The Copa América: Chile vs Argentina!

Tonight is the Final Match in the Copa América, and it's Chile  - vs Argentina!

We're the defending champions.  Last year we beat Argentina, so this year, there's honor on the line - on both sides. 
            The streets went through a mad rush of unseasonable traffic a little while ago (traffic jams on Sunday night of a long weekend?  Did the festival of Peter and Paul agreeably accommodate itself to a night when the whole country wants to sleep in on Monday morning?) as people rushed home to their televisions, but now the streets are so empty you could walk down El Bosque with your eyes closed from Apoquindo to Eliodoro Yanez and not meet so much as a shadow.
            It's so silent out there.
            So still.
            You can hear a pin drop -
            Until a Chilean grabs the ball and the cheering rises up - and the hooting and shouting and barracking and the choirs of men singing footy songs and the children who've been unwisely given vuvezulas stick them out of windows and set off the neighborhood dogs -  and we're only 15 minutes in to the first quarter.
            We're settling in for an amazing night.


Update:  Chi-Chi-Chi!  Le-Le-Le!  (We won.)

The Copa América

Anyone foolish enough to run out of dish soap on the day Chile plays in the final of the Copa América deserves what they get. The shops are bananas.
            With extra banana.
            This is the first time in 99 years that Chile has made it to the finals, and the whole city has gone joyous fruit-salad levels of happy.

This afternoon I had to get to the fabulous Tostaduria Talca.  The metro was divinely mad- trains running slow, trains interrupted, trains jam packed past the gills, with horns and vuvuzelas spilling out the doors!
            The streets were even madder.  Flags, hooters, more vuvezulas, and every other male in a tricolor hat or Red National Team Jersey. But not one teeny tiny solitary taco (traffic jam) - anything like that would interfere with getting home in time for kickoff.  It was the politest set of crazy streets I've ever seen!
            The wooden shelves of the Tostaduria Talca  (a hole in the wall paradise, source of the best nuts, spices and dried fruit in the city and purveyor of dry-goods otherwise unobtainable in Chile) - were bare. They practically echoed. Not a single thing vaguely snack-like was left in the place. The staff were weary and pushing left-over customers out the doors -  I grabbed three packets of pecans (Pecans! Pecans in Chile!) that had been overlooked in a corner, and bolted.
            Coming home, the metro was even more ridiculous than before, but a taxi was out of the question  - the few yellow-topped cabs on the roads waved me off - they were heading out of the city and home as fast as the polite traffic would carry them.

So I went down into the metro and waited patiently for a train - and worried about my next stop, the supermarket  - where I'd been told that the queues were worse than Dieciocho (18th of September - Chile's national day) or Christmas.
            When a train at last squeezed sluggishly into the station, getting myself on board was a feat of mindless strength and courage, but deep in the crush of the train, there was room for a young man beat-boxing with a microphone. The sound was bouncing off the walls, gonging off our eardrums, but he wasn't busking - just riding so high on anticipation that not singing was entirely out of the question.
            The supermarket was worse than I could have anticipated. Checkout queues half-way to the warehouse at the back, and carts piled high with cuts of meat, crates of booze, and house-size packets of potato chips like the world was coming to an end and it was potato chips that would see us through the apocalypse and out the other side.  More potato chips than I could have believed possible.
            And I walked home through waving flags and car horns.
            And my whole block smells like BBQ and beer.
            Life is tremendous.

Game-Day Buffet in the Physiotherapy Gym!

Half a minute after I took this photograph, a nurse arrived with five hundred thousand french fries, to go with all the pretty packets of mustard and ketchup scattered between the olive bowls and potato chip plates. The fries were exceedingly tempting, but the nurses and the physiotherapists and the orderlies beat me to it and I made it out of the scrum with one solitary french-fry in my hand. I wonder what all the cardiac patients thought?  All those middle-aged men with big bellies and scars down the middle of their chests and the daily lectures on healthy eating and do you want it to happen to you again?
            With the High-Noon Chile-Netherlands game playing in the middle of my session, physio today was a gas.  None of the 12:00 patients showed up, and the place was pleasantly empty and strung with bunting, and those of us who were left - with the audibly disappointed exception of those tied to beds by ultrasound or electrical equipment - decided simultaneously that we needed to do our cardio work right NOW, thank you, whether it was in our physio regimen or not - on account of how the bikes and walkers and elliptical trainers are all situated right underneath the big TVs.  And when we ran out of cardio we simply stayed. The physio staff didn't particularly notice. The game was on!
            The fellow who does hand rehabilitation was looking pretty twitchy. His setup is a semi-circular table - he sits inside it with a TV mounted over his head so he can monitor his charges while they load spindles with wooden buttons and tie shoelaces and watch TV while they work.  Fortunately for everyone in the gym, his last patient abandoned him at 12:07, and he could stop looking like a candidate for an imminent coronary, and come around to the other side of the table and watch.
            And then I left, because I had things to do and places to be and it almost killed me to go.  But I waited, listening for the city, but 1:30 came and -
            Nope.  Well, not exactly.  Not this time, anyway.
            And the city was silent as a tomb.
            And Mr Tabubil cleaned up scandalously in the office pool.  He's got to stop betting against Chile. Just for once.

