Western & Ends

I crossed over the border to Peru under a bright and burning sun. In winter and in summer, the air over the mountains is a perpetually thin cover, neither holding in heat at night nor filtering the sun during the day. Standing outside the border crossing, Tuesday morning coming down, and my red pack radiated heat into my back. We were held up at immigration as someone, some American, didn't have an entrance visa and was trying to get an exit visa; always a problem, for me and for her.

And then it was a bus around the lake, from the south to the north, on the way to Puno. Winding back and forth by the lapping waves, the little kitten waves rushing over the rocks on shore, and I was stuck in the fourth seat of the second-to-last row, my knees stuck together and my head leaning to the right. A young girl to my right peeled an orange, breaking each wedge off and tossing the peel out the window. She wore a heart-shaped locket and as we rounded a bend, she closed her eyes and opened the heart and kissed it - once, because once was all she needed.

I walked through Puno and caught my bus to Arequipa. The ride was quiet and uneventful.

Into Arequipa at night, past the chicken shacks and car parts, empty-lot restaurants lit with florescent bulbs, the endless parade of brick-built walls and stained-tin roofs. Peru's second city.

The great cathedral is made of sillar, some sort of luminous volcanic rock, and in between the bell towers the form of a volcano rises, hazy through the dust and the smog; the perfect cone-shape volcano on the edge of town. In the sunshine, the white stone walls are just a single sheet of bright light drifting through the air, but as the sun passed to the west, the rocks still glowed; the lighter lines where the blocks meet, the grayed reliefs and blackened shades.

The plaza is bright and well designed, flanked on three sides by Doric arcades, also made of sillar, with balcony restaurants and wooden roofs. It is, perhaps, the most beautiful plaza I've seen in Latin America.

I spent two days in Arequipa just wandering around, eating ice cream, and drawing a little. It was the end of my trip, the last place I came to I didn't know. Eventually I boarded a bus, the most expensive bus I took, and came back to Lima.

Brothers & Lakes

The hike out of Copacabana started out low and warm, hugging the lakeshore for a quarter mile past farms and sheep and fields, burned and charred. Lake Titicaca is at tremendous altitude and the sky was completely cloudless except for a few low puffy things far off on the other side of the water.

And far it was; the lake is an ocean, it's Great, it's Tahoe, it's seemingly endless and endlessly blue. Color seems more saturated at altitude - or so it seemed to me - and the sky and water swirled with hues so brilliant and intense that 'blue' or 'green,' single words, just can't do them justice. The sky and the water deserved whole phrases; they earned endless streams of adjectives.

We, the same Americans and I, were hiking to some small village to catch a ferry to the Isla del Sol. Like usual, I had no map - but I wasn't concerned; as it is in life, there's only one road. You just never know how long you're on it, that's all.

Well, we hiked - we must have, I was wearing my hiking pants. The road climbed around a mountain, and in between the pines and eucalyptus, the lake would suddenly spill into view; the vast and terrifying lake. You start at altitude and you gain some more, and the lakeshore, the far lakeshore is a dark arc of land, bright brown, maybe spotted a little, but bent around the lake and the curvature of the Earth itself. Below us, waves broke around rocks, less threatening now, leaving white trails of foam to float back out with the water.

After a long while, we started asking the few people on the road how much further we had to go. Some said an hour. Others said three minutes. Then some said four minutes, so at least those numbers matched, right? Of course they were all wrong, but what can you do? Maybe we just walked especially slowly.

Eventually we staggered into town, village really, and walked to the water's edge. The man there hustled for ferry passage to the Isla del Sol, stopping us in the middle of the lake and asking for money. He wasn't even upfront about it, saying he'd like to charge us less but his hands were tied; suddenly we're the bad guy for complaining. Bolivian business.

It was sunset on the other side of the island, but even near the top we were obscured by shadow from the ridge. I looked back across the water, but not in the direction I had come from, but farther east, at the white-capped mountain range and the moon, that celestial dinner plate, rising off the low hills. As it rose, the sky darkened into the bright blackness of a fullmoon night, and I settled down to dinner.

Into the Void, But Hopefully Not

The buses in La Paz that go to the west, over the hills to Lake Titicaca and beyond, leave from the Cemetery District - or, perhaps more accurately, from the various streets directly next to the cemetery, which is never a good place to begin a journey - end, maybe, but never begin.

The cemetery is on the outskirts of town (which in La Paz is more "up" than "out") and in the dark the taxi ride was just a blur of light and dust, half-caught cries from peddlers, pavement and not. I was with three Americans, the first I'd seen since Buenos Aires: Maggie, very sweet, very tough but a six foot blond - a visual liability; Corey, the boy from Mendocino County, whose mysterious time "in the mountains" of North California has funded seven months of travel; and Eleanor, the professor's daughter with the British accent, baby-faced at 29, a professional traveler. We didn't know each other and we didn't know where we were going; strangers, at altitude, heading higher.

We piled in a van, a combi, probably because someone thought it would be more authentic to be cramped in a rattling deathtrap through Bolivia. The first half of the ride was more uncomfortable than dangerous, as we slowly weaved out of La Paz and then, in great sweeping turns, climbed from the valley. There were few towns. The driver seemed to be in a hurry.

At a certain point, though seemingly at random, we got on a ferry. Well, to be accurate, the combi simply turned off the road and onto a wooden boat, barely twenty feet long - like an overgrown dory or an open-ended barge. A man punted us slowly from shore until the motor kicked in. On a moonlit night, on a moonlit lake, we pulled towards Copacabana. It was beautiful and serene, the quiet night.

