We arrived in this beautiful land two weeks ago, exhausted and bruised from our tour of the salar de uyuni in Bolivia. The boarder crossing didn´t present too many problems, however the bus to Salta was a big disappointment. Every traveller, without exception, heading northwards from Argentina had said the buses were the best in SA. We got herded past the posh bus to another shitsville imitation and told it to was going to Salta. It wasn´t the chicken bus but luxury, would not be an adjective I would use. More to the point, it wasn´t going to Salta. No, it was going to Jujuy, where we were supposed to change on to another bus for Salta, that information never relayed to us, so consequently we miss the connection and wait around the bus station for four hours at night time. Lot´s of negotiation, in limited Spanish, eventually get´s us on the last bus for Salta but now we will arrive in the early hours. This was a posh bus! so tired and stressed, we sat back and enjoyed front top seats and cruised off into the night.
First impressions from the bus(?) window were interesting. Heading south from the boarder, faces, landscape and buildings weren´t as different as I´d expected. The indigena were still present in smaller numbers but also in the faces of the landino´s. There were still mud brick houses and poverty in abundance. The difference was in the infrastructure, the roads were paved and so many more private cars. From Jujuy to Salta, gradually the differences with Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia ironed themselves out to reveal a country that could place itself in southern Europe with ease. As the bus entered Salta from the hills, the lights of the city welcomed us into it´s valley and introduced us to a bus station that was better than any I have seen in England.
a travelogue in the time of the information superhighway
1994
My story starts in drizzly, dreary, grey England. I worked as a nurse in a specialist cancer hospital in Manchester. One day, I suddenly entered her world, there she was. At once beautiful, but decaying visibly. Eyes that melt you, fumbled for reasons. High on morphine, she slumped on the chair. Her legs, previously long and graceful, were now fat and full of fluid. She was loosing her hair, something that upset her most. We all witnessed her struggling with the remains of her dignity and modesty, but she carried on fighting. Her mother applied facial cream like a corner man at ringside, her father just looked lost. She was a twenty seven year old woman, right before us, dying in her prime. She seemed to hold up a mirror to the thoughts sailing across my mind, a metaphor for what we've all become and what will become of us. So much potential, so much waste. It is at moments like this that we can take the looking glass to our own fragile existence, and ask questions of it. Cancer had infiltrated her womb, the very giver of life. I became aware of a feeling that her death had released something else, a thirst for living itself. She haunted me. Four months later, I set out on an adventure to view the world that she would no longer see.
Posted by don quixote
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment