Escape from the swine flu to the happiest place on earth



Well, after an email from the risk management people at uni banning all travel to Mexico and recalling staff and students from the country I decided it was time to give up and get out of town as quickly as possible. I booked a Mexicana flight to LA on Tuesday afternoon for the following morning and have managed to bring my flight back to Melbourne forward to the 3rd arriving on the 5th. It was not the best way to leave after about a year in Mexico, but I suppose at least I had the option of getting out of town to places where I can roll my eyes at people getting so worked up about something that statistically is probably the least of their worries when it comes to things that could kill them! Who knows if I´ll see the deposit for the apartment returned, though I am guessing not.



The mad dash from Mexico did hit a minor hiccup when I called a taxi as you´re meant to do and, after 40 minutes of standing on the sidewalk with all my bags, rang up to find that no-one had taken the job yet and I would be waiting another hour for a taxi to show up! As it is reasonably common for taxi drivers to be working in cahoots with theives who will hold you up, knock you around and take all your things in Mexico City, you´re not supposed to hail them from the streets but I felt I had little option and ended up getting a lovely guy who even spoke fluent English as he had lived in New York. At the airport I also had a brief conversation with someone from Reuters which ended up getting quoted in news articles I read on a Mexican site (with the English language original here). Sadly, my new location will likely attract far less attention from the media!



As I now have three days in Los Angeles before getting on the plane home, there was really only one place I was ever going to go to spend them. Of course that place was the happiest place on earth: Disneyland! While I was taking precautions and mulling over my options a lot during the final few days in Mexico City, I never quite realised how much it was all weighing on my mind until I was walking to my hotel room and looked over the pool to see Space Mountain and it hit me that I no longer had to worry about what I was going to do as I was now at Disneyland! The feel of relief was quite amazing and I would imagine the contrast between where I was and where I am will be made quite evident comparing the photos in the past few updates with those in this one!



The past day and a half have thus been spent wandering around enjoying the many amusements of the Disneyland Resort. Although Disneyland itself seems to have a relatively short 10am - 8pm day at the moment, the place is quite packed and from all the groups of teenagers around I can only assume that this must be the tail end of spring break in certain parts of the US (Washington state seems to be one such part).


The theme of this year´s celebration is ¨Celebrate today!¨ and this is the ¨street party¨ parade they have to go along with it. Slightly reaching, today the MCs on the floats announced ¨There´s always something to celebrate every day! For example, did you know that it was on this day that Lousiana became a state?¨

I must be getting old because I do find myself wanting to shake my fist at the damn teenagers who are running around (literally) everywhere, play fighting in crowded queue areas and generally being loud and annoying. There must be something to this whole southern manners idea as I think the Disney World crowd in December was far more polite than the Californian crowd. Whatever the case, it certainly doesn´t seem that the economic crisis or swine flu are hurting Disneyland´s business.


Too many people, but at least there are no face masks

It has all been fairly liberating to be able to wander around without a facemask on, though I did see a group of 3 people wearing them today in Disneyland... but I did notice they were speaking Spanish to each other. I have also noticed that people in this part of the world speak Spanish when they don´t want people around them to hear what they´re saying. For example, today I overhead someone saying that they´d heard they´d modified the boats in It´s A Small World and then switch to Spanish to explain that it was because Americans have become too fat so the boats kept getting stuck. While the official version is that this is not true, from what I hear it is!






All the classics

Interesting to see is how many of the youngins were wandering around in Barack Obama t-shirts yesterday which I assume had something to do with his first 100 days in office as I don´t think I saw even 1 Obama t-shirt today. There was a lone dissenter yesterday who had a ¨Hope¨ t-shirt on that was in the style of the blue, red and black Obama image except with Jesus´s face in the place of Obama. I did fly over a big white dome and a carpark with ¨Home of the Faith Dome¨ written in big white letters for all of us flying over to see when coming in to LA yesterday, which was another sign from up above that I was now in the States and no longer south of the border. Another sign was that all the streets and houses seemed far more neat and orderly than they do flying over Mexican cities.






Of course, none is more classic than the Enchanted Tiki Room!

Anway, I am well and truely rambling now so I will leave it at that! Needless to say, I am enjoying all the classics in spite of the damn kids and may or may not get a chance to update this if anything interesting happens between now and getting home. The weather is nice, the sun is shinning and tomorrow I´m off to enjoy the Beers of the World walk taking place at Disney´s California Adventure as part of the Food and Wine festival they´re currently having.


Captain Nemo has moved aside for a Finding Nemo submarine ride and his seagull buddies are also there chirping out ¨Mine! Mine! Mine!¨ in Australian accents

Either way, this is acting as a nice depressurising and reaclimatisation excercise between Mexico City as it was when I left and Australia as it is both quite fun and carefree and I´m getting use to hearing Australian accents and so the cringing is already beginning to become less and less each time I come across a group of Strayans!

First a plague, now an earthquake...



