The Eduardo VI dropped us at the pier in Lagunas, the town that serves as the entry point for the Reserva Nacional Pacaya Samiria. Here we organized a canoe and two guides and embarked for a four-day canoeing/camping trip into the jungle. During the days, we paddled. Javier and María, our guide and cook, talked over our heads in heavily accented jungle Spanish – a disjointed melody with stops and uplifted notes in an exotic patois. Their voices stayed in my head like a song, working, knocking around until the tune was familiar, pleasant, and I could almost sing along. In moments, our paddles struck the water in perfect unison, propelling us through the quiet, dark water, between narrow river banks overhung with dense greenery. Papagayos (macaws) and parrots exploded from the canopy, feathered fireworks of red, green, blue, yellow. Small yellow butterflies landed on Jesus’ bare back, tasting his sweat. Our guides’ sharp eyes picked out monkeys in the trees and spotted the markings of crocodiles and turtles on the sandy banks. The first day, it rained – poured. I sat in the canoe and tilted my head up, drinking the warm rain, letting it drench me, feeling wild and real and alive. At night, we searched for caimans and hunted the fish that jumped in the shallows, spearing them with a three-pronged lance. We slept on spongy palm branches under tarps and mosquito nets. After dark, we went to the bathroom in pairs, checking the ground and branches carefully for spiders and snakes before squatting. I fell asleep every night listening to the whooping of the frogs and counting the flashes of the lightning bugs flickering through the dark trees. This is the Amazon, the real deal: there are trees that walk, and other trees that kill, clinging with their roots to a healthy trunk like a giant squid wraps its tentacles around a ship, squeezing, strangling, subsuming.

There’s a potent magic in the jungle. Primitive, elemental, it stirs something deep in our bodies, something we already know but have forgotten the words for. Jesus and I returned to Lagunas enchanted. Time passed differently. I caught myself drifting, waking after minutes, hours; four more days slipped through our fingers. We spent hours at “the beach”, and more hours in the town’s only bar, drinking cold beer and watching the heat shimmer on the packed dirt of the main street. There was lots of walking barefoot and playing volleyball in the street with the same group of kids, every afternoon at four. There was nothing to do and so much time to do it in, but no one ever seemed bored. Different to the culture of the States: Do MORE in LESS time – IMMEDIATELY!! Life is simple: simple foods, rice, eggs, fish, bananas, and yucca, simple homes with dirt floors that still need to be swept, hammocks instead of beds. And yet, in the month I spent in the jungle, I saw more people laughing, more smiling and joking, more families at ease: more enjoyment.

I took a lot of pictures. The town of Lagunas is incredibly photogenic, the grass and trees are tall and bright green-yellow against the blue and green houses and the dirt streets that look golden in the baking midday sun. A girl moves through the grass with a bucket of water on her head, a toddler walking at her side. Women use machetes to chop at the grass in front of their houses. Half-naked boys stand on the gunwales of their canoes, leaf-shaped paddles in hand. A fisherman hauls his nets across the river, shouting and stamping his feet to scare off the pink river dolphins that circle his catch. The realization that came to me was simple, but powerful. These images, these faces and scenes in front of me are real. Not from the pages of magazines, romantic, exotic, staged, or contrived. This is life. These people don’t know that they’re beautiful, that what they’re doing is special or photogenic. It’s just life. It’s just the jungle.

Just.

15 July – 6 August

The first five days, we hiked up, then down, then up, then down.  River valley to river valley, straight up and over the peaks in between, descending 1000m then climbing 1000m.  Like climbing over a 4,000-footer in the White Mountains, without switchbacks.  Straight up, then straight back down the other side in one day, five days in a row.  Unlike in New Zealand, the rivers at the bottom of these valleys were crossed once, easily, with a rough log bridge, then forgotten.  No trails meandering along the valley bottoms, circumnavigating the hills in the middle – we traveled direct, and at an average altitude of 3300m (10,800ft).  It’s impossible to talk about the trip without dwelling on the elevation.  Our maps were poor and we didn’t have an altimeter, but with every step, I knew that we were high.  My lungs knew it and my heart beat out protests in Morse code.  Up, up, up, then down, down, down.

In between breaths, Wilson taught me words in Quechua, the language of the locals.  We’re passing through their land, he reasoned.  We should speak their language.
“How are you: imaynalla cashanky,” he’d prompt.
“Ee-la-mayna…eee-ya-llama…how was that again?”
“Imaynalla cashanky.  And the response: aliyammi cashany, I’m fine, thanks for asking.”
“One phrase at a time!” I’d protest, and put one foot in front of the other and pant the unfamiliar syllables like a mantra.

