Latinalicious: The South America Diaries

by Becky Wicks

  ‘The Maestros Ascendidos are showing us the light, we just have to listen,’ Francisco continued as I leaned forward to match his body language and wished I’d worn make-up to the common room table. He really was being as mysterious as Mulder by this point. As he chattered on I couldn’t fight the fantasy of us both running hand in hand towards the entrance to Erks, me in a red wig, him shouting, ‘Scully! If we don’t return from the fifth dimension, I want you to know, I’ve loved you since episode one!’

  You just never know who you’re going to meet when you stay in hostels, which is why I keep doing it, I suppose. It’s like a drug. The next hit always has the potential to be even more fun than the last.

  Francisco’s staying in this hostel in Capilla del Monte while repairs are being made to his house around the corner. Looking at him, I decided he couldn’t be more than thirty years old. He moved here from Buenos Aires two years ago, after a series of visions spanning seven years showed him various images of himself in a past life as a priest — a priest who was secretly unhappy with the cards life had dealt him.

  ‘I would see myself giving orders to people, but wanting to break them, too. I wanted things that a priest shouldn’t have,’ he said, looking sad. He actually looked at one point as though he might cry. ‘In my current life, I was in training as a yoga instructor, but when my visions got too … how you say … big, no, strong, no, emotionfull … I quit my yoga training.’

  ‘You quit yoga training because you were a priest in your past life?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, because the visions showed me I was just echoing my past life. If I became a yoga instructor, I would still be standing in a room telling people what to do.’

  Francisco also told me that, a few weeks ago, he got the feeling he had to talk to a particular tourist he saw at the base of Uritorco, and when he did, the tourist immediately pulled up two photographs on his camera showing a sky full of lights he called UFOs (OVNIs in Spanish), taken the night before. The tourist claimed he hadn’t seen the lights when he looked through the lens, which Francisco explained was probably because his camera was more advanced than his heart.

  ‘You have to see things with your heart, and not your mind,’ he told me, his weatherproof jacket scrunching as he folded his arms. ‘We are coming into a stage of the planet’s life where we’ll soon be unable to deny the … how you say … forces, that are trying to show us the way to a better existence. We’re all in transition. This is why there are so many wars and everyone is so angry and confused,’ he told me earnestly. ‘We are all tools for the energies to use. But sometimes, Becky, we need tools to become tools.’

  I nodded, and was just trying to get my head around the potential consequences of becoming a self-proclaimed tool at the gateway to another dimension in Argentina … in a red wig … when he pulled out the neck of his baggy jumper and produced the biggest quartz crystal I have ever seen. This six-sided prism, resplendent with six-sided pyramids at each end, was tied around his neck with a pink ribbon. It was so huge and light-absorbing I half expected the entire hostel to short-circuit and plug sockets to sizzle as he waved it about.

  Clutching his tool in his fist, Francisco told me I have to be careful if I want to climb Uritorco myself. ‘If the mountain doesn’t want you on it, you’ll soon know. It will push you off,’ he said, ominously.

  The whole of Capilla del Monte, including the mountain, is built on quartz, which is a highly powerful crystal known for its deep metaphysical and healing properties. It’s also, apparently, a well-known tool for aiding spiritual growth, so by wearing a giant chunk of it around his neck, Francisco is channelling the energies of the Maestros Ascendidos directly into his body and receiving their messages. It’s really quite clever. He sees their lights all the time because he’s so advanced and has been through training … training which involved sitting on a chair in his house in Buenos Aires, studying the visions of himself as a priest some 200 years ago.

  Francisco has to remain fully open at all times, he says, something that’s difficult to do in a chaotic city like Buenos Aires. In Capilla del Monte he has room to focus and let in the love. He learns more about the real meaning of his life every day and he’ll definitely be ready for the awakening when it happens in December. In spite of this, however, he never knows when a message from the Maestros Ascendidos might strike and change things completely.

