A personal blog transitioning into an exploration of the intersection of design, technology and ethics
A gallery of some of my favourite in-camera images from Peru, Chile and Bolivia a few weeks ago. They’re not necessarily strong photos or selected as such – just photos I myself enjoy. I have more, but they either need tweaking (straightening horizons, etc) or some real work to bring out the best. I’ll post them up soon enough. No particular order.
Enjoy:
Arica is a relative crime free city, but as with anywhere it pays to be attentive. Most crime in Chile is opportunistic in nature, as opposed to the occassional strangle muggings and minor ATM kidnappings you have to be wary of in Bolivia and Peru.
So I heard this story, of an eminent British archaelogist* I met there. He and his wife had been eating in a restaurant on main street and it seems someone quietly removed their bag.
But what I found fascinating was that the thieves went to some trouble to return their passports to the consulate. Consequently they were able to continue their travels relatively unimpeded.
If only all criminals were so considerate.
* it’s not difficult to find an archaelogist in Arica…they’re attracted to the area like flies to the proverbial. The ultra-dry environment of the region preserves like no other place in the world.
I’m sitting in the emptiest airport I’ve ever experienced. I suspect they only operate a couple of flights a day from Tacna. Consequently my only company appears to be a bored check-in attendant for a different airline and a barman who’s mopping the floor.
And I’ve finished all my books. I have little else to do except get the phone out, take advantage of the free Wi-Fi in Peruvian airports and get blogging.
So, let me tell you about how to get from Arica in Chile to Tacna in Peru.
The two cities are only some 40km apart, but transport between them isn’t what you might expect.
The simplest way is to get your hotel to order a taxi to your destination on the other side. They will deal with the crossing, but from Chile this can be expensive, running at around £35. Similarly, in the opposite direction it’s perfectly possible to get ripped off, as I did last week when I arrived here.
You need two things…your passport and some local currency. In Arica you can take a taxi for £2 to the “Terminal Internacional” where you’ll expect buses but will actually see a huge number of USAnian cars. You find a driver going to the border pay the station fee (200 pesos, 40p) and then go to an office to do some paperwork. You then get shown to your collectivo.
These are always US cars of various vintage. I got a really seventies Crown Victoria driven by a brassy old lady whose hair waved in the wind out of the window. The car contained 5 passengers…a handy one extra than a European or Eastern equivalent, hence more profit. For her troubles you pay just 2000 pesos, about £3.
She took us to the border, made sure we were OK and left. There, waiting, were other collectivos heading to Tacna. They all pass the airport, so no problem. You go through Chilean customs and then get driven the short distance to Peruvian customs, again in a USAnian car, albeit this time I got a more modern but nondescript GM thingy. Cost here was 2500 pesos (they take Chilean money cheerfully.)
That’s it. For less than a tenner you can cross the border. Don’t do like I did the other way last time and get ripped off by a driver taking you to the airport…you should spend more than about £5 to reach the border from the airport even by taxi as it isn’t far. Ask first for the price. Also check whether it’s all the way to Arica, or just to the border (say ‘aduana.’)
I’m now back in Arica following my trip to San Pedro de Atacama and Bolivia. I have a couple of things to deal with here before heading back to Lima for my flight home.
I’ve been foiled by this computer in the hotel from getting a decent image gallery up from the last eight days or so. That means that until I return home you’ll have to take my word for it that the landscape we saw in South West Bolivia was some of the most extreme that I’ve come across in my life.
It’s well known that when a space scientists wants conditions similar to Mars for some experiments they tend to come to this part of the world. It really is that way out. That flamingoes, vicuñas and a fair other range of animals manage to live here is remarkable.
Bitterly cold at night and with burning sunshine in the day, it was hard to be properly prepared at all times. You’d go from being wrapped in five layers to trying to get as much off as possible. All whilst trying to avoid getting badly sunburned. Even our more latin members of the group were looking red. Me? Well I’d bought this Chilean waterproof sun cream which Pablo tried at one point and which he described as being like paint. If you didn’t rub it in enthusiastically it left you looking white like a ghost.
Still, it worked, mostly. My lips are chapped like crazy, and my hands look like an old man’s – super dry air, cold and salt took their toll.
So until I return home to fast computers I’ll just leave you with the one picture I managed to get off the big camera. It’s a whirlwind that we watched crossing the Laguna Blanca. The dust is borax, believe it or not…
We’re about 120km from the nearest town, so zero connectivity here. This will be posted on my return.
We’re at around 4900m up in a small hostel near Laguna Colorada. By Bolivian standards it’s comfortable but the altitude is really hard work and I’ve learned to be careful not to stand up too quickly.
It’s been a day of extreme scenery, sometimes feeling positively martian (in fact, scientists studying mars use the Atacama as the nearest option available on our planet). At Laguna Verde we took advantage of the hot spring there, but I quickly regretted it when getting out. Heat + cold + altitude made many of us dizzy and I never recovered all afternoon.
