Sometimes the news is accompanied by dramatic music and explosive sound effects

I´m back in Babylon, as the ´rainbow´ crew so delightfully called any place where one may fall prey to a cheap watch or pair of counterfeit sunglasses. And somehow I got my timing wrong for my flight to Lima, a day early too, rather than the usual 2 hours late. I blame the Miercoles Martes combo. Two ´M´days in a row gets confusing when reading single letter weekdays from a business card calender.

The past week I´ve been at Rainbow, miraculously washing Cuba right out of my hair, without washing my hair at all. Rainbows are sort of pop up communes that last for a month. I caught the tail end of this one, after spending just over a week in Panama City. The rules are, there are no rules, but sadly, no one had any sort of knives hidden in the wheels of their dragster. Actually no Grease mega mixes anywhere, another odd universal, but plenty of sing songs to pacha mama around the fire, walks to meet the gorgeous views and hilarious, generous people that make the sweaty trip more times in a week than the fat cats that pressed your gym membership want you to know about.

The creatures were, well, there. Half a minute after refusing to momentarily house a fingernail sized spider, a translucent fleshy hermit crab looking thing with great red eyes, a TARANTULA crawled onto and was subsequently kicked from my jandeled foot. I think ¨Jesus Fuck¨ was the term I used, jumping 2 meters up and back with the greatest hacky foot flick of my short career. Whether it was the Universe or the Spiders trying to communicate with me is as yet undecided, but the spiders are ahead 3 to 2. Seriously. I´ll have to check my 13 moon calender. ¨How are such festivals different to Girl Guide camps?¨ I seemed to keep asking myself. Well, firstly, no one was assured not to be scared of the lady who takes her hair off at night. And I realised the importance of a slip knot this time. At three in the morning. Wrapped in a ball of hammock. Being thankful for the gifts of mother earth is also taken much more seriously, which I whole heartedly agree with, hard not to when chilling on the cusp of a Panamanian jungle. However, there reaches a point where you decide to strongly avoid a person that wants to give everything to her as a sacrife. Flowers, down the river. Grasshoppers, into the fire. Whatever was lost in translation I guess I´ll never know.

So, back in Panama city, a day to spare. I´m going to catch one of their air brushed buses to a national park 15 minutes out of the city for a 5 or so hour walk tomorrow, then head to the Smithsonian Institute of Tropical Research for their Tuesday lecture and after match drinks. I caught a talk on their 5 year plan, which ended up being on the mangroves (as I imagine the topic often turns to) but felt rather foolish kicking around afterwards, and politely split. It´s no inagrial professorial lecture after all, though there was deep fried geometry (mini samosas). Another strange universal. Or is it a synchronicity? What is geometry, or fried things, trying to tell me?

And now, some photos.

Here´s one of those air brushed buses, with Bruce Willis on the back. Other popular designs include wrestling heroes and Jesus.

Here´s Alexx checking Melanie for tics. I had a few myself (totally overshadowed by the TARANTULA). I may still have some, there are places I didn´t feel comfortable getting others to check for me. And Alexx! Hilariously, any time anything vaguely out of sorts happened to the food (water was poured in too soon, someone decided to soak the pasta- that was me actually, we made chipatis out of it), he reasured us not to worry, as we were feeding hippies. Those are my bongos in the background.

Here I am with Oriana, authentically grinding maiz into something less bulbous.

Here´s a little something I picked up along the path. a photo i touched, as my terrible spanish would haplessly try and explain.

Here´s possibly my favourite street sign. Check out the bum on that guy! It´s a trend that follows right through to the shop maniquins. Fabulous!

And this could almost be the town belt. But how about his hams?

no more working for a week or two

yes, yes. it´s not technocolour at all... it´s must be this new level of phonetic association spanish is forcing upon me? The problem with my Spanish this week is the level of concentration required. So often I find myself asking people to repeat themselves, not necessarily because I don´t understand, but because i´ve dozed off into one of those waiting behind three trollys in the supermarket checkout stupors. Don´t be fooled, I really don´t understand. And I feel a stupor coming on. Perhaps it has something to do with the crazy heat here? (Thankfully of an entirely different nature to Cuba). I was informed yesterday that while New Zealanders may be upside down, they still share at least some seasons with their northern hemisphere doppelgangers, at least in Panama, where it´s Summer. Oh no, now I´ve gone and got Cliff Richard in my head. I really do miss my records.

not in technocolor

i can´t believe i´ve never noticed the techno in technocolour. how about that?
cuba, oh boy, cuba was set to boot camp.

