http://youtube.com/watch?v=XrT0gAbRqyw

The following joke is making the rounds. Here it is in translation from Spanish:

Hugo Chavez and his chauffeur were going down the highway when suddenly a pig crossed the road, right in front of them. The chauffeur slammed on the brakes but was unable to stop in time, and killed the pig instantly. Chavez ordered his chauffeur very authoritatively, “Find the owner of the pig and tell him what happened: a Bolivarian Accident!”

Three hours later, the chauffeur returned, unsteady on his feet. In one hand was a bottle of aguardiente and in the other a box of Cuban cigars, his hair and clothes all messed up. “What happened?” Chavez asked his chauffeur, who answered:

“Well, the owner of the pig gave me this bottle of aguardiente and these cigars, his wife made me the best food you ever had, and his beautiful daughter made love to me three times, completely wild sex…”

“Well, what did you say to him?”

“Friend,” I said, “I’m Chavez’s chauffeur, and I just killed the pig!”

There is a particularly annoying form of flea present in the mountains of Colombia, and, I presume, elsewhere in the Andes. It jumps onto you from the surrounding brush and burrows just under the outer layer of your skin. None of my guidebooks make any mention of it.

I take my exercise walking to the Three Crosses here in Cali, and find myself the frequent host to this annoying parasite.

You’ll first notice such a flea by a small, red sore that won’t go away. The sore will look like a pimple you’ve scratched, red and small and exposed. After a couple of weeks to a month you’re going to be wondering what it is. Probably one of these mountain fleas.

Tea tree oil is effective. If you spread a dab of tea tree oil on the spot it will kill the flea and the bite will heal in a day or two.

More effective seems to be drowning your fleas. Go swimming for ten minutes. Be sure to submerse your entire body, including your head in the water for as long as you can. This will kill the fleas.

I used this technique to kill off my fleas last week, only to discover one living in my ear — there was just enough air trapped in my ear canal to keep it alive. So I stood in the shower holding my ear open for several minutes and that seemed to do the trick.

Backpackers up and down the Gringo Trail in South America have invariably heard of, if not read, Rusty Young’s Marching Powder. It’s the story of his friendship with a British inmate in Bolivia’s San Pedro Prison, where inmates buy their cells, and some of the best cocaine in the country is produced.

I recently came across a yellow, crumbling paperback copy of Charles Nicholl’s The Fruit Palace. It makes Rusty’s Big Adventure seem tame by comparison. With the spirit of gonzo in his blood and copious amounts of cocaine up his nose, Mr. Nicholl goes to Colombia to write The Great Cocaine Story.

The time is the early 80s, and cocaine has wrapped its champagne tendrils around the brain stems of New York and London’s finest, and Nicholl’s publisher wants the scoop. The lengths he goes to and the risks he takes are astonishing — talking his way into a meat-packing plant in Bogota he suspects is a front for cocaine trafficking, bussing into the Chocó and then boating downriver to Buanaventura on the Pacific Ocean (a very dangerous thing to do, even now), and ultimately getting involved in smuggling a briefcase of 100% pure cocaine out of Santa Marta.

The Fruit Palace appears to be out print. No matter. It received many printings during the 80s and 90s and, though never quite a bestseller, there’s plenty of used copies floating around out there. It is essential reading for anyone interested in South America.

Today is Independence Day in Colombia. No big deal, really; no fireworks, no general jubilation, just a few military parades, and that’s about it.

Of course an Independence Day for a country that is essentially a regional puppet for the US government is never going to really fly. Independence? What independence? All the orders that matter come from the US embassy complex. Government Palace is just a proxy.

Here in Cali the celebrations will be marked by the replacement of the water mains. Yes, for 48 hours, starting last night, 80% of households in this city of several million will be without running water until Saturday night at midnight. At least it’s for a good cause — the mains have to be replaced to finish construction of the new electric trole bus system, which should go a long way toward preventing Lima-like pollution in the future.

