Valparaiso

There was just one blemish on my time in Valparaiso, one a bit more personal than stepping in one of the many mounds of dog excrement that litter the city. I left a futbol café with a place in mind for live music. It was closed. Remembering the guidebook’s description of the bars east of Plaza Sotomayor as popular with the sailors come to port, I went looking for a seafarer’s haunt. I found nothing but eerie buildings and buses on their way home. I came to a dimly lit square. As I passed through, someone from a group of teens said god knows what to me in Spanish. For discretion’s sake, I consulted my map behind a statue. I had just laid my bag at the foot of the statue when a hoodlum from that group swooped it up and sprinted off the square. Still holding my photocopied sheets of Neruda poems, I sprang my step and hauled ass after him. My adrenaline was whipping me into a frenzy as I lengthened my stride. We were making our way up the mazy streets of Valpo and it was high time for me to retain my camera and dignity. Now only a few yards behind him, I began clawing the air to try to collar him at full speed. He heard my crazed breathing and must have known he had it coming; just then he flipped the bag over his head to me and ran off into the Chilean night. I had scarcely noticed an accomplice running alongside him, ready to play a game of catch with my satchel. I fumed and shouted after them and took several seconds to remember I was in a back alley in Chile. A couple of abuelitas gawked at me as they shuffled home.

My newfound insecurity rattled me all the way up the hill, where I sought refuge in the night-time panorama of the city. I didn’t want a fluke incident to blight my conception of Concepcion, one of the wondrous thoroughfares that led me up to my hostel. I put my feet up on a banister overlooking the harbor and, after a smoke and a coffee, the city’s luster seeped back into me as my sweat began to dry. I gaped for awhile at the port that had once been the western hemisphere’s busiest. Sometimes it’s necessary to jostle with the mayhem down below to appreciate such a vista.

I scoffed aloud at the amateurism of the thief – as petty as they come, ill-prepared for a tourist willing to tussle. Neruda’s moonlight cut through billowing clouds casting out to sea. I reached into my bag for the poems I had saved for my last night in Chile, but then realized that the thief really had succeeded in robbing me. In switching to survival mode to chase him down, my hand had involuntarily let slip the Neruda poems. So goes the loss of innocence in a city cloaked in serenity. I closed my eyes to inhale the crisp air and forgive all that was below me. The moon was watchful, the ships docked for the night, and somewhere up the hill in La Sebastiana, Neruda’s ghost promised me a second reading.

The Wine Cradle of the Andes

Mendoza was sepia for the winter but the mountains were still there, as was the wine. There’s something disarming about the flatlands below a mountain range, as if nothing can fall on you....We arrived on a Thursday morning, as did El Gripe in the newspapers: 300,000 exposed, 40% of schools shuttered. Added to this premonition of malaise was the detectable filth on the city’s streets – storefronts looked blanketed by a dust storm and cadaverous dogs hobbled up after you as you passed. While the winter may sully the city, the outlying vineyards retain their unspoiled beauty and the Andes are eternal. We hired a guide and toured three vineyards in addition to the five-course tasting menu we enjoyed at another estate. This cost $150 a head.

Our area of focus was Lujan de Cuyo, a lush valley minutes south of Mendoza. Our tour guide painted a not-so-rosy picture of how El Gripe was squeezing his ski business. This jeremiad influenced our tip at the end of the day.

Since we hadn’t had a fluid conversation with a stranger in several days, we got on well with the guide. In my own head, I couldn’t conjure the circumstances that had plucked this laid back outdoorsman from the pines of Washington state and placed him in Argentina. He mentioned a girlfriend and a job as a ski photographer, but I was unable to connect the dots because it all seemed a whimsical, if enviable, undertaking.

To our virgin nostrils, the wine was ambrosial. Naturally, we concentrated on the Malbec grape, a cast-off from France that was born again on the Argentine hillsides. Its vibrant violet color took on a fantastic glitter as I held it up to the sun. I think being onsite boosted the taste, as a satisfactory sampling is the only acceptable follow-up to all of the swirling and sniffing and smacking of the lips.

Our first bodega was Alta Vista, a rustic compound built by Spanish immigrants at the turn of the century. The charming hostess led us through cavernous basements where the wine mingles with flavored oak in enormous barrels until its ready for drinking. We glimpsed estate workers busy calibrating the wine to its proper temperature for fermentation. For red wine, Alta Vista uses century-old concrete vats that require a delicate finessing of the temperature. A fire is lit under the concrete and the heat disperses throughout. White wine isn’t as sensitive to temperature variations and can be fermented in larger steel vats.

