some thoughts on some songs

i’ve always loved john cage’s 4’ 33”. not so much because of the way it conveys the relative status and ultimate impossibility of silence itself but for the way in which the audience come to create the piece in some measure, they actively engage it’s principle through performance.

i liked the way david byrne always sang as if he was outside looking in – a kind of anxious, disinterested (unpoetic) poetry of the mundane and absurd.

i still get a weird thrill when i hear kylie minogue’s ‘can’t get you out of my head’. it is a kind of pure pop tautology – it puts it’s addictive primary hook precisely where you can’t get it out of your head and then it tells you so…..along with other aspects of her person, i just find that sexy.

steve malkmus is particularly good at splicing his lyrics with little asides as to the artifice of the song itself – occasionally he just steps out of it altogether and waves at you from the sidelines. ‘stereo’ is an obvious point of reference but it’s usually listening to ‘gold soundz’ when he announces, at precisely the point you know it’s coming, that they are ‘coming to the chorus’ that i usually fall off my stool or spit museli all over my lap laughing.

a lot of hip hop utilizes a kind of self-reflexive narration. the rapper’s flow articulating the very fluency and originality of the flow itself in a self-congratulatory loop. in ‘twice the first time’ saul williams ruminates on hip hop’s genetic connection to the slave song - imploring the beat (as a cipher for the burden of black american history), to stop just as it drops back in. brilliant.

i often come back to analogies with painting. i think of lyrics like recognizable objects or motifs on a canvas, a window into somewhere else. there is something in all the above and an attempt in my own recent songs, to bust the window in some sense. the song takes you on a journey with no essential momentum outside of itself and the moment it occupies in time. it acknowledges the artifice of the construction, self conciously taking apart its conventions and received paradigms whilst at the same time reveling in their peculiar characteristics and intrinsic pleasures.

www.myspace.com/guydale

Quito To The Border

Quito as a ghost capital city on the Sunday morning I arrive. Everyone partying in Puerto Lopez perhaps.

Making enough bolognese to last me four days in an expansive kitchen listening to Françoise Hardy.

Going to the cinema to see Benjamin Button with a girl called Emily Button - poetic, even if the film was utter shlock. (Enjoyed Cate Blanchett though, I have no critical faculties when it come to this woman). We had to sweet-talk our way in past no less than 3 armed guards to do it- because we are 10 minutes late.

Playing songs quietly on the terrace in the occasionally library like tranquility of Casa Bambu with the nice Chilean couple I forget the names of....an amazing view of the mountain flanked city.

Waking up with a feeling I was leaving too soon but going anyway.

The horror of finding my empty satchel still wrapped around my legs on the bus out of Quito....relieved of a laptop with all my own recordings from November, music and photos from my trip.

Arriving in Tulcan border town to file a report at a police station Samuel Beckett would have been pround of. Emily kindly buying some rum which the Ecuadorian police gladly consume whilst typing up my report. (This is the first of two times that someone has entered ´British Citizen´ as my first and second name). One un-connected officer gives me a torrent of questions about English whiskey and also if Scotland is in fact England.

Watching The Squid and The Whale on a double bed in the utterly seedy Hotel San Franscico before the power goes out. Feeling indescribably downcast and philosphical alternately....

A brain like a fly around shit for weeks after. Únable to leave the incident alone...an ever accumulating list of losses, involutary acts of (imagined) violence and voodoo directed at the faceless perpetrator.

A long ride to Cali through some beautiful countryside. Emily leaving for the coast on her birthday. Me being ill, again.

Characters - Puerto Lopez

John and Dennis from Minnosota. Musician and eco warrior respectively. Poker. The dog that follows them everywhere. They´re being quietly smart (Americans) and, I can´t think of a better way of saying it, kind of short and cute.....long chats into the evening with John. Later his lost camera grief.

