Six to eight black men

Today, Sinterklaas arrived in town. Dutch children normally scare me by doing passable impressions of the Midwich Cuckoos, with their white-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Today they were all cutely racially transformed, with blacked face-paint, red lipstick, and sporting curly-black-hair wigs. Apparently that's considered normal, in Holland.

David Sedaris takes up the story...

"A heartwarming tale of Christmas in a foreign land where, if you've been naughty, Saint Nick and his friends give you an ass-whuppin'.

In France and Germany, gifts are exchanged on Christmas Eve, while
in Holland the children receive presents on December 5, in
celebration of Saint Nicholas Day. It sounded sort of quaint until
I spoke to a man named Oscar, who filled me in on a few of the
details as we walked from my hotel to the Amsterdam train station.

Unlike the jolly, obese American Santa, Saint Nicholas is painfully
thin and dresses not unlike the pope, topping his robes with a tall
hat resembling an embroidered tea cozy. The outfit, I was told, is
a carryover from his former career, when he served as a bishop in
Turkey.

One doesn't want to be too much of a cultural chauvinist, but this
seemed completely wrong to me. For starters, Santa didn't use to
do anything.  He's not retired, and, more important, he has
nothing to do with Turkey. The climate's all wrong, and people
wouldn't appreciate him. When asked how he got from Turkey to the
North Pole, Oscar told me with complete conviction that Saint
Nicholas currently resides in Spain, which again is simply not
true. While he could probably live wherever he wanted, Santa chose
the North Pole specifically because it is harsh and isolated. No
one can spy on him, and he doesn't have to worry about people
coming to the door. Anyone can come to the door in Spain, and in
that outfit, he'd most certainly be recognized. On top of that,
aside from a few pleasantries, Santa doesn't speak Spanish. He
knows enough to get by, but he's not fluent, and he certainly
doesn't eat tapas.

While our Santa flies on a sled, Saint Nicholas arrives by boat
and then transfers to a white horse.  The event is televised, and
great crowds gather at the waterfront to greet him. I'm not sure
if there's a set date, but he generally docks in late November and
spends a few weeks hanging out and asking people what they want.

"Is it just him alone?" I asked. "Or does he come with backup?"

Oscar's English was close to perfect, but he seemed thrown by a
term normally reserved for police reinforcement.

"Helpers," I said. "Does he have any elves?"

Maybe I'm just overly sensitive, but I couldn't help but feel
personally insulted when Oscar denounced the very idea as grotesque
and unrealistic. "Elves," he said. "They're just so silly."

The words silly and unrealistic were redefined when I learned that
Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as "six
to eight black men." I asked several Dutch people to narrow it
down, but none of them could give me an exact number. It was always
"six to eight," which seems strange, seeing as they've had hundreds
of years to get a decent count.

The six to eight black men were characterized as personal slaves
until the mid-fifties, when the political climate changed and it
was decided that instead of being slaves they were just good
friends. I think history has proven that something usually comes
between slavery and friendship, a period of time marked not by
cookies and quiet times beside the fire but by bloodshed and
mutual hostility. They have such violence in Holland, but rather
than duking it out among themselves, Santa and his former slaves
decided to take it out on the public. In the early years, if a
child was naughty, Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men
would beat him with what Oscar described as "the small branch of
a tree."

"A switch?"

"Yes," he said. "That's it. They'd kick him and beat him with a
switch. Then, if the youngster was really bad, they'd put him in
a sack and take him back to Spain."

"Saint Nicholas would kick you?"

"Well, not anymore," Oscar said. "Now he just pretends to kick
you."

"And the six to eight black men?"

"Them, too."

He considered this to be progressive, but in a way I think it's
almost more perverse than the original punishment. "I'm going to
hurt you, but not really."  How many times have we fallen for that
line? The fake slap invariably makes contact, adding the elements
of shock and betrayal to what had previously been plain, old-
fashioned fear. What kind of Santa spends his time pretending to
kick people before stuffing them into a canvas sack? Then, of
course, you've got the six to eight former slaves who could
potentially go off at any moment. This, I think, is the greatest
difference between us and the Dutch. While a certain segment of
our population might be perfectly happy with the arrangement, if
you told the average white American that six to eight nameless
black men would be sneaking into his house in the middle of the
night, he would barricade the doors and arm himself with whatever
he could get his hands on.

"Six to eight, did you say?"

In the years before central heating, Dutch children would leave
their shoes by the fireplace, the promise being that unless they
planned to beat you, kick you, or stuff you into a sack, Saint
Nicholas and the six to eight black men would fill your clogs
with presents. Aside from the threats of violence and kidnapping,
it's not much different from hanging your stockings from the
mantel. Now that so few people have a working fireplace, Dutch
children are instructed to leave their shoes beside the radiator,
furnace, or space heater. Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black
men arrive on horses, which jump from the yard onto the roof. At
this point, I guess, they either jump back down and use the door,
or they stay put and vaporize through the pipes and electrical
wires. Oscar wasn't too clear about the particulars, but, really,
who can blame him? We have the same problem with our Santa. He's
supposed to use the chimney, but if you don't have one, he still
manages to come through. It's best not to think about it too hard.

While eight flying reindeer are a hard pill to swallow, our
Christmas story remains relatively simple. Santa lives with his
wife in a remote polar village and spends one night a year
traveling around the world. If you're bad, he leaves you coal. If
you're good and live in America, he'll give you just about anything
you want. We tell our children to be good and send them off to bed,
where they lie awake, anticipating their great bounty. A Dutch
parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his
children, "Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things
together before you go to bed. The former bishop from Turkey will
be coming along with six to eight black men. They might put some
candy in your shoes, they might stuff you in a sack and take you
to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don't know
for sure, but we want you to be prepared."

This is the reward for living in Holland. As a child you get to
hear this story, and as an adult you get to turn around and repeat
it. As an added bonus, the government has thrown in legalized drugs
and prostitution-so what's not to love about being Dutch?"

Alien

So, having alienated those few remaining readers who had made it this far, by posting in a foreign language, I now (with an audience of no-one) feel complete freedom to write whatever I please.

Some time has passed without a blog entry. It's hard to blog homecoming. Hard to capture it at all. It's at once such a strange mix of feelings and yet at the same time so horribly cliched. Sometimes I tried to avoid the cliches ("oh you drive on the wrong side, how funny!"), sometimes I just went with it ("oh you call cellphones mobiles!") Probably I mostly annoyed everyone, as people who have "been away" invariably do.

I write now because I have news, mundane, but blogworthy at least. I am taking a job in Holland. A five week software development contract based in Amsterdam. I (re-)pack my bags and travel there on Tuesday. In keeping with the climate-change worries of the times, I am travelling by overnight coach, not on the more-obvious absurdly-cheap easyjet flight. I do take the worries about climate change fairly seriously, notwithstanding an ongoing transatlantic romantic involvement. I doubt I will ever resolve that particular dilemma.

In other news, it has been nice to see everyone and catch up, and relax somewhat into the culture into which I was born. Although everyone in Brighton is now Polish, apparently. Odd. Racists have to work hard to keep up these days. My brother's new house is very nice, and work has immediately begun on Changing Things, in the garden and inside.

Having no audience isn't as freeing as I'd thought. I'm at a loss to know what to report to whom. And that, I think, is the untidy end to that untidy blog post. I'll keep you all up to date on what working in a Dutch energy company is like. I will naturally bike to work every day and eat pancakes regularly!

¿Hablas espanol?

En la ducha esta manana estaba pensando: que raro que llevo ahora diez meses en latinoamerica, sin escribir una sola entrada en el blog en espanol. Pues la razon es claro, que casi ninguna de mis lectores hablan espanol. Pero igual me parecia una buena idea hacer una pequena esfuerza y tratar de escribir en espanol antes de que salga del continente.

Igual la espanol que he aprendido ha sido usado mas para reservar habitaciones (o bien discutir problemas mecanicos de mi carro) que filosofar sobre mis experiences. Aun peor ahora, por tan perezoso que yo sea, empiezo mas y mas a hablar ingles con mis amigos. Claro que ellos hablan en espanol, y a veces si contesto en espanol, pero para que la conversacion adelante con un velocidad mas o menos normal, me parece mejor usualmente hablar en ingles. En hecho es una fuente de diversion ver como la gente nos mira en la calle con nuestras conversaciones bilingue :).

Entonces, en estos ultimos dias, siento muy como entre dos mundos. Estoy hablando con mis amigos y padres en Inglaterra organizando vernos etc, y por eso siento casi ya alla. Pero igual me queda todavia siete dias aca, que no es poco tiempo, y tengo muchos planes y oportunidades por experiences cheveres todavia. Por ejemplo, el esposo de la hermana de mi novia nos invita a su finca el domingo. Mi ultima oportunidad de ver el sol antes de quien sabe cuando!

Para prepararme por mi vuelo de regreso, compre un libro que se llama "sin tetas no hay paraiso". mira este critica en ingles. es un libro muy popular en todas las librerias de bogota. era un telenovela popularisimo aca, y trata de muchas temas muy colombianas: carteles de drogas, la distancia entre pobres y ricos, la prostitucion, cirugia por ampliar las tetas... Tengo muchas ganas de leerlo.

Y ya! Espero que la proxima vez que escribo estara cuando este de regreso. Entonces... aca termina el viaje de 13 meses, 10 paises, y una sola mochila:

"El mapa no es el territorio."

