Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay

Asuncion / Going Home

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:30:00 +0000

The guide book I picked up at The Strand includes every country in
South America. Naturally, some countries warrant more page space than
others. They have more attractions, say, or are simply bigger.
Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru. Those're all in the 200+
page range. The whole book is well over a thousand.

Paraguay, by contrast, warrants 27 pages. The entire country, in 27
pages! I think the Falkland Islands get more pages than that. Hell,
there're cities in this book that get more pages than that. Lots of
them.

Each country in the book gets an introductory page brimming with gushy
remarks about the soaring peaks, beautiful wildlife, awesome night
life, ancient ruins, exotic cultures, etc. The page for Paraguay is
only half full. The only real positive the authors could drum up is
that the people are "very friendly."

Even though I'd managed to find a little excitement in CDE, it's true,
I think, that the country is pretty sleepy. In Asuncion, I'd walk home
at night and in half an hour, across "downtown," I'd see maybe three
cars or motorcycles, two people. This is true even on a Friday or
Saturday night. Cats sit in the middle of roads, cozy on the warm
asphalt. (Why not? It'll probably be twenty minute before a car comes
by.)

I spent four nights there. I was the only person in the theatre for
Revolutionary Road. I watched the new Terminator movie entirely in
Spanish, without subtitles. I think I followed the basic plot just
fine: Christian Bale's grunts are a universal language. I hit the gym
in the mornings, drawing strange looks for doing 50 pull-ups, 50 dips,
200 squats -- and then collapsing onto the floor, moaning. The
CrossFit sessions were invariably followed by ice cream with dulce de
leche on top.

Friday night, I hit up what is probably Asuncion's only gay and tranny
bar. The place is called TRAUMA and feels so much like the clubs on
the fringe of North Beach and Chinatown in San Francisco in the
mid-90s. (I'm thinking of one in particular, a place called
Palladium.) I think it was the music, mostly, that gave it that feel:
EBTG's "Missing," Ce Ce Peniston's supremely queeny club hit
"Finally," and then blowing up the dance floor with Deee-lite's
"Groove is in the Heart." Probably 20 gay men per 1 t-girl. They were
a fun, ridiculous bunch. Much less drab than most Paraguayans I'd met
previously.

Between the central part of town and my hostal is an area full of
strolls. Clumps of girls and t-girls, and then creepy solitary Johns
casting wayward glances. Every night it was something different. One
night, a cat fight that ended up with someones shirt getting torn off,
revealing pubescent-looking breast buds. (It left me wondering: if you
supplement enough exogenous estrogen, your secondary sex
characteristic development should follow, at least haphazardly, a
normal sort of pubertial course? Tanner staging? Despite the copious
endogenous testosterone naturally present in these adult bio-men?)
Another night, a transwoman grabbing my crotch right on the street
corner, in front of a cop, in a desperate bid to get me to spend an
hour with her in the Sheikh Hotel. (USD$20 for her services,
"completo," plus USD$4 for the room for an hour.) That made me giggle
since I'd walked by that hotel during the day and imagined it a very
dour place with women in hijabs. Hah.

Asuncion IS pretty sleepy, but I still found enough there to keep me
busy for a few days.

I'm now in Sao Paulo -- legally since I'm inside the airport, in
transit -- and on my way home.

I'm quite happy to be coming home.

In the last year and a half, I spent three contiguous months in New
York City. Other than that, I haven't been in one spot longer than six
weeks. I'm feeling a very strong inclination to nest a bit, to stop
living out of a suitcase or backpack. My own stuff, my own messes. I
can hardly wait.

Ciudad del Este / Borders / Black Markets

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:44:00 +0000

From Argentina, my next step was to be a border town in Paraguay
called Ciudad del Este. From there I planned to travel back to
Asuncion, the capital, and then catch my flight home.

CDE made the list of places to see because it has popped up in the
news, off and on, as a concern for American law enforcement. The
tri-border area has been a smuggling hub since the mid-1960s with the
opening of the Friendship Bridge, directly connecting the Paraguayan
city of Ciudad del Este with the Brazilian city of Foz do Iguacu.
Supposedly the vast majority of all imports and exports of Paraguay
pass over this bridge. Since 1991, this flow has been augmented by the
MercoSur regional trade agreement between the three countries
mentioned and Uruguay. It is currently the third largest tax-free
commerce zone in the world after Hong Kong and Miami. Half the city is
a shopping mall: junk shops with knock-off electronics, jewelry,
clothes.

CDE pops up in the US news because our Southern border is porous and
vulnerable, and because, in a throw-back to the Monroe Doctrine, Latin
America feels like our backyard. There is, you see, a fairly large
Muslim community in CDE. And there is, these days, some speculation
that not only is money being funnelled from CDE to terrorist
organizations, but maybe there are Al Qaeda operatives there and
training camps in the jungles nearby, etc. (And lions and tigers and
bears! Oh my!) I don't recall any of the articles mentioning any proof
of those claims. The most tangible evidence I recall on this topic
comes from a mid-90s bombing of a Jewish center in Argentina. Eighty
four dead, hundreds injured, executed by bombers who entered through
the triple border area, supposedly part of Hezbollah, ergo supposedly
backed by Iran, etc.

Of course, as a consummate outsider all of that would be off-limits
and likely wholly invisible to me. I figured, though, that I could get
some kebabs or a shawarma.

So, off to CDE. Unfortunately, the easiest way to get there from
Puerto Iguazu, in Argentina, is to cut through Brazil and then cross
the aforementioned Friendship Bridge right into downtown CDE. Easy, if
not for the USD$135 visa requirement for Americans.

A note on borders: Borders are a sort of fiction. We draw them on maps
and talk about them as if they're impenetrable walls through which
even ideas and languages might struggle to pass. They're not. They're
an artifice, a fanciful construction given weight and import by people
who believe in them. For people who LIVE on them, they're a part of
daily life, often crossed without a thought.

The Somalis of eastern Ethiopia are separated from the Somalis of
Somalia by a border. A serious, somber border, given the bad blood
between those two countries. That border is a piece of rope, fraying
in the heat, strung between two little posts in a no man's land
stretch of plastic trash and dust. You can hardly even find the
'immigration' offices on each side and there might not be anyone there
once you do.

How many Pashtuns give a shit about the Durand Line? 'Given weight and
import by the people who believe in them.' That the US military stops
pursuit of militants when they reach that border, sensitive to
political concerns with the Pakistani government, has given that line
a power that it hasn't had in years. That's true both for the military
and the militants. But without that, without the rules of engagement
changing when a line on a map is crossed, who even would've noticed?

Anyway, with this sort of garbage rational in mind, and with those
famous last words -- 'What's the worst that could happen?' -- echoing
in my head, I decided to go for it. I took a public bus to the border
and got my Argentina exit stamp. I chatted with some Brazilian guys as
we passed Brazil's immigration control and then, just like that, I was
in Brazil. A few hours later, I strode past Brazil's other immigration
control -- head up, look purposeful, stride, don't stop -- and walked
right into Paraguay.

I crossed the Friendship Bridge alone at night with my small backpack
slung over my shoulder. After all the news articles, I felt like I was
walking straight into a 'wretched hive of scum and villainy.' It
would've been pretty easy for someone, or a pair of people, to toss me
over the edge, 50m down into the river. A few minutes earlier, a fat
Brazilian woman had told me not to cross the bridge at night because
of how dangerous it. She pointed a finger at her temple like it was a
gun. BANG! She hadn't made any sound, but she didn't need to. (I
wonder, in retrospect, what the onomatopoeia for a gunshot is in
Spanish or in Portuguese? I'm delighted that chickens, in different
languages, make sounds from cockadoodledoo, to cucucaru, to pio pio.)

I thought about her warning as I walked. I can hardly believe I
haven't been mugged yet. I take all of these careful precautions.
Strong body language, no pausing, no guide books or maps, backpack
small enough that I can still sprint, minimal showing of
money/affluence, stay near other people, avoid groups of young men,
look just unstable enough to not be worth it, lock taxi doors, get out
with all my stuff before paying, the more suspicious someone seems the
quicker I need to befriend them, share, talk, seem human, empathize.
Blah blah. The list goes on. Still, it's bound to happen eventually.
It feels a little like virginity: 'It probably won't be a big deal
but, c'mon! Get it over with already!' At this point it's the sword of
Damocles. I've walked through all sorts of shitty places alone -- not
just Bed-Stuy at night, Billy Joel. What's the universe waiting for?

The next morning, with the city seeming far less sinister in the
daylight, I walked around the markets for a few hours. I noticed pairs
and groups speaking Arabic but didn't find any kebab shops. I asked a
woman how to say "mosque" in Spanish but the best should could offer
was "church (iglesia) for Muslims."

At one point, my head thick with thoughts of smugglers and black
markets and terrorists, I asked a man selling air rifles if you could
buy real guns in CDE.

"Further down," he said. "In front of the Chinese restaurant."

I went. One contact handed me off to another, who nodded into a crowd
from which two men emerged.

They stood too close to me. "What're you looking for?"

Only pistols, I said. "What calibre? 9mm?"

I haven't seen a single person in South America, police or military or
otherwise, carrying anything larger than 9mm. Often the police here
are armed with .380 revolvers. I decided to push a little and see if
anything larger was available. I asked if they had .45s.

"No problem. What brand? Colt? Come with us. We'll take you to the
black market right now. You can ride on the back of my motorcycle."

Fuck. I felt a brief moment of shock. I hadn't expected things to move
this fast. There was no way I was getting on the back of some shady
guy's motorcycle, him thinking I had money and reason to buy pistols,
and letting him drive me around Ciudad del Este to some unknown
location. That's not just a good way to end up mugged; it might even
be a decent way to end up dead.

Unfortunately, I think my surprise show in my body language. One of
the men immediately offered, instead, to conduct business in a
restaurant. "Very relaxed, safe," he said.

Mentally, I was already back-pedaling. I nodded as sagaciously as I
could manage and told him I understood. I said I had to speak with my
friend (male -- thank you, Spanish, for letting me say that without
saying it) who was waiting for me Right Now. I looked at my watch and
said I'd return in an hour, to this spot, and talk to the guy with the
red hat again.

I walked away.

