Oxygen

I

Three thousand, three thousand two hundred and beyond… In the Humahuaca Valley in northwest Argentina the altitude sets in and the human body’s resilience is tested. Just how much oxygen does a body need, anyway?

Normally there’s a mild headache that stretches on from several yesterdays. Normally there’s shortness of breath and lethargy. On a first occasion though, during a first clash with the heights, it must be usual to wonder through the night if the symptoms remain within that normal range. As there’s no past experience, nothing to compare an individual reaction to, there’s no exact measurement to be had.

Is this how initial acclimatisation should feel? Is it static? Is it getting worse?

What’s known: not all human bodies are the same. Elevations affect people differently and while three thousand plus metres is not nearly as high as we can go, at some point there comes for everyone that stage where the body is deteriorating faster than it can adjust – when, oxygen-starved, a body slowly dies. It’s not clear just at what elevation a body will succumb to altitude sickness. The only way to know about the nature of one’s own body is to try.

It’s supposed to take about a month to fully adjust. The body produces more red blood cells to better grab oxygen at lower air pressure. Usually after a few days the headache will go, and the breathlessness will gradually dissipate over the coming weeks. Usually the lethargy does not last.

But is this how acclimatisation should feel?

II

The country was a galaxy in grandeur, the bus turned into a toy with its passengers as pinheads, ants. In a landscape like that, of soft yellows, reds and browns, vast and empty, the human is easily understood to be not more than an unimpressive bag of chemicals, affected by changing conditions and prone to reactions. We’re no stronger than the wind and the air.

The country had been creative, with cacti decorated desert hillsides and twisted, multicoloured cliffs that earned their poetic names like the ‘Artist’s Palette,’ and looked as a great wealth of minerals. There were windblown rock formations and it was worth the breathing strain to see it.

Yet from the reaction to the lower pressure it should’ve been some alpine expedition. It should have been on foot with a walking stick, possibly ropes. There shouldn’t have been a bus service at all, nor a highway, nor beyond that open country, buildings.

That the human species has colonised almost every terrestrial environment would account for the two small towns on either side of the bridge. It would explain La Quiaca and Villazon.

It was time to get out and try to stretch one’s legs, because the future was up ahead, across the little bridge, where those bags of cement were, at great speed, going.

III

They were running across the bridge, hundreds of people, without any formalities. What drove their urgency was at first unclear; that they could run at all was a wonder. Where was the oxygen? Well, they say the locals are born with larger lungs.

It was a colourful procession, short indigenous men and wrinkle-faced women with swinging plaits and carefully balanced bowler hats. They lugged bags of building supplies, grain and cases of fruit, more, unknown boxes and baskets carried in multicoloured aguayo blankets slung over their shoulders and across their backs.

Among the bowler hats were several distinct varieties: black, brown or dark green, full-sized, nicely fit on the head or child-sized and looking a bit precarious, balanced at a fashionable side angle.

To the left, another line was coming southwards: people of the same crowd with the same tanned skin and distinctive cheek bones.  They were then carrying nothing but just as quickly. What was all the rush for?

The world has many borders. There’s a winding train line border from Belarus into Vilnius, a muddy channel with reeds between Iran and Iraq, there’s a long line of Tata trucks parked along the road to Haridaspore. And I remember how as another bus had once crossed from Bulgaria to Macedonia the passengers had hid cartons of cigarettes on the bus roof through the skylight as it drove slowly enough not to knock them off, through the checkpoint.

Still, of all borders it’s that one, La Quiaca in Argentina to Villazon in Bolivia, which is one of the strangest of all.

Why were they running? A tourist said they were contrabandistas, desperately smuggling as many loads of Argentina back into Bolivia as they could while Argentine customs officers stopped for lunch and siesta. It was a street market on the run; it seemed as if half of Argentina would be removed and resold before the customs post reopened.

Argentina has a Titanic-sized human border leak that’s impossible to fix; only a few people stood in the official queue.

And although it was but a small bridge it was a border that seemed natural, due to contrast, not least in the human faces to the north and to the south.

To the south was a largely immigrant country with a strong Italian influence that altered the pronunciation of the Spanish language. To the north there was an indigenous majority country still waiting, as at 2005, for its first indigenous president, an achievement which was surprisingly just one year away. His name was Evo Morales and people would speak of the end of Andean Apartheid after his election.

