Sunday, October 31, 2010

Dispatch Number 77 -Notes From a Notebook III

Things You Don't Learn Reading Books
Latin American girlfriends are like wars. They are easy to start and terribly difficult to end.

On Getting There
"I'm not going back, but I don't know where I'm going."
-Scott, The BiPolar Traveler

Cat
Sun burns through the dust of windy arid Huanuco, a city that sits at the edge of the highlands between the Andes and the Amazon basin. Two hotel workers, men in their 20s throw a kitten the distance of a horseshoe pit into a garden fountain deep enough to drown it. The kitten learns it can swim. The men leave it in for some time wallowing in adolescent laughter, eventually they pull it out. The weeks old black kitten sits in shock in the grass next to the fountain.
Minutes earlier Scott, my suicidal American friend and I were discussing human evolution, Was man still evolving or locked into his present form?

Our discussion took place on a balcony above the fountain where we witnessed the cat being tossed. It was cruel.
Scott remarked in his deadpan fashion, I'm not sure humans have evolved.

Scott
Scott talks of suicide in a deep southern Tennessee drawl, morbid contemplations of the noose to put a stop to it all. He explained the importance of using a thick rope to perform the task comfortably and how to set the rope on the neck, not Hollywood style with broken vertebrae, but by gently starving the brain of blood and oxygen. I refer to him as my Suicidal American Friend in letters to friends. In fact, he owns a beautiful piece of white rope tied into a noose that always sits out in the open. He has carried ropes like this one for years, it gives him solace. He jokes to put me at ease, yet I know his musings have a tinge of realism.

He is safe; I am not the type to freak out and try to prevent him from his wishes. I am of the opinion that life is yours to do what you want with it and if he is going to do it, he will. I can only be a normal guy with him and let each of us take away what we need from our time together. The noose helps him keep perspective when his mood turns against the instinct of the heartbeat to live.

He does not seem over the edge, but families say that all the time of murderous or suicidal relations, you never know what lie inside. What I do enjoy about Scott is he possesses both LIFE and DEATH and that is more than I can say of most people I meet.

Chavin
Guided by my sometimes misguided idea of being an antitourist I told Scott I wanted to go to Chavin up in the mountains because the map showed a hot spring there. The idea was to go find a place to sleep and soak in the sulfur baths. Aside from the symbol stamped on our dog eared map of Peru we knew nothing of the place.

After six or seven stops to ask directions we found the nameless hot spring as the sun was setting only to be told by the old woman caretaker that, We open in the morning.

My antitourist wishes were met: we had no idea where to stay the night. The road was cut into a steep mountain side, everything perched on a ledge. Accommodations did not look encouraging, clusters of roadside adobe houses splattered with road mud and locals that stared at us as they prepared to shutter in for the night.

In the fading light of dusk the settlements looked disappointing and depressing. People stood in doorways of dirt-floor houses in wash-worn clothes, dreary muted colors as dusty as the dashboard of the truck. The same old lady pointed down the road with Latin American approximation for a place to sleep. Scott and I harbored silent thoughts of a rough night trying to sleep in a dumpy hospedaje with mice, unrelenting cold air and lumpy beds.

To our surprise Chavin was tidy and stood in stark contrast to all the towns we had passed, it had a colonial atmosphere of thick walled adobe buildings and a new plaza. We settled in for the night at the very comfortable La Casona. To my dismay in the morning I discovered the guidebook called attention to it all: Chavin, its hot spring and even our hotel. After traveling for two years I have learned that most everything has been discovered and Chavin was no exception. Tourism has become industrialized in its reach and scale taking the thrill away from the intrepid off the beaten path traveler. Part of my Latin American odyssey aside from cultural and language studies is searching for these out of the way places that have not been trampled by the tourist hoards.

Rumblings
The intentions of life, where do they go?

Italo Calvo
“In the square there is a wall where the old men sit and watch the world go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.”
-Italo Calvo


David
Huaraz, Peru

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Dispatch Number 76 -Panama Canal


This is a slightly dated piece written while in Panama in 2009.

As an American you hear all sorts of stuff about this waterway growing up, the biggest this or that, the greatest engineering task ever undertaken by man and so on... usually with a great deal of American grandstanding. So there I was standing at the Gatun Locks on the Panama Canal, a giant set of locks on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama. Locks are the equivalent of gigantic rectangular swimming pools and the Gates are like a pair of swing doors to an old style saloon that open and close holding water in or keeping it out.

