the map is not the territory

De regreso

2008-01-21T15:36:00.000-08:00

On the 13th of December I hugged Ana Maria tight, kissed her one last time, tightened my pack on my back, and stepped into Medellín's Metro, bound for the bus terminal. It was time to head back to Bogotá, where this two-week trip, my year in Colombia, and my life away from the UK during the preceding two-and-a-half years, were to come to an end.

Five days later, five days filled with frantic last-minute tying up of loose ends and poignant goodbyes, I was barrelling towards the airport in what was likely to be my last life-threatening taxi ride for some time. So many "last"s. Characteristically, I nearly missed the flight, only the second last in line before they closed the check-in. Also characteristically, this meant that I got a free upgrade to Business class. And, the following day, I was back in the UK, back in Coulsdon, back in the bedroom which I grew up in and where I had not lived for 10 years.

2007. It was a year which started with my catching a last-minute flight back to Colombian with a beautiful Colombian girl who had stolen my heart the previous summer in Bogotá, and ended with me leaving, with heavy heart, another beautiful girl in another Colombian city, another delightful Colombiana who had enchanted me and brought me so many happy moments in such a short time. It was a year in two acts, defined by a break-up so wrenching that I cried into my washing-up for weeks after as I slowly came to terms with the fact that I would not be spending my life with the girl whom I had loved so intensely. But Act One has already been amply decribed in this blog. What of Act Two?

The key moment of the year came when, looking for a new flat, I came across a house-share in the Chapinero neighbourhood of Bogotá: a neighbourhood characterised by its many Universities, its gay population, and its high street catering to regular-Jo lower middle class bogotanos, with shabby malls, shops selling chinese imported goods, and dolarazos or dollar-stores. Run by an American named Grant, the house had six rooms, and was a focus for the small foreign population of Bogotá: Brits, Americans, Europeans and Aussies congregated here. Everyone had their own story and without exception all taught me something about the simple act of living. Here I found a group of people who were so far from living in a rut it sometimes seemed absurd to juxtapose us against the highly conservative bogotanos. Some teaching English, some in love with Colombians, some recovering from relationships, some working with NGOs or in other business ventures. I found people who shared a passionate love for Colombia yet a passionate frustration with its difficult aspects: being able to use humour to let off steam was a huge blessing.

Feeling at home among this inspirational bunch of people, I started to really enjoy Bogotá. Through them, I made many amazing friendships with Colombians. Teaching at the local school, going to the local gym with my housemate, sipping coffee at Juan Valdez with a Colombian girl: I started to feel part of a community in Bogotá in a way that I hadn't done before. I met some great girls: I realised that Panda was not the love of my life. I travelled outside Bogotá for weekends away -- the Eje Cafetero, the Caribbean coast, Medellín, Girardot, Cucuta. I saw something of the astonishing beauty of this country. I was happy.

Around August, I bought a flight home for late December, attracted by an inexplicably cheap fare. I wanted to spend some time with my family, renew old friendships that had weathered two dry years of communicating only by infrequent Messenger and Skype conversations, and see how the UK had got on for two years without me. I, and most of my friends, were celebrating their 30th birthdays in the first half of 2008, and my brother was getting married in June. It seemed like an appropriate time to return.

But then in October, I visited Medellín with my wonderfully entertaining housemate Bridget. I met Ana Maria and wished that I had longer to get to know her and that she didn't live a 9-hour bus ride away. In November I spent a long weekend with her and a bus full of rowdy Paisas on the Caribbean coast. Later that month she visited me for a week (what Colombians call "eight days") in Bogotá, visiting the nearby attractions, and enjoying the simple pleasure of each other's company. I began to regret that I was leaving.

In December, Stefan arrived from Holland, for a two-week holiday. You can follow his blog of our trip at http://www.ballofdirt.com/entries/19444/262599.html. Apart from two weekends in Bogotá, we spent most of our time on the Caribbean coast. Although I hadn't seen him for 12 months, it was great to find that conversation flowed as freely and widely as it ever had, as we compared notes on the year. Travelling around Colombia with someone new to the country, I saw things afresh through his eyes: the stunning natural beauty, the regional diversity, the openness and friendliness of the people, quick to smile, concerned for outsiders. I was reminded of the quality of life even with a modest income in European terms. I wondered more about leaving.

But leave I did, and on December 20th, full of bittersweet emotions, I arrived home. But I now looked at "home" through a different lens. I had lived in another culture long enough to really begin to call that home, and my ideas of where "returning" would take me to had blurred. I had good, close friends now on two sides of the Atlantic; friendships in two languages. I had as much reason to live there as here. I missed so much about "there". I missed even things I'd hated. I missed it as you miss an ex-lover: irrationally. Missing everything about her, even the things which you hated.

But I concentrated on the positive aspects of being home. I came back to find my brother a changed man, having both got engaged, and moved out of my parents place and into a first home with his fiancée, since I'd left the UK two and a half years previously. He had become a man, via a well-trodden route. And yet, even as I looked at myself, without a job, without a home, practically without money, with a girlfriend of one month 6000 miles away, I could feel within myself that I too had changed distinctly in those two years. I had gone through some amazing experiences, some really unhappy times, and some great times. But I had also fulfilled two of my greatest dreams, to travel solo, and to live in a foreign country. I feel the spring in my step, the sparkle in my eye, the relaxed attitude to life, all the signs to everyone I meet that say: I am someone. I have lived and seen things most people have no idea about: no way I'm going to get upset about small things like a someone giving me bad vibes or getting agro. I'm confident, I'm happy, I know who I am, I'm in charge, and I'm going somewhere. And in the end, it seems to me that that is what maturity brings you, what growing up is all about you. Getting there could be marrying your childhood sweetheart and making a home together. Or it could be living in Latin America for two and a half years. Take your pick.

3 month's silence

2007-10-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

Can it really be three months since I last posted? And three months since I finished the CELTA? Time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like a banana.

I have a pending post about how collectivised Colombian society is. It seems it is not going to get posted, so to summarise: family is very important to Colombians, with cousins and aunts being as much a part of the family as brothers and sisters are to us. Friends also, with lifelong childhood friends being very common. We tend to obsess about our fragmented UK or US societies, seeing it as a bad thing and an unfortunate side-effect of our drive toward individualism. Close friend and family support networks do have some clear benefits in keeping society meshed together, but living here you realise the heavy price everyone pays in freedom of self-expression, action and thought. As DH said to me the other day: the UK may have lots of screwed up people, but we make some great music.

So that aside, what is new donde Pablo? Well, since I finished the CELTA I have had the idea that I would like to teach in a public (state-run) school, for ethical reasons. Despite strong opposition from all my Colombians friends who all went to 'nice' private colegios, and from the public school system itself, among whose chief characteristics do not rank flexibility and openness, I finally started teaching in my local public school this week. I do them two hours every morning, teaching 13- to 15-year-olds half a class at a time, ie in groups of 17. They aren't paying me (getting a work visa would have been more trouble than it would be worth) but this is freeing me from all responsibility to "be good" and allowing me to go into class with more confidence. I'm only at day two but so far I have enjoyed it hugely.

The week before last I worked in an orphanage for two days, with younger children, from 5 to 11, supposedly as an assistant to the English teacher there. But the children have lots of behavioural problems (to be expected given their likely backgrounds) and have a very low level of English. Although working with the kids was in some ways rewarding, I didn't feel I could offer them much having no child psychology training and not really being able to teach much English beyond colours and numbers. One girl was playing with plasticine and I asked her, "What are you making?" "A house," she replied. "A house for me because I am an abandoned girl and I don't have a house." Mainly those kids need hugs I think, not English lessons.

I have bought a plane-ticket for Europe, and return to Madrid on December 18. I really look forward to being home again. Originally my plan was to teach here in a school for a while to practise, improve my teaching skills, and find out if maybe teaching might be what I wanted to do "when I came home." I was thinking of doing a PGCE. But I have to say I'm almost wondering why teach in a UK school full of gits when there are lovely kids all around the world who need and deserve an education a lot more. But perhaps my kids are just being nice to me so far because I'm a novelty. Let's see how 'inspired' I am by December.

In other news, I have been writing the odd bit of software, going out partying with my housemates, meeting girls, going on dates. Facebook is a recent internet addiction, and a superb way to not forget birthdays. Photos go there now too: friend-request me if you are interested. A few trips out of the city, and a few party nights within the city.

Oh, and I accompanied my housemate on a trip to the border to change her visa. We ended up spending a day in Venezuela: much like Colombia, only with less comprehensible Spanish, and huge 70's American gas-guzzlers instead of cute little Korean imported cars -- petrol there is extremely cheap.

Oh, and, finally Apple brought out the iPod I always wanted: whole-face screen, wi-fi net browsing, and video. So, to make up for my more or less complete lack of geek- and/or consumerist- purchases in the last two years, I have charged a friend going to Miami with obtaining me one. Bets on how long before getting relieved of it by a knife-wielding street-gentleman.

More Chiva

2007-07-10T20:15:00.000-07:00

A Chiva is a kind of wide, low-slung bus with no windows or doors. Here is one in Cartagena:

I'm not sure if they were ever used as actual transport. Presumably, given that the number of speakers heavily outweighs the number of doors, they have always and only ever been used as party buses.

The plan is you get a bunch of people together, get in the bus, and it drives around while you demonstrate publically that you are Having a Good Time. Very exhibitionist: very latino. And, it has to be said, quite a laugh. Especially with the liberal application of aguardiente.

On Saturday, to celebrate end-of-CELTA, the teachers and students clubbed together and got one. I was quite pleased, having been here for over a year and never been on the inside of one. Amusingly, the bus is high enough to allow Colombians and/or girls to dance, but to ensure that foreigners/men remain seated. This provided me with a perfect excuse to do what I would have done anyway -- namely, drink, while watching incredibly sober girls shake their booties, scream, sing along with Vallenato hits of 1950, and generally act in a way that it would take me a lot of aguardiente to get to. We drove around Bogota city centre generally pissing other people off and making sure we had been seen, then we drove up into the mountains above the city for dinner, and then to a club. The club was practically empty, but since we were a group of 40 we basically made our own club. The DJ who must have been pushing 50 even took requests, and played a bit of 'electronica' for the sake of those of us unused or unable to dance to his standard latin rhythms.

I thought I should record for Posterity that I had done a Chiva trip, because it's such a Colombian thing to do, and it took me such a long time to getting round to doing it. But really there's not much to say about it, except that I got quite drunk and had a nice time flirting with a bunch of lively teenagers (our ex-students). Plus ça change. Good post-breakup therapy, anyway.

On my own two feet

2007-07-07T06:38:00.000-07:00

So here I am, emerging blinking into the sunlight after the long crawl through the tunnel of CELTA: yesterday was the Last Day! Unfortunately, we don't get even a provisional grade until two weeks hence, so I wasn't sure if I was celebrating or drowning my sorrows last night. But indications are that we've all done pretty well.