But that didn’t diminish the joy of seeing thousands of flamingoes here at Laguna Colorada. An amazing sight along with clouds of borax blown up by the winds.
The group I’m riding with is pretty cosmopolitan, Alex a Swedish/French guy, Diana a Spanish girl, Karim, with German, French and Arabic backgrounds and Pablo from Chile with Russian ancestry. And they’re a great bunch to travel with…a lot of jokes and ribaldry.
My hope now is that I acclimatise quickly, but the diet isn’t really full of iron so I’m not optimistic.
Tonight we’re sleeping in the coldest room I ever sat in. It’s -8 and there’s no freaking heating. With all that geothermal energy just beneath us this is irritating to say the least. And it makes me wonder how Andean peoples ever reproduce.
On the upside going outside reveals an amazing starscape. So much is visible it takes your breath away (as does the cold and altitude, but hey, I had some left!) I’ve taken photos which will be added to the gallery on my return. Just wait and see.
I’ve done Arica > San Pedro before, albeit with a change at Calama. Thing is, I just remembered one of the more annoying bits…
Chile has concerns over various food pests and as a consequence you not only get checked for fruit, cheese etc on boarding the bus, there are also occassional checkpoints. So at 3.30 in the freakin’ morning the lights all come on it’s time to step into the cold.
So here I am, wide awake, irritable, and in full realisation that this bus was designed for a country where the average height is a good two inches (5cm) less than back home. So I’ve got my music on, popped my fleece on and hoping for some sleep. Soon.
I struggled to find somewhere to eat this evening, and in the end decided that some more bad food would have to do. I have at least found a source of decent fruit at the market, so I’m getting vitamins and fibre now. Woo!
The smells of Telepizza were calling me in, and I succumbed. I went in. I watched them making a pizza… and lo, it looked like pizza! And verily, I ordered.
While I was waiting for it to be made I sat down and combined reading and watching a telethon for Un Techo Para Chile which has been fundraising like mad lately around here. I’d thrown a few coins into a collection box without really knowing what it was about.
A wino kept wandering in and out, watching the TV for a bit, and then ambling out. He’d just stand there, near the door. I studiously avoiding catching his gaze.
The program then showed a short film about a young family moving from what was essentially a corrugated board shack into a newly built, if somewhat spartan, apartment. That’s when I heard the blubbing. I looked and saw the wino, just standing there, mouth turned down, tears streaming down his cheeks, and blubbing like a three year old that’s been denied another sweet.
It was heartbraking.
If you have a moment, consider making a small donation by following the link above. Since the strong earthquake recently a lot of families and individuals here have lost their homes. Others are just living in absolute poverty. They need your help, and once they have decent living conditions they can do more with their lives, educate their children better, and bring themselves a better future.
Oh seriously, sometimes, when you travel the food is amazing. Sometimes, it looks like it might be a danger to your health…
No, I ordered a veggie pizza, not some sort of mentalist giant cheese flan.
Argh! It’s vomiting salad at me!
Father’s health was seriously affected by malnourishment. Maybe he was just scared of the food here?
[playht_player width="100%" height="90px" voice="Noah"]
Anyone who’s experienced the death of someone close to them will know that there is often a lot to do. No exceptions here, plus the added pressure of limited time. However, I’m not entirely unhappy about the time thing… makes me get things done.
So, following the funeral I went yesterday to the cemetary to finish off the paper work. The tomb is owned in perpetuity by me, although a typical arrangement, that may seem strange in Europe, is to simply rent a tomb for a number of years. Once that time is up the coffin is disinterred and transferred to a shared grave. I also had to sort out maintenance again, in perpetuity. It’s not a lot each year, but with no easy way of paying fifteen pounds to an account in Chile every now and then I had no option.
I actually saw this happening on my second visit. You could see a clearly subdued couple watching as the coffin was lifted from a tomb, cleaned up, sealed in plastic, then loaded onto a hearse. It was a sad sight.
And it’s all made slightly bizarre by the music that’s piped into the cemetary. If you have a funeral it does seem to be suitably sombre, but at all other times they appear to often play cheerful music for the workers to enjoy.
It’s tricky feeling sombre and respectful when you can hear an Abba song.
Still, at father’s tomb it wasn’t so audible.
I took some photos, walked around, paid my respects, and headed back to town for a meeting with the reverend David Hucker who carried out the bilingual service. He’s clearly a nice man, and initially refused my attempt to pay for the service. It had to be turned into a donation to his church before he’d accept. Given the service included a singer, I was amazed. The kindness of people here doesn’t cease to amaze me. We chatted about why he and his wife came here, my own background and so on. All very pleasant.
