out in full force to find a hostel. I looked like a New Yorker walking very quickly and with great purpose from hostel to hostel inquiring on price and checking out the beds and showers (I had made a promise to myself never to use an electric shower or a shower situated directly above the toilet bowl ever again). At the first hostel I thought the woman must have had a speech impediment because I couldn´t understand her Spanish. The second hostel disproved my theory. I thought maybe I was in the Italian immigrant neighborhood and really they weren´t speaking Spanish at all. By the third hostel I realized we had wasted three months trying to improve our Spanish in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. They were all of course speaking Spanish, I just couldn´t understand a word.

I finally found a quaint little hotel along one of the pedestrian streets and was pretty sure the receptionist told me they had a vacancy, although he could have been telling me about the latest lingerie news for all I knew. I returned to get Danielle waiting at the coffee shop with the backpacks. A battalion of Israelis had earlier followed us there and breifly occupied a few tables, but thankfully had chosen a different hostel (no doubt they negotiated a much better deal) and had vacated by the time I got back. Danielle was upset. I thought it was because I had taken so long on my reconnaissance mission, but she apparently hadn´t even noticed my absence–pretending to do Sudoku while watching the Argentinian hunks sip espresso and munch on medialunas. “I have no idea what the waiter is saying! I can´t understand anyone´s Spanish.” She had confirmed my findings. It was time to go and we asked the camarero for the cuenta. He looked at us blankly. Later we learned that the camarero is actually the mozo and the cuenta the factura.

The mighty little Collins pocket dictionary (now in two colors!) we had been travelling with for months has been no help in Argentina. The Spanish here is riddled with slang, spoken as if drunk, and the esses, ends of words and any other difficult to pronounce bits are discarded. As if the beautiful people of Argentina couldn´t be bothered with an extraneous -suffix while lounging around in their lace undergarments. In fact, Spanish here is not even called Espanol–Argentinians speak Castellano!

We settled into our old hotel, decorated in Jewish art, and took a siesta with the double doors open wide overlooking the peatonal. Dinner was more steak, the menu simply a catalouge of cow parts plus a wine list. Our third dinner in the country and we had begun to notice a disturbing trend in the salad department. I am from a family of fundamentalist salad eaters and I was starting to notice a catastrophic lack of choices under the ensaladas heading. I have since come to confirm that every restaurant in Argentina from La Quiaca to Calafate has only three types of salads: (1) lettuce, tomato, carrots (2) lettuce, tomato, carrots, onion, or (3) lettuce, tomato, carrots, onion, ham, and cheese. Really, if you look closely, it´s one salad disguised as three. The lettuce is always iceberg and the salad dressing is never mentioned–just a bottle each of industrial grade oil and vinegar sitting idly on the table. A few weeks later in a large American style grocery mega store in Mendoza, I was the only person shopping in the produce section (squeezing the peaches to assess ripeness), while the butcher, cleaver in hand, was coordinating a mob of carnivorous house wives at the very busy meat counter.

Dinner here is meat and wine and some dinner rolls to keep you busy while your 40 ounce steak is grilling. The sign of a good dining establishment is a crucified (is that lamb or a small cow?) carcass standing upright next to a fire in the window. Literally steak burning at the stake. They really are crucified and meat eating here really is a religion. The salads are for tourists. I did see a sticker on one of those peaches I bought that said the fruit was recommended by the Argentinian Cardiologist Association, an association I suspect which is not doing well in the “don´t eat too much red meat” department. The meat is magnificent though, and for a tourist, embarrasingly cheap. You can buy a filet mignon for the same price as two heads of organic Romaine lettuce in Canada.

The other part of the cow, the milk part, is sold off in heladerias. Ice-cream stores are everywhere. As if all the Starbucks in a U.S. city where suddenly turned into ice cream cafes. And they´re not empty of ice cream or customers. There are hundreds of flavors, although no red meat flavor surprisingly. It defies all tenets of modern medicine that a nation of unrelenting red meat eaters and ice cream lickers remains so thin and beautiful.

Amongst the ice cream, lingerie and beauties of Cordoba, we found an enormous synagogue. The sidewalk had the kind of concrete barricades that you see in front of U.S. embassies or places where a lot of money is stored. It was no doubt built after the two grisly attacks on Israeli targets in Argentina in the 90´s and we felt a bit suspicious taking photographs (me with my beard). Later that day when we finally met the old Jewish owner of our hotel (we had been secretly waiting to meet him ever since we noticed the Hebrew calendar on the wall), we excitedly described the first synagogue we had seen in South America. He dismissed it as nothing more than a well disguised Church with a wave of his hand an accusing “reformistas!” (Certainly a reformista sounds a lot more revolutionary than a plain old reform Jew). His fourth question (after names, country of origin and length of marriage) was whether we had kids. Shocked by our answer (and not getting the joke about our two cats), he implored us to visit the tomb of Rebbe Schneerson in Brooklyn (he´d been there twice) and leave a letter there asking for children. It was no different from the many indigenous Quechua we have met who believe two years of marriage and no kids must mean fertility problems. Only for them a flight to New York and a taxi to the Ohel in Brooklyn would be coca leaves and a swig of 100% alcohol poured on the ground as an offering to Pacha Mama.

Right next door to our hotel was a hauntingly beautiful old Cathedral with a long, warmly lit corridor coming out onto the pedestrian street. It was so inviting we were drawn in one evening. Like thousands of churches and cathedrals across South America, it was a wonderful haven from the bustle outside. A place to let your senses rest a while. Standing in front of a glass-encased and very unhappy-looking crucified Jesus was a girl in her twenties, eyes closed, and fervently praying for something. At the Jesus statue´s feet inside the glass were hundreds of folded up letters of all sizes and colors. I wondered, if we did have fertility problems, whether we wouldn´t hedge our bets and drop off requests to Pacha Mama, Jesus and Brooklyn.

The praying girl was thin, beautiful and well dressed. Whatever she was praying for, she was certainly hedging her bets too, going from one virgin´s shrine to the next and stopping for a few minutes to pray at each. She would gaze up at each well-lit statue in the darkened quiet of the Church. You don´t see this kind of day to day religious belief in the west anymore except amongst fundamentalists. It was touching.

We left Cordoba as we had come, from the bus station. The shiny double decker coaches were lined up in a semi-circle around the station. If Cordoba is New York, this was J.F.K. Each coach had the name of a different Argentine city or town and the engines were idling as they loaded up. We got on the overnight to Mendoza. It was another incredible double decker Argentine luxury liner. Seats that recline into beds, flat screen TVs, and dinner service. These buses are as close to first class as we´ll ever get.