I wondered what it would be like to have an indigenous Bolivian friend, Quechua or Aymara. Would such a friendship have a distinctive Andean shape to it and how would it fit into the rest-of-life jigsaw, so entirely different as to be left waiting to one side, unable to place? What would life be like in La Paz, after I took up my new Bolivian job?

I remembered my mother, who’d warned me to watch out for the multitude sickness. I can only imagine that’s a rare type of affliction which strikes in elevated locations that are also crowded, places just like the La Quiaca – Villazon border.

And there, incidentally, running is certainly not as obvious an activity as stopping to catch breath.

IV

The Bolivian official reminded me, ‘thirty days’ as he stamped my passport. I thought he was fishing for an insistence on ninety for a small unofficial fee, but I might be wrong about that. In any case it was already planned to pursue a work visa, a process into which a week of my life would disappear, later, in the Bolivian capital.

My first Bolivian steps were in the town of Villazon, which, apart from that Andean dust you can’t do anything about, was clean and fastidiously swept. Somehow I’d imagined a more chaotic Bolivia.

They had an organised ticket system at the railway station and with my newly acquired Bolivianos I bought a ticket for Tupiza, the nearest town.

A robust train conductor in a hard cylindrical cap with a tin sign across it, labelling him in Spanish, greeted passengers at the carriage door; and he religiously swept the carriage every half hour or so.

I sat dusty-comfortable, watching the on-train video of traditionally costumed Bolivians dancing around a train, to the eclectic rhythms of Andean cumbias, and the out-the-window movie of banded dry hills, small gullies, distant mountains and a sunset over cactus flats.

There were a few adobe hut villages with washing drying on thorny bushes by a stream. The occasional goods truck chewed up dust and bowler hatted, long plaited goat herders walked from somewhere over the horizon to somewhere else over the horizon. Finally, there was night.

More Argentina...

More Bolivia...

More Mountains, or... 

Getting About by Rickshaw... which is nothing to do with it, really...

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Oxygen

A Little Candombe

A oil painting of Pedro Figari depicting Candombe dancers (oil on canvas 75 X 105 cms.) Costantini Collection. Wikipedia sourced image, here.

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Not realising the rolling hills of farmland, the cattle towns and forgotten villages could consume six hours when coming by bus from Montevideo, the capital, I arrived later than expected.  For much of the way it’d been drizzling; perhaps the bus was behind schedule.  It was already Saturday evening when I hiked into Salto, over the railway lines past the shanties where curious eyes watched me and my backpack walk by.  Towards the centre of the town the buildings took on that dilapidated Spanish style that seemed characteristic of Uruguay.

In a side street I found a paint-peeling mansion that had become a hotel staffed by friendly pensioners and with hardly any Spanish I managed to take a room there.  It was large with a high ceiling; the water was cold and the sheets not unequivocally clean.  But I was pleased to have somewhere to store the luggage.

It was in Salto I found gratitude for the South American habit of eating at ungodly hours.  The world over dinner times are a facet of human existence that seems to have defied the forces of global homogenisation.  Norwegians favour a 4.30 p.m. start to their dinners, Australians dine anywhere from 6 – 8 p.m. and when I asked my friend Marina in Ukraine about their custom, I was told that Ukrainians are a strange people who like to eat at anytime they feel hungry.  Bangladeshis eat slightly latish at around 10.30 p.m. but in Argentina and Uruguay dinners can start as late as midnight.  The restaurant was yet to be crowded when I arrived.

The restaurateur was keen to teach Spanish and tried to chat: there had been foreigners in the night before, I understood.  He directed me to a table where I sat alone until another foreigner entered and was shown to my table.  I’m not sure if the restaurateur fancied himself to be a matchmaker; or if he imagined we might have shared, foreign things to speak of; but what harm did it do if she accidentally had dinner with me?

She was a sociology student from Minnesota or Milwaukee or somewhere in the American middle north that started with an ‘M’.  She was at the end of a six-month educational placement in Uruguay.  ‘It’ll prolong my degree and cost more,’ she said, ‘but I wanted to do something different.’

In Uruguay dinner means beef and beef means an enormous slab of steak that overflows the dinner plate on both sides, tender and juicy beyond comprehension, with the potential to clog a human artery in a single sitting.  It’s divine.  It’s nutritional madness.  It’s national cuisine.  And the king of the beef steaks need share his plate with no one: sidelines of salad or fries are ordered separately.

