The stars slow 
A fairly rare news was released last week, some of the inhabitants of the spa town of
Valizas Rocha were collecting signatures for an initiative to oppose the mayor departmental
Artigas Barrios with respect to your location. At the request of a number, apparently not very important, Valizas neighbors, Artigas Barrios decided to artificially illuminate the dark streets. A seemingly as modernizing and supported, if not, in the call for increased "security" in a town where small pilfering some of his ragged visitors during the summer are common, but where major crimes are virtually unknown .
But the electric light, a symbol of progress since 110 years ago
Edison invented the light bulb, "has some disadvantages as well as the huge consumption of energy involved. Among them is the fact that there is a light source that is as casual in nature, and nature in a more or less pure is one of the things that originally attracted many those who decided to make Valizas home. Neighboring town, and in some ways a slightly cheaper and urbanized, Cabo Polonio, Valizas just had electricity in 1992, and that given the opposition of some of its most naturalists, who argued that the attractiveness of the place was just the difference with any of the other dozens of resorts on the coast of Rocha, a difference based on its original charm. After several meetings it was decided that the power-of course not mandatory for all residents, would bring many benefits, and decided to accept this upgrade, but with the commitment that this power was to remain indoors and not to alter the physiognomy of the landscape valizero. That is, a commitment was that there was no electric lighting in the streets.
Why, for primitive atavism, of dogmatism Nature by nostalgia for the Luddites, fear ...? No, the opponents of this change had an argument more romantic and yet very practical and obvious: the stars. Some of the inhabitants of Valizas like to watch the sky at night and seen in its full majesty shining beauty of the Milky Way, as it can be seen in the southern hemisphere when no artificial light sources illuminating the environment observer. Is undeniable, anyone who has raised head on the field or anywhere without street lights know there are many more stars in the firmament of the city dwellers to see. And some believe that this is a beautiful spectacle that do not have to resign.
(
few months ago in Punta Rubia, another place that almost no electric lights in the streets, drinking a beer at night, no more music than cicadas, chatting with a friend several years living in Spain and told me with horror as the noticeable deterioration in the Castilian language used in Uruguay, also watched the sky with wonder and remark that in the northern hemisphere night sky is much poorer and boring constellations with less visible, less jewels of light in the dark. I was twice in the northern hemisphere but I have no idea if it's true or not. The sky over New York and Chicago, the enormous power epicenters of clarity that I visited, is totally black ). I never liked
Valizas in fact in about twenty years since I came to Rocha first resort should be the least visited. Which is funny because of course it seems a beautiful place with its stream and its dunes unrealistic, but there is something in the punk teenager who was and still am an elitist who does not tolerate the hippie aesthetic almost obligatory in place, the boys furry
screaming songs and Fito Paez Raul Seixas
around the fire, bad girls shaved Berreta drinking wine in plastic bottles of soda, the constant mangueo carried
modus vivendi in a systematic, language-filled pasty unbearable Fillers of the Moluccan
... Ok, not my thing. But it seems so respectable that destination choice as any other option, as my decision to go to other places, and is one of the few centers Rocha who have not gone to the Reverend Fuck rental prices and lodging. So no wonder that many of the people I love and I believe have made Valizas your favorite vacation spot. And I like the way it is.
Why change something that is enjoyed for decades in its more or less rustic and alter the semi-nudist pact with your visitors? The reason for the "security" is very thin, even paranoid that some people has become urgent and needs, communication needs or health that depend on electricity are already covered. The other reason is very simple: by twine.
