Real de Catorce is unique from the first moment you arrive, or try to arrive. There are only two roads into town. The main road rises some 4000 feet in only about 10 miles. The road ends in a tunnel through the mountain that surrounds the town. The tunnel is almost a mile and half long and only one car wide. If you take a bus to Real de Catorce you will have to get off you normal size bus and board a mini bus for the last leg of the journey into town. The ride in the mini bus into town is a never to forget experience. The driver will go hurling through the curved tunnel at break neck speed. This is especially memorable due to the fact that the mini bus only clears the walls and roof of the tunnel by inches.

The town of Real de Catorce has some of the most amazing views in Mexico. You can see for miles out over the surrounding desert and mountains from many areas in town. The town is towered over by Parroquia de San Francisco. Each October between 50,000 and 100,000 pilgrims enter Real de Catorce for the weeklong festival of San Francisco. The church is not one of the more impressive ones in Mexico. What is worth visiting in the church is a room off the main sanctuary that displays the thousands of small amateur religious paintings called “retablos” that pilgrims leave as thanks for answered prayers.

Real de Catorce tends to attract an unusually diverse bunch of people. There are wealthy foreigners and Mexican that have constructed large mansions in and around the town. There are pilgrims in town to pray at the church. There are also always a number of people in town for a different type of trip. Real de Catorce is in the center of the area where the peyote cactus grows wild. This cactus is a hallucinogen. Many people looking for an alternative experience to the norm make the pilgrimage to Real de Catorce in search of this cactus.

Real de Catorce is located in the Northern section of the San Luis Potosi state. It can be reached by bus from the town of Matehuala ($2.50 for the 1 ½ hour bus ride). If you are planning on driving to Real de Catorce please note that large vehicles such as campers cannot enter the town. ]]> http://www.travelertour.com/reviews/real-de-catorce.html/feed 0 http://www.travelertour.com/czech-republic/prague-story-platypus-wrecks.html http://www.travelertour.com/czech-republic/prague-story-platypus-wrecks.html#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:50:39 +0000 admin http://www.travelertour.com/?p=390 The absinthe burned my throat on the way down. Breathing in through my nose I contemplated how it was getting easier every time and when I felt it was safe I let out a high pitched roar. It was 11.30pm and there was me and Scooby and Corco and Masterson-Nolan and we were in our flat in Prague performing our nightly ritual before making our way into the Old Town. I was wearing a tie, sandals, shorts, a shirt I had won in a Malibu promotion, and an apron, which was funny because I don’t usually wear ties, and we were out to have fun because, after all, fun and Love are what life is all about.

We walked down through Letinsky Park and across Stefanov Most and were heading towards the Square when Corco noticed that a bar, called Snack Bar, which wasn’t usually open this late was indeed open. Feeling there was no other option we called in for a quick shot. To get us going, like.

The first thing that struck me about the place was how empty it was, in that it was completely empty. The second was the size of the whiskey glasses the lone barman placed in front of us. Had I been fully sober the first thing I would have noticed was that the lone barman was out of his biscuit tin. Gone a bit sideways. Out of his trumpet. Needing a bit of a shake. He had, to put it mildly, had a bit to drink.

The whiskey glasses were refilled with Becherovka as quickly as we could drain them, and it soon became clear that the bill was not an object. Which was fortunate, considering that if you were counting the shots poured into each glass each time it was unlikely we had enough on us to match the tab.

Now we were drunk, and we were talking away at the barman although he hadn’t a word of English.

“Cesky?”, asked Masterson-Nolan, inquiring as to whether he spoke Czech. He misunderstood, thinking we were asking his nationality, and he shook his head vehemently.
“Serbska!” he declared, sticking his chest out proudly.
“Milosevic”, cried Scooby. Worried I was for a moment when I thought that he might not want Slobadon’s name shouted with such acclaim, but the man couldn’t have been more on Scooby’s wavelength and he never thought past Savo. The universal language of Football. We continued to shout players’ names across the bar at him for a few minutes, most of whom probably weren’t Serbian at all, but he echoed our shouts with added bravado and glided around behind the bar refilling our glasses.

Now we were locked, and the barman reached across and grabbed Scooby’s Man Utd. jersey. I misunderstood, and took off my shirt. He looked at me curiously for a few seconds and then followed suit, releasing his belly and huge man breasts. This really got us going and we were up on our stools pointing our fingers and singing “Who eat all the pies” at him. He was dancing around the place lapping up every profanity we could think of. He waved his hands quickly and diagonally in front of his flabby chest: “Ziggy Zaggy”, he roared. “Ziggy Zaggy” we roared, and we all imitated his curious gesture badly.