And then I was forced to remember we were in Bolivia. The cobrador poked his head into the van and asked for a boliviano fifty from each of us to cover the ferry. This is the thing about South America: no one seems to grasp the idea of "price" as something all-inclusive, as the complete cost of getting from point A to point B to the traveler. For our cobrador, as is often the case, the price of the journey was reflexive only to himself - that is, his cut - and everything else was someone else's problem. (When we protested, he made a big show of charging all the Bolivians the same B\ 1.50) It all makes little sense to me: if he just made the price seventeen to start, kept fifteen, and paid the "toll" himself, he wouldn't have to deal with a bunch of irate tourists and surly Bolivians. Another mysterious piece of commerce in South America.

Eventually we got off the boat, up the concrete embankment, up the long semi-paved road to the west. Maybe we climbed for awhile; no, we must have.

I don't think about death very much, maybe more than the average person, but it never is a possibility, just an abstraction, a conversation starter; "What if I got hit by this bus?" You simply can't live your life preoccupied with the thought of death - it's like flipping through a book to get to the end; there simply isn't any joy in it.

Well, we climbed for awhile, the driver, the Americans, the Bolivians, the Peruvian honeymooners necking in the front seat, and I. And then we started to go down, down the narrow road of broken pavement, down with mechanical acceleration.

Really, we were flying down this mountain road, and if the driver had any reason to hurry, he took it. The first few minutes I was simply in disbelief that anyone would drive so recklessly; "He's a professional," I thought, "and he knows what he's doing. This little stretch will flatten out just around the bend - He'll break if he needs to. "

But the road never stops, just twists and turns across the mountains, and the drive never ends - hairpins taken wide, riding on the wrong side of the road - and as we go I see the first cliff, because we're on cliffs over the lake, thousands of feet above the lake, and with each new set of switchbacks the cliffs go from my left to my right and back.

There is no guardrail. There are no signs. And the driver never takes his foot off the accelerator.

I was sitting in the jump seat, by the door, and I instinctively reached down with my right hand and gripped the edge of the seat, locking my elbow and bracing my shoulder. Maggie screamed out - in English - but the driver refused to yield. He was too busy explaining the history of the lake to the Peruvians, using his right hand to point out into the darkness, just as natural as can be. He looked at them when he made a point, to emphasize the point. I hated that couple. I focused every fiber of my being onto that couple, and with my elbow locked I wanted to throw them from the van, off the cliff, those beautiful Peruvians making sloppy kisses, holding hands, but now, no now, looking and nodding and asking the driver who, what, when as we screamed around the mountain.

And then, as we swerved around a boulder in the road, a feeling came over me, one of those feelings of complete and total sadness. I sat up as my back tensed, and I could see the van flying off the road, or rolling down the cliff, and there was nothing I could do about it; it was an inevitability. The faster we went, the quieter I grew.

Being in a situation like that, you just can't prepare yourself mentally for it, you can't rationally explain why you're in the situation and how it could possibly be anything but dangerous. On a rollercoaster, getting the cheap and ersatz thrill of death, you always know you will pull into the station safe - it's the return you're paying for, the vuelta.

Well, sadness passed through me and off the cliff and I was at peace. The world flattened a bit, and my eye divided the background out the windows and the interior of the van into separate spheres. It scanned the inside, the faded seats, the looks on people's faces, the calm hand movements of the driver, the little hugs of the couple, the way the Virgin prayer card swung from the rearview. That's all that was left in my life, but maybe that's all there was to life to begin with; just a van filled with strangers - some in love, some gripped with fear, some asleep, a van driven by a madman who won't slow down, can't slow down, hurtling through the unmarked darkness, caught between life and death.

I lived, I lived, but it wasn't a cheap thrill. I had mentally prepared myself for my own death, and that's something I don't want to repeat.

The shower in our hostel didn't work. Now that's Hell.

The Snows of Bolivia

It's rare that I stop my day in America to watch the sunset, and the little fireworks around the setting sun - maybe from my car, on PCH, I'll see it go into the sea somewhere north of Catalina between the oil platforms, but even then I'm moving, driving, going somewhere in particular. But on my trip, for whatever reason, I've seen dozens of sunsets, a few sunrises, and I always seem to have a sense of the sun moving across the sky, the changes in temperature and brightness, the atmospheric things.

Lying in my bus seat, staring out the window in Bolivia, I thought I saw the sky change shape; the horizon seemed to close around the sky, drawing in, shrinking in circumference behind the near mountains, pushing the very top, the crown of darkest blue, higher and deeper. The sky was a high-peaked dome of royal hues, and it fell vertically from a point above me. I don't know why I remember this so distinctly, but for some reason it's stuck in my mind as something important.

Outside of La Paz there is nothing, absolutely nothing, just brown hills and scrub, winding roads and tin-roofed shacks. But then, just after dawn, the bus comes through a small pass onto a wide highway, descending from the mountains, and you see it, La Paz, for the first time: a million people, an entire city, a capital, built into a canyon, the suburbs marching uphill, the snowbound Andes in the background, everything perched. That's the only word for it, a city perched in geography.

I stayed at some dive off the main tourist street, near the Witches' Market. La Paz is - and this is a bit of urban studies wankery - one of the easiest cities in the world to navigate. Not that the street plan makes any sense, and there aren't any street signs really, but if you get lost, just head downhill. The city's main road, it's only main road, was built on top of the river that made the canyon, so everything slopes towards this one avenue. Very easy.

The tourist scene in La Paz is its own foreign culture; neither Bolivian, nor produced Bolivian, nor European or American - just a bunch of young foreigners operating without restrictions, fueled by cocaine, beyond regard for themselves or others. I was fairly terrified.

The stories! Two girls who didn't eat for two days because they couldn't get out of bed. Another who had a hundred dollars left and needed to get back to Sao Paolo. People with sunken eyes and greasy hair, barely communicative, disheveled and destroyed. They came six thousand miles for this?

I met the German girls for drinks, and later, as I left their hostel, it started to rain, and I skipped from stone to stone uphill back to my dive. Halfway there, on the deserted street at three am, the rain stopped - paused really, because it took a moment for the rain to become snow, singular flurries of snow falling on the peaked roofs, 'on the living and the dead.'

