Hitchhiking in Patagonia, Tango in Bs. As. - Argentina Travel Story

First, I'll tell you about the beautiful national park of Iguazu, the Catarates. It was one amazing day full of experiences! In the morning, I was a little late for my bus and I saw it driving away without letting me on. I cursed and walked back at the bus station, where I calmly summed up a portion of curses in Spanish to the salesperson. El chofer tiene nada que mierda en su cabeza. Es un hijo de puta madre." A girl told me the cursing sounded very natural and I was kind of proud about that. A few minutes later, another bus took me straight to the Catarates. It was raining and most passengers were workers from the national park. I didn't expect many tourists that day. However, at the entrance they were already lining up. I met some girls from Minnesota with whom I would do the first activity: a train ride to the Garganta del Diablo, the Devil's Throat, one of the most impressive waterfalls I've ever seen. We kept taking pictures (my camera got wet and the display broke) of the violent water amassing in the giant Devil's gulp down. The mist was fascinating, we were just looking down into a white warm cloud of water. I'm less afraid to die now because I can imagine better how I want it to happen. When I'm a hundred years old I'll go to the Catarates de Iguazu with an inflatable rubber boat. I'll sneak over the railing and row my boat just in front of the waterfall, working against the stream. At a certain moment I will sigh with a thankful smile on my face and slowly lift my oars out of the water. And then the waterfall will just swallow everything. I think this is a very good way to go. If you're still around in 2079, watch the news.
After that trip, I redeemed my voucher for the "adventure" tour, and was put on a gas truck that slowly drove down a jungle path. A nice lady told us about the Cappuchine monkeys, about the bamboo canes that grow about three centimeters a day and other natural facts. The dog-sized mammal Coati, that looks like an ant eater is common here. So I met this Dutch couple who offered me to send me some pictures taken by their camera, and we enjoyed the boat ride. They parked the boat under the waterfall for a few seconds in order to get us really wet. It made me feel stupid and worried about the computer in my watertight bag. We walked around the Isla San Martin, beautiful view from above at the waterfall, we spotted beautiful birds and butterflies. One large blue butterfly teased us by folding his wings together when we tried to take his picture. We passed the ugly Sheraton hotel, and I saw a bunch of about twenty Coatis on my way back.
That night, the Dutch couple visited me in my hostel and kindly invited me to have a beer together. We ended up having a good conversation about literature. Meanwhile, a Persian guy made the face of the woman with clay ("I make you face wihth cley") for ten dollars. We also had dinner together; the steak and the Malbec were really good. When I arrived at the hostel, I was told that the guy from the other night had been there asking for me. Probably, one of the willing girls had been with him. I'll never know.

Upon arrival in Iguazu, I checked in the first hostel I saw and booked a tourist-rip-off trip for 90 pesos called gran aventura which of course turned out to be a dull truck ride followed by a boat ride underneath the big waterfall that got us really wet. On the plus side, ran into a friendly couple that promised me to send me some pictures from their camera by email since my own camera had broken. But I will to that tour tomorrow. Today, I relaxed in the small pile (piscina) talking about the hummingbirds.
I walked around in Iguazu a little afterwards. A guy ran into me on the street and brought me to a place where I was offered a free caipirinha. He told me he had been working as a tourist "guide" since he was a kid. He receives provision from bars, restaurtants and hostel every time he brings someone there. He told me this story... he was 23 and he had become father for the first time that morning at 5am but his girlfriend had a problem with her pecho she couldn't breastfeed the baby so he needed some money to buy milk in the supermarket and asked me for it the hospital where his girlfriend stayed was twenty blocks away yes he said she is very young a couple of years ago all fifteen year old girls were pregnant around here we had some empanadas and I gave hime some milkmoney he said thank you you are a "good man" now he could do me a favour he knew a few girls that were willing to sleep with foreign men if they invite them for dinner one of them was his cousin I said well thank you I mean it sounded tempting.

In the hostel, I spoke Spanish with a small Swiss girl called Emily who constantly smiled and told me she was going to study something social in Geneva. We slept with the fan on.

Two people sit in a bar and have a conversation about what they read. Both of them boast with big Authors, with Grand Novels that make it all the way to the intellectualist Olympus. O yeah I read this I read that you missed it O you really should read this and that. They talk like this for a little while and then start to feel a bit weird. They want to tell each other about their latest discovery but they're not sure if that writer is an option for an intellectualist, let alone if he is en vogue. Carefully, one of them formulates something about something he read.
"When I read his stories, I have a weird feeling."
-"What feeling?"
"Like he is there."
-"Who?"
"The writer."
-"The writer? How come?"
"I don't know. It's just... like he is sitting next to you, whispering in your ear or talking very sincerely about things."
-"What things?"
"I don't remember. It's like it doesn't matter."
-"I think we are talking about the same writer. He's anonymous isn't he."
"Yes he is."
-"When I read his lines, I feel like he is so close, like he really understands me, like I can ask his written sentences all kind of personal questions and they will answer me. I can't explain it any better, it's so.."
"Weird..."
-"Yes. Do you have that feeling too?"
"Yes, I feel it too. Would you do it?"
-"What?"
"Visit him? I mean, if you knew his address?"
-"Would I dare? Ha, wow, I never thought about that. But yes I think, yes I would."
"And what if he's just another guy, nothing special?"
-"Do you think he is?"
"No, but he could be, in theory."
-"I don't want to think about that."
"I mean, maybe it's just another hype. They hype everything these days because we are so lonely."
-"Yes, the loneliness spreads like a virus nowadays."
"Exactly, and that writer is a shrewd fox making money of it."
-"A shrewd fox? I don't want to think about that. It makes me sick."
"I'm sorry. Perhaps we shouldn't even want to meet him in person."
-"What do you mean?"
"I mean, what we get from him now, by reading, that might be as good as it gets."
-"Like he isn't real?"
"He is just... helping us consoling ourselves."
-"How?"
"Through his writing we get the feeling of nearness right?"
-"Yes, we do."
"But we're alone with a bunch of printed letters."
-"You can think about it that way."
"So it's US. WE are overcoming loneliness by means of an individual weapon called the imagination of the Other through language."
-"Oh".
"That's as good as it gets. We arrived at the peek of human understanding."
-"Mmm."
"I see that look on your face."
-"What look?"
"You want more. You want the imagination of the Self through language."
-"Stop using this kind of language please."
"Okay. You want him to confirm your personality."
-"So what?"
"He can never do that. Unless..."
-"Unless?"
"Unless he signs out from the universality of language and comes to have sex with you."
-"Ssssh."
"Why you're blushing?"

We all go down that same fucking drain.

Waited a long time in the Buenos Aires bus station, talking to this girl Mira, and taking a bus late at night, a bus that will bring me to Iguazu in twenty hours.

