You learn just by letting the time pass by..As I said in the last report, this one comes from the dusty city of Pisco. Pisco is some 20 km to the national reserve of Paracas and the research station in Playa Atenas where I’m working on my masters. Already the trip to Pisco was quite a little adventure. In the morning before our departure I discovered I had some watery diarrhea. Driving through the desert on an ass pressed together, discovering that a bunch of cotton farmers is striking for higher prices and thereby blocking the Pan Americana, made me slightly nervous, indeed. In the end we took a hotel in Chincha in front of the blockade. Next day in the morning I had an elongated hearing with my intestines on that porcelain throne and when they agreed we could pass on and hit the road for the last kilometers to Pisco and Playa Atenas.
Arrived at the research station we first had to clean it from all the sand that had entered it through every smallest crack and thereby got sieved to the grain size of clay. People that have been on Svalbard know about that phenomenon from snow, what they don’t know is that this kind of sand also covers walls and ceiling and sticks to any surface you might think of. Nose-tickling cleaning the four rooms of the station with five people took almost half a day. Those five people where:
Anna from Germany, Anilú, Pili and Alfonso from Lima and me, Jaime our professor stayed in Pisco to prepare a talk. Some cebiche (pronounced: seviche, which is fresh fish with a loads of lemon, onions and some chili) for lunch and preparations for the next day later, we drove back to Pisco to attend the talk that Jaime gave in honor of the 30th anniversary of the National Reserve of Paracas about its problems and co-management as a solution. After Chinese food and a Pisco Sour and some improvised Salsa dancing in the local disco they spent the night at the station and I between bed and “plop”-toilette a little up the cliff. That toilette became my best friend during the weekend. Positioned slightly above the station in the cliff I had a perfect view on the bay when I just left the door open, which wasn’t such a bad idea, not only because of the sight. The nearer part of the bay close to the station is filled with little fishing boats. One of those is ours but since it’s used only occasionally and is infested by seabirds it resembles a grayish floating guano island. I wonder how much German gardeners would pay for the coating.
Next day I felt so bad that I didn’t move out
of bed very much. When I once stood up I prepared 19
mussel-spat-collector-bags for my colleague Pili, who’s working on a
very similar project. After that straight back to bed, there wasn’t too
much fun for me that weekend. Collector-bag preparation isn’t that much
fun as well and as soon as I get back to Atenas I’ll have to prepare
another 80 for myself. On Sunday we left the station and while Pili,
Anilú, Alfonso and Jaime headed back to Lima and Anna even further
towards the north, I had already reached my temporally final
destination in a hotel called “San Jorge Residential”. So folks, just
to get that straight: WE are residing now and you are ought to call me
Your Majesty from now on… Did We made ourselves clear?!! Thank you
then, you are dismissed. Funny wise it only took a glimpse into my
residential chamber to understand that the staff of the hotel actually
had no idea how to meet my royal demands. The walls are painted in a
mint green and together with the white pale-brownish tiles they leave
behind a rather cold atmosphere. I have two windows of frosted-glass
that are located below the ceiling above my head. The brighter window
is located on the toilette to provide a comfortable atmosphere while
performing my presently favorite business. At least in this point the
staff showed a little comprehension for my demands. To get back from
toilette to my bed takes only three steps, this isactually quite handy after a night full of cerveca. And apparently there where others that had discovered this nice feature of my room before. Because when I took a closer look on the top of my cupboard I discovered an empty pill-cover Viagra. How nice I thought, there have been others here having fun, what an omen. Well concluding it can be said I’m living in an “hour-cheap” sleeping toilette. Fortunately there is more than my hole in Pisco.
The city of Pisco, or at least the parts of it that I have seen, is grey or rather dusty. The dust is an omnipresent companion, everyday hustle for the housekeeping women and proof of the desert that surrounds the city. Especially when the clouds hide the sun from time to time, one easily gets depressed. But as soon as the sun shows its bride face everything starts beaming and apparently smiling at one another. In particular the girls seem to be very fond of smiling at me, which could either be due to their friendliness or due to my unusual good looks these days… so pale! Whatever is true in the end it feels great and I can finally understand all these over-dressed girls and their motivation, when they are fetching for compliments make-up all over their faces running up and down the pedestrian precinct in their high-heels. It makes you somehow feel better than you actually are without this unpleasant taste of conceit, because their smiles come naturally and unprovoked.
