WHORE HOUSES, HOSTELS, BREAKFAST ‘N BED… AND BUSES

I don’t like staying in whore houses, or hotels acting like them, whether Hanoi, Tecun Uman, Dakar, or Santiago. It may SOUND cool, but it’s usually not. There are no keys. The doors only lock from the inside. Weird people congregate and act self-important. Weird sounds come from weird places. The toilet paper disappears only to re-appear in the trashcan smudged with lipstick. And I can’t get a wi-fi signal for shit. I decide to go to Valparaiso. The two-hour ride from inland to coast goes through pipe-organ cactus, eucalyptus, pine, and then finally palm trees. Multicolored houses form a patchwork on the surrounding hillsides, like Mexico without quite the same reeking stench of abject poverty. You can even take an elevator up the hillsides to the next level if you got balls. That’s a pretty good ride for a half dollar, though my stomach really would’ve rather stayed down. There are a lot of cheap hostales and residencias, but none of them advertise wi-fi or internet or anything like that. There IS one that calls itself ‘bed and breakfast’, a term mostly out-of-date, for me at least, and largely superseded by the term ‘hostel’ these days, but that’s probably the best bet. South American hostales pre-date the modern concept of ‘hostel’ btw though they may very well be cognate. If the place is hip to ‘hostels’, then they’ll probably use the term for you. Anyway I usually avoid conspicuously ‘Gringo’-oriented places, but try to maintain an open mind. If I wanted to hang out with Gringos, I wouldn’t be in South America now, would I?

Mostly I try to avoid Interzone people, not international travelers mind you, but what I call local people who consider themselves the self-appointed interface between cultures, whether they actually live in an ‘international zone’ or not, the origin of the term in war-time Morocco, I believe, and popularized by Uncle Bill Burroughs. I like the term so apply it to many circumstances which may not seem similar on the surface, but which I think really are. These people are generally blessed with a better-than-your-typical-local’s facility with Pidgin English and are extremely proud of it. But when I travel I look for authenticity, notwithstanding the fact that my presence and how others may perceive me may change the very thing I’m perceiving. Still I persevere and try to mitigate the circumstances by learning languages and blending in with the environment as much as possible despite the fact that my skin color places me to one extreme of the spectrum.

This is the good or bad side of ‘hosteling’, depending on your point of view, that a traveler can hop from one safe haven to the next, all around the world, without ever really ‘seeing’ the real world around him, only the false world created by other travelers like himself and the Interzone people who act as interface with the ‘real world’. In some cases this may be necessary and even good of course, giving you succor and keeping you from being suckered. But for the most part I avoid it, even though the chances of having real connections with ‘real’ locals are rare, at least in this age or at my age. It wasn’t always that way. Back in my twenties in the seventies I used to hang with the Homies a lot, mostly toking up. That was the zeitgeist then, no? I may have chatted up a few girls then, but they were secondary. There was a sexy revolution stateside about then too, remember? No? Too bad. You hardly needed to go south to get laid. Most cultures in Latin America don’t give up their girls to foreigners anyway, mostly just Peru and Colombia, same then as now. Peruvian girls used to stop me on street corners. “No quiero que te vayas!” she said. But… but I don’t even know you. But riding with the guys on motorcycles around Silvia, Colombia (a town, not a girl), now that was a gas!

Manzanillas, Colombia, seems to have made women their number one export crop. I even remember the name of one girl from Mraflores, Peru, one Rosa Tramoltola, because she wrote it down and visual memory’s better than any other kind. I wonder where she is now? Sorry, Rosa, I meant to get back to you; really I did… That’s old news for Asia of course, though hosteling is even on the upswing there, despite the fact that cost isn’t so much of an issue. You’d probably pay more for a hostel in Thailand than you would at a normal businessman’s hotel. Not so in Argentina, where it can not only save you a chunk of pesos, let you meet some fellow partying travelers, but best of all allow you to do your own cooking, saving more pesos and ham-and-cheese heartache. Once again, this is hardly necessary in Asia, where a decent meal in a small eatery not only costs about a buck, not only tastes good, but has even got vegetables. Remember them? Of course if you want to bang the local bimbos (bimbas?), then a hostel’s not the place for that. That’s probably another reason traveling women are attracted to hostels in free-for-all Asia, where everybody’s in on the absurdly ridiculous sex trade, or it almost seems so sometimes.

