La Paz is a big city... harsh, sure, but also somewhere you can find a more calm, more clean, more quiet part of town where to enjoy some quality food and drink. Mira, Sapucachi is a great place to live, and would have been wonderful to couch surf if any of the 5 people we tried contact were to have responded (laaaame). Having rested and gotten more used to the city, it was even possible to enjoy walking about town, checking out the main university (UMSA), and having a good vegetarian buffet for 24 bolivianos (about 3usd).
It is indeed Latin America... UMSA students occupy an entire building demanding (something about) summer courses, the police in heavy riot gear chill outside the front door of the building and people go by casually... The electoral offices have huuuuuuge lines, and, again, heavily armed police all about. It turns out the (conservative) courts nixed almost some half million voter registrations... yet, all seem quite sure of an Evo victory. The questions pertain mostly to whether they will also control both houses of congress, and which mayor offices, etc... Note: many leftists here are quite dissatisfied with Evo and MAS, making even a ''voto nulo'' campaign (none of the above, nix the elections). Especially around UMSA. Moreover, most peasant organizations are organic with MAS, taking on complete electoral support now... the other side of this coin is a weak Via Campesina of independent social movements as in Brazil... The work now is mostly with MST-Bolivia, which I will hopefully visit around Santa Cruz later this month, the last week or ten days before returning to Brasília.
Till then, off to Cochabamba for the week, back for the elections (I may possibly tag along a Spanish delegation that will be observing the elections in some indigenous communities of the Altiplano, cross your fingers and toes!!! Otherwise, I will be at Plaza Murillo!). Then next week meeting some other backpacking friends and heading south to Oruro, Uyuni and Potosi. Then taking a flight from Sucre to Santa Cruz, since, hehehe, there are no real roads that way ;)
segunda-feira, 30 de novembro de 2009
domingo, 29 de novembro de 2009
Loki at me, I can be in Gringoland wherever I go!!
There is a hostel chain in Peru and Bolivia called Loki. They are committed to providing a safe and fun environment for backpackers. By safe they mean you can be surrounded by nothing but Ausies, Kiwis, Brits, USers, Germans, Israelis, and most other brands of pasty folk speaking English with the widest diversity of accents... By fun they mean that they actually pack in 200 such gringos in the hostel with its very own burger-n-guinness bar. Result: a piece of Gringoland in the heart of La Paz.
Don't get me wrong: if you don't speak any Spanish, and if you don't *want* to speak any Spanish, this is a wonderful place for you! You can watch the rugby or basketball or UEFA game and try to get laid with that hot blonde Kiwi or that cute Irish redhead... There are costume parties sometimes, and an all English speaking tourism agency right there, so you only need to leave the building on a tourist bus with a foreign guide to an extreme adventure experience in, which is this country again? No matter... the mountain bike is still gringo made, so you can trust it and break your arm on the steepest route of the world, or you can rent gringo made gear to scale that 5000m mountain with some name you can't and don't really care to pronounce.
Best of all, you can repeat this diversity of experiences in some three other cities! Can you imagine how wonderful, to be able to travel with the same gringo folk through the same drinking nights with the same gringo music across various different places? A hostel-hopping good time!
The diversity of a corn cereal isle in a USer supermarket!
In how many different places can we replicate the same lifestyle you could have had without ever having flown half way across the world and into a completely different country?
I bet I can paint corn pops blue and sell them in another box and make bank. As long as I can include it at Loki's complementary breakfast, until 1pm for the hungover!
Don't get me wrong: if you don't speak any Spanish, and if you don't *want* to speak any Spanish, this is a wonderful place for you! You can watch the rugby or basketball or UEFA game and try to get laid with that hot blonde Kiwi or that cute Irish redhead... There are costume parties sometimes, and an all English speaking tourism agency right there, so you only need to leave the building on a tourist bus with a foreign guide to an extreme adventure experience in, which is this country again? No matter... the mountain bike is still gringo made, so you can trust it and break your arm on the steepest route of the world, or you can rent gringo made gear to scale that 5000m mountain with some name you can't and don't really care to pronounce.
Best of all, you can repeat this diversity of experiences in some three other cities! Can you imagine how wonderful, to be able to travel with the same gringo folk through the same drinking nights with the same gringo music across various different places? A hostel-hopping good time!
The diversity of a corn cereal isle in a USer supermarket!
In how many different places can we replicate the same lifestyle you could have had without ever having flown half way across the world and into a completely different country?
I bet I can paint corn pops blue and sell them in another box and make bank. As long as I can include it at Loki's complementary breakfast, until 1pm for the hungover!
sábado, 28 de novembro de 2009
La Paz...
