“Just like any other tourist....”

A primeira semana no Peru acaba. Acabo me acostumando um pouco com aquilo que num primeiro momento impressiona, esse impacto “do exótico” que tem por trás o cotidiano do@s outr@s – neste caso, muito imbuído do performance que se faz para o turismo, ou como dizem no Brasil, aquilo que se faz “pro inglês ver”... Até por que acontece algo que me traz, rapidamente, de volta para o realismo: viajando entre Puno e
Arequipa de ônibus, num momento de descuido, levam nosso laptop junto com alguns documentos meus! (Depois, horas passadas nas dependências de delegacias e embaixada, vivenciando a burocracia com suas exigências não poucas vezes ridículas e aquele sentimento de culpa que deve ser muito comum quando estas coisas acontecem, tipo que burra que eu fui, porque não tomei mais cuidado, como se não soubesse cuidar das coisas, da vida, como se não soubesse ser viajante, quer dizer, ser... turista!)


Óbvio que o turismo é, entre outros, um dos fenômenos que move o mundo hoje. Indústria como qualquer outra, onde “o lazer de uns é o trabalho de outros”. Lugar onde as identidades são (re) construídas e “consumidas”. Espaço social onde uns procuram “o autêntico”, o diferente, o Outro. (E alguns, apenas se divertir...) Onde achamos o que queremos e por vezes, o que não queremos. Um fenômeno relacionado à procura do que somos através desse Outro, ou seja, aquilo que supostamente não somos. Captado em escritos e diários de viagem fascinantes, ao longo da história , moderna e pré-moderna, e hoje em dia, no cinema, que também promove um imaginário onde as viagens – mesmo quando a estrada não se faz mais a cavalo ou num calhambeque caindo aos pedaços, mesmo quando é tão fácil subir ao avião e pagar a passagem em 10X – são verdadeiros momentos de catarse. (Por isso acho genial a sacada de uma amiga minha, que percebeu o filme de Woody Allen,
Vicki, Cristina, Barcelona, como uma sátira: você viaja, você se relaciona com esse “Outro”, até você sofre, se mete em encrenca, passa cada uma e volta... igual, à vida de sempre, ao “nada mudou” ou ao business as usual...). Assim, como é eu posso narrar o Peru? Mas preciso narrá-lo. Para mostrar para @s outr@s que fui? Para pensar sobre “verdades sociológicas” e compartilhá-las com pessoas que quero e pessoas que não conheço?

Em todo caso, ontem meu filho e eu concordamos que a viagem valeu muito a pena.
Ter, agora em diante, as imagens daquilo que a gente viu, um país de natureza exuberante e cultura milenar, a repetida mistura de riqueza humana e as pobrezas do mundo humano, tão belo e tão mesquinho e cruel. Jurar que vamos voltar, e na próximas, saberemos navegar melhor os desafios e procurar os cantos menos conhecidos. Continuar falando com as pessoas e convidar algumas, as mais especiais, a que nos visitem, na nossa casa, nossa cidade – ou no meu caso, no pais que adotei, ou que me adotou...

Tunisia, part II.

It is windy, very windy and the sand blows over the desert in a gauzy white veil. We are there, my son and I, part of group coming from Spain in which we are the exception – the other 20 odd folk are all young Spanish university students, from Barcelona and Madrid, Valladolid and Granada. We mount the camels that are waiting for us and begin our saunter into the dunes: a tame ride on the fringes of the Sahara, where the sands have not yet taken on the reddish-ochre glow of the “deep desert” postcards we have seen. In fact, this is but a common ride offered to tourists, two or three camels pulled by taciturn men who seem disgruntled with their task. They become even more so when I exchange my odd mount for a better one - the fiery red Arabian horse who is offered to me, too tempting not to accept after so many years of nurturing my own “Orientalist” fantasy of deserts and desert horses…


As the days go by, we get to know our fellow travelers better. The young Spanish students in our group seem to take in everything with a definite enthusiasm for difference (the “natural”, the “cultural”) on occasions with awe … yet without any apparent signs of discomfort. Of course, our contact with the local people has been basically limited to the perfunctory – bargaining at the marketplace, primarily, and then there are the linguistic barriers that leave us content just to take in the long descriptions and explanations that our guide, who is quite fluent in Spanish, provides us. There are few moments when the barrage of vendors subsides. They are there even when rocky surge of the Atlas mountains separating Tunisia from Algeria rises before us, or while eating succulent dates in an “oasis” that looks more like a park in a small city than that which our long-kindled fantasies have led us to expect…