Anyway at the Gringo ‘B&B’ they show me a room that I don’t like, but for the same price I ultimately get a large room with King-size bed on the condition that I only use the small extra bed. I’m in. So that’s barely two figures $ with cable TV and a rogue wi-fi signal that comes and goes. Jackpot! There’s only one thing missing, a good cuppa’ java, and I finally found that too, right in the bus station. It’s all an illusion of course. The next day AFTER paying the rent the B&B lady tells me that I have to change rooms, since they have a reservation for the big room that night. Why couldn’t she have told me that earlier? At least she didn’t move me herself. That’s not cool. It’s happened to me three times in my life and I remember every one, pissed as Hell. But to add insult to injury, she insists on speaking English to me, even though I’d never spoken it to her nor identified myself to her as American. While it’s all probably innocent, I tend to take such maneuvers as racial slights intended to emphasize her dominance and my Gringo-ass helplessness. While her English admittedly wasn’t that bad, neither is my Spanish, and it’s my money, so THERE! Two can play that game. Like love, language was never meant to be a weapon. So we duel dual lingoes back and forth a few minutes. Welcome to Thailand.

I know it sounds silly but Interzone people generally have identity issues which they resolve linguistically, no exceptions allowed. They can speak your language; you can’t speak theirs, PERIOD, end of discussion. To see you hobbled increases their own sense of self-importance. I speculated on this in Thailand for years, to critiques of paranoia and ego issues on my own part. Whatever the truth of my own shortcomings, I was right on this. It’s been confirmed, and I paid a heavy price for the knowledge. If you want to get ahead, then leave the Interzone bozos behind. They’ll cripple you, no apologies. I learned this lesson the hard way, paying dearly dearly, the penultimate sacrifice so to speak, if you will. I know I will. I hope she’s OK.

But I know to second-guess myself and not to burn bridges, so I even go look at the other room the lady has for me. It’s a dump and I tell her so. I’m out of there and into another cheapo place down the street with not a word of English written anywhere. The guy asks me for my RUC number. That’s the term for your national ID card in Chile. He thinks I’m Chilean. Am I crazy? Of course there’s no cable TV, nor Internet, much less wi-fi, but still it’s better than the room they tried to switch me in to at the first place, and cheaper too, so I’m vindicated at least partially. My miracle coffee didn’t really work either, after my initial exhilaration. They got the right machine but they’re not using the right coffee, or not handling it right in the process, leaving it open to the air or something like that. By the time it rolls into my mouth, it’s long been dead. Coffee is like any other food; it lives. Leave it open and the spirit leaves, evaporated to nothingness. Valparaiso is losing its attraction for me quickly.

About the time the ‘students’ next door finally crash out, AFTER the heavy metal marathon, the street outside is waking up. I hear horses clomping through the street even though I never saw them in the daytime. I imagine that I’m in Dickens’ England slinking down the street in the fog, then drift off again. The second time I finally look out the window; the horses are real. At least the Burmese didn’t attack. That only happens when I take sleeping pills. The last time that happened I lay silent in the grass for hours, tied and captured. When the sun finally rose I realized I was just tangled up in the sheets. That was when I was in traction; I’m better now. I’ll go to La Serena tomorrow, then on up the coast to the Atacama Desert, but I’ve still got a day to kill so follow the coast a few miles down to Vina del Mar. That’s a good move; it’s everything that Valparaiso’s not, shiny and happy compared to Valpo’s run-down feel. I usually like that feel of faded glory, but not always, especially not when I can upgrade for free.

Vina is not expensive at all, certainly not like Copacabana, its sister beach resort on the opposite coast. I’ll come back for the film festival next week. It may not be ‘Grade A’ like Mar del Plata running this week in Argentina, but that means ‘Hollywood’, even if they have an independent section. I like regional films and Vina’s fine, the last place I would’ve expected to like, with its jet-set image. This might be the epiphany for the entire trip. But first I got some miles to go and some things to see. Miles cost money of course, but when you go at night (often no choice) you save the cost of a crib. It usually works out about the same and is great if you can arrive mid-morning. Looking for a hotel at midnight’s a drag.