Some things you can only see in Colombia. There I was, walking to the supermarket yesterday, when I came across a small, blocked off street with men and women practicing marching. They were four wide and six deep and a man in front carried a white flag held forward at a 45 degree angle.

Walking past I got a good side view of the four women in the bunch. Groowr. Stiff-backed, head high and chest out, oh so chest out, they were all short and skinny and fake titties out to here to keep them afloat when the Titanic goes down.

Only in Colombia.

Update: The Colombian Air Force made a big showing last Friday, demonstrating the very latest in military technology.

Where’s the Black Sheep Squadron when you really need them?

Thanks to Danny Hancock for the photo.

Like any good story, just when you think things can’t possibly get any worse, they do.

My scorched and tarnished lungs have been branded by the Lima air with its hot and searing fire, and the thought of enduring another two weeks this way is enough to send me running for a fire extinguisher or, failing that, a tactical nuclear weapon.

So imagine my delight when a little after noon this afternoon my girlfriend interrupted me working on my novel with the announcement that the building next door was on fire and we should really consider making plans to leave the building on rather short order and on a potentially permanent basis.

Our room was perched on top of the third-floor roof, and stepping out into the air one immediately noticed that the visibility dropped to slightly less than a foot, as a massive onrushing cloud of hot white smoke rushed passed me out onto the street below.

The building next door was, it appeared, on fire.

Sirens had been howling for half an hour but I brushed off the annoyance as you do a couple of flies at a picnic: they must not interfere with the activity at hand. But the building next door was most conclusively and spectacularly on fire, and something would need to be done, and really, rather soon.

If you’re going to get burned to death it’s important to make sure your fried corpse is properly dressed so that the medical examiner has something to brighten his day. So I reached into my bag of tricks and pulled out a large yellow bandanna and tied it around my face, cowboy train robber style.

Properly attired I began to move more quickly. Laptop: off: in bag. Passport hidden here: other passport hidden there: money: here: there: can’t remember, time to go: grab a hat (hey, fashion calls) and off we went, the girlfriend and I, down two flights of stairs, through the fluffy oxygen-free clouds a light breeze wafted our way.

Out into the street, and from the park across the way we sat and watched Hiroshima. Huge billows of smoke poured from behind our building, the rainbow of fruit flavours flushing through white to black to grey and back to white again. I held the train robber fashion accessory close to my mouth and fought back a sneeze; I failed, and to the grim amusement of the twenty-odd people gathered in traditional Peruvian style to watch their neighbour’s house burn down, began to sneeze in long, uninterrupted, uninterruptible streams, as airborne snot shot from every facial orifice there was (well, two).

An hour went by. More or less. The smoke got bigger, the smoke got smaller. Finally it got smaller. The cats we rescued from the house stopped mewing their heads off. As the smoke got thinner big chunks of flying soot floated up into the air and scattered their joy throughout the neighbourhood. A cop on a motorbike sirened by, checking out the nearby houses for signs of the fire spreading. It didn’t. We decided to move back in.

The house smelled like a salami warehouse. Even the paint had that smoky flavour, and I don’t even normally lick (or eat) paint. So I sat outside in the tiny front garden with the laptop on my lap until moist white bits of ash started to flavour the keyboard, smearing their yummy goodness all over that finger-based input device.

Turns out the building that burned was a warehouse. Later news brought word that it was in fact a security warehouse. What the heck did that mean? A “security warehouse”? Apparently it houses — or should I say, “housed” — the offices of a security company that takes care of warehouses.

Looks like they could use a little practice.

The foul brew of airborne toxins swarms down the nostrils and into the
lungs, scratching its way down the hatch. The throat itches, evoking a
cough; the eyes, red, burn; various rashes appear. In the morning,
spasms of coughing and sneezing awake you as your body foolishly tries
to expel the poisons it spent the night passively ingesting.

Oh for the love of Lima.

