It doesn´t always rain

Canal Chacabuco

It was a dark and stormy night... it often is in Patagonia.  The days too.  Except when they aren´t.  Then you´re transported to an Edenic paradise with forests of timeless green, peaky mountains harbouring eternal snows far above, serene water nourished by sourmilk cascades tracing down cliffs and gullies, all sheathed in a sonic backcloth of bird calls on which to paint contemplation or activity.



Entering Estero Clemente

Puerto Millabú, a comforting slash in the rocky southern shore of Isla Clemente, was our home for a couple of days, anchored by the river beach at the head of the valley.   The Cascada Salmón beckoned, drawing us to beach then river, through an enchanted Hans Cristian Andersen-esque forest where pixies might have been hiding behind every fallen log, along ledges under small cliffs, and across barenaked rock smoothed by abundantly present rain and wind.   What we optimistically referred to as the trail would have carried stern warnings in a tourist guidebook – myriad routefinding difficulties, easy to lose the trail once you´ve found it, dense and slippery vegetation, steep slopes, exposed steps on a moss-covered tree root between a near vertical bank of loose vegetation and a cliff to cross a stream several metres below, rapidly changeable weather, risk of mist descending, no possibility of assistance.  Wonderful stuff – our sort of hike.  We left temporary markers at critical points that were especially obscure – a ribbon, a hat, a bottle of sunscreen -  and they served us well during the descent.  Lunch found us perched on flat rocks munching granola bars and sipping stream water, pensive and silent, basking in a panoramic view of the upper waterfalls of the Cascada.  Far below Otra Vida swung to her anchor in the bay, dark tendrils of river snaking towards her through grey-green water covered sand.

Cascada Salmón lower part

The following afternoon I downloaded the latest weather forecast : not promising.  We needed a 36 hour window of settled weather to reach and cross the notorious Golfo de Penas, 60 miles of water wide open to the Pacific and therefore to the substantial groundswell radiating from storms that relentlessly pummel the southern ocean between Cape Horn and Antarctica.  As if that was not enough, add in a rapidly shelving bottom amplifying those swells, tidal currents pushing north and south, and intense and frequently changing weather.  It´s a recipe for dangerous wave conditions with anything more than modest winds, and one of our pilot books warns that “even large ships do not cross the gulf in bad weather”.  Finding a 36 hour weather window in Patagonia, we are discovering, is as likely as Donald Trump improving life for ordinary Americans, and rather less likely than finding a herd of pink unicorns.   So, acceding to metrological reality, we replanned our crossing into sections and looked again at the forecast.  Our choice was to leave immediately or wait about a week.  Up with the anchor, quick stowage of loose items below, and on our way within minutes.   Emerging from the protection of Estero Clemente the ocean swell greeted us as we followed a course dodging small islands and shoals through the mist and light rain.  The VHF burst out “Embarcación Otra Vida” summoning Allie to a friendly chat with the captain of a research vessel closing with us through a pass.  “You are very brave” he told Allie, hearing our plans to sail to Puerto Williams.

Belated Valentine´s Day celebration lunch

The islands behind us and conditions fairly benign, we discussed options, and jointly decided to continue overnight to Caleta Suarez, a safe and secure anchorage just shy of Cabo Raper at the northern limit of Golfo de Penas.   It was Léa´s first passage in the open ocean on a sailboat, ever, and Allie´s first overnight passage.  Straightforward, chilly, wet … we all had pleasant watches, and even more pleasant slumbers in the warm passage berths, lee cloths holding us in.   Cosily huddled behind the spray hood in the dark, I was reminded how much I enjoy night watches … the tranquillity brought back lovely emotions of those nights at sea between Ecuador and Chile in the last months.