Artigas Barrios has the highest approval rating of mayors Uruguayans, about 70% of Rocha believes that its management has been good or more, which is not surprising considering the black hole was
predecessor Riet Correa, who literally left the mayor's office broke. But beyond that it was a good administrator, Artigas Barrios had a stroke of good luck, he had to be mayor of Rocha in the same five years in which like much of Argentine tourists and holidaymakers Uruguayan high economic capacity Maldonado moved to Rocha, and the ocean beaches of the department became the most
cool the Uruguayan coast. This obviously meant a huge injection of money to the department, and Artigas Barrios in conjunction with the Ministry of Tourism cleverly exploited the phenomenon. There are many reasons
potential of this movement of wealthy tourists to the east, leaving in some way (though not too have noticed the new influx of tourists in Brazil and Paraguay), Punta del Este and its surrounding resorts. There is a lot of kerchiefs and fashion, of course, but also about the over-exploitation has become the star spa even Uruguay. I'm semi-fernandino, and I have an emotional relationship with Maldonado Rocha obviously I have no money (and somehow I inherited some of the historical animosity between the two territories), but left many years to feel at home in the community I spent much of my childhood, and to find some kind of fun in aesthetics and menemizada miamizada a Punta del Este that has nothing to do with me bicycling and going fishing with my grandfather. The last time I went, the Bob Dylan concert
in the repulsive
Conrad Hotel, Punta del Este found-not visited for more than six years turned into a coastal metropolis painted gold, sweep, noisy badly dressed.
But it's not just me who feels this way and even many who prefer it as a city super luxurious, modern and exclusive, they began to tire of insulting prices and contempt toward what they saw communal privileges already acquired. Monetary greed the municipalities of
Enrique Antia first and Oscar de los Santos then seemed much to the reasoning of the owner of the goose that lays the golden eggs (in some ways the basic reasoning of the corporate-capitalist mentality today), and in return personal or community benefits allowed immediate abrupt changes in the physiognomy of the spa that displeased many of his traditional visitors. Building permits exceptional (legal nonsense, as did that shit can serve to establish exclusions or prohibitions edilicias if granting exceptions can be ignored?) And the proliferation of exploitative projects in places such as La Barra
,
Springs or
José Ignacio have been tired people who had chosen these points precisely because of its isolation and exclusivity. And many of those people have started to migrate to Rocha. Persistent community protavoz pack Gattás
Mecha said in a recent report that La Pedrera is like Punta del Este in the 60's, and many of these people want to go to Punta del Este in the 60's. The problem is that what is beyond Punta del Este is the 60 but La Pedrera, which is another thing. But Artigas Barrios, Mayor wonder, is campaigning to solve this minor inconvenience.
must be very naïve not to understand what what's behind the electrical modernization Valizas. Is the same as in less than ten years transformed the fishing village of Punta del Diablo
a kind of slum tourism, as well as build a millionaire allowed Argentina a number of bungalows in the middle of Playa del Barco
La Pedrera , ruining it forever (at least for those who do not have Miami as the aesthetic model universal), as he did prohibit camping free on the department and what he does drool to
when Pepe Mujica dreams of converting all deserted beaches of Rocha in hyper-private villas that "well-heeled come to lizards to that tourism, the second industry of Uruguay in terms of earnings, becoming the first. Valizas is a naturally beautiful and, unlike Cabo Polonio, where there is a consensus (though often threatened) to preserve it as a natural reserve, capable of being turned into a major tourism center that serves, which makes money, not dirty hippies.
But this requires a minimum infrastructure facilities, including electric lighting is off the streets, one is not going to attract fifties entrepreneurs to invest in a place where hippies roam in the shadows of the streets without electricity . No, you have to clean up, improve, refine and, if possible, take. But what happens to those already there, those who prefer to see the starry sky but have to walk down the street with flashlights? Well it's a sacrificial interest in relation to potential material benefits. Because everything is expendable in relation to the material benefits, especially when they are for groups who then mysteriously end up being much smaller than the victims.
An editorial
summer of 2007, a year before the final explosion of tourism in Rocha, the flagship newspaper of the official left,
Republic, "unsigned editorial although lacking his ineffable style director Federico
Fasano - identified the big problem of this department and its fauna summer in very concrete terms. To the anonymous writer of the underdevelopment (sub-holding) of Rocha was the fault of that "in the department are
has installed a supposed vision of nature protection, that in fact the only thing it has served to worsen some negative aspects . " A statement rather complicated, especially when not supported by anything more than phrases like: "
Minister of Industry and Energy, Jorge Lepra , in a recent interview gave as an example to Cabo Polonio, Uruguay how in some respects is still living and defending the past. In that case, a dunes ecology alleged "unique in the world", as some say, more than false statement, as these exist and existed (up to Malvin), in any desert area ).