We carried no food, only a bit of bread, cheese, fruit and nuts, and I brought my emergency jar of peanut butter and a spoon.  Our meals Wilson begged and bartered from the campesinos who lived along our route.  On the third night, I sat next to Wilson on a wooden bench inside a tiny mud and thatch hut.  On the rickety table in front of us, our hostess placed two bowls heaped with rice, runny fried eggs and boiled yuca root.  Nodding to us that we should start eating, she settled back on her low stool next to the cook fire, tucked her skirts between her legs, and poked another branch between the rocks, sending a fresh wave of smoke into the already thick air.  I took a pinch of salt from the bowl and applied it liberally to the egg before mixing the bright yolk into the rice.  Starved at the end of a long day’s walking, the simple carb-and-protein blast made my stomach sing.  The white, potato-like yuca was dry and starchy, but with a thin layer of salt, delicious.  Satisfied, I leaned back against the wall and sighed.  Straw fibers from the mud bricks tickled the back of my neck, and a curious cuy (guinea pig) startled me as he brushed against my toe, cooing and burbling to his brothers, huddled in the corners of the small cook hut.  The only light came from the small fire, dim, but enough to make out the shapes of the family sitting by the fire, watching us eat.  I felt shy under their gaze, a gringa, wearing in my synthetic-down jacket and head lamp.  When the daughter stood up to clear our bowls and serve tea from the kettle, Wilson nudged me insistently under the table.  “Practice your new language!” he said in English.  “Sool-pie-coo-ee,” thank you, I murmured to the daughter, who froze and looked up from her pouring.  My stomach fluttered and I tried again, “Ee-mahn-soo-tee-kee?”  What’s your name?  She turned to her parents, and the three began to chatter excitedly.  “They want to know where you learned to speak Quechua,” Wilson translated.  Suddenly I was under the spotlight.  I blushed, my eyes watering from the smoke, excited, overwhelmed by a sense of unreality.  They asked me questions.  I could barely get the answers out.  I smiled nervously and tried to breath.  What was I afraid of?  How different these people are?  How much I stood out?  They laughed at my poor attempts at Quechua phrases, but Wilson beamed, proud of his “gringa”, showing me off.  “They love you now,” he assured me.

Three days later we crossed the next pass, Abra Choquetacarpo, 4500m (14,700ft).  It was cold and I was having a hard time breathing.  My senses were on overdrive; every step registered: soft squishing mud, the brush of dew-soaked tussock blades against my leg.  Every blink, every breath had its own savor, and everything I saw sent my mind zooming back through the people and places of the last three years.  New Zealand: Graham, Jasmine, Dr. Gonzo, Lumir, Aussie Bob, long solo hikes when I felt invincible; Antarctica: André, all the good and all the bad; Wyoming: Cal, the Tetons, Jan.  Chile and Argentina and Patagonia and the recent days with Wilson.  Rich, I whispered to myself.  As if here in Perú I’ve finally stored up enough experiences to recognize it.  Rich.

On the other side of the pass, I skipped alongside Wilson on the long Inca road.  It’s seven feet high, five feet wide, a smooth stone highway built into the rocks on the side of the valley, built to speed along the Inca chaskis (foot messengers).  The even white line of the road stretched out ahead of us, and our conversation wound around to become a monologue: Wilson dreams of traveling the world - wants it so bad he can taste it – but money and family problems weigh on him like sandbags on a hot air balloon.  I listened, impressed by his determination and maturity (he’s three years younger than me), and at the same time humbled by the sudden, clear realization of how easy I have it.  I listened, but something in my head was breaking free.  All the times I’ve talked about how money’s not necessary to live, bragged about my minimal living expenses.  How easy, how trite, when you don’t have medical debts or a family to support.  Every moment I’ve spent whining about “too many options”.  I want to bury those thoughts, erase them from existence.  An abstract vision of what my future might be spun around in my head, something rattled and clicked into place.

Two days we spend in Huancacalle, the first town we’ve seen since leaving Cachora a week ago.  It’s one dirt road, lined with whitewashed adobe houses, but there are two or three hole-in-the-wall shops where we buy bread and cheese and bananas through the grated door, and a hostel with electric hot water in the outdoor showers.  It’s Sunday, Mother’s Day, and we wait in line at the top of the hill to use the town’s one telephone so that Wilson can call his mum.  A tiny, baseball-cap wearing woman serves us dinner and breakfast in her kitchen.  The plastic chairs and stained tablecloth, the bare light bulb that hangs over our head, the sink where she turns a tap to run water and rinse our dishes, these are unspeakable luxuries after the past week of smoky bamboo shacks.  Dinner is beef loin, with rice and tomato slices.  Breakfast is the same, with fried trout instead of beef, and black coffee to follow instead of tea.  Our hostess has a silver-rimmed fake tooth and a bright, smiling face that she has to keep uplifted when she talks to us; she barely comes up to my chest.  She, Wilson, and the man who works with her keep up a running commentary while we eat, about me, excluding me.  I’ve spoken Spanish to them, even tried out my Quechua, but I’m a gringa, and our hosts insist on believing that I understand nothing.  It’s harmless, joking, but I feel trapped by my appearance, accent, and culture.  They won’t look past the stereotype.  Still, I like this woman, with her electric laugh, and her efficient way of chopping washing talking cooking all at the same time.