My companion from the American place starting with ‘M’ asked what I thought of Uruguay.  I could tell by the way she asked that she’d grown fond of the country, which I respected since it was much as I would have done, had I stayed there for six months.  I said Uruguay was great but, honestly, seemed a little sad also.  ‘Is it because of the poverty?’ she proposed.  ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen poorer countries that are downright optimistic.  It’s as though Uruguay should be richer; like it’s stuck.’  I added the disclaimer that as my idea was based on less than a week in the country it was most probably incorrect.  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I think what you said is insightful.’  But people from that ‘M’ place aren’t always right either.

Before the meal was done we became three: Benson, another Australian, was joined to us and the meal came to last an additional hour while he ate.  He was travelling around the world and thought to stay in China once he reached there; and it’s interesting that he inevitably did just that.

He was surprised I was going to Bolivia, which I then was.  There’d been political instability with protests, some rock throwing and national shut-downs, what in Bangladesh are called hartals.  ‘All the tourists are leaving,’ he told me, ‘and you are going in?’  ‘Should be no trouble finding a bus seat,’ I joked.  But the situation in Bolivia didn’t worry me much.  There had been no deaths and having been in Bangladesh many times during hartals I knew the worst for the traveller was likely to be the inconvenience of being stranded somewhere and nothing beyond that.  As it turned out the road to La Paz was open and my English teaching job was waiting.  As it turned out Bolivianos are quite considerate when they protest, which is often.  But that’s a later part of it.

It was on the Sunday evening that I got to know Benson slightly more.  Salto was a town where a main street meeting following an afternoon swimming at the hot springs didn’t need to be pre-arranged.  He said he wanted to attend the candombe and not really knowing what that was, I couldn’t argue.  I followed him to the plaza down beside the river port and saw people were gathered there.  It was beyond dusk but not yet Uruguayan dinner time.

Candombe isn’t exactly music, dance or theatre; it’s rather a cultural genre that’s a mix of the three which originated with the arrival of Bantu African slaves in Uruguay.  In its fullest form a candombe performance may feature difficult choreographed dance steps as well as wild improvisation; there can be costumed characters known to the genre such as an old mother, a herb doctor and a sweeper who juggles and performs balancing tricks with his broom; there can be the singing of Spanish or archaic African lyrics; and there is always a troop of drummers.[1] 

We adopted Pablo and his friend who for reasons unclear was called ‘The Duck.’  There was time for chatting as people gradually arrived.  There was a bit of drum tuning, singular beating at first which slowly grew into a low-key rhythm, stopping and re-starting, the talk and the drums. 

Pablo was planning to start a clothing company, he said, and his t-shirt featured an illustration of a giant fork on it.  The Duck was famous among his friends for his trip to Miami, where he’d imprudently arrived on the first anniversary of September 11.  I don’t know if Uruguayan Spanish sounds a little too Middle Eastern but The Duck, he was turned away; and after the solid week of farewell parties that had been in Salto, to the great amusement of his friends within days The Duck was back!

The drums gathered pace, musicians showed considerable skill and soon the crowd was dancing along the street, drums following.  ‘The rhythms are African,’ Pablo said, ‘but there are few Africans left in Uruguay.’ 

With Benson, Pablo and The Duck, I self-consciously and really quite dreadfully danced towards the front, in steps that would’ve shamed any candombe enthusiast.  But I took amusement from being less than a week in South America before finding myself unexpectedly dancing in the street.

It was pleasing to see local residents leaning out windows and clapping in time as the crowd passed; to see the cars and buses waving and jiggling a little from behind their steering wheels as they waited patiently to use the street.  I imagined Sydney: council approval, safety impact statements, noise complaints, insurance issues and ultimately banned.  An event that was so informal and worse, driven by young people, would not last there.  The Duck shared his unoriginal but succinct life philosophy: ‘live for now’ and with that in mind, what could be better than a little candombe? 

It was on the Monday I arrived by small passenger ferry, across the river, back in Argentina.

---

[1]Wikipedia sourced information, here.

Candombe by Pedro Figari (Uruguayan painter, 1861-1938) Image from wikipedia. Here.

Continue your journey, towards  

Bohemian Argentina, 

to Mariachi Nica or, 

on the other side of the world, discover

The Song of Chittagong. Travel safe!