Today was a little less surreal than the weekend here in Mexico City as people had to head back to work and everything returned to relative normality with a blue face mask on top. While most restaurants and cafes and almost all stores are still open, it is still striking to see rows and rows of empty tables in normally busy cafes around town. What is even more difficult to get your head around in all of this is the gap between a lot of what the government is saying and a what the figures and precautions seem to suggest. For example, in one sentence officials will be stressing that this flu has a cure and then in the next announcing that 7 more people died overnight in Mexico City, 2 of which were already in a serious condition when they arrived at hospital. This, of course, raises the question of what happened with the other five? The government has generally been careful not to give any specifics of those who are dying from this, so nobody really has much of an idea of the age, sex or locations of the victims. I was also surprised that the health minister just dropped a revised death toll of 103 people, up from 86 earlier in the day, into a brief phone interview with a short news update on Televisa last night with very little context. It was up to 149 by this morning and who knows what it will be tonight. They´re also weighing up whether to order an almost complete shutdown of Mexico City tonight, including suspending all public transport.



Not content with a global pandemic, Mexico City also rolled out an earthquake this morning which led to buildings being evacuated thus creating the crowds of people we´re being told to avoid! It was apparently 6.0 on the Richter scale and centred in the state of Guerrero somewhere between here and Acapulco. I didn´t actually feel it as I was out at about at the time, so I was a little baffled as to why all these people in suits and blue face masks were congregating on the sidewalks.


Chefs at the Sheraton head back to work.

Now that the School of History at uni has weighed in with their advice to leave town as soon as possible and more and more countries seem to be trying to disuade their citizens from visiting Mexico, I am weighing up my options and wondering whether I should just bugger the deposit on my apartment, get on a plane tomorrow and be on Splash Mountain by sundown. I sent off all the things I was planning to today and have got things more or less organised here should I need to go, so I guess I have some pondering to do. My main concern is that the global hype surrounding this seems to be growing by the day and I do wonder how long it will be before some kind of travel restrictions are put into place. Hmmm...

Mexiflu lockdown continues...



Well, now even the morning walk is off the cards as the Bosque de Chapultepec shut its gates this morning for at least 10 days as the flu lockdown continues to roll out in Mexico City. Sunday masses were also cancelled this morning and the Mexico City government apparently has a ´plan B´ on the cards which would suspend all activities including public transport should the number of cases of the swine flu continue to rise. I also noticed today that cinemas seem to have shut their doors after remaining open to low crowds yesterday.

I think Mexicans are generally a fairly stoic lot and I don´t think there´s any kind of panic breaking out, but the streets are quiet and there seems to be a widespread suspicion the government isn´t being 100% forthright in revealing the number of cases involved. Who knows, but what is obvious is that governments at all levels are taking this incredibly seriously.



This all leaves me in a very difficult spot as I try and figure out what my next move should be. On the one hand, I can´t even go for a stroll around Chapultepec in the morning anymore as even that is now shuttered and I have no idea how I´m going to spend the next few days as I am trying to stay away from cafes and restaurants in line with the recommendations of health authorities. International concerns also seem to be growing and I must say that the constant reports of ¨international flights are continuing from the Benito Juárez International Airport in Mexico City¨ do more to make me wonder whether there exists the possibility these will stop in the coming days than reassure me! If I leave precipitively, however, I will almost certainly never see a peso of the $1000AUD deposit on this apartment. Interesting times, I guess!


Save me, Kevin07!

Get ready for the Mexiflu


As of Friday when this photo was taken, school and universities had been closed and sales of face masks or ¨cubrebocas¨ had skyrocketed.

There is never a dull moment in Mexico City, and as of Friday things have become even more interesting due to the outbreak of a new strain of influenza which apparently combines human, avian and swine flu. Up to today (Saturday), the figures being offered are over 1,000 infected and 68 likely deaths in Mexico centred around Mexico City, but also a few cases in other states. It also seems to have crossed over to the US, with cases now reported in California, Texas, New York and Kansas.


By Saturday morning, the army was out distributing free face masks.

Late Thursday night at around 11pm it was announced that all classes from primary through to university level would be suspended for the following day, something of which I did not become aware until I started reading the paper on the Metro on my way out to the National Library which is on the National Autonomous University (UNAM) campus. I also noticed that the government was advising people to avoid large concentrations of people, such as the Metro carriage I was currently on. This did explain why there were so many people wearing surgical masks around town that morning. When I arrived at the library it was closed, at that stage until Monday, so I headed back to the apartment to see what exactly was going on.


CLOSED! National Anthropology Museum


National History Museum/Chapultepec Castle is also closed, much to this man´s apparent dismay.

It turns out that the Mexican and US governments as well as the World Heath Organization are taking this outbreak quite seriously due to the fact it is a new strain of influenza and it seems to most effect those of us who are otherwise seemingly healthy and in their late teens into their thirties. It was announced on Friday afternoon that all public buildings such as museums and libraries along with schools would be closed for at least 10 days and the big football matches taking place in Mexico City this weekend will also now take place in empty stadiums. The TV and newspapers are full of information on this outbreak as you can imagine, with hygiene recommendations, advice to wear masks over your mouth and nose and people being told to avoid large concentrations of people. I did notice that the flagship news program on the top rating network Televisa was working quite hard to suggest that it was America that exported the virus to Mexico and not the other way around. I guess Mexicans are a little tired of getting the blame for everything from US drug habits to crime and every salmonela outbreak that ever occurs north of the border!


Normally packed on a sunny weekend day, the Bosque de Chapultepec was a bit of a ghost town this weekend.


By way of comparison, this is a picture I took one weekend last year (as also seen in the last entry!)

