Adam Ehad

2009-04-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

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2009-04-24T03:51:00.001-07:00

Black

2009-04-24T03:47:00.001-07:00

absastart

All of my latest scribblings - along with a few

random projects -

can be found below. Enjoy! adamehad@gmail.com

zionismbirth

protektzia

brand

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j-doc
judfilum
innocencejewatchstartazeriyalstart contactsstart teapotstart chinesestart heinzstart returningtobuenos
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absaadeath absathemoskitto absaterrorist absabeggars absasurviving absafriend absashower absablich absasnir absaoptika

2009-04-24T03:31:00.000-07:00

Returning to Buenos Aires

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Shani looked as if she had been designed by a manga artist. Pencil thin arms and legs, a shock of straight hair falling over one eye, she would sit all day curled up on the floor near the heater, clasping a cup of coffee to her chest for warmth, and talking to her best friend Natalia. Shani and Natalia were the only semi-permanent members of the hostel. They had lived there for months, surrounded by a fleeting and ever-changing population of Israeli tourists who were either on there way up to Peru or had just returned from there. Shani had somehow developed a love for Spanish, and she had taken a year between high school and national service in order to learn the language. Who Natalia was though, was always less clear. She was around sixteen years old and obviously a local girl – that much was clear from the fact that she spoke only Spanish and dressed in the sort of clothes that haven´t been seen in England since the nineties. Aside from Shani, she didn´t seem to have many friends, and spent most of her time watching bloody-awful Argentine TV shows.

“She has a story” Shani told me one day, as we were chatting on the tiles near the heater.
“She told me it. But I don´t think I can say...”.
“Of course”, I replied, “It´s none of my business. By the way, I´m thinking of going to Bariloche. Have you been?”
She laughed. Shani, in keeping with her general manga-cartoon appearance, had an ear to ear smile that made her look like she could eat a banana sideways. “I haven´t been outside of Buenos".
The fact that Shani had spent a year in South America without once setting foot outside the city did not surprise me as much as it might have done. She had told me earlier that she had lived her whole life in Haifa without once visiting Jerusalem.
“Well Sarai and Rina are going down for a week, so I might go with them” I told her. And that´s just what I did. Except that somehow the week ended up telescoping into two and a half months in Northern Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil, and I returned to the hostel long after everyone had given me up for dead and stowed away my luggage in the basement.

It was a bad time to arrive back in Buenos. Even in the taxi from the bus station to Mashehu Mashehu (the hostel´s name is taken from the Hebrew slang for “the best”) I was impatient with what was to come. Mashehu Mashehu is even a bigger balagan than your average Argentine hostel. It´s genuinely homely atmposphere is undermined by everything that makes homes – especially Jewish homes - so bloody difficult to deal with. I hadn´t had a proper shave in two months, showered in three days or eaten in two, but I knew that there was no chance of doing what I really wanted to do – i.e. nipping in just long enough to clean myself up before nipping out again for some prime kosher steak. Mashehu Mashehu just ain´t that sorta place. I would have to listen to how I had been missed, and reply likewise. I would have to wait for the prorprioters to remember where they had hidden my luggage. By the time that they did so, something else would have come up, and I would have to somehow remind them, in as polite a tone as possible, that I was still waiting for it. Sigh.

Still, there was nothing for it but to try and hurry things up as much as possible. With this resolution in mind, I rang on the bell.
Silence.
Oh, G-d, here we go.
I rang again.
Nada.
Finally, there was the rattle of a key in the lock, and Natalia opened the door.
She looked surprised to see me.
“Hola” I said, “Todo biene?”
“Si”. She led the way in.

But todo was not biene. The place was in dissaray. Coming into the lounge, I almost barged straight into a small crowd of Argentine pensioners – not exaclty a typical sight for a youth hostel. They were making a great fuss of a child of one or two, who was starting to look thoroughly bored of their attempts to entertain him. In the kitchen, a contingent of seven or eight Israeli girls was lounging about, waiting impatiently to sign in. The landlady, however, was much too busy to attend them, as she was trying simultaneously to set the table for what appeared to be a celebration of some sort, and to deal at the same time with a black-cloaked Rabbi who had taken a vow against looking at women, and was carefully studying the cieling. I only added to the general confusion. “Aaaz!” she cried, as I came into the room “Az, where you been? Where you been Az?” Before I could reply, she begged me in a whisper to take the Rabbi outside into the garden and talk to him.
“We are having Brit Milah*” she told me, scattering forks over the table.
“A Brit Milah? Here? Why here?”
“It´s mitzvah!¨she said, “Now take outside. Say “Shalom, How are you?”, talk...”
Christ. There was nothing for it.
“Um...what time is the Brit?” I asked, as she hussled me out of the French windows.
“Now!” she said excitedly. “Now, now! We wait only for the mohel.”

But, true to Argentine form, the Brit seemed to be happening any time but now. I sat outside with the Rabbi and some other men as he gave us quite an interesting dvar Torah on the upcoming chagim, and I was really happy to find that I understood just about every word that he used – he had taken for me an Israeli and was speaking Ivrit. My Ivrit had really improved in the last two months of being on the road with my future compatriots. But I could not help wandering when things were going to get started. I saw the moel arrive, but there didn´t seem any other guests. And where was the baby?

After the rabbi had finished speaking and all the rest of the men had gone inside, Devorah (the landlady), came out to me with a camera. “Is possible, you take pictures?”
“Sure, sure”. I have never understood why people feel the need to take pictures at a Brit Milah. Pretty grusome, as far as I am concerned. But I felt that now was no time for scruples, so I took the camera and followed her inside.
“Why you wait?” she asked.
“Um...” Eh?
“Why you wait. The Brit, it start!”
She pointed to a small room near the toilets, and I hurried towards them.

This was not normal. The room was full of the old pensioners, perhaps five or six in all, and on the table was the child, who was one year old at least. A Brit Milah, for the ignorant among you, is meant to be done at the age of just eight days, when the pain and health risk are at a minimum. After that age, the operation becomes increasinly painful and dangerous.
The rabbi and one of the old ladies were holding and comforting the child, and the moel was pulling on his surgical gloves.
And I was just confused.
So I concentrated on taking pictures.

Everything went B¨H k´ragil.
Snip, snip, etc.
And the child didn´t seem in too much pain.
By the end, however, he was weeping tearfully. “Awwww...” the old lady crooned. “Don`t cry, don`t cry, mummy is coming, mummy is coming” The child continued wailing. “Don`t cry, don’t cry” the woman repeated, as the door opened – “here is Mummy!¨
Natalia stepped into the room and bent over the child.

Later, we sat at the table, eating bloody awful falafel and pizza. I munched away happily. You get like that after two days without solid food. One of the old men sat opposite me and told me about his time in a bunker in the Golan during the six day war.
“It was cemo achim.” he said. “mamash cemo achim.”
“Really?” I eyed the piece of pizza between us.
“Ken, ken!” he said, “It was different then. No tachanat merkazit, nooo, um...¨ - his Ivrit failed him. ¨- rak shtachim!”
The last word left his mouth in a little burst of spray. I decided against the pizza.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Natalia, sitting silent between two old women who were chatting gustily over her head. She had the child, now sleeping, on her knee, and was staring into space.
The old man, determined not to lose a rare chance at a captive audience, began to regale me with statistics on the quantities of halvah that they had consumed in his bunker. So I turned back, doing my best to banish the sadness from the air, and re-entered the convivial flow of conversation.

*see glossary page

2009-04-24T03:26:00.000-07:00

Title in Centre

Rest of Essay body in "normal", followed by three stars, centred to separate paragraphs.

* * *

Second paragraph in "normal".

2009-04-24T03:25:00.001-07:00

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While I was still in London, I toyed with the idea
of starting an actual blog - not a list of documents
as this site is, but something to keep people
updated on what I was doing.
It rapidly degenerated into something
very different, however, a mixture
of Golders-in-joke and Elizabethan commentary
...as can be seen here.

2009-04-24T03:13:00.001-07:00

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Have you heard of JewWatch?
Of course you have; it is the second
highest site mentioned in the google
results for "Jew" or "Jewish".
Not a pleasant state of affairs.
Just to mix things up a bit, I decided
to set up this alternative site
Feel free to order watches on the
email address given; it is the admin.
address of the "original" JewWatch.com

2009-04-24T02:56:00.000-07:00

Observe the sea of humanity around you.

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Pretty, isn’t it? All those colours.

Now, look closer. You will see that humanity separates itself into bubbles

of culture and ethnic identity, smaller seas that we know as nations.

Nations build fences around themselves and call themselves states. And more often than not a smaller bubble will get caught within the fence;

the Serbs in Croatia, the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Jews in Germany.

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This is not a problem, of course. Or it need not be. But when tough times come along, economic depression or social disorder, nations have a way of turning on the minorities within them.

It happens all of the time. In Croatia. In Rwanda. In Germany.

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The pattern by which nations indulge in these occasional bloodbaths can be well illustrated by the concept of the shibboleth.

The term “shibboleth” comes from an episode in the book of Judges, during which the Ephraimites were engaged in a war with the inhabitants of Gilead. Of the various things that we know of the Ephraimites, we know that they were a tribe characterised by an accent that made them incapable of correctly pronouncing the word “shibboleth”, which is the Hebrew term for an ear of wheat. When ever a man came to the river that divided the land of Ephraim from the land of Gilead, therefore, the Gileadites would ask him to say the word “shibboleth”. If he did not do so correctly, they killed him.

The episode recounted above was merely the first of its kind. Throughout history, the pattern has been repeated: When a nation goes through turmoil, it will often victimise members of the smaller nations within it. But how is it to identify who belongs to this nation? When skin colour, clothing or religion is clearly different, there is no need to. But when it is not, it turns to the shibboleth.

On the 18^th of May, 1302, the Flemish inhabitants of the town of Bruges killed every single man, woman and child who could not correctly pronounce the term “schild en vriend”, on the basis that the French cannot pronounce these words.

In 1312, in the polish city Krakow, in a pogrom against the Germans, anyone over the age of seven who could not pronounce the term Soczewica, koło, miele, młyn ("Lentil, wheel, grinds [verb], mill)" was put to death. These words are hard for German-speakers to pronounce.

During the Peasant revolt, during which the merchants of London attacked the Flemish citizens of that city, anyone who could not pronounce the words “Bread and Cheese” correctly was put to death.

These are just three instances, but in fact, the list of shibboleths is endless; another illustration of the sheer inexorability with which nations turn on the minorities within them.

Time and time again, a nation will go through a period of stress, and a smaller nation within it, previously living in peace and prosperity, will be suddenly attacked.

In 1894, in France, it happened again. A young army officer named Dreyfus was (falsely, as was latter revealed) accused of spying for Germany. Dreyfus was a Jew, a Jew at a time when to be a Jew in France seemed no problem at all. At least, the secularised, assimilated, successful French-Jewish population had never had any problems before. But as soon as the Dreyfus trial started, all of that changed. Rioting mobs appeared in the streets, attacking Jews everywhere, sacking their shops and businesses, and chanting “Death to the Jews!”.

And that might have been the end of the story. As we have said, these things happen all of the time.

But one thing marked this event apart from all others that had preceded it. An Austrian journalist called Theodore Herzl had been covering the affair, and it profoundly changed his views on what it meant to be Jewish, an epiphany that led to the creation of the modern State of Israel.

Let us look at things from Herzl’s perspective.

Up until his time, what it meant to be Jewish was a relatively easy question to answer.

Jewishness was a combination of ethnicity and religion that had its focus in the Jewish faith.

Let us look at the Jewish faith.

Judaism is often called a religion, but this is actually an incorrect term.

Judaism is not a religion. Judaism is a relationship.

Religions divide the world into right and wrong.

Judaism does not do that.

Jews believe that G-d set them apart, making a vow with them, and allowing them only to marry within their own nation. He also gave that nation a particular set of laws.

Religions divide the world into right and wrong, but Judaism divides the world into “right for the gentiles” and “wrong for the Jews”.

This was ok, so long as the Jews lived in the ancient land of Israel. There, they lived in peace, worshipping at their temple in Jerusalem. But in 70 CE, the Roman Empire attacked Judea and Israel, and exiled their inhabitants from the land.

The fate of the Israelites was not an unusual one. The Romans fought many campaigns, and the inhabitants of many countries were exiled to other parts of the empire.

But the Jews were different.

Another nation would be exiled, and forced to live in a new land, surrounded by its original inhabitants.

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As such, that nation faced the constant risk of being attacked by the ethnic majority.

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And this might happen. But sooner or later, the minority nation would intermarry and assimilate into the larger nation.

And their perilous period of exile would be over.

But the Jews were different.

Remember that Jews are allowed to marry only within their own

nation, a nation that observes the laws of the Torah.

This means that the Jews never intermarried and assimilated into the nations around them. Judaism in essence acted as an iron chain around the Jewish nation, keeping its border always clearly defined.

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The Jews never assimilated. Instead, they were attacked again and again and again, wandering from nation to nation in constant search of peace.

And it seemed that their sorrows would never be over.

Until the enlightenment.

The enlightenment was a period in world history from the 17^th century onwards.

During this period, people began to turn away from religion, and towards science.

Nations began to abandon their primitive prejudices and allow equality.

Jews had always been second-class citizens, forced to live in ghettoes.

Even had they not been forced, they would still have stayed ethnically separate; their religion demanded it.

But no longer. Secularism was the new force in Jewish life. Many no longer believed in the Jewish relationship with God. They entered mainstream society.

A new age was dawning. At last, it seemed, the shackles around the Jewish nation was broken.

Soon, it was predicted, they would diffuse into the nations around them, and their eternal wonderings would be over.

This was Herzl’s belief, until he saw the Dreyfus affair.

He had long believed that the Jews should and would assimilate, but now he thought again.

He looked at what had occurred in Europe over the centuries since the enlightenment began, and saw that this assimilation simply had not happened.

The Jews had remained separate, both by choice, and because the gentiles still hated them and would not marry them.

Even when the Jews seemed to be integrating well, the trial of a single Jew like Dreyfus could suddenly show their co-existence to be a farce.

Faced with all of this, Herzl realised that the Jews would never assimilate. And if one looks at the way that in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere Jews constantly seek to marry and associate with other Jews, very often despite having no religious convictions at all, we can see this to be the case.

The idea that the Jews would never successfully assimilate is a familiar one in Rabbinic literature, but for a secularist like Herzl, it was a dramatic new idea.

In essence, Herzl was redefining the bonds around the Jewish nation that we spoke of above.

Let us look closer at these bonds.

Up until that time, it might have seemed that the border around the Jewish nation was enforced by a chain of halacha; belief in Jewish law.

What Herzl was saying that was despite much of the nation abandoning halacha, the chain was still in place.

In essence, he was redefining that chain, as something deeper then halacha – as something specifically and primarily about being Jewish.

In fact, Herzl said, not only much Jews leave the nation-states in Europe, they must leave the nation states in the Near East as well. Jews throughout the world must come to Israel.

The fact that Herzl could say this says something very special about Jews.

The conceptual “chain around the Jewish nation” that we spoke of above is very real.

It is so real that a dark-skinned Jew from Africa, an olive-skinned Jew from the Near East and a white skinned Jew from Europe all have more in common, in a way, than gentiles in the country in which they lived. They could, according to Herzl, despite their completely different backgrounds, from primitive African villages to advanced European university-towns, all come together and work together to build a state. And if you look at Israel today, you will see that this is true.

Perhaps, though, things are not that simple…

Herzl lived in a very interesting time. Although secularism was rife, the makeup of the Jewish nation was not very different from what it had been a few centuries previously, and throughout all of Jewish history. Throughout Jewish history, the makeup of the Jewish nation was determined by a religious code known as halacha, which passes down Jewish identity through the maternal line only, making rare exceptions in the case of converts who genuinely wish to embrace the Jewish faith. In Herzl’s time, Jews still married Jews, whether out of religious or merely cultural reasons.

Thus, when Herzl declared “All Jews must return to Israel and establish a state”, he was saying, “All those who are Jewish according to halacha must return to Israel and establish a state.” He did not use this more exacting language simply because there was no need to. All Jews were Jewish according to halacha, whether they believed in halacha or not, simply because very few gentiles wanted to marry Jews, and vice versa.

By the time the Jewish state was established, not much had changed.

When Israel established its “Law of Return”, therefore, no emphasis was put on the exact definition of a Jew. Everyone knew what a Jew was – it was the same as a Jew in Herzl’s time. Israel became a haven for Jew’s from all over the world. But for many, it was too late. Herzl’s philosophy had prompted many in Europe to come to Israel. But many saw Zionism’s view of the world as overly cynical. The fact that nations turn on those smaller nations within them is no reason to run away, they argued. Better to try and change mainstream society for the better. These people had good intentions, but Herzl was unfortunately right. Many of those who stayed in Europe perished.

Meanwhile, those Jews who had survived to come to Israel got down to the business of establishing the state.

And meanwhile, the world outside was changing.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Russia and the states immediately around it became the USSR. Religion was banned utterly. In this environment of enforced atheism, the Jews of Russia, deprived of their shibboleth Judaism, might easily have assimilated and disappeared. But the Russians themselves – like so many nations before them – did not let this happen. As Herzl himself complained in Der Judenstaat; “(How easily) we could assimilate – if only they would let us!” The Russians, although striving to make all workers equal, could not restrain their own anti-semitism. The soviet government, under the anti-Jewish Stalin, spread vicious official slurs against the Jews, and they also forced all Jews to state the fact of their own Jewishness, in their official identity papers. The problem was that the Soviets defined Jewishness according to their own model of patriarchy. What formed during the intervening sixty years of Soviet rule, then, was a new Jewish nation, not halachically but officially Jewish, the shibboleth that defined their Jewishness nothing more than a line in their I.D. papers, a shibboleth that was passed down from father to son, not, as in traditional, halachic Judaism, from a mother to her children. Many of these “Jews” developed a strong identity as Jews, therefore, and when the Iron Curtain finally fell, they were only too eager to emigrate to Israel.

Israel’s politicians were only too keen to accommodate them. Israel was struggling with a demographic problem. Having granted citizenship to all of it’s Arab citizens, who were increasing at a rate far greater than that of the Jews, they could foresee a time when the Jews would be outnumbered, and an Arab government voted into place. This would lead to exactly the same dangerous situation as had prompted the creation of the state. In order to accommodate as many Russians as possible, in order to increase the non-Arab Israeli population, the government relaxed the law of return, letting in “all those who are Jewish and of Jewish descent”. They defined someone as being of Jewish descent if they had at least one Jewish grandparent. After all, they argued, Hitler’s policy had been too murder anyone with “at least one Jewish grandparent”. And thus, if Israel is to provide sanctuary for Jews who would otherwise be persecuted, this should be our definition too. So convincing was this argument that many believe that Israel’s “Law of Return” is based on Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, set up as it was in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. This is not true at all. Israel’s Law of Return, as it now stands, was only established in the 1970s. The original law was very different. Although, that said, the very idea of basing Jewish identity on the ideas of Hitler, and doing so as a result of the policies of Stalin, two of the greatest mass-murderers in history, is not an attractive one.

Israel’s adoption of a modified Law of Return, defining anyone with one Jewish grandparent as being of Jewish ancestry, had dramatic effects. Many within Russia and the former Soviet republics found that they could find a far better life in newly industrialised Israel than in Russia. Immigrants with the most tenuous “Jewish” ancestry began flooding into the country, including many members of the Russian Mafia. Shops selling pork sprang up in Tel Aviv. Nazareth’s churches filled up with Israeli citizens on Christmas day, all of whom were Russian Christians. A friend of mine met several of these Russians at his first Ulpan. “They openly boasted” he related to me, “ that their closest connection to Judaism was that their grandfathers had killed a few Jews during the war.”

In fact, as the recent discovery of an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi cell in Petach Tikvah shows, many of those “Jews” now in Israel are not only not halachically Jewish, but actually hate those who are.

If this were not bad enough, forging of family papers is very common in the corrupt former Soviet republics, which makes it easy – extremely easy – for many with absolutely no Jewish ancestry at all to falsify records in order to get an entry into Israel and thus the Western World. Corrupt members of the sochnut, eager to swell their records, and thus their standing in the sochnut, are consciously helping in this process. A friend of mine who worked with just such a bent sochnut shali’ach estimated that a busload of completely non-Jewish people are flying to Israel every week.

The lure of Israel’s successful economy is reaching wider than the impoverished of Russia.

The old testament is a powerful text, detailing the redemption of a downtrodden minority, and it’s narrative has been adopted by hundreds of tribes throughout the third world (and even several groups in Europe and the Americas) who have come in contact with one of the Abrahamic faiths, whether Christianity, Islam, or, perhaps even Judaism itself. These tribes often have folk lore describing themselves as “the lost tribes of Judah”, beliefs which never prompted them to contact mainstream Judaism before. Suddenly, however, with Israel’s standard of life being so much better than that of the third world, they are flocking to Israel and demanding entry. And the Israeli government are slowly giving way.

And on Mount Herzl, Herzl is rolling in his grave.

Or so I believe.

Actually, nobody can say what Herzl would think of the current situation.

Many of those who have read his “Autneuland”, with its depiction of a mulitcultured democracy, would say that he would be happy with this multi-ethnic situation. But that particular work was written specifically to win over his non-Jewish readership. His diaries reveal that his real beliefs were rather different; that he wanted a Jewish only population in Israel.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I have read Herzl, a shrewd but humanitarian man, and I believe I know what he would say.

If Herzl could be resurrected for a day, if he could be shown what was happening to the state, if he could speak to some Israelis on the street, and if he could then be asked what to do, I think I know what he would say. He would reply as follows:

“Who are we to define who is a Jew?

If a downtrodden tribe in India have come to identify with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, are we to blame them?

If they have started to call themselves “Jews”, are we to blame them?

If they want to come to Israel and join us, are we to blame them?

If a Russian man, spat on his whole life for being a “Jew”, even though he is not a real Jew but only patriarchally descended from one, should identify with the Jews, are we to blame him?

If he wants to come to Israel and join us, are we to blame him?

No, we are not to blame them.

Zionism is not about blame. Zionism is about stating facts as they are, looking at the dangers inherent for minority-nations, and finding a solution.

When I advised the Jews to leave Europe, did I blame the European powers for creating the situation which made this necessary?

I did not. I simply stated the facts of human nature.

And the facts of human nature are, as I have said before, that it is not safe for the Jews to live among other nations. Throughout all of history, our sages said it again and again. Israel is the nation that dwells alone. In Paris, I said it again, but this time I offered a plan of action.

The Jews must return to Israel.

I should have been more clear.

I should have said: Those who are halachically, maternally Jewish must return to Israel.

It is not my place to say whether all the others, the Russian patriarchal-“Jews”, all those tribes in India and Asia, are Jews. That is not my place.

But when I set out my ideas, I did so about a particular, homogeneous group, a group so constituted that I knew it would bond together successfully: Those who are halachically, maternally Jewish. Whether religious, secular, Sefardi, Ashkenazi or Ethiopian. Even most of the secular members of this group have not yet wavered from the ancient definition of a Jew; anyone whose mother is Jewish, or any genuine convert to that group.

And as long as you define yourself as “Zionist”, as long as your political end is a society in which you can leave freely as a member of this particular Jewish nation, you have to make some tough choices. You can just about live with the situation that you have created. But you cannot let it continue. You must change the Law of Return back to its original.

You say “but it is racist. The Russians in Israel will hate us for it.” Well, I tell you what you already know. That it is not racist. That the Russians in Israel will not hate you for it. And that if they do, it is better than bringing in even more of those who have no connection to us, or to the land.

You say “but Herzl, what about the Arabs?” Well, I tell you what you should already know. That it makes little sense to be like the old woman who swallowed a fly, and swallowed a spider to catch the fly, and swallowed a bird to catch the spider, and so on, and so on.

You say “but Herzl, it’s impossible!” And I tell you. That is exactly what everyone said to me. What is a detail in a law, compared to the establishment of a state in the teeth of seven hostile neighbours? What is it? There are neo-nazi rings in Israel. There are anti-Semitic attacks on synagogues, within Israel, by Russians who have no connection with your people. I lived my whole life for this state. I died broken and exhausted. I did it all for you. If I had known that would allow all of this, I would not have bothered. Listen to me, people of Israel. You ignored me once before, and paid the price. Don’t do it again.”

This, I believe, is what Herzl would say about the law of return.

2009-04-24T02:44:00.000-07:00

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2008-12-21T00:07:00.000-08:00

Thank you for taking the time to look at some of my writing.

For your convenience, you can find it all categorised into three sections below:

Experiences, Essays and Advice & Information.

If you find something that looks interesting, just click on the blue link provided...

Enjoy!

Experiences;

Taking the long way home - The events that led up to this blog

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/testing-entry.html

The political life of South America - Protests, etc.
http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/political-life-of-south-america.html

Communication breakdown - Trying to get directions in Salta

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/communication-breakdown.html

The Salars - Failing consistently to enjoy the Salars

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/kj-k-centre-of-south-america-was-at-one.html

Returning to Buenos Aires - I return to my hostel to find blood everywhere
http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/returning-to-buenos-aires.html

The "Moskito" - The blood suckers of Rurrenabaque

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/11/moskito.html

Surviving a terrorist attack - Argentina and Israel combine

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/12/surviving-terrorist-attack.html

That famath deslad - A brush with Snir

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/12/that-famath-deslad.html

Essays;

A death in Brazil - Notes on South American Travel Writing

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/10/death-in-brazil-notes-on-south-american.html

Seventeen ways to survive a terrorist attack
http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/12/seventeen-ways-to-survive-terrorist.html

Beggar´s Banquet - The duty of the traveller

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/12/beggars-banquet.html

Son of a Blich - Notes on Argentine Cuisine

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/12/son-of-blich.html

How I learned to stop travelling and love my inner tourist - Why true travel is dead

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-i-learned-to-stop-travelling-and.html

Advice and Information;

Glossary - A list of unfamiliar terms you might encounter in this blog

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/ok-that-seemed-to-work.html

A word of warning - A brief disclaimer of any of the embarrassment that I will inevitably eventually feel for some of the stuff that I wrote in my reckless youth

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/testing_23.html

Places in South America where you can get a nice English cup of tea
http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/blog-post.html

The Perils of the South American shower - Why tolerance is essential
http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/perils-of-south-american-shower.html

The horrors of the South American bus journey - Why to always pack earplugs

http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/09/horrors-of-south-american-bus-journey.html

All you ever wanted to know about the South American toilet
http://taking-the-long-way-home.blogspot.com/2008/12/all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-south.html

a test page

2008-12-21T00:06:00.007-08:00

to the (alleged) Charedisation of the city - apparently there are Jews who are afraid of the Men in Black too - and lots of other stuff in between.

to the (alleged)

title

2008-12-21T00:06:00.005-08:00

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How I learned to stop travelling and love my inner tourist

2008-12-13T23:13:00.001-08:00

You see this dude? Cecil Rhodes was his name. The disaster-zone that is now called Zimbabwe was once named Rhodesia - in his honour. If all foreigners can be classed on a spectrum of respectability, from the despised "tourist", through the savvy "traveller", to the glorious "explorer", then it is certainly the latter end of the spectrum that Rhodes occupied. Hacking through jungles, consorting with native chiefs, he was about as involved in his destination as it is possible to get. Cecil Rhodes, explorer par excelence.
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We all want to be Cecil Rhodes. We all want to be the first white man to visit the Zulu tribes of the upper Zambizi.* We all want to learn fluent Swahili for no other reason than because no-one else on the entire continent speaks English. We all want to be the explorer. And this is what makes Rhodes´s state of mind so interesting. Because for all his exploits, Rhodes was the consumate tourist. If he visited Southern Africa today, he would be on the tour bus with the best of them, dressed in a loud Hawaáin shirt, tartan shorts, and wearing an enormous camera strapped across his chest. Rhodes was far more interested in exploiting Africa than discovering it. In other words, Rhodes was the explorer because he had to be.

Yes, if Rhodes visited Southern Africa today, he would do so on a tour bus. But before you start getting smug, you might like to remember that you would probably be on the tour bus along with him. It is not enough simply to have the "right state of mind". Having a passionate desire to truly connect with another culture will not remove you from the tourist-bubble that has been created for you. You see, the essential fact is simply this: it is the destination that decides whether someone is a (a) "tourist" (b) "traveller" or (c) "explorer", NOT the person themselves.

In order to explain why this is, I think that it is first necessary to look at exactly what each of these three individuals is trying to accomplish. We can start by recognising that, despite the differences between them, both the "tourist", the "traveller" and the "explorer" are all engaged in the same pursuit; "travel". This word is itself worthy of definition. "Travel" is a very complex activity, but from one standpoint at least it can be defined as "an encounter with another culture". Thus, "travel = the attempt to encounter another culture".

Within this world of cultural encounter, the "tourist" is a sad and comical figure. The tourist fails on almost all counts. Tagged like children as a member of "tourist group B" in case they get lost, wearing comfort clothing better suited to lounging around the house, bearing their cameras aloft as if to shield themselves from their strange new surroundings, they look helpless, lost and horribly eager-to-please. The tourist fails first and foremost because they never do get to truly encounter their destination´s culture. Shuttled around in tourist buses, cocooned in their tourist hotels, they might as well be watching it on TV.

There is a further twist in the tourist´s fate. When abroad, exploring strange new cultures, it is always dangerously possible to do the wrong thing, to commit a faux pas, to do something that makes you look an idiot. Stirring a matè, leaving a tip when none is expected, not covering your legs in a mosque - all these perfectly innocent actions will make you look like a complete goon to the locals. It seems hardly fair that the "tourist" - who never really encounters the culture in a real way - should be made to suffer this sort of indignity. But the fact is, they do. In fact they do so even more than other types of traveller. Whereas the "traveller" of the "explorer" are sometimes laughed at, it is only by their hosts. Only the "tourist" suffers the doubly-ironic fate of looking ridiculous in his own eyes. People who are accomplished, dignified professionals when at home become utterly ridiculous abroad, wearing the sort of gear (their ridiculous-comfort clothes, their novelty hats, their oversized cameras), that they would never dream of wearing at home.

But as ridiculous as the "tourist" is, we cannot hate them for it. Remember!: It is the destination that decides whether someone is "tourist", "traveller" or "explorer"; not the person themselves . If there is nothing but jungle, the traveller dresses for the challenge, and becomes deified as the brave Explorer. But if there is a tourist company ready to ferry them from the airport to hotel, hotel to carefully selected attraction, warning them all the while to "dress sensibly", and eager to sell them extra camera film if ever they should run out, they understandably succumb to the opportunity, and become tourists. In other words, the "tourist" is nothing more than a traveller who has been too well catered for.

Now, there might have been a time when people defining themselves as "travellers", (in sharp oppostion to "tourists"), might have been in enough of a minority to find themselves not specifically catered for. There might have been a time, in other words, when if you did not specifically choose to travel in the tour group that stays only at the gringo hotel, eats at the gringo restaurant, visits the gringo attraction, you would find yourself obligated to enter explorer mode; learn the lingo, try things for the first time, find yourself alone in a strange new place. Now, however, every restaurant has an English menu, every guide book will explain exactly what strange new foods are made of and how to eat them, every hotel has a doorman who is more than willing to humour the gringos in their incompetent attempts to speak the language.

These days, "travellers" are just as overly-catered for as "tourists". Tourists have their luxury-travel groups, their disposable cameras, their solicitious guides. Travellers have their SLR´s, their long-haired hostel-mates, their inevitable copies of lonely planet. And while of course "travellers" have a bit more of a "hands-on" experience, the extent to which this differs them from mere "tourists" is no way great enough to justify the ego-boost that they get from this fact. Travellers, these days, are just as ridiculous as tourists. They are either inordinantly proud at being so "real", or they are filled of angst because they realise that they are not so real after all, realising, perhaps, that if they are self-conscious enough to realise how untouristy they are, there is still something seriously wrong with the way that they are travelling.

To explain further what I mean by this, I think it is necessary to visit our final category; the "explorer". The "explorer" is the one who goes all out. No gang of long-haired hippies to hang out with, no "lonely planet" guide to his destination, he is on his own. Cecil Rhodes was an explorer in an age when this was most possible. He lived just when long-distance travel had started to become possible, but before many people had had the opportunity to use it. It was inevitable then, that in heading out into Africa, he would have to enter explorer mode.

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I have put the word "inevitable" in bold, because I think it is important. Cecil Rhodes lived at a time when "exploration" and "travel" where inexorably entwined. To travel through Africa was to explore. This is no longer the case. Africa is signposted for the tourist. South America too has a well trodden "gringo trail". Asia´s hippy trail serves much the same purpose. The modern day explorer is different from Rhodes in that his exploration is studied, self-conscious, deliberate.
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Like many people, I have tried my hand at exploration. When I was in Bolivia, I left Uyuni, the city that I was in - which was full of tourists - and headed out into the neighbouring towns. They too had their share of gringos, so I headed out into the surrounding villages, and after much searching, came across a village in which they had probably not seen a gringo in a long time - if ever. And it was there that I realised that the age of exploration is over. We live in an age when the things most worth seeing - the falls at Iguazu, the glaciers of Patagonia, etc - have all been mapped out for the traveller, made comfortable for the tourist. If a traveller finds themself alone in an unchartered landscape, it is usually because they have deliberately sought out a place where they could feel themselves to be an explorer.
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And I think that this is sad as well as dangerous. Those small towns around Uyuni had nothing to reccomend them to the traveller. They were boring places, and the only reason that I found them full of gringos was probably because they were doing exactly the same thing as me - heading out and away into virgin territory. This is sad because when we explore simply to be explorers, we are too self-conscious of our actions for them to be really noble. We are playing to the camera. There is nothing for us to see anymore that has not been signposted by "lonely planet" - if we insist on going out on our own, it is only because our ego´s are desperate for more. And if we do not placate our ego´s by other means, we will eventually destroy the world with our ceaseless "exploring". The more we search for untouched territory, the more it ceases to exist.
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As I have hinted above, I think that the "traveller" suffers from much the same neurosis as the modern day "explorer". They have become distracted from travel itself, and have come to focus on appearances. It is not that I think that the first instincts of either the "traveller" or the "tourist" are un-noble as such. I simply think that both have been naive enough to think that the world is still open to genuine "traveller" or "explorer" experiences. Both are trying to keep up appearances in a world which is fast wearing those appearances away. And in the process, both become distracted from what little travel has left to offer us.
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Not only are the modern "traveller" and "explorer" susceptible to this sort of distraction; they are also susceptible to hate. If one tries to keep up the facade of the "traveller", one inevitably comes to hate "mere" tourists. Travellers hate tourists because tourists are a threat. Just as it is the destination that makes the tourist, it is also the tourist that makes the destination. The more people that are willing to be ferried from attraction to attraction, the more destinations adapt themselves to this new lucrative form of income, and the more the traveller finds themselves in a destination full of photo-opportunities and tacky soveigner stands. And as I have implied, anyone travelling through tourist-land...is a tourist. But travellers don´t merely hate tourists. They hate other travellers as well. Just as a proliferation of tourists has the effect of turning a place into a part of tourist-land, thus spoiling it for the traveller who wants to experience it "real" and first hand, so too does a proliferation of travellers turn a place into part of traveller-land.
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This is just the tip of a giant iceberg; the fact is, the whole world of travel is knotted into an intractable paradox. We Europeans live in a mass culture, and in general we are aware of that. If we fancy going down the mall, we are aware that several hundred people have probably had the same idea. If we like a band, we are aware that several thousand others probably do so as well: we do not expect to be the only audience at a rock concert. And if we feel the need to free our countrymen and immerse ourselves in a new culture, we should be aware that several thousand others will want to come with us.
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We should be aware, but we aren´t. We aren´t aware enough of this because, for one thing, getting away from our fellow countrymen is an unstated assumption implicit in the idea of immersing ourselves in a new culture; and like all unstated assumptions, we never take the time to examine and question it properly. And furthermore, we are living in a world the like of which has never been seen before. Mass travel has excelerated far too fast for our cultural expectations to be dampened accordingly; we still have the heritage of such relics as Cecil Rhodes, in an age when he could not possibly exist.
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So what do we do about all this? Whether tourist, traveller or explorer, we are equally doomed. But if we are still dedicated to travel, we must decide which of these figures we are to be. Well, my choice can be seen in the title of this note. But don´t get me wrong. Being a tourist, in my book, does not consist of travelling around in an air-conditioned bus. Being a tourist means never being prey to the pretension of the "traveller" or the "modern-day explorer". Being a tourist means forgetting the fact that you look like an idiot, and just concentrating on enjoying yourself.
Being a tourist means forgetting your appearance and concentrating on your experience. Being a tourist is realising that we all look like fools now and then, and you just have to take it. We are all tourists.
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And I qoute: "We are all tourists. We learn by doing. Our knowledge comes by the fine art of making our screw-ups something beautiful. And unless you’re willing to go down roads unfamiliar to the cowards and cynics, the art never arrives.It is upon these roads where we are made travelers.As the Global Village becomes more neighborly, the future will belong to the fluent - the ones able to accept the unknown and welcome it.The test of that fluency will rest in our patience: not how well we speak, but how well we listen.Outside the limits of preference and convention await new possibilities, the “undiscovered country” of our potential. Only by asking questions do we encounter anything new; only by challenging our assumptions of the world will reveal our place within it - as one voice in a chorus. And only by honoring differences of those around us will shed light upon the ignorance that keeps us as tourists in our own lives."

