SHAKIRA SHAKIRA!!!!

If I could swap identifities with any woman in the world, I'm sorry Hilary Clinton, but it would be Shakira.

Which is lucky, really, because I'm sure she would feel the same way... about me.

Having temporarily forgotten that her concert was on last night, I had to make a last-minute dash into el Centro when Tara and Gabe discovered everything was ready to rock'n'roll. The Zocalo in Mexico City is huge, and was completely crammed with people from six hours before the show. To give an indication of the level of pants-wetting going on in Mexico, they closed all other tourist attractions (museums etc) for the entire day.

With lyrics like these, you can understand why:

For you, I'd give up all i own
And move to a communist country
If you came with me, of course
And I'd file my nails so they don't hurt you

Mmmm... the layers of meaning.

The goal of finding G&T in the middle of a crowd of 200 thousand people was an epic journey that served as a personal metaphor for life. I spilled out of the metro and followed the hoards of post-adoscent boys, trying to look less excited than they actually were, but unwittingly giving themselves away by sporting even more hair gel than usual.

Extraordinarily, Mexico was exhibiting very strange behavioural symptoms. Anyone who's seen people drive in this part of the world will be shocked to discover that 10 blocks from the entrance, people started forming a line. For a free concert. I mean, there weren't even any gates to get through.

No thanks. I joined the flow of people walking alongside the self-imposed line-followers... and eventually - like a leaf floating on the river - found myself up against a dam wall. Bodies jam-packed beside each other as far as the eye could see.

HTF was I going to get to the other side of the square, and then into the middle?

Firstly I pretended I was 'someone' and entered the restricted section. Not so hard when you're wearing the outfit I had on.



Just kidding. We bought the Shakira! shirts and headbands after the show. I crossed half the width of the square in this manner.

Next, I joined a snake of adolescent crowd-pushers and let them carry me halfway to the stage, looking blank... as though it wasn't my fault I was being pushed in front of all the people who'd been waiting in the sun for hours on end. The only trade-off was that the guy behind me erection-assaulted me, so I turned around, scowled, and pointed my finger at him in a menacing way. Cheeky bugger.

Then I had to go several hundreds of people deep - left. This was the hardest part, I was on the phone trying to ubicarme... shouting 'Shatara Shatara, your hips don't lie underneath your clothes'. I could see people around me souring at the thought I didn't even know Shakira's name (not realising that I was doing a clever sample of song lyrics and then morphing with the name of my friend).

To anyone who tried to block my way, I looked helpless and said 'I'm alone... and lost', which was actually true.

Finally Tara's face, partly obscured by a black Shakira! headband, appeared through the crowd. It was quite a moment.

(Just to spell out the life metaphor: to reach the final goal, sometimes there'll be obstacles, sometimes you'll have to bend the truth a little, need the help of other people... and sometimes men will try to rub their penises on you even when you don't want them to. But if you stick to the goal, you'll make it. Phew)

When I say we 'saw' Shakira, it's actually a bit of a stretch. The Zocalo is flat, and Mexico has discovered periscopes - long cardboard boxes wtih mirrors in the top to see over the crowd. Now, if one or two people have a periscope, they are a great concept (for the people in possession). If everyone has one, well we're back to square one aren't we?



Everyone had one.

Tara, Gabe and I spent the entire duration playing pass-the-periscope, so for approximately one third of the show, I could look through a 4 square centimetre mirror, through a very thick forest of cardboard, to slivers of Shakira displayed on a screen. Seeing the actual flesh and blood on stage was completely out of the question, although I think I may have seen one of her sleeves once.

The rest of the night was spent looking up at the aforementioned forest of cardboard.

My usual thought in visually-challenged situations like this is, 'oh well, I'm here for the music... at least I get to hear this at live. Wow!'

Well, I don't like Shakira's music. I like Shakira. Also, Mexicans love a good sing along, and they know all the words to every song. Unfortunately the guy behind me had a great set of lungs, and was tone deaf.

So there we go, the life metaphor extends: sometimes you discover the thing you battled for and strained towards is an elusive illusion obscured by cardboard and drowned out by a cacophony.

LUCHA LIBRE

Last night we went to one of Mexico's greatest attractions: the Lucha Libre. It translates directly to 'free fighting'... but is more like a choreographed dance of guys jumping all over each other.

Some people love it, I fail to see why.

Basically it seems to be any man who wanted to be gay, but didn't have the guts to come out of the closet contents himself donning a mask with spending half the night with his head between another man's legs (a popular wrestling move??) in what looks like an interpretive dance of oral sex.



