Honest Boom Box Man

A guy in his fifties, gray and balding, sits on a stool on the sidewalk.  In front of him are hundreds of CDs he has burned.  Two-disc sets of salsa, meringue, ranchero, etc.  Musica Latina.

He shakes my hand as I approach.  I get the feeling he's a gentleman.  He's got a discman wired to a powerful, South American Boombox, running off a car battery.  He only chooses grooving salsa.  Trumpets, etc.

I want to find Mexican Opera that I heard in the street the other night.  A quechua mini-taxi driver named Victor played it.  I listened in the road to it and he called me in with his friends and we passed around shots of rum and coke and now I'm invited to play soccer with them.

The opera is not to be found.  I've heard many CDs.  Finally I found Nicola Di Bari, an Italian guy singing in Spanish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjmW2aKMkA4&feature=related
El Corazon es un Gitano (The Heart is a Gypsy)

I dug it but 10 meters down the sidewalk another CD man was blasting Latin Dance Salsa.  I could not focus.  I was mad at him for "pushing" the cd on me.  I was hard sold and paid the guy a 5 sole coin for the CD.

I was walking down the street with my new CD and he whistled.  "Hey!  Hey!" What did he want me for?  Maybe I gave him 2 soles instead of 5.

"Hey, look this."  He flipped the coin, 5 soles, in his rough hands and pointed to it.  Then he gave it to me.
"This not real."
"What?"
"This.  No Real."

A counterfeit?  Looks very real.

I gave him back the coin.  Twenty steps later I thought, what a dolt.  He could have pawned this coin over on somebody else easily as change.


He knows I'm not in love with the music and he wants me to come back so we can listen to the goods together.  That coin's as real as day.  I made a friend.

Peruvian Camel Toe

Fluorescent lightbulbs, neon, chicken-smoke, street vendors, handsome teenagers embracing on the sidewalks.  Three wheeled mini-taxis (125cc motorcycles with three wheels and a backseat) buzz around and honk their horns.  Quechua women walk with their citified children (young adults) who carry their babies the same way the Quechuas do, swaddled in a blanket and strapped to their backs.  Digital cameras, tape recorders, TV sets, and smiling faces everywhere you go... Huaraz is alive!

A baby cries, a man walks by and opens his case to reveal hundreds of shining metal pens.  Cakes for sale!  The city is cool at night.  The mountains surrounding us are capped in ice and the air falls down into the valley.  We all wear a nice sweater and cruise the city.  I feel safe and less lonely than I used to.  But of course loneliness exists and so I occupy my eyes and fall into a gazing trance.  And just when I'm comfortable, in the now, invincible and radiant, I catch my eyes drifting down and I'm staring into the nook of a wild Peruvian camel-toe.  They are everywhere here.  Black polyester, jeans, warmup pants, purple nylon.  I don't know if it's a conscious decision to create such an attractant or not, but camel toes are easy to find in Huaraz, Ancash.  I'm writing a good book: Huaraz Camel Toe.  Urban Outfitters would buy that.  Save the world.  Speaking of which: when do you draw the line on how to spend your time?  Say We could make a million books, a million bucks, all about camel toe.  120 full color telephotos for the coffee table.  Art?  Please tell me what you think.

Everyone here in Peru is beautiful.  Perhaps because they are part of a spectrum I've never seen.  All these villages and cities coming from a bloodline of Incas and Spaniards.  I've seen two natives with blue eyes.    The black hair, thick and shining.  The noses, so many varieties!  The butts, the beards, the teeth.  Ay Caramba!

Send me that camera quick mom!  I've got time and bail is cheap.

For pre-orders, please send some love in your next prayers.  Love's the best commodity.

The Bull Fight in Marcara

The Bull Fight

In a town called Marcara, in the Ancash province of Peru, everyone knows each other.   Spanish and Quechua are interchangeable in the local market.  Quechua is an old language with clicks and guttural pops.  The Quechua people are direct descendants of the Incas.  They live in small adobe houses in the hills and they farm and work the land.  Their feet are brown and cracked from years of walking with sandals made of tires.  

