Across the River

I had forgotten how much I love Uruguay. I love crossing the giantness that is Rio de la Plata, I love getting on the bus in the sun and looking at the green flatness and palm trees. It isn´t wild or exotic, just lovely. I´ve missed the ocean. I´ve missed watching the sky change over it.

I have discovered that I like certain parts of traveling alone immensely. I love to leave and arrive places by myself. To cross borders. To look out my bus window. I´m not such a fan of the parts where company would be nice- like while walking along the sea at sunset, or getting dinner, or catching an Uruguayan punk band performance. But I´m just not into people enough to do the whole friendly hostel companion thing. Fortuitously, I think my number of travel days without a single companion comes out to less than 10. I´ll manage. And in spite of myself I seem to have acquired a troupe of of Brazilian theater kids who sing and play absolutely every kind of Brazilian music imaginable and are headed to the deserted Uruguayan coast. Can't wait for Brazil.


Another thing I forgot about Uruguay is the absolutely fantastic hospitality of all its residents. This whole welcoming, friendly thing is pretty much the standard in Latin America, but here it might be at its max. On every visit, every person I have met has invited me to share anything they have to offer. They have a running joke that an Uruguayan will show up at your house, knock on your door, and ask what time dinner´s at and where the bed is. But this joke is only charming because, in fact, anyone here would cook something up and make a bed for you at a moments notice. A lovely friend of a friend showed up to walk me around the city, took me out to lunch, and then took me home with her to northwestern Uruguay, where she cooked me food, showed me her paintings, and lent me her bike. When I have a door again, consider it open anytime.

Maria and I checked out this marvelous underground public museum in Montevideo and were delighted to find it taken up entirely by an exhibit on city spaces as utopias- as spaces of creation, discovery, wonder, and exploration. Cities designed to play to our human desires for whimsy and for home, for the environment, for play. I´ve spend loads of time studying this idea, from Debord and the situationists, to Latin American ethnographies of space and studies of the history of domination and oppression written into city architecture, in Latin America and worldwide (check out Wikipedia´s definition of psychogeography, it´s neat). It was a lovely treat and really smartly done.


Uruguay has a grant total of 3 million residents. Maria tells me they sometimes think they would have been better off staying a part of Brazil, thus winning 5 world cup titles. I was in Montevideo during the biggest game of their national season. Our power went out 5 minutes in. No riots though! We carry our mate gourd and thermos to the grocery store, to the beach. Jose Mujica, the new(ish) president, is a marvelous lefty expolitical prisoner, who says charming things on his radio show. Maria was good to ask, however, how a country of 3 million can justify being unable to support the entire population. The poverty may be more low profile, but it´s still here, after all.

I´ll resist the temptation to back track and wax on about Argentine political history and current realities-I spent too long studying it to get into it now, and I was on vacation. But don´t forget to read about the exciting stuff going down at Bolivia´s alternative climate change summit right now! (and more). Chaves, Evo, Ortega, Correa, Naomi Kleine, Noam Chomsky, and Eduardo Galeano (those last three being three of my all time favorite folks), will all be in attendance. Adelante, pues!

55 Hours To Buenos Aires

All you busy folks with real jobs and lives keep saying that you just want some time to think your thoughts and come to understandings, but I can now definitively say that after 55 hours on a bus I have no thoughts left to think at all, and no profound realizations to extol. I now know that one can actually become motion sick from sitting down in a cafe and NOT seeing things rush past outside the window, and that most of the part of Northern Argentina that links up with Tarija is pretty, but uninteresting. That`s where Rush Hour 3, The Marine 2, and 10 hours of the bus uniting telenovela Corazon Salvaje come in, I suppose. And at least 7 of those hours were spent just getting across the border and then through the following 5 identical security checkpoints all paced about 20 minutes apart on the highways of Northern Argentina. Nothing like bureaucratic transactions at 4am to reaffirm the ridiculous nature of borders and nations, and the consistency of corruption in low level positions. I was feeling very much like a co-sufferer along with my 100% Bolivian bus group, until we hit the checkpoints. There, my passport was both an invitation to mild ridicule and an easy pass out of any real inspection. Though my light ray based water purifier (I was camping in Mexico!) and my bottles of prescription meds inspired a lot of smug chuckling (where´s she from- the states?) I didn´t have to unpack anything or put up with the insistent derogatory questioning the other folks had to deal with.

55 hour nest

I thought coming back to BA would feel a little more like coming home- I did live here, after all, but mostly it seems just like any other huge city... Seeing my old friends again is wonderful though, and I have a tiny space in a tiny bed in a tiny apartment, so I`m all set! And that`s really the idea, after all. Seeing folks. We have an american queer dj to see spin, a drummer celebration to attend, a Colombian birthday party, and who knows what other strange and largely improbable places to end up. Plus 3 years of local politics to catch up on. And onwards!

ps- keep your eyes out for a guest post on some Bolivia adventures, and a snapfishlink to photos of the crazy boat and motorcycle trip I took last month to the Bolivian Amazon!