One of the first places I ought to know a little closer was the restaurant I would take lunch from now on. Ricardo, Jaime’s first master student, showed me this little restaurant were he eats himself. He did not forget to mention the better hygienically conditions of the food as well as the rest of the establishment in comparison with others in Pisco. A quite convincing argument as soon as someone has seen those others. And I have. But there is more to it. The restaurant prepares wonderful traditional food and serves as much chicha as one can drink. Chicha is brewed juice made of dark purple corn called choclo moreno and tastes a little dry and sweet at the same time and thus slightly strange but meanwhile I became a habitual drinker of chicha. Moreover the restaurant is cheap. I pay only five soles and get a whole menu with a starter and a main course. After finding my restaurant I had to find the internet café of my confidence and another adapter for my computer. This country possesses sockets and plugs in a variety equal to their dogs in the gutter. The adapter was found right in the next TV shop where I found the “Sun & Moon” on the boulevard. It is a small café with only six computers and a very friendly staff. Their coffee is rather crap and slightly expensive but the connection is fast and I’m allowed to smoke. After that coffee I knew I had to find another establishment of confidence: my café. The search began on the street vendors laden boulevard of Pisco. Because the boulevard isn’t that long but a mere hundred meters it took only half a minute to strike gold. The café offers some breakfast and a wonderful fresh orange juice. Right in front of it Tommy sells a colorful variety of necklaces, earrings, pins and various other artifacts from joss sticks to swords made of fish bone. Everybody greeted him while he sold his goods to tourists and Peruvian youngsters and thus I thought why I shouldn’t know this guy. Although physically rather short I discovered a huge heart pumping in his wide chest. His outer appearance resembles a cone with legs. He whore a bright pink cone shaped felt hat, above a pair of warm and trustworthy eyes and a bright, some teeth missing, smile. He always wears three quarter shorts and trekking boots with woolen homemade socks beneath a strikingly well fed belly. Especially his hat makes him like a buoy within the ocean of people sending signals to those without orientation and home seeking. He is a man of great composure. Once a boy was talking to him and the boy’s friend stole some small things from his table. He didn’t say anything and I hadn’t even noticed it but when they were gone he simply said: “Those were poor thieves”. It took me less than a minute to declare him my official Spanish teacher, or castellano as they call their language. He has great patience with my dictionary consulting way of talking his language, speaks slow and repeats vocabulary double and trice if necessary. Meanwhile he brought me in touch with plenty of other Piscovians like Julio whom I use to call “Señor Informacion“ because of his seemingly endless library of leaflets in his pockets about hostels, tour organizers and other helpful information. He wants to take me on a free boat trip to the “Las Bellestas”-islands where guano birds, penguins and sea lions reside. Another person I got to know here is Alberto the night guard of my hotel. We’ve already been out together drinking some chelitas (Peruvian slang for cerveca) and playing pool with a friend of him. Funny wise a cold beer is called: una cerveca/chelita elada, which always confuses me because Ellada is the Greek word
for Greece. Those two languages actually feel being quite close to one another for me and does thereby complicate things even further.
Another day in my new café reading Peter Handke’s “Gestern Unterwegs” and drinking orange juice a sudden power failure revealed a rather surprisingly new view upon the other wise very loud and noisy always salsa and merenge playing Peruvian society. Suddenly I could hear their steps shuffling along the boulevard. People seemed to whisper instead of shouting. A familiar atmosphere spread out within a second and made everybody take a deep breath from hectic coming and going. The atmosphere persisted for moments when people started to talk louder and finally the refrigerator next to my table howled up again, seconds before outlandishly seeming pop music filled the same
air that we were breathing before in silence. However short this moment was it opened a glimpse on a calmer and less hectic part of the Peruvian soul that is present at all times despite of loud music and shouting street vendors.
As time passed by my diarrhea persisted. At around Thursday I contacted the always helpful Ricardo to guide me to a trustworthy doctor in order to get rid of this nerve breaking disease. On Sunday I was cured with the help of some tablets and diet chicken soup from my restaurant.
