a l'autre bout du bout du monde:

2008-03-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

car je ne suis pas se déplacer autant , le blog est assez mort , mis à part ~~mexicaine des ligneurs espagnols qui semble l'apprécier~~ spamming mes commentaires avec de belles phrases comme des mouches même ne veux pas manger ici, alors je remercie pour ne suis pas se déplacer autant, le blog est assez mort, mis à part des ligneurs espagnols qui semble l'apprécier avec de belles phrases comme des mouches même ne veux pas manger ici, alors remercie pour mes commentaires. Hey , putain de

merde troll . mes commentaires. Hey, putain de troll. Il est vrai que j'ai beaucoup de commentaires , en plus de la vôtre, qui sont soit très drôle , et la réalité est que ce blog ou " vlog " comme vous dites, n'est pa Voyage histoires à raconter mes gens que je connais . Il est vrai que j'ai beaucoup de commentaires, en plus de la vôtre, qui sont soit très drôle, et la réalité est que ce blog ou "vlog" comme vous dites, histoires à raconter gens que je connais. Je ne fais rien de plus que d'avoir un endroit pour garder mes comptes , alors putain quitter mon blog seul, si vous savez comment faire pour que les deux putamadre blog pourquoi ne pas en obtenir un et envoyez-moi l'URL , la persistance et Je ne fais rien de plus que d'avoir un endroit pour garder mes comptes, alors quitter mon si vous savez comment faire pour que les deux pourquoi ne pas en obtenir un et envoyez-moi l'URL, la persistance et pourrait voir votre blogueur talent. voir votre Oh, pardon , vous passez votre vie en face de votre ordinateur, car vous êtes si dégoûtant que personne ne veut , ou vous concernant .

Chupat la, trou du cul . De toute façon, pour quelques-uns d'entre vous qui lisent mon blog , j'ai commencé à écrire quelques chroniques Oh, pardon, vous passez votre vie en face de votre ordinateur, car vous êtes si dégoûtant que personne ne veut, ou vous concernant. trou du cul.

De toute façon, pour quelques-uns d'entre vous qui lisent mon blog, j'ai commencé à écrire quelques chroniques car toutes les aventures sont en attente , donc si vous êtes intéressé par la lecture sur des sujets qui ne fut jamais blogué sur , jeter un oeil . Partie 1 toutes les aventures sont en attente, donc si vous êtes intéressé par la lecture sur des sujets qui ne fut jamais blogué sur, jeter un oeil.

Partie 1.

shackles of sedentarism.

2008-02-13T07:35:00.000-08:00

hello all, from my desk at the buenos aires office of olx.com, aka my new capitalist prison.

it could be worse.

i enjoy buenos aires, so it's ok. i'm still pretty broke until payday on the 4th, but surviving thanks to my chéri Carrycito and occasional beer runs with the teknowankers. I've been pretty calm, not going out very much, practising poi lots, not making much artesania these days.

anyway, not much going on, no adventuring, no travelling, no boli (i still cry about that, i'm pathetic, aren't i?).

just fyi: i'm going to upload some pictures soon of my B.C. and California adventures, so stay tuned for that.

also, this entry was edited to include some pictures. please go drool at beautiful baja beaches.

that is all.

love,

cat.

ainsi va la vie qui va

2008-01-16T21:18:00.000-08:00

buenos aires.

it's been almost a month.

life has been quite.. uneventful, as far as adventuring goes. hence why i haven't posted anything. i'm sorry.

i go back and forth between the city and the parana delta aka tigre. when the city stresses me out, i go out there, where people live in elevated houses on green jungly islands covered in flowers and dogs. it's a nice place to relax.

i've taken up juggling, with poi and occasionally bamboo sticks. i'm getting pretty good, actually. my next goal is to become a successful traffic light juggler. i set the bar pretty high for my career, don't i?

i'm down to my last 20$, but i'm giving french lessons. mind you, i can barely say i'm living off of them, yet. but give it time.

crafts are nice, but i'd need to spend my every waking moment knotting up a storm before even attempting to sell in argentina - these guys have a level i'll need years to achieve.

i have decided to stay on here for a while, which leaves me with mixed feelings. a part of me wants to keep on going, while the rational part of me says don't push your luck. stop a while, regain strength and courage, hone your skills, be with friends. being alone with a dog is nice, being alone without the dog.. makes me want to cry. i miss my boli. so much. but i know it was for the best. probably.

i miss my mexican friends, but thankfully for the internet, i'm in touch with most of them, which means chances of our paths crossing again is high. pinches wes, los extraño, su mexican curious, sus campechanos. pero no el mezcal. el mezcal, es mal, we.

i wish i could turn off the vagabond switch in my heart. life is different on the road, for sure. i'm not so lazy. i don't sleep in. i watch the sunrise in different areas and my heart is content. i cherish the little things and keep going forward. but since tiago has been gone, i feel like i've just isolated myself more and my energy is gone. i need to recharge my batteries and calm down for a bit. after all, it's been almost a year since i've been on the road, and sometimes, you need a rest stop.

feel free to drop me a line as i can't be sure of my next update - nobody wants to read about sedentary life and routine.

dear santa*

2007-12-25T08:33:00.000-08:00

i would like to personally thank you for your kindness this year. you answered my prayer even if i didn't leave you out a pacifico.

christmas this year was better than even as a child, jumping out of my bed and throwing myself on the tree to look at my newly acquired loot.

as i left the airport and overheard upbeat, rythmic spanish punctuated with "che!", saying vos instead of tu, cashay and not cayay, that distinct almost italian sounding singing spanish; the license plates speeding by and the realisation that i had finally made it back to south amerika.

even better the look on carry's face when he looked out the window.

merry christmas, from buenos aires!

(*: santa being the plural form of papa and scott.)

san la muerte, santa muerte

2007-12-23T15:51:00.000-08:00

my family on my mother's side is going through a bit of a rough patch, actually no make that a very rough patch. my uncle paul died on thursday, my grandmother died on friday.

it's been quite the death filled week, hasn't it.

i leave mexico city tomorrow. a new adventure begins.

i'm going to miss it here, mostly the people i've met. and mexican curious! speaking of mexican curious, i went to a party last night and behind the dj was a crucifix and a bunch of flowers. very mexican curious.

i look back on my 2 months in mexico and try to think of the good that came out of this trip. i'm kind of amazed i made it to la paz hitchhiking and with no money, it was kind of a test for me to see how far i could make it. a couple months ago, when i left oliver on that rainy morning to go to california, i never would have thought i'd end up in mexico 5 weeks later. but here i am... and i wouldn't be here without all the help i got along the way. all the people who opened their homes and their lives to me, who put up with my boli who was a pain in the arse really, who fed me, who took care of me. i appreciate it immensly, it's thanks to these people that i manage to continue on my journeys.
some people might think it's reckless to just blindly trust people when you're a girl traveling alone, to these people i say: turn off your televisions and go walk around the real world for a second. yes, the world is full of scary monsters but no, not everyone is a scary monster.

i'm going to miss the friends i've made here in d.f., but also the friends i made everywhere in mexico. i now have a home in la paz, in mazatlan, in mexico city. not bad for a homeless girl.

in light of the random acts of kindness i have received this past year, i suggest that this christmas, instead of buying more stuff no one needs, you lend a hand to someone who needs it. feed a homeless person, take in a stray pup. take someone in out of the cold (but keep your laptop locked away, i speak from experience), invite someone new to your table. go out of your way to show a random act of kindness to a random stranger. offer a traveler a home for the night, give the gift of smile to a small child. be human!

and not just on christmas, but everyday.

it's strange being so far away from everyone i love right now, knowing that my mother is going through such a rough time and not being able to be there to comfort her. i feel like a horrible person to be selfishly prancing around latin america when my family is being killed off one by one (that is how it seems, anyway..). christmas time is going to be rough for them... at the same time, i have no idea what my christmas is going to be like. i'm not a very christmasy person, to be honest, but i am wondering if my xmas meal will consist of campechanos, who i will be spending it with, if i actually decide to celebrate it. i really hoped i would be in buenos aires to spend it with you guys, picture on your left. no matter where i end up spending it, or who with, remember you are in my heart.

merry christmas.

life goes on...

2007-12-20T09:05:00.000-08:00

... but it's hard.

i still wake up at 8 every morning thinking i need to bring the dog out.

it still feels strange to not be covered in boli hair.

that i don't get my morning abraxos from my puppy - i'd tap the front of my chest and say, abrazame, loco! and he'd jump up and i'd kneel down and we'd hug.

it hurts, a lot. even if i've regained my composure and have stopped crying hysterically, every now and then i feel like breaking down.

i miss him. a lot. ridiculously so. i mean, i had him with me all the time, and i sacrificed a lot for that dog, and it got me... to mexico city, at least.

but enough about the boli. i'm heartbroken, but that doesn't mean i should make everyone else's life miserable.

i've been consistantly bitching about mexico, methico, méxico. let's put the facts down, shall we?

cat's mexican adventure...
(or how cat got her grieve back, a true story! by cat!)

the cops took all my money in tijuana the night i arrived. this should have been a sign. the guy who picked me up hitchhiking expected me to pay for his food, gas, and cigarettes - this meant going up to taco stands with no money and offering to work the food back. while this guy sat in his car and waited. argh. i bailed on him very quickly.

then my fucking wisdom tooth decides it's not happy hanging out with the rest of my teeth, no, he has to go and try and move into my cheek! asshole! luckily thanks to some penicillin he was quickly shut up. let's hope he stays quiet for another while (but now i have health insurance, so it's cool).

i was stuck hitchhiking with a dumbass pathological liar named brad who was, and i quote, a male escort at 14 (must you say I was a male escort, i can see that you are a dude, dude, so the male really doesn't need to be said everytime, just say i was an escort, period, dipshit.) who travelled the world with a sadistic italian woman who would forbid him from leaving the hotel, so he got to go to all of these incredible places but only saw them from a window.

ok, how to shoot this one down: travelling alone when you are 14 is not easy, i know this because i did it a lot. this often happens when one parent lives in europe and the other in north america, yes? ok. so how the hell does this woman who has no parental liability over you manage to just pick you up and HOLD YOU AGAINST YOUR WILL and cross international borders with you? yeah, really.

his idea of hitchhiking was putting on a ridiculous "pity me" face and half assedly sticking his thumb out.
when i hitchhike, i´m usually bouncy and smiling, jumping around and doing pirouettes with my sign. in a way to say, hi! i´m a nice person! i won´t attack you.

brad, on the other hand, looked like a psycho. he looked angry. i wouldn´t have picked him up. no wonder it took me 2 weeks almost to get to la paz.

brad didn´t have any form of id when he crossed into mexico, making it almost impossible for him to go back to the states.. he thought that he would be coming along with me all the way to argentina, which made me chuckle: "You don´t have a passport." to which he would answer, using his angry face ("THIS IS MY ANGRY FACE. GRRR. I AM ANGRY. LOOK AT HOW ANGRY I AM." actually, you look like you´re constipated, and it´s kind of funny. don´t give me that look, it´s giving me the runs.), yes so as i was saying, he would put on this angry face and hiss, WATCH ME. he thought that going to the american embassy and saying he lost his passport would give him a new one... uh, news flash? your passport number is in the system. they can check if you actually had one. i swear, the american government has computers and knows how to use them. not the brightest crayon in the box, are you bradley?
watch you? sure, man, i´ll watch you get your ass deported, and i´ll laugh hysterically.

he also claimed to be a commercial fisherman, but continued lighting cigarettes with candles. what respect for your fellow sailors! oh, and that he would go up to alaska to go crab fishing every year, and yet didn`t know the exact number of days this season goes on for.

and last, he was a marine who had been dishonorably discharged for punching his drill sergeant in the face... and a mercenary!

and yet walking 5 km from the Pemex station to the Malecon in La Paz was too much for him. you were a mercenary, you say? and a marine? but you can´t walk with a 15 lb backpack (mine weighs about 50) for 5 km, and yet i´m practically running it, and i´ve never even been enlisted? oh pschaaaaaaaw, you, i hope our paths never cross again, and that your arm gets stuck in a crab pot up in alaska. oh, and by the way? your plans of stealing diamonds and money from that old dude? so not cool. when ramon told me they stole your dog, i figured, you had it coming for all of the shitty things you did. i still have nightmares of you waking up with that green crusty smile and saying "I had a wet dream about you". YOU DO NOT EVER, AND I MEAN YOU NEVER, EVER SAY THAT TO A WOMAN. how the hell did you make it to 30?!?!?!

i really hope i never see you again. bradley. ugh.

we all know i finally got rid of him, thanks to a beautiful pothead from michoacán.

who was a godsend, really. i mean, ok, yes, i got a little stung, serves me right for opting to sleep in warm bed smelling of lavender and marijuana rather than sleeping on cold tile smelling of bolivian canine, but at the same time it wasn´t so bad.

it was better than hanging out in mexican meth hotel with flying cockroaches and a scheming, lying gringo who looked like the dude from mad magazine and thought he was above the law. oh yes, i´d much rather hang out with mr. cheekbones at the beach and watch him surf while i nurse a cold pacifico and a cone than hang around drinking cheap mezcal from a plastic jug on a dirty mattress with mr green crusted snaggle tooth smile.

it was like being in a bad travel movie, where the free spirited hopeful heroine ends up in a bed and brothel wondering how the hell she`s going to escape, when suddenly the camera spins around and in walks the knight in shining armor. or in this case, pothead surfer with heart of gold. oh, and did i mention, drop dead gorgeous? man, i will never get over that. at least i got to... ahh.. taste.. a little. i would have liked to pig out rather than just have a little bite, but maybe in another lifetime.

and tiago. running away on me. oh god, you fucked up there, little one. i was hysterical, i was crying non stop, and i was freaking out for no reason, not saying much, just drinking and writing, drinking and writing... and then he returned and life went back to normal, consisting of "mija vente a fumar mota con migo" and "mija tienes que comer, vamos a desayunar tacos", and other mija thises and mija thats.

the mau experience was a strange one, for sure. on one hand i was totally blinded by the incredible light and energy that emanated from this man, and on the other was totally disgusted by us being totally smitten one day, and totally distant the next. in the end, though, i don`t regret it. mau really did show up at the right time, taking me out of a really shitty environment, feeding me, letting me stay with him, letting me roll joints and drink beer and pass out half naked in random parts of the house. and calling me "mija" all the time, awww, i miss him. i hope nothing but the best for him. i really think that in the 2 months i´ve been in mexico there are three faces that will stand out - giulia, mau and emiliano.

sidetracked! let´s continue.

i left la paz with my heart a little more broken than when i arrived, as usual meeting people i adore and having to leave them behind, it wears you out after a while. but i left with my spirits higher than when i had arrived in la paz, and confident that tiago and i would make it.

mazatlan wasn`t easy - but at least it was devoid of methicans (my pet name for mexican meth heads), flying cockroaches and asshole gringos. instead, i managed to land on an inspiring little beach, the island of stone, called the island of the stoned by many of the retired gringos who inhabited the island, which is actually a peninsula. john used to tell me to relax and consider it a vacation. a 10 day vacation! tiago loved it there. we'd go for runs, him in the water happily barking at the waves, at the birds, happily chomping away at fish that escaped from nets and washed ashore, and i would twirl his leash and practise my mediocre juggling.

and then one day hector came and forgot to close the gate, and tiago got out, but chris found him a few hours later and brought him back.. and i found my dog lethargic and unwilling to eat, unwilling to go for a run. it was the beginning of the end of the boli.

the rest is too recent for me to elaborate. it hurts too much to talk about the boli.

but through the hard times i notice there was always a silver lining. whether that silver lining be named giulia, mau, ale, john, alan, diego or emiliano (why so many men? why can`t i ever meet women? oh right, i scare them, gotcha. except for giulia la contessa, because i think she´s me in 30 years.), there have always been people willing to lend a hand to pick me up. granted i probably could have gotten up and limped, but it's always useful to have a crutch. and many crutches i have had. from close or afar... my blog readers, my friends all over the world, have also pitched in, without many of you i would probably still be stuck at mau´s.

yes, mexico has been one gigantic pedo. (for the record: pedo means fart in spanish, but in mexico they use it all the time, no hay pedo oue, no problem man, etc) mexico has been full of topes en el pinche camino. mexico has used me as an aztec sacrifice (even though, as emiliano pointed out, the aztec used to sacrifice people so the sun would keep on shining, ok. the sun does keep on shining, but regardless.), mexico stole my money, mexico stole my skirt (DAMN YOU BAHIA DE LOS SUENOS!), mexico stole my dog, TWICE, and gave him back sick, mexico ended up killing my dog, and mexico almost, i say almost, stole my light. it almost took my dignity and my hope.

but these days, even if i am boliless, even if last night i slept on a floor in a huge abandoned house, things seem to be looking up. i´ve made some great friends in mexico city. i´ve been having a blast discovering mexican curious thanks to emiliano, who really should convert himself into guide for non touristy tourists like myself. witches markets and trannies and pepas are cajetas which is actually dulce de leche but that doesn´t mean pepas are dulce de leche.

and i´ve gotten used to the idea of tacos for breakfast.

(actually. tacos are a very important meal. you have your guisanos, your campechanos, your nopales con queso, your chiles rellenos. you can turn anything into a taco. in fact, i told emiliano about poutine, and he thinks that poutine tacos would be great. so do i. then again we´d just smoked a fattie, so that would explain it.)

mexico, i´m sorry. i take it all back. you are a beautiful, amazing country, albeit fucked up like i´ve rarely seen... you have some serious issues, but then again..

don´t we all?

tiago

2007-12-18T08:20:00.000-08:00

the road is bumpy, full of obstacles and problems, little things that i can get through and horrible things that made me want to break down and smash everything. but through the good and bad, i had tiago to help me pull through, my luz boliviano that shone through the mexican darkness...

i must admit that right now mexico has left me not with a buen sabor en la boca, oue, like foca once told me, but with a rather bitter and foul taste. like marmite. like meat gone bad.

i´ve overcome many obstacles on this trip, but this is one i think i might never get over.. the obstacle of being boli-less. no more tiago. no more girl wandering alone with her dog. just girl wandering alone.

i met tiago some 8 months ago, in a little mountain village covered in jungle named Samaipata in Bolivia. 8 months ago i had written in this very blog that never again would i have to wander alone.

how wrong i was.

i sincerely hoped i could give him a better life than out in the dirt streets of this tiny andean village. from the moment i got him, we were never to be apart more than a few hours when i was out picking cherries. he came with me to parties, he came with me to the peruvian amazon, he crossed canada, the us coast with me, and crossed part of mexico.

how was i to know he would never make it out of mexico alive.

his thirst for freedom ended up taking his life, when he escaped from where i was living in la isla de la piedra.. he was never the same after that, and as i watched my baby boli convulsing and twitching in the hospital yesterday, i knew i could not let him go on suffering.

at 14h20, as i held him and sweetly cooed that i loved him in his ears, he left this world.
i love you boli. and for some reason, i feel like you're sitting right here. i hope you had a good life with me. i tried, i really did. at least you got to see a bit of the world in your short 8 month life span, you saw the ocean, the rockies, the andes, the amazon, you went to california, you went fruit picking.

in those eight months i came to know a rebellious dog, who had little regard or respect for the rules, an affectionate dog who would go nuts whenever i would come near, a protective dog who would watch over me and our home (monstro the backpack.).

he had many names, amorcito, che boli, el boli, puto boli, and of course tia-goo. he was my best friend these past 8 months, something to anchor me down to the real world, someone to hold, someone to keep me warm, someone to talk to while waiting for rides.

i feel so bad for what i did, but i had no other choice. if i had been more selfish i would have kept you alive, but i figured i could not let you suffer, i couldn't bear to see you like that, twitching in an artificial coma.

i think i did what i could, and i think i gave you what i could. i went hungry some days so you could eat.

also, i wish i had a usb cable to show off all the pictures i have of you.

i had hoped to bring you back to samaipata. that you could see where you were from. alas, things are different... but i will bring you back there. i will have your ashes tomorrow or thursday, and i will rub some of them into my new skar (morbid? i care not.), and bring you with me until i can return to bolivia, and i'll scatter you in amboro, near a pretty little waterfall with colourful jungle flowers all around.

i´m sure you´d love it.

i hope you're up there with pi, and squat, and luenlai, and snarf, and all of my dearly departed animals. i know you're all pigging out right now and i hope you find some wonderful legs to bite, cause i know you loved biting people almost as much as you loved me.

te amo, puto boli. descanse en paz.

the universe vs. cat

2007-12-16T22:01:00.000-08:00

so, the boliviano has been sick, as my holey pockets have been able to attest for... but now it's escalated. he had 7 seizures in 24 hours, is currently hospitalized, on some crazy meds and has ivs sticking out of him.

and my friend has had to put up with it. i feel so bad right now. i am so sorry.

my boli. my baby. don't die. please don't die.

this is a call for help.

this is a call for help.

this is a call for help.

i need to be out of my friend's by thursday, and i have nowhere else to go, no one to turn to. can't leave without my boli, can't just leave him to die.

i can't deal with this right now. he is my only fucking friend in a world of instability, the only thing i have that's real in a world where my reality exists only in my head.

the universe is being cruel. the universe wants me to fail. the universe wants to break me into a thousand little pieces, and then maybe a steam roller will come through and pulverise what little is left of me. yes.

FUCK YOU MEXICO, you hurt me so much. so much. i was ready to leave you, and here you are, sucking me right back in. why do you keep doing this to me? i eat your tacos, dammit, for breakfast, lunch AND dinner, so WHAT GIVES?!?

just... rip that heart out of my chest, go on and throw it in the fire, that's right. oh and crush it a little bit more? ahhh, perfect. now throw that mushy muscle that looks like ground beef back into my chest, and i will function normally.

i feel like an aztec sacrifice.

cut me open

2007-12-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

i ventured down to kaustika yesterday to go and meet miguel, an artist here in d.f. whom i've been in contact with, and who knows friends of mine down in buenos aires. i conacted him about doing my skar, my maya kin of the skywalker.

we discussed size and placement, and he went off to sterilize his work area, and finally got to it.

after my last skar experience, i was expecting this to hurt. a lot. i mean, i love my stomach skar, and it reminds me of friends and of argentina, but i'll be honest - it hurt like a motherfucker.
but this didn't hurt. i barely flinched. miguel works fast, and this is a small skar in comparaison to my catamarca frog.

this is my maya kin. it represents the skywalker, the one whose mission is to join the celestial heavens with the earth, the one whose mission is to constantly observe, learn, and walk the roads of life.

okay, now ... it's a bit off. the lines aren't very straight and my kin looks like he's biting his lip. but since when am i a perfectionnist? it was a gift from him and i appreciate it all the more that it was free, and that now i will have something to remember my tumultuous passage through mexico. because let's face it - it hasn't been a piece of cake, and the ups and downs have been many. thankfully the ups have ended up outweighing the downs.
it also serves as a bridge between my past life and my current life - you see my maya kin has a little circle on top of it. instead of having miguel make one, i had it placed directly under an old cigarette burn, branded into me by mathieu the evening before i left for lima, when he proclaimed "this way, you won't forget me." i chose to incorporate this old scar into my new scar because it is a part of my camino, old meets new, learn from the past and go forward with your future.

a lot of you might think, why the hell does she do this to her body?

well, i like to remember things, people, places. that's one reason why my hair is the way it is - full of people i've met who have given me dreads, talismans and gifts given along the way. i describe my dreads as my photo album, they give me strength, not unlike samson. cut off me locks and you cut off me strength.

my body is my canvas, but i choose to decorate it at certain moments in time, rather spur of the moment, with things that seem appropriate in meaning and in context.. my dots i'd wanted for quite some time but getting them done coming back from ushuaia seemed like it was necessary. my catamarca frog i got done before leaving argentina to permanently bear the mark of this country that marked me so deeply, this country i had dreamed of and loved since early adolescence. also to wake up my immune system before embarquing on my trip to bolivia.

my maya kin was deciphered for me in la paz. i loved it from the minute i saw it. and the phrase caminante del cielo often came up in conversations, used to describe me. it seemed fitting, but would have been out of context to have it done anywhere else than in mexico.

the work i do to my body is for me a way of remembering who i am and what i've done. where i come from, where i'm going. in a maori meets memento sort of way, i hope one day to be able to look at my body, not only as a piece of art, but as a recollection of travels past, all the different times and phases of my life. each step taken, each cut in my skin, a constant reminder of my path through this world and through this life.

thoughts on d.f.

