La Quinceañera del Parque

This photo always makes me giggle.  The quinceañera: Mexico at its most extravagant and ridiculous.  I didn't even know that dresses like this actually existed in real life before I arrived in Mexico.  Walking through the streets of Mexico City, I passed a store that sold quinceañera dresses.  I couldn't help but stare they were so... flamboyant.  Shaking my head, I told myself that it had just been some kind of fancy dress shop.  I managed to go on believing this for about three weeks, until in Guadalajara I found myself walking around "that part of town".  All up, there were about twenty stores selling these outrageous dresses, each one seeming crazier than the last.  There were all kinds of ornamentation: wings, leopard print, sparkles, but mostly there was plenty of poof.  This was when I knew that it was probably not just your average fancy dress.

It turns out the quinceañera is a girl celebrating her fifteenth birthday, when she is seen to go from being a kid to a woman.  Just like that, a flick of the switch.  Of course, this idea in itself is not so strange, after all in Australia we have debutantes.  I just love the idea of the quinceañera so much because it does the typical Mexican; it takes what is a fairly normal custom and then seems to have taken a step back, asking itself - but how can I make it more.... jazzy?  The result is a ritual which combines the church and community with a bursting forth of exuberance that seems to hit you over the head, leaving you wondering where it came from?

The quinceañeras are one of my favourite parts of Mexico; they pop up from nowhere when you least expect it.  For instance, this photo was taken on a casual picnic in the park; but I've also seen the girls posing in front of fountains and even once on a roundabout.  That they can just appear, so unexpectedly, is what I love about Mexico.  It takes the extreme, the extraordinary, the ridiculous and makes it the everyday.  Life in Mexico is really quite dream-like: dramatic, colourful, startling and sometimes scary things happen, but no one misses a beat, everything just keeps going on.  - Did you see the girl in the giant purple dress lying on the grass with people attending her skirts?  - Oh, what? The quinceañera? Yeah, I think so.

Stillness

Serenity.  That's all I can think of when I see this photo, everything seems still.  We reached this lake in the Peruvian Amazon by canoe.  The jungle had been dense either side of the river, giving a sense of being boxed in by walls made of plants.  Casting shadows on the dark water, the morning sun stretched to touch the far side of the watercourse.  As we steered into the lake the world seemed to open up, leaving me with the conflicted feelings of being liberated from the confines of the jungle while also being very aware of how exposed I was.

We had made the trip to the lake in the hope of seeing some wildlife.  Sadly, no one was home.  While there was a far-off sloth, he didn't seem very enthusiastic about seeing us.  We paddled further around the edge of the lake, following its banks.  A loud holler erupted from our guide, shattering the silence and stillness of the lake.  He was calling out to the monkeys that were often around the lake.  They answered him, a distant call ringing back through the trees.  He offered to lure them down to the bank for us, coaxing them with offers of bread or some other treats.  We barely considered this before declining it: we were in the Amazon, not a petting zoo.  Bribing wild animals would sap all of the magic out of a place so unknown and so mystical.  Better to leave the place with some of its power.

Lupe II

I've already discussed the Mexican virgin Guadalupe in another entry, so I won't be re-hashing that.  I just love the intensity of this photo; the sheer volume of religious iconography, the prominence and centrality of Guadalupe and the brightness of the colours and in particular the flowers.  What else is so great about this is is that it was located in a small, roadside restaurant in Oaxaca.  By small I mean that while it wasn't small in size, it did have a definite quaint feel about it, particularly in the way that the waitress/cook/owner (I guess), an elderly woman, would simply come and ask you what is was that you wanted to eat, without providing a menu.

Such intense and concentrated imagery in such a relaxed, everyday setting.  Religion is a funny thing sometimes.

New Year, New Start

New Year's Eve 2009, I was in a small Ecuadorian town while doing a stint of volunteering.  It was a purely local affair, being in the country, apart from the six foreign girls.  The locals there have a tradition of making these life size dolls, stuffing them with old clothes.  Normally one doll is made per household.  The dolls represent the old year and are ceremoniously burnt, stacked in a pile at midnight.  Don José, the owner of the local store, pours more petrol over the pile of burning dolls.

River Shanty

The Belén is a district of the Amazonian city Iquítos, Peru; the city being accessible only by boat or plane.  There, everything is built to float.  I visited in the southern hemisphere summer, when the rivers were low.  When the waters run high, the banks extend a few hundred metres up to a market.  The market was undoubtably the worst smelling place I have ever been, which gave me very little confidence to try the food.  But it was strangely fascinating, chickens were cut open in strange ways and left so that you could see eggs forming inside of them.  All kinds of meat were available: fish (also cut strangely), caiman, turtles and some that I either didn't know or couldn't recognise.  My favourite was the natural therapies/magic section .

When the river levels are up, everything is afloat, even the market, all of the Belén is on the river, and the only way to get around for the shanty town's thousands of occupants is in boats.

Sleep Walking The Streets

After having been kindly woken up from having fallen asleep, hugging my backpack on the bus, I was told that I had arrived in Baños, Ecuador.  I hadn't been keen on arriving so late (midnight), but the only other bus that ran that journey would get in a couple hours later still.  Already I had decided where I was going to stay that night, after consulting my guidebook, and a man had also given me directions at the bus station, which seemed easy enough to follow: five blocks straight, two blocks left.  

So, I set off from the bus station, which was really no distance at all from the centre of town, lugging my large backpack and the smaller one on front.  It only took a few minutes for me to realise that I was probably not on path at all, it was hard to count the blocks when all the roads were running at funny angles and their length was really variable.  The streets were deserted; it was eerily quiet. I pulled my guidebook out of the bag hanging on my chest, flicking through to find the town map.  Having worked out where I needed to go, I continued on.  It started to spit lightly.  A car drove past.  I checked the map again.  A drunken shout sounded from a bar.  I turned the corner and stumpled upon this.

I've always been a fan of old cars, and this one, a little worse for wear, looked pretty none-the-less against the brick wall and the old signs.  After snapping this, and checking the map again, I managed to find the hostel, which thankfully had a spare bed.  I passed back this way the next day, but someone had already driven him away.

Huts At Dusk

On a four-day trip into the Peruvian Amazon, I took this picture.  We (the guide, a Colombian guy and myself) were heading back to camp for dinner at dusk in the long, rustic wooden boat.  It was just starting to rain as we were coming up to these huts.  I found the lighting and the reflection striking, but the darkness does hide perhaps the most quirky aspect of the huts visible in the daylight: they had satellite dishes on their roofs.  Technology: it seems you can't escape it.