The smugglers on the bus

17 de enero
Now, right out of foz, we crossed big pretty rolling fields of soybeans and there was one big green valley, almost like colombian countryside, and i thought bonito campo brasileiro. and i saw the long Brazilian flat trucks just like the ones that come to costanera sur in Buenos Aires and park in rows next to the river. The first town we stop in is rich looking and well fed like any in southern santa fe province in Argentine soy country, w/ last names like polanski and sbardeletto on the shop signs. I saw a well fed golden girl, castaño hair and brown shoulders, w/ a peasant blouse off the shoulders and a jean miniskirt. on the way to londrina, driving through the red dirted campo paranaense during sunset, or really before sunset, i saw a rainbow, which i took as a sign confirming my albeit vague plans for the immediate future. and i saw a tree w/ the palo borracho flowers but a different trunk; and on the bus they screened "city of men" until the audiovisual system stopped working, right before the rainstorm, at least there was another show.

at some point toward the beginning of the bus ride, after cascavel, the passengers' ringleader, who looks like a carioca, but i suppose is a gaúcho since he drinks tereré (or a paranaense), took up a cash collection from the passengers, which i suppose was a tip for the driver or a recourse for bribing any roadside cops. oh and i forgot to write that my danish friend oni told me he has "diary," by which I think he meant a bad stomach, something later aboundingly confirmed. and i thought about how benign and dorky the traveling danish and dutch always seem to be. we passed a place called fazenda neblina, and some beautiful ceramic tiled roof fazendas overlooking a long and wide valley snuggled into the folds of round brazilian mounts. there is niebla around here, there are lots of warning signs and each road toll (the company i think is called viapar) has an adjacent lot for crashed and totaled cars, and many on a cursory glance seem to have suffered frontal collisions. martín and his sugar momma are kissing in the seat in front of me, talking hoarsely. it's so funny, how argentines always travel with their gaseosas soft drinks and industrial cookies galletitas, as unaware of their idiosyncrasies as americans when they travel. i'm on a trip; what's the idea, when did the rainbow appear? when i thought about getting strong and clear, reducing things to their simplest, working hard, like the smugglers.

18 de enero
i should remember some of the episodes from last night, my 3rd night in a row of traveling. one of the camelos (smugglers) came and sat down next to me and said he lost 8,000$ usd, trying to get digital cameras across the border from duty free paraguay, he said he wasn't there when it happened; i suppose he has some sort of agent that crosses the stuff for him. i should also remember some of the things i overheard last night: 'brasil sua," the smugglers said, "brazil sweats," as the bus drove away, and the southern carioca peeked out the window to make sure the cops were in fact being left behind. They sweated because they almost got busted. then they also kept saying "caxinha, caxinha," meaning the bus was a cash register for the cops. the other funny thing they said was i think someone, the dane, went to the bathroom, and someone said, "o gringo comeu carne de bufalo,"-- the gringo must have eaten buffalo meat. the bathroom smelled pretty rotten the whole trip (not quite as bad an odor as the rotten rail-side soybeans on the train ride, though).

i went out for a smoke when the cops stopped us and saw some of the guys wearing baseball caps getting out their wallets and scrambling to get money together w/ the fat guy in a yellow shirt ("FUSSBALL" it said), and others. It was clear they were getting ready for the handoff of a wad of bills. In my view, the policía militar rodoviaria guy who came on board was putting on a show. He put a flashlight on the luggage rack, and began to ask questions of the two guys with the baseball caps. Then he followed them down to the luggage compartment, but he left them alone down there as if to let them sort out amongst themselves how much money to get together. The police officer had the air about him of someone going through the motions of a performance. He had a guilty look, as if he had pigged out at lunch but was still looking for cookies or something else: pig. He had a clean tight fitting khaki uniform with lots of pockets, a gun belt, black, with lots of velcro, and a bullet proof vest with a soft mesh covering it. The night was uncomfortable, I almost want to say, I don't know quite why, it was less comfortable than the train. I guess 70 percent inclination on a seat is not necessarily better than none at all.

