Extraordinary Ears 

Travel is an act of imagination. I, we, indulge a desire to go somewhere, and then imagine it. We have ideas that we have gathered from few or many sources about that place, and we construct stories about what we will do there. We are here, and we wish to go there. There things are different, and we will be different there because we are not hemmed in by all that we are when we are here. Travel invites change, the unknown, and perhaps adventure. Some travelers invite the possibilities and immediately go about hemming in experience with meticulous planning. Other travelers fly by the seat of their pants. Still other travelers mix a degree of planning with come-hither looks in the direction of chaos and chance. I have been all of those travelers.

Writing about travel—aren’t we always writing about travel when we write?—makes me think about how people try to take pictures of mountains and sunsets and oceans, certain to fail. Grand horizons, panoramic views, real spectacles are impossible to capture in an image. A detail, though, can evoke the larger experience. I know, for me, it is difficult to refrain from trying to capture the glorious image, but I understand that the close-up detail will make a better photograph. My travel writing is often interior, reflective, when it works for me. The enumeration of events or attempts to describe the big picture sometimes appears in my writing, but the internal detail or observation, the occasional flash of insight, generally more accurately captures truthful personal impressions of the movements that are travel. The literal recounting, for me, often falls short of the significance of what it means to vacate usual patterns and take to the road. The inescapable truth of travel writing is that it is made of words, it is abstract, and it is somehow connected to someone’s voice. I hope that my voice comes through the letters on the page.

Wednesday/March 12, 2008—7:52 p.m.

March 11-12

Punta del Diablo, Uruguay

Beach thought: What is the devil’s point?

The Christian notion of brimstone and hellfire is for children and lamebrains.

The devil tortures with beauty and delights, not fire and pain. The point is to give someone an experience of exquisite beauty and then withdraw the possibility of maintaining it—to make someone know it but forbid acquisition: that is the point.

I walked a gorgeous beach all day today and extended my three-day booking at Punta del Diablo Tranquilo to five days. As I walked for over four hours by crashing surf, I thought about what it would be like to stay here, buy land and build a little house above the beach: a pipe dream—the devil’s point.

The devil’s refined method includes the torturee eventually understanding that once achieving a desire, close examination over time would not only deepen the beauty, it would also destroy it.

Therein lies the devil’s point.

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I ask those who say the nature of beauty requires acceptance of the flaws, and I commend them for that mature notion, but I ask them, at what point do the mounting flaws drain the beauty, deflate transcendent emotion, and leave a person even lower than if the promise/hope of beauty had not occurred?

I recall having similar thoughts when in Cafayate. This beach town, Punta del Diablo, and that small town of another era, gave me feelings that they could be home.

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The devil’s point is to make you (me) think there is a point—to infect a mind (my mind) with need for reason, when there may be no reason or too many reasons to intelligibly/intelligently categorize them.

(see Blake)

Friday/March 14, 2008—1:32 p.m.

Punta del Diablo, Uruguay

Since after breakfast I’ve been copying Natalia’s music. She is my front-desk buddy here at the hostel, a bright, feisty young philosophy student, and she has all of Caetano Veloso, as well as a great selection of Brazilian music, along with jazz and other unusual tunes and videos.

With one full day and a morning left here, I'm skipping along the top of my brain, walking over the grey channels and repelling down to the frontal lobe for a look out toward where I will be next, but a fog is rolling in, a beautiful fog but one that doesn't allow me to see very far ahead. In any case, I won't be on foot, so wheeled vehicles will determine my timing, maybe even my destination. I should invest in a horse and cart: it's slow, but a little hay and a good-natured nag can get you there. Where? There.

14 March 2008

Punta del Diablo

Mr. Smith,

Buy land in Uruguay. Head to the beach here immediately. I leave

tomorrow, walking into the foggy future, and I'd like to hook my heels

to this ocean and beach and drag it along with me, but I'm just not

that big of a man, and the water hook keeps splashing apart with my

first step. 

Chau,

El Steverino

Though I feel midafternoon hunger, I think I’ll skip the callings of my belly in favor of a swim before I make my way to a bus to the park. I can eat and drink later. The little fellow in my gut can scream all he wants to in that dank cave, I have other ideas.

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It is important to have disappointments when traveling. Today I foolishly missed a bus out to the park that left at 13:00 (1 p.m.). As I went about copying tunes to the laptop, checking email, and writing in the laptop journal, my mind twisted the time of departure to 3:00 p.m. I walked to the town by 2:30, only to discover that there was only a bus at 19:00 (7 p.m.) and no return trip today. Tomorrow I leave for Montevideo at 13:50 (1:50 p.m.), so I won’t be able to get to the park.