Maybe Cordoba looked so much like New York because it was the first first world city we had seen in a few months. In any case, New York may have the Rebbe and Swiss Chard, but Cordoba has much more steak, ice cream and lingerie. I´ll take Cordoba.

We were trying to get the 3 o´clock bus from Tupiza to the border. (This is a slight backtrack from the last entry, but worth the read). I had been staring at a locked office door for two hours waiting to buy a bus ticket.  When siesta time was over, a beautiful woman with wet, just-brushed hair arrived and unlocked the door, followed by a man of similar age. They were definitely not sleeping during siesta. Her emphatic claim that the bus would arrive in a few hours was undermined by the busy signal on the telephone when she tried to call Potosi (the point of departure) to prove the point that the bus had actually left and made it through a blockade. Despite this and multiple other convincing indications that the bus was not coming today, I bought two tickets. I think I did this because she was beautiful. The bus did not come at 3 o´clock. She did not look at me when she said “viente minutos mas” and spoke to me like I was a fly. The bus did not come at 3:20, 3:40 or 4:00. I was fascinated by how beautifully passive-aggressive she was every time I came back to the office to ask why the bus hadn´t yet come.  I think I kept coming back every twenty minutes because she was so beautiful, but I hated her.  

At 4:10 a double-decker bus pulled into the Tupiza station. It was an heroic arrival given all the uncertainty and it sent all the loitering, pessimistic Bolivians scurrying to buy tickets. We two gringos were dumb enough to have purchased our tickets in advance  on the word of the saleswoman.  The waiting locals shook their head in pity when I told them I already had tickets.  We did not have a good track record with bus ticket office ladies telling us the bus was coming in viente minutos and so when the bus pulled in in a cloud of red Tupiza dust, I had just finished telling the gathered crowd that the saleswoman was a mentirosa (literally, a liar, but much more conniving in the feminine I think…as opposed to the male mentiroso).

So after much uncertainty we took the best seats at the front of the top deck with a huge panoramic wrap-around window in front. We watched the green-bedded canyon lands around Tupiza turn into a wide, windy expanse of scrub grass. We were heading south fast and I kept having to adjust the curtain to fight off the sun blazing down orange in the western sky.

As we pulled into Villazon (the Bolivian border-town) at dusk, a group of men sprinted toward the bus. We squeezed our way through the mob at the door all yelling the name of different Argentine cities followed by a price. “Buenos Aires ciento bolivianos! Salta cinquenta! Jujuy cuarenta!” We put on our best “get the hell out of my way” faces and started walking for the border.

It was a good 2 km walk down the main street toward Argentina. We spent our last few Bolivianos on mouth-watering empanadas from an old lady cooking them up on her portable streetside stove and, a few blocks later, paused while the o.j. vendor used one of those mounted metal contraptions, which look like they should be mounted to a workbench rather than a cart full of oranges, to peel and squeeze our last cup of Bolivian citrus heaven.  That was the taste in our mouths as we side-stepped trash and refuse and finally saw the bridge dividing the richest and poorest countries in South America.

The border guards on the Argentine side looked European, one with a white face and moustache, one grey-haired and Italian-looking. They were driving a Peugeot with Gendarmaria written on the doors. A French car with a Spanishized French word on the side. Their uniforms were well-made and stylish. All this was strange and immediately stood out to both of us.  It was the first time in a few months we had seen locals who looked ”white” and the first time in months we had seen European cars. But there was something else that stood out, something different from the Bolivian guards that had just stamped us out. I couldn´t quite put my finger on it.

We stood in the entrance line waiting to be stamped into Argentina behind Bolivian men holding large duffel bags and looking like they had a long way ahead of them. I had seen these same guys being coached by a well dressed woman in front of the Bolivian exit office. They were workers heading South for higher paying jobs and she was the intermediary. I watched them thinking what it must be like to face a new country with your family behind you and be poor. When you´re rich, none of it matters. They were like Mexicans heading north to work in the U.S. or Eastern Europeans heading to Germany.

That´s when it hit me. Why the Argentine border guards looked so different. It wasn´t the whiteness in their faces or the better-made uniforms or the handsome imported cars that made them stand out.  What was really different, and took me a long time to identify, was that the Argentines looked like people living in the first world. They had a casualness about them I hadn´t seen in months. I can´t describe it exactly, but it´s a certain relaxed look you don´t see in the third world. The hard faces of the campesinos in the Andean countries (Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia) never look relaxed. Resigned or passive maybe, but never casual.

La Quiaca on the Argentine side looked relaxed and well made. The buildings were brick and had the adornments of a relaxed people. They were painted and some houses had porches. There were tree lined sidewalks and no trash lying in the gutter. People walked by without trying to sell you anything.  For months we had seen nothing but adobe walls and corrugated tin roofs, streets swimming in trash, and everyone with something to sell.  Every minute of every day was spent trying to eke out an existence. Here, people just walked around idly on sidewalks made for walking around idly.

It was late now, around 9 p.m. We took a taxi (a Fiat) to the bus station, sharing it with an indigenous woman with a huge blanketed bundle. The taxi driver joked with us and listened to rock on the radio. He had cigarettes and a cell phone and CDs in the car.

At the bus station there were people everywhere, all sitting on the floor with opened packages of new clothes, toys, and cheap made-in-China-like-junk spread out in front of them. The goods were all in transit, not on display. They were being moved between bags, and wrappers and packing material was being left behind. I spent a long time trying to figure out what they were doing exactly. It seemed to me they were all Bolivians coming into Argentina with cheap stuff to sell. They were waiting for buses to penetrate a vast and comparably rich country.

I bought two tickets to Salta in an office with a computer and we headed out to eat at a nearby hotel, worried we wouldn´t get dinner at 10 pm before our midnight bus. Everything about the hotel and restaurant was different from Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. The window panes, door handles, tables and chairs, floor tiles, light fixtures,  all had a solid but dated feel. It reminded both Danielle and I of South African buildings. The bathroom had soap and toilet paper, heavy porcelain and running water, they were clean and you didn´t have to pay.  