2007-12-14T09:09:00.000-08:00

while diego is sick (sorry man, my fault) or working on school papers, or off interpreting for some hong kong banker, i've taken to night time wandering around the city with a young chilango named emiliano. i met him two days ago when he walked right up to me and asked what my name was. we ended up spending a couple hours together, just going for a ride.

fact sheet:
emiliano, born in london of mexican parents (with some brasilian thrown into the mix, somewhere), smokes a lot of mota and has a kind smile, with cafe au lait skin and honey coloured eyes. he looks younger than his 23 years, studies biology and kung fu, and takes me out at night to find the travestis and prostitutes, helping me see the seedy underbelly of this city, stopping every now and then at a taco stand to savor the different varieties of campechenos to which he is a self proclaimed slave.

these night time lurks have been fun, seeing parts of the city that come alive when the sun goes down.

i wrote a few lines in my notebook about the city which i will share with you , in french. sorry to the english speakers, but for once my francophone readers will have a bit of a breather!

"La Ciudad de Mexico, c'est une ville ou Paris rencontre Calcutta, d'apres la legende.
Une ville ou notre place de la Bastille a ete Mexicanisee et rebaptisee Plaza de la Independencia, ou des rues qui evoquent notre Lutece s'appellent Moliere, Anatole France, Alfred de Musset.
Une ville ou les foules Pekinoises se ruent a travers avenues hautaines dignes de Buenos Aires mais dont l'etat tristoune des maisons colorees en ruine rappellent Lima.
Des vestiges d'epoque coloniale sont stationnes dans des rues aux noms Azteques, Chapultepec, Mixcoac, Cuahtemoc. Cette ville aux multiples facettes, cultures se rencontrant au coin de la rue..
Azteque. Espagnol. Capitalisme.

Ce sont des visages de chiquitana et des nez aquilins, des trapus au visage ride par des annees passees a labourer trop dur pour une paie minime, des jeunes fardees de blanc pour paraitre d'une autre race, des levres rouges et dents manquantes, culs bondes et jambes flasques.

Une ville ou la region totale englobe le Canada au complet, 32 millions de visages, de battements de coeur, de vies en parallele.. 32 millions de reves, de peines, de joies, d'odeurs corporels emanant de tous ces ames se bousculant pour y trouver leur place, leur paix, leurs voeux les plus intenses.

Dans cette ville c'est tout, ou rien. Ou peut etre bien tout et rien a la fois."

stats

2007-12-12T12:34:00.000-08:00

blogger stats for tuesday, december 12.
visits by geographical location...

1. Mexico 21
2. Canada 5
3. United States 3
4. Germany 1
5. Netherlands 1
6. Portugal 1
7. France 1
8. Argentina 1
9. New Zealand 1
10. Australia 1

I can account for the mexican visits as they come from Diego's much visited blog, Canada because it's 4 people from MTL and another from Rouyn Noranda (Oligau!), France as it's probably Scott and Argentina is either Ego or Carry.. but the US (Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Arizona, of all places?!), German, Dutch, Portuguese, Kiwi and Aussie visitors are a mystery! Makes me happy though to see my blog is getting international traffic from people I don´t know.

Drop me a line, ghost visitors!

completely un travel related

2007-12-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

i don't have much to say today, except this...

vous me manquez. vous savez qui vous etes. je regarde les photos de vous, souriants et de bonne humeur, et mon coeur se fend en deux, de ne pas pouvoir partager ces moments avec vous, que vous ne puissiez partager ces moments avec moi.

je vous aime. toujours. mes amours de wankers.

happy 5 year anniversary to my crew. i feel lucky to have been able to participate in it for almost 3 years, even if now I have different priorities. Hopefully one day you guys will come along for some adventuring.

keep on making some noize, and long live NTK!!!!!!

con todo el amor del mundo,

cat speakerlove.

je hais la bureaucratie.

2007-12-11T10:28:00.000-08:00

My passport was not stamped when I entered Mexico, so now I have to pay a fee to get a tourist card. It took me 3 hours today just to get the necessary information, and will have to go back again tomorrow to complete my request. Argh.

I can´t get the dog into Belize without paying some 40$... hence I prefer to just go straight through into Guatemala where it´s a 10$ fee, and then Nicaragua, Hondruas, Costa Rica and Panama as planned, where only health certificates are necessary.

This is a bit of a problem because I am supposed to meet Petra in Veraxcruz and go down to Belize, but right now with all of these extra fees (Tiago sick, me needing a tourist card, etc) I can´t afford it, and I can´t be bothered to fill out paperwork when I can do it the easy way. Maybe we can meet up in Guatemala instead? No clue as to what´s going on, so Pet if you´re reading this, please get in touch with me.

I´ve been feeling quite under the weather these past few days, my muscles are sore and my articulations hurt, I have a constant headache and my nose is stuffed up.. I feel exactly like when I got to Brazil so I´m freaking out that the dengue is back with a vengence, but today I´m feeling better, sort of. I don´t think the suspension is going to happen because I am sick (and also because I can´t afford it), or the scar for that matter. This is me sad, but it´s probably for the better.

At least Tiago is doing better - at least he isn´t pissing orange anymore, and his fur isn´t falling off, although he still isn´t eating as much as I´d like for him to be eating.

So I have to wait to get my documents and then I´m heading out to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas and your Zapatista communidades, here I come.

chilanguemos!

2007-12-09T11:26:00.000-08:00

**edit below**

The annoncement of the day is that as of Christmas I shall no longer be travelling solo with the Boli ... my good friend and fellow freetekno embassador Petra will be joining up with me in Veracruz! This means I will not have to hitchhike alone through such hairraising places as Honduras, Nicaragua and the Darien Gap. And that I will be with one of my favourite people ever, here's hoping we don't kill each other!

Welcome aboard the adventure of a lifetime, miss Petra, remind me to create you an account on this blog so you can post to it.

The other news is the vet thinks Tiago has leptospirosis even though he has been vaccinated for it 3 times. This would suck if it is what he has. I had to collect a murky orange piss sample from my poor Boli to get it sent to the lab. He seems to be doing better but still won't eat and he's getting so skinny. My poor little baby.

My poor aching finances.

(hint: click button. you know you want to help out.)

**here starts edit. read it.**

soooooo,`i`ve already seen the squatted university auditorium which is awesome - they squatted it a few years ago and because the uni is autonomous, they can`t call the cops to evict them.
fucking geniuses! i wish i`d thought of something that cool.

i was taken to see the capital of emo, el chapo, and i felt like i had been transported back to the time when velvet petticoats at the flea market in clignancourt were the most exciting thing in my life. ahh, memories of my goth adolescence. i see all these little emo kids with their big hair and identical lip piercings staring at me like i`m a freak - honey, you know my hair be the hottest thing you`ve ever seen, but honestly, you`re the one walking around with a bird`s nest on your head. that is reserved for robert smith only, so please retire your comb and for the love of whatever fashionable god you believe in, learn to apply that bright red shade of lipstick that really isn`t your colour.

then went out to two house parties with diego la gran puta, the first one was... um. teeny bopper central? diego did his best daddy yankee impression (very convincing) and then we took off to another party, where there was minimal techno and any form of boom boom is welcome these days, so i danced for a couple hours before ending up shitfaced off of 5 beers, how the hell does that happen?
well it does happen and this morning i had quite the problem extracting myself from bed. but i managed to and walked around the downtown for a while (madness) and now i need to find a supermarket so i can whip up some of my orgasm enducing vegetarian lasagna for my favourite puntita who has been so kind in letting me crash at his place, and putting up with the boli`s non stop crying.

can`t wait to see petra again. this is going to be teh awesome (tm), i think we should zip off to costa rica and spend new year`s eve eating coconuts and dancing reggaeton on some jungle beach. yes. sounds lovely.

indeed.

25 millions de chilangos, et moi et moi et moi

2007-12-08T09:42:00.000-08:00

Arrived safely in Mexico City, with a sick Boli who managed to survive the 18 hours in the luggage compartment (pobrecito). The Boli would not eat, would not drink. He was not acting in typical Boli fashion (aka, very annoying), so yesterday I took him to the vet (aie, my pockets, the holes they BURN) who could not figure out what he had.. but he's on antibiotics and seems to be doing a bit better, albeit that he still isn't eating much, is losing industrial quantities of fur and has pus filled eyes.

My Boli, don't die on me, not yet. Please. I can't afford the vet.

This city is una locura total, oue. It's like taking the crowds of Beijing in a hectic Lima setting in a city twice the size of Buenos Aires. Yesterday I tried crossing a street in the centro and there were about 150 people on my side and 200 on the other... it was CRAZINESS getting through that, let me tell you.

I ventured off to the centro to find the artesania market and came back with 50$ worth of seeds, stones, leather cords, waxed string and such. I felt like I had died and gone to artisan heaven! Karin would have been nuts, I'm sure. So now I am broke again but full of stuffs to make more stuffs and now I'm sure I'll be able to sell more stuffs cause I will have more variety on my puesto de venta.

Tuesday normally Diego and I are off to Malinalco with Miguel to do fun fun fun things like get scarred and suspended! In an Aztec pyramid. Squirt.
Squirt squirt squirt.
I'm excited. I can't afford it, but tonight I'm going to go parchar so I can. And if nothing sells well.. such is life, friend.

I will probably hang around here for a week or so and then it's CHIAPAS to go find me a zapatista community to hang out with, then Guatemala, then going to fly through central america to Panama where I have two choices..

a) Take a boat to Colombia.
b) Attempt to go through the Darien Gap

I will say that even if the Darien Gap is reputed to be a killer, the fact that it is a part of the world that few people get to see, and that those who try don't always make it, makes me want to try. That is a pro.
The cons are that I could possibly die, or come out missing important body parts, or come out shellshocked.

Try to talk me out of it, because right now I've got my heart set on getting my name up on the short list of people who have made it across.

Maybe I need to stop pushing my luck... but I think I can make it.

past lives

2007-12-05T05:36:00.000-08:00

in light of my insomnia (goddamn bugs), i spent a few hours looking over things i wrote over the past 3 years.
it went from hope, getting out of paris and the dismal situations that i lived in and starting my new life in montreal, to despair, in about one year.

a blog post made a few days before my 22nd birthday states:

"In 5 days I will be 22 and I can only think of what a waste my 21st year has been. What have I accomplished other than holing myself into oblivion and partying?
This year will be the year I take on South America. This year will be the year I watch the end of the world in awe and anazement.

This year I'm going to find out just what it is I'm supposed to do."

I am very proud of how far I have come this past year. in fact, i'd go far as to say i'm astonished at the progress i've made. i don't think i need to go into detail of my private hell i made for myself in 2006, but i was pretty far gone and when i see who i am now and what i've accomplished all i can think is that maybe there is hope for me after all.

that having been said, i say my goodbyes to the island today.

**edit**

as i walked back from the bus terminal, a bus full of school children zoomed by and i heard squeals of delight as a group of girls and boys yelled "QUE PELO CHIDOOOOOO" (awesome hair!), it made me smile something fierce.

i leave for d.f. at 3, by bus and not by finger, because the bus is pretty cheap and i'd like to be able to zip through. i'd hate to get stuck somewhere. i really just want to go and see diego, get my scar done, and head to chiapas.
my christmas plans of being in buenos aires are pretty much nixed by this point.. it's taken me 2 months to get to the halfway mark, so i'd say i'll probably be in buenos aires by january. in which case my new plan is to find me some tribe who have never heard of this jesus bloke that way christmas is non existant this year.

sounds good, yes?

d.f. scares the shit out of me, though. it's babylon incarnate. 25 million people? that is NUTS, how can so many people live in one city? i mean canada has what 30 million people and it's the second largest country in the world! granted 2/3 of our territory is pretty much inhabitable unless you like permafrost, so i guess it's not the best example.

it's going to be weird being back in a city, an actual CITY, after having spent the past 5 months travelling around the country and the past 2 months on the beach. even when i was in L.A. i never left Venice Beach because i didn't see any reason to go into the downtown core.. i liked my little canals and my beach and my boardwalk.
but i am looking forward to seeing diego again and being back in a hustle and bustle, maybe actually going out for a drink in a place that plays something other than banda music. i would have expected more reggaeton in mexico, alas, i have been failed.

i'm kind of scared that tiago will go nuts in a place like d.f. though, he's jumpy, and he likes his freedom, so i have no idea how he is going to react to being in the largest city on earth. let's hope he doesn't bite anyone in the crotch this time?

(she was a tweaker! she came in between me and my bag! he was just doing his job. good boli. bite all them bad meth addicts.)

goodbye isla. goodbye beach. goodbye ocean. we will see eachother soon.. but before that, i want to go back to the jungle.

quiero seeeeer tu dueno, y algo mas

2007-12-02T17:20:00.000-08:00

ahh, banda music. it goes poom poom poom, poom poom poom, and it's slow and syrupy, melancholy or romantic, sometimes uplifting.

i can't tell the difference.

i'd rather listen to reggaeton, thanks.

tomorrow off to town for financial reasons - i get 100 pesos for running some errands, woot. then i figure out how i'm getting to d.f. to see my puntita!

i've added a new part to the blog... the thank yous. it's starting to be quite a long list, so if you're in between entries and you still can't get enough, go read it :)
i figured enough people have helped me along the way in different ways that they deserved a spot on here.. they too are a part of my journey, why not include them.

like a cold steady rain

2007-12-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

well, at least i got to test the rain stopping capacities of a thatched palm roof - it rained last night. i also got to discover that my sleeping bag is impermeable (can you say that in english? meh, franglais works too.) but my hammock isn't - result, a slippery hammock and a warm blanket.

i am going to attempt going into town today and not getting kicked out. nevermind that i can't afford the boat back, it's 5 pesos, i can always find 5 pesos.
i don't like leaving the island much, in truth.. the island is like a little paradise away from the city, what with such large coconut groves, and the mangroves, and the dirt roads and children running barefoot, calling out to the dogs "CHUCHO!".

tiago woke me up this morning, he was singing. it's not the first time i've heard him sing, he used to do it in la paz a lot, mau would start howling and kaiser and tiago would follow.
this could usually go on for a good 30 minutes, as i watched on, shaking my head laughing. el cantador de perros.

anyway this morning before i opened my eyes i heard this, thought it was just mau howling with the dogs again so i went to turn over and put my hand out and felt empty humid ocean air, opened my eyes and saw that i was in a hammock where the pleasant peppery lavender smell was nowhere to be found - in its place, a heavy salty smell and a steel green ocean, the colour reminding me of piercing eyes.

tiago was sitting on the palapa roof, singing out to a dog who was singing somewhere further down the beach.

strange morning. strange night, too.

my self esteem and high spirits have been rather lacking these days, ever since i found out the boat wouldn't be leaving till february and the whole ideal with the cops. it makes me sad and upset, thinking that i really can'tdo this on my own, surviving just off of my meagre jewelery sales.
but to admit defeat is to fail, and i don't consider it a failure even if i have to ask for help. there are always people who extend their hand to me when i've fallen, and they are never forgotten.. they're the ones who will hold a special place in my book, i'll dedicate entire chapters to them!

i keep trying to keep a positive outlook but it's hard, i mean anyone who thinks this is glamourous needs to come out and see how i'm living...
i have no problem living with the bare necessities but you need to have an expandable stomach to deal with the foodless periods, be able to sleep anywhere no matter the circumstance, find ways of surviving even though none seem to be available, keep a smile so the charm keeps flowing even if you want to break down and cry like a child. which is how i feel these days.

i miss my friends. and my family. there are days i'm happy being alone, and others i wish i could be more sociable, which i'm having problems with these days. i keep mostly to myself, hanging around with tiago.

well, attempting to go into town today around noon. hope it doesn't rain, but i hope it rains finances.

spange, spange, spange.

2007-11-30T07:44:00.000-08:00

well, mike, 46, british skipper, isn't leaving until march. and won't be going much further south than mexico. oh, snap. but he assured me he would listen to the net every morning and transmit my information if someone mentions needing a cook or any kind of crew on board going south, which is nice of him.

the cops keep being annoying and kicking me out of the spots i try to go sell in. next time, apparently, they confiscate my wares. that's a good 200-250$ worth of stuff made, so i need to lay low these days, which sucks because I have a whopping 15 pesos to my name, i can maybe get 2 tacos with that. and i still need to pay for my hammock space. argh.

so this is me saying BE KIND, PRESS MY BUTTON, SEND MONIES.

it's almost xmas, after all.

***EDIT***

Dear Santa,

This year, although I am lacking a chimney and milk and cookies to give you (how does Pacifico with a lime sound?), I would like to say that I'm sorry I have been such a bad spender. That having been said, I would really like it if you brought me the following gift, for which I promise to... get a job upon my arrival which would not involve me sitting on the ground in front of really crappy jewlery made from marijuana fibre.

So Santa, please remember me this year. I will leave out a lime, a knife, and a fresh Pacifico on the porch for you. Please come early. I have a duck to cook for Carry.

Love,

Cat.

p.s. Sorry for that one thing I did. I know you know what I'm talking about. No one else needs to know.

un dia si dios quiere...

2007-11-28T14:32:00.000-08:00

well. a bunch of things.

the other day, after having spent some 8 hours parchando, no money in pockets. i got on the boat back to my island and sat down to write when a man named Montana came to sit and talk with me. finally he offered to go smoke a joint, and as i got up to follow i noticed a piece of paper on the ground. i picked it up.

"Cat

Buen viaje
Vaya con dios!"

inside the note was 10$ and 50 pesos.

O_o

no name. no idea where it came from. the american couple who had just left chabela's? christophe? the nice dutch lady from the boat who i spoke to the same day? it could have just been placed on my bag, which i had just manipulated, or could have been in there for a while. so strange, so cryptic, but welcome as i had only 7 pesos left, enough to take the boat back to mazatlan but not back to the island if i didn't make any money the next day.

yesterday i went to the marina and dropped off a note on the bulletin board announcing that a young girl with no sailing experience but mucho enthusiasm, very versatile and fast learning was looking to work, cooking or cleaning or any odd job, in exchange for a trip to central america.
today i got an email back! so i'm going to hop over there tomorrow and talk with the guy and see where he's going and if we get along.. as Scott pointed out, once you get on a boat, there's no getting off until you get to port.
i hope this works out. it would be so incredible to work my way to panama on a boat!

aaaaaaand, new living situation! and pictures!

mi hamaca is now installed on the roof of this very sweet man named John's house. i wake up every morning looking at this:

this is me waking up.

begin jealousy... now. hahah. personally i've been living on or around beaches for almost 2 months so now it's just same old, same old. i will admit that going to sleep and waking up listening to the sound of the waves is very nice, though, and it's great for the dog because he loves the water, the dead fish, and he can run to his little heart's content.

tiago likes beaches. what a lucky bolivian, most never see the beach.

look at how cute and big he is.

Now, pictures of the author, because it has indeed been a long time, hasn't it?

deep in conversation. hrm.

making jewlery in mulege, a few weeks back.

gratuitous myspace shot! nah i needed a good picture of my eyes for someone who asked for it.

a girl and her dog...

... we wander together.

more when life gets exciting again. ie: having no stress. have no money, but have beer and lime, and can find fish on the beach. yay, fresh dead fish.

isla de la piedra

2007-11-26T09:44:00.000-08:00

as predicted, i ended up spending saturday night on the beach. i found a gazebo near a bit of a grass patch so i put my stuff down there, and walked across the street to see if i could find some cheap food. as i made my way back on the sidewalk, three young girls stopped in their tracks.

"OH!"
"Wow!!"
"Look at her hair!"

one of them ran up to me and started stroking my dreads, the two others grabbing my pigtails and putting them on their heads. one of them looks up at me with big brown eyes and asks if i`ll give her my hair.

"Well i can`t really just pull it off..."

"Oh please! just this fuschia one!"

i rummaged around for my scissors in my bag and cut it off, she held it up to the other girls.

"she gave me one! look at how pretty it is!"

the two others demanded they get one too. i figured it wouldn`t be fair, so i cut off a purple one and a pink one.

they ran off after their mothers, each proclaiming her dread was prettier than the other´s.

it was cute.

found my way back to my pack and tiago, and set up camp. about 15 minutes later `m pulled out of sleep by the sound of my alarm - tiago is barking. i wake up and see five policemen.

shit.

"uh, what the hell are you doing, girl?"

"um. sleeping?"

"where are you from?"

"france."

"why are you sleeping outside?"

"the only hotel i can afford won`t let me stay with my dog. i do have to sleep somewhere, don`t i?"

"i suppose. well. it´s ok for tonight. but find yourself a room tomorrow. it`s dangerous out here."

strangely enough everytime i opened my eyes i saw a cop standing nearby. cant see how dangerous that is, unless of course you consider my cops-stealing-my-monies-in-tijuana experience.

yesterday morning i was wandering off to the market to get a bite to eat (and a banana papaya milkshake, man i love those things) when a man painting a sign on a store stops me in the street.

"is that a chucho?"

"beg your pardon?"

"your dog. is he from mexico?"

"no."

"oh. he looks like a mexican chucho, where did you get him?"

"bolivia. he`s a callejero"

apparently this little thumb thing he has on his front paws is a sign of being a street dog, and a lot of mexican ones (chuchos) have them. i ended up talking with him, oscar is his name, and he asked where i was staying, i told him what had happened the night before.
he shook his head. "you should go to chabela`s on isla de la piedra. she won`t mind our dog, and if you have a tent i`m sure she won`t even make you pay 50 pesos."

well i have no tent but i have my trusty hammock.

i jumped on the lancha (boat) to isla de la piedra and started walking. turns out that chabela is actually isabelle, an artisan from montreal who specializes in making stuff out of coconuts, and she agreed to let me put up my hammock for 45 pesos a night, including use of shower, kitchen and bathroom.

and she lives right on the beach. it costs 15 pesos to go to and from the island, so basically it`s a 5$ a day deal. not so bad.

i went to hunt my first coconut by kicking the tree a couple times. i can`t climb a tree with no branches to save my life (something i need to learn, note to self) so it was pretty comical.

then someone tapped me on the shoulder. i turned around. in his left hand, a machete. in his right, a cocount.

he showed me how to open it to get the water out. i drank half of it, and gave the other half to tiago. then i hacked away at it to get the flesh out. once again. half for me, half for tiago.

it was delicious.

i met my upstairs neighbours, bud growers from grass valley. their kush knocked me out and sent me reeling back to my hammock, where the gegenas ("no see ems") ate me alive all night. apparently they also lay eggs under the skin, which uh, sucks cause i'm covered in bites.
must change hammock`s location from bamboo grove to somewhere far from annoying bugs. that, or buy a tiki torch.

but for that i must get to work, which is what i`m going to do! wish me luck.

goodbye baja, hello mainland

2007-11-24T08:08:00.000-08:00

so much stress for nothing! i got tiago on the boat without a problem. and he put up with the 18 hours in a cage pretty well, he didn´t cry, didn´t have any accidents.

such a good boli, yes you are.

i feel like my blog has become overstuffed with my stress, i mean.. i went to some of the most beautiful beaches in la paz and didn´t even mention them. then again what´s the point of mentioning "white sand, clear, turquoise water, bright sun..." cause i mean, a beach is a beach, right? the boys (ale and mau) tried to get me on a surfboard but that didn´t work out too well. i wish i had pictures of that.

in the meantime, here are some stolen pictures of baja beaches, where ale, mau and i spent a lot of our time.

el tecolote. gegena free.

balandra bay. famous place, full of gegenas.

balandra, again.
somewhere, in pachuca, there exists a phone belonging to a certain alejandro in which there is a photo of a cat and a mau hugging in front of this beach.
hurry up, mamon, i want that picture.

anyway so la paz is behind me now, snif, kind of, now i´m alone again in a new city. i met some people on the boat, a francophone from Switzerland named Christophe (OMG FRENCH IT´S BEEN SO LONG) and some Mexican guys who were a hoot. One of them offered to come around later on to find me and he´s going to try and find me a place to stay, which is cool, but for some reason I have an aching feeling I´mma be sleeping on the beach again. 18 hours on a ferry is looong, but we got dinner and breakfast, and everyone kept buying beer for me so that was cool beans. not quite worth the 85$, although that ferry was the most luxurious ferries i´ve ever seen, then again i´m used to ones that take a few minutes to a couple hours at most. i still feel like i´m on it, still feel the rolling of the boat.
so just got into mazatlan about an hour ago, tried to find the spot where the artesanos go but apparently i need a permit to sell on the street here which makes me angry cause in order to buy said permit i need to sell said artesanias, it´s like a snake biting his own tail thing. ugh.

some days i feel like my expectations are too high, that i´ve set the bar too high for myself and i´m sinking, other days i feel like everything is riding high and i have luck on my side. today i´m a little from column a, a little from column b. just feels like the universe is trying to tell me something. something along the lines of ...