I know people. I know people that really love the idea of doing everything that can be done automatically automatically. They tell me about their dreams. Wouldn't it be nice they say, wouldn't it be nice to have a computer that does all that work for us? I mean, that's what really keeps them warm. That's their wet dream. A computer doing things for us. And then? We will discover that after the computer deprived us of doing repetitive dull things, we will lose our idea of dullness and hence our idea of livelyness, so we will lose our motivation in life and eventually kill ourselves. I don't want to happen. You know, I used to have this dreams too when I was a kid, o how I dreamt about a super computer doing all my work. In psycho-analytical terms it must have been a phase, anal perhaps. But seriously. Can you not dream of anything more - human?

Time passes too fast. I don't have inspiration to write everyday. Buenos Aires is a great city, but for some reason I have no interest in visiting a lot of museums here, nor go to a dangerous neighbourhood like la Boca. A woman I'll meet in the bus station tomorrow will tell me stories about la Boca, that it's really worth a visit but the people there don't like photos of themselves. She went there a couple of times to capture some bridges and old buildings. She was Polish and her name was Mira. She never heard her name as often as she did here in Argentina. So, if you have a chance to go to la Boca, you should do it.

It's a national holiday today but it rains so we can't go to Tigre. That would have been nice to. There are great markets in Tigre. Instead, we would have liked to see a festival movie at the Hoyt. Unfortunately, the movies were all sold out, and we went to have a coffee with an omelet. The day was over before it had really begun.

Gee, this guy must have a huge authority conflict. Since I am not reading this kind of feedback, I provide it myself here. It's a common reaction. This guy is looking for something beyond authority because he is looking for something not yet infected by fear. And that something he hopes, that long thread of fearless experiences will be the priceless totem of his alleged pureness. Because of this, he is too blind to see the world. 

To live for the only thing you find it's worth living for, and be the only one who is denied that thing.

In the café, the Jarrito came with small cookies yesterday. Today, the pretty waitress offered me big cookies because she had forgotten to bring my coffee. They were tasty those big cookies. Tomorrow, I will write in the same place again, and the waitress will bring me a cup of coffee with small cookies and I will think "why not the big ones?"

All because the suffering of the other is more interesting than the pleasure of the other.

After I thought this limerick, I went to the balcony and thought this: We cannot escape.

O The biggest poser might also be saying some true words. I play this. This is a first-person novel but as a person I want to put you first. It is an experimental thing I think should be done and it costs me less time doing it myself than looking up in the records of the surrealist writers who have already done it. It's not about O understanding or even communicating some ideas I cooked up in my private kitchen. Maybe it's about Otherness. About the struggle between the Stranger and his Conceptualization, a struggle the O stranger cannot win.

See what I am heading at? The world is the best therapy. Take my word for it. She can show you so much, you can feel big, you can feel small, you can see how big we are, you can see how small we are. Laughing. Smiling. Trying to live with an everlasting smile on my face that will not annoy anyone - that's harder than it seems. A smile nobody wants to smash off your face. I don't think it's possible. What do you think? You never say anything back. A person that always smiles, she will inevitably become a pain in the ass won't she? I am really wondering. And hoping.

The woman who was not Sara left yesterday.


Instead of this:
"Time/being/freedom/the soul/matter/consciousness itself is like dripping honey" I advice you to write this:
"I think about dripping honey and I feel good."
Perhaps you like those abstraction. I reckon you know them much better than I do. I don't like to talk about these words because it O feels like arguing it feels very bad. Regardless of how many books I read about time, being, freedom, the soul, matter and consciousness, people keep explaining me what it is. And I totally lost my interest in them. I'm almost sorry I don't like to talk about them.
I don't remember this day. I probably wrote in a café until the evening and tried in vain to catch a movie at the BAFICI, went home O early thinking about my next writing and falling asleep with sore eyes and without brushing my teeth! This looks like a travel weblog. And tomorrow I'll write what I had for breakfast. I'll write I had time, being, freedoom, the soul, matter, and consciousness for breakfast O.

I write for a few. I need only a few to convince me of the fact that my endeavour is not completely futile. But don't worry. You can stop reading; I'll have ten other readers to replace you. Writing should be like painting, splashing the words on a mental canvas, and the writer should develop some curiosity about the patterns that he creates, the words that appear on his screen or on his paper like speckles of paint. But what about understanding such texts? Texts remain linear things, concatenations of words one after the other, it won't work if you ask the reader to end of the sentence read this words first before continuing to the. I'm just playing with my medium. Come on, it's monday.

Time is ticking; I have to reinforce my army and adjust its tactics in order to escape boredom once again. Producing nothing but a text is unevitably heading towards boredom. The words just lose their meaning like candies you sucked on for too long, and the sentence they live in won't be able to revive them. Rather, the sentence is doomed to become a funeral of words that are sticking out like tombstones out of the grey earth. I'm trying to pursue LIFE here, and all I'm creating is a dead structure in which even the wittiest remark, the mildest description of the human condition, the most lightweighted verse alluding to the miracle of lover's eyes that shine, all this is just buried in this damned textual cemetery.

What can I do? Ask questions like "Do you prefer cunXXXXXXXX over coiXXX?" (remind me to get rid of the X's in order for the paper version to sell). Shocking! Let's shock each other, let's shock each other as much as we can. Let's cover this whole cemetery with a thin silk blanket and have the picknick of our lifetime on it. There are many ways to shock each other. Some announce morbid actions over the internet. And execute them. The shock can throw us right back into life. But I don't want to be morbid or pornographical. There are other options. In Argentina for example, there is football. I can try to play a football along these lines. The football will look like this: O. So when I continue writing, I will play the ball along the lines so you can follow it with your eyes just like in a real football-match. When it arrives at one end of the field, i.e. the current entry O it means a goal. There are two parties: the beginning and the end. Perhaps the entries will get more exciting. On the other hand: when they start with an O you already know which party scored. Do you have any suggestions for this? How can I make the football O along these lines more exciting?

A few days later, I will be visiting Paraguay, on my way to Bolivia and Peru. A twenty-four-year old girl told me we all have this phase that we want to walk the Inca Trail and visit those countries. She must have had it years ago herself. Yes, we all have this phase. You're twenty and you want to conquer the world, you conquer the world, go everywhere, you have conquered the world and then you start a very normal O life, telling other people that it's a phase we all go trough. Yeah right!
The more alive I feel the more my writing becomes fixed, the more it becomes a token of - death. Mmm, at this point it seems a good idea to let some dogs off the leash to sniff at this paradox. The dogs run towards it, run a few times around it and start to piss against it. I say no stupid dog, you ought to smell and assess the quality of the paradox. Are you a philosopher-dog? You lusty beast! Put your nose up for goodness' sake and smell my paradox. Am I really writing tokens of death here? What is a token of death anyway? Anything that doesn't develop anymore?

Gee, this is crazy shit man.