The first provocative wine we sampled at Alta Vista was Torrontes, a signature white wine of Argentina. To avoid the taint of charlatanism, I won’t broach the oenologist’s phrasebook. Words like “oaky” and “earthy” mean nothing to me. One of my few criteria for wine is that it startle rather than bore me. White wines rarely do the former to my stubborn palate. Torrontes, with its robust, lingering flavor, was a welcome exception.

We next visited Club Tapiz to take in a larger scale bodega. The American label Kendall-Jackson had owned the estate a few years back but an Argentine family proudly returned it to local hands and whitewashed the Jackson name from all of its branding. Why? “We didn’t want the stigma.” So much of the appeal of these vineyards is in them being a generational labor of love.

On arriving at Tapiz, we were ushered into a horse-drawn carriage for a drive through the vineyards themselves. Dust flew up and settled to reveal the supernatural silhouette of the Andes. The driver pulled up next to some idling llamas that looked a bit like men in llama costumes. We were bemused to see each other. I wondered aloud if the clumsy creatures trampled the vines, but no one seemed too concerned.

The wine flowed from this picturesque welcome and against such a backdrop, how could any aroma cause offense? Tapiz showcased its impressive arsenal of vintages beneath a stately chandelier in a barn house. A 2006 Malbec classic struck me with vim so I bought a bottle. We also had the luxury of tasting the wine directly from the vat and attempting to discern these inchoate flavors from their fully matured and bottled cousins.


We needed some nourishment to sponge up the wine and it came in the form of a five-course tasting menu at the lovely Bodega Ruca Malen. The seating chart was such: my four companions to my left and right, and myself opposite the Andes. The young servers blushed before announcing each course in lilting accents that heightened my expectations for an epic repast. The meal was such:

1) Yauquen Sauvignon Blanc 2008 – “refreshing, light and citric”
Goat Cheese Bruschetta

Objective of pairing: “To highlight the citric flavors and fresh fruit of the Sauvignon Blanc”

2) Ruca Malen Malbec 2006 – “Deep, elegant nose”
Slices of Filet Mignon cured with olive oil from Lunlunta

Objective of pairing: “To highlight the fresh red fruit and sweetness of the Malbec”

3) Ruca Malen Merlot 2006 – “Brilliant and intense red…Hints of both
vanilla and chocolate”
Wheat Croquets with Wild Mushroom Ragout
and caramelized onions

Objective of the pairing: “To highlight the black pepper as the aromatic descriptor”

4) Ruca Malen Carbernet Sauvignon 2006 – “An intense ruby red with
hints of toasted oak”

Kinien Malbec 2007 – “On the nose red fruits and some floral violet
notes"

Roasted Beef Tenderloin with squash, sweet corn and mashed potatoes

Objective of pairing: “To show the structure of these two varietals, highlighting the spicy side of Cabernet Sauvignon and flower notes and sweet tannins of Malbec”

5) Granite made of Chardonnay, yerba mate, and honey

White chocolate and season fruit


The menu had every reason to boast. The flavors were all there, even the indescribable ones that the menu so enticingly described. We stayed two hours and were content to stay two more. It was a meal that you impulsively label your best ever because it is so vivid and anything but fleeting.

We wrapped the day at the homey Bodega Sottano, which produces just a few thousands bottles a year. By this stage the wine was evoking some heady conversation. Our affable hostess may have another job as a grade school teacher as she often interjected with a palate quiz: “Where on your tongue do you taste this wine?” “What varietals are striking you?” “What colors do you see in this Cabernet Sauvignon?” As in grade school, I tried to guess the answer by the tone of the teacher’s voice. By the fourth red wine I was running out of colors and labeled one fuchsia. She saw that I was using words that she might not recognize in order to improve my quiz score. I apologized for my inept Spanish and fell silent.

Next she bestowed famous look-alikes on our group of four. One was told he resembled Roger Federer (not the first time), another the singular Waldo, as in “Donde esta Waldo?”, and my third friend an elusive Latin pop star (probably the first time). The hostess decided my beard reminded her of Joseph Fiennes and for the rest of our tour I was known as Shakespeare. We thought it only polite to offer her a celebrity of her own. Despite our assurances that her twin is “an attractive American comedienne”, she was dissatisfied with what Google Images returned for Sarah Silverman. We had evidently exhausted all conversation on wine. It was time to hand in our connoisseur badges and step out of the surreal.

