At the feet of Gumby Death Angel

[A brief reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at this link.] 

I saw from the centre of the city of Tarija, Bolivia a church on a bluff that looked impossible to climb without real gear, so I decided to try it without anyway. I found a road that made it possible to walk. It's not, as I had thought, a church but a cemetery.

A couple of things interested me, the first being the road itself, all hand-laid stones.

It's pretty, of course, but if one thinks of roads before we had the layered marvels that came about in the 19th century, then we are grateful that there are now roads leading through the Andes that can and do take the likes of me to wonders unimaginable without having ridden there. I love roads. Read an account of Defoe or Dr. Johnson travelling, or try African roads and see what I mean. But this road up to the cemetery is pretty, and it led me to a garden worth the visit.

[Garden walls at the cemetery]

I got caught in a rainstorm at the cemetary, which prompted me to write a short piece to come when I have another good connection, "Raindrops Keep Falling on the Dead." It has to wait. Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid, and Che are all dead and won't mind.

Hope you can return for it later.

Meanwhiles, I sat out the rain and checked out the statue that first prompted me to make the climb.
I called it Gumby Death Angel. If I can't think of anything better at least I had a good climb up and down the hill. I considered Klaatu, but I think I should quit while I'm winning.

More on this later.
...\

Tarija, Bolivia

I'd never heard of this city till the landlord at Sucre handed me a ticket to go and be on my way to Paraguay. Tarija is not really on the way the way I intend to go, i.e. through el Chaco, from north to south, skipping the usual Argentine route so few take.

To my delight, and it took a long while, I find this to be a most excellent city. However, I had difficulty finding a taxi from the bus station, as it were, that would take me to the city centre. I'd arrived at the station, a round spot with kiosks and buses that pull up around it, at 5:00 a.m., dead tired after a sleepless night of watching the Andes by moonlight. No driver would take me to the city centre. I had to cross a major blvd to find a taxi driver who didn't notice I had come from the station. I got him to take me to a hotel, booked full, they told me, and then to another, and finally, after at least ten places with no vacancies, I found one on a dirty side street, a one star dump that I took without complaint. I showered, and having slept for a few hours took a look around town. My pleasure. What a lovely looking place. Getting lost within minutes I found myself by the river.

It started to rain at some point, so I took shelter in a church in this city that supposedly considers itself more Argentine than Bolivian.
I'm left wondering about that. In a walk a day later I missed the road to the cemetery, which I assumed was a church on a hilltop. Along the wrong way, I spotted a nicely painted house.

Some things are universal, such as love. Saw that, too. It's likely more meaningful in a foreign language, forcing one to repeat it to ones loved on in Spanish.
Yeah, I'm sentimental. More later about my trip to the cemetery and more of the city.

And stuff.

Canterboli Tales

My mind is crammed with world literature, poetry, history of times and places past and exotic, filled with the arcane and the wondrous, intellectual delights and much too awful to recall without falling depressed into debilitation and sickness, weltschmertz, and loathing; but there is the swell of grand and elaborate hopes and dreams, visions of an impossible future of unfolding treasures and mad joys to indulge, of joke to retell. I have a full mind. But my Spanish is limited, and I slow down to a halt often enough, finding myself in a void of communication, searching for something I just do not have, i.e. the word that others will understand. And then, too, I find my English lowers to the simple, to the cliched, to the basic just above my Spanish. I speak the easy and the immediate. Gone are Bocaccio, Dante, Chaucer. 'I'm going to the tienda to buy soap.' This I say to travelers I meet, my tale, my contribution.

People I meet are often mysteries to me, as occult as stones. And when their secrets are reveled to me, when I hit on the right words and combinations thereof, I find often that they are going to the tienda to buy soap.

Few people traveling (those I meet) are on a pilgrimage to some holy site of universal power, they chattering away the days telling tales of the high and low to wile away the hours and the days as they move slowly toward the magnificent, telling tales of eternal delight. Nor are they driven from their homes by plagues, public or private, in search of anything much more than moving along from here to there in search of another mile and tea at a cafe in the sun, a stroll down the market highstreet to browse among local handicrafts for some thing or other to take back home when the traveling is done. Some might stop on the sidewalk briefly to admire the old statuary atop a church facade, or they might stop for ice-cream to eat under the shelter of a tree in the park. The tale of the day is cosmically interesting insofar as it is possible. The day of travel is as simple as buying soap. The great literature of the world rests idly in my mind, and I long to chat with simple girls, clean and smiling, their tales of sweet smells and smooth skin and warm water, tales of soap and bath.

19/21

I've gone about as far as I can in my search for the Nineteenth Century, and here in southern Bolivia where shops are filled with 16 speed Oster blenders and see-through nylon panties and a hundred varieties of Chinese radios and toys that cause moments of psychic storms, I come as close as possible in my time to that lost time I long for-- to a place where a band of haggard men play old beaten brass

horns to the beat of cracked drums as they return from a funeral, previously solemn, now up-beat, the Twentieth Century all around them in their mourning, resignation tempered with belief in the good of eternity. The small group of men carrying a make-shift shrine of plastic flowers and a doll like Jesus half hidden in a polyester blanket, these men trudge up the street in old plastic sandals and ragged cotton jeans, slowly, slowly, to the annoyance of the family caught behind them on a narrow stone lane, the father tapping impatiently on the steering wheel of his shiny silver-grey Hummer, plump and clean well-dressed children in the back seat gawking at the men in procession ahead.

Electricity obliterates any illusion I might hope to wish for that this is the last vestige of the Nineteenth Century. The metal frames holding up the plastic tarp roof of a sidewalk vendor selling medicinal herbs and witchcraft charms from a stack of boxes printed in China defeats my hopes. But pregnancy gives my spirits a lift in this time, a scene of vitality the Nineteenth Century lacked, pregnancy being a delight and a fulfillment today that was a potential death sentence then, now a promise of good, a curse to others in the Modern world of the Twenty-first Century so many Modernists claim to despise, the latter ignorantly longing for a time closer to that of the hunter-gatherer era of starvation, rampant disease, total ignorance of the night, and the love of the darkness of the mind that is pre-Modernity.

In this land of relative simplicity of work, family, and death I startled those in the courtyard of my hotel when, leaving the shower, I suddenly crouched stark naked behind a stone column, reaching pointlessly for my non-existent pistol, trying to point it at the sound of distant fire-crackers exploding harmlessly elsewhere. This is not the Nineteenth Century. This is not the war. As much as my despised fellows in other lands I fall far short of living in the age of my time.