So the week before last, Panda decided that she wouldn't like me as a boyfriend any more. It was a little hard to take, as I suppose I thought it'd be forever, but she took her time to think about everything and was completely honest with me throughout the process, which although it can be a little painful, is ultimately the fairest way to be treated. We said our goodbyes last Saturday, tears were shed, and then the next day she was back to Duitama and a whole different life there. When people say, "why did you split up?", I tend to look at it as a combination of ingredients and catalyst. The raw ingredients for our break-up have been present from the start, in the form of cultural differences. Not simply between "Colombian" and "British", but between our specific brand of each. The catalyst was her going off to Duitama and having the time of her life with her five housemates and 25 other medical students from around the country, working hard, playing hard, meeting new people, and, I think, realising that she just basically couldn't be bothered with the struggle that our relationship was at times.

Of course despite my best intentions, I lost all my cool and begged her not to leave me, and after she'd gone I felt pretty devastated for the weekend. But the moral of this story is not really that. The thing that has impacted me most about this episode is how quickly I recovered. Saturday and Sunday night I couldn't face being alone in my flat so forced myself upon a CELTA colleague and his girlfriend, who are lovely, and had good evenings. Monday afternoon I decided to just go for a walk in the sun after working on my assignment all afternoon. Then I got in a bus and went downtown and ate chicken in a chicken place with plastic seats, surly waitresses, and football on the TV, and suddenly realised: it's actually ok! I had arrived in Colombia alone; I was now in Colombia alone. I had had a really interesting and challenging year in between, with an amazing girl, and that would always now be part of who I am.

Reflecting on this this week, I have concluded that my "year off" solo travel experience has indeed had the desired effect: to make me more happy and certain of who I am, so that I am not dependent on external things to define my happiness or my life.

I should say of course that during the course of that not very happy or pleasant weekend, I had the very good fortune to have many chats, online or via skype, with lots of good friends back in the UK and Europe who supported me enormously, and I am very grateful for that. Being dumped always sucks; being dumped miles from home had the potential to be extremely sucky indeed. And I'm sure that all that support and chats pointed me on the right path, to my speedy recovery. I am not undervaluing my friends, and the support they gave, by any means.

So now the question really is: what next? I have loved the CELTA. I have enjoyed teaching, and I have enjoyed teaching language, because I find it so fascinating anyway. And Colombians are widely seen as being generally one of the most rewarding nationalities to teach anywhere in the world. And oddly, despite my gripes about Bogota, since I started the CELTA and began to feel a part of the city, in having a daily routine, colleagues/friends/students etc, I feel a lot happier here. And it is certainly preferable to be in a city because you want to, rather than because you are waiting for someone, even if you love that someone very much (or perhaps particularly then.)

A friend of Panda's showed my CV to his school, a private bi-lingual girls school, and they coincidentally needed an IT teacher. They seemed quite interested. But after a first interview I decided not to continue with the applications procedure, for three reasons: one, IT is quite boring, especially at high-school level, and it's English that I've trained to and would like to teach. Two, I wasn't that happy philosophically with teaching a bunch of privileged rich girls to become privileged rich adults: how rewarding would that be? And three, they wanted to pay me only 2 million pesos (about 500 quid) a month, for a 35h working week in the school, plus preparation work at home. Oh, and the final kicker: I would have to sign a one-year contract. In the end, the game just wasn't worth the candle.

However, it seems that I'm not likely to get much more than that, salary-wise, in any teaching job. That's OK I suppose -- I'm here more for the craic than the cash, of course. But I think because of that I'm quite picky about the exact kind of job I want. Unfortunately, without any experience, finding that exact job might be difficult. Additionally, I have to find another apartment in the next 10 days. So there's plenty going on right now. But, importantly, I feel very positive about all the possibilities, and ready to start another chapter of my life!

Bogota in the Grauniad

2007-07-03T14:27:00.000-07:00

From today's Guardian:

Bright lights of Bogota
http://www.guardianabroad.co.uk/tefl/article/298

Bus drivers

2007-06-16T06:12:00.000-07:00

In London, the Routemasters have been phased out, because they are not cost-effective, requiring two men to operate them -- a driver to drive, and a conductor to collect the fare.

In Bogota, the busetas have just one driver. Sometimes his girlfriend, children, or friends ride in the cab with him, and help him by collecting the fair. But most often it is just the one man (and it always is a man), who, as well as navigating the vicious Bogota traffic, a considerable feat in itself, must look out for passengers standing on the sidewalk (bus stops aren't common: people just wait at the roadside and wave at the bus they want), operate the doors which are opened and closed with a jerry-rigged panel built from the electrical spare parts bin, collect the fare from passengers entering the bus, give change, and make as good time as he can, driving in whatever crazy way he can to shave minutes off his route time. At certain set checkpoints, men with clipboards in the street record the time the bus passes: presumably this information is used to decide whether the driver should keep his job or not.


Routemaster, London	Buseta, Bogota

As soon as you step into the bus, the driver accelerates away, throwing you against the seats as you click through the turnstile. Desperately clinging on to the handrails you scramble for some money for the driver. You poke it through a little hole in the plastic divider separating passengers from driver. When the driver has reached third gear, he takes his hand off the gearshift long enough to take your money. He glances at it then counts out the change with his right hand, all the while continuing desperate lane-changes and hard acceleration/braking so as to move ahead as quickly as possible.

So the upshot of all this is that although it is hardly a comfortable and stress-free experience, you can get on (and off) a bus wherever you want, which is extremely convenient, and you are sure to get to your destination as fast as humanly possible given the traffic conditions. I suppose the downside is you might have a crash. Most people don't like to sit in the rear row of seats, or even those by the window, presumably on the basis that that's where you're most likely to be crushed if another bus drives into your one. I don't know how common that is, although on Thursday I did see a bus that had driven into a tree outside my house.

Is that a Concept Checking Question you're asking?

2007-06-12T19:51:00.000-07:00

Something the CELTA folks are very big on is asking questions to confirm instructions are understood, and to check concepts. So are they big on asking questions? What two things do they like to ask questions about?

The problem with this is that I have started doing it in real life :0. The classic correction by saying "Do we say, I do a mistake?" Great in the classroom: patronising as hell at the dinner table. Must stop doing it.

CELTA is Fun

2007-06-10T06:57:00.000-07:00

Over breakfast with Panda yesterday, talking about my first week on the CELTA course, I realised how much happier I am than I was before I started. I think it's due to quite a number of different factors.

Firstly, just a simple thing: I have a somewhat fixed daily routine. It's amazing the calming effect that has, psychologically. Also, bcause I catch the bus every day to 'work' and back, I suddenly feel apart of the city in a way I hadn't done up until now.

A second thing is the course itself. It has been really interesting, and has stimulated me to think about all sorts of issues to do with teaching English, and teaching generally. I am interested in language structure anyway, and teaching is a fun way to study it. Also, like any managed learning environment, it has a calming effect, because you know that someone somewhere has a Plan for you, and though you might not see it all right now, you know that if you complete each small challenge as it is provided to you, you are on the path to success. In the horrible unmanaged mess that is Real Life I am plagued by doubts that anything is in fact the right thing to be doing at any moment. Perhaps religious people feel like they're on a kind of study course their whole life long, with God at the helm.

A third thing is that I am spending my days with people from my own culture (more or less). Quite a number of Brits, some Americans, a Kiwi, and a Swede. I can talk and not feel like an illiterate moron; I can make cultural references and have them be understood; things just flow naturally. Someone suggested going to the pub after school Friday before I even did.

A fourth thing is that our students have been great, and that has really given me a much more positive attitude to Bogotanos/Colombians. They love to learn, they love to join in, they love to contribute, they are eager to please, they don't "take advantage" because they have a trainee teacher. I want to give them all a hug! I remember feeling the same thing when I taught that one time in Cartagena (on the coast). I am definitely looking forward to teaching Colombians for real, wherever that might end up being.

And finally I think it is great to have a 'job' which is involving in many different ways: intellectually, emotionally, physically too (moving around a classroom instead of sitting at a computer.) Certainly getting up in front of students and teaching has given me a huge buzz. Beforehand, on both occasions, I have been really nervous, and have even thought, "why am I doing this? It's just not me! I'm a hiding-behind-a-computer sort of person, not a getting-up-in-front-of-people person!" But precisely because it is quite challenging for me it has given me a huge confidence boost. Teaching is a social activity, and success (at least on the social level) in the classroom has made me feel much more of a social person all round.

I realise that a lot of these things are the "beginners buzz" -- the highly rewarding quick-learning phase at the beginning of any new activity, combined with the kick of doing something that's all new. I'm sure that long-term teachers will tell me, "don't worry, you get pretty bored of it pretty fast." But for the time being I'm the happiest I've been since I came back to Colombia in January. And that's good enough for me :).

QotD

2007-06-07T19:44:00.000-07:00

From George Monbiot, at monbiot.com yesterday:

"What the rich nations give with one finger they take back with both hands."

No ASBOs in Colombia

2007-06-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

ASBOs -- Anti-social Behaviour Orders. As quintessentially British as tea, cricket, the village green, and, well... anti-social behaviour.

Despite the fact that statistics indicate that crime, especially armed crime, is more of a problem in Bogota than in Brighton, I have to say the experience on the ground is rather different.

Consider this common scenario in any town-centre in Britain: you are walking down the street minding your own business when you spot a group of young males coming the other way. You avoid their eyes, or cross the road because you don't want any trouble. Are they drunken yobs on their way home from a night on the lager looking for a fight? Are they a group of teenagers in tracksuits with nothing to do and a bad attitude? Or school-kids waiting for the bus, who will probably shout abuse, and might pull a knife on you to prove their machismo? Best, in any case, just to keep out the way.

I had just learned to live with and accept this as normal. But living now in a country and city with far bigger social problems, scandalously unequal wealth distribution, and a generally poorer populace, where I just do not see this happen, has made me realise that it is not inevitable, and that something must be seriously wrong with British culture for this to be the norm.

I get buses quite often here. They are always full of hard-working, normal people -- young and old, males and females, usually alone or in couples, going quietly about the business of their day (or night). They are not dominated and terrorised by groups of odious teens.

Often, someone will get into your bus and try to sell trinkets, sweets, prayers printed on paper as bookmarks -- anything, just to make an honest few pesos. Or they will get in and sing, do anything. They are very poor, often probably through no fault of their own, and may have been through horrific things (1.5 million Bogotanos are living in shanty towns, displaced by the violence -- that means they have probably lived first-hand through the kind of terrible violent acts that Britain's bored teens have only seen in their tasteless video games). What makes the biggest impression is that they are without exception respectful to all. They ask the bus driver if they can get in and make their pitch, and accept it if he refuses. They are unfailingly polite to the passengers, and simply provide the opportunity for one to help, without pressuring or being in any way anti-social.