The waterway is an 80 kilometer (49 mile) passage over a combination of man made lakes, waterways and canal locks to cross the Isthmus. Since it opened, more than 950,000 vessels have transited the waterway. Enough earth was removed that if it was all put on railroad flat cars, it would circle the globe four times at the equator. The briefest of history- As early as the mid 1500´s the Spanish wanted a water way in Central America to move their gold about, from then on it was studied with various plans made over the centuries. Once the location was set by the French in the 1880´s work began on a sea-level canal that lasted almost ten years. Due to the immensity of the project and high number of worker deaths (over 20,000) caused mostly by yellow fever and malaria, both untreatable diseases at the time, that the French abandoned the ambitious project. The Americans took over the canal rights from the French at the open of the new century choosing a Lock-type canal to speed construction after concluding the French plan would take twenty more years to complete.


There were two canal routes under consideration at the time, one in Panama the other in Nicaragua. The Nicaragua canal, favored by the United States, was known as the American Route. While traveling in Nicaragua I took the American Route on the Rio San Juan, on a colorful combination of river boats, dug out canoes and lake ferries. It was one of the highlights of my travels so far. The landscape along the San Juan feels unchanged from the late-1800s and remains road-less to this day. I traveled for nearly two weeks on the 120 mile long river and discovered it was populated with just three towns; everything between them was virgin jungle, cow pastures and the occasional one house settlement. Thousands of would be gold miners made their way to join the California Gold Rush during the 1850's over both routes using a combination of ships, wagons and trains to make the passage over the isthmus.

To expedite U.S. interest's to build and control the canal Roosevelt´s Administration recognized Panama when it proclaimed independence from Columbia in 1903. It did this because Columbia was slowing the concession discussions and asking for more money. Teddy and his investors would have none of it. The discussions and planning for Panama's secession from Columbia took place in Washington, D.C. The process was a shameful one. When Panama claimed independence America promptly recognized it as a sovereign nation at a ceremony in the White House. It did not include a single Panamanian nor was Spanish spoken. Additional insult was added when the canal treaty was negotiated without Panamanian government officials; it was conducted by a Frenchman. The history of the canal reads better than fiction. Better.

The US went on to build, manage and fully control the land five miles on each side of the waterway from 1903 to 1999. It was run like a military base (and looks exactly like one) that included very large defense installations at the Pacific and Atlantic entrances with 15 inch naval guns. All rights were returned to the Government of Panama in 1999 honoring a handover agreement made in 1977.
Enough history.


At the Gatun Locks observation platform I watched the container ship Maersk Dunbury make the transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean dropping ninety feet in three monumental steps, then set free to sail the Atlantic. From the viewing platform I could throw rocks at the ships as they moved slowly by like sleeping skyscrapers. The Dunbury is a class of container ship designed to just squeeze through the canal with 2 1/2 feet on each side to spare. Cables are tied to the ship then moved by locomotive tugs that keep it centered in the canal way. Transit from ocean to ocean takes eight to twelve hours.

The Dunbury was over 900 feet long and 105 feet wide and paid $268,000 cash for the passage, every ship pays cash two days in advance including the U.S. Navy. The Dunbury is in the Panamax-class of ships designed to maximize the canal dimensions of 110 feet wide and 1,000 feet long. In 2014, a new set of giant locks will open as a third lane to allow transit of post-Panamax ships, the canal dimensions grow to 180 feet wide and 1,500 feet long. Trivia- The smallest toll ever paid was by American adventurer Richard Halliburton who swam the canal in 1928, it took ten days and he paid a 36 cent toll. Tolls are based on weight of a vessel.

Amidst all the heavy industrial equipment and vast volumes of water movement it is of interest to note that the first time a ship is connected to the canal is by row boat that two canal workers row out to catch the lead line. A ship is moved without computers or electronic sensors, instead it is done the old fashioned way: by eye, bells, steam whistles and radios.

The Gates, aptly described as giant steel swing doors weight 700 tons each and are the originals installed in 1914. They open or close in under two minutes and the locks empty and fill in under ten minutes moving a ship up or down 28 vertical feet. The water movement is staggering as a massive pipe system moves, via gravity, 26,000,000 gallons of water in less than ten minutes. The process is repeated three times until vertical movement of 90 feet is reached. Despite these massive movements of machinery, ships and water the whole process is oddly silent, even the movement of water is done so smoothly that it looks as calm as a duck pond.