But was this the heart of the problem for the anonymous writer left, but rather the following: "The others
appointed resorts (Punta del Diablo, Valizas) arrives tourism" low quality ", do not take this as a derogatory statement but the description of a way of life that was promoted for years as a profile for certain levels of our youth, are drawn to this type of tourism. One type of client that obviously is not attractive to promote investments in hotels, good restaurants, instead of "carts" of sausages and pies kiosks in place batches. "Pancho Dotto
Ni would have said it better , how they were going to happen to young people not wanting to go to twine beaches, wanting to sleep in a tent and eating empanadas? The beach which you can afford it, privatize and ruin, not dirty do not know how good is to have a left-wing daily and live in a mansion for $ 2 million to the shore of a lake. The beach for Japanese retirees, not for psychology students, surfers or street musicians. The beach for friends and for the authorities Fasano ministerial guidelines frequently in the plural multimedia. That is the vision of the left who governs us and their spokesmen.
But even advocates of tourism and high-profile progressive with its contradictions, as demonstrated by the resort with more commercial development in recent years Rocha, La Paloma
, which is thought almost certainly ruin by the construction of a hyper-clean deep water port. And there there is a quite remarkable if little or no solidarity in some communities, although almost all permanent residents of La Paloma are against the installation of port, most Rocha favor is made, as they have them touch any residual benefit of commercial activity that this port would produce. And they do not live there. Moreover
not be the first time that a resort environmentally bursts integer Rocha, in the 70's was
La Coronilla -by then the most promising resort-the department that construction of the Canal Andreoni
became a pet cemetery in descomposicón and chemicals from rice fields. Of course, in that case it was the excuse that was something implemented by a dictatorship, and disasters are now approved democratically. For the same neighbors who weep before the cameras of Channel 4
because their neighborhoods were flooded Rocha capital as unprecedented in the history of the city, claiming state help without understanding the direct line between the ecological changes environment and the changes they bring. And responsibility that may correspond to a community that is passively accepting most of these changes based on the hope of economic beneficiaries of the same. But some people, as evidenced by the frequent jibes if Valizas and their struggle for a starry sky, are so accustomed to duck that can not look up. One who discovered
La Paloma this year, and apparently liked it although paradoxically supports the installation of deep-water port, was the multimedia journalist Gerardo Sotelo
, and having spent their holidays here, decided to dedicate a column
in Montevideo.comm. It Sotelo, whose time appears to be extremely valuable, generalizes their subjective impression about life in the resort and becomes a metaphor for the choices, not of the Rocha but of all Uruguayans, and exclusive ways that are raised apparently with the utmost urgency. Write on La Paloma and Rocha: "
its inhabitants seem dully divided between those who prepare for the future and those who prefer to maintain composure picturesqueness and even at the expense of passing bad .
What inspires reflection so crucial? Many things, including "mentioned in passing, the delay in construction of bridge
the Laguna Garzón, which would link more directly to Punta del Este to the beaches of Rocha, a building known to traverse and dramatically alter one of the largest nature reserves in Uruguay, which was approved by the
Dinama only after they were lowered significantly the environmental requirements for such a work. But mostly what inspires Sotelo, although not stated in the note-but furiously said one of the leading issues of the newsletter of
Radio Sarandi - is the delay, slow, in the attention he suffered in one of the restaurants in La Paloma. A terrible thing to mind.
Slow Rocha is something that really surprised the first time that a Montevideo-that is, not just someone who comes from a community characterized by its speed, is in contact with it, and can greatly irritate him, especially if not understands that there is something personal against him. Where does this slowly so distinctive? I think there must be something essentially traditional, but with its iron logic, the summer resort of Rocha are small communities that for nine or ten months a year there is no need to hurry because there is nobody waiting behind. A social time slow metabolism, in which the day is enough to do everything that needs to be done. Why Sotelo think it's so easy to change that and switched to a rate for them is anti-natural only to please? At the end of the day it's a tourist on holiday, you have free time and not have to work like the poor girl to whom you hurry. And it's hot, hinchahuevos. Relax a little.
