Do Horses Bite?

Tupiza, Bolivia

Shhh! Do you hear it? Barely audible? Wait… Yes, the thurram-thurram-thurram, that terrible sound, is growing, coming, gaining ground. Onto the horses! The thunder of hooves is ricocheting off the canyon walls. Lightning speed: they’re coming to catch us; no time to lose!

Did you ever imagine how it would be, in the American Wild West, in the movies? I did. Robbing a bank or a stage coach, flying away on horseback in a hail of bullets, red-check handkerchief over the mouth, disappearing in a cloud of desert dust? And if the trail ever became too hot, if the sheriff was too close or the Pinkerton Detective Agency too diligent in their hunt for the stolen loot, for the thieves and the bounty for capture, one could always do as the infamous bank robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did in 1901, and escape to South America.

What better way to experience Tupiza, where Butch and Sundance finally met their ends, than to hire a horse and gallop like a train, fly like the wind, through a desert canyon, past a cactus or two? Thurram-thurram-thurram: that was the idea.

Helpful hint: of course it would be better to know beforehand how to ride a horse.

Nong Khai, Thailand

It was just yesterday, several years later, I was remembering that afternoon on horseback, how it had been. It was a world away from Bolivia, with the steamy, monsoon Mekong idling by, beyond the cabana. Tourists gathered to chat and sip on drinks, to take the edge off the Thai afternoon humidity. Across the river were the distant houses and tiny motor cars of Laos; on the river were long canoe-like fishing boats. It’s strange I happened to chat with Annie; that Annie was there: she was exactly the person to resolve the riddle of Sanchez, from that long ago day.

Tupiza, Bolivia

Come to think of it, Tupiza, my first full day in Bolivia, never quite fit with the image of a faraway land. You don’t imagine, for example, finding lunch in a small restaurant by the main square, having to knock on the door to wake up the staff from their afternoon siesta, only to sit at a red and blue vinyl bench eating pizza to the sound of Boney M’s By the Rivers of Babylon. It’s a little off-putting.

Still, I clambered boulders at the edge of town, followed a goat trail past the Stations of the Cross to a hilltop. The mountains are thousand-pleated like the inside of lung, ironic given the altitude’s shortness of breath. To the south, three red rock houses with little stone goat yards clung to a canyon wall; to the east, a cemetery of white crosses, artificial flowers and tinsel. To the west, traffic uninterested in Tupiza’s bridge drove instead along the dry riverbed.

I followed a veinlike gully that zigzagged into the hills, in parts so narrow you could touch both walls at once. The rocks were pebble-filled, the olive green willows lit by the shard of late afternoon sky contrasted with rock red. Shadows climbed canyon walls. The air was still.

There was a stand-off in that canyon, but it wasn’t a pistol-toting Pinkerton detective that found me; rather a Doberman that suddenly appeared from around a bend, barking ferociously and running wildly in my direction. The canyon walls too steep to climb, I tried to recall all I knew of dogs and did the only thing worth doing. I stood still.

Fortunately, seconds short of my leg entering its mouth and needing several rabies shots, the dog baulked. My bluff worked. Soon its human arrived, yelling, managing to ward it off. Did they have wild Dobermans in the Wild Wild West?

Like me, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid started their South American adventures in Argentina. Unlike me, they would appear to have staged their biggest bank robbery of all, in Rio Gallegos in 1905, making off to the north and eventually hiding out in Bolivia. Witnesses recalled two English speaking bandits.

At San Vicente outside Tupiza in 1908 came the showdown. Trapped in a house, three soldiers of the Abaroa Regiment of the Bolivian Army’s cavalry, the police chief and local officials sought to arrest the fugitives. The bandits opened fire. There was a gunfight until, at 2 a.m., from inside the house two shots were heard, minutes apart. Two dead, bullet-ridden bodies were later found. It appeared that one had shot the other, who was probably already mortally wounded, before turning the gun on himself.

Tupiza: there should at least be a bit of galloping.

Like Butch and Sundance we were two: there was another Australian tourist, Richard. The hostel offered a lazy triathlon: a first leg by bicycle, all downhill, the second on horseback and the third by jeep, along a dirt road far up into the mountains.

I had only one question. ‘Do they have a really docile, placid horse available?’ I’d barely ridden before. They said they did: a dirty-white horse with a kindly disposition and his name was Sanchez.