You get around by paying a couple dollars and jumping into one of many combis that race between villages and towns.  The combis are minivans filled with peasants traveling the highway to trade and work... Carhuaz, Caraz, Mancara, and big cities.  I am writing from Huaraz, Ancash, a large center of climbing.  In the not too far distance are snow capped peaks.  We are in a bowl surrounded by some of the biggest mountains in the world.  In Huaraz, from where I'm writing, city life is prominent and pollution from old cars gets in your eyes and lungs and you have to get into higher parts of the city and windy alleys to escape being suffocated by car and motorcycle exhaust.  I came to Huaraz by combi.  The combis smell like farm animals - goats mostly, and urine and human body odour.  I'm becoming immune to the smells.  Am I a smell?  I packed Antonio Banderas cologne.

Back to Marcara, a small village.  Cows, pigs, goats, chickens, burros (donkeys) are everywhere here.  The women wear elaborate colored clothing and seem very wise.  The people are dark and have deep brown eyes, black hair.  Their skin is the color of earth, and they have rosy cheeks and they seem to be in very good health.

A former mayor of Marcara, a 71 year old man who stands straight and is Protestant and has big bushy eyebrows, has 10 children.  He is now an agronomist, working to help the quechua campositos (farmers) responsibly use modern chemicals to boost production.   One of the mayor's daughters is Carmen, perhaps 28 years old.  She is westernized and looks like a short New Yorker and she is a flirt and loves to dance and grab and twirl.  She plays between the cousins.  Gabby is 18, and Federico is 40.  

The first festival I wrote about on this blog took place in Marcara.  We met Carmen there and she took us into her world.  We drank and shared glasses with all the people on a grassy field lit by brass bands and fireworks.  I woke up with a pounding headache and a brass band and fireworks were drowning the tiny town.  Everything is adobe and concrete in the town, and the farms surround it and extend along dirt roads into the mountains and hills.

I have been called gringo many times.  I stand at least a foot above the crowd everywhere except for in Lima, and there I am bigger than average.  But Marcara and its people accepted us.  I have danced with old women and I have seen the Quechuans huddle under their elaborate rainbow dresses in the dark and then slowly metamorph into the party, spinning and dancing little local jigs.  They love the way we dance.  I broke a fist fight between two teens and a friend I was drinking with grabbed me and said, "No, this is not for you."  And everyone watched them fight until it ended with a kick to the head.  Dominance.  

In Marcara there was a bullfight in an old circle enclosed by a high wooden fence.  A company comes in with bulls and matadors and the stands are filled, packed to the gills by the townspeople and anyone else who wants to come.  There are people everywhere, standing on houses to see into the mini arena without paying the 7 soles ($2.70).  And there is a parade.  This is all festival... fireworks by crazy men who may have fought in Peru's civil war in the eighties and early nineties.  Loud fireworks are always going off here.  Dynamite at 2 AM, 7 AM, 5:30 AM.  1 PM.  All of the sudden you're jumping and thinking a gun is shooting.  

The Procession is led by the Mayor Domo and his wife.  They are the organizers of the bullfight.  It is a great honor.  The whole bullfight is to the music of a brass band from Lima in blue jackets and they cost 20,000 soles to rent for the day.  That's about 8,000 dollars.  Who knows what the bulls and matadors cost.

The Procession has the Mayor Domo and wife on two great steeds.  The honored hosts are wearing crowns of flowers.  This bullfight is to honor Jesus Christ, so there are Christ t-shirts thrown into the crowd.  Candy, cans of soda and beer, plastic bowls, balls.  They are thrown into the crowd.  And then the matadors, Argentinians and Spanish and Chilean.  This is a Toro Meurte fight.  Bulls will die.

The bulls are tortured with blades.  They have no chance.  All the great excitement of Hemingway's bullfights is predicated upon the artful skill of the matador.  He is always close to death and can kill the bull with skill and finesse.  These matadors were traveling salesman of torture and death.  I wanted to see the matador die a painful slow death.  They went for the kill of the first and third bull, a quick hard jab to the spine, right behind the head, with a trident shaped blade.  And they missed and missed and missed.  And when they finally dropped the lolling bull, they bowed and we whistled.  Whistling is booing in Peru.

The second bull was a beautiful white animal.  He came out of the stall with a slit eye.  His eye was bleeding and hanging out of its socket.  They tortured him to anger.  And he did not fight.  He was too terrified to fight and shit himself continuously.  They twisted his tail, kicked him, stabbed him.  He would not fight.  Finally they got him back into his stall.

I hated Peru.  I wanted to kill the matadors and everyone for miles.  I am superior to you.  But what of our American chicken factories?  They do not exist here.  And our slaughter factories?  They also are not here.