Pint

Bad poetry aside, I am looking forward to coming home. My plans have changed slightly, too: I plan to stay in the UK for the rest of 2006. I hope to share many pint-drinking opportunities with you all during this time!

One of the worst things about living here is the pollution (although there are many worse cities in the world.) It's impossible to stroll the streets of the city without being belched on by buses. Fresh air is something I'm looking forward to a lot.

And one of the oddest is the lack of seasons. There's a very primal part of me that just keeps expecting the days to get longer, or shorter, or sunnier, or rainier, or something. But no. It's like being in some kind of time-warp. One positive side-effect is that I never feel like I am "wasting" the sunshine by doing something else. It'll probably be sunny tomorrow, too. I'm wondering what it's going to be like returning to the grim British winter. Grim, I expect. Still, I'm looking forward to bright autumn mornings, at least, while they last :). Anyway, I always felt that it was February that was the most unpleasant and unnecessary month, and I hope I'll be back to sunny seasonless Bogota by then!

City of night, city of night

I like cities at night. I've never been able to work out if i like Edward Hopper because his pictures so effectively evoke late-night lonely city places, or if I like late-night lonely city places because they remind me of Hopper.

My girlfriend lives in the northern suburbs, which are very nice. Lots of middle-class apartment blocks, malls, and swanky bars. It is relatively safe, and the number of poor people is kept to a minimum. However, it is not safe enough that she is happy to get a taxi home by herself. That's wierd for me, because practically the only purpose of getting a taxi from my point of view is that it is safe, eg if you're a girl travelling alone, but of course Colombia is a foreign country, and they do things differently here.

So anyway, one day last week we went out for a beer, then I accompanied her home, and then made the 40 minute Transmilenio journey home.

In the north, the shining example of a great mass-transit system that is the Transmi blends in well, seeming rather ordinary and perhaps just a slightly cheapskate way to avoid getting taxis. However, as you head south, particularly at night, you begin to have the impression that you are being ported through a parallel Universe. Whilst you are cocooned in your speedy, comfortable 21st-century transport pod, the world outside begins to look more and more threatening and poor. The well-dressed people inside contrast heavily with the street-people outside, carrying plastic sacks of rubbish they have spent the day collecting, standing around burning piles of rubbish, or just sleeping on the street. The grimy prostitutes which line the shuttered shopfronts, lit by dim orange streetlamps, seem not to even be aware of the existence of the buses whooshing past.

I like cities at night. They seem exotic and interesting. That is, until you need to step out into them. Then they seem downright frightening.

For once I manage to post a recent photo (thanks, Pilar!)

This was me and Panda in Oma last week. Naturally, I have photoshopped out my grey hairs.

Humility

There's nothing quite like sitting in a room full of people who you know only slightly, and whose language you understand only partially, to give you a great life-lesson in humility.

When I am speaking Spanish one-on-one I sometimes appear to speak it quite well. This is because in one-on-one conversation a lot can be inferred from context. Try suddenly changing the subject on me and the chances are I will stare slack-jawed at you until I finally manage a "huh?" It is also because in one-on-one conversation I only have to understand a short burst of Spanish before I get to speak.

However, in a group setting, I quickly become very lost. Staying unlost requires a fair amount of concentration, and even then I usually laugh after everyone else, or look bewilderedly to my girlfriend for an explanation in toddler-speak.

Although I thought I was an introvert, it has been made clear to me that I just don't feel comfortable sitting in a group of people laughing and joking amongst themselves and not being able to make any kind of contribution. Panda astutely said to me, "I think what it is is that you like to be the centre of attention, and when you're not, you sulk." I think she put it more kindly, but in essence that appears to be true!

Whatever the level of my Spanish, it is manifest that I just can't stay au courant with the conversation without a lot of concentration, and mostly not even then. This means that I am always two steps behind. It's not where the ego would like to be. The ego would like to be one step ahead of everyone else, demonstrating its sharp wit and intelligence with a funny line here and an apt comparison there. And unfortunately I can't just cry, or run away. I have to persevere through a whole evening or day of being the slow one. It was hard to begin with, mostly because it never even occurred to me that it would be hard!

But really I think it is amazing for one to be subjected to this kind of ego-beating. Egos are stupid things anyway. And realising that you can go through the beating and come out the other side, that being something other than the centre of attention is really OK, is very valuable.

Culture Shock

Culture shock is not wearing off. Quite the opposite: it is intensifying.

Police. Girls. Dancing. Crime. Climate. Food. Everything is different in ways that are so hard to quantify that often you don't even notice them initially. They become steadily more apparent the longer you stick around, until you suddenly turn around and think, "hang on, I thought I understood that but I don't at all!"

It's hard at times. But as a confirmed challenge-addict, I think that's what I like about it. As long as I'm allowed to let off steam at times. So my anti-Whatever rants on here shouldn't be taken too seriously :).

Dancing

You spend your entire teenagehood going out to venues which play loud music in order to meet girls. Some people mistake the means for the end and keep going out even if they already have a partner. Few people make this mistake, but since those people stay in the places, while the others find their girl and move on, they make up a sizable proportion of those in the club.

In your late 20s, you've worked it out. You basically know how to dance, or more to the point how to behave, in a variety of late-night, loud-music, alcohol-fuelled situations. In my case, a combination of the metal clubs of my teenage years and the drum'n'bass and techno clubs of my brighton years, added to which a smattering of gay clubs, led me to behave in a certain ways in venues characterized by loud repetitive beats and stroboscopic lighting.

Then, you come to a different culture. You might, for instance, find yourself in Bogota. You continue, out of habit, to consume beer and come to nightspots. However, insidiously, everything is different. You thought it was all about getting drunk and dancing like a ponce with your mates! Or perhaps you thought it was all about getting drunk, dancing like a ponce with your mates, and picking up a random girl (also drunk and dancing with her mates, perhaps less like a ponce and more like a pissed bint.)

But no. In fact, these nightspots are an excuse for the local youth, who all live with their parents and don't believe in sex before marriage, to simulate sex with their partners on the dancefloor. I believe that the theory is that if you do it in a public place, it can't be bad. True enough, everyone keeps their clothes on, but beyond that there is some serious groin proximity going on.

Of course, being a northern European, I think dance music is about a 4/4 beat and dancing in lines facing the DJ. I feel like an alien here. Dancing is about knowing what you're doing. It's also about simulating sex. Actually, although you might think latin music or salsa is fun and exotic, after you've watched some hot latin girls dancing with their pimply or mustachioed boyfriends on the dance floor a few times, you really wish they would go home and just have sex in their houses like civilised human beings, and leave the dancefloors for people to just have fun!

Obviously, I don't really know how to dance Salsa. But even if i did, i have to say that i reject the whole idea of musical sex on the dancefloor. People say its not about sex, and that I am a silly Brit to think so. Then I ask why I can't dance with a man, and they say "because that would be gay!" Case closed.

I wonder if my own culture will seem weird on my return, or whether it will be a welcome breath of fresh air. I'll say one thing though: I intend to go clubbing, and I intend to dance and have fun. What a revolutionary idea!

Love is a piano

"Love is a piano
dropped out a fourth-storey window
and I am in the wrong place
at the wrong time."

Safe Colombia

From MarketWatch:

"Uribe's rigid stance against guerrillas and his peace plan with far-right paramilitary groups have helped bring down Colombia's murder rate to a near two-decade low, kidnappings declined nearly 78% over four years, and armed rebel attacks on villages have been nearly eliminated, according to Defense Ministry figures."

regresando

So the date is finally set. On Tuesday October 17, I catch an Air Madrid flight to Madrid, and the next day connect with an Easyjet flight which gets me to Gatwick at 2215 Wednesday night.

This should be plenty of time to manage to make it to Beth's wedding on the 21st, and not get the biggest Wag point of all time by being in the wrong continent and missing it.

I have booked a return flight for the 6th of November, which should give me a few weeks to say hi to the UK and see some fireworks, before coming back here to continue my southward peregrinations!

Settled

In case it wasn't obvious, I have decided to stay here, "live" here, until October. Although it is nothing like the original aim of my trip, that is OK, because plans are there to be changed. The map is not the territory, remember?

I have bought a laptop and have persuaded my landlord to install a broadband connection. This gives me the possibility of earning money, and also occupies my days.

I am enrolled in a Spanish Course at the Universidad Nacional, which takes up eight hours a week. It is helpful in filling in the gaps in my grammar knowledge. Unfortunately, in terms of practising, it isn't so useful, because although I am making friends from the class, they seem to prefer to speak English except when the class is actually running. Better to just make friends with Colombians and speak Spanish with them. So I am doing that too :).

The longest that one can stay in Colombia without a visa is 6 months, in any one year: that means I can stay until October 29. I am studying until September 12. Beth's wedding is October 21. So I plan to get a standby flight from Air Madrid and return cheaply in late October. Whether or not this is a permanent return to the UK remains to be seen. It occurs to me that whilst the six months following October are generally grim in the UK, in South America it is summer! So perhaps I will return to continue the trip southwards. Either way, I plan to spend a few weeks in the UK in Oct/Nov, so hopefully will be able to doing some catching up!

Right, I have to go to the DAS office to extend my visa. If they deny me, then I have to leave the country in the next three days, so perhaps plans will change and my next blog post will be written on a steamer travelling up the Amazon into darkest Peru!