Disappointments, missed destinations, leave a traveler with yet more reasons to return to a place. In any case, the smug idea that a place can be known on a traveler’s crunched agenda of a day, a week, or even a month, is foolish and a lie.

Sit at one point on a beach for a year, a lifetime, and you’ll never know the overwhelming variation of wave patterns rising, rolling, and slamming the beach at your feet.

Answer: Return.

That is the devil’s point.

Saturday/March 15, 2008—12:00 Noon

Punta del Diablo is under my skin, and I walk about whistling Blue Skies as I hear Caetano Veloso singing it in my mind’s ear. The devil is in my heart—in a good way, but with softening melancholy. Take a good look, I think. Take a good look; you want to remember this. People are kind, the sky is blue, the steady whoosh of surf sooths any jagged doubts about the goodness of life, and this time in this place is a tender moment before one of inevitable change. This Punta del Diablo will never be here again.

Words/Concepts for the traveler:

Vulnerability/Receptivity/Disappointment/Euphoria/Memory/Flexibility/Alertness/Care/Responsibility

8:13 p.m.

Montevideo, Uruguay

Though I didn’t get to sleep until after five a.m. this morning, following a night at Tranquilo Bar and then at Pico’s, I woke at about 9:30 for breakfast and time on the beach. When I returned from Pico’s in the wee hours, I downloaded Firefox browser, which at first came up in Japanese, and then temporarily wiped out all of my Google archive of emails. Once I got the browser to communicate in English and cursed and repeated operations until my mail returned, I crept back into the room to snooze.

The morning was perfect but too short. I danced with the surf some and reclined on a blue towel, soaked up sun and let the sounds of ocean wash over me until I had to return to pack and check out by noon. At noon, I plugged the laptop in to juice it some and took the time to check email (none) and to assemble an entry for Matador that I’ll proofread and edit.

On the way to the bus, backpack and front pack weighing me down, I remembered Tim’s recommendation for great fried empanadas in a little shack in town. I ordered a variety of four different ones variously made of meat or fish, with or without cheese, and a bottle of Coke for the road. The empanadas are cooked fresh, fried by order, and make for a tasty, delicate homemade treat.

The nearly five-hour bus ride was stuffy, and I dozed/dazed in and out of sleep, arriving at massive human confusion at Tres Cruces Estacion. Busses to Rosario are booked for days. I couldn’t even get a bus to Colonia until Monday. At least Tres Cruces has an Internet spot, and I hopped on a unit to contact Hotel Palacio. Though they didn’t have any rooms when I contacted them last week, I was advised to call. I am not handy with South American telephones, and my Spanish is minimal, so I thought I would shoot for an email. I also researched hostels, all of which either sounded like dreadful places or were not available. The Internet spot is also a locutorio, so I asked the kind fellow at the desk to instruct me as to how to call Hotel Palacio. It is, of course, easy. Somehow, when a woman who only spoke Spanish answered the phone, we communicated. I figured out that there was a room, and I said I’d taxi over.

I was warmly greeted by Fernando, the older gentleman I met last week when I stayed here, and who communicated with me via email. We chatted about the beauty of Punta del Diablo, and he showed me to a penthouse room with a large balcony with views to the dock, the sea, and the city. This lovely aged penthouse room will set me back a whopping 28 dollars a night. I am relieved to be settled in a nice spot. I’ll have to figure out travels tomorrow.

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Extraordinary Ears—A Travelogue

Cultural Dissonance

Everyone here has extraordinarily large ears. Even the smallest person’s ears reach from the top of the head to the tip of the chin. Too big, too big, too big. When I speak with these people, I need to lean in, because they speak softly, and many of them, to my way of listening, do not enunciate clearly. The overall effect upon the music of their language is pleasing—sounds lack hard edges—but a foreigner like myself must lean way in to hear, or it’s easy to miss words and entire phrases. Then, when I tilt in and get closer, I become acutely aware of their huge ears, so I compensate by staring at the nose. These people have small noses that generally dip down at the tip. No, the nose actually is large, but set between such enormous ears, the nose appears diminutive by comparison. Noses are absolutely Portugish or Italianese. The guidebook inks two long chapters relating the complicated history of isolation and then colonization over the centuries, trying to explicate the complex biological soup that resulted in these unique faces—such physiognomies that travelers from anywhere else appear plain. In my own country, my looks are considered eccentric, but here I am pitied for my uniformly balanced features.

