Channelling the Cane Spirits

Good Friday 21.03.08

Bedazzled by a ray of early morning sunlight, I awoke and peered outside the window. The Lima-Ayacucho coach was weaving through high country now, skirting the gentle slopes of a broad river valley. Rocky outcrops perched like watchtowers over a tranquil scene of farms and little hamlets. People tended to their morning chores outside thimble-sized dwellings while herds of llamas roamed sloping pastures partitioned by old-fashioned stone walls. With the road cross-stitching ever higher, new scenes bathed in morning radiance presented themselves at every purl. The now youthful stream ripped a seam fast and rough, while grassland gave way to heath which in turn yielded to tundra as we ascended into a cloud and snow-adorned mountain pass.

On the backstitch, we threaded through a narrow eyelet dotted with stone ruins and eucalyptus, and I began chatting to a Peruvian woman named Clarice who it seems had been fortunate to avoid my wayward feet the night before. Before we knew it, we had macraméd into the dry, cactus-filled valley which Ayacucho occupies. This town flaunts the second-biggest Semana Santa (Holy Week) festival in the world, and I had come to watch. It was just a yarns-length mototaxi ride into the Parque Central, and I was soon making a nearby hostel my own with a new friend Kike, a Peruano from Lima.

We found a VW taxi on the other side of town to take us to Wari, a Pre-Colombian ruin in the area. The Wari people preceded the Incas, this particular site occupied for some 600 years. With the highway cutting between certain buildings much like the Formula One circuit traces the streets of Monte Carlo, we got the impression the entire site was only uncovered during the road's creation. The ruin of Wari, knitted using a combination of assorted stones and adobe is surrounded on all sides by a giant quilt of prickly pear, bearing thousands of the fruit known locally as Tuná.

Our taxi ride for the return trip was flagged down by one of the classic black-hat-wearing indigenous women and her daughters by the roadside. While one daughter and the family's wood bundles occupied the boot, her mother squeezed in the front seat with me. Halfway through the forty-five minute journey she began breastfeeding her infant and within minutes both had fallen asleep, her head lolling gently onto my shoulder like a boat nudging a wharf. Soon my foot, uncomfortably wedged between her leg and the glove-box, followed suit into painful pins and needles, but when I considered rousing her to mention my predicament, a big brown nipple (now liberated from baby and garment) winked at me in reflection from the rear-vision mirror and I was too embarrassed to comment.

The weekend's first procession began around seven in the evening as a glass coffin containing Christ's wooden body was carried out of a church a block from the central park. I soon became utterly trapped in a moshpit of several hundred candle-wielding devotees, and it was only a matter of minutes before a fellow pilgrim's hair was alight. The brass band played a jaunty tune as Christ pushed through the crowd to the parque central to the showering of petals from nearby balconies. We lingered in the street, which began filling with women of all ages wearing black veils and carrying candles. The Virgin Dolorosa, representing Mary's sorrow, slowly approached on a giant palanquin, sweeping silent reverie before her. The old indigenous women, wrinkle-creased faces wise and solemn cut contrasting figures in candlelight as the last procession of the night passed by.

Despite a hypothermic beginning, the celebrations soon got the heart rate going with the Pascua Toro, the Easter Bull run through Ayacucho's main arteries. Hedonism was at high pressure for the Day without Sin, a theological loophole between Friday's death and Sunday's resurreción. A youthful crowd dressed in red danced to the crazy brass band tunes and began constructing human pyramids and throwing each other into the air. Beer and water also took to flight indiscriminately at or from the pyramids, which occasionally collapsed catastrophically onto those below. Screams and frantic manoeuvring announced the approach of a bull, towed behind a galloping gaucho. Once the animal departed on its less than merry way, the street filled again, and the cycle began anew.

Inebriated from three straight hours of this, we headed to a little district named Flores to fill our stomachs. I thought I'd try to local delicacy named Cuy (known to you and me as Guinea Pig). From what I'd heard it arrived on the plate whole with claws bared and deathly snarl. Fortunately mine was fried to a crisp and face down, and it appeared the canny cook had divined at least six of the Colonel's secret herbs and spices. For those that know me well, this was about the best outcome one could ever hope for.