The sun ducked behind the Andes as we parted ways with the vineyards and returned to Mendoza city. We muttered impressions to each other through teeth stained purple from a day’s work. “A good place for a honeymoon.” “How good an investment is a vineyard?” Our guide was grinning at our ravings about the day, his Van Gogh beard holding a couple of droplets of Malbec. This was the bliss I had come for and all the trifles of travel – delays, flu, foreign tongues, and general disarray – wilted in the dying embers of the day.

A Pitch for Peace

I came to believe in the cathartic power of the world’s game after taking in an impromptu soccer match between monks in a Burmese backwater. There, in an unheralded village between Yangon and Mandalay, lay a gem of earthly spontaneity. The pitch was a humble tract of sun-baked mud, but its unlikely surroundings brought a sense of eminence to the proceedings – a shallow lake became one sideline and two adjacent embankments provided elevated viewing for spectators. After a week of listening to my guide boast of how every landscape we observed was uniquely Burmese, I was attentive to a scene that proved him both right and wrong. Under the “uniquely Burmese” category might fall the holy men who checkered the pitch with their luminous maroon robes and jocular soundtrack to the match. In so much as my a priori ignorance of Burmese culture would allow, I also designated the rhythmic cheers emanating from the village crowd as “uniquely Burmese”. But if you were to zoom the viewing lens on the tattered ball that bounced from one spry foot to another, you could easily emerge in another part of the world, amongst another set of bare feet. Here, Kurdish children clad in European jerseys clamor for a shot on goal.

This is where my story dissolves and Ian Klaus’ fades into view. Where the touchline had been a lake in Myanmar, here it is a foreboding border with a hostile country. But these footballers are heedless of international fault lines and perhaps even of the wars endured by their forefathers: a boy casually hops the stone wall marking the Iraq-Iran border to retrieve an errant attempt at goal. For these young Kurds, their own touchlines trump those drawn by statesmen. The dusty pitch provides a stage for self-expression, much the way a dinner table provides a poor family confirmation of its self-sustenance. There is something primordial and natural in the rivalry between the Kurdish towns of Tawela and Biara and the molting of inhibitions on the pitch. There is nothing natural in the border post that stands within earshot of the match. Just as in Myanmar, where Orwellian edicts hover over the citizenry from billboards, Iranian theocracy is a ludicrous sideshow to the freedom provided by the pitch.

Some grassroots organizations are trying to expand the pitch’s touchlines, to claim more fertile land for the artistic minds of young footballers. The younger they start, the better. As Franklin Foer chronicles in How Soccer Explains the World, it does not take long for soccer to mirror sectarianism. Rival hooligans pivot effortlessly from stadium brawls in peacetime to shelling each other’s neighborhoods in guerilla war. The “beautiful game” carries the seeds of a beautiful but tragic life. The liberating bliss with which young players take to the pitch is menaced by the “realities” of war and staid conflict. It is all too often a cruel choice between staying at home and joining the thugs who practice ethnic sport. Either way, the primordial innocence of ball, feet, and dust is lost.

A few years after my trip to Myanmar, the world got wind of a tragedy unfolding in Yangon, the former capital. Thousands of monks were descending on the city in spartan defiance of the ruling junta. Soaring fuel prices had sparked the protests, but there was also a palpable purge of grievances held for decades against the government. The junta responded with the Tiananmen playbook, mowing down the revered monks and jailing thousands of sympathizers. Macabre, awful, and sorrowful though the 2007 crackdown was, it cannot disrupt the tranquil image in my head of monks as the sentries of Burmese society. They had found refuge in the village soccer pitch that day, a rare haven unfettered by tyranny. When it came time to leave the pitch, whether hours, days, or years later, the monks left in resolute columns and carried the dignity of a supportive people with them.

28 hours of Semi-Autonomy: My Jaunt into Kosovo

Note: The names in this story (aside from those of public figures) have been altered out of respect for privacy.

June 2007

As Frommers had prophesied, there really isn’t a whole lot for the ‘tourist’ to do in Pristina. In the end, however, I wouldn’t have to look far for inspiration or hospitality. I cut across Mother Theresa Boulevard to the parallel street where both the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) hold their offices. Only a couple hundred meters from UNMIK headquarters and above the Youth Center looms a giant photograph of the late Adem Jashari, co-founder of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). I entered the security shed outside of UNMIK with little idea of how I would present myself other than as a curious citizen of the United Nations, a rare breed.