鄭小塔: ...tell me more about la paz
me: there is a huge sprawling slum on the higland above... (The famous city of El Alto.) then you drive along a big highway on the edge of a mountain, (like dangling off a cliff) and below in the valley is the ''rich'' city, that looks like the same big slum, but with big buildings here and there... it looks like a boiling bubbling mass of people inside a bowl made of mountains. the mountains are beautiful, snow capped, but the lower you go, the dryer it gets... the more brown... until you get to that ugly brick exposed brown.. the city is all in construction. it looks like everything is a half done construction... so no one can really live in it yet
...and when you get down here... the cars twist all around each other, and the people move in between them like water through rubble. the honking is even worse than in peru, smaller cities, sure, then that might explain... and the streets all go either up or down... nothing is flat. nothing is straight for too long. it is as though the life of the people here falls crookedly onto each others', like the buildings and the street lines adjusting themselves to the harsh ground all around.
鄭小塔: ....haha, i guess i like chaotic cities... i think i'll like la paz
me: :)
if only it were safer...
鄭小塔: em..how's the man got robbed?
me: (a fellow Brazilian who came from Peru the same day) he got into a taxi... the taxi picked up another tourist. drove into an alley with both of them. other men showed up, said they were police, needed to investigate their passports. looked through his passport and bag, took his laptop, gave the passport and bag back to him. and they took away the other tourist... they probably took alot more from him. maybe took everything, and dropped him off in some far away place... it is really horrible.
me: there is a huge sprawling slum on the higland above... (The famous city of El Alto.) then you drive along a big highway on the edge of a mountain, (like dangling off a cliff) and below in the valley is the ''rich'' city, that looks like the same big slum, but with big buildings here and there... it looks like a boiling bubbling mass of people inside a bowl made of mountains. the mountains are beautiful, snow capped, but the lower you go, the dryer it gets... the more brown... until you get to that ugly brick exposed brown.. the city is all in construction. it looks like everything is a half done construction... so no one can really live in it yet
...and when you get down here... the cars twist all around each other, and the people move in between them like water through rubble. the honking is even worse than in peru, smaller cities, sure, then that might explain... and the streets all go either up or down... nothing is flat. nothing is straight for too long. it is as though the life of the people here falls crookedly onto each others', like the buildings and the street lines adjusting themselves to the harsh ground all around.
鄭小塔: ....haha, i guess i like chaotic cities... i think i'll like la paz
me: :)
if only it were safer...
鄭小塔: em..how's the man got robbed?
me: (a fellow Brazilian who came from Peru the same day) he got into a taxi... the taxi picked up another tourist. drove into an alley with both of them. other men showed up, said they were police, needed to investigate their passports. looked through his passport and bag, took his laptop, gave the passport and bag back to him. and they took away the other tourist... they probably took alot more from him. maybe took everything, and dropped him off in some far away place... it is really horrible.
Frontera hasta La Paz
A long day it was to cross borders into Bolivia... a bus, a van, another bus, a boat, that bus, a walk, a taxi... Never assume you know what is to come, always keep a spare few coins and short bills for the travel. And keep safe. A friend was robbed first few minutes in La Paz, hurray, a classic game of 'I took a wrong cab at the wrong time and place'...
MAS posters and grafiti all about... yet in a gringo oh so gringo hostel. A contrast I cant even begin to describe...
Remember that consolidations come from struggles, that are waged far afield from the resulted stays... Kataristas and comunistas and capitalistas all pull the centering state apart...
Defend it with the paid flag wavers¿
Sure MAS will be reelected.
But what is to come¿
What can they do, if a liberal twist remains in the unwillingness or inability to truly decapacitate and decapitate the oligarchy¿
Call it 'revolution', call it 'patria o muerte', invoke the ghosts of el Che all that you want....
no GueMing, no cutting necks, no truly systematic change... and that, even for only a possible gneeration...
for old Bolsheviks were buried in the 30's.
and we now look onto a whole new century.
what is to come¿
what is to be done¿
MAS posters and grafiti all about... yet in a gringo oh so gringo hostel. A contrast I cant even begin to describe...
Remember that consolidations come from struggles, that are waged far afield from the resulted stays... Kataristas and comunistas and capitalistas all pull the centering state apart...
Defend it with the paid flag wavers¿
Sure MAS will be reelected.
But what is to come¿
What can they do, if a liberal twist remains in the unwillingness or inability to truly decapacitate and decapitate the oligarchy¿
Call it 'revolution', call it 'patria o muerte', invoke the ghosts of el Che all that you want....
no GueMing, no cutting necks, no truly systematic change... and that, even for only a possible gneeration...
for old Bolsheviks were buried in the 30's.
and we now look onto a whole new century.
what is to come¿
what is to be done¿
Titicaca
The life of the lake is dying. The peasant people's that used to compliment their farming with fishing can no longer do so, and so submit themselves to the industry of tourism, where a proletariat hussles up and down mountains 30 kilos of gringo pampering gear, or the harshness of a faked culturicity of dances that are simply pra inglês ver.
Yet a short time can yield a rich experience... the islands's very geography makes more or less sheep, more or less papas and maize grow. The families hold micro-plots throughout, integrating interests and spreading risks and tasks... 3 years rotation and 3 years fallow... no llamas or sheep enough for fertilizer, but also no chemicals that vitiate. A self-sufficiency that can't sustain the gas and oil and rice and clothes that come from the continent... And so, where are they to go¿
When canadian trout catch is sold at 20 centavos de Sol per kilo....