I have found that the slowness is not exclusive spa Rocha, in more places and popular resorts such as La Paloma've seen Bay the local move at a speed that, by comparison, makes it seem to cheetahs anfetaminizados Rocha. It is in my opinion a time, pace, philosophical, which is about the same concept of the holiday. I understand that a delay can be very annoying to fart, but I, on vacation, I have no need or desire to attend a hysterical me that makes me feel that I too I have to hurry to my place is free again. There is something beautiful in that slow rebellion, some of the now largely forgotten dignity of knowing that someone be serving not necessarily be your servant, nor be a subordinate. Sotelo
But the tourist is a jealous god almighty so this seems offensive and rejoicing that there are people living in La Paloma modernized, complains that "most
works backwards, that is, pretending that the tourist is tailored to the peculiar working hours and rest of the villagers . " What mad La Paloma, claim that the visitors to adapt to local customs and not otherwise. I guess with that logic, if tomorrow comes a trip to La Paloma Saudis, local women should cover themselves from head to toe when going to the beach and will have to climb a muezzin's tower the SBI.
I can not find words to define this class educated thought (the "sepoy" jauretchiano seems a little soft), but unfortunately not unique to Sotelo but is a mentality that increasingly extends beyond that, I suppose, must originate in countries that live off tourism sexual, because out of the same can not be understood so degraded conception of community identity in exchange for money. But it is not only a problem of the propagandists, it is also the problem of customers.
Because it is also time to demystify and religiously while respecting a class of larvae that surplus to pamper both have begun to confuse hospitality with the right to privilege, hire purchase and kindness to submission. Ie, tourists.
say that a traveler is someone who does not know where you are going and a tourist is someone who does not know where. Well, someone who does not know where it is even more dangerous to the place where it is found that for himself, he knows not what he walks, does not know the local community value attributed to allowing you to observe but not change. There should be a sort of universal code of conduct referred to tourism, which allowed the summary execution of those who infrigieran. Tourism is undoubtedly a source of transfer of surplus resources of rich to poor societies (or the rich to the rich, never poor to the rich because that is done in other ways) but the increase in world population and expansion of tourism as a global holiday habit has generated a number of tourists that decisively affects the communities they visit, and the effect is almost invariably degradation and social disintegration.
the same way that there is no monument of antiquity to support the passage of thousands of daily visitors, many of whom are eager to take along a pebble in a place so picturesque, "there are many communities that support constant violation of their customs or almost continuous supply of bribes to do so. Because the tourist is usually more important physical evidence of your trip-whether a Machu pebbles Picchu or exotic sexual history, "that any cultural experience received. And it is especially important as the experience of status: the last site employee who lives in an apartment of 30 m2 in Shinjuku
happens as if by magic to rest in a bungalow of 100 m2 in Cartagena
, with plenty of Young people who do nothing but smile and offer to please. It is understandable that he is attractive, but of course is an illusion and a harmful illusion for him and for the community to integrate briefly disintegrates.
Another factor inherently destructive of organized tourism for the middle class is that you missed Sotelo in La Paloma, speed. The tour packages are based much of its attractiveness in the cumulative range of supply, so the tours are highly dependent on the amount of activities that can pile on one or two weeks, which is strictly in terms of leisure, of course, shit where one can relax and unwind, but ideal when taking pictures or add anecdotes. That is when, not live to tell. But the experiences are more dependent status as quantifiable as lived, is known, and tourism is more like something you do to others, not live. Ten years ago
Tom Wolfe, and definitely senile or stupid, he argued that time was the best in the history of mankind, because for the first time a Detroit worker could visit Japan. Wolfe obviously the ability to visit Japan is not involved, perhaps more than ever in a society in which privileges experience over the status of knowledge, the ability to understand Japan, and that the same worker who was now able to visit Japan was not unlike his grandfather or even his father, able to buy their own home in Detroit. Ie was and is the era of virtual ownership experiences, knowledge simulation, simulation and simulation status of possession, while, as usual, the real owners were becoming less and more real, though less visible.