We were led into empty country, from a stretch by the railway into just the kind of dry, rocky terrain where an American movie about the Wild West could be filmed. It was picture perfect for galloping, flying off in a trail of dust. But of course, there’s a difference between how things are imagined and reality.

Thurram-thurram-thurram, imagined, is not always how it turns out.

Sanchez was quite good but it wasn’t without trepidation that I sat up there on his back. I was pretty strong on the reins, thinking he should know I was in charge, and far short of galloping, if Sanchez even attempted a light trot, much less a canter, I became nervous and pulled him back. In the country of Butch and Sundance, there was a lot of slow walking that went on. On that day, Sanchez may as well have been a donkey.

Yet there was something more worrisome about his behaviour. He kept trying to twist his head around towards my leg. I didn’t mind if he only wanted to sniff it but I couldn’t be sure of his intentions so I pulled his head back to the front with the reins, just in case. If Sanchez is the placid horse, I’d hate to try the other ones.

‘Do horses bite?’ I wondered.

Nong Khai, Thailand

It’s not often that one needs to consult a horse expert. They’re not like doctors or hairdressers that everyday people visit time to time. Even the tom-tom owning Dhakaiyas probably know enough about horses not to spend much time consulting experts. Indeed, should I require a horse expert I wouldn’t know how to go about finding one.

So it was odd that as I was re-considering Sanchez and the day in Tupiza, Annie sat beside me. She was a British horse-riding instructor living in Hong Kong, where she taught at a riding school. She was on holidays in Thailand. It was the perfect circumstance to clear up that Sanchez issue. ‘Excuse me, but do horses bite?’

She was polite enough not to laugh when I explained the afternoon I spent onboard Sanchez. ‘Horses do sometimes bite,’ she said, ‘but it’s usually when you’re standing in front. It’s very hard for a horse to twist its neck to bite when you’re sitting on it. Maybe you were pulling on the reins too hard?’

Tupiza, Bolivia

Of course there are rumours about Butch and Sundance. It’s said they didn’t actually die in San Vicente. There are people who said they met them, years later, living discreetly back in the United States. It’s said they lived full lives and knew old age, and maybe it’s true: perhaps a final showdown, imagined, is not always how it works out in reality.

Travel by...

boat...

             boat...

                      boat...

    train...

             or                                   camel...

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Do Horses Bite?

Desert Grapes

Jojo had everything going for her. With a teaching career back home and a mortgage down on a house in “Freo”, what Westralians call Fremantle, the funky port town appendage to Perth, what could hold her back?

“There’s something wrong with my throat,” she said, clutching at her neck, her voice raspy.

Jojo and her backpack rocked in from somewhere south of Santiago while I’d grabbed a bus down from up north. Chile is an endless Pacific sliver of a land: it can only increase the chances of a north-going, south-going running-into-each-other. There’s hardly room to step to the side in a country as thin as Chile. A step to the west, shoes will be ocean wet; a stride to the east, footprints will be Argentine.

Besides, it was only natural I should stop somewhere en-route from Iquique to Santiago, to avoid being entombed in a metallic express coach mega-journey for what would’ve felt like days. Jojo wanted to see La Serena. I wanted a bit of non-AC oxygen on the way.

It was the taxi driver in from the bus station who dropped me at the guest house door: he said he knew a place and I didn’t argue. It was a handful of rooms along an enclosed courtyard in an old grey house, colonial and quaint, run by an old grey woman, short and jolly. She dropped by my room, in turn, to tempt me with a tour for the following day. She had a brochure of the Elqui Valley, a winding sliver of green running off into the mountainous hinterland towards Argentina. It came with a price list and coffee presented as a cup of hot water with small packets of Nescafe, sweetener and powdered milk lined up on the saucer. With all the on-selling going on, Chileans had no deficit of entrepreneurial skill.

In the wealthiest country in South America, where the poor could be seen living in flimsy shanties along the vast stretches of otherwise empty rocky-sandy coastline, for the tourist all was ready.

Jojo wasn’t only a teacher. She’d had the experience of running a school in a remote aboriginal community in Western Australia, far enough into the desert that non-aboriginals needed a formal invitation from the tribal elders to drop by. She used to pack up the kids and take them into the bush in the school’s government supplied four-wheel drive for classes, as she could. They were at home in the outdoors. They learnt better there.

