Final Thoughts on South America

Here are a few random thoughts on our visit to South America.  I have a new appreciation for the beauty and grandeur of the continent.  The Andes and surrounding areas are truly awe-inspiring and it is easy to understand the religious fervor that accompanied the early Spanish explorers and missionaries.  The land demands it.  I also came away with a new appreciation of the ancient Inca cultures.  There are aspects of it that are as impressive as some of those of ancient Egypt and somewhat along the same timeline.  The art work shows a high level of sophistication and work with tools.  The system of canals they built to control with flooding of the Amazon and tributaries to maximize the agricultural yield is truly impressive shows a level of technology that was highly developed.  Their cosmology also is intricate and was at a level of religious development on a par with the Middle East, at the time.

There was a certain sameness to all of the countries we visited:  Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Argentina, and Columbia.  The central plaza surrounded by Spanish colonial buildings, the cathedrals, the statues of Simon Bolivar.   Yet each had a distinctive flavor of some kind, whether it was the vineyards of Mendoza, Argentina, the tango in Buenos Aires and the ubiquitous money changers there muttering “cambio, cambio, cambio” under their breath as one approached, or the Pacific Ocean roaring under the cliffs in Miraflores, Peru.  The Gold Cathedral in Quito, Pablo Neruda’s house in Lima, the Botero Museum in Bogota, the grand opera house in Buenos Aires are all things that stand out.  The gritty bus ride to the even more gritty town of Valparaiso in Peru was a glimpse of a nearly vanished world.

I felt safe during this venture although Botoga seemed a bit edgy and had the most police with automatic weapons.  It was also the most difficult city to get around in as public transportation was not easy.  Argentina seems the most dice-y politically.  The recent murder of the prosecutor working on the bombing of the Jewish center twenty years ago was the most prominent but the whole structure seemed shaky.  Chile seemed more stable but nowhere was the stability of the United States.

After what seems like a long time, in a way, and the blink of an eye in another, we are back home in Washington, DC.  We ended the trip with a lovely few days visit with our daughter Kym O’Sullivan and her lovely husband Jay and two of our three O’Sullivan grandchildren, Joanna and Quinn in Tampa. Their oldest son Sylvan is still working in Quito.  A highlight of that was the Seder we had there with Joanna sight reading and singing in her lovely voice a cappella  many of the Passover songs.