Heading out on Saturday for a morning walk, it was obvious that the Centro Histórico was far less crowded than it would be on a normal Saturday when it can be quite hellish. By Friday night, soldiers had been placed at various points around town to hand out face masks and they were indeed out in force around this part of town in particularly crowded areas such as the Zócalo and around the Alameda park and Palacio de Bellas Artes. This meant that the blue face masks that were already popping up everywhere on Friday were far more prevailant, though I must say that a lot of people still seemed fairly unconcerned and were wandering around and sucking in the Mexico City air without any filtering.


Around the Zócalo on Saturday afternoon.

The Bosque de Chapultepec was fairly empty, particularly for a Saturday, which I guess makes sense as all its museums were closed. Curiously, though, the zoo did remain open. As I guess there are very few English speaking people around, I did get briefly interviewed for the NBC Today Show on my walk but I do hope they find someone else to show as I had no real insights to offer on the whole issue as I was a little lost in the Cliff Richard Japan Tour ´74 blaring from the old iPod. Combined with the Epcot Center t-shirt I was wearing, I´m sure I seemed a model of cool sophistication strolling through the streets of Mexico City to the NBC crew!


A medical centre set-up next to the Cathedral at which information about the flu was provided along with free face masks and bottles of water.


Here is the low-down on how to minimise your risks, from dietry recommendations to instructions on how to sneeze.

What happens from here is difficult to know as I am due to fly out on Monday the 4th and am just hoping no travel restrictions are put in place following the declaration of a public health emergency here in Mexico by the World Health Organization and as international concerns seem to be growing judging by the coverage on CNN. I obviously can´t do any more research here as all libraries and universities are set to be closed until at least the 5th. If I didn´t have to chase up a hefty deposit on my apartment I would be very tempted indeed to leave early before any possible restrictions are imposed. As it stands, I will give it a few days and see if things improve before seeing if I can head off to LA and ultimately Melbourne at least a few days early.


As you may be able to spy in the bookshop window, Nazi books are strangely popular in Mexico. Mein Kampf seems to be on just about every book stall in town.

And the winner is...

As I showed the biodome at the entrance to Chapultepec in the last update housing the exhibit unveiling the winning design for the Bicentennial Arch to be built over Reforma for the Bicentennary of Mexican independence in 2010, I figured you´d all be waiting with baited breath to see the winning design and so I stopped in to the tent to see who won.

The display features videos and sketches of all the finalists, which ranged from what I thought were decent proposals:



to some which, while they had their charms, were perhaps a little impractical:



As the video playing behind the model of the winning design reminds visitors of all the great monuments along the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard that were built to represent the nation, I might as well include the photos I´ve taken of them through the year.

So, starting from the Historic Centre, you would first come across the Monument to Colombus:



The next monument would be the monument to the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc:



Beyond that is one of the major icons of Mexico City, the Angel of Independence erected to celebrate the centennary of independence in 1910:



Just before reaching the 2010 bicentennial monument you would come across the fountain of Diana:



And just behind the new arch in the Chapultepec forest is the monument to the Niños Heroes who fought to the death to protect Mexico from the gringo invadors:



So, what did the judges from the Mexico City and Federal Governments choose as, to quote President Felipe Calderón, a ¨symbol of pride and unity for Mexicans¨ to commemorate 200 years of independence?

The winning design for the Bicentennial Arch is...



From the other side:



You may have noticed that this is not an arch at all. That has caused quite a bit of controversy, with one Mexican architect commenting that you can´t have a competition to design a stadium and announce that the winner is a hospital.

Here is a look at the concept art:





All I can assume is that this was the cheapest and quickest design to build in time for the anniversary as it was also by far the least interesting. I don´t quite know what statement this is supposed to make about Mexico as a nation 200 years from its independence, but I suspect it´s not making the one the judges of this competition think it is making. It does look like it would fit right in back in Melbourne as a miscellaneous adornment to a walkway around the Docklands or maybe the Exhibition Centre, but I´m not particularly convinced of this as the grand monument to the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence.

Ah well, to quote Emiliano Zapata, see you in 2010...

¡Hola Barack!




Hot on the heals of Hillary´s visit a few weeks back, Barack Obama has finally made it to Mexico City which has caused quite a commotion and resulted in even more CNN stories about Mexico´s drug war for me to watch every morning. On that front, there are no running gun battles in the streets of Mexico City I´m sorry to say as most of the violence is going on up north in the border states or slightly closer to home in the central-western states of Michoacán and Guerrero.

President Felipe Calderón is getting a lot of praise heaped on him by people such as Obama for tackling the problem of narcotrafficking head-on, but in reality the current violence was set off by a poorly thought-out attempt at asserting his legitimacy as president following the disputed result of the presidential elections of 2006 which brought Felipe to power. At least outside of Mexico, no-one seems to mention the context in which this began, with Calderón barely managing to get himself sworn in amidst scuffles in the Congress as members of the PRD party of candidate López Obrador attempted to take control of the tribunal to prevent what they saw as the consummation of a fraudulent election. Meanwhile, López Obrador had staged his own swearing in ceremony on Revolution Day as ¨Legitimate President¨ of Mexico.

