dirty fingernails

Welcome to Caleu

Caleu is a tiny community of small farms, a chapel, and general store nestled in the dusty hills that surround metropolitan Santiago. Along the one rocky road that strings them all together, hang wooden signs that advertise the home-made and home-grown. "Hay Pan"(We have bread), "Se Vende Queso"(Cheese sold here), "Lechuga Fresca"(fresh lettuce), and the a few parcels of land up for sale. Chirping birds, a few rooster crows, and the occasional crunching of tires over uneven dirt roads dominate the Caleu soundscape. Everywhere smells like hot dirt.

The editor of The Santiago Times (where I intern), owns a few acres here where he and his family also live. I help out in the organic gardens, watering, weeding, feeding chickens, and other light farm work. In exchange, I get to live (humbly, which is the only way really) in their garden shed and get fed three meals a day. A good 80 percent of the meal is straight up vegetables. Though technically this is also a "gardening internship", I still can't believe I get to live and eat here for basically a couple hours a day of gardening and dish-washing at meals. It's a great set up, but will I be able to handle four months of it? Will the routine, physical labor under the mid-day heat, and distance from the city lose it's rustic charm and make me yearn for the madness of living in a concrete jungle? Will I ever write a lead story? Will I ever work up the courage to call sources and confirm facts...in Spanish? Guess we'll see. But oh man, thank god there's internet out here.

What do we grow in the gardens you ask? Well let's take a peek...

Daily weeding ensures a constant layer of earth packed into the crevices around my fingernails. Surely I won't spend hours picking the dirt out of them, just to have them muddied up the next day. Quick fix solution? A bright red nail polish that not only effectively masks the hygiene faux pas, but also allows me to garden in style. Where does my genius come from?

Arugula. One of my favorite vegetables, and they have too much of it. For that, my strangely massive appetite is useful.

Around the farm...

Rosita hangs laundry

Some of my roommates. They're pretty chill, not too neurotic about the cleaning. Though I kind of wish I had roommates who didn't nap ALL DAY or run away when I try to high-five them.

A typical Anderson family meal. The healthiest I've ever eaten in my life.

starting summer on this side of the world

Santiago, Chile

One of my favorite historical figures, Salvador Allende, in front of the capital building

After more than three months of traveling, after three months of couchsurfing with generous strangers, swerving bus rides, sandy hair, irregular bowel movements, jungle rashes, begrudging fishing boat captains, enough pre-hispanic ruins to make Indiana Jones jealous, a whole lot of food sampling, and countless photographs, I am nomadic no more. Or at least not for the next four months. My internship with English newspaper The Santiago Times began less than a week ago. What do I do exactly? Well, it's twofold. I contribute modestly to the online newspaper. Even though the simplistic, unimaginative style of newswriting is not my passion, the translating and re-writing of already published news articles is pretty easy and dare I say, fun. I mostly write articles for the business section on such riveting subjects as the opening of a new lingerie store or a hospital building project, but I was given the early responsibility of translating this high-profile interview.

I live in a garden shed on the homestead of my editor's family, in Caleu, a small town (more like a plebeian enclave) in the Andean foothills, about an hour or two outside of metropolitan Santiago. Here is where I have the second part of my internship. Every morning beginning at 8:30, I learn the basics of organic gardening from Carlos, the gardener and caretaker of their four acres of vegetables, fruit and nut trees, and other bucolic oasis fixings. I am living proof that you can combine international professional experience with organic farming curiosity! Once or twice a week I venture from Caleu to the office at Santiago with the editor, Steve. Public transportation to the city is difficult (one daily bus, $10 round trip) so I just go if Steve is making the trip anyway. If he doesn't leave until the following day, I stay with my conveniently downtown-dwelling Chilean CS host and friend Andres, who has a guest room. The home I'm staying at in Caleu is beautiful, but very isolated. Friends are scarce and the opportunity for peer-bonding is virtually non-existent. I can write for the paper from here, but there are no bars I can saunter into after a hard day's work. Which is probably for the better? I thought it would pain me to be so removed from the city and all its twinkling commercialism and socializing opportunities, but after spending a weekend in Caleu and coming to Santiago for a meeting, the crowds and street noises started to grate on my soul. Stay tuned for pictures of Caleu: hippie Eden.

I just did this.

"Hey don't lick that, it's a souvenir."

Rugged roads, 4 x 4 SUVs, and a dusty landscape. Follow the flamingos.

This is it. The last stretch of my long journey and Riley's. Riley flew out of Antofagasta, Chile a few days ago while I took a bus straight (literally) down to Santiago where I began my four-month internship working for The Santiago Times. I'm here now in Santiago (actually in the countryside an hour outside of the city...I'll elaborate later) and have already been quite busy with the internship, so I apologize to my modest handful of sporadic readers for having taken so long to post. But here it is. Pictures of an end and a beginning.

Three-day road trip though the Atacama Desert
From Uyuni, Bolivia to San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

morning dip in thermal baths after a cold night in the desert

Mars? No, Mother Earth.

She breathes...