But Jojo didn’t get in until after dinner. I’d wandered, found La Serena historical, colonial, quiet and clean. The food was good, the servings judiciously small, as it is in Chile. Nick, the guy at the next table, struck up a conversation on the basis that because I put my chips in the bread and ate it like a sandwich I must be, as he was, British.

But like Jojo and the Chileans I was of colonial stock and not a European. It didn’t mean I couldn’t eat chips on bread.

It was Nick’s first time outside Europe but as a tour guide he’d visited all the countries of Europe apart from Russia, except for three. He asked me to guess. I chose at first Armenia and Georgia, which are technically Europe, but Nick didn’t consider them so. “Okay, it’d be Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus.” He was shocked. I was right. “People always choose Albania,” he said, “but I’ve been to Albania.”

Nick enjoyed being a guide, especially for the Americans who were so nervous and naïve while on the wrong side of the Atlantic. He wanted to demonstrate they didn’t need to be fearful of France.

Jojo turned up as words, after that, from an old grey woman’s mouth. “There’s another tourist,” she said elatedly, “who is interested in the tour. You could split the cost?” Her on-selling had found new merit.

Jojo dropped by my room and we chatted. I heard how she was returning to Chile after a decade, that she’d once spent a year there as an exchange student. She kept touching her throat.

“What are Chileans really like?”

In her slightly rattly voice she narrated how she felt. “Maybe I didn’t notice before,” she said. She’d been shocked by how many Chileans seemed to blame poverty on the poor and how proud they’d been in her Chilean town of the wondrous new mega mall, of the sort that had multiplied across the country.

It seemed a shame if it were true, a country trading its soul for a mega mall.

Jojo said there were exceptions: not everyone was such.

“Did you catch a cold?” She looked nervous, stressed.

“I’m sure I have throat cancer,” she said, her words making her more worried.

“How do you know?”

“I feel it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s tonsillitis at worst!”

I agreed to the tour. At worst, it would be agreeable to spend a day with Jojo.

It might be that a tour guide should look intellectual, maybe with glasses. But there’s no exact model and when Jose arrived with his minivan, he certainly wasn’t it. He was muscular, moustached and about seven feet tall. His voice was so deep I wouldn’t want to take him up a mountain for fear its rumble might set off an avalanche. He could have been a member of the Chilean military’s elite whatever special something forces.

As we got into the minivan, one old grey woman waving us off, Jojo was busy fondling her throat.

“Stop it! It’s not cancer!”

The landscape of the Elqui Valley was unique. Some might marvel at the engineering in the irrigation that let the grape vines grow; for me it was enough to enjoy the contrast of the vineyard green with the dusty, barren hills.

But the Elqui was a distraction, like a suave French film going on in the background of a dinner party. It was the conversation with Jojo at valley centre: it filled the several Elqui hours, interrupted by the occasional rumbling fact supplied by Jose, delivered at the very lowest end of the human hearing scale.

The aboriginal kids saw a flock of birds, Jojo said. It was a particular type of bird that shot up from the sandy ground. It meant nothing to her, but the kids in unison excitedly shouted the word in their language for “water”. Those birds meant water: what the elders taught them, and in the desert water-finding is more important that mathematics.

Meanwhile there was Jose explaining about the pisco, the vodka-like drink allegedly invented in the Elqui Valley, although Peruvians claim it too. We dropped by a distillery and tried a sample.

The aboriginal kids used to tell Jojo where she’d been on the previous evening, the exact houses she’d visited and when. Expertly they read her tracks in the sand.

“The community was like one family. Things go wrong when the kids get older and have to move to Perth for opportunity. The city is a society they don’t understand.”

Jose took us to Vicuña for lunch: the main Elqui town.

Another non-aboriginal worker in the desert once captured a baby camel, Jojo said. He named it after the then Indonesian President, Megawati Sukarnoputri. He liked that name. And Megawati the camel lived in his backyard, everybody knew.

By evening we were back at the old grey house in La Serena. Luckily Jose’s voice had caused no avalanche.

Jojo decided to head down to Santiago with me. I think she liked my non-medical medical opinion concerning her sore throat. As it turned out, after a few days the throat cancer cleared up. 

I should mention: the rest of the world calls her Jo. It’s in my mind that it’s always been doubled: two letters never seemed enough of a name for Jojo.

