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Once I had decided on Mexico as my next destination, once I had a job to go to in Guadalajara, I began to pay attention to mention of these names in the press (‘the press’ was at the time CNN; my house in Bolivia had cable but the only channels it could pick up were the coalition of northern acronyms – CNN, MTV, ESPN). There was little there to inspire confidence in my future home.
Through the early months of ‘09 a popular destination for journalists was any of the US-Mexican border towns, where they could don helmets and flak jackets and crawl under cars and report that no they weren’t in downtown Baghdad, but in fact were in Mexico, former spring break destination of choice turned failed state. The frequent reports came with grotesque statistics, over 5000 drug trade related executions in 2008, the number for 2009 growing sharply and sure to surpass that of the previous year.
Then came the swine flu epidemic, and the journalists donned face masks and went in search of the pig farm at the epicentre of the promising pandemic, and it was suggested that Mexico was on the verge of collapse. Hilary Clinton promised to help.
Maybe this was why it was so easy to find work in Mexico. Maybe it would have been better to stay in Bolivia, where the pausity of international flights has kept swine flu at bay, and where state failures do not mean that the state has failed. Evo had even stifled the war on drugs (and let’s face it, it is the war on drugs and not the drug trade itself which produces high murder rates). It was too late though; I needed cash, and so I prepared myself for life in the failed Mexican state.
There were more face masks and heat detectors and other swine flu paranoia paraphenalia in Sydney airport and in Santiago airport than there were in LAX or Guadalajara.
During my first jetlagged week in Guadalajara the country could have collapsed completely, obliterated by swine flu or drug war or whatever; I wouldn’t have noticed. When the lag finally receded I found myself in a city that looked suspiciously unpostapocalyptic. It didn’t even look preapocalyptic. It actually looked quite… peaceful.
This is the grim reality of Guadalajara; a sprawling, middle class city. A city of suburbs and SUVs. The weather is always mild; the ‘wet season’ consists of nightly storms that pass within an hour but which fill the sky with lightning before they go. Every major intersection is clustered about with American franchises and shopping malls. Taco stalls bloom in the parking lots.
This is not to say Guadalajara doesn’t have its dangers; these are just a little less glamorous than CNN and its failed state stories suggested. These dangers come in many insidious forms; the unpotable drinking water, the tantalising re-heated street food, the prevalence of whisky-by-the-bottle, the drunks protesting their lucidity as they slide into driver’s seats, the ‘just one more shot’ hospitality, the pork fat hidden within seemingly innocuous refried beans, the multitude of double entendres in Mexican parlance, the pre-sunrise school start time.
These dangers ensure that while life in Guadalajara is very very easy, it is never without its pitfalls. Talk among new teachers quickly turns to the state of one’s bowels, or of one’s nerves if one has a car and drives in the city. If CNN says the nation is on the verge of collapse then this must be true, but if this is what collapse looks like then perhaps it is time we had more failed states, especially if these involve extra swine flu school closures. Because we really do have to get up very early and that isn’t fun.
Two short pieces about Mexico’s precarious position on the verge of collapse…
http://www.thetruthaboutmexico.com/2009/04/mexico-as-failed-state-media-narrative/
Pablo Neruda believed that drink tasted better from coloured glass. He filled his houses with glass of all colours and shapes, and walking through his old rooms, passing through the fields of colour cut by each glass, it’s hard not to feel a kind of wonder and contentment. Walking around Valparaiso is very similar; the colour Neruda applied strategically to his house overlooking the city has exploded and run in all directions, and then faded and chipped and washed back over itself all over again, and all this conflicting colour gives the city a sense of fun, of vivacity and wonder.
The open air museum in Valparaiso is a collection of murals scattered over one of the city’s hills. They are grand and mostly abstracted; they look like old socialist monuments. Nowadays though they are looking awfully faded and abstract and sombre. They have been eclipsed by the vibrant flourishes of more recent artists, who with or without permission have been turning the entire city into an open air museum of clashing colours and forms.