There are two teams, the 'tecnicos' (the good guys) and the 'rudos' (you guessed it...)

Now, one glance around Mexico City will automatically beg the question of how they found men big enough to pass as wrestlers. Judging by the size of these guys' packages, it's a pretty fair guess to say 'steroids'.

For example, in the first round all the bad guys seemed to have been chosen for the size of their bellies - all the better to jump on you with - and all the good guys, for the minimisation of damage to genital area. I mean, the smaller the target...

I don't want to harp on, but they're all dressed in lycra so I will. The guy in the white pants could have moonlighted as a drag queen and he wouldn't have had to go to the bother of tucking his package up between his legs, because he didn't have one. It was distressing. Yet, he didn't seem the slightest bit self-conscious about it. You'd think if you were lacking in that area, the last thing you'd do is don tights and go on national TV, thrusting your groin around.

The most impressive bit is the way they fly through the air. One will dive off the stage/wrestling ring - often headfirst - and the guy on the ground will catch him. That's pretty amazing, when you're talking about guys who are 150 kilos.



Going back to the tights, some guys just wear big oversized undies, that look like nappies... except they're three sizes too small so they have a muffin-top issue happening. Looks really uncomfortable.

The finale came when one guy in plaster came out on crutches and all the bad guys started beating Mr Mistical with them (although, miraculously there were about 5 crutches). Then they demasked him. I think this is what you'd call 'foreplay'... who knows what happened out back in the locker room with after all that teasing. A bit of sexual healing, I'd be guessing.



These pics are not my handy camerawork, because cameras are prohibited. Kids on the other hand, can be taken in no problems.

Also legimate to carry in under your arm: noise machines. I've never heard anything like them but they make sirens seem like lullabies. The Mexican penchant for making more noise than any human could reasonably be expected to withstand, is manifested in all its eardrum-disregarding glory, as 10 men sit five metres behind me grinning as they 'play' what look like bomb detonators. You know the box with the handle that you push down? What comes out sounds like a party streamer on steroids, about five times the volume of a car horn. And their arms did not get tired.

CAN'T DO BETTE MIDLER REFERENCE

There's a weight that settles for the duration of a work trip. It's largely related to the unpleasant clash that happens when material wealth meets developing countries. ie. taking your laptop to Guatemala. Sometimes it feels like electrical equipment is met with a collective intake of breath, and than a race to nick it.

This being the case, it was with a sense of great relief that I found myself landing back in Mexico City. As we dropped through the ubiquitous smog, I saw a little green and white VW beatle cab - it was so familiar - and suddenly I felt safe again.

The plane was about ten metres from the tarmac, I had my usual realisation of the miracle of flight - by which planes land without crashing - and suddenly there was a scream of the engine, the nose pointed up again, and the airport was disappearing behind us.

Hmmmmmm.

A couple of options: either someone had f*cked up the landing, and needed a Take Two.... or the plane was being high-jacked by the lesser-known Central American Al-Qaida operative. Those dark horses.

You'd think if you were taking a plane-load of slightly unsettled passengers for Take Two, you'd mention it over the intercom. "Hey guys, sorry, was too busy savouring the chocolate chips in my cookie and forgot about aligning correctly. Let's try that again.'

But as the silence lengthened, and people found themselves looking around the carriage to guage their reactions, by other people's behaviour... I started wondering whether maybe I'm underestimating the power of conviction amongst Central America's terrorist population.

So, I just contented myself with a bit of reckless navel-gazing instead... in the face of my current relational difficulties (to quit, or not to quit, that is the question)

Relationships are kind of like flying, you're sky-high when everything's running to schedule. And strangely, when they end, it's never a smooth landing... there's always some sort of crash and burn.

So maybe, sometimes, as you're just about to hit the tarmac for another crash landing... you decide instead to point the nose skywards one more time. Just hoping that maybe this is the plane with wings that can keep flying, and with a fuel tank that - like a neverending packet of timtams - won't run out of aircraft fuel.

That's hope.

And what of the crash and burn, as you drag yourself burned and bleeding from the wreckage? Months and years in intensive care, that's what. Last week T looked at her watch and said 'oh my GOD. Oh GOD! I can't believe it. F's birthday was yesterday and I didn't remember. Oh WOW!' and I thought, God it's a long road to remembering to forget. Years of clawing your way back to 'before'.

As I write, I listen to J and M downstairs talking and laughing... their burns are healing nicely.

I watch my hands as they type, and they look old.

MEATLOAF

Another music-related title stretch.