The head of the UNMIK Press Office was kind enough to take me to his office for a chat. I entered the facility giddy that I was able to walk among armored KFOR trucks and satellites gathering worldwide intel. (KFOR, short for “Kosovo Force”, is a NATO-led peacekeeping force that has been under UN administration since 1999.) Roger Talbot is an editor of FOCUS, a UNMIK publication that details the latest political, economic, and social developments from around Kosovo. Above all, Mr. Talbot conveyed the lingering uncertainty that governs Kosovo: the yawning gap between Kosovars’ strong desire for independence and their apathetic political participation; the imminent but imprecise date when UNMIK will bequeath the mission to the European Union; the intense skepticism that Kosovar Serbs have about living a life unhindered by prejudice and harassment. For many Kosovars, every effort of imagining a better future is clouded by unrelenting memories of the carnage of 1999. If Kosovars are not convinced that their future paths can converge peacefully instead of eroding each other, then the fledgling state will be left to crumble.

I couldn’t think of an excuse to prolong my stay in the UNMIK compound and reluctantly handed in my visitor’s clearance tag. After asking a security guard for input on my itinerary, I thanked him and crossed the street to mull my options over lunch. I looked up from my menu to see the same man grabbing the seat across from me with a grin, “I’ve got time for a break.”

Andon needed little prompting. In my twenty minutes sipping Fanta with him, he told of the rupture the war caused both personally and nationally. Andon had been working in a hotel in Switzerland when the KLA and Yugoslav Amy began fighting. He rushed home to fill a male figurehead role that many households sorely missed during the war. I listened as Andon recounted in impressive English the incessant terror felt by residents of his town as the Yugoslav Army raided home after home. It could have only been a hearty dose of luck that kept Andon and his family alive. All of this was expressed with a stoicism that belied what he must have felt at the time.

The seeds of the past respectfully sown, Andon turned his attention to his prospects. Working security is among the most profitable trades in Pristina, and my companion had the added bonus of social mobility. In just a few days time, he would be leaving his UNMIK post for a more lucrative security job at the U.S. consulate. “My friends are all jealous,” he chuckled. Indeed. Some 40% of Kosovo’s youth are jobless and the government has tried to stem the growing pessimism with the 11 million-euro Kosovo Youth Action Plan for employment. “Do young people believe the Prime Minister can deliver?” I asked Andon. “They like him a lot; he is a war hero”. Hero for some, wartime nemesis for others. Andon had to get back to work but told me to come find him if I needed anything. I went inside to pay after we had parted ways, only to find that Andon had picked up the tab when I wasn’t looking.

Mitrovica: Bridging the Gap


The latter half of the day took me an hour and a half north to Mitrovicë, or Kosovska Mitrovica, as the Serbs call it. No more poignant a symbol of the conflict exists than the bridge that cuts the Serbian and Albanian halves of the town from each other. The southern bank of the Ibar River is home to some 50,000 Albanians, while 10,000 Serbs are just a stone’s throw to the north. In March 2004, the bridge was the fulcrum of the worst outbreak of violence since the war when two Albanian children drowned in the Ibar. Twenty-eight Kosovars died in the ensuing riots, most of them Albanian. I had used images of the bridge and its daunting sign that reads, “Malicious or provocative behavior shall be repressed immediately” in my documentary and decided to head directly there upon arrival. The bus ride was a spectacle in itself: Albanian-Turkish music blared; schoolchildren were dropped off in empty pastures as part of their commute home; one passenger lit a cigarette with a toddler perched on his knee. I jumped off the bus at Mitrovica and strode towards the bridge in the gathering rain.

My walk to the bridge took me through the Albanian side of town, cutting past the main mosque and a couple of grimy street markets. The rain coated everything with a drab hue. Where Pristina is arbitrary in its reflection of a war torn people, Mitrovicë is a blueprint of division. On one side a mosque, the other a church. On one side the writing in Albanian, the other Cyrillic. On one side a steadier pulse, on the other hypertension underscored by more KFOR troops. KFOR sprawls into all four corners of Kosovo. The Italians operate in the west, the British in the region’s center, including Pristina, the Americans are in the southeast, and the French are in charge of the north, where Mitrovicë lies. Although I was apprehensive walking past the KFOR troops with submachine guns on the bridge, the real tension was on the other side. KFOR trucks can be found at nearly every block; overhead a sign pleaded in English and Cyrillic “In the name of God and justice, do not make our holy land a present to the Albanians!” I entered a military shop where the Serbian owner was speaking French to some KFOR troops. He was trying to persuade them to buy army gear venerating French KFOR’s protection of Kosovo’s Serbs. I wanted to ask residents about life on this side of the Ibar River but the rain ensured that I had little company but the military.