Among Calderón´s first acts were raising military salaries and reinstating the inaugural military parade of the incoming president before the armed forces which the previous two presidents had foregone. He then announced dramatic military operations in a few states such as Michoacán against drug cartels. While at the time all of this was an obvious attempt to ensure the support of the armed forces, assert his authority and affirm his status as the one and only president of Mexico, the operations quickly set off a spiral of violence that has become worse and worse and spread further and further ever since, giving Mexico a higher death toll in 2008 from the drug war than the ongoing war in Iraq. Ultimately it will go on until Mexico quietly decides to pull back the military and the cartels manage to work out a new equilibrium, but the ultimate longterm solution of legalising and regulating the trade is unfortunately unlikely to be on anyone´s radar anytime soon.

Anyway, I figured it might be worth taking a few photos on my morning walk today of what´s going on around Mexico City these days.



The Norwegian government has put up quite the display of photos around the Chapultepec forest of a land of snow, fishing, oil and vikings which people seem quite taken by. I must say it does make me want to hop on a plane to Norway far more than the boat ride at Epcot past trolls and oil rigs.



The British government have also got in the act by having children of Brazil, Mexico, the UK and China make little displays about the importance of rivers to their community to celebrate the Festival of the Thames.



Conveniently located near to Chapultepec and the Mexican presidential residence of Los Pinos is Obama´s hotel...


... where he appears to be reasonably well-protected.



You can always tell if some foreign dignitary is in town as they string up the flag around Chapultepec and down the Paseo de la Reforma.



There were a few protesters outside the US embassy on Reforma to coincide with Obama´s visit and banners dealing with understandable topics like migration reform...


... or renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.



This small protest about environmental damage by the state oil company Pemex and corrupt Mexican governors was a little harder to relate to either Obama or even the US embassy generally. To be fair, they did describe Pemex executives as gringos presumably to make it a little relevant.


On the Mexico front, they are preparing in a big way for the BiCentennial celebrations of 2010 for the bicentenial of the independence movement and centennary of the Revolution (note the clever little 2010 design). Here the winning design for the Bicentennial Arch that will sreatch over Reforma from this very spot will be revealed in a day or so in this biodome.



Federal legislative elections are also to be held in July and one new party to emerge is the Social Democrat Party, or PSD. They are making the point here that people need to ¨think differently¨ (hence the sheep!) and have quite good ads on in cinemas in which people discuss why governments should look at legalising drugs. They are promoting themselves as ¨the left that Mexico needs¨ in the wake of the virutal collapse of the PRD into in-fighting and in general I think they would go down quite well in a country like Australia where young middle class university students such as myself like to have a party on the left to vote for which preocupies itself with promoting ideas that seem quite sensible to us but are a little too radical for the mainstream voters the major parties need to win over. In a country like Mexico where there are still major economic divides and close to 50% of the population living in poverty I suspect they´ll have more trouble taking up the banner of the main party on the left by putting forward a drug legalisation and gay marriage agenda, but I am sure they will do very well in a few Mexico City suburbs.



An older party competing is the Mexican Green Ecologist Party who you might assume would be campaigning on environmental issues, but you would be wrong. The main thrust of their campaigning is bizarrely the re-introduction of the death penalty in Mexico through fear campaigns such as this one which reads ¨Fear is knowing that they could kill or kidnap someone in your family¨. As a party that has always needed to form an alliance with a bigger party, be it the conservative PAN in 2000 or the PRI in 2006, hopefully it is sounding its own death knell with this strange campaign.

I went to Rio... quite a while ago


The festivities begin in the Sambadromo

It has been a while, but I figured I might as well add some pictures from our last stop in Rio De Janeiro for Carnival at the end of February for those who haven´t seen them on Flickr.


Momo, king of carnival!

The big reason for going to Rio I suppose was to see Carnival which is one of those things they tell you´re supposed to do before you die. The centrepiece for the carnival celebrations is the samba parade in the Sambadromo during which different samba schools compete and one is named the victor.







Tickets to the samba parade are quite pricey even for average grandstand seats as we had, running into the hundreds of dollars. We had pre-ordered the tickets online and arranged for them to be delivered to the hotel. Nothing in Rio ever seemed to be all that straightforward, and true to form upon arriving the night before the parade we found the tickets were not at the hotel and the next day the company from which I had ordered them had all their phone lines and live online help service out of order which all seemed quite ominous. As the day moved on and there was no sign of the tickets, the people at reception suggested we visit the Sambadromo to see if we could pick them up there. This all seemed odd to me as I didn´t think the company had offices there at all, but that´s what they suggested and even as a longshot it seemed worth a try, so Boheme and I hopped on Rio´s very efficient metro system and made our way over.









The Sambadromo doesn´t seem to be in a particularly good part of town and there weren´t really many people around, however Boheme and I soldiered on and ended up winding our way around the place and never finding anything that even remotely resembled somewhere we would have been able to pick up the tickets. So it was back off to the hotel and, as it was getting late, we figured we´d just have to write off the $500 or so per person we´d already paid and buy scalper tickets for the next night. At literally the last minute, somewhere around 6 or 7pm, the tickets did finally show up at the hotel so we had to madly get ready and rush back to the metro and back over to the Sambadromo with great relief!



The parade itself was indeed spectacular, but I will say that it is a long evening. From memory, it started at around 9pm and was supposed to last until 6am. We, unfortunately, only lasted until about 5am when we decided our feet were sore enough and we were all tired enough to take the metro back to the hotel. Those trains were about the one thing that did seem to run smoothly in Rio and during Carnival they ran them 24 hours which was handy, even if the walk back to the hotel through the deserted streets of the Botafogo district was perhaps something we shouldn´t have been doing!