One of the two men followed me for the first five minutes or so. I
confronted him and told him I'd return in an hour and reminded him
that I had to talk with my friend first, "ALONE." He agreed, again,
and asked if I wanted any cocaine as well? I walked to one of the
Paraguayan military outposts a few hundred meters away and talked with
the highest ranking person I could see outside. I wanted to be seen
talking with him. I spent the next half an hour changing directions,
cutting through buildings, doubling back, going through bottle-neck
areas and then waiting, hidden, to see if anyone followed.

I never went back by the Chinese restaurant.

A few hours later, I grabbed the last seat on a bus on its way out of town.

Argentina and Iguazu

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:31:00 +0000

I spent a few days in Salta, Argentina, after I left Chile. I didn't
do much there except relax and try to take better care of myself. More
sleep, some strength training at a nearby gym, better food. I watched
Mark Rippetoe's videos on YouTube about the back squat and tried to
apply what I learned as tweaks on how I've been squatting, on and off,
for the last decade. Rotating my pelvis made an enormous difference
and I was hardly able to walk afterward, despite using less weight
than last week.

Mostly, though, I struggled to fill my days. For different people this
is either a really great thing or a really terrible thing. I don't
like it much. Breakdancers in the park, some movies, ridiculous
amounts of walking. I went to a lovely dance and acrobatic performance
one night and fell in love with one musculed Argentinian girl after
another.

Twenty five hours on a bus put me in a small town called Puerto
Iguazu. It's in the triborder area, where Argentina, Brazil, and
Paraguay touch. The nearby Iguazu falls are visible up close from the
Argentine side and in panorama from the Brazilian side. That a
Brazilian visa for an American costs USD$135 decided that for me.

There'd been rumors swirling about how a drought reduced the flow over
the falls to a meager 900 cubic meters per second. The normal flow is
about 1200 m/s, tenfold in the rainy season. "Under 900 m/s isn't
worth going," I'd been told. I'd seen photos from a month ago and it
looked, truly, like it wasn't worth going at all: little wisps of
water, tumbling over a dry, dirt cliff. In Salta, I googled up a web
site run by the Brazilian government with hourly flow data. 1200 m/s
one day, down in the 900s the next, then the 600s, then back up. The
flow changes so quickly that a photo from a month ago turned out to
mean nothing.

The Argentine park is nicely arranged and clean. On a Wednesday
afternoon, it was nearly deserted. The piece de resistance of the
whole splashy mess is an area called Garganta del Diablo, the Devil's
Throat. I had big plans to take some excellent photos. Foreground
objects to give scale, panoramic expanses, rainbows in the mist from
the water breaking, perhaps some birds in silhouette flying over the
falls to draw the eye.

Nothing went as planned. The catwalks above Garganta del Diablo were
so wet with spray that within seconds the camera was soaked, dripping
water off the bottom of the lense, with me tucking it under my shirt
and running back the other direction to pat it dry before the seals
gave and the whole thing short circuited. I didn't want to eat $1000
for a picture of a waterfall and so that was the end of that. The
whole Iguazu expanse is about 4 km wide, so there were plenty of
other, less spectacular waterfalls to photograph.

I probably only spent a few hours in the park, all told, before I left
for the border.

Reflections On Learning Spanish

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:43:00 +0000

I really wish I could flirt in Spanish! Eres como el aire... Flirting
and innuendo are pretty advanced, nuanced parts of language. I suspect
that's all quite a ways off, unfortunately. Si tu cocinas como
caminas, ¡quiero comer las migajas... Hahaha... ¿Carino? ¿Cómo se
llama lo que estamos haciendo? I could learn as I go. I could just cop
lines from Neruda, but it's too flowery (no pun intended): Me traes
madreselvas y tienes hasta los senos perfumados... Maybe not. Eres tan
bonita desnuda. Me pones nervioso! You make me nervous!

I also find it pretty ridiculous that I don't even use foundational
verbs like "hacer" (to do, to make) but I know gaggles of ridiculous,
nearly useless words. I know grio (grasshopper), hormiga (ant), mamut
(mammoth -- they don't even exist anymore!), musselman (Muslim),
suegra (mother-in-law), globos (balloons), poligono de tiro (shooting
range), ombligo (bellybutton), lenceria (lingerie), porta liga (garter
belt). For hula hoop, people just say "hula," or describe it as a un
aro plástico tubular -- a plastic tubular hoop. Travesti is
transvestite, the same as in French.

I know how to say highway (carretera), street (calle), path/trail
(sendero, thanks Sendero Luminoso!), walkway (pasarela), and route
(ruta). I can say idiot, stupid, imbecile, dumb and insipid, when any
one would've sufficed. Philistine is filisteo. I know a word for small
rocks and pebbles (piedra), rocks too big to move by human power
(roca), and gigantic rock faces (penasco). Rocks! Worthless! I know
that I can properly use hoja for a leaf on a tree, a page in a book,
and the corn husks used to wrap tamales. I can say pencil (lapiz) and
pen (lapizero), but I also know pluma -- a word that describes a
fancy, calligraphy-style fountain pen. How useful is that?

I guess this is what happens when you learn things organically. Surely
if I was learning this language with some sort of method, I'd have, in
the name of efficiency, learned a single word for "rock" and then just
used modifiers for scale. I'd have learned "pen" and saved the brain
space that went to pencil and calligraphy pen.

It's pretty funny to sit back and look at this. This is, really, how
children learn language. In that sense, it's a wholly natural and
beautiful process. I happen to pick up "shooting range" where kids
pick up "playground," but the process is the same. I've picked up
"pues" as a hedging, filler word to start sentences as we use
"well..." in English. Tirar, to throw, is used for throwing a ball, but a gun also "throws" a bullet. It's also widely used as "to fuck," as in, "I want to (throw) Shakira." Cojer, to grab, is used for things like "grabbing" a taxi, but, again, is also used for fucking. "Look at him! I'd love to (grab) him." And "menos mal," literally "less bad," which is used as an exclamation like "thank god!" (Nevermind "dios mio!")

In all of this, I've probably picked up loads of things that're dead
wrong. At some point I "learned" that mosquito in Spanish was
"mosquitaro" -- but it's just "mosquito," without the funny Three
Musketeers flourish on the end. I still can't decide if "near here"
should be "cerca aqui" or "cerca de aqui." (If anyone knows, please
tell me! Now's the time to clean it up!) And I'm changing my mind
almost daily on what you can saber vs conocer, and tomar vs sacar. I
thought saber was all general knowledge (places, things) and conocer
was for people only, but now, hearing people use both, both ways, I'm
sensing that maybe saber is surface knowledge, and conocer is a more
familiar or intimate knowing? And tomar, to take, vs sacar, to take
(out of?). Tomar drinks and things off of tables, but sacar things out
of bags, and blood (OUT OF) your vein in the hospital. And sacar
photos, a hold-over, I imagined, from the days of removing a film
slide after each exposure, but now I hear people use tomar as well.
The nuances of things like "ambas" versus "los dos" are lost on me.

I'm loving it even though it feels like a slow process and even though
I think I'd benefit ENORMOUSLY from a formal Spanish class at some
point. There're big gaps. Big ones that I'm aware of, which suggests
that there're probably even bigger ones that I'm not yet aware of. I
haven't pinned down "this" and "that." I already admitted that I don't
use "hacer" even though, if pushed, I can spout off the
barely-irregular present tense verb forms. I presently ignore the past
tense (ha) except for "hace (un mes)," and "fue." I get pretty easily
thrown by different accents and regional variations: The Argentinians
substitute "vos" for "tu," seem to use "vo" like "de" (of/from) (?),
pronounce their double l's like "sh" instead of "yuh," say aca instead
of aqui (are these truly the same?), drop the "s" off the end of
almost everything, and sometimes drop the entire second half of words.
It took me days to sort it out and get back up to normal speed with my
comprehension.

Whew. That said, I am speaking more Spanish than when I started this
trip and that was one of the goals. I'm now at, let me think: Seven or
eight years ago, I went to Ecuador with Sadie speaking, essentially,
not a word of Spanish. After two weeks, she wrote down a handful of
pre-conjugated verbs for me on a piece of notebook paper and I struck
off on my own, traveling around the country for another two weeks. One
month. Over Christmas last year, I spent four weeks in Central
America. And then this trip, now, of five weeks total. So I'm at just
a hair over three months of immersion, zero classes, and spread out
over multiple years.

The good news is that I don't feel like I backslide at all. I pick up
right where I left off, every time, with zero loss in vocabulary or
grammar. Maybe in forty or fifty more years of occasional, short trips
in Latin America, I'll actually be fluent.

Tidbits 3

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:20:00 +0000

1) As I headed east through Peru, the elevation went up and the air
became both colder and more dry. My cuticles were taking a beating, a
few minor hangnails developing into painful crevasses of torn skin. In
a desperate bid to have any skin left on my fingers by the end of this
trip, I bought a small tin of lotion in La Paz and have been applying
it to all my fingers, from the PIP joints down, 2-5x per day.

It's worked even better than expected. Not only has the skin healed,
but the nails themselves seem healthier. The vertical ridges -- which
people had ascribed to everything from mineral deficiencies to
imbalanced chi to "some people are just like that" -- are
disappearing.

2) A few weeks ago, I went to a "botica" in La Paz to buy some
shampoo. The lady pointed to a shelf but all of the bottles were too
big to carry except for a little pink-capped, clear bottle of baby
shampoo. I grunted "gimme that one" and tossed it in my bag. I didn't
get a chance to use it until a week later, in Chile, after four days
without a shower while in the deserts of southwestern Bolivia.

I was so excited about that shower! I stepped into the hot water with
the bottle in hand and just stood there, sighing, enjoying the hot
water for a few minutes before I started washing my hair. The first
dollop of shampoo didn't lather well. My hair felt greasy after four
days without a shower. I added more. The baby shampoo, weakened, I
presumed, so it didn't sting the eyes, wasn't really up to the task.
The bottle was cheap, though, and I really wanted a great shower, so I
didn't care if I used half the bottle to get clean.

I sprayed from the bottle directly onto my head, wondering if this
worthless, latherless garbage was really even shampoo. At that point,
one of my hands brushed my shoulder. It felt oily.