Fabian and ?. Fabian´s inherently hilarious body language, especially whilst playing pool. Isla Del Planta, playing that weird fill in the gaps game about a guy in a car listening to a record skipping who then kills himself...seeing some blue footed boobies and...thats all. Arriving to a hill top vista and sitting next to two guys holding rifles. Me asking them where they´re from and realising I have never actually heard a broad Alabama accent before, at least not in real life....Fabian asking what they are killing...the slow drawled response. ´Aymm jurst killin cayts´ (I´m just killing cats). The highlight of an off day.

Playing cards with the very loud guy from Alaska who was absolutely fascinated with himself.

Micheal, late 40´s from Sheffield. Works as a driver for an incredibly rich sheik in London - I forget how this came about. Takes lovely pictures which he frequently ruins with unnecessary Photoshop post production (in my opinion). Endears himself to my two german friends by asking them exactly what town the Nazi rallies took place in Germany, by way of introduction...They perhaps understandably don´t reply....the look of genuine curiousity and mischief on his face, which despite myself I found contagiously humourous. ´Travels´ with a stunning 22 year old actress from Cali who cooks amazing vegatarian food, practises transcendental meditation´and poses but naked on the beach for his impromtu photoshoots. My redeeming memory of Michael is of his swaying gently on a hammock in the humid equadorian afternoon reading Edgar Allen Poe and listening to Skinny Puppy. A true one off.

Premature Nostalgia/Dirty Dancing (A Short Defence Of Melancholy)

Solitude. A kind of melancholy viewing photographs from the months past.[i] Meditating on the possibility of nostalgia for an activity that is, in essence, still happening. Perhaps I am more guilty of this kind of nostalgic revision than others, but in any case it’s not impossible to see how a trip of such length could entail such a sentiment.

I have been away over five months. It is now mid-february. I am, on the one hand, quite mystified as to where this time might have gone. On the other there is some evidence to suggest (a largely unelaborated lists of place names, events, smells, sights at the back of a book) that it has been spent in a wholehearted sensory overload kind of way.[ii]

So I am sat with this premature nostalgia and I’m looking at myself having it….and writing that. I suppose this is what I feared a Blog might be before I entertained the idea of having one. A self indulgent mess. I may have become my worst fear. Nevertheless I find myself considering the song ‘I’ve Had The Time Of My Life’ from the film Dirty Dancing.

I have no idea why this example above all others came to me. I can’t admit to liking the song (it reminds me of moles and bad hen nights) or for its context being at all apposite. Nevertheless it’s a song sung, we are led to believe, by two lovers who are addressing each other in the present tense and reflecting on, passionately some may say, a period in their shared recent past that is itself enduring through the course of the song. ‘I’ve had the time of my life, I’ve never felt this way before’. In this sense it seemed a good example of what  mean, of what premature nostalgia might be.

I wonder if it is a kind of nostalgia, if not precipitated by, then certainly conducive to the ‘holiday experience’ since contextually a holiday is, by definition, in parenthesis to the rest of your life. It has a clear beginning and end in time that is distinguished from one’s ‘daily life’ (whatever that may mean). Perhaps all nostalgia is merely processing information in a sentimental way and sometimes there is a temporal overlap not unlike the one used to explain deja vu. In my case this line, between 'daily life' and 'holiday' seems increasingly blurred and that is perhaps the motivation and reason for the reflective but ultimately pointless indulgences relayed here. The nomadic or holiday experience has become 'daily life'.

In any case I am lying in a hammock in Ayampe, a remote village on the coast of Ecuador. I have a cabaña right on the beach which has three beds of which, for two nights, I have been the sole occupant. It has a fan and a shower. It has silence or at least noise that is largely devoid of human intervention. (There are the cicadas and crickets who reach a fever pitch like a nature rave when the sun goes down. There is an insect, I don’t know what, that sounds exactly like the old dial phones used to sound when you let go after the number). It has a shop to buy basics and two restaurants that are virtually empty all the time. This place would be tranquil to the point of boredom I imagine if a complete lack of communication with the world and others hadn’t been the defining desire of your last two weeks.