Fresh out of questions for David the guide, I asked what the worst accident was to happened at the canal, thinking I would hear of a runaway ship crashing the giant steel gates followed by an explosion of water. Careful what you ask, the answer was sobering and both accidents involved the steel cables that run from the locomotive tugs and the ship. The lucky guy, if you consider it so, had both his legs cut off when a cable snapped, today he holds an office job and gets around by wheelchair. The other handler, less fortunate, was sliced in two mid-torso by a broken cable.

Last year the Panama Canal Authority had revenues of $2.2 billion, after operating expenses, $800 million was left to the government. As a rural traveller I can attest to the vast scope of infrastructure projects canal revenues have funded in the country side: schools, medical clinics, potable water and sewer systems, erosion control and road improvements. The level of infrastructure in Panama stands apart from other countries in Central America. The Panama Canal is, as I am told, the eighth wonder of the world. While impressive I am unsure deserves to be on the list a world wonders.


Postscript: When I shipped my truck from Panama to Colombia it was loaded on the Carribean side of the canal, thus it never transited the canal. I shared a 40' container with one other vehicle, it cost us each $800 USD to ship our cars. I skipped services offered by freight forwarders who would have handled everything, instead I dealt with every detail of an international shipment directly, it was quite a learning experience in both the process and cultures of the Latin American countries involved.

David
Huaraz, Peru

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Dispatch Number 75 -Amazon Run


The air was cooling in the early evening air as our boat motored up the Amazon river where the jungle always looked the same- high mud banks and settlements of wood plank houses, the land flat and dense with unvarying trees and plants. There was an occasional settlement in this road less country connected to the world only by the cargo boat for necessities of salt, oil and gasoline. Sweat beaded off my brow as I talked with Cindy an American on the upper deck of the Edwardo VIII. The deck was full of American evangelicals on their way to a revival deep in the Amazon jungle. The deck was all hammocks and over packed bags.

Cindy and her husband John came to Iquitos, Peru the largest city in the world without a road leading to it 28 years earlier directed by the voice of god on one of the most bizarre and incredible boat journeys I had ever heard. Originally from Wisconsin they bought a house boat in Michigan and began a journey south on rivers until reaching the Gulf of Mexico, then crossing the hurricane prone Caribbean in an ill-suited 58 foot houseboat with a mere 13 foot beam designed for lake travel, not the pounding swells of the open sea. As the seas grew more treacherous god's voice became stronger when one day off the coast of Venezuela John opened a mariners reference book in a sort of calling to discover a river route that led to Iquitos via Venezuela. This would make the journey much safer by avoiding the big waters of the Atlantic where the Amazon pours out in northern Brazil. They arrived in Iquitos five years after leaving the U.S..

The choice of boat, one expressly designed for smooth lake travel bordered on a loss of sanity when taken over the open sea.

John was the child of missionary parents and as a youth he yearned to break the yoke of the missionary orbit. He never broke it; first performing missionary work in Mexico and eventually in Peru. To John and Cindy taking the ill suited houseboat over oceans was in itself an act of god and explained they felt blessed all the way with the help they received. To Cindy everything was a god granted miracle, her enthusiasm bubbled through her short stocky rugby body.

Before meeting Cindy, as the Edwardo VIII prepared to leave the muddy banks of Iquitos I began to feel something godly, something great aboard this cargo ship when a lily white nubile teen with generic spectacles exclaimed from the stern, The water is so dirty with a matter of fact tone seeping with coldness and superiority. She had an authoritative way of speaking beyond her young mousy appearance. She went on with American impatience, I can't wait until we are moving. It was her last remark to a young companion that got me wondering about the specialness of my ship, See that cross? He strained looking for her abstract sighting. He acknowledged nothing and she went on to explain the shadow of the ship made a cross on the surface of the Amazon's cafe au lait waters.
I silently thought,
We all see what we want to see.

True we were in the Upper Amazon, but it was the tame part, we were just passengers with bags and hammocks so when one revivalist strode the deck in disco era sunglasses and camo pants with a machete tied to his waist it was adventure on the Edwardo.

When I first met John and Cindy on the deck and learned they were from Iquitos, which produces and manufactures nothing, I asked with genuine curiosity what they did for a living. They were remarkably evasive to this question.
Together they stammered, Well, we are a part of the Fellowship of Mission Agencies or something similar and equally unrevealing.