Most tourists are smart. They stick to Miraflores, the upscale enclave
on the shore, where a vigorous ocean breeze cleans the lungs and brushes
the soot from your face.

Not me, though. I wanted to save a whopping twenty bucks for the month I
was here, so instead of Miraflores, welcome to Pueblo Libre, an
otherwise not-so-bad middle class neighbourhood quite a few kilometres
from the ocean. The only problem is that I’m living, working, sleeping,
eating, and trying to avoid exercising in a cloud of smog.

Penny wise, pound foolish, the story of my life.

There’s a YMCA not far from here, and they have a pool. (In Spanish it’s
actually an ACJ, but singing “I want to stay at the ‘Ah, Say, Jo-Ta’, I
want to stay at the ‘Ah, Say, Jo-Ta-Ah’” just doesn’t work nearly as
well.) So I went to said pool, and figured, hey, it’s indoors. I can
exercise in relatively clean air without committing pulmonary suicide at
the same time.

Taking a break between laps I looked up and through my fogged-up goggles
considered the funky ceiling design. Then I looked again, and slowly
propped the goggles onto my forehead. Oh. It wasn’t actually a ceiling
at all, just some blue tarpaulins strapped across an open space above
what was, in fact, an outdoor pool.

The second day here I was astonished to see municipal workers trawling
the main thoroughfares in a tanker truck, pumping water at dessicated
trees at the side of the way. Lima, it turns out, despite the
omnipresent coastal fog, and the constant, handkerchief-drenching
humidity, is actually a desert. The average annual rainfall here is a
mere five centimetres.

In fact winter in Lima maintains an almost constant temperature of about
15C, varying whimsically between 14C and 18C based on factors random
enough to be entirely beyond human comprehension. The only difference
between “inside” and “outside” seems to be that “inside” you cough less
and “outside” your clothes on the washing line develop a thin film of
black dirt.

I find myself suddenly musing on J.R.R. Tolkien’s choice of names in
“The Hobbit”. The dragon, the one Mr. Bilbo Baggins robs, was named
“Smaug”. Tolkien was famous for his hatred of motor cars, and always
rode a bicycle to his job at Oxford. Coincidence? I think not.

Where, exactly, does Lima’s pollution come from? Is it industrial, or
just cars, or what? From what vile monster’s belly comes this
ubiquitous, acrid belch?

An entirely unscientific, indeed un-journalistic survey (I asked my
Colombian girlfriend) suggests that most of Peru’s heavy industry is a
ways north along the Pacific coast, half a dozen hours and more from
Lima. Which leaves only one likely culprit: the automobile, and the
diesel buses that prowl and growl their way through Lima’s streets.

Lima is a city of roughly eight million people — more, if you count the
fringes — and has no train, light rail, subway, or indeed any sort of
public transportation to speak of, except for the aforementioned legion
of big buses, little buses, small buses, tiny buses, monster buses, and
vans.

They pile upon each other, nose to tail, honking and squealing and
cursing their trade, plying their moveable wares for a sol or two, an
ill word always close at hand for the passenger bold enough to complain
at rough treatment.

Living in this cloud of poison it is difficult not to get angry, not to
find buzzing in your thoughts and your dreams words like “city planning”
and “public transportation” and “lung cancer”. Peru, unlike Argentina,
unlike Colombia, is a country that does not work. Do not drink the
water; try not to breathe the air; ready your elbow for the thief at
your side.

Can we not do better, we of the West with laws that mostly work? Can we
not prevent this revolting fate, our cities reduced to poison-clad
monsters, our citizens choked by pollution, our fashionistas in shock at
the soot on their clothes?

Me? I can’t fix Peru. Don’t really want to either, considering the
Street Rudeness Factor. I got a couple weeks more to suck on bus fumes,
then I’m off back to Colombia, a country that may on paper be in the
middle of a civil war, but where at least all three major cities have
something approaching public transportation, you can drink the water,
and, most importantly, you can breathe the air.