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: A Little Candombe





The Deep South: Article Index for articles about Argentina, Chile or Uruguay

Rodent Tourism

She had a dainty nose, small and pointed; her eyes were chocolate brown and shaped as watermelon seeds.  Through the brown silk of her hair could be seen the pink flesh of her small, rounded ears.  Her body was a little plump, overweight; but she was loved.  As she flitted about, like a bridal party attending to its bride it followed her: that long earthworm of a tail.

I’ve never had any particular affection for rats, but this one was the pet of some friends of a friend, many years past in that town of islands, Kristiansund in Norway.  She had free run of the house, the rat, and they seemed not to mind as she scurried up their arm or circumnavigated their necks.  Rats only live for a year or two, they said; so a life-long friendship for a rat is but several seasons.

People are never alone in this world: naturally enough there are other rat admirers amongst us, people enamoured of rodents.  This article is for them, for should one find oneself desirous of rodent-company whilst on holiday, there are options.

Entrance gate to the Kani Mata Temple, Deshnoke, Rajasthan

Deshnoke is a small town of around 15,000 people about thirty kilometres from Bikaner in Rajasthan.  It’s not a town that’d attract much attention, being not dissimilar to any of the other small towns in the brush country of the Thar Desert, if were not for the Karni Mata Temple.

Born in 1387, Karni Mata was a mystic believed to be a reincarnation of Durga; it is said she performed many miracles.  When her stepson Laxman drowned while attempting to take a drink from a tank, Karni Mata urged the god of death Yama to bring him back to life. 

Yama initially refused, but later allowed all of Karni Mata’s male children to be reincarnated as rats.  Alternatively, the 20,000 mostly brown rats that are fed, protected and worshipped at the temple are said to hold the souls of traditional bards called Charans.  Karni Mata is said to have been 151 years old when she died.

Removing one's shoes at the grand silver gates that mark the entrance, it's quite a novel experience to wander a courtyard populated by rats.  At the altar it's possible to seek Karni Mata's blessing, consuming Prasad, the edible offerings shared by the rodents.

The temple is said to reinforce a simple truth: all life is sacred, even rats. 

It is auspicious to see a white rat.  It is auspicious if a rat runs across your foot.  And as I was once told, when bubonic plague caused many human deaths in the towns of Rajasthan, in Deshnoke not a single person died, thanks to the blessings of Karni Mata and her temple of rats.

View from the Rat Garden Hotel, St. Lucia

Across the world in the Caribbean, and it may not be there now for there were plans for it to close, there is or was a budget hotel set amongst a lovely rat garden.  It’s a beautiful establishment in the lush subtropical hills above Castries, the quaint capital of St. Lucia.  The rooms are clean and spacious, food delightful, particularly as the reception area and dining table doubled as the living room of Cherie and her family, the local hoteliers.

A laid back French St. Lucian, there was no question Cherie had a soft spot for animals.  The multiple dogs and cats wandering about were additional family members, so the rats should have come as no surprise.  It was while sitting on the balcony enjoying breakfast, with the paradise of the St. Lucian Caribbean spread out like a blanket beneath, with views all the way to the horizon, Martinique, that they could be seen scurrying about in the garden immediately below: large, well-fed and clean.  ‘People said I should poison them,’ Cherie said, ‘but I didn’t have the heart to.’  If St. Lucia is paradisiacal for human beings, Cherie’s garden is the equivalent for the rats.

And if the St. Lucian pedigree of rat, significantly larger than the Deshnoke and Norwegian varieties, proves insufficient, then far to the south of St. Lucia can be found the capybaras, the world’s largest rodents.

View from the Rat Garden Hotel to Martinique

The Argentine wetland of Estero del Ibera abounds with wildlife, monkeys, deer, caimans, which are an alligator relative; and for me the star attraction: the capybara.  As large as a small goat and tail-less, even for the rat-non-lover this marsh-dwelling rodent is something special.

Capybara wades

As usual I’d imagined hours of weary search and maybe slight danger in the quest to locate the species; in the hope of the sort of fleeting glance that would more than satisfy the visitor to the Sundarbans in search of tigers.  Safaris should be like that, but it wasn’t.

It’s possible to hire a boat from the small town of Colonia Pellegrini to navigate the short distance across the lake to the Ranger Station, headquarters of the National Park.  The boat comes with a guide, who with some luck could be named Gaston, for Gaston makes his living that way.

After not more than several minutes, stepping off at the wharf by the Ranger Station, the expedition was done.  There on the grassy lawn was a capybara.  The creature didn’t bother to look up as we walked close enough to punch its broad flat nose; it was terribly busy doing nothing, what capybaras do best; an almost-statue but for the odd grind of the teeth.  It ruminated on grass as an elderly mother-in-law in a Bangladeshi village might chew paan or betel leaf.