I realized, instantly, my mistake. Looking down at the bottle and
READING IT for the first time ever, it said "Baby Aceite." Aceite: I'd
seen that word before and remembered. Baby oil. The bottle was now
half empty. In the end, I was barefoot, hobbling down a dirt road in a
Chilean village, after dark, covered in baby oil, looking for the
nearest store where I could buy some soap. So unimaginably dumb! I
couldn't stop laughing at how absurd the whole situation was.

3) I sat next to an English girl on a long bus ride who had a blister
pack of pills sitting on her lap. She told me she'd gone into a
pharmacy, told them she had a bit of a sore throat, and received a
pack of twelve 80/400 Bactrim tabs! Everything that's not a
"controlled" (scheduled) substance here is available over the counter.
Just ask. I asked her, a bit facetiously, if they mentioned how often
she'd have to take them, or for how long. Nobody had told her a thing
and she hadn't asked.

Salt Flats and the Bolivian Desert

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:31:00 +0000

I hopped on to a three-day tour of the "Salar de Uyuni" salt flats and
other sights in the deserts of southwestern Bolivia.

The entire first day of the tour was spent driving on the salt flats.
Cutting across, first this way and then that, in an old Toyota Land
Cruiser. There seems to be some effort to have "roads," with most
vehicles following the same paths. This helps with navigation, on a
landscape with little or no way markers, and with preserving the look
of the place so you can continue to draw tourists. There seems to be
little else in this entire corner of Bolivia, save these bits of
natural beauty.

The salt flats themselves are stunning and absolutely worth the money
and effort. They're the largest salt flats in the world, the result of
a gigantic lake draining some 40,000 years ago. There's hardly
anything to take photos of, as every direction is a burning expanse of
white leading to a fuzzy horizon. Of course, the lack of depth cues in
the landscape and an indistinct horizon line lend themselves nicely to
photos that taunt our depth perception. I tossed a few in the gallery.

In one spot, there's a hotel and restaurant where everything, from the
walls to the furniture, is made of blocks of salt cut out of the
earth. The result looks like adobe, only whiter. It's not, though,
anything like a "crystal palace." The architecture is still just a
series of shabby rectangles, slapped together, and the bricks, while
whiter than adobe, have a sort of dirty grayish tone.

There's also an island, ostensibly shaped like a fish to give it the
name "Isla del Pescado," which is covered in cactus from edge to edge.
From a distance, the salt formations at the edge of the "island" give
the effect of water lapping against its shores.

The second and third days were spent off the salt flats, further
south. Lagoons of different colors, some volcanoes, mountains colored
by mineral deposits, geysers of gurgling mud spewing their sulfuric
stench into the air, a few species of flamingos. Some of the other
tourists in my group were quite taken by these things, but I felt
somewhat underwhelmed. Of the twenty or so geyser pits, only one
releases steam in a concentrated jet -- and it's fake, created
artificially for photo ops. Further, the vividness of the colors of
the lakes changes by season, maybe by week or by day. If there's no
wind, the water is placid and its glassy surface reflects nearby
mountains beautifully (I'm told). If it's windy, as it was for us,
this effect is lost and you're left with a lagoon, surrounded by a
white shore of borax deposits, that just has a bit of a tint to it.
Pretty, but not stunning. The waters of Band-e-Amir, in the Hindu
Kush, are tenfold more visually striking.

A note on temperature: The Bolivian altiplano is cold. Every Bolivian
I talked to mentioned how cold it was, as did all the other tourists,
the guide books, the tour agencies, etc. I'd heard rumors that it
often dropped below zero, centigrade. One guy reported that he woke at
3am a few weeks earlier to find the thermometer was pegged in its
lowest position: -25 C. During the day, I wore a normal pair of socks,
a knee-high pair of knit socks over them, long thermal underwear under
my pants, a skin-tight long-sleeve base layer on top, two t-shirts, a
loose air-trapping long-sleeve layer, a third long-sleeve layer with a
faux turtle neck, my TNF waterproof shell, Marmot gloves, and a knit
hat with a polar fleece liner. At night, I went to sleep wearing all
of that, plus a fleece neck warmer, in a sleeping bag that I rented,
which was itself underneath the three or more heavy blankets provided
by the hostals we stayed in. I was warm enough, but only by a small
margin.

On the last day, we ended up at a small hot springs just below 5000m
elevation. It was intensely cold, of course, but the promise of the
steam rising off the water was too much. Smarter people had changed
into their swimsuits the night before; I stripped naked in the dirt,
put on the pair of underwear that most resembled shorts, and hopped
in. The feeling was glorious. I probably spent half an hour in there,
soaking, alternating between enjoying the heat and loathing what it'd
feel like to eventually get out.

When I finally did, I was pleasantly surprised. My body temperature
had increased enough while in the water that I felt like I had some
reserve heat. I took my time drying off, put my clothes back on layer
by layer, and found I was, in the end, far warmer than before I got in
the water. I was reminded, then, of being at a family reunion in
British Columbia, in a back yard hot tub, and jumping out of the tub,
racing up the snowy hill barefoot, rolling down it, and then jumping
back in the tub. If you're quick, you hardly feel it.

On whole, the area is awfully pretty and was a welcome respite after
spending a few days in La Paz, choking on exhaust fumes. If I had it
to do over again, I think I'd have done a one-day tour of the salt
flats alone, preferably on a cloudy day with a stunning sunrise and
sunset. There're hot air balloon "tours," or ascensions, available on
windless days, though I didn't realize this until later. That would be
a pretty stunning way to view the scenery there.

Since I was already within a few kilometers of the Chilean border, at
that point, I crossed over into Chile. This was supposed to be a
shortcut, avoiding a nine hour drive back north to Uyuni, where I'd
catch a bus south to Salta, Argentina. This almost ended up being a
disaster as the town in Chile, San Pedro de Atacama, was ridiculously
expensive and only had bus service out three times a week. Luckily, I
managed one of the last seats on a bus leaving a day later for Salta.

Photos / Chile

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:37:00 +0000

I've uploaded the last of the Peru photos to the Picasa gallery.

Bolivia photos are now uploaded in their entirety also. They are in a
separate gallery.

I can't wait to get home and crop, edit, adjust white balance, etc, on
all of these photos. There're 70 in the Peru gallery and I'll likely
have around 100 there when I get home and dig through all of these.
The tiny versions up now will be deleted, replaced by the full
versions of each. My only concern is that I'll get busy with other
things, or intimidated by the enormity of this project, and will
doddle. I hope not. I already have a good five gigs of photos from
various points over the last few years that're sitting in a folder
called, "To Edit."

I'm now in Chile. I had no plans to end up here on this trip, but it
seemed convenient at the time. I'm in a tiny town in the northeast
called San Pedro del Atacama.

I'll be in Salta, Argentina soon. Hopefully by tomorrow night.

Leaving La Paz, Heading South

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Mon, 25 May 2009 20:00:00 +0000

I'm still in La Paz today, Monday.

Today has been a bust. I tried to go to the gym at 10am, when they
opened, to get some exercise before having a quick shower back at the
hostal and checking out by 11am. Of course, the gym opened half an
hour late. I did a quick max set of pull-ups (13, new personal best!)
and dips (15, somewhere near a personal best, I think). At 12,000
feet! Woo.

After that, I spent three hours trying to send a box to the US. The
box is smallish and weighs 1.5 kg. DHL wanted USD$150 to send it. At
the post office, there're multiple floors with a bunch of different
agencies, each of which has a different set of rules, places they can
ship to, fare charts, etc. The cheapest place I found wouldn't ship
the box because they only ship packages OVER 2 kg. The lady asked me
what things I had on me that had weight. We had to open up the box and
stuff it with whatever I had on me to make it weigh enough: an old
Bolivian magazine, six packages of fiber cookies, and two rolls of
toilet paper! 2.1 kg. Perfect. That cost USD$21 or so and will arrive
in "one to one and a half months." Hahahahah! And they gave me a
tracking number too. Maybe it'll go on a steam boat.

This afternoon, I've tried to finagle my way into visiting a prison
here called Carcel San Pedro. There used to be some "tours,"
unofficially, but everything has been shut down since a news story a
few weeks ago about tourists buying cocaine IN the prison, where it's
produced/refined, and the detention of a few Canadians. I met a Dutch
woman here who runs a tour agency, who knows a guy who used to bribe
the guards to do the tours. I pushed the public health perspective,
saying that I'd been in San Quentin doing pre-parole advising of
inmates and the MDC in Albuquerque doing general practice and STD
care. No dice. It looks like it isn't going to work out as things are
simply too "hot" for any of the guards to risk letting a foreigner in.

I'm heading south to Uyuni tonight to try to link up with a tour of
the salt flats near there. I'll probably be without Internet of any
sort for four days or so. After that, I plan to continue south into
Argentina and stay in Salta for a while. I have less than two weeks
left, but it'd be nice to settle in there, find good restaurants,
sleep more, be out of the pollution of places like La Paz, that kind
of thing.

Two days in La Paz

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:41:00 +0000

I've been in La Paz for the past few days.

Walking a few blocks up a hill here leaves me huffing and puffing.
This is the highest capital city in the world at 3,660 meters (12,008
feet).

I kind of crashed into La Paz after an overnight bus from Cusco to
Puno where I got three hours of sleep, a quick jaunt to Lake Titicaca,
and then another bus from Puno to La Paz. I was so exhausted by the
time I got here that I rented a USD$7 room at Loki Hostal simply
because that was where Lotte had a reservation. That ended up being a
the third night of crappy sleep in a row. The nine other people with
beds in the room snorted coke all night, going to sleep, variously,
between 6am and 9am the next morning.

Loki Cusco, where I spent exactly one night, was a fucking frat house
with almost everyone drunk. Loki La Paz might as well be a flop house
for all the drugs running through it. At least the owners recognize
it. There's a newspaper interview with one of the owners framed on the
wall there, wherein he remarks something like, "The majority of the
backpackers in South America are interested in drugs." Majority. I'd
agree. Maybe even a sweeping one, if you pick a hostal that actively
promotes their party atmosphere as a reason to stay there.

