Reminiscing with a River

O Mamoré, generous sustenance giver, tributary, great earthworm of a river: I see you from above, pushing off and pushing on, northwards flowing, northwards growing, like an uneven, winding hem across the landscape. I see you from the plane, ever the direction shifter, you turn and return, loop and loop once more – almost full circle, several times, before you go about switching course again. Of the Beni, of the lowlands of Bolivia’s east you are a lifeline: the cargo boats ride you as their highway while as ecosystem extraordinaire you shelter creatures – in you the pink dolphins find their home. And with these important tasks, I ask, is it any wonder that as you weave across the savannah you are as commander of the Moxos Plains? What a view! O wild and majestic Mamoré, I know it too, that beyond the horizon the Amazon waits for you. So, below the patchy cloud in the day’s midst I see you twinkle as though winking at the sun, as I ready to re-embrace the jungle heat, as the tiny plane like a careless sparrow drops from the sky – and in, to land, at Guayaramerín.

O Mamoré, do you remember when we met? It was as that open-air truck, the camion from remote San Ignacio de Moxos, cautiously sidled down your muddy bank trying not to overturn in a rut, as it took to the ferry on its way eastwards to the Holy Trinity, Beni’s capital, La Santísima Trinidad. As you well know that was towards the end of the few-hour journey, for of course Trinidad was first established on your very bank, until, it seems, you tired of the dizzy distraction of the town-dwellers and urged them on, was that it? Through flooding and disease you pushed them back, not far, to relocate in 1769. What you might not know is how in the wild ranch-and-mission country of San Ignacio that morning I’d gone to meet the bus only to be confronted instead with that camion, arranged with loose-fitting wooden plank benches to sit on; and it was before we met I faced the dirt highway. But there were blue and yellow macaws in a towering dead tree and caimans lying in the open by the ponds in the cattle paddocks – not sure how the cows could drink there beside all those teeth – and rheas, those South American ostriches, with purpose they went strutting through the grasses beyond the road – and to find these animals without even trying made Beni seem a wildlife wonderland. So it didn’t matter about the patchy rain that fell on us or the dust kicked up that teased our eyes. When we met, if I wasn’t smiling it’s because the wooden plank seating, after hours, bumpy road, does little good to the posterior.

O Mamoré, what do you really think of Trinidad? The low buildings around the central plaza, the palm trees and the melting in the day’s heat, is it to your liking? It can be the sound of the town – the groan of pick up trucks and the buzz of moped and motorbike that swarms the air is unsettling but the Benianos are resourceful people, in tank tops and jeans, removed from the centres of Bolivian power in the Andes, neglected they may say, and proud of their lowland camba Spanish and their camba culture that inherited more from El Andalus than from La Paz. And I need a hat for the sun is fierce. Do you know that in the evening when the locals promenaded and moped-buzzed around the plaza I pondered how it would be to run a little English school there?

O Mamoré, tell me how it was, the Beni, for you saw the Spaniards arriving late, one of the last blank spots in South America on the European maps. You knew the pre-conquest civilisations, the people without a name who built vast canals and mounds across the savannah in a system of agriculture unique to the Amazon basin – they fooled the scientists, didn’t they, who thought that because Amazonian soils are infertile, despite the jungle, humans in any numbers could not subsist there. Isn’t it strange how they’re trying those old ways again, the farmers growing crops on mounds, raising fish in the canals, facing the annual flooding with that prehistoric methodology that reduces the need to slash new areas of jungle every few years when the soils become depleted? You saw the indigenous peoples who came later, you watched as they faced the missionaries and their languages merged, as diverse groups they were reduced to the singular Moxeño people, old ways forgotten. Did they really benefit from Christianity? You saw the nineteenth century rubber boom and best of all you must know the truth of El Dorado: that legendary city of gold that many a fortune-seeker staked their future on, the city that was never found. But perhaps the only El Dorado was always, rather, the twisting and turning you!

