I’m killing time. Sitting in the ante-room of a Chilean accident and emergency department. They call the patients through using a tannoy system. Like every example of the breed, this one is equally incomprehensible. The next component for raising a blood pressure. Fortunately the Forager’s name, with it’s full Sunday version is sufficiently different from those previously called, sufficiently unusual, that it’s enunciated slowly. When we first dated back in the age of slide rules, I was warned never to use a diminutive of her given name, and now I hear it being broadcast to all. The ‘s’ is always swallowed. Triage ask the questions and take the reading. A meaningless blood pressure reading. It’s well known in our local surgery that the sight of a pressure cuff sends the Navigator’s bp score to the stratosphere. I hear her trying to reassure them as to what’s normal. Then they cart her off. I’m presented with a bill and told to go and pay. One of multiple digits…..

We left our pitched campsite, the sun was breaking over the mountains, had complimented ourselves on the short break we’d had. Speculated on what lay ahead, looking forward to an ocean sat to starboard. Cycled just one kilometre when she caught her rear pannier on a surveyor’s post, ending up sprawled across the road. The army bus coming from the rear stopped in time, the corporal climbed down, picked her from the asphalt, she declared that there was no problem and they moved on. Then the shock, the pain, the swelling sets in. Walked very slowly back to the site, pitched tent and hired a taxi to this corridor. Taxis don’t give change.

We even had the presence of mind to collect up all our insurance documents, supposing that a credit card would be the most important for the moment. They don’t take cards, cash only. Just glad they’re not measuring my pressure. I wait some more…..the clock on the TV scrolls through the next hour, as an overendowed hostess discusses the attire of the underdressed celebs walking the red carpet for some award ceremony. The style is called ‘Classico y tranquilo’, I call it ‘near naked’.

The doctor comes to find me…..elbow broken in two places……suddenly…… there’s a different adventure.

Slowly we edge through the process…. A transfer to a private clinic, as internationals we’ll be paying, and anyway there’s no spare beds…..they need to operate, to place a metal pin…..tomorrow evening….

At the Clinica…comes the next pressure point….they don’t recognise the insurance company; frankly no surprise there, but will the bank recognise this card?…..second very prolonged attempt…..success….., the tab has seven digits. I don’t even try to convert…..chipped and pinned, barcoded and finger printed, now we make our way to the fifth floor…..to be screwed and plated.

And a view from the small ward room…….out over the Pacific. Body boarders, parapenters, fishermen, and a cormorant’s eye view into it’s nest. Three full grown chicks in a nest wedged into the axil of a lamp standard. The corrosive droppings eating a Humvee’s bonnet paintwork.

All those cycled miles, all the potential disasters that you can never know about because they never happened, that were a few moments behind or because we were in the right place at the right time. Now the laws of averages have caught up with us. And yet the ‘what if…?’ kicks in. We aren’t solo travelers. We weren’t on an Andean mountaintop, halfway down a bear-infested, truckless road, stuck cashless, bankless in the outback, nor crashed out in the middle of the USA’s mass-transit desert.

If you must, do the deed, do it in a place that’s within walking distance of a quality hospital, it helps with shoe leather and stress management. Do it close to a bus route, helps with the eventual escape. Do it where it’s warm, helps with the recovery period. Better still, don’t do it.

This evening, I’m sitting in a hard hospital chair, up in her grand circle, watching a soft mellow sun set right into the sea, as a finger nail new moon follows it down. One adventure is put on hold, time for a new one.

Posted with Blogsy

Or a bloody good score on the Scrabble board.

Happy Friday 13th; it will be if your first language is Italian. If it’s Spanish, then it’s another saint’s day. Santa Luce’s, and Martes Trece is your ‘dia noir’. If you’re Dutch then it’s a safe day to drive, or if you’re North American you might be one of the 21 million who won’t go to work today.

So friggatriskaidekaphobia is a north European Christian fear, an interesting concept, probably dating back only to the nineteenth century, coupling the Good Friday crucifixion and the non-completeness of the number. Others have attributed it to an association with the death of Gio Rossini. Or the popularisation by Dan da Vinci-Brown, of the French crown’s arresting hundreds of Knights Templar on 13. 09. 1307, a Friday.