Irked by the lack of a “story”, I trudged back across the river and entered a shop at the bus station to whittle away the minutes before my departure. In a move I had repeated throughout the trip, I was paying for my bottled water with too big of a bill. In a tagline he would repeat throughout our two-hour conversation together, Behar Mataj belted out, “Nix problem!” I offered to get change from somewhere else, but Behar was adamant, “No money? Nix problem! Sit down!”
“American?”
“Yes,” Behar slapped the table with approval and a few others in the coffee shop smiled or cheered. Behar spoke little English but I soon learned by the way others deferred to him that he carried some weight in the neighborhood. He brought his teenage son, Iljaz, over from behind the counter to roughly translate. Why was I here? Is America as prosperous as it sounds? I pulled out a copy of my documentary to answer the first question. Appreciating that I’d made the journey, Bajram tried fervently to use English to get his point across.

“Serbia…mafia…politic…no good…” He went into a tirade without words, his eyes glinting as he turned to his son in frustration. Mr. Mataj had a story to tell, but he couldn’t get it out. ‘Come to my home; I show you”. We ducked the railing at the station and twenty paces later stopped at a plot of weeds next to his home. “My restaurant,” was all he said. According to Mr. Mataj, his restaurant had been razed to the ground by the Serbian police. With it he lost his means of living as well as the roots of his social life. Unable to shake the memory, Behar put on a videotape of one of those lost nights at the restaurant. A band played traditional Albanian music and there was a young Behar, bursting into the foreground with an array of dance moves. I couldn’t suppress a laugh and suddenly we were all laughing at the young Behar losing himself in the music. But Behar knew when to stop laughing. The camera panned away from the band to a group of sinister-looking men sitting in the corner of the restaurant. They all had started out as friends, Behar explained. He singled a couple of them out with disgust. “This man…” Behar paused to make a whispering sound and a meddling gesture, “with Serbia”. These were evidently Albanians who had betrayed him to the Serbian police. Behar then asked his wife to bring him a cache of photographs and documents. One by one he pointed out friends and eventual foes that had served with him in the KLA. The wall was adorned with pictures of Behar proudly wearing his uniform, along with Behar tearfully burying his colleagues. Seeing that he was popular with Mitrovicë Albanians, local and national politicians had all met with Behar. Then, we got to the crux of his angst, the reason the man’s outgoing demeanor had been coated with cynicism since the war. Behar handed me an official UNMIK document that read:

“Mr. Mataj reported an attempt on his life on 07 December 00 at 03:05 am and named two of the suspects in the shooting. This was an attempted Murder case and as such was taken over by the Regional Investigations unit.”

- Signed: Will Stephens, Station Commander of Mitrovica South Station

I looked up at Behar. His eyes cursed the mistrust that had entered his life that harrowing day. I asked him who the suspects were, but he wanted to move on. He showed me an OSCE document certifying him as a Municipal Election Observer. If there was one thing that I gleaned from Mr. Mataj's words it was his disdain for the corruption that plagued his people (“mafia…politic…problem...you…me…nix problem…friends!”). I told him I was happy that he could fight for his community with ballots instead of bullets. I wrote my gratitude down on paper for his son to translate later, thanked his wife for the tasty Turkish tea, and jogged to the station to flag down the bus that was already rolling out to Pristina.

……………………………………………………………...........................

After three hours of dining at one of the best restaurants in Pristina, I had only spent 15 Euros. I looked up from my book to see a familiar face on the other side of the terrace. Prime Minister Agim Çeku had his head cocked as he exhaled on his cigar and listened to the animated restaurant owner tell a story. Just a few hours earlier at the Kosovo History Museum, I was looking at a picture of Çeku planning a guerilla offensive. I asked the waiter to initiate the process of requesting a photo with the prime minister: the waiter asked Çeku’s bodyguard, who shrugged and gestured for the owner. I watched it all unfold and realized how rude it could potentially be. The owner didn’t trouble the PM but instead came over to me and offered: “Americans and Albanians are friends, but for the prime minister this is family time."

As I left the restaurant, I smiled at what could have been my best interview in Kosovo. But what would have I said to him? If not America, if not UNMIK, then surely you, Mr. Prime Minister, must have some indication of where your province is heading. But the ineluctable truth, as it rings out across the minarets of Pristina and along the banks of the Ibar, is that even the skipper doesn’t know what course his ship will sail. What remains refreshingly clear, however, is that it will have to be its own course. No timetable for international recognition will make Kosovo a nation – it will be a nation when Serbs and Albanians can meet each other halfway at the Mitrovicë Bridge and not feel unwelcome when they step foot on the other side. Who knows how far off that is, but for now, it’s hardly a consideration.

“Do you ever go across the bridge?” I asked Iljaz Mataj. He shook his head grimly. Even the open-minded Iljaz could not shake the symbolic power of the bridge.