Or people (often women) will turn to making and selling arepas on street corners, charging just a few hundred pesos (10p) for each one. Even though they know that business people or tourists have much more buying power, they are honest and charge the same price to everyone. Squeedgy kids clean windscreens at stop-lights. Old crippled men beg for change at street corners. But they never threaten, and they don't get anti-social if you say no -- despite the fact that they probably need that money to eat.

Of course, crime does happen. A couple of straggly-looking kids tried to rob us a while back, Henry got his cellphone taken off him in a bus by a man with a knife, and the British Embassy reports that people have been stabbed when refusing to cooperate with robbers. But when it does happen, you can't help but feel that at least it was in some way justified. With such a vast discrepancy in wealth, and very few safety-nets for the poor, it is not surprising that some out of desperation turn to crime. It is more remarkable that so many do not, and have a genuine work ethic and respect for their communities and fellow Colombians.

In Bogota, walking down a quiet street at night, you might want to be wary of people who look very poor. They almost certainly won't, but it is possible that they might rob you. You might get stabbed in the process. But at least they have a reason to be attacking you! They need the money more than you do. So much more, that its almost criminal for you to have it in the first place. In Bogota the sight of groups of young males is rarer, because the culture encourages people to go out in mixed groups anyway. But when it does happen, they are not yobs out for a fight, a stabbing, a proving of their masculinity.

In Britain, no-one is really genuinely poor to the same degree, and even those without money have access to a good infrastructure. What gives those yobs the right to go around terrorising people with their anti-social behaviour?

Whenever someone mentions Colombia's "culture of violence" I am reminded of Britain's "culture of yobbishness".

I'm comin home in a f**kin ambulance!

2007-05-15T17:21:00.000-07:00

Panda has been offered an elective in Guy's Hospital by King's College London in March and April of next year. Means we'll be in the UK for my 30th birthday, which I'm quite chuffed about.

Translation

2007-05-14T19:34:00.000-07:00

A friend has sent me her thesis, written in English, and asked if I wouldn't mind taking a look and pointing out any grammar problems. Here's a representative sentence:

Other studies have shown that histrionicotoxins block the ionic conductance, accelerate the inactivation of the nicotinic cholinoceptor (see Daly et al., 1993), diminish the ionic conductance on the voltage-gated sodium channels (see Daly et al., 1993) and inhibit the voltage-gated potassium channel (see Daly et al., 1993).

Unfortunately, I am having trouble translating this into any English, let alone good English. It's a bit of a blow to the ego to have to go to her and tell her I'm too stupid to help her out.

Move to Britain? They're all drunks and psychos

2007-05-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

"Move to Britain? They're all drunks and psychos."

Sangre! Sangre! (La becerrada de Cami)

2007-04-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I went to a bullfight. I have been to Spain on several occasions, and the idea of going to a bullfight has always arisen, but I've never actually gone through with it. I mean, watching an animal being tortured and then killed as entertainment... I've never quite seen the attraction.

But Saturday was not a strict bullfight as such, but a "becerrada". A becerro is a young bull, much smaller than the fully-grown model, I was told. And it is not actually killed, the sword is plastic, it is just a bit of fun. OK, I thought. Doesn't sound too bad. Also, Cami (Panda's brother) was to partake: it was one of the highlights of his year, apparently. It seemed like good form to go and support him.

It is organised by Cami's school. Each year, they rent a few bulls and a mini bullring at the polo club (you can see what kind of school it is), and the boys in the upper few years (15-18) get to partake. When we arrived, there were quite a lot of scruffy-posh boys in white shirts and jeans, with coloured cummerbunds, preparing for the fight by drinking plenty of aguardiente. I didn't blame them. I asked someone how many times they had practised before the event. "Oh, a few times during the year." Not many, I thought. "Yes, they charge a wheelbarrow with plastic horns on it towards each other." Hang on: so this is the first time in front of an actual bull? "Oh yes, for lots of them, hahaha!" Gulp.

We had some food and then made our way to a ring-side spot where we basked in the sun for a bit. The atmosphere built, a band played, and finally the boys swarmed into the ring and sung the national anthem in a deep-voiced show of testosterone. They cleared the ring, and the first team (blue cummerbunds) came into the ring and hid behind sort of wooden fences around the ring. The bull was released, and came running in, and then stood wagging its tail and looking around enthusiastically. Eventually a boy broke cover, and, curtain aloft, ran into the ring. He waved it a bit, and the bull charged, running right through the curtain. Applause! The bull's horns were rounded-off at the ends, but given the force of the head-butt I imagine it would be comparable to having a fence-post stabbed into your throat or thorax, rather than a knife. Some comfort.

The boy fell in the sand. The crowd roared. The sun beat down. The boy made a hasty exit back to his wooden fence, and another boy, in a daze of aguardiente, teenage male pride, and some vestige of the hunter's instinct, came forward. "Sangre! Sangre!" the crowd began to chant in glee. "Blood! Blood!" It was hard to know if the boys were scared. Their fear blurred right into aggressiveness. The bull charged back and forth. The boy didn't really look like he knew what he was doing, but held out bravely for a few charges.

By this time my own adrenaline level was running wild. I thought the spectacle pretty disgusting, a barbaric celebration of the basest of human instincts, that kind of maleness which leads our species into wars and plenty of other atrocities. The game seemed a sort of male right of passage comparable to teenagers playing chicken by driving their cars at each other until one of them steers away, losing face. I have to admit, Colombia's bloody and violent history came to mind too: that made me feel even less comfortable in a crowd happily celebrating fear-induced male aggression. When the crowd cheered and clapped, I found myself shouting "Barbarians!" The parents in front of me half-turned in distaste. Who was this upstart, with anything other than pure admiration for their brave young hooligans? How dare he!

Now another boy was in the ring. He was holding some kind of tinsel-covered sticks, in the colours of the flag of Colombia. "Is he going to stick those in the bull??" I asked Panda. "Yes, but they don't really hurt, don't worry!" she said. The boy ran toward the animal, and leapt over its back, stabbing down with all his might into the bullock's neck and back, ramming the spikes home. The animal started, and became more agitated. One fell loose, but the other stayed in place, with the bull twisting around trying to work out what was ailing it. In any case, it had had the desired effect. The bull was now angry.

Another boy came out with similar sticks, longer this time. Another cheer, another roar of approval, more shouts of "sangre! sangre!", and another pair of sticks stabbed into the animal. The boy looked very proud of his vicious achievement, and the crowd supported him 100%. As they applauded and cheered his bravery, I couldn't stop myself, and found myself shouting, "Yeah, well done, you tortured a defenseless animal!" The parents in front really didn't like that. Panda turned to me angrily: "Do you want to ruin the whole thing?!", she asked. "No," I said. "I want to leave". And I did. I couldn't bear to watch any more.

I felt sickened by the whole spectacle. More by the celebration of violence and machismo than by the actual damage to the animal, I think, but a bit of that too. I don't really think animals have souls, I don't mind if animals get hurt, but I think to celebrate that hurt is the height of barbarity. And watching it live struck me deeply. I sat in the club-house and drank a beer, waiting for my heart rate to return to normal. I thought that I probably should have tanked up before the thing: many unpleasant things are easier to bear with a bit of alcohol in the blood stream.

I felt bad that I had made such a scene. But I felt worse that the cream of Colombia's elite feel it appropriate to celebrate the most aggressive instincts of their young men. I didn't talk much in the car on the way home.

Cumpleando anos

2007-04-25T20:23:00.000-07:00

http://picasaweb.google.com/pmg102/29thBirthday

Beautiful poverty

2007-04-22T19:03:00.000-07:00

If you're like me, you will have at some point seen pictures of rural pre-Industrial Revolution Britain, the canonical shepherd or goatherd with flock, with perhaps rambling simple dwelling in the background, and yearned for a simpler yesteryear consisting of sun, grass, and hearth, and notably not containing rush-hour traffic, overflowing email inboxes, and shopping centres on a Saturday.

Last weekend, we took a trip into the Colombian countryside. Soon after leaving the city limits of Bogota, the road took us through "campesino country". Campesinos are the peasants of Colombia, eking out a marginal living from the land by cultivating basic crops on a scrap of land, and perhaps rearing a cow for milk. Their life is no doubt picturesque. I tried and failed many times to capture on camera their picturesque poverty -- the clothes laid out neatly on the grass to dry, the self-built tumbledown dwellings, the donkey with a load of sticks weighing heavy across its back.

Unlike Colombia's urban poor, living in shanty towns hastily assembled wherever the displaced population arrive (1.5 million in Bogota's southern suburbs alone), the rural poor are lucky enough to be photogenic. Not displaced by violence, they live in steady communities, and can count on neighbours and family for support. Their lives are a small distance above gruelling grinding horror and poverty. They have a family, a place to call home, possessions, a tradition. Children learn at grandpa's knee the ways of the land.

But in our eagerness to appreciate the beauty of the simple country-dweller, we are at great risk of seeing the positive in an essentially negative situation. What hope does an intelligent, diligent, bright young woman born into such a situation have of becoming the next president of Colombia? Or a lawyer, doctor or member of Congress? Essentially none. When we look at developed countries, we find that the number of people who choose, when given a range of opportunities, to live such a nominally bucolic idyll of a life, is effectively zero. We feel that it is right that some people should be living such a simple life, so close to the land and part of a close-knit community -- whilst we ourselves nonetheless choose to work in the City, earn a six-figure sum, and live comfortably in the Home Counties with two pedigree dogs and a plasma TV.

The peasant has disappeared from British society, thanks to the Industrial Revolution. After the fact, we often bemoan the Industrial Revolution, the ensuing urbanisation, and loss of innocence and closeness to Nature. Yet the raw truth is that given the choice, nearly everyone would choose, and did indeed choose, to live in smouldering cities with some hope of wealth and betterment for their family, than a so-called happy life tending livestock.

Whilst it is only right that we should not see the development model followed by our own country as the only valid such model, we are also in danger of over-romanticising certain social states, such that we allow -- or cause -- people in other countries to stay in this model despite their own inclination to leave it.

Until every single citizen of Colombian has an equal opportunity to obtain a quality education and a career, I will continue to consider the material wealth of those who few who have had this opportunty an unfair bounty, unfairly gained, and thus not to be respected. One's right to happily enjoy the fruits of one's labour is proportional to how much others in one's society have had an equal opportunity to obtain such fruits.

A Trifle

2007-04-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

I was sitting next to a man with jelly in one ear and custard in the other, so I turned to him and said, "Are you a trifle deaf?" and he said, "No, I'm mentally ill as it happens."

Long hot showers of the soul

2007-03-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

I thought that the global warming debate had reached a point where the fact of its happening was no longer in question, and the discussion from now on would be on how best to combat and cope with the threat.

Then Channel 4 broadcast a programme saying it was all a liberal conspiracy, and for a while the debate seemed to move backward again. Thankfully it seems that the programme has been widely recognised as a PR exercise in selective editing of selected evidence.