Nemo!




Planes!

We didn´t end up seeing the winning team, Salgueiro, which paraded through the Sambadromo on the second night. I am happy to say, though, that I was about the only person who bought the t-shirt for that samba school as almost everyone went for the favourites Beija Flor (Hummingbird in Portuguese), or at the very least a team that was actually parading that night. Josie and I, on the other hand, just went with the ones we thought looked the nicest without any idea of what they were all about. I was ultimately vindicated in my choice, though, while Josie, sadly, was not!


Go Salgueira and penguin beer

After spending the next day recovering, we ventured out to explore the area around Botafogo were we were staying. Botafogo is outside of the main tourist areas of Copacabana and Ipanema and we stayed in that part of town it was supposed to be a little cheaper and overall it was a pleasant area to wander around, even if it was generally necessary to take a train or taxi elsewhere to get something to eat.


Praia de Urca with Sugarloaf peeking over the mountains in the background


View from Praia de Urca

As well as the pleasant little area of Urca, Sugarloaf was within walking distance of our hotel and so we took the cable car up there for a look over Rio, which is indeed as spectacular as it appears in pictures.


Looking over toward Copacabana and Ipanema


Looking back toward Botafogo with Christ the Redeemer watching over everything

From what I can remember, the next day started off with a short walk through the jungle around the base of Sugarloaf to see if we could spot some monkeys before heading off to Giant Jesus, otherwise known as Christ the Redeemer, for sunset and then dinner at a very nice Japanese restaurant in yet another neighbourhood in Rio. One of the many things Rio seemed to have in abundance was very nice restaurants, even if we did have to almost always take a taxi to reach them!


Yes, there were quite a few of them


And He shall smite the wicked...


Cloudy view from Giant Jesus

Another day was spent wandering around the historic centre of town which was all fun, though I can´t really think of all that much to say about it!


Downtown Rio


Crowded downtown streets selling everything from Hawaiianas to piñatas


Reflection of the Rio de Janeiro cathedral

Overall, Rio was really quite a fun and interesting city and it was worth seeing it during Carnival when, apart from the parade, there was also the odd concert and banda (mobile street party) that we would stumble upon from time to time. That said, as we were getting to the end of over two months of travelling, and a whole year of being overseas for the girls, we were a little warn out by that point. Brazil also has to be the only country I´ve ever visited in which almost no ATMs would accept Australian cards regardless of whether they were Maestro, Cirrus or whatever else. Some of the big chains like HSBC and Citibank did accept our cards, but they were few and far between and other chains that I use all the time in Mexico (and elsewhere) also just wouldn´t accept any of our cards. This at least initially made things a bit difficult as we had to plan quite carefully what we´d spend and how much money we would withdraw if we found a working ATM as it may be a while before we´d come across another one. In the past few days it has also turned out that someone must have taken an imprint of Boheme´s card and her pin number at one of the many ATMs we tried as it was drained of all its funds in a series of transactions around Rio over the past week. Thankfully Josie and I have so far been ok.


Copacabana beach

The hotel was also an annoying experience. I had booked it through an online service (priceline.com) and twice, in December and January, confirmed the rate, number of people and room with the hotel via email. It was part of the Mercure chain which is in turn owned by Accor who also run hotels like Novitel and Sofitel so you would have assumed they had their act together, but from day one we had problems getting anyone who could speak English, getting repairs done in the room and sorting out the bill. Day after day I was assured that they would correct the bill as I went down with all the print outs of emails and booking info, but the inevitable happened when checking out and they ended up insisting it was over $600 more than they had confirmed and, of course, they had one guy on reception who didn´t speak English. Again, I´m surprised the follow-up response from Mercure and Accor has been so bad as all they´ve done is apologise and offer up a range of bogus excuses, with changing exchange rates as my favourite, while refusing to refund any of the money. So, not a great way to end the trip I´m afraid!


Off to the Mercure Botafogo...

While I was kind of looking forward to getting back and finishing up my work in Mexico City, I arrived at around 8am after a long flight from Rio via Santiago and Lima to find the electricity had been cut off from my apartment meaning I had no hot water for a shower and the fridge was full of mould and water. It took me the better part of the day to get an explanation from anyone here as to why that might of happened, with it ending up having to do with someone having moved out and for some reason I don´t quite know their contract also covered my apartment. So it was off to the building admin and then the electricity company the next day... only to arrive at around 1pm which was aparently too late for the Luz y Fuerza del Centro energy people as they were preparing to knock off for the day and so I had to come back the next morning! Thankfully I was able to bribe one of the people working here at the building to hook me up illegally as otherwise I would have been without electricity for a good 4 or 5 days more, but it did involve the annoying ritual of the electricity being disconnected every morning and reconnected when I came back in the evening just in case the electricians came around and caught on to our little caper.


Back to the land of protests. This time it´s centre-left head of the Mexico City government, Marcelo Ebrard, being compared to Hitler by some conservative group who are quite squarely targetting his possibilities as a presidential candidate in 2012 with their propaganda. It is quite unusual to see a protest group with signs in English and advertising that they are broadcasting their meetings live on the web.