Lima of old was The City of Kings. Three hundred years of Viceroys ruled from here, the largest and wealthiest city in the Spanish Empire outside of Madrid.

These days you’d be hard pressed to find any remnant of those former days.

Cleaning the black crust of pollution off my sandal-clad feet each night I have to wonder where it all went wrong, or for that matter if it was ever right. Lima is a city of excesses and extremes, cleanliness and filth, poverty and wealth, but on the street they all have that haunted eye of fear, a sharpened elbow, a rude word, and a lying tongue.

How can we get ahead? How can we stab our neighbour in the back to get there? How can we shove our way to the front of the queue? It’s like living in the United States all over again.

Peruvians are beyond question the worst liars, cheats and thieves I have encountered in South America in a year and a half of travelling and living on this continent. They cheat gringos, of course, but they cheat each other too, also other South Americans (they can pick the accent), and, indeed, anyone who is not from their locale and can be fooled into believing something is worth more than it should be.

The Peruvians have clearly inherited the Roman traits that made “caveat emptor” the byword of that Latin empire.

My main focus for comparison is, of course, the delightfully drug-addled country of Colombia; although that appellation is entirely incorrect, as Peru produces almost as much cocaine as Colombia.

Colombians are in so many ways the contrary of Peruvians. Where Peruvians are cheats and liars, and seem to delight in being rude, like New Yorkers on steroids, Colombians are genuinely friendly, helpful people, who will go out of their way to do you a service, who seem to believe, whether true or no, that it’s more profitable to grow the size of the economic pie than to quarrel over a thin sliver of nothingness.

Two very different studies in capitalism.

Consider the food. Colombia boasts some of the most fertile growing land in South America. Within its borders there there can be found nearly every type of growing region on earth, from the deserts of the north to the jungles of the Amazon, and every mountainous growing region to 5000m and more.

Yet Colombian food is some of the most boring, bland, and generally forgettable food I have ever eaten in my life. In that land of hot pants and hotter women, it’s as though some bizarre puritanical strain courses through the Colombian taste buds. Imagine France and Frenchmen preferring to dine in the traditional English style: boiled potatoes, overcooked beef, and a stiff upper lip for dessert.

Where Colombian food is sterile, boring, and dependably bland, at least it is hygienically prepared. It won’t give you food poisoning. Peruvian food suffers from much greater swings in quality. At the low end is the cheap stuff that will give even the locals the shits. Hygiene is not a very high priority in Peru.

The heights of Peruvians cuisine, however, overshadow Colombia in a mountainous display of chili and ceviche and genuine empathy and understanding for food, what it can be, what it should be, and how to prepare it.

For a long time time I used to think it wasn’t really the fault of Peruvians they were such thieves. Peru, like Ecuador, is overrun by tourists, and, well, I’d probably rob tourists too if I lived here. Easy stupid marks, like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean honestly, some people who travel here walk around with a big flashing neon sign on their forehead that says “Hey! You! Stupid Gringo Tourist From New Jersey Here! You Know, Where Your Cousin Lives? Yeah, You! I Want To Be ROBBED! YES! PLEASE ROB ME! No, Forget The Football Game, I WANT TO BE ROBBED NOW!”

Gringos had corrupted Peruvians and turned them into thieves through the process of tourism. There were lots of tourists in Peru, and lots of thieves; there were hardly any tourists in Colombia, and hardly no thieves. Ergo, stupid tourists with bum bags and loud American accents taught Peruvians and Ecuadorians to be thieves.

Now I begin to wonder if there isn’t more at play. This fear here in Lima is a living, breathing being. It surrounds you and envelopes you in its tightening grip, and grasps cold at your heart. I don’t think I’ve felt like that, really been disturbed by that oppressive atmosphere since Chicago. Colombia may be in the midst of a de facto civil war but people are not generally afraid of each other, nor especially of the government. Here in Lima in the unending shadow of the garua, the permanent coastal fog, here in the shade, in the darkness, the devils are at play in men’s minds, and the fog and the darkness and the fear has entered their souls.