It was pure happenstance that today’s next contribution was slated for posting on such an interesting and auspicious date.

Posted with Blogsy

Chileans do have a certain affinity for certain aspects Britonic. Maybe it’s that remnant of dubious gratitude for the strutted ‘dance Macabre’, executed by a Prime Minister and and a deposed Premier back in the eighties. Or is it ‘neighbour hate’, that enmity which epitomises many adjacent nations. As long as the UK’s tail is being wagged by a few islanders, thumbing their noses at sovereignty, geopolitics and Argentina, then I suspect there will be those of the long, thin country who will smile.

Sitting eating a Chilean empanada, a calorific, arterial clogging culinary confection that, on first encounter, could challenge the Scot’s deep fried pizza’ s ranking in the salt and saccharin league. Sat taking tiffin at a roadside shrine to the belly gods.The television is on, but silent. The rolling script tells a tale of international news. Three headlines stuck on repeat, a diminishing descent until it hopefully disappears in on itself. A baby’s birth weight; six kilograms. Ouch. A calving glacier that’s being filmed from a launch by the BBC; they’re almost swamped by the tsunami wave. Oops, almost met their…..This segues into Prince William in tuxedo and bow tie, rocking with Bon Jovi. Is it not time for a policy shift? it’s not as if he’s canvassing for election.

A case of ….Hatches, Matches and Despatches.

Nice to encounter another national newscaster with a grip on its priorities. Or is this a case of seeing ourselves as others see us? Cold as ice.

Posted with Blogsy

All countries have a common kerbside text, with the possible exception of Singapore; it’s a litterfree city-state anyway. The subject matter is discarded rubbish. A theme that fascinates me, because it sets a signature on an area, one that can tell so much about a place. It posses questions and sometimes even answers them. On the Bolivian altiplanic plain it was the glitter of CDs and the confusion of a hail-clogged drain on a warm day. On the Atacama it’s the dull alumina soda can, burnished Cola paintless and shattering plastic juice bottles. In West Central Scotland it might be the green glazed shards, or a greasy chip wrapper. These answers are easy to deduce; pirated reproduction and nappy water retaining granules. Sand blasting and cheating on a centennial life expectancy. Bucky and a poor diet. But how to answer the question posed by the discards on the Pacific coast: Steering wheel covers?

It’s fun to speculate, to propose scenarios as you loose yourself pedalling along on the inside verge. None in this instance come to mind that might remotely answer the query. The Dakar Rally was in the vicinity last year; maybe there’s a residue of wanna-be racers left behind? Yet that doesn’t sit nicely with the road courtesy we’ve been experiencing. Cars that give way to pedestrians, taxis that stop in the middle of a roundabout to let me through.They’re almost Nederlandish in their insistence. Those faux leather covers with their broken laces will just have to remain question marks, residing in the gutter. Leaving me to tell the tales of advertising hoardings and official roadside signs.

“No burning tyres on the road”. Futile instruction. They’re an utterly essential component to a protest. Be it governmental incompetence, corporate theft or plain boredom. Some routes are more prone to the evidence. The rusting rings of tyre wire, the scorched blistered asphalt, the proximity to the conflict zone. The El Alto/La Paz front line.

“No ditching stones on the road”, not an instruction to gravity or nature, who are the greatest perpetrators, not even the dogs who had tried to pelt the Navigator from a high cliff with disturbed boulders. The reminder is to those who have broken down and need to chock their wheels in the absence of an adequate handbrake. It will come as no surprise to learn that this request is also ignored. It’s one of the main hazards as we freewheel with abandon down the long descents.

Bolivian billboards are only about how the hard-hatted ‘Evo’ built the next section of road, the commercial advertising is restricted to painting household walls in the colours of the respective telecoms companies or the local cement factory. Whilst over the hill in Chile the hoardings parade across the landscape, more as slumber busters than advertising opportunities. Still they reflect the local story. Heavy trucks and giant tyres, earth shifters and a ‘Wendy House’. Mining’s the major economic primer. The flat-pack house, the locally recognised homemaker and hardware store, that goes by a title ripe for a piece of Scottic inuendo; “Sodimac”.