On Saturday, I went to the Coca Museum. It was setup by an
anthropologist working in concert with a historian, psychologist,
sociologist, and lawyer. Something like that. It's a tiny room, but
floor to ceiling with photos and placards. You're given a guide book
in your own language on entry. It took me almost an hour to make it
through the book, following along with the photos. Earliest use of
coca leaves, refinement, addiction, extirmination campaigns,
physiology, how to properly chew the leaves, costs of cocaine
production, etc. Very interesting and well worth the USD$1.20 or so
that it costs to enter. Of interest, one of their citations for
information is Narcotics Anonymous. And the photos in the addiction
section, of people shooting up, were all from NYC.

That afternoon I headed out into Valley of the Moon (Valle del la
Luna) and rented a quad/ATV to tool off around the valley and take
some photos. Driving behind cars and vans on the dirt roads, squinting
hard to keep out the dust, I got positively caked from head to toe. As
I sped up, the wind burned my eyes, making them water. I could feel
the tears carving streaks through the patina, back across my face,
like so many racing stripes.

There were no helmets and no goggles for rent. I opted for a bigger,
more powerful machine and hit a top speed of 91 km/h on a slight
downhill. I'm not sure what that is in miles per hour, but it was
definitely plenty fast to die. Through rivers, past crazy dogs trying
to bite my legs, finding life on a quad to be nothing like a DMX
video. All of that and the photos ended up being shit. Asi es la vida.

On the bus ride back, I spotted some wiry people with dreadlocks in a
park, trying to toss a grip of fabric up over a tall branch. I
immediately recognized what they were up to from seeing Ilana perform
circus arts. I hopped out, chatted with them for a while, took some
photos of them on the fabric. It's funny to randomly run into people
doing circus stuff in La Paz. I gave them the website for Wise Fool,
in New Mexico, and they invited me to a street festival they were
performing at the next day.

Sunday was spent wandering around on foot, bargaining at the so-called
"Witch's Market" where they sell all sorts of interesting things. In
the evening, I took a bus up to El Alto, the high city above La Paz,
and spent a few hours watching lucha libre. Masks, flying drop kicks,
copious shit-talking, the whole bit. It's like WWF in the States
except that none of the wrestlers are very fit, some don't even have
proper costumes, and the audience throws things constantly. Fruit,
bags of trash, water bottles. The wrestlers sometimes throw things
back at the audience, or grab an audience member who's being
particularly audacious and pull their hair.

Chancho fought Santos, El Comando rolled smoke grenades into the ring
before entering. Ninja Boliviano, with "Mortal Kombat!" screaming in
the background, got thrown over the protective barrier next to me,
taking an old lady in the audience to the floor. El Cobarde came over
the fence too and grabbed my water bottle, drinking part of it and
then spitting the rest onto the crowd as I tucked and covered my
camera. Chairs were smashed over heads, people were double-teamed, hit
with signposts and baking trays grabbed from the food vendors.

The highlight of the night, and definitely the crowd favourites, are
the "cholitas catchascanistas." Cholitas are the traditional Andean
women, in bowler hats, with long hair in braids, big skirts and
underskirts, brightly colored blankets tied like backpacks. They're
all the rage in the lucha libre scene here. There's even a midget
cholita. The crowd, well populated by cholitas itself, absolutely
loves them and roars with approval every time they fly through the
air, skirt up, to grab someone by the neck and flip them over. Last
night, the crowd was furious to see Sexy Nightmare, the "marica"
character with a purse and make-up, defeat a cholita favorite, Carmen
Rojas.

It was fantastic and ridiculous. I had read a few articles about it
before going. In the articles, the women involved take feminist
stances, talking about how their presence in what was traditionally a
male-only world helps to open up dialogue, combat machismo, etc.
Fantastic. I'd count this, as ridiculous as it might seem, as one of
the highlights of my time here.

Lake Titicaca

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Mon, 25 May 2009 02:28:00 +0000

I visited Lake Titicaca on my way from Cusco to La Paz, via a stop in
Puno. I think I first read about the lake as a kid in an encyclopedia.
I don't know how old I was, but I remember forming a mental image of
"the world's highest lake" as being a sort of volcanic crater lake
high in the snows, surrounded on every side by impenetrable mountains
of ice and stone.

It's nothing of the sort, unfortunately.

An early morning boat took the Australian girl, Lotte, and I out to
Los Uros. The water was dirty, full of trash, overgrown by algae, the
tranquility broken by loud motors and diesel fumes. There're a large
number of reed islands in the lake, all setup similarly, and the boats
rotate which island they bring the tourists to.

The whole thing is a big dog and pony show. Each floating reed island
is home to one family group, made up of maybe 30 people in a handful
of distinct family units. An island measures maybe 50m in diameter.
There're reed huts around the edges. In the center, large benches made
of reeds are arranged in a semi-circle around a big poster showing the
lake and a few demonstration pieces.

When the boat docks at one of the islands, the show starts. There's a
short presentation about how the islands are created, some talk of
economies and industry, a bit of history, lots of pointing at the
poster, a few jokes. The islander giving the presentation shows how
the reeds are bound, the common fish they eat, the eggs of some of the
birds. They have tiny reed versions of everything to help with the
presentation. Tiny huts, onto tiny islands, tied by tiny ropes, with
tiny dolls.

After 20 minutes of this, the presentation ends. Each tourist is taken
by the hand and led into a separate hut by one of the families.
Inside, they show you the reed mobiles and miniature boats the men
make, and the rugs and jewelry the women make. There, alone in a hut,
sitting on a mattress which is not made of reeds, they ask you to
please buy these things as "memories" of the Uros people. This lasts
for five minutes before you're taken back outside to have even more
wares pushed, this time in a long row of impromptu stalls.

The rugs are beautiful. So are the miniature reed boats. The whole
thing, though, is just so polished. After pushing you to buy things,
they offer to take you to another island via one of the reed boats, at
an additional cost. As the reed boat pushes off, the women line up on
the sore, maybe four to six of them, and sing songs. The first two or
three little ditties are something local. After that, they do a
screeching rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. They finish with
a synchronised group wave and, "Hasta la vista, babies."

I felt sure they were going to do the macarena as well, if we'd only
stayed longer.

We spent about two hours out there and it was enough. I found it
exhausting. The most interesting parts of this little side trip
probably weren't supposed to be part of the trip at all.

The islands have solar panels, one panel per three huts. Each island
has at least one TV. The islanders go to shore in Puno to check their
e-mail. Some of them are huge soccer/football fans and recited to me
all of the leagues that they follow.

If you climb the towers they have on each of the islands, for
semaphore communication with each other, you see that outside of the
touristsy area, there're gobs of metal buildings as well. Some are
bare metal, some are metal with reeds stacked against the outside for
meager camouflage.

The reed boat we rode in to move from one island to another isn't just
reeds. The dual fuselage design is primarily plastic water bottles.
The Uros guide said 1000 of these litre bottles per side of the boat.
I boggled and asked again, but he confirmed it. Two thousand water
bottles, collected from the trash in the lake, repurposed for
buoyancy. I love that.

Dear Mr. Murphy, thanks for all the fish.

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Fri, 22 May 2009 01:08:00 +0000

Machu Picchu! On the cheap!

I arrived in Cusco at 5:30am Monday morning and promptly stashed my backpack at a hostal and headed to the bus station to zip up to Machu Picchu and back in a quick day trip. I took a plastic bag with my camera, toothbrush, some apples, and an LED head lamp. This would turn out to leave me sorely unprepared.

At the Santiago bus station, I met a lovely Chilean couple, Karen and Claudio. Karen was born and raised in Australia and is, thus, perfectly bilingual. They'd planned to take the train up to MP but had been told that the Monday tickets were sold out and there would be no
trains on Tuesday and Wednesday due to a train strike. Because of the strike, the Thursday and Friday trains were already full also.

This was the first I'd heard of a strike. They'd found out about the same route I had and were doing it as their only shot at seeing MP. I was doing it just because I have no money.

We hopped the bus to Santa Maria without problems. From there, a shared taxi up to Santa Theresa along curvy mountain roads. The driver was channeling Colin McRae, forcing uncontrolled oversteer in a FWD station wagon within feet of the cliff edges. I had to tell him to chill out for fear of imminent death.

In Santa Theresa, none of us knew we had to buy train tickets there,
so we hopped in a combi up to hidroelectrica where we were promptly
informed that we couldn't get on the train.

The sequence of events just gets stupider from here.

Walking along the train tracks, it started pouring rain. I had no way
to keep my camera dry, so I tucked everything under my jacket and
hauled ass, covering the 12 kilometers in about an hour and forty five
minutes. I did pace counts in my head to try to keep my speed up and
practically ran through the short tunnels, afraid a train would round
the bend with me in the middle, doe-eyed.

I hadn't planned to stay the night, but it was nearly dark by the time
I arrived in Aguas Calientes. I somehow managed to find a cheap room
and bought my ticket for MP. Through some combination of flirting,
badgering, lying about my age, and looking like a wet puppy, I managed
to get a student rate: USD$20. Fifty percent cheaper than the regular
rate. This is despite the fact that I don't have an ISIC card and my
ridiculous university ID says it expires in 2008 even though I was a
student well into 2009.

At 5:30am the next morning, waiting for the bus, a street vendor told
me I wasn't allowed to take my bag into MP because of something like,
"people have fallen and been hurt, even killed, so they require
backpacks so that you have both hands free." Lucky for me, she
happened to be selling tiny backpacks with llamas on them. Que suerte!
Fast forward five minutes of bargaining and USD$5. Yup. Tiny, shitty
backpack. Six hours later, the button to close it tore off and the
cinch string snapped.

Up at MP, I shot four gigs worth of RAW, EV bracketed photos
for later conversion into HDR. I climbed Wayna Picchu. The guide books
say 1-2 hours. Eager for some exercise, I made it to the top in 34
minutes and 9 seconds. Heart rate 178 half way up, almost vomited
right before the top. As soon as I made it, gasping, groaning, a pasty
German standing at the top in short shorts promptly informed me, "The
record is 22 minute! I read it in a book!"

That afternoon, I tried to leave town but it was day one of the
strike. There were no trains. I spent about an hour fishing for some
other options. No buses, no cars, no motorcycles. To exercise my
vocabulary, I joked with a local: "No horses? Mules? Large dogs? What
about on the river? Boats? Tubes? NOTHING?" Nope.