Church called me in.  A big old Spanish church with wide open doors and flowers among candles.  I walked into this ship, old hard wooden beams above.  The priest, an old Italian man who looked like Hemingway, sat among his flock in the pews.

Outside there was a party with beer and fireworks and a big brass band.  Inside was me and my God.  And my God is everyone I’ve ever met.  And the bulls were floating up in the rafters.  The bulls who were tortured and stabbed, eyes cut out, struck down by Spanish matador cowards to make a buck.

Crying, sobbing in the pews, wishing I could be home, wishing I could be with my love, wishing love and peace to everyone from my little socket in that Spanish church amplifier.  Could you feel my waves?

So what is an adventure?  What the hell is my purpose on this rock?  Patience melting away and under all the wax is just bony old me, sick and tired of these backward brown people and their comida… chicken, trout, pig, and cow.  Rice and beans and lettuce that gives me the shits.

Maybe I should get on a bus and go as far away from what I know as possible, disappear entirely, never come back.  But hey, what about Lima and Helen?  Hang on sloopy, hang on.  Be here now.

What I’ve learned is: family trumps all.  It is what you make it.  These people have families who stick together, as far as I can see.  Am I ready to become the pillar of a family?  Am I working hard enough?  I am sad because I’m so alone.  I can’t talk to anyone in my own tongue.  I just want to be held.

So then I talked to the locals as best I could to understand why they liked the death.  They didn't.  They were very hurt by the pain of the bulls.  I believe they too prayed for the bulls.

9:00 PM

Yesterday I met two cousins from Canada, Gabriel and Frederick, who are at the end of their trip.  We were on a bus together from Lima to Huaraz, Ancash, a province of Peru North of Lima.

The outskirts of Peru are unlike anything I've seen.  A man was defecating in a park, trash and brush piles are burned in the same parks.  People live in houses made of concrete, and/or straw, plastic, bits of material.  Pollution is worse here than in the city center.  Once we left Lima city, we were into the mountains.  The ocean on the left, giant sloping sand dunes and rocky cliffs on the right.  Here and there are scattered squatting villages.  The people there claim parcels by marking them with rocks.  If they continue to improve the property over the course of five years, the land becomes theirs.  This property is desert land, near the highway.  Houses are adobe brick, dirt floor, straw roof, one room.

The trip took 8 hours on winding roads up mountain sides.  I sat next to Milagros, a chubby charming twenty something girl from Lima who has family in Mancara, Huaraz.  She was my informant for the trip and pointed out sugar cane fields, potato farms, Hare Krishna settlements (Peruvian Hare Krishnas have a huge settlement on the desert ocean.

The road was in the Andes, specifically between two regions called the Cordillera Negra and Cordillera Blanca.   I have many photos to post but the connection is iffy here, in Caraz at a hostel.

Last night Gabby,  Fed, and I teamed up to find a place to stay.  Fed is fluent in the local Spanish, he's lived in Lima for years, so I was confident we'd find something cheap.  We went to Carhuaz (different than Caraz) and the town was full of construction workers who are there to build a municipal project.  The roads in these up-mountain towns are concrete and wonderfully maintained.  The agriculture is rich and green once we passed the desert.

Finding no place to stay, we backtracked to Mancara, home of Milagros's family.  Her name means "miracle."  She almost died at birth.  The only available room was in a church-bought resort.  It cost 17 dollars a night per bed.  This is a steep price and out of budget, but the sleep was good.

Why was it good?  We stumbled into a local festival.  We danced wild with the locals to their local brass band as fireworks reported above us.  Everybody was drinking and hollering and whistling.  They kept pulling us gringos into their circles.  At 1:00 AM a huge tower of bamboo was lit, and a wick sparked a 20 minute firework display.  The explosives laws are loose here, and I have firework rocks in my hair and I was burned on the neck (nothing serious) by a spark.

Til 4 we danced and then went to bed.  Tonight we are in Caraz.  Saw some very old ruins today as the sun set, and crawled in ancient caves.  Very tired.  Miss my family and Helen and my friends back home.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

First of all, let's take a moment to think back 10 years.  Where were you and how did you feel?

Three English friends are at the next table, drinking and smoking and debating whether we should take apart the modern world and return to hunting and gathering.