Independence Day

Yesterday, July 21, was Independence Day.

As I stood in the packed streets, taking advantage of being 6 inches taller than anyone else to watch the procession of squadrons of military-looking individuals in various forms of neatly-pressed outfit, I thought, "Hmmm, this isn't much like Brighton."

Living in a foreign city is great. Part of it is living in a foreign language. It adds a level of indirection to everyday life which lends it something of the flavour of a video game. My friend Dominic asked me, "Bogota? What's wrong with Brighton or Bognor?" And although I don't think anything needs to be said about Bognor, regarding Brighton this is a reasonable question. Especially at this time of year, when you are revelling in 35° heatwaves, sunlight until 10pm, and boozing on the beach, while I have daily rain because of the mountains, a monthly cold because of the altitude, and darkness by 6pm every day.

There is a practical element to living here rather than there. The monthly rent for my furnished apartment is £120. A two course lunch round the corner will cost me 80p. In a bar, a bottle of beer will be 35p. (I should mention that if instead you go out in the wealthy northern suburbs, dinner is easily 10 quid, and a pint £2.50). But the real fun of living here is the cultural differences. They keep you on your toes.

If you order tea with milk, they bring you a cup of hot milk with a teabag dumped into it. Hmmm. If you pay for a 8,000 peso meal with a 10,000 peso note, they complain about not having any change and ask if you don't have anything smaller. If you want to call someone from your cellphone who isn't on your network, you go into a small shop where they have bought a cellphone from each network, and use theirs. If you want gum, or water, or a cigarette (just one), you look up and down the street and within one block there will be a man sitting around with a tray, selling these things to you. If you leave your house with shoes in any state other than immaculately shined, you will be hassled continuously to get them cleaned. If you walk along the street looking at anything other than the sidewalk in front of you, you run the serious risk of falling into various potholes, open drain-covers, and the like: every sidewalk is a potential deathtrap.

Homeless people will ask you for money. When you refuse, they will politely desist. When you say that a price in a shop is too high, the shopkeeper will make no attempt to bargain with you or keep you in the shop. When you say, "This liver is horribly overcooked!", the waiter will smile and say, "Si, senor," and not offer to take it away.

You speak Spanish all the time. So does everyone else. Everyone talks about this or that place being dangerous, and it never is, and you wonder if it's just like people thinking London is dangerous, or if actually there is really dangerous stuff going on here, and you just don't see it. On every street corner there is a group of 5 teenagers with khaki uniforms and shaven heads. You don't know whether to be comforted or nervous about this. You never really work out who is the military, who is the police, and where the distinction even lies.

Milk comes in bags, not cartons. Cheese is expensive or horrible, or often both. Apples are expensive, bananas and eggs are super-cheap. Juan Valdez sells gorgeous decaf coffee at 25p a cup, and everyone tells you how expensive the place is. Taxis beep you in the street, just in case you might need a taxi somewhere. Buses stop anywhere and everywhere to pick up and drop off: in between stops, they attempt to break the speed limit before the next stoplight. Instead of route numbers, they have a plaque with some of the places the bus is going propped up in the windscreen, and you have 2 seconds to read the whole thing and flag the bleeder down before it zooms past. Every bus is the pride and joy of the owner, who prefers to spend money putting in speakers that force all the passengers to listen to blaring vallenato music, or red drape curtains across the windscreen, than to actually fix the gearbox.

You must never leave your house without applying sun-cream, and carrying sunglasses, a waterproof coat or umbrella, and a sweater. When the sun is out it can be deadly at this altitude. But five minutes later the clouds have moved in, and without a sweater you are shivering. Then the rain begins, and you remember why you've been carrying this stupid brolly around all day.

Nightclubs play a range of Latin music that you have to dance to in couples. You can ask any girl to dance and they invariably say yes, but that doesn't mean anything. People assume that the reason you are not dancing is stubborness or being boring: they only accept you really can't dance when they see it. Girls passing you in the street look you right in the eyes and smile. But a girl won't kiss you in a club, even tho she's been dancing and flirting with you for the past hour, in case her friends think she's a slut. If you go to a party of wealthy twenty-somethings, chances are that half of them will be wearing metal braces on their teeth. It's de rigueur among those who can afford it. Also de rigueur is for everyone to wear jeans and denim jackets, even tho it must be the worst possible thing to wear, given the climate.

where's the counterculture?

it seems to me, after a while in latin america, that there are two kinds of people here: those who don't have much money but who would like to have some so that they can buy into the "consumer goods" dream, and those that have plenty of money and are glad about that because it allows them to buy into the "consumer goods" dream.

this feeling of unease, you may remember, started in monterrey, mexico, my first destination in latin america. people seemed to think it odd that one might have money and yet not use it to demonstrate status, and that perhaps one's life goals were not perfectly aligned with those of the actors in a car commercial. living in bogotá has made this point even more obvious.

we rich westerners like to perpetuate the fantasy that the rich countries, usually headed by the USA, are big bad boys who mess up the rest of the world with their dysfunctional cultures of individuality, workworkwork, and consumerism. but in all my journey through the US, it seemed i was never far from a grass-roots environmental movement, mothers against nuclear power, or students complaining about multi-nationals' treatment of poor workers in el salvador. and the same can be said about brighton, too.

now i should say right now, that of course my impressions are entirely personal, and i make not even the slightest attempt to gather a representative sample. however, my impressions are at least based on actual interactions with actual citizens of the country, rather than any form of conjecture. and i have to say that i have yet to meet the socially-conscious latin american. if there is a barrio of bogota where everyone eats granola and meets every wednesday in the vegan cafe to read poetry and watch films about the wall in israel, i have yet to encounter or even hear of it.

perhaps unsurprisingly, there are a lot of slogans scrawled on walls, along the lines of "don't vote: organise and fight!" however, not a single person i've mentioned these to has said "yeah, that's right!". everyone is like, "oh yeah, those", a bit ashamed that their country is uncool enough to have such graffiti, not realising that i am proud of the graffiti in my home town! "destroy your TV"! yeah! to me that shows that i live in a place that is socially conscious.

i met a really nice girl a couple of saturdays ago in the kind of swanky restaurant/bar/club that would never admit me in london. she was there by accident, she isn't a regular shallow party girl, she was at pains to point out when we met up later in the week. and indeed, she had moved away from her family in cali, come to bogotá to follow her career as a programmer, was also studying auditing, lived in her own apartment, and seemed happily unmarried and unchildrened at the age of 27. a pretty intelligent and independent girl, and not afraid of bucking those latina traditions. but guess what, when we started talking properly, it was like we were from different planets:

me: "so what do you like to do? what are you into?"
her: "oh, you know. going to the mall. talking to my friends on the phone."
me: "oh. you like films?"
her: "yeah, i loved x-men III and mission impossible III! i love hollywood!"
me: "oh. read anything good recently?"
her: "i don't really read."
me: "and so what is your dream? where are you heading in your life?"
her: "well i'd love to have my own place, and i want to have a nice car."

as we walked through the gridlocked traffic to get to the highly efficient public transport system home, i tried some of the regular anti-car arguments on her. look at all the people trapped in their silly tin cans! sat in traffic! destroying the environment! destroying social cohesion!

she was like "what do you mean? think how comfortable it is, and without all those other people bashing into you." i didn't pursue it further.

i don't mean to pick on this one girl, but she does conveniently illustrate the more general point. everyone here is SO much more consumer-driven, and the idea of a sort of counter-culture, a non-acceptance of that basic 50s american goal of "more and better appliances lead to happiness!" is mostly just met with blank incomprehension.

perhaps it is because the UK and the US did have a counter-culture in the 50s - 70s, and Colombia did not. to be fair, they were probably too busy being mired in an everlasting civil war. indeed, if those people who can escape such things decide to just close down their focus and concentrate on shiny things, and the getting of them, who am I to blame or question them? and i don't. i merely bring this surprising cultural difference to your attention. perhaps it isn't what you would have expected either.

what are you doing in bogotá?

more or less nothing. i interviewed a company to see if i wanted to be employed by them to teach english, but decided that (a) i didn't want to commit to two months, and (b) i couldn't really be bothered to work. so i am basically idle, and my time is spent wandering the streets of bogotá which is called "andando conociendo" in spanish which sounds better, hanging out and er doing not much. it's nice. oh yeah and watching the football.

take a look at the recent behaviour of the colombian peso (this is the sort of link that dates quickly...) and it seems that by far my best option is to spend pounds here, rather than earn pesos.

however, asisnet.com looks like an interesting place. perhaps i'll go and interview them for a job...

Travelling without moving

So Jason left yesterday, and the very same morning I spoke to his landlord and agreed to keep the flat for one more month. I handed over the pesos, and now am suddenly a Bogotá resident. It feels good!

They charge 600,000 pesos, which is around 130 quid, for the month. Seemed pretty reasonable to me -- until an Irish guy told me I should be paying half that. Well, I'm happy for now, because I have a place to myself in a cool location, and I can always re-assess when the month is up.

I have been looking around at various options for teaching english. I don't really need to work, since staying in one place is more or less cheaper than moving around, but I thought it might be fun. A couple of TEFL courses are offered here, running for a month or two, and certainly look comprehensive, but they cost more or less the same as they would in the UK -- from 600 to 1000 quid. A hefty chunk of travel budget right there.

