BELIZE : 25 Oct to 4 Nov 2008

We spent 4 days in Miami, 3 of them door-knocking galleries which had all recently moved to an area where we were constantly warned to be careful and to be gone by 6pm. We walked around for the first 2 days, observing the odd groups of black and Hispanic home-boys and the occasional black car with tinted windows cruising the streets, then hired a scooter which made things easier but I was always happily surprised to find it still there when we got back to it. The last day we visited the art deco area along the beachfront, colourful and buzzing. The galleries were open and welcoming and most looked at our books on the spot, but as usual, haven't replied to follow-up emails. They're all biting their nails to see whether the up-coming Miami and Basel Art fairs will be the usual success or succomb to the chaotic economy.
We are now "recovering"in the tiny state of Belize City and on arrival in Belize city from Miami, we caught a boat straight to Caye Caulker, a small island to the north.
At Caye Caulker we swam a little, did a half day snorkel tour to the barrier reef and otherwise not much at all. The snorkeling was fun, as we saw lots of sting rays, which the guide threw around like beachballs, felt oily to touch, and were not threatening, as well as lots of colourful fish and delicate coral formations. They say that hammock-swinging is an art form here, but boredom follows quickly. There were a few rasta types hanging around, the odd whiff of marijuana and sometimes the sound of reggae in the distance, but otherwise nothing to do. It was here that the sand flies and bed bugs attacked.
One week later we are scratching furiously at the hundreds of bites all over our bodies! After 4 days we travelled to Placencia in the south of Belize, where it was twice as expensive because of the hype surrounding the tourist development there, but again not much to do or see. We've been lucky to be out of the tourist season, with both Caye Caulker and Placencia very laid back and quiet.
All in all, Belize is disappointing, as the local mix of cultures (a British ex-colony with blacks, mestizos, Spanish, Indians, and even a population of Mnenomites/Amish like Dutch original settlers) etc) is being bought out and flooded by rich Americans who build resorts for the tourists who come to fish, dive and wind surf. There's not much evidence of any kind of culture at all (apart from the Garifunas who've developed 'punto rock', which is just a very fast version of reggae with lots of drumming) - especially as they get American TV here. We stayed in a hut owned by Stan, a very friendly, big black ex-footballer from LA who's been here a few years and says the locals are just plain lazy and expect things to be given to them - in other words they have only themselves to blame.
After 3 nights we spent a day on buses getting to San Ignacio in the west, at the border of Guatemala, which we hope will provide a little more interest, and at least will get us away from the sandflies, which have eaten us alive. Tomorrow we take a tour across the border into Guatamala to see the Mayan ruins at Tikal, apparently on a par with Machu Pichu but less expensive to get into and less touristy. We'll be buying the most poisonous mozzie spray we can find because there might not be sandflies over there but we 've been guarantied plenty of mosquitoes!
In two days time, we''ll be glad to get to LA where we can immerse ourselves in gallery hunting again. We will arrive at the historical eveningof 4th November 2008, when the result of the elections will be known. Everyone we've met here and in Miami are expecting Obama to win, and an awful lot also expect him to be assassinated. Not a pleasant scenario!

I leave you for now with a quote from the lonely Planet guide which is really a true analysis of the atmosphere of Caye Caulker, if not of the whole of Belize. Some of my best pics will hopefully follow soon!
"Belizeans have elevated "taking it easy" to an form (where else will you be told that checkout time is "Whatever times you like"?). Shopkeepers will close early if they feel they've made enough money for the day, and hammock swinging is pretty much a national past time..."

CHILE TO BOLIVIA AND BACK TO CHILE

The last couple of weeks have been the most interesting, stimulating, exhausting and enjoyable so far. From the touristic but quaint small adobe village of San Pedro de Atacama, we travelled by 4-wheel drive with a guide named Giyo, his wife (cook) and their month old baby in the front seat, a young Swiss couple and two German girls through the Atacama Desert to Uyumi, where we then caught a bus to La Paz, the highest capital city in the world. The border was a tiny outpost in the desert, and the desert included the largest salt plains in the world as well as some of the highest lakes in the world, and a couple of semi-active volcanoes. This was a bone-jarring 3 day trip, at altitudes of 3600 to 4500 metres, which gave me a 2-day headache to teach me I'm inclined to altitude sickness, and left us all completely ingrained with dust, despite a hotel stay on the second night which allowed us hot showers. The first night was spent at a delapidated outpost with no heating and 4 blankets were not enough to keep out the cold.

The salt plains were so big that you could see the horizon without any interference in all directions, a huge white flat area that was once a large sea, now almost completely salt, and the few odd buildings and even small villages we came across were made from salt rock. These weird places live off the export of the salt, or else men work in copper mines, and many wear overalls and balaclavas to keep out the dust and the sun. We saw sulphur and hot water springs, llamas, vicunas and a kind of ancient rabbit living in outcrops of rock, strange rock formations named after Dali, a petrified tree, and a large rock formation called the Island of Fish.