When I see another movie today I will meet a fat person with a red t-shirt that sleeps during the movie and snorts loudly. I will see him in the toilet and on his t-shirt he has the following text "What do you fear most". Can't get it out of my head. The movie, "Mes Copains" by Louis Gallet, was pretty good. What do you fear most? I fear that people built societies upon the fundament of fear. We share a lot of things, and fear ist about the nastiest of them.

Because today I will also see a group of ugly highrise buildings surrounded by a fence with a guard. Between the ugly buildings, that stood out like obelisks, the grass is very green. There were children playing on it, and I see children playing right at the fence, putting their head between the bars and they laugh as their fat parents march in with their young siblings crammed in an aerodynamic pram. These children will grow up safely. They will know the world as a dangerous place. They will be careful when they go to school. Well done, parents, clap clap clap. Protecting your kids from life is a bit like killing them.

Tonight, I will have a little party on the balcony, and I will smoke something Pana can roll like a real master. The people around me are so young. They are friendly. They are students. I drink wine and I buy a cigar. I treat myself. The thing will be nothing special.

Power and thinking. Again, I am going to tell you something from my authority as a writer of an accepted phd. To many ears it will sound like bullshit. To some ears it will be obvious. To your ears it will be like music. I am not going to tell you about the power of thinking. Run to your nearest bookstore and get hold of a copy of any life-help book if that's what you're looking for. I want to express something about the intrinsic relation between power and thinking. This reflection does not start with a rational argument, but with a feeling. I feel thinking is a way of exerting power. Now rationality has to justify this claim. I have to formulate a theory that sounds plausible to persuade my readers to believe me. Not you, you are already believing me.
So, let's do a bit of theory then. The first step is to formulate the claim in a "claire et distincte" way. The act of thinking is always also an act of exerting power. Exerting power is suppressing something. We think something, a certain proposition. But thinking it is more than reading it in your head. Thinking for example "there are universal values" is more than reading this sentence. To the question of what exactly it is more, I offer the hypothetical answer: the suppression of the opposite. A suppression not by arguments but by the very fact that you are thinking that particular proposition. Thinking is thus formulating rationally supportable claims in your head and exerting power by suppressing beyond rationality the opposite. So I do not believe in pure rationality. I believe if the claims we think can be proved the way mathematical theorems can be proved, we are not thinking them anymore. We would be essentially doing the same thing as big computers that are capable of proving those theorems. I call the surplus of human thinking exerting power because I don't have a better name for it. So, rather then proving our claims, we are approving of them. Compare "I think 5+7=12" to "I think Freud was right." The first case can hardly be called thinking, whereas in the second case, we are unable to provide all the arguments. Nevertheless, we are expressing the claim. Hence, we must be exerting some form of power. What exactly this power is that we exert, remains the question.

Let's demonstrate this right away. I thought for example that our being has become plural since we use phones. I are sitting in my chair waiting for a call and talking to you. I are receiving that call while I try to signal you by nodding my head that I will talk on the phone for no more than ten minutes. I are sorry for that. Now here's something I thought. You probably say "he, this is weird" and you think of an argument against it. It is one person after all, doing several things simultaneously. But my claim is exactly that the person is in the process of being decomposed by the pluripotence of his digital surrounding. You answer to that with some bonmot, and we might have a beautiful discussion about it. In that discussion we are exerting power. We are eventually alone as ambassadors of our own concept of what a person is. We are ambassadors: we don't wage war, but we do exert power.

The movie "dazzle" by the acclaimed Dutch avant garde director Cyrus Frisch was not bad. He had gone through a process of trial and error as he called it, to arrive at a wonderful blend of imagery - and a lot of black screens. The movie is about the relation between Argentina and Holland and was made because of princess Maxima of course, and her father who served in the Videla regime. The concept of guilt was elaborated in an interesting way. I can recommend this movie.

The problems of Argentina. I like to illustrate them by means of yet another short anecdote. I walked about the Abato shopping mall, where the movie theatre is, and entered an electronic store. I asked an employee if they had macho a macho USB plugs. A cable you can plug in your computer and into another computer with an USB-slot to exchange date. But she said they were not available and she didn't know if they exist. There are a lot of USB cables that connect to all different kind of plugs and slots. But not macho a macho. That's the problem with Argentina. There are no macho a macho plugs.

There are big insects here.

We went out and watched some tango. There was a band with a violin player that played pretty well. After the concert I walked into the violin player and asked him hey can I play I miss the feel of a violin's neck sure he said he said you can play wow as I started improvising away to the tango rhythm that was playing in the background good and o how I liked it the feel of an instrument

That night I did not dream about an old lady who was observing me and as soon as I looked back she pointed at me with her stick and yells I am guilty. Of what I stammer of what am I guilty? She keeps pointing and looking at me with this big hazy eyes she points the tip of the grey metal stick towards my chest I feel my heart beating she won't stop staring at me she is staring at me from my conscious. I start thinking that I am guilty of being pointed at and I start apologizing, yammering and creeping on the floor. She has a lot of power, that old lady.
Philosophy should be sprouting from the pain of being. Like a fragile plant. What am I saying here? A plant? Pain of being? I am dwelling in Buenos Aires these days, feel like I have to move on because I already feel too much at home here. It gets a little bit aburrido. But of boredom I already had enough back in Berlin. I had my share, like Baudelaire had his. Now I want something more. And I should stop talking about the pain of being. It's so hysterical.

I had lunch with the woman who was not Sara. Lunch with a lot of carne: cuadril. Big chunks of Argentinian red meat. I loved it. We had a decent wine too. I joked that I would transfer into a lobo, a wolf, so she better not be around by midnight. That was, to my misfortune, indeed not the case. But other things matter more. Do you know what I used to call Nietzsche when I was young and craved for reading every letter of the philosophers? I used to call him lupus significae, wolf of meaning, because that is the way I perceived his writings. The meaning of his writing is so densely distributed along the lines he writes. Where others alude with played subtlety to some chunk of meaning somewhere, Nietzsche hits the bull on its head and spoils the meaning all over the place. Meaning is not something we should anxiously try to hold in our hands, but something we should try to spout out of us as long as we are alive. Something like that. The meat tasted really good.

The woman who is not Sara told me this very significant thing. "I don't want to be the pensamiento of anybody else." That struck me, since I use to transform you into a thought.
Again, put off. another one bites the dust. I want to be accepted. We all want to be accepted. But as what? I guess we all have some vague ideas about this in mind. And they better remain vague. What has to become clearer in our minds is: what is acceptation? We have a romantic idea of acceptation. That it's some kind of deliverance. Once the Other, a school teacher, a girlfriend, some colleagues that used to be mobbing, a postman, a democrat, a masseur, one they've cast this magic spell of acceptance, once they DID this weightless and purely noumenal deed, once they've triggered the mental fireworks of acceptance, everything will be rosy and good.
See? Acceptance ist yet another language game. We have to study its rules. There are certain sentences we want to hear, and as appendices to those sentences, certain acts like the reception of a present and sharing time together. We are tuned to recognize those sentences and this behaviour. In this sense, acceptance can be reduced to self-acceptance. And don't you dare mixing this up with the common cliché (my thoughts are always mistaken for clichés and I detest that), with the cliché that you have to accept yourself before others will accept you. I am talking about something else, something more fundamental as you might. I know very, very few people who would not react to an average reflection like this with a meek shrug and say well that's what I've always said or no no I know it better. It seems so hard for people to just read and listen and try to extract something new from what you throw at them. They read this and say yeah acceptance is very important, they don't even try to ask the type of questions I'm asking here. They take everything for granted except when they can add in their own thoughts. God how closed they all are. So here, it's about acceptance as a language game with certain expectations that are of course always individual. And that also means that we can train them. I can, to give you an example, try to refrase your ignorance in my head, try to feel accepted just because you've read this, not because you understood it.