  ‘It must be like getting a text message, only having it go directly to your heart instead of your phone,’ I commented. Could it be that I was beginning to understand?

  ‘That’s exactly what it is,’ he replied, his face a picture of tranquility as he tucked the quartz crystal safely back inside his jumper. ‘As long as you’re a listener, you will eventually be a receiver. Let’s hug.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Hug me.’

  He stood up, pulled me to my feet and wrapped his arms around me. ‘We hug heart to heart,’ he said. ‘Can you feel it?’

  I nodded, only marginally romanced now. Mulder never hugged Scully heart to heart until at least the fourth season. If this were an X-Files episode, he’d be ruining the sexual tension before it had even started to mount.

  ‘Can you feel it?’ he asked again, tightening his arms so that my face was properly squashed in his jacket. I told him I could, although, to be honest, the only thing I could feel at this point was his humongous quartz crystal digging into my boobs. Strangely, though, as I pulled away, I found I was shaking … physically shaking all over. My hands were trembling so much I could barely grip the seat to sit back down. Weird.

  ‘So who are the Maestros Ascendidos?’ I ventured when I could speak again. I fully expected him to describe the pointy-faced aliens I’d seen around town. ‘Have you seen them in any spaceships?’

  Francisco shook his head and appeared to be struggling for words. I thought for a second that he’d been thrown, like me, by our intense physical connection, and I felt quite good about that. But then I realised his English was just not as advanced as his spiritual connection to the divine, because he pointed at my computer and started jabbering really fast in Spanish. He grabbed the Mac, lifted the lid and with furious fingers typed a URL into the search bar.

  ‘This website will tell you everything,’ he said, clicking the helpful Google Translate button so I could read it in English. ‘Everything,’ he repeated, in a meaningful tone.

  Then, as I turned to the screen and started reading, he exhaled long and hard, like he’d just scaled Uritorco in his mind and said, ‘I must go now. I am tired. I do not normally talk to people. Perhaps I will walk the mountain with you tomorrow, but I will have to see what my heart tells me to do after breakfast.’

  ‘OK,’ I whispered. And off he went, squeaking in his weatherproof jacket, surprisingly straight-backed under the weight of his quartz, leaving me to peruse a garish purple website full of articles with headers like, ‘“Solving Negativity: Nuances of individual and mass relations”, by Archangel Metatron.’

  A further image search on Maestros Ascendidos — or the Ascended Masters — reveals pages of what look like bearded guardian angels looking very wise in the midst of their own multi-coloured auras. Not a grey oval face or basketball sized eyeball in sight. And as for the photos Francisco says he’s seen of mysterious lights around Uritorco, I still can’t find too many online. Are more people really seeing things with their hearts than with their eyes these days in Capilla del Monte?

  If what Francisco says is to be believed, perhaps these so-called aliens are just the concentrated positive energies we must focus on in order to be visited by the truth. And if these energies are real, is ‘the truth’ not so much out there, as it is already living inside us?

  My X-heroes would investigate further. It could be time to dig out that red wig.

  12/10

  Tumbleweeds and the OVNI disappointment …

  I made my way back to the kitchen bright and early the next morning, keen for Francisco and me to spend the day climbing Uritorco t
ogether in the sunshine.

  During the night, my fantasies had spun us both through a world of tunnels and bright lights and falling in love throughout the saga of our dramatic rescue, having both been kidnapped by an evil ET. On and on went our quest, our eternal bickering on the topic of ‘orbs’ versus ‘dust particles catching the sun’, our lovemaking in different dimensions, right through to the movie version that would eventually be made about our life together, living in a house made of quartz, on a mountain.

  But alas, Francisco’s chair was now empty. And so were the rest, except for one, filled by a girl reading a Lonely Planet. Perhaps Francisco’s heart had told him that my head was full of ridiculous notions and he’d gone back to hang out with the Maestros Ascendidos, or to receive more messages from his past self on his own.