Why did I come here? The food can’t decide what it is. The people confuse me. And the ceaselessly whining, high-pitched, circular musical compositions at the threshold of audibility demonstrate an excruciating level of monotony.

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This Place

What is this place with its spires and towers of white stone, and its bunkers, and its elaborate temples and official-looking marble buildings? And who are these people with their inscrutable faces and behaviors? The Larsons, our very dear friends, insisted we’d have the time of our lives if we traveled here. I suppose they are correct in one sense, but we are having the very worst time of our lives.

My wife and I are tall. I am nearly 6’2”, and my wife is 5’11”. The tallest indigenous people top out at 5’2”, so their hotel beds are laughably but torturously short for us. Though our accommodations are luxurious by their standards—the wallpaper and curtains are a stunning blue, gold, and red brocade, and the bathroom contains extravagant copper fixtures and impeccable marble sink and tub—we are just too big for their world. The toilet is too short and small, and the showerhead is too low.

On vacations, we prize our anonymity, which is impossible here. We stand out above the crowd, freakishly, as very few tourists discovered this land isolated between mountains for centuries until recently. I suppose we were initially attracted to their strange history—first a period of unhealthy inbreeding, followed by a succession of military and cultural invasions, and then an extended period of peace and democracy. The capper was the evening the Larsons invited us to dinner and delivered an enthusiastic report about their vacation, which neglected any of the discomforts they must have encountered, and then lent us their Lonely Planet Guidebook, which put a very positive spin on the more exotic features of travel possibilities for the intrepid explorer.

We are usually very open-minded travelers, and the notion of taking off to a relatively undiscovered culture excited us. We are getting more than we bargained for, though.

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The Flim in Our Guide’s Ear

Within Mr. Torent’s ear, there is a red cocoon that contains a small insect the locals call a flim. It is a delicate creature that grows within the fleshy protective coils of the human ear, out of harms way, and the people here respect their symbiotic relationship with the flim because it exudes a mineral-rich oil that seeps into the ear’s pores, resulting in a hyper sense of hearing unknown anywhere else on the planet. Many of the world’s greatest composers and musicians originate from this unique land that Mr. Torent calls home.

Within Mr. Torent’s ear, the flim is in its sixth of seven stages of development—the winged stage, a stage in which Mr. Torent often appears distracted because the fluttering sounds of beating wings divert his attention. He says, “Huh?” or “Excuse me?” in his heavily accented English, and his eyes shift right or left suddenly, but I know he is trying his best to stay concentrated, despite the loud whirring of wings flapping by his ear drum, until the seventh stage arrives.

“At the seventh stage,” according to The Encyclopedia of Entomology, “the cocoon detaches, and the flim breaks free, fluttering its way out to the ledge of the ear’s outermost coil, where it ceremoniously lays its salmon-colored eggs and flits off to one of many colorful pomegranate farms, where it lives for precisely 178 minutes and then dies.”

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With a Lamp in Broad Daylight

Even with a lamp in broad daylight,

Who can locate an honest man?

                                    --Diogenes

Whereas we are people who whittle away at our original character through gradual compromises we take for granted and attribute to maturity and adulthood, people here remain honest and pure from cradle to grave.

We’ve been traveling for over three weeks, and not a single person, whether urban or rural, young or old, has attempted to overcharge us or to steer us falsely. There is no word for deception in their language, and their transparency at first aroused suspicion in my wife and I. In our country, we believe that if something is too good to be true, then it must not be true—an attitude that guarantees we corrupt anyone who is pure. We doubt sincerity and treat honest people like fools. Eventually, we drag down even the best among us, and we corrupt our children as a matter of course.

Innocence yields to experience and we look for advantages and opportunities. People here don’t think that way, and they behave admirably for no reason. They have a word for grandmother that literally translates as the wrinkled elder who would hand you her umbrella in the rain. In fact, people here regularly do hand their umbrellas off in the rain, or rush to cover strangers under large orange canopies of gabardine.Their culture nurtures goodness without a shadow of self-consciousness or any desire for reward.

When we first arrived, we noticed men and women in long reddish-brown robes who walked the streets holding up lit lanterns at all times of the day or night and thought that certainly this must be some kind of joke or a clever marketing ploy. Then Mr. Torent explained that these were monks, chosen at birth through a ritualized process of selection born of shared dreams, and confirmed through a series of tests at age three, age six, and age nine. Everyone here feeds the monks, gives them money, and offers them shelter. These nearly silent men and women want for nothing, and they never preach or admonish a single soul.

In exchange for communal support, monks roam the streets day and night, approaching individuals randomly, raising a lit lamp and looking into a person’s eyes to see deeply into what everyone here refers to as The Pool of Purity.