Cleats at High Noon

Today Chile plays Holland in the Copa Mundial.  At noon sharp.  High noon - soccer cleats and a leather ball on main street.  
Mr Tabubil's office is bringing in the big screen - again, and because the game runs over lunch-time, the bosses have ordered empanadas.  I wonder if the empanadas will arrive, or, if they do, if the delivery person will go away again or simply crowd into the conference room with everyone else to watch the game?
The smog is back, and the government is begging everyone to not go off and have a futbol asado (BBQ) because the city can't stand the extra smoke.  I wonder if it'll stand the extra noise?  If we do pull off a hat-trick against the Dutch Juggernaut and win?  We can't shout louder than when we won last week against Spain and made it into the group of 16. 
Fútbol is a religion, and Chile worships at her altar.  When she won against Spain on Wednesday the sound went on for hours and hour and hours.  I woke at 3 in the morning to horns, and cars parp-parp-parp!-ing along the streets.
But the moment it started - ah. Listen to a city going beserk -

Santiago at Rush Hour... during a Fútbol Game.

The streets of Santiago get extra-busy when Chile is playing in the world cup!

That Darned Copa Mundial Keeps Happening

It's been a big day for the Tabubil Household! Australia played the Netherlands, and Chile played Spain. Mr Tabubil had 5000 pesos (USD $10) riding on Spain winning that one by two goals.
            "Two goals? Spain?"
            "Why not? They're coming off a ridiculously heavy loss to the Netherlands, so they've got the motivation.  And talking motivation - Chile and Spain have a rivalry going way back. It's going to be a grudge match.  And with the fire of past recent defeat burning in their bellies - "
            "Spain's also got the oldest squad in the cup, and Chile's having a real good season-"
            "-and after the way the guys in the office were swanking around after the Chile-Australia,  there's no way I wasn't going for Spain as hard as I could."
            "That explains the two goals, then."
            "One goal's only optimistic. Two's... ambiguous."
            "You're going to lose 5000 pesos."
            "Yep."
It's certainly the first time I've seen a betting strategy that rides entirely on generating irritation in the other members of the pool. Testosterone's a real bitch.

In other news, Australia acquitted herself nobly against the team that took down Spain 5-1, and although she didn’t quite squeak out a win, she didn't exactly roll over either. 3-2, thank you. That's respectable, that is.
            And Chile clobbered Spain. I didn't watch the game. I let the city tell me, and tracked the goals and penalties by the roaring in the streets. Waves of rising sound - honking and shouting and cheering and screaming and drums and trumpets. And even now, the streets are flooded with the blue and red and cars are barping and honking their way up and down.  All over town. 
            I'm no fan of FIFA, or the economic politics of the World Cup, but dear lord, do I love Chile in soccer season.

Birthday Billions

Mr Tabubil's office is running a pool for how many points Chile is going to win by in the Chile Australia game today. The posted options run from 6 to eleventy-billion.
            Mr Tabubil has thrown in in a wild-card vote for Australia to win by one goal.  There was much derision, but, he told me smugly, his strategy is sound. 
            "If a miracle happens" he said, "and Australia wins, I don't have to share the pot, and when Australia doesn't win*,  I  gets points for being a Real Sensitive Guy who's sticking by his wife's country no matter what." He paused for me to appreciate his brilliance."It's even better than roses, Tabubilgirl. Happy Birthday."
            I squawked, and he sighed. "I was going to take you out for dinner, but if we could even find a restaurant with a functioning kitchen tonight, anyone silly enough to eat food cooked while the game's on deserves exactly what they pay for.  I figured we'd stay in, put some smooth music on the stereo, open a box of chocolates, and listen to the reverberations of a whole nation screaming Goooooooooooooooool! 
          Eleventy-billion times."