We ate a steak that we are still talking about a month later. Every steak we’ve eaten since in Argentina has had to compete with the bife de chorizo in La Quiaca. It was thick and pink inside and had the smell of a pool-side barbecue. We had not had meat like this in months. The meat north of here is functional, eaten for protein and has no smell. Everyone in the restaurant was dining casually and it was well past ten o´clock. After Danielle dipped her bread into some olive oil (olive oil on the table!!) we were approached by a jovial older fellow who was sure that we must be from Spain, given the dipping of bread into oil. A few geographical corrections later and we had been joined by him, Gonzalo Fernandez de Mendoza Lopez, and his associate, Gregorio.  They were like an old-married couple taking casually contradictory positions on all subjects, including whether or not my steak was the best one I would taste in Argentina. Gregorio, an Argentine Jew whose family had come over from Belarus, had, at the age of seventy, fallen in love and just relocated from Buenos Aires to join his new wife doing aid work in a nearby Quechua village. Gonzalo, the effusive Spaniard, was helping them set up a database for the village library. Gonzalo told jokes belittling the Argentinians while Gregorio tried desperately to make Gonzalo seem polite. After a lot of laughing, a group photo, and much dipping of bread into olive oil, they insisted on walking us to the bus station–despite the late hour, it was still dinner time in Argentina. It was 10:45.

As we approached the bus station the sea of goods and migrants was spilling out onto the sidewalk. Gregorio told us that “the border is imaginary,” but when we slipped into the clean smelling seats of the bus with working overhead reading lights, air conditioning, and a working toilet just down the aisle, I thought the border may be porous but it is not imaginary. We pulled out of La Quiaca heading south into Argentina. I got out my ear-plugs and a pillow. Behind us was a line. On that side, the buses are late and people are trying to survive. On this side, life is casual and they import French cars.   

Our last day in Bolivia, we left our hotel in Uyuni at 4:30 in the morning. It was still dark, but the first light seeping into the sky gave everything a cobalt halo. The wind was coming off the Salar. Everything was gated shut. We walked through the market to get to the bus station. During the day you can barely move through the throng of people. Now, nothing moved except a few stray dogs crossing the street looking for food, and an old woman sweeping the dark sidewalk in front of her stall.

The bus from Uyuni to Atocha was your standard Bolivian rattler. The window knocking in its frame become the kind of noise that lulls you to sleep. Cold air leaked in but made you realize you were in the desert and the sun hadn´t risen yet. The campesinos all ruddy faces and black hair, smelling like hard work, eyes closed and arms folded even before the engine started–the defiant look of people who know how to survive. Some slumped over their own improvised seats, large vats of water? oil?, heaved up into the bus and heavily blocking the aisle.

It was cozy and quiet and we slept . . . for about thirty minutes. Suddenly: Spanish love-rock (blah, blah, blah mi corazon…..blah blah blah mi amor……blah blah mi alma), so loud it disorted the speakers. A thumping electronica-Andean beat, the speaker right over my head.  Danielle and I are very awake now, waiting for the driver to realize it is too loud and turn it down. The campesinos don´t budge, just another inconvenience to endure silently. Danielle approaches the door separating the driver from his human cargo. It´s locked. She knocks. No reply. The music blares for two more hours. We adapt and sleep.

The bus stops now and then. Three on, one off. The sun is up now and shining onto the vast nothing. Low yellow shrubs and sand. Nothing else. No trees, no plants, no water, no life. Occassionaly a few golden brown vicunas (impala-like) hurtle off in the distance. You can make them out only because they move so suddenly. Nada for miles in every direction. People get off and start walking into emptiness, the woman with huge pink and blue blanketed bundles tied to their backs (I always think there are babies in there, but they´re big and heavy enough to house half a kindergarten. Potatoes? Squashes? Wood?). The men in baseball caps, thick jackets, and jeans.

At some point I woke up and the road had disappeared. We were driving through a valley on a dried river bed. It was wide, maybe forty meters across, but bone dry. Only pieces of plastic trash that looked like they had been washed away from somewhere, but no water to wash it anywhere in sight. The valley walls were muddy, rocky, and steep. More like a canyon. We drove for another hour or so until we came to Atocha.

Atocha is a mining pueblito at the foot of an enormous dam holding back what must be a lot of water. I don´t know how you could live there without dreaming every night of that dam breaking.

The day we arrived in Atocha the toilet paper truck was in town. Thousands of rolls of pink papel higenico piled high in a tough-looking lorry and stacks of the stuff outside every tienda along the main street. Fittingly, our main activity in Atocha was using the bathroom (before catching our bus on to Tupiza). At the bano publico along the train tracks a purchase of pink paper had been made by the elderly, toothless owner, now returning with a wheelbarrow-load of the pink rolls. His gnarled wife was sitting at the entrance selling a ticket inside. I had my first solid bowel movement in weeks, but had to use my own private supply of white toilet paper as my 50 centavos entrance fee only got me a few folds of the pink stuff. I left the two of them and the bathroom business amidst what sounded like an argument over how much he had paid for their month supply of inventory. Along the train tracks it was obvoius that not everyone in town was a customer.

The saltenas (baked potato-filled pastries) were selling like hot cakes and the little old lady carrying them around in a wooden tray-like box hanging from her neck was doing so well she came and asked me if I could break a fifty Boliviano note. It´s not the first time I´ve looked at an old indiginista and thought that it pays to cook well.

For the second leg of our journey (Atocha to Tupiza) we were crammed into a Toyota 4X4 – eleven of us and a large blanketed, colorful bundle of some edible cargo resting on my left foot. The bus company that brought us to Atocha, “11 de Julio” transferred us to the company “12 de Octubre.” I thought that with the 40 lbs. bundle of veggies on my foot, the trip might indeed seem like three months and a day. I couldn´t move my foot out from under the bundle becuase every bit of free space was occupied by human limb and body. Just when I thought we were stuffed in well beyond anything safe and reasonable, I realized that we were actually slated for twelve and were waiting for one more passenger.

A lengthy conversation in Spanish ensued which brought out the owner and eventually he gave his blessing to let the car go with eleven adults and a nino (rather than the full cohort of twelve adults). The 1980´s Landcruiser was definitely designed for no more than eight. It was not comfortable or safe. Danielle and the San Franciscan hipster stuffed in the back with us (seats 9 and 10) both got car sick, despite preventative Gravol (Dramamine). What a waste of good saltenas.

The road was muy peligroso cutting into and over a range of something between mountains and hills, steep, steep drops on either side, and we were hauling ass. “Como nos sigue del diablo.” All three gringos in the back commented that this is what SUVs are supposed to be used for.