Well, I pounded the pavement, rode in combis, uphill and downhill. Somewhere near the stadium I got directions from this little high school girl, probably about 15, who must have just gotten out of school because she had loosened her tie and unbuttoned her blouse. She had tattoos, she wore too much eye makeup in that way teens do, but she was very, very nice. Live the dream Bolivian goth teen girl - just stop cutting yourself.

The last day I was in La Paz, a parade took over the main street. I waited for a couple friends in the main square, eating peanuts. It was my 4th of July, or closest facsimile, to be eating peanuts, wearing a baseball hat and aviators, watching a parade on a sunny afternoon.

I even had a beer.

Sweet & Sucre

I´ll be honest: I didn't have high hopes for Bolivia. Perhaps I had been swayed by every South American I had talked to, who each had their own stereotype. Peruvians think Bolivians commit all the crimes in Peru, Paraguayans mock how cold it is on the altiplano, and Argentines, in their Argentine way, declare Bolivian girls to all be ugly, each and every one. In retrospect, I think this says something more about Peru, Paraguay, and Argentina than it does about Bolivia, but when everyone tells you something, you listen.

My stereotype, or gut feeling really, was that Bolivia was going to be like Peru, the sierras of Peru, but poorer. Well, when I rolled into Sucre, my feet numb, I quickly learned how wrong I was.
Not that Bolivia isn't poor. It´s extremely poor, and you can see on the faces of the shoeshine boys in the plaza the look of want, for food, for education, for opportunity to do anything but be a fifty-cent-a-shine boy on a Sunday in an empty plaza. (They kept asking me if they could shine my shoes, which puzzled me greatly since I only have one pair of shoes on this trip, and they are old dirty Asics running shoes - I should have let one try to get a shine off my polyester clogs. )

And Bolivian culture is similar to the high sierra of Peru, with short dark women in long bright skirts, layered with aprons, vests, and cardigan sweaters, with tights on but no socks and open-toed shoes. They wear their hair braided in long double strands down their backs, and on their heads they tilt black derby hats, very narrow-brimmed. They are bell-shaped women on the sidewalks and in the street, bundles on their backs, dust on their feet, walking uphill.

Sucre is on a hillside high in the mountains of Bolivia, probably around 10,000 ft or so, and from the bus station and my hostel the city slopes downward to a palm-tree filled plaza, the historical sights of Bolivia´s independence, and a generally touristy street of fancy cafes. It is a beautiful city, and though I had to walk about a mile uphill to get to bed every night, I remember it fondly.

It amazes me how large the disconnect can be between the touristy part of town and the rest, the local stores and restaurants and bars; it is a social divide, not a geographic one, because people will see and visit what they want to see and visit, and a backpacker is just as unlikely to visit a hole-in-the-wall polleria as a Bolivian is to go to Paddy´s ex-pat Irish pub. Almost everywhere I´ve been, if you walk two blocks from where the tourists are, there won´t be any tourists around.

I´m not saying anything is necessarily more authentic, because nothing is so static and produced as authenticity, but that there has to be a happy balance in travel between new experiences and the familiar tastes of home. A lot of backpackers I´ve seen reward themselves for anything, for just traveling, by associating only with what food, drink, or people, they already know. But, two blocks away, with a little extra effort, they could see so many new things that, as haughty as it sounds, really represent how life is in Bolivia, or wherever they are. That step is one few people make.

Personally, I wander from the tourist areas because I get bored with how clean and nice everything is, and my inner urban student wants to take in as many blockfronts as he can. So I walked, a lot, up and down, in no general direction, through the white-washed colonial streets of Sucre until I came to the cemetery in the far north, on the edge of the desert wastes.

The cemetery was fascinating: above ground, vaults six or seven high in long houses maybe two or three hundred graves long. In the center of the site were the tombs, family mausoleums in an eclectic mix of ages and styles and levels of decay. The grave buildings went on for a long time, ten, twenty rows, some vaults glassed-in, with gold letters and wilted flowers, while others had quickly painted stenciled names and dates, the paint having run down from the letters, mingling with the concrete dust. Five hundred years of funerals.

As I walked back towards the entrance, I saw a crowd gathered by one of the buildings, a low hum that comes with crowds, and as I got closer I could hear the wailing, the sobbing, the quiet emotion of a funeral. And I watched the two workers carefully raise the casket up the ladder to a fourth-floor vault, and the campesinas in their black mantles over the bell-shaped skirts, and saw the general disregard some people near the edge of the crowd of mourners had for the goings-on; men dressed in black shirts and sandals, sitting on the edge of a planter, sharing a cigarette, spitting on the walkway. Eventually the workers sealed the vault, and the moaning died down, and the crowd dispersed, but I was walking ahead of them back up the hill.

Later, at night, I walked into town but turned right, away from the plaza, towards the rotunda chapel at the east side of Sucre. I had seen a market there on my way to the cemetery, and I figured it would be more lively at night. For once, I was right: thousands of people jammed the streets around the chapel with a festival market nearly two miles long, with stalls selling everything and everything was cheap. At the upper edge of the market, for the market was arranged in the horseshoe shape of a carnival, were hundreds of foosball tables, literally hundreds, all occupied, five games for a dollar.

And there it was, Bolivian life and Bolivian death, all on one day. I think everyone else in the hostel went to the Joy Ride Cafe, an Irish bar on the plaza, for drinks.

Ride the Reading Railroad

I walked across the bridge in line wth the other tourists in the pre-dawn darkness, leaving behind the relative comfort of Argentina for the unknown and inconsistent world of Bolivia. Argentina´s officials were courteous, smartly dressed even at dawn, and used just enough ink to stamp my passport - in a blank box no less - and they wished me a buen viaje.
I took this all to mean, the great show of patriotic devotion to bureaucracy, that the La Quilaca border agents are not only bored, but almost certainly corrupt. The easiest way for a government official to extort money is hide behind the exact letter of the law. Everywhere, even in the States, policemen look the other way about hundreds of little offenses because it simply isn´t in their interest to enforce every statute. But in South America, where everyone is woefully underpaid, it is in their interest, if they make it so. But the tone is always the same - it isn´t extortion, it´s just following the law. I guess it´s easier to have your hands tied than to hold a gun.