Posted with Blogsy

One of the repeating features of our travels are political elections. Both national and local. Given that some campaigns can last three quarters of a year, as in our Paraguayan experience, it’s of little surprise that we find them. Given that every available wall space is, with the exception of churches, fair game for political painting, slogans last until the sun fades them and the posture paint is reapplied all over again. Small insights and minor vignettes crop up in unlikely places.

Tonight’s vignette comes from the presidential contest, Chilean style. I’m returning along the pedestrian precinct, two rows of plastic chairs and one long continuous ribbon of tables are set out, the length taking up two complete blocks. Something must be about to happen. Only there’s nobody about. Now I’m a sucker for a brass band, especially the South American version. When I hear that reverberating drum thump, that staccato from the snares, that practiced perfection of timing, it’s generally time to find out what’s happening. Sometimes it’s the police off to lay a wreath at the cemetery, or it’s the spectacle of an Aymara procession, or, as in this instance, it’s Michelle dining her prospective faithful, or at least it’s her proxy, her door steping canvassers. Banners, flags and taxis totting tannoys, blasting out her anthem. The lyrics that are dominated by the word; “Chile”. As with the lady President across the hill, so Christian names suffice. Ex-President Blanchet is on the stump.

Posted with Blogsy

At last, our first commercial campground, one that has the requisite components. Open for custom, alleged hot showers, non shoogly seating, shaded pitch sites and obvious security. So much for the positives, the stated intentions. If this were Argentina it would also have night long music and early morning dogs. This one has yet to deliver on the former, but does come with an adequate substitute….barking seals and their bleating pups. As for the dogs, they spend their time howling over the water, despite the fact that the seals are hauled out on an island. Two of them are Labradors, the third is an equally stupid cross.

Tent pitched on the north Chilean shore, the Atacaman sand mountains brooding to our rear, the ocean’s long horizon stretched across our front. Just south of the resort of Iquique, a town of highrise holiday apartments and ‘Nitrate era’ wooden buildings, a port that has cormorants for pigeons and vultures for rats. Both perch, wing warming on billboards, the former nest in the plaza palm trees, the latter shred beached carcasses, all poop on the swimming pool’s bleachers. Roosting up lighting columns where they guano cars and the street. A wide spread spatter that gives testament to either their projectile ability or the power of the wind. Either way, I ride quickly underneath. Memories of climbing club songs about the seagulls of Mobile who use a lighthouse as a ‘toilet’, come to mind. But that’s not the Chilean joke.

Missed by and missing, the historical significance. Poop, skat, splat and it’s constituent chemical; ammonium nitrate, it’s what made the early Republica de Chile.

The Spanish conquistadores never did find that fabled gold the Inca’s nation had told them of. So it all started with guano deposits and the mining of the centuries old bird waste. A finite resource that lasted a few short decades. Then it was the turn of the ‘desert gold’, the nitrate ore that could be shoveled and bagged from the surface of the Atacama. Any man could set up as a miner with only his pick and spade, many did, coming goldless from the Canadian Klondike. Then German science invented artificial nitro-fertiliser and it all died out over night. Instant ghost towns and a lasting architectural legacy. However the nation had already gained vast wealth, deprived Bolivia of a seaboard and created an historic tragic hero. Arturo Pratt captained a wooden gun boat that took on a Peruvian iron clad, he died but his name lives on a thousand street names. And his unfotunate moniker still isn’t the Chilean joke.

The Chilean joke….. When la duena, the inn keeper, introduces you to her establishment, to her many blandishments of facilities, she’ll mention the tariff, the toilet, even the WiFi, but that’s not the joke although it is, no, she’ll utter the inevitable ‘Bon motte’, her punch line….Ducha aguas caliente….. Hot shower….Haha….

Posted with Blogsy

One advert that you’ll never encounter in Northern Chile; “Wanted”, Tumble Drier Sales Person”. They might be sending coals to Newcastle and fridges to the Inuit, but there’s no way that a tumble drier can compete with a clothes line on the roof of an Arican hostel. I’m asked if I’ve just put out our washing and then immediately advised to go and bring it back down again. As it will be dry by now. Slight exaggeration. But only just.