*Yes, there are no Zulu tribes in the upper Zambizi. Get over it.

All you ever wanted to know about the South American toilet

2008-12-12T00:37:00.000-08:00

Well, it had to happen some time. Having tackled such troubling subjects as “The perils of the South American shower” (posted 24-9-08) and “The horrors of the South American bus journey” (posted 24-9-08), it is now my painful duty to explore the ins-and-outs of that most enigmatic of domestic appliances, the South American toilet. I suppose I should start off by frankly admitting that the title of this post is wildly untrue. There are many aspects of the South American toilet that will be forever cloaked in mystery, never to be heard by the ear of man. There are other pieces of information that I simply haven´t been able to find out. If any of my readers (numbering around two at latest count) can help add information to this piece, and/or can help me with a “good bano guide to Buenos Aires” that I am in the middle of constructing, any helpful postings would be appreciated...

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Tips and Rules to survive your time in the lav.

- Remember to always take your own toilet paper in South America - chances are, the toilet you’re visiting won’t have any. A half-roll / visit should be sufficient.*

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-Although I always advocate cheapness (naturally), quality of toilet paper is an important issue that should be considered twice. “Economy” in England is not the same as “economy” in Bolivia. The latter is sandpaper, plain and simple. Your choice.
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- The first thing you want to do is check the toilet for ‘clogage’. If it is quite apparent that it had been used recently but not flushed, do not attempt to flush. There’s probably something wrong with the flush, and you may be stirring up something you’ll regret. *
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- If the toilet looks safe to flush, do so. It will clean some of the smears left by your dorm-mates.
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-The vast majority of toilets I have visited do not have toilet seats, so unless you’re either a practicing contortionist or enjoy sitting directly on a cold, dirty toilet rim, you’ve got a bit of work to do before getting down to business. With a couple of 3’ - 4’ long sections of toilet paper folded every foot or so, form a ‘V’ shape to cover the front of the toilet rim, where you’ll be perched — because unless you’re 500lbs+, you may find it pretty much impossible to sit as you normally would on a toilet without a seat - hence the ‘perching’. *
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- Needless to say, protect your genetalia from contact with the toilet itself, at all times.
Sit down and go. Now, there’s a problem you’ll only notice if you go through these steps: how to do a #1. Since that piece of your personal equipment is no longer directly above the water (if you are a male), you’ll either have to hold it, or determine that you really should have gone before you sat down.*
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-It might be an idea to flush often during the process. Just like you, the toilet works best when given several managable tasks to achieve.
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-We now approach one of the less certain areas of this enterprise. To flush, or not to flush? Paper, I mean. That really is the question. As far as I can determine, whether you are in the biggest city or the smallest village, you will always come across signs asking you not to flush your “papelles”. Practically speaking, if you are in Argentina and Brazil, you can usually get away with it if you are in a largish city. In the rest of South America, (or in rural areas of Argentina and Brazil), things get less certain...
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-If you are in an area without good plumbing (i.e. not in an Argentine or Brazillian city), you will have to avoid getting any toilet paper in the bowl during your cleaning up process. This takes some training...
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-The paper instead goes in the little bin next to the toilet.
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- Erm....right. Toilet paper. Let us just say; Those with proper manners will ensure none of the used side, or ‘dirty bits’ will be exposed. A bit of origami practice will have you expert at this in no time. Use your initiative.
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-If the trash receptacle is so full that not one piece of toilet paper will actually stay balanced on the top without tumbling off, simply start another pile next to (or behind) the full trash bin.
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-OK, this is where things get nasty; the combination of “the runs”, with a high water level on the toilet often leads to “splatter”, for which all areas “of the gluteus maximus have to be checked”. I did not write this snippet – I nicked it off another site.
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- Finally, the flush. Never, EVER touch the handle with your hands. Use a foot to push it down. However, some toilets have a pull chain which you may want to grab onto shielded by a layer of toilet paper or the bottom of your shirt (in my case only). After all, washing the toilet is a rare activity, so polishing up the chrome is probably never thought of. *
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- Once you flush, watch out. If the level of the water in the basin gets perilously close to the top, RUN! Otherwise, in the unlikely event that there is a wash basin, wash your hands thoroughly and leave the washroom. *

*Thanks to www.goodliffe.com and www.rooshv.com for additional information

Son of a Blich

2008-12-11T23:55:00.000-08:00

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaYum?

I am seriously campaigning to have the word "blich" added to the Oxford English Dictionary. And until such a time as this new term is safely ensconsed between "blepharostoma" (Noun: a taxonomic genus within the family Pseudolepicoleaceae) and "blimp" (Noun, colloquial: A military middle class Englishman intolerant of others´ ideas), I am in the unfortunate position of being unable to describe just why I cannot get used to Argentine cuisine.
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You see, Argentine food is almost the direct opposite of what I was eating before I came here; the British University Diet. My wealthier friends used to be horrified by the diet of fried egg, baked beans, baked potatoes, chips, sausages, toast, tuna and pasta that I survived on in university, but besides for being all that I could afford, I liked it. The fact that your raw ingredients are usually not of the best quality forces you to be creative in the kitchen, mixing flavours and spices in what usually results as good, filling food.
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In Argentina, flavours are rich and authentic, but they do not mix; You steak is a wonderful hunk of braised flesh, but that is all it is - no sauce, no salsa, and no room for carbs. Your pizza is cheesy; in fact, it is almost 99% cheese, melted into great lava flows that obscure crust, toppings, and often the plate. Your pasta is handmade (unheard of in England), but that alone is expected to suffice by way of flavour, with only a small blob of light sauce added a concession to variety.
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How does one describe the effect of this sort of thing? It can never be described as bland, as such. Quite the opposite, in fact. Cabbage is bland. Potatoes are bland. If anything, the meat and cheese dishes of Argentina are the opposite; very, very rich. But the sheer uninterrupted wall of salty flavour is strangely boring. Rich, yes, but sort of bland, too. Brich, you could say. And please do. The more people who use a term, the more likely the OED is to take notice...

That famath deslad

2008-12-11T22:05:00.000-08:00

As I take the long way home down South America´s “gringo trail”, I occasionally
meet people coming the other way. One such was Snir[1], a little podgy from her
years of bad eating in the army, but still exuding a certain Ashkenazi charm. And
so we sat on the couch together and compared notes on our opposing journeys,
aliyah and yeridah. I have already said enough about my own reasons for wanting
to go to Israel, and Snir´s reasons were also predictable enough; Ashkenazi loathing
of Mizrachit culture and the arsim and frechot that go along with it...a culture that
Snir found doubly loathsome when compared with the bright lights of New York
and L.A., those magical cities which Britney Spears - Snir´s idol - calls home.

“Do you like Britney?” she asked.
“Of course!” I lied, “I just love the foul-mouthed slut”
“What means famath deslad?”
“It means good person”
“She is!” Snir enthused, “I use her songs to learn English. It is very hard!
I don´t understand all words of them!”
As it happens, I use the same technique, but with me the language is Hebrew,
and the singers are Zohar Argov and Eyal Golan. I was about to tell this to Snir, but remembering her scathing comments on the subject of Mizrachit, I decided against.
“I listen so much times to Britney that I know on my heart the words” she continued.
“Off by heart, eh?” I enthused, not knowing what would come next.
“Do you want me to sing a song of Britney?”
“Erm...why not!” I tried to remember the last time someone had made such an
offer and could not. Smiling shyly, Snir began to warble the well-rehearsed words,
and like the consumate performer that she was, not once took her eyes from her audience.

“Ooh, ooh baby

Touch me and I come alive

I can feel you on my lips

I can feel you deep inside

Ooh, ooh baby

You're fillin me up

You're fillin me up...”

I attempted nodding my head along with the tune, but stopped as suddenly as I had began.
If only she stopped looking directly at me, it wouldn´t be so...

“The way you smile,

the way you taste

You know I have an appetite for sexy things

All you do is look at me, it's a disgrace

What's running through my mind is you,

Up in my face
Ooh, ooh baby,
You´re fillin me up
You´re fillin me up”

I furtively wiped the drool from the side of my mouth.
“Would you like me to sing more one?” she asked sweetly.
“Erm! Sure!” I told her. “Just let me jump in the shower quickly! Be right back!”

[1] All of my attempts to explain what her name meant met with ignoble faliure.

Beggar´s Banquet

2008-12-11T13:04:00.000-08:00

In my wild and naive youth, when I believed that it was actually physically possible to find a TEFL job in Buenos Aires, I got together with a group of other English teachers in a small bar near to Congresso, with the dual purpose of making new friends and talking shop. The one thing that I remember most about that bar was that it had reasonably priced Guinness on tap, (the first that I had come across in all of South America), and after four months starved of the ebony nectar, I drank several pints in quick succession, after which the room began to recede and blur. The others were no more abstemious, and as so often happens in such situations, things got a little heated.
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I was too far gone to remember exactly what the argument was about, but soon a shouting-match was in fierce progress between two very tipsy Englishmen, one of whom eventually turned on the other and bawled "You twat! You fucking twat! You've been here almost a year, and you've got no Argentinean* mates, and you don't even speak a word of the language!" A hush descended on the gathered company, and it was generally accepted that the death blow had been struck. What interested me most about the whole affair was that the guy who had been on the receiving end of this insult, had no real interest, as far as I knew, in learning the language. With more than enough friends in the ex-pat community, he had absolutely no need to. No doubt he had come to Argentina to teach, see some beautiful scenery and eat some damn-fine beef. And yet the general assumption seemed to be that he had failed in some undefined duty.
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You notice this assumption in a more acute form, of course, in the younger back-packers stomping their way through the continent. Among these "motchileros", (especially those from the UK), the assumption seems to be that unless you have converted to Catholicism, learned to speak Spanish fluently, and had a torrid affair with a tango-dancer by the time you leave, you're time in Argentina has been wasted. I think that most of this attitude has come about as a guilty backlash against what was the European (and especially the English) attitude, up until fifty years ago, to what was yet to be dubbed "the third world". Africa, Asia and the Americas were there to be exploited, and nothing more; the wealth of their culture, etc, was either patronisingly admired as "surprisingly sophisticated" or simply ignored. (And of course, as always with the English, the reaction to their previously wrong-headedness is typically over-the-top.)
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And yet I think that there is some sense in this attitude, for reasons that are simply aesthetic. It is not easy to explain this fact in words, but there is really a wealth of difference between your enjoyment of food, people and nature in a country to which you feel some sort of intimate connection, some sort of belonging, than one in which you are totally a foreigner. I think that I subconsciously knew this even before witnessing the fight in the pub, and had worried about it all the while that I travelled through Bolivia. My problem was simply that, despite being an English teacher, I have a very hard time learning language. I knew very little Spanish, and didn't think that I would ever know much more. My chances of making real contact with portenos, therefore, seemed slim.
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After three months back in Buenos Aires, I still don't know much Spanish, but something happened this week that made me rethink the whole situation. A combination of sharply dwindling funds and a strange new job working all night at a hostel* meant that by Friday, I was starving hungry, had not showered in three days and had not slept properly in two. In this generally tramp-like aspect I went to Palermo to meet a friend, only to find myself lost in an extremely posh neighbourhood. Seeing two very-well dressed young women coming towards me, I stopped and asked them for directions, only for them to walk right past me without so much as a blush. I suppose that being talked to by ragged beggars is one of those things that the very rich have to learn to deal with - these two were obviously very well practiced in their art.
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I was just giving up hope when a young man, spying my dismay and my ostentatiously Ashkenazi nose, asked me if I happened to be Jewish. I answered that I was, and after a hurried conversation and a couple of phone-calls, he told me that I was invited to a Shabbat ("Sabbath") dinner at a "friends" house the following day. The "friend", as it turned out, was one of the richest men in Buenos Aires, and the dinner was long and varied, and attended by a whole host of posh young people who chatted away with me (in a strange mixture of English, Spanish and Hebrew) as though they had known me their whole lives.
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One young guy, probably in the (incorrect) belief that all Englishmen are expert footballers (or futballers), invited me to join his team. And as the evening wore on and I found myself accepted into this strange upper-crust like some sort of returning prodigal son, my worries about ever finding a connection with the city began to dissipate, only to return as I was beset by new doubts. Was this new circle of friends, the genuine Argentina? Or was I like some white-suited empire-builder being welcomed into a clap-board British Club in a corner of colonial Africa, and foolishly thinking that he now has some connection with the continent? (Perhaps one of you can answer this question for me?) I was considering all this, and eating a delectable dish of smoked salmon chunks in a savoury-caramel sauce (yum!), when I heard a solicitous female voice asking if I was the Englishman everyone was talking about. Looking up, I found myself facing one of the girls who had strutted past me with upturned nose, less than twenty-four hours before.

*Should this have been "Argentine"? I still don´t know...
*This eventually fell by the wayside, for reasons that I won´t go into...