Nothing too exciting has been going on recently as my time here winds to a close with a May 4th flight to LA for undisclosed business in Anaheim. Apart from the dead faces and bloodied bodies staring at me from the tabloids every morning, none of the violence which seems to be all people are seeing of Mexico these days outside of the country is in evidence in Mexico City as far as I can tell. As it´s Holy Week everything is closed right now and as it´s spring I´ve ended up with hay fever while sweltering through 30 degrees days as I´m sure everyone back home is preparing to head into the cold of winter. I´ll try and get something up before I leave. If not, hasta la vista and all that!


Happy birthday, Benito! Though not as grand an affair as it once was, the commemoration of the birth of Benito Juárez is one of those markers of the beginning of spring and a public holiday. While I knew it was a holiday and the date of his birth, I must admit that I was surprised when I woke up on the Monday before his birthday (which fell on a Saturday this year) to find everything closed for Juárez day.

Boxes Ticked Continued...




The trek group at Machu Picchu

We´re off Easter Island with its infernally slow internet connection and now in Mendoza, Argentina so I guess I can finally finish the last entry.


Our roasted guinea pig dinner in Cuzco. You may have to click on it for the full effect.


Not really much meat on the poor little thing

In Cusco after the trek was all over and done with we all ticked off the final thing you really have to do as a tourist in Lima with a guinea pig dinner. The last time I had guinea pig it was presented in a far more appetising manner than at this place where it basically looked like a baked and very angry hairless rat. There´s not much meat on them and they seem a bit tough, but I guess if you´re living high up in the Andes you don´t have many sources of meat apart from alpacas and guinea pigs.




Chinatown in Lima

Our final day in Peru was spent in a warm and bustling Lima. As Josie has been quite sick with a cold since the Lares Trek, Boheme and I made our way out of the main tourist strip and over to Lima´s lively Chinatown for a Chinese feast and some wandering around the shops selling all kinds of odds and ends and through the booths offering tarot readings and various other fortune-telling and clensing rituals. Unlike Mexico City´s Chinatown, Lima´s does show some evidence of the large local Chinese population beyond the mere presence of Chinese lantens and restaurants filled with the locals as there are many hundreds of thousands of Peruvians of Chinese descent who arrived mainly in the second half of the 19th century and apparently integrated quite quickly into Peruvian society. Everywhere in Peru there are Chinese restaurants (called Chifas) and the main supermarket chain in Lima is called Wong which presumably is an outgrowth of all the Chinese supermarkets that used to be located in each neighbourhood of the city. Peruvians still called the corner store the ¨Chinese person on the corner¨ in fact!


Not only did I find out that I was born in the year of the rooster but also that it is sponsored by Inca Kola

As the national Pisco Sour day celebrations were in full-swing, we ended up stumbling upon booths serving up delicious and cheap pisco drinks (pisco is a Peruvian licor made from grapes which is mixed with egg white and lemon juice to make the pisco sour... I think) while a woman sang her little heart out on a stage in the Alameda Chabuca Granda and the crowds enjoyed their drinks accompanied by various Peruvian dishes.


Which pisco to choose?

We were staying at the Gran Hotel Bolívar, a grand old hotel from 1924 on the Plaza San Martín which was once at the centre of the Limeño social scene but now is a bit of a creaking cross between the Tower of Terror at Disney World and the hotel from The Shinning. It is still famous for its pisco sours, however, which meant we also got to enjoy the celebrations and another fine example of Peru´s national drink down in the hotel bar.


Saturday evening in the Plaza San Martín with the Hotel Bolívar in the background



Yet another trip to Peru and enjoyable day in Lima ended with a wander around the packed streets during the evening and a bus ride up to the lookout on the Cerro San Cristóbal hill that rises up behind the historic centre. As Fran and James are now working in a school in northern Peru, I guess it will be back to Lima yet again in a few weeks for the fifth time. That city seems to keep pulling me back for some reason!



From Peru it was on to Easter Island... Ah, Easter Island! While visiting Easter Island seemed like a great idea at the time, it didn´t take long for it to dawn on us that there´s nothing else to do but look at giant stone heads and that it is very hot and muggy. The heat would have been ok if it wasn´t for the complete lack of air conditioning on the island except in the pharmacy which meant there was never any relief. There may have also been more to do if everything wasn´t insanely expensive.


I´m actually in this photo if you click on it!

For a day or so Easter Island may be interesting enough and it is always fun to take pictures of giant stone heads, but if it wasn´t for us renting a car for two days so we could tour the island at our own pace and moving from our muggy little hotel room to a house we rented for only a little more per night after a leak in the bathroom flooded the room, I think we may have all gone quite mad.



As well as it being impossible to get even a simple meal of fish or chicken and chips for under $20, there was always something odd and frustrating going on such as the island running out of fish for a few days. As we had a house, we were able to cook a few nights but even this was a little difficult as, for example, sometimes we´d have to wait for the plane with the milk to arrive the next evening.





There was the annual Tapatai Nui festival going on while we were there which meant there was a big parade with Polynesian dancing and a few floats which broke up the monotony for one evening. Still, I would warn people away from spending more than a day or two on Rapa Nui and I wouldn´t say it´s worth going out of your way to see. Unless giant stone heads absolutely fascinate you.



Once we escaped Easter Island we spent a fairly uneventful day in Santiago and are now in the very pleasant Argentine city of Mendoza. The big trip is slowly wrapping up and I think we´re all a little fatigued at this point. In a few days we´ll have carnival in Rio which I suppose should be fun. We shall see!