It is not only the artists that contribute to the mad vibrancy of the city though. Geography plays its part; Valparaiso is a port city, built into a fingernail of land between ocean and steep hills. As it expanded the only place to go was up and over the hills. Impossibly steep and crooked streets loop over these. They run into each other or flirt without every meeting. Getting from A to B in Valparaiso usually involves a lot of unexpected ascents, descents, hair pin bends and doublings-back. It is not a city for people in a hurry, or for people who like to walk in straight lines.
Valparaiso isn’t for everyone, and for those who do prefer straight lines, as well as proper beaches, hotels and malls, nearby Vina del Mar would no doubt seem like a lot more fun. Valparaiso advertises itself as the Bohemian heart of South America, and with that comes a certain atmosphere. When it rains the tortuous streets become steep torrents of water; drains flood and turds float themselves down towards the port; the many street dogs get soggy and share awnings with stranded students; the city’s cats clamour and yowl their misery. The prettiness of the city is of a dingy, scruffy kind. Spray paint on corrugated iron and concrete.
I returned to Valparaiso, squeezing in a few more days there before I flew out of South America. I did nothing appreciably different from what I had done on my first visit. If anything I explored less and stuck to the known areas. Even so I found new streets, new art, new houses clinging to the precipitous hills, new street dogs. Every little wander brought new corners to explore, new cafes and bars to be frequented, new people to know. Two trips to Valparaiso proved as inadequate as one; the many twists and quirks of this labyrinth need serious time to explore in detail. New murals and characters appear, old ones fade and are worn away. The colours shift, glow and dim like the ordered rows of glass in Neruda’s house. Always there is colour in the labyrinth though, and after two jaunts through the city it really does feel as though brightly painted streets, like tinted glass, produce stronger human responses. Valparaiso, for all its ongoing change and permutation, remains a city of constant wonder and fascination.
I had few demands of Paraguay, but one of them was that I see elegant old buildings, their once-colourful facades now peeling, fading, flaking and crumbling. Asunción didn’t disappoint; its historical heart is full of buildings clinging to their faded grandeur, even as their windows are boarded up and they are abandoned to urban decay.
Downtown Asunción is a strange place, the streets are full of civil servants, money changers and shoe shiners. Everyone else, it seems, has moved out to the suburbs. One of the central plazas has become a tent city; people came from out of town to protest and got stuck here, huddled beneath tarpaulins and around smouldering fires. The presidential palace, the senate and the congress (which is a gleaming new thing built with ‘thanks for believing in us’ money from Taiwan) buildings look out across a sluggish curve of the River Paraguay, but between them and the river has sprouted a shanty-town that now shares a back fence with the palace.
Needless to say the palace is well-maintained (and heavily heavily guarded), as are a few other monuments of national pride, like the Pantheon of Heroes where unknown soldiers and dictators lie coffined side by side. Around these proud edifices the downtown is crumbling. Some of the more significant historical buildings are being restored by various cultural centres – Spain, Catalonia, France, Germany and Japan are all involved in preserving Asunción – but these are well outnumbered by the buildings doomed to obscurity. It is a strange feeling, walking the evening streets and realising just how many of the buildings are uninhabited or underinhabited. It was just as strange realising I was the only guest for four nights in a three-story hotel.
Where once the city might have clustered around its palace and cathedral, now it centres itself around the malls. Giant shopping compounds, skirted by drive-through everything (including the first McDonalds I’d seen in seven months) are scattered around outer-Asunción, and these are a far far better place for sampling the contemporary culture of the city. The centre of the city might be decaying, but out around the malls everything is fresh and hip and glossy.
I inevitably cringed, as most backpackers will cringe, at the idea of spending too much time among the malls. The old downtown was full of fantastic, free galleries and museums and cultural centres. The malls were full of people. The old downtown was full of crumble and decay that for whatever reason attracts me so, but the malls had places to eat, supermarkets, bookstores. For any Paraguayo the choice must be easy; grub around among the emptying shells of the past, or hang out with your friends and meet people among the foodcourts and cinemas of new-Asunción. It is a shame for the city, and after visiting the malls the centre feels all the more forlorn and lonely, but this was exactly what I demanded to see. So the malls and the McDonalds, the SUVs and the siliconed wives, the enormous parking lots and air-conditioned foodcourts, maybe they’re all just the inevitable consequence of my search for elegantly crumbling architecture.