I did not understand their answer since they replied by naming an organization rather than answering the question, what do you do?
They would not say they were Evangelicals or Baptists as I suspected, but chose evasive ambiguous language. I pressed. The what?
It is a charitable organization
So, you are part of a church group? I remembered the white girl with glasses proclaim she saw a cross.
What did you call it? What do they do?
We are helpers, providing assistance to Peruvians.

Yes, I thought, it is the Peruvians that need help. So it is a religious organization?
Yes, oh yes.

They were not forthcoming.
What religion or denomination?
We are helpers in a Christian church in Iquitos.,
came their begrudging answer.
Ah, I thought to myself,
I have flushed out some Evangelicals and they are trapped on the boat with me.

Soon after John was saying they had to go, things to do, people to help; they were helping the group of revivalists that walked the decks with machetes and bibles. Later I learned they planned to build nothing, plant nothing, just have a revival in a remote part of the Amazon jungle. A holiday for seventy Americans in god's name. Never in our introduction did they use the words Christian or Evangelical. John cut the conversation short.

I felt like Peter Sellars in the film Lolita aboard this ship with my evasive Christians. Sellars was the police detective that suspected James Mason as the pedophile he was. I'd wait patient like Sellars did to talk with them again. When I bumped into them a short while later while standing idly John again hastened to prevent a conversation from starting. I'd have to change my tactics.

I watched my Peruvian hammock mates ignore informational signs that were pasted all over the ship reminding them not to litter with colorful phrases and characterizations, by chucking their plastic bottles overboard under the watchful presence of trash cans big enough to shoot baskets into. Yes, the river, to the shock of the Westerners on board, is in fact, a trash can. Ecology is a Western concept.

Later I met John alone on the lower bridge and made myself a companion in guy talk while we stared at the immense river and greenery before us. He had a well developed mid-western potbelly that contrasted with his semi-lean frame and slightly ruddy complexion of a vodka drinker. When he spoke one had the sense of under achievement, of hopes abandoned and lost ambitions. He held no job other than his generic description of a church helper who owned a lot of material possessions in a country where people own nearly nothing except their clothes and the pans in the kitchen. He owned an air boat and a hovercraft, a cargo truck and a room full of remote control airplanes he flew at his model airplane club. Life is simple in these parts and water transport is still done in dugout canoes and other vessels you are surprised can float, so the presence of John's watercraft in Amazon Indian communities would be the equivalent of having a UFO land in San Francisco's bay. The indigenous people have lived this way for thousands of years, why a hovercraft was needed was beyond my grasp.

On the other deck I found a hippie backpacker pair, they are not hard to spot with their long hair, ratty beards and vegetarian skinny limbs; this type earn their bread as they travel playing music for tips and making unoriginal woven bracelets. It is a hard living, they earn money one meal or bus ride at a time; to their credit they do work hard at it. This time it was a European couple doing the hippie hand-in-mouth thing playing guitar, reading and weaving bracelets in their hammocks while we idled along the Amazon river. On one of my many walks around the ship I caught him reading "Guide to Investors". To a hippie this is like a committed capitalist reading Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto looking for another way. These hippies are notorious anti-corporate types finding fault in everything about the system they were nursed on. It was a shock seeing him reading Guide to Investors.

I thought, Man, if the other groupie-hippies saw this they would tear into him like the Christians did to the Pagans in the Roman days.
His whole credibility as a drop out would come into question. They might even begin to suspect his unkempt Che Guevara look and ask unpleasant questions like -is it real or cultivated?

Yes, I thought, less beer would be shared with him, fewer joints passed his way and they would have trouble finding cheap flop houses hippies have in every city.
He was counter-cultural to the hippie fashion itself. I have seen hundreds of them throughout Latin America and ask, why do so many hippie men try to look like the dead revolutionary, Che Guevara?

Below deck a dog wailed. Later I visited the engine room and the dog; I could see the dog but could not hear myself think against the pounding of the diesel engine. A serene duck watched us from his wood cage with all the calmness of Buddha. Before returning to my third class deck crammed with Peruvians I went above deck, lay on my back and stared at the creamy Milky Way, assigning no god or designer to its presence.