Eventually we made it to Tupiza, last stop before the Argentine border. A Welshman asked me for a calculator so he could figure out the exchange rate. I blithely told him it was three pesos to the dollar and eight Bolivianos to the dollar making it three pesos to eight Bolivianos. He was not impressed and told me it was 3.05 pesos to the dollar. I walked away ashamed and approached the ticket window advertising the only direct bus to the border. An unhappy cusotmer service employee gave me a knowing look that she was about to make my life very difficult. In Spanish:

Me:”Hola we are tyring to get to the border today. Is this where I buy bus tickets?”
Her: “Yes.”
Me: “Bueno. How much are they?”
Her: “30 Bolivianos.”
Me: “Bueno. Is there a bus today?”
Her:”Yes.”
Me:”What time?”
Her:”2:30.”
Me:”Is it direct to La Villazon at the border?”
Her: “Yes.”
Me: “Bueno. I´ll take two seats please.¨
Her:”There are no seats left.”

The Welsh banker overheard this and interjected: “Bolivians only answer the question you ask them.” He was right. She had failed to mention that we could stand in the aisle if we wanted to, which only occured to us as the last Israeli body-checked us to get on the bus and took up the remaining aisle space. We watched the bus pull away and Argentina seemed further away than it had all day. We consoled ourselves that at least we wouldn´t have to endure the Israelis for two hours on a crowded bus.

I soon found out that we were in luck. Quite a few other companies had buses heading South (from Potosi) to the border with stops here in Tupiza at 3 p.m. or so. Heeding the Welshman´s advice I began asking all the detailed questions of another grumpy office attendant, repeating the words “Hoy (today), aqui (here), and no problema si (no problem right?)” a lot. Somewhere in her replies she used the word bloqueado which sounded like something that would keep either us from the bus or the bus from the border. Indeed the local policia nacional officer stationed at the bus terminal confirmed that there was a blockade outside of Potosi, a political demonstration, blocking all traffic that might be headed this way. The Bolivians waiting for the same connection all seemed to know this and were discussing alternate plans amongst themselves. These somehow involved cargo trucks.

It was getting frustrating. Everyone had a different answer. Eventually, I made a public inquiry to a gathering of the discussants “¿Nadie sabe nada, si? (Nobody knows anything, right?) A unanimous and knowing “si” confirmed that it was totally normal that none of the bus companies knew if their own buses had left Potosi that morning. It was totally normal that the bus companies couldn´t telephone Potosi or the bus drivers and ask. It was totally normal that the highway policeman had no idea either. It was totally normal that he couldn´t or wouldn´t phone his highway policeman associates in Potosi or along the highway and find out. It was totally normal that the Bolivians were being being kept in the dark. The only abnormal thing was that we gringos were getting irritated. Like the campesinos, the normal thing to do was to shrug and wait.

We waited and waited and eventually a bus that had squeezed through the blockade pulled in and as the sun was sinking into the Salar we made it to the Bolivian-Argentine border. A sea of poverty, saltenas, and pink toilet paper behind us.

Say you´re on a sixteen hour bus ride in Bolivia and you need to take a piss.

Now, we all know this wouldn´t happen very often because, like a seasoned South American traveler, you wouldn´t drink anything for hours prior to any bus ride.

But just say you had to go…like twelve hours into the ride. A really pressing need.

Option 1 would be to timidly approach the bus driver and ask in your best Spanish, with the whole bus listening, if you could please delay everyone else´s arrival to get off the bus and in front of all those craning necks pee on the back tire.

Option 2 would be to try the bathroom on the bus.

Now most Bolivian buses, even those sixteen hour overnight babies, don´t have a bathroom on the bus. But let´s say you shelled out some cash, did your homework, and got on a bus with a bathroom. You´re in seat 7 near the front and the bathroom is behind seat 27 in the back. You get up and wake up the six or so people sleeping in the middle aisle, you avoid the box of chirping chicks, you somersualt over the potato sacks, and oil drums, lift up and go under the boxes of contraband, and finally you get to the door.

You put your hand on the bathroom door and your bladder momentarily stops spasming. Jiggle, jiggle. The door´s locked.

So you make your way back to the front of the bus, I mean you wake up six sleeping Bolivianos sprawled out in the aisle, you avoid the chickens and the potatoes and the oil drums and you get under and then over the boxes, and you get to the conductor and you ask for the key and then you go back waking up your six friends again (“la ultima vez senor”) and you get to the bathroom and you unlock the door.

You really need to pee. It´s been twelve and a half hours now and you have good kidneys. Problem is you also have a good nose and your little bouncing cubicle smells like a two day old diaper (after they start eating meat).

But you also have a good noggin´and you anticipated this and you brought Tiger Balm and you apply it to your nostrils and now it smells lovely, like someone rubbing you down at a rave.

So you take a nice long urinar to the sweet smell of eucalyptus and menthol only being thrown off the throne by the bucking bus twice. Just a few bruises.

You´re a girl by the way.

Let´s say you´re really well organized and you remembered to bring toilet paper (the pink Bolivian kind, one-ply) and you have it with you and you clean yourself up and you reach for the trash can. (In South America you NEVER put toilet paper in the toilet. Always in the little plastic bin al lado).

There´s no trash can. So you look around to make sure no one is watching and you flush it. Ahhhh sweet heavens! You´ve peed.

Option 3, of course, is you do as the Bolivians do and piss wherever and whenever you please no matter who´s watching or how much the posted fine for peeing is.

But god help you if you have the shits.

Danielle and I went to the tourist information office in Uyuni, Bolivia, today to do some homework on the hoards of agencies offering tours in the Salar de Uyuni and Southwest Circuit. They all do the same thing basically. Six tourists, a driver, and a cook cram into a Toyota LandCruiser and head out to the salt desert for a few days (finally an appropriate use of an SUV). Most people say it is a spectacular experience. A few say it was a nightmare and they almost died (jeep breaks down, no radio, no water, temperature drops to -26C at night, guide gets lost, etc.). So checking out the sixty or so agencies at the tourist office is important. It was a first stop in Uyuni.

Wow! Just when we thought Bolivia could never get its act together, we walked into the world´s best tourist information office! Most tourist information offices around the world just aren´t that useful. Someone scribbles something on a free map you´ll never really use and then asks you to sign the guest register to justify their salary at year end.

