Flopping onto a bed was a notably comforting activity throughout the trip, and today was no exception, but we left again before dark to see the shore as the sun inched into the pacific. The trail that led down toward the beach was something we'd noticed the day before, walking the park paths along the cliffs. We followed sidewalks beside streets that eventually broke from parallel and split, revealing a great gorge that opened to the water through a crack in the smooth green hillsides. The gorge contained, among other things, a large fitness club with pools and tennis clubs that passersby could easily observe from above. This was, I supposed, especially true and probably appealing for all the hip folks living in the tall, modern apartment towers that filled this part of Miraflores.
Passage between the paved sidewalks of the city streets and the dusty trails that snaked toward the water could be made at any of a series of little breaks in the old stone retaining wall. At these points, wood plank stairways lead down through otherwise unbroken swaths of clinging green hillside flora.
The changeover to the bottom of the ravine was first noticeable due to the diminution of ambient light and the color moving from from lighter pinks and oranges cast over gray to deeper reds striking green. Before my eyes had adjusted to this difference my ears were filled with the realization that here were lots of birds down here, trees full, singing and chirping at one another. Aside from these avian companions, there were a few other people walking. After spending all day on hard streets, it felt good to be gently padding on the springy, light-colored earth of the path.
The trail lead eventually to the a bit of what I thought of as classically beachy infrastructure, a pedestrian bridge over busy highway that was all two-by-fours and plywood with awkwardly scaled stairs, lots of carved tags and the first hints at the sand that lay on the other side. We made our way through this installation and watched the waves at the beach for a while. The water was cooooold, and every so often a large wave would outdo its companions by tens of meters. The surfers were excited, the fishermen were terrified (we were later informed), and though we had no real basis for comparison, the prevailing sentiment seemed to be that this would be the most noticeable signifier of our proximity to the great shake that had occurred that morning in Chile. I think it's hard for the casual observer from U-S-and-A to get past his or her respective memories of countless images of death-defying surfer feats and really feel the impact of these somewhat weirder than average waves the way that surfer-locals do. If I hadn't known about the earthquake, it's unlikely that I would have noticed.
We tarried a while, examining the sand and rocks, watching brave souls charge in to body-surf and then return with a look that confessed wordlessly the extent to which their testicles had fled up into their torsos, and then we decided that the ravine was no place for gringos in the immanent proper-darkness. The dusty trails were more congested now as people left the beach, but we made our way back up quickly.
I don't remember what time it was, but when we reached street-level the sky was dark, the wind was cool and damp and we were surrounded by headlights moving at speeds that were difficult to estimate. We talked about what we should do next and, being rather non-committal as to whether either of us needed or wanted food we went toward the park, which seemed to be full of people. By the time we got to the edge of the park, Miriam had decided that she was interested in food, and I had decided that I certainly was not. My stomach was behaving in ways that I was forced to ignore in the hope that these increasingly noticeable signs were red herrings and not true foreshadowing. We went back to the cafe across from the park where we'd eaten the the night before and then returned to explore.
The park was an amazing flurry of people of all ages running around, eating things, and trying to sell things to one another. Tables full of trinkets, tools, and general ephemera structured space into rows, and contained a range of antique instruments that were often as unrecognizable to me as hypothetical artifacts from an alien spacecraft; I wished we were traveling by steamship. Beyond the tables, we found rows of art. We got bored with that pretty quickly, and then we started to hear music and we found perhaps the coolest thing that we'd seen up to that point:
No comments:
Post a Comment