Seventeen ways to survive a terrorist attack

2008-12-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

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The twenty-fourth of December 1800 saw the very first bomb attack, against Napoleon Bonaparte. It used a barrel bound with iron hoops and filled with gun-powder and bullets, and dubbed, in the florid language of the time, the "machine infernale." The following century saw around thirty similar events in Britain, France and other European countries, as increasingly sophisticated bombs were set to work on behalf of various separatist and anarchist causes. The twentieth-century began with an average of one terror attack per year. By the nineteen-sixties, this number had doubled. The nineteen-seventies was when it all really took off, and now, fifty years later, we are seeing several terrorist attacks every single day.
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Oh, he's exaggerating, you think. But I only wish I was. Let us look at the events of last month, October 2008. October the first saw three bomb blasts wounding one hundred people in India and an attack by PKK militants in Turkey. The second of October; two suicide attacks on Baghdadi mosques with twenty killed, and four killed and seven injured in a suicide attack in Pakistan. The third of October; a bomb attack kills seven soldiers in Georgia, and another bomb destroys part of a building in Spain. The fourth and fifth were uneventful, but the sixth of October more than makes up for this, with a bomb attack killing several at a bus stop in Sri Lanka, seventeen killed by mortar rounds in a Somalian market, and twenty killed and sixty injured by a suicide bomber in Pakistan. The seventh of October; Two bomb blasts in Baghdad, one killed and seven injured. The eighth of October; Five people injured by a bomb in India, a PKK attack on a bus in Turkey kills three and wounds twenty-two, and ten killed in a suicide attack in Baghdad. The ninth of October; a suicide bomb in Turkey. Eight wounded. Eight dead. Another suicide bomb in Sri Lanka. The tenth; four kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan. A suicide attack kills forty and injures eighty in the same country. Three bombs in Baghdad; thirty dead, thirty injured. The eleventh of October; An attack on the US embassy in Mexico. The twelfth of October; Baghdad; bombs, snipers and more. Twenty dead, thirteen injured. Columbia; Two attacks on hotels. One dead, seven injured. The thirteenth of October; More bombs in Baghdad. One dead, six injured. Bomb in Turkey, five injured. A bomb in Nepal kills three. The fourteenth of October; Afghanistan. Bombs. Nineteen dead. One injured. The sixteenth of October. Pakistan. Suicide bomb destroys building, kills four. The seventeenth of October. USA. Bomb kills one and injures four. Bomb blast in Baghdad injures seven and damages buildings. The nineteenth of October. Pakistan. Bomb blast kills four and injures seven. Baghdad. Two bombs, two deaths, twenty-seven injuries. Afghanistan. Attack on a bus kills forty. Twentieth of October. Attack in India. Thirteen dead. Twelve injured. Bomb in Pakistan. Two injured. Bomb in Baghdad. Four dead. Seven injured. Afghanistan. Suicide attack. Seven dead. Two injured. Twenty-first of October. Helsinki. Arson attack on mosque injures one. Bomb in Bangkok injures one. Bomb in India kills over eighteen and injures over thirty. Twenty-second of October; Nepal, bomb, over ten injured. Twenty-third of October. Suicide attack in Baghdad. Eleven dead. Twenty-two injured. Bomb attack in Afghanistan kills one and leaves one dead. Grenade attack in Indonesia. Bomb blast in Croatia. Two dead, three injured. Colombia. A series of bomb blasts injure sixteen. Twenty-fourth of October. Bomb in Greece. Twenty-fifth of October; Gunfire in Afghanistan kills three. Gunfire and explosions in Georgia kill two and injure one. Twenty-eighth of October. Gunfire in India; four dead, five injured. Suicide bombs and missile attacks across Pakistan kill thirty-five and injure twenty. Twenty-ninth. Bombs in Somalia. Fifty-six dead. Eighty injured. Thirtieth of October. India. Thirteen separate bomb blasts. Seventy dead. Four hundred and fifty injured. Spain. Bomb blast injures twenty-one. Afghanistan. Suicide bomber. Five dead, twenty-one injured. Thirty-first of October; Grenade attacks and landmines in India. Twenty injured. Bomb blasts in Pakistan. Nine dead, twenty-one injured.
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So there you have it. Check up on me if you like.*1 But it is all true. This is the world that we are living in today. One thousand, six hundred and thirty six individuals killed or injured last month alone. And that was a quiet month, no hijacked jets, no attacks on a 9/11 scale. What is more, the above attacks are only the ones that we know about. As several of my Israeli friends who spent their army-service in the anti-terror service have told me, for every bomber that gets through, there are at least ten who are foiled. And of course, even the mercifully small percentage that do get through the net have a far greater impact than October's figures even hint at. The effects of a suicide-bomb are in no way at all restricted to the "mere" twenty or thirty killed or injured. If it were, terrorism would be a particularly inefficient and unsuccessful form of warfare. The real effects of a terrorist-bomb take place away from the epicentre. There are, firstly, the several thousand families and friendships ripped apart by it's blast. For every individual victim mentioned in the newspaper reports, there are a hundred friends and colleagues shocked and shaken by what has happened. And even those who knew no-one involved are affected in a way that is too deep to describe. For every building blown up by a bomb, there are streets and streets of shattered windows, of people who, whilst unscathed physically, will never forget that almighty crash as the detonation ripped the air in two. Even those who lived too far away to hear the blast, "will never forget the moment they heard the news", the moment that terror struck their city. Life is never the same afterwards. It's called terrorism for a reason. And so...
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#1; Aggressive prevention. There are bomb factories all over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Israeli army know exactly where they are. There are hundred of terrorist cells operating in residential buildings, getting ready to attack. It would seem, therefore, that the best tactic in this game is prevention - blowing them sky-high before they do the same to us...
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But. But the fact is, the business of blowing people sky-high is a pretty nasty affair. And not only for those being blown sky-high. As we've said, terrorists like operating out of residential areas, which means that when you go in after them, everyone in the area is treated to a terrifying volley of machine gun bullets ripping through their neighbourhood, with armed troops rampaging through their buildings, helicopters hovering above them, the flashes of explosives and the knowledge that a single stray bullet and they are dead. After being subjected to all this, it is no wonder that they cheer for the brave martyrs who have been killed in the attack, and pledge their allegiance at their carefully orchestrated funerals. For every terrorist that we take down, at least ten are created. In short, it is an utterly hopeless endeavour...
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#2; Hug a terrorist. Considering the sheer hopelessness of aggressive prevention, it has been suggested that possibly, trying the very opposite of aggression might have some effect. And at first glance, it does seem logical to suggest that setting up some sort of social program for our unenlightened brethren, explaining our point of view and the fact that, despite what the cartoons in their newspapers may tell them, we don't actually have horns, might just work...
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But. But there are various obstacles that make this sort of thing near to impossible. You can't just buy a property on the main street in Gaza City and set up a social club and discussion group. You would be dead before you opened your doors. A few years ago, two Israelis took a wrong turning in those parts, ended up in an arab town, and were lynched by a howling mob. These are not hospitable places. If people are living close enough to terrorist groups to be influenced by them, it is more than likely that the terrorists govern the area to some significant extent, and are not about to allow you to influence their target audience. Furthermore, it is disturbingly obvious that playing the whole "lets-be-reasonable" game with these people is doomed to failure. A quick glance at their newspaper headlines makes it clear that Palestinians are living in a parallel universe all of their own, one in which herds of wild pigs and enormous rats rampage through their streets , and horned beasts drink the blood of their children.*2,3
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#3; Buy a terrorist lunch. One preventative measure that does not involve people firing grenades at you is the "human security paradigm". According this this theory, what is necessary is to address the enduring underlying inequalities which fuel terrorist activity. The sort of scheme tries to provide food, water and shelter to impoverished areas, and, theoretically, stops people turning to terrorism in the first place.
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But. As far as most of the terrorist strongholds (and although "stronghold" may bring to mind bunkers and caves, here it refers to whole cities and sometimes whole countries) are concerned, this scheme faces the same problem of #2. You are not going to distribute aid without permission of the terrorists themselves, and what usually ends up happening is that it is distributed to their supporters, or used to widen their fan-base. Any money, of course, goes towards arms. Furthermore, this whole policy seems a bit hypocritical given the general policy of "not negotiating with terrorists". The message that "terror will get you nowhere" is eroded slightly by the fact that, actually, the mere threat of it will give you all the aid you need.
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#4; Know your enemy. Memorising some basic Arabic, as well as a few of the sayings and doings of the prophet, might score you points if you are hijacked and claiming to be an innocent fellow Muslim.
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But. But as most of the most horrific terrorist attacks have shown, especially those targeting middle-eastern airliners and mosques, being a Muslim doesn't seem to count for much against your modern terrorist - anyone tainted by the evils of the west is fair game.
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#5; Strap bags of pig fat to your homes and businesses. This is an interesting one. Apparently, the experts tell us that your pious jihadist will be so put off by the idea of being contaminated with the fat of this unclean animal that he will abandon the mission.*4
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But. But the same experts admit that if this becomes common practice, the clerics will have no problems issuing a fatwah stating that being coated in pig fat as you die is, albeit unpleasant, perfect hallal.
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#6; Remove all the bins from your bus and train stations. This is perhaps the most annoying anti-terrorist practice in existence, as anyone who has had garbage to chuck in a British railway station can tell you. It was instituted to stop giving the IRA a convenient place to plant their bombs.
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But. But indeed. The IRA were cuddly compared to your new brand of terrorist. Lack of proper garbage disposal does little to hinder a jihadist in an explosive belt.
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#7; Set up road-blocks and metal detectors. Ah, yes. Everyone who has been to Israel knows what it is like, standing in long lines outside the bus station, the endless queues at the road-blocks. Still, it stops them getting in...
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But. But, no. It doesn't. The Red Crescent is kind enough to provide the terrorists with ambulances which speed through Israel's check-points...ostensibly to deliver their sick occupants to hospital, but actually, to speed their explosives to their targets. Furthermore, if a terrorist is stopped at the gates or checkpoint, they just detonate there. Given the long queues, they tend to end up killing far more people than anywhere else. Ironic, really. Not to mention the fact that the most commonly used terrorist devise these days is the missile - hundreds are fired from Gaza into Israel every single day.
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#8; Buy a gun! You've always wanted one, and now you've got an excuse! Nail the fucker before he gets you!
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But. But, but, but. They ain't gonna allow you onto a plane with a gun, and as for your home, unless you walk around your house with one already cocked and ready in your hand, you'll be dead before your hand even reaches your holster. Even if you do happen to fire before he detonates, unless you are super-accurate, you will probably just put a bullet into his explosive vest, and prevent him the trouble of pulling the strap himself...
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#9; Don't live in a city. Terrorists want to kill as many people as possible, so you won't find them outside of the city. Small towns are safer, but the safest option is to set up home in a stone-wall cottage with roses round the door. You are unlikely to find explosives hidden among the strawberries and cream at the annual village fete.
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But. If you are looking to avoid and prolonged and painful death, it is possible that the very centre of a city is the best place to be. After all, it is not suicide bombs or shootings that are the big worries anymore, it is nuclear "dirty-bombs" or even conventional bombs. There is very little difference between the ideology of the ruling Iranian "revolutionary guard" and any of your small jihadist terrorist groups. They both spout the same apocalyptic jihadist creed. The only difference between the two is the fact that the Islamists in Iran, with the resources of an entire country at their disposal, are relatively close to getting a nuclear weapon.
And if, at that point, they choose to act on their long-voiced principles, the entire point of living in a village will be lost. Those living in cities will have a nice, peaceful death - vaporised immediately, they won't feel a thing. Those in villages will have to endure the slow and painful option; they will be far away enough from the city to survive immediate death, but with the power of modern nuclear weapons, they will have the burning, the deathly nuclear rain, the fall-out, the radiation sickness, the nuclear winter...all of the horror to deal with. Furthermore, I am reminded as I write this about a survey that was made during the cold war as to the safest viable location in which to live. It was one of many, of course, but this one chose the Falkland Islands as a nice, peaceful place to set up camp, far away from any potential nuclear target. Only a few months later, the Falklands War broke out. I'm not sure what this proves, but it's a fact to bear in mind...
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#10 Don't live in the West. Since moving away from your city and escaping into the countryside is no solution (in fact, more or less the opposite), perhaps it is necessary to leave the whole country, whether it be the US, UK, Israel, or whichever state the Jihadists find so offensive. Not very patriotic, of course, but as every child knows, if you want to live in peace, sometimes you've got to leave home...
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But. But what actually constitutes "the West" is not at all clear. I think that it is about time the term was scrapped in favour of something more genuinely descriptive. You are just likely to be attacked by Jihadists if you are not a "Westerner", as the attacks in Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Indonesia, etc, show...
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#11 Don't be Jewish. Forget bank-robbing, fire-eating and bear-trapping. Being Jewish is perhaps the most infamously hazardous occupation, and terrorism is just one more reason why. As the numerous attacks on Synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish Institutions, etc, show, if you are unfortunate to be born with Semitic blood, your first act of survival should be to have plastic surgery on your nose, to burn your family photographs, and to move to Sweden and take a new name.
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But. But it is not that easy. As drastic as the above action sounds, something tells me that it is not likely to work. As Bernard Malamud has said, "if you ever manage to forget that you are Jewish, there will always be a gentile who will remind you." And history seems to bear him out. The vast majority of those carted off to the death-camps in the Second World War spent most of the journey wandering why they were being singled out for their connection with a heritage that they had abandoned and felt absolutely nothing towards. If you do ever get as far as Sweden, you will hardly have finished assembling your new Ikea furniture before someone jumps through your window with his head wrapped in a kafir and starts spraying you with machine-gun bullets. Try it, you'll see...
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#12 Don't take planes. If you need to go overseas to visit the grandchildren, take a boat. One hell of a lot longer, but when was the last time Al Qaeda sailed a cruise-ship into the World Trade Centre?
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But. But taking a boat is not a guaranteed bomb-proof activity. There have been at least seven terrorist attacks against shipping, and there is no reason to think there won't be more. What is more, as events like the Lockerbie bombings show, not getting on a plane is no guarantee that you won't be killed in an attack on one. *5,6
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#13 Don't take trains. Both planes and shipping are out, but you might have thought you could do your travelling by rail. Don't. There have been at least 15 major terrorist attacks aimed against trains, and the fatalities from rail-related terrorist attacks are probably higher than from any other.
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But. But if you are not going to take the train, there is only one viable alternative left - that most vile of all methods of travel, the bus. I've seen many trainspotters in my time - but has anyone ever seen a single bus-spotter? There is a reason for this. No-one likes buses, and if we are forced to start travelling on them, it is a sure sign that the terrorists have won. Besides, buses are no safer...
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#14 Don't take buses. There have been more attacks against buses than against any other form of transport. It would make sense, in that case, to avoid them. Or at any rate, to sit at the back, as apparently the terrorists like to detonate just as they get on.
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But. But it is not quite so easy. In my naive youth, I used to always sit at the back of the bus in Jerusalem, innocently believing myself thus impervious to fire, shrapnel and flying glass. This, of course, was when I did take the bus. More often I would take a taxi instead, thinking of the fact that we were constantly driving past buses on the road a minor technicality. A friend of mine went even further, refusing to take any form of motorised transport...and when a bus blew up a few metres from the pavement he was walking on, he was thrown through a shop window and almost killed. The fact is, as the picture at the top of this page shows, when a bus is hit by a bomb, whether you are at the back of the bus, in a taxi behind it, or on the pavement anywhere remotely near it, your a gonner....
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#15 Stockpile food and water. Having seen that all forms of prevention, from attacking terrorist strongholds to not taking the bus, do little to stop yourself being hit, it is time to move on to a more pragmatic viewpoint. The question is not how to prevent the attack happening, but to decide, once it has happened, how the hell you are going to survive it. One of the most commonly suggested ways of being prepared for when things go down is to store enormous quantities of canned goods and bottled water in your basement. Unfortunately, all of the terrorist-survival websites that suggest this neglect to add just how such items would mean the difference between death and survival. But if we use our imagination, we can just about see how, if poison gas makes leaving the house impossible and/or piped water supplies are poisoned, having your own back-up source might be necessary.
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But; But if poison gas is used, not only would one need a back-up canned-bean supply, but one would also need a completely ceiled room; and I don't believe that even one per cent of those stocking up on Heinz baked beans in tomato sauce have one of those. In terms of poisoned water; You will, of course, need clean water to drink, but you can make this from poisoned water by distilling it, in the same way that you can distil poisonous sea-water. *7
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#16 Know where your fire escape is. Well, if the plane is in trouble or the building is on fire, surely it makes sense to know the quickest way out? That, at least is the message of all those safety videos they insist on showing us at the beginning of each flight.
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But; Well, this is something that I have always wondered about. Has knowing where the safety exit is, how to adapt your gas-mask "in case of sudden loss of cabin-pressure", and were to find your parachute...has any of this ever saved anyone's life? Really. Have you ever heard of a Boeing 747 opening its doors and all of the passengers jumping out to safety? Neither have I. We have bombings and crashes aplenty, but a plane letting down those big rubber slides into the sea and everyone sliding out? Has there been a single instance of those rubber slides ever being used? I'm genuinely curious about this one!
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#17 Survey your surroundings once you have been kidnapped or hijacked. Try to establish some kind of rapport with your captors, since most terrorists are unsure and quite nervous.

Although I have left it till last, this little snippet of advice was actually the first the came up when I typed “surviving a terrorist attack” into Google; a sure enough sign that for every person that reads it here, there are probably several thousand that have already read it elsewhere.
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And so if you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself in a hijacked aircraft, and start getting to your feet and making your way across to your “nervous” captors, already in your mind envisioning the adoration that will be soon due you as the calm, persuasive savior of the situation…as likely as not you will be much chagrined to see that at least one of your fellow passengers has already had the same idea, and is already now striding purposefully down the aircraft aisle, hard bent on his duty to defuse the situation. And as the blade comes out and the blade flashes in and the blood spurts and screams rise and then die as suddenly into a sudden awful hush…it is then that you will realize that actually, perhaps this whole business is not quite so simple after all. And it is then, of course, that the fear will hit, the real fear, not the pathetic little panicky nothingness that you were once so foolish as to dignify with that term, and you will realize that, not only have you never felt fear before, but your whole life, in fact, has been spent in a near-slumberous complacency, all those years spent utterly unaware of the simple fact of your fragile existence, of the life within your lungs, and as the plane suddenly lurches and fear grabs you so hard by the throat that you can hardly breath, as the agonizing whispers reach your ears (“Two more planes have been crashed into…”, “They say we’re heading for…”), and you lose the struggle to keep your bowels under control, and the plane begins to descend, and, yes, no doubt about it, it’s losing height, and this time it’s not a movie, not a rerun on TV, you’re not going to leave the theatre and buy another carton of popcorn for the car-journey home, because it’s happening to you, amigo, you, just like you always knew it would…

Well, it is then that you will realize that all of the efforts you ever made, or thought of making, fleeing your city, your country, your trains, your buses, cars, barricading yourself behind bags of pig-fat and tins of baked beans in the bottom of sealed buildings in the middle of nowhere, away from it all, away, away, away…all the time you were simply running from the only thing that could ever have saved you; all the time, it was right here, in this nightmare of falling steel, staring at you and daring you to move from your seat…right here, behind those angry Arab eyes.
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Because standing in the aisle with a bloodied knife in his hand is a man who has come willingly and calmly to a fate, the mere prospect of which has you utterly paralyzed with terror…
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“Even as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall not fear, for You are with me”.
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aaaaaaaaaaIn order to win any war, one must have courage.
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In order to have courage, one must rid oneself of the instinctive fear of death.
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The terrorist owed his terrible fearlessness to what is no more than a new and sinister brand of something which has allowed millions of better men, throughout the ages, to treat death for what it is: nothing more than a night between two days. Faith is easy to come by when you really need it, and in the age of exploding men, we need it now.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents,_2008#October
2: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Palestinian_official_newspapers:
_Israel_uses_super_rats_against_Jerusalem_Arabs
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion
4: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3484277.stm
5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorist_incidents_against_shipping
6: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103
7: http://www.ehow.com/how_2330843_make-fresh-water-out-sea.html