  I ate my bread (a loaf of which was the only thing on offer on the breakfast table — typical here in South America), drank my obligatory bitter, hostel coffee and pondered what to do. Perhaps he’d show up in a little bit … but then, he had told me that the energies on Uritorco were more powerful in the early morning and, if we were going to go, it would have to be at this time.

  I buttered some more bread and started idle chit chat with the Lonely Planet reader, an Israeli girl, who told me she’d seen Francisco driving away earlier with a dog poking out of his car window and a bag of sandwiches. Dammit.

  Still, resolving to do what Mulder or Scully would do without the other, I decided to make my way to Uritorco and go alien hunting alone. The Israeli girl had climbed some of the mountain the day before and said it was difficult and that I should probably change my shoes. Granted, black knee-high boots (albeit waterproof flat ones bought during a rain storm in Buenos Aires) probably aren’t ideal footwear in these situations, even if Dana Scully endured all manner of tricky situations wearing heels.

  So, I headed back to the dorm to put my muddy North Face trainers on, and this was when a robust woman in her mid-fifties emerged from the bathroom with her toothbrush hanging out of her mouth and told me that if I was planning to climb the mountain I was welcome to go with her.

  Sylvia from Salta (where I’ll be going next), chattered happily in broken English about her reason for being in Capilla del Monte as we walked the three kilometres to the base of Uritorco. She’s here with a group of people from all over Argentina who worship the deceased spiritual healer Graciela Busto, and regularly make pilgrimages in his name.

  Graciela Busto wrote a series of books while he was alive, one of which was called Conversations with God (not the similarly titled Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue by Neale Walsch, which is a true inspiration, by the way — you must read it), and he was a legend for thousands of people. Sylvia pulled out a photo of him in his prime, standing at a podium in an orange smock, sporting a huge, black frizzy hairstyle. After she kissed it, she told me that she and a bunch of Graciela Busto worshippers she had only ever spoken to online were planning to gather at the base of the mountain and chant some special prayers in accordance with his teachings. Later in the afternoon they were also going to sit in a temple and hold hands for a while.

  ‘I love him, I love him, I love him,’ she kept on saying, gesturing to the sky. Judging by what I could save from being lost in translation, Sylvia also believes in the healing energies that are concentrated around this mountain. She, too, mentioned quartz and its power to enhance the feeling of love, an emotion she appears to feel especially strongly when she’s in this town … unless it’s normal for Sylvia to walk around kissing photos and telling the sky she loves it.

  I’d like to say the four-hour walk up the mountain with Sylvia was one of intellectual conversation, of sharing conspiracy theories mixed with the odd sighting of a UFO, but in all honesty it was a rather boring, rather sweaty, rather uncomfortable trek up a brown hill that Scully definitely could have done in heels, and that I could only just about manage in my trainers. No one talked to me, either, probably because, in spite of my continuous efforts and definite improvement, my Spanish is in no way up to conversing with people about extraterrestrial visitations and the metaphysical healing properties of mountainous terrain.

  When we got to the top, we looked at the view for a bit, which was quite nice, I suppose, but really nothing compared to what Autumn and I had seen in Torres del Paine and Tierra del Fuego. And then we walked back down again.

  When Sylvia and her new friends headed off to their temple, I decided to go back into town and find the Centro de Informes OVNI (UFO Information Centre). I had some questions, mainly involving why I hadn’t seen any. I turned up in a dusty side street to find the ‘centre’ was actually someone’s house, complete with a huge billboard outside featuring a hovering spacecraft. It looked normal enough, not at all like you might expect a house of extraterrestrial purpose to look, which of course made me even more intrigued.

  I rang the bell beside a locked gate, fully expecting a geek in round-rimmed glasses with unwashed hair to emerge in an ‘I Want To Believe’ T-shirt, but there was nothing and no one. I peered across the railings and saw a giant green inflatable alien staring at the garden from the porch. Pretty flowers danced in the wind. A tumbleweed in the form of a discarded plastic bag floated past in the breeze, but there were still no humans in sight. I rang again. Still no answer. I can’t say I was really surprised, though.