The boat sign tree at Caleta Suarez

We arrived a little after dawn, our mooring plan for Caleta Suarez at the ready.  Another boat in such a small caleta could add complications, but cruising boats here are as rare as the aforementioned pink unicorns.  As we rounded the corner we noticed the five commercial fishing boats rafted together.  Undeterred, we stuck with our plan, dropping the anchor, launching the dinghy, and tying shore lines to trees.  One of the fishing boats left, manoeuvring around us.  We were almost done, eagerly anticipating a warm drink below, when a fishermen pointed out that our lines would block all movement, including the boats returning later, and invited us to tie up alongside.  Sounds pretty straightforward, but with our anchor down, their anchors down, our lines ashore, their lines ashore, other lines floating on the water … it took an hour or two to sort it all out.  In the rain, of course.  Allie, dressed provocatively in black oilskins and rubber boots while retrieving our shorelines, attracted plenty of interest from the young fishermen.

The captain of the fishing boat we tied to gave us two perfectly filleted fish, and we were gifted more fish and seafood later, eventually refusing some as there is only so much fish two women can eat.  Léa reminded us we had bypassed Valentine´s Day so a quick ceviche was rustled up (and a chickpea rice salad for me) while Allie prepared the table with a candle and a white silk rose. We enjoyed a celebratory Valentine´s Day lunch just two days late - who´s counting the days here anyway?

After a few days at anchor waiting for weather, including an attempt to reach a natural hot springs aborted due to too much of the wrong type of wind, Allie and Léa painted a sign to go alongside those of other yachts on a tree ashore.  Otra Vida´s longstanding philosophy, “no rules, no limits”, has evolved, and the sign reflects this: “no rules, no limits, no conspiracy theories.”  Yes, there is a story there … several, actually … but they are for another time, perhaps with a lovely Chilean artisanal beer in hand.

When we fixed the sign to the tree it wasn´t raining.  I take that as a good omen.



It doesn´t always rain

Saturdays

Saturday morning, 7th January 2017.  I´m at anchor in Puerto Ingles, a small lagoon at the northern end of Isla de Chiloe, now as quiet as a millpond, sun shining, birds crying, a seal playing in the water, two dogs running along the shoreline. I arrived yesterday morning in Chile after 19 days at sea from Easter Island looking for shelter ahead of an overnight storm.  It´s an excellent anchorage. 

Saturday morning.  A feeling I remember well from the days when I worked in a regular job, waking in the morning light with energy and anticipation.  Sometimes there was a glow from some achievement in the work week … a breakthrough on a project, a milestone achieved, a promotion gained, a political battle won, a contract signed - as often as not, something as insubstantial as a change in a number in a spreadsheet.

Saturday morning.  Most of all the feeling was one of precious freedom.  I could do anything I wanted on Saturday, could truly be myself, with the sure knowledge that the following day, Sunday, I didn’t have to put on the mask of management consultant or corporate manager.  I could live fully on Saturdays – take myself to that liminal space where sleep is a necessity rather than a duty.  A hard ski ascent, thighs burning, smiling so much that my cheeks ache, body caressed by sunburn and sweat and endorphins.  The calm of the last kilometres of a long run, in a trance from the drumbeat of feet connecting with earth, wondering if my iPod battery will last till I get to the end.  Diving deeply into a novel or an essay or a poem or a travel story and not needing to stop.  The intensity of the last hours before dinner party guests arrive, focused on cooking and setting the table and selecting music and tidying up and setting the mood with lights and preparing drinks and polishing glasses and anticipating conversation and smiling and … everything!

        "Why do I climb for hours for a handful of turns in untracked snow? Why do I grin and dance
          afterward?  Why is fun such an anemic answer to the questions above?  Powder snow skiing
          is not fun.  It´s life, fully lived, lived in a blaze of reality."  -  Dolores LaChapelle

Csikszentmihalyi called this Flow, Sartre described it as being engaged with life … whatever words one employs, and this is right at the edge of language, for me it is that feeling of being, not consciously being with that little commentator in your head describing it, but rather being as a state, without a separate awareness of the state.  Being completely in the moment, completely in the flow.  Saturdays.