The busiest the village gets is when all 20 residents and the five tourists distribute themselves into evenly spaced silhouettes along a stretch of beach 3 km long to watch the sun set. (The sun here is an enormous orange bubble that seems to deflate with great symmetry into the ocean around seven pm). In short this is where I want to be, my head and my location have co-incided perfectly. I feel very content. Nevertheless it is precisely here, out of this contentment that the nostalgia begins - is allowed to begin as I stop moving - and it is celebratory as much as it is a wistful acknowledgment of past time, you can ask Patrick Swizzle or Leonard Cohen.

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[i] I want to defend this word melancholy. To wrestle or distinguish it from depression or flagrant navel gazing and introspection with which it is often confused. Melancholy is something that I think can be defined as much by its great beauty and sense of rapture as it is by sadness and introspection. This sentiment seems to me to be exemplified in the music of Leonard Cohen. If it is sad (and often it is) it is sadness elevated to an art form, and one that does not fail to admit the light as well as the dark; broadly life’s sense of wonder as well as it’s disappointments and absurdities. In this sense it seems to me one of the most balanced and ultimately honest and of all sentiments – who has not at some point of great euphoria wondered why life is not always such? And in that thought encapsulated a kind of melancholy that cannot be called sad? (As an aside; a sad or melancholy song that successfully communicates what is I think a not uncommon feeling seems to me to be ultimately positive and edifying. Conversely ‘depressing music’ will always be something that seems utterly compromised by its mode of coming into being – derivative or commercial schlock in any idiom or style that seems bereft of its own voice).

[ii] I only hope these concise scribbles somehow retain their ability to jog the details of these events when I do actually come to set them down.

Agua Caliente and Machu Picchu

A slow ride up through some smaller Inca sites until dusk in Ollantaytambo (via the Inca ampitheatre). The train being craziliy expensive (and in any case somehow too easy). The last meal for a while. Another incredibly bumpy, precipitous taxi ride to Santa Teresa in rain where we spend the night.

Waking at six. San Pedro and a cigarette for breakfast. Hot water from a remote first aid tent. Jordi mixing. Viscous green. A cartwheel on a trainline. Walking. Repetition, sweat and nausea. The wood slats being ou---t—ofs-y—n------c with my stride. Throwing up before a bridge, a little weightless, clean. Feeling better. The sun suddenly hot, present. Jordi, Thai and I bathing in pools around rapids – lots of butterflies, lucid and slowing down a little. Guarda and Lara waiting ahead on the platform giggling like little girls, covered in mosquito bites.

The incredible sound of white water, blocks of sound. Blocks of rock rising thousands of meters out of jungle. Valley gorge. Something about a proper relation to nature. Continuous awe.

Agua Caliente…utter disorientation. Jungle china town. The seeming plastic tin pot temporality of virtually all human constructions (endeavour?). Rain in mild air. Head back on rucksack, to find the middle of something. Turning to the river over and over, second wave, thinking to consolidate, rain on skin, ice cream – a worthy human endeavour.

Strange restaurant table, suddenly enclosed. Food, eyeing bags, others. Guide police lunching with tourists, ‘Inca laughter’. The wildly vacillating turns of my appetite. Fish proving good. Beer too. Ugliest town square I’ve ever seen (fascinating for it). Guada and Lara reprimanded by officials for mounting and embracing its cheap Inca statue. The eponymous hot baths full of fat tourists in brown water. Sickened some. Turning around, tickets in hand. A red hotel room with synthetic sheets. Skin. Sleep. Later, a lasagne, strung out Shithead – losing a lot.