And on the eighth day, it rained.  Wilson and I crossed our final pass in a cloud, a few hours along the road from Huancacalle, a mere 3700m (12,000ft).  The wind whipped the cold rain into our faces.  Three local women passed us as we stopped to dig out our heavy rain jackets and warmer layers.  They carried large bundles on their backs in their traditional, colorful mantas.  Pausing a few steps beyond us, they reached over their shoulders to pull bits of plastic out of the top of their bundles, which they wrapped around their shoulders like capes.  Rain pooled on their wide-brimmed felt hats and their sandaled feet squelched in the red mud as they smiled at us and kept walking.  After about seven hours, our easy, well-graded road petered out in the middle of a lush, green hill.  Houses dotted the hillside and the heavy clouds trailed between tall eucalyptus trees.  Pampaconas.  A chorus of little kids appeared out of nowhere and extended shy hands to wish us “buenas tardes.”  I passed out pieces of hard candy and gum, bought for the purpose in Hunacacalle.  The younger kids were terrified, and I was too, a little.  We sat in another tiny, smoky cook hut to wait for our rice with eggs and potatoes.  The woman cooking for us squatted on a cinder block while she scooped hot oil over the eggs.  When she stood up to pull down bowls from the shelf, I could see a tiny white cuy sleeping under her skirts inside her cinder block seat.  Outside, kids played with our bags.  One of the braver boys poked his head into the smoke and held out my adjustable walking stick.  “What is this for?”  Wilson grinned.  “For killing bears.”  The boy shrieked with glee and ran out again, shouting to his friends.  The rain closed in again before we left, and I hugged my arms to my chest in the sheltered doorway of the cook hut, steeling myself.  I noticed one small boy sitting in the doorway opposite, playing quietly in the mud with his bare big toe.  A pink knitted hat dwarfed his thin, dirty face.  Out of the rain, but not the cold, the boy’s nose was running, and he watched us, the strangers, with huge eyes.  Wilson made him laugh, teasing the chickens, and I resolved never, ever to complain about anything again.

Below Pampaconas, we follow a river we don’t know the name of, through countryside we don’t have a map for.  Directions are asked of the men and women we pass on the trail.  It’s the harvest season, and mule trains pass us, carrying potatoes down to the river, corn up into the mountains.  “Chht…chht…hup, chhhhht,” the campesinos blow through their teeth to keep the animals moving, flicking small sticks and long pieces of grass against the mule’s flanks.  They pause to clasp our hands and say hello as we pass, their deeply lined faces turned upwards in easy, sometimes toothless smiles.  Half-chewed coca leaves tucked into their cheeks distort the sides of their faces and turn their smiles green.  The women wear multiple layers of skirts and sweaters, and under their hats, their hair hangs in long braids down their backs.  The men wear jeans and t-shirts with incongruous slogans in English.  Everyone wears rubber sandals made from recycled tires.  Cracked heels and dirt-crusted toenails testify to years spent working hard in the chakras and running the trails behind the mules.  My Quechua is improving, and draws laughter and occasional confusion from children and adults alike.  I am repeatedly struck with awareness – where I am, what I’m doing - like a bolt of lightning, grounding me in the moment.  I’m absorbing knowledge faster than I can process it.  I’m trying not to romanticize what I’m seeing, I’m trying to understand it and be a part of it, but it’s impossible for me to blend in, and I’m uncertain of my role and how to relate.  My culture is a filter; everything I see and think is run through twenty-five years of life as a US citizen.

On day thirteen, when we rode out of the jungle and into Kiteni, my eyes bulged at the site of pavement, cement sidewalks and internet cafes.  Wilson steered us toward the outdoor mercado for a late dinner.  The meat and french fries were served out of an industrial sized pot that sat over a portable gas burner.  One month in Perú, two weeks in the boondocks, and this was normal: eating dinner at a bench in front of a “restaurant” strapped to the front of a bicycle vending aparatus.  We’d arrived with about thirty other people in the back of a truck loaded with sacks of raw coffee beans.  Coffee grows wild in the jungle, and the villagers who live close enough to the road harvest the beans to sell.  Those who don’t, pick it, roast it, and grind it in their own huts for their families - and serve it to the rare gringa passerby.  ¡Riquisimo! We caught the truck in a small town on the edge of the jungle in the late afternoon.  Five young boys sprawled across the bottom of the truck bed and looked at Wilson and me curiously as we hauled our packs over the wooden sides.  The road, still very much in the jungle, was narrow and rough.  Dust rolled back over us every time the truck slowed to turn a corner.  Palms and lemon trees hung low and encroaching and threatened to knock us from our perch atop the sacks of coffee beans.  The smell in the back of the truck was both rich and repulsive: humanity, raw coffee, dirt, plants, damp wood.  It was slow going.  We stopped every ten or fifteen minutes outside of small houses or along the side of the road where people gathered with their overflowing bags of raw beans. The driver’s wife, a large woman with a meaty face, climbed out of the cab to negotiate, paying cash per kilo. The boys leaped to the beat of her harsh voice: “¡Pan, dos soles! ¡Cinco sacos! ¡Papas, cuatro kilos!” The two older boys strained to heft the tremendous sacks to the top of the pile, while the younger boys swung like monkeys from the center beam, rushing to fill orders for vegetables, riced cans of condensed milk, passing bags of supplies down to the waiting campesinos. They hammed it up for my camera, absolutely brilliant, entirely a part of their surroundings. We picked up more passengers, and the boys shouted to them to move forward, look out, make room!  We resembled immigrants: families, belongings wrapped up in blankets and plastic bags, a box of peeping baby chickens, men straddling the wooden sides of the truck.  Later, the five boys sat in a row on top of the truck’s cab, silhouetted against the back glow of the headlights on the lush jungle foliage.  A nearly full moon rose just before we reached Kiteni.  It was a beautiful night, the end of the first part of the adventure, a prelude to the next four nights to come…

(Don’t forget to check out the photos)

There are two Cuscos. One, which includes the central Plaza de Armas and the adjacent streets with their “turistico” restaurants and tour agencies, belongs to the extranjeros (foreigners), and vibrates with the heavily-accented English of a hundred different touts and vendors swarming around the tourists, looking for money like mosquitoes hunt unprotected skin. Postcards, watercolors, handmade jewelry, painted gourds, finger puppets and musical instruments are paraded and displayed; young girls stand in the middle of the plaza passing out cards, “Massage, lady?  Waxing?  Pedicure?  Manicure?” Restaurant employees hover in the doorways with menus to attract clientele. “Yes, lady, yes, we have a free drinks for you!  Free drink!  You want Mexican?  Or you want tee-pee-cal foods?  Si, yes, we have, only ten soles!  Please, lady, come, come!”  Competition is fierce and therefore prices are low, but even so, the cost of one meal in a tourist restaurant would buy five in a local place.