Believing The Pool is the origin of all things, The Mother and The Star to which all life will one day return, citizens happily yield to the honor of an approach. Mr. Torent elucidates: “We are fond of saying that the lamplight always shines in two directions. That is, we take equidistance and mutuality in relationships for granted. A monk looks into your pool, and you travel through each other’s eyes into the deepest, purist waters to the most honest core of mutual being, eradicating distance entirely. The monk then lowers the lamp and wanders on with no goal, no home, no future and no past.”

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Excursion to the Other Side of the Mountains

The border where land meets sea moves me to wonder and melancholy.

The shoreline tells a story of profound diminishment and retreat as it erodes at an unprecedented rate of six feet of beach and land per year, rapidly forcing the population inland and driving prices of elevated properties along the mountainside to prohibitive limits. A popular tourist postcard depicts the National Oceanic Lighthouse, a model of native architecture and solar technology, submerged up to its observation windows. The sweeping beacon on its roof, now triggered from a remote location, reminds me that this historic lighthouse will forever remain abandoned and will soon vanish beneath the waves.

I look out into the ocean at red triangular flags on top of sturdy white poles marking regular points of annual erosion, and listen to the years flap in a relentless breeze—…1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, …1983, 1984, 1985, ….2001, 2002, 2003…¾as I contemplate my 89-year-old father, my dead mother, my failing knees, the rapid global extinction of species, and, from out behind me in a slanted, windblown thicket, am called to tears by cacophonous screechings of wild monkeys and perverted gibbons that populate the edge of existence.

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Mysterious Standing 

Of our many travels, and Elizabeth and I have explored all of the world’s continents and several off-shore islands, no destination has offered us more beautifully unsettling moments than this place. So much so, that I refuse to publicize it. And among all of our experiences here, the most otherworldly of them all occurred in a small city (which shall also remain nameless) known for its stillness.

Though this city is moderately large, 250,000 inhabitants, getting here was an arduous task. We traveled by jitney, by horse, and, finally, upon the backs of large goat-like creatures known for their habit of spitting a yellowish-brown liquid that smells like tobacco, and for a loud honking-braying sound that announces the arrival of visitors. It’s the only way in to this otherwise grand, decaying city, so it’s impossible to slip into town unnoticed, even on a nearly moonless night. Fortunately, there are relatively few visitors, so the honking-braying doesn’t become an issue.

By the time we got there, our bottoms were sore, and we really did smell like old goats, so we were ready for a bath and a good meal. Mr. Torrent had accompanied us, and he was beside himself with expectation concerning our experience. All he would say before our arrival was that the cuisine centered upon roasted lamb, tuberous vegetables of surprising colors and shapes, and a very tart indigenous fruit that is typically flambéed in large steel tureens at the conclusion of festive meals. He also hastened to remind us that the beds here would be more to our liking because the custom in this region is for an entire family to sleep in a single bed; therefore, we’d have plenty of room. Then he would say, and he said it more than once, “I cannot tell you the most mysterious feature of this place. Do not ask me. It is forbidden.” And then he would chuckle when we paused and wouldn’t ask. He clearly wanted to tell us, but knew that he was honor-bound by tradition to remain mum. Since we didn’t know what he was withholding, we couldn’t even speculate what we would soon cherish as one of the most enigmatic yet profound events of our travel life.

After we settled in to our room, following a meal of keets, their signature lamb stew, we stretched out in our luxurious bed to reflect upon our recent journeys. Elizabeth recounted our excursion to The Internal Falls, deep in the caverns beneath a treacherous mountain locals say is the birthplace of a furry behemoth they believe carried the first humans from the center of the earth up to the surface. Their mythology recounts the birth of humanity within the belly of what they call The Down Below. The falls challenges any in the world for its immense, thunderous presence; and, located eight kilometers beneath the earth’s crust, it even exceeds the Iguazu Falls in Argentina as a wonder of the world. As I recalled our fantastic journey, I almost couldn’t believe it had really happened. We rode down to the falls in canoe-like wagons on tracks, and we wore hardhats with something resembling a miner’s lamp on front. Mr. Torrent embraced an enormous spotlight contraption that illuminated the entire scene, and he operated a lever that controlled our speed. As we approached the falls, the sound became so deafening we had to hold our ears. Elizabeth looked terrified. Then we came around a rocky bend, and there was the falls. It went on for miles, and the mist formed an explosion of rainbow after rainbow for as far as we could see through the intensely white cone carved into the darkness by the spotlight. As Elizabeth lay there in bed, recalling our experience, tears ran down her face. I’d never seen her like this, and I moved closer to her to hold her in my arms. She seemed somewhat embarrassed by her emotions, so I said, “Really, it’s okay. I know. I know.” I didn’t know, but I did understand how overwhelming our travels here had been—how life-changing these strange experiences were, beyond anything we could rationally know. Somehow, we would be different when we would return to our lives. And now, finally, I understood the enthusiasm with which the Larsons had recommended this place.