Morning, bright. Out on the street. Late start. Sat facing tracks. Guarda and Jordi already on the cactus. Not holding it down.[1] Climbing steps – an inordinate number. Everything smelling of San Pedro. Ritz crisps. Fruit in a bag. Utter fatigue. Vomiting (again). Relief (again). Jordi’s multicoloured fatigue, green/red under yellow hat. Lara’s bitten up legs. Folk descending. ‘Quince minutos’ they said, every one.

At the top. Parking lot. Plastic ticket office, Americans, cars, buses…a glass of water that costs two meals. The potential that it’s a horrible mistake. Then through the gate and just staring…every direction an unmitigated visual pleasure, a fact in a natural wonder, an intervention so eccentric and perfect it defies belief. The inability somehow to believe it, comprehend it visually. Reframed, built, crazily built.

Two equadorians chasing the girls, but not quite hassling. Official whistles and cigarettes. All kinds of tourist. Its hot. We have no water – just warm yogurt and a mango. Try not to think about it. Climbing again suddenly easier, weight lifted, in mind, passing energy, mood, desire, laughter…charged silent looking. I didn’t think about it. On the steps - the saint who hands me a full bottle of water.

Coming down. Descending finally, the first time all day, in both senses - as if to be synchronised as such. The evening light bathing the whole place in new angles and dimensions. Light hitting rock on a grand scale. More whistles. Four reluctantly ushered out.

Fatigue. An expensive bus I dislike. Restaurant with kindly owner. Pizza. Coca Cola - the best drink ever (for a moment). A better hostel. Hot shower. In the plaza with Guarda later. Warm evening. Gentle, straight, philosophical. Some sweets in my pocket.

A slow, bumpy ride back in Cuzco in a very hot van. Realising how dangerous it was in daylight. Quickly becoming bored of the two fractionally differing locations for my feet. Later. Half hearted clubbing. Torrential rain on the last day. The market and the kindly juice lady for the last time. Saying goodbye to Lara and Guarda. Missing them all – Manuel, Jordi, Joakim, Lara, Guarda.

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[1] I’m sorry vomiting features so profusely in this and other accounts but it is only out of a desire for a kind of veracity and, it is fair to say that vomiting has been, if not (mercifully) a defining feature, then certainly something of a recurring theme.

Some Notes On Copacabana and Isla Del Sol

Copacapana harbour. Four grown men getting scared in a plastic peddle boat shaped like a swan….

Converting most everyone to the game of ‘Shithead’.

The utter strangeness of the spectacle of a priest blessing a meticulously decorated queue of cars whilst the family sup beers and set off fireworks underneath the back wheels.

Thinking Copacapana was a bit of hippy tourist shell with nothing in its middle and, after three days, feeling my first impression was probably right.

Saying goodbe to Joakim on the boat to Isla Del Sol.

Manuel’s obsession (which began in Sucre) with the Lithuanian girl and her ‘Brother’ reaching new levels of self deception.

The weird combination of charming curiosity and utter cynicism evident in the children on Isla Del Sol.

Forgetting my trunks (again).

Amazing vistas walking from the north to the south side of the island. (Isla Del Sol is the highest lake of its kind in the world, so I´m told.

Not seeing any men of the village for days. Wondering what the fuck they were doing and where.

The proportion of children working in South America is, I suppose, a necessity but still I feel quite over-joyed to see a few playing – no purpose (or commerce) involved.

A lighter exploding in my pocket on a floating straw island during a very tranquil wedding ceremony. The faces of the two fisherman sat next to me. One asking me in the most sincere and concerned tone ‘Amigo?’ and me, bemused, feeling myself up for wounds. Thinking for a moment I had been assassinated in the most bizarre location ever. I guess this was funnier than I can transcribe it.

Some Other Notes On Coroico

Chancing upon the very well located £5 a night hotel complete with sauna and pool after the ride. Likewise a three course dinner in the village costing around a pound.

A Plaza of Argentineans throwing highly amused Bolivian children around on a Friday night. My introduction to Lara, Guada and Thai who were all perched on a baron circular border very drunk on Vodka.