  I’ve noticed since arriving in this town that Capilla del Monte is the kind of place in which the afternoon siesta seems to last all day. Shops and restaurants seem to be open from 10 a.m. till noon and then again after roughly 8 p.m. During the day, packs of street dogs roam around in large numbers and, as you’re generally the only person outside during daylight, they tend to all gather round you and follow you wherever you go, causing you to feel like some sort of powerful Pied Piper, with an iPod instead of a flute. It’s kind of cool. I led my K9 crew round the block twice and into a park, and did a little bit of a dance, which made them jump and wag their tails. Then I realised I probably looked weird and stopped. Then I realised that this is probably what happens to people who stay in Capilla del Monte too long.

  Defeated and resigned to the fact that I was not going to find out any more information regarding UFOs or the Maestros Ascendidos, I wandered back (followed by a silky-haired spaniel cross, and later, a friend of hers) to one of only a few places I knew would be open, the Valpisa Rock and Pizza. This gargantuan restaurant spanning half a block appears to model itself on the Hard Rock Cafe, but as I sank into a booth with red plastic seats and ordered a vino tinto with yet more Adele blasting into my ears from a speaker, it felt more like dining in an empty stadium. It was one of those lonely travelling moments when everything’s just a bit shit, to be honest.

  On the way to the bus station, bound for Córdoba once more with my worldly belongings in the back of a taxi, I told the driver of my disappointment at not seeing any Maestros Ascendidos, or OVNIs. When I mentioned how I didn’t even get to look inside the Centro de Informes OVNI, he shot me a sympathetic look and promptly pulled the car over to the curb. Before I even had a chance to ask him what he was doing, he’d whipped out a photo from the glove box showing Uritorco in the grainy moonlight. Beside it, to the right, almost too far away to tell but not too far away for it not to be possible, was a metallic-looking hovering disc.

  ‘OVNI!’ he proclaimed proudly. ‘I have see quatro time!’

  I haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary myself in Capilla del Monte, except Francisco’s unfathomably large quartz adornment and, now, the taxi driver’s photo, which could of course be showing nothing more than a reflection from a llama farmer’s flashlight. But I learned in Bali that ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, and there are clearly more things in Argentina than I thought possible, too. And if anyone’s looking for their answer to Fox Mulder now that the X-Files is off-air, his sexy, disheveled, truth-seeking counterpart is very much alive and well here … somewhere. He doesn’t have
a job at the moment, I don’t think. But he used to be a priest.

  14/10

  An escape to the English countryside …

  When I was at school, my best friend Claire had a pony. I’ve forgotten his name but I used to call him Poo Bum, because he always had a constant trickle of shit running out of his behind. Apparently it was a medical condition that no amount of drugs from the vet would fix, but Claire loved that shitty-bummed pony like I loved my first Kylie album and first edition Game Boy.

  Every Saturday morning I would accompany Claire to the field where Poo Bum lived and watch as she lovingly brushed his mane and tail, and then tacked him up and went riding. I was fascinated. As they trotted off over the hill leaving me swinging on the gate, a beacon in pink humming ‘Especially For You’, I would watch them in admiration and envy, and wonder when I would become a horsewoman myself. I waited a long time. Until now.

  When my car pulled into Estancia Los Potreros — an impressive, sprawling Argentinean expanse of green fields and grazing horses that gives guests the chance to ride and get involved in estancia life — the vision before me was fresh from the pages of a Jane Austen novel. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and I instantly felt re-energised. Handsome, young gauchos (finally!) in neckerchiefs and flat caps leaned on fences, parakeets squawked in the trees, guides in jodhpurs carried tack, dogs barked and wagged their tails, horses whinnied, chickens pecked at the grass, and Kevin and Louisa Begg, the estancia’s king and queen, greeted me in matching berets (or boinas, as is the correct name) carrying a glass of lemonade on a silver tray. It was paradise after a few too many Quilmes beers the night before …