Boxes ticked: Machu Picchu, Llamas, Guinea Pig and Pisco Sour


Plaza de Armas, Cuzco. Viva el Perú!

We´re now sweltering away in Easter Island after finally getting this dreaded Lares Trek to Machu Picchu over and done with. We did all survive surprisingly well what amounted to a four day trek to Machu Picchu through the Andes with a group of eight people who, apart from a British couple and one tall, pale Norwegian, ended up being all Australian. Overall I´m happy we did the hike as I had already visited Machu Picchu so this made the whole experience a lot more novel than just catching the train from Cuzco once again and it also proved to be a lot less difficult than I think we had all imagined it would be.


As a testament to Inca stonemasonry, the Spaniards incorporated original Inca walls into some of their new buildings and, despite the lack of mortar of any kind, they remain standing.

Before the trek, we had one day of leisure in Cuzco which involved a lot of hassling from people offering massages and selling their paintings as well a brief trip with Boheme up to the Inca ruins of Saqsaywamán. This was followed by a very pleasant stoll down the mountain from the ruins through the little allyways of the city. Despite the fact the hassling by tourist touts does get very wearing after a while, the old Inca capital and ¨navel of the world¨ is still a beautiful city worth visiting.




Scenery on the first day of the hike

Even though we were initially planning to hike to Machu Picchu before the 1st of February when the main Inca Trail closes for a month, we had always planned to do the Lares Trek ¨alternative Inca Trail¨ instead as it is far more remote and less crowded than the main event and also because it winds through remote little communities up the mountains and thus would provide a something closer to a window into how people in that part of the world still live. The trail did indeed end up winding through very remote communities or past the odd adobe house with thatched roof from which children would emerge along with the occasional adult and it appeared that the form in which people were living had changed little since Spanish conquest almost 500 years ago.


Here we all are after the first hill. When does the next season of Dexter start?


At the first camp a local woman was thoughtful enough to include the fine Peruvian beer Cusqueña among the handicrafts.

What made the experience a little strange was that, as we´d been told to buy crackers or gifts such as small toys or pencils to give to the children we met up in the mountains, there was always a ritual of almost everyone in the group handing over the little gifts and then lining up paparazzi-style to take photos of the kiddies in their traditional costumes. For the most part the children seemed to enjoy posing and seeing themselves on the digital cameras and, as it is a long walk to any kind of town not to mention their obvious lack of financial resources, the gifts seemed much-appreciated. So it does in theory seem like a win-win situation. Still, there was something about a bunch of mostly Australian trekkers lining up to take picturesque pictures of the local children in exchange for small trinkets that seemed just a little unsettling on some level!






I guess they did make for nice photos!

The scenery was indeed quite spectacularly barren along the tail and it is hard to imagine how people (and their hoards of llamas) could live in such a place. The nights were cold as the temperatures dropped below zero, but thankfully the sleeping bags were warm and the gloves and beanies that everyone stocked up on in Cusco did the trick. Another surprise of this trip was that the GAP people put on quite a feast at meal times with a soup, a main and, in the evenings, a dessert with every meal. If anything, I think this trek left me a little fatter than before.



A nice little perk of the Lares trek versus the Inca Trail is that the last night is spent in a hotel in the town of Aguascalientes located in the valley below Machu Picchu instead of in a tent. The town itself is even more of a tourist trap than Cuzco, filled with mostly lousy restaurants with aggressive touts. While I found the Mexican dinner of fajitas of alpaca meat wrapped in pancakes instead of corn tortillas fairly tasty, others in the group seemed less impressed when one person pulled a large rusty nail out of their dinner.


All the happy hikers of our group on the third day.

On the fourth morning we all got up bright an early yet again for the 5am, one and a half hour walk up the steep track to the ruins themselves. Arriving at Machu Picchu at 6:30am from the jungle below as the sun was rising over the Andes and the ruins were relatively uncrowded was an entirely different and more impressive exprience than just taking the train from Cuzco and being greeted by the inevitably-overcast skies of the afternoon and hoards of other tourists as Rob and I did the last time around. So, yes, it was all worthwhile and I´m glad I did it. It did seem odd to me that the far fitter other members of the group seemed to have a tougher time of it all, but I guess the GAP people only planned a day for them all to adjust to the altitude whereas I did organise our trip so that we had plenty of time and hiking at altitude before the trek came up. If anything, I feel a little bad for having pushed Boheme so hard to shape up in the weeks before the walk!


A few of us during the sweaty hike to Machu Picchu.


Finally!


The obligatory shot


View over the Apurímac valley

As this is taking a long time to load the photos, I might have to continue this in the next day or so. I´m not sure there´s much to to here, so I´m sure I´ll find the time!

Back to Inca Kolaland


Ekeko, the household god of matrial possesions who I mentioned in the last entry about the Alasitas festival

There were no more incidents in Bolivia and we have made it through the rest of our little adventures relatively unscathed to our current resting place of Puno on the Peruvian shores of Lake Titicaca.


View from Chacaltaya

For our last two days in La Paz, Josie and Boheme opted for a 4 hour bike ride down ¨the world´s most dangerous road¨ while I decided that didn´t sound like a recipe for a great time and instead took an excursion to the peak of Chacaltaya and the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon).