This office, however, was incredibly useful, and at the end there was no guest register, just a survey. They had bus schedules with prices, comment books of local tourist agencies organized by month, one for good comments one for quejas (complaints), eager staff, a book exchange with a good English book, and lots of useful maps. The centerpiece of the office though was a Microsoft Access database cataloging surveys filled out by hundreds of tourists based on their experiences with the different tour agencies doing the Southwest Circuit.

The professional and very helpful Weimar laid out two chairs in front of the computer and proceeded to show us rankings of all the agencies by any criteria we could name: food, quality of the vehicles, quality of the guides, number of tourists recommending the agency, number of complaints against the agency . . . etc. We spent a while oohing and aweing and taking notes and narrowing the list down to a few. And then I saw it, the perfect criterion: a field in the database for nationality. I looked at Danielle knowingly and then almost simultaneously we combined our broken Spanish to ask if there was any way to rank the agencies by number of tourists from a particular country using that agency. Two clicks of a button and Weimar produced a ranking of what I will call the ¨Israeli factor.¨ A ranking of the agencies based on the number of Israelis filling in surveys for each. Dafka!

We used two independent criteria in making our decision: (1) best overall rating, (2) fewest number of Israeli respondants.

Let me say here that if you ever want a real friend, you should befriend an Israeli. Danielle and I have some amazing friends of Holy Land descent. Zivvy, Dror, Shiri, now Itai and Gaia, Effie, and most recently Benji, are some of the most loyal, generous, good-natured, down-to-earth people we know. (You other Americans, Canadians, South Africans and what-have-you are just okay. But keep trying).

Let me also say that I am a staunch supporter of Eretz Yisrael and nothing I say should be construed as slander of the Holy Land. I denounce Hamas, Hezbollah, the European Union, and all the Israel haters out there.

But, let me also say, that the Israelis traveling around South America (and the rest of the world for that matter, India, South East Asia) are not doing our mother land any good.

I´ve always believed that Israel has terrible public relations. Say what you will about the Palestinians and Israel´s enemies, they sure know how to win the public relations battle. Of course, part of this comes from them not giving a damn how many of their own public die to get their message across. But nonetheless they know how to make themselves look good and Israel look bad. The best example of this is the BBC. I love their news, but they are the world´s biggest sucker for confusing anti-Israel propoganda with news. If the BBC really wanted some real anti-Israel fodder, they should come to South America and report on just how unbelievably rude, cheap, loud, obnoxious, aggressive, and culturally insensitive travelling bands of Israeli youth are.

Let´s see . . . On a combined walking, bus, barge trip from Puno, Peru, to Copacabana, Bolivia, there was the travelling Israeli medical student who had every tourist pamphlet between Lima and La Paz fluttering from his pockets and sticking out of his backpack. For hours he fiddled with little improvised packets of these pamphlets, re-arranging piles of them stuffed into bolsitas, munching away on assorted candies as the wrappers fluttered to the ground. We talked for a while and he expressed ambivalence about going back to Israel in a couple of days and finishing medical school. It took a while for me to figure out, but I realized he was strewing a trail of trash behind him like he was afraid of not being able to find his way back home. Of course, the locals thought it perfectly normal that trash should be deposited wherever it is created.

Our accompanying Dutch, English, and German travelers were too polite to say anything. But good old Danielle piped up with a ¨hey is this your garbage?¨ and handed it to him.

Like many an Israeli backpacker he had also perfected the art of highly audible open mouthed chewing. When I first saw this phenomenon in Ecuador–of an Israeli backpacker chewing his cud—I thought ¨well, those Israelis just have different manners.¨ It was not until I saw llamas on the Inca trail displaying their munched up boluses of altiplano grass on their bottom lip that I realized maybe the masticating Israelis showing us their spaghetti and sauce in mid-chew are trying to imitate the local Andean camelids.

Then there was the 2 hour bus ride next to Guy. The CD of hip-hop Andean folk music was interrupted by the chwarck! of him sniffing back his snot at regular 30 second intervals. He regailed us with stories of his bargaining prowess. How deftly he could bargain the price down on food, transport, shelter, and souvenirs. “How much did you pay for this bus? … Oh, really … I only paid 20 soles…did you bargain?¨

His most effective strategy, he explained, was to exploit the poor mathematics education of the rural South American campesinos. Rather than asking how much a particular item cost, he would ask how much of said item he could obtain for a given price. This really threw them off and reaped great discounts. He offered us the link to the ´secret´online Israeli backpacker´s guide to South America, and looked at us with pity when we said we could read Hebrew but couldn´t understand it. “What? You´re Jewish? Why didn´t you tell me?”

His crowning achievement though was his 22 km trek along the train tracks from Machu Pichu to Ollantaytambo. This stretch, as one might guess, is usually done by train. He was indignant though that tourist should not have to pay more than locals for the train. I tried to point out to him that tourists usually earn more money in an hour at home than locals earn in a week and maybe it was a good idea to have differential prices. He looked at me again with pity, and remained proud to have really stuck it to the man.

Things came to a head a few days ago in Potosi when we went on a mine tour–three hours of crawling, squeezing, sliding, and climbing through tight, dark tunnels in an antiquated silver mine. We decided to go with a smaller company and signed up with Julio Ceaser and his ¨Greengo Tours¨for the following morning. Looking foward to a private tour, we were a little disappointed the next day to learn that there would be a third person in our group. Reflexively Danielle asked ¨¿Es de quel pais?¨
Julio Ceasar: ¨Israel.¨ We sighed.

But we greeted our new friend enthusiastically. I thought a good starting point would be the incredible story of the intrepid railway walker. The guy responded ¨yea, why do we have to pay more than the locals? I walked back from Machu Pichu too! They cheat you! It´s unbelievable!¨

Apparently, what we thought was the whim of a cheapskate is actually becoming the new Israeli Inca Trail.

These mine tours are not trivial. You are taken into working mines with horrible conditions. Cave-ins, fumes, explosions, accidents happen. They are dangerous to say the least and this seemed fairly clear to us prior to departure.

The main entrance is a very narrow 200m long tunnel the floor of which is a wall-to-wall rail track made of very rickety wood along which, at totally unpredicatble intervals, three men come barreling down with a very unstable wagon piled high with one ton of rocks. One man runs backwards in front of the wagon to try and coax it to stay on its track, while the other two futilely strain against the back of it to try and slow it down. As soon as the rumble of one was heard, our guide, in a near panic, would shout ¨there!¨and point to a slight widening in the tunnel where we would sprint and plaster ourselves to the wall so as to get off the tracks. (A nurse in a taxi a few days later acknowledged a lot of orthapedic injuries, many likely the result of runaway mine trains).