But an interesting idea that emerged in the debate surrounding the program was that liberals or environmentalists might invent a global climate threat. Or that they would have some agenda which would cause them to tend to distort the data towards an overly-alarmist viewpoint. When those with a vested interest in humanity's ongoing and increasing consumption of goods hold the view that global warming is not happening, or is not the result of human activity, it is only sensible to question their neutrality, whichever viewpoint one holds oneself. But, as Marcus Brigstocke said on Radio 4's The Now Show, liberals would invent a climate change fantasy in order to benefit themselves... how?!?!

I grew up with hose-pipe bans being the norm. Washing your car with a hose on your front drive in summer in British suburbia is morally akin to beating your children there. Your bright green front lawn shouts "I am evil!" Showering three times a day doesn't make you a Nice Clean Person: on the contrary, it makes you a Naughty Wasteful Person. The logic is as follows: The UK is experiencing drier and drier summers, and water is scarce. We ought to share what little we have around fairly. Basic ethics.

Or so I thought. Until I came here. Colombia has abundant natural resources -- whether it's flowers, fruit, coffee or coke that you want, Colombia's absurd fertility makes this country a leading producer of all four. There is no lack of water here. So therefore... there's no moral case against overusing water, right? I couldn't quite accept it. People using hosepipes to clean their front steps every day still seemed wrong. It still felt wrong to wash up under a running tap.

Now it is possible that I'm mistaken and there is a valid argument for not using too much water here either. But that isn't really what interested me. What I found interesting was that my feeling of doing wrong wasn't in fact as straightforwardly logical as I thought. It seemed to be based more on a sort of over-arching philosophy of life: that one should use only as little resources as one can, that one should leave the planet as much in the state that one found it as possible. Perhaps, even, that lots of long hot showers should be avoided simply because they are enjoyable! :o In short, that despite my logical arguments, in fact a kind of Puritan ethics drove my behaviour, not just a straighforward consideration for others.

And I realised that perhaps this is what those who claim that global warming is not in fact a result of human action, that cutting back on our consumptive activities will not help anything, were talking about. Facts are something that can be debated, and, hopefully, a consensus reached, based on evidence. Moral arguments, although subjective, are also universal. They can be presented in the global debate in clear terms: is it right, for instance, that the few who live in luxury should deny the millions living in gruelling poverty the means to build their way out of that poverty? I don't think there are many who would claim that it is. But once we get down into philosophy, the debate loses all universality. Is the path to true happiness through self-denial, frugality, and self-discipline? Or is it through comfort, pleasure and leisure? There are no answers to these questions. Philosophers have debated them for millenia. Religions have their opinions: modern consumer culture has another.

I think we might do well to be very careful in excluding ideology from the climate change debate, and concentrate solely on facts and morality. If it could be demonstrated that the flights of gap-year students going to build bridges in Ouagadougo do more environmental damage than the cars of those who drive to Bluewater every Sunday on shopping sprees, then we should agree to regulating the former rather than the latter. Even if I would personally prefer people to be building bridges than going shopping :).

Ideals

2007-03-12T18:21:00.001-07:00

I've been reading a few books on the history and current affairs of Colombia. Many of you probably already know the key words and phrases: narco-guerrilla kidnapping, state-backed paramilitary terror, mass displacement, human rights violations, etc. These are both the public image of Colombia, and, unfortunately, a part of its reality. The US has provided substantial fuel to this fire, substantial enough that it seems likely the fire would have burned out on any number of occasions in the last 60 years were it not for their contribution.

However, the fact which has impacted me most is the extreme discrepancy in wealth. It seems hard to argue against the case that the vast majority of the population are being kept in abject poverty by a super-rich elite when considering that:

14% of the population, 6 million people, are living on less than $1 a day
the poorest 20% earn an average of $450 a year
the richest 10% earn an average of $8,450 a year
last week, I saw a chap driving along in a brand new Jaguar XJ, price with import duty perhaps $100,000

With such a vast spread of incomes, it is hard to work out who is the "ordinary" Colombian. Once you've excluded the super-rich (the top 3%, let's say, since 3% of the population own 70% of the land), you are still left with a vast range, from the abjectly poor right up to what might be considered "middle-class" households -- two cars, a large modern apartment in a gated compound, yearly holidays abroad.

The nominal minimum wage is $1920 a year. When I first found that out, I was appalled, wondering how on earth those people -- waitresses, cooks, cleaners etc -- could afford things like mp3-players, jeans, cellphones, burgers, etc, which all cost as much as or more than their US prices, and are apparently on sale everywhere. But it looks like those people are in something like the 70th percentile across national earnings -- in other words, reltively rich!

I have never really thought of the UK as much of an egalitarian society, but I realise now that it has always been one of my most basic assumptions that things should cost roughly the same everywhere. A beer is 3 quid. Minimum 2, and any more than 4 or 5 is an outrageous extortion, to be expected only in exclusive establishments full of people with more money than sense. The same goes for most basic commodities. Kwik-Save may be somewhat cheaper than Waitrose, but only by maybe 10% -- and in reality, all sectors of society shop in Tesco.

So I just really have trouble getting my head round the fact that in one neighbourhood food or drink or rent will cost 10 or 20 times what it might cost somewhere else. And that is only my limited experience, I'm sure the total range is much broader. It starts to make consumption look a bit odd. You could pay $2 for your lunch -- or go somewhere only marginally less shiny, pay $1, and give the difference to one of those "under a dollar a day" people, thus doubling their daily income!

The only egalitarian thing is transport which by its motionary nature doesn't have a per-neighbourhood cost. 50c for any bus-ride, 20c a kilometre for cab rides.

However of course the place one eats, drinks, rents, or whatever, or even whether one walks, catches a bus or taxi, or drives, is strictly dictated by one's position in the class heirarchy. As a foreigner I am basically excluded from its choking hold, which gives me some welcome freedom. Still, people realise that as a foreigner I must have at least enough money to afford a plane-ticket here, thus making me basically mega-rich compared to 80% of the population. That excludes me from going drinking in the poorest parts of town. It would probably be an irresistible invitation to robbery*. On the flip-side, the fact that I can't list my "family roots" on demand does exclude me from a certain top-level section of society: certain clubs, as well as having astronomical membership costs, are by invitation and reference only.

Becoming more aware of the extreme inequality in this country has made me more than a little uncomfortable going out in the middle-class establishments, and with the middle-class preoccupations of most of my social circle. It's disgusting, right, spending more than what 80% of the population earn in a day on dinner?

Well, that is what my European socialist heart tells me. But there are counter-arguments: if there is an elite who by protecting their own land and financial interests are ensuring that this situation continues, they are not the same people as this middle-class. Secondly, I can't (and nor can anyone) redress the extreme inequality by not spending that money, even if it was simply given to the poor. The roots of the problem are obviously far deeper. And thirdly, by spending that money, I/we are at least providing employment for some waiters, cleaners, etc, who otherwise might be begging or living in the street.

Those arguments, particularly the last, have always appeared to me as canards used by the nominally socially-responsible middle-class to justify their consumption. Surely the thing to aim for is a more equal society, where each of those cleaner has the opportunity to train as a lawyer or doctor, not just a few extra dollars for hours of backbreaking work with no exit in sight? But in a country with few spaces for movements for social change, and considerable risk for those attempting to do so, is it any surprise that the comfortably-off simply get on with living their lives?

The basic truth is that spending $15 on a steak in a posh North Bogota restaurant, while many people are starving or undernourished, is no worse than spending $15 on it in Norway (the most equal country by some measures) while children die of starvation in Africa. Somehow though, when the problem is outside the national border it becomes unnecessary to think about it too much. Can we blame middle-class Bogotanos for drawing their "national border" around the richer northern suburbs of Bogota, leaving them free to enjoy their steak, when in northern Europe many progressive and socially-conscious people are also enjoying their steaks, while humanitarian disasters all over the world continue to happen?

Source for income figures: UNDP

* Or am I myself becoming prey to class-based stereotyping and fear: "Anyone poorer than us must be out to steal from us! Lock the gates! Keep the peasants at bay!"

Eclipsed

2007-03-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

Picture the scene. It is the last Friday of the month: payday. The night when men go out and drink their paychecks before their wives can get a hold of it. Also the night when thieves are at large: what better time to rob than when a man is drunk, and carrying near on a month's earnings in his back pocket?

At 11pm a man is rushed into the hospital emergency room: he has bullet wounds to his shoulder and is covered in blood. Accompanying him, his son, also wounded, bleeding from the hand and arm. From the garbled reports of the two men, it appears that they had been drinking in a cigarreria on Trece and 45, not a notably pleasant barrio, when thieves burst in, firing several shots, demanding money from the men and the cashier. It appeared that giving up their wallets was not enough, as the man and his son were shot anyway.

The doctors quickly assess the situation. Although it appears at first that the man has head injuries, they quickly establish that his situation is not critical. The son's hand is in bad shape, but his injuries aren't life-threatening either.

Then, another man rushes into the room, carrying his son over his shoulder. This man, 25, is in very bad shape. Doctor's decide that his case must take priority and immediately begin to attend to him. However, the other young man is now becoming very agitated, pointing at the new entrants and shouting, "Ladrones! They tried to kill my father!". Police are called. It appears that during the shooting and robbery attempt, one of the thieves mistakenly shot one of their own: the young man currently bleeding to death in the emergency room. The moral dilemma is clear, but his case is more critical so the doctors naturally prioritise him. His brother arrives. The brother is shouting at them, "Help him! Please help him!". The other young man is shouting, "Let him die, why should you help him, he is a murderer!" Despite all that the doctors can do, his injuries are too serious. After half an hour of emergency surgery, there is nothing more to be done. He is dead. His brother rushes to his side, tears flooding from his eyes. "Please don't die hermano," he keeps repeating. The other young man has fallen silent. The police wait outside.

This scene was not broadcast on an overdramatic telenovela on Friday night. No, in fact it happened on Friday night during Panda's turno (24-hour shifts) at University. She watched that young man die.

Studying Medicine isn't much like studying Computer Science. I think the most dramatic event in my undergraduate studies was probably discovering the power of currying in functional programming. Not entirely comparable. I think medical students get more Reality in one week than the average programmer gets in their whole life. I hope I don't seem ghoulish by reporting this particular event. Naturaly, every week has similar events. Some of the stories I hear make my hair stand on end. I just thought I'd share one with you.

Worth 12,000 words

2007-02-24T06:25:00.000-08:00

Dia sin Carro

2007-02-02T14:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, February 1st, was "car-free day" in Bogota. I first saw it advertised on the front of a Transmilenio bus last week, and asked Panda what it was all about. Apparently, once every 6 to 12 months, the city has a car-free day to reduce air pollution levels. Amusingly enough, buses, the main pollutant producers, are exempt, as are taxis. However, by keeping private cars off the roads, the levels are apparently reduced significantly. I was somewhat taken by the idea: like Ciclovia (where they close a number of major roads to motor traffic on Sunday mornings leaving them free for cycling, roller-blading, and simply strolling) it seemed a rather progressive idea. I resolved to take a walk through the city on that day and see for myself what effect it would have.

