Leather

I have seen tanneries on docos, vast fields of brightly coloured dyes in the sun... but in real life they are something else.
The smell hits you first.
Im told it's MUCH worse in summer.
It's winter now, about 16 or 17 degrees I guess, so apparently I'm spared the worst of the stench.
Still it's overwhelming.
At first I try to breathe through my mouth to give my nose a break, but I can still smell it.
Thick, dark and acrid, full of ammonia it catches your breath and pulls the fresh air right out of you.
You wish you didn't have a nose.
They offer you a sprig of mint to hold above your lip.
Like that's going to help.
I would have to squish the mint into crude plugs and fully stuff my nostrils shut to have any effect at all, still I smile and say merci.
Hundreds of yellow skins lay drying and even more hundreds are moving through the honeycomb of stinking vats below.
The leather is carried in a process from vat to vat much as it has been done since the 16th century.
The first vats are white, full of some crap to strip the fur, then the heavy wet hides are slung from one stinking wet pothole to another.
Colour to colour and so on as the tanning continues.
At the final stage it passes through vats of pigeon shit (the ammonia smell) where young and old men: the Tanners, up to their waists in cold, putrid liquid tread and kneed the skins with their bare feet as we look on voyeuristically, taking photos.
As I take a photo a young man looks up and into my eyes.
Glancing across at the other balconies, to the sea of cameras snapping away above these men, I see the greatest gap of wealth and lifestyle I've ever encountered.
My guide later tells me that being a tanner is a well paid job, perhaps to assuage my guilt, perhaps it's true.