I felt like I’d taken enough of Joaquin’s time so I decided I’d make the effort to arrange the headstone entirely on my own. With limited Spanish and nothing more than a vague idea of where a stonemason may be, I set off.
Now, this is where you have to admire the Chilean desire for efficiency. The hospital is at one end of a road approximately 1km long. At the other, lies the municipal cemetary (not the one Chris is in). Along this road are numerous funeral directors and various parked hearses, ranging from custom made examples to tired looking old American station wagons. Given this is one of the more important routes to the hospital, I can’t help wonder if it helps reassure incoming patients. Still, it’s efficient.
After some aimless wandering I spotted a suitable stone mason, went inside, and did my best. On Monday morning I’m either getting exactly what I wanted, or a very rough approximation with some crazy typeface. Let’s see. Again, Chilean flexibility and a can-do attitude helped. I explained I wasn’t likely to be around for much longer and that I couldn’t wait the usual week. He made it happen.
The next job of the day was to visit the house where my father lived. He’d rented a room here for over ten years.
I had a real shock when the first item brought in was his suitcase. It’s the only recognisable item I saw in his belongings – the same cream coloured Samsonite suitcase he’d used throughout much of the eighties. It was a touch battered, but it even still carried a sticker for a hotel in Sluis in the Netherlands (a small, sleepy town once notorious for having the highest density of sex shops in the world) at which I remember him buying me waffles with cream and strawberries each time we visited on his tours.
From there on in it went a little downhill. There was no wallet, no photo album, no sign of his early past in South America. Apart from a couple of postcards from his days in Belgium(!) and his passports going back to the mid-eighties there was nothing. None of my letters to him were there, nor any photos of me or any of his children. I still have to visit another place where he apparently kept some stuff, but mostly I believe they were just things he sold on the market where had a small spot.
So what did I find out about him?
Looking at his passports he travelled an awful lot up until around 2006 when he broke his hip-bone in a fall during a tussle of some sort. He’d been trading in clothes and, for a while, also appeared to be running some sort of homeopathy service. He was buying significant quantities of remedies from a german supplier in South America whose exact location I’ll be working out shortly. He had three books in his belongings, two of which were on homeopathy, with the other being an encyclopaedia.
The rest was mostly junk. Old lottery tickets, some snacks he sold, a collection of out of date milk cartons, old clothes (though mostly in good condition – looks like he still preferred to be smart!) and a lot of random notes. No notes, however, spoke of feelings, interestingly. There was no journal, no address book even. Just accounts of his work, routes he was taking and so on.
There weren’t any signs of written correspondence with friends anywhere. I did, however, find a printout with what would appear to have been an e-mail address. So I now know that at least sometimes he went online. Maybe he did find me after all but opted to keep quiet? Who knows.
The house itself was relatively clean, with the downstairs occupied by the landlady and her son, and upstairs by various lodgers. But my father didn’t really spend much time there – as had been the case when I knew him, he preferred to be out at bars or selling at the market, using his modest room as merely a place to sleep at night and to store a few things.
And that’s really it, so far. There’s little more evidence.
After this it was off to the bars where my father liked to hang out. He had a few acquaintances and friends there. People he would drink and play billiards with whilst arguing about sports, politics and any other subject that caught his attention. It’s fair to say he hadn’t changed much, in many ways.
So we’d agreed to meet up at the pool hall and have a few drinks and a game of billiards (or pool or whatever it’s called) in his honour.
It was fascinating to sit in the places my father sat, and play the tables he’d have played at. I didn’t get somber. In fact it reminded me that his life, whilst poor, wasn’t terrible. He had friends, and he had things to enjoy. That’s a big part of what we all need. So we drank a little, and I learned the favoured drinks of his friends – one called pancho, which is basically beer and Fanta mixed together, and another called hota which is a mix of wine and, believe it or not, Coca-Cola. Yes, I was surprised by that one too!
Later, as I tried to encourage one particular drunk friend of my father’s to NOT play with my camera, Joaquin told me he’d a call for his mariachi band to play a serenade. “Would you like to come,” he asked.
How could I refuse?
About two hours later I concluded that Chilenos are, essentially, completely mental. But in a nice way :o) They arrive, in their slightly too small costumes, from different directions at the specified address. And they must keep quiet outside and not be discovered. Because nobody expects the mariachi.
At the allotted moment they all pile into the house and the singing starts. The lady whose 50th birthday it was seemed bemused at first, but appeared to enjoy. Her husband, however, was a strong, surly type who looked like someone who made a living from ripping lorry tyres from their rims with his bare hands.
Still, he didn’t kill any of us so I gues it was OK for him.