The city was transformed. It turned the smoky, noisy, clogged arteries of bogota into relaxed de facto pedestrian byways. Crossing the road was no longer a life-threatening battle of wills with three lanes of speed-limit-defying, fume-belching traffic. Walking along any road, one could hear the birds rather than the constant roar of passing cars. I started from my home, and walked almost 50 blocks towards Panda's university, further than I had originally planned, just savouring the new Bogota which would be available for one day only. On arriving at Panda's university, I joined her and a friend for lunch. Amongst other things, the topic of the dia sin carro came up. Her friend was adamant: the ban had no effect on pollution, yet reduced the economy of Bogota by 40% for that one day. I refrained from asking the source of her statistics -- nor from putting it to her that even if true, was not an attractive ambience to one's city worth the price of a dip in economic productivity? I feared we might come to blows.

And this, I have to say, has been a theme of my interactions with the moneyed classes here. (My interactions with the other classes has, I regret to admit, been limited to thanking them for serving me lunch, or directing me towards the washing powder in Exito.) It seems to be generally accepted that solutions should be personal, not general. Bogota has a pollution problem? Fine: buy a comfortable car, and travel inside of it. Bogota has a crime problem? Fine: live inside of a closed apartment complex, guarded by men in uniforms.

But as ever, being exposed to other ways of thinking is most usefully used to expose the lens through which one views the world oneself, which otherwise remains invisible. I remembered an occasion when I had seen Noam Chomsky lecture in London. His key message was the Zeroth Rule of moral argument (in that case, as applied to the (by his argument, hypocritical) foreign policy of the United States): "Those things which are bad for me, are bad for everyone." Ie, that morals are ubiquitous. It is wrong, at the most basic level, to criticise (or bomb) other countries for engaging in "terrorist activities", whilst committing identical activities oneself. This seemed to me, as it apparently does to Chomsky, fundamental. If the traffic noise in your street bothers you, then the only ethical solution is to band together with your neighbours and campaign for traffic calming methods. It is not simply to buy double glazing.

There is another angle on this too. It is embodied in this phrase from Martin Fowler: "You can change your organization, or change your organization." Ie, either change the way things are done where you are -- or move. Perhaps a traveller, or at least a foreigner living abroad, is more likely to take this attitude. I see that there are states run in different ways. In some states, this universalization of morals is encoded in law. Explicitly, in laws of workplace equality etc, and implicitly, in the nationalisation of public resources and infrastructure. In others, the solution of such problems appears to be left to the individual (with their capacity to solve such problems being directly proportional to their income.)

I notice that this latter approach seems to be favoured in Colombia, and in the U.S. Once, the U.S. had to fight a genuine national threat whose primary ideology happened to be Communist: perhaps this has poisoned it thenceforth from openly accepting Socialist ideologies (at whose core may be the idea of the generalisability of morals.) Colombia's leftwing guerrillas don't even participate in the political process: they hide in the hills, kidnap people, and grow and distribute drugs to fund their war. Perhaps this situation has similarly poisoned ordinary Colombians against such ideas.

New home!

2007-01-18T05:56:00.000-08:00

It's been fun living with Panda's folks. They've treated me really well, and by a lucky coincidence her brother's being at camp meant that I got my own room. But after a week of apartment hunting, I finally found this lovely place, and last night moved in. It's impractical but cool: one huge room with windows all the way along one side, and a small bathroom and kitchen along the other side.

Neither married nor engaged

2007-01-11T06:30:00.000-08:00

I seem to have confused a number of people with my use of the word "in-laws". I thought it could refer to the parents or family of one's partner. Apparently that is only if one is married to that partner. My apologies. Don't worry, I'll mention it if I get married (or engaged).

Back in the Col Omb I A

2007-01-09T17:24:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, I had no idea which continent I would be in on Thursday. I had neither plane ticket (thanks to Air Madrid's untimely demise) nor visa (thanks to Colombia's finely honed system of bureaucratic unhelpfulness.)

Yet by Wednesday afternoon I had, with the help of an army of in-laws in Colombia, managed to get that innocent-looking sticker in my passport which meant Freedom. And Thursday morning, at 4:30am at Heathrow airport, I took a deep breath and handed over 500 quid in return for a one-way ticket to Colombia: Panda's flight still had space for me.

This time round, I felt the culture shock a hundred times more than before. It was obvious that I would, going straight from the bosom of my family to the other side of the world. The altitude also affected me much more (last time the ascent from sea level took two days.) The odd thing about culture shock is its insidiousness. It's somehow easier to spend a couple of days in a mud hut in the jungle in Guatemala eating toads and drinking saliva-based beverages* than it is to live with a middle-class Colombian family. Bogota may be one of Robert Young Pelton's "Dangerous Places", but if you squint your eyes it can seem a lot like, well, "any normal city", as Simon memorably described it on seeing my Bogota In Pictures book.

But then again its not, quite.

Some cars are normal middle-class Renault Clios and Audis. But they share the road with an odd assortment of junky old pickups, cars without windows full of dirty children, and cobbled-together horse-drawn carts. We laughed about how in England people would ask Panda things like, "so, in Colombia, do you have cheese?" (or whatever other perfectly normal item). But then on my second night here I was awoken at 1am to the sound of smashing glass, shouting in the street, and the groans of a man apparently being bottled to death. Ok, perhaps the result of an over-active imagination fuelled by sleep-deprivation, jetlag, altitude-adjustment, and culture shock. But you know, the pavements aren't even normal. Each block has its own pavement, and poor blocks don't have a pavement at all. Huge smoke-belching buses attack you from all angles. People are either very rich and live in ugly apartment blocks surrounded by high fences and watchmen, or very poor and sleep in the central reservation. It is generally wise, when hailing a cab in the street, to first consider the apparent likelihood of being robbed by the driver. And people look at you all the time. And the girls are beautiful :).

Right now, I'm looking for an apartment. My in-laws have been very welcoming and have made me feel as at home as they can, but living in someone else's house has never been something I'm particularly good at. It's amazing the range of places available. Anything from £50 a month up to £2,000 a month. I suppose after Holland where the wealth gap is narrower even than England, the size of the wealth gap here is bound to come as a shock. The existence of a healthy middle-class comes as a surprise against a backdrop of so much poverty and suffering. The second-highest number of displaced people in the world, remember. After Sudan. And yet there I'll be, sipping lattes in the sun at the Parque 93, as if all were right with the world.

Come the revolution, I'll be the first against the wall, I'm sure. "But I was a sort of hippish liberal for a bit, between being a Tory twat teenager and integrating so well into the Colombian bourgeoisie! I bought organic pesto and knitted lentils! Spare me!", I'll blubber. But there'll be no remorse.

* No, you didn't miss an episode. I never did that. I'm just guessing.

Six to eight black men

2006-11-19T11:19:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-05T13:21:00.000-08:00

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?

2006-10-12T07:58:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-09-13T19:09:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-26T09:19:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-25T22:45:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

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

Safe Colombia

2006-08-08T21:58:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-04T10:57:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-21T11:49:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-06-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-06-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-15T08:16:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-09T05:48:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-30T13:58:00.000-07:00

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

lost car, found god

2006-04-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-16T14:57:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-04-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-04-07T17:51:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

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

2006-03-14T06:38:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-13T12:13:00.000-08:00

"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

2006-03-07T06:52:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-27T08:25:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-21T09:33:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-13T07:25:00.001-08:00

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

2006-02-05T17:22:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-03T10:21:00.000-08:00

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.

beautiful belize

2006-02-02T07:37:00.002-08:00

well the border crossing from mexico was superbly easy. they speak english here again! to begin with i kept addressing all officials in spanish, before i remembered. in the north there's lots of hispanic-looking people, some of whom actually don't speak english, so it's highly confusing.

it feels like a very civilised country, unlike mexico. everybody drives nice and slow, and coruzal, the first town on the road through belize, is so laid back its amazing. there's hardly any cars at all, everyone's biking around, and everyone smiles and says hilloo deer, or stops to chat. it feels a lot like, say, the Scilly Isles -- like the England of thirty or fifty years ago. today i am leaving this lovely place and going to a nature reserve, one of many. belize is all nature reserves and relaxed people, as far as i can tell.

it's going to be a struggle to face other central american countries after this, that's for sure, with their corruption and lack of civilised infrastructure.

oh, and the houses here are all faded clapboard affairs on stilts, rather than the concrete and breezeblock structures so favored by the mexicans. often with attendant old black man sitting in rocking chair on the stoop.

met david and naomi the first night i was here, in the guesthouse: the first fellow-brightonian travellers of the trip! like me, of course, they aren't from brighton at all, they just moved there. it was wierd to sit and talk about brighton house prices over a couple of belikins, but all that was brought to a stop by the other people in the bar who came over to talk to us. an interesting mix of locals and ex-pats.

finally, no more maize tortillas! here it's good old rice, beans and chikin. and deep-fried flour tortillas called "fry jacks", if you want a heart attack on a plate. oh yeah, as well as everyone talking english with accents that sound to me like jamaicans (even the hispanics which seems kind of incongruous), most people also speaks creole which is so cool to listen to. "ah won't ya cut out ya foolishness bwah."

rising tide

2006-01-28T11:11:00.000-08:00

So I left San Cristóbal earlyish tuesday morning, taking the winding road through the mountains to Palenque. As I reached the outskirts of the town, it began to rain, and with the window down and the damp lush jungle rain smell wafting in, I actually felt a sort of nostalgia for England and rainy winters! The road was fairly empty and in good condition, and it swept back and forth between beautiful jungled mountains, with small villages dotted along the way. The major thing of note to happen on the journey was the indigenous people trying to sell some kind of fruit to passers-by. in one village, small children were rushing into the path of oncoming traffic in order to try to force it to stop, while their father looked on critically. Presumably he would beat them if they didn't reach their quota. A little further along, a Mayan woman and a small girl had actually erected a rope-and-flag barrier across the road on a blind mountainside bend. I did the only thing I could do in the circumstances: hit the gas. Presumably the contraption fell to the road, and didn't wrap itself around the rear axle of the ´burban (possibly with Maya family still attached).

When I arrived at Palenque, it was still raining. I began to get the first feelings that maybe actually rain wasn't all that cool. I had never noticed it before, but in England when it's raining, that usually means it's going to stop sometime soon. So I had a sort of subconscious expectation that kept being denied, which was unsettling. I decided not to go up to the ruins but to stay at El Panchan, a sort of grotto in the jungle, and hope the rain might have stopped in the morning.

I met Haken a Swede (who I'd first met in Oaxaca) in the bar whilst I was wandering around unsuccessfully trying to find a bed. His roommates of the previous night were leaving so we decided to try going halves on a cabaña: it only came to US$5 each. The only one she had left was on the first floor, so we left our bags and went back to the bar to eat drink and socialise. I met a Canadian family of two teachers and three children aged probably 6 to 12 who had bought an A-Team style van, and taken a year off travelling down through the US and Mexico. How totally inspirational. It became clear in conversation that having kids is the best ice-breaker and cultural ambassador you can have!