The optimists of the world say that you can take something from every failure.. even relational ones. Well, I do.. but not in the hippy everything-has-a-reason sense. More the enraged everything-is-f*cked sense.

Not so with Luis (Dec-Jan). While his ideal girlfriend would probably have been a cadavar, judging by the amount of effort he wanted to put in, we had one good conversation. I took it with me.

It's like food. If your life is filled with amazing meals, you don't notice the exquisite mocha baked cheesecake you scoff unthinkingly whilst chatting about the new rockclimbing instructor the gym.

But if you've been living on rice and beans for three weeks, you do.

Same with conversation. And given that Luis and my time together was characterised by long silences, which seemed impossible to fill, that one great conversation we had stuck out like a mocha baked cheesecake among rice and beans.

It was the meat in the oven convo. The general gist is this: once in your life, you have to take all your meat, and put it in the oven. Kind of the non-vegetarian version of eggs-in-one-basket.

It means you're risking everything, and you have to stick by that decision to make it worth that decision.

On the strength of that conversation, I didn't just take off to India to explore new, undiscovered diving sites. I stayed here to run against the strong wind of resistance that is freelance journalism.

I'm glad I did, so then why turn around and take a job in PR, no matter how well paid? I know where my passion is: it's the off-the-meter stress, it's the robberies, the assaults, the police incidents and chats with transexuals, priests, dissidents, femimists, poets, taxi drivers... and then pasting them together into something that's mine.

Anyway, so I left my meat in the oven.

THE RELIGION REPORT

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2007/1924264.htm

TAKE A LOAD OFF, FANNIE

F*cker, more like it.

This time yesterday, things were more normal. I had rung to check on a bus back to Xela from Antigua, and all was fine. Fun as the chicken bus was, I didn't want to do it again. I wanted to sit on a shuttle bus and not watch my things like a hawk.

So I booked a shuttle for Sunday afternoon, back to Xela, and relaxed. Thing is, they overbooked and kicked me off the bus. So I booked another one for this morning, and gave myself over to a night of good food with Sylve.

We ran into the boys from last night: a Dane called Emille (great name... for a girl) and a pom called Ben (great name, for a boy).

They were more fun the night before after a few tequilas, but we had a nice night and then headed home because Sylvie had a 4am bus. There are no cabs in Antigua at midnight so we walked. We came across a quintessial Aussie with blonde dreadlocks who was wandering the streets with his hostel key extended, just in case he found the door to his hostel. He was totally lost, and swearing the requisite amount. "I mean, it was fucking here a fucking second ago, ahhh shit."

A guy passes and asks for a cigarette and the aussie says, "No...smoko" realising too late he doesn't know the word in Spanish for smoke.

We leave him pointing his key at random doors and getting shooed away by random doormen, and hit the dark part of the walk.

I notice a guy following us, it's the cigarette guy. So I tell Sylvie to wait for him to pass. He doesn't.

He starts crossing the road towards us, and I back towards the light. Sylvie runs. He's asking for money. I tell him we don't have any.

He reaches inside his jacket, and I don't want to know if he's just bluffing - I really don't. In truth, I'm scared.

"Vamas a gritar," I say in my most tall voice. "We will scream." He keeps coming.

"De verdad, vamos a gritar," and just as I am opening my mouth for one of those dream screams, where you open your mouth but only a whimper comes out, he turns and leaves us.

We wake four hours later for our early buses. Mine is late, and it ends up being a guy in a car. He loads me up, and drives me and a snoring old blonde American to Guatemala city, the opposite direction from Xela.

She gets out at the airport, and he dumps me at a generic bus stop.

"But I could have done this myself from Xela," I say, "I bought a shuttle ticket."

There's no arguing over this, it appears, so I flounce my things onto the bus and as I'm putting them on the floor, the bus guy tells me that I have to put them in the console. It's prohibited to have them on the floor.

There are five 17 year-olds watching rape porn on a mobile phone in front of my. It's not what I need at 6am. One of them is looking at me in an unnerving manner.

I am busting and I have a four-hour trip in front of me.

Three hours later, I really think I'm about to burst and I'm REALLY thirsty, but I can't drink because I"ll exacerbate the problem. I'm also really hungry, but after watching the roadside urinary antics of all the men on this trip, I realise the same happens with the food men because there are no toilets around, so I resist food.

The entire trip is threaded with cheerful cumbia music that bounces around in my head, with its off-beat accordians which are really really jarring when you need to go to the toilet.

At one point, on the strength of 'we are ten minutes away' from the girl with silver-rimmed teeth and a moustache, who is sitting beside me, I buy and drink a half-litre of orange juice.