Capybara chews

That capybara was seriously so unfazed by human presence I thought it might be a fraud: that some ranger had tamed one to impress the tourists, that it’s probably called Antonio and sleeps at the end of the ranger’s bed.  I wanted a real, wild, useless capybara.

Soon back on the water, after checking-in at the Ranger Station, with the silence of an oar Gaston sidled the dinghy to within inches of a caiman, the crocodilian as long as the boat.  It floated as though dead: but its eye moved.

‘Australian crocodiles can run as fast as horses on land over short distances,’ I told Gaston.  Actually I’ve no idea if its true but I think I might have heard that on TV once.  He was suitably impressed.

Continuing through the reeds two things became apparent.  At Estero del Ibera there were seemingly-lifeless caimans all over the place, their hardy scaled bodies and jagged long jaws floating about here and there, the reptiles completely fearless of the boat.  And there were genuine wild capybaras, different sizes but inevitably fat, and completely fearless of the boat.  It was incredible.  Giant rat swims, giant rat chews something, giant rat does nothing much in particular: all could be seen at incredibly close range.

Capybara wallows

Completely satisfied with my capybara encounters, I was in a better position to enjoy the overactive river otters and the bird life, the most impressive bird being the ungainly southern screamer, something of a cross between vulture and turkey that nested in reed clumps and though I didn’t hear it, must be in the habit of screaming now and then, presumably in a southerly direction. 

A swamp deer watched with this, ‘yeah, whatever’ look, as we paddled close.  What was it with these Argentine animals?  None had the least fear; had they not met humans before?

Capybara does nothing much at all

The great thing about Gaston was his genuine interest.  He must have done that tour every day and probably still does, but he really seemed to love those wetlands, his backyard.  I imagined his life with slight envy, how tranquil it would be if the most stressful event in your workday was a caiman closing an eyelid, or maybe that gets to you after a while?

For rodent enthusiasts and those who are not, the Estero del Ibera experience can only impress.  There must be few safaris in the world where contact with wild animals is so easy, where you could just about reach out and touch them; and its surprising really, because while it’s illegal to eat capybaras in Argentina, so I was told, they are hunted for their leather: capybaras sometimes become the belts worn by the gauchos, the Argentine cowboys.

Capybara, king of the rodents

Of course there's more to the Caribbean than rats.  And for more adventure, tracking rodents can't compare with tracking fearsome, wild beasts in Eastern Europe or wondering if the wolves will come...

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Where the World is Most Definitely Flat

Iguazu Falls

Two days later and morning started too early, some time before eight we were walking through the national park gates on our way to Iguazu Falls. By some miracle the sun was shining, the perfect day for rain to end. The we was the European couple I’d ignored at the mission but met in San Ignacio regardless, due to my need for caffeine first thing a.m., a cup of coffee that thirty seconds missed the bus for me, while Giulia and Igor turned up ten minutes later at the stretch of footpath doubling as bus stop. They’d dared breakfast. Suddenly we had about an hour and a half to solve the world, an activity befitting the final leg of their round world journey from and to London.

‘No, it’s not genes,’ Igor was saying, ‘Tahitians are fat because France subsidises the price of baguettes. An English-style loaf costs ten times as much in Tahiti.’

‘It’s not just the baguettes,’ said Giulia.

‘Two points, there’s the paté too – goose liver, French, full of fat and subsidised.’

Igor had this curious habit of awarding points for what people said. Within minutes I’d raced ahead of Giulia, who’d only managed six to my ten, unless it was one of those games where the more points you earn the worse you’re doing. Not knowing the rules my game plan had no strategy.

‘How did you like Australia?’ I asked.

‘Ten points, it was brilliant,’ he said.

‘There are few truly jaw-dropping moments in this world,’ Giulia said, ‘but Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef both made my jaw drop.’

‘Another two points,’ Igor said, ‘The people are great. Australians can fix any problem calmly and professionally, like that problem with our plane ticket. The company where I work in London would fall apart without them.’

‘New Zealanders were more interested in money,’ she said.

‘Two points again. It’s because of the Americans who drop by New Zealand for two weeks and take helicopter rides to mountain tops. They’re too obese to walk and it makes New Zealand expensive for everyone.’