Enjoying real heat after a long absence.

Swimming.

Walking out of the village to the sound of Bolivian festival rehearsals (all generations included). (These rehearsals were in fact going on in every place I stopped in Bolivia and, on the evidence I saw, the Februray Carnival would be well worth seeing).

The happy discovery of Fernet by the bottle in the village square.

Fernet assisted activities:

Jordi cooking up an superb asado that garnered the praise even of Argentineans – which is no small feat.

Lara and Guarda dancing like crazy women.

Jordi and Pablo successfully bribing the night porter with chicken.

Manuel playing God.

The near silent disco.

Jumping in the pool at night.

Sunday. Playing an elaborate form of Whist that involves divination in a way. Eating Pizza. Going to the sauna.[1]

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[1] Saunas, I have realised, always tend to fill me with a quiet sense of horror. I’m not sure if the idea of sweating profusely with a group of strangers in the dark offends my British sensibilities or if it approaches and then cruelly retracts any erotic potentiality it may seem to precipitate by its sheer discomfort. Perhaps by a similar token of Britishness, I am just better predisposed to enduring intense cold than I am to intense heat or I dislike them because I always feel like a stockbroker or some such from a typically cheesy American movie. In any case the entire fibre of my being tends to yell at me to get out of a sauna about as soon as I’ve entered one.

'The Most Dangerous Road In The World'

I was warned that it was a dangerous eccentricity organised for and indulged by international tourists alone. They allegedly ‘lose’ a tourist a month (though I don’t believe it). I was however, for reasons that quite escape me, adamant I wanted to cycle down the most dangerous road in the world.

I have said I dislike tours. I also have little time for the vest topped Pepsi Max image of adrenaline sports, but there I was at the summit wanting to get on with it as if the size of my penis depended on it.

It was, to my surprise, an utterly thrilling experience to descend 3000 meters on a precipical dirt track in an hour and a half. It was also, when I took the time to lift my head from my vibrating handlebars, stunningly beautiful. I rode a few feet behind the guide, who also rode like a lunatic, grinning like an idiot through some of the most beautiful sub tropical scenary, rivers and waterfalls and eventually into the village of Coroico. I have a t-shirt to prove it (though I have yet to cut off the sleeves). I am a bit of lunatic on a bike, maybe this is the real reason I never learnt to drive.

Some Brief Notes On La Paz

Loki: A pretty soulless party hostel with great beds. It’s a little Europe/Australasia party bubble. The incongreguity of no-one speaking Spanish, even the manager, in the middle of South America.

Vomiting in my sleep onto those same great beds. The shock.

The spectacle of thousands of different coloured buildings rising up out of all sides of a valley up to 4000 meters above sea level.

The Museum of Bolivian Contemporary Art actually being a collection of, from what I could tell, one’s man’s fascination with Surrealist A-Level Art, complete with (the not exclusively) adolescent obsession with large breasts in various states of exposure. Quite bad.

Meeting Narda in Plaza Sucre (which is virtually impossible to get to owing to the fact that it is actually a major roundabout and not really a square at all). Talking Bolivian politics and romantic art in a weird food ‘mall’ eating Japanese food. Watching a remarkably authentic Bolivian Green Day tribute act. Very strange but weirdly satisfying all the same.

Going to watch Manuel’s friends’ band rehearse in uptown La Paz. Encountering the Latin Janis Joplin.

Manuel’s face on drums (whilst improvising his way through a song he has never heard before). Quite special.

Manuel’s face upon first sampling an authentic Bolivian-English-Indian Chicken Madras. Also quite special.

Feeling as if, for health reasons, or I don’t know what, I didn’t completely find La Paz in some sense…like I missed something.

Agua Caliente and Machu Picchu

A slow ride up through some smaller Inca sites until dusk in Ollantaytambo (via the Inca ampitheatre). The train being craziliy expensive (and in any case somehow too easy). The last meal for a while. Another incredibly bumpy, precipitous taxi ride to Santa Teresa in rain where we spend the night.