Surviving a terrorist attack

2008-12-01T17:59:00.000-08:00

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At some point in the (hopefully near) future, readers of my blog (and I am suprised to find that I have already gained two - I still do not know where from) will find a essay that I have written on the subject of terrorist-attack-survival. Most Buenos Aires blogs are preoccupied mainly with meditations on tango, the ever-fluctuating economy, and the finer points of the empanada...so I do realise that some justification is necessary. And so...
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For much of my time at University, I lived with the assumption that I would make aliyah the moment I graduated. In my mind, I went through all that would happen after I arrived. I would learn the language. I would integrate into society. I would live happily ever after...
But as my time at Uni drew to a close, I began to see the flaws in this vision. My time as a language-teacher trainee had made it only too clear that the only way to really learn a language is to speak it, to make mistakes, repeatedly, until slowly, slowly, you learn to communicate. I began to realise what it would really be like; spending my first year or two in the country as an incoherent foreigner, desperately mouthing half-comprehensible gibberish to an impatient public in an attempt to improve my language skills. It would be something of a dream-killer, all right. There is enough to put off a first-time oleh without that.
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If only there was a place where I could practice and perfect my Ivrit, I thought, a place where the people would be understanding and patient, and where I would not be making them late for work with my linguistic incompetence. I had already heard of the hordes of Israeli tourists ploughing through South America and India. I had been on the road before, and knew what it would be like. That comedaraderie of the road that allows you to chat to complete strangers. The fact that after a few weeks you are well used to only understanding half of what anyone is saying. The way that you can spend an entire morning just chatting about nothing. It seemed ideal to the point of being compulsory. And so I bought a ticket for Argentina.
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Among the Israelis who I hang out with in Buenos Aires, I am known as the only guy ever to arrive in South America with a Spanish-English dictionary in one coat pocket and an Ivrit-English dictionary in the other. But that's not the half of it. To make aliyah via South America is to be caught up in two separate processes of integration. When I’m not learning how to pronounce the Spanish “drrrr”, I’m practicing my Hebrew “(g)resh”. When I’m not wondering how anyone can possibly enjoy mate, I’m wondering how anyone can possibly enjoy “Goldstar”. When I’m not discussing the precise differences between a chafafnic, a chababnic and a chardalnic, I’m learning what differentiates Flogers from Cumbias and Glams.
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The only time that both my Israelification and Argent-initiation have come directly in contact is when I found myself considering the above issue from those dual perspectives; How exactly does one go about surviving a terrorist attack? The question was raised as follows...
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My plan on arriving in Buenos Aires for the first time had been to teach for a year, and then, after a brief tour of Bolivia and possibly Peru, to head off home to England before making aliyah. My plans changed slightly when I found myself, only a week after arriving, going down to Bariloche with some Israelis I had met. When a week in Cordoba and two weeks in Salta were added to my impromptu itinerary, I figured I might as well make a go of it, and so headed up into Bolivia and Brazil and stayed for over three months. None of which did anything to help my finances, of course. Back in Buenos Aires, I took one look at my bank balance and decided that I had better start researching the possibilities of making aliyah directly from Argentina. The Israeli government pays for the ticket of anyone emigrating to Israel, and whilst it had once looked like I would be able to afford my own ticket back to England, this no longer seemed so certain. So one day, just as spring was turning into summer, I made my way to “AMIA”, the Argentine Jewish cultural centre, and asked to speak to the aliyah people.
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The man at the door was not forthcoming. Carefully herding me away from the building, he told me that one needed an appointment to be allowed in. After delivering this statement, he proceeded to cross his arms across his chest and look at me with the clear expectation that I would turn around and trot off home. If I had been in any other situation, I would have been less surprised by his official tone, but that just isn’t the way that things work in the Jewish world.
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In my experience, the Jewish traveller’s contact with his foreign compatriots goes something like this; You are in a foreign city, and you decide to pop into a kosher bakery or synagogue. The shop-owner or supervisor asks where you are from.
“England” you tell him.
“England? Really?” He tells you that his great uncle knew someone from England once.
“No kidding?”
No kidding. Deciding that this common factor gives him something of a claim to you, he offers you a biscuit or a tour of the synagogue. He then gives you a brief account of the Jewish history of the place, and a comprehensive list of every kosher restaurant and store within a fifty-mile radius. It then occurs to him that you need somewhere to stay. He wonders aloud if that old sofa in the front-room pulls out. You assure him that you are safely ensconced in a comfortable hostel, and really should get back to your sight seeing, but it is only after he has enquired after your next destination, given you his phone-number “just in case”, and offered you several of the eligible young maidens of the vicinity that you are allowed to flee. So, in this case, I was surprised.
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Discussing the episode with some friends later that afternoon, I was given some background information that put it all into perspective. Around ten years ago, the AMIA building was subject to an enormous suicide attack that totally destroyed it, killing eighty-five and injuring hundreds. The fact that the organisers of the whole affair were never caught has given the Argentine Jewish community something of a paranoid feel, and this is not helped by the fact that it is very much justified. Argentina holds one of the worlds most dangerously porous borders at the triple frontier between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, and Paraguay alone is known to be packed with Islamic militants.
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Bearing all this in mind, I began to understand the both the doorman’s initial inhospitability, and the way it deepened into downright aggresiveness when I insisted that surely, surely, there must be some way I could come in without an appointment. After all, I had come all this way...
“Do you speak Hebrew?” he had asked.
“More or less” .
Some of his unfriendliness had melted away, and he began to ask me a rapid series of questions. But. This was Hebrew all right, but not as we know it. His strange Argentine accent rendered it foreign, blunting the consonants or reducing them to barely perceptible shadows of their former selves.
“I thought you spoke Hebrew!” he barked, in response to my obvious incomprehension.
“I do, but-”
“Let me see your passport!”
He flipped it open, to reveal, on the first page, two stamps in flowing Arabic... souvenirs of the time I had popped over into Egypt on a visit to Eilat. His suspicion deepened.
“You must go away” he said.
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I had gone away.
But the episode had set me thinking.
If terrorism was that much of a threat over here, I had better start preparing for the homeland.
After all, I could learn to pronounce my “resh” like a true sabra, quaff Goldstar for breakfast, lunch and supper , and be able to spot a chababnic at fifty yards. But until I had figured out how to survive a terrorist attack, I was not prepared for life in Israel...

The "moskito"

2008-11-20T16:43:00.000-08:00

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa La Paz

--------------------------Mark but this flea, and mark in this,---------------------------------------------------How little that which thou deniest me is; ---------------------------------------------- It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee, --------------------------------------------------And in this flea our two bloods mingled be...
-------------------------------- (From "The Flea" by John Donne)

_________________________________________________________

“...because at the end of the day, sex is just like a mosquito bite”.
“Just like a mosquito bite?”
“Uh-huh." I nodded. "It’s an itch that just keeps coming back.”

We were talking - Shira and I - under the porch of the Nargillah Cafe in Rurrenabaque. We had met on the propeller plane from La Paz, and during the forty minute journey, I had got to know various things about her; the plump sensuality exuding from her sun-kissed skin, the Russian childhood that gave that charming tang to her lazy voice, and the fact that, having grown up in an entirely secular part of Tel Aviv, I was the first "dos"* she had actually met. As soon as she had told me this, of course, I knew that sooner or later we would have the conversation that I had already had with several others of similar background to hers. All of those questions that they had long harboured about the lives of the religiously-affiliated - "Is it true that you only eat kosher? You have never eaten non-kosher? Never?", "Tell me, how many times a day do you have to pray?" and "Is it true that, until you are married, you don't do sex?" - all these questions were now unbottled.

It was the last of these questions that concerned them most, of course, and Shira was no exception. "Is it true?" she asked. "Is it true that you don't even -" she left the question dangling with a little smile. Even Israelitas, for all their notorious frankness, will only go so far. And so I tried to explain the way that I saw it; desire like an itch - you scratch it and it gets worse, you ignored it and it remains...either way, it doesn't go away. But I was dimly aware, as her grey-green eyes flickered over me, that this was not the answer that she wanted to hear. So I gently steered the conversation into another channel.
"You know, there's only one thing I don't like about this place."
"Really?" Her cat's eyes regarded me with amusement. "Not me, I hope?"
"No, it's all these fucking mosquitoes. That was the only thing I liked about La Paz. Not a single one."

There are no mosquitos in La Paz.
Coming up from Buenos Aires, the buses had travelled for three days up hill, the air getting thinner and colder with every hour that passed, until we finally arrived in one of the highest cities in the world. La Paz sits in the hollow of a crater-topped mountain, its brown slopes, pixellated by a tapestry of brown box houses, trapping the petrol fumes which choke it's already thin air. It is no surprise that no mosquitoes survive within this cauldron of bad air. Even humans have a hard time of it. The slack-faced, thin-lipped natives, who seem to have evolved both the lungs and the grim temperament to survive here, know better than to run in the streets. As for us foreigners...well, within an hour of arriving we had all developed persistent hacking coughs, and over the next few days, you could see the natural rhythms and drives of our bodies slowing and cooling, as we adapted to an oxygenless pace of life. The boys and girls moved gradually away from each other. Relationships became more platonic. And so when Ortal, slim brown limbs and bright brown eyes, sidled up to me one evening in the restaurant and softly suggested that I come on back to her hotel room, it didn't take too much effort to refuse, despite the fact that she was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.

Ortal. Over that last evening in La Paz, I got to know her fairly well. I liked the calm softness of her voice, the intelligence in her self-conscious smirk, and the fact that she quite patently was not a slut. That ambiguous little suggestion earlier...it had just been part of her earthy, no-nonsense Israeliness. But as the clock crawled towards midnight, I realised that I had to cut our conversation short if I wanted to be packed and ready to go in time for my flight to Rurrenabaque the next morning. It hardly mattered. She would be flying in only a day later.

Flying from La Paz to Rurrenabaque constitutes possibly the greatest climate change that it is possible to experience. You lift off from the high, cold, airless Plateau on which La Paz is situated, sail for half an hour over a cold black range of mountains that rise in sharp stabs at the sky, and land on the other side, in a world that had plunged down into a green and tropical chasm. You step out of the plane onto a bank of fresh green grass (it is an ´airfield´ in every sense of the word), in a deep humidity scented with all the trees of the rainforest. Your "La Paz-cough" dries up instantaneously in the warm air, and sweat pops out all over your skin.

To take this journey after a month or so in the acrid airlessness of La Paz is something like going through a second puberty. During the taxi ride from the airfield to our hostel, I watched the changes taking place in those around me. Layer after layer of clothing were shed in deference to the heat, the guys swatted at insects and wiped away sweat, and the girls opened like flowers. Couples became suddenly more tactile, new glances, bright with meaning, were exchanged. More than anything else that happened during my time there, I will remember that taxi ride...the way we came to life, felt our bodies straightening and stretching in the heat.

The next morning, I awoke with my arms, legs and forehead covered in mosquito bites. There is something with me and mosquitoes. Not only do they seem to find me irresistible, scoring bite after bite on my skin whilst others sleep untroubled just metres away, but I am also very allergic to them. For others, a mosquito bite is just an irritated pin-prick; for me, a red and angry sore. It's a double-whammy that smacks of a brutal sort of irony on the part of the Higher Powers. There was a time when I spent hot and sweaty nights in a dedicated fight, swiping viciously in the dark, cursing my invisible foes and their buzzing whine. But now I just let them do their worst. Even when I tried my best to placate them, it did little good. That first night in Rurrenabaque, I had coated every limb in my body in repellent, but left my back untouched and bare, an offering which I hoped meant that the rest of me would me spared. When I woke, I found that my back was the only part of me not scored with little nipples of irritated flesh.

Shira found the story very amusing when I told it to her that morning at the Nargillah cafe. She inspected the line of bites machine-gunned down the length of my wrist. "Look at what she did to me!" I complained. "I can understand them getting thirsty. But why don't they just stay in one spot and drink their fill? Why did she have to make such a lot of separate bites?"
"How do you know it's a she?"
"Oh, only female mosquitoes drink blood" I told her. "Scientific fact. I'm an expert on the damn things. For instance, did you know..." But Shira hadn't sat down next to me to talk about mosquitoes. She steered the conversation in the direction of religion, and began pumping me for all the information she had so long wandered about. But she could see that she had lost my attention. For while I was explaining about eating kosher, about prayer, about sex, I had caught the far-off roar of the airplane, and realised that Ortal was probably on it.

It was because of Ortal that I went over to the "Moskitto" that night. Everyone goes to the Moskitto in Rurrenabaque. It's one of only two Gringo pubs, and the other one is quite a formal affair, patronised by older travellers. So when the sun goes down, that is where everyone under thirty goes, and that is where I hoped to find Ortal, who I hadn't seen all day. I had even wandered if she had perhaps had missed her flight, but I saw her as soon as I entered the pub, surrounded by a tight little knot of Israelis, her back towards me, that long brown hair curling down between her bare shoulders. I stood watching her for a while, then caught sight of Shira waving from another corner. I waved back, and after I had ordered a drink, I went over to join her.

The Moskitto is aptly named. The multitude of pot plants hanging from it's walls harbour a whole army of mosquitoes that drift down after sunset, flicking among the bare legs under the tables, under loose T-shirts, over bare arms, raising welts and itches. Notwithstanding this drawback, however, there are two things that stand in its favour. Firstly, its absolutely stonking soundtrack, the full gamete of heavy rock from Led Zep onwards. Secondly, its varied and professionally prepared range of drinks. It's an interesting cocktail...alcohol and hard rock, twin intoxicants that I had been starved of during all those dry, musicless weeks in La Paz. I had ordered a long, cool mix of vodka, rum and coke, and took my first sip just as the DJ got down the first track of the evening, the hard, wicked burn of the alcohol hitting at the same instant that a raw slice of electric sound coursed through the air like acoustic energy...the opening riff of Led Zep's "Been a long time".

It was around the time I was on my third drink, and Shira and the table between us had begun to recede on that familiar tide of alcohol, drifting further and further away whilst staying fixed in space all the while...it was then that the conviviality began to dissipate. Israelis don't drink, really, and Shira began to look disturbed at this new brooding version of the friendly young dos she had, after all, only just met. She told me she was going to the ladies, and as she got up and began to weave her way through the tables, a waiting shadow detached itself from the group at the far end of the bar and made its way towards me; Ortal.

She smiled and the music lurched. Who, I wandered, granted a crescent of enamel such semi-mystic power? But there was no time to think, as she slipped into the seat next to me and wrapped a friendly arm around my shoulder.
"I hear you're staying at the Lobbo" she said.
"Erm...uh-huh". The music's rip-snorting electric pulse, I dimly noticed, had taken on a new and deep significance. "Hold on, how did you know?"
"The register. I saw when I was signing in. You're in room seventeen, right? Well, I'm next door - room sixteen." And oh Christ, there it was, that smile again. I was wandering what the hell to say when the music suddenly stopped, replaced by an old familiar tune, the tinkling strains of "Happy birthday to you"...
"Oh G-d" - she stood up - "Be right back", and she hurried back to where the cake was already being cut amid the celebratory flash of cameras. And I was out in the hot, humid night, the old cobbled road a moonlit white beneath my feet, the Lobbo, the stairs, my key clacking in the lock, a gulp from the vodka bottle beside the bed burning down my throat with a bang. Lights out.

Sleep. Sleep, coming and going, the alcohol and the aching exhaustion of my body dragging me down, the stifling heat dragging me back, I lay drifting between sleep and wakefulness, the heat like a body laid across me, a line of sweat inching down my ribs and across my stomach, and I was drifting down, drifting down, only half aware of the flurry of voices out on the stairs, goodnights and see-you-in-the-mornings, of Ortal's door softly clicking to. Sleep. The gritty snap of a lighter, the sound of her softly exhaling coming through the cardboard-thin walls, and as the faintest tang of cigarette smoke tickled my nostrils, I knew exactly were she was sitting, with her slender brown legs dangling, out on the balcony, watching the river with a cigarette between her lips.

When I awoke again, it was by the wind, a cool rush snapping back the drapes and cooling the film of sweat gathered on my skin. My body tensed at the sudden cold...tensed and relaxed as the cool wind receded as quickly as it had come, and the room was suddenly stifling hot again. G-d knows how many minutes, hours passed that way, half asleep in the sultry heat, vividly aware of Ortal stretched sleeping in the next room. The dark in my room textured by the wet heat into a stifling velvet blackness, and in that blackness...
--------------------------A pin-prick of sound.
------------------ ---A high tiny point of sound... ---------------------------------------------------------- ...rising.... ------------------------------------------------------------------- ....falling... -------------------------------------------------------------- .... growing... -------------------------------------------------------- ....like an approaching but distant siren.
---------------------------------Mosquito.
That sultry stuka-whine, oozing out on the hot air, catching the ear and not letting go, a certain sensual beauty to the high, slant-eyed sound. I felt it then, the tiniest of feather brushing my chest, and working down. Even I know when resistance is futile, and as sticky sleep rolled over me I felt the slow, itchy burn of the bites beginning to swell. When I awoke in the morning, I knew, and looked with rimmed and bleary eyes into the bathroom mirror, I would find the bites, like hickies, scattered all over my chest and neck.

* Semi-pejorative slang for "religious". For more, see "Glossary" entry

The Rage of the Ex-Pat

2008-11-19T04:00:00.001-08:00

It is hard to believe these days that there was once a time when leaving in your country and heading out into the great unknown was looked upon as dangerously eccentric. When the great writer Laurie Lee visited Spain in the 1920s, he was one of the only Englishmen there. Things have changed so much since then that when, in the "gap-year" between high school and University, I chose to stay in London and work instead of travelling to India and Thailand, my decision raised consternation among my friends - especially those whose parents were paying both for their trip, and their subsequent University education. "You're staying where?" they asked me, "Where? London?" their bemused derision a carbon copy of the disbelief Laurie Lee reports as meeting when he announced that he was leaving Blighty.
a
The world is still slowly adapting to this utter reversal in the fortunes of overseas travel. It is constantly necessary to reconcile that old conception of the lone traveller as one of the "chosen few" with the reality; you will probably make just as many English friends in a foreign city as you had back home, if you stay long enough. Every time I meet a fellow English Teacher in Buenos Aires, I always notice a familiar ambiguous expression on their faces; genuine pleasure at meeting someone from the home country, mixed in with mild annoyance at the sight of yet one more invading their turf.
a
I have always thought that it must be that much harder for those who arrived in the days before mass tourism, who now find their niche in life corroded by the avalanche of new young upstarts from the home country, arriving in droves to teach English. Being one of these myself, I thought that I would combine necessity (the need to find a job after months of unsuccessful searching) with the spirit of scientific enquiry, and posted a message on the jobs forum of the online "BA Expats" community, asking for "advise" (sic).
a
Contrary to my expectations, first responses were heart-warmingly welcoming. I was touched that so many people cared enough to help me. But mixed in with this welcome were the sure signs that a nerve had been touched...and a very tender nerve at that. One of the first "veteran"s who responded limited himself to sniping attacks on my spelling, justified enough against someone purporting to teach English. Another old-timer voiced his conviction that I was "another of these early to mid-twenties" trying to "extend his adolescence" instead of getting "a proper job".
a
There was something strangely comforting about this attack. Being pounced on for daring to be young was just what I needed as I was mourning my twenty-fourth birthday, and a new crop of premature white hairs descended on my scalp. And it is not often that I am taken for one of the upper classes, either. The supposition that I was just "doing teaching" until I had finished messing around and could enter daddy's firm was a nice, if unfortunately untrue assumption. So too were the insinuations ("extending his adolescence") that my parents were supporting me, or that the definition of "enough to live on" meant "enough to party on".
a
As well as being one of the smart set, I also seemed to come across as something of an international criminal. Several of the forum members bemoaned my utter contempt for the law of the land, in teaching without a work permit...not knowing, of course, the hours I had spent back home trying to get one. During my research, I was eventually told that, as; (a) it is necessary to apply for your permit before entering Argentina (b) you need to be accepted by an employer before applying for your permit (c) you need to have a face-to-face interview before being accepted by your employer (d) you cannot have a face-to-face interview before entering Argentina...getting a permit is an impossibility. An impossibility, I was told, that the government acknowledges by making even those without work-permits pay tax. (Something that, truth be told, I have yet to experience.)
a
The attacks on my adherence to the law can best be put down to understandable ignorance, and perhaps the same excuse can be extended to the poster who demanded to know why, if I was merely "qualified" (as I had mentioned), and not actually "gifted" too, why I was wasting peoples time trying to teach. I have never thought of teaching as one of the fine arts, and had never realised that people would expect the accessories of talent and the muse in order to carry it out. I suppose it is quite flattering really.
a
It's not to say that being a gifted teacher (and I like to think that I am one) is not important. It is the assumption that is actually possible to get a decent qualification without being gifted. Fellow teachers will know exactly what I am talking about, having seen that inevitable percentage of their teaching course drop out after discovering that they don't have what it takes. It is the course that you take (provided that it is a decent one) that teaches you to get in touch with your talent. I'm sure that some of the many people I have met who tell me that they "are not technically qualified, but just have a natural gift for teaching, I suppose", might have a genuine latent talent somewhere - but in my experience they are all totally useless teachers. Employers know this, and that is why they pay no attention to your claim of a supposed "gift", sticking instead to the nitty-gritty of paper...and that was why I did the same.
a
This is all information that a non-teacher cannot necessarily expected to know, but still...it is only the TEFL teacher that can expect such searching analysis of their character. People who would never think to ask the guy who washes their car or does their gardening if he has a natural "gift" for the profession (he needs to eat, goddamit!) will unblushingly demand that a teacher is more than merely competent and well-qualified. It is all part of the rage of the ex-pat, something that I would not doubt feel too if I were in the same position. In fact, far from being offended by any of the (many!) responses to my original request for "advise", what I feel most is a deep empathy. We are all facing the same crumbling and ever-homogenising world, a world where there is no town without a Macdonalds and a gaggle of young tourists, a world where the word "foreigner" is ceasing to have any meaning at all...
a
To see the original conversation...
http://baexpats.org/jobs/3186-aaaaargggghhhh-oh-no.html

A Death in Brazil; Notes on South American Travel Writing

2008-10-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

k
There is only one travel-book that you have to read about South America, and that book is "A death in Brazil" by Peter Robb.
The reason for this is two-fold.
Firstly, "A death in Brazil" is quite simply a brilliant book. This meticulously researched, deeply passionate and thoroughly absorbing work is undoubtedly the greatest work about any country south of Mexico.
But this is unfortunately something of a default achievement. Not only is "A death in Brazil" the best, but it is also the only really good work (that I have discovered, at any rate), about any part of this rich and vast continent. This dubious distinction, I should say, is not to detract from its qualities - it is one of the finest pieces of any travel-writing that I have read, cleverly switching between genuinely unique personal experience, narrative accounts of public events, and insightful socio-historical analysis that is always colloquial enough to avoid sounding like a Cultural Studies seminar.
But as far as South-American travel writing is concerned, "A death in Brazil" stands as a lush oasis in a barren literary desert.