Grapes...

             wheat

     rice

                               horticulture

               bamboo

          coffee








This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Desert Grapes

Whispers at the Gate

Is it more the Bangladeshi sour Noakhali curd or the sweet Bogra variety?  Is it the availability of snacks along the street or that small thrill of having crossed a Dhaka roadway and lived to tell about it?  Is it the storytelling or the sense of community; the trying to take up some of that unstoppable cheerfulness street side or leave behind a little individualism in favour of a focus on human connection?  Why do I live in Dhaka?

The up-down, here and back again, deshi memories cover a lot of ground and to think of all there is to think about is time-consuming and wearisome.  It’s really much simpler to blame my living in Dhaka on Rosmary.  And I do.

But I suppose nothing bad could ever come from the whispers at the gate, the whispers that were.

It’s 2005 and the doctors’ class finishes at 9 p.m.  The day crowds are gone from Avenida Arce: the Aymaran ladies bustling by in the morning in their broad skirts and bowler hats are at home; the short, suited gentlemen who maybe work in a bank are done with their evening commute; even the shoe-shiner kids who in La Paz, Bolivia, wear balaclavas to protect their identities because shoe shining is not an esteemed profession, and who sometimes sniff glue, have found a better place to be.

The Language Institute Director, Robert, waits as always for my class to finish, the last of the day.  In turn he asks that I wait while he locks up.  The Institute is in an old house, white and brown, with a long driveway and a few trees in the front yard; and it’s not entirely comfortable to be there alone at a latish hour.  As he sets the alarm he’s narrating some anecdote, preferably with a pun in it to give an alternate, wittier meaning.  The students, professionals by day, wander up the driveway towards the street and on the footpath they linger.

Carlos is the only physician in the doctors’ class.  He’s very humorous: in class he corrects his sentences from ‘I went to the city yesterday’ to ‘I went to the city last week’ because he’s not sure how to spell ‘yesterday.’  Remy is thoughtful.  A dentist from high up on the city’s eastern hills she brings me apples or biscuits, not as a bribe… she gets the top mark anyway.  Marina my landlady is there if she can make it, if she’s not off on a knitting expedition for the knitting cooperative to some far-flung village. 

And Sylvia from the south of the valley has English that flows like her silk scarves and saris, or salwar kameez, what she likes to wear despite it not being her tradition by culture.  She’s not to be bothered by linguistic forms or grammar and I love it: the audacity and the bravado in her need to communicate regardless.  And as her teacher I suppose I shouldn’t love it, but I do.  ‘I am Señora Mumbai!’ she declares, adopting the pseudonym Marina gave her after one long-winded, exciting and almost grammar-free tale of her first trip to Mumbai.  And indeed she is Señora Mumbai.  There’s none like her. 

Carlos sits upon his motorbike, ready to leave, waiting for his wife Rosmary to climb aboard.  She completes the class.

It’s 2005 and it might be because of the padlock they are given to footpath lingering.  Robert grimaces as he fiddles with the chain and attempts to click the lock shut.  He asks me to try.  Meanwhile they’re talking.  You’d think they’d be tired after one and a half hours of English but at the end of the lesson Spanish re-emerges, released from banishment, and the language in its newfound liberty bursts out into energetic conversation like a bull released into a bull ring.  

Marina is laughing at something Sylvia said; Rosmary is explaining how her mother-in-law mustn’t know about the motorbike, how she has to get off it early, up the street, and check the coast is clear before Carlos can ride it into the apartment garage… I shouldn’t be writing that but Carlos’s mother doesn’t read in English and this article will publish on the other side of the world.  Remy discusses her bathroom renovations and the colour of tiles or her dancing practice.  But I tell all this only from the translated portions and the Spanish snippets I understand. 

It’s 2005 and mostly at the gate they whisper plans.  I never know what the latest plan is and I’ve learnt to let those whispers be.  It’s just as well if life has a few surprises in it.  Most often they whisper restaurant dinners and then they whisper together a ‘Welcome to Bolivia’ party for one of my Sydney friends who’s due to visit.  He’s late but the party goes ahead without its guest of honour and Sylvia cooks a quinoa pie, quinoa being a native grain of the Andes that is supposed to be healthy.  Carlos and Rosmary provide the premises and the main course of vegetarian sushi, featuring a Japanese salt available only at a single shop in the south of La Paz, a shop which isn’t actually a shop and involves banging on a private gate only known to those who know!  Marina brings apple pies and Remy offers a pink, mousse-style dessert.