It was snowing as the bus crested the mountains surrounding La Paz. The road curved away and into emptiness, mist and cloud hanging low over the road, obscuring everything in shifting, coiling white. Above the road stark and towering black crags soared and could be glimpsed through the white for brief moments. Jagged cascades of water tumbled down by the road.
A little lower and the damp earth was visible, birds scuttling among the low bushes and lonely shepherds wrapped in tarps hunched by the roadside. Long skeins of abandoned stone fence unravelled across the highland fens, and great Grendeline electricity stanchions loomed out of the mist.
A little lower and the great depths plummeting away from the road were visible. The sheer black cliffs began to give out to steep green slopes. Further coils of pale road were piled against the cliffs. Rusted signs leaned along the roadside.
A little lower and we emerged out of the cloud, the road looking up and down long, verdant canyons. Windows opened, layers were shed and the bus crawled around trucks and tractors working to clear fresh, muddy avalanches from the road.
A little lower and silhouettes of vultures were pasted against the sky. Branches and leaves lashed out at the passing bus and the dust of the road coated everything in yellow. We reached the bottom of the canyon and passed alongside a river, letting people off at the most unlikely of locations, their bus stops nothing but a tree among a thousand other overgrown trees.
And then we arrived in Coroico, a pretty town of step cobbled streets and fading little buildings clustered on a long green spur overlooking the valleys and looked over by the towering mountains. Coroico is the largest town (population 5000) in the Yungas, an area stretching north from La Paz to the Amazon basin, and encompassing tropical lowlands and stark highlands. It produces the country’s best coffee and coca, as well as an abundance of fruit, and traces of gold in its riverbeds.
African slaves that survived the mines of Potosí ended up settling in the Yungas, where the humidity and warmth was a welcome relief after the frigid mines. They mixed culturally with the local Aymará people, adopting traditional dress and indigenous language, but marrying mostly among themselves, so that now, more than a hundred and fifty years later Coroico and the Yungas are home to most of the few black Bolivians. These people don’t fit into the usual polarised race politics of Bolivia – where people are either brown and indigenous or white and ruling-class – and as such are a marginalised, forgotten minority.
At 1700 metres above sea level Coroico feels unlike anywhere else I’ve been in Bolivia. People dress more scantly and all drinks are served cold; two things I have grown quite unaccustomed to, but totally necessary in the heat. In the evening an arsenal of bugs seek out unprotected flesh, and the central plaza falls quiet far earlier than in the highlands.
Situated at one end of Bolivia’s most famous road and conveniently close to La Paz, Coroico is becoming something of a resort town for visitors. Most of the hotels have pools, and there is very little else to do except eat and swim and lie in a hammock. Although I managed to lose hours by the pool or pilfering books from the hotel book exchange (the only way I could justify the cost of staying in Coroico), I found the town pretty-but-boring. To busy myself, and to earn more time in the pool I scaled a tall hill behind the town, and found the humidity more difficult than the altitude anywhere else (the hill reaches 2450 metres and as such is still lower than any other place I’ve been in Bolivia). From the summit a magnificent view, gusts of butterflies and many many hungry insects.
I went to Coroico to relax and to see another side of Bolivia. After two nights I found I had no desire for further relaxation and that I couldn’t find anything more to see of this other side of Bolivia. The hotel and the pool scene just weren’t doing it for me, and I found myself eager to be back in the highlands where the pace is less relaxed and swimming seems ridiculous and cycling actually is dangerous.