The next morning I went to see the ruins, and the rain mercifully held out for the four hours I was there. Back at the hostel, the rain began again, so I abandoned plans to visit Agua Azul
and we instead went into town on a supplies mission. The following morning, we would leave to drive to Chetumal with Veronika, an Austrian girl.

As we sat in the bar that night, eating, drinking, and watching first a fairly appalling harpist, then an amazing fire dancer (and I have seen quite a few), the rain just kept on coming. I began to wish I had driven the few hundred yards from the cabaña to the restaurant. At about 1am, we finally decided it just wasn't going to stop, and as we planned to wake up and leave early the next day, we made a run for it.

I arrived a little after Haken, to the first surprise of many that night. He was butt naked (Swedes eh). He explained, between slightly hysterical laughter, that he had decided to run back with the room key in his mouth, as he was using both his hands to hold a plastic bar chair he had stolen above his head as a makeshift umbrella. As he reached the top of the iron spiral-staircase to our room, the key had fallen from his mouth, dropping straight into the growing muddy puddles below. Being one to confront unpleasant situations head-on, he quickly realised that his only option was to strip naked and swim around in the mud looking for the key. Absolutely incredibly, 15 minutes later he actually found it, and ran naked and mud-coated to the shower blocks to clean off. Needless to say there was no hot water. I can't imagine what other people must have thought if they saw him.

Anyway, relatively unfazeable, I just (after laughing quite a bit) put out the light, and got into my bed. The rain was still torrential, and it was so loud, sleep was slow in coming. In fact before it did, we heard a commotion outside: the American girls from the neighbouring cabaña were screaming into the night: "Don't do it! It's too dangerous! Muy peligroso! Come back!". Kneeling up to see what was going on, I couldn't believe what I saw. The river had risen so high with the rain that it had burst it's banks entirely. Our bridge back to the main area was underwater except in the middle, with a fierce-looking current rushing all around it. The entire cabaña area was at least a metre deep in water. And it was still raining like it would never stop.

The five guys whose (ground-floor) cabaña had been flooded, and who had been considering attempting a swim to higher ground, became the first of many refugees in our first-floor cabaña building. As more and more came, lured upward by the sight of others, each had a crazy story to tell. Some poor fools had camped, and had simply abandoned tents full of possessions to the rising water. Some had been fast asleep and only awakened when the water rose above their mattress. A Canadian couple were in a very bad way: the girl was suffering from shock and was shovering uncontrollably and vomiting off the blacony. Another Canadian girl had left her bike, which she'd ridden all the way down from Toronto, chained to a tree. It was anybody's guess whether tree or bike would be there come morning.

The girls next door got the iPod going, and made everyone cups of mushroom tea. Soggy rizla came out, and joints started to circulate. Our room became a sort of changing-room and chillout room, with Haken, incredibly, still trying to sleep through everything. I had gotten up, and whilst I was chatting to some people, a wet Quebecois guy and a wet Mexican guy decided to occupy my bed. At 4am, the rain continued unabated. I had had quite bad diarrhoea that day, but since we were effectively ship-wrecked, I just clenched butt-cheeks harder and grimly held on. At this point, there were about 10 people passed out on beds and floor and packs in the girls' two-bed room. The Canadian couple were sharing the end of Haken's single bed; myself and Erica from Michigan joined Francois and Gaika on my bed. Then, whilst trying desperately to keep my sphincter closed, a feat which took almost all my attention, and yet also having to fight the growing need to just shut my eyes and sleep, I lay and listened to Erica (a recent Biochemistry graduate, it transpired) from Michigan talk for three hours about how life on this planet originated, how life can be detected on other planets, what dengue fever is, and other topics that are now lost forever to me.

At 0630, when I was feeling horribly bloated and uncomfortable, and really thinking I could no longer control my body, a guy appeared in the doorway looking grim. "I've been," he said. I thought he meant he had finally given in and relieved himself in the raging waters. Feeling slightly better for not having to be the first, I decided I had no option but to do likewise. But it turned out that in fact, in those fews hours, with the slackening rain, the water level had falled dramatically. It was now possible to squelch barefoot through marsh to the toilet block where, incredibly, the tide-marks indicated that the water had stopped rising just before overflowing into the toilet bowl. Ah unalloyed delight. Ah blessed relief. An eruption fit to wake a campsite, but I didn't care. And somehow, my emergency toilet paper had survived dry through everything. Never was a man happier. When I returned to my wet, already-full bed, I pulled a bit of damp unused cover over my head, and within minutes was asleep. Sorry Erica: I must have seemed terribly rude.

In the morning (well, later that morning), we were made aware that the following night's stay would be free. But what with a guy coming in with a bleeding ankle, saying on of the El Panchan dogs had bitten him, and the whole place being a marsh, and the rain restarting again, we all were very keen to leave as soon as humanly possible, even though it meant fording the river with the ´burban. But it started and forded like a trooper, and we were on our way without a backward glance.

Three minutes down the road, the rain suddenly, and completely, stopped. Was it just one raincloud, with a Mayan-cursed vengeance against hippy campers, that had caused all that destruction? Difficult to know. But as the sun came out, and the car and ourselves began to dry out, I decided that perhaps I didn't really miss the rain, after all.

miscellanea

2006-01-25T14:23:00.000-08:00

Get hold of some of this. Oaxaca has the most amazing hot chocolate i have ever tasted. I guess you'd expect it from the land of chocolate! And, as usual, google, the net, and american commerce conspire to make it available to anyone with a credit card. I bought some to send home, but I lost it. It may be hiding somewhere in the suburban, its hard to be sure.

Also there are some pictures of New Year on the net now. Thanks Maaike :)!

Wow amazing jungle-surrounded mist-wreathed rain-drenched maya ruins here at palenque. Tomorrow early taking the never-taken road cutting across the Yucatan peninsular through hopefully tourist-free ruin sites to Chetumal where I make only my third international border-crossing of the trip, into Belize. Tips Graham? Thinking of going to Orange Walk and Belize City, then taking the road to Tikal in Guatemala.

christmas pictures

2006-01-24T06:48:00.000-08:00

Relaxing over christmas on the beach at maruata.

And at one in the morning, watching a sea turtle lay her eggs.

(Pics courtesy of Mahi, ta!)

And now I'm off to Palenque to view some ruins! I decided to go into Guatemala via Belize in the end, so that is my next border crossing in a few days probably!

photographs

2006-01-22T13:32:00.000-08:00

i spent yesterday at an indigenous village fiesta at zincanatán with an israeli couple. the guy was really into photography: he took about 70 pictures in a few hours. i preferred to just watch and experience than try to record, but looking at
his website i can't deny that he has got some amazing pictures in the past.

the pictures of yesterday are not there yet, but there's some great ones of central america, particularly "people". i'd highly recommend a quick browse, especially on work time. and check back later for the ones of yesterday.

tourist or traveller

2006-01-19T11:01:00.000-08:00

i think i have finally hit upon the distinction. unfortunately i have to report that i am (i could optimistically add "as yet") by this definition firmly in the "tourist" camp.

you can recognise tourists, because they lack a role. they are observers. when you watch a TV documentary about aztec ruins, you see only the ruins themselves. never the cameraman, the sound guy, the mic and the camera. you have the impression of a single subjective experience. it is as if you are a ghost in the scene. if the camera spun round and showed you the process of making the programme you are watching, you would get an unpleasant shock.

when a tourist encounters other tourists, he gets a similar feeling. the tourist wishes, ghostlike, to observe without participating. when it is just you, you can make believe that you don't exist. but when you are forced to confront other tourists, the truth of your own role-less presence is forced upon you.

a traveller, by contrast, i believe, has a role. he really engages in the situation. perhaps he stays in one village for three weeks, makes some friends, learns how to make tostadas, and teaches some english. since he has a role, he is not a ghost and does not have the same crisis of self. even though his presence also is transitory, it is concrete.

actually i doubt whether i myself will ever achieve "travellerhood". part of the fun of travelling for me, is being sometimes the only person of my own culture. you can make believe you are anyone, and place any interpretation you please on what you see. it's so much more diverting than at home, when through long familiarity you know always what people are thinking and why they are acting the way they are, and you know that everyone else understands you in the same way.

De Monteczuma y gringos

2006-01-13T12:02:00.000-08:00

Well, finally after 6 weeks it happened. Monteczuma, in the form of two Zapoteca girls serving us tacos at the side of the Puebla-Oaxaca Expressway in between laughing at our Spanish, took his revenge. I woke up at 5am in general discomfort, and spent the morning issuing forth from various orifices. Unpleasant.

Actually, although I felt generally pretty grim, and didn't get out of bed much for a couple of days, really I had it pretty mild. I'm not sure whether the lesson is not to buy street-food from laughing Zapotecas, or just not to care too much about getting ill. tbh, getting ill for two days in what is now four months of travel is probably better than i average at home, over the winter months.

So yesterday I finally got to see more of Oaxaca than the inside of a hostel. It is totally unlike everywhere else i've been: it's "Gringolandia" as somebody said. Full of american seniors in luminous orange shorts and Europeans in ridiculous holiday-chic "indigenous" clothing sipping lattes in absurdly overpriced restaurants. pretty funny really, a good diversion from the rest of my trip. There are about 10 hostels here at least, and the HI one is huge and as clean and organised as any I saw in the US. So there are a lot of travellers here too, so plenty of interesting inter-beer international chat.

Tourists piss me off though. Blundering about, looking at stuff even though they don't know why, just to fill up their day. And make no mistake, I include so-called "travellers" in this too. What the futtock are they doing? Don't they have homes to go to, jobs to do, like normal people? What do they expect to find inside a 17th century cathedral, at an indigenous market, or among pre-Hispanic ruins? I mean, if you're really interested in some subject, sure, read books about it, study it properly from home, see photographs, and perhaps culminate many years of study with visits to specific sights. But coming to a country, following a set path through a set of historically and culturally unrelated "sights" which just happen to be within bussing distance of one another, loitering aimlessly in the streets and squares of some poor town, spending absurd amounts of money buying rubbish that you will only use to clutter your stupid homes, using people's genuine poverty and culture ancestry as a backdrop for your idiotic notion of the perfect holiday. Bleugh. You all make me sick. And what the hell will you do with all those photographs of the inside of churches and ruins and buildings? You're not a professional photographer: your pictures will be rubbish. A church is the house of God. It is a sacred building where people go to pray. Ruins are just old things that haven't been used for a while. Buildings... are buildings! Where people live, or work. They are not freaking tourist attractions! Go home, I say, go home!

Somehow, I manage not to include myself in this group. Just because the stupid tourist clothes I wear don't happen to be luminous orange, or because I speak a few words of broken Spanish, or because I look at things instead of buying or photographing them. Interesting hypocrisy.

bad day turned good

2006-01-07T18:28:00.000-08:00

Two bad things happened today: I lost my money belt (with passport, tourist permit, credit card and traveller's cheques), and somebody crashed into my car.