Our Israeli companion began to get a little nervous in the main entrance tunnel which was understandable. His response though, rather than to pay the utmost attention to the guide (an experienced ex-miner) was to start kvetching.

¨Carlos what are you taking us here?¨ open palms gesticulating in disdain. ¨Is it safe?¨ This was only the beginning of a long hour of criticism and disobedeince by our Israeli friend. Finally, to our great relief, he told the guide that the dust in the mine was bad for his voice and that he had a performance the following night. Performance? Finally I realized why the guide kept calling him Elvis. One of our two guides accompanied the Elvis impersonator out of the mine while we quietly obeyed the other guides instructions and finished the tour.

Israeli backpackers don´t use the Lonely Planet like the rest of us. They´re too smart for that. They have their own website with all the special deals and bargains listed. There are hostels and restaurants all over South America with Hebrew endorsements written in marker on notebook paper taped to the windows and many serve falafel and shwarma. One way to avoid the Israelis is to avoid these places. If you can read Hebrew you can circumnavigate the places on the website. Finally, as most of those in question are fresh out of the army and don´t have much cash, you can out-spend them and stay in nicer places and eat in more expensive places (no shwarma though, sorry). But the ultimate weapon is the ¨nacionalidad¨field in the database in the tourist informatation office in Uyuni.

We´ve met one or two Israelis down here who you wouldn´t mind spending four days squashed in a jeep in the desert with, but the rest would really disappoint their imas and abas. It´s a pity since they obviously don´t represent all Israelis.

Pots, pans, baby clothes, Nivea cream, enough cheap leather shoes to be-shoe every barefoot man on earth, friendly vendors with carts specially designed to peel and squeeze delicious oranges for a $.20 cup of juice heaven, hair curlers, WWF playing cards, backpacks, screws, belts, notebooks with ¨Brat Pitt¨ on the cover,  the sweet sickening smell of roast pork, nail clippers, Lee jeans, sunglasses, pens, Gillette Mach 3 razor blades for less than $1 a piece (wish I didn´t have a beard), t-shirt dying ink, bananas, people everywhere, glasses of brownish colored beverage with a nut? fig? inside always covered with a saucer, flashlights, socks, brooms, underwear, DVDs!, more DVDs!, y mas DVDs! all blatantly copied, the smell of urine everywhere, leather boots, plumbing pipes, batteries, bras, super-glue, aspirin, marbles, light bulbs, puppets, squeaky whistles that sound like real birds and make you look up in anticipation of seeing a parrot only to see a man smiling with a whistle in his mouth and ten more hanging from his arms, skirts, hats, onions, Levi jeans, electrical tape, diapers, razors, tiger balm, milk of magnesia (not for Gringos, you can just use tap water, a remarkable laxative), rope, balloons, spices,  napkins, big beach balls with spikes (¿por que why?), tupperware, toilet paper, carrots, stray dogs running beneath the stalls (the source of the urine smell?), as the day wears on ladies coming around with tea and coffee for all the vendors, ahhhh! another cup of freshly squeezed o.j., sweaters, blankets, paint, ¨compro oro¨ (I buy gold), combs, cassette tapes, wool, herbs, raw meat, razors, potatoes, my little pony dolls, camera film, hand bags, jewelry,  school books, wallets, i.d. card holders, in every stall a campesina (indigenous rural lady folk) with her baby hidden amongst all the wares sometimes breast feeding sometimes asleep . . . everything on earth is for sale, you never know if it´s ¨original¨ or a knock-off and where the hell is all this stuff made? . . . China, no? 

Two hours into Peru from the Ecuadorian border, one of our day packs was stolen. The dirty little ladron left a bad taste in our mouths that has soured Peru a little. The stolen day pack contained all of our guide books, among other things, so we had a taste of pre-Lonely Planet travelling. God bless Lonely Planet. The little bastard also got my green book — a collection of everything I´ve written in the past five years (poems, stories, thoughts). ¡Que lastima! The only upside is that maybe the little maldito will have more persistence than me and actually get my stuff published. At least there is one person in the world who can now appreciate my brilliant writing, even if he can´t speak English. 

By now we have seen quite a few Peruvian cities. From Chiclayo and Trujillo in the north to Cusco and Arequipa in the south, with a little smidge of Lima in the middle.  Two things all Peruvian cities have in common: unbelievable noise pollution and very aggressive salespeople. The latter are the primary source of the former.

First, are the taxis. More per capita than in NYC for sure. Like all Peruvians selling something, taxi drivers believe that pedestrians need to be constantly reminded that they are there and ready to take your money. Every taxi that passes you (mas o menos ten per minute) honks at you. This is the first layer of background noise. There are many others. Almost no one owns cars so public transportation is ubiquitous. Taxis, combis, collectivos, buses, mototaxis, etc. Each has its own call, ranging from honks to modified car alarms that blare on and off in an instant, to guys hanging out of the side shouting destinations ¨Puno, Puno, Puno!¨¨Arequipa, Arequipa, Arequipa!¨ They have no faith that you might be able to decide for yourself that you need a bus and identify the correct one. The honking, beeping, squealing, squawking, bleating, wailing, whining, blaring, barking, yelling have no limits. 5 a.m. is no injunction.

On this cacophenous background are the street vendors selling ANYTHING you can think of. Peru must have an informal economy twice the size of the formal one. They stop you every few feet selling anything from adrenaline-packed-canyoning-for-gringos-with-death-wishes, to individual used AA batterries. Popcorn, peanuts, gum, water, tours, t-shirts, your photo Senor!, shoe shine for your Tevas?, sunglasses, phone cards, empanadas, pan, choclito con queso, verduras, chicha, helados, etc. Like the hucksters of transportation, they are loud and constant. The gringo tourist has it even worse because he must also contend with the old ¨menu in your face routine¨ (with added soundtrack of course). ¨Amigo! Spaghetti, cuy (guinea pig), orange juice?¨

Thrown in to the great communal Peruvian sales pitch is blaring music, reggaeton – a mix between Latin hip-hop, salsa, and reggae – being the best example. The music must be loud enough to distort as it comes out of the speakers.