Outside of Tourist Cusco, pollerías line the streets, selling rotisserie chickens in pieces (an eighth of a chicken with a plate of French fries and buffet salad costs four soles – USD$1.50), and in the mercado (market) there are dozens of abuelitas and mamichas (literally: little grandmas and mamas) standing over small gas ranges cooking up almuerzos completos (complete lunches: a huge bowl of thick soup with corn or potatoes to start, then a plate piled with rice, salad, and the main course of chicken stew, or a piece of fish or beef or sheep, or with French fries cooked with tomatoes and onions) for less than one US dollar.  Clientele have their favorite stalls, and at the popular ones the benches overflow and people eat standing up, passing the bowl of ají (hot sauce) back and forth, shouting for kachi (Quechua – the indigenous language – for salt). A roll of toilet paper is provided to wipe the grease from your fingers.  And in the same mercado: dried pears, spices, shoe polish, rugs, chocolate, flowers, cheese, fruits, corn, woven fabrics, ceramics, flour, vegetables, backpacks, cleaning products, pig heads, shawls, fruit juice, towels, herbs, quinoa bars, freshly butchered cow portions. There are metal drains in the cement floor for washing down the fish guts and cow blood and spilled soup. In this Cusco, they speak Spanish and Quechua only.

The city is a carnival, and everyone in it is a barker.  Women stand on the corners wearing yellow aprons, holding cell phones, selling air time, announcing their wares, ”llamadas llamadas llamadas llamadas“. On the outskirts of the city, combis (crowded, battered vans) rattle through the potholes with a man or woman hanging out of the open door shouting the destination, “chin-CHAIR-o-chin-CHAIR-o-chin-CHAIR-o!” but barely slow to admit or deposit passengers.  I watched one woman in stilettos and a business skirt run full tilt after a combi destined for Urubamba while the caller held out an arm to help her aboard, all the time commanding her to “sube-sube-sube-sube” (“get on, get on!”).  I love the combis.  They’re slow and they’re crowded; they stop for anyone who waves an arm from the sidewalk or shouts “¡Baja!” (“Stop!”) from the inside.  “Too full” isn’t a concept that the combi drivers acknowledge.  People sit on top of each other and stand in the space between the seats where your feet are supposed to go.  Abuelitas with five different bags of farm produce doze in the back seats while clean cut business types pass dirty-faced children back to sit on top of the bags of potatoes.  Young mothers carry infants on their backs in brightly colored mantas, the little ones nearly invisible in the folds of fabric, until a tiny grasping hand fights its way clear or the van jolts through a pothole and suddenly you find yourself staring into two curious brown eyes.  I love the crush and the proximity, the smell of the earth in the clothes of the old men, sharing smiles with the other passengers when the road gets rough or when the sliding door gets stuck and both the driver and his helper have to get out and yank it open. Peruanos seem always to be smiling.  There’s a saying here: in Perú, everything is possible, but nothing is certain.  I like Perú.  You can’t drink the water or find paper in bathrooms (a roll of TP in a Ziploc bag is a permanent resident in my daypack), but for thirty-five cents you can buy hot corn on the cob with salty Andean cheese from a woman on the street corner, and if the combi is too full, you can always ride on the roof.

*

The country is poor, but the people are descended from the Incas, from kings, and they are strong.  Their ancestors constructed stone citadels on mountain tops at elevations greater than 3000m (9,800ft), quarried, carried, shaped, and stacked rocks, some the size of cars.  They carved steps out of the hills steep enough to give tight-rope walkers vertigo, but I’m willing to bet that they didn’t need to use their hands to climb them. Jeni and I, however, out of breath and without shame, perfected the “four-appendage” climbing method over our six days approaching and exploring the most famous Inca ruins, one of the new seven wonders of the world: Machu Picchu. Why did these people build in this place?  So high, so remote, so difficult.  The strength that must have been required and the ingenuity - a marvel.  I must admit my knowledge of the history and the culture and the methods is lacking.  It was not the details so much as the overall honda of the ruins that brought tears to my eyes, once, twice, three times, surprising and unexpected, welling from some vein in my soul as yet untapped.