Moreover, it appears that a native speaker, especially one with a University Degree, can more or less walk into private tuition type jobs. The Irish guy mocking my rent is doing this, at about US$10 an hour, which ain't bad really. My question is, do I want an excellent TEFL qualification which will prepare me and allow me to travel the world teaching English to groups of adults or children? Or do I just want to kill a month or two in Bogota? I guess in reality, the latter is the case.

I really must go and buy a jumper. It gets pretty cold here in the evenings! I think that is why I like the weather here so much: there is always a slight cold edge to the air, like a sunny Spring or Autumn day in England. Although the weather patterns are all mixed up, another expat told me: the rainy season is supposed to be way over, but yesterday the wind was strong enough to blow the parasols away in Juan Valdez!

So that's it. After 8 months of travelling, I am now settling down for a while. For how long, I really don't know. One side-effect is that my blog entries are going to be become a whole lot less interesting, and probably less regular. Another is that now that I have a permanent address, I also have a permanent phone number! It's 33 44 323 -- this, from the UK.

bogotá colombia

after a couple of days just hanging out in santa marta, enjoying serendipitous afternoon conversations with local people, i took off into the mountains again, this time just a two-hour bus ride up to a small village called minca. a german guy operated a small farm up there, and rented out the spare rooms. it was very peaceful and relaxing, and i ate a lot of delicious mangoes which were just then falling, and helped to roast and grind coffee beans and peel and boil mangoes in exchange for my room.

then, it was time finally to leave the coast and head inland.

i arrived last sunday in bogota to beautiful blue skies, and a city with a very european feel, with gleaming twingos competing politely for road space with battered renault 4s, clean streets bustling with pedestrians, and an effective if complex rapid transit system, utilising bendy buses in dedicated lanes.

the following day, i moved out of the hostel and into jason's tiny but very cosy apartment in a colonial building. since then, i have been relaxing and just enjoying being in a city of some size. it's great to wander the streets people-watching, hang out in the parks or plazas, stroll amongst the colonial architecture of the old city, or sip juan valdez coffee amongst the students who are much cooler than me. the girls are, true to reputation, beautiful. i have no idea what the crime figures actually are, but i certainly feel safer here than in any of the central american capitals, and window-shopping along carrera 7 could be in any european city. every sunday several main thoroughfares are closed to vehicular traffic, for cyclists, joggers, skaters, or just strollers.

i really like this city, and i don't think there's another one to rival it this side of buenos aires, so i am inclined to consider staying here a little while.

Hot chocolate and the charlie factory

You know, I'm really having trouble knowing where to start with this one. Three day's hard hiking brought us to the most beautiful and unspoilt ruins site I have ever seen. And the journey itself was as fascinating as the destination. Here are some of the themes of the week.

Drugs

As some of you may know, apparently some drugs are produced in Colombia. Actually, a lot of drugs. Historically, Marijuana was the crop of choice in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, but in 1980 the Colombian government aided by the US government took a strong anti-drug stance in the region, spraying and killing all the crops. However, marijuana is still widely and cheaply available, as was evidenced on the first day of the trip when Edwin, our guide, distributed the complimentary shopping bag full of weed. Out of the eight of us, two were pretty serious druggies and decided that a block of weed the size of a cabbage would not be enough for the 6 days, so proceeded to buy the same quantity again from the obliging local farmer, for the absurd price of 15,000 pesos (just over 3 quid).

So since the 1980s, of course drug production has stopped, and all those farmers are now growing such crops as bananas, coffee, and cocoa. Or possibly that might have happened if it hadn't been for the developed world's suddenly-burgeoning appetite for a certain white powder, and the slopes of the Sierra Nevada providing perfect conditions for growing its raw ingredient: the coca plant.

As we walked up on the first day, we were flanked on all sides by fields of the pale green, shrubbish plant. Edwin gave us a short introductory lesson as we stopped for a breather halfway up a particularly steep ascent. A small field of coca plants produces a crop three times yearly. The leaves are stripped off, and within four months a new set of leaves has regrown. The plant is extremely hardy, and does not suffer from any of the potentially financially disastrous bug infestations that coffee, banana or coffee plants do. Each farmer has just one small field (although when I say "small", this is a field that yields three kilos of coca paste with each crop.) This distributed system ensures that there is no one point of failure in the cocaine production system.

When we arrived at our first campsite, we were offered a tour of a "factory", more like a shed. This is where the coca leaves are converted into paste for delivery further up the chain, in a childishly simple process involving the addition only of a few simple chemicals -- limestone and gasoline, among others -- and which takes about 8 hours. The paste product is better known in the West as "crack". I know this, because our drug-happy friends, upon returning to this site on the fifth day, enquired as to whether they might perchance purchase some cocaina from the nice man, to which they were told no, only the paste, and it would cost them 15,000 pesos per gram bag. That's just over 3 quid kids, remember? So Martin set to work converting a water bottle into a crack pipe, and I watched fascinated as three guys thought of nothing but their next hit for the next 8 hours. The locals don't touch it: they see nothing wrong with it though. They are simply supplying a market. The larger questions of the rights and wrongs of chemical dependencies just don't even enter the equation.

Kidnapping

Now I didn't know this before I made the trip, but in 2003 11 tourists on this exact hike, with our guide, were kidnapped by the ELN (left-wing paramilitaries) in an attempt to draw national and international attention to the plight of the people living in ELN-controlled areas -- and to highlight that the government was in league with the right-wing paramilitaries. I will not go into the whole story here, as I am sure that it can be found all over the internet, but suffice it to say that it just gave the whole trip yet one more surreal aspect. Most strange was the calm and humorous way that the guides talked about the situation they'd been in.

I should say that it seems that the tourists were in fact very well treated, and when "released" joked that they were pretty happy since they'd paid for a 6 day tour and got another 95 days for free! And that things are pretty safe now for tourists, because the government and the people want the tourist dollar coming in, so the paramilitary groups make sure that they get safe passage. A chunk of our 440,000 peso (100 quid) trek fee went towards paying the relevant protection money.

The hike

I thought it was heavy going. Carl the Irish guy who had hiked Macchu Pichu amongst others thought it was more or less straightforward. Every day we only did 3 or 4 hours actually walking, except the penultimate day when we had to do about 8. What really got me was the almost interminable ascents and descents. On the first day, for instance, we climbed a hill then descended it. So it was more or less 90 minutes of steep climbing, followed by 90 minutes of steep knee-unfriendly downhill.

But the real kicker was the third day, the final approach to the City. This started off well, with a fun if sketchy cable-car river-gorge crossing. Then, after an hour's fairly flat but rough-going hiking, we arrived at a wide fast-flowing river. The plan was to wade through it. Not once though, but eight times. We followed the river valley for about an hour upriver, and since the banks were often too steep, we had to walk through the river. It was about 15 or 20 feet wide, and in places came up above the waist. And the current was strong in spots too. This was where I realised that my waterproof Rohan walking shoes were exactly the wrong kind of footwear: much better some kind of light canvas shoe. I tried it in bare feet: I ended up with bruised toes and nearly slipping and getting washed downriver. But once water gets inside waterproof shoes, it can't get out, so I had the pleasure of walking in two personal squelchy puddles for the rest of the day.

Once I had just about gotten into it, and being wet didn't seem like an option but a basic way of being, we reached The Steps. There are 2000 of the slippery moss-covered buggers apparently, from river to city: I didn't count them. I will never mock the people on the stairmaster at the gym again.

And then of course, two days later, we had to do the whole thing in reverse. And although slippery rock steps coming up might be hard work, slippery rock steps going down are plain dangerous. I found this out when I missed my footing and slipped down about 15. It was only that I had the good luck to slip on a curve that meant I didn't end up in a heap in the river. The adrenalin rush was magic though :).

The indigenas

There are tribes of indigenous people living up in them there hills, too. They were super cute (I seem to have a thing for indigenous people, this could be a bit worrying...), and didn't use money or otherwise enter into the modern world. They lived off what they grew, chewed coca leaves for fun, and man woman and child dressed in long off-white tunics, and wore their black hair long and untied. They had cute pet pigs and little tiny doggies too. Every time our guides were cooking up some food for us, a few would appear, and sit around forlornly looking at us with puppydog eyes, until we'd had our fill, when they would dutifully fill up plastic bags with leftover rice or beans or whatever to take back to their cute little indigi-huts. I wanted to stay and live with them.

Social ineptness

Of course, on a trip like this, spending 6 fairly intense days in close proximity with 6 strangers, it's pretty important that everyone is kind of cool. Although certain members of the party amazed me with their capacity to do drugs (did I mention that someone brought a bottle of blotter acid up to the city, too?), they were all fine to share space with for a week.

With the notable exception of Jens, the American Perl programmer from Melbourne Australia where he had left his recently-divorced wife. He was the most hilariously socially inept person I have ever met, and seemed to carefully craft every phrase in order to make everyone hate him. It is very interesting to watch the social dynamics in these groups: it's a bit like Big Brother et al, except that you are living it, and importantly you can't vote anyone out!

I hate to judge people, so I tried to be nice to him the whole time (especially since we were all trapped together for a week!) but others were not so nice, and unfortunately, by the end, people were coughing and saying "cock" anytime he was talking, and other such playground behaviour. What was worst was that he seemed totally unaware that he was making such an impression. As generally the most socially inept person in a group, it was nice to watch someone else take the role, and to study them close up to see just how they were going wrong. Undoubtedly he was a nice chap deep down, and all his arrogant nonsense and pompous manner was just bluster to cover a complete ignorance of social protocol, but people react pretty fast to that kind of thing, as became clear.