          "The more you consume, the less you live" - Guy Debord

It´s an indictment of our western model that Saturdays are, for many, the only day of the week when this is possible.  From his perch in Soho in the mid 19^th century Marx foresaw a key consequence of capitalism – alienation from life – and refused to lie still and accept it.  Have we progressed in the 150 years since he was writing?  Yes, a little – we do have that one precious day out of seven, although for 1.9 billion people on the planet existing on less than $2 a day Saturday effectively doesn´t exist.  Being, Saturday morning, is, for the most part, a western privilege.
 

And living on a sailboat, where it feels to me that Saturday mornings are much more frequent, where floating at anchor and sharing the beauty of Patagonia with interesting companions is what life will consist of for months ahead … what does that say about my privilege?   I sometimes feel a need to justify it by explaining that living on a sailboat involves a lot of work, a relic of my upbringing in a western society.  But doesn’t such an explanation reinforce the very model that leads to work dominating life?

Ah, perhaps there´s no escape from the circular logic.  It´s enough to make you want to run off with a sailboat to Patagonia …

Easter Island

“… on this island the Wind God inhabits
the only church living and true:
our lives come and go, dying, making love:
here on Easter Island where everything is altar,
where everything is a workroom for the unknown,
a woman nurses her newborn
upon the same steps that her gods tread.

Here, they live! But do we?
We transients, followers of the wrong star,
were shipwrecked on this island as in a lagoon,
like in a lake in which all distances end,
on a motionless journey, so difficult for men.”

Men IX, La Rosa Separada, Pablo Neruda

We arrived at Easter Island after a lovely 23 day trade wind passage from Ecuador, port tack all the way, barely adjusting our sails, life lived at a 20 degree angle.   Rashly ignoring nautical tradition, we left on a Friday and had a woman aboard so probably we should have sunk.  As you are reading this obviously we didn’t.  Another small nail in the coffins of patriarchy and superstition.

During the passage I read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive”.  I chose it because it sounded interesting, and it was a surprise to find Easter Island as one of his case studies.  To précis the book: he examines historical and contemporary societies that have thrived or failed, and teases out five substantive themes: environmental damage; climate change; hostile neighbours; friendly trade partners; and the society’s response to environmental challenges.

Easter Island was occupied by Polynesians from island groups to the West in about 900AD.  The population is estimated to have grown to about 15,000, and then declined to about 3,000 by the time the first Europeans sighted it in 1722.  By then it was already an ecological disaster, with no significant trees left standing, and its population was barely surviving  The iconic moai (stone head statues) were there in profusion, extravagantly contrasting with the poverty of the islanders.

What had happened? Diamond meticulously brings together strands of scholarship, describing how the Polynesians developed a two class society, with aristocrats living in large houses in prime locations, and peasants farming the land.  Over time the felling of trees, used for house construction, cooking, elaborate cremation rituals, and for moving the large stone statues from the quarry to their final sites, denuded the island.  The response of the aristocrats appears to have been to erect ever greater monuments as power struggles developed between rival chiefs.  What had been an island capable of supporting its population became an ecological wasteland driven by the vanities and egos of the ruling elite and their ever more elaborate traditions.  Unsurprisingly, following the immiseration of much of the population, the aristocracy was overthrown, but it was too late – the forests had gone.  Soil erosion accelerated without trees to moderate the effects of rain and wind.  Heating and cooking was only possible by burning grass.  Game animals died out with the forests, cutting off that food source.  Lacking large trees, large canoes could no longer be built, limiting fishing to what could be caught in sheltered waters very close to the coast.  Chickens and rats became the main sources of protein.

Of course, while the Polynesians destroyed the forests and reduced the population by 80% from its peak, western imperialism takes second place to no one in these matters.  By 1877 the population had been reduced a further 96% to a mere 111 inhabitants through a combination of disease deposited by Christian missionaries, slave raids by Peruvians, and profiteering by the European chancers that imperialism regularly excreted into occupied lands.  Every Easter Island Polynesian today is descended from one of the 36 survivors who had children.

