Category: Travels
Nazca lines at ground level
Sunset at Nasca, Peru
Elongated skulls
Museum with elongated skulls. Want a better look? Sure! Your tour guide puts on rubber gloves, opens the case, and takes them out to the front porch where the light is better. The closest is a normal human skull ( maybe 500 years old) for comparison:
An MD on the tour discusses anomalies in the sutures of the elongated skulls:
Tour guide Brien Foerster shows a skull he found and donated to the little museum in Paracas, Peru:
Our first meal in Peru
No, I do not intend to go all Instagramy, but for the benefit of my seafood-deprived friends in Uruguay. On the left, shrimp, octopus, potato thingies, squid, tuna, razor clams, and scallops. Chimichurri and a delightful picante sauce. On the right, Cesar salad with corn-battered prawns. All exquisitely prepared. A bit under USD 30.
The country kitchen, or lack thereof
June 2014: It’s been six months now that the kitchen of our little country place has looked like this. After building a few little pieces of cabinetry, I froze on the kitchen. First, it was bloody hot, and woodworking is not great fun when you’re sweating and sawdust sticks to you. Then the awful rains, and then … well, no real excuses.
The other day I had a breakthrough of sorts. I realized that I’d been trying to start with the largest, most critical component, which would maybe present no problems if I had experience. But I don’t. “Warming up” with the smaller, less critical pieces makes a lot more sense.
Update: it’s been 2-1/2 years now, and it still looks like this. I think maybe It’s not going to happen?
Giant ants
Espacio Ciencia is an interactive science museum next to the Portones shopping center in Montevideo. I had never noticed it before yesterday, when we made one of our “OK,we really need to go” trips to Montevideo. Because driving to and in Montevideo is not something I think anyone likes. But going by bus is worse.
Long ago I dreamed of making giant ants, and placing them in the trees of our property in North Carolina. Warms my heart to see someone else went through with it!
Dog gone.
From Syd this afternoon:
Was not there today. The tent was there, looking worse for wear. Definitely had not had a human sleeping in it last night, but perhaps a dog. The chain was still there. The bowl was also gone.
So, I guess the adage to “leave the campsite cleaner than you found it” also hasn’t permeated the Uruguayan psyche, but this appears to be an encouraging development.
Why do people do this?
My routine now includes afternoon walks with my goofy dog and Syd and his five dogs in who-know-who-owns-it 170 hectares/500 acres of scrub in Villa Argentina north.
Yesterday, we heard barking in the middle of it. Where barking shouldn’t be. We changed our return path to pass by again, but heard no more barking.
Today, we heard the barking again, and bushwhacked to find a scared, barking dog, chained to a tree. But with a little plastic bag of dog food. But also with a large bowl, presumably for water, overturned.
With six dogs in tow, we made little progress in connecting. Syd returned to leave it water.
Being Easter week, probably best if it stays there: our favorite vet in the campo is fully booked with pets until Monday.
Previously, Syd discovered the remains of a dog similarly chained, and left to die (it could have chewed through a rope). But there’s evidence of some care here. But still a chain. I’m not racing to judgment.
We’ll do what we can.
Inca ruin or fossilized dinosaur?
Alas, neither. Just a curious broken concrete arch, in the middle of 500 acres of notmuch. Most interesting is that Syd has walked his dogs here for years, and apparently this was new to him.
Yesterday this was a house
A bit before 10:00 last night, at the corner where Syd and I unleash dogs before wandering 170 hectares of scrub land, thee was a roaring fire, and explosion, and the end of a small, neat wooden house.
The explosion would have been the garafa, or 13-kg “supergas” tank. Interesting that it shows just this small tear.
Anyway, no one was home, and perhaps — some people here speak in a very garbled manner, and the neighbor is one of them — someone untied the Boxer dog in the yard before the explosion, though that’s a little hard to imagine. And he said that two guys on motorcycles had essentially firebombed the house.
The bomberos arrived in a fire truck 50 minutes later.
I think I know how I’ll decline to donate to them when they next come around begging for donations.