I repeated the 12 km hike in the other direction, this time clocking
in at a little over an hour and a half. It poured rain the entire way.
More pace counts and thoughts of William Darby's book, "We Led the
Way," about the founding of Rangers. Famous for their "Ranger stride"
of 5 miles per hour, sustainable seemingly forever. I've played with
this fast rucking idea in the past, on treadmills. Above 4.2 miles per
hour requires a stride length that makes my hips hurt. They ached on
this return trip and the rocks tore through my shoes, but I was happy
with my time.

I got lucky and caught a combi from hidroelectrica to Santa Maria. The
strike, I learned, was over water rights and costs. The Peruvian
government is planning to start charging for water and the farmers,
nationally, were up in arms over it. They'd blockaded all the roads
with rocks, burning tree stumps, maybe tires. I spent four hours in
Santa Maria, trying to get a ride with anyone, in anything, before it
got dark and I was stuck finding a room for the night.

I ended up staying in a hostal with an Argentinian guy, a French
social worker with dreads and a pink backpack, and a scrawny,
vegetarian Austrian. While the Austrian boiled coca leaves to make
tea, the Argentinian and Frenchman smoked pot. We sat around and
talked about capitalism, socialism, and communism into the night.

Somewhere in there, the Argentinian asked what Austria was famous for.

"Mozart, right?"

"Mozart. Bach also. Goethe."

"Bach? Really?" I'm busy, now, mixing up Bach and Beethoven, imagining
someone with their ear pressed against a piano.

"Joerg Haider. All of Europe knows him. You know? He died in a car
crash." Car crash gets scare quotes here. "Hates Israel. And likes
mens."

Gay Austrian, recently dead? I remember him now. I skimmed an article
about him in one of my roommates gay lifestyle magazines. He had an
entourage of beautiful boys.

"Adolf Hitler. THE CELLAR!" The cellar? "The dad and the childs and
the sex and the locked cellar!"

At the end of the night, the Austrian confided in me that he knew
September 11th was done by "CIA bombs" to elicit global sympathy and
provide an excuse for invading Afghanistan. This, of course, was done
"for oil" and, more importantly, to take control of the poppy trade
there in order to increase the opium flow into Iran as a way of
undermining the Iranians. "Just like the British in China." We moved
from there into Coca Cola covering up studies on aspartame, and
aspartame being the number one reason pilots lose their licenses as it
causes them to be befuddled. Jewish control of the media rounded out
the night before I crashed.

The next morning, on my way to breakfast, I ran into Karen and Claudio
again. They'd stayed another night in Aguas Calientes; I hadn't made
it much further. We managed seats on the only combi in town and drove
off toward the first blockade as Karen and Claudio teased me about
oggling the punk rock blonde Australian girl in the seats in front of us. At the first
blockade a bunch of men sat around drinking tea and shooting the
breeze, sitting on rocks they'd knocked down from the hillside to
block the road. The picture in the gallery is of this blockade. I
wondered, idly, if they used levers or a bit of dynamite?

We walked through the blockade and on for another hour to the next
town. Nothing was moving. We were on day two of the strike, the final
day, but opinions varied as to when the blockades would be lifted.
Variously, I heard: at 4pm, at 5pm, at dark, at 6pm, at 7pm, at 8pm,
at 10pm, at midnight, and at noon the next day. Nobody seemed to know
anything and rumors spun wildly as the town filled up with trapped
people. Between this town and Cusco there was at least one blockade,
of which people had seen pictures, but there were rumored to be 11
more.

With word that the blockades were lifted, a caravan of almost fifty
trucks, buses, combis, and cars pulled out of town and started
picking their way around rocks, heading for Cusco. We didn't make it
past the first village. About 10 kilometers and we were all stopped
again, in a line. A crowd was gathered, people were drunk, some had
sticks, rocks and cactus were strewn across the road. We sat for an
hour. Word filtered back of some possible violence up at the front.

I left my bag in the van and walked up to the front of the caravan to
see what was happening. No violence. Pretty mellow. The whole village
strip was about 50 meters long. People milled about. Kids played in
the streets. Maybe 100 to 150 people out, eating, chatting about day
to day stuff, not politics. I wandered through them, carefully,
politely, and bought some food at the store there. I tried to be very
sensitive to the crowd energy and body language, but a bumper sticker
quote kept running through my head: "Never underestimate the power of
stupid people in large groups." Large groups can become riots pretty
quickly, but this felt very tranquil. Just a bunch of disenfranchised
people trying to say, "Hey, we exist!" A healthy thing, I think, for a
democracy.

Back at the van another hour passed. Miles from light pollution, the
sky is awash with stars. I was enjoying the scene when a buzz started
about an "alternative route." It was 8:30pm now and we wouldn't be let
through the village until 11pm. Vehicles started turning around and we
followed. Along the train tracks, through back roads, up over the
hills. We made it about half an hour before our driver, trying to pass
another van on a desolate mountain curve, drove into a mud pit.

Pushing, tow ropes, heaving, putting weight here and there. We jacked
up the rear of the van, to raise the stuck wheel. We used rocks from a
creek that crossed the road 20 meters in front of us to fill the area
under the tire, providing traction. The mud near the tire was elbow
deep. Finally, with the rocks, a tow rope hooked to a 4x4, and a lot
of pushing, we got the van out.

Everyone was elated! Minutes later, after finding the shoe that was
sucked into the mud during the final push and cleaning up a bit, we
were underway.

We made it exactly 20 meters.

As we crossed the creek that the rocks had been taken from, the van
bottomed out and something started dragging. Everyone groaned and
exchanged concerned looks. It took the driver ten minutes to reattach
the bumper.

Half an hour later, we were lost on some back roads, then in some
town. Some kids gave us bunk directions. The gas tank was on empty.
People were, understandably, agitated and upset with the driver for
taking us on a route he didn't know, getting the van stuck, leaving
town without gas and then running on empty, et cetera. A whole litany
of complaints.

After all of this, we finally made it into Cusco around midnight. My
day trip became three days. Three days in the same clothes, with
hiking and fast walks to add to the stink, low on money, making a
snails progress across one corner of Peru.

"What can go wrong, will go wrong." Murphy's Law.

In all, it was an interesting experience and, luckily, I left enough
leeway in my plans to absorb that kind of thing.

There're distinct positive outcomes too. I became awfully fond of
Karen and Claudio and hope to keep in touch with them in the future. I
got some exercise. I took some photos that, I hope, post-HDR
processing, tone mapping in Photomatix, etc, will be absolutely
stunning.

And this morning, in the shower at a hostal in Cusco, I ran into the
dishy punk rock Australian that Claudio had teased me about having a
crush on. She and I are traveling together now, on to Puno tonight and
to La Paz over the next few days.

So long, Peru, and thanks for all the fish!

Machu Picchu, the alternative route

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:10:00 +0000

Ok, so there's more than one way to skin a cat. And in a populated
country, with active commerce, there's more than one way to get
ANYWHERE. There has to be.

If you don't want to spend your life savings being bored on the Inca
Trail for four days, or hand over half of your life savings to the
PeruRail monopoly, there's another option:

In Cusco, hop a taxi to Terminal Santiago (USD$1, maybe). There, take
a bus to pueblo of Santa Maria (USD$5, 4-6 hours). From Santa Maria,
take a combi to Santa Theresa (USD$3 or so, 1.5-2.5 hours). And from
Santa Theresa take a combi to Hidroelectrica, the hydroelectric plant
that is the last PeruRail stop before Aguas Calientes (USD$1, quick).
If you bought a "local train" train ticket in Santa Theresa (USD$8 for
foreigners, despite being the local train, blah blah), you can hop the
train here, if they're running, and ride the last 12 kilometers into
Aguas Calientes.

If you forget to buy your train ticket in Santa Theresa, or don't want
to wait for a train, you can walk along the tracks up to Aguas
Calientes. 12 kilometers along craggy, sharp rocks takes 2-3 hours per
the guide book. Just don't get caught in a tunnel when the train is
coming.

Machu Picchu, by the books

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:52:00 +0000

Officially, there're only two ways to get to Machu Picchu.

The first option is to spend a few days walking the Inca Trail, an
option which costs USD$400+ for a government approved group and
requires purchase months in advance. The groups, and the trail, take
everyone from lardy computer programmers to grandma and, as I
understand it, are clogged with gringos and trash and worn away by
heavy traffic over the last few decades.

The second option is to buy a train ticket from PeruRail that will
take you to and from the nearest town, a small mountain village called
Aguas Calientes.

The round trip train prices range from USD$96 for the "Backpacker"
service, to USD$588 for the "Hiram Bingham" luxury service. On top of
your train ticket, you'll pay USD$14 for the bus from Aguas Calientes
up to the ruins themselves and USD$40 to enter the ruins. If you're
smart, you bring food and water with you and DON'T get stuck sleeping
in Aguas Calientes. If you don't, you'll be unpleasantly surprised to
find prices in Aguas Calientes to be maybe 5x Cusco, which is already
1.5x Lima or Arequipa. If you get all the way to Machu Picchu itself
without those things, you can buy them at the ruins for another
five-fold price increase. USD$14 bottles of water. That kind of thing.

Machu Picchu is the biggest tourist pull in Peru and, indeed, in all
of South America. Once you're "in," they've got you by the balls and
squeeze every cent out of you.

That said, the ruins are pretty striking. They make people's lists of
"Wonders of the World" pretty regularly. The park is clean and well
maintained with stunning views of the ruins themselves and the nearby
mountains. There're lots of quiet little nooks to get lost in and
there's a nearby mountain, Wayna Picchu, that you can climb if you
want to get your heart rate up. There're even some token llamas,
looking planted like lawn flamingos. Hobbyist photographers from all
over the world toting the biggest cameras you'll ever see. USD$3000
camera bodies set to "Auto" and entire backpacks full of low quality
Tamron glass. Porsches on bicycle tires, 15 km/h in a straight line.

If you go during the right time of year, and take the earliest 5:30am
bus up to the site, the crowds probably aren't bad. If you go during a
nationwide transit strike, you have the place practically to yourself.
Ahem. More on that in another post.

It's sort of ridiculous. They're ruins. That's it. And the cost! But
you're probably not allowed to leave Peru without seeing them. In
fact, in the administrative office after you exit the park, you can
get your passport stamped with the official Machu Picchu visa-style
stamp.