Now, when you arrive in America, a stern man asks you three questions you can´t hear, stamps your passport with as little or as much ink as possible, and turns away in disgust to say ¨Next!¨as if each person he sees is another little bit of hell itself. This is the mark of an honest nation.
Bolivia, then, was something more than an honest nation - there was, and I´m not joking or exaggerating, a hobo jungle fire outside the border post. The post itself was a poorly-constructed wooden building basically empty: just a table, a stack of visas, two broken pens, and a massive portrait of Evo Morales. Evo wears the complicated necklace of the Bolivian presidency - it pales next to the one Dick Levin wears - but what struck me is that he isn´t wearing a suit. I guess I just assume leaders wear suits, so to see a president, in his official state portrait, in a sweater and slacks, struck me as a bit odd. Now, Evo, he´s not even in business casual. Heck, I get more dressed up to go on a second date.

Well, wouldn´t you know it, but Bolivia was on strike the day I arrived. Something about miners, or coca growers, or whatever - most people in South America will take any excuse to protest ineffectually. (In America, we store up that energy and have massive ineffectual protests. Much more efficient.) So the buses weren´t running, and ¨no hay tren¨was the refrain, but I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no bolivianos in my pocket.

I found a bus to Sucre, eventually, that was to leave at four. Four wasn´t so bad - it was eleven, and I was in a no-horse, no-ironhorse town, but five hours is nothing.

Well, four became around five.

And five became seven.

Around six, I had a minor argument with the ticket agent, who assured me that the bus would leave at seven on the dot. She was wrong, but by five minutes, so I´ll cut her some slack.

But as my bus was loading, order began to fall apart. The bus company had been selling tickets for buses long delayed, or possibly non-existent, and people kept coming on and sitting in seats that, for all they cared, they had bought. Since no one wanted to confront the surly Andean women piling onto the bus, the rightful ticketholders just chose new seats, or ignored their assignments, creating one of those chain-reaction seating disasters that never ends well for someone. In this case, the woman sitting in the window seat next to me was told to move - not get off the bus, just move to the aisle seat across from me. Well, this woman went crazy, yelling at the ticket lady, calling her filthy names, and physically restraining me from getting up to let her out of her seat.

So the ticket lady, the woman, and the surly Andean man whose seat was occupied shouted at each other, with a thin American unable to move, or understand exactly what people were saying. In the middle of this, a small boy, maybe seven, comes on the bus. Local children come on South American buses all the time trying to sell gum or soda or whatever. This kid decided that in the middle of a shouting match to start his routine, warbling a song of hardship in the worst whiny children-singing voice I´ve ever heard. He stopped long enough to whip out his panflutes. It was like a Marx Brothers movie, except filled with Quechua insults.

Fourteen hours after crossing the border, I was on my fourteen hour busride to Sucre. The window didn´t close, and I lost feeling in my toes sometime before dawn.

Close to the Maddening Crowd

Salta looked like it needed more trees - set in the northern Argentine hills, sunny, everything had a brown glow to it that wasn't quite golden but more like ... burnt toast. The plaza is quite lovely, surprisingly dense and colonial, with pedestrian streets radiating from its sides, but the sky and the hills, the amber glow made Salta seem like a Wild West Buenos Aires, a porteno with dust on his boots.

By chance or by fate, I checked into a hostel called "Backpacker's Soul" which was about everything you can imagine it would be. It had two sister hostels in Salta and there was always a BBQ or a salt flats tour or an empanada course going on - suffice to say, I wasn't pleased.

Maybe my mind had been altered a bit by being in Paraguay, but I couldn't stand backpackers, the backpacker scene, or even just knowing that there were other Americans around. Backpackers are a culture unto itself, and while there are plenty of interesting people to meet in hostels, there are a lot of pseudo-spiritual hippie wanderers, exiled frat boys looking to score, and gritty Ernest Hemingway wannabes with more pockets on their pants than talent in their writing.

Perhaps I'm being a bit hypocritical. I feel at times like all of these people, these stereotypes, while I'm on the road, in hostels, telling stories - maybe I just would like a bit of balance in my fellow travelers.

Oh, and to never hear Bob Marley "Legend" again.

For whatever reason, and I've said this before I believe, I never felt so lonely as I did when I met other Americans. When I've been by myself, truly and utterly isolated from everything comfortable and familiar, I feel comfortable and self-reliant because I know, no matter what, I have nothing else but myself. In Salta, hearing English on the street, or watching Americans pound pints at the bar, laughing and joking, it all just reminded me of what I miss in America, of being truly and utterly alone on my trip. The tastes of home were torture because they were not and could not be home; just simulacra, shades from my past.

But then you learn something new about home unexpectedly, in the cookie aisle: I was in the cookie aisle, buying cookies for my bus trip to Bolivia, when I noticed a couple, both about twenty, dressed as only tourists dress, debating cookie purchases themselves. They were a head taller than everyone else and had a easy way about their interaction that marked them as Americans. Indeed, they were Americans, tall Americans from Wheaton College, and we went and got coffee because that's what Americans do.

I was jittery for days at a time in Argentina.

Well, they were named Amy and Steve and they were sophomores - as if they could have been named anything else. If I were in the States, I would have written them off immediately as hearty religious Midwestern folk I had nothing in common with, but there, drinking my fifth coffee, speaking wildly and authoritatively, as with a speech practiced many times, I talked to them, and I listened in return.

They were about as sensible and decent as you could ask a couple to be. They had faith, tremendous faith, the faith that builds and helps and heals, and they bore it like a shield against the unsolvable problems of existence.

