As always, it was the innocently looking girls:
The first girl is one of the Uros living on the floating islands in Lake Titicaca in Peru. The second girl is one of the Mojenos living in the remote community of Buen Pastor in Tipnis National Park in Bolivia.
– “Good evening. I am a renowned writer with many prizes to my name.”
– “Nice to meet you. I am Andreas Moser and there is a price on my head.”
– “Priceless!”
– “Prizeless as well, to my despair.”
Hier könnt Ihr diesen Artikel auf Deutsch lesen.
When I arrived in Bolivia, there were so many people at the airport in Cochabamba that the immigration police asked “Who is local?” and anyone in the hall who raised their hands and passports could just walk through. I should have joined the crowd, but at that time I wasn’t yet confident enough that I would pass for a Bolivian.
So I got a one-month tourist visa at the airport, free of charge. This I could extend twice for another month by going to the Immigration Office. When I told my Bolivian friends where I would go, they all advised to take a few books, a bottle of water and the day off because I would need to wait for hours. In reality, you go directly to the friendly guy at counter no. 6 and before you can even sit down and start to explain your request to stay for another month, he has already taken your passport, stamped it with the extension and handed it back to you. “How much does this cost?” I asked. “Nothing. Enjoy your time in Bolivia!”
Three months per year are the maximum allowed on a tourist visa. When I wanted to stay in Bolivia longer, I was overwhelmed with offers of work contracts, volunteering contracts and marriage proposals, all of which could have served as the basis for a residence permit. It was also most surprising how many people could claim that “the head of the Immigration Office is my friend” or how many people had “a sister-in-law at the very top of the Immigration Department”.
But I didn’t want to do anything shady. Also, I was already aroused by the prospect of getting arrested to take a look at the famous Bolivian prison system. That didn’t work. One time I got into a police checkpoint after my visa had expired, already hoping that I would be driven away in a van with metal-grilled windows. The officer checked my passport carefully, looked at me, looked sorrowfully at the visa, looked back at me and handed my passport back, saying “I am glad you are enjoying Bolivia, Señor”.
So I stayed four more months, illegally. From now on, whenever you are ranting about “illegal immigrants”, please remember that it’s people like me that you are talking about.
Bolivia is not only friendly to visitors, but also quite smart. Instead of locking up immigrants, building walls or deporting people, all of which would cost a lot of money, they impose a fine.
So I worked hard for a few months until I had saved thousands of bolivianos, with which I went to the Immigration Office in La Paz to pay the fine. The officer there was very kind, said that they had already closed for the day but that I should come in and sit down, told me that I needn’t apologize at all for overstaying and proceeded to calculate the exact amount of the fine. Until then I had heard different numbers everywhere, ranging from 20 to 26 bolivianos per day.
The officer took the time and the help of several of his colleagues to explain in detail how the fine was calculated, and for the benefit of other travelers, I can reveal that the amount is 12 UFV per day. An UFV is an unidad de fomento de la vivienda, which is an accounting unit introduced to make payable amounts independent of inflation. It is calculated by dividing the Consumer Price Index of the present month by the Consumer Price Index of the same month of last year, taking the 12th root of that result, then calculating the nth root whereby n is the number of days of the present month and lastly multiplying this result by the value of the UFV of the previous day.
I did not understand it.
The officer had a computer and a calculator, but he was using a pencil and lots of paper to do his calculations. After about 10 minutes, he pronounced that I would have to pay a little more than 3,000 bolivianos. Which was good, because that’s exactly what I had saved.
When I wanted to pay however, he said “No, no, you can pay later. At the border.” I had the feeling that he was hoping almost as much as me that the border guards would forget about it and that I could leave Bolivia without such an enormous financial contribution.
But the Bolivian border guards at Kasani, on the border with Peru, were diligent public servants, although not without humor. “Why didn’t you just find a Bolivian woman and get married if you wanted to stay that long?” they asked before engaging in the same lengthy and complicated calculation of UFVs and bolivianos. The officer was using his phone to WhatsApp with his wife, but for the Fields-worthy calculation he too used pencil and paper.
He called his colleagues to show them the foreign guy who had overstayed not by a few days, but by four months. They were very curious and informed me that unfortunately I would only get the silver medal with my fine of 3,082 bolivianos because one time someone had come through that border post who had to pay more than 4,000. I was disappointed.
By the way, all of this is done completely above board. The payment is not a bribe. You get a receipt, a lot of handshakes, good wishes for your travels and the useful information that you can come back to Bolivia next year without any problems.
As you can see from the receipt, I committed the “grave violation” of “staying in Bolivian territory in an irregular way”. The fine was 25.68 bolivianos per day. That’s 3.34 euros (3.70 US dollars) or exactly 100 euros per month.
You have all seen these cables on wooden poles, dangling across fields, leading from village to village, from country to country and even connecting the continents underwater. This is how the internet comes into your home.
Have you never asked yourself where this internet actually begins?