Waking at six. San Pedro and a cigarette for breakfast. Hot water from a remote first aid tent. Jordi mixing. Viscous green. A cartwheel on a trainline. Walking. Repetition, sweat and nausea. The wood slats being ou---t—ofs-y—n------c with my stride. Throwing up before a bridge, a little weightless, clean. Feeling better. The sun suddenly hot, present. Jordi, Thai and I bathing in pools around rapids – lots of butterflies, lucid and slowing down a little. Guarda and Lara waiting ahead on the platform giggling like little girls, covered in mosquito bites.

The incredible sound of white water, blocks of sound. Blocks of rock rising thousands of meters out of jungle. Valley gorge. Something about a proper relation to nature. Continuous awe. I: small, fractional, humbled…a part.

Agua Caliente…utter disorientation. Jungle china town. The seeming plastic tin pot temporality of virtually all human constructions (endeavour?). Rain in mild air. Head back on rucksack, to find the middle of something. Turning to the river over and over, second wave, thinking to consolidate, rain on skin, ice cream – a worthy human endeavour.

Strange restaurant table, suddenly enclosed. Food, eyeing bags, others. Guide police lunching with tourists, ‘Inca laughter’. The wildly vacillating turns of my appetite. Fish proving good. Beer too. Ugliest town square I’ve ever seen (fascinating for it). Guada and Lara reprimanded by officials for mounting and embracing its cheap Inca statue. The eponymous hot baths full of fat tourists in brown water. Sickened some. Turning around, tickets in hand. A red hotel room with synthetic sheets. Skin. Sleep. Later, a lasagne, strung out Shithead – losing a lot.

Morning, bright. Out on the street. Late start. Sat facing tracks. Guarda and Jordi already on the cactus. Not holding it down.[1] Climbing steps – an inordinate number. Everything smelling of San Pedro. Ritz crisps. Fruit in a bag. Utter fatigue. Vomiting (again). Relief (again). Jordi’s multicoloured fatigue, green/red under yellow hat. Lara’s bitten up legs. Folk descending. ‘Quince minutos’ they said, every one.

At the top. Parking lot. Plastic ticket office, Americans, cars, buses…a glass of water that costs two meals. The potential that it’s a horrible mistake. Then through the gate and just staring…every direction an unmitigated visual pleasure, a fact in a natural wonder, an intervention so eccentric and perfect it defies belief. The inability somehow to believe it, comprehend it visually. Reframed, built, crazily built.

Two equadorians chasing the girls, but not quite hassling. Official whistles and cigarettes. All kinds of tourist. Its hot. We have no water – just warm yogurt and a mango. Try not to think about it. Climbing again suddenly easier, weight lifted, in mind, passing energy, mood, desire, laughter…charged silent looking. I didn’t think about it. On the steps - the saint who hands me a full bottle of water.

Coming down. Descending finally, the first time all day, in both senses - as if to be synchronised as such. The evening light bathing the whole place in new angles and dimensions. Light hitting rock on a grand scale. More whistles. Four reluctantly ushered out.

Fatigue. An expensive bus I dislike. Restaurant with kindly owner. Pizza. Coca Cola - the best drink ever (for a moment). A better hostel. Hot shower. In the plaza with Guarda later. Warm evening. Gentle, straight, philosophical. Some sweets in my pocket.

A slow, bumpy ride back in Cuzco in a very hot van. Realising how dangerous it was in daylight. Quickly becoming bored of the two fractionally differing locations for my feet. Later. Half hearted clubbing. Torrential rain on the last day. The market and the kindly juice lady for the last time. Saying goodbye to Lara and Guarda. Missing them all – Manuel, Jordi, Joakim, Lara, Guarda.