Our approach to the site took four days.  The anticipation grew during the hike. Long, full days, each one better than the last.  It was a different experience for me: hiking with a group of twelve; mules to carry the packs; breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks all provided and cooked and served under a tent with chairs, a table, napkins, cutlery.  Many in our group had never been on a multiple day hiking trip.  For one young Korean girl, this was her first hike. Ever.  One guy had half-healed broken ribs, and two contracted altitude-aggravated stomach bugs.  Even Jeni, my fellow hard-core hiker chick, was suffering from bronchitis – yet no one ever complained.  We took it slow, we took a lot of rest stops, we talked, we bonded; we had a blast.  I learned a good lesson in anti-snobbery, and the slow pace meant that I took heaps of photos.  It took us two days to climb from Mollepata at 2900m to the 4600m (15,091ft) pass below Mt. Salkantay (6271m / 20574ft).  The word “WOW” was never far from my lips, though I rarely had enough breath to speak it.  Atop the pass, we built a cairn of rocks to honor Pachamama (the Incan mother earth).  Dozens of other small rock towers stood on rocks across the barren saddle.  Clouds drifted between our legs and among the rocks: Pachamama tasting her offerings.  On the other side of the pass, the route meandered down the side of a valley past small farm houses of branches and stone and thatch.  Locals rode past us on horses or stood in their doorways, watching us pass.  Families live in huts on the sides of the mountains, raising their children and their crops kilometers from roads and from their neighbors, linked only by rough foot and hoof paths.  There’s no such thing as “wild” space, it seems.  The land is used, inhabited, despite the altitude, the remoteness, the difficulty of the life.

As we descended, the terrain changed abruptly.  “Welcome to the Jungle” began to play in my head as banana trees replaced alpine grass and bamboo and flowers and creepers crowded the trail.  I had to step aside to let a spider the size of a lime with dark hairy legs pass.  Wilson, our guide, picked grenadillas for us to try, a type of passionfruit with a hard shell and pulpy seeds inside that look like frog eggs: sweet and juicy.  On the fourth day we reached the train tracks and got our first view of the mountaintop fortress of Machu Picchu.  It was hot, and we were sweating, surrounded by banana trees and the sound of insects, and there it was – Machu Picchu – right there.  I could imagine Hiram Bingham and the original explorers in 1911, bushwhacking through the jungle and then suddenly noticing some interesting terracing on top of the peaks.  And then we were there!  Day five – we made the steep climb to the ruins to arrive at six AM when the gates opened.  Jeni and I lagged behind a bit, hesitant to look.  After so much time and planning and energy, here we were.  It was a bit silly, but we held hands, looked at the ground, and shuffled towards the edge of the first overlook, then counted to three and raised our eyes at the last moment…awesome.

Words and descriptions are pathetically inadequate.  There are rock walls and buildings and structures, there are gardens of orchids and a temple that resembles a work of abstract art, all shapes and designs blending into one another, in harmony with the surroundings and with Pachamama.  The ruins are literally built into the top of a mountain.  The walls give way to cliffs which drop dizzyingly to the river below, and in all directions are similar peaks, steep, green, and dramatically independent of the valley and each other.  Jeni and I spent one day, then came back for a second full day, paying extra for the privilege, exploring, climbing the surrounding peaks, relaxing, absorbing, meditating. I don’t remember ever being so content, so utterly at peace in a place.  On the day before my birthday I was sitting on top of Montaña Machu Picchu with Jeni, mixing guacamole in a plastic bag and staring down at the ruins and at the mountains around above and below. And I was smiling.

So ends chapter one of the Peru Story.  Stay tuned for more, and check out the photos.  Two new albums: “Argentina” and “Peru #1″.

Angus and I arrived in Puerto Montt on the Sunday morning bus, and chose Casa Perla at random out of the guidebook.  Perla herself met us at the front door of the homestay, urging us to hurry up, come in, drop our stuff, and ¡vamos!  She spoke too rapidly for me to catch what, exactly, the hurry was, or where we were going, but there was a small cluster of people at the door, clearly waiting for us to join up and get on with it.  “It’s a curanto (coo-RAhn-to),” Trina (a Kiwi woman about my age and fellow guest at Casa Perla) explained as we trooped down the hill toward the waterfront.  “But I’m not really sure what that means.  It’s a traditional Chileno meal, and we have to go to this island, where there’s this woman cooking it.  And that’s all I know.”  Lunch on an island in Chile.  Okay.

At the bottom of the hill, we waited for a bus.  We stood next to the Sunday market, and the scent of fish was overpowering in the 80F sun.  Standing room only on the bus; I found myself pressed up next to Clementine, a Frenchwoman who spoke better Spanish than English.  We communicated between languages, using words and hand gestures and facial expressions.  Closer to the front, Angus met the perfect mate to play Cheech to his Chong.  He and Stace, a sixty-year-old English/Dutch yoga instructor, had somehow grabbed seats and were cracking open their cans of beer, the hoppy odor adding to the sticky air inside the bus.  Stace had a frizzy silver-and-ginger beard and long, thin hair pulled into a tight knot on the top of his head.  Small wisps of light red hair ringed his forehead, ears, and neck.  Off the bus and down a long cement ramp to the edge of the water, where a small, brightly-painted boat waited to ferry us the ten minutes across the sound to Isla Tengla, then another ten minutes walking to the opposite side of the island to the farm where the mysterious curanto was meant to take place.