O Mamoré, do you remember my little adventure in Guayaramerín? You’ve become the Brazilian border by then, isn’t it? And apart from that little disputed island it’s clear that on your far bank the Portuguese starts, in the Brazilian co-town called Guajará-Mirim. So I took the boat, do you recall? I saw how broad and fine you are –and from the heat I wished to, ill-advised, dive into you. There was ill-ease, did you sense it? I’d read I could enter the Brazilian town for the day without a visa and return but it wasn’t certain what would happen. I tell you, when I went inside the immigration building on the far bank I paused with a kind of dumb, innocent smile waiting for the official to acknowledge me, wanting to humbly ask if Brazil wouldn’t mind much if I slightly entered its territory for just a short while. The official quite deliberately turned his back which I took as quiet permission to wander past the desk and out onto the street – I’m sure that’s what it was about – overlooking the formalities, just as he’d undoubtedly done for foreign tourists before. I liked Brazil for that, not hung up and welcoming. Guajará-Mirim was not by appearance so different from the Bolivian side, as you know, just an outpost town in a remote pocket of that other country. It was hot, more than hot, I needed water and the shops were closed, even if they would accept Bolivianos in payment.

O Mamoré, I found a mid-range hotel, for water, not to stay, and inside there wasn’t a soul at reception but after some minutes a uniformed maid, attractive, came, and all I could say, the only Spanish I found, that I knew, that she would understand was ‘agua’ – water, aside from the hello and thank you I managed in Portuguese.  She took a bottle from a trolley, a bottle that must’ve been destined for a bar fridge and I only wanted a glass of tap, and I showed her, I couldn’t pay unless she would take the Bolivianos she didn’t seem to want. She put her finger to her lips, O Mamoré, it was secret, without language, between us – and there wasn’t much I could do. I was more than hot and more than thirsty – she could see that. Back at the riverside I boarded your ferry to Bolivia and again the Brazilians overlooked, didn’t mind, and I really admired them. It’s the sort of thing that’s beyond Australian comprehension. I imagine you admire them too.

Other Bolivia...

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This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Reminiscing with a River

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...

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

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Oxygen

Welcome to Vilnius

Photos: Ragnar Scheen

You can look, but while you might find seasons in the politics you won’t find politics in the seasons.

Autumn: the tracks appeared to trace a stream below, or several but as the train meandered along hillsides direction was difficult to contemplate.  The morning was reluctant and the wooded valleys were almost drained of colour.  In the yellow of the last leaves and the low grasses was a sense of farewell to the year; and while the white of the birch trunks had momentarily gained prominence and the first snow must’ve fallen by then, winter’s renovation remained awaited.  Primarily it was a landscape descending into brown, into the darkness of pine and wooden Belarusian villages.  It was the story of a border lost somewhere too in the season.

It was rather in the speed of the train, in the slowing, the pausing and the chugging along a little further that the border was at first suggested, as though there might be a schedule to the crossing.  Only when it seemed that the wood and the hillside might stretch beyond the autumn did other evidence appear.  It came in the unlikely form of low concrete posts, set among the trees in pairs, like statues of a long ago out-of-love couple meeting in the forest for old time’s sake, or perhaps to collect wood for the fire of their old age.  In each pair the nearer was painted red and green, for Belarus, while its mate was white with the feature of stripes in yellow, green and red: the stripes of Lithuania.  That old couple came near and withdrew: like the train the border held no steady course.

And it is possible to try to protect the blessings of the past from the uncertainties of the future.  And it is possible to try to safeguard the future from the ravages of the past.

In a pause in the forest the Belarusian guards boarded, to see that the passenger had all he papers they could wish for, including hotel receipts to account for every night in the country.  Beyond the post-couple the Lithuanians boarded, but for them the passport checking felt more as an afterthought, a ‘suppose we should know who is coming into the country.’  Perhaps their preference might more naturally have been to sleep longer, under the blanket away from autumn.

But a passport with a kangaroo on its cover was as the yellow leaves in the woods, it brought a slight energy with it, surprised as they were to see it.  Enquiries were made, assurances came that no visa was required.  Somebody official must’ve checked a nationality list.

The Vilnius station, not an hour from the border, sits upon a hill with the centre of the old town in the cobblestone capital in a small valley below.  There are about 500,000 people in Vilnius, 3 million in Lithuania.

I trailed the other passengers moving down into damp streets.  While for many, they must’ve been coming home; while for others, they must’ve been there a thousand times before: I was busy not knowing where I was going, taking in the charms of history as recorded in the buildings as I followed a random road.  Church spires multiplied as the valley city took over.

Too, I was busy contemplating the need for a scientist, how to, in a new place, locate a pathologist in a diagnostic centre.  It’s not that I’d befallen any illness, fortunately.  I required no tests and indeed it wasn’t just any pathologist that would do.  I needed one called Rita.