And the stamp, at least, is free.

Heading to Cusco / CFSB / Photography Numbers

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:30:00 +0000

I'm leaving Arequipa tonight on an overnight bus to Cusco. San
Cristobal del Sur, 7:30p overnight service, in case they roll off a
cliff like some bus did last week. "More than 200 meters into a
ravine," 50 onboard, 26 dead. Considering the mechanism, maybe that's
not a bad ratio.

I'm going to miss my gyms here in Arequipa. *sniff* All the broken
equipment, the spindly pull-up bars that bite into my hands, the
complete lack of any cardio gear, everybody wearing weight belts for
every exercise.

Two days ago: The official CrossFit warm up. 3 rounds of: Samson
stretches, 10-15 reps of overhead squats with a broomstick, sit-ups,
back extensions, pull-ups, and dips. I subbed in GHDs for the sit-ups.
The "warm-up" took me twenty minutes to complete and left me gasping,
slumped over the preacher curl bench for 10 minutes afterward. (Uh, I
was dehydrated and hungry?)

GHD demo here: http://media.crossfit.com/cf-video/cfj-oct-2005/glute-ham-demo.wmv

This morning: heavy back squats followed by ten minutes of metabolic
conditioning -- MetCon. The squats were olympic bar (45 lbs) plus 50
kg, probably aound 150 lbs total? That felt pretty fucking heavy for
sets of 5 reps. I could squat 185 lbs for reps for years; I guess this
is what two years of sitting on your ass does. For the MetCon, 5
rounds of "Cindy" in 9:34. "Cindy" is 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15
squats, for rounds over the course of (normally) 20m.

This mixture of abbreviated MetCon preceeded by going heavy on a
single big compound exercise is in line with a modification of the CF
programming called CFSB -- CrossFit Strength Bias. It should result in
more rapid strength gains than the CrossFit main page "Workout of the
Day" (WOD) programming alone with only marginally slower MetCon gains.
That's the idea anyway.

And yes, people really do use WOD as an acronym in real life. "Wad."

--------

I've shot over 1000 photos now, of which I still have approximately
500. Most of the other 500 were deleted immediately due to the subject
moving out of frame, light metering being totally fucked up, or, most
likely, immediate "neophyte photographer's remorse," etc. Of the
remaining 500, I'd guess about 250-300 are unique subjects. The rest
are subject matter duplicates with different depth of field, lighting,
angles, etc.

The on-camera review is minimally useful for checking precision focus,
even at full zoom. The screen doesn't have enough resolution. The
wonky 14" CRTs in cyber cafes aren't much better. I'd rather lug
around a bunch of dupes than inadvertantly the one photo of a bunch
that's perfectly focused and lit.

Tidbits 2

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:23:00 +0000

1) Everyone here plays pan flutes. In the parks, on the sidewalks,
leaning out of second story windows. Pan flutes! They're ubiquitous!

2) The bus line security used a metal detector wand to check all
baggage before boarding the overnight bus from Lima to Arequipa. I
wasn't keen showing my busmates that I had a thousand dollar camera in
my backpack when I knew I'd be asleep most of the trip.

I tried to think of ways around it. I decided my best shot was to wait
until multiple people were approaching security, then slip in front of
them and play happy/"Spanish dumb" when asked to open the bag, hoping
I'd be waved through to avoid holding up the other patrons.

The guard ended up solving the problem for me.

He asked what country I was from as he waved the wand over my bag,
setting off a cacophony of beeps. When I replied that I was from the
USA, he went wide-eyed, beaming, and shouted "OBAMA!" "Obama!" I
replied. And with that he waved me through. Problem solved. Hahahaha.
I love it. Thanks, Barrack.

3) Peru has the worst napkins in the world. Tiny, diaphanous,
single-ply squares of which they only give you one or two. Is there a
paper ration? You have to stack a bunch together to get anything done.
They remind me of the tiny toilet paper squares that were popular in
the mid-90s to get people to waste less paper, before everyone
rebelled.

The mark of a fancy restaurant here isn't cloth napkins, it's two ply.

4) My MP3 player seems to be getting quieter. Since I won't be sailing
past the Sirens any time soon, I guess I oughta get some q-tips.

5) American pop music is popular here, even in decidedly non-touristy
spots. There's a very heavy preponderance of AC/DC, Bon Jovi, and Aha.
I've probably heard "Take on Me" ten times in the last week. And I
suspect Peruvians think all Americans were workin' on the docks before
the union went on strike... it's tough, so tough...

6) Number one is false. I've seen exactly two since I've been here.
And only two llamas.

Getting comfortable with Nikon's D5000

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:21:00 +0000

Someone wrote and asked if I was getting more comfortable with the new camera.

I suppose the Nikon and I are slowly learning to live with each other.

I'm finding out things like AEB (automatic exposure bracketing, for
shooting multiple RAW images for later conversion into HDR) only work
in P/M/A/S modes. These also seem to be the only modes where you can
adjust EV manually. That bugs me since the camera tends to take darker
photos than I want in all of the automatic modes.

I use A and S modes pretty heavily, but almost never use M and don't
even know what the "Program" mode means/does. (Of course, I didn't
bring the manual with me.)

Fog totally boggles the automatic white balance. Easy to fix in
PhotoShop later, sure, but still annoying. I'd rather have it be RIGHT
straight out of the camera.

And things that I thought were very important, like power-on to first
photo speed, aren't. I'm so afraid of scratching the lense that I put
the cap on it anytime the camera is turned off and put away in my bag.
So when the camera is away and I spot a photo I want, what takes
longer, the near instant boot up, or me removing the lense cap and
raising the camera to my eye? Duh. And when I expect a perfect photo
opportunity, it's already out and powered on, so again boot speed
doesn't matter.

Prior to the purchase, I gave a lot of thought to lenses and figured
that I'd want the 18-200 as a walk-around and a fast prime, like the
cheapie 50mm 1.8 that's available for about a hundred bucks and is
super sharp. The D5000 was only available as a kit with the 18-55, so
when the opportunity came up, in the camera store, to swap with
someone who had the 18-105 kit lense from a D90 purchase, I took it.
105mm is a decent amount of reach and I can't afford the 18-200 right
now anyway.

I'm finding I don't really miss the extra reach, but I do miss having
a very fast lense. Front flash is ugly. This camera has superb high
ISO performance, but to really "see in the dark," that ISO performance
needs to be paired with fast glass. Of course the D5000 only
auto-focuses with AF-S lenses that have their own AF motor built in,
and the 50mm 1.8 for $100 does NOT have its own motor. I'll probably
end up paying twice that for something similar in AF-S. Will have to
check later.

My other big gripe is the battery. My MP3 player says it's at full
battery for ages and then dies quickly. So what? It cost me $30. This
ridiculous camera does the same thing. A photographer with a dead
camera is stranded. How does Nikon get away with this? Nobody would
buy a car that claimed a full tank for the first 250 miles and then
dropped precipitously and left you on the roadside with your thumb up
in the last 50.

All of that said, it's lovely to finally have full creative control. I
used a pocketable "point and shoot" for so long, where I had to
actively work around the camera to get it to do what I wanted, that
it's a real blessing to be able to set the camera to do absolutely
anything.

Now if only I wasn't afraid I'll be mugged every time I took it out of
the non-descript plastic bag I carry it around in...

Metabolic conditioning in Arequipa

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:50:00 +0000

I'm in Arequipa now. The overnight bus from Lima ended up taking
almost 17 hours. To make things even better, we stopped for breakfast
in a pit of biting insects. I was outdoors for two minutes before
fleeing back into the bus with six new bites on my left hand alone.

I spent Monday exploring Peru's second largest city.

I found a shooting range. Poligono de tiro. It's about USD$3 to use
the range, plus another USD$2 to rent a pistol. They have two: a .380
and a 9mm, both weird/shitty knock-offs. The big expense is the ammo.
You pay per bullet, about 60 cents each. That the .380 ammo and 9mm
costs the same suggests that the high price is a result of a munitions
tax rather than creation cost. The "range" itself is two lanes, one
about five meters deep and the other about six meters. (The rear wall
is slanted sharply.) Foam egg cartons line the wall to decrease
reverberations.

The whole thing is tucked away in a tightly packed
industrial/residential area. Outside, I was offered the chance to
shoot heroin for the first time on this trip. Maybe I just haven't
been hanging out in the right areas.

I also found two gyms that're walking distance from where I'm staying.
One, called Kratos II, feels like a 70s bodybuilding gym. All iron and
concrete, posters of Arnold peeling off the walls, dark and rank. The
other, called "Strong," is an enormous multiplex sort of thing. It has
a long entry hall with 500 lockers, five or six large studios, and a
cavernous weight lifting area. The weights area is almost empty, but
the studios are crowded with teenagers in street clothes, backpacks
on, following along with a dance instructor who's a mix of 1990s MTV
and decidedly Latin hip gyrations and pelvic thrusts.

Both charge one sole to work-out. That's USD$0.33 or so.

Yesterday, I went to Kratos and used an Olympic bar to do 15-10-5 of
overhead presses, sumo deadlift high pulls, dips, and squat thrusters.

Today, I went to Strong and did a half version of a CrossFit workout
called "Angie." "Angie" is 100 pull-ups, 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups,
100 squats, in order and, of course, for time. I did fifty of each and
finished in 26:09. The fifty pull-ups took me 14:46. I'd done 15 by
the two minute mark but finished the last few as singletons. Push-ups
in 7:04, sit-ups in 2:35, squats in 1:44. No rest. Ideally, one
finishes the FULL workout of 100 reps of each in under 20 minutes.

Sex Work in Lima / Hustling CDs in NYC

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:55:00 +0000

A week ago, I went to a brothel in Lima for a little bit of hot
ethnographic action.

I'm not sure what I was expecting but it ended up being so boring that
I hardly even want to bother blogging about it. I've been avoiding it
for a week now, but I suppose I should get it down on "paper" in case
I want to recall something about it later.

There're a handful of city-run brothels, but they're in shitty parts
of town and all the way across the city from where I was staying. I
went to a non-sanctioned brothel closer to Miraflores. I'm pretty sure
it was called Club Sulte, but googling that turns up nothing.