Actually the harangue of the sales pitch can be beautiful in an annoyingly catchy way. Each salesperson using his own inflection to make his product as catchy as possbile. I still can´t get the ice-cream salesman out of my head with his deep voice, head tucked in, lips fully puckered out ¨helados, helados, heladitos!¨Or the shrill ladies in the bus station in Cusco, all 25 of them, one at a time in rapid succession ¨Arequeeeeeepa, Arequeeeeepa!¨ 

My dear Granny Thelma used to call rude, loud people ¨Peruvians.¨As in ¨that man over there is a Peruvian. He has no manners.¨I don´t believe in such stereotypes and we have met many wonderful and kind Peruvians, but I know where the loud part comes from now.

Speaking of stereotypes, we met an Israeli who walked for eight hours on a train track from Macchu Picchu to Ollaytantambo because he refused to pay the higher tourist price for the train ticket. He was so proud of the thirty dollars he had saved. The only other people who ever make this ridiculously long and hot journey are occasional Inca Trail porters, who could outrun the Isreali army drunk and in their sleep.  The Israeli also told us about his numerous bargaining victories with Peruvian sellers. I realized as he spoke that only Israelis and Arabs can out-bargain the Peruvians, and an American-Canadian mestizo doesn´t have a hope in hell. Although we have a pretty good husband-wife, good-cop bad-cop routine going.

Of course the intense pressure to sell comes from grinding poverty, and the artful bargaining comes from gaping inequality. The upper class, ultra-rich Peruvians and American retirees with $800 video cameras should pay more for alpaca scarves than average Peruvians eeking out an existence driving a taxi. I saw a grey-haired, pot-bellied, American couple arguing for a senior citizen discount because the 15 soles  ($4.60)  entrance fee to see a spectacular museum housing a perfectly preserved sacrificed Inca woman was too much. The couples´ monthly pension is probably more than the annual budget of the museum.

That museum by the way, Museo Santuarios Andinos, is the most haunting sight I´ve seen in a long time. Macchu Picchu in all its splendor is peopleless (aside from the 2,000 person horde of tourists). It´s magnificent and awe-inspiring, but it´s just stone. This museum in Arequipa houses the perfectly preserved remains of a 14-year-old Inca girl sacrificed on top of a volcano 500 years ago. She was found in 1995 a few weeks after an adjacent volcano erupted and melted the ice that had been keeping her beautiful for centuries. Everything she was buried with — clothes, offerings, food — was perfectly preserved. It´s chilling. And the Japenese designed transparent freezer that she now lives in makes it all the more so. Ahhhh the Japanese, I bet they wanted to put a DVD player in there too.

The other museums, in the north of Peru, housing the remains of the Lord of Sipan for example, were equally cool, but lacked the whole young girl being sacrificed at 6,000 meters element. Spooky!

Say what you will about the Inca, they certainly liked heights. How the Spanish defeated them I will never know. Yea, yea, yea I know the whole Guns, Germs, and Steel arguement, but really all the Inca needed to do was ambush them before they acclimatized.  

The Inca trail was only possible thanks to coca leaves. Anyone who says it´s easy is a liar or has a porter carrying everything they own. The coca makes you move uphill fast. I hiked with a 12 kg backpack which was agony when the coca wasn´t pulsing through my veins. The porters who carry 25 kg, wear smooth leather sandals, and move 10 times faster (seriously, ten times faster) were an impressive sight. Zero percent body fat  and strong backs. These guys are very impressive. Very impressive.

They serve you hot tea in your tent at 5 am and clap for you as you arrive in camp each day. They make you pizza and fresh fish in a 4000-meter high wilderness and have your tent set up and taken down before you can blink. They were one of the highlights of the trail for me.

Unfortunately, some tourists arrive in Cusco and don´t give themselves enough time to acclimatize. They over pack and then think they can carry their own packs. Half way through the trek they have the porters — already straining under the legal limit of 25kg –carry the extra load. The porters, desperately poor, will never say no to the extra cash. The tourists, in awe of the porters strength, never think about the bad backs and work injuries these guys must end up with. It was really sad to see the pitiful tips the porters ended up with after their spectacular work.

I only couldn´t help thinking that the Inca, like the porters, surely could have defeated the Spaniards, like modern-day tourists, unacclimatized and over-packed.

The trail was stunning, passing trough all kinds of terrain — from high mountainous altiplano, way above the tree line and dotted with lagoons, to orchid and fern laden cloud forests. Along the way Inca ruins cling to mountain sides. Wind on carved stone.

Machu Pichu are just two words you´ve heard over and over again which transform into this unfathomable stone city on an impossible mountain top hidden by a shield of higher peaks that makes you realize just how ugly any modern city really is. It is astonishing. It makes you forget the pain in your knees from the 2,000 Inca steps the day before, the pain in your feet from the kilometre on kilometre of carved stones winding through the forest, and the pain in your shoulders from your pack.

After we descended to the Sacred Valley, we spent a night at Willka T´ika — a five star haven surrounded by gardens unrivaled even by my Granny Thelma´s once upon a time. It´s somehow nestled incongruously in a sea of rural South American poverty. The place is a luxurious Eden. We lay under the stars in an outdoor stone bathtub filled with rose petals, rosemary, eucalyptus, and other unidentified herbs under the Milky Way in all its glory serenaded by live Andean folk music from a nearby concert. It was magical, especially for our aching bodies.  

Peru´s not so bad after all.

After Galápagos, we took a looong overnight bus ride east from Quito to the jungle town of Coca. Good thing we were sleeping most of the way, because the few times our eyes were open we noticed how scary the bus ride was. We were basically careening through the Andes on tiny, curvy roads that sometimes went over tiny, rickety bridges over deep canyons. In the middle of the night. In the clouds. And in the rain.

We waited in Coca for a few hours before meeting our guide from the jungle lodge we were going to. Those few hours were long enough. Coca is basically a town that sprung up in response to the oil boom. Petroleros (oil workers) from all over Ecuador come through Coca on their way to their jungle outposts, where foreign oil companies are drilling the hell out of the Amazon.

We had a 3-hour motorized canoe ride to our jungle lodge in the pouring rain. Every minute was worth it. The lodge was fantastic. It is an entirely community-run lodge that was set up to provide an alternate source of employment for the Sani people to the oil industry. The weather was hooooooot and steeeeeamy, rather uncomfortable actually. To avoid the heat, we started at 6am for a few hours of hiking in the jungle, and went out again at 5pm (still scorching hot one hour before sunset!). Even in the heat we had to wear long pants, rubber boots, long sleeves, sunscreen, and insect repellent.