Marina asks Señora Mumbai where the little shop she runs is exactly, the one selling saris and from that starts a long-winded story of the Indian bindi she is wearing and how she came upon it.  When she’s done Marina quietly asks me if Sylvia’s English is correct when she speaks, because it’s bold and flowing and Marina’s not sure.  I tell her Señora Mumbai’s English is more than perfect which makes us both laugh because in a way it’s true.  And I challenge Carlos that if he can drink water from his glass using chopsticks I’ll give him a hundred percent in his next English test. 

Whispers take us further one weekend, to Sylvia’s house that lies between the Valley of the Moon and the Valley of the Sun.  We eat and dance, with her and Carlos waving handkerchiefs about like Kurds do.  And from the whispers, in the parties that arise are the interesting questions like, ‘Bolivia is an okay country isn’t it, for living?’  They know I’ve travelled and it’s all ears for my response. ‘Yes, of course!’

It’s 2005 and Rosmary asks, ‘But where will you live eventually, to settle?’  I casually say I don’t know and she says, ‘But where is your heart?  Where is it that your heart lives?’

It’s striking how sometimes it’s the big life questions that have the easiest answers.  Ask me if I want sugar with my tea and I’ll take a moment to decide; but to Rosmary’s question the answer was obvious and undeniable.  ‘More than anywhere else, it lives in Bangladesh.’

‘Then you should settle there,’ she said.

Wisdom: it’s as conspicuous as a scarlet ibis flying through a Trinidadean mangrove forest, which was to come; and as unusual as being mistaken for a local in the Norwegian Arctic, which had been.  It comes in small packages, short sentences that stand out amongst the routine chattering that has no more sense to it than clattering of cutlery has music.  It stands out amid the mountains of poor quality advice masquerading as something more.  Wisdom: in contemplating my living in Dhaka it’s not entirely incorrect to conclude it’s a Bolivian thing, a matter of a tricky padlock at a city gate.  It’s not entirely incorrect to blame Rosmary.  You can too. 

Then again, I suppose nothing bad could ever come from the whispers at the gate, the whispers that were.

The class and friends

Grammar-free English can enhance one's reputation, in Bangladesh; while in Romania whispers can sustain an old lady in her later years. Or read some more, linger in the Bolivian Andes a while.


This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Whispers at the Gate





At Home in Bolivia: Article Index for articles about Bolivia

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

The Red Bird

Eudocrimus ruber.  Adults measure 55 – 63 centimetres in length with males slightly larger weighing about 1.4 kilograms.  Wingspans are 54 centimetres and nests are messy stick constructions built well above the waterline.  Flight is nimble and the curved bills of the males are 22% longer.  Let’s talk of waders.  Let’s remember Caroni.

And there was Eid on its way.  And there was Diwali on its way.

‘Take my number,’ she said, ‘and if you’re not busy for Eid, call me and you can celebrate with us.’  Just as once there had been a coincidental meeting with a Dhakaiya businessman aboard a Bangaon train, there was that young woman in the Miami terminal, waiting as we were for the flight to Port of Spain.  We’d asked her of her country and she’d said a few things.  You know a country has to be good when the first invitation is granted before arrival.

She had no way to know there’d be knobble-kneed Shazam in Bermuda shorts and t-shirt to look after us.  Neither did we.  It was our very first trip to Trinidad.

Shazam was used to tourists because he was the driver at the guest house in Diego Martin.  He’d spent the week before us with a wealthy American woman who’d had shopping to do and he’d enjoyed that.  He knew the tourist routines of the north of the island and he’d heard all the tourist complaints.  He was used to the sometimes fussiness of foreigners.

Shazam was expert enough indeed to dutifully ignore the instructions of the guest house manager regarding the ordering of the sites.  The main trouble seemed to be with Maracas Bay, a postcard beach on Trinidad’s northern shore where the manager may have thought about the tourist-friendly sunset, telling Shazam to go there last.  Shazam thought about the traffic and the narrow winding road.  Despite working as a driver, he was nervous in traffic and on narrow winding roads.  You could tell this by the way he jerkily swung to the side on occasion as a speedier vehicle passed; and because he said as much.

It was hot in the middle of the day at Maracas Bay, perfect for a swim and a lunch of the battered shark in roti dish called shark-n-bake.  And it was just as well to do things the Shazam way.

I’m not sure why Shazam thought we’d be delighted by the modest modern shopping malls of Trinidad.  Perhaps that’s where some of the other tourists liked to go to feel at home; maybe he’d been there with the American woman the week before; but it didn’t take much time and he was pleased to show us, in between the British colonial blocks of the Trinidadian capital, so we didn’t suggest anything different.