*And if Australia does pull out a hat trick and win the game, I knew they had it in them, and I knew it all the time, and no-one, but No-one, is a bigger patriot than me.  Seriously, Australia, give it your all.  Or my birthday night is going to be less romance, and all sniggering.

Six to Eleventy-Billion.

Tomorrow afternoon Chile will play her first game in the Copa Mundial - Chile versus Australia.  Chileans are rather passionate about fútbol, and I am Australian. Tomorrow afternoon I plan to hide.
Chile? Spain? The Netherlands? Australia?
            It's not exactly contentious that FIFA is as bent as a nine-bob note.  Most right-thinking Aussies around this way are presuming that the group Australia got was the result of someone at FIFA HQ being given lots and lots and lots of lovely money. 
            Mr Tabubil's office is running a pool for how many goals Chile is going to win by tomorrow. The listed options run from 6 to eleventy-billion.
            Can't they let us go down with dignity? On the basis that Australia's chances have been officially calculated at less that those of a snowball in the Sahara at mid-day in the sun, I'm not going down with the ship.

Chi. Chi. Chi. Le. Le. Le. Viva Chile.

via http://breaktime.biobiochile.cl/

Volcán Villarica

One of the biggest reasons to come to Pucon is the opportunity to climb the Villarica Volcano. Volcán Villarica has one of the world's most accessible lava lakes in its caldera - and when the conditions are right, you can climb to the top and look right down into it.  The main shopping street in Pucon is lined with sports outfitters and touring companies - all of similar degrees of reputability - all of whom  will outfit you with a full cold weather climbing kit and lead you on a climb up to the volcano caldera. The tour leaves extremely early in the morning and is not an easy climb - five to six hours slogging up a snowfield, climbing at an angle often above 45 degrees.  



On a scale of tourist-wranglers, the Pucon fellows are extreme professionals. My dad and my sister have both made the climb and reckon that it was a positively exciting and majorly memorable experience. Their group took five hours to climb to the caldera, but the return trip took scarcely more than an hour – the climbers all slide down the trail on the seats of their pants! Dr Tabubil even saw one guy climbing up with a snowboard on his back, prepared for a seriously awesome return trip.  There's an excellent description of the climb here on the Go World Travel blog. As for Dad and Dr Tabubil, their only regret of the climb was that the day they climbed Villarica, the lava pack was too low in the caldera to be seen.  Like any volcano, Villarica plays by its own rules.  Some days the lava glows brightly, some days it does not - but always, the view from the summit is spectacular.    
            The lower reaches of Volcán Villarica belong to a small ski resort - when the lifts are running, they cut an hour off of the climb. One evening, Mr Tabubil and I drove up a deeply graded road to the base of the ski lifts, and turned out onto a rutted service lane.  



We'd passed through a conifer forest into a lava field - a land of ash and stunted twisted trees and low, badly-growing bracken.  The weather was close and clammy - and we found it an almost sinister experience, as we drove the vegetation petered out and we were driving through  a wrecked and shattered landscape; cold and damp, gray ash underfoot, and the only foliage scattered spikes of livid orange flowers.  Our imaginations were boundless.  The flowers were like flames, licking out of the ground. Thick mists curled and wraithed. It was a landscape straight out of Tolkein. We'd driven out of life and into Mordor; nowhere could be more like Mordor than the slopes of that  volcano,  not even the landscapes inside Tolkein's own head.
            Abandoning the car, we climbed on foot.  I sat down on a small rise and let Mr Tabubil go on ahead.  He disappeared into the mist and I imagined that I was sitting outside the Gates of the Dead, watching the Dead armies pass before me as shapes in the murk - and heard, behind me, a sharp crack. I turned. Mr Tabubil stood about 5 feet away, frozen in mid-stealth. He had spent a good ten minutes, crazy man, working his way silently back toward me across the moss, planning to sneak up behind me, gargle “Got you, my Precious!” and hopefully watch me jump off my rock  and fall into a ravine.
I do wish he hadn’t stepped on that twig!