My hobby is making my character, making it more and more interesting. It is a hobby that is intrinsically tragic. If you (I switch from "me" to "you" don't forget to notice!) try to make your character more interesting you can never succeed. You will end up with a boring simplistic character, a character that is aligned precisely to that one goal. So you have the tragic in your boat. Still want to skipper? It might be the best narcist treatment.

I have to make backups regularly. Backups are an interesting phenomenon. They can make you feel safe. I mean, right after you made a backup, right after you saved all your work on various usb-sticks, as well as on various servers on different continents so that your work will survive a partial nuclear winter, and emailed them to yourself and some best friends. Right after you took this backup measures, you can feel really relieved, like you are on top of everything, you are not vulnerable anymore. Nothing can happen to you because you have everything secured. It's a high that lasts for several minutes before it dies away. But even after the high has died away, the backups will remain. So with all that backups made, nothing can happen to you. Even if you get an accident, you can be sure your personality can be restored from the backups.

I also saw a dog walking.

A few days from now I will experience some unprobable situation. I was playing dice and had to throw five times the same number. The called it the poker. You have three tries. I threw two ones in the first try and threw another one with the second try. Put the remaining two dices back in the holder and shook well. I thought "well, this is ain't gonna happen" and then I threw and those dices roll on the floor and ended with the one up. It was like god was looking over my shoulders and helped me a little with the dices. I want to make two comments about it. One. We were sitting on a balcony under the starry Buenos Aires night, so it is possible that God has seen me throwing the dice from the sky. Two. I didn't win the game after all.

But the thing is, of course, that today is not a few days from now. I don't remember what I did during the day, but at night: tango.

The bearded tango-teacher with his big nose and Russian name moved about like a snakeman or Karl May's Winnetou. His movements were so flexible, so smooth and natural it was a delight to follow him striding on the parquet. He gave his instructions in a friendly way and I liked him. When we entered the Cathedral, as the place is called, we paid 15 pesos, ran up a stairs and found ourselves on the parquet among other dancers. We just dropped in like that. He started with the absolute basics. Holding each other's arms and walking rhythmically which I did with the woman who was not Sara. It is not like taking a walk, you have to move "juntos" the tango-teacher told us and demonstrated it with a woman. Juntos, you feel the weight and push her in the direction you are going to move juntos. It was not easy for me. I caught myself in the act of thinking it was like horseback riding. Pulling the rein with little force, gently let the horse walk into the right direction. But how dare I! Women are not like horses.
I decide to write a story about that tango lesson. A couple gets to know each other and starts with the most basic steps the funny teacher shows them. They mess up in the beginning but gradually they get better. The frame of the story is just this one tango lessen, but of course every step of the tango symbolizes some future events the couple will experience in their relationship. I think it can be something nice when written precisely. That life is like dancing the tango I got from this movie "scent of a woman" with Al Pacino as the blind colonel dancing to "Por una cabeza". It's a nice movie scene. Remember how he says, because of his blindness, "Charly, I need some coordinates here"?

In Argentina, a coffee Jarrito is a medium-sized cup of coffee. It's as good as it gets. I have written in a café that whole day. I have to sit close to the enchufe, the plug. What is there to say? It is like office work, sitting behind a computer and hitting the keys on the keyboard many times. By the way, I like this perspective on work. When we answer the question of what we actually do, we shall not quote the social structures (I am reporting to this person, I am instructing that person) or the abstract denomination of our labour (I am writing a report, I am being the boss) but only the physical movements that are involved. En mi caso, there are a lot of finger movements involved. So what I do for a living is fingering. I finger the keyboard and that is what is recognized in some miraculous ways. Sometimes I still finger my ballpoint or pencil, by holding them and making tracks of ink on the paper. And what is your job?


Of course, I also think. I have been trained to think, at your service. About the mask for example. The face I am so fond of, the face of the person that ought to be Sara but isn't of course, it is the face of a Mexican actress. Was it a mask? Was it her real expression? How sincere can a mask be? Wait, wait, before you throw back common wisdom at me. I read and forget a lot of pages about "Sein und Schein", masks and reality, that should give me some credit. So please wait with the common wisdom. I know what a mask is. It has straps and it can itch when you put it on. Please cross that river and stand on my side. Let's listen to the rattling voice of the common wisdom together. It says we always all wear masks it's inevitable. O how wise this voice is. It freaks me out. It leaves me as a philosopher without a job. I cannot add anything to that. We always all wear masks it's inevitable. Brilliant. The voice rattles on. Truth is not the opposite of the mask, o no, it is rather (beautiful word by the way), it is rather inherent in some aspects of the mask. So now we have aspects. The truth is a patchwork from different aspects that are only accessable through masks rather than the clean antonym of masked existence. The voice rattles on. We smell he has halitosis. But he is speaking the truth. Is ther something more to explore? If you are a philosopher yourself, and I know some philosophers read this crap, you are very welcome to react about it. I would love to explore this question very much or rather, turn it into a question again because for me it has the still-water character of a final answer.

I went to see her that night. We went to a demonstration, a Marcha near the Tribunales metro station. Katia and I bought a bottle of wine, we danced in the crowed and I gave her a kiss. I don't know who she is. That question "who are you?" becomes a grand question, yes it becomes the question that echoes in my head when I go to sleep. As I said, she was not Sara and a couple of days later it was all over. Now take it from me that this does good. I get a character like old cheese.

Luck seems to follow me wherever I go. Even on a normal day when I some work that muse is right behind me. What is the nature of good luck? Getting lucky? I don't mean winning the lottery or living a long and healthy life. I don't know either, you tell me. I feel very tired and my blog is way behind, now tell myself I have to write something about luck. What are we anyway? It is of course just interpretation. I just felt bedazzlingly lucky because of the delicious coffee that was served by the beautiful waitress here in Gallo 702 in Buenos Aires. The waitress wears braces that are glued to her teeth. I can see it when she smiles. That's a pure observation, don't you think? An observation of the kind I want to make them. Preserving our pureness in observing, our mis-en-scène of perceptional innocence that's what I want to do. The waitress. So luck is just a feeling I hear you sigh. A no-brainer. That guy just feels lucky about the little joys of life. Such a cliché. But wait a minute please. Saying you are lucky because the coffee you ordered and paid for is saying you are lucky because you get what you are entitled to. And we are all entitled to good luck and happiness (American constitution). To say you got lucky because you got what you ought to get is to behave in an unacceptable way. We cannot accept that I call this luck, because it destroys the concept of luck. It insults people who don't feel lucky when they got what they ought to get. So, apart from being an insult to some people, I have no idea what my luck is. And I am not interested to know it.