Well, I was a West Coast Ivy League Jew, and they were religious Midwestern folk, but if nothing else we were all Americans together. May our faith, our mutual faiths that transcend religion, our Union remain strong forever. Amen.

I boarded the midnight bus to Bolivia and ate my cookies.

The Che of Making Mistakes

I had two hours to kill, so I went to Brazil.

Brazil - the vast land of samba, futbol, and the Amazon. A nation alive with passion, history, dynamic tensions. Brazil! Is there a more romantic place to visit?

I saw three blocks before I had to catch my bus.

________________

It was planned so perfectly, my bus travel, all the way to Bolivia through the Chaco - thirty hours of unpaved roads. All I had to do was sit back, relax, and get to Asuncion in midmorning.

Well, I woke up in an uncomfotable position, in the dark. We weren´t moving. I pulled back the curtain to see the dirty white concrete of Asuncion´s terminal awash in sodium-orange light. I checked my watch. Four am. I checked my watch again. Four am.

The bus to Bolivia only leaves at eight pm, and I wasn´t too keen on spending a day in the bus station before boarding a thirty hour bus. My mind started to drift a bit, away from reality and real options. At one point I went into the center, probably around seven, and couldn´t find a hostel.

There I was, next to the abandoned train station, with all my junk, at dawn in Asuncion. My mind continued to drift. I was stuck, couldn´t stand pat, couldn´t move forward. I headed back to the bus station.

Instead of waiting twelve hours for a thirty hour bus, I took a six hour bus back to Encarnacion (because you can´t cross the river at Asuncion) then a hop to Posadas. This part went well.

Then I bought tickets to Salta.

I arrived in Posadas around six in the afternoon, maybe seven - but my bus to Salta left at two in the morning. I hadn´t slept in a day or two, so it just never occurred to me that this was, clearly, a terrible decision.

I don´t remember much of what I did, I think, because everything kept closing and the temperature kept dropping. A man fell asleep on my pack for awhile. I think I had some tea, and a medialuna. Argentina lost a football match. I had a sandwich. I paced back and forth for a couple hours. I drank a Coke then returned the bottle. I read the titles of the books in the window of the kiosk. I never sat down except to eat.

I was not happy. It was not a happy time.

Well, seventeen hours later I was in Salta - tired, broken, confused and agitated. It only took me two days to get to Salta, twelve hours from the Bolivian border. Much better than a 30 hour bus.

The streets immediately around Salta´s bus terminal do not have street signs. I walked down Avenida San Martin, past Parque San Martin, and like a modern Joseph, no hostel would take me. Five hostels rejected me. The sixth try, as they say, is the charm. I slipped through the door to my room, and quietly, in the dark, went to bed, in a bed, for the first time in three days.

Cut to a Nation´s Quick

Paraguay is something of a puzzle, geographically the heart of South America, yet completely isolated from the world, land-locked,´an island surrounded by land,´ a country both unknown and forgotten. It´s a place with all the modern conveniences that still feels out of time, as if the entire nation has been misplaced by history and no one seems to care. If ever a country and a people could be said to sleep-walk through the future, it would be Paraguay. Everything was just as I thought it would be, and yet everything was completely unexpected.

All of this was far from my mind out in the national park, a huge swath of northern Paraguay along the Brazilian border. I never got a map, and I´m not sure there was one anyway, but I sketched a rough guide from a display at the visitors´center, and hit the trail. I was the only visitor to the park that week.

There was a mirador at the far end of the park, a thousand-foot outcropping twenty kil0meters away, that I was saving for later in the week. Until I got my bearings, I had more modest goals: a small historical monument to Mariscal Francisco Solano Lopez, and a thin jungle stream. It would be a rather pleasant hike.

As I walked up the red dirt road, I quickly became lost. Nothing really matched up to my map, and there weren´t signs, so I just had to mentally arrange the landscape with digital pictures. While I was at a crossroads, tilting my map to make it reflect reality, I saw far to my right, a white bust set upon a stone pedestal; a general staring across a dirt path south into the forest - at nothing. And then I saw them, dozens of white busts upon stone pedestals arranged at ten meter intervals in an arrow-straight line to the northwest. I followed the statues through the forest, past each simple monument, until the trail ended and I was standing in a clearing, a perfectly rectangular clearing of packed red earth carved out of the jungle. I followed that too, over a quarter mile, but it led nowhere; after a while, it just fell back into the trees.

This wasn´t a clearing, it was an airstrip.

I found the monument to F.S. Lopez at the opposite end - a soaring 60s spire encrusted with tribute plaques from each department of the country. From the monument, leading once again through the trees, a stone path ran to the tomb of F.S. Lopez - a thirty-foot cross - and the grave of his Irish mistress. Later I found the third monument to Lopez, at the site of his death, facedown in a creek with a Brazilian bullet lodged in his back.

I never made it to the river.

(Back in Asuncion, two guards smoke a cigarette beside the Pantheon, their blue and red uniforms starched, their demeanor relaxed. Inside, the bodies of Paraguay´s heroes sit in the dark beneath ¨Fides et Patria.¨ The guards toss their cigarettes into Ave. F.S. Lopez and retake their post in the afternoon heat.)

I learn about the War of the Triple Alliance. In the 1860s, Paraguay amassed a huge military under the direction of Mscal. F.S. Lopez, a dictator constantly looking to expand his influence. After Uruguay´s government fell into chaos, Lopez declared war on Brazil and Uruguay, smashing north, waiting for Argentina to ally against the Brazilians. When Argentina dragged its feet, Lopez declared war on Argentina. The Paraguayans enjoyed early success, but after a disastrous river battle against the Brazilian navy, the Paraguayan army suffered defeat after defeat. Disease and a prolonged guerrilla war devastated the population. Eventually, Lopez, his son and successor, the top generals and the leaders of the Catholic Church in Paraguay fled to remote Cerro Cora, where they staged a fight to the death against the invading Brazilian army. They lost. But the Paraguayan president flies in every year to Cerro Cora to honor the man that led to the death of fifty percent of his country.