That evening, as we recalled the falls, wondered at the monks with their lamps, reviewed anecdote after anecdote about Mr. Torent, mourned the disappearing beaches on the other side of the mountains, revisited grand meals and astonishingly putrid ones, we couldn’t have predicted what we would see the following day, and the impact it would have upon every assumption we had made up to that point in our lives.

We slept soundly, contentedly, in each other’s arms that night. When we woke to the whooshing sounds of the whirling ceiling fan the next morning, the egg-yellow sunlight on the wall beside us indicated we were in for a scorcher. We dressed in white linen, which is the local summer fashion—and a very practical one at that. Elizabeth wore a wide-brimmed white hat, but I opted for lots of sunscreen and my trusty wheat-colored Panama. As long as I stood out as a tall tourist, one more anomaly couldn’t matter. In the dining room, we joined Mr. Torent for several cups of the local morning beverage, a hot stimulant called rang, made from a variety of crushed leaves and generously sweetened with syrup distilled from a fruit that resembles a mango in shape and texture but is eggplant purple. In any case, the drink did the trick. It was served in handmade bowls, and a single bowl had the effect of a triple espresso. We each had three bowls as we ate fried local tubers from wooden plates.  I don’t know if there are words in English for the tastes of these vegetables. If such words exist, I’ve never heard them or read them. Also, I must admit that we were so invigorated by our drinks that it wasn’t easy to distinguish among the multiple feelings of well-being in which we were awash. The hot sun so intensified as it shone down through skylights, the stimulating rang surged through our veins, and these nutritious vegetables looked like potatoes and turnips from some other planet—some large, some small, some resembling little animals, others in shapes unlike anything we might recognize as food at all: the whole morning feast set the stage and made us strong enough, I suppose, for our final strange voyage with Mr. Torent into this place so off the beaten track that we might as well have been on Venus.

As we had entered the city on a nearly moonless night, we hadn’t taken in the immense, baroque, colonial buildings; and the streets were empty. So, when we stepped out into our street’s blinding morning light, what met our eyes stopped us short in our tracks.

It must have been 9:30, and we expected the bustle of commerce any city this size would naturally engender. Instead, though, there was absolute quiet and stillness. What night had hidden, we now could clearly see. The sidewalks and roads displayed somewhat chaotic circular patterns of color—large dots, three to four feet in diameter, of red, yellow, black, orange, purple, lavender, green, brown, white, and a myriad of colors I honestly had never seen before. The streets were far from empty, though. Quite the opposite. Upon each of these colored dots stood a motionless man, woman, or child. Each person stood silent and still as a statue, posed with the right arm up, palm facing outward, and the left arm down, palm facing backward. The streets and sidewalks were packed, thousands of human statues. Not a human stirred. “This I could not speak,” Mr. Torent related in a husky whisper. “Now it is our turn to take our place on the street. Since we are outsiders, we are privileged to stand upon a dot in the shade of a Bo tree. It is understood that we would not survive the heat and the immense effort of standing so very concentratedly still without such accommodation.”

And so we stood there outside our hotel, upon our respective colorful dots, from 9:30 that morning until the appointed hour of 6:37 in the evening when a gong in a clock tower sounded. The pain throughout my body was excruciating. It swelled and receded in waves throughout the day, and at certain brief moments it and any sense of self or time vanished into nothingness I only became aware of upon return from it. This must have been their Pool of Purity, for which there were no words. 

I realized that all my life I thought I was a traveler when I flew in airplanes, drove in cars or busses, rode on beasts of burden, and took extended walking tours. I had moved past scenery and people, and took in fleeting perceptions, and that, I’d thought, was what it meant to be a traveler on the surface of our planet. All my life I’d been on the move. As I stood stock still in 94-degree heat, my sense of self and pain appearing and disappearing throughout the day, I broke apart. I don’t know how else to put it. It wasn’t a breakdown; it was a breaking open. I stood still, and the movement of sounds and sights traveled past me. A complete reversal occurred. The world was the traveler, and I was the stillness. We all were the stillness temporarily standing as the world swept past us.

Steven Jay Weinberg