It also came as a timely reminder of the pitfalls of returning to a career in software. Imagine returning to a milieu where such behaviour is considered normal!

Ciudad Perdida

The Lost City itself is beautiful. It's a large area of grassy circular terraces linked by mossy rock stairways high up in the mountains, surrounded by rainforest, waterfalls, and sky. It is a truly magical place and I'm glad it's so difficult to get to, because that allows it some chance of retaining that magic. There are many restrictions in place: for instance, no one tour group can stay there for more than two nights. Also, archaelogical excavation is blocked because of indigenous claims of sacred land, and indigenous people are prevented from living there (and modernizing/spoiling it, in all likelihood) by the government. So for the time being, it belongs to the birds, and the few hardy souls who make the three-day trek up.

Tim's wikipedia link and these images should help to give some idea of the magic of the place.

Conclusions

So, I got to try out my filter bottle in anger finally, and I'm pleased to report that it works well and that I drank river water for a week without getting sick.

On the second day, I hung my (100% polyamide) trousers over the fire to dry, and Misud the Turk caught them just before they caught fire. They are a little singed. And my lovely Rohan walking shoes gave me blisters because the heel padding is more or less worn away, and although I have tried to clean the mud off, don't look like they'll ever be quite the same again after 16 river crossings.

I have got more used to sleeping in hammocks, and doing strenuous exercise every day made me feel so good that I'm determined to do this kind of thing again.

When we arrived back in civilisation again, it was a heavy culture shock. It was Mother's Day, which in Colombia's macho culture means that the women all stay home and look after the children, while the men go out and get plastered.

And after having had delicious hot chocolate every morning for a week, I am thinking of making it a breakfast staple. That and a rock of crack. Only kidding!

wedding bells

an aside from usual travel-related stories...

my brother proposed to his girlfriend whilst they were in mexico last month, and they are engaged to be married in june 2008!

congratulations :)

The mighty jungle

In 10 minutes, I am leaving Santa Marta to trek into the jungle to Ciudad Perdida.

Hopefully see you all in 6 days!

All at sea

OK. It's a weak title. But it kind of came into my head and then persisted, judo-blocking any decent titles.

Well, here I am, safe and sound in Cartagena, Colombia! I never thought I'd say I'd feel safe to arrive in one of Robert Young Pelton's 5-star "World's Most Dangerous Places". But after the last 5 days, I was happy to embrace the docks of any country that would have me.

So, last Tuesday morning at 5am me and Jasper the Swede got a cab to Panama City´s cute little domestic airport. Pretty much spaced, we crowd together in a tiny 30-seat propeller plane and a week of fear begins. Flying low over the city was pretty fun actually - it was amazing to see that although downtown PC is all North-American style high-rises, it ends abruptly and is surrounded by lush green rainsforest.

In a half hour we arrived on the football-pitch-sized island of El Porvenir airport. The plane trundles over the grass like a bus to a small thatched shack where we meet a crazed and incomprehensible Italian who it turns out is our capitano, and David, his French Tintin-like skipper. They take our passports off, and we get our shoes off, roll up our trousers, and generally make like we're in the Caribbean. Apart from an airstrip, there is only white sand beach, palms, a few thatched huts, and a few yachts in the bay. The rusty one is ours.

There are seven of us in total. Notably, there is Jono, a fat arrogant bigoted Philadelphan, who is trying to take charge already. Then there is Runa, a 63yo Norwegian lady who seems pretty cool. Colin the Icelandic Dane is skinny, white, and wearing all synthetics, and is kind of comically chav-like. Also there is Maria, another Swede, who is 20 and cute like a girl from a previous century. Then there is a strange middle-aged man with staring eyes and a distracted air. Maria tells me she heard him talking to himself in their hostel, which I take to be a joke. Ah how wrong I was.

So eventually we all get ferried into the yacht which is unbelievably small, and smells of mildew. Three of us guys are sharing a V-shaped sort of almost-double bed in the prow. Jono and Colin are sharing the kitchen table which folds down into another bed. And Runa and Maria get to share the bed in the rear cabin. Our stuff goes everywhere there is a nook or cranny.

We motor off, and over the next two days get to know each other a bit, whilst visiting a few of the beautiful tropical islands of the San Blas Archipelago. David the American keeps himself to himself, mostly talking to himself whilst staring fixedly at random, although we do learn that he has spent 5 months on a yacht before, single-handing it up the East Coast of the US. I am worried, since I am sharing a bed with him, that when the Voices tell him to kill someone, I will naturally be first. David the skipper, the Frenchman, wows us with his culinary skills the first night, and does not let us down from then on in. Every meal is a 3-course extravaganza. Fabio and David communicate in shouted Spanish, but talk to us only in English (annoying for me since I speak both French and Spanish, which they both speak better, but necessary for the monolinguists among us: the Americans.) We hardly get to use the sails in these two days, but we do learn that sailing in the rain is not that fun. At least it is warm rain. We also learn that docking the boat in the river mouth means that sandflies get in, and spend the next four days jumping out from unexpected hiding holes and consuming us. One might have expected that Fabio the Professional Sailor would have realised that.

So, we eat well, we spend some time at sea thinking, wow, being in a 30-foot boat for 5 days is going to be pretty boring actually, and we realise, after swimming in the sea and walking the sandy beaches, that a 30-foot yacht doesn't have a shower, or even any notable source of fresh water. So it looks like we are going to be salt-encrusted sweaty beasts for the rest of the jouney.

This turns out to be true. As we make for the open sea on the third day, David makes up the "rota". Ah. It turns out that Fabio will spend nearly all the time of the trip sleeping or getting stoned. David will cook and sleep. We will be sailing. Naturally, we are not told how to do this. Any instructions are shouted in incomprehensibly accented English, like "All!", when practically the only thing communicated is a sense of extreme urgency. Not conducive to a relaxing trip.

However, after that, we don't see any rain, and the wind seems to be behind us. W get going, with Jasper on the tiller, and everything seems to be going well. Jono, Maria and I sit upstairs till midnight, taking turns trying to keep the ship pointed east. The ship has an unlit compass, so we do this by watching the stars, and someone shining a torch on the compass and shouting out the reading. It actually starts to be quite fun, and its certainly exciting. David the American is immediately and from then on in, extremely seasick. He sleeps on the upper deck, in the open air and sea spray, in only a pair of shorts. It turns out he thinks that wearing more clothing, for instance waterproofs, would be missing an opportunity to burn calories by sweating. Er, yes David.

At midnight, we are all getting too tired to drive, so we wake Jasper and Colin, the poor bastards, and ourselves lie downstairs in the bucking and heaving beds which stink. We have to keep the hatches shut so we don't get wet, so the smell and humidity has no escape. No-one changes as there doesn't seem any point when we can't wash.

The next morning (a few hours later), I wake up realising I must have slept, and get up to watch the dawn. Unfortunately the sun is obscured by a large and unpleasant looking stack of storm clouds. It's amazing how much more real weather is at sea. Runa has slept in the footwell all night as she couldnt bear the stink of fumes in the rear cabin: she's right, it is pretty strong. Maria, instead, just stayed up and helped drive.

During the day, we mostly talk about cultural differences, as travellers are wont to do. The sea is getting pretty choppy now, and we get rained on a fair bit too. It's hard to chart the passage of the day. The view doesn't change, except for the position of the sun and clouds, and the angle of the boat depending on winds. The food is still good though. Jasper does a long 6-hour stint on the tiller. He seems happy enough. He was in the Navy during his National Service. Fabio and David get high and pass out.

The following night, everyone is basically a little less cheerful than the night before, knowing that the crew are no help, and having had very little sleep. Also, although the rain has stopped, the sea is super choppy, and the possibility of the boat just disappearing into the briny deep is starting to worry everybody, and there are clouds all around making star-navigating challenging.

We basically follow the same pattern as the previous night. Runa stays upstairs again, but since the boat is on a 30 degree angle all night long, with everyone hanging on for dear life, no sleep is to be gotten. I go below for a couple of hours in the early hours, to be bounced around in the cabin and think dark thoughts.

The next day, we are all extremely tired and although we expect to land anytime soon, are having trouble keeping our spirits up. But the sun in shining, Jasper lends me on of his walkman headphones, and we start to share around some of the Balboas we have to finish before we dock. Life on the open wave starts to seem good again, except for David the American who as well as talking to himself was obliged to take of his pants and generally void himself from all orifices off the back of the boat all night as he suffered from diarrhoea too. So that's why its called the poop deck. Also, we did actually learn a bit about sailing, as when we "sailed close to the wind", we got the best speed, but at times would go to close and the whole sail would whip round, sending the boat plunging to the other side, and the people below tumbling out of their beds. Fabio, upset at having his 3day siesta disturbed, came up and starting shouting out instructions which no-one understood. By this point tho everyone just laughed at him. Unfortunately Runa was thrown across the deck and banged her head. I tried to step down into the cabin but the ladder was not secured properly and slipped away from me. Somehow I held on averting a nasty fall.

Once we asked about lifejackets, but we didn't understand the answer.

At around midday, we sailed into the port of Cartagena. Dizzy with lack of sleep and 5 days on a rocking boat, we then had to wait for wo hours for immigration to clear. Still, we were so happy to be on dry land, we celebrated with an absurdly overpricd lunch in the yacht club (since we couldnt go any further into the country without our passports).