Villarica and Los Pozones: Running Hot and Cold

In the daylight, lake Villarica was wide and blue, and the mountains across the lake were green and sharp-tipped.  We walked out of the cabana onto the terrace and looked up to see the snow-capped cinder cone of Volcán Villarica rising up behind the trees.  We would spend much of the next week sitting on our terrace and watching it smoking - exuberant puffs of white smoke.  Puff. Puff. Poof!


 

It gave a certain frission to a peaceful holiday breakfast.

All that week we kept to a rigorous schedule. We slept late, waking half a hour before a very nice woman arrived at eleven to service the cabana.  While the beds were made and the bathroom swept, we lay on lounge chairs under a tree and watched the light shift over the lake.  
            When the nice woman finished and gone, we went back to bed for a nice hearty nap, then lunched,  swam in the lake for an hour or so, and drove into  Pucon to buy groceries for a BBQ dinner on the terrace.  After dinner we wound sit out by the lake until the light died, then we would come inside and read to each other until it was time again to go to bed.
            It was an utterly splendid place for a holiday - lazy volcanic frissions and all. We had arrived just before the season opened -the season opens the week of the new year, more or less, and the beach and the lake were all our own. 
            But things were happening. One day a row of floats appeared in the lake to mark a swimming area.  The next day, a row of freshly painted wooden benches was laid out on the shore.  A lifeguard tower was trundled down onto the beach. The next a pack of teenage boys and girls arrived at the little swimming beach - hooting and splashing distantly, jumping off the jetty, adding a touch of holiday gaiety to the scene.

We swam in the lake every afternoon.  The water was very clear and the lake slopes so steeply away from the shoreline that a short jetty can make for splendid diving - straight into water the color and consistency of bottled ice-cubes.
            I love me my fresh water - any way, any how, and any where, and I could stand Villarica for a good hour or so before i started to feel a little nippy.  My Canadian Mr Tabubil, who can handle temperatures staggeringly below zero if they occur on the other side of a parka and good set of thermal underwear, is not quite so comfortable with water. That man can - and has- caught a nasty chill off of a reef in the Hawaiian islands.  Down at Villarica, he'd stand on the jetty, working up the courage to jump, then rise up vertically from the depths at a velocity only slightly slower than the one he'd taken going in,  and spend the rest of my vivid, brisk and breezy hour sulking in the sun complaining about chilblains and yelling when I dripped on him.

 One day, we dragged ourselves away from our quiet beach and drove to the hot springs at Los Pozones.  There are many volcanic hot springs in the region. Some of these hot springs have decadent lodges built around them, with saunas and plunge pools and café-bars.  Others are nothing more than natural pools in the forest.

 

“Los Pozones” is at the au-naturel end of the spectrum.  A chain of natural springs strung along a tumbling mountain river at the bottom of a narrow mountain valley, it posesses marked paths, and wooden staircase reaching down into the water, and a wooden change-house built over the topmost pool, but otherwise, it feels much as Volcan Villarica made it. 
            The water was extremely hot. The weather was also extremely hot - it was a good 30 degrees C in the sun, but the temperature differential was still great enough to have steam billowing from the pools. We've done this rodeo before, and thought it pretty good, all things considered. Los Pozones, however, puts a twist on the formula. The idea was to alternate sitting in the hot spring with jumping into the icy river next door, and THAT water made Lago Villarica feel like a tepid bath - those tumbling rapids must have topped out at a neat 4 degrees C.  After plunging in once and making a hellofalotofnoise before I got out in a hellofahurry, I sat on a rock on the riverbank and let Mr Tabubil gallantly splash me. This ridiculous regimen was supposed to open your pores and fill you simply to the brim with sulfur and minerals and healthy vitality. On a more temperate day the pools would have been an utterly sybaritic luxury, and we have decided to return mid-year, in deep winter, and spend a week sitting in hot-springs when the weather is sensible.  As it was, between the extreme cold and the extreme heat, all I got was a sniffle.
Humph.

Puerto Natales and Pampas

At the end of April, while our Aussie guests were here, we all flew together down to the far south of Chile.  We were heading into the pampas – the thousands on thousands of rolling kilometers of open southern grasslands, going to Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine.
We were going tower hunting.

Puerto Natales is the base camp for the Torres del Paine - from here you go out hiking, trekking, white water rafting, and for all of the other reasons people come down to the end of the world - even hang-gliding those stone fingers, if you’re semi-suicidal.