What was left was what Johnny Rotten
was defined as "Cheap holidays
on Other's people's misery ." Looking miserable with a miserable pity, servants served, magnified and false experience of home transplanted abroad. Something that has nothing to do with the trip
, a necessary experience, almost obligatory, for the restless spirits. The trip, whether physical or merely psychic, is an initiatory experience whose core is provided, depersonalization. Unlike tourism, which is an experience of virtual reaffirmation of one's ego through a pseudo-confrontation
with otherness, the journey is the real contact with the otherness and the genuine exchange with it. An exchange is only possible by lowering the barriers of personal ego and the collective cultural ego, which is only possible by the disappearance of the self all possible to make room for what may enter or we want to enter. Experience shows us that we are not so important, one of the first steps to acquire any real kind of human importance.
Today, the global tourism boom and expanded industry and rated as a form of mutual exclusion relationship, travel is increasingly rare. Among other things it is impossible to go where the tourists go; the tourist changes the environment dramatically and does everything possible so that it resembles it for your convenience. That is, eliminate the otherness, but without mutual exchange, simply by the local suppressive submission, which is reduced to a color, a flower necklace bizarre accent. The tourist is, of course, a conqueror, not a host, but instead of armies brings credit cards. The traveler, traveling with the money to travel, travels essentially naked, but what kind of trip can be done in places like Punta del Este, Mar del Plata or Acapulco? None, of course, unless you have a bag of peyote or something. And yet, I would never recommend seriously placed in an area with so much bad karma and noxious stimuli.
A little more than a century, a traveler could find the Galapagos Islands and their spirit is agitated enough to find a tool with which to battle against the very theory of creation. Today, these islands are threatened by the ecology-minded tourists, which by generating a large and rich tourism industry around the area became better standard of living in Ecuador, resulting in a migration of service providers than that the ecosystem can support it. This means that those who love iguanas, giant tortoises and the untouched nature altered with its own balance intact presence of the islands, which are now its fantastic wildlife at risk. But go to argue against the inalienable right of tourists to visit the islands and locals to make money with them. So far almost any ecosystem has earned a miserable round to a bag of money, and on the rare occasions he has been so, their wins have been nothing more than temporary deferrals, temporary truce until the next offensive.
(
not just a problem of poor societies, although the same is most apparent corrupting effect, but also happens to the rich. One person I know returned to Europe after 20 years, and sadly told me to revisit the museums and sites of Paris that had fascinated at the time, it had been impossible to republish this experience because of the number of people present. I said that at first thought it would have fallen on a bad day, but later confirmed it was the same in every place, in every frame, every ride. He told me that the pure pleasure of artistic experience to stand before a painting by Vermeer or Caravaggio, and to internalize it through this year almost forgotten is that of contemplation, was not yet possible to the hordes of people filled camera photos that did not care to be there or see Vermeer, but simply to document their presence at the scene. This he had a Uruguayan 60, but I thought of the French poor, to those who realize that are elbowing into the ranks behind the show than their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents built, and when they come up protest the usher, it is counting banknotes of all nationalities, and looks and shrugs. They are also losing something that, despite the essential artificiality of art and its exhibition, was also a natural territory .)
I had the opportunity and the experience of having lived through the roughest Rocha, desolate, primitive and even hostile . Nobody made me do it, could have chosen to stay in the Gold Coast or return to Maldonado, but it was an experience I wanted to have that training was essential in my life. So today we usually have our friends anecdotes summer-or off-season travel-crossed by wild storms dark outside, with stories that seem characteristic of shipwrecks or barbarians, and adventure in the wonders discovered that Nature speaks and says things essential, but that just makes us humans where we stayed silent and still.
Today I find myself more prejudiced and gentrified, and when after a year of hard work come my vacation I have no desire to be carrying water Hookah or having to heat water on a stove for washing dishes, so I prefer to avoid sites Rocha less civilized and choose intermediate locations, where they have running water and electricity at the ranch, but at the same time can wander paths land without crossing with anyone and you can see the stars. Maybe
As you move into the years I have increasingly needs for comfort and consumption, and requires good restaurants (ie, expensive), and delivery services
, and casinos and acclimating my holiday shopping. Perhaps as I become an old jacket that I'm dead in life long before going to the drawer, maybe wear a shirt and play hawaina palette on the seashore, I do not know. If so I hope to have the minimum dignity to be me that I move to one of the numerous resorts that offer and all that crap, and do not have the arrogance to pretend unprecedented change for the convenience of my weaknesses the environment in which they fell as a bag of rotten cancer.