It is possible, of course, that I am incorrect in this wholesale condemnation of this area of travel-writing. In fact, I am more than happy for someone to prove me wrong about this if it gives me something to read. (One reason that I wrote this piece is so that someone, typing "South American travel writing" into google, will come across it and let me know of a book that has slipped through my net.) Also, it is always possible that I am too harsh and hasty a critic. I tend to tolerate boring books until half-way through the first chapter. If I am still bored at that point, I stop reading and give the book away. But so far, at any rate, I stand by what I have said. I have even developed a couple of theories as to why the few books written on the subject of South America are so monumentally disappointing.

First of all, we have the question of the sheer scarcity of travel-writing about South America. Why is it so hard to find? The answer, I think, lies in the sheer size of the thirteen countries that make it up. Africa, a continent of around the same size, is divided into more than three times as many countries. The same goes for Western Europe, an area of barely half the size of either Africa or South America. It is no doubt far easier to make a really authoritative and thorough account of countries of European smallness. In fact, as far as I am aware, there is probably twice as much English-language travel-writing dedicated to Spain and Italy alone then to the rest of the world put together. The infamous Argentine trouble with developing a consistent and cohesive identity is in no small part due to its sheer size, and we can hardly be surprised that something that these South Americans themselves find so difficult to describe should have dissuaded the gringo.
The immediate question that this hypothesis raises is that of the USA. There is plenty of really good writing about "America", from John Steinbeck, through Alistair Cooke, Jack Kerouac, Bill Bryson, etc, etc. So why has the USA, with so much in common with Argentina (national myth of the cowboy or gaucho, slaughter of the indigenous population to make way for the settlers, "melting-pot" ethnic diversity) produced so much more quality travel-writing?

There are, I think, two possibilities. First of all, whilst the USA and Argentina share many historical parallels, they also have many differences. Whilst both were originally colonies, and had to fight for independence, the USA's colonial status was far less willing from the start. Many of the first settlers were famously in search of specific freedoms, and the birth of the country (for which, importantly, much more blood was spilled that in Argentina's bid for independence) was far more pervaded with a sense of liberty than that of Argentina, and this no doubt has given Americans more of a shared identity than is had by the Argentines. (The US too, has a shared identity as a nation of immigrants. Whilst many of the Argentine "Indians" were wiped out, a large part of the population is made up of indigenous immigrants from other parts of South America, meaning that the country is a strange blend of those with ancient connections to the continent, and those without).

A second point is that it is noticeable that all of the really good American travel writing is written by Americans. Perhaps one has to be born into a country of that size to really understand it. And it could be, therefore, that all of this has something to do with the fact that Americans belong to the English speaking world, in which travel-writing is a popular form, whereas Argentines belong to the Spanish-speaking world, in which it is perhaps not. I could be wrong about this, of course.

We have, therefore, a couple of tenuous explanations of why there is so little travel writing about Argentina specifically, and South America in general. But no we face a new question; Why is the little travel writing about South America that actually exists so disappointing? For there are a few books out there, the two most famous being "Saddled with Darwin" (a journey, partly on horseback, following Darwin's journey through South America) by Toby Green and "The old Patagonian Express; by train through the Americas" by Paul Theroux. Both of these men had a good budget at their disposal, plenty of free time dedicated specifically to travelling and writing about their experiences...everything, in fact, that one would think would result in great pieces of travel-writing. But despite all this, both works are completely disappointing. Or would it be better to say because of all this?

Here we come to the crux of the matter. If you look at all the really great travel-writing out there; Everything from the early "As I walked out one midsummer morning" by Laurie Lee, through the popular "Notes on a Small Island" by Bill Bryson, to the subject of all this, "A death in Brazil", one common aspect is obvious. Almost all great travel writing came about by accident. The writer travelled simply to travel, keeping incidental notes along the way, and some time afterwards (in the case of "A death in Brazil" as long as twenty years), he or she decides that, actually, it is all worth publishing. Paul Theroux and Toby Green both travelled specifically to write, the former, because that is what he does, the latter, because he had won a photography competition for which the prize was money which could be used to travel and write about the experience. (Bizzarly enough, most of the photographs in "Saddled with Darwin" do not look like the work of a professional at all).

Travelling specifically to write is a great way of producing really bad travel writing. The accidental writer, such as Peter Robb, looks down from the top of a mountain of experience and pinpoints specific illuminating incidents and adventures along the way, with the additional insight of accumulated knowledge about the national psyche, seeing all the while the broad path that his journey through a country has taken. To make that same journey with a book already in mind would be to have to document every stage of the journey without any of the perspective of the journey as a whole, and without the lens of time with which to judge which incidents to document and which to forget. This is what has happened with Paul Theroux and Toby Green, and the result is two very boring books.

There are a handful of books which don't have these specific defects, and I suppose that whilst I didn't enjoy them all that much myself, they may be enjoyed by other people. The most worthwhile is probably "The motor-cycle diaries" by Che Guevara, a sheaf of papers posthumously published by the revolutionary's daughter. This work is probably best read alongside the 2004 film. Che's raw account was not intended (in its present form, at any rate) for publishing, and there are a lot of incidents that he notes with passing modesty ("it took me two hours to swim across the river") that are actually a lot more dramatic, and which the film emphasises. There is also, of course, "In Patagonia" by Bruce Chatwin. I suppose it would appeal to some people, but the disconnectedness of each chapter from the next, which some seem to find exhilarating, leaves me bored by the lack of cohesive structure. Like so many works, "In Patagonia" excites us by "breaking the rules", but at the same time reminds us of why the rules are there.

There are a few more books out there, obscure 18th Century accounts of "Journeys in the Argentine", Darwin's own notes, etc, etc, works which are more interesting from a historical account than anything else, as well as a handful of less-than-brilliantly-written accounts that were inevitably going to happen as soon as backpackers began hitting the Gringo Trail. (In fact, "the Gringo Trail" is the title of a much hyped book that I got bored of, as usual, halfway through the first chapter.) My advise to anyone searching for good South American travel writing, therefore, is to turn to the many travel magazines popping up across the continent. There are some really great free or cheap magazines in Buenos Aires alone, full of informative, passionately written stuff, "Vos", "The Nose", "The Argentimes", etc. If you are really determined to pick up a book about the continent, however, remember that I am a harsh critic, and you may well enjoy much of the stuff that I didn't. All of the books that I have mentioned are fairly easy to get hold of, at your local book store, or, appropriately enough, on amazon*...

*See what I've done there? Amazon.com, River Amazon...see? Clever, Eh?

Returning to Buenos Aires

2008-09-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

h
Shani looked as if she had been designed by a manga artist. Pencil thin arms and legs, a shock of straight hair falling over one eye, she would sit all day curled up on the floor near the heater, clasping a cup of coffee to her chest for warmth, and talking to her best friend Natalia. Shani and Natalia were the only semi-permanent members of the hostel. They had lived there for months, surrounded by a fleeting and ever-changing population of Israeli tourists who were either on there way up to Peru or had just returned from there. Shani had somehow developed a love for Spanish, and she had taken a year between high school and national service in order to learn the language. Who Natalia was though, was always less clear. She was around sixteen years old and obviously a local girl – that much was clear from the fact that she spoke only Spanish and dressed in the sort of clothes that haven´t been seen in England since the nineties. Aside from Shani, she didn´t seem to have many friends, and spent most of her time watching bloody-awful Argentine TV shows.

“She has a story” Shani told me one day, as we were chatting on the tiles near the heater.
“She told me it. But I don´t think I can say...”.
“Of course”, I replied, “It´s none of my business. By the way, I´m thinking of going to Bariloche. Have you been?”
She laughed. Shani, in keeping with her general manga-cartoon appearance, had an ear to ear smile that made her look like she could eat a banana sideways. “I haven´t been outside of Buenos".
The fact that Shani had spent a year in South America without once setting foot outside the city did not surprise me as much as it might have done. She had told me earlier that she had lived her whole life in Haifa without once visiting Jerusalem.
“Well Sarai and Rina are going down for a week, so I might go with them” I told her. And that´s just what I did. Except that somehow the week ended up telescoping into two and a half months in Northern Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil, and I returned to the hostel long after everyone had given me up for dead and stowed away my luggage in the basement.

It was a bad time to arrive back in Buenos. Even in the taxi from the bus station to Mashehu Mashehu (the hostel´s name is taken from the Hebrew slang for “the best”) I was impatient with what was to come. Mashehu Mashehu is even a bigger balagan than your average Argentine hostel. It´s genuinely homely atmposphere is undermined by everything that makes homes – especially Jewish homes - so bloody difficult to deal with. I hadn´t had a proper shave in two months, showered in three days or eaten in two, but I knew that there was no chance of doing what I really wanted to do – i.e. nipping in just long enough to clean myself up before nipping out again for some prime kosher steak. Mashehu Mashehu just ain´t that sorta place. I would have to listen to how I had been missed, and reply likewise. I would have to wait for the prorprioters to remember where they had hidden my luggage. By the time that they did so, something else would have come up, and I would have to somehow remind them, in as polite a tone as possible, that I was still waiting for it. Sigh.

Still, there was nothing for it but to try and hurry things up as much as possible. With this resolution in mind, I rang on the bell.
Silence.
Oh, G-d, here we go.
I rang again.
Nada.
Finally, there was the rattle of a key in the lock, and Natalia opened the door.
She looked surprised to see me.
“Hola” I said, “Todo biene?”
“Si”. She led the way in.

But todo was not biene. The place was in dissaray. Coming into the lounge, I almost barged straight into a small crowd of Argentine pensioners – not exaclty a typical sight for a youth hostel. They were making a great fuss of a child of one or two, who was starting to look thoroughly bored of their attempts to entertain him. In the kitchen, a contingent of seven or eight Israeli girls was lounging about, waiting impatiently to sign in. The landlady, however, was much too busy to attend them, as she was trying simultaneously to set the table for what appeared to be a celebration of some sort, and to deal at the same time with a black-cloaked Rabbi who had taken a vow against looking at women, and was carefully studying the cieling. I only added to the general confusion. “Aaaz!” she cried, as I came into the room “Az, where you been? Where you been Az?” Before I could reply, she begged me in a whisper to take the Rabbi outside into the garden and talk to him.
“We are having Brit Milah*” she told me, scattering forks over the table.
“A Brit Milah? Here? Why here?”
“It´s mitzvah!¨she said, “Now take outside. Say “Shalom, How are you?”, talk...”
Christ. There was nothing for it.
“Um...what time is the Brit?” I asked, as she hussled me out of the French windows.
“Now!” she said excitedly. “Now, now! We wait only for the mohel.”

But, true to Argentine form, the Brit seemed to be happening any time but now. I sat outside with the Rabbi and some other men as he gave us quite an interesting dvar Torah on the upcoming chagim, and I was really happy to find that I understood just about every word that he used – he had taken for me an Israeli and was speaking Ivrit. My Ivrit had really improved in the last two months of being on the road with my future compatriots. But I could not help wandering when things were going to get started. I saw the moel arrive, but there didn´t seem any other guests. And where was the baby?

After the rabbi had finished speaking and all the rest of the men had gone inside, Devorah (the landlady), came out to me with a camera. “Is possible, you take pictures?”
“Sure, sure”. I have never understood why people feel the need to take pictures at a Brit Milah. Pretty grusome, as far as I am concerned. But I felt that now was no time for scruples, so I took the camera and followed her inside.
“Why you wait?” she asked.
“Um...” Eh?
“Why you wait. The Brit, it start!”
She pointed to a small room near the toilets, and I hurried towards them.

This was not normal. The room was full of the old pensioners, perhaps five or six in all, and on the table was the child, who was one year old at least. A Brit Milah, for the ignorant among you, is meant to be done at the age of just eight days, when the pain and health risk are at a minimum. After that age, the operation becomes increasinly painful and dangerous.
The rabbi and one of the old ladies were holding and comforting the child, and the moel was pulling on his surgical gloves.
And I was just confused.
So I concentrated on taking pictures.

Everything went B¨H k´ragil.
Snip, snip, etc.
And the child didn´t seem in too much pain.
By the end, however, he was weeping tearfully. “Awwww...” the old lady crooned. “Don`t cry, don`t cry, mummy is coming, mummy is coming” The child continued wailing. “Don`t cry, don’t cry” the woman repeated, as the door opened – “here is Mummy!¨
Natalia stepped into the room and bent over the child.

Later, we sat at the table, eating bloody awful falafel and pizza. I munched away happily. You get like that after two days without solid food. One of the old men sat opposite me and told me about his time in a bunker in the Golan during the six day war.
“It was cemo achim.” he said. “mamash cemo achim.”
“Really?” I eyed the piece of pizza between us.
“Ken, ken!” he said, “It was different then. No tachanat merkazit, nooo, um...¨ - his Ivrit failed him. ¨- rak shtachim!”
The last word left his mouth in a little burst of spray. I decided against the pizza.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Natalia, sitting silent between two old women who were chatting gustily over her head. She had the child, now sleeping, on her knee, and was staring into space.
The old man, determined not to lose a rare chance at a captive audience, began to regale me with statistics on the quantities of halvah that they had consumed in his bunker. So I turned back, doing my best to banish the sadness from the air, and re-entered the convivial flow of conversation.

*see glossary page

The Salars

2008-09-25T00:28:00.000-07:00

kj

k
The centre of South America was, at one point in distant history, a series of enormous salty lakes. Remnants of these now dried-up lakes can be found all over the north of Argentina and Chile and the south of Bolivia, but by far the largest is the Bolivian ´´Salar de Uyuni´´ . When that lake dried up, what was left was a great, white, flat plain of salt, a hallucinogenic place bordered by sulphuric geysers and volcanoes, and lagoons of strange bright chemical colours, bright reds and blues, populated by great flocks of flamingos. The prospect of seeing the salars was one of the main reasons that I came to South America at all, which makes my experiences of them (so far, at any rate), particularly ironic.

My interest in the salars meant that I had been on the continent for no more than a couple of weeks when I started making plans to see them. The opportunity of travelling with ´´other´´ Israelis had taken me down to Patagonia and then up to the city of Cordoba, but once there my enthusiasm got the better of me and I headed off on my own, straight up the centre of Argentina, making a bee-line for the Salar de Uyuni. I stopped for Shabbat in Salta, a city set out neatly on a great flat plain bordered by a circle of green mountains that plunged down to meet it. A cable-car took me to the top of one of these hills, and I looked down at the strange, murky scene. The city is both heavily polluted and very brightly lit by the fierce low sun (Salta is very high up), which makes it impossible to see its vistas properly, either with or without sunglasses on. With sunglasses on, the place looks dank and murky. Without, the bright sun gets in your eyes…

I had chosen Salta because it had once had a thriving Jewish community, and a Chabad family had flown in from Israel to preside over its inevitable death, which meant somewhere to eat over Shabbat. I didn´t envy the chabadnics their task. The rabbi told me that only five or so teenagers ever bothered using the well-equipped club above the lovely little shul. They were such a nice little family too, if a little reserved and business-like. The wife was a frank and outgoing woman, not yet grown detached and weary of her G-d-forsaken outpost, like many chabad wives that I have met. The kids (B``A``H) were the cutest I have ever met, and ridiculously friendly. The little boy, Yankie, would hardly stop giving me hugs. During our conversations at the Shabbat table, I eventually found out the reason for this immense friendliness. The couple had decided, based on some (perhaps misunderstood) injunction of the Rebbe, not to allow their kids any non-frum playmates…i.e, none at all.

I really liked Salta. It was very different from Cordoba, from which I had just come. As you got closer to Bolivia, the people became more Indian, the technology more unreliable and the traffic more insane. The traffic in Salta really was completely insane, which made the immense popularity of cycling all the more surprising. ``It´s almost like Beijing`` I wrote on my first day there. ``Except without the repressive government and the Chinese food.`` I thought for a moment. ``Actually, it´s not a bit like Beijing`` I admitted, ``but there are a hell of a lot of cyclists. I lost count of the number that my taxi driver came close to killing on the way from the bus-station to my hostel.``

It was in Salta that I discovered that my plans for visiting the Salar de Uyuni would have to be delayed. I wanted to be in La Paz (where there was a more substantial Chabad) for Tisha B´´av, and the way I figured it (although I think I might have miscalculated), there was no way of checking out the Salar and heading all the way up there in one week. I was less than chuffed by this realisation, and decided to visit one of the small ``local`` salars which surrounded Salta (hence it´s name, I think). There was a fair bit of hassle working out how to get there cheaply (there were several exorbitant Jeep tours available), but a local girl gave me directions of how to get there by bus, and so I set off.