Cindy, on the other hand, was eager for conversation sharing her life story and faith in christianity. (faith is believing in something that is not real.). Her bright passionate eyes distracted from her thick barrel chest that hid her feminine features. She reminded me of an overgrown Oompa-Loompa out of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. She went on with a well rehearsed story about their sailing journey in the houseboat from Michigan to Iquitos and how god's hand made it a safe journey; to Cindy every aspect of that journey was a miracle. It was in this conversation she relaxed and began to use the term christian freely making distinctions between real christians and the ones who say they are. Religious extremism was rearing its head. When she said this her eyes fired with intensity that bordered on hostility.
I thought to myself,
Were the children of god ever at peace with each other, let alone the rest of the world?

Her passive obedience was a curiosity to me and I encouraged her to go on and tell me of miracles. Oh, the time I was in charge of the kitchen services here in Peru and the cook found kerosene in the igloo drinking water tanks. Cindy, as kitchen boss, glossed over the problem and explained that kerosene was natural and to serve the water anyway.
Christian compassion., I thought.
Later when they re-examined the tainted water the kerosene was gone and explained away as a supernatural occurrence. Another was a boy born with a rare condition without bones in his legs; at a revival his bones were restored and he walked thereafter.


The Bible, what a great book., she started in without encouragement from me, It has everything. I started reading it when I was seventeen.
She waxed and wained this way for a while suggesting I should consider reading it. Curious as to what her other spiritual influences might be I asked what second book she would recommend after the Bible. She launched into a long explanation of how busy she has been as a mother of forty-five raising three children, the demands of missionary work,
And, well, my second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth choice is the Bible.
Yes,
I thought, The Bible, the world's all-time best seller is all we need.

Her unwavering belief in the only book she had ever read and faith in the marvelous and supernatural held me in wonder that a person could be satisfied going through life this way. Cindy was a goldmine. I had only seen her kind on tv, and now, before me I was talking with one. She was a prodigy that confirmed the lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church.

Those who live the god-fearing life are educated to believe natural disasters are connected with human affairs, paybacks for human misdemeanors rather than the Law of Nature that gives us plate tectonics and volcanoes. I chuckle when they attach our "sins" to the level of cosmic significance. Is there any other way to describe it, other than extreme egocentricity when connecting humans to natural events.

In fresh morning air while the boat stopped to unload goods at a river settlement I watched black and tan waters mix where two rivers met, pink dolphins swam in and out of the contrasting waters.

Later, the seventy or so evangelical revivalists held a service on their deck with a portable MC system, I heard plenty of Hallelujahs through the port hole while a loner from the group strode the open deck full of piety with bible in hand that gave her an uncomfortable constipated look. Had I seen the machete wielding man I would have asked about his visionary hope of a miraculous deliverance. What I had long suspected and often treated as a joke, was very real to this group, that acts of nature are acts of god, such as floods, fire, saltine crackers, our boat sinking and rainfall.

In the middle of the night I watched a remote fishing village receive its twice weekly ice to preserve their catch that is stored in old refrigerators set like coffins packed with ice and covered with banana leaves that took six men to maneuver onto the ship. A Peruvian small business woman, America was the owner of those crates of fresh fish who went on to explain that if she took them to the next big town she could sell them for twice the price. Her route was: our ship every other week to buy fish, then cargo trucks to the interior to sell them wholesale, then back on the ship to repeat the process dragging empty refrigerators around.

Morning fog shrouded the banks of the MaraƱon, the Sun looked like a ball on the horizon as we approached port after nearly three days on the water. The journey on the Amazon was over as we approached Yurimaguas the last city with a road going to it; anything beyond it was limited to boat travel, which was how I traveled for six weeks covering nearly 1,700 km (1,000 miles) of water ways in a variety of ships, speed boats and dugout canoes. At one point I spent two weeks with guide, Rudber paddling the waterways of a nature reserve in a leaky dugout canoe camping in deep jungle spotting all sorts of animals; we covered 250 km (155 miles) this way.

The evangelical christians disembarked in the middle of the night in a remote area for their jungle revival. Unlike the christians aboard the Peruvians were applied to their form of living disembarking their produce: of lumber, fish, green bananas, cattle, scrap metal and sacks of rice and sugar.

All materials are loaded on and off ships, trucks and docks by hand. The cargo loaders, lean compact men with Indian features work in tattered filthy clothes carrying unbearable loads that buckle their legs, up to 200 pounds, over wood planking and muddy banks. To watch them is to watch ants work. And this is how Iquitos' half-million people are supplied, every case of beer, box or bag of food is trans loaded by hand.
My journey down the Amazon River was coming to an end.


David
Huaraz, Peru