A couple days later, I´m waiting at the bus station in Pedro Juan Caballero, waiting for the bus to take me back south. Across the street is a stadium, more like a high school gym, and it´s jumping, it´s just filled with people and energy. A banner tells me, in Portguese, that this is the world under-16 girls ´hambol´championships. I pay my dollar and go inside.

Handball, it´s called. But it´s not handball, it´s something else, some sport I´ve never seen before, a bizarre amalgamation of basketball, mini-soccer, hockey, and insanity. The crowd is apoplectic. It´s Paraguay´s best squad against the Brazilians, and the Paraguayans are down by two with five minutes to play. The Paraguayan team looks like the Paraguayan people, short and dark, thick girls with broad shoulders and flat feet. The Brazilian team is anchored by a pair of twins, blonds, probably over six feet tall; lean girls with too-long legs and small heads.

The Brazilians commit a foul, I think, and a squat girl takes a penalty shot, holding the handball and throwing it overhand. One of the twins, the goalie, blocks the shot with her forearm. The crowd groans, men leaning against the boards turn in disgust, kick the ground, and throw their arms across their bodies. Immediately a chanting begins, and a clapping, and the crowd rallies as the girls go on defense. The Brazilians score from the outside.

And then it suddenly hit me, something cultural about Paraguay, and for a moment I thought I saw into the heart of the heart of South America, into the forgotten country and unknown people. Here it is, I remember thinking, Paraguay in miniature; defeated by the beautiful Brazilians, living, dying, losing at a game no one plays, at a game no one knows. The guards and the Pantheon, the busts in the forest, and handball - it´s all the same veneration of defeat, the complete and utter inability to ever recover from disaster, the same jealousy that comes with any small victory - this is the dark weight on Paraguay´s soul, and whether I´m right or whether or I´m wrong, I don´t care. I saw something there that I can´t explain away.

Here It Is or There It Went

Concepcion was a nothing town, but it was a town, and there aren´t a lot of those in western Paraguay, so I took my chances. If you were to believe Lonely Planet, it sounds like a calming respite, an oasis in the vast Paraguayan plains - it isn´t. It´s a nothing town, with nothing, no one, and nowhere. I spent two days.

The only men in town were gathered along the one paved road in front of the national bank, waiting for government money to start the sesame season. They stood there, an average group of Guarani, men with wide eyes and sunken cheeks, clad in worn denim with straw hats, kicking the dirt with the toes of their boots, laughing and talking until the bank door opened, then the talking stopped and the men surged forward, looking only at the door and the guards in front of the door; looking hungrily, greedily, at what could be on the other side.

I spent a dollar on half a chicken and hit the road.

Armed with two bags of bread and virtually no information, I went north towards Brazil to go camping; alone, without a tent or a sleeping bag, and - as I found out later - no insect repellent. In retrospect, it´s easy to say this was a bad idea, but in the moment, with no one to disagree with me but myself, ideas tend to grow and expand without reason. Only the most aware mind can remind itself of external opinions.

Well, I wasn´t thinking of this when I jumped off my bus somewhere along a deserted stretch of highway north of Ybiyui - all I wanted to do was piss, and I did, into the forest, with my pack on the edge of the asphalt. In South America, as in North America, I refuse to pay to urinate, as I am yet to find a bathroom that looked like it spent my fifty centavos on actually maintaining the facilities.

I walked back along the highway about a mile without a car passing me, turning at the small park entrance, and continuing up the dirt path to the visitors center. It was dusk, or thereabouts, and the last birds of the day were making long spirals in the sky. The crickets joined in as the temperature dropped and the sun´s last bit bled over the hills to the west. I walked up the path with nothing behind me.

Lucky for me, I didn´t have to improvise a shelter - the park had an extra bunk in the rangers´cabin. I ate some bread and fell asleep, exhausted.

At times, sleep can be a terrifying thing. For about a month I´ve been taking Larium, an anti-malarial pill with extreme psychotropic side effects ranging from irritability and depression to ¨homicidal psychosis.¨I took it in Africa and I´m taking it here, and I´ve had the same problem each time; namely, dreams so vivid, so clear and life-like, that they are indistinguishable from reality. But they follow a pattern, more or less:

Towards the end of all my dreams on Larium, there is a moment that could only be found a dream, and I am suddenly aware I am dreaming, and mentally (that is, second-mentally, in my character in my dream) I think about how strange it is to be a character in a dreamworld filled with such bizarre choices. I count out my options, slightly bemused by the situation. While this is happening, my first mind, the mind that is dreaming, discusses with itself the action I, in my dream, should take. The other parts of the scene - the other people, the setting and mood - simply fade away until it is just me thinking about what to do as I think about what to do.

Suffice to say, I don´t understand why Larium isn´t used recreationally. That night I dreamt a dream I can´t remember, as I can´t remember most of my dreams in South America.

It´s German for ¨Boredom¨

As slow as Asuncion is on a weekday, it simply becomes catatonic on the weekends, without even the perfunctory openings in the morning to keep up appearances. I wandered through downtown, figuring I could fit in all the government buildings into an afternoon. It was a Sunday constitutional through Constitution Plaza, so to speak.

None of the major buildings had much to get excited about, other than the novelty of a presidential mansion without a fence; ¨Dubya, hey, I was just walking by...¨ The Congress building is a hideous mass of gleaming steel and glass, buffed brick, and cantilevered overhangs; that is, the type of ugly that could have only been designed through a competition and by an architect. Across the street, at the edge of the bluff that falls away to the Parana, is a small plaza, once probably quite grand, but now in a poor state. Marking the boundary of the plaza is a chipping white Italianate edge rail, and I paused in the afternoon heat to take a few touristy pictures of the fading glory. As I looked down at my camera - I still don´t really know how to use it - I saw something trot out of the bushes, and nuzzle a tree. The animal came over to me - it was a fat black pig, snorting with delight over a nut it had found.