In San Telmo there is a market and a lot of street artists. Painters, musicians. Tourist as far as the eye can see. A painter painted Amy Winehouse in very bright colours using his fingers to the rhythm of her latest record. The result was pretty amazing. The guy kept dancing around in front of the canvas and threw spicks of white, green, purple, blue on it after shaping the characteristic face of madame Winehouse with his hands. He attracted a lot of people with his life-painting. Look! He is doing something. Doing something? Yes, do-ing. Someone is doing something here. That attracts people like flies.

In a café I wrote a few pages. I want to write faster than you can read but I will never succeed. My writing is nothing to write home about. But to deliberately choose this mediocrity is such a liberation of the spirit. Once you accepted you are producing crap and crap only, you can start living. Like a pig in the mud, the mud feels so good on the cold pig-skin. And after many years you might think about other pigs, rolling in the same mudpool. Never mind. I want to demonstrate that badness has a place in the world, that bad writing just like bad acting, bad composing, bad playing, bad sex, bad relationships, bad eend, bad jokes and bad weather has its place on the earth. I will never be able to proof this. Once this is read and known, a one-way process of recognition, of approval and assessment of a certain quality will be started. A process like a ticking timebomb. What will come out will be goodness, and the badness will be forgetten. Why can't I safe the badness?

A Canadian hairdresser came and asked me to use his computer. A little reluctant at first, I saw this man was a real tourist and I let him send an email from my machine. He paid for my coffee my friends had already paid for. Luck had put a few licks of her ointment too much on my forehead.

In the metro on my way back home I saw a smile. I saw the cutest smile I had seen in years. The smile was on the face of a girl and the girl was Sara. Or rather, she ought to be Sara, but she wasn't. That smile changed to another metro line and I changed too. She gave me a telephone number and all that and I decided to call her. Felt a bit like in a movie. The question "who is this person?" I mean when you really ask this question you feel very much alive.

"Mi nombre es Cecilia si necessito cualcosa me llamas..." said the friendly waitress in the café where I write today. Writing in Buenos Aires is optimal. Firstly, it's one of the worlds most literate cities, with an impressive amount of good bookstores. Secondly, the wifi cafés are plenty and affordable. Thirdly, the climate stimulates creativity. Okay, the last point is my subjective experience. I am working an a novel in Dutch in which the main character is called Martin. The café I write in today is called Martinez. When Martin travels to South America he is called Martinez too. The coffee tastes good here, a jarrito with a small glass of water stands next to me. I write for several hours, concentrating on a small ten-inch screen, destracted only by paired female jointed appendages covered partly by petite skirts. I like legs. But I like writing more. So I continue as the people pass the café in a mood I deem hasty. Why? I feel like something is protecting me. I keep surviving in this world where everybody seems to struggle. I just survive sitting here and writing my crap. It's a scandal. It's crazy. Something has to be done about it. Okay, this blog is not my only output, there are also serious things, but still, me sitting here grinning at sixty square inches of a computer screen cannot be justified by even the most brilliant of output can it?
Well, here in South America we don't think so much of a justification. We just do what we do. It doesn't matter, does it? What if everyone would think if they were allowed to try what they want most? Still, I cannot justify it. I am enjoying life and doing for no less than the full one hunderd percent what I want, so I don't have any percentage left for a justification. It's a funny mechanism isn't it?

I walk around with a woman from Buenos Aires today. She is very big, five centimeters taller than I am, and she takes nice pictures of people who sleep on the benches in the belching metropole. We walk through a big park in Palermo and suddenly she has a thorn in her toe. It's bleeding and it won't stop. We turn around. She says she will visit a massage saloon and that will take two hours. Well that's very interesting. I start getting curious about that treatment. Of course she wants to put me off and seeks a more subtle way of doing so than saying bluntly "you bother me". Anyway, we walk back through the park and she takes a taxi somewhere tells me I can walk home. Illusions come, illusions go. And it is not at all a bad treatment to undergo this cycle at least a few time. Without the tall woman next to me I walk on and think about this recycling of emotions. In a way, it must be like a soup in our head, with all those ideas, imaginations, hopes, propositions, wishes drifting in a thick fluid. Shaking it up might not be the best recipe to cook up something marvelous, but it is definitely the first line of a very good recipe. What do you think, Jack? I miss you, by the way. And I like you again. I don't need to ask you for forgiveness because I killed you. I know you are way beyond that. But Jack, do you agree? Is it good to have thinks shaken up over and over again in order to, well, preventing the need to shake them up over and over again? Do you understand what I'm saying? Sorry Jack, I didn't want to bother you. And by the way, I think the emotional brewery in our head is an asset you are not entitled too.

Rested. Travel guidebooks use a rhetorically smooth English that I like to call mashed language. The smoothness of the idiom gives me an artificial taste in the mouth, a taste like a wine that is everymen's friend but leaves the connaisseur with a bitter aftertaste. It's the length of the sentences, the range of the idiom that smells like conceit, the concoction of words like concoction, the showy linguistical brilliance that makes it unreal. I prefer "Russian English" because you can sense a person is speaking to another person. I'll write a short persiflage of guidebook English now, in which I'll just make up the words. Read it and feel it. The rag-gourded boisterings on the trombose-cled aquaplanic treetops reels like a foliage bland as you recuperate the vernicular tresshold. Coming from the redupiated path along the wind-jerbous rodondritis, you haul along the zigzul of weaselbreathed prolasteracs. Following your way over the funneled duplex road, you will arrive at a tagliatelli moon-shaped echterous brailjabber. The Opulence of prigarious randards is tantamount. Be aware of the utriscopical blany-bliny queepers that might peep jeevingly into even the most heedful reeder. Continue to the tumbledomed rogue rascal-castle Plitacus built for his concubinette Vossius in 1578 and gaze at the kart-wodged rillicry that adds to the broader rant of grandiloquence reveshed unto ravenous railleries. Bart the briss brooks of the readily awry restallions and don't miss the trecharian ondulavrigance of the zip-zopped cobblestone blanders. Step in the woggling warrebuster of the cloudy canapé, feel like the crescent king himself and taste the delicoravious ripplots of his royal ruminance. Give a try at the höver-horns that conceile the vaulted frescos on the hovercraft and wert iolic precious plassings on tetrapacks insigned to heist toily twannings. Understand the Urdu language of the regalious utalotrope ultra-jaded reips dwelling in the klopwarthed mansions that are scattered around this marvelotritious moor-montobine. On your way back, don't skip the lavender lurage as it eropiates your ralapious rovus.