"hey you, yeah you, the freak with the 50 lb backpack, bolivian canine and travel cage on your head, you heard me, what the hell do you think you´re doing?"

umm. fufilling my destiny?

"bullshit! you´re digging your own grave! hello, reality check!"

umm.

i think my energy and my force of will to survive and overcome these obstacles should be stronger than all of these things. after all this is only a test.

it´s weird, there´s so much i want to see and do and right now i´m just stuck in a rut of i can´t do this when the entire point of this trip was proving to myself that i can do this, but it´s just getting harder and harder as time goes on. there were days in venice beach (LA) where i wouldn´t make a dime and people flying a sign that said "FUCK YOU" could make 40$ in 10 minutes. that used to depress the hell out of me. i´m sitting here knotting away and trying to make an honest living and i have to be thigh deep in a dumpster to eat (and what terrific dumpsters) and these dudes run around and say "fuck you! i´m hungryy, gimme some cash!" and make more than i do. jesus christ what is wrong with the world.
or maybe it´s what i make? granted i´m not very good yet, well i´m good at the knots that i do know and people seem to like what i do, but i´ll admit it´s not yet varied. i really want to be working with leather more than hemp but i do what i can with what i have and i think that´s the important thing. when i get to d.f. i´ll stock up on stones and seeds and leather so i can start making other stuff to add to my puesto de venta.

it´s the first time in a week that i´ve woken up to something other than mau saying mija come smoke a joint, wouldn´t mind the joint right about now, wouldn´t mind getting my morning hug either. need to find me some new friends. shouldn´t be hard. i´m a happy shiny bouncy ball of joy with multi coloured dreads and a nicotine stained smile that will melt your heart or make you want to buy me a different brand of toothpaste.

off to find the artesanos and figure out where the loophole in the system is, hope i make some $$$, hope you all are safe.

i am.

incoming grey hairs! zomg!

2007-11-23T10:20:00.000-08:00

"Catalina."

"Catalina."

"Catalina."

"MUUUUUH?"

"Wake up and come smoke a joint with me, mija."

"Muh."

(for those who know me, you know that MUH is morning speak, especially when following a night of tequila shot upon tequila shot upon... good gracious Natalia! You are my new hero.)

I woke up and went in the kitchen and smoked a joint with Mau. So last supper style.

"I`m sad you`re leaving. You`re a nutcase, but you`re also a great person. You always have a home in La Paz, if you ever come back. Will you ever come back?"

Biting my lip.

"Maybe. I don`t know."

"Well if you do, you have a home with me. Don`t ever hesitate, my door is always open for you. And maybe you won´t get out today, La Paz has a funny way of keeping people stuck here."

No mames!

And then something really funny happened but I`m not going to broadcast that to the world. A hug, a kiss, a cuidate mucho, and goodbye.

Poof. Goodbye, Mau. You´re beautiful. Really. Maybe in another life.

---

Ok. Day on. Run to Baja Ferries, buy ticket (85$ what!) ask woman at counter if dog can come, she says yes in cage. Run back to Mau´s, get stuff, get dog. Run to buy cage, go to bus station, but ticket for Pichilingue. All is good. Look at ferry ticket. Oh noes.

"NO ANIMALS ALLOWED."

oh. god. no. que pinche pedo.

So. I´m freaking out. 30 new grey hairs have elected my head as place of residence along with the other 500 that have popped out since I started this trip. Stress! ARGH! OUT OF MY LIFE!

Options? Get ticket paid back and prey that I can afford a plane ticket from San jose del Cabo to Guadalajara? Hitchhike back up to TJ and go down through Mexicali?

Hop a cargo? Seems like the best option. Cargo. Yes. Cargo. There is always cargo in a port, right?

In other news that isn´t cat`s raging case of stress (tm), i`ve found an artist for my next skar (if i can afford it) who also offered to do suspensions in some pyramids out near oaxaca. QUE CHIDO! especially since the skar i want to get is the symbol for caminante del cielo which is mayan, so having it done in such an incredibly spiritual place and on mayan land would just be so beautiful.

que buena onda.

alright. bus leaving in 30 minutes. in one hour my fate is sealed... let`s hope tiago doesn`t fuck up yet another thing (i love my dog, but damn it`s difficult.)

tacos for breakfast

2007-11-22T08:46:00.001-08:00

"Good morning Catalina"

"Good morning Mau"

"You hungry? Want breakfast?"

"Sure... what do you suggest?"

"Tacos."

(●ω●)

eeeh... what?! tacos... for breakfast?!

crazy mexicans.

Still no bag, probably not until tonight, anyway. Dammit. I walked around for a few hours last night, and finally this cute little mexican girl with a mohawk (!!!) comes up to me and says, "you´re so beautiful! I love your hair! Where are you from girl?" and turns out she works at a bar, so she called me in and gave me some free shots cause no one was in there yet. Her name is Natalia and she´s originally from TJ (tijuana), and I stayed and chatted with her for a good 2 or 3 hours until I figured I should probably haul ass back to Mau´s and feed Tiago. She told me to come back tonight cause it´s free tequila for girls, I asked what kind of music they´d be playing and she rolled her eyes.

"Reggaeton"

I am SOOOOO there, girl. See you tomorrow.

Got back to Mau´s, he kept trying to force feed me an omelette cause he says I don´t eat enough, which is probably true but then again i´m used to eating a meal a day from being dirt broke. I conceded and ate the stupid omelette (which was full of garlic mmm, garlic, stop feeding me aphrodisiacs, fool!) while he howled away making the dogs go crazy (El cantador de perros oue), i swear that man is crazy. I made a few necklaces cause I have hemp again (yay), listened to him screaming over his video game "A HUEVOOO!!! CHINGOOOON!". I fixed a necklace for him, something a Japanese friend gave to him which didn´t look like it needed to be fixed but he´s been asking me to make a new braid for it so I did. He seemed really happy with the result and gave me a bone crushing hug saying, "Now I have something to remember my cosita francesa!"

Awww. At least everything is less.. awkward than it was. Cause it was awkward for a few days. Now it seems like it´s back to normal, minus a few things, ha.
This should be a lesson to me.. like a crash course in Traveling 101:

"Never sleep with the people who are letting you stay with them, even if they look like they walked out of a Calvin Klein ad when they`ve just stepped out of the shower, even if they have the most amaaaaaazing dark green eyes and cheek bones you could cut yourself on, even if they have lips like whoa and pretty dulce de leche coloured skin, even if they smell like lavender and pepper, and ESPECIALLY even if they say, you can sleep on the floor or with me."
Hrm.
Bed versus cold tile. Gorgeous Mexican surfer boy versus hairy Bolivian canine. Hrm.

Hard to pick which sounds more appealing.

Ever been to an all you can eat buffet chock filled with all of your favourite foods, and have your mouth screwed shut? I haven't, but I have had to sleep in the same bed as a Mau and not be able to touch the Mau, and that is torture.

So the floor it is for me.

/end bitterness. Not really bitter. But still. I`d have preferred a different ending. I WALK OUT ON YOU, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. GRR.

And speaking of endings...

I know I keep talking about leaving people behind and such but it is something that´s been on my mind for a while. There are so many people who I love and care for immensly and I haven´t seen a lot of them in a long time. My mother, for example, and my father, but there´s also all of my wankers back in Montreal.. I feel so selfish for having taken off the way I did, but I think I need to elaborate a little on why I left so abruptly.

"So I’m up at dawn putting on my shoes
I just want to make a clean escape
I’m leaving but I don’t know how soon
I know I’m leaving but I don’t know where to"

First, imagine going from the Amazon to concrete jungle, fluorescent lighting, traffic, white skin. Shock, complete and utter shock. Imagine going from living day to day to stagnant sedentarism. It´s like an iron fist to the jaw.
I broke down. I spent 2 weeks crying. I spent 2 weeks bashing my head against the wall wondering why the hell I´d gotten on that plane, why I didn´t stay. So I left for the West coast and tried to make money but failed. I got bored. I wasn´t getting any news from Montreal, and all the news I was getting kept breaking my heart, over and over. I miss my family, really, but all I could imagine going back there was not being able to find any work, being miserable, and having to go through another winter too cold for people of sound mind.

"it only gets worse when i´m stuck in one place.. i´m always pacing around or walking away..."

So I went south, and kept on going. And I´m going to keep on going. Even though I miss my parents, my friends, my family, even though with every new city I love and lose, even though I hate saying goodbye, I am going to keep on going until I get tired, until my feet are bleeding and broken. like they sing in my favourite song..

"Je ne sais pas ou je vais, oh ca je l'ai jamais bien su,
Mais si jamais je le savais, je crois bien que je n'irai plus..
Aujourd'hui je t'aime, oui mais demain, on ne peut jamais etre sur de rien, on va toujours seul sur la route, je continue coute que coute.."

I feel like I need to apologize for living my life this way, because when I left I left a lot of things untended. My apartment is gone now, my stuff is at a friend´s (merci crevette), but I left without saying goodbye. I left without saying I love you, take care, I´m sorry I´m so unstable and can´t live like this anymore. I´m sorry I want to walk alone with my dog, and be myself, and wander through this life like the mayan caminante del cielo. That is my purpose, and it was my choice, but that does not mean that it doesn´t hurt me every time I have to say goodbye.

"and it all boils down to one quotable phrase ´if you love something, give it away´"

But I shouldn´t have to apologize for wanting to live my life the way I live it, for loving people, for loving cultures, for loving seeing something new everyday, meeting new faces, speaking another language than my own, and wanting to discover the world.

" "if you're still free, start running away... cause we're comin' for ya!"

I´m sorry that I haven´t seen my mother in almost a year, and that the last time I saw Sarah was for her mother´s funeral; that Amelie and Crevette are stuck in Montreal when I´d rather have them here on the road with me, that Niko needs to go back to France and I don´t know when I´ll ever see my big brother again (on a eu nos differences mais dans mon coeur, tu es et sera toujours mon hermano), that Aprille is going to Thailand and not Buenos Aires (HERPASSO SECORRO).

Anyway. Thought I should clear some things up. And I leave you with Bright Eyes, Landlocked Blues. It´s a good summary. That, and it will always make me remember Aeon and Courtney who picked me up in Garberville one rainy day, and who I left in LA two weeks later. Hope you guys are well.

(quotes from Landlocked Blues (Bright Eyes) and Ou je vais (La rue Ketanou))

p.s. this blog entry was edited 10 000 times. Hope you like it. I think it´s very entertaining.

la concha de la lora....

2007-11-21T17:19:00.000-08:00

universe, please stop sending me signals that force me to stay in la paz. please stop, ok?

now that i´ve found a cage (within 3 blocks of the bus terminal, oh thank the lord), i left my bag at a friend´s house and he was supposed to bring it back around 2 but didn´t. so i have to wait to get my bag so i can leave. what the hell, man!

anyway! last night met a bunch of great people, pedro and renée, awesome people and we sat around while ale played some traditional mexican songs (la llorona goes on and on and on...) and drank a shitton of mezcal and i ate the worm and now i think i am the worm, or that i have an amoeba or some intestinal parasite.

enough about bad things my god! i´m in mexico! it´s hot out! there´s no snow! yay.

well i guess if i manage to get my bag back tomorrow i´m off to pichilingue and then mazatlan... makes me sad, kind of. ale left this morning and invited me to come see him in pachuca, and tomorrow i´ll have to say goodbye to mau who has been so good to me, cooking for me, and never letting me buy my own beer.

i wish things had been different. we don´t have much to say to each other these days, but it´s also cause i´m always running around trying to figure stuff out and he´s always passed out from smoking too much weed and cause he gets up at ungodly hours for his school (marine biology go figure). in any case i hope he hasn´t minded having a crazy french girl and her even crazier dog in his house for a week.

now just cross your fingers that i manage to get my bag, the cage, and on the ferry for mazatlan before i do something stupid.

puto boli

2007-11-20T12:33:00.000-08:00

tiago decided to escape on me for 4 days, leaving me in a state of shock, which lead to complete despair and finally me trying to beat the shit out of a banana tree.

needless to say the tree won.

so this is me wandering through la paz at 7 am, at noon, at sunset, in the middle of the night, barefoot, whistling. crying hysterically, calling out to my dog. tiago. tiago. por donde andas amorcito?

this morning when i heard something fidgeting with the front gate, then the sound of something metallic, and a run. i lept out of bed and ran out the door and lo and behold, was the puto boli himself, tiago la terreur. a little burnt on his nose but other than that he`s fine. i`m so happy he came back, i couldn`t imagine life without him. in fact, life without him was terrible. he`s annoying as all hell but i wouldn`t give him up for anything.

the past 4 days haven´t been so great, therefore, what with me looking for my dog and not noticing the situation with m. going from whee! to meh in .5 seconds. we had a little chat last night which ended with me saying something along the lines of, such a shame, you`re a pretty little thing, but i`m used to it by now, i always end up leaving, so i try not to get too attached. it`s cool man, no worries. i`ll be out tomorrow, to which he said no no, it`s cool, you can stay.
i wonder if this reaction(*cough* rejection *cough*) came from me being a wreck or if it`s because i´m leaving...
or that i`m trying to, anyway, cause everything seems to be holding me back these days.

now i have to buy a transport cage, but i can`t afford the cage and passage to mazatlan, so i`m not sure of what to do. i am going to need a cage. this is fact. however, a 200$ cage is not necessary. in fact, i could buy the 200$ cage but then i`d have all of 2$ to my name and that won`t get me to mazatlan.
a vet has an old beaten up one for 70$ but it has no door, but she said she could fix it up for me. the thing is i want to leave like, now, right, cause i`m not sure how much longer i want to stick around. actually, i have 30 days to get to buenos aires, so that doesn´t give me much time to hang around staring at the ceiling, or walk around this boring city that i know by heart now.

i leave you with this heartwarming self portrait taken 2 months ago, the day i embarqued on this crazy trip, in rock island, washington.
´

we`re just one big happy family.

te deja con buen sabor en la boca oue

2007-11-17T16:13:00.000-08:00

ahhh, peace at last.

now i`m living in a cockroach and meth free environment with a guy from michoacan so it seems like a more mexican deal than the previous one which was living with a gringo in a meth motel (what else were we expecting for 25$ a week?).

the story as follows:
i got rid of the gringo and got the hell out of the motel inhabited by cockroaches and methheads.. the gringo was talking about robbing some old man and getting tons of money so i walked out, sorry man but i can`t be around someone like that. took tiago for a stroll on the beach and there i met two artesanos (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL WEEK?!) who i hung out with for a while until they brought me over to mauricio`s where i`ve been living ever since. he heard about the gringo and the hotel and asked me if i was ok and i said not really, i want to leave la paz, so he offered a place to stay so i`d change my negative ideas about baja.
and now i feel like this huge weight has lifted off my shoulders, no more brad, no more meth neighbours, my stuff is in a secure spot and tiago is happy cause he has a new friend named kaiser (yet another pitbull). and mauricio is a really nice person, in fact he`s a beautiful person with a lot of heart and he`s radiant, he just has this crazy glow and amazing energy flow. and just as beautiful to look at, man how do i find these guys i´ll never know, but thank whichever god you pray to, cause i`m not complaining.

which gets me to my next topic: the bane of the traveler`s existence.
the thing about wandering around is that you meet a lot of wonderful people, a lot of assholes as well, but let´s focus on the positive. and i´ve met a lot of incredibly kind people, interesting conversations and fun times were had. and i´ve had to leave all of them behind me, which is always sad. it breaks my heart everytime when i have to say goodbye to them ..this means you, arica, and you, buenos aires, and you, lima, and you, ushuaia, and you, samaipata, and now it also means you, la paz. so many friends, travel companions, lovers, i miss them all and this time i know it´ll be no different.
i guess it´s just the way it goes, i always end up leaving wonderful people behind me, never knowing if i´ll ever see them again, or what could have been.

màs alla del sur!

2007-11-14T14:29:00.000-08:00

(sorry Diego, I stoled your book title)

HI!

I´m alive!

So where to start? Cherry season ended and I found myself without a cause. What to do? I chased BC around for a while and then finally hitchhiked down to California to a festival to see my sister, and then hitched up and down the coast until getting to Venice Beach where I stayed for 2 weeks, making necklaces and hairwraps to survive up until Halloween, when I found a ride that dropped me off some 300 kilometres into Baja California. Between Venice and San Quintin my wallet disappeared, so although my bank card is no longer in my possession, donations are still appreciated and will always find their way to me, so please guys, remember your favourite adventurer cannot survive on filtered water and tacos alone.
Since parting ways with the ride, I´ve been hitching through the desert, accompanied although I would rather be alone, but here is our last stop together - he goes back to Alaska and I go north, which should put a stop to creepy guy staring at me when I wake up. We´ve been sleeping in abandoned ranches, behind Tecate factories and for a week in a palapa on the beach where I met Giulia, a wonderful woman, ageless, who´d been living on this beach for a few months. She inspired me to keep on going. If you read this contessa, I wear your strachi with pride (and the Mexicans love it, skeezes), I hope you love your tresses still, and that they´ll still be in when we (inch´Allah) meet up in Colombia.

Now I´m in La Paz, Mexico. It´s beautiful, it´s sunny, it´s hot, i´m browner than brown, but no one will buy anything from me, and it seems like hair wraps went out of fashion along with dayglo spandex. I also have a wisdom tooth making kits way through my cheek which always makes for great times, thank god for penicillin.

The adventure, hopefully, should follow to Puerto Vallarta and from there... a boat to Costa Rica? A bus to Tapachula where the Ticabus will take me to Panamá? Continue hitchhiking through such hair raising places as Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador? I hope not. I like adventure, but I like being alive too.

Maybe if someone sponsored me I´d do something crazy like that, maybe even go through the Darian Gap like this dude I met who is doing it on a bike (but am i that crazy? I´ll leave that to the next blog entry....)

In the meantime I continue attempting the life of an artesana so that I may one day see the Buenos Aires penis once again (the Obelisk, you perverts) and that Tiago might one day see his birthplace once more and happily frolick through heaps of trash with his parents.

More to come soon from the crazy chick with the crazy hair, crazy love to all and remember... DO WHAT YOU´RE AFRAID OF!

anticipation

2007-08-10T16:05:00.000-07:00

suffering from a large dose of culture clash, and seriously empty pockets, i high tailed it out of montreal (rather abruptly might i add) and crossed canada to come pick cherries in the okanagan valley.
i'm mentally preparing for my return down south which i hope will happen sometime in october. i've decided to go down to mexico and go through central america to panama, where i'll jump on a boat for columbia, and from there make my way back down to argentina.
i'm deciding against taking the plane for tiago's sake, also because i want some more adventure in my life :)
stay tuned for updates in the coming months!

the long road home

2007-06-20T19:38:00.000-07:00

This was my original itinerary:

This is what I ended up doing:

Here are the stats:

hours of travel:

bus: 275 hours
train: 63 hours
hitchhiking: 32 hours
boat: 8 hours
plane: 1 hour (+ 21 hours to and from lima)

total: 400 hours

total kilometres:

19 290 kilometres

countries visited:

Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil.

diseases contracted:

1: strange skin eruption. possibly dengue.

number of freak accidents:

1. Carmen de Patagones, stupidly walking through low tide while playing accordeon
2. Buenos Aires, stupidly waltzing on flat surface.
3. Isla del Sol, stupidly slipping on gravel surface, but miraculosly unscathed.

No young marginalized white chicks were harmed during this trip.

Involuntarily, at least.

(Buenos Aires, I'm looking at you.)

Many bottles of beer, however, lost their contents.

I'm back in Montreal now after two weeks and it's hard. It's really hard. But, in keeping with the joyous, uplifting spirit of this blog, I would rather not talk about the hell that was Atlanta, or getting Tiago on the plane. Let's keep it happy.

My bag is officially dead - the zippers are busted, the ties are gone, and I found the contents exploded all over the plastic bag that it was held in when I went to retreive it on the belt at PET. I'm sad, but el Monstro lasted 12 years, which is an honorable lapse of time for a backpack. Although I'm not retiring him completely, he has indeed made his last long scale trip, but for short periods and small loads he should handle it fine.

Bookmark this blog, and check back in the fall, for the new installment of the adventures of a girl and her (new and improved) backpack.

Thanks for reading.

jungle fever - the shaman and la madre

2007-06-02T14:14:00.000-07:00

we left lima last saturday direction tingo maria, after one of my "brilliant" last minute ideas about going onto yurimaguas instead of iquitos, thinking we could get there from tingo maria. turns out that while tingo maria is really beautful, in the high jungle in the cordillera azul, the roads out of there are terrible and to get to yurimaguas you need to take a taxi to toroche (35 soles) and then a 4 x 4 to tarapoto (25 soles) and then a micro to yurimaguas. um, no.
so we hopped on a bus for pucallpa and upon arriving tried to figure out how to get to iquitos, do we boat it (3 days), oops no boats leaving today, or do we fly it (45 minutes), shit we missed the plane. we wandered back out to town figuring we´d sleep on it when we met a basque who told us about a community he knew some 5 hours by boat where he´d been before. we figured well why the hell not? so the next morning at 8 am we hopped on a crowded boat down the ucayali river towards massisea.

the shipibo who live in the jungle seem more southeast asian than peruvian, they look filipino or indonesian, with fine, graceful features and beautiful smiles. they are a bueatiful people, living with their traditions, without electricity or running water, living off of exchanges and sharing the wealth with the community.

we were not to stay in massisea, though, and walked the 3 kilometres separating massisea from the small community of nuevo ceylan further down the river. when we got to the last bend some 10 children came running out towards us, all sñiles, hola, hola! and led us down the dirt path towards the house of the shaman.

he was not there, though, but his wife was, and she fed us a delightful plate of spaghetti, rice, plantain and chicken, with the most delicious glass of lemonade my taste buds have ever experienced.

teo arrived and greeted us all warmly, with a kind smile, ustedes son muy especiales para mi, como mi niños, and told us we would go see la madre ayahuasca the following day, eat a bit, and then do our first ceremony, relax the next day, do another ceremony on thursday and on friday we would leave.

perfect.

we walked around the village greeting the locals, children following us and running around, playing with tiago, beautiful smiles and ragged clothes leading the way down a muddy path lined with papaya trees and plantain, all the way to the chocolate coloured river.

we slept in the adjoining room in teo´s house, before going to sleep drinking coca and yerba maté, exchanging our stories.. a 20 year old american boy named riley was there with us an ex intravenous heroin and cocaine user now afflicted with hepatits c, he had been there for 2 months on a cleanse, he told us his story and i felt bad for this young boy with so many demons.

the next morning we woke up and drank our "medecine" before trekking some 12 kilometres to see la madre, a vine about 15 metres high that grows from the ground to the sky, an impressive tressed bark that seemed hundreds of years old, the energy emanating from this plant was amazing. we sat in the clearing for an hour or so, butterflies swirling all around us, coming to rest on our bodies, fluttering off to explore another body, probably thinking we were some sort of malformed flower.

the night arrived and we prepared ourselves for the ceremony, drinking this brick red karkadet tasting liquid - the minute i drank it i could feel it rushing troughmy body, shivering, wrapping myself in blankets to warm myself up. i sat there listening to the sounds of the jungle (at night it really comes alive out there) and thechants of the shipibo who were assisting in the ceremony, trying to concentrate on the plant working inside me.. but nothing. no visions. just the impression that i was covered in filth, scraping a my arms and my face trying to clean myself.

i took the huasca three times over two ceremonies and always the same - sleepy, filthy, sad.

after 5 days spent in the jungle living peacefully with this jungle tribe, teo lent us his boat and we sped back towards pucallpa where we met... a phenomenon. a fabulous maricon, a drag queen not in drag, with the most obvious cocaine addiction i ve seen in a long time, who dragged us from bar to bar begging us to dance with him, us laughing at this force of nature before us.

i jumped on a plane back to lima where i ve been for 2 days, hanging out with my juggler friends and fighting with the artisan who lives in the dorm i m sleeping in ' the asshole was feeding my dog HALF A BURGER this morning wen i woke up and couldnt understand why i was mad. i dont want strangers feeding my dog, even less human food, case then he learns to beg and wont eat his food, and the asshole started insulting me, assuming things about me, and as i was packing my bag all i could say was, dude you dont know me, so what you think means nothing, because you ae a judgemental prick. and hes going on saying shit to me and all i want is for him to STFU and leave me alone so i grabbed my dog and walked out, and here i am.

i leave tonight and i dont want to, im not ready, i cant leave yet. i ve spent 4 months with stars in my eyes and hope and this life i ve been living means so much more, the people ive met and the things ive seen are incredible, and to think that tonight it all comes to an end breaks my heart.

argentina, i miss you, you are my heart and soul. (and my libido. HOHO!)
peru, you made me angry and scared, but now i ve started to get to know you, and you are magical.
chile, i barely know you, but what i know is that you have a huge heart.
bolivia, you are the heart of south america, but you need to cherish your ressources.
brasil, you are expensive as fuck.

when i get back to montreal i will write the wrap up: kilometres done, hours of transportation, yadda yadda.

degenerate arm herpes and stripey socks

2007-05-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

after 28 hours travelling from puno watching the andes fall, descending from 3 800 to 2 600 and being able to breathe again, waiting 3 hours in arequipa for a bus to lima, watching the andes change from snow capped to dry and desertic in less than 100 kilometres along the pan american highway that winds through the deserts of south peru while kissing the pacific coastline under a setting sun, absolutely beautiful, but i know these places already. sleep some more, ignore than van damme - schwarzenneger marathon on the bus, eat some papas rellenas and some chicharrones, sleep.
back in the country of reggaeton, last night at 12:30 (am) i arrived in lima, sooo not a good time to arrive. we jumped in a taxi for barranco (at that time i wouldn´t risk a collectivo with all my stuff..) where i just happened to bump into moises (THANK GOD) while aimlessly searching for a hostal at 1 am. tibo gets in tomorrow and i hope tomorrow night we´ll be jungle bound.

in the meantime i have all of 40 soles left to my name, maybe a little less now after the ceviche i had for lunch (YUM), 10 soles for the hostal so it´s ok, but jeebus. i can´t afford to take cash out on the visa if i´mma take the dog back, and i don´t want to keep mooching off of donations, even though they are always appreciated.

anyway. today is call delta and call embassy and figure out how the hell to get tiago back day, followed by maybe a bit of lima nightlife. or maybe i´ll just crash long and hard.

the centre is calling, good idea to go before it gets dark, god knows it´s sketchy out there.

isla del sol, isla del frio!

