Come Travel with Me

Today, ladies and gentlemen, I, your host, Jor "San Pedro de la Velazquez y Toro Rojo" Jazzar, will be taking you on a curious little tour to some curious little places....

But first, to fully enjoy this pleasure cruise, you must download Google Earth from Google at http://earth.google.com

Now then, if you would all open your Google Earth program and enter the following location: Charcani Grande, Peru

In one of my many meanderings I discovered this little gem of a spot tucked snuggly between two huge volcanoes, El Misti and Nevado Chachani. It seems to be a resort of sorts. I would be inclined (especially if I were there...yuk-yuk!) to call it the "last resort", given it's precarious location.

As if it weren't enough to find this little hole in the world, I was delighted and intrigued to find various messages written into the sides of these mountains, large enough to be from these satelite images.

What could they be, I wondered. One of them reads "DIOS PATRIA LEY". Another reads "ESCUELA TECNICO SUPERIOR AREQUIPA". And there are others, too, some legible and some not. My best guess, as a naive cyber-world traveler and budding anthropologist was that these must be some kind of prayers or pleas to the volcano gods begging not to be destroyed.

I had good evidence to support these conclusions. For instance, I knew that "DIOS" is spanish for "God". And when I looked on the other side of the volcano, I could see that much of the neighboring city, Arequipa, had been destroyed by a relatively recent eruption. So these must be messages stemming from that basic cultural impulse of a people who have had to contend with these supernatural forces for millenia--messages of a religious people, powerless over nature.

Then came the research to confirm my rather hasty conclusion.

To my humbling bemusement, these were not the primitive sort of archeo-religious relics that I thought they were. Instead, I found that they are no more than nationalistic slogans and advertisements!! "DIOS PATRIA LEY" means "God, Mother-Country, Law". And "ESCUELA TECNICO SUPERIOR AREQUIPA" seems to be no more than a rough-hewn billboard saying "The superior technical school: Arequipa".

And I'd also found more in the neighboring city. One says "LA NESTLE LECHERA [large space] CAFE VALENZUELA", which I take to mean "Nestle milk [at] Cafe Valenzuela". Another one, in a rather action-packed font reads "TOL[-not clear, maybe 'EO'] ZAMA". This one is a mystery to me. It may be interesting though. Bonus points for anyone who can come up with its meaning.

Next time, come with me to Fallujah, Iraq, and see from above what a city under siege looks like. Or maybe we'll visit Caracas, Venezuela, in recent history a city with perhaps the starkest contrast between rich and poor, a trend slowly being reversed by the vast social reform undertaken by the villified Hugo Chavez who has nationalized most of the oil resources in this country to provide social services like health care and education to the poor.