At the beginning of time, the land was dark, and full of stone and precipices. Viracocha, the creator of civilisation, decided to bring light to the world, and called the sun, followed by the moon and the stars, up out of the waters of the great dark lake. Then he summoned a race of giants out of the cold rocks, but they were ignorant and rebellious, so he swept them away, swelling the lake and flooding the land. When the waters receded he made a smaller race of men out of clay and pebbles. Once the best of these had gone forth and founded a civilisation in the high mountains, he began to wander the land as a tramp, leaning on his staff and instructing the people. Then Viracocha, the bearded old man, the white god of the Andes walked west across the ocean, leaving his creations to their destinies.
Before the first gringos arrived in South America – those bearded, shining beings that seemed momentarily like Viracocha returned, until they opened fire and set about dismantling the civilisations that the creator god had crafted – Titicaca was a tourist destination, a pilgrimage site at the heart of the Inca empire. Isla del Sol, the island of the sun is where the sun and man first rose, and ever since then people have been visiting it to pay their respected.
Once the Spanish did arrive, bringing Catholicism with them, a town on the shores of the lake, Copacabana, became an equally important pilgrimage site. Here resides the Virgen de Candelaria, one of the most important icons in the latino canon, with a long history of bestowing miracles.
Arriving in Copacabana I could see why such importance was invested in the place. The town, surrounded by hills and pastures, was far smaller and far prettier than I expected, the streets empty save for the faint murmur of a bustle around the cathedral. A beach – one of the few in Bolivia – spanned from hill to hill in a long, colourful crescent of trout restaurants, boats and fussball tables. The sky and lake mirrored the blue warmth of one another.
Though the streets of Copacabana are heavy with handicraft stall and pizza restaurants, the town doesn’t need gringos. A steady flow of pilgrims flow through town to have babies and vehicles blessed at the cathedral. Hippies from all over South America come to camp on the beaches of Isla del Sol, and to sell jewellery and jugglery on the streets of Copacabana.
Fortuitously, I arrived on a weekend, which meant that the street outside the cathedral was full of stalls selling religious trinkets, and of cars, trucks and vans decorated with ribbons and flowers, there to be blessed by the priest and his holy water, and by families pouring out libations of beer and wine. In her sanctuary – probably the most beautiful church I’ve seen in South America – the Virgen was on display, her holy curtain pulled back to reveal the little icon, surrounded by gold and icon and saints a martyrs.
On the hill above the town – itself a pilgrimage site – people bought model cars or shops or houses or children or whatever it was they wanted most. They cracked beers and poured them over their offerings. They lit candles in grottos, niches and caves, the whole hill stained with black wherever offerings had been made to the syncretic god of the town.
On the morning of my trip to Isla del Sol the sun was strangely absent, and rain was prickling the surface of the lake. As the clouds gradually cleared the enormous mountains off behind the lake became visible, as did the other islands, peninsulas, beaches and bays of the lake. This undoubtedly is the best of lake Titicaca. From high up on the spine of Isla del Sol the entire lake is visible – an immense thing but never quite so large that the horizon swallows the distant mountains. The perfect size to be both amazing and beautiful. Far away I could see the Peruvian side of the lake, and the islands and hills I had already visited.
The island self is a strange mix of pre-Colombian ruins and herds of sheep and eucalyptus groves and barren slopes of brightly coloured, layered stone. At time it looks like Australia, at other times like the Mediterranean, and at other the chill fjordlands of Chile or New Zealand.
The particular sites of the island were not particularly interesting before the weird beauty of the island itself – the ruins of an Inca temple, another labyrinthine ruin inhabited by nervous sheep, a ceremonial stone table, a sacred stone, the rock Titicaca which gives its sacred name to the whole lake – but the path of carefully laid stone twisted between these sites, while on all side the magnificent lake was changing colours and textures and tones.
In a long day I walked the length of the island, spied its many barren peaks and tiny villages and hidden beaches, and at every turn it was easy to see why this should be the sit of creation myths, the birthplace of civilisation and the sun.
In the evening back in Copacabana a spectacular sunset rose out of the lake, the colours changing and blooming as I watched. These sunsets no doubt having settled over the lake for centuries, seen variously by pilgrims from all corners of the old and new worlds, and affecting all of them, causing them all to pause and consider what a beautiful land they had come upon.