2007-05-21T16:42:00.000-07:00

we wandered about and ate some delicious asaditos with a spicy maní (peanut) sauce OMGWTFBBQ so good. sooo good.
while the girls were sleeping off our crazy la paz night, i walked the dog and met a sweet columbian artesano, mighty beautiful to look at might i add. make that really beautiful to look at, so much in fact that he actually made me blush by telling me i was bonita, i stared at my feet for about 5 seconds and he laughed at me. aw. i´m a sucker for compliments from pretty boys with pretty accents. i ran off looking for rolling papers and told him i´d see him later - we ran into him later on in the evening before he ran off saying something we couldn´t understand, leaving us alone with our pipe and our bottle of bolivian red, which is weird but in a good way. i was hoping to run into him today as he had a plan for a 5 boliviano hostel, ok well it´s on straw mats instead of matresses but whatever, it´s cheap. imagine the itchy dreads though.

i was awoken the next day by the sounds of tiago chewing... on my llama foetus. doh! you don´t just find those everywhere, only in the witches market in la paz, and god knows what they use to fossilize them. i was so mad, it was a gift!

we had (another) trout lunch (it´s fresh and delicious and good for your memory, which i definately need) before jumping on the boat for isla del sol.

lake titicaca is beautiful and BLUE and big and the mountains kiss the water while the altiplano sun shines and the wind makes your face numb.

we got to la isla and climbed, oh how we climbed, and climbed, i felt like i was going to die, the pack and the dog and the altitude, dear jesus. 4 500m above sea level makes you feel like you´re going to suffocate, you pick something up off the ground and you´re out of breath. so imagine climbing up from 4 300m to 4 500 m with a 20kg pack and a dog, behind hoardes of mamitas and their llamas and donkeys, laughing at the silly gringo who´s clutching her heart and gasping for breath, offering 10 bolivianos to take the pack as i huff and puff, "No es la mochila.. es la altura!"

we get to the top and there it is, the illampu mountain range, it´s 6 500 m peaks (second largest in south america) majestically looming over the beautiful blue waters below.

we camped out for a night, three in a two place tent, with the dog who was vomiting llama foetus (or, as we call it, chupacabra) all night and releasing some of the nastiest gases i´ve ever smellted (i say it was the spirit escaping his little puppy body by any means it could!) and now we´re back in copacabana, stuck apparently because of a strike (oh, bolivia...). who knows when that will end. dammit. I have 17 days left! YOU CAN´T DO THIS TO ME! i need to get to the jungle! well, normally we can get a collectivo to kasani and then get to puno so all is not lost.

thibault, however, lost his CB and seems stuck in la paz, i don´t know how he´s doing.. but he has some stuff i left (ugh) at the hostal so i hope i see him again. cause you know a battery charger is always important to have when going to the jungle.

anyway. PICTURES. parce que vous le valez bien.

northern argentina: sierra de las 7 colores and la quebrada de humahuaca (3 600m)

bolivia:

villazón

first night in bus, blair witch styleez.

this one speaks for itself

lemonade in a bag!

tiago!

la paz children and thibault

lago titikaka

illampu mountain and titikaka

isla del sol

4 500 m! i made it!

put your hands up for detroit la paz

2007-05-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

la paz. so. where to start.

the llama foetuses? the shoe shiner who tried to steal my shoe? the san pedro cactuses sold at the witches market for a mere dollar fitty? fried chicken everywhere? the strange street man who grabbed my arm pleading that i give him money, and as i said dejame! and took my arm out of his bony grasp i smacked him in the face (by accident)?
or maybe my food poisoning - it was bound to happen sometime, living dangerously the way i do, except that it wasn´t caused by eating salteñas made by fat mamitas, but by a rather odd tasting wonton soup. serves me right for craving chinese food in bolivia, i guess.

it goes up and down and up and down and huff and puff and pause, heart.. going.. to.. explode. the pollution and the cars and the 70 degree hills and the traffic, both human and mechanical, all of this added on to the fact that you´re living between 3 800m and 4 085 m at all times just makes it so hard to breathe.
at night sometimes it felt like i was suffocating, a big sign of soroche, but i survived.

i think i have everyone covered for presents now. can you say neurotik ALPACA crew?

i sent home 7 kilos yesterday. it cost me a whopping 250 bolivianos. that´s a little under 40$. woot.

isa and her chilean friend maria josé came back to town, we went out for a lovely vegetarian meal with some kind of soya meatballs covered in cheese and god it was good, such a relieving change from, oh what´s this? FRIED FOOD. we went to get our tickets for copacabana and the lady at the desk asked us, french, the both of you? no, french, and canadian. i asked how she knew and she said the accent - surely isa has a very noticeable francophone accent but me? ME?!?!?! with my trusty rrrrs and shhhs and dropin off the d´s in ados and whatnot, with all that linguistic practise, surely she couoldn´t mean that i had a (heaven forbid) FRENCH ACCENT!

i was crushed. so i went and had a coca maté to cheer myself up.

we decided that for our last night in la paz we needed to do something, so we bought a 10 boliviano bottle of rhum (read: DOLLAR FITTY) and looked for food, salchipapas and cheese bread just wouldn´t cut it, so we wandered off towards the oblisk and saw a big MB in the distance.

McBoli! I exclaimed. the mc donald´s of the altiplano!

McBoli! replied the chorus of hungry people.

it actually stood for megaburger but we thought mcboli was funnier.

it was that, or salchipapas, or broaster chicken (read: deep fried chicken deep fried plantain and deep fried fries, which goes without saying)

after that we wandered down to traffic and surprise! the dj was a boli-frenchy. spinning ridiculously awesome acid house and old school detroit and uk techno. Stay up forever? check. Jeff Mills? check. old school Prodigy? check. Vitalic? check.

I know of a certain roommate of mine who would have been nuts. hell i went nuts - i needed a bit of speakerlove.

and then the trance hit, and that´s when i hit the bar, and met a lovely catalan girl who assured me my accent had nothing left of catalá at all, but that i sounded purely argentine. aww. thanks. i do still make a point of saying barthelona instead of barcelona, just because i can´t imagine saying it any other way.
after the comment from the lady at the bus terminal this boosted my ego and i went along happily chatting away in castellano with a myriad of different people.

i met a few people i wanted to hit, one that was trying to teach me about france, when i lived there for oh 8 years? hi, douchebag? don´t try to tell me that bretons and provençales have the same culture, cause we don´t. in any case whenever i´d try to say something he´d say, will you let me speak?
at one point i asked if he was interested in having a conversation or a monologue, and then i left.

then this italian girl lashed out at me when i was trying to help thibault out of the bar, he walked into her and i said lo siento, and she got really mad at me for no apparent reason, piss off you french bitch, i hate the french, i´m italian, blablablabla, vafanculo, vafanculo. i almost headbutted her, but decided that i´d let her make a fool out of her skankself by walking away. i don´t understand people who judge someone based on their nationality - i´m better than that. she obviously wasn´t. i bolted after that.

one thing i´ve noticed in bolivia is people are either extremely pleasant, friendly and helpful, or the are complete assholes. i´ll ask them something in spanish and they look at me as if i´m speaking to them in uyghur. i´ll repeat and repeat and they´ll just stand there - no entiendo

no entiendes o no quieres entender, la concha de tu madre!

the altiplano dwellers are a perfect example of that. they are either odious or delightful, whereas in the oriente, or eastern bolivia, people are generally a lot nicer, and generally politer. but, as in all of south america, people never say oops! sorry! i just bumped into you! or pardon me for stepping on your dog!

cultural differences or lack of education? maybe both?

in any case the indigenous population here seriously needs to learn garbage management and sanitation, because throwing bags of piss out the window (poor hitchhikers) or leaving their trash everywhere, only to burn it all later is definately not hygenic, nor ecofriendly.

getting a little sidetracked here, this morning i ran back to the hostel and put a very very very drunken thibault to bed before grabbing ALMOST all my shit (i left my CAMERA CHARGER DOH and my ganesh statuette) and then ran to isa and m jota´s hostel to wait for the bus. while waiting a delightful old man came and spoke to us and asked us if we were tourists, i said depends on your definition of tourist.

define tourist.

well there´s the tourist who comes with a camera and a credit card and hangs around with ex pats and just looks at sites and has little or no interest in local culture, and there´s the person who goes to share things and discover new people, cultures, places.

très bien, but you know those piercings on your face are going to give you cancer?

it was still a pleasant morning.

we jumped on the bus and promptly crashed, and upon arriving here in copacabana went to eat some fresh trout from lake titicaca.
delightful, and i´m not big on fish.

tomorrow we jump on a ferry for isla del sol where we´ll camp until tuesday morning when thibault comes to meet us and then we go to the jungle and i don´t know what isa is doing yet.

i have 20 days left and i´m petrified, i don´t want to leave, i especially don´t want to go back to lima the dreadful, but then again i miss my pajeritos and i´m sure the feeling is mutual... for most of them, anyway.

i´m going to go get a nice cold beer and go pet the alpaca standing in the street and hopefully dip my feet in the lake, which has a year round temperature of between 10 and 15 degrees, which is a hell of a lot warmer than the strait of magellan.

fossilized llama foetuses and crazy frenchies

2007-05-14T17:20:00.000-07:00

i arrived in la paz after 18 hours in a chair that was NOT semi cama because i had indeed gotten the last seat out of santa cruz at the back of the bus, 18 hours of cut off leg circulation sitting next to a giant chiquitana with tiago crying, crying, crying. nice.

la paz is this crazy little hole of a city at the bottom of a sort of valley beneath snow capped mountain tops and shantytowns all around the downtown core. i think it´s a nice place, not as sketchy as lima, more hustle and bustle than santa cruz.

finding a hostel was not easy, tho.

i walked around for about 2 hours looking for a cheap hostel, it was all booked up full... being at almost 4000m after being at 1800m is quite a strain, so i went nuts after walking up and down and up and down and caved in for a room at 50 bolivianos which is cheap by our standards but expensive as fuck compared to my usual budget.

as i was walking to the hong kong pollos a la brasa place, three saltimbanco looking dudes were eyeing me up and down, one came to speak to me and for some reason i answered in french - turns out all three are french. we went for some lunch and some turkish coffee and went back to their hostel to drink a bit of rhum, while conversing it turns out that one of them knows bast and tom, what the fuck crazy world, so small.

so we´re probably going to go to iquitos together as the other two are going towards ecuador, and we´re both all gung ho on doing the ´huasca with the shaman in the jungle.

now we sit here with our bottle of rhum wondering what to do with ourselves in a city where civil dressed policemen ask you if you want cocaine and llama foetuses are sold on the street as talismans for luck.

wow.

bolivia really is a fucked up place, but i love it.

the adventures of cosita and tiago

2007-05-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

i said goodbye to my friends in samaipata and hitched a ride with a bus back here, so i´m sitting here in santa cruz with tiago on my lap eating a sausage (and he won´t stop whining -- HUMANS EAT FIRST, THEN DOGGIES, ME ENTIENDES?) waiting for my bus to la paz, 120 Bs (15$) for cama service (first time for everything) seems like a nice price, anyway it was the only company with seats left so i took it. i want to get to la paz and send some of my stuff back to montreal because now with the dog and two backpacks it´s starting to get quite crowded on my person.

i´m loving bolivia but missing argentina like mad.. my little porteños. carry, juanito, kythe, and even the oos wankitos, mirko, polak, frances, sabri, sebas.. meh.

i´ll be back soooooooon i promise.

now to find some bathrooms and get the little one to evacuate his bowels as i´ve already been pissed on and it´s not pleasant.

more to come from the highest capital city in ze world!

nunca mas estaré sola....

2007-05-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

day 5 in samaipata, escaping tomorrow back to santa cruz and hopping on a bus for la paz where i can hopefully find isa who is finally in the same country as me.

life is lazy and sweet, i spend teh day with the artesanos in the market calling out to tourists and trying to help them sell their stuff, all while drinking copious amounts of maté and eating delightful onion and corn cakes fresh out of the oven.

samaipata has a large expat community, full of francophones, bretons, normands, and swiss folk, so it´s strange to be surrounded by so many francophones! last night there was a bit fo a party down at la candé´s (where i live) and we were all drinking cachaça and blabbing away in french it was nice.

i went over to elodie's the next day, who showed me a pile of puppies.

"take one. please. either luna will kill them off, as she's already killed two and injured one, or they'll die. i can't keep them, and i don't want them on the streets."

maybe 4,5 weeks old, emaciated. full of parasites.

i couldn`t leave them there.

i picked the biggest and strongest male, he´s a little mutt but he´s adorable, i don´t know what to name him yet though. bene or tiago, i´m thinking, or maybe saqui which is quechua for favourite, but it´s a girl´s name. or nosé, cause everyone keeps asking "como se llama?" "no sé" "hola, nosé!". he´s curled up in my sweater right now, and he is the cutest thing i´ve seen in a long time.

yay! i have a dog. and i´m going to go to the market and pick up some menudos and some rice and make him a good meal so he can be a big strong dog who can protect me one day.. for the moment though, he´s tiny and fragile and i have to protect him.

i shouldn´t have problems taking him back, normally they need to be 8 weeks old for their first vaccines and whatnot so i´mma take him to the vet in la paz and get a health certificate for him and see what i can do to bring him back with me.. if i can´t bring him, well i guess i´ll have to stay here.

or maybe moises can help me out. i don´t know. i´ll find something, cause i´m not leaving him behind that´s for damn sure.

samaipata

2007-05-10T08:16:00.000-07:00

we left corumbá and went on to quijarró to take the fancier train monday night, we slept through most of it although the first hour was filled with strange music videos from mexican superstar who has a tendency of putting water faucets and candles on her bras. must be another one of their fetishes to add to "sola la puntita".

we got into santa cruz around 8:30, i went to pick up el monstro and then kyhe saw me off in a cab as i sped towards the 3rd ring road to get my bus and she went back to the bimodal terminal to scratch her non existant balls a couple hours waiting for her bus back to bsas.

i was lucky enough to arrive just as a collectivo to samaipata was pulling up, a mere 15 bolivanos (2.50$) later and 3 hours of muddy mountain roads later i was dropped off in the middle of the mountain. i walked the 2 km uphill between the road and the main plaza and i was there - samaipata.

it doesn´t look like much at first, a few streets and chickens and horses walking around, but when you get to know it it´s incredible.

i found a hostel and wanted to wander off to the market for some cheap food when an israeli backpacker interpelled me and asked if i wanted to share a cab to el fuerte, a ruin from the chané aazonian tribe, then the incas, and then the spaish colonialists. i decided i might as well get some culture in me so i followed. it was interesting but the misty mountain climat made it hard to see all the ruins.

came back to town and had a large yet overpriced dinner and a few beers with the israelis, when i heard "Hey Frenchy!" and saw pablo the crazy uruguayo artesano i met in santa cruz, we spoke for a bit and then i went back to my hostel to read a bit, wondering what the hell i coudl find to do here which wasn´t overpriced.. see i had originally come here to go to amboró, but no buses go there and it is a 25$ taxi ride to get there, or a 6 hour walk up the mountain.

a knock on the door announcing that sergio, the even crazier argentine artesano met in santa cruz with pablo was downstairs waiting for me, a big elfish grin proclaiming "Frenchy! you made it!".

samaipata is a little town lodged in between many beautiful parks and natural wonders, waterfalls and the like, where it would appear the only inabitants are children, taxi drivers, israeli backpackers and artesanos who don´t seem to be selling much.
it´s a really beautiful place, very magical, with tropical flowers and fruits and vegetables, everything is grown locally and 100% natural, no GMO or greenhouse labs around here. it´s the kind of place where you throw a seed into the grass and a year later you come back to find a plant growing there.

a large terrain here costs about 500$, with mountain views and everything, i can´t think of a better place to buy a farm to survive 2012 (damn you aprille. damn you.)

i met a wonderful girl from ile maurice who grew up in england, came here and stayed 3 years in bolivia. she still hasn´t gone home and isn´t thinking of going back anytime soon. she broke her foot in the winter and so has stayed in samaipata for 6 months, living in a delightful little house that she rents for 100$ a month, on the mountain with a large garden for her 3 dogs to play in.

this place is so wonderful, i love it, it´s full of little things that make me happy, like dirt roads and snot faced children waddling through the mud, waking up in candela´s garden to see a crazy columbiano doing telas from the tree overtop my tent, seeing all the artesanos work and all the animals, the horses, chickens, ducks, dogs, etc. i really like the countryside, and it´s doing me a world of good. especially living where i am, it´s like a big commune with childrena nd animals and artists. i love it.

yesterday sergio and i sat on the plaza drinking maté and conversing with the few like minded souls, he says i brought him luck yesterday, ahah.
it´s nice being somewhere were there´s nothing to do but look at the wind ruffling the leaves and the colours of the mountain changing with the sun.

i agreed to travel with sergio for a bit before going onto peru, he said he feels like we both have similar personalities and we get along well, he´s an elfish little thing and i´m " la cosita ", neither artisan nor juggler nor hippie, just a strange thing that exists and travels and cohabitates with everyone peacefully, apparently. we´re going to try and find a dog, and he says he´ll hold onto it for me when i leave.

our plan is to heard towards vallegrande, but we might go to trinidad in the jungle instead, who knows anyway.

i´m off to go eat a large segundo in the market for 80 cents and find the elf.

samba samba samba sim!

2007-05-07T07:59:00.000-07:00

i decided that it wasn´t right to be in brasil and NOT go out, so i accompanied carlos and rafael (from the pousada) to a samba party on the outskirts of town.
i looked quite out of place with my dirty red pants and holey grey tanktop amidst the hoards of scantily clad brasilian beauties, but it was fun. i filmed it because there was a live band and it seemed so typical. i really liked it even though the women looked at me in horror (yeah well i´m not a citizen of the sexiest nation on earth, sorry, my ass is flat and pasty white, no point in wearing short skirts of tight pants!) and carlos made sure there was always beer in my hand.
i remember leaving, and that´s about it. apparently the door was locked and we were knocking on the window and i was coughing all night to the point where everyone in the dorm thought i was choking. interesting.

corumbá is a really pretty town on the pantanal and i hope to be able to explore it. the only problem is it´s already about 40 degrees outside and the minute i walk out i´m dripping in sweat and it´s almost unbearable - and it´s autumn here, i don´t even want to know what it´s like in summer.

it saddens me that i leave tonight at 7, i really would have liked to stay longer in brasil, but the fact that i´m ever so slightly illegal here and that my pack is in storage at the hostal in santa cruz are forcing me to leave the country.

it´s so strange, 10 km from here it is another world, this is the first time i have crossed a border and seriously felt the change. in la quiaca, even though argentina, it already felt like bolivia from seeing all the chiquitanas in the street, but here, it is a completely different world.

watching kids do capoeira under the shade of a tree in the street and hearing people play sambra rythyms while sitting at a terrace, fried pantanal catfish with feijoada and caprinhas, children playing in the street and the sound of football matches echoing through the city... yes, no doubt about it, this is brasil.

i just wish i could understand everything instead of 1/3! i can read it fine but listening to it is another story.

going to call delta to change my flight, i think june 1st sounds like a nice return date. right on time to pay rent!

i´mma go drink a caprinha (what? 11am you say? pff! i´m on vacation!) and walk around the pantanal now.

death train: part 1

2007-05-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

we left santa cruz about an hour behind schedule, no surprise there, and settled into our faux leather seats and commenced our 22 hour journey out of the lowlands and into the pantanal.
an american in the peace corps told us last week when he took the train it derailed, so i had my hopes up for some similar deadly adventure but alas, none.
"the death train" is long a thing of the past, the tren mixto having been taken out of commission a few years ago.. essentially, there were no seats, people could jump in with cargo, people were standing in between wagons, and people died because of this, but also because of malaria, dengue and yellow fever. lovely!

speaking of dengue, i think i might have it, as i have most of the major symptoms: flu-ish, headachey (although not as bad right now as it was yesterday and this morning), aching muscles and joints, and rashes. really gross pus filled rashes. or maybe it´s just a bad cold and a couple rashes. in any case, i´mma take a lot of paracetamol and drink water and i should be fine.

anyway enough about me feeling like i´m about to die and back to the important matters, the dun dun dun.
the train is still a bit dodgy, going from side to side and bouncing on the tracks, sometimes giving you the impression that everything is going to fall over to one side. but we survived it, even though the heat was unbearable and the 7$ seats highly uncomfortable.
we met a brasilian with a heart warming smile named felipe who kept us company for a bit of the trip, inviting us to a joint as we tried to pressure him into drinking some of our cheap bolivian beer (which is prohibited on the train, apparently, because tomar en el viaje es peligroso...!). we kept opening the door despite the huge NO ABRIR LAS PUERTAS CON TREN EN MOVIMIENTO signs and the conductors kept yelling at us, once they were out of sight we would open them again to sit on the stairs and take in some air, it must have been 45 degrees in that train.

during the entire trip people would come in at one station selling all sorts of goodies, like lemonade in a bag (YUM), and empanadas, and asaditos, and hay pollo al horno pollo.. pollo al horno, and chicha fria, and what have you.. as usual i went against what everyone says and tried some asadito with yuca and had a few empanadas, and lemonade in a bag. at night it calmed down, when apparently if you listen closely you can hear the voices of those who perished on the train. i was sleeping with my head on the windowsill and at times i could hear faint noises that sounded neither like animal nor wind. i can´t say if it really was the ghosts of the death train, but at times it seemed a bit strange.

we arrived in quijarro at 11 and went to buy a ticket back to santa cruz but were met with a closed boleteria because there are no tickets left for today. well i suppose that´s alright, but what if we wanted to buy one for tomorrow?

so we thought about what we could do. technically i am not allowed into brasil for i am travelling with my canadian passport and require a visa and neither of us thought to bring our yellow fever inoculation slips, but we figured fuck it, let´s try it.

and so here i am in corumbá, brasil (pronounced brasiU), completely unplanned, completely surreal, in the heart of the northern pantanal.
normally i am allowed to stay 10 days, but i left my pack in storage at the hostel in santa cruz so that´s not really an option, and i want to get to samaipata and la higuiera.

my portuguese is non existant and they speak really fast but when they speak slowly i can understand maybe half of what they´re saying.

i think i need to learn portuguese next.

it´s really really really hot and my flip flops just broke and we don´t really know what we´re doing here or how to get out but hey!
this is what happens when you travel with me - you never know where you´re going to end up.

i almost died again!