"Amongst other grand strategies for making the world work and taking care of everybody is the design science revolution of providing ever more effective tools and services with ever less, real resource investment per each unit of end performance. For instance, a communications satellite, weighing only one-quarter of a ton is now out-performing the transoceanic communication capabilities of 175 thousand tons of copper cable" World Game by R. Buckminster Fuller-How It Came About, April 1968


This transatlantic cable was laid on the ocean floor between Heart's Content Newfoundland and Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island, Ireland.  Before the cable, it took a minimum of 10 days to carry a message by ship.  With the cable, a message and response could be sent and received in minutes.  Europe and America were connected.  Consider the power of the modern satellite.


Technology can be great!  We can do more with less.


Yesterday afternoon I traveled by bus to the Centro Historico.  Home of all the Spanish government buildings.  Tens of thousands of people.  Police on motorcycles.  The weather is sunny and cool.  Long pants and a long shirt are the norm.  I saw the enormous crowd and went towards where the natives (who are 99+% of the crowd) were going.  I found a food mall.  People shout at you to convince you to stay and eat at their stall.  I chose a woman with a mouth full of gold teeth and food that looked gorgeous.  For 7 soles ("so-lays"), equivalent to 3 dollars, I got a hot bowl of soup with crab and onions and fresh fish and corn and peppers.  Eating next to me were policemen and young working men from the neighborhood.  7 soles is a lot, and I got only a bowl of soup!  I was sad.  I finished my soup and looked to the woman to pay her.  She brought me the main course, a heaping pile of ceviche ("say vee chay"), raw fresh fish cooked by lime juice.  No heat involved.  The acid of the lime cooks the fish.  Fried calamari, potato, seaweed, a fritter.  I drank a teaspoon of the water.  More to follow?

September 10, 2011

Just woke up, 9:00.  Last night we (Paul from UK and Sylvan, a med student from France) hit the town.  A section called "Pizza Street" because every bar and restaurant serves pizza.  We bought two pitchers of the best Peruvian beer, Cusquena, beer for a total of 50 soles including tip... about 20 American dollars.  The bar was in the style of an English pub.  On pizza street we were offered cocaine, marijuana, hash, speed, and prostitutes.  


The coastline here is much different than in the States.  Large rocky cliffs slope into the water, and the city is built above the water, on the cliffs.  It seems to be a flat city, and these slopes seem to be the walls of a large mesa.


Drinking instant coffee, ate a buttered, jellied roll.  Just met a guy from Germany.  English prevails here and everywhere so far.  Almost everyone knows some.

September 9, 2011. Day 1

Hey Everyone... family and friends.  I was writing in my journal and realized I've nothing (much) to hide. So I'm writing for all to see.  There will be a more seedy version available, con permiso.  Ask and I'll grant.

Today is September 9, 2011.  Last night I landed in Lima.  On the flight I met a gentleman named Jorge who was born in Lima.  He now lives in Memphis.  On my trip to San Diego years ago I met a man named Jorge.  My airplane friend helped me find my taxi... upon leaving the plane there were at least a hundred drivers holding signs with passenger names.  My driver drove a Toyota Yaris and he was missing a pinky.  He took me on the scenic route.  Gas fumes are everywhere.  All the schoolbuses from your past are here.  $20 for a thirty minute ride to my Hostel in Miraflores, a nice district in Lima.  We are a walk away from the ocean.  The patio of the building smells like urine, but I'm used to it.  There's a dog here and he pees in the courtyard.  Slept well.

Rolls, butter, jelly, instant coffee for breakfast.

Saw a hummingbird today.  Never seen one like it.  Almost all red, and quite large

Flo Rida - Club Can't Handle Me ft. David Guetta [Official Music ...
Play this link... that's what's playing.  Katy Perry was just on.

Soft sun, blue skies, temps in the high 50s.

Paul, a british gentle soul from Manchester, is on his phone swinging in the hammock.  A couple from somewhere fair (Sweden) just arrived.

The most fascinating part of the trip so far is the food.  Potatoes, big corn, big carrots.  Pictures to come.  Estudio espanol.  The grocery store has mucho yogurt.

For lunch: turkey sandwich with whole grain bread (always being baked fresh), apple, giant carrot, Green Kola product.  Grocery store is for the real Gourmande.. all fresh at reasonable prices.  Loaf of fresh whole grain bread is $1.75.

Lots of construction here.  dilapidated concrete structures are side by side with new construction.  Build as you can... make it work.  240V, 50hz at the outlets.  Going to get involved. Will post photos.  Peace.