Right now, the Brazilian girl that is often running her mouth, with a high pitched voice, and a Paraná accent I can't understand, along w/ the camelos, are telling horror crime stories involving Foz de Iguaçu & Paraguai. The way the camelos invoke Paraguai, it's more like a land of opportunity than ghettoville, as it's considered in Argentina, although, yes, a dangerous place. The camelo eating chips and drinking guaraná who sat next to me, the one who lost everything, said, "Lá no paraguai, a gente pode comprar droga, armamento ..." You can buy guns, weapons ... He also told me that the Rio favelas were now full of Angolans, who also trafficked drugs and arms. The same guy told me that he had 5 women, just in Rio alone, and that he sometimes makes the Foz Iguaçu run twice a week. Now, he said, he's going to go home, rest, and try again in a few days. He said it's more stressful, what happened to him, because he doesn't know exactly what happened, how the shipment went wrong, it wasn't within his realm of control. He said he had to trust his middle man when he was told: "Voce perdeu." "You lost." "Então perdi." "So I lost," he said.

Right now, already in São Paulo, one of the camelos is unloading his bulky rectangular blue and black packages that have to be carried by two people. All the other people on the bus are like: "Caralho! A mudança!" "Fuck, a move ..." And, "O bicho traz de Paraguai tudo para sua casa." "That bitch is bringing a whole house's worth of stuff from Paraguay." The guy had someone waiting for him here, at a random stoplight by the canal in São Paulo, and a car waiting. I wonder how much he had to pay the bus driver for the unscheduled stop.

I forgot to mention that the orange shirted guy I spoke to last night requested Roberto Carlos from a friend with a music player, Brazilian rock; now one of the guys quotes part of that Caetano and Gil song, "Aquele Abraço." "Torcida de Flamengo, aquele abraço ..." So they're Flamengo fans. Orange shirt guy: "Tudo que me deu a vida, me deu Paraguai." "Everything that I have in life, Paraguay gave me." He said that if he went to Paraguai with 5,000$, he could make 7000$ or up to 40%, depending on what store he sold the goods to. Once we were on the homestretch to Rio he half unpacked his bag to treat the Argentines and I to some Amarula liquor, made from the African marula fruit, and it turned out to be a moment bathed in bathos, because in the bag he had two big duffel bags in which he had planned to carry his merchandise. They were folded up. "Agora mesmo," he tapped his watch, "em paraguai, tem alguem chorando porque perdeu a mercaderia." Right now in Paraguay, there's someone crying because they lost their merchandise.

He says the smuggler's is a hard lifestyle because in his neighborhood, all his neighbors are all pendientes of what everyone does, and no one knows he's a camelo. He said his neighbors "passam a vida tomando conta da vida dos outros," they're always up into everybody's business. Now he's making a cellphone call to someone in Rio, talking of his misfortune. He's planning to get some money together, maybe even sell his car, and go back to the tri-border region tomorrow, to try to get his money back. His plan had been to road-trip to Salvador with his girlfriend, with the money he was going to make. Now, all he's bringing for her is a bottle of Johnny Walker red label and a bottle of Amarula. "Chorei," I think he said on the phone, I cried.

He also talked to me about what is likely another risk of his traveling lifestyle (he lives with his mother, it seems), which is that another of his girlfriends cheated on him. "As cariocas botam chifre cara." "Carioca (Rio) girls cuckold you, dude." He also told me he was drunk for a week and cried when a girlfriend cheated on him. He said he should have known it, everyone in the neighborhood knew apparently, but didn't realize it until he saw her making out against a wall with a big black guy. "Uma me boto ums chifres assim de grande," he said, "Dissem que o homem no chora, chorei." "One of the girls put horns on me this big, they say men don't cry, I cried." This was orange shirt camelo's vision of Paraguai: "Tem coisas lá que ninguem tem visto ..." "There are things there no one has seen." He said in a little plaza in Ciudad del Este there's a little guy that goes around to people saying, "Balas, perfume ..." Bullets, perfume. Then, I don't know if later, if you hang around, he tacks some more stuff on: "Balas, perfume, drogas, armas ..." Bullets, perfume, drugs, weapons ...