This we reached on the third morning of the trip, after getting up at 4am to catch the sunrise there. To demonstrate the enormity of the salt lake, Giyo drove for long stretches through the dark with the headlights off, across a huge plain of white nothingness to this island. We got there in time and climbed to the top, breathing very heavily as the altitude got to everyone. The island is covered in 1000-year old cactii and the fossils of shellfish, so it was amazing to consider that it really was an island in the middle of an ocean a few million years ago.

The further north we got in Chile, the more we saw women wearing traditional dress, which consists of layers of colourful skirts, creamy stockings, shirts and shawls, complete with long black platted hair and a small bowler hat which was often perched at jaunty angles on top of the head. The men wear dusty suits and fedora-like wide-brimmed hats, and they have dark brown leathery skin from a lot of time spent outside and a very obviously Indian heritage. They are tough nuggety people only about 1.6m on average in height, and quiet but very friendly. I think it's a tough life for them and doubt if it's a long one. We saw these people more and more as we moved north into Bolivia, and La Paz itself was an interesting mix of people wearing this dress with younger ones wearing jeans and sneakers. But everyone had a mobile.
As soon as we got to Uyumi, the first real town we came across in Bolivia, full of these people, and with a very pleasant open plaza, and decent food and even coffee, we liked Bolivia more than we'd liked Chile. We were even able to indulge in a good pizza as we waited for the bus that took us to La Paz. La Paz is a very large city based at 3600m in the bottom of a valley and climbing up all the steep sides of the valley for hundreds of metres, and it's a wonder the whole thing doesn't come sliding down, which shows it hardly rains there. It's a bustling, buzzing place, with markets everywhere every day, and on our first day there we caught a local minibus to the market in the hills at the top. This is the largest market I've ever seen, stretching up winding stairs and paths, and for miles along open spaces that were like unused building sites, and into streets that went on and on, somehow divided into sections of second-hand clothing, shoes and sneakers, car parts, electrical, plumbing and building materials, you name it, it was there. Also there were pickpockets and armed police, and despite all the warnings and our general alertness to the possibilities, Geoff was robbed. This involved a broken egg thrown at his neck on his left side, an aggressive old woman pushing up against him as he continued to walk, and some very light fingers. He wasn't totally aware of what was happening, but instinct made him keep his left arm down over his shoulder bag instead of lifting it to wipe off the egg, which would have exposed the bag. He wiped it off with his right hand, and as the women kept pushing him, he moved off quickly to the side as soon as he could. Seconds later he was confronted by 3 police, who told us that was an attack and couldn't believe he hadn't lost anything. It wasn't until a little later that Geoff realised his sunglasses had gone from his left jacket pocket, but he was somehow relieved as they were very scratched and now he had the perfect reason to buy a new pair, which he did straight away for $3.
Three days in La Paz were full of colour, good cheap food at markets near our hostel, and a buzz, which Chile didn't have. It's much cheaper because it's poorer, and culturally more stimulating. On the third night, we got on a bus to Copacabana, a small town on Lake Titicaca. This lake is so big it looks like a sea. We walked a lot there, visited a simulation of a floating village made from long grass reeds that people had lived in only 50 years ago, and ate trout in the markets. After 2 days there, we caught a bus back to La Paz and then caught a bus for another overnight trip back across the border into Chile and to the northern beachside town of Iquique, where I'm writing from. This is a really cute town, apparently pretty affluent by comparison with other Chilean towns because of the copper mines, with wide wooden footpaths through the centre of town, old wooden colonial buildings, and a beach with surf. Tomorrow evening we hop on yet another bus for a 24 hour trip back to Santiago, and fly out the next day for Miami, which should be a bit of a culture shock.

CHILE : From Santiago to La Serena via Valparaiso

Flying back to Santiago from Punta Arenas after a night at the Hostel del Rey and an interesting conversation with a Chilean writer, we stayed another night with Ines (the lady friend of our spanish teacher in Sydney), spent the following morning visiting the commercial art galleries of a very swish suburb nearby, returned for another supermarket lunch, then caught the bus to Valparaiso.
Valparaiso is a hotch-potch of buildings and shacks climbing the hills behind a working harbour, every wall covered in the ubiquitous graffiti of Chile, the hillsides of the central cerros (hills) with very cute cafes and bars, hostels and little handicrafts shops. Apart from avoiding the market area which several people have warned us is dangerous, we walked around, caught an ascensor up one hill, drank coffee in a little cafe where the waiter told us about his trip to the Amazon with Greenpeace and bemoaned the Chilean character that wouldn't allow change in a country with a huge gap between rich and poor, caught a bus to the southern end of the town and ate seafood, drank pisco sours and red wine, and walked around the coast to beaches with run-down empty pools and change-rooms. This summary of our last week has just been written from our window-less bedroom where we've returned for a siesta (to digest the lunch time pisco sour and red wine) before going out tonite in search of some kind of vibrant nightlife which in Chile does not seem to start until quite late...