Sunday in Sucre With Nel

...OR A Response to My Own Griping

As taken from my journal, July 12th, 2009.

I am out today before the town is stirring, in part because I have no alarm clock and had not the sense to go back to sleep in the cool thin bed, in the frigid room I am sharing with the assistant tour guide who is so furious with her "trainer" she has hopped a bus with 8 of our group and skipped a stop on our itinerary.

I walk most of the morning. Where have I gone? What have I seen? I definitely climbed a hill. And I definitely slid down again. There was the market, full of vegetables so bright they cut through the dim-lit hall like Christmas lights, fruit juice stands, Play Boy track suits and sheep´s intestine. There are a lot of stone streets, many of which smell of rotting garbage or worse. There are families, and taxis, and an improbable number of farmacies and chocolate shops. A street of hospitals, and coffin shops. A funeral. Polluted white stone and signs I cannot read.

I am still in shock at finding myself in a city so pleasing to the eye, though eerily reminiscent of Cuzco (Peru), a place I'd prefer to never seen again. It is all the quasi-European buildings, I think, and the excess of dread-locked been-there-done-that backpackers. And of course those massive, vendor-laden central squares I equate with the Americas. These gems of order and imposed security (at least, that's the idea) are guarded as much by omnipotent municipal building and stoic cathedrals as the bored soldiers with their pointy guns. In the plaza (all of them) the game is indifference: you walk, you watch without seeming to, and feel yourself watched by those you cannot see; perhaps by locals hawking wares or enjoying the sun, or by tourists taking pictures and paying too much for drinks at rooftop bars.

Tired of all this aimless wandering, I settle onto a bench in Sucre's main square (imagine, you can actually sit on such benches! I've always thought them purely decorative). I sit and I watch and am watched. And I think. I cannot decide which sensation is stronger: frustration with my group, or frustration with myself for letting the group frustrate me. I think the second one. What right have I to complain? I am in Bolivia. Again. Even on the worst of days, no way am I anything but lucky.

So in response to my previous griping, I should know by now it is such trivial trials that make the journey my own. This first occurred to me last year (Warning: WE'RE GOING BACK IN TIME HERE!), while riding a camel to our camp in the Sahara. Pretty no? The very stuff of travel ads and glossy brochures. I've been dreaming of visiting the desert my entire life (from birth I mean, not simply my traveling life) and my enthusiasm was unquenchable (speaking of quenching, the keening voice of last year's guide just popped into my head, "Seriously Nel, drink some water! Diet Coke doesn't cut it in the Sahara!").

So there we were, the chain of us arranged by who could stand each other with least difficulty, red sun beginning to set and clouds of sand traipsing 'neath the feet of our swaggering steeds. Again, this is vacation promo waiting to happen, and oh was I happy... and then out loudest and most obnoxious of the girl's (by which I mean her mental age, in body years she was nearly 40) began to sing. Not a song, even, but rather the three-note theme song she and her set had made up to celebrate their special "ethnic garb", makeup and --get this!-- superpowers made up to distance them from the rest of us, and to pass the time on endless bus rides (*Insert Strangled Scream Here*). Though I'm loathe to even re post this, the words to their jingle, repeated ad nausem, were, "We're the Turbinators!"

I found this refrain downright painful and sure enough, the woman in question (who was a teacher, of all things) continued her off-key melody the entire way to the camp where we were staying. By the time we arrived I was on the verge of tears --or homicide-- but that night as I lay awake, staring up at the stars, smiling at the whistling breeze and checking my mat for scorpions, this is what struck me: this is my trip. My experience. And without she-who-shall-not-be-named's refrain it would not be mine... better? Worse? Not mine.

Odd as it sounds, it was my annoyance and my politically/morally/racially incorrect companions who separated this story from some generic blurb into the life and times of miss-adventure. And so I must own it. And the next day, when she went back to singing (by which time even her friends seemed bored) I smiled like Mona Lisa, and thanked the cosmos for bringing me, finally, to this wonderful place.

I hear this phrase all the time from friends, when talking of my travelogues: you "live vicariously" through these stories, substituting paragraphs for places, tiny words for endless distances. If this is indeed the case than readers too must learn to take the rough with the smooth, the everyday good with the everyday bad. And comfort yourself with the fact that if you don't like it, all you need do is click that X or press delete and the experience is gone. Here and now, in the jeep, on the road, huddled round an explosive heater in 3 pairs of flannels, trying to wash the grit out of my shoes with pink toilet paper --the same shoes which the next day a 6 year old in the plaza will ask to polish-- listening to music considered trite in any language, at once lost in and loving this furious, lonely, listlessness...

This is where I am. The place is basically irrelevant. For it will never be as I describe it; I cannot tell you Bolivia, or China, or even Canada. All I have to offer is one pen, one pair of eyes and the thousand heartfelt details that give lift to the whole world.

Details like the amplified voice chanting from the far side of the plaza, where the sun is beginning to warm the bench where I am sitting, "Alo? Uno, does, tres.." as it has been the whole time I've been lingering in this spot. And of course the couple across from me, tangled awkwardly round each other's necks, ardent lover lost in his lady's bosom while she shrugs, looks over at me, and rolls her eyes.

Who is the 13 year old with the 6 balloons, sitting on the edge of the flower bed? And the well-groomed, heavily oiled boy of around the same age sitting on a bench by the fountain trying to look as if he's not waiting for a girl. Perhaps they are waiting for each other? Where are all these dogs coming from? Who is lighting off fireworks, at the height of the afternoon, and for what purpose? There are children climbing on the lion statues which look ripped straight from the House of Lords, while a band begins to play and no one is listening.

I get up and walk some more. I pass an impromptu (or that's how it looks) carnival where the rides/equipment looks so akin to torture it gives me the shivers. Remember how somewhere around adolescence the jungle gyms and playground slides we used as children were torn out and replaced by static plastic "kid safe" versions? Well the rides here... they were probably out of date when my grandparents were small. Yet the kids merely laugh and hit each other with balloon swords and eat ice cream in tiny cones. I shudder in particular at the creaking ferris wheel consisting of dog cages painted to look cheerful. And the merry-go-round which is nothing but ancient Fisher Price cars (I had one of these, I'm quite sure!) on a rusty track.

What is this all for? Does this happen every Sunday? I cross a bridge over an empty pond and am face to face with a climb-on model of the Eiffel Tower. Now that looks like fun!

An ageless woman with two long braids, an embroidered shawl, bowler hat and two children cloistered in her skirt leans against a brick wall, by the quickee pizza parlour, across from El Hostal Colonial. Her eyes see through me, stranger, and I hurry on my Sunday way.