The farm was small, sheltered, and consisted of a few small buildings: a house, a barn with attached animal pens, and a round, open-ceilinged structure with long tables set for the meal.  Scruffy dogs bickered in the grassy space between the buildings, and older, dark-skinned men stood silently in the doorway of the barn.  Meanwhile a plump, soft-looking matron in a long skirt and lavender apron moved busily from barn to house, house to dining area.  I smiled at the men, asked if I could take photos, and suddenly I had an escort.  Pedro led me through a green arborway into the garden, and to the edge of the stone wall that separates the farm from the beach.  It was low tide, and the beach was huge and wet.  I took a few pictures, and then stood talking to Pedro, doing my best to understand his rapid Chileno speech and trying to respond with the right words when he paused.  He was perhaps seventy, and short, with a heavily lined face, a thick grey mustache, and dark eyes.  My comprehension was not 100%, but it was enough.  He told me about his life, about his travels: he worked in a factory in Connecticut, and later (or perhaps at the same time?) served in the Chilean air force, flying a route that took him through Toronto, Detroit, St. Louis, Dallas, San Antonio, Huston, Mexico and Central America on countless occasions.  It was from him that I learned that GW Bush was on a tour of the Middle East, and that Hillary Clinton had won out over Obama in NH.  He’d like to see Hillary take the general election in November, but agreed with me that change is important.  This feels like someone else’s life, like something I might read about.  And yet, this is real.  This is where I am.

Finally, we were called into the barn to watch them “open” the curanto.  In the floor of the barn was a poured cement hole, perhaps a foot deep and a meter square.  Perla, our expedition leader, stood next to me and explained the process in heavily-accented English.  To build a curanto: first, a fire is built in the bottom of the hole, on top of a layer of round stones.  The stones bake in the fire, and when they’re red hot, the cooks begin constructing the layers of food.  Several layers of huge wet leaves cover the rocks, and on top of that they lay alternating layers of shellfish, leaves, meat, potatoes, vegetables, leaves, more shellfish, more meat, and then on the very top, two kinds of heavy, rich potato bread.  The whole lot is covered with more leaves, then several burlap sacks.  For two hours, the food sits and steams and the fat and juice and flavors from the various ingredients drip and mingle and cook.  The smell, as Pedro and two others peel back each layer, is exotic and mouthwatering.

The shells clack and clatter against one another as the matron forks them out in their red net bags.  Two shy cats hide under the benches around the curanto, eyeing the fish and the people, and the dogs creep closer and closer to the hole until someone notices them and shouts them back outside.  The food, once served, fills the long tables to capacity.  There is a watery salsa to spoon over the potatoes and the mussels; bottles of cool white wine are passed while the pile of discarded shells grows on a tray at the end of the tables.  Jo the dog sits at my feet, licking my knee occasionally in hopes of a pork bone.  By the end, my fingers are greasy and my stomach groaning.  This is cuisine.

There is a siesta on the beach after the meal.  I sit with Angus, Stace, Trina, Ant (Trina’s partner), and Clementine, not talking, each of us in our own private digestive stupor.  There’s no need for words, no need to play the “getting-to-know-you” game.  The six of us, we’ve discovered, are going to be together for another whole week as we travel south to Puerto Natales on the Navimag Ferry.  It’s a four-day boat trip through the Patagonian Channels, and it’s the only way see Chile’s Pacific coast.  We will have plenty of time to talk in the coming days.  For the moment, I am easy.  I’m humming along with the universe, in the exact right place at the exact right time.

In the morning, the sound of the cabaña roof being irrigated woke me, and I stepped outside to see shimmering green grass and steep green hills, misty behind the spray of the water.  Volcán Villarrica was bright white against the sky, and the other local volcanoes, Llaima and Quetrepillan, looked jagged and prominent further along the horizon.  Chris came round with the 4-wheeler (imported from NZ) and hauled Angus and me to the worksheds where his Mapuche (Chile’s indigenious tribe) workers waited with the tractor and a trailer full of hay.  “We’re going up the top,” he told us.  “Hang on.”  It took about twenty minutes to get half way up before the tractor ran out of gas, and Angus and I were obliged to walk the rest of the way while Chris and the workers went back down to top up the tank.  I was wearing long pants.  Chris had told me earlier, “My workers aren’t used to seeing women show their legs.  If you wear pants it’ll keep them from falling off the tractor.”  The track was steep and dusty, and it wasn’t long before the long pants were sticking to my legs.  The plus side was that they kept the tábanos off my skin.  These were huge, Jurassic Park bugs, flies, black and orange and persistent.  Their bite, Chris said, is quite painful, but it takes them so long between landing and biting that they make easy targets for killing.  Angus and I slapped and swore our way up the hill, finally reaching the top, out of breath and sweaty and covered in bruises from where we’d administered countless tábano death blows.  It was worth it.  We could see all three volcanoes, the farm, and the lake from the top paddock.  “This is just like New Zealand…it’s almost a bit disappointing,” Angus said.  “I know,” I replied.  “That’s why I like it.”

We spent a week relaxing and exploring the farm, the lake, the town, and the surrounding mountains.  Pucón is the Queenstown of Chile: touristy, trendy, and expensive.  Chileans as well as Europeans flock to the Región de Los Lagos during the months of January and February to go white water rafting, to hike Volcán Villarrica, to soak in natural thermal pools, and to spend money along the manicured main street of the town.  Chris’s farm is well-located in that it’s far enough away to feel secluded and peaceful, but close enough for him and Dagmar to do good business selling their venison to local restaurants, where it’s served as a regional delicacy.  Angus taught me to windsurf on the lake in front of the main house, and Dagmar helped both of us plan some of our trip south to Patagonia.  We learned how to navigate the local bus routes and spent time wandering both in town and around the closest national park, Huerquehue.  One day hike took us up into araucaria territory – the monkey puzzle tree.  Its bark is a jigsaw of odd shapes and rough edges, while its branches are long, slender and uplifted, like the tail of a tree-hugging mammal.  On another day, we rode with Dagmar for three hours to Valdivia, a coastal university town, sooty and run down and more authentic-feeling than either of the cities Angus and I had seen so far.  We discovered the contemporary art museum, located in the remains of an old brewery.  The building was deliciously industrial and rich with character; the exhibits paled in comparison.  The long drive between Pucón and Valdivia also provided time to listen to Dagmar’s yarns of being a sailor and sail-maker, an outspoken, direct German woman in a man’s field.  Her trade has brought her to Antarctica, the Carribean islands, and beyond, and her straightforward, talkative method of storytelling, punctuated with long bursts of laughter, made the miles pass quickly.