I have. That’s why I have been following these cables on a multi-year journey. And now I finally found it: The place where the internet is produced is on Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca, situated in a small but beautiful bay.
After Donald Trumps’s speech at the Republican National Convention, I made this joke, inspired both by the plagiarism in the current Mrs Trumps’ speech and by the speech itself:
As with all my other Donald Trump jokes however, it turned out that I was actually spot on. From the very revealing article Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All:
Now, I would like to clarify that I think all Hitler and Nazi comparisons are over the top. I also think that Mr Trump’s danger lies less in what he believes (he’ll change his mind tomorrow anyway or just lie again) than in being a psychopath. Many elements of fascism can be found in Mr Trump’s speeches. But until the first people will get killed, let’s just stick to Mussolini comparisons for now.
In his autobiography My Early Life, the young Winston Churchill writes about his feelings towards war and conflict. He seems to regard it all as one great adventure.
About his time at the Military College in Sandhurst:
Here the study was of divisions, army corps and even whole armies; of bases, of supplies, and lines of communication and railway strategy. This was thrilling. It did seem such a pity that it all had to be make-believe, and that the age of wars between civilized nations had come to an end for ever.
On the latter point, Churchill was wrong. He would live to see World Wars I and II, and make a considerable contribution on behalf of civilization in the second.
If it had only been 100 years earlier what splendid times we should have had! Fancy being nineteen in 1793 with more than twenty years of war against Napoleon in front of one! However all that was finished. The British Army had never fired on white troops since the Crimea, and now that the world was growing so sensible and pacific – and so democratic too – the great days were over. Luckily, however, there were still savages and barbarous peoples. There were Zulus and Afghans, also the Dervishes of the Soudan. […]
These thoughts were only partially consoling, for after all fighting the poor Indians, compared with taking part in a real European war, was only like riding in a paper-chase instead of in the Grand National.
In 1930, it was apparently absolutely OK to publish an autobiography riddled with racism.
The young Churchill was so eager for war that in 1895, he took leave from the British Army to sail to Cuba at his own expense and join the Spanish in the Cuban War of Independence. Always on the side of European colonialism.
Each officer received a solid block of two and a half months’ uninterrupted repose. […] as I could not afford to hunt, I searched the world for some scene of adventure or excitement. The general peace in which mankind had for so many years languished was broken only in one quarter of the globe. The long-drawn guerrilla between the Spaniards and the Cuban rebels was said to be entering upon its most serious phase. […] It seemed to my youthful mind that it must be a thrilling and immense experience to hear the whistle of bullets all around and to play at hazard from moment to moment with death and wounds.
What would get you on a terrorism watch-list today, in 1895 was considered to be a completely decent plan to spend one’s holidays.
The Colonel and the Mess generally looked with favour upon a plan to seek professional experience at a seat of war. It was considered as good or almost as good as a season’s serious hunting, without which no subaltern or captain was considered to be living a respectable life.
Churchill did indeed come under fire and received his first medal. Equally important, it was in Cuba that he discovered cigars.
A few years later, he still hadn’t lost his taste for war. About a battle in the Second Anglo-Afghan war, Churchill writes:
So a lot of people were killed, […] and others were badly wounded and hopped around for the rest of their lives, and it was all very exciting and, for those who did not get killed or hurt, very jolly.
Very jolly indeed, all this war stuff. It makes me regret that I never fought in one.
“Well, we didn’t have cinema yet. What else was a young man supposed to do?”
(Thanks to long-time reader Ana Alves who mailed me Churchill’s autobiography as part of her annual book package. If you want to support this blog too, here is my wishlist of books. It’s hard to get the books I want in English or in German in South America, so I appreciate any help. Thank you!)
Before I went into the jungle in Bolivia, my biggest fear was of snakes.
But then, after a couple of days of wading through the green hell, completely lost, I heard something move in the tree above my head. I took a few steps back and saw this scary reptile lowering itself slowly. It moved like a snake, but it’s head was much bigger. I saw no eyes, no nose, it seemed like the whole head consisted only of claws ready to devour me.
It was the scariest thing I have ever seen.
I definitely ain’t going back to the jungle.
From Donald Trump’s book – or to be precise: Tony Schwartz‘s book with a photo of Donald Trump on the cover – The Art of the Deal:
“There are no guarantees,” warns the man who keeps shouting “Believe me!”
Hier geht es zur deutschen Fassung dieses Artikels.
Hidden in the labyrinth of the Old City of Jerusalem, it looks rather unimpressive from the outside. You could almost walk past the church that was built over the spot of Jesus’ crucifixion and his grave without noticing that there is any church at all. But in the dozens of churches, chapels and shrines inside the Church of the Holy, you can easily spend a few interesting hours. Even as an atheist.
Here, services are still shrouded in secretiveness. Hymns are sung in Latin, Ancient Greek or Aramaic to prevent the common worshipers from understanding anything. But the monks and deacons also speak English when they try to divert streams of visitors: “Move!” “It’s closed!” “This way!” Like bouncers in front of a popular club. Only the pigeons flying around inside the large cupola are free to roam around.