2007-05-04T11:41:00.000-07:00

52 hours (26 of which without a bathroom in the bus, argh, i won´t do the piss-in-a-bag-and-throw-it-out-the-window thing) and 14 hours waiting at a bus stop later, here we are sipping frutilla granitas in Santa Cruz, biggest city in Bolivia and main city in the tropical lowlands.

the road to get here wasn´t as bad as i expected, or maybe the driver was just a bit more careful, i didn´t hear any screeching tire falling off the cliff noises, but the gas tank started leaking last night and as a result we pulled over for an hour to check and fix it. if i understood correctly, the bad condition of the roads, all the bumping and rocks bouncing wear out the bottom and after a while the rocks start hitting the gas tank. apparently something similar happened with another bus company some time ago, and the bus exploded on a road. it´s a good thing the driver noticed the smell of gas, or else the same thing could have happened to us.
needless to say, long after the smell of gasoline had dissapated and the tank was fixed, i was still paranoid.
the bus was fairly empty so i was able to stretch out and actually sleep about 8 hours, which i really needed because i haven´t slept more than 4 maybe 5 since we left buenos aires.

it´s hot as fuck out here, and humid, but i guess that does without saying when you use the word tropical, although it doesn´t seem so tropical when you see the kilometres of lush pastures and cows, but does seem it when you see plastic looking leafy green trees and palms in above mentioned pastures.

it´s a very beautiful city, the centre is a mix of colonial architechture with small terracotta houses painted a variety of coulours, small dusty "cobblestone" streets lined with palm trees and flowers.

people here are apparently a mix of quechua and guarani, and they don´t walk around in traditional garb like pleated layered skirts, bowler hats and garishly colourd andean scarves - probably because we´ve left the andean highlands and altiplano and as such, the indigenous populations who inhabit it.

they also seem friendlier here, we´ve already bumped into a few people with massive stretches and even a guy doing piercings in the street.
we found a nice, clean, cheap hostel with perfect temperature water by following an indication in my guidebook (I LOVE YOU WHOEVER WROTE IT), 40 bolivanos for both for a room with two beds and showers, that´s about 12 pesos, or 4$, for two people combined. upon arrival an argentine juggler and a venezuelan artisan invited us to a joint and everyone was very friendly.

i like this place. i think i might stay on a few days after i come back from the DUN DUN DUN death train (which everyone knows out here!) because i can go to amboró park and check out some neat waterfalls in a jungle-esque setting, which means i´m going to push my ticket back, a week, maybe two, who knows, but i don´t want to leave bolivia just yet, as it is fast becoming my favourite south american country (argentina doesn´t count because argentina is argentina, dammit!)

superboliviana, indeed.

hi, i almost died in a bus last night

2007-05-03T04:37:00.000-07:00

buenos aires - la quiaca: 1900 km, 28 hours.

the bus was an hour and some late leaving retiro and i do believe we might have been the only non-bolivianos on the bus.
a child kept popping his head over the seat and staring at us. i kept wiggling my finger and smiling and he´d hide his head, only to pop it out again five minutes later. i thought he was cute with his little black eyes and big puffy, rosy cheeks, so finally i asked him como te llamas?, he gave me his name but i can barely understand 3 year olds when they speak in my native tongue let alone a language i haven´t begun to master. after about three times kythe and i both understood that his name was nahuel, which sounds more argentine than bolivian but anyway, then he asked us our names, which we never should have given him : for the next hour and a half he kept screaming catalina! porque reís? callate! callate!
one day i will understand why people on buses in latin america think it´s a good idea to feed their children sweets and 2 litre bottles of soda and let them run around and scream and make everyone else in the bus´ life miserable. sugar = hyperactive annoying children. especially on a 28 hour bus ride.

we made friends with the bus drivers (they saved us from nahuel the horrible sugar baby) who shared maté with me and let me smoke downstaires (awesome) and i took about 200 pictures of the sierra de las 7 colores and all along the road of the quebrada de humahuaca, i tell you, i´ve never seen anything like it and it still leaves me in awe after the second time. and now you´ll be able to see why cause i have pictures, pictures, pictures, but i probably won´t be able to upload them until i get to lima.

we arrived at la quiaca around 3pm, took a 5 peso warm but not hot shower and then dragged ourselves to the border, jumping back and forth on the bridge saying "look! now i´m in bolivia! oh! now i´m in argentina! oh! i´ve got one foot in each country tee hee!" like the idiots that we are, we crossed into villazón where i promptly bought some hoja and bica because it´s just so good and LEGAL and really does help with the altitude. we then went to the bus station to find a way to santa cruz where we were told we´d need to go through tarija to get to destination instead of sucre or else it would be an extra 10 hours. we paid all of 5$ US and then went to find something to eat, walked around the market where i found something scrumptious for amélie, tried to find an atm but it wasn´t working, and then i steeped some hoja with my yerba and made myself some cocamaté before embarquing on the bus. i don´t know if cocamaté is something common but it´s hellagood and it keeps you awake and alert and keeps soroche away.

i look at my guide to see where we´re going, my map tells me that tarija is 189km from villazón but the bus driver says 7 hours.

that seems... strange, even for south america.

now i knew beforehand that roads in bolivia are generally unpaved, and most of the times resemble more dirt paths than roads, ferg had told me the first hour of bumpy roads and heads bouncing onto ceilings would be funny but then it would get tedious and annoying quite fast - especially considering there were 4 grown humans (i dislike the world adult because i do not yet feel i am one, nor will i ever be one if i continue sleeping in subwoofers in filthy blankets in the mud) and two children in a bench for 4 people with seats that didn´t recline. but that didn´t bother me, not one bit.
neither did the lack of street lights, well you´d imagine that there would be none on a dirt road, right?

what bothered me was as i looked lovingly out the window at the jagged mountains poking out against the clear night sky, thinking about how i would have rather seen the scenery at night rather than day, i peered down..

and saw the road under the wheel.

a one lane road about 2 metres wide atop a cliff with a 2500m drop towards a winding, dry river bed in the valley below.

my vertigo kicked in and i started jumping to the other side, perhaps thinking that extra weight on the other side of the bus would keep the bus from tipping over the edge, or make me feel better about the fact that i was literally peering down upon my possible death, and started hyperventilating.

i then understood why 189 km was a 7 hour bus ride.

every now and then you´d feel the bus tip to one side and feel the screeching of breaks: one of the back tires didn´t seem to be working so well and sometimes would just barely skim the edge and i could feel my heart leap out of my chest as if it was my last waking moment.

it was scary as hell but exciting in a strange way. how many times in your life can you say you drove through 2 metre wide hairpin bends going up almost 4000m in the andes in the black of night, only to go back down to 1000m and then go so far up all you can see out the window is clouds, clouds, and more clouds..?

wait! i can say it again! because tonight at 6:30 we jump on a 24 hour bus to santa cruz which is in the lowlands, but to get there you have to go through the central highlands (aka antiplano), at some 3500m, where the roads are apparently really, really, really bad, but also really, really, really beautiful.

i can´t even imagine what the la paz - coroico road through las yungas must be like.

aside from bus frights, it really is beautiful up here, and high up, and the sun beats down like mad and at night it´s not too cold but right now we´re only at some 1 500m. i´ll tell you if i´m cold in sucre where it´s 2 000m higher.

we had a nice little breakfast at the mercado central, a sort of bolivian funnel cake with honey and a cheese empanada and dear god people like their food fried - everything i´ve eaten since i´ve been here has been fried, and not because i´ve asked for it that way, but because it´s cheap and local and i like eating cheap and local. i know you´re not supposed to eat food from street vendors but PFFFFF to that.

i love the bolivianas, with their layered skirts and colourful scarves which they use for everything - carrying their children, as backpacks, as ponchos, etc.. and the hats! i want a hat like that.
although distinctly andean, bolivians have finer, less prominent facial features than their peruvian neighbours (i call it "the inca nose"), but they look so much more indigenous, dark skin that is tanned by a scorching hot sun, rosy cheeks and they come up to my belly button (well.. maybe not but you get the picture). i´m fascinated by them, they´re not what you would call aesthetically beautiful by our modern standards but they have something to them that i just can´t pinpoint. maybe because they´re still so traditional in the way they live and dress and speak - their spanish is very accented with some andean dialect, i´m hesitant to say aymara or quechua because there are so many others but it´s the first that come to mind.

that, and they have AMAZING handicrafts. amazing.

so tomorrow night we should be in santa cruz which means saturday we´ll be en route for quijarró on the (dun dun dun) death train and by monday night i should be back in santa cruz en route for sucre, from there uyuni to see the salt flat, la paz just to say i was there and i hope by next friday i´m in copacabana on the edge of titicaca so i can do a little tour of isla del sol (fabled birthplace of incan mythology) before jumping on a bus to puno so i can get back to lima on time for my plane on the 17th. i hope to arrive in lima the 14th or 15th so i can still cram in some last minute souvenirs and see moises my punk friend who has the BEST SMILE EVER and eat some ceviche and then goodbye, south amerika.

but not for long. and now - bolivia awaits!

edit:

waiting for my bus, all we´ve been doing is pigging out because it seems like it´s all there is to do here in tajira, oh my god the little indian woman in front of the bus terminal makes the most AMAZING empanadas ever, they´re potato and pea stuffed with spicy mined meat and drool, once again, screw you, people who say don´t eat on the street.

on another note, i was asked if this is the pg 13 version of my trip.

to you, i answer: me? do anything even remotely non catholic? never.

well. i won´t document it in a travel blog. i save the crispiest stories for home. like moustaches and weird looks in the morning.

et tu fais comment pour ne pas être sourde?

2007-04-30T12:53:00.000-07:00

i woke up in a subwoofer wrapped in a filthy muddy blanket at 7 am this morning, and realized that i was 3 hours out of town and needed to be on a train at 9:40.

um. what? dammit.

it´s really hard writing a blog entry with one of your avid readers looking at everything you type over your shoulder. quit it, kythe. I MEAN IT I´MMA PUNCH YOU.

so, because i´m a trashbag, i had to buy a new ticket, a bus ticket as there´s only one train a week and i can´t stay yet another week in BsAs, although i would love to as i´m sure you know. we leave at 9 tomorrow for la quiaca which is the last city before bolivia and then we go to santa cruz for the dun dun dun, as my father called it.

oh, and here, when i disappear for 3 days, people call the cops and attempt to file missing persons reports. in montreal, knowing you guys, or maybe knowing me is more appropriate, you´d probably think i was passed out in a ditch. which was actually the case, sorta.

the party was lovely, the music was lovely, i have 10 000 pictures of me with my head in the speaker, and pictures of eyes (!) that i wish i could have gouged out with a spork but the poor thing needs them, i think. my stay in argentina is coming to an end and i can feel it pushing down on my back, i don´t want to leave but there´s always next time. even if my mother doesn´t seem to approve of my choice to travel instead of getting a proper education - diplomas or passport stamps?

um, passport stamps please! because if i don´t do it now, i won´t be able to do it when i´m pushing 60 and retired, it´s just not the same...

dot dot dot

2007-04-25T09:59:00.000-07:00

uneventuful night at bahrein spent in the company of two beautiful columbian girls i met at mirko´s last week, but i have to admit i was already feeling kind of blar before even going out so i left fairly early (4 am is early down here). it might also be because barely anyone i know was there, and normally it´s a crazy crazy time, but alas it wasn´t, and it was my last one. oh well.

trying to figure out the best routes to get to do everything i want to do in bolivia in two weeks isn´t easy, but i´ll figure it out somehow. i do want to minimize the time i spend in peru for money´s sake, and also because lima is just so sketchy it´s incredible.

i´m already planning narfette does south amerika: part 2 for next autumn so i can continue my journey. my father told me when i first informed him of what i wanted to do that i was being too ambitious, and now i think he was right. i underestimated the distances, the cost of travelling, and especially that i would fall in love with argentina and stay here for an extra two weeks. my plan is cuando llegará la nieve en montréal... no estaré!

i get to go by purmamarca again (YAY! this time I WILL HAVE A CHARGED BATTERY!) and discover the quebrada de humuhuaca which is on the way to la quiaca. i can´t wait to see the north again, it really is amazingly beautiful, and then be on the altiplano before going onwards to the lowlands and the jungle. what an amazing array of scenery i´ll have gazed upon at the end of this trip!

anyway not much on my front today. BUT, i finally uploaded pictures. hooray! there aren´t a lot as i haven´t been bringing my camera with me everywhere.

carrie, laura, ferg, mouah, mariana and carry

with la towa, the hottest drag queen in all of buenos aires

last night at home with tsunami

my scars are healed! and wow i look tired.

como le encanta la gasolina (dame más gasolinaaa!)

2007-04-24T12:35:00.000-07:00

i used to despise reggaeton, and now i think i´ve just gotten used to it, cause if i said i didn´t like reggaeton i´d be a lying piece of oh shi--.

so, i give you the song that´s been stuck in my head for two days.

now, if you´re like me, this song should make you want to shake your flabby, flat, white ass and start humping the air while thrashing around wildly like a mad woman.

if you´re like me you´ll also wonder why the hell le gusta la gasolina.

um.

do not question the meaning behind reggaeton. or beware the wrath of the towel shaking puerto rican.

so in my last week in buenos aires i need to start getting my shopping done (so send in your special requests now or forever hold your peace), maté gourds, the 10 kg of yerba i´ve decided to take along with me instead of my clothes, and also... a new scar! a traditional indigen design, from catamarca, because ever since i discovered the frogs that look like cats on a painting I WISH I COULD STEAL AND HANG IN MY LIVING ROOM, i´ve fallen in love with the imagery. also because scars make me happy and are a nice way to mark my passage through argentina.

i´m going to suffer in bolivia cleaning it, but oh well.

this is the design:

isn´t it hot?

now the question is: to eat a huge slab of provolone, or not?

que linda onda!

2007-04-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

ticket for tucumán booked, i leave the black hole that is malos aires on monday at 9 am, accompanied by miss nasty kate. sweet.
the train from palermo to retiro takes you through approximately 2 km of shanties, it´s quite astonishing to see them. nothing in comparaison to peru´s shanties, but still something.

i ran around all day, well actually i waited around all day, for people who never showed because we missed each other, or because i have no patience or probably mainly because i´m really bad at giving indications. sorry, mike, sorry, kythe. i deserve a beating.

while walking from one point ofrendez vous to another i was stopped by a deaf man selling little cards, he pointed at my hair and smiled, and then pointed at my back to ask how long it was, so i took my hair out of it´s messytail and he laughed, and then motioned to my piercings and made the international sign for "you are crazy." it was sweet.
two blocks later, a toothless old man carrying cardboard boxes started asking me if my hair was real, and i explained that it was but wasn´t, and he laughed a big toothless laugh proclaiming that it was the nicest hair in buenos aires (not the first time i´ve heard this) and that it was a linda onda. little things like that make me smile.

leaving monday means i probably will be at next weekend´s party, provided the sound systems don´t end up killing each other first -- sunday morning was an outburst of fighting, cursing and general pissy moods between drop in, kernel panik and OoS. i ended up leaving because i´m on vacation from this bullshit - i have enough drama in my own sound system without having to put up with the drama going on in other people´s. ugh.

i´m going to walk slowly back home and grab a beer and pass out in front of a movie because it seems like the good thing to do.

that is, if i don´t get lost in the mob of people who are currently processing down the street for god knows what reason.

not quite a superboliviana, but almost

2007-04-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

well, the reason i´ve been sticking around buenos aires longer, the "big free party que no se suspende por lluvia" (har har) has been postponed... por lluvia! ah, and here i thought we were disorganized wankers, but apparently there´s worse than us...

you´d think when you´ve printed out 10 000 flyers and there´s 30 djs who´ve all come in from various parts of the world and the continent for this party you could find a rainproof spot.... or just move it indoors to cocoliche for the night, i guess that´s ok.

you might stop the party but you can´t stop the lluvia? that´s what it seems like, what with 4 days of rain. oh, a porteño autumn, how lovely.

in any case i can´t afford, time or money wise, to stay another week, although i´d love to, because bolivia awaits, la ruta del ché, santa cruz de la sierra, the (dun dun dun) death train, the salar de uyuni, the rainforest, city of skimask wearing shoe waxing children aka La Paz, ayuhuasca in Cochabamba (Lake titicaca), all of it is there, beckoning out to me... i´ve even started wearing my filipino dashiki-type-garb to prepare myself for the bolivian highlands.

i had originally written one of my artsy fartsy entries on the Road (tm) and how much i was missing it but a power outage caused all the PCs in the locutorio to turn off aaaaaand I lost it.

Hi, Blogger customer support? EVER HEARD OF AUTO SAVING DRAFTS???? IT MAKES THE WRITER IN ME VERY UNHAPPY. VERY VERY UNHAPPY. THIS IS ME UNHAPPY.

anyway. this trip, in the beginning, was very beneficial, because i needed to get away from everything and everyone and just be by myself for a while, live my life without really having to think about everyone else, my 4 roommates and whatnot.
after 2 months however, it´s also helped me to realize how much i need these people in my life, because i miss them like crazy... what matters in the end is that they´re my family, even if we fight ad bicker and scream at each other for stupid things like sleeping on floors instead of going to the formule 1 (oh, louis) or money issues (what family doesn´t have this problem?), or silly material possessions. i am proud to be a wanker alongside you guys.

speaking of wankers! one of the people i actually got along with at the point (shudder...) is in town! yes! new people to bug and pester at parties! cause i think the oos guys have reached saturation point. or maybe i´ve reached saturation point.

i´ve been having strange pesadillas lately, mostly weird things about possession or strange spirits and alternate realities and worlds. if all of these things are inside me, i can only wonder what is going to come out when i go see the shaman.

i managed to wander over to the oldest and biggest accordeon factory in all of south amerika the other day, i must admit i had a tinge of hope in my heart that i would find an old used battered 120 for 300 pesos.. what i found there was high ceilings and accordeons on shelves from wall to wall, every size, colour and type imagineable, from accordeon to bandoleon.. but alas, nothing affordable. i did get a free concert thoughm as the fabricant took out a couple and played everything from traditional french to traditional tango as the three women sipping maté at the table behind him sang along. i was in tears!
last night we thought we heard accordeon coming from the room but it was actually the computer, and we tiptoed with a hige knife and opened the door, tears of fear streaming down our cheeks, expecting some spectre to lunge out at us.
what a bunch of drunks!

i waddled over to see the brightly coloured tin houses of la boca, which is actually one big decomposing bario of old buildings in dire need of repair, and 3 streets of cute coloured houses. it´s a poor neighbourhood, supposedly the roughest inside the limits of capital federal buenos aires, where one is not supposed to venture out at night. being who i am with my general disregard for the rules i did the contrary, and hi i´m still alive. mind you i didn´t actually venture in TOO far, cause i didn´t have my guia and it was starting to rain. ah well. next time!

getting to bolivia will take me through córdoba and tucumán, then back up through either jujuy or salta to the bolivian border.
in the spirit of jujuy, i ran into one of the peruvian transsexuals i met on the bus whose face was melting off from the heat! i asked her how she was, and what she was doing here...
"working"...
"doing what?"
"working. with my friend. for ourselves."

no explanation needed.

la gonche del parrote!

2007-04-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

it´s humid as hell although about a metre of rain fell last night (once again turning niceto vega into a river), you can feel it pushing down on you and i kind of wish it wasn´t so hot out because it´s not helping my headache.

went out to bahrein and ran into antoine and marie maud from drop in who i spent quite a few hours talking with, it was weird speaking french i kept throwing in buenos and porkes and other spanish words which much have sounded weird but then again i was really really drunk (doh).
anyway. talked with mm a lot about their trip, the 11 countries they went through, heard their version of stories we heard back hom (the renegade virus brawl, and what have you), what actually happened to seb (was in a car, got jacked, at 3 in the afternoon, they asked him to hand over a cell phone that he didn´t have, and then they shot him WITH HIS KID IN THE BACKSEAT WTF HOW CAN PEOPLE BE SO GODDAMN EVIL?!), discussed montreal ("When I think of Montreal I think of Mutante!" - Antoine), realized that contrary to what we, NTK, believed, they didn´t think we were complete idiots but were rather quite fond of us.
really nice to see those guys, i liked them when they were in town, and they were the 2 i got along with, so i´m happy to see they´re still around.

i don´t want to leave argentina. i really don´t.

but i really want to go to bolivia. and then come back here. and then go to ushuaia and frolick elf styleez with the penguins.

you might stop the party but you can´t stop the pizza

2007-04-17T10:22:00.000-07:00

i just spent an hour writing an entry that i thought was top notch, and stupid mozilla crashed and I LOST IT AS I PRESSED PUBLICAR.

ARG.

coincidentally, my other entry was all about ARG, and how much i love it, even though it makes me angry on some days (i blame that on my raging hangovers and random passer bys raging libidos, hola mami this, dipshit), it makes me really happy most of the time. i mean, how can you not love a city where you can get a slab of cheese on the grill for 2$ and beer is cheaper than water?

oh, and have i mentioned how gorgeous the men are?
the men are gorgeous! albeit BATSHIT CRAZY, slightly misogynistic, and oh so very macho. but like my father said.. what the hell else would you expect from a mix of italians and spanish?

i figure next week i´ll hit rosario for a day, and then jujuy and up to the bolivian border where i can hop a train to vallegrande and then santa cruz, where i´ll take the (dun dun dun) death train not only once, but twice, because doubling your risks of dying is always better in my book, with the lovely miss kythe rawson (yer a nutter, nutter), before hitting uyuni and la paz, lago titicaca and returning to peru. i have exactly one month to do all this.

i figure if i can hitchhike 2500km in 3 days i can do this in a month.

when i look back on my month in argentina i think of so many things, so many wonderful things come to mind, like low laying fluffy clouds and open spaces, ché, boludo, splooge and puntitas, crazy beer filled nights and green-almost-yellow eyes (and as such, elevators, you crazy bastard), sleeping under shooting stars and windy plains, icy water and dolphins; i think of giggling furiously and stripey red dreads, pumping tekno fists and waking up with things written on my leg, chilling winds and scorching deserts, sprained ankles and simultaneous sighs of satisfaction met with bursts of laughter, multicoloured mountains and muddy shoes, street dogs and choripans, dead guanacos and flaming drag queens.

but mostly i think of the love.

so much love. so much at some times i felt i was going to explode. so much love it made my eyes change colour and my face took on an elfish glow down south in ushuaia (<3), so much love in this country, or maybe it was just me that needed to get it all out of my system, i´ve been holding that stuff in me for a while.

i also think of my alfajor sister (she´ll get the joke, will you?) who´s gone now (cry), and that i´m the only trashbag left out on the giant curb that is buenos aires, or malos aires, whichever you prefer, depending on my mood and my state of ebriety, so now who am i gonna hump speakers with?

and carry who has been so amazing, so sweet, opening his home and his heart to me, putting up with my drunken rants and (not-so) mediocre (anymore) castellano and my overconsumption of maté.

i´m totally marrying him. love you cariño, hey you´re sitting next to me in the cyber café fancy that...

oh, and by the way, i have some really awesome friends, specifically mossieu crevette, aka MY NEW FAVOURITE PERSON EVER (tm).
gracias bómbon! i owe you dinner and a (downloaded) movie.

i´m off to spread the (speaker)love.

(and maybe eat a chori. or three.)