From the window of the bus, rapid succession of images: arid landscapes, arid towns. Peasant women with scarves and headgarb, or working alongside other members of the family in orchards and fields not so unlike “a roça” back home, occasional shepherds with their diminished flocks picking their way through the incongruous juxtaposition of new constructions and old mosques, people hawking their wares on the highway, a young woman waiting at an empty train station in the middle of nowhere. Driving through one small city at twilight, I see a neon sign outside a long flat building that says something like ‘Faculte d’Études Sociales et Politiques’, seeming so strangely out of context (my bias, albeit.)

Grabbing at any chance I get to talk to anyone, with whatever linguistic resources I have at my disposal – the cab driver, a gracious woman pharmacist with whom I share a brief exchange when I go in to purchase a pair of tweezers, the handsome young man whose horse I ride over the sands that in this case, are but the “gateway” to a Sahara I will never really enter. As days go by, we get better at the tasks at hand: bargaining at the medina, photographing peasants, veiled and unveiled women from a bus window as the scenarios whizz by, framing everything in transient perspective. Our guide is perpetually taking advantage of the hours spent riding our tour bus to feed us tidbits of information on his country: its long history since the days of Carthage and Rome, its route into modernity, the current political regime and the historic, improved status of women within this Muslim country, how Berber shepherds who still live inside caves carved into the stony hills depend also on the few dinars we drop into their boxes after our brief glimpse at their abode. I am not sure how many of the young folk on board pay attention, but some, I am sure, are as interested as I am. For others, perhaps much less.

Like most of the places I have been through too quickly, I feel like I should come back. There are things around me I try to grasp in too little time. Too many days spent on the bus, with all those landscapes and dun-colored towns whirring by. A calm afternoon in Sidi Bou Said and the gleaming blue sea stretching out behind it, Lucas and I drinking mint tea and almonds with the young ladies from Barcelona, and gentle caress of the Mediterranean sea and feeling just so damn lucky to be in a place I had never dreamed of getting to. Time, travel and strong(er) currencies are a privilege I know are not to be taken lightly. To greedily drink from the fountain of what this world has to offer and to perhaps give something back: just some coins, just these words?

Day three in Tunisia: reflections on “consuming place” and searching for the Other…

Part 1.

When we venture out on our own in the late afternoon, I stop to ask for directions from a young man who has anxiously offered his services in escorting us to the city center in his horse and cart. We hesitate a bit, wondering whether to accept or to continue our trajectory on foot. I gather all my available linguistic resources to carry out our conversation in bits and pieces – as much French as possible, with Spanish and English thrown in whenever I get stuck. Twenty year old Mohammed takes a liking to us and offers to show us a bit of the city “not for money”…and then to take us to a store where we can pick up some swimming trunks or a pair of shorts for Lucas. When he drives us a bit out of the way, into what is evidently the periferia of a city that, with the exception of its row of luxury hotels, in itself has a shabby and chaotic appearance, I wonder for a moment where he is taking us… just as I am grateful for the chance to get a bit further from the beaten path. He seems kind and interested in conversation, and I feel frustrated with myself for my still so very limited ability to express myself in French. I believe him when he says he is taking us “not for money” and attempts to refuse the coins I give him…

My son, who complains that I am “too optimistic” about everything, most of the time, believes that the local folks’ interactions with us could hardly be based on anything more than immediate interest in financial reward and seems to find my attempts at communication rather silly. Even when we stop some young women on the street, and I use my feeble French to ask for directions, what I interpret as shy smiles are to him grins and laughter at my linguistic limitations. Of course, I do not fool myself… we are little more than part of a huge mass phenomenon, coming now to a country whose economy is moved by tourism, traveling the world at any chance we get. “You must be a sociologist”, said a young man whom I talked with at convenience store, “you ask so many questions!” Just as he is perceptive, I suppose I am obvious. And I also suppose one could say, this is one of the many moments in which my professional and my personal interest come together. Perhaps also, for many of the people who deal with the throngs of tourists crowding their markets and streets, sociability, communication and curiosity intermingle with their need or interest in making a livelihood from the foreign visitors who come to their shores. (After all, haven’t notions of pure sentiments, actions, borders and boundaries lost their credibility? )