Given the history one might expect the Polynesians to be unwelcoming to those of us from western nations still carrying an imperial stain. Not a bit of it.  Warm, friendly, sharing, willing to help … the culture of the island seems grounded in welcoming hospitality and mutual support.   Going into Hanga Roa by dinghy the first evening we were swamped by several breaking waves.  Local fishermen hoisted our dinghy onto the dock and gave us a hand up from the water, then put glasses of whisky-cola in our hands and invited us to share their barbequed fish while they got to work saving the drowned outboard motor.   As the evening continued we were invited to stay in one of their houses rather than return to the boat in our wet clothes.

There´s a happy and relaxed feeling to the island.  People have enough to live on, and there seems to be neither obvious poverty nor ostentatious displays of wealth.   People have time to talk and want to get to know you.  Within hours I felt I had friends on the island.

Was our reception coloured by our arrival by sailboat?  Of course, to some extent.  Significant numbers of tourists fly into the island for a few days vacation, apparently 5000 a week in peak season. Travelling here by sailboat takes a bit more effort, and Otra Vida was only the 23^rd sailboat to arrive at the island in the previous year.  Compared to the volume of boats at the average Caribbean island that is a rounding error, sure.  Then again, an average of two sailboats a month means that sailboat crew are not so unusual on Easter Island.

The model underlying western capitalism, the model of rational economic man, says that our nature as people is to be competitive, to maximise our own self interest, if necessary using violence.  It says that these dark base instincts need to be controlled by strong social rules and norms, backed up by the threat of state-applied force.  Altruism is a fantasy, according to this model, and all interactions are calculated (perhaps imperfectly) in terms of the benefit to each party.

I´ve found it noteworthy that cities do indeed seem to bring out that version of human “nature”, but that smaller more remote places seem to operate quite happily against “nature”.  Or could it be that our more fundamental nature (let´s forget my skirting dangerously close to essentialism here) is to be cooperative and generous, to support each other in community, and that our “natural” competitiveness is socially constructed?   Looking out at Otra Vida at anchor in the distance, the maoi to the north proudly staring inland, after a day of getting provisions for the boat with my fisherman friend Juan, it certainly feels that way.  And that feels right, feels good, feels like something I can hold on to.

696 Songs

Otra Vida’s bow slices through a seascape of uncomplicated purity.  The water foams and sprays either side, during the day cresting white on perfect Yves Klein blue, while at night sparking with the glitter of bioluminescence.  We’re well over half way through our passage from Ecuador to Easter Island, 14 days at sea so far, another 8-10 days to go.

A few days earlier I decided to create the mother of all playlists, going through every piece of music on my computer and selecting the songs that I liked.  696 songs was the final count.  Of course there are songs I like that are not on my computer, and some songs that I decided not to include but which held some resonance for me at some point in the past but no longer.  But overall those 696 songs cover a lot of my life.

What captures my attention as I start playing the list is the vivacity of the memories.  So intensely felt, even more so in this pristine part of the planet, more lived hallucinations than mere recollections.

Ah, those memories.  I noticed a few themes.  Women featured a lot, not surprisingly, both lovers and friends. Mountains and sailing.  Alcohol, in the form of parties, meals, or occasionally hangovers.  And travel, of course travel.

Barcelona (Freddie Mercury and Monserrat Caballe) finds me driving into Barcelona for the first time on a grey morning before Christmas 1989, not especially liking the city.  No inkling of how crucial Barcelona would become to me … and that years later, living there and loving it, Hey Man! (Nelly Furtado) accompanies me jogging along Barceloneta´s beachfront before meeting Rufus and Cris for a memorable Sunday lunch.