2007-04-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

i haven´t been up to much, due to lack of money to move around (THANK YOU to the people who donated, you have saved my life from VISA the EVIL).. i was hoping to go to rosario this weekend but it is my trashbag sister´s last weekend so i´m staying on. i´ll go there when i leave for bolivia.

i plan on leaving buenos aires on the 24, giving me about 4 weeks to go through bolivia and get back to lima.

in the meantime i continue living life the porteño way.

ready for... what?

2007-04-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

in typical crackwhore class fashion, i was waltzing out of a door when my foot decided it wasn´t happy and promptly bent itself to a 70 degree angle, sending me flying into a mud pit screaming profanities in a mix of castellano and french.

a kind girl came over and i was screaming at her because she kept touching my foot and then i´d start screaming at her, then apologizing, then screaming again until i finally told her to get lost before i killed her because the pain in my foot was blinding all common sense:
"i´m sorry, i´m drunk, i´m in pain, WHAT THE FUCK DON´T TOUCH ME BITCH, oh my god i´m so sorry i didn´t mean it WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DEAF DON´T TOUCH MY FUCKING FOOT!"

oops, i´m really very sweet when i don´t aggravate an old sprain, it´s nothing personal.

i managed to waddle back to the speaker but my foot was throbbing so i decided to curl up under a table and sleep the pain off, which worked somewhat.
i ended up sleeping again and woke up in time for a yummy breakfast (gracias frances) and cow cadaver with potatoes and marek´s cuba libres and BORAT and chic the dog slobbering all over me. sweet.

wandered off to a bar with giacomo and marek and then woke up in kristian´s bed (who left for mar del plata sweeeeeeeeet i have a bed) with a nasty headache that seemed to scream GET ME A CHORI AND SOME JUICE BITCH, which is exactly what i did.

now, i must call my insurance and make sure i don´t have to pay for this and get my foot to a medico before i break it.

also, please send beer monies, food monies, or "we miss you and don´t want you dead so here´s 500$ to get back to peru without hitchhiking or blindly following teknotravelers into la selva" monies... random acts of kindness are always appreciated. MMKAY?

2007-04-05T18:06:00.001-07:00

i just prepared a very tasty ratatouille for five very hungry djs, a catalan who knows pulpi and oriol (obvio), a czech from metro sound system, polak and frances from here and an italian whose name i can´t remember for the life of me.

some of them are buying a bus and going to bolivia in a month.

it´s very hard to resist offering to cook for them so i can go with them.

i like that there are so many people converging here in BsAs for the party in two weeks, that we are all from different sound systems and countries but are all incredibly in love with south amerika.

it´s going to be very difficult to go back to canada and live with a sedentary sound system that i love to death, don´t get me wrong, but who i wish would get a move on a little more often.

decisions, decisions.

ponar la bañera

2007-04-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

i think that means plug the tub, but i could be wrong.

i have about 150$ left after paying off some of my visa bill (ARGH) for the next month and a half. will i survive? will i manage to crawl back into the dimsal abyss of filth and hell that is lima, peru, in time for my plane?

only tuning in, same blog time, same blog channel, will tell!

so in the meantime, pictures, people.

my dots are sexy.

i miss my dog, and i miss ushuaia.

so much love. is in this picture.

el estrecho de magallanes and tierra del fuego.. goodbye, my love. goodbye.

a sheep on the ferry. who could sense death was near.

my maté consumption is approximately one kilo per week. that´s a lot of yerba.

i ran into a montrealite!

warning: overconsumption of tekno is hazardous to your health.

see what i mean?

crazy nights spent, sunday was very strange, tuesday i drank too much pisco and i think i got woken up by a security guard at bahrein but i can´t be sure, last night i watched the sun rise with ezekiel and woke up with the sound of ferrrrrrg in the house.
tonight.. i could take it easy, but i think i´m supposed to go make a ratatouille for frances and a bunch of austrian freetekno kids.

buenos aires you´re killing me. i love you though, so it´s ok if you eat my brain.

C´EST UNE AFFAIRE DE FAMILLE!

i shed some skin because i´ve shed my skin

2007-04-01T09:22:00.000-07:00

i spent 48 hours in 4 buses for 3200km to come back to buenos aires, heartbroken that i was leaving my promised land behind, patagonia, tierra del fuego.. but confident.

i really have shed my skin, i really have found a light to guide me.

so i decided i needed to mark it.

my dear takito, juan, gave me three dots, dermally punched and then the skin was removed, on my forehead.

a new beginning.

i needed to mark it, like a tribal rite of passage, it tells my story. it´s not an aesthetic thing, it´s a memory, and i love it. it´s kind of crooked, but then again so am i, i´m not perfect, and neither are my mods.

i will be staying a while in buenos aires... and then going to bolviia to take the (dun dun dun) DEATH TRAIN. sweet.

je ne veux plus me battre avec toi..

2007-03-28T23:26:00.000-07:00

i don´t want to leave this place i don´t want to go back to the infernal spiral of the same hollowed faces the same darkened places the same people the same things the same speakers the same streets and names...

i want to stay on this road i want to discover the world meet people share their experiences and live with them learn from them love them.

i see life in my eyes and it had been years since i had recognized myself in a mirror.

it had been years since i remembered what it felt like to just be instead of escaping. i thought coming here was an escape but i realize now, i truly see it, that coming here was a way to find myself and remember what is truly important.

living.

et j´ai erré...

2007-03-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

la plaine est morne sous la pluie
les nuages bas et gris...

je suis parti de ma famille
il ne faut jamais revenir
quand le soleil jamais ne brille
quand le meilleur devient le pire...

et j’ai erré et voyagé
et même si je pense à toi
à toutes les heures de la journée
et même si je pense à toi
jamais je ne reviendrai...

i can´t leave this place. it has a magic over me that i can´t describe.

i´m sorry.

comme les journées sont longues...

2007-03-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

awake at 9:30, a rare occurancy for someone such as myself, but i ended up crashiong at one am, and it was the first time in a very long time that i slept eight consecutive hours without interruption since i´ve been in south america, or at least for as long as i can remember.

i was actually woken up by the sounds of people saying "wow it´s so nice out! it´s a good day for trekking!", and i was on time for breakfast for once.. i prepared myself a few matés as usual and saw that the dreadlocked street dog who keeps following me around was waiting for me in the garden, awww, he´s a cutie. cariñoso, a glutton for affection he is.

as the sun was (finally) out and the sky was blue, 15 degrees, we decided to hit up some nature today. accompanied by a paraguayo slash monkey man, a half american half paraguayo and a mexican (who won the BME scolarship! fancy that!) we tried to hitchhike the 20km separating ushuaia from the trekking site, but 4 people hitching is kind of ridiculous so the only person who picked us up was a local bus taking other trekkers to the site.. well 25p for 4 people isn´t so bad i guess, it´s better than 25p per person!

because of the heavy rain over the past few days it was incredibly muddy, and the "moss pit" as we called it was full of water.. needless to say, with my skate shoes i looked pretty pitiful. and my sprained growth plate didn´t make hiking up very easy, but i had a big stick to help me and although i got my foot stuck in the mud a couple times (BIGFOOT!) i managed to get up to the laguna esmeralda and back down without too much difficulty.

it was a 5 hour hike going to and from, generally it takes 3 hours but we were jumping over trees and trying to find dry land so we strayed from the path a bit and it took us a bit longer... when we finally saw the green lake and the albino glacier it was like a smack in the face, waterfalls around us and the surrounding glaciers peeking out shyly from behind neighbouring mountains. superb.

my feet were sopping wet by the time i got back to the hostel (which is great, really, a very family atmosphere and many different nationalities, nothing to do with THE POINT ARGH ARGH) and right now my shoes are plopped up on a tree stump next to the radiator, here´s hoping by tomorrow i can wear them again!

a couple pictures to tease you, more tomorrow.
blogger templates suck because they cut my pictures off, boo.

look! i´m an elf!

donde aprendiste a tomar maté? - que dices, no es una scienca, es maté, boludo!

2007-03-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

on my third maté of the day, stuck inside because of the rain and cold and greyness that settles onto ushuaia in the autumn, chatting away with the staff and the paraguyayos who are here on vacation. (one of them is dancing michael jackson styleez as thriller plays in tyhe background, quite well might i add, what a sight!)

last night i walked around with a newly found friend and we sat and split a bife four ways: for ourselves and for the two dogs who had decided to sit with us and beg for affection. then one of them followed us back to the hostel, where we were for about two hours, and when we left to go out he was sitting in front of the gate waiting for us. awwww.
then i went to this place named kuar for a drink, the music wasn´t my favourite but the barman with his dreads coiffed pineapple style was kind enough to give us some free drinks.
there was a circus type show, with firebreathing, sword swallowing clowns who then proceeded to throw shaving cream pies on everyone present in the club. myself included. with music by emir kusturica and goran bregovic! sweet.
anyway i went to talk to them after and they told me to come round later tonight for a show, one of them is from buenos aires and is going back up this week through esquel, bariloche and el bolson, which is my route.
this is me trying to get a free (or at least cheaper) lift back up.

i decided to bail on the norweigians, well firstly it´s raining so i´m not going to adventure out the 3km walk separating me from the port, and secondly... it just seemed too farfetched, even for me, and that´s saying something.
there is, however, a french family docked on the bay, and i´m going to try and see with them, it seems safer to be with a family then with two scandahouvians.
and even at that.. ok, so what if i didn´t make it to the REAL end of the world.. i still made it to tierra del fuego and ushuaia and that is what matters in the end right?

the clouds are thick and milky and the mountains are barely visible, it´s about 5 degrees outside and very wet, so no glaciers today, unfortunately.
boo.

i´m fairly upset right now as my darling kerido kenhitomio (aka ze pequenho) has a tumor on his eye, and the cheque i left for my roommates seems to have disappeared, so i have to figure out a way to fax a copy of my visa to the vets, and the operation is going to cost about 300$, 300$ which i can´t afford to pay but i´m willing to give my last penny to save my sexy boy, just as i spent more than half of my south amerika fund on vet fees for him before i left. arrrrrg. poor bebe.

and my poor roommates who have to take care of him instead... i´m a bad rat mom.

eres una duendita!

2007-03-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

ushuaia.

my god.

i woke up this morning and stepped outside and my jaw dropped when i saw that i was surrounded by snow capped mountains and the water, and the port and the wildlife and ...

*ORGASM*

words really can t express how i feel. i have dreamed of this place for so long, and it really is beautiful, the town itself is a tourist trap but i walked around the mountain a bit, and i bought a few calabasas for mate, and tried to find a way to cape horn....

well, i found a way. i met two young scandahuvians from norway who kindly offered to take me there.

for free.

now. i know it s really really really risky to get on a boat headed for the end of the world with two complete strangers. especially when they re having a leaky motor problem.
sooooo tomorrow morning i am supposed to meet up with them for lunch and see what s going on.. if my instinct says backoff, i will forget about this whole sleeping in the lighthouse at the end of the world idea and frolicking with penguins, if my instinct says cool beans i follow.
i am constantly trying to push my limits further.. but at what point is it just pushing it? when i told marcin he did that big brotherly "CAAAAAAAAT" thing he does like when i said something about a russian cargo to antartica...

anyway. i am still thinking about it.

one of the french guys i met on the bus told me he met an artisan the other day in puerto madryn who said "hey, i met this crazy french chick who was hitching to ushuaia!".
a + b = yeah, that was probably me.

hee.

i prance around town with a sparkle in my eyes and a smile with my bloo elf hat and my polar blanket wrapped around me poncho style, my accordeon hooked up to my belt, and everyone stares at me funny, and the artisans call me over and ask me if i really am an elf - when i told the story of my adventure down from carmen del patagones and the norwegians he said to me:

eres una duenda.. una duendita azul, porque tienes magica chica...

maybe. just maybe.

my face looks different. my eyes have changed colour. i am metamorphosed by this adventure through argentina and patagonia is my mistress, tierra del fuego my dream, the way the landscape went from the patagonian steppe to wild crazy forests and streams in 5 seconds is amazing, winding roads around the andes...

words. can t. speak. just. awe. love. love. LOVE!

could someone throw on some slayer cause i think i ve gone hippie on myself. jeebus.

speechless.

2007-03-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

i made it.

i´m here.

3200km in one week.

i´m in ushuaia.

i dipped my feet in the icy turquoise waters of the magellan strait and watched the smallest dolphins on earth swim next to th boat.
i cried when the boat docked on tierra del fuego.
i cried when my feet finally touched its soil.

right now i am so happy, i have no words to describe it.

you have to see it to understand.. and even then.. i don´t think pictures could justify the emotion i felt.

however. in the midst of all this happiness, a person i was lucky to have met a few years back in montreal and who i hoped i would see again in 3 weeks in buenos aires has passed on... seb from drop in caravan was shot and died in brasil last week.

i can only wish the best for his son and claire at this point, because it´s terrible news and i´m still in shock.

all the more reason to stay safe...

péripatéticienne

2007-03-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

when i last left you, i was in the company of my intrepid argentine adventrurer friend in puerto madryn.
we spent a night there, staying with friends of his, sonia, her son mauro, his (seventeen year old) girlfriend pamela, and their seven month old son astor. much maté was had, and a very tasty patagonian tort that i can´t for the life of me remember the name of.
we decided to head out on the night bus to trelew where we could pick up a collectivo to ruta 3 and spend the night at the station and wait for a truck. before that, though, ché b. needed to find some porro material and so we stopped at to see a friend of his at the feria artesenal. while he went off and did stuff, i stayed with the bags and played accordeon, attracting the attention of nearly every one of the artisans who came over to ask if they could try it out. i walked around and found a necklace for a certain someone who has helped me out quite a bit, no names yet it´s a surprise, and one for myself, and the artisan threw in a free piece of petrified wood from a prehistoric forest in the heart of patagonia.
of course i had to put it in my hair.. if not, i´d lose it, for sure.
by that point the children of the artisans all came over and started playing with my midget. and then started fighting over it. so i had to put it away.

we got on our merry way and got into trelew at 23h30, and then jumped on a bus to the outskirts of town and spent the night drinking maté, chatting and exchanging travel stories. at 6 we went to a station about 1km away where there were more trucks and therefore a better chance of getting picked up. after about an hour, i furiously started rubbing my thumb on my st christopher medal, and roughly 10 minutes later a trucker who had said he was going to ushuaia but didn´t want any hitchers finally honked at us and told us he´d leave us at comodoro rivadavia.

his name was claudio and he´d been driving for 10 years. he married a french girl and was expecting a child. he liked dire straits, the grateful dead, traditional argentine folk and old metal a la g n´r, and had a battered copy of castaneda´s the teachings of don juan in his truck. i figured he couldn´t be a bad guy!
he fed me some sort of pickled cow tongue for dinner, and i HATE tongue, reminds me of summers at my grandparents´ with my cousins, looking at eachother wondering how we were going to succeed in stomaching my grandmother´s leathery, slimy tongue dishes. but this was actually pretty tasty, maybe because it was in between two pieces of bread and i´d been living off of cheese and crackers for 2 days.

or maybe it´s just my grandmother´s cooking was nasty and tongue is actually pretty good.

after a joint and a couple matés he decided he´d bring us all the way to rio gallegos. so we spent the night sleeping in a field under THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SKY EVER (tm), i saw 3 shooting stars in less than a minute, and could clearly see the milky way and satellites. amaaaaaazing, as jes would say.

this morning at 5 we took off and i saw the sun rise over the plains and almost cried. every fibre of my being started to sing and i swear i felt i was going to have a heart attack my heart was going so fast. guanacos looking up at me, and then away, jaded, "another one of them killing machines, meh, ooOoOoh, look, a shrub!" *chomp*. claudio put on use your illusion and did his best axl rose impression while i threw on my hat and did my best slash impression and we all burst out laughing.
he drove us 1200km to a gas station called san cristobal (GASP! A GOOD OMEN? not really.) here in rio gallegos where i´ve been since 10 am.

i said my goodbyes to ché b. and we parted, and i tried and tried and tried to find someone to jump on with but they´re all going north to el calafate, so i decided to walk down ruta 3 through the city and ran into che b who kindly offered to buy me a beer and some internet time.

it´s a shame claudio didn´t bring me all the way to ushuaia, cause now i´m stuck in this sandy, depressing town and no one wants to pick me up, and the bus costs over 100 pesos and i have 200 pesos for the next two weeks so that´s not really an option. my options are either stick it out until someone picks me up, or stick it out until tomorrow at noon and take a bus to punta arenas in chile.

in the meantime.

patagonia is beautiful. i think i´m in love with her. every night i sleep with her, and every morning i wake up to find her peeling off another layer for me to discover.

now. my main concern is getting the fuck out of here.

i saw a dead guanaco

2007-03-19T15:52:00.000-07:00

turns out that one of the intrepid argentine travellers i met, a girl named Sol, knows Aprille and la Mario and friends of theirs who i´ve heard about but don´t know.. crazy how the world is so small...

after 2 nights and 1 day in las grutas (beautiful beach with crazy tide changes!) where i saw MY FIRST PENGUIN ZOMGWTFBBQ adrian and i said goodbye to fédé and sol who were going onto bariloche and walked the 5 km separating us from la ruta 3. after about an hour holding up my fancy RIO GALLEGOS carton, 3 guys in a white ford pickup told us we could jump in the back, and we rode for 300 km under a beautiful blue sky until here, here being puerto madryn. i thought it was funny that they had a saint christopher sticker on their window.. a good omen, me thinks.

i miscalculated my kilometres... i´m, right now, at approximately 1400km from BsAs and at about 1797km from Ushuaia.. kinda the half way mark, so i´m not looking at 3400km ida y vuelta, but 6200 ida y vuelta..!!! craziness. at least i have a friend for the next 1000km, who i´ve affectionately surnamed ché boludo (literal translation: friend, ballsack) because

1. he looks like ché guevara. and is how i imagine el ché was when he was the same age travelling through patagonia.
2. he starts all of his sentences with ché and finishes them with boludo.

i love how everyone here calls eachother boludo or boluda which in french would translate into couillon and couillonne but i don´t think i know any english words that would translate into a nickname for ballsack.

when people ask why we´re travelling together he says ¨she has a tent and i don´t, but i have a fork, and she doesn´t.¨
what a sweetie. he´s been teaching me about the history of patagonia, the tehuelche tribe that was killed off, the mapuche.. he´s been hitchhiking around patagonia and tierra del fuego for a while, and has beautiful photographs to prove it. it´s nice having someone who knows the best ways to get where i´m going, and i´m sooo thankful right now that i took the train, cause the past 2 days have been a blast.

i sprained my ankle on the beach yesterday while walking out during low tide, i was stupidly walking and playing the accordeon at the same time and CRUNCH, i slipped on a tidepool.
well, my excuse is that i, all by myself, have managed to learn by ear LA WALTZ D´AMELIE with my MIDGET. i think that´s worth the sprained ankle. however, poor ché has to listen to it non stop for the next 1000km. and i have to walk on it with my 20 kg pack. ah well.

you know how in canada you see dead groundhogs on the side of the road? well here, it´s dead guanacos. i counted 3 dead guanacos in 40km. so sad, cause they´re so cute when they´re actually alive and staring at you in that "what the hell are you?" sort of way.

i´ve been kind of perplexed by the eerie similarities between my trip right now and the lyrics to a song by la rue ketanou, sur les chemins de la boheme, especially

avant de partir le pouce en l´air.. a l´autre bout, du bout du monde...

yeah. that´s what i´m doing.

oh and my mornings aren´t filled with café creme, instead, i drink maté.

horses and emus and cows, oh my!

2007-03-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

so here i am.

viedma, on the rio negra, the door to patagonia.

the train was not 14 hours as announced when i bought my ticket (i´m starting to get used to this) but insteadd about 20, as i left BsAs at 19h30 and got in here at 15h30.

on the train i met a couple of intrepid argentine travellers, including one who is going down ruta 3 to rio gallegos, now we´re sitting at the bus station sharing a maté and an egg sandwich waiting for a micro to take us to las grutas where we can pitch up our tents on the beach and tomorrow dip our feet in the water before continuing on south.
we were transported in an old rusty cattle truck from the train station at c. de patagones to viedma for a mere peso and a half, which i found ridiculous, and funny, and surreal all at the same time. ha.

my feet hanging out of the door, holding on to the metal bar, accordeon in hand playing melodies out to the patagonian steppe, wow. just. yeah.
it reminded me of la camargue, and it has a very garrigue like quality to it like in provence, but no lavender - instead, cows, sheep, horses and ostrich run around the treeless plains. salt flats here and there, a couple rivers, dunes, and a beautiful sky with huge, looming fluffy clouds.

and it´s only the beginning.

from here on it´s survive or die, but now i´ve got adrian the gaucho to accompany me down south, so all is good in the world of cat.

do what you´re afraid of

2007-03-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

an old friend who goes by the name of dirt told me that today, and that´s exactly what i´m doing, what i´ve been doing.

3400km. i know people can hitch across canada in a week.. surely in 3 weeks i have time to do what it is i need to do?

i need to get a really big knife. and a can opener. and maybe a little camping stove. but i can always just make a fire. or just eat canned corn, used to live off of it, why should it be any different now?

i am kind of scared even though i boldly proclaimed that i´m not afraid of anything, which is false, i´m sure there are some things out there that would send me screaming and running in the opposite direction, but for some strange reason i have absolutely no fear regarding what i´m about to do.

buenos aires is wonderful beautiful and exquisite, the people i´ve met here have truly marked me and i am seriously thinking into finding a way to come back here, and live here maybe, who knows. i really like this place, i like that it´s cheap and beautiful and makes me feel safe, it makes me feel alive and happy.
montreal did that for me when i first moved there.. and now it just makes me feel empty and sad, i go out cause i have nothing better to do, always the same hollow faces, always the same sketchy places. i gave up everything i had in france and took off for a better life in montreal, i got a better life in the sense where yes i have a roof, and a family, and good friends.
but i lost my reason to be. which is to just be and live.

the road is long but it is there, waiting for me, calling out, i haven´t come this far to tread water in buenos aires, i was just testing it..

so, my route starts at viedma, which is a short ferry ride from c. del patagones, and then it´s straight down on road 3 for about 1700 km. and then.. the end of the road. the end of the world. alone. finally.

alone.

a lot of the things that i am running away from....

what exactly am i running away from, anyway? why the hell have i had this dream stuck in my head for as long as i can remember, to sit on top of a cliff and look out at the icy cold waters where the south pacific and atlantic join, and smoke a joint and forget about everything and everyone?
i´m going to prance around in my tutu on the edge of the world and cross my fingers i don´t slip off a glacier and end up in a museum in 2000 years.

i have this weird running away from everything syndrome that i think i´ve had ever since i read on the road and decided i was going to run away from boarding school with my guitar and my friend julien. obviously it didn´t work, but i was 12, and that need to escape was already well anchored within me.

the thing is i can´t really run away from myself, well i do, in some ways, i suppose, but what i´m trying to do now is to try and figure out what exactly, who exactly, and why.. why i need to run away constantly. maybe i can find my brain down there, maybe i´ll fall in love with a little stretch of land that i can call my own, raise some guanacos, maybe i´ll learn mapuche and find a new cause to fight for.
or maybe i´ll just come back the same and feel disappointed.

my accordeon is quickly becoming my best friend. it sounds human enough to maybe be human, wailing out my lament to the world, wailing out my immense tristesse to whichever air current will listen..

il n´y a plus que la patagonie.. la patagonie qui ne convienne a mon immense tristesse..

2007-03-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

this phrase made me laugh hysterically for a good five minutes because it was so random.

my danish "roommate" kristian:

tank tops are like vaginas.. i like them tight but they´re never long enough."

um. ha. hahahaha.

i talked to my father today who called me here, about five minutes after i complained i hadn´t gotten news in 10 days and he usually complains when i don´t send news.

he´s jealous, and thinks that my spanish is good: Plus qu'impressionné par la qualité de ton espagnol, heh. heheheheh. heheheheheheheh. sorry. it´s just never happened before, so i´m kind of gloating.

mentally preparing for a 3400km journey that needs to be done in 3 weeks is kind of hard, considering i don´t really know what´s out there. i want to follow a bruce chatwin'esque journey across the barren treeless plains but i want to trace my own path and i´m not quite sure how or why but i figure i´ll just follow my gut instinct at every stop. it´s been pretty accurate so far, so why not just continue that way?

my mother told me never to play with fire but i was never one to listen

2007-03-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

my ticket is booked and i´m happy to be going back on the road but saddened to leave behind me a handful of people who have made me feel so at home in the two weeks i have been here.

i leave for carmen del patagones, a small town south of bahia blanca, to go see the sealions and then i follow la ruta 3 all the way down to rio gallegos.

someone pointed out to me yesterday that more than 50% of patagonia belongs to ted turner, benetton, sylvestre stallone and other such moguls. i knew before that many of the indigenous populations of argentina (more specifically patagonia) had been driven off our their lands so that a few rich folk could come and be ranchers 3 days a year, but i did not know to what extent....