That was how I discovered Purmamarka. It was through a series of mistakes and circumstances that I ended up staying there at all. I think that the route the local girl suggested was different from the one I ended up taking. The girl had estimated that the journey to the Salar would take three hours. I don´t know how she came up at that figure. It is possible that her route was shorter, of course, but still…At any rate, what with a breakdown en-route, it took something like six, and I arrived in Purmamarka, still only three-quarters of the way to the Salar, well into the evening.

It was immediately obvious that this was the remotest point that I had yet ventured. Jujuy, halfway house between Salta and the Salar, had been a smaller, duller, more hectic and indigenous version of the former. This place was several steps further in the same direction. It was a small settlement of adobe houses, bathed in a strange golden haze that turned out to actually be immense clouds of dust, lit up by the many Jeeps squeezing through it´s narrow streets. The place was alive. Indians were everywere, lining the streets behind their stalls of bright produce, and playing live folklore (the South American name for folk, although exactly why, I´d also like to know) in just about every pub, bar and restaurant. The sound of music was everywhere, the booming strum of guitars and the high whistle of the pan-pipes. What a place to end up during the nine days.

It was no surprise that the town was popular with folklore fans. There was not a bed to be had in any of its several hostels. But it was a mild night (for winter), and I figured that I could sleep in the fields that bordered the village. This turned out to be less easy than I had thought. What had been a comfortable walking temperature was less comfortable lying down, especially as evening cooled into night. I decided that a couple of Irish coffees might numb me to the cold, and using this as an excuse, I did a tour of the music filled bars.

What a place. The music was brilliant and alive, and so were the people. The place seemed a gathering point for every bohemian in the whole of Jujuy province, and for every pretty girl in the whole of the country. I had been a bit disappointed with the state of Argentine femininity up till then, but the bars were full of flowery dressed beauties, singing tipsily and drawing deeply on their cigarettes. Sitting on the steps of one of the bigger bars, two of them leaned towards me, cheeks flushed with wine.
``Come with us`` they murmured happily.
``Um…perdon?``
``Comme souce?``
``Oh!`` - realisation, (disappointment?,) dawned - ``Africa de Sur``
``Ahhhh!`` they nodded happily, and made way for me to pass.

I had claimed South Africa as my place of residence for obvious reasons. The one time that I had forgotten, admitting to the proprietress of a shop in Buenos that I was from England, she had given me a lecture on how the people of Argentina would make ``a happy fist`` (I quote), the day that Maggie Thatcher kicks the bucket. A few days later, as I was talking to Narkiss on a bus that took us past the military academy, an old man who had somehow intuited my origins, mumbled something about ``a glorious army, a glorious, glorious army`` and stumbled off to stand, embarrassed, at the other end of the bus. It was clear that I could not expect too much assistance from the older generation at least if I admitted to being an Englishman. And assistance was very much what I required that night.

There was literally not a bed available in town. Eventually I sought refuge in the police-station, where the officers reluctantly let me sleep on a bench in the front hall. Fuck, it was cold. My teeth chattered so violently that I could hardly eat the next day. I barely slept a wink. At six in the morning I gave up trying, and went in search of a cup of tea. It was very difficult to find. Already, the people and their dogs (Argentina is immensely overstocked with dogs) were up and about, taking their wares to the market. The tourist shops were opening. But a nice cuppa? Nada. I strode away from the village to try and warm myself up, and as I did so, the sun began to rise. As the colour seeped into the landscape, I realised why it had been so dusty the night before. I was in the middle of a dessert. A strangely fertile dessert, with clumps of green trees breaking out of the rock, but a dessert nonetheless. The village was surrounded by immense masses of rock, mountains almost, each a different colour. It was the strangest place that I had ever been.

I ended up paying a fortune (in northern Argentine terms) to get to the Salar. Around fifteen quid. It was not that necessary, but I needed to get on to La Paz, and it seemed like taking an age for the official tour to get itself together, so I bargained a taxi down and off we went. We wove through the astonishing landscape on a snaking black ribbon of road. After that freezing sleepless night I was stiff and half-asleep. I almost fell asleep on the way there. I did fall asleep on the way back, as the great cloud-filled canyons passed by unseen. That’s why I will always remember Purmamarka more fondly than I remember the relatively small, heavily mined Salar, covered in black tire tracks. I promised myself, as I went back to Salta that afternoon, that I would return to Purmamarka, its music and its girls. And there is still the possibility that I might still do so…

gggggggggggggggggggggg* * *

You might have thought that I would have learned from my earlier experience in the Argentine salar, but for various reasons I didn´t. Once again, I found myself in a salar, this time, a far larger and more pristine version, and once gain, I was half asleep. I had met my travelling companions in La Paz over Shabbat and Tisha B´av. They had told me that, like everyone else (Israelis almost always start in Peru and sweep on down through the Salar to Buenos or Sao Paulo), they were going to the Salar de Uyuni. I didn´t bother dropping any hints until Motzei Tisha B´av, when we were all stuffing ourselves with chicken in the Chabad rabbi´s flat. It was a really great evening, with great food and conversation, singing round the guitar and sheer relief at being able to laugh again. I realised that I really liked this lot, (and whats more, they were frum), so I dropped the appropriate hints, and the next day I boarded the bus with a rowdy crowd of singing mizrachim. The Bolivian passengers (Bolivians are the most sober, silent people I have ever come across) looked round in sheer amazement at this riotous phenomenon. This only put the Israelis in higher spirits. ``Welcome to the party!`` they shouted, and off we went.

But as the afternoon turned into evening, the party atmosphere dissipated. Fuck, it was cold. There was ice on the windows. I knew what to expect, having taken the bus up from the border to La Paz, but the Israelis were shocked into silence. The bus rattled and crashed and threatened to fall apart, just as it had done on the way up, but this time things were even worse. I had been relatively healthy on the way up, but I had spent the following weekend in the pollution and thin air of La Paz, and had developed a weak but constant cough. On the way up, I had managed to fall asleep in between the more shocking stretches, only to be woken up as I crashed back into my chair, having been thrown halfway up to the ceiling. Not a pleasant way to wake up, let me tell you. Nasty on the elbows. But this time, there was no sleep. The cold froze our bones to the marrow. Christ, it was miserable. What is more, the aisle was full of poor Bolivians who could not afford a seat. One mother had plonked her children next to me (I was to discover in time that I attracted Bolivians in the same way that I attract mosquitos) and I could not move my aisle-side leg without waking them up and setting them off moaning. (Bolivian children, in keeping with their silent elders, never cry – just moan.) Christ.

We arrived in the town of Uyuni utterly exhausted. For some reason, the fact that I was heading out dog-tired onto the Salar, once again, did not fill me with the apprehension that it should have. Even the fact that I was doing so with a lot of Israelis who I hardly knew didn´t bother me so much. But that was because I had never travelled with such a crowd before. There were fifteen of us. In Buenos, Bariloche, Cordoba and Salta I had done my touring with single Israelis who I met at the hostels or Bet Chabad. So I can be forgiven my undue confidence. I had no idea how hard it is to travel with a crowd of people whose language you do not speak very well. You find yourself butting into conversations which you had assumed, due to longish pauses, were over. And as they speak your language no better (in fact, worse), than you speak theirs, you get the uncomfortable impression of being ignored when you say something, simply because they don´t understand.

Things were made immensely more difficult by the fact that, apparently, the lady in charge of the agency lied to us. She had told us that we could go five to a Jeep. After a couple of hours of waiting, she modified this agreement to include two Ivrit speaking Americans (presumably Jews, unless they were theology students) who had turned up after us. When we finally got into the Jeeps an hour or so later, we discovered that it was in fact seven Israelis in one Jeep, seven in the second, and myself, my Lobbo roommate Shlomo, an Israeli girl whose name I simply could not remember, and four ``Tzarfatim`` in the third. I sat in the front with the complete tipesh of a monolingual driver, (``These guides speak near perfect English!`` proclaimed a sign in the agency´s office. My arse.), and in the middle seats sat the Tzarfatim, forming a barrier between myself and the back seat, occupied by Shlomo and the girl (who actually spoke perfect French, learned from her mother, whose nationality apparently did not make her any fonder of the ``shalmanim``, as she called them.)

I did not quite share her Xenophobia, but I had by that time well realised how hard it was to intergrate into such a large crowd of fast-speaking Israelis, and knew that having the French always with us could not do any good, especially if they were to separate me from my new friends in the way that they were doing now. Secure in this unspoken fraternity, I fell asleep in the front seat, yet again, as we rolled out onto the salt.

The feeling of mutual suffering was broken thoroughly the next morning when the French/Israeli girl (she really had the most unmemorable name), told me that the tzarfatim were calling me to join their Jeep. My Ivrit was good enough to gather that I was wanted in the car, but not quite good enough to figure out who it was who wanted it. I left with the impression that it was Miss X who had decided on my place in the foreigners Jeep (she and Shlomo squeezed in with the Israelis), and this misconception was reflected in the public argument that I had with her at lunch the next day. It was an argument motivated more by the urgent need to publicly air my concern about the whole matzav, in as un-``I say chaps, I´m really terribly concerned``-like way as possible. And I was genuinely concerned. It would have been different if I could have eaten with the French and talked with them. But a couple of them did not speak English, and what with the need to keep kosher, I found myself being shuttled between one group and another as meals alternated with driving. And after all, one reason I was with this group was to learn Hebrew, at the end of the day.

Anyhow, my ruse walked, and I ended up, for the remainder of the tour, in the one Jeep that never had any Tzarfati members. I am not sure what they thought of the young Englishman who did not say a word all morning, but disappeared off to lunch with his Israeli friends, who afterwards came along without him and demanded that the whole French contingent split up. As luck would have it, me and Shlomo bumped into the two English-speaking ones on the tourist (we had grown wise through bitter experience) bus back to La Paz. They seemed to bear no rancour.

But I was still unsatisfied. The first day of the Jeep tour had been spent half-asleep and in isolation. On the second, we left the salar and headed out on to the lagunas. We hadn´t seen a grain of salt since. In the run up to my trip, I had daydreamed about the salar, inspired by all the photos that I had seen. The world divided by the horizon into bright white below and bright blue above, and myself, sitting cross-legged in the middle. It was the physical image of the simplicity that I was so into mentally, a material equivalent of what I was trying to achieve in the mornings, cross-legged on my hostel bed, learning (or trying to learn) to meditate.

After the Ortal episode, when I was making plans for Brazil, I realised the risk I was taking in leaving so quickly. I might never have another chance to see the salar, to see it the way I wanted to see it. I decided to try again. I was on my way out of the country, of course, but would take a couple of days out in Uyuni on the way. And this time I would do it properly. I would have a good nights sleep before I set out. And once there, I would not be shuttled around in a jeep. I would rent a bycicle, or possibly even a motorbike. I had learned to ride one in Rurre, were every man, woman and child rides a motorbike, and had caused only minor damage to myself and the enormously powerful bike in the process. And Salta was only a couple of days away. I would spend as long as I needed, and then head down for another Shabbat with those lovely chabadnics. Perhaps I would pop into Purmamarca too. Yes, definitely.

But things were not that easy. I learned by email that the chabadnics had chosen just that week to head off on their well-deserved chofesh. Not good. I would have to make my stay in Uyuni sharpish, before heading through to Brazil via Santa Cruz. Groan. Here we go again. And here we went again. The tourist bus-ride to Uyuni was an uncomfortable affair, if not the sheer torture of the bog-standard busses that I had experienced before. We broke down on the way there, and the driver requested us all to pass our water-bottles forward to help cool the engine. It may have been a tourist-bus, but we were still in Bolivia.

I arrived in Uyuni late, tired and without any information about motorcycle rental. But it couldn´t be too hard, could it? There must be an immense market for that sort of thing, surely? But apparently not. There was not a motorcycle rental, not a Jeep rental, not a car rental anywhere. Even the bicycles could only be rented for riding round the town. It was already noon before I realised something else. It would take at the very least four buses to get to Sao Paulo, and today was already Monday. If I wanted to get there before Shabbat, I would have to hurry, especially as Bolivian buses only travel at night. So I booked myself a ticket to Sucre for that evening, and then jumped into a cab and gave the address of a small village which I had been told, during my desperate search for information, was very near to the Salar. Perhaps they had bike rental there. If not, I would have to walk.

They did not have bike rental. They did not have nada. It was a tiny Indian settlement occupied by the hard core peasantry, a salt-processing station, and not much else. Still, it was near to the salar. I could see the earie glistening mirror of it, warping and waving in the heat. I set out towards it. I appeared to be walking on a great bed of rusting metal. I had never seen rocks like these before. They clinked just like pieces of iron. And there was a lot of them. They stretched out in all directions. I kept on walking. After an hour, I put down my bag and considered my options. This was bizarre. Where was the salar? The glimmering white horizon seemed unchanged from an hour ago. I kept walking. Half an hour later, I looked at my watch. The straps on my bag were cutting into my shoulders. Any more of this, and I would have to go back before I had even arrived. I kept walking. Two hours had passed. And still the horizon mocked me. If I had not seen the salar with my own eyes, I would have been convinced that it was a malicious lie fabricated by the guide books. I kept walking.

I never did get to the salar. Eventually I decided that if I wanted to get back in time to catch the bus to Sucre, I would have to turn around. I managed to hitch a lift with an upper-class Bolivian in a much dilapidated land-rover, that creaked and crashed on the dirt-track back to Uyuni, throwing me against the ceiling and very nearly breaking my neck. I left Uyuni without a backward glance. I had given up even trying, and had no plans to ever return. But sometimes, when I see pictures like the one below, I wonder if I was right to give up so easily...and the possibility of finding a bike for rent in La Paz and driving it down floats through my mind…Watch this space.

Communication Breakdown

2008-09-24T23:41:00.000-07:00

lih
I am, of course, hesitant to label any person or any group as particularly lacking in intelligence. But my attempts to communicate across the boundaries of language have several times led me into a corner were only one conclusion can be drawn. This situation usually involves my attempts to get directions, armed only with the name of the required road.
“Bolivar?” I would ask confidently, only to be greeted with a look of undisguised bafflement.
“Bolivar?” I was repeating myself now, but I really had nothing else to go on. And surely the name should be enough? “Bolivar? Avenue Bolivar?”
A shrug of the shoulders was the only reply.
*Sigh* “Bo-li-vaaaar?”
“Ah!”, realisation dawns, “Bõlivarrr!” My guide rolls the final r with Iberian relish and points the way.

This, of course, was not enough to settle my opinion. I had once spent half an hour wandering around the Machaneh Yehuda Souk asking passers-by how to get to the Marzipan Bakery, meeting nothing but ignorance, until one genius of a woman said “Ah! Murtzipen!” And this among a race famed for their intelligence.

What really convinced me was my attempts to obtain sundry items from the staff of the Kaskai hostel, where I stayed in Salta. Requiring a plastic bag for some dirty clothes, I armed myself with one that I already had, not bothering to remove the t-shirt inside it, and headed or the reception.
That shirt proved fatal.
“Do you have a plastic baaaag?” I asked, rustling my own vigorously.
The two biddies behind the counter were regarded me with bewilderment.
“Baaaag!?” I emphasised (rustle-rustle), “BAAAAAAG?”
All that rustling could not go unnoticed. One of the girls emerged from behind the panel and tried to prise the bag open.
“No, no, no!” I clamped it shut. “Just a bag!” (Oh G-d)
The other girls was now feeling through the plastic, attempting to assertain the nature of what lay within, muttering various suggestions in Spanish all the while.
I resorted to my dictionary.
“Bolso!” I cried in triumph.
But what a short-lived triumph.
That I now wanted a bag was obvious; the question was what type.
“In the toilet?” “Mochillah?” L-rd have mercy.
I resorted to Alta Vista Babel Fish, and the fact that all I wanted was a spare plastic bag, dawned at last upon humanity.

Just before I left the Kaskai, I had (what I thought was) my last opportunity to witness Argentine incomprehension at first hand, as I had already booked my ticket to Bolivia.
There were no matches in the kitchen, but I was not unduly alarmed.
“Fuego” was on of the only about ten Spanish words that I actually knew, and I complented myself on it’s usefulness.
“Fuego!” I announced proudly at the reception, imitating the motion of lightnig a cigarrette.
Oh G-d. It was the look of bafflement I had come to know so well.
“Que?”
“Fuego! Fuego? You have fuego?”
“Eh, no…no understand”
“Fuego…” (Christ)
“Fuego?”
Thank G-d.
“Yes! Yes! Fuego!”
“You wan’t ciggarettes?”
“No, no, no. just fuego…” I almost moaned. For fucks sakes…
The girl was now saying something in Spanish and pointing outside.
Now it was my time to be confused.
“Eh?’
“I you want smoke must go outside”
Time to resort to Alta Vista Babel Fish, in whose light, truth dawned.
Ciggarette lighter in hand, I was about to head for the hills when something held me back.
“Fuego?” I asked, tapping the lighter.
“Si, si”
“Did I say it wrong?”
“Que?”
Oh G-d.
I never did find out what had been so hard to uderstand. Ok, I was making the motion of lighting a cigarrette, but I was also shouting “Fire! Fire!” at the top of my voice. Oh well.

The perils of the South American shower

2008-09-24T23:28:00.001-07:00

asd IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAh, the glorious South American "suicide shower".
This little beauty is designed to deal with the lack of hot water tanks in these developing countries, and acts in the same way as an element in a kettle, except that it needs a hell of a lot more electricity to make it work. For this reason, it plugs straight into the mains, and all the lights go dim when you switch your shower on. Being South America, these things are often wired in quite a cavalier fashion, which can often result in powerful shocks to the unsuspecting showerer. Or showeree. Which? Anyhow, despite this obvious drawback, I have it on good authority that they are not lethal. At least, no-one has complained about them yet...

Taking a shower in Bolivia (and to a lesser extent in similar countries) is an adventure both perilious to body and soul. The dangers incurred by the body are obvious enough…sever scalding or hypothermia, depending on the temprement of the shower in question. The dangers incurred by the soul are altogether more obscure, for the showers in Bolivia seem to be controlled by a system alien to the forces of science and logic, a system whose green-eyed perversity is more than powerful enough to mangle the spirit and wreck ones faith in the divine mercy of G-d.