The basic run-down is this: Taxi turns off the road into a little nook
in front of an unmarked gate. There's a small, attended guard house.
The guard asked for USD$40; I ended up paying half that. Once your
cover is paid, the gate rises vertically to reveal a secluded
courtyard with fancy cars, an outdoor bar, a strip of hotel rooms,
and, of course, the main club itself. As ridiculous as this sounds,
the gate rising was the highlight of the night. I felt like I was in
on a secret.

Inside the club, there's a stage for dancing, a bar, and lots of cozy
round booths done up in red vinyl. Mirrors line the walls. There're
plaster vases and Greek style pillars. The patrons are attended to by
serious men in tuxedo shirts with cummerbunds. There's an attempt at
being debonair, obviously, but it ends up feeling much more Miami
Vice.

Drinks start at USD$8 for a beer and run up from there. The overly
attentive staff float out of the background to blot the condensation
off your mugs.

The bathrooms are large and clean. The women's contains lockers for
the girls who work there and has a long list of rules that starts with
"no fighting."

The women, about ten in total for a slow Monday night, sit along the
bar, chatting with each other, smoking cigarettes, looking bored. If
not for the scanty, brightly colored outfits, they could've been
construction workers shooting the breeze on a lunch break.

I chatted with a handful of the girls, one by one. This is what I gleaned:

They're all Catholic. They all have at least one child. None of them
balked at admitting this. All but one were Peruvian. (The other was
Colombian.) Their stated ages were all in the mid to late 20s. All
said they'd been doing sex work for a couple of years and had started
to help make ends meet.

Uniformly, all agreed that working in the brothel was preferable to
working on the street for the following reasons, in this order: safer,
better money, hanging out with their friends.

As their brothel is unsanctioned, they don't have the "proof of STD
check-ups" cards, but they are tested every three months, "for
everything," and the testing is paid for by the club. They all thought
a three month interval was fine and appropriate. The city-run brothels
require testing for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis every 15 days,
with HIV testing every few months (exact interval unclear).

All said they used condoms every single time for vaginal and anal sex
and denied that they'd accept extra money to go without one. None used
condoms, or dental dams for that matter, for oral sex.

Sex is almost only ever sold as an inclusive experience up to two
hours. The prices start at USD$120 for one male, USD$100 for one
female. USD$200 for a man and woman together. You can negotiate with
multiple girls to have a bunch together and, I'm told, this was not
uncommon with foreign businessmen.

The rates are negotiated directly with the girl herself. They receive
100% of the fee. The brothel itself does not take a cut. There is also
no... shit, I can't remember the term for this. I've chatted with
strippers in the US who pay some basic fee to the club each night for
them to work there. That didn't exist at this club. The patrons often
buy drinks for the girls, and some of the girls really press this
aggressively, but the girls don't receive any cut of the drinks sold.

The club itself makes money from the cover charge, the exorbitantly
priced drinks, and rental of on-site hotel rooms. Those rooms start at
USD$30 and run all the way up to USD$120 for what's dubbed, on the
price list, as a "penthouse" even though the whole complex is single
story. If you already have a hotel you can take the girls there. I
don't think there was an extra fee for taking a girl off-site, but I
didn't explicitly ask.

--------

That's all I was able to get. I think the club staff, but not the
girls, started to get annoyed that all I was doing was talking. I left
an hour and a half later, kind of in a daze, wondering why I'd spent
so much money for that, what I'd expected, why I'd been so interested,
etc.

I think it was mostly simple curiousity.

In New York City, or at least in midtown on the "tourist circuit,"
there're lots of touts hustling hip-hop CDs. They flag you down with
something like, "Do you like hip-hop?" and then get a CD into your
hands as fast as they can before asking for a donation and pouring on
the charm.

A few weeks ago, I spent forty-five minutes on a street corner talking
with one of these guys. I'd long been curious about how it works. How
long do they work each day? Which days? Where? Who buys the CDs?
What's the best approach? Are they CDs really of their own, original
work? Do they work in teams? Are permits required? How much money do
they make? How is turf selected? What's the overhead? In between all
of that, we talked about Quannum, growing up in NYC, the economy,
about his kid having Kawasaki's (no shit!), etc.

Maybe my curiousity about sex work in Lima was the same impulse as my
curiousity about hustling CDs in NYC? I like to know how things work.

The answers, if you're curious, go like this: Permit required and kept
on-hand for police checks, technically supposed to work side-by-side
with one of the tabled military veterans, but nobody does.
(Apparently, vets get free permits to sell almost anything, anywhere
in NYC.) The guy I talked to worked seven days a week, usually from
about 4p to 8p, often on the same corner, always in the same area,
between high traffic tourist sites like the Empire State Building and
Times Square. His CDs are his original work, done in a studio, but he
admitted that some people probably were passing off someone elses
music as their own. He pays for studio time, artwork, licensing of
samples, etc. The latter is done through lawyers and is only signing
contracts for some percentage to be paid if the song ever makes money,
etc. "You've gotta do that. Even if your song only gets played on
satellite radio some times, that's still income, every time. You've
gotta be covered." The rates are far lower for unsigned artists than
signed. That's all the initial capital required. After that, it's
maybe 50 cents per CD, inclusive.

He admitted that only tourists buy the CDs. "New Yorkers, man, they
won't give you the time of day." He makes approximately $200 to $500
per day, noting that most people made a lot less. He'd seen some
success in the mid-90s and had toured parts of Europe. He attributed
much of his sales success to this. If someone stopped to talk, he'd
ask where they were from. "If I can pull out my passport, here, and
show them a stamp from their country... they'll buy. It's that simple.
They want a story to tell their friends." "Sometimes," he said, "to
get someone to stop, I'll ask, 'You're not afraid of a black man,
right?' It's kind of fucked up, but people are too embarassed to keep
walking."

Hahaha... Anyway, that was interesting insight into a micro-economy
that I knew nothing about. The sex workers in Lima, too, though that
cost me far more money to take a peek at. I think, in retrospect, that
my time would've been much better spent trying to talk with someone in
public health in Lima. Perhaps next time.

Tidbits 1 / Visas

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Sat, 09 May 2009 03:07:00 +0000

1) Occasionally, I see lesbian couples necking in the park at night. I
like that. I've read that Buenos Aires is a huge gay mecca for Latin
America. Lima, as far as I can tell, is not. The kids at the skate
park: "maricon" this, "las maricas" that. I guess that's why I feel so
heartened to see gay couples being affectionate in public, even if
only rarely.

2) New crush! Buse Unlu! Huff.

3) There's a grocery chain here called Vivanda. It's a lot like Trader
Joe's, maybe even Whole Foods. It has become my new home. I eat so
much healthier when I'm choosing the parts of my meal. Plus, they have
free wifi. If I pull myself out of bed before 10am, they even have
scrambled eggs!

4) The Josh Harris fan videos for Shiny Toy Guns songs blow me away. I
think I'm in love with the dancing girl. They're all available on
YouTube. His username is coddfish77.

5) Bolivian visa: Three visits over five days, an hour talking with
the ambassador as he chain smoked, USD$135. That's the price the US
charges Bolivians to enter the States. That's so FAIR, but damn it's a
lot of money. After all the hassle, I ended up with a visa that's good
for five years, unlimited entries, up to 90 days per year in country.

6) Paraguayan visa: One day, USD$65, but I totally had to trick them
into it. As they handed back my passport, they made some ominous
comment about how this was an exception, the consulate normally
couldn't do this, and the ambassador (lost in translation), so I
shouldn't (lost in translation). I hope that doesn't come back to bite
me, but I now have a hologram-fringed unlimited entry visa valid until
2017! (Whaaaat?)

7) I kind of love this place. I could live here. You know, kids, from
age two to four or five. Perfect. This is a big deal to me. I could
live here, and it's not San Francisco, New York City, DC, or London.
Lima? Yes, please!

8) I felt pretty proud posting my recent pull-up achievement. I think most adult males can do one, at most. Right after I posted that, with the CrossFit Games webpage open in another tab, I saw an athlete profile that read, "Max pull-ups: 64." Sixty four! Who does sixty four pull-ups at a go? It's absurd. That's an absurdity I want.

Reading Kafka in Peru

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Sat, 09 May 2009 02:26:00 +0000

I finished the novel I brought with me a few days ago. The book
exchanges at hostels are completely picked over. Everything is in
Japanese, or German, or Hebrew. Wanna read Slumdog Millionaire? Only
if you read Dutch. The English language books seem like gag gifts. Who
brought the giant 1960s hardback "The Book of Hormones" with them to
Peru? Really?

I've decided to cut weight and space by dumping the novel I have and
putting some eBooks on the Palm TX. I use iSilo as a reader and it
supports an auto-scroll mode, multiple fonts, "flicking" page
advancement (finger or stylus), etc. I hit up Project Gutenberg
(http://www.gutenberg.org) from the wifi at McDonald's and pulled down
five books in ten minutes.

It's all older stuff, outside copyright. The selection isn't great.
"Illustrated History of Furniture" from 1935, anyone? Without
illustrations? There're lots of classics, though. I pulled down
Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and "Beyond Good and Evil," some
Plato, etc. I also grabbed "The Prince," as I've caught myself using
"Machiavellian" frequently lately and I lack the cred. Kafka's
"Metamorphosis" too, not because I've ever used "Kafkaesque," but
because I hear it a lot at parties. (Hah.)

And because of a great line in "The Squid and the Whale" where the dad
is describing one of his students: "She's a very risky writer, Lili.
Very racy. I mean, exhibiting her cunt in that fashion is very racy. I
mean Lili has her influences in post modern literature, it's a bit
derivative of Kafka, but for a student, very racy."

Uh. Okay. So I started with Kafka, mostly because it was the shortest
of the things I'd downloaded. I read half of it and I don't think I'm
going to finish it. It's painfully bad. One of the "seminal works of
short fiction of the 20th century?" What the fuck? Awful. I feel like
I'm missing out on some grand cosmic joke. Can someone clue me in?
Allegory for the sorry state of being a cog only to wake up one day
and realize your condition? Wow. Profundo.

I'm remembering everyone I ever talked to at a house party in San
Francisco who stood there with their fancy import beer and ironic
t-shirt and dropped "Kafkaesque." Fuckers.