Since my last visit to Puerto Natales, the little town has gone upscale.  The houses have turned into hostels and vegan cafes, and downtown, the shops cater almost exclusively to people needing sports shoes, hiking gear and artisanal chocolates of surpassing mediocrity.
            (After a week in the park, I imagine that any sort of chocolate looks pretty good – especially chocolate that says “artisanal” on the wrapper and comes tied up in little ribbons. Caveat Emptor and all that, but if you’ve been hiking for a week, singing paeans to the wilderness over a smoky campfire and plates of tinned baked beans, any chocolate at all might actually taste just as good as that slab of grade-A Belgian dark that you’ve been dreaming about at night.)
            The shabby little shop where nine years ago I had eaten hamburgers with a view has been gutted and painted white and turned into a temple of southern cuisine – serving up local Patagonian lamb and export-grade salmon like Chileans usually never get. They hadn’t changed the view, though. (an upgrade to that view would require a celestial choir and a couple of seraphim, and the seraphim would send you down to ten thousand thousand years in purgatory for imagining that it might need a coat of paint -)
            This little town currently boasts at least 33 gastronomic establishments of sufficient note to have earned serious reviews across the interwebs, several of whose renown stretches beyond Patagonia.  The afro-chilean fusion cuisine of Afrigonia regularly and reliably stacks up against high-concept palaces of cuisine in capital cities across the world.  We considered it, even stood thoughtfully at the door, and then we went away and ate pizza. It’s the sort of thing you do when one member of your group is two feet high and prefers to spend his dinner hour crawling around the floor underneath the coat rack.
            “We could eat in the other places” Sarah said “but it’s not a very nice thing to do to other diners.  People go to places like that for romantic evenings out.  They don’t want a small child shrieking and banging the silverware to remind them how romantic evenings can end up!”
            “Canoodling with consequence.” I said.
            “Exactly.” Miles reached out and caught a shaker of oregano before it hit the floor of the pizza parlor with a terminal crash.  He raised a wry eyebrow. “Anywhere with real glasses is basically out.  But pizza is good.”
            This pizza was very very good indeed. Wood-fired, freshly made - at the Pizzeria Mesita Grande, on the corner of the Plaza de Armas at Arturo Prat 196, Puerto Natales.

            Sarah, Miles and Laurie left Puerto Natales by boat – catching a ride on the Navimag cargo ferry up to Puerto Montt. Mr Tabubil and I waved them goodbye, and hopped in our car to drive back to Punta Arenas.
            The pampas were blanketed by a heavy frost – the tall grass showing silver, each blade and leaf etched in ice. I asked Mr Tabubil to stop the car and stepped out to bring him sprays of grass, each autumn seed netted with rainbows where the headlights hit.
            We were out so early that we were driving before the truckers were up, before the farmers and ranchers were out, and on all that long road it was only us-
            As the sun rose, low places on the road filled up with mist – pooling there in choking fogs that lifted as we climbed out of the hollows to give shifting views of a world of color beyond the car - red and russet and gold, with eagles wheeling above us in the sky and herds of winter cattle with their heads down, blowing steam into the frozen grass.
            We held hands across the gearstick, and smiled out at the silent autumn world and in toward each other – it was one of the moments, one of the times where you know, even as they happen, that you’ll be coming back to them over and over again for years. One of those Moments,  you know?

School Uniforms.

It's Wednesday. Let's be funny.

When I was fifteen years old, my family moved to the city of Antofagasta, in the North of Chile.  I had a new school, with a new uniform-  a white blouse, a navy-blue tie and a very short, very tight navy-blue tunic. The tunic was cut so tightly that we couldn't run up the stairs to our classroom - we had to take the steps one a time, in a ladylike fashion - and the only way to sit at our desks was with our backs straight and our legs elegantly crossed- but no matter how carefully we sat, the tight skirts rode up past our hips and the boys in the class ogled our thighs and underpants.
First thing I did was write to a friend in the US and ask her to send me two pairs of navy blue cycle pants - QUICK.            I had those cycle pants with me in Chile in less than two weeks, and every day after that I sat and slumped and leaned and lolled exactly however I wanted.

