Mare Liberum

This blog really piss me off. I’m moving to blogspot.

http://mares411.blogspot.com/

Lima has a very nice and modern airport, almost to the extent that I feel ashamed of our international airport in Taiwan. But I guess the fact that a great part of the Peruvian economy relies on tourism must have motivated them well enough to spend so much money in building a new and good-looking airport. However, once I got on the taxi and rode into the city of Lima, the image changed dramatically. The moment I was out of the airport, the road started to get bumpy, and the typical impression of a poor south american city overlapped with the reality. To ride a taxi here, you have to negotiate with the taxi driver for the price first before you hop on. So the taxi drivers are always in a rush, trying to get their customers to their destinations asap. My taxi driver serpentined and cut in lanes and honked like every 5 seconds, trying hard to shorten the journey for only a few minutes, while I was seated nervously at the backseat, anxious about a possible upcoming traffic accident. I had always thought Taiwan probably has one of the worst traffic in the world. All drivers in Taipei have to drive like a pro in order to survive in such a rough driving environment, which the roads are narrow and the taxis dashing around looking for customers like a feeding frenzy of sharks. But now I know Taipei is at least beaten by Lima in how bad the traffic condition can be. As I was anxious about ending my life in any second, I did not stop observing the city. Just outside the airport, I saw a shabby guy lying face-down on the traffic island. His posture of facing down on the ground was not very natural, almost looked like someone being gunned down. Standing right by him was a girl in a dusty traditional clothing with red and black stripes, perhaps only 10 years old, holding a tray of tacky merchandise, trying hard to haggle with the passersby. And as I started to penetrate deeper into Lima, apparently they were not an exception of the city. They signified my entering the world of Perú, where poverty is a norm of life.

I followed the suggestion of Lonely Planet to leave Lima asap, so I only stayed in Lima for a very short 6 hours. Some people told me never to believe what the Lonely Planet said in the book, however I found the description of Lima to be quite genuine. I had known how ugly Lima is for a while from the movie Motorcycle Diary, a movie about how Che Guevara’s grand trip changed his life and motivated him to embark on his revolution causes all over South America. Perú is a land of grandeur. Countless mountains of the Andes traverse the land, cutting out valleys and canyons where the Incas built their castles of stones. After the spaniards invaded and destroyed the Incan Empire in 1535, they thought Cusco was too far away, so they built the port city Lima. In the movie, there was a comparison of the two cities with two screenshots played one after the other. I was shocked back then. And now I am shocked again, in the real city of Lima.

After about 40 minutes of ride, I arrived at the bus terminal of Cruz del Sur (Cross of the South), the biggest bus service provider in Perú. The initial agreement of the taxi fare was $50 soles (abbreviated and plural form of the peruvian currency “nuevo sol”, or literally “the new sun”. One sol is approximately 0.4 US dollars, or 12 NT dollars). But all along the ride, he kept complaining to me how hard he has to work everyday and how much he will be deducted by his supervisor for each deal made. After the ride through the Lima city, I was still shocked by the living environment of the civilians of Lima, and I gave way to him and agreed to pay him $55 soles. And this was my first “donation” in Perú.

When I learned that all tickets to Arequipa had all been sold out in Cruz del Sur and the next bus available was the next morning, I became a bit nervous. I had only 12 days in Perú, and every day was planned. If I missed this bus and spent an extra day in Lima, I might end up canceling some trips. Fortunately, I found another company named Inclusivo just around the corner and got one of the last two spots to leave for Arequipa! What a close call! After securing my ticket to Arequipa, I decided to roam around the Miraflores to find a bank for money exchange and to visit the Peruvian Museo de la Nación. The bank teller in the Interbank (the most common bank in Perú where you can exchange for soles with traveler’s checks) was a young guy who just graduated from college. He told me he had been practicing to speak english for eight consecutive weeks and was really excited to talk to me in english. It seems like it was either there were not many english-speaking customers for a while or I was such a rare asian guy to visit the area, two other tellers (while there were only 4 of them in the bank at that moment) dropped their work at hand and came to help him out in figuring out how to deal with the traveler’s checks and talked with me in turn in english on totally unrelated issues, leaving local peruvians waiting in line, livid and confused. I never knew being an asian guy who speaks english would make me a VIP in a peruvian bank! After leaving the bank, I got lost in the street on my way to the museum. But some friendly local peruvians were always there giving me a hand in locating my destination, and I finally got to the museum after about an hour of wondering around.

Museo de la nación was a building much smaller than I thought, considering it to be a “national” museum. There were only 3 levels open to the public on that day, and quite out of my expectation, exhibitions pertaining to the indigenous cultures comprised only a very small portion. All legends were in spanish, so it took me much effort to read and understand every single line. And I just had to give up reading everything (which is really not my style when visiting a museum I am interested in) and moved on to the next level. But at the last level, I learned about the “Sendero Luminismo (Shining Path)”, a Maoist communism party that started in 1980 trying to overthrow the Peruvian government. The exhibition was made in a photojournalist way, with shocking images taken during those bloody events. There were several images that left a huge impression on me, especially a boy with a scar on his face who had been rescued out from a shining path’s camp. It was a face of a 13 years old that you would never forget once you saw it. Given that there were only less than 4 hours for me to finish the museum and return to the bus terminal, and the sun was already setting, I made some quick notes and took several pictures before I found my way back to the Inclusivo.