Imagine, if you will, the foreign student of English, fed a diet of solely Standard American Dialect, say, by a teacher from the West Coast of the United States.

Our student speaks good English. Not perfect, but still very good English and has just been sent to New York City for a month of personal and professional business.

The only problem is that he can’t understand a thing anyone says.

Cut to the present tense, and here I am in Lima, a speaker of Spanish as a foreign language very much accustomed to the classical, uninflected speech of Colombia. By contrast, Limeña Spanish has all the guttural power and force of Brooklyn “fuggedaboutit” English and the mouth shape of a Polish butcher trying to get his mouth around American vowels.

Limeñas like to say that of all Latin Americans they speak the purest form of Spanish on the continent. They say this is because the Viceroy lived here for three hundred years, that this was the capital of a vast empire.

That may be. It may also be that New York City is the capital of a vast American empire.

Is there a correlation between capital cities and muscular, unintelligible language?

I’m a fan of macadamia nuts. Living in Australia, they were plentiful, if not especially cheap.

Colombia also produces a fair quantity of the Australian Nut. The unshelled variety is ridiculously cheap (COP$3,000 for half a kilo), but shelled macadamias are equally as expensive as anywhere else. So imagine my surprise when I came across macadamia oil in the supermarket yesterday, next to imported olive oil, and at half the price as in Oz.

Let me think. Locally grown and processed macadamia oil — right here in Cali — or the two year old dregs of whatever the Spanish and Italian olive groves decide to throw Latin America’s way. Hmm. I’m going with the macadamia oil from now on.

Also nifty is De Alba’s Aceite de Macadamia Con Ají, macadamia oil with a chile in it, turning the light yellow oil a deep pink. Spicey popcorn, anyone?

Check out Del Alba’s web site here.

After a long illness it’s as though the whole world appears again in ghastly grey newness, ready to be loathed afresh. So it has been recently after a seemingly-endless bout with that favorite tropical friend and companion, dengue.

How did it began. It was a Monday. How fitting. Even if it was a public holiday. The girlfriend wanted to go for a picnic down by the river. Bah, I said, I hate picnics, and off we went.

An hour’s drive later, we found ourselves among screaming kids, nowhere to sit, flies (and, unnoticed, mosquitoes) galore, and an adjacent paddock full of testicular-challenged colts with what can only be described as a bowl cut for their tails.

Great. We made short work of the sandwiches we’d brought, looked rather sheepishly at each other as yet another ear-splitting yelp of some small humanoid rodent caused us both to wince, and simultaneously began packing up to leave.

So much for that idea, we both said at practically the same time, and went for an ice cream at a nearby shopping center to soothe the annoyance.

The day ended on a real upbeat note, it was the same day my brother emailed to say he had been kidnapped, and finished very late after a telephone conversation with the Colombian anti-kidnapping police (see other post).

The kidnapping incident dragged on, and with it a not entirely unexpected general sense of malaise. It was to be expected; I was under a lot of pressure, it would go away soon.

Except it didn’t. (more…)

What is it about travel writers’ strange urge to piss in hotel sinks? First I read Notes From a Small Island, and within the first couple of pages Bill Bryson tries to shock our grandmothers with his casual sink pissing ways.

Now I pick up a far more excellent book, Moritz Thomsen’s The Saddest Pleasure (now sadly out of print), who waits a chapter or two to get from Ecuador to Brazil before he starts pissing in sinks too.

I mean come on. Everyone knows guys piss in sinks. We all do it, we just make sure no one is watching when we do. Cuz you know, we get sick of lifting that fucking lid for you ladies — so much easier to lay the ol’ trouser snake out all nice and comfy on top of the sink brim and let go with a refreshing stream. You just have to make sure to run the tap afterwards, or else the sink starts to smell like a urinal.