I suddenly smelled smoke, thick oily smoke, and heard children yelling. It occurred to me to lean over the rail and I did - right into the face of some of the worst slums I´ve seen since leaving Lima. There is no transition between Congress and the shantytowns, just a bluff, over which the pavement ends.

Asuncion was dead, but I had hurried back to my hostel - I had an appointment for dinner with two German girls, Jennifer and Mareike, the only other tourists I met in Paraguay. It´s a strange thing, really, that I have met very few foreigners my age in South America, because everyone (including the German girls) seems to be either 19 or 27. Makes me wonder what I´m doing here, or what everyone else is doing differently.

Anyway, the German girls were unimpeachably German, holding their cigarettes with their index and middle fingers pointed directly up, rotating their wrists back and forth with each drag. They spoke in English to me, German to each other, and Spanish when necessary. They both had nervous laughs - suffice to say, they were wonderful.

Well, they left the next day on the Death Bus to Bolivia, and I headed north up the Rio Paraguay to the town of Concepcion. Auf Wiedersehen!

All Quiet on Plaza Uruguaya

Taking a bus in South America is always an adventure; even when the most average, everyday things happen en route, a bus just can´t escape the absurdity of travel. On my bus to Asuncion - which, though a direct bus, picked up every campesino it could find . the cobrador breaked for lunch in one of the small villages scattered along the rivers and hills of eastern Paraguay. The bus slowed in front of a restaurant, stopped, the corbador got out, paced to the counter, ordered, waited, got his plate of food and proceeded to eat this meal as our bus idled on the roadside, packed with farmers and chickens and exhausted Americans. Sometimes, you just have to laugh at these things or lose your mind.

Asuncion is a strange and quiet town, somehow devoid of life in a downtown full of people. Sitting on a bluff over the Parana, the city steams during the day, thunders through the night, and never works. Shops - whether because of the weather or a cultural malaise - are open from mid-morning to about noon and then maybe...maybe...again from four to six. Everything closes, supermarkets, gas stations, everything. It´s a city in phases, day to day.

The downtown, or what seems like the downtown, is like a less cluttered Lima Centro - low, deceptively ornate colonial homes, small cornerstores that never open, half-finished, half-hearted high-rises. Not many ambulantes out, and the street vendors seem loathe to motivate a sell in the oppressive heat. Nothing in downtown is new, and even new things feel worn and tired.

On the Plaza Uruguaya, I think I see a protest; dozens of black plastic tents slung low between the trees, with men and women engaged in nothing beneath the cypresses and oaks. This was late in the afternoon, and I was wandering the city trying to find a hostel, so I didn´t pay much thought to it. This is South America, these things happen.

The next day I walked back through the Plaza, in no particular hurry. I saw men crowded around a stool, waiting to get a haircut. I saw women hidden in the triangular pup tents, pounding corn. A couple police officers sit in the shade, comparing batons. There are no banners. No literature or graffiti. This isn´t a protest at all - these are squatters, living apart from the swirl of business around them, in the heart of downtown. I see a section of concrete pulled up, filled with water, surrounded by children beating the stains out of shirts. I break for lunch myself just to get out of the sun.

I head to the Lido Bar, a diner across from the Pantheon of Heroes, one of Paraguay´s many, many monuments to its disastrous wars. Paraguayan food is delicious, if a bit odd - not nearly enough potatoes or corn to truly be South American. I started with sopa paraguaya; not a soup at all, but a cornbread with layers of cheese and onions, fried. It´s dense and tasty. The Lido Bar has to be one of my favorite restaurants in South America, and one of the few true diners on this continent. I guess I take for granted how American the diner really is - all bustle, ¨How´s it going, darlin´?¨greasy menus, staring into your cuppa at 3am. South America has cafes and comedores, but give me a diner - or give me death!

Well, the Lido had it, the American thing. (It´s a Peace Corps favorite, apparently.) All the waitresses are short, homely, and squat, obese actually, except for the one - and there´s always one - the skinny one who is just too skinny, too quiet, and too dour. They all wear these hideous striped orange and yellow nurse´s uniforms so snugly cut that they no longer seem like clothes being worn but an intrinsic piece of the body itself; an exoskeleton of starched cotton. Suffice to say, they were perfect.

I move on to a catfish empanada. The fans try to keep pace with the humidity in the afternoon. I pick at the remains of my cornbread, pushing aside the crumbs to fit my catfish onto one plate, staring across the street at the honor guard at the Pantheon sweat in sheets, and I start to think Paraguay is more like some lost South American Dixie - in spirit, if nothing else.

A bus streaks by, heading to the bus terminal.

Out of Time on the 4th of July

South Americans seem much more proud of specific dates than in America - we have fireworks and hotdogs and baseball on the 4th of July, but nearly every Argentine town has a Ave. 9 de Julio or a plaza or something. There must have been an entire cottage industry churning out busts of San Martin or O´Higgins or Bolivar, because every city, even the smallest pueblo, has something to honor the liberadores. America´s had too many wars to get that excited over the Revolution, but since it was my first 4th abroad, alone, I decided to spend it in style at the Jesuit reduccion Trinidad, a UNESCO World Heritage Site about two hours north of Encarnacion in the rolling hills of eastern Paraguay.

[A little history: After the initial conquests of South America, huge sections of the continent remained largely ignored by the Spanish Crown because they lacked, well, things worth conquering. In these areas, the religious orders became the de facto government presence and, as long as things remained calm, were free to do as they pleased. In the Rio de la Plata, the Jesuits took the warring, semi-nomadic tribes of the delta and organized them around mission towns, or reducciones, scattered throughout the region. Souls were saved, cultures smashed, etc.

Well, this worked fine for about three centuries. But then the Spanish Crown decided the Jesuits had too much power (which was probably true) and kicked them all out, burned down the missions, and gave away the rights to native labor to political cronies and big landowners.