As every dhobi wallah knows, the sun bleaches, the wind dries. The Atacama has both, the latter in rather more profusion than a cyclist might appreciate. The sun comes with the daylight, the wind with a precision of a timepiece. From sun up until onces, the cool air flows down from the mountains, coming out of the nor’east with hints of glacial cold. At 11 o’clock precisely a few dust devils will approach from the sou’west, a racing attack. The wind will preform a perfect pirouette, a pendulum swing through half a compass in a matter of momments. An utterly un-Latino punctuality, very predictable, very Atacaman.

Atacama, the driest place in the world. Some parts have never experienced rain, in others the last time it drizzled it made world news. Yet don’t get the idea that it’s dawn to dusk sunshine, despite the local authority’s claim to be the “City of Eternal Sun”. I’m told they can expect just four days of cloud cover annually. Yet for those who might suffer a Seasonally Affective Disorder, the advice is to just drive ten miles inland, to a vast, clear skyscape. Maybe they exaggerate, as we caught one quarter of that cloud claim leaving town. The next night we sat high above a temperature inversion that blanketed both city and coast, that raised the odds to fifty percent of that fabled total. On the third night, again sleeping in the open, under the myriad stars and meteor showers, we woke to very damp, condensated bivi-bags. Nights are cold, the sky clear, convection ratios are high. We are but two alien blots of water cocooned in a meager breathable membrane. You can feel rather small in a place like the Atacama.

And yet there is no vegetation, no evidence of natural life. The land is a soft tone of roseate pink that complements the dust blue sky. Early morning light casts shadows that delineate the ripple ribbed contours, etch out the transient dry river beds and offer contrasts that are soon washed out by the fast climbing sun and the approaching flat light. The Candelabra cacti, in their narrow contoured corridor, come and go as we speed down through their domain. Their scarcity close to the road a testament to their collectability. Darker patches apparently at a distance, that suggest cropping or scrub, suddenly turn out to be much closer and are just a cluster of broken rocks. That which suggests lying water turns out to be salt pan. As with the saltlands so with these sandscapes, the perspectives are contorted by the want of reference and lack of scale.

South of Arica , for three hundred kilometres, these coastal hills fall straight to the ocean, there’s no reason, no room for a road; nobody lives here. So it takes to the upper ground. Only there’s two deep valleys, that suddenly appear before us. Their rims lost in the general clutter of rollicking ground. The road tips over the lip and drops. A view, a model tractor working on the valley floor, a twenty-five kilometre descent that logic suggests will have to be replicated on the other side. Potential for tedium, if it wasn’t for the miraculous transformation in the canyon bottom. A lineal verdant strip a few metres wide. The Andean ranges are two hundred kilometres to the east, they feed the rios with enough melt water to allow them to cross the desert with sufficient flow to sustain a small farming industry. Rice, olives, tomatoes, onions, herbs.

Literally a line in the sand, the instant boundary between desert and life. A brain-eye green comfort blanket that takes moments to cross and will stay on our side as we take an afternoon to climb back out of it’s presence. Rivers of life that will be sacrificed at the altar to agriculture. Most will have struggled over that aridity only to be captured and enslaved, many will not make the short dash to freedom and the open sea.

My advice for potential dryer sales people….stick to flogging bottled water, I’m sure it’s the coming fashion.

Enough advice, enough hypocrisy; I’ve had a life in that agro-industry. My shirt’s dry up on the roof of the aptly named “Sunny Days Hostel” and it’s time to chop a salad. Basil, onion and tomato.

Posted with Blogsy

The Chilean government like to erect vast hoardings in many colours claiming responsibility for the upkeep and repair of the potholes that we’re bouncing around in. The cost/spend will be quoted. It will involve a string of numbers that confuses my simplistic eye. Anything over seven digits is big, as in millions, beyond that, and incomprehension sets in.

I’ve been brain exercising, as I climb what I hope will be the last long climb to the Paso. All say that it’s downhill thereafter. Using a known conversion ratio, to equate a Chilian peso to a boliviano, I’ve reached an acceptable figure that hasn’t used too many rounds up or down sums. We check the answer with the next WiFi connection and I’m rather pleased, I’m only out by 8%. An error far outwith acceptable statistical analysis, but it’s only an error of 0.7 pence sterling. A factor that will easily be swallowed up by the next ‘devil of usury’.