I sleep. The ride goes forever. Then the bus stops and dumps us in the middle of nowhere. That's when I discover some MoF*cker has relieved me of my SLR camera, extra lens and worst of all, my microphone. My only microphone.

The result of this is that I can't file the stories I've promised, so my livelihood is gone... at least until I get back to Mexico.

I hurded onto a yellow school bus, which turns out to be a personalised service that drops everyone in the province at their front door. The roads are really bumping and I'm actually visualising my cargos soaked in urine. I wonder what would be worse out of that, and dying of a burst bladder with urine in my bloodstream.

That's when a religious nutter gets on the bus and starts telling us in a seering, relentless voice to repent. He keeps doing so for 20 minutes and I am so close to walking up and slapping him that I am sure my facial expression is pure hate. Then he goes through the bus asking for money - I mean, if he'd asked at the beginning for money to refrain from speaking, I would have been throwing it at him. But ... whaaaaaaaat?

That bus stops and everyone is hurded off it, and I find myself in a taxi. The driver just keeps saying 'What a shame, oh well, that's life' in a tone that suggests he thinks gringos have too many possessions in the first place. Fair enough.

Nine hours after setting off for the three-hour journey I arrive, with more urine and less net worth that I ever intended for this journey.

In a nutshell, I am really pissed off. The Pollyanna in me says at least I'm not pissed on.

CHICKEN RUN

When she heard that I was going to Guatemala for two weeks, Sylvie decided to pop down for a visit. We decided on Antigua.

So, on Friday afternoon, I packed my bags and bade my light-fingered (is that the adjective for THIEF?) host mum goodbye, and jumped on a chicken bus.

The brightly painted, smoke belching vehicles are so named for the fact that people bring chickens on them. Who would have guessed?

It was the most amazing ride of my life. It's the general size of a school bus, but Guatemalans sit three-to-a-seat for the journey - in this case five hours. I put my most essential items at my feet and plonked myself down next to two sturdy gentlemen. The downside of this was that there was only enough room on the edge of the seat for one of my two bum cheeks. So, for the next three hours, I applied myself to a major balancing feat. Every now and then I'd try to claw myself a couple of extra centimetres, but neither of them were budging.

It's hard to balance, because you have to hold onto something, but the aisles are packed with people standing, so it's a matter of finding a bit of space on a seat-top and then riding the twists and turns. Kind of like surfing, but not as fun.
Then a young man in an orange T-shirt got on and pressed himself up against me. Having experienced 'erection assault' on a bus in Ecuador once before, I was having none of this and spent quite a while glaring at him and twisting away from his pressing frame. Finally I discovered that neither he nor his penis had any interest in me, so just let it ride. Eventually I had one arm around my two neighbours, holding the seat behind, and one stretched across the non-erection-assualter pressed up against the guy on the other side of the aisle, holding his seat as well.

Once you've given up on the idea of personal space, it's quite liberating. I had hours and hours to watch the people around me. There was noone non-indigenous in sight. The mother behind me was letting her gorgeous, spitty little 2-year-old mini-man blow rasperries on the window. This is where LatAmericans get their immune systems from I guess.

Then a really fat old lady who was about 2 foot tall, got on the bus. She had one of the worst mouths of teeth I've seen - well, most of them were gone, and the remaining ones were dark brown. On her head she was carrying a bundle the size of her body, and as we careered around mountainsides I watched her balance it with three fingers of one hand, while the removed her fare from the folds of her clothing with the other hand.

Eventually, I felt so cramped and guilty that I offered her my seat and discovered that it's actually more comfortable standing up. So I spend the rest of the trip being gawked at by everyone wondering how a giant can have such long arms.

There was a mother wearing full indigenous dress, and very impractical green heels. She had two boys who could have been twins except that one was obviously two years older than the other one, so that would have been a weird pregnancy and we probably would have heard about it in the Guiness Book of Records.

Her boys were so cute, one was feeling a bit sick so she put some water in the top of a bottle lid, and poured it on his head. And then his brother rubbed it into his scalp. They both had big round heads and skinny little bodies with thin brown arms. They were the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Eventually she and one son got seats a few rows apart, so she pulled the second one up onto her lap and then patted her leg. The first son gave up his relatively comfortable space to clamber up onto her second leg and he and his brother fell asleep with all their little brown limbs entangled.

The bus stopped three times for roadwork, about 20mins each time. With all the windows shut, things get a bit warm and close, but people just chat happily between themselves and eventually the bus takes off again.