And that was the last time the native peoples of South America were ever mistreated. The End.]

One thing I´ve noticed about South Americans is how helpful they are. You ask them a question, and you´ll always get an answer; even if they don´t know, they´ll always send you somewhere. Maybe it´s shameful to not have any answers, to say ¨I don´t know.¨I was walking around Encarnacion trying to catch a colectivo, and everyone told me a different place. The police officers told me the colectivo didn´t exist, no, never - what day is it? - no, not today, no. I saw my hostelkeeper, and she wasn´t sure where the bus stopped, but that there was one, somewhere. She also told me to adjust my watch an hour; Paraguay and Argentina are in different time zones - who knew.

Despite her encouragement, I just about gave up. It was nearly two, the ruins were an hour away, and they closed at five. ¨Some Fourth,¨ I thought, and with nothing better to do, I went to an Internet cafe to catch up on my email.

I sat there, languidly typing, disinterested in life. Something wasn´t right about the day - I had just given up my plans and a distant part of my mind kept rolling, rebelling against the actions of the rest. Its synapses kept firing. My eyes burned, my stomach churned; I could hear the minute hand turn, each click from the clock. The clock. Something´s not right. The clock...something´s not right...with the clock. Something´s not right with my clock.

The woman was right: Paraguay is in a different time zone than Argentina, and my watch had been set to Argentina time. Well, wouldn´t you know it, but Paraguay is an hour behind Argentina, not an hour ahead. So it wasn´t two in the afternoon, it was barely noon, and I still had the day, the Fourth, Independence Day.

An hour later, I´m on the non-existent colectivo, having just walked out to the highway and asking every bus that went by. Paraguay is a very flat country, with only occasional red outcroppings of rocks as hills - more like small monoliths than anything. The ground is a very bright red color, a lush color, and the uncultivated fields are thick with palms and vines, brush still green in the depths of winter. We pass through small towns, we pick up people at lonely paradas and drop them off by the side of the road where only a couple tire tracks snaking through the grass shows that somewhere, behind the trees and vines, is a home. At times we pass brush on fire, being burned to clear a field. It was a bright and sunny day.

I was dropped off by the side of the road myself, by myself.

It´s not often you get a UNESCO World Heritage Site to yourself, but I did. I guess I was the first visitor all day, the first English-speaker in a month, and the first American in several. The day could not have been better.

The ruins themselves were impressive and, having lived in Peru, I know ruins.

Trinidad was once the home for five thousand Guarani and their Jesuit overlords, with dormitories and workshops, orchards and graveyards, and all religious buildings the priests could think to build. The main plaza is about four hundred feet square, with the red brick arcades of the workshops flanking either side. None of the buildings have roofs, though most are in pretty good shape, good enough to see the remains of ornament.

The highlight of the site is, as you might expect, the cathedral. It must have been an unbelievably impressive building, a hundred foot high Romanesque church perched on a hill at the edge of civilization, clad in gold, with a three piece golden altar to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The gold´s all gone now, long gone, melted after the church was burned and the Jesuits expelled. I sat across from the pulpit, in the choir. In the dying afternoon, the light slants across the walls of a once dark and holy place, revealing the chipping rock of another man´s time and another time´s faith. I felt something inside, in the choir in the sun; a sort of resigned respect for the ferocity of time - how nothing, not even faith, can overtake time.

It was a beautiful day and very quiet on the hill. At night, I thought about the Fourth, the fireworks and hotdogs back at home, and the few stone saints sitting smashed in the apse on the hill, all growing less distinct, worn, day by day.

Udon on the Parana

Back south again on a four hour bus to Posadas, which I knew wasn´t going to be four hours when I saw the ticket taker bring three DVDs onboard. At least the volume was low and the road smooth as the dense jungle of the far northeast gave way to a rolling landscape of hills and farms of Misiones Province.

I got in late to Posadas (thanks to The Devil Wears Prada) and stood for a few minutes trying to orient myself, being very touristy with my bag and my Lonely Planet under a streetlight as everyone else hopped on and off the local buses. A local couple, Tamara and Marco, put me out of my misery by pointing me in the right direction. They were both very nice and very Argentinian, and were really excited to show me around Posadas; in short, they were much more helpful in their hometown than I am in my own.

Besides eating an ice cream cone, some temperamental showers, and a street protest by mate farmers, not much happened in the couple days I was in Posadas. The city is well designed and very pedestrian friendly, with a lengthy costanera boardwalk down the bluffs by the Parana, and some new ritzy mansions to the northwest, but, as far as cities go, it´s all nothing much to speak of. So, I left, over the bridge to Paraguay.

Paraguay is, as you can imagine, a little off the beaten path for Americans and, pretty much, for everyone else. Someone at the consulate told me that the Republic gives out fewer than 2000 tourist visas to Americans each year (certainly not helped by Paraguay´s slogan: ¨Paraguay: You have to feel it.¨) It´s most famous author once called it ¨an island surrounded by land¨- all the Argentines said it was cheap, dirty, and poor.

Our bus broke down right after immigration on the far side of the bridge. Soldiers with rusting AK-47s directed people onto later buses. Hello, Paraguay!

By sheer luck I got off the bus right near my hostel, ¨The German Hostel¨run, naturally, by a thin Asian woman. Encarnacion, the only city of any size in southern Paraguay, did a thriving business in selling Argentines tax-free goods until Argentina one-upped them by imploding its own economy in 2001.



Encarnacion is divided in half by a steep bluff, cutting the hectic shabby commercial district off from the sculpted plazas up the hill. For a border town, it is quite pleasant. The highlight of the city - at least in my opinion - is Hiroshima, a Japanese cultural center\restaurant with the best udon I´ve ever had. I suppose it feels a bit strange to be an American sitting in Paraguay eating Japanese food, but such is the world we live in. The next day, July 4th, I headed north.