In the evening we toured the Hindu fair beyond the city, to the south.  Trinidad’s population is split, about evenly, between Africans and Indians, the descendants of slaves and of indentured labourers, and while the Africans are Christians, the Indians are divided principally between the Hindu and Muslim communities.  It’s the strong Indian influence that makes the island unique in the West Indies.  There were flashing lights and tabla songs on a stage at the fair, because Diwali was on its way.

Eudocrimus ruber.  It was after that I suggested Caroni and Shazam was quite discouraging without exactly explaining why.  I pressed him for the reason and in the end he said he’d taken tourists there before and they said there was nothing to see.  There were too many mosquitoes and Caroni was just a swamp and it was disappointing.  We had to convince him that we’d not be of such an opinion.

He was still in two minds at the dock where the small, open-air tourist boat waited.  He still worried about mosquitoes as we put repellent on.  Politely he made it clear that he’d not recommended Caroni and so if we didn’t enjoy it, it wasn’t his doing.  And we waved as the boat set off.

 At first there were narrow channels with mangroves on either side and the boat had to drive slowly to find passage between the submerged sticks and the shallows.  It was there we saw the python, spiralled tightly in a mangrove branch.  Indeed there were two.  It was there the afternoon sun sprinkled gold among the greenery and brought reflections enough on the water to make tranquillity.  There was a caiman too, a smaller alligator relative, posing in wait amid twig and branch on the channel-side mud.

Well, the channels became canals and lagoons as the sun moved lower, as the sky was decorated with those Caribbean pinks you don’t seem to get elsewhere.  And there were greys too, in the rain clouds that mostly moved around us but occasionally delivered a little light water down upon the boat.  To go further was to better appreciate the size of the marshland: at five thousand hectares it’s not the Sundarbans but it is large enough to feel lost in.

And perhaps there are no tigers in Trinidad but there are the scarlet ibises.  Eudocrimus ruber.  The main attraction.

It’s a diet of red crustaceans that produces the brilliant scarlet of their feathers.  The colour comes about at the time of the second moult, as the younger birds in grey, brown and white learn to fly.  The scarlet ibis is the only shorebird in the world with red feathers. 

As the boat once more returned to smaller channels the first ibises found us.  They were like shots of fire beneath the mangrove canopy, light streaks flashing across the mangrove green and black as they somehow negotiated the entanglement of branches in high speed flight.  What do the pythons and caimans, and all the other animals that sought to blend in, sporting mangrove tones, think of those flashy ibises?

But as soon as the flashes of red, three or four together, were spotted shooting by, so they were gone and the terrain returned to its usual shades.  Was that all we’d see of them?

And there was Eid on its way.  And there was Diwali on its way.  But it was not these occasions, rather Christmas which was still some months away that came to mind as the boat turned to enter a larger lagoon once more.  There was a large tree at some distance, and it seemed to be decorated with dozens of shining red lights.  As the sun was negotiating its last with the Gulf of Paria in the direction of Venezuela, the ibises came in to roost by the dozens, choosing that singular tree, and as each weary air circle was completed and a pair of wings finally folded, one more light was added to the unlikely, everyday, mangrove, marshland Caroni Christmas tree. 

Eudocrimus ruber.  The wader.  The eater of red crustaceans.  The tree decorator.

It was dark as the boat returned to the dock.  Shazam cautiously asked how it was and he was rather pleased with the answer.  He was relieved because we said nothing of mosquitoes, mostly as there weren’t any about.  Caroni was not ‘just a swamp’ and we had no complaints.  Who indeed could be disappointed with the red bird?

On the drive back to the guest house we passed a Christmas tree sculpture of small white lights, and on one side was the outline of a Diwali lamp and on the other a crescent moon.

On the drive back Shazam said to me excitedly, ‘I have met many tourists, but if I ever get the chance to travel I want to travel like you do.  You take things easily, as they come.’  In the car, full voiced, he sang his national anthem, and we sang ours.  And we had no complaints.

Shazam took us to a park on Diwali evening where we lit candles along with local families.  And for Eid he took us to his home, to feast and to celebrate.

Wikipedia sourced photo.

For bird enthusiasts, there are also grey birds of battle to see, while others are more kind of fish people.  There's even something here for the fruit enthusiast.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Red Bird