PE class, though, couldn't be hacked.  PE was a relic of the Edwardian age. The boys went outside and played basketball, volleyball, baseball and soccer. The girls stayed inside and ran relay races up and down the gym.  My arrival caused something of a stir - I was from NORTH AMERICA, where girls did more than this - the girls in my class thought that maybe I might make a wedge to push open a door, and taking me by the hand, they led me up to our gym teacher, and asked her if this North American girl might be able to show them how to play soccer - ?
            The gym teacher froze absolutely solid.  Her face turned white, and then it turned red, and for an entire minute, her mouth opened and shut and opened and shut - she couldn't speak a single word.  
When she finally could speak, her words were brief and final:
            "Nice girls do NOT play soccer! NICE girls do not HIT and KICK and PUNCH!"
We went back to running relay races.  In warm weather, for a change of pace, we'd stroll down to the town boardwalk and spend our PE hour sunning on the town beach in our bikinis, and the boys would leave their sports to follow us, and stand knee deep in the waves so that they could have a good view.

The Doctor Tabubil Files: The Quamby Rodeo, Part Two

My sister, the estimable Dr Tabubil, is spending ten weeks on a rural clinical rotation in Cloncurry, a small pastoral town in the Queensland Outback.  It's a fantastic place, and together we have collaborated on a series of guest posts  all about living and working in the Red Centre.  Enjoy!

Last weekend was the Quamby Rodeo.  Quamby is 45 kilometers north of Cloncurry.  Population 6.  Unless it’s rodeo day.  Then, the population jumps to more than 2,000!
            The Quamby Rodeo kicks off the rodeo season – the next weekend it’s the Cloncurry Merry Muster, and the weekend after it’s the Mt Isa Rodeo, but Quamby is regarded as the best – it’s only one day, but the crowds can get a lot closer to the action. 

            I drove out with four other people, and we arrived just in time for the Greasy Pig event.  I've never seen this before.  It was awful: 100 young men and women running after a poor, terrified wild pig.  Eventually it was caught, and dragged back to the start line by its hind legs.  Not the best start to a rodeo, actually.  Apparently, Quamby is not on the "official" rodeo circuit, so does not need to abide by the regulations pertaining to animal cruelty...

            Yeah.  I got that. 

I’ve never seen so many hot cowboys in my life - devastating young men, every way I looked. Tight jeans, button down shirts, and the ever-present Akubra hat.  The faint smell of sweat as they brush past  you, the side-long glance as they see a woman for the first time in weeks, and the crunch of gravel under their boots as they move to lock eyes with the bulls and the broncos.  The motes of red dust that cling to your skin and your eyelashes, and make films over trees and animals lends a surreal quality to the day.  Little children shriek with laughter as they gather handfuls of the red earth and fling it in the air. 

            I wore my own new Akubra hat and blended right in!  Not really – I’m clearly a city girl. I got upset when my hat blew off and got dirt on it.

 The mutton buster was delightful.  This event is for the babies - tiny bronco-riders-in-training, their hats cut to fit the brim of their safety helmets, their eyes as terrified as the eyes of the sheep, as their fathers hold them on the animals back, all the one way from one side of the arena to the next (it's only 4 meters wide!).  And the crowd roars in encouragement!   

Mutton busters mutton busting:

I kept myself busy photographing as much as possible. I was camped by the fence snapping photos of the men as they were flung off the broncos when there was a quiet, "Excuse me, please," from behind me. I turned to find an impossibly gorgeous horse breathing over my shoulder, red dun in color, and an intricate lead over its shoulder as the cowboy side-stepped it to the gait. It's impossible not to romanticize the life on a station when everything is in technicolor and softened by gatherings of people who haven't met for months.

A young jackaroo waits for his turn in the ring.

Rodeo fans waiting on the fence.

But what I loved about it was that I finally understand what my patients mean when they say they muster.  There was bull riding, bronco riding, and cow roping.  And I get it now.  When they tell me that the old leg wound is hurting from rubbing on the stirrup, I know why.  I know why they get rolled by cattle and thrown by horses.  I know why they are covered in dust when they walk into my rooms.

Jackaroos tangle with bull-calfs.

A jackaroo gets a grip.

Horses are broken.

And so are riders.

The jackaroo bites the dust.  And if he's unlucky, I might have a new patient tomorrow.
 

The Dr Tabubil Files: The Absence of Nightlife in a Small Town

My sister, the estimable Dr Tabubil, is spending ten weeks on a rural clinical rotation in Cloncurry, a small pastoral town in the Queensland Outback.  It's a fantastic place, and together we have collaborated on a series of guest posts  all about living and working in the Red Centre.  Enjoy!
 

Driving into town from Mount Isa, Cloncurry begins when you pass the first pub and the lawn bowls club.