I felt similarly when I read "Anna Karenina" while in Haiti. I'd often
fancied girls I'd seen reading interesting things on the metro or
BART. Kant, Plato, Foucault, Arabic workbooks, the like. What do you
say to a girl reading Foucault? That he might be naked, strapped to a
barrel in a SOMA basement, "ridin' dirty?" And Kant? Look but don't
touch.

I remember one girl quite clearly who was reading "Anna Karenina" on
the Haight bus. Dusky eyes, honey-colored skin, dark curls spilling
across her face, bohemian fashion with lots of layers and dangly
jewelry, short denim mini, bare muscular legs, leg warmers, ridiculous
moccasins. Of course, I imagined her brilliant, intense, spilling over
with sensual energy -- and with a propensity for serious Russian
authors I wasn't cultured enough to have read. Some mix of Celine from
Before Sunset and Clementine from Eternal Sunshine with a little
Richard Dawkins thrown in for good measure.

It took me a week and half to finish Tolstoy as I wandered around
Haiti. I appreciated the book as a period piece, but when she threw
herself under a train, I struggled to feel anything other than relief
that the book would end soon.

Somewhere in hating that book, I remembered the girl from the Haight
bus and, for a moment, hated her too.

Maybe I'm just not cut out for art. Fuck Tolstoy and Kafka and museums
and live jazz and art galleries. I'm happy to be a Philistine. I'd
much rather be lying on my back on a skyscraper roof, craddled against
cold stone, staring into the night sky as light pollution creeps in
from every side, listening to Shiny Toy Guns cranked to 11.

Harder Better Faster Stronger

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Fri, 08 May 2009 05:52:00 +0000

Most of the parks along the cliffs overlooking the Pacific have
pull-up and dipping bars. I made ample use of them my first few days
here. I've been doing pull-ups on and off for the last little while. A
few weeks ago I set a new personal best: 12!

On Monday, I went to a class at CrossFit Peru. My first time despite
having read the CrossFit website on and off over the last few years.
Three rounds, for time, of 20 overhead presses, 20 box jumps, 20 sumo
deadlift high pulls, and 20 squat thrusters. Me and a handful of
Marines. I finished last. Loved it! Traps are still sore, five days
later.

Since then, I've been doing more with the bars above the beach and
have gone back for more classes at CF Peru even though they leave me
wimpering and on the edge of vomiting. I'm starting to have fantasies
about coming out of this five week vacation and actually being
stronger, harder than when I started. That'd be a nice change from
previous trips.

Maybe I can combine CrossFit and chinning with a chronic cough for my
abs and then a week or so of a good South American parasite to help
strip off the fat? Perfect! I was just reading about "opportunistic
parasites" and body fat a few days ago:
http://www.gymjones.com/knowledge.php?id=29

Anyway, the 2009 regional CrossFit Games happen to be this weekend
near Lima. They cover all of Central and South America plus the
Carribbean, for a chance to represent the region at the CrossFit Games
in California. I'm sticking around Lima until then, and then probably
heading to Arequipa, on to Cuzco, Lake Titicaca, then into Bolivia: La
Paz, salt flats, whatever. Stuff. More sleep, I hope, and on softer
mattresses. More "Like a Prayer," less exhaust fumes. More chinning,
less knee pain. More hot French girls, less drunk Canadian men. More
aji, less ajo. More Nietschze, less Kafka.

Actually, waaay less Kafka. More on that later.

--------

Also, I've uploaded another batch of tiny photos. I can't wait to get
home and edit these. They'll clean up very nicely when cropped
appropriately, rotated so they're level, etc. The last is the big joy
of not having a tripod. You shoot from anything the camera will lay
still on and then rotate and crop as needed later.

Photography is supposed to be ____.

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:13:00 +0000

Olivia had a National Geographic book about landscape photography
laying around the house. Even just days before my boards, when I
really should've been studying, I was reading that book instead.

It left me frozen.

On my first day in Lima, I spent hours walking around without taking a
single photo. Instead of a tiny pocket camera, I had a fancy-pants SLR
body, Nikkor glass, 12 gigs of storage raring to go. And I didn't even
touch it.

Everywhere I looked, I saw possible photos, but my internal dialogue
was a mess. "Avoid the bullseye! Compose the scene! Everything adds to
the story you're trying to tell! Honor the rule of thirds! The leading
lines must lead to the subject! Include foreground elements that add
scale! Consider your depth of field! If you want ALL of that in focus,
you're going to have to use a crazy-high aperature. To do that, you
need a tripod. Want bokeh behind that flower? That person? Slanting
light would be better here. Return at sunset, wake before dawn! If you
don't have a graduated filter, the sky will be blown out! Worthless!
Would you want that on the wall in your living room? If not, don't
press the shutter."

Argh.

I finally ended up taking some photos that night, after five or six
hours of walking around.

I'm warming back up to it, slowly.

Last night, I hopped the low brick wall and crawled out onto one of
the cliffs above the ocean. I spent half an hour on my belly in the
dirt and grass with the camera propped up on some books, trying to get
the perfect exposure for a night shot of the city.

Other than worrying that someone might sneak up behind me and kick me
over the cliff, I loved it. That half hour recaptured some of the joy
and delight of working to take good photos.

The Oldest Profession

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Mon, 04 May 2009 05:19:00 +0000

Cheap alcohol, smoking anywhere you want (even in bars!), casinos with
both slots and tables, and, best of all, legal prostitution! Lima is a
great place for vices. The only thing left? Drugs. Those, of course,
are in ample supply, but their allure is probably somewhat diminished
by the idea of a Peruvian prison where you might spend a year or two
before the case even goes to trial.

Anyway, prostitution is legal in Peru. How 'bout that?

I've done a little reading on the Internet. From what I gather, prices
range from USD$3 on the street to USD$200 in trendy clubs and
businessmen lounges, with the handful of gritty brothels falling
somewhere in between.

The brothels are the only avenue actively regulated/monitored by the
government. The women are issued ID cards and receive biweekly (or
monthly, depending on your source) STD testing. They receive 30% of
the payment plus some small percentage of drinks they help sell.
Condoms are mandatory.

I have no sense of whether or not that's a good deal, or a living
wage, or what. I've read that work in the brothels is desirable as
it's safer, but I've also read that the lion's share of this sort of
sex work is outside that system. If true, that suggests that there's
some heavy stigma (for people working there or visiting), or that the
pay sucks comparatively, or that the brothels are nasty, or that
they're not actually safer, or that there's a cap on the number of
brothels/workers, or... the possibilities are almost limitless.

Google on this topic pulls up some results from the San Francisco
Department of Health. Unfortunately, they're in PDF and thus
unreadable on my Palm TX. I'm curious what SFDPH's take on all of this
is. I'm also curious what the locals think, what the brothels are
like, what the sex workers in the brothels vs on the streets/clubs
think, etc. And then all of the public health and law enforcement
questions: decreased STD rates, legal avenues for sex workers to
report and prosecute rape, decreased stigma, destruction of the
abusive pimp/madam system, etc?

I've often thought that decriminalization of prostitution in the US
would go a long way toward some positive outcomes (above) with little
or no negative repercussions. The argument centering around free
markets, sales of goods and services, individual autonomy, etc, goes a
long way with me.

My sense is that Peru legalized only recently. I wonder if they have
data to answer the above questions yet?

I'm not sure how much longer I'll be in Lima, but it's something I'd
like to dig a little deeper on.

Miraflores

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Mon, 04 May 2009 03:58:00 +0000

During my first hour in Lima, I wrote it off as yet another
non-descript Latin American capital: ugly, falling apart, loud, under
a blanket of heavy smog. As I choked on fumes, I wondered why,
exactly, I'd ended up another one of these places.

By some happy twist, I ended up staying in a ritzy suburb called
Miraflores. This neighborhood wouldn't be out of place in Western
Europe. Cobbled walkways, careful landscaping, fountains, sidewalk
cafes with live musicians, international cuisine. In the parks,
painters hawk their wares, musicians and acting troupes ply their
trades, children squeal on brightly colored playgrounds carpeted with
fake grass. There's an open air mall built into a seaside cliff that
has stores like Adidas, Diesel, and Hollister. Some of the houses and
most of the apartment buildings are new or newly rennovated and hip in
a way that wouldn't be out of place in San Francisco. And the piece de
resistance: Starbucks.

The western limit of the neighborhood is a steep drop into the Pacific
Ocean. At the bottom, people play soccer and surf. The beach is mostly
rocks not much smaller than your fist. When the waves wash back out to
sea, they drag across each other, creating a sound like the roar of a
crowd going up in a stadium.

Along the promontory there're parks and walkways, massive art
installation pieces, a lighthouse.

One of the parks, Parque del Amor, is dedicated to lovers and has
snippets of poetry and prose on the subject tiled into the low walls
where teenagers come for heavy make out sessions. Cell phones are the
new boom box as couples set the atmosphere with tinny pop music. If
anyone gets too close -- a couple walking by, one of the rose sellers
-- the girl pushes the boy's hands off her breasts and feigns
indignation and embarassment.

Wedding parties, too, come to the park for photo opportunities in
front of its famous centerpiece: a large statue of two lovers sharing
a tender embrace. On Saturday night, there were four in the span of
fifteen minutes.

The neighborhood is a little more spendy than most, but by choosing
cheaper lodging off the main square (I pay USD$5 per night) and the
"daily special" (<i>ejecutivo</i>) menus, it's still very affordable.

It's very easy to be here. I like it. It feels very vacationy. Perhaps
that feeling has less to do with location and more to do with the fact
that I am accomplishing almost zero.

--------

I uploaded a few more pictures to the gallery. From the looks of
things, you'd think I only go out at night.

Beantown

noreply@blogger.com (daviduri) — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:59:00 +0000

I am in Lima now.

I'm so exhausted from the last two days, or the last week, or the last 27 months, that I hardly know what to do with myself. I occaisionally have to shout down my internal dialogue that's saying "go, go, go!" to remind myself that I don't need to accomplish anything here. I'm on vacation. It's okay to sit back and do nothing whatsoever. I finished PA school, found a job, passed my boards. Everything is on track. Auto pilot.

I'm going to attempt to periodically upload small, unedited versions of some of the photos I take. These will be available here, sorted by country with this trip's countries appearing first.