The feel of a language is an independent factor, beyond the idiom. Rested.

Daniel works at the Argentinian Correos. He is a very friendly and goodlooking guy. He travels daily between Cordoba and Buenos Aires for three months now. Before, he went to all parts of Argentina - he knows every Correos headquarter in the country. His camionette is accompagnied by a custodia-car to protect him from robbers since Argentinian highways are dangerous. On his way, he knows exactly where to stop and he eats a bar of Rhodesia chocolate during his break. He always drives at night so he doesn't see much of the countryside.

We started to hitchhike late that day; took a bus to the entry of ruta 9, the main highway that connects Cordoba to Buenos Aires. We got a ride right away, in the back of a truck, to the service station where we started to ask the camiones that headed back to La Capital. Many of them had strict regulations so they weren't allowed to take anyone, but after about half an hour we were lucky with a guy who drove the Correas - Daniel. We drove the whole night. The precision of his manoeuvring around the slower camiones was intriguing. We arrived in Buenos Aires very early the next morning.

In our culture, peope are used to swallowing huge amounts of narratives. I don't want to bluntly shoot at this fact from my position here as a blog-author, but let's just consider it. All the stories, all the movies, all the news facts. It might just be too much, it becomes like fast food. We eat and eat and stuff ourselves with fats that make us only crave for more of the same. The very diversity of the cinematographical and real-life narratives we are confronted with daily might result in a very monotonous diet.

I could work in a fancy café once again. I really have to get used to it. The idea is to write a certain amount of pages per kilometer so I can keep track of where on earth I will be when I finish certain chapters, stories, word-rows. A couple of hours went by with me peacefully striking the keys on my little white computer and producing some word-rows that are not relevant here.

We had icecream. We bought dinner in a supermarket. We had sausages, plenty of rice, and carrots. Our hosts liked it. Kaiser, the nine month brown dog that took the cat's whole head in his mouth as a sign of affection, got some of the leftovers.

We woke up in Cordoba and started walking around under the hot sun. In this city we had the address of some couchsurfers so we called them we were coming and jumped on a crowded bus. After a twenty minute bus ride we arrived at their place, a small one-floor white casa with a garden around it. Meri and Viktor are so kind.
After arranging some things we went back to the center to enjoy the architecture and the atmosphere of Buenos Aires main rival. The only beggars we saw were sitting in front of the neogothic church. The two-million city was kept really clean; 't was a delight to sit down on the grass and share a small bottle of Carcasconne, inexpensive Mendozean wine. A small museum Meri showed us had an agreeable collection of modern Argentinian art on display; I remember a girl carrying a blue hare through a wood.

You're reading the Original here. The raw version, the unabridged account of a trip that has yet to become bolder, to lift off as it were. You can copy this original; it is not protected. No-one will come and make the claim of intellectual ownership. No-one will sue you when you use these lines to suit any occasion. No-one will ask any questions. But believe me: there is no better way to protect the Original.

What would Jack have done? He would have treated Sara and drink a good Cabernet Sauvignon or Malbec with her, he would have lied his hand on her rounder parts and sing a hymn to the moon with her. He wouldn't that care Sara fell from the sky. He wouldn't have cared if she grew from the ground either.

In the Mendoza hostel I wrote a few pages. I couldn't really focus on what I had to say; perhaps I had nothing to say.

After a walk through the large well-kept city park we wanted to taste what Mendoza is famous for: wine. A bodega offered wine tastings for the tourist. The most expensive wine costs 340 pesos for one glass, that is about 100 dollars. For one glass of wine. The ladies smiled accordingly and served some tasty water as we were asked to wait for our turn. We looked at each other and the wine-menu that included a range of exotic upper class wines, and decided to sneak out the rustic patio. Wines of superior quality have every right to exist, just like the fruit flies that drown in it.

That night, we could have done the ultimate Argentinian thing: a cabalgata (horseback riding) during atardecer (sundown) to have an asado (barbecue) upon arrival. We could have trotted dully towards the bright peach sunset, singing gaucho cantos, laughing, make a huge campfire and warm the palms of our hands while the horse hoofs would scratch the barren ground, eat chunks of juicy quadril meat roasted on a slowly revolving pin with fat dripping into the fire that would have evaporated with a hissing sound. Unfortunately it was not available.

We tried to hitchhike to Cordoba instead, but at the access road to the main highway we didn't have much luck. So we took the bus instead for 100 pesos en effectivo. In Argentina, always ask for en effectivo because it's ten percent cheaper. It was a cama-bus but the service was way below the semi-cama we had experienced on our way to Bariloche, were the service readily surpassed aircraft standards. The night was no pleasure, but at least she brought us to yet another city.

That night I did not dream about delicious wines flowing from steep mountain slopes (again the slopes) into a lava pool where broadly smiling saleswomen bathed and measured the acidity with the greatest precision then chlorified it and bottled the wine in slender bottles that would start to talk so they had to put the cork on a special kind of phellem they had circumcised in order to close the bottles airtight.

Pablo went out early for work, and we left with him. Still sleepy, we walked along the grand avenue of Santiago searching for a please to sit down and have a coffee. Although the city center was full of people, we could hardly find a bakery like the ones I am used to in Berlin where you can have a cup of coffee and a sandwich. I got a bit mad. What were all those people doing here, with all the shops closed? Cultural difference should be something funny, something that makes you go ah-ha and rub your curious chin. Here it only struck me like a fallacy, a freak of culture. Please do open the shops at times we are used to, and THEN you may serve the most exotic cultural differences, THEN we will be interested.

We took a bus to Mendoza at daytime. Ate something in the station. The bus ride turned out to be a good decision because we crossed the Andes on a very rough terrain near its highest peak - the Aconcagua is nearly 7000 meters high. They would just have to put a small pinnacle of human vanity on top of it to actually exceed seven kilometers. Uphill, towards the pass tens of large trucks crawled up the dusty roads, reaching 3800m at the Argentinean border control. We had to wait only for about half an hour and could enjoy the view. The old dilapidated railroad tracks that curved the grey mountain slopes formed a fascinating remembrance of earlier attempts to conquer the harsh Andean ridge.

Mendoza is a neat colonial town. The center is structured around a two block square with four orbital squares; the south-eastern one called Plaza Espana is the best. Check out the mosaic of colonial madness and the little tiles of Spanish weapons on the floor. Mendoza is very green like most Argentinean cities built in times when space was plenty. A salad in a fancy bar. We spent the night in creaking bunk beds - the blue hostelling international sign had called us in. Wine, papas fritas and a good night's sleep.