I lay my drunk self down for a few hours before night two and during the first hours of darkness Kike and I caught the performances of folkloric dancing in the Centro Cultural. Many traditional dances featured from around the country, all performed in classical dress that is still worn daily by some in the rural areas. While this was going on the staunch Catholics were attending mass, the Evangelicals had all paid to see a concert, the indigenous souvenir vendors were asleep atop their wares and the drunks were doing what they do best. We presently found ourselves at an out of town discoteque playing Salsa and Cumbia and I was lubricating my dancing legs with Peruvian beer. Once it had reached critical mass, my one-size-fits-all Latin two-step and unabated enthusiasm made up well enough for the flaws in my technique. Well, at least that's what I thought at the time.

Back in the central park later on, the fireworks had begun and centre point to the whole arrangement were giant castillos of bamboo, mistakenly assumed by me to be works of art but instead multi-tiered platforms of utter dangerousness. Soon all kinds of fireworks were exploding from them in every direction - bright embers cascaded all over, fiery wheels spun and took off, lunatics sprinted about jetting sparks and overhead blossomed glorious bursts of colour. Eventually though, anarchy mellowed to anticipation as the growing crowd looked to the cathedral for the final show. Emerging from the great doors was a pyramid covered in candles and glowing in incandescent blue-white light. Topped by a figure of Christ, three hundred men shouldered the huge structure for a lap around the square in representation of his resurrection.

When I awoke, Peru's biggest holy fiesta was winding down. Everywhere stalls were being packed up, people were beginning to disperse and we took our time walking about, victims of our own sinful behaviour. Ironically, on this day of Christ's resurrection, many in Ayacucho were prone on the footpaths, slumped against walls or face down in doorways. After nightfall, I squeezed into a mototaxi bound for the bus station, and before long had departed for Ica on the Pacific coast.

Thursday 06.12.07

There are places in this world where the alcohol flows like water, where perfect strangers get along, cultures come together (though often nullified within moments) and no-one complains too much if you come home stinking drunk and a little noisy at 7am. I'm talking about the typical youth hostel. For those who have never backpacked, it might be a fairly alien concept, but it does become your home when travelling, albeit one you share with a few dozen or more like (or loose) minded individuals.

Single travellers make up the broth of the hostel soup, the core ingredients of which tend to be of English, Australian, Kiwi or Irish stock; a handful of Scandinavian, North American, Israeli and those of Germanic roots are then thrown in and a sprinkling of other nationalities adds the final touch. The English and Irish are happy to get drunk every single night, and usually spend their afternoons watching football on TV. The Aussies and Kiwis will be scouring the town come evening for nightclubs they haven't been kicked out of yet. They sleep all day. Everyone speaks English, and there are always more males than females. You will hardly ever run into a person from France, Spain, Portugal or Italy at a Latin American hostel, even in Buenos Aires. Since bathroom, bedroom and living room are shared; belongings litter the floor; and beds, clothing and hair often stay unkempt for the whole day, it doesn't pay to obsess that your roommates' personal hygiene portfolios aren't as impeccable as yours.

Not all hostels are the same. Some tend to be quiet affairs - somewhere to stay while studying or escaping everyone else, meanwhile others are the complete opposite, encouraging group excursions and long-lasting drunken orgies where one may not see the light of day for more than half a week. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Buenos Aires, where the two hostels Lime House and Milhouse stand on opposite banks of huge Avenida 9 Julio. The Milhouse rates very highly with many English and Irish travellers, because here the alcohol to weight ratio is very good. For non-vampires though, the Lime House offers somewhere light, relaxed and a lot more worldly, but still with a lively social scene.