By the end, when people start ejecting themselves from the crush they have to negotiate themselves down the middle aisle, which parts like the Red Sea. Well, most of the aisle, apart from the backpack containing my laptop which didn't budge. You'd see people step down, feel something under their body weight and then step over it. My laptop may never be the same again.

The exhaust is carefully positioned in the exact place that when you finally spill out the front door, you get bathed in a farewell sea of black smoke. Every singe person, but you're so happy to be uncrumpling yourself that you don't really notice.

Then I jumped on another chicken bus and finally reached Antigua, where a friendly little chap told me about military service in Haiti while we walked to the centre. The hotel took a bit of finding, but eventually Sylv and I found ourselves sitting in a totally gringo cafe eating hamburgers and talking to a Norweigan firetwirler called Martin (gorgeous) and an evangelical Christian whose wife had spent a year in Guatemala to adopt their daughter, and somehow managed not to learn any Spanish in that time. But it was, apparently, God's will for them to have that baby.

Then we headed back to a comfortable room, where the beds had mattresses instead of foam, and the doors locked, and slept soundly.

Next day we visited what is quite possibly the most boring tourist attraction in the world. A convent, that belonged to an order of nuns with a name strikingly similar to 'capacino'. It was full of workmen, who just ogled us and made rude comments. And a guard who came into the room we were looking at, talked about the weather, and then tried to kiss us, and these slightly lack-lustre scupltures:

GUATE'S GOIN' ON....

I try to make all the title entries a song title, but yes, this is a bit of a stretch.

Anyway, am on Day Three in Xela, Guatemala.

I'm having a seriously good time. The great thing about 'echando la hueva' (being really lazy) is that then being really producive feels great.

The most distressing chapter of my life is now over: I have moved out of the 'mad'house. You cannot imagine my glee.

Must remember to write the sad story of Martin, the Rabbit.

Anyway, the tendency towards massive overpreparation to which I am so prone kicked in around 10pm Friday, had to be at the airport midday Saturday and somehow have moved out in the interim. Packing had to begin immediately.

It was unfortunate, because Thursday night ended up being a 6am job due to Iñaki hitting it off with my friends... which I guess is a good thing, as he's been avoiding them so long.

Jemima went out of her way to make sure he felt comfortable, as per their first converstaion:
I: So, what do you like about Latin men? (yeah, great opener)
J: Well, why don't we start with what I don't like about Latin men?
I: Sure, ok.
J: Their height (she says, looking down from her privileged position a full head taller than him)

Somehow he bounced back, and had both J and T lined up with blind dates before the night was out.

I was so hungry when the night began that our:
a) refused entry to Cibeles on grounds of not having booked - please, get your hands off it, did someone forget we're in Mexico
b) appallingly bad 'Vietnamese spring rolls' - that must have refered to what they were eating back in the war...

made me even hungrier, due to delay, and inedibility. Drinking on an empty stomach is never a good idea, but possibly made worse when martini, gin, tequila, wine and beer collide.

Needless to say, this rendered my Spanish language interview with a Mexican anthropologist on:
The slipping grasp of catholocism in Latin America: culture wars and rise of alternative religions"... slightly challenging.

Oh good. There's always the concern that your talent can smell the alcohol that's emenating from every pore of your body, even if they haven't noticed your bloodshot eyes.

In an attempt to counter the effect, I wore my new glasses. I still haven't got over the idea that they make me look intellectual. Actually, I am long-sighted so it really f*cks me up for walking around.. .and I nearly fell over.

My talent was not at all as I expected. If I had alcohol from every pore, he had hair. He was even growing a pretty serious patch out of his nose.

Anyway, from what my fuzzled mind could tell, he was very articulate (apart from my general inability to grasp his general message) and I went off to shoot the breeze wtih Jemima, the funniest person in the world

We talked about religion and after tiring of weighty subjects, talked about height. She once dated a guy who was 6"7 and people in the street used to walk up and basically ask about whether his height was reflected in his genetaelia. Bloody poms, so crass.

Then, unfortunately, we walked past a dwarf.

Apparently he's not sensetive about his height though, because he dresses up as a bear at the Lucha Libre and gets thrown around for the titilation of spectators.

Anyway, we ended up at the pool hall with Tara... and then, intriguingly, at the bowling alley. Jemima says that from her first degree, she mastered pool. From her PhD, she's on top of bowling. Who know what'll happen if she goes back to study again.

Anyway, then, decided to go home and pack. Hmmm... moving out, packing for a trip on which I embark at midday tomorrow... and only three hours' sleep under my belt from the night before.

There's nothing like a challenge.

CORRESPONDENTS REPORT

http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2007/s1908742.htm