A majority of the Mapuche indigenous people living in Patagonia do not hold legal title to the land that their ancestors lived on before the arrival of the Spaniards, but which figures as publicly-owned property. That is why indigenous land is frequently sold off, and it is the problem underlying many land ownership disputes in the region.

Fucking colonialists.

but I am a hypocrite, for I live in Canada, a vast territory that was completely stolen from the tribes who it rightfully belongs to.

i´m finally starting to understand the term that i hate so much. yes. i´m talking of course about white guilt.

i booked my ticket to carmen del patagones!

2007-03-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

i have only one thing to say today:

that, and maté rules.

p.s. you don´t wanna fuck with us. nuh uh.

2007-03-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

i am in SUCH a pissy mood right now.

i think i´m going to walk down the street and wait until some sleazy gross guy says "HOLA MAMI QUE PECHOS HERMOSOOOOS" and kick the shit out of him, just to let it all out.

ROAR.

2007-03-10T23:23:00.000-08:00

i know i should be out doing stuffs and i was out doing stuffs but i´m so bloody tired and the namakanamakenawhatever club we were at was horrible and i really only wanted to go see the wankitos and chill and curl up in a ball with some tekno before i end up all alone with no music save for an accordeon that i don´t know how to play.. and i don´t have any numbers and i´m just.. argh. argh. argh.
i´m listening to family affair and it almost makes me want to cry at how amazing this entire trip has been and how lucky i´ve been with all the people i´ve met and the crazy experiences, and that i could be so selfish and ridiculous to be pissed off that i´m not with a bunch of wankers listening to the same records i listen to in montreal.
i need to sleep well and eat properly (not just empanadas and provoleta, which is basically a slab of provoleta cooked on parrilla with pesto and olive oil it´s divine) and get myself to the train station and figure out what i´m doing before buenos aires eats me alive and i end up stuck here. not that i´d mind it, but i need to shed my skin and run naked in the middle of nowhere for awhile. sleep under the stars and walk, walk, walk, walk, walk.

naked maté

2007-03-10T16:52:00.000-08:00

speakerlove.

it brings people together in strange ways: last night i met a 22 year old italiana from kernel panik with dreadlocks and pigtails travelling solo like me, it was really interesting. she knows most of the drop in crew that i met when they were in montreal. we agreed on certain things and giggled furiously while cursing the fact that the church-turned-into-a-club did not have columns for us to properly enjoy the music. but at least there was music, right, and beer, and smiles, and chris liberator always plays, and i think of louis whenever i hear it. i love how polak plays, craaazy acid it´s wonderful. man, i wish you guys (ntk wankitos) were here, even with the language barrier you would probably have a blast anyway.

entonces, i had a blast, those guys are craaaaazy and sweet and sometimes total assholes and i love it they remind me of us back home, completely disorganised (donde esta esta puta cable!) and they start late and end later than expected and call after parties at people´s houses who don´t want people there.
total wankerz.

this morning i woke up next to a nekkid aprille and it felt like waking up net to ben, like a warm fuzzy comfort blanket, and then we drank like 20 matés and got craaazy and wore tutus (wonder why people were staring at me at the convention?) and showed off our asses and took stupid pictures because we´re stupid girls.
would somebody please take us out to the curb where we belong?

i went to the tattoo convention to keep aprille´s hangover company but bolted after about 2 hours when i noticed that i felt like a freak among freaks. i hate when people stare at me, like STARE at me, and seeing as i am not overly nor visibly tattooed i felt like i had nothing to do there. that, and the crazy lady with the painted boobies didn´t smile back when i said nice tits with a goofy grin.

i reaaaally need to get out of buenos aires or i might just get stuck here. it´s got one of those black hole auras. i still haven´t been to the train station - mañana, mañana, as they say. i´ve stopped actually expecting anything to happen mañana, mañana, and i´ve kinda gotten into the habit.

why do today what you can do tomorrow?

awesome. total procrastinators.

i think i might have been a gaucho in a past life, seeing how much maté i drink. i ove that shit. with sugar. without sugar. in any form. in a bowl, in a cup, in a gourd, whatever, just gimme that stuff. i think i might just throw out all of my clothes and stock up my backpack with maté.

or maybe i´m just nuts.

que ojos hermosos tienes

2007-03-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

i had hoped that the excursion to see the trans-putas would be an interesting exchange, but it did not happen as i exoected. glamourous, some half naked, some completely naked, with a certain presence to them that made me feel that i, a real woman, was just a misformed creature next to them: some looked more like a woman than i ever will, and that in itself was quite impressive. nothing compared to the transsexual and transvestite street workers in my neighbourhood who have bad implants and whose drug addictions can be seen written all over their bodies in scars and cernes. even if they aren´t beautiful in society´s eyes, these girls were beautiful.
but if you aren´t a paying client, you are nothing, and they have nothing to say or exchange with you.
basically, fuck off if you´ve just come to meet us, we have better things to do.

oh well.

today the sun has returned and i´ve been writing and drawing, laying in my hamoc under the sun. i think a siesta is in order to survive tonight though.

cuidase.

2007-03-08T17:41:00.000-08:00

it´s been raining pretty hard for the past 2 days, and here when it rains, it pours.
for hours.
and then stops, and drizzles, and starts up again.

it wasn´t as bad as last week when the street i live on ended up like this:

but almost, in some areas, yet i still managed to walk to viva and see aprille and finish the stencil for the tattoo and changed my bridge jewelery so now i feel like me again with my metal back on my face.

so, i promised pictures. a lot of them are drunken party pictures or pictures of people so i only have a few.

this one is for amé.

this one is for L1L1 who will understand if she looks at the label.

this one is just because i love the 2cv and the colour and the license plate.

this one is because aprille rocks.

this one because it fucking rules.

these because these people make me happy.

this one for my crew.

tonight carry and i are going to walk over and say hi to the transvestite/transsexual street workers. awesome.

where have you been all my life

2007-03-07T15:03:00.001-08:00

seems like an appropriate entry title, seeing as i´ve said it every day now for the past 10 days. it´s true though - i looooove carry, i loooooove kythe, i loooooove aprille, i loooooooove the oos guys (who now say wanker proudly, i call them my wankitos jaja, i´m in good hands with my new best friends ever), and i loooooooooove cheap beer.

i have come to the conclusion that porteños are walking penises. as in, i can´t walk out of the house without cat calls, hola mamis, or go out without some random guy coming up to me and attempting to molest me on the dance floor.
or in elevators. growling. with cat eyes.

um. yes. so. new topic.

i saw pierre last night and finally met the famous flo, and carry, ferg and aprille came too, i invited everyone out but carry paid for the 10 beers :) by the time pierre and flo left i think we killed them with our beer consumption!

i need to get on a train for bariloche so then i can start my walking towards cape horn and before my only friends for 2 weeks become guanacos and penguins.
maybe i should adopt a street dog.

tomorrow pictures i PROMISE.

weekend update with a brainless cat

2007-03-05T04:50:00.000-08:00

ok. buenos aires, you got me. you got me good. it´s monday morning and i feel like i´ve been hit by a bus from overconsumption of cheap argentine wine and tekno.

tekno, oh thank the heavens, for one night in hackney, and for girls with red stripey dreads to dance with and hump speakers with (i love you aprille!), and por favor quieres comprarme una cervezaaaa, i´ll be your new best friend, and what do you mean i passed out and missed the bus? where is everyone? ah well, hey mirko let´s take 10 pictures of ourselves looking like zombies and then i´ll pass out on your lap on the way back to buenos aires and you can play with my dreads ok? purrfect.
ZzZZzZzZZzZZ

now I need to figure out what I´m doing today, i think pierre arrives tonight, so i wanna invite him and his girlfriend to a parrilla so we can eat so much cow we start to moo.

send braincells please.

ladies and gents... now, with working pictures!

2007-03-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

let´s see some pictures, shall we?

i´ve selected my favourites from my trips, but feel free to just look at the main flickr page.

Lima - Tacna.

Arica, Chile -- my possee and the colourful little houses.

dark, dark, dark, white! dark.

if amelie and i ever decide to move to arica, we can live side by side.

kimy´s house

Arica - Calama - Jujuy : The Atacama

this dog and i shared half a sandwich in calama at 9 am. then he followed me for an hour. i named him tramp.

the valley of death on your left, the valley of the moon on your right, and the valley of the dinosaurs straight ahead

desert, salt flats, and snow capped andes

going up to 5 000 metres is a hard thing to do, but the road is always beautiful isn´t it?

it was really high up.

at the aduanas. go biquette, go! it´s such a random picture.

saying goodbye to chile...

... and hello, argentina: my first glimpse of my promised land. i felt like moses, except i didn´t die when i crossed the border.

more to come later. have fun with the pictures, if you want.

obsessive linking.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7168711@N05

thanks to everyone who donated to my narfette does southamerika fund, and look at what i found randomly etched into the street:

destiny!

ok i´m out. love you.

miramar

2007-03-02T15:53:00.000-08:00

i decided not go to to mendoza, kythe and i both decided it wasn´t worth the 14 hours, so instead i wandered off with kristian to find some mattresses and just walk around all day basically.
waiting around for carry to eat some parrillada and then hopefully aprille, ferg, juan and kythe are all popping by and we´ll find something to do with ourselves.

buenos aires, party city?

i really wanted to get tattooed tomorrow but because of the metre and a half of rain that flooded the streets the shop is kind of wrecked so i probably won´t be able to.. i´m going to stick around here one more week, probably leave the 10th, and then go down to mar del plata and then go meet up with diego in miramar, and from there PATAGONIA AWAITS.

as usual, this could be totally useless information, cause i´m sketchy.

in any case, last night i started sketching, and that sketch turned into a page full of sketches that made me want to sketch even more and more and so i´ve decided to make a little comic of my travels, because thats what the sketches are :) i even made a little map and everything. my southamerika looks like it´s pregnant but hey, it´s my southamerika now!

2007-02-28T19:18:00.000-08:00

i sit here listening to paranoiche and can´t help but smile at the story behind the title, and even though none of the ntk wankers are here with me all i need to do is log on to the site and listen to a track and they´re here, somehow, in spirit. it was nice to run into mirko again wearing the mir shirt, i snapped a picture. mir in argentina!
kernel panik arrive here in april. so i might cut my bsas time short and head down to bariloche as soon as next week and then come back up here in april for that.. damn you, tekno, damn you.

i had a rather interesting night last night, people here are... very caliente to say the least, it´s such a change from montreal night life! one more example of the difference between people who live in the cold and people who live with the sun, i guess.

i was walking to meet with juan and kate and someone stopped me in the street asking if i was aprille.

uh no, but i know her..?

very weird.

i think i could like living here after the first few days i´ve been here. porteños seem to be a strange bunch, they remind me a lot of catalans, and therefore a lot of montrealers - we´re all kind of in a league of our own, strange cities with strange lifestyles.

i think i might actually try and get an actual night´s sleep tonight, in lima i never slept, on buses i sleep with one eye open, and if not i´ve usually been waken up by the insane heat, so i think i´m going to pass out about now ish and wake up with the heat at noon, and go out and do my stuffs.

2007-02-27T12:21:00.000-08:00

day 3 in buenos aires.

i finally met frances and nahuel (mirko) from OoS and gave them the styli, t shirts and vinyls i´d been carrying since montreal (that´s like what 7000km jaja) and it was really nice to met them.. the international tekno family of wankers. ah, yes. it was nice to hear a familiar acid loop, and they really liked the vinyls - the medellin cartel one really is excellent i must say. i was surprised that the MIR t shirt actually fit mirko, and frances inherited my virus t shirt -- all hand me downs that i can get again but that they probably can´t get, so they really were enchanted. frances and mirko together remind me of dunzy and mat - the older one who´s more zen and the younger one who just makes a mess all the time. haha. sounds like home already!

i keep saying barcelona instead of buenos aires -- they really are that similar, and the vibe here is great. i could see myself getting stuck here heheh.

it´s like someone´s turned on a faucet in my pants and the handle´s stuck, lordy lord such beautiful people in this city, i can only watch in awe as i walk through crowds of porteños all more beautiful than the other.
i basically just walk around all day looking and stuff and getting a feel for the city, i bought a french-spanish pocket dictionary cause i kinda need one, and a roquefort empanada OMG DIVINE DIVINE I want more.
yesterday my lunch was a kg of cashews and a fresh pear to wash it all down, it was lovely.

today i think i´m going to attempt to find how to get to carry´s from here by foot and then tonight drum n´bass with la mario and aprille and maybe carry who knows, buenos aires here i am now, entertain me!

2007-02-25T20:25:00.000-08:00

i left jujuy at 5 am and promptly passed out, having not slept all night because i chose to just walk around and visit a bit.
i was awoken at 11am by the sound of a dozen screaming children and i was drenched from having fallen asleep with my sweater and my hamac/sheet.
the air conditioning basically didn´t work, and there were no windows that we could open, not even the emergency exit; we would have had to break the glass.
we stop the bus in the middle of la pampa for half an hour to try and fix it. doesn´t work. we´re already behind schedule, we´ll try at the next rest stop.
but a man passed out, and people started banging on the windows screaming parada, parada por favor. we the bus stopped again, and everyone got in a circle around him and started fanning him with what they could and throwing water on his face. that was another 30 minute stop.
i was the only person on the bus left with water so i passed it to the woman behind me who had 2 kids with her, who wouldn´t stop crying. the bottle never made it back to me, but that´s not a problem, i could deal with it.

we finally get to a gas station, where a couple of the passengers climbed onto the top of the bus to try and opppen the top windows. a really intricate system with wood and string and hooks, well it was functional anyway. there was also a bath thingy and a shop where we all filled up on water for the children and i bought some 4 bottles of water "just in case" which by the time we had to stop at another gas station because the motor was overheating were already long gone.

by that time it was already 19h and we were 3 hours late - the bus didn´t leave until 21h and instead of arriving in BsAs at 3am as planned, i got off the bus at quarter to eight.
you get what you pay for, i suppose. but because of the 45 degree heat inside the bus with children screaming and no air conditioning, water or on bus movie as promised, you can imagine the hell that it was. all 28 hours of it. people were very solidary - the first floor of the bus was more ventilated so everyone let the older women and young children sit down there and the rest of us kind of lived with the dripping swear and sticky seats.

i do however have a strange memory - i don´t know if it´s because of the mix of heat and altitude and diazempam to sleep it all off or if it actually happened -- of someone being on top of me, hands under my shirt and trying to do something to me obviously, and i had no force but managed to escape it unscathed.
i´m thinking it was probably a hallucination rather than reality. i´d rather think it anyway. especially if it concerned the ex convict covered in kinfe wounds sitting next to me, who told me he was going to bsas to find the woman who killed his child.

um.. help.

i was lucky enough to have met a twenty five year old argentinan who´d just been hitchhicking through bolivia and peru who was going to the same barrio as i was. we had chatted a bit about tattoos, okupas and the road, so when he offered to accompany me to aprille´s i accepted without hesitation - he lives about 3 blocks away further north so he took me all the way there. it´s nice cause had he not been there i would have been completely lost.

so after 42 hours in 3 buses since thursday night i´m now finally in bsas and it´s hot as hell, i mean arica and lima were hot but it was a dry heat - here it reminds me of those hot humid montreal nights, or toronto last august at petra ´s with the power outages heh.
i lent my patagonia handbook to an aussie on the busride and forgot to ask for it back when i got off in a hustle in jujuy instead of salta. oh well. i´ll find another one.

i figured out that for some reason commenting was set to members only which is stupid so now you can continue not commenting :)

cuídase, hermana

2007-02-23T19:47:00.000-08:00

i left calama at 10 this morning and crossed the atacama for only an hour and a bit into san pedro de atacama where the salar is (salt flats).
imagine a desert with snow capped mountain peaks in the background. imagine the peaks no longer being peaks but actual ginourmous mountains looming over flat, arid desert lands, with the salt flats scattered here and there. i say imagine because my camera´s battery died about 5 km outside of san pedro and i have only but a few pictures to show for my journey.

then we got to purmamarca, a UNESCO world heritage site, and i understand why.. when we got there it reminded me of the road out of andorra into france -- clouds scattered so closely i could reach out the window and feel them in my hands, i could barely see the andes around me, and saw just grey nothingness when i looked over the side of the road. when we finally managed to emerge from the clouds what i saw was breathtaking -- literally, we were at almost 5 000 m for most of the trip and breathing by that point had become quite difficult, and i could feel the fatigue taking over me as i could barely keep my eyes open -- mountains of all of the colours of the rainbow, overlooking a valley of pastures, vinyards and ranches, their peaks hidden within the clouds. blue, turquoise, red, purple, beige, grey, my god i could name them all but some of the colours i saw had no names that i knew of. i don´t think i´ve ever seen something as beautiful as the purmamarca, i swear. and of course i´ll never forget it because it feels like the images of this place have been burned into my eyes, but you´ll never get to see what i saw because my stupid camera decided to die as i was taking pictures of the snow capped mountains overlooking the atacama. but imagine the pyrenees crossed with the grand canyon and the garrigue of provence in the valley, with cactus dotting the slopes of the mountains. absofuckinglutely beautiful. never seen anything like it.

i decided to get of at jujuy instead of salta because i didn´t feel like arriving at 1 am after 27 hours travelling, and jujuy seemed very "hustle and bustle". i walked around looking for a bus to buenos aires -- one company asked me for 350 pesos (more than 100$US): i looked at him and said ¨SOY GRINGA PERO NO SOY ESTUPIDA! LADRON!" (I might be a tourist but i´m not stupid, thief!). then a company offered me 160 pesos (about 50$US) to go to Cordoba tonight and then BsAS in the morning, but I said no because my guidebook says between 20-30$US maximum. finally i found a company that offered a semi-cama plus almuerzo (lunch) for 80 pesos (about 25$) that is holding on to my luggage that leaves for BsAs at 5 this morning, meaning i arrive at 3 am. so i accepted.

for what i´ve seen of argentina up to now, it really is enchantingly beautiful, and compared to chile and peru no one even notices me, i blend in to the settings seeing as there are so many mixes here. i still get the occasional ¨aie no te duele¨?" but i´m used to that.

i made a phone call to bsas and then sat down in the cafe to have a dulce de leche sundae when a little girl who was selling flowers came up to me, i told her no, lo siento, but thank you. then the tv in the cafe started showing the simpsons and she sat down to watch but the owner told her to leave. the little girl was pleading with her saying she just wanted to watch five minutes. so i bought her an ice cream so she could watch the simpsons -- it was only 50 cents, and if only you could have seen the smile on her face.. she was so cute, i couldn t say no. nothing to do with the glue sniffing, gringo hating peruvian street vultures..
stupid rechargeable camera batteries, ecofriendly maybe, but hella stupid when you need a camera to remember something.

then i walked into a restaurant and when the waiter asked what i wanted i said "dame algo de barato, rico y local, y una cerveza, la mas grande que tienes" ie: give me something cheap, good and local, and the biggest beer you´ve got. i ended up with some sort of mystery meat schnitzel with avocado salad (MMMM) and fries and a 40. all for 7 pesos - 2.50$. not bad. i think the beer cost the most though. oh well. alcohol kills bacteria, right?

then i met victor or ´boli´, an ambulant street vendor who tried to sell me needle and thread, lo siento pero no le necisito, gracias, and he just fell in love with my piercings and my hair, que me encanto eso, me encanto quiero los mismos que tu! i bought him a beer and then he went off, telling me he had 3 kids and a ´novia gorda´ (fat girlfriend) to feed.

i still have 4 hours to kill and i don´t really know what to do with myself, jujuy is a small town, i don´t want to wander too far off from the bus station but i don´t wanna sit around it all night either. i wanted to go to a peña but the entrance fee is a bit over my budget (130$ just for transportation from lima to bsas total, still not so bad considering it´s almost 3000 km)

i feel like a new woman, a new person. i´ve been here for 13 days and in those 13 days i ´ve been to 3 countries and 1500 km, i´ve met people, i´ve laughed and cried and danced and gotten drunk, i´ve tried new foods and seen landscapes that have left me in awe. i´ve learned a new form of juggling and been playing the accordeon a lot. being here has made me tap into my creativity pool and rekindle my inspiration to learn and love and live, but especially to be and create and keep my eyes open at all times. there´s something about being in sudamerika that makes me so happy, i don´t know what it is -- is it because i´m finally here after longing for it for so long, "no sueñas tu vida, vivas tu sueño", or is it because it´s a change of atmosphere, of culture, of landscape? i can´t say i really know what it is, but i can feel a change in myself, a change for the better. my survival instincts are back and i´m aware of my surroundings, constantly observing and writing furiously in my red notebook in chickenscrawl while travelling on bumpy roads across the everchanging andes.. the andes. my god.
i used to think the pyrenees were the most beautiful mountains ever. and now, it´s the andes. jungles, deserts, glaciers and fjords, these mountains change every 300 km and i can´t get enough of them.

this cybercafe, as many down here, does not have a cdrom drive so i can upload pictures, the only one i´ve uploaded is the one you see on your right: me looking lovingly at this continent with my finger on arica, city of the eternal spring, where i met people who could melt the entire icy winter of canada with their smiles. i think that´s what i love most about people here is their smiles.. maybe it´s because they´re so dark and their teeth so white, or maybe it´s because when they smile it´s from oreja hasta oreja, i don´t know, but every single person i´ve met here has been so kind and amable it´s uncanny. why have we lost that in the western world? why are we so afraid of eachother? we should embrace our differences!
i´ve gained a new love for life that i´ve never had before while being here.. people are so different, they don´t look at me like a circus freak.. eres distincta, the cop at the border told me, and i´m the only one he smiled at. like el marcel told me, tienen mas miedo de tu que tu tienes miedo de ellos, y por ese la gente te respecte, pero cuidase, hermana, y tienes que ser preparada a toda eventualidad -- they´re more scared of you then you are of them, and for that they will respect you but be cautious and be prepared for everything.

and i think of the card that la kimy wrote that said never i´d have imagined having a french girl, a french girl and not a gringa, in my house, and i am so happy to have met you - thank you for being who you are, and don´t ever change, don´t forget us, and remember you always have a home in chile.

tomorrow i finally arrive in my "promised land", buenos aires, where i hope i will be able to do some street performance to give my visa a breather, before i continue onto patagonia where i will sleep under the most beautiful sky i have ever seen.. we can see orion´s belt in the north, but have you ever seen his bow? there are so many stars it´s incredible, you can see the milky way and magellan´s cloud (the galaxy, puxa!), but you can´t take a picture of it, believe me, i´ve tried... soon patagonia, il n´y a que la patagonie, la patagonie qui convienne a mon immense tristesse.. and then, like in my favourite song, l´autre bout du bout du monde, tierra del fuego.

cuidase, mis cariños, pienso en vs y siempre estais con migo en todo este camino.

2007-02-23T03:56:00.000-08:00

after a 10 hour bus ride, i just arrived in calama, a little town about 2 hours northwest of san pedro de atacama - in other words, i´m in the middle of the driest desert on the planet.
i leave at 10 for salta, in argentina, which is a 12 hour bus ride, so i´m crossing my fingers that i´ll be able to hop a bus at 11 or so for BsAs, which is a 22 hour bus ride, so I can be there tomorrow night.

i shared half a cheese and ham sandwich with a little street dog, a beautiful cocker spaniel. it´s amazing the dogs in the street here, i saw a beautiful husky and wanted to take him with me, but they probably wouldn´t let me on the bus with him.

kimy made me a little card with a picture of a flower that i really liked in arica and wrote me the cutest little text and i was reading it on the bus and i swear i was crying, she´s such a sweet thing, i miss her already.

i met a traveller named marcel, a thirty-something chilean with blond dreads and blue eyes, he used to live in montreal, well live is a big word really, he had a little truck that he lived in and travelled all around canada, planting trees, doing the apple thing, yanno, seasonal work.

anyway i gotta jet my bus takes off in 20 minutes and i have to wander back to the geminis terminal and begin the crossing of the ATA-fucking-CAMA.