The weekend saw Buenos Aires play host to another big music festival, Personal Fest. Me, Anahí and her friend Camila all had tickets to the Friday night show, which kicked off for us with Tego Calderon, a famous Reggaetón artist who was accompanied by a couple of sexy African dancers. In the interim I took the others to see the Dandy Warhols, proponents of cool psychedelic prog-rock before we headed back to catch Electronic Tango group Gotan Project on the main stage. We fought our way through the crowd, filled with tattooed Latino gangsters (in clothing ten sizes too big) waiting at the same place for B-Real from Cypress Hill. Surely this couldn't be right - the stage was double-booked, and when finally Gotan Project's members, immaculately suited in white took the stage, it was to jeers and whistling from the crowd. The organisers had made a big mistake, and the several thousand-strong audience turned on the Tango group, hurling water bottles and the glow sticks that had been ironically handed to every paying punter. During their third song, the lead singer was struck by a pink torpedo in mid-note and they walked off the stage in disgust. Boldly they returned minutes later and finished their set to greater applause than they had begun with, all the while deftly sidestepping the remainder of the glowing missiles.

I wandered off to catch some electronic music, and returned after an hour or so to the main stage to watch B-Real. With bi-lingual rhyming over funky beats and old-school stoner hits that everyone knew, he rocked the place, all while smoking joint after huge joint. With most of the crowd having BYO'd especially for the occasion, it's a wonder the fire brigade weren't alerted by nearby residents.

I migrated back to the dancefloor where seminal New York tech-heads Fischerspooner played an hour of great tunes and then returned for Snoop Dogg, but having had my fill of the crowd, I sat on the grass at the back. Without warning, two hundred people or more began running in my direction, and I did the only thing I could - I bolted too, hiding behind a tent as others leapt fences or fell over in the dirt. It was over as soon as it had begun, but only a few minutes after everyone returned it happened again, and then a third and final time. No one around knew what had transpired until after the event, when we found out someone had been stabbed. The Snoop Dogg show went on, and in typical fashion, he kept the crowd chanting his name repeatedly in several different ways throughout all his famous tracks for over two hours.

A Kiwi friend Ricky joined me on Sunday evening to meet up with Anahí and another friend Elisa at a lake in Parque Tres de Febrero in Palermo. The streets winding through the park were lively at this time, devoted to joggers, rollerbladers and bike riders. Rented four and six-seater cycle buggies trundled past, often filled with singing or guitar-playing porteños, but the lake they had all flocked to definitely looked cleaner from a distance. The four of us departed to Palermo Hollywood in the later portion of the evening, and there was a feeling of finally breaking into the Buenos Aires underground music scene as the Afro Mama Jam session began. Rapping, singing and beatboxing were layered over improvised funk, while guitars, brass instruments and drums changed hands and rhythms. A pair of tapdancing twins augmented the eclectic collection of sounds and the crowd, squashed in between the bar and stage, held dance-offs of their own until management finally told everyone to pack up at 4am.

Saturday 10.11.07

It seemed like the day couldn't come fast enough, and when it finally arrived, it was surreal. Creamfields, one of the world's biggest electronic music festivals had come to Buenos Aires. My pre-party preparation didn't sit too well in my stomach - we had been out at a club the night before, but with the resolve of a hungry mongoose, I prepared myself to enter the snake's lair again, and soon I was buzzing across town with a car full of Argentineans toward the festival.

Things looked grim as an acrimonious wind whipped dust into our eyes as we entered the festival grounds while dark clouds overhead released a little moisture into our faces. It didn't last, and the murky thunderhead passed harmlessly by, revealing a glowing sunset. Despite the air temperature sliding quickly toward single digits, the music was heating up, and for the next few hours in the Cream Arena - one of eight dancefloors, we were treated to some of Argentina's finest minimal and progressive house when first Deep Mariano and then world-famous Hernan Cattaneo took to the turntables. There was scantly room to wobble in the white hanger as several thousand sunglassed porteños (locals of Buenos Aires) jumped up and down in the haze of smoke and flashing lights. I squeezed my way out of the hanger and departed for the Main Stage to meet friends Ali and Brent from the hostel to see LCD Soundsystem. By now, the entire festival site, previously home to the Argentinean Grand Prix was full of people, but outside the body bundles massed around the music it was near freezing.

