South American Recap

May 24, 1994

Aboard American Airlines flight 17, enroute from New York to San Francisco. ...

This is a mid-day flight, and it's been a bit odd: the highway was empty on the way to the airport; the airport itself was basically empty, and the flight is also empty. It's a different pattern than the one I'm used to: I normally fly in the evening or early morning, along with zillions of other business people, so everything is crowded. This is much more civilized: I was able to spend the morning at home, and had breakfast with the family before everyone dashed off in separate directions; and I'll reach San Francisco in time for dinner with a business associate before turning in for the night.

I've just returned from three weeks in South America, where I learned that one week is great, two weeks is tolerable, but three weeks is too much. I enjoyed Rio, but Sao Paulo is like ten Detroits piled on top of one another. It's a city of 17 million, gray and drab, mostly slums; I'm sure it has its good parts, but I've been there nearly a dozen times and I have yet to see them. From there, I went on to Chile -- a country whose entire population is smaller than that of Sao Paulo, and which combines 21st-century space-age industrialization with peasants riding into town on horse-drawn carts to sell their vegetables. Santiago is far enough south that I could see a little of the winter season -- there was lots of snow in the mountains as we flew across the Andes. But the weather in Santiago was more like northern California: the trees were desperately trying to turn brown, but they just couldn't make it.

After Chile, the next stop was Caracas. What can I say about a country where passengers disembarking at the main airport are frisked for guns and drugs? The company that I was working for in Caracas told me they would arrange for someone to meet me at the airport -- it turned out to be an army sargeant who had been given a $5 bribe to whisk me past the customs lines. This is a country where the phones don't work, the mail doesn't get delivered, the water is shut off for days on end, and the electricity often fails. The infrastructure in Caracas is slowly collapsing: the plumbing and electricity were intended for a city of 1.5 million, but peasants flocking in from the countryside to "ranchitos" around the periphery of Caracas have increased the population to nearly six million. I was there less than 72 hours; that was more than enough.

The final stop was Mexico City, which I first visited last December. This is, as I've told my children, the land of the punch-buggies: half of the cars are VW beetles, painted a variety of rainbow colors. Lemon yellow, cherry red, coal black, emerald green, navy blue -- and those are just the private cars. Most of the taxis are lime-green VW beetles, and the front-passenger seat is always missing. Anyway, Mexico was fine, though I never had a chance to stray outside the hotel during the four days I was there ...