Another reason for writing is conquering fear. Perhaps that's also what Franz Kafka did. What is fear, anyway? The sensation we have when something scary happens, like in that funny shower-scene in the Hitchcock movie? The confrontation with an unexpected intimidating fact, or rather with the confrontation a fact that we are able foresee much more than we would like to be able to foresee that fact, or rather the gruesome shivering we feel in our spines when power is exerted upon us in a hostile manner, or rather when we look our certain death in its ugly grinning face when some of the fundamental Angst peeps through the stratum of our worldly ventures. Our life is a peep-show of death looking at itself. Fear, who are you? You are, like everything else, a way of exerting power, not its opposite. But such an odd way of exerting power, because it is not organized around the self. It is organized around the decomposition of the self. Those remarks are just for consideration, please do never take them for granted.

Santiago still. The museum at the Moneda, near the government seat has an interesting interior but the current exhibitions are not interesting enough to lure us inside. Instead, the swimming pool we saw the day before is much more attractive. The hot day makes me lazy and I played in the water with a small blue ball only for about half an hour before snoozing in the fresh grass. Take the fact for example that the ball is blue. Its diameter was about eight centimeter by the way. It could have been a red ball, or a green one. I could have left out the color altogether. With the color mentioned, and not the children that lend it to me, nor the curvature or the temperature of the pool, nor the fact that my towel was a bit dirty and in the middle of the pool was a rock formation, nor the English-speaking kid with a grandmother in Chicago that played with me - with the color mentioned I take a certain path. A small blue ball is reproduced in the corner of your eye; the swmimming-pool story is structured around that ball. You see? Now try to apply this to other concepts too, concepts that are more abstract than a blue ball, like knowledge, truth, beauty.

Pablo took us to a friend and then to another friend. We had good Caipirinhas in several Santiago homes. Most of Pablo's friends are tv-reporters or students of that subject, and most of them grew up in Punto Arenas, in the very south of Chile.Friday the thirteenth. I am in a café where the waiter has bloody eyes and under the glass plates of the tables are roasted and unroasted coffee beans. Santiago de Chili is a magnificent city, a metropole with many faces. I've been here for a couple of days now and moved about the center enough to get a first impression. A lively, colonial city, the people seemed a little bit more relaxed than in Argentina, though street vendors and shoe polishers were everywhere. A grand network of square blocks constitutes the heart of the city, the part where restaurants and shops await their visitors and most of the money flows. Walking on those streets makes a European feel like he never left home.
From the hill "Cerro San Cristobal" (you don't need to write that down, you won't miss it in Santiago) the view of the city is impressive. Its multifariousness is even more noticeable from here: under the thick cover of smog that cannot escape over the surrounding mountains we see the commercial district with its high-rise glass-facade buildings but also the wide cuadros of low colonial houses. Tourist instincts awoke as we walked up to the Maria statue. The Virgen is popular here. I could look up why but I only want to play. Taking a picture with the sun behind her head like a halo. On our way down we discovered two new functions in Silvia's camera: baby1 and baby2. The camera was able to keep track of the age of the baby when a picture was taken in baby1-mode. This could be done for more than one baby, too. That's where baby2 kicks in. Having more than two babies simultaneously is not advisable for technical reasons. I volunteered to be baby1 and baby1 was 30 years, two months and 1 day old. It's not very young for a baby.

The park was huge and included a botanical garden, some cultural centers, a cablecar, a beautiful swimming pool and many barbecue spots. We walked down through the botanical garden that displayed species from all over the 4200 km long country of Chile and then exited the park. We trodded down the hot Avenida Providencia where a trumpet player let us take a picture of him, pointing knowingly at the "Providencia" street sign.

The meat I bought and prepared that night was really bad. A writer should have an eye for details and this is not a detail.
Good day, writing. The apartment didn't have an airconditioning but that didn't bother me. I wrote on this very experimental travel writing thing, associating freely words and thoughts I don't believe in. Where did this writing take place? I try to remember. It was a round table in a kitchenette, a glass table you can look through, and I did not write enough. I felt incomplete in the small room that gradually heated up as the sun reflected in the windows of the tall building that dominated the view from behind the half closed curtains. Inspiration becomes a little devil once you have some nihilism in your veins.

That night we moved on for reasons of tact. A gasstation functioned as a pick-up spot - couchsurfing in Santiago take two.
Pablo is the friendliest guy you can imagine. He picked us up at the gas station and started to proudly show us his city right away. On our way to his apartment we passed some crowded streets that reminded me of certain areas in Berlin during hot summers. People like going out in Santiago. After leaving our bags in his apartment and a quick refreshing shower, we went out to a bar called "el café". I was fascinated by the colorplay of its interior: the large mirror on the wall that reflected the tile floor and the oak tables. In fact, I was forced to take a series of pictures that made the waiters look curious because I stood on a chair and held the camera as high as I could.

Photography. Great minds have reflected on this subject. I feel a bit awkward now, like I don't have a clue. What can I say? Capturing life in a still image. Conservation of a drifting presence, reproduction of the continuum in dead images, holding up the inevitable in a photographical composition, capturing our desire in a reflection that goes beyond language, creating a body of shadow and light, transposing movement into the realm of the pure mind, blah blah. I advise myself, on behalf of you, to re-read some books about the subject.I decide to meet someone today I call that person Sara because that's what first comes to my mind. She was not on our overnight bus to Santiago de Chile, I didn't meet her on the streets of this five million metropole with the 02 area code, neither was it the woman that sold me a ticket at the musuem entrance. She just fell down from the sky, so to speak, almost like a fictitious person. Well I said doesn't that hurt, intentionally using the negative expression to show that I had presupposed it would hurt because falling from the sky normally does. In her case, it obviously didn't hurt but how could I know? Besides, when I would have known all about her being like a feather and all I would never have talked to her and she would never have known about my existence and a lot of beautiful interaction would never have occured. So I asked her if she was hurt and looked at her arm to see if there were bruises and scratches but she was immaculate. She just smiled and told me her name was Sara and I thought something new is happening here. Well Sara I said aren't you hot, knowing that up there in the sky the temperature is a lot lower (I've been on an airplane more than once). Again I supposed Sara would feel in the same way I do, and again I was wrong. But she obviously liked my wrongness, because she smiled once more. She wasn't hot at all, she said she was rather cold because where she came from they could heat each other with their souls. I looked at her and laughed, I told her listen I put you on hold because I just wanted to let her wait. She was really beautiful and I was attracted to her but here I felt I had some power and couldn't resist to exert it. Frankly, I wanted to blow the cold air of our human condition in her face, instead of being heated up by her superhuman prettiness. Just wait for me Sara, just wait indefinitely until I come back.
Words should be fresh when they are written down. But the freshness of words cannot be measured by their individual smell or structure like fruits. They are all connected and build up a giant web that can have a dusty or a fresh aura. And there is another particularity. One moldy word can increase the freshness of its neighbours.