I left Cholula yesterday morning for Puebla, got into town to find the hostel full, so booked into a grim but cheap hotel. Using the baños in a restaurant at lunchtime, I realised I wasn't wearing my money belt. Yes, I had put it in my pillow case in the Cholula hostel so it was safe overnight, then had left without it. Wag point. I frantically called them, but the person answering didn't speak english or understand my spanish, so I just drove over there, narrowly avoiding running over a man, sideswiping a taxi, and being run into by a bus -- all this on a 30 minute journey :/. When I arrived the guy from the previous night was nowhere to be found, and the new guy in charge had no idea. The bed had been stripped: no sign of money or belt.

I was told the original guy would be back the next day, so I figured all I could do was return to Puebla. This morning, I called Cholula again, and -- thank god -- original guy says yes, he has the money belt. So I drive over there yet again (incident-free -- on the weekend all the mentalists (mostly bus drivers) stay off the roads, apparently), and with much gratefullness, pick up the goods. I incidentally offer the others a lift to Puebla -- and, randomly, they all accept. So eight of us pile into the truck and I make the Cholula-Puebla trip for what feels like the 100th time. Just on the outskirts of Puebla, I pull up at some traffic lights: unfortunately, what I don't spot is the guy in the 'parked cars' lane to my right, who is reversing into a spot. He is obviously looking back and not forward, and as he reverses in manages to swipe me with his front wing. I am not too bothered, given that I am driving a tank, although my passengers are a little taken aback by my sangfroid. When the lights go green, I pull away, but apparently the guy hasn't bothered to move back out of my way, because as I do my rear bumper catches his front bumper, and rips it half off. All of this relayed to me after the fact by my passenger watching in the wing-mirror. I drive on: when in Mexico, etc. When I drop the others off, I check the truck but it hasn't suffered a bruise. American overengineering: one point.

. . .

Yes, the Dutch girls, plus a Mexican-French couple, and some Mexicans, helped me share the Tequila. I found out afterwards that cheap tequila gives bad hangovers. I finally got over the headache 2 days later. But we had fun, randomly crashing the party of the Mexican girl's family. Thanks, Elisabeth and Carlos (who I think was her uncle.)

. . .

Actually, today, I'm bored of travelling. I'm sick of the neverending change, the impermanence of anything of value. And there's a lot to confront, all by yourself. Well I kind of was, but then I met some Swiss-Germans and they invited me to join them for a beer -- and I forgot about all that again.

by the way...

2006-01-06T21:22:00.000-08:00

In case you're interested, Wikipedia on "The Map-Territory Relationship".

¿what's the spanish for wavicle?

2005-12-31T13:22:00.000-08:00

OK. Still no word from yahoo about my email. I have started using my gmail account instead. Actually it is much better (yes i realise i am somewhat behind the curve only realising that now.) pmg102@gmail.com it is, pmg101 was already taken.

So, not having email meant i missed all your christmas wishes, or perhaps you're all just cabrones and you didn't send me any. I'm joking! Actually, what it did do is totally scupper my plans to meet up with les françaises in puebla for new year's, since i only heard from them today, and it's already the 31st! However, the flipside of that is that I therefore stayed in Morelia a little longer, and had the pleasure yesterday to spend the day discussing philosophy of physics, among many other things, with a charming local girl! But i get ahead of myself.

I had a good time in Guadalajara. I left my car parked in the street, just outside the parking meters zone. After four days, I thought I should check on it, for peace of mind, so I walked up there, to find the driver's window smashed! On closer inspection, I realised that actually it was just open -- in my half-asleep idiocy on Monday morning when I moved it, I had left the window open. Nothing had been touched -- there wasn't even a homeless man asleep in it. So take what lesson you like about crime versus fear-of-crime. I did shut the window though, before I left it again.

It was also the festival of the Virgen de Guadalupe whilst I was there, so with a few others from the hostel we went and consumed remarkably unhealthy mexican street food, consisting mainly of deep fried things with sugar, whilst not buying things from the many artisan stalls. And we saw some Aztec dancing! Apparently they dance for days on end.

The hostel is dead cool, they hook you up with fun local things each night. Guadalajara has a big art scene, so a couple of times there were trips to galleries and things like that. One girl from the States was staying at the hostel, but had been working in a local community for the previous six months, and she took us to meet her host family for a birthday party. It was great to leave the centre and go out into the real Mexican suburbs, even if they did take advantage of our offer to buy beer and tricked us into buying 50 bottles.

I missed the opportunity to see more french films (seems to be a theme) and/or a bullfight by deciding after a week to leave, for the pretty towns of Colima and Ciudad Guzman, on the way to Maruata's empty beaches for Christmas week. That was amazing. Especially creeping around the beach at one in the morning looking for turtles laying eggs! They are a 400-million-year-old species, and it is amazing to watch them. That was where I met the turtle girl and her boyfriend, Canadians, who (since there were so few people staying) I saw every day. When the time came for leaving, it turned out we were all headed to Morelia, so I offered them a lift, and was then invited to dinner with her family, which was where I met her sister the quantum physicist. Hopefully I will be able to put some of the pictures that they took up here.

Both of my cameras are now used up: I am trying to decide whether to develop them here to paper, or CD, or send the films home, or what. I also have realised (OK, it was obvious to everyone else) that not having a digital camera was a mistake. I am thinking about buying one, but it's pretty galling when they're more expensive here even than home, and certainly than the States.

On the way into Morelia, for a joke but not really, we stopped at a Burger King. You have to marvel at the fact that they can make a Whopper taste identical in Morelia, Mexico, Great Bend, Kansas, and Brighton, England. Or you might think it is a bit sinister. Apart from that, its been tacos, quesadillas, and comida corrida all the way! Oh, and fish, at the beach. Mmmmm.

So, I hope everyone else had pleasant Christmases, and a Feliz Año Nuevo to you all. I have tequila and limes: hopefully I will be able to persuade the Dutch girls at the hostel to share them with me. Apart from that, I had my hair cut. The poor man was very mystified that I wanted those clippers for cutting the side and back pushed all over my head. But he came through bravely. And all for GBP 1.75. I love this country!

no email :(

2005-12-28T11:50:00.000-08:00

if anyone has tried to email me, i am not receiving emails at the moment. thanks, yahoo. i have contacted them to ask what is going on. i have had that account for over 5 years and never had a problem, and now that i need it it goes pear-shaped!

had a very relaxing xmas getting a tan, swimming with turtles, drinking coconuts and sleeping under palm palapas on the beach at maruata. hoping to make it to puebla for new year!

happy holidays a todo :)

¡viva mexico!

2005-12-16T11:06:00.000-08:00

the cadence of my journey has changed somewhat now
that i am across the border. i have slowed down quite
a bit. partly this is because the US being in many
ways culturally similar to home meant that i could do
a sort of high-speed trip. actually i covered over
10,000 miles in the two months i was there. and partly
it is because driving in mexico is a rather different
proposition than driving in the US. i think this is a
trend which will only continue...

so, first i spent one week in monterrey, as it turned
out, staying with a family which was pretty cool.
except that she wanted to practise her english on me
so i didnt really get much of a chance to practise my
spanish! but i got by, during the day when she was at
work, in my conversations with shopkeepers and museum
attendants, so was kind of chuffed. middle-class
monterrejians aspire to be USAian. it seemed a shame,
but i suppose inevitable.

i started off being very circumspect with respect to
food and water. however nothing went wrong so i became
more and more adventurous. now i pretty much eat
everything, yes including salad, and i clean my teeth
under the tap, and i am pleased to report i have had
no ill-effects as yet!

so after a lovely week in monterrey, i drove down to
zacatecas, a lovely colonial town in the middle of
mexico, where i liked the hostel so much i stayed a
week. i decided to take spanish lessons there too,
since a teacher at the university language centre
would do 1-on-1 for 4 GBP an hour. i tried to speak
spanish in the hostel as much as possible too, as some
of the other guests were trying to improve their
spanish, and i bought (randomly) an agatha christie
book in spanish and a diccionario, the former i have
conquered the first two chapters of with the aid of
the latter.

and yesterday, i finally left and drove down here to
guadalajara, mexico's second biggest city (mexico city
the first, monterrey is the third), with two absurdly
beautiful french-canadian girls whose university has
an exchange program with the university in puebla.
both, alas, have mexican boyfriends... during the
journey, we conversed in a melange of french, spanish,
and english. the early stages of learning a language
are really fun and rewarding, as you pick up new
vocabulary daily.

the city is, well, big, (7mi ppl i think). the hostel
seems to be a little too anglophone for me. i have
already met two people who had been at zacatecas --
i'm not sure i like the 'gringo trail' factor too
much. i will probably stay here a few days (perhaps a
week, true to form), then swing by morelia to see the
monarch butterfly migration, whence to the michoacan
coast to find a playa for christmas :).

nada mas, hasta la proxima!

updatelet

2005-11-23T13:42:00.000-08:00

right, i have 18 minutes of internet time left in san antonio public library in texas until the town shuts down for thanksgiving, so let me do a quick summary of the last few weeks.

well, i am now gearing up to cross into mexico, and i bought this book in austin which has scared me stupid. i bought some chloraquine in a wal-mart, and it cost $98!!

after charleston i teamed up with a fat swiss girl for a few days and we dropped by savannah and then stayed a couple of nights in the tree houses at the hostel in the forest which was amazing! i left her there, as far as i know she's still there :).

then i sped by st augustine florida which is the oldest town in the US, and feels like it. its just like the mediterranean, tho a bit tourist-heavy.

i tried to drive through biloxi mississippi: the highway just stopped though, with the bridge ahead only half standing. on the opposite shore you could clearly see skyscrapers half subsided, and junk everywhere. i did actually drive through new orleans, tho i didn't stop. it is a mess. you all saw it on the news anyway, so you know how it is -- but it's pretty bizarre to pass through. oh i forgot mobile alabama where i had some amazing oysters, and dothan alabama where i didnt bother to attend the national peanut festival. i spent a few days in lafayette louisiana, the heart of cajun country, with lots of good food (crawfish, gumbo, etc) and tried to track down some french speakers which is hard. learned some interesting history of the place too. its certainly a long way from the McDs wal-mart strip-malled USA of stereotype.

i stayed in austin texas a long weekend: there is an incredible live music scene there. every night of the week, every bar in town has some form of live music. and often free! and $2 budweiser -- even i'll drink it at that price. its a cool city too, a little liberal dot in an otherwise conservative republican state. oh and props to the girls in southside bbq in elgin who were the first people i met who actually laughed at my accent. "wow, you're actually from england? that's so amazing!" ;)

a guy at austin hostel tipped me off to global freeloaders. its wicked -- way to get free accomodation! so i'm trying to use it to arrange my first nights in mexico, with some woman who wants to practise her french, bizarrely enough! and she offered me a cup of proper english tea that her english friend sent from leicestershire -- how can i resist that. i'm getting a bit US culture-tired actually. miss home! ;)

the moustachioed lady tells me i have five minutes remaining. hope everyone's well, think i better sign off, wish me luck in crazy mexico, not too sure when i'll next get to the net to update!

