Oct 2007

What little I saw of this immense country was simply unbelievable. From the colors on the mountains that, I promise, I didn't photoshop to the kindness of people even in the bus station. And you know no country puts their best foot forward with transportation personnel.

Because I was planning to hang out in Salta, Argentina for a few months, I was not at all in tourist mode and do not have pictures of the bright red and yellow cathedral or lively plazas. Someone should teach me that people really don't mind tourists taking pictures in tourist towns. But though the city of a million's economy is tourist-based, it has the openness of a small country town that you read about in Steinbeck and aren't sure ever really existed. It makes you want to ask for directions even though you're pretty sure you're two blocks from the center and there are signs all around anyway.

The only thing I did touristy, I think, was have a meat filled lunch the day after my arrival with random guy #17 that treated me to a meal. Yes, I really did eat half my share of that feast below that included cow parts better left in Spanish. Chew with your eyes closed and you won't believe that you're only going to pay $15 a person in what looks to be one of the swankiest places around.

The rest of my time there, I bought my own wine ($3 each) and steak ($2 for 2) to cook a feast with the friends I met at the hostel. I found a cheap room at the home/hostel of a generous and concerned family--grandmother, 4 children, 3 grandchildren--that prepared breakfast every morning and gave me more than enough advice to get around.

The first days in Salta were a bit crazy because I went dancing, thus destroying anything akin to a sleeping schedule. After the first night, I went out with the kids at the hostel at the usual 2:15 (get there before 2:30 for free!) and stayed not quite til the end but 6am is fine for me. The more traditional club had an older crowd and all the salsas and cumbias you could stand, while the younger clubs mixed in rock and an enthusiastic YMCA.

After dancing my hiking shoes off for a couple of nights, I got down to business and easily found employment at some institutions that teach English. Seems like everyone here knows a little English and is thinking of improving it. It's a completely different vibe from Peru, probably because of the stark economic difference. Despite Argentina's recent crisis, they have the customs of a 1st world nation. I suppose it's not surprising to feel some relief leaving the hassle and constant attention needed in Peru, and the feelings of guilt that accompany seeing such naked, arbitrary structural inequality.

But after a week in the dry paradise of Salta, I saw how relaxed my life for the next three months was going to be... and I went crazy. Searching online for jobs that I can't get in the states. I decided I needed something more challenging, something to do with something to do with my career, no?

And now my excitement over the project I undertake in less that 12 hours, as I write this. I am helping a research team in the southern Amazon of Peru observe the salt-licking (perhaps more helpful to say mud-eating) behavior of macaws, parrots and parakeets. Apparently, just chillin isn't really in me. I get to wake up every morning around 4am and count the number of birds that come to the salt licking site, then enter data and hopefully help with some analysis. I am so stoked to be rain-soaked for 2-3 months, you can't imagine.

I took the same bus route back between Argentina and Chile (wow, ow) and took some amazing pics of the mountains from the bus. I'm sure they're not as impressive in mini, but those colors were really unbelievable.

(Ew sorry it's crooked!)

A bit scattered as I sign off here. Won't have technology access at all while in the forest, but if I get bitten by an agressive spider with deadly neurotoxins, I'll have my mom post a link to the Get Well Cindy webcam.

From Lima, I skipped directly to Cusco, tourist gateway to the famous Incan city on the mountains, Machu Picchu. Because of a connection through my friend, I was staying with a group of 20 farmers from 4 different Peruvian regions who were meeting to learn more about organic and sustainable farming techniques. The participants were about as different from each other as they were from me. Some men from the island paradises in Lake Titicaca were dressed for dinner in NYC, but the women from the Cusco region wore traditional garb of beautifully bright striped patterns, some with toddlers tightly pinned on their back with a cradle of a blanket, all speaking Quechua. The Incan language still preserved in many mountain regions shares little with Spanish and a translator accompanied the group. While they were in meetings for 3 days, I visited more museums, churches, and monuments, seemingly ever climbing the innumberable stairs that descend into the valley city.

The city is full of opposites, rich tourists and begging indigenes, burning days and freezing nights, more intricate balconies overlooking narrow cobblestone passages. Pure is a place for architecture enthusiasts. Generally, the immense, precisely stacked Incan stones form 6-8 feet of foundation from which the bleached Spanish cllay stretches into clean contrast with the deep blue skies. Not a single picture I took of the Incan irrigation systems still in use came out well. They line the roads and run into pools by farms and houses, almost all still made from Incan clay bricks (that, surprisingly flake with light pressure..oops). Picturesque all the way to the drainage system, also a remant of the brilliant engineers. Don't flush that paper!