Despite all the discomfort, the experience was incredible! Instead of stepping over animals who decided that the middle of the path was the best place to call home (as in the Galápagos), the jungle hikes were more about trying to spot incredibly camouflaged animals through binoculars. Needless to say our wildlife pictures from Galápagos are a little more exciting. We saw crazy insects (giant millipedes, leaf-cutter ants, huge grasshoppers that looked like leaves), colourful fungi, amazing trees and plants, various different types of monkeys, 13% of all bird species on earth (really), black caimans (related to the alligator), frogs, 2-foot long worms, you name it. The biodiversity is staggering, especially compared to the Galápagos where on some islands there is only one kind of plant or a handful of bird species.

The food at the lodge was also amazing (obviously this is Danielle writing… happy tummy = happy traveler). A definite highlight was a traditional dish called maito, which is fish cooked in a kind of palm leaf — the cook went into the jungle with his machete to cut the leaves himself — and served with yucca, plantains, aji (spicy sauce…yummm), and a tomato-onion sauce. The best meal I´ve had in Ecuador so far.

Onward. After the jungle, we went to Baños, famous for its volcanoes and thermal baths. We had thoroughly relaxing few days there, soaking in the baths, going on hikes, and just enjoying the scenery. Volcano-watching is also a favourite tourist pastime, but the volcano was inactive while we were there. A few days later, however, we learned that it spewed ash and smoke 5 km into the air and covered Riobamba (a town 4 hours away) with 4 cm of ash.

From Baños, we took another hair-raising bus ride to a quiet colonial town called Guaranda. The scenery was outstanding. In the Andes and all. We took a day trip to a small town called Salinas, where we visited co-op factories where they produce wool, soccer balls (with fake logos on them, of course), chocolate, ceramics, cheese, herbal teas, and salami. It was fascinating. Pictures on Flickr.

After that, we took a crazy train ride from Riobamba towards the south, on a portion of track called El Nariz del Diablo ( the Devil´s nose). Basically a zig-zag switchback track that descends a steep mountain side. The train is only for tourists, but it was amazing nevertheless.

We are now in Cuenca, Ecuador´s 3rd largest city. It´s an old colonial city (founded in the 1500s atop ruins of an Incan city) surrounded by hills, full of culture, well-dressed Ecuadorians and fancy cars. Tomorrow off to relax in a small town called Vilcabamba, then off to Peru!

Before I go, would just like to make a few general points about Ecuador…

1. It is never too early to start playing latin techno music on the bus, say… at 6am.
2. Aforementioned music is never loud enough. 
3. This country is full of volcanoes! Many of them active. Who knew? 
4. The bus is never going fast enough around a hairpin turn with a 2000m drop.
5. Within one day of traveling, you can get to the coast, or jungle, or 5000m in the Andes.
6. To make the @ sign on a Spanish keyboard, you have to press Alt + 64. Weird.

We´ll write more from Peru. ¡Hasta luego!

The problem with blogging while traveling is that we never feel like updating our blog… but we´re trying. Photos are really annoying and slow to upload, so please be patient with us… more photos to come.

So. Entonces. We are now in the Galápagos Islands, in the town of Puerto Ayora. On the mainland, we struggled with the altitude of towns like Quito and Otavalo. Here, we are struggling with the constant motion of the sea. God bless Gravol (which, interestingly, is just as important for land-sickness as it is for sea-sickness… as I type this I feel like I am swaying slowly from side to side. oy).

 The past few days were spent visiting vastly different islands, from desolate black lava flows (from 100 year-old eruptions) with no life save 1 or 2 lava cactuses and many scurrying lava lizards, to an island where every square foot is covered with birds. Hilarious ones. Red-footed boobies (not to be confused with the red-necked and red-nosed boobies from Canada), masked boobies, blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, tropicbirds, etc, etc. Baby birds, juvenile birds and adult birds. Mating pairs, doting parents who trade egg-sitting duties every few hours, single birds, and of course white bird shit everywhere. Jackson Pollock couldn´t have asked for better splatters of white paint against the black lava cliffs.

 The marine turtles and iguanas, crabs, and Darwin finches have also been a highlight (photos to follow, when we have time to suffer through the slow internet connection).

These islands bring out the real tensions of tourism and traveling. 80,000 visitors per year coming through tiny islands with fragile ecosystems falling over each other to get perfect photos of the most photographed animals in the world. That being said, much of the immense amount of money generated by the industry goes directly to conservation efforts. The guided trips are very strictly regulated, and on each island there is a clear path from which tourists are not allowed to stray.

We return to the mainland on Monday, after another 4 days of stressing our vestibular systems. Adios, land lovers. Hasta luego.

We arrived at the airport around 7 a.m. on September 11th. Flying on the anniversary is cheap. It was clear to me that everyone was aware of the significance of the morning. I kept repeating the eerie first sentence of the 9/11 Commission Report to myself: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.” Indeed it was a big, bright morning. The airport was busy. CNN, which now has a strangle hold on all airports in North America, was blaring through every waiting area. Even those without TVs had the soundtrack piped in. The image of the World Trade Center being struck was everywhere.

We boarded our plane and took off just about the time the September 11th planes would have. There was no mention made on board, but there would have been a moment of silence in NYC as we reached cruising altitude.

The following morning in Quito, after the third Church tour of the day–hundreds of painted and sculpted images of Christ bloody and dangling on the cross–we came upon a panoramic painting of hell. In dark red, orange, and black, with different sectors for adulterers, murderers, unbelievers, etc. The painting was just inside the entrance of a stunning Church whose interior is entirely plated in gold-leaf. The indigenous people who built the church were not allowed in after it was complete. They could only stand at the door, the best vantage to veiw the misery and torture of hell. The painting was strategically located to scare the indigenious huddled at the entrance into converting. I´m not sure the 9/11 hijackers were thinking any differently from the Spanish. Submission through fear. (Did you ever notice that submission has the word “mission” in it?)

Ecuador has had a tumultous political past. Elected presidents often don´t finish their term. President Gabriel Garcia Moreno was hacked to death by machete on the steps of the presidential palace. In the same square outside the presidential palace, there were police everywhere, in at least four different uniforms. They were heavily armed with everything from M-16s to swords.

Later in the week we visited the museum of Ecuador´s most famous artist Oswaldo Guayasamin. Two of his paintings from his series ¨manos¨(hands):