2007-02-21T13:02:00.000-08:00

stuck between the altiplano and the driest desert on earth, the sun always shines in arica. always. it never rains. ever.
for someone who suffers from SAD like i do, my serotonin levels are having a non stop party right now. here, for all you wankers stuck in cold, icy canuckistan: have some sun. there's too much of it down here.
(i can hear you all muttering salope as i type this)

oh, and i have a chilean lover and you guys don't, na na na na boo boo. ok, lover is a bit of an overstatement -- how about drunken one night stand? whatever.
they love the blue eyes. and i love the dark skin. que rico. QUE FUCKING RICISIMO. one more reason to love chile, i swear, the men here are just.. wow. simply breathtaking. and i hear argentinians are even better.
antici.... pation.

putting my libido aside for a minute (hey, i'm not getting any in montreal, i had to make sure everything still works down there OK?), i'm almost sad to leave because everyone i've met here is so wonderful and sweet, and the fact that everything has palta (avocado) in it makes me drool, but i can't wait to see my darling aprille and dance around buenos aires in a tutu and eat parrillas. ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

i really don't want to leave south america and i've only been here for 10 days, i feel so at home here, so free, it's owning up to everything i ever dreamed it would be. i can still remember listening to my father's stories about chile and argentina and just the way there were stars in his eyes as he spoke, that was the moment i decided i needed to come see it for myself. and now here i am, completely in love with the desert, with the 45 degree heat and the ice cold pisco sours, with reggaeton and choripan. and kimi who has to be the sweetest thing since dulce de leche, she has such a beautiful soul and a good heart. i wish there were more people like her in this world.
she won't let me pay for food. she won't let me pay for my drinks. she calls me la cata, but some of the others also call me pinky because of my narf tattoo, pinky y el cerebro they say down here.

i managed to upload a lot of pictures (350) on to a cd which i will upload when i get to buenos aires, it takes too long in a cyber and even if it is only 2$ for four hours, i don{t wanna spend four hours in front of a pc when i could be outside in the sun contributing to my peeling tan.

2007-02-20T18:44:00.000-08:00

an exerpt from a friend´s blog:

Met various characters including a traveller traveller type who had dreads of many colours, a myriad of piercings, patchwork clothes and who even owned a soundsystem back home in Canada which had been used for squat raves in some of the most unlikeliest places ("no-one could figure out how we got our rig into that place"). Being someone of high intelligence she finally lost her rag and high-tailed it out of Lima when the Aussie crew arrived.

how fitting. thanks, tom.

i leave for salta on thursday.
i love chile. i really do.

and avocados are gods gift to man.

p.s. drunken beach parties while listening to salvador adamo, oh man. so surreal.

2007-02-19T11:50:00.000-08:00

it actually took me 21 hours to get from lima to tacna, which is one hell of a long bus ride, but goddamn, the scenery was beautiful. i think i took like 100 pictures of the desert! such amazing contrasts, rice fields and grazing cattle amidst the aridity of the altiplano, and the beaches looked fantastic.
i was sitting next to a fisherman named segundo on the bus, who was such a sweetheart, he kept offering me food and stuff and i kept declining but he'd put it in my hands saying toma toma tienes que comer algo so in the end i accepted the chicharrones (some sort of grilled salted pork with grllled salted corn) and the dulces and the popsicles.
whenever the bus would stop somewhere hordes of people would come to the window saying what they had to sell and the passengers would throw money out the window for them in exchange for various foods, i actually think that's such a wicked idea, we should have that in canada.
now i know everyone says don't eat anything from street vendors but it's so fucking good and so cheap, and since when have i been one to follow the rules?

tacna was a nightmare, everyone telling me one thing and then another, like get your story straight i just spent 21 hours on a bus now get me to chile pronto! it ended up costing me about 3$ to get to arica and another 3$ to get into chile, i finally arrived in arica at 11 pm chilean time (+2h from lima time) and maria catalina, a peruvian housemaid who works here, helped me find a hostel around the bus terminal.
i decided i wasn't tired enough to sleep (the travelers at the hostel suggested i buy some diazepam for the long bus trips, one of those blue babies put me out for a good 15 hour) so i went out to the centre looking for a bar. first bar was some karaoke bar with a few old guys sitting around drinking pisco, so i bolted pretty fast. as i left the bar i noticed a sign saying SALIDA - ESCAPE. i had to chuckle at that.

then i heard the smiths coming out of a bar down the street so i went there and it's a good thing i did! marcelo the bartender actually GAVE me beer after beer and introduced me to his friends kike (a dj who likes acid tekno whaaaaaaaaaat!) and his girfriend kimi, jorge and ignacio.
they all seemed appalled that i paid 10$ for a night in a hostel and kimi suggested i come live with her because she lives alone while her mother works in iquique. i know most people would think it's a bad idea, but i spent 4 hours conversing with these people and sometimes you can just tell if someone has a good heart, and these guys definately have a beautiful energy to them so i accepted her offer and i'm really glad i did, because this is what it's about you know? meeting people and living like them, alongside them, instead of being scared of them. besides, what can a bunch of 19 ear old stoners possibly do to me, i wonder?
after we went to the beach and as usual i ran into the water fully clothed, i took a few pictures but you can tell i'm completely wasteland by that point.

i think i'm in love with this country and the chileans are so hospitable and amable it's incredible. not to mention drop dead gorgeous, such a refreshing change of scenery from the short stumpy hooked nose peruvians (no offense intended and i know this sounds superficial, but they are not a very attractive bunch) i was only going to stay a day in arica but i think i'll stay a bit longer, it's a beautiful little town and half of it was designed by eiffel, but anyway the vibe here is really nice. it's a 30 hour bus ride to Santiago or 35 to Mendoza so i think i'm going to skip santiago and go straight to argentina.
of course i change plans every day so who knows?

i'm off to sit my pasty white ass on the beach and eat some palta.

2007-02-17T14:43:00.000-08:00

i booked a bus for tacna, i leave at 7 tonight and arrive at tacna at 4 tomorrow afternoon - it´s a 17 hour trip with a few stops. i hope i can get into arica before the sun goes down, but i probably won´t. i don´t want to have to stay overnight anywhere but i´d really like to hit the beach at least once, apparently the beach there is gorgeous.
i´m too broke to afford even a semi-cama so i just went with the basic economico, but there were no window seats left, boo.
i just got back from central lima in a collectivo which goes through 4 different districts, the contrast in this city between poor and rich are unreal : standing on plaza de armas with it´s enormous colonial vestiges and seeing the shanties on the moutain in the distance, wow, i wish i had my camera, but it´s burned into my mind so i don´t think i´m about to forget it any time soon.
i can´t wait to get to chile and sit my ass on some clean sand and dive into blue water (instead of murky brown). i´ve got one hell of a wicked tan already, by the time i get back to lima i reckon they won´t be calling me gringa anymore :)

2007-02-16T03:54:00.000-08:00

as usual i´m still up at 7 in the morning - since arriving here i usually take a 3-4 hour nap when it´s cool in the morning and then when it´s too hot i wake up and go out. today i´m just going to skip the nap and walk to miraflores, get some breakfast and just walk around a couple markets without buying anything aside from a bathing suit and some sunglasses because i have neither!

i´m trying to escape tonight to pisco, and then head to nazca to see the lines, maybe stop for a day in arequipa and then bus down to tacna to cross into arica in chile. that should take me about a week, if i don´t go to hostels and just take night buses and sleep in them.
from tacna it´s a very very long bus ride to varparaiso that goes through the atacama, and from valparaiso i´m going to cross into argentina. i don´t think i´ll go through santiago this time around but rather when i come back from tierra del fuego.
i´m sad to not have seen the punk squatt or to have visited villa el salvador, because i don´t want to stay more than 2 days in lima before i catch my flight. i hope that by the time i get to macchu picchu it isn´t heavily booked in advance!
i´m excited to be finally attacking the road, i needed a few days to get accustomed to being here before jumping into it completely but now i feel ready to just fly. i mean i´ve got three months man, i gotta make the most of my time and my (little) money!

i probably won´t have much internet access as i´ll be wandering around cities and sleeping on buses most of the time instead of staying in hostels so this is me saying ¨YES THE BEACHES OF SOUTH PERU AND THE SNOW CAPPED ANDES BRING IT ON!¨ and disconnecting from the world for a few weeks.

2007-02-15T17:43:00.000-08:00

feeling kind of disconnected today, there are so many people in the hostel now, and right now most of them are sitting at the bar.
this afternoon i was pretty bored, a lot of people were still sleeping at 4 and the others were nursing their hangovers in front of the television. the sun was way too strong to actually go out before 4, so i ate a bit of fruit and decided to go for a walk - barranco is pretty safe during the day because there are policeman everywhere, and at night if you avoid the beach areas you should be fine - no one wanted to come with so i took off alone. two twenty something peruvian boys came up to me, asked me where i was from, what was my name, i chatted with them for a bit in the street trying to pick up a vibe, finally my gut instinct told me to lose the paranoia a bit. they brought me to a tattoo parlor just down the street and i sat and talked with the tattoo artist, luis, for a while, smoked a bit of mota, met a peruvian with blue eyes! it turns out the two boys who accosted me on the street and luis are also malabaristas and tonight a couple of us from the hostel are going to go to puente de los suspiros to do the bohemian thing. barranco is actually quite an artistic district, and i must say it is very beautiful, the architecture and the colors are breathtaking.

apparently there is a hostel here for 7 soles a night, if that is the case then i am so moving out of this hostel! it´s cheap by international standards for the facilities that are offered but it´s like the club med for backpackers on the gringo trail, and i hate that right now i´m on it.

i might meet up with someone i met here in iquitos in april to go to the jungle for an ayahuasca ceremony. it´s such a powerful plant, and i came here to find answers so i´m sure the huasca can help me answer them. from what i´ve heard the first voyage is very scary for most because it brings out all of your fears, questions, everything you hide from yourself generally when you try to pretend everything´s ok but really it´s not: it just shoves it in your face, brutally honest.
supposedly the indians can just glance at you and see if you´re sick or have a problem and they brew different plants and things to heal you, i´m not saying i am sick but i do think a bit of shamanic magic could open my eyes to the important things in life.

i´m starting to think 3 months isn´t enough, i just wanna go everywhere right now. and get the fuck out of this hostel!

2007-02-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

yesterday i went to meet moises, a juggler punk who is friends with aprille and who happens to live just a block away. when i saw this heavily pierced and tattooed little peruvian punk with the biggest smile i´d ever seen i thought, finally, i think i might have found the way to get over my peruphobia and actually connect with the locals! a couple of his friends were there and invited me to come out with them. i figured it´s either that or go back to the hostel where i´ll do nothing, or take them up on their offer and discover a side of the city i´ve been trying to find - obviously i went with them.
elisa, ketty and rodrigo (who used to live in montreal in a theatre!) are malabaristas, jugglers, and what jugglers! contact juggling, mendalas, poi, claves, trapeze and stilts even. they took me to an artist space about 2 blocks away from plaza barranco, a beautiful old colonial building with large courtyards, workshops and a stage set up for trapeze and those neat pieces of cloth that people use to suspend themselves in the air. they were all practising with eachother and exchanging moves and techniques - i can´t juggle to save my life, although i´ve tried, so i sat and watched in awe for a few hours until one of them passed me a plastic contact ball to practice with. and then ketty taught me how to do mendelas, which has similar movements to poi but is done with large pieces of cloth, it´s very suave, fluid, i really liked it. it inspired me to want to buy some juggling stuffs (because it´s just sooooo much cheaper here) so i can practice when i´m in the middle of nowhere in patagonia by myself. the mendelas came pretty easily whereas the pelota is really hard, but when i actually managed to make it move in my hand i was so happy i started to dance around like the drunken, easily excited fool that i am.
they were very patient and open, and for the first time since i got here i felt like this is what i came here to see. i ended up staying with them until 4 am, and when i went to leave elisa handed me a beer and said "no te vayas!!".. i took the beer but left anyway cause i was beat, but they invited me to go back to the space tonight for a juggling show. i thanked them for the invitation and being so kind and generous despite the fact that i´m a gringa but they assured me that i wasn´t and that i had a good vibe about me so to come back whenever. i managed to walk the 5 blocks back to the hostel without being frightened that anyone was going to attack me, and passed out in my hamac promptly upon arriving - i pay for a bed that i don´t use, i sleep in my hamac in the courtyard every night, and the hostel´s pet kitten usually curls up with me.

moises told me about a punk squat in the centre that i´m dying to see. i want to see how peruvian punks live! he´s probably not up yet but i hope i can go there with him today.

there are some wonderful people in this hostel, but a lot of them are here to surf, party, and get laid, which isn´t at all why i´m here.. they don´t really exchange much with the locals, other than bodily fluids of course. i´ve never really hung around backpackers as generally when i travel i either stay with friends of friends of a friend, or in squats, and they do have a certain level of westernism that they bring with them. what´s the point of going to peru if it´s to get drunk with other foreigners in the backyard of a hostel? or basing your travel experience on which city has cheaper booze, easier girls and a better nightlife? some of these people have been all around the world but know nothing of any of these places they´ve visited other than the obvious tourist destinations and monuments. i was talking with an american girl about experiences in egypt and then a few minutes later i overheard her say she´d never been to africa -- HI EGYPT IS IN AFRICA YOU IDIOT. at the risk of sounding like a pompous asshole, if you´re going to brag about it you should at least get your facts straight about where you´ve been.

i really do think a big part of my paranoia came from their hesitance to do anything; and because i don´t want to go out alone, i´ve barely seen the city. but now that i have met peruvians who i actually connected with, i think i´m going to try and see more of them so i can learn about how they live.
one of the girls, ketty, she works as an anthropologist in la selva with indigens, studying the way they live, how they educate each other, their symbols and mysticism. we talked about it for a while and it seemed fascinating, with what i could understand of it with my mediocre castellano. i had really interesting conversations with them about the street children and poverty after i told them i wanted to go into social work. i might be on the other side of the world but certain things are always the same despite cultural differences - in montreal it´s heroin addicts shooting up on the street in broad daylight and the crackheads who live on my corner, in lima it´s 5 year old children sniffing shoe polish and smoking pasta. same shit, different pile. i really had excellent conversations (even though sometimes i was struggling with the language barrier) with them and i´m happy to have been able to meet them, it opened my eyes to a side of lima i didn´t think would exist.

it´s so hot right now, i´d say at least 40, and the sun is beating down so hard i´m in a slight vegetative state right now. i got my first sunburn here, really badly might i add, just by being at the beach for an hour and a half! we must have looked like something else down there, wading through the (filthy) water fully clothed with a 2$ bottle of champagne wrapped in a yellow plastic bag in our hands.
saturday night there´s something called the freak show, with suspensions and stuff, i might actually be able to get suspended myself! that would be so so so great, it´s something i´ve wanted to do for some time now!

i´m going to get a 20 cent ice cream now and take in some sun, this time i hope i don´t burn to a crisp.

2007-02-13T01:02:00.000-08:00

day 3 in lima.
i decided to leave the hostel yesterday, accompanied by a motley crew comprised of jolande, a dutch girl, bryn, an american girl, tom, a cockney musician and richard, a scot; we ventured out to centro lima even though it is reputed to be quite dangerous (and understandably so) to check out chinatown(i wanted cheap sandals but couldn´t find any, it seems that a size 10 is unheard of in peru) and eat at a chifa.
strangely enough, lima supposedly has the largest chinese community of south america, yet i saw maybe 2 chinese people in chinatown. it´s mostly markets selling indian clothes, street vendors and kids selling candy, in an area full of buildings in semi ruin and quite a dirty setting -- an interesting contrast from touristy miraflores and bohemian barranco. they have a sort of clandestin animal market there, people carry 4 or 5 puppies around at a time. they are all such beautiful dogs, boxers, pit bulls, even huskies: but half of them look like they´re dying, it´s so sad. i wish i could have at least taken one with me to get it out of such horrible treatment, but alas, i could not.
when we arrived at the mercado central, a boy of about 8 approached us to try to sell us candy as most of the children here do. we politely shook our heads, ¨no, gracias, necesitamos nada¨ as we got out of our taxi and rummaged through our pockets for the 8 soles required to pay for our ride.
the child was perched on the door, reaching into the cab trying to pick the change out of bryn´s hand as she was counting it and trying to recuperate 50 cents that had fallen behind the hand brake.

a swarm of them started to gather around us, probably thinking that the five gringos were easy targets, and i have to admit it threw me off guard- i might be a gringo, but i´m certainly not a rich one, and to be honest, at that point i was really annoyed with these children who just would not go away no matter how many times we told them to piss off.
they may have snot and grime smeared on their face, that´s not going to get to me, i´ve seen it before and i know it´s an act - i´ve seen gypsy kids rob tourists in the parisian metro and hold out dirty hands asking for money with their thick accents ¨s´il vous plait donnez moi argent¨ ; groups of twenty children in mexico trying to sell me 5 pieces of gum for 25 cents and old women clutching babies wrapped in filthy bandages; or seven year olds who are blind and deformed, with arthritis you´d only think a seventy year old could have, playing the erhu at 3 am in beijing; little flower girls who should be in school but who, because their parents assumed that sending them away to the city would be more beneficial for them, are wandering the streets in search of tourists so they can bring back enough money to send to their parents.. it´s a vast global scam to try and use children to make us feel like crap and take pity upon seeing their big brown eyes and tattered clothes. honestly, it could work, if only you didn´t see them run off five seconds later to start playing in the streets with a smile and pointing at the gringo they just ripped off. these children look so cute and innocent, but they´ll put on a song and dance to rob you blind without you noticing, ¨quiero agua, dame agua¨ - as you pass them your bottle of water, two others will be behind you, opening your bag to steal your stuff and sticking their tiny, agile hands in your pockets.

we were literally swarmed by a group of four or five children with packets of sweets, holding out their hands pleading with us to give them money to eat as we´re all standing around the taxi wondering what in god´s name was going on and why our friend was still sitting in the cab. it drew even more attention to ourselves, but we attempted to serve as guards from these vultures in training looking for anything to grab from us; they were really persistant, poking their hands through the door trying to snatch up a sole, "por favor para comer, por favor tengo hambre, dame algo¨ pointing towards the coins.

one of these children was so incredibly persistant it was almost scary. he just wouldn´t give up, no matter how many times we tsked at him and shooed him away. seeing as i speak spanish a tad bit better than the four others, i swatted at his hand when he reached for the change in bryn´s hand. i looked at him and told him ¨no tenemos nada para ti, ahora vayate!¨
he looked at me with such hate, i could almost read in his eyes something along the lines of "if i had a knife, i would slit your throat right here and now". i have to admit it sent a certain chill down my spine, and i thought to myself.. maybe i should have listened to the woman at the front desk when she warned us not to venture into central lima. i don´t think i´ve ever been scared of a child before, but this little guy gave me a serious case of the creeps, especially when he followed us for twenty minutes.

other than that, it was an interesting experience to be in what seems like the only chinatown in the world that doesn´t actually have anything chinese except for the food, which even at that seems peruvianised : i´m assuming it´s because the chinese, great business men as they are, have realised there is absolutely no money to be made in lima, as the peruvians have a hard enough time as it is running their little market stalls that all sell the same generic indian sarongs and faux inca tokens.

i´m quite used to being stared at in the "western" world, but here, it´s absolutely incredible how they stop in their tracks and glare at me as if i´d just landed here from pluto. serves me right for having blue hair, a mostly shaved head and multiple facial piercings.
however, compared to north america or europe where people stare at me as if i have the plague, here people laugh and smile, full of curiosity. they don´t find me repulsive, on the contrary, they find it rather amusing to see this gringa with rags for clothes (i have duct tape covering up a huge slit in the backside of my pants, a souvenir from jumping a fence to go swimming in an exposition lot a few years back and a rat chewed tank top), and cheek piercings (which are actually of incan origin!). many of them came up to me, mostly to say "diosmio! no te duele esos piercings? porque tienes tanto; te gusta el dolor?" . i usually don´t like being pointed at or glared at, my general reaction is to ask if they want my picture so it lasts longer, but here it goes over well because they aren´t aggressive or hostile about it at all, which is a refreshing change from the habitual piercings + dreads = junkie who shouldn´t be approached attitude back home. the children especially seem to find my appearance fascinating as they all point at me with wide eyes and smile, asking "papa, porque ella tiene el pelo azul?"

i still can´t help feeling bad for all the children who walk barefoot in the streets with their little packets of candy: i would love to buy candy from them, but i don´t want to encourage them to live like this, begging on the street and, if that doesn´t work, stealing. i do hope to be able to work with these children, to give them a chance to get good head start in life. before coming down here i had found an organization that arranged volunteer work in ayacucho, but it was very expensive and i found out by asking around that there are many free volunteer opportunities throughout south america. one of the peruvian girls who works at reception here at the hostel took one of the guests staying here to an orphanage for a day. he told me they had offered him a volunteer position, taking the kids to the parc, playing with them, bathing them, taking them to the doctor, giving them their medication, teaching them to read and whatnot. he declined, but i wanted to know more, so paola got me the number and i hope to be able to work at least a few days with these children. at first i thought my spanish wouldn´t be good enough, but she assured me that it would be sufficient to communicate with five year olds - just goes to show how mediocre my castellano has gotten over the years, even if i feel flattered when the peruvians ask me if i am spanish because of my lispy c´s and z´s. someone even asked me if i was catalan!

lima seems like such a strange place, full of contrasts and risks at every corner, i have eyes behind my head at all times and the minute i feel something brush against me i flip out thinking it´s a pickpocket or something. it´s definately not a city i feel comfortable in, but i want to discover it, learn its secrets. i´m thinking of going to villa el salvador which is an autonomous squatter settlement south of the city, just to look at the way people live and to try and understand it. there´s also a possibility to go visit the shantytowns with a guide (weird, i know), which i definately want to do, because it´s the reality for such a large portion of the population here and i´m not here just to stay in miraflores with all the malls and burger kings - i want to experience lima for what it is, a multi facetted city lodged between the andes and a very polluted pacific coast; where colourful colonial buildings stand next to decrepit concrete buildings, palm trees and shanty towns, enormous markets where the stalls are full of handicrafts on one side and plastic made in china trinkets on the other.

it really is a strange place, i´ve never actually been scared to walk alone even in broad daylight anywhere, but here nothing ever seems safe or sure. it´ll take some getting used to.

lima, si!

2007-02-11T10:52:00.001-08:00

i arrived in lima at one am last night, got to my hostel around 2.30 where i was greeted by a motley crew of canadians, dutch and aussie folk.
i just woke up, due mostly to the fact that i hadn t slept in a few days.. the sun is beating down and it s so refreshing, seeing as just yesterday i was in subzero temperatures.
i was planning on going out for some ceviche but apparently it s not worth going after 2pm as the freshness of the fish is compromised.. i guess i ll just have to wait until tomorrow!

i think i m going to go to mendoza for the wine festival before going to buenos aires, i don`t plan on sticking around lima for too too long...

i`m off to the food fair.

cheers!

2007-02-01T18:17:00.000-08:00

I leave for Lima in 9 days!

ITINERARY:

If all goes as planned (which it probably won't), I should be in Lima for two weeks, then I have two choices on how to get into Argentina:
cross into Bolivia through Lake Titicaca, and take the road south of La Paz into northern Argentina, where I'll hit Iguacu and then Rosario;
or go to La Paz, then go east towards Santa Cruz to take the "Death Train" to the Brazilian border, go south into Paraguay and continue down until northern Argentina.
I will stay in Buenos Aires for a few weeks, this is sure. I hope to at least hit Montevideo in Uruguay for a day or so before I continue south into Patagonia. From there I will begin my jouney to Tierra del Fuego (the reason for the trip) and Ushuaia. After Ushuaia, I will go through the Chilean Lake District to Puerto Montt, and then go north to Santiago and Valparaiso.
After that, I will go back to Peru, hit Cuzco (how "gringo trail follower" of me..), and if time allows I will go north of Lima for a bit, before finally returning to Lima a week before I leave, so around May 10th.