We’ve checked the exchange rates and I know that it’s time to learn a new sum, bases ten and twelve are primary school stuff, but now there’s a choice, either learn to divide by the Sterling 859.8025, or the Dollar 500. I like the simple, but two hundred bucks to go to the toilet? S**t, I knew it would be a bit more expensive, but….Right conversion. Wrong $.

‘They’ were wrong about the downhill as well. ‘They’, are of course vehicle drivers who don’t note the dispiriting, heart thumping reascents. Still it affords time for some further brain training.

Posted with Blogsy

There out there out there, only they’re hard to find. Those that are throng and swim against the tide of conventional thinking and those who lead, remain true to their beliefs, only nobody seems interested in following.

We’re on a long descent, down from the altitudinous watershed, slipping down through a series of bio-spheres, finding plants that look vaguely familiar. Antecedents to many in a garden centre’s flowering display. When a roadside signage claims our attention. An eye can be easily attuned to pick out from the surrounding melange of information, that which it wants to find. I can spot the word: ‘camping’ or the associated triangular icon at any distance. Then I notice the converted rail carriage that would grace any spaghetti western, the array of wind turbines and photo-voltaics, the artistic adobo walls and the general aura of ‘alternative’.

Alex, Andrea and their family moved up to this apparent sterility of desert over twenty years ago, at a time when being different was taken to be a form of dementia. They tell the tale of the visit by the then British ambassador who came with an offer of photo-voltaics for each household. They were the only ones to put their hands up, the rest just wanted the cash hand-out.

He’s the beachcombing sculptor artist as well as the local air traffic controller or at least a radio amateur with a scraped out landing strip. She, the enthusiast for education, both for her own family and for a nation. When we meet, she’s busy plant-naming and creating a trail through their back country. For in the afternoon members from Tarapaca University are due to arrive for a field visit. We tack along behind. If ever there was good reason to be using botanical names, and given our primitive Spanish, it is today. Now we have some names for the flora that edge the road verge and hillsides. There amongst those scientific nomenclature is another small gem. The Bromeliads, the air plants, non parasitic growths that can colonise other shrubs and trees but also telegraph wires. This particular specimen goes by the name ‘clava’, the nail. Both a physical description as well as an apt requirement for tethering to a surface, given this wind scoured place.

That icon for a tent, wasn’t quite what we had expected. Chilean camping is on occasions different. More akin to an African Safari tent. A row of ex-army metal bunk beds, a stack of box folded blankets, all under a construct of scaffold poles and heavy canvas. Only and sadly on this occasion a storm had passed through recently, shredding the accommodation to tatters. They both feel that it’s another manifestation of a changing climate, one that they’re seeing in various ways, with each successive season. We end up pitching in the lee of their shade clothed garden, under the constant chatter of the whirring wind generator, a noise that must spell free savings in this hard tack environment. The conversation turning to the iniquities of politicians and international corporations, and in particular, the mine companies and their own national government. They have their axes to grind, and even if only half that we’re told be factually true, then I can understand their frustrations. They’re showing a way, but not many are ready to follow. Today they are still different, still considered ‘loco’.

Yet there is a real feel of adventure, of hope of achievement. It’s a privilege to be a witness for a few moments to another’s living dream.

Posted with Blogsy

WANTED…..COMPETENT COMPOSER….

To compose a new auto alarm tune to replace the world dominating ten-part disharmony that pollutes the globe. This is a unique commission that will give maximum exposure for a new and emergent composer. You’re globalised creation has the potential for exessive sales, and yet to be ignored by every law enforcement officer and civilian by-stander from Nome, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina.

Entrants should sent their initial manuscripts to The Muzak Corp. Planet Zog, and marked for the attention of ‘ The Irritating and Superfluous Noise Dept’. ref. Planet Earth. Org.

Remuneration will be by direct payment based on a total sales basis and in our usual choice of currencies. Wire Coat Hangers (Wch) or Road Traffic Cones (Rtc).

Posted with Blogsy