Setting foot on the island, I was a bit nervous. Four years ago, first visiting the universities in England felt a bit like this.

I found a single street village built around a tranquil blue bay. Half the town, maybe more, is bars and dive centers. The dialect is Carribean pirate English.

Cat Empire plays everywhere.

Sold.

A thin, sandy layer of dust covers its every street and coats its every colorful, crumbling house. With every passing car it shoots up. With every swinging door it rains down. That is to say, it doesn't do either very often in little, lazy Leon.

The locals, when they move, move like they have nowhere to go. They have seen a lot. The revolution wasn't so long ago.

They still remember it in lost, leftist Leon.

They still remember the struggle, its causes, its consequences. They still remember the sounds of airplanes in the night, the smell of powder and the victory cries. They still remember what it felt like, having hope.

Its their defeat that they try to forget in lovely, lonely Leon.

--

Salento is a cool, small town, set in the mountains which are thickly and colorfully covered in tropical forest and surrounded by coffee farms.

The locals wear big cowboy hats, very short ponchos and hang metre-long knives on their belts. Most are big fans of General Wellington's boots. It is also the first town where moustaches are frequent, bushy and awesome. Possibly due to the rubber booots, they all have that slow John Wayne walk, throwing each leg forward and then letting it flop down.

That, the actual cowboy attitude, look and eyes, the small town feeling, the horses galloping down the square, the colonial church around which the city is built, the number of pool houses and saloon-like bars all add up to give the town a "tropical western" sort of feeling.

You could easily imagine Clint Eastwood riding into town with a single bullet in his colt, speaking in dubbed Spanish.

In short, we and I like Salento very much. The fact that the locals grow their coffee and their moustache goes a long way towards this, admittedly, but the Old West atmosphere is a great and unexpected bonus.

As part of a long series of bets, dares and challenges, which I never turned down, never lost, and even (and only) won a free lunch back in Puerto Natales, Maria challenged me to eat her little jar of jalapenos in a shot. We set the reward at five Euros.

Doing the maths (asked Duarte, our currency specialist), it would almost pay for the night's stay at the hostel. Pros and cons weighed, needless to say, the challenge was accepted.

The referees decreed the move legal so I poured in a little ketchup. I took a deep breath. I weighed the glass in my hand. If I had any sense, I'd be feeling pretty stupid at this point.

But I don't and it went in one go. The dozen jalapenos, the ketchup, and a spicy vinnager they were soaked in. I choked on the vile vinnager and the jalapenos nearly made me beg for a quick death. My whole tongue felt like it would set the table on fire if I licked it. My throat swelled up, burning. But I chewed every one of those jalapenos with their nuclear seeds. Red as the ketchup, eyes all wet, I smiled proudly at a job well done.

One by one Maria counted the coins in front of me. Five euros, as promised, in a handful of twenty cent coins. Five euros that I can't change anywhere or do anything with. The jalapenos hadn't made me want to cry half as badly as the ringing sound of coins piling on top of each other.

"Well, you'll have the souvenier to carry around so you can remember me and this bet," she said, laughing. I'll have that souvenier for a very long time.

If I had any sense, I'd feel pretty stupid.

Tinhamos andado o dia todo a percorrer o Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego.

-Vinte minutos para o fim do mundo,- disse a Maria a apontar para a placa que assim o indicava.
-Realmente, Duarte, se tivesses vinte minutos para o fim do mundo, que é que fazias?
-Aqui?
-Não sei, em qualquer lugar.
-Se fosse aqui, deitava-me.

--

À espera que o mundo acabe

After over eight hours of Spanish dubbed torture, the final scene of the final Twillight "saga" film sparkled on the tiny screen.

Bored, twelve hours into the bus ride, I looked out of the right-hand window and noticed the dizzying height at which our thin tar road unwound along the mountainside. The bus turned a sharp turn. A silver box emerged on our left. I couldn't tell what it was but it was awfully close.

Breaks screeched.

An old lady gasped.

...

The kid on my left had had to take off his shirt after throwing up on it. He peed into a plastic bag. Throughout the night, he had slept with his mother and his younger sister in a pretzel of limbs that had a tendency of flopping onto me: heads on my lap, hands on my face, feet on my knees. His sister cried every three minutes and a half and needed diaper changes about twice as often.

The two men on my right smelt like black horses when they run in the midday heat. Due to some unexplainable physical impediment, they couldn't keep their arms down. One of them kept the mugshot of his son in his wallet.

To the sound of a dull thud, we crashed against the oncoming silver truck.

We would later laugh about choosing the cheapest bus and the dangerous route.

Note: Later.

I remember an old conversation with a good friend, not so many months ago. I was going through a rough time at work, and there were three of us on the roof, and I was getting it off my chest.

"You know, most times I come home and I can't even remember what I've spent my day doing." She's always been so much older than me, where it counts. She said:

"That's what you call growing -"

"Hmm?"

"You know what, never mind." I shrugged, a little smug.

I remember this old conversation and I stretch out my arms. I yawn a little bit. Across from me I watch islands like hills like ghosts drift by in chiaroscuro layers. I've had three days to think about a lot of things.

And every day I know exactly what I did.



(-on the Virtues of Being Normal)

Aboard the Evangelistas

--

"In Argentina, among some intellectual circles, we read a lot of Fernando Pessoa.
He is, I think, very Portuguese. You are at the same time open like the sea, but so closed."
- The polyglot Argentine, hiker, guide, naturalist and intellectual in Puerto Natales

"Tell me, nurse, what´s wrong with me?" The French girl said, putting down her white wine. The nurse was a tall blonde danish girl.

Now I realise that this sounds just like the opening for an adult-rated film, but bear with me here.

"Every day I am tired. I sleep too much. Tell me nurse."

"Nothing," the nurse said. "You're just bored. You've spent three days on a boat. You don't have anything to do so you sleep and you eat, is all."

"But I'm always like this. Even when I'm working, I wake up feeling tired. I worry about it, I think about it a lot."

"You're not working now - you're on holidays so you can sleep as much as you want. Without worrying. Maybe you're only tired because of that."

"Yeah. That's my problem. Maybe I think too much."

"You should drink not think!" The nurse said, raising her glass of boxed red. My kind of nurse.

Later, the French girl said:

"The Swedish are my dream. That's my mission you know? To fuck a swedish every place that I go. It's been a problem, though. There's so few of them travelling."

Now I realise this sounds like the premise for an adult-rated film, but bear with me here.

Old Chum

When I arrived at Carmelo, it was smelling like it had just rained, fresh and wet and strong. I was crossing the first road, going downhill, when a one-eyed dog came running up, wagging its tail, barking in delight. It jumped up, knocked my headphones off, licked my hands when I reached for them. It was a greeting between old friends.

He must have mistaken me for somebody else. I guess his one good eye wasn't all that good after all.

"Maf, what's the deal with the buses? You can only pay for them in coins but nobody gives us any change."

"Ah, porque voces nao estao a ver. If you've got coins here you're king. There are almost no coins left. They realised the metals the coins are made of are more valuable than the coin itself, so a lot of people melt the coins and sell the metal. You can get a card though, for bus rides called the Monadero."

I have seen the future and will be building myself a foundry in the basement back home.

The PA announces something incomprehensible. Dozens of people move around us, arriving and departing. Maria, with that backpack on, which is as big as she is (and about twice as heavy), asks:

"So, your phone doesn't work, the machine just ate your card - Kiko, what would you do without us?"

A banner hangs on the wall, reads: Beinvenidos a Buenos Aires.

--


"Resistencia"


From the rooftops