New friends. Matthieu (France), Lidia (France), Brigit (Netherlands), Olivier (Canada)

How we tore through southern Bolivia

one of many bizarrely serene, flamingo-dwelling lagoons that sprinkle the desert

Oh look, a volcano

Potosi, Bolivia

Cerro Rico, not as rico as it was five centuries ago

Riley and I took a tour of some cooperative mines.

separating minerals

Miner's delight: coca leaves, unfiltered cigarettes and quinoa powder

dynomite.

Uyuni Salt Flats, Bolivia

walking on salt blocks carved out of the flats to make motels

playing with photographic illusion = endless fun

During our tour of the salt flats we stopped by a "train cemetery". I found the sky more interesting.

Blocks of salt. Each line indicates a year. They're like trees!

Antofagasta, Chile

hello ocean, it's been a while

San Pedro de Atacama

"Where there is injustice, a rebellion is born"

UnBOLIVIAble

Copacabana, Bolivia

Isla del Sol, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

Sunset over the lake

Sunrise over the AndesLeaving the island

Island ladies spinning yarn

Where is my mind?

Traveling has been a complicated sport. At times an excitingly unpredictable mistress, never failing to entertain. Then there are those inevitable instances, after months on the road, when you're forced to realize something is missing from your beloved nomadic lifestyle. A forgotten piece of who you are, whose value can only be appreciated after the sudden awareness of its absence. Mine crept into the consciousness on a stuffy mid-day bus to our next country, Bolivia. I hate to say that it was on the way to one of my favorite countries when I was reminded of the sacrifices that traveling occasionally demands. Riley and I shared an earbud, listening to one of the mixes he brought on the trip for his discman. While I gazed mindlessly out the window, R nudged my arm. He wanted me to stop tapping his knee because it reminded him of how badly he needed to pee...with still two hours to go until Copacabana. I wasn't aware I'd been tapping but after being told not to and making a conscious effort to cease the annoyance, the bizarre electric current found an alternative outlet in my foot. Tapping my foot on the floor ricocheted the current back up through my leg and into my hand where fingers started tapping again, but to a quicker beat complimentary to the foot tapping. R glared. Cue awakening. I had to move. I wanted to dance. I needed to. A torso bob and lipsyncing the chorus of Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" into a fistful of invisible microphone is only temporarily soothing. I miss dancing. I hadn't been able to really dance since Halloween in Bogotá. Sure I could shake my thang at one of the many discotecas but it's extremely rare to find the energy at just the right time (nighttime, baby), at just the right place (downtown usually). I miss the package. I miss the dim dancefloor whose epileptic light flashing somehow makes anyone a decent dancer. I miss rapid shoulder girations and rythmic hip sways to synthesized beats. I miss how effective simultaneous booze-drinking is at loosening joints. I miss how readily available that feeling was back home.

Oh boohoo, right Kamille? Cry me a river. I thought you promised not to go into this self-discovery nonsense. Look man, traveling is never just about the far-away places you're seeing or the once-in-a-lifetime experiences you're having. It's also getting ripped-off no matter how pitch-perfect you think your Spanish is and incredibly unpleasant, inconveniently-timed bowel movements and unbearable rashes and exasperation and exhaustion and loneliness and public humility and not being able to remember why the fuck you're doing this and it's missing things.

Riley's admitted to deeply missing his bikes, biking, fixing bikes, talking about bikes, etc. I caught Riley staring off and when I asked where his mind was, he said bike parts. With glazed eyes, he marvelled over a beautiful tandem Cannondale in the hallway of our hostal in Copacabana. I could have sworn I saw him drool. I love and miss my bike too, but not in the same technical manner nor with the same viseral passion. Luckily his cravings were satiated by a mountain bike trip we took on the "most dangerous road in the world" in the towering jungle hills near La Paz (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungas_Roadhttp://www.liebreich.com/LDC/HTML/Climbing/Mountain_Biking_Bolivia.html or ).

In Spanish, another way to say you miss something is me hace falta or to feel a lacking. There you go. Whether you like it or not, travel is also about the lacking.

La Cumbre to Coroico, connecting route from highlands to Amazon

zipping through coca plantations

1,969 ft drop-offs, no guardrails, 3 meter wide trails, and short breaths at some 4,000 meters above sea level

La Paz, Bolivia

The coca leaf. Infamous in the States as the raw base of cocaine, but in the Bolivian highlands it's been a source of relief from the ails of high altitudes. Since before the Spanish conquest, people have been chewing the coca leaf to quell the appetite and give workers energy to work the land all day. It was a symbol and a ritual centuries before it's manipulated form would become a fashionably illicit narcotic thousands of miles away.

oh cute, matching hats

La Paz, highest capital in the world(Sucre is in fact the political capital of Bolivia, thanks for the clarification, Freddy)

old school arcade games!

Downtown street food tour. From 2.5 - 10 bolivianos (35 cents to $1.25), you can't go wrong.

empanadas

at the lunchtime comedor, co-op kitchens stalls

chorizo sandwich egg/steak/hamburger/sausage sandwichChicharron and choclo: deep-fried pork fat and skins and corn with chili sauce