The Cloncurry Lawn Bowls Club

Cloncurry's pubs are very important to the social (and cultural even!) life out here.  There are 4 main drinking holes in town.  The most popular is the Leichardt (Named for the 19th Century explorer Ludwig Leichardt). One of the big draws of the Liechardt is it’s restaurant – they serve quite an adequate steak (we’re in steak country after all, although the Wagon Wheel has the BEST steak in town).  But the pubs aren't really about the food.  Next door to the restaurant, the Leichhardt has a pub, that turns into at disco after 10 pm. The place really fills up after midnight with a hundred sexually active young men and women.  The dance floor is packed and the crush at the bar is three people deep. (Which is very deep for a little town!)

The Leichardt Hotel

Alcohol isn’t cheap out here – it costs to have it shipped in - but the booze flows all night long. What else is there to do for sexed-up young people in a little town in the middle of the bush one hundred and thirty kilometers from Isa and a thousand kilometers from the coast?  There’s a lawn-bowls club, but that is for the over-60 crowd. There is a cinema.  It’s open-air, where you bring your own chairs, but it’s been closed for a few years now.  

The Cloncurry Cinema

And the young people have money to burn.  So they drink. And they shag. And they come to see me the morning after. The ladies dress up in their smallest, slinkiest dresses (not high heels though – this is the Australia's Red Center!  High heels'd get too darned dusty.) and the gents refuse to put in any effort: they wander into the pub wearing shorts and thongs (note to North American readers - thongs are what you would call flip-flops.  You wear 'em on your feet) - a costume that's the perfect recipe for being denied admission to any pub in Brisbane. 

            One night I was sitting at a bar, nursing a drink and chatting with work colleagues, when a rather unsteady gentleman moseyed up next to me to order a Bundy and Coke (that’s Bundaberg Rum and coca cola for the uninitiated).  He seemed inordinately pleased with his wallet, holding it out and catching my eye like he was begging me to comment.

            “Nice wallet,” I obliged. 

            “Yeah,” he slurred.  “It’s like green and sh**t.”

            And there ended his chances for further conversation.  

            The incidence of sexually transmitted infections out here really is spectacular.  Currently, the Mt Isa medical is fielding a Syphilis epidemic. In Australia -  in 2012!  At our clinic it is standard practice to offer an STI screen along with every Pap smear (regardless of the age of the woman).  And we offer a full STI screen at every doctors visit for every patient – of any age and gender.  Our standard tests are Chlamydia and Gonorrhea swabs, and we always encourage HIV, Hepatitis C and a Syphilis serology along with them.  This we do even for backpackers from overseas, who are passing through and who don’t have medicare (editor's Note: Medicare is Australia's national health care system.) and have to pay the full costs of the tests.  If you’re interested, it costs $488 dollars to be screened for those five infections.  Only three of them are easily treated.  So play sensible, okay?

            And then there are the backpackers.  Cloncurry is a major destination on the working-holiday track.  Kids come through all the time, and most of them pick up work in the pubs, where the fun is.

            And this is my medical conversation, about a week after every single one of them arrives: 

            "Hi Doctor.  I've come to inquire about what sort of birth control you offer here in Cloncurry."

            "Well, we've got condoms. And the pill. And the IUD. Condoms are good."

            "Ah - I think that the pill sounds exactly like the sort of thing I'm wanting."

            "You work in a pub, right?"

            "I do."

            "You party a lot?"

            "Indeed I do."

            "We'll start with the condoms, then." 

A Chilean FLIES

I’ve spent the last week with a good dose  of the winter flu – brain like porridge, limbs like jell-o, short term memory a bit like a bowl full of goldfishes (which ought to add up to something greater than the average goldfish, but, as anyone who has ever kept fish knows, ends up totaling slightly less than the IQ of the dumbest fish in the bowl - the one that tries to inhale straight out of the air stone and eat the plastic plants. Also generally the one that goes on an epic feeding binge the moment you go on holidays, so that the kind friend who agreed to feed the fish for you while you were away has to scrape small bits of goldfish innards off of the walls of the tank by day four.  After which you can never go on holidays again, because your friend has spread the word.) and I had absolutely no sensible alternatives but to curl up on the sofa under a blanket and watch the Olympics on the television.

            It was a real hardship, I can tell you. O, these terrible winter flus! 