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[1] I’m sorry vomiting features so heavily in these accounts but it is only out of a desire for a kind of veracity and, it is fair to say that vomiting has been, if not (mercifully) a defining feature, then certainly something of a recurring theme.

Some Refections On Uyuni Tour

Four days, five tourists, a cook and a driver in a 4x4. At risk of sounding lazy or dumb I saw natural wonders that often went beyond my vocabulary. For now at least some odd reflections, a list of the locations and a link to the (dubious authenticity of) photographs.

Tupiza

Kollpani

Laguna Amorilla y Casetes

Volcana Uturnunku

Elizo y Grands

Laguna Hedionda

Coipa

Laguna Thermas

Salvador Dali’s inspiration (I can't remember the name)

Laguna Verde

Volcana Licancaur(?)

Geisers (5000 m above sea level)

Laguna Colorada

Train Graveyard

Uyuni

Colchani

Uyuni Salt Flats

Isla Pescado

Leaving Tupiza in a fake Slazenger cap and Addidas semi-rainproof jacket. Everytime I catch my reflection – which mercifully isn’t often out here – I feel like I’m about to be introduced to a dodgy boxing instructor.

Walking out from the crop of houses in Kollpani village at sunset. Llamas. Peace. The most idyllic village.

Watching a young girl in red round up three donkeys. (Inevitable flashbacks to Heidi, the television series, not the ex-girlfriend).

A goat skull in the grass, some sports shoes.

Eating Daisy’s soup with Jordi, Manuel, Joaquim and Fernando in a hut. Evening light. 

The way Emilio (our driver) introduces every single new location in exactly the same casual humble way. With his body twisted in our direction and his elbow as a prop on the back of the seat.

Dawn. I don’t see it enough (or at least not from the right end of the telescope, as it were).

You know you are in trouble, addictively speaking, when you are smoking a cigarette at 5000 meters above sea level. A few years ago I may have taken some machoistic rock and roll pleasure in this fact - but now it just seems a bit sad.

There is no evidence of life at five thousand feet apart from geisers in the desert spewing water of 200 degrees plus.

Seven in a 4x4 chewing coca to keep the altitude shock at bay…a lot of lagoons, each one more spectacular than the last until Laguna Verde – set below a volcano that borders Chilli. The kind of place you are surprised to find looking as Photoshopped in real life as it does in postcards.

Busting my knee (again) jumping off a mud kerb in this crazy terracotta rock landscape. The horror of thinking I might have just ended my trip. (Thankful that it turned out to be more of a cautionary relapse).

Singing songs in a rank cold hostel somewhere in the national park, a little drunk on Whiskey. Thinking for once, some of these songs aren’t bad.

Finding a pair of sunglasses that suit me in Uyuni. 

Being able to extract more than £60 from a cash point.

Salt Hotel in Colchani. A table made of salt upon which is placed a pot of table salt. I thought it was a joke.

Constantly weighing the issues of aesthetics and poverty with a camera.

Speechless on the flats. Sunrise. Alien beauty.

Wind, Sand, chapped lips, bad hair, camararderie.

Buying an item of tourist Llama wear, despite myself.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/muteswimmer/

The Worst Day (In Various Tenses)

I wake up with a surprise hangover. I thought it was only a hangover. It’s 7.30 and Jordi is knocking on the door. We are due to go to the Potosi mines at 9am. I’ve heard little about the mines and read less. That is my way. I’m undoubtedly guilty of peer pressure. I’m going to go even though I don’t fancy it at all this morning. My four Uyuni compatriots are going. I feel dizzy. My relationship with Bolivian food/hygiene has been, lets say strained and I’ve got this mystery hangover (I only had a few glasses of whiskey the night before, to warm me up).