I wish I could post some pictures. Later hopefully I will. Of course, the experience was an amazing challenge, on a social, physical, and emotional lever, and a lot more "first" experiences for me too. I wish I could say that we bonded and it was the most amazing group of people I ever met, but as often in real life that wasn't quite the case. David was crazy, Jono was an opinionated bigot, and Fabio was an irresponsible stoner. The others were cool, but naturally the Meanies loom larger! I would never recommend the trip to someone else, but on the other hand it was a more or less unique experience, and as you know for me a big part of this is not having fun.

And there was one important side-effect: when we finally came into Cartagena, we simply had no energy left to expend on being nervous about Colombia itself. I just slept for 13 hours straight, and today we have done hardly anything except wash, eat and use the Net. It is certainly a pretty place, reminding me a bit of Casco Vieja, Panama City's old centre, and Havana, Cuba. But it is Sunday, so empty and closed for the most part, and hard to judge. Tonight we go out to celebrate Jasper the Swede's birthday, and our arrival on dry land!

Goodbye

Former and new owners of the Suburban. May it consume many more gallons of gas. *sheds tear.

lost car, found god

So, i sold the car, to these nice people!

I visited them in what the guidebook says is a campsite, but which is actually a sort of church retreat place. Of course i was not the first so misinformed, so they, used to such visitors, let me stay. More than that, they offered me a room instead of camping in the car, invited me to eat with them every day, and didn't charge me a cent for anything!

During dinner the first evening I told my story about the import tax, and Heinz showed an interest in buying the car. After 3 days of hilarious 5 hour waits and paperwork shuffling, the car is now his. We agreed that he would pay $1500 for the car, and i would get whatever remained after the tax was charged. I didn't think this would be much, but i didn't feel that i could ask for more than $1500 given the condition of the car, and more to the point its gas consumption. In the end, i ended up legally relieving myself of the car, and with $500 in fresh notes in my pocket. I don't think i got such a bad deal.

However, on the last night, i discovered why everything up to that point had been free: friendly dr erika jekyll turned into evangelical erika hyde! I was subjected to a 90 minute theology lesson which was rendered in such simplistic terms that although initially i felt i was being patronised, i begun to realise about 60 minutes in that in fact it was an insidious form of hypnotism. I was also taken to a church service under the vague impression that it was some kind of "meeting". It was the first time i had been to a church service in a decade, and worse of all all the songs were in spanish and i didnt even know the tunes! Still, it was pretty interesting.

Thankfully i made it out of there with my life and my wits intact, with only a gideon bible in spanish and english on facing pages to remember my ordeal by.

In fact, this strange experience came at a rather odd moment. One might even say that it had been sent by God - to warn me away from Christianity? After finishing reading The Brothers Karamazov, and Strait Is The Gate, both of which deal with the issue of Virtue, in the implied context of Christianity, I was starting to leave behind some of my Humanistic prejudices, and to think that there was something to this whole religion thing after all.

I have always been a little wary of writing off things which have been accepted for centuries as true even when they apparently are not. I had begun reflecting that although there is a difference between a literal truth (eg, Brighton Beach is pebbly) and a metaphorical truth (eg, Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and no man cometh to the Father but by him), metaphorical truths are so crucially important in holding societies together, and in fact in allowing the limited human mind to grasp greater things, that to consider them "untrue" is more or less a mistake. I had decided to study religions a little more closely, starting, perhaps, by reading the Bible. When I thought about my beliefs, I thought that perhaps they coincided with those of a Christian closer than I had liked to think.

However, then, like cold water being thrown in my face, I received a reality update. During the ninety minute lesson from Erika, and the 30 minute sermon from German Evangelical Willi, all the doubts from my adolescence which had caused me to abandon Christianity in favour of a humanist based morality ("since we are all that there is, it is doubly important to be nice to each other") resurged.

I will still study the Bible. It is certainly edifying. A book that has lasted 2000 years begs careful examination. But, since I am very certain, after 28 years of reflection, that I will not confuse metaphorical with literal truth, I will never be a Christian, or indeed a Buddhist, or a Pagan, or a Rastafarian.

Religion scares me most and seems most absurd when it is not woven into the societal context in which it exists, and seems most sensible when it is so integrated. This seems to tell me something about the meaning of metaphorical truths. I think that perhaps my problem with a purely hedonistic society such as many seem to live in is that it seems to have /no/ metaphorical truths woven into it.

A diverting episode in the countryside, in which i did more than just sell a big car to an exceedingly friendly, helpful, kind and amiable man.

** I do not intend to insult anyone with this post, and I apologise if I have done so. I am still aware that there is the possibility of a bigger truth out there that I still perhaps just don't see, that others do. But all I can do is reflect what I honestly believe right now. **

*** This post is so inflammatory and so complex that I need at least 5 times the time I actually have to dedicate to it, but unfortunately I am paying by the minute so the raw article will have to do. ***

return

so... as beth hinted in her comment, she's thinking of getting married. cor blimey, another year, another friend married off.

i will, of course, be returning to sunny britain for this event!

so now i have a definite end-point to my wanderings. london (or thereabouts), and october. so i'll see you all then! however, i might not necessarily stay around, i have some new thoughts on that score... but let's see first if i have any money by then.

i crossed into panama at the hilarious sixaola crossing near the Caribbean coast, where there is only recently a road. the bridge across the river which defines the border is a single-track railway bridge. they have put railway sleepers alongside each rail to allow road traffic to precariously pass over. When you get to the other side, you just leave your car on the railway line, causing chaos for people coming the other way (no, there is no signalling in place!) whilst you wait for a bloke to type out a temporary importation permit. luckily, most people don't bring vehicles over this crossing!

however, you might find that the bloke asks you what your final destination is, and you might say, "er, here!", and he might say, that'll be $1000 please. because if you are importing a vehicle then you must have to pay the import duty, naturellement!

so then, you might change your mind, and remember that after all you were planning to take it with you in your suitcase when you flew -- ah, i mean, took the non-existent car ferry -- to colombia. and you might ask the bloke, hypothetically, what would happen if the car were to, say, fall in the sea? and you would be upset to find that even in this instance, you would still have to pay the panamanian government $1000 for the pleasure.

uh-oh.

but all is not (quite) lost: i have an address of another bloke in panama city who may have a different story, or offer me some kind of loophole. a bit of a laugh though, as i'm sure you'll agree!

snake!

oh yeah, and i remembered today about that snake we saw! except, well, actually i was the only one that saw it, incredibly.

we were driving along this long dirt track out of the deserted santa rosa national park, where we'd already seen a bunch of birds and things, when i saw this huge yellow snake at least the width of the car (and its a big car, as i might have mentioned), curled across the road. i jumped on the brakes. and i was all, "look, there's a huge snake!" and simone was all, "er what where?" and i was all, "that huge yellow thing the size of a person right in front of us!" and simone was all, "what?" and it sort of started, leisurelyly pulled all its coils up, and slithered off into the undergrowth.

i was glad we weren't hiking! and it was quite near houses and things. what larks eh pip, what larks!

wildlife!

well costa rica has been a nature trip. Memorably, we saw
coatis, squirrel monkeys, quetzales, bell birds, agoutis, jays, vultures, all kinds of hummingbirds, frigate birds, trogons, iguanas, and memorably a roadside hawk tearing apart its prey, at the roadside. All in the wild! We also saw any number of different birds and butterflies which we didn't manage to identify. Simone, you might want to post some more on here, if you can remember any! Simone also saw a two-tailed sloth and caimans and some more things, because she went on a guided tour whilst I saved my money.

The cloud forest is amazing to walk through, and the birds really don't seem shy of humans at all.

It's funny because wildlife has sort of been a background feature of my trip so far, if that, so it was great to live someone else's trip for a while. And, naturally, it turned out to be super-interesting and I'm really glad I got the opportunity to see it all! And we did our fair share of people-meeting too, what with park rangers, who are always informed and interesting, and our little adventure in cuajaniquil where i inadvertantly er ran out of gas on the way out of the valley, and we spent a good hour begging gallons of gas around town. It was really embarrassing and drove the point home hard about what an offensive beast the Suburban is, that we poured in a huge bucket full of gas, and it only got us the 15 miles to the next town, and gas station. I think I'll have to promise never to drive a car again, to make up for the damage I've done to the environment in the last 7 months...

Green city

Managua, Nicaragua's capital, was half-destroyed in 1973 by an earthquake, and efforts at rebuilding have been minimal. Climbing the small hill in the middle of the city for the views, one has the impression of looking out over a large forest, with the odd cluster of buildings poking up here and there. Descending into the old centre, there are huge deserted expanses of shabby-looking concrete and trees, with the odd original building left standing here and there. It is a very odd place.

I stayed in the Barrio where all the budget hotels are, which unfortunately is a relatively high-crime area. Most of Managua is, however. I was repeatedly warned never to go out with my passport or more money than I absolutely needed, and a trip to the cash machine meant taking a taxi ten blocks, taking shelter in the shopping mall (a completely incongruous slice of norteamericana), then taking a taxi right home again, where the hotel owner would unlock the door for me. One night I went one block down to get some gallo pinto for dinner at a small local eatery, and saw an old man wandering the streets with a machete. "Old Miguelito," they told me back at the hotel. "Yes, he patrols the streets to keep this block safer for our guests." We heard his whistle throughout the evenings. I wondered what he would do if set upon by a gang of street kids.