Mostly I want my nephews, or my potential children have the opportunity to go to places I was, walking along the paths I walked, and yet still look like they were never busy, and listen to what nature language told me that no man can play. And they can choose from, each of them, a different star to be christened with a name ridiculous and magical. That's something I do not want Artigas Barrios, Sotelo, Pancho Dotto, Mujica or stolen Fasano friends to my family or yours. That is something that has no price can be.
I still like much
Milan Kundera, a writer now totally out of fashion, who in some ways was one of the greatest writers of testimonials of abuse and terror of socialism and who only recently pointed out in relation to a dubious and unbelievable incident in which his youth would have reported a dissident. It is logical that in societies shaped from the point of view that
more Intrusion remarkable and worthy of review than his novels, but I still marvel at the clarity of expression of the Czech and renunencia to be pigeonholed ideologically dogmatic categories. Kundera was a compliment, which seems tailored to a Rocha, of the slowness in his novel called, precisely,
Slow in proposing this quality as a virtue as opposed to the vertigo of speed and vertigo consumer capitalism dynamic factors proposed as positive. In this novel, Kundera remembered the difference between contemplating something and just see it, explaining the first crystal is not absolutely impossible if one slows down and stops. But this is not novel I think that comes to mind in this post but his latest work to date
Ignorance (2000), which recounts the vision of his native Prague through the eyes of an exile who returns to his hometown after twenty years in Paris.
Irene (the character of the speaker Kundera), a fierce opponent of the Czech communist regime which was forced to emigrate, is returning to a city bastardized by intrusive ads in their most representative historical sites and a city to its knees before the requirements of global tourism at some point he learned that Prague was one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, and introduced as the inevitable fate of their tours. The interesting thing about this sad discovery of Kundera's character is that it is narrated from a nostalgic perspective of someone unable to internalize the changes in their emotional landscape, but with fury and lucidity recognizing the elements of pure oppression, pure monetary dictatorship are those changes. And the abuse and loss involved.
A recent advertising campaign of the Ministry of Tourism, encouraged the hospitality of the Uruguayan with phrases like "a English
, a friend!, A Brazilian, a friend!, An Argentine ... a brother! "looking for cushion possible xenophobic resentment-even encouraged by the government to which the Ministry of Tourism from the conflict caused by Botnia
. I will not be me, I travel with an Italian passport and is often defined as "the Argentine," which encourages nationalist hostility against the visitors. But people visiting my house nailed his pictures on my walls and paint them the color they like more. And it runs for me too, because if something drew us for some reason, it makes sense to try not to alter that identity that attracted us first, and do the exercise to transform megalomaniac Nuesto taste and image. The road that is going on these issues is completely wrong and we start to retrace or at least, remember that you can retrace and is not a historical curse. Meanwhile
for me, for obscurantist Valizas, for those who think differently and do not admire Sotelo Barrios Artigas, for those who know that time runs at different speeds in different places for visitors (another word not gets along well with the concept of tourist who is more like a client of a brothel) and occasional travelers, and immigrants-are always welcome and we exchange with them is rewarding and enriching, tourists can stay in their fucking Disneyland and its disgusting Las Vegas, and if anyone would think that you can buy my conduct and environment or feel the sole owner of an area of \u200b\u200bsea or sky, there will be neither my "friend" or my "brother", but the recipient of all the rejection that can be expressed verbally or physically.
But surely the whole apparatus, ideological and factual state will continue to operate according to please the tourists who travel with laptop in tow world under the wallet. And this year of destruction, prostitution and servitude will be promoted by the modern old who can not appreciate anything that has no price and golden rule as an example of progress. And the world is going to die screaming, but unfortunately after that old shit. If everyone decided to change Rocha, rush to Sotelo and the Japanese do not get angry and humiliated with her ass up in exchange for buying a plasma or an extra motorcycle, well, that's their prerogative. And I remind my own how do you tell people like that, and the tone in which you have to spit the words. Just do not go to realize, because when there is neither honor nor identity, people do not perceive that she is being insulted. Meanwhile
is as always: under the pavement, the beach. Behind the lights, light from the stars.
For 