When no fish outside farms can yield the weight and wealth for complimenting the dry peasantry...
When tourism is the harsh and degrading and ocasional support it is...
Can there be a turn to an electoral populist compromise as here in Bolivia¿
Can there be a solidification of a mass movement that escapes the repression of the 'terrorists'¿
Peru, and I have left it, is left alone...
...leave it to them to shift the gears of our continents path, from the Chilean economic 'growth' or the Colombian military ossification, to the populist innovations of Bolivia and Venezuela.... donde quedan los Peruanos¿ Donde vamos nos Latinos nos quedar¿
Yet a short time can yield a rich experience... the islands's very geography makes more or less sheep, more or less papas and maize grow. The families hold micro-plots throughout, integrating interests and spreading risks and tasks... 3 years rotation and 3 years fallow... no llamas or sheep enough for fertilizer, but also no chemicals that vitiate. A self-sufficiency that can't sustain the gas and oil and rice and clothes that come from the continent... And so, where are they to go¿
When canadian trout catch is sold at 20 centavos de Sol per kilo....
When no fish outside farms can yield the weight and wealth for complimenting the dry peasantry...
When tourism is the harsh and degrading and ocasional support it is...
Can there be a turn to an electoral populist compromise as here in Bolivia¿
Can there be a solidification of a mass movement that escapes the repression of the 'terrorists'¿
Peru, and I have left it, is left alone...
...leave it to them to shift the gears of our continents path, from the Chilean economic 'growth' or the Colombian military ossification, to the populist innovations of Bolivia and Venezuela.... donde quedan los Peruanos¿ Donde vamos nos Latinos nos quedar¿
Machu Picchu 2
Machu Picchu, for those of you who can't understand the languages of my continent, was a wonderful experience. It is an ancient ruin perched between two mountains at the curve of a deep river... A old sacred city to which the Quechua people took refuge during the Spanish onslaught, and which was left to forgetfullness untill Yale took it over... What is to be described, how can it be told, what it is like to be at such a place¿ A gringo could go there and appreciate the stones, the mountains, the mistique of the place.... but only a south american, even if adopted as I am, an truly take in the burning emptiness of the ''what we could have been'' and the values that built that place. Let no romanticism whitewash the imperialism that built it, the newness that contrasts with the millenarian Tiwanaku and Guarani peoples, and the painfulness of a classist religious exclusivity... but, still, it is not like the ongoing genocide, like the capitalist imperialism that places gringos there with their mcdonalds and pasty-fleshed women posters... what is to be done¿ to acknowledge it, even, is to go out of one's way in that international but not internationalist play ground. a pluricultural country, even, would negate Collantisuyu, in which I now write... Waikis, learn our world. Learn this in the pain in which it is deserved. That is the hammer that harshens the glow of the past glories that linger in the mountain forests mists of Machu Picchu. Friends gave me prayer flags to flutter on trees of a mountain.... may those prayers incarnate loving karma to that place, to our world, to the passing flourishing decay of the cultures that trample each other on the thin mountain air, of the jungle moisture below raining all about the jagged mountains all about.
segunda-feira, 23 de novembro de 2009
Machu Picchu
Aventuras aventuras, como näo! Estive em Machu Picchu ontem, que tinha outro nome em seu tempo... Há um encanto com o que fomos (me fazendo agora de filho adotivo de nossa América) e oque poderiamos vir a ser, mas ao mesmo tempo uma estranheza no compreendimento que os povos que construiram aquelas lindas cidades e templos também o fizeram sobre os templos de outros povos, que seu império expandiu como os árabes em realezas polígamas que transformavam outras culturas em suas próprias, que todo imperio é imperialista... aí, perde-se todo o romanticismo sobre aquela gente e seus Incas... mas ganha-se, ou digo somente pessoalmente, ganhei uma visäo comparativa de civilizaçöes: se ambos impérios Inca e espanhol fizeram genocídios, pode-se comparar a medida de adaptaçäo dos outros povos à cultura ''vencedora'', e ví mais vestígios dos outros povos pré Incas em suas ruinas que vejo agora destes todos em nossas igrejas católicas... vejo a melhoria de esgotos e eletrecidade (para alguns) que vieram com a contínua colonizaçäo européia, mas vejo agora a morte das centenas de espécies de milhos e batatas e outras plantas que os povos dos Incas criaram e recriaram em seus terraços. Aonde cheguei? Aonde estou chegando? Nesse vai e vem de histórias sobre histórias, de impérios sobre impérios, de culturas sobre culturas, fico até tonto como os que caminham sobre essas montanhas sem se adaptar ao ar fino... mas me encontro cada vez mas. Fui até um pouco mais irmäo latino dos portadores Peruano-Quechua naquela trilha classista de turistas romanticos... Aprendi mais sobre eles e sobre mim mesmo. E assim vou... Por el suelo agora, cada vez mais, e mesmo ciego, sigo. Seguirei. Estou contente.
Assinar:
Postagens (Atom)