After a brief respite the headline act, The Chemical Brothers came on and by this time, the main floor (the only completely open air one) was packed tighter than a Guatemalan chicken bus. As the music began with a long humming, smashed wholly and surely by their breaking beats and flowing rhythms, the crowd began to move in waves, pushing and being moved in all directions like ripples on a living lake; jumping together (sometimes involuntarily) with the rising and crashing of the music. In the brief intervals of acquiring an inch or two of personal space, we gulped lungfuls of cold air from above our heads. It was one of the most intense and memorable experiences of my life, and with visuals and electronic music synchronised, improvised and synthesised live on stage, was beyond doubt the best performance of the night.

Playing a mash-up of 80's, 90's and modern tracks from synth pop to acid house and old-school industrial breakbeats, 2 Many DJs rocked their arena; James Zabiela played brilliantly during a period of frenetic dancing that I can barely remember, while none other than Carl Cox played for the final three hours on the main stage to bring in the end of the party and a gorgeous (though wobbly) sunrise.

By Monday we had recovered sufficiently to wander down to San Telmo, and as the originally brisk day turned warm with the afternoon sun, we found ourselves in Plaza Dorrego, the corazón (heart) of the inner-city suburb. Like a family of urban giraffe a group of Argentine models were participating with perfect poise in the shooting of an advertisement for an American shoe company. We stayed until well after nightfall drinking and socialising even once the girls had been shipped off to greener pastures.

Late on Tuesday night i joined my friends for another venture into the world of tango. Narcotango, a well-known nuevo tango outfit were playing a gig at Salon Canning, unfortunately more popular with the classical tango crowd, usually seen by the younger nuevo crowd as a bit boring. When the group came on mixing electronic beats, guitars and singing to with usual tango accompaniment, they didn't fail to impress, but the crowd, attempting to dance a slower Salon Tango to music faster than they were accustomed were nowhere near as dynamic as we had all hoped.

Tuesday 09.10.07

As the precipitation in Buenos Aires turned torrential (for not the first time since we arrived), we left the capital, en route to Cordoba in the heart of Argentina. On the same, apparently treacherous stretch of dead-straight highway where I had seen an accident while travelling toward the capital, we encountered yet another while heading the opposite way. This time it was an overturned hauler reposing obliquely in the median ditch amongst its spilled payload of perhaps a tonne or two of sand. All day and into the evening, we cruised across flat grassy heartland that seemed to go on forever, and when we finally arrived in the second-largest city in Argentina, all was quiet on the city's streets.

The same could not be said the next day when the inner city thoroughfares teemed with people, so Adam and I joined the throng and embarked on a tour of the local cathedrals. The first was a grand peach edifice with blue domes and a giant crowned statue of the Virgin Mary presiding over the interior; the second a gilded Baroque renovation of an ancient Jesuit structure. In South America's early colonial past the city was occupied by the Jesuits, a devout Roman Catholic order, before their expulsion from the continent in 1767. The missionaries for the Society of Jesus were particularly disliked by both the Spanish and Portuguese for their opposition to slavery of the native people.

We treated ourselves to a Parillada come evening, the famous Argentinean mixed grill, featuring such choice beef bits as ribs, intestines, stomach, kidneys and heart. It was a meaty assault on the senses, topped off with a 500gm, 4cm thick piece of prime beef that was undoubtedly the best we had ever had - a warm loaf of succulent delight that was not unlike a dessert in texture. We praised the creature that had previously nurtured this piece of flesh and tipped the staff handsomely, while keeping in mind the entire episode had set us back less than AUS$10 each. We stumbled across an ice cream parlour on the way home, and for a dollar more had steak-sized servings to top it all off.

We were on another bus on Thursday, bound for Argentina's Oktoberfest, held in Villa General Belgrano, a quaint (if a little contrived) town a couple of hours away. The town, celebrating its 75th anniversary, was settled partly by the survivors of a sunken German battle ship in the Battle of the River Plate in 1940, bringing German traditions, dancing, food and beer to the area. The southern part of South America, from Brasil to Chile is littered with Germanic settlers, most of whom arrived during or after World War II.