"Volto a casa com minha saude, gracas a deus, perdi tudo em ceu azul." "I'm going home with my health, thank God, I lost everything in Blue Sky." Blue Sky is the name of the place near the border where he actually lost it all. "Bald, broke, toothless," that's the expression he uses for having lost it all. He said he's got a good girl now, though, and he knows she's a good girl because when he met her the first time he also was bald, broke and toothless and so she must really like him for who he is. His girlfriend had to shell out the 10 reais for their first beer together. He had just lost everything in Paraguay back then too, but that time he had been mugged. We're reaching the certain point where we begin the descent to Rio after peaking the Serra das Araras.

enero 19
The name of my friend, orange shirt smuggler, was Aleixandre. When we said goodbye, he said he was sad he had lost it all, but at least he had made a new friend. Once we were arriving in Rio, a tall, white-haired smuggler the others called "Paraiba" was crawling under all the seats in the bus, trying to find the digital memory cards he had stashed throughout the bus. He couldn't remember where he had put them, he hadn't written down the seat numbers. I think he only found three out of five.

Against Voyeurism: Baby Goat-Cradling in the Andes and Reverse Borat in Papua New Guinea

Voyeurism used to be just for perverts. Now it's for everybody, thanks to tourism. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. And it is driven by two factors: the massification of the global tourism industry, and its increasing focus on the cult of authenticity (instead of highly organized and deliberate spectacles and landscape offered by resorts and classic destinations: Rio's Christ Statue, the Eiffel Tower, Niagara Falls, Waikiki Beach, etc.). Thanks in part to the Lonely Planet fetish for departing the beaten path, tourists today tend to leave their home patch of soil in order to see the local culture and landscape in "X" place in its natural state. Whether this so-called natural state is manufactured or not, the tourists sometimes cannot tell, but the people who make their living off tourists know exactly what they are after and scramble to provide it.

In Bolivian and Peruvian Andean cities, there is always available, for photo purposes, a little girl in Indian costume cradling a baby goat in her arms. Same for the tango dancers, male in brimmed hat, girl in fishnet stockings, in Buenos Aires streets. These are people who have turned themselves into props or extras on a stage set. There are worse ways to make a living, but the point is that these performances are the tip of the iceberg: they're only explicit demonstrations of a larger event taking place.

The locals are on exhibit and it is the poetics and material conditions of their everyday existence that is of interest to the tourists, who are not after landmarks anymore, or souvenirs. They are hunting experiences and images, and whether these are recorded or not, the satisfaction derived is directly proportionate to the feeling of having penetrated to the kernel of a place's identity, to the soul. Of course snapping a picture of the little indigenous girl with the wriggling goat in her arms scores low on the authenticity chart, but it is better than nothing, barring an immersion tour that includes a "home visit" to an indigenous family at their city-edge shantytown settlement (or better yet, a spontaneous friendship with an indigenous family who invites you to their remote village after market day and serves you marvelously indigestible food that you can reference later).

What this means in practice is that inevitably in the receiving countries everyone's everyday life becomes a spectacle. The locals cannot opt out of participating in the performance put on for the tourists, and this as true of Paris as it is of Bali. I say receiving countries and I mean receiving countries just as people who study migration say receiving countries, except they mean countries that receive poor people and I mean countries that receive rich people: tourists. Tourists are rich people on the move. I don't mean this as a put down, it's the simple truth. When a rich person arrives in a new country, whether he's on business or pleasure or an extended stay, he's a tourist. When a poor person arrives in a new country, he's an immigrant. Poor people do not tour, they go on pilgrimages, or they emigrate, or migrate, or march to exile or refugee camps. The United States and Europe receive the huddled masses (or deport them), and they export hordes of tourists.

Tourism, we all know, could be a magnificent deal for all involved; it's a clean industry, supposedly (except that because of its increasing tendency to overexploit locales of natural beauty in rugged areas it tends to create waste and infrastructure problems much quicker than host countries can resolve them). By some measures it's the largest industry in the world, ahead of the weapon and drug trades even, although it's difficult to quantify those. Tourism could be equitable and help reduce poverty. Except it hardly ever does. One part of the raw deal is created by the fact that the economic benefits of tourism go largely to property owners and the harms eventually accrue mostly to whomever stands in the way of development (whether it's done through the gentrification of high-traffick tourist neighborhoods in cities or the buyouts of fishermen in coastal areas).

Tourism creates jobs but in poor areas too often these are low-tier service jobs, which transform locals into the help assisting in the pampering of outsiders. There are exceptions, sure, but a day or two anywhere in the Caribbean or in Northeast Brazil or the Yucatan in Mexico or parts of Thailand, and the pattern is confirmed. More important perhaps is the cultural distortion that results as tourists demand certain images, landscapes and experiences; the question always becomes, how far is the host society willing to go in order to please the tourists and their thirst for the supposedly authentic? I wonder if anyone has ever written comprehensively about how cultural production and the land itself is affected in areas and cities highly determined by tourist traffic. And also, how is this hankering after the authentic doing violence upon the experience of the tourist himself, subjected sometimes as a result to a pantomime of local traditions and forms?