Comedy Waltz (Fairground Attraction) and Please Forgive Me (David Gray) catapults me back to three crazy months in Covent Garden in 2001, newly single and free and very much enjoying it.

La Vie en Rose (Edith Piaf) recalls a hungover day shared with Anett after a typically decadent dinner party with good friends in my Budapest apartment in 2009.  Reni dancing round and round to She’s Electric (Oasis) whenever and wherever it was played. Born Slippy (Underworld) as the seminal anthem of Sziget festival in 2005.  Budapest memories ...

The Tide is Turning (Roger Waters) is etched in my soul as the final song of his Wall concert at Potsdamer Platz in mid 1990, a welling up of optimism and hope and freedom animating the still-communist night air, under a Berlin sky once again painted with searchlights, searchlights for peace this time.

Muscle Cars (Mylo) takes me to Carneval in Maastricht in 2007, tiny glass of Dutch beer in very cold hand, dressed in a clown costume, standing outside a bar with work colleagues and friends watching the parade, boere music playing, Limburgs dialect temporarily replacing Dutch as the lingua franca.

Massivan´s version of Refazenda recalls passion fuelled days anchored off Platja Migjorn, Formentera - white sand, turquoise water, beautiful lovers.

And Jimmy Buffett, unsophisticated sophisticate of Caribbean beach music, triggers avalanches of Colorado mountain memories.  Driving up the Roaring Fork Valley, sunburn blisters on my face from the previous day´s abortive attempt on Mt Elbert cut short by a terrifying lightning storm, for the first time really hearing the lyrics of Changes in Latitudes.  Sharing local beers with friends each May at our Beach party at Arapahoe Basin, buzzing from skiing Pallavicini in shorts, Volcano playing from someone´s pickup truck, smoke from the grill obscuring the inflatable palm trees against a backdrop of sun and snow.

I could go on.  The memories rise up - I taste and smell them, feel them as if they are happening again, here in this blue on blue world of Pacific sailing. Yes, these pellucid reveries are another magical aspect of beautiful long ocean passages.  Who needs TV?

Mermaid

Otra Vida´s anchor lies snugly in the white sand of French Harbour, Roatan, waiting patiently for a few days of atypical weather to make the journey east to the corner of Nicaragua, then south to Providencia and eventually Panama.   The reef protects us from swell and waves and presents a pallete of blues and turquoises either side of a sharp white line of foam crashing in the middle distance.  The constant trade winds soften the fire of the tropical sun toasting us from a mostly cloudless lapis lazuli sky.

The reef protecting French Harbour

We read, talk, think in the hammock, do a little boat work, swim, cook.  Sunrises and sunsets frame our days, accompanied sometimes by a masterful education in contemporary electronic music from Icelandic crew member Gusty.

It´s not hard to spend time on this island.

French Harbour´s version of breakfast TV is the daily cruisers´ net, a VHF radio discussion between yachties about upcoming weather, social plans, trips to the grocery store, the local iguana farm and needed or offered spare parts.  At the end of the net each day the yacht “Mermaid” chimes in with a trivia question. Erudite and thoughtful, these questions involve history, literature, sailing lore, mythology … an injection of a fragment of magic from a fine mind into the everyday cruising business of propane refills and potluck dinners.

Sometimes at sunset you´ll find the crew of Otra Vida at the supremely casual Tiki Palapa enjoying inexpensive cold beers and easy conversation with other yachties and a few stray adventurers seeking escape from the nearby hotel.   One evening we join a table including a fit, slender, tanned American guy talking politics, lamenting the likely choice of Trump as Republican nominee.   He holds forth with passion and wit and obvious intelligence.

Breakfast with John in the cabin of Mermaid of Carriacou

This is my first face to face encounter with John A. Smith, captain of “Mermaid of Carriacou”.  I introduce myself, strike up a conversation, comment on his interesting trivia questions, and the following day invite him to join us on board Otra Vida for dinner.  He arrives in his sea kayak with a freshly baked loaf from Mermaid´s galley.  Within minutes it is evident that John is someone cut from a different cloth, and we are in for a special time.  It turns into a late evening of stories and memories, fuelled by beer and rum and grilled vegetables.  