The weather changed at the end of the week: from hot, stifling days to 50F (10C) with rain and wind.  The volanoes have fresh snow on their summits.  Summer seems to have fled early.  “Extremely unusual!” Dagmar told us, shaking her head.  Angus and I are on the move as well, from Pucón to Puerto Varas.  We’re heading south to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.  Yesterday we rode the bus for an easy-as-pie five hours, and will explore Puerto Varas a bit in between the raindrops before boarding a ferry in Puerto Montt and sailing for four days along the Patagonian coast to Puerto Natales.  Here’s hoping for sunshine!

You’ve seen this phenomenon in movies.  There’s some powerful, unconventional, emotional performance.  The audience is quiet, stunned, uncertain of how to respond, until one person stirs, putting his hands together once…twice…and then a little bit faster and a little bit faster as others begin to join him.  Slowly at first, but steadily, until the entire audience is on its feet, clapping, cheering, united in their adulation and enthusiasm for the performers.  It’s become a bit of a cliché, but after sitting in a bus on the side of the Pan-American highway for an hour, waiting for the six passengers that the bus driver forgot at the last station, the slow-clap seemed the only appropriate response.  As the bus shifted into gear and lurched into traffic, finally, I grinned at Angus and put my hands together once…twice…and then listened with glee as the entire bus erupted into cheers and hollers and laughter.

It was meant to be an eleven-hour bus ride from Santigao, south to Pucón, to Angus’s uncle’s farm.  First the bus was late.  Then it broke down.  Then it had to wait for the passengers it had left behind.  At first Angus and I were nervous, then incredulous, and then it just became entertaining.  We took turns at the window, watching the countryside roll past.  The hills around Santiago were brown and dry, but as we moved south they became greener, lusher, larger.  From hills to mountains to volcanoes.  We listened to our MP3 players and communicated in signs (Charades, rather than English or Spanish has become our first language.  As I struggle with the Spanish, I’m losing command of the English.  Inarticulateness is a new experience for me.).  Angus, the artist, drew himself an elaborate tattoo and I befriended the old Chilean woman across the aisle who wore a pale flowered dress and waved a black lace fan back and forth in front of her face.  She drew my attention to the recently-erupted Volcán Llaima as we drove past: a smoking black cone ringed with ashy clouds.

This was day four in Chile, and despite the monotony of the road, probably the most relaxing.  The first three days, in Santiago, I was in a daze.  Not four hours after landing, I was sitting at a table with a Chilean family, eating corn, tomatoes, and barbequed meat, struggling to speak Spanish, struggling to accept that this was reality.  Raquel, Raúl, and their children (José, 17, and Juan Pablo, 20) were helpful, welcoming, and patient, but it all seemed too far out.  Angus and I lazed through the scorching summer days (85-90F, easily) next to the family’s pool, ate what was put in front of us, and tried to follow the conversations that rolled around us like a hot Spanish wind.

Raúl took us on a walking tour of downtown Santiago (el Centro), where we saw La Moneda, the house of La Presidente, and had our picture taken with the carabineros in front of the mansion.  They wore sharp white uniforms and carried thin, jeweled swords.

For New Year’s Eve, the family ate a late meal, then took to the streets at midnight for the fireworks (fuegos artificiales) display.  People choked the streets, flinging confetti, kissing and hugging and wishing each other “¡Felíz año nuevo!”  Children ran and shreiked, champagne was poured, and when the fireworks ended, the party really got started.  Angus and I rode with José and Juan Pablo to an outdoor event stadium, and from 2 AM to 8 AM we danced, drank, and tried not to get lost in the crush of the 6,000 other young (16-20 year olds) revelers.  Raúl picked us up at the front gate of the arena at about 9 AM, just as the heat of the sun began to be unbearable, and we spent the rest of the day passed out by the pool.  The whole celebration might have been a hallucination; it still surprises me to realize that it’s 2008.

The timing of this place is disorienting.  The days begin late.  Breakfast is light, and the biggest meal of the day is at 1 PM.  There’s a snack around 5 PM, a light dinner at 10 PM, and then off to the discos when they open at 1 AM.  The keyboards in the internet cafés are different.  For the first time I can correctly apply accent marks and upside-down question marks without needing to consult Microsoft Word Help.  Supermarkets are overwhelming, and as I can’t understand numbers when they’re spoken to me, paying for things is a trial.  The young boys who bag my groceries get tips.  Taxi drivers do not.  Stray dogs are everywhere.  There is so much that is different, my eyes got tired, and my head hurt from trying to translate and absorb.  It was a relief, therefore, to get onto a bus and to have thirteen hours of nothing-time in which to work on assimilating the past days’ barrage of information and newness.