            I watched the rowing, where the British woman’s pair won the gold by a country mile and the British men’s eight came so close to taking the gold medal from the Germans that the dear BBC commentator became so excited that he lost his voice almost entirely before anyone had crossed the finish line.

            I watched handball – which mixed up rugby with netball and ballet, and the water polo-  which seemed as destructive as it was enthusiastic, and fencing (Europe’s own home-grown martial art)- which showed me that I remember nothing from high school and college sports.  All I saw of the medal match in men's foil was a buzzing and balletic silver blur, and someone jumping skyward with a clenched fist and a yowl of triumph.

           I found that I preferred acrobatics over the team sports – events that pit the raw human body against gravity of the laws of motion, and break the laws and tell gravity to go Hang - and fly.

            So I watched the diving, where they offer slow-motion replays of exquisitely pointed hang-time and the moment where 40 km/h of human flesh meets the surface of the pool and Takes the Splash Underwater With It. 

            That’s magic.  Right there.

            I watched the women of rhythmic gymnastics, with their hoops and their balls, and the tiny girls on the vaults and uneven bars, and the trampoline-  Mr Tabubil and I watched the men's’ trampoline final together, and we found it a revelation.  We didn't do anything like that in our backyard in Tabubil when I was a kid.  (where that is defined as bouncing three stories into the air and doing two double pike twists, a plank layout and a triple somersault before coming back down again, landing precisely in the middle of the trampoline - X marks the spot - then going back up again another nine times.)

            But most and best of all, we watched the men's artistic gymnastics.  Not the team events, but the individual events, because here, one of the athletes performing in front of us had busted loose and soared free not only of gravity, but a stronger sort of downward pull.

            We wanted to watch Tomas Gonzalez – he of the blue and white leotards and the trim military mustache and the wide, white, smile.  And of Chile.  Incidentally, and almost in passing.

Tomas Gonzales competed alone for Chile.  At home he trained with no support (for want of an institution to support him) and no funding – until a benevolent millionaire stepped in and funded his endeavors privately.  Against a national mood of yawning indifference, he pushed himself to the very peak of his sport – and won himself a place in the finals of the Olympic Games.

            Now that he was there - now he was our darling – schools across Santiago marched their students into the gymnasium to watch one of their own compete in the Olympic finals of the Men’s Vault and the Men’s Floor Exercise.  They wore Tomas Gonzales moustaches painted on their upper lips, their teachers wore press-on moustaches made of felt, and a Chilean commentator in the Wembly Arena in London shouted “And here we have Tomas Gonzales– he’s about to perform in the – what’s he performing in again?” 

            She didn’t know. She hadn’t even put in the effort of finding out.  But she was wild for him –

We all were. He had taken our little coastal nation into the world. We cheered and gripped hands and hugged sofa cushions –

            I remember watching the live feed in 2004, when the Chileans Fernando Gonzales and Nicolas Massu  played against Germany in Athens for the Gold Medal in the  Men's Tennis Doubles - and won.

            The game was a long one, and intense - three and a half hours - up and down - advantage to Chile, then to Germany, then to Chile again - the Chilean commentator cheering, pleading, cajoling, begging the players, screaming himself raw - and finally - Bang!  Game point!

            We threw open our windows, and from all around us rose up a solid roar of sound.  People screaming, shouting singing, car horns blaring - from every apartment and house and street - there were more people watching in the square in downtown Santiago than there were in the stadium in Athens - we shouted and sang and hollered and whooped and banged the walls.

            Tomas in London didn’t win a medal.  But we wept anyway.  The man without a team won himself fourth place in both events, right up amongst the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese and the Japanese - the men who came with teams and had whole nations shoving them along from behind (or hauling from in front, willy nilly, in the case of the Chinese.)  He said that he was entirely satisfied,  that to have made it into that company meant as much – or more than - a medal, and his splendid smile said that he meant it. 

            We agreed whole-heartedly.  A Chilean had Made It.  We basked in the glory that he brought us, and the more perceptive among us offered up our apologies and granted the glory to himself alone.

            The cynical might read this story as a parable,  and wonder what will happen to Tomas– and the future of gymnastics in Chile -  when he comes home. 

            We can do all that later, if we need to.

            Let's raise our glasses, and our cheers and our open admiration  to a genuinely extraordinary man: a man with a gift, and more than a gift, a will, a will  that carried him all the way to the Olympic Games.  And made a whole nation sit up and take notice.