John´s a wonderful raconteur, full of colourful stories, engaging, interesting.  But there is more.  His lifestyle, indeed his very existence, is a challenge to consumerism, to accumulation, to striving.  By the standards of the mainstream John Smith cannot exist, and in practical terms for them he more or less does not exist.  No bank account, no “fixed abode”, no “job”.  He sails a traditional wooden cargo boat built on a Carriacou beach, a boat with plenty of history.  He rescued and painstakingly restored the partially sunken Mermaid by hand, after a previous shipwreck in the 70s saw him bivouacking for a few months in the Swedish cemetery on St Barths. 

The Eastern Caribbean back then must have been a remarkable place.  Along with John Smith you would have found Don Street, Jimmy Buffett, Fatty Goodlander, Bob Dylan, Herman Wouk and a cast of other unique individuals living a life of freedom on and around boats.  That has all gone now – the relentless march of neoliberal consumer capitalism and disneyfication has rendered those islands into a theme park servicing first world tourists with a contrived pastiche of Caribbean life.  As John puts it, the Eastern Caribbean today is “embarrassing”.

The legend and the person fluidly intermingle.  He is the “chum with a bottle of rum” that Buffett ends up “drinking all night” with in “Changes in Latitudes”, the “hobo sailor” of Dylan´s “115^th Dream”.  The legend and the person are both fascinating.  A life demonstrating that truth is relative, that facts are perceptions, his very existence holding a mirror to your eyes, bringing you face to face with the impossibility of objective truth.

Where does truth end and legend begin?   Postmodernism showed us that truth is temporal and relative (unimaginative conservatives and religious literalists can please go and wail somewhere else).  So what matters more?  The illusion of objective truth that would turn an evening into something akin to reading the stock prices from the Wall Street Journal, or an evening of magic realism flowing like a silver stream from the lips of someone the mainstream could accept only as a fictional character in a novel?

We go aboard his lovely engineless wooden sailboat for breakfast the following morning, nursing modest hangovers, faces smiling with memories of the night before.  He makes good strong coffee and we sit on deck chatting, photographing parts of a no longer published sailing guide to these islands, and listening to John tell stories.  He reaches for a tattered copy of Ovid and reads a few lines to us, then recites a Shakespeare sonnet from memory.

Mermaid of Carriacou with John on deck blowing a conch shell

Later that day, I watch him swim the half mile to shore from Mermaid, towing his sea kayak behind him, playfully flipping on his back to admire the emerging stars at dusk. Here is a man at home in the moment, revelling in the now, drinking in the wonders of the planet and the universe that pass many of us by.  I sit on the dock, cold beer in hand, having arrived in my rowing dinghy powered by a small outboard motor, a rather modest set up by yachtie standards, and feel sharply how much further there is to go in simplifying life and appreciating the wonderful pleasures of the planet.  John´s an inspiration, a man living a purely free life.  I hope I get there one day.

The atypical weather we have been waiting for finally arrives.  We weigh anchor and head towards Guanaja.  Leaving the anchorage we motor towards John´s engineless boat held securely by three anchors, pipping the electronic horn on Otra Vida as a salute to him and the good times we shared.  John springs up from his cabin, joy in his muscles, a big smile on his face, conch shell in hand, and blows us a traditional salute in return.  The sound of his conch echoes across eons of seafaring.  As to my oh-so-convenient push-button electronic horn … well, what can I say?  There is still so far to go.  I hope I get there one day.

Bolivia 2015

From Parque Monticulo your eyes easily capture a panorama of La Paz.  Huge eucalyptus trees adorned with declarations of love frame the crenelated mountains on the horizon.  A Sacre-Coeur of rock silhouetted against the summer sky, the yellow teleferico whispering by in the middle distance.