I get through a portion of my breakfast. We get to the office and are served a coca leaf tea. I’m waiting to feel better though. The tour guide thinks I look like Sting or, on reflection, Bryan Adams. I don’t feel like talking about this. He goes on to explain some stuff in the van on the way. I’m not really concentrating. In fact I’m now spinning out. We arrive in the area of Potosi below the mines. I can't really tell you how disappointed I am to learn we actually have to dress up as miners. I hate tours. I’m now wearing mismatching false waterproofs and a pair of wellington boots two sizes to big for me. I’m hoping I don’t have to walk much. I think I am going to throw up.

I can’t really say what happened in the mine itself either. I just know it was the worst 50 minutes of my life. I remember the guide putting a cigarette in the mouth of an effigy of the devil mounted on the wall. I remember not being able to breath properly and mechanically moving in the appropriate directions whilst telling myself it will soon be over – to not breakdown. I’m having a panic attack in short. I’ve got a fever. I remember crawling through holes and ascending a broken ladder in pitch darkess with a litre bottle of water in my hand. I remember hoping my knee doesn’t go again and that I don’t lose my oversized wellington boots in the hole 30 meters deep below me. I remember nearly thinking it was funny to be in the middle of Bolivia enduring a panic attack with chronic diahorea in the most dangerous ‘tourist attraction’ you are ever likely to set foot in.

Over lunch my friends avoid my eyes and occasionally, only half jokingly, ask where I am. I’m glad when its over because, although I don’t have a bed to go to (we are leaving for Sucre today), I don’t have to look at food anymore. I can lie on my bags in this weird seminar living room attached to the Hostel Felimar and close my eyes. The others do their last bit of sightseeing. I don’t want to see anyone. I really am not ‘here’. I want to be somewhere else, in a different body.

I don’t think I sleep in this room at all – I merely hallucinate myself into the dirt under the shoe of the hero of an action movie that is playing incredibly loudly on the television on the otherside of a glass divide. (The architecture of this place was crazy). I can only concentrate on the obstacles to sleep. I am action movie anxiety on uncomfortable rucksack. I don’t know when I realised I was locked in this room exactly but at some point it was inevitable, ill or not, that I was going to need the toilet. The manager has long disappeared from reception. For the first time in my whole trip I am homesick. In fact I am absolutely paralysed by homesickness. I want to cry but I know my stomach will contract if I do. The disappeared manger turns up on the other side of the glass as I’m pissing into a 2 litre bottle of water on my knees. Out of shame (or maybe its the influence of the movie) I perform a sort of rolling dive behind some chairs and am pleased I don’t spill a drop. I am very sick close to tears action movie under a table man.

We set off for Sucre having said goodbye to Fernando. Apparently we nearly died twice on route owing to a chirpy but ultimately psychotic taxi driver who only takes over on a good bend. I am still only remotely aware of what is going on. I remember Jordi telling him he would’nt pay him if he didn’t slow down. In Sucre the boys are indecisive about what they want to eat. I am still adverse to the idea of food and resent the fact that there indecisivness is making me walk around half the city. If I wasn’t so dizzy the whole time I would go off on my own. I only want a bottle of water. Eventually they select the shittiest place I have ever seen with a young waitress that, despite my best attempts, looks utterly bemused at my request for ‘agua’. She is now turning around and looking to her mother for support as if I have asked her something indecent. The intervention of my native Spanish speakers appears to do nothing to resolve the sitution - the girl simply doesn't understand the word agua. Eventually I loose my temper, get up abruptly, walk over to the fridge behind the bar, take out the bottle of the liquid in question (which I can plainly see) and, slamming it down on the table proclaim the said bottle as ‘AGUA’ loudly, so that no one in the bar, least of all the bemused young waitress, is in any doubt. Suffice to say I have been oft reminded of this temper tantrum by my friends since. 

It was only later that I realised I had lost or had my phone stolen in Potosi. (As a phone it was essentially redundant but it also happens to be my camera and only access to portable music). It was a difficult day. The kind of which, having survived it maybe makes you a little stronger. My Father would have said it was ‘character building’.