The bus ride took about 16 hours to get to Arequipa, so I basically had to sleep on the bus. The seat was actually quite comfortable and could be lowered to almost 180 degree when I felt like sleeping. There were movie channels that I could choose from, but they were all dubbed in spanish. I only finished the Edge of Darkness, casted by the old Mel Gibson, before I got too tired by watching a spanish-speaking movie for 2 hours. I soon felt asleep. When I woke up in the morning at 7:30AM, dim light sieved through the fog from the distant horizon into our bus. And for the first time after I hopped on that bus, I could see what was going on outside. The bus was advancing slowly uphill in a land surrounded by endless sand dunes and clay-colored rocks. There were almost no plants. It was so arid that it reminded me of an old movie Dune. I touched the window, and it was icy cold. It should be below 10 degree celsius outside. Suddenly, I saw an indigenous people carrying a sag half the size of himself, walking alone in this arid world of sand dunes. Our bus went past him in less than two seconds, leaving him in clouds of dust. While we were complaining how tiring the school work or our job was and slept in in the morning, there were people who had to trudge through these dessert every morning carrying sags we would probably not have to carry in a life time in order to earn a meal to survive. Then I thought of the bus driver, whom had driven for 12 hours already without resting. As a doctor-to-be, do we doctors really have the right to complain about working overtime after thinking about these people’s condition?

In the past, I have written blogs in different forms starting from my freshman year in college. And I feel that by forcing myself to write, no matter on what issues, it became an important process for developing my ability to think and reason critically. And this time, I am going to try to do it in english. If you know the physiology of a human brain, it is conceivable to argue that there is a threshold of age for learning languages and obtain new knowledge. I am 29 this year already. And although I have tried hard to maintain my ability to soak up new information and process and integrate these knowledge to do reasoning and independent thinking, I know in years my mind inevitably is going to become rigid someday. I will no longer be so open-up to all the wonders and diversities the world present to me like I used to be, and I will lose the ability to roam the world of intellects so freely and without boundary. So I guess this is the time that I have to make a breakthrough of myself. I have been in touch with english for more than 2 decades, but I have never been able to master it like a native speaker. I know I can blame it on the environment, since in Taiwan most people have little chance to practice speaking it. But I guess I have to be responsible for it myself in some respect. I had all the resource I need to really master this language, and the problem is just that I did not make the best use of them and urged myself hard enough to learn it well.  But anyhow, this can be a start.

My trip in South America has just entered the 10th day today, after finishing the magnificent Machu-Pucchu. The adventure in Perú will come to an end in 2 days, and my next stop will be Brazil. I guess if I keep slacking off on keeping my diary, I will be overwhelmed soon. And this is the trip of a lifetime which I won’t allow the precious memory to fade away with time. I will just force myself to keep the diary whenever I have time, to preserve the experience while it is still fresh, and to level my intellectual power to a higher ground.

2008年4月 我剛滿27歲 經歷了人生的重大轉折 不知不覺也過了一年半

我放棄了自己的那顆北極星 心中早已沒了夢想

現在想的盡是些俗氣的東西 如何成功 如何變有錢 如何穩固我未來的物質生活

或許只是年紀到了吧 明瞭了一些現實的道理

或是也早就明瞭了 只是不願接受 所以一直以來都在不切實際地追尋與眾不同

來這邊念書 對向來有名校情節的我來講 實在是很大的妥協

不過既然早已成為行屍走肉 不管曾經多麼地不滿和不屑 現在也都已經接受了

物質慾這麼強烈的我 太貪心 想要的東西太多 結果就是沒辦法貫徹自己的夢想

以前太幸福了 導致於夢想流於理想化

沒有了夢想 但喜歡挑戰未知的心還在 或許這還是值得慶幸的

抓住青春的尾巴之拉丁美洲背包客流浪團

Tiempo:
starting early- to mid-August 2010, prone to change
Duracíon:
3 weeks~1 month
Destino:
Chile, Peru, Argentina, Brazil
Miembros potenciales:
3-4 ppl, 5 at most. Looking for adventurous, healthy, and brave
individuals who are deeply attracted by the mysterious and exotic
Latin America. Knowing some Spanish would be a plus. Male preferred.

嘴炮打了幾年 一直沒成行 一方面是真沒找到空閒時間 一方面心態其實也開始老了
明年夏天我就29歲了 人生不能回頭 再不完成這個夢想 他就要離我而去
時間很殘酷 不等人 也不容許回頭 時間點一過 旅行的意義就再也不一樣

人生苦短 所以要一口氣!

有興趣的請和我連絡: sr.yeoh@gmail.com