Eyes drop down to the intensely packed houses clinging to every bit of buildable land.  Mondrian colours decorate an apartment block injecting primary colours into a sea of brick red.  The spread of La Paz stops only where building is impossible.  The valley has long since been filled, and El Alto, hundreds of metres higher on the flat Altiplano above La Paz, is the spillover.

A classical fountain, currently dry, sits in the middle of the park, shaded by complex branches of evergreen trees.  Birds flutter limb to limb singing their songs into the contemplative afternoon. Andean mountains push skywards, desire manifested in pink and beige and grey-green forests, the white snow on Illimani aristocratically towering above all that surrounds it.

I´ve spent 6 weeks in La Paz in the last two years, not very much time really, and yet I feel at home here.  There´s a peace to the place that fits its name.

Street art springs into view everywhere – it is only a matter of seeing it.  Walking down from Monticulo I glance at some graffiti on a hoarding by a construction site … “art is everything and for everyone or for nobody” … and then I notice the tag “Mujeres Creando”.  Of course.  Mujeres Creando – the fearless anarcha-feminists who contribute so much vitality to the spirit of La Paz.  And Madie, the always smiling, always friendly fixture of Virgen de los Deseos, the downstairs café of their wonderful casa in Sopocachi where I am once again staying.  My little room, with its hard mattress and shared bathroom, is a long way from those predictable hotels in the colonies of consumption where I spent my business days and nights.  It feels warm, loving, welcoming.  What is true luxury if not this?

I walk into the café and see Maria Galindo, activist extraordinaire, sitting at one of the tables, deep in conversation.  Her eyes are aflame like Che Guevara´s in Korda´s iconic photo, broadcasting clarity about a Latino future without macho patriarchy, a future of freedom, electricity buzzing in the air around her.

Freedom.  That´s the word.  It´s what I feel in La Paz.  Even though it´s a city, freedom is right there in my field of vision – the high mountains are no more than an hour away.  Wordsworth, writing in the English Lake District not far from where I grew up, found freedom in the mountains and the seas.  For me too that´s been a fairly clear thread through much of my adult life.

“Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,

One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:

In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,

They were thy chosen music, Liberty!”

William Wordsworth

But what is true for one person is not necessarily true for others.  My friend Sylvia has a different response to La Paz.  She notices pollution, overcrowding, litter, traffic – none of which is easy to dismiss.  She feels an energy and atmosphere in the city that makes her ill at ease. 

Her truth and my truth are different, but equally valid (or invalid).  Like in Baudelaire´s The Double Chamber, both beauty and horror are always present – our perception is all we can go on.  What each of us sees is true for us.  Our accumulated life experience builds those doors of perception - Roland Barthes´ insight that we each read our own novel regardless of the intent of the author is much more than merely a piece of clever literary criticism.  For thousands of years the high Andes have been a place to cleanse one´s doors of perception … and duly cleansed what we see remains relentlessly our personal version of truth.  That being the case, isn´t the idea of objective truth a conceit born of scientific reductionism, or the detritus of a world view anchored in religious hierarchy?  It hardly matters which.

So today I will sit back and enjoy the subjective truth of my perception of La Paz.  I´ll add honey to the camomile tea on the table in front of me, and give thanks for this delightful afternoon, these beautiful people, this gentle city sanctuary, this wonderful life.

“An infinitesimal odour of the most exquisite choice, mingled with a floating humidity, swims in this atmosphere where the drowsing spirit is lulled by the sensations one feels in a hothouse.  The abundant muslin flows before the windows and the couch, and spreads out in snowy cascades.

…

And this perfume of another world, whereof I intoxicated myself with a so perfected sensitiveness; alas its place is taken by an odour of stale tobacco smoke, mingled with I know not what nauseating mustiness.  Now one breathes here the rankness of desolation."

The Double Chamber, Baudelaire