‘He hasn’t been the same since they bombed Belgrade,’ Giulia explained.

Giulia and Igor fit together like Christmas-in-July, unlikely but compatible, he dogmatic, she diplomatic, he emotional and she frank. Mid-thirties Giulia was fashionably casual in that Italian way while I was just sloppy. Her tightly curled hair was blond-African attractive and as tall as she was, Igor was taller, probably star basketball player for Serbia. That’s why when the bus finally arrived, ten points to the bus company, he hit his head on the roof while trying to sit, minus five. I’d graduated to awarding points of my own and it felt good.

‘You think the rain might stop?’ I said to Igor, ‘five points.’ He looked at me suspiciously, assessing the appropriateness of my new point-awarder post, but after some contemplation seemed to accept my efforts, perhaps because he’d always awarded points and never actually earned any. Water leaked through the bus roof (no bingo this time) as the scenery rattled by, rolling red dirt hills, small wooden farmhouses, scrawny chickens and hints of jungle, towards Argentina’s end.

When we arrived in sleepy Puerto Iguazu we settled into a hostel carefully chosen via the random method and wandered to the tri-border where the Parana and Iguazu rivers met, over the one Paraguay, the other Brazil. Puerto Iguazu was relaxing, good for pretending you were on the Amazon verges as despite being a major tourist hub it had a frontier feel. Our discussion continued over dinner, pizza and beer. ‘It’s not that all Americans are bad,’ Igor said, ‘but remember that lady in Peru?’ He looked to Giulia for affirmation, ‘she was running around Lima looking for a First Boston bank. ‘I only bank with First Boston!’ she was yelling. She had no concept she was standing in sodding Peru!’

‘Did you make it to Bolivia?’ I asked hopefully.

‘We spent a couple of weeks there,’ Giulia said.

‘How was it?’ I held my breath.

‘We missed the worst of the strikes,’ she said, ‘but others had to knock on boarded-up restaurants to get dinner. They pretend to be closed, might be attacked if they openly break the strike, but inside they were open. They sneak you in.’ I liked the idea of knocking on boarded-up buildings for a meal, people who sneak you in, are open on the inside.

‘Bolivia has great desserts, people were really friendly,’ Igor said, spilling his beer in the process. I had to deduct six points.

Judging by Iguazu National Park, Argentines manage to keep major tourist attractions relative pristine, raw and refined: like a tango turn. There were a few ugly buildings but mostly it was tasteful and like the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney it did well considering how many people go there. The falls sit right on the Brazil border, both sides have an airport and fancy hotels, so Americans can jet in for a day and say they’ve been to South America according to Igor.

Within metres of the entrance we (we meaning mostly me) stood captivated by a group of rat looking creatures on spindly legs in the bushes by the track. They were like smaller, jungle capybaras and I asked around. ‘I know the animals you mean,’ locals said, ‘but not their name.’ A great start to the day, animals sufficiently useless as to be virtually nameless.  I’ve always had a soft spot for useless animals.

Giulia preferred the butterflies in azure blues, oranges, purples, yellows and patterned whites. ‘It’s as if each butterfly has to submit an application on the extent of its uniqueness before being allowed permission to enter the park,’ Igor said.

‘I really prefer moths,’ I couldn’t help saying.

As for the falls themselves I was a sceptic, waterfalls are generally nice but I had doubts how much they could impress even if big. That all changed when we first saw them. ‘It’s another jaw dropping moment for me,’ Giulia said. There were hundreds of large falls including one directly beneath the platform where we stood, the smallest of which would be an important tourist site in most countries, but here just entrée to the colossal liquid horseshoe in the distance that blended jungle, spray and sky into the horizon hills of far Brazil. ‘That’s the Devil’s Throat, it’s two kilometres across,’ Giulia said, ‘let’s go there last.’

Water, water everywhere as the track wound its way right to the edge of several falls. Looking down, the world was simply spray rising hundreds of metres, raincoat country despite sunshine. There in a tree was our first wild toucan!

‘Everything’s Italian here,’ Giulia said referring to Argentina not the falls, ‘when Argentines hear I’m Italian they launch into it themselves, even speak Spanish with an Italian accent.’

‘Does that explain the zh sound?’ I said, ‘from what I’ve heard Argentines want to transform every consonant into zh.’

‘Two points and they probably can,’ Igor agreed.