Now we were ossified, and recollection becomes all blurry. Certain memories, distinct moments, stand out clearly. Outside for some fresh air after a shot went down wrong with Masterson-Nolan. “This”, I said to him, “this is the weirdest yet”, because some weird things had happened to us in ten and a half weeks, and we jumped up and down hugging for three hundred and sixty degrees and went back inside. Seeing Corco behind the bar. Serbian traditional music. Seeing a new face sitting at the end of the bar and wondering when he had come in. Me being behind the bar and pulling myself a pint. Going through his CD collection. Finding a Ricky Martin album, and passing it around and laughing. Breaking his Ricky Martin album in front of his face…

Snap went the plastic case and snap went the laughing expression on Ziggy’s face and snap returns my memory nice and clear. His new expression scared me sober. I looked around and my brain worked surprisingly fast as it evaluated my situation and didn’t like what it found. Corco was sitting at the bar staring at his feet after obviously having a few whiskey glasses more than was good for him. Scooby was standing staring at the wall, probably in the middle of an acid flashback induced by the copious amounts of grass we had smoked earlier in the day. Masterson-Nolan was nowhere to be seen. Ziggy was aiming a punch.

I was never renowned for my chin and collapsed like a ton of feathers under his first blow. The sixth man was obviously a friend of Ziggy’s and he copped what was happening quick and Corco had raised his head from his daze just in time to see a stool heading for his face. He hit the ground before his blood and he wasn’t getting up any time soon. Ziggy had lost his balance himself after his exertion and it was me and him in a race to regain our footing. The sixth man was lining up Scooby with his stool but was interrupted by the timely arrival of the Policie, in the form of a nineteen year old cop with a baton and a gun that made a bar stool look very small. He exchanged words in Czech with the sixth man.

After almost three months in Prague I had heard enough stories about the Czech police to fear that we weren’t out of the woods just yet. Scooby was looking around him but all he was seeing was snakes and swinging monkeys and a man with a huge platypus growing out of his left arm. I wasn’t happy to see the cop laugh at a crack made by the sixth man and enjoyed even less seeing him prepare to skull Corco with the huge baton in his left arm. He brought it down with his full weight behind it and Corco was lucky to get his arm up in time to deflect the blow with his elbow, resulting in a sound that was painful for me to hear…

Snap went Corco’s arm and snap went the realisation inside Scooby’s head that something terrible was happening and snap went Scooby. He pure panicked and began launching the liquor bottles lined up beside him in all directions, screaming horribly as he went. He was soon joined in his screams by the sixth man and the cop who were both caught square with flying bottles. Ziggy went to stop him and slipped and cracked his head against the bar. Masterson-Nolan arrived back from his wanderings and he grabbed Corco and I grabbed Scooby and we made as fast an exit as we possibly could.

But we had to go anyway, I’d left the chocolate spread in the fridge.

Pasar Mardika, like any market, is a microcosm of the society it serves. On the surface it is the thriving, if ugly, commercial heart of the city, but the market also exemplifies the roiling tensions and brewing conflict that threatens to tear Indonesia apart.

Within Mardika are sold those goods which it is deemed profitable to transport to this isolated corner of the globe such as manufactured goods from Western Indonesia and the rest of South East Asia, as well as a few imported goods from the West. More fascinating for the Westerner is the exotic produce imported from the even more isolated specks of land which form the Malukan archipelago – fruits such as rambutan, durian, and manggosteen, plus any number of different varieties of banana from the tiny pisang susu (milk banana) to the huge pisang Ambon (Ambon banana) and all sizes in between. Spices are sold here too, intoxicating to the senses – cengkeh (cloves) and pala (nutmeg), native to this part of the world, marica (pepper), kayu manis (cinnamon) and, of course, cabe (chilli). The smelliest section of the market is undoubtedly the pasar ikan (fish market), the most frustrating is the clothes shops – no matter how I try I can’t fit even the XXXL clothes over my sturdy Western frame.

However, the market tells other stories, too – the design itself speaks eloquently of the poor town planning, appallingly bad architecture and shoddy workmanship that is characteristic of much of the developing world. The result of lack of funding and unimaginative beauracracy, Mardika consists of a series of concrete boxes, four stories high, arranged into long avenues in which identical shop fronts display their bewildering array of goods. In odd corners, enterprising marketeers set up trellises of cheap consumer items, vie-ing for space with the innumberable mini-busses which fan out from here to all corners of the island.