Knowing that I had already lost plenty of time for the preparation of my experimental site at Atenas I planned my first trip to the site without the others for Tuesday. The first thing that happened on that day was to remember that I had forgotten the keys to the station when I was already in Paracas, some 15 km away from Pisco. Some swearwords and two hours later I had grabbed the keys and took a taxi to the station. From Paracas it is another 20 kilometers through dunes and desert to Atenas. The street follows the coast along the bay whereby offering a view on the waterside as well as on the desert.
Although dusty, dry and dead the desert doesn’t hide it’s very own beauty. At some places it stretches out into the horizon with only small interruptions by knot like hills while a few kilometers ahead intense red, dark grey spotted dunes slowly rise into the sky. In the evenings those dunes start to glow like open volcanoes. A little way ahead the dunes, thousands of small earthen knots pop out of the sandy floor divided by cracks created by the wind that are running between them. When the sun touches the oceans surface at dusk they begin a shadow play of spots and lines granting a face to the desert’s dreams. Like the snow on Svalbard, the sand flows like water over the floor when there is wind. The name Paracas is Quechua and means Rain-sand. I love this old Inca expression because it grasps in two words what everybody can see with his own eyes, floating ghosts of unknown heritage and secret destination. Maybe they present the lost souls of the Paracas culture that were once subjugated by the Incas.
Whatever those shapes resemble it couldn’t help me knotting the 52 first collector bags for my experiment together and thus I had to that my self. My fingers still remind me of these two days. Three days later the other students of my Peruvian supervisor Jaime came to proceed with their projects at the station, taking different samples of crabs, soil and scallops, or to prepare their own experimental set-ups. This weekend I should finally be released from diarrhea so that I could help them with diving and sampling as they helped me with further preparations for my set up. I’d now call it “knitting stones” but before I had found a working technique to prepare stones as underwater weights, only the harshest curses were leaving my mouth. What a hassle. In the end everything went
fine and thus we could set up the first inner triangle at the experiment site at seven meters depth before Pili, Alonso and the others returned to Lima on Sunday. Since only the inner triangle of setup was installed and my project highly depends on timing, I got quite a bit nervous that I might had to wait until the next turn of students coming to the station in two weeks time. For that reason I called the always helpful and never short of advice Ricardo the same day. Ricardo then made a few calls and finally gave me the number of Paul, a diving student that he knew from somewhere else.
Because Paul was busy with his own
thesis about eatable algae and working for a company that supports him,
he gave me the number of his Dutch girlfriend Inge. I phoned her five
minutes later and we planned that she would come to Pisco on Tuesday.
In the end they both showed up and we had a couple of beers before we
went to bed because Wednesday we had to start at 5:30 am. For those who
know me a little better the hardest part of that day was to stay up at
five o’clock in the morning. Nevertheless and unbelievably but I made
it. While Paul joined a couple of commercial divers to work at an oil
platform nearby, Inge and me went out with Lucho, a local “watchyman”
from nearby (so called because those people are paid to guard cars,
hotels, everything else and evenspat collectors), in order to set up the rest of my experiment. But Lucho is not only the granter of safety to my experiment, he is also a skilled technician for compressors, boat engines and everything else that is somehow related to boats and diving. Unfortunately we couldn’t set up everything on that day and thus we arranged for a second turn on Thursday.
By now it’s Friday and my experiment is set up entirely. The lines are all not as clean and straight as I wished to place them but I think it’s a workable area and sampling will work out fine in the end. But what happened in between. Well, on Monday I became the supermodel of my hotel, when they asked me to pose in their rooms for photos on their internet site. Please don’t ask for the address and the time you might be able to watch them there… I don’t know it!!! Anyway I’ll tell you as soon as I know. But the best is that got a new room for the same price. I am not leaving in a sleeping toilette anymore. By now it is five steps to the toilette and I have three windows from which one is of normal size and offers a view on the inner yard of two meters until the next window. I’d call that
real progress. Uh, I almost forgot, I couldn’t find any Viagra pill covers. Today I’ll join Paul and Inge towards Lima in order to talk to my professor again and have some
nice beers with Fernando. I hope you are all fine and have as wonderful days as I have here…
Sincerely yours,
Liko