Pretty much the extent of the development at the world´s highest developed ski area.

Chacaltaya is purportedly the world´s highest developed ski area at 5395m above sea level, though beyond a small lodge I didn´t see much sign of development, and thanfully it was a relatively short but steep walk up to the top. The tour I was on consisted of 9 Brazilians, a Uruguayan couple and me all crammed into a little minivan, so the main language of the trip was Portuguese and I learned that Brazilians both love to take photos and take their shirts off. It wasn´t too cold up the top, but it was snowing and I guess Brazilians likely see even less snow than the average Australian as they were going crazy having snowball fights and taking off their shirts and taking pictures of themselves lying in the snow.


With a Brazilian guy on the tour who wanted a picture with the only non-South American I guess. He raced right up to the top then vomited due to alitude sickness.

The Valle de la Luna was a bit of a waste of time as it was just some fairly unimpressive erosion that I suppose might somewhat resemble the surface of the moon. The whole day involved lots of driving for little payoff, but then when I heard the tales of injuries, heatstroke, wading through mud and saw the limbs of Josie and Boheme covered with insect bites from their epic bikeride, I began to appreciate the whole experience a lot more.


At the Valle de la Luna one of the odder features was a solitary figure playing the panpipes and a small guitar perched high above the amazing geological formation.


Looking back to La Paz from the Valle de la Luna

As the Inca Trail is rapidly approaching, we´ve been trying to get some hiking in along the way and our last day in La Paz was supposed to involve a 6 hour trek up to the base camp of Huayna Potosí at 5130m above sea level.


Just to prove I made it to the base camp

Again, there was much struggling and eventually the guide suggested that just he and I continue on to the base camp as it was a steep climb and Boheme didn´t think she´d be up to it while Josie also wasn´t feeling well. I think Roger our guide over-estimated my fitness as he proceeded to rush up the rest of the without stopping which almost killed me, though he seemed pleasantly surprised that his estimated one hour to the top had only taken 5 minutes! One nice thing about continuing alone was that it gave me a chance to chat to Roger in Spanish which you don´t get much of a chance to do with people when you´re traveling in a group of mainly English speakers.


Roger and Me

Roger was telling me about the migration to La Paz from the countryside of young people which had resulted in the springing up of a whole new city called El Alto with about 1 million people perched above La Paz and surrounding the airport. His take on it was that there was little to no work in the countryside except in areas where there was a large amount of tourism such as around Lake Titicaca. He also mentioned how he´d like to live in an English-speaking country for a while but the difficulties that Bolivians have as, for example, every time they want to apply for a US visa they are charged a non-refundable fee of $100 US. Anyway, we made it back to the camp in what must have been record time and all up the look took less than half the time it was supposed to.


Getting to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca involves crossing the straits of Tiquina in a little boat while the bus travels seperately on a precarious looking barge

From La Paz we traveled over to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca and caught the boat to the Isla del Sol for two nights. Lake Titicaca and particularly the Isla del Sol is a lovely part of the world and, yet again, this was supposed to involved quite a bit of walking to get us somewhat prepared for the trek to Machu Picchu.


View of the Cordillera Real over Lake Titicaca from our hostel on the Isla del Sol

After a brief walk on the first day to some Incan ruins, we did attempt a larger 6 hour walk to the northern end of the island and back via the coast. Again, I´m not sure all of us will make it through to Machu Picchu without the assistance of a mule or llama, but the scenery was impressive and the walk really wasn´t all that difficult. In fact, the worst part of the whole stay on the Isla del Sol was the nightmarish task of carrying my pack up the steep incline from the boat dock to the hostel up near the top of the island.


Josie and I walking across the island

The island itself is still strongly indigenous, with most of the locals speaking Aymara rather than Spanish to one another while there are also no cars and few links such as TV and internet to the outside world. The main economic activity does seem to be centred around tourism now, though, as seems to be the case in much of this part of the world. Enterprising little kids even set up small stalls on which they place vaguely interesting looking rocks which they attempt to hawk to the passing tourists, most of whom seemed to be from Argentina.


Llamas enjoying a day at the beach

From the Isla del Sol, we left Bolivia behind for this trip and caught the bus over the border to Puno in Peru. We only have one full day here and chose to visit the main tourist attraction, the Uros or Floating Islands.


Uros Islands, Peru

I visited the Uros once before with Rob and they really are a mix of an interesting glimpse into a unique way of life that has persisted over centuries and the ultimate tourist trap in which everything you see is scripted and manicured to give the tourists what they want.


The locals giving a demonstration of how they trade with one another. They did seem to be having a good time and laughing quite a lot at all the ridiculous demonstrations they must have to do several times a day for the tourists.

Each island is built upon a base of totora reeds and the islands are best known for their distinctive reed houses and boats. The tours from Puno take you on the 30minute boat ride out to the island where locals reenact how the trade with one another, explain a little about their history and then try to sell you various handicrafts. It is a fairly fun and interesting experience that you really have to do, but it does make Disneyland look subtle in comparison.


Typical tourists!

Tomorrow we head off to Cuzco where we have one full day before the Lares Trek to Machu Picchu begins. Hopefully we´ll all make it out alive. As today was the beginning of the Virgen de la Candelaria festivities in Puno, I´ll leave you with a few pictures of a parade of people from surrounding villages we happened to stumble across this afternoon.




Parading the Peruvian flag