I thought about all this after watching nearly all of Olaf Breuning's video "Home 2" at the Whitney Biennal in New York, which ends in May. The video features a hysterically comic and neurotic actor named Brian Kerstetter bumbling his way through a tour of Papua New Guinea, including a foray to an urban beach, a trash dump, a crowded market, and an organized cruise along the Sepik River Basin, an area that like most of Papua New Guinea is divvied up among different tribes that still practice much of their traditional culture, including tattooing, wearing penis gourds, dancing, mask-making, etc. In other words, anyone that has a serious fetish for the tribal could hardly do better than spend a few weeks in PNG visiting remote tribal areas and snapping pictures of men in mud masks and headdresses. Which, essentially, is what the tall, gangly, pale, red-headed actor does in "Home 2."

He's kind of a reverse Borat. Through his manic efforts to engage with locals, via his shameless exhibitions of near total ignorance and oblivious good nature, the actor somehow ends up pulling the curtain up on how absurd it is that wealthy people travel thousands of miles in order to pose with tribal men and have their picture taken next to dwellings made of natural material (as we see one of the couples on the river tour doing).

The red-haired actor, who's usually wearing an AC/DC shirt, is constantly joking around with the locals, giving away money, putting marsupials on his head, frolicking amidst tribal dancers, wearing a gorilla mask. The humor and the smiles he elicits from the Papuans underscore a common humanity that tourism prefers to ignore in favor of the exotic. The tribal dances put on solely for tourists' benefit ("This performance is just for me," the actor says gleefully), the outsiders' constant wielding of cameras including the very one through which the documentary is filmed, the contrast between the air-conditioned and insecticide-sprayed cruise boat and the rusticity of the villages-- all of it underscores difference, which is what tourism wants to accentuate, difference.

In a world in which all the political rhetoric is about equality of all peoples, our principal manner of coming into contact with one another (other than war), is thru an industry that manufactures and seeks to promote and emphasize difference. Even when the actor tells us gravely of a mosquito bite he received on the eyeball, which forces him to wear gauze over one eye, he does so in the grim voice of a warrior describing his battle scars. This is pure Lonely Planet bravado: "Despite all the dangers and annoyances, I am still here, searching out the heart of this place, the soul, so I can capture it in bits and pieces and say I have seen it."

Before, one had to come back from a trip and say: I saw this pyramid, or this monument. Now, it's, "I saw men in penis gourds and mud masks. I was bit in the eye by a malarial mosquito." Olaf Breuning's exaggeration of the masochism and voyeurism inherent to this authenticity-hunting seems to make fun, simultaneously, of the stunts of "Jackass," the Crocodile Hunter, gross-out reality shows, the Travel Channel, most travel literature and National Geographic programming, as well as centuries of ethnology and documentary filmmaking in exotic locales. He's showing the seamy seams on the underside of the multi-colored dream-coat of tourism. At the end, when the actor says, speaking of fellow passengers on an Air Niugini flight, "Each of them have a home they want to go to, just like I do," he's not so much talking about home as he is about humanity's sameness: everyone's on a journey. It's just that tourists seek to dramatize their trip histrionically and hunt for experiences, when being there should be enough, or too much already. Every expectation distorts a trip a bit further. Every checklist of authenticity is a wall between oneself and the truth of a place.

I like Raymond Roussel's idea of traveling to a place and never leaving your hotel room or closed carriage; or Laurence Sterne's hilarious farce of a travel book, A Sentimental Journey, in which no real tourism actually takes place and instead an impulsive, amorous itinerary is pursued, with no sightseeing involved; real travel literature wouldn't do anything except reveal internal states, the exterior would on its own leave its vague fingerprint on the psyche; and, finally, I like Alejandra Pizarnik, Argentine poet, who wrote the following once in her notebook: "I am in St. Tropez, that is to say, 3 km from St. Tropez. Instead of staying locked into my room, I should go visit the town, get to know the old streets, look at people. But for me, returning from a place without having seen it is a reason for pride. To say no instead of yes excites me."

(Girl with llama photo: Thomas Quine)