We wound our way around the bottom, platforms perched close enough beside the falls that you could stick your arm under however many tonnes of water if you felt it worthwhile. Standing there meant being drenched in five seconds from spray. A squirrel sat on the railing further back, jumping and flit-flitting its bushy tail.

‘Argentina has style,’ Igor proclaimed in the direction of the squirrel, ‘in Buenos Aires I saw a bidet in a public toilet.’

‘You were impressed by that bidet weren’t you?’ said Giulia.

‘It would never happen in Chile,’ he retorted, ‘all money, no class. They serve instant coffee in little packets and think that’s European.’

The forest was bird noises, rustling bushes and another troop of those unnamed rat creatures. We encountered fuzzy-faced cai monkeys, a troop of thirty or more, grooming each other, carrying babies through the canopy. The whole troop made this giant leap, one by one, across a canopy gap.

Middle Age seers thought the world flat, which would have been understandable had not the Greeks many centuries earlier known it round – knowledge discovered and discarded, returned to jungle, moss and strangler fig. It would have been understandable had they thought it while standing atop the Devil’s Throat. Two kilometres of planet seem to disappear suddenly downwards into mist-void and modern science might be tempted to vote for flatness here.

     From deep-green jungle chocolate channels emerge, rush and swirl to abyss and perhaps beyond, flow southeast to solidify into the Pampas like liquid chocolate cooling. The channels vine-twist like the weave and weft of events, places, moments and faces, tri-colour deep-green, brown and toasted orange sky. The patterns are absurd, chance meetings, confusion and laughter that humans alone could never create, the patterns of journey.

     That channel there, it’s when at twenty-three I found myself in an Iranian university lecture, barely-decipherable biology in Farsi, tomatoes and potatoes with black clad women partitioned in rows on the left. Where it meets that small stream, that must be the lecturer who somehow went to Adelaide, knew to discuss cricket before moving onto legumes.

     We walk on water, Giulia, Igor and I, like Central American Jesus Christ lizards, across aluminium bridges, island hopping one kilometre out to the Earth-yawn. The islands are stubborn, fixated with stasis, thinking they can avoid change and defy the river, but on the downside they constantly lose soil and have to grab every passing grain upside to maintain an unchanging illusion. It takes energy to stand still.

    

     ‘It’s relatively easy for westerners to let go and be free of their daily dramas,’ Giulia said, ‘but so few do. Fear holds them back, somehow they like their dramas; it gives comfort.’

     The channel beyond, that was the little village in Rajasthan where at twenty I was called into the school, taught an impromptu English class and drank tea with all the teachers in the headmaster’s office. They’d slurped so loudly in tea-appreciation and I’d tried to copy but burst out laughing at what in Australia was rude. We culture-shared the why and they laughed at my laughter.

     The water, thing of beauty and life-shapes, carries sticks, leaves, anything that comes to it, has a rhythmic flow that felt good watching. The water brought together, united in a vast liquid plain, was a gathering audience for the great horseshoe plummet.

     Maybe it’s the collusion and deception of sunshine and spray, together creating permanent rainbows far below which lure like sirens water to the edge. Maybe they conspire with the unseeable rocks at the bottom to hit and split water so violently the whole place roars in pain. I can’t hear Giulia speak so I just nod. But when the worst happens sustenance arrives in the most peculiar packages, that small Iranian girl travelling on the bus with her grandmother, who uninvited rechristened me Farid because she couldn’t say my name, and together we’d discovered and sang that Salam Ebdasam, Salam Farid song most of the way to Bandar Buhshehr. How did she know I’d been robbed and needed distraction? Just when all seems lost water regroups, altered and replenished – and sometimes by chance it’s you who drop unexpected into someone’s far away life with something to offer, an opportunity to be useful in some modest probably unknown way. Sometimes you’re the Ebdasam, the water that pushes in a broad sweep down valley away from crisis.

     The river disappears in the direction of Paraguay fed by challenge, knowledge and inspiration, stronger and more together, to some final destination the indignant islands will never see. Might it be the chaotic enchantment of Buenos Aires? Or the land of the delta?





Memories also filed under Estonia,  packaged in the Himalayas and risen from the dead in Cyprus.

A shorter version of this article is published in Star Magazine, here: Where the World is Flat

Note: This was first written in 2005 and redrafted in 2007.  It follows on from the post ‘The Mission’.  The names are changed and it’s not one hundred percent fact, but close to it.  It was when I was on my way to Bolivia for the first time to take up a teaching job.

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