Despite all that, I quite liked the few days I spent in Managua, because it at least felt authentic, and had a few museums, a theatre, two cinemas, and other trappings of a proper city. Still, when I left and finally could relax a little from the perpetual fear of crime, I did breathe a sigh of relief.

I also visited Granada and Leon, the two colonial towns and backpacker-hangouts of Nicaragua. I met lots of interesting international people, read the Brothers Karamazov in a hammock, ate great spaghetti bolognese, and sometimes braved the heat to take in the unquestionably beautiful architecture.

My favorite spot though was Isla de Ometepe, which I made the trek to even though I only had one day before I needed to be in Costa Rica. I braved the 90 minute ferry ride each way, which was the choppiest I've ever had (crazy considering it's a lake, not even the sea) and a one-hour bus ride to spend just one night at sleepy Altagracia. But the people of the island lived up to their reputation as the friendliest in Nicaragua, and I received so many genuine smiles it was worth the trip. Thanks especially to Juan who after chatting to me on the bus and finding I was going to his home town, offered to lend me his bike to explore the town. On my return, he and his friends cooked up a delicious sopa de pollo and invited me to share it with them. I also got to sample an extremely potent drink made by pouring a litre of beer and a half-bottle of rum into a small cooler full of ice, which was then passed round the table. I only wish I'd had longer to spend on the island. I will certainly return if I ever get the opportunity.

Thence to Costa Rica, and an amazing array of bird and plant life: I am excited to say that I saw not one but three resplendent quetzales, and a mating pair of three-wattled bellbirds! But that is another blog entry.

Honduras

The crossing into Honduras was a nightmare. Everything that I had feared up until then, but had happily not happened, all came on one day, just when I was thinking I'd got the whole border thing sewn up.

It cost me nearly US$70 to finally get into Honduras with the car, including having to bribe the police twice due to an alleged missing fire extinguisher. Hmmm. It's scary being pulled over on a mountain road by a military-uniformed surly-looking man with gold teeth and a machine gun. Yes, the fine would be 2,000 lempiras. Or I could pay him $20 right here, he implied. Unfortunately for me, I didn't have even $20, after my thorough rinsing at the border (apparently, a permit to bring a car through Honduras for a few days costs US$25. Ah, plus a number of "administration fees".) I showed the nice man the five one-dollar bills I did have left, sweating profusely. Miraculously, unpredictably, he accepted them and wished me a safe trip.

There are a bunch of criminals at every border, tramitadores they like to be called, and you pay them a few dollars to help you through the process. You might expect to even be helped. But mostly, they just make sure that the relevant palms get greased. To be fair, the entry into Honduras was the most complex thing I've ever seen, taking several hours between innumerable offices, each box-like room with a couple of shifty-looking individuals playing solitaire on 386s, who would take 2 photocopies of form X4c and print and stamp form Zn9 and give you form PP1 to sign and ask for $5. So the guy probably did help me somewhat. But it's not like you have any choice anyway: the only way to get the shouting mass of dishevelled gold-toothed louts to desist is to accept the "help" of one of them.

Today, four days later, I had finally managed to screw up the courage to attempt to cross into Nicaragua. I had prepared plenty of cash, in various currencies and denominations, spread around my person. After the Honduran police robbed me again ($10 this time) a mile or so before the border, I was ready to face hell to get into Nicaragua. And then... it was a breeze. There was hardly anyone there, everyone was polite and quick, and no-one charged me anything, except for the official $7 entry fee. Nothing at all for the car.

It's all very strange. One would almost think that the alternating horrendous and straightforward crossings had been set up by a master of psychological torture.

So apart from the border crossings... Choluteca was horribly hot, and I should have even paid for air conditioning. I spent a lot of time lying under the ceiling fan in my pants in the hotel room going "urgh", not sleeping well, and having many cold showers a day. I did however meet some lovely and interesting people the few times I did go out and brave the baking gringoless streets. Some people were a little surly but I spent a great evening drinking with the owner of a restaurant and his friends and family, and another morning talking with the sister of the owner of the comedor I ate breakfast at while she was waiting for college. Had almost forgotten what white people look like until I got to Estelí today: I think I am back on the tourist trail.

Some extremely out of date pictures

"Warning, mountains in rear view mirror are closer than they appear" -- crossing the Rockies, Colorado.

A beautiful clear day near Boulder.

The Burban in the Sierras, California.

Perched on a rock above the Grand Canyon watching the sunset.

Caroline the beautiful Quebecoise poses in the Burban in Zacatecas, Mexico.

Revolutionary zeal

At the Guatemalan-Salvadorean border I avoided paying the US$80 "exit fee" that a shifty looking man in sportswear tried to levy. They were rank amateurs though: starting with an amount that just made me stare, then laugh, then immediately halving the alleged tax. No, I thought, I'll just chance my luck without this vitally important signature.

Mayan-Guatemalan women are slim, dressed in loose-fitting traditional skirts and blouses, have long clean hair and wear no makeup. They are beautiful. Salvadorean women are fat, wear tight cheap fashions that make them look fatter, put makeup on with a trowel, and apparently comb their hair with goose fat every morning. They are not beautiful. The men look at you suspiciously. Certainly this is a country less used to outsiders. However, when I have actually stopped to talk to people, I have found everyone to be more than welcoming, and helpful and friendly. Eating breakfast pupusas in Sonsonate, the owner came down with a big grin and invited me to stay in his house! Lots of people here speak some English, as a huge proportion of people are or have worked in the US.

San Salvador is odd. The affluent and leafy Western suburbs (where my hostel is situated) seem like a North American city, in lots of ways. There are three malls, and many gas stations and US fast-food establishments. Then, you can take a bus or a 30 minute walk to the centre, which resembles nothing so much as a huge 30-block street market, with a Cathedral and Plaza more or less buried in the middle, and pretty much not a lot else. I went looking for the Science Museum but didn't have the exact address, and two sets of other Museum curators plus the Sheraton staff couldn't tell me where it was. In fact they thought it didn't exist. It was about two blocks away.

So apart from the capital, I've been hiking in Bosque El Impossible (swimming in the river yay!), and hung out for a day on Lago Coatepeque. I managed to be present for the FMLN's political rallies in both Suchitoto and San Salvador -- quite an experience! They are the party that formed out of the guerillas of the Civil War, and the revolutionary spirit is still very much alive. It was quite fun standing in a city Plaza packed with people wearing red chanting "Hasta La Victoria Siempre!"

Now east, through Eastern El Salvador, then skipping through a very small and by all accounts unremarkable corner of Honduras to Nicaragua. It's hot here!

avoiding bandits, meeting friends

On the road down into San Pedro La Laguna, Lago Atitlán, I encountered a broken down chicken bus blocking the carriageway. A man optimistically waved me through, so I pulled forward, only to find that the gap was pretty much not Suburban-sized. Trying to reverse back up the hairpin, I only slid further forward, and when the bus to my right itself slipped off the rocks holding it, 6 inches toward me, I just gave up and breathing in, slithered the ´Burban through the gap. I am starting to get pretty proud of my ability to navigate the beast. Which probably means I am due a crash. Actually, I did have a pranglet in Santa Cruz, as I left, in the parking lot. I had to do some crazy N-point turns to get out the gate, and the rear windows were all muddy. I tried to do it on intuition but misjudged the length of the car by about 2 inches. I made a two-inch dent in a Toyota truck's bull bars. Needless to say the Suburban was unscathed, yet again. Unfortunately the owner was standing right there: fortunately, they were two super-nice guys from Guatemala city, and although they started off a bit upset (reasonably enough!) when I was contrite, they were very friendly. I ended up giving them 100 quetzales to get the bar knocked back into place. Actually I have the best conversations with people through car-related events (just to counter those people who thought that by travelling by car I wouldn't meet people!).

Since there was two chicken-buses-worth of passengers milling about in the road, a good hour's walk in the sun to the nearest town, I offered lifts to one group, 8 schoolteachers from San Pedro. They were very helpful with directions, and interesting to chat to. Although I generally feel guilty driving such a huge car, I do really enjoy all the conversations with the people I give rides to.

Lago Atitlán is pretty. I had never really thought before how much volcanoes add to the beauty of a place. I think because they are a bit like the mountains in children's books -- conical, wooded, with tops shrouded in clouds. The place I stayed was odd. It resembled nothing so much as the greenfields area in Glastonbury. Lots of nice places to hang out run by hippies, with reggae music, fruit smoothies, good organic coffee and fresh bread, all that sort of thing. After spending a few hours one afternoon chilling out in one place, reading a book on Central America, I came out onto the footpath and was actually surprised to see Guatemalans there. Still, the local people seem to generally like the hippies. There are lots of friendly women and kids selling cakes and ice-creams and handcrafts, and they are super good-natured, even when you never buy anything. I have found that from the Maya: when you politely, with a smile, decline whatever they are offering, they smile back and move on. Intimidation seems not to be a part of their culture. It makes for a pleasant atmosphere.

I think every one of the four days that I spent in San Pedro, I met at least one person who I knew from previous encounters on the gringo trail. It's surreal. It's so nice to see people you thought maybe you'd never see again, and find out what they've been up to. So there was no shortage of friends to hang out with, and rooms were just a few dollars a night. I can understand why people stay there a while! However, I still began to feel after a few days that it was time to move on. I heard so many warnings about bandits on various roads around San Pedro that I was almost disappointed when I got all the back to the Carretera Interamericana without meeting a single one. Perhaps they don't work Sundays.