In Santiago we spent a night with Ronald, a Dutch translator about my age who travels with his boyfriend and works in every city for a couple of weeks before moving on. He used the same computer model as I did and would probably have the same shoe size too. It was kind of funny, like meeting someone who actually is in your skin. "How do you do it?"
We walked around a bit to explore Santiago since we were all new to the city. Ended up with a meal from the micromarket consisting of paltas (avocados), bread, bad wine, lettuce, yoghurt, and cheese. The couch was tough to unfold but it worked out fine in the end, whining and cracking like the odd coincidence of our meeting. Reflections about this were due. At least I could say something about themeaning that sticks to almost everything like dripping honey. Every cracking sound, the position of the chairs, the purring of a cat, the smell of onions that you're supposed to cut, the height of the ceiling, the bubbles that rise to the surface of your tablewater, the spiral form of the light saving bulb, it all has some gigantic symbolic meaning, it's satisfied with meaning like dough is satisfied with eggs. Don't touch anything please, the meaning might squirt all over the place.Drop-out. Look at that dash! Drop-dash-out. It's so beautiful. Almost a reason to drop out of the system. On the other hand, inside the system there are many beautiful dashes to, so it is not a logically valid reason. There is no syllogism with the minor premise "the dash in drop-out is beautiful", the major premise "one should act upon words with beautiful dashes", and the conclusion "one should drop out" because one could also act upon other words with beautiful dashes, such as rise-and-shine, live-a-normal-life, buy-plenty-of-car-insurance, become-a-member-of-the-rotary-club, etc. Why do people feel like a drop-out (officially spelled without the dash) when they do something they really like for some longer period of time? Did they drop out of a system that expects them to comply, to give in, to give up so they can be controlled by the system that promises to give at least something of it back to them? I don't know. Making yourself dependent of a system that keeps all the candies you are gonna eat in your whole life somewhere safe and hands them out to you in regular, predictable intervals - this can be a comfortable way to cope with the parabolical curve of our lives. I close my eyes a bit not too much and I see people crushed by some kind of system. They seem to agree they always do of course they are part of the system. There are other people (that would be the "me"-character), who think they made it outside the system, and talk disdainful about everybody else. That is a stupid and intolerable stance. Every human being is part of some system, and he is an agglomeration of systems himself: "outside" is always an illusion that should be demystified by our ratio. It's easier to accept yourself as being a "dropout" than to swallow you are fulfilling a parasitic, dirty, anonymous role in some system you don't agree with. It's a boring and simple mechanism. Reason has to drag everything inside, inside the Reich - thoughtful(!) reason should try to lure everything inside.
Before drifting off into philosophical speculations too much, I want to tell you about my day. It was a terrific one, one of those days you feel on the top of things. We got early in our hostel with the man in the other bunk bed that had been so loud at five am that he woke us up and I tied his shoelaces together as a goodbye. We decided to go rafting. So we arranged everything at some office in Pucon and decided to do the bajo for 8000$ ($ means peso in Chile; we paid the equivalent of 10€), with currents until category three. It turned out to be pretty tame, but it was great fun. We saw some beautiful birds and ducks around the river Trancura. A bunch of large black birds with white beaks (pardon my ornithological ignorance) seemed to be gathering on some rocks amidst the stream. I like the way the stood there, moveless and with their beaks pointed in different directions.
We were in the boat with some American freetime missionaries that had just built a church bricked it from the ground in four days. Four days! Not even six days and then one a day off as decent deities tend to do. They built it faster than god. The oldest guys were over 80. The loudest was a friendly Tennessee woman in her fifties. "Welcome to our bunch" she said. The over-eighties were in a different boat that took a safer course, but still, of our courage not much was demanded. The grey rafts were pumped up and we dragged them into the water. Our guide sat in the back and used a vocabulary of four words: forward, back, stop, and down. There was now left and right, no manoeuvring beyond do and don't, no initiative beyond pulling forward and giving up.
The birds stood very still on their rocks and the wild water that splashed all over us - all over me because I was placed on the right side of the prow thus catching most of the water.
We were driven back into town, had a glass of refreshing "mote" (cereals in a sugary juice, not to be confused with "mate") you are most probably going to drink yourself if you visit Chile, and went back to the activity agency to do canopy. Half an hour later, we were brought to an adventure park with great views of the three volcano's Villarica, Lanin and Quetrupillán where they had hung a few kilometers of steel cables we were supposed to glide on. The thing is, those cables hung more than a hundred meters above the ground. I was a bit disinclined when the guys put on my straps and took us up the hill in a dusty SUV. Above, we were shown how it works: left hand on the straps, right hand behind you on the cable to use as a brake, legs stretched out in front of you. Sooner than we thought, we were flying over the valley - it felt just great! Admittedly, I conquered some little fears of height that day, and admittedly, that made me feel so expletively alive.

Being alive, and not being a vegetarian, I longed for a steak and I had one. A big chunk of red meat. Dinnertime: Mister Writer has his meal.

Our bus to Santiago de Chile left at 10pm - alas, it was going to be a very uncomfortable ride up north.
A day of full-blown hitchhiking excitement. We started off in San Martin, took a local bus to some place in the direction of Junin that threw us out in some barrio with dusty dirt roads and a beautiful scenery. We walked back to the paved road and stuck out our thumbs the way Chris McCandles did in Alaska. A truck pulled over and let us hop on. Seen from the back of a truck the scenery of the Andean Patagonia region is a dream. The volcano of Lanin appeared on the horizon and we gazed at it with delightful respect. This is so good!


Upon arrival in Junin, the last small town before the Chilenean frontera, we got off the truck and hiked a few kilometers down the road until we reached an intersection. Many cars passed, ignoring our dust-covered thumbs that must have appeared somewhere at the verge of their vision. It was damn hot and we walked with heavy packs, but that's the way it should be. It is, in some strange paradoxical manner, causing us to call things perfect. We passed a casern, waved to the guards, footbathed in a small river, and arrived at a small police station where we picked up a bottle of water. A Spanish couple brought us from there to the Chileanean border. The Mapuche village on the way was not interesting. At the border, they had to turn around because they had no allowance for their rental car to enter Chile. We waited at the border control, which has a beautiful view on the Lanin volcano that we enjoyed. A truck took us from there to Pucon and that ride, on a bumpy dirtroad down the mountain pass with great views and the Lanin volcano in a steadily growing distance, the Villarica volcano appearing in front of us as if they were two old friends exchanging smoke signals of affection, the small shacks behind the trees surrounded by chicken and sheep, the colorful mountain slopes edging the road, the weaving people - it was one of a kind. O how we enjoyed it.
We found a hostel with a fair price and a very comfortable matrimonial bed (we didn't care we surely haven't got the faintest intention of ever getting married). The place was called "El refugio". We had some quick dinner and headed to the refugium of dreams in this new town.

Perhaps I dreamt. Say the word. The word is asphyxia. Enter the room. Look around. There are many people who look like you here. It should be comfortable but it isn't. And that's exactly why you're here. They are going to cure you. I write this for people who want to read something else than X, something profoundly different from "I went to cool places and did cool things". I write for people who are headed for the cross - that is of course, the clinic.