Not to say that the strangeness and unreality has disappeared.  Living on Angus’s uncle’s farm is like being in NZ.  We’ve been here for five days, hiking and exploring the countryside and enjoying being able to speak English.  I keep forgetting that I’m in Chile.  Still, there are new things to learn and plenty to keep us occupied, and there will be stories to follow.

In the meantime, ¡felíz año nuevo a todos!  Check out the photos: http://community.webshots.com/user/susanm483 and check back again soon!  Ciao for now…

Sensory deprivation.  These are a few of my favorite things that I didn’t know were my favorites until they were removed from my world.  Bugs.  Rain.  Outdoor smells.  Green.  Fresh draft beer.  Trees.  It’s the bugs that I miss the most, I think.  Or, they’re the things that are most obviously missing.  I’ll see a dust mote float by and swat it out of the way, thinking it’s a fly, only to remember, with a start, that there aren’t any bugs here.  A speck on the wall is a spider, an odd shadow in the corner is a cobweb – except it’s not.  Seeing rain on TV, reading a description of a wet, stormy night – I’m enthralled.  My uncle mailed me a stack of the Sunday comics, in color (a treasure in themselves!).  One strip showed a family standing in the rain in their soggy front yard, surveying a growing drainage problem.  I was transported.  I could feel the cold, raw moisture in the air, hear the squish of the grass, smell the rotting fall leaves.  Vivid sensations from a comic strip.  I think I stared at the newsprinted page for fifteen minutes.  Little things are treasured; small reminders of the outside world: fake spiders sit glued to window sills, silk ivy crawls around office cubicles, plastic palm trees tower in dorm room corners.  Every bathroom stall on station has a tropical-themed picture taped to the back of the door.  People find ways to inject their white, icy days with shots of sunshine, life, warmth, greenery and bright turquoise water.

Little things…I wish I could describe the sense of humor.  The best I can do is say that it’s all about the little things.  Subtle.  Creative.  Fueled by the inherent madness of subtracting oneself from the real world and moving to a cold, dead place where one lives in too-tight quarters and works too-long hours.  Release happens in the oddest ways.  For example.  This past weekend: The Halloween Party.  Costumes planned for months were pulled out, painted on, and paraded across a stage for the entire community to cheer and jeer.  Little things take on enormous importance.  I have spent hour-long meetings discussing whether or not to put our galley napkins into dispensers on the tables or to leave them in a central location for community members to pick up before sitting down.  When we introduced silverware-sorting at the dish window, there was chaos.  Routines are followed to a T.  Changes incite revolt.  As if we as humans can only bear so much, and living in this place has already stretched the limits.

It’s a community of travelers, adventurers.  Every Monday night someone presents a travelogue – a slide show and talk of their recent journeys.  So far we’ve had people speak about Tibet, Guyana, Suriname, Mongolia.  We’re readers.  There’s a drawer in the dish room that the DAs use for their personal effects; it’s always full of books.  During our breaks we sit two or three at a table and plow through classics, comic books, history, biographies, comedies, tragedies, poetry.  Cribbage is the card game of choice.  Carhart is the fashionable name brand for pants, shirts, and insulated bib overalls.  The more patches, the better.  In any given gathering, heads wearing hats will outnumber the bare ones.  Facial hair for men is an art form: chops, fu manchus, goatees, soul patches, handlebar ‘staches, trimmed beards, wild beards, and the ever-popular two-day stubble.  The community is swollen at the moment – we’re nearly at capacity at 1092 people.  For the last two weeks we’ve been overrun by Polies – a hundred or so Raytheon employees waiting, waiting, waiting to fly to the South Pole.  The temperature has to be above -50C (approx -64F) before the LC130 Hercules planes can fly.  Colder than that and the fuel lines will freeze.  So far the temps at the pole have sat solidly at -60C, -70C.  And so the Polies sit, drinking coffee in the galley, checking their email in the computer kiosk, living out of their carry-on bags, getting up every morning to check the passenger manifests to find out if their flight has been cancelled yet.  But this, this is our community.  Twenty-eight people living in my dorm in transient housing, waiting to make the eight-hour flight to the South Pole.  The South Pole.  Many of them have been volunteering in the kitchen, washing pots to while away the hours, and a few I’ve gotten to know well.  Two weeks now – they’re bored and excited and itching to go; I’m jealous.  Take me with you!!

And, this week’s magic moment…
Visited Scott’s Terra Nova hut, at Cape Evans!  A fifteen mile ride on the sea ice in the back of a big orange delta (flat bed vehicle with a passenger box strapped to the back – bumpy), and then stepping into history.  Walking through the hut where Scott and his polar expedition spent a long, harsh winter, burning seal blubber and planning their ill-fated overland trip to the South Pole.  I was training as a hut tour guide, so it was hard to take the appropriate moments of silent, reverent appreciation that the space deserves.  But.  I’m training as a hut tour guide, so I’ll get to come back.  The highlight of the day, however, came on the drive home.  PENGUINS.  Three Adelies – tiny black and white waddling cuties, flapping and sliding their way across the ice.  Abracadabra – Antarctica.

The sun set for the last time on last Tuesday, October 24, at 1:41 AM.  I stood outside in my pajama pants and watched it sink below the horizon…and then come back up.  There’s an awful lot of light these days…not much warmth.  For all the spring brightness, I’m craving the bone-warming heat of a beach, a park, a grassy lawn.  Just keep my eyes on that golden NZ beach taped to the back of the toilet stall door…