Antigua is really one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. Every corner seems is a photograph waiting to be taken. Bright sunshine and clear blue skies frame time-faded or brightly-painted colonial houses, and lilac and bougainvillea trees fill the courtyards of crumbling ruins of convents, churches and monasteries. The colourful Maya handcraft and produce markets crowd the cobbled streets. And always the green slopes of one of the three volcanoes surrounding the city visible beyond. It is very touristy, with a lot of rich Guatemalans and El Salvadorean tourists as well as gringos, but really they don't spoil the picturesqueness. It is so expensive I am only staying one day, but it is definitely somewhere I would love to return to, with money. It is slightly less good for a solo traveller than other places, because it isn't really possibly to "lose yourself" in the city.

But I have bought a map of El Salvador, and will cross the border tomorrow. It has been a very rapid two-week tour of Guatemala, but I have done pretty well at seeing a diverse range of places. I don't even know what to expect of El Salvador, which is quite exciting in a way!

Four punctures in two days

So... sometime around Valentine's day I left Belize and braved the corruption and anarchy of Guatemala. I should immediately say that I have seen no sign of anything like this. The border was very straightforward, and the helpful man who took me through all the steps was interesting, friendly, and didn't even ask me for any money. I offered him 10 quetzales to thank him, about 70p, and he seemed cheerful enough!

Northern Guatemala is somewhat like Belize -- sparsely populated, forested, and with villages strung along the road in which everyone will smile and return waves and greetings as you pass through. I find it so soul-nourishing to have these little encounters with people. I was talking last night to the Finn who I have been travelling with for the last four days, since Tikal, about friendships. It seems that, unable to deal with the temporary nature of life (we all die), we like to separate our relationships into the "temporary" and the "permanent". It can easily seem that only the permanent relationships have value, or meaning. But once you accept that in fact all your relationships are temporary, just shorter or longer, it is a great liberation and you realise that therefore all relationships have value. I have enjoyed travelling with Tuomas for four days, and the fact that we may never see each other again does not reduce that. Equally, I have valued exchanging genuinely happy greetings with men doing road repairs, women carrying packages on their heads, and children drawing water at wells, beside the road.

Tikal was pretty groovy. It is really a big rainforest, with huge enormous trees with monkeys, birds, and other wildlife in them, which incidentally contains a few giant stone pyramids! It is lovely to walk around, and I spent nearly a day there. Then, along with a Canadian couple and Tuomas I drove down to Lago Atitlan, taking four days and stopping often along the way. Apart from managing to get four punctures, and leaving my sandals and my towel in various hotels, it has been a fun trip. Actually things going wrong with the car has proved a great opportunity for meeting people. The guys who fixed my puncture in Fray Bartolome one evening for 15 quetzales (1 gbp) were super-friendly, and were so amused when I returned the next morning with another tyre that they fixed it for free! By the fourth wheel-change, I was getting pretty quick, at least.

So there we are. One night, we decided to stay in this hostel. It was so weird being suddenly transported back into gringolandia, with fruit smoothies and organic dinner, bonobo on the stereo, etc etc. Basically I found it pretty unpleasant, even though the riverside setting was beautiful, the people interesting and international and open to talking to strangers, and the prices good. I would have loved it in England, for sure. I suppose I've become so used to (so addicted to) extreme cultural dislocation that just sitting in a bar boozing with some Europeans somehow lacked lustre. I couldn't face going straight to Lago Atitlan, the next stop on the gringo trail, so I have stopped in Santa Cruz del Quiche for two days. There is absolutely nothing to do here, and I am pretty much the only gringo. The others have gone on to their various destinations. I will go to Atitlan though, and Antigua. I have to overcome my stupid cultural prejudice against First Worlders (or whatever you call us), since they are likely to be some of the most interesting First Worlders I'll ever meet. And I can at least hang out with them as equals.

So, probably another week in Guatemala, and then on into El Salvador, which I'm really looking forward to -- it has no traveller trail to speak of. Tuomas is generally of a like mind to me, so wants to go to El Savador too, so I hope we can join up again further down the road.

This morning I came across my 90 Doxycycline tablets, supposedly for three months travel in malarial parts of South America. The idea of continuing this rate of experience-exposure for another 7 months and 15 countries sometimes makes my mind feel like exploding. And makes me go hide in an Internet cafe ;). Presumably that's why most travellers stop from time to time for a few weeks in nice, safe, culturally easy gringo hangouts. But now that I've had the full on 100% cultural immersion experience, I find it hard to accept it diluted, even though keeping taking it neat might make my head explode!

Travel really is a drug.

A week in Toledo

I have just spent four days in two Maya villages, Blue Creek and San Jose, in Toledo district in Southern Belize. One of the poorest regions in the country, it is incidentally where Maya Gold chocolate comes from. I stayed two days in a guesthouse, and two days with a family. I didn't take any pictures, due to my usual reticence in treating humans as photo opportunities. Here though are a few of my crowded impressions from those impression-filled few days.

Sharing the joy in accomplishment of reading with Juni, 8. Doing English by pointing at pictures with the smallest daughter. Eating hot bowls of chicken or pork caldo with fingers, accompanied by huge calabash-pots of corn tortillas, freshly cut, milled, patted and fried.

Many first-time experiences. Seeing glow-worms glimmering in the grass, like a trip. Riding with seven guys in the back of a pickup going to the village meeting. Sleeping (just) in a hammock. Washing in a stream surrounded by rainforest. Watching the mother wring a chicken's neck, helping to pull out its feathers, then only four hours later eating it.

Listening with growing incredulity as the village school principal talks enthusiastically, in complete seriousness, about the discovery of the lost city of Atlantis in 2004. "Somwair neeah Japan I tink." They are Maya, but they learn the Caribbean-inflected English used throughout Belize. It fits them, somehow.

Being interrupted mid-shave one morning by two giggling, wriggling sisters, hiding smiling behind shocks of jet-black hair, holding onto each other for support, feet bare, toes splayed, as they inform me: "Yur brekfass reddy!"

Finding myself naturally helping the women (sweeping the floor, plucking the chickens, playing with the children), unable to sit idly by while they work. Yet shying from offering my services with the men's work (raising a roof), embarrassed by my soft hands, weak arms, unsuitable for the task.

The 14-year-old neighbour sitting on the porch with me, telling me about the Romans, and his plans to study history. But when bidden inside by Valentino, he says his goodbyes; he won't come inside the other man's house.

No electricity: at night, the only light is from candles. And in San Jose, old mustard jars filled with kerosene, a length of wick piercing the lid. Sophia knocks one over in her excitement to show me the Maya Atlas. I, worried grownuply about fire hazard, recruit Valentino to help clear up, forgetting that he has been drinking. He snarls at the children and they scatter. He violently mops the tabletop with a nearby pair of trousers, spilling the vase of plastic flowers. Sophia appears, too late, meek and crestfallen, with the Toilet Peepah.

The children wonder at my truck. "It beautiful!" says Juni, simply. I demur: I well remember what a wreck it has looked in parking lots along the way. Yet here, 15 miles of dirt track between us and the rest of world, yes, it somehow does seem quite luxurious. Embarrasingly so.

Eggs and oranges undescribably delicious, eggy and orangey beyond where I had calibrated Eggness and Orangeness to be. Yet their chicken, free-range, organic, freshly killed, is surprisingly tough, gristly and dry.

Mostly, I am inspired and glow from the primal joyousness, the wholehearted dedication to living, the cheerfullness of the children (Valentino has 10, 2 boys and 8 girls. He tells me matter-of-factly that two have died: one in infancy, one at 19, of Hepatitis.) According to the Atlas, in most Maya villages children account for 60% of the population. Into adulthood, harder truths are apparent. The subordinate nature of the women's role. The alcoholism amongst the men, and the status games, the playing at being important, speechifying, self-congratulation.

But what has worked for centuries ought, perhaps, to be left to work now. They are paving the road to the villages, they say. Things will, of course, change. But the Maya people have been around since before the Romans: somehow I don't doubt that they will survive whatever comes their way.

things

my 43things

although in fact, only 37 things (so far). how lacking in imagination i must be. or possibly just short of internet time.

what are yours?

frontiers

frontiers are wierd. discontinuities in the desert. i can't get my head round them. why is it that from tijuana to tulum, every cafe in mexico has a paper-napkin holder made of a vertical U of metal, but 3 miles south, across the belize border, suddenly everyone has decided that the correct object to hold paper napkins is a wooden tray with a sprung metal loop?

why is it that from vancouver to halifax, donuts are provided as a de rigeur snack on every street corner by tim horton; yet in america (an equally if not more snack-obsessed country) no such chain was to be seen?

why from baja california to patagonia do they speak spanish, yet in belize it is considered normal to speak english, instead? why do belizeans write their street names in paint on bits of wood, while mexicans get theirs sponsored by car manufacturers and printed on metal? why do mexicans drive like their pregnant wife is in the passenger seat, and belizeans like tomorrow would be soon enough?

the fact that differences in culture exist, i can understand (although even that question does bear reflection). what i find hard to understand is that one culture spans a large area of land, running right up to what is after all an imaginary line, and then suddenly, for no reason at all, just stops.