Listening closer to the flurry of languages among the visitors, one could assume that most Christians are Russian. Russian women, to be precise, because the men look rather bored walking behind their headscarf-covered wives. The women on the other hand look as ecstatic as if they had just fallen in love. Only Nigerian women are even more in a state of trance than their Russian sisters. Many of them light twenty candles at once. As soon as the believers leave however, a nun comes by and removes the candles that have just been donated. They can be sold to the next hapless person who thinks this helps.
German tour groups are working their way through the church rather methodologically. “This is the Chapel of Saint Helena.” “Ok, then we still need to go to the altar of Mary Magdalene.”
Walking around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, you can feel like Indiana Jones exploring. Up on a gallery, you find the altar of crucifixion.
In the basement and second basement underneath, I venture into chapels, vaults and crypts.
Behind the shrine for the actual grave of Jesus, to which there is a long queue of people who haven’t yet heard that their hero went to heaven, there is a small opening in the wall that you could easily overlook. Through a corridor that gets narrower and darker with every step, it leads to the grave of Joseph of Arimathea.
Electricity hasn’t yet been introduced to this dark corner. Candles light the way. A painting on the wall has been sooted beyond recognition.
When visiting a Protestant service in Central Europe, one could almost believe that Christianity exists in an enlightened form. But here I witness scores of Christians kneeling in front of a stone, kissing it for minutes and moving candles, icons and tablecloth above it, and I know that superstition is alive and paying hefty contributions to priests and churches.
Some pilgrims swipe across an icon three times, bowing their head with each move. In the Catholicon, the largest church within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a woman has been resting her head on a stone pedestal for so long that I believe she must have fallen asleep.
The air is heavy with frankincense, as if to enhance the spiritual obfuscation by medicinal means.
Despite all my incomprehension, I do have to mention one positive aspect: Here, Europeans, Asians (all of the men wearing suits, by the way), Africans, Arabs and Indians are sitting, praying and singing together.
A nun is trying to attract my attention, but for all the wrong reasons: She admonishes me that I must not cross my legs while sitting in one of the pews. With evil and strict eyes, she looks out of her chador. Who makes up such rules? In 13 years of attending school, I was admonished less than during this one visit to a church: don’t stand there, don’t take photos here, don’t sit down, and – that really crossed a line for me – why I don’t kneel down. I am only a guest, but I won’t allow the keepers of the Grail to bully me around.
Not many visitors find the way to the small, unmarked side entrance to the right of the courtyard in front of the church. The door is open. The guard is sleeping, which is not a surprise given how dark the room is. Or maybe he is already dead. Who knows how often this place is cleaned. It could be easily cleaned out however, with such a keeper. There would be a few dollar bills on a silver plate, literally.
The paintings in this church are more colorful and with writing that I can’t decipher. A very narrow staircase hewn into the rock leads me to an upper floor. The same foreign style, just more light. Only from looking at the other visitors can I tell that I am in an Ethiopian church. Ethiopian Christianity is one of the oldest in the world and due to its isolation from the rest of Christianity, it maintained its very own character.
Now I have reached the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from where I can see five spires at once. Walking across the roof, I get to the Orthodox Copts. Until now, I hadn’t even known that there are different Copts. With every new room of this property, Christianity becomes more complicated.
Just as I want to put my foot across the threshold, I spot the poster on the door. Terrified, I tumble backwards, holding my breath. What is this? And why is it in a church? Photos of men kneeling in the sand, wearing orange overalls, their murderers standing behind them. Any second, their skin, veins and flesh will be cut.
Obviously these are the Egyptian Copts murdered in Libya in February 2015, but does this barbarity have to be depicted on a church door? Is this an attempt to revive the idea of martyrdom? Isn’t this propaganda exactly what ISIS wants?
As I step out of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I hear the call of the muezzin from the Omar Mosque, only 30 meters away. This is what I like about the Old City of Jerusalem, the three Abrahamic religions sometimes co-existing, sometimes competing in a relatively small area. Mosques, churches and synagogues are interlaced next to, above and with each other so closely that it would be impossible to divide the city along religious lines.
Speaking about different religions, there is no love lost between all the Christian churches represented in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They can’t even agree on opening and closing times. For 800 years already, it is therefore the Muslim families Joudeh and Nusseibeh who hold the only keys to this holy place of Christianity and who open the heavy gates every morning and close them at night.
Links:
It seems that there is a new definition of humility, which sounds like this
and looks like this.
But then, for a candidate who makes up his own “facts”, pulls out random numbers, changes them the next day and again the day after, who rarely manages or wants to answer a question, who gave a speech of more than one hour without a single specific policy proposal, who needs to tell everyone and all the time how smart he thinks he is, but who can’t form whole sentences or hold a thought for more than three seconds, well, for a candidate like this, making up new meanings of words shouldn’t come as a surprise. Just don’t be surprised if by next year, Mr Trump will also have completely different definitions of democracy, freedom and separation of powers.
The Happy Hermit 