We spent the hours before the festival kick-off climbing a nearby hill, Cerro de la Virgin to look over the surrounding forested bits, represented by a profusion of classically European trees. In true Latin American style, there was further reward for our hard work - nestled amongst the rocks at the top was a white cage in which was locked a small Virgin Mary figurine and a plastic red rose. As day turned to night the German-style beer from the local microbreweries began to flow while the local schools and organisations strutted their stuff on the stage. Rain too began to fall in near-equal proportions, and with all hotel beds in the town already taken, we left for Cordoba again by bus; followed by another agonising bus journey through the Argentinean prairie back to Buenos Aires the next day.

Wednesday 03.10.07

I had been looking forward to my birthday all year, mostly because I had planned to celebrate it in Buenos Aires. I had made finally made it there the night before, and I couldn't have felt happier. The highlight of the day came in early afternoon, when we left on a bus for La Bombonera, the blue and yellow hued stadium of the Boca Juniors, the most famous football club in Buenos Aires. Adam, myself and the rest of the people on our tour were seated way up high in the steeply-tiered stadium, in seats affording a brilliant birds-eye view from near the halfway line. With over ninety minutes before kick-off the Boca supporters, well known for being the craziest in the world, were already singing, booing and cheering themselves into a lather.

Finally the match started and the Boca Juniors set to work on a depleted San Lorenzo team, while up in a far corner of the stadium a dedicated (and raucous) group of the away fans were making as much noise as they could. As the home team began to dominate, scoring off a brilliant header, the Boca chanting got more and more intense. The stadium, now a Roman coliseum, throbbed with frenetic singing and jumping. The increasingly rabid crowd screamed, cheered and cursed at every turn even when it became clear their team would win. Finally, when win they did, it was to rapturous applause and yet more chanting. As the away fans were quietly led away first by an entourage of police, we could reflect that many Argentinean men, especially the Boca fans, rate Diego Maradona (an-ex Boca player voted the best footballer of all time) above even their mothers, who they adore more than God Himself.

Thursday morning Adam and I caught a bus to Recoleta, an inner-city suburb and, upon finding ourselves standing outside one of the most lavish cemeteries in the world, decided to take a look. All available sites were taken by mausoleums made of expensive stone and stacked with caskets, flowers, candles and religious imagery. This cemetery stands as a who's who of Argentinian dead people, including that of Evita (Eva Perón), the famous philanthropist and former First Lady of Argentina.

It wasn't long before we were making preparations for our first clubbing experience in Buenos Aires, where it is quite normal to arrive at 2.30am or later. Club 69 occupied what appeared to be a converted theatre, with a sunken dancefloor overlooked by a huge stage. Performers emerged in front of us as the techno pulsed, featuring mirror ball helmeted go-go groovers, fat feathered transvestites, barely-clad females on mobile pole platforms and even a strip tease. We took to the podium in the name of hedonism, and partied until 7am, when we caught a taxi returning to destination reality.

It was with a little trepidation that I accepted an offer to play indoor soccer on Friday afternoon. I had barely slept and the only things I had eaten all day, a Quarter Pounder and large fries, were now churning uselessly within my guts. The eight of us playing on a field underneath an elevated highway were soon drenched in sweat, most of all Adam who didn't look very well at all. By the end of the match, I think most of us were happy it was over. Feeling that perhaps a healthy lifestyle could benefit me in some as yet unforeseen way, I swore off alcohol and junk food for the remainder of the day.

Saturday i spent watching sport instead, namely the Rugby World Cup and a cycling race up and down the 20-lane Avenida 9 Julio (The widest in the world) not far from our front door. Finally after a tactical nap, lots of water and perhaps a hint or two of alcohol, we left for Pacha, a world-famous club franchise. A huge white building stands north of the city centre on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, crowded with people, many dressed to impress and sporting sunglasses that are more trendy than yours. The music thumped inside, outside and in the various VIP areas, all of which I was refused entry to, possibly on irritatingly numerous occasions. It dawned on me, at the same time as the sun did over the water, looking around at the multitudes of trashed Argentineans around me, just why they were all wearing sunglasses in the first place.