Friday, April 09, 2010

MOTORHOMES, WORKER`S CLASS EXTREME SPORTS AND THE GOLD UNDERNEATH THE POOR`S FEET


The motorhome where I lived for a week in Pedro`s house. It`s a luxury to perform sedentary life for a week in an icon of movement.



It seems I am specializing in developing a worker class version of extreme sports. In the picture, after rafting down Jachal River in truck tyres, using old brushes as rows.


Medical check for La Maga… In a scale from 1885 it weighted 18,5 Kg.... more than it should, but the consider I am carrying all materials needed for binding my boks and framing the postcards I sell to sustain this trip.
Mud brick houses and superb rural landscape at Pampa Vieja.

Jorge took me in his Ford Taunus to Nonogasta. And he did so despite his car was falling apart. Indeed, we lost the exhaust in one of the bends....
Norht of Chilecito, the landscape turns barren, the town sparced... It is an untravelled road to Tinogasta in Catamarca. This obsession for following the tiniest lines in the roadmaps leads to being stuck in remote places. Which is something I love....

In Potrerilllos I am invited home by a local family. Antonio, the boy in the picture, rides his bike which has no tyres or breaks. He rides it over the pavement, making a terrible noise indeed. I am invited to drink mate and camp by his home. It is hard to believe that amazing reserves of gold lie just underneath Antonio`s poverty, the gold that is extracted by foreign companies and forges the offficial reserves of Swiss Banks, for example. In Latin America little has changed over the last 500 years.