night night sleep tight

2005-11-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

well i suppose it had to happen eventually. bedbugs. saturday morning i woke up with bites all across my shoulders and arms. in the early hours of sunday morning i actually felt the biting and put the light on to find two or three of these little blighters happily cavorting on my pillow and in the bedclothes, after a tasty supper of me. wide awake now, frantic searching revealed four or five more including some babies. cute eh. i gave them all a good blast of insect repellant and watched with a sort of horrified glee as they slowly curled up, then stretched out, and then died.

i have bites on my hands, face, neck and feet now too. also they are probably living in my luggage. i put it all through the tumble dryer set to very hot for half an hour -- but i wouldn't be surprised if they somehow lived through it. apparently they can live for up to *a year* then come out and get right back into sucking blood.

in other news, i was shocked to read today that 22 people were killed in a tornado in kentucky and indiana on sunday. it seems nearby (although it's not: 500 miles or thereabouts) because we *weren't* that far from there, only a couple of weeks ago. travelling has made the world smaller already.

also, i'm starting to get heartily sick of rich white self-obsessed shallow privileged college kids. charleston is definitely a beautiful town. but the 'college town' thing is even more sickening here, in a place with a lot of poverty, and a very blatant black/white divide. it appears to me, against my expectations, that america has bigger class divides than britain. perhaps because i'm confusing wealth with class.

and everybody's having a remarkable time

2005-11-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

Readers of taste will remember today's title from a DJ Shadow album. It is sampled from a recording of a gentleman who went to Memphis, Tennessee "in order to purchase some automobiles". Leaving Memphis yesterday I decided DJ Shadow suited the mood -- and then he went and name-dropped the very "sun-deck of the Peabody Plaza Hotel" that I had just been in!

Well OK, I didn't actually stay at the Peabody: at $200 a room it is a bit beyond my budget. I *did* however see NIN among others at the Voodoo music festival in the baseball arena opposite, and afterward hung out with some Chicagoans who *were* staying there. And I used the phone in their lobby. So it was a rather strange coincidence to have it name-checked the following day on an album I'd had for years...

After crossing Kansas, which wasn't really as big as I'd expected, in St Louis I met up with my former schoolfriend Paul Seet who now lives in Chicago. We hung out for a week, taking in Anna, Illinois (home of Bunny Bread), Paducah, Kentucky (home of nothing in particular), and Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee. People started talking funny nearly as soon as we hit Kentucky.

It turns out that although Paul and I have a lot in common (like our names, and our school years), he is an American in ways that I am not. I see eating out as an opportunity to relax, enjoy good conversation, soak in local atmosphere, and sample interesting local cuisine. Paul sees it as a necessary evil with the aim of consuming as quickly as possible food the quality of which, from the brand name posted outside, can be predicted with complete accuracy. I see sleeping as a necessary evil which must be done to make the next day pleasant, and should cost as little time and money as possible. For Paul it is the key part of the day, where he can relax in the personal space which is for a short time his and his alone, safe from the marauders and risks of the outside world. I find Interstates boring and depressing, unlike their ever-interesting and more leisurely cousins, the state and county roads. Paul prefers the Interstates for their efficiency to the ever-stressful twists and turns of the back-roads.

So just these three differences: and apart from that we agreed that it was nice to see each other. I characterise him as 'American' in these preferences (predictable food, comfortable beds, efficient transport) because it seems that America tends to agree with him in these respects. Hence the rise of the Brand, favourite antihero of the lazy liberal. I prefer the unexpected, the unusual, the interesting. So do some other people.

I can't think of any kind of useful conclusion however. And although it is the first rainy day in a week of hot sunshine (I got sunburned Sunday at the show!), hence stopping by the library to update y'all, I should really get out and see something of Chattanooga. Perhaps the Choo Choo (although I favour the Civil Rights/Trail of Tears museum). So how about you, gentle reader, putting your own conclusion in the comments?

Staying just one night

2005-10-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

Driving across Southern Utah was an incredible experience. From Grand Canyon, I came through Red Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Grand Staircase (Escalante), Dixie National Forest, Arches National Park, Colorado National Monument, Rocky National Park, and of course all the land in between. Google image search for any of those names to get a feeling for what it's been like: my photos are probably rubbish, and won't get developed or scanned for months anyway.

Grand Canyon's chief virtue is its size, almost to the exclusion of anything else. I managed to find a rock to perch on, and read my book, occasionally looking up and going, "Wow, that sure is a long way away." The other Canyons are more comprehensible, and therefore to some degree more attractive. I did a few hours' hiking in Arches which is just like walking in a petrified shipyard -- or spaceshipyard. These enormous red rocks, lined up in rows and rows.

At a certain height, pines are replaced and joined by "aspens", a gorgeous tree with delicate silver-white branches, and translucent leaves which are yellow-to-red now, in their fall colouring. With the sun shining through them, and the leaves trembling in the wind, almost every turn in the road presents new photogenia. I got a great view of the full moon rising above mountains, while the last of the evening sun lit them up fiery red. I couldn't stop to photograph it, but I didn't need to.

In the Rockies I reached 11,000 feet at a pass at the Continental Divide, as it's called, and it was snowy all around! From there I descended into Boulder, where I've spent a couple of days hanging out because all the continuous onward movement had started to become unsettling. It is a wonderful town to have stopped in, too -- its main features are lots of trees (in autumn colour), a pedestrianised Main Street chock full of independant coffee places and used book stores, and a huge and gorgeous campus (the University of Colorado) and its attendant 30,000 students. A girl posting posters told me that it has the highest concentration of PhDs of any town in the US, and that it has 300 days of sunshine a year. An odd man from Georgia reading David Icke in Moab Hostel had commented on the beauty of Boulder's girls: he was right. Last night, I went to see open mic poetry at a co-operatively run food store and cafe. And it has a great Public Library with free internet access! But today I leave, for Denver, and then to start the long lonely crossing of the Great Plains, leaving the South-West for the South-East.

Before I go though, I wanted to say something about this whole National Park deal. I picked up a book in here by Henry David Thoreau, about walking, wherein he made the distinction between Nature as primary actor, with Man hosted in it, as against Nature contained and managed merely as a pleasant diversion among Man's many available pleasant diversions. He was writing in the 1800s: he was a part of only the sixth party of white men to climb Mt Kerridge in Maine, and soon the whole of the Eastern seaboard was to be logged for arable farming. Now, whenever I visit these great beautiful wild places of America, I can never wholly shake the feeling of being package-touristed, with "marked trail" this, "entrance fee" that, and "visitor centre" the other. It's a shame: it spoils the trip. In an odd way I look forward to entering the wholly unremarked Great Plains region, where the beauty is hard to define, package up and name -- and for that reason goes generally unrecognized. Finally perhaps there I will be able to feel more like Man within Nature, than experiencing Nature as a construct of Man.

NB: Dom, you may be interested to know that I went through Dolores, Colorado. Those who haven't read Lolita will be uninterested to hear this. On a side note, in Oregon I actually saw a town called "Loleta" in Humboldt County, which seemed a large coincidence.

sick

2005-10-12T20:28:00.000-07:00

damn i caught some silly american cold. i thought i'd shook it then camped out in sequoia national forest and the temp dropped to like -10deg during the night. i woke up freezing cold and just jumped into the driver's seat and drove with the heating on max, until my feet had thawed out. so i don't feel sociable and i feel all sleepy and just snotty. grrr.

since SF its just been mostly a sort of inadvertant national parks tour -- yosemite, sequoias, death valley, zion, and grand canyon. i made a detour via grass valley to try and find ed buryn, the guy who wrote the inspirational "vagabonding in the USA" in 1975 or summat. it was pretty cool managing to meet up with him. however, horribly, his daughter had died in an auto accident only the month before. i just hoped that half an hour talking to me about travelling might help ease his pain. made me ratchet down my speed a notch too -- tho 60 in the burban feels like about the most it'll do anyway.

most amazing day must have been in lone pine, where i was stranded one day waiting for the truck to get fixed after it overheated in the desert (not my fault! the radiator was cracked!). i went into the chamber of commerce asking if there was anything to do in town for one day, seeing as i didnt have a vehicle (they just looked confused). when i came out this lady got into some crazy electric car, i go "wow what a cool ride" and she's like "want a lift?" so i followed her round her hilarious small-town organising day. linda snell USA.

most amazing night was last night. stayed in tecopa hostel in death valley. there's no clouds, and its absolutely silent, and the ex-hippie that built the hostel built a tower u can climb up and watch the stars, and talk for hours setting the world to rights with some random literature major grad from seattle on his own trip, the only other guest in the hostel (and human for hundreds of miles, it seemed!). saw some shooting stars and definite UFOs over nevada desert too...

right goin to bed. try and get rid of this stoopid cold.

town country town country

2005-10-01T20:10:00.000-07:00

Entered the US to little fanfare, except for the payment of $6 for the pleasure of giving the federal government my fingerprints and a mugshot. Easier than I had expected. First hurdle overcome.

Three nights in a hotel while I acclimatised and recovered from jetlag, then three in the friendly if slightly chaotic Green Tortoise (above the needle exchange -- playing good block/ bad block to get to the mini mart for beers in the evenings), one in almost complete isolation on Vashon Island, a 10 minute ferry ride, across the Puget Sound, and then, after a slightly fraught but eventually victorious day used-car shopping, the beginning of a slow crawl down highway 101 and the west coast of washington, oregon, and northern california. Met too many crazy people to list, and nearly stacked the truck on many occasions from the sheer draw-jopping beauty of the coastline vistas. Even if things are slightly spoiled by the surfeit of seniors in RVs and official "vista point"s.

After six days driving, including 2 nights sleeping in the back of the truck (ouch, it actually gets pretty cold at night, even despite those walmart-purchased $4 fleece throws lining my three-season sleeping bag), I am now happy to be cooling my heels in San Fran -- altho I am already on my second hostel. There's about 7 in town, each with different qualities, and in different areas. Or perhaps I just can't get out of the habit of continual onward movement.

The map is indeed not the territory: I have found it almost impossible to estimate driving times from looking at the trusty rand mcnally (last year's issue (that's the '05 one, go figure) can be bought at a 60% discount from walmart, hoo-yah for corporate destruction of downtown shopping districts). An hour's hiking in the redwood forests of NorCal became 3 when I seriously underestimated the scale of the map, and I had to accept a lift from a couple of liberal seniors the last part. They were not impressed to find that despite my cute english accent I was destroying planet hourly with my 15mpg Suburban. That bothers me somewhat too. Not enough though.

Enough for now. San Fran rocks tho. Apart from all the homeless people, rudies, and crackheads. But hey, It's America Stupid.

Till the next hostel with free internet...