i spent the last two weeks of my three weeks in La Habana taking daily conga, bongo and eventually shaker and, yes, cow bell lessons from Roberto Santamaria, a guy I met while taking a photo of men fixing a huge car of some sort (i don´t need to know the names of the types if i can´t drive them, the exterior was that 50s sort of bulbous look, like it could float) with the licence plate HDU, some joke about taking dunedin out of the girl, or is it the other way round? Hearing something about ¨música¨ as i asked permission to photograph them, they directed me to Roberto who we eventually met later for short sweet percolator coffees to listen to his uncle´s recordings enormous 70s synth funk collection. and here i am, 2 weeks later with a pair of bongos and a heavy conscience. if a vegan is going to buy some bongos, the most guiltless place must be cuba, right? nothing is wasted here. the woman i was staying with spent sundays curling her hair with toilet rolls. ah yes, guiltless.
Roberto also took me to Cuba´s central recording studio. Brilliant to see how they do it here. not much differently, aesthetically anyway. half empty bottle of rum, half full ashtray at a rakish angle to the nosmoking sign. cooledit. anyone important seemed to wear a cheese cutter. or maybe that´s why they seemed to look important?
we also spent much time with Tropa, or Francisco Sanchez, an eighty something saxophonist that had recently had cateract surgery, and had been promised a bonus of sorts by Camilo Cienfuegos a week before his plane crashed. apparently. we bought a burnt album featuring some of his saxophony which turned out to be the buena vista social club recording. how about that, so did Kim Hill.... oddly. it really just keeps getting stranger. oh to understand! Quite a wonderland really, nothing as it seemed. my ´host father´for example. fairly chilled looking chap of 70 in a jesterish yellow and pink panelled shirt, a photographer, into yoga and some sort of magnet healing. sweet. nice that he´s waiting up for me, warning me about machete attacks. great that he wants to keep talking about the suffering of the people, how careful i have to be and how capitalism is the one stop solution for everything. great. but how can someone so tranquil get so angry and afraid about black people? how about the chest beating machete demonstration to quell my fears and renew my confidence ? and of who exactly were those rather close up and personal photos he tripped upon, asking advice of the camera he´d just aquired at 4 in the morning. stranger and stranger.
took the obligatory salsa lesson, an aerobics-style group class at the Museo del Ron. i´m trying to concentrate my wiggling to the lower half of my body. caught an incredible guy (in a cheese cutter no less) that was mixing salsa and moonwalking thrillingly.

oh so much more, but i have to run.

quickly though, two great language stories.... did i tell you about the one where i asked to smoke a cd, and the shop owner gave me an ashtray (i meant burn). just yesterday, having been in the land of tips for the tourist currency (read: a total life saver for some people), i asked the woman in the panamanian bathroom if she worked there. as she replied yes, i handed her a quarter, which she refused, as i realised she must simply work in the building. phew, about that. i got a ¨Thank you¨ in English. Understood.

what´s on the board, miss ford?

hola!
i´ve been in cuba. it´s made difficult to write there, but here´s something i saved until now, dated 23 jan. thankfully blogs have a reverse chronology.

I want to find 'the real havana' and punch it in its fat ugly mouth. I''ve never been so frustrated nor furious. My good friend Roberto, the only one not to have ripped me off, or shlurped some toothless whistle my way to the beat of baby, hey lady, was just arrested as he embraced an Italian friend about to get the hell out of here. Probably pertanent to mention that the police car (889, officer 26914) nearly ran us all down in the process. Guidebooks have hinted at the 'hastle' Cubanos sin identity card can recieve when seen associating with foreigners, one would think they'd make allowances for those with a valid passport. No. Handcuffed and thrown in the back of the car, aside an old man who had been similarly dragged, though he appeared to have come from his own house. What to do? Irony of ironies the road was blocked off to traffic as some sort of film set was constructed, and there I am, my camera incapable of capturing any of it. The best, try and ring his cell phone later, and not tell his mother or sister for another few hours for fear of worrying them unduely (the italian's advice, which i begrudgingly am going to take).

I've heard that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all people here are police. Their usefulness I'm unable to calculate in any logical way. The dual currency, pesos for cubans and convertibles for foreigners has resulted in streets of shop windows utterly out of reach for anyone living here. The temptation and desperation is enough to trap anyone new, and i've certainly been caught out. Perhaps the most naive, 'the milk scam', whereby a sack of skin asks you to buy milk for her hungry children, mutters something about protein, and later, one discovers on making a few 'friends', sells the milk back to the store. And when you're able to make a months wages returning ill gotten milk, why not? The inability of people to move, due to travel restrictions and poverty have created a city trapped in its own year book photos, or if you will, bright paintings of old cars. Your home town, forever. Though, it has allowed me to dish some dirt on some of the more suspicious characters of my travels here, primarily the man that helped us find cheap accomodation and persisting in aquiring boxes of unwelcome cigars for our immediate purchase. He burst into my room the other day, perving at my wallet under the auspices of telling me, as if for the first time, what a beautiful woman i am, schlup schlup. nothing on the rich description of the rape scene should i leave my drink around similarly black dudes. It's ironic that the more obvious members of this population take pains to appear as the worldly ones.

I hope Roberto's okay.