One day, I accompanied the group on a field trip to medicinal plants production center, where they grow and make teas, oils, creams, lip balm. Apparently an NGO came to this village to inform them how the weeds they pull up to plow potato field are in high demand in the health- and beauty-conscious foreign markets. They showed us how to make lip blam--so much vegetable shortening!--and extract oils in between feeding us copious amounts of mate de menta, grilled (huge) corn kernals and a filling soup of veggies, wheat and a chunk of meat.

The bus ride up the mountains was as impressive as the four man outfit. Wow, getting the huge tour bus up dirt roads for donkeys in the dry season but then the views too, of miles of terraces carved into seemingly unreachable mountain slopes by industrious and apparently patient farmers 8 centuries ago. On the way back to the city, we visited an establishment that raises and sheers the 4 llama cousins native to the area: llamas, guanacos, vicunas and alpacas. You see llamas on the streets all over, but the hair on these guys was incredible. One of the places I actually thought to take a picture.

A bike ride up the mountain and around some of the ruins close to the city was one of the highlights of my week in Cusco. But thinking of Peru, I will always think of food and farming, as they've enriched and scarred the country. The chicken that, you're right Sara, resemble the chicken we eat in the states; the hot chocolate made from grinding dark bars. The countryside a patchwork of variously tilled brown-iron clay with patches of trees like tufts of hair on a burned dog.

Oh, but I suppose I shouldn't forget to mention Machu Picchu.

The site is as beautiful and awesome as you've heard. Something about the immensity just brings me to silence. Incredible. They must have had some pretty rockin concerts up there too because the acoustics at that theater, oo, make you want to yoddle. But I can find nothing to say other than it was a surreal experience and that you should talk to me before you visit because it can be carisimo!

This marked the end of my stay in Peru.. and I travelled hard by bus the next few days to reach Argentina. The people in the bus stations at Chile made me glad I was just passing through. As did the man shouting sermons through the middle of town.

I landed in Lima into the welcoming arms of a friend´s family, allowing me to stay in an otherwise unnavigable city for any blue-eyeds venturing outside the central plaza. El Centro´s colonial architecture suggests there still may be a coquettish dame peering from behind the intricately carved enclosed balconies and belies the reality of a sprawling capital of this third world nation.

Certainly I wouldn´t have ventured on many of the micros, combis or collectivos with their innumberable routes distinguished, yes, by color, letter and number... though really the only sure way to know where you´re going is to listen to what the man hanging out the door is shouting. They´re cramped and crazy. Avoiding eye-contact is the surest way to say no thanks to the candy or sandwiches or keychain staplers or books on childern´s psychology being offered by vendors--ranging from demure to Tommy Boy with a hankering for hotcakes--that crisscross a square mile a day, getting on and off every few blocks.

¨Sure some care about Fujimori´s human rights violations, but 40% of the population votes to wipe the hunger from their children´s eyes and who can blame them?¨ True. And they vote.

But get out of the streets and feel the warmth of life lived with more deliberate care. Sit, talk, forget about the time. Oh yeah, and eat. I thank Peru for every pound I gained there. In the family I stayed with, the daily ritual consists of weaving through the neighborhood market that sells fresh everything--fruits, meats, breads, sweets--plus gifts and toys, all your necessities including the latest in American sweatsuits ranging every imaginable color. (No wait--as we waited for a parade of children dressed in traditional peruvian costumes, I grasped what must have been a mind-blowing revelation to those aspiring Picassos born in the 8 to 64 Crayola box upgrade generation. A rainbow in an American closet doesn´t have all the colors in a hat from Cusco.) Mmm.. back to the food. I could spend an hour getting lost in flavors I can´t describe and names of fruits I still don´t know. But instead I´ll tell you that my perplexion since that first morning when my friend would´t stop apologizing for not having fresh fruit to make juice, as he sliced and squeezed 12 oranges, waned in the following week when every morning he blended a typical peruvian juice of papaya, apple, watermelon, strawberries, pineapple and kiwi. To call it a juice is to call a Frosty ¨milk¨.

When I wasn´t eating 3 course lunches for $4, I was walking so slowly around their historical museums that I could read all the placards in Spanish and eavesdrop on tours. I went to markets, fairs, a university, the zoo, museums, galleries, an incredible piano concert by Russian Alexander Paley, the plazas, some catacombs, some ruins, the huge, glowing cross overlooking the city, tipped my favorite street musicians and built up the confidence to cross a street, order from a menu and haggle with a taxi driver. I listened as much as possible and learned about their history, economy, weather, geography, sports, shows, jokes. But I missed the sun, hot water and blending into a crowd.