The market encompasses a huge area – extending for nearly a kilometre in all directions. The box construction of the concrete buildings, lining long, crowded and bewildering avenues of people and goods is disorienting for someone unfamiliar with the district. This can be dangerous in a city which is on the edge of anarchy, for Mardika exemplifies the very real tensions which beset the entire Maluku Archipeligo. Mass transmigration of Muslims from the overcrowded islands of Western Indonesia has created a growing sense of frustration and alienation among the predominantly Christian Eastern Indonesians.

“I wouldn’t mind being considered a second class citizen if I lived in Australia or the Netherlands” says my exchange sister, Stany, “but I am made to feel like a second class citizen in my own country, and it isn’t right!”.

Caught uneasily between these two groups is the native muslim population – they too feel threatened for space and livelihood by the transmigrants, yet remain irrevocably tied to them by the sense of brotherhood that is the essence of Islam.

Added to these tensions is the lack of education, which can make people suspicious of outsiders, as well as poverty which encourages resentment of us rich Westerners. One day when I was trying to find a bus that would take me from the market to the city centre I found myself totally lost. I turned corner after corner only to find myself confronting yet another long, stifling avenue of tall concrete boxes lined with yet more stalls of bewildering colour and content.

Gradually I found myself moving into the rougher areas of the market where there were few respectable traders. Asking for directions, I found myself caught up in a group of youths, both guys and girls, who, although not physically threatening, appeared to derive great joy from my plight. They whispered snidely to each other and menganggu (teased) me with their refusal to give me logical directions. One of them, with a leer on his face, offered to give me a lift on the back of his scooter, which I hastily declined.

Into this scene of conflict between East and West strode more tinder in the form of a man who, in his presence, exemplified the tensions between the two halves of Indonesia. He was a young Javanese transmigrant, but I don’t remember his name despite his gallantry – perhaps because for me he is the archetype of all that is good and bad about Java. Taller and thinner than the locals, with straight hair in place of Ambonese curls, he consciously sought to maintain his Javanese halus (calm) in the face of the youths’ kasar (courseness).

Indicating that I should follow him, he walked briskly through the market, with me skipping along to keep up with him. He wore his “halus” like a shield, unaware (or uncaring) that the locals interpreted it as arrogance, and that the youths we had by now left behind would consider his actions extremely provocative.

Within a few minutes we found a bus that would take me to the centre of the city, and as I had discovered that it was his destination too, I insisted on paying his fare as a thankyou. He protested vigourously that he was quite happy to walk, and looked sullen during the ride. When we reached our destination he left the bus with barely a word or backward look, and it was only later that I realised what the problem was.

He was bored.

Lacking both employment and money, he was desperate for something to while away the hours. Too “halus” to lower himself to the sport of “menganggu” Westerners, he had been looking forward to the stroll as a way of passing the time. I, in my stupid, Western arrogance, had stolen his walk, making his day half an hour longer than it needed to be.

********

Four months after this trip to Ambon, sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians broke out in the city. Pasar Mardika was one of the first areas to be razed, in a conflict which has taken over 3,000 lives. The fighting still continues, 2 years later despite (because of?) the intervention of the Indonesian Army, which consists primarily of Western Indonesian Muslims.

In the Lefka Ori, you’ll drive through small villages, like Moni, Agia Irini, Laki, and Fournes that have been inhabited by families for generations. About 12 km from Sougia we stopped at a local tavern where the proprietor offered us complimentary shots of Raki as a greeting, a common Cretan custom.

There is no real purpose for the town other than helping visitors indulge themselves in the richness and beauty of the area. Is there even a school in the area? A hospital? The only hospital would be a burn-victim unit from all the unprotected sun exposure these people are getting.
My time spent in St. Tropez helped me master the act of laziness. The town itself isn’t know for having any organized tourist activities, so it’s plain to see how easy it is to be engulfed by laziness and indulgence in a world of sand, sea and hot sun. My days were spent around the pool or by the sea tanning. In the evening, I walked around the area and gawked at the beautiful people. Yet, after only a day, it was too much for me. It’s like eating a whole chocolate cake at once- it’s too rich and creamy for your stomach to handle, so you feel sick. The richness there sickened me. People say that inner beauty is more important than outer beauty, but that statement is a true fact when you see it happening all around you. In Scotland, the beauty is there but it invites people to come experience it with open arms. In St. Tropez, most people hoard all the beauty for themselves. They use it all without knowing a limit. Soon, I fear, there will be nothing left.

"This bloke had his backside over the edge of the dinghy” said Colin, our host, nursing his fifth beer of the evening, in a strange and desolate place called Shark Bay in Western Australia.

"That’s no bastard!” She huffed. "That’s Rambo, my sweet little pussy. Everyone knows about him. E’s armless, is Rambo!