One begins in a fairly orthodox fashion.
One enters the shower, and fumbles around with the taps until one arrives at a temperature that approximates a comfortable heat, but is either a little too hot, or a little to cold. With such a temperature, it is possible to live. But here the tyrannical human passion for perfection asserts itself, and leads us, as in so many other cases, to wreck and ruin.

The water is just that little too hot.
So you turn the ‘caliente’ tap down just a tad.
Just a tad.
Suddenly, you are engulfed in a polar stream of liquid ice that sets numb fire to your chest, removes your teeth from your gums, bores a drill of ice into your skull and renders your balls tiny and mettalic. Hurridly, you attempt to rectify the damage, turning the tap an inch in the opposite direction, only for the massed forces of hell to assemble in the shower head and rain down molten lead. Choking back your screams, you step out of the line of fire, and turn the tap…not even an inch…half an inch at most, back towards the cold. The firestorm abates for a second, and with a sigh of relief you step back under the water. But, oh, what a mistake. For that second of lukewarm normality was just a moment of weakness on the part of the frosty fingers of the underworld, as the antartic blasts gather for a second attack. It is not slow in coming.

By this point, you are shivering and hollow-eyed, but not so utterly destroyed that you do not hear your European conscience spurring you on to assert the universal rights of the white man, to wrestle even the most chaotic heathen situation into some semblence of civilisation. With renewed determination, you set to work again on the tap, inching it, oh so stealthily, oh so craftily, a milimetre or less towards the hot.
The fires of gehenom engulf you.
Half a milimetre towards the cold.
An antartic blast freezes your muscles and almost stops your heart.
An atoms width towards the hot.
You are cast into the molten crater of a volcano.
Half an atoms width towards the cold.
Frostbite attacks your limbs.
Impossible.
Fucking impossible.

The political life of South America

2008-09-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

fgh

aaaaaaaaaaaaaWelcome to South America, baby!

The Avenue 9 de Julio is the widest road in the world, with some eighteen lanes of traffic. It is a river of traffic, an utter Amazon of traffic, with one strange island in the middle, a foreign embassy, which, claiming their property as foreign soil, refused to move when the buildings were cleared to create the avenue. On the day that I arrived, however, the great river of cars and buses had slowed to a trickle, and then stopped completely. Buenos Aires, a city for whom hardly a week passes without some fresh political crisis, was experiencing its worst political crisis in a very long time. The farmers, pissed off for some reason that my Spanish was never good enough to understand, had parked all of their trucks in the centre of the great road and were spending the days marching up and down its mammoth length, spilling into the side streets, regrouping, returning, chanting and singing songs about Che Guevaro.

The whole thing was incredibly well-organised. Each squadron of protestors came from a different regional or political group, which they advertised on proudly upheld banners that had obviously seen other battles. These banner-bearers formed the front row of the group. Behind them came the drummers, around twenty young men and women beating out with well-practiced fervour. Behind the drummers came everyone from the region itself, clapping to the beat and singing popular anthems. It was clear that protesting, along with drinking mate and invading the Falklands, is one of the favourite Argentine pastimes.

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It was not the best time to be arriving for the first time in a city, a country, a continent that I had never seen before, without a word of Spanish, ridiculously over-dressed in a freak heatwave, not having eaten in twenty-four hours and dragging behind me enough luggage to last for up to a year. No driver would take me to the hostel area (which is just off the Avenue 9 de Julio) but I eventually pursuaded one to drop me where his car would not be wrecked, and I went the rest of the way on foot, ploughing through crowds of protestors who were luckily too much enjoying the beer-fueled party to give me more than minor hassle. Finally at the hostel, I dragged my bags up two flights of stairs only to find that it was full, without a bed available.

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Later, much later, when I had showered, rested and eaten, I returned to the Avenue 9 de Julio. Dusk was setting in, and the protestors were still at it. I walked into the middle of the great empty road and watched a mass of them coming towards me, flanked with their white banners. The moon shone bright out of the deep blue sky, and as I waited for them to come, I bid goodbye to the world that I had left, the dull city that had bored me for too long. The angry rattle of the drums came nearer and nearer, and pounded in my ears as the first banners sweept by. Then I slipped in among them, marching for a cause that I knew nothing about.

Things had not completely settled down when, less than a week later, I got on a bus heading for Bariloche. I stayed there for about a week, a brief respite from the hectic political life of the country. Quiet snowy Bariloche limits its political activities to the sheltering of Nazi war criminals, and even of that, I heard not a trace, but for some gossip at the Bet Chabad. Cordoba was less quiet. Once again, my arrival coincided with a political crisis, this time something to do with the blue-collar workers and their government pensions. Again, not the best time to arrive in a strange city. Sarai and Rina were too scared to leave the hostel. I, less sensible, chose to take a stroll round the city-centre in the company of a thousand-strong mob of protestors. It´s an interesting way to see the town. Walking along with the drums and the banners and the chants, watching as the pavements are ripped up and thrown at the police, as the dustbins are blown apart with explosives, and then, after ducking into a shuttered bar for a cup of tea, returning to a city empty of people, a silent city strewn with paper.

I was beginning to get the measure of your average Argentine ciudad. In England, every town has a Boots, a Tesco, a Cenotaph. In Argentina, every town has a Plaza de Majo, a lot of streets named for equally patriotic dates and generals, and a group of protestors, whose size and character usually has something to do with the town they are in. In Buenos Aires, the crowd was huge. In Cordoba, the crowd had been smaller but full of a fierce local pride. In Salta, after a couple of days in the city, I already knew what I would find. In the pretty colonial Plaza de Majo, under the blazing sun, a group of thirty or so middle-aged people were holding up banners and doing a dignified little conga in protest against (I think) the treatment of the physically disabled.

The moment I entered Bolivia, of course, all of that dissapeared. The population just aren’t the protesting type, although an Israeli I met nostalgically told me of how his tour bus was besieged by a group of stone throwing separatists. It made him feel quite at home, apparently. A couple of weeks after I arrived in Bolivia, however, I was gratified to find an unorganised mob of cheerful protestors chanting ineffectually in one of the town squares, under the ridiculously careful scrutiny of a whole crowd or riot police, shields and all. I had no idea what it was all about, of course, but from that moment, I began to feel more at home in that mad country.

Bolivia may not be into protests, but it takes its elections pretty seriously. While I was there, they were having the strangest election I had ever come across. One shabbat morning we walked out into a street empty of people and cars. All the shops were closed, there were no traders around, and we savoured the unusual luxury of being able to walk on the pavements, which are usually utterly occupied by the street-hawkers and their wares. ``It´s like Yom Kippur`` said the Israelis. We had been well-informed of the impending election. Every wall was strewn with graffiti urging the public to vote ``Si`` in favour of Evo, the president. Apparently, a lot of people weren´t happy with him, and they were having a referendum. Evo for president or Evo not for president. A sensible enough decision, you would think. Until you were told that Evo is actually the only candidate with anything like a popular vote. So Evo for president or else...? I left the country before I ever heard an answer to that one, heading into Brazil, which was (is) having its own election fever. The bizzare thing in this case is that there seems to be a rule against unaccompanied advertisements in favour of political candidates. Every placard, flag, etc, has some very bored indivual sitting next to it, talking into their mobile or staring into space. Interesting. All of which takes me up to the present. I´m heading back into Argentina. We´ll see how it goes.

Places in South America where you can get a nice English cup of tea; A chronology...

2008-09-23T19:56:00.000-07:00

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aaaaaaaaaaaaAh! Made the British Empire what it was!

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I began composing this list in Rio de Janeiro. I had arrived in that city at the worst possible time. People go to Rio to sea the beach, the bodies, and the statue of Christ. I arrived in the middle of a week long rain storm, with the beach grey and abandoned, and Jesus shrouded in mist. Every now and then, he teased us by appearing fleetingly through the fog, showing a leg or two, before disappearing again. “Come out, you bastard, come out” I muttered. I had paid a good tenner for the cable car up to see him. By the time that I finally did, I had grown thoroughly sick of his sanctimonious marble features, and as soon as I got to the bottom of the hill again, I headed straight for the “Libres” café in Ipenima, the last bastion of the English cuppa this side of Mexico, and did not re-emerge until it was time to head back to Sao Paulo. Once there, I realised that this list might actually be quite useful in giving anyone who is interested an idea of the route of my travels, something that my style of blogging neglects. And so…

Argentina
Everywhere. Hurrah for the Agentines. The natives may need a bit of prodding, but they can usually rustle up the required ingredients when they see a gringo really wants them. It was partly for this reason that I ended up returning to Buenos Aires.

Bolivia
La Paz: Probably the Israeli cafes, “Nargillah”, “Lobo”, etc. Other gringoish places will have tea, but not milk. In all cases, you must be prepared to drink your tea “con cannela”, i.e. with cinnamon. To Bolivians, the concept of tea without cannela is a bizarre and outlandish idea.
Rurrenabaque. Ditto.
Topozi; Don`t make me laugh. There is no tea in Topozi. There is nothing in Topozi.
Sucre; Ditto.
Santa Cruz; Probably the posher hotels, of which Santa Cruz has plenty.

Brazil
Sao Paulo: Apparently nowhere. There are places where they are prepared to give you a cup of mint tea in one of those ridiculously miniscule eggcups that they use for espressos. I thought that I had struck gold at “Matok”, a pricey little place at the very centre of the Jewish area. They seem to pride themselves on being uber multi-culti there (they whipped out their English menu at the first sign of linguistic awkwardness on my part) and the waitress proudly informed me that “cha con leche” was no problem at all. But it transpired that not only did the staff not know what tea with milk was, they did not even know what tea-full-stop was. The closest most Brazillians have come to tea is “Leo” Iced Peach Tea, and they duly heated some of this up for me, adding a cup of milk that they had tried to boil in the microwave[1]. The resulting peachy, frothy, milkiness was not unpleasant as such, but it was certainly one of the odder sensations that my taste-buds have ever had to contend with.
Rio de Janeiro: The “Livres” café in Ipenima. After two months starved of tea, I sat there for an entire afternoon, drinking pot after pot of Twinnings “English Breakfast”, as every good ex-pat should.

[1] Have you ever tried to boil milk in a microwave? Don’t. It is one of those things that you do at University. Not a particularly productive or enjoyable experience, but something to be looked back on, I suppose.

A word of warning...

2008-09-23T17:23:00.001-07:00

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"Better remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt"

Apparently it was Abraham Lincoln who came up with that little phrase, and when I was a kid, the people around me just loved using it. That will give you some idea of the smarmy society that I grew up in, as will the fact that it was not until I was in my late teens that I realised what utter bollocks it is. Of course it is not better to remain silent than to be thought a fool. Far, far better to express what you really are, however imperfect and foolish that self may be, than to try and keep up a false pretension at something better. I say this now because I am perfectly aware that my view of the world is probably different from yours, touched by different taboos, and often politically incorrect to the point of naivety. I am perfectly aware of this, but I don't mind you telling me so. Speak your mind. After all, it is far better to do so than to remain silent...

Glossary

2008-09-23T16:14:00.000-07:00

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If you think I use a word which needs to be added to this list, please tell me!

Achim - Hebrew: brothers

Aliyah - Lit: "Going Up"... i.e. Going up to live in Israel.

Balagan - A mess. This is a complete catastrophe or tangled situation. Balagan is a good way to describe the state of your room, the relationship with your last lover or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Bet Chabad – Hebrew for ¨Chabad House¨

B"H - Abbreviation of Baruch Hashem, Hebrew for "Thank G-d"

Brit Milah - Circumcision

Cemo - hebrew: like / as if

Chabad – Um. This is a hard one. Chabad is very hard to define because they one of those very big groups that is to big to maintain a single personality. The beef is this: Chabad were until recently, just another Hassidic sect. Their last leader, however, was an immensely influential speaker, who attracted thousands to Chabad, and convinced them to dedicate their lives to spreading the ideals of religious life among the (now mostly irreligious) Jewish people. For this reason, Chabadnics can be found in the most obscure areas of the world, trying to convince dwindling Jewish communities not to assimilate completely. This selfless dedication makes Chabad an important part of the life of many Israeli travellers, who are sure of a place to eat in many incredibly unexpected areas.

Chabadnic – A member of Chabad.

Chagim - Hebrew: festivals

Chuffed – English slang; happy for a particular reason.

Frum – slang for ¨religious¨

G-d – Replace the dash with an O, and your home. It´s a Jewish custom not to write the name of G-d for reasons of respect.

Gringo – an immensely complicated phrase. Check out the wikipedia article on it. Go to http://www.wikipedia.org/, make sure you are using the English version, and type in ¨gringo¨

Hassidic – A religious group whose main feature (in this day and age) involves dedication to a guru-like leader.

Ivrit – Hebrew for Hebrew. In the way that a Frenchman would say ¨Francais¨ rather than ¨French¨, a Spaniard would say ¨Espanol¨ rather than ¨Spanish¨, etc. Confusing, I know.

Jewish – it takes a whole lifetime to figure out what that means.

Ken - Hebrew: yes

K'ragil - As normal

L-rd – See G-d

Mamash - Hebrew: really

Mitzvah - the opposite of sin.

Mizrachi – Several meanings, one of which is ¨Religious Zionist¨, i.e. a subscriber to the fashionable but unfounded idea that the State of Israel is a precursor the redemption.
I don´t agree with Mizrachi philosophy, but they are fun to hang out with.

Mizrachim – the plural of Mizrachi

Motzei Tisha B´av – The night after Tisha B´av

Nada - Spanish; nothing

Rebbe - Guru

Shabbat – Hebrew for ¨Sabbath¨, i.e. Saturday. Nothing to do with Ozzy Osbourne.

Shalman – Israeli phrase describing the dorky Europeans who commit the cardinal sin – in Israeli terms - of allowing themselves to be ripped off.

Shalmanim – Plural of Shalman

Shul - Synagogue

Shtachim - Hebrew: settlements

Tachanat merkazit - Hebrew: central (bus) station

The nine days – the nine days before Tisha B´´av, in which it is forbidden to eat meat, listen to music, and generally party, for reasons of mourning.

Tipesh – Hebrew for ¨fool¨

Tisha B´´av – a yearly day of mourning and remembrance of the destruction of Jerusalem two-thousand years ago, and for all the measly things that have subsequently happened to us.

Todo biene - Spanish; Everything is ok

Tzarfati – Hebrew for ¨French¨.

Tzarfatim – Plural of Tzarfati.

Taking the long way home

2008-09-23T12:15:00.001-07:00

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IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII The Drakensburg Mountains

I started planning this trip some fifteen years ago, when I was eight or nine years old. We had left the concrete jungle of Johannesburg for the Drakensburg Mountains, a great range stretching across the Eastern part of South Africa. My family had come to South Africa a couple of generations before, fleeing an extended series of pogroms that were ravaging Lithuania. They were not alone. Hundreds of others were coming from the villages of Lithuania to South Africa to start a new life. Thousands of others were settling in the United States. A few went to Britain, and other such unlikely places. There were even a lot settling in Palestine, involved in the lunatic scheme of setting up a Jewish State. Those who stayed, trusting in the new enlightenment spirit of tolerance, perished in the flames.

Of all this, I knew nothing. One doesn´t tend to see the big picture at age nine. All that I knew was that I loved the Drakensburg, and that I loved traveling the cactus-lined roads to get there, and that as soon as I grew up and no longer had to go to school, I was going to do hit the road and get some serious traveling under my belt. When I was twelve, and Johannesburg was deteriorating ever further into a maelstrom of violence, my parents followed the example of their own grandparents, and got out before it was too late. We came to England, and it was there that I began concreting my idea of travel. It was obvious that travel wouldn’t fund itself, and I eventually hit on the idea of teaching English as a way of surviving on the road. A year after finishing school, I began a BA in English Language and Literature, the first step towards full qualification as an English teacher.

I knew that it would take me at least four years to become fully qualified. The urge to travel could not be put off for that long, and during my time in University I was often conspicuously absent from lectures, having taken advantage of some Ryanair or Easyjet price-crash to fly off to Dublin or Rome. It is ironic that I often traveled more during term-time than during the long summer holidays. That’s the way that it is at University – all the time in the world to travel, but no money to do so. I managed to stump up enough cash during my first year, though, to travel through Israel for a couple of weeks. The next year, I did the same thing. By the end of my four years at University, I had visited the country a total of six times.

Each time I visited the country, I made a point of visiting the kotel, an ancient wall which stands in the very centre of Jerusalem. This wall is the only thing that remains of the ancient city which the Romans destroyed two thousand years ago, during a violent campaign against the state of Judea in which much of the population was put to the sword. Setting a trend which was to be repeated through the ages, some ancestor of mine managed to get out before it was too late, just as some descendant of his fled from Spain to Italy as the wheels of the Inquisition were set in motion. From Italy my family eventually ended up in Lithuania, and the rest you know.

Each time that I visited the kotel, I liked to take some time out to sit and watch the people flocking from all over the country to pray at the wall. After that Roman campaign of two-thousand years ago, the people had scattered in every direction, and the diversity of lands that they ended up in can be seen best at the kotel, where Serfardim rub shoulders with Ashkenazim, Ethiopians with Iranians, Indians with Chinese. It was here at the kotel that I first began to realize that the tide of history had passed me by. Seeing myself through the eyes of the Israelis around me, I realized that I was something of an anomaly, a kid from the Diaspora. From there, from that time. And as I watched the people coming and going from the ancient wall, I first began to wonder if it was not perhaps time for my family to finish its ceaseless traveling.

Back at University, I began to read up on the history of the country, and began to understand the grim reasons that made it´s founders willing to spend their lives toiling day and night in a swampy, disease-stricken wasteland. And it was thus that I found myself, after years of anticipation and hard work planning for the day that I could start traveling, with the wry realization that I had other priorities. By way of compromise, I gave myself a year in South America, based in Buenos Aires, where I hope to find a job teaching. It is a choice – I was considering “making Aliyah[1]” straight from London – that I am happier each day that I made. Almost every day, I seem to be discovering new things about myself, my people, and our dubious place in the world, and it partly for this reason that I have set up this blog. Feel free to follow me, on the long way home…

[1] A Hebrew phrase meaning the act of moving to Israel. See the glossary entry for more…