And then it was off for a burger. I was granted my wish of a vegetarian sandwich, which turned out to be a chip sandwich with salad and avocado in it that tasted suspiciously meaty (cooked on the same griddle, no doubt)… but I had to chuckle at many of them ordering nothing more exciting than a cup of tea with their meal. Which was, of course, served in china, with a saucer. Don’t see that much in English burger bars at 2am in the morning…
It’s now Saturday here and I’ll admit to a slightly lazy day. I got up late, wandered around town, had yet another terrible breakfast (they’re better in Peru, I have to say) and generally felt slightly subdued. The day before had been quite happy, really, and now it was simply about going back to normal. I have no tasks left until Monday, and attempts to find options such as teaching people how to create websites have failed to elicit much interest.
So I’ll go through the small bag of items I took from my father’s place, take some notes, and generally meander today. Don’t expect an exciting post tomorrow! I also have to decide what to do next. I still have two weeks to use up, but no clear leads in other countries. I suspect once I’m finished here it might just be time for a bit of a holiday. I just need to decide – relaxed, or exploratory? Any thoughts?
And so it came. In a way it’s weird… I always felt there were only two likely things to happen.
First, I would find my father (or he would find me) and a period of reconciliation may take place. Closeness, perhaps never, but reconciliation would be fine.
Second, I would never find him, and that would be that. Finito.
I’d actually come to the conclusion a few years ago that maybe he’d died some time ago. In some ways it was an easier conclusion… it stopped me feeling guilty for not continuing a search or trying harder.
I don’t think I was ever ready for this. And this morning I woke up very early at around 5am. Partly because I went to bed very early, but also because my mind was spinning. I decided to put some music on. And this piece came up:
And I took a moment to try and remember what was really good about my father. I’ve told the story that shows the negative in him. The curious thing is that our negative moments in life tend to be far fewer in occassion than our positives, yet they often define us.
So I remembered:
There was more… but those are what sprung to mind. And I had my first ‘moment’ there in bed at about 6am this morning.
The next came during the funeral. But first, a little about Chilean funerals…
Chile doesn’t feel wildly different to Spain, in so many ways. The climate, the landscape even… at least, when I compare it to Alicante where my family lives. Culturally it’s similar enough that you expect things to be reasonably similar. And I suppose they are. But that’s still quite different to Britain.
First things first, you arrive at the hospital with all your paperwork a little before the funeral directors come to collect the body. In our case we then had an hour or so of waiting before heading to the cemetary. I’ve already mentioned that instead of burial plots, niches are used.
And in our case, as there were only two of us at the undertakers we could ride in the hearse, up front. I was disappointed, in a way, as the hearse was simply a silver Ford Taurus Estate. With BMW hubcaps. As a car geek I was disappointed! But then in the UK we use Fords for hearses as well, so I can’t complain… but I’d still prefer to head off in a Daimler, if anyone’s listening….
In the back was the coffin, wrapped in the skin of Bungle.
I realised that if we had an accident (not entirely unlikely) the coffin was unrestrained. It would be… messy, to say the least. Still, we made it to the cemetary where I met the kindly David Hucker from the Anglican Church, his wife, a singer he’d brought along, my father’s landlady, and several of his friends.
Given that funerals tend to be arranged very quickly here, and that he had no family at all here, it was a good turnout.
We then slowly walked behind the car to the tomb, where two rows of plastic garden chairs were laid out. The Bungle-Coffin was then placed on a support, and the car left. Nearby a bell tolled.
Rev. Hucker gave a simple ceremony in both English and Spanish with accompaniment and song from the delightful guitarist. And then the moment I was completely unprepared for. Everyone who knew my father stood up to say a few words of remembrance. When it came to my turn, I fell apart. I didn’t even start talking, just sobbed.
It’s so unlike me. A few tears, sure. But sobbing? Proper, wobbly belly, heaving chest sobbing? Nope, not since I was a little kid.
Every time I remembered the good parts of my father, I went again. More than in the morning which was a single burst of tears.
After a few minutes and a few tissues I managed to compose myself to string together a barely articulate sentence. It would have to do, or I’d just be off again. I patted the Bungle-Coffin, sat down, and the ceremony was then brought to a close.
Of course, the English bits didn’t make sense, entirely, in the context, but they were familiar, which helped, I think.
Then the next new part – the coffin was then pushed into the tomb, and we got to watch the workers carefully seal it up. The flowers were then placed in front of the stone, and we took turns to quietly pay our last respects.
My thoughts have also drifted to my brother and half-sister back in Europe. The five grandchildren my father never even knew about, and the joy he missed out on with all of them.
One day I’ll explain this whole story to my new born son (and any others) and maybe I’ll be back in Arica once more.
And when we come back, I’ll give Joaquin Alvarez, the British Honorary Consul, a call. He has been amazing, taking a lot of time and trouble to help me with arrangements. He came to the funeral with us as a friend of my father’s, and has touched me with his kindness and generosity of spirit. A true giant amongst men.