Lithuania has a long history.  They say its language is of the Baltic branch and related to Latvian, and that it’s the most conservative language in Europe, the one that’s evolved the least from the Sanskrit roots of the Indo-European language family.  They say there’s a village in Lithuania’s north called Indija, where local linguistic peculiarities have some commonality with languages still spoken in Pakistan’s Baltistan.

Once, at the end of the fourteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the largest countries in Europe, with territory stretching to the Black Sea.  And in 1991 the country made its mark on history again, as the first Soviet republic to declare independence, a move that cost the lives of 14 Lithuanians when the Soviet Army attacked the Vilnius TV Tower.  But the movement had history’s blessing.  The Soviet break-up started in Lithuania.

In a way it was that transition that paved the way for my need of a pathologist.  When the borders opened, a Norwegian friend of mine Ragnar was sent to the country on business.  As that business over the years developed so did his passion for Lithuania.  He took the country into his heart or maybe it captured him.  But beyond business he contributed in various ways, to promote modernity and development.  He’d taken an apartment in Vilnius and although he wasn’t arriving until the following day I was lucky, because a pathologist called Rita held for me the keys.

I kept in mind my general luck too in finding new addresses in unknown cities.  I kept my eyes on the works of art that were the buildings of the old town.  I took in the signs of each snaking alleyway just as the signs of autumn had taken in me.  There were Northern European style shops playing American background music.  I saw proper supermarkets with metal poles outside to tie your pet dog to.  There were large bookstores, music stores and cafés. 

Although I missed Ukraine already, where I’d been living that year; although I enjoyed Belarus, memories stirred.  It was as though in Vilnius I’d arrived back into a happy Northern European past.  All the same, should a chimney sweep have passed by on the street it wouldn’t have seemed altogether out of place.

There may have been queries with people on the street but I found the alleyway I needed.  Soon I was sitting opposite Rita-in-a-white-lab-coat and drinking a cup of coffee.  There was a book open on the desk between us with multicoloured microscope pictures on its pages.  I wondered how to diagnose my being there: I doubt there are multicoloured microscope pictures that can do that.  Perhaps it was simply the autumn that had taken me in that direction.  Rita picked up the phone and dialled Norway.

When she was able to, she whisked me across the city by car, to Ragnar’s apartment: open-plan, modern and with that wooden, pine-type smell that can easily remind one of Oslo.  It had a peaked wooden roof with no ceiling and on the table was a note, in Norwegian, to me.  ‘Welcome to Vilnius,’ it read, ‘Try the beer in the fridge.  Lithuanian beer is good.’  In retrospect I’d say it was probably the most modern accommodation I’d had for the best part of a year.

The apartment was an art gallery: a fish swimming from a rafter, wooden angels over there and of course, candles everywhere.  I surveyed the room and found again that smile that had been with me since I’d left Belarus, the re-finding of a different Northern European dimension to life.

Ragnar arrived from Oslo the next day.  It was the first time we’d met in five and a half years.  We spoke English, then Norwegian once again, and the hardest part was the ‘yes’, the rediscovering an automatic Norwegian ‘ja, ja, ja’ to replace the Russian ‘da, da, da’ I’d picked up in East Ukraine, although I was never skilled at Russian.

We found a restaurant some floors below street level, in a ‘mind your head’ type of cellar.  They served sausages by the half-metre and beer in tall glasses, by the metre.  We walked around the castle and up the hill to the historic three white crosses that were destroyed in the Soviet era but were rebuilt when the politics turned.

And in the evening we walked to the end of the street to find a forest overlooking a river.  It was a landscape descending into brown, at that time of the year.

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“Look! From the glowing west, forceful and angry winds

Are eastward moving with ferocious, headlong haste,

And bringing biting frosts to our Lithuania dear.

My friends, let’s to the house and build a glowing blaze.”[1]

-         From the poem Metai, or The Seasons, by Kristijonas Donelaitis.  This epic poem from about 1765 is considered the first classical piece of fiction written in the Lithuanian language.  From the third part of the poem, ‘Autumn Boon’.

Stay Happily Baltic, with Latvia or Estonia!

Retire eastwards back to Belarus.

Or go for the tropics in Trinidad!

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Welcome to Vilnius

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[1] English translation of the poem is here: http://members.efn.org/~valdas/autumn.html